Issue #1251, January 18, 2015
1. Haiti: Deal Fails, Martelly Rules by Decree
2. Mexico: Students’ Parents Storm Army Base
3. Puerto Rico: Machetero Prisoner Is Released
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. 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. Haiti: Deal Fails, Martelly Rules by Decree
Haiti entered a long-threatened period of constitutional crisis on Jan. 12 when terms expired for all 99 members of the Chamber of Deputies and for 10 of the country’s 30 senators; the terms had already run out for another third of the senators. Since the government had failed to hold overdue elections for these seats, Parliament no longer had a quorum to pass laws and President Martelly was free to rule by decree in the absence of a viable legislature. He and the leaders of Parliament had announced an agreement on Dec. 29 that would extend the legislators’ terms if Parliament met a Jan. 12 deadline to pass amendments to the electoral law [see Update #1249], but the deal didn’t win the agreement of the main opposition parties. The vote never took place.
The slide into direct presidential rule came on the day when Haitians were marking the fifth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that destroyed much of Port-au-Prince and left tens or hundreds of thousands of people dead. (Radio-Canada 1/11/15 from correspondents; Radio France Internationale (RFI) 1/13/15 from correspondent)
Martelly’s opponents said they would continue with the anti-government demonstrations they have been sponsoring since the fall to demand Martelly’s resignation. On Jan. 15 an opposition coalition announced plans for marches in Port-au-Prince on Jan. 16, Jan. 17, Jan. 20, Jan. 22 and Jan. 23. The coalition includes the Patriotic Movement of the Democratic Opposition (Mopod) and a new political party, Pitit Desalin (“Children of Dessalines,” referring to the revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines). Pitit Desalin’s leader is ex-senator Moïse Jean-Charles, who until late 2013 was associated with the Lavalas Family (FL) party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004) [see Update #1204]. FL itself has refrained from calling for Martelly’s resignation, but according to former FL senator Louis Gérald Gilles, the party is demanding the resignation of Martelly’s new prime minister, Evans Paul, a longtime Aristide opponent who hadn’t been confirmed by Parliament before it lost its quorum. If Paul doesn’t step down, Gilles said, FL will join the other opposition groups in demanding Martelly’s resignation. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 1/15/15; Haïti Libre 1/17/15)
As of Jan. 15 the so-called “Core Group”--the ambassadors of Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, the US and the European Union (EU), along with the special representatives of the United Nations (UN) and the Organization of American States (OAS)—had declared their countries’ “support for the president of the republic in the exercise of his constitutional duties.” The US had backed the failed agreement to extend the legislators’ terms, and US ambassador Pamela White angered many Haitians by attending a meeting of Parliament the evening of Jan. 11 when the deal was being discussed. She apparently hadn’t been invited. “You want to know what I think of Pamela White?” a passerby told an RFI correspondent the next day. “These people have long since been interfering in the country’s affairs. They’re the ones who chose Martelly, because he sold them the country.” The speaker was referring to interference by foreign powers in the 2010-2011 elections [see Update #1062]. (RFI 1/13/15; AlterPresse 1/15/15)
In contrast to the Core Group, the center-left government of Uruguay may react to the situation by withdrawing its troops from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), as it threatened in December [see Update #1249]. Uruguayan foreign minister Luis Almagro was reportedly planning an “emergency” visit to UN headquarters in New York to coordinate the withdrawal of his country’s 605 MINUSTAH members in the near future. (AlterPresse 1/15/15)
It was unclear how much effect the dissolution of Parliament would have on the government’s operations, which were already hampered by a longstanding stalemate between Martelly and the opposition, but an anti-mining coalition, the Mining Justice Collective (previously the “Collective Against Mining”), is concerned that the president may take advantage of the situation to impose a law that would greatly expand the mining sector [see Update #1230]. The measure, which was stalled in Parliament, would change Haiti’s 1976 mining code to allow the Bureau of Mines and Energy (BME) to sign directly with mining companies without having to win approval from Parliament, opening up northern Haiti to massive open-pit gold mining by foreign companies. The World Bank helped draft the law, and six Haitian groups filed a formal complaint with the bank on Jan. 7, noting that the measure was written without the public consultation often required by the bank’s own policies. (Upside Down World 1/13/15 from IPS)
*2. Mexico: Students’ Parents Storm Army Base
At least seven people were injured, some seriously, on Jan. 12 when dozens of protesters tried to enter a Mexican military post in Iguala de la Independencia in the southwestern state of Guerrero, saying they were looking for students who were abducted in the area the night of Sept. 26-27 [see Update #1248]. The missing students had attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the town of Ayotzinapa, and the protesters were other students from the school and parents and relatives of the missing youths. The military post, staffed by the 47th Infantry Battalion, is near the sites where local police and others—possibly including soldiers and federal police--gunned down six people and abducted 43 students in the September violence. So far authorities have only identified the remains of one of the missing students, leaving 42 unaccounted for.
“[Y]ou too were complicit in the violent acts that happened in Iguala,” one of the parents told the soldiers, addressing them over a megaphone. “Today we’ve come to demand that you give us our children, because you know where they are…. Today we’re telling these cowardly and murderous soldiers that they aren’t good for anything but killing students, not for confronting organized crime, which they’re scared of.” Unable to get into the installation, a group of students commandeered a Coca-Cola delivery truck and knocked down one side of a gate. Inside the post the protesters were outnumbered by some 300 military and state police agents, who used tear gas and fire extinguishers in an attempt to disperse them. The protesters responded with rocks, which the agents hurled back. The injured included four parents, two students and one reporter from the Venezuela-based television network TeleSUR. Two demonstrators were detained and held for about one hour.
After being driven from the post, the protesters joined with members of the militant State Organizing Committee of Education Workers in Guerrero (CETEG) to march to the Iguala-Chilpancingo highway, where they set three trucks on fire. (La Jornada 1/13/15)
The Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) insists that the September attack was the work of municipal police from Iguala and nearby Cocula and the members of a local gang, Guerreros Unidos (“United Warriors”). In the official version, the gang members took the 43 students and executed them, incinerating the bodies at a dump in Cocula. The government has arrested 97 people in the case, and is pressing charges against former Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda Villa. Federal officials say the investigation has been completed, although they claim to be continuing the search for the 42 students who are still missing.
Insisting they had nothing to hide, on the evening of Jan. 13 federal authorities said they would make arrangements for the parents of the missing students to visit military installations. Federal governance secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong announced on Jan. 14 that the military would also invite the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to inspect the Iguala post, although he denied any involvement by the military in the September events. (LJ 1/14/15, 1/14/15, 1/15/15)
According to an investigative report published on Dec. 13 by the Mexican weekly Proceso, both the military and the federal police monitored the movements of the Ayotzinapa students the evening of Sept. 26 and were probably involved in the violence. Two researchers--Jorge Antonio Montemayor Aldrete from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and Pablo Ugalde Vélez from Mexico City’s Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM)—have questioned the PGR’s conclusion that the missing students were killed and then incinerated at the Cocula dump. The researchers say it would be impossible to build a fire at the site that would be hot enough for the sort of full incineration the government claims. The military has its own modern crematoria, and the researchers have asked to see records of their use in late September. (LJ 1/4/15) The researchers also charge that vegetation shown in photos of the dump in November couldn’t have grown back so quickly after the intense heat from the supposed fire, and that if some students had been killed there, blood and other organic material would have left enough DNA in the soil for investigators to make positive identifications of the victims. (LJ 1/14/15)
In other news, a leader of the Triqui indigenous group, Julián González Domínguez, was kidnapped by 10 armed men from his home in Santiago Juxtlahuaca municipality, in Oaxaca near the Guerrero border, and was found dead at a nearby highway on Jan. 12, according to the Oaxaca International Indigenous Network (RIIO). González was a leader for many years in the Unification Movement of the Triqui Struggle (MULT); more recently, he was one of the founders of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA), a new center-left party started by former presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The Triqui zone has been the scene of violent conflicts between the MULT, the rival Independent Unification Movement of the Triqui Struggle (MULTI) and the Social Welfare Unity of the Triqui Region (UBISORT); the last organization is said to be a paramilitary group linked to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) [see Update #1054]. González’s community also had a longstanding agrarian dispute with a nearby community directed by the PRI-affiliated National Campesino Confederation (CNC). RIIO said that González had been receiving threats and that another member of his community was kidnapped and murdered in December. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IACHR, or CIDH by its initials in Spanish), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), had issued “cautionary measures” calling on the Mexican authorities to protect the Triqui leader’s life. (Sputnik News 1/13/15)
*3. Puerto Rico: Machetero Prisoner Is Released
Some 150 supporters greeted Puerto Rican independence activist Norberto González Claudio at San Juan’s international airport on Jan. 15, hours after he was released from a federal prison in Coleman, Florida. González Claudio, a former member of the rebel Boricua Popular Army (EPB)-Macheteros, had served a three and one-half year prison term for his involvement in the group’s 1983 armed robbery of $7.1 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut—until then the largest heist on record. Arrested in May 2011 in the central Puerto Rican town of Cayey after spending 25 years as fugitive, González Claudio pleaded guilty in exchange for a shorter prison sentence [see Update #1133]. He was due to be released last September, but his time in Coleman was extended four months because of an alleged infraction. The activist’s relatives and colleagues saw this as part of a pattern of physical and psychological tortures they say he endured.
Supporters and relatives of another prisoner, Oscar López Rivera, were among the people greeting González Claudio at the airport. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 1/15/15; Univision 1/15/15 from Inter News Service; Hartford Courant 1/15/15 from AP)
López Rivera has been in the US prison system for 33 years for his role in another independence group, the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) [see Update #871]. He refused to accept a clemency offer in 1999 from then-US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and is now apparently the last prisoner from the group. Fellow FALN member Haydée Beltrán Torres was released in 2009, and her husband, Carlos Alberto Torres, was released in 2010.
González Claudio was the last prisoner from the Macheteros group, whose leader, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, was shot dead by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in September 2005 [see Update #1117]. Víctor Manuel Gerena, the Wells Fargo driver who carried out the 1983 robbery, is reportedly living in Cuba. Along with African-American activist Assata Shakur (formerly Joanne Chesimard) and FALN activist William Morales, Gerena has become a target of US politicians seeking the return of US political exiles from asylum in Cuba as a condition for improved relations between that country and the US [see World War 4 Report 12/24/15]. (Hunterdon County (NJ) Democrat 1/13/15)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti
Did Iran kill Argentine prosecutor?
http://ww4report.com/node/13911#comment-452733
French Economist Piketty Blasts Vulture Funds in Argentina Tour
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/French-Economist-Piketty-Blasts-Vulture-Funds-in-Argentina-Tour-20150117-0017.html
Brazil Truth Commission Details Extent of Rape During Military Dictatorship
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/5187-brazil-truth-commission-details-extent-of-rape-during-military-dictatorship
Peru: protest legal assault on land rights
http://ww4report.com/node/13447#comment-452714
Peru: youth protest labor law
http://ww4report.com/node/13906
Ecuador: Defending the CONAIE beyond Its House
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/5178-ecuador-defending-the-conaie-beyond-its-house
Ecuador: Correa blinks in stand-off with CONAIE
http://ww4report.com/node/13898
Colombia: will government answer FARC ceasefire?
http://ww4report.com/node/13897
Are the FARC narco-traffickers?
http://ww4report.com/node/13903
Straight Talk on How Maduro Measures Up to Chávez (Venezuela)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/09/maduro%27s-progress-economic-warfare
Economic Solutions: Two Perspectives from the Bolivarian Left (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11160
Rudy Giuliani Will Advise El Salvador on Security, Justice Reform
http://latindispatch.com/2015/01/12/rudy-giuliani-will-advise-el-salvador-on-security-justice-reform/
El Salvador: Archbishop Romero Declared Martyr
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5180-archbishop-romero-declared-martyr
El Salvador's Other Crisis
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5172-el-salvadors-other-crisis
Poor Guatemalans Are Taking On North American Mining Companies-and Have the Bullet Wounds to Prove It
https://www.thenation.com/article/194809/poor-guatemalans-are-taking-north-american-mining-companies-and-have-bullet-wounds-pr
Justice in Guatemala Deferred, Again (Audio)
https://nacla.org/news/2015/01/14/justice-guatemala-deferred-again-audio
Guatemala postpones ex-dictator's genocide retrial
http://ww4report.com/node/13896
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
Ayotzinapa: 100 Days of Rage, Sorrow and Struggle in Guerrero
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5181-ayotzinapa-100-days-of-rage-sorrow-and-struggle-in-guerrero
The L.A.-Ayotzinapa Connection (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14454
#Alertabachajón - Police Shoot at Indigenous Tseltales Trying to Recover Lands (Mexico)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/alertabachajon-police-shoot-indigenous-tseltales-trying-recover-lands/
Mexico’s Economy 2015: Boom, Bust or Burp?
