Alleged gang members are transferred to the Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison built by the government of Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to house 40,000 detainees accused of belonging to organized crime. CREDIT: Presidency of El Salvador

By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Apr 17 2023 (IPS)

Violence involving organized crime has made Latin America the most dangerous region in the world and has helped paved the way for a repressive kind of populism with a dangerous future, whose most visible symbol is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

According to United Nations reports, Latin America, home to eight percent of the global population, accounts for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. (These statistics do not include deaths in wars, accidents and suicides.)

Observers talk about a generalized security crisis, and the Salvadoran president boasted of a 56.8 percent decline in the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, while Ecuador, at the other end of the spectrum, showed an increase of 82 percent.

But comparisons in percentages from one year to the next are misleading if the absolute numbers are not taken into account. For example, the homicide rate in Chile increased 32.2 percent in 2022, although in actual numbers that meant 4.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In El Salvador, the figure for the same year was 7.8 per 100,000.

Statistics in percentages, magnified by the media and by the rise in the degree of violence in the crimes committed, spread a sensation of insecurity and fear among the public.

The terrain of politics

Politics have seized onto the insecurity crisis, which serves in some cases for the opposition to question the government, or in others for those in power to seek to neutralize their opponents. Both sides come up with shortsighted measures that do not attack the roots of the problem and can actually aggravate it in the medium to long term.

The most common reaction is to beef up the police force while providing it with greater means and authority to crack down on criminals. Police officers are given a greater margin of discretion to size up the danger and shoot – in other words, to become “trigger-happy”.

The expression is not new in the region. It became widespread in various countries between the 1960s and 1980s, under military dictatorships, when the law enforcement and armed forces murdered opponents in staged shootouts or brutally cracked down on social mobilizations.

The revival of these practices in the 21st century has required legitimization through laws, such as the so-called “law of privileged legitimate defense”, passed in Chile on Apr. 10, or broader norms that involve the police, the military and the powers of the State, as Bukele has pushed through in El Salvador.

Bukele, the leader of El Salvador’s Nuevas Ideas party, used his majority in the legislature to allow him to be re-elected as president. And on Mar. 22, 2022, he declared a state of emergency, accompanied by various legislative reforms that in practice gave him a free hand in his fight against crime, namely gangs known in Central America as maras.

More than a year after the state of emergency was declared, Amnesty International denounced widespread violations of human rights in the small Central American country:

“This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime,” the human rights watchdog said in a statement released on Apr. 3.

“Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency,” it added.

A member of the carabineros, Chile’s militarized police, is photographed while opening fire on a street in Santiago. CREDIT: Courtesy of El Desconcierto

Repressive populism

Bukele replaced prisons with virtual concentration camps. A total of 1.5 percent of Salvadorans are currently deprived of liberty, which means the Central American country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

However, opinion polls show that eight out of 10 Salvadorans are satisfied with the current president and want him to be reelected, while some dissident voices warn that the State is replacing the gangs as an agent of intimidation and concentration of power.

The temptation to imitate Bukele with repressive populism that feeds on showy measures is present throughout Latin America. While the “privileged legitimate defense law” was being debated in Chile, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in Santiago, demolished houses registered as belonging to drug traffickers, in front of the television cameras.

In Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso, threatened by impeachment, announced in early April that he was authorizing the “possession and carrying of weapons for civilian use for personal defense” as an urgent measure against the “common enemies: delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Delinquency, drug trafficking and criminal organizations are recurring terms when talking about insecurity, but a dangerous drift is often observed where ‘trigger-happy’ laws and measures give way to repression against social protests or empower political persecution under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Criminalizing the poor

Javier Macaya, president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a far-right Chilean party that vindicates the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), accused the United Nations of supporting “political violence” when its High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned of the dangers posed by the “law of privileged self-defense”.

The authoritarian scope of “trigger-happy” laws also includes the criminalization of immigrants and poor neighborhoods, classified as gang territories that shelter drug trafficking rings, although large drug traffickers and drug users from high-income sectors are rarely prosecuted in the cities of Latin America.

Political persecution is often disguised as security, as in Nicaragua in February when 222 dissidents were expelled and stripped of their nationality. The government of Daniel Ortega accused them of “treason”, described them as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” and justified the measure in the name of national peace.

Security has been instated as Latin America’s most pressing issue. The latest Amnesty International report documents arbitrary acts in Venezuela that include forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Haiti, mired in ungovernability, is another country where human rights are a victim of insecurity.

The complexities of the fight against crime involve strengthening the police and also growing vigilante justice on the part of citizens. In Brazil, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) authorized the police to kill criminals and loosened restrictions on gun ownership for civilians. His successor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, suspended the measures after taking office on Jan. 1.

Latin America has become a kind of arsenal, with more powerful weapons for the police, and also with the illegal trade that feeds organized crime. A third of the firearms seized in 2017 in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama came from the United States.

A couple participate in the gay pride parade in San Salvador, held before the state of emergency was declared on Mar. 27, under which the government is carrying out massive raids in search of suspected gang members. Members of the LGBTI community are among those arbitrarily detained, victims of police homophobia and transphobia. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Nov 21 2022 (IPS)

Police raids against gang members in El Salvador, under a state of emergency in which some civil rights have been suspended, have also affected members of the LGBTI community, and everything points to arrests motivated by hatred of their sexual identity.

Personal accounts gathered by IPS revealed that some of the arrests were characterized by an attitude of hatred towards gays and especially transsexuals on the part of police officers."Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’.” -- Cultura Trans

“Cases like this, which reveal hatred towards gay or trans people, are happening, but the organizations are not really speaking out, because of the fear that has been generated by the ‘state of exception’,” an activist with Cultura Trans, a San Salvador-based organization of the LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) community, told IPS.

Hatred of homosexuals and transgender people

The activist, who asked to remain anonymous, said that another member of his organization, a gay man known as Carlos, has been detained since Jul. 13, after he complained about the arrest two months earlier of his sister Alessandra, a trans teenager.

The authorities have accused them of “illicit association,” the charge used to arrest alleged gang members or collaborators, under the state of emergency.

“The case against Carlos was staged, it was invented,” said the source. “He is a human rights activist in the trans community, we have documents that show that he participates in our workshops, in our activities.”

A police officer stops a young man in San Salvador and checks his back and other parts of his body for gang-related tattoos, one of the elements used by authorities to track down gang members in El Salvador. Since the state of emergency was declared, 58,000 people have been detained, in many cases arbitrarily, among them members of the LGBTI community. CREDIT: National Civil Police

The state of exception, under which some civil rights are suspended, has been in force in El Salvador since Mar. 27, when the government of Nayib Bukele launched a crusade against criminal gangs, with the backing of the legislature, which is controlled by the ruling New Ideas party.

Gangs have been responsible for the majority of crimes committed in this Central American country for decades.

According to the constitution, a state of exception can be in place for 30 days, and can be extended for another 30. But a legal loophole has allowed the government and Congress to renew the measure every month, under the argument that this was already done during the 1980-1992 civil war.

This interpretation could only be modified by the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice. But Bukele, with the backing of the legislature, named five hand-picked magistrates to that chamber in May 2021, in what his critics say marked the beginning of a shift towards authoritarianism, two years into his term.

Since Mar. 27, the police and military have imprisoned some 58,000 people.

In most cases no arrest warrants were issued by a judge, and the arrests are generally based on gang members’ police files.

In addition, anonymous tips by the public to a hotline set up by the government have gradually expanded the number of people arrested.

“The state of emergency exposes you to an inefficient prosecutor, incapable of investigating and linking people to crimes,” William Hernández, director of Entre Amigos, an LGBTI organization founded in 1994, told IPS.

He added: “If a police officer decides to detain someone and make a report of the arrest, they go out to look for them, but there’s no record of who reported that individual, where the information came from, and no one knows who investigated them.”

Among the 58,000 detainees are some 40 people from the LGBTI community, according to a report made public in October by Cristosal and other human rights organizations that monitor abuses committed by the Salvadoran authorities under the state of exception.

