Ernesto “Che” Guevara delivers his famous speech on Aug. 8, 1961 at the Inter-American Economic and Social Council in the Uruguayan city of Punta del Este. This was the last continental forum Cuba attended before being excluded until the Seventh Summit of the Americas, to be held Apr. 10-11 in Panama City. Credit: Public domain

By Patricia Grogg
HAVANA, Apr 8 2015 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama was only four days old when Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara publicly castigated the United States’ policy of hostility toward Cuba at an inter-American summit, reiterated then Prime Minister Fidel Castro’s willingness to resolve differences through dialogue on an equal footing, and held secret conversations with a Washington envoy.

More than half a century later, the U.S. president accepted the challenge of pursuing rapprochement with the Caribbean island country, overcoming conflicts, mutual resentment and tensions, and initiating the still precarious process of normalising bilateral relations.

On Apr. 10 and 11 he will come face to face with Cuban President Raúl Castro at the Seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama City.

Guevara addressed the meeting of the Inter-American Economic and Social Council of the Organisation of American States (OAS) on Aug. 8, 1961, on behalf of the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, his leader and comrade-in-arms in the guerrilla revolt that deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959.

The summit meeting, held in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este, was the last time Cuba participated in an inter-American forum, as the island nation was suspended from the OAS in January 1962, a measure that was officially lifted in June 2009.

At the Punta del Este conference the United States formally established the Alliance for Progress, launched by U.S. President John Kennedy (1961-1963) months earlier to counteract the influence of the Cuban Revolution in the region, after his government’s frustrated attempt to invade the island in April 1961.

Behind the scenes of that conference the Argentine-born Guevara held a confidential meeting in Montevideo on Aug. 17 with Richard Goodwin, Kennedy’s special counsel for Latin American affairs, regarded by Cuban media as the first high level contact between authorities of both countries since bilateral relations had been broken off in January 1961.

Five days later the White House issued a statement describing the meeting as “a casual cocktail party conversation in which Goodwin restricted himself to listening.”

Since then there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to secure closer ties, until after Fidel Castro’s retirement in 2006, his brother and successor Raúl together with Obama surprised the world on Dec. 17, 2014 with their announcement of the joint decision to restore diplomatic relations.

Hence a lot of attention in the run-up to the Seventh Summit of the Americas is being focused on the two heads of state. It will be Obama’s third attendance at a Summit of the Americas, while Cuba has been excluded until now. Cuba’s presence at this Summit is the result of a diplomatic strategy that led to unanimous support from countries of the region for its reinstatement, and that brought about the thaw with the United States.

Cuban political scientist and essayist Carlos Alzugaray regards the growing autonomy of the region as a factor in the process. “It could be said that the United States has lost the initiative and its room for manoeuvre” south of the Rio Bravo or Rio Grande, he told IPS.

After the first Summit of the Americas which took place in 1994 in the U.S. city of Miami, successive meetings revealed that Latin America was increasingly unwilling to accept U.S. dominance. This came to a head with the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a star concept at early summits but which fell out of favour in just over a decade.

It was at the Fourth Summit, in the Argentine city of Mar del Plata in 2005, that the host country and other South American nations rejected attempts by the United States and Canada to impose the FTAA. Leftwing or centre-left leaders had come to power in the south of the hemisphere, like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (1999-2013), who called on the Mar del Plata meeting “to be the tomb of FTAA.”

As a regional counter-proposal, in December 2004 Chávez and Fidel Castro launched what is now known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), made up of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Grenada and Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Three years later, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was founded in order to encourage integration, social and human development, equity and inclusion in the region. Its members are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.

All the countries of the Americas except the United States and Canada came together in 2011 to form the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). This forum reinstated Cuba as a full member of the regional concert of nations, in the absence of Canada and the United States.

While Cuba basks in this new international context, Alzugaray itemised internal changes put in motion by the government of Raúl Castro since 2008 to modernise the socialist development model, as well as “overall changes arising from the growing presence in the region of China, above all, and also of Russia.”

But the Panama Summit, convened formally to satisfy the region’s demand to end Cuba’s ostracism from the bloc of the 35 independent states in the Americas, and to take a significant step toward normalisation of relations between Havana and Washington, may need to shift its attention to the crisis between the United States and Venezuela.

Obama issued an executive order on Mar. 9 declaring that the situation in Venezuela, governed by socialist President Nicolás Maduro, is a “threat to the national security of the United States,” and he imposed several of the country’s senior officials. The measure met with the disapproval of the majority of Latin American countries.

“No country has the right to judge the conduct of another and even less to impose sanctions and penalties on their own,” said UNASUR Secretary General Ernesto Samper, a former president of Colombia. In his view, unilateralism will prevent Washington from maintaining good relations with Latin America.

“Under these circumstances, it will be very difficult for the United States to develop a strategy in the region that takes into account Latin American and Caribbean interests and allows for natural adaptation to change,” said Alzugaray.

In his opinion, Obama has made “a serious mistake” in the run-up to a meeting that was supposed to celebrate hemispheric reunion. “The region will overwhelmingly support Cuba and Venezuela,” Alzugaray predicted.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

St. Vincent and the Grenadines has installed 750 kilowatt hours of photovoltaic panels, which it says reduced its carbon emissions by 800 tonnes annually. Credit: Kenton X. Chance/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ST. JOHN, Antigua, Mar 26 2015 (IPS)

Richard Huber is chief of the Sustainable Communities, Hazard Risk, and Climate Change Section of the Department of Sustainable Development of the Organisation of American States (OAS). Its objective? Foster resilient, more sustainable cities – reducing, for example, consumption of water and energy – while simultaneously improving the quality of life and the participation of the community.

On a recent visit to Antigua, IPS correspondent Desmond Brown sat down with Huber to discuss renewable energy and energy efficiency. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What is a sustainable country?

A: A sustainable country is a country that is significantly trying to limit its CO2 emissions. For example, Costa Rica is trying to become the first zero emissions country, and they are doing that by having a majority of their power from renewable sources, most notably hydroelectric but also wind and solar and biofuels.

So a sustainable country in the element of energy efficiency and renewable energy would be a country that is planting lots of trees to sequester carbon, looking after its coral reefs and its mangrove ecosystems, its critical ecosystems through a national parks and protected areas progamme and being very, very energy efficient with a view towards, let’s say by 2020, being a country that has zero carbon emissions.

Q: How can small island states in the Caribbean be sustainable environmentally?

A: The first thing you would want to do is to have a very strong national parks and protected areas programme, as we are working on right now through the Northeast Management Marine Area as well as Cades Bay in the south, two very large parks which would encompass almost 40 percent of the marine environment.

In fact, there is a Caribbean Challenge Initiative throughout many Caribbean countries that began through the prime minister of Grenada where many, many Caribbean countries are committing to having 20 percent of their marine areas well managed from a protection and conservation point of view by the year 2020.

So protect your biodiversity. It’s a very good defence against hurricanes and other storm surges that occur. Those countries that in fact looked after their mangrove ecosystems, their freshwater herbaceous swamps, their marshes in general, were countries that had much less impact from the tsunami in the South Pacific. So protect your ecosystems.

Second of all, be highly energy efficient. Try to encourage driving hybrid cars, fuel efficient cars and have a very good sustainable transport programme. Public transportation actually is a great poverty alleviation equaliser, helping the poor get to work in comfort and quickly. So be energy efficient, protect your biodiversity would be the two key things towards being a sustainable country.

Q: What examples of environmental sustainability have you observed during your visit to Antigua?

A: I’ve been travelling around with Ruth Spencer, who is the consultant who’s working on having up to 10 solar power photovoltaic electricity programmes in community centres, in churches and other outreach facilities. We went to the Precision Project the other day which not only has 19 kilowatts of photovoltaic, which I think is more electricity than they need, and they are further adding back to the grid. So that is less than zero carbon because they are actually producing more electricity than they use.

There is [also] tremendous opportunity for Antigua to grow all its crops [using hydroponics]. The problem with, for example, the tourism industry is that they depend on supply being there when they need it so that is the kind of thing that hydroponics and some of these new technologies in more efficient agriculture and sustainable agriculture could give. The idea would be to make Antigua and Barbuda food sufficient by the year 2020.

Q: Could you give me examples of OAS projects in the Caribbean on this topic?

A: This is the second phase of the sustainable communities in Central America and the Caribbean Project. So the first one we had 14 projects and this one we have 10 projects. So let me give you a couple of examples in the Caribbean. In Dominican Republic we are supporting hydroelectric power, mini hydro plants and also training and outreach on showing the people who live along river basins that they could have a mini hydro powering the community.

