NotiSur, 06/01/01 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit [This report is for your private use only, and may not be redistributed or repduced without permission from the publisher, LADB.] ------------------------------------------------------------ L A T I N A M E R I C A D A T A B A S E NotiSur - South American Political & Economic Affairs ISSN 1060-4189 Volume 11, Number 20 June 1, 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright 2001, Latin America Data Base (LADB), Latin American Institute, University of New Mexico Director: Rebecca Reynolds Bannister Editor: Patricia Hynds Staff writers: Carlos Navarro, Robert Sandels LADB ARCHIVES: Back issues are referenced to provide historical background relevant to the articles in this newsletter. These can be accessed with a subscription to the LADB searchable on-line archives at http://ladb.unm.edu/ by clicking on Search Archive. 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In This Issue: REGION: OPERATION CONDOR INVESTIGATIONS SPAN SEVERAL COUNTRIES INCLUDING THE U.S. * Uruguay reopens case of Chilean chemist * Case of UN official closed because of amnesty * Kissinger refuses to testify in Operation Condor case * Bolivian president tied to Operation Condor DESPITE DECADES OF DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AND MASSIVE ASSISTANCE, MOST OF REGION'S CAMPESINOS ARE STILL POOR * Limited access to credit plagues rural areas * Small farmers need to overcome effects of isolation ____________________________________________________________ ********************* GENERAL ********************* REGION: OPERATION CONDOR INVESTIGATIONS SPAN SEVERAL COUNTRIES INCLUDING THE U.S. Increasingly, former military leaders and politicians in several countries find themselves under investigation and sometimes jailed for human rights abuses carried out under Operation Condor, the coordinated repression of leftists during the Southern Cone military dictatorships of the 1970s. The net has not stopped with Latin Americans. Judges in both Argentina and France want Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state under former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, to testify regarding US complicity in Operation Condor activities. Created and based in Chile, Operation Condor, called by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano the "MERCOSUR of terror," also included the militaries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Human rights groups say that in the 1970s and 1980s, 30,000 people disappeared in Argentina and 1,200 in Chile, while 156 Bolivians, 160 Paraguayans, and 140 Uruguayans were disappeared in their own or neighboring countries (see NotiSur, 1993-02-16, 2000-07-07). Uruguay reopens case of Chilean chemist In January, Uruguayan Senate vice president Fernando Gargano tied the death of Chilean Eugenio Berrios to Operation Condor. Berrios, who was involved in developing the lethal gas Sarin, fled Chile in 1991. In November 1992, Berrios showed up at a police station in the Uruguayan resort of Parque del Plata and said he had escaped from a house where he was being held against his will by a group of Uruguayan and Chilean security agents. The police did not file a report, and they returned him to his captors who said Berrios suffered from mental delusions (see NotiSur, 1993-09-03). Berrios' body was found on an Uruguayan beach in 1995; he had been shot in the back of the head. "We all know this was an assassination carried out to silence him because he had become a danger," said Gargano in a radio interview on Jan. 28. Berrios worked as a chemist for the Chilean secret police (Direccion de Inteligencia Nacional, DINA). At the time he left Chile, he was wanted for questioning by Judge Adolfo Banados regarding the 1976 assassination in Washington, DC, of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his US assistant Ronni Moffitt (see NotiSur, 1995-06-02). He had also been implicated in the deaths of Spaniard Carmelo Soria and former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970). Frei Montalva died of septic shock after undergoing a routine operation in 1982. His daughter, Sen. Carmen Frei, is convinced that her father's death was the result of foul play and that Berrios might be involved. On May 9, a Chilean police report implicated four army officers and two noncommissioned officers in Berrios' disappearance and death. Named in the report are Carlos Angel Espinoza Lopez, Pedro Jara Morales, Jose Guillermo Montenegro Valenzuela, Felipe Enrique Cabrera Palacios, Martin Michael Borck Keim, and Santiago Caradeux Franulic. The investigation was ordered by Judge Olga Perez last December. On May 16, Uruguayan Judge Alvaro Gonzalez said he had accepted the request by prosecutor Nancy Hagopian to reopen the Berrios case. Hagopian made the request based on the Chilean police report. The case was closed in 1998 after the Uruguayan judiciary found insufficient evidence to charge several Uruguayans suspected of collaborating in Berrios' death. Case of UN official closed because of amnesty On April 11, the family of Spaniard Carmelo Soria asked