Former Officer in Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet's Brutal Regime Taught at Pentagon — Investigated for Torture and Murder

'His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,' says former intelligence officer

Julio Jaime Garcia Covarrubias.

By Nadia Prupis
A former member of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime taught at the Pentagon's top university for 13 years, despite repeated complaints from his colleagues about his past as a torturer and murderer of political dissidents in the South American nation.

Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in Santiago with leading the executions of seven people in 1973 following a U.S.-backed coup, allegations which the U.S. State and Defense Departments were aware of when they renewed his visa and allowed him to keep teaching at the National Defense University's William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, according to a McClatchy investigation.

"His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror," Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer who specializes in Latin America, told McClatchy. "If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell othe.r countries how they should be fighting terrorism?"

At Firedoglake, investigative journalist Kevin Gosztola writes:

Attention to Covarrubias' employment at the National Defense University (NDU) comes just after State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki maintained during a press briefing the US has a "long-standing policy" to not support coups. She suggested the U.S. "does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means." They must be "peaceful and legal."

Garcia Covarrubias has been in Chile since January 2014, after an investigative judge ordered him to return to his home country for the duration of the inquiry into his role in the 1973 killings and the extent of his involvement in the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) spy agency.

Chilean 70's torture survivor seeks justice

McClatchy continues:

The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias' contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him.

"We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime," said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. "He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn't have anything either or he wouldn't have been hired."

One of Garcia Covarrubias's alleged former victims described undergoing gruesome ordeals at his hands, including sexual torture and electric shocks to eyelids and other sensitive parts of the body. He was reportedly known to have a "penchant for horsewhips and perversity."

Garcia Covarrubias downplayed his involvement in the Pinochet regime to international press after the Chilean military disclosed a list of over 1,000 former members of the secret police, which included his name. However, as McClatchy explains:

The DINA link matters.

...The killings and other assassinations outside Chile were attributed to DINA. The Nixon administration’s support of a regime that relied on rampant torture helped galvanize the human rights movement in the United States.

Even as the allegations against Garcia Covarrubias came to light and other professors at the center raised concerns over his hiring, U.S. officials rallied behind him. Martin Edwin Andersen, the school's then-communications director, was reprimanded and eventually pushed out by senior staff after questioning his continued employment there.

"It's shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent," Andersen said.

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Al Qaeda: Friend or Foe? The US Cannot Have It Both Ways

The US government needs to be confronted with the untenable position of maintaining al Qaeda as America’s enemy while for decades it has been creating, funding and promoting al Qaeda.

What’s it going to be? Friend or foe? Trick or treat? Ally or enemy?

This line of questioning has no greater relevance than the US government’s rather ambiguous relationship to the so called al Qaeda terrorists.

By Joachim Hagopian

On the one hand, war criminals Bush and Cheney insisted al Qaeda was the identified enemy that changed our world forever on 9/11, when allegedly 19 box cutting al Qaeda Moslem terrorists killed nearly 3000 Americans. Bush and Cheney convinced Americans that al Qaeda was the reason behind the US invading Afghanistan in October 2001 and less than a year and a half later Iraq. Al Qaeda is the reason President Obama is still justifying fighting that same war in Afghanistan thirteen years later. Al Qaeda is the reason why the Department of Homeland Security was suddenly created to make sure those al Qaeda enemies were kept out of the US, dedicated and committed to protecting American citizens from another 9/11.

Al Qaeda is the enemy of America, and that has not changed from the early Bush days right up to the present Obama presidency. You ask any American over the last decade and a half who the enemy is in the global war on terror and virtually every one of them will readily rattle off “al Qaeda.” Repeatedly drilled into our brains, the American public has been forever reminded that it is the al Qaeda terrorists who are America’s longtime sinister nemesis constantly plotting to kill us Americans every chance they get.

