Americas

The Enxet Indigenous communities of Yakye Axa and Sawhoyamaxa in the Bajo Chaco region of Paraguay have been living at the side of the Pozo Colorado-Concepción highway formore than 15 years. Despite rulings in their favour by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, they remain excluded fromtheir lands. Deprived of their traditional livelihood and way of life, without adequate health care or sanitation, and dependent on irregular government food supplies, they face an insecure present and an uncertain future.

From the northern most reaches of the Arctic, to the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego, Indigenous Peoples in the Americas have long experience dmarginalization and discrimination. Denied a voice in decisions which affect their lands, lives and livelihoods, Indigenous Peoples are disproportionately affected by poverty, even when living in areas rich in minerals and other natural resources. Many still do not enjoy constitutional recognition and their rights to ancestral lands are ignored or dealt with in ways that fail to provide adequate protection to Indigenous economic and cultural traditions. Resource extraction, forestry, agro-industry and other development projects on Indigenous lands are often accompanied by harassment and violence as powerful corporations and private interests flout international and domestic laws in pursuit of profit. A persistent and entrenched cycle of deprivation and social exclusion puts Indigenous people, especially women, at increased risk of attack while helping ensure that their persecutors are rarely held to account.

Faced with this legacy of appalling human rights violations, Indigenous Peoples throughout the Americas region have mobilized to make themselves heard. Their demands for respect for their land rights and cultural identity, for their right not to face discrimination, indeed for their entitlement to all human rights, are increasingly being brought to the heart of, and reinvigorating, the human rights discourse in the region.

The Yakye Axa and Sawhoyamaxa communities were able to take their case to a regional court and were helped in doing so by a number of NGOs. This reflects the increasing collaboration and co-ordination of the Indigenous and human rights movement in the region, which allows defenders, campaigners and activists to draw strength, support and inspiration from each other’s experiences and successes.

Insecurity

In Colombia, many of the human rights abuses committed in the internal armed conflict – including killings and enforced disappearances – are aimed at displacing civilian communities from areas of economic or strategic importance. Many Indigenous communities live in regions rich in mineral and other resources on lands legally and collectively owned by them. Such communities are often attacked in an effort to force them to flee so that the area can be opened up for large-scale economic development. Those communities that campaign against such development are accused of being “subversive” – an accusation which is often followed by paramilitary attacks. Guerrilla groups also threaten and kill members of Indigenous communities whom they accuse of siding with the enemy. However, Indigenous Peoples in Colombia are becoming increasingly militant in defence of their human rights. In the last few months of 2008, thousands of Indigenous people staged large-scale protests across various parts of the country, culminating in a march to the capital, Bogotá, in November to protest at continued human rights abuses and in support of their land rights.

In Mexico, members of the community of Huizopa, in the northern state of Chihuahua, which includes Pima and Raramuri Indigenous Peoples, demanded amining company’s operations on communal lands comply with agreements made with the community. Those supporting the protests faced threats and police operations to break up protests.

In Chile, the continuing expansion of the extractive and forestry industries combined with the slow progress in resolving land claims continued to provoke tensions between the authorities and Indigenous Peoples, particularly the Mapuche. In a worrying development in 2008, a regional prosecutor sought to use an anti-terrorism law against protesters supporting the Mapuche claims. The government had given repeated assurances that the law, which dates from the period of military government under General Augusto Pinochet, should not be used against Indigenous people seeking recognition of their rights.

In Bolivia, entrenched racism and discrimination persisted. Efforts by the government of President Evo Morales to promote the rights of Bolivia’s Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized sectors of society met opposition from powerful landowning families and the business elite, fearful of losing long-held privileges. Tensions exploded into violence which culminated in the killing of 19 campesinos (peasant farmers) in Pando department in September. Investigations by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Ombudsman’s Office found that local officials were directly involved in the killings and that police had failed to protect the Indigenous and campesino protesters.

However, some states are increasingly having to recognize the legitimate claims of Indigenous Peoples and take steps to make them a reality. A Supreme Court decision in Brazil to recognize the constitutional rights to their ancestral lands of the Makuxi, Wapixana, Ingarikó, Taurepang and Patamona Peoples marked an important step in a 30-year battle and was widely seen as a landmark victory for the rights of Inidgenous Peoples in Raposa Serra do Sol state. However, positive outcomes remained an exception and many Indigenous Peoples continue the struggle for their land.

