Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
By Deisy Francis Mexidor/PL.
The United States promotes the accountability of others for human rights; however, a simple analysis of its recent history indicates it as a country with chronic illnesses and among the main violators.
Every year, the White House offers its report on the subject. In 2022, Secretary of State Antony Blinken considered that the report made “an objective and rigorous account of human rights conditions around the world”, of course, without touching on the situation at home.
There was talk of arbitrary homicides, torture, “inhuman” conditions in prisons and forced disappearances, among other significant problems in the 12 months before the publication of the document.
Last March a new evaluation - according to Washington standards - included almost 200 countries and territories. Blinken emphasized that unfortunately in 2022 “we continue to see a decline in human rights conditions” in all regions.
But let's look at some of what was left out. In which section appear the persistent application of police violence and the growing loss of basic rights and freedoms of the American people such as the right to vote and reproductive rights.
The murder in 2020 of the African-American George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer unleashed one of the largest waves of protests in the United States since the period of large demonstrations for civil rights in the 1960s of the last century. Floyd's death did not stop a problem that for many is systemic.
For example, a study determined that between 1980 and 2019, a total of 30,800 people died as victims of police violence in this North American nation: an average of 810 each year and the majority of them were black.
But the homicides at the beginning of 2023 of the young African-American Tire Nichols (29 years old) in Memphis and of Anthony Lowe, 36, in California, show with just two more cases after Floyd's, that the evil is entrenched, especially when It's about racial minorities.
By the way, they are still asking for justice for Keenan Anderson, another young African-American man from Los Angeles, who died in January after being detained by the police in a traffic incident and receiving several electric shocks with a TASER gun.
Statistics indicate that three people die every day in the United States at the hands of the Police and more than half are black.
Painfully, an African American is three times more likely to lose his life to police violence than a white person, data reveals.
In another order, something that also calls into question the morality of the United States to demand accountability for human rights is that, despite global condemnation, it keeps the detention and torture center open in its illegal base in occupied territory in eastern Cuba. (Guantanamo).
In that prison, 21 years after its installation, “serious human rights violations continue to be perpetuated,” say international organizations.
For many critics who demand that President Joe Biden “close Guantanamo (prison) once and for all,” what is happening there is “a national shame for the United States.”
Considered at the time as “a human rights loophole”, torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, forced disappearances and prolonged detentions have been reported in the prison.
Now the scenario in the Middle East also prompts reflection. The United States insists on supporting Israel's massacre in Gaza, against world opinion and the majority of Americans, and we call ourselves a democracy? activist Medea Benjamin said on social media.
After UN Secretary General António Guterres “invoked the rarely used Article 99 to provoke a vote in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza, the United States was the ONLY country that voted against,” stressed the co-founder of the pacifist organization CodePink in its X account.
Guterres denounced the current situation in Gaza as a “spiraling humanitarian nightmare.”
They are notes while I watch TV and read newspapers. More and more Palestinians are dying. Who stops the massacre? By the way, it is December 10, 75 years ago the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed. (Photo: Internet)
