Lecture by Carlos Aguirre

Saturday, November 23, 2013

2:00 pm

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

More than 45 years after his death in Bolivia, Che Guevara continues to both inspire efforts towards social justice around the world and spark fierce discussions about his life and legacy. This lecture will revisit his place in history and will provide a nuanced assessment of his political and cultural significance today.

This talk is offered in conjunction with the ongoing exhibit “Korda and the Revolutionary Image” that will be on display through January 26, 2014.

Carlos Aguirre is a Professor in the UO Department of History and Director of the Latin American Studies Program.

Presentation by Elliott Young

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

2:00 pm

Browsing Room, Knight Library

This public presentation is part of the Transnational Americas Speaker Series, organized by the Latin American Studies Program and the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies. The contents of this Speaker Series were developed under a grant from the Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language (UISFL) Program, International Studies Division, U.S. Department of Education. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.

Elliot Young is an Associate Professor of History at Lewis & Clark College.

Nov. 14, 2013, 3:46 p.m. PST

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Armed men broke into a nonprofit agency that works to locate children missing from El Salvador’s civil war and set fire to the group’s archives, national fire officials said Thursday.

The intruders also stole computers during the early morning attack that damaged four offices of the Probusqueda Association for Missing Children. Investigators could smell combustible fluid at the scene, fire Sgt. Armando Pineda said.

While authorities provided no motive for the attack, Probusqueda said earlier this year that it had documented at least a dozen cases of children stolen by members the military during the 1980-92 war between the Salvadoran government and leftist guerrillas. Some were sold or given away for adoption, or raised by the men who took them, the group said. Efforts to investigate those cases have been hindered by the military’s refusal to turn over DNA records.

The group has also received nearly 1,000 complaints about children separated from their families during the U.S.-backed war. It says it has helped at least 235 people, many adopted in the United States or Europe, locate their birth parents.

“This is clear sabotage of our work,” director Ester Alvarenga said, adding that she had not yet been allowed to check the burned offices. “We don’t know what documents they destroyed or took, but this is an attack against our work.”

One of the office’s guards said the attackers stormed in before dawn by forcing another guard arriving for work to act as decoy and get him to open the door. The first guard, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of reprisal, said he and the other guard were beaten and tied up, then their assailants appeared to open cabinets and throw objects around before setting a fire.

“They told us that if we moved, they would kill us,” he said.

Official human rights prosecutor David Morales suggested the attack could be related to an appeal before the country’s Supreme Court that would eliminate amnesty for people who committed grave war crimes, and he asked the attorney general to make a priority of investigating the attack.

“They have the responsibility to look at the possibility that this was a politically motivated attack intending to intimidate Probusqueda because of their work in defending human rights,” Morales said.

The 1993 amnesty law has protected military commanders from being prosecuted for crimes committed during the civil war, including the murder of six Jesuit priests. But last year the Inter-American Court of Human Rights said the law goes against an international treaty.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has found the government was responsible for the abductions of at least six children also documented by Probusqueda. It ordered El Salvador to open government archives and meet other requests for action, such as providing medical and psychological support to victims, naming schools after the abducted, locating those still missing and apologizing publicly.

The nation has fulfilled only the last part of the order, holding a ceremony last year at which a Cabinet member asked for forgiveness from families.

The case recalled the experience in Argentina, where the military kidnapped hundreds of children of political opponents, and the prosecution of those responsible three decades later led to the indictment of top officers, including army Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, then-head of Argentina’s military junta. Some of the kidnapped children were adopted by military families.

In most of Probusqueda’s cases in El Salvador, children were separated from their families during the confusion of war and were turned over to the Red Cross in the belief their parents were among the 75,000 people killed in the conflict. Such children were placed in shelters and offered for adoption, mostly to families in the U.S. and Europe.

Shaken human rights activists and relatives of civil war victims gathered outside Probusqueda’s offices.

“They are doing the same thing they did in the 1980s,”said Apolonia Guillen, a 72-year-old who said she lost relatives in the war. “They don’t like justice; they don’t want justice.”

