Argentine archbishop Jorge Bergoglio was selected as pope at a time when the Roman Catholic Church in this South American country is facing a rebellion by priests and laypersons who reject the role of the church leadership during the 1976-1983 dictatorship and the lack of reparations for past omissions and complicities.

The accusations against Bergoglio for his alleged ties to the dictatorship, which made headlines around the world when his appointment as pope was announced by the Vatican, are just the tip of the iceberg of a controversy that has raged for decades without a solution and which is coming to light as the regime’s human rights violators have been brought to trial since the amnesty laws were scrapped.

Groups like Curas en la Opción por los Pobres (Priests with an Option for the Poor), Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio (Christians for the Third Millennium) or Colectivo Teología de la Liberación (Liberation Theology Collective) have voiced increasingly harsh criticism against the Argentine bishops’ conference’s shortcomings in terms of self-criticism, in spite of an apology and pledge to investigate issued a few months ago.

Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio in Buenos Aires in 2008. Credit: 3.0 CC BY-SA

“It’s good that this debate is happening, that we work to clarify what happened, so that the truth will come to light. That would be very healthy,” Claudia Touris, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires and the coordinator of Relig-Ar Grupo de Trabajo en Religión y Sociedad de Argentina (Relig-Ar: Working Group on Religion and Society in Contemporary Argentina), told IPS.

The debate that has divided Catholics in Argentina broke out as a result of a statement issued in November 2012 by the Argentine bishops’ conference, in which they apologise “to those we let down or failed to support as we should have” during the dictatorship.

They also promised to carry out “a more thorough study,” to find out the truth.

The statement was issued as a “Letter to the People of God” and was titled “Faith in Jesus Christ leads us to truth, justice and peace.” It condemns the crimes committed as a result of “state terrorism” but adds that “We also know of the death and devastation caused by the violence of the guerrillas”.

Opponents of the regime criticise that interpretation.

Cristianos por el Tercer Milenio described the statement as falling short because it denies the connivance between some prelates and the dictatorship. According to the group, made up of laypersons, those who served as military chaplains should be demanded to provide information, and “scandalous situations that confuse and weaken the faithful should be brought to an end.”

For their part, Curas en Opción por los Pobres said they were “scandalised by so many stances running counter to the Gospels” and by the fact that priest Christian von Wernich, who was sentenced for human rights violations, “was not expelled from the priesthood,” and unrepentant former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, found guilty of crimes against humanity, continues to receive communion.

On the eve of Bergoglio’s appointment as pope, Curas en Opción por los Pobres, priests who live and work in Argentina’s slums, loudly protested because the bishops had taken reprisals against one of the priests who had criticised the statement released by the bishops’ conference.

Bishop Francisco Polti of the northern province of Santiago del Estero transferred Father Roberto Burell, one of the signatories of the letter that the Curas en Opción por los Pobres sent to the bishops, from his parish.

“We aren’t going to call you ‘estimados’ (esteemed – the formal form of address in a letter in Spanish) because we do not esteem cowards,” says the letter sent by the priests.

The priests also told the bishops that when they are no longer bishops “only the powerful will be sorry, because the poor, the peasants and indigenous people will celebrate.”

That was the climate among Catholics in Argentina when Cardinal Bergoglio was elected Wednesday Mar. 13 as the first pope from Latin America.

Touris said the bishops’ conference statement was considered overly timid by many Catholics, although it was a fairly novel call for those who have information on forced disappearances or the theft of the children of political prisoners – two human rights abuses widely committed by the dictatorship – to come forward.

“We’ll have to see if this continues, and if it goes deeper,” she added.

She said there was no single, unanimous Church position with respect to the regime, which is why some bishops were ideologically in line with the military and helped “sweep out alleged communist infiltrators,” while other priests and bishops supported the victims of persecuation.

As examples of the former, Touris mentioned Cardinal Raúl Primatesta, army vicar Victorio Bonamín, and archbishops Adolfo Tortolo and Antonio Plaza – all of whom are dead – who witnesses said they had seen in clandestine detention centres.

But, Touris said, there were also bishops who stood alongside the victims of the regime, such as Jaime de Nevares, Jorge Novak or Miguel Hesayne, as well as dozens of priests, nuns, seminary students and laypersons who were kidnapped, “disappeared”, murdered, or forced to flee into exile.

Two bishops are considered martyrs for their opposition to the regime.

The first is Enrique Angelelli of the diocese of the northern province of La Rioja, who was killed in 1976 in a purported car accident which is suspected to have been a murder. The other is Carlos Ponce de León, bishop of the Buenos Aires district of San Nicolás, who also died in a suspicious car crash in 1977.

At the time, Bergoglio was the Jesuit Provincial (elected leader of the order). Two Jesuit priests who worked in poor neighbourhoods were abducted. Some accuse the new pope of turning them over, but others say that on the contrary, his influence saved them.

Touris said the superior general of the Society of Jesus was Spanish priest Pedro Arrupe, who urged the priests to assume a political and social commitment. As a result, more Jesuits were persecuted, tortured and forcibly disappeared in Latin America in the 1970s than priests from any other order.

In Argentina, under Bergoglio’s leadership, the order assumed a more traditional position, the professor noted. He urged the more socially committed priests to abandon their social activism in order to avoid repression, as he himself stated in his defence.

Argentine human rights activist and 1980 Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an active believer, said this week that “the Catholic Church did not take a homogeneous stance” with respect to the regime, and “there were bishops who were complicit in the dictatorship…but not Bergoglio.”

“I believe he lacked the courage to support our struggle for human rights at the most difficult times,” Esquivel said in a statement issued by his organisation, Servicio de Paz y Justicia (Peace and Justice Service) in Argentina.

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

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 5 2013 (IPS)

The trial over a campaign of terror coordinated among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s and 1980s began Tuesday in Buenos Aires with former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as one of the main defendants, along with another 24 former military officers.

Under Operation Condor, as the coordination between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay was known, opponents of the regimes were tracked down, kidnapped, tortured, transferred across borders and killed – including guerrilla fighters, political activists, trade unionists, students, priests, journalists or mothers demanding to know what had happened to their missing sons and daughters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In spite of repeated violations of house arrest by people convicted of crimes against humanity during Argentina’s dictatorship, some activists remain in favour of this lenient alternative to prison, but they want better oversight by the courts.

The Prosecution Unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations committed during the state terrorism indicated that in late 2012, 37.8 percent of the 813 persons detained for crimes against humanity were under house arrest.

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

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

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

Hidalgo, who had registered Laura as his own biological child, was recognised in the street by de Sanctis herself, who denounced him to the justice system. He was supposedly under arrest in a geriatric centre in Buenos Aires, where he lived. The court revoked his privileges and transferred him to a hospital at the Ezeiza Prison Unit, in the outskirts of the Argentine capital.You always hear about cases in which victims recognise and denounce them, and if they are not denounced more frequently it is because they aren't recognised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At 8 a.m. on Oct. 25, 1975, Brazilian journalist Vladimir Herzog voluntarily reported to the São Paulo headquarters of the government’s intelligence agency and was never seen alive again.

The facilities he had been summoned to were just one of the detention and torture centres that were active during Brazil’s last dictatorship.

Herzog was editor-in-chief of the news department at the São Paulo-based television network TV Cultura, and had been called in for questioning by the Information Operations Department of the Centre for Internal Defence Operations (DOI-CODI) for his alleged connections to the then-illegal Brazilian Communist Party (PCB).

He died under torture, but his death was made to look like a suicide by the military in an attempt to cover up the murder. A photograph released later showed Herzog hanging in his cell, but in a position that clearly revealed that the military’s suicide version was a farce.

The picture quickly became a symbol of the lies of the military regime.

Denounced by the Union of Professional Journalists of São Paulo, the death of “Vlado” – as he was called by friends and family – had profound repercussions, triggering a wave of protests and setting off a mass movement that played an instrumental role in bringing down the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

More than 37 years later, Herzog’s murder could be the case that finally sets Brazil on the path of investigating the crimes and abuses committed throughout its long dictatorship.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organisation of American States (OAS) accepted a petition to open an inquiry to determine the responsibility of the Brazilian government in Herzog’s death, understanding that the state has not fulfilled its duty to investigate, prosecute and punish the perpetrators.

The IACHR will submit a report with its findings to the central-left administration of President Dilma Rousseff and, if the government fails to implement its recommendations, it will bring the case before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In 2010, the court issued a ruling condemning Brazil for its failure to open up criminal inquiries and prosecute the perpetrators of the “arbitrary detention, torture and forced disappearance of 70 individuals during the dictatorship, including members of the Communist Party and peasants from the region,” who were part of the Araguaia guerrillas, a group that operated from1972 to 1974 in Marabá, state of Pará.

Attempts to bring the perpetrators of human rights abuses committed during the past dictatorship have been thwarted by a 1979 amnesty law (No. 6,683) passed by the military regime that pardoned anyone involved in political crimes or human rights violations in the period between Sep. 2, 1961 and Aug. 15, 1979.

Despite this obstacle, the Rousseff administration made great progress in this sense with the establishment of a National Truth Commission (created by Law No. 12,528) in 2011, mandated with investigating cases of forced disappearances of political opponents during the dictatorship.

This law was enacted in 2012 and sets a term of two years for the commission to complete its mandate. According to the document “Direito à Memória e à Verdade” (The Right to Memory and Truth), prepared by the government, at least 150 dissidents arrested or kidnapped by repressive forces during that period are still missing today.

Their relatives continue to search for their remains or for any information on the fate of their loved ones.

The truth commission is not the only effort to reveal the truth of the dictatorship’s abuses, as an increasing number of committees are being formed by state representatives, students and workers.

“Every action seeking truth and justice organised by the younger generations, to learn about and fight for human rights in Brazil is a new blow dealt against the dictatorship and the state of emergency,” Maria do Rosário Nunes, the presidency’s human rights secretary, said on Jan. 19 at the launching of the Journalists’ Truth Commission.

“Brazil has been slow to join the debate on truth commissions, which is aimed at recovering (collective) memory and obtaining justice for the deaths and disappearances committed during the dictatorship, and it’s far behind other countries, such as Uruguay and Argentina,” Beth Costa, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), told IPS.

“But the IFJ and the National and Latin American Federation of Journalists welcome this firm decision by the government of Brazil,” she added.

Costa acknowledged the government’s difficulty in countering historical resistances, which date back to the period of national re-democratisation.

“For years there was resistance from the military, which still has an impact through the seats held in parliament by the country’s conservative parties, many of which backed the military regime,” she said.

The members of the National Truth Commission face the challenge of filling in the information gaps that exist in the cases of disappearances and assassinations, and in the files that were put at their disposal for the investigation, which may not be complete despite the Data Access Act that Rousseff passed along with this specialised body.

“Some 25 journalists were killed during the dictatorship,” journalist Audálio Dantas told IPS. A former president of the Union of Professional Journalists of São Paulo, Dantas headed the protests to expose Herzog’s staged suicide.

Dantas, who currently heads the National Commission of Brazilian Journalists for Memory, Justice and Truth, detected major gaps in the government’s files, which he consulted as part of the research for his book “As duas guerras de Vlado Herzog” (The Two Wars of Vlado Herzog), published in 2012 by Editora Civilização Brasileira.

When he tried to access the case files, he was asked to furnish a copy of Herzog’s death certificate.

“This demand was not only absurd, it was disrespectful to Vlado’s memory. Meeting this request would have entailed accepting as true the cause of death recorded by the certifying doctor, Harry Shibata, a DOI-CODI collaborator, who signed the certificate without ever seeing the body, ruling it a suicide,” Dantas wrote in his book.

“The Truth Commission finally succeeded in having the certificate amended,” he told IPS. Now it states that Herzog’s died as a result of “injuries and abuses suffered while in the São Paulo second army facilities (DOI-CODI).”

Beth Costa believes that reconstructing the history of the journalists who were forcefully disappeared by the dictatorship will be a key step in rebuilding the country’s collective memory and in the process of re-democratisation of its institutions, especially at a time in which Brazil is listed among the countries with the greatest number of journalists murdered in the line of duty.

Freedoms such as the right to report freely and safely and the right to be informed are once again at risk. This was made patently clear when newspaper reporters André Caramante, of Folha de São Paulo, and Mauri Konig, of Paraná’s Gazeta do Povo, were forced to leave the country after receiving death threats for exposing police misconduct.

Dantas recalled that, in addition to guaranteeing the safety of all media professionals, the government must weed out certain elements from police forces, which were left over from the dictatorship and form extermination squads.

“It’s shameful that after successfully fighting off political repression we are now incapable of battling the repression that is a daily reality in the peripheries of our large cities and inside our police stations,” he said.

“The government is afraid to tackle this problem, perhaps because most middle and upper class people believe that seizing and executing without trial is an acceptable practice. It’s the country’s biggest shame today,” he charged.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 9 2012 (IPS)

Global rights watchdog Amnesty International presented an Argentine court Wednesday with documents which show that Spanish courts are blocking lawsuits brought by the families of victims of human rights crimes committed during the 1936-1939 civil war and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

The report was presented by the president of the Spanish chapter of Amnesty, Esteban Beltrán, to the federal judge who is investigating Franco-era human rights abuses in response to legal action brought by the families of victims, based on the principle of universal justice.

Beltrán told IPS that “in Spain, all of the doors are being closed to the victims who are seeking justice, truth and reparations for forced disappearances, systematic torture and extrajudicial executions.”

“We have come to urge the Argentine justice system to continue investigating, and we have provided documents demonstrating that this work is not being done in Spain, and that the cases are systematically shelved without a single paper being moved,” he said.

In 2006, human rights groups in Spain provided the Audiencia Nacional – the national high court – with evidence that the number of forced disappearances during the civil war and the Franco regime totalled at least 114,000, and that some 30,000 babies and toddlers were stolen from their parents.

Internationally renowned Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón, a former Audiencia Nacional magistrate, was disbarred for attempting to investigate these crimes in Spain.

Garzón had based his investigation on the principle of universal jurisdiction, which states the crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties and can be tried at any time in any place.

He had invoked the same principle when he attempted, while amnesty laws were still in force in Chile and Argentina, to prosecute former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and others involved in the forced disappearance, torture and murder of thousands of people committed in the 1970s and 1980s by the dictatorships in these South American countries.

Although in February, Spain’s Supreme Court found Garzón not guilty of overstepping the bounds of his jurisdiction, it criticised his interpretation of international human rights law, and said he was wrong to start investigating human rights crimes in Spain because the 1977 amnesty was still in effect for human rights violations committed during the dictatorship.

But the Supreme Court disbarred him for 11 years in a separate case, involving illegal wiretapping in a high-profile prosecution for corruption. He is thus unable to continue investigating human rights crimes in Spain.

The report that Beltrán presented to Argentine Judge María Servini analyses 21 of the 47 cases that the Audiencia Nacional referred to provincial courts, and concludes that nearly all of them were simply shelved, with no action being taken.

Only in two cases were measures taken to exhume bodies from some of the hundreds of unmarked common graves scattered around Spain, identify the remains, and hand them over to surviving family members, the report states. But after this was done, these cases were also blocked, it adds.

The aim of the Amnesty report, titled “Closed Cases, Open Wounds”, is to show that the victims have been abandoned by the justice system in Spain, where these crimes have never been investigated, the human rights group says.

It states that “the rights to truth, justice and reparations for the victims of crimes under international law committed during the civil war and the Franco era continue to be denied in Spain.”

The report openly contradicts the Spanish government’s response to Judge Servini in June 2011, when she was informed that according to Spain’s attorney general’s office, cases involving Franco-era human rights crimes were being prosecuted in that country.

But Amnesty International’s investigation gave rise to a very different conclusion, says the report, which underscores the reluctance of provincial courts in Spain to take action, and their readiness to shelve the cases, while citing new violations of rights that they thereby commit.

“There is a clear violation of the right to justice” due to the failure to investigate the charges, the lack of respect for the right of victims’ relatives to find out the truth, and the denial of the right to reparations, says Amnesty International Spain.

The courts also failed, the report adds, to notify the families of the decision to dismiss the cases after taking virtually no action on them.

In addition, Amnesty questions the legal arguments cited by the courts.

Although the lawsuits involve crimes against humanity, the courts in Spain have argued that the statute of limitations has run out on the crimes or the 1977 amnesty law is still in place, or they have dismissed the cases on the grounds that all of those allegedly responsible are dead.

“Amnesty International considers that Spain is failing to fulfil its international obligations,” states the report, before urging the Argentine courts to continue investigating the crimes committed in Spain.

The legal action in Argentina was filed in April 2010 by Inés García Holgado and Darío Rivas, relatives of victims of Franco-era repression. They have since been joined in the lawsuit by the family members of other victims.

Carlos Slepoy, an Argentine lawyer based in Spain who represents several of the plaintiffs, told IPS that the lawsuit so far involves 20 cases. But he said the number could climb “into the hundreds” as relatives of other victims join in the legal action.

Slepoy said political prisoners who were arrested for their political or trade union activities and affiliations during the final stage of the regime have also come to Buenos Aires to testify in court, bringing powers of attorney enabling them to represent other victims.

Judge Servini plans to travel to Madrid in June to take depositions in the Argentine Embassy from survivors of the repression or family members of victims who wish to join the lawsuit as plaintiffs.

A criminal lawsuit against 1,500 former members of DINA, the secret police of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, is seeking to shed light on the most active player in the repression, which stretched outside the country’s borders.

Villa Grimaldi, a former detention and torture centre, now a "peace park". Credit: Marysol*/CC BY-SA 2.0

“We are trying to get the DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional) investigated as a criminal organisation,” Boris Paredes, a human rights lawyer, told IPS.

“The conclusion reached is that DINA operated as an extermination group, and as such, we believe that all of its members were part of an illicit association,” he said.

The charges filed this month by the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD – Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared) is based on a memorandum that the office of the army chief of staff handed over to Judge Alejandro Solís on Aug. 28, 2008.

The memorandum, an official list of 1,500 names, was provided to the judge in connection with a case involving the victims of Villa Grimaldi, the largest torture and detention centre run by the 17-year military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

The 1,500 names on the list are of official members, from the senior-most military officers and civilians to the lowest-ranking staffers, of DINA, which was dissolved in 1977 and replaced by the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI – National Information Centre), that operated until the end of the regime.

“It’s important for the country to know which people participated in these bodies, because we must urgently make progress on passing legislation that respects human rights and that, as is being done in Argentina, prohibits human rights violators from holding public positions,” Paredes said.

He said several judges have taken the position that “no one who belonged to DINA was unaware of what was happening, and each one was a gear in a large machinery set up to kidnap, torture and kill people.”

AFDD spokeswoman Gabriela Zúñiga told IPS that the courts in Chile have handed down sentences against the “poster boys” of the repression, like army General Manuel Contreras, founder and chief of DINA, and Álvaro Corbalán, CNI head of operations.

“But there are a large number of agents who we don’t even think of as belonging to (DINA),” she said, mentioning Rosauro Martínez, a lawmaker of the co-governing right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI), who she noted is “paradoxically” a member of the Latin American Parliament’s human rights commission; Cristián Labbé, mayor of the upscale Santiago neighbourhood of Providencia,; and Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, the son of the late dictator.

“In a healthy society, which wants to resolve the issue of human rights violations by means of state policies, it is unseemly for terrorists and perpetrators of crimes against humanity to be in public positions, without having been held accountable in the courts and before society,” Zúñiga said.

Cath Collins, director of the Observatory of Human Rights at the Diego Portales University, said DINA operated as an “extra-institutional apparatus purposely created outside the discipline of the armed forces, to enable the military to deny that they were institutionally involved in the human rights violations.”

According to the information that the AFDD has compiled, and the evidence presented in court, DINA was responsible for the deaths of all of the AFDD members’ lost loved ones, and was also responsible for coordinating the repression against opponents with the rest of the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of the Americas, in what was known as Operation Condor.

The Pinochet regime killed and forcibly disappeared 3,216 people, while another 38,254 survived prison and torture, according to the Interior Ministry’s human rights programme, which based its figures on the 2004 and 2011 reports by a commission presided over by Catholic Bishop Sergio Valech (1927-2010) until his death, and the 1991 truth commission headed by Raúl Rettig.

The Diego Portales University’s Observatory of Human Rights found that nearly 70 percent of the cases of those who were killed or “disappeared” are still being investigated by the justice system, 22 percent have never gone to court, and the rest have been concluded.

The report says that between 2000 and 2011, 824 former agents of the dictatorship faced prosecution, although 31 of them died during that period.

Of the 793 former agents who are still alive, 544 are still under trial or are awaiting sentencing or appeal, 177 have been sentenced but have never been imprisoned due to benefits they have received, 66 are in prison serving their sentences, and six have been convicted but are free due to reduction of sentence or because their sentences were commuted.

The report also indicates that 47 of the former agents behind bars are serving their sentences in the Punta Peuco prison and 10 in the Cordillera prison, which are both exclusively for military personnel, and have comforts that “border on luxury.”

Punta Peuco’s inmates include Contreras, who is serving 25 life sentences – more than 300 years in prison – and his second-in-command, former Brigadier-General Pedro Espinoza.

Another of the human rights violators held at the modern Punta Peuco prison is former Brigadier-General Miguel Krassnoff, who was sentenced to a total of 144 years in prison on charges of forced disappearance and murder.