RELATED STORY: 'The Power of Nightmares' — Brilliant Documentary Describes How Western Governments Control and Direct Their Citizens by Fabricating
the Threat From 'Global Terrorism'

This is the commonly accepted explanation given by the US government to promote and justify waging America’s longest lasting wars in its history, fighting and dying on multiple war fronts and allocating unprecedented amounts of US taxpayer dollars bleeding a shaky, faltering economy dry, while financing annual Defense budgets greater than the entire rest of the world combined. That’s how much al Qaeda is our sworn enemy. Giving away our hard earned tax dollars to the detriment of a shrinking middle class and a swelling underclass of disenfranchised poor increasingly unable to make ends meet. The American public has made a very grave self-sacrifice in its post-9/11 lost civil liberties, all for the sake of so called security at home so American Empire can keep us safe from those swarthy mean looking Muslim terrorists who will gladly die for Allah just to kill us.

Human Rights and the ‘New’ Latin American Left

With regards to civil and political rights, the results have been mixed. On the one hand, important progress has been made; for example, the Argentinean government’s policy of punishing the crimes committed during the dictatorship. Also, some governments on the left, including those in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, have been loyal to the rule of law. But on the other hand, many of the leftist governments have given in to the temptation of eroding basic liberties to maintain political control. For example, governments in Argentina, Nicaragua and Venezuela introduced legislation to control the press in ways that allow them to censor the media.

By César Rodríguez-Garavito
The current Venezuelan crisis and the government’s decision to severely limit freedom of the press and the right to protest, raises a broader topic of discussion. From a human rights perspective, what has been the track record of the contemporary Latin American left?

Ten years ago, I published a book together with Patrick Barrett, Daniel Chavez and other analysts entitled The New Latin American Left. In the book, many of us expressed our hope, based on empirical studies, that the progressive governments and movements that were expanding across the region would be able to do the impossible: promote human rights through egalitarian economic policies without weakening civil liberties or collective rights like those that protect the environment, territory and culture of indigenous peoples.

We argued that from the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) in Mexico to the “piqueteros” (demonstrators) in Argentina, there were heartening signs of a democratic left, both in the economic and political sense, that could offer a real alternative to the crises created by the neoliberal governments of the 1980s and 1990s. Our thesis suggesting a promising and relatively homogeneous left in the region was a direct critique of Jorge Castañeda, the former Foreign Minister of Mexico. He had earlier proposed a binary typology that divided the Latin American left into a good camp that, according to him, combined respect for the rule of law with sensible management of the economy (e.g. Brazil and Chile) and a bad camp that did the exact opposite (e.g. Nicaragua and Venezuela).

We wrote in the days when Rafael Correa was an anonymous university professor, Lula’s government was only just beginning, Ricardo Lagos was continuing the centrist legacy of the Chilean Concertación (a coalition of center-left political parties) and Hugo Chávez had yet to turn toward the authoritarianism and personality cult that Nicolás Maduro embodies today. A decade later, how has it played out? Interestingly, it seems that all of us were wrong. There was not one left or two, but rather many more, as the behavior of the region’s governments has shown.

With regards to civil and political rights, the results have been mixed. On the one hand, important progress has been made; for example, the Argentinean government’s policy of punishing the crimes committed during the dictatorship. Also, some governments on the left, including those in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, have been loyal to the rule of law. But on the other hand, many of the leftist governments have given in to the temptation of eroding basic liberties to maintain political control.

For example, governments in Argentina, Nicaragua and Venezuela introduced legislation to control the press in ways that allow them to censor the media (laws denounced by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression). President Maduro in Venezuela recently closed independent television channels and newspapers.

Less well-known is the case of Ecuador, where President Correa’s government has harassed leaders and movements that used to be his allies, but that he now ridicules as the “infantile left.” A recent example of the erosion of rights is the government’s decision to dissolve the Pachamama Foundation, a highly regarded environmental NGO in the country. This was done on the basis of an authoritarian law that allows the executive branch to close any organization for reasons as specious as “having deviated from [its] goals and objectives” or “affecting public order.” In addition, more than 200 political opponents have been criminally prosecuted under a law that purportedly protects against “sabotage and terrorism,” but which has been used to smother all types of protest and is jealously implemented by a judicial system that Correa himself has brought into line.

