By Guy Dinmore
KAYIN STATE, Myanmar, Apr 17 2023 – Food is passed around a campfire, and a guitar strums as cool night air tumbles down mountain cliffs, relieving the jungle of its heat.

A dozen or so young Myanmar activists – some having just travelled long distances evading military checkpoints, others already living in exile – have come together in a jungle camp for a training course with a difference. Instead of armed combat, their chosen role is enabling the overthrow of the military junta through non-violent means.

Conversations are animated, with talk of federal democracy and creating a country that would also give political space and freedom to ethnic minorities. They are joined by soldiers of the rebel Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) protecting the camp deep in southeastern Kayin State.

The peaceful setting of the camp belies the horrors of the civil war beyond the mountains that is breaking Myanmar apart. The generals who overthrew a democratically elected government and seized power in 2021 are increasingly responding to a national uprising by waging terror on civilians it calls “terrorists” in an attempt to break their support for armed insurgents.

The aftermath of Myanmar military air strikes on a crowd gathered in Pa Zi Gyi village in Sagaing Region on April 11, in which the anti-junta resistance says over 150 people were killed, including children, performing dances. Credit: Local People’s Defence Force

On April 11, the military carried out what is believed to be the deadliest attack of the civil war so far, using air strikes and a helicopter gunship on a village ceremony organised by the parallel and underground National Unity Government (NUG) in Sagaing Region.

At least 165 people, including 27 women and 19 children, some performing dances, were killed, according to the NUG. The regime says it was attacking the NUG’s People’s Defence Forces.

Over the past two years, artillery and bombing raids using aircraft supplied by China and Russia have targeted schools, IDP camps, hospitals, mosques, Buddhist temples and Christian churches across the country. Tens of thousands of houses have been torched, and more than 1.3 million people displaced since the 2021 coup, according to UN estimates.

The barbarity defies belief. In February, a unit of some 150 soldiers known as the Ogre Column were dropped by helicopter in Sagaing and went on a marauding killing spree that lasted weeks. Scores of villagers were killed. Women were raped and shot. Men and boys were beheaded, disembowelled and dismembered.

Truth about massacres in wars gone by took months or even years to fully emerge, but in this modern era of mobile phones and social media, the grim evidence is transmitted by survivors within a day or so.

Kyaw Soe Win, a veteran activist with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), which carefully documents civilian deaths, arrests and extra-judicial killings, shows IPS a picture he has just received on his phone of a man in Sagaing, disembowelled and his organs taken out.

Why do they do this? “It is to spread fear and terror,” he says.

AAPP, now based in the border town of Mae Sot just inside Thailand, has an exhibition dedicated to victims of successive uprisings against military rule since protests against the first post-independence coup in 1962. Rows of faces and names stare out from the walls, including pictures of some 30 civilians – among them two Save the Children charity workers – who were tortured and burned alive in what is now known as the 2021 Christmas Eve Massacre in Kayah State.

“This chapter is different,” Kyaw Soe Win, a former political prisoner, says of the present conflict. “The situation is getting worse and worse. The numbers of political prisoners and fatalities and houses torched are far higher. The junta is oppressing the people and is even more brutal than before.”

Sky, a resistance fighter and writer, who uses a nom de guerre, explains in a Mae Sot bar how the insurgency is also very different this time.

“After the 1988 student uprising, it took me three years to get an AK-47 and 300 bullets. Now it is much quicker. Now we are getting modified AK-47s through the Wa. They call it a Wa-AK,” he laughs, referring to an autonomous border area run by the heavily armed United Wa State Party. Their one-party narco-state on the border with China stays out of the war but makes money from both sides.

“China systematically eroded history after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, but after the 1988 protests in Myanmar, we still have the whispered stories. This generation knows what is right and wrong,” said Sky.

Despite what the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights recently called its “scorched earth policy”, the regime is steadily losing this war in terms of territory and military casualties.

