Nº 1, JANUARY-MARCH, 2011. VOLUME 43 ISSN 0254-203X ... file2 JanuarY-MarCh, 2011 latinamericapress...

Amazon jungle in Peru destroyed by informal gold.

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Indigenous community in Panama may have to flee its island home as water levels rise.

Chevron strikes back

PAGE 8

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US oil company makes several claims against Ecuador in “mega-trial.”

Kuna Yala’s climate change refugees

Blood-stained gold

Nº 1, JANUARY-MARCH, 2011. VOLUME 43 ISSN 0254-203X

independent information, from latin america & the caribbean, for the world www.latinamericapress.org

JanuarY-MarCh, 2011 latinamericapress2

Latin America’s roleFor Calvo, Latin America and the Carib-

bean now have a fundamental role in the climate change debate.

Many of the region’s countries have mini-mal contributions to climate change, yet suffer some of the greatest impacts, with extreme weather and temperature increases that liter-ally melt away water resources such as tropical glaciers.

This does not mean, however, that there is a consensus in the region.

In Cancun, Bolivia stood alone to slam the participants for not doing enough to avoid a worsening of global warming. It received no support, not even from its allies in the region, like Nicaragua and Venezuela, the latter of which is South America’s largest oil producer.

But Calvo said that Brazil, Chile, Colom-bia, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Peru have all

Region’s activists state their case against climate change, but governments make minimal advancements.

The results of the 16th International Climate Change Conference in Cancun last month were minimal, at best, but the pieces are in place

for concrete changes. The rest is up to policy-makers.

Delegates of the more than 190 countries that participated in the 16th Conference of the Parties, the UN summit on climate change, agreed to maintain an average temperature in-crease below 2º Celsius, but they failed to adopt concrete measures to achieve this, such as the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

They also failed to extend the Kyoto Pro-tocol, which went into effect in 2004 and is set to expire in 2012.

While the Cancun summit largely avoided the sense of absolute failure that ruled the Copenhagen meeting a year earlier, it puts pressure and the world’s attention on the 2011 talks in Durban, South Africa, so concrete agreements are reached.

One of the few measures reached this year was the so-called “Green Climate Fund,” a World Bank-administered fund that aims to help developing countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change effects with US$100 billion to 2020. Initially, $30 billion will be provided by the United States, the European Union and Japan. Latin American and Caribbean countries can access the fund.

“The agreements do have some positive elements,” said Eduardo Calvo, a Peruvian scientist and member of the Intergovern-mental Panel on Climate Change. “And while they didn’t fulfill the expectations, there is a scheduled revision of the goals in 2015 that will allow us to improve them.”

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEANRamiro Escobar in Lima

Delegates miss the boat in climate change summit

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developed countries have resisted making significant cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

“There is a scheduled revision of the goals in 2015 that will allow us to improve them.”— Eduardo Calvo

3JanuarY-MarCh, 2011 latinamericapress

made energetic calls to stem climate change. Costa Rica, whose citizen Christiana Figueres was named executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, says it will be carbon neutral by 2021.

The entire region is responsible for just 12 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Bank, mainly due to deforestation and use of fos-sil fuels.

The United Nations Environment Pro-gram says that since the 1970s the number of people who have been affected by climate change has risen from 5 million to 40 million in 2009.

Other Latin American countries have come up with their own programs, including Ecua-dor’s push for international donations not to drill for oil in rich reserves detected under the Yasuni National Park.

The love/hate of REDDPart of the Green Climate Fund will be

destined for the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries program, whose ob-jective is reducing emissions for the six gases that cause global warming: carbon dioxide, methane gas, nitrous oxide, hydrochloro-fluorocarbon, perfluorocarbon, and sulfur hexafluoride.

Some countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru, along with environ-mental organizations including Greenpeace and Conservation International, have backed this plan that allows industrialized countries to pay to maintain forests intact in other regions of the world, as long as those who keep the forest intact are compensated.

Greenpeace, however, has complained that it is still unclear where the money will come from for the Green Climate Fund and that some regions will take precedence over others.

The Caribbean is particularly vulnerable to climate change, as rising sea levels could mean that some of the island nations will be under water. According to the Alliance of Small Island States, composed of countries from the Caribbean, Africa and Oceania, a 1-meter rise in water levels could cost damages above $6 billion a year.

Basic infrastructure, hospitals, schools, housing and farmland and tourism infrastruc-ture face potential risks, particularly in the Bahamas, Belize and Trinidad and Tobago The estimates do not take extreme weather, such as tropical storms, into account. q

CoNTENTs

LATIN AMERICA“seed Treaty” empty without small-scale

farmers 14Water woes continue 16Women seek to bridge farming’s gender gap 33

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEANdelegates miss the boat in climate change

summit 2Monoculture’s double-edged sword 5declining purchasing power undermines

remittances 25afro-descendants’ plight in the spotlight 35

SOUTHERN CONEWomen struggle for basic rights 34defining disappearance 37

BOLIVIAhigh-ranking police accused of

drug-trafficking 22

BRAZILPantanal, a paradise worth preserving 6indigenous Brazilians say “no” to Belo Monte 7Women fight for healthy farming 33

CHILEOne year later 39

COLOMBIAdeepening dependency on mining 11searching for the key to peace? 21

ECUADORChevron strikes back 8Chevron’s last resort 9

GUATEMALAWikileaks: Colom referred to Menchú as

“a fabrication” 29dos erres unearthed again 36

HAITIduvalier’s return stokes tensions 19

HONDURASstill no mining law 15a tarnished first year for Lobo 20

MEXICOBishop ruiz dies 30

NICARAGUAinterview with women’s rights activist

azahálea solís 32

PANAMÁControversial mining law green-lighted 10Mining law revoked 10Kuna Yala’s climate change refugees 26

PARAGUAYTransgenic corn moves forward 17Lugo’s government limps through the

middle of its term 27

PERUBlood-stained gold 13no clear scenario for election 24

PUERTO RICOunemployment at a nearly two-decade high 31

URUGUAYControversial pulping industry expands 4

4 latinamericapress JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

URUGUAYJosé Elosegui in Montevideo

Controversial pulping industry expandsLands for pine and eucalyptus trees increase as country grows cellulose business.

another cellulose plant is set to become the largest single private investment in uruguay’s history.

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The diplomatic dispute between Uruguay and its neighbor Argen-tina over a large paper pulping plant along the shared border not only

did not derail the business, but Uruguay is tak-ing steps to expand the controversial cellulose industry, a move that could put in jeopardy one of the country’s main resources: land.

On Jan. 18, Montes del Plata de Uruguay, a consortium of forestry companies Arauco of Chile and the Swedish-Finnish Stora Enso, signed a US$1.9 billion — the largest single private investment in Uruguay’s his-tory — contract to build a pulping complex in Conchillas in the southeastern Colonia department.

The project, which includes a pulping mill and a port for cellulose exports, would produce 1.3 million metric tons a year from its estimated start date in 2013.

According to the consortium, the com-

plex’s construction will create an estimated 3,200 jobs. But once in operation, the company says it will provide direct employment to only 500 people.

Passed conflictUruguay’s cellulose industry was thrust

into the international spotlight when its other plant that straddles the Uruguay-Argentina border began to operate in late 2007. The plant, owned by Finnish company UPM-Kymmene, which purchased it from another Finland-based company, Botnia, in 2009, sits on the Uruguay River in the town of Fray Bentos. An outcry from environmentalists and the government of Argentina sparked a diplomatic dispute between both countries and massive protests over the pollution the plant poised to cause.

The Argentine government lodged a case against its neighbor in the International Court of Justice, which gave Uruguay a moral convic-tion for not respecting the treaty on the river the two countries share, but did not order the plant to close.

The $1 billion-plant in Fray Bentos was also touted by the government as a job creator, but it currently employs just several hundred people. The Rio Negro department has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

MonocultureUruguay has around a million hectares of

eucalyptus and pine forests, most of it des-tined for the cellulose industry and largely in the hands of multinational companies. The Montes del Plata consortium is the single-largest owner of the land with almost 240,000 hectares, and UPM-Kymmene holds around 225,000 hectares. US company Weyerhaeuser owns more than 140,000 hectares.

Most of Uruguay’s farmland is dedicated to transgenic soy cultivation. The industry, mainly controlled by large Argentine farming companies, takes up around 1 million hectares, meaning that the forestry and soy industries together hold one-eighth of Uruguay’s arable land.

These industries are exhausting key water sources for many rural communities, and lead-ing to soil degradation, displacement of small-scale farmers, the loss of food sovereignty and safety and the loss of control of land to foreign companies.

Critics raise their voicesSome criticism of this system has emerged

from the government itself. President José Mu-

5latinamericapress JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN

Monoculture’s double-edged swordRegion lags in deforestation as industrial food agriculture grows, though a food crisis may still be brewing.

The growth of agriculture in Latin america is the main cause of de-forestation in the region, home

to more than one-fifth of the world’s forests and more than half of the globe’s primary forests.

But as the industry grows, it does not necessarily mean more food for the region’s inhabitants, as monocul-ture, such as soybeans, are generally destined for surging demand of biofu-els and animal feed.

according to the united nations Food and agriculture Organization’s,

or FaO, 2011 edition of its state of the World’s Forests report, nearly half of Latin america and the Carib-bean is forested, but that land has decreased faster there than in any other region.

Between 2000 and 2010, forest-land in Latin america and the Carib-bean fell by nearly 42,000 hectares to 890,782 hectares. The global annual average deforestation rate in the pe-riod was 0.13%, while it was 0.46% in the region.

“We need to emphasize the con-nection between forests and people, and the benefits that can result when they are managed by people from the area in an innovating and sustainable way,” said eduardo rojas, assistant director general for the FaO’s forest program.

The expansion of large-scale farm-ing that is largely responsible for deforestation in the region ironically does not mean more food for the local population, since much of the crops are not destined for food.

On Feb. 3, the FaO said world food prices had hit another historic high in January, meaning poorer countries that often import food, including hai-

ti, may suffer more, as global supplies of grains dwindle, demand grows and prices rise even more.

“These high prices are likely to per-sist in the months to come,” said FaO economist and grains expert abdol-reza abbassian in a statement. “high food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food.”

in a column published on argenti-na-based environmental website eco-Portal, the organization’s director, ri-cardo natalichio, criticized the FaO for considering monoculture tree planta-tions — such as eucalyptus — that are used for industry, as forests, claiming that the industry is detrimental to the environment.

“among the impacts of tree mon-oculture is loss of biodiversity, altera-tion of the water cycle, lower food production, soil degradation, loss of indigenous and traditional cultures, conflict with forestry companies, job loss, expulsion of the rural population and deterioration of tourism-heavy areas,” he wrote. —LP.

jica has expressed his worry for the increased concentration of Uruguayan lands in foreign hands. He has called on lawmakers from the ruling Broad Front party to evaluate possible alternatives. Lawmakers from his party con-curred, and following the Montes del Plata announcement, said this type of industry is not ideal.

Sen. Eduardo Lorier, of the Communist Party, one of the member parties of the Broad Front, was quoted in a Jan. 20 article in La Di-aria as saying that the two cellulose plants “cre-ate very few resources for the country” because they operate — or will operate in the case of Montes del Plata — in duty-free zones.

Lorier added that the forestry and soy in-dustries are a step backward for Uruguay, since it means it simply exports more raw materials, and more of its land is concentrated in the

hands of a few, foreign companies.For its part, Grupo Guayubira de Uruguay,

an umbrella group of environmental orga-nizations, has harshly criticized the Montes del Plata project. The group has long warned against the social, cultural and political impli-cations of monoculture.

One of the group’s members, activist Eliza-beth Díaz, told Latinamerica Press that the en-tire “global model” should be reconsidered.

“ We’re talking about a factory and a number of hectares destined for plantations, instead of talking about using them for food production or other types of traditional prod-ucts,” she said. “Montes del Plata holds some 250,000 hectares of land, five times the area of the Montevideo department. That’s ridiculous for Uruguay and I think any other country on earth.” q

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Sustainable economic activities are crucial to avoid the decline of this great ecosystem.

The Pantanal is an immense re-gion spanning 147,574 square kilometers, and is part of an even larger area, the Upper Paraguay

River Basin, which totals 362,376 square kilometers on the Brazilian side alone — an area twice that of Uruguay. While its biome, or ecosystem, is the best preserved of the six that exist in Brazil — given that only 15 per cent of its original vegetation has been deforested — there are already serious signs of trouble, as evidenced by the ongoing slaughter of alligators and the lack of proper waste disposal.

JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

Certified livestockFarm animals have lived on the Pantanal since the early 18th

century and, unlike what is happening in the Amazon, there has not been intensive deforestation to create pastures, as indicated by a study coordinated by the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)-Pantanal, which included the partici-pation of several NGOs.

Cattle from the marsh feed on both natural grass and crops, but even in the dry season the food supply is abundant. The animals look for food in the capões, or hammocks. These tree clusters that look like islands can be home to dozens of plant species.

Organic farming is already being practiced, and there is a strong tendency towards expanding the number of certified livestock in the Pantanal, according to the president of the Brazilian Association of Organic Livestock, Leonardo Leite de Barros. “Conscientious consumerism is here to stay,” he said during a roundtable at the 5th Symposium on Natural and Socioeconomic Resources in the Pantanal, held in late 2010 in Corumbá, Mato Grosso do Sul.

There are about 4 million heads of cattle on the Pantanal, accounting for 2 per cent of Brazilian beef, out of a total 200 million heads — one of the largest populations in the world.

Fishing, another resource“I’ve always been passionate about fish,” admits Dr. Emiko

Kawakami de Resende, who arrived in 1985 to work at

The Pantanal is the best protected of Brazil’s six ecosystems.

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BRAZILJosé Pedro Martins in Mato Grosso do Sul

Pantanal, a paradise worth preserving

Hefty economic interests are spilling over into this south-western region, raising concerns among environmentalists, scientists and, above all, its people, whom are all united in the pursuit of sustainable development for this part of the country.

Unfortunately, little attention is currently paid by the Bra-zilian and international communities to the Pantanal — the world’s largest wetland — located between the states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. This is contrary to what hap-pens in the Amazon, and it flies in the face of the fact that the Pantanal is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Natural World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve.

A clear indicator, however, that the Pantanal is occupying an increasingly important place on the Brazilian scientific agenda has been the creation of two new scientific institutions in recent years, both overseen by the Ministry of Science and Technol-ogy and focused directly or indirectly on the area. These are the National Research Center of the Pantanal, based at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT) in Cuiabá, and the National Institute of Science and Technology for Wetlands, also under the coordination of UFMT.

The big question is how the Pantanal can develop within a sustainable framework, while retaining its extraordinary biodiversity and natural resources. Additionally, it must also be determined how rearing livestock will continue in the region.

latinamericapress 7JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

BRAZIL

Indigenous Brazilians say “no” to Belo MonteHalf million people presented a petition to President Rousseff to block controversial hydroelectric project.

hundreds of native peoples from Brazil’s amazon, environmen-talists and human rights activ-

ists marched in the country’s capital on Feb. 8 to protest the proposed Belo Monte dam, a hydroelectric project that would flood thousands of hect-ares of amazon rainforest.

The demonstrators presented Pres-ident dilma rousseff, who took office in January, with a 500,000-signature petition to block the project, which would become the third largest dam in the world.

The Belo Monte dam, an us$11 billion-project, would displace some 50,000 people and hurt the delicate ecosystem. Many of the would-be victims are indigenous, a group al-ready threatened by Brazil’s expand-ing industrial sector. They rely heavily on the amazon tributaries for fishing and would see their environment de-stroyed.

Protesters, some of them wearing native garb, marched through the streets of Brasilia to demand that the project be halted. in late January, the Brazilian environmental institute fu-eled the outcry after it gave the green light for the construction of “necessary infrastructure” for the dam, including clearing hundreds of hectares of for-ests and new roads.

Following that, France-based

alstom, signed a deal for 500 mil-lion euros ($674.1 million) to provide equipment in this initial stage of the 11,000MW-project. The plant is ex-pected to start operations in 2015.

