The Colombian government announced today that it will challenge a court decision that forced them to dismantle a military base located on land belonging to indigenous tribes in Guaviare province.

The court stated that the base in Guaviare was endangering the lives of indigenous people who were caught up in the battle between the military security forces and rebel groups.

“We respect the decisions of the court and we abide by them, but we will [ask] the court to revise the terms and issues,” said Colombian defense minister, Juan Carlos Pinzón.

The Colombian Constitutional Court said that the base “violated the fundamental rights of its peoples” and that the “The Jiw and Nukak indigenous groups [were] in grave danger of being physically and culturally exterminated due to the internal armed conflict and the failure of the authorities to give them adequate protection.”

According to the court three indigenous people have already been injured because of exploded ammunition and landmines around the base in Barrancon. The base is used to train members of the Navy and Special Forces.

Commander of the Armed Forces General Alejandro Navas is arguing that the military should not be seen as an invading force. He says that if they pulled out of the area completely it would open up a strategic corridor for Colombia’s largest rebel group, the Farc.

“We’re fulfilling our constitutional duty of ensuring the security of Colombia,” he said, according to BBC News World.

He claims that members of the Eastern Bloc of the Farc would be able to meet up with the Western Bloc and the 16th Front if they leave the area.

The ruling on Thursday morning came just weeks after security forces clashed with members of another indigenous group in south-western Colombia over demands that the army leave their land.

Pictures of soldiers being carried down the mountain by members of the indigenous tribe Nasa sparked heated debate over armed forces on indigenous land.

Pinzón however, said the situation in Guaviare and the situation in Cauca are “totally unrelated” and that the ruling would have no bearing on the forces in the Cauca province.

But Nasa indigenous leader Marcos Yule said the ruling set an important precedent and he is hopeful they can have the same results in Cauca.

The Nasa have demanded that both the army and the rebels leave their territory and take their fight elsewhere.

After Colombian soldiers were expelled by indigenous leaders from the Cauca region yesterday, President Juan Manuel Santos announced that he plans to investigate the occurrences and bring these leaders to trial. He called yesterday’s incidents “unacceptable” and asked the local community to cease all violent actions, according to Télam.

In protest of the violent conflict taking place between the Colombian military and members of Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the area, the indigenous community in Cauca dismantled barricades built by both the army and the FARC. Members of the community also pushed out a few soldiers who were guarding antennas. Army and government officials believe such actions constitute a serious attack against the military and that indigenous leaders responsible should be brought to trial.

President Santos did acknowledge, on the other hand, that the real enemy of the Colombian forces is the FARC and that his administration respects indigenous communities, Military officials do not seem to agree – General Jorge Jerez stated that the “guerrillas of FARC and the indigenous are working together to remove troops,” as reported by Pulsar News Agency.

Indigenous authorities denied such accusations and submitted a public letter to the FARC asking them to remove their troops from the territory. The letter told FARC that “we do not need your presence because the guerrilla does not bring us peace; you attack our civilians, you disrespect our authority and our justice,” as quoted in Télam.

A protest paying homage to the late Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, on Sunday ended with 64 people detained and 22 injured. An estimated 3,000 protesters mobilised against the tribute.

Chile’s police cracked down on protesters with water cannons and tear gas. According to the Santiago administration, the suppression of the protesters was triggered by clashes between them and the military.

City Mayor Pablo Zalaquett described the authorisation to perform an act of homage to the former dictator in the locality as an “error.”

The protesters against the Pinochet homage were led by relatives of those killed during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

Representatives of Human Rights groups emphasised that the intention of the protest was to delegitimise the rule of the ex de facto leader.

Lorena Pizarro, the president of the Association of Relatives of Detained and Disappeared in Chile, apportioned the blame of the suppression of the protests to President Sebastián Piñera.

The organisers of the tribute are members of the ex-military who campaign for the release of prisoners who have committed Human Rights violations in Chile.

