Residents of La Hacienda, in the central department of La Paz in El Salvador, are holding pictures of the four American nuns murdered in 1980 by members of the National Guard, as they attend the commemorations held to mark 35 years of the crime, in December 2015, at the site where it was perpetrated. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 23 2016 (IPS)

The ruling of the highest court to repeal the amnesty law places El Salvador in the dilemma of deciding whether the country should prosecute those who committed serious violations to human rights during the civil war.

It also evidences that, more than two decades after the end of the conflict in 1992, reconciliation is proving elusive in this Central American country with 6.3 million inhabitants.

At the heart of the matter is the pressing need to bring justice to the victims of war crimes while, on the other hand, it implies a huge as well as difficult task, since it will entail opening cases that are more than two decades old, involving evidence that has been tampered or lost, if at all available, and witnesses who have already died.“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians...And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”-- Engracia Echeverría.

Those who oppose opening such cases highlight the precarious condition of the judiciary, which has important inadequacies and is cluttered with a plethora of unsentenced cases.

“I believe Salvadorans as a whole, the population and the political forces are not in favour of this (initiating prosecution), they have turned the page”, pointed out left-wing analyst Salvador Samayoa, one of the signatory parties of the Peace Agreements that put an end to 12 years of civil war.

The 12 years of conflict left a toll of 70,000 casualties and more than 8,000 people missing.

Samayoa added that right now El Salvador has too many problems and should not waste its energy on problems pertaining to the past.

For human rights organizations, finding the truth, serving justice and providing redress prevail over the present circumstances and needs.

“Human rights violators can no longer hide behind the amnesty law, so they should be investigated once and for all”, said Miguel Montenegro, director of the El Salvador Commission of Human Rights, a non-governmental organization, told IPS.

The Supreme Court of Justice, in what is deemed to be a historical ruling, on 13 July ruled that the General Amnesty Act for the Consolidation of, passed in 1993, is unconstitutional, thus opening the door to prosecuting those accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during the conflict.

In its ruling, the Court considered that Articles 2 and 144 of said amnesty law are unconstitutional on the grounds that they violate the rights of the victims of war crimes and crimes against humanity to resort to justice and seek redress.

It further ruled that said crimes are not subject to the statute of limitations and can be tried regardless of the date on which they were perpetrated.

“We have been waiting for this for many years; without this ruling no justice could have been done”, told IPS activist Engracia Echeverría, from the Madeleine Lagadec Center for the Promotion of Defence of Human Rights.

This organization is named after the French nun who was raped and murdered by government troops in April 1989, when they attacked a hospital belonging to the guerrilla group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

The activist stressed that, even though it is true that a lot of information relevant to the cases has been lost, some data can still be obtained by the investigators in the District Attorney’s General Office in charge of criminal prosecution, in case some people wish to instigate an investigation.

The law has been strongly criticized by human rights organizations within and outside the country, since its enactment in March 1993.

Its critics have claimed that it promoted impunity by protecting Army and guerrilla members who committed human rights crimes during the conflict.

However, its advocates have been both retired and active Army members, as well as right-wing politicians and businessmen in the country, since it precisely prevented justice being served to these officers –who are seen as responsible for frustrating the victory of the FMLN.

“All the crimes committed were motivated by an attack by the guerrilla”, claimed retired general Humberto Corado, former Defence Minister between 1993 and 1995.

The now repealed act was passed only five days after the Truth Commission, mandated by the United Nations to investigate human rights abuses during the civil war, had published its report with 32 specific cases, 20 of which were perpetrated by the Army and 12 by insurgents.

Among those cases were the murders of archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in March 1980; four American nuns in December of the same year, and hundreds of peasants who were shot in several massacres, like those which took place in El Mozote in December 1981 and in Sumpul in May 1980.

Also, six Jesuit priests and a woman and her daughter were murdered in November 1989, a case already being investigated by a Spanish court.

The Truth Commission has also pointed to some FMLN commanders, holding them accountable for the death of several mayors who were targeted for being considered part of the government’s counter-insurgent strategy.

Some of those insurgents are now government officials, as is the case with director of Civil Protection Jorge Meléndez.

Before taking office in 2009, the FMLN, now turned into a political party, strongly criticized the amnesty law and advocated in favour of its repeal, on the grounds that it promoted impunity.

But, after winning the presidential elections that year with Mauricio Funes, it changed its stance and no longer favoured the repeal of the law. Since 2014, the country has been governed by former FMLN commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén.

In fact, the governing party has deemed the repeal as “reckless”, with the President stating on July 15 that Court magistrates “were not considering the effects it could have on the already fragile coexistence” and urging to take the ruling “with responsibility and maturity while taking into account the best interests of the country”.