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexicos-economy-2015-boom-bust-or-burp/
Mexican Labor 2014 in Review
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=232#1786
Farewell to the Grand Old Dean of Latin Journalism (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/farewell-to-the-grand-old-dean-of-latin-journalism/
US Politicians Descend on Cuba as Normalization Process Begins
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/US-Politicians-Descend-on-Cuba-as-Normalization-Process-Begins-20150117-0014.html
Five Years After the Earthquake in Haiti, the Sad State of Democracy and Human Rights
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/14409
It’s Been Five Years, and All the Money Raised is Gone: What did the Red Cross Accomplish in Haiti?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/its-been-five-years-and-all-the-money-raised-is-gone-what-did-the-red-cross-accomplish-in-haiti
Haitians Worry World Bank-Assisted Mining Law Could Result in “Looting”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5179-haitians-worry-world-bank-assisted-mining-law-could-result-in-looting
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/
Showing posts with label Puerto Rico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Puerto Rico. Show all posts
Monday, January 19, 2015
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
WNU #1224: US Acts on “Danger” From Central American Children
Issue #1224, June 22, 2014
1. Central America: US Acts on Child Migrant “Danger”
2. Mexico: Wages Stay Down in Stalled Economy
3. Haiti: Martelly Harasses Opponents, Gets Award
4. Puerto Rico: Austerity Law May Spark Strike
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, US/immigration, 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. Central America: US Acts on Child Migrant “Danger”
US vice president Joe Biden made a one-day visit to Guatemala on June 20 for a meeting with regional authorities on the recent increase in Central Americans, especially underage minors, apprehended while attempting to enter the US without authorization at the Mexican border. Calling the influx of children “an enormous danger for security” as well as a “humanitarian issue,” Biden said the US planned to continue repatriating the young immigrants but would provide Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras with US$9.6 million to reintegrate the deportees into society. The US is also offering financial aid that US officials say will help stop the flow of immigrants: US$40 million to Guatemala to launch a five-year program to reduce youth recruitment into gangs; US$25 million for a five-year program to add 77 youth centers to the 30 already operating in El Salvador; US$18.5 million through the six-year-old US-sponsored Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) to support Honduran institutions in the fight against crime; and another US$161.5 million for CARSI throughout the region.
Participants in the meeting—the last stop on a tour that had taken Biden to Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic—included Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, Salvadoran president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, Honduran government coordinator Jorge Ramón Hernández and Mexican governance secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio.
The number of unaccompanied Central American minors detained at the Mexico-US border from October 2013 through May 2014 increased by 66% over the number in the same period a year earlier, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The total of 34,611 detained Central American children included 9,850 Salvadorans, 11,479 Guatemalans and 13,282 Hondurans. US officials blame the sudden increase on Central American governments’ failure to control the drug-related violence that drives many youths to flee their countries; the US also cites reports of rumors that US immigrant authorities would be lenient with unaccompanied minors caught at the border.
Central American officials respond by pointing to the US government’s failure to control the demand for drugs in the US, the main stimulus for drug trafficking in the Caribbean Basin region, and also to frustration over the US government’s apparent inability to change its laws to accommodate some 11 million immigrants now living in the country without documents. The Central Americans “have focused their diplomatic efforts on pushing for better conditions for the detained children,” according to the New York Times. Guatemalan president Pérez Molina has asked the US to grant Guatemalans temporary protected status (TPS) in the US, while Honduran foreign minister Mireya Agüero de Corrales has called for Honduran minors to be granted special status to stay in the US with family members. Honduras’ rightwing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, pointedly skipped the meeting with Biden so he could attend the World Cup soccer championship in Brazil. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/18/14; Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 6/20/14 from EFE; NYT 6/21/14)
Progressive organizations are also critical of US policies. In a June 18 statement SOA Watch, a US-based group that tracks abuses by Latin American military officers trained at the US Army’s School of the Americas (SOA, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC), noted that the increases in unauthorized migration from Honduras followed the “SOA-graduate led coup” in that country on June 28, 2009, almost exactly five years before Biden’s 2014 visit. “The current humanitarian crisis on the border is a direct result of the drastic US-led militarization of the drug war [in Central America and Mexico], unequal economic relationships (e.g. Free Trade Agreements that have ravaged campesino communities), and US support for the cartel-infiltrated post-coup government of Honduras,” SOA Watch charged. The group encourages US residents to sign a petition to the US Congress “to end the counterproductive funding of the Drug War and the corrupt Honduran regime” (accessible at http://org.salsalabs.com/o/727/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15901).
(SOA Watch 6/18/14 via Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County)
On June 21 the Mexican Senate’s Human Rights Commission called on the US government to respect the rights of the minors detained at the border and asked Mexican diplomats to make visits to detention centers to ensure that the youths are being treated properly. But Mexican human rights groups continued to focus on the mistreatment of Central American migrants passing through Mexico [see Update #1220]. Central Americans traveling in the northern state of Coahuila cite the local police along with criminal gangs as the main dangers they face. Pedro Pantoja, a Catholic priest and an adviser at a Coahuila shelter for migrants, says the travelers sometimes fear the police more than the gangs: “They don’t know who to run from.” A Mexican reporter describes the municipalities of Coatzacoalcos, Tierra Blanca and Las Choapas in the south of Veracruz as “the Bermuda Triangle for Central American migrants” because of the regular attacks by armed gangs. In the most recent case, three Central Americans were shot by robbers as they tried to ride a freight train in the area on the weekend of June 13; one died from his wounds. (LJ 6/18/14, 6/22/14)
*2. Mexico: Wages Stay Down in Stalled Economy
Even as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto continues to push for economic “reforms” [see Update #1214], government agencies report that the economy still has one of the worst records in the hemisphere. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew just 1.1% in 2013, the poorest result in four years, and the government has reduced its forecast for growth in 2014 to 2.7%. The Banco de México, the country’s central bank, cut its key interest rate this June to stimulate economic activity, warning that the growth outlook was “weaker than expectations even a couple of weeks ago.” Only one-half of the population works in the formal economy, and even these workers are probably earning less than their parents did. Mexico’s legal minimum wage has fallen at least 66% in purchasing power over the last three decades, according to Alicia Bárcena, the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, CEPAL in Spanish).
In an interview published by the left-leaning daily La Jornada, Bárcena said the largest drop in the minimum wage occurred in the 1980s; the wage stabilized in the 1990s, but it failed to grow and then fell slightly with the 2008 world economic crisis. Mexico is one of the few Latin American countries where the minimum wage didn’t recover during the past 10 years, in sharp contrast to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Uruguay. Citing the example of Brazil, where the minimum wage doubled from 2002 to 2011, Bárcena said a clear and consistent minimum wage policy is what has been most effective in fighting poverty and inequality over the past decade. CEPAL is supporting a call from Miguel Angel Mancera, the center-left head of government for Mexico’s Federal District (DF, Mexico City), for a national discussion of the minimum wage. (LJ 6/9/14; Financial Times (UK) 6/18/14)
Mexico’s economy has been closely tied to the US economy, especially in the 20 years since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. The agreement has created both winners, such as Mexico’s automotive assembly sector, and losers, notably agriculture, according to Alicia Girón, an economic researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “In our case, with opening up and removing the duties on corn, genetically modified (GM) corn has arrived in Mexico and displaced production at the local level,” Girón told the Pervuvian online magazine Mariátegui. “So if we observe the fields that were abandoned or simply stopped producing corn, now they are centers for narco trafficking.” The loss of work in the countryside was also a major force driving migration to the US, she said. “It’s a lesson that all the free trade treaties that have been signed with the US, such as those with Colombia, Chile, Peru, should take into account.” (Mariátegui 6/6/14)
*3. Haiti: Martelly Harasses Opponents, Gets Award
Haitian investigative judge Sonel Jean François ordered political activist Rony Timothée provisionally released on June 4 while an inquiry continued into charges that he had set fire to a vehicle and incited others to crime during a May 14 demonstration against the government of President Michel Martelly. Timothée--a spokesperson for the Patriotic Force for Respect for the Constitution (FOPARC), which backs the Family Lavalas (FL) party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004)-- was arrested by armed civilians on May 17 with a misdated warrant and was held in prison in Arcahaie, a town some 30 km north of Port-au-Prince, starting on May 19. Judge François is also investigating two other defendants in the case, Assad Volcy and Buron Odigé.
“Everyone knows that Timothée’s arrest was of a political nature,” his attorney, André Michel, told the online news agency AlterPresse on June 4. “He had the good luck to appear before an independent judge,” Michel added, contrasting Timothée’s treatment to the situation of two other clients, Enold and Josué Florestal, who have been imprisoned since August 2013 [see Update #1188]. Another opposition figure has also faced government harassment. Moïse Jean-Charles, a senator for North department [see Update #1204], was attacked by national police agents on May 8 as he was returning to Port-au-Prince from a funeral for another activist, Fritz Gérald Civil, at Miragoâne in Nippes department. On May 30 the senator was barred from visiting Timothée at the Arcahaie prison, and several witnesses say he was attacked by guards at the prison. (AlterPresse 5/30/24, 6/5/14, 6/9/14)
On June 19 President Martelly attended a black-tie fundraiser in midtown New York to receive an award for work in education from the Happy Hearts Fund, a foundation that builds schools in areas hit by natural disasters. Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) was honored at the same event for his work as the top United Nations (UN) envoy for the Indian Ocean tsunami recovery effort. The event, which reportedly raised $2.5 million, featured business leaders, fashion models and entertainment figures. At one point Martelly, formerly a singer of Haitian konpa music under the stage name “Sweet Micky,” joined with Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean to perform Bob Marley's “No Woman No Cry.” The Happy Hearts Fund’s founder, the model Petra Nemcova, is romantically involved with Martelly’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe.
Some 40-50 New York-area Haitians and their supporters protested outside on 42nd Street for about three hours, chanting “Where is the money?” from behind barricades as celebrities like fashion designer Donna Karan entered the event. Billions of dollars were raised for relief efforts after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated much of southern Haiti in January 2010, but Haitians say very little seemed to reach them. Bill Clinton headed the now-defunct Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an international group charged with monitoring the funds. (Wall Street Journal online 6/20/14; report from Update editor)
*4. Puerto Rico: Austerity Law May Spark Strike
As of June 19 several Puerto Rican public employee unions appeared set to call a general strike to protest Law 76, a special austerity measure that Gov. Alejandro García Padilla signed on June 17. A coalition of 35 unions said it had selected a date for a general strike but would keep it secret so as to take the government by surprise; the union didn’t describe the form the strike would take. Two major unions—the Union of Workers of the Electrical Industry and Circulation (UTIER), which represents workers at the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA, AEE in Spanish), and the Authentic Independent Union (UIA), which represents workers at the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA, AAA in Spanish)--held strike votes on June 17 and then staged a protest at San Juan’s Plaza Las Américas shopping mall. Some unions also started holding smaller job actions in the first week of June. In October 2009 the unions responded to earlier austerity measures with a powerful one-day general strike [see Update #1008], but it was unclear whether they would be able to mount a similar action now.