“The military is in a very, very difficult situation which is only getting worse,” says Matthew Arnold, an independent policy analyst on Myanmar with previous conflict experience in Afghanistan and Sudan. He says the regime’s forces are “atomised” and “bleeding out in a war of attrition”. In some towns, they are pinned down in police stations and barracks and cannot be reinforced or resupplied for months on end.

Because it cannot move freely on the ground over the vast distances to maintain its outposts and impose its authority, the junta is resorting increasingly to air strikes and artillery against civilian populations.

Sagaing and the neighbouring region of Magwe are crucial conflict areas.  Covering an area bigger than England, they are known as the heartland of the Bamar majority and had been, for decades, a fertile recruiting ground for the Bamar-dominated military. But no more.

“There are very few areas of Sagaing where they are not fighting on a regular basis. The junta was hit all over the place in February in Sagaing and Magwe,” says Arnold, who credits resistance forces moving rapidly “from muskets to drones and IEDS” (improvised explosive devices) in inflicting heavy losses.

Vulnerable in more remote areas in Chin State in the west and areas of the southeast, the military’s pullback is expected to accelerate as the monsoons come.

Thantlang in Chin State, near the border with India, was the first large town to fall to the rebels, although the junta’s bombing raids and artillery made sure that little was left standing. With no air defences, the resistance knows well that if it takes full control of more urban areas, then they are inviting disaster upon the civilian population.

Myanmar is, in effect, fragmenting.

The regime has a firm grip on the big cities of Yangon, Mandalay and the capital Naypyitaw – where residents say life is bustling and returning to some kind of ‘normal’ with even the makings of a property boom. But beyond, its real control is tenuous and weakening.

Fighting a war on many fronts, the regime is trying to follow its practised divide-and-rule tactics of cutting deals and ceasefire pacts with various ethnic armed groups, aided to some extent by China’s influence in border areas.

But major ethnic groups in most of the frontier states, such as the KNLA, which has been fighting the world’s longest civil war since 1949, are successfully resisting. A ceasefire with the mostly Buddhist Arakan Army also looks fragile in the western state of Rakhine, where in 2017, the military forced over 700,000 Muslim Rohingya into Bangladesh in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that has brought charges of genocide against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice.

“Sadly, a prolonged fragmentation is a possibility, but we must accept that has been a possibility in Myanmar since before the coup of 1962,” David Gum Awng, deputy minister for international cooperation for the NUG shadow administration, tells IPS.

“It is natural and unsurprising that EAOs (ethnic armed organisations) are consolidating gains, but the question is what these EAOs plan to do with their territory if and when the democratic forces win,” he adds.

The NUG, he says, aims to rid Myanmar of the “abusive and criminal military dictatorship and along with it the military’s obsession with centralised Bamar-Buddhist nationalist rule”, to be replaced by a democratic federal system offering “ethnic minorities genuine self-determination” through negotiations.

This significant shift in policy also extends to recognising and reaching out to the Rohingya, with the NUG promising justice and accountability for crimes committed against them by the military, a path towards citizenship, and peaceful repatriation for refugees.

Although the NUG is built around remnants of the old guard of the National League for Democracy government ousted in the 2021 coup, its stated intentions have set it apart from the Bamar nationalist leanings of Aung San Suu Kyi, its 77-year-old former leader now held by the junta in solitary confinement.

Strengthening but still, difficult ties between the self-proclaimed NUG and the ethnic armed groups are particularly worrying for China. Myanmar’s giant neighbour sees a threat to its long-term strategy of dominating the ethnic groups along its border while keeping Western powers out of a pliant Myanmar with the goal of developing massive infrastructure projects and a secure gateway to the Indian Ocean.

Even though it enjoyed favourable relations with Aung San Suu Kyi, China is keeping the NUG at a cold arm’s length while propping up the junta with weaponry and diplomatic protection at the UN. India’s tacit backing for the regime has facilitated its own strategic investments.

