As investigative journalist Allan Nairn said on Democracy Now! in January: "Well, you know, if you go and burn down your neighbor's house, don't complain when, as they run from the flames, they come onto your lawn."
By David L. Wilson and Jane Guskin, MRZine
March 13, 2016
The March 9 debate in Miami between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was the first chance the two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination had to discuss immigration and its connections to trade and U.S. policy in Latin America. Unfortunately, neither candidate took advantage of the opportunity.
The mainstream "immigration debate" generally avoids mentioning the forces that have driven millions of Latin Americans to move here without legal authorization over the past forty years. The media and the politicians treat the migration either as a natural disaster ("flooding over the border") or as a second-rate science fiction movie ("the aliens are invading") -- with either scenario seen as deserving an aggressive response.[...]
Read the full article:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2016/wg130316.html
Showing posts with label Guatemala. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Guatemala. Show all posts
Sunday, March 13, 2016
Thursday, April 30, 2015
US Program to Resettle Central American Minors Likely to Help Few
By David L. Wilson and Jane Guskin, Truthout
April 30, 2015
Central American children are back in the news. The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border was up again in March, although it was still only half the figure recorded in March 2014. Parents and young children continue to be held in immigration detention centers, leading to protests like a five-day hunger strike at the Karnes, Texas, facility in early April. And Republican politicians and ultraconservative media are once again complaining that President Obama is being soft on undocumented children fleeing violence in Central America.
The right's latest target is a program the Obama administration announced last fall under which some Central American immigrant parents can apply to have children still living in their home country declared refugees and reunited with their families here. According to the US State Department, which administers the program, the goal is "to provide a safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children are currently undertaking to the United States."
"This is in complete violation of what the Constitution says," Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) announced on April 23 as he prepared to deliver a letter co-signed by 36 representatives demanding an end to the program. A Senate judiciary subcommittee held a hearing that day to discuss the policy, which subcommittee chair Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) claimed had "created a dangerous situation."
The legislators' concerns seem exaggerated.[...]
Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30523-us-program-to-resettle-central-american-minors-likely-to-help-few
April 30, 2015
Central American children are back in the news. The number of unaccompanied minors crossing the border was up again in March, although it was still only half the figure recorded in March 2014. Parents and young children continue to be held in immigration detention centers, leading to protests like a five-day hunger strike at the Karnes, Texas, facility in early April. And Republican politicians and ultraconservative media are once again complaining that President Obama is being soft on undocumented children fleeing violence in Central America.
The right's latest target is a program the Obama administration announced last fall under which some Central American immigrant parents can apply to have children still living in their home country declared refugees and reunited with their families here. According to the US State Department, which administers the program, the goal is "to provide a safe, legal, and orderly alternative to the dangerous journey that some children are currently undertaking to the United States."
"This is in complete violation of what the Constitution says," Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Arizona) announced on April 23 as he prepared to deliver a letter co-signed by 36 representatives demanding an end to the program. A Senate judiciary subcommittee held a hearing that day to discuss the policy, which subcommittee chair Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) claimed had "created a dangerous situation."
The legislators' concerns seem exaggerated.[...]
Read the full article:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/30523-us-program-to-resettle-central-american-minors-likely-to-help-few
Friday, February 20, 2015
Central America "Aid" Won't Slow Migration
If we want Central Americans to have the right to stay home and make change in their own communities, we'll have to - at the very least - stop making things worse for them with unfair trade pacts and military "aid."
By Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson, Truthout
February 20, 2015
On January 29, the Obama administration announced a proposal to provide $1 billion in aid to help El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras "address the lack of economic opportunity, the absence of strong institutions, and the extreme levels of violence that have held the region back at a time of prosperity for the rest of the Western Hemisphere."
According to an op-ed by Vice President Joe Biden in The New York Times the same day, these measures are needed to prevent problems like "the dangerous surge in migration" that occurred "last summer when thousands of unaccompanied children showed up on our southwestern border."[...]
Read the full article:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/29197-central-america-aid-won-t-slow-migration
By Jane Guskin and David L. Wilson, Truthout
February 20, 2015
 |
| Photo: Cristina Chiquin, Mujeres Ixchel |
According to an op-ed by Vice President Joe Biden in The New York Times the same day, these measures are needed to prevent problems like "the dangerous surge in migration" that occurred "last summer when thousands of unaccompanied children showed up on our southwestern border."[...]
Read the full article:
http://truth-out.org/news/item/29197-central-america-aid-won-t-slow-migration
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
WNU #1254: US Pushes “Plan Colombia” for Central America
Issue #1254, February 8, 2015
1. Central America: US Pushes New “Plan Colombia”
2. Chile: Mapuche Continue Drive for Land
3. Mexico: Official Ayotzinapa Claims Disputed
4. Mexico: Authorities “Rescue” Maquila Workers
5. Haiti: Union and Maquilas Negotiate on Pay
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: The Update is ceasing publication on Feb. 15. In the remaining issues we are trying to include some updated information on stories we covered in the past.
*1. Central America: US Pushes New “Plan Colombia”
On Jan. 29 the administration of US president Barack Obama announced that its budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2016 (October 2015-September 2016) would include $1 billion in aid to Central America, with an emphasis on El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The goal is to help “implement systemic reforms that address the lack of economic opportunity, the absence of strong institutions and the extreme levels of violence that have held the region back at a time of prosperity for the rest of the Western Hemisphere,” according to a White House fact sheet. The New York Times published an op-ed the same day by Vice President Joseph Biden explaining the request as a way “to stem the dangerous surge in migration” last summer—a reference to an uptick in border crossings by unaccompanied Central American minors that peaked last June and quickly diminished in subsequent months [see Update #1237].
The $1 billion proposal appears to be a more detailed version of a plan presented by Vice President Biden and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in Washington on Nov. 14 [see Update #1244]. It provides “over $400 million” for “trade facilitation” and other forms of economic development; “over $300 million” to “advance regional security efforts”; and “nearly $250 million” to “strengthen institutions,” including “rule-of-law institutions” so that they can “better administer justice.” In his op-ed Biden indicated that the US proposals for Central America are modeled on Plan Colombia, a $9 billion program started in 1999 as a “war on drugs” effort. The vice president claimed that Colombia is now “a nation transformed.”
The economic reforms in the proposal are aimed at “creating business environments friendly to entrepreneurs.” “Central American economies can grow only by attracting international investment,” Biden wrote. The US is “ready to work” to help “ensure that local enterprises get the most out of existing free trade agreements,” such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). (White House Fact Sheet 1/29/15; New York Times 1/29/15)
Despite its neoliberal economic features, the proposal has the support of at least some center-left Latin American leaders, including Salvadoran president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a leader in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), once a leftist rebel group. With the US aid in the proposal “we have opportunities to go on working to guarantee you the right to education, to health, to live in families,” he told a group of Salvadoran school children on Jan. 31. (La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador) 2/1/15) Center-left Chilean president Michelle Bachelet also backs the plan, which includes having Central American countries join the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc currently composed of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Bachelet was in Guatemala on Jan. 30 for talks with Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina about his country’s request to be admitted to the alliance. (Télam (Argentina) 1/30/15)
The proposal emphasizes the need to reform Central American justice systems but doesn’t give specifics. On Feb. 2-3 the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), held hearings on a complaint by four Honduran judges over their dismissal from their posts after they publicly opposed the June 2009 military coup that removed former president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009) from office. Former judges Guillermo López, Luis Alonso Chévez, Ramón Enrique Barrios and Tirza Flores say the dismissals violated their free speech rights. The current Honduran government supports the removal of the judges. Government attorney Jorge Serrano argued that the action “doesn't violate…precedents set by the inter-American system.” (Tico Times (Costa Rica) 2/4/15 from AFP)
*2. Chile: Mapuche Continue Drive for Land
A group of about 70 indigenous Chilean Mapuche from the José Llancao community peacefully occupied a section of a government research farm in Vilcún commune in Cautín province, in the central Araucanía region, to further their demand for 60 hectares of land that they say belong to the community. The Carillanca Farming Research Center (INIA Carillanca) started as a private estate but has been operated as a research facility under the Agriculture Ministry for the past 50 years. According to the community’s werken (spokesperson), Juan Alguilera Esquivel, the residents have been trying to reclaim the 60 hectares, which they say were usurped illegally by the owner of the private estate, for more than 20 years. The Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, have been using land occupations since the 1990s in a campaign to regain land they consider ancestral territory [see Update #1240]. Local estate owners are strongly opposed to the community’s claims on the research facility. “Not one meter should be sold,” said Marcelo Zirotti, president of the Agricultural Development Society (SOFO). If the government gives up any land, “they’ll be telling us, the farmers, that we should close up and go elsewhere.” (Radio Bío Bío (Chile) 2/6/15; El Ciudadano (Chile) 2/6/15)
Meanwhile, rightwing politicians and business representatives are blaming Mapuche activists for many of the 150-160 forest fires reported in Chile’s Araucanía region in the past six months. In January Senator Alberto Espina of the center-right National Renewal (RN) party implied that the fires are being set by Mapuche activists protesting what they consider the theft of their land by forestry companies. Patricio Santibáñez, president of the Chilean Timber Corporation (CORMA), charged that 70% of the fires are “organized, planned.” A report by the carabineros militarized police put the total number of fires connected to the Mapuche conflict at 15 for the period, less than 10%, and said the number of arson cases had declined. Santibáñez repeated charges from 2012 that Mapuche activists were responsible for an outbreak of forest fires then, including one in which seven firefighters were killed [see Update #1113]. The 2012 fires came at a time of severe drought; Mapuche spokespeople said the situation was aggravated by the forestry companies’ planting of more flammable trees such as pine and eucalyptus. (PanAm Post 1/30/15; Rebelión 2/7/15)
*3. Mexico: Official Ayotzinapa Claims Disputed
The nonprofit Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) released a report on Feb. 7 citing a number of irregularities in the Mexican federal government’s investigation of the disappearance of 43 teachers’ college students in Iguala de la Independencia in the southwestern state of Guerrero the night of Sept. 26-27 [see Update #1251]. The Argentine experts have researched deaths and disappearances in about 30 countries, including those that occurred in their own country during the 1976-1983 “Dirty War” against suspected leftists and in Guatemala during that country’s 1960-1996 civil war. The Argentines were brought into the investigation by the parents of the missing students, who had attended the traditionally leftist Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa.
The Mexican government has concluded that all the students were killed and that their bodies were incinerated in a dump in the Guerrero municipality of Cocula and thrown into the San Juan river. The Argentines found several problems that they said made it impossible for them to confirm the official version. For example, the government had agreed to keep the independent experts involved in all phases of the investigation but didn’t in fact include them on some occasions—notably, at the time when the supposed remains of the students were found. The Argentines also said the Cocula dump wasn’t guarded during part of the period of the investigation, so that evidence could have been altered. Journalists and researchers have questioned other aspects of the official account, including the government’s contention that only municipal police and a local gang were involved in the violence and the claim that the bodies could be thoroughly incinerated in an open-air fire. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/8/15)
Teachers in Guerrero have regularly joined with students in demonstrations over the Ayotzinapa disappearances, but on Feb. 6 they had an additional reason to protest. Members of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) and the Only Union of Guerrero State Public Servants (Suspeg) blocked the Miguel Alemán coastal highway in Acapulco for nearly three hours to protest the state’s failure to pay their salary. According to the national SNTE, some 12,000 Guerrero teachers didn’t get valid paychecks. The unions indicated that both the state and the federal governments were responsible for the shortfall in funds. (LJ 2/7/15)
Forced disappearances by the police are not limited to Guerrero. According to Denise García Bosque, an attorney for families in the northeastern state of Coahuila, the nonprofit Families United has documented 150 disappearance cases in the past 18 months in just one area, the small city of Piedras Negras and the region known as Cinco Manantiales. García said that in at least 60 of these cases there is evidence of participation by special police groups, principally a state unit created in 2009, the Special Arms and Tactics Group (GATE). A total of 51 of the victims have been found alive but are all in prison; they charge that they were tortured into making false confessions that they were members of criminal groups. Special police units are proliferating throughout Mexico, the national daily Excélsior wrote last November; they “sometimes receive special training by US, Colombian or Israeli elite groups,” the paper said. (LJ 2/7/15; TeleSUR English 2/7/15)
*4. Mexico: Authorities “Rescue” Maquila Workers
Federal and state authorities said they rescued 129 Mexican workers on Feb. 5 from sexual and labor exploitation at Yes Internacional SA de CV, a Korean-owned garment assembly plant in Zapopan in the western state of Jalisco. The factory was closed down, and four of the executives were detained, according to the National Migration Institute (INM). The workers--who were mostly women, including six minors--reported being subjected to blows and insults, and federal authorities indicated that they would investigate reports of interrupted pregnancies and serious injuries apparently resulting from sexual assaults. In 2013 Jalisco police said they rescued at least 275 people who had been held in inhumane conditions in a tomato-packing factory.
Mexican media described Yes International as a maquiladora, a tax-exempt assembly plant producing for export. Its products were largely socks, but press accounts didn’t indicate what retailers contracted with the factory. The day after the initial raid, the federal Labor and Social Welfare Secretariat (STPS) said the factory was closed for irregularities in its operation, such as a failure to certify the plant’s boilers, not for alleged mistreatment of workers. Some plant employees told reporters that they hadn’t experienced abuses and that they objected to the closing of the plant. Although the workers said the pay was low—600 to 700 pesos a week (about US$40.50 to US$ 47.24)—they were upset about losing jobs in an area with limited employment opportunities. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/6/15, 2/7/15; International Business Times 2/6/15)
*5. Haiti: Union and Maquilas Negotiate on Pay
Haiti’s Textile and Garment Workers Union (SOTA), which represents a number of workers in the Port-au-Prince garment assembly sector, has worked out an agreement under which the owners of three factories are to honor the legal minimum wage of 300 gourdes (currently about US$6.38) a day for piece workers in the industry. The 300-gourde minimum went into effect in October 2012 but has generally been ignored by management. According to a Jan. 6 SOTA press release and a Feb. 6 radio interview with Yannick Etienne of the labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (BO, “Workers’ Struggle”), under the agreement workers who were receiving 225 gourdes a day now receive 300 gourdes and those who received 300 gourdes receive 375 gourdes. In addition, the three companies agreed to provide back pay to cover the difference between the old and the new wages for two months during which SOTA and the companies negotiated; this would come to about $4,255 collectively for the workers in one of the companies, Multiwear SA. Although the agreement falls far short of the 500-gourde minimum garment workers had demonstrated for in December 2013 [see Update #1203], BO organizer Etienne considers management’s agreement to the raise and also to the principle of back pay a significant step forward.
Etienne and representatives of two other unions, the Confederation of Haitian Workers’ Forces (CFOH) and National Confederation of Haitian Workers (CNOHA), traveled to the US in January 2014 for talks with three North American firms that contract with Haitian T-shirt manufacturers [see Update #1204]. According to BO the three firms--Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc., Kentucky-based Fruit of the Loom and North Carolina-based Hanesbrands Inc.—said the unions would have to negotiate directly with the Haitian factory owners. SOTA then entered into talks with the factories but the other two unions refused to do this. Later, however, CNOHA denounced SOTA’s agreement with the factories on back pay, saying the workers really should receive $114 million collectively.
