On April 14, María Elena Foronda was awarded a Goldman Environmental Prize, one of six given each year to grassroots “environmental heroes” from around the world. The community activist from Chimbote, Peru was honored for her work in cleaning up health-threatening pollution left by Chimbote’s fishmeal industry. Foronda was unable to attend the San Francisco award ceremony, however, because she did not receive a U.S. visa in time: According to Goldman Environmental Foundation program officer Beto Borges, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security delayed what should have been a routine visa process in order to investigate Foronda’s “criminal record.”
In 1994, Foronda and her husband were jailed on false charges of belonging to Shining Path, the violent Peruvian insurgent group. The couple were freed after thirteen months as a result of a campaign by Amnesty International and other groups. Later, according to Borges, Peru’s Supreme Court formally exonerated the couple. They were two of thousands of Peruvian activists, with no actual insurgent ties, who were jailed during the Peruvian government’s convulsive “anti-terrorist” campaign of the 1990s. Eventually a campaign by Peruvian and international human rights groups forced the government to free those unjustly accused of terrorism and clear their names.
This history might have served as a warning to the U.S. and other governments of the possible dangers of indiscriminate use of the “terrorist” label and of suspending legal guarantees in the name of fighting terrorism. Instead, the mere fact that Foronda was once falsely accused of terrorist activities has made her a target of continuing U.S. suspicions.
Foronda’s case is reminiscent of the way accused Communists from around the world used to be routinely denied visas to visit the United States. Some were, indeed, Communists—a label they proudly took for themselves (and, indeed, while in many countries party membership was illegal, in many others Communist parties played an important role in electoral politics). Others unable to enter the United States were not actually Communists, but simply leftist activists or sympathizers whose politics did not meet the approval of rabidly anti-Communist U.S. officials.
Today, in Latin America as in the United States, the “terrorist” label seems to be replacing “Communist” as an all-purpose way of smearing activists. In both Peru and Bolivia, leaders of coca growers groups have been dubbed terrorists for organizing protests against U.S.-funded coca eradication programs. In Chile, indigenous Mapuche activists have been arrested and charged under anti-terrorism laws dating back to the military dictatorship. Three Mapuche activists were acquitted in April of charges that they had committed “terrorist arson and threats” in connection with a dispute over indigenous rights and territory in the southern part of the country. They remain in jail, however, on other charges of “illegal terrorist association”; charges which their supporters say are equally unjust.
There are some cases where the “terrorist” label arguably fits: Peru’s Shining Path did engage in murder and intimidation of civilians, including progressive activists who did not support the group. Many recent attacks by Colombia’s FARC have similarly targeted non-supportive civilians. (Both groups are included on the U.S. State Department’s “terrorist” list; some other governments, including Brazil’s, have refused to endorse the label as applied to the FARC.) In some other cases, facts and interpretations are murky, but—though it may be provocative to point this out in the current political climate—Latin American as well as U.S. history provides us with some examples of violence used against noncivilian authorities to defend rights later recognized as legitimate (the American Revolution is one that springs to mind). Such violence should not be glibly filed under the “terrorist” label.
Very often, however—increasingly often, it seems—completely nonviolent organizers and community activists like María Elena Foronda are becoming the targets of measures nominally aimed at fighting terrorism. As in the McCarthy era, it seems that one of the aims of giving these activists frightening labels—“Communist” then, “terrorist” now—is simply to discredit their work in the eyes of the less politically-savvy. Meanwhile, says Beto Borges, María Elena Foronda and the Goldman Environmental Foundation have not given up their quest for Foronda’s visa; they hope that she will eventually be able to talk, in person, with us here about her successful community environmental work..
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the editor of NACLA Report on the Americas