Much of the rest of Asia, including democracies like Japan and South Korea, are also working to protect their own interests in Myanmar while hoping that engagement with the regime will lead to a negotiated settlement of the war. UN agencies and the INGO aid industry also maintain a presence, mostly ineffectual, in junta-controlled Yangon.

This perceived complicity angers the Burmese diaspora, which is busily raising money for aid and weapons for the resistance. Notions of a negotiated settlement with General Min Aung Hlaing’s State Administration Council, as the junta calls itself, are far from the minds of those waging their “forgotten war”.

“Thai generals are brothers with the Myanmar military. Singapore banks hold their money. The Burmese feel forgotten,” said one US-based doctor, speaking in Bangkok after taking medical aid to the border.

While recognising that the West’s attention and resources are focused on the overriding goal of defeating Russia in Ukraine, the resistance did receive a significant boost last December with the US Burma Act passed by Congress.

The act authorises the Biden administration to extend non-lethal aid to “support the people of Burma in their struggle for democracy, freedom, human rights, and justice.” It explicitly mentions the NUG, although not ethnic armed groups.

Some Washington-based analysts argue that the legislation does not mark a major US policy shift, but diplomats and experts in the region see it as a highly significant step towards endorsing the NUG and the wider resistance movement.

“The US is now saying it wants the resistance to win and has fundamentally shifted the narrative. This is why China is getting worried. Beijing is focused on the discourse of talks and the peace process,” commented one expert in Bangkok who asked not to be named.

“There won’t be lethal assistance. The US doesn’t want to be involved in another war now. But there will be more public and diplomatic support of the resistance and pushing other actors not to engage with the junta,” he added.

David Gum Aung of the NUG is more cautious, calling the Burma Act “a significant piece of legislation” which makes funds available and opens the door to more sanctions against the regime while “recognising” the NUG.

“We can view the Burma Act as a very important document symbolically but less potent practically. Its symbolic value stems largely from the fact that it outlines that the US views the SAC and their caretaker government as illegitimate and does not recognize their authority, their right to represent Myanmar or their justification for the coup.”

“We are still sorely in need of all manner of aid, from humanitarian to strategic… but we cannot fall into the trap of assuming that everything the Act makes possible will eventuate,” he said.

Thinzar Shunlei Yi, a democracy and youth activist who led anti-coup protests in Yangon and is now in exile, stresses that the broad-based and non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement remains the “backbone of the revolution”.

Success, she says, will mean the surrender of the junta, with the people defining what happens to the perpetrators of crimes, whether to be put on trial in domestic courts or through international mechanisms. For her, it also means a social revolution that will tackle “patriarchy, hegemony, racism etc”.

Kyaw Soe Win of the AAPP, whose grisly routine is to scroll through fresh images of the dead, says war criminals must be prosecuted to achieve national reconciliation.

“We need justice for the survivors and victims,” he says. “Without justice, there can be no reconciliation.  There was never any justice before, only impunity through the decades. No action was ever taken.”

AAPP has so far documented over 17,000 political prisoners still in detention and the deaths of over 3,100 civilians since the coup, although it knows the actual toll is much higher.

Nicholas Koumjian, head of the UN-authorised Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar which is working with AAPP, says credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer”.

Back in the jungle resistance camp, the young activists gather near caves that act as air raid shelters and talk of a future without military rule that will necessitate total reform of the armed forces. Among the group, one was severely tortured in prison, one shot in the leg during street protests and a mother who had to leave her child behind.

The annual New Year festival of Thingyan is approaching, and they sing popular songs of love and separation and a homecoming they know may be years away.

AAPP is working with the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar to collect and preserve evidence of crimes against international law committed since 2011 to expedite future criminal proceedings. Nicholas Koumjian, head of the IIMM, said on the second anniversary of the coup that credible evidence had been collected of an “array of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, unlawful imprisonment, and deportation or forcible transfer.”