Another project which is very interesting is the Grenada project whereby 90 percent of the poultry in Grenada was imported. The reason it’s imported is because the cost of feed is so expensive. So there was a project where the local sanitary landfill gave the project land and the person is going by the fish market and picking up all the fish waste which was thrown into the bay earlier but he is now picking that up and taking it to the sanitary landfill where he has a plant where he cooks the fish waste and other waste and turns it into poultry feed.

So now instead of being 90 percent of the poultry being imported it’s now down to 70 percent and not only that, his energy source is used engine oil.

Q: What advice would you give to Caribbean countries on the subject of renewable energy and energy efficiency?

A: The first thing that needs to happen is there needs to be an enabling environment created on order to introduce renewables, in this case mostly solar and wind. Right around this site here in Jabberwock Beach there are four historic windmills which are now in ruins, but the fact of the matter is there is a lot of wind that blew here traditionally and still blows and so these ridges along here and along the beach would be excellent sites for having wind power.

Also lots of land for example around the airport, a tremendous amount of sun and land which has high security where you could begin to have solar panels. We’re beginning to have solar panel projects in the United States which are 150 megawatts which I think is more than all of Antigua and Barbuda uses.

So these larger plants particularly in areas which have security already established, like around the airport you can introduce larger scale photovoltaic projects that would feed into the grid and over time you begin to phase out the diesel generation system that supplies 100 percent or almost 99 percent of Antigua and Barbuda’s power today.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

You can watch the full interview below:

Q&A from IPS News on Vimeo.

Luis Almagro, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Uruguay, addresses the opening of the 16th session of the Human Rights Council, in Geneva, Switzerland. Credit: UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferré

By Luis Almagro
MONTEVIDEO, Jan 18 2015 (IPS)

Two decades after the first Summit of the Americas, a lot has changed in the continent and it has been for the good. Today, a renewed hemispheric dialogue without exclusions is possible.

Back in the mid-1990s, at the time of the Miami summit, it was the time of imported consensus, models of economic and social development exclusively based on the market and its supposed perfect allocation of resources through the invisible hand.Today, all voices count, and if they do not, they will have to. The powerful club of the G8 turned into the G20; still, this is not enough to embrace the new reality of our hemisphere.

Hidden under a development rationale, the greatest wave of privatisation and deregulation took over the continent. The role of the state was reduced to be a facilitator of a process based on the principle of survival of the fittest. Solidarity, equity and justice were all values from the past and poverty a necessary collateral damage.

However, these values were in the top of the minds of the people of the hemisphere, who turned their backs to these policies and instead during the past 15 years, have forcefully supported the alternatives that combine economic growth with social inclusion, broadening opportunities for all citizens.

Economic growth went hand in hand with social inclusion, adding millions to the middle class – which today accounts for 34 percent of Latin Americans – surpassing the number of poor for the first time in the history.

If this was possible it was because governments added to the invisible hand of the market, the very visible hand of the state.

And this took place within the context of the worst post war global financial crisis that led to an unprecedented recession in the United States and Europe, which the latter still strives to leave behind.

Growth with social equity turned out to be the new regional consensus.

Today, this binds the region together.

Today, conditions are present to set up a more realistic cooperation in the Americas, where all members could partner in equal conditions, from the most powerful to the smallest islands in the Caribbean.

Today, nobody holds the monopoly over what works or does not; neither can anybody impose models because the established truths have crashed against reality. While in the 1990s social exclusion in domestic policies and voice exclusion at the international level were two sides of the same token, this in not any longer acceptable.

Today, all voices count, and if they do not, they will have to. The powerful club of the G8 turned into the G20; still, this is not enough to embrace the new reality of our hemisphere.

To the existing bodies, the region has added in this past decade the dynamic UNASUR in South America and CELAC in the Americas, thus leaving the OAS as the only place for dialogue among all countries of the Americas, whether large, medium, small, powerful or vulnerable.

But, governmental or inter-governmental actors by themselves are not the only answer to the problems of today´s world. Non-state actors of the non-governmental world, the private sector, trade unions and social organisations must be part of the process.

Leaders need to interpret the time in order to generate an agenda for progress, but progress that is tangible for people, for citizens, to whom we are accountable to.

Therefore, in a more uncertain international economic environment, we should focus on maintaining and expanding our social achievements and a new spirit of cooperation in the Americas can be instrumental for that.

The Summit of the Americas in Panama, in April 2015, may be the beginning of this new process of confidence building, where all countries can feel they can benefit from a cooperative agenda. This will be a historical moment because this time there will be no exclusions.

The recent good news on the diplomatic front related to the normalisation of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Cuba and the participation of Cuba in the Summit represent an additional positive signal. Panama deserves the support of the entire region before and during the Summit.

This will be a great opportunity to strengthen democratic values, the defence of human rights, institutional transparency and individual freedoms together with a practical agenda for cooperation for shared prosperity in the Americas.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

By Ignacio Ramonet
PARIS, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

In ‘Hard Choices’, her new book about her experiences as Secretary of State during U.S. President Barack Obama’s first term (2008-2012), Hillary Clinton writes something of prime importance about Cuba – she says that late in her term in office she urged Obama to reconsider the U.S. embargo against Cuba.
“It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”

Ignacio Ramonet

For the first time a U.S. presidential hopeful has publicly stated that the blockade imposed by Washington on the Caribbean island – for over fifty years! – is “not achieving its goals”.

In other words, the embargo has not subdued this small country in spite of the amount of unjust suffering it has caused for its population.

The essence of Hillary Clinton’s declaration is two-fold: first, it breaks the taboo on saying out loud what everyone in Washington has known for some time: that the blockade is useless.

And second, and more importantly, her statement comes at the moment when her campaign is being launched for the Democratic Party nomination to the White House; that is, she is not afraid that her affirmation – in opposition to all of Washington policies towards Cuba over the past half century – could be a handicap in the electoral battle she faces up until the elections of November 8, 2016.

If Hillary Clinton takes such an unorthodox position, it is because she is aware that public opinion on this topic in the United States has changed, and that the majority today is in favour of ending the blockade.

Indeed, a nationwide poll in February 2014 by the Atlantic Council research institute, found that 56 percent of U.S. respondents favour changing Washington’s policy towards Cuba.

Contrary to hopes that arose after U.S. President Barack Obama was elected in November 2008, Washington’s relations with Cuba have remained on ice. Just after taking office in April 2009, Obama announced at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago that the United States was seeking a “new beginning” in its relationship with Havana.

“Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments”
But he made only limited, largely symbolic, gestures, permitting Cuban Americans to visit the island and send small amounts of money to their families. Later, in 2011, he adopted further measures but these were still of limited scope: he allowed religious groups and students to travel to Cuba, authorised U.S. airports to handle charter flights to Cuba, and increased the limit on remittances Cuban Americans could send to their relatives. Not much in comparison with the huge disputes that divide the two countries.

One of their differences – the case of ‘the Cuban Five’ – has caused an international commotion. Five Cuban intelligence agents, engaged in the prevention of anti-Cuban terrorism, were detained in Florida in September 1998. They were convicted in a Cold War style political trial – a real courtroom lynching – and sentenced to long prison terms. The injustice of their treatment is clear from the fact that they had committed no acts of violence, nor spied on U.S. security secrets, but had risked their lives to prevent attacks and save human lives.

Washington is inconsistent when it claims to combat “international terrorism” yet continues to back anti-Cuban terrorist groups on its own soil. For instance, in April 2014 the Cuban authorities arrested another group of four people arriving from Florida with intent to commit attacks.

Washington’s attitude towards Cuba is still reactionary, typical of the Cold War era which has been over for a quarter of a century. Its archaic stance is in sharp contrast to the position taken by other governments.

For example, all Latin American and Caribbean states, whatever their political orientations, have recently improved relations with Cuba and denounced the blockade. This was proved in January at the summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) held in Havana.

Washington was snubbed again in May at the general assembly of the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, when Latin American countries, in a fresh show of solidarity with Havana, threatened to boycott the next Summit of the Americas scheduled for 2015 in Panama if Cuba is not invited.

For its part, the European Union decided in February to abandon its so-called “common position” on relations with Cuba, imposed in 1996 by José María Aznar, the then Spanish prime minister, to “punish” Cuba by rejecting all dialogue with the island’s authorities. But the policy proved fruitless and it failed. Brussels has recognised this and has reinstated negotiations with Havana to reach agreement on political and economic cooperation.

The European Union is Cuba’s biggest foreign investor and its second most important trading partner. Reflecting this new spirit, several European ministers have already visited the island.

In contrast with Washington’s immobility, many European foreign ministries are observing with interest the changes President Raúl Castro is promoting in Cuba in the framework of “updating the economic model” and the line taken at the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in 2011, which are highly significant transformations of the economy and society. The recent creation of a special development zone around the port of Mariel, and the approval in March of a new foreign investment law, in particular, have excited great international interest.