Organizations such as survival international, amazon Watch, the indigenist Missionary Council, which is tied to Brazil’s Catholic Church, and dozens of others have demanded that rousseff’s government stop the proj-ect, which they say will cause irrepa-rable environmental and social harm.

“The Brazilian public is sending a loud and clear message, one that is being echoed internationally that the dilma government needs to rethink the Belo Monte dam and opt for more sustainable ways of meeting Brazil’s energy needs,” said Christian Poirier, Brazil Program Coordinator for ama-zon Watch. “The Belo Monte dam proj-ect is foolish on so many levels — from its social and environmental impacts on our climate and on the people and the rainforests of the amazon to its technical and economic viability.” —LP.

Embrapa-Pantanal and today heads the institution. Kawakami explains that in those early years, there was a breakthrough in understanding the Pantanal thanks to the efforts of researchers, institutions such as Embrapa-Pantanal, the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), and UFMT, among others, in addition to the anonymous and generous support of people like Américo Sousa.

Sousa, 62, a fisherman since the age of 12, knows “every-thing” about the dynamics of the Pantanal’s rivers. And half of those five decades of direct contact with the Paraguay basin’s waters was devoted precisely to support the research of experts from Embrapa and other organizations. With seven children, Sousa says he “owes everything” to the rivers and to the fish.

It is people like this that have spearheaded a new outlook for the Pantanal, which has the possibility to follow paths towards truly sustainable development that take into account the idiosyncrasies of the ecosystem and demands, dreams and challenges of the local population.

However, while the people of the Pantanal are passionate about the rivers, animals, and life in the region, the difficulties are numerous.

A survey conducted by UFMS agricultural engineer Marcos García de Henrique dos Anjos and others, interviewing 35 families totaling 198 people directly or indirectly involved in artisanal fishing in Porto Murtinho, Mato Grosso do Sul, noted

some important obstacles, such as the disparity in quality of life indicators between rural and urban populations.

In rural areas, 57.14 per cent of those surveyed had no deeds for their homes, and 21.4 per cent lived in a casa cedida, a home lent for free by the owner — often an employer, a relative, or an institution — to the tenants.

In urban areas, however, 57 per cent had their own homes. Still, only 5 per cent of households in the city had sewer access while 48 per cent used septic tanks. In rural areas, 64 per cent used well water and, in the city, 95 per cent of homes were serviced by the state sanitation company.

An important tool, which tends to be used often when planning for the sustainable use of natural resources in ecosys-tems such as the Pantanal and the Amazon, is socio-economic zoning. A study by Cristhiane Oliveira de Graça Amânciom along with others from Embrapa-Agricultural Biology was car-ried out in the riverfront community of Castelo, in Corumbá. Socio-economic zoning revealed, among other things, that 59 per cent of respondents had only primary education, the local market still worked mainly through the barter system and, with the decline in livestock, fishing has played an increasingly larger role as a source for animal protein.

“Like other communities surveyed, the one we see here has suffered from an absence of public policies aimed at riparian zones,” say the study’s authors. q

8 latinamericapress JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

a pool of toxic sludge abandoned by Texaco.

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ECUADoRLuis Ángel Saavedra in Quito

Chevron strikes backUS oil company makes several claims.

releasing about 18 billion barrels of con-taminated water into the Ecuadorian jungle and leaving behind 627 pools of toxic waste, which affected about 30,000 people, including campesinos and indigenous populations from five indigenous peoples: the Siona, Secoya, Cofán, Waorani and Quichwa.

In 1993, they filed suit in a New York fed-eral court, accusing the company of polluting the environment and negatively impacting their health by using outdated technology. Ten years later, in 2003, the New York Court of Appeals transferred to case to Ecuador and or-dered Chevron—which by then had acquired Texaco—to file the case in Ecuador.

Chevron had sought to avoid prosecution in the United States because laws are less strin-gent in Ecuador and the courts can be more receptive to pressure from big business.

In 2003, the lawsuit against Chevron began in the Superior Court of Nueva Loja, in the eastern province of Sucumbios. Since then, numerous surveys and inspections ordered by the court in the fields where Texaco operated, including expert opinions requested by the company itself, proved the damage that had been done.

Backed into a corner, Chevron bogged down the trial by demanding unnecessary

The lawsuit against oil giant Chevron, has hit a turn-ing point. The sentence handed down on Feb. 14 by Judge Nicolás Zambrano of the Superior Court of Sucumbíos, in the Amazon town of Lago Agrio,

fined the oil company for approximately US$9.5 billion for environmental damage caused in the Ecuadorian Amazon ba-sin between 1964 and 1992 during Texaco’s operations there. California-based Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001.

Although the ruling sets payment at $8.6 billion, Ecuador’s Environmental Management Act obliges the responsible party to pay an additional 10 percent of the value of compensation to claimants.

In environmental terms, the trial against Chevron in Ecuador is the largest environmental damage verdict, a list that includes the 1989 oil spill in Alaska by the Exxon Valdez tanker. Its owner, US firm ExxonMobil, was sentenced to pay $4 billion in compensation for the largest environmental catastrophe in US history; another runner-up was the case against British Petroleum, which has paid about $3.5 billion so far for the en-vironmental damage caused by an accident at one of its drilling rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

“This trial is not about accidental damages. We’re talking about harm to people and the environment that was done in a deliberate manner,” says Luis Yanza, president of the Amazon Defense Front, an umbrella organization for the indigenous and campesino communities that are suing Chevron.

A long disputeAfter 28 years of operation, with 339 wells punched into

15 oil fields, Texaco left the country in 1992 — but not before

expert evaluations and threatening the plaintiffs with criminal prosecution for alleged fraud, and even forging military intel-ligence reports to present the plaintiffs as alleged terrorists.

“Texaco did everything to delay the case, taking advantage of allowances with the Ecuadorian judicial system. There were times when [the company] submitted 40 legal briefs in half an hour,” said Yanza.

The oil company’s legal maneuvers came to an end when, on Dec.16, 2010, Judge Zambrano terminated the investigation stage and requested the 215,000 pages of documents from the case to analyze them and make a decision.

Chevron responded on three fronts: the first at the Per-manent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, Netherlands, suc-ceeded in early February with gaining a temporary ban on the enforcement of any sentence issued against the company in Ecuador. The Court’s decision ordered that Ecuador “take all measures at its disposal to suspend or cause to be suspended the enforcement or recognition within and without Ecuador of any judgment” against Chevron.

A similar injunction was achieved by a New York federal court. On Feb. 8 a week before Judge Zambrano handed down the sen-tence, Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that for the following two weeks no ruling on the case could be made in Ecuador. After hearing Zambrano’s verdict, Kaplan decided to extend the ban until March 8. Meanwhile, he will analyze the case to assess whether he will extend the scope of this ruling and make it permanent.

But Chevron decided to push further. On Feb. 1 the com-pany filed a lawsuit in New York against 47 Amazon residents involved in the suit. In addition,it initiated proceedings against the plaintiffs’ legal team, their advisers and scientific experts,


“While the fine is insignificant compared to the damage caused by Texaco, this ruling includes advanced case law on environmental rights and corporate responsibility with respect to nature; this is what makes the decision a historic step in de-fense of life,” said Fajardo.

In addition to the $9.5 billion to be paid by Chevron, the Sucumbíos judge ordered that the company apologize publicly to its victims. If Chevron refuses to do so, the company will be required to pay an additional sum twice the original amount specified, that is, in excess of $19.2 billion.

Although both parties have appealed the court ruling, it has already set a precedent for new environmental damage claims worldwide.

“Nigeria was waiting for this ruling because they have a similar situation,” says Fajardo. Diocles Zambrano, leader of the Angel Shingre Network of Community Leaders, or RLCAS, adds that European multinational oil companies Repsol and Perenco “should already be concerned.”

The RLCAS —named for Angel Shingre, the Ecuadorian environmental leader assassinated in November 2003 — has monitored the damage caused by these two companies in the Amazonian province of Orellana and is gearing up to follow the trail blazed by the Amazon Defense Front. q

technicians and others who collaborated in the trial, including environmental non-governmental organizations, laboratories, law firms, the producer of the documentary “Crude”, Joe Ber-linger, who showed the world the harm caused by Texaco, and even the Provincial Court of Sucumbíos.

The oil company is basing its case on the Racketeer Influ-enced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to argue that everyone involved in the trial is conspiring to extort and defraud Chevron in the Lago Agrio case.

RICO is used in the United States to prosecute crime syn-dicates like the mafia. According to Chevron, all parties to the suit, as well as lawyers and organizations involved in the trial and the court in Sucumbíos, are part of a criminal conspiracy that deliberately seeks to extort money for a large payout from the company by abusing the judicial process, falsifying scientific reports and seeking to manipulate the company’s share price.

The battle is not yet wonPablo Fajardo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, is undaunted by the

lawsuit filed by Chevron in the United States and considers it one more failed attempt by the company to avoid paying dam-ages. Now his focus is on how to enforce the 188-page ruling Zambrano issued.

ECUADoR

Chevron’s last resortOil giant claims extortion in counter-suit against Amazon pollution plaintiffs’ legal team.

us oil company Chevron filed a countersuit Feb. 1 against the lawyers of the thousands of indigenous and campesino plaintiffs in a landmark, multi-billion-

pollution case in ecuador’s jungle. The san ramon, Califor-nia-based company filed a suit in a new York district Court, accusing the plaintiffs’ legal team and others tied to the case of racketeering under the racketeer influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or riCO, a law aimed at stem-ming mafia activity.

Chevron faces damages of up to us$113 billion in the ecuadorian suit, which has been housed in the amazon town of Lago agrio, and a verdict is expected soon.

“a judge in ecuador is close to issuing a decision in the long-running case there, and Chevron is becoming ever more desperate to undermine the plaintiffs in u.s. courts,” wrote The New York Times.

The plaintiffs allege that Texaco, which Chevron ac-quired in 2001, spilled millions of gallons of toxic wastewa-ter, infused with heavy metals, in the ecuadorian amazon, poisoning villagers and destroying the soil. The company says state-run Petroecuador already approved its clean-up

of the area when it passed its concession on to the com-pany in 1992, and that it was free of responsibility.

“it is hard to know what to make of such a patently absurd and egregious insult as this; Big Oil suing the vic-tims of their contamination,” wrote Mitch anderson, the corporate campaigns director of amazon Watch, a us en-vironmental organization that is advising the plaintiffs, in a column in the San Francisco Chronicle. “now, as the com-munities continue to suffer a public health crisis, Chevron is pouring ghastly sums of money into a scorched-earth legal and public relations strategy designed, essentially, to destroy the hopes of the plaintiffs.”

in its countersuit, the Chevron accused the plaintiffs of extortion, and said the report the court-appointed special-ist submitted to the judge, which confirmed many of the plaintiffs’ complaints, was falsified and biased. The suit, however, did not accuse the plaintiffs directly but their law-yers and others involved in the case.

On Feb. 7, in its final argument submitted to the court in ecuador, environmental groups with ties to the case said Chevron wrote again that there is no proof that its opera-tions or any result of them harmed anyone in the area, and that the plaintiffs’ accusations are unfounded.

environmentalists dismissed the report.“Chevron is embarrassed to promote a document that

is so clearly misleading,” said Karen hinton, a spokesperson for the 30,000 plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, in a press release by amazon Watch. “Chevron’s final argument makes a mockery out of the evidence at trial and is so deceptive that not even Chevron wants people to read it.” —LP.

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JanuarY-MarCh, 2011

Environmentalists slam legislation they say will cause irreversible damage.

in the first of two votes, Panama-nian lawmakers Feb. 1 approved a controversial mining law that aims

to exponentially expand the sector in the country, a legislation that was staunchly opposed by environmental and indigenous rights groups.

The Ministry of Commerce and industry currently has more than 180 requests for mining licenses that, if granted, would encompass 40 percent of Panamanian territory.

The proposed law would allow foreign entities or persons to mine in Panama, as well as increase double the royalty fee to us$0.04 per dollar of mining-generated income.

several environmental and indig-enous organizations complain that there has not been enough debate and technical analysis about the ecological

and social impact the industry could have.

Canadian company inmet is devel-oping a $5 billion copper-gold project that would require the relocation of more than 5,000 people, mainly indigenous and campesino villag-ers near Panama’s northern coast. The project would be the largest in Central america.

President ricardo Martinelli’s gov-ernment is also looking for partners to develop the Cerro Colorado copper project in the western Chiriquí prov-ince, which would make Panama one of the top copper producers in the West-ern hemisphere. according to Marti-nelli, the mine has more reserves than el Teniente mine, in Chile, the world’s top copper producer.

a year ago, production began at the Molejón gold mine, owned by Canada’s Petaquilla Minerals Ltd., a project that sparked criticism and protests.

in a joint statement by more than a dozen environmental and indigenous groups, signatories expressed “our

deepest worry about the process and content of this polemic and nefarious bill that attacks Panama’s environmen-tal security and sovereignty,” referring to the mining bill.

“Particularly worrying is the recalci-trant position of the government repre-sentatives by not effectively integrating members of civil society,” said the state-ment.

They added that the law completely skirts the issue of previous consultation of the indigenous community mem-bers affected by potential mining and other investment projects, as is stated in the international Labor Organiza-tion’s Convention 169 on indigenous and Tribal Peoples.

Before the vote, organizations in-cluding the national association for na-ture Conservation presented a counter-bill: a moratorium on open-pit mining.

President Laura Chinchilla of Costa rica, Panamá’s northern neighbor, last year issued a moratorium on open-pit mining over a similar contro-versy. —LP.

PANAMA

Mining law revokedAfter protests, Martinelli aboutfaces on mining law reforms.

On the heels of protests by environmentalists and indigenous groups, Panama’s President ricardo Martinelli backed away from a controversial legis-

lative reform that would open the country up to foreign mining investment.

at Martinelli’s behest, on March 18, lawmakers re-pealed a reform to the country’s mining law that was passed a month earlier. Martinelli had pushed for the revised law, claiming it was necessary to increase invest-

ment in the Central american country.The reform centered around two projects: the Cobre

Panama deposit, a more than us$4 billion copper-gold deposit that would require the relocation of more than 5,000 people, mainly indigenous and campesino villagers near Panama’s northern coast. The other project, Cerro Colorado, in the western Chiriquí province, which would make Panama one of the top copper producers in the Western hemisphere, sits within the ngöbe Buglé comar-ca, a semi-autonomous indigenous area, drawing harsh criticism in Panama and internationally.

But reform to the nearly four-decade-old mining code is not dead. The government says it has resumed negotiations with indigenous groups for a new reform. in response, indigenous groups say they will continue their protests until the government ensures that their land will not be encroached upon by foreign companies. —LP.

PANAMA

Controversial mining law green-lighted


Indiscriminate mining affects environmental and cultural sustainability.

In his inaugural speech last August, Presi-dent Juan Manuel Santos said mining would be one of the five motors for Co-lombia’s progress. But critics complain

that promoting this industry would endanger the country’s chance at environmental and cultural sustainability.

Colombia holds Latin America’s largest coal reserves and has significant amounts of gold, silver, platinum, nickel, copper, iron, magnesium, lead, zinc and titanium, as well as deposits of emeralds.

Forty-percent of the country is currently concessioned off for mining projects because of lax laws, according to Mario Valencia of the non governmental Colombian Network Against Large Scale Transnational Mining, an umbrella group of 50 rights and environmen-tal organizations in the country. Government figures show that the mining and hydrocarbon industries comprise 85 percent of Colombia’s foreign investment. From 2002 to 2009, invest-ment from these industries has increased from US$466 million to $3 billion, and exports from $2.8 billion to $8.1 billion.

“The law prioritizes only the economic aspects,” says Juana Díaz, a spokeswoman for the National Indigenous Organization of Co-lombia’s Territory and Biodiversity arm.

Díaz pointed to a 2001 reform to the Min-ing Code that loosened environmental regula-tions by scrapping approval for exploration, and changed land ownership requirements, in favor of large companies, with requirements such as large-scale infrastructure and heavy machinery “that only multinational companies could fulfill,” cutting out many small-scale miners.

