Casa Alianza awarded world's largest humanitarian prize

"The phenomenon of street children is global, alarming and escalating. Casa Alianza is the voice and the defender of this helpless and unprotected segment of society" -- Queen Noor of Jordan 

By W. E. GUTMAN

GENEVA -- Casa Alianza, the private agency serving abandoned children and youth in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico, was awarded this year's $1 million Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize. The award is bestowed annually on an organization that makes extraordinary contributions toward alleviating human suffering.

The award ceremonies took place in Geneva, Switzerland. Queen Noor of Jordan joined with other world dignitaries in honoring the organization.

  Headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica, Casa Alianza is the Latin American branch of the New York-based Covenant House. Founded in 1981, it provides shelter, food, medical care, legal protection and education to thousands of Central American street children as young as 6.

Armed with a vigorous and effective legal aid apparatus, Casa Alianza has prosecuted cases that have led to the conviction and imprisonment of scores of Guatemalan police officers charged with the murder of street children. Through its efforts, the practice of jailing children, often in the same cells, with adults has been abolished in Honduras; and worldwide attention has been called to the sexual exploitation of street children and the emergence of sex tourism in Central America. Casa Alianza has also taken the lead in exposing the trade in illegal baby adoptions from Guatemala.

The organization is currently pressing 550 cases involving various serious crimes against children.

"In Central America we have disposable children and we are not willing to accept that the abuse and murder of children continues," said Casa Alianza executive director, Bruce Harris. Though he places much of the blame for an unrelenting wave of violence against children squarely on "misguided, delinquent and degenerate agents of the state," he insists that "the biggest murderer of children is world indifference."

  In a short but impassioned statement, Queen Noor, the widow of the late King Hussein of Jordan, said that "the phenomenon of street children is global, alarming and escalating." Estimates suggest that there are 100 million children living on the world's streets. She added, "Casa Alianza deserves the Hilton Humanitarian Prize for being the voice and the defender of this helpless and unprotected segment of society and for its important work to stop the human rights abuses inflicted upon them."

Steven Hilton, president of the Hilton Foundation, hailed Casa Alianza for "taking a leadership role" in the protection of street children. "Its work has reached beyond Latin America onto the world stage to speak out on behalf of exploited children everywhere."

Casa Alianza was selected from some 160 nominations made by members of the international community, including diplomats, foundation leaders and academics. This year's nomination of Casa Alianza was made by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, who established the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. Bruce Harris was featured in Cuomo's recently published book, "Speak Power to Truth", which tells the stories of leading human rights defenders around the world. Casa Alianza was nominated for last year's award by this writer. The 1999 award went to the African Medical and Research Foundation. Doctors Without Borders was the 1998 recipient.

In thanking the Hilton Foundation, Bruce Harris said: "The prize is recognition of the highest order that these children have not been forgotten. The money will feed and shelter many more abandoned children, but the recognition will feed their souls."

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and its related entities have assets of nearly $1.8 billion and have distributed $299 million for charitable projects throughout the world since its founding by Conrad Hilton, who left the bulk of his fortune to the foundation.

Belatedly, LatAm nations face up to "dirty war" legacy 

Chile, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico are reluctantly coming to terms with the darkest chapters of their history.  Will they go the extra mile and bring the criminals to trial? 

Rigoberta Menchu

By W. E. GUTMAN 

The fundamental objection to granting pardons in cases involving crimes against humanity is rooted in the axiom that no person is above the law.

Anxious to sugarcoat history, Latin American governments have stubbornly rejected this concept.  In the name of "reconciliation," they chose to look the other way.  Angered by international scrutiny -- rather than humbled by the villainy of their crimes -- they conducted half-hearted, pro-forma hearings that rarely led to trials.  When they did, the defendants were routinely set free after serving token sentences.  Paid off, judges hastily enacted clemency authority statutes and exonerated military thugs "in the national interest."  Politically beholden, they masterminded the defection of desperadoes to safe havens abroad and pronounced murderers and narcotraffickers "innocent" on the grounds that they lacked "sufficient evidence."  Predictably, the "evidence" had long been buried in unmarked graves.

High-ranking military officers, some of them former death-squad chieftains, have since branched out into organized crime.  Tired, if not repentant, others have invested in legitimate businesses.  Many have surrendered to the unfettered tranquillity of retirement.  Atrophied to a useless stump by decades of political corruption, the proverbial long arm of the law never reached out to touch them.  Instead, years of vacillation, obstructionism and hostility short-changed their victims and posterity, defiling justice, delaying "absolution" and adding fuel to the flames of national discontent.

