In Brief
Impunity Challenged in Chile... SANTIAGO-It has not been a banner year for Chile's former military tyrants. October 16, 1998, saw the arrest in London of their maximum leader, the...
...That same juror was also accused of attempting to bribe another member of the jury panel...
...Also participating was Subcomandante Marcos, who urged the people to resist the government onslaught...
...Farms will no longer be subject to expropriation against the will of their owners...
...A medical examination showed that some of the killed activists had been shot at pointblank range, and the MST claimed that the police had summarily executed them after they were in custody...
...The government's new program, the "New Rural World," will give authority over land transfers to state governments, which in rural areas are often dominated by landlords' local political machines...
...Vulnerable to these criticisms and to the recent high-profile failures of their policy prescriptions in Asia, Russia and Latin America, the Treasury and the international financial institutions have lobbied Northern Jubilee campaigns and other NGOs in the North for the critical support they need for their debt/ESAF initiative...
...While the Fund and the Bank have acknowledged that after 20 years of imposing adjustment policies on countries across the globe, poverty and inequality have seriously worsened, they will not address market liberalization, privatization, monetary and related economic adjustment policies as sources of these growing problems...
...As of mid-August, the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico documented the presence of 37,000 troops surrounding three communities which have a combined population of no more than 500...
...As they had along their entire iollrnev the marchers sought to keep their message simple...
...But he survived that period and the many other secular and ecclesiastical storms of his era by anchoring himself in a profound spirituality and faith in the Catholic Church as an institution...
...In the towns and villages they passed, the marchers argued that the terrible inequality of Brazilian society is worsened by economic policies that favor multinational corporations and international financial institutions over the interests of ordinary citizens...
...Originally sympathetic to the dictatorship, he grew critical of its repressive labor decrees and its embrace of free-market policies, and organized a coalition of labor groups opposed to the dictatorship...
...All 150 military policemen on duty at the demonstration were indicted, though they were not jailed and 142 continued performing their normal duties...
...The accused in the Caravan case include former secret police second-in-command Brigadier Pedro Espinoza and three other former army officers...
...Under the pretense of con- structing roads and protecting forests, the military has been encir- cling pro-Zapatista indigenous communities with armed troops...
...Alejandro Reuss...
...The pressure of the international case against Pinochet, along with the efforts of human rights activists and the relatives of the disappeared, has opened the way for the current prosecutions of Arellano and Gord6n, which many observers considered impossible until recently...
...The trial did not answer a number of questions about the police action and the subsequent investigation...
...Deepa Fernandes is a freelance writer and a producer of Pacifica Radio's Our Americas...
...The timing was precise...
...He quickly became involved in the contentious politics of the 1930s by joining the Integralistas, a quasifascist organization crushed by dictator Getfilio Vargas in 1938...
...Because not all weapons had been fired, any accused policeman could claim that he had not fired...
...Vatican bureaucrats also tried to restrict his movements...
...Born in 1909 into a middle-class family in Fortaleza in northeastern Brazil, the precocious seminarian took early ordination at age of 22...
...His struggle for Latin American development and human rights largely defined liberationist Catholicism...
...congressional approval for an IMF quota increase, the Treasury has sought to link funding of the ESAF to that of the proposed Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) multilateral debtreduction plan...
...and increase taxes on the banking sector and the country's richest individuals...
...Chilean prosecutor Juan Guzmin Tapia, who is pursuing human rights investigations against Pinochet and other officials of the dictatorship, brought the Caravan of Death charges...
...The country's military dictators prohibited any further mention of Dom Hl1der in the media...
...In the 1960s the region became a political and theological hotbed, leading U.S...
...His attempts to change Brazilian society and the Church made Dom H61der many enemies, especially among the repressive military officers who ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985...
...They also used diplomatic channels to prevent him from winning the Nobel Peace Prize...