These officers performed a tribute to the oppressor and Chilean torturer, Miguel Krassnof, in 2011.

News story courtesy of AgenciaPulsar.

A Guatemalan court yesterday sentenced five men to 7,710 years in prison each for their roles in a 1982 massacre that left at least 256 indigenous people dead.

Former civil patrollers Eusebio Grace, Julián and Mario Acoj and Santos Rosales as well as former military commissioner Lucas Tecú were found guilty for their roles in a massacre in the village of Plan de Sánchez. Each man was sentenced to 30 years per murder plus 30 years for crimes against humanity.

According to humanitarian organisation ACOGUATE, the massacre happened on July 18, 1982. Between 2 and 3pm, about 60 men dressed in military uniform with assault rifles entered the town. They separated young women and girls from the rest of the population, raping and battering them before killing them.

Amnesty International also notes that other adults were imprisoned in a house before troops fired on them indiscriminately and attacked them with hand-grenades. Some villagers were forced into straw dwellings that were doused with gasoline and set alight. Most people killed were Achí Mayans, and their bodies were dumped into mass graves.

Though a group of survivors filed a complaint in 1992, there were no developments in the case until August 2011 when the five men were captured.

“Slowly but surely, justice is beginning to prevail for these horrendous crimes that have hung over Guatemalan society for three decades,” said Sebastian Elgueta, Central America researcher at Amnesty International. “Each new verdict erodes the long-entrenched impunity in the country, and the authorities must continue to ensure that the thousands of victims and their relatives are given access to justice and full reparation as well as the truth about what happened.”

Other Cases

Amnesty International also notes that the de facto head of state at the time of the massacre, now-retired General José Efraín Ríos Montt, is currently facing genocide charges. Charges were laid in January.

On 12th March, Pedro Pimentel Ríos was the fifth person to be convicted and sentenced for crimes related to the Dos Erres Massacre, another massacre in Guatemala where more than 200 people were tortured and killed.

This Friday is also the 30-year anniversary of Ríos Montt’s rise to the head of state in Guatemala. The man came to power after a 1982 coup d’etat and stayed in power until August 1983. Half of all the documented human rights violations during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict took place in those years.

“Torturers are not born that way: someone educates them, trains them and supports them.” This statement belongs to a report by Amnesty International as part of its campaign to eradicate torture. The same report states that there are over 150 military training centres in the world whose job it is to provide training to foreign armed forces. Protected by secrecy and without any independent control, these centres have the potential to “facilitate human rights violations”.

Latin America and the SOA (image courtesy of N.ree.K)

Such is the case of the infamous School of the Americas, a US Army education facility aimed at training members of Latin American armed forces which has been operational since 1946. Many of its graduates have taken part in military dictatorships throughout the continent and have been accused of committing crimes against humanity using the counter-insurgency methods they were taught at the school. The School of the Americas is not an anomaly, but an integral part of US foreign policy that reached as far south as Argentina.

As we commemorate a new Día de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia (the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’etat) this Saturday 24th March, it is worth remembering the role the School of the Americas played in the country’s recent history.

The Cold War And The National Security Doctrine

“America for the Americans” is a phrase commonly used to summarise the so-called ‘Monroe doctrine’. In his State of the Union address in 1823, US president James Monroe set out what would become the US policy towards the rest of the American continent to this day: by rejecting the intervention of the European powers in the continent, America would become part of the US’s sphere of influence.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the political, cultural, economic, and military influence of the US on the continent expanded. The onset of World War II accelerated the process, already underway, of military cooperation, and favoured a common defence policy based on continental solidarity. Thus, the 1947 Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance stated that any foreign attack on one of the signatory states would be deemed an attack on all of them.

U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Fostor Dulles, mastermind behind the 1954 coup d'etat in Guatemala (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In the 1960s, US policy towards Latin America shifted as the Cold War intensified and the success of the Cuban revolution brought the communist threat to its backyard. The fight against communism -or any political movement identified as such- became the number one objective for the US. The role of the Latin American armed forces within the continent and even within their own countries was then redefined to achieve this objective: their main aim became to guarantee internal stability.

