Guatemala to try more former top military officials for Maya genocide

Sofia Menchu. Reuters. November 29, 2019

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala’s human rights prosecutor on Friday indicted another former top military official for genocide and crimes against humanity committed during the bloodiest phase of the Central American country’s 36-year civil war.

A military operations chief under deceased Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, Luis Enrique Mendoza Garcia will be tried in March for his role in an operation in the early 1980s that killed at least 1,771 Maya Ixil and displaced thousands.

Judge Jimmy Bremer on Friday formally received the charges the prosecutors presented against the 76-year-old in a court in Guatemala City.

Mendoza Garcia is the fourth top military official facing justice in less than a week after Benedicto Lucas Garcia, Manuel Callejas and Cesar Noguera were indicted in a separate case of genocide against the same community.

“I was not the one who ruled,” Mendoza Garcia said in a declaration given by video conference, adding that he had had no means to plan or carry out such an operation. Reuters was unable to contact the accused, all of whom have denied the allegations.

Mendoza Garcia was captured six months ago after having been on the run since 2011. Guatemala’s human rights prosecutor said there were more victims and witnesses who could testify against him than in other processes.

Former military intelligence chief Jose Mauricio Rodriguez was acquitted last year of charges of genocide and crimes against humanity after the court said it had insufficient evidence.

During the civil war, from 1960 to 1996, an estimated 200,000 mostly Mayan civilians were killed and another 45,000 went missing.

Rios Montt, who ruled during the war’s bloodiest phase, between 1982 and 1983, died in April last year. At that time, he was facing renewed charges after his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity was overturned.

Lucas Garcia is the brother of former president Romeo Lucas Garcia. Guatemala’s human rights prosecutor accuses him of having planned one of the operations in the Maya Ixil region some 225km northwest of the capital.

Separately on Friday, Guatemalan President-elect Alejandro Giammattei regretted the decision of a Swiss court to uphold a 15-year prison sentence for Swiss-Guatemalan Erwin Sperisen for his role in a 2006 prison operation.

Giammattei himself faced accusations of human rights violations for the same incident, during which seven prisoners but no government officials died; he was later exonerated for lack of evidence.

“An act of injustice,” Giammattei said. “I would have liked to testify in the case.” Sperisen’s lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment but told local media they would take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Mexican authorities make arrests in killings of American Mormons

Mary Beth Sheridan. Washington Post. December 1, 2019

MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities on Sunday arrested several people suspected of involvement in the killing of nine members of the LeBaron family, the extended clan of American Mormons whose deaths last month drew international attention to rising violence in this country.

The federal attorney general’s office said in a communique that soldiers, Marines, National Guard and other security forces launched a joint operation early Sunday and detained “various individuals believed to be involved” in the killings outside the town of La Mora in the northern state of Sonora.

Officials didn’t provide details, and the attorney general’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. The newspaper El Universal cited sources as saying three people were arrested in Bavispe, not far from La Mora.

Mexican authorities have said the LeBarons — an extended family of fundamentalist Mormons with dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship who have lived in northern Mexico for generations — appear to have been caught unawares in a conflict between affiliates of the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels that dominate the rural area. Three mothers and six children were slain in the ambush.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador faces mounting pressure to rein in the country’s growing violence. In the latest eruption, authorities said at least 19 people were killed over the weekend in a gun battle between the Cartel of the Northeast and security forces in the northern town of Villa Union, about 40 miles southwest of Eagle Pass, Tex.

President Trump said last week he was planning to designate Mexico’s cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, a move that Mexico fears could lead to foreign interference in everything from the business sector to government security policies.

Attorney General William P. Barr is expected to visit Mexico City this week at the invitation of the Mexican government to discuss Trump’s plan.

Julian LeBaron, a family spokesman and longtime anti-violence activist, said the three suspects detained Sunday were low-level “thugs.” He and about 50 other members of his extended family are scheduled to meet with López Obrador on Monday morning.

“We think that’s the reason why they went and picked up these local thugs — so these people can say, ‘Yeah, we did something about this,’ ” he said.