...While President Fernando Henrique Cardoso expressed his discontent with the verdict, his government has adopted new policies to curtail agrarian reform by reducing the budget and changing the mechanism to redistribute land...
...Prosecutor Marco Aur6lio Nascimento is suing to have the verdict overturned, arguing that the judge had improperly instructed the jury and that one of the jurors had made prejudicial statements about the MST during the trial...
...Yet he also had the rare gift of appealing to all groups, including students, revolutionaries and the press...
...Treasury are making an allout effort to secure the funding necessary to make the Fund's controversial Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF)-used by the IMF since 1987 to shape the economies of the world's poorest countries-self-financing...
...A good portion of this money comes from the United States, which is beefing up the region's militaries under the guise of fighting drug Continued on page 49 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2 trafficking...
...John L. Hammond is author of Fighting to Learn: Popular Education and Guerrilla War in El Salvador (Rutgers University Press, 1998...
...Jim6nez was the head of Chile's publicsector workers' union at the time of his February 25, 1982 murder...
...Doug Hellinger In Memoriam: Brazil's "Bishop of the Poor" RECIFE-Brazil's liberationist bishop, Dom H61der Camara, died in Recife, Brazil, on August 27...
...As he did through his life, Dom H61der was wearing his cassock...
...The judicial reinterpretation of the amnesty law clears an important legal obstacle, though there remains Pinochet's immunity as a Senator-for-life...
...In 1985, the military left power and Dom H61lder retired as archbishop...
...The marchers-students, trade unionists, teachers, religious activists, indigenous peoples and activists of the Landless Workers Movement (MST)-delivered a simple message: The Brazilian economy should put the needs of Brazilians before the priorities of the international financial community...
...In contrast with younger liberationist clergy who have harshly criticized the Vatican, Dom H61der practiced obedience to the hierarchy, no matter what its political persuasion...
...He discreetly retreated from internal Brazilian politics and concentrated on making speeches abroad...
...On September 29, 1999, the man who ordered the bombing of the La Moneda presidential palace during the military coup of September 1973 and promised to "eradicate the Marxist cancer" from Chile, retired General Gustavo Leigh, died...
...Just before the 1964 coup the Vatican transferred Dom Hl1der out of Rio because of a rivalry with an anti-Communist cardinal...
...For its part, the Treasury has shown no willingness to delink debt reduction from the required implementation of adjustment policies, which, critics charge, have opened and restructured foreign economies for the benefit of international investors...
...While many bishops applauded the 1964 military overthrow of President Jodo Goulart, Dom Hl1der took a wait-and-see approach...
...Manuel Contreras, was tried and imprisoned in Chile for the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt, the arrest of Gord6n is the furthest the Chilean judicial system-itself deeply implicated in the dictatorship-has ever gone in the prosecution of human rights abuses...
...October 16, 1998, saw the arrest in London of their maximum leader, the ex-dictator and Senator-for-life Augusto Pinochet, on charges, originating in Spain, of torture and genocide...
...To build these roads, which cut through Zapatista autonomous communities, the Mexican state has plugged massive amounts of money into its armed forces...
...Details on the exact nature of this poverty-reduction initiative will not be available until late November or December--well after expected congressional action on IMF financing...
...The most direct attack on the liberationists came in the archdiocese of Olinda and Recife, where Dom H61der's conservative replacement dismantled many of his programs and punished a number of progressive priests...
...Like most bishops, Dom H61der was a politician who built links to the rich and powerful...
...suspend debt payments...
...Media attention was briefly drawn to the south of Chiapas in mid-August when troops were parachuted into the area surrounding the community of Amador HernAndez, allegedly to construct a road to protect the surrounding forest area...
...The videotape of the massacre, which was fortuitously filmed by a local TV camera crew that was caught in a traffic jam, was played at the trial...
...Sergio Arellano Stark, commander of the "Caravan of Death"' which roamed Chile "disappearing" political prisoners in the months after the military coup, and retired Gen...