Book Discussion with Jean Franco

Browsing Room, Knight Library, 4 p.m., October 23, 2013

Jean Franco is one of the foremost scholars of Latin American cultural and literary studies. She is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. A former president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), she has received numerous awards, including the 1996 PEN award for lifetime contribution to disseminating Latin American literature in English, the Gabriela Mistral Medal from the Government of Chile, and the Andrés Bello Medal from the Government of Venezuela. She is the author of numerous books, including The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Harvard UP, 2002), which won the Bolton Prize from the American Historical Association.

In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival. Discussants: Pedro Garcia Caro (Department of Romance Languages) Tamara Lea Spira (Department of Women’s and Gender Studies) Jean Franco (Columbia University) A book signing will follow the panel discussion

The Latin American Studies Program is proud to announce the release of two products of our collaboration with Guatemala’s Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (AHPN).

The report Del silencio a la memoria. Revelaciones del AHPN, originally published in Spanish in 2011, has been translated and published with a preface by Kate Doyle. The book will be freely distributed in digital format and will be available at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/12928

The publication in Spanish of the report Del silencio a la memoria was unanimously praised as a step forward in both making the work and mission of the AHPN widely known and offering a synthesis of its potential to understand how systematic state repression worked. The story told in this report is an exemplary case of commitment with the past and the future of a society still recovering from the wounds of violence and social injustice. Making this report available in English will amplify the reach of this story and will allow for increased international attention to the amazing work the AHPN is doing. We are very proud to be able to offer this translation to students, scholars, human rights activists, and everyone else with an interest in the connections between history, memory, archives, human rights, and power.

Gabriela Martínez’s documentary Keep Your Eyes On Guatemala (RT 54 min.) tells the story of the AHPN intertwined with the complexities of past human rights abuses, the dramatic effects they had on specific individuals, and present-day efforts to preserve collective memories and bring justice and reconciliation to the country. The film will premiere on October 24 (6 pm, 221 Allen Hall) and will be made available to educators, students, human rights advocates, archivists, and the general public free of charge.

The funding for these two productions was generously provided by the University of Oregon Libraries, the Network Startup Resource Center, Phil and Jill Lighty, the School of Journalism and Communication, and the Americas in a Globalized World Initiative.

Gabriela Martínez is an international award-winning documentary filmmaker who has produced, directed or edited more than ten ethnographic and social documentaries, including Ñakaj, Textiles in the Southern Andes, Mamacoca, and Qoyllur Rit’i: A Woman’s Journey. Her experience as a documentary maker and researcher gives Martínez a unique and broad approach for the teaching and sharing of theoretical knowledge as well as hands-on production skills.

Most recently, she has directed the documentary film “Keep Your Eyes on Guatemala” (2013) which tells the story of Guatemala’s National Police Historical Archive (Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional—AHPN) intertwined with the complexities of past human rights abuses, the dramatic effects they had on specific individuals, and present-day efforts to preserve collective memories and bring justice and reconciliation to the country. This film will be premiered on October 24 (6 pm, 221 Allen Hall).

Gabriela is also Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS).

By Victor Ruiz Caballero for The New York Times

SANTIAGO, Chile — A former Chilean Army officer charged with murdering Víctor Jara, a popular folk singer, shortly after the 1973 military coup has been sued in a Florida court under federal laws allowing legal action against human rights violators living in the United States.

Mr. Jara, then 40, was a member of the Communist Party and an accomplished theater director and songwriter whose songs of poverty and injustice remain vastly popular. He was arrested with hundreds of students and employees at the Santiago Technical University, where he was a professor, a day after the Sept. 11 coup that ushered in 17 years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The detainees were taken to Chile Stadium, used to hold thousands of prisoners. There, Mr. Jara was singled out with a few others, beaten, tortured and shot. His body, with 44 bullet wounds, was found dumped outside a cemetery with four other victims. The arena was later renamed Víctor Jara Stadium.

The lawsuit against the former officer accused of his murder, Pedro Pablo Barrientos, comes as Chileans take part in a number of cathartic, emotionally charged events leading up to the 40th anniversary of the coup.

