Result comes a year after Chileans rejected a progressive constitution that would have expanded Indigenous rights.
Chile has voted to reject a new conservative constitution, leaving the text drafted during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in force.
With nearly all of the ballots tallied on Sunday night, more than 55 percent of Chileans voted against the text, compared with about 44 percent in favour.
The proposed constitution, which was drafted by a committee dominated by the conservative Republican Party, would have reinforced property rights and free-market principles and included limits on immigration and abortion.
The result comes more than a year after Chileans roundly rejected a progressive constitution that would have classified the Latin American country as a plurinational state, established autonomous Indigenous territories and elevated the environment as well as gender equity.
Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric, who before the vote pledged to focus on long-term development in favour of further attempts to change the constitution, said the results showed that the country had become polarised and divided.
“I invite you to build together a new era for Chile: growth for all, social justice and citizen security,” Boric, who became Chile’s youngest-ever leader in 2021 at 35, said after the vote. “The country needs everyone.”
Republican Party leader Jose Antonio Kast expressed disappointment over the result.
“We failed in the effort to convince Chileans that this would be a better constitution than the existing one,” he said.
The push to replace the current constitution, adopted during Pinochet’s military dictatorship, was set in motion after as many as 1 million protesters took to the streets in 2019 demanding sweeping political and social change.
While Chile is one of the richest and most stable countries in Latin America, it has some of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the developed world.
In a 2020 referendum, 80 percent of Chileans voted to replace the Pinochet-era constitution, which was widely blamed for allowing companies and the elite to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor, working classes.
But the public’s enthusiasm for change waned in the years following the protests as issues such as crime, the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation took centre stage.
Opinion polls in the weeks leading up to the latest vote had predicted defeat.
“This whole process has been a waste of government money … it’s a joke,” government employee Johanna Anríquez, who voted against the new constitution, was quoted as saying by the Associated Press news agency.
“Let’s keep the one we have and, please, let’s get on with the work of providing public safety.”
In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.
And flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverise an already thoroughly pulverised territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.
According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first utilised in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese levelled their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. The strategy has since been seen in an array of armed conflicts worldwide, including the 36-year civil war in Guatemala that ended in 1996 after killing and disappearing more than 200,000 people, primarily Indigenous Mayans.
In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and United States buddy Efraín Ríos Montt – who oversaw a particularly bloody segment of the war in the early 1980s – was found guilty of genocide in a Guatemalan court. And while subsequent judicial machinations and Ríos Montt’s own death by heart attack saved the man from earthly atonement for his crimes, you might say the truth is not so easily wiped “off the face of the earth”.
Indeed, scorched earth was a primary component of the Guatemalan army’s genocidal approach to its adversaries, and hundreds of Indigenous villages were destroyed along with water supplies, crops, and anything else that might sustain life. And what do you know: Guatemalan state savagery was boosted by none other than the state of Israel, which after all already had several decades of experience in eradicating Indigenous life in Palestine – pardon, “making the desert bloom”.
As journalist Gabriel Schivone notes in an article for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), not only did Israeli advisers help ensure the success of the 1982 military coup that brought Ríos Montt to power, but Israel also “assisted every facet of attack on the Guatemalan people” from the late 1970s into the next decade. For successive Guatemalan governments, Schivone writes, Israel had become the “main provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weaponry, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance”.
In keeping with the “desert-blooming” variety of blasphemy, Israel was also credited with assisting Guatemala in agricultural endeavours during the civil war era – since there’s clearly nothing better for agriculture than, you know, scorched earth.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring El Salvador, the United States’s supposedly existential fight against communism during the Cold War also enabled right-wing regimes to slaughter a whole lot of peasants. And like in Guatemala, Israel was standing by to offer a helping hand – including in the implementation of scorched earth policies.
An AJ+ video draws attention to the fact that Israel helped train ANSESAL, the Salvadoran intelligence agency that “would lay the foundation for death squads” during El Salvador’s own 12-year civil war, which killed at least 75,000 people and ended in 1992. According to the video, from 1975 until the start of the civil war in 1979, Israel was the source of a full 83 percent of El Salvador’s military imports. The vast majority of wartime killings were perpetrated by the US-backed right-wing state and associated paramilitary groups.
