Assessing the record of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Latin America's rural conflict zones (1979–2016)

ABSTRACT

Analysing the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights highlights major problems of access to justice in rural Latin America. A majority of the cases ruled on by the Inter-American Court since its inception in 1979 concern violations of human rights in major urban centres. This despite the fact that the worst human rights violations committed in Latin America in recent decades have targeted rural populations. Under specific historical conditions, some rural victims and their advocates have successfully brought their cases to the Inter-American Court. Notably, most of the Colombian cases adjudicated by the court have concerned events in rural conflict zones. In the case of Peru, the focus has been almost exclusively on events in the capital city, Lima. The stark contrast between Colombia and Peru points to a broader trend. Further research must be carried out to determine why, how and with what effect the rural victims of state-sponsored violence have sought international justice remedies, where these efforts have succeeded, and where they have foundered. Human rights mobilisation at the local level determines where Inter-American Court cases originate. This article considers the geographic distribution of cases brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights as a function of the strength of advocacy networks connecting rural and urban areas, and beyond, in relation to Latin American histories of dictatorship, counterinsurgency, and the evolution of the inter-American human rights system itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• rural violence
• armed conflict
• social movements
• international justice
• Inter-American Court of Human Rights
• Organisation of American States
• Colombia
• Peru

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was conducted in Washington, DC, San José, Costa Rica, and Bogotá, Colombia with funding from the University of Toronto, the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture and the University of Connecticut. Many thanks to Par Engstrom and Courtney Hillebrecht for their invaluable feedback. Thanks as well to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments. At the University of Connecticut, thanks to Mark Overmyer-Velázquez, Jason Oliver Chang, Mark Healey, and Richard A. Wilson. At the University of Toronto, thanks to Sean Mills, Melanie Newton, Yvon Wang and Kevin Coleman. Thanks to Francisco Quintana and Luz Marina Monzón for generously sharing their insights. Special thanks to Geneviève Dorais, Cynthia Milton, and Geneviève Lessard for comments on draft versions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Luis van Isschot is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of History and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut (2012–2014). He is the author of The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919–2010 (2015). His book is being published in Spanish by Editorial Universidad del Rosario.

Notes

1. Ulrich Oslender, The Geographies of Social Movements: Afro-Colombian Mobilisation and the Aquatic Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 20.

2. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, ‘IACHR Takes Case Involving Colombia to Inter-American Court’, Press Release, 29 July2011.

3. Alto Comisionado para la Paz, 2015. Contribución al entendimiento del conflicto armado en Colombia. Comisión Histórica del Conflicto y sus Víctimas. http://www.altocomisionadoparalapaz.gov.co/mesadeconversaciones/PDF/InformeComisionHistoricadelConflictoysusVictimas (accessed 12 May 2017).

4. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (1959) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (1979) together constitute the longest-functioning regional justice system outside of Europe. The Inter-American Commission has undertaken dozens of onsite investigations, held more than 1,000 hearings, and referred more than 200 cases to the Inter-American Court.

5. República de Colombia, Alegatos Finales Escritos. Caso No. 12.573 ‘Marino López Mena y Otros – Operación Genesis’ (12 February 2013).

6. Amongst the groups providing international protective accompaniment and support to these displaced communities in Urabá are Peace Brigades International, Projet Accompagnement Solidarité Colombie, Witness for Peace, and Fellowship of Reconciliation Peace Presence.

7. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is a regional judicial institution based in San José, Costa Rica and established in 1979 to adjudicate human rights cases originating in countries that have ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, first debated in 1959, adopted in 1969, and entered into force in 1978. The court comprises seven elected judges. The two main functions of the court are (1) to rule on contentious cases between human rights victims and member states, and to (2) issue provisional measures for the protection of individuals or communities under threat. Before being passed on to the court, human rights advocates must have demonstrated to the commission that they have exhausted all legal recourse at the national level.

8. Joe Parkin Daniels, ‘Colombia Peace Process Weathers the Storm as FARC Hands in Weapons’, The Guardian, 16 June 2017.

9. Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, Informe Final, Conclusiones Generales (Lima: CVR, 2003).

10. See recent reports out of Colombia regarding the targeting of rural rights advocates working on the land restitution process underway since the 2011 Ley de Víctimas. Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín, Margarita Marín Jaramillo, and Francy Carranza, Dinámicas del asesinato de lideres rurales: las coviarbles municipales (Bogotá: Observatorio de Restitución y Regulación de Derechos de Propiedad Agraria, June 2017).

