by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2013 | Indigenous Autonomy, Noncooperation, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Repression at Home
By Colombia Informa; translation by Molly Fohn
After two weeks of peaceful protesting against oil exploitation in Arauca, on February 12 that department’s social organizations began a strike announced a few days earlier as a response to the repeated broken promises by the national government and transnational companies.
The last attempt at dialogue took place on Monday, February 11, between the Commission’s spokespeople (composed of a delegation of indigenous people, peasants, youth, women, workers and community members) and representatives of the Minister of the Interior, as well as oil companies that operate in the region, with the goal of establishing the conditions that would allow the fulfillment of those promises that they’ve been making since May 2012.
The repeated lack of follow-through by the government and businesses, and the delay in the negotiation process caused the fracture in the space for dialogue, followed by the use of state force: approximately 1,200 members of the Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron (the ESMAD in Spanish) arrived to violently evict the communities at the protest sites.
The first act occurred on the walkway San Isidro, over the de Tame road toward the Arauca capital, at the gate to the petroleum complex Caricare, which is used by the transnational company OXY, where ESMAD, the Police, and the Army assaulted the mobilized communities by setting fires to the surrounding pastures, discharging their weapons, destroying common buildings (a school), taking away the food supplies to the protestors, and beating and retaining four people.
As a result of the violence, a pregnant indigenous woman who was passing through lost her baby because of the effects of the tear gas, and had to receive emergency attention at a medical center.
The police had kept local and national reporters from contacting CM&, RCN, and other local media that moved to Caricare; the national army set up a checkpoint in the sector of Lipa that prohibited the passage of reporters “for security reasons.” It should be noted that in the Quimbo (Huila) events the police also restricted the presence of the media and acted out a series of violations of basic human rights and International Humanitarian Rights (DIH).
In the face of the this situation, the Human Rights Foundation Joel Sierra posted an Urgent Action which stated its concern for the detention of people, aggression and brutal violence exercised against the peasants and indigenous peoples, the infractions of the International Humanitarian Rights committed by the police to violate and destroy civil installations, and the removal of supplies for feeding those protesting. The Foundation also insisted that the Colombian State respect human rights and the International Humanitarian Rights norms.
In similar form, Urgent Action denounced a series of violations to the protestors’ rights by the police, whose members have dedicated themselves to constantly photograph those that participate in the protests, have retained, interrogated, and reported some of them, and have appeared in civilian clothing and armed in the middle of the night at the edges of the protest sites, among other cases.
In the rest of the protest sites, like the gate to the petroleum complex of Caño Limón in the municipality of Arauca, the town of Caricare in Arauquita, the bicentennial pipeline in Tamacay and el Tigre (Tame) and in Villamaga (Saravena) and the fire substation of Banadías (Saravena), the authorities have sent contingents from the army, the national police, and the ESMAD, because they fear the same will happen in those places that happened in Caricare.
It’s important to note that at this time people and vehicles cannot travel by land to get outside of the department of Arauca by the only two major roads (Casanare and Norte de Santander), and all commerce and activity is completely paralyzed in that region of the country.
From Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4140-colombia-riot-police-attack-communities-protesting-oil-exploitation-in-arauca-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 29, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Chris Woods / The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
The near constant presence of CIA drones ‘terrorises’ much of the civilian population of Pakistan’s tribal areas according to a new report.
Men, women and children are subjected to almost constant trauma – including fear of attack, severe anxiety, powerlessness, insomnia and high levels of stress – says a nine month investigation into CIA drone strikes in Pakistan by two top US university law schools. More than 130 ‘victims, witnesses and experts’ were interviewed in Pakistan for the study.
A number of those eyewitnesses corroborated the Bureau’s own recent findings – that rescuers have been deliberately targeted by the CIA in the tribal areas.
The new study heavily challenges US government claims that few civilians have died in CIA drone strikes, saying that there is ‘significant evidence’ to the contrary.
As the report notes in its executive summary: ‘In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false.’
Impact on civilians
The joint report, Living Under Drones , is by Stanford University’s International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, and New York University School of Law’s Global Justice Clinic. The 165-page study looks at key aspects of the CIA’s drone programme – its legal basis, how strikes are reported, their strategic implications – and how civilians are affected.