According to SOTA, workers affiliated with CNOHA and a group called “ROHAM” assaulted Etienne with rocks and tools on Jan. 30 while she was in Port-au-Prince’s main industrial park to talk to the management of the Multiwear SA plant about the company’s failure to deliver the back pay it had agreed to. Although Elienne was unharmed, BO took the attack very seriously, and a number of supporters in Haiti and internationally have signed on to a statement protesting CNOHA’s actions. (SOTA press releases 1/6/15, 1/30/15; Etienne interview 2/6/15)
In other labor news, transit in Port-au-Prince was paralyzed on Feb. 2-3 when transportation operators in 25 unions and collectives went on strike to demand that the government reduce fuel prices. Buses, minibuses, tap-taps (small vans used as minibuses) and moto-taxis (motorcyclists offering rides for a fee) were almost all absent from the streets as strikers enforced the job action with rocks and barricades of flaming tires. The government of President Michel Martelly responded by announcing that as of Feb. 6 the price of gasoline would fall from 215 gourdes to 195 gourdes (about US$4.58 to US$4.15), with corresponding reductions for diesel fuel and kerosene. But students from the State University of Haiti (UEH), who rely on public transit to get to classes, said they would continue to protest until the government lowers the gasoline price to 100 gourdes. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/2/15, 2/3/15, 2/7/15)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
Making Palm Oil Sustainable Will Take More Than a New Label (Latin America)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/02/06/making-palm-oil-sustainable-will-take-more-new-label
Latin America: People’s Tribunal Hopes Verdict on Mining Abuses Gains Traction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/5210-latin-america-peoples-tribunal-hopes-verdict-on-mining-abuses-gains-traction
Argentine President Courts Controversy With Tweet From China
http://latindispatch.com/2015/02/05/18754/
Chile’s LGBT Movement Wins Historic Victory with Approval of Civil Unions
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/5211-chiles-lgbt-movement-wins-historic-victory-with-approval-of-civil-unions
Peru: Achuar protesters seize Amazon oil-field
http://ww4report.com/node/13956
#LeyPulpín: Peruvian Youth Fight for their Future
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14556
Rosa Palomino: “On the Radio We Care About Our Rights and Aymara Culture” (Peru)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/rosa-palomino-radio-care-rights-aymara-culture/
In Peru, Scientist Documents the Impacts of Continent’s Largest Gold Mine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/5207-in-peru-scientist-documents-the-impacts-of-continents-largest-gold-mine
More than 60 Bodies Found in Colombian Mass Grave
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/More-than-60-Bodies-Found-in-Colombian-Mass-Grave-20150207-0018.html
Colombia: peasants detain soldiers... again
http://ww4report.com/node/13954
Colombia: whither FARC's future?
http://ww4report.com/node/13955
The Economic War: Not just business as usual (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11183
The Justice Brigades of Ayotzinapa (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-justice-brigades-of-ayotzinapa/
Tourist Development Behind State Repression of Non-Violent Indigenous Movement (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14548
150 People Reported Disappeared in Piedras Negras, Mexico
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/150-People-Reported-Disappeared-in-Piedras-Negras-Mexico-20150207-0012.html
A Look at the New Provisional Electoral Council (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/a-look-at-the-new-provisional-electoral-council
In the Dominican Republic, Many of Haitian Descent Left Effectively Stateless
http://latindispatch.com/2015/02/02/in-the-dominican-republic-many-of-haitian-descent-left-effectively-stateless/
The Battle over Immigrant Driver’s Licenses Flares Anew in New Mexico (US/immigration)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-battle-over-immigrant-drivers-licenses-flares-anew-in-new-mexico/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
1. Central America: US Pushes New “Plan Colombia”
2. Chile: Mapuche Continue Drive for Land
3. Mexico: Official Ayotzinapa Claims Disputed
4. Mexico: Authorities “Rescue” Maquila Workers
5. Haiti: Union and Maquilas Negotiate on Pay
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: The Update is ceasing publication on Feb. 15. In the remaining issues we are trying to include some updated information on stories we covered in the past.
*1. Central America: US Pushes New “Plan Colombia”
On Jan. 29 the administration of US president Barack Obama announced that its budget proposal to Congress for fiscal year 2016 (October 2015-September 2016) would include $1 billion in aid to Central America, with an emphasis on El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The goal is to help “implement systemic reforms that address the lack of economic opportunity, the absence of strong institutions and the extreme levels of violence that have held the region back at a time of prosperity for the rest of the Western Hemisphere,” according to a White House fact sheet. The New York Times published an op-ed the same day by Vice President Joseph Biden explaining the request as a way “to stem the dangerous surge in migration” last summer—a reference to an uptick in border crossings by unaccompanied Central American minors that peaked last June and quickly diminished in subsequent months [see Update #1237].
The $1 billion proposal appears to be a more detailed version of a plan presented by Vice President Biden and the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras in Washington on Nov. 14 [see Update #1244]. It provides “over $400 million” for “trade facilitation” and other forms of economic development; “over $300 million” to “advance regional security efforts”; and “nearly $250 million” to “strengthen institutions,” including “rule-of-law institutions” so that they can “better administer justice.” In his op-ed Biden indicated that the US proposals for Central America are modeled on Plan Colombia, a $9 billion program started in 1999 as a “war on drugs” effort. The vice president claimed that Colombia is now “a nation transformed.”
The economic reforms in the proposal are aimed at “creating business environments friendly to entrepreneurs.” “Central American economies can grow only by attracting international investment,” Biden wrote. The US is “ready to work” to help “ensure that local enterprises get the most out of existing free trade agreements,” such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). (White House Fact Sheet 1/29/15; New York Times 1/29/15)
Despite its neoliberal economic features, the proposal has the support of at least some center-left Latin American leaders, including Salvadoran president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a leader in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), once a leftist rebel group. With the US aid in the proposal “we have opportunities to go on working to guarantee you the right to education, to health, to live in families,” he told a group of Salvadoran school children on Jan. 31. (La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador) 2/1/15) Center-left Chilean president Michelle Bachelet also backs the plan, which includes having Central American countries join the Pacific Alliance, a trade bloc currently composed of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Bachelet was in Guatemala on Jan. 30 for talks with Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina about his country’s request to be admitted to the alliance. (Télam (Argentina) 1/30/15)
The proposal emphasizes the need to reform Central American justice systems but doesn’t give specifics. On Feb. 2-3 the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), held hearings on a complaint by four Honduran judges over their dismissal from their posts after they publicly opposed the June 2009 military coup that removed former president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009) from office. Former judges Guillermo López, Luis Alonso Chévez, Ramón Enrique Barrios and Tirza Flores say the dismissals violated their free speech rights. The current Honduran government supports the removal of the judges. Government attorney Jorge Serrano argued that the action “doesn't violate…precedents set by the inter-American system.” (Tico Times (Costa Rica) 2/4/15 from AFP)
*2. Chile: Mapuche Continue Drive for Land
A group of about 70 indigenous Chilean Mapuche from the José Llancao community peacefully occupied a section of a government research farm in Vilcún commune in Cautín province, in the central Araucanía region, to further their demand for 60 hectares of land that they say belong to the community. The Carillanca Farming Research Center (INIA Carillanca) started as a private estate but has been operated as a research facility under the Agriculture Ministry for the past 50 years. According to the community’s werken (spokesperson), Juan Alguilera Esquivel, the residents have been trying to reclaim the 60 hectares, which they say were usurped illegally by the owner of the private estate, for more than 20 years. The Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, have been using land occupations since the 1990s in a campaign to regain land they consider ancestral territory [see Update #1240]. Local estate owners are strongly opposed to the community’s claims on the research facility. “Not one meter should be sold,” said Marcelo Zirotti, president of the Agricultural Development Society (SOFO). If the government gives up any land, “they’ll be telling us, the farmers, that we should close up and go elsewhere.” (Radio Bío Bío (Chile) 2/6/15; El Ciudadano (Chile) 2/6/15)
Meanwhile, rightwing politicians and business representatives are blaming Mapuche activists for many of the 150-160 forest fires reported in Chile’s Araucanía region in the past six months. In January Senator Alberto Espina of the center-right National Renewal (RN) party implied that the fires are being set by Mapuche activists protesting what they consider the theft of their land by forestry companies. Patricio Santibáñez, president of the Chilean Timber Corporation (CORMA), charged that 70% of the fires are “organized, planned.” A report by the carabineros militarized police put the total number of fires connected to the Mapuche conflict at 15 for the period, less than 10%, and said the number of arson cases had declined. Santibáñez repeated charges from 2012 that Mapuche activists were responsible for an outbreak of forest fires then, including one in which seven firefighters were killed [see Update #1113]. The 2012 fires came at a time of severe drought; Mapuche spokespeople said the situation was aggravated by the forestry companies’ planting of more flammable trees such as pine and eucalyptus. (PanAm Post 1/30/15; Rebelión 2/7/15)
*3. Mexico: Official Ayotzinapa Claims Disputed
The nonprofit Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) released a report on Feb. 7 citing a number of irregularities in the Mexican federal government’s investigation of the disappearance of 43 teachers’ college students in Iguala de la Independencia in the southwestern state of Guerrero the night of Sept. 26-27 [see Update #1251]. The Argentine experts have researched deaths and disappearances in about 30 countries, including those that occurred in their own country during the 1976-1983 “Dirty War” against suspected leftists and in Guatemala during that country’s 1960-1996 civil war. The Argentines were brought into the investigation by the parents of the missing students, who had attended the traditionally leftist Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa.
The Mexican government has concluded that all the students were killed and that their bodies were incinerated in a dump in the Guerrero municipality of Cocula and thrown into the San Juan river. The Argentines found several problems that they said made it impossible for them to confirm the official version. For example, the government had agreed to keep the independent experts involved in all phases of the investigation but didn’t in fact include them on some occasions—notably, at the time when the supposed remains of the students were found. The Argentines also said the Cocula dump wasn’t guarded during part of the period of the investigation, so that evidence could have been altered. Journalists and researchers have questioned other aspects of the official account, including the government’s contention that only municipal police and a local gang were involved in the violence and the claim that the bodies could be thoroughly incinerated in an open-air fire. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/8/15)
Teachers in Guerrero have regularly joined with students in demonstrations over the Ayotzinapa disappearances, but on Feb. 6 they had an additional reason to protest. Members of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) and the Only Union of Guerrero State Public Servants (Suspeg) blocked the Miguel Alemán coastal highway in Acapulco for nearly three hours to protest the state’s failure to pay their salary. According to the national SNTE, some 12,000 Guerrero teachers didn’t get valid paychecks. The unions indicated that both the state and the federal governments were responsible for the shortfall in funds. (LJ 2/7/15)
Forced disappearances by the police are not limited to Guerrero. According to Denise García Bosque, an attorney for families in the northeastern state of Coahuila, the nonprofit Families United has documented 150 disappearance cases in the past 18 months in just one area, the small city of Piedras Negras and the region known as Cinco Manantiales. García said that in at least 60 of these cases there is evidence of participation by special police groups, principally a state unit created in 2009, the Special Arms and Tactics Group (GATE). A total of 51 of the victims have been found alive but are all in prison; they charge that they were tortured into making false confessions that they were members of criminal groups. Special police units are proliferating throughout Mexico, the national daily Excélsior wrote last November; they “sometimes receive special training by US, Colombian or Israeli elite groups,” the paper said. (LJ 2/7/15; TeleSUR English 2/7/15)
*4. Mexico: Authorities “Rescue” Maquila Workers
Federal and state authorities said they rescued 129 Mexican workers on Feb. 5 from sexual and labor exploitation at Yes Internacional SA de CV, a Korean-owned garment assembly plant in Zapopan in the western state of Jalisco. The factory was closed down, and four of the executives were detained, according to the National Migration Institute (INM). The workers--who were mostly women, including six minors--reported being subjected to blows and insults, and federal authorities indicated that they would investigate reports of interrupted pregnancies and serious injuries apparently resulting from sexual assaults. In 2013 Jalisco police said they rescued at least 275 people who had been held in inhumane conditions in a tomato-packing factory.
Mexican media described Yes International as a maquiladora, a tax-exempt assembly plant producing for export. Its products were largely socks, but press accounts didn’t indicate what retailers contracted with the factory. The day after the initial raid, the federal Labor and Social Welfare Secretariat (STPS) said the factory was closed for irregularities in its operation, such as a failure to certify the plant’s boilers, not for alleged mistreatment of workers. Some plant employees told reporters that they hadn’t experienced abuses and that they objected to the closing of the plant. Although the workers said the pay was low—600 to 700 pesos a week (about US$40.50 to US$ 47.24)—they were upset about losing jobs in an area with limited employment opportunities. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/6/15, 2/7/15; International Business Times 2/6/15)
*5. Haiti: Union and Maquilas Negotiate on Pay
Haiti’s Textile and Garment Workers Union (SOTA), which represents a number of workers in the Port-au-Prince garment assembly sector, has worked out an agreement under which the owners of three factories are to honor the legal minimum wage of 300 gourdes (currently about US$6.38) a day for piece workers in the industry. The 300-gourde minimum went into effect in October 2012 but has generally been ignored by management. According to a Jan. 6 SOTA press release and a Feb. 6 radio interview with Yannick Etienne of the labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (BO, “Workers’ Struggle”), under the agreement workers who were receiving 225 gourdes a day now receive 300 gourdes and those who received 300 gourdes receive 375 gourdes. In addition, the three companies agreed to provide back pay to cover the difference between the old and the new wages for two months during which SOTA and the companies negotiated; this would come to about $4,255 collectively for the workers in one of the companies, Multiwear SA. Although the agreement falls far short of the 500-gourde minimum garment workers had demonstrated for in December 2013 [see Update #1203], BO organizer Etienne considers management’s agreement to the raise and also to the principle of back pay a significant step forward.
Etienne and representatives of two other unions, the Confederation of Haitian Workers’ Forces (CFOH) and National Confederation of Haitian Workers (CNOHA), traveled to the US in January 2014 for talks with three North American firms that contract with Haitian T-shirt manufacturers [see Update #1204]. According to BO the three firms--Montreal-based Gildan Activewear Inc., Kentucky-based Fruit of the Loom and North Carolina-based Hanesbrands Inc.—said the unions would have to negotiate directly with the Haitian factory owners. SOTA then entered into talks with the factories but the other two unions refused to do this. Later, however, CNOHA denounced SOTA’s agreement with the factories on back pay, saying the workers really should receive $114 million collectively.
According to SOTA, workers affiliated with CNOHA and a group called “ROHAM” assaulted Etienne with rocks and tools on Jan. 30 while she was in Port-au-Prince’s main industrial park to talk to the management of the Multiwear SA plant about the company’s failure to deliver the back pay it had agreed to. Although Elienne was unharmed, BO took the attack very seriously, and a number of supporters in Haiti and internationally have signed on to a statement protesting CNOHA’s actions. (SOTA press releases 1/6/15, 1/30/15; Etienne interview 2/6/15)
In other labor news, transit in Port-au-Prince was paralyzed on Feb. 2-3 when transportation operators in 25 unions and collectives went on strike to demand that the government reduce fuel prices. Buses, minibuses, tap-taps (small vans used as minibuses) and moto-taxis (motorcyclists offering rides for a fee) were almost all absent from the streets as strikers enforced the job action with rocks and barricades of flaming tires. The government of President Michel Martelly responded by announcing that as of Feb. 6 the price of gasoline would fall from 215 gourdes to 195 gourdes (about US$4.58 to US$4.15), with corresponding reductions for diesel fuel and kerosene. But students from the State University of Haiti (UEH), who rely on public transit to get to classes, said they would continue to protest until the government lowers the gasoline price to 100 gourdes. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/2/15, 2/3/15, 2/7/15)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
Making Palm Oil Sustainable Will Take More Than a New Label (Latin America)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/02/06/making-palm-oil-sustainable-will-take-more-new-label
Latin America: People’s Tribunal Hopes Verdict on Mining Abuses Gains Traction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/5210-latin-america-peoples-tribunal-hopes-verdict-on-mining-abuses-gains-traction
Argentine President Courts Controversy With Tweet From China
http://latindispatch.com/2015/02/05/18754/
Chile’s LGBT Movement Wins Historic Victory with Approval of Civil Unions
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/5211-chiles-lgbt-movement-wins-historic-victory-with-approval-of-civil-unions
Peru: Achuar protesters seize Amazon oil-field
http://ww4report.com/node/13956
#LeyPulpín: Peruvian Youth Fight for their Future
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14556
Rosa Palomino: “On the Radio We Care About Our Rights and Aymara Culture” (Peru)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/rosa-palomino-radio-care-rights-aymara-culture/
In Peru, Scientist Documents the Impacts of Continent’s Largest Gold Mine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/5207-in-peru-scientist-documents-the-impacts-of-continents-largest-gold-mine
More than 60 Bodies Found in Colombian Mass Grave
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/More-than-60-Bodies-Found-in-Colombian-Mass-Grave-20150207-0018.html
Colombia: peasants detain soldiers... again
http://ww4report.com/node/13954
Colombia: whither FARC's future?
http://ww4report.com/node/13955
The Economic War: Not just business as usual (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11183
The Justice Brigades of Ayotzinapa (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-justice-brigades-of-ayotzinapa/
Tourist Development Behind State Repression of Non-Violent Indigenous Movement (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14548
150 People Reported Disappeared in Piedras Negras, Mexico
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/150-People-Reported-Disappeared-in-Piedras-Negras-Mexico-20150207-0012.html
A Look at the New Provisional Electoral Council (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/a-look-at-the-new-provisional-electoral-council
In the Dominican Republic, Many of Haitian Descent Left Effectively Stateless
http://latindispatch.com/2015/02/02/in-the-dominican-republic-many-of-haitian-descent-left-effectively-stateless/
The Battle over Immigrant Driver’s Licenses Flares Anew in New Mexico (US/immigration)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-battle-over-immigrant-drivers-licenses-flares-anew-in-new-mexico/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
WNU #1252: Argentine Prosecutor Dies in “Suicide”
Issue #1252, January 25, 2015
1. Argentina: AMIA Prosecutor Dies in “Suicide”
2. Argentina: Many Are Suspected in AMIA Coverup
3. Mexico: More PEMEX Contract Scandals Exposed
4. Guatemala: Top Cop Convicted in Embassy Fire
5. Links to alternative sources on: South America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: The Update is ceasing publication on Feb. 15. In each of the remaining issues we will try to include some updated information on stories we covered in the past.