Law 76, the Special Law of Fiscal and Operational Sustainability of the Government, is a response to a fiscal crisis from February, when US rating agencies decided to reduce Puerto Rican bonds to junk status [see Update #1208]. The measure allows the government to renegotiate public employees’ contracts, liquidate unused sick days and freeze salaries; there are also options for privatizing PREPA and closing 100 public schools. Investors seemed unsure the austerity measures would work: yields on the $3.5 billion junk bonds issued in March soared in June, reaching 9.65% on June 19.
Union leaders insist that the drastic measures are unnecessary. On June 20, Julio Vargas, the president of UTIER’s Solidarity Program (ProSol), charged at a press conference that management employees had given themselves raises of as much as $3,500 a month in the last third of 2013, shortly before insisting on sacrifices by unionized workers. Meanwhile, UIA president Pedro Irene Maymí told demonstrators outside the Government Development Bank that day that the government had outsourced work in a total of $8 billion in contracts, not the $1.5 billion claimed by Gov. García Padilla. “This is the way they’re carrying off the money, to García Padilla’s friends,” Maymí said. The Puerto Rican Socialist Workers Movement (MST) called for the government to declare a moratorium on the public debt. (In These Times 6/9/14; Reuters 6/19/14; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/20/14; Prensa Latina 6/21/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, US/immigration, US/policy
Latin America’s Rightwing Parties Are Falling Apart
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4903-latin-americas-rightwing-parties-are-falling-apart
Canada Found Guilty for Role in Mining Injustices in Latin America
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12368
Is the Chilean Student Movement Being Co-opted by Its Government?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4902-is-the-chilean-student-movement-being-co-opted-by-its-government
Soccer Is Democratic. The World Cup Is Oligarchy. (Brazil)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/19/soccer-democratic-world-cup-oligarchy
Repressing World Cup protests — a booming business for Brazil
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/repressing-world-cup-protests-booming-business-brazil/
Peru: prison for regional leader who opposed mine
http://ww4report.com/node/13322
US Scientists, Oil Giant Stole Indigenous Blood (Ecuador)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/us-scientists-oil-giant-stole-indigenous-blood-24385/
Ecuador’s CONAIE Indigenous Movement: A Return to the Bases in a Fight for Water Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4901-ecuadors-conaie-indigenous-movement-a-return-to-the-bases-in-a-fight-for-water-rights
Against the war, a mandate for peace (Colombia)
http://alainet.org/active/74665
Colombia Peace Talks Survive Elections, May Have Lasting Implications for Regional Integration and US-Led “War on Drugs”
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/colombia-peace-talks-survive-elections-may-have-lasting-implications-for-regional-integration-and-us-led-war-on-drugs
Santos' Presidential Win in Colombia is a Vote for Peace
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/4900-santos-presidential-win-in-colombia-is-a-vote-for-peace
Protest and Destabilization in Venezuela: The Difference Between the Violent And Non-Violent Right Is Smaller Than You May Think
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/17/protest-and-destabilization-venezuela-difference-between-violent-and-non-violent-righ
Is Poverty Still Falling in Venezuela?
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10749
Venezuela: Amazon indigenous protest mining law
http://ww4report.com/node/13321
El Salvador: charter to recognize indigenous rights
http://ww4report.com/node/13320
The Root Causes of Migration: End U.S. Funding of the Drug War and the Corrupt Honduran Regime
http://www.peaceandjusticesonomaco.org/root-causes-migration-end-us-funding-drug-war-and-corrupt-honduran-regime
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be Forced into Exile for Being Gay in Honduras
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/there-has-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-forced-into-exile-for-being-gay-in-honduras
Guatemalans File Lawsuit Against Canadian Mining Company for 2013 Shooting
http://intercontinentalcry.org/guatemalans-file-lawsuit-canadian-mining-company-2013-shooting/
Zapatistas Mourn a Death and Begin a New Cycle of Building Indigenous Autonomy (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12372
Mexican Workers Battle Firings, Peso-Pinching
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexican-workers-battle-firings-peso-pinching/
Puerto Rico Unions Threaten Strike Against Austerity Budget
http://inthesetimes.org/working/entry/16814/puerto_rico_unions_threaten_strike_against_austerity_budget
Juarez Mother Seeks U.S. Political Asylum (US/immigration)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/juarez-mother-seeks-u-s-political-asylum/
The Latino Media Gap: A Conversation with Frances Negrón Muntaner (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/19/latino-media-gap-conversation-frances-negr%C3%B3n-muntaner
How Deportation Created A New Class Of Disposable Soldiers (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/6/20/how-deportation-created-new-class-disposable-soldiers
Another US Spying Problem in Latin America: The US DEA (US/policy)
http://alainet.org/active/74773
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://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. Central America: US Acts on Child Migrant “Danger”
2. Mexico: Wages Stay Down in Stalled Economy
3. Haiti: Martelly Harasses Opponents, Gets Award
4. Puerto Rico: Austerity Law May Spark Strike
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, US/immigration, 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. Central America: US Acts on Child Migrant “Danger”
US vice president Joe Biden made a one-day visit to Guatemala on June 20 for a meeting with regional authorities on the recent increase in Central Americans, especially underage minors, apprehended while attempting to enter the US without authorization at the Mexican border. Calling the influx of children “an enormous danger for security” as well as a “humanitarian issue,” Biden said the US planned to continue repatriating the young immigrants but would provide Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras with US$9.6 million to reintegrate the deportees into society. The US is also offering financial aid that US officials say will help stop the flow of immigrants: US$40 million to Guatemala to launch a five-year program to reduce youth recruitment into gangs; US$25 million for a five-year program to add 77 youth centers to the 30 already operating in El Salvador; US$18.5 million through the six-year-old US-sponsored Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) to support Honduran institutions in the fight against crime; and another US$161.5 million for CARSI throughout the region.
Participants in the meeting—the last stop on a tour that had taken Biden to Brazil, Colombia and the Dominican Republic—included Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, Salvadoran president Salvador Sánchez Cerén, Honduran government coordinator Jorge Ramón Hernández and Mexican governance secretary Miguel Ángel Osorio.
The number of unaccompanied Central American minors detained at the Mexico-US border from October 2013 through May 2014 increased by 66% over the number in the same period a year earlier, according to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The total of 34,611 detained Central American children included 9,850 Salvadorans, 11,479 Guatemalans and 13,282 Hondurans. US officials blame the sudden increase on Central American governments’ failure to control the drug-related violence that drives many youths to flee their countries; the US also cites reports of rumors that US immigrant authorities would be lenient with unaccompanied minors caught at the border.
Central American officials respond by pointing to the US government’s failure to control the demand for drugs in the US, the main stimulus for drug trafficking in the Caribbean Basin region, and also to frustration over the US government’s apparent inability to change its laws to accommodate some 11 million immigrants now living in the country without documents. The Central Americans “have focused their diplomatic efforts on pushing for better conditions for the detained children,” according to the New York Times. Guatemalan president Pérez Molina has asked the US to grant Guatemalans temporary protected status (TPS) in the US, while Honduran foreign minister Mireya Agüero de Corrales has called for Honduran minors to be granted special status to stay in the US with family members. Honduras’ rightwing president, Juan Orlando Hernández, pointedly skipped the meeting with Biden so he could attend the World Cup soccer championship in Brazil. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/18/14; Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 6/20/14 from EFE; NYT 6/21/14)
Progressive organizations are also critical of US policies. In a June 18 statement SOA Watch, a US-based group that tracks abuses by Latin American military officers trained at the US Army’s School of the Americas (SOA, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, WHINSEC), noted that the increases in unauthorized migration from Honduras followed the “SOA-graduate led coup” in that country on June 28, 2009, almost exactly five years before Biden’s 2014 visit. “The current humanitarian crisis on the border is a direct result of the drastic US-led militarization of the drug war [in Central America and Mexico], unequal economic relationships (e.g. Free Trade Agreements that have ravaged campesino communities), and US support for the cartel-infiltrated post-coup government of Honduras,” SOA Watch charged. The group encourages US residents to sign a petition to the US Congress “to end the counterproductive funding of the Drug War and the corrupt Honduran regime” (accessible at http://org.salsalabs.com/o/727/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=15901).
(SOA Watch 6/18/14 via Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County)
On June 21 the Mexican Senate’s Human Rights Commission called on the US government to respect the rights of the minors detained at the border and asked Mexican diplomats to make visits to detention centers to ensure that the youths are being treated properly. But Mexican human rights groups continued to focus on the mistreatment of Central American migrants passing through Mexico [see Update #1220]. Central Americans traveling in the northern state of Coahuila cite the local police along with criminal gangs as the main dangers they face. Pedro Pantoja, a Catholic priest and an adviser at a Coahuila shelter for migrants, says the travelers sometimes fear the police more than the gangs: “They don’t know who to run from.” A Mexican reporter describes the municipalities of Coatzacoalcos, Tierra Blanca and Las Choapas in the south of Veracruz as “the Bermuda Triangle for Central American migrants” because of the regular attacks by armed gangs. In the most recent case, three Central Americans were shot by robbers as they tried to ride a freight train in the area on the weekend of June 13; one died from his wounds. (LJ 6/18/14, 6/22/14)
*2. Mexico: Wages Stay Down in Stalled Economy
Even as Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto continues to push for economic “reforms” [see Update #1214], government agencies report that the economy still has one of the worst records in the hemisphere. Gross domestic product (GDP) grew just 1.1% in 2013, the poorest result in four years, and the government has reduced its forecast for growth in 2014 to 2.7%. The Banco de México, the country’s central bank, cut its key interest rate this June to stimulate economic activity, warning that the growth outlook was “weaker than expectations even a couple of weeks ago.” Only one-half of the population works in the formal economy, and even these workers are probably earning less than their parents did. Mexico’s legal minimum wage has fallen at least 66% in purchasing power over the last three decades, according to Alicia Bárcena, the executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, CEPAL in Spanish).
In an interview published by the left-leaning daily La Jornada, Bárcena said the largest drop in the minimum wage occurred in the 1980s; the wage stabilized in the 1990s, but it failed to grow and then fell slightly with the 2008 world economic crisis. Mexico is one of the few Latin American countries where the minimum wage didn’t recover during the past 10 years, in sharp contrast to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Uruguay. Citing the example of Brazil, where the minimum wage doubled from 2002 to 2011, Bárcena said a clear and consistent minimum wage policy is what has been most effective in fighting poverty and inequality over the past decade. CEPAL is supporting a call from Miguel Angel Mancera, the center-left head of government for Mexico’s Federal District (DF, Mexico City), for a national discussion of the minimum wage. (LJ 6/9/14; Financial Times (UK) 6/18/14)
Mexico’s economy has been closely tied to the US economy, especially in the 20 years since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect. The agreement has created both winners, such as Mexico’s automotive assembly sector, and losers, notably agriculture, according to Alicia Girón, an economic researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “In our case, with opening up and removing the duties on corn, genetically modified (GM) corn has arrived in Mexico and displaced production at the local level,” Girón told the Pervuvian online magazine Mariátegui. “So if we observe the fields that were abandoned or simply stopped producing corn, now they are centers for narco trafficking.” The loss of work in the countryside was also a major force driving migration to the US, she said. “It’s a lesson that all the free trade treaties that have been signed with the US, such as those with Colombia, Chile, Peru, should take into account.” (Mariátegui 6/6/14)
*3. Haiti: Martelly Harasses Opponents, Gets Award
Haitian investigative judge Sonel Jean François ordered political activist Rony Timothée provisionally released on June 4 while an inquiry continued into charges that he had set fire to a vehicle and incited others to crime during a May 14 demonstration against the government of President Michel Martelly. Timothée--a spokesperson for the Patriotic Force for Respect for the Constitution (FOPARC), which backs the Family Lavalas (FL) party of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004)-- was arrested by armed civilians on May 17 with a misdated warrant and was held in prison in Arcahaie, a town some 30 km north of Port-au-Prince, starting on May 19. Judge François is also investigating two other defendants in the case, Assad Volcy and Buron Odigé.