Psychiatrists and doctors report a deeply stressed population in parts of the tribal areas. In their ninth year of bombing, US drones now fly almost constantly over towns such as Mir Ali and Miranshah.
One psychiatrist told researchers that many of his patients experience ‘anticipatory anxiety,’ a constant fear that they might come under attack. The report goes on to note that:
Interviewees described emotional breakdowns, running indoors or hiding when drones appear above, fainting, nightmares and other intrusive thoughts, hyper startled reactions to loud noises, outbursts of anger or irritability, and loss of appetite and other physical symptoms. Interviewees also reported suffering from insomnia and other sleep disturbances, which medical health professionals in Pakistan stated were prevalent.’
Pakistani MP Akhunzada Chitan reported that when he visits Waziristan to see his family, people ‘often complain that they wake up in the middle of the night screaming’ because of the drones.
The Stanford/ NYU report also examines in detail three Obama administration drone strikes. Multiple eye-witness reports of civilian deaths are accompanied by ‘corroborating evidence from other independent investigations, media accounts, and submissions to the United Nations, and courts in the UK and Pakistan.’
In total, more than 50 civilians are likely to have died in these three strikes alone, the report concludes. Anonymous US officials were still claiming recently that civilian deaths have only been in ‘single digits’ during Obama’s entire four years in office.
Attacks on rescuers corroborated
The NYU/ Stanford report also independently corroborates a major Bureau investigation with the Sunday Times, which found that multiple CIA strikes between 2009 and summer 2011 had deliberately targeted rescuers and funeral-goers . Citing a number of eyewitness accounts, the study notes:
Secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another’s rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers.’
Hayatullah Ayoub Khan was driving in North Waziristan when the car ahead of him was damaged in a drone strike. The report says that as Khan approached on foot to see if he could help ‘someone inside yelled that he should leave immediately because another missile would likely strike.’ As he returned to his car, a second missile killed whoever had been inside.
A second anonymised man told researchers of an attack on the home of his in-laws: ‘Other people came to check what had happened, they were looking for the children in the beds and then a second drone strike hit those people.’
People now avoid assisting victims of drone strikes, researchers were told. One ‘leading humanitarian organization’ said that it insists on a six-hour mandatory delay before its workers are allowed to assist, meaning it is ‘only the locals, the poor, [who] will pick up the bodies of loved ones.’
When seven of Faheem Qureshi’s family and friends died in Obama’s first ever drone strike , he believes he only survived because he was able to walk out of the smoking rubble of the house unaided.
‘Usually, when a drone strikes and people die, nobody comes near the bodies for half an hour because they fear another missile will strike,’ Qureshi told researchers.
Funeral practices have also changed in the tribal areas because of fears of CIA attack, according to a number of witnesses. Firoz Ali Khan told researchers:
Not many people go to funerals because funerals have been struck by drones. Many people are scared. They don’t go to funerals because of their fear.’
The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Professor Christof Heyns, recently described the deliberate targeting of civilian rescuers as ‘a war crime.’
‘No response’
The joint report by two of the US’s biggest university law schools came after legal campaigning group Reprieve suggested a study into the impact of drones on civilians. It also assisted in putting researchers in touch with some of those affected in Pakistan – although Reprieve has had no editorial input, according to the report.
Professor Sarah Knuckey of NYU’s Global Justice Clinic co-authored the study with Professor James Cavallaro at Stanford. The pair visited Pakistan twice with a team of young lawyers, interviewing more than 130 people in connection with the CIA’s bombing programme.
Knuckey, who has previously investigated killings by the Taliban in Afghanistan, told the Bureau she had been surprised at the high levels of civilian trauma described by health professionals in the tribal areas. Incidence levels more closely resembled those found in higher intensity conflicts, she said.
Asked what she thought the study would achieve, Knuckey said that she hoped that those responsible in the US for covert drone strikes ‘look at this and say there are extremely well documented and serious concerns, both about the impact of our policies on Pakistani civilians, and also on the US’s own interests, and we need to consider this very seriously.’