A tribute was paid to Krassnoff in November 2011 by Providencia Mayor Cristian Labbé, a former army colonel.

Although Collins stressed the large number of people who have been convicted of human rights violations in Chile, she said the sentences were considered light in comparison to the gravity of the crimes, and pointed out that only around one-third of those who have been sentenced are actually in prison.

Another pending challenge is repealing or modifying the 1978 amnesty for human rights abusers, which is still in effect.

And while states have an international obligation to investigate human rights crimes, it was not until 2011 that cases were presented on behalf of victims of human rights crimes for whom no legal action had been brought.

In January 2011, Santiago prosecutor Beatriz Pedrals filed 726 new lawsuits which included, for the first time, legal action for the death of President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) in the Sept. 11, 1973 bombing of the La Moneda government palace during the coup mounted by Pinochet.

Previously, all of the lawsuits had been filed by survivors or by family members of victims.

“Progress has been made, but we have clearly not achieved full justice,” said Zúñiga. “Most of the perpetrators have got off scot-free.”

Paredes, meanwhile, said that in the last few years, “there have been important advances made in the courts, by magistrates who have courageously done important work…We have seen results with respect to unveiling the truth.”

But she concurred with Zúñiga that “justice is lame-footed because the sentences handed down are ridiculously short.”

Based on the principle of universal justice, human rights crimes committed during Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco are being tried in Argentina, and more and more plaintiffs are joining the lawsuit.

The human rights lawyers who initially brought the lawsuit in Argentina in April 2010 argued that after 36 years of dictatorship and 36 years of democracy in Spain, there were no efforts to investigate the abuses committed in Spain.

Internationally renowned Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón was disbarred on charges that he overstepped his jurisdiction when he began to investigate the human rights crimes, which were presumably covered by an amnesty issued by the Spanish parliament in 1977.

“In our view, the doors are closed in Spain, where it is argued that they were common crimes, covered by an amnesty, on which the statute of limitations has run out,” Inés García Holgado, one of the plaintiffs in the case that got under way in an Argentine federal court in December 2011, told IPS.

Two of García Holgado’s great uncles, Luis and Elías García Holgado, were executed in 1936 and 1937, respectively, and her uncle Vicente García Holgado was a victim of forced disappearance.

“In Spain, they see this as a question for the history books; they aren’t going to investigate or bring it to trial,” she said.

Elías García Holgado was mayor of the town of Lumbrales and provincial legislator in the western province of Salamanca when he was arrested and summarily executed. Luis, who worked in the post office in the town of Hervás, was seized after the military coup and executed.

Inés García Holgado, an Argentinian, is confident that the case will move ahead because of the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity. “I am very hopeful. If we are successful, Argentina will be the first Latin American country to apply this principle,” she added.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism, which are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties, can be tried at any time in any place.

Thus, national courts can try foreigners for crimes of this nature committed abroad. However, the legislation of many countries requires an explicit link between the victims and plaintiffs and the country where the prosecution is taking place.

The other original plaintiff in the case is 91-year-old Darío Rivas, who was born in Spain but has lived in Argentina since he was nine years old.

His father, Severino Rivas, mayor of the village of Castro de Rei in the northwestern Spanish province of Galicia, was purportedly killed in 1936 by members of Spain’s fascist Falange movement. His remains were found in an unmarked common grave in 2005.

Soon after the lawsuit was filed, four other people whose relatives were victims of the Franco regime joined García Holgado and Rivas as plaintiffs. Some of them were themselves survivors of the abuses of the dictatorship which ended when Franco died in 1975, giving rise to a transition to democracy, the first free elections in Spain, in 1977, and a new democratic constitution, which went into effect a year later.

But it was after Argentine Judge María Servini, who is handling the case, asked the Spanish courts for information in December that the number of plaintiffs began to climb.

Argentine lawyer Carlos Slepoy, who represents several of the plaintiffs, told IPS that “20 cases have already been denounced in Argentina and we are expecting 55 more. But in time, they could number in the hundreds.”

Slepoy explained that some of the direct victims of the final stage of the regime, who were arrested for their political or trade union activities and affiliations, began to come to Buenos Aires this month to testify in court, bringing powers of attorney enabling them to represent other victims in the same or other cases.

García Holgado said that from Argentina, they are advising survivors of the Spanish dictatorship and family members of victims on how and where to obtain documents that serve as evidence of the crimes that were committed, in order to bring legal action in this country.

In December, Judge Servini asked authorities in Spain to provide the names of military officers involved in the repression; lists of victims of forced disappearance and summary execution; lists of children who were stolen from their parents during the dictatorship; and the names of companies that allegedly benefited from the forced labour of political prisoners.

Human rights groups in Spain had provided the now disbarred judge Garzón with evidence that at least 114,000 people were forcibly disappeared and 30,000 children were stolen under Franco.

Servini also asked the authorities in Spain whether they were effectively investigating “the existence of a systematic, generalised and deliberate plan to terrorise Spaniards who supported representative government, by physically eliminating them” between 1936 and 1977.

Spain has not yet responded, said Slepoy. “They will probably use delaying tactics, which is what governments do when they don’t want to respond,” the lawyer said.

The principle of universal justice was applied in Spain by Garzón when he investigated human rights crimes committed by the dictatorships of Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990), in lawsuits in which Slepoy was also involved.

Now, after a movement that attempted to get human rights crimes committed by Argentina’s seven-year dictatorship tried in Spain, the attempt is to apply the principle the other way around: in Argentina, for crimes against humanity amnestied in Spain.

In Argentina, the two amnesty laws that had shielded military personnel from human rights prosecutions were struck down in 2005, clearing the way for hundreds of former military commanders, officers and lower-ranking soldiers, as well as civilian collaborators, to be tried for forced disappearance, torture and killings committed during the dictatorship, which “disappeared” an estimated 30,000 opponents of the regime.

Something similar happened in Chile. In 1998, Garzón issued an international arrest warrant for former dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), who as a result was arrested in London, where he spent 503 days under house arrest.

But although he was not extradited to Spain for trial on human rights charges, as sought by Garzón, and was instead permitted by British authorities to return home on humanitarian grounds, the process helped get the ball rolling in Chile, where he was indicted in connection with forced disappearances – though he died without ever going to trial.

But when Garzón began to investigate the Franco regime’s crimes, far-right Spanish groups, including Manos Limpias (Clean Hands) and Libertad e Identidad (Liberty and Identity), accused him of abuse of power for investigating crimes that were covered by the 1977 amnesty, in the first of three cases brought against him almost simultaneously in the Supreme Court.

On Feb. 27, the Supreme Court found him not guilty of overstepping the bounds of his jurisdiction, although it did criticise his interpretation of international human rights law, and said he was wrong to start investigating human rights crimes in Spain as the amnesty was still in force.

But 18 days earlier, the Supreme Court had already disbarred the investigating magistrate for 11 years in a separate case, involving wiretapping in one of the highest-profile prosecutions for corruption in times of democracy in Spain, against leaders of the right-wing Popular Party, in power since December.

Slepoy said the argument put forth in Spain – that the people investigated in connection with Franco-era human rights crimes are now dead – is false. “These are hurdles thrown up by the government to show that it is supposedly impossible to try those accused of the crimes,” he said.

“The culture of impunity is so strong that it makes it look like the amnesty law is untouchable, the way things used to look in Argentina,” the lawyer said. “But I am confident that Spain is moving in the direction of a process similar to what we have experienced in this country.”

He also confirmed that lists of names of plaintiffs in Spain are being drawn up, so Judge Servini can take their depositions at the Argentine Embassy in that country when she travels there in June, to add new plaintiffs to the lawsuit.

Former combatants in Argentina who took part in the 1982 Malvinas/Falkland Islands war are waging their final battle: they are trying to get the Supreme Court to classify the brutal mistreatment to which they were subjected by their officers as crimes against humanity.

Sheep in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Credit: Strange Ones/CC BY 2.0

“We are the last collective victims of the (1976-1983) dictatorship,” Ernesto Alonso, a member of the Centre of Former Malvinas Islands Combatants in La Plata, the capital of the eastern province of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

On Apr. 2, 1982, the de facto regime suddenly invaded the South Atlantic archipelago, located about 480 km east of Argentina, which has been occupied by Britain since 1833.

The resulting 74-day war, which ended when Argentina surrendered on Jun. 14, cost the lives of 635 Argentine and 255 British soldiers.

There is abundant testimony from former Argentine combatants of cases of death by starvation and hypothermia, corporal punishment such as immersion in freezing water, mock firing squads, sexual abuse and other forms of mistreatment by officers and non-commissioned officers.

“For years we couldn’t talk about these things, but now it’s starting to become possible,” said Alonso, who added that he was optimistic that the Supreme Court would hand down a ruling that could put an end to the impunity surrounding these human rights crimes.

“What happened to us was in the context of the dictatorship. The same actors were involved,” said Alonso, referring to the military officers active in the de facto regime.

For that reason he is confident that, as prosecutions against members of the military charged with kidnapping, torture and forced disappearance move ahead in the courts, action will be taken with respect to the crimes committed in the Malvinas/Falkland Islands.

A score of Malvinas veterans filed the first legal action in 2007. The first instance court ruled that the abuses were crimes against humanity, which mean they were not subject to any statute of limitations.

The verdict was upheld by the court of second instance. But the defendants appealed to the Cámara de Casación Penal, which ruled in 2009 that crimes committed in the war should have been tried in the military courts, and that the statute of limitations had run out.

On the eve of the 30th anniversary of the invasion of the islands, 120 former combatants turned to the Supreme Court, which accepted the case.

The plaintiffs say that if the Court rules that no statute of limitations applies to their cases because they involve crimes against humanity, many more veterans who have not yet dared speak out will come forward and seek redress.

The legal action has the support of human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who is the president of the Provincial Commission for Memory, an independent body created by the Buenos Aires provincial legislature in 1999.

Some 80 officers and non-commissioned officers are accused of torture and other crimes against soldiers in the Malvinas, most of whom were young conscripts doing their obligatory military service.

Some of the defendants are already in prison accused of human rights crimes committed during the dictatorship, which “disappeared” some 30,000 people. But most of them are in active service or retired, and drawing pensions as veterans.

“The dictatorship had not ended on Apr. 2 (1982), and the torture continued over there,” during the war, former conscript Pablo de Benedetti, one of the plaintiffs, told IPS.

De Benedetti was 19 years old and had received less than two months of military training when he was sent to the Malvinas.

He was put to work laying landmines and slept in trenches where he survived in the middle of the southern hemisphere winter despite the shortage of food and the extreme cold.

His superior was a Sergeant Romero, who frequently punished him by forcing him into pools of freezing water and not letting him change out of his wet clothing afterwards. Winter temperatures in the Malvinas/Falklands can drop to 10 degrees Celsius below zero.

The veteran said the sergeant once put a rifle to his head and pulled the trigger, to frighten him. Romero also regularly shouted out the command “hit the dirt!” and ordered him to do frog jumps next to the minefield, as punishment.

“My legs starting swelling up and after a while I couldn’t walk,” de Benedetti said. “They took me to see the military doctor, who told me in front of Romero that I had to take medicine and could no longer be submerged in cold water or stay in wet clothes.”

But when de Benedetti returned to the trench, Romero said he would cure him, threw away the medicine, and forced him once again into the pool of freezing water.

By June, de Benedetti had to be hospitalised on the island, before he was transferred to the mainland. His feet were so swollen that his boots had to be cut off. He almost lost his legs.

When he was in the hospital in Puerto Belgrano, in Buenos Aires province, he was not allowed to call home to tell his family how and where he was.

“You can’t call because we’re still at war,” his superiors told him. But de Benedetti managed to get a wheelchair, pretended to go to the bathroom, and made it to the nurse’s station where he called his parents, who showed up at the hospital the next day.

The young conscript, who spent 20 days in the hospital, suffered serious physical and psychological consequences the first few years after the war, which his family was left on its own to deal with. Today, at the age of 49, he continues to take medication for the damages suffered in his feet and legs.

He is confident, though, that the Supreme Court will give the green light for trying these crimes. “I hope those officers will be demoted, and will be stripped of their benefits, honours and pensions. And above all, I hope they will go to prison for what they did,” he said.

Another plaintiff, Silvio Katz, finally decided to speak to the media a few years ago about the abuse and humiliations he suffered as a combatant in the Malvinas, which was aggravated by the fact that he is Jewish.

“F***ing Jew, Jewish fag, traitor” were some of the insults Katz received. He and other soldiers were forced to hold their hands in freezing water. But in his case, he was also forced to stick his face in.

On one occasion he was staked out on the frozen ground in his underwear and t-shirt, and his fellow soldiers were forced to urinate on him. “They even forced me to eat excrement. I will never forget that,” he said.

Katz said that shortly after he returned from the war, he saw his torturer, non-commissioned officer Eduardo Flores Ardoino, in the street, and peed his pants.

“There were three people. One person was holding me down; one person was holding my hand; and the other person was doing the job. They lay me down, and…” Fatu said of the female genital mutilation she underwent as an eight- year-old in Liberia.

FGM is a taboo and complicated topic in Liberia and it is dangerous for women to speak out about it. Credit: Travis Lupick/IPS

According to the World Health Organization, Fatu endured what is classified as a type II female circumcision (on a scale of one to three), where her clitoris and labia minora were cut away.

Now 23 and a student at the University of Liberia, Fatu’s circumcision was part of her initiation into the secretive Sande Society, a pseudo-religious association to which most Liberian women – depending on which tribe and part of the country they are from – are members.

The Sande and its male counterpart, the Poro, shape many aspects of culture, tradition, and society as a whole in this West African nation. The Sande “bush” schools are where young Liberian women – some as young as two years old – are supposed to receive instruction on the traditions of respect, how to run a household, and how to prepare for marriage.

It is also where their circumcisions happen.

The Sande society believes this rite of passage makes a woman strong and prevents her from becoming promiscuous.

International organisations such as the United Nations Children’s Fund argue that FGM is a human rights violation that denies women “their physical and mental integrity, their right to freedom from violence and discrimination, and in the most extreme case, their life.”

FGM’s central position in the Sande makes it particularly difficult to curtail, explained Minister of Gender and Development Julia Duncan-Cassell. But through cooperative efforts with traditional leaders, the government of Liberia is quietly moving to shut down the Sande schools and bring an end to female genital cutting in Liberia.

“Government is saying, ‘This needs to stop’,” stated Duncan-Cassell. “I can’t tell you that it stopped completely, but the process is ongoing.”

In the past the Liberian government has been unwilling to comment on FGM and Duncan-Cassell outlined the clearest position on the practice to date. She affirmed her office’s commitment to putting an end to female circumcision in the country. FGM is a taboo and complicated topic here in Liberia.

While Fatu mostly spoke positively of her experiences with the Sande, many women interviewed by IPS refused to discuss the society or FGM.

“It hurt. Seriously, it hurt. And there was a lot of blood,” Fatu said, contorting her facial muscles as she recalled the experience. Yet Fatu maintains she does not regret the time she spent in the Sande bush school.

“From that time till now, I feel like a woman. I feel proud,” she said, her last word spoken slowly, drawn out, and punctuated with the same emphasis she used to describe the pain she felt during her initiation.

Duncan-Cassell conceded that eradicating FGM in Liberia will take time.

“There has been a statement put out by the Ministry of Internal Affairs asking all of our mothers, our aunts, our sisters, to desist from such practices,” Duncan-Cassell said. “Government wants to respect the beliefs of the people but, at the same time, is telling them not to infringe on the right of someone else.”

There are no reliable statistics on the number of Liberian women circumcised; however, it is estimated that as many as two-thirds of women in the country have undergone the procedure.

The cessation of Sande initiations and FGM remains a highly sensitive issue for the government, and officials interviewed maintained that it would take years to put an end to the practice. However, an alleged deal exists that could see the Sande sidelined sooner than most expect.

Assistant Minister of Culture at the Ministry of Internal Affairs Joseph Jangar said that a deal has been struck between the Sande and Poro societies, whereby the Sande would hand over land used for initiations to the Poro.

“The women agreed,” Jangar said. “With that understanding, the women cannot practice Sande. Because of that, we are not issuing permits (to operate Bush schools) to any Sande Society.”

Jangar said that an official letter, sent on Dec. 9, 2011 to district superintendents and heads of both the Sande and Poro societies, requested that all Sande groves be closed down by the end of that year. “They all received the letter,” he said. “If we find any zoes (traditional spiritual leaders) practicing Sande school, we will fine them.” Monitors are scheduled to go out into the counties by the start of April, he added.

However, Minister of Internal Affairs Blamo Nelson claimed that he was not aware of the letter, but said that he sees FGM slowly becoming a thing of the past.

“The advocacy calling for an end to FGM should continue,” he said. “And I’m sure that in time these practices, that more and more Liberians are beginning to find obnoxious, will go away.”

Mama Tormah, head of all the Sande’s female zoes, said the society is currently undergoing a number of changes, including placing an emphasis on more formalised studies into the culture. Another is addressing a criticism often levied at the Sande – that it enrolls and circumcises girls far too young to take part on their own free will. Tormah acknowledged that 17 or 18 years should be the minimum age for students of the “bush” schools.

She, however, denied that grove schools were ever involved in FGM and chastised Duncan-Cassell for speaking publicly about this taboo subject. “You’re not supposed to ask me that question under lights,” Tromah protested.

Meanwhile, Nelson cautioned that traditions and beliefs are difficult things to change and, when it comes to an issue as culturally sensitive as FGM, are complicated to even debate.

A conversation on genital cutting in Liberia has no doubt begun. But for some, it has arrived too late.

In December 2011, 17-year-old Lotopoe Yeamah underwent her Sande initiation in Nimba County. According to media reports, complications left her bleeding for a week. When Yeamah was finally taken to a clinic, she was pronounced dead on arrival.

By Fabiana Frayssinet and - -
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 30 2012 (IPS)

Outside the Military Club in Rio de Janeiro, where a commemoration of the anniversary of the 1964 coup d’état was being held, hundreds of demonstrators, many of them teenagers, shouted slogans and threw eggs at arriving members in protest.

Maria de Aquino Silveira, 19, covered herself with the names of her dead or disappeared relatives. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

On Thursday Mar. 29, at the time set for the demonstration, which was organised over online social networking sites, a single protester could be seen, stoically holding a piece of paper reading “A coup is not a revolution.”

Dozens of journalists, disappointed by the tiny scope of the protest, were preparing to leave, when more protesters began to arrive.

“The dictatorship is over, the torturers must go to jail,” some shouted. “Parasite! Coward!” called others when an elderly retired member of the military, recognised by the crowd as a former torturer, tried to make his way to the entrance of the Military Club.

“We are here for the sake of justice, to end the impunity of military torturers and murderers,” said Tánia Rocha, a former political prisoner and widow of a murdered member of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCB).

An active member of Torture Never Again, one of the organisations calling for those responsible for human rights violations to be brought to justice, Rocha was moved by the size of the protest, which was growing for the first time since the return to democracy.

“I’m enjoying this,” she told IPS, raising her placard with photographs of victims of forced disappearance.

Sixteen-year-old Nando de Oliveira told IPS he was participating in the protest so that “torture may be eliminated forever.”

During the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, more than 475 people were killed or “disappeared”, 50,000 were imprisoned and over 20,000 were tortured. The most powerful woman in the country, President Dilma Rousseff, is herself a torture survivor.

An amnesty law adopted in 1979 prevented bringing those responsible for the abuses to justice.

Rocha attributes the long-delayed social reaction in Brazil to the relatively low number of victims – compared to the thousands killed under dictatorships in countries like Argentina and Chile – and to the amnesty law.

“In spite of that, the dictatorship here was as bloody, murderous and cruel as in other countries,” said Rocha, who was tortured in prison, although “not as much as other comrades, who were mutilated.”

Rousseff imposed a ban on military celebrations of the Mar. 31 anniversary of the coup, for the first time since the return to democracy.

But the armed forces simply held the celebration two days earlier, and carried on with their programme as planned, including a lecture titled “64: a verdade” (1964: The Truth).

Screened by bodyguards, another retired officer managed to get into the Military Club. A poorly aimed egg was enough to get the chanting and shouting going again.

A young man dressed up in a military uniform and a donkey’s head carried a placard reading “Pai! Afasta de mim esse cálice” (Father, take this cup away from me), a line from a famous song against the regime by singer-songwriter Chico Buarque.

Young people’s activism against the crimes of the dictatorship is also found in other states, such as São Paulo in the south, where some young people have started to organise protests aimed at “outing” former torturers.

“Brazil was the first country in the region to have a dictatorship,” another protester, Ana Miranda, of the Coletivo RJ Memória, Verdade e Justiça (Memory, Truth and Justice Collective of Rio de Janeiro), told IPS. “Our impression is that silencing opposition was so strategically important that it was imposed in drastic fashion, until today.”

The silence was so profound that “after all this time, we still carry our fear internalised within us, as if the armed forces still wielded absolute power,” said Miranda.

Perhaps one of the results of this fear is that the Truth Commission, which will begin this year to investigate human rights abuses committed since 1964, does not have the power to bring legal action.

But Miranda believes that even so limited a discussion of the truth is encouraging the movement of victims’ relatives and human rights organisations to take to the streets.

