Uruguay: Congress votes to overturn amnesty law

Uruguay's Congress has voted to lift an amnesty law that protected officers from prosecution for crimes committed during military rule from 1975 to 1983, paving the way for possible future trials.

The vote was 50-40 and the bill is now expected to be signed by President Jose Mujica in the nick of time - the statute of limitations would have kicked in on 1 November.

Human rights activists, naturally, have welcomed the move. It was still a difficult decision in Uruguay, as illustrated by the fact that the congressional debate lasted 12 hours. While Luis Puig, a deputy with the ruling Broad Front coalition, called the measure an end to impunity, opponents have presented it as ignoring the will of the people since the amnesty law has been upheld in two referendums. It's a little more complicated than that though; for a start, the country's supreme court had ruled the law unconstitutional. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights had also insisted that Uruguay must remove the law. The referendum result had also been close, around 48%, narrowly missing the required 50%.

We will have to see what the end to the amnesty brings. The military is attempting a pre-emptive strike and already calling for prosecutions for former guerrillas.

Uruguay overturns amnesty for military-era crimes (BBC)
Uruguay Lawmakers Revoke Dirty War Amnesty (Time)
Uruguay scraps 'dirty war' amnesty (Aljazeera)

Peru: Forced sterilisation investigation to be reopened

Peru has informed the Inter-American Human Rights Commission that it will reopen the investigation into cases of forced sterilisation which took place in the country in the 1990s. This is a rather unexpected piece of good news; the forced sterilisation of mostly poor and indigenous women is an element of Peru's conflict which was not examined in the truth commission. There is therefore a real need to look into this.

There is often mention of one specific case, Maria Mamerita Mestanza, who died following a tubal ligation in 1998. Important though her case is, it is merely emblematic of a much wider scandal involving many thousands of women, the majority of whom were poorly literate or illiterate, rural, and Quechua-speaking, and were either pressured, coerced or deceived into undergoing sterilisation procedures.

Just in case this problem doesn't seem particularly severe in the context of the violence that Peru was experiencing at the time, it's worth remembering that the UN Genocide Convention (1948) classes imposing measures intended to prevent births within a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as genocide.

Good background information is provided by Jocelyn E. Getgen in Untold Truths: The exclusion of forced sterilisations from the Peruvian truth commission's final report, full text available here in PDF form.

Peru to reopen probe into forced sterilization of women (LA Times blog)
Peruvian prosecutors reopen investigation of forced sterilizations during Fujimori government (Washington Post)

Brazil: Senate approves truth commission

The proposal for a truth commission, which I discussed here, has passed another hurdle, winning a vote in the Senate, and is now just waiting for president Dilma Rousseff's signature. Considering Rousseff herself was jailed by the military and she has been outspoken in favour of the commission, I think it's safe to assume she will sign! However, Senator Randolfe Rodrigues described the planned commission as "timid". The amnesty law will remain untouched, so ultimately the perpetrators are safe from legal consequences. Disappointing.

Brazilian Senate approve investigation of human rights abuses during military dictatorship (Washington Post)
Brazil will look into its harsh political past but the military are safe (Mercopress)
Brazil creates truth commission to probe rights abuses (BBC)

Argentina: JUSTICE for the ESMA victims

Well, it feels like I've been waiting a long time to write this post - but of course, not nearly as long as the Argentine relatives have been waiting for justice. It's almost two years since the ESMA megatrial started, and it's finally over, and some of the worst perpetrators of human rights abuses of the dictatorship have received lengthy jail sentences. They include Alfredo Astiz, responsible for the infiltration of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in the very early days of the group's existence and for the murder of two French nuns. Congratulations Argentina for taking a massive step towards justice for the disappeared and their relatives.

