Issue #1245, December 7, 2014
1. Mexico: One of Missing Students Confirmed Dead
2. Mexico: Protests Link Ayotzinapa, Ferguson, Garner
3. Costa Rica: State to Compensate Nemagon Victims
4. Chile: Four Women File Sexual Torture Complaint
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico
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. Mexico: One of Missing Students Confirmed Dead
The remains of one of 43 students abducted the night of Sept. 26-27 in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero have been identified by DNA tests, parents of the missing students said on Dec. 6. Technicians in Innsbruck, Austria, established that one of 14 bone fragments sent them by the Mexican government came from the body of Alexander Mora Venancio, a 19-year-old student at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa; gang members and municipal police had detained him along with 42 other Ayotzinapa students in Iguala de la Independencia during attacks which also left three students and three bystanders dead. The bone fragments were found in a dump near Iguala in Cocula municipality after three members of the Guerrero Unidos (“United Warriors”) gang told federal authorities they had helped burn and dispose of the bodies of the missing students there [see Update #1241].
The students’ parents acknowledged the identification of Mora Venancio after talking with a group of independent forensics experts from Argentina; the parents say they don’t trust information from the government of President Enrique Peña Nieto. A notice was posted in the victim’s name on the college’s Facebook page. “Compañeros,” it read, “to all those who have supported us, I am Alexander Mora Venancio…one of the 43 who fell on Sept. 26 at the hands of the narco-government…. I feel proud of you, who have lifted up my voice, courage and freedom-loving spirit. Don’t leave my father alone with his sorrow; for him I mean practically everything—hope, pride, his efforts, his work and his dignity…. I invite you to redouble your struggle. Let my death not be in vain. Make the best decision, but don’t forget me. Rectify if it’s possible, but don’t forgive. This is my message.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/7/14)
The DNA identification seems unlikely to end the widespread anti-government protests that have dominated the two months since the Iguala attacks [see Update #1244]. On Dec. 2 the federal Chamber of Deputies voted 292-100 to pass a measure that would amend the Constitution’s Articles 11 and 73 so that the authorities could limit a demonstration if they judge that it violates citizens’ “right of mobility.” The Chamber’s committee on constitutional matters had returned the measure to the full body for voting on Apr. 23, but the deputies didn’t take action until the current crisis. The center-right National Action Party (PAN) proposed the measure, and deputies from President Peña Nieto’s centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a small PRI satellite party, the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), joined them to approve it. The small leftist Labor Party (PT) and two center-left parties, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the Citizens’ Movement, opposed the bill, although PRD and Citizens’ Movement deputies on the constitutional committee had backed it in April. The PRD has lost popular support--and even party founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano--over the Iguala violence; former Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez, accused of ordering the attacks, is a PRD politician.
Rights activists promptly denounced the anti-protest measure. “We are concerned that amid the human rights crisis that the country is going through, the response of the Mexican state is send a message to inhibit social protests,” Carlos Ventura, of the Fray Francisco de Vitoria Human Rights Center, told a press conference in Mexico City on Dec. 3. The measure was received in the Senate on Dec. 4, but it was unclear how soon the senators would schedule a vote. (LJ 12/3/14, 12/5/14; TeleSUR English 12/4/14)
Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that at least some of the violence by alleged anarchists at Ayotzinapa protests has involved agents provocateurs. On Dec. 3 the online Mexican publication Animal Político posted two videos showing officials or police agents from the Federal District (DF, Mexico City), which has been governed by the PRD since 1997, in civilian dress among the protesters at a Dec. 1 march along the city’s Reforma avenue. In one of the videos, a man later identified as an official in a city agency is seen throwing a metal tube during a confrontation at the end of an otherwise peaceful protest. Two police agents seize the official and begin beating him, but other agents say: “Wait, he’s a compañero.” Agents then lead the official away and release him. (VICE 12/3/14)
*2. Mexico: Protests Link Ayotzinapa, Ferguson, Garner
Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and other activists held actions in at least 47 US towns and cities on Dec. 3 to protest the abduction of 43 teachers’ college students by police and gang members in Mexico’s Guerrero state in September; each of the 43 students had one of the actions dedicated to him. The protests were organized by UStired2, a group taking its name from #YaMeCansé (“I’m tired now,” or “I’ve had it”), a Mexican hashtag used in response to the violence against the students, who attended the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in the Guerrero town of Ayotzinapa. The protesters focused on US government financing for the Mexican government--especially funding for the “war on drugs” through the 2008 Mérida Initiative [see Update #952]--but they also expressed outrage over the US court system’s failure to indict US police agents in two recent police killings of unarmed African Americans.