Heavy metals, heavy impactMining may generate billions in profits, but

that “does not make up for the environmental

CoLoMBIASusan Abad in Bogota

Deepening dependency on mining

and social and many other costs that are dif-ficult to calculate,” said Juan Mayr, Colombia’s former environment minister and a current advisor for the United Nations Development Program. “They are extracting non renewable natural resources, causing a great impact on Colombians’ collective patrimony. They grant mining titles without any kind of oversight, any kind of qualification. It’s a system plagued with a lack of vision and [with] irregularities.”

Transnational mining companies have 43,000 square kilometers of concessions.

South African miner Anglo Gold Ashanti

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Local residents protest influx of mining projects.

“[The Mining Code has requirements] that only multinational companies could fulfill.”— Juana díaz

JanuarY-MarCh, 2011 12 latinamericapress

has a concession of 6,900 square kilometers in its gold projects Gramalote in Antioquia and La Colosa in Tolima with important political and economic impact that explains the numer-ous social conflicts, says Sen. Jorge Robledo, of the opposition Alternative Democratic Pole.

“The population is paying and will continue to pay a high price,” said indigenous Sen. Marco Avirama. “In the process of mining exploration and exploitation, because of the machinery, vehicles and technology used, the soil stabil-ity and the fauna, flora and water is strongly affected, wiping out the local ecosystem with no possibility of its recovery.”

Avirama pointed to the large amounts of water needed to extract gold and the use of cyanide and mercury that eventually contami-nates local rivers.

According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, Colombia’s gold mining industry has made the country home to the largest mercury contamination on earth. Measurements taken by the agency last year in Segovia, in the northwestern Antioquia de-partment a mineral rich zone, found 10 to 20 times greater the 10,000 nanograms per cubic meter considered safe by the World Health Organization.

Water resources are also at severe risk.Some local residents in the northeastern

Santander department have urged the govern-ment to deny an environmental permit for Ca-nadian mining company Grey Star that plans to extract more than 500,000 ounces of gold per year from deposits in the Santurbán high-altitude wetland, a valuable ecosystem that is protected under the constitution. The area is home to more than 40 lagoons, hundreds of streams and abundant vegetation that regulates the water cycle.

Drilling here would put the water supplies for 1.6 million people in the cities of Cucuta and Bucaramanga in jeopardy, Robledo said.

“They are going to use 40 metric tons of cyanide and 230 metric tons of ammonium nitrate-fuel a day,” he added. They are going to dynamite 1,075 million metric tons of soil in the first phase [of the project] and … do so in an area of high-altitude wetlands and natural reserve, which is prohibited.”

Opponents to the industry note its cultural impact.

Campesinos, indigenous and Afro-Colom-bians are already being deprived of water and land by those who are working in informal mining or those who have “sold out” to the big companies,” said Avirama. “Also, the invest-ment that companies bring in and the invest-ment that they generate are accompanied by

the non governmental Human Rights and Displacement Consultancy.

He said that nearly one-third of the 280,000 people displaced in Colombia in 2010 came from areas where these two industries were present.

The government has started to crack down on informal mining by making surprise visits to the mines, cancelling permits for a lack of security and instating higher fines for viola-tions. Santos’ government also said it would create the National Minerals Agency to regu-late small-scale mining, which it says is highly contaminating and has become a source of financing for the armed groups.

But Valencia says that that it is really a way to favor large-scale mining companies.

“There are more than 2 million artisanal miners in Colombia that have long lived off of this activity,” he said. “The government is trying to take this way of life away from them and give it to the large mining companies. It has been grouping artisanal mining with ille-gal mining, so now it has the authorization to persecute both of them … and clear the way for the transnationals.” q

“A dispossession of land is being consolidated, as well as foreign investment, especially in mining and palm oil, that is tied to forced displacement.”— JorgE roJas

practices that are not in accordance with the ancestral forms of life of the population.”

Eviction and displacementThis influx of wealth attracts illegal armed

groups, which position themselves near the projects to extort or sometimes putting themselves at the service of the transnational companies.

“A dispossession of land is being consoli-dated, as well as foreign investment, especially in mining and palm oil, that is tied to forced displacement,” said Jorge Rojas, director of

JanuarY-MarCh, 2011 13latinamericapress

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informal mining has destroyed large swaths of amazon rainforest.

PERUHildegard Willer in Puerto Maldonado

Blood-stained goldAmazon jungle destroyed by informal gold mining.

María Tintaya and René Santos want to get married soon. The rings are the least of their wor-ries. The young nurse and the

electrician work in a shop that buys gold in the Amazon department of Madre de Dios near the border with Brazil.

It’s Sunday morning and Tintaya is attend-ing to three young miners. Two of them are lis-tening to music on an MP3 player, in sneakers with the laces for fashion. The eldest, 25 years old, takes out a piece of crumpled paper from his pocket. Inside is a silver-colored ball.

Tintaya takes it and puts it in a clay bowl and burns it with a lighter. Little by little, the highly toxic mercury starts to burn off, and the harvest is revealed: a 15-gram piece of gold.

Tintaya pays them US$600 in cash without asking for any certificate of where the gold came from. For one week’s work, each miner receives $200, the minimum monthly wage in Peru.

Like so many others, the three young min-ers dropped out of school. They left their native Cusco in Peru’s southern Andes to mine for gold that is buried under the rich Amazon soil of Madre de Dios. They form part of a mineral supply chain that includes both formal and informal, artisanal and industrial miners.

Humberto Cordero, an Environment Min-istry representative for the region, estimates that just 5 percent of the miners there have permits and approved environmental impact studies.

Around 60 percent are illegal miners, he says, and another 30 percent are awaiting ap-proval.

Miners large and smallThe miners of Madre de Dios include

wealthy Peruvian, Brazilian and even Russian and Chinese investors, whose workers sift through the murky waters and muddy banks with large, modern dredgers, excavators, dump trucks. Others work independently, with hand tools and diesel-powered drains to suck up the gold-rich sediment of the rivers and streams.

Large and small, the estimated 40,000 people living off of mining in Madre de Dios have one thing in common: their activity is harming the jungle. Trees are chopped down indiscriminately, soil is injected with toxic wastewater tainted with mercury and motor oil. Some tributaries no longer exist; miners have turned them into muddy desert.

Neither the Ministry of Energy and Mines in Lima nor regional authorities in charge of regulating and supervising this industry here have been able to bring order to its growth in the department, let alone mitigate its environ-mental impact.

As gold trades at record prices, more min-ers stream in, crippling government efforts to rein in on the trend.

A Feb. 18, 2010 ban on new permits and the proposed division of the department into mining and non-mining zones has had little effect.

“We now have a problem that informal miners are invading the new buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve,” said Cordero.

Environment Minister Antonio Brack called up a last resort: the Navy. Last Feb. 19, he called up the units tasked with watching over the Amazon tributaries to destroy as many as 14 dredges that it found in the rivers.

Since then the miners have stepped up a counter-attack and two protesters were killed as miners blocked highways in protest.

But the problem will not be resolved in Madre de Dios. The gold mined illegally en-


ters the market through intermediaries. This gold, according to export statistics, is sold in Switzerland, Canada and the United States, for industrial uses or in banking.

“When will the press make a campaign like they did for [Africa’s] blood diamonds so people stop buying gold that destroys the jungle?,” said Brack in a press conference on March 10.

Green goldPerhaps the ministry ignores that there

have been multiple attempts to produce gold on a small-scale and ecologically-sustainable. Five days before the Peruvian government staged the military intervention in Madre de Dios, the first so-called fair trade seal for gold was launched in London.

To obtain the seal, artisanal miners have to

LATIN AMERICA

“Seed Treaty” empty without small-scale farmersBiodiversity and food sources under threat despite legal tools.

More than 100 nations have signed the united nations-backed international Treaty on Plant genetic resources for Food and agriculture, but

threats to food sovereignty, food security and biodiversity loom large.

Participants in the fourth session of the governing Body of the seed Treaty, which went into effect in 2004, held in Bali, indonesia, March 14-18, said the treaty is nec-essary to combat the effects of climate change, by ensur-ing food supplies for the world’s growing population.

Costa rica, Cuba, el salvador, guatemala, Peru and uruguay are the only Latin american countries to have signed and ratified the treaty.

“With climate change already altering growing con-ditions and populations rapidly increasing, preserving and sharing crop diversity on a global scale is no longer optional,” said dr. shakeel Bhatti, secretary of the Treaty’s governing Body. “no country — rich or poor — has within its borders the crop diversity required to meet future food

needs. all countries need to improve the way they share their seed crop material as a matter of great urgency.”

The exponential growth of monoculture, particularly soy for biofuel production, which governments from Bra-zil, argentina and Paraguay have promoted despite eco-logical risks and amid an emerging food crisis, has caused the deforestation of vast swaths of the amazon and other forested areas around south america. The industry also threatens the environment and the health and lives of lo-cal residents.

The Treaty falls short, critics say, of protecting campesi-no and indigenous farmers from large multinational com-panies taking their seeds and patenting them, and later on, forbidding these small-scale farmers from saving their seeds.

The Treaty created a “multilateral system” in which sig-natories establish a mechanism to increase access to plant genetic resources, through a type of food bank, for food and agriculture.

“More than 90 percent of seeds stored by the mul-tilateral system were taken from farmers’ fields: small-scale farmers who select and save their own local seeds should have unconditional access to these seeds,” said international peasant farmers’ movement via Campesina. “similarly, industry must unconditionally pay the debt it incurred by freely taking seeds from farmers. The repay-ment of a debt in reparation of a theft has never allowed the same theft to continue.”

The issue is especially tense in Mexico, where geneti-cally-modified seeds threaten the biodiversity of corn — the native staple crop of the country. —LP.

comply with environmental, social and labor standards. The first shipments of “ethical” gold came from mines in Bolivia and Colombia.

“There are mining associations in Peru that are in process of getting ethical certification,” said Olinda Orozco, of the nongovernmental organization Red Social, or “Social Network,” that is dedicated to artisanal mining issues.

Most of this gold comes from mines in the deserts of the Arequipa and Ayacucho depart-ments in southern Peru, where the environ-mental costs of gold mining are lower.

While news reports in London speculate whether the wedding on April 29 of Prince William will include a set of wedding rings made with ethical gold, many couples, includ-ing Santos and Tintaya, continue to marry with rings made from the destruction of the Amazon. q


HoNDURAsAlejandro F. Ludeña in Tegucigalpa

Still no mining lawMines advance despite a lack of legislation to regulate the industry.

The residents of Honduras’ Siria Valley have become the emblem-atic case for the country’s lack of a proper mining law. Dozens of

residents in the village say accuse one of the world’s largest gold mining corporations of spilling toxic heavy metals into local water resources, sickening villagers and livestock.

It’s been over three years since the govern-ment began investigating, and there has been no resolution yet.

The villagers and other members of Hon-duran society say that if the country had a proper mining law that regulates the industry with set safety standards, the alleged contami-nation never would have occurred.

Toxic chemicalsAfter devastating Hurricane Mitch slammed

Honduras in 1998, the country opened its doors to multinational companies, so much

so that one-third of the national territory is concessioned off to mining companies, with a total of 157 permits for drilling.

One of the largest is the San Martín gold mine. The government granted it to Entre Mares, a subsidiary of Canadian mining com-pany Goldcorp, the world’s third-largest gold producer. But fears over mining contamina-tion grew out in the people of mineral-rich municipalities of San Ignacio, Cedros and El Porvenir, in the Siria Valley in Francisco Morazán department.

According to the local environmental committee in Siria Valley, mining there has contaminated water used for domestic con-sumption and farming.

Roger Escober, the committee’s vice presi-dent, said that the open pits of Palo Alto and La Rosa — two gold mines — are spilling toxic waste water that has reached the mouths of villagers, but he says law enforcement officials “have done nothing.”

Following the June 2009 coup, “we have lost confidence in the Attorney General’s Office,” said Escober. “Even though it knows there are very sick children, it has not acted as its duty dictates.”

Villagers have not ruled out reaching out to international bodies in search for justice.

Controversial lawHonduras’ mining law was approved in

1999, following similar legislation in other Latin American countries.

Pedro Landa, an internationally-known activist for clean mining, said the law re-sponded to pressure by the Inter-American Development Bank and the Economic Com-mission for Latin America and the Caribbean for countries to instate laws that “cut taxes and reduce environmental controls to attract investment.”

In 2004, several civil society organizations drafted a reform to the law along with govern-ment agencies that set up a framework for mining activities that included environmental regulations and regulations that aimed to en-sure the health and safety of the local popula-tion. The bill was never approved.

Another bill, by Civic Alliance for Democ-racy, or ACD, was presented to Congress two years later, restricting much more the mining companies’ operations, but it wasn’t approved either.

In 2007, however, the Supreme Court found 13 articles in the 1999 mining law un-constitutional, including the tax break and the scrapping of the environmental impact study for concessions.

One-third of honduran territory has been concessioned off for mining.

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LATIN AMERICA

Water woes continueRapid urbanization coupled with aging infrastructure limits water supplies.

One of the region’s biggest challenges to the access to

clean water is the rapid expansion of the urban centers, according to the united nations Food and agriculture Organization, or FaO.

some 120 million

people living in cities across Latin america and the Ca-ribbean lack safe drinking water. The region is the most urbanized region in the world, with 78 percent of its 590 million inhabit-ants living in urban areas. By 2050, this percentage will likely increase to 88 percent.

urban populations top 15 million in cities such as Mexico City and sao Paulo in Brazil. Countries includ-ing uruguay and ecuador have included water as a basic human right in their constitutions, an attempt to counter a failed spate of water privatizations in the 1990s and early 2000s.

still, some low-income households are forced to purchase water since cen-

tral urban systems still do not reach them. Jan van Wambeke, who heads the Land and Water depart-ment at the FaO’s office for Latin america and the Caribbean, said poor households pay 50 percent more for water than higher-income ones.

“Faced with the explo-sive growth of cities, the lack of water and sewage supplies that affects a sig-nificant part of the urban population, a sustain-able, efficient and equal management of water has never been as important as it is today,” said van Wam-beke.

a shortage of water supply and infrastructure does not only mean less availability for human con-sumption. The trend also

threatens food supplies, since agriculture is the larg-est consumer of water on the planet.

“urban agriculture can help increase food security for vulnerable urban popu-lations and strengthen so-cial fabric, producing fresh and innocuous food in lim-ited spaces like patios and apartment terraces,” said alan Bojanic, who heads the FaO’s regional office for south america, marking World Water day on March 22 in santiago, Chile. “More-over, it allows generating additional income through the sale of surpluses.”

Climate change and sub-sequent extreme weather such as drought and flood-ing poses an additional threat to water supplies, he added. —LP.

Currently, the law is only partly in effect.Last year, left-leaning lawmaker Marvin

Ponce tried to present a new mining reform that would declare all minerals property of the Honduran state.

The proposal was rejected by business leaders.

“We are 100% against this bill,” said Adolfo Facussé, president of the National Industries Association, adding that Ponce’s project “wants to close off job opportunities to thousands of Hondurans who need work.”

No consensusFollowing the June 2009 coup, Honduras

remains brutally polarized, both politically and socially, limiting the chances of a law passing that fulfills all sectors’ agenda.

Some members of civil society, including Pedro Landa, of the Honduran Center for the Promotion of Community Development, say that ACD’s bill is too ambitious to receive approval.

“The perspective has been lost by seeking

the blessing of the National Popular Resis-tance Front [organization emerged against the 2009 coup and which today brings together the opposition to the current government] for any kind of social struggle,” told Landa to Latinamerica Press. He says big business is too powerful for a bill that could slow the industry to pass, and polarization among the population is too great, to begin with, that it prevents ef-fective articulation of civil society.

In the meantime, the villagers of Siria Val-ley wait for their case to be solved.

“We should send this message to the popu-lation: Our struggle does not end here [with the resolution of their case]; we want a new mining law,” said Escober.

