South American Dictatorships in Images

Greg Weeks points to this incredible, if harrowing, collection of photos from Operation Condor. The photos were found in Paraguay’s “Archives of Terror,” which documented the deaths of tens of thousands of South Americans at the hands of military regimes and the collaboration between dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Peru. We can and do talk about the horrors of human rights violations, the injustices of regimes that extrajudicially murdered their own citizens, and the sheer numbers of those who died under such regimes, but there is something about the photographs like those from Operation Condor that convey in a unique way exactly what that violence looked like on a daily basis for many.

On Allegations that Argentine & Italian Dictatorships Fixed World Cups

This week, FIFA is hosting a conference on the World Cup in history. Scholars from throughout the world are gathering to look at how the World Cup has been more than just a sporting event, filtering into the politics, society, and economics. At the conference, however, two scholars have made some rather bold claims about the connections between the World Cup and politics:

Soccer’s biggest prize may have twice been won with the help of dictators fixing matches for the host team.

Argentina’s triumph in 1978 and Italy’s in 1934 were said to be influenced by military leaders seeking propaganda coups, delegates were told Thursday at a symposium titled ”The Relevance and Impact of FIFA World Cups.”

”It’s the same old story: Sport and politics are brothers and sometimes sport is under the other brother,” Italian writer Marco Impiglia told The Associated Press.

Impiglia presented a paper suggesting Benito Mussolini ensured favorable refereeing decisions, helping the Italian team win.

Raanan Rein, an Israeli professor of Latin American history, said he was ”100 percent persuaded” that Argentina’s military junta influenced a 6-0 win against Peru. The match is a notorious chapter of World Cup lore and ensured Argentina advanced to the final instead of great rival Brazil.

Certainly, there is little doubt that dictatorships benefited from World Cup victories, and it is not even limited to Argentina and Italy. Though Brazil was not the host country in 1970 (Mexico was), its victory there and its status as the first ever tri-champion allowed dictator Emilio Garrastazu Medici to lead the country into the worst excesses of nationalistic pride, even while the military dictatorship was at the height of its most repressive phase. Certainly, dictatorships and repressive governments have benefited from World Cup victories in the past. Nonetheless, as tantalizing and fascinating as the idea is, the key sentence from the article is really this:

Still, Rein and Impiglia said their claims lack documentary proof.

Suffice to say, that’s a pretty big problem. That’s not to say the allegations are totally baseless – for years, there have been allegations and oral accounts from participants or politicians suggesting that Argentina’s 6-0 defeat of Peru in particular was suspect and may have counted on support from any number of officials, be they Peruvian coaches or players, or the referees themselves. Nonetheless, these allegations have generally been whispers, with a lot of contradictions between stories and not a lot of corroborating evidence. Documentary evidence could go far in helping clarify the issue, but that is something Rein and Impiglia lack. One can be “totally convinced” that match-fixing took place, but that does not address the actual issue of whether there is enough evidence to empirically say it did indeed occur. Indeed, although the allegation of manipulating the 1978 or 1934 World Cups is a sexy argument, it distracts from perhaps the more important (and demonstrable) fact that, regardless of whether or not regimes fixed matches, the World Cup played a key role in drumming up popular support for brutal regimes not just in Argentina and Italy, but in Brazil as well. Indeed, the World Cup was and continues to be one of the most visible forms of ultranationalism and sport in the world today, regardless of regime types or match-fixing.

Israel, Guatemala, and the Question of Genocide

As the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt appears to be headed back to square one after the Constitutional Court’s ruling, NACLA has a fascinating piece up on Israel’s ties to Ríos Montt:

Known as “Brother Efraín,” a fundamentalist convert of the California-based “Church of the Word” (Verbo), Rios Montt thanked his God in heaven for anointing him as Guatemala’s president, but on earth he thanked Israel for establishing his March 1982 military coup. Israeli press reported that 300 Israeli advisors helped execute the coup, which succeeded so smoothly, Brother Efraín told an ABC News reporter, “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” Through the height of la violencia (“the violence”) or desencarnacíon (“loss of flesh, loss of being”), between the late 1970s to early 1980s, Israel assisted every facet of attack on the Guatemalan people. Largely taking over for the United States on the ground in Guatemala (with Washington retaining its role as paymaster, while also maintaining a crucial presence in the country), Israel had become the successive governments’ main provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weaponry, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance.

