Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1089, July 24, 2011
1. Argentina: Is Barrick Gold Shrinking Chilean Glaciers?
2. Puerto Rico: Opposition Mounts to Gas Pipeline
3. Costa Rica: Medical Workers Gain Little in Strike
4. Colombia: Teachers Flee Paramilitary Threat
5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Argentina: Is Barrick Gold Shrinking Chilean Glaciers?
In a report published on July 19, the Argentine branch of the environmental group Greenpeace charged that operations by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation in the Andes at the border with Chile had already significantly damaged three small glaciers. Citing a 2005 technical study, Greenpeace said the surface of the Toro 1, Toro 2 and Esperanza glaciers “diminished by between about 56% and 70% because of the activities carried out by Barrick” even before mining operations had begun. The regions on either side of the border are arid, and farmers in the valleys largely depend on Andean glaciers as a source of water.
Barrick, the world’s largest gold mining company, has two open-pit gold and silver mines near the glaciers. Veladero, in Argentina’s northwestern San Juan province, has been in production since 2005, with a projected life of 14 years; Pascua Lama, partly in San Juan province and partly in Chile’s Huasco province, is scheduled to open in 2013, with a projected life of 21 years.
Greenpeace attributes the shrinkage of the three small glaciers to exploratory and other preliminary work on the mines, such as road construction, drilling and the use of explosives, which could cover the glaciers’ surfaces with dust and discarded material. Although most glaciers are being affected by global warming, Greenpeace says other glaciers in the area didn’t experience the same shrinkage as the three closest to the mine. Environmentalists expect that the other glaciers will suffer similar damage as mining operations expand.
The Veladero and Pascua Lama mines have been targets of protests for years [see World War 4 Report 5/17/08]. Barrrick originally intended to move the three glaciers as part of the operation, but this plan was shelved after strong protests by Chilean environmentalists. Argentina has passed a law for the protection of Andean glaciers which could limit damage from the mines. However, Barrick has filed for injunctive relief from the measure, and in November 2010 an Argentine judge suspended the law in San Juan province, ruling that it would cause economic damage. (Adital (Brazil) 7/20/11)
*2. Puerto Rico: Opposition Mounts to Gas Pipeline
Two US Congress members, Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-AR) and Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL), are seeking signatures from their colleagues on a letter to US president Barack Obama about a proposed natural gas pipeline in Puerto Rico. “At a time when we should be promoting renewable, clean energy throughout the country, a 92-mile pipeline--nearly as long as the entire island--is a step in the wrong direction,” the representatives wrote in the letter, which has been endorsed by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA). The project (“Gasoducto” in Spanish) shouldn’t proceed without an environmental impact statement conducted by the US Corps of Engineers, according to Grijalva and Gutiérrez. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 7/12/11)
The activity in Congress reflects growing opposition to the $450 million project, which would carry imported natural gas from the Peñuelas-Guayanilla area on the southwest coast to a place near San Juan on the north coast.
Rightwing governor Luis Fortuño of the New Progressive Party (PNP) Is promoting the Gasoducto as a way to transition from oil to natural gas; pipeline advocates say this will save $60-$100 million a year, about one-third of the cost of generating Puerto Rico’s electricity. But on July 13 the People’s House (“Casa Pueblo”), a respected environmental organization based in the town of Adjuntas, released a study suggesting that any savings would be offset by environmental damage and risks to the 200,000 people who live near the area the pipeline will pass through. Critics also note that the biggest contractor for the project, Pedro Ray Chacón, has no experience with this type of operation; he is said to be personally close to Gov. Fortuño. (People’s World 7/21/11)
On July 22 the New York daily El Diario-La Prensa ran an editorial opposing the pipeline and calling on “Puerto Ricans outside the island…to express their concerns.” (ED-LP 7/22/11) The paper is the main Spanish-language periodical in New York City, which has a large population of Puerto Ricans and people of Puerto Rican descent, including two members of Congress.
Adding to the Gasoducto’s problems, in a letter dated July 12 the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) refused to let the EcoEléctrica company proceed with planned modifications to its terminal in southern Puerto Rico until the company complies fully with FERC regulations. The modifications are necessary if the terminal is to handle the liquefied gas when it arrives in Puerto, so this delay will in turn delay use of natural gas in electricity generation at least until 2012. (Claridad (Puerto Rico) 7/19/11)
An opinion poll published by the daily El Nuevo Día in March indicated that 56% of the population wasn’t convinced that the Gasoducto would lower the costs of electricity, with only 27% thinking that it would; 17% were undecided. An overwhelming 61% of the people polled said they were concerned about the safety of pipeline, while just 19% expressed confidence. The poll was carried out by The Research Office, Inc., a company based in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, from Mar. 7 to Mar. 14. El Nuevo Día noted that that this period included the Mar. 11 earthquake and tsunami that devastated a nuclear power plant in Japan—at a time when Puerto Ricans were still concerned about a January 2010 earthquake that hit southern Haiti, some 400 miles to the west. (END 3/27/11, 4/1/11))
*3. Costa Rica: Medical Workers Gain Little in Strike
After 24 hours of negotiations, the Costa Rican government and all the unions representing medical workers for the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS) signed an agreement on July 23 ending a strike that the unions had started four days earlier over economic issues. This was the first major strike to confront President Laura Chinchilla since she took office in May 2010. As in a number of Latin American countries, social security includes medical care in Costa Rica, and the CCSS employs some 48,000 medical workers at 29 hospitals.
The unions’ main demand was for the government to pay off its debt to the CCSS, which the unions say has reached $1.446 billion. The government holds that the number is much lower. In the settlement the government agreed to pay 85 billion colones (about $169 million) for now; the two sides also agreed to set up a joint commission to study the fund’s financial problems. The unions’ other major demand was for CCSS workers to continue getting full credit for sick days in the calculations for their pensions and yearly bonuses. The government wouldn’t back down from its decision to start giving partial credit to CCSS workers, as it does with other workers. The government also held firm on its decision to dock strikers for the four days they were out, although there are to be no other reprisals.
During the strike the government and the unions gave dramatically different accounts of how effective the action was. The CCSS said 5% to 10% of the workers observed the strike call; the unions claimed that while many doctors continued to work, 75% to 80% of the other medical employees had participated in the walkout. (Adital (Brazil) 7/20/11; Prensa Latina 7/20/11; AFP 7/23/11 via El Universal (Caracas); La Nación (San José) 7/24/11)
*4. Colombia: Teachers Flee Paramilitary Threat
All 44 teachers at the public high school in Las Delicias, a village in Tierralta municipality in the northern Colombian department of Córdoba, sought refuge in Montería, the department’s capital, on July 22 after being threatened by a paramilitary group. According to Domingo Ayala Espitia, president of the Córdoba Teachers Association (Ademacor), the paramilitaries sent the teachers text messages demanding 15 million pesos (about $8,535). More than 1,100 students attended the abandoned school.
The threats reportedly came from members of the Gaitanist Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, said to be a group of drug traffickers. Various armed groups--which the government and the media now call “bacrim,” short for “bandas criminales” (criminal gangs) [see Update #1086]--are described as successors to the far-right United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a paramilitary group whose members were demobilized from 2003 to 2006, during the administration of former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010).
The Las Delicias displacement is the second such incident in the department; last year 12 teachers fled a rural high school in Montelíbano municipality. Four teachers have been killed in Córdoba so far this year, and at least 197, including the Las Delicias teachers, have received threats. (EFE 7/23/11 via Univision; InfoBAE (Argentina) 7/24/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US
Chile’s Sebastián Piñera Shuffles Cabinet As Popularity Drops
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/19/chiles-sebastian-pinera-shuffles-cabinet-as-popularity-drops/
Peru: populist prez-elect appeases plutocrats with primary appointments
http://ww4report.com/node/10149
Peru: outgoing García government in final effort to disband "uncontacted" indigenous reserves
http://ww4report.com/node/10146
Colombia: labor strife rocks oil port
http://ww4report.com/node/10148
Venezuelan Funds Dry Up For Hugo Chávez Supporters In New York
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/18/venezuelan-funds-dry-up-for-hugo-chavez-supporters-in-new-york/
El Salvador: Social Programs Bolster Support for Funes Government
https://nacla.org/blog/el-salvador-social-programs-bolster-support-funes-government
Guatemala: Resisting the New Colonialism
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5136
Mexico AG purges office, charges 111 officials with corruption
http://ww4report.com/node/10151
Mexico: relatives of disappeared stage hunger strike
http://ww4report.com/node/10147
Is the Mexican Economy Booming?
https://nacla.org/blog/mexican-economy-booming
Aid Caravan to Cuba Crosses U.S.-Mexican Border
https://nacla.org/blog/aid-caravan-cuba-crosses-us-mexican-border
Haiti: Cash for Work – At What Cost
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2011/7/18/cash-for-work-at-what-cost.html
House Committee Votes To Stop Funding OAS (US)
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/21/house-committee-votes-to-stop-funding-oas/
House Homeland Security hearing on Hezbollah's hyperbolized hemispheric shenanigans (Latin America)
http://ww4report.com/node/10152
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
WNU #1088: Students and Copper Workers Strike in Chile
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1088, July 17, 2011
1. Chile: Students Defy Government, Copper Workers Strike
2. Dominican Republic: At Least Three Die in General Strike
3. Haiti: Hundreds of Families Evicted From Soccer Stadium
4. Mexico: The Economy Is Down and the Cartels Are Hiring
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Chile: Students Defy Government, Copper Workers Strike
Tens of thousands of Chilean students and supporters marched through downtown Santiago on the central Alameda avenue on July 14 in their fourth massive demonstration demanding a reversal of the system of privatized education instituted under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As in previous days of action, there were also large marches in other major cities.
The latest protest was only about half the size of the previous march, on June 30, which was said to be by far the largest demonstration since the restoration of democracy in 1990 [see Update #1086]. Santiago area authorities estimated that 30,000 people marched on July 14, while the organizers put the number at 80,000. The Santiago daily La Tercera reported that 20,000 people participated in Valparaíso and 4,000 in Concepción. Many students may have stayed away from the Santiago march because it proceeded through the downtown area in open defiance of the government, which had authorized a route that would have kept the marchers away from some important government buildings.
Violence broke out at the end of the demonstration when masked youths—considered provocateurs by some protesters—began throwing rocks and at least one Molotov cocktail at Carabinero police agents in front of the La Moneda presidential palace. The otherwise peaceful action then ended in the worst violence of the student protests to date, with the police using water cannons and tear gas and youths smashing windshields and setting one car on fire. The authorities reported that 32 agents were injured in Santiago; a total of 133 people were arrested in Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción. (LT 7/15/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/15/11, __ from correspondent)
The protest appeared to mark a decisive rejection of efforts by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera to slow the protests by announcing a “Great National Agreement on Education” (GANE) on July 5. Accompanied by Education Minister Joaquín Lavín, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1999 and 2005, Piñera proposed a $4 billion fund for the improvement of higher education, more scholarships for poorer students, a lower interest rate for student loans, and more supervision of the education system by the central government. But the president rejected the students’ demands for ending education for profit. (La Nación (Santiago) 7/5/11)
After a nine-hour meeting at the University of Biobío in Concepción on July 16, the Chilean Student Confederation (CONFECH), the main student organization, decided to continue the mobilizations while also seeking ways to create a political platform for their demands. Camila Vallejo, president of the Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH), denied that the protesters were wearing out. “There’s a greater conviction that it’s necessary to make a social accord, since the GANE doesn’t represent us,” she said. (Radio Universidad de Chile (Santiago) 7/17/11)
On July 11, three days before their own mobilization, student organizations participated in another protest calling for a return to policies from before the dictatorship. Some 17,000 workers held a 24-hour general strike against the National Copper Corporation of Chile (Codelco), the state-owned copper enterprise, to mark the 40th anniversary of Socialist president Salvador Allende’s 1971 nationalization of the copper mines.