The Cuban authorities see no contradiction between socialism and private enterprise. According to some estimates, private enterprise, including foreign investment, could expand to take up 40 percent of the country’s economy, while 60 percent would remain in the hands of the state and the public sector.

The goal is for the Cuban economy to be increasingly compatible with those of its major partners in the region (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) where public and private sectors, the state and markets coexist.

All these changes highlight by contrast the stubbornness of the U.S. Administration, painted into the corner of an ideological position dating from another era, even if, as we have seen, more voices are raised day by day in Washington to acknowledge the error of this position and the need to abandon international isolation in terms of its Cuban policy. Will President Obama listen to them? (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

A tunnel in Chile's El Teniente mine, the world's largest underground mine. Credit: Marianela Jarroud/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 1 2013 (IPS)

Civil society groups from throughout Latin America are urging “home countries” to take greater responsibility for the actions of their companies abroad, particularly those in the extractives industry.

“We would like to be able to influence policies that are being developed around the supply of minerals for various purposes – a lot of these policies are being framed as having to do with national defence, so there’s practically a guarantee that these reserves must continue to be supplied,” Pedro Landa, with the Honduran Centre for Collective Development, told IPS in Spanish."It is not just the host states that have a responsibility in this regard, but also the home states, where these companies come from.” -- Katya Salazar

“But that’s making these companies more aggressive in our countries … Oftentimes these companies are more powerful than the governments, and can simply buy off officials.”

Several groups are currently in Washington to speak on the topic with U.S. lawmakers and to testify before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the primary rights forum of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which has its headquarters here.

The groups are warning that legal frameworks throughout Latin American countries have been overhauled in recent years such that, today, pro-business policies have made it extremely difficult for local communities to oppose mining proposals in their vicinities.

“Honduras is considered one of the most violent countries in the world, with a homicide rate of 86 per 100,000 residents, but this level of crime is very closely linked to the conditions in our country that also have to do with the extractive model,” Landa told a briefing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

“In countries like Honduras, where there is a lot of social upheaval, it’s easy to pass laws that facilitate the extractive industries, especially mining. But these laws have been harmonised to be in concordance with the free trade agreements that our countries have signed … while many of the proposals have been put forth or influenced by the transnational corporations themselves.”

The United States in particular passed a slew of free trade agreements with Latin American countries during the 1990s, during the process of which the U.S. government mandated labour and trade concessions that, in the eyes of many, gave inordinate power to multinational mining companies. Landa says that the result today is a lack of adequate mechanisms by which local communities can oppose these industries – in any Latin American country.

In part because of trade agreements but also in part because of high global prices for minerals, Latin America has become a hotbed of extractives speculation in recent years. Simultaneously, local communities have seen their legal rights to oppose these projects curtailed.

“Since the 1990s in the region there’s been an expansion of investment in the natural resource sector, as part of the globalisation process and part of the privatisation of state-owned industries, and also linked to the growing global power of China and other developing countries,” Keith Slack, extractive industries global programme manager for Oxfam America, a humanitarian group and host of Thursday’s briefing, told IPS.

“Quite directly related to this increased interest has come this increased level of conflict, protest and social disruption.”

Much of this disruption is taking place in indigenous lands, compounding a broader issue in many countries where indigenous communities continue to struggle for agency and rights afforded other citizens. At the moment, most multinational companies do not appear to be adequately prepared for this complexity.

According to a new report released Wednesday by First Peoples, an advocacy group, just 5 of 52 U.S. companies surveyed had policies in place for “productively engaging” with indigenous communities. Indeed, some communities are feeling pressure from multiple companies interested in extraction projects.

“We’re noticing a broad trend in which companies operating in close proximity acquire ‘spillover’ risk from one another,” Nick Pelosi, a grants assistant with First Peoples, told IPS, pointing to such a situation around Neuquen, in Argentina. “In such scenarios, the positive policies and practices of individual companies are overwhelmed by the cumulative negative impacts of all companies in the region.”

New paradigm

Activists are now particularly focusing on trying to strengthen opportunities for local communities in Latin America and elsewhere to pursue judicial remedies for human rights violations in mining companies’ home countries. On Friday, this “home state” responsibility will be discussed for the first time before the IACHR, and proponents suggest that it could offer a new paradigm within international law.

“The Inter-American system and the United Nations have been focused on the responsibility of host states, where these violations happen,” Katya Salazar, executive director of the Due Process of Law Foundation, a Washington watchdog group, told the hearing on Thursday. “But we want to propose something new: it is not just the host states that have a responsibility in this regard, but also the home states, where these companies come from.”

Today, some 60 percent of the foreign mining companies in Latin America are Canadian, and as such last year Salazar and others requested an IACHR hearing specifically on home state responsibility for Canada. Although that hearing was turned down, Salazar notes that Friday’s more general hearing on the topic should be able to lead to a new discussion.

“Ten years ago we didn’t discuss women’s rights with the commission, while five years ago we didn’t discuss indigenous rights – but now these are common topics,” she told IPS.

“Similarly, today the discussion on the responsibility of home states is not yet a discussion at the commission. But the idea is that this hearing will open a window of new legal discussions within the Inter-American system.”

The ability of local communities to use the U.S. legal system to seek redressal for rights violations received a significant setback earlier this year. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to allow a group of Nigerian plaintiffs to sue the Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum Company in U.S. court, finding that Shell’s connection to the United States was too tenuous.

Yet critics of the decision say that this is precisely the purpose for which the law in question – known as the Alien Tort Statute – was created.

“When Alien Tort claims are no longer effective in helping people to get responses to violations of their rights, what other tools exist?” Dora Lucy Arias, with the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers Committee, a Colombian NGO, said Thursday, discussing some of the activists’ lobby efforts on Capitol Hill.

“So I’m wondering if, from Congress, we may be able to think about some new and really effective mechanisms to make sure that the victims of these human rights violations have some recourse.”

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio used chain gangs and a "tent city" in his crusade against undocumented immigrants in the state. He has been sued more than 2,000 times and is now is overseen by a federal monitor. Credit:Valeria Fernandez/IPS

By Ramy Srour
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

Saul Merlos is an undocumented migrant from El Salvador. About two years ago, he was living and working in the southern U.S. city of New Orleans.

“One day, our employers told us we were going to get paid, but instead they sent immigration,” he told IPS. “I was a witness to the raid, where they got 55 of us.”"People are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school." -- Jennifer Rosenbaum of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

Merlos said the raid was violent. “I was a witness that there was a pregnant woman with her daughter, but they didn’t care,” he said. “They yelled at her, and at all of us, that this was their country and asked us what we were doing in their country. They hit some of us, and didn’t even allow me to use the restroom.”

Speaking to IPS on the sidelines of a hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) Monday, Merlos added that the immigration officers did not read the workers their rights or inform them of what to expect from the detention process.

As momentum builds for U.S. immigration reform after months of political deadlock, a group of NGOs and immigration lawyers are warning that the U.S. system is currently leading to widespread violations of immigrants’ human rights.

The accusations come as the IACHR, the region’s pre-eminent rights forum, began an investigation into the issue on Monday. At that hearing, held at the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, advocates questioned the rights standards used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers (ICE).

According to the witnesses, ICE officers may have violated immigrants’ basic human rights by indefinitely separating them from their U.S. citizen children, in addition to having detained them without appropriate constitutional protections.  

Family focus

At Monday’s hearing, multiple advocacy groups alleged that ICE detention practices have failed to account for the human rights of parties involved when officers use what is known as their prosecutorial discretion. This refers to a federal agency’s authority, in immigration cases, to decide whether to begin removal proceedings against undocumented migrants.

Saul Merlos has been in the United States for 18 years, and has a 13-year old daughter who is a U.S. citizen. A favourable exercise of prosecutorial discretion would avoid him being deported Dec. 17, 2013.

“All we want is for the U.S. government to stop this because they are separating our families,” Merlos said.

The place of human rights in immigration proceedings has emerged as a key point of discussion in recent months in situations in which the children are U.S. citizens but at least one of the parents is deported because of their illegal status. Most of the time, this means that families are separated for indefinite amounts of time.

“We need to realise the serious concerns raised by the way people are being arrested and the way the U.S. government is pursuing these prosecutions.” Jennifer Rosenbaum, the legal director at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice (NOWCRJ), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The government’s failure to use its prosecutorial discretion has led to families being separated and to children being separated from their parents,” she said.

NOWCRJ and several other groups are calling on U.S. ICE officers to consider rights norms when detaining illegal immigrants or considering initiating removal proceedings against them. According to data presented before the IACHR this week, U.S. immigration agencies have largely failed to use their prosecutorial discretion, choosing instead to deport thousands of illegal immigrants with no regard to their family ties.

