PERU: Stepping Up Protection for Native Groups in Voluntary Isolation

March 27, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Peru-small1

Women and children from a Nanti community in initial contact with Western culture in the Peruvian region of Madre de Dios. Credit: INDEPA

Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Mar 26 (IPS) – In the dense Amazon rainforest of Peru, there are five reserves inhabited by indigenous groups who have chosen to remain totally or partially isolated from the rest of society. But these areas are not officially demarcated as indigenous lands, and only one is protected with a control post.The authorities responsible for them are now attempting to reinforce protection of these vulnerable populations, ignored for years by the state.

“A reserve is an instrument to protect the rights of these communities, who have found themselves obliged to live in isolation due to a series of violations they have suffered, particularly during the rubber boom. We owe them a historical debt,” Paulo Vilca, the general director of intercultural affairs and peoples’ rights at the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs, told Tierramérica*.

Throughout the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, the expansion of rubber tapping in the Amazon brought disease, death and virtual extermination to the rainforest’s indigenous peoples, who were forced into slave labour.

Groups living in “voluntary isolation” have chosen to avoid all contact with the rest of society in the countries where they live, for historical reasons such as the extermination described above. Other groups are categorised as living in “initial contact”: while they remain largely isolated, they engage in contact with the outside world for certain concrete reasons, such as health care.

After many years of waiting, a multi-sectoral commission in Peru recognised five reserves in August 2012. Three of them – Isconahua, Murunahua and Mashco-Piro – are in the eastern region of Ucayali. The Madre de Dios reserve is in the southeastern region of the same name, while the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is in the southern region of Cusco.

The latter is additionally home to the Matsiguenga and Yora peoples, but it also overlaps with the natural gas fields in Lot 88, an area under lease to the Camisea gas consortium.

All five are currently classified as “territorial reserves” but are slated to be designated as “indigenous reserves”, a category created in 2007 by Law 28.736 to provide greater protection for people living in isolation or initial contact.

In order for this reclassification to be official, the executive branch must issue a supreme decree. The Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs submitted the proposal in the first week of March, and it is now under study by the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

The categorisation of these lands as indigenous reserves would mean the official demarcation of the territory needed to provide greater guarantees for these populations who face permanent ongoing threats, said Vilca.

Julio Ibáñez, an attorney with the Inter-Ethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), stressed the need for indigenous organisations to form part of the commission responsible for evaluating these requests, in order for the native peoples themselves to have a say in the decision.

“This would guarantee that the rights of indigenous peoples in isolation or initial contact are represented and protected by genuinely representative organisations,” Ibáñez told Tierramérica.

This commission is currently made up by representatives of the national government, regional governments and universities, but includes no indigenous delegates.

Vilca reported that his department is drafting a proposal for the inclusion of indigenous organisations in the commission.

Since becoming active again in mid-2012, the commission has had to deal with a number of pending issues, such as the evaluation of requests for the recognition of another five reserves, which date back 10 to 14 years.

Vilca is preparing a report on this matter, after receiving the files for these requests in December from the National Institute for the Development of Andean, Amazonian and Afro-Peruvian Peoples (INDEPA).

He acknowledged that the state has not paid sufficient attention to these populations, but is now trying to rectify that situation.

Of the five territorial reserves that have been recognised, only the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve is protected with a control post.

The vice ministry has announced the signing of agreements with local governments and the National Natural Protected Areas Service to guarantee the protection of the other reserves.

In the meantime, a whole range of threats loom over them, from illegal logging to oil and gas operations.

Argentine-based Pluspetrol, which heads up the Camisea gas consortium, is seeking to expand its activities in Lot 88 into a section of the Kugapakori-Nahua-Nanti reserve – which encompasses three communities in initial contact: Santa Rosa de Serjali, Montetoni and Marankeato – and the buffer zone around Manu National Park.

In 2010, the government agency that promotes oil and gas industry investment accepted the request from Pluspetrol, which presented the terms of reference and a citizen participation plan to modify its environmental impact assessment in order to include the new activities.

In May 2012, technicians from INDEPA and Vilca’s department stated that gas exploration activities would pose a risk to the populations living in isolation.

As a result, the public participation mechanisms should only apply to the three communities in initial contact mentioned above.

Pluspetrol then asked Vilca’s agency if it should present a citizen participation plan to inform these three settlements of its activities.

The response, which came in late August, was that this would not be necessary unless the communities themselves demanded it, and that it should be carried out in coordination with the Vice Ministry, since it would be an ad hoc procedure.

The non-profit organisation Law, Environment and Natural Resources (DAR) questioned this response, since it opens up the possibility of information-sharing workshops in territories that are supposed to be protected.

Vilca replied that the mission of the Vice Ministry of Intercultural Affairs is not to promote investment, but rather “to enforce respect for the rights of the peoples.”

In addition, his team must still evaluate the modification of the environmental impact assessment for the expansion of activities in Lot 88, and in this case, its evaluation will be binding.

After Pluspetrol activities were reported in the Manu National Park buffer zone, the company stated that it would not continue with its plans in the area. But DAR and indigenous organisations believe that the matter is far from settled.

Tierramérica contacted Pluspetrol and the Department of Energy-Related Environmental Affairs for their input on the subject, but neither had responded by press time.

In the meantime, a million dollars in funding from the Inter-American Development Bank will be used this year to step up protection of indigenous reserves, reported Vilca.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Culture, Environment, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America, Lead, Politics Tagged With: ,

Operation Condor on Trial in Argentina

March 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

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Manuel Cordero, captured on camera in 2009 by a journalist with Uruguay’s Channel 12 violating house arrest in Brazil. Credit: Canal 12

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Mar 05 (IPS) – The trial over a campaign of terror coordinated among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s and 1980s began Tuesday in Buenos Aires with former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as one of the main defendants, along with another 24 former military officers.Under Operation Condor, as the coordination between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay was known, opponents of the regimes were tracked down, kidnapped, tortured, transferred across borders and killed – including guerrilla fighters, political activists, trade unionists, students, priests, journalists or mothers demanding to know what had happened to their missing sons and daughters.

"This is the first time in Latin America that a trial is being held over Operation Condor, to prosecute those responsible, above and beyond trials held in some countries for specific cases," lawyer Luz Palmas of the Fundación Liga Argentina por los Derechos Humanos (FUNLADDHH), a human rights organisation, told IPS.

The 25 defendants include Videla and other former generals like Reynaldo Bignone and Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. Uruguayan general Manuel Cordero, prosecuted for the role he played in the illegal detention centre at Automotores Orletti in Buenos Aires, was extradited from Brazil for this trial.