After the law was ruled unconstitutional, the media were saturated with opinions and analyses on the subject, most of them pointing out the risk of the country being destabilized and on the verge of chaos due to the countless number of lawsuits that could pile up in the courts dealing with war cases.

“To those people who fiercely claim that magistrates have turned the country into a hell we must respond that hell is what the victims and their families have gone –and continue to go- through”, reads the release written on July 15 by the officials of the José Simeón Cañas Central American University, where the murdered Jesuits lived and worked in 1989.

Furthermore, the release states that most of the victims demand to be listened to, in order to find out the truth and be able to put a face on those they need to forgive.

In fact, at the heart of the debate lies the idea of restorative justice as a mechanism to find out the truth and heal the victims’ wounds, without necessarily implying taking perpetrators to jail.

“We do not want them to be jailed for a long period of time, we want perpetrators to tell us why they killed them, given that they knew they were civilians”, stressed Echeverría.

“And we want them to apologize, we want someone to be held accountable for these deaths”, she added.

In the case of Montenegro, himself a victim of illegal arrest and tortures in 1986, he said that it is necessary to investigate those who committed war crimes in order to find out the truth but, even more importantly, as a way for the country to find the most suitable mechanisms to forgive and provide redress”.

However, general Corado said that restorative justice was “hypocritical, its only aim being to seek revenge”.

In the aftermath of a recent high-profile U.S. murder trial, several new studies have found that the controversial self-defence law at the heart of the case, known as “Stand Your Ground”, is being applied differently depending on defendants’ ethnicity.

The new statistics on this racial disparity have come out as the Stand Your Ground laws, which have been passed in nearly three-dozen U.S. states, have come under review at the state and federal level.“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down.” -- Paul Graham of the Centre for Community Change

That includes in Florida, the location of the widely viewed trial of a “neighbourhood watch” volunteer named George Zimmerman, who was accused of the murder of an unarmed black teenager named Trayvon Martin.

Zimmerman’s acquittal last month, explained by some jurors as being based largely on the legality of his actions under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, outraged broad sections of the country.

The state-level “self-defence” statute was first introduced in 2005, and allows someone who feels threatened to use deadly force against an attacker without first trying to get away. For this reason, the law is also known as “No Duty to Retreat” and, by critics, “Shoot First”, and has been increasingly criticised for escalating rather than mitigating conflict.

Yet according to a new study by the Urban Institute, the application of this law has varied significantly according to the ethnic make-up of both the attacker and the victim.

The shooting of a black person by a white person, for instance, has been found to be justifiable under Stand Your Ground 17 percent of the time. On the other hand, the shooting of a white person by a black person has been found justifiable just slightly over one percent of the time.

In the states that have no such statute, white-on-black shootings were found to be justified about nine percent of the time.

“Stand Your Ground clearly has racial implication in communities of colour and black neighbourhoods,” Paul Graham, with the Ohio Organising Collaborative at the Centre for Community Change, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“When you have this kind of disparity and this kind of inequality, it is a devastating blow for all communities.”

Another recent investigation, carried out by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, looked at some 200 Stand Your Ground cases and found that defendants who had killed a black victim went free 73 percent of the time. Yet defendants who killed a white victim went free just 59 percent of the time.

Since 2005, 31 other states have followed Florida’s lead in passing similar laws, while several others are reportedly considering similar legislation. On average, so-called justifiable homicide rose by about eight percent in states with Stand Your Ground laws, amounting to about 600 additional killings.

“We need to work towards building safe communities where all kids can grow up in prosperous environments and not be worried about being gunned down,” Graham says.

Under fire

The Stand Your Ground laws were strongly pushed for by a few high-profile gun-rights groups here, in particular the National Rifle Association (NRA). In the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin verdict, these groups have doubled down their support for these laws, including by suggesting that minorities stand the most to gain from such self-defence legislation.

“We all know why it’s come under fire right now, because of that one case in Florida, but that’s just a ruse for attacking self-defence in general,” Erich Pratt, communications director for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“[Changing Stand Your Ground] would adversely affect minorities, if we say that they are not going to be able to defend themselves when they fear for their lives. That’s really what we are talking about.”

Indeed, the Tampa Bay Times study also found that black gunshot victims were more likely than whites to be carrying a weapon when they were killed and were more likely to be committing a crime, such as burglary, at the time of any altercation.

In addition, while blacks make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, they constitute some 55 percent of its homicide victims, with the majority of those murders committed by other blacks.

Further, black youths have had a high success rate in arguing for justified homicide under Stand Your Ground law in “black-on-black” crimes.

However, there remains significant disparity in the success rate of justified homicide between white defendants and black defendants in white-on-black crimes.

“The bottom line is that it’s really easy for juries to accept that whites had to defend themselves against persons of colour,” said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor and civil rights law expert at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

This evident racial disparity is now strengthening national calls for investigations into Stand Your Ground laws and their application on the ground.