“Everyone knows that Timothée’s arrest was of a political nature,” his attorney, André Michel, told the online news agency AlterPresse on June 4. “He had the good luck to appear before an independent judge,” Michel added, contrasting Timothée’s treatment to the situation of two other clients, Enold and Josué Florestal, who have been imprisoned since August 2013 [see Update #1188]. Another opposition figure has also faced government harassment. Moïse Jean-Charles, a senator for North department [see Update #1204], was attacked by national police agents on May 8 as he was returning to Port-au-Prince from a funeral for another activist, Fritz Gérald Civil, at Miragoâne in Nippes department. On May 30 the senator was barred from visiting Timothée at the Arcahaie prison, and several witnesses say he was attacked by guards at the prison. (AlterPresse 5/30/24, 6/5/14, 6/9/14)
On June 19 President Martelly attended a black-tie fundraiser in midtown New York to receive an award for work in education from the Happy Hearts Fund, a foundation that builds schools in areas hit by natural disasters. Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001) was honored at the same event for his work as the top United Nations (UN) envoy for the Indian Ocean tsunami recovery effort. The event, which reportedly raised $2.5 million, featured business leaders, fashion models and entertainment figures. At one point Martelly, formerly a singer of Haitian konpa music under the stage name “Sweet Micky,” joined with Haitian-born rapper Wyclef Jean to perform Bob Marley's “No Woman No Cry.” The Happy Hearts Fund’s founder, the model Petra Nemcova, is romantically involved with Martelly’s prime minister, Laurent Lamothe.
Some 40-50 New York-area Haitians and their supporters protested outside on 42nd Street for about three hours, chanting “Where is the money?” from behind barricades as celebrities like fashion designer Donna Karan entered the event. Billions of dollars were raised for relief efforts after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated much of southern Haiti in January 2010, but Haitians say very little seemed to reach them. Bill Clinton headed the now-defunct Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), an international group charged with monitoring the funds. (Wall Street Journal online 6/20/14; report from Update editor)
*4. Puerto Rico: Austerity Law May Spark Strike
As of June 19 several Puerto Rican public employee unions appeared set to call a general strike to protest Law 76, a special austerity measure that Gov. Alejandro García Padilla signed on June 17. A coalition of 35 unions said it had selected a date for a general strike but would keep it secret so as to take the government by surprise; the union didn’t describe the form the strike would take. Two major unions—the Union of Workers of the Electrical Industry and Circulation (UTIER), which represents workers at the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA, AEE in Spanish), and the Authentic Independent Union (UIA), which represents workers at the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority (PRASA, AAA in Spanish)--held strike votes on June 17 and then staged a protest at San Juan’s Plaza Las Américas shopping mall. Some unions also started holding smaller job actions in the first week of June. In October 2009 the unions responded to earlier austerity measures with a powerful one-day general strike [see Update #1008], but it was unclear whether they would be able to mount a similar action now.
Law 76, the Special Law of Fiscal and Operational Sustainability of the Government, is a response to a fiscal crisis from February, when US rating agencies decided to reduce Puerto Rican bonds to junk status [see Update #1208]. The measure allows the government to renegotiate public employees’ contracts, liquidate unused sick days and freeze salaries; there are also options for privatizing PREPA and closing 100 public schools. Investors seemed unsure the austerity measures would work: yields on the $3.5 billion junk bonds issued in March soared in June, reaching 9.65% on June 19.
Union leaders insist that the drastic measures are unnecessary. On June 20, Julio Vargas, the president of UTIER’s Solidarity Program (ProSol), charged at a press conference that management employees had given themselves raises of as much as $3,500 a month in the last third of 2013, shortly before insisting on sacrifices by unionized workers. Meanwhile, UIA president Pedro Irene Maymí told demonstrators outside the Government Development Bank that day that the government had outsourced work in a total of $8 billion in contracts, not the $1.5 billion claimed by Gov. García Padilla. “This is the way they’re carrying off the money, to García Padilla’s friends,” Maymí said. The Puerto Rican Socialist Workers Movement (MST) called for the government to declare a moratorium on the public debt. (In These Times 6/9/14; Reuters 6/19/14; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/20/14; Prensa Latina 6/21/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Puerto Rico, US/immigration, US/policy
Latin America’s Rightwing Parties Are Falling Apart
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4903-latin-americas-rightwing-parties-are-falling-apart
Canada Found Guilty for Role in Mining Injustices in Latin America
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12368
Is the Chilean Student Movement Being Co-opted by Its Government?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4902-is-the-chilean-student-movement-being-co-opted-by-its-government
Soccer Is Democratic. The World Cup Is Oligarchy. (Brazil)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/19/soccer-democratic-world-cup-oligarchy
Repressing World Cup protests — a booming business for Brazil
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/repressing-world-cup-protests-booming-business-brazil/
Peru: prison for regional leader who opposed mine
http://ww4report.com/node/13322
US Scientists, Oil Giant Stole Indigenous Blood (Ecuador)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/us-scientists-oil-giant-stole-indigenous-blood-24385/
Ecuador’s CONAIE Indigenous Movement: A Return to the Bases in a Fight for Water Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4901-ecuadors-conaie-indigenous-movement-a-return-to-the-bases-in-a-fight-for-water-rights
Against the war, a mandate for peace (Colombia)
http://alainet.org/active/74665
Colombia Peace Talks Survive Elections, May Have Lasting Implications for Regional Integration and US-Led “War on Drugs”
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/colombia-peace-talks-survive-elections-may-have-lasting-implications-for-regional-integration-and-us-led-war-on-drugs
Santos' Presidential Win in Colombia is a Vote for Peace
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/4900-santos-presidential-win-in-colombia-is-a-vote-for-peace
Protest and Destabilization in Venezuela: The Difference Between the Violent And Non-Violent Right Is Smaller Than You May Think
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/17/protest-and-destabilization-venezuela-difference-between-violent-and-non-violent-righ
Is Poverty Still Falling in Venezuela?
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10749
Venezuela: Amazon indigenous protest mining law
http://ww4report.com/node/13321
El Salvador: charter to recognize indigenous rights
http://ww4report.com/node/13320
The Root Causes of Migration: End U.S. Funding of the Drug War and the Corrupt Honduran Regime
http://www.peaceandjusticesonomaco.org/root-causes-migration-end-us-funding-drug-war-and-corrupt-honduran-regime
There Has Never Been a Better Time to be Forced into Exile for Being Gay in Honduras
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/there-has-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-forced-into-exile-for-being-gay-in-honduras
Guatemalans File Lawsuit Against Canadian Mining Company for 2013 Shooting
http://intercontinentalcry.org/guatemalans-file-lawsuit-canadian-mining-company-2013-shooting/
Zapatistas Mourn a Death and Begin a New Cycle of Building Indigenous Autonomy (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12372
Mexican Workers Battle Firings, Peso-Pinching
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexican-workers-battle-firings-peso-pinching/
Puerto Rico Unions Threaten Strike Against Austerity Budget
http://inthesetimes.org/working/entry/16814/puerto_rico_unions_threaten_strike_against_austerity_budget
Juarez Mother Seeks U.S. Political Asylum (US/immigration)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/juarez-mother-seeks-u-s-political-asylum/
The Latino Media Gap: A Conversation with Frances Negrón Muntaner (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/6/19/latino-media-gap-conversation-frances-negr%C3%B3n-muntaner
How Deportation Created A New Class Of Disposable Soldiers (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/6/20/how-deportation-created-new-class-disposable-soldiers
Another US Spying Problem in Latin America: The US DEA (US/policy)
http://alainet.org/active/74773
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://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/
Monday, May 26, 2014
WNU #1221: Latin American Protesters Target Monsanto, Chevron
Issue #1221, May 25, 2014
1. Latin America: Protesters Target Monsanto, Chevron
2. Honduras: OAS Agency Orders Protection for Campesinos
3. Mexico: Capital’s Residents Fight Water Project
4. Dominican Republic: Will New Law Settle Citizenship Conflict?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, 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.
Note: There will be links but no Update on June 1, 2014. Publication will resume the following week.
*1. Latin America: Protesters Target Monsanto, Chevron
Latin American activists joined thousands of environmentalists and farmers around the world in an international protest May 24 against genetically modified (GM) crops and Monsanto, the Missouri-based multinational that dominates the transgenic seed industry. This was the third March Against Monsanto since May 25 last year [see Update #1195], and organizers expected the day of action to include protests in some 351 cities in 52 countries.
In Chile, where a farmer won more than $65,000 in December 2013 by challenging the contracting methods of Monsanto’s local affiliate [see Update #1207], organizations including Chile Without Transgenics and I Don’t Want Transgenics (YNQT) sponsored protests in eight cities.
Mexicans held a total of 13 different protests. In the southeastern state of Chiapas, Without Corn There Is No Country and other groups organized an informational event in front of the cathedral in San Cristóbal de las Casas to raise awareness about the consequences of GM crops, while about 60 protesters marched in Santiago de Querétaro, the capital of the central state of Querétaro. Rubén Albarrán, of the band Café Tacvba, joined the painter and environmentalist Francisco Toledo to protest in the southern state of Oaxaca, and hundreds marched in Mexico City chanting: “We want beans; we want corn; we want Monsanto out of the country!” GM planting is limited in Mexico, but researchers say that even the current level of sowing has contaminated some of the many varieties of native corn; the plant was first cultivated in Mexico.