The original goal of the nationalization was to use the proceeds from the copper industry for education, heath care and industrial development, and the students have been pointing to copper as a possible source of funding for public education. The Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC), the main union in the industry, says the military dictatorship that overthrew Allende in 1973 worked to reverse this policy, with “the result that Codelco just controls 30% of the copper that’s mined and leaves the country, while the remaining 70% has stayed in the power of companies like Phelps Dodge, Anglo American, BHP Billiton and other big transnationals.” The July 11 protest marked the start of a campaign to get two million signatures by October on a petition calling for a plebiscite on returning control of copper mining to the government. (Adital (Brazil) 7/12/11)
*2. Dominican Republic: At Least Three Die in General Strike
A 24-hour national general strike on July 11 against the economic policies of Dominican president Leonel Fernández was “95 to 100%” effective, according to the organizers. After the first 12 hours, Fidel Santana, a spokesperson for the National Strike Committee, congratulated the Dominican people, calling them “the basic protagonist of this day’s success.” He claimed that an important element in the strike was the absence of efforts to force the productive sectors, commercial enterprises and transportation companies to observe the strike call; he said protesters were showing respect for people who chose not to honor the work stoppage.
But there was significant violence during the strike, and at least three people were reported killed. The National Police said Carlos Luis Alonso Filión died during the night in a shootout with police agents in the Rafey neighborhood of the northern city of Santiago. Another man, Edwin Manuel Felipe Abreu, was killed in Santiago’s Don Pedro neighborhood by two men on an all terrain vehicle, according to Gen. Juan Ramón de la Cruz Martínez, police chief of the Cibao region. In addition, 12 people were injured in Santiago and 20 were arrested.
The family of Anderson Parra Cruceta reported that he was shot dead while he was taking pictures on his cell phone of violent confrontations between the police and demonstrators in the Villa Faro neighborhood of Santo Domingo Este, to the east of the capital. A teenager and a police agent were both wounded in different incidents in the southwestern city of Barahona, while a woman was hit by birdshot while walking down a street there. Three youths received shotgun wounds in Haina, about 20 km west of Santo Domingo.
The Broad Front of Popular Struggle (FALPO) and the Alternative Social Forum (FSA), a coalition of grassroots organizations, were the main organizers of the strike, which was backed by the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). The demands included a reduction in the prices of food, medicine and fuel; a 35% increase in the pay of public employees, including soldiers and the police; elimination of recent increases in taxes and charges for electricity; and the designation of 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for education, as required by the Constitution. The organizers gave the government until Aug. 14 to comply with the demands; on that date the groups plan to hold a national assembly to decide on further actions.
The FSA called a one-day strike around similar demands in October 2007 [see Update #918]. Father Regino Martínez of the Jesuit Service for Refugees and Migrants (SJRM) said it was “sad” that the poor “have to resort to striking against the authorities so that they’ll know about the difficult conditions [the poor] are experiencing” as a result of the government’s “indifference.” (Listín Diario (Santiago) 7/11/11; EFE 7/12/11 via ADN.es; Adital (Brazil) 7/13/11)
*3. Haiti: Hundreds of Families Evicted From Soccer Stadium
Backed up by the National Police of Haiti (PNH) and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), on July 15 Port-au-Prince authorities began evicting some 400-450 families from the parking lot of the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium, where they had been living after being displaced by a January 2010 earthquake. The authorities said the eviction was necessary so that workers could get the stadium ready for an Aug. 4 match between two teams in the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF).
The evictions, which were expected to take place over several days, were orderly, especially in comparison to the forcible removal of thousands of earthquake victims from the stadium itself in April 2010 [see Update #1028]. The city government had consulted in advance with the camp’s coordinating committee, residents were allowed time to pack their belongings, and the authorities gave each family a check for 10,000 gourdes (a little less than $250) as they left. But plans for relocating the families seemed unclear. Apparently the residents were originally going to be moved to another camp, known as “Caroussel,” at the former site of the Simbi hotel, on the southern outskirts of the capital, but the occupants there objected to having a large number of new people. The authorities have mentioned two other possible sites. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 7/15/11, 7/16/11; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 7/16/11)
It appears likely that as the displaced persons camps are closed down, many of the earthquake survivors will end up returning to their damaged homes. A draft report written for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) this spring indicated that about one million people in the affected area were living in their old homes despite the danger that the buildings could collapse [see Update #1082].
*4. Mexico: The Economy Is Down and the Cartels Are Hiring
The average income of Mexican households fell by 12.3% between 2008 and 2010, the government’s National Statistics and Geography Institute (INEGI) reported on July 15. The richest households generally lost the most in percentages, but poorer households suffered more because their income was already so low, according to the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure, which the INEGI conducts every two years. The decline in income reflects a 6.1% contraction of the Mexican economy in 2009 in the midst of a world economic crisis that started in the US; the Mexican economy recovered partially in 2010 with a 5.4% expansion. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/16/11)
The long-term economic situation is no better, according to José Luis Calva Téllez, a member of the Economic Investigations Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since the government began applying neoliberal economic policies in 1982, the Mexican economy has grown at an average rate of 2.1% a year, which is the worst economic performance in Latin America, Calva says. The minimum wage, the standard on which other wages are based, has lost 71.3% of its purchasing power over the same period; even the comparatively well-paid unionized workers have seen the purchasing power of their salaries fall by 50%. The main source of new job growth in Mexico, according to Calva, is narcotrafficking, when he says has created 600,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, the Mexican federal government is insisting that the economy has stabilized after weathering the international economic crisis. Economy Minister Bruno Ferrari announced recently that the “fall in incomes is just a perception.” (LJ 7/17/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic
WikiLeaks Cables of Interest on Latin America, Released June 27-July 10, 2011
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3118-wikileaks-cables-of-interest-on-latin-america-released-june-27-july-10-2011
Buenos Aires Mayor Macri To Face Run-Off Election Against Fernández de Kirchner’s Candidate
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/11/buenos-aires-mayor-macri-to-face-run-off-election-against-fernandez-de-kirchners-candidate/
Brazil: ranchers using Agent Orange to deforest the Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/10134
Peru: strike against copper mine hits Ayacucho
http://ww4report.com/node/10135
Ecuador: Indigenous resistance is the new 'terrorism'
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3119-ecuador-indigenous-resistance-is-the-new-terrorism-
The Audacity of Free Trade Agreements (Colombia, Panama)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5102
Embattled Colombian Unionists Rally Against ‘Free Trade’
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11619/colombian_unionists_rally_against_free_trade_in_washington/
In Colombia, watchdogs criticize an investigation into a presidential wiretapping scandal
http://fsrn.org/audio/colombia-watchdogs-criticize-investigation-a-presidential-wiretapping-scandal/8798
Venezuela’s Chavez Seeks to Combat Inflation, Enacts Law for Just Prices and Costs
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6355
How the US Props Up Criminals and Murderers All in the Name of Our Catastrophic Drug War (Central America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3126-how-the-us-props-up-criminals-and-murderers-all-in-the-name-of-our-catastrophic-drug-war
Costa Rica Under Attack From Within
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5112
Action Alert! Violent Forced Evictions Leaves Families at Risk in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3125-action-alert-violent-forced-evictions-leaves-families-at-risk-in-honduras
Indigenous and Afro-Honduran Women’s Constitutional Assembly
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3122-indigenous-and-afro-womens-constitutional-assembly-in-honduras
Resistance to Political and Business Assaults on Indigenous Land and Resources in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3127-resistance-to-political-and-business-assaults-on-indigenous-land-and-resources-in-honduras
Community radio station manager gunned down in Honduras
http://ww4report.com/node/10139
Argentine Singer-Songwriter Facundo Cabral Murdered in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3120-argentine-singer-songwriter-facundo-cabral-murdered-in-guatemala
Photo Essay: Outrage over the Murder of Protest Singer Facundo Cabral
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3123-photo-essay-outrage-over-the-murder-of-protest-singer-facundo-cabral
Facundo Cabral – A Musical Tribute (Guatemala)
https://nacla.org/blog/facundo-cabral-%E2%80%93-musical-tribute
US deports ex-Kaibil to face charges in Guatemala massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/10133
Migrants as Targets of Security Policies (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5074
Deciphering Drug Prohibition in Mexico: An Interview With Isaac Campos
https://nacla.org/blog/deciphering-drug-prohibition-mexico-interview-isaac-campos
Love and Its Purest Weapons: Resistance and Sacrifice (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/love-and-its-purest-weapons-resistance-and-sacrifice
MexicoBlog: Fast and Furious Scandal Heats Up
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2011/07/lauras-blog-fast-and-furious-scandal.html
Clinton Foundation Accused of Sending Haiti Shoddy Trailers (Video)
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/12/clinton_foundation_accused_of_sending_haiti
Dominican Republic Intensifies Targeting of Haitians
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3124-dominican-republic-intensifies-targeting-of-haitians
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1088, July 17, 2011
1. Chile: Students Defy Government, Copper Workers Strike
2. Dominican Republic: At Least Three Die in General Strike
3. Haiti: Hundreds of Families Evicted From Soccer Stadium
4. Mexico: The Economy Is Down and the Cartels Are Hiring
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Chile: Students Defy Government, Copper Workers Strike
Tens of thousands of Chilean students and supporters marched through downtown Santiago on the central Alameda avenue on July 14 in their fourth massive demonstration demanding a reversal of the system of privatized education instituted under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. As in previous days of action, there were also large marches in other major cities.
The latest protest was only about half the size of the previous march, on June 30, which was said to be by far the largest demonstration since the restoration of democracy in 1990 [see Update #1086]. Santiago area authorities estimated that 30,000 people marched on July 14, while the organizers put the number at 80,000. The Santiago daily La Tercera reported that 20,000 people participated in Valparaíso and 4,000 in Concepción. Many students may have stayed away from the Santiago march because it proceeded through the downtown area in open defiance of the government, which had authorized a route that would have kept the marchers away from some important government buildings.
Violence broke out at the end of the demonstration when masked youths—considered provocateurs by some protesters—began throwing rocks and at least one Molotov cocktail at Carabinero police agents in front of the La Moneda presidential palace. The otherwise peaceful action then ended in the worst violence of the student protests to date, with the police using water cannons and tear gas and youths smashing windshields and setting one car on fire. The authorities reported that 32 agents were injured in Santiago; a total of 133 people were arrested in Santiago, Valparaíso and Concepción. (LT 7/15/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/15/11, __ from correspondent)
The protest appeared to mark a decisive rejection of efforts by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera to slow the protests by announcing a “Great National Agreement on Education” (GANE) on July 5. Accompanied by Education Minister Joaquín Lavín, who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1999 and 2005, Piñera proposed a $4 billion fund for the improvement of higher education, more scholarships for poorer students, a lower interest rate for student loans, and more supervision of the education system by the central government. But the president rejected the students’ demands for ending education for profit. (La Nación (Santiago) 7/5/11)
After a nine-hour meeting at the University of Biobío in Concepción on July 16, the Chilean Student Confederation (CONFECH), the main student organization, decided to continue the mobilizations while also seeking ways to create a political platform for their demands. Camila Vallejo, president of the Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH), denied that the protesters were wearing out. “There’s a greater conviction that it’s necessary to make a social accord, since the GANE doesn’t represent us,” she said. (Radio Universidad de Chile (Santiago) 7/17/11)
On July 11, three days before their own mobilization, student organizations participated in another protest calling for a return to policies from before the dictatorship. Some 17,000 workers held a 24-hour general strike against the National Copper Corporation of Chile (Codelco), the state-owned copper enterprise, to mark the 40th anniversary of Socialist president Salvador Allende’s 1971 nationalization of the copper mines.