The National Security Doctrine, whilst not written down or systematised, is considered to be a military doctrine developed by the US government and instilled into Latin American soldiers through training centres such as the School of the Americas. Many trace its origins to the counter-insurgency teachings of the French military, who developed their own doctrine to fight against the resistance of the independence movements from their former colonies in Algeria and South East Asia.

The most important aspect of the National Security Doctrine, the one which shaped all the policies developed under it, was the idea that social conflict and armed struggle in Latin America (and the so-called Third World in general) was not the result of internal factors, but of communist infiltration by groups backed by the USSR. This way, all internal conflicts were redefined as being part of the bigger threat of the Soviet Union against the US, thus justifying US intervention. This intervention, however, was not direct. As military involvement by the US was generally not supported at home, especially after the Vietnam War, the training imparted to Latin American soldiers and the redefinition of the role of the armed forces sought to prepare them to carry out their job as regional ‘police’ within their own borders.

‘Torturers Are Not Born That Way…’

Leopoldo Galtieri (Argentina), Roberto Viola (Argentina), Hugo Banzer (Bolivia), Manuel Noriega (Panama), Juan Velasco Alvarado (Peru), Omar Torrijos (Panama). What reads like a ‘who’s who’ of Latin American dictators is but a small fraction of the long list of graduates from the School of the Americas.

Leopoldo Galtieri, graduate of the School of the Americas and Argentine dictator during the Dirty War (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The School, ran by the US Army, first opened its doors in 1946 in Panama. Back then, it was called Latin American Training Center, Ground Division and its objective was to train Latin American soldiers in war and counter-insurgency techniques. In 1950 it was moved to its definite location in Panama, Fort Gulick, and Spanish was adopted as its official language. It would remain in Fort Gulick until 1984 when it was relocated to the US. In 1963 it was renamed United States Army School of the Americas, the name by which it would become internationally known.

According to the NGO SOA Watch, since 1946 the school “has trained over 64,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics”. Many of these were involved in military regimes across the continent in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. More recently, graduates from the school participated in the attempted coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 2002, and the coup that deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya in 2009.

What exactly did the soldiers learn in their visits to the School of the Americas? In 1991, seven Spanish-language Army manuals, based partly on lesson plans used by instructors since 1982, were released to the US Congress and in 1992 two CIA manuals used for training in Latin America were added. These texts included material from CIA and US Army manuals written in the 1950s and 1960s and had titles such as ‘Revolutionary War and Communist Ideology’, ‘Terrorism and the Urban Guerrilla’, ‘Handling of Sources’, and ‘Interrogation’.

One of the most striking features of these texts is the lack of distinction between legitimate and legal opposition movements and armed guerrillas. The ‘Counterintelligence’ manual defines as potential counterinsurgency targets any groups or political parties “that have goals, beliefs or ideologies contrary or in opposition to the National Government” or the US. It then recommends the creation of black lists to include “enemy agents” and “subversive persons”, including political opposition leaders and “collaborators and sympathisers of the enemy”. The suggested solutions to the enemy presence include infiltrations into enemy groups and population control techniques such as curfews, military checkpoints, house searches, issuance of ID cards and rationing. Detention procedures compliant with the rule of law are ignored. According to the analysis carried out by NGO Latin American Working Group (LAWG), “throughout the manuals there is discussion of detaining suspects without mention of proper procedures for arrest, obtaining admissible evidence, trial and conviction. There is no mention of warrants or the right to contact an attorney or any comparable local laws. In fact, it is recommended throughout that detainees be kept in isolation and not be allowed to contact anyone.”