An opinion of the Attorney General’s Of-fice favorable to the residents of Siria Valley, to prevent Goldcorp close and go quietly from Honduras, forcing it instead to compensate those affected, would probably be a first step to prevent that Honduras, centuries after being a colonial mining outpost, put again its natural wealth in foreign hands.” q


however, it does shed light on certain aspects of folk wisdom and a world view expressing its re-lationship with nature. It is with this impressive background that several generations of indig-enous and campesino communities that live on Paraguayan territory have been producing and conserving dozens of varieties of native seeds for human and animal consumption. This an-cient practice is nevertheless being threatened by multinational biotechnology corporations and elite agricultural exporters.

In Paraguay, genetically modified corn was prohibited in 1993 by Environmental Impact Assessment Law 294/93; however, in Janu-ary the Paraguayan Institute of Agricultural Technology (IPTA) — recently created by President Fernando Lugo — authorized the multinational corporation Monsanto to ex-perimentally grow transgenic corn, a move that foreshadows a point of no return for best prac-tices in agro-ecology and organic agriculture because of potential genetic contamination. This jeopardizes the development of campesino family farming and traditional indigenous production, which will be the primary par-ties affected if genetically modified seeds got out, according to the National Campaign for Paraguay Free of Genetically Modified Corn, which includes environmentalist and human rights groups.

Farmers in the villages of Caazapá, Guaira, Caaguazú and Misiones, in eastern part of the country, are being pushed out by agribusiness with increasingly frequency to the detriment of traditional farming. It is during this transition that the use of transgenic corn seeds emerged, brought from soybean-producing areas located in the departments of Itapúa, Alto Paraná, Canindeyú; in these regions genetically modi-fied corn seeds are smuggled in from Brazil and Argentina. According to estimates by the National Service for the Health and Quality of Plants and Seeds (SENAVE), there are about 100,000 hectares of genetically modified corn in the country.

Transgenic soy is legal in Paraguay, how-ever, and Paraguay was the last country in the soy-producing region —which also includes Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay— to allow its use. In October 2004, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock approved the com-mercialization of four varieties of Monsanto-developed genetically modified soybeans, but in reality almost all soybean crops were already transgenic.

The fear given this new reality comes from the fact that Paraguayans do not consume soy; corn, on the other hand, is a mainstay in the country’s diet.

In Guaraní, corn is called avati. One of the many legends about this versatile plant tells of the misfortune of a young man whose fiancée dies after she is hit

by a stray arrow. The name of this maiden with luminous white-blonde hair was Avati (áva: hair, tî: white). Anguished over losing her, he decides to never leave the graveside of his beloved. On that very land, dampened by so many tears, a mysterious plant with long leaves began to grow. With time, it bore fruit, and from that moment on, ears with golden kernels began to multiply and were used to make various types of food.

This fantastical story may not accurately explain the origin and evolution of this grain;

Farmers grow illegally genetically modified corn smuggled by large-scale farmers.

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PARAGUAYGustavo Torres in Asunción

Transgenic corn moves forwardMultinational corporation Monsanto begins experimental cultivation of genetically modified corn.


state control, constrictedNow that Monsanto has permission to ex-

periment with genetically modified corn, the IPTA’s scientific/technical team, as established by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, will be responsible for evaluating the results of experimental crops in accordance with the regulations recommended by the National Commission for the Biosecurity of Fisheries and Forestry.

The IPTA must also ensure compliance with technical and administrative require-ments during the trial, and will establish the re-sponsibilities therein. For example, Monsanto is required to comply with biosafety standards by staying at least 600 meters away from other cornfields and maintaining a buffer area of 10% around any parcel.

In this context, state agencies such as the SENAVE and the Environmental Secretariat are trying to comply with existing laws and strengthen public institutions. SENAVE has no power to authorize this crop, but it does have the mandate to enforce legislation in this case, given that the cultivation of transgenic corn is prohibited by law.

The actions of state bodies collide with the interests of large-scale producers like the Agri-cultural Coordinator of Paraguay (CAP), the Trade Union for Production (PMU) and the Rural Association of Paraguay (ARP), which are all part of the country’s primary economic power and have the backing of major media outlets. These outlets in turn develop strident campaigns to discredit the government’s de-termination to control the illegal cultivation of genetically modified corn.

The strongest actions are directed at the head of SENAVE, Miguel Lovera, whom rural entrepreneurs and the media accuse of being against progress in agricultural production, development and technology. For its part, the Senate, with an opposition-led major-ity, requested from the Executive branch the immediate suspension of intervention in the cultivation of genetically modified corn, while campesino and indigenous organizations give full support to current SENAVE authorities.

“We welcome the fact that SENAVE, for the first time in its history, is in full compli-ance with the mandates that environmental standards require of it, in carrying out the destruction of transgenic corn in the region of Alto Paraná and by announcing that there is a timetable to be enforced in zones where these crops grow. The actions of this state institution clearly demonstrate a commitment to the Paraguayan people, which contributes to in the fight for the recovery of sovereignty over

territory, culture and food,” Vía Campesina Paraguay, an umbrella organization for Para-guayan campesino groups, said in a statement late last October.

Lovera told Latinamerica Press that “the de-cision of the State, during my term, is based on compliance with current regulations. What is prohibited is not permitted and vice versa. We are simply applying these principles to achieve what is proposed by the national government and state policy so that development models can coexist, provided they are compatible. The mission given to me is to level the playing field for competition and coexistence; obviously I have to promote actions that allow just that.”

“If there is an excessive expansion of one monoculture, whatever it is, and it impacts other types of agriculture determined to be vulnerable, of course we would have to inter-vene and balance these options,” he said.

Regarding genetically modified corn, the official said that since it is illegal, SENAVE will pursue control and elimination of these crops.

“What we’re doing is destroying the il-legal cultivation of transgenic corn, just as it is done with marijuana in our country. It is that simple,” said Lovera. “It’s unfortunate that some producers have fallen into that trap, although in reality many voluntarily do so because they have lived with impunity for years. We are determined to change this, to make Paraguay a more serious country where coexistence is rooted in the standards and regulations from the rule of law. That’s what we’re working on.”

Illegal crops in traditional campesino regions

On a tour of the district of Yuty in the de-partment of Caazapá, a large amount of geneti-cally modified corn crops was found on small farms. The south central region of the country remains the domain of traditional farmers, though in light of the increase of transgenic soy monoculture and agro-business, they are beginning to feel threatened by contamination risks to the native corn crops.

“What we’re doing is destroying the illegal cultivation of transgenic corn, just as it is done with marijuana in our country. It is that simple.”— MiguEl lovEra


HAITI

Duvalier’s return stokes tensionsFormer dictator could further complicate derailed elections.

The surprise return of former haitian dictator Jean-Claude duvalier on Jan. 16, and his sub-

sequent arrest the next day for alleged abuses of power during his 1971-86 rule, stirred up more tensions as the country grapples with an electoral stalemate.

duvalier was briefly detained and, questioned for four hours and then released, though prosecutors charged him of misusing state funds and abuse of power.

But on Jan. 20, four haitians, in-

cluding a former un spokeswoman, sued the 59-year-old former dicta-tor, known as “Baby doc,” for crimes against humanity, including torture.

human rights groups, including amnesty international and human rights Watch, are demanding that du-valier face criminal charges for alleged human rights crimes.

“haiti must investigate Jean-Claude duvalier, and anyone else al-legedly responsible for such crimes, some of which amount to crimes against humanity, in a trial that is thorough, independent and fair,” said amnesty international special adviser, Javier zúñiga.

duvalier became “president for life” after the death of his father, François duvalier “Papa doc” (1957-71) in 1971. he was ousted in February 1986 by a military coup led by Maj. henry nam-phy, who ruled from 1986 to 1988.

Thousands of people were execut-ed, disappeared or fled in exile during duvalier’s regime at the hands of the militia national security volunteers, known as “Tonton Macoutes.”

“duvalier’s return to haiti should be for one purpose only: to face jus-tice,” said José Miguel vivanco, ameri-cas director of human rights Watch. “under the presidency of duvalier and his Tonton Macoutes, thousands were killed and tortured, and hundreds of thousands of haitians fled into exile. his time to be held accountable is long overdue.”

duvalier’s arrival eclipsed electoral turmoil. a second-round runoff, sched-uled for Jan. 16, has been indefinitely delayed over continued disputes and allegations of irregularities stemming from the nov. 28 vote.

The Provisional electoral Council said former first lady Mirlande Mani-gat and ruling party candidate Jude Celestin made it to the runoff. But al-legations of fraud required a recount, which has still not been completed, that may favor third-placed candidate Michel Martelly, a popular singer.

Both the Organization of american states and the united nations are pressuring haiti to complete the re-count. —LP.

In this area of the country, traditional corn varietals consumed include Avatitape, Avati Lo-cro, Guaikuru Avati, Avati Mbya, Morotí Avati, Pichinga Avati, Avati Tupi, Tupi Morotí Avati, and Tupi Pytã Avati, among others. A local pro-ducer in Capiitindy, in the district of Yuty, who asked to remain anonymous, told Latinamerica Press that genetically modified seeds are increas-ingly grown in the community.

“The small farmer is beginning to plant genetically modified seeds, often tempted by the supposed benefits that these have —for example, not having to hoe (remove the weeds), as they are resistant to weeds. The transgenic corn grown here is smuggled in from Argentina, but it’s common for private seed suppliers to already carry them,” said the campesino farmer.

“In regard to agriculture, it has not been found that genetically modified crops have higher yields; on the contrary, it generates a dependency by farmers on multinational corporations,” said Silvia Gonzalez of the Agricultural Law and Land Reform Studies

and Research Center (CEIDRA) during the presentation of the Corn Bill to the National Parliament in late October 2010.

It merits reiterating that Paraguay has signed the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agricul-ture, which entered into force in 2004. This treaty aims to safeguard the genetic diversity of cultivated plants, and therefore Paraguay is obliged to take necessary measures in order to protect traditional agricultural knowledge, as well as the fair distribution of benefits and decision-making.

Campesino organizations, indigenous peo-ple, and civil society are aware of the negative impact that may result from the introduction of genetically modified organisms.

“Genetically modified organisms and pesticides on the table mean more exclusion, more misery, more needless deaths, more dependence on multinational corporations and more humiliation for Paraguay,” notes the National Coordinator of Rural and Indigenous Women Workers (CONAMURI). q


Discontent is also pronounced in right-wing sectors. Fernando Anduray of the Demo-cratic Civic Union, a civil society group which backed the coup, accused Lobo of spending too much time trying to shore up international support than addressing problems at home.

What many groups agree on is that Hondu-ras’ existing problems have only grown worse under Lobo. Unemployment and underem-ployed affects 44 percent of the economically active population, according to January data from the Labor Secretariat.

Violent crime has also grown exponentially. There is an average of 14 murders a day in the country, making Honduras one of the most violent countries on earth. In the first half of 2010 nine journalists were killed.

For some analysts, violent common crime and organized crime add to political persecution.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said in its 2010 World Report that human rights violations include the lack of an impartial judi-ciary and threats against human rights activists, journalists and transgendered citizens.

Those responsible for human rights viola-tions during de-facto government after the coup have not been held responsible for their actions, the organization said.

Neither truth nor justiceEven after the Truth and Reconciliation

Commission was installed in May 2010, to investigate the facts related to the 2009 coup, few Hondurans believe its conclusions will bring about justice. Its tasks are not clearly defined, and it lacks the power to investigate the incidents.

“This Commission was born dead,” said Alejandra Nuño, director for Mesoamerica for the Center for Justice and International Law.

The victims were left out of the decree that created the commission, and it does not force government officials who participated in the coup to answer to it, she added.

In addition to Lobo’s failure to address deep inequalities and poverty in the country, the political divide is deepening. The National Popular Resistance Front, has also lost cred-ibility since it has been unable to head an alternative discourse.

Priest Ismael Moreno, director of the Jesu-its’ Reflection, Research and Communication Team said in a recent article in the Honduran magazine Envío, that the Front has not been able to mobilize and bring a real opposition together.

“To get out of this shifting political and social terrain we should think about a new social pact,” he said. q

HoNDURAsAlejandro F. Ludeña in Tegucigalpa

A tarnished first year for LoboPresident’s administration makes little headway in improving human rights, economic growth and public safety.

Honduras has become even more polarized in the more than one year since President Porfirio Lobo took office. Lobo’s critics

accuse the leader, whose rise to power stems from questioned elections in late 2009 follow-ing the coup that ousted ex-President Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009), of failing to bridge the dramatic political divide in the country and adequately investigate and end human rights violations.

Lobo, who took office Jan. 27, 2010, defends his government as stimulating the economy. According to the Economic Com-mission for Latin America and the Carib-bean, Honduras’ economy grew 2.5 percent in 2010, after it contracted close to -2 percent in 2009.

But many sectors are unimpressed and criticize Lobo for the continued political crisis the country has been mired in since the June 28, 2009 coup.

Deep polarizationOne of Lobo’s bragging points has been

that he created a unity government. But rep-resentation of some opposition sectors does not mean that, his critics say.

In fact, the National Popular Resistance Front, which is led by Zelaya, questions the elections that brought Lobo to power, since they were held in the wake of the coup, amid a snowballing number of allegations of corrup-tion and unconstitutional practices by the de facto government.

Gloria Oquelí, a leader of a pro-Zelaya fac-tion of the Liberal Party, one of the country’s oldest parties, said those behind the coup are enjoying impunity and as a result are partici-pating in public life, such as Romeo Vázquez, an army general who was part of the coup and is now director of the state-run Honduran Telecommunications Company.

“[The Truth and Reconciliation] Commission was born dead.” — alEJandra nuño


Colombian groups seek to bridge communication gaps and end conflict.

Going down in histor y as the president who brought peace to Colombia has been the dream of several of the country’s recent

leaders, and President Juan Manuel Santos is no exception.

On Aug. 7, he took office claiming that the “keys to negotiation are not lost.”

“Santos wants Colombia to figure among the emerging international powers,” said law-maker Iván Cepeda, son of murdered Patriotic Union party leader Manuel Cepeda, whose death in 1994 the Inter-American Court on Human Rights blamed the Colombian state. “For that to occur, Colombia can no longer be at war.”

Cepeda participated in the international forum “Making Peace in Colombia” in Buenos Aires in late February that brought together dozens of international and Colombian groups trying to help end the country’s five-decade armed conflict.

Even though Santos has flirted with the idea of peace, it has also been clear that it “won’t be at any price” and he has ruled out negotiations with any group that refuses to disarm, and disarmament before talks is the most complex element.

But Cepeda argues that mistrust has hin-dered the process.

“There has not been a peace process [in Colombia] where spokespeople of one of the parties have not been eliminated, and the most exemplary case is the genocide against the UP,” said Cepeda in reference to the Pa-triotic Union, or UP, the political force made up of demobilized members of the insurgent Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which in 1984 intended to return to civilian life and were systematically killed by hired gunmen and paramilitaries.

“Colombia can’t have a dual agenda where peace is sought but the conflict is deepened,” said Cepeda, who is also a member of the Colombian Collective for Peace led by Pie-dad Córdoba, a former senator of the Liberal Party.

Guerrilla proposalsLast September, the state prosecutor’s of-

fice barred Córdoba from holding any public office for 18 years for “collaborating with the FARC” — based on alleged information found on the computer of rebel leader Raúl Reyes, killed in the Colombian military operation into Ecuador in March 2008 —, a decision the former lawmaker asked the Administra-tive Court, a body aimed at protecting citizens from government actions, to overturn.

The well-known mediator for the release of more than 15 hostages held by the FARC attended the Buenos Aires forum, where she screened two videos featuring interviews with FARC and National Liberation Army, or ELN, members manifesting their willingness to dialogue.

One of them, current FARC commander Alfonso Cano, said that the negotiations toward peace have five points including the neoliberal economic model, land reform, in-ternational humanitarian law, prisoners of war and the creation of what he called a “system of democratic cohabitation,” which he described as “a system in which everyone can participate and end this historic practice of the Colombian oligarchy of using crime as a political weapon to silence adversaries.”

In another video, the ELN’s spokesman, who goes by the alias Gabino, listed eight points, which included the commitment with the respect to the international humanitarian law which includes not involving civilians in the conflict, the abandonment of tactics such as kidnapping, hostage-taking and the recruit-ment of minors and the recognition of the conflict as the first step to solve it. The govern-ment does not consider it “armed conflict” but rather in its words, a “terrorist threat.”