The protest “is a community effort by Mexicans living in the US [to show] that we don’t want our tax money to finance the Mexican government, which is corrupt,” Karla de Anda, one of the organizers of the protest in Miami, told the Associated Press wire service. “They’re giving [Mexican authorities] money for arms,” US writer and activist Roberto Lovato said at a New York vigil. “They’re giving armament for disappearing people, for creating mass graves.” Signs at the various protests called for an end to “Plan Mexico,” comparing the Mérida Initiative to the bloody US-funded Plan Colombia of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The US has given Mexico $1.2 billion under the initiative, according to Maureen Meyer of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).
The Mexican actions were planned just as many people in the US were protesting a grand jury’s decision on Nov. 24 not to indict a white Ferguson, Missouri police agent, Darren Wilson, for the August shooting death of an unarmed African-American youth, Michael Brown. On Dec. 3, as many of the Ayotzinapa actions were starting, a grand jury announced its decision not to indict white New York City police agent Daniel Pantaleo for the chokehold-induced death in July of an unarmed African-American street vendor, Eric Garner. Mexican protesters highlighted the parallels with the Mexican killings, which St. Louis University student Ale Vázquez Rubio called “too obvious to ignore.” “The connection is having a government that doesn’t value brown and black bodies,” she said at a protest in St. Louis; Ferguson is a suburb of the city. “The connection is also in the silencing of a lot of voices.” “Our governments are working together to oppress us, so why shouldn’t we be working together?” another St. Louis protester asked. “United we stand” and “Somos unidos,” the participants chanted, alternating English and Spanish.
In New York, UStired2 was holding its scheduled vigil in Times Square in the evening when thousands of people marched to the site in a spontaneous protest of the Garner decision. The Mexican protesters joined in with the chants of “Hands up, don’t shoot,” a reference to the Brown shooting. “Do you hear that?” Lovato asked a reporter. “It’s like an echo.” Lovato noted that USTired2 put together a conference call between the mothers of the missing students and parents of children in Ferguson the evening before. “The most moving moment was when the indigenous mothers who were looking for their sons who [have] been disappeared by the Mexican police were speaking to African-American mothers about what is happening in Ferguson. They were both saying ‘I know what you feel, I know what this is like.’” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 12/3/14; Univision 12/4/14; Fox News Latino 12/4/14; Voices of NY 12/4/14)
*3. Costa Rica: State to Compensate Nemagon Victims
A decree by Costa Rican president Luis Guillermo Solís authorizing payments to former banana workers sickened by the pesticide Nemagon became official on Dec. 1 with the measure’s publication in the government’s gazette. Under the decree the government’s National Insurance Institute (INS) will pay out from 25% to 100% of the medical bills for workers who suffered physical or psychological damage from Nemagon, with the percentage based on their years of exposure to the pesticide. The decree currently covers 13,925 former banana workers; cases are pending for 9,233 of the workers’ children and 1,742 of the workers’ spouses. More than 11,000 other applications were dismissed.
Nemagon is a brand name for dibromochloropropane (DBCP), a chemical known to cause sterility, cancer, miscarriages, genetic deformities and other health problems. It was formerly in wide use in Central American banana fields; it was applied in Costa Rica from 1967 until the government banned the chemical’s importation in 1979. Affected Central American banana workers have been demanding compensation for decades. Costa Rica passed a compensation law in September 2001 but without setting up a mechanism for paying the workers. Some 780 Costa Ricans already won a separate settlement in 2011 from California-based fruit and vegetable producer Dole Food Company, Inc., which began making payments in September 2012 [see Update #1144]. The agreement with Dole also covered 3,157 Nicaraguans and 1,000 Hondurans. (La Nación (Costa Rica) 12/2/14; Tico Times 12/3/14)
*4. Chile: Four Women File Sexual Torture Complaint
On Dec. 1 Nieves Ayress Moreno, a Chilean-born naturalized US citizen, formally joined a criminal complaint filed earlier by three other Chilean women over sexual political violence that they say they suffered under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chilean law doesn’t treat sexual violence as a separate complaint; instead, the crimes are considered “illegitimate pressure,” allowing some of the perpetrators to escape justice. The complaint seeks to have the crimes “incorporated into the penal code and those responsible for them to be able to be punished,” according to another of the plaintiffs, Alejandra Holzapfel. Ayress Moreno, who lives in New York, delayed joining Holzapfel and the remaining two plaintiffs, Soledad Castillo and Nora Brito, in the complaint until she could travel to Chile.