The original goal of the nationalization was to use the proceeds from the copper industry for education, heath care and industrial development, and the students have been pointing to copper as a possible source of funding for public education. The Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC), the main union in the industry, says the military dictatorship that overthrew Allende in 1973 worked to reverse this policy, with “the result that Codelco just controls 30% of the copper that’s mined and leaves the country, while the remaining 70% has stayed in the power of companies like Phelps Dodge, Anglo American, BHP Billiton and other big transnationals.” The July 11 protest marked the start of a campaign to get two million signatures by October on a petition calling for a plebiscite on returning control of copper mining to the government. (Adital (Brazil) 7/12/11)
*2. Dominican Republic: At Least Three Die in General Strike
A 24-hour national general strike on July 11 against the economic policies of Dominican president Leonel Fernández was “95 to 100%” effective, according to the organizers. After the first 12 hours, Fidel Santana, a spokesperson for the National Strike Committee, congratulated the Dominican people, calling them “the basic protagonist of this day’s success.” He claimed that an important element in the strike was the absence of efforts to force the productive sectors, commercial enterprises and transportation companies to observe the strike call; he said protesters were showing respect for people who chose not to honor the work stoppage.
But there was significant violence during the strike, and at least three people were reported killed. The National Police said Carlos Luis Alonso Filión died during the night in a shootout with police agents in the Rafey neighborhood of the northern city of Santiago. Another man, Edwin Manuel Felipe Abreu, was killed in Santiago’s Don Pedro neighborhood by two men on an all terrain vehicle, according to Gen. Juan Ramón de la Cruz Martínez, police chief of the Cibao region. In addition, 12 people were injured in Santiago and 20 were arrested.
The family of Anderson Parra Cruceta reported that he was shot dead while he was taking pictures on his cell phone of violent confrontations between the police and demonstrators in the Villa Faro neighborhood of Santo Domingo Este, to the east of the capital. A teenager and a police agent were both wounded in different incidents in the southwestern city of Barahona, while a woman was hit by birdshot while walking down a street there. Three youths received shotgun wounds in Haina, about 20 km west of Santo Domingo.
The Broad Front of Popular Struggle (FALPO) and the Alternative Social Forum (FSA), a coalition of grassroots organizations, were the main organizers of the strike, which was backed by the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). The demands included a reduction in the prices of food, medicine and fuel; a 35% increase in the pay of public employees, including soldiers and the police; elimination of recent increases in taxes and charges for electricity; and the designation of 4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for education, as required by the Constitution. The organizers gave the government until Aug. 14 to comply with the demands; on that date the groups plan to hold a national assembly to decide on further actions.
The FSA called a one-day strike around similar demands in October 2007 [see Update #918]. Father Regino Martínez of the Jesuit Service for Refugees and Migrants (SJRM) said it was “sad” that the poor “have to resort to striking against the authorities so that they’ll know about the difficult conditions [the poor] are experiencing” as a result of the government’s “indifference.” (Listín Diario (Santiago) 7/11/11; EFE 7/12/11 via ADN.es; Adital (Brazil) 7/13/11)
*3. Haiti: Hundreds of Families Evicted From Soccer Stadium
Backed up by the National Police of Haiti (PNH) and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), on July 15 Port-au-Prince authorities began evicting some 400-450 families from the parking lot of the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium, where they had been living after being displaced by a January 2010 earthquake. The authorities said the eviction was necessary so that workers could get the stadium ready for an Aug. 4 match between two teams in the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (CONCACAF).
The evictions, which were expected to take place over several days, were orderly, especially in comparison to the forcible removal of thousands of earthquake victims from the stadium itself in April 2010 [see Update #1028]. The city government had consulted in advance with the camp’s coordinating committee, residents were allowed time to pack their belongings, and the authorities gave each family a check for 10,000 gourdes (a little less than $250) as they left. But plans for relocating the families seemed unclear. Apparently the residents were originally going to be moved to another camp, known as “Caroussel,” at the former site of the Simbi hotel, on the southern outskirts of the capital, but the occupants there objected to having a large number of new people. The authorities have mentioned two other possible sites. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 7/15/11, 7/16/11; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 7/16/11)
It appears likely that as the displaced persons camps are closed down, many of the earthquake survivors will end up returning to their damaged homes. A draft report written for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) this spring indicated that about one million people in the affected area were living in their old homes despite the danger that the buildings could collapse [see Update #1082].
*4. Mexico: The Economy Is Down and the Cartels Are Hiring
The average income of Mexican households fell by 12.3% between 2008 and 2010, the government’s National Statistics and Geography Institute (INEGI) reported on July 15. The richest households generally lost the most in percentages, but poorer households suffered more because their income was already so low, according to the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure, which the INEGI conducts every two years. The decline in income reflects a 6.1% contraction of the Mexican economy in 2009 in the midst of a world economic crisis that started in the US; the Mexican economy recovered partially in 2010 with a 5.4% expansion. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/16/11)
The long-term economic situation is no better, according to José Luis Calva Téllez, a member of the Economic Investigations Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Since the government began applying neoliberal economic policies in 1982, the Mexican economy has grown at an average rate of 2.1% a year, which is the worst economic performance in Latin America, Calva says. The minimum wage, the standard on which other wages are based, has lost 71.3% of its purchasing power over the same period; even the comparatively well-paid unionized workers have seen the purchasing power of their salaries fall by 50%. The main source of new job growth in Mexico, according to Calva, is narcotrafficking, when he says has created 600,000 jobs.
Meanwhile, the Mexican federal government is insisting that the economy has stabilized after weathering the international economic crisis. Economy Minister Bruno Ferrari announced recently that the “fall in incomes is just a perception.” (LJ 7/17/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic
WikiLeaks Cables of Interest on Latin America, Released June 27-July 10, 2011
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3118-wikileaks-cables-of-interest-on-latin-america-released-june-27-july-10-2011
Buenos Aires Mayor Macri To Face Run-Off Election Against Fernández de Kirchner’s Candidate
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/11/buenos-aires-mayor-macri-to-face-run-off-election-against-fernandez-de-kirchners-candidate/
Brazil: ranchers using Agent Orange to deforest the Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/10134
Peru: strike against copper mine hits Ayacucho
http://ww4report.com/node/10135
Ecuador: Indigenous resistance is the new 'terrorism'
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3119-ecuador-indigenous-resistance-is-the-new-terrorism-
The Audacity of Free Trade Agreements (Colombia, Panama)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5102
Embattled Colombian Unionists Rally Against ‘Free Trade’
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11619/colombian_unionists_rally_against_free_trade_in_washington/
In Colombia, watchdogs criticize an investigation into a presidential wiretapping scandal
http://fsrn.org/audio/colombia-watchdogs-criticize-investigation-a-presidential-wiretapping-scandal/8798
Venezuela’s Chavez Seeks to Combat Inflation, Enacts Law for Just Prices and Costs
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6355
How the US Props Up Criminals and Murderers All in the Name of Our Catastrophic Drug War (Central America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3126-how-the-us-props-up-criminals-and-murderers-all-in-the-name-of-our-catastrophic-drug-war
Costa Rica Under Attack From Within
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5112
Action Alert! Violent Forced Evictions Leaves Families at Risk in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3125-action-alert-violent-forced-evictions-leaves-families-at-risk-in-honduras
Indigenous and Afro-Honduran Women’s Constitutional Assembly
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3122-indigenous-and-afro-womens-constitutional-assembly-in-honduras
Resistance to Political and Business Assaults on Indigenous Land and Resources in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3127-resistance-to-political-and-business-assaults-on-indigenous-land-and-resources-in-honduras
Community radio station manager gunned down in Honduras
http://ww4report.com/node/10139
Argentine Singer-Songwriter Facundo Cabral Murdered in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3120-argentine-singer-songwriter-facundo-cabral-murdered-in-guatemala
Photo Essay: Outrage over the Murder of Protest Singer Facundo Cabral
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3123-photo-essay-outrage-over-the-murder-of-protest-singer-facundo-cabral
Facundo Cabral – A Musical Tribute (Guatemala)
https://nacla.org/blog/facundo-cabral-%E2%80%93-musical-tribute
US deports ex-Kaibil to face charges in Guatemala massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/10133
Migrants as Targets of Security Policies (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5074
Deciphering Drug Prohibition in Mexico: An Interview With Isaac Campos
https://nacla.org/blog/deciphering-drug-prohibition-mexico-interview-isaac-campos
Love and Its Purest Weapons: Resistance and Sacrifice (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/love-and-its-purest-weapons-resistance-and-sacrifice
MexicoBlog: Fast and Furious Scandal Heats Up
http://americasmexico.blogspot.com/2011/07/lauras-blog-fast-and-furious-scandal.html
Clinton Foundation Accused of Sending Haiti Shoddy Trailers (Video)
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/12/clinton_foundation_accused_of_sending_haiti
Dominican Republic Intensifies Targeting of Haitians
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3124-dominican-republic-intensifies-targeting-of-haitians
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
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You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, July 11, 2011
WNU #1087: Haitian Farmers Lose Land to Sweatshop Zone
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1087, July 10, 2011
1. Haiti: Fertile Land Seized for New Sweatshop Zone
2. Guatemala: Government Ordered to Aid Evicted Campesinos
3. Colombia: Campesinos Massacred in Nariño
4. Mexico: Widow of 1970s Rebel Murdered
5. Mexico: US Gun Scandal Widens to Include FBI, DEA
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Haiti: Fertile Land Seized for New Sweatshop Zone
Residents of Caracol, a village in Haiti’s Northeast department, say they were never consulted or even warned about plans to build a huge new “free trade zone” (FTZ, a complex of assembly plants) on land where many of them have been farming for some 20 years. “It’s the most fertile area we have at Caracol,” resident Renel Pierre told journalist Sylvestre Fils Dorcilus. “It’s inconceivable and unacceptable that the government could choose this part of the land to set up an industrial park.”
The Parc industriel du Nord (Northern Industrial Park, PIN) is a joint project of the US government, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB, or BID in French and Spanish) and South Korea’s leading apparel manufacturer, Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. Together, they are putting some $300 million into the FTZ, which promoters claim will generate 20,000 jobs in the short term and 65,000 jobs over time. The Haitian government provided the land, which it says is state property; the administration of former president René Préval (1996-2001 and 2006-2011) promised to compensate the peasants who have been using it [see Update #1074].
“The government has no respect for us,” Robert Etienne, a local farmer said to Dorcilus, whose three-part series on the project was produced with backing from the UK-based Haiti Support Group and was published by the online Haitian news service AlterPresse. “It was only one fine morning at the beginning of January--when a team of technicians came to explore the area--that we were told about the project.” The technicians used heavy equipment to remove everything in their way, including crops and part of a church that a pastor, Arnold Baptiste, built there 10 years earlier.
“Imagine for a moment the wrongs done to peasant farmers who are getting ready to harvest their crops or who had just finished sowing.” Etienne said.
Some of the farmers have formed the Association for the Defense of Caracol Workers’ Rights (ADTC) to demand compensation and new land from the government. They indicate that they don’t trust the government’s promises, remembering that peasants in Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border 45 km southeast of Caracol, reportedly were never compensated for land used to build the Compagnie de Développement Industriel S.A. (Codevi) FTZ there, which opened in 2003. (AlterPresse 7/4/11)
Other Caracol residents are optimistic about the FTZ. A young woman identified as “Yole” told Dorcilus that unemployment was at “a high point” in the department, as in the rest of the country. “Sure, working conditions for employees in the industries are alarming, but I think the industrial park will help young people a lot on the economic level,” she said.
