Supporters of president-elect Jair Bolsonaro celebrate his triumph in the early hours of Oct. 29, in front of the former captain's residence on the west side of Rio de Janeiro. The far-right candidate garnered 55.13 percent of the vote and will begin his four-year presidency on Jan. 1, 2019. Credit: Fernando Frazão/Agencia Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 29 2018 (IPS)

Voters in Brazil ignored threats to democracy and opted for radical political change, with a shift to the extreme right, with ties to the military, as is always the case in this South American country.

Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former army captain, was elected as Brazil’s 42nd president with 55.13 percent of the vote in Sunday’s runoff election, heading up a group of retired generals, such as his vice president, Hamilton Mourão, and others earmarked as future cabinet ministers. He takes office on Jan. 1.

His triumph caused an unexpected political earthquake, decimating traditional parties and leaders.

The Bolsonaro effect prompted a broad renovation of parliament, with the election of many new legislators with military, police, and religious ties, and right-wing activists.

His formerly minuscule Social Liberal Party (PSL) is now the second largest force in the Chamber of Deputies, with 52 representatives. The country’s most populous and wealthiest states, São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro, elected PSL allies as governors, two of whom had no political experience.

Brazil thus forms part of a global rise of the right, which in some countries has led to the election of authoritarian governments, such as in the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary and Poland, or even the United States under Donald Trump.

Bolsonaro’s chances of taking his place in the right-wing wave only became clear on the eve of the first round of elections, on Oct. 7.

Little was expected of the candidate of such a tiny party, which did not even have a share of the national air time that the electoral system awards to the main parties. His political career consists of 27 years as an obscure congressman, known only for his diatribes and outspoken prejudices against women, blacks, indigenous people, sexual minorities and the poor.

But since the previous presidential elections in 2014, Bolsonaro had traveled this vast country and used the Internet to prepare his candidacy.

Early this year, polls awarded him about 10 percent of the voting intention, which almost doubled in August, when the election campaign officially began.

That growth did not worry his possible opponents, who preferred him as the easiest adversary to defeat in a second round, if no candidate obtained an absolute majority in the first. The idea was that he would come up against heavy resistance to an extreme right-wing candidate who has shown anti-democratic tendencies.

Fernando Haddad, the candidate of the leftist Workers Party, promised his supporters, after his defeat in the Oct. 28 elections, that as an opposition leader he would fight for civil, political and social rights in the face of Brazil’s future extreme right-wing government. Credit: Paulo Pinto/Public Photos

But this was no ordinary election. The poll favorite was former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), whom the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) insisted on running, even though he had been in prison on corruption charges since April, and was only replaced on Sept. 11 by Fernando Haddad, a former minister of education and former mayor of São Paulo.

Five days earlier, Bolsonaro had been stabbed in the stomach by a lone assailant during a campaign rally in Juiz de Fora, 180 km from Rio de Janeiro.

The attack may have been decisive to his triumph, by giving him a great deal of publicity and turning him into a victim, observers say. It also allowed him to avoid debates with other candidates, which could have revealed his weaknesses and contradictions.

But two surgeries, 23 days in a hospital and then being confined to his home, due to a temporary colostomy, prevented him from participating in election rallies. So the social media-savvy candidate focused on the Internet and social networks, which turned out to be his strongest weapon.

The massive use of WhatsApp to attack Haddad aroused suspicions that businessmen were financing “fake news” websites, thus violating electoral laws, as reported by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo on Oct. 18. The electoral justice system has launched an investigation.

The recently concluded campaign in Brazil triggered a debate about the role of this free instant messaging network and “fake news” in influencing the elections.

The social networks were decisive for Bolsonaro, who started from scratch, with practically no party, no financial resources, and no support from the traditional media. The mobilisation of followers was “spontaneous,” according to the candidate.

Brazil, the largest and most populous country in Latin America, with 208 million people, is one of the five countries in the world with the most social media users, with 120 million people using WhatsApp and 125 million using Facebook.

But these tools were only successful because the former army captain managed to personify the demands of the population, despite – or because of – his right-wing radicalism.

He presented himself as the most determined enemy of corruption and of the PT, whose governments from 2003 to 2016 are blamed for the systemic corruption in politics and the errors that caused the country’s worst economic recession, between 2014 and 2016.

As a military and religious man, recently converted to an evangelical church, he swore to wage an all-out fight against crime, a pressing concern for Brazilians, and said he would come to the rescue of the conventional family, which, according to his fiery, and often intemperate, speeches, has been under attack by feminism and other movements.

He seduced business with his neoliberal positions, represented by economist Paulo Guedes, presented as a future minister.

The promise to reduce the size of the state and cut environmental taxes, among other measures, brought him the support of the agro-export sector, especially cattle ranchers and soybean producers.

The economic crisis combined with high crimes rates, added to a wave of conservatism in the habits and customs of this plural and open society, galvanised support for Bolsonaro, while offsetting worries about his authoritarian stances or his inexperience in government administration.

Bolsonaro said he would govern for all, defending “the constitution, democracy and freedom…It is not the promise of a party, but an oath of a man to God,” he said while celebrating his victory, announced three hours after the close of the polls.

His speech did little to reassures the opposition, which will be led by the PT, still the largest party, with 56 deputies and four state governors.

A week earlier he said that in his government “the red criminals will be swept from our homeland,” referring to PT leaders. He threatened to jail his rival, Haddad.

In the past he defended the torturers of the military dictatorship and denied that the 1964-1985 military regime was a dictatorship.