Three of the accused were declared unfit to stand trial for health reasons. Another 15 people under investigation died before the case came to trial.

"Orletti was an operational base for Condor. Foreigners who were kidnapped were taken there, which is why it was decided to take both the cases to oral trial together," said Palmas, who represents survivors of the torture centre as well as victims of forced disappearance.

The trial that began Tuesday, which could stretch on for up to two years, is for the kidnapping and forced disappearance of 106 people. The largest group of victims were Uruguayans (48), but there were also Argentines, Bolivians, Chileans, Paraguayans and one Peruvian.

The case was initiated in 1999, when the two amnesty laws that put a stop to the prosecution of members of the military for human rights abuses committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship were still in force.

The lawsuit thus invoked forced disappearance as a crime against humanity that was not subject to amnesty.

After the amnesty laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005, along with the presidential pardons of former members of the military junta, the case picked up speed, more victims were included and more people came under investigation.

In the Orletti case, the crimes are illegal detention and torture. Sixty-five victims were identified, some of whom survived and, like Ana Inés Quadros, a Uruguayan citizen, have already testified in an earlier stage of the trial in 2010 against four torturers belonging to the Argentine intelligence services.

At that time, Quadros declared that she was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in July 1976 and taken to Orletti, where she was tortured and raped by Cordero. She was later transferred to an illegal detention centre in Uruguay, and eventually freed.

However, Cordero is only being tried for illegal detention under Operation Condor, and not for the crimes he committed in Orletti, because the Brazilian justice system did not grant extradition for that case.

In the view of Lorena Balardini, research coordinator for the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group, this trial "is the biggest to be held so far in the region over Operation Condor, and could serve as an impetus for other countries where there have been delays or backsliding," she told IPS.

Balardini said there had been "a setback" in Uruguay. She was referring to a Supreme Court ruling in February this year overturning a lower court verdict to remove the statute of limitations on crimes of the 1973-1985 dictatorship, regarded as crimes against humanity.

"This trial is a way of making these abuses visible and judging them from the viewpoint of coordination between dictatorships," she said. For this reason, CELS, in its capacity as legal representative of several victims, has focused on key cases in which that coordination is proven.

For example, CELS is representing the families of Marcelo Gelman – the son of Argentine poet Juan Gelman – and his wife María Claudia García Irureta. The couple was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976 at the ages of 20 and 19 respectively, when García was seven months pregnant.

Gelman was killed and his body was identified in 1989, but García was taken from Orletti to Uruguay, where she gave birth to Macarena Gelman, who was finally tracked down at the age of 23 by her grandfather in 2000. García’s body has never been found.

Complaints will also be lodged on behalf of Horacio Campiglia and his secretary Susana Pinus, Argentine citizens who were kidnapped in Galeão airport in Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and were presumed to have been transferred to Argentina, where they disappeared.

In the context of Operation Condor, other famous cases were investigated specifically, such as the murders in Argentina of Uruguayan Congressmen Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in 1976.

Former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, who took refuge in Argentina after being overthrown by Hugo Banzer in 1971, was also murdered there in 1976.

According to lawyer Carolina Varsky, head of litigation at CELS, these murder cases were not included in the Operation Condor trial in order to evade restrictions imposed by the amnesty laws, and only cases of forced disappearance – considered “ongoing crimes” – were taken up.

As for the central role played by Chile’s DINA, the secret police of late dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), Varsky regretted the lack of progress in prosecuting direct or indirect agents of repression who participated in Operation Condor.

Essential evidence came from Paraguay, where lawyer and journalist Martín Almada discovered in 1992 what are known as the Archives of Terror in a police station in Asunción, containing innumerable documents shedding light on the fate of Operation Condor victims from the seven countries.

Further evidence is contained in declassified documents from the United States State Department, such as a 1976 memo from an FBI agent describing the coordinated actions of South America’s military regimes, which could go "as far as murder."

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, History, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America Tagged With: ,

Argentine Rights Violators under "House Arrest" Stroll the Streets

February 17, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 16 (IPS) – In spite of repeated violations of house arrest by people convicted of crimes against humanity during Argentina’s dictatorship, some activists remain in favour of this lenient alternative to prison, but they want better oversight by the courts.The Prosecution Unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations committed during the state terrorism indicated that in late 2012, 37.8 percent of the 813 persons detained for crimes against humanity were under house arrest.

Home detention may be allowed by judges for prosecuted or convicted persons over 70, those with terminal illnesses, or with health problems that cannot be treated in prison. But because of the lack of control measures, those supposed to be under house arrest frequently violate its terms.

"You always hear about cases in which victims recognise and denounce them, and if they are not denounced more frequently it is because they aren’t recognised," lawyer Alan Iud, of the Grandmothers of Plaza Mayo, the organisation devoted to looking for the children of the detained-disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina, told IPS.

In January, former army intelligence agent Carlos Hidalgo, prosecuted for more than 200 crimes against humanity and convicted for the baby theft of Laura Catalina de Sanctis, the daughter of a disappeared couple, was seen cycling through the streets of Buenos Aires.

Hidalgo, who had registered Laura as his own biological child, was recognised in the street by de Sanctis herself, who denounced him to the justice system. He was supposedly under arrest in a geriatric centre in Buenos Aires, where he lived. The court revoked his privileges and transferred him to a hospital at the Ezeiza Prison Unit, in the outskirts of the Argentine capital.[pullquote]3[/pullquote]

This month, obstetrician Jorge Luis Magnacco, convicted for baby theft and prosecuted for his part in several childbirths at the Navy School of Mechanics, located in a residential neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, home to one of the most notorious illegal detention centres of the dictatorship, was seen strolling through the streets with his wife.

Members of the association HIJOS (Children for Identity and Justice, against Forgetting and Silence) filmed Magnacco entering a shopping centre and then a restaurant.

The court that had granted Magnacco the privilege of house arrest decided to repeal it and transfer the convicted doctor to a correctional facility.

Human rights organisations say they are not against house arrest per se in properly justified cases. However, they say home detention cannot be granted without any control or oversight.

"The judge should regulate house arrest, which is not the same as granting release from prison," said Lorena Balardini, coordinator of research at the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), an NGO working on legal and human rights issues.

"Curtailing the granting of house arrest is not an option, because it is part of the guarantees of due process for any crime. But neither can detainees be left to their own free will," the expert told IPS. "The problem is not the privilege itself, but slackness in its regulation," she said.