Yet others raise separate concerns about the possible implications of more lenient behaviour on the part of ICE.

“We should remember that the government isn’t actually separating families, as the parent is choosing to leave his or her child behind,” Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst at the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS), a non-profit organisation here, told IPS.

“Moreover, it probably shouldn’t be standard U.S. policy that people can’t be deported if they have children, because there’s the question of where exactly you’re going to draw the line. If the parent has engaged in criminal activity such as identity theft, or has broken serious laws, are we saying that the American victim is not going to receive any restitution just because that immigrant has a child?”

Rights advocates, on the other hand, suggest that in the majority of related cases, immigrants are stopped and detained unconstitutionally in the first place.

“In New Orleans and other communities across the country, people are disappearing on their way to drop their children off to school,” NOWCRJ’s Rosenbaum said. “Their apprehensions involve the inappropriate use of force and no due process protections. What is even more worrying is that most of them are the victims of outright racial profiling.”

In 2012, as many as 150,000 U.S. citizen children saw at least one of their parents get deported, according to information presented Monday at the IACHR.

The U.S. delegation to the OAS was not able to respond to the panel’s allegations.

“Unfortunately, the federal government shutdown prevented us from properly preparing for today’s hearings, as officers were not able to collect any evidence and witnesses,” Lawrence J. Gumbiner, the deputy U.S. permanent representative at the U.S. mission to the OAS said. Gumbiner later declined to comment further on the human rights implications of the allegations.

Washington gridlock

The hearing comes at a critical time, as Congress recently resumed its work on a proposal that would massively overhaul the United States’ sprawling immigration system. As the House of Representatives looks more closely at the comprehensive Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernisation Act approved by the Senate last June, President Obama urged all in Washington to come together and fix the country’s “broken immigration system”.

House Republicans oppose comprehensive immigration reform, which they worry would force them to accept some provisions that they dislike, particularly a contentious “path to citizenship” for the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants currently living in the United States. Instead, House conservatives have broken apart the many issues in play in the reform push and started passing piecemeal legislation.

“One of the major concerns is that yet another comprehensive immigration bill will only bring more illegal immigration in the country,” CIS’s Feere told IPS. “Right now, many Americans simply do not trust the president to actually go through with the bill’s enforcement provisions.”

U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs included monitoring of the state oil company, Petrobras. Credit: Molly Mazilu/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 29 2013 (IPS)

As the first formal probe by an international rights body into allegations of U.S. mass surveillance began here Monday, privacy advocates from throughout the Americas accused Washington of violating international covenants and endangering civil society.

Monday’s hearing took place before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an arm of the 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS), which includes the United States."The unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region." -- Joy Olson of WOLA

The heads of Brazil and Mexico are among the 35 world leaders on whose personal calls the NSA has reportedly been eavesdropping, according to new information made public last week but leaked earlier this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Indeed, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has offered perhaps the most strident diplomatic response yet, cancelling a state visit to Washington in September upon being notified of U.S. snooping into Brazilian official affairs, including monitoring of the state oil company. Brazil is also leading a push to institute a new international agreement on privacy.

“I was in Brazil right after these revelations came out, and my sense is that this goes back to this idea of U.S. exceptionalism – that it operates by one standard and everyone else operates by another. Other countries are increasingly less willing to accept that this is how the U.S. functions in the world,” Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“Further, the unofficial response from Washington – ‘Grow up, everybody does this kind of spying’ – was very unappreciated by many in the region. That just served as confirmation that the U.S. doesn’t understand its evolving relationship with Latin America.”

The IACHR investigation could now indicate a more concerted reaction from Latin American countries, joining new opprobrium from European and other world leaders as well as an ongoing national discussion here over the scope of U.S. spying on private citizens.

“While the United States is having a huge debate over the legality or constitutionality of domestic mass surveillance, there’s been very little discussion of the legality of international mass surveillance,” Danny O’Brien, international director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital privacy advocacy group, told IPS.

“The worrying truth is that we have almost no safeguards in place regarding the surveillance of anyone outside of the U.S. That’s problematic because domestic laws were written with the assumption that the people we targeted were agents of a foreign power, spies or even major political figures abroad – not, say, everyone in a particular country.”

For its part, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has maintained that its surveillance programmes, which could be gathering data on the phone or online activities of upwards of a billion people, follow U.S. law and do not violate the privacy of U.S. citizens or foreigners within the United States.

In fact, increasing evidence suggests that regular exceptions have been made to these guidelines, but globally activists are increasingly frustrated with the U.S.’s refusal even to indicate that it is adhering to the spirit of international human rights norms.

The Washington-based IACHR, for instance, oversees the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969, which explicitly guarantees the right to privacy. (While the United States has not ratified the American Convention, it did sign it in 1977.) Critics now want the IACHR to censure the United States for violation of this and other international norms.

“According to the U.S. explanations, all measures have supposedly been taken to respect the privacy of American citizens and those in US territories, however no legal protections apply to foreign nationals,” the Brazilian office of Article 19, an anti-censorship group, told IPS in a statement.

“By basing its justifications and actions solely on domestic law … the U.S. government has shown disregard for the universality of human rights and the fact that international human rights standards on privacy and freedom of expression and information apply to all, irrespective of borders.”

The United States was represented by four officials at Monday’s session, but none offered any formal response. Stating that the recent 16-day shutdown of the U.S. federal government had halted preparations for the hearing, the officials only promised a written response within a month.

While President Obama himself has suggested that politically sensitive spying on allied leaders would stop, on Tuesday two bills were slated to be proposed on Congress to rein in broader aspects of the NSA’s surveillance activities. Neither of those, however, would offer additional safeguards for those outside of U.S. territory.

Questioning exceptionalism

In a formal submission made to the IACHR on Monday, EFF, Article 19 and several Latin American civil society groups warned that several countries in the region were already struggling under heavy-handed government surveillance tactics, and expressed concern over the ramifications of the new U.S. revelations.

“For many individuals throughout the Americas region, especially journalists and dissidents, the Internet and mobile telephony have been transformed into a threat. The use of these mediums is difficult or almost impossible without the risk of state interference,” the submission states.

“Even if no single person is actually listening, the chilling effects of surveillance are felt, as the risk of revealing a journalistic source or legal client, for example, may be too high … Freedom of expression and freedom of information allow human rights defenders to challenge abuses to human rights; without the privacy to conduct investigations and communications away from the prying eyes of the state, this becomes impossible.”

It is unclear whether Washington’s spying could now embolden government surveillance in parts of Latin America. Yet even in the current climate, in which governments and civil society together are decrying U.S. snooping, EFF’s O’Brien warns that the focus on the United States could divert some important focus.

“Given the United States’ previous involvement in Latin American politics,” he says, “one of the biggest consequences could be that any surveillance discussion is going to emphasise the U.S.’s surveillance, while potentially underplaying the future risk of more local surveillance.”

The IACHR commissioners could now take a range of actions. Either way, the commission will publish a report on its findings, yet advocates are hoping that the commission will also refer the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica.

Although the United States does not recognise the Inter-American Court, more than 30 other countries do. A decision against the U.S. there would be damaging and could do much to influence the decisions of other human rights institutions as well as the roiling diplomatic atmosphere surrounding the surveillance allegations.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) says it is “deeply concerned” over the Venezuelan government’s decision to withdraw from the American Convention on Human Rights, a move that went into effect Tuesday.

The Venezuelan government has denounced the four-decade-old convention, which currently covers 23 of the 35 members of the Organisation of American States (OAS), as a tool of U.S. meddling in Latin America. But rights groups warn the move will eliminate a court-of-last-resort option for Venezuelans who feel they are unable to receive a fair judicial response within their own country – an option that remains guaranteed in the Venezuelan constitution.

“This comes at the expense of the protection of rights of the people of Venezuela, who are stripped of a mechanism to protect their human rights,” the IACHR, based here in Washington, stated Tuesday.

“The Inter-American Commission calls on Venezuela to reconsider this decision … [and] regrets that, despite repeated calls by the Commission and by other international bodies for Venezuela to reconsider its decision to denounce the Convention, the State of Venezuela has not reversed that decision.”

The American Convention on Human Rights sets out how OAS countries must guarantee citizens’ human rights. It also empowers the IACHR and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in Costa Rica, to monitor and rule on rights-related complaints that have not been dealt with through domestic judicial channels.

Venezuela is the third country to formally denounce the American Convention on Human Rights and withdraw from the Inter-American Court’s jurisdiction. Trinidad & Tobago made a similar decision in 1998 after the court criticised that country’s use of the death penalty, while Peru tried to do the same the following year.

