Comments by Argentine Foreign Minister Hector Timerman have set off what the Wall Street Journal describes as “a new bump” in US-Argentine relations, as well as in relations between the Kirchner government and the municipal government of Buenos Aires. On Wednesday, by way of Twitter, Timerman publicly criticized Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri’s decision to send capital police officers to the US-run International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in El Salvador for a second straight year. Foreign Minister Timerman:
“As a [Buenos Aires resident] I'm frightened that Macri continues sending police to study 'antiterrorism' in courses taught and financed by the USA….In the past, they were dedicated to training the military in coup techniques and courses in torture and persecution of political enemies. It seems to me that these are limits that we shouldn't cross.”
Speaking to the press later, Timerman said ILEA– created in 1995 by President Bill Clinton as part of a global network of five international police training centers – reminded him too much of the School of the Americas – the US Army’s Ft. Benning, Georgia training center which became infamous for its role in training military leaders who seized power around much of the region during the 1970s and 1980s.
The foreign minister’s comments were strongly rebuked by members of the municipal government yesterday, including the head of the metropolitan police, Eugenio Burzaco, who called Mr. Timerman’s remarks “foolish” and an insult to the US and the many other countries who continue to send their police forces to the Salvador-based facility for training. In 2011, Burzaco says four Argentine police officers will participate in a course on “security and terrorism” with eight Peruvian officers, eight Brazilians, eight Chileans at the ILEA.
Both Burzaco and the Rodriguez Laretta, chief of staff to Mauricio Macri, contend that members of the Argentine federal police force have also trained at the International Academy. The mayor’s office is now calling on the Mr. Timerman to resign because of his comments.
There are at least two or three back-stories which make Mr. Timerman’s comments particularly newsworthy. First is the foreign minister’s long history of human rights activism in Argentina and elsewhere. He is the son of journalist Jacobo Timerman, an outspoken critic of the Argentine dictatorship, who was kidnapped and tortured by the military in 1977. Shortly thereafter, Hector Timerman took over his father’s newspaper, La Opinión, and became a frequent visitor to Washington where he worked with Carter administration officials to secure information about his father and other individuals detained or assassinated by Argentine military junta. In the 1980s, Timerman went on to help found Human Rights Watch, as the Washington Post noted in a 2008 profile written shortly before he took over as Argentina’s ambassador in Washington.
His comments this week come after President Barack Obama said he will visit Brazil and Chile (in addition to El Salvador) in March – in effect flying over Argentina without stopping. That decision has provoked some frustration among Argentine officials, according to various reports over the last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Timerman himself suggested that Mr. Obama was skipping Argentina because President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was unwilling to compromise on certain trade and international security issues.
In August of last year, Hector Timerman held meetings in Washington DC with his counterpart, Sec. of State Hillary Clinton. Public remarks from that meeting are available here.
To other stories:
· BBC reports on the murder of Nuevo Laredo’s police chief, along with several of his bodyguards. A former military officer, Gen. Manuel Farfan, had only been on the job for a month before he was killed. According to the report, he was one of at least eight former military officers recently appointed as local police commanders in the state of Tamaulipas. The Wall Street Journal says investigations into the murders have begun.
· Human Rights Watch has also been in Mexico, visiting the state of Nuevo Leon to conduct a fact-finding mission about eight killings which, evidence has suggested, resulted from the “unlawful use of lethal force by army and navy officers.” The human rights group also says they have documented a dozen instances of forced disappearance which implicate the army, navy, and police. Families of the victims say no one has been held accountable for any of the crimes Human Rights Watch reports on in Nuevo Leon– a fact HRW calls unacceptable:
“On December 20, the Inter-American Court issued a binding judgment to Mexico that all human rights violations should be investigated and prosecuted in the civilian justice system. It was the fourth judgment by the court dealing with military abuses against civilians since 2008, all of which have established that under no circumstances should military jurisdiction apply to human rights violations committed by the armed forces against civilians.”
· Also on Mexico, In Sight Crime has launched what looks like an excellent new joint project tracking gunrunning from the point of production in Romania to sellers in the US, before heading south into Mexico and Central America. The project is a collaboration between FRONTLINE, the Investigative Reporting Workshop, The Center for Public Integrity, InSight and the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism.
