By Ricardo Candia Cares on August 10, 2018
“We are firmly committed to the non-application of the Antiterrorist Law to Indigenous Peoples due to acts of social demand”, was Michelle Bachelet’s program, that she carried out with strength and conviction.
The so-called anti-terrorist law that punishes the Mapuche people on a daily basis has been accused by the United Nations rapporteurs as being an instrument that:”….weakens the possibility of a fair trial and makes it less likely that the truth of what happened will be clarified”. And it has asked the Chilean government to refrain from applying it.
However, Michelle Bachelet applied it punctually, viciously and systematically during her tenure as Chile’s president.
Bachelet, her ministers and the parties that supported her ignored the indications of the organs of the United Nations and the formulations that the International Labor Organization (ILO) expresses in Agreement 169, in relation to the rights of the indigenous peoples.
More so, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a 2014 ruling, forced Chile to overturn convictions for the improper application of the Anti-Terrorism Law against Víctor Ancalaf, José Huenchunao, Jaime Marileo, Patricio Marileo, Ciriaco Millacheo, Aniceto Norín, Pascual Pichún and Patricia Troncoso.
And during her time as president, the police killed, in those so called, “confusing incidents”, no less than fifteen Mapuches.
The violations of the rights of the Mapuche people have not been the only reprehensible conduct by the new High Commissioner for Human Rights on her list of resignations and betrayals.
Michelle Bachelet’s administration has not been characterized by an advance in the human and social rights of the most impoverished and punished sectors of our country.
Quite the contrary, in vast marginalized communities of the workers and poor, human or social rights have been abandoned. In populations at the mercy of poverty, crime, and trafficking, armed gangs, where there are no pharmacies, supermarkets or services and where the police do not even enter, the human and social rights defined by the United Nations, from where the former president is now going to pontificate, are a bad joke beyond comprehension.
The main debt she left behind in Chile having to do with human rights has to do with her active and enthusiastic role in deepening a culture that terrorizes the homes of the people, condemning them to poverty, to marginality, eternal debts, schools in very bad condition, and a health care system of misery.
Bachelet has perfected an economic system that steals from workers through the AFPs (pension system) and therefore condemns them to a terrible life in their later years
Michelle Bachelet contributed as few others have to poisoned environments that affect millions of poor Chileans living near the famous Sacrifice Zones, that includes generators, mines, salmon farms, plantations that dry up the land, industries that rot everything, companies that prey on what they touch.
Awarded the highest environmental prize of the United Nations Organization “Champions of the Earth”, the former president, between both mandates, authorized the installation of 44 coal or oil generators where cancer will spread with the wind.
It will be interesting to witness the next visit of Bachelet, as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who will come to Chile to learn about human rights in a country where human rights abuses were rampant when she was in power.
It is enough to laugh or cry.
Source: El Clarín of Chile, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau