More than 80 Latin American personalities call on Biden to close Guantanamo Bay

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Former foreign ministers, senators, former legislators, and personalities from Latin American countries political and academic world signed a joint statement urging U.S. President Joe Biden to close the Guantanamo prison.

Specifically, there are 83 signatories to this document, released on Monday, which supports the recent petition of 24 U.S. Democratic Party senators calling for the closure of the detention center established in 2002 at the Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

“We understand that this request by the legislators aims to vindicate respect for the law, the centrality of human rights and democracy in U.S. domestic and international policy,” states the letter, signed by former foreign ministers Susana Malcorra (Argentina), Celso Amorim (Brazil), Antonio Aranibar (Bolivia), José Miguel Insulza (Chile), Francisco Carrión (Ecuador), Bernardo Sepúlveda (Mexico) and Eduardo Ferrero (Peru), among many others.

“However, such a decision would transcend the local dimension and would send a clear and significant message to the world and Latin America in particular, in whose territory this prison is established,” the document continues.

The leftist signatories, calling themselves the Latin American Roundtable for Reflection, last year repeatedly requested the suspension of the elections to the Presidency of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), consider that the closure of Guantanamo “would contribute to creating a new space for conversation in the American continent”.

According to the letter, the position would favor dialogue on issues such as the strengthening of democracy, respect for human rights, inequality, cooperation and development, technology transfer, and the restructuring of the Inter-American system.

The request of this Latin American group is also supported by the conclusions of a group of United Nations (UN) experts, “for whom the forty detainees still living there are in what they call a legal limbo, outside the reach of the U.S. constitutional judicial system.”

The UN rapporteurs described the detention center as “shameful for the world” and urged the U.S. government to begin in a few days to close the site immediately.

“Remaining detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison are at risk of death from rapidly deteriorating health due to aging, and physical and mental damage suffered from cruel and inhumane conditions of incarceration,” the UN report quoted in the letter as saying.

Former U.S. President Barak Obama (2009-2017) made the closure of the base one of his priorities as president and, although he did not achieve his goal, he managed to empty part of the prison by transferring a total of 196 detainees to third countries.

During the campaign for the 2016 elections, U.S. President Donald Trump was against prisoner transfers and promised to maintain and expand that prison to fill it – he said – with “bad guys”.

The Guantanamo prison housed 800 prisoners shortly after its opening, ordered by U.S. President George W. Bush (2001-2009) after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.