Around Latin America

-In good news from Guatemala, this past week, an army officer was convicted for his role in the disappearance of eight indigenous villagers in 1981. Colonel Marco Antonio Sanchez was sentenced to 53 years in prison, and three of his subordinates also received prison sentences. While this isn't the first incident of conviction in an "enforced disappearance" case, it does mark the first time that a high-ranking military officer has been convicted in such a case. Meanwhile, lawyers entered damning evidence from secret Guatemalan military archives in the case of charges of genocide against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who seized power in 1982 during Guatemala's 36-year civil war and who oversaw some of the worst crimes against humanity during the war. While Montt is far from conviction still, the fact that a jury has found Sanchez guilty, combined with the horrible details of the military documents in the Montt case, allow hope that Montt finally pays for his crimes. And while an acquittal would be an injustice, the simple fact that formerly-secret military documents have now become public, revealing just how horrible Montt's "administration" (and others during the civil war) were will deal a major blow to any efforts to rehabilitate Montt or the right in this war.

-In bad news for women's rights in Brazil, a Brazilian doctor who performed abortions was found dead in her car last week. Authorities are investigating whether Dr. Neide Mota Machado's death was a murder or a suicide. Machado had had her medical license stripped earlier this year, after she was accused of performing nearly 10,000 abortions in Brazil (where abortion is illegal save for cases of rape, severe deformation of the fetus, or of a threat to the life of the mother). For those who feel that making abortion in the United States legal only in the cases of rape, incest, or health risks to the mother, it is worth pointing out that over 230,000 women entered hospitals due to complications from botched illegal abortions in 2008 alone.

-Finally, one of the darker aspects of the U.S. embargo on Cuba emerged in a recent story that alleged that "a dozen Cuban children with heart defects were forced to endure unnecessary surgery because the U.S. embargo blocked them from receiving American-made catheters." While the U.S. apparently made such exports to Cuba legal back in 1992, the paperwork is enough of a "hassle" that medical companies have little reward in going through all the bureaucracy imposed by the limited embargo, which allows medicine to get to Cuba. Even so, after $142 health care items were approved to go to Cuba in 2008, only $1.2 million worth of goods actually reached the island, according to this report. While I question the use of the term "genocide" to describe unnecessary surgeries on 12 children, there is no denying the fact that the embargo has very real consequences upon the daily lives and even survival of many Cubans, and this story just offers one more very stark reminder of that fact.

The Annual Protest at the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation

Erwin reminds us that today is the day of the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the School of the Americas. The name-change happened back in 2001, when the Bush administration realized the School's name had been associated with some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century in the Americas. Rather than closing the school down or providing a real analysis of possible changes in U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the government opted to simply change the name to the WHISC.

Among the school's more infamous graduates, there is murderous Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, former friend-to-America Manuel Noriega, and Lieutenant Byron Carvajal, a Colombian facing 60 years in prison for murdering ten counternarcotics police in Colombia, as well as many other distinguished men who were involved in torture and murder throughout Latin America. Obviously, if you've been running a center that trained soldiers who raped, tortured, and murdered civilians everywhere from Chile and Argentina up to El Salvador and Guatemala, you would hope a complete shut-down would happen, rather than a simple name-change, but that would be too humane. As a result, the protests continue on an annual basis.

Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of the group School of Americas Watch (and major protagonist in Leslie Gill's excellent book that looks at the history, ideology, and results of the SOA) has an article up at HuffPo that outlines the recent activities of graduates from the SOA (including one of the leaders in the Honduran coup this year), as well as outlining a quick history of the SOA and the theme of the protests this year (which focus on the 20th anniversary of the murder by armed forces of 6 Jesuits, their cook, and his daughter in El Salvador).

Without a doubt, the School of the Americas is one of the darkest parts of American foreign policy in the 20th century, and the fact that it continues to exist under a lengthy euphemism does nothing to take away from the ugliness of the facts. It's worth learning a little more about the SOA if you haven't already, and contacting your congressperson to ask them why the U.S. continues to support an institution notorious for its training of torturers, rapists, and murderers.

Historical Image of the Day

Aztecs dying of smallpox. From The Florentine Codex.

A belated tribute to Thanksgiving

Argentina's First Beatified Indian and Issues of Identity

This Sunday, the Roman Catholic Church will beatify Caferino Namuncura, an Argentine Mapuche who died of tuberculosis while training to become a priest at the age of 18. Beatification is the first step in what may lead to canonization (beatification occurs after the first miracle attributed to a subject; canonization only happens after the second miracle) . Namancura is notable because he is the first Argentine indigenous person to be beatified (the Church only canonized its first American Indian in 2002, when Juan Diego of Mexico gained the honor).

