Latin America has democracy, but abuses persist

By Kieran Murray

MEXICO CITY (Reuters): With soldiers back in their barracks, leftist rebels demobilized and right-wing death squads in retirement, much of Latin America has awakened from the nightmare of its recent past.

Massacres and torture chambers that once characterized the region have for the most part disappeared since it turned to democracy and ended the civil wars. But despite democratic advances, experts say Latin America's human rights record is still poor and in some countries is once again deteriorating.

Legal efforts to have Chile's former military dictator Augusto Pinochet face charges that he covered up human rights crimes raised hopes among activists that other nations might start to look honestly at their past. But the case against him is bogged down in the courts and few Chileans believe he will ever face a full trial.

Latin America's most glaring human rights tragedy is Colombia, where a 37-year-old war fueled by the cocaine trade grows more brutal by the day. Right-wing paramilitaries and Marxist guerrillas regularly target civilians and the murder and mutilation of defenseless peasants is commonplace.

Around 40,000 people have been killed in Colombia in the last decade alone, the vast majority of them civilians.

"It's a war against the civilian population," said Regulo Madero Fernandez, a human rights activist based in the violent city of Barrancabermeja, the site of a long-running territorial battle between rebels and paramilitary groups.

In an attack at Easter, paramilitaries allegedly killed 40 people in southern Colombia, chopping the arms off one of the victims with a chain saw. Last month, rebels killed 35 people, beheading many of them, in two attacks in Cordoba province, apparently believing they collaborated with paramilitaries.

Other insurgencies in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua ended with peace accords in the 1990s and Peru's brutal Shining Path rebels faded after their leader was arrested in 1992. Each of those wars killed tens of thousands of civilians, while military rule in Brazil, Argentina, Chile and elsewhere in South America brought a systematic assault on basic rights.

In most cases, governments used the "national security doctrine" to justify counterinsurgency sweeps in rural areas where rebel armies operated, or "dirty wars" against trade unionists, students and other opponents in the cities.

The wars are now over and some governments appear committed to establishing the rule of law. But critics say the national security doctrine is still latent in many countries and, while they do not believe the military is about to reassume control, they warn old habits of stifling dissent might return if a new crisis erupts.

Guatemala's rights record improved dramatically in the mid- 1990s as peace accords were negotiated, but the number of death threats against labor organizers and social activists has allegedly soared again since President Alfonso Portillo's government took office 18 months ago.

"We are returning to the counterinsurgency mentality in which, to silence the opposition, you have to kill them," said Claudia Samayoa of the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation, named after the Maya Indian woman who won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize.

At a meeting in Mexico this month, regional rights experts said the torture of prisoners was still widespread and security forces still used heavy-handed tactics in several other nations including Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Paraguay. Cuba came in for sharp criticism for harassing critics of a one-party system that outlaws opposition to the Communist Party.

Not even the most ardent activist would say Latin America today is anything like it was two decades ago, when death squads ran wild and massacres of civilians were common. But critics say the failure to identify and prosecute military officers who committed atrocities in the past sends a dangerous message that they remain above the law.

Despite the rise of democracy, weak judicial systems mean most people have little or no protection before the law and corrupt officials are still able to throw their weight around. Neither has democracy improved the standing of indigenous Indians, whose long history of marginalization lies behind the ongoing but mainly peaceful Zapatista rebellion in Mexico.

"When democracy came, it was like a period of spring, but we came to realize the new governments were dependent on the same interests and the armed forces and they were not able to bring real democracy," said Enriqueta Maroni of Argentina's best-known rights group, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.

Maroni's son and a daughter disappeared at the hands of security forces one night in 1977 and, like many activists across the region, she is still fighting for justice. "We have the right to know what happened to our children and we have the right to justice," she said.

Argentina's junta generals were jailed after military rule collapsed in 1983. They were pardoned in 1990 but many have now been detained again for baby-theft crimes.

But most of those who violated human rights in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America remain free. Most have not even been publicly identified.

In Pinochet's case, he escaped extradition to Spain from Britain last year after he was judged mentally unfit to stand trial. Lawyers are trying to put him on trial at home, but a court is expected soon to decide whether to suspend the case against him. Even if it declares him fit to stand trial, legal appeals could keep him out of court for years.

Hina Jilani, the United Nations' special representative for human rights defenders, said too many nations have tried to sweep past atrocities under the carpet and warns that impunity only makes a return to the past more likely.

He added: "They have to take care of past violations in a manner which gives the message that they will not tolerate these violations in the future."