Inside the Military Club, army General Gilberto Serra agreed to an interview with IPS, which took place beside a partition bearing newspaper articles from the time of the coup, called a “revolution” by those who took part.

“They (the protesters) have their own opinions, and they have the right to express them. But I think that back then, they would have had to take responsibility for sending those young men and women to die with the guerrillas,” Serra said.

“They are the guilty ones, not us. Back then we kept a communist government from taking power,” he added. In Serra’s view, the Truth Commission should listen to “all sides,” although he also said that “truth should be left to the historians.”

One of the speakers at the anniversary lecture was General Luiz Eduardo Rocha, notorious for saying that Rousseff should be required to appear before the Truth Commission to testify about her past actions as a guerrilla fighter.

Outside, demonstrators were joined by a former colonel who, years ago, was discharged by the army for condemning the coup. “I’m an army man, but I’m on your side,” he told the crowd.

“I was discharged from the army in 1964 because I opposed the coup, torture, and abuse of power by the military,” 72-year-old retired Colonel Bolívar Meirelles told IPS.

Inside, the officers – elderly and retired, or young and in active service – listened to Rocha as he defined the “revolution” as a “civil-military movement”.

“I see nothing wrong with the Truth Commission, although it’s extremely vindictive and the motive behind it is to provoke unrest in the country at a time of relative calm,” retired General Jonas Correia told IPS.

Sitting between two police patrol cars, a 19-year-old girl wrote in red paint over her clothes and body the names of her family members who were murdered or disappeared during the dictatorship.

Maria de Aquino Silveira grew up listening to the stories of how one of her sisters and some of her uncles, aunts, grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts were killed in the dictatorship.

“I grew up with internet, and so I learned that there are other people, too, who suffer and have suffered, and the masks begin to fall off. Now the world is larger, and we can see further. And I am no longer the little girl who listened to stories about the family. Now I can see with my own eyes,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente and - -
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 27 2012 (IPS)

The trial for the theft of babies of political prisoners during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship is nearing its end after more than three decades of work by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have so far tracked down 105 of an estimated 500 missing children.

In some of the thousands of cases of forced disappearance in Argentina, babies were stolen and raised by military couples. Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

The sentence is expected to be handed down in late May, Alan Iud, a lawyer for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told IPS.

Since the years of the dictatorship, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have been trying to find out what happened not only to their sons and daughters, who were “disappeared” by the regime, but to their missing grandchildren.

The stolen babies were either born to political prisoners in clandestine detention centres or kidnapped along with their parents, who were later killed or “disappeared”. The children were then given to military or police families, or in some cases, to couples who adopted them in good faith.

The defendants are charged with “taking, retaining and hiding minors and changing their identities”.

Some of the missing grandchildren are just now finding out their true identities, more than 30 years after they were kidnapped.

“I lived with them for 32 and a half years,” said Francisco Madariaga, referring to the people he considered his parents for over three decades.

He grew up as Alejandro Gallo, and believed he was the biological son of former army intelligence officer Víctor Gallo, one of the defendants in the trial.

Around the age of 16, Madariaga began to reject his “father” because he was a “very violent man. I was his war toy; when he looked at me he would see the enemy,” he told IPS.

He added that at around age 20, he began living in anxiety, plagued with doubts about his real identity.

But feelings of fear and guilt kept him from asking his “parents” about who he was. It was not until he was 32 years old that, pressed by his friends, he worked up the courage to visit the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo office and take a DNA test at their National Genetic Data Bank, which confirmed his true identity.

He found out that he was born in the Campo de Mayo clandestine detention centre, where his mother Dr. Silvia Quintela, a young surgeon who was four months pregnant when she was kidnapped in January 1977, was held.

Quintela is one of the thousands of victims of forced disappearance in Argentina, who number around 30,000 according to estimates by human rights groups.

Francisco’s case was one of the few in which either of the biological parents survived. His father, Abel Madariaga, managed to flee into exile after his wife was seized.

Years later, when he returned to Argentina after the regime collapsed, he dedicated himself to the search for his son and became the only male member of the board of directors of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.

Now the young man, who has been reunited with his biological father and relatives, has high hopes for the trial. “I testified, as a plaintiff. I am anxiously waiting for the sentence. I want justice to be done, because they ruined so many lives,” he said.

Iud explained that the trial has not covered all of the cases of stolen children, but merely “a representative sample of what happened, not in just one, but in several clandestine detention centres.”

The cases presented include that of the three Ramírez children, who were two, four and five years old when their mother was kidnapped and their father was in prison.

Instead of leaving the children with other family members, their kidnappers dumped them in an orphanage, where they suffered sexual abuse, mistreatment and hunger for seven years.

Another case is that of Victoria Montenegro, who denounced the complicity between a prosecutor, Juan Romero, and the army intelligence officer who killed her parents and raised her, the late Colonel Herman Tetzlaff.

Last year Romero resigned as a prosecutor, after he was accused in court of passing information to the colonel.

The illegal appropriation of the children of political prisoners was not among the crimes covered by the two amnesty laws passed by Congress in the mid-1980s, which enabled military human rights abusers to evade prosecution.

Nor was it covered by then President Carlos Menem’s (1989-1999) 1990 pardon of members of the former military junta, several of whom had been sentenced to life in prison.

The attorneys for the Grandmothers brought legal action in 1996, taking advantage of the fact that the crime of baby theft was not specifically included in the amnesty laws and the pardon, which were not struck down until the mid-2000s. The trial finally got underway 13 months ago.

In the dock are former dictators Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone; other prominent armed forces officers; and Dr. Jorge Luis Magnasco, who attended the births.

“The crime for which they are being tried is appropriation of children, but the aim of this trial is also to show that there was a systematic plan to steal children. And to hold Videla and Bignone responsible,” as heads of the military junta, Iud said.

Over the years, the plaintiffs have compiled abundant documents and testimony as proof that there were specific orders as to how to handle pregnant political prisoners, so that their children would be raised in homes “free of hatred towards the armed forces,” the lawyer said.

There is also evidence that members of the Catholic Church and staff at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina and the State Department were aware of, and helped conceal, this crime.

Excerpt:

By Edgardo Ayala and - -
TECOLUCA, El Salvador, Mar 26 2012 (IPS)

A choked-up Mercedes Alfaro told the fourth session of the International Restorative Justice Tribunal in El Salvador how she lost seven members of her family in a 1982 massacre.

“It’s very hard to lose the ones you love the most,” the 50-year-old survivor of the massacre in Guajoyo told the panel of judges and the courtroom audience in the town of Tecoluca, in the central province of San Vicente.

In Guajoyo, a subdivision of the municipality of Tecoluca, the army slaughtered some 200 people in June 1982, including Alfaro’s parents and siblings.

Testimony from survivors and witnesses to the massacres and human rights abuses committed during the 1980-1992 civil war was heard by the court from Mar. 21 to Mar. 23.

The armed conflict between state security forces and the former guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), now the governing political party, left 75,000 people dead and 8,000 disappeared. The 124 massacres, involving the killing of nearly 8,000 people, were almost all perpetrated by the army.

The fourth session held by the court in El Salvador focused on massacres committed in and around San Vicente, which had a strong guerrilla presence during the civil war. The army carried out around 40 massacres in the province.

The Restorative Justice Tribunal was organised by the Human Rights Institute at the Central American University (IDHUCA), based on the international justice movement originated in the 1980s that does not seek prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible, but rather reparations for the victims.

According to the United Nations, “Restorative justice refers to a process for resolving crime by focusing on redressing the harm done to the victims, holding offenders accountable for their actions and often also engaging the community in the resolution of that conflict.”

“We want to create a space for victims to speak out and be heard,” José Ramón Juániz, president of Lawyers of the World, an NGO based in Valencia, Spain and a member of the bench at the Tecoluca tribunal, told IPS.

Many people who took the stand as witnesses had never described their experiences in public before.

“I didn’t have the courage to talk about everything that happened, but I just asked God to give me the strength,” said Alfaro.

Unlike the 1981 massacre in El Mozote, for example, that drew widespread attention because some 1,000 people had been killed, many of the people testifying now in Tecoluca have not even been recognised as victims, because their cases have never reached the justice system.

Apart from Juániz, the tribunal was made up of Rosario Valpuesta, a professor at the Pablo de Olivide University in Spain; Carol Proner, a human rights expert from Brazil; José María Tomás y Tío, a judge and head of the Foundation for Justice of Valencia, Spain; Suelli Aparecida Bellato, vicepresident of Brazil’s Amnesty Commission; and Ramón Cárdenas, a Salvadoran survivor of the May 1980 Sumpul massacre in Chalatenango province, where some 600 people were killed.

The army suspected these rural communities of providing logistical support for the rebels of the FMLN, which became a political party after a 1992 peace deal put an end to the war.

When the army descended on Guajoyo in June 1982, the people fled, but they were trapped on the bank of the Lempa river. Some managed to swim away, but many adults and children trying to cross the river on a raft were machine-gunned from a helicopter, survivors said.

“Their bodies were carried away by the river,” said Alfaro, who was talking about her experience for the first time. She also described how the soldiers forced her to cook for them, after they had murdered her family.

The Guajoyo massacre does not appear among the human rights violations investigated by the United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission that was established at the end of the war.

The concept of restorative justice calls for the participation not only of the victims, but of the perpetrators, who, freed from the fear of prosecution, can admit to their crimes. The goal is to bring about forgiveness by the survivors, and reconciliation.

“Let the killers come and ask us for forgiveness;” said Juan Cornelio Chicas, a 58-year-old survivor of the 1981 massacre in Junquillo in the northern province of Morazán. “I am willing to forgive them, but I want to hear them say, ‘Look, I killed your children.’ I will never forget my children,” he said with tears in his eyes.

About 70 people, including 10 children, were killed in Junquillo.

But those accused of the murders did not attend the court sessions in Tecoluca, not even the ones identified by the Truth Commission, like Captain Carlos Medina Garay, who was one of the officers commanding the military operation that ended in the Junquillo massacre.

Military personnel involved in human rights abuses have escaped justice thanks to the 1993 amnesty law.

“Unfortunately, the perpetrators are not willing to testify,” Proner told IPS.

In spite of constant calls from local and international human rights organisations for the repeal of the amnesty law, the country’s politicians and justice authorities have kept it in force.

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, who took office in 2009, has refused to even open a debate on the possibility of revoking the amnesty law, in spite of having apologised in January on behalf of the state for the victims of the El Mozote massacre.

“This is a government that apologises to the victims while forgiving and protecting the perpetrators,” Benjamín Cuéllar, the head of IDHUCA, told IPS.

The written decisions summarising the testimony and the findings of the tribunal are not binding, but are intended to have moral force for the victims. However, Proner said the reports could form the basis for local and international legal action in future.

In previous sessions of the tribunal, the decisions have called for the state to provide material, psychological and moral reparations for victims. But government agencies have consistently ignored the appeals.

“It is up to the authorities and the Salvadoran state, not the court, to determine appropriate reparations mechanisms,” said Juániz.

Several witnesses called for justice to be done. At the very least, they said, the state should pay compensation, and the army’s archives should be opened, so that the truth about what happened can be made public.

They also called for the perpetrators to apologise, and for the bust of Roberto d’Aubuisson (1944-1992) erected in a square in San Salvador to be torn down.

The rightwing D’Aubuisson was the founder of the death squads that collaborated with the armed forces in the massacres of civilians during the armed conflict.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares and - -
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 19 2012 (IPS)

“To achieve peace, it is necessary for the truth to come out, and for the victims to receive reparations. And part of this is that cases of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya people must come to trial,” says Guatemalan indigenous leader Rosalina Tuyuc.

Guatemalan indigenous leader Rosalina Tuyuc. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The prominent human rights activist has been fighting for justice and peace as head of the National Coordinating Committee of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), which groups survivors of the civil war, since 1988.

On May 10 in Tokyo she will become the first indigenous woman to receive the prestigious Niwano Peace Prize, which recognises Tuyuc’s “extraordinary and dogged work for peace,” according to the Japan-based Niwano Peace Foundation.

The committee that selects the recipients of the prize created in 1983 also stated in its press release that Tuyuc “is an inspiring example of how victims of discrimination, drawing on their faith, are empowered by working together, to defeat human rights violations and reverse the causes that have hurt them so deeply.”

Excerpts of her interview with IPS follow:

Q: What do the legal proceedings against former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983) on charges of genocide, which began on Jan. 26, mean for peace, reconciliation and justice in Guatemala? A: People have been waiting for these trials for over 20 years. This sets a historic legal precedent in the country. And it is a sign that he has something to testify and acknowledge, as head of state when the (1982) coup (that overthrew General Romeo Lucas García) took place.

What I hope for most is that, if all of the testimony provided (in the case) shows that he was politically and administratively responsible, in the name of the state, hope will be generated that in Guatemala it is possible to hold trials for the crime of genocide without having to turn to the international arena.

Q: Businesspersons, high-ranking military chiefs and prominent figures who it was once unthinkable that they would be tried are now being brought to trial. Do you think that Guatemala is on the road to overcoming impunity? A: Yes indeed, we’re heading in the direction of overcoming impunity. This moment should have occurred 15 or 18 years ago, because if minor crimes like theft come to trial, how can it be that there is no legal action for the lives of 200,000 people killed on the orders of agents of the state? This has to serve as a show of good will with respect to enforcing the law, to show the rest of the world that this is a civilised country.

Q: What major steps must the country take, along that path? A: The justice system has to demonstrate, at the national and international level, that the political will does exist here to achieve this. Then there is also the question of raising public awareness, so that people know what happened here and so that it will never happen again.

The armed forces should vindicate their image. I hope that General Otto Pérez Molina (president of Guatemala since Jan. 14), the highest authority in the country, will apologise for the abuses committed. But not only that – he should say where the 60,000 or 70,000 victims of forced disappearance are.

Providing information on their whereabouts is an act of moral and institutional reparations that the armed forces should make towards all victims.

Q: The peace accords marked a before and after in the history of the country, but they have also been criticised. In your view, what are the biggest accomplishments of the agreements? A: The approval of laws with a social focus, such as the creation of the land fund, the mixed private-public Rural Development Bank, and laws aimed at improving conditions for women and combating domestic violence and all forms of discrimination.

We now have institutions addressing indigenous issues, such as the Presidential Commission against Discrimination, the office of the Defender of Indigenous Women, and a Maya media outlet. If it hadn’t been for the peace accords, this probably would not have happened.

Q: The issue of agriculture is still an Achilles’ heel for the full development of indigenous people in Guatemala. Do you see changes on the horizon? A: The agricultural question was always the cause and origin of the armed conflict, and still gives rise to a great deal of social conflict. I think the day the state understands that indigenous people depend on Mother Earth and her resources, there will be changes.

Q: What do you feel about the president, after the first two months of his four-year term: fear or hope? A: The biggest fear is the racist attitude of the new government. The second message is that all investment in fighting hunger will be based on megaprojects, and that is a very big concern among social organisations, because once again we’re not seeing changes, just a continuation of what past governments have done.

The market aspect is always given priority, without seeing the damages that this causes to Mother Earth, the water and forests, which are the most essential things.

Q: What does it mean to receive the Niwano Peace Prize? A: It is the biggest gift that I have received for the grain of rice I have contributed to the social struggles for all of the changes that we are hoping for in our Guatemala.

I also see it as homage to those who were my inspiration, the community leaders who fought for the land and natural resources before the 1980s and whose hopes were sadly cut short along the way.

It is difficult to achieve peace in a society like ours, but making the attempt to bring harmony between human society and nature is worth it.

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet and - -
RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 16 2012 (IPS)

A group of young lawyers in Brazil’s public prosecutor’s office are seeking to break through the wall created by the amnesty law that blocks the investigation and prosecution of serious human rights violations committed during the country’s 21-year military dictatorship.

Bodies of guerrillas wrapped in canvas by soldiers in 1972 along the Araguaia River in the state of Pará, Brazil. Credit: Image obtained from the digitisation of negatives held by retired sergeant José Antônio de Souza Perez

The 1979 amnesty law has so far kept human rights crimes like torture, forced disappearance and murder, committed by members of the security forces or leftwing guerrillas, out of the courts.

“Our argument is that (forced disappearances) are not crimes of the past, but ongoing crimes,” Ronaldo Cramer, the representative of the Rio de Janeiro state chapter of Brazil’s bar association (OAB-RJ), told IPS.

In these cases, the crime of kidnapping is ongoing until the victim appears, dead or alive. And if those responsible for the forced disappearance refuse to provide information on the whereabouts of the body, they continue to practice the crime of hiding the corpse, prosecutor Ivan Cláudio Marx of the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul explained to the press.

Cramer said that by taking this approach, “we are trying to break through the amnesty law, which refers to crimes committed until Aug. 15, 1979.”

“This is not about revising the law or giving it a different interpretation,” added the OAB-RJ lawyer, one of the driving forces behind the Campaign for Memory and Truth, which helped come up with the strategy based on the “ongoing crime” argument, which has also been used in other Latin American countries like Chile and Guatemala.

The group moved from theory to practice on Wednesday Mar. 14, when they brought charges against army reserve colonel Sebastião Curió in a court in Marabá, in the northern state of Pará, for the “aggravated kidnapping” of five people in that area in 1974.

The disappeared victims, who belonged to the Araguaia guerrillas – the armed wing of the Communist Party of Brazil – were captured during military operations led by Curió.

According to the group of seven prosecutors who filed the legal action, the whereabouts of the victims are still unknown, although there is testimony from witnesses who say they were tortured and were seen for the last time in military custody.

“The decision by federal prosecutors to bring charges against a retired military officer for grave abuses committed in the 1970s is a landmark step for accountability in Brazil,” the New York-based watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement.

Under the military regime, more than 475 people were killed or “disappeared” for political reasons, according to official reports. In addition, some 50,000 were imprisoned and at least 20,000 were tortured.

“This is tremendous news for the families who lost loved ones in the brutal repression that followed the 1964 military coup. A quarter century after Brazil’s transition to democracy, they are still awaiting justice,” HRW Americas director José Miguel Vivanco said in the communiqué.

Now it is up to a federal judge to determine whether or not the case will go to court. If it does, it will be the first time that a member of the military involved in the dictatorship will be in the dock for human rights violations. Up to now, that possibility has been blocked by the 1979 amnesty.

The amnesty law was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2010. But according to the prosecutors who filed the charges, the accusation does not run counter to that legal verdict either, because “the five kidnappings are ongoing,” said Sérgio Suyama, a prosecutor from the southern state of São Paulo.

The group of prosecutors aimed to give a response to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in November 2010 issued a ruling condemning Brazil for upholding an amnesty law that is “incompatible” with the international human rights treaties signed by this country.

The binding ruling stated that the amnesty cannot continue to prevent the investigation and prosecution of crimes against humanity committed by state agents during the military regime.

In 2011, Congress approved the creation of a Truth Commission, which will begin this year to investigate the human rights violations committed since 1964. However, it will not have the legal authority to establish criminal responsibility, and its conclusions will not give rise to court cases.

In the face of “setbacks” and hurdles like the Truth Commission and the amnesty law, “This action by the Public Ministry (public prosecutor’s office) is essential, not only because it involves legal action, but more importantly because these people like Curió, who remain in the shadows, will be showing their faces and telling what happened,” Cecilia Coimbra, the president of the group Tortura Nunca Mais (Torture Never Again), told IPS.

The human rights activist, a former member of the Communist Party who was imprisoned and tortured by the army in 1970, said the important thing is for these stories from the past, as well as public documents that “are still in the hands of repressors like Curió, to come to light, and not just to a certain extent, as the Truth Commission intends.”

“We hope this legal action brought by the prosecutor’s office will be the first of many,” she said.

There are 55 other cases that fit the category of ongoing crimes, in which the group of prosecutors could file charges.

Cramer said the Brazilian bar association “is well-disposed towards” the initiative. Many were in favour of amending the amnesty law, but the public prosecutor’s office “did not move enough” to do that, he said.

“We hope the Public Ministry will be committed to this, and that legal action like this will stop being isolated events and will become a corporative stance;” said Cramer. Only then, he added, will the courts be able to confirm that ongoing crimes “are excluded from the amnesty law.”

In his view, that would be a way to begin filling the gap left by a Truth Commission that is “a necessary but not sufficient tiny first step.”

“Until the truth comes out, this story will always be a ghost, an open wound,” the prosecutor said.

One of the Supreme Court magistrates, Gilmar Mendes, ridiculed the concept that certain crimes committed by the dictatorship are “ongoing” and thus do not fall under the amnesty.

“We’re going to wait until this question reaches the Supreme Court,” he told the press. In the meantime, “let’s just let people discuss this and entertain themselves with the debate.”

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares and - -
GUATEMALA CITY, Mar 13 2012 (IPS)

“In 1982 they killed my mama and 15 other people, and they burned down our house. Now we are trying to get support, because we have not received any aid,” says Jacinto Escobar, an Ixil Indian who is seeking reparations for the damages sustained during Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war.

Most of the victims of Guatemala's civil war were indigenous people. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The war between the leftwing guerrillas and government forces left 250,000 people – mainly rural Maya Indians – dead or missing. According to the U.N.-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission, the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings.