These organizations have collected some 4,000 complaints of arbitrary detentions and other abuses, including torture, committed against detainees. Some 80 people have died in police custody and in prison.

Carlos is a gay man who spoke out against the arrest of his younger sister Alessandra, a trans woman seized in May by Salvadoran police, accused of belonging to a gang. In July he was also arrested and so far little is known about their situation, under the state of emergency in El Salvador, which has led to the imprisonment of 58,000 people. CREDIT: Courtesy of Cultura Trans

Police homophobia

In the case of Carlos, 32, and his sister Alessandra, 18, the information available is that she was arrested in May in one of the police sweeps, in a poor neighborhood in the north of San Salvador.

She was arrested for not having a personal identity card. She had recently turned 18, the age of majority, and she should have obtained the document, which is needed for any kind of official procedure.

The police officers who arrested Alessandra told her mother that she was only being taken for 72 hours, while the situation was clarified.

However, something that could have been easily investigated and resolved turned into an ordeal for her and her family, especially her mother, who was facing several health ailments, said the Cultura Trans activist.

“She was in the ‘bartolinas’ (dungeons) of the Zacamil (a police station in that poor neighborhood),” the source said. “We went to leave food for her, then they sent her to the Mariona prison. We realized that she had been beaten and sexually abused, because she was being held in a men’s facility.”

He added: “When they took Alessandra, her mother told us that the police told the girl ‘culero, we are going to take you to be raped, to be f**ked,’ which is what actually did happen. ‘We’re going to take you so that you learn not to dress like a woman’.”

Culero is a pejorative term used in El Salvador against gays.

Meanwhile, her brother Carlos spoke out against Alessandra’s arrest, during activities carried out by the LGBTI community.

In May, in a march against “homo-lesbo-transphobia” – hatred of gays, lesbians and trans people – he carried several handmade signs calling for his sister’s release from prison.

The authorities visited Carlos’ house, and threatened to arrest him as well, which they did on Jul. 13.

According to the source, the police and prosecutors put together a case and accused him of illicit association. They are asking for a 20-year prison sentence.

“It’s not because of illicit association, we know that very well. It’s because he’s a human rights activist in the LGBTI community, and because he has been demanding the release of his sister,” said the Cultura Trans activist.

“We want him back with us, and his sister too,” he said.

William Hernández, director of the association Entre Amigos, said that the police and the Attorney General’s Office stage raids against alleged gang members without carrying out proper investigations to substantiate the arrests or to release detainees if they are innocent. The Salvadoran government has been on a crusade against gangs since March, but in the process there have been numerous abuses and illegal detentions, according to human rights organizations. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Underreporting hides the real number of cases

According to reports by the NGOs, while the 40 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained represent a small proportion of the total number of people arrested, there could be an underreporting of undocumented cases, especially in rural areas.

“In this country, although it’s small, there may be cases in remote places involving people who have never contacted an NGO. These are cases that remain invisible,” Catalina Ayala, a trans woman activist with Diké, an LGBTI organization whose name refers to justice in Greek mythology, told IPS.

Ayala said that, although she has not personally experienced transphobia from the authorities on the streets of San Salvador, and her organization has not received concrete reports of cases like Alessandra’s, she did not rule out that they could be happening.

“I think it’s a positive thing that the authorities are arresting gang members, but not people who have nothing to do with crime, or just because they are LGBTI,” she said.

The organization’s lawyer, Jenifer Fernández, said Diké has provided legal assistance to 12 people from the LGBTI community who have been detained, mainly because they were not carrying their identity documents.

In one of the cases, the police said things that could be construed as transphobic, although there was also a basic suspicion, since she was a trans woman without an identity document.

“She was a 25-year-old woman who had never had a DUI, an identity document, because she suffered from gender dysphoria and was afraid to go to register, afraid of being asked to cut her hair or to remove her make-up,” said Fernández.

Gender dysphoria is a sense of unease caused by a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity and has repercussions on their ability to function socially.

“The arrest report said that she was a gang member disguised as a woman, that they did not know who she was, that she gave a name but that it could not be proven without a DUI,” the lawyer explained.

But Fernández added that, in general, with or without a state of exception, trans women suffer the most from harassment, mockery and aggression.

Of the 12 cases, 11 of the individuals were released, and only one remains in custody because, according to the police, there is evidence that the person may have had ties to a gang, although the details of that evidence are unknown.

Call to stop abuses

On Nov. 11, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) expressed concern over “the persistence of massive and allegedly arbitrary arrests” by Salvadoran authorities under the state of emergency.

It also reported non-compliance with judicial guarantees, and called on the government “to implement citizen security actions that guarantee the rights and freedoms established in the American Convention on Human Rights and in line with Inter-American standards.”

Among the constitutional rights suspended since the beginning of the state of emergency on Mar. 27 are the rights of association and assembly, although the government says this only applies to criminal groups meeting to plan crimes.

It also restricts the right to a defense and extends the period in which a person can be detained and presented in court, which Salvadoran law sets at a maximum of three days.

On Nov. 16, Congress, which is controlled by the governing party, approved a new extension of the state of emergency, which it has done at the end of each month.

New Ideas lawmakers have said that the restriction of civil rights will be extended as long as necessary, “until the last gang member is arrested.”

In this country of 6.7 million people, there are an estimated 60,000 to 70,000 gang members.

Bukele’s party holds 56 seats in the 84-member legislature, and thanks to three allied parties they have a total of 60 votes, which gives them a large absolute majority.

A group of alleged gang members is presented to the media by police authorities in El Salvador on Jul. 20 as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the war against gangs waged in this Central American country under a state of emergency. But families of detainees and human rights organizations warn that in many cases they have no links to criminal organizations. CREDIT: National Civil Police

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Aug 5 2022 (IPS)

The body of Walter Sandoval shows a number of dark bruises on his arms and knees, as well as lacerations on his left eye and on his head – signs that he suffered some kind of violence before dying in a Salvadoran prison, accused of being a gang member.

The evidence of the beating is clear in photographs that Walter’s father, Saúl Sandoval, showed to IPS.

Walter, 32, was one of those who died in Salvadoran prisons after being detained by the authorities in the massive raids that the government of Nayib Bukele launched at the end of March, under the protection of the decreed state of emergency and the administration’s fight against organized crime and gangs.

The young man, a farmer, died on Apr. 3, in the parking lot of the hospital in Sonsonate, a city in the west of the country where he was transferred, already dying according to the family, from the police station in Ahuachapán, a city in the department of the same name in western El Salvador.

He had been transferred to the police station after his Mar. 30 arrest in the Jardines neighborhood of the municipality of El Refugio, also in the department of Ahuachapán.

“They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station,” his father told IPS.

He added that his son had been hanging out with friends, getting drunk. A few minutes later, a police patrol picked him up on charges of being a gang member, which the family vehemently told IPS was not true.

“He never received medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot,” the father added."They tortured him in the dungeons of the Ahuachapán police station. He didn't receive medical assistance, he died in the hospital parking lot." -- Saúl Sandoval

He says the only explanation he has for why the police detained Walter is because “they wanted to get the day’s quota.” What he meant is that police officers are apparently supposed to arrest a specific number of gang members in exchange for benefits in their assigned workload.

Deaths like Walter’s, if the participation of police is confirmed, are the most violent and arbitrary expression of the human rights violations committed since the government began its plan of massive raids, in what it describes as an all-out war on gangs.

Since late March, the Salvadoran government has maintained a state of emergency that suspended several constitutional guarantees, in response to a sharp rise in homicides committed by gang members between Mar. 25 and 27.

In those three days, at least 87 people were killed by gang members, in a kind of revenge against the government for allegedly breaking an obscure under-the-table agreement with the gangs to keep homicide rates low.

The state of emergency has been in place since Mar. 27, extended each month by the legislature, which is largely dominated by the ruling New Ideas party. Since then, violent deaths have dropped to an average of three a day.

Among the constitutional rights suspended are the rights of association and assembly, although the government said it only applies to criminal groups that are meeting to organize crimes. It also restricts the right to defense and extends the period in which a person may be detained and brought before the courts, which is currently three days.