It goes without saying, of course, that scorched earth campaigns are deadly – and sometimes, that deadliness outlives the conflict itself. Take Vietnam, where the US military’s quite literal scorching of the earth with the toxic defoliant Agent Orange continued to cause miscarriages, birth defects, and severe illnesses decades after the official end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
In Iraq, the US’s use of depleted uranium munitions might also qualify as a scorched earth policy of sorts, as saturating a territory in radioactive poison doesn’t do much to ensure its long-term habitability.
Speaking of poisons, the Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli military fired US-supplied white phosphorus rounds at southern Lebanon in October despite the use of such weapons in civilian areas being “generally prohibited under international humanitarian law”. As per the Post’s writeup, south Lebanese residents affected by the attack “speculated that the phosphorus was meant to displace them from the village and to clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area”.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or in the Gaza Strip, which has seen its fair share of illegal white phosphorus bombardments by Israel.
As the Israeli military now carries on scorching and re-scorching the earth in Gaza and the humans therein along with it, there is a singularity that distinguishes Israel’s efforts from scorched earth experiments of the past. In El Salvador, for example, the army’s goal was never to eliminate the very concept of El Salvador, whereas Israel appears intent on annihilating Gaza altogether.
But unfortunately for Israel, resistance is one thing that can grow in scorched earth.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
The world produces enough food to feed all of its 8 billion people, yet hundreds of millions go hungry every day.
There is no shortage of food being produced globally. Yet, more than 735 million people faced chronic hunger in 2022.
The United Nations has called for urgent humanitarian action to save lives and livelihoods. It has warned the target of ending hunger by 2030 might not be reached.
Communities across Africa are also facing their worst food crises in four decades. But the funding of aid programmes that tackle food insecurity is declining.
So, if the world has enough to feed its people, why do so many nations suffer from food insecurity and hunger?
In just three years, Javier Milei, an eccentric libertarian economist and regular participant on talk shows on TV, managed to create a political party and become president of Argentina. And in the second round of the election, he beat his Peronist rival Sergio Massa, who was economy minister at the time of the election, by a considerably larger margin than polls predicted – 55.7 percent to 44.3 percent. Milei’s victory was so overwhelming that he won in 21 out of 24 provinces, including historical Peronist enclaves in which his opponent had led in the first round.
Milei’s campaign was based on radical political and economic ideas. His programme included the elimination of the Central Bank of Argentina and government subsidies, the dollarisation of the economy, and the privatisation of healthcare and education systems. Politically, he proposed the deregulation of gun possession, the creation of a marketplace for human organs, and minimised the human rights violations of the military government in the 1970s. Throughout his campaign, he also engaged in many extraordinary, high-impact stunts, such as throwing creative insults at his opponents, calling the pope “the representative of evil on earth”, and waving a chainsaw in public rallies.
So how did he manage to get elected?
The first factor that could help explain his unexpected electoral success is widespread frustration with long-term economic stagnation. After a decade of ever-deepening economic hardship, Argentina’s previous government had entered the electoral process with some 40 percent of the population living in poverty and an annual inflation rate of 142 percent. This made Milei, an outsider with no previous political experience, known for his anti-elite and pro-libertarian discourse, increasingly attractive to the electorate.
His rise to power began when the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns implemented to stem the virus’s spread deepened social discontent and made Milei’s pro-“liberty” rhetoric appealing to large segments of society. His disruptive rhetoric, publicised with countless TV appearances, public talks and YouTube videos, turned him into a cult figure among young males and got him elected to Congress in 2021.
During this time, the crude deterioration of the economic situation made people cry for change, regardless of the cost, and turned them against mainstream politicians. This is why even when Massa’s performance far surpassed Milei’s in the final presidential debate, people negatively perceived this as bullying of an “amateur” by a “professional politician”.
A second factor that made Milei’s rise to power possible was his effective exploitation of the anti-Peronist sentiment in the country. The main branch of the Peronist movement, the Justicialist Party, has been in power for 27 out of the 40 years since the restoration of democracy in Argentina in 1983. Most opposition parties, both on the left and the right, primarily blame the party for deepening political corruption, deteriorating public health and education systems and the general “national decay” perceived by many. The public animosity towards Peronist former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, seen by many as the main representative of the left-wing, progressive agenda in the country, has been especially severe.
