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LATIN AMERICA: Hunger Strikes Fuelled by Institutional Deafness – IPS ipsnews.net
October 30, 2010 at 10:04 am (Uncategorized)
LATIN AMERICA: Hunger Strikes Fuelled by Institutional Deafness – IPS ipsnews.net.
SANTIAGO, Oct 29, 2010 (IPS) – Protesters ranging from prisoners to government leaders have resorted to hunger strikes in Latin America in recent years to press their demands. Behind the growing use of the extreme protest measure is a lack of institutional responses, according to experts.
No longer is the hunger strike only a radical measure resorted to mainly by prison inmates. Workers, peasants, indigenous people, businesspersons, students, nuns, priests, legislators, judges, reporters and teachers in the region have been fasting for different causes in countries governed by political forces of all stripes.
In Bolivia, the president himself, Aymara Indian Evo Morales, declared a hunger strike in April 2009 to press for passage of a law.
And opposition to another law prompted a group of around 30 journalists to fast this month for 14 days in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz.
In Costa Rica, a group of environmentalists have been on a hunger strike outside the presidential palace since Oct. 8, to protest an executive decree declaring that an open-pit gold mine in Crucitas, in the north of the country, is in the “public interest,” thus allowing the project to go ahead.
And in the northern Chilean region of Coquimbo, Cristian Flores, spokesman for a group of 11 residents of the town of Caimanes, told IPS that “In 10 years we have never received a response from the state.”
He was explaining why the group decided to declare a hunger strike on Sept. 27, to demand the removal and clean-up of a nearby mine tailings deposit.
A much higher profile hunger strike in Chile came to an end early this month after 82 days. A group of 34 prisoners belonging to the country’s largest indigenous group, the Mapuche, were demanding fair trials.
They called off their protest when charges against them under a strict anti-terrorism law were withdrawn and the government of rightwing President Sebastián Piñera promised they would be tried under standard criminal law.
Although they are not a new phenomenon, hunger strikes are “symptoms of something more serious: that there are segments of the population in Latin America who are invisible and are not being heard,” José Santos, at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Santiago, Chile, told IPS.
On Jul. 23, laid-off members of Mexico’s Electrical Workers Union (SME) lifted a hunger strike in which both men and women participated for different lengths of time, ranging between 34 and 90 days, as part of a struggle to get their jobs back after a state-owned power utility was closed down in the capital.
The protest ended when conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón agreed to high-level talks to address the demands of the workers, several of whom were in critical condition.
Santos, a philosopher and academic, disagrees with the idea that the peaceful pressure mechanism has become “fashionable.”
He also said there was a difference between indefinite hunger strikes and shorter fasts joined to support a specific cause.
José Aylwin, co-director of the Citizen Observatory, a Chilean NGO, said hunger strikes in the Southern Cone country occurred because of the state’s “serious limitations” in guaranteeing “the exercise of political rights.”
One of these limitations, he told IPS, is Chile’s electoral system, “which excludes not only indigenous people, but also different currents of opinion or thought, from legislative decision-making.” Another is “the tightly controlled access to the media,” he added.
In both Cuba and Venezuela, protesters have died as a result of hunger strikes.
In Venezuela “the hunger strike is no longer just a tool used by prisoners; it has been used by oil workers and workers in other industries in the hands of the state, as well as other segments of society,” Marino Alvarado, coordinator of the Venezuelan Programme of Education-Action in Human Rights (PROVEA), told IPS.
In July 2009, the mayor of the metropolitan area of Caracas, opposition politician Antonio Ledesma, fasted for 130 hours to protest a move by the government of socialist President Hugo Chávez to take over many of the mayor’s duties and offices by creating another post.
And in September, university students fasted to complain against alleged political persecution by the Chávez administration.
Jesuit missionary José María Korta, 81, used the same mechanism Oct. 18-25 to press for the release of three Yukpa indigenous men in prison on murder charges, respect for native forms of justice, and a large uninterrupted Yukpa territory instead of several smaller disconnected ones in northern Venezuela.
The only Venezuelan to die as a result of a hunger strike was Franklin Brito, a 49-year-old farmer and schoolteacher who died on Aug. 30 after fasting for five months, demanding respect for his property rights over his land. In the last few years he had held several previous hunger strikes.
