On September 25, in a ceremony at the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington, D.C., the OAS amended its charter to allow the hemisphere's governments to ostracize from the group any government coming to power by coup. This welcome step underlined the growing consensus in the region that maintaining constitutional, democratic governments is in each nation's best interests. And indeed, with scant exceptions, the region comprising Latin America and the Caribbean stood out as one of the few parts of the world where elected civilian government seemed firmly ensconced.
The history of the area makes clear that elected governments have offered the greatest possibility for enjoyment of human rights; in the past, the rupture of constitutional order in every case brought serious and systematic human rights violations. In this sense, the 1997 congressional and municipal elections in Mexico, the first in which opposition parties could compete with the long-governing Party of the Institutionalized Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Institucionalizada, PRI) on a level playing field, marked a significant step forward for democracy in the region. Cuba-where an unelected government completed thirty-eight years in power-remained the exception to the trend toward greater political space.
But while elected government may be a precondition for human rights to be respected, the region's dismal record shows that it is by no means sufficient. Massive and serious human rights violations plagued the region in 1997, regardless of the regular alternation in power of elected governments. Indeed, the lack of respect for human rights in countries as diverse as Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic showed that elections are only the first step toward genuine democracy. Massacres, extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and other forms of police brutality, along with inhumane prison conditions stubbornly continued.
Many of the region's elected governments accepted legitimate criticism of their abusive human rights practices, abandoning the defensive reactions of the past. Many realized they stood only to benefit from opening communication with human rights monitors. The exceptions remained the governments of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which continued to deny international human rights groups access to the island while harassing and prosecuting those attempting to monitor rights domestically; the government of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, which denounced human rights groups' motives even as it adopted some of their recommendations; and the Ernesto Zedillo government in Mexico, which admitted to shortcomings in police behavior but expelled international human rights monitors and categorically rejected their findings. Indeed, the only governments in the region which continued to violate human rights as part of central government policy were Cuba and Peru.
Even governments that accepted international criticism failed to make human rights protection a priority by designing programs and dedicating resources to the eradication of torture, police brutality, arbitrary detention, and other widespread abuses, as well as the impunity with which these acts were committed.
In Colombia, thirty-five massacres claimed the lives of 272 individuals in the first eight months of the year, and some 450 more died in individual political assassinations during the same period. The bulk of the carnage was attributable to paramilitary groups, usually working with military acquiescence and in some cases with military support; according to the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), a respected human rights organization, 76 percent of the human rights violations recorded in 1997 were the work of paramilitaries, 17 percent were the work of guerrillas, and 7 percent were the work of state agents. In Peru, torture remained a common practice employed by police against both accused terrorists and common criminal suspects, and even against a member of the army intelligence service accused of leaking information to the press. In Mexico, political violence in rural areas-in some cases with official involvement or acquiescence-remained acute, and the justice system showed a marked tendency to be lenient with the government's supporters and severe with its opponents. In Brazil, amateur videotapes capturing random police brutality shocked a nation seemingly inured to the fate of criminal suspects. In Venezuela, security forces resorted to systematic abuses, including torture, extrajudicial executions, and the disproportionate use of lethal force in their efforts to control crime in urban areas.
President Fujimori's government in Peru demonstrated its lack of respect for the rule of law by a dizzying series of maneuvers including the sacking of three of the seven members of the Constitutional Court after they ruled against a third presidential term for Fujimori. The judges' removal effectively put the court out of business for settling constitutional conflicts.
Prison conditions in many parts of the region were so bad as to constitute serious human rights violations, and a majority of those held had not been convicted of any crime; indeed, some detainees were held for years in preventive detention, in violation of the presumption of innocence. Some 90 percent of Honduran, Paraguayan, and Uruguayan inmates were unsentenced, while in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Haiti, El Salvador, Peru, and Venezuela, the proportion of unsentenced inmates ranged from 65 to 85 percent. In the Dominican Republic, we found one prisoner who had been held for ten years without trial.
Meanwhile, in a serious setback to international human rights protection mechanisms, Jamaica announced in late October that it would become the first country in the world to withdraw from the Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. North Korea renounced the covenant itself in August. The Jamaican move, which will have the effect of preventing individuals whose rights may have been violated by the Jamaican government from appealing to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, was apparently intended to deny death row inmates an opportunity for U.N. review.
While the overall picture in 1997 was of continued serious violations, several positive developments occurred. The signing of a final peace agreement in Guatemala, bringing an end to three decades of armed conflict, contributed to a continuing decline in the number of human rights violations linked to counterinsurgency operations. Peru's government in October suspended the use of "faceless courts" to try terrorist suspects. Those courts had presented numerous and profound due process violations. Persons accused of the aggravated form of terrorism, in Peru termed "treason," will continue to be tried by military courts, although the judges will no longer remain anonymous. The amendment of Brazil's criminal code to codify torture as a crime marked a step forward in an effort to eradicate that practice. And in Colombia, President Ernesto Samper introduced two pieces of important legislation: one, would ensure that gross violations of human rights be prosecuted in civilian, rather than military courts, and a second would make forced disappearance a crime. In Venezuela, the Supreme Court on October 14 knocked down as unconstitutional a 1956 vagrancy law which allowed administrative detention for up to five years of possible delinquents without proof of individual wrongdoing.
Perhaps the most ominous development in 1997 was the persecution in several countries of some of the region's most outstanding reporters and news media. Thin-skinned officials in Panama, Argentina, and Peru lashed out at their critics among the press, demonstrating an intolerance for criticism more characteristic of authoritarian regimes than democratic governments. In Cuba, harassment of the small independent press corps continued unabated.
In Argentina, in January, news photographer José Luis Cabezas was handcuffed, beaten, shot dead and set on fire, in a chilling reminder of the dangers of investigating police corruption. At this writing, three provincial police officers have been detained in connection with the case. On September 11, the only Argentine Navy officer to have voluntarily confessed to serious human rights abuses during the military dictatorships from 1976 to 1983 was abducted by armed men with police credentials. During the two hours he was held, former Capt. Adolfo Scilingo was beaten and threatened, and the initials of journalists to whom he had told his story were carved in his face. His captors threatened to kill Scilingo as well as those journalists: Mariano Grondona, Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, and Horacio Verbitsky. President Carlos Menem's reaction to this gangland-style incident, in which he suggested that Scilingo was not to be believed, followed unfortunate comments he had made shortly before the attack, in which Menem appeared to suggest that the limits of press freedoms could be determined by violence.
The government of Ernesto Pérez Balladares in Panama took steps to suppress freedom of expression by setting in motion a deportation order against Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, associate editor of the daily La Prensa. Gorriti's articles covering corruption in official circles irked those in power, who sought to oust the award-winning reporter based on specious legal grounds. Gorriti's investigative unit had written about drug money flowing into President Pérez Balladares's campaign and alleged irregularities in the accumulation of television networks by the president's cousin. However, in a significant victory for press freedom, the government reversed itself in October, allowing La Prensa to retain Gorriti in a senior position in Panama and vowing to seek derogation of legislation limiting the role of foreign nationals in the media.
In Peru, the government launched a campaign against the Israeli-born majority shareholder in Lima's Channel 2 television, Baruch Ivcher Bronstein. Channel 2 was the first to broadcast an interview with Leonor La Rosa, an army intelligence agent severely tortured by her employers on suspicion of having leaked information about planned persecution of the press. An escalating campaign of harassment against Ivcher culminated in the July 13 revocation of his Peruvian nationality, followed by takeover of the television station by the pro-government minority shareholders. Other journalists faced serious harassment, including Blanca Rosales, managing editor of the daily La República, who was abducted, beaten, and threatened by unidentified armed men before being released.
Cuban authorities continued to intimidate journalists. Among those arrested were Héctor Peraza Linares, co-director of the Habana Press news agency, and Raúl Rivero, the head of Cuba Press. On February 26, a group of government supporters gathered outside the homes of Cuba Press journalists Tania Quintero and Ana Luisa Baeza, throwing objects and shouting. Joaquín Torres Alvarez, the director of Habana Press, was beaten in May by several assailants whom he later identified as members of the State Security forces and representatives of his neighborhood's communist party office.
In Mexico, gunmen murdered Jesús Bueno León of the Guerrero state weekly 7 Días; Bueno had written that he believed state officials planned to kill him in retaliation for his reporting. After covering police excesses in Mexico City in September, four reporters wereabducted and tortured by unidentified assailants.
In December 1996, a new series of television regulations went into effect in Colombia, including limitations on the broadcasting of violent images which could, if enforced, seriously restrict news coverage, among other things, the measures restricted airing statements from guerrilla or other criminal organizations. Although the regulations have not produced attempts at censorship as of this writing, their implementation granted the government tremendous leeway to limit television coverage. Colombian cameraman Ricardo Velez fled the country in September after receiving serious threats on his life related to a suit for damages he filed against the army. Soldiers had beaten Velez while he filmed repression of a protest march in 1996.
In June, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights published a report finding that the government of Chile had violated the right to freedom of expression by banning the sale of a book written by Francisco Martorell in 1993. The book, Diplomatic Impunity, concerned the circumstances leading up to the departure of the former ambassador of Argentina in Chile, Oscar Spinosa Melo. The commission called on the government of Chile to lift the ban on the book.
Meanwhile, when President Rafael Caldera of Venezuela recommended that a November 1997 Iberoamerican summit in Caracas suggest measures to protect the "right to truthful information," this concept-suggesting governmental control over press content-provoking well-deserved approbrium from press watchdog groups.
Human rights monitors continued to face threats, harassment, and physical violence in several countries in the region, and in many cases governments failed to take measures to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible. In a dangerous continent, Colombia remained the killing field for human rights defenders. Mario Calderón and Elsa Alvarado of the Center for Research and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, CINEP) were killed by masked gunmen in their Bogotá apartment, apparently in retaliation for their human rights work. Alvarado's father was also killed and her mother seriously wounded in the same incident. On September 28, authorities arrested five people who may have taken part in the killing. Among the other human rights monitors killed by unidentified gunmen in Colombia in apparent retaliation for their work were Nazareno de Jesús Rivera of the Segovia Human Rights Committee, Margarita Guzmán a former colleague who pressed for an investigation, and Víctor Julio Garzón, a member of the all-but-extinguished Meta Civic Committee for Human Rights. A third member of the Segovia Human Rights Committee, Jaime Ortiz Londoño, was forcibly disappeared. Several other monitors have been forced to leave the country because of death threats. On October 26, the guerrilla group known as the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) kidnapped two election observers from the Organization of American States in an effort to frustrate municipal elections. The guerrillas freed the observers after more than a week.
In Cuba, where monitoring the human rights policies of the government runs afoul of numerous provisions of the penal code restricting free expression and association, those who attempted to defend human rights faced harassment and prosecution. On July 15, authorities detained human rights lawyer René Gómez Manzano along with three other prominent dissidents. At this writing, the four leaders remain in prison facing possible trial for enemy propaganda.
