Interview with Darling Rios Procurator for the Defence of Human Rights
and Carlos Emilio López of the Reconciliation and Human Rights Commissions with Alberto Mora
Revista En Vivo, Channel 4
January 29, 2020
Alberto Mora : Today we have in the studio Compañera Darling Rios, Procurator for the Defense of Human Rights, and Compañero Carlos Emilio López, from the Reconciliation and Human Rights Commissions. Welcome to both of them, thank you for being with us this morning. We wanted to talk a little bit about this Joint Plan for Reconciliation and Human Rights, and if you talk to us first about who are the members or involved in this Plan for the Year 2020.
Carlos Emilio López : Good morning Compañera Darling Rios, Procurator for the Defense of Human Rights; good morning Compañero Alberto Mora. A greeting to everyone who is watching.
This Joint Human Rights Action Plan 2020 reflects a concept, which is the concept of unity and the practice of unity. We brought together the plans of various actors, both institutional and social: the Plan of the Procurator's Office for the Defence of Human Rights, as the entity that promotes and accompanies the Human Rights processes of the People of Nicaragua; the Commissions for Reconciliation and Human Rights as a communityand family space, integrating diverse leaderships; religious, social and moral leaderships, which have a commitment to the Common Good, a commitment to Reconciliation; the plans of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, as a government institution responsible for overseeing the formulation and implementation of policies and programmes for women in all sectors; the Ministry of Youth, as the government institution responsible for designing and implementing programmes for Nicaragua's youth, as one of the main actors in the development of our model promoting the common good .
And this Plan is even open to other actors to join, both social and institutional, for example the Public University, the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN), because this Plan has a series of strands allowing the involvement of different actors in the promotion, communication, and denunciation realting to the protection of human rights.
The Plan has 6 strands: One, has to do with the promotion of Reconciliation and Human Rights. The idea is that from the 7,500 Commissions for Reconciliation and Human Rights that now exist in the country, the members of those Commissions can serve as Promoters of Peace, Coexistence, Harmony and the Common Good, promoting a Culture that unlearns all forms of violence; that they be ambassadors of family unity, family harmony, work, multidimensional harmonious community life. This is one strand of action.
Another strand of action has to do with Human Rights education, to promote in a mass way the content and practices of Human Rights. This will involve holding seminars, workshops, courses, postgraduate courses, an education process, both from the education system itself and via community education in human rights. In such a way that the People of Nicaragua, its families and communities can appropriate and empower their Human Rights.
Human rights are not a matter just for elites, nor a matter for lawyers or experts, rather, human rights are universal, and last year our Good Government was promoting a campaign called "We all have rights", all rights for all people. Hence, this effort to appropriate Rights, the identification so that we are living in a Model that makes Rights a reality.
Our Government Model of Reconciliation and National Unity is not a discursive Model of Human Rights, it is a truthful Model reflecting reality, one that embodies, materializes and restores Civil, Political, Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights, the Human Rights of all generations and the Human Rights of all Sectors. Therefore, the idea is to promote in a mass way the knowledge of Human Rights via a process of promoting awareness and via education.
Another strand of this Joint Plan has to do with the denunciation, the public denunciation, nationally and internationally when sovereign rights are violated. Here we refer to the Right to Peace, the Right to Sovereignty, Independence and Self-Determination. No State, no Supranational Power, no International Organization can tell us as Nicaraguans, or dictate to the Government or the People of Nicaragua what our Political Model should be, what our Economic Model should be, what our Socio-Productive Programs should be, what our priorities should be.
Our Political Constitution, which is the Supreme Law, establishes that Nicaragua is a sovereign state, a free state, a state with self-determination, and therefore we are not in submission or under the rule of anyone. As Comandante Daniel, Nicaragua's Constitutional President, said: "On our knees only to God".
Therefore, in the spirit of dignity and loyalty to the national legal system and to our own model, when situations exist that violate that peace, that stability, that model, we will denounce them to the relevant international bodies, such as the United Nations and other global and regional bodies.
I have mentioned three strands: Promotion of Reconciliation and Human Rights; Education in Human Rights, and public denunciation. There are three more.
Alberto Mora: Darling Rios, could you complete the other three axes, please?
Darling Rios: Good morning to all the families joining us in this program.
The Joint Plan for Reconciliation and Human Rights is a plan that, in the current context, aims to create and form a culture of respect for human rights, among families, among communities and in all areas of coexistence between Nicaraguans, young people, women, men, children and older people who are meeting every day, working together and building, both within the family and outside it.
This culture of respect for human rights is also linked to the recognition of citizen responsibilities; in other words, not only do I have rights, I also have citizen responsibilities, and we are promoting these citizen responsibilities through education in human rights and citizen responsibilities, which is one of the strands proposed by Carlos Emilio.
We also have the strand of acknowledging Human Rights. Since 2007 we have a National Project that has guaranteed human rights for all, education, health, roads, and socio-productive programs. The entire National Human Development Plan promoted by our Government of Reconciliation and National Unity since 2007 is a plan to promote the dignity of the human person, and has come to guarantee rights on a daily basis.
In other words, today a Nicaraguan wakes up, can take a bath from running water, has drinking water, has electricity, can go to pay a ticket, on subsidized Urban Bus Transport, can send their children to school for free. Other people may be able to pay for a private school, but in general, the great mass of children in Nicaragua, are guaranteed the Right to Free Education. Likewise, today a person who gets sick and can go to a hospital; a woman who has an illness, like cancer for example, that we would not want to exist but it exists and has to be treated and treated in dignified conditions that must be guaranteed for those women, she can go to hospital and receive free attention imparted with human warmth.
These rights are there day in day out. So, every day we enjoy rights but perhaps it does not occur to us to think about how we take care of them, how we defend them too, because they are rights we have acquired. They are rights that in this process of restitution of basic rights that we have lived together since 2007 we have taken as normal. But this cannot mean we are then going to attack these rights by practising soem kind of destabilization, or that some people careless of the need of other people to have or to count on these rights, set out to ask for sanctions or actions against Nicaragua's people, in a way that causes concern, about how long we can continue to guarantee these basic rights. Thus, we have to work on recognizing and acknowledging these rights, we need to take care of these rights, because we have to take care of the dignified life that we have been building for our people.
Therefore, this strand of action promoting recognition of human rights for women, children and youth is important because we have been advancing in human rights on a daily basis and we must get to know them, we must be able to compare with what was happening before 2007.
Before 2007, there was no free education, no free health care, no decent infrastructure in schools, which were also privatized; we did not have the roads we have today; we did not have electricity all day like we have today, much less an energy matrix that covers more than 90% of the national territory. There are so many rights that we have been building and for us one of the main strands of action that we have to implement is this recognition of rights.
We also have the strand of action that has to do with the formation of values for the protection of Life. This also has to do with citizenship responsibilities, because the culture of respect for Human Rights has to do with the recognition that People are born free, that we can choose how we want to live, that we can choose, but we must do so with Respect for others.
We must know that somone cannot impose on another belief in something they do not believe in; or impose on a woman that she has live with a man when she does not want to, because we see men who murder their partners for that reason. But a woman has the right to decide how long she wants to live with a man; she should not fear being murdered because she may decide not to live with someone.
Therefore, when we speak of the formation of values and recognition of the need to protect of life, and to live with dignity, this also has to do with the prevention of murders, of femicides that occur unfortunately. We should have a culture of respect for life, for the life of women, for the life of children, for the life of youth, for the life of families, for the life of other beings; and not only of other human beings, let's say our families, women, men, but also other living beings, animals, we must promote harmonious Coexistence with Mother Earth, with the environment. In other words, to change this current culture is to form a new culture of respect, values and harmonious coexistence.
We have already talked about this demand for respect for Sovereign Rights as well. Within this whole process we are now meeting with the Commissions of Reconciliation and Human Rights throughout the country; we have already been in four Regions. We have been in Estelí, in Carazo, in Rivas, in León, in Chinandega; that is to say, we have already worked in some departments and we are talking about a training cycle that we propose to have, because these are strands but at the same time they have a transversal aspect.