“It is very unfortunate that the Venezuelan government has decided to go through with this action,” Francisco Quintana, programme director for the Andean, North America and Caribbean region at the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

“Yet if the government thought it was going to get away from this international supervision completely, that’s not right – at least with regard to any human rights violations that occurred before Sep. 10.”

Indeed, given that Venezuela remains a member of the OAS, the IACHR will maintain jurisdiction to monitor the country’s human rights situation. Further, as Quintana notes, the Inter-American Court will be able to continue hearing cases of alleged rights violations from during the period that Venezuela was party to the convention, from 1977 until Tuesday.

Yet critics worry about the potential impact not only on Venezuelans who have suffered abuses but also on the strength of the overall Inter-American structure, one of the world’s oldest pan-regional rights systems. The United Nations warned Tuesday the move could “have a very negative impact on human rights in [Venezuela] and beyond”.

‘Grave backlash’

Tuesday’s withdrawal follows through on one of the last policy decisions made by former president Hugo Chavez, who in July 2012 stepped up complaints that the Inter-American Court was interfering in domestic affairs.

Chavez had earlier accused the OAS of supporting a coup against his government. But the final motivation to withdraw appears to have been a ruling by the Inter-American Court in favour of Raul Diaz Pena, a Venezuelan who was found to have been mistreated in prison after being convicted of placing bombs near Caracas embassies.

“The Venezuelan government was against the external supervision of human rights issues from an international organ – over the past decade, the Inter-American Court lodged many cases against Venezuela, and the Chavez administration began to view these as political attacks,” CEJIL’s Quintana says.

“While the court established that there were clear violations of human rights, many didn’t even take place under Chavez. Some had to do with judicial independence, others with excessive force by the police – a wide range of cases, which offered no reason for the government to become frustrated with the system as a whole. After all, these rights were explicitly protected by the system and the convention.”

On Monday, CEJIL and more than 50 other organisations from 14 countries throughout the region derided the Venezuelan move and lamented its broader implications.

“Venezuela’s denunciation of the American Convention represents a grave backlash for the protection of human rights in the region,” the groups warned. “Additionally, this denunciation is preceded in recent years by the non-compliance of most of the sentences and measures of protection issued by the Inter-American Court.”

Also on Monday, Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, reiterated Chavez’s charge that the Inter-American system was a U.S. pawn.

“[T]he U.S. is not part of the human rights system, does not acknowledge the court’s jurisdiction or the commission, but … the commission headquarters is in Washington,” President Maduro said at a news conference, according to media reports. “Almost all participants and bureaucracy that are part of the IACHR are captured by the interests of the State Department of the United States.”

Indeed, the United States, itself a member of the OAS, has signed but never ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, part of a longstanding suspicion of international legal instruments. Yet rights groups are suggesting that Maduro’s criticism underlines an incongruous policy stance.

“The Venezuelan government’s attitude is highly contradictory,” Guadalupe Marengo, deputy director of the Americas programme at Amnesty International, a watchdog group, said Tuesday.

“On the one hand it is promoting universal ratification of the American Convention on Human Rights and urging other countries to ratify this instrument while, on the other, it is withdrawing from it and denying its inhabitants access to the protection of one of its bodies.”

Silence

Decisions by the Inter-American Court have increasingly rankled several Latin American governments. Yet Venezuela, along with Ecuador, Bolivia and others, has led a recent attempt to reform the Inter-American system in ways that activists say would weaken several of the IACHR’s most important tools.

That attempt was rebuffed by member states at the end of a major debate process late last year, though the push for reforms continues.

Still, advocates say there has been no significant response from OAS members to Venezuela’s decision to withdraw from the convention. “There have been no repercussions from other members,” Quintana says.

Another watchdog group, Human Rights Watch, recently sent a series of letters to the presidents of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, urging them to persuade Venezuela to rethink its decision. Yet Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division and lead author of the letters, told IPS there was “No answer – silence. It was very disappointing.”

The Western Hemisphere’s approach to countering the use and flow of illegal drugs may soon change radically, as recently published reports by the Organization of American States (OAS) signal a region less willing to be dominated by the United States and anxious to act on a more multilateral basis.

On Thursday here in Washington, OAS Secretary-General Jose Miguel Insulza presented two reports by his organisation on the issue, endorsing alternatives to the U.S.-led status quo.

The two reports include an analytical assessment of the current situation surrounding illegal drugs in the Americas, and one looks towards potential future scenarios for a coordinated response. The two reports, released in May, were a focus of debate at the OAS General Assembly in Antigua, Guatemala, earlier this month.

While the reports did not lead to any concrete policy shifts by the OAS at the general assembly, some observers see the reports as an indication that changes could be afoot.

“A few years ago the issue was a taboo,” Coletta A. Youngers, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America, an advocacy group, told IPS. “It was seen as purely U.S.-dominated, and if you would have proposed something like these reports, people would have laughed at you.”

The reports favour the view that the overall drugs issue is a public health, rather than a security, matter. Youngers believes such a stance represents a “very useful tool” for starting a serious discussion on hemispheric drug policy.

“With these reports, we now have a basis from which we can carry forward the debate,” she says. “The question now is how we do that.”

At the general assembly in Antigua, representatives of the 35 OAS member states decided that the organisation would hold an extraordinary session to discuss drug policy in 2014. The United States initially opposed such a session, but in the end accepted the plan, merely adding footnotes to the declaration expressing its concerns.

Still, Youngers believes Washington is “very bothered” by the language of the reports – and by the fact that the rest of the OAS appears to be asserting its own interests at the expense of U.S. regional control.

“After decades of the U.S. being able to dictate policy,” she says, “Latin America is now taking ownership and saying this is an issue which needs to be debated at the regional level by all the states concerned.”

Decriminalisation

The United States is particularly troubled by the OAS’s forward-looking report, Youngers suggests. That report is critical of the approach long held by the United States, which tackles the drug issue primarily through law enforcement and views drug users as criminals.

The analytical report, too, contains language that runs counter to the prevailing system.

“Decriminalisation of drug use,” the report states in its conclusion, “needs to be considered as a core element in any public health strategy. An addict is a chronically sick person who should not be punished for his or her dependence, but rather treated appropriately.”

It goes on to weigh in specifically on marijuana, seemingly amenable to the possibility of removing it from the region’s list of illegal drugs.

“(I)t would be worthwhile to assess existing signals and trends that lean toward the decriminalisation or legalisation of the production, sale, and use of marijuana,” the report concludes.

The issues of decriminalisation of drug use and marijuana in general remain highly controversial within the United States. Federal laws here continue to maintain that the use of all illicit drugs, including marijuana, is a crime.

In only two states, Washington and Colorado, is the private production and consumption of marijuana legal, and that was only allowed following public referendums late last year that resulted in surprise decisions to legalise.

In Latin America, meanwhile, there is a wide array of opinions on decriminalisation of illegal drugs.

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who hosted the recent OAS general assembly, surprised many when he came out in early 2012 in support of legalising all drugs. Prior to being elected, he had stated his opposition to such an approach, but apparently had a change of heart after becoming leader of a country wracked with violence related to the trafficking of illegal drugs.

Pérez referred to the OAS reports as a “triumph”.

Other Latin American states, too, have made significant moves toward the legalisation of marijuana specifically. In Uruguay, for example, personal use is permitted, and the legislature is currently debating possible ways to legalise and regulate both the production and sale of the drug.

Youngers says the OAS reports will allow more “experimentation” among countries in the region in crafting their own drug policies, a change she says would be welcome.

No consensus

Others have suggested that the implications of the reports could be far broader, affecting a global anti-narcotics system which concerns nations beyond the Western Hemisphere.

“We are potentially on the cusp of the collapse of the existing international counter-narcotics regime,” Vanda Felbab-Brown, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, another think tank here, told IPS. “And it looks like the Latin Americans could be the ones to pull the plug.”

Felbab-Brown notes that there is as yet “no consensus” within the OAS on anti-drugs policy, and says many countries are wary of any further relaxation. For instance, countries with high consumption levels (Brazil and Argentina, for example) are “lukewarm” toward less intensive interdiction policies or any further decriminalisation of controlled substances.

She is critical of the OAS reports for professing an interest in harmonised policy, however, while at the same time endorsing a country-by-country approach.

“The reports express an OAS desire to have its drug policy cake and eat it too,” she says. “What this would likely lead to is a scenario of different countries adopting different policies, generating spill-over problems and complaints from neighbours.”

The drug problem should be tackled not as a security issue but as a public health question, with policies for “prevention, treatment and rehabilitation,” delegations from the 34 countries participating in the 43rd General Assembly of the Organisation of American States agreed.

The meeting, which opened Tuesday Jun. 4 in the colonial Guatemalan city of Antigua, on the theme “For a Comprehensive Policy against the World Drug Problem in the Americas,” will conclude Thursday Jun. 6 with a final declaration that, it is hoped, will express a consensus position on the most viable strategies to fight drug trafficking in the region.