In Nicaragua the government finally recognized the land rights of the Awas Tingni Indigenous community, thereby complying with a 2001 decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In Suriname, the Saramaka People, descendants of escaped African slaves who established settlements in the rainforest interior in the 17th and 18th centuries won a judgment in their favour by the Inter American Court of Human Rights. In a ruling by the Court regarding logging and mining concessions on the territory of the Saramaka People, the Court established that: “The State violated, to the detriment of the members of the Saramaka people, the right to property.”

Violence against women and girls

Women’s groups continue to demand action over an increasing number of homicides in the region. Many of the women’s bodies bore marks of torture and in particular sexual violence. However, the response of many governments, particularly those in Central America, remains woefully inadequate and few of the killings have been properly investigated.

Laws to improve respect for women’s rights and in particular the right to freedom from violence in the home, community and work place, exist in most countries in the region, with the notable exceptions of Haiti and some other Caribbean countries. Nevertheless, progress on preventing violence against women and punishing those responsible remained limited. In Nicaragua, for example, specialist police investigation teams dealing with gender-based violence against women remain woefully under-resourced and in Venezuela specialist training for law enforcement officials on dealing with violence in the home has failed to materialize.

Nicaragua and Haiti stood out in the region as two countries where more than 50 per cent of all reported victims of sexual abuse were 18 years old or younger. In the vast majority of cases, the perpetrators were adult men, many holding positions of power. The sexual abuse of girls, some as young as nine or 10, was intrinsically linked to poverty, deprivation and exclusion which left the girls at risk of sexual exploitation as their only means of survival. Despite the widespread nature of the problem, the stigma associated with sexual violence condemned many survivors to silence.

"Being raped, it makes you... A person without rights, a person rejected from society and now, in the neighbourhood I live in, it’s as though I am raped every day because every day someone reminds me that I should put myself in a corner, that I shouldn’t speak, I should say nothing".-Rose (not her real name), interviewed by Amnesty International in Haiti, March 2008.

Given the high levels of sexual violence, it is particularly worrying that Nicaragua, along with Chile and El Salvador, continued a prohibition of abortion in all circumstances – even in cases where the pregnancy was the result of rape or where continued pregnancy could put the woman or girl’s life at risk. There were reports of efforts by religious pressure groups in Peru and Ecuador to seek a similar ban. In Uruguay, despite widespread popular support for abortion to be decriminalized, President Tabaré Vázquez vetoed proposed reforms on the grounds of his personal religious beliefs. In contrast, in Mexico the Supreme Court voted to allow legislation decriminalizing abortion in the District of Mexico City.

Of the five countries in the Americas where a reduction in maternal mortality by 2015 is a government priority, national maternal mortality ratios (there is no disaggregated data for different maternal groups) decreased in Bolivia, Brazil, Mexico and Peru, but not in Haiti, where only 26 per cent of births were supported by a skilled attendant in 2008.

Deprivation

Many Latin American and Caribbean countries havemade efforts in the last decade to reduce poverty. However, despite some progress, more than 70 million people were living on less than US$1 a day and levels of social inequality and disparities in wealth remained high. According to the UN Development Programme, Latin America remained the most unequal region in the world.

Marginalized and dispossessed communities in rural and urban settings in many countries continued to be denied their rights to health care, clean water, education and adequate housing. This already critical situation risked being exacerbated by the global economic crisis.

In relation to health indicators, figures published by the UN Population Fund showed that the Dominican Republic and Guatemala were among the countries with the lowest level of spending on public health care – amere 1.7 per cent and 2 per cent of GDP respectively. This was in stark comparison with Cuba which spends 6.9 per cent of GDP on health and the USA where spending stood at 7.2 per cent of GDP. Nevertheless, thousands of people in the USA remained without health insurance, with many poor and marginalized people finding it difficult to access adequate health care.

Death penalty

Most countries in the region have abolished the death penalty either in law or in practice. However, in the USA, a notable exception in the region, the death penalty and deprivation remained inextricably interlinked; the vast majority of the more than 3,000 people on death row are too poor to pay for legal representation of their choice.

In April, the US Supreme Court issued a decision that execution by lethal injection did not violate the US Constitution. Executions resumed in May after a seven-month hiatus. By the end of the year, 37 prisoners had been put to death, bringing to 1,136 the number of executions since the USA resumed judicial killing in 1977.

The Supreme Court’s decision is notable for the separate opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens, who has served on the Court since December 1975 and has therefore witnessed the entire “modern” era of the death penalty in the USA. He wrote that his experience had led him to the conclusion that “the imposition of the death penalty represents the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the State is patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment”. He added that racial discrimination continued “to play an unacceptable role in capital cases”.