Milei expertly took advantage of this during his presidential election campaign. He and his supporters labelled Massa as a “Kirchnerista”, implying that he belongs to the more radical part of the Justicialist Party that the former president and her husband, Nestor Kirchner, came to embody. Despite holding a more centrist position than the Kirchners and being a fierce opponent of their camp for over a decade, Massa could not get rid of that label. The result of the election mirrored Brazil’s 2018 election, when Jair Bolsonaro beat Fernando Haddad. In both cases, most voters supporting political parties whose candidates did not make it to the second round privileged “change” over the “fear” that Milei (or Bolsonaro) provoked.
The third determinant of Milei’s electoral success was the support afforded to him by former President Mauricio Macri in the second round of the election. Macri is a key player in Argentinian politics and founder of Juntos por el Cambio, the most important coalition opposing Peronism. Milei has been as vocal an opponent of Juntos as he was of Kirchnerismo from the beginning and was in no way a natural ally of Macri. Nonetheless, after the general election, which the Juntos candidate lost, Macri openly supported Milei without consulting his allies.
Macri’s support was essential for Milei’s electoral success for two reasons. One, it helped Milei simplify the narrative of his campaign and tell the public the choice between him and Massa is actually a choice between “Freedom and Kirchnerism”. Two, the financial support and access to electoral oversight infrastructure Macri provided Milei with proved crucial on election day and allowed the right-wing candidate to secure its victory.
Finally, Milei took advantage of the success of far-right populists in other countries, from Brazil to the United States and Italy. Indeed, he systematically incorporated into his political toolbox the tried and tested anti-status quo, antiprogressive, anti-climate change talking points of Bolsonaro, Donald Trump, Giorgia Meloni and others. Milei’s efforts to follow in the footsteps of these right-wing figures, coupled with the support he received from the likes of Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson as a result of his reactionary antics, provided him with international visibility and exposure in the media.
Today, we can see clearly what led to a far-right outsider like Milei clinch the Argentinian presidency. But what are the prospects of his administration? Will he be able to pursue the radical agenda he promised to those who voted for him?
His party controls just 38 seats (out of 257) in the lower chamber and seven (out of 72) in the upper chamber of Congress. He also lacks local government support, as his political party was unable to secure any governorships or mayoralties.
Can he rely upon his recent, and fragile, alliance with Macri to further his agenda? Also, will he be able to maintain popular support once he starts enacting his radical economic policies?
All of these are unknowns. What is certain is that the economic and social crisis, the accelerating inflation, and the heavy burden of the IMF loan will not disappear overnight.
The Milei administration already announced severe public spending cuts and a decision to weaken the value of the Argentinian peso by more than 50 percent against the US dollar as part of its promised “shock therapy” merely days after officially taking power. If such policies, welcomed by the IMF but condemned by progressive activists as “social murder”, do not deliver the desired results, and deliver them soon, Argentina’s experiment with far-right populism may end up being very painful, and short-lived.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
But now, as Chile prepares to vote on a new draft, Ñanco Antilef finds himself in a paradoxical position: hoping to keep the old version in place.
“It’s not that we are defending Pinochet’s constitution. It’s just that this proposal is worse,” he told Al Jazeera in a recent interview.
A member of the Democratic Revolution party, Ñanco Antilef was one of the few left-wing representatives to participate in the Constitutional Council that drafted the new version, which is set to go before voters on Sunday.
Rather, it was Chile’s far-right Republican Party that led the drafting process, holding 22 of the council’s 50 seats.
The result, critics say, is a draft that favours right-wing priorities at the expense of historically marginalised groups, including Chile’s Indigenous peoples.
“It is tied to a business model and favours individual interests rather than collective ones,” said Ñanco Antilef, himself of Indigenous Mapuche descent.
Now, he and other Indigenous Chileans are pushing for voters to reject the draft constitution, even if that means the country will be stuck with the Pinochet-era version for the foreseeable future.
“We are 13 percent of the population,” said Alihuen Antileo Navarette, a Mapuche lawyer elected to represent Chile’s Indigenous peoples on the council.
