Activists and victims’ relatives protesting the closure of Tutela Legal, outside San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

Some 50,000 files on crimes against humanity are languishing in an undisclosed location in El Salvador, prey to damp and the ravages of time, while activists and lawyers frantically try to regain control over them.

Without prior warning, on Sept. 30 the Catholic Church suddenly closed the office that had spent decades painstakingly collecting the documents: the Tutela Legal del Arzobispado – the legal aid office of the archbishop of San Salvador.

But the former employees of the office, who learned that day that it was being closed, are working to reopen it elsewhere and are laying claim to the files.

“We are the legal representatives of the victims of abuses and their families, we are handling the cases, and that means our work has to continue,” Alejandro Díaz, a lawyer who was laid off when Tutela Legal was closed, told IPS.“We are not demanding anything that is not ours, but something that belongs to us, the families of the victims.” -- Rosa Rivera

“We are taking the last steps to relaunch the new office,” which will be called Tutela Legal Doctora María Julia Hernández, in honour of the human rights advocate who was the director of Tutela Legal from 1983 till her death in 2007, Díaz said.

The files contain the accounts given by survivors and victims’ families on audiotapes, videotapes and written documents, photos of victims and relatives, and documentation of places and dates of massacres and other crimes committed during the 1980-1992 civil war.

Tutela Legal spent decades collecting documentary evidence and testimony about the abuses, while providing legal aid to survivors and victims’ families.

Funding for the new office will come from the same international organisations that supported Tutela Legal, including the Catholic aid agency for England and Wales (CAFOD), the French Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD), and the Caritas branch in the northern Spanish region of Asturias.

“These organisations have promised us the same support they gave us when we were in the archbishop’s office,” Ovidio Mauricio González, the director of Tutela Legal at the time of its closure, told IPS.

Some 300,000 dollars are needed to digitise all of the material and organise it in accordance with international standards, González explained. A portion of the documents on paper are in poor condition due to damp and the passage of time, he added.

The archbishop of San Salvador, José Escobar, alleged a few days after the Tutela Legal office was closed that the decision was due to misuse of funds. But he did not provide any details.

According to González, no doubts were ever raised about the management of funds by Tutela Legal, which underwent regular audits by the international organisations that financed it.

Activists point out that 10 days before the office was closed down, the Supreme Court did something that was surprising given the history of the justice system in El Salvador: it agreed to hear arguments challenging the constitutionality of the 1993 amnesty law, which has let the perpetrators of human rights crimes committed during the armed conflict off the hook.

The Tutela Legal archives could serve as key evidence in legal prosecutions that may be reopened, depending on the Supreme Court’s decision.

Human rights groups at home and abroad are worried about where the files may be.

The Washington Office on Latin America said in a statement that it “hopes and expects that the Archdiocese will carefully protect these archives and make them available to researchers and investigators, in keeping with the Church’s long tradition of defending human rights and human dignity and the proud history of Tutela Legal.”

A group of around 100 national and international organisations also published lengthy advertisements in the local press, calling for the preservation of the files.

The archbishop’s office claims it is protecting the archives, although it transferred them to other installations, which have not been disclosed.

CAFOD, which has supported Tutela Legal’s work since the early 1980s, released a statement saying “We are concerned at the manner in which Archbishop Escobar Alas ordered the offices of Tutela to be closed: private security personnel escorted staff – many of them with decades of faithful service – to their desks giving them just ten minutes to collect their belongings and leave, obliging them to sign papers that they were ‘satisfied’ with the arrangement.”

“I’m here in solidarity with these people in their just demand to preserve the archives,” Andrea Mcleoud, an activist with Somos Tutal (We Are Our Land, in the Nahuatl indigenous tongue), told IPS during an Oct. 6 protest outside San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Somos Tutal is a group of student activists from the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA).

Tutela Legal was set up in 1982 by then archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas after he closed its predecessor, Socorro Jurídico, which was founded in 1977 by archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero.

Romero was assassinated by far-right death squads while saying mass in March 1980, when the armed conflict broke out in this impoverished Central American country of six million people.

Some 80,000 people –mainly civilians – were killed in the conflict in which government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups were lined up against the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) – now the governing party.

“We are not demanding anything that is not ours, but something that belongs to us, the families of the victims,” said Rosa Rivera, whose family was killed by soldiers and paramilitaries on May 14, 1980 along with 300 other peasants, including women and children, who were trying to flee to Honduras across the Sumpul river in the department or province of Chalatenango.

But the files also contain cases involving more recent human rights abuses.

One example is the case against lead contamination in a rural community caused by a car battery factory. The case was referred to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in 2008.

Far from here, in the Vatican, the beatification of Monsignor Romero is moving forward quickly, on the decision of Pope Francis. But paradoxically, part of his legacy is hanging by a thread.