In a study submitted to Haiti’s Economy and Finance Ministry (MEF), the Boston-based consulting firm KOIOS Associates LLC notes environmental problems with the project, such as air pollution, residual waste and the heavy use of water resources by the plants. But many of these negative effects could be attenuated “[i]f a sufficient proportion of additional tax revenues [expected from the FTZ] were dedicated to the development and improvement of the region’s social and physical infrastructures,” according to the report. (AlterPresse 7/6/11)
The new FTZ is clearly a priority for the US government. In early June Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, paid her second visit to the site, accompanied by a high-level delegation that included US ambassador Kenneth Merten, US Agency for International Development (USAID) deputy mission director Anthony Chan and Mark D’Sa, an executive from the US retailer GAP who is “on loan” to the State Department. (Haïti Libre (Haiti) 6/15/11)
According to Koios Associates, Oxford University economist Paul Collier, who wrote a United Nations “development plan” for Haiti in 2009, calls the project “development as it should be done.” “This will be a match that strikes a fire and gets things going,” former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) predicts. (Koios Associates website, accessed 7/10/11)
*2. Guatemala: Government Ordered to Aid Evicted Campesinos
As of July 5 the Guatemalan government had still failed to comply with instructions from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to help more than 600 campesino families that had been evicted from land in the Polochic Valley in the northeastern department of Alta Verapaz. The IACHR, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), gave the government 15 days to carry out “precautionary measures” (medidas cautelares) to guarantee the life and physical integrity of the displaced campesinos, to ensure that they had food and shelter, and to report on investigations into the violence that accompanied the evictions.
The campesinos were removed in a series of raids from Mar. 14 to Mar. 20. Some 2,000 soldiers and national police agents, joined by private security guards, evicted the approximately 3,000 members of 14 Q’eqchi’ Maya communities from lands in Panzós municipality claimed by Ingenio Chabil Utzaj S.A., an agribusiness firm owned by the Widmann family [see World War 4 Report 4/10/11]. The security forces destroyed the campesinos’ homes and belongings and some 1,400 hectares of crops, according to the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), which said the families had been living and working on the land for 30 years. Campesino Antonio Beb Ac was killed during the main operation on Mar. 15, and 12 people were injured, including a 18-month-old girl who suffered third-degree burns on her arms from a tear gas grenade.
The evictions were the subject of a television documentary by Kinowo Media and the independent Guatemalan film collective Caracol Producciones, posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2zH5Ckz1G4
Violence continued after the evictions. Campesino Oscar Reyes was killed and three others were injured on May 21 while they were tending crops in the Tzamilá cooperative. The communities charged that Chabil Utzaj security guards killed Reyes. Margarita Chub Che was shot dead in front of her husband and two small children on June 4; she had participated in the Council of Polochic Communities and was said to be a beloved and respected leader. The private guards have reportedly been harassing the evicted families, who are living without adequate food or shelter now that their homes and crops have been destroyed.
“They’re killing and capturing us like in the year 1982,” one campesino said during the evictions in March, referring to the military attacks on indigenous communities that caused most of the estimated 200,000 deaths during Guaemala's 30-year armed conflict. (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 6/13/11, 7/6/11; Adital (Brazil) 7/7/11; Amnesty International 6/1/11)
The Widmann family, which owns the Guadalupe sugar mill, decided to move its operations to the Polochic Valley in 2005, with the assistance of a loan of more than $20 million from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE). On Apr. 5, following the March evictions, the BCIE announced a restructuring of the loan, which is now $28.5 million. Another 150 million quetzales (about $19.3 million) is expected to come from an investment by Guatemala Sugar State Corp, which is owned by Grupo Pellas, a Nicaraguan company and one of the principal sugar and ethanol producers in Central America. The Widmann family claims that the Chabil Utzaj plantation will generate 500 permanent jobs and 1,500 temporary jobs. (El Periódico (Guatemala) 4/6/11)
*3. Colombia: Campesinos Massacred in Nariño
On June 25, a group of 10 to 12 heavily armed hooded men wearing camouflage clothing and traveling in a red sport utility vehicle fired their weapons indiscriminately at the “Discovery Villanueva” disco and pool hall in the center of Villanueva, a village in Colón Génova municipality in the southern Colombian department of Nariño. Eight campesinos were killed in the attack: Celso López, Sandro López, Horacio Gómez, Luis Gil, Libio Noguera, Luis Arcos, Plinio Noguera and 15-year-old Albey Gaviria. Four other campesinos were wounded. (Agencia Prensa Rural 6/28/11 from Comité de Integración del Macizo Colombiano (CIMA); Noticias Terra 6/26/11 from AFP)
The victims were all campesinos who earned a living cultivating coffee. (El Tiempo (Colombia) 7/4/11)
Paramilitary groups from the “Bloque Calima” have been in Villanueva since 2002, when they established the village as an important base for their actions in the surrounding area. The paramilitaries have since carried out forced displacement, forced disappearances, and selective murders of residents in the municipalities of Colón Génova, San Pablo, La Unión, La Cruz, San Bernardo and Belén, all in the eastern area of Nariño, and in neighboring Florencia municipality in Cauca department. After the paramilitaries were officially “demobilized” in 2006, the same groups reappeared with the names “Nueva Generación” (New Generation) and “Los Rastrojos.”
The latest massacre came just over a week after community members and activists from the region took part in a “First Forum on Mining and Water” in Colón Génova on June 17. Participants in the forum reported that multinational corporations have been pressuring local communities to allow the exploitation of mineral resources in the area, including gold, silver and copper. (Agencia Prensa Rural 6/28/11 from Comité de Integración del Macizo Colombiano (CIMA))
Nariño governor Antonio Navarro Wolff, himself a former leader of the demobilized M-19 leftist rebel movement, said the massacre was a surprise because “there was no information about illegal armed groups in this zone.” (El Colombiano (Colombia) 6/28/11)
Nariño Secretary of Government Fabio Trujillo said the massacre may have been carried out by common criminals, but that initial investigations suggest the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group was responsible. According to Trujillo, one theory is that the massacre was in revenge for the killing of an ELN informant a week earlier. (El Universal (Cartagena) 6/29/11 from Colprensa-El Colombiano; El Tiempo 7/4/11)
*4. Mexico: Widow of 1970s Rebel Murdered
Two armed men gunned down Mexican activists Isabel Ayala Nava and her sister, Reyna Ayala Nava, in the early afternoon of July 3 as they were leaving a church in Xaltianguis, a village in Acapulco municipality in the southern state of Guerrero. The killers took the women’s cell phones, and later in the day Isabel Ayala’s daughter, Micaela Cabañas Ayala, received a threatening call made from her mother’s phone.
As a teenager Isabel Ayala was a member of the rebel Party of the Poor (PdlP) and was married to its legendary leader, the former school teacher Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, who died during a military assault at the end of 1974. Ayala and the couple’s baby daughter Micaela were captured in 1974 and were taken to Military Camp No. 1, where Ayala was tortured. She was released in 1976. After living outside Mexico for many years, she returned to the country in 2008 and was active in two groups, United Lefts of the South and the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Guerrero. She worked to expose crimes committed in the “dirty war” against leftists in the 1960s and 1970s and supported her daughter’s activism in the Born in the Tempest Civil Association. Two of Ayala’s brothers were reportedly murdered earlier this year. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/3/11; Comité Cerezo urgent action 7/4/11)
On July 7 a number of human rights organizations based in Guerrero demanded protection by the authorities for Micaela Cabañas and a thorough investigation of the July 3 murder. The groups suggested that the killings were “a political crime connected to [the sisters’] activism in defense of human rights and the clarification of crimes against humanity during the so-called ‘dirty war.’” The current president of the state legislature, Deputy Faustino Soto Ramos from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), noted that the murders came as the legislature was analyzing proposals for a truth commission to investigate crimes committed in the counterinsurgency. (La Jornada de Guerrero 7/8/11; Proceso (Mexico) 7/6/11)
Correction: The item originally referred to Guerrero as "western" rather than "southern."
*5. Mexico: US Gun Scandal Widens to Include FBI, DEA
Some “gun trafficking ‘higher-ups’” who supply weapons to Mexican drug cartels may have been “paid as informants” by US government agencies, according to a letter two ranking US Congress members sent US attorney general Eric Holder on July 5. “The evidence we have gathered,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) wrote, “raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department”--which Holder heads—“not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”
The “other agencies” may include the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the letter said.
The new information came from a congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, a US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) program that allowed some 2,000 firearms to enter Mexico illegally in what appeared to be a bungled effort to trace the activities of US gun smugglers in the US Southwest [see Update #1073]. During interviews over the July 4th holiday weekend with staff from the congressional committee probing the operation, acting ATF director Kenneth E. Melson revealed that his agency had been kept “in the dark about certain activities of other agencies, including DEA and FBI,” Issa and Grassley’s letter said, and this tended to corroborate what the committee staff had learned “from other witnesses” suggesting that the agencies might have arms traffickers on their payroll as informants.
At least one alleged Mexican drug trafficker is already trying to build a legal defense around a claim that he was an informant for the US government. Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, said to be a major figure in the Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested in Mexico in March 2009 and was extradited to the US last February to face charges related to drug trafficking. On Mar. 15 Zambada Niebla’s attorneys filed a notice in federal court in Chicago claiming that since 2004 he had been working “on behalf of” the DEA, the FBI and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As many as 40,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence over the past five years, and a high percentage of the weapons used come from areas in the US with lax gun laws [see Update #1083]. On July 6 Mexican federal police released a videotaped interrogation of Jesús Rejón Aguilar, allegedly a founder of Mexico’s Zetas gang. “[A]ll the weapons are bought in the United States,” he told the police. “[E]ven the American government itself was selling the weapons… Whatever you want, you can get.” (San Francisco Chronicle 7/7/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/7/11; NarcoNews 7/10/11)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
To Live with Dignity is to Build a New World (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5041
Unequal Education System Under Fire in Chile
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3108-unequal-education-system-under-fire-in-chile
Bolivia withdraws from UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
http://ww4report.com/node/10098
Kichwa community takes Ecuador to Inter-American Court of Human Rights over oil contract
http://ww4report.com/node/10106
"Dead" FARC leader sentenced to 22 years in absentia (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/10088
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines Explores Colombia’s Gold Rush
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/05/al-jazeera%e2%80%99s-fault-lines-explores-colombia%e2%80%99s-gold-rush/
Colombia: indigenous communities condemn FARC attacks in Cauca
http://ww4report.com/node/10105
President Chavez Returns to Venezuela after Treatment in Cuba
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6325
Cable Reveals Corruption & Mistreatment Of Cuban Doctors Working In Venezuela
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/08/cable-reveals-corruption-mistreatment-of-cuban-doctors-working-in-venezuela/
El Salvador: Funes Opposes Mining, But Legal Ban Uncertain
https://nacla.org/blog/el-salvador-funes-opposes-mining-legal-ban-uncertain
El Salvador: Body of Young Anti-Mining Activist Exhumed from Common Grave
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/3117-body-of-young-anti-mining-activist-exhumed-from-common-grave
Urgent Action! Anti-mining Activists Detained in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3112-urgent-action-anti-mining-activists-detained-in-honduras
Honduras' Very Own War on Terror
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3114-honduras-very-own-war-on-terror
From Cartagena to Tegucigalpa: Imperialism and the Future of the Honduran Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3109-from-cartagena-to-tegucigalpa-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-honduran-resistance
Honduras Truth Commission: Yes, it was a coup
http://ww4report.com/node/10103
Photo Essay - March for Remembrance 2011 in Guatemala: Genocide, the People will Judge You
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3111-photo-essay-march-for-remembrance-2011-genocide-the-people-will-judge-you-
Argentine folksinger Facundo Cabral assassinated in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/10104
The PRI Strikes Back (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/pri-strikes-back
Mexico state elections marred by floods, army operations
http://ww4report.com/node/10097
Cherán: Community Self Defense in Mexico’s Drug War (Photo Essay)
https://nacla.org/blog/cher%C3%A1n-community-self-defense-mexico%E2%80%99s-drug-war-photo-essay
How We Helped Pave Haiti's Road to Cholera Hell
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/07/07/CholeraHell/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1087, July 10, 2011
1. Haiti: Fertile Land Seized for New Sweatshop Zone
2. Guatemala: Government Ordered to Aid Evicted Campesinos
3. Colombia: Campesinos Massacred in Nariño
4. Mexico: Widow of 1970s Rebel Murdered
5. Mexico: US Gun Scandal Widens to Include FBI, DEA
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Haiti: Fertile Land Seized for New Sweatshop Zone
Residents of Caracol, a village in Haiti’s Northeast department, say they were never consulted or even warned about plans to build a huge new “free trade zone” (FTZ, a complex of assembly plants) on land where many of them have been farming for some 20 years. “It’s the most fertile area we have at Caracol,” resident Renel Pierre told journalist Sylvestre Fils Dorcilus. “It’s inconceivable and unacceptable that the government could choose this part of the land to set up an industrial park.”