The government can also wiretap the communications of “terrorist groups”, meaning gangs, although it could already do so under ordinary laws.

After the state of emergency was declared, homicides dropped again to around two or three a day, and there are even days when none are reported.

But some 48,000 people have been arrested and remanded in custody, accused by the authorities of belonging to criminal gangs. And the number is growing day by day.

However, the families of detainees and human rights organizations complain that among those captured are people who had no links to the gangs, known as “maras” in El Salvador, which make up an army of a combined total of around 70,000 members.

On Jun. 2, rights watchdog Amnesty International stated in an official communiqué that “Under the current state of emergency, the Salvadoran authorities have committed massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment, and at least 18 people have died in state custody.”

But President Bukele, far from being receptive to criticism, dismisses and stigmatizes the work of human rights groups, referring to their representatives as “criminals” and “freeloaders” who are more interested in defending the rights of gang members than those of their victims.

Walter Sandoval is one of the young men who have died with signs of torture in El Salvador’s prisons under the state of emergency in force in the country since the end of March. The police captured him without any evidence linking him to gangs, said the young man’s family – part of a pattern that has been documented by human rights organizations. CREDIT: Courtesy of the Sandoval family

Silent deaths and torture

The local human rights organization Cristosal has documented nearly 2,500 cases of arrests which, according to the families, have been arbitrary, with no basis for their loved ones to have been detained under the state of emergency.

The organization has also monitored press reports and social networks and has carried out its own research to establish that, as of Jul. 28, some 65 people had died while detained in the country’s prisons or in police cells as part of the massive police raids.

Some of the deceased showed obvious signs of beatings and physical violence, as was the case with Walter and other cases that have been widely reported in the media.

The official reports of these deaths received by family members are vague and confusing, such as that of Julio César Mendoza Ramírez, 25, who died in a hospital in San Salvador, the country’s capital, on Jul. 15.

The official report stated that he had died of pulmonary edema, i.e., his lungs filled with fluid, but also stated that the case was “being studied.”

Suspicions that the deceased were victims of beatings and torture during their imprisonment are not ruled out by their relatives or by human rights organizations.

“The cause of death given to the relatives in the hospital sometimes differs from the legal medical examination, and that leads one to think that something is going on,” lawyer Zaira Navas, of Cristosal, told IPS.

She added: “There are also families who say they were told it was cardiac arrest, but the victims have bruises on their bodies, which is not compatible (with the official version).”

And in the face of doubts and accusations that beatings and torture are taking place under the watchful eye of the State, the authorities simply remain silent and do not carry out autopsies, for example, which would reveal what really happened.

Navas remarked that, even within the state of emergency, “the detentions are arbitrary” because the procedure followed is not legally justified and many people are detained simply because of telephone complaints from neighbors – with which other human rights defenders coincide.

Another problem is that among these 2,500 complaints by families, about 30 percent involve detainees who have chronic diseases or disabilities or were receiving medical or surgical treatment, according to Cristosal’s reports.

The prison staff do not allow family members of the sick detainees to bring their medication, although in a few rare cases they have authorized it.

“We have seen deaths because it is presumed that they have been tortured, beaten, etc., but there have also been deaths of people who have not been given the medication they need to take,” Henri Fino, executive director of the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Law (FESPAD), told IPS.

Regarding the dubious role played by the government’s Institute of Legal Medicine (IML), in charge of conducting the forensic examinations to inform families about the cause of deaths, Fino said that in his opinion it has no credibility.

Especially, he added, now that members of the so-called Military Health Battalion have been stationed since Jul. 4 at several IML offices, presumably to assist in various tasks, including forensic exams, given the shortage of staff.

“What collaboration can they (the military) provide, if they are not experts, and the only reason they are in the IML is to exercise oversight?” Fino said.

Media war

Some of the people who have died in jails or prisons, who were arrested under the state of emergency, were described by the local media as victims of arbitrary, illegal detentions, in contrast with Bukele’s propaganda war claiming that all the detainees are, in fact, gang members.

The press has highlighted the case of Elvin Josué Sánchez, 21, who died on Apr. 18 at the Izalco Prison located near the town of the same name in the department of Sonsonate in western El Salvador.

The media have referred to him as the “young musician”, because he had been learning to play the saxophone, and they have described him as a decent person who was a member of an evangelical church in the area.

But according to neighbors, Sánchez was well-known as an active gang member in his native El Carrizal, in the municipality of Santa Maria Ostuma, in the central department of La Paz.

“They saw him well-armed on farms in the area, along with other gang members, and he told the owners not to show up there anymore, or they would kill them,” a resident of that municipality, who asked not to be identified, told IPS.

Contradictions like this have strengthened local support for Bukele’s insinuations that the independent media are in favor of gang members and against the government’s actions to eradicate violence in the country.

In fact, opinion polls show that a majority of the population of 6.7 million support the president’s measures to crack down on the maras.

But even though Sánchez was recognized by neighbors as a gang member, his arrest should have been carried out following proper procedures and protocols, based on reliable information proving his affiliation to a criminal organization.

This is something the police do not usually do in these massive raids where it is impossible for them to have the evidence needed on each of the nearly 48,000 detainees.

Nor did the fact that he had been a gang member merit him being beaten to death, since his human rights should have been respected, said those interviewed by IPS.

Shackelia Jackson's brother Nakeia was murdered by police in Jamaica. Credit: Amnesty International

By Shackelia Jackson
KINGSTON, Jamaica, Mar 22 2017 (IPS)

As a relative of a young man killed by the police in Kingston, Jamaica, many people have asked me how my family copes with the pain, with having lost a part of us, with the immense frustration of not having found justice for Nakiea.

The answer is not easy. Some days, the strength to continue fighting for justice comes from within, others, from the support we have received from so many people from around the world.

Some days feel lonely, as if we were the only ones going through this pain.

But a recent visit to Brazil with Amnesty International showed me that we are not alone. We are not alone in our pain, nor in the seemingly endless struggle for justice.

Unlawful police killings and impunity is a tragic phenomenon that crosses borders across this continent. From the USA to Brazil, hundreds of young men – most of them black, most of them poor – are killed by the police. Hardly any officers are taken to justice to respond for their actions, for the immeasurable suffering they cause to families like mine.

Unlawful police killings and impunity is a tragic phenomenon that crosses borders across this continent.

I had never been to Brazil before. I had never expected to feel so close to home.

While in Rio de Janeiro, a city where police officers killed two people every day in the run up to the 2016 Olympic Games, I met with some of the many relatives with whom I share the same struggle for justice.

Zé Luis is one of them. He lost his son Maicon, after police shot him dead in 1996. Police said it was in self-defense. Maicon was two years old. No one was ever held responsible for this killing. In 2016 the statute of limitation expired which means the case will now never be brought to a national court.

My heart broke with the families I met in Brazil.

But these stories, and my story, although immeasurably tragic are the catalysts augmenting my drive to never stop. To not only engage the Jamaican authorities in a conversation but to ensure that we work towards preventing what happened to my brother from happening to others. The only way for impunity to flourish, is for good people to be silent and to fight alone.

Our strength comes from working together.

I fight for me, for my brother and for all those around me, in Jamaica and beyond.

So their fight becomes my fight. Their world becomes mine. We become stronger together and the memories of their love ones and desire to save those who remain are our collective impetus.

And this fight is also yours because Nakiea was my brother but tomorrow this tragedy could happen to you, to your brother, to your father, to your friend. And as long as justice is not done, we are all in danger.

But together, we are stronger.

I fight because I have no other choice, to stop would mean I am giving another police officer permission to kill another of my brothers.

Excerpt:

Residents of Orange Villa, an inner-city community of Kingston protest on 14 July 2016 for the ongoing impunity in the case of Nakiea Jackson. Police showed up at the protest to intimidate relatives. Credit: Amnesty International.

By Louise Tillotson
KINGSTON, Nov 23 2016 (IPS)

The morning her brother was shot dead in January 2014, Shackelia Jackson had slept through her alarm. She woke up to the sound of his name and instantly knew something was wrong. When she ran down to the modest restaurant he operated in downtown Kingston, she noticed the spoon in the rice pot, the flour where the chicken was being fried. Then one of his slippers, and blood marks.

Her brother, Nakiea, had just prepared lunchtime orders and taken the garbage out when he was shot by the police. Police believed a robbery had happened close-by and were pursuing a “Rastafarian-looking” man. Nakiea fit that description.

In the two years that have passed since Nakiea was killed, police have raided the community several times, always coinciding with the days when the court was meant to hear his case. A preliminary enquiry was dismissed after a fearful witness failed to appear in court. When the community protested the dismissal of the case in July, police cars showed up.

In their public pursuit of justice, his sisters and brother have suffered frequent intimidation and harassment from the police.

Unfortunately, this isn’t an extraordinary story in Jamaica. In the past decade, the Caribbean island nation’s police have killed more than 2,000 people – until recently an average of four people every single week, mostly young men in inner-city, marginalized communities.

But as terrifying as they are, these numbers only tell part of the story.

As our new report Waiting in Vain, Jamaica: Unlawful Police Killings and Relatives’ Long Struggle for Justice reveals, police in Jamaica are not only killing people in shocking numbers, but they are using a long catalogue of “terror tactics” to ensure no one asks questions, let alone pursue ever-elusive justice.

Evidence strongly suggests that extrajudicial executions continue to be used as a strategy sanctioned by the state to “get rid of criminals”. Others killed are bystanders, in police custody, or simply people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After police shootings, officers tamper with crime scenes, leave the victims to “bleed out”, or drive them around “to finish them off”.

When their relatives pursue justice, they face intense and pervasive harassment by the police, in multiple areas of their lives. Most of the people we spoke to over several months asked us to tell their stories anonymously, because they live in severe fear of reprisals from the police.

Several families, including children, saw their family members being killed in front of them.

Many still encounter the police officers allegedly responsible in their neighbourhood.

Often police turn up at their homes, in some cases to unlawfully arrest and ill-treat relatives of the victim.

They also show up at hospitals, and even at the victims’ funerals, all as a way to intimidate and silence.

Meanwhile, the families are left waiting, dependent on a cripplingly slow justice system.

Claudette Johnson has been waiting 13 years for the Special Coroner’s Court to determine the cause of her son´s death, allegedly at the hands of the police. The court has a measly budget, and a backlog of at least 300 cases at any given time. But this is just a first step in her struggle. If the inquest concludes the killing was unlawful, it could take another decade to get the case to criminal trial.

In a context of rampant impunity, and without legal representation since Jamaicans for Justice, a human rights NGO assisting her, lost funding for such work in 2014, Claudette often feels she is waiting in vain.

Jamaican authorities will argue that they are doing something right as the number of killings by the police has reduced significantly over the past few years.

Numbers might have gone down, but little else has changed in the way the police force deals with the shocking institutional problems that allow police officers to get away with murder.

As of June this year, an independent police oversight mechanism (INDECOM) established in 2010 has initiated prosecutions against police in 100 cases, but only a handful have gone on trial due to chronic backlogs in the court system.

As far as we know, only a handful of police officers have been convicted of murder since 2000, for the more than 3,000 killings by police that took place in the same period.

When we asked, Jamaica’s Director of Public Prosecutions didn´t provide any data on the number of charges brought against officers or the number of convictions made in the last 10 years.

INDECOM has been a game-changer in Jamaica’s response to its decades-old epidemic of extrajudicial executions. But no matter how effective it is, it has no magic wand, and cannot have sole responsibility for improving accountability within the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

Holding Jamaican police to account requires strong political leadership and genuine will to reform a system that lets police get away with murder.

This doesn’t mean re-inventing the wheel. But it does mean empowering the institutions that can build a strong system of accountability.

The Special Coroner’s Court urgently needs reform and resources to operate effectively and to play a role in preventing future killings.

Last June, a Commission of Enquiry into human rights violations during the joint police-military operation in 2010 that left 69 people dead, issued clear recommendations for police reform. The highest levels of the state must pay attention to and act on these recommendations.

Ongoing reform of the justice system must also include practical measures that protect witnesses, and guarantee quicker and equal access to justice for relatives of people allegedly killed by state agents.

History shows the way the police operate and kill does not solve crime, it terrorizes families and cows communities into silence. This cannot continue. No more waiting in vain – it’s time for justice.

The views expressed in IPS opinion articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS-Inter Press Service.

When their relatives pursue justice, they face intense and pervasive harassment by the police, in multiple areas of their lives. Most of the people we spoke to over several months asked us to tell their stories anonymously, because they live in severe fear of reprisals from the police.

Several families, including children, saw their family members being killed in front of them.

Many still encounter the police officers allegedly responsible in their neighbourhood.

Often police turn up at their homes, in some cases to unlawfully arrest and ill-treat relatives of the victim.

They also show up at hospitals, and even at the victims’ funerals, all as a way to intimidate and silence.

Meanwhile, the families are left waiting, dependent on a cripplingly slow justice system.

Claudette Johnson has been waiting 13 years for the Special Coroner’s Court to determine the cause of her son´s death, allegedly at the hands of the police. The court has a measly budget, and a backlog of at least 300 cases at any given time. But this is just a first step in her struggle. If the inquest concludes the killing was unlawful, it could take another decade to get the case to criminal trial.

In a context of rampant impunity, and without legal representation since Jamaicans for Justice, a human rights NGO assisting her, lost funding for such work in 2014, Claudette often feels she is waiting in vain.

Jamaican authorities will argue that they are doing something right as the number of killings by the police has reduced significantly over the past few years.

Numbers might have gone down, but little else has changed in the way the police force deals with the shocking institutional problems that allow police officers to get away with murder.

As of June this year, an independent police oversight mechanism (INDECOM) established in 2010 has initiated prosecutions against police in 100 cases, but only a handful have gone on trial due to chronic backlogs in the court system.

As far as we know, only a handful of police officers have been convicted of murder since 2000, for the more than 3,000 killings by police that took place in the same period.

When we asked, Jamaica’s Director of Public Prosecutions didn´t provide any data on the number of charges brought against officers or the number of convictions made in the last 10 years.

INDECOM has been a game-changer in Jamaica’s response to its decades-old epidemic of extrajudicial executions. But no matter how effective it is, it has no magic wand, and cannot have sole responsibility for improving accountability within the Jamaica Constabulary Force.

Holding Jamaican police to account requires strong political leadership and genuine will to reform a system that lets police get away with murder.

This doesn’t mean re-inventing the wheel. But it does mean empowering the institutions that can build a strong system of accountability.

The Special Coroner’s Court urgently needs reform and resources to operate effectively and to play a role in preventing future killings.

Last June, a Commission of Enquiry into human rights violations during the joint police-military operation in 2010 that left 69 people dead, issued clear recommendations for police reform. The highest levels of the state must pay attention to and act on these recommendations.

Ongoing reform of the justice system must also include practical measures that protect witnesses, and guarantee quicker and equal access to justice for relatives of people allegedly killed by state agents.

History shows the way the police operate and kill does not solve crime, it terrorizes families and cows communities into silence. This cannot continue. No more waiting in vain – it’s time for justice.

Excerpt:

Police action in response to indigenous protests is increasingly under scrutiny in South Africa. Credit: Thapelo Lekgowa/IPS

By Dr. Anja Bienert
LONDON, Sep 7 2015 (IPS)

Everyone has the right to life. This principle is enshrined in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and appears in numerous international treaties and national laws.

Yet this notion was sorely absent the day police fatally shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, in a public park in broad daylight.From the streets of Ferguson, Missouri to the favelas of Brazil, police use of force and firearms often makes global headlines when it turns fatal.

On Nov. 22, 2014, police in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S., responded to an emergency call about an unidentified male standing in a local park and pointing a gun at people. It is unclear if the responding police officers were aware of the caller’s tip that the weapon was “probably fake”, or if they knew the alleged gunman was only a child.

Within two seconds of stepping out of his police car, one of the officers shot Tamir Rice from just metres away. A surveillance video later released by police shows how the young boy was fatally wounded in the blink of an eye. He died later in hospital.