“[I]f a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario … both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different,” President Barack Obama said last month in unusually personal remarks following the Zimmerman acquittal.

“And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these Stand Your Ground laws, I’d just ask people to consider, if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman who had followed him in a car because he felt threatened?”

He continued: “And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, then it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.”

Since then, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a government body, has started an investigation into these laws, while the Senate Judiciary Committee has also stated it would hold hearings on Stand Your Ground in September.

The Florida State Legislature will also be taking another look at the effect, benefits and consequences of the law this fall, the first such move it has made. Still, supporters are girding for a fight.

“I don’t expect that the legislature’s going to move one damn comma,” Matt Gaetz, chairperson of the Florida Criminal Justice Subcommittee and a supporter of the law, said recently. “If the members of the committee support changes, they will be proposed, but nobody can count on my vote.”

Honduran society remains shocked at the tragic fate of Aníbal Barrow, a journalist and university professor whose body was dismembered and scattered around a lake in Villanueva, in the northern province of Cortés.

Barrow, 65, was kidnapped on Jun. 24 in the city of San Pedro Sula, the provincial capital, 450 km north of Tegucigalpa, as he was riding in his car with family members and a driver, who were released unharmed by the unidentified gunmen

The car was found several hours later, with a bullet hole in one of the doors, and traces of blood inside. Barrow’s remains were discovered 15 days later in a swamp next to a lagoon near the community of Siboney, in Villanueva.

Social analysts say the murder indicates that Honduras has entered a phase of “high-profile violence,” and that reporters are the favourite victims in order to spread terror. In the past three and a half years, 29 media workers have been killed on the job.

“We are experiencing a kind of violence that was not seen 15 years ago. The way criminals are operating has changed. This action is more like a message from organised crime in the 21st century – a long way from the banditry seen in Honduras in the 19th century,” historian and social analyst Rolando Sierra told IPS.

“This is high-profile violence. The victims are not ordinary citizens, but well-known journalists, evangelical preachers, lawyers or human rights activists; in other words, the violence is spreading towards sectors that have a greater impact on society,” he said.

Stunned, in broken voices, the reporters who covered the recovery of Barrow’s remains told how his clothes and personal documents were found buried, and later on, parts of his body were discovered wrapped in bags while other parts were found in a different spot, charred from burning.

“It was a cruel and abominable deed,” said Human Rights Commissioner Ramón Custodio.

Journalist Jorge Oseguera, a friend of Barrow’s and a correspondent for the HRN radio station in Tegucigalpa, said he found the “macabre act” unbelievable.

Choking on his words, Oseguera said, “we who work in the media have become used to violence, but when it affects someone close to us, a colleague and friend, all we can say is that these killing machines have no mercy for anyone.”

The murdered journalist was host of a popular morning talk show on the Globo TV channel in San Pedro Sula, where he also taught mathematics at the National Autonomous University of Honduras.

Four suspects have been arrested, but 10 people have been implicated by a protected witness who was one of the hired killers, said the head prosecutor at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Roberto Ramírez. The motive for the murder has not been revealed.

Honduras has an average of 20 murders a day and its annual homicide rate in 2012 was 85.5 per 100,000 population, nearly 10 times the global median rate of 8.8 per 100,000. It is considered one of the most violent countries in the world.

The security ministry has announced it aims to reduce the homicide rate to 80 per 100,000 population this year. However, the authorities have not spoken to the press for two months, limiting their information to official communiqués that do not give murder figures.

The National Human Rights Commission has recorded 36 journalists murdered since 2002. But 29 of the killings have taken place since rightwing President Porfirio Lobo took office in January 2010.

Impunity is the common factor in these cases, only one of which has led to a firm sentence. Prosecutor Ramírez, however, is hopeful that Barrow’s grisly murder will be solved soon, due to the abundance of evidence.

Honduras is regarded as an especially high-risk country for journalists. Killings of reporters are concentrated in 10 of the 18 provinces, most of them known for drug trafficking problems.

In the view of journalist and university professor Miguel Martínez, “the viciousness of Barrow’s murder takes us back to the 1990s in Colombia, or to Mexico today. And it indicates the need for a debate on organised crime and extradition.”

“There is plenty to discuss. It would seem that this (murder) was a message sent by organised crime, because of its characteristics, but the time has come for the press to know how to behave in the face of the coming avalanche, and what safety protocols should be used,” Martínez said.

Bertha Oliva, a prominent Honduran human rights activist, told IPS the murder showed “disrespect for life, for freedom of expression, and for those who are the link between society and the state. We have to get to the bottom of this and find out why he was killed.”

