Human Rights Developments

Defending Human Rights

The Role of the International Community

The Work of Human Rights Watch

While responding to crises throughout the hemisphere, the Americas division of Human Rights Watch primarily focused attention on a core group of countries experiencing the most serious human rights problems. Human Rights Watch sought, in each country, to address the most pressing human rights issues: the Pinochet prosecution and freedom of expression in Chile; violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Colombia; unfair election conditions, weakening of the rule of law, and impunity in Peru; deficiencies in the justice system in Mexico; political violence and electoral fraud in Haiti; accountability in Argentina; the protection of NGOs and human rights defenders in Guatemala; the use of excessive force by police and military in Bolivia; and overall human rights conditions and the U.S. embargo in Cuba.

In addition to documenting abuses through published reports, Human Rights Watch responded rapidly to breaking events by directly addressing high-level government officials and representatives of relevant regional and international bodies, and generally pressing our human rights concerns in a firm, concise, and timely way. Human Rights Watch also conveyed its views in meetings with senior government officials of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela. In meetings and correspondence, we made specific recommendations for improving human rights conditions.

As the region's gravest human rights crisis, Colombia was the division's major focus during 2000. In February, just as the U.S. Congress was debating a massive military assistance package for Colombia, Human Rights Watch released its report, "The Ties That Bind: Colombia and Military-Paramilitary Links." This documented the continuing close relationship between Colombian military and paramilitary forces, directly rebutting the Colombian government's claim that the military was not responsible for paramilitary abuses. And to ensure that the message was heard, the division's executive director and Colombia researcher both testified before the U.S. Senate as to the report's findings, arguing that tough human rights conditionality be included in any proposed assistance to Colombia.

The report made front-page headlines in Colombia, where top military leaders tried to discredit its findings by suggesting, grotesquely, that Human Rights Watch was in the pay of drug traffickers. Not long after, Cuban government representatives facing censure at the U.N. Human Rights Commission mounted a similar attack, alleging that Human Rights Watch received substantial funding from U.S. "special services." But such politically motivated invective rightly carried no weight or credibility, the more so because neither source could refute the carefully documented facts that were the basis for Human Rights Watch's conclusions.

After President Clinton invoked the Colombia aid law's national security interest waiver-after the State Department found that Colombia had failed to meet six of the law's seven human rights-related conditions-Human Rights Watch vigorously protested the Administration's subjugation of human rights imperatives to counter-narcotics interests. Members of the European Union, skeptical of Plan Colombia, approved only a third of the funds requested, and dedicated all of their aid to nongovernmental organizations, as opposed to official entities.

Fujimori's crisis of legitimacy dominated Human Rights Watch's work on Peru. On the advocacy front, Human Rights Watch urged the OAS and others in the international community to adopt a firm posture on Peru's democratic deficit. In early May, Human Rights Watch wrote to OAS Secretary General Cesar Gaviria, comprehensively detailing deficiencies in Peru's electoral conditions. In June, after the election, the division's executive director attended the OAS General Assembly in Windsor, Canada, urging member states to press Fujimori to "restore the interrupted democratic process" in Peru. In September, as the political crisis unfolded in Peru, Human Rights Watch sought to ensure that the human rights abuses committed during Fujimori's decade in power were not left in impunity, including by directly challenging the efforts of Vladimiro Montesinos to secure immunity from potential prosecution by obtaining political asylum in Panama. In pursuit of this, Human Rights Watch wrote to the Panamanian president, setting out the reasons why any granting of asylum would be profoundly mistaken, and sent a delegation to Panama to discuss the question with relevant officials.

The historic prosecution of Pinochet was Human Rights Watch's primary focus in Chile. In late April, the division's executive director published an opinion piece in the Chilean daily El Mercurio that critically analyzed Pinochet's due process arguments against prosecution. This was published shortly before the Santiago Appeals Court began hearings on stripping Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution. Human Rights Watch's Chile researcher attended the hearings, the only international observer permitted to do so, and closely monitored the legal developments that culminated in the lifting of Pinochet's immunity.

The Americas division made important strides toward the broad dissemination of its human rights information by entirely revamping Human Rights Watch's Spanish-language website. With materials arranged chronologically by country and by issue, the site presented a detailed picture of human rights conditions in the region. The goal was to be comprehensive-providing documents that ranged from letters to reports to opinion pieces on each country and issue-as well as timely-effecting the simultaneous release in electronic and traditional formats of all of the division's public materials.