Human rights advocate Francisco Soberón, head of Peru's Pro-Human Rights Association (Asociación Pro-Derechos Humanos, APRODEH), faced repeated anonymous death threatsapparently in retaliation for APRODEH's defense of a respected judge facing arbitrary legal proceedings and a police whistle-blower facing persecution.
In Bolivia, National Police agents arrested Waldo Albarracín, president of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights (Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos, APDH) on January 25 and allegedly tortured him for over three hours. The police agents reportedly beat Albarracín all over his body, including his genitalia, subjected him to death threats and near-asphyxiation. Albarracín was later hospitalized with serious wounds.
Church-related human rights groups in Mexico continued to come under attack. Padre Camilo Daniel, founder of Chihuahua's Commission of Solidarity and Defense of Human Rights (Comisión de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, COSYDDHAC), and his secretary were threatened with death in January. On February 15, armed men ambushed a group of investigators from the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center in the Chiapas town of Sabanilla, wounding José Montero in the arm. Also in Chiapas, assailants tried unsuccessfully to burn the offices of the Coordinating Group of Nongovernmental Organizations for Peace (Coordinadora de Organismos No Gubernamentales por la Paz, CONPAZ).
In Venezuela, members of the Human Rights Office of the Vicariate of Puerto Ayacucho, state of Amazonas, came under attack for their work on behalf of the Amazonian Indians. Following inflammatory criticism of the office by local politicians and members of the regional government, two vehicles belonging to the office were damaged by acid.
In November, Human Rights Watch honored Carlos Rodríguez Mejía, a distinguished human rights attorney from the Bogotá-based Colombian Commission of Jurists (Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, CCJ), in our annual celebration of human rights monitors from around the world. Rodríguez is a founding member of the CCJ, one of Colombia's most effective human rights groups. It was largely through Rodríguez's efforts that the U.N. agreed to set up a special office of its High Commissioner for Human Rights in Bogotá to press the government to protect human rights.
The presence of the United Nations human rights mission in Guatemala, known as MINUGUA, continued to contribute to reduced levels of politically motivated human rights violations. Nonetheless, the mission's prestige suffered a blow with the delay in publication of its investigation into the forced disappearance of a guerrilla captured by the army in October 1996. To its credit, MINUGUA continued to press the case despite stonewalling by the government.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights opened a field office in Colombia, a long-awaited move that held the promise of reducing violations. In April, the U.N. Human Rights Committee in New York lamented that "gross and massive human rights violations continue to occur in Colombia." It expressed its "deep concern" over evidence that paramilitary groups "receive support from members of the military" and that "impunity continues to be a widespread phenomenon." Torture in Mexico also received well-deserved scrutiny from the U.N. In its conclusions reached in April, the Committee Against Torture praised legal reforms but strongly faulted the systematic practice of torture in the country. In August, Nigel Rodley, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, visited Mexico to document the nature and extent of violations.
The Clinton administration's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices provided an accurate and detailed description of the human rights problems and practices in the region. In a departure from past practice, the administration in 1997 also took steps to raise human rights issues to a more prominent position in its agenda with the region, on some occasions issuing public statements in countries where it had previously been silent. In Colombia, the U.S. embassy publicly expressed its concern over military authorities' verbal attacks on civilian investigators who linked Gen. Farouk Yanine to the Puerto Araujo massacre, the first time it had spoken publicly on a human rights case. And despite strong pressure from members of Congress eager to fund Colombian anti-narcotics campaigns regardless of human rights violations by the army, the Clinton administration held up aid to the military until August, when the Colombian armed forces agreed to human rights conditions. At this writing, it is unclear how the conditions will be implemented and to what extent the U.S., in making aid determinations, will rely exclusively on the Colombian defense ministry's evaluation of its own troops' human rights record.
In Peru, U.S. officials issued strong statements on the sacking of three members of the Constitutional Court and on the revocation of Ivcher's citizenship. Meanwhile, private pressure from the administration contributed significantly to convincing the government of Panama to reverse its plan to deport investigative journalist Gustavo Gorriti. In particular, the influence exerted by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during her visit to Panama in October appeared to have had an important impact. In Mexico, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with local human rights organizations, a significant symbolic action given the hostility these groups face from the authorities.
Efforts to make public the U.S. role in past human rights violations in the region inched forward, as the C.I.A. completed, but did not make public, an internal study of its ties to a military death squad in Honduras. CIA documents released in August confirmed that the agency knew about the interrogation and torture of civilians by that unit in the 1980s and that agents visited at least one of its clandestine prisoners. Documents declassified in 1997 about U.S. involvement in the coup that overthrew the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 provided a chilling inside look at the methods used and promoted by the agency, including targeted political assassination and mass murder.
Meanwhile the Clinton administration acted to protect from deportation Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, wanted in Haiti for massive and serious human rights violations committed by a paramilitary group he headed during the military dictatorship. Constant received CIA payments in Haiti while directing the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (Front pour l'Avancement et Progrés d'Haïti, FRAPH). Moreover, the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince refused to return to the Haitian government the approximately 160,000 pages of documents and other materials seized from FRAPH and Haitian military headquarters in 1994, documents that could assist prosecutors' efforts to punish human rights violators.
While discussions of free trade issues dominated his tour of Latin capitals in October, President Clinton made important statements on behalf of freedom of expression in Argentina, where attacks on journalists ascended in 1997 with apparent government tolerance. During the president's trip to Mexico and Central America in May, Clinton failed to mention human rights.
In December 1996, the European Union Council of Ministers adopted a new, stronger policy toward Cuba, making full economic cooperation conditional on human rights improvements.Unfortunately, European investors in Cuba, as well as Canadians and others, failed to adopt effective strategies to ensure respect for labor rights in their Cuban workplaces, where government-dominated projects denied basic rights of free association and speech.
An effort by Mexico to negotiate a trade and political cooperation agreement with the European Union without the E.U.'s standard human rights clause was defeated when the Zedillo government, in July, agreed to the insertion of the full human rights clause.
In July, the European Parliament issued a strong resolution calling on the Fujimori government to reinstate the magistrates of the Constitutional Court who had been dismissed by the Congress; to guarantee freedom of expression; and to abolish the practice of torture.
Some European embassies and diplomats took high-profile roles in attempting to lessen political violence and the suffering it caused in Colombia. In April, Netherlands Amb. Gysbert Bos made a three-day visit to the Middle Magdalena region, in part to draw attention to a rise in paramilitary activity and displacement. The E.U. continued to pressure Colombia to improve its human rights record, and announced in September its full support for a negotiated settlement to political conflict.
In 1997, we published book-length reports in English and Spanish on rural violence in Mexico, prison conditions in Venezuela, and violations of children's rights in Guatemala. Our report on police brutality in Brazil was published in English and Portuguese. Human Rights Watch released each report in the respective nation's capital, followed up with a week discussing our conclusions and recommendations with senior government officials, European Union and U.S. ambassadors, human rights organizations, and the press. As part of this and other in-country advocacy trips, the division's executive director met in 1997 with the presidents of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela to urge attention to human rights violations.
Several issues we have pressed jointly with other human rights organizations for years produced results in 1997: In Peru, the government suspended the use of civilian faceless courts used to try terrorist suspects; in Brazil, legislation was passed to codify torture; and in Colombia legislation was introduced to try human rights cases in ordinary, rather than military courts. Cases that we have litigated before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights together with the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) and local partners bore results as well: the court found that the government of Peru had violated the American Convention on Human Rights in the detention, torture, rape, and prosecution before faceless military and civilian courts of María Elena Loayza Tamayo and ordered her release, a move the government complied with shortly thereafter; and the commission mediated a friendly settlement in the case of the extrajudicial execution of a human rights activist and wounding of a second in Colotenango, Guatemala, in 1993. The settlement required the government to prosecute and punish those responsible and provide reparations to the community for numerous abuses suffered at the hands of military-sponsored civil patrols. Also in Peru, the government released Luis Cantoral Benavides, whose case we had taken to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Our legal representation of author Francisco Martorell at the Inter-American Commission also brought a victory when the commission in June released its final report on the case, finding Chile had violated his right to freedom of expression by banning the sale of his book. In July 1997, the United States National Administrative Office (U.S. NAO, the body charged with hearing cases of alleged violations by Canada or Mexico of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, commonly referred to as the labor rights sideagreement of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA) accepted for review a petition filed by Human Rights Watch and the National Association of Democratic Lawyers (Asociación Nacional de Abogados Democráticos), which charged the Mexican government with failure to enforce its domestic labor code or set up effective mechanisms to adjudicate labor disputes. The U.S. NAO was expected to issue its findings by the end of November 1997.
In June, a campaign we organized involving press, regional governments, and human rights organizations from several countries succeeded in defeating a candidate promoted by Guatemala to join the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The candidate's career of political alliances with military dictators made him unsuitable for the post. We also protested violations of freedom of expression across the continent and pressed the Clinton administration to raise the issue during the president's October trip to Latin America.
For a listing of relevant reports, missions and letters, see at the end of this report. Partial listings also follow each country chapter
Several well-publicized incidents of police brutality and corruption constituted the principal human rights developments in 1997 in Brazil. Despite encouraging good faith efforts by many authorities, including at the federal executive level, human rights violations continued to be severe and varied.
On March 31, Brazil's widely viewed television news program Jornal Nacional broadcast an amateur video showing military police extorting, beating, torturing, and humiliating persons randomly stopped at a roadblock in Diadema, a working class suburb of São Paulo. In one scene, the police without provocation shot and killed an unarmed passenger in a car after a random stop. The explicit images, which were filmed on at least two separate occasions, sent shock waves throughout Brazil and the world. The videos confirmed what human rights groups had been reporting about the frequently violent and unprofessional nature of military police in São Paulo. Subsequent journalistic investigations revealed that dozens of complaints about these kinds of violence and corruption had been lodged with police authorities in Diadema in the months preceding the March televised incident, without results.
A week later, on April 7, the same national news program exhibited another amateur video, this time depicting extortion, severe beatings, and humiliations inflicted by the Rio de Janeiro military police in Cidade de Deus, a poor community on the city's outskirts. The Cidade de Deus video shifted the focus of debate to the national nature of the problem, as well as to programs of the Rio State Secretariat of Public Security that promoted and paid bonuses to police officers involved in acts of bravery. In the days following the video's airing, reports surfaced demonstrating that three of the six policemen involved were receiving monthly pay bonuses for bravery. In the midst of this debate, Human Rights Watch noted, in a detailed report released at this time that, in practice, "bravery" bonuses were awarded to police officers that had killed criminal suspects, regardless of the circumstances. Human Rights Watch's research showed that in a one-year period, from May 1995 to April 1996, at least 179 police officers were promoted in Rio de Janeiro in connection with incidents that claimed the lives of seventy-two civilians and six police officers. The victims' autopsy reports showed that in some of these cases, they werethe victims of summary executions, rather than shootouts, as the reports authorizing bravery rewards contended.