The Dec. 29, 1996 peace agreement between the government and the National Revolutionary Unity of Guatemala (URNG) rebel coalition was the culmination of the peace process in which retired General Otto Pérez Molina – president of Guatemala since January – took part as a representative of the army.

The peace deal established that survivors of the 36-year armed conflict would receive reparations, and included special pacts on human rights and the identity and rights of indigenous people.

A national reparations programme was created by the government in 2003 to pay economic damages, provide material compensation, such as land and housing, and offer psychological support and rehabilitation.

But corruption, nepotism, and the use of the reparations programme for political ends has made its work an uphill task, and the majority of survivors are still waiting for compensation, while only some have received limited reparations, say human rights activists and reports.

“The programme distributed 576 housing units here in 2011, but they were only half-built,” another survivor, Manuel Tay, told IPS from the northwestern province of Chimaltenango. “We had to buy cement and steel, pay a builder, and even haul in construction materials to finish the houses.”

Tay, who lost five of his siblings during the conflict, said the houses are made of such “simple materials that some of the houses weren’t even three months old and the floor was already cracked.”

To receive reparations, Tay had to go through endless red tape in government and non-governmental organisations and set up the Q’anil (“seed” in the Kaqchikel Maya language) Association.

So far, the activist has only received a 36-square-metre house and 3,600 dollars in compensation for himself and his two surviving siblings.

But the survivors of the war would not be so frustrated if it were not for the reports of mismanagement of funds by former officials who have worked in the reparations programme.

A lack of transparency, discretionality and discrimination are some of the difficulties found in the national reparations programme by a social audit carried out in 2010-2011 by 19 NGOs, including associations of survivors of the conflict.

“There are signs of corruption in the implementation of the reparations measures, and violations of the rights of victims, and there is no clear, systematic, appropriate and permanent policy on attention to collective cases,” the report says.

In 2011, 32 indigenous communities brought action against the Guatemalan state before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) for failing to effectively provide reparations to survivors and family members of victims of the armed conflict.

The problems also involve the psychological and social support and rehabilitation measures for the survivors.

Sergio Castro with the non-governmental Centre for Forensic Analysis and Applied Science (CAFCA), an organisation that provides support to people affected by the war, told IPS that since its creation, the reparations programme has focused on material and economic compensation, which has reached “perhaps 20 percent of all victims.”

“But there has been no restitution of land, investment in production, or psychosocial reparations for the women who suffered violence,” which also form part of the measures outlined by the government programme, he added.

Castro said psychosocial support for victims “is essential for restoring the social fabric and bringing about peaceful coexistence,” especially taking into account that “both victims and victimisers live in the communities.”

Other Latin American countries, such as Chile and Argentina, have also implemented mechanisms to provide economic and social reparations to the victims of past military dictatorships. Another precedent was the German programme of compensation for survivors of the Nazi holocaust.

Feliciana Macario, an activist with the National Coordinating Committee of Guatemalan Widows (CONAVIGUA), told IPS that in the case of Guatemala, “there has been a lack of will” to support victims of the war.

But the fact that Pérez Molina, a signatory of the peace agreement and a former army combatant during the conflict, is now president does not offer hope of support to survivors of the war.

“If the president was a signatory of the peace accord, he should enforce it,” said Macario. “But as yet I can’t say much, until we see how he will deal with the budget for the reparations programme.”

The programme’s budget for 2012 is 10.5 million dollars. But social organisations have asked Congress to assign it nearly 40 million dollars.

The activist said the aid is extremely important for survivors of the armed conflict, who lost family members, their homes and their crops. She added that psychological and social support is especially important.

“It would do so much to help people get over the violence that was suffered by so many. Thousands of women were raped by the Guatemalan army but have never received any help,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente and - -
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 12 2012 (IPS)

While the trials against members of the military and police for human rights abuses committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship move ahead, the regime’s economic crimes have also begun to come to light.

More than 600 businesspersons lost their property to the dictatorship.

“We weren’t involved in politics and had nothing to do with the government. But they took everything we had, our seven companies and the company plane. And it’s a miracle they didn’t kill us,” Alejandro Iaccarino, who was a prosperous dairy industry businessman in the 1970s, told IPS.

He is suing for millions of dollars in reparations, and the trial should begin this year, as soon as the ongoing trial against two police officials accused of kidnapping him and his two brothers, “with the sole aim of taking over everything we owned,” comes to an end, he said.

The expected conviction of the two imprisoned police officials on charges of kidnapping and associated crimes is the necessary requisite for him to sue for reparations for economic and moral damages.

The case of the Iaccarino family involves one of the highest-profile economic crimes committed by the dictatorship. The family lawyer, Florencia Arietto, told IPS that “this will be the first time that the state will be sued for reparations for the dispossession of property.”

The government’s secretariat of human rights is aware that this was not an isolated case. It set up a special unit to investigate economically-motivated crimes against humanity committed by the regime.

The unit has drawn up a list of over 600 cases of companies that were liquidated, hollowed out, taken over or appropriated, for the sake of outright theft or because they were not in line with the dictatorship’s economic liberalisation policies.

These cases have remained invisible up to now, overshadowed by the horror of the forced disappearance and murder of some 30,000 people by the dictatorship, according to estimates by NGOs.

The firms that were stolen included poultry companies, textile factories, wineries, printing presses, steelworks, paper factories and banks.

Some business owners were also accomplices in the plunder, acting against their competitors. They also turned in workers, trade unionists or labour lawyers who worked for them.

In January, a prosecutor in the northern province of Jujuy asked the courts to summon Pedro Blaquier, the owner of Ingenio Ledesma, a sugar refinery company in the town of Libertador General San Martin.

The prosecutor’s request forms part of the investigation of a raid carried out in 1976, when some 400 people were rounded up, 55 of whom are still missing. Vans sporting the company logo were used in the operation.

But in another case, the Paskvan family, which owned poultry companies in the eastern province of Buenos Aires and the central province of Santa Fe, lost their businesses. The case was taken up by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2011.

Another case that is going to court is that of Federico Gutheim and his son Miguel, the owners of the Sadeco textile company, who were kidnapped by the regime and forced to renegotiate an export deal with a Hong Kong firm.

Then there is the case of the Papel Prensa company that supplied newspapers with paper. The firm’s owner, David Graiver, died in an airplane accident in 1976, and his family was kidnapped and forced under torture to sign over shares in the company.

But the Iaccarino case has a unique characteristic, Arietto, their lawyer, said: the amount of documentary evidence saved by the family, showing in detail how they lost their property.

Iaccarino’s two brothers and their father were kidnapped in November 1976 in the northern province of Santiago del Estero, where the family owned cattle and 25,000 hectares of land. At almost the same time, Alejandro Iaccarino and his mother were seized in Buenos Aires.

“Seven people with guns came into the garage of the building where we lived and took us away,” the businessman told IPS. Although the parents were released after a few days, the three brothers were held for 22 months in 14 different detention centres.

At first they were informed that they were “at the disposal” of the executive branch, a category that gave certain legal status to prisoners held by the regime. But in order to be stripped of their assets, they were moved to a secret location, Arietto explained.

“It’s an incredible case, doubly serious, because in January 1977, with the vile objective of stealing their property, they were transferred to a clandestine detention centre, the Brigada de Lanús in Buenos Aires province,” she added.

Taking part in the operation were a judge, his secretary, and a notary public, who visited the detention centre to sign a power of attorney making it possible for the father to hand over his property in exchange for the release of his sons.

The Iaccarinos asked the notary public to make note of the address of the Brigada de Lanús. Because that was done, the fact that they signed the power of attorney in the presence of a notary public while being deprived of their freedom was officially documented.

“The physical, moral and economic damages that were inflicted on us are inestimable,” Iaccarino said.

“We had seven companies that were functioning perfectly; you can see that from the balance sheets. We had managed to introduce technology and strengthen the entire dairy industry in six northwestern provinces,” he said.

The persecution had begun, more subtly, before the kidnappings. The state-run Banco Provincia, which was taken over by the dictatorship, began to cut off the family’s credit lines, to force them to sell off their land at ridiculously low prices.

“The bank manager, who knew us, told us we were on a blacklist. Later we found out that there were seven people inside our companies who were doing intelligence work for the dictatorship,” he said.

They also discovered that one of the people who tried to buy land from them was a nephew of the dictatorship’s labour minister.

But the real nightmare began with the kidnappings. “I was on the brink of death three times. They put a hood on me and strapped me naked, by the wrists and ankles, to a bed frame, and tortured me with electric shocks,” he said.

Once the property had been signed over, the front men took out millions of dollars in loans from banks that had friendly ties with the dictatorship and did not pay them off. The companies went under, the banks did too, and the Central Bank auctioned off the assets, which were purchased in good faith by other businesspersons.

Only Alejandro and one of his brothers, Carlos, are still alive. The parents are dead and the oldest brother, Rodolfo, died in 2009, one month after receiving anonymous death threats.

The family lawyer said that as soon as Bruno Trevisán and Jorge Ferranti, the two police officials who kidnapped and tortured the three brothers in the Brigada de Lanús, are convicted, the lawsuit for damages will come to trial.

“The legal experts estimate that the value of the property stolen from the Iaccarinos was equivalent to around 40 million dollars today, and we are going to sue for that,” Arietto said.

The aim of her clients, she said, is to reveal in the trial “the complex circuit created to advance a predatory economic policy.”

Excerpt:

Mental health professionals in Argentina have accumulated such a wealth of experience in treating victims of state terrorism that they are now sharing it with colleagues across the country’s borders.

Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, which like Argentina were under the yoke of military dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s, now have access to the experience of mental health professionals here by means of a growing body of written material on how to provide assistance for survivors of torture and relatives of victims of state repression.

Psychologist Fabiana Rousseaux is director of the “Dr Fernando Ulloa” Centre for the Assistance of Victims of Human Rights Violations, which has been operating since 2010 within the sphere of the government’s Human Rights Secretariat.

“The Centre offers psychological assistance and medical advice to victims who survived state terrorism, family members and other people affected by the breakdown of the family or other effects of that period of history,” she told IPS.

Rousseaux was referring to the tragic consequences of the 1976-1983 dictatorship, which “disappeared” around 11,000 people, according to the official list of cases recorded so far by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, although human rights groups and independent experts put the number at 30,000.

The political prisoners held in the secret concentration camps and jails set up by the de facto regime in the most populous areas of the country suffered a broad range of abuses including torture and rape, and many were killed outright or dumped, drugged but alive, from planes into the sea on the so-called “death flights”.

In addition, hundreds of babies born to political prisoners in captivity were stolen and raised by military families under false identities.

Rousseaux explained that the survivors of the repression are now testifying as witnesses in the trials against human rights violators “and are reliving extremely traumatic situations, through their testimony.

“It’s shocking to see how much these past events affect the day-to-day lives of the people who suffered them. And to talk about them is to relive them,” she added.

Some 4,500 witnesses are testifying in the trials that got underway again after the amnesty laws were struck down in 2005.

With respect to the family members of victims, she said “a recurring issue is the idea that they can’t complete their mourning for a victim of forced disappearance because the remains have not been found.”

But she said experience has shown that “this is not always the case.”

“Each person does what they can to deal with and survive what happened to them. And you can work to find other ways that make it possible for people to complete their mourning process even if there is no body,” she said. “Of course, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” she added.

Besides providing assistance at the Ulloa Centre, the mental health professionals there train their colleagues from public hospitals in the provinces.

“We have 45 professionals in Buenos Aires and a network around the country, which is constantly incorporating new specialists,” she said.

The experts at the Ulloa Centre also help train the doctors who sit on the boards that evaluate the damages suffered by victims of state terrorism, in order to assess and authorise the compensation to which they are entitled under a law passed in the late 1990s.

Rousseaux said the health professionals should “assume” that anyone who was detained under the dictatorship suffered physical and psychological damages, without the need of subjecting them to an interrogation or of requiring them to provide “proof”.

The Centre supports the victims who serve as witnesses in court trials, and has provided advice to members of the judicial system since the trials got underway again, after they were halted by the two amnesty laws passed in the late 1980s and the pardons for the members of the military junta issued by former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

Guidelines for the work carried out with judges, prosecutors and plaintiffs are outlined in a “protocol on the treatment of victims-witnesses in judicial proceedings” published in September 2011.

The purpose of this protocol is to avoid the revictimisation or retraumatisation of the victims-witnesses during the process of administration of justice, the document states.

The protocol, which is also being used in neighbouring countries, points out that the victim’s testimony must form part of the state’s task of providing reparations, and clarifies that the individual “is not an object of proof” but “a subject of rights.”

The booklet offers guidelines on minimising the harm caused to victims of human rights abuses who are now serving as witnesses, and who waited for decades for the state to summon them to testify about their appalling experiences.

The professionals at the Ulloa Centre recommend that members of the judicial system receive training in the protection and promotion of human rights or ask for support from other government institutions.

They also offer a broad range of practical advice. For example, as far as possible, the victim-witness should meet and be dealt with at all times by the same member of the judicial staff. And notification by mail should be avoided; the witness should be contacted directly by telephone, to reduce risks.

The protocol also recommends that the reason the witness is being cited should be clearly explained, and that members of the security forces should not be involved in transporting them. In addition, the witnesses should be provided with transportation and travelling expenses, should not be made to wait, and should never be exposed to contact with the accused.

Besides the protocol, the Ulloa Centre has produced other booklets to help train mental health professionals, such as one on “current consequences of state terrorism on mental health”.

This document states that many victims or victims’ relatives have not sought out assistance for physical or psychological problems because even years later, they still freeze up in the face of the terror they continue to suffer as a result of the crushing experiences they have gone through.

“Supporting witnesses in trials against state terrorism” is another of the booklets produced by the Ulloa Centre, which reports certain cases and experiences that can be useful for mental health professionals in other countries where victims of dictatorships are testifying in court.

Rousseaux said that more recently, the Ulloa Centre has been accepting cases of people who have suffered abuses at the hands of the security forces, or who have been the victims of people trafficking – human rights violations committed since democracy was restored in 1983.

But the experience accumulated in dealing with victims of state terrorism is the Centre’s greatest contribution to society, she said, because it started out with no manuals, “working on the basis of improvisation more than experience,” when it began to assist victims of a state that terrorised its citizens rather than protecting them.

After a hearing that lasted more than 11 hours, a Guatemalan court ordered the trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), who could face up to 30 years in prison if he is convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (left) at the hearing in court, next to his lawyer. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

“On Mar. 25, 1982 they killed my three sisters, my mom, and five brothers who were all kids. First they were questioned by (military officers), who tried to get them to give up the guerrilla members (they were looking for); and when they couldn’t give them what they wanted, they were shot on the spot,” Elena Chávez, a survivor of a 1982 army raid and mass killing in western Guatemala, told IPS.

This Ixil woman has been fighting relentlessly ever since to bring the perpetrators of this massacre committed during Guatemala’s long civil war (1960-1996) to justice.

But she had to wait until this year for the first positive sign, which finally came on Thursday when Judge Patricia Flores issued the order initiating criminal proceedings against Ríos Mott.

For the time being, however, he will be eluding jail, as the judge has allowed the retired general to stand bail. According to the judge’s order, the defendant poses “no obstruction of justice or flight risk, and therefore a 500,000-quetzal bail (about 65,000 dollars) is set and the (defendant) is placed under house arrest with limited movements.”

The decision has upset the victims’ families, who demand that Ríos Montt be jailed immediately.

“We want him in prison, we want to see justice done and the law enforced, because he’s responsible for the human rights abuses committed against my relatives in the massacre at Nebaj, Quiché,” in northwestern Guatemala, Chávez said.

At the hearing, Prosecutor Manuel Vásquez accused Ríos Montt of carrying out the “Victoria 83” and “Firmeza 82” operations, under which the armed forces massacred thousands of indigenous people in Guatemala, in actions that amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.

The prosecution described how during the dictatorship headed by the now 85-year-old Ríos Montt, at least 1,771 people were killed, 1,485 girls were raped, and 29,000 people were forcibly displaced from their homes.

For these crimes, the Public Prosecutor’s Office asked the judge to initiate criminal proceedings against the retired general.

When the time came for the defendant to speak, Ríos Montt laconically responded that he had “heard and understood the prosecution’s charges, but (preferred) to remain silent.”

While he has repeatedly denied the charges of genocide brought against him, the memories of the tragedy remain vivid in the victims’ minds.

“I was only 11. How could I be the enemy? There was no need to kill women and children to combat the enemy,” Antonio Caba, another Ixil survivor of the Quiché massacre, told IPS.

Caba lost a grandmother and two brothers in 1982 when government security forces razed his village in Quiché, the region most targeted by the army during the war waged against the left-wing guerrillas.

“What we’re asking for is justice, so that this won’t happen ever again, because if these crimes are left unpunished they could be repeated,” said Caba, who hopes to see Ríos Montt in jail soon.

Two hundred thousand people were either killed or disappeared during Guatemala’s 36-year armed conflict.

Ninety-three percent of these crimes were perpetrated by members of the armed forces, according to the report issued in 1999 by the independent Historical Clarification Commission set up to investigate abuses committed during the war.

The U.N.-backed truth commission also found that Ríos Montt’s dictatorship marked the most brutal period of human rights violations, which targeted primarily the indigenous population.

The truth commission was set up as a result of the Peace Accords signed in 1996 between the armed forces and the then-insurgent group Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, with the mandate of clarifying “with all objectivity, equity and impartiality the human rights violations and acts of violence that have caused the Guatemalan population to suffer” during the armed conflict that lasted almost 40 years.

The case against Ríos Montt has generated national and international expectations, as he is the first high-ranking military officer to be brought to trial.

Throughout the hearing, he was accompanied by his daughter, Zury Ríos.

“I have faith in justice and the law and I’m here to stand by General Ríos Montt as his daughter and his friend. The prosecution will now have to prove all the charges,” she told IPS.

Outside the courthouse, a large crowd of people carrying placards and photographs of the disappeared followed the hearing closely.

The hearing ended with a smile on Ríos Montt’s face and a bittersweet feeling among the survivors and relatives of the victims.

Another trial opened Tuesday with Spain’s best-known judge, Baltasar Garzón, in the dock for attempting to investigate crimes against humanity committed during the 36-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco.

This is the second and most important of the trio of lawsuits against him.

Garzón is again before the Supreme Court in Madrid only five days after his last appearance. The verdict is still pending in the earlier trial, for alleged illegal telephone tapping of conversations between detainees and defence lawyers in the “Gürtel” affair, one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of Spain’s democracy.

The new case has wide implications because Garzón’s action in authorising the investigations was founded on the application of international law to the crimes of the 1936-1939 Civil War and the 1939-1975 Franco dictatorship.

Garzón in fact pioneered the principle of international jurisdiction in cases of crimes against humanity when he issued an international warrant for the arrest in London in 1998 of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006).

Francisca “Paquita” Sauquillo, a distinguished anti-Franco activist for rights and freedoms since the 1960s, told IPS Monday that “Garzón must be absolved because he has not committed any crime and because he is a leading example of the correct application of the laws in Spain.”

Both the Gürtel affair and the present lawsuit, known as the “Historic Memory” case, are extraordinary in that the Supreme Court is prosecuting Garzón against the wishes of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has called for dismissal of the charges in both cases for lack of evidence of any crime.

But the Supreme Court, which is empowered to prosecute judges in active service, chose to pursue these suits that were brought by private persons through prevarication, that is, the rendering of a knowingly unjust ruling.

In the present Historic Memory case, the plaintiffs are two Francoist organisations which are requesting that Garzón be barred from the judge’s bench for 20 years.

The Gürtel case (so called after the German word for “belt”, in Spanish “correa”, the surname of the chief accused) was adjourned pending verdict on Jan. 19. The plaintiffs in the case are lawyers for Francisco Correa, the ringleader of the scam, and others accused of bribing senior politicians in the ruling conservative People’s Party,

Paradoxically, those accused of bribery and corruption have not yet been brought to trial.

Joan Garcés, a renowned jurist and a close personal aide to former Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), told IPS that the trial of Garzón for alleged abuse of power over the investigation of crimes of the Franco era is “wrong”.

He said “the testimony of internationally recognised jurists should be admitted (in the trial) because Garzón has been one of the strongest promoters of international law,” but this testimony has already been refused by the court.

The charge of prevarication (criminal malfeasance) is leveled against Garzón because he opened an investigation into his court’s competence to rule on the forced disappearance of 114,266 people between July 1936, when a military coup against the legitimate government started the Spanish Civil War, and December 1951.

Garzón is accused of not applying the 1977 Amnesty Law, which it was ostensibly the duty of his office to comply with.

He is further charged with having declared himself competent to investigate the disappearances of persons during the Civil War and the Franco era. Tens of thousands of the slain lie buried in shallow graves and ditches in Spain, without their families ever being able to recover their bodies.

Juan Ignacio Cortés, spokesman for the Spanish chapter of Amnesty International, told IPS it is “scandalous for a judge to be put on trial for defending justice, truth and reparations for the victims, and their relatives, of a massive violation of human rights.”

Earlier, Amnesty issued a communiqué saying it was of no importance whether or not Garzón had infringed national legislation, because it is the 1977 Amnesty Law that is at fault for preventing prosecutions for crimes defined by international law.

