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Violence and Impunity in the Americas

“Impunity undoes all hope. It closes the path to atonement, which is not only punishment and reparation but recognition that another way of living is possible.”      
— Héctor Schmucler

“I got no property but yo I’m a piece of it
So let tha guilty hang
In the year of tha boomerang”          
— Zack de la Rocha, “Year of tha Boomerang”

Although the work of human rights organizations in Latin America rarely receives much coverage in the U.S. press, thousands of people have fought tirelessly for justice since the end of the “dirty wars” of the 1970s and eighties. Government-sponsored dirty wars throughout Central and South America during those decades left hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children dead, and until very recently there has been little punishment for those responsible. But recently human rights fighters have achieved several victories—the year 2006 has featured criminal investigations of former government and military officials in Argentina and Uruguay, with legal prosecution pending for former dictators Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala and, until his recent death, Augusto Pinochet of Chile (for more news, see www.soaw.org).¹

Efforts to prosecute former leaders like Pinochet and Ríos Montt face some formidable obstacles. De facto impunity for violent crimes has long plagued Latin American societies. Although some anthropologists have speculated about social and cultural factors contributing to this atmosphere of impunity, the most important reason why so few criminals have faced prosecution is found in the political and economic structure of Latin American societies. In many countries that have endured military dictatorships, the civilian governments that formed after the wars ended continue to include former torturers, murderers, and rapists, as well as the people who sanctioned or directed their actions. These criminals often occupy high positions within the government, as Ríos Montt did until 2004. Moreover, some of Latin America’s current ruling parties are the direct descendants of the dictatorships, and in fact continue to invoke their memory. In El Salvador, for example, the same person who founded the ruling party ARENA (Roberto D’Aubuisson) also directed the death squad assassinations of numerous priests, nuns, and civilians in the 1980s.² Widespread political corruption and right-wing calls for a “reconciliation” granting amnesty to criminals add to the obstacles.³ In this type of atmosphere powerful figures are often able to prevent their own prosecution.

But any discussion of justice for the perpetrators of the dirty wars in Latin America must include their neighbors to the north. During the 1970s, eighties, and nineties the U.S. military trained numerous human rights violators at the notorious School of the Americas, counseling them in the methods of torture and psychological warfare. The U.S. government helped fund horribly repressive regimes all over the continent, with Ríos Montt’s campaign of genocide in Guatemala being just one example. In 1982, in the midst of Ríos Montt’s genocide campaign against Mayan Indians, Ronald Reagan attacked Ríos Montt’s critics, declaring that the Guatemalan dictator was “totally dedicated to democracy.” Reagan then insisted on increasing military aid to Guatemala.⁴ In the 1970s, figures like Richard Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped define the U.S. position in the dirty wars, frequently deciding to boost military spending and prop up brutal dictatorships rather than support popular democracy. Under the Reagan administration, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, CIA Director William Casey, General John Singlaub, CIA Director and Vice President George Bush, and a number of others all played key roles in shaping U.S. policy and therefore bear responsibility for enabling ruthless criminals throughout Latin America, most notably in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil. And of course, the support of recent U.S. administrations for murderers—and, sometimes, our own direct participation in horrendous war crimes—have extended far beyond the Americas—to Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia, to name a few others. This is no minor matter, for behind the abstract death statistics lie literally millions of human beings whose lives were destroyed by the greed, arrogance, and inhuman savagery of their—and our—political leaders. Moreover, many of the key perpetrators from past administrations—people like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, John Negroponte, Otto Reich, and Elliott Abrams—continue to help design U.S. policy overseas and roll back democracy at home as part of the current Bush administration’s so-called “War on Terror.”

Legal Paradigms as a Reflection of Power

Laws and the penalties imposed for those who break them tend to reflect the balance of power within a given society. In the U.S., for example, the severity we assign to certain “crimes” is largely conditioned by a culture and a popular media dominated by the rich and powerful. The street dealer convicted of selling crack may get 25 years in prison, while those responsible for the repression and murder of entire populations walk free (and in fact often receive enthusiastic praise from intellectuals). Such disparities have deep roots in the United States, reflecting both the power of the ruling class and the cultural characteristics of our society.⁵ On the global scale, the U.S. is unable to establish the formal rules of conduct but can simply disregard international law when it gets in the way, as it did in 1986 after both the World Court and the United Nations condemned the Reagan administration’s use of state terrorism against Nicaragua (and of course, as the current Bush administration does almost daily⁶ ). Whereas most recent U.S. leaders are commonly recognized as war criminals in most parts of the world, we have yet to reach that level of honesty ourselves.