Throughout 1997, Rio de Janeiro authorities continued to promote and pay bonuses to police involved in acts of bravery. In April, the Bar Association of Rio de Janeiro, citing the Human Rights Watch report, filed an unsuccessful challenge to the constitutionality of the bravery measures in state court. Following reports in September in Rio dailies to the effect that fourteen ranking military police officers indicted for their involvement in a gambling racket had received pay raises and promotions for bravery, State Representative Carlos Minc introduced legislation into the Rio State Legislative Assembly seeking to limit the bonuses and promotions to police not facing indictment for serious crimes. In October, the Superior Institute of Religious Studies (Instituto Superior de Estudos Relgiosos, ISER) a leading nongovernmental organization (NGO), released a report demonstrating that the Rio police had killed at least 942 civilians in the period from January 1, 1993 through July 31, 1996. The ISER study included analysis of the autopsy reports demonstrating that at least forty of these 942 civilians had been shot at point-blank range. Figures regarding the high incidence of bullets to victims' heads and chests and the percentage of shots from behind suggested that the number of summary executions may well have been substantially higher. The study also demonstrated that the number of persons killed by the police in the city of Rio rose from sixteen per month prior to May 1995, when the current public security secretary, Gen. Nilton Cerqueira, assumed control of Rio police forces, to thirty-two per month afterwards. In this same period, the Rio police killed 3.4 times as many civilians as they wounded.
Despite attention focused on the São Paulo military police due to the Diadema incident, official figures showed that in 1997 military police killings of civilians in the state continued to decline. In the first eight months of 1997, military police in the São Paulo metropolitan area killed eighty-six civilians while on duty and fifty-one more while off duty. In those same eight months, the military police suffered eight fatalities on duty and twenty-four off-duty deaths. In 1996, the number of civilians killed by military police in São Paulo, both on and off duty had fallen to 183, the lowest full-year total in a decade. Twenty-seven police (twenty-one while off duty) were killed during this same period. By contrast, four years earlier, in 1992, the military police killed 1,190 civilians in São Paulo while suffering fifty-five fatalities. These reductions were widely believed to be related to the creation and continued operation of the Office of the Ombudsman for the Police, as well as a state program (Programa de Acompanhamento de Policiais Envolvidos em Ocorrências de Alto Risco- PROAR) that required police officers to be removed from street duty, at least temporarily, when involved in fatal shootings. In December 1995, the State Secretariat of Public Security had extended the PROAR program to include police officers involved in killings while off duty.
Nonetheless, throughout 1997, São Paulo police violated basic human rights. On May 20, military police stormed the Fazenda da Juta housing complex, which had been occupied by squatters for several months. When the squatters resisted eviction by throwing rocks and sticks, the police, not specially trained for such operations and without adequate equipment such as shields and helmets, fired at the squatters, killing three. One of the victims was killed by a single bullet to the back of the head, suggesting a summary execution. Another squatter was killed by bullets to the chest, which a police officer contended he fired in self-defense after being knocked to the ground. The coroner's report, however, indicated the victim had been shot twice through the chest in a straight line, casting doubt on the police officer's version of events.
In September, the involvement of two São Paulo military police officers in the kidnapping and murder of an eight-year-old boy prompted the State Secretary of Public Security to fire the commander of the State Military Police. During the same week, in Brasília, military police officers orchestrated the kidnapping of the young daughter of a federal congressman, who was released after a rescue operation. These two incidents once again prompted intense debate on the issue of police violence and corruption.
In April and May, shortly after the images in Diadema and Cidade de Deus aired on television, a special state parliamentary inquiry in Minas Gerais state gathered evidence of the widespread practice of torture in police precincts in Belo Horizonte. Members of the state parliamentary inquiry commission appeared in one infamous precinct with a video camera and filmed a room that detainees had described as a torture center. The video corroborated the statements given to the parliamentary commission both in terms of the location of the torture center and its characteristics: the room included rivets to hang a "parrot's perch," a bar on which prisoners are extended during torture sessions, and a water faucet and two exposed wires, presumably used for electric shock torture. Despite this and other evidence, Minas Gerais Gov. Eduardo Azeredo denied that the police in Minas Gerais practiced torture and refused to order a full investigation.
Two months later, the Minas Gerais military police organized a massive strike. Demanding higher wages-military police in Minas Gerais received a starting wage of roughly U.S.$400 per month-the police organized a strike that paralyzed the state for two weeks in June. By the end of the month, the governor ceded to the striking police officers' demands, authorizing a 50 percent base salary hike. The Minas Gerais dispute touched off similar protests or wage demands in more than a dozen other Brazilian states in July and August.
Prompted by this police unrest as well as increasing popular and media attention to the severe problem of police corruption and violence, a national working group led by newly appointed National Secretary for Human Rights José Gregori studied needed changes to improve public security throughout Brazil. In September, as a result of the work of these groups, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso proposed a series of legislative and constitutional modifications in police structure, including an amendment to eliminate military courts entirely, to authorize the states to unify the civil and military police should they so choose, and to protect witnesses to incidents of police abuse. If implemented, these measures could significantly reduce the incidence of gross human rights violations committed by state agents. However, it was unclear whether these reforms would be given priority by Brazil's Congress, whose record for enacting human rights measures continued to be poor in 1997. At this writing, the legislative package is still pending in Congress. So, too, are dozens of other important proposals included in the National Human Rights Plan, released on May 13, 1996. Since then, the Brazilian Congress managed to approve only a handful of measures. Apart from a law criminalizing torture passed in the wake of the Diadema incident, the only other public security reform passed by Congress since the plan's release was Law 9.437, which criminalized illegal weapons possessions, signed into law on February 20.
Prison conditions throughout Brazil continued to violate international standards in 1997. The primary violations involved official violence directed against detainees or complicity in prisoner-against-prisoner violence; overcrowding; unsanitary conditions; and lack of access to recreation, education and other benefits. Substandard conditions were exacerbated in police precincts' detention centers, where prisoners were held for months and even years. In São Paulo,nearly 30,000 detainees were held in precincts, which according to the most generous official estimates, had capacity for fewer than 16,000. The São Paulo daily Folha de S. Paulo reported eighty rebellions in precincts and eleven more in penitentiaries in the state in the first six months of 1997, up from seventy-one rebellions in precincts and eight in penitentiaries in all of 1996. By early October the number of revolts in penitentiaries rose to fifteen. In September, São Paulo authorities announced the signing of contracts to build seven prisons with a total capacity for 5,544 detainees. If completed on schedule, along with the planned construction of fourteen more prisons, these centers of detention would provide space for an additional 17,520 prisoners by the end of 1998.
To their credit, São Paulo authorities rarely used deadly force to control prison and precinct rebellions. This was not always the case, however, in all of Brazil in 1997. On July 29, military police entered the Róger penitentiary in João Pessoa, Paraíba, to end a prison riot in which a group of prisoners had seized the warden, three guards, and two fellow prisoners as hostages. Subsequent medical examinations demonstrated that seven of the eight prisoners killed had been severely beaten and likely tortured and then summarily executed, a conclusion that the state governor himself accepted. Two months later, military police responded to another rebellion in the same facility killing one detainee. Investigations by the João Pessoa municipal human rights commission showed that the prisoners were armed with sticks and that the police response was, at a minimum, disproportionate. In October, two more prisoners were killed during an escape attempt.
The problem of prison and precinct overcrowding was exacerbated in 1997 by the existence of prisoners held in these detention facilities beyond the terms of their sentences. In September, ad hoc investigatory commissions composed of members of the State Bar Association, the State Attorney General's Office and representatives of the State Legislative Assembly documented irregularities observed during surprise visits in the state of Sao Paulo. For example, the ad hoc commissions found several detainees held beyond the terms of their sentences, scores of others eligible for parole or early or day release programs, as well as one case of a detainee held for more than two years based on a provision which allows thirty-day renewable detention periods.
In 1997, rural conflicts continued to seize headlines as the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra - MST) intensified its efforts to force the government to take land reform measures. In numerous incidents throughout 1997, land occupations by the MST and other groups of landless resulted in armed conflicts. According to the Pastoral Land Commission (Comissão Pastoral da Terra, CPT), through mid-October 1997 twenty-five civilians had been killed in these land conflicts. While in 1996, the military police were responsible for most of those killed in land conflicts (including nineteen squatters in a single incident in El Dorado do Carajás on April 17, 1996), in 1997, according to the CPT, hired gunmen killed a much greater proportion of the victims in land disputes.
Figures for 1996 and partial figures for 1997 demonstrated an increase in both the number of land disputes and the violence practiced in their resolution. In 1996, forty-six individuals were killed in land conflicts, an increase from the thirty-nine deaths in conflicts registered in 1995. The CPT also registered a significant rise in the number of conflicts in 1996 (653) compared to 1995 (440), as well as the number of persons involved, which rose from 318,458 in 1995 to 481,490 in 1997. Although figures for 1997 were not available, the CPT reported that throughout the year, this trend of escalating land conflict and increasingly violent resolutioncontinued in 1997.
A positive development in the campaign against rural violence and impunity was the June 27-29 jury trial and conviction in Imperatriz, Maranhão state, of three landowners for ordering the 1986 targeted assassination of Father Josimo Moraes Tavares, regional director of the Pastoral Land Commission. Landowners Guiomar Teodoro da Silva, Adailson Gomes Vieira and Geraldo Paulo Vieira, arrested in 1994 and held in pre-trial detention since then, were sentenced to fourteen, eighteen and nineteen years' imprisonment, respectively. The conviction of the crime's intellectual authors in this case was exceptional: according to the CPT, of 976 land-related killings and 891 cases of attempted homicide registered from 1985 through the beginning of 1997, only fifty-six cases had gone to trial. In only fourteen of the trials, those who ordered the killings were prosecuted, with seven cases resulting in convictions.
In an unfortunate use of the criminal justice system against land reform activists, a trial court in Pedro Canário, in the eastern state of Espírito Santo, convicted landless leader José Rainha on June 10 for the 1989 murders of landowner José Machado Neto and military police officer Sérgio Narciso. Despite overwhelming evidence that José Rainha was hundreds of miles away when the killings occurred, the jury convicted, and the presiding judge sentenced him to twenty-six-and-a-half years in prison, on the grounds that he organized the land occupation and helped the peasants leave after the murder. Witnesses on Rainha's behalf included a military police colonel from Ceará, the former agriculture secretary for Ceará (now a federal congressman), and other elected officials from Ceará, all of whom testified that Rainha was in Ceará and not Espírito Santo during the time of the land conflict. The trial was tainted by other irregularities, including the presence of several persons on the jury with ties to one of the victims. At this writing, no date has been set for Rainha's second trial, guaranteed him under Brazilian law.
