#Organization of American States

[leftistfeminista]

Now, the CIDH has brought the ESMA exhibit to the Organization of American States (OAS) Headquarters in Washington DC in an attempt to start a conversation about crimes against women during dictatorships across Latin America. The exhibit will be available for visits throughout the whole month of March, dedicated to both the Argentine feminist struggle and the quest for memory, truth, and justice. 

“Trophies” and “retraining” — the exhibit

Featuring 28 testimonies from women survivors, the exhibit shows the specificities of women’s experiences within the clandestine centres with testimonies from the trials as well as recent interviews. Banners and texts convey the story that the military coup was part of a “systemic and patriarchal” plan to eradicate women victims through gender-based violence. 

Testimonies show how women were generally used as ‘trophies’ by the military, subjected to humiliation and suffered gender-based violence when tortured. This often came in the form of sexual abuse, which sometimes resulted in unwanted pregnancies. 

34 women were forced to deliver their babies in violent conditions, often seeing them taken away immediately  — some were abducted by the military to be raised as their own, but many were murdered. 

The violence was not limited to rape and sexual abuse — several psychological methods were also employed. The military reinforced gender stereotypes on detained women by giving them lessons on wearing makeup and having officers take them on “dates,” among other obligations to “retrain” them as women. 

“Gender-based violence existed before the dictatorship, existed during the dictatorship, and continues to exist,” Mantilla Falcón said. “The Argentine case shows how women’s bodies were completely sexualized, how rapes and pregnancies in conflict affected them differently than men.” 

When the trials were re-opened in Argentina in 2001, it took a long time for the judiciary to incorporate a perspective on gender in their investigations. The first time a torturer was condemned for rape was in 2010. And, in 2011, Judge Sergio Torres, in charge of the ESMA case, declared that the sexual violence in the clandestine center was “a systemic practice carried out by the State within a plan of repression and annihilation”. 

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

At OAS summit, Brazil seeks to soften criticism of Nicaragua’s government

Just hours before the start of the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C., the government of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is keeping diplomatic and political tempers high due to proposed corrections to a statement critical of the government of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua.

The Brazilian delegation made “substantive changes” to a document prepared by the United States, Canada, Costa Rica and Antigua and Barbuda on “the escalation of repression, the closure of civic space and human rights violations” in Nicaragua. Despite the conclusive reports by the United Nations group of experts and the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), the Brazilian delegation questioned the commission of crimes against humanity by the Sandinista administration. The Brazilian diplomats eliminated the words “alarming conclusion” and replaced it with “there are elements.”

Moreover, the Brazilian diplomats added the word “alleged” to the passage about infringement of property and social security rights through the confiscation of property and assets and the denial of pensions for individuals deprived of their nationality by the Nicaraguan government, and which the promoters of the original declaration had emphasized.

Brazil also completely removed the mention of the dramatic levels of migration by Nicaraguans who have fled due to political persecution and the socio-political crisis raging since 2018, the year of massive social protests against the regime. On Tuesday, the Human Rights Collective Nicaragua Never Again denounced that this is the largest exodus in the history of Nicaragua, greater even than that of the 1980s, when the country fought a civil war that left tens of thousands dead: “At least 605,043 Nicaraguans have left their country in the last 62 months, nine percent of the total population, due to state repression against opponents, religious leaders and critics of the government of Daniel Ortega,” they remarked.

Continue reading.

[chicagotimesmagazine]

South America: A Strategic Reassessment For The United States

By Chicago Times Magazine – July 20, 2024 The recent rise in Russian and Communist Chinese activity in South America necessitates a reevaluation of U.S. strategy in the region. Historically, South America has served as a stage for external powers to exert influence, a dynamic the Monroe Doctrine, with its inherent complexities, sought to navigate. Today, the challenge lies not in solely…

[paulpingminho]

[plethoraworldatlas]

Guatemalan prosecutors said Thursday they will seek to strip President-elect Bernardo Arévalo and several members of his party of their immunity for allegedly making social media posts that encouraged students to take over a public university in 2022.

Cultural Heritage prosecutor Ángel Saúl Sánchez announced the move aimed at Arévalo and members of his Seed Movement at a news conference while federal agents executed search warrants and sought to arrest more than 30 student members of the party.

It was only the latest legal salvo against Arévalo, an anti-corruption crusader who shocked the nation by winning the presidential election in August. The United States government, Organization of American States and other outside observers have suggested the legal attacks are an attempt to keep Arévalo from taking power in January

...

Since Arévalo won a spot in the August runoff, prosecutors have been pursuing his party on accusations of wrongdoing in the gathering of the necessary signatures to register years earlier. A judge suspended the party at prosecutors’ request.

Among the crimes prosecutors plan to pursue against Arévalo and others in the new case are aggravated usurpation, sedition and illegal association.In April 2022, students took over San Carlos University, Guatemala’s only public university, following what they considered the fraudulent election of the school’s new rector Walter Mazariegos. They said that during the vote by students, faculty and administrators, Mazariegos only allowed those who would vote for him to cast their ballots.

The U.S. State Department sanctioned Mazariegos for suffocating democratic processes and taking the position of rector after what it called a fraudulent process

The students did not stand down until June of this year.

In the case announced Thursday, one of the examples given in prosecutors’ documents is a message in which Arévalo congratulated the protesters on X, formerly known as Twitter, in March: “the USAC is making it possible to see a ray of hope in Guatemala.”

On Thursday, Arévalo called the Attorney General’s Office’s actions against his party “spurious and unacceptable.”

Later Thursday, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller announced that 11 more Guatemalans would face U.S. visa sanctions for undermining democracy.

“The United States unequivocally rejects continued, brazen efforts to undermine Guatemala’s peaceful transition of power to President-elect Bernardo Arévalo,” Miller said in a statement. “This includes Public Ministry officials’ plans to file charges against President-elect Arevalo and Vice President-elect (Karin) Herrera, as well as members of the Semilla party and other opposition members. We also condemn the politically motivated raids and arrests targeting members of the Semilla party.”

It came one day after the Organization of American States permanent council approved a resolution calling Guatemala’s Attorney General’s Office an undemocratic actor trying to “discredit and impede” the democratic transition of power.

On Thursday, the OAS condemned the latest moves by the Attorney General’s office as “actions of a political nature that distort the electoral process.”

[endimpunityday]

DAY I - Opening ceremony - Intl' Day to end Impunity Against Journalists 2023.

08:00 - 09:00 -  Registration at the Organization of American States (OAS) Hall of the Americas. 

09:00 - 10:30 - Opening ceremony of the global commemoration

Artistic performance by Vivir Quintana, singer, composer

Welcome and opening remarks:

Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the OAS 

Tawfik Jelassi, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO 

Keynote speeches by:

Margaret Macaulay, IACHR President 

Birgitta Tazelaar, Co-Chair, Media Freedom Coalition and Netherlands Ambassador to the United States 

Address by:

Justice Imani Daud Aboud, President, African Court for Human and Peoples Rights 

Testimony from:

Danish Karokhel, Director & Editor-in-Chief, Pajhwok Afghan News

Panel discussion:

 Irene Khan, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and Opinion

Jodie Ginsberg, President, CPJ

[jayaaaa]

Common America W gif with the OAS flag for when you really need to dunk on the other continents

[rotzaprachim]

im shaking every single student organizer and screaming that they need to separate a demand to divest from arms funding from the demand for a university to cut off all contact with Israeli and Israeli-American scholars and students, a demand which no university will agree to because implementing it would in many cases be very illegal

[reasonsforhope]

Version that doesn't require sign-in.

"Hot Labor Summer just became a scorcher.

[On August 25, 2023], the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith [a.k.a. immediately] into bargaining.

The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.

Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing possible again, after decades in which unpunished employer illegality was the most decisive factor in reducing the nation’s rate of private-sector unionization from roughly 35 percent to the bare 6 percent at which it stands today...

“This is a sea change, a home run for workers,” said Brian Petruska, an attorney for the Laborers Union who authored a 2017 law review article on how to effectively restore to workers their right to collective bargaining enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which was all but nullified by the act’s weakening over the past half-century. Taken together, Petruska added, last week’s decisions recreate “a system with no tolerance for employers’ coercion of their employees” when their employees seek their legal right to collective bargaining...

Since the days of Lyndon Johnson, every time that the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to put some teeth back into the steadily more toothless NLRA. But they’ve never managed to muster the 60 votes needed to get those measures through the Senate. The Cemex ruling actually goes beyond much of what was proposed in those never-enacted bills."

-via The American Prospect, August 28, 2023

--

Note: I didn't include it because the paragraphs about it went super into the weeds, but the reason all of this is happening is because of the NRLB's general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, who was appointed by Biden. In fact, according to this article, this "secures Abruzzo’s place as the most important public official to secure American workers’ rights since New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who authored the NLRA in 1935." Voting matters

[nando161mando]

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

IACHR Condemns Attacks on Brazil's Democratic Institutions

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) condemns the violence perpetrated against institutions in Brasilia, that amounts to an attack on Brazilian democracy. These events left scores of people injured and caused damage to the buildings that house the Federal Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidential Palace. The IACHR calls on the State to investigate these events and to step up its efforts to strengthen democracy.

On January 8, supporters of the country's former president demonstrated in Brasilia to demand a military intervention to oust Brazil's legitimately elected government. Over the course of that day, demonstrators violently stormed facilities housing the three branches of government in the country's capital, Brasilia. At least 70 people were injured, the Health Ministry reported. According to the Union of Professional Journalists of the Federal District, at least 12 journalists were attacked and several had their equipment stolen or damaged. The violence was broadly condemned by other nations and by international organizations. Domestically, criminal proceedings were launched against the alleged perpetrators and masterminds of these attacks.

The IACHR rejects violence in demonstration contexts and stresses that the right to freedom of assembly must be exercised peacefully and without weapons. States must take any measures necessary to prevent violence, protect the safety of anyone involved, and preserve law and order, as well as investigate any violence, and try and punish anyone responsible for it, with full respect for due process.

Continue reading.

[kaurwreck]

The average American's ignorance of federalism and the separation of powers is going to fuck us on child online protection legislation if the same energy that is going towards KOSA isn't dedicated towards state legislatures too.

The federal efforts towards KOSA have moved much more slowly than state efforts, and Section 301 of KOSA is drafted with language that permits much more restrictive state legislation because Congress is trying to avoid preempting the 23+ child online protection bills already passed by states, and the many more being considered by states.

[maplemonarchy]

!!!!!!ATTENTION DEMOCRATIC PARTY VOTERS!!!!!

If you live in the following states you can vote for uncommitted on the primary ballots:

SUPER TUESDAY States + Territories:

Alabama

Colorado (as Noncommitted Delegate)

Massachusetts (as No Preference)

Minnesota

Tennessee

American Samoa

MARCH (Non-Super Tuesday)

Washington State - March 12th

Missouri - March 23rd

APRIL

Rhode Island - April 2nd

Wisconsin (as Uninstructed Delegate) - April 2nd

MAY

Kentucky - May 21st

JUNE

New Jersey - June 4th

New Mexico (as Uncommitted delegate) - June 4th

Montana (as No Preference) - June 4th

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

instagram.com :: Jesse Duquette (@_jesseduquette)

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 8, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 09, 2024

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement. 

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States. 

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests. 

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.” 

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” 

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power. 

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm. 

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.” 

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South. 

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court. 

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

From the perspective of 2024, Kennedy’s comments seem prescient, but the country could go even further backward. The 2024 Republican Party platform, released today, calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment not to protect equal rights for Americans from discriminatory laws, as those who wrote, passed, and ratified the amendment intended. Instead it calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of fetuses from the time of fertilization. It says that states should start passing laws protecting those rights: so-called fetal personhood laws that have their roots in the 1960s and were considered a fringe idea until about fifteen years ago. Those laws prohibit all abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and several forms of contraception.  

Saying states should pass such laws echoes the language Trump has used to try to avoid the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular abortion stance by claiming, as the Supreme Court did in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, that states alone should write laws covering abortion. But in its reaction to the Republican platform today, the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization made it clear that the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to open the way for a national abortion ban. The Fourteenth Amendment, after all, gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

“It is important that the [Republican Party] reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” the organization said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[endimpunityday]

DAY I - SESSION 2: Flash talk - Combating impunity: obligations of the States and the role of public officials in building trust in the media.

Participants will be able to discuss the specific role of public officials, particularly the obligation they have to prevent attacks on the press through their speech. They will also be able to reflect on what is the situation in each region regarding the use of public speech to increase or decrease the safety of journalists. 

Moderator: Ruth Kronenburg, Executive Director, Free Press Unlimited

Testimonies from:

Xenia Hernández, National Project Coordinator of Florida International University 

Panel discussion:

Guilherme Canela, Chief for Freedom of Expression And Safety of Journalists, UNESCO

Hon. Neema Lugangira, Chair, African Parliamentary Network on Internet Governance and Member of Parliament, Tanzania

Dzenana Burek, Executive Director of the Press and Online Media Council in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Pedro Vaca Villarreal, IACHR Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression

Panel followed by a Q/A session.

11:45 - 12:45 - Session 2: Flash talk - Combating impunity: obligations of the States and the role of public officials in building trust in the media.

[mapsontheweb]

Members of the Organization of Ibero-American States