However, in spite of agreement that the issue should be addressed from a public health standpoint instead of the law enforcement approach used in most countries in the region today, the draft Antigua Declaration of the General Assembly of the OAS does not include concrete actions, or even a vague road map for the future.

What remains contentious and what foreign ministers must resolve before the conclusion of the OAS meeting is the follow-up mechanism that should be implemented.

Fourteen countries are proposing that the OAS Permanent Council call an extraordinary General Assembly in 2014 in Guatemala, with the goal of moving forward in the debate on new strategies to combat drug trafficking and in the design of an action plan for the period 2016-2020.

Under this proposal, the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) would be in charge of preparatory work for the meeting.

But the other 20 countries (Cuba has been suspended since the early 1960s) are opposed to the proposal, including the United States which is in favour of continuing to debate the drugs issue but is against an extraordinary assembly and CICAD involvement.

Canada is concretely proposing that the OAS Permanent Council, instead of CICAD, determine how the issue is followed up.

Another novelty is the incorporation of “a cross-cutting human rights perspective” and a gender perspective into public policies arising from the OAS summit, with the purpose of reducing demand and supply of illegal drugs.

Too little, too slow

Sandino Asturias, head of the Centro de Estudios de Guatemala (CEG – Centre for Guatemalan Studies), told IPS that the consensus on the need to treat drug trafficking as a health problem, rather than a public security issue, reflects a change in tackling this scourge even by the United States, as it implicitly admits that the armed fight against drug trafficking has failed.

In Mexico, under conservative President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), more than 83,000 people were killed in the context of the fight against organised crime, according to official figures. But the demand for drugs from consumer countries, especially the United States, has not declined. As a result, there is a growing consensus among governments in Latin America that it is time to consider new strategies.

“Some Latin American countries have been exerting pressure, and the idea that Washington only makes demands and the region must comply is beginning to change. I think there have been developments since the arrival of (U.S. President Barack) Obama, in the sense that there is more self-criticism,” Asturias said.

David Martínez-Amador, an expert with Proyecto Criminova in Mexico, which publishes academic papers on criminology, said that the health approach “has been put on the table.” But he criticised the fact that concrete policies, and sanctions against the use of armies in the war on drugs, have not been agreed.

“Like most of these forums, it ends with motivational speeches, hoping for discussions to continue while waiting for the extraordinary meeting; it’s a waste of time,” Martínez-Amador told IPS.

Several countries are taking steps to implement regulatory frameworks to legalise production of marijuana, including Argentina, Spain, Portugal, and in particular Uruguay, where parliament, at the behest of the leftwing Broad Front government, is debating a bill to legalise and regulate the sale of marijuana.

“This forum is just that, a forum, but when the doors close, each country has to blaze its own trail,” said the Mexican expert.

Turning the page

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, the host of this week’s OAS Assembly, proposed legalising drugs in early 2012, to shocked reactions.

During his election campaign he had said he was opposed to the idea, and days after he took office on Jan. 14, 2012, the government created a special agency to fight drug trafficking headed by its own drugs tsar, and confirmed that the Kaibil Commando, an elite army unit accused of the worst human rights violations during the 1960-1996 internal armed conflict, would lead the drug war.

No one, not even members of his own cabinet, could foresee that just one month later the retired general, who campaigned for the presidency on promises of coming down hard on crime, would declare that the time had come to consider decriminalisation as a possible solution to the rising tide of drug-related violence.

In April 2012, he tabled the issue again at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, although the United States responded negatively.

Several hypotheses have been put forward as to why Pérez Molina is defending the legalisation of drugs.

The British weekly newspaper The Economist speculated that the Guatemalan president was trying to get more funds from the United States, while Natalie Kitroeff, a researcher for the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said he was exerting pressure to lift the arms embargo imposed in 1978 on Guatemala due to human rights abuses committed during the civil war.

“The president is motivated by his image. (Pérez Molina) wants to be seen internationally as someone committed to democracy, not tainted by the past,” Asturias said.

The OAS summit is an opportunity for him to “turn the page” after the controversial trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, in which a witness directly implicated Pérez Molina of having participated in massacres in the highland department (province) of Quiché while commanding the Gumarcaj Task Force, Asturias said.

Women and children from the village where the Esparza family was murdered by soldiers in Mexico's "drug war" demand justice outside the schoolhouse.Mónica González /IPS

By Joe Hitchon
WASHINGTON, May 25 2013 (IPS)

Following the release of a major draft report on drug policy in the Americas, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, called for the beginning of debate aimed at reforming those policies throughout the region.

“Delivering this report today,” Insulza said Wednesday, “we are encouraged by the sincere aspiration, which I now have the privilege of presenting to the entire hemisphere, that this is not a conclusion but only the beginning of a long-awaited discussion.”"A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways.” -- John Walsh of WOLA

The draft report was shared with the 35 member countries of the OAS and is now scheduled to be discussed in depth at the upcoming organisation’s general assembly, on Jun. 4 in Guatemala.

The call for a new debate comes in light of a strengthened resolve on the issue throughout the region. This relates to the violence associated with drug trafficking as seen along the U.S.- Mexico border, as well as an increased prevalence of drug use and growing demand for health care services to treat addictions.

While acknowledging shortcomings in the implementation of current policies, some countries are continuing to defend the overall approach, and are encouraging a plan of action adopted by the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) branch of the Washington-based OAS. This approach calls for the continued concentration of efforts to reduce both supply and demand, as well as measures in line with United Nations conventions on drug law.

The new OAS discussion will inevitably be energised by the recent surprise legalisation of marijuana in two U.S. states in November.

“A one-size-fits-all response won’t work for complex problems that affect different countries in various ways,” John Walsh, a senior associate with the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), an advocacy group here, told IPS.

“The report points to the need for flexibility to pursue options that may imply national and international reforms, including legal and regulated cannabis markets. And it emphasises that this more open debate is really just now beginning.”

Many of the region’s leaders have expressed frustration with the limits and exorbitant costs of current policies and their desire for a fuller and more creative debate.

But according to Walsh, who participated in writing the OAS report, there is a lot of scepticism over whether the OAS will be up to the task, especially given U.S. domination of the issue. But he also emphasises that the new report represents a good first step in the direction of a more constructive and nuanced debate.

“Drug policy is an international issue as well as a domestic issue and it can be hard to separate them, especially when you’re talking about drugs trafficking across borders – if it’s an issue in Colorado, chances are it is related to the issue in Mexico,” Walsh, who released a paper on this issue earlier this week, told IPS.

“In the case of cannabis in particular, the U.S. has been the chief advocate for international drug conventions that place strict controls on cannabis. However, as the U.S. begins to revisit and alter its cannabis laws, this will certainly have an effect on how the drug conventions are seen within the U.S. – and, and in turn, in Latin America, because all countries in the Americas are signatories of the same treaties.”

The OAS draft report even explores the potential creation of legal and regulated markets that would reflect these changes taking place in the United States.

“Changing U.S. public opinion towards cannabis is being reflected in changes in state policy, which has already placed the U.S. at odds with the drug conventions,” Walsh notes. “And while some of the Latin American states might be feeling a bit puzzled by the U.S.’s new approach to drug policy, others are seeing an opportunity to have similar proposals.”

Yet significant differences remain in public attitudes on this issue outside the United States. Walsh suggests that while public opinion has led government policy in this county, governments would need to lead public opinion towards legalisation in many Latin American countries.

Cannabis disconnect

Following the November elections here, a looming disconnect has opened up between where the United States seems to be going on cannabis policy and how the U.S. is asking other countries in the region to act. This is most evident in the case of Mexico, with Washington continuing to push the Mexican government to use its security institutions to forcefully crack down on the illicit cross-border drug trade.

For the moment, it appears unlikely that this policy will change. Yet some analysts say they are already seeing a fundamental shift in this dynamic, with Latin American governments taking the lead for the first time, in trying to define drug policies in the region.

Depending on how it proceeds at the meeting on Jun. 4, the new OAS report could be a central component of this shift. Beyond the cannabis issue, for instance, the OAS report offers a range of proposals and alternatives to be considered which, if adopted, would dramatically change the way drug policies are implemented.

This is happening after years in which the U.S. government was able to largely dictate such policy. Very recently, however, Latin American countries have been examining the drugs problems they’re dealing with on an individual level – and to decide on the most appropriate policy responses.

“Most of the considerations of new cannabis policy involve examining the potential to separate the cannabis market from the wider black market for illicit drugs,” Colletta Youngers, a long-time Latin American drugs expert with WOLA, told IPS.

