Beautiful Horizons

Failing to See the Big Picture

I'm thrilled to see Bishop Oscar Romero receiving the attention and respect he deserves on the thirtieth anniversary of his death. I'm especially gratified to see at long last, the government of El Salvador sharing in that recognition.

Unfortunately, the likes of Bishop Romero are getting harder to find in the Roman Catholic Church. I write this as a regular mass-attending Roman Catholic and am simply disgusted by the Vatican's response to the continually unfolding scandals that are spreading across Europe, to the point where the official response is to smear the media reporting on the matter or this bit of tu quoque nonsense:

Earlier in the week, New York's archbishop, Timothy Dolan, used his blog to dismiss the New York Times' reports and defend the pontiff's record by arguing that authorities outside the church also are culpable. Stories about sexual abuse by priests were "fair" if "unending," he wrote. But he condemned the media for portraying child sexual abuse "as a tragedy unique to the church alone. That, of course, is malarkey."

Sadly, this latest everybody-is-responsible-so-nobody-is-to-blame defense is of a piece with a little-noticed section of Benedict's letter to the Irish church in which he seemed to blame the crisis, in part, on "new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society."

Let me dumb this down for the hierarchy at the Vatican: you are hemorrhaging members of your flock. You are desperate to recruit new priests. Without parishioners, you have no church. You're men first and right now, you appear to be a bunch of weak man busily covering your glutei to protect yourselves. Shame on you.

An Entire Page!

I have been reading the New York Times since 1980 and until Saturday's paper cannot remember an entire page being devoted to stores from Latin America.

So Much For Infallability

Pope Benedict has backpedaled on his foolish remarks concerning the treatment of the indigenous peoples in the Americas. There is no better source for information on the treatment of the natives by the Christian colonizers than Saint Bartolome de Las Casas. Las Casas provided first hand accounts to the Spanish Court as to what the conquistadors did. Here are some selected quotes:

• And never have the Indians in all the Indies committed any act against the Spanish Christians, until those Christians have first and many times committed countless cruel aggressions against them or against neighboring nations.

• Yet into this sheepfold, into this land of meek outcasts there came some Spaniards who immediately behaved like ravening wild beasts, wolves, tigers, or lions that had been starved for many days.

• More than thirty other islands in the vicinity of San Juan are for the most part and for the same reason depopulated, and the land laid waste.

• We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.

• After the wars and the killings had ended, when usually there survived only some boys, some women, and children, these survivors were distributed among the Christians to be slaves.
• With my own eyes I saw Spaniards cut off the nose and ears of Indians, male and female, without provocation, merely because it pleased them to do it. ...Likewise, I saw how they summoned the caciques and the chief rulers to come, assuring them safety, and when they peacefully came, they were taken captive and burned.

• They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike.

• They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!

• They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house.

• They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim's feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive.

• With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim's neck, saying, "Go now, carry the message," meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains.

• ...they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them.

Jesus surely wept to know of this being done in his name.

More on Simon

Boz tipped me to this op-ed in yesterday's Miami Herald calling for a Simon Wiesenthal for Latin American victims of crimes against humanity. There actually have been a few: Baltazar Garzón, the Spanish judge who developed the case against Augusto Pinochet is certainly one as is Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, the Chilean judge since retired who bravely poked holes in the shield of impunity that has protected so many human rights abusers.

I certainly agree that the world would be a better place with more Simon Wiesenthals. It would be an even better place if the public and the government of so many countries throughout the world felt that crimes against humanity were absolutely unacceptable under any circumstances,  thereby eliminating the  need for Simon Wiesenthals.

I can dream, can't I?

International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women

Marifeli Perez-Stable has a a column worth reading in today's Miami Herald on International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, which is today, and why violence against women is such a critical issue in Latin America, especially in Colombia:

Violence begets violence, and no country in Latin America can match Colombia's record of civilian victims in its 40-year-old armed conflict. During the last 20 years, at least 70,000 people -- the vast majority not combatants -- have been killed. More than three million have been internally displaced. Since 2000, more than 10,000 people have been kidnapped. All the warring parties -- guerrillas, paramilitaries and the latter acting in cahoots with the security forces -- have perpetrated violence against the civilian population.

All sides have increasingly wielded rape, sexual abuse and sexual mutilation as weapons in their seemingly endless conflict. Afro-descendent, indigenous and peasant women are particularly vulnerable. Paramilitary forces are the most frequent sexual predators. Punishing women for alleged collaboration with guerrillas, forcing entire communities to flee a desirable area or simply desecrating the ''enemy's honor'' are the most common reasons. Guerrillas have likewise violated women to submit the civilian population in territories under their control. All armed combatants have sometimes forced women and girls into sexual slavery for their pleasure and that of their commanders.

Check it out. Amnesty International also makes the case for violence against women contributing to the spread of HIV. Here's a way to do something about it.

Is the New OAS Head Downgrading the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights?