Amnesty also complained that maintaining the 1977 law “incurs non- fulfilment of obligations contracted by Spain by virtue of international law”.

Therefore, in Amnesty’s view, investigating human rights violations can never be regarded as a crime, even if doing so entails setting aside an amnesty law or other norms stipulating the prescription of such crimes.

At the root of the legal actions against Garzón is his decision five years ago to authorise the exhumation of 19 mass graves, one of which was presumed to contain the remains of poet Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), and to charge 35 high-ranking officials in the Franco regime with responsibility for the atrocities.

The Supreme Court criminal chamber ruled in November 2008 that Garzón did not have jurisdiction over the matter. In May 2009 the Supreme Court accepted a suit against Garzón by a Francoist group, and a year later decided to try the case.

Consequently, Garzón was suspended from his position as a member of the National Court, Spain’s high court where major cases are heard.

Enrique Borcel, head of the Hispanic-Argentine Observatory in Madrid (OHA), a cultural and human rights NGO, told IPS that the trial of Garzón seeks to cover up the events of history, so that the whole truth about the crimes committed by dictatorships – in Spain or elsewhere – never comes to light, “because the actions and example of this judge attract attention from all over the world.”

Borcel was kidnapped and tortured in 1967 by agents of the Argentine military dictatorship of that time, and bargained for his freedom by selling his property and offices so as to pay “a ransom”, after which he emigrated to Spain where he has lived ever since.

The human rights activist emphasised the worldwide scope of the role played by Garzón in the fulfilment of United Nations treaties and international laws on human rights.

For example, he said, it was thanks to Garzón that investigations were opened in Spain into what happened to the thousands of firing squad execution victims who were buried in unmarked graves during the Franco era, and that in Argentina 43 members of the armed forces and one civilian were prosecuted for alleged repressive actions during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, after Garzón issued international arrest warrants.

Meanwhile, Cortés stressed that the right course of action is the opposite of what the Supreme Court is doing: it ought to support and promote the quest for justice, and support those who are victimised for defending human rights. This, he said, is an obligation under international law “which the Spanish state must uphold”.

Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists and the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (a Spanish NGO working to find and identify those disappeared by the Franco regime) made a joint statement Monday in support of Garzón, reviving the phrase “Garzón is innocent, whatever the Supreme Court says!” coined by anti-corruption prosecutor Carlos Jiménez Villarejo in 2010.

Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, said, “What bitter irony that Garzón is being prosecuted for trying to apply at home the same principles he so successfully promoted internationally.

“Thirty-six years after Franco’s death, Spain is finally prosecuting someone in connection with the crimes of his dictatorship – the judge who sought to investigate those crimes,” he complained.

After this second trial, Garzón faces yet a third lawsuit before the Supreme Court, in which he will be accused of illegally receiving funds from the Santander Bank as payment for delivering some seminars at a university in the United States, which later allegedly influenced him to take a judicial decision in favour of Santander Bank president, Emilio Botín.

Strong as support for Garzón may be within Spain and beyond its borders, the judge’s enemies appear to have achieved their purpose, as it seems highly unlikely the 56-year-old Garzón will be able to return to his High Court position, from which he opened so many doors for international human rights law.

Two decades after the signing of the Peace Accords, together with the social commitments they contained, El Salvador’s levels of poverty and violence are so high that academic and social leaders are proposing new accords to overcome the crisis.

The signing of the Peace Accords, Jan. 16 1992. Credit: Courtesy of UNDP

In spite of their diametrically opposed ideologies, the FMLN – now a political party and governing the country with President Mauricio Funes – and the ultra rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) reached a consensus facilitated by the United Nations, and in Mexico on Jan. 16, 1992 they signed the agreement to end the war and attempt to salvage the ruined economy.

The Peace Accords laid the groundwork for a democratic transition in a country that had previously endured military rule, either directly or as the power behind the scenes, in the interests of the wealthy and powerful elite. Broad swathes of the population were persecuted and killed simply for wanting to change this unjust situation.

“If we were able to overcome the brutality of war through dialogue, we can also defeat poverty, inequality and violence through dialogue and concerted decision making,” wrote analyst José María Tojeira in an editorial in La Prensa Gráfica, a local newspaper.

The 20th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords coincides with an acute economic crisis and an apparently unstoppable wave of murders of civilians. El Salvador is ranked among the most violent countries in the world, with 70 homicides per 100,000 people, according to official statistics from the Institute of Legal Medicine.

Of El Salvador’s six million people, 36.5 percent live below the poverty line, with 11.2 percent living in extreme poverty, according to 2011 figures from the economy ministry.

“What we need is to further develop the democracy that we initiated 20 years ago… the challenges are enormous, but so are the opportunities,” Nidia Díaz, a lawmaker in the Central American Parliament and a member of the FMLN team that signed the historic pact in Chapultepec Castle, Mexico City, told IPS.

Retired general Ernesto Vargas, who signed the accords on behalf of the government commission, said that new negotiations involving all relevant actors are not only viable but necessary, given the huge challenge of overcoming the country’s acute problems.

“There must be a countrywide agreement with an institutional focus… free from ideologies, motivated only by the desire for a better nation,” just as occurred two decades ago, Vargas told IPS.

As a result of the 1992 Chapultepec Accords, the Human Rights Ombudsperson’s Office was created, as well as the National Civilian Police (PNC) and the National Public Security Academy to train police, including demobilised guerrillas and soldiers, with a civilian vision. Some of the insurgents were given land to farm.

Mechanisms were also adopted to make the justice system, which for years had suffered from corruption and political manipulation, more effective and transparent.

However, two decades after the accords the justice system continues to be afflicted by the same evils, according to local analysts and international reports like that of the U.S. Department of State, which makes an annual survey of problems related to this issue in El Salvador.

“As long as the (composition of the) Supreme Court remains in the hands of the Asamblea Legislativa (Congress) and is subject to the agreements between party leaderships, it will serve those interests,” Ramón Villalta, the head of Social Initiative for Democracy, a civic education NGO, told IPS.

After arduous negotiations, and very grudgingly, the military commanders accepted a reduction in the number of their troops, and the cashiering of individuals and units responsible for human rights crimes, including massacres such as the one in El Mozote, perpetrated in December 1981 by the Atlacatl Battalion, in which about 1,000 people killed.

On Monday, President Funes formally sought forgiveness from the people of El Salvador for the El Mozote massacre, acknowledging the army’s culpability, in the context of official activities to mark the 20 years of peace.

In exchange for the downsizing of the armed forces, the FMLN agreed to lay down its arms and participate in the country’s political life as a legal party, which led to the electoral victory in March 2009 that put President Funes, a moderate, in office.

International pressure was a key factor for ending the civil war, and especially for persuading the military to make concessions. The international outcry increased after the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, by an elite armed forces unit, during a fierce guerrilla offensive that paralysed the country for three weeks.

Analysts are now saying that in spite of the lessons learned from the peace accords two decades ago, reaching consensus is still a complex process in a country like El Salvador, where people still hold rigidly to opposing ideological positions.

“Negotiating new accords is not viable at the moment; the necessary correlation of forces is absent,” analyst Dagoberto Gutiérrez, a former guerrilla commander who also participated in the negotiations 20 years ago, told IPS.

“Economic and political power will only negotiate when it is necessary and inevitable, and right now that is not the case,” he said.

The Peace Accords put an end to the war, which was the most urgent need, but they did not succeed in bringing about deep-rooted economic changes which could have ushered in a new paradigm for the country.

“To really change the economic issues, we need another 20 years of war,” said Gutiérrez.

Political scientist Salvador Samayoa, another signatory of the 1992 agreement, castigated those who criticise the accords for “only” concluding the war and not solving crushing economic and social issues, a fairly widespread criticism since 1992.

“As if (stopping the war) were a very easy thing to achieve, or somehow not very important… Ask a mother, if she could go back in time and prevent the death of her son, if that would have been less important,” Samayoa wrote in the newspaper El Diario de Hoy.

It was the first time that a Salvadoran judge was holding a hearing to decide whether the case of Roque Dalton, a poet murdered 36 years ago, should go to trial. But the hopes of his family were dashed.

Magistrate’s court number 9 in San Salvador ruled Monday Jan. 9 not to proceed in the case against former guerrilla leaders Jorge Meléndez and Joaquín Villalobos, whom Dalton’s family allege were responsible for the May 1975 murder. Judge Romeo Giammattei finally declared the case closed.

The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) said the 15-year statute of limitations for the prosecution of common crimes had lapsed.

But the poet’s two sons, Jorge and Juan José Dalton, argue their father’s killing should be treated as a crime against humanity, which has no statute of limitations, in contrast with ordinary murders.

“We have been demanding justice for 36 years, and today’s (Monday’s) resolution is a scandalous miscarriage of justice,” journalist Juan José Dalton told IPS after the hearing.

“For the first time, we sat down with a judge at a hearing of my father’s case. This was a historic occasion, but it only lasted three hours and then the case was closed,” he said.

The FGR argued that the poet’s murder was an ordinary crime, and said that since El Salvador has not signed the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) which has jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, the Dalton case cannot be tried in El Salvador as such.

Instead of carrying out an investigation and bringing charges, the FGR asked the judge to dismiss the case once and for all.

“This is a demonstration of the extent of impunity, showing that the Salvadoran justice system is corrupt and flawed, and that it is on the side of the criminals rather than on the side of the victims,” complained Jorge Dalton, a film maker.

The family of the most distinguished poet in El Salvador’s history say that Villalobos and Meléndez, who in May 1975 belonged to the leadership of the leftwing People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), ordered Roque Dalton’s execution.

The poet was also a member of the ERP, which later joined four other leftwing groups to found the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which waged guerrilla warfare against government forces from 1980 to 1992, and became a legal political party after the signing of the peace deal that put an end to the civil war.

Apparently, Dalton was accused by his ERP comrades of insubordination and spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He was found guilty in a “revolutionary trial” in which Villalobos and Meléndez allegedly participated and he was killed in circumstances that remain obscure.

Villalobos is now an anti-drugs adviser to the government of conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón, and Meléndez is head of the Secretariat for Vulnerability Affairs in the Salvadoran government of President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN, who took office in July 2009.

Only Meléndez showed up for the hearing; Villalobos was represented by his lawyer, Rigoberto Ortiz.

“So many lies and falsehoods have been told… This could be part of some political plan,” Meléndez told the press, as he entered the court room.

Born in 1935, Dalton was part of a distinguished generation of Latin American writers and poets that included Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay, Juan Gelman and Julio Cortázar of Argentina, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia.

His most important works include “La ventana en el rostro” (The Window in My Face, 1961), “Taberna y otros lugares” (Tavern and Other Places) for which he won the 1969 Casa de las Américas Prize, “Miguel Mármol” (1972), “Pobrecito poeta que era yo…” (Poor Little Poet That I Was, 1975), “Poemas clandestinos” (Clandestine Poems, 1975) and “Historias prohibidas del pulgarcito” (Forbidden Stories of Tom Thumb, 1975).

Dalton’s remains were never found. However, in their lawsuit his sons mentioned two possible places: a house in the Santa Anita neighbourhood to the east of San Salvador, and a volcanic rock crater called El Playón, in the southeastern province of La Libertad, where rightwing death squads used to dump the bodies of leftists they killed during the civil war.

In May 2010, the Dalton family asked the FGR to investigate the case, but it did not do so. They also called on President Funes to dismiss Meléndez, who was then the director of Civil Protection.

Funes did not fire Meléndez, however, but promoted him to Secretary for Vulnerability Affairs.

In August 2011, the Dalton family once again asked the FGR whether or they would investigate the case. But they received no reply.

Finally in November last year they took the case to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

According to observers, the closure of the case by the Salvadoran justice system could be an element towards the case being accepted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica.

“In this country, the laws are not on the side of truth, but of impunity,” said Juan José Dalton.

By - - and Ángel Páez
LIMA, Dec 29 2011 (IPS)

The Peruvian government will propose that the Organisation of American States review the powers of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and is seeking the support of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. The move is a reaction against a lawsuit brought against it by the IACHR.

Sources at the Peruvian Justice Ministry who preferred to remain anonymous told IPS the IACHR had committed an “excess” in forwarding to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the details of alleged summary executions of three captured guerrillas by an army commando that raided the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima in 1997 to free hostages.

The three insurgents, members of the leftwing Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA), were purportedly killed in cold blood after they handed over their weapons to the Chavín de Huántar commando unit, after a successful raid to free 71 hostages who had been held for four months.

The IACHR, which is part of the Organisation of American States (OAS) human rights system, argues that the Peruvian state has failed to investigate the incident and punish those responsible. All 14 MRTA members who participated in taking the hostages for the purpose of exchanging them for imprisoned guerrillas were killed in the operation.

But the ministry sources claim that the Peruvian justice system is taking legal action against suspects of the alleged summary executions.

They point out that in January 2011 the attorney general’s office requested a 20 year prison sentence for Vladimiro Montesinos, former intelligence adviser to then president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), 18 years for former army commander Nicolás Hermoza, and 15 years for officers Jesús Zamudio and Roberto Huamán, for their involvement in the killings.

“If they say the Chavín de Huántar commando did not violate human rights, why have Montesinos and Hermoza been accused of these crimes that the state says did not exist?” asked lawyer Gloria Cano of the Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos (APRODEH), a local human rights group.

“The IACHR recommended investigating and resolving this contradiction, but the Peruvian state has not complied, which is one of the reasons why the IACHR initiated the lawsuit,” Cano, who represents the relatives of Eduardo Cruz, Víctor Peceros and Herma Meléndez, the three alleged victims of unlawful killings, told IPS.

“There is evidence of these crimes. In two cases we have the testimony of former Japanese official Hidetaka Ogura, who was one of the hostages, as well as forensic evidence, while for Cruz we also have the testimony of two police witnesses,” she said.

“Although these events took place 15 years ago, no one has yet been convicted,” she complained.

“Instead of complying with the IACHR’s recommendations, the Peruvian state questions the Commission’s competence and rejects the lawsuit against it. That is exactly the way the Fujimori government behaved,” Cano said.

But in the view of constitutional law expert Enrique Bernales, the IACHR should not have initiated the suit against the Peruvian state, because the case in Peru is still ongoing.

“In the irreproachable trial and sentencing of Fujimori, Peruvian justice has shown its high standards, so there can be no doubt that it will leave no stone unturned to bring cases of human rights violations to justice,” he said.

“According to my information, prosecution of the perpetrators of the alleged summary executions is ongoing in this country. Therefore the state has a right to reject the lawsuit brought by the IACHR,” he said.

Bernales also said that the government has the right to propose changes in the Commission’s operating rules. “The inter-American human rights system cannot remain motionless in time. Everything changes, and regulations must also reflect reality,” he said.

The IACHR sent a confidential report on the case to the Peruvian Justice Ministry on Jun. 13, which concluded that the Fujimori regime had prevented prosecution of those responsible because it was implicated in the crimes.

The document, a copy of which was obtained by IPS, states that the authorities at the time also refused to hand over the bodies of the guerrillas to their families, and ordered instead that they be buried secretly in different parts of Lima, without ever having published autopsy reports as required by law.

The document also highlights that on Aug. 12, 2002 Peru’s Supreme Court accepted an application for the members of the Chavín de Huántar commando unit to be tried by the military justice system, despite the fact that military courts do not have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, according to the American Convention on Human Rights.

The IACHR recommends that the Peruvian state investigate members of the Chavín de Huántar commando unit, since only Montesinos and Hermoza, already serving lengthy prison sentences for other human rights abuses, Zamudio who is a fugitive from justice, and Huamán, who is not in custody, are being prosecuted for the crimes.

The Commission’s final report was delivered to the government of Alan García (2006-2011), but it was only leaked to the press after President Ollanta Humala took office Jul. 28. When no reply was received, the IACHR forwarded the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San José, Costa Rica.

When news of the lawsuit broke, Humala, a former military officer, said he would protect the members of the Chavín de Huántar unit, because they are “national heroes.”

Rocío Silva Santisteban, executive secretary of the National Coordinating Coalition on Human Rights (CNDDHH), said she does not understand why the government does not simply back the existing proposal for restructuring the IACHR. The OAS formed a working group based on that proposal, which has been meeting for over a year, chaired by Peruvian ambassador Hugo de Zela.

“What people should know is that 70 civil society organisations from all over Latin America have sent a letter to de Zela, demanding that the inter-American human rights system be strengthened, not weakened,” Silva Santisteban told IPS.

Excerpt:

A judge in Argentina has begun to investigate human rights crimes committed during Spain’s civil war and the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1936-1975).

Remains of Franco-era victims unearthed in Zaragoza, Spain. Credit: Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory

The judge requested the names of military officers involved in the Franco regime; lists of victims of forced disappearance and summary execution; lists of children who were stolen from their parents during the dictatorship; and the names of companies that allegedly benefited from the forced labour of political prisoners.

Servini initially shelved the lawsuit, on the grounds that investigations had been opened in Spain. But the Cámara Federal, a second instance court, ordered her to investigate whether Spain’s justice system was effectively taking action.

The case thus landed back in the hands of Servini who, invoking the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity, issued the request for a wide range of information, such as the addresses – or death certificates – of agents of the regime.

The human rights lawyers who brought the suit presented Servini with a new document in which they stress that, after 36 years of dictatorship and 36 years of democracy in Spain, “not only is there not even a truth commission, but not one single child has had his or her identity restored.

“The case was opened in Argentina because everything indicated that not even with a socialist government did the will exist for it to prosper there,” one of the Argentine lawyers, Beinusz Szmukler, told IPS, referring to the government of socialist prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-Dec. 21, 2011).

To make his point, he pointed to the case against Spain’s internationally renowned judge Baltasar Garzón, who was suspended from his post in May 2010, accused of overstepping his jurisdiction for starting to investigate crimes committed during that country’s 1936-1939 civil war and subsequent dictatorship.

Garzón had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed by the dictatorships of Argentina (1976-1983) and Chile (1973-1990), when amnesty laws still blocked legal action in these two South American countries.

But when the judge launched a probe into human rights abuses in his own country, which were covered by an amnesty issued by parliament in 1977, “he was shoved aside, and now he runs the risk of losing his career as a judge,” said Szmukler.

Spain’s Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory – which helps relatives search common graves for victims of the civil war and dictatorship – and a dozen human rights groups in Argentina are behind the lawsuit filed in Buenos Aires on behalf of the families of victims of the Franco era.

Citing many of the arguments presented by Garzón, the human rights lawyers filed the lawsuit in Argentine court in the name of six relatives of victims, who live in Argentina. The group of plaintiffs will grow in the next few months, because new cases of relatives are being presented, said Szmukler.

One of the plaintiffs is 91-year-old Darío Rivas, who is seeking justice in the murder of his father, Severino Rivas, purportedly killed in 1936 by members of Spain’s fascist Falange movement.

Severino Rivas was mayor of the coastal village of Castro de Rei in the northwestern Spanish province of Galicia when he was seized and shot. He was missing for decades until his remains were found in an unmarked common grave and handed over to Darío in 2005.

“Mr. Severino Rivas and the families of Inés García Holgado (another plaintiff) were the victims of a homicide technique perfected by the Spanish Falange: ‘paseos’ (strolls) that ended with a bullet to the back of the neck,” the lawsuit says.

Holgado is the grand-niece of Elías García Holgado, who was mayor of the town of Lumbrales and legislator in the western province of Salamanca when he was arrested in 1936. He was executed a year later.

The lawsuit says these circumstances are similar to those of thousands of other people killed in “what constituted a systematic, widespread, deliberate plan to terrorise Spaniards who backed representative government, by means of the physical elimination of its most representative exponents.”

In their brief, the human rights lawyers note that Spanish courts actively exercised universal jurisdiction in cases of crimes against humanity committed in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala.

The aim of the legal action is not to question Spain’s amnesty law, which was recently upheld in the face of an attempt to repeal it, but to exercise universal jurisdiction in Argentina with respect to crimes “that offend and injure humanity, and are still unpunished,” the lawyers stated.

Human rights organisations put the number of victims of forced disappearance during Spain’s civil war and the Franco dictatorship at 113,000. Some 2,500 mass graves have been located and excavated over the last few years.

In addition, there are an estimated 30,000 cases of children who were stolen in Spain and given or sold to adoptive families. But no legal action has been taken in any of these cases in Spain, and the now-adult children have never discovered their real identities or been reunited with their biological families.

In solidarity with these cases, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have joined the case as co-plaintiffs. The Grandmothers association was created to search for the children who were “disappeared” along with their parents in Argentina during the dictatorship and raised by military couples or families who adopted them in good faith.

Szmukler and the rest of the lawyers say they will not be satisfied with a declaration merely recognising that the genocide took place, and promising to find out the truth about what happened.

There is a precedent for that in Argentina. The descendants of people killed in the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire, which claimed some 1.5 million lives, successfully pressed for this South American country to officially recognise the genocide, in April.

“In the case of Spain, when we presented the lawsuit there were at least 13 (dictatorship-era) military officers still alive, and there are also the cases of 30,000 people who are unaware of their origins and identity,” the lawyer said.

“We want an in-depth investigation, to determine the truth and establish who was responsible. If Spain does not do it, we will do it here. I hope we get cooperation,” he added.