*1. Argentina: AMIA Prosecutor Dies in “Suicide”
Argentine federal prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment late on Jan. 18 with a gunshot wound to his head. Nisman had filed a 289-page criminal complaint on Jan. 14 charging that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and eight others, including two Iranians, had acted to cover up the alleged role of the Iranian government in the July 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires [see World War 4 Report 1/19/15]. The bombing, which left 85 dead and some 300 injured, is considered the deadliest anti-Semitic attack carried out anywhere since World War 2. Nisman’s death came the day before he was to testify to the National Congress about the charges.
Nisman’s body was found in his locked apartment by his mother and agents from his 10-member security detail after the prosecutor failed to answer phone calls; he was lying next to the .22-caliber handgun used to shoot him. Investigators initially suggested suicide, as did President Fernández in a Facebook posting on Jan. 20. But evidence emerged later that undercut the suicide hypothesis: Nisman had not appeared suicidal; there was no note; gunpowder traces weren’t detected on Nisman’s hands; a locksmith disputed claims that two entrances to the apartment were locked; and a previously unnoticed third entrance was discovered. Reversing her earlier position, Fernández wrote on Jan. 22 that the prosecutor had probably been murdered. (New York Times 1/22/15, 1/23/15 from correspondents; InfoBAE (Argentina) 1/22/15)
In October 2006 Nisman--who was appointed to head the AMIA inquiry by former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), Fernández’s late husband--formally charged the Lebanese organization Hezbollah with carrying out the AMIA bombing and the Iranian government with ordering it. In January 2013 Argentina and Iran signed an agreement for a joint investigation into the attack [see Update #1195]. Nisman opposed the deal, as did Jewish community leaders, who felt this would impede prosecution of the Iranian suspects. An Argentine appeals court ruled the agreement unconstitutional on May 15, 2014, although the government has appealed the decision [see World War 4 Report 5/18/14].
In his Jan. 14 complaint, based in part on intercepted phone calls, Nisman accused the presidency and people close to Fernández of working to negate the charges against Iran in exchange for trade deals. In addition to President Fernández and Foreign Minister Timerman, Nisman named legislative deputy Andrés “Cuervo” Larroque; Luis D’Elía, a leader in the leftist Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA) and the piquetero (“picketer”) unemployed movement who is close to the government [see Update #975]; Fernando Esteche, the leader of the far-left group Quebracho [see Update #960]; Héctor Yrimia, a former prosecutor in the AMIA case; Mohsen Rabbani, a former cultural attaché to the Iranian embassy suspected of masterminding the bombing [see Update #1124]; and Jorge “Yussuf” Khalil, an Iranian community leader in Buenos Aires. The complaint included transcripts of phone conversations between D’Elía and Khalil. (Todo Noticias (Argentina) 1/15/15, 1/23/15; NYT 1/22/15 from correspondents)
Fernández supporters noted that Nisman had close relations with the US embassy in Buenos Aires, according to US diplomatic cables released by the Wikileaks group in 2010, and that he followed advice from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs (OIA). It seems that Nisman regularly notified the embassy in advance about his legal moves. A confidential diplomatic cable dated May 19, 2009, notes that Nisman advised the embassy of his request for the indictment of a new AMIA suspect the day before he submitted the request to the judge in the case, Rodolfo Canicoba Corra. (Buenos Aires Herald 1/16/15)
In related news, at least 10 people were injured the night of Jan. 18-19 when a crowd chanting anti-Semitic slogans attacked a hostel in Lago Puelo in the southern province of Chubut, beating and robbing Israeli tourists. The hostel’s owner, Sergio Polak, said the crowd also hurled rocks and Molotov bombs and fired shots. Attacks on the hostel “started in March or April last year,” he said. “We connect it with the campaign going on for a while on the subject of Israeli tourism. They say [the guests] are Israeli soldiers.” The attack reportedly went on for hours because the local police didn’t have enough agents on hand. There were about 10 assailants, identified as neighbors of the hostel. Initially no one was arrested, but a local radio station reported later that the attackers were “at the disposition of justice.” (La Nación (Argentina) 1/21/15 from Agencia DyN)
*2. Argentina: Many Are Suspected in AMIA Coverup
While the US media focused on the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s Jan. 14 charges against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, many people have been accused over the years of blocking the investigation into the deadly 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) building. The people suspected include a former president, a judge, an intelligence chief, and officials of two foreign governments. After an inquiry that has gone on for 21 years under several different governments, Argentine prosecutors have still not won a single conviction in the case.
In May 2008 Nisman charged former president Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999) with impeding the initial investigation during his presidency. In March 2012 federal judge Ariel Lijo ordered Menem to stand trial on the charges, along with the judge who headed the original investigation, Juan José Galeano; intelligence service directors Hugo Anzorreguy and Juan Carlos Anchezar; and two commanders of the federal police [see Update #1124]. The trial still hasn’t taken place. Formerly an opponent of President Fernández, Menem is now a political ally and seems to be having a relatively easy time in the courts. He is also implicated in the government's clandestine sales of 6,500 tons of arms to Ecuador and Croatia from 1991 to 1995. In March 2013 an appeals court found him guilty of “aggravated smuggling,” but he currently enjoys immunity as a senator for La Rioja province [see Updates #1097, 1167].
Menem was allied with the US government while he was president, and the US embassy was clearly upset when Nisman filed charges against him in the AMIA case. Nisman apologized for not giving the embassy advance warning, according to a May 27 confidential cable obtained by the Wikileaks group. Then-US ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne, now the ambassador to Mexico, complained in another confidential cable two days later that the Menem charges “could complicate international efforts to bring the Iranian indictees to justice.” “Nisman may still be currying favor from the Casa Rosada [Argentina’s presidential palace] with a view to a favorable judicial appointment in the future,” Wayne claimed. The May 27 cable emphasized the US government’s interest in keeping the investigation centered on Iran and away from Menem: “Legatt officers [legal attachés] have for the past two years recommended to Nisman that he focus on the perpetrators of the terrorist attack and not on the possible mishandling of the first investigation.” (Buenos Aires Herald 1/16/15)
Although never formally charged, another coverup suspect is Antonio Horacio Stiles, better known as “Jaime Stiusso” (or “Stiuso”), the director of operations for the federal Intelligence Service (SI) until Fernández replaced him in December. Stiusso entered intelligence work in 1972, serving under the highly repressive 1976-1983 military junta and then under all governments since the restoration of democracy. He is said to have been close to Nisman, and also to have worked closely with Israel’s Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Stiusso seemed to have a great deal of power in the government. Then-justice minister Gustavo Beliz had to resign his post on July 25, 2004 after tangling with the intelligence director. Beliz went on television the same day to charge that Stiusso had “messed up” the AMIA investigation. Beliz also said Argentina’s intelligence apparatus was a “black hole,” a “parallel state” and a “secret police without any controls,” and he described Stiusso as someone “the whole world fears because they say he’s dangerous and can have you killed.” (La Nación (Argentina) 12/18/14; El País (Madrid) 1/25/15)
Although the Iranian government would obviously have reasons to block the inquiry if Iranian officials were involved in the AMIA bombing, there have also been accusations against Israeli officials. In January 2014 former Israeli ambassador to Argentina Yitzhak Aviran (1993-2000) announced that his country had killed most of the perpetrators of the attack. “The vast majority of the guilty parties are in another world, and this is something we did,” he said. Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman noted that Aviran’s comments “would imply that Israel hid information from Argentine courts, blocking new evidence from appearing.” Timerman demanded that Aviran tell Argentine prosecutors whether Israel had further information [see Update #1205].
Some Argentines noted that suspect “suicides” like Nisman’s are hardly unprecedented in the country [see Update #454]. Claims of suicide have been questioned in at least five other cases, all of which took place during Menem’s presidency or involved Menem or people close to him. In three of the cases, the victim was about to testify or was considering doing so.
Former Customs head Brig. Gen. Rodolfo Echegoyen (or Etchegoyen) was shot in the head in his studio in December 1990; as in the Nisman case, there were no traces of gunpowder on his hands. Echegoyen was reportedly investigating the Edcadassa company, owned by members of the Yoma family, former in-laws of then-president Menem. Postal magnate and former Menem associate Alfredo Yabrán was found dead of apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds in one of his country estates in May 1998; he was sought for questioning in the January 1997 murder of photojournalist José Luis Cabezas, who had been investigating Yabrán’s business activities. Naval captain Horacio Pedro Estrada was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment in August 1998; again, no traces of gunpowder were found, and the right-handed Estrada was shot in the left side of his head. Estrada was reportedly considering testifying in the case of illegal arms sales to Ecuador and Croatia. Also in August 1998, Marcelo Cattáneo was found hanging in an abandoned structure on a Buenos Aires university campus; he was charged with paying bribes in a corruption case involving the state-owned Banco Nacion bank and IBM, the US computer giant. His family expressed doubts about the suicide hypothesis. Lourdes di Natale, once a secretary to former Menem in-law Emir Yoma, supposedly fell or jumped to her death from her apartment’s balcony while drunk in March 2003, but no alcoholic beverage was found in her apartment and the amount of alcohol in her blood should have made her incapable of getting on the balcony. She was about to testify in the case of the smuggled arms. (Diario Uno (Argentina) 6/18/12; Página 12 (Argentina) 1/20/15)
*3. Mexico: More PEMEX Contract Scandals Exposed
Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico’s giant state-owned oil monopoly, signed contracts worth $149 billion with outside companies from 2003 to 2012, according to a Jan. 23 investigative report by the Reuters wire service; about 8% of these contracts were cited by a congressional watchdog, the Chamber of Deputies’ Federal Audit Office (ASF), as having irregularities “ranging from overcharging for shoddy work to outright fraud,” Reuters’ reporters wrote. The problems involved more than 100 contracts with a total value of $11.7 billion.
Reuters’ revelations appeared as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto was pushing ahead with an “energy reform” program to open up the country’s petroleum industry to still more contracts with private firms. Praised by the US government and media, the program is unpopular with many Mexicans, who see it as a form of disguised privatization. Two major scandals implicating PEMEX contractors came to light last year, one involving Oceanografía SA de CV and the US banking corporation Citigroup Inc., the other involving the California-based technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) [see Update #1239].
PEMEX officials rarely act to correct the contract problems, according to Reuters. From 2008 to 2012 the ASF sent PEMEX 274 recommendations to take action on the irregularities. PEMEX’s response so far has been to suspend a few employees in just three of the cases; the rest of the recommendations were dismissed or are still awaiting action. The government plans to establish a new independent auditing office for the enterprise to resolve this problem, but past performance by PEMEX auditors leads to skepticism. One example was the case of sales to Brazilian chemical maker Unigel SA. From to 2009 to 2011 PEMEX’s petrochemicals subsidiary sold the Brazilian company a chemical at an unexplained discount that cost the Mexican enterprise $24.2 million. PEMEX internal auditors flagged the problem, but the head auditor advised his colleagues to “work with the director of PEMEX Petrochemicals to attend to and answer [our] recommendations, with the aim of avoiding them becoming definitive issues.” The PEMEX officials who approved the deal weren’t disciplined; one now works for Unigel.
“PEMEX’s taxes and dividends finance about 30 percent of the federal budget,” Reuters noted. “Contract abuse at the oil giant eats into the government’s ability to fund services from healthcare to road building.” (Business Insider 1/23/15 from Reuters)
Meanwhile, PEMEX and the overall Mexican economy are being hurt by plunging oil prices on international markets. As of Jan. 23 PEMEX’s oil was selling at $38.03 a barrel, its lowest price since June 2009. (La Jornada (Mexico) 1/24/15). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects a growth rate of 3.2% for Mexico this year and 3.5% for 2016, a little below its projections for the world as a whole--3.5% in 2015 and 3.7% in 2016. (Forbes México 1/20/15 from Reuters)
*4. Guatemala: Top Cop Convicted in Embassy Fire
On Jan. 19 Guatemala’s High Risk Court B convicted former police chief Pedro García Arredondo of the deaths of 37 people in a fire at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City on Jan. 31, 1980 [see Update #1237]. García Arredondo was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the fire and 50 years for the deaths of two students; he is already serving a 70-year sentence for the killing of a student. The fire broke out when police stormed the embassy, which had been occupied by indigenous and campesino protesters from El Quiché department; the police blocked the doors and refused to let firefighters enter. The victims included the Spanish consul, two of his employees, a former Guatemalan vice president, a former Guatemalan foreign relations minister, and 22 El Quiché campesinos; one was Vicente Menchú, the father of 1992 Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum.
