Most-read posts of 2014

2014 is drawing to a close and it's been a mixed one for the blog, with life getting in the way quite frequently. Nevertheless, there have been a few highlights in Latin America and in my posts. There's no question about the stand-out LatAm event of the year for me: it was Estela de Carlotto of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo discovering her own grandchild in August. A truly amazing moment, the kind that you didn't dare think would happen. There was a massive outpouring of emotion from Argentina, and indeed the world, in response.

These are my top five posts of the year:

"Escrache" is word of the year for Fundéu BBVA - 1 January

Book review: Carmen Castillo's Un día de octubre en Santiago - 8 March

Argentina: Grandmothers' president finds her grandson - 6 August


Peru: Exhibition of victims' clothing - 10 September

Response to "Memory is not history"- 15 September

Travelling

There will be little to no posting during November. But I will hopefully be gathering plenty of material for future posts!

Happy Birthday Blog/Bye Bye

When I began thinking about this post this morning, I didn't realise that it was two years to the day since I started the blog. Seems like some kind of a sign...

The point is that I set up the blog with no idea if anyone would ever read it, and well, gradually some did (hi, all of you!). There is something very satisfying about sharing an interest with others all across the globe, and I remain fascinated by the subject of this blog. Thanks to everyone who has commented, emailed, and otherwise provided feedback.

Two years ago I was working part-time and living somewhere where I hardly knew anyone. In short, I didn't have much of a life ;-) Things have changed, happily for me, and I no longer have the time to devote to the blog as I want to. That is generally a good thing, but I'm still disappointed because I really enjoy blogging. But seeing interesting stories continually pass me by is getting frustrating. I simply can't keep up with all, or even a good selection, of the memory developments in Latin America.

So with regret, I'm taking a back seat, at least for a while. The archives will stay, and perhaps I will write again if and when circumstances allow, but I will no longer make any claim to blogging daily. Those of you who have your own Lat Am/memory blogs - keep up the good work!

p.s. Let's end with some good news.

Blogging Note

Blogging has been neglected this week while I translated a ridiculous number of words for the folks who pay me. Now I'm off for a long weekend. Proper posting will resume on Tuesday.

Tech Issues

Hallo all,

I am having Internet connection problems. There will probably be no further posting until after the weekend. Plus, I have enabled comment moderation due to recent spam. Please be patient if your comment takes a while to appear.

Twitter

Several of you are now following me on Twitter. I'm sad to say I haven't got to the bottom of Twitter yet, asiding from joining it (I don't even know how you found me), so don't hold your breath waiting for updates. It's on the list of "things I need to learn to understand"....

Yours,
Technically Challenged

Blogging Note

Have a good weekend everyone; I won't be back til Tuesday at the earliest.

Happy Birthday Blog

Please excuse me a second of navel gazing ;-)

It's a year since I began the blog. My original intention was to continue my collection of news clippings that began as a physical entity on my shelf about 6 years and then grew into my uncontrollable bookmark section on my browser. I wasn't sure if anyone else would ever read it.

Since then I have started to expand a little more on my personal opinions and leanings, and I had to drop my other blog for lack of time, and because this one was more rewarding. I have a modest but growing readership, including subscribers to Google Reader and other feed services, and, well, thanks guys! It is pretty gratifying to see the stats going in the right direction and I am especially thankful to those of you who take the time to comment and email. Thanks too to the people who link to me - if I'm not linking to you and I should be, drop me a line! The blog is really Peru and Argentina-biased, and that is unlikely to change, but a few of you take the time to point me to interesting memory issues from other countries and that is fantastic.

I'm acutely aware of my distance - in all senses - from Latin America and don't know really how long I can maintain my knowledge base enough to be a useful blogger. But for now, here's to more posting in the future!