His brutal statements are downplayed by his followers as “boastfulness” and even praise his declarations as frank and forthright.

The problem is not the statements themselves, but the fact that they reveal his continued fidelity to the training he received at the Military Academy in the 1970s, in the middle of the dictatorship

He considers the period when generals were presidents “democratic”, since they maintained parliament and the courts, although with restrictions and subject to controls and purges..

Bolsonaro’s victory, with 57.8 million votes, also has the symbolic effect of the absolution of the military dictatorship via elections, to the detriment of democratic convictions.

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr
WHITE PLAINS, New York, Dec 30 2014 (IPS)

Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba after more than five decades of a misguided policy which my uncle, John F. Kennedy, and my father, Robert F. Kennedy, had been responsible for enforcing after the U.S. embargo against the country was first implemented in October 1960 by the Eisenhower administration.

The move has raised hopes in many quarters – not only in the United States but around the world – that the embargo itself is now destined to disappear.

Robert F Kennedy Jr

This does not detract from the fact that Cuba is still a dictatorship. The Cuban government restricts basic freedoms like the freedoms of speech and assembly, and it owns the media.

Elections, as in most old-school Communist countries, offer limited options and, during periodic crackdowns, the Cuban government fills Cuban jails with political prisoners.

However, there are real tyrants in the world with whom the United States has become a close ally and many governments with much worse human rights records than Cuba – Azerbaijan, for example, whose president Ilham Aliyev boils his opponents in oil, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, China, Bahrain, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and many others where torture, enforced disappearances, religious intolerance, suppression of speech and assembly, mediaeval oppression of women, sham elections and non-judicial executions are all government practices.

Despite its poverty, Cuba has managed some impressive accomplishments. Cuba’s government boasts the highest literacy rates for its population of any nation in the hemisphere. Cuba claims its citizens enjoy universal access to health care and more doctors per capita than any other nation in the Americas. Cuba’s doctors, reportedly, have high quality medical training.“It seems stupid to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, and expecting different results. In this sense, the [Cuba] embargo is insane”

Unlike other Caribbean islands where poverty means starvation, all Cubans receive a monthly food ration book that provides for their basic necessities.

Even Cuban government officials admit that the economy is smothered by the inefficiencies of Marxism, although they also argue that the principal cause of the island’s economic woes is the strangling impact of the 60-year-old trade embargo – and it is clear to everyone that the embargo first implemented during the Eisenhower administration in October 1960 unfairly punishes ordinary Cubans.

The embargo impedes economic development by making virtually every commodity and every species of equipment both astronomically expensive and difficult to obtain.

Worst of all, instead of punishing the regime for its human rights restrictions, the embargo has fortified the dictatorship by justifying oppression. It provides every Cuban with visible evidence of the bogeyman that every dictator requires – an outside enemy to justify an authoritarian national security state.

The embargo has also given Cuban leaders a plausible monster on which to blame Cuba’s poverty by lending credence to their argument that the United States, not Marxism, has caused the island’s economic distress.

The embargo has almost certainly helped keep the Castro brothers [Fidel and Raul] in power for the last five decades.

It has justified the Cuban government’s oppressive measures against political dissent in the same way that U.S. national security concerns have been used by some U.S. politicians to justify incursions against our bill of rights, including the constitutional rights to jury trial, habeas corpus, effective counsel and freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, eavesdropping, cruel and unusual punishment, torturing of prisoners, extraordinary renditions and the freedom to travel, to name just a few.

It is almost beyond irony that the very same politicians who argued that we should punish Castro for curtailing human rights and mistreating prisoners in Cuban jails elsewhere contend that the United States is justified in mistreating our own prisoners in Cuban jails.

Imagine a U.S. president faced, as Castro was, with over 400 assassination attempts, thousands of episodes of foreign-sponsored sabotage directed at our nation’s people, factories and bridges, a foreign-sponsored invasion and fifty years of economic warfare that has effectively deprived our citizens of basic necessities and strangled our economy.

The Cuban leadership has pointed to the embargo with abundant justification as the reason for economic deprivation in Cuba.

The embargo allows the regime to portray the United States as a bully and itself as the personification of courage, standing up to threats, intimidation and economic warfare by history’s greatest military superpower.

It perpetually reminds the proud Cuban people that our powerful nation, which has staged invasions of their island and plotted for decades to assassinate their leaders and sabotaged their industry, continues an aggressive campaign to ruin their economy.

Perhaps the best argument for lifting the embargo is that it does not work. Our 60-plus year embargo against Cuba is the longest in history and yet the Castro regime has remained in power during its entire duration.

Instead of lifting the embargo, different U.S. administrations, including the Kennedy administration, have strengthened it without result. It seems silly to pursue a U.S. foreign policy by repeating a strategy that has proved a monumental failure for six decades. The definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over expecting different results. In this sense, the embargo is insane.

The embargo clearly discredits U.S. foreign policy, not only across Latin America, but also with Europe and other regions.

For more than 20 years, the U.N. General Assembly has called for lifting the embargo. Last year the vote was 188 in favour and two against (the United States and Israel). The Inter American Commission on Human Rights (the main human rights bodies of the Americas) has also called for lifting the embargo and the African Union likewise.