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By Paul Virgo
ROME, Apr 17 2023 – New research by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has revealed that almost half the world’s population of around eight billion people belong to households whose livelihoods depend to some degree on agrifood systems (AFS).

The findings are important as farming and the food system as a whole is central to the multiple challenges humankind faces to feed a global population forecast to rise to 10 billion by 2050, while meeting the Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, hunger and malnutrition, combat the climate crisis and preserve natural resources for future generations.

So the research offers precious information for decision makers, and FAO is aiming for it to be the start of an ongoing statistical data series.

Agrifood-system transformation offers the promise of new jobs in both agriculture and the off-farm segments of agrifood systems, particularly in low income countries with large, young populations. Deliberate policies, however, are needed to ensure the quantity and quality of these jobs

The report said that around 1.23 billion people worked in agrifood systems in 2019, including 857 million in primary agricultural production (agriculture, livestock, forestry, fishing, aquaculture, hunting) and 375 million in the off-farm segments of agrifood systems.

The 1.23 billion people working in agrifood systems belong to households made up of an estimated 3.83 billion people.

FAO says there is evidence of a high degree of exploitation of labour in agrifood systems, including harmful conditions, precarious job security, low wages, disproportionate burdens on women, and coercive use of child labour.

So statistics on the number of people employed in AFS can be useful to monitor for violations of human rights and to develop and target policies to regulate working conditions in the sector.

Agrifood systems also present opportunities though, as they can offer many new jobs, a factor that is especially important in lower-income countries with lots of young who need employment.

So the data can help to shape policies to develop these opportunities.

For example, better understanding of the existing workforce could reveal entry points for programmes to increase skills and entrepreneurship.

“Identifying and quantifying the number of agrifood-system workers is essential for several reasons, particularly for low- and middle-income countries of the Global South,” Ben Davis, the Director of FAO’s Inclusive Rural Transformation and Gender Equality Division, told IPS.

“In low-income countries, the largest number of workers are employed in agrifood systems, and agrifood systems are a key economic motor of growth and poverty reduction,” added Davis, the lead author of the study, which is entitled Estimating Global and Country Level Employment in Agrifood Systems.

“Agrifood-system transformation offers the promise of new jobs in both agriculture and the off-farm segments of agrifood systems, particularly in low income countries with large, young populations.

“Deliberate policies, however, are needed to ensure the quantity and quality of these jobs.

“Statistics on the number of people employed in agrifood systems would also help regulate working conditions and develop and target appropriate policies and programmes to support livelihoods”.

The three challenges facing agrifood systems – feeding a growing population, providing a livelihood for farmers, and protecting the environment – must be tackled together because, given the many interconnections, taking a single-issue perspective on any objective can lead to unintended impacts on others. Market in Rome. Credit: Paul Virgo / IPS

The new report said that the continent with the largest number of people employed in agrifood systems is Asia with 793 million, followed by Africa with almost 290 million

It said the majority of the economically active population in low-income countries, particularly in Africa, had at least one job or activity in agrifood systems.

It said that 62% employment in Africa is in AFS, when relevant trade and transportation activities are included, compared to 40% in Asia and 23% in the Americas.

The study said that, of the 3.83 billion people belonging to households reliant on agrifood systems for their livelihoods, 2.36 billion live in Asia and 940 million are in Africa.

The study is the first to give a systematic, documented global estimate of the number of people involved in AFS.

It said the number of people engaged in the sector has been undercounted in the past due to three factors.

The first is that many people, especially those living in poverty, work several jobs and lots are involved in AFS, even if this is not their primary activity.

The second is that many AFS jobs are seasonal or intermittent and so easily missed by surveys.

Finally, many people are engaged in household farming for their own consumption on top of their primary occupation.

The report gives the example of a full-time schoolteacher who grows produce for sale on their land.

Agrifood systems produce some 11 billion tonnes of food worldwide each year, the FAO says.

But they also have a big environmental footprint.