Half a million beans, two-thirds black and one-third white, reflect the ethnic makeup of one decade of murder victims in Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Dec 5 2012 (IPS)

Human rights activists in Brazil mobilised Wednesday to draw attention to the fact that half a million people have been murdered in this South American country in the past 10 years.

On Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, 500,000 beans were scattered on the national flag and on 40-metre-long strips of red carpet,, in a protest organised by the local NGO Rio de Paz.

Hundreds of passersby stopped to gaze at the symbolic rivers of blood, which ran up to a wooden cross and a sign reading: “Brazil: half a million murders in 10 years. SHAME.”

“We want a structural reform and the professionalisation of the police, who are plagued with serious corruption problems,” the president of Rio de Paz, Antônio Carlos Costa, told IPS.

“We are also calling for the transformation of the penitentiary system, because inmates live in subhuman conditions, without any prospects for reintegration in society. And we want every state to set homicide reduction targets,” he added.

The organisation has held peaceful protests in large cities since 2007. This week it organised demonstrations in Brasilia, the federal capital, and São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, after the non-government Sangari Institute released a Map of Violence in Brazil, with the latest statistics.

The activist said “157 murders a day were committed between 2001 and 2010. In 2010 alone, 57,000 people were killed. We want the statistics on crimes and violent deaths to be released in a timely, transparent manner in all states” in this country of 194 million people.

According to Rio de Paz, those most at risk of being murdered are poor black men between the ages of 18 and 25

“The number of homicides in the black population, which accounts for two-thirds of all of the deaths, is growing. Public policies for poor communities are needed. It is impossible to achieve peace in a consumer society that is as unequal as ours,” Costa said.

The Map of Violence, subtitled “New patterns of homicidal violence in Brazil”, shows that murders among the white population have fallen steadily since 2002, while they have risen steadily among blacks.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, 10 Rio de Paz activists arrived at Copacabana beach to set up the installation.

“The red carpets represent blood, and of the 500,000 beans, two-thirds are black and one-third are white, representing the proportional ethnic makeup of the victims. The idea is to give people a chance to visualise the number of people killed,” Costa said.

He said he believes the years of mobilisation and protests have helped bring about some positive changes.

The overcrowded prisons of the civil police were closed, and the Rio de Janeiro state government, which did not have targets for reducing the homicide rate, now includes such objectives in public security planning, he said.

Another change, he said, is represented by the “Police Pacification Units” (UPPs), permanent community policing bodies that are set up in favelas or slums previously dominated by drug trafficking groups. The constant police presence is accompanied by an increase in spending in the areas of health, sanitation, housing and education.

“We had long been calling for a peaceful ‘occupation’ (of the favelas),” Costa said. “There have been improvements, but they have been smaller than we had dreamed. We wanted an in-depth reform of the police and the work they do.”

According to surveys by the Institute of Applied Economic Research, nearly 80 percent of respondents are afraid of being murdered.

The overall figure of half a million murder victims is similar to, or even higher, than the number of victims in some countries at war or caught up in internal armed conflicts.

The civil war in Somalia, which broke out in 1991 and is still raging, has left a death toll of around 500,000, according to different sources. And just over 200,000 people were killed during Indonesia’s 25-year military occupation of East Timor.

The civil war in Angola left some 500,000 victims in 27 years (1975-2002), according to some sources.

The new statistics are not surprising, because they reflect the state of public security in Brazil and Latin America, criminal attorney Gustavo Teixeira, a member of the human rights commission of the Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros, told IPS.

“The most frightening thing is that many deaths occurred in confrontations with the police and other state agents,” he said.

“We have a construct of public security that emerged in the time of the (colonial) empire and during dictatorships, and which took on the shape of an armed military police. This is a sentiment that takes years to build.”

In his view, elite security forces armed to the teeth should not be the rule when it comes to patrolling the streets, to avoid accidents like stray bullets, which kill many people, for one thing.

A reform of Brazil’s penal code, which dates back to 1940, has been the focus of heated debate. But it would not necessarily cut crime rates, Teixeira said.

If all of the existing criminal laws were actually enforced, things would be different, he added.

“If our constitution and criminal legislation were enforced, our reality would be more humane,” Teixeira argued. “It ‘s not about creating more laws, but about putting in practice the existing ones, and equipping the judicial police, which are civil, federal forces, with the means to carry out quality investigations.”

He added that higher quality police work would give a major boost to the judiciary’s ability to hold effective trials.

The sensation of impunity arises from the delays in trials, he said. “The justice system moves at a snail’s pace because of a shortage of judges, but also because of the poor quality police investigations – not because of the lack of laws. Increasing sentences to 40 or 50 years is not going to fix things,” Teixeira maintained.

“Brazil has sentences varying from 12 to 30 years for crimes against life. If the threat of the death penalty were enough to inhibit crimes, there would be no more homicides in the United States.”