He said the family wasn’t satisfied with the arrests of the triggermen, but wanted the detention of “the people who were responsible for giving the order” to carry out the attack.

At least 19 killed as Mexican cartel battles police and army south of U.S. border

The FBI has been assisting Mexico in trying to track down the killers. Last month, Mexican police detained a man believed to have been involved in the attacks, authorities said in the communique Sunday. That arrest wound up providing “critical information and evidence” that authorities pursued.

LeBaron helped lead a march of thousands of critics of López Obrador in Mexico City on Sunday, the first anniversary of the president’s inauguration.

Mexicans were shocked by the attack on the Mormon family, but some have criticized the LeBaron family for calling on Trump to do more to reduce violence in Mexico — including classifying cartels as terrorist groups.

LeBaron acknowledged that many Mexicans worried that such a designation could prompt a U.S. military invasion.

“I don’t think any of us would like to see that,” he said. “But when your sisters and cousins are being murdered, we don’t care where the help comes from.”

As Troubles Grow, Mexicans Keep the Faith With Their President

Elisabeth Malkin. New York Times. December 1, 2019

PARAÍSO, Mexico — Every day before dawn, a knot of unemployed men gather at the gate of a construction site, hoping to land a job building a new oil refinery that Mexico’s president promises will bring riches to this forgotten corner of southeastern Mexico.

They linger until noon before drifting off in the haze of the Gulf Coast sun. They will be back again the next day, trusting that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s bet on oil will pay off for them. “He is trying to do his best,” said one of the unemployed men, Geovanni Silván.

That patience suggests why Mr. López Obrador continues to enjoy vast approval, one year into his presidency, despite a flatlined economy and relentless violence.

He ran on promises to make the state work for the people instead of for the elites that were favored by his predecessors. And many Mexicans feel that he has begun to do just that: pouring money into social programs, crisscrossing the country in commercial flights to speak directly to ordinary Mexicans, slashing government salaries and forgoing the pomp of past presidents.

So while Mr. López Obrador has little to show for his efforts so far, many Mexicans remain hopeful, willing to give time to deliver the revolution he promised.

The support he enjoys personally outstrips Mexicans’ opinion of his governance, analysts say.

“The power of his leadership is that there is consistency in what he says and what he does,” said Edna Jaime, director of México Evalúa, a research group that analyzes government policies.

In his first year, helped by a pliant majority in Congress, he has upended Mexican politics, dismantling the policies of his predecessors to chart a leftist course intended to correct the country’s yawning inequalities. He has raised the minimum wage, won a new labor law, cracked down on fuel theft and pushed Mexico to do more to produce its own food and energy.

Even when his actions have largely followed those of his predecessors, his rhetoric has departed from theirs. With a new force called the National Guard, he has kept the military at the forefront of the fight against organized crime, and deported tens of thousands of Central American migrants — all while declaring migrants welcome and an end to the war on gangs.

“The transformation that we are undertaking is within sight,” he said in a speech Sunday, adding that he needed another year to make those changes irreversible. “We are practicing politics in a new way,” he said. “Now we are guided by honesty, democracy and humanism.”

Critics accuse him of trampling the country’s fragile institutions as he concentrates power. His response is to say that the institutions were created by “snobs” to serve neoliberal interests — and to fill them with loyalists. He has alienated rights groups with his handling of Mexico’s human rights commission. Economic analysts argue he has made erratic decisions, sapping investor confidence, and he has convinced no one that he has a strategy to deal with organized crime.

That failure is made glaringly clear with each new spasm of violence, including the murder of three mothers and six children near the United States border last month. On Sunday, as Mr. López Obrador was declaring his commitment to protecting lives, the authorities said 21 people had died in a two-day battle between security forces gang gunmen in the northern state of Coahuila.

But the discredited opposition makes an easy foil for his rhetorical attacks on corruption — the origin, he says, of Mexico’s ills.

And his daily 7 a.m. news conferences allow him to frame the national discussion, blotting out his opponents and even his political allies.

“He is a formidable storyteller,” said Blanca Heredia, a political analyst at CIDE, a Mexico City university. “He has won people’s confidence and almost a kind of faith.”