Blogging Note

Just a brief note to say it's great to see the number of subscribers to the blog creeping up. If you haven't checked out a blog manager like Google Reader as a way of keeping track of all your favourite blogs and news services, give it a go (and you can subscriber to this blog by clicking on the button on the right side bar or just by copying and pasting the URL into your reader). And, if you write your own blog, it'd be great to know about it either in the comments or by email - sometimes I find blogs from checking my stats or stumble across writers who are linking to me without me really being aware of it. This happened just yesterday when I came across small state and immediately thought "Great! A well-written, informed blog about Uruguay!" because you know, I've been on a day trip to Uruguay - nothing that would really qualify me to do more than post links to news about it. Blogs that fit in with the general direction of this one will, naturally, be added to the blogroll. Anyway, happy reading - I'll be back with a couple of actual content posts very shortly.

Uruguay: Impunity Debate

Just wanted to draw attention to this article in Upside Down World which looks at the discussion surrounding the possible repeal of Uruguay's 'impunity law', which prevents prosecutions for most crimes committed during the country's military dictatorship.

Between Law and Politics: The Continuing Struggle against Impunity in Uruguay

By the way, the blog has been quiet and will remain so for the next couple of weeks, since I was away, then I got a bad cold and had no energy for anything, and on Friday I'm going away again. I will be around sporadically, and back soon.

Merry Christmas and Felices Fiestas to All

Merry Christmas everyone!

I will be around over the next couple of weeks, but sporadically, so don't expect posting to be too regular. Thanks to all readers and commenters this year - this blog was a cautious experiment when I started in April, and for a while it looked like no one was ever going to read it, but then the stat counter started creeping up and it's become very rewarding. I'd like to wish everyone all the best for 2009.

Here's the result of my playing with my blog front page and the simple yet strangely addictive wordle.

Thoughts on WHINSEC/SOA

This blog doesn't get too many comments at this stage. You quickly learn that there is a high view to comment ratio, and that's ok. So when I saw that a very brief, linky post of mine had garnered a comment, I was interested. It was a post on Colombia and the commenter was Lee Rials, who describes himself as public affairs officer at WHINSEC, the US military training academy formerly known as the School of the Americas.

I felt privileged to have attracted the attention of a representative of a US state institution!* But a few seconds on Google deflated my pride, since it seems I have just joined the ranks of the many blogs to have been graced by the commenting ability of military public relations. Rials makes a habit of this: see here, here, and here. And in fact, if you google 'moral libel' in quotes the vast majority of the results are comments about WHINSEC/SOA from Rials. The comments are not particularly well tailored to the exact article, which explains why I got the standard 'moral libel' treatment even though I had expressed no judgement or causal link in my tiny post.

But ok, ok, we're on the subject now, so what DO I think of SOA/WHINSEC? Well, first things first: I'm not a US citizen or resident, so it's not my tax dollars paying for its existence, which may or may not be relevant. Second, can we just look up for a second? Yep, that's right, right up there - the title of the blog: Memory in Latin America. Because a lot of what I do is news compilation, and because I believe that the power of traumatic memory is its prevalence in the present, yes, I talk about the here and now. But ultimately, what brought me here is my interest in the past military dictatorships of Latin America and their aftermath. So really, I'm not so much coming from the WHINSEC direction, but am rather interested in the SOA and its legacy (lost by the acronyms? Get background here). The point being, I am still allowed to talk about what SOA may or may not have done wrong in the past even if the current institution is blameless.

You can read a lot about the activities of members of the Latin American military who had at some time attended a course or courses at SOA. They include two members of the Argentine junta (Galtieri and Viola); Ecuadorian dictator Guillermo Rodriguez; Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos and several perpetrators involved in the Cantuta massacre; and many, many, more. I'm not saying that the SOA caused every one of those people to become a torturer, a murderer, or a human rights abuser. That would be a nonsense. What I'm saying is that evidence suggests that the SOA was part of the machinery with which the US maintained its influence in the hemisphere, and that this influence did not have human rights as a priority - this is putting it about as mildly as you possibly can. The US throws its weight behind regime change when it considers this advantageous (Nicaragua, Chile); the democratic status of a country is not decisive in this, but rather the attitude of the country towards the Northern superpower. I don't think I have ever met a person who knew anything about Latin America who believed that US had anything other than its own interests - and solely those interests - at heart in its dealings with the hemisphere.