One reason that it diminishes our global prestige and moral authority is that the entire embargo enterprise only emphasises our distorted relationship with Cuba. That relationship is historically freighted with powerful ironies that make the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

Most recently, while we fault Cuba for jailing and mistreating political prisoners, we have simultaneously been subjecting prisoners, many of them innocent by the Pentagon’s own admission, to torture – including waterboarding and illegal detention and imprisonment without trial in Cuban prison cells in Guantanamo Bay.

While we blame Cuba for not allowing its citizens to travel freely to the United States, we restrict our own citizens from traveling freely to Cuba. In that sense, the embargo seems particularly anti-American. Why does my passport say that I can’t visit Cuba? Why can’t I go where I want to go?

I have been a fortunate American. I have been able to visit Cuba and that was a wonderful education because it gave me the opportunity to see Communism with all its warts and faults up close. Why doesn’t our government trust Americans to see for themselves the ravages of dictatorship?

Had President Kennedy survived to a second administration, the embargo would have been lifted half a century ago.

President Kennedy told Castro, through intermediaries, that the United States would end the embargo when Cuba stopped exporting violent revolutionists to Latin America’s Alliance for Progress nations – a policy that mainly ended with Che Guevara’s death in 1967 and when Castro stopped allowing the Soviets to use the island as a base for the expansion of Soviet power in the hemisphere.

Well, the Soviets have been gone since 1991 – more than 20 years ago – but the U.S.-led embargo continues to choke Cuba’s economy. If the objective of our foreign policy in Cuba is to promote freedom for its subdued citizens, we should be opening ourselves up to them, not shutting them out.

We have so much to learn from Cuba – from its successes in some areas and failures in others.

As I walked through the streets of Havana, Model-Ts chugged by, Che’s soaring effigy hung in wrought iron above the street, and a bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln stood in a garden on a tree-lined avenue.

I could feel the weight of sixty years of Cuban history, a history so deeply intertwined with that of my own country. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

The dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) from start to end systematically dismantled every vestige of “the Chilean path to socialism” that the government of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) had attempted to follow. But it also established political structures that Chilean democracy has not yet managed to eradicate. See the process in the timeline below:

Data: Marianela Jarroud based on documental sources. Design: Ignacio Castañares

Click to enlarge

By IPS Correspondents
Sep 11 2013 (IPS)

Free, public education is the main demand expressed today by Chilean society, especially the young. The issue is not that Chileans don’t study, or that school enrolment is low. The problem is the growing privatisation of the system, as shown by this graph, and how that has divided students into different categories, in terms of quality of education. It all began with the reforms ushered in by the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990).

Click to enlarge

Data: Marianela Jarroud based on official sources. Design: Ignacio Castañares

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier at his Feb. 28, 2013 hearing. The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups. Credit: Milo Milfort/IPS

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

For the first time ever, on Thursday Haiti’s former dictator faced his accusers, answering questions about corruption and human rights abuses during his brutal 15-year regime (1971-1986).

The court of appeals hearing was part of a process that will determine if Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier is to be indicted on rights abuses.

“We think that this is a wonderful day for justice in Haiti,” rights attorney Nicole Phillips of the Washington-based Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), told IPS. “For the first time… and despite the efforts of his attorneys, Jean-Claude Duvalier came to court.”

The ex-dictator showed up on Feb. 28 only after first disregarding three previous orders.

The sweltering courtroom was packed with over a dozen victims of the regime and with local and foreign journalists, lawyers and representatives of human rights groups.

After his lawyers failed to convince judges to hold a closed session, for four hours the sickly looking 61-year-old, dripping with perspiration, answered judges’ questions and accusations, whispering his evasive and oft-flippant denials to the clerk who read them aloud.

A group of aging supporters of the 29-year (1957-1986) regime of “Baby Doc” and his father François “Papa Doc” Duvalier applauded the former despot’s more irreverent answers.

When Judge Jean-Joseph Lebrun asked Duvalier about murders and executions during his rule, the ex-dictator responded: “All countries have murder.”

“Were there political prisoners in Fort Dimanche?” the judge asked about the prison known as “Haiti’s Auschwitz,” where an estimated 3,000 prisoners were executed or died of hunger and disease.

“Fort Dimanche was full of all kinds of delinquents,” Duvalier replied.

At one point Duvalier even claimed, “In every domain, I have a good record” and even tried to turn the tables.

“Everything was going well when I was here. When I came back [in 2011], I found a broken and corrupt country. I should ask you, what have you done with my country?” he asked.

Human Rights Watch estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 people were killed during the reigns of “Baby Doc” and his father. Rights groups also documented torture, rapes, forced exiles and forced disappearances during both regimes.

Among those seated in the space reserved for victims was Robert “Boby” Duval, a former Fort Dimanche prisoner.

When asked by judges, Duvalier claimed Duval had been arrested for “subversive activities” and “weapons possession,” saying the then-young businessman had been “well-treated” in prison.

“A member of his family brought him food three times a day,” Duvalier maintained.

“I didn’t have any weapons,” a visibly angry Duval later told IPS. “He told a lot of lies about me.”

“He sent me to Fort Dimanche, forcing me to drop to 90 pounds,” continued the now burly ex-soccer player, who spent 17 months in prison in 1975 and 1976, eight of them in Fort Dimanche. “They gave us 300 calories a day… They jammed 40 people into a four-by-four meter cell. Two or three people died every day.”

The judges also asked Duvalier about the accusations of corruption and embezzlement. Experts estimate “Baby Doc” stole at least 300 million dollars.

Asked if he still had money in foreign accounts, Duvalier replied “no,” even though at least four million dollars is in a frozen Swiss account.