The rightwing government of President Otto Pérez Molina, who was a military officer at the time of the fire, said it respected the court’s decision. A note from the Foreign Relations Ministry expressed regret for the deaths of “famous Spanish people and Guatemalans.” “These situations cannot be repeated,” the note added. The Spanish Foreign Ministry wrote that the Spanish government “expresses its satisfaction and congratulates the Guatemalan justice system for having, 35 years later, judged these acts in accordance with the laws and with respect for due process.” (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 1/20/15 from AFP; Prensa Latina 1/20/15)
As of Jan. 13 Judge Carol Patricia Flores had ordered a medical examination for former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) to determine whether he can attend his new trial for genocide against Ixil Mayans in El Quiché department. He failed to appear at a hearing on Jan. 12 to discuss administrative issues in the trial. Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison on May 10, 2013, but the Constitutional Court threw the verdict out 10 days later [see Update #1178]. A new trial started on Jan. 5 but was immediately suspended because of a defense challenge to one of the judges, Jeannette Valdez, on the grounds that she had written her 2004 doctoral thesis about the genocide. (La Nación (Costa Rica) 1/13/15 from AFP)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: South America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
Commodity boom extracting increasingly heavy toll on Amazon forests (South America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5191-commodity-boom-extracting-increasingly-heavy-toll-on-amazon-forests-
New Evidence Raises Questions About Death of Argentine Prosecutor
http://latindispatch.com/2015/01/22/new-evidence-raises-questions-about-death-of-argentine-prosecutor/
Prosecutor’s Death a Test for Argentine Democracy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/5192-prosecutors-death-a-test-for-argentine-democracy
La Legua: Building Community in Small Spaces (Chile)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14486
In Memoriam: Pedro Lemebel (Chile)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/23/memoriam-pedro-lemebel
Bolivian Socialist Funds Election Campaign by Selling Potatoes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5188-bolivian-socialist-funds-election-campaign-by-selling-potatoes
Ecuador: Waorani warriors on trial in oil-field raid
http://ww4report.com/node/13925
Chevron Crowned as World's Worst Company for the Environment (Ecuador)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chevron-Crowned-as-Worlds-Worst-Company-for-the-Environment-20150123-0024.html
Ecuador: The “Citizens’ Revolution” vs Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5189-ecuador-the-citizens-revolution-vs-social-movements
Social Movements Demand ¨Maximum Sentence¨ for Indigenous Leader’s Murderer as Trial Continues (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11165
El Salvador: Pardon Granted For One of 17 Women Jailed for Miscarriage, Accused of Homicide
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/5198-el-salvador-pardon-granted-for-one-of-17-women-jailed-for-miscarraige
Evidence the DEA Attempted to Alter Testimony on Drug War Massacre in Honduras
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14509
Trial on Guatemala’s Spanish Embassy Fire Resumes Today: The Rest is History (Video)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/19/trial-guatemala%E2%80%99s-spanish-embassy-fire-resumes-today-rest-history-video
2015 US Appropriations Act Maintains Restrictions On US Military Aid To Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5186-2015-us-appropriations-act-maintains-restrictions-on-us-military-aid-to-guatemala
Mexico: Ayotzinapa, Emblem of the Twenty-First Century Social Order
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5193-mexico-ayotzinapa-emblem-of-the-twenty-first-century-social-order
Forced Disappearances Are Humanitarian Crisis in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5195-forced-disappearances-are-humanitarian-crisis-in-mexico
Lopez Obrador Back on the Battlefield (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/lopez-obrador-back-on-the-battlefield/
Vanished in Vallarta (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/vanished-in-vallarta/
Mexico: cops arrested in 'disappearance' of reporter
http://ww4report.com/node/13920
Cuba, U.S. Agree on Diplomacy, Clash Over Human Rights During Historic Talks
http://latindispatch.com/2015/01/23/cuba-u-s-agree-on-diplomacy-clash-over-human-rights-during-historic-talks/
The Cuban Opening and the Struggles for a New Social Order
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5194-the-cuban-opening-and-the-struggles-for-a-new-social-order
Security Council Arrives in Haiti as New Electoral Commission is Announced
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/security-council-arrives-in-haiti-as-new-electoral-commission-is-announced
New Tools for Assessing Progress in Haiti Reconstruction and Development
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/new-tools-for-assessing-progress-in-haiti-reconstruction-and-development
Is USAID Helping Haiti to Recover, or US Contractors to Make Millions?
www.thenation.com/article/195673/usaid-helping-haiti-recover-or-us-contractors-make-millions
Over 17,000 Mexican Children Attempt to Enter US Every Year (US/immigration)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Over-17000-Mexican-Children-Attempt-to-Enter-US-Every-Year-20150123-0019.html
The Israel-Mexico Border: How Israeli High-Tech Firms Are Up-Armoring the U.S.-Mexico Border
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/27/israel-mexico-border
Joining our struggles to build another world: 10 years of horizontal organising in El Barrio, New York (US/immigration)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14495
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
1. Argentina: AMIA Prosecutor Dies in “Suicide”
2. Argentina: Many Are Suspected in AMIA Coverup
3. Mexico: More PEMEX Contract Scandals Exposed
4. Guatemala: Top Cop Convicted in Embassy Fire
5. Links to alternative sources on: South America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: The Update is ceasing publication on Feb. 15. In each of the remaining issues we will try to include some updated information on stories we covered in the past.
*1. Argentina: AMIA Prosecutor Dies in “Suicide”
Argentine federal prosecutor Natalio Alberto Nisman was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment late on Jan. 18 with a gunshot wound to his head. Nisman had filed a 289-page criminal complaint on Jan. 14 charging that President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and eight others, including two Iranians, had acted to cover up the alleged role of the Iranian government in the July 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires [see World War 4 Report 1/19/15]. The bombing, which left 85 dead and some 300 injured, is considered the deadliest anti-Semitic attack carried out anywhere since World War 2. Nisman’s death came the day before he was to testify to the National Congress about the charges.
Nisman’s body was found in his locked apartment by his mother and agents from his 10-member security detail after the prosecutor failed to answer phone calls; he was lying next to the .22-caliber handgun used to shoot him. Investigators initially suggested suicide, as did President Fernández in a Facebook posting on Jan. 20. But evidence emerged later that undercut the suicide hypothesis: Nisman had not appeared suicidal; there was no note; gunpowder traces weren’t detected on Nisman’s hands; a locksmith disputed claims that two entrances to the apartment were locked; and a previously unnoticed third entrance was discovered. Reversing her earlier position, Fernández wrote on Jan. 22 that the prosecutor had probably been murdered. (New York Times 1/22/15, 1/23/15 from correspondents; InfoBAE (Argentina) 1/22/15)
In October 2006 Nisman--who was appointed to head the AMIA inquiry by former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007), Fernández’s late husband--formally charged the Lebanese organization Hezbollah with carrying out the AMIA bombing and the Iranian government with ordering it. In January 2013 Argentina and Iran signed an agreement for a joint investigation into the attack [see Update #1195]. Nisman opposed the deal, as did Jewish community leaders, who felt this would impede prosecution of the Iranian suspects. An Argentine appeals court ruled the agreement unconstitutional on May 15, 2014, although the government has appealed the decision [see World War 4 Report 5/18/14].
In his Jan. 14 complaint, based in part on intercepted phone calls, Nisman accused the presidency and people close to Fernández of working to negate the charges against Iran in exchange for trade deals. In addition to President Fernández and Foreign Minister Timerman, Nisman named legislative deputy Andrés “Cuervo” Larroque; Luis D’Elía, a leader in the leftist Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA) and the piquetero (“picketer”) unemployed movement who is close to the government [see Update #975]; Fernando Esteche, the leader of the far-left group Quebracho [see Update #960]; Héctor Yrimia, a former prosecutor in the AMIA case; Mohsen Rabbani, a former cultural attaché to the Iranian embassy suspected of masterminding the bombing [see Update #1124]; and Jorge “Yussuf” Khalil, an Iranian community leader in Buenos Aires. The complaint included transcripts of phone conversations between D’Elía and Khalil. (Todo Noticias (Argentina) 1/15/15, 1/23/15; NYT 1/22/15 from correspondents)
Fernández supporters noted that Nisman had close relations with the US embassy in Buenos Aires, according to US diplomatic cables released by the Wikileaks group in 2010, and that he followed advice from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs (OIA). It seems that Nisman regularly notified the embassy in advance about his legal moves. A confidential diplomatic cable dated May 19, 2009, notes that Nisman advised the embassy of his request for the indictment of a new AMIA suspect the day before he submitted the request to the judge in the case, Rodolfo Canicoba Corra. (Buenos Aires Herald 1/16/15)
In related news, at least 10 people were injured the night of Jan. 18-19 when a crowd chanting anti-Semitic slogans attacked a hostel in Lago Puelo in the southern province of Chubut, beating and robbing Israeli tourists. The hostel’s owner, Sergio Polak, said the crowd also hurled rocks and Molotov bombs and fired shots. Attacks on the hostel “started in March or April last year,” he said. “We connect it with the campaign going on for a while on the subject of Israeli tourism. They say [the guests] are Israeli soldiers.” The attack reportedly went on for hours because the local police didn’t have enough agents on hand. There were about 10 assailants, identified as neighbors of the hostel. Initially no one was arrested, but a local radio station reported later that the attackers were “at the disposition of justice.” (La Nación (Argentina) 1/21/15 from Agencia DyN)
*2. Argentina: Many Are Suspected in AMIA Coverup
While the US media focused on the late Argentine prosecutor Alberto Nisman’s Jan. 14 charges against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, many people have been accused over the years of blocking the investigation into the deadly 1994 bombing of the Argentine Jewish Mutual Association (AMIA) building. The people suspected include a former president, a judge, an intelligence chief, and officials of two foreign governments. After an inquiry that has gone on for 21 years under several different governments, Argentine prosecutors have still not won a single conviction in the case.
In May 2008 Nisman charged former president Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-1999) with impeding the initial investigation during his presidency. In March 2012 federal judge Ariel Lijo ordered Menem to stand trial on the charges, along with the judge who headed the original investigation, Juan José Galeano; intelligence service directors Hugo Anzorreguy and Juan Carlos Anchezar; and two commanders of the federal police [see Update #1124]. The trial still hasn’t taken place. Formerly an opponent of President Fernández, Menem is now a political ally and seems to be having a relatively easy time in the courts. He is also implicated in the government's clandestine sales of 6,500 tons of arms to Ecuador and Croatia from 1991 to 1995. In March 2013 an appeals court found him guilty of “aggravated smuggling,” but he currently enjoys immunity as a senator for La Rioja province [see Updates #1097, 1167].
Menem was allied with the US government while he was president, and the US embassy was clearly upset when Nisman filed charges against him in the AMIA case. Nisman apologized for not giving the embassy advance warning, according to a May 27 confidential cable obtained by the Wikileaks group. Then-US ambassador Earl Anthony Wayne, now the ambassador to Mexico, complained in another confidential cable two days later that the Menem charges “could complicate international efforts to bring the Iranian indictees to justice.” “Nisman may still be currying favor from the Casa Rosada [Argentina’s presidential palace] with a view to a favorable judicial appointment in the future,” Wayne claimed. The May 27 cable emphasized the US government’s interest in keeping the investigation centered on Iran and away from Menem: “Legatt officers [legal attachés] have for the past two years recommended to Nisman that he focus on the perpetrators of the terrorist attack and not on the possible mishandling of the first investigation.” (Buenos Aires Herald 1/16/15)
Although never formally charged, another coverup suspect is Antonio Horacio Stiles, better known as “Jaime Stiusso” (or “Stiuso”), the director of operations for the federal Intelligence Service (SI) until Fernández replaced him in December. Stiusso entered intelligence work in 1972, serving under the highly repressive 1976-1983 military junta and then under all governments since the restoration of democracy. He is said to have been close to Nisman, and also to have worked closely with Israel’s Mossad and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Stiusso seemed to have a great deal of power in the government. Then-justice minister Gustavo Beliz had to resign his post on July 25, 2004 after tangling with the intelligence director. Beliz went on television the same day to charge that Stiusso had “messed up” the AMIA investigation. Beliz also said Argentina’s intelligence apparatus was a “black hole,” a “parallel state” and a “secret police without any controls,” and he described Stiusso as someone “the whole world fears because they say he’s dangerous and can have you killed.” (La Nación (Argentina) 12/18/14; El País (Madrid) 1/25/15)
Although the Iranian government would obviously have reasons to block the inquiry if Iranian officials were involved in the AMIA bombing, there have also been accusations against Israeli officials. In January 2014 former Israeli ambassador to Argentina Yitzhak Aviran (1993-2000) announced that his country had killed most of the perpetrators of the attack. “The vast majority of the guilty parties are in another world, and this is something we did,” he said. Argentine foreign minister Héctor Timerman noted that Aviran’s comments “would imply that Israel hid information from Argentine courts, blocking new evidence from appearing.” Timerman demanded that Aviran tell Argentine prosecutors whether Israel had further information [see Update #1205].
Some Argentines noted that suspect “suicides” like Nisman’s are hardly unprecedented in the country [see Update #454]. Claims of suicide have been questioned in at least five other cases, all of which took place during Menem’s presidency or involved Menem or people close to him. In three of the cases, the victim was about to testify or was considering doing so.
Former Customs head Brig. Gen. Rodolfo Echegoyen (or Etchegoyen) was shot in the head in his studio in December 1990; as in the Nisman case, there were no traces of gunpowder on his hands. Echegoyen was reportedly investigating the Edcadassa company, owned by members of the Yoma family, former in-laws of then-president Menem. Postal magnate and former Menem associate Alfredo Yabrán was found dead of apparently self-inflicted gunshot wounds in one of his country estates in May 1998; he was sought for questioning in the January 1997 murder of photojournalist José Luis Cabezas, who had been investigating Yabrán’s business activities. Naval captain Horacio Pedro Estrada was found dead in his Buenos Aires apartment in August 1998; again, no traces of gunpowder were found, and the right-handed Estrada was shot in the left side of his head. Estrada was reportedly considering testifying in the case of illegal arms sales to Ecuador and Croatia. Also in August 1998, Marcelo Cattáneo was found hanging in an abandoned structure on a Buenos Aires university campus; he was charged with paying bribes in a corruption case involving the state-owned Banco Nacion bank and IBM, the US computer giant. His family expressed doubts about the suicide hypothesis. Lourdes di Natale, once a secretary to former Menem in-law Emir Yoma, supposedly fell or jumped to her death from her apartment’s balcony while drunk in March 2003, but no alcoholic beverage was found in her apartment and the amount of alcohol in her blood should have made her incapable of getting on the balcony. She was about to testify in the case of the smuggled arms. (Diario Uno (Argentina) 6/18/12; Página 12 (Argentina) 1/20/15)
*3. Mexico: More PEMEX Contract Scandals Exposed
Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico’s giant state-owned oil monopoly, signed contracts worth $149 billion with outside companies from 2003 to 2012, according to a Jan. 23 investigative report by the Reuters wire service; about 8% of these contracts were cited by a congressional watchdog, the Chamber of Deputies’ Federal Audit Office (ASF), as having irregularities “ranging from overcharging for shoddy work to outright fraud,” Reuters’ reporters wrote. The problems involved more than 100 contracts with a total value of $11.7 billion.
Reuters’ revelations appeared as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto was pushing ahead with an “energy reform” program to open up the country’s petroleum industry to still more contracts with private firms. Praised by the US government and media, the program is unpopular with many Mexicans, who see it as a form of disguised privatization. Two major scandals implicating PEMEX contractors came to light last year, one involving Oceanografía SA de CV and the US banking corporation Citigroup Inc., the other involving the California-based technology company Hewlett-Packard (HP) [see Update #1239].
PEMEX officials rarely act to correct the contract problems, according to Reuters. From 2008 to 2012 the ASF sent PEMEX 274 recommendations to take action on the irregularities. PEMEX’s response so far has been to suspend a few employees in just three of the cases; the rest of the recommendations were dismissed or are still awaiting action. The government plans to establish a new independent auditing office for the enterprise to resolve this problem, but past performance by PEMEX auditors leads to skepticism. One example was the case of sales to Brazilian chemical maker Unigel SA. From to 2009 to 2011 PEMEX’s petrochemicals subsidiary sold the Brazilian company a chemical at an unexplained discount that cost the Mexican enterprise $24.2 million. PEMEX internal auditors flagged the problem, but the head auditor advised his colleagues to “work with the director of PEMEX Petrochemicals to attend to and answer [our] recommendations, with the aim of avoiding them becoming definitive issues.” The PEMEX officials who approved the deal weren’t disciplined; one now works for Unigel.
“PEMEX’s taxes and dividends finance about 30 percent of the federal budget,” Reuters noted. “Contract abuse at the oil giant eats into the government’s ability to fund services from healthcare to road building.” (Business Insider 1/23/15 from Reuters)
Meanwhile, PEMEX and the overall Mexican economy are being hurt by plunging oil prices on international markets. As of Jan. 23 PEMEX’s oil was selling at $38.03 a barrel, its lowest price since June 2009. (La Jornada (Mexico) 1/24/15). The International Monetary Fund (IMF) projects a growth rate of 3.2% for Mexico this year and 3.5% for 2016, a little below its projections for the world as a whole--3.5% in 2015 and 3.7% in 2016. (Forbes México 1/20/15 from Reuters)
*4. Guatemala: Top Cop Convicted in Embassy Fire
On Jan. 19 Guatemala’s High Risk Court B convicted former police chief Pedro García Arredondo of the deaths of 37 people in a fire at the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City on Jan. 31, 1980 [see Update #1237]. García Arredondo was sentenced to 40 years in prison for the fire and 50 years for the deaths of two students; he is already serving a 70-year sentence for the killing of a student. The fire broke out when police stormed the embassy, which had been occupied by indigenous and campesino protesters from El Quiché department; the police blocked the doors and refused to let firefighters enter. The victims included the Spanish consul, two of his employees, a former Guatemalan vice president, a former Guatemalan foreign relations minister, and 22 El Quiché campesinos; one was Vicente Menchú, the father of 1992 Nobel peace prize winner Rigoberta Menchú Tum.
