190528

pick 1 or more of the original 30 human rights. write a blog post…refect about the right(s) that you chose w/ one of the topics that we discussed last week about Argentina. must incorporate relation/connection to the “facts and figures” handout

argentina?

• vuelos de muerte
• torture
• murder
• kidnapping
• sexual assault

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

There are so many

The government of Argentina from 1976 to 1983 had violated the personal liberties of its people on so many occasions it’s difficult to even enumerate it. The torture, detainment, and murder carried out throughout the duration of the Dirty War is a hallmark of the government at the time, and the human and civil rights violations that took place are endless. Firstly, we can discuss the violations by the Argentine government of people’s right not be be arrested, detained, or exiled arbitrarily (Article 9), which can be coupled with a few others, like Article 11’s right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, or Article 12’s protection from “arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence”, or, most importantly, the right to not be subjected to torture or other cruel treatment from Article 5. This is held to the regime’s propensity to create their “disappeared” through kidnapping citizens, whom they would then take to whichever center nearby they used (so, for example, la ESMA in Buenos Aires) and torture them until they spoke whatever the authorities wanted to hear, through any number of means. Nobody was innocent unless the government said so; “leftists” were targeted whether they were actually leftists or not, clearly violating Article 11, and the kidnappings would often take place by breaking into their homes (as well as the latter portion—communications were sometimes searched), violating article 12.

It’s difficult to imagine not having the same (general) guaruntee of certain rights that we have today; when I was younger, before I started reading books and watching films that gave me glimpses into other societies that weren’t similar to my own, I never realized that these were not universal, and not secure. But even for people in our own country, they’re not necessarily “rights”; criminals are treated harshly, and corruption within the prison system allows for people to be put in jail both illegally and unconstitutionally; black and hispanic people are still targeted by police, and have a higher rate of death than the average; hate crimes against certain groups are still rampant in certain regions (for instance parts of the South with the KKK or anti-LGBT hate). Even still, I have a degree of trust that allows me to walk outside in the evening without much fear of the government kidnapping me, or have nightmares about torture by their hands.

It’s been well documented and argued by all in the spheres of history, politics, urban life, and more that one of the keys to ending the cycle of poverty, the bane of most nation’s existences, is education. This has been a major issue in America, where we have large disparities between the typical cushy suburbs and dilapidated inner cities, like Detroit or Chicago, whose residents have no money to pay higher taxes that would improve their cities conditions and schools, and whose citizens are often so impoverished the sole focuses of their lives are surviving either poverty or violence, rather than thinking about anything past high school (much less education), which could give them the skills to be highly productive members of society (like goal setting, managing tasks, things that would help them and their families leave whatever situations they’re in).

This is not specific to America, however; Latin America too has a plethora of issues surrounding poverty being fueled by a lack of education. One of the main issues is that there is a lack of skilled laborers in the market: because people don’t go to school, they don’t end up seeking the types of education that would give them skills that their countries need right now, as both the second and fourth article purport. So-called “human capital” is another attributing factor to the economy that Latin America misses out on when they don’t educate their population; because there’s no skilled labor, so many people cannot contribute to an economy that needs it. Not to mention education is one of the most essential tools for mobility; being educated allows for the skills useful to get out of poverty to be grown, and a higher educated population means a population lower in poverty. Both of these are espoused by each of the articles, in different sections and contexts, but I agree with them all; it’s the same in the United States, just with a slightly different climate. A more educated population in any country means a more prosperous society worldwide, which I think is important; when one country does anything, its effects are rarely confined to the borders of that country, because of the level of globalization that’s normal today. The question of whether the U.S. should be involved in giving aid is tricky; is it overstepping our boundaries? Should we try at all? Personally, I think it’s up to whatever country we even want to send aid to to decide, but I think we should be careful before deciding to help another country’s issues.