While life in much of the country proceeded much as usual on Thursday, outside the makeshift courthouse, several dozen aging Duvalier supporters dressed in red and black – the colors of the former regime – chanted “Long live Duvalier!” and “Duvalier, this is your country, do whatever you want!”

On the radios, and online, Haitians and Haiti-watchers stayed abreast of the proceedings through Tweets, photos and videos sent out by journalists, lawyers and human rights advocates.

Haitian journalist Rachèle Magloire sent out quotations every minute or so, at one point tweeting out that Duvalier said, “I am the son of a great nationalist. If it weren’t for me, the country would have fallen into civil war.” Another journalist tweeted from the room: “Duvalier supporters clamouring” while a correspondent abroad noted: “Extraordinary day in #Haiti.”

The hearing ended at about 3:30 pm and is to be continued on Mar. 7, when victims like Duval and others are expected to testify.

Thursday’s session is part of an appeal by regime victims who filed a complaint against the former dictator in 2011 for crimes against humanity. In January 2012, a judge rejected the charges, citing Haiti’s 10-year statute of limitations on murder as one reason. The ruling was condemned by local and international rights groups, and by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Bureau of International Lawyers (Bureau des Avocats Internationaux – BAI), one of the groups representing the victims, noted that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch all say the abuses under Duvalier’s rule constitute crimes against humanity.

“These crimes cannot be barred by any statute of limitations pursuant to international law that is binding on Haiti. As a matter of law, the Court of Appeals must grant the victims’ appeal and allow Duvalier to stand trial for his both his political violence and fraud crimes,” BAI attorney Mario Joseph said in a statement on Thursday following the hearing. “Given the events today, we are hopeful this court will issue a fair decision.”

From left to right, Veronique Roy, often referred to as Duvalier's "long-time companion", Jean-Claude Duvalier, and General Prosper Avril, a former dictator and ex-member of François Duvalier's Presidential Guard. Credit: AlterPresse/Stephen Ralph Henri

By Jane Regan and Milo Milfort
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

Angry and frustrated, but also cautiously hopeful, victims, human rights advocates and the Haitian population are waiting for Thursday, Feb. 28, the day former dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier has been ordered to appear at a hearing to determine whether or not he will face charges for human rights abuses committed during his brutal 15-year regime (1971-1986).

The order was issued on Feb. 21 when, once again, the 61-year-old ex-dictator refused to show up at court. The sweltering room was packed with representatives of foreign and local human rights groups, journalists and with some of the 30 victims who are suing Duvalier on the rights violations.

After listening to arguments from Duvalier’s lawyer, the three judges issued an order saying it was “imperative” that Duvalier come to a Feb. 28 hearing, with police escort if necessary.The pencil of history has no eraser, and people are watching, taking notes. We will never stop demanding justice.

Victims, including Robert “Boby” Duval, imprisoned by the regime for 17 months in 1976 and 1977 and who was in the courtroom, were cautiously hopeful about the ruling.

“It’s a big deal,” Duval later told IPS. “If the Haitian legal system can judge a criminal like Duvalier, that means people can start to have a little bit of confidence in it.”

But the 59-year-old Duval – who nearly died in Fort Dimanche, which is sometimes called “Haiti’s Auschwitz”, and who later co-founded a human rights group called League of Political Prisoners, Friends and Families of the Disappeared – warned that the order is only one small step.

Thursday’s session will only determine if the government will open an investigation and begin to hear victims’ complaints, he said.

Since Duvalier’s sudden return to Haiti in 2011 after 25 years in exile, “it’s almost like the government has been protecting him, and that’s a problem, because they are under international obligation to judge him,” Duval said.

Duvalier was first indicted for crimes against humanity in 2008 and then again in 2011. But last year, the court suddenly ruled that he would only be tried for embezzlement, saying that the alleged abuses had taken place too long ago.

Human rights groups, victims and even journalists denounced the decision, noting that under international law, there is no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. This week’s hearing is seen as perhaps the last chance for Haitian victims and Haitian society.

“The State has an obligation to ensure that there is no impunity for serious violations of human rights committed in the past,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a statement on Feb. 21. She noted that Duvalier is accused of overseeing “torture, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances and rape”.

“Such systematic violations of rights must not remain unaddressed,” Pillay continued. “All those Haitians who suffered such abuses have a right to see justice is done.”

Human rights activist Marie Yolène Gilles, director of programmes for the National Human Rights Defense Network in Port-au-Prince, has been fighting for justice in Haiti for over two decades.

A journalist at a radio station destroyed during the Sep. 30, 1991 coup d’état carried out in large part by former members of the ancien régime and against democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, she has been forced into hiding several times over the years. She is not entirely optimistic about the current government’s commitment.

“The people in power always say they are working for democracy, for a ‘state of law,’ but if that’s true they need to send clear signals,” Gilles told IPS.

Mixed signals

Since Duvalier’s sudden and suspicious return to Haiti in 2011 (he arrived with no passort), signals from President Michel Martelly – an admitted former “Tonton Macoute” during Jean-Claude’s reign – have been anything but clear.

Martelly paid the aging ex-despot a very public visit and called for reconciliation. More recently, the government issued Duvalier a diplomatic passport, claiming that as a former “president”, he was entitled to it.

Last year, despite a judge’s order that he stay in the capital, Duvalier attended an event commemorating the second anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Gonaives, about 100 kilometres up the coast. He sat in the front row next to the ex-dictator and accused human rights violator General Prosper Avril, and even shook hands with President Bill Clinton and the presidential couple.