...With this latest inundation of troops into Chiapas, it seems only a matter of time before the crisis reaches a flashpoint...
...In fact, IMF Managing Director, Michel Camdessus, defiantly defended adjustment policies at the close of the Annual Meetings...
...The Caravan of Death case produced a milestone Supreme Court decision last July denying the officers' claim of immunity under the 1978 amnesty law promulgated by the military dictatorship...
...The inescapable reality in Chiapas today is that the indigenous peoples who identify with and join the Zapatista struggle are losing their homes and lands...
...establish new regulations on capital flight and short-term speculative investments...
...Before leaving, they presented Central Bank president Amfnio Fraga with a small gift--a U.S...
...Doug Hellinger is director of The Development GAP, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington, Kenneth P Serbin teaches Latin American history and directs the TransBorder Institute at the University of San Diego...
...Dom H6lder emerged as a spokesman for the underdeveloped world...
...They have seen their countries' economies gutted by these programs, as import liberalization, high interest rates, the lack of government assistance and diminishing consumer demand due to falling wages have destroyed local businesses, small farms and the jobs they provide...
...The meeting led many priests, nuns and lay pastoral workers to engage openly in campaigns for human rights, social justice and the formation of base communities...
...The overwhelming majority of Zapatistas are unarmed, defending themselves only with fistfuls of stones and barricades of their own bodies, as occurred in late August in the community of San Juan La Nueva Esperanza...
...Intermediate social indicators, such as school enrollment and adequate health facilities, will be used to measure progress toward achieving antipoverty goals...
...As the new archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Hl61der once again came into close contact with the poverty and exploitation of the drought-stricken northeast...
...The Military Police are under the authority of the state governor and the state department of public security...
...The effects of these changes are already being seen: In the first four months of 1999, just 385,320 acres were expropriated for agrarian reform and 1,249 landless families resettled, compared to 1,395,550 acres and 8,994 families in the same period last year...
...Such policies are driven by the country's need for hard currency to pay its enormous foreign debt...
...In Rio, Dom H61lder increasingly turned his attention from traditional Church concerns to the growing social inequalities produced by Brazil's rapid economic growth...
...Humberto Gord6n Rubio, a former junta member and head of the Chilean secret police accused in the 1982 assassination of labor leader Tucapel Jim6nez, have been arrested on human rights charges-in Chile...
...anti-narcotics funds allotted to Mexico jumped by 400...
...The march passed through 160 towns, from the fertile lands of the coast to the arid stretches of the interior, with demonstrators holding hundreds of community meetings, debates and workshops at schools and churches along the way...
...T]he so-called bitter IMF medicine," he told the press, "...is very good medicine for those who want to strive to improve the living conditions of their people...
...But Lives on in Brazil BELIM-On August 19, after a delay of more than three years, a seven-man jury in Bel6m, Brazil, acquitted Colonel Mario Pantoja and two other military police officers of intentional homicide in the 1996 massacre of 19 landless farmworkers in Eldorado do Carajds in the state of Pari...
...It clearly showed that the police approached the demonstration firing machine guns into the air and then fired directly at the crowd...
...She is co-author, with Medea Benjamin, of Benedita da Silva: An Afro-Brazilian Woman's Story of Politics and Love (Food First, 1997...
...The role of legal persistence and creativity aside, the prosecution of Pinochet and other human rights violators in Chile depends on a political balance of power...
...Upon reflection, Dom H61der dissociated himself from the ideals of this movement and turned to the teachings of the French Catholic and humanist philosopher Jacques Maritain, who later influenced an entire generation of Brazilian clergymen and intellectuals who shifted to the left and became proponents of liberation theology...
...The September 14 arrest of Gen...
...The scenario of the armed forces moving into villages and forcing locals either to side with them or flee is all too common...
...Kenneth P. Serbin A Long March Against Neoliberalism RIO DE JANEIRO-On July 25, more than 1,100 people gathered in Rio de Janeiro in front of the offices of Petrobris, the national oil company, to protest government plans to privatize the profitable industry...
