Twenty years ago, on January 11, 2002, the first prisoners entered the detention camp built at the Guantánamo naval base, the US enclave on Cuban soil.
They were 20 citizens detained in Afghanistan on suspicion of terrorism, who were transferred in a military plane from Kandahar, on a flight that lasted 20 hours during which they remained chained.
They arrived wearing orange and hooded overalls and entered a detention camp made up of open-air cages, before being transferred to the definitive prison then under construction.
The George W. Bush Administration wanted to have a place of detention where suspects would not be protected by the
habeas corpus
and judicial control of the US constitutional system, nor by the Geneva conventions for prisoners of war that govern the United States. all civilized countries. They were declared combatant enemies without a state and the prison assigned to them was conceived as a judicial limbo for all purposes: illegally kidnapped persons were transferred to third countries, under indefinite detention and without trial, and torture was practiced due to sleep deprivation and false drownings. The excuse for such aberrations was the
global war on terror
decreed against Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, after the suicide plane attacks of September 11, 2001.
The monster has a life of its own and is still open. Nor could Barack Obama finish him off, despite the fact that he signed a presidential decree on the second day of his term ordering the closure of the facility. He had the permanent boycott of those who had applauded his creation, that is, the Republican congressmen. Donald Trump even wanted to increase the number of detainees and Joe Biden has not managed to fulfill his electoral promise to close the camp when he completes one year of his presidency.
More than 700 prisoners, all of the Islamic religion, have passed through the base, and 39 detainees remain. Only ten are charged, five for the 9/11 attacks and 27 without criminal charges by the commissions that prosecute prisoners according to the code of military justice. Nine inmates have died in these 20 years, two from natural causes and seven from suicide. Around 500 prisoners left Guantánamo for their countries of origin or other host countries under the Bush presidency and another 200 under Obama, after complex procedures that include negotiations with host governments, usually in exchange for compensation. The cost of keeping the prison is 540 million dollars a year, but greater is the political and image cost suffered by the United States due to the mere existence of this judicial aberration.Guantánamo has acted in a certain sense as a flag of inhumanity that has even provided an excuse for the violation of human rights in the world.