Continuing the November 6th Class Discussion...

It's easy to understand why there was little consensus in class over punishment and reparations for state-sponsored crimes of that magnitude. Many important thoughts were brought forward if only to compound the problematic nature of the issue. Clearly the punishment will never fit the crimes committed and if that is the chosen road how does one identify which laws were broken and to what extent when the judgement is so temporally removed from the crime. Which legal system should be used, whose set of laws? And with such a complex network of criminal culpability who should be singled out for penalization? An article I read recently concerning the legal case against a high-ranking military officer from the "Dirty War" era in Argentina concluded with a sense of relief in response to the life sentence that was handed down. To me it seems very anti-climatic and void of closure, doing little to positively address the fact that state-sponsored repression and violence was able to carve such a wide and uninterrupted wound in Argentina's corpus real. I've had little exposure to death however, I was only nine when my grandfather died and nobody close to me has passed on since, so I'm really in no position to fully empathize with the victims, but I choose forgiveness over an eye-for-an-eye and I can't see that a life sentence or the penalty of death would console me much.

Our culture spends so much time and effort determining guilt and penalizing those responsible, filling the prisons and finding new and more elaborate ways of doing so (ie. the US Patriot Act...coming soon, the Patriot Act II). The comment in class regarding "restorative justice" triggered a lot of valuable thought. When cases such as Argentina's "Dirty War" and Guatemala's Civil War are dealt with legally (or not) I think more focus should be placed on prevention and that we utilize the advantage of hindsight to shift our perspective from treating an isolated case to healing a wound inflicted on humanity as a whole and strive to prevent the recurrence of similar incidents. The policy goal should be to somehow institutionalize the sentiment of "nunca mas" that is so often cried out in the wake of rampant injustice. But where does one begin? On whom does the responsibility fall and how do you dissect an event that involves so many seemingly independent players, uniting their personal motives of greed or power to create a charade of international conflict resolution and prevention? As one classmate mentionned, after the dust settled in Guatemala the CIA went back to business as usual. Do you attack the institution that enabled the repression and funded the violence even if the individual orchestrators have left its ranks? I think the most appropriate strategy today is to hold corporations to social and environmental responsibility. But then we're left the vested interests that bind corporations to the politicians, the capitalist soul of America. So in the end I've once again arrived at my familiar yet uneasy conclusion that under the current design of capitalism the world will continuously fail to adequately address the problems of rampant poverty, disgusting inequality and horrific violence that plagues us all and we stand to witness sequals to the same sad stories over and over and over again, all the while crying out "NUNCA MAS".

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Different Bananas, same old story.

When the United Fruit Company dissolved it was replaced by Chiquita Brands International, another US-based company with tremendous lobbying power that routinely makes enormous donations to the Democrats in Washington to ensure a “favorable investment climate” in Guatemala and other Carribean nations. In past, the US government has unilaterally imposed over one billion dollars in trade sanctions on the EU for giving priviledged market access to the poorer banana producing nations in the Carribean. They’re still at it Guatemala, going to bat for US shareholders in attempt to capture more of the EU market, spending billions of dollars, but failing to address the issues of poverty and corruption that plague the country where they have set up shop.

A recent article in Latin America Press included details from a report by UN Human Rights advisor, Philip Alston. Alston describes Guatemala as an “ideal place to commit murder” because of rampant corruption, impunity and the reliance on extra-judicial and summary legal action on behalf of “rogue” police forces. In 2005, there were over 5,400 murders in Guatemala and only 1% of cases will result in conviction, largely due to dilapidated institutions that suffer from insufficient state funding. Police enforcers are combining extra-judicial murder with brutal torture to send the message to youth gangs and mafia members that the law is to be feared and treated like any other group involved in systemic violence. Wow. The article really brings to light the lasting impacts of the “US-assisted” civil war that lasted 36 years until the 1996 Peace Treaty. And over what? Bananas. Protecting us from Communist invasion. How different would Guatemala be today if the US’ worst fears actually materialized and a Communist government came to power and then spread across the region? The natural alliance with Castro would have presumably created governments with similar objectives and social policies and the entire bloc would have become internally stronger. Conversely, had the Bay of Pigs actually succeeded Cuba might look a lot like Guatemala today since its social and political climate at the time of the revolution was nearly identical to that in Guatemala. The most disturbing part of the article was that recent polls show that a majority of the population support social cleansing tactics, showing that fear continues to grip a desperate citizenry.

To access this article in full you will have to obtain a trial access code, which can be done through a link at the bottom of the homepage and is good for three weeks. Search for "A Recipe for Crime" from September 21, 2006. Link to Article

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