Human Rights: Editor’s Letter
During the day, I edit story after story on human rights for the Fall issue of ReVista. During the evening, I work on my biography of Irma Flaquer, a courageous Guatemalan journalist who was…
Category: Human Rights
ONGs en América Latina y los derechos humanos
Las ONG ofrecen mil modos de recordar la dignidad humana a los gobiernos y las sociedades. Las dos experiencias que esbozo en esta nota reflejan algunas de las estrategias asumidas por…
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…
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…
Harvard Graduates
Mayra is one of many rural Mexican students benefiting from the work of Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Alumna Mariali Cardenas EdM’02. Living in the northern mountains…
Las Fuerzas Armadas, Harvard y la CVR
La Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación ha revelado cómo se organizaron las operaciones especiales de inteligencia que fueron el principal recurso de poder de Fujimori. La central de…
Researching Gender Quota
Last spring, as the Mexican political parties began compiling their candidate lists with mandatory quotas for women for the first time, I was teaching a Freshman Seminar at Harvard…
Harvard Medical School Spanish in Chile
During this past summer, seven first-year Harvard Medical School students got the unique opportunity to hone their Spanish skills in the orphanages and schools of Santiago. They were…
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…