“The protests have not only grown in number, but have also become more radical and coordinated, and people are increasingly defying the state” in Venezuela, Alvarado said.
In Cuba, hunger strikes are used by dissidents protesting against the government of Raúl Castro, which considers dissident groups “mercenaries” at the service of the hostile U.S. policy towards the socialist island nation. According to the independent Cuba Archive, 12 people have died in hunger strikes since the 1959 revolution.
The demands set forth by the hunger strikers have been better prison conditions, recognition as political prisoners, and release from jail. Orlando Zapata, 42, died in prison on Feb. 23 after refusing food for 85 days.
“The government deliberately let Zapata die. It was a death foretold,” Elizardo Sánchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a dissident group, told IPS.
The government denied responsibility.
Political dissident Guillermo Fariñas was internationally renowned for his repeated hunger strikes. After Zapata died, he declared his own hunger strike on Feb. 24 in his home in the central Cuban city of Santa Clara demanding the release of 26 prisoners with health problems. He called off his protest on Jul. 8 when the imprisoned dissidents began to be released.
Hunger strikes are “a legitimate recourse in extreme situations, resorted to by racial, gender or other minorities,” said Sánchez, who added that “hunger strikes will continue to happen as long as people lack other means to defend their rights.”
Alvarado said “The hunger strike, an expression of desperation and civic protest in which people risk their health and life, is a sign that the game between government and the governed is stuck, that people are not finding a solution to their demands, and frequently not even institutional responses. It is a negative symptom, dangerous to society.”
Hunger Strike in Venezuela
October 28, 2010 at 11:50 am (Protest, Strategy)
Tags: Hugo Chavez, indigenous rights, IPS News, Venezuela
Here is a very interesting case in how activists use the right techniques at the right time to win their goal – or at least to have a meeting with the government.
Activists in Venezuela have (so far) successfully used a hunger strike to gain an audience with President Hugo Chavez regarding the release of 3 prisoners who were convicted of murder in the state court rather than the indigenous courts as promised by the new constitution.
Since the new constitution was based on the concept of indigenous rights, the public views Chavez as a crusader for the indigenous community. This allowed a hunger strike to be successful since hunger strikes are tactics that are to be used against those who support you.
Hunger strikes were popularized by Gandhi but the use of them is frequently misinterpreted. Many believe that his hunger strike was a way of pressuring the British to give India its independence but actually Gandhi used hunger strikes to protest the violent riots between Hindus and Muslims. His hunger strike was a way of asking the Hindu and Muslim people who were his devoted fans to be nonviolent.
The story regarding the hunger strike in Venezuela is reprinted below:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=53290
Hunger Strike Off as Gov’t Agrees to Talks on Native Demands
By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 25, 2010 (IPS) – An 81-year-old Jesuit missionary in Venezuela ended a week-long hunger strike Monday after the government agreed to high-level talks to negotiate the release of three indigenous prisoners facing murder charges and to discuss land claims by Yukpa communities.
José María Korta told journalists outside Congress in Caracas, where he was holding his fast, that in “the dialogue that we have held with government leaders, the main reason for our hunger strike has received a response.”
In the company of two young activists who joined him in the hunger strike over the last three days, the elderly missionary said he felt fine and that he could have “continued the strike, and may still take it up again.”
Korta called off his protest after Vice President Elías Jaua promised to meet with him to listen to his concerns and seek solutions to his demands, along with leftwing President Hugo Chávez, who returned from an 11-day international tour Sunday.
“We hope the dialogue and negotiations with representatives of the government and other branches of the state will bring about the release of Sabino Romero, Alexander Fernández and Olegario Romero,” three indigenous men in prison for murder since a year ago, Lusbi Portillo, with Sociedad Homo et Natura, an environmental group that has been involved in the Yukpa cause for 25 years, told IPS.
But “We also need a road map to overcome the underlying problems, like the defence of indigenous forms of justice and the handing over of ancestral indigenous land occupied by cattle breeders or granted to mining companies in concession,” he added.
Sources in Congress said legislators are working with Supreme Court judges on measures in favour of the three indigenous inmates.
During his hunger strike, Korta told IPS that “Since 1999, when the new constitution –which is very beautiful but has hardly been enforced — was approved, indigenous people like the Yukpa have been awaiting the demarcation of their territories.”
The constitution, which was rewritten under Chávez by an elected constituent assembly that included delegates of indigenous organisations, requires the demarcation of indigenous territories. It also stipulates for the first time that the legislature must include representatives of native groups.
Korta said the Yukpa “are victims of the colonialist viewpoint that predominates among many officials.”
The Yukpa, a Carib-speaking Amerindian population of around 12,000, are one of the five native groups living in northwestern Venezuela, between the Sierra de Perijá mountains, which mark part of the border with Colombia, and Lake Maracaibo.
While some Yukpa leaders and communities have accepted land and other aid distributed by the government, more radical groups led by Sabino Romero — such as the Chaktapa village, of which he is chief — continue to demand legal recognition of a larger, continuous Yukpa territory, instead of areas granted to separate communities.
They are demanding a territory of 285,000 hectares located between the Sierra de Perijá and the fertile plains from which they were gradually driven in the 20th century by the expansion of cattle ranching and oil prospecting.
They don’t want to end up “like ham in a sandwich,” Portillo said, referring to tracts of land offered by the government that are wedged between border areas reserved for military use and the plains along the lake, which are covered by ranches.
Some of these groups have come down from the mountains in recent years and occupied idle land on cattle ranches that they claim as their traditional territory.
Wayúu, Yukpa and Barí communities living on the Venezuelan side of the Sierra de Perijá, from north to south, are also opposed to the coal-mining concessions granted to companies in the area, and maintain that the government is delaying the demarcation of indigenous territories because it would hinder plans for mining activities and the construction of railways and ports.
The Yukpa communities led by Romero are asking the government to pay ranchers compensation for the improvements they have made to the land occupied by the indigenous protesters, such as houses, barns, fences, artificial lakes, dikes, electric wiring, rural roads and fixed machinery.
The ranchers have agreed to give up the land if they receive not only compensation for the property itself but also for the improvements.
But in its agrarian reform effort, the government argues that landowners must be able to show an unbroken chain of land titles that can be traced back many decades, and refuses to pay for improvements to expropriated rural property if the owners cannot do so.
There is thus a political stand-off between the Chávez administration and the cattle breeders along the shores of Lake Maracaibo.
On Oct. 12, 2009, the government handed over communal land titles to 41,600 hectares to three of the more than 100 Yukpa communities.
The next day, a violent incident broke out between Sabino Romero and several of his family members and friends, with people from the community of Guamo Pamocha, led by a rival chief, Olegario Romero.
The heated argument over land spiralled into violence, and two people were shot and killed — Sabino’s son-in-law and Olegario’s 16-year-old pregnant sister — and several were injured.
The courts ordered the arrests of Olegario, Sabino and Alexander Fernández, a member of the Wayuú community who is married to Sabino’s daughter.
They were first held in a local military garrison. But when pressure mounted from the indigenous groups and organisations that back their cause, the three men facing murder charges were transferred to a prison in the city of Trujillo in the country’s western Andes highlands.
This year, Homo et Natura has been fighting in the courts for the three men to be returned to their communities and tried under indigenous criminal justice systems, which were recognised by the constitution.
Article 260 of the constitution establishes that “The legitimate authorities of indigenous peoples can apply in their territory forms of justice based on their ancestral traditions (in cases) that only involve members of their communities, according to their own customs and procedures, as long as they do not run counter to the constitution, the country’s laws and public order.”
The Yukpa justice system is based on reparations rather than punishment. For example, it requires the offender to work several years for the victim’s family, Portillo explained.
According to Sabino Romero’s defence attorneys, the evidence of what happened on Oct. 12, 2009 was altered; the interpreter used in the trial was not fluent in the Yukpa dialect spoken in the village of Chaktapa; and the chief is being held in a cell with evangelical inmates who press him to join them in prayers and rites that differ from his own beliefs.
The Spanish-born Korta is known as Ajishama, “the white ibis who shows the way” in the Ye’kuana language, by students at the Indigenous University he founded.
There are some 600,000 indigenous people from 36 different ethnic groups in this South American country of 28 million people. Just over half live in communities in border regions. (END)