[...] A February 1983 CBS Evening News with Dan Rather program reported, Israel “didn’t send down congressmen, human rights activists or priests” to strengthen Israel’s special relationship with Guatemala. Israel “taught the Guatemalans how to build an airbase. They set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the [Israeli-occupied Palestinian] West Bank and Gaza, designed simply to beat the Guerilla.” Timemagazine (03/28/83) chimed in that Guatemalan army “outposts in the jungle have become near replicas of Israeli army field camps.” At one of these Israeli outposts replicated in Huehuetenango (among the areas hardest hit by the genocide, with the second highest number of massacres registered by a UN truth commission), Time continues: “Colonel Gustavo Menendez Herrera pointed out that his troops are using Israeli communications equipment, mortars, submachine guns, battle gear and helmets.” Naturally, as Army Chief of Staff Benedicto Lucas García had stated previously: “The Israeli soldier is a model and an example to us.”

In spite of emphasis on US support for Guatemala and other brutal regimes in Central America in the 1980s (and certainly the US absolutely was the keystone in supporting these regimes), it was not the sole actor. Both Augusto Pinochet’s government and the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983 sent weapons and military aides to right-wing military regimes in Central America. That Israel, more often than not an ally of the US during the 1980s, was also a willing supporter of Ríos Montt is an untold part of the story, but not necessarily a surprising one, for rarely do authoritarian regimes work in a bubble cut off from international support from a variety of countries.

And of course, that also means Israel was directly tied to a regime that committed genocidal acts itself. There is a quotation from Ríos Montt’s own press secretary in the 1980s that gets at the heart of the mindset behind the regime’s brutal tactics, which may have killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans in 1982 alone:

Look, the problem of the war is not just a question of who is shooting. For each one who is shooting there are ten working behind him.” Rios Montt’s press secretary added: “The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators. Therefore, the Indians were subversives, right? And how do you fight subversion? Clearly, you had to kill Indians because they were collaborating with subversion. And then they say, ‘You’re massacring innocent people’. But they weren’t innocent. They had sold out to subversion.

This certainly appears to be genocide, or “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” And it is not as if the targeting of indigenous groups was a secret even at the time. As an evangelical pastor at the time himself put it,

 The army doesn’t massacre Indians. [...] It massacres demons, and Indians are demons possessed; they are communists.

That is, simply put, the targeting of an ethnic group for massacre, for destruction, and it was a fact that people at the time were willing to admit. Ríos Montt’s trial may be undone by a technicality, but the historical evidence overwhelmingly points to genocide in Guatemala under the military leader. That Israel supported such a genocidal regime is tragically ironic, if somewhat unsurprising, in the context of the final decade of the Cold War.

Post-Election Paraguay – Is a Return to Mercosur Next?

After the institutional coup against Fernando Lugo last June, politico-economic trade bloc Mercosur suspended Paraguay’s membership. The response was swift, and Horacio Cartes, who at the time was a potential candidate for president, called on Paraguay to maintain faith in Mercosur and to work towards having the suspension lifted. Now that Cartes has won the election, it appears that he was sincere in his comments and that he is now taking steps towards restoring Paraguay’s full participation in Mercosur. Perhaps more importantly, Mercosur members seem willing to restore relations with Paraguay. Both Jose Mujica of Uruguay and Cristina Kirchner of Argentina congratulated Cartes on his victory, with Kirchner tweeting “We wait for you in Mercosur” and that Paraguay’s “place is with us in Mercosur always,” while Mujica invited Paraguay to Mercosur’s June summit in Uruguay. Of course, Brazil also has a say in the matter; Dilma Rousseff’s foreign ministry proclaimed that it would be glad to welcome back Paraguay, but only on the condition that Paraguay’s Congress approve Venezuela’s admission to Mercosur (the Paraguayan Senate’s holdup had been what initially kept Venezuela from gaining full membership). Cartes seems willing to take this step, having already spoken with legislators to try to pressure them into accepting Venezuela’s admission. And in another good sign for Paraguay, none other than Nicolás Maduro himself, Venezuela’s recently elected president, called Cartes to congratulate him and to express a desire to improve bilateral relations between Venezuela and Paraguay.  Thus, it seems that, as Greg Weeks suggested, South America is willing to allow the resumption of democracy in Paraguay to heal the relations that were strained with Lugo’s removal last summer, and it appears that, barring any sudden rupture, Paraguay is well on the path to returning to normalized political and economic relations with its neighbors.

In other Cartes news, he has also finally apologized for blatantly homophobic and hateful remarks he made regarding homosexuality. While that does not mean he is any more open-minded regarding diversity, at least he had the wherewithal to acknowledge what he publicly said was offensive, hateful, and contributing to a climate of sexual discrimination and fear.

Around Latin America

-Marking the first major protest of the year, over 100,000 Chilean students took to the streets to continue to push for educational reform, an issue that has garnered much support and been a consistent problem for conservative president Sebastian Pinera. (And for those wondering, this is what (part of) over 100,000 people in the streets looks like.)

