Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

The Work of Human Rights Watch

Organization of American States

The OAS's electoral observation capacities were severely tested this year in both Peru and Haiti, where election monitoring missions nevertheless successfully avoided the shortcomings of past such teams. In Peru, a mission led by former Guatemalan minister of foreign affairs Eduardo Stein conducted a forthright, transparent, and proactive observation of the electoral process. In Haiti, Barbadian Ambassador Orlando Marville led a team of observers that were the first to discover the fraudulent calculation method that tainted the results of senatorial elections. Both bodies ended up deciding to quit their host countries prior to the completion of the elections, after it had become clear that electoral abuses would not be remedied.

But the OAS showed less initiative in dealing with the results of its monitoring efforts. With regard to Peru, in particular, the OAS Permanent Council rejected a proposal by the United States and Costa Rica for an ad hoc meeting of foreign ministers under Resolution 1080-the provision appropriate to responding to interruptions of democracy-to discuss sanctions against Peru. By a substantial majority, member states showed themselves to be unwilling to take strong measures to respond to unfair elections. This consensus revealed the limits of the OAS's effectiveness in managing interruptions of the democratic process that fall short of a coup d'etat. The limits of Resolution 1080 were also on display in the case of the coup in Ecuador. Despite the ouster of the president, the OAS failed to take action.

Nor did the OAS take concrete actions with regard to Haiti. At this writing, OAS Deputy Secretary General Luigi Enaudi was engaged in negotiations with the Haitian authorities to try to alleviate the worst aspects of the summer's elections, but no reforms had yet been announced.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights sent multiple death penalty cases against Trinidad and Tobago to the Inter-American Court. In 1998, the country announced that it would withdraw from the American Convention on Human Rights so as to eliminate the inter-American human rights system as an avenue of appeal for death row inmates. The withdrawal became effective in 1999, but the cases referred by the commission to the court involved incidents that had occurred when Trinidad and Tobago was still bound by the convention.

In a contrary and positive direction in the Caribbean, Barbados recognized this year the jurisdiction of the court.

United Nations

The United Nations maintained a permanent human rights presence in Colombia and Guatemala, and to a lesser extent in Haiti. In other countries, visiting special rapporteurs and other mechanisms lent their expertise to efforts to address human rights problems. The August-September mission of the U.N. special rapporteur on torture to Brazil, for example, drew public attention to prison abuses and strengthened the credibility of local monitoring groups. Earlier in the year, at the April meeting of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, a resolution censuring the Cuban government for its intolerance of peaceful dissent, among other problems, was instrumental in maintaining pressure for reform.

The Bogotá office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights continued its invaluable work in 2000, visiting regions shaken by war and pressing the Colombian authorities to implement needed reforms. The office's annual report was an accurate and compelling portrayal of the dire state of human rights in Colombia. In a wise decision, the Colombian government agreed to maintain the office until April 2002. Yet, disturbingly, U.N. staff noted a marked drop in cooperation from Colombian officials.

The United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala (Misión de Verificación de las Naciones Unidas en Guatemala, MINUGUA), established after the 1996 peace accords, published reports on the peace process that included detailed analyses of human rights issues. Under the 1996 peace accords, the mandate of MINUGUA was due to expire at year's end. Although President Portillo had requested that MINUGUA extend its stay, at this writing the U.N. General Assembly had not yet decided on the extension.

In Haiti, the six-year-old U.N. human rights monitoring mission departed the country in early 2000, together with the U.N. peacekeeping mission. A smaller human rights mission was subsequently installed: the United Nations International Civilian Support Mission in Haiti (Mission internationale civile d'appui en Haïti, MICAH).

High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson visited Mexico in November 1999, signing an agreement with the government to undertake a human rights technical cooperation program. At this writing, the U.N. and Mexican government had not agreed on the exact nature of the program. Following the high commissioner's visit, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions released a report on Mexico. Although it noted that the government had taken some positive steps, the report concluded: "Unfortunately, these positive undertakings have not been sufficient to correct the situation."