It was filed Wednesday by the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability in a Jacksonville district court on behalf of Mr. Jara’s widow and daughters under the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. Mr. Barrientos, 64, moved to the United States in 1989 and became an American citizen. He lives in Deltona, Fla., southwest of Daytona Beach.

Last December, a Chilean judge charged Mr. Barrientos and another officer, Hugo Sánchez, with committing the murder. Six other officers were charged as accomplices.

“Although ideally justice should be achieved in the home country, international justice efforts are at the service of the victims and by pursuing them, we can support and invigorate justice at home,” said Almudena Bernabeu, a lawyer for the center.

Mr. Barrientos was found in Deltona last year by a Chilean television crew and denied having ever been in the stadium. But a dozen soldiers from his regiment have testified that he was in charge of the companies sent there. One of the soldiers, José Paredes, said in legal testimony that he had witnessed Mr. Barrientos and other officers beat and torture Mr. Jara and other prisoners.

“After that, Lieutenant Barrientos decided to play Russian roulette, so he took out his gun, approached Víctor Jara, who was standing with his hands handcuffed behind his back, spun the cylinder, put it against the back of his neck and fired,” Mr. Paredes stated. The gun went off and Mr. Jara “fell to the ground,” he added. The other officers fired as well, he said.

Although the Chilean Supreme Court authorized the judge’s request to extradite Mr. Barrientos from the United States in January, the Chilean government has not sent the extradition request to American officials. The 543-page legal file is still being translated, according to the Foreign Ministry.

After Mr. Jara’s death, his wife, Joan Jara, a British-born dancer who moved to Chile in 1954, left the country with her two young daughters. She returned 11 years later and has dedicated the past 40 years to “rescuing Víctor from being merely a victim.”

Since she first filed a criminal lawsuit in Santiago in 1978, the case has been handled by half a dozen judges; it was closed and later reopened; Mr. Jara’s remains were exhumed for forensic analysis and reburied in 2009; and the details about his killing have been coaxed out of witnesses drop by drop.

“All of the information that has been dug out about the officers who were in the stadium has been discovered without the help of the army,” she said.

The legal action against Mr. Barrientos seeks damages for torture; extrajudicial killing; cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; crimes against humanity; and arbitrary detention. The plaintiffs are requesting trial by jury. The ultimate goal, Ms. Jara said, was not monetary compensation, but to use the only available legal tool in the United States to hold Mr. Barrientos accountable. Mr. Barrientos could not be reached for comment.

“There’s no money that can cure the damage that has been suffered,” she said in a recent interview. “I’ve had two lives: one before and one after 1973.”

Pope Condemns Idolatry of Cash in Capitalism

by Lizzy Davies for the The Guardian

Head of Catholic church condemns economic system and calls for society with people, not money, at its heart.

Pope Francis has called for a global economic system that puts people and not “an idol called money” at its heart, drawing on the hardship of his immigrant family as he sympathized with unemployed workers in a part of Italy that has suffered greatly from the recession.

Addressing about 20,000 people in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, the Argentinian pontiff said that his parents had “lost everything” after they emigrated from Italy and that he understood the suffering that came from joblessness.

“Where there is no work, there is no dignity,” he said, in ad-libbed remarks after listening to three locals, including an unemployed worker who spoke of how joblessness “weakens the spirit”. But the problem went far beyond the Italian island, said Francis, who has called for wholesale reform of the financial system.

“This is not just a problem of Sardinia; it is not just a problem of Italy or of some countries in Europe,” he said. “It is the consequence of a global choice, an economic system which leads to this tragedy; an economic system which has at its center an idol called money.”

The 76-year-old said that God had wanted men and women to be at the heart of the world. “But now, in this ethics-less system, there is an idol at the center and the world has become the idolater of this ‘money-god’,” he added.

Sardinia, one of Italy’s autonomous regions with a population of 1.6 million, has suffered particularly badly during the economic crisis, with an unemployment rate of 20%, eight points higher than the national average, and youth unemployment of 51%.