Forced labor, the practice whereby laborers are recruited with false promises of high wages and then maintained against their will in work camps, continued to occur in 1997, although at rates believed lower than prior years. The CPT's figures for 1996 showed a significant decline in the number of victims involved in forced labor compared with 1995. While the number of cases of forced labor fell only slightly from twenty-one to nineteen, the number of victims plummeted from 26,047 to 2,487. This dramatic decrease was widely believed to be the result of joint programs of civil society, principally the CPT and rural labor unions, and the federal government's Ministry of Labor, particularly in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. In that state, in which thousands had been held captive in coal pits in prior years, efforts to eliminate forced labor proved successful. In Minas Gerais, the work of a parliamentary commission of investigation helped reduce the number of victims of forced labor from 10,040 in 1995 to 790 in 1996.
In September, federal authorities announced plans to expropriate lands used for forced labor. The minister of land affairs announced that those workers who had been forced into debt bondage at the Flor da Mata estate in São Félix do Xingu, southern Pará state in the Amazon region, would be settled on the estate and that the government would follow this new policy with other areas in which forced labor is practiced. Legal experts, however, argued that such expropriation was beyond the authority of the federal government and required the enactment of legislation specifically authorizing such expropriations. At this writing, legislation that would empower the federal government to expropriate land used for forced labor operations is pending in Congress.
After convictions in April and November 1996 in the first two trials of military police officers involved in the July 1993 murder of eight sleeping children and adolescents in the Candelária plaza in downtown Rio, prosecution efforts suffered serious setbacks in late 1996 and 1997. First, in December 1996, two police officers and one civilian were acquitted after the prosecution failed to press the case against the defendants despite strong evidence, including witness statements, attesting to the involvement of two of the men. Then, in April 1997, former police officer Nelson Cunha, who had been convicted in November 1996 and sentenced to 261 years in prison, was acquitted of all homicide charges by a second jury. This, despite Cunha's confession that he was in the car with the killers and that he personally shot and injured survivor and key witness Wagner dos Santos in the head. Cunha, who admitted pointing the gun at the youth's head, claimed the gun went off accidentally as the car was moving. Cunha continued to serve a separate sentence of eighteen years for attempted murder based on his initial conviction.
For other high-profile massacres, impunity continued to be the rule. More than five years after the 1992 massacre at Carandiru prison, where 111 prisoners were killed, no one was brought to trial, although the case had been transferred from the military to the ordinary courts. The prosecution of police responsible for the August 1993 massacre of twenty-one residents of the Vigário Geral favela in Rio de Janeiro inched forward in 1997. In April, a jury in Rio convicted former military police officer Paulo Alvarenga, the first of more than fifty defendants to be tried, to more than 400 years in prison, of which he will have to serve thirty.
In the early morning hours of April 20, 1997, four young men and one teenager doused Pataxó Indian Galdino Jesus dos Santos, asleep on a bench in Brasília, with gasoline and then set him afire, producing severe burns which caused his death at a local hospital a few hours later. Dos Santos was attending a conference on indigenous rights in celebration of the National Indian Day. He returned to the hostel where he was staying shortly after closing and was forced to sleep outside. Subsequent investigations established that the boys had seen dos Santos asleep, proceeded to a gas station, and then returned to set him afire. Despite this and other evidence, Judge Sandra De Santis Mello reduced charges against the defendants from murder to assault and battery followed by death, accepting their position that they lacked any intent to kill or seriously harm dos Santos. Both the initial incident and the subsequent judicial decision touched off protests and calls for greater governmental efforts to protect the rights of indigenous peoples. At this writing, the defendants still face prosecution.
One encouraging trend during 1997 was the increased cooperation between governmental authorities and civil society in the area of human rights. In the northeastern state of Pernambuco, the state government continued to finance a witness protection program run by an NGO. In 1997, the Ministry of Justice took steps in conjunction with local governmental authorities to transplant this program to five other states. In June, the federal government created the National Secretariat for Human Rights within the Ministry of Justice, which worked closely with NGOs to develop programs jointly and to press for the implementation of measures included in the National Human Rights Plan. In São Paulo, the Ombudsman's Office for Police continued its energetic oversight of police abuse that contributed to significant reductions in police violence against civilians. The Human Rights Commission of the Federal Chamber of Deputies continued to denounce human rights violations throughout Brazil, holding numerous hearings in several locations to expose local abuses and provide fora for local activists and also pressed the Chamber and the Senate to pass sorely needed human rights legislation. In Rio Grande do Sul, the State Legislative Assembly's Human Rights Commission published its third annual "Blue Report," themost thorough catalogue of human rights violations in the state. Across the country, state legislative assemblies either formed human rights commissions or strengthened those that already existed; this same phenomenon occurred at the municipal level as well. Through these measures, government agents strengthened their relationships with their nongovernmental counterparts while assuming responsibility for vital oversight of citizens' rights.
The Brazilian government participated in the Oslo negotiations to draft the landmines treaty. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed its intent to attend the December conference in Ottawa and to sign the landmines treaty at that time. In March, Brazil took an initial step toward recognizing the illegitimacy of the occupation of East Timor by sending its first official delegation to the former Portuguese colony since the 1975 Indonesian invasion. Brazil also received a September visit by Nobel Laureate José Ramos Horta. During his previous visit to Brazil in November 1996, Ramos Horta was received by President Cardoso.
The Brazilian government imposed no formal obstacles to human rights monitoring, and Brazil continued to maintain an active civil society including human rights organizations, religious groups, civic associations, and unions. In addition, in 1997 a number of state legislatures and city councils formed human rights commissions which played an increasingly important role, alongside those governmental commissions that already existed, in this watchdog capacity. In May, the São Paulo state legislature established an Ombudsman for the Police, a position previously created by gubernatorial decree. In September, the state legislature in Minas Gerais created an ombudsman's office based on the São Paulo model.
Unfortunately, this trend was not universal. In many parts of Brazil, authorities continued to be antagonistic towards human rights monitors. Human rights activists in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte faced both death threats and law suits for their courageous efforts to rid the police of violent officers. The death threats rarely triggered serious investigations on the part of the appropriate authorities. A list of ten activists who promote investigations of corrupt and violent police in Rio Grande do Norte began to circulate at the end of 1996. The first person on that list, attorney Gilson Nogueira, was murdered on October 20, 1996, and in May 1997, despite significant evidence of police involvement in his killing, federal prosecutors ended their investigation into the matter with no indictments.
Throughout 1997, Rio de Janeiro authorities responded to legitimate criticism of police violence by attacking the sources. This aggressiveness applied to Human Rights Watch, after our report on police brutality, as well as to local and national critics.
The European Union (E.U.) financed numerous NGOs dedicated to the defense of human rights in Brazil in 1997. Member states of the European Union encouraged Brazil to comply with international human rights norms through regular meetings with federal officials both in Brazil and on official government trips to Europe. At year's end, several governments expressed interest in providing instructors and financing a program directed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to train Brazilian police in methods that respect fundamental human rights. This ICRC training program would build on two courses which it led in 1997 for representatives of the military police forces of each of Brazil's twenty-six states and federaldistrict. National Human Rights Secretary José Gregori sought financial support from E.U. governments for police training in human rights during several visits to Europe in 1997. At this writing, however, plans for such financing have not been completed.
In 1997, the U.S. gave relatively little direct assistance to Brazil. For fiscal year 1998 the administration requested U.S. $225,000 for training through the International Military Education and Training Program (IMET) and U.S. $1 million in anti-narcotics assistance, as well as U.S.$ 600,000 targeted to police forces in Brazil. The U.S. government finalized plans to open an FBI office in Brasília to combat drug trafficking during fiscal year 1998, although according to the U.S. embassy, no clear timetable for its operation has been established at this writing.
During the year, the U.S. government sponsored numerous visits for human rights activists, judges, and prosecutors to the United States through the administration of justice and United States Information Services programs, as well as visits to Brazil by experts on alternative sentencing and the federalization of human rights crimes, both issues contemplated by the Brazilian National Human Rights Program. The State Department's chapter on Brazil in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1996 accurately portrayed the varied human rights problems that Brazil faces, as well as the advances and setbacks provoked by governmental policies.
In October, President Bill Clinton visited Brasília, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In Brasília, Clinton met with his counterpart Fernando Henrique Cardoso, as well as the presidents of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. Unfortunately, President Clinton failed to address the issue of human rights publicly during the trip.
Police Brutality in Urban Brazil, 4/97
COLOMBIA
Human Rights Developments
Even as the administration of President Ernesto Samper took limited steps to curb violence and address impunity, the human rights situation in Colombia deteriorated. Political violence was particularly intense in areas contested by guerrillas and by paramilitaries operating with the acquiescence and in some cases the support of the army. All parties routinely attacked perceived enemies within the civilian population, meaning that noncombatants-among them farmers, elected officials, teachers, banana workers, merchants, and children-remained Colombia's most frequent victims of political violence. Thousands of Colombians fled violence to join the rapidly growing ranks of the forcibly displaced. Meanwhile, poor conditions in Colombia's jails led to a series of protests, several of which became violent and resulted in casualties among guards and prisoners.
Although exact figures remained difficult to confirm and many cases went unreported or uninvestigated, it was clear that political violence increased, especially as October 1997 municipal elections neared. According to our records, there were at least thirty-five massacres in the first eight months of 1997-twenty-seven committed by presumed paramilitaries and eightcommitted by presumed members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC), the country's largest guerrilla group. In all, these massacres claimed 272 lives. More than 450 Colombians also died in targeted assassinations, with the largest identified group being peasants.
Human Rights Watch recorded a reduction in the number of cases attributed to the security forces, either acting alone or with paramilitary groups, while guerrilla violations increased. In the past, the army openly backed paramilitaries. Human rights organizations in Colombia called on the government to take concerted action against paramilitaries to demonstrate that they were not supported or tolerated by the armed forces. It was significant, therefore, that even as the police and military incorporated human rights into their public statements and held meetings with human rights groups, words did not translate into consistent action against paramilitaries, who operated freely in heavily militarized areas and significantly expanded their operations. The state's failure to arrest paramilitary leaders or pursue their units constituted tacit approval for their violations and meant that paramilitaries waged an unhindered campaign of terror throughout most of the country.
According to the Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ), a respected human rights organization, 76 percent of the violations recorded were the work of paramilitaries, 17 percent were the work of guerrillas, and 7 percent were the work of state agents. Human Rights Watch recorded twenty-four cases of extrajudicial executions and eight forced disappearances attributable to the army during the first six months of 1997. On January 10, for example, 18th Brigade soldiers apparently executed three youths detained in a Saravena, Arauca, slum, beating and shooting them in front of witnesses. In addition, in regions like the Middle Magdalena and southern Cesar department, army units patrolled openly with groups of armed civilians, killing and threatening supposed guerrilla supporters.