That belief holds strong in Paraíso, an oil port in Mr. López Obrador’s home state, Tabasco, that has become a laboratory for the president’s plans to develop Mexico’s poor southeast.

“You can’t touch Andrés Manuel here,” said Ana Luisa Castellanos, a former supporter and a local member of the left-wing party the president led for years before he broke away.

Rivers and land merge in a giant delta of marshland and mangrove where Tabasco lies at the crook of the Gulf of Mexico. Like the rest of the region, Tabasco has sunk far behind Mexico’s central and northern states, where billions in factory investment has transformed the economy.

One of Mr. López Obrador’s main promises was to correct that imbalance. The prize for Tabasco was the new Dos Bocas refinery, part of the president’s strategy to rescue the government’s indebted state-owned oil company, Pemex, and stem Mexico’s dependence on imports of gasoline.

Mr. López Obrador also launched one of his signature social programs in Tabasco, an effort to revive the abandoned countryside and bolster domestic production by paying smallholders to grow fruits and vegetables and plant fruit and timber trees.

Those who skip meetings or do not show up for chores at the program’s nurseries forfeit the monthly $230 subsidy.

Critics argue that the program is little more than a handout, but for many who participate, it has been transformative.

After disease wiped out her coconut trees, Romana Segura Ramón, 64, had abandoned her 2 ½ acres. Now, she and her husband grow beans, corn and other crops, and have planted mahogany trees. “We are dedicated to our land again,” she said.

Elizabeth Genesta, 29, said the biggest advantage is what she has learned from longtime farmers. A biochemical engineer who left the oil industry to raise water buffalo, Ms. Genesta found that it was a “titanic job” to plant trees to restore her land, and sought help.

“It’s fantastic how we all benefit from each other,” she said.

It is a sign of the president’s priorities that when Congress passed an austere budget last month, Pemex accounted for almost half of all infrastructure spending, and the welfare ministry received billions in new money.

Without more government investment, though, Mexico’s private sector has halted its own plans and that uncertainty has contributed to the economy’s halt, said Ms. Jaime, the analyst.

“The president’s plan to reactivate the economies of the south won’t close the gaps,” on its own, she added.

Whatever the results of the long-term strategy, there is early optimism in Tabasco. Last week, hotels were full and oil workers in neon-colored overalls seemed to be everywhere: crowding early morning buses and filing off the boats that returned them from offshore rigs.

José Luis Delgado Burgos, 35, spent much of 2018 unemployed before he found a job as a human resources manager on an oil rig a year ago. He gives all the credit to the president. “They had shut down the rigs and thanks to him they opened them,” Mr. Delgado said.

Industry analysts argue that building a new refinery is a mistake that will drain billions from Pemex — already the most indebted oil company in the world — and place additional strain on the government’s finances. Environmental groups warn that the site’s location at the edge of the sea makes it vulnerable to accidents.

But in Paraíso, if there are doubts about the refinery, they pale beside the expectations that thousands of promised jobs will materialize when the pace of construction picks up.

“Everything that is development is a good project,” said Ciro Burelo Magaña, a local lawyer who opposes Mr. López Obrador. Then he added: “In a while the sea will swallow it up, because of climate change.”

The hope of new jobs does not obscure other problems. Paraíso’s residents fear that local criminal gangs are becoming bolder. Last week, the dismembered body of a local policeman was left outside the house of a former City Council member.

And like everywhere in Mexico, there is no sign that authorities have the ability — or the will — to stem the violence.

In June, Juan Luis Ligonia, 40, was returning with a load of fresh fish from Yucatán when armed men stopped him and stole his truck, ending his business supplying fish to Mexico City. When he went to the police with information about where the truck had been spotted, they told him he needed to pay a bribe if he wanted them to investigate.

“I voted for him thinking that there would be a change,” Mr. Ligonia said of the president. Instead, he said, “There is no improvement.”