Last summer the island’s hardship became national news when Stefano Meletti, a 49-year-old miner, slashed his wrists on television during a protest aimed at keeping the Carbosulcis coal mine open.

Urging people not to give up hope even in the harsh economic climate, Francis also called on them to fight back against the “throwaway culture” he said was a by-product of a global economic system that cared only about profit. It was, he said, a culture that saw the most vulnerable society become marginalized.

“Grandparents are thrown away and young people are thrown away,” he said. “And we must say no to this throwaway culture. We must say: ‘We want a fair system; a system that allows everyone to move forward.’ We must say: ‘We do not want this globalized economic system that does so much harm.’ At the center has to be man and woman, as God wants – not money.”

His own father, he recalled, had suffered great hardship after moving from northern Italy to Argentina in the 1920s. He went “a young man … full of illusions” of making it in the new world, but soon found there was no work to be had. “I didn’t see it; I had not yet been born. But I heard of this hardship at home … I know it well,” said Francis.

“From Silence to Memory: Archives and Human Rights in Guatemala and Beyond”

University of Oregon, October 24, 2013

In 2005, a massive amount of documentation belonging to the former Guatemalan National Police was discovered. Among other types of data, it contained invaluable information on systematic human rights violations during the 36-year civil war that ravaged that country. The National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) has become a central piece in the efforts to find truth, justice, and reconciliation in Guatemala, and its work is attracting world-wide attention from archivists, librarians, scholars, activists, and human rights organizations.

The University of Oregon is proud to announce the publication of the English translation of the report From Silence to Memory. Revelations of the AHPN, originally published in Spanish in 2011, and to present the premiere of a documentary on the AHPN produced by Gabriela Martínez (UO School of Journalism and Communication), that tells the amazing story of this archive. A stellar line-up of speakers will highlight the importance of the work conducted by the AHPN and will reflect on the connections between the preservation of archives, the construction of collective memories, and the fostering of a culture of human rights in Guatemala and elsewhere.

Program

3:00-4:00 p.m. Knight Library Browsing Room

“‘From Silence to Memory’: Revelations of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional.”

Chair: Stephanie Wood (University of Oregon)

Panelists:

Jean Franco (Columbia University)

Gustavo Meoño (National Police Historical Archive, Guatemala)

Kent Norsworthy (University of Texas, Austin)

4:00-5:00 p.m., Knight Library Browsing Room

Philip H. Knight Dean of Libraries Distinguished Lecture

“The Role of Archives in Strengthening Democracy and Promoting Human Rights.”

Trudy Peterson, consulting archivist and former Acting Archivist of the United States.

5:00-6:00 p.m., Reception in Knight Library Browsing Room

6:00-7:30 p.m., 221 Allen Hall

Presentation of the documentary Keep Your Eyes On Guatemala by Gabriela Martínez (Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon)

Introductory remarks by Peter Laufer, James Wallace Chair in Journalism

Screening of documentary

Q&A with film director and other guests.

These events are sponsored by the University of Oregon Libraries, the Network Startup Resource Center, the Latin American Studies Program, the School of Journalism and Communication, and the Oregon Humanities Center

Latin American Studies Spring Speaker Series:

May 2013 Upcoming Events

Brazil: Culture, Race, and Politics

Schedule of Events

Monday, May 6: “Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil”
Keisha-Khan Perry (Brown University)
3:30 p.m., Browsing Room, Knight Library

Thursday, May 9: “Democracy, Development, and the Puzzling Success of Brazil”
Peter Kingstone (King’s College London)
4:00 p.m., 112 Lillis

Thursday, May 16: “Speaking of Flowers: Commemorating 1968 Military Brazil”
Victoria Langland (UC Davis)
3:30 p.m., Browsing Room, Knight Library

Thursday, May 23: “Beyond the Punishment Paradigm: Mapping Africa and Brazil During Samba’s ‘Golden Age’  (1920s-1940s)”
Marc Hertzman (Columbia University)
3:30 p.m., 240C McKenzie