We are going to be educating ourselves in Human Rights, but not only in Human Rights of people or of families, but also in those Rights that we have as Peoples, as Nations, those Rights to live in free Self-Determination, those Rights to choose our social and economic andpolitical Model, which is our Model of democracy with social justice.
If we are to talk about democracy we need to look at the variety of democracy in Chile for example, in other words, who wants that style of democracy? Today there is a whole Revolution of the Chilean People fighting for a truer democracy with social justice. Moreover, Chileans are fighting to create a new Political Constitution, because the Political Constitution that exists in Chile is the Constitution that was in place when the dictator Pinochet was in power.
So in Nicaragua we do have a model of democracy with social justice, a constitution that responds to the human rights of the people, which is based on guaranteeing human rights for the people. Itf that were not so we would not be an exemplary country in terms of gender equality and equity, we call it equal democracy. In terms of gender equality, we are the fifth country in the world, it would be incoherent to say that we have a Democracy with social justice if we did not have those achievements tha one can see when reviewing the matter at a global level.
So it is important to emphasize that we have the right to have sovereignty and therefore to defend our sovereignty as well, our sovereign right to choose, and that is what we are doing. That is one of the strands we are working on.
We are also working on the sense of awareness of women and youth and the mobilization we are developing throughout the country to promote their rights. And that is where the Commissions for Reconciliation and Human Rights play a fundamental role. They have a presence at the community level and they are the people who are in direct contact with families. They are leaders, people who represent or who are in direct contact with the churches, with all the community spaces that exist.
Alberto Mora: Let's continue with the Reconciliation and Human Rights Commissions, you were talking about 7,500 in the whole country, I remember when there were only 1,000.
In this regard, I would like to ask you for a little more information about the functioning of these more than 7,500 commissions. I used to joke with you and say, I remember, when there were 1,000 commissions that it was like the arduous work of many ants developing that process, above all at a community level.
In that regard, how do these structures, if they can be called structures, function in the different places where they operate? The other day you had the data by department, and how they were progressing in each of them, I understand that they are already working all over the country.
Carlos Emilio López: I'd like to acknowledge the 7,500 Reconciliation and Human Rights Commissions that have been formed throughout the country, and to recognize their work of depolarization, the work of reducing tension they have carried out in the communities, the work of communication and the promotion of harmony, fraternal love, the culture and sense of family, because we are all one family. There is only one type of blood that runs through all Nicaraguans, there is only one heaven that shelters us, we have a common history, common heroes and heroines, a common culture and tradition, and that sense of belonging to this motherland, to this country, of concern for others, of dignity and a sense of belonging.
These 7,500 commissions are made up of diverse leaderships. One of the strongest leaderships is the evangelical leadership. We should recognize the work of all the evangelical pastors of Nicaragua that are integrated in the commissions; in the majority of these commissions, the coordination teams include a pastor, or several pastors of different denominations.
Here different Christian and denominational expressions are participating out of active pacifism, making the Beatitudes a reality: "Blessed are those who fight for peace, for they will be called sons and daughters of God.” Religious leaders have joined the Commissions out of that spirit of the Gospel of peace, the Gospel of understanding and the Gospel of the Common Good.
As regards this recognition of community leadership, we should note, as our Procurator said, that there are teachers, nurses, older adults, who have a certain ancestry in the community and who have always played a motivating role and are a reference of authority within the spaces of community coexistence. That is to say, the Commissions are composed of those social and community leaderships that already exist within the community.
Among the 7,500 Commissions we have 15 Departmental Commissions and we have two Regional Commissions on the Caribbean Coast. One Commission is for the North Caribbean Autonomous Region and another operates in the South Caribbean Autonomous Region. We then have 153 Municipal Commissions. And the rest of the Commissions are of district and community character. All the Districts which make up their respective Municipalities are represented and the communities that integrate those Districtshave their own Commission
So we can talk with certainty when we affirm that the whole national territory has seen a flourishing of Commissions; we have traveled all over the Country, North, South, East and West crossing all the departmental and municipal limits, and we have verified the installation of these Commissions and their operation.