When abuses were investigated, the military continued to use its tribunals to cover them up, most notably in the case involving Gen. (ret.) Farouk Yanine Díaz, charged with ordering the 1987 massacre of nineteen men near Puerto Araujo, Santander. On June 23, then-army commander Gen. Manuel Bonett, appointed the investigative judge on the case, announced he would close further investigation of Yanine's involvement. He did so despite solid evidence implicating Yanine. The case had been prepared by the Attorney General's Human Rights Unit, which continued to do credible investigations. Similar evidence collected by the Human Rights Unit had served to convict the civilian paramilitaries accused of carrying out the Puerto Araujo massacre.
In a welcome decision, the Constitutional Court ruled in August that unresolved cases involving extrajudicial executions, torture, forced disappearances, and rape by the security forces must be tried in civilian court, not military tribunals. Writing for the majority, magistrate Eduardo Cifuentes Muñoz held that human rights crimes "have absolutely no connection to the role of State agents according to the constitution. [A]ny order to commit such a crime merits no obedience whatsoever."
However, as of this writing, no pending cases, including that of General Yanine, have been transferred to civilian courts for trial. In an effort to ignore the ruling, military tribunals continued to hear cases involving serious human rights violations, including the December 1991 massacre by police and local paramilitaries of twenty Páez Indians, among them five children, near Caloto, Cauca. On September 23, a military tribunal declared that the massacre constituted an act of service meant to "help (the victims) coexist peacefully" and released the anti-narcoticspolice captain found to have planned and helped carry out the killings. Although the Samper administration presented a bill to congress that would reform the military penal code to reflect the Constitutional Court decision, as of this writing it was unclear what its fate will be.
Overall, the paramilitary group known as the Peasant Self-Defense Group of Córdoba and Urabá (Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba and Urabá, ACCU) amassed the worst record, committing at least twenty-two of the massacres reported in the first eight months of 1997. In July, over one hundred ACCU members arrived in Mapiripán, Meta, by air, then killed and beheaded at least seven men in the local slaughterhouse. Part of the group's much-publicized plan to form a national alliance of paramilitary groups and reach areas formerly considered guerrilla strongholds, the Mapiripán attack lasted for five days without any reaction by police or military forces based in the area, despite pleas from the local judge. Residents told journalists that as many as thirty more people may have been killed, beheaded, and thrown into the Guaviare river. Most of the residents fled after the attack. In a press interview published after the massacre, ACCU leader Carlos Castaño vowed that in the future, there would be "many more cases like Mapiripán."
Elsewhere, the ACCU expanded its influence, moving south from the Caribbean coast into the departments of Bolívar, Magdalena, Santander, Sucre, and Cesar, with massacres, killings, death threats, and forced displacement marking its advance. Since October 1996, the ACCU has repeatedly entered Panama, where it has killed and threatened local villagers it accuses of providing guerrillas with food and medicine.
Despite the announcement of a U.S. $1 million reward for information leading to the capture of ACCU leader Castaño, nothing was done to capture him or his forces. After highly decorated army Col. Carlos Velásquez reported in 1996 that his superiors at Urabá's 17th Brigade had failed to pursue the ACCU, rather than investigate his information fully, the military cashiered him. Near San José de Apartadó, for instance, a combined force of paramilitaries and army soldiers reportedly executed José Macario David Góez, a mentally retarded man, on March 27. on March 27. Afterward, soldiers apparently dressed David's body in a military uniform and presented him to the press as a guerrilla killed in combat.
Other paramilitaries also operated in Colombia virtually unimpeded by the authorities, among them the Northeast Self-Defense Group (Grupo de Autodefensa del Nordeste, GAN) around Segovia and Remedios in Antioquia. Since the 1980s, when paramilitaries allied with the army's Bomboná Battalion carried out a series of massacres, this region has been tormented with political killings. After the killings of three human rights workers in March [see The Right to Monitor, below], authorities convened a "security meeting" to discuss ways to prevent further attacks. Nevertheless, on August 2, the GAN reportedly took seven people from their homes in Remedios, including former mayor and Patriotic Union member Carlos Rojo Uribe, then executed five of them on the road to Segovia. Rojo and teacher Luis Alberto Munera, also a member of the Segovia Human Rights Committee, were taken to Segovia, where they were shot. In September, some alleged GAN members were arrested.
During the year, several peace initiatives were begun, but, as was obvious from behavior of the parties to the conflict, there was no real commitment to negotiating an end to the fighting. As October 26 elections neared, elected officials and candidates throughout Colombia came under increasing attack. Both the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN) and FARC vowed to stop elections in a dozen departments. The ACCU and its allies in the United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC) coalitionannounced in May that they would prevent pro-guerrilla "proselytizing" in areas of conflict, which candidates considered a threat against those who failed to embrace their views.
Within a month after aspirants had to submit their names to the National Electoral Registry, authorities reported that over 900 had canceled their candidacies due to threats. While similar elections in 1994 were suspended in nine municipalities, as of mid-September, there were fifteen municipalities without mayoral candidates. In the words of one candidate who withdrew, "to be a candidate for mayor or even town council in many rural areas. . .is to search out a death foretold."
In the first eight months of 1997, government authorities reported that ten mayors had been murdered, representing towns in eight departments. In addition, thirty-six town council members were killed. Even candidates' family members were the frequent targets of death threats and kidnaping. Colombia remained the world's leader in reported kidnappings, close to half of which were carried out by rebels. According to government authorities, between November 1996 and August 1997, forty-one mayors were kidnaped.
Both paramilitaries and guerrillas also threatened journalists. Among them was Alfredo Molano, who reported that in August he received a paramilitary threat suggesting that he was a "subversive encysted" in the government because of his work for the government's High Commissioner for Peace. In turn, the FARC announced in June that it would consider journalists who wrote what they considered "apology for militarism" legitimate military targets.
Far from protecting threatened mayors, the security forces appeared largely powerless or unwilling to pursue their attackers. To the contrary, mayors themselves became the targets of army investigations for supposed ties to guerrillas. An army intelligence report leaked to the newsweekly Semana in May alleged that 650 municipal governments-more than half of those in Colombia-had either direct ties with guerrillas or collaborated with them. Dozens of mayors protested, saying the information was tantamount "to putting a gravestone over our heads." The mayor of Sogamoso, Boyacá, a Catholic priest, filed formal charges against the government for defamation, and the army later disavowed its report.
Instead of moving aggressively to protect the civilian population and ensure its neutral status, the government promoted Rural Watch Cooperatives Cooperativas de Vigilancia y Seguridad Rural, CONVIVIR), made up of civilians authorized to gather intelligence for the security forces, join maneuvers, and use weapons banned for private ownership, including machine guns, mortars, grenades, and assault rifles. Although CONVIVIRs receive a government license, the identities of their members remain anonymous even to local authorities.
In 1997, we received credible reports that CONVIVIRs in the Middle Magdalena and southern Cesar regions were led by known paramilitaries and had threatened and killed Colombians deemed sympathetic to guerrillas or who refused to join. On February 3, a CONVIVIR patrolling with the army's Fourteenth Brigade near the village of San Francisco, in Santander, apparently executed Norberto Galeano, Reynaldo Ríos, and a seventy-year-old man, then dismembered their bodies. Two months earlier, the same group had been linked to the massacre of at least seven people in the nearby villages of La Congoja and Puerto Nuevo, prompting the mass displacement of over 700 villagers.
Along with the CCJ, fourteen human rights groups filed a suit with the Constitutional Court calling for Decree 356, which regulates CONVIVIR, to be declared unconstitutional. In its brief, the CCJ argued that through CONVIVIR, the Samper administration was arming civilians in violation of the constitution. Given Colombia's tragic history of paramilitary violence,executive director Gustavo Gallón noted in an August 26 hearing before the court, a decree that "permits the organization and development of paramilitary groups. . .is contrary to the essence of the State's rule of law."
Dozens of government officials, mayors, and religious leaders also objected to CONVIVIR, among them Attorney General Alfonso Gómez Méndez, who argued that CONVIVIR involved civilians in the armed conflict, thus excluding them from the humanitarian protections granted by Protocol II Additional to the Geneva Conventions.
"With the organization of CONVIVIR," Gómez noted, "the Colombian state once again has fallen into the error of promoting the creation of `armed individuals,' who intensify problems of illegal repression and war without quarter."
In August, even President Samper admitted that some CONVIVIRs "have transgressed their legal boundaries to assume combat roles." Subsequently, the government announced that it would suspend the creation of new CONVIVIRs.
Guerrillas also committed serious abuses during 1997, among them massacres. On March 9, presumed members of the FARC's 34th Front opened fire on an ice cream parlor in Currulao, Antioquia, killing nine people, including parlor owner Danilo Valencia Naranjo.
The FARC was believed to have sent the April book bomb that killed Pedro Agudelo, the seventeen-year-old son of Hope, Peace and Liberty party (Esperanza, Paz y Libertad) leader Mario Agudelo.
The FARC made a practice of attacking civilian targets, putting the lives of noncombatants at serious risk. In January, guerrillas apparently activated a bomb in front of a Medellín skyscraper, killing four passers by and wounding forty-one others.
In September, one of Colombia's largest hydroelectric plants was the target, causing the government to recommend that families begin limiting their use of electricity.
The ELN also committed serious violations, among them targeted killings. According to press reports and information gathered by human rights groups, the ELN was responsible for at least forty-nine political killings in the first nine months of 1997. Among the victims were farmers, mayors, an employee of the attorney general's office, and children. In addition, the ELN apparently killed several security force agents hors de combat, among them three soldiers captured and executed on August 3 near El Playón, Santander.
The ELN stepped up its use of car bombs, registering dozens of attacks in the first six months of 1997. In an attack on March 17, a car bomb in Cúcuta, Norte de Santander, apparently detonated by the "Resistencia Yariguíes" Front of the ELN, killed eighteen-month-old Martha Liliana Riveros and left several others wounded.
Kidnaping remained a common tactic of paramilitaries and guerrillas, who routinely took family members of combatants as hostages. Since 1996, the ACCU kidnaped over a dozen family members of guerrillas, seven of whom were released on March 26 under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Several political kidnapings led to deaths. On May 5, the FARC announced that Congressman Rodrigo Turbay Cote, kidnaped in 1995, had died while being transported along the Caguán river in his native department of Caquetá, apparently after falling from a canoe. In retaliation, paramilitaries who had kidnaped two family members of an ELN commander announced that they were executed in May.
Three Americans kidnaped by the FARC in 1993 remained missing as of this writing- Richard Tenenhoff, David Mankins, and Mark Rich. The FARC was also implicated in theexecution-style slaying of two kidnap victims, Austrian Johan Kehrer and German Alexander Scheurer, in the Chocó jungle in March.
The forced displacement of civilians continued to be part of the strategy of war used by all sides, particularly paramilitaries. In March, the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos y el Desplazamiento, CODHES), nongovernmental organization (NGO), estimated that between 1985 and 1996, 920,000 people had been displaced by violence, an average of one in every forty Colombians. According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) in Colombia, 72 percent of the displaced were children.