Excerpt:

Relatives of former military personnel and businessmen are bringing lawsuits against ex guerrillas and journalists in Guatemala in connection with the 1960-1996 civil war – a legal offensive that human rights defenders say is politically motivated.

Native men, women and children - like these girls from the highlands - were the main victims of the army during Guatemala's civil war. Credit: Roots and Wings International/CC BY-ND 2.0

“They are also seeking to criminalise various professionals, who today are working for peace, for the work they do as journalists or human rights defenders,” he said.

The armed conflict between Guatemalan security forces and leftwing guerrillas left 250,000 people dead or disappeared, most of them rural indigenous villagers, with the army being responsible for 93 percent of the crimes, according to the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH).

But the battle continues, now in the legal arena.

Just a few days before the Dec. 29 commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the signing of the peace agreement that ended the armed conflict, the law courts received three lawsuits against ex guerrillas and human rights activists.

One of them was filed Nov. 2 by businessman Ricardo Méndez against 26 former members of the now-defunct Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and Guatemalan Labour Party (PGT), insurgent groups active during the war, whom he alleges kidnapped and tortured him 29 years ago.

One month later, Estela de Mata, head of the Guatemalan Association of Military Widows (ASOMILGUA), formally accused 32 former members of both guerrilla factions “of committing terrorist acts.”

The third lawsuit was presented Dec. 12 by U.S. coffee businessman Theodore Plocharski against 52 former insurgents, accusing them of the kidnapping, torture and murder of diplomats, including the 1968 assassination of John Gordon Main, then U.S. ambassador in Guatemala.

Among the accused is Yolanda Colom, the sister of outgoing social democratic President Álvaro Colom, and Margarita and Laura Hurtado Paz, relatives of Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who is in charge of criminal prosecutions.

Human rights activist Iduvina Hernández and journalist Marielos Monzón are also named as defendants in the lawsuit. They presented themselves to the Attorney General’s Office to clear their names.

“It is perfectly well known that I have never belonged to any political or guerrilla organisation nor ever committed any crime; I am being accused of these things in order to cast aspersions on my character and so prevent me from working in my profession and publishing opinion-editorials,” said Monzón, who has defended access to justice for victims of the counterinsurgency war.

In the view of Magdalena Sarat, of the National Coordination of Widows of Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) – an NGO working for the rights of indigenous Maya women who lost family members in the civil war – the legal offensive carried out by allies of the armed forces is a strategy “to silence the survivors of the internal armed conflict so that they will stop denouncing the abuses committed by the army.”

Sarat told IPS, “This is revenge because some cases of genocide and military personnel responsible for the massacres have been prosecuted, thanks to the Attorney General’s work.”

The Attorney General’s Office has secured the arrest and conviction of a number of military and police officers who were found guilty of genocide, forced disappearance and other abuses against civilians during the war.

In 2010, two former police officers were sentenced to 40 years in prison for the Feb. 18, 1984 forced disappearance of Fernando García, a university student and trade unionist.

This year’s arrests included those of retired general Héctor López, accused of genocide in the massacres of over 300 persons between 1978 and 1985, and former chief of police Héctor Bol, for the disappearance of García, as well as other members of the armed forces facing prosecution.

But Sarat said “the highest ranking military commanders, responsible for massacres of the indigenous population, are still at large, like general Efraín Ríos Montt” (1982-1983), who is accused of carrying out a scorched earth policy that involved the wholesale destruction of some 440 villages.

“And yet we see him going about free and easy, without a care in the world, after they left thousands of widows and orphans,” she said.

Sarat acknowledged that crimes committed by the guerrillas during the war should also be cleared up, but she emphasised that the army is to blame for 93 percent of the human rights abuses perpetrated during the war, compared to just three percent attributed to the guerrillas, according to the CEH.

Héctor Nuila, a lawmaker of the leftwing Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, formerly a coalition of guerrilla movements and now a political party, told IPS the lawsuits brought against ex insurgents, journalists and activists “are politically motivated.”

He said part of the strategy is to seek the removal of Attorney General Paz y Paz, who has succeeded in getting several military officers arrested and convicted for abuses committed during the conflict.

“The plaintiffs have publicly stated that the competence of the attorney general is on trial. Moreover, they have accused people of crimes that were committed before they had even been born, and have accused people who happen to have worked very hard on strengthening the security and justice systems,” Nuila said.

On the other side of the issue, they are standing firm. “I hope the attorney general does not represent just one group. They (the guerrillas) were terrorists who planted bombs, blew up bridges and killed innocent people and businesspersons. I hope the attorney general will investigate their families,” de Mata said.

“Members of the army are being prosecuted for war crimes. Now the Attorney General’s Office should investigate the criminal acts committed by the guerrillas,” Plocharski told the media.

Excerpt:

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

Millions of documents from the Guatemalan national police archive, shedding light on torture, forced disappearances and murders committed during the1960-1996 counterinsurgency war in this country, are now available on-line thanks to a collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin.

The archives are being painstakingly restored and organised. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

The Politics of Memory conference held Friday Dec. 2 at the University of Texas unveiled a digital archive hosted by the university, holding 12 million of the roughly 80 million pages of national police documents discovered by chance in 2005.

The on-line digital repository from the Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala (AHPN) will be available to the public “with no requisite whatsoever,” Alberto Fuentes, one of the experts working at the AHPN, told IPS.

“Essentially, it contains two things: documents on cases involving crimes and violence in the country, as well as records of social control and surveillance, especially of opposition politicians,” Fuentes explained.

“We have found more than 900,000 personal dossiers containing names, photographs and fingerprints of individuals, as well as notes about their political activities,” he said.

In July 2005, the Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos – the office of Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman – found the abandoned documents by accident in an abandoned munitions depot on the north side of Guatemala City. The messy bundles of records were stacked floor to ceiling in dozens of rooms infested by rats, bats and cockroaches, and many of the files were in an advanced state of decay.

The administrative police records, which date from 1882 to 1997, document the repressive role played by the police during the 36-year armed conflict between leftist insurgents and government forces, which left a death toll of 250,000.

That total included at least 45,000 people who were seized by the security forces and forcibly disappeared, their bodies buried in unmarked graves in cemeteries or in secret graves, often in military bases, according to the Historical Clarification Commission.

The U.N.-mandated truth commission found that the army was responsible for more than 90 percent of the killings in the civil war, most of whose victims were rural Maya Indians.

The records that came to light in 2005 document the role played by the National Police during – and before – the conflict. The AHPN began to salvage and digitise the archives in 2006. The documents are held under tight security.

The archive includes arrest warrants, surveillance reports, identification documents, interrogation records, snapshots of detainees and informants, and of unidentified bodies, fingerprint files, transcripts of radio communications, ledgers full of photographs and names, as well as more mundane documents like traffic tickets, drivers’ licence applications, invoices for new uniforms and personnel files.

So far, 13 million documents have been cleaned, classified and digitised.

Documents from the archive have served as evidence in several trials against members of the military prosecuted for human rights abuses committed during the war.

“In just one single case, the disappearance of Fernando García, a trade unionist and student leader, the archive provided the court with 667 documents,” Fuentes said.

García disappeared on Feb. 18, 1984. But it was not until 26 years later that two of those responsible for his death, both former policemen, were sentenced to 40 years in prison on charges of forced disappearance.

Fuentes said the AHPN also provided documents that contributed to this year’s arrest of retired general Héctor López, accused of the crime of genocide in connection with the deaths of more than 300 people between 1978 and 1985, and the arrest of former police chief Héctor Bol for the disappearance of García.

“The documents in the archive are being used as proof to enable the justice system to issue arrest warrants and bring people to trial,” Fuentes said.

Justice is essential to bringing about reconciliation in this impoverished Central American nation.

Ada Melgar, whose father was assassinated during the armed conflict, told IPS that “once it has been clearly demonstrated that army officers and the high command played a role in the thousands of massacres and murders in the country, we will be able to feel a measure of peace.”

The massacres included the wholesale destruction of around 440 indigenous villages in the country, as part of a scorched earth counterinsurgency policy applied in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“We have filed a case against the state, because we are sure that my father’s death was planned by the security forces,” said the daughter of Hugo Rolando Melgar, a law professor at the University of San Carlos who was machine-gunned on Mar. 24, 1980.

Ada Melgar, who works in the police archive, believes the institution has “very valuable documents that can prove the existence of lists of names of people held in police custody that coincide with many men and women who were captured and disappeared.”

Forensic experts have also found answers in the archive.

“The first photos we saw there were from post-mortem records of several bodies that had not been identified. But there were even references in the records to the fingerprints that they took from the bodies,” José Suasnabar, assistant director of the non-governmental Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), told IPS.

The AHPN “has become a primary source of information” for the search for people who were disappeared during the armed conflict, he said.

Suasnabar said they had found abundant information in the archive that will help them identify bodies buried in unmarked graves in the cemetery in Escuintla, in the south of the country.

Aura Elena Farfán with the Guatemalan Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared(FAMDEGUA) told IPS that the police archive “has been tremendously important, because documents about our family members have been found, and it is helping bring the cases to trial.”

“Our concern now is that everyone who in one way or another has come under scrutiny for the repression during the war wants the archive to disappear,” she said.

But 12 million pages are now publicly accessible online, thanks to the collaboration between the AHPN and three institutions at the University of Texas in Austin: the Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS), and the University of Texas Libraries, which is home to the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

According to the Politics of Memory conference, the aim of the project is to make the unique historical records “a living archive in service of Guatemala’s historical memory…(bringing) to researchers, human rights activists, and prosecutors around the world an archive that has already begun to help rewrite the history of state repression in Guatemala.”

“By bringing this archive online, LLILAS-Benson is helping to make it possible for people around the globe – from those searching for disappeared friends and family, to those studying institutions of surveillance and state repression, to those exploring the legacy of U.S. involvement in Guatemala – to undertake research using these materials.”

Excerpt:

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 20 2011 (IPS)

The bill to establish a National Truth Commission in Brazil, which has made it through the lower house of Congress and is now in the Senate, is considered at least a start in clarifying, and preventing a repetition of, the abuses committed during the country’s 21-year dictatorship.

For some the commission, or CNV, that was approved by a Senate committee on Wednesday Oct. 19 is a watered-down or weak version of what is really needed, while others see it as the best that can be achieved at this time.

The CNV will not have the power to punish those responsible for human rights violations committed during the 1964-1985 de facto regime, and its conclusions will not give rise to court cases.

That is because of the 1979 amnesty law, which covers all cases of torture, forced disappearance and murder committed by the dictatorship, as well as crimes by left-wing guerrillas active during that period.

But the simple fact that the truth commission was created “represents a step forward with relation to Brazil’s failure to act on this issue before,” said political analyst Mauricio Santoro of the Getulio Vargas Foundation.

During the dictatorship, 475 people were forcibly disappeared, 50,000 imprisoned, and at least 20,000 tortured, according to official figures.

Although it will be “less far-reaching” than similar truth commissions created in Argentina, Chile or Peru, “it is very important with respect to the gathering of information on Brazil’s recent history, and the recognition of the importance of preserving the memory of resistance to the dictatorship,” Santoro told IPS.

The CNV will cover the period from 1946 to 1988, despite pressure from human rights groups and the families of victims of the dictatorship, who want it to merely apply to the 21-year dictatorial regime, in order to avoid a dispersion of efforts.

Aton Fon, a lawyer with the Social Network for Justice and Human Rights, said that is a weak point of the CNV, because the period covered is very broad for a commission of just seven members and 14 advisers, that will not even have its own budget, “which will compromise the quality of the work to some extent.”

In an interview with IPS, Fon said the period covered by the commission was extended as the result of an attempt to “play down the seriousness of the human rights violations committed by state security agents during the dictatorship.

“To avoid saying that only the military committed human rights abuses, the idea is to examine the entire history of Brazil,” lamented the lawyer, who attributed “the government’s backtracking” that led to the creation of a limited CNV to pressure from sectors of the military.

Another criticism is that the current format of the CNV opens up the possibility that it could include members of the military, even though the security forces were “directly involved in the repression” and serious violations like forced disappearance, secret graves, torture, and the suppression of documents, Fon said.

That participation, the activist said, would bring legal problems, because the military are subject to a strict hierarchy.

“We would see problems like having a member of the military on the commission summoning a superior to give his testimony, and in the face of possible refusal, having to respect his decision,” he said.

Another criticism is that one article of the bill creating the CNV determines that “the secret information and documents provided to the commission cannot be divulged or put at the disposal of third parties.”

Another article states that the activities of the CNV will be public except in cases in which it determines that “maintaining confidentiality is relevant to achieving its goals or to safeguarding the privacy, honour or image of individuals.”

That means “it will be a truth and memory commission only for its seven members,” and not for the whole country, “when the idea is precisely to find out about everything that happened, to overcome the past,” said Fon.

“There can be no full democracy without the possibility of knowing who did what, how it happened, and where the documents are,” he said.

The CNV was initially proposed as part of a broad human rights plan debated by different sectors of society. But under pressure from military and religious groups, it was gradually scaled back.

A CNV “like this one, that President Dilma Rousseff wants, will be a weakened commission, incapable of revealing to society the crimes of the military dictatorship,” says a statement signed by representatives of associations of former political prisoners and victims of political persecution, victims’ families, and human rights activists.

Rousseff herself was imprisoned and tortured when she was a young member of a left-wing guerrilla organisation.

Her two immediate predecessors, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) – a member of the leftist Workers Party like Rousseff – and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), also suffered under the dictatorship.

Lula spent time in prison as a trade unionist, and Cardoso, a victim of political persecution, was forced into exile in Chile.

Fon says the prevailing idea in politics today is “accepting what is possible, rather than fighting for what is necessary.”

Meanwhile, the vice president of Tortura Nunca Mais (Torture Never Again), Victoria Grabois, called the CNV “a farce.”

The activist’s brother, husband and father have been missing since 1973, when they were captured as members of the guerrillas of Araguaia, a remote area in the northern jungle state of Pará. More than 70 members of the insurgent group, created by members of the Brazilian Communist Party, were hunted down and killed by the army between 1972 and 1975 in a military operation that has yet to be clarified.

Grabois said it is unacceptable for the CNV not to be a “justice commission” as well – that is, a body with the power to bring legal action against the perpetrators of abuses.

“We understand that there is no statute of limitations for crimes against humanity like torture, forced disappearance and murder. It is an aberration that those who killed, tortured and kidnapped are not tried and convicted,” she told IPS.

She attributed this “fear of the truth” to civilian governments “that did not have the courage to make a break with the military.”

Comparing her country with neighbours like Argentina and Uruguay which are investigating their past and are bringing human rights violators to trial, the activist blamed the lack of legal action on “the slave mentality that still prevails in Brazil, and keeps society from becoming politicised.”

But Sueli Bellato, vice president of the Justice Ministry’s Amnesty Commission and assistant secretary of the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission, does not agree with this criticism.

“Even if we could have created a truth commission a long time ago, I think we are now mature and ready to seek out the truth about what led to a lengthy period of dictatorship in this country,” she told IPS.

Bellato, a participant in the group that drafted the bill establishing the CNV, said “the work was serious and responsible, and it took into account other experiences, and especially the characteristics of the Brazilian context.”

She mentioned two positions in dispute: “groups that believe that touching on the past would run counter to the strengthening of democracy” and “others that believe that the consolidation of democracy depends on revisiting the past and getting to the truth about what happened, by obtaining information about the whereabouts of victims of forced disappearance, who killed them, and in what circumstances.

“These revelations and the determination of who was responsible could influence today’s security policies, creating mechanisms that stand in the way of the practice of torture as a means of obtaining a confession,” she said, as an example of the positive results of the creation of a CNV – even one with a limited mandate.

“As has already happened in other countries, the commission can cover a lot of ground and overcome previously established stages. At each stage, the CNV can include in its conclusions the recommendation for a new stage,” she said.

Excerpt:

The last time Supaya Serrano saw her sisters Erlinda and Ernestina, they were just three and seven years old, respectively.

The three of them were walking through the bush, escaping from a Salvadoran army operation in Chalatenango province. It was 1982 and a bloody armed conflict was being waged in El Salvador. When Supaya heard shots, she hid her little sisters and went to find shelter. When she came back for them, her sisters were no longer there.

Later she heard that witnesses had seen soldiers capture Erlinda and Ernestina and take them away in a helicopter.

They were never heard from again.

Nearly 30 years after the disappearance of the Serrano sisters, no serious investigation into the case has been held, and no one has been brought to justice.

Today, Supaya talks about her sisters’ disappearance as if time had stood still. “I want to know the truth and find out what happened to them, that’s all. I hope some day I’ll see them again,” she says.

Aug. 30 was International Day of the Disappeared, instituted in 1983 by the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared (FEDEFAM) to draw attention to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are detained in isolation, completely cut off from their relatives and legal counsel.

In over 30 years of work with Amnesty International in Latin America, I have met many people like Supaya. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, brothers and sisters, they have spent years going to courtrooms, demonstrating with posters of the missing, following leads and knocking on doors, in their own countries and abroad.

They are people who just want to know what happened to their loved ones.

Many things have changed since my first trips to Chile and Argentina, back in the 1970s. Nearly three decades after the demise of the last Latin American dictatorships, we are beginning to see significant progress towards justice, especially in recent years.

In Argentina, for example, dozens of top military brass have been put on trial for their roles in human rights abuses, including thousands of forced disappearances, during the 1976-1983 dictatorship. Dozens of stolen children, taken from illegally detained mothers and given in adoption, have discovered their true identities.

In Peru, members of the “Colina Group” death squad and former high officials in the government of ex-president Alberto Fujimori were recently found guilty of the murders of 15 people and the forced disappearances of 10 others, committed in 1991 and 1992.

In Colombia, retired colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas was sentenced in 2010 to 30 years in prison for the forced disappearance of 11 people in 1985, after an army attack on the Palace of Justice where leftwing M-19 guerrillas had taken 300 hostages.

Few of us would have imagined, just 20 years ago, that we would see these people brought to account. However, in other countries there has been little or no progress.

In Bolivia, for instance, prosecutors investigating forced disappearances perpetrated in 1980 and 1981 are still having difficulty gaining access to military records, in spite of the Supreme Court having twice ordered the declassification of the files.

And Brazil has steadfastly refused to repeal a 1979 amnesty law that prevents the investigation of hundreds of cases of torture, murder and disappearance.

Meanwhile, in the United States those responsible for crimes under international law, such as torture and forced disappearances committed during the “war on terror” – the global campaign against terrorists declared by ex-president George W. Bush in 2001 – have not been brought to book.

Even today, Amnesty International continues to receive hundreds of complaints about forced disappearances from every corner of the planet.

In Mexico, for example, we have seen a rise in reports of disappearances allegedly perpetrated by the armed forces in the context of operations to combat organised crime.

It is no coincidence that disappearances continue to happen in the Americas. When those responsible for human rights abuses are not brought to justice and punished, it is likely that such abuses will recur. The message that is sent when rights abusers are not prosecuted is a very dangerous one.

The situation is so critical that in 2006 the United Nations adopted the International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Forced Disappearance, under which each of the signatory countries must prevent forced disappearances, initiate investigations when they are committed and bring those responsible to justice.

The convention, which has been ratified by most Latin American countries, is an important step towards clarifying these crimes against humanity. However, for the convention to be really useful, it is essential that all states commit themselves to putting it into practice.

“It’s very hard to delve into the past, but what keeps me going is the hope of seeing my sisters again one day,” Supaya said.

This hope is all that is left when someone loses a loved one, without knowing what happened, without knowing whether they are alive or dead and without being able to say goodbye at a funeral ceremony. They are left with no option but to spend each day of their lives wondering: ‘Where could they be?’

But they are not alone: we will never abandon them.

* The author is a Special Advisor at Amnesty International.

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Sep 6 2011 (IPS)

As human rights cases from Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship move ahead in the courts, cases of judges and prosecutors who were accomplices in the crimes are coming to light.

Thanks to the memory of witnesses and survivors of the “dirty war”, as well as the tireless efforts of human rights organisations, judges and prosecutors implicated in dictatorship-era human rights crimes have generally been kept from taking part in the trials.

And information provided by the survivors and witnesses is now being used to gradually purge these judges and prosecutors from the legal system.

The most recent case is that of Otilio Romano, a federal court judge in the western province of Mendoza, who despite numerous accusations against him managed to stay in his post until late August.

There was evidence that Romano was involved in 76 cases of kidnapping, torture and forced disappearance between 1975 and 1983. Nevertheless, he evaded legal action for years.

But charges have now been brought against him for 17 crimes against humanity, and the Consejo de la Magistratura – a high council made up of judges, legislators and lawyers – decided to suspend and impeach him, on the grounds that he served the cause of state terrorism by failing to investigate crimes against humanity as a prosecutor during the regime.

Colleagues of his like Luis Miret, Rolando Carrizo and Guillermo Petra Recabarren, who had kept their posts until recently, were also suspended and are facing charges for denying justice to numerous victims of the dictatorship.

Carolina Varsky, a lawyer with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), told IPS that her human rights group has long denounced the complicity of judges and prosecutors during the dictatorship, but that “only in the last decade has the issue begun to be discussed.

“Until well into the 1990s, denunciations (of the collusion) were disregarded by the judicial branch, which protected judges who were accomplices of the dictatorship,” she said.