In Balardini’s view, house arrest should be terminated when its conditions are violated by the detainee leaving the premises, contrary to what was agreed with the judge.

"Home detention is a privilege because the detainee is living in the comfort of his or her own home, and it is based on legal and humanitarian criteria," she said.

"This implies a commitment on the part of these persons to comply with the rules of the game, but if they do not, house arrest must be revoked because this is another way of making the benefit tangible," she said.

"But one must not fall into the trap of concluding that the problem lies in house arrest itself," she said.

In Balardini’s view, the main thing is that the accused or convicted person is in detention. "The form or method, so long as it is suitably implemented, is not important. As a human rights organisation working with persons deprived of their freedom for common crimes, we do not want to see the eradication of house arrest," she said.

She also warned of the danger of creating special rules just for crimes against humanity.

"These trials are emblematic, but they cannot be played by different rules, because that could endanger their legitimacy. Criminal law ordains the availability of house arrest, and it is the judge who decides when to apply it," she said.

Iud, the lawyer for the Grandmothers association, agreed. "We are not against the institution of house arrest when it is used for humanitarian reasons, which must be studied case by case, but we do believe that once it is ordered, and is strictly justified, oversight should be in place, and there should be controls that today do not exist," he said.

"The judge, or the secretary or other personnel of the court, should be in charge of verifying compliance with the court order. They could carry out surprise visits, or make phone calls, or set temporary guards. A mechanism must be sought, because at the moment there is no control whatsoever, and they (the detainees) know it," he said.

In Iud’s view, judges cannot shelter behind the excuse of lack of resources, because a simple phone call would suffice to make periodic checks that the order is being respected.

If this is not possible, an institution should be authorised to carry out oversight. Iud suggested this could be the Patronato de Liberados (a welfare organisation for released inmates) that comes under the justice ministry and has a budget provided by the judicial branch.

The trials of military personnel and civilians for crimes during the dictatorship so far add up to 1,013 persons prosecuted and 378 convicted. The number of convictions has increased five-fold since 2008 as a result of combining cases and accelerating trials, according to the Prosecution Unit.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Human Rights, Justice, Latin America, Report Tagged With:

Execution Sparks Unrest in Kashmir

February 11, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Athar Parvaiz

SRINAGAR, Feb 11 (IPS) – “Give us his body; we want to give him a respectable burial…” this is the overwhelming demand across Kashmir following the hanging of Mohammad Afzal Guru who was convicted for his role in the attack on the Indian parliament on Dec. 13. 2001. Nine people died in the attack.Guru was convicted by a trial court in 2002. Two years later, the Indian Supreme Court upheld the trial court’s order.

A mercy petition from his family was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee on Feb. 3. He was executed on Feb. 9 in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail. The body was buried in the jail premises.

His family and many others have objected strongly to the burial. “We will not sit silent until the body of our beloved brother is returned to us,” Afzal’s elder brother Aijaz Guru told IPS in a broken voice over phone from his house in Doabgah-Sopore, 65 km north of Kashmir state capital Srinagar. “We want to give him a decent burial.”

He added: “We are well aware that our brother became a victim of vote bank politics. Now his body should be returned to us. It is our right.”

The demand for Guru’s body is the second such from Kashmiris. There is already a demand for return of the mortal remains of Maqbool Bhat, a Kashmiri separatist leader who was hanged and buried in Tihar Jail on Feb. 11, 1984 after being convicted on the charge of killing an Indian official. Kashmiris have kept an empty grave for Bhat’s mortal remains in Srinagar’s ‘Martyrs’ Graveyard’.

The execution of Afzal Guru has evoked strong reactions from civil society and political parties in Kashmir across the board. With elections in India due next year, many say Guru was hanged for ‘petty’ political reasons and that he was not given fair trial.

“This is part of India’s election drama and a proposition motivated by electoral considerations in which Kashmiris are being made sacrificial lambs,” separatist leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq told IPS over phone from New Delhi where he was detained briefly after the hanging of Guru.

“Yes, there was politics involved at every stage and it was indeed a political trial rather than a judicial trial,” Prof. Anuradha Chenoy from the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi told IPS on phone.

According to Chenoy, there are many loopholes in the Indian judicial system. “The Indian lower courts and judiciary as a whole look at some cases in a typical fashion: if they treat somebody as an enemy, they look at his case with that perspective only; and not on merit,” she said. “It is well known that Guru did not get a fair trial.”

Expressing her distress about Afzal’s last wish to see his family not being fulfilled, she said: “Every person’s last wish before death is to see his family. But it is quite unfortunate that he did not get an opportunity to see his wife and son before he was hanged.”

Guru’s friends say he had “given up militancy” in the late 1990s and had set up a pharmaceuticals business.

Delhi University lecturer Syed Abdul Rehman Geelani, who was earlier acquitted in the same case, said that Afzal Guru’s family was not informed by the government about his execution. “His wife had absolutely no clue. Under the law, she had every right to meet him before the execution,” he told IPS.

“I woke her up early on that morning (Feb. 9) and informed her about rumours of Afzal’s hanging. It was so shocking for her as she was completely unaware. She told me that she had received no communication at all.”

India’s Home Secretary R. K. Singh has said the family was sent a letter through speed post.

That led Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to say: "If we are going to inform someone by post that his family member is going to be hanged, there is something seriously wrong with the system."

Omar Abdullah said this kind of execution is “unheard of.” In an interview to Indian news channel NDTV, he said: “There are enough voices already in the rest of the country who believe that the evidence was flawed.”

According to Abdullah, there could be long-term political implications. “We can deal with the short-term implications as we have taken enough security measures for that, but what we are worried about are the long-term political implications of this execution,” he said.

Mehbooba Mufti, president of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) – the largest opposition party in the legislative assembly – said that while “the hanging should not have been carried out, the return of Afzal’s body was the least the government could do to show concern for humanity.”

The Kashmir government has imposed curfew all over the state. At least three people have been killed and scores injured in clashes between police and people who defied curfew restrictions.

Internet services have been blocked in order to curb protests on social media. News channels have also been blocked.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Asia, Human Rights, Justice, Report, Unrest Tagged With: , , , ,

Mexican Victims Get Law That "Should Not Have to Exist"

February 11, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Daniela Pastrana

MEXICO CITY, Feb 08 (IPS) – “We will not stop fighting until there is justice for our children,” says Araceli Rodríguez, the mother of a young federal police agent in Mexico who disappeared along with seven other people in the western state of Michoacán on Nov. 16, 2009.

mexico_rally_4001

Rally in Ciudad Juárez in June 2011, when the civil society movement decided to promote the Victims’ Law. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

This woman is one of tens of thousands of relatives of the dead, disappeared and displaced by violence in Mexico, and she hopes to find support for finding her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, in the General Law on Victims, which enters into force on Saturday, Feb. 9.