The rightwing government of President Otto Pérez Molina, who was a military officer at the time of the fire, said it respected the court’s decision. A note from the Foreign Relations Ministry expressed regret for the deaths of “famous Spanish people and Guatemalans.” “These situations cannot be repeated,” the note added. The Spanish Foreign Ministry wrote that the Spanish government “expresses its satisfaction and congratulates the Guatemalan justice system for having, 35 years later, judged these acts in accordance with the laws and with respect for due process.” (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 1/20/15 from AFP; Prensa Latina 1/20/15)
As of Jan. 13 Judge Carol Patricia Flores had ordered a medical examination for former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) to determine whether he can attend his new trial for genocide against Ixil Mayans in El Quiché department. He failed to appear at a hearing on Jan. 12 to discuss administrative issues in the trial. Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison on May 10, 2013, but the Constitutional Court threw the verdict out 10 days later [see Update #1178]. A new trial started on Jan. 5 but was immediately suspended because of a defense challenge to one of the judges, Jeannette Valdez, on the grounds that she had written her 2004 doctoral thesis about the genocide. (La Nación (Costa Rica) 1/13/15 from AFP)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: South America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
Commodity boom extracting increasingly heavy toll on Amazon forests (South America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5191-commodity-boom-extracting-increasingly-heavy-toll-on-amazon-forests-
New Evidence Raises Questions About Death of Argentine Prosecutor
http://latindispatch.com/2015/01/22/new-evidence-raises-questions-about-death-of-argentine-prosecutor/
Prosecutor’s Death a Test for Argentine Democracy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/5192-prosecutors-death-a-test-for-argentine-democracy
La Legua: Building Community in Small Spaces (Chile)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14486
In Memoriam: Pedro Lemebel (Chile)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/23/memoriam-pedro-lemebel
Bolivian Socialist Funds Election Campaign by Selling Potatoes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5188-bolivian-socialist-funds-election-campaign-by-selling-potatoes
Ecuador: Waorani warriors on trial in oil-field raid
http://ww4report.com/node/13925
Chevron Crowned as World's Worst Company for the Environment (Ecuador)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chevron-Crowned-as-Worlds-Worst-Company-for-the-Environment-20150123-0024.html
Ecuador: The “Citizens’ Revolution” vs Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5189-ecuador-the-citizens-revolution-vs-social-movements
Social Movements Demand ¨Maximum Sentence¨ for Indigenous Leader’s Murderer as Trial Continues (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11165
El Salvador: Pardon Granted For One of 17 Women Jailed for Miscarriage, Accused of Homicide
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/5198-el-salvador-pardon-granted-for-one-of-17-women-jailed-for-miscarraige
Evidence the DEA Attempted to Alter Testimony on Drug War Massacre in Honduras
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14509
Trial on Guatemala’s Spanish Embassy Fire Resumes Today: The Rest is History (Video)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/19/trial-guatemala%E2%80%99s-spanish-embassy-fire-resumes-today-rest-history-video
2015 US Appropriations Act Maintains Restrictions On US Military Aid To Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5186-2015-us-appropriations-act-maintains-restrictions-on-us-military-aid-to-guatemala
Mexico: Ayotzinapa, Emblem of the Twenty-First Century Social Order
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5193-mexico-ayotzinapa-emblem-of-the-twenty-first-century-social-order
Forced Disappearances Are Humanitarian Crisis in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5195-forced-disappearances-are-humanitarian-crisis-in-mexico
Lopez Obrador Back on the Battlefield (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/lopez-obrador-back-on-the-battlefield/
Vanished in Vallarta (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/vanished-in-vallarta/
Mexico: cops arrested in 'disappearance' of reporter
http://ww4report.com/node/13920
Cuba, U.S. Agree on Diplomacy, Clash Over Human Rights During Historic Talks
http://latindispatch.com/2015/01/23/cuba-u-s-agree-on-diplomacy-clash-over-human-rights-during-historic-talks/
The Cuban Opening and the Struggles for a New Social Order
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5194-the-cuban-opening-and-the-struggles-for-a-new-social-order
Security Council Arrives in Haiti as New Electoral Commission is Announced
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/security-council-arrives-in-haiti-as-new-electoral-commission-is-announced
New Tools for Assessing Progress in Haiti Reconstruction and Development
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/new-tools-for-assessing-progress-in-haiti-reconstruction-and-development
Is USAID Helping Haiti to Recover, or US Contractors to Make Millions?
www.thenation.com/article/195673/usaid-helping-haiti-recover-or-us-contractors-make-millions
Over 17,000 Mexican Children Attempt to Enter US Every Year (US/immigration)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Over-17000-Mexican-Children-Attempt-to-Enter-US-Every-Year-20150123-0019.html
The Israel-Mexico Border: How Israeli High-Tech Firms Are Up-Armoring the U.S.-Mexico Border
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/27/israel-mexico-border
Joining our struggles to build another world: 10 years of horizontal organising in El Barrio, New York (US/immigration)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14495
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
Tuesday, December 2, 2014
WNU #1244: US Embassy Staff Beat Injured Colombian Workers
Issue #1244, November 30, 2014
1. Colombia: US Embassy Staff Beat GM Protesters
2. Haiti: Martelly Pledges to Resolve Electoral Crisis
3. Mexico: Peña Pledges to Resolve Ayotzinapa Crisis
4. Mexico: Two Defenders of Migrants Are Murdered
5. Central America: Refugee “Crisis” Plan Gets a Debut
6. Links to alternative sources on: Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/policy
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Colombia: US Embassy Staff Beat GM Protesters
Colombian national police and several employees of the US embassy in Bogota kicked and beat injured former employees of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), during a protest in front of the embassy on Nov. 18, according to the workers and to a report by a local television station, Canal Capital. Members of the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol) have been encamped outside the embassy since August 2011 as part of a campaign to get GM to reinstate them and compensate them for the injuries they received while working at the plant [see Update #1193]. The attack came on a day when the workers’ supporters in the US filed a complaint with the US Justice Department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charging GM with bribing Colombian officials in violation of a US law, the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Some Asotrecol members decided to step up their protest on Nov. 18 by chaining themselves to a post outside the embassy. Although the nonviolent action didn’t block access to the building, US embassy employees in suits joined Colombian police in cutting the chains and then apparently beating and kicking three of the protesting workers. Asotrecol president José Parra was arrested, although the authorities released him the next day. The workers’ supporters are urging US-based activists to contact the embassy (011-57-1-275-2000, ACSBogota@state.gov) and request the release of the names of the embassy personnel who participated in the attack. (The Real News 11/23/14; Asotrecol supporter’s email 11/24/14)
*2. Haiti: Martelly Pledges to Resolve Electoral Crisis
Haitian president Michel Martelly announced on Nov. 28 that he was setting up an 11-member commission to make recommendations within eight days on how to break a deadlock holding up long-overdue partial legislative elections. Haiti hasn’t had any elections since March 2011 runoffs from the 2010 elections. Elections were scheduled in 2012 for 10 of the country’s 30 senators but have been postponed for two years because Martelly’s government wants changes to Haiti’s electoral laws and six opposition parties refuse to accept the amendments. The terms for the 10 senators expire on Jan. 12; in the absence of elections, President Martelly could say the Senate lacked a quorum and could try to rule by decree. This in turn would set off a constitutional crisis, since the current 10 senators announced Nov. 17 that they would refuse to step down in January if no elections were held.
Meanwhile, opposition groups continue to hold militant demonstrations demanding Martelly’s resignation [see Update #1243]. Some 20 Haitian humans rights organizations, including the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH), issued a joint call on Nov. 27 for “citizen responsibility” to avoid a worsening crisis; the groups also called on the government not to carry out “political acts,” such as arbitrary arrests of opponents, which could hamper the exercise of democratic rights.
“The country is divided,” Martelly admitted in his brief Nov. 28 announcement, carried live on radio. “The problems are many. The problems are complicated.” Miami Herald correspondent Jacqueline Charles reported that the president’s voice “sound[ed] devoid of the fight and energy that have become a hallmark in his ongoing battle with the country’s opposition over delayed local and legislative elections and his own fate.” The commission he announced is to review the results of consultations that Martelly held with various groups from Sept. 22 to Nov. 24. It will include Gérard Gourgue, an 89-year-old jurist who was justice minister in two provisional civilian-military governments after the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in February 1986; three religious leaders; three former elected officials; business owner Réginald Boulos; a peasant leader, Charles Suffrard, once close to former president René Préval (1996-2001, 2006-2011); and Paul Loulou Chéry, who heads the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). The only woman in the commission is educator Odette Roy Fombrun. (AlterPresse 11/28/14, 11/28/14; MH 11/28/14)
*3. Mexico: Peña Pledges to Resolve Ayotzinapa Crisis
In a Nov. 27 address Mexican president Peña Nieto announced that he was sending the Congress a series of proposed constitutional amendments he said were intended to resolve a crisis brought on by the killing of six people and the abduction of 43 students the night of Sept. 26-27 in the southwestern state of Guerrero [see Update #1243]. According to federal prosecutors, corruption in the municipal government and police in the city of Iguala de la Independencia were behind the violence; the police and the mayor, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, were reportedly linked to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”). Peña Nieto’s amendments would end the independence of the police in Mexican municipalities and bring them under the control of state police departments. The president also proposed strengthening laws for the protection of victims. In his presentation Peña Nieto tried to associate himself with popular demands for the return of the 43 missing students by using a slogan repeated throughout the many national and international protests since the attacks: “We are all Ayotzinapa.” The missing students and three of the six people known dead attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa. (La Jornada 11/28/14, 11/28/14)
Peña Nieto’s government sent mixed signals about its sympathy for the protesters, however. On Nov. 29 the authorities released 11 detainees who had faced serious federal charges stemming from a Nov. 20 protest in Mexico City; federal judge Juan Carlos Ramírez had ordered the release due to lack of evidence. The detainees’ relatives held a press conference on Nov. 29 at the capital’s Bellas Artes cultural center to insist that the arrests had been arbitrary and to call for the resignation of federal attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, who they said had promised to step down if the cases didn’t come to trial. (LJ 11/30/14)
Protesters said government harassment was continuing. Sandino Bucio Doval, a student activist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), reported that plainclothes federal police agents apprehended him on the university’s campus in the capital’s Coyoacán section the afternoon of Nov. 28, forcing him into their vehicle and then driving him around the city for several hours. At a press conference on the campus the next day, Bucio Doval charged that the agents beat him, questioned him on his role in the student movement, and threatened to rape him and to damage his family. They then cleaned him up, the student said, and took him to federal prosecutors, claiming they’d seen him put a bomb in his backpack. He was released six hours after his arrest. In Bucio Doval’s opinion the incident was intended to intimidate him and other student activists. (LJ 11/30/14)
The center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) continued to suffer fallout from the violence in Iguala; Mayor Abarca was a party member. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a three-time presidential candidate for center-left coalitions and one of the PRD’s founders in 1989, resigned “in an irrevocable manner” on Nov. 25, a few hours after a meeting with PRD president Carlos Navarrete. In his resignation letter Cárdenas said he didn’t want to “run the risk of sharing responsibility for decisions taken through myopia, opportunism or self-complacency.” (LJ 11/26/14)
*4. Mexico: Two Defenders of Migrants Are Murdered
Two volunteers who regularly helped feed Central American migrants passing through Mexico were shot dead on Nov. 23 while talking in their car near the house where they lived in Huehuetoca in México state, according to human rights defenders speaking at a Nov. 26 press conference. The victims were identified as Adrián, a local resident who described himself as a transvestite, and Wilson, a Honduran migrant who was granted a humanitarian visa by the government in November after he had testified about criminal activities for the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (Seido). Human rights defenders asked the media not to use the volunteers’ last names in order to protect their families.
Last February the two volunteers stopped an attempt to kidnap migrants, holding one of the suspects while waiting for the police to arrive. They received death threats after that incident; they were promised police protection but reportedly never got it. Adrián and Wilson cut back their volunteer work for a while but resumed it recently. The Nov. 26 press conference included Jorge Andrade and Andrea González from the Colectivo Ustedes Somos Nosotros (the “You Are Us Collective”); Fray Tomás González, the director of La 72: Refuge-Home for Migrant Persons in Tenosique; and Luis Tapia Olivares from the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH). The authorities have long known about the criminal gangs operating in the region but did nothing, Andrea González told reporters. “We can no longer permit this type of violence and impunity to permeate our society.” (El Universal (Mexico) 11/26/14; NPR 11/26/14 from correspondent; El Economista (Mexico) 11/27/14)
Mexican authorities regularly allow gangs to prey on Central American migrants as they head north in an attempt to reach the US, Mexican human rights defenders say—sometimes from incompetence or laziness, and sometimes as a result of active collusion with criminal elements. The left-leaning daily La Jornada cited a recent example. Edwin Alexander Medina Rosales, who identified himself as a Honduran, was arrested with two other men on Jan. 12 in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, as they were extorting Central American migrants traveling north on freight trains. But ten months later, on Nov. 24, he was again robbing migrants, this time in Atitalaquia, Hidalgo.
As of Nov. 27 Medina Rosales had been imprisoned in Hidalgo, but according to La Jornada reporter Blanche Petrich his capture happened by chance: extra Atitalaquia municipal police were on duty in anticipation of the arrival of the Caravan of Central American Mothers, a group of women seeking sons and daughters who disappeared while trying to go from Central America to the US. Although the police intervened to detain Medina Rosales and an accomplice, there was a 16-hour delay in processing the suspects, during which the migrant victims were held and threatened with deportation. “For now the predators of the railroad lines are in an Hidalgo prison,” Petrich concluded. “It remains to be seen whether later on they walk free and go back into action.” (LJ 11/27/14)
*5. Central America: Refugee “Crisis” Plan Gets a Debut
The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) hosted a special event on Nov. 14 in Washington, DC to present a plan that El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—Central America’s “Northern Triangle”—are proposing as a response to the spike earlier this year in immigration to the US by minors from their countries. The “Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle: A Road Map” was originally released in September and is similar to programs announced at a July summit in Washington [see Update #1228]. However, the IADB event, with US vice president Joseph Biden and the three Central American presidents in attendance, “was the real ‘coming out’ party for the proposals,” the DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote in its “Americas Blog.”
According to CEPR’s analysis, the plan is basically a continuation of the security and economic policies the US has been promoting in the region for decades. It includes a “war on drugs” effort similar to “Plan Colombia,” a US-funded project in Colombia which Biden and other speakers cited as a success. Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández also referred to Mexico’s militarized anti-drug policy as a model, despite the ongoing crisis in Mexico since a Sept. 26-27 attack on students by police in collusion with a drug gang. To address continuing poverty in the three countries, the plan proposes “deepen[ing] our existing trade agreements,” such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The plan raises the possibility of creating “special economic zones,” apparently a revival of earlier efforts to create “model cities,” “charter cities” and “Special Development Regimes (RED)” in Honduras [see Update #1160]. “[T]he plan brings to mind various past cases of crises exploited for economic gain, as Naomi Klein detailed in her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine,” CEPR wrote, highlighting a remark by Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, who said: “The crisis has become a huge opportunity.” (Americas Blog 11/26/14)
Meanwhile, The Nation and Foreign Policy in Focus have collaborated on an article about the results of DR-CAFTA’s implementation. The authors found that “the pact has had a devastating effect on poverty, dislocation and environmental contamination in the region. And perhaps even worse, it’s diminished the ability of Central American countries to protect their citizens from corporate abuse.” “Overall economic indicators in the region have been poor,” they wrote. “Amid significant levels of unemployment, labor abuses continue” [see Update #1242] and “[w]orkers in export-assembly plants often suffer poor working conditions and low wages.”