A judge who reviewed the actions of the two police officers involved wrote that, having watched the surveillance video of the incident several times, he was “still thunderstruck by how quickly this event turned deadly”. He found probable cause for the officer who pulled the trigger to face murder charges.

Nobody is disputing that police are faced with challenging, and often dangerous, situations. The power to use force is indispensable for police to carry out their duties, but that does not mean it is an inevitable part of the job – in fact, the underlying principle of the international standards for policing is not to use force unless it is really necessary.

Those standards, the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms, spell out for police when force can legitimately be used.

What the Tamir Rice case shows is that in the U.S., as in many other countries, police often fall short of this mark. This tragic reality has been highlighted time and again, including the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the series of protests it unleashed.

From the streets of Ferguson, Missouri to the favelas of Brazil, police use of force and firearms often makes global headlines when it turns fatal.

In countless other cases, including in response to demonstrations, police are too quick to use force instead of seeking peaceful conflict resolution. They deploy tear gas, rubber bullets and other weapons in arbitrary and abusive ways or use excessive force, causing serious casualties, including killing and maiming people, often with little or no accountability.

Killings by police in Brazil have disproportionately impacted young black men. Numerous police shootings in the U.S. have resulted in the death of unarmed people, likewise with a disproportionate impact on African American males. In Bangladesh, special police forces have carried out heavy-handed police operations with lethal force, resulting in the deaths of many people.

And in countries including Bahrain, Burundi, Cambodia, Greece, Spain, Turkey, Venezuela and Ukraine, serious casualties have resulted from police use of tear gas, rubber bullets and other means of force, sometimes even firearms, during public assemblies.

In cases such as these, governments and law enforcement authorities frequently fail to create a framework to ensure that police only use force lawfully, in compliance with human rights and as a last resort. Killings and serious injuries are frequently the price of this failure.

This is due to a variety of reasons, including domestic laws that contradict international human rights obligations, deficient internal regulations, inadequate training and equipment, lack of command control and the absence of accountability for police who act outside the law.

To tackle this problem head-on, Amnesty International has published a new set of Guidelines on police use of force, timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the UN Basic Principles being adopted. Drawing on examples from 58 countries in all regions of the world, their detailed conclusions and recommendations are meant to support government authorities to implement the UN Basic Principles and ensure good, effective, human rights-compliant policing.

In certain limited circumstances, police can and will need to use force to maintain law and order. But this must respect strict rules and may never be seen as a licence to kill, nor as granting immunity to police officials.

Nobody is above the law, least of all those who have a duty to uphold it.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Washington DC, the evening of April 29. 2015. Activists and supporters affiliated with the #DCFerguson movement gathered in Chinatown for a march in solidarity with the Baltimore protests of the cop killing of African-American youth Freddie Gray. The DC event involved over a thousand marchers by the time it wound up in front of the White House. Credit: Stephen Melkisethian/cc by 2.0

By Kitty Stapp
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 2015 (IPS)

Since being roundly chastised last fall by the U.N. Committee Against Torture for excessive use of force by its law enforcement agencies, the United States hasn’t exactly managed to repair its international reputation.

Fatal beatings and shootings of African American and Latino citizens, mainly men, by the police have continued seemingly unabated, with the latest being the widely publicised case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, died Apr. 19 of spinal cord injuries in what has been ruled a homicide after being arrested for allegedly carrying an illegal pocket knife. Six officers have since been charged in his murder."As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite." -- Michael Ratner

The wave of cases – many caught on camera and shared via social media – have sparked a nationwide protest campaign grouped under the hashtag #blacklivesmatter.

On Nov. 28, a year after the Committee’s damning report, the U.S. must provide information on what it has done to follow up on its recommendations, which included prompt investigation and prosecution of police brutality cases and providing effective remedies and rehabilitation to the victims.

“The best way to begin to bring this racism and particular police murders to an end is by what we are seeing today: massive and militant demonstrations everywhere and shutting cities down,” Michael Ratner, president emeritus of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights, told IPS. “We are in a special moment that rarely occurs in this country; people are mobilised and in the streets. That is the key. Our cities cannot be governed without the consent of the governed.

“But of course there are other important elements as well. The platform the U.N. CAT offered for Blacks particularly to speak out was important, very important. It gave Michael Brown’s family an opportunity to be heard around the world as it did others. The conclusions of the committee were powerful and while the United States tried to ignore them, the world would not. The report gives international legitimacy to the protests we are seeing every day.”

Michael Brown was an unarmed Black teenager who was shot and killed by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. A grand jury refused to indict in his Aug. 9, 2014 death.

Brown’s parents testified before the U.N. committee in Geneva last year, and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein cited the case in condemning “institutionalised discrimination in the U.S.”

“The CAT report put pressure on the U.S. to do something and while its response was inadequate, the report’s findings can be seen as the beginning of the end for the belief both in the U.S. and abroad that the U.S. is a just society toward Blacks,” Ratner said.

“As the U.S. claims a human rights mantle and criticises others for racism, it becomes the world’s greatest hypocrite. Yes, the U.S. is the most powerful country and can ignore the U.N., but ultimately by doing so, it will be ignored.”

Ratner cited a previous instance that demonstrates how important the U.N. can be in this regard. In 1951, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People” was submitted to the U.N. by the Civil Rights Congress and detailed the horrendous situation faced by American Blacks.

“It received huge international press. The U.S. realized that it could not call itself a democracy and claim it was better than Communist countries if racism was so embedded in its society. Three years later the Supreme Court ended school desegregation.

“While the report was not the only reason for that change, the point is that the U.N. and particularly the recent CAT committee report has pointed to serious defects in U.S. democracy and human rights. It’s hard after this report, although surely the U.S. will try, to criticise other countries’ human rights and not simply be laughed at.”

Because the U.S. is a state party to the Convention against Torture, it is regularly examined by the CAT committee. Its next report is due in November 2018, after which the date for the next review will be set. In general, these reviews happen every four or five years.

Alba Morales, a researcher for the U.S. Programme at Human Rights Watch, agrees that advocates have been able to use the international attention brought by these reports to strengthen their local work.

“Take the John Burge torture cases in Chicago, for example,” she told IPS. “Burge was a Chicago police officer commander who oversaw the torture hundreds of arrestees in that city. Chicago advocates worked for decades to obtain accountability for those acts of torture by police, and appeared before the U.N. Committee Against Torture in 2006.

“It was only after the U.N. Committee called for accountability in that case that the U.S. government took action, eventually indicting and convicting Burge of obstruction of justice. While this was the result of many years of local advocacy, the spotlight that the U.N. report shone on these cases also contributed to the outcome.”

Morales said that the United Nations can continue to welcome the voices of those directly affected by human rights violations everywhere, including in the U.S.

“The families of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis attended the last meeting of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Their testimony powerfully illustrated the racial discrimination that persists in the U.S. While none of these U.N. committees can enforce any judgements against the U.S. or any other country, having an international platform amplifies the voices of those who are working incredibly hard to improve the human rights situation in the U.S.”

Ratner noted that U.S. racial discrimination, backed by state violence, has a lengthy and deeply rooted history that dates back hundreds of years.

“Ending the police murders and brutal treatment of Black people in the United States is no easy task,” he said. “Many whites, particularly in law enforcement, are racist to the core. It is a racism that has a history since the early days of slavery and it is a racism that continues in many aspects of Black people’s lives.

“Once it was called slavery, then Jim Crow, then slavery by another name, then the new Jim Crow. Yet we all know this unequal and brutal treatment of Black people must end.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Elizabeth Gomes, the wife of Amarildo de Souza, who has been missing from the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro since Jul. 14, 2013. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 19 2013 (IPS)

Over the last two decades, nearly 92,000 people have gone missing in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, according to official figures and academic studies. Most of the cases have been shelved with little or no investigation.

Amarildo de Souza, 43, lived in Rocinha, one of the biggest of the favelas or shantytowns that line the hills ringing the city of Rio de Janeiro, the state capital.