After meeting with Santiago Appeals Court president Mario Carroza on Dec. 1, Ayress described some of her experiences to reporters at a press conference. She was abducted by security forces along with her father and 15-year-old brother in the fall of 1973, she said, and was subjected to electric shocks and sexual violence in the Londres 38 torture center of the now-defunct National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). “Later they brought my father so that he could hear the tortures,” she said, adding that the torturers included Argentines, Brazilians and Paraguayans. “Afterwards they transferred me to Tejas Verdes [a concentration camp], always bound and hooded. The most terrible part was there, because the torture school was there, and the forms of aggressions and sexual violence I was exposed to are unspeakable.” At one point, she said, she witnessed DINA director Manuel Contreras personally directing her torture.
Court president Carroza told the website for the memorial park at Villa Grimaldi, another DINA torture center, that while technically the complaint would have to be treated under Chilean laws in effect at the time of the alleged abuses, Chile had signed on to international human rights conventions that might apply to the cases. “As the judicial power, we need to look at this situation, analyze it and confront it in the shortest possible time,” he said. “We’ve already been condemned in the past by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights [CorteIDH], precisely for not carrying out this type of investigation in depth.” (Fox News Latino 12/1/14; Rebelión 12/1/14)
Nieves Ayress is well known in New York as an activist for immigrants and for human rights. Her husband, Víctor Toro, was a founder of Chile’s Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR); he too was tortured by the Pinochet regime. In 2007 the US government started a seven-year effort to deport Toro as an undocumented immigrant, but on Oct. 23 of this year a US immigration court granted him a work permit and permission to remain in the country, while denying his request for political asylum. (TeleSUR English 10/24/14)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico
The Water Grab That Powers Predatory Development (Latin America)
https://nacla.org/blog/2014/12/04/water-grab-powers-predatory-development
Shale Oil Fuels Indigenous Conflict in Argentina
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27750-shale-oil-fuels-indigenous-conflict-in-argentina
Six Guantanamo Detainees Leave for Uruguay
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Six-Guantanamo-Detainees-Leave-for-Uruguay-20141207-0005.html
Lessons from Bolivia: re-nationalising the hydrocarbon industry
https://opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/stephan-lefebvre-jeanette-bonifaz/lessons-from-bolivia-renationalising-hydrocarbon-indust
Bolivian women fight back against climate of violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5139-bolivian-women-fight-back-against-climate-of-violence
“Indigenous Peoples Are the Owners of the Land” Say Activists at COP20 in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/5143-indigenous-peoples-are-the-owners-of-the-land-say-activists-at-cop20-in-peru
Andes: repression ahead of Lima climate summit
http://ww4report.com/node/13796
Ecuador indigenous leader found dead days before planned Lima protest
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/06/ecuador-indigenous-leader-found-dead-lima-climate-talks?CMP=twt_gu
Colombia: peace talks resume; Uribe urges 'rebellion'
http://ww4report.com/node/13790
Colombian general captured by FARC resigns
http://ww4report.com/node/13767
Pemon Indigenous Occupy Airport in Venezuela: “We Have Had Enough of Broken Promises”
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/11053
Community Democracy Confronts Mining in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/5138-community-democracy-confronts-mining-in-el-salvador
Palm Oil and Extreme Violence in Honduras: The Inexorable Rise and Dubious Reform of Grupo Dinant
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/27864-palm-oil-and-extreme-violence-in-honduras-the-inexorable-rise-and-dubious-reform-of-grupo-dinant
In Oaxaca, Caravan of Central American Mothers Calls for Unity of Movements
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13825
Central American Mothers Build Bridges of Hope
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/central-american-mothers-build-bridges-of-hope/
Mexican Immigration Authorities Impede Humanitarian Aid to Central American Migrants
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13833
Mexico’s Civic Insurgency
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/mexicos-civic-insurgency/
Students March for Ayotzinapa and for Their Future (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13802
Ayotzinapa: I read and I share (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5142-ayotzinapa-i-read-and-i-share
