Demilitarization in Latin America will be a priority for the IACHR in 2019

Demilitarization in Latin America will be a priority for the IACHR in 2019



The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) announced today that it will implement a "priority action plan" in 2019 to work with the governments of Latin America in a progressive demilitarization of their territories.

The executive secretary of the IACHR, Paulo Abrão, explained to Efe that this "concrete action plan" is still in the making but will be materialized in successive meetings.

This program was advanced during an IACHR hearing that commissioner Flávia Piovesan described as "historic" because it addressed militarization, one of the "greatest problems" in Latin America that is the legacy of the military dictatorships that blew the region to death for decades.

"The nationalist narrative and authoritarian populism are one of the challenges we face," said Piovesan before adding that "the growing militarization implies a risk of human rights violations and impunity for those responsible."

For this reason, the representatives of the IACHR undertook to avoid a setback in rights and freedoms due to the increase in the number of military actions on the civilian population.

Several spokespersons of human rights organizations warned during the session of the increasingly broad power with which the Armed Forces operate in several states such as Honduras, Mexico, Uruguay and Brazil.

The commissioners of the IACHR were shocked to hear the testimony of Alicia Rabadán, the mother of Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadán, a Mexican citizen who was killed by soldiers in 2010 while he was kidnapped.

"A call alerted of a kidnapping, the soldiers came to the place and found three people who were shot indiscriminately, among them was my son," Rabadán narrated in tears.

According to the mother's testimony, Jorge Antonio was one of the victims of the kidnapping and was buried in an unidentified mass grave after the military allegedly realized they had made a mistake and killed an innocent civilian.

"They altered the scene of the crime and said that it was a hitman," said Rabadán, who lamented that no one was held accountable for the death of his son despite the Mexican National Human Rights Commission acknowledged what happened in a report 2013

"It represents the behavior of the Mexican State to favor impunity," said Rabadán.

The commissioner Luis Ernesto Vargas, who repeatedly expressed his condolences and stopped the intervention time for the mother to express himself freely, described the fact as "paradigmatic" about militarization, with hundreds of similar cases.

"Some leaders believe that the scenario in which these operations occur is an open field: first they shoot and then they ask," he exclaimed.

Vargas said that the IACHR "will do everything possible to keep this issue on its agenda" and gave as an example the situation in Honduras, where human rights violations grow "exponentially" as the Army acquires greater powers. .

In the same sense, the Special Rapporteur of the IACHR for Freedom of Expression, Edison Lanza, expressed his concern about the collection of signatures promoted in Uruguay to "approve by constitutional reform that the military can participate in citizen security".

It was the Uruguayan senator and former presidential candidate Jorge Larrañaga (National Party, right) who launched the campaign to submit a constitutional amendment to the citizens' consultation that includes, among other measures, the creation of a National Guard with the military and that has achieved more than 100,000 signatures

For the commissioner Antonia Urrejola Noguera, some citizens accept the "hard-line" speech in response to their sense of insecurity, for which reason the IACHR must "also address society and not only the States."

On the other hand, the Commission heard the testimony of Laura Zúñiga, daughter of the environmental leader Berta Cáceres, and received reports of "repression" in Nicaragua, as well as data on the increase in assassinations of social leaders in Colombia since the signing of the agreement. peace with the guerrilla of the FARC in 2016.

With these issues, the IACHR, the autonomous body of the Organization of American States (OAS), closed its 170 th period of sessions.

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