The Bolivian Hispanic Amparo Carvajal, a historical defender of human rights in Bolivia, has been on vigil for more than 40 days before the House of Human Rights in La Paz, which was her office for several decades, to demand that it be returned to her. For the last three days, the 84-year-old woman has been living on the terrace of the house, to which she climbed a ladder. She sleeps in a tent, she lacks access to toilets and presents dehydration. She cannot enter the office because it is occupied by another group of human rights activists that does not recognize Carvajal’s leadership. She is she declared to the press: “I am going to die here. I won’t move.”
The place is surrounded by police and by the adherents of the veteran fighter, among them several opposition deputies. The Government considered it “a problem between private parties”, but it has clear political connotations. Carvajal received the support of the Catholic Church, non-governmental organizations, journalists’ associations, and other institutions. Also from several opposition leaders, who denounced that the ignorance of the directive of the Permanent Assembly of Human Rights (APDHB) led by the former nun seeks to silence the criticism of this NGO to the Government, since the other directive that disputes the entity , headed by Edgar Salazar, is supposedly close to the pro-government Movement for Socialism (MAS).
For his part, Salazar affirms that he only opposes Carvajal’s “president for life” in the APDHB and assures that she was dismissed by an institutional congress in December 2021. From this sector, Carvajal is criticized because he supposedly follows an agenda opposition and did not defend the victims of the Sacaba and Senkata massacres, which took place under the Government of Jeanine Áñez, in November 2019.
Carvajal was born in 1939 in Riaño (León, Spain) into a very Catholic family that had 14 children. She arrived in Bolivia in 1971 as a Mercedarian nun from Bérritz. In 1980, when the order left the country, she decided to leave it in order to stay. She had previously supported the priest Gregorio Iriarte in the founding of the APDHB, which replaced the Episcopal Commission for Justice and Peace, dependent on the Catholic Church, after its dismantling by the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer.
The new ecumenical organization played a major role in denouncing the repression of the military dictatorships and its leaders had to go into exile more than once. The APDHB promoted struggles such as the hunger strike that wrested Banzer’s general and unrestricted amnesty for political prisoners in 1978. During democracy, it was an important center of protest against neoliberal policies, which caused internal rifts that would end, already during the MAS governments, in their division for political reasons. This was made completely open after the crisis that caused the fall of Evo Morales in 2019.
Carvajal is considered a hero by the citizen platforms that fought against Morales’ third re-election to the presidency. One of these groups campaigned to nominate her as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Carvajal was very present at the protests against the imprisonment of former President Jeanine Añez, accused of having conspired to overthrow Morales. Simultaneously, she became a figure rejected by the ruling party, which considers that she has lost her old commitment to progressive causes and today is “used by the right.”
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The two groups that aspire to stay with the APDHB have appealed to the courts. Salazar’s faction has had police protection since it took office, considered a symbol of human rights in the country, on June 2. Carvajal won a “freedom action” that forces the rival group to stop intimidating her. The judges have not wanted to answer, for lack of conclusive elements, the most important question: who owns the institution. Without waiting for that to finally happen, Carvajal is waging her umpteenth fight to achieve justice as she understands it.
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