“This is both to protect the people who want to obtain cannabis from having to go into criminal markets, and also to the extent that cannabis is a big part of illicit drug revenues that are for now entirely in criminal hands and to put those revenues into the hands and control of the state.”

Still, she admits that for the time being the issue of legal, regulated cannabis markets is a priority for some U.S. states, but not yet for the national government. But Youngers also points to countries such as Uruguay – where such a law is currently pending – and others that are currently exploring such issues.

Mexico has been a prominent defender of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the battle being waged by some members of the Organisation of American States to curb its authority.

What is paradoxical, according to human rights defenders, is that Mexico’s strong support for the IACHR actually endangers to some extent access by victims of human rights abuses in Mexico to this last resort for justice.

“Mexico has backed the work of the (inter-American human rights) system and in its discourse it presents itself as a defender of human rights. It even managed to place representatives in the system,” human rights lawyer Simón Hernández told IPS.

“The risk is that this can translate into a degree of political control over decisions against the Mexican state,” said Hernández, an activist with the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre.

The human rights group has presented petitions to the IACHR in cases like the Pasta de Conchos coal mine disaster, where 65 miners were buried after a methane explosion in 2006 in the northern state of Coahuila, or the women raped that same year in San Salvador Atenco during a police crackdown on protests.

The problem, Hernández said, is that “in international forums, Mexico’s position has always been marked by an enormous contradiction between its rhetoric and reality.”

David Peña with the National Association of Democratic Lawyers said “Mexico’s foreign policy has been characterised by accepting everything, supporting everything – but domestically, the situation is different.”

Peña is one of the lawyers who brought the case of eight women killed in 2001 in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, known as the “cotton field” case for the name of the waste ground where their bodies were found, to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

In November 2009, the Court found the Mexican state guilty of denial of justice in relation to three of the murders.

Three years later, Mexico asked the Court to declare that it had complied with the sentence, even though the femicides (gender-related murders) and disappearances of women not only continued but had spread to the rest of the country, as part of the wave of violence that has swept Mexico since 2006.

And the map of femicide hotspots includes the central state of Mexico where San Salvador Atenco is located – and which was governed by current President Enrique Peña Nieto from 2005 to 2011.

“Mexico has supported the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,” said human rights lawyer Peña. “It was one of the countries that proposed closing down the discussion (of the reforms) and I hope that position will win out. But we don’t know what repercussions that support will have (on denunciations against the Mexican state).”

The regional human rights system – made up of the Washington-based Inter-American Commission and the San Jose, Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights – oversees compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights.

The IACHR has eight thematic rapporteurships, the most dynamic of which is the special rapporteurship on freedom of expression, which receives nearly one million dollars a year in external financing.

The regional human rights system is appreciated by human rights defenders but not governments. Since June 2011, states affected by its resolutions, including Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, have been pressing for reforms to curtail its reach.

And in May 2012, the secretary-general of the Organisation of American States, José Miguel Insulza of Chile, himself questioned the system, stating in an interview that “if you look at the statistics by country, most of the countries that have the most cases (before the IACHR and the Court) are not the ones where the largest number of abuses are committed, but are where the non-governmental organisations know how to use the system.”

The debate is focused on the IACHR’s power to issue binding precautionary measures; the singling out of countries considered “problematic” – like Cuba, Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela – in its annual report on human rights; and the operation and financing sources of the special rapporteurships.

The criticism is that one-third of the IACHR’s budget comes from the European Union, the United States and Canada, even though the last two have refused to ratify the American Convention on Human Rights, which forms the basis of the system.

In the special OAS meeting held Friday Mar. 22 to discuss the reforms, Mexico defended the need for states to be reliable in meeting their payments to the system, and announced an extraordinary 300,000 dollar contribution.

“It is time for the states to give all of their support to the Commission,” said Mexican foreign minister José Antonio Meade.

The legal experts who spoke to IPS said it was necessary to strengthen the inter-American system.

But one of them added that, compared to “the level of violations” committed in Mexico, very few cases are accepted by the IACHR. There are even cases, like that of San Salvador Atenco, in which there had been “certain delays” by the Commission when it came to carrying out an in-depth investigation, the source said.

Nor is Mexico included in the annual report singling out countries with human rights problems, even though as many as 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished in this country, according to NGOs.

On Mar. 14, the IACHR held a marathon session of hearings related to abuses by the Mexican state.

Two of them involved the leftwing government of Mexico City, one for the public exhibition of detainees and another for the refusal to accept evidence running counter to the sentence that found that activist Digna Ochoa’s 2001 death was the result of suicide rather than homicide.

In another case, the women raped in San Salvador Atenco rejected the apology they were given by representatives of President Peña Nieto.

Two other hearings involved public policies, such as the concentration of authority over the police forces in the interior ministry, and the inoperativeness of the government’s Mechanism of Protection for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists.

Since 2006, 61 activists and more than 50 reporters have been killed and at least 15 have gone missing in Mexico.

In the latest hearing, representatives of the Rarámuri and Tepehuán indigenous communities complained that the authorities did not consult them on the construction of a tourism project in the northern state of Chihuahua.

The 35-member Organisation of American States (OAS) on Friday voted unanimously to approve a series of reforms to the Inter-American human rights system, but stepped back from proposals that had caused the greatest concern among civil society groups.

Nonetheless, rights advocates are expressing frustration that Friday’s highly anticipated vote did not bring a close to the reforms process. Instead, the final resolution mandates the OAS “to continue the dialogue regarding the core aspects for strengthening” the Inter-American system, which includes the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and Court of Human Rights.

“By adopting this document, the states [are] supporting essential elements of a robust system that will continue to be relevant into the future,” Lisa Reinsberg, executive director of the International Justice Resource Center, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“However, our hope had been that today’s session would definitively put an end to debate on the reform process. Instead, the commission will now be required to invest more time and resources into responding to suggestions, diverting attention away from important human rights concerns.”

The controversial two-year reforms process had been seen as potentially devastating for a system lauded by the rights community but which has increasingly frustrated governments of the region. Since its creation in 1959, the IACHR has proven to be one of the most effective parts of the otherwise largely moribund OAS, since 1978 overseeing the American Convention on Human Rights.

While the push for reforms is officially characterised as a strengthening process, it has been spearheaded by the governments of Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, each of which have expressed dissatisfaction with the current system.

“It is important to remember that it is the commission that has the authority to modify its rules and practices, and that the commission is intended to be autonomous from the OAS political organs,” Reinsberg says, noting that on Monday the IACHR passed new Rules of Procedure.

“Overall, those changes are generally positive and increase transparency for users of the Inter-American system. While the changes include some concessions to states, the commission held its ground where it mattered.”

No “real strengthening”

Meanwhile, longstanding worries over the broader strength of the system – particularly its chronic underfunding – were only partially addressed. Indeed, the funding issue goes to the heart of the debate on both sides.

“This process did not achieve a real strengthening of the Inter-American System … nor has the process resulted in an increase in funding,” Tirza Flores, a Honduran magistrate, stated in Spanish outside the OAS headquarters Friday morning, speaking on behalf of more than 150 NGOs and thousands of petitioners.

“We call on the states to comply with their obligation to finance the commission, instead of suffocating it by limiting or conditioning its external funding.”

Flores, too, called for an end to the “political process” of revising the system’s procedures. Yet this was upset by a last-minute proposal by Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua to “continue the dialogue”, stating that the reforms process had “failed to complete its work”.

In their resolution, the four countries called for discussion to continue on a half-dozen issues. These included precautionary measures (the power to require immediate action to protect groups or individuals), the commission’s annual publication on the human rights records of individual countries, and the functioning of the thematic rapporteurs.

This bloc is also demanding discussion on longstanding frustrations that the Inter-American system is inordinately controlled by the United States and other “external” countries.

These disagreements led several delegations to express concern that Friday’s vote would bring the Inter-American system a step closer to fracturing, particularly as Ecuador and Bolivia nearly refused to vote for the final resolution. Venezuela and Trinidad & Tobago have already stated they will withdraw from the system, while Ecuador and Bolivia have now issued similar warnings.

Funding discrepancy

On Friday, this schism played out in the backroom negotiations over the resolution’s final wording.

These revolved around three particular disagreements: over the implications of “full financing” of the IACHR, over whether the system’s external funding should be able to be “earmarked”, and, especially, over attempts to “strengthen” and “adequately finance” the thematic rapporteurships.

Much of the frustration expressed by these countries and others on Friday dealt with a central discrepancy at the heart of the Inter-American system.

On the one hand, the United States is the IACHR’s largest single funder – offering around 1.3 of its 10-million-dollar annual budget – and hosts its headquarters. On the other hand, for decades Washington (and Canada, another prominent funder) has refused to sign on to the American Convention on Human Rights.