The Parc industriel du Nord (Northern Industrial Park, PIN) is a joint project of the US government, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB, or BID in French and Spanish) and South Korea’s leading apparel manufacturer, Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd. Together, they are putting some $300 million into the FTZ, which promoters claim will generate 20,000 jobs in the short term and 65,000 jobs over time. The Haitian government provided the land, which it says is state property; the administration of former president René Préval (1996-2001 and 2006-2011) promised to compensate the peasants who have been using it [see Update #1074].
“The government has no respect for us,” Robert Etienne, a local farmer said to Dorcilus, whose three-part series on the project was produced with backing from the UK-based Haiti Support Group and was published by the online Haitian news service AlterPresse. “It was only one fine morning at the beginning of January--when a team of technicians came to explore the area--that we were told about the project.” The technicians used heavy equipment to remove everything in their way, including crops and part of a church that a pastor, Arnold Baptiste, built there 10 years earlier.
“Imagine for a moment the wrongs done to peasant farmers who are getting ready to harvest their crops or who had just finished sowing.” Etienne said.
Some of the farmers have formed the Association for the Defense of Caracol Workers’ Rights (ADTC) to demand compensation and new land from the government. They indicate that they don’t trust the government’s promises, remembering that peasants in Ouanaminthe, on the Dominican border 45 km southeast of Caracol, reportedly were never compensated for land used to build the Compagnie de Développement Industriel S.A. (Codevi) FTZ there, which opened in 2003. (AlterPresse 7/4/11)
Other Caracol residents are optimistic about the FTZ. A young woman identified as “Yole” told Dorcilus that unemployment was at “a high point” in the department, as in the rest of the country. “Sure, working conditions for employees in the industries are alarming, but I think the industrial park will help young people a lot on the economic level,” she said.
In a study submitted to Haiti’s Economy and Finance Ministry (MEF), the Boston-based consulting firm KOIOS Associates LLC notes environmental problems with the project, such as air pollution, residual waste and the heavy use of water resources by the plants. But many of these negative effects could be attenuated “[i]f a sufficient proportion of additional tax revenues [expected from the FTZ] were dedicated to the development and improvement of the region’s social and physical infrastructures,” according to the report. (AlterPresse 7/6/11)
The new FTZ is clearly a priority for the US government. In early June Cheryl Mills, chief of staff for US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, paid her second visit to the site, accompanied by a high-level delegation that included US ambassador Kenneth Merten, US Agency for International Development (USAID) deputy mission director Anthony Chan and Mark D’Sa, an executive from the US retailer GAP who is “on loan” to the State Department. (Haïti Libre (Haiti) 6/15/11)
According to Koios Associates, Oxford University economist Paul Collier, who wrote a United Nations “development plan” for Haiti in 2009, calls the project “development as it should be done.” “This will be a match that strikes a fire and gets things going,” former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) predicts. (Koios Associates website, accessed 7/10/11)
*2. Guatemala: Government Ordered to Aid Evicted Campesinos
As of July 5 the Guatemalan government had still failed to comply with instructions from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to help more than 600 campesino families that had been evicted from land in the Polochic Valley in the northeastern department of Alta Verapaz. The IACHR, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States (OAS), gave the government 15 days to carry out “precautionary measures” (medidas cautelares) to guarantee the life and physical integrity of the displaced campesinos, to ensure that they had food and shelter, and to report on investigations into the violence that accompanied the evictions.
The campesinos were removed in a series of raids from Mar. 14 to Mar. 20. Some 2,000 soldiers and national police agents, joined by private security guards, evicted the approximately 3,000 members of 14 Q’eqchi’ Maya communities from lands in Panzós municipality claimed by Ingenio Chabil Utzaj S.A., an agribusiness firm owned by the Widmann family [see World War 4 Report 4/10/11]. The security forces destroyed the campesinos’ homes and belongings and some 1,400 hectares of crops, according to the Committee for Campesino Unity (CUC), which said the families had been living and working on the land for 30 years. Campesino Antonio Beb Ac was killed during the main operation on Mar. 15, and 12 people were injured, including a 18-month-old girl who suffered third-degree burns on her arms from a tear gas grenade.
The evictions were the subject of a television documentary by Kinowo Media and the independent Guatemalan film collective Caracol Producciones, posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2zH5Ckz1G4
Violence continued after the evictions. Campesino Oscar Reyes was killed and three others were injured on May 21 while they were tending crops in the Tzamilá cooperative. The communities charged that Chabil Utzaj security guards killed Reyes. Margarita Chub Che was shot dead in front of her husband and two small children on June 4; she had participated in the Council of Polochic Communities and was said to be a beloved and respected leader. The private guards have reportedly been harassing the evicted families, who are living without adequate food or shelter now that their homes and crops have been destroyed.
“They’re killing and capturing us like in the year 1982,” one campesino said during the evictions in March, referring to the military attacks on indigenous communities that caused most of the estimated 200,000 deaths during Guaemala's 30-year armed conflict. (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 6/13/11, 7/6/11; Adital (Brazil) 7/7/11; Amnesty International 6/1/11)
The Widmann family, which owns the Guadalupe sugar mill, decided to move its operations to the Polochic Valley in 2005, with the assistance of a loan of more than $20 million from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE). On Apr. 5, following the March evictions, the BCIE announced a restructuring of the loan, which is now $28.5 million. Another 150 million quetzales (about $19.3 million) is expected to come from an investment by Guatemala Sugar State Corp, which is owned by Grupo Pellas, a Nicaraguan company and one of the principal sugar and ethanol producers in Central America. The Widmann family claims that the Chabil Utzaj plantation will generate 500 permanent jobs and 1,500 temporary jobs. (El Periódico (Guatemala) 4/6/11)
*3. Colombia: Campesinos Massacred in Nariño
On June 25, a group of 10 to 12 heavily armed hooded men wearing camouflage clothing and traveling in a red sport utility vehicle fired their weapons indiscriminately at the “Discovery Villanueva” disco and pool hall in the center of Villanueva, a village in Colón Génova municipality in the southern Colombian department of Nariño. Eight campesinos were killed in the attack: Celso López, Sandro López, Horacio Gómez, Luis Gil, Libio Noguera, Luis Arcos, Plinio Noguera and 15-year-old Albey Gaviria. Four other campesinos were wounded. (Agencia Prensa Rural 6/28/11 from Comité de Integración del Macizo Colombiano (CIMA); Noticias Terra 6/26/11 from AFP)
The victims were all campesinos who earned a living cultivating coffee. (El Tiempo (Colombia) 7/4/11)
Paramilitary groups from the “Bloque Calima” have been in Villanueva since 2002, when they established the village as an important base for their actions in the surrounding area. The paramilitaries have since carried out forced displacement, forced disappearances, and selective murders of residents in the municipalities of Colón Génova, San Pablo, La Unión, La Cruz, San Bernardo and Belén, all in the eastern area of Nariño, and in neighboring Florencia municipality in Cauca department. After the paramilitaries were officially “demobilized” in 2006, the same groups reappeared with the names “Nueva Generación” (New Generation) and “Los Rastrojos.”
The latest massacre came just over a week after community members and activists from the region took part in a “First Forum on Mining and Water” in Colón Génova on June 17. Participants in the forum reported that multinational corporations have been pressuring local communities to allow the exploitation of mineral resources in the area, including gold, silver and copper. (Agencia Prensa Rural 6/28/11 from Comité de Integración del Macizo Colombiano (CIMA))
Nariño governor Antonio Navarro Wolff, himself a former leader of the demobilized M-19 leftist rebel movement, said the massacre was a surprise because “there was no information about illegal armed groups in this zone.” (El Colombiano (Colombia) 6/28/11)
Nariño Secretary of Government Fabio Trujillo said the massacre may have been carried out by common criminals, but that initial investigations suggest the National Liberation Army (ELN) rebel group was responsible. According to Trujillo, one theory is that the massacre was in revenge for the killing of an ELN informant a week earlier. (El Universal (Cartagena) 6/29/11 from Colprensa-El Colombiano; El Tiempo 7/4/11)
*4. Mexico: Widow of 1970s Rebel Murdered
Two armed men gunned down Mexican activists Isabel Ayala Nava and her sister, Reyna Ayala Nava, in the early afternoon of July 3 as they were leaving a church in Xaltianguis, a village in Acapulco municipality in the southern state of Guerrero. The killers took the women’s cell phones, and later in the day Isabel Ayala’s daughter, Micaela Cabañas Ayala, received a threatening call made from her mother’s phone.
As a teenager Isabel Ayala was a member of the rebel Party of the Poor (PdlP) and was married to its legendary leader, the former school teacher Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, who died during a military assault at the end of 1974. Ayala and the couple’s baby daughter Micaela were captured in 1974 and were taken to Military Camp No. 1, where Ayala was tortured. She was released in 1976. After living outside Mexico for many years, she returned to the country in 2008 and was active in two groups, United Lefts of the South and the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Guerrero. She worked to expose crimes committed in the “dirty war” against leftists in the 1960s and 1970s and supported her daughter’s activism in the Born in the Tempest Civil Association. Two of Ayala’s brothers were reportedly murdered earlier this year. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/3/11; Comité Cerezo urgent action 7/4/11)
On July 7 a number of human rights organizations based in Guerrero demanded protection by the authorities for Micaela Cabañas and a thorough investigation of the July 3 murder. The groups suggested that the killings were “a political crime connected to [the sisters’] activism in defense of human rights and the clarification of crimes against humanity during the so-called ‘dirty war.’” The current president of the state legislature, Deputy Faustino Soto Ramos from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), noted that the murders came as the legislature was analyzing proposals for a truth commission to investigate crimes committed in the counterinsurgency. (La Jornada de Guerrero 7/8/11; Proceso (Mexico) 7/6/11)
Correction: The item originally referred to Guerrero as "western" rather than "southern."
*5. Mexico: US Gun Scandal Widens to Include FBI, DEA
Some “gun trafficking ‘higher-ups’” who supply weapons to Mexican drug cartels may have been “paid as informants” by US government agencies, according to a letter two ranking US Congress members sent US attorney general Eric Holder on July 5. “The evidence we have gathered,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) wrote, “raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department”--which Holder heads—“not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”
The “other agencies” may include the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the letter said.
The new information came from a congressional investigation into Operation Fast and Furious, a US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) program that allowed some 2,000 firearms to enter Mexico illegally in what appeared to be a bungled effort to trace the activities of US gun smugglers in the US Southwest [see Update #1073]. During interviews over the July 4th holiday weekend with staff from the congressional committee probing the operation, acting ATF director Kenneth E. Melson revealed that his agency had been kept “in the dark about certain activities of other agencies, including DEA and FBI,” Issa and Grassley’s letter said, and this tended to corroborate what the committee staff had learned “from other witnesses” suggesting that the agencies might have arms traffickers on their payroll as informants.
