Green, Latin America is still fertile ground for atrocious wars

At first glance, it looks like a sea change across Latin America. In Guatemala, after a campaign season that saw dozens of politicians, journalists and human rights activists murdered, voters defied the intimidation tactics and knocked former dictator EfraÌn RÌos Montt out of the presidential race November 9.

In Argentina, President Néstor Kirchner has reversed official policies protecting retired military officers responsible for thousands of murders and disappearances between 1976 and 1983. These individuals are now subject to extradition for trial in Europe, and the likelihood of Argentine prosecution is increasing.

In Mexico, the nation's highest court has ruled there's no statute of limitation on prosecutions for political disappearances. And President Vicente Fox Quesada's government has finally opened the archives of the country's secret police. Investigations into hundreds of murders and disappearances of leftists in the 1960s and 1970s seem likely.

And Chilean General Augusto Pinochet's ordeal in Britain, where he narrowly avoided extradition to Madrid to stand trial for the murder of Spanish nationals under his rule, has given former dictators everywhere reason to think twice before traveling abroad.

But the sad truth is that political murder remains a viable option for Latin American elites. In Brazil, police routinely kill drug addicts and street children in cleansing sweeps with strong political overtones. El Salvador has not even begun the process of seeking justice for tens of thousands killed there in the 1970s and 1980s. In Guatemala, despite Ríos Montt's defeat, retired military men and their paramilitary agents still enjoy impunity.

And nowhere are dirty-war tactics more apparent than in Colombia. Carlos Castaño Gil doesn't need to run for office because his paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) continues to receive support from official security forces and exert powerful influence at all levels of Colombian government. President Alvaro Uribe Vélez is even proposing amnesty for Castaño's "demobilized" fighters, the folks responsible for most of the bloodshed in the nation's decades- old war.

Murders, massacres and disappearances remain more powerful in Latin America than rallies, fundraisers and opinion polls. The region's ballyhooed transition to democracy is, at best, a messy work in progress.

© 2003 Colombia Week. W. John Green (wjgreenva@aol.com) is a senior research fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington, D.C., and author of Gaitanismo, Left Liberalism, and Popular Mobilization in Colombia (University of Florida, 2003). His column appears biweekly in Colombia Week. Published here by permission of Colombia Week (http://www.colombiaweek.org) and W. John Green.

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opinion

In Latin America, dirty war is still viable