WHINSEC is the child of SOA, and a name change does not wipe away the past. Military violence against civilians is the plague of Latin America and it is not in the past, unfortunately, but continues despite democratic governments. We read daily of deaths, Peruvian villagers driven from their homes, Colombians lured with offers of job interviews, dressed as guerrillas and shot, politicians openly classifying human rights organisations as terrorists. I don't think that the efforts of Lee Rials' or those like him will ever be able to convince observers that continuing to train military officers in this institution is wise, effective, or a good use of funds, just as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were never going to be satisfied with the military continuing to control the ESMA, even though it was no longer a torture centre. Moral libel? Well, we're talking about crimes against humanity and the influences that surround them, so I think I'll take my chances with the thought crimes.

There is lots more information on this subject than I can include here, but I can give a few leads:
A Visit to WHINSEC (Plan Colombia and Beyond)
Torture is Un-American: The SOA and its Devastating Legacy (COHA)
WHINSEC transparency amendment today (Plan Colombia and Beyond)
SOA Watch
Lesley Gill's The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas [partly available free to view on Google books; not a perfect book, but informative]

*Not as privileged as the people whom the CIA drop in on, obviously.

Blogging Update

Just a notification of small adjustments to the blog; if you look to the right I've installed a gadget which feeds in from my google reader shared items. The point of this is to provide quick links to pieces I've particularly liked but haven't specifically blogged about - either because I don't have time or because they don't quite fit with the slant of the blog (which, just in case you didn't know, is how the events of the past - in particular dictatorships - shape the present in Latin America) or because I just didn't have time. I'll still be drawing attention to articles in the main blog as well, as compiling information is actually one of the main things I do here.

Further down there's also a button to click if you'd like to subscribe to the blog in a reader, which makes it easy to keep up with new posts.

Blog Round-Up

Public Prosecutor's Office presents declassified documents from the US embassy in Lima (Fujimori on Trial)

Greg Weeks reviews another book which might find its way onto my Christmas list, this time dealing with Chilean dictator Pinochet: Heraldo Munoz's The Dictator's Shadow (Two Weeks Notice)

In Colombia, The FARC answers a letter (Plan Colombia and Beyond), and

Flor Díaz is a great dancer, mother of four children, health promoter, devout Catholic, and is serving six-and-a-half years in prison for “rebellion.”

Dancing in Prison (Community Action for Justice in the Americas)

Blog Round-Up

There's plenty of people blogging away more industriously than I am this week, so here's a selection:

In his own “Justice and Peace” confession (which began in July), he did not hesitate to admit to giving the order to kill people who ’smelled like guerrillas.’ Without blinking, he confessed to the San José de Apartadó massacre of 1998. He said he ordered the massacre because the town was so secluded, and the logistics of getting there were so difficult, that it wasn’t worth it to make an incursion just to kill one or two people. Therefore, in order to make the most out of the trip, they killed the largest amount of people that could possibly be associated with the FARC.

You really can't argue with some people's logic, can you? More on the testimony of Raúl Hasbún regarding human rights abuses in Colombia from Plan Colombia and Beyond. From the same blog, "No place in a civilized and democratic society".

Also, the effects of Plan Colombia on its neighbour, Ecuador: Refugees in Ecuador: Plan Colombia and the Asylum Lottery (Ecuador Rising)

And a key word is impunity, in Peru: The country of extrajudicial killings and media silencing they don't tell you about (Inca Kola News)
And in Mexico: Press freedom organization issues alert for Mexico (LA Times blog)

Finally, just to get your blood boiling - at least if you're anything like me - try this from Borev: WaPo Makes Latin America an Offer it Can't Refuse

Memorials: Interview with Julián Bonder

Peruvian newspaper La Republica carries in interview with Argentine architect Julián Bonder, whose work includes a monument to the victims of the AMIA bombing.

- What is the meaning of a memorial?
- It's a space which invites people to think, to reflect on the past. The word memorial comes from the Latin "memento", something which warns us about past and future topics. The term monument is very interesting, which means remember and warn. Therefore, is it possible that thinking about monuments can warn us about past events, thinking about the future? The idea is not to generate objects where memory can be deposited, but spaces which activate memory.

Yes, indeed, this is one of the principles behind this blog. You can read more of the interview at the link below, although I would have preferred to read more about the concrete manifestations of the memorial culture in Latin America, as well as the theory.

Entrevista | Julián Bonder. Promotor (La Republica)

Blog Round-Up

Death in Peru from Inca Kola news

Images of Peru's commemorations, five years after the TRC report, at APRODEH's Construyendo Memoria [Spanish, but you can just watch the slide show as well]

And videos about the TRC, compiled by Lapicero Digital [all in Spanish]

Guatemala: The forgotten spirits of Rabinal at Upside Down World - this is long but worthwhile. I have a collection of 'unbelievable quotes' from the Argentine generals, but this one is as bad as anything I've read:

The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea. – Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt, 1982

Amnesty International's reaction to Bussi and Menendez's sentence, in Argentina

Subversive Memory, on summary executions in Colombia, by Community Action for Justice in the Americas

News Round-Up

A lot going on in the news and blogs this morning, and so much of it I would love to comment on more, but I would be here all day, so here is a kind of list, and if time permits I'll come back to the most striking articles and write a bit more:

In Argentina, Clarin has images of the ESMA from the 1970s and beyond, marking its designation as a national monument.
Postales de la ESMA, que el Gobierno declaro Monumento Historico (Clarin)

Meanwhile, Pagina/12 is marking tomorrow's 30th anniversary of the abduction of Laura Carlotto, daughter of Estela Carlotto, founder of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of her disappearance, Carlotto senior put an advert in the newspaper marking the occasion, and has done so every year since then.
Registros de la ausencia (Pagina/12)

Tyler Bridges at Inside South America has a very interesting piece on the land mines that Pinochet laid around Chile's borders; I had no idea that this had occurred.
Chile: Land Mines

I stumbled across The New World Lusophone Sausophone for the first time and was pleased, because as a non-Portuguese speaker Brazil is a really big gap in my knowledge of South America. Here's the kind of thing that interests me:

Brazil is the only nation on the continent that has not overturned its amnesty law and engaged in the sort of truth and reconciliation process we have seen in Chile and Argentina (and more recently, in the Fujimori case, in Peru.)

"Scenes from an Old Folk's Home for Traumatized Cold Warriors"

The LA Times recalls a US citizen who fought and died in the conflict in El Salvador through his diaries (hat tip to Tim's El Salvador blog for drawing the link to my attention).
An American Adventurer's Death in El Salvador

In Peru, the lawyer representing the victims of Barrios Altos and La Cantuta has asked the authorities and citizens in general to be vigilant during the final phase of Fujimori's trial.
Piden a la ciudadania estar alerta en etapa final de juicio contra Alberto Fujimori (La Republica)

Blog Round-Up

Another great installment from Ash Kosiewicz, working with a forensics team in Peru. In this blog post he publishes the videos of an interview with Gisela Ortiz, human rights activist and sister of one of the Cantuta victims. I had to delay linking to this post as I somehow couldn't get the videos to work, but I've seem them now. From the video:

What does the act of remembering mean to you?

It is a mix of emotions. On the one hand, there is the pain and anguish that we lived through, not knowing where our loved ones were. To be denied before the justice system, the indifference under the dictatorship of Alberto Fujiori, the way we found their remains, images that are still vivid in our memories. But on the other hand, there are feelings of hope, that in one moment there will be justice, of the solidarity of those who came to know and accompanied us and shared our pain. This was the strength we needed to continue this fight over so many years.

See more: The Fujiori Trial and Human Rights - Take Three

Also in Peru, Fujimori on Trial reports that Session Suspended due to Fujimori's Health. Apparently,

Fujimori had a severe gastroenterological condition, which could cause the former president to suffer a severe abdominal colic resulting in diarrhea.

I don't get this; does the man have the runs or doesn't he? 'Cos it seems to me that could get diarrhea isn't so very sick. But there we go.

And from the Mexico Reporter, there was so much good stuff I honestly couldn't choose between Mini-Skirts Banned to Stop "Provoking" Rape in Mexico (don't-even-get-me-started...), Immigration Explored as a Concept in Mexico City Exhibition (photography!), and Waiting for a Man to Die. So basically, I just recommend the whole blog.