During the last quarter of the twentieth century, Latin America was dominated by authoritarian military regimes and immense human rights violations. Especially in Chile and El Salvador, where human rights abuses were rampant during Pinochet’s dictatorship and the Salvadoran civil war. The region is still dealing with the legacy of terror from its authoritarian past. Cath Collins, a professor and researcher in the School of Political Science at the University of Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile, runs a project mapping recent human rights trials in Chile. A recent book by Collins, Post-Transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador, describes the struggle to obtain justice for human rights violations in two countries that have adopted very different strategies. Accountability for human rights violations will be analyzed during and post-conflict; to determine if a correlation exists between human rights organizations actively participating during conflict and the accountability outcome post-transition.
First, Collins outlines the intensity of human rights violations in both Chile and El Salvador. Chile’s greatest human rights violations occurred during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Although most Chileans believed the authoritarian interregnum would be brief, the coup ushered in seventeen years of military rule. During Chile’s 1973 to 1990 military dictatorship, approximately three thousand people were killed or disappeared by Pinochet’s state agents. As well, thousands of Chileans suffered torture, imprisonment, arbitrary arrest, and severe repression. Pinochet’s regime was driven to eliminate political enemies to overcome internal conflict. Chile’s secret police, Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional, ran detention a...
... middle of paper ...
...illiams. 1993. The Military and Democratization in El Salvador. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami.
Collins, Cath. 2008. “State Terror and the Law: The (Re)judicialization of Human Rights Accountability in Chile and El Salvador.” Latin American Perspectives 35, no.5 (September): 20:37.
Ekern, S. 2010. “The Modernizing Bias of Human Rights: Stories of Mass Killings and Genocide in Central America.” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no.4: 219-41.
Collins, C. 2010. “Human Rights Trials in Chile During and After the Pinochet Years.” International Journal of Transitional Justice 4, no.1: 67-86.
Hawkins, Darren. 2002. International Human Rights and Authoritarian Rule in Chile. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Sriram, Chandra. 2004. Confronting Past Human Rights Violations: Justice vs. Peace in Times of Transition. London: Frank Cass.
All throughout the 20th century we can observe the marked presence of totalitarian regimes and governments in Latin America. Countries like Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic all suffered under the merciless rule of dictators and military leaders. Yet the latter country, the Dominican Republic, experienced a unique variation of these popular dictatorships, one that in the eyes of the world of those times was great, but in the eyes of the Dominicans, was nothing short of deadly.
In the beginning, Rafael Trujillo was a fruitful and beneficial leader to the country of the Dominican Republic. Trujillo reduced foreign debt and made the country more profitable, mainly because he was an excellent business man. However with this new prosperity, came the loss of the citizen's political liberties (1 “Rafael Trujillo”). Rafael Trujillo may have made the country more profitable, but he still was getting away with taking away innocent citizen’s political liberties.
When we think about society, there is often a stark contrast between the controversy projected in the media that our society faces, and the mellow, safe view we have of our own smaller, more tangible, ‘local’ society. This leads us to believe that our way of life is protected, and our rights secured by that concept of society that has been fabricated and built upon. However, what if society were not what we perceive it to be, and the government chose to exercise its power in an oppressive manner? As a society we would like to think that we are above such cruelty, yet as The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera by J. Joaquin Fraxedas recounts the state of Cuba in the 1990’s, we must also remember that all societies and governments view the individual differently as opposed to the whole. Each group has unique expectations that are enforced upon the individual which extend beyond those expectations that are written. What this book brings to light is the extraordinary repercussions of refusing to meet the demands and expectations of those that lead our governments. When we veer from the path well-trodden and into the ‘wild’ as Juan did, we may not face death quite as often, but the possibility of those we once called our own, persecuting us for our choices is a true and often an incredibly frightening danger.
Walker, Thomas W and Armony, Ariel C. Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Latin America. Scholarly Resources Incorporated, 2000. Wilmington, Delaware.