In Puerto Rico activists marched from San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Rivera Park to the Capitol. Monsanto doesn’t sell GM seeds on the island, but along with other multinationals like Pioneer and Syngenta it uses large tracts of farmland for experiments, according to Jesús Vázquez Negrón, the spokesperson for the Nothing Saintly About Monsanto collective. Activists claim Monsanto uses more land than it is entitled to under Puerto Rican law [see Update #1181]. (Aporrea (Venezuela) 5/24/14 from TeleSUR and unidentified wire services; Primera Hora (Puerto Rico) 5/24/14; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/25/14, 5/25/14)
Three days earlier, on May 21, activists held a similar international action against another multinational, the California-based Chevron Corporation. With protests in 13 countries-- Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Nigeria, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the US—International #AntiChevron Day targeted the petroleum giant for damage to the environment and to people living near the company’s operations. (Adital (Brazil) 5/20/14; TeleSUR 5/21/14)
Latin American activists focused on Chevron’s refusal to settle a $19 billion judgment (later reduced to $9.5 billion) by a court in Ecuador in favor of indigenous people there whose territory was damaged by oil exploitation that the Texaco Company carried out from the 1960s to the 1990s, before its merger with Chevron in 2001. On Mar. 4 this year a New York court ruled that the plaintiffs and their lawyers obtained the Ecuadorian judgment through fraud and that the company could ignore it [see World War 4 Report 3/22/14]. Chevron insists that Texaco cleaned up the damage in the 1990s and that all existing problems are the fault of Ecuador’s own state-owned oil company, Empresa Estatal Petróleos del Ecuador (EP Petroecuador). Ecuador’s government responded the week of May 19 by releasing the results of 2013 tests by the US-based Louis Berger Group indicating that Chevron is in fact responsible for the ongoing pollution. (Reuters 5/22/14)
While Ecuador’s center-left government supports the demand that Chevron settle the judgment, similar governments in the region continue to do business with the multinational. In April Chevron joined with Argentina’s state-owned oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), to announce plans for an additional $1.6 billion investment for hydrofracking at the Vaca Muerta shale deposit in the southwestern province of Neuquén [see Update #1191]. “The shale play in Argentina is unique because of the rock,” Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson told the Reuters wire service on May 22. “Argentina has kind of won the geological lottery.” (Reuters 5/22/14)
Meanwhile, as of May 24 Venezuelan oil minister Rafael Ramírez had signed an agreement with Ali Moshiri, Chevron’s head of Latin America and Africa operations, for the multinational to provide a $2 billion low-interest loan to the state-owned oil giant Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) to help increase oil output at the two companies’ Petroboscan oil joint venture. “We will continue to collaborate and cooperate with PDVSA because we believe the resources that are here in Venezuela are significant enough that we will be able to increase production not just in our current project but also in future projects,” Moshiri said, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Latin Post (New York) 5/24/14)
*2. Honduras: OAS Agency Orders Protection for Campesinos
On May 8 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), the human rights agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), ordered a series of protective measures for 123 leaders of campesino movements struggling for land in the Lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras. The campesino organizations filed a request for the protection orders last October with the assistance of the North American nonprofit Rights Action, which reported that as of July 2013 a total of 104 campesinos had been killed since 2009 in ongoing disputes with large landowners in the region [see Update #1204]. In March of this year the CIDH asked the Honduran government for information on what steps it was taking to end the bloodshed; the government reportedly failed to respond. (Adital (Brazil) 5/23/14)
The Honduran government came in for further criticism in the CIDH’s annual country report, released in April. Despite some improvements in legislation, the CIDH found that as of the end of 2013 “a legislative framework persists which in practice creates situations of human rights violations, particularly for transsexual persons.” Transsexuals, especially women, are at risk of abuse and arbitrary arrests by the police, regardless of whether they are engaged in sex work, according to the CIDH. The report also cited evidence from Honduran organizations of 112 violent deaths in the LGBT community from June 2008 to July 2013. (Proceso Digital (Honduras) 5/17/14)
The CIDH has referred another issue to a related OAS agency, the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH). This is a legal case concerning the village of Triunfo de la Cruz near Tela in the northern department of Atlántida. The inhabitants are members of the Garífuna ethnicity, a group descended from Africans and from Arawak and Carib indigenous peoples. They say the government has refused to grant them land titles even though the village is on their ancestral land. The court heard testimony on May 20 from the government, the CIDH and Garífuna representatives, including village resident Angel Castro, who charged that a large part of his land had been sold off illegally. The parties to the dispute have one month to present written summations. (La Prensa (San Pedro Sula) 5/20/14 from EFE)
*3. Mexico: Capital’s Residents Fight Water Project
Dozens of Mexican civilians and police were injured on May 21 in a violent confrontation over water resources in the centuries-old village of San Bartolo Ameyalco, now part of Alvaro Obregón delegación (borough) in the Federal District (DF, Mexico City). Over the past year a group of village residents has fought against a plan that the Alvaro Obregón government announced in April 2013 to run pipes off the natural spring now supplying water to San Bartolo Ameyalco. When workers arrived, with a police escort, in the morning of May 21 to lay down pipes for the project, residents armed with clubs, rocks and Molotov bombs attempted to block the construction. The protesters set up flaming barricades and detained at least two police agents, while the police arrested nine protesters, according to villagers. By the end of the day the village was without electricity and was surrounded by some 2,000 DF police agents, who ensured that the construction could proceed. About 50 police agents and 50 to 70 residents were reportedly injured.
According to delegación head Leonel Luna, the project’s goal is to use the spring to supply potable water to 20,000 area residents--without affecting access to water by the San Bartolo Ameyalco community. DF head of government Miguel Angel Mancera Espinosa, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (DF), claimed on May 22 that he’d received reports blaming the protests on water vendors concerned that the increased supply of water would cut into their sales. DF security secretary Jesús Rodríguez Almeida charged that the attacks on police agents constituted what he called “citizen brutality.”
Residents insisted that Leonel Luna’s plan is not to supply water to nearby neighborhoods but to divert the water to the Centro Santa Fe, a huge shopping mall about five miles away. Hundreds of villagers gathered in an assembly in San Bartolo Ameyalco’s main plaza on May 22 and announced that they would prevent the new pipe system from going into operation. They said they no longer recognized Luna as their representative; their only authority from now on would be the village assembly, they decided, and political parties would not be allowed to intervene. (Revolution News 5/21/14; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/22/14, 5/22/14, 5/23/14)
In other news, the body of Ramón Corrales Vega, a former official of a local ejido (communal farm) was found in Choix municipality in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, the night of May 22-23; he was apparently shot by men armed with AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles. Corrales Vega was a leader in protests against iron mining by Paradox Global Resources S.A. de C.V., the Mexican subsidiary of the Chinese Rizhao Xingye Import and Export Co industrial conglomerate. Some 50 protesters kept workers and equipment from entering the Paradox mine for 15 days in August and September 2013 to press a demand that the company pay $5 million that the activists said it had promised the ejido. State police arrested 30 of the protesters, and 17 are still in custody. Corrales Vega had apparently been in hiding to avoid arrest for his role in the protest. (LJ 5/25/14)
*4. Dominican Republic: Will New Law Settle Citizenship Conflict?
A new naturalization law went into effect in the Dominican Republic on May 23 when it was officially promulgated by President Danilo Medina. The law seeks to regularize the status of thousands of Dominicans, mostly Haitian descendants, affected by Decision 168-13, a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal (TC) last September declaring that no one born to undocumented immigrant parents since 1929 was a citizen. The new law--which President Medina had promised to introduce to Congress on Feb. 27 [see Update #1213]—was approved quickly once he finally presented it in May. The Chamber of Deputies passed the bill on May 16, and the Senate voted 26-0 on May 21 to approve it.
Under the new law, people born in the Dominican Republic to foreign parents between 1929 and 2007 will become citizens if they are listed on the electoral board’s civil registry and can present certain documents. People who cannot present the documents will have 90 days to register for regular immigration status if they can produce proof that they were born in the Dominican Republic; after two years as resident immigrants, they will be able to apply for citizenship. The government says only about 24,000 people were affected by Decision 168-13, including 13,000 Haitian descendants; human rights groups put the number affected at 200,000 and say almost all are Haitian descendants. (Associated Press 5/21/14 via New York Times; El Nuevo Herald (Miami) 5/23/14 from EFE)
Haitian immigrant rights activists were critical of the measure. “The law gives you something,” Jean Baptiste Azolin, the coordinator of the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR), said on May 20, while the bill was still awaiting approval, but the measure “complicates the situation” for the Dominicans who aren’t in the civil registry and lack the required documents. The 90-day limit is too narrow to produce documents, according to Azolin. “Does the Dominican government have the capacity for receiving all these people in that period of time?” he asked. “Can the Haitian government produce papers by the deadlines?” Jean Robert Argand, the director of another Haitian rights group, the Dec. 4 Collective, said the measure “only mitigates certain effects. The problem can come up again at any moment.” (AlterPresse (Haiti) 5/20/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, US/policy
Canadian Mining in Latin America Doing Serious Environmental Harm (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4856-canadian-mining-in-latin-america-doing-serious-environmental-harm
South America: How ‘Anti-Extractivism’ Misses the Forest for the Trees
http://nacla.org/news/2014/5/21/south-america-how-%E2%80%98anti-extractivism%E2%80%99-misses-forest-trees
Bolivia’s Mother Earth Law Hard to Implement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4858-bolivias-mother-earth-law-hard-to-implement
Bolivia’s Conamaq Indigenous Movement: “We will not sell ourselves to any government or political party”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/4864-bolivias-conamaq-indigenous-movement-we-will-not-sell-ourselves-to-any-government-or-political-party
Phosphates Mining Rocks the Boats in Northern Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/4855-phosphates-mining-rocks-the-boats-in-northern-peru
Chevron in Ecuador Representative of Multinationals' Continuing Abuse of Indigenous Peoples
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4854-chevron-in-ecuador-representative-of-multinationals-continuing-abuse-of-indigenous-peop
Terrorism in Venezuela and Its Accomplices
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10684
"Here the People Govern": Autonomy and Resistance in San Francisco Opalaca, Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/4865--qhere-the-people-govern-autonomy-and-resistance-in-san-francisco-opalaca-honduras
Guatemala: Violent Eviction of the La Puya Peaceful Mining Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4863-guatemala-violent-eviction-of-the-la-puya-peaceful-mining-resistance
Social Conflicts Escalate around Hydroelectric Projects in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4857-social-conflicts-escalate-around-hydroelectric-projects-in-guatemala
Guatemala's New 'Right-wing' Attorney General Raises Questions and Fears
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4851-guatemalas-new-right-wing-attorney-general-raises-questions-and-fears-
After an assassination, the world stands in solidarity with the Zapatistas (Mexico)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/assassination-world-stands-solidarity-zapatistas/
Mexico: more narco-mineral exports seized
http://ww4report.com/node/13244
Mexico and Monsanto: Taking Precaution in the Face of Genetic Contamination
http://foodtank.com/news/2014/05/mexico-history-of-gm-contamination
Pay Rumble at Border Big Rig Plant (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/pay-rumble-at-border-big-rig-plant/
The Creeping Decriminalization of Marijuana in the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/5/23/creeping-decriminalization-marijuana-caribbean
Remember When Venezuela and Bolivia Kicked the U.S. DEA Out of Their Countries, Accusing It of Espionage? Looks Like They Were Right... (US/policy)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/remember-when-venezuela-and-bolivia-kicked-the-us-dea-out-of-their-countries-accusing-it-of-espionage-looks-like-they-were-right
Nobel Peace Laureates to Human Rights Watch: Close Your Revolving Door to U.S. Government (US/policy)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10682
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://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. Latin America: Protesters Target Monsanto, Chevron
2. Honduras: OAS Agency Orders Protection for Campesinos
3. Mexico: Capital’s Residents Fight Water Project
4. Dominican Republic: Will New Law Settle Citizenship Conflict?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, 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.
Note: There will be links but no Update on June 1, 2014. Publication will resume the following week.
*1. Latin America: Protesters Target Monsanto, Chevron
Latin American activists joined thousands of environmentalists and farmers around the world in an international protest May 24 against genetically modified (GM) crops and Monsanto, the Missouri-based multinational that dominates the transgenic seed industry. This was the third March Against Monsanto since May 25 last year [see Update #1195], and organizers expected the day of action to include protests in some 351 cities in 52 countries.
In Chile, where a farmer won more than $65,000 in December 2013 by challenging the contracting methods of Monsanto’s local affiliate [see Update #1207], organizations including Chile Without Transgenics and I Don’t Want Transgenics (YNQT) sponsored protests in eight cities.
Mexicans held a total of 13 different protests. In the southeastern state of Chiapas, Without Corn There Is No Country and other groups organized an informational event in front of the cathedral in San Cristóbal de las Casas to raise awareness about the consequences of GM crops, while about 60 protesters marched in Santiago de Querétaro, the capital of the central state of Querétaro. Rubén Albarrán, of the band Café Tacvba, joined the painter and environmentalist Francisco Toledo to protest in the southern state of Oaxaca, and hundreds marched in Mexico City chanting: “We want beans; we want corn; we want Monsanto out of the country!” GM planting is limited in Mexico, but researchers say that even the current level of sowing has contaminated some of the many varieties of native corn; the plant was first cultivated in Mexico.
