2010

History was made on Thursday when a U.S. District Court Judge in Southern Florida, William J. Zloch, sentenced former Guatemalan special forces soldier Gilberto Jordán to ten years in federal prison. Jordán was convicted of lying on his citizenship application to hide his role in the 1982 massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Dos Erres, Guatemala. In condemning Jordán to the maximum time allowed by law for naturalization fraud, Judge Zloch made clear that he intended the ruling to send a clear message that “those who commit egregious human rights violations abroad” cannot find “safe haven from prosecution” in the United States. The sentence marks the first time that any of the dozens of Kaibil special forces who carried out the murders almost 28 years ago has been prosecuted.

They did it again. Despite the fact that not a single soldier responsible for human rights violations has been held accountable by civilian authorities in the years since the onset of the Merida Initiative, the State Department released its second report on September 2nd  affirming that the Mexican government has met the Merida Initiative’s human rights requirements. This report not only recommends the release of roughly $36 million in Merida funds that had been previously withheld from the 2009 and 2010 budgets, but also sends the wrong message to Mexico on human rights.

In 2005, I visited the community of San José de Apartadó, Colombia. A group of poor farmers who had been repeatedly displaced from their homes by violence, they had decided to call themselves a “peace community” and reject violence from all sides—paramilitaries, guerrillas and the army.  Yet the community was subjected to ever more harassment and violence, including by the local 17th army brigade.  Some 170 members of the peace community have been assassinated since 1997. My visit came soon after seven members of the peace community, including three children, and a local farmer had been massacred and dismembered.  The community members had left their army-occupied town to construct a bare-bones, dirt-floor village down the road.

For a lot of people, the day after Labor Day is the time to get down to business. For us, it's just September 7th. Why? Because when you're going for change as big as we are on U.S.-Colombia policy, you never stop working hard.