His small 10-square-metre house on a narrow alleyway called “Roupa Suja” (dirty clothes) at the top of the hill was home to himself, his wife and their six children.

The neighbourhood has no sanitation, running water, garbage collection or street lighting.“The UPP police took my husband away, and his documents. He went missing a month ago and I have no money. At least I want his bones, to bury them. I want an answer: Where is Amarildo?” -- Elizabeth Gomes

To support his family, de Souza worked in construction and did odd jobs. When he wasn’t working, he would go fishing.

On Sunday Jul. 14 he came home after fishing. At the door to his house he was met by a group of 20 military police officers who said they needed to take him to the local Police Pacification Unit (UPP) for questioning.

The UPPs were created by the Rio de Janeiro state government to establish a sustained police presence in the favelas and drive out the drug trafficking gangs. The community policing and crime prevention strategy launched in 2008 is complemented with social programmes, such as bringing piped water, sanitation, education and other services to the favelas.

Rocinha was “pacified” in September 2012, when the police occupied the vast favela and forced out a drug gang that controlled the area, where heavily armed drug traffickers used to be a routine sight.

De Souza was last seen getting into the police car.

His case became another focus of the near-daily protests that have been held in this city over the last two months. His face can be seen on posters plastered around the city, above the question “Where is Amarildo?”

“There are a series of irregularities in what the police did,” Amnesty International adviser Jandira Queiroz told IPS. “If [de Souza] was wanted for questioning, he would have only had to go to the local police station, rather than UPP headquarters. These mistakes on the part of police merit investigation, in and of themselves.”

Amnesty International is urging its three million supporters worldwide to send letters to the state government and ministry of security calling for a thorough investigation, witness protection, and prosecution of the perpetrators.

“The police say they let him go,” said Queiroz. “Nothing has been found so far, and there is no evidence of where he – or his body – could be. If he died, his family at least wants to give him a decent burial.”

The UPP headquarter’s surveillance cameras, which could confirm the police claim that he walked out of the station, weren’t working that night. And the GPS devices in the police cars that picked up de Souza were not hooked up.

The civilian police are treating the case as a homicide, possibly committed by UPP federal agents or by drug traffickers.

The family is losing hope of finding him alive. The climate in the neighbourhood is one of frustration and a feeling of insecurity and lack of protection.

An indignant Elizabeth Gomes, de Souza’s wife, said: “The UPP police took my husband away, and his documents. He went missing a month ago and I have no money. At least I want his bones, to bury them. I want an answer: Where is Amarildo?”

This high-profile disappearance drew attention to the cases of hundreds of people who have gone missing without leaving a trace. Police officers were the main suspects in many of the unresolved cases.

According to the Public Security Institute, an average of 15 people a day go missing in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The most frequent causes are murders, domestic disputes, and mental problems.

But the statistics are not updated when a missing person case becomes a homicide, for example, after a body is found.

A study by Fábio Araújo, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, found that 91,807 people went missing in the state between 1991 and May 2013.

In 2011, 5,482 people went missing, and in 2012, 5,934. Most of the missing persons are men from the favelas or poor suburbs.

In his report, Araújo says the police are “extremely violent,” as are the militias – bands of off-duty members of the police or military involved in extortion and other forms of organised crime – and drug trafficking gangs. “These actors sometimes fight and sometimes cooperate to make bodies disappear,” he said.

On Aug. 13, families of missing persons and activists took part in a public hearing organised by the human rights commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature.

“My sister’s car was shot up by the police, and she has been missing for five years,” said Adriano Amieiro, the brother of Patrícia Amieiro, a 24-year-old engineer who went missing in June 2008. “I don’t think we’ll ever see her again. Our family has not been able to have closure; we have no body to bury,” he told IPS.

A bill currently moving through the Senate would classify the crime of forced disappearance in a new article in the penal code.

In Brazil, bodies are often made to disappear, because when no body is found, police stop investigating.

“This is a country of impunity when it comes to crimes against life,” Antônio Carlos Costa, the head of Rio de Paz, a local NGO, told IPS. “Thousands of people disappear and the authorities don’t worry about finding out what happened to them. Many cases are never even registered in police stations, and the police are among those who carry out this practice.”

According to Costa, although the statistics are “chilling,” the number of people who go missing is actually higher than the official figures, and there are clandestine cemeteries all around the city and surrounding areas.

“We live in a culture of banalisation of the loss of human life, which is reflected in the powers-that-be,” Costa said.

The chair of the state legislature’s human rights commission, lawmaker Marcelo Freixo, said “deep contradictions” emerged in the investigations into de Souza’s disappearance. In the second week of August, he sent an official request asking the prosecutor’s office and the civilian police to clarify the discrepancies.

In the legislator’s view, the police claim that de Souza may have been linked to drug trafficking in Rocinha was an attempt to “discredit the victim” and the complaint that he had gone missing.

Freixo told IPS that there was no indication that de Souza or his family were involved in drug trafficking.

He proposed the creation of a task force involving representatives of the prosecutor’s office and the state ministries of security, social assistance and human rights, to investigate cases of missing persons in the state.

Turkish police have been using excessive force against unarmed protestors. Credit: Arzu Geybulla/IPS

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay have advised “maximum restraint” following media reports of a violent police crackdown on peaceful protestors in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.

In a statement on Jun. 18 Pillay said, “The atmosphere is still…highly combustible, it is important that authorities recognise that the initial extremely heavy-handed response to the protests, which resulted in many injuries, is still a major part of the problem.”

The Turkish Medical Association last week reported nearly 7,500 protest-related injuries since the occupation of the park began at the end of May, and at the time of writing six have died.

Pillay urged the Turkish government to take “all necessary measures to ensure that police forces do not resort to excessive use of force… The aim should be to minimise damage and injury, and respect and preserve human life.”

The protests began as a peaceful complaint over land use in Gezi Park – an island of green in the middle of the concrete Taksim Square – but expanded swiftly into an anti-government uprising in many cities around Turkey.

One of the 50 original Gezi Park protesters, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Bengi, told IPS: “I have been a part of the protest from its very beginning. I’m not surprised at the police violence, as Turkey has a tradition of violence, suppression and police brutality.”

She acknowledged that attempts over the last decade to move closer to EU succession have led to a decrease in open state hostility, “so in a sense this reaction could be seen as strange.”

Expected or unexpected, the violence has been extreme and has grabbed media attention and the eyes of the world’s leading rights bodies, with watchdogs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch strongly condemning the actions of heavily armed security forces against peaceful demonstrators.

Bengi sees this violent response as a direct result of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s “wayward” decision making. “The Prime Minister has shown a lack of effective management, and simply wants to prove to the people that what he says will be done.”

Many have questioned Erdoğan’s administration of the police force since the protests began, including the widespread use of gas canisters against the population.

Two protestors are reported to have died due to gas canisters; Abdullah Comert, 22, a youth member of the opposition Republican People’s Party, was killed after being struck in the head by a canister in Hatay, close to the Syrian border in southern Turkey, while cleaning worker Irfan Tuna died after having been subjected to powerful tear gas in Kızılay Square in Ankara.

The U.N. high commissioner drew specific attention to the use of these canisters by police forces in her statement on Jun. 18.

“Reports that tear gas canisters and pepper spray were fired at people from close range, or into closed spaces, and the alleged misuse of rubber bullets, need to be promptly, effectively, credibly and transparently investigated,” she stressed.

The Turkish Medical Association says many of the injured have reported respiration disorders caused by tear gas, and musculoskeletal system injuries (soft tissue injuries, cuts, burns and fractures), which are related with close-quarter shots of tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. They also reported tear gas being released into a clinic in Ankara.

Kimber Heinz, organising coordinator of the ‘Facing Tear Gas’ (FTG) campaign spearheaded by U.S.-based War Resisters League, told IPS that gas, pepper spray and other chemicals weapons have become a popular tool among oppressive governments to quell democratic uprisings.

“We started hearing a lot of calls around 2011 from places like Egypt, how there were canisters being used by police to injure people and suppress popular resistance movements.” Many of these canisters, she said, carried “Made in USA” labels.