“If it’s true that he’s dead, I want to find his ashes. If it’s true that they incinerated him, I want to find his teeth. And I won’t rest until all those responsible for his death are in prison and his name is cleared of any suspicion,” she told IPS.

For the last two years, Rodríguez has been participating in the citizens’ Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), created by poet Javier Sicilia.

Twenty months have passed since the MPJD demanded a law to help relatives left behind by violence in Mexico, at a mass rally in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez. The law, backed by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was promulgated Jan. 9.

The big challenge is for it to be enforced and produce results, everyone agrees.

“Such a law should not have to exist,” Sicilia said the day it was promulgated. “It’s the consequence of not applying the laws that are made to protect and provide justice to citizens, and of a war that should never have happened.”

Since his son, Juan Francisco, was murdered in March 2011, Sicilia has toured the country and knocked on the doors of government offices, accompanied by hundreds of victims and fellow citizens in solidarity with them, who seek to end the security policy inherited from the government of former president Felipe Calderón.

In December 2006, when Calderón began his presidential term that ended Dec. 1, 2012, he declared war on drug trafficking cartels, militarised public security and conferred extraordinary powers on the federal police, whose personnel increased six-fold while their budget expanded from 800 million to three billion dollars.

As a result of the strategy, 60,000 people have been killed and 25,000 disappeared, according to official figures, although civil society organisations cite much higher statistics. A total of 250,000 people have been displaced and there are countless relatives of victims, many of whom have lost everything in the pursuit of justice or have even been murdered themselves.

In June 2011, in Ciudad Juárez on the border with the United States, after a caravan had driven 3,400 kilometres through the most violent states in the country, the MPJD first proposed a victims’ law.

The victims’ bill had a rough passage, and once the law had been approved in Congress, it was vetoed by Calderón. But his successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, promulgated it in a solemn ceremony at which he said it was urgent to have a legal framework in place to protect victims.

“It is a victory for the Movement, and will benefit many people, but enforcing it is still a distant prospect,” another mother, Margarita López, whose 16-year-old daughter disappeared, and was presumably killed, in the southern state of Oaxaca, told IPS.

On Jan. 19, López was attacked in Mexico City when she was going to meet a team of Argentine forensic scientists to take DNA samples from the skeleton that the authorities say is her daughter.

“I am tired of fighting everyone, because the authorities are part of the problem. Sometimes I think about leaving the country, but if I go, who will look for my daughter?” she said.

The Victims’ Law covers legal and psychological protection, compensation, health services, housing and education, as well as a key element: “declarations of absence”.

These allow, for example, grandparents to have legal custody of their grandchildren, while the state is compelled to continue to look for their disappeared parents, because the declaration is not a death certificate.

The law involves re-engineering the enforcement of justice by means of a National Victims’ Assistance System. It has been harshly criticised by organisations close to former president Calderón, and also by the autonomous National Commission for Human Rights, which would lose some of its powers.

The law’s promotors themselves acknowledge that it contains errors, due to the speed with which it was enacted. The senate will have the opportunity of making corrections this month when it incorporates regulations that will translate it into policies.

“The law needs to be perfected; it was approved very quickly because the priority was getting the state to recognise the tragedy, but we are already amending it,” the recently appointed coordinator of human rights advisers to the attorney-general’s office, Eliana García, a supporter of the law, told IPS.

“It establishes a system of restorative justice in four dimensions: the right of victims to the truth, the right to justice, comprehensive compensation and the guarantee that this will not be repeated. It is an unprecedented law,” said García, a renowned leftwing social and political activist.

Detractors of the law point to the burden on the budget, as the law obliges the state to pay the costs of physical, mental, moral and material harm, as well as healthcare costs for victims of crime and human rights violations, no matter the perpetrator or when the crime occurred.

This means coverage would be extended to victims of the so-called “dirty war” in the 1970s.

Article 71 states that if the perpetrator of the crime cannot pay compensation, because he or she is a fugitive, dead or disappeared, the state will take responsibility for reparations up to the equivalent of 78,600 dollars.

“It was a mistake to make such a broad promise of subsidiary compensation; in the corrections we are working on, we have restricted reparations to serious crimes against life, freedom and physical integrity,” García said.

There will also be modifications to the National Victims’ Assistance System, which under the law includes nearly 4,000 officials in national and states’ ministries, as well as to the chapter on competencies, which only involves the national government.

What is still not clear is how regional and municipal authorities will be made to comply with the law, especially as they are most frequently accused of crimes by victims and their relatives.

The new bodies that will look after victims who are currently helped by the Procuradoría Social (socio-legal office), created in September 2011 and now to be replaced under the new system, have yet to be identified.

The MPJD is already preparing workshops and reading circles to study and promote the law in the country’s 31 states, in accordance with one of the agreements at a meeting held in the Mexican capital Jan. 25-27, at which organisations in the United States and Canada were also represented.

“We know that after this law’s publication, there is still a great deal to be done. We have come away with a long agenda,” activist Ted Lewis, head of the human rights programme for Global Exchange, one of the organisations that financed the caravan that travelled the United States and arrived in Washington in September 2012, told IPS.

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Featured, Human Rights, Justice, Latin America Tagged With:

"Pregnant, Chained to a Wall and Starved", One of 136 Terror War Stories

February 6, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

bush_cheney

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said then Vice President Dick Cheney (left) in 2001. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

George Gao

NEW YORK, Feb 06 (IPS) – Shedding new light on a chapter of the U.S. "war on terror" that has largely remained shrouded in secrecy, the Open Society Justice Initiative released a report Tuesday detailing the cases of 136 individuals who were extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).Entitled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition”, the report confirms that the CIA held suspected terrorists in undisclosed prisons, known as “black sites”. The agency also carried out “extraordinary renditions” – defined by the report as the illegal transfer of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for detention or interrogation.

According to the Justice Initiative’s report, CIA detainees were tortured and abused in detention sites around the world. Some were wrongfully detained, and others were never charged for a crime.

“That’s the thing with these cases, each one is quite disturbing,” Amrit Singh, author of the report and senior legal officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative’s National Security and Counterterrorism programme, told IPS.