UN Mission Investigates Excess Force Used against Ecuador Protesters

EFE. November 30, 2019

GENEVA – The United Nations mission investigating the protests that occurred in Ecuador between Oct. 3-13 heard numerous complaints of arbitrary detentions by police and the possible disproportionate use of force, for which it asked that further investigations be permitted into those cases.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which deployed a team of experts there from Oct. 21 to Nov. 8, received reports that at least nine people had been killed, 1,507 injured (435 were members of security forces), and 1,382 placed under arrest, according to a statement by the organization this Friday.

The UN experts cited reports from victims and witnesses that police and military deployed, following the declaration of a state of exception, failed to comply with international rules in their “unnecessary and disproportionate use of force.”

“Victims and witnesses denounced the repeated use by security forces of tear gas and buckshot fired at short distances against demonstrators,” which left hundreds injured and undoubtedly some people killed, the mission said.

The statement noted as a “disturbing pattern” the large number of arbitrary detentions reported during the crisis, in some cases in huge numbers and “without any concrete charges against those detained.”

The mission interviewed many who said that after being arrested they suffered cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, while some reported that due process of the law was not observed when they were put in solitary confinement or moved to non-authorized detention centers.

Upon seeing the results of the mission, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michele Bachelet, said the protests “had a high cost” for those detained, and that “people should be able to express their complaints without fear of being injured or arrested.”

The former Chilean president, who sent a similar mission to investigate the protests in her own country and whose results will soon be published, urged Ecuadorians to enter into dialogue to prevent further conflicts and to build an inclusive, intercultural and peaceful society.

She also asked that “independent, impartial and transparent” investigations be carried out into reports of human rights violations and the plundering and destruction of public and private properties.

The mission of human rights experts traveled to Ecuador at the invitation of President Lenin Moreno’s government, which, as the spokeswoman for the UN office directed by Bachelet, Marta Hurtado, told a press conference Friday, provided freedom of access to the people and installations the UN personnel requested.

The experts carried out 373 interviews including 83 with some of the victims, and went to three detention centers while visiting the provinces of Chimborazo, Tungurahua, Cotopaxi and Guayas.

The statement also said that some protesters presumably resorted to violence as they blockaded highways, looted and set fire to buildings, attacked ambulances and destroyed public and private property.

At the same time, the experts reported more than 100 attacks on reporters covering the protests, both by security forces and demonstrators, while some audiovisual media were cut off and several offices of other media suffered acts of vandalism.

The demonstrations in Ecuador took place between Oct. 3-13 after President Lenin Moreno announced adjustments to the economy that included the end of gasoline subsidies, a measure that detonated social protests.

Peru opposition leader Keiko Fujimori walks free from jail

Marco Aquino, Maria Cervantes. Reuters. November 30, 2019

LIMA (Reuters) - Peruvian opposition leader Keiko Fujimori walked free from prison on Friday night after being jailed for more than a year pending a trial over allegations she accepted illegal campaign contributions from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht.

Fujimori, leader of the powerful right-wing Popular Force party, left prison in the Chorrillos district of capital city Lima, according to a Reuters witness at the scene where hundreds of supporters gathered outside in anticipation of her release.

Fujimori was met by her husband outside the prison with flowers and balloons. Others supporters carried the orange banners of her political party.

The country’s Constitutional Tribunal, Peru’s top court, ordered her release on Monday after she was handed an 18-month pre-trial sentence in October last year.

“I have lived though the most painful moment of my life,” Fujimori told reporters, adding the decision to release her “corrected a process full of abuse and arbitrariness”.

Prosecutors allege she led a criminal organization and received millions of dollars from Odebrecht, which is at the center of a region-wide corruption scandal. Fujimori denies the accusations.

Fujimori is the daughter of Peru’s ex-President Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights crimes and graft.

Her release comes as Peru prepares for legislative elections in January after President Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress amid a battle with opposition lawmakers over his anti-corruption campaign. Keiko Fujimori’s party had held a majority in Congress before its dissolution.

The far-reaching Odebrecht scandal has swept through Peruvian politics. Earlier this year, former president Alan Garcia killed himself to avoid arrest in the probe. A number of other former presidents are also under investigation.

Fujimori, who still faces an eventual trial on the corruption allegations, said she would continue to cooperate with Peru’s judiciary. She added she would look to spend time with her family before making decisions on any other plans.