He argues the draft constitution deliberately “excludes” Indigenous voices from government.
“The text does not ensure that we have institutional representation, neither in Congress nor in the Senate, and it ignores our historical demands to respect our ancestral territories,” Antileo said.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric holds up a copy of the latest draft constitution, presented to him by Constitutional Council President Beatriz Hevia [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
A history of inequality
Sunday’s referendum will be the second time in as many years that Chileans have gone to the ballot box to weigh a new version of the country’s constitution.
President Gabriel Boric indicated it would also be the last opportunity to swap out the Pinochet-era constitution for the remainder of his four-year term.
“Whatever the result that the people choose, that process will come to an end,” Boric said at a summit of world leaders last month.
The history of the current constitution stretches back to 1980, when Pinochet — a ruler who oversaw the mass abduction and execution of his left-wing critics — appointed a government commission to draft a legal framework to formalise his authority.
Ñanco Antilef grew up during the dictatorship in the 1980s. “There was a strong repression. We didn’t even go out on the patio of our house because police would throw tear gas. It was a situation of fear. I remember they shot a neighbour dead. These are the memories I have of that time.”
Living in a low-income neighbourhood on the periphery of the capital Santiago, Ñanco Antilef also witnessed inequality that he now credits to Pinochet’s right-wing model of governance.
“It allowed people who had resources to maintain their privileges, and for the people who didn’t, it was difficult to obtain a higher quality of life. I was only able to go to higher education because I won grants and got help from others,” he said, adding: “Pinochet’s constitution generated a very individualistic society.”
The 1980 constitution has been criticised not only for its undemocratic origins but also for enshrining Pinochet’s rigidly conservative values in Chilean law.
Opponents say that, despite numerous amendments, the constitution still curtails social welfare programmes in favour of protecting free-market values. It also fails to acknowledge Chile’s Indigenous groups, which comprise an estimated 2.2 million people.
José Antonio Kast, leader of Chile’s Republican Party, celebrates the number of seats his party claimed on the Constitutional Council on May 7 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
A tale of two drafts
Concerns over social welfare ultimately simmered into widespread anti-government protests in 2019. Millions of Chileans flooded the streets, voicing a spectrum of demands, including calls for better public healthcare, fairer access to education, abortion rights and pension reform.
Many protesters singled out Pinochet’s constitution as the root cause of the discontent. That prompted Chile’s government to hold a referendum in 2020 to decide whether to ditch the old charter and write a new one.
The voters came back with an overwhelming response: 78 percent approved of the proposal, and a plan to reimagine the constitution was hatched.
But the first attempt floundered. Written by a Constitutional Council comprised mostly of left-wing leaders and independents with no political experience, the 2022 draft was seen as lengthy, confusing and overly progressive. It failed at the ballot box, with 62 percent of voters rejecting it.
In May, another election was held to determine who would write the second draft. This time, voters turned to the conservative right.
“After [the] progressive movement, there was a regression and fear of change,” Claudia Heiss, the head of political science at the University of Chile, said of the swing rightward.
She believes the draft on Sunday’s ballot enshrines values and ideas that “don’t belong in a constitution”, by recognising “patriotic symbols” and protecting “the patriarchal conception of society and traditional gender roles”.
Among the most controversial additions is an article that appears to acknowledge the rights of “life of those who have yet to be born” — language that could tighten Chile’s already restrictive abortion laws.
Elisa Loncon from the Mapuche Constituent Assembly celebrates her election to lead the Constitutional Convention on July 4, 2021 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
Draft prompts Indigenous concerns
But Indigenous rights supporters also see Sunday’s draft as a step backwards, after the promise of the first rewrite attempt.
The first draft envisioned Chile as a “plurinational” country, “composed of various nations” that recognised Indigenous rights to autonomy and self-governance.
The second version, however, defines Indigenous groups as “part of the Chilean nation, which is one and undivided”.
The number of Indigenous representatives on the second Constitutional Council was also curtailed. Indigenous candidates had to receive at least 1.5 percent of the total vote to have a seat on the council. Only one, Antileo, qualified.
