Peru Identifies Civil War Victims – at Snail’s Pace

August 30, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Aug 30 (IPS) – Of the 69,000 people killed during the 1980-2000 armed conflict in Peru, at least 16,000 were buried in secret unmarked graves. So far, only 2,064 of these bodies have been recovered, and just 50 percent have been identified, according to a new report.“The exhumation process is slow and disorderly, and moreover it is not a priority for the authorities, even though no democracy can grow strong without reconciling with its past and without recovering its dead,” historian Carola Falconí, executive director of the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH), told IPS.

For example, the forensic medicine institute (IML), which is in charge of the exhumations and answers to the attorney general’s office, does not have a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations to recover the remains of the victims of the civil war between government forces and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

Nor do the authorities have up-to-date records on the areas where bodies were buried, often in mass graves, which would give a complete picture of what still needs to be done, says the book "Los muertos de Ayacucho. Violencia y sitios de entierro clandestinos" (The Dead of Ayacucho: Violence and Clandestine Burial Sites), presented by COMISEDH on Tuesday Aug. 28.

The book was published nine years after the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) released its final report, which stated that 69,000 people, mainly indigenous peasants, were killed or forcibly disappeared, as victims of Sendero or the state security forces.

IML officials estimate that there are 15,731 victims – acknowledged to be an underestimate – of the conflict buried at more than 4,000 sites around the country documented by the CVR up to 2003.

But the IML was only able to find 2,064 bodies between 2002 and 2011, which means that at this rate, it would take eight decades to exhume the rest of the bodies, and much more time to identify them and turn the remains over to the victims’ families, says the book, whose journalistic investigation was carried out by this reporter.

The government inaction is especially notorious in the southern department or region of Ayacucho, which suffered the highest number of victims during the armed conflict. Official figures indicate that in the last 10 years, the remains of 1,196 of the 8,660 victims buried there – a conservative estimate – have been exhumed.

COMISEDH reveals in its book that in Ayacucho there are another 1,818 burial sites, besides the 2,234 reported by the CVR in 2003.

The new figure emerges from the updating of the records carried out by COMISEDH from 2004 to 2009, after the CVR stopped operating.

The figure has since been updated, to a total of 6,462 secret unmarked graves.

To locate the sites, a team of COMISEDH researchers headed by Falconí interviewed thousands of family members of victims, survivors and witnesses in some 100 villages and towns of Ayacucho. Several of the experts had been in charge of putting together the original CVR list in that region.

Falconí said that in late September, she would give the updated list to the office of the public prosecutor and the ombudsman’s office, so it could be used as “a tool to draw up a plan for forensic anthropological investigations and an orderly, efficient process of exhumation, in accordance with international standards.”

In its 2003 report, the CVR recommended that the government craft a national plan for forensic anthropological investigations, to make it possible to recover and identify the remains of victims and hand them over to the families, in an efficient and planned manner, especially necessary given the complexity of the events in question and the number of years that have passed.

“It’s not the same thing to exhume the body of someone who died recently as those of people who were murdered over two decades ago,” said Falconí.

Exhuming bodies implies stirring up past crimes. Forensic anthropological investigations make it possible to identify the cause of death, and provide clues as to who may have been responsible, as a result of analysing the bones and scraps of clothing and other belongings and carrying out a reconstruction of events.

The head of the IML, Gino Dávila, told IPS that his team has an annual schedule for exhumations, but that a document with a medium- to long-term scope such as the one called for by the CVR would be difficult to come up with because the government forensic experts work on the basis of requests by the prosecutors who are investigating the civil war-era human rights violations.

“For this year, we have programmed some 400 exhumations, to try to speed things up and gain time. If we assessed what would be needed to complete the work (recover the remains of all of the victims), a great deal of funds would be needed,” Dávila said.

The specialised IML forensic team has a budget of about 600,000 dollars a year – 80 percent less than what Dávila had requested from the attorney general’s office for the purpose of recovering and identifying the remains of victims, including DNA testing.

Only 50 percent of the bodies exhumed have been identified so far. The rest are still pending DNA tests. And in some cases, it is impossible to determine the identity of the victim due to the poor state of the remains, the absence of family members to provide blood samples to match with DNA, or the lack of materials to carry out the required technical process.

This high proportion of unidentified bodies indicates inadequate investigation prior to the exhumation, according to experts at the only two specialised civil society institutions, the Andean Centre for Forensic Anthropology Research (CENIA) and the Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team (EPAF).

There are family members who have been waiting for results of DNA tests for seven years, when they gave blood samples. The civil society experts say that at the very least, grieving relatives should be informed when a match is made and a body is identified.

In response to the indifference and ignorance of much of society and the lack of political will on the part of the authorities, COMISEDH proposed a plan of forensic anthropological investigations for Ayacucho, in order to recover the victims in a more efficient manner, Falconí said.

The head of the human rights investigation team in the ombudsman’s office, César Cárdenas, said that “Allowing them to stay there (in the ground) is like recognising that Sendero Luminoso, which started the armed struggle, was right. And we know that this is not true.”

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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Thousands Call for Peace in Colombia

May 21, 2012 by

The Real News Network

Thousands of victims of violence march in Bogota tell warlords they want an end to the conflict


More at The Real News


Filed Under: Conflict, Human Rights, Inequality, Insurgency, Justice, Latin America, Politics, Social Justice, Video Tagged With: ,

U.S.-Afghan Pact Won’t End War – Or SOF Night Raids

May 3, 2012 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, May 2, 2012 (IPS) – The optics surrounding the Barack Obama administration’s "Enduring Strategic Partnership" agreement with Afghanistan and the Memorandums of Understanding accompanying it emphasise transition to Afghan responsibility and an end to U.S. war.

But the only substantive agreement reached between the U.S. and Afghanistan – well hidden in the agreements – has been to allow powerful U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to continue to carry out the unilateral night raids on private homes that are universally hated in the Pashtun zones of Afghanistan.

The presentation of the new agreement on a surprise trip by President Obama to Afghanistan, with a prime time presidential address and repeated briefings for the press, allows Obama to go into a tight presidential election campaign on a platform of ending an unpopular U.S. war in Afghanistan.

It also allows President Hamid Karzai to claim he has gotten control over the SOF night raids while getting a 10-year commitment of U.S. economic support.

But the actual text of the agreement and of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids included in it by reference will not end the U.S. war in Afghanistan, nor will they give Karzai control over night raids.

The Obama administration’s success in obscuring those facts is the real story behind the ostensible story of the agreement.

