Newsbriefs
Impunity Continues In Haiti PORT-Au-PRINCE, AUGUST 7, 1996 On July 24, a Haitian jury acquitted two alleged gunmen in the 1993 murder of former Justice Minister Guy Malary. The verdict...
...Although greeted initially with much skepticism, the EPR has demonstrated its seriousness by staging "lightning" appearances to read their Aguas Blancas manifesto and to solicit recruits...
...The militarization of the sierra and of Guerrero's Pacific coast Vol XXX...
...The document called for the "overthrow of the antipopular government" and the establishment of a "workers' republic," to be run by local self-defense committees and "popular justice tribunals...
...Reed Brody Emergence of Second Guerrilla Group In Southern Mexico No Surprise GUERRERO, AUGUST 1, 1996 When the self-declared "People's Revolutionary Army" (EPR) emerged from the southern Sierra Maestra of the state of Guerrero this past June 28, its appearance was no surprise...
...EPR fighters have been seen throughout the state-from the western "hot lands," to the impoverished, indigenous mountain regions, to down-and-out popular colonies in the port city of Acapulco...
...The manifesto itself has been translated into Nahuatl, Mexico's second language, suggesting a base in Guerrero's indigenous regions...
...Apparently unable to resist the temptation to put women back in their place, he included the feminine and masculine forms of most nouns throughout his speech, pausing and smirking before emphasizing the feminine form...
...John Ross is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco who has widely covered events in Southern Mexico...
...He won his office fair and square, even though he relied on a questionable alliance with exiting seventerm President Joaquin Balaguer to do so...
...If this continues, "gender will always appear as an appendix, rather than as central to the proposals and alternatives developed...
...A roundtable on work examined the feminization of poverty and the growing vulnerability of workers resulting from the expansion of the maquiladora system...
...That proves they are not Zapatistas...
...We have to keep breaking open the space for women...
...Despite very modest gains, the left's continuing resistance to women's equality was manifested throughout the Forum...
...Morissaint was cooperating with the investigation until he was mysteriously sprung from jail in September, 1995...
...Waving home-made flags and heavy weapons, about 70 neatlyuniformed guerrillas laid wildflowers at a memorial for the dead campesinos, and read "The Manifesto of Aguas Blancas" to some 2,000 startled onlookers...
...decision was just a "delay" in the death-squad leader's deportation, which would allow Haiti's judicial system to better prepare for his trial...
...In Tepetixtla, once an OCSS stronghold, soldiers conducted house-to-house searches...
...The release is "probably related to Mr...
...Former President Aristide described the U.S...
...This elicited a great deal of laughter from the floor, demonstrating all too clearly the formidable challenges ahead...
...Financing such social programs may be difficult for FernAndez, who has inherited a domestic public-sector deficit estimated at $730 million...
...move as a "slap in the face" to Haiti...
...The jury pool, chosen by justices of the peace, consisted entirely of professionals who openly mocked the two beggars...
...The New York-raised Fernmndez, a 42-year-old lawyer and professor, was virtually unknown until former President Juan Bosch, of the centerleft Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), picked him as his running mate for the 1994 presidential elections...
...Many Forum delegates apparently suffered from a misconception about the meaning of gender, reducing it to so-called "women's problems" like domestic violence and rape...
...After a 14-hour trial that ended at four in the morning, the jurors acquitted the defendants in 40 minutes...
...government continues to refuse to release them to Haiti...
...The problem is jobs and economic security, which the Dominican people don't find here, and that is what motivates them to emigrate," said FernAndez in an interview shortly after his election...
...According to Haiti's Minister of Justice, Morissaint was shepherded away under U.S...
...FernAndez has promised to end the highly centralized, caudillo style of government of which Balaguer was a master...
...As a result, only two alleged hitmen-a Franqois aide and a Duvalierist from Cap Haitian-were in custody to stand trial in the Malary case...
...Constant, who has admitted receiving a salary and encouragement from the CIA, is wanted at home to face charges of murder, torture and arson, and Haiti has requested his extradition...
...The case illustrates the many obstacles to achieving justice in the more than 3,000 killings and countless acts of intimidation carried out between 1991 and 1994 by the Haitian military and its allies in the paramilitary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH...
...The only direct reference to women's concerns in the summary of the central document roundtable was: "It is necessary that the entire document achieve an authentic focus on gender...
...Participants in the workshop effectively tied their focus on women and gender to a general understanding of the problems confronting the region-in sharp contrast to discussions at the Forum itself...
