Paris (EFE).- Latin America was in 2022 a good reflection of the global trend to restrict some human rights -such as protest or expression-, especially in cases like Peru last December, according to the general secretary. of Amnesty International (AI), Agnès Callamard.
“The trends in Latin America reflect well the global trends, so we have seen the right to demonstrate, the right to freedom of expression and the right to collective action through protest were restricted or repressed through the use of force. ”, Callamard lamented in dialogue with EFE in Paris, where AI presented its global report on human rights in 2022.
For Callamard and his organization, Peru was one of the most illustrative cases of the global “regression” of human rights observed in 2022, a year in which global attention was almost monopolized by the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
“The indigenous peoples (of Peru) were specifically targeted in the context of political protests against the situation of the president,” he lamented.
But Peru’s is not, according to Callamard, the only negative example. The treatment of refugees and migrants – often from Venezuela or Central America – worsened in countries like Mexico or the United States.
Likewise, AI’s general secretary traveled to Colombia in 2022 and, in her meetings with “the groups of the 2021 protests in Cali and elsewhere, verified that “there has been no accountability” for the repression of that movement. social violence, which left many women dead, injured and victims of “sexual violence”.
Callamard also specified that in 2022 violence continued against “vulnerable” sectors of the Colombian population, including some indigenous communities, whether by “military forces, armed groups or by corporate actors, including mining or oil companies.”
However, AI’s general secretary optimistically stated that “there are signs that the Colombian government (now headed by Gustavo Petro) is prepared to take positive action.” In this sense, she highlighted the adoption in 2022 of the law that decriminalized abortion in Colombia for certain circumstances.