Obama’s decisions on how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond and what their mission will be will only be made in a "Bilateral Security Agreement" still to be negotiated. Although the senior officials did not provide any specific information about those negotiations in their briefings for news media, the Strategic Partnership text specifies that they are to begin the signing of the present agreement "with the goal of concluding within one year".

That means Obama does not have to announce any decisions about stationing of U.S. forces in Afghanistan before the 2012 presidential election, allowing him to emphasise that he is getting out of Afghanistan and sidestep the question of a long-term commitment of troops in Afghanistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement will supersede the 2003 "Status of Forces" agreement with Afghanistan, according to the text. That agreement gives U.S. troops in Afghanistan immunity from prosecution and imposes no limitations on U.S. forces in regard to military bases or operations.

Last month’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on night raids was forced on the United States by Karzai’s repeated threat to refuse to sign a partnership agreement unless the United States gave his government control over any raids on people’s homes. Karzai’s insistence on ending U.S. unilateral night raids and detention of Afghans had held up the agreement on Strategic Partnership for months.

But Karzai’s demand put him in direct conflict with the interests of one of the most influential elements of the U.S. military: the SOF. Under Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. war strategy in Afghanistan came to depend heavily on the purported effectiveness of night raids carried out by SOF units in weakening the Taliban insurgency.

CENTCOM officials refused to go along with ending the night raids or giving the Afghan government control over them, as IPS reported last February.

The two sides tried for weeks to craft an agreement that Karzai could cite as meeting his demand but that would actually change very little.

In the end, however, it was Karzai who had to give in. What was done to disguise that fact represents a new level of ingenuity in misrepresenting the actual significance of an international agreement involving U.S. military operations.

The MOU was covered by cable news as a sea change in the conduct of military operations. CNN, for example, called it a "landmark deal" that "affords Afghan authorities an effective veto over controversial special operations raids."

But a closer reading of the text of the MOU as well as comments on by U.S. military officials indicate that it represents little, if any, substantive change from the status quo.

The agreement was negotiated between the U.S. military command in Kabul and Afghan Ministry of Defence, and lawyers for the U.S. military introduced a key provision that fundamentally changed the significance of the rest of the text.

In the first paragraph under the definition of terms, the MOU says, "For the purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), special operations are operations approved by the Afghan Operational Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in accordance with Afghan laws."

That carefully crafted sentence means that the only night raids covered by the MOU are those that the SOF commander responsible for U.S. night raids decides to bring to the Afghan government. Those raids carried out by U.S. units without consultation with the Afghan government fall outside the MOU.

Coverage of the MOU by major news media suggesting that the participation of U.S. SOF units would depend on the Afghan government simply ignored that provision in the text.

But Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters flatly Apr. 9 that Karzai would not have a veto over night raids. "It’s not about the U.S. ceding responsibility to the Afghans," he said.

Kirby would not comment on whether those SOF units which operated independently of Afghan units would be affected by the MOU, thus confirming by implication that they would not.

Kirby explained that the agreement had merely "codified" what had already been done since December 2011, which was that Afghan Special Forces were in the lead on most night raids. That meant that they would undertake searches within the compound.

The U.S. forces have continued, however, to capture or kill Afghans in those raids.

The disparity between the reality of the agreement and the optics created by administration press briefings recalls Obama’s declarations in 2009 and 2010 on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq and an end to the U.S. war there, and the reality that combat units remained in Iraq and continued to fight long after the Sep. 1, 2010 deadline Obama he had set for withdrawal had passed.

Fifty-eight U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq after that deadline in 2010 and 2011.

But there is a fundamental difference between the two exercises in shaping media coverage and public perceptions: the Iraq withdrawal agreement of 2008 made it politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Iraqi government to keep U.S. troops in Iraq beyond 2011.

In the case of Afghanistan, however, the agreements just signed impose no such constraints on the U.S. military. And although Obama is touting a policy of ending U.S. war in Afghanistan, the U.S. military and the Pentagon have public said they expect to maintain thousands of SOF troops in Afghanistan for many years after 2014.

Obama had hoped to lure the Taliban leadership into peace talks that would make it easier to sell the idea that he is getting out of Afghanistan while continuing the war. But the Taliban didn’t cooperate.

Obama’s Kabul speech could not threaten that U.S. SOF units will continue to hunt them down in their homes until they agree to make peace with Karzai. That would have given away the secret still hidden in the U.S.-Afghan "Enduring Strategic Partnership" agreement.

But Obama must assume that the Taliban understand what the U.S. public does not: U.S. night raids will continue well beyond 2014, despite the fact that they ensure enduring hatred of U.S. and NATO troops.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

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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PAKISTAN: Tribes Plead for End to Army Offensives

June 7, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai

PESHAWAR, Jun 7, 2011 (IPS) – Fear and anxiety have spread among residents of North Waziristan in northwest Pakistan after U.S. Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that the Pakistani government would launch a major offensive in the area.

The announcement, however, has also divided Pakistanis – some say it would harm civilians, while others think that a military operation in North Waziristan, said to be the base of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, is the only way to wipe out militants and restore peace in Pakistan.

"About one million people from the Federally Administered Tribal Area are still displaced due to military operations; the impending action in North Waziristan will further add to their problems, rather than doing any good," said Wakil Shah, a teacher from South Waziristan.

People like Shah still remember 2004, when the Pakistani army launched its first-ever military operation in South Waziristan Agency to flush out militants. The operation caused a mass exodus, with some 300,000 displaced people migrating to the adjacent districts of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan in the nearby province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

"We fear the operation could trigger a mass exodus and we want the government to avoid military action because thousands would face starvation and diseases in camps," Shaukatullah, a resident of Datta Khel, a tehsil (county) of North Waziristan, told IPS over the phone.

Reports about military operations in Waziristan have sent a chill down the spine of the tribal population, he said. A majority of the residents are opposed to terrorism and are ready to cooperate with the government in ending insurgency, but believe that a military operation will not solve the problem.

"Has any military operation in any tribal area established peace?" he asked. "The government needs to take local dwellers into its confidence to eliminate militancy." A military operation would create resentment against the government, he said.

South and North Waziristan are two of the seven tribal units or "agencies" that constitute Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA), the region that lies between Afghanistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the northwest. The FATA is spread over 47,000 sq kms with a population of five million.

It has been plagued by militancy since 2001 when U.S. and allied offensives toppled the Taliban from power in Afghanistan. Both the Taliban and Al-Qaeda are said to have crossed over the 24-km porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to take refuge in the FATA.

