News round-up

Argentina
Argentine reporter claims he was threatened by ex-military officer on trial for torture (Journalism in the Americas)
Rodolfo Walsh and the language of denunciation (PEN International)
La Escuelita II: trece represores condenados y ocho absueltos (Pagina/12)

El Salvador
Unhealed wounds on the Day of the Dead (Tim's El Salvador Blog)

Panama/El Salvador
Ermordeten Erzbischof Romero gewürdigt (Blickpunkt Lateinamerika)
Monseñor Romero, un 'mártir latinoamericano', ya tiene un monumento en Panamá (Univision)

News Round-Up

Argentina
Former Argentine leader Menem indicted for graft (AFP)

Guatemala
NGOs Urge President Colom to release military archives (WOLA)
Awaiting sentence in forced disappearance case (Naty en Guate)
Historic first sentence against former member of Guatemalan military for crime of forced disappearance (Naty en Guate)
Plan Sofia 82 is handed over (Naty en Guate)
Rights courts condemns Guatemala in 1983 massacre (AP)

Panama
Twenty Years After US Invasion, Panama Still in Search of a Body Count (truthout)

Peru
Peruvian Police Identify Commander of Resurgent Shining Path Guerrilla Group (Americas Quarterly)

Dictator News

The General in his Labyrinth: Who Remembers Manuel Noriega? (COHA)

Chile: Home Truths about the Dictator and his Family? (IPS)

Latin America: Truth Commission Resources

Argentina:
Comision Nacional sobre la Desparicion de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persions, CONADEP, 1983)
Report entitled "Nunca Mas" (Never Again)

Bolivia: Comision Nacional de Investigacion de Desaparecidos (National Commission of Enquiry into Disappearances, 1982)
Commission dissolved early without producing a report, see here

Chile: Comision Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliacion (National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, known as the Rettig commission, 1990)
Report here in English, here in Spanish
Comision Nacional sobre Prision Politica y Tortura (National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture, known as the Valech commission, 2003)
Report here in Spanish

Ecuador: Comision "Verdad y Justicia" (Truth and Justice Commission, 1996)
More information here
Comision de la Verdad (Truth Commission, 2007)
Official site here

El Salvador: Comision de la Verdad para El Salvador (Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, 1992)
Report: De la locura a la esperanza: la guerra de 12 años en El Salvador
From Madness to Hope: the 12 year War in El Salvador

Guatemala: Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (Commission for Historical Clarification, 1997)
Report: Memoria del Silencio
Memory of Silence

Panama: Comision de la Verdad (Truth Commission, 2001)
More information here

Paraguay: Comision de Verdad y Justicia (Truth and Justice Commission, 2003)
Conclusion and recommendations of report in Spanish here

Peru: Comision de la Verdad y Reconciliacion (Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 2001)
Final report here in Spanish, here summarised in English

Uruguay: Comisión Investigadora sobre la Situación de Personas Desaparecidas y Hechos que la Motivaron (Investigative Commission on the Situation of Disappeared People and its Causes, 1985)
More information here
Comision para la Paz (Peace Commission, 2000)
Scroll down to the bottom of the entry here to download a Word document of the final report in Spanish

Other sources of information

Brandon Hamber
David Gairdner, The Role of Truth Commissions in Political Transition in Chile and El Salvador (pdf)
Institutional Center for Transitional Justice
Strategic Choices in the Design of Truth Commissions
United States Institute of Peace

News Round-Up

In Peru, defense lawyers and prosecutors are to sum up in the trial of Fujimori (seems like this trial has been in its end stages for a long time already, right?)

Also, Lori Berenson has been moved to a prison in Lima because of health problems related to her pregnancy (she is married to another MRTA guerrilla whom she met in jail; they are allowed conjugal visits).

Former dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega, is apparently currently the only prisoner of war on US soil (I didn't know that - did you?), but his fate after serving his sentence remains unclear. (Thanks to Two Weeks Notice for drawing my attention to that one).

And Impunity Watch has an article on the identification of victims of paramilitaries in Colombia.

El Salvador: Police Academy Controversy

NACLA has run a long article on a new US-run police training facility in El Salvador which has revived memories of the infamous School of the Americas, where a number of human rights abusers in the Latin American military dictatorships were trained.

It's hardly surprising that the United States and their plans for an International Law Enforcement Academy weren't exactly welcomed with open arms in Central America... plans in Panama, and then Costa Rica, fell through. Eventually the institution was located in El Salvador. It's also no wonder that in a region scarred by civil war marked by severe human rights abuses, there is suspicion about a military training facility which is not completely transparent in its work.

... the ILEA’s top official, Hobart Henson, who spent 24 years with the Indiana State Police before coming to El Salvador, assures me, “This isn’t the SOA. We’re not teaching torture or water boarding or anything like that. I wouldn’t be involved in something I didn’t feel good about.” When I ask to see course materials, Henson equivocates, at first saying he doesn’t have them in the office, then that it is school policy not to give them out.

[...] A Freedom of Information Act request for ILEA course materials, filed in October, has also gone unanswered. [Editor's note: In March 2008, the Department of Homeland Security rejected the FOIA request. Releasing such materials, according to the rejection letter, “could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.”]

As Lesley Gill, an anthropologist at American University and author of the book School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas, explains, “The use of human rights discourses­ in U.S. military and police training is something that started with the SOA. After the SOA was criticized for promoting violence and torture, they started to include a human rights course in their curriculum, and to use human rights language to describe what they were doing.” She continues, “This human rights talk is more aimed at an outside, domestic audience—at the school’s potential critics—than it is indicative of any effort by the U.S. to reform the military or police forces they are involved with. It is designed to stave off criticism."

(Just to be clear, that Editor's Note in the quote is from NACLA, not me... the ellipsis is mine, showing where I cut the article).

Waaaay more detail here:
Another SOA? A police academy in El Salvador worries critics

Also, updated with a letter protesting against the criticism of human rights activist Benjamin Cuellar contained within the original article:
Getting Personal: Cuellar and the ILEA Controversy (NACLA)

And School of the Americas Watch is a site which opposes the existence of the SOA/its new incarnation WHINSEC.

Latin America: Forced Disappearances

The Inter-American Court on Human Rights is dealing with cases of forced disappearance from Honduras, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama and Argentina.

"In the history of human rights abuses, disappearances are not new. But the systematic and reiterated manner in which they have been used as a weapon designed to bring about not only the actual disappearance of certain persons but to generate a generalised state of anxiety and insecurity is a relatively recent development," said Ventura.

In Latin America, forced disappearance has been used with "exceptional intensity" in recent decades, he added, clearly referring to the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s.

This is the key to the practice of forced disappearance: it controls the whole of society by making people afraid to agitate, afraid to protest, afraid to gather even for peaceful reasons, to mention anything controversial, to walk the streets at night... in short, it creates fear of public life and tears apart the social fabric. Although the figures for disappearances are nothing like they were in the horror years of the late 1970s, any number is clearly too high, and this is a practice which, as this article proves, persists across the continent.

Inter-American Court Focuses on Forced Disappearances (IPS)

Panama/US: Noriega Fights Extradition

Former Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega, continues to fight his extradition from the U.S. to France on charges of money-laundering. He is currently in jail in the States, convicted of drug racketeering, and his lawyers are arguing that he is a prisoner of war and should be repatriated to Panama.

Noriega makes extradition fight (MSN)