It makes complete sense that governments would want to retain an artificial sentiment of democracy through a “blended” sort of democracy, especially with the rise of international surveillance and accountability. For instance, the referendum in Chile only occurred in the first place because the government wanted a fake vote to please the international community, who was increasing pressure to add more elements of democracy to their assumingly non-democratic system. As for controlling the legal and non-legal aspects of the country, I was listening to a podcast earlier where they were talking about the same issues as the movie No in Paraguay, under Alfredo Stroessner, and it told the story of a women whose brother was murdered by the police, but they had no hope of getting justice because the government (the ones who murdered him in the first place) controlled the courts, so nothing would get done. It’s like the scene in No where the husband goes to an Argentinian general to try and get a solution to his wife’s disappearance, and he’s met with veiled hostility and an awareness not to trust the government, who disappeared her in the first place.

I think it’s really interesting how authoritarian regimes have shifted from the past to now; look at the regimes of World War II, particularly Hitler and Mussolini. They had stated control over every aspect of the country, but their tactics were to either convince the people that it was a gift to them that their nation had such a great leader (Hitler’s charisma earned him great support, and he framed his dictatorship as saving Germany) or to intimidate people into following through harsh measures and brute force (both, but that was Italy’s main task). There wasn’t even a majority seat-holding like in they have Nicaragua, because the regime was complete and total. I feel like it’s more similar to Venezuela, who replaced the National Legislative Assembly with his own, bans opposition parties from running against them, and terrorizes its citizens everyday.

Four of the major issues that Latin America faces in regard to the environment are deforestation, air and water pollution, illegal mining, and oil production. Deforestation not only harms those who live there (whether it be Brazil, Peru, or elsewhere) through animals losing their habitats, soil erosion, and flooding (which often harms locals or indigenous people), but implicates other countries too; deforestation bringing down the trees that keep our Co2 levels low and increasing greenhouse gases affects our global environment, not just the surrounding land of the Amazon. Pollution of the air and water of a city or country increases cancer rates, and can harm the environment of that area (whether it be from acid rain, or depletion of the ozone), which in turn harms the global environment. Illegal mining results in minerals that many countries that suffer from it export, and quite often abuses the men (or children) who work there; children are often forced to work doblas (24 hour shifts), and are exposed to dangerous materials, chemicals, and situations (like explosions or breathing in pollutants) daily. Oil production is particularly influential upon the international community, as almost every country but a very select few import their oil, and the environmental impacts tend to be along the lines of oil spills polluting waters and causing deaths of those in the regions they exist in and majorly harming the environment by drilling deep into the land and ruining the affected earth. Some of the major environmental issues we should pay heed to because they affect the global environment (as in the cases of deforestation, oil production, and pollution), and some we should because it’d be somewhat immoral to gloss over the issue, to cast it aside as unimportant (particularly with illegal mining, but with all of them on some level).

There’s a level of danger that the majority of people living in the United States, or at least those that are so vocal about their opposition to immigrants, face in their lives; for the typical suburban family, things like gangs, dehydration, or death by starvation aren’t everyday worries. The process of immigrating illegally, regardless of the moral situation, is undoubtedly an arduous one. As illustrated by the documentaries and movies we’ve watched so far, the road to America is often fraught with injury and death, not to mention violations of all other kinds, whether it be thievery or sexual assault. Riding on the Bestia seems like a death sentence; limbs cut off from the wheels of the train, women being violently assaulted, dehydration and starvation, spending all your willpower avoiding the legal authorities of whatever country you’re in, and so much more—it’s something that’s even difficult to fathom for me, living that life for weeks or months, especially as a typical suburban American citizen.  

It’s interesting to look at the timeline of immigration throughout the years of our country’s existence and compare it to what we have today, especially considering the magnitude of tensions surrounding the issue of immigration. We started the so-called “immigration problem” we have today, and most people don’t even know about it. The Bracero Program set into motion a pattern of coming and going that wouldn’t be stopped by a mere piece of writing on a paper; by giving people the option to commit this type of seasonal work, people’s livelihoods began to depend more and more on doing so. Combine this with the surges of immigration since then, particularly within certain nations, and the current makeup of immigrants is established.

