The vice president, Beatriz Argimón, questioned whether Diego Burgueño’s decision to withdraw his application to be director of the National Institute of Human Rights (Inddhh) was due to his statements. The member of Todo la Verdad —a collective that brings together the victims of the MLN— had told The Observer that the vice president’s opinion on the eventual participation of victims of the guerrillas made him “definitively close the road” to running “for dignity.”
“ANDIt is important that they have legal experience or extensive militancy on the issue of human rights,” she had said. This Saturday, at a press conference, Argimón denied that the comment was directed at Burgueño.
“I don’t think it was because of my statements (that he has withdrawn his candidacy), because in reality when I was consulted, I didn’t know who they were, who had presented themselves in their entirety. Out of respect, not only for the fellow legislators who were doing the study, I told them to continue with the respective instances. What a colleague of yours asked me is how I considered the different proposals from the community, at the time of being evaluated by the legislators”, he pointed out.
He added that there has to be a “fair balance” which “does not mean that everyone is exclusively technical, or that everyone is exclusively technical, or that everyone is a militant of the cause.”
“Although the system is not very serious, the contempt it made of some of the applicants forgets in its generalization the path of struggle and, in my case in particular, for the equanimity of seeking the whole truth” Burgueño said to The Observer this weekreferring to his vision of human rights relating to the recent past.
His name had been presented by the nationalist legislator Nancy Nuñez. But the whites, as Senator Gustavo Penadés specified on Wednesday, will be leaning towards other names as new directors. The agreement in the government coalition is that the National Party appoints two directors and the Colorados and Cabildo Abierto one each, leaving the designation of the rest in the hands of the Broad Front.
Burgueño also considered a “lack of respect” the expressions of the senator Silvia Nane, who, in dialogue with The Observer, had indicated his opposition to people who are victims of the guerrilla, like him or like Sergio Molaguero, being accepted as candidates for the INDDHH as they have an “opposite vision” with the defense of human rights. Molaguero was sponsored by the Colorado deputy Omar Estévez, but that community will also go another way.
