By Guillermo Alvarado

The United States likes to present itself as the country of dreams and human rights and hands out praise and sanctions to other peoples as an implacable arbiter, despite the fact that it is one of the countries that has signed or ratified the fewest international conventions on this subject in the entire planet.

To name but a few, it is not a party to the conventions on the Rights of the Child or the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; it does not recognize the International Criminal Court or the prohibition of cluster munitions.

It is shameful that in the richest country in the world, almost 12 million children live in poverty, suffer from malnutrition, have to work from an early age and drop out of school, which mutilates their future.

One in 10 children has no health insurance and among ethnic minorities, a quarter do not receive a complete vaccination program and all, without exception, live in a highly polluted environment.

Each person in that country produces an average of 19 tons of carbon dioxide per year, which has serious effects on human health and nature.

Nothing illustrates the contradictory way in which human rights concepts are applied there better than a couple of good examples that occurred last month.

On November 19, a jury acquitted white youth Kyle Rittenhouse who in August 2020, when he was 17 years old, fired a hunting rifle at a group of protesters, killing two people and wounding a third.

According to the court, the teenager acted in self-defense, despite the fact that he traveled armed almost 30 kilometers to commit the deed, but the worst thing is not that.

Former President Donald Trump received him with great honors and the Republican representative for the state of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, submitted a bill for him to be awarded the Congressional Medal, a decoration reserved for notable personalities.

On the other hand, Ethan Crumbley, 15, entered a Michigan school on November 30 with a 9-millimeter pistol and killed four classmates and injured six others, including a teacher.

He was charged with terrorism and will be tried as an adult, something prohibited by the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Why the difference in the treatment of these two cases? Quite simply, folks, Rittenhouse shot members of the Blake Lives Matter organization, Black Lives Matter, and for that he is almost a national hero.

Crumbley, on the other hand, killed other white kids at Oxford High School and for that he is a terrorist. What is not in question is that both had every facility to get firearms and vent the hatreds, frustrations and fears that a perverse system inoculates them minute by minute.