Manzoor Shah, project officer of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told IPS the new operations in North Waziristan would be no different from the early operations in the FATA, when civilians were driven away but the militants stayed. "Some 80,000 people from South Waziristan still live in Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. There is no hope of their repatriation," he said.

Some of those refugees were displaced in 2009 when the army launched Operation Rah-e-Nijat (Path to Salvation) to flush out militants. South Waziristan residents also suffered from the army’s earlier Operation Zalzala (Earthquake) in January 2008.

"The operation in Bajaur Agency in August 2009 also failed, as the Taliban still operate there, while about 100,000 people have been displaced," retired army major Humayun Khan told IPS.

Khan said that for the past two years, the Pakistan army has been busy with operations in Kurrum, Khyber, Orakzai, Mohmand, Bajaur and South Waziristan Agencies, but has been unable to rid these places of militants. "At the receiving end is the poor population, who are living in camps, braving hunger, diseases and the scorching sun," he lamented.

The U.S. has long been demanding a full-scale operation in North Waziristan Agency, but Pakistan had yet to accede to the demand.

"Lately, the assassination of Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden in the garrison city of Abbottabad had left Pakistan in an awkward position and the government now seems to toe the U.S. line," Khan said.

"It’s a very important fight and a very important operation," said Mullen on television May 31, on the need for the Pakistani army to attack North Waziristan.

"We are not taking dictation from anyone. We’ll see whether such an operation is required," said Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on his monthly television programme "Prime Minister Online" last week.

On May 31, a tribal jirga or grand council in North Waziristan appealed to the government to desist from army action, saying that peace had returned to the area and that a military operation would make the situation tense.

"We are strictly opposed to military action in the FATA because these operations have not done any good to the people. Education, health and social services have been destroyed due to the military presence in the FATA," said Gul Wali Khan, a shopkeeper from Mohmand Agency.

Khan, who has been living in Jalozai camp in the Nowshera district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa for the past 18 months, says the operation in North Waziristan will hit the people hard while militants will remain unharmed.

Jalozai camp is home to 95,000 people from the different FATA agencies who are facing acute shortages of food, water and medicine. The North Waziristan operation will be the last nail in the coffin of the tribal population, shopkeeper Khan said.

But the Awami National Party, which rules Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, argues that a military offensive is the only option to establish peace in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

"The militants run training schools for bomb-making and prepare the youth for suicide attacks in North Waziristan. They are then sent to any part of the country for sabotage activities," says Bushra Gohar, a lawmaker of the Awami National Party. Gohar describes North Waziristan as the international headquarters of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

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, Featured, Insurgency, Politics Tagged With: ,

Tajikistan’s New Generation of Guerrillas

May 25, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Portia Crowe

NEW YORK, May 24, 2011 (IPS) – While most of the world is closely watching the Middle East, monitoring the human rights situations in Bahrain, Syria, Libya and Israel, the International Crisis Group (ICG) is keeping its eye on neighbouring Central Asia.

On Tuesday, the group released a report highlighting growing security threats in Tajikistan – the country it deems "by most measures, Central Asia’s poorest state", and which is increasingly facing internal and external security threats.

The report focuses primarily on insurgencies in the eastern region of Rasht. Military operations against the warlords and young insurgents there have been unsuccessful, and in 2010 resulted in a fragile peace deal between the government and those it had accused of terrorism.

After a 2009 ambush and continued fighting throughout 2010 "demonstrated that someone in the Rasht area was capable of deploying trained deadly force," President Emomali Rakhmon arranged a deal with United Tajik Opposition (UTO) member Mirzokhuja Akhmadov, who was blamed for the assault.

Akhmadov and his followers gave up their weapons in exchange for full amnesty, and became allies of the government.

"The 2010 Rasht operation dealt a disastrous blow to the image and what remained of the fighting capacity of Tajik military and security forces," the report said, and while Tajikistan’s army appears weak in the face of national warlords, the ICG report also raises concerns about the threat posed by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, or IMU, which is wreaking havoc in neighbouring Afghanistan.

The IMU is a guerilla group "with a vision of an Islamist caliphate, that is fighting in Afghanistan alongside the Taliban," said Paul Quinn-Judge, Crisis Group Central Asia project director, adding, "Tajikistan must hope it remains preoccupied there."

The report cautions that a weakened Tajikistan could catch the interest of the Central Asian guerrillas, as Afghanistan’s conflict draws nearer the 1,400-km Afghan-Tajik border.

Following the army’s efforts to quell the Rasht uprisings, only about 30 soldiers remain in its sole well-trained counterinsurgency unit. Meanwhile, Afghan fighters have been steady infiltrating Tajikistan for years, and "Tajikistan has almost no capacity to tackle a dedicated insurgent force," the report says.

These security threats are stemming from new generation of guerillas emerging within both Tajikistan and the IMU, according to the report. "They are mostly men in their twenties with little memory of the Tajik civil war of 1992-1997," it added, referring to the five year ethnic war that left some 50,000 to 100,000 people dead.

It said this development has "punctured" the assumption that Tajiks are too damaged by the memory of war to turn on the regime – a regime which continues to provide incentive for revolt.

"Corruption remains at a breathtaking level," Quinn-Judge said. The Tajik government is suspected of smuggling narcotics from Afghanistan to China and Russia, and thus intentionally leaving the Afghan border insecure.

And the country’s corrupt politics and weak army are further matched with a "moribund" economy and degraded infrastructure, according to the report.

With these grievances in mind, some predict that the wave of citizen uprisings spreading across the Arab world will douse Tajikistan as well.

"President Rakhmon denies that the North African scenario of popular unrest and revolt could happen in Tajikistan", said Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia programme director.

"But Tajikistan is so vulnerable that a small, localised problem could quickly spiral into a threat to the regime’s existence," he said, adding, "Tajikistan is not immune."

The report offers recommendations for both the government of Tajikistan and the international community. It calls on the Tajik government to repeal its bans on moderate Islamist groups that repudiate the use of violence, and to encourage their participation in political and social life.

It asks Russia, China, and the United States to assess the risks to the Afghan-Tajik border and to discuss measures to reinforce border security.

It also asked for a reconfiguration of foreign aid strategies, suggesting conditionality as a norm and special rewards for reform. "Investing now in developing aid staff expertise in Tajikistan and Central Asia would pay significant dividends," it says.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

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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Obama Troop Surge Decision Ignored Pak-Taliban Ties

May 23, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

Analysis by Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, May 22, 2011 (IPS) – The unilateral U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden created a spike in mutual recriminations between U.S. and Pakistani politicians, but their fundamental conflict of interest over Afghanistan was already driving the two countries toward serious confrontation.