Take the case of Fatima Bouchar, one of 136 individuals whose experience the report documented. In 2004, the CIA and Thai authorities abused Bouchar at an airport in Bangkok. She was chained to a wall and starved for five days, before being rendered to Libya. Bouchar was four and a half months pregnant at the time.

“Part of the reason why this report was written is because it’s really important to tell the stories of what happened to these victims,” said Singh.

The report argues that along with its illegality, torture produces faulty information. It cites the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who was extraordinarily rendered by the U.S. to Egypt in 2002. Under the threat of torture, al-Libi fabricated information about Iraq, Al-Qaeda and the use of biological and chemical weapons.

In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell cited this fabricated information in his speech to the U.N., while advocating for war in Iraq.

The report was written in the context of post 9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policies. Its opening epigraph draws from a 2001 television interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, conducted by Tim Russert for “Meet the Press” on NBC News.

“We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world,” said Cheney. “A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quickly, without any discussion."

The report also lists 54 complicit “foreign governments” that participated with the CIA in various ways: by hosting CIA. prisons on their territories; by capturing, transporting and torturing detainees; by providing intelligence, etc.

“It really speaks to the power that the U.S. wields over the world,” said Singh. “In this case, the U.S. has power essentially recruit partners in committing human rights violations in the name of countering terrorism.”

Checks and balances and extrajudicial killings

In 2002, Maher Arar was detained by U.S. authorities at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport. The CIA flew him out to Amman, Jordan, where he was abused by Jordanian guards. Then he was extraordinarily rendered to Syria, locked in a grave-like cell for 10 months, beaten with cables and threatened with electric shocks.

Arar’s lawyer Maria LaHood, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told IPS that they sued the U.S. government officials who sent him to be tortured. But their case came up short.

“Basically, the defendants (the U.S. government) came back with the same arguments as they always do, saying even if what (Arar) says is true – that the U.S. sent him to Syria to be tortured – the officials can’t be held liable,” said LaHood.

She said that when U.S. government officials associate their actions with “national security”, it is nearly impossible to prosecute them. “The judiciary cannot touch it.”

“Even though there’s constitutional violations here, there’s no remedy,” she added. “(Arar) couldn’t go anywhere with his case in the U.S. He hasn’t gotten an apology. He’s still on the watch-list.”

LaHood told IPS about similar challenges in prosecuting extrajudicial killings. She noted an ongoing case Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta in which the families of three U.S. citizens – who were killed in U.S. drone strikes – are suing the U.S. executive branch.

“The defendents – Panetta, Petraeus and a couple of others – have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the judiciary can’t adjudicate the case,” she said.

When asked about the balance of power between the executive and judicial branches of the U.S. government, LaHood said, “(The) executive power has grown and grown, and that’s in part because the executive is increasing its own power, and in part because the judiciary is deferring to it.”

Philip G. Alston, a professor of law at New York University School of Law and a former U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, told IPS, “The executive branch is effectively given carte blanche by the judicial branch.

“The latter has particularly abdicated its responsibility to uphold the rule of law in any matter that involves the CIA,” he added. “The result is that it is left to make its own decisions, subject only to pro forma Congressional oversight – which, as far as can be judged from the public record, is little short of cheerleading.”

Singh told IPS, “There’s no doubt that there are serious terrorist threats today in the world, and they must be dealt with in an appropriate an lawful manner, but the fact that these threats exist does not constitute grounds to deviate from established domestic and international law.

“U.S. courts have largely denied victims of torture their (compensations). U.S. courts have not acted as a constraint on the abuse of executive power, which is how they should conduct their business,” she said.

Meanwhile, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released a statement in response to a controversial U.S. Department of Justice white paper, entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associate Force.”

“The parallels to the (George W.) Bush administration torture memos are chilling,” said Vincent Warren, executive director at CCR, of the white paper. “Those were unchecked legal justifications drawn up to justify torture; these are unchecked justifications drawn up to justify extrajudicial killing.”

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This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Human Rights, Justice, Lead, Security, United States Tagged With: , , ,

U.S. Prison Population Seeing “Unprecedented Increase”

February 4, 2013 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Carey L. Biron

WASHINGTON, Feb 04 (IPS) – The research wing of the U.S. Congress is warning that three decades of “historically unprecedented” build-up in the number of prisoners incarcerated in the United States have led to a level of overcrowding that is now “taking a toll on the infrastructure” of the federal prison system.Over the past 30 years, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the federal prison population has jumped from 25,000 to 219,000 inmates, an increase of nearly 790 percent. Swollen by such figures, for years the United States has incarcerated far more people than any other country, today imprisoning some 716 people out of every 100,000. (Although CRS reports are not made public, a copy can be found here.)

“This is one of the major human rights problems within the United States, as many of the people caught up in the criminal justice system are low income, racial and ethnic minorities, often forgotten by society,” Maria McFarland, deputy director for the U.S. programme at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

In recent years, as a consequence of the imposition of very harsh sentencing policies, McFarland’s office has seen new patterns emerging of juveniles and very elderly people being put in prison.

“Last year, some 95,000 juveniles under 18 years of age were put in prison, and that doesn’t count those in juvenile facilities,” she noted.

“And between 2007 and 2011, the population of those over 64 grew by 94 times the rate of the regular population. Prisons clearly aren’t equipped to take care of these aging people, and you have to question what threat they pose to society – and the justification for imprisoning them.”

According to the new CRS report, a growing number of these prisoners are being put away for charges related to immigration violations and weapons possession. But the largest number is for relatively paltry drug offences – an approach that report author Nathan James, a CRS analyst in crime policy, warns may not be useful in bringing down crime statistics.

“Research suggests that while incarceration did contribute to lower violent crime rates in the 1990s, there are declining marginal returns associated with ever increasing levels of incarceration,” James notes. He suggests that one potential explanation for this could be that people have been increasingly incarcerated for crimes in which there is a “high level of replacement”.

For instance, he says, if a serial rapist is incarcerated, the judicial system has the power to prevent further sexual assaults by that offender, and it is likely that no one will take the offender’s place. “However, if a drug dealer is incarcerated, it is possible that someone will step in to take that person’s place,” James writes. “Therefore, no further crimes may be averted by incarcerating the individual.”

Smarter on crime

Of course, the U.S. prison population’s blooming needs to be traced back to changes within the federal criminal justice system. Recent decades have seen an expanding “get tough” approach on crime here, under which even nonviolent offenders are facing stiff prison sentences.