By contrast, the first council included 17 seats for Indigenous groups, distributed according to population size. The Mapuche, Chile’s largest Indigenous population, were given seven seats, while the Aymara were given two. Eight other Indigenous groups — the Atacameño, Colla, Quechua, Yagán, Kawésqar, Chango, Diaguita and Rapa Nui — were given one seat each.
Experts like Salvador Millaeo, a Mapuche lawyer and academic at the University of Chile, indicated that the new constitutional draft’s shortcomings are part of a long tradition of Indigenous marginalisation.
“Chile has a terrible relationship with its Indigenous people,” Millaeo said. “We need rules that establish an equal distribution of development opportunities where ancestral grounds are recognised, and the cultural patrimony of Indigenous people is protected, respected and guaranteed.”
He explained that Sunday’s constitutional draft only mentions Indigenous rights in an “abstract” way, by saying the law “could” include Indigenous representation in Congress.
The new draft would also strengthen Pinochet’s governance model, upholding neoliberal principles that are at odds with Indigenous values, Millaeo said.
“For example, the idea that nature is not an object but a subject that needs to be cared for — that’s not in the current [constitution], but the new proposal goes even further away from that.”
Constitutional experts meet inside the National Congress to create a proposal to send to members of the Constitutional Council in Santiago, Chile, on June 5 [File: Esteban Felix/AP Photo]
Voter fatigue high
That Indigenous viewpoint, however, runs contrary to many of Chile’s business interests.
The country is one of the world’s top copper producers, and its economy is hinged on resource extraction. Mining makes up about 58 percent of the country’s total exports.
Fernando Hernandéz, a civil engineer who works in the mining sector, said he plans to vote in favour of the new draft constitution because it protects Chile’s economic interests.
Land should “generate value, jobs and growth”, Hernandéz explained.
But like many Chileans, Hernandéz is sceptical of what a new constitution can achieve. And after nearly three years of constitutional votes and councils, fatigue is setting in.
“Chile won’t transform from one day to another by changing the constitution,” Hernandéz said. “This has been exhausting for Chile and for its people.”
Ñanco Antilef, the architect who participated in the Constitutional Council, agreed that voter enthusiasm is waning. “There’s electoral fatigue and less interest in the process this time around.”
But he insisted that voting was still important, if only to protect the status quo — and hold out hope for a better deal in the future for Indigenous Chileans.
Leaders hold tense talks after Venezuela organised referendum to claim oil-rich territory that makes up two-thirds of Guyana.
Venezuela and Guyana have agreed not to resort to force to settle a territorial dispute over the oil-rich Essequibo region after a tense meeting between the two countries’ leaders in the Caribbean.
Guyanese President Irfaan Ali and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro agreed to “not threaten or use force against one another in any circumstances, including those consequential to any existing controversies between the two states” and to “refrain, whether by words or deeds, from escalating any conflict,” in an 11-point declaration that was read out at a press conference after the meeting.
The two men were unable to make progress in resolving the long-running dispute over the territory, however, with a joint commission composed of the foreign ministers of both countries and other officials asked to address the issue and report within three months.
No questions were allowed at the press conference.
Essequibo amounts to more than two-thirds of the territory of Guyana and is home to 125,000 of its 800,000 citizens.
Tension has been rising in recent weeks after Venezuela held a referendum earlier this month on whether to establish a Venezuelan state there in a move Guyana feared was a pretext for a land grab.
Venezuela insists Essequibo should be under its control because it was within its borders during the Spanish colonial period while Guyana says a border drawn by international arbitrators in 1899 means it is part of Guyana.
The hours-long meeting between Ali and Maduro took place at the main international airport in the eastern Caribbean island of St Vincent following mediation efforts by the regional groupings of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).
The declaration noted the impasse between the two men, who clasped hands before their talks.
Guyana argues the controversy should be resolved by the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands while Venezuela says the court does not have jurisdiction.
Earlier in the day, Guyana’s government issued a statement saying that Essequibo was “not up for discussion, negotiation or deliberation”. Ali echoed those comments during a news conference he held during a break in his talks with Maduro.
“All of this belongs to Guyana,” Ali said, pointing to a thick leather bracelet on his right wrist featuring the outline of Guyana. “No narrative propaganda [or] decree can change this. This is Guyana.”