The IPCC’s recent Synthesis Report, which completed its Sixth Assessment cycle, said that 22% of global greenhouse gas emissions currently stem from agriculture, forestry, and land use.

Without radical change, the world is set for a future of persistent food insecurity and the destruction and degradation of natural resources.

Building sustainable, resilient agrifood systems, on the other hand, can help tackle the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and food insecurity.

FAO has presented a Strategy on Climate Change, which argues that a holistic approach is needed.

It says the three challenges facing agrifood systems – feeding a growing population, providing a livelihood for farmers, and protecting the environment – must be tackled together because, given the many interconnections, taking a single-issue perspective on any objective can lead to unintended impacts on others.

By Navid Hanif
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 17 2023 – The world is at a crossroads. This week, the United Nations Secretary-General, government ministers and senior leaders are gathered in New York at the ECOSOC Financing for Development Forum. (scheduled to take place April17-20).

This follows the recent World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings of heads of international financial institutions leaders, finance ministers, and other leaders. These discussions are a timely chance to decide on urgent action to address the global crises we face.

Among others, the war in Ukraine, the resultant food and energy crisis, the effects of COVID-19, climate change impacts and rising global interest rates – all have contributed to increased hunger and poverty.

Many hard-hit developing countries have slow growth, high inflation, and unsustainable debt, which undermine development prospects and prevent them from investing in health, education, infrastructure, and the energy transition.

We recently released the Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2023: Financing Sustainable Transformation, the 8th report from the Inter-Agency Task Force on Financing for Development.

Given the scale and number of crises, it won’t be a surprise to learn that financing needs for the Sustainable Development Goals are growing. Unfortunately, development financing is not keeping pace.

Navid Hanif

We estimate that by 2027 LDCs and other low-income countries will need US$220 billion in external financing, 30% higher than the US$172 billion they needed in 2021. Many countries are falling behind, or even going backwards on the SDGs.

Faced with food and energy shocks, there may be a temptation to concentrate resources on urgent short-term problems. But FSDR 2023 emphasizes that delaying long-term investment in sustainable transformations would put the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and climate targets out of reach and further exacerbate financing challenges down the line.

The Financing for Sustainable Development Report 2023 calls for: (i) a new generation of sustainable industrial policies to chart national green transformations; (ii) immediate international action to scale up development cooperation and SDG investments to support this investment boost, the SDGs, and climate action; and (iii) reforms to the international financial architecture that are needed to support this boost in investment, and to make the system more equitable and fit for purpose.

The possibilities of green industrialization

There is hope.

We have seen in recent years a sharp and swift uptake in new technology and in the transition to green solutions. Energy transition investments rose to US$1.11 trillion in 2022, surpassing fossil fuel system investments for the first time. The green economy became the fifth largest industrial sector, totalling US $7.2 trillion in 2021.

A new green industrial age is not only possible, but it can be the breakthrough needed to bring the SDGs back on track. Industrialization has historically been an engine for progress. Sustainable industrialization—which would include low-carbon transitions—can lead to growth, job creation, technological advancement, and lay the foundation for poverty reduction and enhanced resilience. Industrialization must also be made equitable and sustainable, aligned with the SDGs, and deliver climate action.

Unfortunately, most developing countries are not yet able to benefit from the new technological advances. Many, especially least developed countries, have insufficient resources to invest in the needed transformations, including green energy and sustainable agriculture. Developing countries cannot make the necessary progress on their own, though their advancement would benefit all countries.

An SDG investment push

The international community must scale up investment to support sustainable transformations, the SDGs, and climate action. The push for greater investment is in line with the UN Secretary-General’s call for an SDG Stimulus, aimed at scaling up affordable long-term financing for countries in need by at least US$500 billion a year.

The SDG Stimulus calls on the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) to massively expand lending and offer it on better terms. Development banks can do this through both increased capital bases and better leveraging of existing paid-in capital.