In turn, overcrowding has become a massive issue, with the federal prison system as a whole operating at 39 percent over capacity in 2011, according to CRS. The result has also been significant price overruns, with the Bureau of Prisons budget doubling to nearly 6.4 billion dollars even while hundreds of millions of dollars worth of unaddressed infrastructure problems continue to mount.

Yet the problems being experienced by the federal prison system actually stand in contrast to certain trends at the state level. While some states have dealt with even more worrisome problems of prison overcrowding – including California, which in 2011 was ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court to take steps to reduce the pressure – recent years have seen movement at the state level to counter overincarceration.

Some of this action may have come from serious state budget crises. Currently, after all, it costs between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars to house a prisoner in the United States.

According to a new report by the Sentencing Project, a Washington advocacy group working on prison reform, prisoner populations in the United States overall declined by around 1.5 percent in 2011. Furthermore, last year lawmakers in 24 states adopted policies that “may contribute to downscaling prison populations”.

“There has been a marked change in the amount of activity at the state level to end our addiction to incarceration,” Vineeta Gupta, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told IPS.

“Some states are currently having many discussions they would not have had 10 years ago – getting smarter on crime rather than tougher on crime. None of these moves are comprehensive enough to address the large scope of the problem, but they’re very important starting points.”

She continued: “Unfortunately, the federal government has been going in the opposite direction.”

Mandatory minimum

Arguably, the single most important element in explaining the record incarceration numbers both at the federal and state levels could be “mandatory minimum” sentencing requirements, under which federal and state law over the past two decades has automatically required certain prison sentences for certain crimes, particularly for drug offences.

Such polices have eliminated the ability of judges to tailor judicial responses to individual circumstance. Over the years, sitting judges have resigned over mandatory minimum policies, while others have waged high-visibility campaigns for their rollback.

“Particular attention should be given to reforming mandatory minimums and parole release mechanisms as policies that can work to reduce state prison populations,” the Sentencing Project suggests, noting also that “Mandatory minimums do not reduce crime but result in lengthy prison terms that contribute to overcrowding.”

Such analysis echoes parts of the CRS conclusions while also undergirding growing momentum on the issue. According to the Sentencing Project, seven states last year weakened or repealed certain mandatory minimum regulations.

More dramatically, in mid-January, Senator Patrick Leahy, the head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, told a Washington audience that he would support doing away entirely with federal mandatory minimums, which he called “a great mistake”.

“Senator Leahy’s comments are a very big step towards starting a conversation to address a major driver of the federal growth,” the ACLU’s Gupta says. “The hope is that some of the stuff that’s brewing in the states, where crime in some places is still at an all-time low, can now serve as an example for the federal system.”

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2013.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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Prisons in Mexico on Verge of Collapse

December 28, 2012 by

Global News Blog / IPS

Daniela Pastrana

MEXICO CITY, Dic 28 (IPS) – Edgar Torres Castillo, 21, has spent two years in the prison of Gómez Palacio, in the Lagunera district between the northern Mexican states of Durango and Coahuila – an arid zone known as one of the most dangerous parts of the country.Amparo Castillo, the mother of Edgar, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing a cell-phone, last saw him during a Dec. 18 visit to the prison. “I thought he was acting strange, he seemed really sad and as if he had been hurt,” she told IPS by phone. “We spent just an hour together before they started to shoo us out – things were really tense,” she said with anguish in her voice.

In the wee hours of the morning on Dec. 17, the police transferred 137 prisoners from the Gómez Palacio prison to federal penitentiaries.

The next day, at the end of the visiting hours, people living in nearby homes heard loud bursts of gunfire and cries inside the prison. The authorities reported that 25 prisoners and six unarmed guards had been killed during an escape attempt.

In a communique, the Durango police said the prisoners had opened fire on the guards when they were thwarted in their attempt to escape.

Later, the federal government emptied out the prison, where 78 people have been killed in the past three years and several major prison escapes have been staged. At the time it was emptied, there were 500 inmates left in the prison.

Like other family members, Castillo went to the prison after the reports of gunfire, to find out what happened. When little information was offered, the prisoners’ relatives held protests and set up roadblocks. “We didn’t even know if they were alive or not,” she said.

The bloody clash between prisoners and guards was one more illustration of the crisis plaguing Mexico’s prison system, which experts say is on the verge of total collapse.

There are 429 prisons in Mexico, according to the latest report by the ministry of federal public security. Of that total, 15 are run by the national government, 10 by the authorities in Mexico City’s Federal District, 91 by municipal governments, and the rest by the states.

Studies indicate that the prison population is 22 percent (around 40,000 prisoners) over capacity. In addition, four out of 10 inmates are still pending sentencing. But prisoners awaiting trial are held in the same cells as convicted inmates.

Those charged with or convicted of federal crimes, generally for involvement in organised crime like drug trafficking, make up just one-fifth of the prison population.

After a visit to 24 prisons around the country in 2009, a report by the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture warned about structural flaws in Mexico’s penal system, which encourage abuses of all kinds committed with the aim of obtaining confessions or self-incriminating statements.

The already heavy use of preventive detention became even more excessive during the crusade against the drug cartels waged by President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) in his six years in office.

The “Diagnóstico Nacional de Supervisión Penitenciaria”, an assessment of the prison system presented by the governmental National Human Rights Commission in September, found that six out of 10 prisons in the country were co-governed to some extent by criminal groups.

The report warns of prison hotspots in 10 of Mexico’s 31 states. Between 2010 and 2012 alone, a total of 521 prisoners escaped in 14 prison escapes, and 350 people were killed in two riots and 75 fights.

The prison of Gómez Palacio, which went through six different directors in less than three years, has been the site of high-profile escapes and acts of corruption.

In March 2009, a group of armed men wearing federal police uniforms walked into the prison in broad daylight and took five prisoners away with them. In July 2010, the then director of the prison, Margarita Rojas, was arrested and accused by the attorney general’s office of allowing inmates who later took part in a mass killing of 17 people on a nearby farm to leave the prison.

According to the federal government, the guards allowed a group of inmates to leave the prison at night, using the guards’ weapons and official vehicles, to carry out reprisals against rival criminal groups.

But that was not the only case. Jorge Carvallo, president of the bar association of the state of Mexico, next to the capital, reported in November 2010 that prisoners, with the complicity of the state police, were allowed to leave the Barrientos prison at night to commit armed robberies.

The government of Durango announced on Dec. 21 the definitive closure of the Gómez Palacio prison, which will be converted into a police station.

Meanwhile, the families are still desperately seeking information about what happened to the inmates.