The pivotal event in relations between the Barack Obama administration and Pakistan was the decision by Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan in 2009, despite the knowledge that Pakistan was committed to supporting the Taliban insurgents as a strategic policy in its conflict with India.

Obama launched a desperate, last-minute effort to get some kind of commitment from the Pakistanis to reduce their support for the Taliban before the decision to escalate the war. But he did not reconsider the decision after that effort had clearly failed.

It was always understood within the Obama administration that any public recognition that Pakistan was committed to supporting the Taliban could be politically dangerous to the war effort. As a result, Obama’s national security team decided early on to deny the complicity of Pakistani Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and director of the ISI intelligence agency Shuja Pasha, despite the knowledge that they were fully behind the policy.

On Mar. 26, 2009, a story in the New York Times provided the most detailed news media account up to that date of Pakistani assistance to the Taliban. But the story quoted anonymous U.S. officials as blaming "mid-level ISI operatives" and expressing doubt that top Pakistani officials in Islamabad were directly coordinating the clandestine efforts by ISI operatives to assist the Taliban.

That did not reflect the briefing Obama had gotten from George W. Bush’s director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, after his election. McConnell had learned from communications intercepts that Kayani considered the Haqqani network, which was being targeted as the most serious threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan, as a "strategic asset".

As Obama approached a decision on Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for another troop increase of as much as 40,000 troops, the Pakistani military’s determination to use the Taliban and the Haqqani network to advance Pakistani interests in Afghanistan was a major issue in the policy debate.

Opponents of the troop surge request, including Vice-President Joe Biden, deputy national security adviser Tom Donilon and Afghanistan War coordinator Douglas Lute, argued that the Pakistanis were not going to change their policy toward Afghanistan, according to Bob Woodward’s account in "Obama’s Wars".

Biden argued in a meeting on Sep. 13, 2009 that Pakistan was determined to avoid an Afghan government "led by a Pashtun sympathetic to India" – i.e., Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The conclusion was that the Pakistanis would continue to aid the insurgency the U.S. was trying to defeat.

Despite that argument, as the policymaking process was entering its final weeks, Obama tried to exert high-level pressure on Pakistan.

In a Nov. 11, 2009 letter to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Obama said Pakistan’s use of such "proxy groups" as Haqqani and the Taliban would no longer be tolerated, as Woodward recounts. National Security Adviser James Jones and Counterterrorism adviser John Brennan were sent to Islamabad to deliver the message.

Obama wanted Pakistan to understand that he would take unilateral action against the Taliban and Haqqani safe havens in Pakistan, including accelerated drone strikes and commando raids, unless Pakistani forces attacked them.

That message was clearly received. A Pakistani official told the New York Times, "Jones’s message was if that Pakistani help wasn’t forthcoming, the United States would have to do it themselves."

The week of Nov. 17, CIA Director Leon Panetta met with Pasha and other top Pakistani officials, and complained about the presence of the Taliban leadership headquarters in Quetta, Baluchistan, according to Woodward’s account. He cited intelligence that bombs were being made there, then "taken across the border and blowing up Americans".

Panetta proposed joint U.S.-Pakistani operations on the ground aimed at the Quetta Shura, but Kayani refused.

In a response to Obama’s letter late in November, Zardari voiced the Pakistani military’s rationale for Pakistan’s use of Afghan insurgents to protect its interests in Pakistan. He charged that "neighbouring intelligence agencies" – meaning India – "are using Afghan soil to perpetuate violence in Pakistan."

And Zardari did not give a clear response to Obama’s invitation to plan joint operations against those forces.

When Obama met with his national security team for the final time on Nov. 29, he knew that the pressure tactic had failed. Lute, Obama’s Afghanistan coordinator, warned that Pakistani policy was one of four major interacting risks of a troop surge policy.

But Obama approved a plan for 30,000 additional troops anyway, suggesting that the decision was driven by the political-bureaucratic momentum of the war rather than by a rational assessment of cost, risk and benefit.

Throughout 2010, the Pakistani military continued to make clear its refusal to compromise on its interests in Afghanistan. In late January, U.S. and Pakistani authorities picked up Mullah Ghani Baradar, the second-ranking official in the Taliban Quetta Shura, in a raid in Karchi – apparently without realising in advance that Baradar was present.

But when the United States sought to extradite Baradar to Afghanistan, the Pakistanis refused. And Baradar and several other members of the Quetta Shura who had been detained by the Pakistanis were reported in October 2010 to have been released.

In a January 2011 interview with Public Broadcasting System’s "Frontline", Gen. David Petraeus, by then the commander in Afghanistan, was asked about Pakistan’s release of top Taliban leaders. "We’ve actually had a conversation on this very recently," said Petraeus blandly, "and in fact there has been a request for information…"

Two National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 2010 pointed once again to the centrality of Pakistani policy to the outcome of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

The NIE on Afghanistan concluded that the United States was unlikely to succeed in Afghanistan unless Pakistan changed its policy to take military action against insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But the estimate on Pakistan made it clear that no such change in Pakistani policy could be expected.

In mid-December, the Obama administration issued a five-page summary of its December 2010 review of the Afghanistan War, which concluded that the "gains" were "fragile and reversible" and that consolidating those gains "will require that we make more progress with Pakistan to eliminate sanctuaries for violent extremist networks."

Immediately after that review, the New York Times reported a military proposal for cross-border raids into Pakistan aimed at capturing Taliban commanders for interrogation back in Afghanistan.

Beginning in late 2010, moreover, the U.S. infiltrated hundreds of unilateral intelligence agents into Pakistan, suggesting an intention to carry out further cross-border raids.

Those moves had already alarmed Pakistan’s military leaders well before the U.S. raid against bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad.

And in a classified report sent to Congress in early April, the Obama administration strongly criticised Pakistan’s failure to attack insurgent safe havens in Mohmand in northwest Pakistan for three straight years, as reported by the New York Times Apr. 5.

Moeed Yusuf, South Asia advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, who has been leading a study of Pakistani elite opinion on relations with the United States, believes the crisis in U.S.-Pakistan relations can be blamed on a failure of both governments to acknowledge explicitly the existence of a fundamental conflict of interests.

"If there is a strategic divergence of interests, I think Pakistan needs to put it on the table," said Yusuf. Pakistani leaders "need to be very candid about why it’s not in their interests" to do what Washington wants, he said.

If the interests at stake are not brought into the open, Yusuf suggested, "A rupture is possible."

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2011.