In Puerto Rico activists marched from San Juan’s Luis Muñoz Rivera Park to the Capitol. Monsanto doesn’t sell GM seeds on the island, but along with other multinationals like Pioneer and Syngenta it uses large tracts of farmland for experiments, according to Jesús Vázquez Negrón, the spokesperson for the Nothing Saintly About Monsanto collective. Activists claim Monsanto uses more land than it is entitled to under Puerto Rican law [see Update #1181]. (Aporrea (Venezuela) 5/24/14 from TeleSUR and unidentified wire services; Primera Hora (Puerto Rico) 5/24/14; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/25/14, 5/25/14)
Three days earlier, on May 21, activists held a similar international action against another multinational, the California-based Chevron Corporation. With protests in 13 countries-- Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Nigeria, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the US—International #AntiChevron Day targeted the petroleum giant for damage to the environment and to people living near the company’s operations. (Adital (Brazil) 5/20/14; TeleSUR 5/21/14)
Latin American activists focused on Chevron’s refusal to settle a $19 billion judgment (later reduced to $9.5 billion) by a court in Ecuador in favor of indigenous people there whose territory was damaged by oil exploitation that the Texaco Company carried out from the 1960s to the 1990s, before its merger with Chevron in 2001. On Mar. 4 this year a New York court ruled that the plaintiffs and their lawyers obtained the Ecuadorian judgment through fraud and that the company could ignore it [see World War 4 Report 3/22/14]. Chevron insists that Texaco cleaned up the damage in the 1990s and that all existing problems are the fault of Ecuador’s own state-owned oil company, Empresa Estatal Petróleos del Ecuador (EP Petroecuador). Ecuador’s government responded the week of May 19 by releasing the results of 2013 tests by the US-based Louis Berger Group indicating that Chevron is in fact responsible for the ongoing pollution. (Reuters 5/22/14)
While Ecuador’s center-left government supports the demand that Chevron settle the judgment, similar governments in the region continue to do business with the multinational. In April Chevron joined with Argentina’s state-owned oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), to announce plans for an additional $1.6 billion investment for hydrofracking at the Vaca Muerta shale deposit in the southwestern province of Neuquén [see Update #1191]. “The shale play in Argentina is unique because of the rock,” Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson told the Reuters wire service on May 22. “Argentina has kind of won the geological lottery.” (Reuters 5/22/14)
Meanwhile, as of May 24 Venezuelan oil minister Rafael Ramírez had signed an agreement with Ali Moshiri, Chevron’s head of Latin America and Africa operations, for the multinational to provide a $2 billion low-interest loan to the state-owned oil giant Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) to help increase oil output at the two companies’ Petroboscan oil joint venture. “We will continue to collaborate and cooperate with PDVSA because we believe the resources that are here in Venezuela are significant enough that we will be able to increase production not just in our current project but also in future projects,” Moshiri said, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Latin Post (New York) 5/24/14)
*2. Honduras: OAS Agency Orders Protection for Campesinos
On May 8 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), the human rights agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), ordered a series of protective measures for 123 leaders of campesino movements struggling for land in the Lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras. The campesino organizations filed a request for the protection orders last October with the assistance of the North American nonprofit Rights Action, which reported that as of July 2013 a total of 104 campesinos had been killed since 2009 in ongoing disputes with large landowners in the region [see Update #1204]. In March of this year the CIDH asked the Honduran government for information on what steps it was taking to end the bloodshed; the government reportedly failed to respond. (Adital (Brazil) 5/23/14)
The Honduran government came in for further criticism in the CIDH’s annual country report, released in April. Despite some improvements in legislation, the CIDH found that as of the end of 2013 “a legislative framework persists which in practice creates situations of human rights violations, particularly for transsexual persons.” Transsexuals, especially women, are at risk of abuse and arbitrary arrests by the police, regardless of whether they are engaged in sex work, according to the CIDH. The report also cited evidence from Honduran organizations of 112 violent deaths in the LGBT community from June 2008 to July 2013. (Proceso Digital (Honduras) 5/17/14)
The CIDH has referred another issue to a related OAS agency, the Costa Rica-based Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH). This is a legal case concerning the village of Triunfo de la Cruz near Tela in the northern department of Atlántida. The inhabitants are members of the Garífuna ethnicity, a group descended from Africans and from Arawak and Carib indigenous peoples. They say the government has refused to grant them land titles even though the village is on their ancestral land. The court heard testimony on May 20 from the government, the CIDH and Garífuna representatives, including village resident Angel Castro, who charged that a large part of his land had been sold off illegally. The parties to the dispute have one month to present written summations. (La Prensa (San Pedro Sula) 5/20/14 from EFE)
*3. Mexico: Capital’s Residents Fight Water Project
Dozens of Mexican civilians and police were injured on May 21 in a violent confrontation over water resources in the centuries-old village of San Bartolo Ameyalco, now part of Alvaro Obregón delegación (borough) in the Federal District (DF, Mexico City). Over the past year a group of village residents has fought against a plan that the Alvaro Obregón government announced in April 2013 to run pipes off the natural spring now supplying water to San Bartolo Ameyalco. When workers arrived, with a police escort, in the morning of May 21 to lay down pipes for the project, residents armed with clubs, rocks and Molotov bombs attempted to block the construction. The protesters set up flaming barricades and detained at least two police agents, while the police arrested nine protesters, according to villagers. By the end of the day the village was without electricity and was surrounded by some 2,000 DF police agents, who ensured that the construction could proceed. About 50 police agents and 50 to 70 residents were reportedly injured.
According to delegación head Leonel Luna, the project’s goal is to use the spring to supply potable water to 20,000 area residents--without affecting access to water by the San Bartolo Ameyalco community. DF head of government Miguel Angel Mancera Espinosa, of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (DF), claimed on May 22 that he’d received reports blaming the protests on water vendors concerned that the increased supply of water would cut into their sales. DF security secretary Jesús Rodríguez Almeida charged that the attacks on police agents constituted what he called “citizen brutality.”
Residents insisted that Leonel Luna’s plan is not to supply water to nearby neighborhoods but to divert the water to the Centro Santa Fe, a huge shopping mall about five miles away. Hundreds of villagers gathered in an assembly in San Bartolo Ameyalco’s main plaza on May 22 and announced that they would prevent the new pipe system from going into operation. They said they no longer recognized Luna as their representative; their only authority from now on would be the village assembly, they decided, and political parties would not be allowed to intervene. (Revolution News 5/21/14; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/22/14, 5/22/14, 5/23/14)
In other news, the body of Ramón Corrales Vega, a former official of a local ejido (communal farm) was found in Choix municipality in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, the night of May 22-23; he was apparently shot by men armed with AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles. Corrales Vega was a leader in protests against iron mining by Paradox Global Resources S.A. de C.V., the Mexican subsidiary of the Chinese Rizhao Xingye Import and Export Co industrial conglomerate. Some 50 protesters kept workers and equipment from entering the Paradox mine for 15 days in August and September 2013 to press a demand that the company pay $5 million that the activists said it had promised the ejido. State police arrested 30 of the protesters, and 17 are still in custody. Corrales Vega had apparently been in hiding to avoid arrest for his role in the protest. (LJ 5/25/14)
*4. Dominican Republic: Will New Law Settle Citizenship Conflict?
A new naturalization law went into effect in the Dominican Republic on May 23 when it was officially promulgated by President Danilo Medina. The law seeks to regularize the status of thousands of Dominicans, mostly Haitian descendants, affected by Decision 168-13, a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal (TC) last September declaring that no one born to undocumented immigrant parents since 1929 was a citizen. The new law--which President Medina had promised to introduce to Congress on Feb. 27 [see Update #1213]—was approved quickly once he finally presented it in May. The Chamber of Deputies passed the bill on May 16, and the Senate voted 26-0 on May 21 to approve it.
Under the new law, people born in the Dominican Republic to foreign parents between 1929 and 2007 will become citizens if they are listed on the electoral board’s civil registry and can present certain documents. People who cannot present the documents will have 90 days to register for regular immigration status if they can produce proof that they were born in the Dominican Republic; after two years as resident immigrants, they will be able to apply for citizenship. The government says only about 24,000 people were affected by Decision 168-13, including 13,000 Haitian descendants; human rights groups put the number affected at 200,000 and say almost all are Haitian descendants. (Associated Press 5/21/14 via New York Times; El Nuevo Herald (Miami) 5/23/14 from EFE)
Haitian immigrant rights activists were critical of the measure. “The law gives you something,” Jean Baptiste Azolin, the coordinator of the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR), said on May 20, while the bill was still awaiting approval, but the measure “complicates the situation” for the Dominicans who aren’t in the civil registry and lack the required documents. The 90-day limit is too narrow to produce documents, according to Azolin. “Does the Dominican government have the capacity for receiving all these people in that period of time?” he asked. “Can the Haitian government produce papers by the deadlines?” Jean Robert Argand, the director of another Haitian rights group, the Dec. 4 Collective, said the measure “only mitigates certain effects. The problem can come up again at any moment.” (AlterPresse (Haiti) 5/20/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, US/policy
Canadian Mining in Latin America Doing Serious Environmental Harm (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4856-canadian-mining-in-latin-america-doing-serious-environmental-harm
South America: How ‘Anti-Extractivism’ Misses the Forest for the Trees
http://nacla.org/news/2014/5/21/south-america-how-%E2%80%98anti-extractivism%E2%80%99-misses-forest-trees
Bolivia’s Mother Earth Law Hard to Implement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4858-bolivias-mother-earth-law-hard-to-implement
Bolivia’s Conamaq Indigenous Movement: “We will not sell ourselves to any government or political party”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/4864-bolivias-conamaq-indigenous-movement-we-will-not-sell-ourselves-to-any-government-or-political-party
Phosphates Mining Rocks the Boats in Northern Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/4855-phosphates-mining-rocks-the-boats-in-northern-peru
Chevron in Ecuador Representative of Multinationals' Continuing Abuse of Indigenous Peoples
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4854-chevron-in-ecuador-representative-of-multinationals-continuing-abuse-of-indigenous-peop
Terrorism in Venezuela and Its Accomplices
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10684
"Here the People Govern": Autonomy and Resistance in San Francisco Opalaca, Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/4865--qhere-the-people-govern-autonomy-and-resistance-in-san-francisco-opalaca-honduras
Guatemala: Violent Eviction of the La Puya Peaceful Mining Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4863-guatemala-violent-eviction-of-the-la-puya-peaceful-mining-resistance
Social Conflicts Escalate around Hydroelectric Projects in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4857-social-conflicts-escalate-around-hydroelectric-projects-in-guatemala
Guatemala's New 'Right-wing' Attorney General Raises Questions and Fears
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4851-guatemalas-new-right-wing-attorney-general-raises-questions-and-fears-
After an assassination, the world stands in solidarity with the Zapatistas (Mexico)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/assassination-world-stands-solidarity-zapatistas/
Mexico: more narco-mineral exports seized
http://ww4report.com/node/13244
Mexico and Monsanto: Taking Precaution in the Face of Genetic Contamination
http://foodtank.com/news/2014/05/mexico-history-of-gm-contamination
Pay Rumble at Border Big Rig Plant (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/pay-rumble-at-border-big-rig-plant/
The Creeping Decriminalization of Marijuana in the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/5/23/creeping-decriminalization-marijuana-caribbean
Remember When Venezuela and Bolivia Kicked the U.S. DEA Out of Their Countries, Accusing It of Espionage? Looks Like They Were Right... (US/policy)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/remember-when-venezuela-and-bolivia-kicked-the-us-dea-out-of-their-countries-accusing-it-of-espionage-looks-like-they-were-right
Nobel Peace Laureates to Human Rights Watch: Close Your Revolving Door to U.S. Government (US/policy)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10682
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://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, February 11, 2014
WNU #1208: Haitian Rights Activist Gunned Down
Issue #1208, February 9, 2014
1. Haiti: Human Rights Activist Gunned Down
2. Brazil: Fare Protesters Open Turnstiles in Rio
3. Dominican Republic: New Plan Announced for “Foreigners”
4. Puerto Rico: Bonds Are Junked Despite “Reforms”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, 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.
*1. Haiti: Human Rights Activist Gunned Down
An unknown assailant shot Haitian human rights activist Daniel Dorsinvil (or Dorsainvil) dead in Port-au-Prince’s Canapé Vert neighborhood the afternoon of Feb. 8; Dorsinvil’s wife, Girdly (or Gerly) Larêche, was also killed. Dorsinvil was the coordinator of the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) and a founder of the recently formed Patriotic Democratic Popular Movement (MPDP), a coalition of 30 groups [see Update #1207]; Larêche’s brother Ronald Larêche is a legislative deputy from Northeast department for the Unity party of former president René Préval (1996-2001 and 2006-2011).