Smitha, Frank E. 2002. Chile, to the Overthrow of Allende in 1973. Chile, to Chile to 1970 3 (June). http://www.fsmitha.com/h2/ch24y.htm (November 7, 2011).
...an, Payam. "Are International Criminal Tribunals a Disincentive to Peace?: Reconciling Judicial Romanticism with Political Realism." Human Rights Quarterly 31 (2009): 624-54.
Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University. (1994) Twenty-five Human Rights Documents. New York: Columbia University.
.... The US state department cut international credit to Allende’s government, thus making Chile’s inflation rise into triple digits. By 1973 Chilean tanks had taken to the streets and refused Allende’s safe passage out of the country. He was eventually killed by an attack of his own armed forces. He brought this upon his self when the working class wasn’t happy with the slow rate that companies were being nationalized. This up rise had become the bloodiest up rise in the history of Latin America. Many of the supporters of the communist party had been rounded up and were tortured and killed. Many of them were put into mass graves. The military was the government for 17 years. They got rid of the legislation. This government had the US support except for the Carter administration. The actions that Chile’s military took set the tone for other Latin American militaries.
The U.S. also supported Pinochet’s torture treatment “CIA operatives provided torture equipment and training to the leading pro-U.S. dictators of Latin America at U.S. military institutions, among them the infamous School of Americas complex in Georgia’s Fort Benning, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WHINSEC. Chilean units trained here and it also provided training to death squads in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Paraguay, and other countries” (“Cold War Killer” 7). Not only did The United States train troops to fight for Pinochet but they also gave him torture weapons such as chambers to torture the Chilean people. Pinochet is known for torturing and hurting tons of people. The Chilean government stated “According to a government report that included testimony from more than 30,000 people, his government killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000. Two-thirds of the cases listed in the report happened in 1973” (Reel and Smith 1). After the coup, thousands of people in Chile were rounded up and taken to the national stadium in Santiago, where they were captured, tortured, and held prisoner for months. This is a real life account of Lelia Perez and what she experienced “I was forced to wear the clothes of people we had seen being killed. There was a curfew and the few people around just walked away from us. The
Rohter, Larry. "After 30 Years Argentina's Dictatorship Stands Trial." SIRS Issues Researcher. N.p., 20 Aug. 2006. Web. Feb.-Mar. 2014. .
In 1990, the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established and became the primary strategy chosen by the state, to handle the systematic human right violations committed during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Chile is one of the earliest countries to establish truth and reconciliation commissions and continue the pursuit of justice for many of the disappearances and killings during this era; reparation programs have grown gradually and a second truth commission, the “Valech commission”, has been established. The Chilean TRCs are considered to have “set the standards” for such commissions and are an important source for revelation and information. In this paper, I argue the effectiveness
The model of transition to democracy and the model of democracy itself both shaped the Chilean investigative journalism after the dictatorship. This is not a univocal process: there are movements, peaks, subtlety, and the likes. In other words, there are continuities and ruptures –Stuart Hall- and critical junctures –Gramsci, McChesney).
45 Oona Hathaway, ‘Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?’ (2003) 112 Yale Law Journal
Barria, L., & Roper, S. (2010). The Development of institutions of human rights: A comparative stud. Palgrave Macmillan: New York.
Throughout the ages, there have been many dictators, all cruel and unforgiving, including Paraguay’s dictator, Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, who singlehandedly was able to isolate the country from the rest of the world. This all started with the ending of the Paraguay’s revolutionary war, where Dr. Francia manipulated the newly formed government behind the scenes. The question is, during his dictatorship, did he do more good than harm? Even if originally Dr. Francia had good intentions, did he ended up to becoming a dictator who isolated Paraguay from the rest of the world? This research paper, will explain both sides of the argument to create a strong case to prove. Dr. Francia negatively affected Paraguay and did he do more harm than