...The EPR also took credit for an ambush on a military convoy on July 19, in which an army captain was reportedly wounded...
...John Ross Elections In The Dominican Republic: A Break With The Past...
...In the end, however, women's proposals were simply annexed to the central document...
...One of the goals of the Women's Workshop was to examine the impact of neoliberalism on women's lives...
...With the exception of the gender roundtable (in which few men participated), all of the roundtables were dominated by men...
...At the Forum's fifth meeting in Montevideo in 1995, they kept up the pressure...
...The judge ridiculed one witness for not remembering the exact date and castigated him for not reporting the crime immediately, an impossibility during Haiti's de facto period...
...Women do not fit into the authoritarian schemes of our parties," said Lorena Pefia, an FMLN representative to Congress and founding member of the Ml1ida Anaya Montes Women's Movement...
...The subject of gender has always been viewed exclusively as a 'women's problem,' and women are left feeling invisible in the theories, discussions and actions of the left," she said...
...The new guerrillas made their debut in Aguas Blancas during a memorial for 17 members of the Organization of Campesinos of the Southern Sierra (OCSS), gunned down in June, 1995 by Guerrero state police...
...Ever since the January, 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, reports have circulated that a new guerrilla movement would soon surface in the sierra of Guerrero-the same mountains in which rebel schoolteacher Lucio Cabafias and his Party of the Poor fighters harried the Mexican army between 1967 and 1974...
...Documents obtained by the Mexico City Times also hint at ties to Peru's Shining Path...
...The mysterious group appears to be avoiding confrontation with Mexican security forces, and clashes have been infrequent...
...Of the many potential witnesses interviewed, only two beggars dared to give their story to the police...
...The verdict caused an uproar in Haiti...
...Women participants at the Fourth Forum, held in Havana in 1993, made their presence felt at the final plenary, where they stirred up a debate about gender...
...Constant's work for the intelligence community," according to Ira Kurzban, general counsel to the Haitian government...
...Yet the EPR appears to be grounded in left-wing groups like PROCUP-PDLP...
...No legislative elections accompanied this year's presidential race, which took place two years early because of Balaguer's agreement to step down in 1996 after widespread allegations that he stole the 1994 election from Pefia G6mez...
...Of particular concern was the left's resistance to gender equality and its refusal to take women seriously...
...The workshop's other key objective was to integrate a consciousness of gender into the political analysis of the left...
...Concerned with these developments, Lety M6ndez led a delegation to the roundtable responsible for preparing the Forum's central document, where she proposed that the women participate in order to ensure that gender analysis be incorporated into the final document...
...Drug Enforcement Agency asset Marcel Morissaint, was arrested in Haiti, however, and charged in the killing...
...Thousands of documents seized by the United States from army, police and FRAPH offices during the invasion might shed light on the Malary case, but the U.S...
...Another on health and education examined the impact of cuts in social spending and the deterioration of services for women and their families...
...In the aftermath of the October, 1994 invasion of Haiti, Port-auPrince Police Chief, Michel Francois, who is believed to have ordered the Malary killing, slipped away to the Dominican Republic-where he was recently arrested and sent not to Haiti but to Honduras...
...government's commitment under the UN convention on torture to extradite or bring to trial suspected torturers...
...He will also have to find a way to bail out the disastrous publicsector enterprises, which together are the largest source of jobs in the country...
...Dorita Carcafio, a Cuban representative to the International Democratic Federation of Women, criticized those who suggest that economic terms-structural adjustment, external debt, neoliberalism-are too difficult for women to understand...
...There has to be access to health, education, social security...
...Erica Polakoff Sources Reed Brody is former Human Rights Director of the UN Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) and has assisted the Haitian Government in prosecuting human rights crimes...
...A dozen militants of an umbrella campesino coalition which includes the OCSS have also been imprisoned...
...Yet their eyewitness identification of the defendants could not surmount Haiti's most important hurdle-class...
...decision to release FRAPH leader Emmanuel "Toto" Constant from INS custody onto the streets of New York, rather than deporting him to Haiti...
...Eight campesinos accused of being EPR members have been jailed and, they claim, tortured into signing confessions...
...Indeed, it may be the EZLN's increasingly pacific posture that provoked the emergence of the EPR at a delicate moment in EZLN-government talks...
...As a result, the PLD has only one of 30 senators and 12 of 120 representatives in Congress...