At least one alleged Mexican drug trafficker is already trying to build a legal defense around a claim that he was an informant for the US government. Jesús Vicente Zambada Niebla, said to be a major figure in the Sinaloa drug cartel, was arrested in Mexico in March 2009 and was extradited to the US last February to face charges related to drug trafficking. On Mar. 15 Zambada Niebla’s attorneys filed a notice in federal court in Chicago claiming that since 2004 he had been working “on behalf of” the DEA, the FBI and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
As many as 40,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence over the past five years, and a high percentage of the weapons used come from areas in the US with lax gun laws [see Update #1083]. On July 6 Mexican federal police released a videotaped interrogation of Jesús Rejón Aguilar, allegedly a founder of Mexico’s Zetas gang. “[A]ll the weapons are bought in the United States,” he told the police. “[E]ven the American government itself was selling the weapons… Whatever you want, you can get.” (San Francisco Chronicle 7/7/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/7/11; NarcoNews 7/10/11)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
To Live with Dignity is to Build a New World (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5041
Unequal Education System Under Fire in Chile
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3108-unequal-education-system-under-fire-in-chile
Bolivia withdraws from UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs
http://ww4report.com/node/10098
Kichwa community takes Ecuador to Inter-American Court of Human Rights over oil contract
http://ww4report.com/node/10106
"Dead" FARC leader sentenced to 22 years in absentia (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/10088
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines Explores Colombia’s Gold Rush
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/05/al-jazeera%e2%80%99s-fault-lines-explores-colombia%e2%80%99s-gold-rush/
Colombia: indigenous communities condemn FARC attacks in Cauca
http://ww4report.com/node/10105
President Chavez Returns to Venezuela after Treatment in Cuba
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6325
Cable Reveals Corruption & Mistreatment Of Cuban Doctors Working In Venezuela
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/08/cable-reveals-corruption-mistreatment-of-cuban-doctors-working-in-venezuela/
El Salvador: Funes Opposes Mining, But Legal Ban Uncertain
https://nacla.org/blog/el-salvador-funes-opposes-mining-legal-ban-uncertain
El Salvador: Body of Young Anti-Mining Activist Exhumed from Common Grave
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/3117-body-of-young-anti-mining-activist-exhumed-from-common-grave
Urgent Action! Anti-mining Activists Detained in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3112-urgent-action-anti-mining-activists-detained-in-honduras
Honduras' Very Own War on Terror
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3114-honduras-very-own-war-on-terror
From Cartagena to Tegucigalpa: Imperialism and the Future of the Honduran Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3109-from-cartagena-to-tegucigalpa-imperialism-and-the-future-of-the-honduran-resistance
Honduras Truth Commission: Yes, it was a coup
http://ww4report.com/node/10103
Photo Essay - March for Remembrance 2011 in Guatemala: Genocide, the People will Judge You
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3111-photo-essay-march-for-remembrance-2011-genocide-the-people-will-judge-you-
Argentine folksinger Facundo Cabral assassinated in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/10104
The PRI Strikes Back (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/pri-strikes-back
Mexico state elections marred by floods, army operations
http://ww4report.com/node/10097
Cherán: Community Self Defense in Mexico’s Drug War (Photo Essay)
https://nacla.org/blog/cher%C3%A1n-community-self-defense-mexico%E2%80%99s-drug-war-photo-essay
How We Helped Pave Haiti's Road to Cholera Hell
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/07/07/CholeraHell/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, July 4, 2011
WNU #1086: Paramilitaries Kill Five Indigenous Colombians
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1086, July 3, 2011
1. Colombia: Paramilitaries Kill Five in Zenú Community
2. Chile: Education Protests Continue to Grow
3. Mexico: New Mass Kidnapping of Immigrants Reported
4. Latin America: Pride Marches Focus on Marriage, Violence
5. Haiti: Activists Tell UN to Pay for Cholera Epidemic
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Colombia: Paramilitaries Kill Five in Zenú Community
On June 30, Colombian Ombudsperson (Defensor del Pueblo) Volmar Pérez Ortiz condemned the killings of five Zenú indigenous people in the Lower Cauca region in the northeast of Antioquia department. According to information provided to the Ombudsperson's Office by the Indigenous Organization of Antioquia (OIA), the murders took place June 24-26 in the Zenú communities of La 18 and La Unión-Pato in Zaragoza municipality.
On June 24, presumed paramilitaries murdered 19-year-old Luis Hernández Torres (or Luis Eduardo Hernández Yanes, according to some sources) of the community of La 18. On June 25, presumed members of the same paramilitary group murdered Jorge Mejía Estrada, Zenú vice-governor of La 18, and his sons 17-year-old Steven Alberto Mejía Bedoya and 16-year-old Juan Camilo Mejía Bedoya. On June 26, the body of Lexter Enrique Graciano Pérez, a member of the La Unión-Pato community, was found in the Nechí river; he had disappeared five days earlier.
Ombudsperson Pérez Ortiz urged the relevant government authorities to “take effective measures to prevent the threats of illegal armed groups operating in the Lower Cauca subregion of Antioquia from leading to new violent acts and the forced displacement of the Zenú community.”
Reports from the “Early Alert System (SAT)” coordinated by the Ombudsperson’s Office indicate that illegal armed groups operating in the area of Zaragoza, El Bagre, Nechí and Tarazá municipalities in northeastern Antioquia include “Los Urabeños,” “Los Paisas,” “Los Rastrojos,” “Las Águilas Negras” and “la banda de Sebastián.” These paramilitary groups have been carrying out threats, selective and multiple murders, and forced displacement. According to local indigenous authorities they have also been forcibly recruiting children and adolescents from the indigenous community. (El Tiempo (Bogotá) 7/1/11; Organización Indígena de Antioquia Consejo de Gobierno 6/28/11; Caracol 6/28/11; RCN Noticias Medellín 6/28/11) [Note: the Colombian government and media now commonly refer to paramilitary groups by the acronym "bacrim," short for "bandas criminales" (criminal gangs).]
A June 28 statement from the OIA attributes the killings to the paramilitary group “Los Rastrojos,” and notes that the Colombian armed forces “look impassively and without concern at the bloodletting of our indigenous people.” The OIA said the Colombian military has not yet gone to the area where the killers buried the bodies of Mejía Estrada and his sons, apparently claiming that flooding has prevented them from getting there. (OIA 6/28/11)
Zaragoza mayor Víctor Darío Perlaza denied that the deaths had occurred. Antioquia police commander José Gerardo Acevedo Ossa claimed the murders of the Zenú community members “have been isolated cases by those who are linked to different activities from what they were carrying out.” (El Colombiano (Medellín) 6/29/11)
The latest killings follow the murders of three other Zenú community members on Apr. 8 in La Chilona, 6 km from La 18: Francisco Monterroza Oviedo and the brothers Osneidy Peña Mercado and Zeider Peña Mercado. In May, alleged members of “Los Rastrojos” murdered Jesús María Aguilar, who served as president of the Communal Action Board of the El Campanario community in Cáceres municipality--in the same Lower Cauca region--and was the husband of local indigenous authority Ramona Martínez. (Caracol 6/28/11)
Meanwhile in the pre-dawn hours of June 29 in Yarumal municipality, on the highway linking Medellín with the Lower Cauca region, four rebels from the 36th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) burned a semi truck, a smaller truck and two buses. When the Antioquia Highway Police arrived to investigate the attack, the rebels triggered an explosion that killed highway police commander Maj. Félix Antonio Jaimes Villamil. Four other police officers were wounded. The rebels escaped. (BBC 6/29/11; Minuto30.com 6/30/11; bajocauca.com 6/30/11 from El Meridiano de Córdoba)
*2. Chile: Education Protests Continue to Grow
With chants of “An educated people will never be deceived” and “We want a free, quality education,” tens of thousands of Chilean students, parents and teachers took to the streets on June 30 in the latest protest against the privatized education system set up under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Giorgio Jackson, president of the Federation of Catholic University Students (FEUC), estimated that 200,000 people took part in the demonstration in Santiago, while Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) president Camila Vallejo put the number at more than 300,000. By most accounts the Santiago protest was twice the size of a June 16 march that local media had called the largest since the return of democracy 21 years ago [see Update #1084].
The Santiago march was only part of the day’s action. Organizers said 200,000 protesters marched in other cities around the education demands; meanwhile, students have occupied some 200 schools and 30 universities over the last three weeks. More and more people from different sectors of Chilean society were joining the movement, FECH president Vallejo said. “Each time we have more support.”
Violence broke out at the end of the Santiago march when groups of youths tried to loot downtown stores. The police used tear gas and water cannons on the crowd. At least 38 protesters were arrested and some 20 police agents were injured, according to the authorities. Protest organizers denied responsibility for the violence. “I feel that a large percentage of these people wearing hoods are infiltrators,” Vallejo had told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina the day before the demonstration. She noted that Chile had a history of the use of provocateurs.
Rightwing president Sebastián Piñera responded to the protests by saying that “the strikes, the demonstrations are legal, but education isn’t improved with strikes or demonstrations.” (La Tercera (Santiago) 6/30/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/11 from correspondent; Prensa Latina 6/29/11)
After a July 2 meeting at the University of the Frontier (UFRO) in Temuco, capital of the Araucanía region in central Chile, the approximately 30 organizations in the Chilean Student Confederation (CONFECH) announced plans for another strike and day of protests on July 14. FEUC Jackson noted that the Federation of Mapuche Students had participated in the meeting and that the movement’s demands now included a call for new scholarships and greater enrollment of indigenous students along with respect for cultural differences in the schools. The Mapuche are Chile’s largest indigenous group. (PL 7/3/11)
*3. Mexico: New Mass Kidnapping of Immigrants Reported
At least five Central American immigrants were forcibly removed from a freight train by about 10 armed men wearing hoods on June 24 near the village of Medias Aguas in the east central Mexican state of Veracruz, according to two immigrants who managed to escape. The number of people kidnapped could be as high as 80, according to the well-known immigrant rights activist Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, coordinator of the Brother and Sister Migrants on the Road shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec in the southern state of Oaxaca. Solalinde reported the kidnappings to the authorities after talking to the two witnesses.
Mexican criminal gangs have carried out a number of mass kidnappings of undocumented Central American immigrants as they travel through on their way to the US. A group of 20-50 immigrants were reportedly kidnapped near Chahuites, Oaxaca on Dec. 16, and another group was seized on Dec. 22 [see Update #1062]. A total of 72 immigrants from Central America, Brazil and Ecuador were kidnapped and then massacred last August in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas [see World War 4 Report 8/26/10].
Solalinde said that on the morning of June 24 about 250 immigrants--including Central Americans and Mexicans from the southeastern state of Chiapas—left Ixtepec on a freight train known to immigrants as “The Beast.” Most had stayed at Brother and Sister Migrants on the Road before taking the train. After traveling for 14 hours, the train was stopped by the armed men, who had brought at least three vehicles. The two witnesses said they saw five immigrants being taken away from their side of the train, but they thought that many more may have been seized. The witnesses also believed that the train operators were collaborating with the kidnappers.
State and federal authorities tended to play down the incident. On July 1 federal attorney general Marisela Morales told a reporter: “We still don’t even have the exact number of people. And the act itself hasn’t been confirmed; we just have reports.” But Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), said he had no doubt that a kidnapping took place. “What’s important,” he added, “is that the authorities, rather than discrediting [victims and human rights defenders] or getting into a war of facts and figures, should show that they are acting, that they are seeking justice for a very vulnerable group.” The CNDH reports receiving some 400 complaints about violations of immigrants’ human rights during the first half of this year. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/29/11, __, 7/2/11, __ )
Solalinde met with Veracruz governor Javier Duarte de Ochoa on July 1. After the meeting the rights activist said he felt the state government was now showing “more readiness than the federal government to investigate the cases.” He noted that he had shown Duarte de Ochoa, a politician from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), evidence that former PRI governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán was linked to gangs that prey on immigrants. “Father, I can assure you that Fidel Herrera is Fidel Herrera and I’m me, and I’m going to demonstrate by actions that that’s how it is,” Duarte de Ochoa said, according to Solalinde.