“Later I will decide what I will do in the second stage of my life,” she said. “I have had the opportunity to reflect and also realize there have been things I could have done better.”

Bolivia to renew Israel ties after rupture under Morales

PAOLA FLORES. AP. November 28, 2019

Bolivia said Thursday it will restore diplomatic ties with Israel, a decade after then-President Evo Morales severed relations because of an Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

The renewal of ties with Israel was announced by interim Foreign Minister Karen Longaric as part of an overhaul of Bolivia’s foreign policy following Morales’ resignation this month.

Many Israeli tourists visited Bolivia before Morales cut off relations with Israel, and the hope is that they will return, Longaric said.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, welcomed the Bolivian announcement.

He said Israel’s Foreign Ministry had worked for a lengthy period to restore relations.

The ouster of Bolivia’s former “hostile” president, Morales, and replacement with a “friendly government” had also made it possible, Katz said.

Bolivia’s interim government has also named Walter Oscar Serrate Cuellar as the new ambassador to the United States after an 11-year diplomatic rupture.

Morales, who espoused socialism, claimed victory in an Oct. 20 presidential election. But opposition protesters alleged fraud and the military turned on Morales, forcing him to resign and seek asylum in Mexico.

Bolivia Ends Security Forces’ 2-Week Exemption from Criminal Responsibility

EFE. December 1, 2019

LA PAZ – Bolivia’s caretaker government on Thursday repealed a decree that over the past two weeks had exempted soldiers and police from criminal responsibility when taking part in operations to restore order in the violence-racked country.

That executive order had come under harsh criticism from Amnesty International and other global human rights watchdogs, as well as from the Ombudsman’s Office in the Andean nation, where social upheaval since the Oct. 20 presidential election has left 34 dead, many of gunshot wounds during police and military operations.

“We’ve achieved the desired pacification,” interim President Jeanine Añez said in a brief statement at the presidential palace in La Paz.

She said the decree issued on Nov. 14, two days after she took office, was a “constitutional remedy” adopted amid “unprecedented violent actions.”

Añez referred specifically to what she called “days of terror” in the highland city of El Alto, near La Paz, where she said the lives of more than 250,000 people were at risk in what could have been a “tragedy of devastating proportions” at a refinery.

At least 10 civilians died of gunshot wounds during a military and police operation on Nov. 19 in that city of nearly 1 million inhabitants when groups of anti-government demonstrators gathered outside the refinery.

The caretaker government denies that the security forces opened fire, but the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which sent a delegation to Bolivia, and other entities have denounced excessive force in different security operations, including the one in El Alto.

Nine other civilians died of gunshot wounds in a military and police operation in the Bolivian city of Sacaba on Nov. 15.

According to the Ombudsman’s Office, a total of 34 people have died and 832 have been injured in violent incidents since the Oct. 20 election, which has since been annulled.

The violence began on Oct. 21, after longtime leftist President Evo Morales declared himself the winner in the first-round amid accusations of fraud by the opposition.

Morales was forced to resign on Nov. 10 after an Organization of American States audit of the vote found various irregularities in the election process and he lost the support of the armed forces.

On Nov. 11 Morales took up an offer of political asylum in Mexico and the Bolivian army began carrying out joint operations with the police, which had asked for military backing to help quell violent protests amid a power vacuum.

Formerly a deputy speaker of the Senate, the conservative Añez was sworn in as interim president on Nov. 12, while the controversial decree exempting the security forces from criminal responsibility was issued two days later.

Morales’s ouster has been termed a “coup” by different Latin American governments and politicians.

Brazilian former President Luiz Inacio da Silva, an icon of the left in Latin America, said in an interview with British newspaper The Guardian that was published on Nov. 22 – two weeks after he was released from prison in Curitiba, Brazil, where he was serving a sentence for a corruption conviction he says is politically motivated – that the ouster of Morales was a coup and a crime.

But he also told that paper that Morales had made a mistake by seeking a fourth term in office.

Voters had narrowly rejected that possibility in a 2016 plebiscite, but the following year Bolivia’s Supreme Court abolished term limits for all elected officials on the grounds that they violate candidates’ human rights.