The Obama administration has so far not engaged with the authors. A July 18 request for a meeting with the US National Security Council has yet to be answered.
From The Center for Investigative Journalism: http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/09/25/drones-causing-mass-trauma-among-civilians-major-study-finds/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Prostitution, Rape Culture
By Cyril Mychalejko / Toward Freedom
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.
Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving population into submission through fear and shame via the suffering of their mothers, sisters, and daughters.
In 1999, UN-backed truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), declared that during the war, “the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity…[and] they were killed, tortured and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political or social participation…”
Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities.
“The goal of counterinsurgency is to undermine the cohesion of a community that is needed for resistance,” said Kuecker. “Gender violence not only terrorizes women in the community, but it also disrupts traditional patriarchal gender relations by sending the message to men that they are not capable of protecting women.”
According to Emily Willard, Research Associate for the Evidence Project of The National Security Archive writing in Peace and Conflict Monitor this April, “The military’s strategies of targeting women reached such a large portion of the male population, normalizing rape and violence against women. The residual effect of these genocidal policies and strategies can be seen in the rate and type of violence in Guatemala today.”
In 2010, 685 women were assassinated in Guatemala, compared to 213 in 2000. And while there were more than 40,000 complaints of violence against women filed with the Guatemalan Public Ministry, only 1 percent of those registered by the Judicial Department resulted in sentencing, according to a report published June 1 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Just Associates (JASS), “Caught in the Crossfire: Women on the frontlines in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.”
The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries.
In Guatemala, the report singles out the civil war’s legacy of violence and impunity, the increased militarization resulting from the War on Drugs, land and resource conflicts, and the influence of foreign governments and businesses – specifically from the United States and Canada – as major contributing factors to the ongoing violence directed at women, and the targeting of women as a tactical and deliberate tool of political repression. The report states that the phenomenon of femicide has “reached crisis dimensions.”
Guatemala’s Civil War: No Justice, No Peace
“The crises in Guatemala are not internal crises,” Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a community development and anti-mining solidarity organization, told Toward Freedom. “They are global struggles.”
Guatemala’s Civil War serves as a perfect example. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristic moment of historical honesty, apologized to the Guatemalan people back in 1998 for the U.S.’s role in overthrowing democracy in the country and contributing political, military, and financial support to genocidal counterinsurgency programs which successive dictators carried out on the Mayan population.
“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” said Clinton.
The war left over 200,000, mostly indigenous civilians, murdered, while tens of thousands were raped, tortured, disappeared and displaced. But in the wake of the war, as many as an estimated 98 percent of those responsible for war crimes and genocide (both Guatemalan and American) remain free.
“In Guatemala, the surge in femicides demonstrates that peace is not just the cessation of war,” the JASS report states. “The lack of justice for crimes of the 1980s has left victims without redress, and culprits in power.” Amnesty International noted that in the last 10 years as many as 5,700 women have been murdered.
The position of recently elected president Otto Perez Molina that there was no genocide in the country is a perfect illustration of how impunity persists. However, Perez Molina, a former general and CIA asset who was trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, is taking a position that is self-serving, not just racist and revisionist. He led a military battalion in the early 1980s in the country’s northwestern highlands where some of the bloodiest massacres occurred. In addition, as Annie Bird, journalist and co-director of Rights Action pointed out in a profile of the president this year, Perez Molina ran a “secret torture center” for political prisoners while serving as head of the country’s military intelligence in 1994. One of Perez Molina’s past bosses, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the country’s Mayan population between 1982-83, wiping out entire villages in the process. Thirty years later Rios Montt, who was a very close ally of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, is just now standing trial, and is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”
Sandra Moran, a Guatemalan feminist, lesbian, artist and activist working on women’s rights and human rights in Guatemala City, is a member and co-founder of Colectivo Artesana and Alianza Politica Sector de Mujeres. She lived in exile in Canada for 14 years after participating in the country’s student movement in the early 1980s. After working tirelessly abroad to build transnational solidarity, Moran returned to Guatemala to participate in the Peace Process and to help rebuild a more peaceful, just and humane country.