Official sources suggested that robbery was the motive; according to the police, the couple had been in a bank, and the killer reportedly took Larêche’s handbag. POHDH executive secretary Antonal Mortimé questioned the official explanation and demanded a full investigation. “For us this was an execution,” he told reporters. “This is a harsh blow for the human rights sector in Haiti.” Human rights attorneys Newton St-Juste and André Michel called the killing “a political crime meant to intimidate the human rights sector, which is considered embarrassing for the powers that be.” (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/9/14; Haiti Press Network 2/9/14)
The double murder came shortly after Haitian president Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) ended a Feb. 4-7 visit to Washington, DC, receiving what the Miami Herald called “rave reviews” from US officials. At his first meeting with the Haitian president, US president Barack Obama indicated that he was pleased with Martelly’s commitment to holding the long-delayed senatorial and municipal elections this year, saying that this will “help resolve some of the political roadblocks that stalled some progress.” Obama is facing criticism for failing to disburse all the funds designated for helping Haiti recover from a devastating January 2010 earthquake, while South Florida immigration activists and 100 Congress members have called for him to approve a Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program that would let 110,000 Haitians join their families in the US. The president admitted that “we have a lot more work to do.” Martelly thanked the US “for always standing by the Haitian people.” (MH 2/6/14)
*2. Brazil: Fare Protesters Open Turnstiles in Rio
As many as 2,000 Brazilians demonstrated in Rio de Janeiro during evening rush hour on Feb. 6 to protest an increase in local bus fares from 2.75 reais (about US$1.15) to 3.00 reais (about US$1.26); the fare hike, imposed by Rio mayor Eduardo Paes, took effect on Feb. 8. The protesters marched about a mile from the Candelária area without incident, but as the demonstration approached the Estacião Central do Brasil, the city’s main transit hub, dozens of youths reportedly from the Black Bloc charged into the station, jumping over turnstiles and inviting commuters to join them. Some protesters vandalized ticket booths, while others set fires in garbage cans outside the station, blocking cars and tying up traffic. The militarized police attacked the youths with tear gas and concussion grenades, creating panic among the crowds of commuters, and protesters responded with rocks and clubs. SuperVia Trens Urbanos, the company that runs the city’s trains, decided to let passengers ride for free while the chaos continued. Police agents escorted thousands of commuters, some choking on tear gas, to the trains.
According to the police, 28 people were arrested at the protest. There was one serious injury: Santiago Andrade, a camera operator for TV Band, was hospitalized with head injuries and remained in a coma after four hours of surgery. One colleague said Andrade was hit by a police grenade, while other witnesses said he was hit by a flare, which could have been thrown by either side. Apparently he was shooting footage from a tree, and the injuries may have been caused by his fall when the object hit him.
The protest was organized by the Rio de Janeiro Free Pass Movement (MPL), with support from the Revolutionary Popular Student Movement (MEPR); some protesters carried the banners of the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), a Trotskyist group, and the Freedom and Socialism Party (PSOL), an electoral coalition. Anger over high transportation costs in Brazil, which was one of the triggers that set off massive demonstrations throughout the country in June [see Update #1181], remains strong. The new increase in Rio means that a daily commuter there will be paying some 120 reais a month (about US$50), nearly a sixth of the minimum wage of 724 reais (about US$304) a month—more if the commuter needs to take more than one bus. Adding to popular resentment, the four companies that operate most of the buses are controlled by several of the city’s oldest and wealthiest families. “I totally support this protest," a health worker named Fabiana Aragon told a correspondent for the British daily The Guardian. She was spending almost a third of her 1,000 reais (about US$416) monthly income on transportation, she said, adding: “The situation now is absurd.” (The Guardian 2/5/14 from correspondent, 2/7/14 from correspondent; Terra (Brazil) 2/6/14; Página 12 (Argentina) 2/8/14)
*3. Dominican Republic: New Plan Announced for “Foreigners”
On Feb. 5 the Dominican government presented the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva with its National Regularization of Foreigners Plan, a program for determining the status of the tens of thousand Dominican residents who were stripped of their citizenship last September by a Constitutional Tribunal (TC) ruling [see Update #1201]. The court’s Decision 168-13 declared that no one born to undocumented immigrants since 1929 was a citizen. Human rights groups estimate that this affects some 200,000 people, mainly Dominicans of Haitian descent.
Apparently the regularization plan is the same as Decree 327-13, which President Danilo Medina signed on Nov. 29. The decree suspends deportations for 18 months and calls on undocumented immigrants and Dominican nationals affected by Decision 168-13 to apply to the government by providing personal identity documents, which will be entered into a “registry of evaluation.” According to the decree, officials will consider applications based on such factors as ties with Dominican society (including knowledge of Spanish) and labor and socioeconomic conditions. Some applicants would qualify to be naturalized, while others would be given an immigration status. Those who don’t qualify would be deported at the end of the 18 months. Deputy Foreign Minister Alejandra Liriano told reporters that the “government has set up, in record time, the most ambitious and comprehensive plan in the country’s history in this area.” She insisted that the government has a “strong stance” that “no person having Dominican nationality will be stripped of it.” (Caribbean Journal (Miami) 2/5/14)
It isn’t clear that President Medina’s regularization plan will be enough to counter the international condemnations that followed the TC’s September ruling. The 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) reacted on Nov. 27 by suspending the process of admitting the Dominican Republic to the group. On Dec. 5 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) urged the Dominican government “to rapidly take steps to restore the nationality of individuals affected” by Decision 168-13. Dismissing the government’s plan for naturalizing former citizens, the UNHCR asserted that “[i]nternational legal standards require that the government automatically restores the nationality of all individuals affected by the ruling.” (UNHCR press release 12/5/13) One day later, on Dec. 6, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), said the TC ruling implied “arbitrary deprivation of nationality and lack of recognition of these individuals’ legal personhood,” which in turn “leads to a situation of extreme vulnerability in which violations of many other human rights arise.” (IACHR press release 12/6/13) The decision has also created tensions with the Haitian government, and the two countries have been holding “binational dialogues” on the situation; the most recent was held on Feb. 3 in the Dominican city of Jimaní, near the Haitian border in the western province of Independencia. (Adital (Brazil) 2/5/14)
The TC’s decision has also led to bitter quarrels within the Dominican Republic. On Feb. 7 Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, the archbishop of Santo Domingo and the leading Catholic figure in the country, called Mario Serrano, a Dominican Jesuit, “shameless” because of his advocacy for the nationals deprived of their citizenship. The next day the president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), Manuel María Mercedes, said during a radio interview that the cardinal should be held responsible if Serrano suffers physical harm. Mercedes also revealed that he had written to the Vatican two months earlier asking for the cardinal’s removal on the grounds that he’d passed the Church’s mandatory retirement age of 75. “If there’s anyone who has to leave his post in the Catholic Church to give way to a new generation, it’s the cardinal,” he said. (Hoy Digital (Dominican Republic) 2/8/14)
*4. Puerto Rico: Bonds Are Junked Despite “Reforms”
The US financial services company Standard & Poor's Ratings (S&P) announced on Feb. 4 that it was reducing the Puerto Rican government’s bonds to junk status; another US ratings agency, Moody’s Corporation, made a similar move on Feb. 7. Gov. Alejandro García Padilla responded on Feb. 4 that Puerto Rico would be able to overcome the financial crisis by implementing budget cuts; for the fiscal year 2014-2015 the island would have its first balanced budget since the 1970s, he said. The government faces a tremendous $70 billion debt, fueled in past years by its ability to offer tax-free municipal bonds to US investors. For comparison, last July the US city Detroit declared bankruptcy because it faced a debt of $28 billion; with a much larger debt, Puerto Rico is ineligible for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection. The administration of US president Barack Obama has indicated that it isn’t considering a bailout for the island. (Prensa Latina 2/5/14; Reuters 2/7/14)
In his remarks after S&P lowered the bonds’ rating, Gov. García Padilla complained that his government had done everything the bondholders had asked. Writing in the Puerto Rican weekly Claridad, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Hispanic studies professor Félix Córdova Iturregui agreed that the government had shown “total docility…before the financial interests that hold the economy captive. The government is a hostage of the bond rating agencies.” Successive Puerto Rican governments have in fact routinely followed Wall Street’s recommendations for austerity and privatization; the latest example was the reduction of teachers’ pensions in December, setting off a two-day teachers’ strike in mid-January [see Update #1205]. These policies “have failed spectacularly,” Prof. Córdova wrote, calling for “the country’s democratic forces to restructure our economy,” possibly starting with a debt moratorium. (Claridad 2/4/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
The Hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/4/hypocrisy-human-rights-watch
Aymara Culture Protects Their Children from Psychological Distress (Chile)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/aymara-culture-protects-children-psychological-distress/
Munduruku People Kick Miners Off Indigenous Territory, Seize Equipment (Brazil)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/munduruku-people-kick-miners-indigenous-territory-seize-equipment/
Rival Factions in Bolivia's CONAMAQ: Internal Conflict or Government Manipulation?
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/2/3/rival-factions-bolivias-conamaq-internal-conflict-or-government-manipulation
Prosecution of Forced Sterilizations in Peru Still Possible
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/4688-prosecution-of-forced-sterilizations-in-peru-still-possible
Peru: US court action over Cajamarca repression
http://ww4report.com/node/12993
Canadian and Chinese- Owned Mining Concessions Illegal in Ecuador, Argues Report
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4684-canadian-and-chinese-owned-mining-concessions-illegal-in-ecuador-argues-report-
A New Wiretapping Scandal Casts Doubt on the Colombian Military's Support for Peace Talks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4687-a-new-wiretapping-scandal-casts-doubt-on-the-colombian-militarys-support-for-peace-talks
Colombia: war has claimed 6 million victims
http://ww4report.com/node/12992
FARC proposal to protect coca, cannabis growers (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/12973
The Pros and Cons of Venezuela's Currency Controls
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10317
Costa Rican National Elections: Immediate Results, Longstanding Challenges
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4689-costa-rican-national-elections-immediate-results-longstanding-challenges
Prying Native People from Native Lands: Narco Business in Honduras
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/4/prying-native-people-native-lands-narco-business-honduras
Violence continues in Guatemala
http://intercontinentalcry.org/violence-continues-guatemala/
Mexico Chucks Test Bonuses, National Exam
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexico-chucks-test-bonuses-national-exam/
After The Plantones: Looking Back On An Autumn Of Struggle In Mexico City
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/4683-after-the-plantones-looking-back-on-an-autumn-of-struggle-in-mexico-city
Self-defense Groups and Community Police Forces in Mexico: Differences as Seen from the Villages
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/4691-self-defense-groups-and-community-police-forces-in-mexico-differences-as-seen-from-the-villages
How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/11427
The New Free Trade Fever (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-new-free-trade-fever/
Jim O’Neill’s MINT Theory Advances a "Perfect Storm"—for Whom? (Mexico)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/2/3/jim-o%E2%80%99neill%E2%80%99s-mint-theory-advances-perfect-storm%E2%80%94-whom
"Alfy" Fanjul Eyes Cuban Sugar Despite Labor Allegations
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/6/alfy-fanjul-eyes-cuban-sugar-despite-labor-allegations
Martelly to Meet with Obama in Washington Today, Elections Top Agenda (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/martelly-to-meet-with-obama-in-washington-today-elections-top-agenda
How arts and organizing helped defeat Alabama’s anti-immigration law (US/immigration)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/arts-organizing-helped-defeat-alabamas-anti-immigration-law/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
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. Haiti: Human Rights Activist Gunned Down
2. Brazil: Fare Protesters Open Turnstiles in Rio
3. Dominican Republic: New Plan Announced for “Foreigners”
4. Puerto Rico: Bonds Are Junked Despite “Reforms”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, 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.
*1. Haiti: Human Rights Activist Gunned Down
An unknown assailant shot Haitian human rights activist Daniel Dorsinvil (or Dorsainvil) dead in Port-au-Prince’s Canapé Vert neighborhood the afternoon of Feb. 8; Dorsinvil’s wife, Girdly (or Gerly) Larêche, was also killed. Dorsinvil was the coordinator of the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) and a founder of the recently formed Patriotic Democratic Popular Movement (MPDP), a coalition of 30 groups [see Update #1207]; Larêche’s brother Ronald Larêche is a legislative deputy from Northeast department for the Unity party of former president René Préval (1996-2001 and 2006-2011).