-With the recent conviction of some of his former top aides for corruption, Brazilian federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva to examine what, if any, role in or knowledge of payoffs Lula might have had during his first term.

-Uruguay became the third country in the Americas to legalize gay marriage nationwide (joining Canada and Argentina) after the Chamber of Deputies approved the Senate’s changes to the bill (the Chamber of Deputies originally passed an earlier draft of the bill last December). Meanwhile, in Chile, Congress has begun debating the legal recognition of same-sex couples; though the recognition would fall short of allowing gay marriage, it would grant gay couples the same rights as married couples.

-Although the frontrunner in Paraguay’s upcoming elections, conservative candidate Horacio Cartes apparently has quite the history of shady dealings and possible corrupt practices, including international smuggling, practices that, if true, could further strain Paraguay’s relations with its neighbors, relations that were already damaged when Congress rapidly removed former president Fernando Lugo through a dubious “impeachment.”

-A study finds that an overwhelming amount of the money donated to aid Haiti after the devastating 2010 earthquake ultimately ended up in the hands of US companies, with only one percent aiding Haitian companies themselves.

-Speaking of Haitians, they are among the thousands of immigrants who have recently entered into Brazil, leaving the small state of Acre to ask for federal aid in supporting the influx. I don’t quite agree with Boz that their desire to move Brazil automatically means that the economy there is doing well, but it at least suggests that people in other countries perceive the Brazilian economy to be preferable to their own.

-In spite of his family’s claims late last year, Alberto Fujimori does not actually have cancer, which was the reason his family initially called for his release from prison, where he is currently serving a 25-year sentence for human rights violations during his 1990-2000 presidency. Although the former president is not actually ailing, that has not stopped Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani from calling for a pardon for Fujimori.

-As a hunger strike among prisoners at US facilities in Guantanamo continues, the US has begun force-feeding some of the striking prisoners.

-In the wake of the rape of a tourist from the US, Rio de Janeiro has banned the use of vans for public transit (rather than the larger buses) in the southern part of the city. Of course, that the ban is in effect only in the wealthier southern zone where tourism dominates provides yet another reminder of the social stratification evident throughout Rio, including in public transportation options.

-Hundreds of thousands of Colombians, including President Juan Manuel Santos, marched in support of ongoing peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC.

-Are Brazil and Russia close to a missile deal?

-Although scholarship and human rights activism have already torn much “the veil” off Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the recent exhumation of Nobel-laureate Pablo Neruda could further shed light on the poet’s death and end years of speculation over whether he really died of cancer, as had long been maintained, or if the regime had him killed, a theory that has been bandied about as well.

-Outrage continues over the appointment of evangelical politician Marco Feliciano as the head of the Brazilian Congress’s Human Rights Committee in spite of a history of public homophobic and racist statements. As a result, in a blow against transparency or accountability in government, the Committee recently decided to close all hearings to outsiders  in hopes of preventing protests from erupting in committee hearings.

-Speaking of human rights in Brazil, police are finally facing trial for their role in the executions of prisoners during the Carandiru massacre of 1992. The massacre, which occurred 21 years ago this October, left 102 prisoners dead from gunshots after police entered the prison to break up gang fighting between prisoners.

-A Guatemalan court upheld the not-guilty verdict of former president Alfonso Portillo on charges of theft of state funds. However, his legal problems are far from over, as the ruling now opens the path for his extradition to the United States, where he faces indictment for embezzlement and money laundering.

-A Chilean court has suspended development on the Pascua Lama mine, originally set to be one of the world’s largest gold mines, ruling that the pollution and environmental destruction already caused by the Canadian mining company Barrick violates the original terms of the agreement. The shutdown marks a victory for indigenous groups, who had argued that the mine threatened their daily lives and resources, and is part of broader challenges to Barrick’s environmental toll and presence throughout Latin America.

-Finally, scientists have recently encountered a new species of porcupine in Brazil, but the future of the species is already uncertain, as the tree-dwelling Coendou speratus lives in an endangered forest.

Today in “The Least Surprising News You’ll Hear”

England did not extend an invitation to Margaret Thatcher’s funeral to Argentine president Cristina Kirchner.

I can’t possibly imagine why…

On Thatcher, Argentina, and the Catholic Church during Dictatorships

Yesterday, Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns & Money and I discussed Thatcher’s death from a Latin American perspective,  the Catholic Church during authoritarian governments, and transitions to democracy in Latin America.

Margaret Thatcher Dead

Margaret Thatcher has died at 87.

