As a controversial bill that would grant Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez decree powers for one year awaits final approval, on Wednesday the country’s National Assembly offered initial approval to another package of legislative acts that have many talking. Those laws, the BBC Mundo reports, include a bill on the “Defense of Political Sovereignty and National Self-Determination.” Among its ten articles, the bill prohibits both partisan and non-governmental organizations from receiving “foreign monies” that are intended to defend “political rights.” More specifically, the proposal’s objective is to “protect the exercise of political sovereignty and national self-determination from foreign interference” by restricting “economic aid or financial support” to persons or groups that might “threaten the stability and functioning of the Republic’s institutions.”
The BBC cites an article from the state-run Agencia Venezolana de Noticias (AVN) which spells out who some of those organizations might be. Getting mentions are USAID and Freedom House, as well as anti-Chavez organizations Primero Justicia, Un Nuevo Tiempo, Súmate, Podemos and 100% estudiantes.
Penalties for breaking the proposed law would range from fines to political proscription.
Not mentioned in the bill (again, according to BBC Mundo’s coverage) is the notion of “international cooperation,” an idea of some chavistas which has included the creation of a State-administered fund to receive and distribute all foreign money intended for non-governmental organizations. “International cooperation” is mentioned among the nine articles of the “Ley Habilitante” (Enabling Law), likely to be approved by the end of this week, but according to Marino Alvarado of the human rights group, PROVEA, Wednesday’s proposal may be “more serious” than earlier talks of “international cooperation.” Based as it is on the vague principal of “national sovereignty,” Alvarado tells Tal Cual that unions, cooperatives, and even the university could be subject to the penalties under the law if they “invite someone from abroad” considered by the government to be “a threat to the state institutions.”
On the “enabling law,” the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) (among others) expressed its concerns in a statement Wednesday. The IACHR:
“Both the constitutional provision and the delegating law fail to set the limits necessary for the existence of true control over the executive branch’s legislative power, while there does not exist a mechanism to allow a balanced correlation of government power as a guarantee for the respect for human rights.”
The IACHR goes on to say that the “possibility that bodies democratically elected to create laws delegate this power to the executive branch is not in and of itself a violation of the separation of powers or the democratic state,” but, in the case of the present Enabling Law proposal, there is special concern about how “power delegated to the executive branch” might be used to “create norms that establish the sanctions that would apply when crimes are committed.” The IACHR also cited the aforementioned article on “international cooperation”:
“In this aspect, the IACHR reiterates its concern regarding the possibility that the capacity of non-governmental human rights organizations to do their important work is curtailed.”
The final issue taken up in the IACHR’s statement (released jointly with the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression) is a modification of the country’s 2005 Telecommunications and Social Responsibility in Radio and Television Law (Ley RESORTE). The Inter-Press Service has more on this today, as a first reading of an amendment to that law was approved by Venezuela’s single-chamber legislature yesterday. IPS, on the amendment, and particularly their controversial extension of “social responsibility” to the internet:
“Under the proposed amendments, radio, TV or internet messages that ‘could incite crimes against the president,’ ‘could stir up unrest or disturb public order,’ ‘defy the legitimately installed authorities,’ or that promote ‘law- breaking, war, hate or political, religious, racial, gender or xenophobic intolerance’ will be actionable.”
The proposed amendments face a second vote in the National Assembly before they are officially approved. The same is the case for the “Defense of Political Sovereignty” proposal.
To other stories:
· On human rights and Brazil, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has made an historic ruling, maintaining, in the New York Times words, that “a Brazilian amnesty law covering crimes during the country’s 21-year dictatorship [is] invalid.” The Court went on Tuesday to say that Brazil is responsible for the forced disappearance of at least 70 peasants and militants who were part of the Araguaia resistance movement. Brazil has been among the most hesitant in the Southern Cone to investigate atrocities committed by the state during two-decades of Cold War dictatorship (1964-1985). Its national Supreme Court went so far as to uphold the constitutionality of the country’s amnesty law earlier this year. But the Inter-American court was clear in its rejection of that ruling Tuesday, saying the country must “conduct a criminal investigation into the Araguaia case, bring the guilty parties to justice, search for those who have disappeared and provide medical and psychological treatment to their surviving relatives.” The ruling also included a directive that “42 direct relatives of the victims be provided $45,000 each in compensation for their suffering.” Viviana Krsticevic of the Center for Justice and International Law called Tuesday’s ruling a “turning point,” and one which puts the human rights issue squarely on the desk of incoming President Dilma Rousseff. More from Mercopress as well as the National Security Archive, which adds “one of the most important conclusions of [the] case is the affirmation of the victims’ right to the access of information about the disappearances.”
