About twenty years ago I heard Rigoberta Menchú Tum speak in person for the second time. We had used a Scholastic Update magazine excerpt from the book I, Rigoberta Menchú for quite a few years with our social studies classes at John F. Kennedy High School. She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. Then, in 1994, I began teaching at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School. Instead of teaching five 40-minute classes a day, I got to teach two 135-minute classes (plus advisory). So the following year, when we began a global-studies curriculum on human rights, I had my classes read the entire book instead of just a few selected pages. She was a kind of hero for me, and she became that for many of my students reading her story.
That second speech I went to was at Synod House, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street. She spoke mainly about the need for an international campaign against impunity, like the impunity with which the Guatemalan government was still attacking indigenous communities and activists for labor and human rights. I was disappointed with this approach. To me, at that time, it was sufficiently general in scope that it blurred some important particularities. To me, it blurred the role of the US government, which had overthrown the elected government of Guatemala in 1953, replacing it with a series of increasingly violent military dictatorships. It blurred the role of US corporations in financing these violent dictatorships as a means of protecting profits on their plantations. And it blurred the role of racism against Native Mayan peoples which allowed their treatment as less than human.
That was a long time ago. I still see the need to clearly identify and denounce imperialism and racism, but I also see the need to identify and denounce all kinds of systems and ideologies that subordinate the lives of individual people to the glittering promises of their "larger" goals. It is over six months ago that the criminal gang calling itself "Boko Haram" kidnapped hundreds of high school girls in Chibok, Nigeria. They have since then carried out more kidnappings and killings, including the bombing of a teacher's college in Kontagora. They have done all this with impunity, in part because the government of President Goodluck Jonathan seems only to be able to imagine these attacks in terms of his own re-election. He first attacked the reports of the Chibok kidnapping as the work of his political opponents. Then he attacked the demonstrators demanding the girls' return as agents of his political opponents. He only belatedly acknowledged that the kidnappings had, in fact, taken place! Impunity in these cases has been a result of both Boko Haram and the government treating regular people as disposable.
The police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this summer was committed with impunity. The police were surprised initially that the case got traction in social media and then in mass media. That's why they scrambled around with a series of unsustainable lies, like the story that police officer Darren Wilson had suffered a fractured orbital socket at the hands of Michael Brown. But the unprecedented grand jury hearing, in which the district attorney submitted mounds of exculpatory evidence (including Wilson's own testimony) turned the indictment process into a trial of the victim himself, without -- of course -- any cross examination, because the DA was acting as if he were Wilson's attorney, instead of speaking for the dead. I keep hearing this described as the rule of law. It may be the rule of a vicious order but the only law demonstrated is that power corrupts.
The "disappearance" of 43 teacher's college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico was committed with impunity. Acting on orders from the local mayor, police opened fire on a bus carrying a football team, thinking it was the student teachers, killing three people. They also fired on the students' bus, killing six and capturing the rest. The police then turned their captives over to assassins from a narco cartel.
I can write about the Israeli murders of thousands of Gazans, about Massey Energy's murders of dozens of miners, about Russian troops masquerading as "rebels" shooting down a passenger airplane. I can write about gang rapes by University of Virginia frat boys, or by gang members styling themselves an "Islamic State." But I have come to believe that disregard for individual humans, along with the ability to act without fear of consequence is -- itself -- a particular kind of crime that we have to identify and denounce.
Efrain Ríos-Montt was "president" of Guatemala in 1982 and 1983. What he presided over was mass murder, torture, rape and genocide. He was eventually charged with these crimes, but won a seat in the Guatemalan Congress in 2007, giving him congressional immunity from prosecution. In May 2013 he was convicted in Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to seventy years. In May 2014 that conviction was vacated by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala. It is a reminder to me that impunity is not just a crime of the vicious sociopaths who commit the murders, rapes and tortures. Impunity is a crime of the politicians and judges and police who collude to allow these people to walk away as if they had done nothing. Impunity is a crime of the press that chooses not to report on these murders, rapes and tortures. And if we know and do nothing, it is a crime of those of us who remain silent.
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