With regards to socio-economic rights the results are more positive. Governments in places like Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay and, lately, Chile (under policies promised by President Bachelet) have considerably increased their investment in education and health, raised taxes and renegotiated royalties arising from petroleum and mining, winning them the support of large majorities of the electorate.

Further, they have done this without large increases in inflation or damaging the economy, in contrast to Argentina and Venezuela. This has led to a significant decrease in poverty and inequality in these countries, which helps explain the decrease in both in the region more generally over the last decade.

The record is less positive and more consistent with regards to third generation rights. In fact, when it comes to collective rights to protect the environment and indigenous peoples, the Latin American left is indistinguishable from the right. To use the colorful metaphor of the Uruguayan analyst Eduardo Gudynas, we have a “brown left,” in which the green has been overshadowed by the red; in other words, centrist development models inherited from the twentieth century which encouraged extractive industries have overridden environmental concerns.

This is seen in Venezuela’s dependence on petroleum and across the region with the priority given to mining and the exploitation of natural resources in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Nicaragua. On environmental and indigenous rights, the records of Presidents Rousseff in Brazil, Morales in Bolivia or Correa in Ecuador, are as disappointing as those of governments on the other side of the political spectrum, for example in Peru and Colombia. The rulings against the governments in the Inter-American Human Rights system in cases like the Belo Monte Damn in Brazil or the exploitation of petroleum in the Ecuadorian Amazon, home to the Sarayaku indigenous peoples, is further proof of the violation of these rights.

Overall, therefore, the scorecard on human rights in the region is, in the best-case scenario, mixed, or, in the worst-case scenario, deeply disappointing. The question that has yet to be answered is the same one we contemplated ten years ago when the “new left” was still new: how do you protect social and economic rights without undermining civil liberties or the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their land and environment?

______________

César Rodríguez-Garavito is Associate Professor of Law at the University of the Andes (Colombia), and serves as International Director of the Center for Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia), a human rights NGO based in Bogota. 

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

CNN's Zakaria's Fantastic Economic Advice: His 'Free Market Faith' Doesn't Add Up For Latin American Nations

Fareed Zakaria speaking at the Blumenthal Pe. forming Arts Center,
Charlotte, NC in Oct of 2010. (Photo by James Willamor)

By Jim Naureckas
[CNN's Fareed] Zakaria presented what he called "another installment of 'How to Ruin Your Economy in Five Easy Steps'" on his GPS show on CNN (1/12/14): "Last time, Venezuela ticked off all the boxes, but we found another country that is following the same sad path."

That country was Argentina, which Zakaria criticized for following Venezuela's lead in "attacking big business," allowing "restrictions on global trade" and so forth–the basic neoliberal critique of developing economies. Zakaria ends with the moral:

Argentina's attempt to mirror a failed state like Venezuela tells a larger story. Look at this map of Latin America from a great article in the Wall Street Journal this week. On the left in green, you have the countries that are facing the Pacific. Mexico, Peru, Chile and Colombia are among the countries opening up their economies to great success. On the right, in red, you see the opposite. Countries that face the Atlantic, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, are closing their economies and resorting to populism. The countries in green are projected to grow nearly twice as fast in 2014 as the countries in red.

So the countries that are following Zakaria's advice are doing great, and the countries that aren't listening to him are doing worse–in the future. The great thing about the future, of course, is that it hasn't happened yet. What if we look, instead, at how those countries have actually done in the recent past? Here's the percentage change from 2003-13 in these nation's inflation-adjusted GDP, in their own currency, based on IMF data (with per capita GDP growth in parentheses):

Mexico: 28.8 (11.1)

Peru: 89.7 (61.8)

Chile: 59.2 (44.4)

Colombia: 58.3 (40.5)

Argentina: 89.0 (69.0)

Brazil: 44.1 (30.9)

Venezuela: 74.0 (48.0)

So the "great success" countries have grown by an average of 39.5 percent per capita over the past 10 years, while the "sad path" countries have grown by 49.3 percent per capita over the same time period. Maybe Argentina's efforts to "mirror a failed state" aren't so mysterious after all.