Judging by the timing and interdependence of several recent events too analogous to be the result of mere coincidence, this may be about to change.

CHILE'S TORTURE CHAMBER

In a continuing probe into Augusto Pinochet's past, police stormed a German enclave said to have served as a torture center during the former head of state's 17-year rule.  Ordered by Supreme Court Judge Juan Guzman, the raid aimed at finding a fugitive, Paul Schaefer, wanted as a material witness.

Sworn testimony alleges that many Pinochet opponents were forcibly taken to the compound, located about 200 miles south of Santiago, where they were tortured and murdered.  Schaefer, who is also wanted on child abuse charges and is believed to have information about the compound, was not found.  Authorities suspect that the police tipped off Schaefer, allowing him to escape.

Judge Guzman plans to interrogate Pinochet, 84, on Oct. 9.  Last month the Supreme Court stripped the "caudillo" of his self-granted immunity from prosecution.

GUATEMALA AND MYRNA MACK

After a decade of dawdling and questionable legal maneuvers, Guatemala's highest court will at last prosecute three ex‑Guatemalan army officers implicated in the murder of human rights activist, Myrna Mack.  A noted anthropologist working to expose atrocities against the Maya, Mack was found brutally murdered 10 years ago this month.  She had been stabbed 27 times by two attackers in broad daylight.

An international outcry led to the extradition from California of Noel de Jesus Beteta Alvarez.  A former member of the presidential guard, Alvarez was tried and sentenced to 30 years imprisonment.  In 1996, retired Gen. Juan Valencia Osorio and Cols. Juan Guillermo Oliva and Edgar Augusto Godoy were also arrested in connection with Mack's murder.  Oliva is a graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas.  Godoy, then a paid CIA operative, is a former chief of intelligence.

Cited in declassified U.S. State Department documents and suspected of having directed Mack's assassination, the trio is set to go on trial sometime in late October.  Appeals by the defense are anticipated but the momentum worldwide interest in the case has created is expected to result in an indictment.

"The truth can only be covered up for so long," said Helen Mack, a prominent attorney who spearheaded the decade-long struggle to bring her sister's assassins to trial.

HONDURAS EXHUMES ITS PAST

Honduran officials have at long last ordered the exhumation of human remains from a clandestine cemetery that once served as a base for Nicaragua's "Contra" rebels.  Discovered near a hospital that once serviced the former El Aguacate Contra base, about 90 miles east of Tegucigalpa, the tombs may contain as many as 184 bodies, among them those of former Honduran rebel chief Jose Maria Reyes Mata and James "Guadalupe" Carney, a U.S. Jesuit.

The CIA-built the El Aguacate base, which had its own runway and operated as a logistical nerve center from 1979 to 1990.

Reyes and Carney were part of a group of about 100 men who formed a rebel group in the mountains of Honduras.  Military authorities insist that the rebels died during skirmishes and that their bodies were left in the mountains.  Compelling evidence suggests that Carney and Reyes were brought to Aguacate, interrogated, tortured and slain.

MEXICO AND REPRESSION

Mexico's self‑portrait as a safe haven for refugees fleeing the repressive regimes of Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s is coming unraveled with revelations that it, too, secretly waged a brutal campaign against dissidents.

Two recent incidents may force Mexico to come clean with the mass killings and "disappearances" of hundreds of people at the hands of a dreaded army unit known as the "White Brigade."

The first involves the apprehension in August of Ricardo Miguel Cavallo, a former Argentine army officer living in Mexico.  Wanted in Argentina, Cavallo is charged with committing atrocities during the "dirty war."  Argentina has asked that Cavallo be extradited and tried.  At this writing, Mexico has not responded.

Shortly after Cavallo's arrest, Mexicans were reminded of their country's own secret horrors.  Two Mexican generals, Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Humberto Francisco Quiros, were taken into custody and charged with narcotrafficking.  Curiously, their role in the bloody persecution of Mexican guerrillas over 20 years ago was omitted from the indictment.

President-elect Vicente Fox has been conspicuously silent on the matter.  "He will be too be busy fighting corruption, streamlining an absurdly complex judicial system and addressing vast and intractable socio-economic problems to rattle old bones of contention," was the sly remark of a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Besides," added author Carlos Montemayor, "Fox is not even remotely interested in the subject."

*

Arguing for "truth" in the abstract while shielding the guilty, adds villainy to hypocrisy.  Implicit in this artifice is the argument that, for the "good of society," victims of barbarism should not only abstain from revisiting the past, they should in fact pretend it never took place.

