Translated by Alessandra Fumagalli
The pacific protest has always been considered as a strong way to tell the truth, to spur the positive change. The trigger factors are different: from the inequalities to the climate change, from the repression to the injustices. There are more and more people who take to the streets in order to make count of their rights, their freedoms, their ideals.
Meanwhile, there are more and more governments that put down these revolts with bloodshed, that issue more repressive regulations in order to avoid them, and sometimes they also punish the demonstrators. Random captures, tortures, illegal use of the force, killings, and violation of human rights have gained the upper hand by now.
Concretely, in 2022 there are more than 85 countries where the governments decided to act with an illegal use of the force in order to suppress the protests, and in 27 countries the police used lethal arms, and there are more and more governments that implement regulations to repress every kind of demonstrations. We are in front of at a rather worrying picture, especially in Latin America.
In Chile, the protests are majorly caused by the desire to obtain more equality and a respect of the human rights. Illicit requests, whose response by the authorities is the use of the violence, with the repression and detention (based on two main principles: discrimination and imbalance of the sentence). High costs of living, corruption and the raise in the costs of the underground’s tickets led to the protests in 2019 and in 2020, where several demonstrators were unfairly incarcerated. These protests’ years have obviously been characterized by repression and violence.
Concretely, according to the Amnesty International’s reports, more tan 12,500 people have been brought urgently to the hospital, 347 were eye-injured , 5,558 people were victims of institutional violence and, to conclude, 1,946 crimes committed by the policy have been reported. These are alarming data, that make it clear how much Chilean institutional bodies can’t tolerate peaceful protest.
Inequality, racism, violence, and the civil war caused, during the years, a series of protests and strikes in Colombia. Again, instead of listening ad trying to accept the requests of a population that is at the end of its tether, the only solution used by the government was violence. According to the esteems of Amnesty International, 84 people have been killed between April and June 2021, and 1,790 were the injured people. The eye injures are the most spread ones, due to the use of rubber bullets and teargas. The Colombian case is very important due to the violence used by the police during the protests in 2021. The excessive use of the force, torture, inhuman treatment, attacks against indigenous and eventually sexual violence against women and the LGBTIA+ community. The demonstrators’ bodies became a battleground: they were punished because they spoke out, manifested a social, economic, and political needs, that has been going on for years.
In 2022 the Cuban government adopted a new penal code, that established detention from four to ten years for those who “endanger the constitutional order and its common functioning”, criminalizing, at the same time, the opposition. Cuba is a country characterized by the lack of food and medicaments, by the ongoing power outage and by a missing sanitary assistance, a difficult lifestyle that damaged the population. The basis of the protests on the 11th July 2021 was the desperate request of changing. Again, the government deprived the population of its right to express and to meet pacifically, through mainly the power outage, internet’s interferences, the police and, obviously, random captures.
During the demonstrations, a strategy used by the Ecuadorian authorities is the declaration of the state of emergency in order to use armed forces in the territory and, consequently, militarize the areas. That is what happened in 2019, after a series of protests in the country, the Ecuadorian president declared the state of emergency with the following use of the armed forces. It is important to underline that only in the October (from the 3rd to the 12th October 2019) 1,192 people were captured, 1,340 injured and 8 died. Moreover, in 2022 the Ecuadorian president launched an administrative order, that established that the armed forces must repress the terroristic threats. The lack of the description of the so-called terroristic threats can cause the repression of any kind of dissent, protest, activism for human rights that can bother the high ranking government officials.
2021 onwards, in Mexico the protest regards principally the women. In 2021, the Mexican police put down a revolt led by Mactumactzà’s female students (74 captured women and 19 captured men) with bloodshed. It wasn’t a violent protest, but a regressive response of the government was not long in coming. According to the Amnesty International’s analysis, carried out by collecting proofs, the demonstrators were pulled by their hair, they were taken by the neck, hit in the face, back and abdomen, and there were no shortage of racist, classist, and misogynistic insults. As far as these protests are concerned, it was terrified the response given by the police with regard to the (forced) disappearance of 43 Ayotzinapa school students in 2014. According to the Amnesty International, the Mexican police told the demonstrators that “they will be 95, instead of 43 disappeared students”.
It is clear how the protest is a way to enforce one’s rights and ideals. The main problems is that the governments can’t see the protest as an everyone’s right, but as a threat to their powers.
Sources are freely available at:
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr22/3133/2020/en/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/repression-in-the-spotlight/
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/05/right-to-protest-under-threat-mexico/
https://www.amnesty.it/una-mappa-interattiva-sulla-repressione-delle-proteste-pacifiche-nel-mondo/
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Mondo Internazionale APS - Riproduzione Riservata ® 2023
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L'Autore
Giorgia Milan
Giorgia Milan, classe 1998, ha conseguito una laurea triennale in “scienze politiche, relazioni internazionali e governo delle amministrazioni”, con una tesi riguardo la condizione femminile in Afghanistan, e successivamente una laurea magistrale in “Human rights and multi-level governance”, con una tesi riguardo la condizione delle donne rifugiate nel contesto dell’attuale guerra Russo-Ucraina, il tutto presso l’Università degli studi di Padova.
I suoi interessi principali sono i diritti umani, in particolare i diritti delle donne. È proprio il forte interesse per questi temi che l’ha spinta a intraprendere un tirocinio universitario presso il Centro Donna di Padova, durante il quale ha avuto la possibilità di approcciarsi al mondo della scrittura e della creazione di contenuti riguardanti la violenza di genere e le discriminazioni.
In Mondo Internazionale Post Giorgia Milan è un'autrice per l'area tematica di Diritti Umani.
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