Many of the judges in question were actually appointed during the de facto regime.

But “over the last decade, this issue began to be debated, and in the past few years it steadily gained momentum” as human rights cases came to trial, said Varsky, the head of CELS’ “Memory and the Struggle Against Impunity” programme.

Human rights trials were resumed after the amnesty laws for military personnel adopted in the mid-1980s were overturned in 2005 and the presidential pardons granted to imprisoned members of the former military junta in 1989 and 1990 were struck down in 2007.

However, human rights groups complain that accomplices of state terrorism still form part of the justice system, and could even be sitting as judges in courts that are trying crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship.

There have been, for example, several cases of judges and prosecutors implicated in the forced disappearance of children, which was proven to be a systematic practice during the regime.

A total of 11,000 cases of forced disappearance have been officially proven, but human rights groups put the number at 30,000. In addition, some 500 children were kidnapped as babies along with their parents or born into captivity to political prisoners, and raised in many cases by childless military or police couples.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who are searching for their missing grandchildren, have managed to restore the true identity of 104 of the children – now adults – so far. Some of them were raised by the members of the military who stole them, while others were adopted by families in good faith.

Alan Iud, a lawyer for the Grandmothers association, explained to IPS that of the 104 grandchildren who have been located and identified, 30 percent were given in adoption through the courts, which is why the association is investigating adoption records from that time period.

The association has hopes of finding more cases of grandchildren whose real identities were hidden by means of corrupt judicial procedures. In the meantime, the Grandmothers have been on the alert, because some prosecutors and judges who were involved in those cases are still active.

In the past few years, several dictatorship-era cases have come to light in which judges who were aware of the children’s provenance awarded them in adoption to strangers in illegal arrangements that took only a few hours, without even looking for the children’s biological relatives, such as grandparents.

One of the judges was recused in a case of theft of a child, because he himself had been an official counsel of minors in cases in which the children of victims of forced disappearance were illegally given in adoption.

Despite its shortcomings during the dictatorship, Argentina’s adoption law even then required that every effort be made to locate a biological family member before children were given up in adoption, which was supposed to be a last resort.

Two of the judges who handled these irregular cases – and publicly admitted to having done so – have died: Delia Pons, who approved the adoption of three children of victims of forced disappearance, and Ofelia Hejt, who approved at least 15 illegal adoptions.

The Grandmothers said in the film “Botín de Guerra” (Spoils of War) that Pons once told them: “Ladies, I am sure that your children were terrorists, and for me, ‘terrorist’ is a synonym for ‘murderer’ – and I do not plan to return the children of murderers.

“It would not be fair to do so, because you wouldn’t know how to raise them properly, and because you have no right to do so,” Judge Pons added, according to the Grandmothers.

After Pons died, and after a number of failed attempts to gain access to the adoption records in her court, the Grandmothers managed to get the files analysed, in order to find new cases of stolen children whose identities were changed with the late judge’s complicity.

Another judge, Luis Vera Candiotti, was prosecuted this year for involvement in the theft of a child in 1977. Although he knew the little girl had been taken from her parents, who were victims of forced disappearance, he granted her in illegal adoption to the military officer who took her.

Also under investigation now for the theft of children are former judges Juan Carlos Marchetti and Delfin Castro, accomplices in cases in which the children’s background was concealed and they were given up in illegal adoptions.

There are other judicial officers whose names Iud preferred not to mention, because they are still active in the justice system. But they were complicit in crimes committed in children’s courts during the dictatorship, when they were judges or clerks.

One of them, who is currently a federal appeals court judge, is implicated in several cases of illegal adoptions, including the case of the son of former Uruguayan political prisoner Sara Méndez. He was given in adoption to a policeman in Argentina.

Méndez, a survivor of torture camps, spent 25 years searching for her son in Uruguay and Argentina until she finally found him in 2002.

Another case is that of prosecutor Juan Romero, who went to trial in July, accused of passing information to and helping a colonel accused of stealing the young daughter of victims of forced disappearance.

Romero had been questioned by Congress in the 1990s, thwarting his appointment as a judge, which was proposed by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999). Instead, the president named him prosecutor in a criminal court. But he has now resigned as prosecutor.

Excerpt:

By Milagros Salazar
DOCE CORRAL, Peru, Jul 13 2011 (IPS)

The daylight is fading, but Francisca Huanca’s hopes are growing brighter. “Yes, they’re his sneakers, he liked to play football,” she says with tears in her eyes. She has just caught a glimpse of the remains of her husband, nearly three decades after he was murdered in the biggest massacre committed by the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas in Peru’s highlands.

Women from Sicuani at exhumation of the remains of their loved ones. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

She arrived on Jun. 21 after a 15-hour drive from Sicuani, her hometown in the nearby province of Cuzco. She was accompanied by eight fellow townspeople who also decided to return for the exhumation of the remains of their loved ones killed in the Jul. 16, 1984 massacre committed during the 1980-2000 civil war between the Shining Path and government forces and their paramilitary allies.

On that day in 1984, a group of between 30 and 40 members of the Shining Path used pickaxes, hammers, stones and guns to slaughter around 100 villagers at several locations in the south of Ayacucho province, in a case known as the “bus of death”.

The guerrillas, disguised in military and police uniforms, had hijacked the bus that runs to the highlands in the south of Ayacucho province from Lima every Monday, and made a macabre tour from 7:00 AM to midnight, stopping in each town and village where the local authorities and community leaders had refused to join the Shining Path.

The bones talk

The victims included at least a dozen traders from the market town of Sicuani, who happened to be in Doce Corral at the time, buying alpaca wool. Alejandro Aguilar, Huanca’s husband, was one of the traders who never came home.

“I was left on my own with my small children. One of them was just eight months old,” Huanca says as she shows IPS photographs of her family, her husband’s identity card, and their marriage certificate.

She is crying, but is obviously very strong. She was fully aware that by coming to Doce Corral for the exhumation of the remains of her husband and other victims from Sicuani by the forensic experts and staff from the public prosecutor’s office, she would be delving into her own pain.

The exhumation of common graves is part of the process of clarifying what happened that day, returning the bodies to their families for proper burial, and bringing those responsible to justice.

The bones of the dead talk: they reveal how the victims were killed, the wounds they suffered, the last frozen expressions on their faces.

The clothing is still intact, and provides the clues needed to jog the memory of the victims’ family members, of the last time they saw their loved ones. Huanca has always remembered the red wool sweater her husband was wearing when they said good-bye that day in Sicuani.

The first day of digging did not bring the expected results: the forensic experts excavated a grave believing they would find Alejandro Aguilar’s body, which wasn’t there. Only the next day, after Huanca had an anxious, sleepless night, were his remains found in a nearby grave.

“It’s very complex to exhume a clandestine cemetery because there is no information on the location of the graves,” forensic archaeologist Marcela Ramírez with the Andean Centre for Forensic Anthropology Research (CENIA), who is leading the team of experts, told IPS.

“You can only base your work on people’s memories, which is why it is important to carry out a good preliminary investigation, to avoid digging around in vain and raising people’s expectations,” she explained.

CENIA has been carrying out this work for the non-governmental Human Rights Commission (COMISEDH) and the Sicuani Catholic vicariate, which have supported the families of the victims of Ayacucho and Cuzco in their struggle for justice.

Since 2005, the two organisations have been pushing the public prosecutor’s office to investigate the case, but not until 2009 did the Ayacucho prosecutor’s office launch the investigation.

COMISEDH and CENIA have worked with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) that investigated the abuses committed during the armed conflict, to help locate mass graves.

Ayacucho, one of the poorest and most remote, rural and heavily indigenous parts of the country, accounted for a full 47 percent of the nearly 70,000 people killed in the civil war, according to the CVR report issued in 2003. The Commission held Shining Path responsible for 54 percent of the killings.

After the CVR completed its work, COMISEDH and CENIA continued their investigations, documenting 99 victims of the “bus of death” and 34 burial sites expected to hold the remains of 72 people.

The case is especially complicated given the remote location – over 25 hours by car from the capital of Ayacucho; the number of years that have gone by since the killings; and the way they were carried out, with bodies buried at different spots along the route taken by the hijacked bus. Moreover, some of the victims are still missing.

In the face of so many obstacles, the victims’ families and the authorities have had to be extremely dedicated to pushing forward with the case.

The latest exhumation is an illustration of the difficulties: of the more than 20 bodies that the team expected to find, only 15 were found between Jun. 20-29 – four victims from Sicuani and the rest from villages near Doce Corral.

Furthermore, the government forensic team had to call off its work early due to logistical challenges and because it failed to find family members to approve further exhumations.

Waiting for closure

Ayacucho provincial assistant prosecutor Carlos Antonio Zaravia, who has overseen the exhumation work, promised the families of the victims from Sicuani to hand over the remains to them shortly, after the lab results have been compared to the information gathered in the preliminary investigation. “That could take five or six months, if DNA tests are not needed,” he told IPS.

Despite the wait, some have already begun to find closure in their grieving process. The Sinsaya family from Sicuani managed to identify the clothing of Leonardo Sinsaya, another of the victims.

His widow Teófila, who is now 64, and his 54-year-old brother Esteban and 45-year-old sister Benedicta, spotted the beige jacket Leonardo was wearing that day, the red and blue sweater he knitted himself, and the grey slacks he usually wore. His hands had been tied behind his back, and his wide open mouth indicated that the last sound heard from Leonardo was a scream of terror.

“He suffered a lot when he died, now we have found that out, with a great deal of pain,” Benedicta tells IPS. “But at the same time we are more at peace now because we know it’s him.”

Her brother Esteban says that after they found Leonardo’s remains, he “saw” his brother saying good-bye. “I saw him dressed in a brown suit, he smiled at me and said ‘you don’t know anything, don’t say anything’, said good-bye and went through a large green door,” he says, sobbing.

Esteban Sinsaya saw this vision during a group therapy session led by psychologist Joni Muñoz with the government’s Integral Reparations Programme. The psychologist came to Doce Corral with the family members from Sicuani to help them process their pain.

The families of the victims from Sicuani have become very close. They help each other out and provide each other with support. In Doce Corral, they pray over every corpse that is unearthed and make traditional coca leaf offerings.

They have shared the same pain for the last 27 years, and for at least some of them, the search for the remains of their loved ones has finally come to an end.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 11 2011 (IPS)

The mere rumour that El Salvador’s Supreme Court (CSJ) might be thinking of repealing the amnesty law was enough to trigger an institutional crisis in this country, showing how fragile its recovery is from the wounds left by the 1980-1992 civil war.

No one knows who started the false whispers in the corridors of Congress – the CSJ has stated it has no plans for even considering such an action – but it unleashed a full-blown political crisis.

Lawmakers in Congress and judges in the CSJ constitutional chamber have been at daggers drawn since Jun. 2, when Congress approved Decree 743 in a move to block the abolition of controversial laws like the amnesty law and others that have benefited political parties for decades.

The amnesty law was passed by Congress in 1993 to let the perpetrators of human rights crimes committed during the armed conflict off the hook.

Ever since its approval it has been harshly criticised by human rights defenders at home and abroad, while the powerful elites, the military and the right have stubbornly refused even to consider its repeal.

Under the new Decree 743, CSJ constitutional chamber resolutions must be approved unanimously by its five judges, instead of by a majority, as previously. Generally, four out of the five judges have pushed through resolutions regarded as historic, and free of overarching political or economic influence.

The decree makes it virtually impossible for the constitutional chamber to make any controversial rulings, such as declaring particular laws unconstitutional.

For instance, in August 2010 the CSJ declared unconstitutional the transfer of funds from different government ministries to the presidency, a “secret appropriation” of funds the sitting president could use at discretion.

One month later it also declared unconstitutional the protection enjoyed by media owners and editors, who could get away with publishing libellous or defamatory statements that violated citizens’ rights guaranteed under article 2 of the constitution.

Also in 2010, the CSJ made it possible for independent candidates to run for election as mayors or lawmakers, eliminated the “closed list” system of voting under which candidates from only one party could be selected, and proposed an “open list” system in which photographs of candidates would appear on the ballot papers, not just the party logo, and voters would be able to choose candidates from more than one party.

Lawmakers were upset by these changes, and tensions between the CSJ judges and Congress broke out.

Again by virtue of a CSJ resolution, on Jul. 1 the electoral court, TSE, dropped two long-standing political parties – the National Conciliation Party and the Christian Democratic Party – from its register, because in the 2004 elections they failed to take the minimum percentage of the vote required by the electoral code.

However, the parties intend to re-register with the TSE under new names.

“For the first time, we are seeing an independent constitutional chamber that is not tied to the political landscape, and this independence is exactly what political parties are afraid of,” said analyst Alfredo Mena Lagos.

After arduous political negotiations, in July 2009 Congress appointed new judges for the CSJ constitutional chamber, and from the outset their track records indicated that they would not be subservient towards the country’s economic and political elites, as in the past.

The votes of rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) lawmakers were key for the approval of Decree 743, following instructions from their leader, former president Alfredo Cristiani (1989-1994), who has personal reasons for blocking any attempt to overturn the amnesty law.

Cristiani could be among 20 people accused of killing six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in November 1989, at the height of a ferocious military offensive against leftwing guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

As president, Cristiani was also commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and there are reports that he participated in a meeting in San Salvador where the top military brass planned the Jesuits’ murder.

Eloy Velásquez, an investigating judge at Spain’s National Court, ordered the arrest of 20 members of the armed forces May 29, and Interpol was to have executed the arrest warrants through the Salvadoran police. But the arrests have not been made due to controversy as to whether the Spanish justice system has jurisdiction in the case.

Conservatives regard this as interference from Spain, and argue that the accused are protected by the amnesty law.

The case was presented in Madrid in 2008 by the Centre for Justice and Accountability (CJA), a California-based NGO working to bring human rights abusers to justice.

Cristiani himself acknowledged that fears the amnesty law might be abolished were the motive behind his party voting for Decree 743.

“We had information that the amnesty law might be declared unconstitutional, and in the circumstances, we consider ARENA’s votes were well cast,” he said.

CJA prosecution lawyer Almudena Bernabéu told local media that Cristiani is still of interest to the case “as an accessory.” “He isn’t being prosecuted, but he has been named in the lawsuit,” she said.

When the former president heard that the CSJ was not actually considering repealing the law, he backed down and his party has asked for Decree 743 to be overturned, but the FMLN, which has a parliamentary majority, opposes this move, as CSJ constitutional chamber resolutions could also be detrimental to it.

The FMLN became a political party after the 1992 peace agreement and is now governing the country for the first time, led by President Mauricio Funes, who took office in June 2009.

In October 2000, the CSJ heard a constitutional complaint against the amnesty law, and ruled that it was not unconstitutional, although the courts were given the freedom to try cases of crimes against humanity.

In any case, abolition of the law cannot be enforced retroactively. “In fact, overturning the law would not cancel its effects. That is why we are invoking universal law, since certain human rights violations are not subject to amnesties or statutes of limitations,” Loida Robles, a lawyer for the Research Foundation for the Application of Law (FESPAD), told IPS.

President Funes had the legal power to veto the decree, but in the event he signed it into law with unusual speed, in less than 24 hours. Analysts have interpreted this as a counterblow against the CSJ judges who ruled against “secret appropriations”.

Since he took office Funes made it clear that he would not put pressure on Congress to repeal the amnesty loaw, because it would re-open old wounds from the civil war, he said.

“We condemn what the president did. We hoped he would veto the decree,” said Robles.

Miguel Montenegro, the head of the El Salvador Human Rights Commission, told IPS that the amnesty law has done nothing but ensure impunity for crimes, and stressed that in 2000 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruled the Salvadoran state must strike down the law.

“The amnesty law should never have existed, because it was planned, prepared and approved by a Congress that was interested in protecting human rights abusers,” Montenegro said.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Jun 28 2011 (IPS)

It’s been nearly three decades since Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship came to an end, but the sex crimes committed against political prisoners are just now starting to draw more attention, after being pushed into the background in human rights trials.

ESMA, from torture centre to human rights museum. Credit: UNESCO

Balardini, a co-author of the study “Gender violence and sexual abuse in clandestine detention centres”, is working with lawyer Ana Oberlin and psychiatrist Laura Sobredo to finally bring these crimes to light – and the perpetrators to justice.

The three CELS experts who produced the study organise seminars to sensitise judicial system workers on the issue. Speakers in the seminars include well-known figures like former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón – famous for getting former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) arrested in London – and members of international criminal tribunals.

So far, there have been scant results with respect to prosecuting sex crimes committed during the dictatorship. Only one sentence has been handed down so far, against non-commissioned officer and torturer Gregorio Molina, in June 2010. Although the grounds for charges in such cases “are excellent,” this was the only conviction, Balardini said.

“There is great reluctance on the part of judicial system operators,” said the expert. The majority see sex crimes as falling in the broader category of torture, but classifying them as such is just another way of concealing them, she said.

“If a crime is differentiated and specified in our penal code, to merely lump it in a wider category reduces its significance and importance,” Balardini said. “We want it to be understood that the systematic repression included the practice of sexual violence.”

The justice system must specifically investigate these crimes, she said. But few prosecutors and judges have done so, although some have begun to study the issue.

“We are making progress. But we have had more failures than achievements,” she admitted.

A layperson might suppose that after all these years, sex crimes would be difficult to prove. But Balardini explained that when it comes to crimes against humanity, in which victims suffered a wide range of abuses and torture in clandestine detention centres run by de facto governments, the main evidence comes from testimony.

It is impossible to prove each case of torture in which a victim was naked and tied to a metal bed spring in a room where the only other people were torturers. Other witnesses, if any are still alive, can only testify that they heard her screams or saw her coming out of the torture chamber or back to the cell injured, she said.

Balardini noted that women are reporting sex crimes now more than ever before. And some cases have begun to prosper. In the 1980s, “neither the justice system nor society heard or paid attention to them,” she said.

In seven years, the dictatorship forcibly disappeared between 11,000 and 30,000 people, depending on the source of the estimate.

The regime hunted down left-wing activists, guerrillas, trade unionists, members of social movements and people who were picked up and “disappeared” merely to rob them. These people filled up numerous concentration camps, where they were tortured and usually ended up being “transferred” – a euphemism that meant they were being taken away to be killed, either shot or thrown, drugged but alive, from airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean or the River Plate estuary.

Among the abuses, sexual attacks on women as well as men were a systematic practice.

The former junta members were tried in 1985 and sentenced, several of them to life in prison, during the government of Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989).

Later, the legal action brought against thousands of lower-ranking members of the security forces sparked army revolts and heavy military pressure against the still-fragile democracy, which prompted the adoption of two amnesty laws, in 1986 and 1987, that shielded human rights abusers from prosecution.

The former military commanders were pardoned and released in 1989 and 1990 by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

The impunity only began to be tackled when the late Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) became president. Congress repealed the amnesty laws and presidential pardons, and the Supreme Court found them unconstitutional. As a result, the human rights cases were resumed in the courts. Today there are more than 360 trials underway nationwide.

In this new context, the sexual torture of women political prisoners has begun to receive specific attention, unlike during the trials in the 1980s.

A few judges have called for specific investigations into what are classified as “crimes against honour,” although most other judges still include sex crimes in the broader category of torture.

“In the first case involving the First Army Corps (one of the clandestine prisons), the number of victims who reported sex crimes was appalling, but these crimes become invisible in sentences that broadly refer to cases of torture,” Balardini said.

The study on gender violence and sexual abuse collected the accounts of women political prisoners. In some cases, their husbands, who were seized along with them, are still missing, and in other cases, the women’s children were taken from them – circumstances that tended to overshadow the other crimes of which they were victims.

“I am only now able to talk about it,” said one. “Within the context of the horror you experienced in the concentration camps, a rape seemed like something secondary,” said another of the women who spoke anonymously.

In some cases, women were forced to fix themselves up and were taken from the illegal detention centres to apartments to have sex with military officers or others. If they refused, they could be “transferred”. The victims finally feel they can talk about these situations in which they were degraded and forced to have sex.

The authors of the study say that in the 1980s, the trials had “limited aspirations,” and the testimony was focused on proving the existence of a systematic plan of repression. For that reason, sex crimes did not figure in the sentences against the former junta members.

In the face of the magnitude of the plan to exterminate dissidents, the objective of demonstrating the extent of the repression overshadowed the details of the individual experiences of political prisoners.

But now there has been a “qualitative leap” in the testimony of victims, the authors say.

The survivors of the dirty war, both men and women, had largely refrained from talking about sex crimes for different reasons.

One was that at the time, when the dictatorship had just come to an end, they believed the priority was to find out what had happened to the victims of forced disappearance. Many also felt the need to conceal from their families the most shocking and private details of the horror they had experienced.

But today, the survivors are apparently more ready to reveal their experiences. There is also a large body of academic work by the women’s movement that has helped bring visibility to the question of sex crimes, the study’s authors explain.

Balardini said the sentences issued by the U.N. international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s set a fundamental precedent by recognising various forms of sexual violence as crimes against humanity.

She also said recent reports that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi purportedly ordered that rape be used as a weapon of war against the opposition were made possible by the new visibility of sexual violence within the context of armed conflicts around the world.

Excerpt:

By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jun 27 2011 (IPS)

A second term for Argentine President Cristina Fernández would make it possible to continue ushering in the changes “we want and that our children wanted” when they were forcibly disappeared or murdered during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, said longtime human rights champion Estela de Carlotto.