Here is a small selection of coverage of the issue:

Astiz, el Tigre y el grupo de tareas de Massera (Pagina/12)
Quiénes son los enjuiciados (Pagina/12) - recommended as a "who's who" of the accused
Primera condena por los crímenes de lesa humanidad cometidos en la ESMA (CELS via Proyecto Desaparecidos)

Life sentence for Argentine "Blond Angel of Death" (Reuters)
Argentina's 'Angel of Death' jailed for crimes against humanity (Guardian, includes video embedded below)
Argentine Navy captain ‘Angel Face’ Astiz sentenced to life imprisonment (Mercopress)
France praises Argentina justice system over the sentencing of Astiz (Mercopress)
Argentina: 12 Given Life Sentences for Crimes During Dictatorship (New York Times)

Latin America Round-up

Here's some interesting stuff I've been reading over the past few days:

Latin America
Hey, it's an iconicity piece, so I'm going to link to it. Of course I agree that the region has icons (and I can't believe there's no mention of Che!) but I'm unconvinced that Latin America is obsessed with the past or indeed that this is a negative thing. In other circumstances we are always pointing out that countries are in a hurry to "move on" and sweep their pasts under the carpet. See also Greg's far more considered comments on the article.
In Latin America, dead leaders become icons (Washington Post)

Argentina
The Argentine election was so predictable that I've found nothing new to say about it. Here is just a tiny quirk from crooked ex-president Carlos Menem, himself just re-elected as a senator, stating that all he needs now is to be named pope. Shame about that whole arms-trafficking thing.
Menem re-elected senator says the only post he's missing is 'Pope' (Mercopress)

Chile
Two pieces on Robert Funk's blog about political pressure on judges and voter registration. The key stat as far I'm concerned:

In the 21 years since democracy, more than 90% of people aged over 45 vote, but just 20% of those aged under 30 do.

Colombia
A judge in Manhattan has sentenced two Colombian men involved in the kidnapping of an American citizen in Latin America, but the pair claimed to have been themselves abducted by the FARC as minors. The judge apparently believed them and criticised rigid sentencing guidelines.
FARC members convicted in American's kidnapping (NY Times)

El Salvador
In the new gangland of El Salvador (New York Review of Books)
Alma Guillermoprieto's piece is fantastically well-written.

Mexico
You know, one of the reasons that it's the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and not the parents is because the relatives in Argentina made a conscious decision to keep the group women-only in the hope that the State would respect the sanctity of motherhood (supposedly held in high esteem by the Catholic, ultraconservative junta) and not dare to attack the members. You only need to read about the infiltration of Alfredo Astiz and the murder of the original leader of the Madres, Azucena Villaflor, to realise that that was wishful thinking. Yet decades later, in Mexico, women continue to battle for human rights in the face of considerable risk.

Ninety percent of the non-governmental organisations in Mexico are founded and run by women, says journalist and women's rights activist Lydia Cacho Ribeiro

Women reject normalisation of gender violence (IPS)

Uruguay
Uruguay finds bones of possible dirty war victim (CBS)

Argentina: Sentence in ESMA trial

Spain's Stolen Babies

I just watched the episode of BBC2's This World: Spain's Stolen Babies, and it was pretty amazing, especially viewed through the lens of my interest in Argentina.

In short, it seems that many babies were taken from new mothers during the Franco regime and sold. The women were told their babies were stillborn or had died shortly after birth. Although they were not disappeared people as in Argentina, there are a number of startling parallels, such as:

- The involvement of the Catholic church. Several witnesses said that they had bought babies from priests or were told of their child's "death" by nuns working in the hospitals.
- An ideological aspect in which children were taken from "unsuitable" (left-wing, unmarried) parents and placed with more "appropriate" (pro-regime) parents.
- A fear of/respect for authority which made it difficult to question what was said by doctors and other professionals, coupled with a certain amount of turning-a-blind-eye from certain sectors. In Spain, the situation has been complicated by the fact that mothers did not have to enter their names on the birth certificate - this was supposed to "protect" unmarried mothers - and that adoptive parents could be entered as biological parents. That makes DNA testing the only hope for a clear answer, and as I'll note below, that's not so easy either.

There was some mention that the number of children taken from their biological parents could run into the hundreds of thousands. That is a truly huge figure and there was little indication of how it was arrived at, so I'll reserve my judgement until I see some proof on that, but really, it doesn't matter. The stolen children of Argentina are a huge issue and there are "only" around 400-500 of them. Even if there was only a handful, it would still be a big scandal.

Unfortunately, as yet the Spanish government has resisted opening a full investigation into the stolen children. As the BBC points out, data protection laws prohibit DNA banks from sharing or cross-referencing data and the Spanish government has yet to fulfil its promise to set up a national DNA database. It sounds like the Spaniards affected need to take a leaf out of Argentina's book and protest very, very loudly to get this situation changed.

Spain's stolen babies and the families who lived a lie (BBC)