The Spectre of Ayotzinapa Haunts the Continent (Mexico)
https://nacla.org/news/2014/12/07/spectre-ayotzinapa-haunts-continent
Wixarika Leaders to First Majestic Silver: Follow IMD Mining Ltd Example, Abandon Mining Project in Sacred Lands (Mexico)
https://intercontinentalcry.org/wixarika-leaders-to-first-majestic-silver-follow-imd-mining-ltd-example-abandon-mining-project-in-sacred-lands-26285/
Mexico: In the Land of Zapata, a Community Fights Natural Gas Development
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5135-mexico-in-the-land-of-zapata-a-community-fights-natural-gas-development
The Rebirth of an Urban “Dead Zone”? (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/the-rebirth-of-an-urban-dead-zone/
We Can Pretend Mexico’s War Isn’t ‘Made in the U.S.A.’, But the Numbers Don’t Lie
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/13811
How Canada and Mexico Have Become Part of the U.S. Policing Regime
https://nacla.org/blog/2014/12/01/how-canada-and-mexico-have-become-part-us-policing-regime
In Memoriam Juan Flores 1943-2014 (Puerto Rico)
https://nacla.org/blog/2014/12/06/memoriam-juan-flores-1943-2014
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://alainet.org/index.phtml.en
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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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 women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Monday, December 8, 2014
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
WNU #1235: Mexican Police Kill Guerrero Students, Again
Issue #1235, September 28, 2014
1. Mexico: Police Kill Guerrero Students, Again
2. Guatemala: Police Occupy Town After Violence
3. Haiti: Women Protest 1835 Abortion Law
4. Nicaragua: Contra-Drug Series Was CIA “Nightmare”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, 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. Mexico: Police Kill Guerrero Students, Again
The Attorney General’s Office of the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero announced on Sept. 28 that 22 agents from the Iguala de la Independencia municipal preventive police had been detained and removed to Acapulco in connection with a violent outbreak the night of Sept. 26-27 that left six dead and 17 injured. At least two of those killed were students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College, located in the town of Ayotzinapa, and as of Sept. 27 some 25 of the students were still missing. Two students from the same school were killed in an assault by state and federal police during a protest on Dec. 12, 2011; Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre Rivero eventually had to apologize publicly for the killings after the federal government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) issued a recommendation for an apology and for compensation to the victims’ families [see Update #1153].
According to the authorities, the violence in Iguala began late on Sept. 26 when a group of students from the teachers’ college commandeered three buses to take them back to Ayotzinapa, about 125 kilometers away, after a visit to the city. Police agents responded by shooting at the buses, killing two students. Later that night, unidentified gunmen attacked a bus on the federal Iguala-Chilpancingo highway as it was taking a Chilpancingo soccer team, the Avispones (“Hornets”), home after a match with an Iguala team. A teenage player, David Josué García Evangelista, was killed, along with a passenger, Blanca Montiel Sánchez; the bus driver was wounded and died afterwards from his injuries. The military also found a man’s body at another location on the same highway; the victim still hadn’t been identified as of Sept. 28. It wasn’t clear whether he was a student, but the daily La Jornada suggested that the night’s attacks were “against anyone who looked like a student.”
As the violence was beginning on Sept. 27, Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez told a reporter that “apparently someone hired [the Ayotzinapa students] to come and make trouble.” The mayor’s wife, Municipal Family Development System president María de los Angeles Pineda Villa, was scheduled to deliver a report in a public plaza that night, although there was also a dance with a tropical music group, Luz Roja de San Marcos, at the plaza. Mayor Abarca Velázquez, a business owner and a member of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), is reportedly planning to have his wife replace him in city hall if he wins a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies next year. The students said they simply came to Iguala to do fundraising in the streets, and they denied that they seized the buses by force. “There was some discussion with the bus drivers; they agreed to do us a favor,” Pedro David García López, a representative of the Ayotzinapa Student Executive Committee, told reporters on Sept. 27. “There wasn’t a kidnapping or a threat against a driver…. The buses had already let out their passengers.”