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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Deferring to Petraeus, NIE Failed to Register Taliban Growth

February 14, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON, Feb 14, 2011 (IPS) – Despite evidence that the Taliban insurgency had grown significantly in 2010, the U.S. intelligence community failed to revise its estimate for Taliban forces as part of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan in December.

That unusual decision was in deference to Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan, who did not want any official estimate of the insurgency’s strength that would contradict his claims of success by Special Operations Forces in reducing the capabilities of the Taliban in 2010.

In late 2009, the intelligence community adopted an estimate of 20,000 to 30,000 full-time insurgents, as reported by McClatchy newspapers in November and confirmed in a press briefing by Brig. Gen. Eric Tremblay, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), on Dec. 3, 2009.

But in 2010, the Taliban and their allies increased the total number of attacks to 34,000, compared with 22,000 in 2009, according to official ISAF data – a whopping 54 percent rise.

That major step-up in operations suggested that the Taliban had grown substantially between 2009 and 2010. Yet no revised intelligence estimate of Taliban strength appeared in late 2010, even though the National Intelligence Council produced a National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan in December. Such an NIE would normally be expected to include an updated estimate of insurgent strength.

Last month, officials of NATO and Petraeus’s command managed to suggest that the number of insurgents had not grown in 2010 and then dismissed the very idea of an intelligence estimate of the size of the forces fighting against ISAF.

On Jan 3, 2011, an unnamed NATO official in Brussels said there were "up to 25,000" Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, according to a Jan. 6 story by Associated Press reporter Slobodan Lekic. The same 25,000 figure – the mid-point in the 2009 estimate – had been provided earlier by "several military officers and diplomats", according to the Lekic story.

That figure would imply that the number of full-time Taliban had not grown since 2009, and might even have shrunk – thus supporting Petraeus’s claims of success.

But in a Jan. 9 response to a query from Associated Press, NATO spokeswoman Oana Lungescu clearly disparaged the idea that there could be an official estimate of the Taliban strength. "There has never been a single reliable source for the size of the insurgency," said Lungescu, adding that all estimates of the insurgents are "highly unreliable".

Lungescu sought to divert attention away from a focus on the numerical strength of the Taliban, suggesting that it "misrepresents gains made by alliance forces in the past year". But it is logically impossible for a numerical estimate of insurgent strength to "misrepresent" the results of military operations.

Lungescu was implying that an estimate of Taliban numerical strength would interfere with ISAF’s claims of having weakened the Taliban.

In an obvious effort to suggest that the insurgency had been reduced in size, Lungescu said,"[T]housands of insurgent leaders have been killed or captured and several thousand fighters have been taken off the battlefield."

In response to an IPS query to ISAF about the estimated strength of the Afghan armed insurgency, an ISAF spokesman, U.S. Navy Lt. Fernando Rivero, did not respond except to refer to the Jan. 9 statement by Lungescu.

An Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman said Feb. 9 that the ministry estimates the number of Taliban insurgents at between 25,000 and 35,000, although he said it was "just a guess".

The failure of the intelligence community to adopt a revised estimate in the NIE last year was shaped by a highly politicised relationship between the intelligence community and the most powerful field commander in modern U.S. warfare.

The NIE reflected an agreement on what one intelligence source called a "division of labour" between the NIE and the military under which the NIE would not deal with issues bearing on the success of the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. Intelligence officials understood that such issues were "outside our lane", the source said.

An estimate of Taliban strength in the NIE would have obvious bearing on the success of U.S. military operations, since it would show whether the Taliban had been able to continue to grow despite losses inflicted by Special Operations Forces raids.

The decision to forego a formal estimate of insurgent forces may have been authorised by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who has oversight of any national intelligence product, and adjudicates any major differences of view that can’t be negotiated. Clapper, who took over as DNI last August, has a reputation for sacrificing truth to support existing war policies.

He is best known for having claimed in October 2003, when he was director of the Defence Department’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency, that the missing WMD in Iraq "unquestionably" had been transferred to Syria and other countries before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Dr. Antonio Giustozzi of the London School of Economics, a widely-published specialist on the conflict in Afghanistan, told IPS the Afghan National Army had provided him with an estimate in April 2010 of 36,000 full-time insurgents – roughly a 50 percent increase over the 2009 estimate.

Giustozzi provided IPS with his detailed estimate of insurgent forces as of January 2011. The estimate includes 36,000 full-time fighters and nearly 50,000 part-time local fighters. The Taliban only mobilise that much larger local pool of manpower occasionally, according to Giustozzi.

That a revised estimate of the insurgency’s strength is missing from the latest NIE recalls the political struggle between the CIA and the U.S. military command over the estimate of Vietnamese Communist-led military forces.

In late 1966, a CIA analyst, Sam Adams, found that the military’s estimate of less than 300,000 Communist-led forces in Vietnam did not reflect the evidence of continued growth in those forces – and particularly of "irregular" local paramilitary forces.

The CIA came up with a new estimate of Communist-led forces to 431,000 to 491,000, which was presented in a draft national intelligence estimate in spring 1967. But the military command continued to stonewall, flatly refusing to accept any increase in the overall Viet Cong "order of battle" above 300,000.

Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to Gen. William Westmoreland, the top U.S. commander in Vietnam, on Mar. 9, 1967, "If these figures should reach the public domain they would literally blow the lid off Washington."

Wheeler urged Westmoreland to "do whatever is necessary to insure [sic] that these figures are not repeat not released to news media or otherwise exposed to the public."

Westmoreland agreed. According to his intelligence chief, Gen. Joseph A. McChristian, Westmoreland said such an estimate would be a "political bombshell" if it got out to the public.

CIA Director Richard Helms finally caved in to military pressure in September 1967 and ordered the CIA to agree to an estimate of exactly 299,000.

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told IPS he recalls Sam Adams quoting in a conversation with him the explanation Helms had given to Adams: "My job is to protect the Agency, and there is no way I can do that if I get into a pissing match with the Army when it’s at war."

Like Westmoreland, Petraeus appears to have invoked the privilege of the military commander to avert the potential "political bombshell" of an estimate that would almost certainly have shown a large increase in the number of armed insurgents in Afghanistan.

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

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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RIGHTS-PERU: At Last, Reparations for Civil War Victims

February 9, 2011 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Milagros Salazar

LIMA, Feb 9, 2011 (IPS) – Peru will begin to pay individual monetary reparations to victims and survivors of the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war, with top priority put on elderly people in remote villages in the country’s impoverished highlands, where most of the human rights violations took place.

Although collective reparations have been made in the form of infrastructure projects at a community level, the individual damages have been delayed because the official registry of victims has not yet been completed.

