Humanitarian groups call for fair, transparent retrial in case of Curuguaty Massacre in Paraguay.
| Autor | Gaudin, Andres |
When President Fernando Lugo (2008-2012) was ousted in a parliamentary coup in June 2012, legislators from right-wing parties justified their attack on democratic institutions by saying the president had been guilty of "poor performance of duties," and cited a bloody event that had occurred days earlier, on June 15, 2012, as a pretext. The incident, known as the Curuguaty Massacre, had resulted in the deaths of 11 campesinos (agrarian workers) and six of the 324 special police agents sent to repress the occupants of state-owned land that was under de-facto exploitation by a private firm. Four years later, on July 11, judicial proceedings on the massacre ended with sentences of up to 35-years handed down to 11 campesinos, but without any investigation of the policemen involved (NotiSur, July 13, 2012).
In vestigation ignores campesino deaths
In an article on June 6, the Associated Press quoted Amnesty International to recall that when he had presented his findings to the court, prosecutor Jalil Rachid had said he had not investigated the person or persons who had had fatally shot the workers "because the investigation focused on the campesinos' ambush of the policemen." Rachid was recently appointed the country's vice minister of domestic security.
Given this--plus other biases and omissions--several organizations and local and international personalities and institutions are calling for the government of President Horacio Cartes (NotiSur, Sept. 6, 2013) to set up a new and impartial trial. The day before the judgment was read, the US Department of State had sent Paraguay's Foreign Ministry a letter signed by 10 Republican and Democratic legislators urging that the issue have a fair and transparent resolution. Similar messages from several Nobel Prize recipients, humanitarian groups, United Nations commissioners, Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) Judge Eugenio Zaffaroni, and legislators from the European Parliament and the Southern Common Market have arrived in recent days.
"This farce we have just seen takes us back to the bloody years of the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) in which the judiciary was merely a mask used to crudely cover up the cruelest assassinations," said journalist Jose Maria Quevedo, one of the main defense witnesses for the campesinos (NotiSur, Feb. 28, 2014). Quevedo, who participated in an independent investigation done by the Plataforma de Estudios e Investigacion de Conflictos Campesinos...
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