On Sept. 27 the State Organizing Committee of Education Workers in Guerrero (CETEG), an organization of dissident local members of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), condemned the police attack and announced that the group’s campaign against the federal government’s “education reform” program [see Update #1174] would now include a demand for punishment of the people responsible for the Iguala killings. (CNN México 9/27/14, some from Notimex; La Jornada (Mexico) 9/28/14, 9/28/14; Informador (Mexico) 9/28/14)
*2. Guatemala: Police Occupy Town After Violence
On Sept. 22 Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina declared a 30-day state of emergency in San Juan Sacatepéquez municipality in response to the deaths of at least eight indigenous Kaqchikel in a confrontation the night of Sept. 19-20 in the municipality’s Pajoques community [see Update #1234]. Some 600 police agents were sent to the municipality; according to one report they were backed up by 1,000 soldiers. Under the state of emergency the police are free to break up any demonstration or public meeting held without government authorization. On Sept. 23 the police arrested five community members, charging them with murder, attempted murder, arson and illegal meetings and protests; there are warrants for several dozen other community members.
There is little agreement on what happened the night of Sept. 19-20, even on the number of deaths: press reports range from eight to 11. The confrontation was between supporters and opponents of two construction projects, a huge cement factory in the municipality and a section of a beltway around Guatemala City, and the two sides gave radically different accounts. Construction supporters—generally residents who have been hired by the cement factory’s owners or have sold land for one or both of the construction projects—claim that the resistance activists are thieves and rapists who regularly harass and rob other community members.
Opponents of the construction charge that the incident started when 10 armed men from the factory entered Pajoques and fired on opponents, killing one and wounding two others. Community members say they called the national police soon after the shooting began but the police never arrived. All five of those arrested on Sept. 23 appear to belong to the resistance. Two claimed they had solid alibis. Celestino Turuy Pajoj, the director of a local school, said he was at a private university taking a law course, while José Dolores Pajoj Pirir said he was at a hospital with one of his sons at the time of the killings he is charged with. Two of his sons were shot at the beginning of the confrontation; one died and the other was hospitalized with injuries.
The Guatemalan firm Productos Mineros Limited, a subsidiary of Cementos Progreso, is the principal owner of the cement factory, holding 80% of the shares; the remaining 20% are held by the Swiss multinational cement company Holcim Ltd. Cementos Progreso is controlled by Guatemala’s rightwing Novella family, which has contracts for millions of dollars worth of development projects arranged by President Pérez Molina and his Patriot Party (PP), according to a Sept. 22 report by the Guatemalan Independent Media Center. Cementos Progreso made large contributions to Pérez Molina’s campaign in the 2011 presidential election. (Latin American Herald Tribune 9/23/14 from EFE; Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 9/24/14, 9/27/14 from EFE; TeleSUR 9/25/14; NACLA 9/26/14)
*3. Haiti: Women Protest 1835 Abortion Law
Some 30 Haitian women held a protest in front of the Ministry for the Feminine Condition and Women’s Rights (MCFDF) in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 26 to demand the decriminalization of abortion. Under Article 262 of Haiti’s Criminal Code, in effect since 1835, the sentence for a woman having an abortion and for anyone who helps her is life in prison. The law is apparently never enforced, but because of it all abortions in Haiti are clandestine and unregulated. The country has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the Americas, with 530 deaths for each 100,000 births; 100 of these deaths follow abortions. In a 2012 survey of 352 women who had abortions since 2007, 40% reported having complications. “Criminalization isn’t a solution,” the protesters, mostly young women, chanted. “We want to be educated sexually to be able to decide.” The demonstration was sponsored by a number of women’s rights organizations, including the Initiative for an Equitable Development in Haiti (Ideh), Kay Fanm (“Women’s House”) and Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA).