“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared [in recent years] are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran.
Amnesty International submitted a briefing on Guatemala to the UN’s Human Rights Committee in March, voicing concern how “female victims often suffer exceptional brutality before being killed, including rape, mutilation and dismemberment.”
Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country.
In 2007 Amnesty International issued a report noting the presence of “clandestine groups” in the country, comprised of the “the business sector, private security companies, common criminals, gang members and possibly ex and current members of the armed forces,” who were then, and continue to target human rights activists in order to maintain impunity and an unjust and patriarchal social order.
“Guatemala’s peace-making process never moved into a necessary peace-building process that could assure strong institutions and practices,” the JASS report states. “The government typically fails to conduct investigations or prosecute the perpetrators of women’s murders.”
The Guatemalan government’s embrace of ex-war criminals and current criminals, combined with the support of international political and business actors, sustains what Rights Action’s Russell calls, “an unjust, racist, and violent social order” and “maintaining business as usual and politics as usual.”
Business as Usual
In 1954 the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, coordinated the coup which overthrew democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Reasons behind this act include the fact that he rewrote the country’s labor code and initiated land reforms, acts deemed unacceptable by United Fruit Company and Washington. The idea of Guatemala being solely a source of cheap labor and a place to extract resources with low costs and even lower oversight has been a continuum in the country’s history. The lack of justice and weak governance appears to be seen as a comparative advantage for the country. For example, Amnesty International, in its briefing to the UN this past March, also pointed out how “[t]he failings of the state continue to be relied on by companies, in particular mining companies, who prefer the lower national standard to international human rights standards.”
One example the JASS report points out is Perez Molina’s refusal to respect the 55 community consultations held throughout the country in indigenous communities, which overwhelmingly rejected so-called development projects involving mining, oil and hydroelectric dams. According to ILO Convention 169, the international law which Guatemala is a signatory of, indigenous communities must provide free, prior, and informed consent to any projects that would impact their land and communities. Other “failings of the state” include the refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against activists who challenge the status quo by demanding that their human rights, such as those enshrined under ILO 169, are recognized and honored.
The JASS delegation led by Menchu and Williams listened to testimony from women who shared stories about the violence during the war and the violence associated with what might be described now as low intensity conflicts surrounding land and resources. Their report stated, “They described that today’s intent is subtler: to force communities out of areas where mineral and other types of resources are coveted. But the methods are very similar: rape, murder, imprisonment, division and harassment…Women presented testimonies and evidence of many cases where army and private security presence is associated with putting down local protests against mining operations and other development projects that displace and disrupt communities to exploit natural resources.”
Less than two weeks after the report was released, Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc working against the widely unpopular Canadian gold mining project owned by Radius Gold, was shot by assassins and is now in the hospital in critical condition.
While criticism of the Guatemalan State is necessary and warranted, the Canadian government deserves the same treatment. Lawmakers in Ottawa have consistently aided and abetted such behavior by their industry due to what at best could be considered indifference, but is more likely a deliberate disregard for the human rights and environmental rights of communities affected by Canadian mining companies.
A perfect illustration of this was the failure to pass Bill C-300, a modest, if not flawed piece of legislation, which would have empowered the Canadian government to investigate human rights complaints and strip guilty companies from taxpayer subsidies through the Canadian Pension Plan and Export Development Canada. Apparently murder and gang-rapes linked to Canadian mining projects in Guatemala (not to mention similar acts throughout the hemisphere and around the globe) are not enough to encourage lawmakers in Canada to pass legislation that would hold their country’s companies accountable for these crimes and human rights abuses.
While women are being targeted for their social justice leadership roles in these conflicts, it is modest progress in the realm of rights and empowerment that has allowed women to assume such roles.
“Since the war ended women’s leadership in their communities and with community struggles have increased. More and more women have realized that they have rights and that they must defend their rights. And this is part of the reason why violence against women has increased,” said Moran. “An act of violence against a woman is not just an act against the individual, but against all women. It is a message that if you leave your house, if you continue to organize or raise your voice, that this can happen to you.”