Obviously, British & diplomatic historians have more of her career to consider, but it’s not without it’s Latin American element. As others will also note, in 1982, the Argentine military dictatorship tried to finally assert its claim to the Malvinas/Falklands island in an attempt to drum up nationalist fervor in a country growing critical of the use of repression and economic policy of the dictatorship. Of course, Thatcher herself was facing criticisms at home over harsh anti-labor policies and economic plans, and thus used the islands to drum up her own nationalist support. Ultimately, the British handily defeated the Argentine military in the Malvinas/Falklands War, further discrediting the ruling military junta, which was responsible for the torture and murder of its own soldiers in the brief war itself. Overall, over 600 Argentines and 200 British forces died during the war; within a year, the disgraced dictatorship had fallen, Argentina had returned to democracy, and soon thereafter, those responsible for the torture, murder, and disappearance of 30,000 were on trial for crimes against humanity. Thus, in many ways, while not the sole deciding factor, the war between the military government and Thatcher’s navy was a key moment in the history of the Argentine dictatorship.

To be clear, one cannot give all, or even most, of the credit to Thatcher – she certainly didn’t have such a long view of her response at the time, and the Argentine people (and even the military itself) played a far greater role in the end of the dictatorship. Nonetheless, her nationalist policies, while problematic in their own ways, had important if unexpected consequences, and so Thatcher’s England is a part of the history of Argentina’s military dictatorship and it’s downfall, and her legacy in Argentina is indeed a complicated one.

Former Dictator Calls for Military Uprising in Argentina

Jorge Videla, the first military leader of Argentina’s military dictatorship who governed for five of the regime’s seven years, has apparently called for the Argentine military to arm itself for an overthrow of the government.

To repeat: the man who for five of seven years led a brutal authoritarian regime that oversaw the murder of upwards of 30,000 of its own citizens, the “disappearance” of thousands, the torture of tens of thousands, and the kidnapping of at least 500 victims’ children, wants the military to prepare itself for the possibility of doing it again.

Of course, Videla is in prison until he dies, leaving only for ongoing trials that continue to find him guilty of manifold human rights violations. That he finally faced justice for his role in the regime hopefully serves as a deterrent to any current military officials actually entertaining such possibilities. Videla’s guilt and his admission to his regime’s repression have already rendered him a villain of Argentine history to many; the fact that he continues to believe that the use of force to overthrow democratically-elected governments is appropriate only serves as another reminder of his truly reprehensible attitudes towards civilians, democracy, and Argentina itself.

Around Latin America

-While many in the Americas celebrated the announcement of the first American pope last year, not all citizens (including Catholic clergy) in Francis I’s home country are pleased with Bergoglio or the Catholic hierarchy in Argentina.

-It appears the long national mourning of Hugo Chávez may have hindered plans to embalm the late Venezuelan president.

- José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the first economics minister of Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship, has died at 87. In a pattern that was not uncommon throughout the region, Martínez de Hoz garnered praise in the international community at the time for his imposition of neoliberal policies (policies that ultimately led to deindustrialization and privatization in Argentina), but whose imposition of such policies was accompanied by crackdowns on labor, repression, and human rights violations.

-In Brazil, former soccer player and current politician Romário is calling on Brazil’s Truth Commission to investigate Brazilian Football Confederation official Jose Maria Marin for his possible role in the murder of journalist Vladimir Herzog in 1977 during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Meanwhile, in another reminder of how broken Brazil’s legislative branch is, evangelical minister and congressman Marco Feliciano, who has openly made racist and homophobic comments in the past, was chosen to head Congress’s Human Rights Commission.

-Several Nobel Peace Prize winners recently wrote in support of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organization that had been under criticism from member countries recently.

-It’s been more than 40 years since the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal dictator of the Dominican Republic for more than 30 years, and activists, scholars, and others are calling on the Dominican government to form a truth commission to fully investigate and officially address the regime’s brutality (including the murder of 25,000 Haitians in 1937 alone).

-Speaking of Truth Commissions, last week marked the 20th anniversary of El Salvador’s Truth Commission; Tim has a nice summary of its findings.

-The US military has acknowledged that prisoners at Guantanmo are on a hunger strike, though it denied that the strike was “widespread.”

-The trial of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier for human rights abuses continues, and the defense seems to be struggling a bit. Duvalier’s attorneys asked one witness if she may have been arrested by mistake, her reply? “If I was arrested by mistake, I was imprisoned by mistake and forced into exile by mistake.”

-Activists in Argentina are pushing for judicial reform to make the system more transparent and “democratic.”-Guyana’s Parliament rejected a law that would have made it illegal to carry disassembled gun parts into the country, a law designed to reduce gun smuggling and gun violence in the country.

-Great Britain’s plan to require Brazilian tourists to acquire travel visas on hold for now.

-Finally, IPS had a fascinating story on how indigenous women in Chile are helping bring solar energy and clean energy into communities in the Atacama desert, one of the driest places on the planet.