HRW just put out a report entitled “Ecuador: Crackdown on Protesters” about violent protests that took place in August. HRW interviewed various protest leaders including “Salvador Quispe, the indigenous prefect of Zamora Chinchipe province” and reported that “All said that they had not been engaging in violent acts”.
But Salvador Quispe was caught on film attacking police with what looks like a section of a metal fence. You can see it at about the 58 second point of this video. The police were stationed around Ecuador’s presidential palace (Carondelet). The same video shows Carlos Pérez Guartambel, another protest leader, urging people to march on Carondelet.
HRW either didn’t bother to look at the footage or deliberately buried what was shown. Its report says it received “conflicting accounts as to whether the attackers were demonstrators or provocateurs who had infiltrated the demonstrations”. The provocateur allegation doesn’t pass the laugh test when leaders like Quispe were caught on film attacking police.
The report makes absolutely no appeal to protest leaders like Quispe to stop engaging in acts of violence. No matter how conclusive the evidence, HRW is determined to ignore and obfuscate violence perpetrated by opponents of progressive governments in Latin America.
This will surprise nobody who knows that Ken Roth, executive director of HRW, wrote this year that “”For all its faults, the U.S. government remains the most powerful proponent of human rights”. As explained here, HRW denies there is problem with having a CIA official on its board for several years – one who then returned to the US government to act as an “interlocutor between the intelligence community and non-government experts.” That just scratches the surface of what a joke HRW has become.
Joe Emersberger is co-author of “Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.”
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