Official sources suggested that robbery was the motive; according to the police, the couple had been in a bank, and the killer reportedly took Larêche’s handbag. POHDH executive secretary Antonal Mortimé questioned the official explanation and demanded a full investigation. “For us this was an execution,” he told reporters. “This is a harsh blow for the human rights sector in Haiti.” Human rights attorneys Newton St-Juste and André Michel called the killing “a political crime meant to intimidate the human rights sector, which is considered embarrassing for the powers that be.” (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/9/14; Haiti Press Network 2/9/14)
The double murder came shortly after Haitian president Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) ended a Feb. 4-7 visit to Washington, DC, receiving what the Miami Herald called “rave reviews” from US officials. At his first meeting with the Haitian president, US president Barack Obama indicated that he was pleased with Martelly’s commitment to holding the long-delayed senatorial and municipal elections this year, saying that this will “help resolve some of the political roadblocks that stalled some progress.” Obama is facing criticism for failing to disburse all the funds designated for helping Haiti recover from a devastating January 2010 earthquake, while South Florida immigration activists and 100 Congress members have called for him to approve a Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program that would let 110,000 Haitians join their families in the US. The president admitted that “we have a lot more work to do.” Martelly thanked the US “for always standing by the Haitian people.” (MH 2/6/14)
*2. Brazil: Fare Protesters Open Turnstiles in Rio
As many as 2,000 Brazilians demonstrated in Rio de Janeiro during evening rush hour on Feb. 6 to protest an increase in local bus fares from 2.75 reais (about US$1.15) to 3.00 reais (about US$1.26); the fare hike, imposed by Rio mayor Eduardo Paes, took effect on Feb. 8. The protesters marched about a mile from the Candelária area without incident, but as the demonstration approached the Estacião Central do Brasil, the city’s main transit hub, dozens of youths reportedly from the Black Bloc charged into the station, jumping over turnstiles and inviting commuters to join them. Some protesters vandalized ticket booths, while others set fires in garbage cans outside the station, blocking cars and tying up traffic. The militarized police attacked the youths with tear gas and concussion grenades, creating panic among the crowds of commuters, and protesters responded with rocks and clubs. SuperVia Trens Urbanos, the company that runs the city’s trains, decided to let passengers ride for free while the chaos continued. Police agents escorted thousands of commuters, some choking on tear gas, to the trains.
According to the police, 28 people were arrested at the protest. There was one serious injury: Santiago Andrade, a camera operator for TV Band, was hospitalized with head injuries and remained in a coma after four hours of surgery. One colleague said Andrade was hit by a police grenade, while other witnesses said he was hit by a flare, which could have been thrown by either side. Apparently he was shooting footage from a tree, and the injuries may have been caused by his fall when the object hit him.
The protest was organized by the Rio de Janeiro Free Pass Movement (MPL), with support from the Revolutionary Popular Student Movement (MEPR); some protesters carried the banners of the Unified Socialist Workers Party (PSTU), a Trotskyist group, and the Freedom and Socialism Party (PSOL), an electoral coalition. Anger over high transportation costs in Brazil, which was one of the triggers that set off massive demonstrations throughout the country in June [see Update #1181], remains strong. The new increase in Rio means that a daily commuter there will be paying some 120 reais a month (about US$50), nearly a sixth of the minimum wage of 724 reais (about US$304) a month—more if the commuter needs to take more than one bus. Adding to popular resentment, the four companies that operate most of the buses are controlled by several of the city’s oldest and wealthiest families. “I totally support this protest," a health worker named Fabiana Aragon told a correspondent for the British daily The Guardian. She was spending almost a third of her 1,000 reais (about US$416) monthly income on transportation, she said, adding: “The situation now is absurd.” (The Guardian 2/5/14 from correspondent, 2/7/14 from correspondent; Terra (Brazil) 2/6/14; Página 12 (Argentina) 2/8/14)
*3. Dominican Republic: New Plan Announced for “Foreigners”
On Feb. 5 the Dominican government presented the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva with its National Regularization of Foreigners Plan, a program for determining the status of the tens of thousand Dominican residents who were stripped of their citizenship last September by a Constitutional Tribunal (TC) ruling [see Update #1201]. The court’s Decision 168-13 declared that no one born to undocumented immigrants since 1929 was a citizen. Human rights groups estimate that this affects some 200,000 people, mainly Dominicans of Haitian descent.
Apparently the regularization plan is the same as Decree 327-13, which President Danilo Medina signed on Nov. 29. The decree suspends deportations for 18 months and calls on undocumented immigrants and Dominican nationals affected by Decision 168-13 to apply to the government by providing personal identity documents, which will be entered into a “registry of evaluation.” According to the decree, officials will consider applications based on such factors as ties with Dominican society (including knowledge of Spanish) and labor and socioeconomic conditions. Some applicants would qualify to be naturalized, while others would be given an immigration status. Those who don’t qualify would be deported at the end of the 18 months. Deputy Foreign Minister Alejandra Liriano told reporters that the “government has set up, in record time, the most ambitious and comprehensive plan in the country’s history in this area.” She insisted that the government has a “strong stance” that “no person having Dominican nationality will be stripped of it.” (Caribbean Journal (Miami) 2/5/14)
It isn’t clear that President Medina’s regularization plan will be enough to counter the international condemnations that followed the TC’s September ruling. The 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) reacted on Nov. 27 by suspending the process of admitting the Dominican Republic to the group. On Dec. 5 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) urged the Dominican government “to rapidly take steps to restore the nationality of individuals affected” by Decision 168-13. Dismissing the government’s plan for naturalizing former citizens, the UNHCR asserted that “[i]nternational legal standards require that the government automatically restores the nationality of all individuals affected by the ruling.” (UNHCR press release 12/5/13) One day later, on Dec. 6, a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), said the TC ruling implied “arbitrary deprivation of nationality and lack of recognition of these individuals’ legal personhood,” which in turn “leads to a situation of extreme vulnerability in which violations of many other human rights arise.” (IACHR press release 12/6/13) The decision has also created tensions with the Haitian government, and the two countries have been holding “binational dialogues” on the situation; the most recent was held on Feb. 3 in the Dominican city of Jimaní, near the Haitian border in the western province of Independencia. (Adital (Brazil) 2/5/14)
The TC’s decision has also led to bitter quarrels within the Dominican Republic. On Feb. 7 Cardinal Nicolás de Jesús López Rodríguez, the archbishop of Santo Domingo and the leading Catholic figure in the country, called Mario Serrano, a Dominican Jesuit, “shameless” because of his advocacy for the nationals deprived of their citizenship. The next day the president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), Manuel María Mercedes, said during a radio interview that the cardinal should be held responsible if Serrano suffers physical harm. Mercedes also revealed that he had written to the Vatican two months earlier asking for the cardinal’s removal on the grounds that he’d passed the Church’s mandatory retirement age of 75. “If there’s anyone who has to leave his post in the Catholic Church to give way to a new generation, it’s the cardinal,” he said. (Hoy Digital (Dominican Republic) 2/8/14)
*4. Puerto Rico: Bonds Are Junked Despite “Reforms”
The US financial services company Standard & Poor's Ratings (S&P) announced on Feb. 4 that it was reducing the Puerto Rican government’s bonds to junk status; another US ratings agency, Moody’s Corporation, made a similar move on Feb. 7. Gov. Alejandro García Padilla responded on Feb. 4 that Puerto Rico would be able to overcome the financial crisis by implementing budget cuts; for the fiscal year 2014-2015 the island would have its first balanced budget since the 1970s, he said. The government faces a tremendous $70 billion debt, fueled in past years by its ability to offer tax-free municipal bonds to US investors. For comparison, last July the US city Detroit declared bankruptcy because it faced a debt of $28 billion; with a much larger debt, Puerto Rico is ineligible for Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection. The administration of US president Barack Obama has indicated that it isn’t considering a bailout for the island. (Prensa Latina 2/5/14; Reuters 2/7/14)
In his remarks after S&P lowered the bonds’ rating, Gov. García Padilla complained that his government had done everything the bondholders had asked. Writing in the Puerto Rican weekly Claridad, University of Puerto Rico (UPR) Hispanic studies professor Félix Córdova Iturregui agreed that the government had shown “total docility…before the financial interests that hold the economy captive. The government is a hostage of the bond rating agencies.” Successive Puerto Rican governments have in fact routinely followed Wall Street’s recommendations for austerity and privatization; the latest example was the reduction of teachers’ pensions in December, setting off a two-day teachers’ strike in mid-January [see Update #1205]. These policies “have failed spectacularly,” Prof. Córdova wrote, calling for “the country’s democratic forces to restructure our economy,” possibly starting with a debt moratorium. (Claridad 2/4/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
The Hypocrisy of Human Rights Watch (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/4/hypocrisy-human-rights-watch
Aymara Culture Protects Their Children from Psychological Distress (Chile)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/aymara-culture-protects-children-psychological-distress/
Munduruku People Kick Miners Off Indigenous Territory, Seize Equipment (Brazil)
http://intercontinentalcry.org/munduruku-people-kick-miners-indigenous-territory-seize-equipment/
Rival Factions in Bolivia's CONAMAQ: Internal Conflict or Government Manipulation?
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/2/3/rival-factions-bolivias-conamaq-internal-conflict-or-government-manipulation
Prosecution of Forced Sterilizations in Peru Still Possible
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/4688-prosecution-of-forced-sterilizations-in-peru-still-possible
Peru: US court action over Cajamarca repression
http://ww4report.com/node/12993
Canadian and Chinese- Owned Mining Concessions Illegal in Ecuador, Argues Report
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4684-canadian-and-chinese-owned-mining-concessions-illegal-in-ecuador-argues-report-
A New Wiretapping Scandal Casts Doubt on the Colombian Military's Support for Peace Talks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4687-a-new-wiretapping-scandal-casts-doubt-on-the-colombian-militarys-support-for-peace-talks
Colombia: war has claimed 6 million victims
http://ww4report.com/node/12992
FARC proposal to protect coca, cannabis growers (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/12973
The Pros and Cons of Venezuela's Currency Controls
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/10317
Costa Rican National Elections: Immediate Results, Longstanding Challenges
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4689-costa-rican-national-elections-immediate-results-longstanding-challenges
Prying Native People from Native Lands: Narco Business in Honduras
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/4/prying-native-people-native-lands-narco-business-honduras
Violence continues in Guatemala
http://intercontinentalcry.org/violence-continues-guatemala/
Mexico Chucks Test Bonuses, National Exam
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexico-chucks-test-bonuses-national-exam/
After The Plantones: Looking Back On An Autumn Of Struggle In Mexico City
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/4683-after-the-plantones-looking-back-on-an-autumn-of-struggle-in-mexico-city
Self-defense Groups and Community Police Forces in Mexico: Differences as Seen from the Villages
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/4691-self-defense-groups-and-community-police-forces-in-mexico-differences-as-seen-from-the-villages
How NAFTA Unleashed the Violence in Mexico
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/11427
The New Free Trade Fever (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-new-free-trade-fever/
Jim O’Neill’s MINT Theory Advances a "Perfect Storm"—for Whom? (Mexico)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/2/3/jim-o%E2%80%99neill%E2%80%99s-mint-theory-advances-perfect-storm%E2%80%94-whom
"Alfy" Fanjul Eyes Cuban Sugar Despite Labor Allegations
http://nacla.org/news/2014/2/6/alfy-fanjul-eyes-cuban-sugar-despite-labor-allegations
Martelly to Meet with Obama in Washington Today, Elections Top Agenda (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/martelly-to-meet-with-obama-in-washington-today-elections-top-agenda
How arts and organizing helped defeat Alabama’s anti-immigration law (US/immigration)
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/arts-organizing-helped-defeat-alabamas-anti-immigration-law/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
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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