Links between human rights in Latin America and Palestine

London, ON.- Kevin Neish, one of the Canadians on the Mavi Marmara last May when the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza was brutally intercepted by the Israeli military, is a human rights activist with long experience in Latin America. He was in London last fall to talk about the Canadian Boat to Gaza and he explained what how he sees the connection between Latin American solidarity work and Palestinian human rights.

You’ve done human rights work in various countries, could you talk a bit about that?
Kevin: I started in Guatemala where I worked a human shield for opposition leaders during negotiations that led to the peace accords, including (Nobel peace Prize winner) Rigoberta Menchú, some deans from the university and a couple of labour lawyers. I also went to El Salvador a couple of times as an elections observer to their legislative and presidential elections. All those trips were under the auspices of the Central America Support Committee (CASC) in Victoria.

From Colombia, I met a trade unionist named Liliany Obando, who toured across the country in 2006 to meet with Canadian labour and solidarity groups, she stayed with me and my late wife. When she was jailed without charge for almost a year and then finally came to trial in 2009, I decided to go down to Colombia witness her trial and to stay with her family. Her family was being threatened, in particular her young daughter was being threatened by paramilitaries. So I went and stayed with them to try to make things safer.

In 2002 I worked as a human shield with the International Solidarity Movement in Palestine; I spent three weeks in Bethlehem. The plan was that I was supposed to stand with Palestinian farmers as they tended their olives trees and protect them from attacks by Zionist settlers, but in the end the Israelis invaded the West Bank and I spent most of my time in a refugee camp in Bethlehem acting as a human shield again.
What do you see as the link between your solidarity work in Latin America and in Palestine?

It’s really the same bullies, the same oppressors in both cases. I remember when the Somoza dictatorship fell in Nicaragua in 1979, the new government announced that they would honour all of the debts the former dictator had left except for one: the debt they refused to repay was what Somoza owed to the Israelis for weapons and training of the death squads that had oppressed the Nicaraguan people. I heard the same thing from people in El Salvador, about how Israelis had helped train the death squads and torturers in that country.

And we hear the same information from Argentina and Chile, about how the Israelis had helped train the torturers and death squads under those dictatorships as well. There have been lots of links between Israel and political repression in Latin America, sadly.

And now more recently with Cast Lead (the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 which left more than 1400 Palestinians dead), some Latin American countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua have sent their Israeli ambassadors packing as a diplomatic protest. Sadly, in these cases where the Israeli ambassadors are kicked out because of that country’s human rights violations, the Canadian embassy ends up volunteering to look after Israeli interests –our diplomats working for another country. It’s shameful really, but what can you expect from Harper’s government?

David Heap is a member of the Canadian Boat to Gaza national steering committee and active with the Latin American Canadian Solidarity Association in London, Ontario.

Tags:

flotilla

canadian boat to gaza

gaza