In December, Saint Kitts and Nevis carried out the first execution in the English-speaking Caribbean since 2000. Charles Elroy Laplace was hanged on 19 December 2008, ending a 10-year moratorium. He had been convicted of murder in 2006 and his appeal was dismissed in October 2008 for being filed out of time.

Exclusion

The trend towards improved political stability witnessed in the previous 10 years was overshadowed by the worsening crisis in public security.

Levels of police abuses and crime and gang violence were worse in areas where the state was largely absent, allowing criminal gangs to dominate much of the life of the community. In Brazil, for example, many impoverished urban communities continued to be denied basic services and state involvement remained largely limited to periodic military-style incursions by the police. These operations, often involving hundreds of officers in armoured vehicles and helicopters, were characterized by excessive use of force, extrajudicial executions, torture, and abusive behaviour towards residents. In Jamaica, the majority of police killings, many of which were unlawful, occurred in poor inner-city areas.

"Down there, in the rich part of town, it’s different. They think that the police really have to invade, really have to kill, really have to exterminate everything that goes on here. They just don’t see that this is a community with people who work and children that study".-Lúcia Cabral, Complexo do Alemão, Brazil, April 2008.

In Mexico, where criminal violence has spiralled, large numbers of military personnel have been deployed with police to combat crime. Few governments have made the connection between rising crime and abuses by state officials. However, ministers in some countries admitted publicly in 2008 that the quality of policing had fallen below both national and international standards. Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago all acknowledged significant failings in their police forces and their limited ability to offer reasonable levels of protection and effective law enforcement in many communities as a result. Nevertheless, the steps taken to remove officials responsible for human rights abuses or corruption in no way matched the magnitude of the problem and were bedevilled by procedural an administrative obstacles.

Too many governments have contributed to worsening standards of policing by closing their eyes to reports of torture or unlawful killings. Some have even sought to justify such abuses as necessary in the current public security climate. Independent police complaints commissions or police ombudsmen offices remained largely confined to the USA and Canada. In the few other countries where such bodies exist, they continued to be largely ineffective.

In some countries, such as Guatemala and Brazil, more evidence emerged during the year of the involvement of police officers and former officers in the killing of suspected criminals. In Pernambuco in Brazil, 70 per cent of all homicides in 2008 were attributed to death squads or so-called extermination groups mostly composed of agents of the state, particularly police. In Guatemala, the killing of hundreds of young men reminded many of the social cleansing campaigns of the 1990s when street children suspected of being petty thieves were tortured and killed. The targeting by police and others of groups of young men and boys from poor communities on the basis of their appearance and age aggravated feelings of exclusion from mainstream society.

In some instances, the disregard for life in excluded communities was particularly shocking. For example, dozens of young men from Soacha, near Bogotá, Colombia, were killed by members of the military in order to claim bonuses offered by the government for each “guerrilla” killed.

‘War on terror’

There was continuing concern over the treatment of foreign nationals detained by US forces in the “war on terror”; more than 200 men were held in the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. However, there was some progress in 2008 in challenging the government’s attempts to exclude them from the protections of the law. In June, in a landmark ruling, the US Supreme Court rejected the government’s arguments that the Guantánamo detainees should be denied their right to habeas corpus on the grounds that they were non-US nationals captured and held outside US sovereign territory. In November, President-elect Barack Obama confirmed his commitment to take early action after taking office in January 2009 to close the Guantánamo detention facility and to ensure that the USA did not resort to torture.

Voice

Human rights defenders in Latin America remained in the forefront of efforts to make the voices of victims heard, often despite sustained efforts to silence them. On 4 February and 20 July, millions of people marched in Colombia and around the world in protest at kidnappings by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC). Thousands of people had also taken to the streets in Colombia on 6 March to demand an end to human rights abuses by the security forces and paramilitary groups. Four months later, Jhon Fredy Correa Falla, a member of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (Movimiento Nacional de Víctimas de Crímenes de Estado), which organized the March protest, was shot dead by four gunmen on motor bikes. Several human rights defenders in Guatemala and Honduras were killed on account of their human rights work.

Women queuing outside a health centre in rural Huancavelica, Peru, 26 September 2008.

In several other countries, human rights defenders also faced increasingly hostile reactions from the authorities. In Venezuela, for example, the expulsion of the Director for the Americas of Human Rights Watch in September following publication of a critical report was followed by an upsurge in public statements accusing local NGOs and defenders of being “pro-Yankees”, “anti-Bolivarian revolution” and “unpatriotic”.

Some governments resorted to misuse of the criminal justice system to frustrate the work of human rights defenders. In Mexico, for example, five Indigenous leaders from the Me’ phaa Indigenous People’s Organization (Organización del Pueblo Indígena Me’ phaa, OPIM) in Guerrero State, were detained in April and charged with murder. Despite a federal decision in October that there was no evidence implicating four of them and despite eyewitness testimonies that the fifth was elsewhere at the time of the murder, the five remained in detention at the end of 2008.

In Nicaragua, nine women human rights defenders faced legal proceedings for their involvement in the case of a nine-year-old Nicaraguan girl who obtained a legal abortion after she was raped in 2003. Although many professionals and officials were involved in the girl’s case, the legal complaint focuses only on the women human rights defenders who have a background in promoting sexual health and women’s rights.

Defenders promoting the rights of communities long consigned to the margins of society – Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people – were often at particular risk. For example, in Honduras, leaders of the Afro-descendant Garifuna community in the village of San Juan Tela, were threatened and forced to sign over community land to a private company at gunpoint. In Ecuador, Esther Landetta, a leading environmental and women’s rights activist, was the target of repeated threats and intimidation because of her crucial role in voicing community concerns about the possible negative consequences of irregular mining activities in Guayas Province.

The repression and intimidation of human rights defenders in the region may have varied, but one aspect remained worryingly consistent – in almost all the cases investigated by Amnesty International, those responsible were not brought to justice.

However, justice for the long-silenced victims of gross human rights violations during the military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s moved several steps closer in a number of countries during 2008.

"Education is important so that our children can learn skills, use the internet, have access to the same opportunities as paraguayans, so they stop saying that the indigenous people are stupid and ignorant".-Florentîn Jara, Sawhoyamaxa community, Paraguay, November 2008.

In Paraguay, President Fernando Lugo made a public apology to the victims of human rights violations under the military government of General Alfredo Stroessner. In December, the Truth and Justice Commission published its report and recommendations on human rights violations committed during the military government (1954-1989) and transition to democracy. It identified more than 20,000 victims and recommended that the Public Prosecutor investigate all cases.

In Uruguay, scores of formermilitary officers were called to testify against General Gregorio Alvarez, head of the military government between 1981 and 1985, and Juan Larcebeau, a retired naval officer, accused of the enforced disappearance of more than 30 people.

In Argentina, in the first judgment of its kind, two people were convicted and sentenced to prison terms for the “appropriation” of the daughter of a couple who were the victims of enforced disappearance in 1977. The ex-army captain who stole the child and gave her to the couple was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in April.

In El Salvador, two human rights organizations filed a suit in a Spanish court in November against El Salvador’s former President, Alfredo Cristiani (1989-1994), and 14 military officers in connection with the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in 1989.

Brazil stood out as one of the few countries in the region that had yet to confront the scars left by past abuses. By neglecting those who had suffered torture and other abuses, the Brazilian state had not only failed to respect the human rights of these victims, but had allowed abuses to become entrenched.

In Mexico, the 40th anniversary of the massacre of students in Tlateloco square, Mexico City, was commemorated but this was not accompanied by advances in bringing those responsible to justice. In other cases, there was some progress in holding to account those responsible formore recent human rights violations. In Colombia, dozens of members of the armed forces, many of them senior officers, were dismissed for their alleged involvement in the extrajudicial execution of civilians. In Bolivia, the unprecedented speed with which the international community moved to ensure investigations into the killing of 19 campesinos in September raised hopes that those responsible would be brought to justice. In October, the Bolivian government filed an extradition request with the US government regarding former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and two former ministers who were accused of involvement in genocide for their role in the killing of 67 people during demonstrations in El Alto in 2003.

"The Canadian government and the oil companies... persist in the destruction of our land and our way of life. At times we may seem defeated and incapable, but I assure you we are not. As long as there are Lubicon people left, we will continue to fight for a fair and just relationship with governments and corporations alike."-Cynthia Tomlinson, Lubicon Cree member, Alberta, Canada, April 2008

In the USA, a Senate committee concluded, after an 18-month inquiry into the treatment of detainees in US custody, that senior officials in the US government had “solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees”. Among other things, the committee found that the authorization by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of aggressive techniques for use in Guantánamo “was a direct cause of detainee abuse there” and had contributed to the abuse of detainees in US custody in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Conclusion

Throughout the Americas region, human rights defenders continue to work for a world where everyone is able to live with dignity and where all human rights are respected. To do this, defenders often have to challenge powerful social and economic elites, as well as the inertia and complicity of governments that are failing to honour their obligations to promote and defend human rights.

Events that have occured in 2009