Tag: impunity

Will Congress or Obama stop supporting Honduras’ death squads?

Leave a comment

he Obama administration is coming under fire for its role in arming and funding murderous Honduran police, in violation of US law. Under the Leahy Law, named after Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the US government is not allowed to fund foreign military units who have commit gross human rights violations with impunity. The director general of Honduras’ national police force, Juan Carlos Bonilla, has been investigated in connection with death squad killings; and members of the US Congress have been complaining about it since Bonilla was appointed last May. Thanks to some excellent investigative reporting by the Associated Press in the last couple of weeks – showing that all police units are, in fact, under Bonilla’s command – it has become clear that the US is illegally funding the Honduran police.

So, now we’ll see if “rule of law” or “separation of powers” means very much in a country that likes to lecture “less developed” nations about these principles…

The government of Honduran President Pepe Lobo was “elected” after a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government of President Mel Zelaya in June of 2009. Zelaya later told the press that Washington was involved in the coup; this is very believable, given the circumstantial evidence. But what we know for sure is that the Obama administration was heavily involved in helping the new regime survive and legitimize itself. Washington supported Lobo’s election in 2009, against the opposition of almost the entire hemisphere. The Organization of American States and the European Union refused to send observers to an election that most of the world viewed as obviously illegitimate.

The coup unleashed a wave of violence against political dissent that continues to this day. Even Honduras’ Truth and Reconciliation Commission – established by the coup government itself – found that it had “undertaken political persecution … and that it was responsible for a number of killings committed by state agents and those acting at their behest, in addition to the widespread and violent repression of rights to speech, assembly, association.”

Which brings us the elections scheduled for later this year. Once again, a social-democratic party is in the race, including people who courageously defended democracy against 2009’s military coup. Its presidential candidate is Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the wife of the president whom Washington worked so hard to get rid of. This party is among the victims of the government’s political repression: in November, LIBRE mayoral candidate Edgardo Adalid Motiño was gunned down after attending a rally for Xiomara Zelaya.

So there you have it. A death squad government may not be the Obama administration’s first choice, but it prefers it to a leftist government that Hondurans might elect if they were to have a free election. The current government belongs to Washington, just like the US military base that the Pentagon would like to keep in Honduras indefinitely.

If all that sounds disgusting, and reminiscent of President Reagan’s death squad governments in Central America, it’s because it is both. The question right now, as in the 1980s, is what will members of Congress in Washington do about it?

Gee, what do you think President Obama will say and do? What do you think Congress will do?

A kidnapping is ignored – as most crimes go unpunished in Mexico

1 Comment


Photographs of Zynthia Cazares’ brother, husband and father, all still missing

Matamoros, Mexico — They have spotted their stolen vehicles at stoplights, driven by the same gunmen who used them to take their entire family captive last July. They have reported the brazen abduction to every branch of Mexican law enforcement, only to be ignored, or directed someplace else.

For the women of the Cazares family who were kidnapped with their families for ransom — and who are still searching for five missing relatives — the official response to their horrific ordeal has been even more excruciating than the crime itself. Even now, they say, after months of trying to goad the Mexican authorities into action, they still see criminals they recognize living large here in this border city, as untouchable as kings.

“We’re completely impotent,” said Zynthia Cazares, 30, an American citizen who was among those abducted and whose husband, brother and father are still missing. “No one will help us.”

Six years into a mostly military assault on drug cartels, impunity across much of Mexico has worsened, and justice is harder to find. Criminals in Mexico are less likely to be punished now than even just a few years ago, say current and former government officials and experts who have studied Mexico’s ailing judiciary, because the authorities have been overwhelmed by increases in violent crime while corruption, fear and incompetence have continued to keep the justice system weak.

Many areas now veer toward lawlessness: in 14 of Mexico’s 31 states, the chance of a crime’s leading to trial and sentencing was less than 1 percent in 2010…and since then, experts say, attempts at reform have stalled as crime and impunity have become cozy partners.

“Crime goes up, diminishing the likelihood of punishment, which causes crime to rise again,” said Alejandro Hope, a former senior intelligence officer for Mexico. “And so we go.”

On our side of the border we get the same crap press releases the Mexican government hands out on their side. The War on Drugs is succeeding – especially with the help of politicians in Washington, DC. Hogwash!

Remedies for a criminal drug culture are simple and well established in countries where decisions are grounded in science and medicine — not religious morality and ten cent slogans.

Authorities on both sides of the border might consider getting down to business and clearing the criminals out of government, disarming the gangsters on the street. It starts by taking the profit out of prohibition. It didn’t work the last time we made a big deal of it. It still doesn’t work.

RTFA for the details, the story of this tormented family, the silence and stonewalling of a useless government.

India to lift contentious security law in Kashmir

Leave a comment


Yes, there are parts of Kashmir that look just like my neck of the prairie
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A much-despised law that suspends basic rights and shields security forces from prosecution in the disputed province of Kashmir will be lifted in some areas in the next few days.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, said in a speech to police officers that the situation in many areas of Kashmir had become peaceful enough to warrant removing the law, which is known as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act.

Human rights activists have long argued that the act, which gives government security forces wide latitude in areas where insurgents operate, has led to widespread abuses. The discovery of thousands of unidentified bodies in mass graves in the region this summer seemed to underscore the impunity the law allowed.

Security officers cannot be prosecuted for acts committed while on duty in areas covered by the act without permission from the Home Ministry, and such permission has almost never been granted, even in cases where rape and murder were alleged.

The law was put in place in the Indian-administered part of Kashmir in 1990, when the state was in the grip of insurgents — partly fueled by Pakistan — who sought to wrest it free of India…The insurgency petered out in the late 1990s, and the past few years have been largely free from armed struggle. But the act has remained in force and was a crucial catalyst for unarmed protests that have swelled in Kashmir almost every summer in recent years. Last year more than 100 people died in protests, most of them killed by security officers who fired into rock-throwing crowds.

But this summer was largely tranquil, and the state government has been slowly reducing the visibility of its security presence in the region, removing heavily armored bunkers and taking machine-gun-toting security officers off the streets.

Like many activists around the world who support the range of struggle from national liberation movements in earlier days, pro-democracy movements, nowadays – I sincerely hope the Indian government can make it past sectarian insurgencies to support full-blown democracy in a region long in the search for its own voice in governing.

This could be a start.