Category Archives: ends

Mining in Latin America

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I know this is coming up a bit late, but I was busy writing many papers as usual.  This blog is about the debate that occurred in Vancouver about mining in Latin America. Although I couldn’t physically make it out there, I listened to it through the radio and took 6 pages of notes, yes, quite a bit. What can I do, I found it really interesting.  So what are my thoughts? I find this subject really complicated. After listening to Goldcorp’s vice-president and the other panelists, I do have to agree with them saying that there is a lack of institutional integration from the governments which triggers violence and every day killings in Guatemala, for instance.  But somehow, when mining companies arrive, things get more out of control and the issue of land rights stands out. For instance, last year in El Salvador a conflict started with those who opposed mining. It became so sharp that people were “gunned down.” Protestors and activists were shot, etc.  This is one example of the kind of conflicts that take place at the local level when mines begin to operate. However, it was argued the amount of benefits given to the locals (from a Goldcorp perspective) even when they leave the country. For instance, their involvement with schools in the area, mentoring programs directed at development and capacity, and even museums showing people the equipment to teach them about mining. Companies also invest heavily in roads and improve the region’s communication infrastructure. Barrick for instance, gave a $500,000 grant to a community in Peru. Hmmm.. Nevertheless, as a Peruvian, I know the amount of corruption that exists, so I just wonder where exactly did that money go to. We can’t be so soft and just accept tokens. The amount of environmental consequences and health issues that companies leave in the area is just immeasurable.  I understand that companies have to go where the gold is, but they have to respect the area in which they are going to and the people.  This week, it was brought to my attention this new mining project in Peru, “Minas Conga” which is planning on making the biggest investment ever in this sector.  However, a week after their proposal, locals rejected them by stating that the construction will leave the natural lakes without any water.  There have already been violent incidents with workers from the company being hurt by locals. It’s very complicated.

There is a lot more I could say on this issue, but I’ll leave it open for opinions.

http://elcomercio.pe/peru/1323382/noticia-pobladores-le-dicenalto-mina-cajamarca

Guatemala 1

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I knew that the United Fruit was very involved in the Guatemalan economy but I seriously didn’t know to what extent, which really surprised me.  Even though the company argues that they provided workers with better conditions than most other farms and even provided them adequate housing, their colonizing type abuses and overall domination of Guatemala has had tremendous impact even seen nowadays.  Seriously I don’t understand how “better conditions” meant paying your workers no more than 50 cents per day while your company was making millions.

 They have retained the country’s progress by implementing this “foreign intervention” in Guatemala’s internal affairs.  This United States Company abused the country by making disproportionately amounts of profit, taking advantage of their resources from an impoverished country, thus making it even more poor and violent. Their freedom was bashed. 

Argentina 2

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It’s hard to believe that a country like Argentina has experienced such dark times. While reading Feitlowitz, A lexicon of terror, Argentina and the legacies of torture, I really started getting goosebumps as I went along the lines of horrible meanings to words that I actually use on a daily basis such as “capucha.” This article is basically all about how language was used as a way either to hide things in a euphemistic way or to use it as a code language. Reminded me of how in 1939 the Nazi’s started using that type of language to hide the fact that horrific crimes were about to be committed.  The altering of words was part of the methods used to control and manipulate people so that they wouldn’t be able to understand what was really going on.  For instance, the usage of the word “tratamiento” which in reality means to “treat” someone was used as the word for “torture.” It’s really horrifying how things turned out in Argentina and how, even after WWII and the Holocaust, we still saw in 1976 some of the similar techniques or approaches used by the Nazi’s.

“Fifteen thousand disappeared ten thousand prisoners, four thousand dead, hundreds of thousands uprooted; these are the raw statistics of terror” (1).  Walsh’s letter to the Military Junta was a very courageous act.  He throws out so many secret details like the amount of money invested in the military, intended to prove that those policies were more important than human rights abuses, and it was very hard not to believe his honest words. While the people involved in and with the military were becoming richer, the rest of the population was suffering the consequences. La Guerra Sucia was more than sucia!

The Use of Human Rights?