WHINSEC Change of command ceremony in 2010

The declassified CIA manuals are even more crude. Whilst the Army manuals try to keep up appearances by making references to documents such as the Geneva Convention, the CIA’s “Human Resource Exploitation Manual” has an entire chapter dedicated to coercive interrogation techniques. The aim of these techniques, they explain, is to induce psychological regression in the prisoner, defined as “a loss of autonomy, a reversion to an earlier behavioural level”. The “three major principles involved in the successful application of coercive techniques” are physical weakness, dependency and intense fear and anxiety. To achieve this, the manuals indicate that suspects should be held incommunicado and should be deprived of any kind of normal routine in eating and sleeping. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, soundproof, dark and without toilets. Causing fear by threatening the prisoner is included as a technique in this chapter, as the manual indicates that the threat to inflict pain is often more effective than the feeling of pain. Other coercive techniques discussed in the manual include prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, disruption of routines, solitary confinement, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and use of drugs or placebos.

This type of training has had serious consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. US backing for Latin American dictatorships has been widely documented, but what the manuals from the School of the Americas show is the true and chilling extent of the intervention. It did not only consist of political support: it went as far as teaching the soldiers how to torture prisoners.

Even those who did not suffer the application of these ‘coercive techniques’ on themselves or their loved ones, those who were oblivious to it all or those who had not been born yet suffered the consequences of State-sponsored terrorism. The social and economic outcomes of the Latin American dictatorships are still being felt by many to this day. The techniques taught at the School of the Americas were but a means to an end: to subjugate the opposition to the massive social and economic changes introduced by the dictatorships from the 1970s onwards.

‘Different Name, Same Shame’

In 1984, Panamanian president Jorge Illueca denounced the School of the Americas as the biggest base for destabilisation in Latin America and evicted the US army from Fort Gulick, a step which was part of the broader process put in motion by the Panama Canal Treaty and which involved the progressive withdrawal of US forces from Panama.

Protesters hold up crosses with the names of the disappeared at SOA Watch's annual vigil. (Photo: Carolyn Scorpio)

The School of the Americas was then reopened in Fort Benning, in the US state of Georgia. In 2001, and after the public outcry caused by the release of the training manuals, the school closed down and was replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). SOA Watch and other human rights NGOs have been publicly denouncing WHINSEC ever since, as they consider it to be “the School of the Americas under a different name”. There has been no critical assessment of the way the school was conducted and therefore no real changes to its objectives, procedures and lack of independent control.

Many NGOs advocate for the closing of WHINSEC, with SOA Watch at the forefront of the struggle. The sole purpose of SOA Watch, based in Washington DC and with offices in Latin America, is to push for the closure of the School of the Americas, under whatever name it may be called. Founded in 1990 after the massacre of six priests and two women by School of the Americas graduates in El Salvador, this NGO has been working relentlessly through demonstrations and nonviolent protest to achieve their goal. Last November, during a yearly vigil, a SOA Watch activist was arrested for breaking into the grounds of WHINSEC in Fort Benning, and later condemned to six months in prison. Unlike the school educators, hundreds of anti-WHINSEC activists throughout the years have had to face justice and serve prison time.

Despite their efforts, an average of 1,000 students per year (mainly Latin American) continue to attend WHINSEC for training on counterdrug, urban terrain, major combat and joint operations. The school receives a budget of US$14m annually.

The most promising gesture regarding the School of the Americas has not come from the US, but from the Latin American governments. Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia have all decided in recent years to stop sending soldiers for training at Fort Benning. This goes to show that, whilst changing the 200-year long foreign policy of a world super power may not be easy, only the autonomous decisions of a strengthened and united continent can save millions from being at its mercy.

Guatemalan anthropologists are excavating mass graves at a former military outpost near Cobán, Alta Verapaz, searching for the remains of 200-300 people.

The bodies are suspected to belong to people who were disappeared during the country’s internal armed conflict, which lasted from 1960 to 1996.

The former outpost – Now a UN peacekeeper training centre – has five mass graves nearby, said the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala’s deputy director José Suasnavar.

“In the fifth pit, which we are working on now, we have already found 14 skulls,” he said at a press conference earlier this week.