The year was marked by forced displacements on a massive scale not seen previously. In March, more than 13,000 people, most from black minority communities, fled their homes along the Riosucio river in the northwest department of Chocó after paramilitaries took control in December 1996 and the army carried out indiscriminate air attacks two months later. After a difficult journey through the jungle during which several people reportedly died, the army blocked the passage of peasants fleeting to the town of Mutatá. The refugees were prohibited from making the journey. There were credible reports that a soldier fired on a group of the displaced attempting to reach Mutatá in April and seriously injured two people, including a girl. A court later found the government, specifically the army, responsible for causing the forced displacement, and ordered authorities to ensure the families' safe return to their homes.
Nevertheless, as of this writing, thousands of displaced from Riosucio continue to live in crowded camps at Pavarandó Grande, without sufficient food, water, or health care. Paramilitaries threatened to enter the camp to kill displaced, and reportedly assassinated several people in nearby towns.
The Samper administration responded to mass displacement by creating the post of "presidential counselor for the "displaced" in April, adopting a revised national plan on displacement in May, and promulgating Law 387 in July, which dealt specifically with assistance, protection, and prevention issues. Advocates criticized the government for promoting the return of the displaced to their homes without guaranteeing their safety, highlighting mandatory registration requirements and lack of funds as serious flaws in the new law. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees opened an office in June by invitation of the Colombian government, but no formal agreement about the scope of the agency's activities had been reached at the time of this writing.
Doubts about the government's ability to effectively address the problem of forced displacement were deepened by the case of 280 families violently evicted by paramilitaries from the Bellacruz Ranch in the department of Cesar in February 1996. With twenty-six of at least twenty-eight arrest warrants against the implicated paramilitaries still outstanding, the families were unable to return, and most were resettled on unirrigated land that allowed only a precarious existence. In May, the Constitutional Court issued an injunction protecting the rights of the Bellacruz peasants after the governor of Cundinamarca refused to allow the families, whom she accused of being subversives, to resettle in her jurisdiction.
In April, some 300 Colombians were forcibly repatriated from Panama to Bahía Cupica, Chocó, after the UNHCR was denied access to interview them in Panama. Safe conditions for their return did not exist, and the repatriated families were evacuated from Bahía Cupica on an emergency basis in September after paramilitaries circulated a list of twelve people they intended to kill or kidnap.
In Colombia's jails, prisoners cited severe overcrowding, lack of medical care, and isolation as the reasons behind a series of coordinated protests that began in January and continued through June. A census by the National Penitentiary Institute, responsible for administering Colombia's prisons, showed that although Colombia has the capacity to house 30,000 prisoners, as of April 1997, it reported holding 42,000 inmates, half of whom were still awaiting trial for common crimes and rebellion. In the Valledupar prison, in Cesar, armed inmates and imprisoned members of the ELN killed four prison guards and took sixteen other people hostage, including a fourteen-year-old girl, in April before agreeing to surrender to authorities and releasing the hostages unharmed.
Given the serious problems of internal displacement, hostage-taking, and violence, the ICRC took an increasingly important role in Colombia, boosting its in-country staff to forty-three people and maintaining nine offices. The organization brokered prisoner exchanges, visited prisoners and hostages, aided the wounded and displaced, and assisted threatened Colombians to flee the country. According to ICRC estimates, their office assisted in the release of forty hostages between August 1996 and March 1997. The ICRC also gave presentations on international humanitarian law to ACCU members and guerrillas.
Human rights defenders continued to be the targets of attack and threats. On May 19, Mario Calderón, an employee of the Center for Research and Popular Education (Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, CINEP), Elsa Alvarado, his wife and a former CINEP employee, and Carlos Alvarado, Elsa's father, were killed by masked gunmen in their Bogotá apartment, apparently in retaliation for their human rights work. Although Alvarado's mother was seriously wounded, the couple's eighteen-month-old son was unharmed. On September 28, authorities in Medellín arrested five people who may have taken part in the killing.
In Segovia, Antioquia, GAN continued to work in close coordination with the army's Bomboná Battalion, an alliance considered complicit in the March 9 murder of Nazareno de Jesús Rivera, a Segovia Human Rights Committee member. The same day, colleague Jaime Ortiz Londoño was forcibly disappeared. On March 12, the Army's Fourteenth Brigade falsely displayed Rivera's body to the press as "a guerrilla killed in action" and showed reporters Ortiz's identity documents. On March 23, a former member of the same group, Margarita Guzmán, was killed in her office, apparently for her work for the authorities investigating Rivera's death and Ortiz's "disappearance."
Also on March 7, Víctor Julio Garzón, the secretary general of an agrarian association and a well-known human rights defender, was killed by unidentified gunmen in his Bogotá office. Garzón was a member of the Meta Civic Committee for Human Rights, all but extinguished after its members have been systematically killed. Although international outrage followed the 1996 murder of Josué Giraldo, president of the Meta Civic Committee for Human Rights, at this writing, no arrests have been made in his case, which remained in preliminary investigation along with most other investigations into past killings of human rights monitors.
Community leaders who spoke out about human rights continued to be targets. On October 6, FARC members, apparently angered by the decision of San José de Apartadó residents not to supply food, abducted and killed Luis Hernando Goes, Luis Fernando Aguirre, and Ramiro Correa. The three were members of a civic group working to make the town neutral territory in the battle among guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the army. Another civic leader, Francisco Tabarquino, had been killed by paramilitaries on May 17.
Government workers who investigated cases involving links between the security forces and paramilitaries were also killed or forced to leave the country for their safety. Among them, former Yondó, Antioquia, ombudsman Gustavo Núñez was pulled from a public bus by paramilitaries near Barrancabermeja and killed on August 8.
Other human rights defenders were the targets of threats and surveillance by members of the security forces. Wilson Patiño, a human rights activist from Remedios, Antioquia, was forced to leave the area after armed men came to his home on March 20, apparently to kill him. On May 24, Neftalí Vanegas Perea, a human rights defender in Ocaña, Norte de Santander, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by armed men believed to be working in league with the security forces.
The offices of the Association of Family Members of the Detained and Disappeared (Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos, ASFADDES) were the target of a June 24 bombing that destroyed the group's archives. Subsequently, organization members in Medellín and Riosucio, Chocó, received several threats, including that of a telephone caller who claimed that "the bomb was only a warning, so it would be better if you left the office." Two branch offices were later closed for fear of attacks, and the group's president and her family were forced to leave the country for their safety.
Other human rights workers reported receiving threats related to their work. After a series of massacres in the Middle Magdalena region, five human rights workers associated with the Regional Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights (Corporación Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, CREDHOS) were informed that their names appeared on death lists being circulated by paramilitaries. In September, members of the Association for the Promotion of Social Alternatives (Asociación para la Promoción Social Alternativa, MINGA) said that suspicious men were watching their offices and were following the MINGA and ASFADDES members working there.
In response to the killings of human rights defenders, thirty-six human rights groups, unions, religious groups, and indigenous groups petitioned the government in May and again in June for investigations into attacks, the punishment of those responsible, an end to the military's verbal attacks on their work, and guarantees of protection. A key demand was for an aggressive and immediate law enforcement effort to identify, track down, and arrest members of paramilitary groups and their security force patrons, an effort, the groups noted, that should be given equal status with punishing drug traffickers and guerrillas.
In a partial acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation, President Samper issued a directive honoring the work of human rights defenders and explicitly barring government officials, including the army, from making statements that "falsely accuse or belittle the right to a defense, due process and the honor [of human rights defenders]" on July 16. Subsequently, groups met with the government, and on September 9, Colombia's Human Rights Day, President Samper announced the creation of a Human Rights Council to coordinate actions among the government's multiple human rights offices.
April 7 marked the official opening of the Bogotá office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, led by Amb. Almudena Mazarrasa and staffed by five experts and a deputy director. At this writing, it is too early to judge the effectiveness of the office, but at least one ofthe objectives in establishing it was achieved: the office pressed the government on issues of concern to the commission, including reforms to the military penal code and CONVIVIR. Experts traveled throughout the country and held regular meetings with government officials, representatives of human rights groups, and Colombians wishing to deliver complaints.
Nevertheless, the Human Rights Committee continued to lament Colombia's failure to implement its repeated recommendations, and noted that "gross and massive human rights violations continue to occur in Colombia." The Committee expressed its "deep concern" over evidence that paramilitary groups "receive support from members of the military" and that "impunity continues to be a widespread phenomenon."
Some European embassies and diplomats took high-profile roles in attempting to lessen political violence and the suffering it caused. In April, Netherlands Amb. Gysbert Bos made a three-day visit to the Middle Magdalena region, in part to draw attention to a rise in paramilitary activity and displacement. The visit was seen as especially important given that the Netherlands occupied the presidency of the EU.
For its part, the EU continued to pressure Colombia to improve its human rights record, and announced in September its full support for a negotiated settlement to political conflict.
The European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) donated U.S. $5 million dollars in emergency aid to international NGOs to assist the thousands of people forcibly displaced earlier in the year in Urabá.
The Organization of American States agreed to send a team to Colombia to monitor municipal elections in areas where guerrillas and paramilitaries had threatened candidates. Two monitors, a Guatemalan and a Chilean, were kidnaped by the ELN and held for more than a week before being released. For its part, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission continued to hear Colombian cases and took part in several efforts to resolve cases through so-called "friendly negotiation" between victims and the government. However, in several high-profile cases, including the 1990 Trujillo massacre and the 1994 Villatina massacre, this effort had not, at this writing, borne tangible fruit.
In October, two Colombian human rights groups formally presented to the commission the case involving Navy Intelligence Network No. 7 and its involvement in the killings of at least sixty-eight people from 1991 to 1993 in and around Barrancabermeja, Santander. The case was detailed in Colombia's Killer Networks: The Military-Paramilitary Partnership and the United States, published by Human Rights Watch in November 1996.
The United States pursued a contradictory policy in Colombia. On the one hand, the Clinton administration for the first time made human rights an important part of U.S.-Colombia relations. In 1997, the State Department issued its most detailed and critical human rights report ever, concluding that "the [Colombian] armed forces committed numerous, serious human rights abuses." In addition, the report noted, "the Samper administration has not taken action to curb increased abuses committed by paramilitary groups, verging on a policy of tacit acquiescence."
This report was followed by an April letter from Secretary of State Madeline Albright toSen. Patrick Leahy, co-sponsor of a 1996 amendment that placed human rights conditions on some antinarcotics aid. In the letter, Secretary Albright announced that the spirit of the amendment would be applied to all anti-narcotics aid, including monies suspended after Colombia was "decertified" a second time in a row for failing to meet U.S. goals in fighting drugs. In an unusual move, the U.S. embassy publicly expressed its concern over the tone used by military authorities to attack civilian investigators who linked General Yanine to the Puerto Araujo massacre, the first time it had spoken publicly on a human rights case.