An external review panel is calling on the World Bank to institute sweeping reforms to its widely cited annual “Doing Business” report, including doing away with a controversial ranking of countries on a variety of business-friendliness metrics.

Doing Business is put out jointly by the World Bank and its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), both based here in Washington, and has become one of the bank’s most high-profile publications.

“Over the decade that it has been published, Doing Business has achieved a great deal of influence,” Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s planning minister and chair of the review panel, said Monday at the audit’s London unveiling.

“It is the leading tool to judge the business environments of developing countries, generating huge global media coverage every year. Several countries – such as Rwanda – have used it as a guide to design reform programmes.”

Indeed, reportedly used by some 85 percent of global policymakers, the report has built up particularly outsized influence in the developing world, as government officials have competed to raise their index ranking.

Yet for this reason, critics have for years warned that the report was pushing countries to lower taxes and wages and weaken overall industry regulation, thus potentially endangering the poor.

On Monday, the 11-member panel, appointed in October by World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, offered strong backing for several of these criticisms, even while it stated that the report should continue to be published. Most prominent among these is the recommendation to do away with the aggregated Ease of Doing Business Index, introduced in 2006.

“The decision to retain or drop the aggregate rankings table is the most important decision the Bank faces with regard to the Doing Business report,” the review states.

“Removing it would defuse many of the criticisms levelled against the report, but would diminish the report’s influence on policy and public discussion in the short term. In the long term, however, doing so may improve focus on underlying substantive issues and enhance the report’s value.”

The report also calls for greater transparency within the reporting and evaluation processes, and urges the bank to move the report’s “home” from the IFC to the research department within the bank proper. This latter recommendation could be particularly important given past criticisms that the Doing Business team has been reticent to implementing any major changes.

In an unusual public statement ahead of the review’s publication, President Kim suggested that plans were afoot to make just such a change. Yet he also sketched out a clear stance on the overall importance of both the report and its rankings.

“It is indisputable that Doing Business has been an important catalyst in driving reforms around the world,” Kim said on Jun. 7. (The bank declined IPS’s request for further comment Monday.) “I am committed to the Doing Business report, and rankings have been part of its success.”

Pure knowledge

The Ease of Doing Business Index rankings are based on metrics drawn from 10 regulations and other factors impacting on a country’s business environment. These include permitting and registering, ease of getting credit and electricity, the legal framework for enforcing contracts and protecting investors, how much tax a company must pay and how a government regulates cross-border trade.

These data points are then distilled down to a single score, allowing World Bank researchers to rank all 185 countries the report covers. The 2013 rankings awarded top scores to Singapore and Hong Kong and bottom scores to Chad and the Central African Republic.

Yet the review panel is now warning that such aggregation tends to cloud crucial country-level variations.

“It is important to remember that the report is intended to be a pure knowledge project,” the review states. “As such, its role is to inform policy, not to prescribe it or outline a normative position, which the rankings to some extent do.”

The past year has seen significant pushback against such criticism of the rankings, from prominent voices within the business community as well as certain development scholars.

“I think these rankings really do have fundamental value, as without the rankings the Doing Business report is just one more research exercise among many the World Bank does,” Scott Morris, a visiting policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, told IPS.

“It is because of the ranking that this report has unique value to those countries that have a long way to go on economic reform. Think of a small sub-Saharan African country with a reformist government in place – how does it get international leverage for reform or gain global attention for what it has accomplished? The rankings exercise, with its very high profile, is tremendously valuable in this regard.”

Regulatory opportunity

While the Doing Business report has received regular low-level criticism since its introduction, much of this was technical.

Over the past year, however, the issue has become far more politicised, with certain countries – led by China – complaining that the report was biased in favour of capitalist systems. Beijing has wanted the World Bank to halt publication of the report outright.

Meanwhile, humanitarian, labour and other progressive groups have also stepped up calls to reform the report. On Monday, many of these groups found the panel review to be surprisingly in line with their own worries about Doing Business leading to a weakening of regulation.

“After years of working with small and micro enterprises in developing countries, (we) know that helping people to set up and run a business is only half the job,” Christina Chang, lead economist for CAFOD, the Catholic aid agency for Britain and Wales, said in an e-mail to IPS. “Without a conducive regulatory environment, the odds are stacked against their success and many may never even get off the ground.”

CAFOD has actively pointed to problems with scoring on the report.

“Some indicators are linked with a drive to lower labour standards and corporate taxation rates,” the agency states. “These are not ideas that other publications of the Bank endorse, and they should not be in their most influential publication.”

Yet the panel’s recommendations, some groups contend, now offer a potent opportunity.

“The panel’s report is a defining moment for World Bank policy to reflect the needs of working people, and a balanced approach to labour market regulation,” Sharan Burrow, general-secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, said Monday in a statement. “If adopted, the World Bank has the opportunity to reshape the relationship between working people, business and governments.”