The article laid special emphasis on the way DR-CAFTA restricts Central American governments’ ability to stop environmental abuses by foreign corporations. For example, internal documents obtained by activists indicated that fear of losing in arbitration proceedings required under DR-CAFTA was one reason the Guatemalan government failed to act on a 2010 order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to close down the Canadian firm Goldcorp Inc.’s controversial Marlin gold mine [see Update #1110]. “These perverse incentives have led to environmental deregulation’” the authors wrote, “and increased protections for companies, which have contributed to a boom in the toxic mining industry—with gold at the forefront. A stunning 14% of Central American territory is now authorized for mining.” (The Nation 11/24/14)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/policy
Why isn't Brazil exploiting its amazing wind capacity?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5129-why-isnt-brazil-exploiting-its-amazing-wind-capacity
Police extermination campaign in Brazil's favelas?
http://ww4report.com/node/13752
REDD, Neo-Colonialism in the Land of the Pataxo Warriors (Brazil)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13766
Lima’s Leftist Mayor Defeated by Four Years of Right-Wing Attacks (Peru)
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/25/lima%E2%80%99s-leftist-mayor-defeated-four-years-right-wing-attacks-0
Protests Against Contamination of Lake Titicaca Continue: Peru
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Protests-Against-Contamination-of-Lake-Titicaca-Continue-Peru-20141128-0043.html
Indigenous Communities Take Chevron to Global Court for 'Crimes Against Humanity' (Ecuador)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/indigenous-communities-take-chevron-to-global-court-for-crimes-against-humanity-26226/
Ecuador: The Breach Dividing Intag
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5133-ecuador-the-breach-dividing-intag
Members of the Indigenous Guard Killed by Farc Guerrillas in Toribio, Colombia
https://intercontinentalcry.org/colombian-indigenous-guards-killed-in-toribio-25968/
Colombia’s Land Restitution Process Failing Those Forced Off Their Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5134-colombias-land-restitution-process-failing-those-forced-off-their-land-
Amnesty: concern over Colombia land restitution
http://ww4report.com/node/13760
13 Dead and 145 Poisoned from "Overdose" After Riot in Venezuelan Prison
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11047
Venezuela’s Indigenous Mapoyo Language Added to UNESCO Heritage List
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11048
Intimacy and Discovery in Mariana Rondón's 'Bad Hair' (Venezuela)
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/26/intimacy-and-discovery-mariana-rond%C3%B3n%27s-%27bad-hair%27
Central America’s “Alliance for Prosperity” Plan: Shock Doctrine for the Child Refugee Crisis?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/central-americas-alliance-for-prosperity-plan-shock-doctrine-for-the-child-refugee-crisis
What ‘Free Trade’ Has Done to Central America
http://www.thenation.com/blog/191321/what-free-trade-has-done-central-america#
The corporate nullification of the human right to water: the case of El Salvador
https://opendemocracy.net/ed-atkins/corporate-nullification-of-human-right-to-water-case-of-el-salvador
Why the murder rate in Honduras is twice as high as anywhere else
https://opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/mo-hume/why-murder-rate-in-honduras-is-twice-as-high-as-anywhere-else
Because Violence and Sexual Slavery Should be Tried in a Court of Law: No Impunity! (Guatemala)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13770
Mexico Faces Political Crisis over Students' Disappearance and Presidential Conflict of Interest
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=230#1778
Ayotzinapa Protests: Report from Ciudad Juarez (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/ayotzinapa-protests-report-from-ciudad-juarez/
We’re all tired — protests against state violence go worldwide (Mexico)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/11/tired-protests-state-violence-go-worldwide/
Trafficking in Women and Girls and the Fight to End it (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13758
Cholera on the Uptick in Haiti as Donor Response Falters
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-on-the-uptick-in-haiti-as-donor-response-falters
SOA Protest: Grassroots Mobilizations Connect Struggles against State Violence and Injustice (US/policy)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5131-soa-protest-grassroots-mobilizations-connect-struggles-against-state-violence-and-injustice
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
1. Colombia: US Embassy Staff Beat GM Protesters
2. Haiti: Martelly Pledges to Resolve Electoral Crisis
3. Mexico: Peña Pledges to Resolve Ayotzinapa Crisis
4. Mexico: Two Defenders of Migrants Are Murdered
5. Central America: Refugee “Crisis” Plan Gets a Debut
6. Links to alternative sources on: Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/policy
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Colombia: US Embassy Staff Beat GM Protesters
Colombian national police and several employees of the US embassy in Bogota kicked and beat injured former employees of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), during a protest in front of the embassy on Nov. 18, according to the workers and to a report by a local television station, Canal Capital. Members of the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol) have been encamped outside the embassy since August 2011 as part of a campaign to get GM to reinstate them and compensate them for the injuries they received while working at the plant [see Update #1193]. The attack came on a day when the workers’ supporters in the US filed a complaint with the US Justice Department and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charging GM with bribing Colombian officials in violation of a US law, the 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Some Asotrecol members decided to step up their protest on Nov. 18 by chaining themselves to a post outside the embassy. Although the nonviolent action didn’t block access to the building, US embassy employees in suits joined Colombian police in cutting the chains and then apparently beating and kicking three of the protesting workers. Asotrecol president José Parra was arrested, although the authorities released him the next day. The workers’ supporters are urging US-based activists to contact the embassy (011-57-1-275-2000, ACSBogota@state.gov) and request the release of the names of the embassy personnel who participated in the attack. (The Real News 11/23/14; Asotrecol supporter’s email 11/24/14)
*2. Haiti: Martelly Pledges to Resolve Electoral Crisis
Haitian president Michel Martelly announced on Nov. 28 that he was setting up an 11-member commission to make recommendations within eight days on how to break a deadlock holding up long-overdue partial legislative elections. Haiti hasn’t had any elections since March 2011 runoffs from the 2010 elections. Elections were scheduled in 2012 for 10 of the country’s 30 senators but have been postponed for two years because Martelly’s government wants changes to Haiti’s electoral laws and six opposition parties refuse to accept the amendments. The terms for the 10 senators expire on Jan. 12; in the absence of elections, President Martelly could say the Senate lacked a quorum and could try to rule by decree. This in turn would set off a constitutional crisis, since the current 10 senators announced Nov. 17 that they would refuse to step down in January if no elections were held.
Meanwhile, opposition groups continue to hold militant demonstrations demanding Martelly’s resignation [see Update #1243]. Some 20 Haitian humans rights organizations, including the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH), issued a joint call on Nov. 27 for “citizen responsibility” to avoid a worsening crisis; the groups also called on the government not to carry out “political acts,” such as arbitrary arrests of opponents, which could hamper the exercise of democratic rights.
“The country is divided,” Martelly admitted in his brief Nov. 28 announcement, carried live on radio. “The problems are many. The problems are complicated.” Miami Herald correspondent Jacqueline Charles reported that the president’s voice “sound[ed] devoid of the fight and energy that have become a hallmark in his ongoing battle with the country’s opposition over delayed local and legislative elections and his own fate.” The commission he announced is to review the results of consultations that Martelly held with various groups from Sept. 22 to Nov. 24. It will include Gérard Gourgue, an 89-year-old jurist who was justice minister in two provisional civilian-military governments after the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in February 1986; three religious leaders; three former elected officials; business owner Réginald Boulos; a peasant leader, Charles Suffrard, once close to former president René Préval (1996-2001, 2006-2011); and Paul Loulou Chéry, who heads the Confederation of Haitian Workers (CTH). The only woman in the commission is educator Odette Roy Fombrun. (AlterPresse 11/28/14, 11/28/14; MH 11/28/14)
*3. Mexico: Peña Pledges to Resolve Ayotzinapa Crisis
In a Nov. 27 address Mexican president Peña Nieto announced that he was sending the Congress a series of proposed constitutional amendments he said were intended to resolve a crisis brought on by the killing of six people and the abduction of 43 students the night of Sept. 26-27 in the southwestern state of Guerrero [see Update #1243]. According to federal prosecutors, corruption in the municipal government and police in the city of Iguala de la Independencia were behind the violence; the police and the mayor, José Luis Abarca Velázquez, were reportedly linked to the local drug gang Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”). Peña Nieto’s amendments would end the independence of the police in Mexican municipalities and bring them under the control of state police departments. The president also proposed strengthening laws for the protection of victims. In his presentation Peña Nieto tried to associate himself with popular demands for the return of the 43 missing students by using a slogan repeated throughout the many national and international protests since the attacks: “We are all Ayotzinapa.” The missing students and three of the six people known dead attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa. (La Jornada 11/28/14, 11/28/14)
Peña Nieto’s government sent mixed signals about its sympathy for the protesters, however. On Nov. 29 the authorities released 11 detainees who had faced serious federal charges stemming from a Nov. 20 protest in Mexico City; federal judge Juan Carlos Ramírez had ordered the release due to lack of evidence. The detainees’ relatives held a press conference on Nov. 29 at the capital’s Bellas Artes cultural center to insist that the arrests had been arbitrary and to call for the resignation of federal attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, who they said had promised to step down if the cases didn’t come to trial. (LJ 11/30/14)
Protesters said government harassment was continuing. Sandino Bucio Doval, a student activist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), reported that plainclothes federal police agents apprehended him on the university’s campus in the capital’s Coyoacán section the afternoon of Nov. 28, forcing him into their vehicle and then driving him around the city for several hours. At a press conference on the campus the next day, Bucio Doval charged that the agents beat him, questioned him on his role in the student movement, and threatened to rape him and to damage his family. They then cleaned him up, the student said, and took him to federal prosecutors, claiming they’d seen him put a bomb in his backpack. He was released six hours after his arrest. In Bucio Doval’s opinion the incident was intended to intimidate him and other student activists. (LJ 11/30/14)
The center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) continued to suffer fallout from the violence in Iguala; Mayor Abarca was a party member. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a three-time presidential candidate for center-left coalitions and one of the PRD’s founders in 1989, resigned “in an irrevocable manner” on Nov. 25, a few hours after a meeting with PRD president Carlos Navarrete. In his resignation letter Cárdenas said he didn’t want to “run the risk of sharing responsibility for decisions taken through myopia, opportunism or self-complacency.” (LJ 11/26/14)
*4. Mexico: Two Defenders of Migrants Are Murdered
Two volunteers who regularly helped feed Central American migrants passing through Mexico were shot dead on Nov. 23 while talking in their car near the house where they lived in Huehuetoca in México state, according to human rights defenders speaking at a Nov. 26 press conference. The victims were identified as Adrián, a local resident who described himself as a transvestite, and Wilson, a Honduran migrant who was granted a humanitarian visa by the government in November after he had testified about criminal activities for the Assistant Attorney General’s Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (Seido). Human rights defenders asked the media not to use the volunteers’ last names in order to protect their families.
Last February the two volunteers stopped an attempt to kidnap migrants, holding one of the suspects while waiting for the police to arrive. They received death threats after that incident; they were promised police protection but reportedly never got it. Adrián and Wilson cut back their volunteer work for a while but resumed it recently. The Nov. 26 press conference included Jorge Andrade and Andrea González from the Colectivo Ustedes Somos Nosotros (the “You Are Us Collective”); Fray Tomás González, the director of La 72: Refuge-Home for Migrant Persons in Tenosique; and Luis Tapia Olivares from the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH). The authorities have long known about the criminal gangs operating in the region but did nothing, Andrea González told reporters. “We can no longer permit this type of violence and impunity to permeate our society.” (El Universal (Mexico) 11/26/14; NPR 11/26/14 from correspondent; El Economista (Mexico) 11/27/14)
Mexican authorities regularly allow gangs to prey on Central American migrants as they head north in an attempt to reach the US, Mexican human rights defenders say—sometimes from incompetence or laziness, and sometimes as a result of active collusion with criminal elements. The left-leaning daily La Jornada cited a recent example. Edwin Alexander Medina Rosales, who identified himself as a Honduran, was arrested with two other men on Jan. 12 in Tierra Blanca, Veracruz, as they were extorting Central American migrants traveling north on freight trains. But ten months later, on Nov. 24, he was again robbing migrants, this time in Atitalaquia, Hidalgo.
As of Nov. 27 Medina Rosales had been imprisoned in Hidalgo, but according to La Jornada reporter Blanche Petrich his capture happened by chance: extra Atitalaquia municipal police were on duty in anticipation of the arrival of the Caravan of Central American Mothers, a group of women seeking sons and daughters who disappeared while trying to go from Central America to the US. Although the police intervened to detain Medina Rosales and an accomplice, there was a 16-hour delay in processing the suspects, during which the migrant victims were held and threatened with deportation. “For now the predators of the railroad lines are in an Hidalgo prison,” Petrich concluded. “It remains to be seen whether later on they walk free and go back into action.” (LJ 11/27/14)
*5. Central America: Refugee “Crisis” Plan Gets a Debut
The Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) hosted a special event on Nov. 14 in Washington, DC to present a plan that El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—Central America’s “Northern Triangle”—are proposing as a response to the spike earlier this year in immigration to the US by minors from their countries. The “Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity in the Northern Triangle: A Road Map” was originally released in September and is similar to programs announced at a July summit in Washington [see Update #1228]. However, the IADB event, with US vice president Joseph Biden and the three Central American presidents in attendance, “was the real ‘coming out’ party for the proposals,” the DC-based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote in its “Americas Blog.”
According to CEPR’s analysis, the plan is basically a continuation of the security and economic policies the US has been promoting in the region for decades. It includes a “war on drugs” effort similar to “Plan Colombia,” a US-funded project in Colombia which Biden and other speakers cited as a success. Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández also referred to Mexico’s militarized anti-drug policy as a model, despite the ongoing crisis in Mexico since a Sept. 26-27 attack on students by police in collusion with a drug gang. To address continuing poverty in the three countries, the plan proposes “deepen[ing] our existing trade agreements,” such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR). The plan raises the possibility of creating “special economic zones,” apparently a revival of earlier efforts to create “model cities,” “charter cities” and “Special Development Regimes (RED)” in Honduras [see Update #1160]. “[T]he plan brings to mind various past cases of crises exploited for economic gain, as Naomi Klein detailed in her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine,” CEPR wrote, highlighting a remark by Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina, who said: “The crisis has become a huge opportunity.” (Americas Blog 11/26/14)
Meanwhile, The Nation and Foreign Policy in Focus have collaborated on an article about the results of DR-CAFTA’s implementation. The authors found that “the pact has had a devastating effect on poverty, dislocation and environmental contamination in the region. And perhaps even worse, it’s diminished the ability of Central American countries to protect their citizens from corporate abuse.” “Overall economic indicators in the region have been poor,” they wrote. “Amid significant levels of unemployment, labor abuses continue” [see Update #1242] and “[w]orkers in export-assembly plants often suffer poor working conditions and low wages.”
