WOLAblog

Fujimori on Trial II

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The former Peruvian president's trial has been an example of transparency and fairness, according to numerous observers. Yet the proceedings have taken place against a backdrop of growing hostility toward human rights defenders from parts of Peruvian public opinion and some government officials who remember Fujimori as the man who "saved Peru from terrorism."

As Jo-Marie Burt and Coletta Youngers document in an extraordinary account for WOLA, support for Alberto Fujimori has ironically risen at a time when the abuses of his 10-year-long rule have come to light more fully and graphically than ever before.  A conviction against Fujimori would set a milestone in efforts to reaffirm the rule of law and end impunity in Peru and everywhere in Latin America.  Reading this account and news stories, it's hard to miss the irony of Fujimori receiving the kind of fair, open trial that his regime regularly denied its opponents, not to mention supposed guerrilla sympathizers.

Today's news from Lima (read this story from El Comercio) would seem to support one of Jo-Marie's and Coletta's points, that Fujimori's defense team is doing its best to delay the verdict. Fujimori's lawyers will ask the judges to shorten the daily hearings from the usual eight hours, citing their client’s ailing health.

A verdict is expected in September.

Fujimori on Trial

The trial of Peru's former president Alberto Fujimori has opened an intriguing window into the inner workings of a state repressive apparatus. Witnesses have revealed how the state developed intelligence squads after 1990 to rub out purported guerrilla sympathizers and to neutralize critics. This was no random violence, but rather part of a deliberate and calculated effort directed from the very highest levels of government. As Carlos Rivera of the Lima-based human rights group Instituto de Defensa Legal, which has aided the prosecution, said in the newspaper La Republica:

If in the 1980s [the military] resorted to the indiscriminate use of violence, in the '90s we witnessed the use of the intelligence apparatus for selective repression. Even the chief of the National Intelligence Service and the army have said, We were being paid to do what before we could not do.

Jo-Marie Burt has observed part of the trial for WOLA, and we will have a third report from her and senior fellow Coletta Youngers in the coming days.  

Bill Ford II

 

The New York Times gives Bill Ford his due.

Litigating securities and product-liability cases took a back seat for Mr. Ford after that day in 1980. Of the American government, he said a year later, “You can’t take seriously the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty if at the same time you are sending arms, ammunition, trucks and police equipment to a junta which is murdering its own citizens.”

(Photo: A monument to the four churchwomen, near where their bodies were found, in El Salvador. Photo by Cindy Buhl)

Obama and Brazil

Latin American media have run reams of articles and broadcast reports on Barack Obama this week, some more perceptive than others, with some of the best from Brazil like this essay by sociologist Glaucio Ary Dillon Soares in the Rio de Janeiro paper Jornal do Brasil.

He recounts arriving in New Orleans in the late 1950s to study at Tulane University and finding himself faced with incomprehensible racial codes: segregated streetcars, white condescension, blacks so intimidated that they would leave the sidewalk and walk in the street if they saw whites coming in the other direction. He points out that the Democratic Party was at the time the party of choice of Southern white supremacists. Now it's about to nominate an African-American for president, part of  

a long process, with millions of small heroic actors helped by some political figures. It's a long way from being completed.

Bill Ford

Bill Ford was a Wall Street lawyer called by extraordinary circumstances to live an extraordinary life in the pursuit of justice. His younger sister, Ita Ford, was a Maryknoll nun and one of four American churchwomen raped and killed by National Guardsmen in El Salvador in December 1980. Their deaths, coming nine months after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, focused international attention on the violence and impunity prevailing in El Salvador at that time. Bill Ford worked hard to ensure that his sister would be remembered not just for the horrific manner of her death, but for her life of compassion and struggle. He helped lead efforts to hold two Salvadoran generals liable for the killings in U.S. federal court after they took up residence in Florida, and he spoke out everywhere for putting human rights and social justice at the center of U.S. foreign policy. He traveled many times, and often at great risk, to El Salvador to speak about the case and to press for justice.