The beneficiaries of the reparations will be direct family members of people killed or forcibly disappeared in the armed conflict, rape victims, and people left with disabilities.

"This is a pending issue that must be addressed," said Jesús Aliaga, executive secretary of the High Level Multisectoral Commission (CMAN) set up to monitor the state’s policies and actions on reparations. "It has been a long wait," he told IPS.

He said the CMAN Technical Commission, which he himself chairs, delivered a report that determined the amount of reparations to be paid, to Prime Minister José Antonio Chang on Jan. 31.

In its 2001 to 2003 investigation of human rights abuses committed during the 20-year civil war, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that the conflict between government counterinsurgency forces and the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas claimed the lives of 69,000 civilians.

However, the Reparations Council projects the total number of dead and disappeared civilians at around 50,000, based on its field visits to each region, where people applying for reparations fill out registration forms.

"The Technical Commission produced four cost projections taking into account the final projected estimates from the General Victims’ Registry. The amounts have to be realistic. We are not putting a price on a life, nor are we asking the survivors to ‘sell’ their dead," Aliaga said.

"We want to make the payment of a forgotten debt viable and sustainable," he stressed.

The technical report will be published when Chang, who presides over the Council of Ministers, and the members of the CMAN reach a final decision.

But Aliaga told IPS that reparations to the families of local authorities like mayors or justices of the peace killed or disappeared in the conflict would be 1,350 dollars, while damages to the families of members of the "rondas campesinas" — rural vigilante groups trained by the army to fight Sendero, and thus seen as heroes — were set at just under 14,000 dollars.

The official also said the proposed amounts presented to the prime minister are far from the "maximalist option" outlined by the National Human Rights Coordinator (CNDDHH), an umbrella group of 60 NGOs, which called for reparations calculated on the basis of the official minimum wage.

"Monetary reparations have a symbolic component; the amount that was proposed is a reference point," Gino Huerta with the Legal Defence Institute (IDL), who forms part of the CMAN as a representative of the CNDDHH, told IPS.

Aliaga explained that the reparations were calculated on the basis of actual monthly incomes in the conflict zones, mainly poor highlands areas where incomes are generally far below the official minimum wage.

The damages are based on incomes lost in the years since a breadwinner was killed or disappeared, or since the victim was left disabled.

For 2011, the government foresees payments totalling 7.2 million dollars in individual reparations, and a similar amount in collective reparations, which it continues to pay out.

In four years, the government has made collective indemnification to around 1,200 of the 5,660 communities registered as victims.

The collective reparations programme launched in 2007 consists of small infrastructure projects in areas hit hard by the conflict.

"Reparations should be as homogeneous as possible, because in contrast with Argentina and Chile (where damages were paid after military dictatorships), in Peru there was a larger proportion of poor victims," Huerta said.

The IDL and the International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) provided the Technical Commission with the report "How Is Pain Quantified?" which describes reparations programmes in other countries of Latin America and discusses different ways that reparations can be made.

Huerta said the local human rights organisations insist that no conditions should be placed on how the families of victims use the damages, and that the elderly should be the first to receive payments.

Aliaga, for his part, said the Technical Commission also recommended that a set amount be paid, instead of different amounts depending on the specific human rights violation involved, to "avoid resentments."

He also confirmed that the first to receive payments will be elderly persons in rural areas, and that the technical report determined that three out of four victims were poor peasant farmers from the country’s Quechua-speaking Andean highlands regions.

In his interview with IPS, Aliaga expressed concern over "the fragility of the information" on the General Victims’ Registry, which he said was only half complete. Moreover, of the 22,000 victims registered by December 2010 — of the projected total of 50,000 — there are "6,000 dead victims without any beneficiary identified," he added.

"This worries us because in the end we would only have to pay reparations to 16,000 of the nearly 50,000 victims projected by the Council," he said.

Determining who will or will not receive monetary damages is more complicated than it might seem. It must still be determined who is considered disabled by the conflict, and an amendment is still pending to include rape victims in the reparations programme.

In addition, the way the damages are distributed among the victims’ direct family members must be determined, as well as what happens if new relatives turn up.

Aliaga stressed that the General Victims’ Registry was supposed to be completed two years ago, and said the failure to meet the deadline led to delays.

But Rivas said that was "only a pretext," and that the registry didn’t have to be completed before individual reparations began to be made.

The technical secretary of the Reparations Council pointed out that delays occurred because the laws and regulations governing the registry were not approved in time, and insufficient funds were assigned.

He noted, for example, that the team in charge of reviewing the registration forms filled out for the inclusion of victims on the General Victims’ Registry had to be temporarily disbanded in December 2008 due to a lack of budget funds.

And although funds were once again available in January 2009, then prime minister Javier Velásquez did not give the team permission to begin operating again until July 2009.

Rivas said the Registry will be completed this year, and that of 73,000 applications, 50,000 have been verified, mainly from the hardest hit regions: Ayacucho, Junín, Huancavelica and Apurímac.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

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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A Janus View of Guatemala

December 8, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IDN

By Julio Godoy

http://www.indepthnews.net/ 

GUATEMALA CITY (IDN) – Something extraordinary happened in Guatemala City on December 2: Jean Marie Simon’s historic photos of the crimes committed by the Guatemalan army during the civil war’s peak years that exsanguinated the Central American country between 1979 and 1983, were shown in a unique exhibition in what used to be the Guatemalan government’s headquarters, the so-called National Palace, downtown in the capital.

The exhibition is unique, because Simon’s photos, irrefutable proof of the indescribable brutality of the Guatemalan army’s operations against civilians, including children and women, are now being shown in what used to be the centre of military power in Guatemala.

Generals ruled Guatemala in those bleak dictatorial years from that very palace — a dictatorship that killed more than 200,000 people, including children and women, kidnapped more than 40,000 civilians, forced some one million into exile, out of a population of less than six million at the time, and transformed the country into an unfathomable nightmare. The National Palace was then the heart of Guatemalan darkness.

One horrendous, memorable photo of the exhibition shows the tortured body of Beatriz Barrios Marroquín, a 26-year old school teacher kidnapped on her way to the airport. Army death squads captured her on December 10, 1985, just while she was trying to flee to Canada, where she had found asylum. Her body, discovered a couple of days later, had no hands — her killers had amputated them. The body shows also numerous slices and burnings wounds. Her killers had tortured her to death. The teacher had also been sexually abused.

Simon remembers that a piece of cardboard was found near Barrios’ mutilated body, with her name written on it and the words "more to come".