Estela Barnes de Carlotto Credit: Public domain

Fernández, whose husband Kirchner died suddenly of a heart attack on Oct. 27, 2010, announced Jun. 21 that she will run for another four-year term in the Oct. 23 general elections. She is the current favourite in the polls, well ahead of the candidates of the fragmented opposition.

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, an association working to find and reunite with their biological families almost 500 (now-grown) children and babies who were kidnapped with their parents or born to political prisoners in clandestine torture centres, was founded by a group that branched off from the world-renowned Mothers of Plaza de Mayo human rights group.

As of April, 103 of the children had been found. They had been illegally adopted by military families or others, and their identities were kept secret by the de facto regime that was responsible for the forced disappearance of about 30,000 people, according to human rights organisations.

Barnes de Carlotto arrived in Geneva Jun. 23 to attend an event at the United Nations to promote the nomination of the Grandmothers’ Association for the Nobel Peace Prize.

She sat down with IPS to discuss some of the most topical human rights issues in Argentina, as well as current political affairs.

Q: What was the Grandmothers’ reaction to the news that Fernández would stand for re-election? A: The Grandmothers’ Association was delighted. It’s very good news. We have been very supportive of both Kirchner and Cristina’s administrations, not as a political party but because of the decisions of state they have taken on human rights issues.

There has never been such decisiveness, openness and awareness within the state for solving and responding to our demands, for instance the repeal of the “Full Stop” and “Due Obedience” laws (the amnesty laws passed in the late 1980s that let military human rights violators off the hook).

They also converted the clandestine torture and detention centre in the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA, in the Argentine capital) into a museum of memory, like other concentration camps all over the country that have now become memorials.

In addition, (the two ‘Kirchnerista’ presidencies) made reparations for human rights violations, held consultations, showed respect, and opened up the government house to every human rights event held to make reparations.

We really appreciate these actions, and we firmly believe that if Cristina can continue her policies for four more years, the kind of country that we want will be consolidated. At bottom it was also what our children wanted: social justice, the elimination of poverty and a decent life for all, not a wealthy one but a dignified one, in Argentina.

Q: Human rights organisations in Argentina have been shaken in recent weeks by the legal charges that Sergio Schoklender, the financial manager and legal adviser of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, his brother Pablo and others embezzled the organisation’s funds. What is your view of the case? A: Actually it was something we could see as outsiders, that this young man Schoklender had really bizarre attitudes, flaunting money and a luxurious lifestyle. He was also a permanent fixture in the institution, as if he were the one in charge of everything.

This came to light because of a dispute between the two Schoklender brothers. Let’s remember their history: they spent many years in prison for the murder of their parents (in 1981). Well, they did their time, so they have the right to reintegrate into society. But in this particular case it seems they have misappropriated and misused funds from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Foundation.

This is an injury that touches us all. We have made a public statement about the difference between the two organisations. The Grandmothers’ Association is a completely separate group with our own views and minimum funding; we have clarity in all our actions and our handling of donations is transparent.

We are constantly being audited, and the auditors’ reports congratulate us for our close financial control and our tidy accounts. As the head of the organisation, I have the obligation of knowing whether things are going properly.

But in this case, I don’t know what happened to Mrs. (Hebe de) Bonafini (the head of the Mothers group), who apparently didn’t know what sort of persons she was dealing with. Now love has turned to hate and she also wants the Schoklenders punished to the full extent of the law.

What do the human rights organisations want? For the justice system to find out what happened, and if a crime has been committed, for the guilty parties to be punished.

Q: Another important issue is the investigation of the identity of the young man and woman who were adopted as young children at the height of the dictatorship by Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the main shareholder in the media group that includes the newspaper Clarín. What do you think about their acceptance of DNA testing to determine their parentage, after 10 years of refusals based on legal arguments? A: The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo were very pleased to hear that the lawyers, who say they are defending these young people, announced that they had agreed to have blood, saliva or hairs tested by the National Genetic Data Bank, to compare with all the families waiting to find our grandchildren by this means.

This was a new development because they had systematically refused to be tested for the last 10 years, through their lawyers, using specious arguments, and the judges have allowed the prevarication and prolonged the anguish of not knowing whether they are someone’s missing grandchildren.

We don’t know if they will turn out to be the children of disappeared persons or not, but we have got to the point where we can arrive at the truth. That, for us, is the most important thing.

The case of the Noble children is just another case, to us. It’s not because she’s the owner of the Clarín media group that we “want to take away”, quote unquote, her children. The point is, there were serious irregularities in the adoption process, with the adoption papers of both of them containing flaws and untruths. And their refusal made it all but impossible to find the truth.

Now if they get tested, with all the right safeguards and help from experts for both sides, and the lawyers and everything done according to the law, it will be discovered whether they are the grandchildren we think they are.

If it turns out that they are not, they will carry on with their lives and continue waiting to find out their identity. Once their blood samples have been processed and stored in the Bank, they remain there for the future, so that if there is a late claim from a search for a stolen child, they may perhaps discover the truth. I hope they are our grandchildren, because they will receive nothing but freedom, love and family.

Q: Why have you accepted the initiative by the organisation Grandmothers for Peace, that is campaigning for your association to receive this year’s Nobel Peace Prize? A: Well, the idea was proposed in Argentina many years ago. But it was Senator Daniel Filmus, formerly education minister under Kirchner, who sent our credentials to the Nobel Prize committee, and our nomination was accepted and we became candidates.

We know that we were very well placed last year, but the prize was awarded to (U.S. President Barack) Obama.

Obama should really have refused the prize because of what he was going to do the next day (increasing U.S. troop strength in Iraq). But that is the way things are.

This year we have been nominated again, and we have been invited to come and talk to people, so they can get to know us, because you can’t promote or nominate what you don’t know. And this group Grandmothers for Peace, a non-governmental organisation, has invited us to give a talk, like those we routinely give, not in pursuit of prizes but for the struggle to continue.

Excerpt:

By Elizabeth Whitman
NEW YORK, Jun 20 2011 (IPS)

Fredy Peccerelli and his team of forensic anthropologists sort through human bones and other remains – shoes, clothes, ID cards. A stack of long, thick bones dark with dirt accumulates as they painstakingly reconstruct what they can from Guatemala’s La Verbana Cemetery, where for decades anonymous corpses have been dumped.

An image from "La Toma". Subtitle reads: "Are they coming out now? What's the situation right now, Col. Plazas?" Credit: Courtesy of HRW Film Festival

“Granito”, directed by Pamela Yates, Paco de Onis, and Peter Kinoy, chronicles the painstaking efforts by survivors, victims’ families, lawyers, and other professionals, including Yates herself, to bring General José Efraín Ríos Montt, head of the military government from March 1982 to August 1983, to trial at the Spanish National Court for crimes against humanity.

In 1996, as a stipulation of peace accords ending the civil war, the Guatemalan Truth Commission investigated the mass killings and disappearances, which peaked in 1982, and discovered the army’s pattern of targeting the indigenous Mayan population. The Center for Justice and Accountability estimates that over 200,000 were killed.

Yates was in Guatemala in 1982, filming “When the Mountains Tremble”, a documentary about guerrillas’ resistance efforts against a string of U.S.-backed military dictators. Some of the film’s footage was used to help build a case of genocide against Ríos Montt.

The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, which opened late last week in New York, is screening both of these films and 17 others that relate to human rights.

Yates’s film, along with “La Toma” (The Siege), directed by Angus Gibson and Miguel Salazar, and “Impunity”, directed by Juan Jose Lozano and Hollman Morris, poignantly depict the unrestrained brutality of military regimes, the sufferings of survivors and families of victims, the drawn-out process of demanding justice, and above all, what seems to be the elusiveness of victory.

Obtaining justice: slow, and never steady

“La Toma” is the story of the army’s siege on the Palace of Justice in Bogota, Colombia in 1985, in which 94 people died. During the chain of events initiated by M19 guerrillas’ takeover of the Palace and resulting in the army’s overnight siege, 12 people disappeared. Only two returned.

Over a quarter century later, their families still demand that army leaders be held responsible. In June 2010, Colonel Alfonso Plazas Vega, commander of the army during the siege, was sentenced to 30 years in prison for aggravated forced disappearances, but he has yet to actually go to prison.

“Impunity” exposes deep-rooted corruption within the Colombian government, which was complicit in or even paid paramilitary groups that carried out atrocities including mass killings and disappearances.

In 2005, the Justice and Peace Law was passed in Colombia. Some 31,600 paramilitaries ostensibly laid down arms. Of those, 3,600 were turned over to be prosecuted, and only 600 of those went to the Justice and Peace Law Tribunal for hearings.

In 2008, the Colombian government extradited 15 former paramilitary leaders to the U.S., where they would face charges of drug trafficking and money laundering – not the charges of conspiracy, racketeering, kidnapping and homicide that families and lawyers had demanded.

By July 2010, only two partial sentences had been passed for the assassinations of 11 people.

With so many crimes committed and so little justice brought upon the perpetrators, these films beg the question: where is justice?

Their answers are not straightforward, and yet somehow they are hopeful.

Angus Gibson, co-director of “La Toma”, calls Vega’s trial a “landmark.” Even if at times holding leaders accountable seems to take one step forward and two steps backward, he tells IPS, “that one step forward is very important.”

Pamela Yates has a similar outlook, maintaining that there are “many ways to look at justice done”.

“I don’t think justice is just done with a trial and a conviction,” she elaborated in an interview with IPS.

She cites the example of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Detained in London to be extradited to Spain, he ultimately never went to trial but “his legacy was destroyed”, Yates says.

Even so, these films prove that obtaining justice – or even raising that issue – is a painstaking process that can span decades. The sluggish pace is due partially to rule of law and evidence, and partially just a matter of political will, says Andrea Holley, deputy director of the HRW Film Festival.

As shown in “La Toma”, the trial against Colonel Vega began in 2008, when the siege and disappearances occurred in 1985. Events in “Granito” have a similar time span.

As a human rights defender and a filmmaker, Yates says she is “used to setbacks”. But every once in a while, “we have really great victories.”

The power of collective change

“La Toma”, Gibson says, is a “celebration of the relentless determination of the families of those disappeared, who… for 25 years didn’t give up.”

The aftermath of the trial – Vega convicted but not yet jailed – is not uplifting, but Gibson insists that “La Toma” is about progress achieved over the course of a quarter century in defending human rights.

Over the years, the human rights defenders have brought about a change in the paradigm of international and domestic justice. They demonstrate what Yates calls the “Granito concept” – the power of collective action.

“Granito” means a grain of sand. “Each of us has to figure out: what is the tiny grain of sand that we’re going to contribute?” Yates explains. Believing that no one person is more heroic than another, she says, is a mindset that can “make it a lot easier for us to act”.

Holley also speaks of the power of collective action. It is a concept, she says, that is not prevalent in the U.S. But elsewhere in the world, it is a way of life, and it manifests itself in the fight for justice.

Human rights is about “lots of people getting together, because we all have different skills,” she tells IPS.

Yates believes that because human rights defenders and activists have worked together and so diligently, particularly in Latin America, they have been able to strengthen the judicial system and rule of law in their countries.

Raw snapshots of suffering as much as of determination, these films are also a testament to the dignity and victories of all those who defended their rights and demanded justice.

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Feb 28 2011 (IPS)

After 35 years of campaigning and legal action by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the first trial over the systematic theft of babies of political prisoners during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship began Monday.

“It was sad and even repugnant to see the apathy and indifference of the accused, who dozed off while the prosecutor’s report was read out,” 91-year-old Rosa Roisinblit, vice president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the organisation that brought the charges, told IPS after the first day of the trial in a Buenos Aires court.

In the dock are former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, 85; the last head of the military junta, Reynaldo Bignone, 83; five prominent army, navy and coast guard officers; and one civilian doctor.

The eight defendants face charges of “taking, retaining, hiding and changing the identities of” 34 children born to political prisoners held in clandestine prisons during the dictatorship.

The opening session of the trial, which could last more than eight months, was attended by representatives of human rights groups, survivors of the “dirty war” against dissidents, and relatives of the victims.

Some 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the seven-year dictatorship, according to human rights organisations.

Videla was brought into court in handcuffs because he is serving a life sentence for other crimes against humanity. But as the prosecutor’s report was read, the former dictator dozed off, with his head on another defendant’s shoulder.

“We have no doubt that there is more than enough evidence to prove that this was a systematic plan to steal children,” said Roisinblit, who hopes the defendants will be sentenced to life in prison.

Roisinblit’s only daughter, Patricia, was eight months pregnant when she was kidnapped in 1978. Patricia’s husband, José Pérez, was also forcibly disappeared, and they left behind a 15-month-old daughter, who was raised by her grandparents.

The toddler, Mariana Pérez, is now 34. It was not until 11 years ago that she found out that her mother had given birth to a baby boy, Guillermo Pérez, in the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), the regime’s largest and most notorious torture centre.

In 2000, the young man was located by the Grandmothers. He had been raised by a civilian employee of the air force, who had taken the baby and changed his name. Roisinblit is now a defendant in the case, accompanied by her two grandchildren.

The Grandmothers emerged in the late 1970s, during the dictatorship, as a breakaway group of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, which was founded to demand that their missing sons and daughters be returned to them alive.

The specific focus of the Grandmothers was to track down their lost grandchildren, who were either born in captivity or kidnapped as babies or toddlers and illegally adopted by military or civilian families after their parents had been forcibly disappeared.

In recent years, grown siblings of the missing children have joined in the task, setting up their own networks to reach out to young people still living under the false identities they were given.

The Grandmothers estimate that some 500 babies or toddlers were stolen during the dictatorship. Some of them were presumably killed.

A total of 102 youngsters have been found. Most of them were raised by military families. But some were adopted in good faith by couples who did not know their history.

Of the 34 cases included in the trial that got underway Monday, some of the young people are still missing and others have regained their real identities. Among those not yet found is the grandson of the president of Grandmothers, Estela de Carlotto.

The youngsters who have been reunited with their biological families include the granddaughter of famous poet Juan Gelman, Macarena Gelman, who was found in 2000; Buenos Aires city lawmaker Juan Cabandié, who was born in ESMA; and human rights activist and national legislator Victoria Donda.

The former junta members were tried in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison. Later, the legal action brought against thousands of lower-ranking members of the security forces sparked army revolts and heavy military pressure against the still-fragile democracy, which prompted the adoption of two amnesty laws in 1986 and 1987. The former military commanders were pardoned and released in 1989 and 1990 by presidential decree.

After the pardons, no member of the military was imprisoned for human rights violations until the late 1990s, when the Grandmothers brought the charges for baby theft — a crime that was not covered by the pardons or the amnesty laws.

Other human rights trials were resumed after the amnesty laws were overturned in 2005 and the pardons were struck down in 2007.

It took 14 years for the baby theft trial against Videla and the other officers to open. “Since we started, there have been many new developments and discoveries,” said Roisinblit.

Besides Videla and Bignone, the defendants in the trial that began Monday are former army general Santiago Riveros, former admirals Antonio Vañek and Rubén Franco, former navy captain Jorge Acosta, former coast guard officer Juan Antonio Azic, and a doctor who worked at ESMA, Jorge Magnacco.

Four others accused in the case have died since the charges were brought: former admiral Emilio Massera, former police chief Juan Sasiain, former coast guard officer Héctor Febres and former army chief Cristino Nicolaides.

At the start of the trial, which is being aired on television, prosecutor Federico Delgado’s report was read out. The document stated that although “births took place” in every clandestine detention and torture centre in the country, there were “strategic centres” that operated as “maternity wards,” complete with birthing rooms and nurseries.

These included ESMA, in the capital, Campo de Mayo, a military base 30 km from downtown Buenos Aires, and at least six other illegal prisons that operated in military and police installations.

Delgado said in his report that this “is not just another case,” but one that reveals “one of the darkest episodes in Argentine history” of “systematic violence by the state.”

Excerpt:

By Ángel Páez
LIMA, Dec 28 2010 (IPS)

A decade after the end of Peru’s 20-year counterinsurgency war was officially declared, the army broke its silence, to give its own version of events.

The report, “In Honour of the Truth”, based on dispatches by officers involved in combat missions, contradicts the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), which issued a lengthy report on the 1980-2000 armed conflict in 2003, based principally on the testimony of survivors and relatives of victims.

According to the CVR, nearly 70,000 people, mainly indigenous peasants, were killed or forcibly disappeared, as victims of the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas or the state security forces.

“We are only giving our account of the events and facts, which are described in the war dispatches,” said General Otto Guibovich, who was army chief until the first week of December, and who ordered the drafting of the report in 2009.

“To write the history of a conflict, anyone knows it is necessary to consult the war dispatches, because that’s where the history is recorded,” he told IPS.

“This is a very professional report that reflects both the version of the officers who took part in the war and of the rank-and-file troops who talk about their experiences in unknown episodes of the armed conflict,” Guibovich said.

“We haven’t invented or changed anything. Everything that is in the report has been documented. This is a contribution to getting the truth out.”

According to the army report, which was officially presented in late November, the massacres of civilians committed by members of the military were the actions of individuals that did not form part of military doctrine, since counterinsurgency manuals do not recommend wiping out entire populations, but winning over hearts and minds instead.

“The human rights violations that regrettably occurred during the war were not a systematic practice, and were neither ordered nor orchestrated by the Peruvian army command, but were the result of absolutely individual decisions and actions,” the report says.

Human rights lawyer Karim Ninaquispe of the Runamasinchiqpaq human rights association (ADEHR), who represents the families of victims of the massacre in the highlands village of Accomarca, one of the worst mass killings committed in the war, said that claim is half-true, because no one in a war issues an order for a massacre of civilians in writing.

“The report collects information in a biased manner that does not necessarily reflect the truth,” she said. “In investigations into these crimes, like the one in Accomarca, the likelihood of finding written orders for killing or disappearing people is small.

“The army does not set down the statements of Telmo Hurtado, who personally led the massacre (of 69 villagers, mainly women and children) in Accomarca, which implicate the military high command and prove that (Hurtado’s) actions were not an ‘excess’ of war, as they are trying to depict,” Ninaquispe said.

Another controversial assertion by “In Honour of the Truth” is that the Army Intelligence Service (SIE) “death squad” known as the Colina Group was never officially part of the army.

The Colina Group carried out the notorious Barrios Altos and La Cantuta massacres in 1991 and 1992, in which a total of 25 civilians were killed. Former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) is serving a 25-year sentence in connection with the killings.

“No detachment, group, unit, department or division under that name exists or existed in the army’s records,” says the report in one of only three paragraphs dedicated to the criminal organisation that acted with the authorisation of the military brass.

In cryptic terms, and without specifically mentioning Fujimori or his security chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — who is also in prison on multiple human rights and corruption charges — the report blames them for the death squad’s actions.

“During the government that was in power between the 1990s and 2000…certain individuals used the authority invested in them to begin a succession of illegal actions that altered the order within and outside of the army…That is how, with a view to achieving objectives designed and planned by themselves, they created irregular bodies,” the report says.

But during the trials in which Fujimori and Montesinos were tried for the activities of the death squad, which killed an estimated 50 people between November 1991 and July 1992, official documents and confessions by members of the military clearly demonstrated that the Colina Group was part of the army.

“The Colina Group formed part of the structure of the army, and was created through the Army Intelligence Directorate (DINTE), in August 1991,” Avelino Guillén, one of the prosecutors in Fujimori’s human rights trial, told IPS.

“There are documents signed by former DINTE chief General Juan Rivero Lazo, ordering that Army Intelligence Service agents and army weapons and installations be put at the disposal of Colonel Fernando Rodríguez, who was in charge of organising the group. This shows that the army’s claim is false,” he added.

“What’s more, former army commander Nicolás Hermoza himself admitted that he held a private meeting with the members of the Colina Group in the main army base, and that he urged them to fulfil their duty. These events cannot be obviated by the army,” Guillén said.

According to the army’s report, 1,067 members of the military died in the armed conflict: 101 officers, 90 noncommissioned officers and technicians, and 876 rank-and-file members.

“During the conflict, 1,022,000 military patrols were carried out, and purported excesses that are now the focus of court cases were reported in only 47 of them,” General Guibovich told IPS. “That is something like 0.004 percent of the total. This is a historical statistic, not an invention. So, we can’t talk about systematic massacres.

“In the report we acknowledge our mistakes and the lessons learned in order to avoid a repeat of regrettable events. As actors and victors in the conflict, we have a right to offer our version,” he said.

Peruvian Judge Diego García Sayán, the president of the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights, commended the army for deciding to provide its account, from its own perspective.

“I highlight the army’s effort to investigate and reflect on a period in which it played a fundamental role,” he told IPS, speaking in a personal capacity. “The report is a contribution to knowing, from the point of view of those who fought in defence of democracy, what happened during the armed conflict whose impact is still being felt.

“One might not necessarily agree with what is said, but the army’s intention of getting its own version out must be underscored,” García Sayán said.

In his view, “keeping silent over dire events does not contribute to the search for the truth. In that sense, the army’s decision to publicly discuss its central role during the conflict poses a challenge to those who believe that the best thing is for nothing to be said, for fear of how history will judge them.”

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