We are not going to continue installing more Commissions because although the whole country has 10,000 communities, there are some communities where the geographical distances are very short or communities that are very small that are made up of 10 or 15 houses. So forming Commissions throughout the country was very difficult, but the 7,500 commissions we have formed cover all the 10,000 communities that exist in Nicaragua; in other words, the entire country now has these spaces promoting harmony, coexistence and common understanding among Nicaraguans.
The Commissions have taken on the task, as we said at the beginning, of becoming the National Movement for the Promotion of Reconciliation and Human Rights. They will play the role of tehir communiteis' voice, of a bridge, of facilitating common understanding, and will be the exponents of this process of education, communication and appropriation of our Human Rights.
Our Procurator said something very important, and that is to make it possible for the Nicaraguan people to identify all the processes of restitution of Human Rights that we are living through, so people are aware of that, so our people can see, feel and identify for themselves. There is an expression of Jesus in the Gospel, where he says: "He who has eyes to see, let him see, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear".
The availability of vaccines in hospitals, that is the Right to Health; the expansion of health infrastructure in the country, that is the Right to Health; the construction of maternity homes, health centers, modern hospitals, hospitals with state-of-the-art technology, all in all a health infrastructure that not only guarantees free, good quality, appropriate treatment, but also specialized care, care focused on the complicated diseases people present, care for chronic diseases. In other words, making it possible for our people to identify that all this is making the Right to Health a reality.
Or again, over the last 13 years, more roads have been built than in all of Nicaragua's history. That is to make true the Right to freedom of movement, to make it a reality, the Right to move fromone place to another, the Right to have interconnectivity. These are Human Rights!
Or take, the availability of food in the country through all the food security programs that have been created, the Zero Hunger Program, the Healthy Backyards Program, all the programs that allow rural families access to seeds, to technology, to training, to property security, to accompaniment for improved productivity in the countryside. All that makes what the Constitution says come true so that Nicaraguans realize their right to be protected from hunger.
To have cut chronic child malnutrition, severe child malnutrition, acute child malnutrition managing to reduce chronic child malnutrition by two thirds in these last 13 years. That is to make a reality of the Right to Food, the Right to Food Security and Food Sovereignty.
In other words, the more than 40 social and productive programmes that the Government of Reconciliation and National Unity has at its disposal make a reality of each of the human rights established in the international covenants, conventions and human rights treaties, as well as the rights expressly recognized in our Constitution.
That is to say that the model of government, the model of human development being developed and implemented in Nicaragua, is a model of rights, of individual rights, of collective rights. We have to create awareness of this in all sectors of the population, so that all sectors can take pride, feel dignified and identify with these rights that are being realized. We can breathe them, we can see them, we can feel these Human Rights in our lives every day!
As Darling, our Procurator, said with the daily examples she pointed out: A citizen gets on the bus and the cost of the bus is the same as it has been for many years. That is the right to have subsidized basic services, the right to basic services of water, electricity, transportation, and basic sanitation.
The State has invested billions of córdobas in making these social rights a reality; we are talking about the fact that 80% of the General Budget of the Republic is destined to social issues; that is to say, we are talking about a Budget with a human face, a Budget of public investment in Human Rights. So, 23% of the General Budget of the Republic is allocated to Education; 23% of the General Budget of the Republic is allocated to Health; another important percentage is allocated to Housing.
We have a range of programmes that guarantee access to housing for Nicaraguans. The Constitutional Right mandates that Nicaraguans have the right to decent housing. So on that score you will find the Roofing Plan, there you will find the "Bismarck Martínez" Hosuing Program. Addressing that issue you will find all the Programs where there is a process of unification between public and private efforts, guaranteeing housing subsidies, even to the middle class for example, with low interest rates and with practically symbolic premiums.
In 2006 we had a deficit of 500,000 houses in Nicaragua, and we have been reducing this deficit rapidly throughout the country, such that houses are no longer only built for the upper-middle class, but for all sectors of the population.
Alberto Mora: Of course! And there we can go on, continue...
Carlos Emilio López: We have to keep going! Keep going! Keep going!
Alberto Mora: The list is longer... drinking water, is another area. In Education one might say that despite all the effort that has been made as well on that issue, which constitutes basic Rights but which sometimes are, I don't like to use that word, but other people use it a lot, they are sometimes made invisible!
