Dr. Filartiga, torture, and the environment

When the father of a boy who was tortured to death by police describes a situation as torture, it carries special meaning. In researching issues of human rights and the environment recently, I came across this moving statement by Dr. Joel Filartiga at an event marking the anniversary of the pathbreaking case Filartiga v. Pena-Irala (2nd Cir. 1980) (case discussed by IntLawGrrl Beth Van Schaack here):

Torture is the highest sin. Torture has no territory. It is an eternal and horrendous crime. We feel it in our spirits as if it were today. We live it every moment. We are living it with each moment.
Right now there are indirect ways of torture. Thousands of workers are dying in my country, intoxicated by agrotoxics that are being used in differential ways: There are [tens of thousands of] liters per year of pesticides used in a country of only six million inhabitants. These pesticides destroy the brainwaves . . . We have a sick country, miserable because the improper cultivation of soy has devastated our forests. Paraguay was an earthly paradise. . . . Today there are no more forests. Because there are no more forests, there is no more rain. The Paraguay river is a nest of water right now. The climate has changed completely. There are no more birds. The Guyra Campana, the bell bird that was born in Paraguay, no longer exists because there are no more forests.
Not only were Paraguayans tortured, our Paraguayan land is being tortured right at this moment. We are the fourth producer of soy in the world -- what a pity. We don't have birds, we don't have water, we don't have good health, our workers don't have any more land. . . . This is a problem of massive proportions my country is struggling with now.

Remarks of Dr. Filartiga [translated from Spanish by the law review], The Making of Filartiga v. Pena: Alien Tort Claims Act After 25 Years, 9 N.Y. City L. Rev. 249, 279-280 (2005-2006).

Skin lesions, rashes, headaches, nausea, vomiting and birth defects are among the health problems described in this IPS story about agrochemicals used on soybean plantations in Paraguay, an article that references Dr. Filartiga regarding the herbicide glyphosate.
Dr. Filartiga is quoted in this story two weeks ago, when a young man died just days after the fields next to his house were sprayed with pesticides, remarking on "chronic poisoning that leads to cancer or children born with deformities such as cleft lip." This study shows the link of pesticides to cleft lip and other birth defects.
For additional information on the environmental situation in Paraguay:

• World Wildlife Fund: Environmental Problems in Paraguay
• World Wildlife Fund: Soy Expansion: Losing Forests to Fields
• Ecologist story and video: Killing fields: the true cost of Europe's cheap meat

"An investigation in Paraguay has discovered that vast plantations of soy, principally grown for use in intensively-farmed animal feed, are responsible for a catalogue of social and ecological problems, including the forced eviction of rural communities, landlessness, poverty, excessive use of pesticides, deforestation and rising food insecurity."

On September 21

On this day in ...
... 1955 (55 years ago today), Gladys Teresa Notario Cortaza (left) was born. (photo credit) She earned university degrees in business administration. In 1985, during the 35-year dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner, she was a clandestine founder of the Partido Humanista Paraguayo. She ran for a seat in the legislature on the party's ticket in 1989, a month after Stroessner was forced out of office. Then, in 2003, she became the 1st woman to run for President of Paraguay. Notario garnered fewer than 1,200 votes -- 0.08% of all ballots cast.

(Prior September 21 posts are here, here, and here.)

On August 16

On this day in ...
... 1946, Dorothy Jacobs Bellanca died in New York City, 52 years and 6 days after she'd been born in Zemel, Latvia, the youngest of 4 daughters. In 1900 the family immigrated to Baltimore, where her father worked as a tailor and she attended public schools. Her mother died, and at age 13 Dorothy went to work, hand-sewing buttonholes on men's coat for $3 a week. (As no image of Bellanca appears to exist online, we post above left a photo of New York garment workers performing such work. (credit)) By age 15 she'd "organized female immigrant buttonhole makers into Local 170 of the United Garment Workers of America"; she'd go on to become a leading labor organizer who "promoted class solidarity, but took particular interest in organizing women." During the New Deal era -- at the request of Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, an IntLawGrrls transnational foremother -- she served on the Maternal and Child Welfare Committee. Bellanca also ran to be the Member of Congress representing Brooklyn, losing to the incumbent by a margin of fewer than 16,000 votes out of more than a quarter-million cast. Bellanca recently was featured as "Immigrant of the Day" by our colleagues at Immigration Prof Blog.
... 1869 (140 years ago today), la batallas de Acosta Ñú/Campo Grande, a struggle that had raged for days, took a particularly tragic turn: the massacre of thousands of Paraguayan child soldiers by troops from the Triple Alliance comprising Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Some of the children -- who'd been impressed into service by the leader of Paraguay (flag at right) after many adults were killed or captured -- "fought with fake beards to conceal their age." To this day the event is commemorated as Children's Day in Paraguay.

(Prior August 16 posts are here and here.)

On February 3

On this day in ...

... 1989 (20 years ago today), in Paraguay, "a violent coup" overthrew the 34-year dictatorship of General Alfredo Stroessner. "Within weeks," Human Rights Watch stated in its country report for that year, "Paraguay was transformed from one of the more repressive countries in Latin America to a much more open society preparing busily for its first free and relatively fair elections in decades."

... 1967, in the nearly century-old Pentridge prison (right), convicted murderer Ronald Ryan was hanged at 8 a.m. "He is remembered as the last person to be judicially executed in Australia."

On June 12

On this day in ...
... 1935, a ceasefire was reached in the Chaco War between Bolivia (flag at right) and Paraguay (flag at left). The 3-year conflict had resulted in 100,000 casualties. In a landmark decision respecting the roles of Congress and the President, the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp. (1936), would find constitutional the government's prosecution of the defendant corporation on charges that it had illegally conspired to sell machine guns to Bolivia.
... 1963 (45 years ago today), an assassin shot civil rights activist Medgar Evers dead outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Evers had moved there several years earlier with his wife, Myrlie, to begin work as the NAACP's 1st field secretary. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Conviction for his murder finally came in 1994, decades after the defendant, Byron De La Beckwith, had avoided conviction in 2 separate trials. From 1995 to 1998 Myrlie Evers-Williams, who had pressed for the retrial, served as the 1st woman chair of the NAACP. (credit for photo of Evers family)