He is also often seen out and about at swank restaurants with friends and political allies, some of whom hold government posts.

Many in Haiti also criticise the U.S. government for not taking a stronger stand. In contrast to the U.N. and human rights groups, Washington has been largely silent, or has implied that judging the ex-dictator was not a priority.

Noting that Duvalier had a record of “repression”, in a 2011 interview with CBS, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was up to “the government and people” to decide on his fate, stressing: “[W]e’re focused on trying to maintain stability, prevent chaos and violence in this very unpredictable period with his return.”

“The so-called ‘friends of Haiti’ countries have been too tolerant,” Duval told IPS. “That doesn’t happen in other countries. This is a lack of respect for the Haitian people. So many people died during the Duvalier regime.”

Except for a brief period, the U.S. government supported the 29-year Duvalier dictatorship (Jean-Claude’s father, François, controlled Haiti from 1957 until his death in 1971) with military and development aid, as well as with direct budget support.

Jean-Claude Duvalier’s government also received millions of dollars in assistance (grants and loans) from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank.

“The pencil of history has no eraser”

The Feb. 28 hearing is part of an appeal brought by a group of 30 victims that is being closely watched by local and international rights groups, many of whom had representatives in the courtroom last week, among them Béatrice Vaugrante of Amnesty International.

“Jean-Claude Duvalier cannot be beyond the reach of justice,” Vaugrante said in a statement issued after last week’s order. “The authorities in Haiti have the duty to do all they can to ensure he faces the courts for the systematic abuses that took place during his time in office. If he continues to avoid the hearing, he must be arrested.”

Rights activist Gilles agrees.

“Duvalier must be judged. That would show people that you have to pay for what you do. He needs to face up to all of the accusations and society must know why all those crimes happened, why so many died, why they tortured people at Fort Dimanche,” Gilles told IPS, quoting a Haitian proverb: “‘The pencil of history has no eraser’ and people are watching, taking notes. We will never stop demanding justice.”

The doctrine of national security imposed by the United States on Latin America, which fostered the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, is making a comeback in Honduras where a new law is combining military defence of the country with police strategies for maintaining domestic order.

The law created the National Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence (DNII), a key agency in the security structure that does not appear to be accountable to any other body, and does not appear to be under democratic civilian control.

“This bill unites or fuses military defence and internal security, which is dangerous, because one of the aims after the Cold War was to separate these fields, due to the negative effects (their union had) on systematic violation of human rights” in the region, sociologist Mirna Flores, an expert on the issue, told IPS.

“We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America, and the danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers,” she said.

The approval of the law on Jan. 14 took human rights organisations, civil society groups and academic bodies by surprise, because of the rushed nature of the legislation, the lack of consensus-building and the skipping of two of the three debates necessary for passing laws in parliament.

Sergio Castellanos, a legislator for the leftwing Democratic Unification Party, was the first to react when the bill was introduced. He asked for time for a fuller debate, but was overruled by the large rightwing majority comprising representatives of the governing National Party and one wing of the Liberal Party.

The law was passed amid a whirlwind of parliamentary activity, along with constitutional reforms and other laws that have engendered controversy in the country, such as mining regulations and suspension of all tax exemptions, pending review.

The Intelligence Law has some loopholes consisting of a lack of conceptual definitions, included in modern legislation in order not to allow room for discretionary interpretations or decisions.

Roberto Cajina, a civilian consultant on security, defence and democratic governance, told IPS that lack of definitions and limits in the text of the new law could give rise to “temptations” for abuse.

“It must be clearly understood what is meant by investigation, intelligence, strategic action, privacy protection, national security, special units, covert operations, special agents, special protection measures, secret funds and special risks, to cite just the most important definitions that are lacking in the law,” Cajina said.

Article 28 out of the 33 articles in the law says the DNII may recruit active members of the armed forces and the national police, Cajina said. This is “a very delicate matter and should be studied with care,” he said.

“As it stands, it is a dangerous precedent. One could warn of possible ‘piracy’ of the DNII toward the armed forces and police. What kinds of intelligence do each of them carry out?” he asked.

“If this is not clarified, problems and serious contradictions will arise, and the scenario will change radically. It is necessary to demarcate the boundaries of the fields of action of each of them,” Cajina emphasised.

Flores, the sociologist, and Cajina concur that another vacuum in the law is the lack of a chain of command subjecting the DNII to the control of any civilian institution or authority. It is not clear to what body it is affiliated.

The law compels private bodies to “cooperate by providing information required of them in order to support intelligence efforts”.

The experts said there should be a clearer description of the kind of information that private companies are required to give, because the current text leaves too much room for discretion. “The DNII director could, with very little justification, pick any organisation as a subject of interest which must provide the information (the DNII) demands,” they said.

“We are alarmed at this law that was tabled without ceremony, but also without debate, and furthermore, relying on old Cold War concepts,” activist Bertha Oliva, of the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), told IPS.

Oliva said she was concerned by some aspects of the law, especially the power it gives the DNII to create “special investigation and intelligence units” and to cooperate with “other state intelligence bodies”.

“Does that mean there are more? Which ones? Why do we know nothing about them? I think there are many loopholes that could lead to abuses,” she said.

In the 1980s, members of the Honduran intelligence corps created the so-called Batallón de la Muerte (death squad), which was responsible for the forced disappearance of 187 people for political and ideological reasons, according to an official report.

