Blog post
Faced with an unprecedented pandemic, governments across the Americas have begun to respond to COVID-19 in a variety of ways, ranging from calling for states of emergencies, to imposing travel bans, to implementing quarantines. Stakes are high and the way governments respond to this pandemic could determine the future of millions of people.
Governments are ultimately responsible for protecting people and their human rights but have often failed to do so in the Americas. Deep inequality, structural discrimination, a tendency to revert to repressive policing, censorship, underfunded public health systems, and inadequate social security and labour protections long predate the outbreak of COVID-19 in the region.
This book’s goal is to dialogue with the large and growing community of professionals, government officials, activists, and academics who are engaged in our region to promote the work of confronting the authoritarian or violent past of our countries. Latin America has become, in fact, one of the most dynamic areas in the search for routes to transitional justice in recent decades.
An estimated 60 to 80 percent of female migrants from Central America are sexually assaulted on their journeyand perpetrators often act with total impunity. As thousands of Central American women weigh the risks of migrating to the US each year, they must take into account an extra peril: An estimated 80 percent of female migrants from Central America are victims of sexual abuse at the hands of criminal groups, human smugglers, or corrupt officials during the journey.
Torture in children happens during peace times and during political violence and war conflicts. The majority of torture victims happen during peace times. The high-risk groups are impoverished children living in the street, children deprived of parental care, children in conflict with the law, and children in detention. During political violence and war the high risk children are the children detained during political violence, child soldiers, children internally displaced in refugee camps, detained children during the war against terrorism and children tortured by peacekeeping forces.
Rather than starting out from a preconceived list of items that a gender sensitive reparations program has to abide by, it would seem that, in order to claim that women have been taken into account, a policy of reparations must begin by including the voices of women .
The multidimensional child poverty study, conducted jointly with the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), demonstrated the worsening trends since 2006, with 78 per cent of Guatemalan children living in conditions of monetary poverty and/or deprivation of rights (multidimensional). The situation is even worse among indigenous children, with 89.4 per cent of these children living in poverty.