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Although human rights are commonly glorified in North America, they do have a less publicized negativity associated with them.  Starting this course off in September, I had only ever been taught about the inherent goodness of the concept of human rights.  After all, how could bad be associated with something everyone strives to defend?  Slowly throughout the course I have come to realize that human rights are a relatively new concept written in charters by developed nations of the West.  More importantly, human rights declared in international documents seem to mostly be the result of abuses rather than preventative of said abuses.  Human rights have even been manipulated by developed nations as an excuse to hypocritically invade a nation in the name of human rights.  However, intervening nations often have other agendas. 

Even with all of these ways in which human rights are limited and can be manipulated, I still believe human rights are needed.  Human rights declared on an international level publicly acknowledge that all members of the human race are equal with equal rights.  Although the enforcement and realization of these rights may not be equivalent based on the political rule one lives under, there is still the necessity of having human rights as a tangible, real thing to potentially claim or refer to.  Human rights unify us in our hope for better treatment for all.  They provide guideline, or “golden rule,” for how people should be treated.  They serve as a claim for a marginalized individual or a group to address the international press and community for help when governments are not protecting the rights of its citizens.  Internationally declared human rights also support social justice activists on a global level.  Overall, human rights discourse does have its limitations, but the hope and the promise these rights provide make them far from useless.

The Use of Human Rights?

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Although human rights are commonly glorified in North America, they do have a less publicized negativity associated with them.  Starting this course off in September, I had only ever been taught about the inherent goodness of the concept of human rights.  After all, how could bad be associated with something everyone strives to defend?  Slowly throughout the course I have come to realize that human rights are a relatively new concept written in charters by developed nations of the West.  More importantly, human rights declared in international documents seem to mostly be the result of abuses rather than preventative of said abuses.  Human rights have even been manipulated by developed nations as an excuse to hypocritically invade a nation in the name of human rights.  However, intervening nations often have other agendas. 

Even with all of these ways in which human rights are limited and can be manipulated, I still believe human rights are needed.  Human rights declared on an international level publicly acknowledge that all members of the human race are equal with equal rights.  Although the enforcement and realization of these rights may not be equivalent based on the political rule one lives under, there is still the necessity of having human rights as a tangible, real thing to potentially claim or refer to.  Human rights unify us in our hope for better treatment for all.  They provide guideline, or “golden rule,” for how people should be treated.  They serve as a claim for a marginalized individual or a group to address the international press and community for help when governments are not protecting the rights of its citizens.  Internationally declared human rights also support social justice activists on a global level.  Overall, human rights discourse does have its limitations, but the hope and the promise these rights provide make them far from useless.

No Justice for Mexican Women

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"The National Citizens' Observatory for Femicide (OCNF), which groups 43 human rights and women's organisations, documented around 7,000 cases of rape in 10 of Mexico's 32 states in 2010. However, the real total is assumed to be much higher as rape is considered one of the most underreported crimes.

The average age of the victims was 26, the report adds.

In cities with high crime rates like Ciudad Juárez, invaded by drug cartels, the police and army troops, groups of men frequently seize girls and women from the streets, rape them, and release them – or toss their bodies in the desert or garbage dumps."


http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105941

No Justice for Mexican Women

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"The National Citizens' Observatory for Femicide (OCNF), which groups 43 human rights and women's organisations, documented around 7,000 cases of rape in 10 of Mexico's 32 states in 2010. However, the real total is assumed to be much higher as rape is considered one of the most underreported crimes.

The average age of the victims was 26, the report adds.

In cities with high crime rates like Ciudad Juárez, invaded by drug cartels, the police and army troops, groups of men frequently seize girls and women from the streets, rape them, and release them – or toss their bodies in the desert or garbage dumps."


http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105941

Workers Cooperatives: A Means to Reduce Discrimination?

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In Argentina, workers cooperatives are becoming an empowering method to achieve women's rights in equal labour treatment.  These worker cooperatives are not only providing easier routes to employment for women but also sexual minorities traditionally excluded from the workplace.  Cooperatives seem to be an effective way for helping the marginalized and reducing poverty so far where they have been implemented.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105940

Workers Cooperatives: A Means to Reduce Discrimination?

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In Argentina, workers cooperatives are becoming an empowering method to achieve women's rights in equal labour treatment.  These worker cooperatives are not only providing easier routes to employment for women but also sexual minorities traditionally excluded from the workplace.  Cooperatives seem to be an effective way for helping the marginalized and reducing poverty so far where they have been implemented.

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=105940

Guatemala Week Two

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The second set of Guatemala readings really put me to shame.  America’s intense involvement and murderous meddling in Guatemala depressed me and made me ashamed as an American.  The C.I.A. colluded with Guatemalan army officers who worked in narcotics smuggling in order to maintain leverage over the Guatemalan army.  It is so ludicrous that the American Drugs Enforcement Agency was at the same time working to prevent narcotics trafficking while the C.I.A. was not only undermining its efforts but much worse enabling the murder of U.S. citizens in Guatemala.  The C.I.A.  supported army officials who were responsible for vast human rights abuses.  I was even more horrified that when eventually an investigation was initiated to uncover who was behind the human rights abuses, America never fully finished or publicized it.  Overall, what happened in Guatemala and the U.S.’s involvement is appalling.

Guatemala Week Two

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The second set of Guatemala readings really put me to shame.  America’s intense involvement and murderous meddling in Guatemala depressed me and made me ashamed as an American.  The C.I.A. colluded with Guatemalan army officers who worked in narcotics smuggling in order to maintain leverage over the Guatemalan army.  It is so ludicrous that the American Drugs Enforcement Agency was at the same time working to prevent narcotics trafficking while the C.I.A. was not only undermining its efforts but much worse enabling the murder of U.S. citizens in Guatemala.  The C.I.A.  supported army officials who were responsible for vast human rights abuses.  I was even more horrified that when eventually an investigation was initiated to uncover who was behind the human rights abuses, America never fully finished or publicized it.  Overall, what happened in Guatemala and the U.S.’s involvement is appalling.

Anna’s Latin American Studies 2011-11-28 20:27:00

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Human Rights - I'm not really sure how to sum up. Especially without revealing the thesis to my final paper. I guess I'll just throw a few of my major revelations from this semester out there and see what you all think. 

The first is that Human Rights are way more complicated than I thought they were. I have always placed very high value on justice and in the past few years that has become more complicated as I realized that justice is understood differently by different communities and in different contexts. In Canada the fact that our justice system and penal system are synonymous creates problems in that two definitions of justice come into conflict. The things we have discussed in this class have broadened my understanding of justice. Victims of human rights abuses often live in places where there is not the same kind of recourse or infrastructure in the justice system to bring the perpetrators of these abuses to justice. People in power who can manipulate the system to protect themselves and manipulate the mass media to condone or justify their actions in the public’s perception also often perpetrate human rights abuses. In situations like this what is justice for the victims? There are international tribunals, information on the victims are released but really, how does this effect the people whose family members disappeared or who experienced torture at the hands of doctors and the military? I don’t want to sound hopeless but the problem is that the rights violations are often so enormous that justice for the victims is impossible. Even if the rights that are being violated are identified, protected by law, and successfully prosecuted they are still constantly violated. How can change happen when we are constantly digging ourselves out from under the mountain of grief and loss caused by the human rights abuses of the past. Are Rights to be solely preventative or are they useful after they have been violated?


I don't really know what the answer is but for me they have to have some value. At a certain point it stops being about semantics and starts being about hope. 

End of an era

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What did I learn? Rather, what do I think I learned or what do I think I know now?

Long answer short, not enough, and at least not thoroughly enough.

I’ll be honest, before this class, I hadn’t put too much thought into Human Rights. I suppose I knew I would be able to defend myself with  my rights at some point if need be, but as stated in a previous post, I’ve never been in a situation where my rights needed to be defended or evoked. Not only that, but now that we have studied the discourse of Human rights from its inception, they don’t really have the same meaning to me. I guess that in the beginning I didn’t really understand the globalization of rights and the need for them to be thought of as such. Whatever we think our rights are vary in terms of culture, religion and geography.

It’s amazing that rights as a discourse can be molded as the platform for any movement. As Jon stated early on in the course, it wasn’t about bashing America, who often seem the secret perpetrators who violate Human Rights. There is of course some truth to that as we found out from our Guatemala case study regarding United Fruit and many other military coups in Latin America orchestrated by the United State’s economic influence. Although an easy target, there is more to it than just blaming the United States. It just takes a little patience and thought.

We read news stories and case studies which infuriated me. I have to say that Jon’s stance was ever more appealing in those situations. That is why I hadn’t published a lot of my blogs. They were less about the discussion of rights and more about my frustration with society. So, yes I edited myself which almost seems to go against the goal of blogging.

How surprising that Universal Rights declared by the UN (which I thought actually meant something) are not actually universal. One thing that really surprised me was how hard rights have to be fought for when they’re considered something universal, natural, something shared between all 7 billion of us. Canada’s hoity-toity approach to Universal Human Rights has been officially shattered for me. I firmly believe that you cannot claim any rights that you would deny someone else. For an example is the case of migrant workers in Canada. From what I understand, there is a 40-year-old government program called SAWP (The Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program) in which our government engages in an agreement with a country like Mexico to receive cheap labour. So people from Mexico come to work on farms here doing difficult work and getting paid unfair wages and live in terrible working conditions. If the situation was reversed, I assume our government would be spieling all sorts of Human Rights jargon demanding fair and just treatment to Canadians. So not only do we have the gross hypocrisy of the Canadian government but also the indifference of the Mexican government to defend their citizen’s rights. This situation of Mexico and Canada is not unique to the relationship between Canada and Latin American countries. All one has to do is look at Canadian Mining Company’s activities in Latin America and there will be more examples of hypocrisy and the disdain of some Latin American governments.

I’m really grateful for the great discussions we’ve had and ideas shared. I’ve been thinking about the fact that there are 7 billion of us on this planet and the tangibility of universal rights when there’s so many people. One of the interesting things I observed was the relevance of declarations on rights from the seventeenth and eighteenth century have pertaining to current social situations.

Finally, I don’t know that I know anything, I may have learned a bit but learning is an ongoing process and therefore one of the things I will continue doing is questioning rights. Are they natural, stagnant? What constitutes a right? Who decides what rights are? How do we enforce rights? One of the most important things I feel that we discussed was about the things or people whose rights haven’t been declared. What about the rights  of people in the LBGT community? What about rights to education? The one that I’m specifically grappling with at the moment, is water a human right? For some food water for thought about that check out this link.

http://thetyee.ca/News/2006/03/22/WaterRight/

Well, what else can I say about the term except, We’ll always have Paris Rights.

Right…..?

human rights

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Over the course of a semester, I have learned a lot about human rights. However empty they may be to some, I will continue to support and advocate for the recognition and protection of human rights. As I am currently writing in my paper, I feel that human rights need a face-lift. To so many they are just fuzzy words like democracy, freedom and liberty. Something that everyone wants, yet are unable to adequately describe. I want human rights organizations to make an effort to show the general public what human rights are. I was disappointed when I went to the homepages of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. You could donate to human rights, you could learn about specific cases of human rights violations around the world, but you couldn’t find a page where human rights were explicitly defined, perhaps it was in the section of their mission statement and purpose, yet I was hoping to be automatically informed and educated about human rights the moment I entered their webpages.

Instead of just tossing the term human rights in speeches and state of the union addresses, American presidents need to put their words to practice. Weren’t we supposed to pull the troops out of the Middle East a couple years ago? Weren’t we supposed to close the clandestine infamous prison of Guantanamo about 2 years ago? We need to stop saying things in the name of human rights and act. Also we need to stop letting Far-right groups like the Tea Party take the key words that describe the tiresome work of those who spend their lives defending human rights in the most dangerous places around the world. We need to have a definition of human rights cemented in our minds.

Human rights also need to strengthen their relationship with international courts so that it can be more effective. Countries part of the United Nations need to recognize that the world’s governing body is superior and violations like crimes against humanity need to be taken seriously regardless of which political background the perpetrator is from. The lingering question remains, so we’ve rounded up all the bad guys and tried them, they are guilty, then what? What kind of punishment should they receive? Is withering away in solitary confinement the best option? I am firmly against the death penalty, however, if we seek and desire justice, what should a logical punishment be?

Human rights need to be respected everywhere, including the United States (and Israel). I am ashamed that my country continues to scoff at something as essential as human rights. When will we wake up and realize that torture and spreading fear are not the answer, that if we treat our neighbors with kindness and respect, they too would respect us, when will we respect undocumented workers and treat them humanely, instead of jailing immigrants without means of justice? It is time that we embrace human rights, it is time that we realize that in order to make this world a better place, it starts with us at home. Hopefully that day will come soon, either way I will continue supporting human rights.