“We are trying to help a group of women who came to us in a terrible state, in despair and full of fear for their loved ondes,” activist Verónica Villarreal of the Popular Workers Coordinating Council told IPS. Her group provided shelter to a group of women who came to the capital of the state, four hours from Gómez Palacio, in search of information.

Since Dec. 19, Amparo Castillo has been on a vigil outside the Durango prison, hoping to see her son. “They haven’t told us anything, we don’t know how they are. We only know that they took some to prisons in other states and that others are here, but they told us we’ll only be able to see them in four weeks.

“There’s no law here, people have been tried and convicted without evidence. And now it’s easy for them just to shut down the place; they don’t think of the expenses that represents for us. My son didn’t steal the cell-phone, but in any case, I have already paid it off. What do they want? It wasn’t something that deserved eight years in prison, or to have to go through all of this,” she said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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Power in Bolivia’s Gas-Rich Chaco Region Thrust into Indigenous Hands

December 28, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Stephanie Wildes

TARIJA, Bolivia, Dic 27 (IPS) – Due to the intense political polarisation in the Chaco region, home to Bolivia’s oil and natural gas wealth, three indigenous lawmakers who entered the legislative assembly of the southern department of Tarija as representatives of their people have quickly come to wield decisive power.For centuries, the semi-arid Chaco of Bolivia had a reputation of being inhospitable. Temperatures that often climb as high as 45 degrees and a scarcity of shade-providing trees were combined with its distance from the centres of power. During the colonial era, the Spanish invaders found it almost impossible to settle the vast dry region of open grasslands and shrubby areas.

Between 1933 and 1935, the harsh natural conditions helped defeat first the Bolivians and then the Paraguayans in the war they waged for control over the northern part of the Gran Chaco region, which they also share with Argentina.

As a result, there have always been areas in the now prosperous department of Tarija that have been the exclusive domain of the Guaraní, Weenhayek and Tapiete indigenous people, the area’s ancestral inhabitants. Even with the gradual arrival of paved roads and the development of a number of cities, driven by oil industry activity, the deepest reaches of the Chaco continue to be theirs.

Nevertheless, until 2009, they were excluded from political and institutional structures and received scant or no assistance from the state. They remained distanced by their geographical isolation, their Guaraní dialects, and their conceptions of humanity and government.

But 2009 ushered in a number of the changes for which they had risen up in protest marches on repeated occasions. “It was a historic victory for the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia, the Guaraní People’s Assembly, and popular forces in general,” departmental assembly member Justino Zambrana told IPS.

“We were finally able to elect representatives in accordance with our traditions and customs, under the mandate of the new political constitution of the state of Bolivia,” the Guaraní leader said.

The new constitution adopted that year proclaimed Bolivia to be a plurinational state, and officially recognised 36 ethnolinguistic groups, in a country where over 60 percent of the population of 11 million identify themselves as indigenous.

It also stipulated that the legislative assemblies of the nine departments into which Bolivia is divided must include indigenous representatives elected by the native communities, in accordance with their traditions and customs. In the case of Tarija, the assembly must include three indigenous representatives.

Previously, in January 2006, the country’s first ever indigenous president had taken office: Evo Morales, who is of Aymara descent. In 2011 he was re-elected to a second five-year term.

In Tarija, as well as supporting the demands of their particular ethnic groups, the indigenous representatives were also called upon to assume unexpected responsibilities when departmental governors and legislatures were elected in 2009.

They became members of the Departmental Legislative Assembly of Tarija, the Chaco region department that is now the energy and economic heart of Bolivia, as well as a major source of oil and natural gas for the entire continent. Its massive reserves supply energy to the megalopolis of São Paulo, Brazil, as well as the north of Argentina.

The department’s strategic importance gave rise to a heated political dispute in its capital, Tarija, 896 km south of La Paz.

The tight race between the political parties that back the Morales administration and the opposition resulted in a virtual parity of forces.

This meant that, among the 30 assembly members in Tarija, the votes of Tapiete representative Vicente Ferreira, Weenhayek representative Antonio Tato and Guaraní representative Zambrana became strategic.

"At first they didn’t take us into account, but when they realised that our votes were worth something, they started to seek us out,” Ferreira told IPS. “It was very difficult for me. Sometimes we didn’t know which way to decide, and in the meantime I had to learn about laws and take part in debates with lawyers.”

A series of rapid developments put the trio to the test. On May 27, 2009, the president of the assembly had to be elected. Out of affinity with the platform of Morales’ party, the Movement to Socialism (MAS), they voted for its leader, Aluida Vilte, also of Aymara descent.

This took the small indigenous caucus a step closer to the upper echelons of power in Tarija, and Zambrana was elected vice president of the assembly.

Seven months later, the assembly had to decide on whether or not to impeach Governor Mario Cossío, of the opposition party Camino al Cambio (Road to Change), who had been charged with acts of corruption by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

The three indigenous votes were decisive in separating Cossío from his post and opened the way for a MAS member, Aymara deputy Lindo Condori, to be designated governor in his place.

“We do not do political favours for anyone. In the case of Cossío, we had to enforce the law, and that’s what we did. That was why we supported his removal,” Zambrana said.

“In indigenous assemblies we take great care to avoid any kind of political interference. When someone needs to be challenged, we challenge anyone, and sometimes this (national) government has played a divisive role and wants indigenous people to dominate other indigenous people,” he added.

“I was taught that one people cannot subjugate another people, that there has to be respect. We are always ‘yambae’ (free, with no owner, in the Guaraní language),” he declared with a smile.

And in fact, in May 2010, at the beginning of the second year of the departmental legislature’s five-year term, Zambrana became its president, but was elected with the votes of the opposition to MAS.

It is said that a committee from the national government came from La Paz to persuade the three indigenous representatives to change their stance. “Why would an indigenous person want to be president of the assembly? D

Do you want to side with the right?” an emissary is reported to have asked, and was met with the reply, “And is the indigenous president Evo Morales governing the country to side with the right?”

A year later, Zambrana was re-elected to the presidency of the legislative assembly. He says he was even approached to run for governor, but turned down the idea.

Analysts in Tarija believe his stance helped to avoid exacerbating the frequent belligerence that characterises the department’s legislature. Accusations and counter-accusations about pressures of various kinds have also affected the decisive indigenous caucus.

At the time of Zambrana’s re-election as president, a group of MAS supporters allegedly cornered Weenhayek representative Tato for three hours, in an attempt to intimidate him.

The notoriously timid legislator avoids speaking with the press. At the end of 2012, he was back in his home community, where he was called on to account for his actions to the “captains” or leaders of the Weenhayek people.