· While election results were finally announced early Thursday morning, the LA Times today looks at the “scourge” of sexual violence which has returned to the country in the wake of last year’s devastating earthquake. A strong women’s movement, the paper says, had successfully pushed for legislation that made rape a serious criminal offense for the first time in the country’s history, five years ago. Now, according to the Times, the movement “struggles like the rest of the nation to recover, even as women are being subjected to horrific sexual violence.”
· With respect to Haiti’s election, both the Washington Post and Miami Herald praise the CEP for accepting a much scrutinized OAS report which suggested the government-backed candidate Jude Celestin be removed from a second-round runoff. Similar reactions from much of the international community, as the AP’s Jonathan Katz notes in what looks to be his final dispatch from the country. The Herald, in particular, scoffs at criticism of international strong-arming:
“Foreign intervention? Please. Haiti and donor countries are inextricably bound together. The international community has made a huge bet on Haiti and has an equally large stake in its success. That's why the OAS was called in to review the election results in the first place, and why its findings deserved to be heeded. There's no reason to question its impartiality and seriousness of purpose.”
A decidedly different opinion from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, one of the organization’s most vocal in opposing the OAS’s report and calling for a complete re-run of Nov. 28 elections. CEPR’s Mark Weisbrot, in a press release Wednesday, calls the CEP’s decision a “big setback for democracy in Haiti.” Weisbrot: “Far from fixing the problems with the first elections, this is simply an attempt to impose an illegitimate government on Haiti, and it will backfire.”
· A new FAO report is getting significant attention this week after the UN organization said its global Food Price Index showed food prices at their highest level since the organization began monitoring such prices in 1990. FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian, on the FAO’s findings: “These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come. High food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food.” The only positive sign may be the fact that in a number of countries good harvests have led to domestic prices of some food staples remaining lower than world prices. Reuters with a bit on the Latin America-specific elements of the crisis, mentioning frozen prices for basic foodstuffs in Honduras, increased spending on anti-poverty programs in El Salvador, and Guatemala’s consideration of slashing import tariffs on wheat. The New York Times reports on some of the other worries in the Global South today.
· In other economic issues, Eric Farnsworth in the February issue of Current History looks at what he calls China’s “new mercantilism” in Latin America.
· The Economist on the FARC’s foray into gold mining: “With the price of gold close to record levels, and with government action having reduced the guerrillas’ income from kidnapping and drugs, some FARC fronts are now financing themselves through illegal mining.”
· The Wall Street Journal reports on a major truckers strike in Colombia that began Thursday and has become, in the paper’s words, “Juan Manuel Santos's biggest confrontational showdown since he took office six months ago.” Two-thirds of Colombia’s 180,000-member Trucking Association (ACC) is believed to be participating in the stoppage (approx. 100,000 truckers). The strike is a reaction to the Santos administration’s decision last month to end a policy of setting minimum freight rates that truckers receive for each delivery.
· Greg Grandin, at The Nation’s group blog, on the potential consequences of a White House offensive to get an FTA with Colombia passed. Even if trade union murders are reduced, the case of Guatemala, says Grandin, should be instructive:
“In order to demonstrate its ‘readiness criteria,’ Guatemala, the year before Washington ratified the Central American Free Trade Agreement, brought its homicide rate of trade unionists down to zero. Yet as soon as the treaty went into force in July 2006, violence against labor activists shot up. By March 2008, Guatemalan trade unionists suffered eight murders, one attempted murder, two drive-by shootings and one gang rape. Since then, repression against labor and other activists has only increased.”
· Finally, Professor Jo-Marie Burt in Peru’s La República this week on disturbing suggestions by all major Peruvian presidential candidates – save Ollanta Humala – that, if elected, they would consider pardoning Alberto Fujimori, currently serving a 25 year sentence for human rights crimes. Burt says that opinion is in marked contrast to a recent survey she helped carry out in Peru (with the Instituto de Opinión Pública of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) which shows 63.3% of Peruvians opposing a pardon of the ex-president. Of those, nearly 59% percent say Fujimori should not be pardoned because “he is guilty and his sentence must be served.” Further, these most recent numbers, says Burt, appear to coincide with figures gathered just after Fujimori was sentenced in 2009. Then, 2/3 of Peruvians say they supported the court’s verdict. Today, 53.5% say they fully support the conviction and sentence while another 24% say they support the verdict but believe the sentence may have been too harsh. Just 9.4% of Peruvians say they are not in agreement with the sentence at all because Fujimori “is innocent.”
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