Ali noted that while both parties were committed to keeping peace in the region, Guyana “is not the aggressor”.
“Guyana is not seeking war, but Guyana reserves the right to work with all of our partners to ensure the defence of our country,” he said.
Maduro said ahead of the meeting that “we will make the most of it so that our Latin America and the Caribbean remains a zone of peace”.
White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that the United States was monitoring the situation closely. “We don’t want to see this come to blows,” Kirby said. “There’s no reason for it to, and our diplomats are engaged in real-time.”
Maduro has ordered state-owned companies to explore and exploit the oil, gas and mines in Essequibo. Both sides have put their militaries on alert.
Lima, Peru – He was horrible at math. Loved to play sports. And always seemed to be smiling. When Gisela Ortiz thinks back to her older brother Luis Enrique, she remembers someone who was kind and generous, willing to lend clothes out of his own closet to classmates in need.
But when Ortiz was 20, her brother disappeared. She later learned that soldiers had burst into the university residence hall where he was staying and abducted him, along with eight other students.
Together with a professor, they were taken into a field and executed, their bodies dumped in a mass grave. Luis Enrique was only 21 years old.
Now, more than three decades later, the person Ortiz holds responsible has been released from prison — and Ortiz is among those raising their voices in protest.
In 2009, he had been convicted of ordering massacres between 1991 and 1992 that claimed the lives of 25 people, including Luis Enrique.
But critics have said that his record of human rights abuses stretches much further, to include allegations of torture, involuntary sterilisation and forced disappearances. The Inter-American Court had ordered Peruvian authorities to refrain from releasing Fujimori, given the severity of his crimes.
“A regime of impunity has been established,” Ortiz said after Fujimori’s release. “Ignoring the ruling of the Inter-American Court really makes us a country that does not respect human rights at the international level, and that is a step that is difficult to reverse.”
Families hold up photos of loved ones who disappeared under the presidency of Alberto Fujimori [Jacob Kessler/Al Jazeera]
Peru is a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and is legally bound by the decisions of the Inter-American Court.
But Fujimori has remained a towering figure in Peru’s conservative politics, with a broad base of popular support. Proponents credit him with stabilising the economy, combatting armed leftist groups and launching infrastructure projects that improved transportation, education and healthcare.
The former president was first granted a humanitarian pardon in 2017, though it was later nullified. Peru’s Constitutional Court reinstated the pardon this month, partially on the basis of Fujimori’s advanced age and poor health.
Still, César Muñoz, the Americas associate director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera that Fujimori’s release is an “extremely serious setback” for rule of law, not to mention for those harmed.
“It’s a slap in the face to the victims,” Muñoz said.
He explained that, according to international law, humanitarian pardons may indeed be granted to human rights abusers, but two conditions must first be met.
The first condition requires countries to punish human rights abusers according to a consistent standard, without discrimination or favour.
“You cannot have rules that change depending on who the person is,” said Muñoz.
The second condition requires that medical professionals render an independent, thorough and impartial determination about the need for a humanitarian release.
“Those two elements were not there” in the case of Fujimori’s pardon, Muñoz explained.
Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, wearing a face mask, exits a prison on December 6 near Lima, Peru, where his daughter Keiko and Kenji guide him to a waiting car [Courtesy of Elio Riera/Reuters]
Following Fujimori’s release, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said it “rejects Peru’s decision” and called for the country “to take effective measures to guarantee the victims’ right to access justice”.
Cameras last week captured Fujimori, 85, stepping out of the prison gates and into the arms of his two children, Kenji Fujimori and Keiko Fujimori, both influential politicians.
The news left Javier Roca Obregón, also 85, feeling “indignant”. He has long since lost hope of ever seeing his son, Martin Roca Casas, again.
“I am 85 years old, and I have no hope,” Obregón told Al Jazeera. “I just want to die soon.”
In 1993, Casas was a student at the National University of Callao when he was tortured and detained by Peruvian military forces. His body has never been recovered.
Obregón and others believe Casas’s abduction was linked to his student activism. He remembers his son as a beacon of hope for other young people — “an example of overcoming” life’s obstacles.
Shortly before he went missing, Casas participated in a march against a tuition increase at his university. When two people started to film the protest, he and other students grabbed the camera and destroyed it — an act Obregón suspects precipitated his kidnapping.
“In Peru, the life of a poor person is worth nothing. The poor have no right to justice,” said Obregón, who originally hailed from the small, rural town of Yanama. “Just like a dog, they can kill it and then forget about it. That is what is being repeated.”
Javier Roca Obregón, right, and his wife remember their son Martin Roca Casas, who disappeared after being detained by military officials [Jacob Kessler/Al Jazeera]
Critics have said Fujimori governed with relative impunity during his term in office, from 1990 to 2000. His presidency oversaw the dissolution of Congress and the suspension of Peru’s constitution, allowing him to consolidate power.
Carolina Oyague said it was a “terrible” feeling to see the video of a smiling Fujimori being released to his children.
Her older sister Dora, 21, was one of the nine students abducted from the Enrique Guzmán y Valle National University of Education in 1993, alongside Luis Enrique Ortiz.
Oyague remembers her sister as “cheerful and creative”, a budding entrepreneur who sold everything from makeup to cakes to pay for her education.
It was not until September of this year that parts of Dora’s skeletal remains were recovered and presented to her family. To watch Fujimori walk free only a few months later left Oyague furious.
“There’s no mea culpa,” she said. “He doesn’t even have a modicum of remorse.”
Fujimori has issued vague apologies in the past but has never taken direct responsibility for the military killings or the other abuses that occurred under his administration.
If anything, Fujimori’s governing style and ideology — nicknamed “Fujimorismo” — has remained a dominant political force in Peru. His daughter Keiko was one of the leading candidates in the 2021 presidential election, as part of the conservative Fuerza Popular party.
Carolina Oyague remembers her sister Dora, who was killed when she was a 21-year-old university student [Jacob Kessler/Al Jazeera]
Inés Condori, president of the Association of Women Affected by Forced Sterilization of Chumbivilcas, was among the more than 200,000 Peruvians sterilised without their consent between 1996 and 2000, in what Fujimori’s government sought to portray as an anti-poverty measure.
Many of the victims were Quechua-speaking Indigenous women from rural communities, a fact that has fuelled accusations of ethnic cleansing. Condori, too, considers Fujimori’s release a miscarriage of justice.
“We have been fighting for 25 years, but there is no justice for us, the poor,” Condori wrote to Al Jazeera on WhatsApp. “[Fujimori] needs to be in prison forever.”
New president Milei warns of painful measures as currency value slashed, subsidies cut, public works tenders cancelled.
Argentina’s government has announced it will slash the value of its currency, the peso, by more than 50 percent against the US dollar as its new far-right president seeks radical solutions to fix the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.
President Javier Milei‘s economy chief announced the painful measure on Tuesday, saying it was necessary for Argentina to “avoid catastrophe”.
The devaluation would drop the peso’s value from 400 to the dollar to more than 800 to the dollar, a blow to tens of millions of Argentinians already struggling to make ends meet.
Economy Minister Luis Caputo announced a raft of other austerity measures, including sweeping subsidy cuts, the cancellation of tenders for public works projects, and plans to axe nine government ministries.
However, the government plans to double social spending for the poorest to help them absorb the economic shock.
“For a few months, we’re going to be worse than before,” Caputo said in his televised address.
“If we continue as we are, we are inevitably heading toward hyperinflation,” he said.
A sign outside a store reads, in Spanish, ‘We accept dollars’, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on December 12 [Tomas Cuesta/Reuters]
‘Tough pill to swallow’
The planned measures drew praise from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to whom Argentina owes $45bn, but sparked harsh criticism from some progressive activists.
Left-wing activist Juan Grabois said that Caputo had declared “a social murder without flinching like a psychopath about to massacre his defenceless victims”.
“Your salary in the private sector, in the public sector, in the popular, social and solidarity economy, in the cooperative or informal sector, for retirees and pensioners, will get you half in the supermarket,” Grabois said. “Do you really think that people are not going to protest?”
Jimena Blanco, chief analyst with risk consulting firm Verisk Maplecroft, said Milei’s government was trying to temper an otherwise guaranteed economic crash landing.