“There are now reports coming out of Istanbul that canisters produced by NonLethal Technologies, based in Homer City, Pennsylvania and Defense Technologies based in Casper, Wyoming, have been found on the ground in Gezi Park,” Heinz added.

Facing Tear Gas has helped promote a petition, authored by American-Turkish lawyer Kerem Gulay, that calls on three U.S. congressmen to propose legislation that could stem the flow of tear gas to countries that are violently stifling peaceful protests.

The petition cites the fact that some 150,000 canisters were used across Turkey between May 28 and Jun. 16, and that in the same period 12,000 people received medical care for exposure to multiple forms of tear gas. The primary target of the petition, Senator P. Leahy from Vermont, was unavailable for comment.

While the U.S. represents a spigot that can be tightened to choke the supply of these products to Turkey, Bengi is unsure that such a call has resonated with the Turkish population yet.

“Right now people are still trying to shake off the shock of sustained use of tear gas. Their anger is entirely focused on the Turkish government,” she said.

Brazil’s Guarani-Kaiowá people are the targets of violence at the hands of large landowners and their paid gunmen in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 23 2013 (IPS)

There is a “deficit of justice” in Brazil, where the police themselves sometimes join the ranks of organised crime, in the form of militias, according to Amnesty International.

In the past few years, significant advances have been made in Brazil in terms of ensuring basic rights, but there are still problems in many areas, Atila Roque, director of the Brazilian chapter of the London-based rights group, said Wednesday.

Amnesty’s Annual Report 2013: The State of the World’s Human Rights, released Wednesday, analyses the situation in 159 countries and dedicates over four pages to Brazil. It notes the country’s high rates of violent crime, and the excessive use of force and even torture by those in charge of law enforcement.

“The threat to the life of the population in general posed by criminal activities is still serious, and the state bodies that should guarantee the rights of society often become the agents of violations of those rights,” Roque told IPS.

Rio de Janeiro’s militias – squads of rogue police who have formed illegal vigilante gangs and dominate entire neighbourhoods – are an extreme case, Roque said, because they are made up of agents who “use the uniform as an instrument to break the law and join the world of crime.”

The activist said the state is having trouble fighting this new form of organised crime.

“This phenomenon has gained visibility in recent years and reveals, above all, a process of deterioration in public security, because of the failure to contain the expansion of organised crime within the very ranks of the police,” Roque said.

The policy of creating ‘Police Pacification Units’ in Rio de Janeiro favelas or shantytowns has been one of the measures used to bring down soaring homicide rates. But the community policing strategy has not extended to favelas dominated by the militias made up of corrupt police.

“If this problem is not addressed in-depth, there will be no improvement in terms of justice and human rights,” Roque said.

The Amnesty report says at least 200,000 more guards are needed in the country’s prisons, where it describes conditions as “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”

Roque said that due to an aggressive incarceration policy, the prison population in this country of 198 million people has climbed to over 500,000 – a number only surpassed by the United States, China and Russia.

Worse, over 40 percent of inmates have not yet been sentenced, and a number of them may not even be found guilty in the end.

An Amnesty delegation that visited prisons in the state of Amazonas in northwest Brazil last year to investigate reports of abuse “saw inmates in foetid, overcrowded, insecure cells.

“In several prisons women and minors were detained in the same units as men, and there were numerous reports of torture, including near-suffocation with a plastic bag, beatings and electric shocks by the state military police,” the report added.

Indigenous people especially vulnerable

The Amnesty report also focuses on the plight of the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous people in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, who are facing intimidation, violence and threats of being forced off their ancestral land.

“Peasant and indigenous leaders in that region are vulnerable to violence at the hands of landowners, and the risk of death remains high,” Roque said, referring to “the organised extermination of a people with the collusion of the state in the face of apathy on the part of society.”

Amnesty criticised a July 2012 attorney general’s office resolution authorising mining and hydroelectric projects and military constructions in indigenous territories without the prior consultation to which they are entitled under International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which was ratified by Brazil in 2002.

Flavio Machado, regional coordinator of the Conselho Indigenista Missionário (CIMI), a Catholic missionary organisation that works on behalf of indigenous rights, told IPS that native people are “completely disregarded” by the authorities in Brazil and are facing the most complex situations seen since the 1964-1985 dictatorship.

“There is a concerted attack on indigenous people. The demarcation of indigenous territory is moving ahead slowly, and they are treated as second-class citizens,” said Machado, who worked with Amnesty on the indigenous rights section in the organisation’s annual report.

The 45,000-strong Guarani-Kaiowá community is the second-largest native group in the country, where 0.4 percent of the population is indigenous. Most of the Guarani-Kaiowá live in small areas of land in the southern part of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where they face alarming levels of violence.

The overall homicide rate in Brazil is 27.4 per 100,000 population, according to the 2012 Map of Violence. But the murder rate among the Guarani-Kaiowá is 140 per 100,000, Machado said.

In the last 10 years, 12 indigenous leaders were killed in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul alone. Most of them were Guarani-Kaiowá.

“The violence is exercised by ranchers and their paid gunmen,” reported CIMI, which is linked to the Catholic bishops’ conference. “There is a militia to kill indigenous people and prevent the demarcation of their ancestral land by the authorities. So far only 10 percent of their territory has been officially recognised.”

But Machado said the most serious problem faced by the Guarani-Kaiowá is the high suicide rate, caused by anguish over the lack of prospects for the future. According to the Health Ministry’s special office on indigenous health, there were 611 suicides in that ethnic group between 2000 and 2012.

Survival International, a human rights organisation that campaigns for the rights of indigenous peoples, reported that ”the Guarani suffer a wave of suicide unequalled in South America.”

“This is the consequence of the process of confinement in small areas without possibilities for development,” Machado said.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has not received representatives of the country’s indigenous groups since taking office in January 2011, despite their numerous requests, CIMI reported.

Protestors armed with bamboo sticks faced police in riot gear in Dhaka on May 4, 2013. Credit: Kajul Hazra/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Adding to a long list of domestic woes, including a factory collapse that left hundreds dead last month, Bangladesh is now grappling with a wave of violence that threatens to deepen the gulf between secular sections of society and religious fundamentalists.

Earlier this week at least 27 people were killed on the streets of the capital, Dhaka, as police clad in riot gear clashed with Islamic hard-liners calling for radical changes to the country’s constitution.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971." - Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj'
Sparked by a massive rally organised by the religious group Hifazat-e-Islam (Protectorate of Islam) on Sunday, May 4, the violence left hundreds injured with bullet wounds, fighting for their lives in hospitals across the city.

Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), the nearly 100,000 demonstrators wielding bamboo sticks and banners demanded implementation of the Hifazat’s 13-point programme, which calls, among other things, for the execution of “atheists” or anyone accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammed.

Aware of the group’s plans, the government had requested Hifazat leaders to postpone their mass rally in light of the national tragedy that occurred on Apr. 24, when a building in the Dhaka suburb of Savar housing several factories collapsed, leaving over 800 dead.

Undeterred by a daily mounting death toll from the Rana Plaza catastrophe, the worst garment sector disaster in history, the group pushed ahead with what it called the “Dhaka Seize”, cutting off access to all six entry-points into the capital and occupying all the main thoroughfares.

Witnesses to the street battles, which carried on into Monday, say protestors vandalised buildings, torched scores of businesses and looted shops, all the while chanting anti-government slogans.

Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj’, described the violence as a veritable “war against the state”.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971,” he told IPS, referring to the bloody independence struggle that resulted in the secession of what was then East Pakistan from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, leaving at least three million dead, by the most conservative estimates.

Ever since the creation of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, this Muslim majority country of 160 million has been governed by a secular constitution.

Dutta believes Hifazat-e-Islam, an alliance of about 12 religious groups, is now seeking to dismantle the pluralism that has for years been enshrined in the constitution and “destroy the nation’s social, cultural and democratic values”.

Other demands on the group’s 13-point agenda include bans on anti-Islamic “propaganda” (in the form of social media) and the “intermingling” of men and women in public spaces, as well as mandatory religious education from primary to higher secondary levels.