For its principled stand, the administration was harshly criticized by some Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who argued that human rights concerns hampered the drug war. Led by the International Relations Committee and its chair, Rep. Benjamin Gilman, Republicans attempted to remove the Leahy amendment from the 1998 Foreign Operations bill, an initiative that failed.
Although the Clinton administration acknowledged that Colombia's human rights situation continued to be serious, it also pushed hard for aid to the military to fight drugs, arguing that funds would be channeled to units without bad records. After months of tense negotiations, the Colombian and U.S. governments signed an end-use monitoring agreement on August 1, freeing $70 million of the $100 million slated to reach Colombia in 1997, much of it for the army and navy. Among the items sent were communications equipment, night vision scopes, and parts for helicopters and river patrol boats. Police continued to receive aid throughout the year, including munitions and weapons. However, the agreement on military aid left monitoring to the Colombian Defense Ministry, not U.S. officials, who were severely limited in their ability to verify any reports.
Cuba voiced muffled support for human rights and representative democracy in the past year, as it moved toward greater economic engagement with Europe, Canada, Asia, and Latin America. But the government revealed an intransigent reliance on political oppression to crush internal opposition through its repressive measures against dissidents, failure to amnesty political prisoners, continuing blockage of human rights monitoring, creation of new laws restricting human rights, and refusal to dismantle oppressive legal structures.
In one of Cuba's strongest statements favoring human rights, President Fidel Castro Ruz signed the Viña del Mar Declaration, endorsing support for democracy and respect for human rights, fundamental liberties, and the principles consecrated in the United Nations Charter, at the Sixth Iberoamerican Summit of leaders in Chile in November 1996. On January 9, 1997, however, Cuba flaunted its disdain for the agreement by arresting Héctor Palacios Ruiz, the president of the Democratic Solidarity Party (Partido Solidaridad Democrática, PSD), charging him with contempt for the authority of President Castro and seizing his copies of the Viña del Mar Declaration. Palacios Ruiz, whom the Cuban government sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment on September 4, had challenged the government's willingness to comply with the declaration in an interview with a German journalist.
Palacios Ruiz's trial, and Cuba's refusal to amnesty political prisoners, highlighted the government's reliance on its prison system as the backbone of its repressive tactics. Once again, in the past year the government failed to reform a penal code that criminalized the exercise offundamental rights under provisions such as "enemy propaganda," "contempt for authority," "illicit association," "dangerousness," and "illegal exit." Cuban courts routinely denied basic due process guarantees, including sufficient and timely access to lawyers, the right to present witnesses and evidence for the defense, and open courtrooms free of intimidation.
Among the dissidents prosecuted in the last year was Enrique García Morejón, a member of the Christian Liberation Movement (Movimiento Cristiano de Liberación, MCL), sentenced in February 1997 to four years in prison for enemy propaganda. The court alleged that he had distributed flyers saying "Down with Fidel," but reportedly the charge arose from his collecting signatures for the MCL's unsuccessful attempt to obtain legal status. In May 1997, Cuban authorities sentenced Ana María Agramonte Crespo, a member of the Nationalist Action Movement (Movimiento de Acción Nacionalista), to eighteen months for contempt for authority and resistance to authority. A Cuban court condemned Ricardo De Armas Hernández, a member of the PSD in Matanzas, to nine months for dangerousness in May. Confined in the harsh Agüica prison, De Armas reportedly suffered beatings by prisoners held for common crimes in August. In August 1997, a court convicted Luis Mario Pared Estrada,, a leader of the Thirtieth of November Party "Frank Pais" (Partido 30 de Noviembre "Frank Pais"), of dangerousness and sentenced him to one year. In September, a Havana court convicted his colleague, Maritza Lugo Fernández of bribery, for allegedly trying to pay a prison guard to bring a prisoner a tape recorder.
A Cuban court also convicted Néstor Rodríguez Lobaina, the president of Youth for Democracy ( Jóvenes por la Democracia), of contempt for authority and resisting arrest on April 10, 1997, sentencing him to eighteen months. In September, several prison guards beat him after he began a hunger strike to protest prison conditions. On June 17, 1997, a court sentenced Radames García de la Vega, a vice-president of Youth for Democracy, to eighteen months for contempt for authority. In late July, the government convicted Heriberto Leyva Rodríguez, a vice-president of the same group, of contempt for authority of the Santiago court, reportedly based on his testimony at Garciá de la Vega's appeal hearing earlier that month.
The dissidents convicted of political crimes in 1997 joined over 800 additional political prisoners in Cuba's extensive prison system. Prison conditions remained poor for all inmates, and dissidents suffered particularly abusive treatment. Political prisoners often suffered dramatic weight loss due to meager food rations; serious, and sometimes life-threatening, health problems due to insufficient medical attention; and, in some cases, abuses at the hands of guards or common criminals, with whom they routinely were mixed. Prison authorities forced some imprisoned dissidents to spend periods in isolation cells, restricted their visits, or transferred them far from family members. The punitive and intimidatory measures against political prisoners that caused severe pain and suffering violated Cuba's obligations under the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which it ratified in 1995. Once again, in the past year the government forbade access to its prisons by international human rights monitors and humanitarian groups, including the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Guards at the Kilo 8 prison, which is known for its extremely harsh conditions, persisted in their abusive treatment of Jesús Chamber Rodríguez. He suffered deteriorating health due to confinement in punishment cells, insufficient medical attention, poor nutrition, and denial of access to sunlight for weeks at a time. Chamber Rodríguez began serving a ten-year sentence for enemy propaganda in 1992, but Cuban authorities sentenced him to four more years in 1996 forcontempt of authority, apparently based on his criticizing prison conditions and shouting "down with Fidel." Jorge Luis García Pérez, known as Antúnez, who began serving seventeen years for enemy propaganda, sabotage, and "evasion" in 1990, also received harsh treatment from prison authorities. Prison guards responded to Antúnez's hunger strikes, in protest of prison conditions, by denying him family visits and medicine. In September, guards at the Guantanamo prison beat Antúnez after he criticized the government.
Cuban failures to provide medical care left many political prisoners in critical condition. Omar Del Pozo Marrero, a doctor who received a fifteen-year sentence in 1992 and was held at the Combinado del Este prison, suffered severe hypertension and malnutrition in 1997, due to insufficient medical care, bars on his access to sunlight for several week periods, and restrictions on family visits. Prison authorities at Kilo 8 did not provide Eduardo Gómez Sánchez, who was sentenced in 1994 to twenty years for illegal exit and rebellion, with appropriate treatment for a liver ailment that turned his skin yellow and caused vomiting, diarrhea, and weight loss.
Cuba's efforts to stifle criticism reached inside prison walls as well, where prisoners protesting inhumane treatment faced retaliatory measures, including beatings, isolation, and criminal prosecution. On January 21, 1997, a Cuban court convicted Víctor Reinaldo Infante Estrada, whom a Cuban military court sentenced to thirteen years in prison in 1992, to one additional year for contempt of authority. The court based Infante Estrada's second sentence on his denouncing abuses at the Agüica prison, where he was held. In May, when he demanded improved medical treatment, the prison authorities punished him again, by confining him to an isolation cell for over one month.
Security forces harassed and arbitrarily detained scores of nonviolent activists in the past year. Government repression touched broad sectors of civil society, including academics, human rights activists, labor organizers, religious leaders, youth groups, and unofficial political parties. Cuban authorities notified many dissidents that they were at risk of criminal prosecutions if they did not abandon their "counter-revolutionary" activities or leave the country. Activists fled Cuba in response to these warnings, including Miguel Angel Aldana, a leader of the Martiana Civic Association (Asociación Cívica Martiana), who left for the United States in April 1997, after Cuban authorities threatened him with a four-year sentence for dangerousness. Cuba employed diverse methods to control dissident groups: conducting unauthorized searches; firing employees; seizing fax machines and photocopiers; making unsupported allegations of links between activists and terrorists (specifically regarding the eleven bombs that targeted Cuban tourist destinations between April and September); and, denying dissident groups any legal recognition. The government also heightened harassment of homosexuals, raiding several nightclubs known to have gay clientele and allegedly beating and detaining dozens of patrons.
Official intent to silence dissenting voices was glaringly manifest in the July 15, 1997 detentions of four prominent, nonviolent leaders of the Internal Dissidents' Working Group (Grupo de Trabajo de la Disidencia Interna, GTDI): professor Félix Antonio Bonne Carcasses, economists Marta Beatriz Roque Cabello and Vladimiro Roca Antúnez, and attorney René Gómez Manzano. On May 5, the group held a well-attended press conference encouraging a boycott of elections planned for late 1997. In June, the GTDI issued a statement titled The Motherland Belongs to All (La Patria es de Todos), which challenged Cuba's exclusive recognition of one political party. Cuban authorities categorized the dissidents' peaceful protests as "counter-revolutionary crimes." At this writing, the four leaders remain in prison facing possible trial for enemy propaganda and revealing state secrets, reportedly about the Cubanelectoral system.
Cuba continued to exercise strict control over labor rights during 1997, refusing to allow the formation of any independent unions. The Foreign Investment Law required all investors to hire employees through the government-controlled employment agency, which apparently selected some workers based on political viewpoints. Independent labor activists faced government harassment. State security agents interrogated Manuel Antonio Brito López, the secretary general for the Union of Independent Workers (Unión de Trabajadores Independientes), in Havana on July 12, advising him to restrict his movement until August 6, the final day of the International World Festival of Youth and Students.
In preparation for the October 1997 Fifth Communist Party Congress, in late May the government released a position paper titled The Party of Unity, Democracy, and Human Rights that We Defend, which praised Cuba's allegedly spotless human rights record. Yet, the document called upon the "truly free" press to "guarantee the continuity of socialist, patriotic, and anti-imperialist ideas and values, and the Revolution itself...." Meanwhile, the government manifested its disdain for genuine press freedoms throughout the year. In July, Cuban authorities sentenced Lorenzo Paez Núñez, a journalist with the Habana Press agency in Pinar del Río, to eighteen months for contempt and defamation of the police, based on his having reported alleged police abuses.
Cuban authorities relied heavily on both short-and long-term detentions to intimidate journalists. Authorities detained Héctor Peraza Linares, the co-director of Habana Press, in Pinar del Río on June 23, only releasing him in September. Raúl Rivero, the head of Cuba Press, was arrested on July 28 and August 12. Cuban authorities freed Cuba Press journalist Efrén Martínez Pulgarón in mid-September, without charges, following his August 13 detention. Cuba employed other dissuasive tactics as well. On February 26, the authorities harassed Tania Quintero and her colleague Ana Luisa Baeza, of Cuba Press, with "repudiation meetings" (mítines de repudio) in which groups of up to sixty government sympathizers gathered outside the women's homes, throwing objects and shouting criticisms. Following a February 21 arrest, Joaquín Torres Alvarez, the director of Habana Press, was beaten in May by several assailants whom he later identified as members of the State Security forces and representatives of his neighborhood's Communist Party office.