The Sept. 26 protest was in observance of the annual Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion, which is officially observed two days later on Sept. 28, but the issue had gained additional attention in Haiti because of a Sept. 20 article in the French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. According to the article, in May 2013 a group of doctors, feminists and religious leaders adopted a resolution for decriminalization after a colloquium on abortion organized by Haiti’s Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP). “Haiti must remove the vagueness existing currently in its legislation on abortion by adopting a law that abrogates Article 262 of the Criminal Code of1835,” the resolution read. However, it has been kept secret and hasn’t been presented to the Parliament for legislative action. (Le Nouvel Observateur 9/20/14; AlterPresse (Haiti) 9/25/14, 9/27/14)
*4. Nicaragua: Contra-Drug Series Was CIA “Nightmare”
On Sept. 18 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a number of classified articles from its in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, including an article about “Dark Alliance,” a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News that linked the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels to the sale of crack in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. Other US media, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, harshly criticized the series’ author, investigative reporter Gary Webb, noting, and often exaggerating, flaws in his reporting. Webb lost his job at the Mercury News and was never employed by a major newspaper again; he was found dead on Dec. 10, 2004 in an apparent suicide [see Update #777].
The CIA journal article, by a Directorate of Intelligence staffer named Nicholas Dujmovic, described the initial public reaction to the series as a “nightmare” and “a genuine public relations crisis.” Although the contras’ links to cocaine trafficking had been reported previously, Webb’s series had more effect, in part because it connected the contras to the explosion of crack use in African-American communities. It was also one of the first major stories to gain traction through circulation over the internet. Dujmovic attributed the popularity of “Dark Alliance” to “societal shortcomings.” “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times-–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community,” he complained.
The CIA’s response largely relied on “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” Dujmovic wrote. The agency managed to discourage “one major news affiliate” from covering the story, and in another case it helped out a reporter by making “a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual’s alleged CIA ties.” But to a large extent the mainstream media did the job on Webb without prompting from the CIA. The Los Angeles Times, for example, assembled a group of 17 reporters in what one member called the “get Gary Webb team.” The group “put [Webb’s series] under a microscope,” another of the reporters, Jesse Katz, said in a 2013 radio interview. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.” The result of the media attack was a “success,” according to Dujmovic, although only “in relative terms.” (The Intercept 9/25/14)
The story has never completely disappeared from public consciousness, however. A 1997 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general, Frederick Hitz, confirmed the contras’ link to drug trafficking, and a new story about contra drug dealing appeared in October 2013 in both the rightwing US-based Fox television network and the left-leaning Mexican weekly Proceso [see Update #1198]. A feature film about Gary Webb, “Kill the Messenger,” is scheduled for release on Oct. 10.
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, US/immigration
Global Drug Report: Don't Just Decriminalize, Demilitarize (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5063-global-drug-report-dont-just-decriminalize-demilitarize
REDD: A controversial mechanism (Latin America)
http://alainet.org/active/77477
Biodiversity Offsetting Advances in Latin America Amid Controversy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5056-biodiversity-offsetting-advances-in-latin-america-amid-controversy
Until the Rulers Obey: Learning from Latin America’s Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/5060-until-the-rulers-obey-learning-from-latin-americas-social-movements
How one Latin American peace group has persevered over 40 years
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/40-years-serpaj-continues-peace-work-throughout-latin-america/
Trucks Set on Fire in Mapuche Conflict Zone, Chile
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Trucks-Set-on-Fire-in-Mapuche-Conflict-Zone-Chile-20140928-0002.html
What is at stake in Brazil
http://alainet.org/active/77401
An indigenous nation in the industrialized heart of South America (Brazil)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12904
Police Violence and Forced Evictions in São Paulo: An Interview with Benedito “Dito” Barbosa (Brazil)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/police-violence-and-forced-evictions-in-sao-paulo-an-interview-with-benedito-dito-barbosa
Washington Snubs Bolivia on Drug Policy Reform, Again
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5061-washington-snubs-bolivia-on-drug-policy-reform-again
Peru: rural mayor killed in jungle unrest
http://ww4report.com/node/13561
Peru: Newmont behind water authority shake-up?