the Chilean government to comply with the resolution by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) that the case be reopened. Soria worked for the UN Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago at the time of his death. He had lived in Chile since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Soria was apprehended by DINA agents on July 14, 1976. His body, which showed signs of torture, was found two days later inside his car at the bottom of a canal in Santiago. At the time, the police said his death was the result of a drunk-driving accident. Soria's case was closed in August 1996 by the Chilean Corte Suprema based on the 1978 amnesty law. The family then appealed to the IACHR. In December 1999, the commission called on the Chilean government to take whatever steps were necessary to bring to justice those responsible for Soria's death. Following the IACHR decision, the Soria family filed a motion with the Corte Suprema to reopen the case. They also tried unsuccessfully to meet with President Ricardo Lagos and Foreign Relation Minister Soledad Alvear. On May 10, the family again asked the Chilean judiciary to reopen the case. Alfonso Insunza, lawyer for the family, told the press that the family wanted the body exhumed to find out if it really was Soria, and they want a new autopsy performed to determine the exact cause of death. But on May 24, the Corte Suprema ruled against reopening the case, again citing the amnesty laws. Insunza said the family intended to appeal the decision. Meanwhile, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon issued an international arrest warrant for retired Chilean Gen. Hernan Julio Brady Roche, defense minister in the mid-1970s. Garzon said he had evidence implicating Brady in the abduction and killing of Soria. Brady denied any involvement in Soria's death, and he dismissed the arrest warrant, saying Garzon was looking for "stardom." Brady was in Chile at the time Garzon issued his warrant, which legal sources say makes it unlikely the order will be carried out. Human rights groups hold Brady responsible for the transfer of detainees to execution sites on Sept. 11, 1973, the day of the military coup that overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) and brought Pinochet to power. Kissinger refuses to testify in Operation Condor case On May 26, Argentine federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said he wants to question Henry Kissinger for his alleged complicity in the activities of Operation Condor, although he admitted it was highly unlikely that Kissinger could be made to testify. "If we cannot obtain a statement from a director of IBM, getting one from the former secretary of state seems a pipe dream," said the judge, referring to the case involving alleged bribes by IBM officials to officers of the Banco Nacion de Argentina (see NotiSur, 1996-02-16, 1998-06-05). In his memoirs, published in 1999, Kissinger denied any involvement or complicity in Operation Condor, and he referred to declassified Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department documents that indicate that the US supported the coup in Chile as "fantasies." A CIA document dated August 1978 and released in November 2000 revealed that the US knew about Operation Condor and plans to carry out actions in Europe against Latin American leftists (see NotiSur, 2000-12-01). Meanwhile, Judge Roger Le Loire, who is handling cases relating to Operation Condor in France, summoned Kissinger, in France on a personal visit, to testify on the alleged US role in the murder of opposition figures in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship. Judge Le Loire is investigating allegations that five French citizens who disappeared in Chile were kidnapped and tortured. He is also investigating the disappearance of several French nationals in Argentina during the military regimes in that country. The summons was delivered to Kissinger at the request of William Bourdon, lawyer for the families of those who disappeared. Bourdon said Kissinger's testimony was essential to the case because of numerous exchanges between the Chilean DINA and the CIA after the 1973 coup. Kissinger left France for Italy without seeing Le Loire. The US Embassy sent Le Loire a letter saying that Kissinger had other obligations and that the information requested by the judge was confidential, a French court source said. The embassy suggested the judge file an official request for information with the administration of President George W. Bush. The source said a request had been sent to Washington in 1999 during the administration of President Bill Clinton, but no answer had been received. Since the Chilean judiciary began investigating the disappearances and assassinations that occurred during the military regime, international human rights organizations have charged that Kissinger and other US officials share responsibility for the human rights violations committed by Pinochet's security forces. Bolivian president tied to Operation Condor Proof that the wife and daughter of an Uruguayan guerrilla killed in Bolivia in 1976 were