So it’s of no surprise that the immigrant population is noticeable, at the very least (whether it’s a problem or not depends on what section of the political spectrum one lies upon), and has been in the public eye as a hot topic for quite some time. What’s most distinguishable, which has been greatly exacerbated by the current administration, is the border crossings; the most perpetuated idea in the media, whether true or not, is that the majority of immigrants (illegal ones, at least) come through the southern border between the United States and Mexico, which the current administration opines needs restriction to stop such flow.

This all has led to major public discourse around the way to handle the immigration issue; the right propagates tough legislature and audacious federal projects to curb immigrant arrival, while publicly denouncing the lives and livelihoods of all immigrants in America, legal or not. And most opponents of immigrants in our society outright refuse to give an ounce or two of humanity to those crossing the border, or coming by train, or car, or plane. The documentary really highlighted to me the way knowing a story intimately, or even at a more base level, changes an opinion, because much of the time what interacting with a person’s story does is force humanization upon them; how much more did we feel for the woman who couldn’t go to Mexico to visit her dying father, or the girl who was afraid she couldn’t go to college, or the parents afraid of being deported away from their children?

When I was a kid, the type of things I’d be asked (particularly at my all-white, limited diversity public school) would usually range somewhere from “Are you Chinese?” to “Are you good at math?” (spoiler alert: I’m not either). Assumptions make themselves aware to us in the way other people interact with us, whether at first meeting or throughout our course of knowing them, and in our own reactions to others; if we come across a man with a briefcase and blazer, we may believe he’s of wealth and successful, the way we might presume someone with dirty clothes and a shopping cart full of junk to be poor and homeless, as per the situations we discussed in class today. No matter if we cancel whatever thought we had immediately after thinking it, or never do: we still think them either way.

But these types of assumptions can often ring much more harmful; for those like the kids Gerardo Lopez nurtured through his gang intervention program, assumptions made at face value could lead to anywhere from rejected job interviews to physical violence, depending on the situation and magnitude of the supposition. This is not to discount any of the “smaller scale” assumptions: if various people make the same opinions of you for your entire life, it can build up to the point that it’s deleterious. But there are direct consequences to assumptions made of dire situations, and for someone like any of the people we heard and talked about, lives can be altered in significant ways from assumptions made by others, whether those alterations be external or internal.

It’s a story every American knows: we reach our hands over the U.S. borders and play our own tune on another country’s set of strings, imprint our own melodies on Puerto Rico, on Guam, on Panama, on Cuba. We know it in different ways; some of us hear the tune of imperialism, all dissonant chords and off-beat notes, and others the sweet melody of discovery, of expansion, of freedom. Whichever way we perceive it, there is no denying our foreign presence, nor its impacts on the country we’ve elected to insert ourselves in. The extent to which U.S. intervention has impacted foreign nations it’s intervened in is both widely debatable and distinctly identifiable, depending on the country, situation, and year. Some aspects are tangible—trade partners, GDP—but others much less so, more of government, of social issues, of environment.

None of this is new: ever since the launch of the frenzied movement west in America, towards our newly gained territories of California, Nevada, Utah, we have been obsessed with expansion, both within our borders and outside. We’ve gone from California to Mexico to Panama, deposing presidents, fighting wars, and building canals, involving ourselves in countries not our own. What would be interesting to delve further into is the impact our intervention into foreign government has had on such nations, both in historical and modern contexts; for example, what did our installment of Pinochet, and our subsequent involvement in the dictatorship, result in long-term for Chile? What if we had never intervened? And the same with Argentina, Panama, Nicaragua—did we meddle with the economy directly, or indirectly? We can at least catalogue in some regard the situation with Cuba: without us, without the influence of the Cold War, and Bay of Pigs, and the Missile Crisis, they wouldn’t have had the relations they have with Russia (to the extent they do now), and the government would have had less difficulty with the sanctions we put in place against them. But what the less obvious outcomes are, the small little cracks that led to earthquakes, may remain untraced, or unknown.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton