By IPS Correspondents
CARACAS, May 6 1998 (IPS)

Impunity, which remains the norm for crimes attributed to security forces, continues to stymie the consolidation of democracy in the Americas, according to the Inter- American Human Rights Commission (CIDH), currently meeting in Venezuela.

The economic integration in progress in the Americas “will not be viable, nor will a state of law, if we fail to overcome the high levels of impunity enjoyed by human rights violations,” said the chairman of the CIDH, Venezuela’s Carlos Ayala.

In Colombia a full 97 percent of cases go unsolved, including “both strictly human rights violations and common crimes,” pointed out Chile’s Jose Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation (NGO) invited to Caracas by members of the CIDH.

Human rights groups in Venezuela presented before the CIDH this week unresolved cases in which they are fighting the state, while Vivanco advocated the idea that the United Nations establish a permanent court to try crimes against human rights.

The cases denounced by the NGOs are in line with concerns expressed by members of the CIDH, which is holding its biannual meeting Monday through Friday in Caracas.

The CIDH is trying to create a new sensitivity and set precedents with respect to violations of human rights.

Peru is in the limelight, due to human rights abuses linked to the crackdown on subversive movements. Attention is also centred on Colombia’s generalised climate of violence, and on Central America, where crimes like those that marked last decade’s bloody conflicts continue to be seen.

The work of the CIDH and the sentences handed down by the Inter- American Court of Justice “can contain clear messages to states that feel they are untouchable, even because they are democracies,” said Ligia Bolivar of Provea, a Venezuelan NGO.

Bolivar drew the CIDH’s attention to the “El Amparo case,” the Oct. 29, 1988 massacre of 14 fishermen by a Venezuelan anti- subversive military and police commando on the border separating Venezuela and Colombia, for years covered up as a clash with Colombian guerrillas.

The government of Rafael Caldera, which took office in 1994, finally admitted the state’s responsibility in the case before the Inter-American Court of Justice, and agreed to pay indemnisation to the victims’ families, although legislation governing Venezuela’s military was not reformed as the Court requested.

“The concept that human rights violations in the continent are the work of regimes headed by military juntas is mistaken,” Vivanco maintained. “Serious violations subsist in democratic countries.”

He added that the view that violations are only an issue south of the Rio Grande is also mistaken, because “it is enough to take a look not only at the application of the death penalty in the United States, but also at the discrimination in trials that lead to a death sentence, when the accused are African Americans or Latinos.”

The February 1989 Committee of Families of Victims brought up the impunity associated with police brutality. The committee takes its name from a February 1989 social uprising known as the “Caracazo”, when brutal repression by the security forces left hundreds dead.

Liliana Ortega, the coordinator of the Committee, said the CIDH is “practically our last hope” for an investigation into 44 cases in which documented evidence is available, which have been “unjustifiably neglected and delayed” by the Venezuelan courts.

Ortega also brought up a case in which impunity is linked to the dismal state of prison systems, a common concern in Latin America and the Caribbean: the mantle of oblivion surrounding the summary execution of around 100 prisoners in the ‘Reten de Catia’ in Caracas on Nov. 27, 1992.

Guards in the Reten de Catia – which was demolished a year ago as a gesture by the government to show that it was serious in overhauling its penitentiary policy – justified the massacre by alleging that they had discovered an escape plan. The episode coincided with a bloody aborted military uprising against then- president Carlos Andres Perez.

The CIDH was also alerted by indigenous communities, through the Catholic Vicariate of Venezuela’s Amazonia region, where “garimpeiros” – illegal gold-miners – killed 16 Yanomami indians in 1993.

According to Catholic church sources, the indigenous communities have been working towards a “friendly agreement” to get the state to provide guarantees and protection to avoid a repeat of that incident, which will require CIDH oversight.

After hearing the reports of the NGOs, Robert Goldman from the United States, the vice-chairman of the CIDH, said “it has been an interesting, valuable, and necessary experience.”

“You are the legitimate expression of the free association of civil society,” CIDH chairman Ayala told the NGOs.

The holding of the CIDH’s biannual session in Caracas indicated a restoration of relations with Venezuela, which had been tense due to the El Amparo case and denunciations lodged in 1995 by Perez and his former minister Reinaldo Figueredo, facing legal proceedings at the time, that their right to defence had been violated.

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