To make matters worse, around a third of the Inter-American system’s budget comes from the European Union, which is otherwise not connected to the system.

“The control and definition of its policies are not in our hands, but rather are in the hands of others,” Ricardo Patino, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, stated in Spanish-language testimony on Friday, calling the situation ridiculous and unacceptable.

The impact of this funding discrepancy, Patino suggested, is that the Inter-American system reflects the ideology and priorities of its primary donors rather than of the rest of the member states. For instance, he noted, the IACHR rapporteurship on freedom of expression – seen as a darling of the United States and European Union – receives far more funding than do others on women, children or economic justice.

Patino also proposed creating a new rapporteurship, on torture and extrajudicial killing, while making references to the United States’ armed “drone” programme. He also promised that Ecuador would pay for such a position.

This would be a significant turnaround, as Ecuador reportedly offered just 1,500 dollars in funding to the Inter-American system over the past three years. Likewise, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua made no donations between 2010 and 2012.

“A clear majority of the region’s governments support the commission’s response to the reforms process,” Viviana Krsticevic, executive director of the Center for Justice and International Law, a Washington advocacy group, said in a statement to IPS immediately following the resolution’s vote.

“However, the governments did not pledge the additional 10 million dollars needed for the Commission to function effectively.”

On Friday, nearly all delegations made pleas for the countries of the Americas to come together, take ownership of and fully fund the Inter-American system – at a cost, one delegate noted, of just two cents per citizen. With the new resolution likewise reaffirming its commitment to provide “full funding” for the Inter-American system, this is now a point on which all of the region’s countries, for the moment, formally agree.

Native people protesting against the Belo Monte dam, a project that created a rift between Brazil and the IACHR. Credit: Atossa Soltani

By Clarinha Glock
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil , Mar 1 2013 (IPS)

March will be a key month for defining the future of the Inter-American human rights system, which has come under fire from a number of countries in the region.

Mar. 22 is the deadline for members of the Organisation of American States (OAS) to present proposals for reforming the regional justice system created in 1948 with the purpose of promoting and protecting the basic rights enshrined in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The system is made up of two autonomous bodies: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), based in Washington, D.C., and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San José, Costa Rica.

Its main function is to oversee compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights, adopted in 1969.

The government of Ecuador made the first reform proposal, and is also leading an effort to create a parallel system of justice in the framework of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), which has, however, not yet materialised.

Venezuela, for its part, denounced the American Convention in September 2012, and is set to withdraw from the inter-American justice system in September 2013.

The debate on reforms was launched in June 2011 with the creation of a working group within the OAS. Since then forums, public hearings and on-line consultations have been held to study different recommendations.

The chief proposals would restrict the IACHR’s power to impose precautionary measures (the adoption of urgent measures to protect individuals or groups from irreparable harm), curtail detailed analysis of countries with mass human rights abuses and limit the powers of the special rapporteurs, such as the rapporteur for freedom of expression.

The Commission has political functions – carrying out specific visits and issuing recommendations and reports – and quasi judicial ones: receiving complaints from organisations or private individuals, determining whether they are admissible, requesting precautionary measures by the relevant states and taking cases to the Inter-American Court.

The Court’s functions are litigation, consultation and the adoption of precautionary measures. Its rulings are final and are not subject to appeal.

Brazil’s relations with the Commission soured in April 2011, when the IACHR called, as a precautionary measure, for the immediate suspension of the permit for the construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam on the Xingú river in the Amazon rainforest, to protect the health of native communities affected by the works.

The Brazilian government rejected the request. But the Brazilian position was misinterpreted, according to the Foreign Ministry’s human rights division, which instructed a representative to reply to IPS’s enquiries on condition of anonymity.

Brazil was already in the process of meeting the Commission’s demands, in response to requests from national oversight agencies, and the country’s support for reform of the IACHR was not triggered by the ruling, the diplomatic source said.

In any event, the Brazilian government withdrew its ambassador from the OAS, as well as its candidate to sit on the IAHCR board of officers. March is the deadline for countries to nominate candidates and, according to the Foreign Ministry’s human rights division, by mid-February no decision had been taken by Brazil in this respect.

“Proposals for reform are being presented just when the Commission and the Court are complying with their obligations under the Convention,” said activist Jair Krischke, the head of the Movement for Justice and Human Rights (MJDH), based in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

According to Krischke, the stance taken by Brazil was not only prompted by the ruling on Belo Monte, but also by a 2010 Inter-American Court verdict ordering the handing over of the remains of people who were forcibly disappeared in the 1972-1975 military action against the Araguaia guerrillas and the payment of reparations to the victims’ families.

The government maintains it has already paid compensation, but it has not done so for moral damages, as the Court ordered, Krischke told IPS.

When a similar verdict was issued against Uruguay, “the government held a ceremony in parliament, attended by the president, and apologised for the forced disappearances (committed during the 1973-1985 dictatorship). Brazil did not even publish the Court sentence,” he said.

Government discontent with the Inter-American human rights system is incomprehensible, said associate professor Deisy de Freitas Lima Ventura, of the University of São Paulo’s Institute of International Relations.

“When a sovereign state forms part of a regional system, it is precisely in order to hear criticism and receive recommendations or condemnations,” she told IPS.

The governments of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela are active in this campaign because the inter-American justice system has touched on crucial aspects of their presidents’ agendas, de Freitas said.

“When the Inter-American system accepts an opposition politician in Venezuela as a candidate, or when it asks for respect for the rights of journalists of a newspaper in conflict with the president of Ecuador, it touches on issues that are personal for the presidents. That is also what happened with Belo Monte and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff,” she said.

The stance taken by Ecuador coincides with uncomfortable decisions about domestic questions, said Mario Melo, a professor of human rights at the Simón Bolívar Andean University and the lawyer representing the Sarayaku people versus the Ecuadorean state in their case before the Court.

In June 2012, the Court ruled that the government of Ecuador had violated the rights of this native community by failing to consult them about the encroachment of an oil company on their lands in the early 2000s.

“It’s a delicate issue for the government because of its policy of expanding the oil frontier in indigenous territories,” Melo said.

Since the 1970s and 1980s, the Commission has been a forum for victims of abuses who have exhausted domestic legal remedies, or who find themselves facing unjustified delays in the national judicial system.

Camila Asano, the foreign policy coordinator for Conectas Direitos Humanos, an NGO with consultative status at the United Nations, recalled that crucial issues in Brazil, like slave labour and gender-based violence, had to be addressed by the IACHR before they became visible.

But the legal process is slow – one of the criticisms levelled at the inter-American justice system. Sometimes there is no time to wait for a decision, and that is why the precautionary measures are needed, Asano said.

Ecuador wants to eliminate the Commission’s power to impose precautionary measures, leaving that authority to the Court.

Brazil – where the Commission has repeatedly ordered precautionary measures to protect activists, journalists, landless rural workers and prison inmates – recognises the competence of the Commission, but has suggested changes that would make the procedures more rigorous and complicated.

The Brazilian proposal, according to the Foreign Ministry’s representative, is that the Commission should sharpen up the arguments justifying its decisions in cases like Belo Monte, and put more emphasis on the promotion of human rights.

“They should not only judge and punish violations, but rather develop measures that prevent them from being committed again,” the source said.

Other criticism is more worrisome, such as questions about whether the Commission is competent to produce annual reports on countries that merit special attention. Country delegates allege that these reports should not single out specific states, but should focus on all the members of the OAS system.

The fact that the United States and Canada have not ratified the American Convention, yet contribute to funding the special rapporteur on freedom of expression, has also annoyed a number of countries.

One of the proposals is that donations should not be earmarked for a particular rapporteurship.

Brazil is calling for more transparent management, and for resources to be distributed from the OAS ordinary fund, without excluding the possibility of receiving donations from international foundations and development banks.

“A large proportion of the proposed improvements have not been implemented because of a lack of resources,” said Asano. Her human rights group considers that, as an economic powerhouse, Brazil should set an example and increase its contributions.

According to the diplomatic source, this country made its last contribution in 2008. “In 2010, management of funds was redirected from Itamaraty (the Foreign Ministry) to the Planning Ministry. This year we asked for 800,000 dollars, but the request was not approved due to a budgetary shortfall,” the source said.

“In the last few years we have tightened our belts when it comes to expenditure, and no contributions were made. I wouldn’t say it was for political reasons; perhaps there really was no money,” the source added.

Professor Melo believes that after the discussions are over, the most radical reforms will not be approved. “Everyone knows that weakening the Inter-American system would only strengthen the authoritarian use of power,” he said.

In de Freitas’s view, “to renounce this dimension of control, as Venezuela did, is to mortgage future generations. Obviously, a regional rights protection system does not solve the problems, but in many cases it can shed light on the abuses.”