“The continued disinformation and presentation of the [conflict] as a terrorist

CoLoMBIA

Jenny Manrique in Buenos Aires

Searching for the key to peace?

“There has not been a peace process [in Colombia] where spokespeople of one of the parties have not been eliminated.” — iván CEpEda


BoLIVIA

High-ranking police accused of drug-traffickingFormer anti-drug chief arrested in Panama, accused of trafficking cocaine to the United States.

in a major blow to the government of President evo Morales, who has frequently defended his country’s

anti-drug program, the former head of the country’s special Forces against drug Trafficking police unit, rené sanabria, was arrested in a sting op-eration by the us drug enforcement agency and Panamanian police.

sanabria, who head the police unit in 2007-2009, was working for the country’s intelligence agency at the time of his arrest. he was detained along with Juan Foronda acero, a Bolivian citizen with a record of drug trafficking. Both men were extradited to the united states a day after their arrest.

according to media reports, the dea, which Morales kicked out of Bolivia in 2008, had been tracking sanabria since november after 144 kilograms of cocaine was seized in Mi-ami. us prosecutors say that sanabria and Foronda made deals with under-cover dea agents posing as Colom-bian traffickers to ship drugs in a zinc container from arica, Chile. he alleg-edly made a deal with the agents last year to receive a cut once the drugs reached us shores.

sanabria denies the charges and plead not guilty in a Miami court on March 2. he faces life in prison if con-victed, and was denied bail since he was considered a flight risk.

Bolivian interior Minister sacha

Llorenti said in a press conference that local law enforcement officials began an investigation that ended with the arrest of Maj. edwin raúl Oña Mon-cada and Capt. Franz Fernando siles ríos, members of the anti-drug agen-cy, and Col. Milton sánchez Pantoja, former anti-drug chief of Cochabam-ba and southern La Paz’s police chief, as sanabria’s alleged accomplices.

Llorenti said that the three men are involved in a trafficking ring.

“Our objective is for no link in this ring of traffickers to go free and that it is completely disbanded. For that to happen, we will continue to work in coordination and cooperation under international agreements,” he said.

Opposition legislators said they will try to question Llorenti in Con-gress over the case, accusing the government of having ties with drug-trafficking.

“it’s a clear signal that drug-trafficking is embedded in the gov-ernment because [sanabria] isn’t just anyone,” said lawmaker andrés Ortega. —LP.

outbreak is closing the door to peace,” said Gabino.

“This is the first time that guerrillas are addressing to a civil society forum like the Colombians for Peace,” said an optimistic Córdoba, who works tirelessly to convince the public that a military response to the conflict is not the answer to advance peace talks. “If the anti-democratic media continues to be the soap box for enemies of peace in Colom-bia and continues to pursue and demonize those of us whom they consider as terrorists because we speak of peace, our path will be much longer.”

The former senator said she is worried and ashamed for being unable to stop “humani-tarian degradation” such as common graves, crematoriums, 5 million internal refugees and “7,000 political prisoners in sub-human conditions, some terminally ill because as ex-combatants, their human rights are violated in prisons.”

The government has called these figures “inflated” and says the number of internally dis-placed victims is 3.7 million, and has refused to call “terrorists” political prisoners.

National consensus“Even if there is an inarguable interna-

tional consensus and enthusiasm for the new government, I think that the fundamental line is the same: silence the humanitarian gestures [unconditional releases by the guer-rilla groups] and order the deaths of all the [FARC] commanders,” said Carlos Lozano, a spokesman for Colombia’s Communist Party and director of the newspaper Voz. He pointed to the operation ordered in mid-February by Defense Minister Rodrigo Rivera, to close in on Cano, at a moment when the FARC was in the process of unconditionally freeing two hostages, police Maj. Guillermo Solórzano and army Cpl. Salín Sanmiguel.

He said the “supposed 80 percent” of Colombians that supported former President Álvaro Uribe, who governed from 2002 and 2010 and was best known for his hard-line and militarized response to fight leftist rebels, “need to be given a new tonic in favor of peace.”

While Uribe’s flagship Democratic Security Policy wiped out much of FARC’s leadership, it promoted the demobilization of paramilitaries who are now showing up in criminal bands.


inbrief·The government of Chile fined Canadian mining company Bar-rick gold us$23,000 for violating environmental regulations that aim to protect the country’s glaciers, during its development of the con-troversial Pascua Lama gold and silver mine that sits on Chile’s shared border with argentina. The Latin america environmental Conflict Ob-servatory called the fine “laughable,” considering its severe damage to the glaciers.

·More than two months after the vote, the electoral body in Haiti de-termined the two candidates that will advance to a second-round presi-dential run-off slated for March 20. Former first lady Mirlande Manigat, of the nationalist and Progressive democrats group, will face musician

Michel Martelly, of the Campesino response party. The nov. 28 election ended in political turmoil after al-legations of fraud emerged. The Pro-visional electoral Council eliminated ruling party candidate Jude Celestin from the vote.

·Between april and september of last year, 11,333 migrants were ab-ducted in Mexico, according to the country’s national human rights Commission. Most of the migrants were from Central america. The re-port found that the victims were sub-jected to kidnapping, extortion and physical and sexual abuse.

·Pharmaceutical and chemical companies that use the traditional medicine and therapies of Peru’s amazon indigenous communities will have to pay the government starting June a 10 percent-royalty, according to the regulations of

a law that protects indigenous knowledge relating to biological resources, the Culture Ministry said Feb. 9. The money will be put in a development fund for indigenous communities that will be adminis-tered by government and commu-nity representatives.

·amnesty international is urging lawmakers in Trinidad and Tobago to vote against a bill that would re-sume the executions in the country. The bill, presented by Prime Minis-ter Kamla Persad Bissessar, whose government says capital punish-ment is necessary to lower the murder rate, would give courts the ability to skirt previous judicial rul-ings that halted executions in 1999. according to government figures, there were 3,335 murders between 2002 and 2010 in the country. Cur-rently, 42 people are on death row there.

On Feb. 24, upon presenting the agen-cy’s 2010 annual report, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said massacres by these new criminal groups, in which the former para-militaries are taking part, in Colombia last year increased by 40 percent with 179 murders. The victims were mainly social leaders, human rights activists, indigenous and Afro-Colombians.

According to the country’s Ombudsman’s Office, the number of threats against displaced citizens, labor leaders and teachers have also increased. Even though the government claims that unorganized criminal gangs are to blame, studies by the pro-peace organization Cor-poración Nuevo Arco Iris show that criminal bands such as the Comando al Sur are a highly organized union of demobilized paramilitary members.

“What we had were drug-trafficking bands posing as paramilitaries. They extradited their leaders, but they didn’t bring down the struc-ture and the process was done behind victims’ backs,” said Sen. Gloria Ramírez, of the opposi-tion Alternative Democratic Pole.

According to documents released by transparency activist site WikiLeaks and con-fessions by former paramilitary members, the supposed progress in paramilitary demobiliza-tion was staged by the Uribe government so the results of their operations would seemingly improve.

Those who were handing over weapons were not real members of organized armed groups, but gang members, unemployed and poor, recruited at the last minute with prom-ises of receiving the benefits awarded to those who demobilized, some have alleged.

“The pressure on the military has not been insignificant,” said a former navy officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“We [the military] are not the worst en-emies of peace because we are who battle and die. There is a mob-like economic power that has clearly been benefitting from the war,” he said, adding that he hopes that the military is not just a spectator to the talks, but that it is included in the negotiations.

“If the keys to peace are not lost, hopefully the Santos’ government will find them and open the door to dialogue.” q


“I’m a nationalist because we are going to recover our natural resources.”— ollanta HuMala

PERUCecilia Remón in Lima

No clear scenario for electionFive presidential candidates in technical tie.

Once again, Peruvians are set to go to the polls in a presidential elec-tion marked by indecision and uncertainty.

According to recent polls, five candidates have a near-equal shot at making it to the second-round runoff, following the April 10 vote.

Twenty million Peruvians are expected to chose among four pro-free market candidates, including former President Alejandro Toledo, who governed from 2001-2006, and a national-ist lead who narrowly lost Peru’s 2006 election to Alan García.

Toledo’s former finance minister, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, has been the biggest surprise, coming in fourth place in voter intent, accord-ing to a March 28 survey by the Peruvian Mar-keting and Public Opinion Studies Company, or CPI. He trailed nationalist Ollanta Humala, who had just over 23 percent, and Congress-woman Keiko Fujimori with nearly 21 percent. Her father, former President Alberto Fujimori, is currently in jail for human rights violations during his authoritarian 1990-2000 regime.Lima’s former mayor, Luis Castañeda, trailed with 17 percent.

More of the sameFour candidates with the exception of

Humala have advocated a continuation of free market policies that Alberto Fujimori started in Peru in the 1990s.

The most notable example is Kuczynski, who has shot up in the polls in recent weeks, largely in the capital Lima, where one-third of the electorate is based. He is largely credited with Peru’s economic growth during Toledo’s government, although he has been criticized for becoming a dual citizen of the United States and Peru in the 1980s to work as a banking executive in the US. Critics also say that he represents the interests of transnational companies.

Humala, candidate of the Gana Peru alli-ance, composed of his Nationalist Party and several left-leaning parties, has been accused of maintaining ties to Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez. An alleged tie to Chavez cost Humala the 2006 election, some analysts have said.

“I’m a nationalist because we are going to recover our natural resources,” said Humala. He has advocated higher mining royalties and taxes, which he says could be a major source of income for the country, a top producer of gold, silver, copper, zinc and other metals. “We will invest this money in high-quality education.”

“Peru lives off the sale of these natural resources,” he said. “Peru has resigned owner-ship of natural resources. It has resigned sover-eignty. The economic model is not sustainable because it depends on international markets. This is the moment to diversify the economy by taking advantage of growth.”

Widespread discontentFor some analysts, Humala’s rise in the

polls is another testament to successive gov-ernments’ inability to ensure that economic growth reaches all sectors as poverty still affects around one-third of Peru’s nearly 29 million people.

Economist Humberto Campodónico said that while the gross domestic product grew 32 percent during Toledo’s 2001-2006 gov-ernment, it did not reach most of society and these sectors “manifested their discontent by voting for Humala, who was close to winning the presidential election.”

Over the past decade, the economy ex-panded 73 percent, but the minimum wage only rose 46 percent — or US$150 to $215, Campodónico noted.

“Perhaps what most bothers the population is listening each day about how any fulfillment of their needs is immediately denounced as ‘an attack on the economic model’ and as a result, they’re impossible to be fulfilled,” he added.

Humala’s rise in the polls has been blamed for a weakening of Peru’s currency, the sol, and a drop in the local stock market, an ac-cusation which some have dubbed “financial terrorism.”



Declining purchasing power undermines remittancesStronger local currencies and inflation hit families back home.

remittances into Latin america and the Caribbean may have increased last year by us$100

million compared with 2009 to $58.9 billion, but stronger local currencies and inflation reduced recipients’ pur-chasing power, according to an inter-american development Bank report published March 14.

“expressed in local currencies and adjusted for inflation, remittances to Latin america and the Caribbean were 8.7 percent lower in 2010 than in 2009,” said the report, entitled, “re-mittances to Latin america and the Caribbean in 2010: stabilization after the Crisis.” Money transfers to this re-gion were worth 4.4 percent less than

in 2009 due to currency fluctuations, particularly the weak us dollar.

“remittances remain a vital source of income for millions of families in the region who depend on these flows to cover the cost of basic needs such as clothing, medicine or food,” it said.

“For many of these recipient families, 2010 was a year of increased econom-ic vulnerability, since with stronger local currency values and rising infla-tion, the remittances they received did not reach the same value of the previ-ous year.”

remittances to the region had fallen in 2009 amid the international financial crisis, which left thousands of migrant workers and immigrants living in the united states and europe unemployed.

The report said remittances in 2009 had fallen 15 percent compared with 2008, when they reached a re-cord $69.2 billion.

While remittances started to stabi-lize in 2010, there were marked differ-ences between subregions, the report said. remittances to Central america increased just over 3 percent as em-ployment grew in the united states, where the vast majority of Central american emigrants move. in andean countries, however, they fell just over 4 percent since employment has largely not recovered in europe, where most migrants from that area live.

remittances to haiti increased by 20 percent, mostly because of the Jan-uary 2010 earthquake. Brazil saw a 15 percent-drop in its remittances, as its strong economy lured some migrants back home, the bank said. —LP.

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN Remittances (in Us$ millions)

Country 2009 2010Mexico 21,132 21,271guatemala 3,912 4,127Brazil 4,746 4,044Colombia 4,134 4,023el salvador 3,465 3,540dominican rep. 2,790 2,908Peru 2,665 2,534honduras 2,483 2,529ecuador 2,495 2,324haiti 1,641 1,971Jamaica 1,798 1,911nicaragua 915 966Bolivia 1,023 964argentina 853 886Chile 756 820venezuela 733 756Paraguay 691 723Costa rica 535 509guyana 356 374Panama 29 1297Trinidad & Tobago 116 123uruguay 116 120suriname 103 109Belize 100 100source: iadB

Campodónico points to a recent report by Barclays Bank that recommended their clients buy dollars ahead of a potential win by Humala in the first round. “Do note that this is not the first time Barclays is practicing this ‘financial terrorism,’” he said.

Last September, when now-Mayor Su-sana Villarán was gaining in the polls on her center-left Social Force movement ahead of the municipal elections, Barclays said Peru was financially rattled.

The result is a fear campaign, he said, which targets, above all, the poorest Peruvians, warning that an Humala win would mean high inflation and political instability, two concepts familiar to citizens who lived through hyper-inflation, economic crisis and near-political

collapse in the 1980s and parts of the 1990s.Meanwhile, there are no guarantees for any

candidate. “There is no clear scenario a few days away from the elections,” said Fernando Tuesta, director of the Public Opinion Insti-tute at the Pontificate Catholic University of Peru. “While the final result is in the hands of the candidates and their campaigns and the electorate’s changing mood,” no candidate is expected to gain a majority in Congress.

“The one who wins in the second round will only have a fictitious majority,” he said. “The result will be a president with minor-ity support, incapable of making necessary changes ... for a skeptical electorate ready to disapprove of the results of their vote.” q


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rapidly rising water levels may force Kuna from islands to coast.

PANAMALeslie Josephs on Carti Mulatupu

Kuna Yala’s climate change refugeesIndigenous community may have to flee its island home as water levels rise.

Panama’s Kuna do not need a televi-sion to hear about global warming. It has already come to their front door and to adapt, they’ll have to pack up

and move. The Kuna’s floating paradise — a belt of palm tree-peppered white-sand islands that dot the pristine aquamarine sea north of Panama — is under threat. Rising water levels may force the thousands of Kuna who inhabit the San Blas archipelago to flee to the coast, a move that will change their traditional way of life and cultural backbone.

“Everything is flooded, up to your ankle,” said Helen Perez, the director of the school on Carti Mulatupu, a Kuna island of some 500 people. He refers to the strong winds that hit the island in January, causing water to rush to the community, briefly flooding the labyrinth of sandy lanes that divide the wooden and palm huts where the Kuna live.

According to the Smithsonian Institute for Tropical Research, the sea level is rising at 2.5 millimeters a year, a rate that could put some of the islands, which barely peek out above the crystalline Caribbean Sea, underwater in less than a century. Some estimates of water level increases are much higher, and for the Kuna, exacerbated by seasonal strong winds and tide surges.

Time running outAt the UN Climate talks in Cancun late

last year, the Alliance of Small Island States, composed of countries from the Caribbean, Africa and Oceania, highlighted their plight, saying that for the Caribbean, a 1-meter rise in water levels could cost damages above $6 billion a year.

“For that reason, facing reality, we’re informing people about the displacement of the island to dry land,” Perez added. The San Blas island chain is part of the Kuna Yala, a “comarca,” or in Panama, semi-autono-mous indigenous land. Ninety percent of the

35,000 Kuna live on around 45 of the more than 350 islands that stretch all the way near the Colombian border.