Andrés Oppenheimer expresses some legitimate concern on this possibility:

[Incoming Secretary General Miguel Angel] Rodríguez has told top OAS officials that he plans to downgrade the job of Human Rights Commission Secretary General Santiago Cantón, and have him report to a soon-to-be-created position of OAS human rights director. In addition, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression Eduardo Bertoni may lose his job, which would be taken over by the Rodríguez-appointed human rights director.

Before I tell you what Rodríguez told me in a telephone interview Wednesday, let's remember that the special rapporteur job was created by the OAS human rights commission in 1997, and it was endorsed by former President Bill Clinton and 33 other presidents at the 1998 Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile.

Unlike the OAS in general, which is often little more than a debating society because it must make decisions by consensus, the OAS human rights commission and its special rapporteur have been very effective largely because they operate as an independent agency.

As such, they have been in the forefront of the fight against human rights abuses and censorship in Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Guatemala, Haiti and Venezuela.

''The commission has played a fundamental role in denouncing Latin American dictatorships,'' says Horacio Verbitsky, president of the Center of Legal and Social Studies, a leading Argentine human rights group. ``Anything that diminishes that role hurts Latin American democracy.''

U.S. Ambassador to the OAS John Maisto agrees. ''The Inter-American human rights commission is the jewel of the organization. It must be independent and autonomous in everything it does,'' he said.

While I wouldn´t go quite so far as to make the debating society analogy (the OAS´s magazine Américas is a fascinating read for those interested in the Western Hemisphere), Oppenheimer is absolutely right about the independence and the value of the IACHR. I hope that any budget proposals do not affect either the IACHR or the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Making the Case for the ICC

Marcela Sánchez makes a compelling argument that the refusal of the United States to sign and ratify the treaty creating the International Criminal Court undermines justice in Latin America. Here's why:

Dolly Filártiga

I neglected to call your attention to this profile of Dolly Filártiga, the sister of Joelito Filártiga, a 17 year old who was tortured to death by Paraguay's secret police. I wrote more about Ms. Filártiga here and her successful efforts to obtain a judgment against her brother's murderer here in the USA.

The law under which Filártiga sued the torturer, the Alien Torts Claims Act is being attacked for this usage by the Bush administration. Filártiga's final words in the article speak eloquently as to why the ATCA is valuable:

"It cost my family a lot to have my brother die in this way. I am not talking about money. We never really recovered. . . . This has been one of the most important fights in my life. It would be very sad to know we don't have the possibility to fight for human rights here."

Indeed.

Oscar Arias on Disarming Haiti

Oscar Arias, one of the most deserving Nobel Peace Prize winners and former president of Costa Rica had an op-ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post that spoke to some of the issues I raised previously concerning President Aristide's demobilization of Haiti's army in 1995. His article demonstrates an all too common problem in poor countries that have large militaries:

Like so many countries in the Third World, Haiti has suffered not only from a lack of national security in the sense of borders and territorial integrity but also from an ongoing crisis of human security, the right of each person to live in peace and with the guarantee of basic rights such as food, health care, education and citizenship. The army, long an instrument of suppressive authoritarian regimes, has historically deprived Haitians of these fundamental rights.

Isolated and destitute, Haitians have been terrorized by military violence and its accompanying legacy of poverty. In the late 1980s, the army consumed about 40 percent of the national budget, even as hunger and AIDS wracked the population. Haiti had one soldier for every 1,000 citizens, and 1.5 doctors for every 10,000. [my emphasis]

So, as I stated before, in addition to being weapons of repression against their own citizens, the military in Latin America in many countries with less than democratic traditions have also been a source of wasteful spending. Arias has the good fortune of being a citizen of a country that abolished its military nearly sixty years ago and whose citizens probably enjoy the best quality of life in Central America.

Aristide Leaves - What Does this Mean For the Americas?

As you no doubt know by now, Haiti's President, Jean Bertrand Aristide has resigned and left Haiti. Haitian Chief Justice Boniface Alexandre has replaced Aristide for the time being as per the constitutional rules of succession.

What does this mean for Latin America? When you couple this with what happened last year in Bolivia, two years ago in Argentina, four years ago in Ecuador, what nearly happened in Venezuela almost two years ago and what is on the verge of happening in Peru, democracy is extremely fragile in Latin America right now.

Yet the White House doesn't seem to be terribly troubled by this: concerns about freedom among our closest neighbor and our biggest trading partners. Andrés Oppenheimer was right in this column when he said that this neglect will come back to haunt us, if not sooner, then most assuredly later - and it won't be pretty.

The other aspect of what has happened in Haiti that worries me is Aristide's inability to defend his government from the rebels. Aristide disbanded the Haitian army when he was restored to his elected role as president in 1994 and at the time it was probably a good thing at least on paper. The Haitian army was corrupt, had ties to drug dealers and had a human rights record that in the most charitable terms could only be described as abominable.

The question now is this one: will Latin American leaders who now feel threatened seek to make their military geared more towards defending their rule than in serving the needs of their country? Will weak leaders now feel a need to expend valuable and scant resources on strengthening the military instead of devoting these resources toward needed improvements in infrastructure, education and social needs? Is there going to be a return to Praetorianism?

Stay tuned . . .