He died on Sunday morning at home with his family after a year-long battle with cancer. WOLA offers sympathies to his family.

(Photo: On the 25th anniversary of the four religious workers' deaths, Bill Ford traveled to El Salvador for a commemoration. Photo by Cindy Buhl.) 

Garage Band

     The Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de El Salvador performs Dvorak's "New World Symphony" and Astor Piazzolla's "Concierto para Bandoneón y Orquesta" in a public parking garage in San Salvador, May 29.

The concert was one of two performed by the orchestra, directed by Martín Rodrigo Jorge, in places where people park their cars in this automobile-centered city.   

El Salvador Election Poll

A new public opinion poll from Gallup shows FMLN presidential candidate Mauricio Funes with a 21-point lead over the candidate for the ruling Arena party and former National Civil Police director Rodrigo Ávila. Funes stands at 41 percent and Ávila at 20 percent, with about one third of voters undecided.

The election is in March 2009.  The same poll puts Salvadoran President Elías Antonio Saca's approval rating at 36 percent. Salvadoran news site ContraPunto dissects the poll results.

Dark Light

 

Chilean artist Iván Navarro makes multi-media sculptures that often feature neon tubes attached to pieces of furniture. They glow brightly but Navarro has decidely dark intentions, like prodding the viewer to think about electricity as a method of torture, or about the death penalty. As he put it,  

“Neon is fragile, but it can electrocute you.”

This piece, at a joint exhibit of his work with Courtney Smith at G Fine Art in Washington, is topped with a stack of posters showing a photograph of two hooded people, one holding a guitar and standing on top of the other. The other side of the poster carries a translation of folksinger Víctor Jara's unfinished poem "Chile Stadium", which Jara wrote when he was being held captive in the Estadio Chile after the 1973 coup. Viewers are invited to take a copy of the poster with them.

(Photo: G Fine Art)

A Vote for Transparency

Last week, the House voted to restore public access to the names of graduates and instructors at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas, as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Bill. This is a good amendment for a couple of reasons.

First, it restores the status quo in existence up to 2006, when Congress voted to classify the names of the institute’s graduates and instructors for the first time in history. Up until then, those names were available to civil-society organizations, either through the school itself or through the Freedom of Information Act.

Second, the amendment restores the principle that U.S. security cooperation with Latin America ought to be conducted openly and transparently. WHINSEC, based in Columbus, Ga., has been widely criticized for its past history of training Latin American officers who were later implicated in serious human rights abuses in their home countries. This is a shameful history for which the United States, through its military training programs, shares responsibility. The institute maintains that it has changed, adding human rights and respect for the rule of law to its curriculum and screening participants to keep out officers with a history of abuse. When Congress voted to keep the names of WHINSEC personnel and students secret, it made it impossible for outside observers to review the records of WHINSEC students or monitor the behavior of WHINSEC graduatues.  Congress undermined WHINSEC’s claims to transparency and accountability and added a cloak of secrecy.

Because of the track record of U.S. involvement with Latin American security forces, human rights groups are sure to raise concerns about training programs for Latin American militaries at every step. Any serious response to those concerns has to start with transparency about who is being trained and who is doing the training. This bill goes in that direction. We congratulate Congressmen McGovern (D-MA), Sestak (D-PA) and Bishop (D-GA) and Chairman Skelton for making it happen.

Hello?

People still can't travel legally to Cuba under U.S. law. But cellphones can. 

As someone quoted in The Miami Herald said, the new U.S. rule will mean 

''...I can call my mother in a hospital in Havana thanks to the cellphone that George Bush allows me to send her... But I can't go visit her.

I hope the Cuban-American community in South Florida sees through this charade."

So do we. Engagement with Cuba is not the sort of thing you can phone in. It takes people-to-people contact. It should be clear to everyone by now that the U.S. government's restrictions on travel to Cuba inflict needless pain on Cuban-American families while doing nothing to promote reform on the island. WOLA has long supported engagement as a better approach.