Granting clemency to war criminals is not only designed to whitewash the crimes but contrived to engineer changes in the conduct and outcome of criminal proceedings -- not to serve justice.  Fortunately, there is no statute of limitation on war crimes.  War criminals are and will remain prosecutable -- and punishable.  So are the intellectual authors who plan, sanction or orchestrate atrocities from the safety of their office.

The question is: Will survivors and the families of victims live long enough to be vindicated?

Ontario bans private adoptions from Guatemala 

Evidence that Guatemalan infants, stolen or bought, often make their way to Canada, has prompted one province to outlaw "brokered" adoptions. 

By W. E. GUTMAN 

News that Canada's Ontario government will ban most adoptions from Guatemala is sweet music to Bruce Harris.

It was three years ago that Harris, Casa Alianza's maverick executive director, first pointed fingers and exposed Guatemala's thriving "steal-and-sell" illegal adoptions market.  His investigations -- and the tangled web of conspiracies he unearthed in high places -- culminated in a fraudulent defamation of character lawsuit that nearly cost him his freedom.

Ontario's decision not only vindicates him personally, Harris says, but offers hope that this "foul commerce will be banned by Canada's other provinces as well and, perhaps, by other nations."

Ontario's Ministry of Community and Social Services will now bar any adoption brokered by private lawyers, allowing only cases of abandonment that have been duly researched and sanctioned by Guatemala's courts.

"These judicial adoptions involve rigorous investigation of the infant's parents and family," says Harris. "But they account for only about 10 percent of adoptions out of Guatemala."

Guatemala has long been suspected of engaging in the baby trade.  Allegations that babies are frequently bought or stolen, that mothers are coerced into giving up their newborn infants or even paid to conceive, have since been validated.

International adoptions from Guatemala, which has the weakest adoption statutes in Central America, have risen dramatically in the past few years.  After China and Russia, Guatemala is one of the main adoption hubs for babies destined for Canada.  Of the thousands of adoptions from Guatemala in the past four years, only several dozens were legally processed.

There are two methods of adoption in Guatemala -- private and "official."  The first is handled by attorneys, generally at the behest of young, desperately poor mothers.  By law, the mother can stop the process at any time -- a right rarely spelled out or enforced.  The private system invites both coercion and corruption.  Although mothers must, by law, submit to an interview with the Solicitor General's Office and the diplomatic representative of the adoptive parents, attorneys often threaten to punish the mothers if they back down.

Adoption fees range between $15,000 and $22,000 per child.  Adoptions from the United States generate well over $25 million in yearly revenues to Guatemala.  "It's become one of that nation's biggest non-traditional exports," Harris explains.

Concern over the trafficking of babies has prompted the Canadian Embassy in Guatemala to initiate mandatory DNA testing in all adoption cases.  Tests have since confirmed that many women  "giving up" babies were not the infants' biological mothers and that they had been paid [by lawyers] to dupe adoptive parents.

Earlier this year, a United Nations report on the illegal movement of babies out of Guatemala concluded that "legal adoption appears to be the exception rather than the rule.  Since huge profits can be made, the child has become an object of commerce rather than the focus of law."

In light of the U.N. report, "the Ontario government is now taking measures to ensure that adoptions from Guatemala are above board," said Patricia Fenton, executive director of the Adoption Council of Ontario and president of the Adoption Council of Canada.

"I hope that Ontario's brave and ethical decision," Harris said, "inspires the rest of the Commonwealth to follow suit.

* *

It was in September 1997 that results of a Casa Alianza investigation led by Harris were publicly released, along with a list of 15 criminal complaints that had been previously filed with the Public Prosecutor's Office.

One of the complaints alleged that attorney Susana María Luarca Saracho de Umaña, wife of the former President of Guatemala's Supreme Court of Justice, Ricardo Umaña, had routinely engaged in influence peddling and solicitation of bribes.  She was also accused of pressuring public officials to look with favor upon her illegal adoption schemes.

Two weeks later, Mrs. Umaña sued Harris for defamation, perjury and slander.

* *

Guatemala's insistence that the truth is not a legitimate defense and that freedom of expression excludes the right to speak up against crime and injustice bodes ill for a nation whose somber and violent past continues to invite scrutiny.  Underlying the Harris case is the nagging reminder that in Guatemala, despite claims to the contrary, transparent politics, justice and a respect for fundamental rights are nebulous objectives, not a priority.

Guatemala has long been suspected of engaging in the 
baby trade.  

Allegations that babies are frequently bought or stolen, that mothers are coerced into giving up their newborn infants or even paid to conceive, have since been validated.