Beautiful Horizons

An Utter Failure of Imagination

Alexei Barrionuevo has an article in Saturday's New York Times about a potential energy crisis facing Argentina, Chile and Brazil. What is notable about the article is the utter failure of the leaders cited in the article to look aggressively at alternative methods of generating energy, some of which are under their noses.

Gold - This Year's Diamonds?

Typepad is anything but reliable tonight, so I need to be quick. Accordingly, I urge you to read this article in the New York Times about gold mining and its impact upon a Peruvian town.  As fopr Lawrence Kurlander, a mining executive mentioned in the article, please don't expect us to believe that you got something for nothing from Vladimiro Montesinos. None of us are that stupid.

Speaking of Peru, by the way, former Rio correspondent for the Times, James Brooke has a profile of Montesinos's former boss, ousted president and current fugitive, Alberto Fujimori and his plans to return and run again. Just what Peru doesn't need.

On Being a Good Citizen of the World

This is the sort of story that really fills me with hope. It profiles Fredy A. Peccerelli, a young man originally from Guatemala whose family fled to the United States when he was nine after his father was threatened by death squads.

Peccerelli has since become a forensic anthropologist dealing with human rights organizations to obtain justice for those whose voices have been brutally stilled:

Human rights organizations employ forensic anthropologists to document war crimes and human rights abuses. Mr. Peccerelli, director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, has investigated the deaths of thousands of civilians killed in the civil war in Guatemala from 1960 to 1996.

"What we do is all about life," he said here last month on a break at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "It's about people. This is about applying scientific knowledge for everyday human issues."

The association awarded its science and human rights prize for 2004 to Mr. Peccerelli and his colleagues at the foundation for promoting "human rights at great personal risk."

It's through the hard work of people like Peccerelli and Dr. Clyde Snow, probably the major figure in this field, that the scientific truth about the hideous human rights records of some of the most brutal figures in history have come to light.

Also in the New York Times today is an editorial by Dolly Filártiga, the sister of Joel Filártiga who was brutally tortured to death by the former Paraguayan dictator, Alfredo Stroessner 28 years ago today at the age of 17. Dolly Filártiga eventually fled to the US, discovered her brother's killer living in Brooklyn and with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights brought suit under the Alien Torts Claims Act against Américo Peña-Irala and obtained a judgment against him - and a landmark decision in the history of human rights litigation.

As I wrote here and here, the Bush administration and the Ashcroft DOJ are trying to render this avenue of obtaining justice moot. Dolly Filártiga makes a compelling argument as to the value of this judgment:

Although Mr. Peña-Irala was sent back to Paraguay and none of the $10 million judgment has yet been paid, our case established a remarkable precedent: from Ethiopia's Red Terror to Argentina's Dirty War to the Philippines' dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos, in 19 instances survivors or victims' relatives have used this law to obtain a measure of justice.

For my family, the court decision put us at risk but also gave protection — the Paraguayan government threatened us but wouldn't risk retaliating once we had the American legal system on our side. In Paraguay, the case remains a symbol of the injustice of the Stroessner dictatorship, and my brother is considered a martyr for human rights.

However, this remarkable legacy is now in jeopardy. Reversing almost three decades of executive-branch policy, the Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court to eviscerate the Alien Tort Claims Act. In a case involving the kidnapping of a Mexican doctor suspected of involvement in the killing of an American drug enforcement official, the Justice Department (supported by amicus briefs from business lobbies) is claiming that the rulings in my case and in 18 others since were based on a mistaken interpretation of the law. Today the court will hear its arguments for a new reading of the 215-year-old statute that would make it virtually impossible for human rights victims to sue.

If the court accepts these arguments, then torturers like Américo Peña-Irala would be able to travel freely in the United States. Deposed dictators like Ferdinand Marcos and brutal generals like Carlos Vides Casanova, who presided over human rights abuses in El Salvador in the 1980's, could come here and enjoy safe haven.

Opposition to the International Criminal Court, opposition to the Alien Torts Claims Act. I'll be tactful and calm and simply say that I find it impossible to believe that the Bush administration genuinely cares about justice for victims of human rights abuses.

Why Reform Efforts Are Still Failing

I selected several categories for this post in large part, because this address by Alan Stoga, the President of Zemi Communications, given at the recent Americas Conference is very much on point and on target. It's too long and there are too many key points to mention that I won't excerpt any of it. I really urge you to read it.

While you're reading it, I'll go off in a corner somewhere and deal with the cognitive dissonance resulting from the fact that Stoga was managing director of Kissinger Associates from 1984 to 1996 and is still a Director and consultant to the firm . . .

The Mahogany Trade

The New York Times has a great article about the mahogany trade and how it is harming the Amazon region.

Furniture dealers in the USA get a terrific price for mahogany furniture:

Mahogany from Peru, it said, was used to craft the $9,241 writing desk offered by the Kittenger Company, a 137-year-old manufacturer in Buffalo. It made the $13,515 entertainment system sold by Henkel Harris. It was used to make $3,700 acoustic guitars, the decks of suburban homes, even coffins.

It doesn't do much for the communities from where it is taken:

Contracted and equipped by middlemen, the loggers earn about $7 a day to sink into the jungle for up to half a year. Many come out with malaria or tropical infections. Some die from disease or accidents.

"The jungle makes you old — the heat, the worry, the work," said one logger, Pedro Rojas, who is 37 but looks decades older.

Even these small bands of loggers need trails, food and supplies. A multinational team of biologists recently estimated that in just one month loggers along Las Piedras River had killed enough animals for 90,000 pounds of meat. The team also found 231 logging camps, 176 of them in areas set aside for Indians.

Some of these native groups, hunter-gatherers from the Mashco Piro and Yora tribes, are so isolated they are known as "the noncontacted." They are particularly susceptible to influenza and other diseases.

"For Indian people, this is a serious threat against their lives, a threat that raises the possible dangers of extinction," said Victor Pesha, president of the leading Indian federation in Madre de Dios.

There's a lot of buck passing going on:

Brigid Shea, spokeswoman for the International Wood Products Association, representing American importers, said the onus was on Peru. "It's really incumbent upon them to make sure before the product leaves Peru that they're comfortable with its legality," she said.

Once in the United States, no more certification is required, and demand for the wood does not encourage scrutiny.

Ken Fuhrmann, customer service representative for Henkel Harris, said that in 30 years on the job, perhaps eight people had asked about the origins of the wood.

"I would say they don't really care," he said. "They just want a good product."

At Classic Galleries, a fine furniture store in Huntington, N.Y., the unmistakable rippled grain of mahogany gleamed on ornately carved dining tables, bureaus and headboards throughout the showroom.

But no one knew where the mahogany came from, said Barbara Marcone, a saleswoman at the store for 19 years. "Nobody asks," she said.

There's a simple solution for this. Mahogany is lovely, durable wood, but it's being taken out of forests at an alarming rate. If you care about the environment at all, don't buy mahogany.