Last year, leaders of some of the Kuna com-munities decided it was time to start looking at alternatives and settled upon moving to the verdant hills of the coast.

The Kuna are possibly one of the most fiercely autonomous, independent and in-sular indigenous people in Latin America. They form their own policies and have some authority over who can enter their land. Women wear traditional dress, including the colorful molas, woven overlain panels of flo-rescent-colored fabric that they sew into their blouses, bright red, patterned headscarves and small gold hoops that sits tightly around the septum, and rows upon rows of beads encircle their legs from ankle to shin.

Spanish is rarely heard on the islands, where the native Kuna tongue is spoken.

But the group also has strong mistrust of the Panamanian government, rooted in a long struggle for autonomy. The Kuna Congress is seeking financing from outside governments, including Britain, to help the community members relocate.

Carti Sugdub, with a population of 5,000, is the most populated of the islands. Its residents may be the first to leave, along with smaller islands like Carti Mulatupu.

The communities live simply, eking out a life on small-scale agriculture, fishing and


“It’s not easy to tell someone who has lived his whole life, who has been born, grown up, on an island, lived near the sea, ‘Move. It’s time.’”— ariEl gonzálEz

tourism. Few have electricity, let alone other modern conveniences like televisions and computers.

Indigenous communities have long-com-plained that they contribute little to climate change, yet suffer the largest impacts: deadly droughts, floods and a rapid depletion of water resources.

Who’s at fault?“That’s why last year we raised the criticism

last year that if we did not alter the environ-ment, why do we have to be the ones to pay?” asked Ariel Gonzalez, secretary of the Kuna Congress.

His point is not entirely true.The Kuna who live on the archipelago

have a space issue: they no longer fit on the islands.

And order to increase the space, they use land fill, most notably coral, which acts as a natural barrier to protect the islands from sea surges.

“Every student’s father has to do this,” Osvaldo Taylor, a 34-year-old father of two students, as he tossed buckets of recently harvested coral into a small lot in front of the

school, speaking through a translator.The organisms that comprise coral grow

at a snail’s pace — just a few millimeters a year, meaning the Kuna are speeding up the process.

“I will say it is not correct to tie 100 percent to [global warming,” said Hector Guzman, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institute for Tropi-cal Research, who has researched the San Blas ecosystem extensively. “They are responsible for the damage of the reefs and there is where they are missing the point.”

So now the Kuna are faced with a quicken-ing countdown before they are forced off the is-lands they have lived on for about a century.

And some do not want to go.“I can’t obligate my people to move,” said

Gonzalez. “It’s not easy to tell someone who has lived his whole life, who has been born, grown up, on an island, lived near the sea, ‘Move. It’s time.’”

Village elders, particularly, have reserva-tions about starting over.

“With time, everything will flood,” said Orlando Paniza, a 68-year-old father of four. “Then where will I go?” q

PARAGUAYGustavo Torres in Asunción

Lugo’s government limps through the middle of its term

President loses support from progressive political and social movements.

swing in repression of grassroots movements and the criminalization of social protest.

Lugo’s election as President of the Republic carried enormous significance for the coun-try’s politics, economy, public administration and culture, given that it was the last in the region to become a democracy after the 1989 ouster of former dictator Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89). It is with this in mind that grass-roots groups express their criticism and urge the government to reorient its administration towards deepening the reform process, starting with defending and restoring certain elements of state authority to improve democracy and human rights as they are threatened by the corporate mercantilist system, where private power imposes strict limits on government actions and exercises considerable control over the economy, political systems and social and cultural life.

Little more than halfway through his five-year term, President Fernan-do Lugo Méndez’s administration —which was met with high expec-

tations when he took office in August 2008, breaking 61 years of rule by the Colorado Party— is now strongly criticized by the same sectors that traditionally supported him: social movements and leftist groups.

The failure to deliver on key campaign promises and his administration’s tendency towards more conservative politics are the most heatedly debated topics, especially when it comes to the non-implementation of land reform and domestic security programs, the latter even considered a setback given the up-


By the end of 2010, the situation was less tense for President Lugo in personal terms as he recovered from treatment for lymphatic cancer, and in some areas of government ad-ministration as he reached agreements with the opposition. He also managed to quell the debate about a potential impeachment that emerged halfway through last year. A macro-economic growth bonanza contributed to this end — according to the Central Bank of Para-guay, the Paraguayan economy grew 14.5% in 2010— as did a parliamentary agreement to cover vacancies in the Comptroller General of the Republic, the Supreme Court, the Superior Court of Electoral Justice and some embassies deemed critical for the government as Argen-tina and Uruguay.

MisstepsHowever, Lugo is losing the support of

organizations and leftist movements like the Broad Front and the Paraguayan Communist Party. The latter, in a recent statement, said that “to defend the reform process is to denounce the failure of the reform program.”

The criticisms focus — among other things — on the steps Lugo has taken towards a policy of privatization related to road concessions and the dredging of river basins requested by river barons, soy farmers and importers, whose plans will destroy much of the biodiversity of the two major rivers, the Paraguay and Paraná, according to estimates from environmental groups. This would damage the wetland sys-tem located in the central plain of the La Plata Basin, which is the largest stretch of freshwater wetlands on the planet.

Airline terminal concessions legislation, which the Executive Branch sent to Congress for review and was approved on 16 December in first instance in the Senate, has also been rejected by the so-called Guasu Front, which groups leftist organizations that support Lugo: Tekojoja, Movement for Socialism, Popular Patriotic Movement, and Socialist Popular Convergence, among others.

This law would provide for 30- to 50-year private concessions of the following airports: Silvio Pettirossi in Asunción, Guaraní in Ciudad del Este and Mariscal Estigarribia in Paraguayan Chaco. According to the adminis-tration, the project seeks to put in the private sector’s hands the construction, remodeling and maintenance of these air terminals on the grounds that it would bring into the country an investment of US$100 million and create about 15,000 jobs. Leftist parties believe that this amount is negligible considering that two of these airports are very profitable.

Guasu Front considers this legislation a “surrender of state assets to foreign capital” and also argues that since the airports in question are currently profitable for the State, there is no need for concessions.

Likewise, the neglect of the indigenous people given the government’s lack of a more inclusive plan — even though this had been one of Lugo’s campaign platforms — and the non-recovery of ill-gained lands and property incurred during Stroessner’s long dictatorship, are two claims against the administration to rectify in the remaining years of its term.

Beyond this criticism from one sector of its allies, socialist leaders allege that the defense of the reform process that began with the election of Lugo “will be carried out with Lugo, without Lugo and even against Lugo.”

The progressive optionFollowing municipal elections held on

7 November, the Colorado and Authentic Radical Liberal parties continued dominating almost 98% of local governments, just as before the election.

With these results, President Lugo will re-main hostage to traditional parties, although the Paraguayan society is making a gradual turn away from ingrained conservatism towards the search for new political actors committed to solving serious national and local problems that the right has not resolved. Thus, the Guasu Front has emerged in a third sector as an alternative for the 2013 general elections.

“We are one of the organizations on the left along with the Paraguayan Communist Party and Socialist Popular Convergence, as well as various social organizations, perhaps most critical of the lack of depth and little dedica-tion to reform under Lugo’s government, which is being held captive by conservative traditional sectors. Tekojoja is committed to the reform process and not the person; over time, changes have not come, and there is widespread disappointment in the countryside and the city. Today as a party we are assuming a position to move the process forward no matter what. We support the hopes for reform but not the status quo,” Marcos Ibáñez, head of communications for the Tekojoja Party, told Latinamerica Press.

“We are part of the grassroots struggle in Paraguay, from deep inside Paraguay, sup-porting land reform, structural changes in the distribution of wealth, fighting poverty — all points that are now just on paper, in speeches. The reality is that there is a shift to the right at all levels,” Ibáñez said. q

“We support the hopes for reform but not the status quo”.— MarCos ibáñEz


rigoberta Menchú called Colom’s alleged insults filtered by Wikileaks disrespectful.

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President allegedly accused the Nobel Peace Laureate of manipulating indigenous communities in a protest against a cement plant.

and in May 2007 they held a plebiscite in which 8,948 people rejected the project and only four approved

Opposition to the project stems from the fact that the cement’s production requires large amounts of water and communities fear that local aquifers will dry up, depriving them of this vital resource. The plant also generates dust that has led to respiratory illnesses among the local population.

Boiling pointTensions between the government and the

people of San Juan Sacatepéquez peaked in June 2008 — a month before Derham’s fare-well reception — when the Police arrested 47 community leaders. A few days later, Francisco Tepeu Pirir, accused by the community of ac-cepting bribes from Cementos Progreso in ex-change for supporting the project, was lynched by a furious mob in the village of San Antonio Las Trojes. The government responded by sending troops to San Juan Sacatepéquez.

The army was later accused of serious human rights violations against the indig-enous population, including sexual assaults on women and arbitrary searches without a court warrant.

Menchú and other Mayan intellectuals publicly spoke out against the Colom admin-istration during the conflict. His reported com-ments to Derham came shortly afterward.

During the conversation with Derham, Colom allegedly accused Menchú of inciting the people of San Juan Sacatepéquez to oppose the construction of the plant and held her “par-tially responsible” for the violence unleashed in the community.

He is also quoted as saying that Menchú had been rejected by the Mayan people when she ran for president in 2007, when she only received 5,026 votes in her native department of Quiché.

The government’s “Mayan face” is unmasked

After the cable document was published early this year by the Guatemalan press, Menchú responded: “It is embarrassing for a

GUATEMALALouisa Reynolds in Guatemala City

Wikileaks: Colom referred to Menchú as “a fabrication”

“A fabrication” of French anthropologist Elizabeth Burgos is how President Álvaro Colom allegedly described Nobel Peace

Laureate Rigoberta Menchú, according to a classified document published by transparency activists Wikileaks on Jan. 16.

The document, signed by former US am-bassador James Derham, claims that Colom made this statement during his farewell recep-tion in July 2008.

Burgos transcribed a series of interviews with Menchú and transformed them into the autobiographical narrative I, Rigoberta Menchú, published in 1983.

Colom is quoted accusing Menchú of manipulating Mayan Kiché communities who oppose the construction of a cement plant in San Juan Sacatepéquez.

Over the past four years, indigenous com-munities have voiced their discontent against Guatemalan corporation Cementos Progreso,


MEXICo

Bishop Ruiz diesLong-time champion of indigenous rights leaves void in some of country’s most marginalized communities.

Bishop samuel ruiz, who spent four decades fighting for the rights of the Maya communi-

ties of Mexico’s impoverished Chiapas state, died Jan. 25 at the age of 86 after a lengthy illness.

ruiz, who embraced the Liberation Theology movement, which advo-cates justice, was a mediator between

zapatista rebels and the government after the 1994 uprising that left 145 people dead.

But ruiz was no friend of the government or the large landown-ers in the area, who accused him of collaborating with the zapatistas, an accusation he denied, though he did sympathize with their cause. he had received death threats and repeated defamation attempts.

Bishop of the san Cristobal de las Casas diocese, ruiz was dubbed “the Bishop of the Poor,” for his work championing the rights of the local population in one of Mexico’s poorest states. as a member of the Liberation Theology movement, as in other Latin american communities, he helped in-corporate the work of lay workers into the Church, who worked in the most rural areas of the state.

“This is a great loss for Chiapas,”

said Chiapas state gov. Juan sabines guerrero. “‘The bishop of the poor, Tatic, as we affectionately knew him, is a great loss, but without a doubt, he planted a seed of hope, of peace, of justice and will carry on for many years, since in some way, he educated the people and the government about the defense of human rights.”

in a statement, the general Com-mand of the zapatista army of na-tional Liberation said:

“don samuel ruiz garcia not only practiced Catholicism for and with the dispossessed, his team also trained a generation of Christians committed to the practice of Catholicism. he was not only concerned about the condi-tion of poverty and marginalization of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, he also worked, along with a heroic pas-toral team, to improve their inhumane conditions of living and dying.” —LP.

president to be involved in a situation of this sort. If he really made those statements, I think it’s disrespectful and rude.”

The following day, during a ceremony to swear in the new members of the Presidential Commission Against Discrimination and Rac-ism, Colom said he had apologized to Menchú for the incident during a telephone conversa-tion earlier that day.

“I have always had an excellent relationship with Mrs. Rigoberta Menchú and I apologize if the former US ambassador misinterpreted my words. I have paid my respects and the conver-sation was as amicable as always”, he said.

Nevertheless, the incident was embar-rassing for Colom. He took office in 2008 promising to build “a government with a Mayan face” and held a traditional cer-emony in which he was supposedly named a shaman by indigenous spiritual leaders. In reality, though, his UNE government has done little more than pay lip service to indig-enous rights and the demands made by Mayan communities have barely been heeded.

A 2007 bill put forward by peasant or-ganizations — the Integral Rural Develop-ment bill — which seeks to stimulate rural employment, protect small land-holders and native seeds and create a Ministry of Rural Development — has remained stalled in Con-

gress because of private sector opposition. Failure to approve the bill has been regarded by peasant organizations as a betrayal and sparked numerous protests during the Colom administration.

With regards to plebiscites, the Colom administration recently put forward a “regla-mento” that would allow plebiscites to be held, as stipulated under International Labor Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal People.

Guatemala ratified Convention 169 in 1996 but it has not been enforced because for any treaty or bill to come into effect under Guatemalan law, a legal instrument known as a “reglamento” that weaves it into the Constitu-tion must be approved first.

To this date, Mayan communities have held 50 plebiscites but none have been legally binding because these additional norms have not been approved.

But far from expressing satisfaction over the “reglamento” proposed by the government, indigenous organizations have objected, say-ing it imposes restrictions on the right to hold plebiscites, which contradicts the purpose of Convention 169.

For indigenous communities, Colom’s pledge to build “a government with a Mayan face” now sound rather hollow. q


PUERTo RICoDaniel Vázquez in San Juan

Unemployment at a nearly two-decade highSkilled workforce migrates in search of higher paying jobs.

States, one returns. Others live between the two countries.

Duany added that the flow of Puerto Ri-can migrants to the US mainland would slow significantly if the local economy improves, which is unlikely.

In a recent column in daily El Nuevo Día, physician Hernán Padilla said 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s medical school graduates migrat-ed to the United States during the 1990s, while more than 2,000 doctors have left the island over the past decade. In the year 2002, alone, 1,300 nurses sought work permits for Florida.

Puerto Rico, however, has been a promising destination for immigrants from other Carib-bean countries, who say the Spanish-speaking island mixes their culture with the possibility of more economic opportunities since Puerto Rico is a US protectorate.

The Community Service Commission on the island says 3 percent of Puerto Rico’s popu-lation is foreign, including 69,000 Dominicans, 19,600 Cubans, 11,000 Mexicans and 4,000 Colombians. Immigration from the Domini-can Republic here, however, has slowed as that country’s economy is growing.

Paradoxically, even though Puerto Ricans enjoy some of the same benefits as US citi-zens, Puerto Ricans between 16 and 24 years old have some of the worst living conditions and development in New York — below Do-minicans and Mexicans — according to the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty organization in the city. The group also has one of the lowest rates of schooling and em-ployment.

Lost decadePuerto Rico had a half-century of eco-

nomic growth until 2000, but the island never recovered from two recessions, most recently in 2006, still present, the most serious since the Great Depression of 1929.

Local economists have said that the last 10 years was a lost decade in terms of devel-opment for Puerto Rico. Unemployment in 2000 was 11 percent and topped 16 percent in 2010. Economic growth was 3 percent in 2000, and fell to minus 3.6 percent in 2010. The vital manufacturing sector lost 52,900 jobs in the last decade. Currently, 35 percent of the population buys food with food stamps.

In an effort to increase consumption and reactivate the local economy, the government issued a reform that exempts Puerto Ricans who earn up to US$20,000 a year, or close to half of the island’s households, from the in-come tax. The local government is also facing a $3.2 billion budget deficit. q

Puerto Rico’s unemployment last year topped 16 percent, the highest rate in the last 17 years, as a slow economic recovery has prompted the island’s

skilled workforce to migrate to the US main-land in droves.