The government permitted a small number of permanent international news bureaus to operate in Cuba, including, as of March 19, the U.S.-based Cable News Network (CNN). While the U.S. government approved licenses for nine additional media to open Cuba bureaus, the Cuban government did not allow these companies to do so. In February 1997, new regulations granted Cuban authorities the right to reprimand or withdraw credentials from foreign reporters who had failed to demonstrate "objectivity," accurately represent the facts, or comply with journalistic ethics.
Additional Cuban legal initiatives further narrowed the exercise of free expression, association, and movement. In December 1996, Cuba passed the Law Reaffirming Cuban Dignity and Sovereignty (Ley de Reafirmación de la Dignidad y Soberanía Cubanas, also known as the Gag Law). A response to the Helms-Burton law, which tightened the U.S. embargo, the law created broad restrictions on free expression, criminalizing even the appearance of support for U.S. policies. Cuban authorities then insisted on public manifestations of support for the law. In early 1997, the government circulated a pro-law petition, the Declaration of the Mambises of the Twentieth Century (Declaración de los Mambises del Siglo XX, the "mambises" fought forCuban independence), to mass organizations, schools, universities, and workplaces. On April 7, Cuban authorities briefly detained Fidel Emilio Abel Tamayo, the father of one of several schoolchildren who had refused to sign the declaration in March.
In April, Cuba extended its control over citizens' movements with the passage of Decree 217, which directed all but "legal" residents to leave Havana. President Castro praised the initiative's potential for minimizing "indiscipline." By late April, the official Cuban press announced that the government had returned more than 1,600 "illegal residents" of Havana to their home provinces "using persuasive methods." Cuba also retained its prohibition on unapproved emigration and continued to prosecute for "illegal exit." In October 1996, Cuban authorities sentenced Abel Denis Ambroise Sanville to fourteen months for illegal exit.
Cuba attempted to weaken United Nations human rights mechanisms. As it had in 1996, Cuba pushed for a narrower mandate for the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, which previously had censured Cuba. At the Human Rights Commission's fifty-third session in Geneva in March and April 1997, Cuba successfully lobbied to restrict the Working Group's scope. Cuba also co-sponsored a resolution urging member states not to employ coercive economic or political measures against countries in response to negative human rights practices.
The government barred international human rights groups' access to the country, as well as access by the ICRC and the U.N. Special Rapporteur. In September 1997 Human Rights Watch requested permission to conduct independent investigation in Cuba, having been denied access since 1995. In October, the request was denied.
Odilia Collazo Valdés, the president of the Pro Human Rights Party (Partido Pro Derechos Humanos, PPDH), suffered repeated arrests during 1997, as did other PPDH members, including Maité Moya Gómez and Jorge Luis Rodríguez. On October 23, a Cuban court in Santa Clara convicted eleven members of the PPDH of "association to commit criminal acts" (asociacion para delinquir) and "disobedience," with sentences ranging from one year of house arrest (María Felicia Mata Machada) to one and one-half year in prison or at a prison work camp (José Antonio Alvarado Almeida, Ileana Peñalver Duque, Roxana Alina Carpio Mata, Lilian Meneses Martínez, Arélis Fleites Méndez, Marlis Velázquez Aparicio, Iván Lema Romero, Danilo Santos Méndez, Vicente García Ramos, and José Manuel Yera Meneses). The trial occurred after the activists held a hunger strike to protest the government's detention of another PPDH member, Daula Carpio Mata. The judge reportedly allowed the defense attorney less than ten minutes to present testimony from all of the defendants. On October 29, the court sentenced Carpio Mata to sixteen months internment in a work camp for assault, following her outspoken criticisms of an earlier trial.
René Gómez Manzano, an attorney with the Agromontista Current (Corriente Agromontista), a legal defense group, and leader of the Internal Dissidents' Working Group, remains in detention at this writing. After repeated prior denials, Cuba granted Elizardo Sánchez Santacruz, the leader of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (Comisión Cubana para los Derechos Humanos y la Reconciliación Nacional) permission for international travel in early 1997 and did allow him to return to Cuba. On May 30, the Cuban government detained Sánchez's colleague, Moisés Rodríguez Quezada, for seventy-two hours, warning him to abandon his work or leave Cuba.
In November 1996, the General Assembly again voted to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba. In April 1997, the fifty-third session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission again censured Cuban human rights practices. As in prior years, Cuba dismissed the resolution as slanderous. Cuba's efforts, described above, to weaken U.N. human rights mechanisms met with some success. The government refused to allow the Special Rapporteur on Cuba, Swedish diplomat Carl-Johan Groth, to conduct in-country research, but he nonetheless provided excellent coverage of Cuban human rights developments.
In March, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a detailed report on Cuba's lack of compliance with the American Convention on Human Rights. Acknowledging that the Cuban government was excluded from the inter-American system in 1962, the commission nonetheless stressed that the Cuban state retained its obligations to uphold international human rights standards for its population.
On December 2, 1996, the European Union Council of Ministers adopted a new, stronger policy toward Cuba, known as the "common position," to "encourage a process of transition to pluralist democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms...." The policy made full economic cooperation conditional on human rights improvements, including penal code reform, the release of political prisoners, an end to harassment of dissidents, the ratification of international human rights conventions, and respect for the freedoms of speech and association. When its review of political and economic developments in Cuba revealed no notable progress, on June 26, the E.U. renewed the common position for an additional six months. Unfortunately, European investors in Cuba, as well as Canadians and others, failed to adopt effective strategies to ensure respect for labor rights in their Cuban workplaces, where government-dominated projects denied basic rights of free association and speech.
Canada's role as a leading foreign investor in Cuba provided it with important leverage for pressuring Cuba to make genuine human rights reforms during 1997. Yet, Canada's most significant human rights initiative, the January 1997 joint declaration between the Canadian and Cuban foreign ministries, included no concrete agenda for improvements in Cuban human rights practices. Relying on the principle of "effective influence," the accord, which also addressed foreign investment, taxation, banking, and other issues, provided that Cuba and Canada would cooperate on human rights issues by holding seminars, training judges, and "exchang[ing] experiences" relevant to Cuba's intent to support a citizen's complaint commission. Unfortunately, the Cuban government, which detained several dissidents during the negotiations, showed little sign of taking the accord seriously. A Cuban Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that "it is a blatant exaggeration to say that the inclusion of the issues of human rights in a broad and diverse joint declaration with Canada implies the existence of problems in this regard on the island." At this writing, the joint accord has resulted in informal bilateral talks on human rights in Havana early in the year, closed seminars on children's and women's rights in May and June,and preparatory meetings regarding legal reforms and a Cuban citizen complaint commission.
In the past year, the U.S. government could not point to human rights gains in Cuba arising from its anachronistic thirty-year policy of isolation. President Clinton acknowledged that the policy had failed in April, when he noted that the embargo had not created "an appreciable change in the Cuban regime...." The embargo, which was solidified in 1996 with the passage of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act (also known as the Helms-Burton law), continued to restrict the rights to free expression and association and the freedom to travel between the U.S. and Cuba, thus violating Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty ratified by the United States. The government's granting of ten licenses permitting U.S. media outlets to operate in Cuba was a positive step, but still reflected tight government control over communication between the two countries.
The Dominican government committed serious human rights abuses during President Leonel Fernández Reyna's first year in power. Police and members of the military used excessive force against criminal suspects, prisoners, and individuals participating in peaceful public demonstrations, and routinely violated due process rights. Dominican prisoners, particularly minors, suffered in deplorable conditions, and some 85 percent of detainees were held without trial, many for long periods.
On February 23, police reacting to a disturbance in the Azua prison reportedly killed three unarmed boys in cold blood. Two police lieutenants, one named Méndez and another known as "Gomera," reportedly lined up the seventeen-year-old boys, Roberto Rafael Corporán, José Ignacio Payano Núñez, and José Paredes Gutiérrez, against an interior wall of the prison and fired repeatedly at them with shotguns, killing them while other inmates pleaded for the three youths' lives. The government opened an investigation, initially concluding that the three boys had been killed while trying to escape the prison, but have not released final results of its inquiry at this writing.
On November 18, 1996, at least one-hundred heavily-armed Dominican police entered a squatters' settlement known as "El Café," on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, to evict approximately 600 families. The police fired weapons and tear gas, wounding at least ten residents. One police officer reportedly fired at Alfredo D'Oleo Encarnación, who was unarmed and standing on his patio, killing him. The government has not concluded its investigation of the El Café incident at this writing.
Dominican security forces using excessive force killed over thirty other individuals in the past year. The police and military involved in shootings frequently invoked the defense that they had been fired upon before shooting, but witnesses often contradicted their accounts. Among these cases, on March 7, army Sgt. Roberto Reyes Familia was riding his motorcycle in Santo Domingo when a vehicle side-swiped him. Reyes Familia fired at the vehicle, killing Antonio Santos Caraballo. On September 26, police invoked self-defense in the deaths of two suspected criminals in the Capotillo region of Santo Domingo, but onlookers allegedly saw police shoot the suspects after they had laid down their weapons. In May, police conducting a drug raid inCapotillo allegedly saw José Ramírez swallow a package of crack cocaine. As the police beat him with their weapons, Ramírez began to foam at the mouth and lost consciousness. The police left Ramírez at the scene. He died three hours later, as neighbors were transporting him to a hospital. While the immediate cause of Ramírez's death remained uncertain, police used excessive force in beating him and were negligent in failing to provide him with medical assistance.
Police reportedly tortured several detainees in the past year. On January 27, police arrested Ramón Vizcaino and his wife Rosie Cuevas in Vicente Noble and transported them to the national police headquarters in Santo Domingo. On three occasions over two days, officers in the robbery department beat Vizcaino, using a baseball bat and grabbing his testicles, while insisting that he admit to assisting with an escape plan for the Monte Plata prison. The police then held him for over one month, without providing him with medical treatment for injuries from the beatings, including a hernia. Police also reportedly tortured several suspects by hanging them by handcuffs or thumb screws for extended periods and denying them food, water, and access to toilets.
Dominican police routinely ignored due process protections, such as providing access to lawyers and observing the forty-eight-hour limit on holding detainees in police lock-ups. They also arbitrarily detained criminal suspects' family members as hostages, to entice the suspects to turn themselves in. Police detained Ramona Pozo, the seventy-year-old mother of Ramón Pozo, for three days in July, until her son surrendered to police in Haina.
Dominican authorities used excessive force at several public demonstrations. On April 24, a peaceful demonstration marking the 1965 U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic was disrupted by shots fired from a Navy minibus. Sailors shot Joseliu Perdomo through the back of the leg and wounded several other demonstrators. Police opened fire on the nonviolent crowd at a Santo Domingo rally against rising telephone rates in June, leaving Araceli Pensón and Virtudes Alvarez with injuries from shotgun blasts and wounding several others.
Late in the year, police committed serious human