A search warrant drawn by the First Court of High Risk allowed Attorneys of the Public Ministry (MP) and researchers at the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala to go to the site, and they have been working there since the 27th February.

“It is very uncertain, determining the number of bodies that can be located in the former military detachment, because there are indications that there are more graves in the region,” Suasnavar said.

Aura Elena Farfan, director of the Association of Relatives of Detained-Disappeared of Guatemala, said the action for excavation was initiated by relatives who complained about their disappeared family members.

“During the years 2004 and 2005, many people approached us from Cobán to ask for help,” she said. “At that time, we started soliciting the MP for an intervention, to clarify the facts.”

Suasnavar said since the institution began the process of exhumations in 1992, the bones of 6,000 victims have been found; 65% of the remains have been identified.

According to a UN-sponsored Truth Commission, about 250,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared during the 36-year armed conflict. Most of them were indigenous, and the commission attributed 93% of all atrocities to state and paramilitary forces.

Antonio Domingo Bussi, former general accused of crimes against humanity, has died at age 85. Bussi was admitted into a cardiology clinic in Tucumán on Monday and died yesterday from cardiac arrest.

The body is currently at The Heart Institute and will be transferred to Pilar tomorrow, province of Buenos Aires, where he will be buried. The ceremony was short and intimate, with only family and close friends.

Born in Entre Ríos, in 1975 Bussi took charge of ‘Operation Independence’ in San Miguel de Tucumán, taking over the role of Acdel Edgardo Vilas. He had gained political power in the area twice, once during the military dictatorship in 1976, and once after, between 1989 and 1993.

In 2008, Bussi was given life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of Senator Guillermo Vargas Aignasse. He is also accused of connections with detention centres across the Tucumán area during the dictatorship.

Earlier today, president Dilma Rousseff sanctioned two new laws that facilitate the access to government data and ends secrecy of public documents. The laws are called ‘Commission of Truth’ and ‘Law of Access to Information’.

The ‘Commission of Truth’ will investigate the crimes against human rights that happened between 1946 and 1988, when the Brazilian military was in power. The commission will be given two years to produce a report with conclusions and recommendations about the crimes committed.

The ‘Law of Access to Information’ attributes a 50-year deadline for all the information classified as top-secret to be filtered by the government, some documents will remain secret whilst others will finally be revealed to the public.

The president, who was arrested and tortured in the period of the military dictatorship, stated that is a “great pride to sanction these two laws.”

“Silence and oblivion are always a great threat,” she adds.

The Brazilian military police invaded the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro today, which has been controled by the drug cartels for the last 30 years.

The operation started in the early hours of this morning and there was no gun fire exchanged as the authorities found no resistance.

After the invasion proved to be successful, aproximately 1.000 favela inhabitants witnessed an improvised ceremony where the Brazilian flag was raised in the centre of the slum, to symbolize the army’s victory against crime.

The Batallion of Special Operations (BOPE) also raised the flag of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, Sergio Cabral, congratulated the security forces and said he informed president Dilma Rouseff about the success of the operation.

“The population needs peace to raise their children and live with dignity; any access to a dignifyed life is through peace,” states Cabral.

There are about 120.000 people living in the Rocinha favela nowadays.

The Mexican Employers’ Confederation (Coparmex) announced that kidnappings in Mexico increased by 40% and homicides by 25%. According to the official rates, extortion and robbery increased as well.

President of the Employers’ Confederation, Gerardo Gutierrez, stressed that Mexican citizens are perceiving a crisis of public safety. He pointed out that the population’s complaints about the lack of efforts made to overcome this crisis in the long term.

Mexico suffers from severe safety issues ever since the implementation of strategies against drug trafficking, proposed by the President Felipe Calderon. The strategies include the use of military in public security tasks whenever the police was ineffective, missing or had been infiltrated by criminal groups. Violence linked to this problem has killed at least 40000 people since the president took office in 2006.

Story Courtesy of Agencia Pulsar.