11. Jule Kruger et al. ‘It Doesn't Add Up: Methodological and Policy Implications of Conflicting Casualty Data’, in Counting Civilian Casualties: An Introduction to Recording and Estimating Nonmilitary Deaths in Conflict, ed. Taylor B. Seybolt, Jay D. Aronson, and Baruch Fischhoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 251.

12. The best known academic literature on grassroots human rights organising in Latin America focuses on Argentina. The monographs that have been published on Argentina include: Alison Brysk, The Politics of Human Rights in Argentina: Protest, Change, and Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999); Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, Revolutionising Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Michelle Bonner, Sustaining Human Rights: Women and Argentine Human Rights Organisations (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007). Since the 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet, an influential scholarship on human rights organising around the Chilean case has emerged. Monographs on the Pinochet trial and related issues include: Naomi Roht-Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet's Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Cath Collins, Post-transitional Justice: Human Rights Trials in Chile and El Salvador (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010).

13. Thomas Buergenthal, ‘Remembering the Early Years of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice Working Paper (New York: NYU, 2005); Thomas Buergenthal, ‘The Inter-American Court of Human Rights’, American Journal of International Law 76, no. 2 (1982): 231–45.

14. Of special significance in terms of understanding the perspectives of the victims of violence is the work of Carlos Martín Beristain, especially his 1,200-page study compiling hundreds of interviews with people affected by the work of the Inter-American Court. See Carlos Martín Beristain, Diálogos sobre la reparación. Experiencias en el sistema interamericano de derechos humanos. 2 vols (San José, Costa Rica: Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos, 2010).

15. Jo Pasqualucci, The Practice and Procedure of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 83.

16. I did the work of coding the case law of both the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court of Human rights according to types of human rights violations committed, perpetrators, victims, and the geographic distribution of the violations concerned, amongst other variables, between 2013 and 2016, with the assistance of student researchers Kattie Bonilla, Jack Zachary, and Orlando Deavila.

17. William Patrick Kelly, ‘On the Poverty and Possibility of Human Rights in Latin American History’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development 5, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 438.

18. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4. As Klaas Dykmann underscores in his history of OAS action on human rights since 1970, the 1970s were characterised by both increased official repression and increased official concern for human rights. Klaas Dykmann, Human Rights Policy of the Organisation of American States: Philanthropic Endeavours or the Exploitation of an Ideal? (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2008).

19. The year 1979 was a watershed in Latin American human rights history. Concern for what became known as the ‘transition to democracy’ began to coalesce at the international level through the activities of Amnesty International and other groups acting in support of Latin American activists, and the OAS, and academic institutions such as the Wilson Center. Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Comparative Perspectives (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

20. Juan Pablo Scarfi, The Hidden History of International Law in the Americas: Empire and Legal Networks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), xviii.

21. Inter-American Juridical Committee, Report to the Inter-American Council of Jurists Concerning Resolution XXXI of the Conference of Bogotá: Inter-American Court to Protect the Rights of Man (Washington, DC: Pan-American Union, 1949).

22. The Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the OAS was held 12–18 August in Santiago, Chile. Twenty-one Latin American countries, plus Haiti and the US, were represented at the meeting. Some 20 Caribbean island nations, and Guyana, Suriname and Belize, were all still colonies or protectorates of the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France and the US.

23. In May 1965, the OAS created the Inter-American Peace Force, legitimising the presence of 42,000 US marines on the island nation with the addition of small numbers of troops from other member states.

24. Report on the Activities of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in the Dominican Republic, Inter-Am. C.H.R., O.A.S. Doc. OEA/Ser.L/V/II.13, doc.14 rev. (1965).

25. Rebecca Atencio, Memory's Turn: Reckoning with Dictatorship in Brazil (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 10. See also: Bruno Boti Bernardi, ‘Silence, Hindrances and Omissions: The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the Brazilian Military Dictatorship’, International Journal of Human Rights (Forthcoming).

26. William Patrick Kelly, ‘The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism’, Journal of Global History 8, no. 1 (March 2013): 168.

27. Mark Ensalaco, Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 105.

28. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Chile, Inter-Am. C.H.R., O.A.S., OEA/Ser.L/V/II.34 doc. 21 corr.1 (25 October 1974).

29. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 17.

30. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Argentina, Inter-Am. C.H.R., O.A.S., OEA/Ser.L/V/II.49
Doc. 19 corr.1 (11 April 1980).

31. Between 1961 and 2016 the commission undertook 96 on-site visits to 23 countries. Three-quarters of these visits were conducted in the 1980s and 1990s.

32. Organization of American States, ‘Inter-American Court of Human Rights: Proceedings of the Installation' (San José, Costa Rica, September 1979), 21.

33. The Comisón Colombiana de Juristas has estimated that a total of 8,000 people were legally prosecuted under the National Security Statute during President Turbay's term in office between 1978 and 1982, most of them by court martial. As cited in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Mauricio García Villegas, eds., El caleidescopio de las justicias en Colombia, vol. 2 (Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2001), 322.

34. Meanwhile, the US and Canada refused to ratify the convention and remained outside the reach of the court.

35. Thomas Buergenthal. Remembering the Early Years of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. New York University School of Law Center for Human Rights and Global Justice Working Paper No. 1 (2005), 5.

36. Pablo Saavedra, meeting with author, San José, Costa Rica, 8 March 2012.

37. Dykmann, Human Rights Policy, 53.

38. The Southern Cone refers to Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil.

39. Haiti has received 14 in-country visits by the commission, while Guatemala has received 13, Colombia 7 and Peru 6. The Dominican Republic comes next with 5 visits.

40. As per my findings, in the case of Argentina, no rural contentious cases have been heard by the court, reflecting the central importance given to rights activists’ denunciations of central state authorities. In Chile, six out of eight cases pertain to events in cities. Equally striking is the case of Venezuela, where only two of the 17 cases brought before the court concern events in a rural area. Ecuador has been subject to 20 cases in total, 16 of which concern events in urban areas. Just two out of the 11 Honduran cases concern events in rural areas, despite historically high levels of violence against peasant activists.

41. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Caso Tenorio Roca y Otros v. Peru, Excepciones Preliminares, Fondo, Reparaciones y Costas (22 September 2016), 15.

42. Upwards of 90% of the human rights atrocities in Guatemala were carried out by the military in the highlands, yet fewer than half of the contentious cases ruled on by the court concern events in rural areas. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2010), 33. For an in-depth consideration of the limitations of human rights organising in Guatemala since the 1970s see Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre.

43. Mary Roldán, Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, 1946–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 106.

44. Winifred Tate, Drugs, Thugs and Diplomats: US Policymaking in Colombia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 12.

45. GMH (Historical Memory Group), ¡Basta ya! Colombia: Memories of War and Dignity (Bogotá: CNMH, 2016), 114.

46. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá and Maria Victoria Uribe, ‘Constructing Memory amidst War: The Historical Memory Group of Colombia’, International Journal of Transitional Justice 10, no. 1 (March 2016): 3.

47. Informe Final, Conclusiones Generales. The Peruvian TRC was limited to the investigation of the period between 1980 and 2000, which put constraints on the data they could collect, and the scope of their historical analysis. Cynthia J. Milton, ‘At the Edge of the Peruvian Truth Commission: Alternative Paths to Recounting the Past’, Radical History Review no. 98 (Spring 2007): 3–33. For a critical take on Peru's TRC, see Greg Grandin, ‘The Instruction of Great Catastrophe: Truth Commissions, State Formation, and National Identity in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala’, American Historical Review 109, no. 1 (February 2005): 46–67.

48. For readings on the method of comparative history, see Alette Olin Hill and Boyd H. Hill, ‘AHR Forum: Marc Bloch and Comparative History’, The American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (October 1980): 828–46.

49. Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, Una nación desplazada: informe nacional del desplazamiento forzado en Colombia (Bogotá, CNMH - UARIV, 2015), 38.

50. Luis van Isschot, The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia's Oil Capital, 1919–2010 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), xi.

51. Comisión de la Verdad, Informe Final.

52. Jo-Marie Burt, ‘Quien habla es terrorista: The Political Use of Fear in Fujimori's Peru’, Latin American Research Review 41, no. 3 (2006): 52.

53. Jo-Marie Burt, ‘Accounting for Murder: The Contested Narratives of the Life and Death of Maria Elena Moyano’, in Accounting for Violence: The Marketing of Memory in Latin America, ed. Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh Payne (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 69.

