The price of justice

JORGE ANTONIO BARRIOS was just nine years old in 1998 when the Aragua state police came looking for his father, Benito. He watched as the officers beat him and took him away. Later that day Benito died from multiple gunshot wounds. The police said they shot him in self-defence after he opened fire on them. As is customary in Venezuela, no one was prosecuted. The country has one of the world’s highest murder rates, and according to academic studies, 96% of homicides go unpunished.

Many murders are committed by security forces, and the Aragua state police are among the worst offenders. Between 2000 and 2008 the public prosecution service registered over 7,000 extra-judicial killings, around half involving state police forces. The Barrios family case, however, is exceptionally horrific.

Five years after Benito’s death, his brother Narciso had a violent row with a state policeman who reportedly had refused to pay for drinks. The police later raided the homes of four family members, stealing possessions and in two cases starting fires. Two weeks later they arrested Narciso’s nephew. After Narciso protested, they shot him dead. Despite being warned to drop the case, the family began an arduous search for justice in Venezuelan courts. Their woes were just beginning.

Over the nine years since Narciso’s death, another seven men in his family have been fatally shot. The latest was Jorge Antonio, who was killed by an unknown assailant on December 15th while riding a motorcycle. There is no proof that state police are behind the murders, but the Barrios clan says police have threatened, arrested and beaten family members. And the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has found that “in the majority of these acts, members of the same police force of the state of Aragua appear to be clearly implicated.”

The IACHR has directed the national government to provide official protection to family members, and says it has not complied. “The Barrios family is being exterminated in the face of inaction by the State, which has ignored the [IACHR’s] entreaties, decisions, recommendations and orders”, the commission said in a statement on January 18th. Venezuela’s public prosecutor, Luisa Ortega Díaz, insists that the government did order protection for the family—even though Hugo Chávez, the president, announced last year that the country would withdraw from the regional human-rights system, which he accuses of “complicity with Washington.” Even once the withdrawal takes effect this August, the government must still fulfil its legal obligations in existing cases.

Unstoppable?

“BRAZILIANS! You’ve just been taken for fools!” So wrote the organisers of an online petition calling for the impeachment of Renan Calheiros, who was elected president of Brazil’s Senate on February 1st. And on February 11th, though Carnival was in full swing, the petition notched up more than 1.36m signatures, 1% of the electorate. That gives its backers the right to present their demand to Congress, though they will have to wait until after February 19th to do so: whereas other Brazilians get three days off for Carnival, lawmakers enjoy two full weeks.

Mr Calheiros, a wheeler-dealer of the sort who excels in Brazil’s fragmented coalition politics, was president of the Senate from 2005 to 2007. But he resigned after allegations that a lobbyist had paid maintenance on his behalf to a lover with whom he had had a child, and that he then faked receipts for the sale of cattle to try to prove that he could have afforded to pay her himself. He denies all wrongdoing and has since stayed active in politics, but only behind the scenes. His allies in the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB), Brazil’s largest, evidently judged it was time for him to return to centre-stage.

Hold on tight

WALK down Calle Gamarra in Lima’s La Victoria district and you might imagine you are in Kowloon. For a dozen blocks, Gamarra and its side streets are packed with multitudes and lined by high-rise buildings, the older ones of rough and ready brick, the newer ones of glass. At ground level every square metre is occupied by shops and galleries selling clothes. The buildings above are an anarchic mixture of offices and workshops.

Gamarra is the humming heart of the rag trade in Peru, a country blessed with top-quality cotton as well as alpaca and vicuña fibre. It is home to more than 15,000 separate businesses. Since at least part of the industry is informal (ie, not legally registered), nobody knows how much Gamarra turns over, but estimates range from $1.3 billion to $3 billion a year. Not long ago La Victoria was known for crime, grime and chaotic poverty. Now Gamarra is pedestrianised and patrolled by municipal police. Nearby, investors are planning an $80m shopping centre combined with new workshop space, according to Carlos Neuhaus, who is advising them.

Never too late

GUATEMALA’S civil war, which ran for 36 years until 1996, was one of the darkest episodes in Latin America’s recent history. A UN-sponsored truth commission estimated that 200,000 people were killed during the conflict, most of them Mayan villagers, who in many cases were killed by the state security forces. Some of the worst butchery took place in 1982 and 1983, during the dictatorship of Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general who led the country for 17 months.

Past and future

WITH Europe prostrate and much of Latin America rising fast, you might have expected what was once the junior partner in a transatlantic “strategic association” to be calling the shots. But no: at a biennial summit with the European Union in Chile’s capital, Santiago, on January 26th and 27th and at a get-together of CELAC, the community of Latin American and Caribbean nations, on the following day, the Latins seemed determined to display both internal divisions and their addiction to the gesture politics of the past.

A night from hell

BRAZIL was supposed to be celebrating this week: the first of the stadiums for next year’s football World Cup staged a debut match and a party was planned to mark 500 days till kick-off. Instead the country is in mourning, the party cancelled. Early on January 27th a fire in a nightclub, Kiss, in Santa Maria, a university town in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, killed 235 people, mainly students. Most of the more than 100 injured are in a critical condition. President Dilma Rousseff, visibly upset, rushed back from a summit in Chile and declared three days of national mourning.

A catalogue of negligence caused Brazil’s most lethal fire for more than 50 years. It was started by a spark from a flare lit by the band performing in the early hours. That set light to soundproofing foam on the ceiling. Flames spread fast, releasing toxic fumes and short-circuiting the power supply, casting the venue into darkness. Security guards stopped the first to flee, apparently believing they were trying to bunk without paying: in Brazil, club patrons run up tabs and pay on the way out.