“He promised a very tough pill to swallow and he’s delivering that pill,” she said. “The question is how long will popular patience last in terms of waiting for the economic situation to change.”
Economic shock
The economic overhaul is part of the new strategy by Milei, who was sworn in on Sunday and has aggressively sought to tackle the fiscal deficit he believes is the root of Argentina’s economic woes.
A self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, Milei argues harsh austerity is needed to put Argentina back on the path to prosperity and that there is no time for a gradualist approach. However, he has promised any adjustments will almost entirely affect the state rather than the private sector.
Argentinians, disillusioned with skyrocketing inflation and a 40 percent poverty rate, have proven surprisingly receptive to his vision.
Still, Milei’s road map is likely to encounter fierce opposition from the left-leaning Peronist movement’s lawmakers and unions it controls, whose members have said they refuse to lose wages.
Mexico City, Mexico – It was the eve of Lupita Rivera’s 84th birthday, but she had chosen instead to go back in time and celebrate her 15th.
Hard of hearing and reliant on a wheelchair most of the time, Rivera was decked out in a bronze-coloured ballgown, sparkly nail polish and baby pink lipstick as she attended her “Quinceañera de Oro”, a twist on a centuries-old coming-of-age tradition in Mexico.
Normally, a quinceañera party is held on a girl’s 15th birthday, to mark her entry into adulthood. But the organisers behind the annual “Quinceañera de Oro” event want to offer the opulence of a quinceañera to elderly, blue-collar women who never had the opportunity to participate.
Rivera, for instance, grew up on a ranch in the southern state of Oaxaca. She remembers watching as the girls from town held quinceañera bashes, complete with traditional folk dances. It was a custom her rural family did not subscribe to, nor could afford.
“I made little sacrifices, lots of little sacrifices, and worked and worked, and then when I was able to give my own daughters quinceañera parties, I felt enormous pride,” Rivera said. “Now I can’t believe I’m here doing it myself.”
Newly inaugurated libertarian president warns there is ‘no alternative to a shock adjustment’.
Argentina’s new President Javier Milei has warned his country’s people to prepare for painful austerity measures as he seeks to turn around decades of economic stagnation and decline.
Taking office on Sunday after his upset election last month, Milei used his inaugural address to prepare Argetinians for the short-term hardship he insists is necessary to fix the biggest crisis in the country’s history.
In a break with tradition, the 53-year-old economist delivered his speech to supporters with his back turned to the legislature.
“There is no alternative to a shock adjustment,” Milei said after taking the presidential baton and sash. “There is no money.”
Guests at the inauguration included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban, right-wing former Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro, Uruguay’s conservative leader Luis Lacalle Pou and Chile’s leftist President Gabriel Boric.
Latin America’s third-largest economy, which has stumbled between crises for decades, is grappling with annual inflation of higher than 140 percent and a 40 percent poverty rate.
The country owes $45bn to the International Monetary Fund.
Milei, who is known for hard-right libertarian views, has promised a series of radical measures to fix the economy, including spending cuts equivalent to 5 percent of the economy and switching the Argentinian peso for the United States dollar.
A self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, Milei on Sunday reiterated that the state would shoulder the burden of getting the country’s finances in order.
“We know that in the short term, the situation will worsen, but soon we will see the fruits of our effort, having created the base for solid and sustainable growth,” he said.
In one of his first actions in office, Milei announced on social media that he had signed a decree to slash the number of ministries by half, from 18 to nine.
Milei, whose abrasive style has drawn comparisons with former US President Donald Trump, rose to fame with his diatribes against the “thieving” political class and invocations of Argentina’s “golden age” during the early 20th century.
His anti-establishment message struck a chord with Argentinians, particularly young men, after successive governments presided over the country’s decline from one of the richest economies to a cautionary tale of economic mismanagement.
Milei decisively beat former Economic Minister Sergio Massa of the centre-left Peronist coalition in a run-off election on November 19.
Still, Milei will need to negotiate with rivals to govern effectively as his coalition bloc lacks a majority in the legislature.
There have been signs that the political maverick could soften his more radical positions in office.
His cabinet includes mainstream conservatives in favour of ideological libertarians, while talk of shutting the central bank and dollarisation has dissipated in recent weeks.
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