Simon adds: "When security agents arrived to take fingerprints from her severed hands, Captain Armando Villegas, head of the Honor Guard G-2 (military) intelligence office was already there. When they asked him, ‘Hey man, what happened?’ Villegas responded by taking out a card on which he had written Barrios’ name, and told them that it was she. The writing on Villegas’s card matched that on the cardboard message."

A couple of months later, Villegas was named director in the official personal guard of Vinicio Cerezo, who had been elected civilian president. Cerezo was the first civilian president Guatemala had since 1952. Villegas never faced any charge.

The photo, which Simon shot in a morgue near Guatemala City, is now being shown as an overdue homage to Beatriz in the very corridors where her death was decided and planned. Another grim detail of the exhibition — the U.S. government, allegedly a mentor of the criminals who killed the teacher and thousand others and converted Guatemala into the inferno it is now, was represented in the opening of the exhibition by its current ambassador, Stephen McFarland.

The photo of the tortured teacher’s body is but one of the numerous proofs Simon collected of the atrocities committed by the Guatemalan army in those years, and had been published before, in a book printed in the U.S. in 1988.

During the more than 20 years that have gone past since, Simon’s book, ‘Guatemala: Eternal spring, eternal tyranny’, a photo essay accompanied by a written account of the atrocities the photos documented, circulated in Guatemala in its original English version only among very restricted circles. But this year, Simon could publish a first Spanish edition, printed in Guatemala by a courageous publisher, supported by international institutions such as the Foros Foundation and New York-based human rights groups.

SIGNIFICANT STEP

The very fact that the book is now available in Spanish to Guatemalan readers is already a significant step in the writing of country’s modern history in Guatemala itself. It offers local society the irrefutable evidence of the crimes committed by the army.

This proof is necessary, for Guatemala has never openly discussed its recent history, least of all the involvement of the ruling oligarchy in the army’s campaign of scorched earth in the countryside and of systematic killings of political opponents, students and unions’ leaders in the cities.

The few attempts to debate modern history — such as the report by the Catholic Church’s office of human rights, published in 1998 — were smothered to silence by more ruthless violence. The church report’s leading author, Juan Gerardi, was assassinated only a few days after the document was made public.

Furthermore, army officials still justify these crimes arguing that the Guatemalan military during the civil war only fulfilled its constitutional role and was protecting the rule of law. To begin with, the Guatemalan army started manipulating elections and killing annoying political opponents as early as 1954 — long before the war reached its infernal heights of the 1980s.

The army’s manipulations of elections continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s and until the early 1980s, accompanied by corruption of the military, unparalleled in Latin America. To pretend that the army, by killing civilians and manipulating elections and illegally amassing fortunes, was defending the country’s constitutional order is simply absurd, not to speak of hypocritical. Guatemalan rulers obviously seriously suffer from denial.

The recent publication of Simon’s photos in Guatemala has triggered a heated debate on memory and justice in a society not accustomed to discuss any national matter in a civilised manner.

Expectedly, the oligarchy and the army condemned the publication as a provocation only aimed at resurrecting the country’s past, and thus contribute to reopen the unhealed wounds left by the civil war.

MORE THAN AN OBSERVER

Some exhibitions and lectures had to be cancelled, under terror threats. Some even accused Simon of being French — comments addressed at Simon were published, in incorrect French, in the local newspapers. Jean Marie is actually a U.S. citizen — although she might be a Guatemalan at heart. Obviously, some members of Guatemalan upper class are so irrational, that accusations of being European is the worst insult they can think of for those whom they see as their class enemies.

Jean Marie Simon first came to Guatemala in 1981, as an unofficial observer for the human rights group Americas Watch. She had worked as photographer in New York, and she continued to do so in Guatemala. As reporter for Americas Watch, Simon was pivotal in formulating the group’s yearly reports on Guatemala, the first to denounce the genocide the army was committing against the Mayan Indian population, and also the infernal cadence of killings against civilians in the cities.

But Simon was more than an observer and a reporter. She became a close witness to the suffering of widows and mothers and sisters who had lost husbands, children and siblings at the hands of the army death squads.

Simon would visit every morgue in the country — and come back with photos of the dead and shocking testimonies of what human beings can inflict upon their fellows. She would offer emotional comfort to the relatives, be their friend and protector, and sometimes even financial patron.

Simon also helped people under death threats to safely leave the country. Surely it is not an exaggeration to say that in those disastrous days, Simon alone made a larger contribution to the defence of human rights in Guatemala than all the diplomatic corps and organisations active in the country. For that reason, the publication of her book and the exhibition of her photos in Guatemala is also a modest homage to her uncompromising work.

But, in a way, the release of Jean Marie’s book in Guatemala and the exhibition of her photos at the very heart of darkness are both a proof of how much the country has changed since the late 1980s, and also an irrelevant exercise in civil courage.

Guatemala is today disposing of the better press it has ever had. Freedom of speech, something undreamt of in the late 1970s, early 1980s, when journalists would be killed every day, is today taken for granted. Numerous newspapers and other media also give room to a variety of voices, though journalists may still be harassed.

Also, some subjects remain a tabu — for instance, the involvement of leading economic and military personalities in illegal cocaine dealing, in money laundering, and in other forms of international organised crime. But still — compared to the climate of repression and self-censorship three decades ago, Guatemala’s is on the whole a country with freedom of speech.

And yet, this civil virtue might help to conceal the unchanged undemocratic, corrupt, brutal nature of Guatemalan society. Some 6,000 people are killed every year in the country — related to its population, this crime rate makes of Guatemala the most violent country in Latin America.

Women are a preferred target of crime. Every year, some one thousand women are killed, in what local activists have dubbed feminicide. Sexual violence against women and children occurs on a daily basis.

RANDOM VIOLENCE

Furthermore, today’s random violence is somehow worse than the political motivated sadism of the 1970s and 1980s. In those years, even if terror was palpable in everyday life, you knew who could be target of a hit squad. Even if you were a political activist, if you were cautious enough, you could survive.

Today, crime is omnipresent, and it hits where you expect it the least. This randomness of crime has transformed former idyllic neighbourhoods and regions into high security tracts — not only in the old gated communities of the rich, where oligarchs and military and their servants hide away their incommensurable wealth, but also in the most modest districts, where poor dwellers are forced to live behind bars lest that ruthless gangs attack them and take their last possessions.

Corruption continues to be rampant, and goes up to the highest echelons of political, military and economic elite. Poverty is as dramatic as ever, despite the enormous wealth amassed by army officials and oligarchs.