This history raises fears that a similar body could be recreated, since the executive branch is giving the armed forces and police wide powers to run an intelligence corps which by law was supposed to come under the rule of the Commission on Public Security Reform, a civilian body working on structural reform of the police, prosecutors and the justice system.

But according to Matías Funes, chair of the Commission on Public Security Reform, its proposals do not have the ear of the legislative and executive branches. “It’s as if there were a parallel agenda,” and the institutional environment and democratisation of the country are not making progress, he said.

The execution-style killing of a leader of the Landless Workers’ Movement in a sugarcane plantation in the southeastern Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, where bodies of opponents of the dictatorship were incinerated in the 1970s, recalls one of the most tragic chapters in this country’s history.

Cícero Guedes, murdered Jan. 26 in the north of Rio de Janeiro.

In the book “Memórias de uma Guerra Suja” (Memoirs of a Dirty War), Cláudio Guerra, formerly an agent of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), the 1964-1985 military regime’s political police, tells how the bodies of 10 leftwing activists were burned, in order to leave no trace, in the oven of the Usina Cambahyba sugarcane plant in Campos dos Goytacazes, a municipality in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Forty years later, the name of this agroindustrial complex of seven plantations with a total area of 3,500 hectares is again linked to the silencing of a bothersome voice, but this time under a full democracy.

Fifty-four-year-old Cícero Guedes was an outstanding leader in the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST). He led the land occupation of the Usina Cambahyba plant which gave rise to the Luiz Maranhão encampment.

“He was a real symbol, and (his murder) sends a powerful message to the MST, which is organising the land claims of rural workers in the area,” one of the MST national directors, Marcelo Durão, told IPS.

“We are in conflict with the forces of oppression in the region,” he said, and he described Guedes as “a staunch activist, consistent and very focused on the struggle for land, as well as an authority on agroecological production.”

Marcos Pedlowski, a professor at the State University of North Fluminense who has studied land reform issues there since 1998, said the murder “is clearly an attempt to break up the organisation, rather than a petty dispute.” Guedes was “an icon of efforts in the struggle for land”, he said.

The MST leader was cut down by at least 10 bullets in an ambush in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 26, near the sugarcane industrial complex. He was cycling home from a meeting to negotiate the legalisation of the situation of the 100 landless families in the encampment.

The dispute over land ownership with agribusiness owners in the region “has been exacerbated by the delay in legal procedures involving properties regarded as unproductive, and therefore subject to expropriation for agrarian reform purposes,” said Maria do Rosário Nunes, the human rights secretary for the Brazilian Presidency. The Cambahyba case is an example, she said in a communiqué.

Legal authorisation for the expropriation, which effectively allows it to go ahead, was granted in August 2012, 14 years after the ruling by the Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

“The backdrop (to the murder) is the slowness of federal justice,” Marcelo Freixo, a state legislator for the Socialism and Freedom Party and chair of the Human Rights Commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature, told IPS in an interview.

“The large plantations in the sugarcane processing region are bankrupt and are in debt to the state, in an area where there is a great concentration of poor and landless people. This is where INCRA really has to ensure land reform,” he said.

The large estates belonged to the late Heli Ribeiro Gomes, a former deputy governor of Rio de Janeiro, and were passed on to his heirs.

In the book, Guerra says he took advantage of his friendship with Ribeiro Gomes to “disappear” the bodies of the leftwing activists, using the factory oven.

The story is “absurd”, according to Ribeiro Gomes’s relatives, but other equally macabre tales have been borne out in reality, even in the present day, like the killing of Guedes and other rural activists whose deaths did not receive as much publicity.

“They say 10 activists were cremated. But we can well believe there were many more,” said Durão. The area is notorious for its history of violence against rural workers on the part of the “sugar kings” and their hired killers.

Durão drew attention to the “brutality” of the killing, and its “premeditated nature”, with four shots to the head and six to the left side of the chest.

Freixo said it was “a murder by several killers, an ambush… and nothing was taken. Clearly it was an execution.”

The northern part of the Fluminense flats has not changed much – at least in terms of fundamental issues like land ownership, human exploitation and violence – since the dictatorship era, nor since previous centuries, when the first forms of slavery in Brazil were introduced on sugarcane plantations.

In 2009, a Labour Ministry report said Campos dos Goytacazes was the area with the highest number of workers labouring in slave-like conditions, a shocking situation in the 21st century, Freixo said. However, it is not surprising, since this region was the last in the country to abolish slavery.

Pedlowski, author of the book “Desconstruindo o Latifúndio – a Saga da Reforma Agrária no Norte Fluminense” (Dismantling the Large Estates – the Saga of Land Reform in North Fluminense), stressed the concentration of land ownership, linked to sugarcane monoculture and violence.

The Gini coefficient, which measures inequality on a rising scale from 0 to 1, is 0.8 for land ownership in Campos dos Goytacazes, the highest inequality coefficient in the state of Rio de Janeiro.

“The same families always rule the roost in Campos,” a region that is “the traditional cradle of the extreme right, like Tradition, Family and Property (TFP, a traditional Catholic civic organisation, now-dissolved),” and a place where political corruption scandals have erupted in modern times, the book says.

Guedes fought tirelessly against the use of toxic pesticides in agriculture, in addition to fighting injustice. He was a sugarcane cutter in the northern state of Alagoas before joining MST in 1996 and obtaining a plot of land in the Zumbi dos Palmares settlement.

