The top story from the Americas in the Washington Post this weekend is from Guatemala where two reports examine human rights and the recent discovery of an 80,000 document police archive containing records of numerous human rights atrocities between 1960 and 1996. The warehouse where the document treasure trove was found opened about 2 weeks ago and is considered the largest such archive ever released in Latin America. Nearly 7.5 million documents thus far have been digitized and catalogued, and, according to the WaPo, they “give detailed accounts of the shadowy world of police disappearances of activists, with photographs of students and labor leaders arrested by police and explicit instructions on how to spy on military critics who were later clandestinely seized and murdered.” Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom has said that he believes the “liberation of the archives will have a positive impact in the struggle against impunity,” but added that, for those who could be held responsible, these archives raise a lot of fears.” In a second piece, the WaPo illustrates such very real fears. According to the paper, the story Gladys Monterroso’s kidnapping “has become a symbol of Guatemala's collective trauma as the nation suffers through a huge surge in abductions and killings that has gone largely unnoticed internationally amid the attention focused on the violence in its northern neighbor, Mexico.” Monterroso, a law professor and the wife of Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman, Sergio Morales, was kidnapped in late March. The abduction came just a half a day after Morales released first report based on the newly discovered police documents, implicating national police in atrocities during Guatemala's 36-year civil war. The WaPo says Ms. Monterroso resurfaced 12 hours later, bruised, bloodied, and raped by her captors in hopes of intimidating her husband.
In the New York Times an opinion piece on the Fujimori trial in Peru by María McFarland Sanchez-Moreno of Human Rights Watch says the verdict against the former president has brought both paradoxical joy “in this once unthinkable moment” and worry “that people would forget how we got here.” Ms. McFarland writes that she too once shared in the widespread relief that Fujimori was acting to end the chaos brought on by the Shining Path insurgency. Still today, she writes, “some will argue that he should not have been convicted. Not because he wasn’t guilty, but because he got things done. However, McFarland adds that the verdict against Mr. Fujimori does show that “next time Peruvians may be able to put their trust in democratic institutions, not autocratic leaders.” As Reuters also reports in the NYT over the weekend, suspected leftist rebels killed 13 troops in two ambushes in a mountainous region of Peru where security forces are fighting cocaine traffickers, indicating that the fight Mr. Fujimori aggressively and illegally waged may not yet be over.
On U.S. Cuba policy, the Wall Street Journal writes that “President Barack Obama plans to tell Latin American leaders later this week that the U.S. is willing to discuss how to improve relations with Havana, but wants Cuba to take steps toward democracy before it is reintegrated into the Western hemisphere's economic and political institutions.” While the U.S. wants the meeting to focus on the global economic recession, Obama administration officials said the president is ready to engage on the Cuba issue if brought up by other leaders. But, according to the paper, the White House will not approve further steps toward the normalization of relations with Cuba until it sees how Cuba responds to an easing of travel and remittance restrictions. In an opinion piece, Maria Werlau of the Cuban Archive project, says neither isolation nor engagement have helped Cubans attain their rights. “Sanctions, though ethically justified, can't work unilaterally; treating Cuba as a normal partner is immoral and counterproductive,” maintains Werlau. She argues in the piece that a new policy of comprehensive conditional engagement supported multilaterally is needed.
From the Miami Herald and LA Times, a series of reports and opinions in the lead-up to the Summit of the Americas. OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, writes in the MH that the Summit’s timing, in the midst of economic crisis, “offers a great opportunity for leaders in our hemisphere to fashion a fresh, regional development perspective.” He says the OAS is ready and willing to “support a sustainable energy partnership that includes the north-south and south-south transfer of low carbon technologies, such as solar energy, wind energy, biomass and geothermal and ocean thermal energy sources.” An editorial in the LAT argues that the Summit will give President Obama the chance to offer “leadership without big-stick unilateralism.” The paper says the issues of the economy, free trade, immigration, security/drugs, and Cuba are all issues around which a new U.S. Latin America policy must be formed. MH columnist Andres Oppenheimer believes this first issue, the economy, will be most on the minds of Latin American leaders, arguing that a series of U.S. proposals on enlarging alternative energy agreements, expanding the Mérida Initiative, supporting free trade agreements, and reducing healthcare costs through a regional healthcare partnership would help to allay Latin America’s economic worries. And, finally, in the wake of the Fujimori conviction, the MH remembers how the Summit of the Americas was the forum at which leaders first vowed to combat widespread political corruption, signing the world’s first international agreement against corruption in 1994. “Fifteen years later,” the MH writes, “almost a dozen who signed the anti-corruption pact in Miami or in subsequent years are in prison, under indictment, or spent years dodging criminal charges of corruption or violation of human rights.”
In other news over the weekend, the NYT reports from Mexico that frustrated women’s groups are challenging the recent appointment of Mexico’s ambassador to Canada, Francisco Barrio Terrazas. According to the NYT, rights groups estimate that as many as 500 women have been killed since 1993 in Ciudad Juárez and other cities in the state of Chihuahua. Many maintain that the police more rarely investigate cases of violence against women, often because the women are frequently poor. The women’s groups’ “most incendiary assertion” against Mr. Barrio Terrazas is that he once, while governor of Chihuahua, suggested that female victims of violent crimes should not have worn miniskirts and walked through unlit streets.
An AP report in the NYT says Bolivian President Evo Morales is continuing his hunger strike in an effort to press legislators to pass an election law.
In the LAT, WSJ, WaPo, and MH opinions and reports on Mexico, Colombia, and the so-called “war on drugs.” John Ackerman, a columnist for the Mexican weekly, “Proceso,” writes in the LAT that “Mexico’s problems will not be solved by placing high-powered weapons into the hands of a group of supposedly ‘untouchable’ elite police officers.” Rather, the U.S. should focus its attention on helping Mexico build effective and independent institutions in Mexico’s justice system and those federal agencies responsible for fighting corruption. The WSJ reports that antidrug activists will be launching a new campaign against marijuana use in the U.S. which will argue that pot smokers in the U.S. are unwittingly supporting drug cartels in Mexico. An opinion piece in the WaPo says “it’s clear that the drug war, like Prohibition, has led us into a gruesome blind alley. Mike Gray of the “Common Sense for Drug Policy” argues that “ending drug prohibition won’t solve our drug problem”…but it “will put drug addiction back in the hands of the medical profession, where it was being dealt with successfully.” And, from Colombia, the MH reports that the debate over drugs may be traveling in the reverse direction in that country. According to the paper, the Colombian Congress this month will begin discussing a bill supported by President Alvaro Uribe that would prohibit the possession of any drug and would punish addicts and drug users with mandatory clinical treatment. The bill would overturn a 1994 Constitutional Court ruling which maintained that prohibiting the use of drugs violated the constitutional right to ''free development of personality.” Since then, adults are allowed to possess up to 20 grams of marijuana and one gram of cocaine for consumption in the privacy of their homes, says the MH.
Finally, the MH reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Haiti this week en route to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The trip is expected to come two days after Clinton leads the U.S. delegation at a critical Haiti donor’s conference in Washington. And the WSJ says new fears of poverty in the midst of a global economic crisis will be on the minds of the Latin America’s economic elite gathering in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday at a regional meeting of the World Economic Forum.
Photo: The Washington Post
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