Activists and victims’ relatives protesting the closure of Tutela Legal, outside San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Oct 16 2013 (IPS)

Some 50,000 files on crimes against humanity are languishing in an undisclosed location in El Salvador, prey to damp and the ravages of time, while activists and lawyers frantically try to regain control over them.

Without prior warning, on Sept. 30 the Catholic Church suddenly closed the office that had spent decades painstakingly collecting the documents: the Tutela Legal del Arzobispado – the legal aid office of the archbishop of San Salvador.

But the former employees of the office, who learned that day that it was being closed, are working to reopen it elsewhere and are laying claim to the files.

“We are the legal representatives of the victims of abuses and their families, we are handling the cases, and that means our work has to continue,” Alejandro Díaz, a lawyer who was laid off when Tutela Legal was closed, told IPS.“We are not demanding anything that is not ours, but something that belongs to us, the families of the victims.” -- Rosa Rivera

“We are taking the last steps to relaunch the new office,” which will be called Tutela Legal Doctora María Julia Hernández, in honour of the human rights advocate who was the director of Tutela Legal from 1983 till her death in 2007, Díaz said.

The files contain the accounts given by survivors and victims’ families on audiotapes, videotapes and written documents, photos of victims and relatives, and documentation of places and dates of massacres and other crimes committed during the 1980-1992 civil war.

Tutela Legal spent decades collecting documentary evidence and testimony about the abuses, while providing legal aid to survivors and victims’ families.

Funding for the new office will come from the same international organisations that supported Tutela Legal, including the Catholic aid agency for England and Wales (CAFOD), the French Catholic Committee against Hunger and for Development (CCFD), and the Caritas branch in the northern Spanish region of Asturias.

“These organisations have promised us the same support they gave us when we were in the archbishop’s office,” Ovidio Mauricio González, the director of Tutela Legal at the time of its closure, told IPS.

Some 300,000 dollars are needed to digitise all of the material and organise it in accordance with international standards, González explained. A portion of the documents on paper are in poor condition due to damp and the passage of time, he added.

The archbishop of San Salvador, José Escobar, alleged a few days after the Tutela Legal office was closed that the decision was due to misuse of funds. But he did not provide any details.

According to González, no doubts were ever raised about the management of funds by Tutela Legal, which underwent regular audits by the international organisations that financed it.

Activists point out that 10 days before the office was closed down, the Supreme Court did something that was surprising given the history of the justice system in El Salvador: it agreed to hear arguments challenging the constitutionality of the 1993 amnesty law, which has let the perpetrators of human rights crimes committed during the armed conflict off the hook.

The Tutela Legal archives could serve as key evidence in legal prosecutions that may be reopened, depending on the Supreme Court’s decision.

Human rights groups at home and abroad are worried about where the files may be.

The Washington Office on Latin America said in a statement that it “hopes and expects that the Archdiocese will carefully protect these archives and make them available to researchers and investigators, in keeping with the Church’s long tradition of defending human rights and human dignity and the proud history of Tutela Legal.”

A group of around 100 national and international organisations also published lengthy advertisements in the local press, calling for the preservation of the files.

The archbishop’s office claims it is protecting the archives, although it transferred them to other installations, which have not been disclosed.

CAFOD, which has supported Tutela Legal’s work since the early 1980s, released a statement saying “We are concerned at the manner in which Archbishop Escobar Alas ordered the offices of Tutela to be closed: private security personnel escorted staff – many of them with decades of faithful service – to their desks giving them just ten minutes to collect their belongings and leave, obliging them to sign papers that they were ‘satisfied’ with the arrangement.”

“I’m here in solidarity with these people in their just demand to preserve the archives,” Andrea Mcleoud, an activist with Somos Tutal (We Are Our Land, in the Nahuatl indigenous tongue), told IPS during an Oct. 6 protest outside San Salvador’s Metropolitan Cathedral. Somos Tutal is a group of student activists from the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA).

Tutela Legal was set up in 1982 by then archbishop Arturo Rivera y Damas after he closed its predecessor, Socorro Jurídico, which was founded in 1977 by archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero.

Romero was assassinated by far-right death squads while saying mass in March 1980, when the armed conflict broke out in this impoverished Central American country of six million people.

Some 80,000 people –mainly civilians – were killed in the conflict in which government forces and right-wing paramilitary groups were lined up against the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) – now the governing party.

“We are not demanding anything that is not ours, but something that belongs to us, the families of the victims,” said Rosa Rivera, whose family was killed by soldiers and paramilitaries on May 14, 1980 along with 300 other peasants, including women and children, who were trying to flee to Honduras across the Sumpul river in the department or province of Chalatenango.

But the files also contain cases involving more recent human rights abuses.

One example is the case against lead contamination in a rural community caused by a car battery factory. The case was referred to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in 2008.

Far from here, in the Vatican, the beatification of Monsignor Romero is moving forward quickly, on the decision of Pope Francis. But paradoxically, part of his legacy is hanging by a thread.