Close to 1.1 million of the 3.7 million Puerto Ricans were employed last year, 38,000 fewer than in 2009. Self-employed residents on the island also dropped to 170,000 people last year, 3,000 fewer than 2009, according to the Department of Labor and Human Resources.

December, which is usually marked by an increased number of temporary jobs, saw a decrease in construction, manufacturing, retail and government jobs.

According to The Economist magazine, Puerto Rico is one of the 10 slowest growing economies in the world (Venezuela is the fifth-slowest.) The economy has been in a recession for more than four years that was met with a rising cost of living for its population and ris-ing crime.

Constant exodusThere are 4.1 million Puerto Ricans liv-

ing on the US mainland, compared with 3.7 million on the island, whose population fell 2.2 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to the census. Many of the migrants moved to New York City, which has more than 1 million Puerto Ricans who were born on the island.

Many of the migrants are highly educated Puerto Ricans: doctors, scientists, engineers and teachers. Local media often write of the “massive leak of human capital.” Jorge Duany, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico and a demographic expert, said that low salaries, poverty and unemployment have influenced the increased exodus. He said that for every two Puerto Ricans who go to the United

Local economists have said that the last 10 years was a lost decade in terms of development for Puerto Rico.


NICARAGUAInterview with women’s rights activist Azahálea Solís

“National law has contempt for women”It’s been almost four years since Nicaraguan lawmakers passed an outright abortion ban, joining the ranks of Chile and the Dominican Republic as the few Latin American nations not to allow women to terminate their pregnancies under any circumstances. The law sparked an outcry both in Nicaragua and globally from rights activists who argued the draconian law is a fundamental human rights violation since it criminalizes aborting a fetus even to save the life and health of the mother. In one of the most emblematic cases, a young pregnant woman in the northwestern city of León, was reportedly denied radiation for cancer because it would have harmed the fetus.

The move was pushed by current President Daniel Ortega, who also ruled from 1979-90, and his Sandinista party, which at its onset supported women’s rights. Azahálea solís, a women’s rights activists and leader of Nicaragua’s Autonomous Women’s Movement, known as MAM has fought for women’s rights for 25 years. She was also a member of and fought for the Sandinista National Libera-tion Front. Latinamerica Press editor Leslie Josephs spoke with Solís about her work and how women’s rights are threatened in Nicaragua today.

Tell us about the current situation as a result of this ban.In the case of the young woman in León, after she got preg-

nant they found her cancer, which required radiation treatment [which would have killed the fetus.] But in the hospital in Leon, they told her that they couldn’t give her the abortion because it is illegal. This is not an invention of media.

To understand the situation better, it’s important to note that they had about eight years without anyone dying from an ectopic pregnancy. The first death [for this reason] occurred after the criminalization of therapeutic abortion. The same hospital had another striking incident. A pregnant woman came with diarrhea. She was not given any medication because of the doctors’ fear that anything they gave her would induce an abortion. That woman died. She died from diarrhea. It’s a really terrifying situation.

What is behind the ban on therapeutic abortion?They are mainly political reasons. There are no reasons

that have anything to do with reasons outside of politics. In 2006, there were national elections and Comandante [Dan-iel] Ortega, the current president of the republic, ran for the fourth time, and by that point, he wasn’t willing to lose the election.

So they made this exchange with the [Catholic] Church, not because he thought it would increase his votes, but because it was a way to stop the Catholic Church from acting within the electoral opposition against Ortega. They weren’t trying to capture more votes. People who normally have a conserva-tive or anti-Sandinista ideology are people who are against abortion. The fact that the [Sandinista National Liberation] Front put itself against abortion did not immediately create a following. They were trying to stop any attack from the Catholic Church.

What impact has the criminalization had on women’s health?

It’s a fact that violence against women and the murder of women have increased during these years. This could be because of how national law has contempt for women. This could be since how national law has contempt for women. This could be rooted in the national law because of the contempt it generates against women. If you criminalize the right to save

someone’s life ... what’s clearly what’s behind it is that women’s lives are worth very little in the ideological cultural imagination.

In relation to concrete events that have to do with pregnancies or maternity deaths, actually there is information that in hospitals in the coun-try abortion is performed so that this maternal mortality does not increase. But on the other hand, the fact is that the criminalization is an unavoidable factor in medical attention because the doctor, if he or she fulfills his medical duty, it could be a crime. If he or she does not, the person could be accused of negligence for not saving someone’s life.

There is an absurd issue in the Nicaraguan penal code that is “psychological damage to the

fetus”, which is anyone who causes physical or psychological damage to the fetus is subject to criminal punishment.

What is being done to stop this law?There is a proposal signed by various lawmakers, mainly

Liberal ones, because no deputy in the [Sandinista] Front has signed it. It has to do with when it is necessary to save the life of the woman, an exception can be established so the therapeutic abortion can be performed.

Did you ever support the sandinistas?Of course. I’m part of that generation of the revolution.

In my personal history, I was a former soldier during the revolution.

Don’t you think that this is contradictory to the meaning of the revolution?

Absolutely. The original, historic program of the Sandini-sta Front spoke of the emancipation of women. In the 1980s, when the 1986 constitution was being discussed, the Sand-inista Front proposed that the right to life was an unalienable right, and in response, conservative sectors proposed that life started at conception. The Sandinista Front opposed that completely. q

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LATIN AMERICA

Women seek to bridge farming’s gender gapWomen face inequality in land access and farming resources.

Latin american women comprise one-fifth of the region’s farmers, but they face inequalities such as

obstacles to land ownership, loans and farming supplies, putting a crimp in food production, according to a new report by the united nations Food and agriculture Organization, or FaO.

according to its state of Food and agriculture 2010-11 report “Women in agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development,” published on March 7, women farmers work more tempo-rary or seasonal jobs and with lower income compared with their male counterparts.

“Closing the current gender gap is not only about social justice,” said alan Bojanic, head of the Latin america and Caribbean office of the FaO. “it is a key step in increasing productivity, reducing food insecurity and promot-ing sustainable development in Latin america, three key factors to fend with the current global scenario which is marked by rising food prices.

Women in Latin america have less access to land, and when they do, it is usually a smaller and lower-quality plots. They also have fewer heads of

livestock and use less technology than men.

The report said families benefit when women have more decision-making powers in household finances, because they spend more on food, education, health care and clothing.

studies in Brazil have shown that mothers’ income has a greater impact on her children’s nutrition than that of fathers, and that extended co-habitat-ing Mexican families have shown that income contributed to the household by women — not only mothers — has a greater impact on children’s nutri-tion than money generated by men, report said.

The FaO called on governments to eliminate discriminatory laws that hurt women’s opportunities and to improve their access to farming re-sources, education and loans. —LP.

BRAZIL

Women fight for healthy farmingThousands of women farmers protest against toxic agro-chemicals.

Thousands of women marched in late February and early March across Brazil’s 10 biggest states to protest the use of toxic agro-chemicals that cause health and

environmental damage.More than 10,000 women participated in the protests,

called by the Landless rural Workers’ Movement and the international agrarian organization vía Campesina.

“Our fight is to defend land reform, farming ecology, the production of healthy food,” said ana hanauer, of the Landless rural Workers’ Move-ment.

The women marched in the states of Bahia, Ceara, espirito santo, Fortaleza, Mi-nas gerais, Pernambuco, rio de Janeiro, rio grande do sul, são Paulo and sergipe, under the slogan “Women against agri-Business and agro-Toxins’violence: For Land reform and Food sovereignty” as

part of the celebrations for international Women’s day, on March 8.

“We are mobilizing to shed light on the problems caused by the farming industry,” said hanauer. “One is the indiscrimi-nate use of farming chemicals. The poisons market is a prob-lem for our sovereignty, for our health and the environment.”

since 2008, Brazil has been the world’s top consumer of farming chemicals. according to the national syndicate of agro-Chemical Products industry, an industry group, the coun-try uses more than 1 billion liters of these chemicals a year.

The national agency for health supervision, a govern-ment organization, says that 15 percent of the food con-sumed in Brazil contains levels of agro-chemicals that are dangerous to human health.

in an interview with website Viomundo published Feb. 20, raquel rigotto, a professor and re-searcher of community health at Ceara university, said that “in 2008, more than half of the farming chemicals consumed in Brazil were on soy plantations. That soy is largely exported for processing into animal feed and subsidize european and north american consumption of meat.”

“That doesn’t mean food for our peo-ple,” she said. “it means the concentration of land, the reduction of biodiversity, [in-creased] water contamination, poisoning of workers and the families that live near these plantations.” —LP.

“The poisons market is a problem for our sovereignty, for our health and the environment.”

— ana HanauEr


Women mark international Women’s day with protests.

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Women struggle for basic rightsInequalities and abuses continue despite some advances.

Women across the Southern Cone region took to the streets March 8 — International Women’s Day — to demand their rights

and an end to the abuses and discrimination their gender has suffered for centuries.

In demonstrations and meetings, women from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay sought to strengthen a growing women’s rights movement and to demand that their governments design public policies that defend these rights.

Although it was a breakthrough in Argen-tina and Brazil when their respective presi-dents, Cristina Fernández and Dilma Rousseff, were elected, inequalities and violence against women continue.

The legalization of abortion and the inclu-sion of the gender-based killings in the penal code are at the center of Argentina’s move-ment. In 2010, 260 women were killed, ac-cording to Casa de Encuentro, an Argentine’s women group. Despite some advancements, such as a new law aimed at preventing vio-lence against women with stiff penalties for gender violence that went into effect in 2010, the trend has continued. Raquel Vivanco of the Juana Azurday Women’s Collective says that there have been 10 femicides so far this year.

Nevertheless, other aspects of Argentine law are threatening women, such as a ban on non-therapeutic abortions.

There are 500,000 voluntary abortions per-formed in the country every year, according to the United Nations, and back-alley abortions “are the main cause of maternal mortality in Argentina,” said Vivanco. Clandestine abor-tions there generate US$300 million a year.EscuchaLeer fonéticamente

Brazil’s feminist movement is hoping that Rousseff ’s promise to dedicate her young

government to eradicating extreme poverty and bridging gaps in equality will mean more equality for women.

Tica Moreno, a member of the Brazilian chapter of the World March of Women, said that it is important to make progress on the guarantee of childcare for the empowerment of women, build up forces in the struggle for the legalization of abortion, and fight against the objectification and “commodification” of women’s bodies and lives.

Women’s groups will meet later this year at the third National Women’s Conference, called by the governmental Special Secretariat for Women to debate and evaluate public policies and their impacts on women.

“We want to gain force and achievements in the fight for women’s economic autonomy in these spaces,” said Moreno. They also aim to increase their presence in the debate over the current development model, she said.

Pending issuesIn Uruguay, women’s demands have been

heard.“It is widely understood now that women’s

demands are valid and they have been adopted in politicians’ discourse, which has allowed for advancement in legislation and public policies,” said Lilian Abracinskas, director of the nongovernmental organization Mujer y Salud.

Abracinskas noted that women have long worked with politicians, civil society and la-bor unions, but women have not significantly advanced in their presence in government. Women hold only 12 percent of parliamentar-ian seats.

“Uruguay’s democracy owes something to women. This is something we’ve been after for many years,” said Abracinskas, adding that “political parties have no inten-



Afro-descendants’ plight in the spotlightMore than 500 years of exploitation and discrimination leave poverty in their wake.

The united nations labeled 2011 the international Year for People of african descent, in an effort to combat persistent racism, racial discrimination, xe-

nophobia and intolerance, said navi Pillay, the united na-tions high Commissioner for human rights.

approximately 150 million of the 590 million residents of Latin america and the Caribbean are afro-descendants, and they continue to experience levels of poverty and social exclusion disproportionate to the rest of the popu-lation, according to the afro-descendant Population of Latin america, a regional project under the united na-tions development Program.

it’s been more than 500 years since africans were brought to Latin america and the Caribbean as slaves, and the prejudice, racism and marginalization continues. some of the poorest communities in the region are afro-descendant communities. —LP.

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN Afro-Descendant population

Country % of the total populationBahamas 69.0Belize 40.5Bolivia 1.6Brazil 28.3Colombia 16.3Costa rica 1.5Cuba 54.7ecuador 8.7guyana 43.4haiti 74.2honduras 4.0Jamaica 88.5Mexico 0.5nicaragua 10.2Panama 56.9Paraguay 2.7Peru 8.0dominican republic 68.3suriname 33.4Trinidad & Tobago 39.0uruguay 4.9venezuela 8.0* estimated figuressource: Latinamerica Press-based on figures from the inter-american develop-ment Bank on the afro-descendant population (2004) and the economic Commis-sion for Latin america and the Caribbean on the total population (2005).

tion of promoting women’s leadership” and designate only women who support the status quo.

Paraguay has been slow to hear women’s cause. One of the most marginalized sectors in the country is poor campesina and indigenous women.

Women in rural areas face some of the highest risk of rights violations, facing forced migration or human trafficking, said Perla Álvarez, of the National Rural and Indigenous Women’s Coordinating Group.

As small-scale farming families are forced to look for work in urban centers, pushed aside by large agribusinesses, women often end up working living in precarious settings and are frequently subjected to wage discrimination as domestic workers. Álvarez said they face even worse discrimination if they leave the country to search for work.

Close to 25 women’s groups in Paraguay, including Amnesty International, Catholic Women for Choice, the Right to Health Move-ment, the Peace and Justice Service, among others, demanded equality and the respect of all women citizens’ human rights. Many women’s groups in Paraguay are urging the government to improve campesino women’s access to land, a land reform with gender equality that would allow them equal access to land titles, public policies that guarantee women’s right to life, health, a zero tolerance to gender-based killings, and a new sexual and reproductive health law.

Women in Chile continue to face perilous situations. The weak support to women’s rights during several governments since democracy was restored in 1990, has endangered women’s rights. The new right-wing government of President Sebastián Piñera has put these rights even more in doubt.

“The scenario is dangerous because the government’s proposal is reinforcing women’s roles in the home, working but with precarious work, and with many children to take care of,” said Gloria Maira, a member of the Feminist Articulation of Chile and the March 8 Coor-dinating Group.

“We have big demands and big resistance in this movement, which is not backing down from the rights we’ve already won,” said Maira. “The contraception has begun to disappear from health centers. Emergency contraceptives are not available in health centers as called for in the law.”

Maira said this March 8 should be a starting point for women around the region to unite and resist the current scenario of obstacles to women’s rights. q


After the Kaibil officers were arrested by the US authori-ties, the Guatemalan asked the United States to authorize the extradition of Jordán and Pimentel Ríos to Guatemala so that they can be tried for crimes against humanity.

In 2000, a criminal court in the municipality of San Benito, Petén, ordered the arrest of 17 of the 58 Kaibil soldiers involved in the massacre, but ultra-right-wing war veterans’ associations lodged 36 appeals in a desperate attempt to stall the process.

However, in February last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered the Guatemalan government to re-open the case and the arrest warrants were re-issued.

Aura Elena Farfán, president of the Association of Family Members of Detained and Disappeared Persons in Guatemala, or FAMDEGUA, says that Orantes Sosa’s arrest is an important step in terms of securing justice for the victims of Dos Erres, as back in 1982 he was the sub-lieutenant in command of the contingent that perpetrated the massacre.

However, his extradition process to the United States, and eventually to Guatemala, might be complicated as the Canadian Center for International Justice, fearing that he might attempt to escape again or that the Guatemalan army might try to stall the legal process against him, has demanded that he should be tried in Canada, a country whose laws allow the prosecution of foreign war criminals.

Unspeakable crueltyAccording to the report “Guatemala: Memory of Silence”,

published in 1999 by Guatemala’s truth and reconciliation commission, in October 1982, guerrillas ambushed an army convoy near Palestina, in the vicinity of the tiny village of Dos Erres (which was named after two brothers called Ruano who received the original land grant for the area), killing 21 soldiers and taking 19 rifles.

The Guatemalan army quickly retaliated, flying a contingent of 58 Kaibil soldiers into the area to wipe out the inhabitants of Dos Erres, who were considered to be guerrilla sympathizers.