There are several interesting issues at play in the beatification of Namuncura. First, it is the first under Benedict XVI's policy of beatifying and canonizing in the subjects home country, rather than in Rome. Thus, the ceremony will happen this Sunday in Chimpay in Patagonia). Second, there is the issue of ethnicity and religious colonization. While Cardinal Nercone is cited in the BBC piece as saying that Namuncura "was a role model for many, many young people" whose "ideal was to serve his people." Mapuche Indians in Argentina view the issue differently, rightfully condemning the genocidal campaigns the Argentine military launced against the indigenous people of Patagonia in the late-19th century and saying Namuncura's handover and conversion were part of this process of militaristic imperialism. Many Mapuche are offended by the cooptation of Namuncura by the Catholic Church, both in the past and now in the present sugar-coating and simplification of his story (as each and every beatification has exactly that effect on an individual's biography).

More interesting to me, though, is a quick comment in the Yahoo story that points out that Namuncura "has a wide following among the Argentina's poor." Anybody who has traveled to Argentina knows that the class divide also intersects frequently with racial categories; there are a far more disproportionate number of poor indigenous peoples than the "whites" of Argentina (indeed, the only beggars and homeless people I saw in Buenos Aires were clearly of indigenous ancestry). This isn't to say that there are no poor whites. However, the disparity is obvious and present.

What strikes me about all this is the ways in which different groups are competing over Namuncura's identity. The Church has its own (obvious) reasons to add another saint, particularly one from Argentina (and indigenous to boot!); likewise, the Mapuches understandably want to resist this and maintain Namuncura's identity as part of their broader struggle to address their own issues of identity and the genocide [and while that word is often misused, that's exactly what happened in the Argentine case - the military set out to completely kill off the indigenous peoples of Argentina] they suffered in the 19th century and beyond at the hands of the Argentine military (often with religious complicity). The less obvious element in all this is the poor, who are also often indigenous. Framed in terms of identity, they can relate to him both in terms of economy and ethnicity. Of course, it is the masses whose opinions are left out of the reports on Namuncura's beatification - instead, it is the traditional (but not necessarily in the bad sense) framing of the beatification as "Church hagiography vs. Indigenous resistance to cooptation". Yet the thousands of indigenous Catholics who have multiple reasons to relate to Namuncura are left out of the equation, even while it's their devotion that makes the beatification possible. It just reminds us once more how complex race relations and issues of identity in Argentina (where many people still deny the existence of "real Indians") can be.

Israel and Genocide

Gershom Gorenberg's article at TAPPED, "The Israeli Government's Genocide Politics" accurately sums up the hypocrisy of Israel's policy toward Darfur refugees and the Armenian genocide. While Gorenberg's ignores Israel's own policies toward the Palestinians, he turns a white hot lamp on the failure of Israel to embrace Darfur's refugees and to go along with Turkey's continued denial of their 1915 massacre of Armenians.

Is it too much to ask of Israel to have them stand in as a leader of world human rights given the conditions leading to the founding of the country? I would say no, but perhaps I am asking too much of a vulnerable nation surrounded by enemies. However, as Gorenberg points out, "The underlying issue is that, pragmatically, Israel can claim it must protect its interests, even if that means indulging an ally ashamed of its history. It can argue that refugees pose a security threat. It can reject refugees in order to maintain its ethnic balance. But if it does those things, it has no grounds to speak about Western countries who turned away Jews in 1938."

Absolutely. What Israel can't do is have it both ways. They can't act as cold-hearted as the rest of the world to suffering while forcing everyone else to remember what happened to the Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s. That is rank hypocrisy. Personally, I think we do need to remember the Jewish Holocaust all the time. But we also need to remember the Armenians, the Native Americans, Darfur, Australian aborigines, and other peoples who the world has failed.

The Loss of Another Important Human Rights Voice in Latin America

Like Argentina in December, El Salvador has lost one of its most important voices in the human rights struggle - María Julia Hernández has died at 68 years of age. Hernández had been one of the more important voices for human rights in El Salvador. She was one of the more important chroniclers of the murderous atrocities of death squads throughout the country. In addition, her quest for human rights did not stop with the peace accords in 1992, as she continued to advocate against the continued threat of (very real) police violence in El Salvador, well into this decade. As this generation of human rights activists dies off, we are losing some very important voices in this world. Let's hope the younger generations have paid attention, and continue in the footsteps that these amazing women and men have already set.