handed over to the Argentine military adds to previous indications that Bolivian President Hugo Banzer participated in Operation Condor. After the death of Enrique Joaquin Lucas in Cochabamba, his wife, Graciela Rutila Artes, and the couple's daughter Carla were turned over to Argentina's security forces by officials of the Banzer dictatorship (1971-1978). Bolivian human rights groups reported in late May that a body buried in an unidentified grave in the La Paz general cemetery belonged to Lucas, an Uruguayan national who was killed after his capture by Bolivia's security forces. Rutila Artes, an Argentine citizen, and her daughter were taken to a clandestine torture center in Argentina, after which both disappeared, said Bolivia's Asociacion de Familiares de Detenidos y Desaparecidos (ASOFAMD). The Argentine human rights group Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo found Carla, who had been raised by a couple with links to the Argentine military, and in August 1985 she was reunited with her maternal grandmother Matilde Artes (see NotiSur, 2000-12- 15). Alberto Hein, with the Asociacion de Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos, said the discovery of Lucas' remains and testimony about the fate of his wife and daughter confirmed that Banzer had ties to Operation Condor-- an allegation he has consistently denied. Journalist Kintto Lucas, brother of the slain guerrilla, said in a letter published May 29 in the Uruguayan daily La Republica that then Bolivian interior minister Gen. Pereda Azbun later met with Uruguayan authorities in Montevideo to report that Operation Condor had carried out its task. The Comision para la Paz, set up last year by Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle to investigate the fate of some 140 individuals who disappeared in Uruguay during the dictatorship (1973-1985) or in neighboring countries, had earlier asked the Uruguayan Embassy in Bolivia to help collect information on what happened to Lucas. [Sources: El Nuevo Herald (Miami), 03/10/01; La Opinion (Los Angeles), 05/15/01; Spanish news service EFE, 01/28/01, 04/11/01, 05/09/01, 05/16/01, 05/16/01, 05/26/01; Notimex, 04/14/01, 05/10/01, 05/24/01, 05/29/01; Associated Press, 05/14/01, 05/28/01, 05/29/01; Reuters, 05/24/01, 05/29/01; The Miami Herald, 05/26/01, 05/29/01; Inter Press Service, 05/29/01] DESPITE DECADES OF DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AND MASSIVE ASSISTANCE, MOST OF REGION'S CAMPESINOS ARE STILL POOR [The following article by Stephen T. De Mott is reprinted with the permission of Noticias Aliadas in Lima, Peru. It first appeared in the May 21, 2001, edition of the weekly publication Latinamerica Press.] In March, tens of thousands of campesinos took to the streets of Asuncion, Paraguay, demanding credit for small and medium-size farmers and price guarantees for cotton (see NotiSur, 2001-03-23). Leaders of the country's Federacion Nacional Campesina (FNC) denounced deteriorating socioeconomic conditions in rural areas and demanded that the government also provide technological improvements in cotton processing "to break the dependency on international markets." The difficult situation of Paraguay's rural families is echoed across Latin America and the Caribbean. Despite decades of development projects, massive assistance programs, agrarian reform, credit plans, rural cooperatives, and the work of thousands of nongovernmental organizations, rural poverty has increased between 10% and 20% in the last three years in several countries in the region, according to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). More than 90 million Latin American and Caribbean campesinos currently live below the poverty line, while 47 million live in extreme poverty, the IFAD reported. While the region's rural population dropped steadily between 1980 and 1997, from 122 million to 111 million, the proportion of poor and indigent rural residents remained constant for most of that time, increasing toward the end of the 1990s. "Agrarian reform in the 1970s followed by two decades of changes managed to reduce the sharp polarization regarding the issue of land ownership, but polarization is re-emerging because of investments and technological improvements," said sociologist Fernando Eguren, president of the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales (CEPES). Limited access to credit plagues rural areas In El Salvador in 1995, lack of access to credit kept poor families from taking advantage of a lucrative market for honeydew melons. Although net income from the cultivation of melons for export was 20 times that of traditionally cultivated corn, campesinos could not afford the per-hectare production costs, which were six times higher. "If poor households do not have access to credit, they are excluded from transiting to more remunerative crops and the poverty cycle is perpetrated," Martine Dirven wrote in a study conducted by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). "A fair number of case studies identified credit--above know-how, technology, and market access--as the main bottleneck restricting the expansion