54. Through the middle of 2017 there were four Peruvian cases and five Colombian cases awaiting rulings by the Inter-American Court. See Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, ‘Casos en Etapa de Fondo (Pendiente de Emitirse Sentencia)’. http://www.corteidh.or.cr/index.php/es/casos-en-tramite-pendientes-de-emitirse-sentencia (accessed 21 June 2016).

55. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Second Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Peru, OEA/Ser.L./V/II.106 Doc. 59 rev. 2 (June 2000). For commentary on the legality of state withdrawal from the court, see Pasqualucci, The Practice and Procedure of the Inter-American Court, 145.

56. Jo-Marie Burt, ‘Guilty as Charged: The Trial of Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for Human Rights Violations’, The International Journal of Transitional Justice (2009): 390.

57. Anita Ferrara, Assessing the Long-Term Impact of Truth Commissions: The Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2015), 136.

58. Orin Starn, Nightwatch: The Politics of Protest in the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 136.

59. Mario Vargas Llosa, Informe de la comisión investigadora de los sucesos de Uchuraccay (Lima: Editora Peru, 1983).

60. Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Inquest in the Andes’, New York Times Magazine, 31 July 1983.

61. Steve J. Stern, ed., Shining and Other Paths: War and Society in Peru, 1980–1995 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 1.

62. ‘They maintained that the Peruvian State is responsible for the alleged victims’ deaths, both by virtue of the military's direct involvement in the events and by virtue of the State's failure to comply with its duty to protect the journalists.’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Report No. 62/10, Petition 142-03 Admissibility Jorge Sedan Falcón et al. (Peru: March 24, 2010).

63. Luis van Isschot, ‘Rural Colombia: The Architecture of State-Sponsored Violence and New Power Configurations’, in Dominant Elites in Latin America, ed. Liisa North and Timothy D. Clark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 119–49.

64. To better understand this episode, see Ponciano del Pino, En nombre del gobierno. El Perú y Uchuraccay: un siglo de política campesina (Lima: La Siniestra Ensayos, 2017).

65. In response to the disappearance of 19 travelling merchants on 3 October 1987 the Inter-American Court ordered Colombia to investigate paramilitary organising in the Middle Magdalena. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Case of the 19 Merchants v. Colombia. Preliminary Objection (12 June 2002).

66. Alejo Vargas, Magdalena Medio Santandereano: colonisación y conflicto armado (Bogotá: Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular, CINEP, 1992), 245.

67. Interview with author (Bogotá, 27 September 2005).

68. Comité Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos, ‘Inauguración de albergue’, Bulletin (June 1989). CREDHOS Archives, Barrancabermeja.

69. Albergue Campesino, ‘Informe Albergue de Campesinos Damnificados por la Guerra Sucia Magdalena Medio,’ (January 1990), CREDHOS Archives, Barrancabermeja.

70. Justice and Peace, ‘The Displaced: Colombia's Hidden People’, Colombia Bulletin 1, no. 1 (April 1991).

71. The Urabá region had been the site of popular resistance to paramilitarism since the late 1980s. ‘Por el derecho a la vida: Paro cívico en Urabá’, ¡A Luchar! 16 (Bogotá, 25 March–7 April 1987).

72. Iván Orozco Abad. La Rochela: Memorias de un Crimen Contra la Justicia (Alfaguara: Distribuidora y Editora Aguilar, Altea, Taurus, 2010.

73. The case spent two years in Barrancabermeja and Pasto (1989–1991) and then six years in Cali (1991–1996). It then spent 15 years under the authority of the Fiscalía General de la Nación in Bogotá (1996–2011).

74. Associated Press, ‘Colombia Ordered to Pay $7.8m to Relatives of Massacred Victims’, 10 June 2007.

75. Kathryn Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 247.

76. Consejo de Derechos Humanos, Naciones Unidas, 31.o período de sesiones, Tema 2 de la agenda, Informe anual del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos, Situación de los derechos humanos en Colombia. A/HRC/31/3/Add.2 (15 March 2016), 17; Amnesty International, ‘Colombia: Spike in Killings as Activists Targeted Amid Peace Process’, Press Release, 7 February 2017.

77. Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Case of the Massacre of Ituango v. Colombia. Sentence of 1 July 2006, C N.148.

78. Alexandra Huneeus, and Javier Couso, eds, Cultures of Legality: Judicialisation and Political Activism in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5.

79. Miguel LaSerna, The Corner of the Living: Ayacucho on the Eve of the Shining Path Insurgency (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 25.

80. van Isschot, The Social Origins of Human Rights, 17.