Even more beyond the scope of debate is the “low-intensity” structural violence involved when a powerful country like the U.S. supports global economic policies favoring the rich at the perpetual expense of the poor.  Examples of this tendency include the use of economic warfare against the people of Cuba, Iraq, and other nations, and when the richest country in the world gives only 0.14 percent of the federal budget to foreign humanitarian assistance.⁷
 

If a violent crime is defined as the deliberate infliction of physical pain on another, those who defend such policies are also guilty and should face appropriate punishment. But “structural” and “overt” forms of violence are intimately related for another reason: the structural inequalities and power disparities help make it possible for nations and other groups to commit large-scale violence without fear of prosecution. Héctor Schmucler observes that “If action against impunity has as its objective some type of sanction against those individuals, groups, or institutions responsible for determined crimes, the search for truth necessitates…coming to understand how those crimes were possible” (my emphasis).⁸ The struggle against violence and impunity must therefore also concern itself with addressing the structural injustices that underlie most human rights violations.

Clearly we must reexamine how we define “crimes” and their severity. The purpose is not even to arrive at definite conclusions, but rather to pose questions and to open the debate to voices seldom heard. For instance, what responsibility lies with the numerous governmental bureaucrats and politicians who have been complicit in the crimes of their governments? What degree of responsibility lies with journalists, opinion-makers, and media corporations who justify torture or otherwise facilitate violence and repression? What responsibility do we ourselves owe to the victims of these crimes? 

Continuity and Change since the End of the Dirty Wars

Within the last two or three years, human rights and victims’ groups have started to make limited gains in bringing violators to justice. In Guatemala, Argentina, Uruguay, and elsewhere these courageous people have successfully brought international attention to the cases of the perpetrators, resulting in a number of convictions. In recent months human rights delegates have even convinced several South American countries to stop sending military personnel to the Georgia-based School of the Americas.

Unfortunately, with few exceptions the primary criminal convictions have been of common soldiers, paramilitaries, and low-ranking officers; in general, justice has not reached the higher levels of command. When it has, those responsible have usually received slap-on-the-wrist punishments—small fines, short prison sentences, temporary house arrest, etc. If human rights defenders can successfully prosecute Ríos Montt in Guatemala, that would be a very significant step in confronting the problem of high-level impunity in Latin America.

As things stand now, there is continued impunity of high-level officials for crimes committed in the 1970s and eighties, a situation that facilitates modern-day repression and state violence. In Latin America the worst example is Colombia, whose government has diligently maintained the worst human rights record in the hemisphere since the 1990s by giving free reign to human rights torturers and murderers who support the government.⁹ In the late 1990s, Bill Clinton (whose foreign policy often receives tacit approval or praise from the liberal end of the spectrum), started “Plan Colombia” as a part of the so-called War on Drugs. Since then, the Colombian government has received several billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer money. Last year alone Colombia got $643.3 million for “military and police programs,” in addition to $131.3 million as part of the “Andean Counterdrug Initiative.” What’s more, the amount of specifically “military” aid to Latin America has climbed rapidly during the Bush administration. As the U.S.-based World Policy Institute reports, by 2006 “military aid to Latin America increased to over 34 times its year 2000 levels” (their emphasis).¹⁰

Elsewhere the pattern of U.S. military aid remains similar. The top two recipients, Egypt and Israel, have compiled deplorable human rights records. It is often argued that certain Arab states in the Middle East have atrocious records as well, but this point, while true, is less important than the fact that our own government directly funds and enables state-led terror and repression. The U.S. may not be able to prevent human rights abuses abroad, but it can, theoretically, refrain from participating in them.¹¹

The U.S. relationship with such regimes partially reflects another strategy: when direct forms of violence receive too much of a backlash, as they sometimes do, the government finds ways of disguising its involvement in that violence. The outsourcing of violence has been a useful tactic in U.S. foreign policy for decades. A number of current U.S. policies fall under this category: the transport of terror suspects to foreign countries where they are then tortured (“extraordinary rendition,” which has long been illegal), the training of Latin American military personnel, and the paramilitarization of Latin American countries are some examples of how the U.S. shifts the burden of committing the violence to third parties while accomplishing the same goals. In each case, both the severity of the offense and the responsibility of U.S. policymakers are ignored or downplayed. And in each case those responsible for defining and implementing such policies have received little or no punishment.

Now, just as during the dirty wars, there is an urgent need to prevent our government from perpetrating, funding, and encouraging repression and injustice. Pursuing the guilty parties at the top—from Efraín Ríos Montt and other former dictators, to recent U.S. policymakers and the current Bush administration—is a vital step toward the prevention of further violence.