Solalinde also called for closing down the National Migration Institute (INM), which he called “corrupt, obsolete,” and replacing it with a new federal agency. (LJ 7/2/11)
*4. Latin America: Pride Marches Focus on Marriage, Violence
Chileans celebrated LGBT Pride in Santiago on June 25 with a march from the central Plaza Italia to the La Moneda presidential palace. Organizers said 30,000 people joined the march, while the police gave a crowd estimate of 12,000. Participants carried signs with such slogans as: “Marriage and civil union law for all couples” and “Antidiscrimination law for everyone.” The march came one day after New York became the largest state in the US to allow same-sex marriage. Rightwing president Sebastián Piñera announced on May 28 that he would send Congress a proposal for a law to legalize civil unions for the country’s more than two million couples, including same-sex couples, but he insisted that the law wouldn’t permit same-sex marriage. Chilean LGBT activists are pushing for full marriage equality. (AFP 6/25/11 via Terra.com)
Marriage was less of an issue for LGBT activists in Mexico City, where same-sex marriage was legalized in December 2009 [see Update #1018]. The emphasis for thousands of marchers in the city’s 33rd Pride event, held on June 25, was on fighting homophobic crime. Activists noted how much progress they had made over the years. “Never, not in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that there would be so many people in the street” for Pride, actor and activist Tito Vasconcelos said, but now “[w]e’re in a bloodbath. Homophobic hate crimes continue. This march is to demand from the government all that it still owes us.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/26/11)
In El Salvador hundreds of activists marched through the capital’s streets on June 25 to demand respect and tolerance in a society they said was dominated by machismo and discrimination based on sexual orientation. But “political and social conditions have been changing,” William Hernández, coordinator of the rights group Entre Amigos (“Among Friends”), told the AFP wire service, and activists have been working on building respect and tolerance in various sectors. (AFP 6/25/11 via Terra.com)
Cubans held their first Pride march on June 28. Outnumbered by reporters, about 10 people carried multicolored banners from Havana’s Paseo del Prado to the Malecón esplanade by the Caribbean. The march was separate from activities that day at the government’s National Sexual Education Center (Cenesex), which is headed by Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban president Raúl Castro. LGBT Observatory, which organized the march, said it invited Marisela Castro to the march. “Once again they missed an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that what they cry out is true, that rights are respected here,” LGBT Observatory director Leannes Imbert said. Imbert blamed the low turnout on intimidation.
Dissident LGBT activists note improvements in the government’s policies toward LGBT people but say there is still discrimination. (EFE 6/28/11 via Terra.com)
On July 2 Lima mayor Susana Villarán led Peruvians in the capital’s 10th Pride march, from the Campo de Marte to Plaza Washington, in front of Casa España de la Cultura. “I accompanied the Gay Pride march as a citizen, I did it also as a candidate, and now as the main authority I’m participating in this parade through the streets of Lima,” said Villarán, who took office six months ago. The AFP wire service said 200 people participated, while the Lima daily La República referred to “thousands of activists.” (AFP 7/2/11 via Terra.com; LR 7/2/11)
*5. Haiti: Activists Tell UN to Pay for Cholera Epidemic
During the last week of June several Haitian social organizations called on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) to pay reparations to the victims of a cholera epidemic that appeared to originate at the international occupation force’s base near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau. Representatives of Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA), the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA) and other groups said MINUSTAH should pay out to the Haitian people 25% to 30% of its annual operating budget of $853 million. SOFA made similar demands in January [see Update #1062]. The epidemic, which started in October, has killed some 5,500 people to date and sickened about 300,000. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 7/1/11)
The renewed demands came as the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report on June 28 in one of its journals, Emerging Infectious Diseases, that points to the MINUSTAH base as the likely source of the disease. “Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite [Haiti’s main river] and one of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” wrote a team headed by a leading French cholera expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux. The report states that the camp had “deficient sanitation,” and it also casts doubt on MINUSTAH’s repeated claims that none of the Nepalese soldiers at the base showed symptoms of cholera. “We…believe that symptomatic cases occurred inside the MINUSTAH camp,” the team wrote. (Emerging Infectious Diseases, July 2011; Reuters 6/30/11) [Piarroux came to similar conclusions in a preliminary report last year; see Update #1060.]
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
WikiLeaks Cables of Interest on Latin America, Released June 6-26, 2011
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3098-wikileaks-cables-of-interest-on-latin-america-released-june-6-26-2011
Chile: The Mapuche Struggle in Pinochet's Shadow
http://ww4report.com/node/10042
Uruguay Removes Block on Investigating Abuses During Military Rule
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3106-uruguay-removes-block-on-investigating-abuses-during-military-rule
Peru: Puno protesters suspend strike, call for resurrection of Aymara Nation
http://ww4report.com/node/10063
Case against Amazon Indian Leader in Peru ‘Closed’
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3102-colombia-impunity--keeping-the-black-hand-anonymous
People's Tribunal against the Criminalization of Protest in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3099-peoples-tribunal-against-the-criminalization-of-protest-in-ecuador
Large-Scale Mining to Test Rights of Nature in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3105-large-scale-mining-to-test-rights-of-nature-in-ecuador
Food Security and the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia
https://nacla.org/blog/food-security-and-free-trade-agreement-colombia
Colombia: 'Impunity' – Keeping the 'Black Hand' Anonymous
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3102-colombia-impunity--keeping-the-black-hand-anonymous
Colombia: indigenous leader killed in "false positive" attack
http://ww4report.com/node/10076
Hugo Chávez Says Doctors Removed Cancerous Tumor; No Word On Return To Venezuela
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/01/hugo-chavez-says-doctors-removed-cancerous-tumor-no-word-on-return-to-venezuela/
President Chavez's Address to the Nation, 30 June 2011
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6318
The People Legislate: Grassroots Media Movement Creates Its Own Law in Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6297
Venezuela: government probes media coverage of prison riot repression
http://ww4report.com/node/10066
Leaked Diplomatic Cable Reveals U.S. Panama Express Rendition Program; Hints At FARC In Panama City
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/01/leaked-diplomatic-cable-reveals-u-s-panama-express-rendition-program-hints-at-farc-in-panama-city/
The Different Logics within the Honduran Resistance: An Interview with Bertha Cáceres
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3097-the-different-logics-within-the-honduran-resistance-an-interview-with-bertha-caceres
Nicaragua: small merchants, farmers block roads to demand debt relief
http://ww4report.com/node/10073
UN expert warns new El Salvador law harms judicial independence
http://ww4report.com/node/10072
U.S. Cable Reveals Honduran Resistance Sought Weapons In Nicaragua After 2009 Coup
http://latindispatch.com/2011/06/27/u-s-cable-reveals-honduran-resistance-sought-weapons-in-nicaragua-after-2009-coup/
Love, Struggle and Memory in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/10047
Photo Chronicle of Mexico's Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3101-photo-chronicle-of-mexicos-caravan-for-peace-with-justice-and-dignity
“Trying to Combat Drugs with Violence is Turning Mexico into a Graveyard”: Julian LeBaron
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5018
Conversation in the Castle: The Victims Meet the President (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/conversation-castle-victims-meet-president
‘Now Is the Time’: Ramsey Clark on Cuba and Lucius Walker (NACLA Radio)
https://nacla.org/blog/%E2%80%98now-time%E2%80%99-ramsey-clark-cuba-and-lucius-walker-nacla-radio
Haiti 1994: The Forgotten Intervention
http://ww4report.com/node/10053
Why Haiti Needs a Literacy Campaign
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5035
Monsanto in Haiti
http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2449-monsanto-in-haiti
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1086, July 3, 2011
1. Colombia: Paramilitaries Kill Five in Zenú Community
2. Chile: Education Protests Continue to Grow
3. Mexico: New Mass Kidnapping of Immigrants Reported
4. Latin America: Pride Marches Focus on Marriage, Violence
5. Haiti: Activists Tell UN to Pay for Cholera Epidemic
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Colombia: Paramilitaries Kill Five in Zenú Community
On June 30, Colombian Ombudsperson (Defensor del Pueblo) Volmar Pérez Ortiz condemned the killings of five Zenú indigenous people in the Lower Cauca region in the northeast of Antioquia department. According to information provided to the Ombudsperson's Office by the Indigenous Organization of Antioquia (OIA), the murders took place June 24-26 in the Zenú communities of La 18 and La Unión-Pato in Zaragoza municipality.
On June 24, presumed paramilitaries murdered 19-year-old Luis Hernández Torres (or Luis Eduardo Hernández Yanes, according to some sources) of the community of La 18. On June 25, presumed members of the same paramilitary group murdered Jorge Mejía Estrada, Zenú vice-governor of La 18, and his sons 17-year-old Steven Alberto Mejía Bedoya and 16-year-old Juan Camilo Mejía Bedoya. On June 26, the body of Lexter Enrique Graciano Pérez, a member of the La Unión-Pato community, was found in the Nechí river; he had disappeared five days earlier.
Ombudsperson Pérez Ortiz urged the relevant government authorities to “take effective measures to prevent the threats of illegal armed groups operating in the Lower Cauca subregion of Antioquia from leading to new violent acts and the forced displacement of the Zenú community.”
Reports from the “Early Alert System (SAT)” coordinated by the Ombudsperson’s Office indicate that illegal armed groups operating in the area of Zaragoza, El Bagre, Nechí and Tarazá municipalities in northeastern Antioquia include “Los Urabeños,” “Los Paisas,” “Los Rastrojos,” “Las Águilas Negras” and “la banda de Sebastián.” These paramilitary groups have been carrying out threats, selective and multiple murders, and forced displacement. According to local indigenous authorities they have also been forcibly recruiting children and adolescents from the indigenous community. (El Tiempo (Bogotá) 7/1/11; Organización Indígena de Antioquia Consejo de Gobierno 6/28/11; Caracol 6/28/11; RCN Noticias Medellín 6/28/11) [Note: the Colombian government and media now commonly refer to paramilitary groups by the acronym "bacrim," short for "bandas criminales" (criminal gangs).]
A June 28 statement from the OIA attributes the killings to the paramilitary group “Los Rastrojos,” and notes that the Colombian armed forces “look impassively and without concern at the bloodletting of our indigenous people.” The OIA said the Colombian military has not yet gone to the area where the killers buried the bodies of Mejía Estrada and his sons, apparently claiming that flooding has prevented them from getting there. (OIA 6/28/11)
Zaragoza mayor Víctor Darío Perlaza denied that the deaths had occurred. Antioquia police commander José Gerardo Acevedo Ossa claimed the murders of the Zenú community members “have been isolated cases by those who are linked to different activities from what they were carrying out.” (El Colombiano (Medellín) 6/29/11)
The latest killings follow the murders of three other Zenú community members on Apr. 8 in La Chilona, 6 km from La 18: Francisco Monterroza Oviedo and the brothers Osneidy Peña Mercado and Zeider Peña Mercado. In May, alleged members of “Los Rastrojos” murdered Jesús María Aguilar, who served as president of the Communal Action Board of the El Campanario community in Cáceres municipality--in the same Lower Cauca region--and was the husband of local indigenous authority Ramona Martínez. (Caracol 6/28/11)
Meanwhile in the pre-dawn hours of June 29 in Yarumal municipality, on the highway linking Medellín with the Lower Cauca region, four rebels from the 36th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) burned a semi truck, a smaller truck and two buses. When the Antioquia Highway Police arrived to investigate the attack, the rebels triggered an explosion that killed highway police commander Maj. Félix Antonio Jaimes Villamil. Four other police officers were wounded. The rebels escaped. (BBC 6/29/11; Minuto30.com 6/30/11; bajocauca.com 6/30/11 from El Meridiano de Córdoba)
*2. Chile: Education Protests Continue to Grow
With chants of “An educated people will never be deceived” and “We want a free, quality education,” tens of thousands of Chilean students, parents and teachers took to the streets on June 30 in the latest protest against the privatized education system set up under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Giorgio Jackson, president of the Federation of Catholic University Students (FEUC), estimated that 200,000 people took part in the demonstration in Santiago, while Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) president Camila Vallejo put the number at more than 300,000. By most accounts the Santiago protest was twice the size of a June 16 march that local media had called the largest since the return of democracy 21 years ago [see Update #1084].