The article laid special emphasis on the way DR-CAFTA restricts Central American governments’ ability to stop environmental abuses by foreign corporations. For example, internal documents obtained by activists indicated that fear of losing in arbitration proceedings required under DR-CAFTA was one reason the Guatemalan government failed to act on a 2010 order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) to close down the Canadian firm Goldcorp Inc.’s controversial Marlin gold mine [see Update #1110]. “These perverse incentives have led to environmental deregulation’” the authors wrote, “and increased protections for companies, which have contributed to a boom in the toxic mining industry—with gold at the forefront. A stunning 14% of Central American territory is now authorized for mining.” (The Nation 11/24/14)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/policy
Why isn't Brazil exploiting its amazing wind capacity?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5129-why-isnt-brazil-exploiting-its-amazing-wind-capacity
Police extermination campaign in Brazil's favelas?
http://ww4report.com/node/13752
REDD, Neo-Colonialism in the Land of the Pataxo Warriors (Brazil)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13766
Lima’s Leftist Mayor Defeated by Four Years of Right-Wing Attacks (Peru)
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/25/lima%E2%80%99s-leftist-mayor-defeated-four-years-right-wing-attacks-0
Protests Against Contamination of Lake Titicaca Continue: Peru
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Protests-Against-Contamination-of-Lake-Titicaca-Continue-Peru-20141128-0043.html
Indigenous Communities Take Chevron to Global Court for 'Crimes Against Humanity' (Ecuador)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/indigenous-communities-take-chevron-to-global-court-for-crimes-against-humanity-26226/
Ecuador: The Breach Dividing Intag
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5133-ecuador-the-breach-dividing-intag
Members of the Indigenous Guard Killed by Farc Guerrillas in Toribio, Colombia
https://intercontinentalcry.org/colombian-indigenous-guards-killed-in-toribio-25968/
Colombia’s Land Restitution Process Failing Those Forced Off Their Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5134-colombias-land-restitution-process-failing-those-forced-off-their-land-
Amnesty: concern over Colombia land restitution
http://ww4report.com/node/13760
13 Dead and 145 Poisoned from "Overdose" After Riot in Venezuelan Prison
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11047
Venezuela’s Indigenous Mapoyo Language Added to UNESCO Heritage List
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11048
Intimacy and Discovery in Mariana Rondón's 'Bad Hair' (Venezuela)
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/26/intimacy-and-discovery-mariana-rond%C3%B3n%27s-%27bad-hair%27
Central America’s “Alliance for Prosperity” Plan: Shock Doctrine for the Child Refugee Crisis?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/central-americas-alliance-for-prosperity-plan-shock-doctrine-for-the-child-refugee-crisis
What ‘Free Trade’ Has Done to Central America
http://www.thenation.com/blog/191321/what-free-trade-has-done-central-america#
The corporate nullification of the human right to water: the case of El Salvador
https://opendemocracy.net/ed-atkins/corporate-nullification-of-human-right-to-water-case-of-el-salvador
Why the murder rate in Honduras is twice as high as anywhere else
https://opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/mo-hume/why-murder-rate-in-honduras-is-twice-as-high-as-anywhere-else
Because Violence and Sexual Slavery Should be Tried in a Court of Law: No Impunity! (Guatemala)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13770
Mexico Faces Political Crisis over Students' Disappearance and Presidential Conflict of Interest
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=230#1778
Ayotzinapa Protests: Report from Ciudad Juarez (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/ayotzinapa-protests-report-from-ciudad-juarez/
We’re all tired — protests against state violence go worldwide (Mexico)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2014/11/tired-protests-state-violence-go-worldwide/
Trafficking in Women and Girls and the Fight to End it (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13758
Cholera on the Uptick in Haiti as Donor Response Falters
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-on-the-uptick-in-haiti-as-donor-response-falters
SOA Protest: Grassroots Mobilizations Connect Struggles against State Violence and Injustice (US/policy)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5131-soa-protest-grassroots-mobilizations-connect-struggles-against-state-violence-and-injustice
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
WNU #1242: Brazilian Police Unit Suspected in Massacre
Issue #1242, November 16, 2014
1. Brazil: Police Unit Suspected in Belém Massacre
2. Mexico: Students Wounded as Protests Continue
3. Mexico: US Elite Starts to Doubt “Mexican Moment”
4. Latin America: GAO Reports on FTA Labor Violations
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Brazil: Police Unit Suspected in Belém Massacre
At least 10 people were shot dead by a group of masked men on motorbikes accompanied by two cars the early morning of Nov. 5 in several impoverished suburbs of Belém, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Residents reported on the massacre by social media while it was in progress, warning people to stay indoors. Some of the killings may have been targeted, but in other cases the attackers apparently shot randomly at people on the streets. The incident came just hours after the Nov. 4 shooting death of Antônio Marco da Silva Figueiredo, a corporal in an elite military police unit, the Metropolitan Tactical Patrol (ROTAM). “There is a big probability that if there was not active police involvement” in the subsequent massacre, “then there were people who already passed through the police,” Anna Lins, a lawyer from Pará Society for the Defense of Human Rights (SDDH), told a reporter. “It was summary execution.”
Da Silva Figueiredo, the ROTAM agent whose murder seemed to provoke the massacre, reportedly headed a “militia”—a paramilitary group of former and off-duty police agents—in the suburb of Guamá. He and his gang were suspected of carrying out executions of local youths, and some sources indicated that the group was trying to take over the drug trade in the suburbs. Area residents celebrated as news spread of Da Silva Figueiredo’s death the evening of Nov. 4, but members of his police unit reacted by posting internet messages such as: “The chase has started” and “ROTAM has blood in its eyes.” Sgt. Rossicley Silva used his Twitter account to call for “the maximum number of friends to give a response.” Several federal agencies joined state authorities on Nov. 6 in an investigation into the killings. (Wall Street Journal 11/6/14 from correspondent; Adital (Brazil) 11/7/14; Portal Brasil 11/7/14; Time 11/10/14 from correspondent)
On Nov. 11, one week after the Belém massacre, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP), a São Paulo-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), released its annual report on violence in Brazil. The researchers found that in the five years from 2009 to 2013 Brazilian police agents killed 11,197 people. It took police in the US 30 years, from 1983-2012, to kill a similar number, 11,090; the US population is half again as large as Brazil’s. Brazilian police agents are also killed; according to the report, 1,770 died violently in the five-year period, but 75.3% of them were killed while off duty, while 81.8% of the killings of civilians were by agents on duty.
There was also a clear racial disparity in the killings by police. A report released in April by the São Carlos Federal University (UFSCar) found that based on their share in the population, African-descended people were killed by police in São Paulo state at three times the rate that whites were killed; 79% of the police involved were white. Of the 944 state police agents investigated in São Paulo from 2009 to 2011, 94% were let off without charges. (Washington Post 11/11/14 from AP; BBC Mundo 11/12/14 from correspondent)
*2. Mexico: Students Wounded as Protests Continue
Two students were wounded on Nov. 15 at the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in the Coyoacán section of the Federal District (DF, Mexico City), when a police agent fired his pistol at a group of youths. Witnesses said the incident started when two men from the DF judicial police and two women from the DF prosecutor’s office arrived in a car and began photographing students near the Che Guevara Auditorium; student activists have been meeting in the auditorium to plan actions protesting the killing of six people and the abduction of 43 teachers’ college students in Iguala de la Independencia in the southwestern state of Guerrero the night of Sept. 26-27 [see Update #1241]. When a group of students challenged the four officials, one of the two agents responded by assaulting a student and then firing his pistol at the ground. The same agent fired again, several times, as all four officials fled the campus on foot, pursued by a group of students. The shots wounded one student in the foot and grazed another student’s knee; a dog was also injured.
Students searched the officials’ car, finding an ID for Rodolfo Lizárraga Rivera, the agent they said fired at them. They then smashed the car and set it on fire. In the evening some 300 DF riot police agents entered the campus and blocked off access while crane operators removed the burned vehicle. The DF has been governed since 1997 by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was already in trouble with its left-leaning base: José Luis Abarca Velázquez, the former Iguala mayor who allegedly ordered the September massacre and abduction, was a PRD politician. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/16/14)
The UNAM attack came the same day as a suggestion by Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that his government may be planning to use more force in dealing with the protests that have followed the Iguala killings. Returning on Nov. 15 from a week attending summits in China and Australia, Peña Nieto warned that the government has the ability to use police action “when other mechanisms to reestablish order have been exhausted.” He added that he hoped “that we don’t arrive at this extreme of having to use law enforcement.” (LJ 11/16/14)
Demonstrations focused on the massacre have in fact been constant since late September. Marches occurred almost every day in the DF during the week of Peña Nieto’s trip abroad, tying up traffic but generally remaining peaceful. Demonstrations in Guerrero, often led by teachers and teachers’ college students, were much more militant. On Nov. 1o hundreds of protesters blocked access to Juan N. Alvarez International Airport at the resort city of Acapulco for four hours. “Understand our rage, tourist ladies and gentlemen,” the activists chanted; 11 state police agents were injured when they tried to keep the demonstrators from reaching the airport. On Nov. 11 protesters set fire to the state headquarters of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Peña Nieto’s party, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital. The next day protesters set fire to the offices of the state legislature and the education secretariat, also in Chilpancingo. (LJ 11/11/13; 11/12/14, 11/13/14; New Yorker 11/12/14)
Meanwhile, parents of the missing 43 students, who all attended the traditionally radical Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa, set out with in two caravans on Nov. 13 to bring their message to other parts of Mexico. One caravan, composed of three buses and one minibus, headed north toward Chihuahua state, with stops planned along the way in the states of Zacatecas, Jalisco and Michoacán. The second caravan left later in the day for the southeastern state of Chiapas, with the intention of going from there to the states of Oaxaca, Morelos and Tlaxcala. In Chiapas the parents met with leaders of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the autonomous community of Oventic on Nov. 15. “We had a pleasant reception,” a participant told reporters. The EZLN commanders “listened to us the whole time, and they said that as always they have to consult with their bases of support on the form in which they can support us going forward.” A third caravan was to leave on Nov. 15 or 16 to visit communities in Guerrero. The three caravans plan to converge in Mexico City for a large protest action set for Nov. 20, the holiday commemorating the start of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. (LJ 11/14/14, 11/15/14)
Although federal authorities say they are certain the 43 missing students were all executed by gang members associated with Iguala’s mayor, investigators have yet to identify the remains of any of the students in the various mass graves they have found in different parts of Guerrero. One victim who has been identified, however, was a Catholic priest from Uganda, Father John Ssenyondo, who had been living in Mexico for five years. The authorities used dental records for the identification. Unknown gunmen had blocked a road and forced Ssenyondo into their car on Apr. 30; the reason for the abduction is unknown. His remains were found in a village called Ocotitlán; it is apparently in Zitlala municipality, more than 150 kilometers from Iguala. (BBC News 11/14/14)
*3. Mexico: US Elite Starts to Doubt “Mexican Moment”
Although some US investors still seem confident about their economic opportunities in what they have called the “Mexican Moment” [see Update #1241], concern is growing in US ruling circles as militant protests continue in Mexico in response to a Sept. 26-27 massacre and mass abduction in the southwestern state of Guerrero. “Violence, impunity and corruption are once again dominating the news about Mexico in the US, tarnishing, if not cancelling, the image so successfully cultivated by the government of [President] Enrique Peña Nieto over the past two years,” David Brooks, the US correspondent for the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada, wrote on Nov. 16.
Brooks noted that the US State Department felt compelled to comment on the Mexican crisis two days in a row, with spokesperson Jen Psaki calling on Nov. 12 for a transparent investigation into the “heinous and barbaric crime” in Guerrero. “We certainly urge all parties to remain calm through the process,” she added. Sources close to the US Congress told the newspaper that some Congress members were monitoring the situation and were expected to make their concerns public soon.
Some US media seem to share these concerns. After repeatedly promoting Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reform agenda, the New York Times admitted in an editorial published on Nov. 12 that Mexico had reached “a tense point.” “Two years ago, when he took office…Peña Nieto pledged to revise the penal code, give more attention to crime victims and focus on Mexico's economic growth as a means of reducing drug-related violence. What limited progress has been made still has not repaired a criminal justice system unable to properly investigate crimes, end the corruption or stop the killings.”
The newsweekly Time showed how sharply the media have shifted. Last February the magazine had a picture of Peña Nieto on its cover with the caption: “Saving Mexico: How Enrique Peña Nieto’s sweeping reforms have changed the narrative in his narco-stained nation.” On Nov. 6 Time ran an article headlined: “Mexico’s Nightmare: How the disappearance of 43 students in September has forced the country to once again confront the scourge of drug violence.” (LJ 11/16/14; Time 11/6/14; NYT 11/12/14; AFP 11/13/14)
Further tarnishing Mexico’s image—and Peña Nieto’s—was the revelation on Nov. 9 by a team of reporters led by Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui that when not staying at the official presidential residence, Los Pinos, Peña Nieto and his wife, telenovela star Angélica Rivera Hurtado, have been living in a $7 million mansion belonging to a major government contractor. Rivera told the celebrity magazine ¡Hola! that she and her husband owned the mansion, located in the exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in western Mexico City. But Peña Nieto never included it in the statement of assets he’s required to supply each year; in fact, the house technically belongs to an engineering company that is part of Grupo Higa, which according to Aristegui’s report is owned by Mexican entrepreneur Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú.
Companies in Grupo Higa won building contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in México state during Peña Nieto’s 2005-2011 term as governor there. On Nov. 3 of this year, a Chinese-led consortium won an uncontested bid for a $4 billion federal project for a bullet train; a Grupo Higa division was part of the consortium. The government suddenly cancelled the contract on Nov. 7, shortly before Aristegui’s story was to be published. (Los Angeles Times 11/9/14 from correspondent)
*4. Latin America: GAO Reports on FTA Labor Violations
On Nov. 13 the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an agency that investigates federal spending for Congress, released a report on the US government’s handling of labor violations in countries with which it has “free trade” agreements (FTAs). Recent FTAs, such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), have requirements for participating countries to meet certain standards in labor practices. The GAO claimed to find progress in this area in the partner countries--but also “persistent challenges to labor rights, such as limited enforcement capacity, the use of subcontracting to avoid direct employment, and, in Colombia and Guatemala, violence against union leaders.”
“US and foreign officials said that El Salvador and Guatemala—both partners to CAFTA-DR—as well as Colombia, Oman, and Peru have acted to change labor laws,” according to the report. There was also progress in fighting anti-union violence in Colombia. Data from the nonprofit National Union School (ENS) indicated that murders of union members and labor activists fell from 102 killings in 2003 to 35 in 2013. However, the violence continues, and the report notes that according to observers “although murders of unionists are a serious concern, threats of violence against union members also create a significant deterrent to workers organizing.” The report gave no evidence for improvements in Guatemala. “[T]he extent of the problem is unclear because disaggregated statistics on violence against unionists are not collected,” the GAO wrote. One union cited 63 cases of union leaders or members being killed from 2007 through 2013 because of their union activities; labor activists said the Guatemalan government hasn’t acted adequately on these cases.
The FTA labor clauses require the US to have a mechanism for filing complaints about alleged labor violations by member countries. The GAO found that “[s]ince 2008, the Department of Labor (DOL) has accepted five formal complaints…and has resolved one, regarding Peru.” The unresolved complaints are from Guatemala (2008), Bahrain (2011), Honduras (2012) and the Dominican Republic (2012). One likely reason there are so few complaints is that “union representatives and other stakeholders GAO interviewed in partner countries often did not understand the submission process, possibly limiting the number of submissions filed.” The failure to resolve the complaints quickly, according to people interviewed, “may have contributed to the persistence of conditions that affect workers and are allegedly inconsistent with the FTAs.”
US agencies have provided $275 million in labor-related technical assistance and capacity-building activities for FTA participants since 2001. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) responded to the report with a Nov. 13 statement charging that “[w]hile the words and promises may be put on paper, this report demonstrates that we are unable to hold countries responsible when they break those standards.” She cited the poor results as a reason not to pursue the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive FTA that would include Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru and the US, along with Australia, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. (GAO announcement 11/13/14; Politico 11/14/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba
New Priorities for South American Integration
http://alainet.org/active/78758
State violence and human rights (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13482
Latin America: The irregular path of progressive governments
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5124-latin-america-the-irregular-path-of-progressive-governments
The failures of Latin America's left
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5119--the-failures-of-latin-americas-left-
Military Personnel Trained by the CIA Used Napalm Against Indigenous People in Brazil
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27294-military-personnel-trained-by-the-cia-used-napalm-against-indigenous-people-in-brazil
Brazilian Truth Commission: 400 People Killed Under Dictatorship
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazilian-Truth-Commission-400-People-Killed-Under-Dictatorship-20141115-0007.html
On Bolivia’s new child labour law
https://opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/neil-howard/on-bolivia%E2%80%99s-new-child-labour-law
Colombia: crime lord falls, para links revealed
http://ww4report.com/node/13717
Colombia: peace talks off as FARC capture general
http://ww4report.com/node/13728
Venezuela Receives Over 100 Palestinian Medical Students in Scholarship Program
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11012
Nicaragua: opposition mounts to canal scheme
http://ww4report.com/node/13726
El Salvador Commemorates Jesuit Priests
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/El-Salvador-Commemorates-Jesuit-Priests-20141116-0006.html
Legal Vacuum Fuels Conflicts Over Water in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/5125-legal-vacuum-fuels-conflicts-over-water-in-el-salvador
Conceiving While Poor, Imprisoned for Murder (El Salvador)
https://nacla.org/article/conceiving-while-poor-imprisoned-murder-0
Blood for Gold: The Human Cost of Canada’s ‘Free Trade’ With Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/5123-blood-for-gold-the-human-cost-of-canadas-free-trade-with-honduras
Mexico in Crisis: U.S. Drug War Funding, Ayotzinapa and Human Rights Violations
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13396
Excerpts from Congressional Briefing on the Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Human Rights in Mexico, Central America and Colombia
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/excerpts-from-congressional-briefing-on-the-impact-of-us-security-assistance-on-human-rights-in-mexico-central-america-and-colombia
Mexico: Ayotzinapa’s Uncomfortable Dead
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5121-mexico-ayotzinapas-uncomfortable-dead
Ayotzinapa and the New Civic Insurgency (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5122-ayotzinapa-and-the-new-civic-insurgency-
Ayotzinapa Resistance: "This is just getting started" (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5120-ayotzinapa-resistance-qthis-is-just-getting-startedq
Mexican Gang Suspected of Killing 43 Students Admits to Mass Murder
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5117-mexican-gang-suspected-of-killing-43-students-admits-to-mass-murder-
Ciudad Juarez and Ayotzinapa (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/ciudad-juarez-and-ayotzinapa/
The Yaqui Water War (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13463
Sonora and Arizona’s Uncertain Water Futures (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13485
Cuba’s Retired Population Struggles With Economic Reforms
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/10/cuba%E2%80%99s-retired-population-struggles-economic-reforms
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
1. Brazil: Police Unit Suspected in Belém Massacre
2. Mexico: Students Wounded as Protests Continue
3. Mexico: US Elite Starts to Doubt “Mexican Moment”
4. Latin America: GAO Reports on FTA Labor Violations
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba
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. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Brazil: Police Unit Suspected in Belém Massacre
At least 10 people were shot dead by a group of masked men on motorbikes accompanied by two cars the early morning of Nov. 5 in several impoverished suburbs of Belém, the capital of the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Residents reported on the massacre by social media while it was in progress, warning people to stay indoors. Some of the killings may have been targeted, but in other cases the attackers apparently shot randomly at people on the streets. The incident came just hours after the Nov. 4 shooting death of Antônio Marco da Silva Figueiredo, a corporal in an elite military police unit, the Metropolitan Tactical Patrol (ROTAM). “There is a big probability that if there was not active police involvement” in the subsequent massacre, “then there were people who already passed through the police,” Anna Lins, a lawyer from Pará Society for the Defense of Human Rights (SDDH), told a reporter. “It was summary execution.”