...Whatever the reasons, it is a blatant violation of the U.S...
...In exchange for the votes of Balaguer's center-right Reformist Party, Fernindez promised not to sack Balaguer's "note-bearers"-political appointees on the government payroll...
...FernAndez faces a difficult choice: the PLD will either have to ally with the Reformist Party to get reforms through Congress, or Fernandez will have to resort to governing by decree-the style of government that he has promised to change...
...Cuauht6moc Cilrdenas, leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), even suggested they were in the employ of Guerrero's disgraced exgovernor Ruben Figueroa, who was forced from office for his role in the cover-up of the Aguas Blancas massacre...
...Michele Wucker Workshop On Gender and Inequality Held In Conjunction With Sio Paulo Forum SAN SALVADOR, AUGUST 1, 1996 6 "Every day in the political "Lwork we do in mixed-gender organizations, we have to fight to keep the issue of gender a top priority," said Lety M6ndez, member of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and coordinator of the First Continental Women's Workshop, held July 2325 in conjunction with the Sixth Encounter of the Sdo Paulo Forum in San Salvador, El Salvador...
...According to government officials, the U.S...
...Balaguer's last-minute endorsement of FernAndez was also motivated by a deep-seated animosity towards the other top presidential contender, Jos6 Francisco Pefia G6mez, of the center-left Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD...
...protection...
...Armored troop carriers, tanks and helicopters moved into the region, combing mountain towns for suspected guerrillas...
...Judges and prosecutors have balked at ordering the arrest of armed thugs who remain at-large in Haiti...
...Fear also impeded the Malary investigation...
...They have clean uniforms and good weapons," EZLN's Subcomandante Marcos told reporters in Chiapas...
...No 2SEP1-IOcr 1996 1 Vol XXX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1996 1NEWSBRIEFS was immediate...
...She is currently preparing a book about the Dominican Republic and Haiti...
...The Forum, which purported a comprehensive approach, not only marginalized gender issues but the women participants as well...
...On June 28, three state judicial police officers were wounded at an EPR road block near Chilpancingo, the state capital...
...Meanwhile, the military claims to have found weapons caches, medical supplies and leftist literature, including Proletario, the publication of the Revolutionary Party of Workers and Campesinos-Popular Union (PROCUP), now merged with Cabafias' Party of the Poor (PDLP...
...The Forum Working Group agreed to sponsor a Women's Workshop in conjunction with the Forum meeting planned for the following year in El Salvador, but it later reneged on its promise of financial support...
...Women were underrepresented and gender was largely ignored in previous Sdo Paulo Forums, according to M6ndez...
...Government officials have been quick to label the rebels as "common criminals...
...Zapatista leaders have denied any involvement in the new guerrilla outbreak...
...One group to which the EPR has definitely not been linked is the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN...
...The Malary verdict comes on the heels of the U.S...
...One of Franqois' associates, former U.S...
...Erica Polakoff teaches Sociology and Women's Studies at Bloomfield College in New Jersey, where she is Sociology Coordinator...
...He has also promised to create working institutions that will slow the massive flow of Dominicans to the United States--51,047 legal immigrants and an estimated 30,000 illegals in 1994 alone...
...We do not wish to participate in a space where we are systematically made to appear incompetent, where we are constantly accused of being emotional, and where overt or covert sexual harassment is the norm...
...Bosch helped secure Fernindez's 1996 victory by striking a deal with his long-time rival Balaguer...
...According to the Baltimore Sun, however, the U.S...
...NEW YORK, AUGUST 17, 1996 L eonel Fernindez, who was sworn in as president of the Dominican Republic on August 16, has one thing going for him that no other Dominican president has ever had...
...Perhaps the most dramatic example was the closing remarks made by FMLN representative Shafik Handal to the assembled delegates...
...government has agreed to allow Constant to "self-deport" at any time to a third country of his choice-effectively allowing him to escape justice...
...Their sudden appearance underscores the fact that some groups still see the armed option as a viable vehicle for social change in Mexico...
...Michele Wucker is a freelance journalist based in New York City...
...Women not only understand these terms," she said, "but suffer their consequences daily...
...While the PLD may gain seats in Congress if legislative elections are held as planned in 1998, the PRD, which controls the lower house, and the Reformist Party, which is one vote short of a Senate majority, have threatened to push those elections back to coincide with the presidential vote in the year 2000...
Vol. 30 • September 1996 • No. 2