This includes urgently rechanneling special drawing rights through the MDBs, which can then leverage the impact by borrowing on capital markets, building on the model developed by the African Development Bank.

Debt challenges faced by developing countries are among the obstacles to progress. Already, about 60% of poorer countries are in or at a high risk of debt distress, twice the level from 2015. The international community must work together to urgently develop an improved multilateral debt relief initiative.

Reforms to the international financial architecture

Fixing the debt architecture is just one element of needed architecture reforms. The international financial architecture system, which guides how global funds are invested, is in a state of flux, with multiple reform processes taking place simultaneously.

We are undergoing the biggest rethink of our international systems since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. But unlike Bretton Woods, which was done as one under the UN umbrella, the current multiple reform processes are piecemeal, fragmented, and lack inter-institutional coherence.

From debt architecture to international tax norms, to trade rules, to revamping investment agreements, the reform processes must aim for a coherent international system that takes the Sustainable Development Goals and climate action fully into account. We must have targeted action to make the architecture fit for purpose to serve the needs of the world, and developing countries in particular.

Failure is not an option

Given current trends, 574 million people – nearly 7% of the world’s population – will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030. Without urgent and scaled up action on sustainable development financing, the prospects for achieving the SDGs grow dimmer.

In fact, the already great gulf between developed and developing countries could widen to become a permanent sustainable development divide. It will take deliberate and coordinated action to ensure that reforms serve the needs of developing countries – and thus help deliver the SDGs. But it must be done.

There must be a recognition that we all share a common future as we share a common earth. With global financial assets of almost $500 trillion, there is no shortage of money. The world has the means: all that is lacking is the will.

Navid Hanif is a United Nations Assistant Secretary-General, and Acting Director, Financing for Sustainable Development Office, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. He is also the UN sous Sherpa to the G20 finance and main tracks.

The 2023 Financing for Sustainable Development Report: Financing Sustainable Transformations is a joint product of the Inter-agency Task Force on Financing for Development, which is comprised of more than 60 United Nations Agencies and international organizations.

The Financing for Sustainable Development Office of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs serves as the substantive editor and coordinator of the Task Force, in close cooperation the World Bank Group, the IMF, World Trade Organization, UNCTAD, UNDP and UNIDO. The Task Force was mandated by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and is chaired by Mr. Li Junhua, United Nations Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs.

A copy of the report is available at https://developmentfinance.un.org/fsdr2023.

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By Gustavo González
SANTIAGO, Apr 17 2023 – Violence involving organized crime has made Latin America the most dangerous region in the world and has helped paved the way for a repressive kind of populism with a dangerous future, whose most visible symbol is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador.

According to United Nations reports, Latin America, home to eight percent of the global population, accounts for 37 percent of the world’s homicides. (These statistics do not include deaths in wars, accidents and suicides.)

Observers talk about a generalized security crisis, and the Salvadoran president boasted of a 56.8 percent decline in the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants in 2022, while Ecuador, at the other end of the spectrum, showed an increase of 82 percent.

But comparisons in percentages from one year to the next are misleading if the absolute numbers are not taken into account. For example, the homicide rate in Chile increased 32.2 percent in 2022, although in actual numbers that meant 4.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants. In El Salvador, the figure for the same year was 7.8 per 100,000.

Statistics in percentages, magnified by the media and by the rise in the degree of violence in the crimes committed, spread a sensation of insecurity and fear among the public.

The terrain of politics

Politics have seized onto the insecurity crisis, which serves in some cases for the opposition to question the government, or in others for those in power to seek to neutralize their opponents. Both sides come up with shortsighted measures that do not attack the roots of the problem and can actually aggravate it in the medium to long term.

The most common reaction is to beef up the police force while providing it with greater means and authority to crack down on criminals. Police officers are given a greater margin of discretion to size up the danger and shoot – in other words, to become “trigger-happy”.

