• Chile
    Jan 31, 2005
    Chile has made significant progress in recent years in prosecuting former military personnel accused of committing grave human rights violations during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990.) A new code of criminal procedure, in force all over the country except Santiago (where it will be introduced in 2005), has strengthened due process guarantees for criminal defendants and greatly reduced the incidence of torture. Yet special procedures that violate due process rights are still being use in prosecutions of members of the Mapuche indigenous community, charged under terrorism laws for attacks on farms and pine plantations in the Araucanía region. A still unresolved legacy of the Pinochet era is the problem of military court jurisdiction over crimes involving police.
  • Brazil
    Jan 31, 2005
    Egregious abuses in the criminal justice system—including extrajudicial killings and torture by police and prison authorities—remain Brazil’s most pressing human rights problem, but in 2004 there were new threats to freedom of expression. A foreign correspondent was nearly expelled from Brazil for an article that President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva considered offensive, and the government took steps to create regulatory bodies for the country’s film, broadcast, and print media. Socially and economically marginalized populations are among those hardest hit by long-standing and systemic weaknesses of the criminal justice system. The problems of forced labor and human trafficking, as well as rural violence and land conflicts, also target the country’s poorer citizens. As in the past, perpetrators of human rights abuses enjoy impunity in the vast majority of cases.
  • Argentina
    Jan 31, 2005
    Serious problems continue to beset Argentina’s criminal justice system. These include police abuses, prison overcrowding, torture of detainees, and degrading conditions of detention in police lockups. Under strong public pressure to deal more effectively with violent urban crime, the government of President Néstor Kirchner passed laws in 2003 increasing the use of pretrial detention and lengthening jail sentences for violent offenders. On a positive note, the Kirchner government continues to press for accountability for human rights violations committed during Argentina’s period of military rule (1976-1983). At this writing, roughly one hundred former military and police officers had been detained, and several key trials were underway.