Darling Rios: Or they get taken for granted. That's really an important thing. I like to go back to this because a common saying in the struggle of the Chileans, nowadays: "Let Dignity become a habit". In Nicaragua, dignity has become a habit; it's not that you make it invisible, it's that you naturalize it.
I remember that before 2007 you spent almost the whole day without electricity and when the electricity came on you'd say "the electricity's back", or else everybody applauded or shouted in the Barrio, so you realized, “ah, the electricity has come because people are shouting!” But today all day you have access to energy in your house and you also have access to drinking water, that is, it has become the most normal thing.
Today when you go to a hospital, if a woman died or a child died at birth, that's a scandal, it's news, the family goes and makes accusations of negligence, because it is not normal, it is not natural; before it was natural. So, I think it's not that it is made invisible, but that people don't think about it, therefore, it has to be thought about, it has to be said.
Alberto Mora : I think you may have misunderstood me. I wasn't thinking about people in general, I was thinking about the people who are not interested in acknowledging that restitution of rights.
Darling Rios: Yes, of course, those people not only make rights invisible, they manipulate them as well.
Alberto Mora: I was thinking not so much of people who don't pay attention but of people who reallydon't want to notice! As Carlos Emilio said, he who has eyes to see, let him see, and he who has ears to hear, let him hear.
But, well, there are people who have eyes but they don't want to see, because it doesn't suit them, I'm talking about those little opposition grouplets, those people. That's what I'm talking about.
Of course, there are also people who say, let's do better! That's normal, you already have this or that, you already have the house, now you want the porch. That's normal for people and that's what happens. But, well, that list is huge... Carlos Emilio, will the number of Commissions grow do you think,? Does it depend on the reality in each territory?
Carlos Emilio López: it depends, but with these 7,500 Commissions, as I told you before, we cover the entire National Territory.
There's an important strand we haven't mentioned. We have mentioned five, but the sixth is that of Communication. We are going to work on the communication on Human Rights in all areas, and the main communicators of Reconciliation and Human Rights are going to be the mainly but not only the members of the commissions. Teachers too, but also leaders of social sectors, by which I mean the labor unions, small and medium business people, community movements...
In other words, the idea is for the Commissions for Reconciliation and Human Rights, together with other institutional, social and community sectors of the population, should become a national voice for Peace, understanding, unity and Human Rights. And of course the media, the citizen power Media, the social networks, all of us who have a Internet account, a social network account, all of us must become promoters, communicators of a positive, proactive, constructive, unifying message of Respect for Human Rights and Nonviolence. In such a way that we all contribute to becoming agents, subjects, and instruments of Peace.
Alberto Mora : Darling Rios, when will other entities, say UNAN, or all the other compañeros you mentioned, become integrated in this process?
Darling Rios: In fact, the Joint Plan for Reconciliation and Human Rights is a plan that has been formulated with all the other institutions; that is, fromteh beginning of the Work Plan we have been acting together with the Ministry of Women, the Ministry of Youth, the Office of the Procurator for the Defence of Human Rights, the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior.
As we have stated, the Reconciliation, Justice and Peace Commissions also carry out educational work.
So we are going to be developing Diplomas, seminars and as we develop that work we will do so with the Universities; so throughout the year to come we will indeed be working with all these other institutions and coordinating, organizing ourselves with these other entities, and institutions.
Carlos Emilio López: The Plan, as our Procurator says, also interconnects with the Plans of other institutions; for example with the Ministry of Education.
With the Ministry of Education we are working on the elaboration of workbooks on Rights and Responsibilities; so, there will be workbooks for primary school children, for adolescents and young people in secondary school; and also, for teachers, methodological guides. That way every level in the education system will have materials with which to communicate, to reflect, to share, and to help all of us become Educators and subjects able to make our own the concepts of Peace, Reconciliation and Human Rights.
Alberto Mora: Thank you... Thank you, Darling Rios, procurator for the Defense of Human Rights, for coming on the program. Thank you, too Carlos Emilio, for being with us.