The expression is not new in the region. It became widespread in various countries between the 1960s and 1980s, under military dictatorships, when the law enforcement and armed forces murdered opponents in staged shootouts or brutally cracked down on social mobilizations.

The revival of these practices in the 21st century has required legitimization through laws, such as the so-called “law of privileged legitimate defense”, passed in Chile on Apr. 10, or broader norms that involve the police, the military and the powers of the State, as Bukele has pushed through in El Salvador.

Bukele, the leader of El Salvador’s Nuevas Ideas party, used his majority in the legislature to allow him to be re-elected as president. And on Mar. 22, 2022, he declared a state of emergency, accompanied by various legislative reforms that in practice gave him a free hand in his fight against crime, namely gangs known in Central America as maras.

More than a year after the state of emergency was declared, Amnesty International denounced widespread violations of human rights in the small Central American country:

“This policy has resulted in more than 66,000 detentions, most of them arbitrary; ill-treatment and torture; flagrant violations of due process; enforced disappearances; and the deaths in state custody of at least 132 people who at the time of their deaths had not been found guilty of any crime,” the human rights watchdog said in a statement released on Apr. 3.

“Key to the commission of these human rights violations has been the coordination and collusion of the three branches of government; the putting in place of a legal framework contrary to international human rights standards, specifically with regard to criminal proceedings; and the failure to adopt measures to prevent systematic human rights violations under a state of emergency,” it added.

A member of the carabineros, Chile’s militarized police, is photographed while opening fire on a street in Santiago. CREDIT: Courtesy of El Desconcierto

Repressive populism

Bukele replaced prisons with virtual concentration camps. A total of 1.5 percent of Salvadorans are currently deprived of liberty, which means the Central American country has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

However, opinion polls show that eight out of 10 Salvadorans are satisfied with the current president and want him to be reelected, while some dissident voices warn that the State is replacing the gangs as an agent of intimidation and concentration of power.

The temptation to imitate Bukele with repressive populism that feeds on showy measures is present throughout Latin America. While the “privileged legitimate defense law” was being debated in Chile, Rodolfo Carter, mayor of the municipality of La Florida, in Santiago, demolished houses registered as belonging to drug traffickers, in front of the television cameras.

In Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso, threatened by impeachment, announced in early April that he was authorizing the “possession and carrying of weapons for civilian use for personal defense” as an urgent measure against the “common enemies: delinquency, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Delinquency, drug trafficking and criminal organizations are recurring terms when talking about insecurity, but a dangerous drift is often observed where ‘trigger-happy’ laws and measures give way to repression against social protests or empower political persecution under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Criminalizing the poor

Javier Macaya, president of the Unión Demócrata Independiente, a far-right Chilean party that vindicates the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), accused the United Nations of supporting “political violence” when its High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk warned of the dangers posed by the “law of privileged self-defense”.

The authoritarian scope of “trigger-happy” laws also includes the criminalization of immigrants and poor neighborhoods, classified as gang territories that shelter drug trafficking rings, although large drug traffickers and drug users from high-income sectors are rarely prosecuted in the cities of Latin America.

Political persecution is often disguised as security, as in Nicaragua in February when 222 dissidents were expelled and stripped of their nationality. The government of Daniel Ortega accused them of “treason”, described them as “terrorists” and “mercenaries” and justified the measure in the name of national peace.

Security has been instated as Latin America’s most pressing issue. The latest Amnesty International report documents arbitrary acts in Venezuela that include forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. Haiti, mired in ungovernability, is another country where human rights are a victim of insecurity.

The complexities of the fight against crime involve strengthening the police and also growing vigilante justice on the part of citizens. In Brazil, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) authorized the police to kill criminals and loosened restrictions on gun ownership for civilians. His successor, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, suspended the measures after taking office on Jan. 1.

Latin America has become a kind of arsenal, with more powerful weapons for the police, and also with the illegal trade that feeds organized crime. A third of the firearms seized in 2017 in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Panama came from the United States.