Read more from Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 2, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Cyril Mychalejko / Toward Freedom
The War on Drugs is becoming another “Dirty War” in Mexico, with the tactic of enforced disappearances reappearing as a commonplace occurrence in the country.
“Enforced disappearances in Mexico have happened in the past and continue to happen today,” the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances stated during a presentation of its findings in March.
The UN Group noted that during the country’s first “Dirty War”, which lasted from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, enforced disappearances was a systematic State practice used against students, indigenous peoples, peasants, activists and anyone suspected of being a critic or opponent of the government.
“While the Cold War provided the pretext to disappear social movement actors and people opposed to regimes, the War on Drugs again provides pretexts to disappear people opposed to government policies,” said Stuart Schussler, the Mexico Solidarity Network’s International Solidarity Coordinator. “When you disappear people it’s a crime against the whole community and an assault on its social fabric. As a result, people become afraid to speak up and to organize.”
Now that this practice has reappeared in the country’s latest conflict, the UN notes that the cases of disappearances share the same patterns of widespread impunity, secrecy and lack of reparations and justice for the victims as in the past.
“The refusal of the authorities to recognize the true dimensions of this phenomenon and the involvement of public officials in these crimes – whether by commission, omission, or collusion with organized crime groups – has enabled this crime to spread to many parts of the country,” Amnesty International stated in response to the UN’s findings.
Since President Felipe Calderon deployed the military to combat narco-trafficking in December 2006, over 50,000 people have been murdered—more than the death toll for the 11-year war in Afghanistan. According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, between 2006 and April 2011, 5,937 people have been reported lost or missing, while 8,898 murdered people remain unidentified. Much of this violence, which has been carried out by the Mexican government, military, and police, has been subsidized by U.S. taxpayers though the Merida Initiative, a counter-narcotics policy modeled after Plan Colombia, which provides Mexico with $1.6 billion in aid that is supposed to have human rights requirements.
“Instead of reducing violence, Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’ has resulted in a dramatic increase in killings, torture, and other appalling abuses by security forces, which only make the climate of lawlessness and fear worse in many parts of the country,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The UN Group noted that groups targeted include women, migrant workers, human rights defenders and journalists. It also noted that although drug cartels are responsible for these acts, it received “detailed documentation” that public authorities and military personnel are believed to be responsible for numerous cases.
HRW published a report in November 2011 which supports these charges. The report documented 39 cases of disappearances where evidence “strongly suggests” government involvement. It states: “The cases follow a pattern: victims are arbitrarily detained by soldiers or police, their detentions never officially registered, and they are not handed over to prosecutors. In the immediate aftermath of such detentions, victims’ relatives routinely seek information from security forces and justice officials, who deny having the victims in their custody.”
This lawlessness and failure to investigate and prosecute crimes was of great concern to the UN. In fact, 24 states in Mexico have not even criminalized the offense, while “less than 25 per cent of offenses are reported and only 2 per cent result in conviction.”
“The victims of enforced disappearances have no faith in the justice system, prosecution services, the police or Armed Forces. The chronic pattern of impunity still exists in cases of enforced disappearance and sufficient efforts are not being made to determine the fate or whereabouts of persons who have disappeared, to punish those responsible and to guarantee the right to the truth and reparation,” the UN Group’s report stated. “It would seem that Mexico is unwilling or unable to conduct effective investigations into cases of enforced disappearance.”
HRW’s Vivanco added that this leaves victims’ families with the burden of searching for their loved ones. The UN also noted that the government has also consistently dismissed the crimes by suggesting that the victims were involved in illicit activities, much like how the victims of Cold War state terror in the region were often labeled communists.
Mothers from across Mexico marched to the nation’s capital this past Mother’s Day on behalf of their loved ones who have been disappeared to demand justice.
“For some it has been years, for others months or days, of walking alone, of clamoring in the desert of the hallways of indolent and irresponsible authorities, many of them directly responsible for (disappearances) or complicit with those who took (loved ones) away,” the mothers’ group said in a communiqué.
From Toward Freedom: http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/2831-dirty-war-tactic-of-disappearances-reappears-in-mexico