Of course, past performance is not a guarantee of future results.  But US corporate media's past performance in identifying economic policies that will lead to faster economic growth is pretty pathetic. Eight years ago, the New York Times ran a largish op-ed called "Globalizing Good Government" (4/10/06), in which Federal Reserve Bank officials Richard Fisher and W. Michael Cox attempted to sort the world into countires that "pursue policies that achieve faster economic growth" and those whose policies "lead to stagnation."

Really, it was sorting countries by how pro-corporate their economic policies were, and as I pointed out at the time (Extra!, 5/06), the "faster economic growth countries" were growing about half as fast as the "stagnation" countries. To a startling degree, when you see discussions about the economic policies of other countries in the US press, you're reading fantasy stories about imaginary lands where peoples are rewarded or punishment according to their adherence to the free market faith.

Thanks to Mark Weisbrot and Jake Johnston of CEPR for crunching the IMF numbers for me.
UPDATE: Years of growth covered in the calculations above corrected–they go to 2013, not 2012. I also meant to mention that the Argentina numbers are a little shaky–the country has been credibly accused of understating its inflation ratae–but its actual growth rate is probably still higher than all of Zakaria's favored nations except Peru.

Reprinted with permission from Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

Mandela’s Dream of Black Power Became a “Neoliberal Nightmare”

  

Nelson Mandela: During his younger, more revolutionary days.

Tributes to Nelson Mandela fill the media, with stories of his lengthy prison term and his “willingness to forgive” his oppressors.

Nowhere in sight is the real story of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress that he headed, a story best told by Naomi Klein in her wonderful book, The Shock Doctrine. 

The ANC’s Freedom Charter, adopted in June 26, 1955, in Kliptown South Africa, begins with the promise,

“The People Shall Govern…”

It promises Land to the landless. Equality. Free and compulsory education. Freedom of movement, and more.

From prison, Mandela wrote a note to his supporters in January of 1990, a month before his release. Here’s what he wrote:

“The nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industries is the policy of the ANC, and the change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable. Black economic empowerment is a goal we fully support and encourage, but in our situation state control of certain sectors of the economy is unavoidable.”

In the 1980s, young Black South Africans, weary from three decades of patience, took to the streets to fight for their beloved Freedom Charter.

When Mandela was released from prison after 27 years, on February 11, 1990, most spent on Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa under the ANC appeared ripe to fulfill their dream: the Freedom Charter.

Great Expectations: yet, South Africa took the route characterized by Mandela as “inconceivable.” Political successes, but economic ruin. South Africa is now among the most unequal societies in the world.

‘Women Should Be Submissive': And Other Google Autocomplete Suggestions

Written byTetyana Bohdanova

A series of ads by UN Women, revealed in late October, used the Google Autocomplete feature to uncover widespread negative attitudes toward women. Global Voices followed reactions to the UN Women campaign and conducted its own experiment in different languages. The results of searches conducted both within the UN Women campaign and Global Voices revealed popular attitudes not only about women’s social and professional roles, but also about their sexuality, appearance and relationships with men.

UN Women ad featuring Google autocomplete suggestions for
the phrase “women shouldn't.”

The creators of the UN Women ads used search phrases like “women cannot”, “women shouldn’t”, “women should” and “women need to” completed by genuine Google search terms to highlight overwhelmingly negative stereotypes, sexist and highly discriminatory views held about women by society globally. The ads quickly went viral and sparked a heated discussion online. Last week, creators have announced that they are planning to expand the campaign in response to the mass online reaction.

The auto-complete function for searches, according to Google, predicts users’ queries based on the search activity of all users of the web as well as the content of indexed pages. The predictions may also be influenced by past searches of the particular user if they are signed into their Google account.

Global Voices asked its contributors from around the world to carry out Google searches using the same or similar phrases as those used in the UN Women campaign, in their own languages. The searches done between October 19 and October 25, 2013, revealed attitudes about the roles women are expected to take in society, often demonstrating the same global prejudices, but sometimes showing contradictions in different countries. Below are searches in 12 languages from different countries and continents:

Spanish
Chile

“Women should not…”. A screenshot by Silvia Viñas. October 21, 2013.

Women should not…
Women should not preach
Women should not work
Women should not talk in the congregation
Women should not drive

Peru

“Women cannot…” A screenshot by Juan Arellano. October 21, 2013.

Women cannot…
Women cannot preach
Women cannot be pastors
Women cannot donate blood
Women cannot live without man

Puerto Rico

“Women should…”. A screenshot by Firuzeh Shokooh Valle. October 21, 2013.

Women should…
Women should be submissive
Women should use the veil
Women should preach
Women should work

French
France

“

Women should…”. A screenshot by Suzanne Lehn. October 21, 2013.

Women should…
women should stay at home
women should work
should women preach
women should wear skirts
women should be submissive
women should know
women should vote
women should stay at home
should women work
women should do the cooking

“Women don't know…”. A screen shot by Rayna St. October 21, 2013.

Women don’t know…
women don't know how to drive
women don't know what they want
women don't know how to be in love
women don't know how to read cards

Arabic
Egypt (similar results in Jordan)

“Woman cannot…”. A screenshot by Tarek Amr. October 21, 2013.

Woman cannot…
Woman cannot live without marriage
Woman cannot live without a man
Woman cannot keep a secret
Woman cannot interpret man's silence

Chinese

“Women cannot…”. A screenshot by Gloria Wang. October 21, 2013.

Women cannot…
Women cannot be too smart
Women can't drive
Women cannot give birth
10 topics women cannot discuss with their husbands

Romanian

“Women should not…”. A screenshot by Diana Lungu. October 21, 2013.

women should not…
women should be loved not understood
women should not be understood
women should not wear pants
what women should not do in bed

Italian
Italy

“Women should…”. A screenshot by Gaia Resta. October 22, 2013.

Women should…
Women should stay at home
should play hard to get
should stay in the kitchen
should be subdued

“Women should not…”. A screenshot by Gaia Resta. October 22, 2013.

Women should not…
Women should not be understood
should not work
should not be understood but loved
should not read

German
Germany

“Woman should not…”. A screenshot by Katrin Zinoun. October 21, 2013.

Woman should not…
Woman should not teach
My wife should not work

“Woman can…”. A screenshot by Katrin Zinoun. October 21, 2013.

Woman can….
Woman cannot come
Woman cannot get pregnant
Woman cannot cook
Woman cannot get a baby

Hebrew

“Women don't…”. A screenshot by
Gilad Lotan. October 21, 2013.

Women don't…
Women don't work
Women are not modest
Women don't know how to drive
Women don't want to have kids

Hungarian

“A woman should be…”. A screenshot by Marietta Le.
October 21, 2013.

A woman should be…
a woman should be a chef in the kitchen
a woman should be pretty and ruthless

Danish 

“Women cannot…”. A screenshot by Solana Larsen. October 20, 2013.

Women cannot…
Women cannot drive
Women cannot control vagina
Women cannot be color blind
Women cannot barbecue

In Danish, the searches for “women cannot” and “women can” yielded the same results.

Russian
Russia

“Women should not…”. A screenshot by Veronica Khokhlova. October 19, 2013.

Women should not…
Women should not be believed
Women should not lift heavy things
Women should not drink
Women should not be trusted

English
The UK

“Women should…”. A screenshot by Annie Zaman. October 25, 2013.

Women should…
Women should be seen and not heard
Women should stay at home
Women should know their place

Not all searches carried out by members of Global Voices community turned up negative terms. Nevertheless, the results of the experiment largely confirm UN Women’s worrying conclusion that a great deal of work still remains to be done in order to advance women’s rights and empowerment around the world.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.