United States

The year 2000 marked the emergence of the United States as a major player in the armed conflict in Colombia, with the approval of the U.S. $1.3 billion aid plan. Debated heatedly yet passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Congress, the Colombia aid package was the largest ever approved for a Latin American country. Although the aid was conditioned on Colombia's compliance with strict human rights conditions, President Clinton waived six of the seven conditions for reasons of U.S. national security on August 22.

Clinton's use of the waiver, made just prior to his visit to Colombia, allowed aid to go forward even as U.S. officials acknowledged that the forces they were funding maintained ties to paramilitary groups, had failed to suspend or prosecute implicated officers, engaged in human rights abuses, and refused to enforce civilian jurisdiction over human rights crimes. With brutal candor, a spokesperson for the office of White House adviser and drug czar retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey explained the president's decision: "You don't hold up the major objective to achieve the minor."

In December 1999, the first U.S.-trained Colombian army battalion completed its training and was deployed. A second battalion began to train the following August. U.S. law mandated that fewer than 500 U.S. troops be in-country at any one time barring an emergency. But reflecting a global trend to "out-source" war, some analysts projected that as many as 1,000 U.S.-related personnel could be in Colombia on any given day, many of them working for private companies under contract to the U.S. military.

The southern Colombian department of Putumayo, home to 50 percent of Colombia's illegal coca crop, was to be the first target of the U.S. eradication strategy. Officials acknowledged that forced population displacement was a likely outcome of the eradication effort, and proposed to set up government-controlled "temporary" camps to distribute assistance. Groups working with the internally displaced protested, saying that the planned activities risked "fomenting the conflict, targeting innocent civilians, and substantially increasing internal displacement in Colombia."

The Clinton Administration, backed by Congress, initially took a strong line against the manipulation of the electoral process in Peru that led to Fujimori's third term. President Clinton directly suggested that the U.S. relationship with Peru would be damaged if democracy was not respected. Yet, when other OAS members states failed to rally to the U.S. call for an ad hoc meeting of ministers under Resolution 1080, the U.S. did not appear to push hard for the measure.

Behind-the-scenes negotiations of U.S. officials during the September video scandal were said to be critical in convincing Fujimori to agree to leave office and to dismantle his hated intelligence apparatus. Yet instead of promoting full accountability in Peru's return to democratic rule, the United States threw its weight behind a scheme by which intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos escaped to Panama to seek political asylum. In October, Montesinos returned to Peru after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in Panama.

On the positive side, important progress was made in the declassification of U.S. documents relating to human rights violations in Chile under military rule. By mid-year, in accordance with a 1999 declassification directive, thousands of documents from the State and Defense Departments and other U.S. agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were released. Some files were held back on the order of the CIA's director, George Tenet, supposedly to conceal sensitive information about intelligence-gathering methods. At this writing, the CIA and other government agencies were preparing for another massive release of documents.

A breakthrough in understanding the role of the CIA in Chile came in September, in response to a 1999 amendment to the fiscal 2000 Intelligence Authorization Act authored by member of the House of Representatives Maurice Hinchey. It required the CIA to submit a report to Congress on its relations with Pinochet's military government, among other aspects of CIA involvement in Chile. In the report, the CIA revealed that it had maintained a liaison with Manuel Contreras, the infamous director of Chile's security agency from 1974 to 1977. The relationship lasted throughout the period in which human rights were grossly and systematically abused in Chile, and it ended a year after the car-bomb murder in Washington, D.C. of Allende's former foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, and his colleague Ronni Moffitt, for which Contreras had been indicted in the United States and convicted in Chile.

Small but symbolic steps were also taken toward easing the decades-old U.S. economic embargo on Cuba, an outmoded policy instrument that Human Rights Watch and many other observers believed to be counterproductive to the human rights cause. After months of debate in congressional committees, both houses of Congress passed legislation in October to allow limited food and medicine sales to Cuba. The measure signaled the first meaningful retreat in nearly four decades in the U.S. policy of economic sanctions against Cuba, but was unlikely to yield more than a small volume of actual business. Because of compromises with conservative lawmakers opposed to loosening the restrictions, no U.S. export credits or private financing would be allowed on food sales. And on the negative side of the balance, the legislation codified restrictions on the travel of U.S. citizens to Cuba.