...The MST also charged that the investigation smacked of a coverup...
...Dom H61der underwent great personal and political transformation...
...In between, retired Gen...
...From then until 1962 he directed Brazilian Catholic Action, whose emphasis on lay activities and small-group meetings laid the groundwork for the renowned Christian base communities...
...All together, the march reached an estimated 300,000 people...
...Many Third World development groups-including those in the debtcancellation advocacy network, Jubilee South-are outraged at the prospect of having the success of the global Jubilee 2000 debt campaign used to strengthen the IMF and expand its power to impose structural-adjustment programs...
...The result will be an even deeper and broader involvement of these institutions in the everyday management of national economies worldwide...
...Between 1996 and 1997 alone, U.S...
...Above all, the short and slender bishop devoted his energies to the poor...
...For the following ten weeks, they walked 982 miles to Brasilia in a symbolic protest to call attention to Brazil's economic and social ills, which protesters say have been exacerbated by the demands of the IMF and the policies of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...When they reached Brasilia on October 7, the marchers-along with 10,000UU supporters-headele tUO Brazil's Central Bank, which also houses the IMF's Brazil office...
...During a recent visit to New York, Roberto Baggio, MST state coordinator in Parand, said that the government's intent was to "bring neoliberalism to agriculture...
...The focus will be on health care, education and social policy, rather than on the generation of wages and incomes sufficient to ensure dignified living standards...
...As a final irony, under the new plan it will be the IMF and World Bank that determine the adequacy of national poverty-reduction plans...
...For 67 days the marchers woke at dawn, walked two hours before breakfast, another five hours before lunch, and then continued, traveling an average of 19 miles per day...
...Espinoza is currently imprisoned in Chile for his role in the 1976 assassination of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C...
...The number of displaced people is now more than 30,000, concentrated in refugee camps scattered across Chiapas and surrounded by some form of armed control...
...Stung by the difficulty it encountered last year in gaining U.S...
...the MST organizes groups of unemployed and landless farmworkers to occupy unused farms and pressure the government to carry out the law...
...It will also mean that individuals who acquire property will be at the mercy of their creditors...
...The PRSPs would ensure that a country's goals and plans for poverty reduction and social development are consistent with these macroeconomic policies...
...Pinochet remains under arrest in Britain, facing extradition to Spain...
...Guzmin, meanwhile, continues his pursuit of the former dictator in Chile, seeking to interrogate him in connection with 41 separate human rights cases...
...Survivors were not asked to identify the responsible policemen, and when the policemen returned their weapons, they were not checked in, nor were the policemen's hands inspected for gunpowder...
...Well-armed paramilitaries who terrorize pro-Zapatista supporters-supposedly outside of anyone's control-have been a fundamental part of the incursions...
...By now he was far too controversial to become a cardinal...
...Pinochet may escape to the grave, but the recent prosecutions are heartening steps forward in Chile's incomplete "transition to democracy...
...At the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings in Washington this September, the IMF publicly committed itself to poverty reduction-a subject on which it has demonstrated no knowledge and little interest in the past-renaming ESAF the "Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility...
...Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) will, in the future, be required of governments, but they will be produced "in close collaboration with Bank and IMF staff...
...Militarization Continues in Southern Mexico CHIAPAS-The militarization of Chiapas is accelerating at an alarm- ing rate...
...In 1990 he even appeared at a seminar in Rio given by Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, who had earlier led the charge against liberation theologians...
...Despite widespread police impunity in rural Brazil, the verdict shocked many Brazilians who thought the case might bring a conviction because of the high number of victimsand because the massacre had been caught on videotape...
...He teaches sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...Expropriation will come to depend on the free market: With financing from the World Bank, the government will provide credit so that the landless can negotiate individually with landowners who wish to sell their property...
...During the 1930s the Church transferred Dom Hl1der from Fortaleza to the capital in Rio de Janeiro, where his organizational talents flourished...
...Maria Luisa Mendonga SOURCES Alejandro Reuss is a member of the Dolars & Sense editorial collective...
...This stance is consistent with the Fund's position on HIPC from the start: that the initiative is designed to reduce the debt of those countries that pursue "prudent" economic policies...
...Deepa Fernandes IMF Ventures into the Poverty-Alleviation Business WASHINGTON, D.C.-The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S...
...Though a previous head of the secret police, Gen...
...At the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in Rome he successfully propagated the idea of a "Church of the Poor," and he began to speak out against the injustices of the world economy...
...Maria Luisa Mendonca coordinates the Brazil Program at Global Exchange...
...flag, to symbolize who really controls Brazil's economy...
...The murders occurred on April 17, 1996 when military police fired on a demonstration of more than 1,000 militants of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) who had blocked a highway in Eldorado do Carajds, demanding the expropriation of a farm they had occupied a year earlier...
...In 1952 he was made a bishop...
...The Court found, in agreement with Guzmdin, that the amnesty did not apply to 19 disappearances attributed to the unit in which the bodies of the victims have never been found...
...There they urged the government to reduce interest rates to help boost economic growth...
...This new procedure is meant to put an end to mass occupations and undercut the MST...
...Billed as the "biggest trial ever in Brazil," it was actually divided into 27 separate trials, and with the acquittal, the remaining trials have been suspended...
...This new outlook strained Dom H1lder's relationship with the elite...
...The three acquitted officers claimed that they had been following the orders of Pard state governor Almir Gabriel, but he and the Secretary for Public Security laid the blame on the officers...
...The Mexican government has also adopted a new strategy of fusing local state police with the national army to carry out military operations...
...Meanwhile, the Zapatistas continue to organize, to disseminate information, and to resist the militarization of their land...
...Homeless and hungry people are the easiest to subdue...
...He became the "bishop of the favelas," intensifying the Church's work in the burgeoning shantytowns and lobbying the government for development programs to assist the masses...
...They oppose any adjustment conditionality attached to debt-reduction schemes, including that found in the HIPC Initiative...
...It judged these to be an ongoing crime of "perpetual kidnapping," opening the possibility of other prosecutions on similar grounds...
...Cold War politics further deepened suspicions of his loyalties...
...He and other progressive bishops took the conclusions of Vatican II a step further at the 1968 gathering of the Latin American Bishops Conference (CELAM) in Medellin, Colombia, where they denounced "institutionalized violence," forging the beginnings of liberation theology...
...In 1969 Dom H61lder daringly denounced the practice of torture in Brazil before an audience of thousands in Paris...
...His book on Church-mi - itary relations in Brazil will be published next year by University of Pittsburgh Press...
...It was one of the most painful moments for Dom H61der and progressive Catholicism in Latin America...
...They will be introduced first in a handful of HIPC-eligible nations and eventually in all ESAF countries...
...leaders to fear it would explode into another Cuba...
...Under Brazilian law, idle farmland can be expropriated and redistributed...
...In recent years, they argued, the Cardoso Administration has prioritized state subsidies for large agribusiness firms over assistance for small farmers...
...Yet throughout the long crisis in Olinda and Recife Dom H61der remained silent...
...Gord6n, a Pinochet loyalist who headed the secret police when Tucapel Jim6nez was assassinated, signals the growing momentum against military impunity...
...In this new era, the Catholic Church retreated to a more conservative position, partly under pressure from Pope John Paul II...
...That same week in the neighboring community of La Realidad, a conference of Zapatista supporters, striking students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and international solidarity activists was examining the ways in which Mexican indigenous communities were being stripped of their cultural heritage...
...This article was adapted from "Remembering H1lder Camara: Faith Power and the Poor," which appeared in Christian Century in September 1999...
Vol. 33 • November 1999 • No. 3