The soldiers arrived at the hamlet on Dec. 6, disguised as guer-rillas, and forced inhabitants out of their homes, herding men into the school building and women into the village’s two churches.

The Kaibiles separated children from their parents. They bashed the smallest infants’ heads against walls and trees and the older ones were killed with blows to the head. Their bodies were dumped in a well.

Then villagers were interrogated one by one, then shot or bashed with a hammer and then dumped in a well. Women and girls were raped and pregnant women had their fetuses ripped out with machetes.

A total of 252 civilians were massacred in Dos Erres even though no communist propaganda was ever found in the village.

The brutal slaughter occurred at the beginning of a decade when the guerrillas launched their biggest offensive ever, to which the army responded with the so-called “Operación Ceniza” (“Operation Ashes”), in which mass killings were com-mitted and entire villages were razed to the ground.

What had been a selective campaign against guerrilla sym-pathizers turned into a mass slaughter designed to eliminate support or potential support for the rebels, a strategy that dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) called “draining the sea that the fish swim in”. q

GUATEMALALouisa Reynolds in Guatemala City

Dos Erres unearthed againUnited States and Canada arrest former soldiers involved in one of Guatemala’s worst wartime massacres.

Twenty nine years after one of the most brutal massa-cres perpetrated by the army against the indigenous Mayan population, the name Dos Erres (“The Two R’s”), a tiny village in the northern department of Petén,

has come back to haunt 52-year old Jorge Vinicio Orantes Sosa, one of the 17 Kaibil commanders wanted by the Guatemalan justice system for leading the contingent that committed the killings.

On Jan. 20 this year, Orantes Sosa, with his hands and feet shackled and escorted by three security officers, faced his ini-tial extradition hearing, in Calgary, Canada, two days after he was arrested in the small western town of Lethbridge, in the province of Alberta.

Orantes Sosa has both Canadian and American citizenship and is charged in the United States with lying to obtain citizenship papers after he answered “no” to two questions asking whether he was accused of human rights violations in his country of origin and whether he had ever served in the armed forces.

“I think there should be a thorough investigation into how he was able to obtain Canadian citizenship”, says Carmen Aguilera, who served as Guatemalan consul in Calgary for two years.

Orantes Sosa was apparently in Lethbridge for less than a day to visit relatives living in the south side of the city and had travelled to Canada after fleeing his home in Riverside, California, in May last year, when he was arrested by the Unit Against Human Rights Violators and War Criminals of Canada’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

First, he escaped to Mexico and in January this year he boarded a commercial flight to Vancouver, Canada, and from there made his way to Lethbridge, where he was arrested by the Canadian police.

Two other arrestsTwo other Kaibil commanders — the Kaibiles are a special

operations force that specializes in jungle warfare tactics and counter-insurgency operations — were arrested on the same date as Orantes Sosa: Gilberto Jordán, who was found guilty of lying in his citizenship application by a Florida court and received a ten-year prison sentence, and Pedro Pimentel Ríos, who is currently awaiting trial in California.

Jordán had lived in California since 1990, where he worked as a cook and Orantes Sosa was a martial arts instructor.


In Argentina, it is said that the term “disap-peared” is known around the world be-cause of the country’s brutal 1976-1983 military dictatorship. More than 30,000

people were disappeared during the regime, according to the Latin American Federation of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, or Fedefam. They were victims of systematic violence, to which dictator Jorge Videla once referred to as: “What are the disappeared? They’re just that, disappeared, which is to say, nothing.”

“We know that they were always [disap-peared], but today, 25 years later, they are recognized by the rule of law as the new con-vention goes into effect,” said Pablo Barbuto, coordinator of the legal arm of the governmen-tal Human Rights Secretariat.

The International Convention for the Pro-tection of All Persons from Enforced Disap-pearance, an initiative of Argentina and France, took effect on Dec. 23, five years after it was adopted by the United Nations. Twenty-one nations, including Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay, have ratified the convention.

Even though the region already has the 1994 Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, under the Organiza-tion of American States, the latest convention is the first time that the right of victims to the truth and reparations has been noted interna-tionally. The convention also recognizes the continuous nature of a disappearance.

The convention defines forced disappear-ance as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or ac-quiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.”

The convention also requires governments to train judicial branch workers and state security force members involved in investiga-tions of disappearances, said María Eugenia Carbone, a legal advisor in the Human Rights

Secretariat, specializing in international issues. This new international agreement is the fruit of a campaign by the Mothers and Grandmoth-ers of the Plaza de Mayo, Fedefam, and the US-based League of United Latin American Citizens.

New casesEven though the convention is not retro-

active, “it does carry a moral and symbolic weight against the repressors,” said Carbone. “It ratifies the legitimacy of the trials that are still going on in Argentina. It could be an ele-ment to reinforce the sentences and, above all, complement our ‘Never Again’ human rights policy.”

The convention calls for the creation of a special committee to handle cases of forced disappearance, a panel of 10 independent members, who will receive reports, request government reports and conduct monitoring. Each of the Southern Cone nations accepted the convention with the exception of Paraguay, whose Congress is reviewing the text.

Even though the Convention calls for in-creased prison sentences for the kidnapping and disappearance of pregnant women and children, and a sentence reduction if the sus-pect collaborates in locating the disappeared person, in Southern Cone nations, this model, which has been applied in Colombia and South Africa, does not necessarily mesh with the local system.

“It’s a hotly disputed project internally because we place memory, truth and justice at the same level,” said Barbuto, “and justice can be sacrificed for the sake of truth.” In Paraguay and Uruguay, amnesty is expressly prohibited by the constitutions.

.In Argentina the emblematic case is that of Julio López, known as the only disappeared person since the human rights trials against dictatorship-era military and police officials began in 2005, when amnesty laws were knocked down. López who was first abducted between 1976 and 1979 and was a key witness in a murder case against alleged dictatorship-era human rights violators in La Plata. On Sept. 18, 2006, at the age of 77, he disappeared on his way to the courthouse. His whereabouts are still unknown.

In Paraguay and Uruguay, there are no recent cases of disappearances. However, in Paraguay, the Truth and Justice Commission, which met from February 2005 and August 2006, found in its report that there were 500 people who were disappeared during the Al-fredo Stroessner’s 1955-89 dictatorship.

Judith Rolón, head of the Truth, Justice and

soUTHERN CoNEJenny Manrique in Buenos Aires

Defining disappearance

International convention against forced disappearances takes effect.


inbrief·Ecuador is the nation with the high-est number of endangered mammals, after indonesia, according to the country’s newly published red Book of ecuadorian Mammals. These red Books, published around the world, are based on the international union for the Conservation of nature’s sys-tem for grading extinction risks of animal and plant life. The number of endangered mammals rose from 43 in 2001 to 101 this year, according to the book, published March 29.

·On the morning of March 15, 1,000 police officers and soldiers forcibly removed some 3,000 indigenous Q’eqchi Maya, destroying their crops and homes in alto verapaz, in north-western Guatemala, after the lands were claimed by a farming business

company that plans to grow sugar-cane for ethanol on the land. genera-tions of indigenous guatemalans have lived on there.

·More than 230,000 people have been displaced in Mexico in the last four years due to the country’s vio-lent drug trade, according to a recent report by the geneva-based internal displacement Monitoring Center. since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón’s government launched a militarized at-tack on drug traffickers, 30,000 people have been killed as a result of the wave of violence, particularly in the states of Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, near the us border, where cartels are warring for control of drug routes.

·More than 5,000 farmers marched on March 24 through the streets of asuncion and other cities of Para-guay, demanding agrarian reform. The protesters, mainly cotton farm-

ers who are being displaced for soy production, are demanding President Fernando Lugo ensure more equal land distribution, which was one of his campaign promises.

·The inter-american Court of human rights, a branch of the Organization of american states, ruled March 24 that Uruguay must drop amnesty laws that protect military and police officers from facing human rights violation charges stemming from the 1973-85 dictatorship. The ruling was part of the Court’s opinion that said officials must investigate the 1976 disappearance of María Claudia garcía iruretagoyena de gelman, who was abducted at 19 in argentina, seven months pregnant. her daughter María Macarena gelman was born in a clan-destine detention center, abducted and adopted by a police officer. her true identity was discovered and re-stored two decades later.

“The good part about the convention is that it is not expected to resolve the problem but rather, to prevent the crime.”— giMEna góMEz gadEa

Reparation office in Paraguay’s Ombudsman’s Office, said the commission cleared the path for 10 new cases of forced disappearances, but she hoped the new convention would speed up the process.

In fact, Paraguay’s penal code already includes forced disappearance, a crime that carries up to 25 years in prison.

Crime preventionIn Argentina, the law recognizes the crime

as kidnapping or homicide, if the victim’s body is found. The inclusion of forced disappear-ance in the penal code is still being debated by lawmakers. Forced disappearance is already a crime in Uruguay since 2007 and in Chile since 2009.

“The good part about the convention is that it is not expected to resolve the problem but rather, to prevent the crime,” said Gimena Gómez Gadea, a spokeswoman for Fedefam and the niece of Nelsa Gadea, a Uruguayan citizen who was disappeared Dec. 18, 1973, in Chile during the 1973-90 dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Even though it will take many years for these countries to incorporate the convention’s points into their national legislation, she said

it represents “the legacy of those countries that suffered from this crime to those that are still suffering from it, like Mexico and Colombia.”

Strangely, Chile was one of the countries that said it would not sign the agreement unless the nation would not be required to investigate previous cases, despite a strong campaign by human rights activists aimed at lawmakers, said Lorena Pizarro, president of the Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared Group in Chile, whose father, Waldo Pizarro was detained and disappeared in 1976.

The country is now hearing cases against military officers that, according to the Interior Ministry’s human rights program, have put only 65 of the 200 convicted officers behind bars, while others have received reduced or commuted sentences because of statutes of limitations and other loopholes.

“The Chilean armed forces are not what they once were but they maintain an unspo-ken pact of silence, which makes it difficult for the cases to advance,” said Pizarro. “Some suspects have been called into retirement after a certain time in the armed forces. We are confident that the convention will give moral legitimacy to those trials.” q


Thousands are still living in temporary housing one year after Chile’s “forgotten disaster.”

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CHILEBenjamin Witte-Lebhar in Constitución

One year laterVictims of the country’s “forgotten disaster” struggle to recover.

One year after shaking central Chile to its core, last February’s 8.8-magnitude earthquake and tsunami combo — dubbed the “forgotten disaster” by some in the international press — is anything but for its

tens of thousands of direct victims, many of whom will soon be spending a second frigid winter in makeshift emergency housing.

Overshadowed from the beginning by the far deadlier earth-quake in Haiti, which occured just weeks before, Chile’s Feb. 27 disaster was soon squeezed off the international news radar by yet another high profile disaster: British Petroleum’s April oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. By August, the powerful quake struggled to remain relevant even in Chile, where attention was instead being paid to the dramatic saga of “los 33,” a group of now world-famous miners who survived 70 days trapped un-derground before their surprising rescue in October.

“Chile dropped to second, then third, fourth or fifth priority. Here everything was forgotten,” Luis Corona, a mechanic in the devastated coastal city of Constitución, told Latinamerica Press. “After the earthquake and tsunami, along came the miners, so [the powers that be] headed off in that direction and abandoned us. They had to rescue the 33. They forgot all about us.”

fact, healing this wound is possibly the most important aspect of the reconstruction process,” he said.

Piñera’s housing minister, Magdalena Matte, claims the government has already approved some 130,000 housing subsidies and begun construction on 70,000 new residences. She promises that by the end of this year, the state will have provided 220,000 subsidies — theoretically one for every family left homeless by the disaster — and furnished 80,000 families with new homes.

“We’ve advanced at an incredible rhythm,” she explained in a March 1 interview with Diario Financiero. “I think that in time, given the way we’re advancing, this is going to be a model of how to go about reconstructing.”

The numbers have a nice ring to them, especially when cou-pled with the 6 percent economic growth figure Chile was able to post last year in spite of the costly quake. As is often the case, however, the facts and figures — at least from the perspective of residents in the hardest hit Maule and Biobío regions — fail to tell the whole, or even the real story. In lively Santiago, shaken hard but not badly damaged by the quake, business is indeed booming. The government just unveiled plans to add two new lines to the city’s subway system. And in “Sanhattan” — an upscale Santiago district so called for its cluster of gleaming office towers — construction continues on the billion-dollar Costanera Center, which will soon boast South America’s tallest skyscraper at 300 meters.

But in places like Constitución, Dichato, Lloca and other badly damaged cities in Maule and Biobío, full recovery remains an elusive goal. Gone are the mountains of debris that the quake and tsunami left heaped along the coastline and up and down city streets. The rebuilding process, however, has been slow — and so far only partial. Local economies have yet to bounce back. Summer tourists, an important source or local revenue, mostly stayed away this year.

Sandra Jara, a beachside fishmonger in the Maule region coastal town of Duao, lost her home and food stand to the tsu-

The days leading up to last week’s one year anniversary were somewhat of an exception, as national attention shifted back — albeit tem-porarily — to the February disaster. Stirring up potent memories for people nationwide, the sudden media attention also shed light on the ongoing reconstruction effort, exposing diver-gent perspectives about what and how much the government has done to help Chile recover.

Everything humanly possible?President Sebastián Piñera, a conservative

businessman who took office just 13 days after the disaster, said in a Feb. 26 interview with Radio Bío-Bío that the reconstruction is more than 50 percent complete. One day later, dur-ing an earthquake anniversary speech in Con-stitución, Piñera told gatherers his government “has done everything humanly possible.”

“We are not only rebuilding the material things that the earthquake and tsunami de-stroyed, but we also need to heal the tremen-dous wound so many people have suffered. In

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nami. With help from friends and family she rushed to rebuild in time for the summer season, erecting a pair of plywood struc-tures with whatever materials she could gather. Unfortunately, few summer vacationers showed up. “We all knew it would be bad, but this bad?” she said.

In Constitución, thousands of people left homeless by the disaster lived in tents for the first several months before finally receiving government aid in the form of mediaguas (rudimen-tary wooden huts). That, and a single box of food (25 kilos per family) is all the state assistance they’ve seen so far, explained Nieve Vergara of El Pozo, a riverside neighborhood in Consti-tución razed by tsunami waves.

“The help that Constitución received came from individuals, private companies, sports clubs, neighborhood councils from all over Chile. They collected food and clothing, and came here to distribute it directly,” he said.

“Today we’re living in ... emergency housing. It’s the only thing we’ve received from the government. It’s true what the government says, that they installed lighting and provided us with drinking water, but that was only four months later. We had to fight for it. We had to make them do it.”

Weary of the waiting gameTwelve months after the disaster, Vergara and thousands of

other quake victims continue to occupy the emergency shelters while they wait for the state to come up with more permanent housing solutions. Most of the emergency housing units are grouped into makeshift townships called “aldeas.”

Of the 107 aldeas erected after the quake, 99 remain, ac-cording to the Housing Ministry. Together they house roughly 4,200 families, which are now preparing to pass another bone chilling winter in their crowded, drafty and leaky emergency dwellings. Drinking water is scarce in some cases. The shared showers are cold. The collective port-a-potties foul smelling and in short supply. Minister Matte’s latest promise is to eliminate the townships by mid 2012 — 15 months from now.

Opposition leaders have jumped on the reconstruction shortcomings to poke holes in President Piñera’s once shining political armor. The tactic seems to be working. Rewarded for his handling of “los 33,” Piñera saw his approval rating reach a high of 63 percent in early November. More recent polls have him in the 40 percent range.

The conservative president marked the quake’s anniver-sary with a whistle-stop tour of damaged Maule and Biobío towns. “I come in peace,” he told gatherers during a Feb. 19 stop off in Dichato, where he was met by protestors. A week later approximately 3,000 people aired their frustrations with a demonstration in the Biobío capital of Concepción. Protestors waving black flags booed Piñera during his anniversary speech in Constitución as well.

“Here it’s just been questions and consultations. That’s it. No help,” said Luis Corona. “What we have had is a lot of help from individuals. But from the government, nothing. It’s all been through the efforts of friends and family members. The people are lifting themselves back up. That’s it. We can’t expect anything else.” q

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