· A series of reports and interviews on organized crime, corruption, and impunity in Guatemala and elsewhere: first, BBC Mundo, in a video report and written article, calls drug cartels the “new enemy” of the country. While traffickers have long had a presence in the Guatemala, the report says the relocation of heavily armed Mexican cartels to the country is today’s most pressing concern. Currently there are approx. 52 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in Guatemala (as a point of comparison, Mexico’s murder rate is just 14/100,000). And 95% of those killings go unprosecuted. According to the Francisco Dall’Anese head of the UN’s anti-impunity commission, CICIG, the challenge is two-fold: win the battle against organized crime while at the same time maintaining constitutional guarantees. In a separate BBC interview, Dall’Anese speaks more about the work of the CICIG – work which has come under recent scrutiny by members of the country’s political and economic establishment. And the Wilson Center now has up on its site a recent discussion about organized crime in both Guatemala and other Central American countries (Honduras and El Salvador, among them).
· Also from the Wilson Center, video from a Monday panel on Honduras and the Inter-American System. Speakers there included OAS Sec. General José Miguel Insulza, Leticia Salomón of the Centro de Documentación de Honduras, Eduardo Stein of the Honduran Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Honduran ambassador to the US, Jorge Ramón Hernández Alcerro, among others.
· At the Huffington Post, Vincent Warren and Joshua Birch of the Center for Constitutional Rights, write on the one year anniversary of Walter Trochez’s murder in Honduras. Trochez, a LGBTQ activist, was also an active member of the Honduran Resistance. His murder attracted significant attention and to this day has gone unprosecuted.
· In Ciudad Juarez, the number of deaths in 2010 surpassed 3000 this week. The indispensable Diario de Juarez was the first to break that news. Also on Mexico, an editorial in today’s New York Times comments on the Washington Post’s investigative series on US guns and their movement south into the hands of Mexican cartels.
· Reuters reported yesterday (and Amnesty International comments) on the Cuban government’s decision to prevent dissident Guillermo Farinas from traveling to France to accept the European Parliament’s Andrei Sakharov human rights prize.
· Peruvian writer and recent Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, has come out with strong criticism of Keiko Fujimori’s presidential candidacy in Peru, calling the possibility of her election “a catastrophe for the country.” Many suspect Fujimori would pardon her father, Alberto Fujimori, if elected.
· From the AP, MINUSTAH, which had previously dismissed claims that its troops might be responsible for bringing cholera to Haiti, now says it will support a UN-backed independent commission to investigate the cholera epidemic and its origins.
· And lastly, on the recently released Latinobarómetro numbers for this year. Brookings’ Kevin Casas-Zamora looks at what the results reveal about the region. The topics he touches upon: the region’s general sense of optimism, its support for pragmatic policymaking, serious worries about crime and violence, and Venezuela. It’s this last point which may bring us back to where we started today. The new Latinobarómetro numbers show 84% of Venezuelans preferring democracy over any other political system. In Casas-Zamora’s words, this “dwarfs” even nations like Uruguay and Costa Rica – two nations which consistently sit atop the region with respect to the democracy question. I highly recommend reading all of Casas-Zamora’s analysis. This last part in particular might complicate thinking about what’s going on in Venezuela (and others places) at the present moment. It also raises questions, I think, about growing divisions between international definitions of democracy and the notions of democracy supported by the historically “excluded.” Excerpting from Casas-Zamora:
“Whatever misgivings one may have about the political situation in Venezuela, it has to be recognized that the presence of President Hugo Chávez has conferred considerable dynamism to debates on democracy in Latin America.”
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