The Santiago march was only part of the day’s action. Organizers said 200,000 protesters marched in other cities around the education demands; meanwhile, students have occupied some 200 schools and 30 universities over the last three weeks. More and more people from different sectors of Chilean society were joining the movement, FECH president Vallejo said. “Each time we have more support.”
Violence broke out at the end of the Santiago march when groups of youths tried to loot downtown stores. The police used tear gas and water cannons on the crowd. At least 38 protesters were arrested and some 20 police agents were injured, according to the authorities. Protest organizers denied responsibility for the violence. “I feel that a large percentage of these people wearing hoods are infiltrators,” Vallejo had told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina the day before the demonstration. She noted that Chile had a history of the use of provocateurs.
Rightwing president Sebastián Piñera responded to the protests by saying that “the strikes, the demonstrations are legal, but education isn’t improved with strikes or demonstrations.” (La Tercera (Santiago) 6/30/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/11 from correspondent; Prensa Latina 6/29/11)
After a July 2 meeting at the University of the Frontier (UFRO) in Temuco, capital of the Araucanía region in central Chile, the approximately 30 organizations in the Chilean Student Confederation (CONFECH) announced plans for another strike and day of protests on July 14. FEUC Jackson noted that the Federation of Mapuche Students had participated in the meeting and that the movement’s demands now included a call for new scholarships and greater enrollment of indigenous students along with respect for cultural differences in the schools. The Mapuche are Chile’s largest indigenous group. (PL 7/3/11)
*3. Mexico: New Mass Kidnapping of Immigrants Reported
At least five Central American immigrants were forcibly removed from a freight train by about 10 armed men wearing hoods on June 24 near the village of Medias Aguas in the east central Mexican state of Veracruz, according to two immigrants who managed to escape. The number of people kidnapped could be as high as 80, according to the well-known immigrant rights activist Father Alejandro Solalinde Guerra, coordinator of the Brother and Sister Migrants on the Road shelter in Ciudad Ixtepec in the southern state of Oaxaca. Solalinde reported the kidnappings to the authorities after talking to the two witnesses.
Mexican criminal gangs have carried out a number of mass kidnappings of undocumented Central American immigrants as they travel through on their way to the US. A group of 20-50 immigrants were reportedly kidnapped near Chahuites, Oaxaca on Dec. 16, and another group was seized on Dec. 22 [see Update #1062]. A total of 72 immigrants from Central America, Brazil and Ecuador were kidnapped and then massacred last August in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas [see World War 4 Report 8/26/10].
Solalinde said that on the morning of June 24 about 250 immigrants--including Central Americans and Mexicans from the southeastern state of Chiapas—left Ixtepec on a freight train known to immigrants as “The Beast.” Most had stayed at Brother and Sister Migrants on the Road before taking the train. After traveling for 14 hours, the train was stopped by the armed men, who had brought at least three vehicles. The two witnesses said they saw five immigrants being taken away from their side of the train, but they thought that many more may have been seized. The witnesses also believed that the train operators were collaborating with the kidnappers.
State and federal authorities tended to play down the incident. On July 1 federal attorney general Marisela Morales told a reporter: “We still don’t even have the exact number of people. And the act itself hasn’t been confirmed; we just have reports.” But Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), said he had no doubt that a kidnapping took place. “What’s important,” he added, “is that the authorities, rather than discrediting [victims and human rights defenders] or getting into a war of facts and figures, should show that they are acting, that they are seeking justice for a very vulnerable group.” The CNDH reports receiving some 400 complaints about violations of immigrants’ human rights during the first half of this year. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/29/11, __, 7/2/11, __ )
Solalinde met with Veracruz governor Javier Duarte de Ochoa on July 1. After the meeting the rights activist said he felt the state government was now showing “more readiness than the federal government to investigate the cases.” He noted that he had shown Duarte de Ochoa, a politician from the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), evidence that former PRI governor Fidel Herrera Beltrán was linked to gangs that prey on immigrants. “Father, I can assure you that Fidel Herrera is Fidel Herrera and I’m me, and I’m going to demonstrate by actions that that’s how it is,” Duarte de Ochoa said, according to Solalinde.
Solalinde also called for closing down the National Migration Institute (INM), which he called “corrupt, obsolete,” and replacing it with a new federal agency. (LJ 7/2/11)
*4. Latin America: Pride Marches Focus on Marriage, Violence
Chileans celebrated LGBT Pride in Santiago on June 25 with a march from the central Plaza Italia to the La Moneda presidential palace. Organizers said 30,000 people joined the march, while the police gave a crowd estimate of 12,000. Participants carried signs with such slogans as: “Marriage and civil union law for all couples” and “Antidiscrimination law for everyone.” The march came one day after New York became the largest state in the US to allow same-sex marriage. Rightwing president Sebastián Piñera announced on May 28 that he would send Congress a proposal for a law to legalize civil unions for the country’s more than two million couples, including same-sex couples, but he insisted that the law wouldn’t permit same-sex marriage. Chilean LGBT activists are pushing for full marriage equality. (AFP 6/25/11 via Terra.com)
Marriage was less of an issue for LGBT activists in Mexico City, where same-sex marriage was legalized in December 2009 [see Update #1018]. The emphasis for thousands of marchers in the city’s 33rd Pride event, held on June 25, was on fighting homophobic crime. Activists noted how much progress they had made over the years. “Never, not in my wildest dreams, did I imagine that there would be so many people in the street” for Pride, actor and activist Tito Vasconcelos said, but now “[w]e’re in a bloodbath. Homophobic hate crimes continue. This march is to demand from the government all that it still owes us.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/26/11)
In El Salvador hundreds of activists marched through the capital’s streets on June 25 to demand respect and tolerance in a society they said was dominated by machismo and discrimination based on sexual orientation. But “political and social conditions have been changing,” William Hernández, coordinator of the rights group Entre Amigos (“Among Friends”), told the AFP wire service, and activists have been working on building respect and tolerance in various sectors. (AFP 6/25/11 via Terra.com)
Cubans held their first Pride march on June 28. Outnumbered by reporters, about 10 people carried multicolored banners from Havana’s Paseo del Prado to the Malecón esplanade by the Caribbean. The march was separate from activities that day at the government’s National Sexual Education Center (Cenesex), which is headed by Mariela Castro, the daughter of Cuban president Raúl Castro. LGBT Observatory, which organized the march, said it invited Marisela Castro to the march. “Once again they missed an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that what they cry out is true, that rights are respected here,” LGBT Observatory director Leannes Imbert said. Imbert blamed the low turnout on intimidation.
Dissident LGBT activists note improvements in the government’s policies toward LGBT people but say there is still discrimination. (EFE 6/28/11 via Terra.com)
On July 2 Lima mayor Susana Villarán led Peruvians in the capital’s 10th Pride march, from the Campo de Marte to Plaza Washington, in front of Casa España de la Cultura. “I accompanied the Gay Pride march as a citizen, I did it also as a candidate, and now as the main authority I’m participating in this parade through the streets of Lima,” said Villarán, who took office six months ago. The AFP wire service said 200 people participated, while the Lima daily La República referred to “thousands of activists.” (AFP 7/2/11 via Terra.com; LR 7/2/11)
*5. Haiti: Activists Tell UN to Pay for Cholera Epidemic
During the last week of June several Haitian social organizations called on the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) to pay reparations to the victims of a cholera epidemic that appeared to originate at the international occupation force’s base near Mirebalais in the Central Plateau. Representatives of Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA), the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA) and other groups said MINUSTAH should pay out to the Haitian people 25% to 30% of its annual operating budget of $853 million. SOFA made similar demands in January [see Update #1062]. The epidemic, which started in October, has killed some 5,500 people to date and sickened about 300,000. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 7/1/11)
The renewed demands came as the US government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a report on June 28 in one of its journals, Emerging Infectious Diseases, that points to the MINUSTAH base as the likely source of the disease. “Our findings strongly suggest that contamination of the Artibonite [Haiti’s main river] and one of its tributaries downstream from a military camp triggered the epidemic,” wrote a team headed by a leading French cholera expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux. The report states that the camp had “deficient sanitation,” and it also casts doubt on MINUSTAH’s repeated claims that none of the Nepalese soldiers at the base showed symptoms of cholera. “We…believe that symptomatic cases occurred inside the MINUSTAH camp,” the team wrote. (Emerging Infectious Diseases, July 2011; Reuters 6/30/11) [Piarroux came to similar conclusions in a preliminary report last year; see Update #1060.]
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
WikiLeaks Cables of Interest on Latin America, Released June 6-26, 2011
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3098-wikileaks-cables-of-interest-on-latin-america-released-june-6-26-2011
Chile: The Mapuche Struggle in Pinochet's Shadow
http://ww4report.com/node/10042
Uruguay Removes Block on Investigating Abuses During Military Rule
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3106-uruguay-removes-block-on-investigating-abuses-during-military-rule
Peru: Puno protesters suspend strike, call for resurrection of Aymara Nation
http://ww4report.com/node/10063
Case against Amazon Indian Leader in Peru ‘Closed’
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3102-colombia-impunity--keeping-the-black-hand-anonymous
People's Tribunal against the Criminalization of Protest in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3099-peoples-tribunal-against-the-criminalization-of-protest-in-ecuador
Large-Scale Mining to Test Rights of Nature in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3105-large-scale-mining-to-test-rights-of-nature-in-ecuador
Food Security and the Free Trade Agreement with Colombia
https://nacla.org/blog/food-security-and-free-trade-agreement-colombia
Colombia: 'Impunity' – Keeping the 'Black Hand' Anonymous
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3102-colombia-impunity--keeping-the-black-hand-anonymous
Colombia: indigenous leader killed in "false positive" attack
http://ww4report.com/node/10076
Hugo Chávez Says Doctors Removed Cancerous Tumor; No Word On Return To Venezuela
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/01/hugo-chavez-says-doctors-removed-cancerous-tumor-no-word-on-return-to-venezuela/
President Chavez's Address to the Nation, 30 June 2011
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6318
The People Legislate: Grassroots Media Movement Creates Its Own Law in Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6297
Venezuela: government probes media coverage of prison riot repression
http://ww4report.com/node/10066
Leaked Diplomatic Cable Reveals U.S. Panama Express Rendition Program; Hints At FARC In Panama City
http://latindispatch.com/2011/07/01/leaked-diplomatic-cable-reveals-u-s-panama-express-rendition-program-hints-at-farc-in-panama-city/
The Different Logics within the Honduran Resistance: An Interview with Bertha Cáceres
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3097-the-different-logics-within-the-honduran-resistance-an-interview-with-bertha-caceres
Nicaragua: small merchants, farmers block roads to demand debt relief
http://ww4report.com/node/10073
UN expert warns new El Salvador law harms judicial independence
http://ww4report.com/node/10072
U.S. Cable Reveals Honduran Resistance Sought Weapons In Nicaragua After 2009 Coup
http://latindispatch.com/2011/06/27/u-s-cable-reveals-honduran-resistance-sought-weapons-in-nicaragua-after-2009-coup/
Love, Struggle and Memory in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/10047
Photo Chronicle of Mexico's Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3101-photo-chronicle-of-mexicos-caravan-for-peace-with-justice-and-dignity
“Trying to Combat Drugs with Violence is Turning Mexico into a Graveyard”: Julian LeBaron
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5018
Conversation in the Castle: The Victims Meet the President (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/blog/conversation-castle-victims-meet-president
‘Now Is the Time’: Ramsey Clark on Cuba and Lucius Walker (NACLA Radio)
https://nacla.org/blog/%E2%80%98now-time%E2%80%99-ramsey-clark-cuba-and-lucius-walker-nacla-radio
Haiti 1994: The Forgotten Intervention
http://ww4report.com/node/10053
Why Haiti Needs a Literacy Campaign
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/5035
Monsanto in Haiti
http://www.towardfreedom.com/americas/2449-monsanto-in-haiti
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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