Weenhayek grand captain Moisés Sapirenda referred to the possibility of Tato’s removal as the indigenous ethnic group’s representative. “There are many things he has not reported. Next year we will consider if his mandate should be withdrawn,” Sapirenda told IPS.

The Weenhayek leader is also less than satisfied with the work of the rest of the indigenous caucus in serving the people they represent.

“We are happy with the opening that allowed us to elect our authorities through our own traditions and customs. We were hoping for laws that would benefit our people, but it seems that when it comes to deciding on works that could change our lives, we are a minority once again. We continue to be far away, like always,” he said.

Sapirenda’s warning should not be taken lightly. The Weenhayek have already revoked the mandate of a national assembly member and a regional assembly member in a neighbouring department.

In the meantime, the Tapiete and Guaraní captains are waiting until their next regular assemblies to assess the reports made by Ferreira and Zambrana, who will be expected to render accounts on how they have responded to the challenge of suddenly being thrust into positions of power.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


Filed Under: Development, Energy, Environment, Featured, Justice, Latin America Tagged With: ,

A Year of Progress in Argentina’s Human Rights Trials

December 28, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dic 26 (IPS) – Although it didn’t receive much media coverage, this year Argentina’s justice system made strides in speeding up human rights cases, and dozens of defendants were convicted, three decades after the end of the 1976-1983 dictatorship.Figures from the “prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations committed during the state terrorism” indicate that nearly 400 suspects were tried this year, and that 86 of them were sentenced, 72 of them for the first time.

The accused, mainly former members of the military and former politicians, were charged with crimes against humanity such as kidnapping, illegal detention, torture, sexual violence, theft of the babies of political prisoners, homicide and forced diappearance.

“The policy we have followed, of accumulation of cases, has brought results,” the unit’s prosecutor, Pablo Parenti, told IPS. "More important than the number of trials is the fact that the number of defendants in each case has grown.”

The trials of those who committed human rights abuses during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship began immediately after the return to democracy. But they were brought to a halt by amnesty laws and pardons in the late 1980s.

However, the trials got underway again in 2006, after the laws passed by Congress and the presidential pardons issued by Carlos Menem (1989-1999) were declared unconstitutional.

The official list of victims of forced disappearance, which remains open as new cases are constantly cropping up, includes more than 1,200 names. But human rights groups say the total number is actually around 30,000.

The first cases that came to trial were against just one defendant, or a few at the most, and covered a limited number of victims. This forced witnesses to go through the painful process of testifying over and over again, and dragged out the legal process.

This year, however, a number of cases committed in the same clandestine detention centre or the same military district were combined, and dozens of defendants have been tried simultaneously in each trial.

“When the unit began to operate (in 2007), the cases were very dispersed and fragmented,” Parenti said. “Some trials were important because they were the first, and we had to support them, but they were only against one or two accused.”

Given that outlook, and on the instructions of the Attorney General’s Office, the unit adopted a series of measures to combine similar cases in order to expedite the trials, he added.

“There was resistance from judges and prosecutors, because our justice system is accustomed to working on a small scale, with smaller volumes of evidence. But in the end, progress is being made, as we have seen this year,” Parenti said.

One of the biggest, highest-profile trials began in November. It combined all of the atrocities committed in the Naval Mechanics School (ESMA), the dictatorship’s biggest torture centre. Located in the centre of Buenos Aires, a total of 5,000 political prisoners were held there, and only a handful came out alive. The ESMA installations are now a human rights museum.

One single ESMA torturer came to trial in 2007 – former coast guard officer Héctor Febres, who committed suicide in his cell just before the trial. In 2011 another 16 ESMA human rights violators were tried in a second trial.

But in this year’s ESMA trial, 68 defendants sat in the dock, including six former pilots of the so-called “death flights”, from which political prisoners were thrown, drugged but alive, into the ocean.

The current trial, called the “unified ESMA” case, covers crimes committed against an unprecedented 796 victims.

Early this month, another large-scale trial began in the central province of Cordoba, which combined 16 cases against 46 defendants and involving 450 victims. Like the ESMA trial, it will end in 2013.

A third large-scale trial, which began in the last few weeks, is being held in the northwestern province of Tucuman, involving 43 defendants and 235 victims from two big detention centres.

Meanwhile, a trial in the province of Buenos Aires ended Dec. 19 with 23 convictions, including the death penalty for 16 of the accused. The case, which involved 280 victims held in six illegal prisons, was called the Circuito Camps, after the then local police chief, the late Ramón Camps.

According to the prosecutors Unit, 20 trials involving charges of crimes against humanity are currently underway. “As of 2008, only 70 defendants had been convicted; that number had gone up to 339” by November, said Parenti.

Nevertheless, the prosecutor said he was not satisfied with the pace of the trials.

“Things are moving ahead, but don’t believe everything is going fine,” he said. “There is still a long way to go; there are nearly 1,000 people facing prosecution, and although bigger trials are being held, the pace is still far from satisfactory. There are prosecutions where hearings are held (only) twice a week.”

Parenti commented that the accumulation of cases helped give the trials greater visibility, more in line with the gravity of the crimes in question. “By looking at the whole rather than the parts, the magnitude of the state terrorism is highlighted.”

The prosecutor also said the combination of cases has helped provide a clearer picture of the abuses committed during the dictatorship. “Bringing 50 people to trial is not the same thing as trying one or two,” he said.

The evidence also becomes overwhelming, due to the sheer number of witnesses.

The new guidelines for human rights cases handed down this year by the Camara de Casacion Penal – the criminal court of appeals – to expedite complex cases involving large numbers of victims included one aspect that was of particular importance for the witnesses: the use of videotaped testimony, in order to avoid “revictimising” the survivors, who have been testifying in trial after trial since 30 years ago.

Parenti also expressed concern about the lack of effective oversight of those serving their sentences under house arrest due to health problems or advanced age – 38 percent of all convicted suspects – who are often seen out and about.

And he said that although the appeals process has been streamlined to some extent, there are very few final sentences. Of 339 defendants who have been convicted, only 50 have exhausted the appeals process, while the rest are still waiting for the final sentences, in some cases since 2009.

“That is another big challenge that we have to work on: for the final sentence to be handed down by the higher courts as soon as possible,” he said.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2012.

This article may not be republished, broadcast, framed, or redistributed without the written permission of IPS – Inter Press Service. Republication of this material without permission from IPS, the copyright holder, constitutes a violation of United States and international copyright laws and may result in legal action.


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