Thousands of Guatemalans still die of hunger every year, in a country endowed with natural resources, from gold to oil and a potentially rich agriculture. To make crime worse, impunity is all but absolute. Less than two percent of crimes are ever elucidated. This impunity has led international observers to dub today’s Guatemala a paradise for assassins.

In a nutshell: Guatemala might now have a freer press and hold regularly free elections, than it ever did since independence from Spain in 1821. But the other, ugly, ruthless face of Guatemala is unlikely to change.

Oligarchs have been threatening to carry out a coup d’état against the powerless, incapable elected government of President Alejandro Colom, only because he has been trying — rather unsuccessfully — to introduce a modest tax reform. They even orchestrated a seemingly perverse complot involving the suicide of one of their own, and raised unfounded charges of assassination against Colom. Meanwhile public schools and hospitals decay into ruins and in prisons inmates kill each other as if they were protagonists of a Hollywood horror movie.

Obviously, oligarchs have learned that freedom of speech and free elections is a price they can afford, even if they keep complaining about it. What they won’t let happen are the fundamental social and economic changes Guatemala needs to survive as a functioning state and perhaps become a civilised society. (IDN-InDepthNews/07.12.2010)

Copyright © 2010 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters

This article should not be republished or redistributed without the permission of the original author or copyright holder.


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RIGHTS-PERU: US Court OKs Extradition of ‘Butcher of the Andes’

November 3, 2010 by

Global Geopolitics & Political Economy / IPS

By Ángel Páez

LIMA, Nov 3, 2010 (IPS) – A U.S. appeals court has given the green light to the extradition to Peru of retired Peruvian army officer Telmo Hurtado, who fled to Miami in 2002 to escape trial for the Aug. 14, 1985 massacre of 69 people in the southern Andean village of Accomarca.

Hurtado had filed a habeas corpus petition to avoid extradition, alleging that he has already been tried in Peru for the crimes charged, and that his life would be in danger if he were sent there because he participated in the counterinsurgency war against the left-wing guerrillas and would face reprisals.

When his first habeas corpus application was denied, Hurtado appealed the decision. But his appeal has now been rejected by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction in the southeastern state of Florida where he is living.

A three-judge panel handed down the verdict Oct. 27, a copy of which was seen by IPS Tuesday. The court ruled that Peru’s request for the arrest and extradition of Hurtado is valid under the extradition treaty between Peru and the United States, signed Jul. 25, 2001.

Confirmation of Hurtado’s extradition came just a few days before the start of a trial in Peru, this Thursday, of 29 former members of the armed forces for one of the worst massacres perpetrated in the 1980-2000 counterinsurgency war against the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas.

Hurtado was arrested in Miami in April 2007 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for lying on his visa application, claiming that he had no criminal record.

His luck ran out in March 2008, when a federal judge in Miami ordered him to pay 37 million dollars in reparations to two survivors of the attack on Accomarca, and recommended his extradition to face criminal charges in Lima.

"I want to look him in the eye and hear him tell the whole truth," Emiliano Quispe, head of the Association of Relatives of the Victims of Political Violence in Accomarca, told IPS.

"He says murdering those people was his own initiative," said Quispe, whose mother María Baldeón and 30 of his other relatives died at the hands of the military patrol unit commanded by Hurtado. "That’s a lie. Nobody did anything off their own bat in those days. Everyone was acting under orders from above. Hurtado is protecting his superior officers.

"At last, the time has come for justice. I am grateful to the U.S. court for sending Telmo Hurtado back so that he can be punished as he deserves," Quispe said.

Karim Ninaquispe, the lawyer representing relatives of the Accomarca victims, said the last step is for U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to sign the extradition order.

"As I understand it, no further appeals are possible, and Hurtado should be surrendered immediately to the Peruvian authorities to face trial," she said.

"The prosecution has asked for a mandatory 25-year prison sentence, without parole, for Hurtado and a score of other defendants," she said.

According to the U.S. appeals court ruling, Hurtado argued that he should not be extradited because the Peruvian state has already tried him for his part in the Accomarca massacre.

In 1992, a military court in Peru sentenced him to six years in prison for abuse of authority, in connection with the massacre, which he described in detail at the time. But he was acquitted of murder charges.

However, Hurtado, who has been dubbed "the Butcher of the Andes", was never jailed. And in 1995 he was pardoned under an amnesty issued by the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) for members of the military who had been sentenced or were facing prosecution for human rights violations.

In November 2000, when human rights trials were reopened, Hurtado fled to Miami, where he had relatives.

"The verdict is important, because one of the few reasons the court might have had for blocking Hurtado’s extradition was if it believed he really could be in danger in Peru, but it did not take this view," Jo-Marie Burt, a political science professor at George Mason University who has researched trials for crimes against humanity in Peru, told IPS.

"Now Hurtado has 30 days to file an appeal, but my sources say he probably will not do so. After this period, the Department of Justice will apply for a certificate of extradition from Secretary of State Clinton. If she signs it, Hurtado can then be put on a plane to Lima straight away to stand trial," Burt said.

Hurtado argued that the extradition treaty between Peru and the United States should not apply to him, because his case is not specifically defined as extraditable.

However, the court ruled: "There is no need to look beyond the written words of the text (of the extradition treaty), as Hurtado suggests, because the language is not ambiguous. As a result, we conclude that the extradition treaty does not bar Hurtado’s extradition to Peru."

Ten of the 29 members of the armed forces facing charges for the Accomarca massacre are still at large.

A former soldier, Francisco Marcañaupa, testified in 2008 that the Accomarca villagers were all rounded up in one small house. "They didn’t shoot or do anything to us, and all of a sudden I saw Lieutenant Telmo Hurtado opening fire on them, then he threw in a grenade, and smoke starting coming out of the house."

Another former soldier, José Contreras, said the order was to leave no survivors or witnesses. "After Hurtado put all the people in one house, he tossed in a grenade. But since they didn’t all die, he started to finish them off with his gun, and ordered that the house be burnt down."

"We will attend all the trial hearings to see that the law is strictly enforced," said Quispe, of the Association of Relatives of the Victims. "Our people have been suffering since the massacre perpetrated by the ‘Butcher of the Andes’. Twenty-five years have gone by, and the trial is just beginning.

"Many of the people of Accomarca have had to move to Lima, because they cannot bear to live in the place where their parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins were killed. The victims were unarmed elderly men, women and children," he said.

"Hurtado’s hour is at hand. Now it is time for justice. And the day he is finally sentenced, we will have peace in our hearts," he concluded.

All rights reserved, IPS – Inter Press Service, 2010.

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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