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.”

U.S. President Barack Obama has called on Congress to pass legislation to strengthen gun control and combat a trend of growing gun violence. Credit: Michael Saechang/ CC by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jan 16 2013 (IPS)

Unveiling the most extensive gun control proposal in generations, U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday signed nearly two dozen executive orders and called on the U.S. Congress to enact a legislative package to blunt the country’s growing trend of gun violence.

The executive orders will strengthen a background check system for gun purchases, increase investigations into the sources of guns used during crimes, bolster the government’s ability to research gun ownership and violence, provide schools with more safety resources and launch a “national dialogue” on mental health.

The president is also urging Congress to take up legislation to require universal background checks for gun buyers (currently, around 40 percent of gun sales do not require any such check), to restore a ban on military-style assault weapons that expired in 2004, and to outlaw ammunition clips that store more than 10 bullets.

The recent flurry of activity around gun control in the United States was prompted by the killing on Dec. 14, 2012 of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in the state of Connecticut. Nonetheless, public shootings, particularly at schools, have become a nearly regular event in the United States in recent years.

According to a 2007 survey, the United States, where the Constitution’s Second Amendment guarantees the right to “keep and bear” guns, owns nearly half of all privately owned guns in the world. According to a study by Harvard University, a child in the U.S. is 13 times more likely to be killed by gun violence than a child in any other industrialised country.

On Wednesday, President Obama noted that in the month since the Connecticut shootings, more than 900 additional deaths in the United States have been blamed on guns. Others have suggested that the figure would double if it included gun suicides.

“We can’t put this off any longer,” the president said. “And in the days ahead, I intend to use whatever weight this office holds to make [new gun-control laws] a reality.”

Tackling trafficking

While many progressives are lauding the new moves, some are expressing regret that the president didn’t include basic initiatives to curb the significant flow of weapons from the United States into Mexico.

The Second Amendment “was never…designed to arm foreign criminal groups”, Eduardo Medina Mora, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, told journalists last week, suggesting that the new legislative atmosphere offers a “window of opportunity”.

Some 60,000 Mexicans have reportedly been killed in gun violence over the past half-dozen years. According to statistics offered by the U.S. government itself, around 70 percent of the guns seized in Mexico over the past year have been of U.S. origin.

“Mexico’s previous administration prodded the U.S. to take stronger action on gun control for years, and Mexico’s new ambassador has continued that pressure,” Christopher Wilson, an associate at the Woodrow Wilson Centre’s Mexico Institute, a Washington-based think tank, told IPS.

“With so many victims of organised crime in Mexico killed by assault rifles bought in the United States, Mexico would, I think, welcome any efforts to increase controls on those weapons – whether through a ban or increased screening of buyers.”

Yet in his remarks on Wednesday and in the details of his slew of executive orders, President Obama did not appear to emphasise the impact of U.S. guns on populations outside the country.

“I am incredibly encouraged that the White House is taking this action and finally taking on the gun issue,” Joy Olson, executive director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a rights watchdog group, told IPS. “However, when it comes to Mexico, the kinds of executive orders that President Obama could have made to deal right now with gun-trafficking issues, he didn’t do.”

On Monday, WOLA delivered a petition to the White House, signed by 55,000 people in the United States and Mexico, urging executive action on this issue. In particular, the petition called on the Obama administration to enforce an existing ban on the importation of foreign-produced assault rifles and to expand reporting requirements for assault weapons currently in effect only in border states.

“Part of what this reflects is the disconnect that often exists between the formation of domestic and international policy,” Olson said. “This is seen as a domestic policy issue in the U.S., and President Obama’s remarks and actions today reflect that. But the U.S. needs to realise that this is an issue that has huge implications for other countries, as well.”

Gun lobby going strong

Olson noted that the most important actions in this regard will require authorisation from Congress. Yet while she was confident that some members of Congress would be interested in moving to restrict the southward flow of arms, the broader prospects of President Obama’s new proposals are unclear.

The Republican-held House of Representatives will be one obstacle, with reports suggesting that even moderate Republicans in the House are not pushing for action on the president’s new proposals.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), a lobby group, remains an active and generous supporter of many Republican (and some Democratic) members of Congress. NRA membership has reportedly soared since the Connecticut shootings, as have purchases of assault-style weapons. In response to the shootings, the group suggested putting armed guards in schools.

Given House Republican threats, Democrats are being cautious in taking potentially politically damaging stances on legislation that stands little possibility of becoming law. A sluggish response from Democrats could now be the biggest obstacle standing in the way of major gun control overhaul.

In fact, recent surveys suggest broad and non-partisan support for some key components of Obama’s new proposals. According to a new poll by the Pew Research Center released on Monday, more than 80 percent of respondents support significantly expanded background checks for gun sales and laws preventing the mentally ill from purchasing weapons.

Further, majorities also support the creation of a federal database on gun ownership and bans on assault-style and semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. But because the partisan divide is far wider on these issues, Congressional action may be less likely.