Da Silva Figueiredo, the ROTAM agent whose murder seemed to provoke the massacre, reportedly headed a “militia”—a paramilitary group of former and off-duty police agents—in the suburb of Guamá. He and his gang were suspected of carrying out executions of local youths, and some sources indicated that the group was trying to take over the drug trade in the suburbs. Area residents celebrated as news spread of Da Silva Figueiredo’s death the evening of Nov. 4, but members of his police unit reacted by posting internet messages such as: “The chase has started” and “ROTAM has blood in its eyes.” Sgt. Rossicley Silva used his Twitter account to call for “the maximum number of friends to give a response.” Several federal agencies joined state authorities on Nov. 6 in an investigation into the killings. (Wall Street Journal 11/6/14 from correspondent; Adital (Brazil) 11/7/14; Portal Brasil 11/7/14; Time 11/10/14 from correspondent)
On Nov. 11, one week after the Belém massacre, the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP), a São Paulo-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), released its annual report on violence in Brazil. The researchers found that in the five years from 2009 to 2013 Brazilian police agents killed 11,197 people. It took police in the US 30 years, from 1983-2012, to kill a similar number, 11,090; the US population is half again as large as Brazil’s. Brazilian police agents are also killed; according to the report, 1,770 died violently in the five-year period, but 75.3% of them were killed while off duty, while 81.8% of the killings of civilians were by agents on duty.
There was also a clear racial disparity in the killings by police. A report released in April by the São Carlos Federal University (UFSCar) found that based on their share in the population, African-descended people were killed by police in São Paulo state at three times the rate that whites were killed; 79% of the police involved were white. Of the 944 state police agents investigated in São Paulo from 2009 to 2011, 94% were let off without charges. (Washington Post 11/11/14 from AP; BBC Mundo 11/12/14 from correspondent)
*2. Mexico: Students Wounded as Protests Continue
Two students were wounded on Nov. 15 at the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), in the Coyoacán section of the Federal District (DF, Mexico City), when a police agent fired his pistol at a group of youths. Witnesses said the incident started when two men from the DF judicial police and two women from the DF prosecutor’s office arrived in a car and began photographing students near the Che Guevara Auditorium; student activists have been meeting in the auditorium to plan actions protesting the killing of six people and the abduction of 43 teachers’ college students in Iguala de la Independencia in the southwestern state of Guerrero the night of Sept. 26-27 [see Update #1241]. When a group of students challenged the four officials, one of the two agents responded by assaulting a student and then firing his pistol at the ground. The same agent fired again, several times, as all four officials fled the campus on foot, pursued by a group of students. The shots wounded one student in the foot and grazed another student’s knee; a dog was also injured.
Students searched the officials’ car, finding an ID for Rodolfo Lizárraga Rivera, the agent they said fired at them. They then smashed the car and set it on fire. In the evening some 300 DF riot police agents entered the campus and blocked off access while crane operators removed the burned vehicle. The DF has been governed since 1997 by the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was already in trouble with its left-leaning base: José Luis Abarca Velázquez, the former Iguala mayor who allegedly ordered the September massacre and abduction, was a PRD politician. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/16/14)
The UNAM attack came the same day as a suggestion by Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that his government may be planning to use more force in dealing with the protests that have followed the Iguala killings. Returning on Nov. 15 from a week attending summits in China and Australia, Peña Nieto warned that the government has the ability to use police action “when other mechanisms to reestablish order have been exhausted.” He added that he hoped “that we don’t arrive at this extreme of having to use law enforcement.” (LJ 11/16/14)
Demonstrations focused on the massacre have in fact been constant since late September. Marches occurred almost every day in the DF during the week of Peña Nieto’s trip abroad, tying up traffic but generally remaining peaceful. Demonstrations in Guerrero, often led by teachers and teachers’ college students, were much more militant. On Nov. 1o hundreds of protesters blocked access to Juan N. Alvarez International Airport at the resort city of Acapulco for four hours. “Understand our rage, tourist ladies and gentlemen,” the activists chanted; 11 state police agents were injured when they tried to keep the demonstrators from reaching the airport. On Nov. 11 protesters set fire to the state headquarters of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Peña Nieto’s party, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s capital. The next day protesters set fire to the offices of the state legislature and the education secretariat, also in Chilpancingo. (LJ 11/11/13; 11/12/14, 11/13/14; New Yorker 11/12/14)
Meanwhile, parents of the missing 43 students, who all attended the traditionally radical Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa, set out with in two caravans on Nov. 13 to bring their message to other parts of Mexico. One caravan, composed of three buses and one minibus, headed north toward Chihuahua state, with stops planned along the way in the states of Zacatecas, Jalisco and Michoacán. The second caravan left later in the day for the southeastern state of Chiapas, with the intention of going from there to the states of Oaxaca, Morelos and Tlaxcala. In Chiapas the parents met with leaders of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the autonomous community of Oventic on Nov. 15. “We had a pleasant reception,” a participant told reporters. The EZLN commanders “listened to us the whole time, and they said that as always they have to consult with their bases of support on the form in which they can support us going forward.” A third caravan was to leave on Nov. 15 or 16 to visit communities in Guerrero. The three caravans plan to converge in Mexico City for a large protest action set for Nov. 20, the holiday commemorating the start of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. (LJ 11/14/14, 11/15/14)
Although federal authorities say they are certain the 43 missing students were all executed by gang members associated with Iguala’s mayor, investigators have yet to identify the remains of any of the students in the various mass graves they have found in different parts of Guerrero. One victim who has been identified, however, was a Catholic priest from Uganda, Father John Ssenyondo, who had been living in Mexico for five years. The authorities used dental records for the identification. Unknown gunmen had blocked a road and forced Ssenyondo into their car on Apr. 30; the reason for the abduction is unknown. His remains were found in a village called Ocotitlán; it is apparently in Zitlala municipality, more than 150 kilometers from Iguala. (BBC News 11/14/14)
*3. Mexico: US Elite Starts to Doubt “Mexican Moment”
Although some US investors still seem confident about their economic opportunities in what they have called the “Mexican Moment” [see Update #1241], concern is growing in US ruling circles as militant protests continue in Mexico in response to a Sept. 26-27 massacre and mass abduction in the southwestern state of Guerrero. “Violence, impunity and corruption are once again dominating the news about Mexico in the US, tarnishing, if not cancelling, the image so successfully cultivated by the government of [President] Enrique Peña Nieto over the past two years,” David Brooks, the US correspondent for the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada, wrote on Nov. 16.
Brooks noted that the US State Department felt compelled to comment on the Mexican crisis two days in a row, with spokesperson Jen Psaki calling on Nov. 12 for a transparent investigation into the “heinous and barbaric crime” in Guerrero. “We certainly urge all parties to remain calm through the process,” she added. Sources close to the US Congress told the newspaper that some Congress members were monitoring the situation and were expected to make their concerns public soon.
Some US media seem to share these concerns. After repeatedly promoting Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reform agenda, the New York Times admitted in an editorial published on Nov. 12 that Mexico had reached “a tense point.” “Two years ago, when he took office…Peña Nieto pledged to revise the penal code, give more attention to crime victims and focus on Mexico's economic growth as a means of reducing drug-related violence. What limited progress has been made still has not repaired a criminal justice system unable to properly investigate crimes, end the corruption or stop the killings.”
The newsweekly Time showed how sharply the media have shifted. Last February the magazine had a picture of Peña Nieto on its cover with the caption: “Saving Mexico: How Enrique Peña Nieto’s sweeping reforms have changed the narrative in his narco-stained nation.” On Nov. 6 Time ran an article headlined: “Mexico’s Nightmare: How the disappearance of 43 students in September has forced the country to once again confront the scourge of drug violence.” (LJ 11/16/14; Time 11/6/14; NYT 11/12/14; AFP 11/13/14)
Further tarnishing Mexico’s image—and Peña Nieto’s—was the revelation on Nov. 9 by a team of reporters led by Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui that when not staying at the official presidential residence, Los Pinos, Peña Nieto and his wife, telenovela star Angélica Rivera Hurtado, have been living in a $7 million mansion belonging to a major government contractor. Rivera told the celebrity magazine ¡Hola! that she and her husband owned the mansion, located in the exclusive Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in western Mexico City. But Peña Nieto never included it in the statement of assets he’s required to supply each year; in fact, the house technically belongs to an engineering company that is part of Grupo Higa, which according to Aristegui’s report is owned by Mexican entrepreneur Juan Armando Hinojosa Cantú.
Companies in Grupo Higa won building contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in México state during Peña Nieto’s 2005-2011 term as governor there. On Nov. 3 of this year, a Chinese-led consortium won an uncontested bid for a $4 billion federal project for a bullet train; a Grupo Higa division was part of the consortium. The government suddenly cancelled the contract on Nov. 7, shortly before Aristegui’s story was to be published. (Los Angeles Times 11/9/14 from correspondent)
*4. Latin America: GAO Reports on FTA Labor Violations
On Nov. 13 the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), an agency that investigates federal spending for Congress, released a report on the US government’s handling of labor violations in countries with which it has “free trade” agreements (FTAs). Recent FTAs, such as the 2004 Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), have requirements for participating countries to meet certain standards in labor practices. The GAO claimed to find progress in this area in the partner countries--but also “persistent challenges to labor rights, such as limited enforcement capacity, the use of subcontracting to avoid direct employment, and, in Colombia and Guatemala, violence against union leaders.”
“US and foreign officials said that El Salvador and Guatemala—both partners to CAFTA-DR—as well as Colombia, Oman, and Peru have acted to change labor laws,” according to the report. There was also progress in fighting anti-union violence in Colombia. Data from the nonprofit National Union School (ENS) indicated that murders of union members and labor activists fell from 102 killings in 2003 to 35 in 2013. However, the violence continues, and the report notes that according to observers “although murders of unionists are a serious concern, threats of violence against union members also create a significant deterrent to workers organizing.” The report gave no evidence for improvements in Guatemala. “[T]he extent of the problem is unclear because disaggregated statistics on violence against unionists are not collected,” the GAO wrote. One union cited 63 cases of union leaders or members being killed from 2007 through 2013 because of their union activities; labor activists said the Guatemalan government hasn’t acted adequately on these cases.
The FTA labor clauses require the US to have a mechanism for filing complaints about alleged labor violations by member countries. The GAO found that “[s]ince 2008, the Department of Labor (DOL) has accepted five formal complaints…and has resolved one, regarding Peru.” The unresolved complaints are from Guatemala (2008), Bahrain (2011), Honduras (2012) and the Dominican Republic (2012). One likely reason there are so few complaints is that “union representatives and other stakeholders GAO interviewed in partner countries often did not understand the submission process, possibly limiting the number of submissions filed.” The failure to resolve the complaints quickly, according to people interviewed, “may have contributed to the persistence of conditions that affect workers and are allegedly inconsistent with the FTAs.”
US agencies have provided $275 million in labor-related technical assistance and capacity-building activities for FTA participants since 2001. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) responded to the report with a Nov. 13 statement charging that “[w]hile the words and promises may be put on paper, this report demonstrates that we are unable to hold countries responsible when they break those standards.” She cited the poor results as a reason not to pursue the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a massive FTA that would include Canada, Chile, Mexico, Peru and the US, along with Australia, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. (GAO announcement 11/13/14; Politico 11/14/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba
New Priorities for South American Integration
http://alainet.org/active/78758
State violence and human rights (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13482
Latin America: The irregular path of progressive governments
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5124-latin-america-the-irregular-path-of-progressive-governments
The failures of Latin America's left
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5119--the-failures-of-latin-americas-left-
Military Personnel Trained by the CIA Used Napalm Against Indigenous People in Brazil
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27294-military-personnel-trained-by-the-cia-used-napalm-against-indigenous-people-in-brazil
Brazilian Truth Commission: 400 People Killed Under Dictatorship
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazilian-Truth-Commission-400-People-Killed-Under-Dictatorship-20141115-0007.html
On Bolivia’s new child labour law
https://opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/neil-howard/on-bolivia%E2%80%99s-new-child-labour-law
Colombia: crime lord falls, para links revealed
http://ww4report.com/node/13717
Colombia: peace talks off as FARC capture general
http://ww4report.com/node/13728
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/11012
Nicaragua: opposition mounts to canal scheme
http://ww4report.com/node/13726
El Salvador Commemorates Jesuit Priests
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/El-Salvador-Commemorates-Jesuit-Priests-20141116-0006.html
Legal Vacuum Fuels Conflicts Over Water in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/5125-legal-vacuum-fuels-conflicts-over-water-in-el-salvador
Conceiving While Poor, Imprisoned for Murder (El Salvador)
https://nacla.org/article/conceiving-while-poor-imprisoned-murder-0
Blood for Gold: The Human Cost of Canada’s ‘Free Trade’ With Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/5123-blood-for-gold-the-human-cost-of-canadas-free-trade-with-honduras
Mexico in Crisis: U.S. Drug War Funding, Ayotzinapa and Human Rights Violations
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13396
Excerpts from Congressional Briefing on the Impact of U.S. Security Assistance on Human Rights in Mexico, Central America and Colombia
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/excerpts-from-congressional-briefing-on-the-impact-of-us-security-assistance-on-human-rights-in-mexico-central-america-and-colombia
Mexico: Ayotzinapa’s Uncomfortable Dead
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5121-mexico-ayotzinapas-uncomfortable-dead
Ayotzinapa and the New Civic Insurgency (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5122-ayotzinapa-and-the-new-civic-insurgency-
Ayotzinapa Resistance: "This is just getting started" (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5120-ayotzinapa-resistance-qthis-is-just-getting-startedq
Mexican Gang Suspected of Killing 43 Students Admits to Mass Murder
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5117-mexican-gang-suspected-of-killing-43-students-admits-to-mass-murder-
Ciudad Juarez and Ayotzinapa (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/ciudad-juarez-and-ayotzinapa/
The Yaqui Water War (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13463
Sonora and Arizona’s Uncertain Water Futures (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13485
Cuba’s Retired Population Struggles With Economic Reforms
https://nacla.org/news/2014/11/10/cuba%E2%80%99s-retired-population-struggles-economic-reforms
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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