A father of five, Guedes ran an agroecological farm and was regularly to be found at organic produce markets, as well as participating in local coordination with the government food purchasing programme, which buys produce from family farms to provide school meals.

“He did not learn at the university. The rest of us learned from him,” Pedlowski said.

“The MST was his life. He made great sacrifices to form marketing groups for producers…and he was not satisfied with having his own land. He led from the front at other land occupations. He was the animator,” he said.

“The elimination of such a dynamic leader shows the degree of impunity and the state of paralysis of land reform, especially since (Brazilian President) Dilma (Rousseff) took office,” he said.

According to the MST, the current administration not only has not solved the problem of 150,000 families camped by the roadside waiting for land, but has increased the concentration of land ownership, some of it in the hands of foreign companies.

An INCRA report says that in 2012 the agency invested 1.05 billion dollars and benefited 23,000 families in 117 settlements.

Last year, it says, the agency obtained declarations of public interest on 31 properties for the purposes of land reform.

A building at the former Faculty of Medecine and Pharmacy. Credit: INURED

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 24 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

When the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission failed to approve, or even respond to, a proposal by the University of the State of Haiti (UEH) for a unified campus to replace the nine destroyed or badly damaged faculties in the capital, Vice Rector Fritz Deshommes was not surprised at the silence.

Nor was he shocked at the fact that, 25 years after students and professors asked for help from Haiti’s post-dictatorship governments, they remain in separate faculties sprinkled across Port-au-Prince.

“The reason that the university campus has never been built is political. Because if all the students were permanently together in one place, they would have the necessary material conditions to better organise themselves and make their demands heard,” Deshommes told Haiti Grassroots Watch.

“Then they would be able to turn everything upside down. The political authorities understood the importance of this. A single campus is not in their interests,” he said.

The fight for a campus didn’t start only after the earthquake. It was born after 1986, the date of the end of the dictatorship of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier.

Ever since a 1960 strike of students at the University of Haiti, François Duvalier established his control over the various faculties. He issued a decree on Dec. 16, 1960 creating the “University of the State” in the place of the University of Haiti, whose fascist character was apparent in the language of the decree.

Among other things, it said “considering the necessity to organise the University on new foundations in order to prevent it from transforming into a bastion where subversive ideas would develop…”

Article 9 was even clearer. It said that any student wanting to enroll in the university had to get a police paper certifying that he or she did not belong to any communist group or any association under suspicion by the state.

After Feb. 7, 1986 – which saw the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier in a U.S.-government chartered airplane – one of the most dominant slogans became “Haiti is free!”

The political uprising that spread throughout the country also extended to the university system. As in other sectors of Haitian national life, professors and students at the university demanded a number of reforms, as well as the construction of a campus that would gather together all the faculties sprinkled throughout the capital.

Since then, there has been some progress – the name was changed to UEH, there has been some democratisation, the level of teaching has been improved – but lack of financing has paralysed the institution. The budgets from the last few years show that UEH has never received more than one to 1.3 percent of the state budget.

Even worse, the government’s Action Plan for Renewal and Development (PADRN in French), proposed by the René Préval team, asked for only 60 million dollars for “professional and higher education” as part of its request for 3.864 billion dollars sought for reconstruction – only 1.5 percent of the total.

The new Michel Martelly government showed signs it would increase UEH’s budget, but according to a recent report by AlterPresse, a member of the Haiti Grassroots Watch partnership, the most recent budget dedicates only 1.5 percent to UEH.

“This budget shows the contempt that our elected officials have for the country’s principal public institution of higher education, as well as their evident desire to weaken it and perhaps even do away with it altogether,” Professor Jean Vernet Henry, rector of UEH, told AlterPresse in the Jan. 27 article.

“Friends of Haiti” support the private sector

At the very moment the proposal for the State University of Haiti campus was locked in a drawer, the Dominican Republic built a university campus in the north of the country – the King Henry Christophe University. Built in only 18 months, the campus cost 50 million dollars.

And the universities and government of the “friends of Haiti” countries?

Despite a number of meetings and conferences held abroad and at seaside hotels and at the most expensive conference centres in the country, despite the promises of a number of U.S. universities, through at least two consortia, and despite the promises at the Regional Conference of Rectors and Presidents of the Francophone University Agency (AUF in French) as well as the AUF, most courses are still taught in sheds and temporary buildings.

“We have hosted a lot of universities who are capable of assisting us, but they don’t have the resources to build,” Rector Henry told the Chronicle of Higher Education in an article published last January.

“They can (only) only help us through long-distance courses, scholarships and exchanges,” he added.

In the meantime, at Quisqueya University, a private institution, reconstruction is moving along well. Back in October, the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission gave a green light for a project of the Faculty of Medicine, and more recently – last December – the Clinton Bush Fund offered 914,000 dollars for a “Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation”.

“The Center will be a destination for business people of all levels,” the Fund’s Paul Altidor said in an article on the Fund’s website.

The focus of Haiti’s “friends” is clear.

The future in peril

But a 2000 study of public sector universities in the developing world called “Peril and Promise” is also clear, especially on the urgency of investing in public sector higher education.

It says, “Markets require profit and this can crowd out important educational duties and opportunities… The disturbing truth is that these enormous disparities are poised to grow even more extreme, impelled in large part by the progress of the knowledge revolution and the continuing brain drain…

“For this reason the Task Force urges policymakers and donors – public and private, national and international – to waste no time. They must work with educational leaders and other key stakeholders to reposition higher education in developing countries.”