Though the group claims to uphold the Islamic faith, many religious scholars like Moulana Ziaul Ahsan, president of the Bangladesh Sammilita Islamic Jote, have denounced their actions as “unconstitutional”.

Meeting violence with violence

Soon after the official rally ended late Sunday night, police tried to disperse the crowds, but activists hailing mostly from madrashas (religious schools) refused to clear the streets until the government agreed to implement a new anti-blasphemy law.

While many eyewitnesses say the protestors provoked police reprisals by throwing homemade explosives, bricks, stones and sticks, other sources claim the government must be held accountable for deploying the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) police force and the paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) with instructions to “shoot to kill”.

“I have never seen such violence before,” Kajul Hazra, a photojournalist who has 22 years of experience working in Bangladesh, told IPS, adding that over 12,000 police were dispatched to quell the riot.

“The protestors used drums of petrol to torch trees cut from islands on the streets, broke window panes and set fire to parked vehicles, banks and offices…ambulance sirens, flames and tear gas smoke filled the air of Motijheel area (Dhaka’s commercial hub),” he recalled.

Police Spokesman Masudur Rahman told the press on Monday that his men were “forced” to use “rubber bullets, tear gas and sound grenades to control the violence.”

But human rights advocates say the decision to fire on unarmed protestors amounts to a violation of democratic principles.

“They (the police) fired on the demonstrators late at night, into the darkness, which was really cruel,” Farida Akhter, a leader of the United Women’s Forum, told IPS, adding that such actions “are those of a dictator government and completely unacceptable in a democratic society.”

A visibly shaken public sees the incident as a frightening reminder of the deep divisions in the political sphere.

According to Rokeya Prachy, a prominent social activist, Hifazat enjoys the support of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), as well as the Jamat-e-Islami, whose leaders are currently being tried for war crimes allegedly committed on behalf of the West Pakistan military junta during the 1971 Liberation War against pro-independence activists.

In February and March, tens of thousands of civilians took to the streets when the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh failed to mete out the long-anticipated death penalty to former Jamat leader Abdul Quader Mollah.

Hifazat and its supporters have called attention to the discrepancies between the government’s acceptance of the anti-Jamat rallies earlier this year – popularly known as the ‘Shahbag protests’– and its violent response to this week’s Hifazat march.

Others say the different government tactics were based on the nature of each protest, with the demonstrations in Dhaka’s Shahbag Square being peaceful sit-ins, compared to the Hifazat’s vandalism and aggression.

“Why should the government’s actions (on Sunday and Monday) be termed undemocratic when security forces acted to protect the lives and properties of innocent people?” asked Abul Barkat, chairman of the economics department at the University of Dhaka, in an interview with IPS.

“I think the police were very careful in their operation to save lives,” he said.

Political parties, meanwhile, have fallen back on the usual blame game: at a press conference at the BNP’s Dhaka branch Monday, spokespeople for the opposition accused members of the ruling Awami League of instigating the violence, a claim the latter has stoutly denied, insisting that the BNP and its ally, the Jamat, were behind the chaos.

While political leaders pointed fingers, the violence quickly spread to the southern city of Khulna, to Sylhet in the north-east, Rajshahi in the north-west and to the southeastern port city of Chittagong, where a day-long clash with law enforcers left at least seven people including one police officer dead, with over 50 people still suffering from severe bullet wounds.

A woman is attacked by police at an anti-rape protest in New Delhi. Credit: Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI)

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Harsh police handling of public protests erupting across India over a spate of sensational rapes since December has resulted in renewed demands to reform a force that retains the repressive features of its colonial origins.

Last month a bench of the Supreme Court, angered by police brutality on women protesting against rapes in the capital, New Delhi, and other north Indian states, demanded to know the status of compliance with rulings the apex court had made on police reforms six years ago.

“Even an animal won’t do what the police officers are doing everyday in different parts of the country,” the bench said, referring, among other things, to the beating up by police of a 65-year-old woman who had joined protests against rape in Aligarh, a city in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “How can police officers beat an unarmed lady?”

Justice G.S. Singhvi, leading the bench, singled out the case of a police officer slapping a young woman participating in protests on Apr. 19 outside a Delhi hospital where a five-year-old girl was being treated for serious injuries inflicted on her by her rapist in the Gandhi Nagar area of the capital.

“The police can do little to reduce crimes like rape, but they should be judged by how they react to such crimes,” said Jyotiswaroop Pandey, who retired last year as director-general of police in the northern Uttarakhand state and is currently a member of the police reforms commission.

Pandey told IPS that it was “unacceptable” that police failed to react to complaints of misbehaviour against a bus driver on Dec. 16, 2012.  Hours later, the driver and his crew were arrested for the gang rape and brutalisation of a 23-year-old woman passenger.

The victim and her male companion were flung off the bus and left lying in a busy Delhi street naked and bleeding for almost an hour with no passer-by daring to intervene for fear of getting embroiled in a lengthy police case.

As public protests grew, authorities moved the young woman to a Singapore hospital where she succumbed to her grievous injuries on Dec. 29. In Delhi, police resorted to water cannons, baton charges and mass arrests as protesters surged towards parliament.

Commenting on the rough treatment of protesters, Pandey said the police had “forgotten that their primary focus should have been on maintaining peace and order without resorting to force or behaviour likely to exacerbate tensions when an empathetic attitude could have quietened tempers.”

Even more than the brutal repression on the streets, rights activists are concerned with the way rape victims are treated at police stations, starting with refusals to record complaints.

In December, the victim of a gang rape in Patiala, Punjab state, committed suicide by consuming poison after leaving behind a note charging police with failing to act on her complaint and, instead, intimidating her.

Soon after she was raped by three men, the victim had appeared on television channels describing her ordeal, but that failed to rouse the police. Even after the suicide it took intervention by the Punjab high court before authorities moved to sack three policemen and initiate criminal proceedings against them.

In a press note released on Apr. 23, the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), a major non-government organisation that is pushing for police reforms, expressed “serious concern at the continuing lack of response to victims of rape.”

CHRI said evidence of this failure could be seen in the way police handled the case of a five-year-old girl who was kidnapped and raped in Delhi last month.

Instead of registering the missing person complaint, police “simply drove the distraught parents away,” the CHRI press note said, adding that policemen even offered a bribe to prevent the family from taking their story to the media.

Even the new rape laws, which threaten police officers who refuse to record a complaint of rape with a two-year jail sentence, seem to have done nothing to change attitudes and behaviours, said CHRI Director Maja Daruwala.

The new law, drawn up after wide consultations with civil society, takes into consideration current thinking on gender issues and existing patriarchal attitudes in society to modify ideas ingrained in the Indian Penal Code that was introduced by the British colonial regime in 1860.

Recent events show that the law, passed by parliament on Mar. 20, is yet to kick in. “Changes in law brought about after the Dec.16 rape have little meaning if the police continue to defeat justice through their…subversive practices,” Daruwala said.

Also, while the changes provide for quicker trials and harsher punishments for rapists, they have been criticised for completely overlooking the burning need to modernise the police force to make it service-oriented rather than repressive, as desired by the Supreme Court.

“If the 2006 directives of the Supreme Court were adopted and implemented they could have transformed the police from a feared and distrusted force into an essential service upholding the law,” says Navaz Kotwal, coordinator of CHRI’s police reforms programme.

On Mar. 6, alerted by reports in the media of the police’s repeated high-handedness in dealing with anti-rape protests, the Supreme Court issued notices to the provinces to report on progress in implementing reforms.

But senior police officers are sceptical. “Even though the apex court has not given up its monitoring, the present bunch of police reforms is already a futile exercise,” says Vikash Narain Rai, former director-general of police in the northern Haryana state.

Rai told IPS that if police reforms are to be successful they need to be accompanied by “judicial reforms, an overhaul of correctional services and real empowerment of society.”

Rai regrets that the emphasis remains on “flexing state muscles through increased retribution and protectionism, essentially by-products of male chauvinism, rather than on sensitising criminal justice functionaries and empowering women.”