of nontraditional crops," said Dirven. Throughout Latin America, access to credit has been low in rural areas. Since the mid-1980s, the disappearance of agricultural-development banks and special credit lines, because of market-oriented policies and the high level of indebtedness of many farmers, has led to a sharp drop in total loans to farm families in most countries. Although some politicians, such as those in Peru's current presidential campaign, continue to promise low- interest loans for farmers, many experts consider such credit an unacceptable risk. "Development banks have never produced satisfactory results," said Fernando Lucano, representative of the Latin American Challenge Investment Fund. "Low-interest loans just don't cover the cost of providing good credit." But credit restrictions are hardly the only problem. The lack of education and know-how has also done much to keep campesinos mired in poverty. Although school enrollment has improved substantially in Latin America, rural education lags well behind urban education in both quantity and quality, says ECLAC. Studies have shown that a good command of the four basic mathematical operations is needed to correctly apply agricultural inputs and deal with merchants. This usually requires six years of schooling. ECLAC figures show that rural residents between ages 20 and 24 have an average of more than six years of schooling in Chile, where the average is 8.8 years, as well as Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Colombia, but less in Honduras and Brazil, where the average is 4.2 years. Their parents' educational level was consistently below six years. Development programs, says Dirven, "tend to be discussed with and then transferred to the head of the farm household, who, in educational terms, is usually the least apt to understand all the implications and, in attitudinal terms, often the least willing to change." She recommends that development workers and others seeking to transfer technology attempt to direct their message to the entire household, especially its younger members, even though this may go against local customs. But the difficulty with that strategy is that campesino youth are disinclined to stay at home. Lack of land and job opportunities combined with a desire to put their education and imagination to greater use induce many to migrate to already overcrowded cities. Small farmers need to overcome effects of isolation Many small farmers live in isolated conditions--poverty is often a measure of how far someone lives from major roads and urban centers--and find it difficult to connect with markets or stay abreast of fluctuations in supply and demand. Time and transportation costs are often high in relation to the amount of produce to be bought or sold, making production for home consumption a rational choice even if there are significant cost/price differences in favor of the market. Lack of timely information about market variations can be costly. In Arequipa, in southern Peru, farmers who were unaware of the low price of onions recently planted the crop only to later plow it under because it was not economically worthwhile to harvest the onions. On the positive side, campesinos in Guatemala, El Salvador, and elsewhere have begun using Web sites to sell handicrafts. "The smaller producers are, the more essential it is for them to organize," says Dirven. Once campesinos start cooperating, they can gather enough produce to make it sufficiently attractive to prospective buyers. Furthermore, campesinos organized collectively can achieve increased negotiating power, economies of scale, and lower transaction costs. Small farmers, however, are often as isolated from one another as they are from potential markets. Lack of paved roads, public transportation, electricity, and telephones severely limit their access to a wider world. A 1996 Fondo de Inversion en Telecomunicaciones (FITEL) survey of 240 rural settlements in Peru showed that only 13% had direct access to a paved road. It takes more than an hour to get to the district capital for 20% of the population who live in larger settlements (1,001-3,000 people) and 45% of those who live in mid-size and smaller settlements. Victor Lainez, project director for Caritas of Peru, the Catholic Church's aid office, said most projects on behalf of campesinos fail because they do not adequately address all the factors from production to sales and marketing. Caritas has provided assistance and development programs to small farmers for 45 years, says Lainez, the situation of the poor has continued to deteriorate. "We have increased productivity," he said, "but that only increases the supply, which brings the prices down, and the campesino ends up the same or worse than before." Lainez and many others concerned with overcoming rural poverty also blame globalization. Lainez complains that subsidized agricultural products from Europe, the US, and China undersell Peruvian farmers who receive no government support. "Globalization has been a negative factor," he said. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= pvtsa-05.31.01-19:43:55-23724