That was back in 2000.

Have Haitian politicians, donors, and the “citizens” in the north and others trying to take over the King Henry Christophe University read that report?

Many critics fear that Haiti’s past and present governments – who permitted in the past and persist in permitting the deterioration and denigration of a commonly held good, the State University of Haiti – have been so completely swept away by flood of neoliberal thinking that they don’t see the catastrophe that they have and are in the process of constructing, through non-reconstruction.

*Students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti collaborated on this series.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media.

To see the photos and read more stories visit Haiti Grassroots Watch.

Excerpt:

Students in a tent "classroom" at the Faculty of Agronomy and Veterinary Medecine, next to the land the State University hopes to use for a campus. Photo: HGW

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 24 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Two years after the earthquake, and despite the proposals written, the consortiums organised and the foreign delegations entertained, the University of the State of Haiti (Université d’Etat d’Haïti or UEH) still has not seen any “reconstruction”, and the proposal for a university campus that would unite all 11 faculties remains a 25-year-old dream.

Today, the majority of the 13,000 students at the UEH’s faculties in the capital are jammed into sweltering sheds, struggling to hear the professor who is shouting, hoping to drown out the other professors shouting in the surrounding sheds.

The fact that the Haitian government and its “friends” have not financed the reconstruction – on a sufficient operating budget – of the oldest and most important institution of higher learning in the country represents more than a “peril” to Haiti’s future.

These choices – or at least, these omissions – offer perfect examples of the global orientation of the “reconstruction”, which is centred on the needs of the national and international private sector, and which favours “answers” to urgent problems that are often palliative quick fixes.

Finally, these omissions represent contempt for the public interests of the entire nation.

The dream of a campus, the farce of the IHRC

The disaster of Jan. 12, 2010 destroyed nine of the 11 UEH faculties in the capital. Three hundred and eighty students and more than 50 professors and administrative staff of UEH disappeared, according to the university and to a study by the Inter-university Institute for Research and Development (INURED), released in March 2010.

(According to the same study, at least 2,000 students and 130 professors in all of the institutions of higher learning died in the catastrophe.)

Nevertheless, this tragedy offered an opportunity to state university authorities, who are themselves charged with supervising all institutions of higher learning in the country.

The members of the Council of the Rectorate saw their chance to make a dream become reality. Twenty-five years ago, in 1987, delegates at the first conference of the National Federation of Haitian Students (FENEH in French) listed a campus as one of their post-dictatorship goals and demands.

“We always wanted a university campus, we really struggled for that,” recalled Rose Anne Auguste in an interview with Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) in July 2011. Once a FENEH leader, today she is a nurse and community activist.

Over one year ago, the Rectorate submitted a proposal to the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), the institution charged with approving and coordinating all reconstruction projects.

“Right in its first extraordinary meeting, on Feb. 5, 2010, the University Council decided to face the reconstruction problem… and we voted a resolution asking the Executive Council to take all measures deemed necessary to assure all the University faculties could be rehoused together,” according to the project, which HGW obtained.

“When considered as part of the challenge of reconstruction and of the re-founding of this nation, this project can be seen as a crucial asset of primary importance which will assure a better tomorrow for our population,” the same document continues.

The Rectorate proposed a provisional student and preliminary budget of 200 million dollars for the construction of the main campus, with classroom buildings, libraries, laboratories, restaurants, and university housing to lodge 15,000 students and 1,000 professors on part of the old Habitation Damien land in Croix-des-Bouquets, north of Port-au-Prince.

Following the submission of the project in February 2011, for months, the IHRC “didn’t respond”, said Vice Rector Fritz Deshommes.

“We gave a copy to each member of the council… the administrative director promised to call us, but that promise was empty. And they never discussed the proposal,” he said.

Auguste was aware of the project.

A founder of the Association for the Promotion of Integral Family Health (APROSIFA in French), Auguste was a member of the IHRC, representing (without the right to vote) the Haitian “NGOs”.

“The project was never discussed at any IHRC assembly, but every member knew about it. I tried to pressure the administrative council to get the project considered and discussed,” she told HGW.

“According to the project director, there were some technical weaknesses,” she added.

Maybe.

But the IHRC had its own weaknesses, according to a study by the U.S.-based Government Accountability Office or GAO published in May 2011.

After a year of existence, many projects had been approved but not financed, two out of five departments had no director, and 22 of 34 key posts remained vacant, the GAO noted.

In short, the IHRC was not “yet fully operational… According to U.S. and NGO officials, staffing shortages affected the project review process – a process to determine whether project proposals should be approved for implementation – and communications with stakeholders, such as the Board of Directors,” according to the GAO.

But the IHRC did acknowledge getting the project.

Contacted via email on Oct. 17, 2011 by HGW, the ICHR director of projects at the time, Aurélie Baoukobza, promised that the campus proposal was under consideration.

“The proposal is currently following the reviewing circuit (sic) and the discussions relative to its approval have not yet been shared,” she wrote.

“Therefore, I cannot discuss this project with the media. The decision of the IHRC and the Government are supposed to be delivered to the submitting parties (the Rectorate) by the end of the week. Only after that official email can I speak about the project,” she promised.

Four days later, on Oct. 21, the mandate of the IHRC expired.

Silence ensued.

[See Part 2]

*Students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti collaborated on this series.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA) and community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media.

To see the photos and read more stories visit Haiti Grassroots Watch.

Excerpt: