Human Rights
Winter 2019 | Volume III, Number 1
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
Introduction
Guest Introduction: Human Rights
On my first visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, I received a copy of a passport of a young Polish boy. He had emigrated from Warsaw with his family, escaping the atrocities of the…
Country Focus
Peru’s Human Rights Coordinating Committee
The human rights abuses that devastated Peru from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s are once again an issue of debate in that country with the release of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation’s…
Human Rights and Reconciliation
I feel the strongest of bonds with Cuba. I was born there and left as an 11-year old with my family for the United States shortly after the revolution came to power. We thought our stay here would…
A Violence Called Democracy
It became known as Guatemala’s Black Thursday. Peasant demonstrators swept through the streets of Guatemala City. They smashed windows and burn cars, while some chanted “We want…
The Persistent Insanity of Augusto Pinochet
When Pinochet was given his freedom by the courts and ushered out of the Senate in July of 2002, it was always with the expectation that he would avoid the public spotlight and stay at…
The Naked Emperor of the Southern Cone
On a hot and dusty January day in Santiago de Chile, I was riding in my host father Alberto’s pickup truck, passing the large factories and ramshackle homes that line the city’s north border…
Peruvian Commission on Truth and Reconciliation
Today Peru is confronting a time of national shame. The two final decades of the 20th century are—it’s necessary to say without beating around the bush—a mark of horror and…
Guatemala Today
As the rains fade and the heat returns, Guatemalans are preparing themselves for what many believe to be the country’s most important election in recent memory. To hear it told on the…
Health, Immigration, and Human Rights
Women and Youth’s Right for Quality Health Services in Mexico
If you’re walking through a market in Mexico City, you just might stumble on a health post for pregnant women. You might be surprised—as I was during a recent trip to Mexico City—of the…
The Law and Life
Vicky arrived with visible anxiety at the legal assistance office where I was volunteering in our small Northern California town of Napa. Sitting uneasily across the desk from me, she whispered…
The 10% Solution
Distinctive among recent demonstrations on the streets of Mexico City have been protests organized by retired and often impoverished men employed temporarily and under contract in…
Suffering That is “Not Appropriate at All”
A few weeks ago, a few friends and co-workers from Partners In Health, a small Harvard-affiliated organization concerned with lessening health disparities, put together a photographic…
Stigma, Discrimination and Human Rights
Six babies are born into the world each day with the HIV virus, many of them in Latin America. Last year, 1.5 million people with HIV were living in Latin America and another 440…
Inter-American Court
On September 18, 2003, the Inter-American Court issued an historic judgment expanding the scope of protection of labor rights of migrant workers in the Americas. The decision is the most…
Harvard Student Group Fosters Advocacy
Over the course of the 2002-2003 academic year, a group of Harvard Law Students concerned about human rights in Latin America organized through regular meetings at the Human Rights…
Children Seeking Asylum
Edwin Muñoz left his native Honduras at 13 to seek asylum in the United States. Abandoned by his mother as a four-year-old, he had lived with a brutal cousin who forced him to earn money…
Thinking on Human Rights
Transition to Democracy
During the1970s and 80s dictatorships throughout much of Latin-America, thousands were illegally incarcerated, tortured, summarily executed, disappeared or forced into exile. Young…
The Emergence of Religious Pluralism
The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), signed in 1966 under the auspices of the United Nations, gives people the right to freedom of religion. Article 18 of the…
Rethinking Human Rights
I sit in my Bogotá office, catching up with reading in international law. I sometimes wonder whether to bother. Here in Colombia, reality makes the language of human rights seem useless…
Reclaiming the Disappeared
The four women sat blindfolded and bound in the clandestine prison in La Plata, Argentina. Only one lived to tell the story. And her story, a reflection of the dark time of the 1980s Argentine…
Perspective on Human Rights
In the last 20 years, Latin America has experienced a shift in the scope and debate regarding human rights compliance. In the 80s, Central America was immersed in civil wars, and South…
Indigenous Rights
In recent human rights practice, Latin America’s indigenous peoples have fared better than its Army officers. While government efforts to apply the rule of law to military officers have been…
Harvard Forum on Human Rights in Brazil
The Harvard Forum on Human Rights in Brazil spotlights Harvard faculty and research centers engaged in human rights and Brazil-related research. It also features Brazilian scholars…
Internationalizing Human Rights
The internationalization of human rights standards, under way for decades, has accelerated in recent years. More countries than ever before have incorporated human rights norms and…
Book Talk
My World Is Not of This Kingdom
Gregory Rabassa translated My World Is Not of This Kingdom by João de Melo because it was the most astonishing novel he had read since One Hundred Years of Solitude. He undertook this…
Proclaiming Revolution
In April of 1952, Bolivia, an obscure, landlocked, country with a mining economy and an impoverished indigenous majority in the heart of South America jumped to the front pages of…
Poéticas del flujo
osé Antonio Mazzotti, in his second book, Poéticas del flujo. Migración y violencia verbales, identifies the different trends in 1980s Peruvian poetry. With characteristic flexibility and a wide…
Signs of the Inka Khipu
How people know things is as important for study as is what they know. Facts do not exist without a system of thought. How facts become facts, the basic units of knowledge, is crucial to…
The Company They Kept
For nearly a century, Central America and the Caribbean were the mis-en-scène of the bananero culture that thrived for nearly a century (1870-1960). The culture itself is famous for…