7-14-05,9:05am
A coalition of organizations working in solidarity with people in Central America denounced ongoing human rights violations, highlighting recent abuses by state forces in El Salvador and intimidation of CAFTA opponents in Guatemala.
In El Salvador, riot police attacked a student protest in San Salvador on July 5, seriously injuring four students and detaining five. The high school students had shut down the streets in front of the University of El Salvador (UES) in a peaceful protest against the recent increase in bus fare El Salvador. The riot police entered and attacked the National University for the first time since the end of the civil war in 1992, setting off bombs of tear gas and opening fire on the students with rubber bullets.
The attacks follow a string of events in El Salvador in which groups opposing the ARENA government policies -- especially the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) -- have been targets of government repression and profiling. The pictures of social movement leaders have appeared in newspapers with captions calling them terrorists, and some of those leaders were later picked up and beaten by police. Anti-CAFTA protests in February and May were also broken up my riot police, resulting in injuries.
Repression is also escalating in Guatemala at an alarming level: less than halfway through this year, the number of abuses reached 87 percent of last year's total. Between January 1 and June 22, more than 102 acts of aggression against human rights defenders and social activists were carried out in Guatemala, including the execution of an activist protesting the passage of CAFTA in March. On July 9 Albarito Juarez, director of the Alliance for Life and Peace, was assassinated as he ate dinner in his home. His organization was a strong force in opposing CAFTA.
Between May 8 and May 12, as President Oscar Berger was meeting in Washington with President Bush to discuss the agreement, eight organizations that had openly opposed CAFTA were raided -- only information vital to the organizations' work was taken. In late June the office of the Union of Education Workers of Guatemala (STEG) was raided. STEG had joined demonstrations against CAFTA in March. Shortly thereafter, unidentified vehicles began to park outside the organization's offices to intimidate or monitor staff.
CAFTA opponent Mario Antonio Godinez Lopez, general coordinator of the Association for the Promotion and Development of the Community (CEIBA), received a serious threat on July 7 from unknown individuals telling him that he was carrying out destabilizing activities. In April, Godinez traveled to the United States to lobby against CAFTA with a delegation led by Monsignor Ramazzini, the Archbishop of San Marcos, who has also been threatened with death. The intimidation of CEIBA staff began after the anti-CAFTA protest. On March 16, the day after the demonstration, unidentified, armed men went to Godinez's office and asked to see him.
'Current US policy toward Guatemala is to turn a blind eye to the human rights violations inflicted on the Guatemalan people. At best,' Pat Davis, director of GHRC said, 'it is willful blindness in the service of a neoliberal agenda that the Guatemalan and US governments favor and the Guatemalan people oppose. At worst, it is a shared interest in repression. By not condemning the Guatemalan government for these abuses and demanding improvements, the U.S. government, by omission, is complicit.'
The Stop CAFTA coalition is a loose network of solidarity organizations working with partners in Central America to further opposition to the Central America Free Trade Agreement. The coalition will be holding a press conference and rally in front of Cannon Office building (Corner of Independence and New Jersey, in Washington, D.C.) to denounce on going human rights violations, on Thursday July 14 at noon. They will be joined by religious and civil leaders from Central America.