http://ww4report.com/node/13562
Peru: massacre victims exhumed in Ayacucho
http://ww4report.com/node/13569
Peru: record coke bust points to Mexican cartels
http://ww4report.com/node/13566
Colombia's indigenous communities at risk: report
http://ww4report.com/node/13572
Colombia's Ecopetrol to process fracking licenses
http://ww4report.com/node/13568
Venezuela’s Maduro Responds to Scathing US Editorials and Blames Capitalism for ‘Environment Collapse’
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/10928
When A Cement Factory’s Progress Drive Turns Deadly (Guatemala)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/9/26/when-cement-factorys-progress-drive-turns-deadly
El Salvador: Total Ban on Abortion is Killing Women and Girls and Condemning Others to Decades Behind Bars
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5063-global-drug-report-dont-just-decriminalize-demilitarize
Mexico Police Kill 2 Students During Protest, 25 Missing
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mexico-Police-Kill-2-Students-During-Protest-25-Missing-20140928-0013.html
Sonora Spill adds to the Social and Environmental Consequences of Free-Market Mining in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5066-sonora-spill-adds-to-the-social-and-environmental-consequences-of-free-market-mining-in-mexico
Memorial Planned for Famed Border Writer (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/memorial-planned-for-famed-border-writer/
Climate Ironies Expose the Vulnerable Borderlands (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/climate-ironies-expose-the-vulnerable-borderlands/
Bring on the Casinos-Tax Free! (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/bring-on-the-casinos-tax-free/
ISIS to attack US through Mexico —not!
http://ww4report.com/node/13579
Mexico: protests for imprisoned vigilante leader
http://ww4report.com/node/13578
The Growing Divide Between Democrats and Latino Voters (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/9/29/growing-divide-between-democrats-and-latino-voters
Expanding Insecurity (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/9/24/expanding-insecurity
DHS Argues It Has Evidence That Locking Up Immigrant Families Deters Migration. One Problem: It’s So Wrong. (US/immigration)
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/dhs-argues-it-has-evidence-locking-immigrant-families-deters-migration-one
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
1. Mexico: Police Kill Guerrero Students, Again
2. Guatemala: Police Occupy Town After Violence
3. Haiti: Women Protest 1835 Abortion Law
4. Nicaragua: Contra-Drug Series Was CIA “Nightmare”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, 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. Mexico: Police Kill Guerrero Students, Again
The Attorney General’s Office of the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero announced on Sept. 28 that 22 agents from the Iguala de la Independencia municipal preventive police had been detained and removed to Acapulco in connection with a violent outbreak the night of Sept. 26-27 that left six dead and 17 injured. At least two of those killed were students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College, located in the town of Ayotzinapa, and as of Sept. 27 some 25 of the students were still missing. Two students from the same school were killed in an assault by state and federal police during a protest on Dec. 12, 2011; Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre Rivero eventually had to apologize publicly for the killings after the federal government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) issued a recommendation for an apology and for compensation to the victims’ families [see Update #1153].
According to the authorities, the violence in Iguala began late on Sept. 26 when a group of students from the teachers’ college commandeered three buses to take them back to Ayotzinapa, about 125 kilometers away, after a visit to the city. Police agents responded by shooting at the buses, killing two students. Later that night, unidentified gunmen attacked a bus on the federal Iguala-Chilpancingo highway as it was taking a Chilpancingo soccer team, the Avispones (“Hornets”), home after a match with an Iguala team. A teenage player, David Josué García Evangelista, was killed, along with a passenger, Blanca Montiel Sánchez; the bus driver was wounded and died afterwards from his injuries. The military also found a man’s body at another location on the same highway; the victim still hadn’t been identified as of Sept. 28. It wasn’t clear whether he was a student, but the daily La Jornada suggested that the night’s attacks were “against anyone who looked like a student.”
As the violence was beginning on Sept. 27, Iguala mayor José Luis Abarca Velázquez told a reporter that “apparently someone hired [the Ayotzinapa students] to come and make trouble.” The mayor’s wife, Municipal Family Development System president María de los Angeles Pineda Villa, was scheduled to deliver a report in a public plaza that night, although there was also a dance with a tropical music group, Luz Roja de San Marcos, at the plaza. Mayor Abarca Velázquez, a business owner and a member of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), is reportedly planning to have his wife replace him in city hall if he wins a seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies next year. The students said they simply came to Iguala to do fundraising in the streets, and they denied that they seized the buses by force. “There was some discussion with the bus drivers; they agreed to do us a favor,” Pedro David García López, a representative of the Ayotzinapa Student Executive Committee, told reporters on Sept. 27. “There wasn’t a kidnapping or a threat against a driver…. The buses had already let out their passengers.”
On Sept. 27 the State Organizing Committee of Education Workers in Guerrero (CETEG), an organization of dissident local members of the National Education Workers Union (SNTE), condemned the police attack and announced that the group’s campaign against the federal government’s “education reform” program [see Update #1174] would now include a demand for punishment of the people responsible for the Iguala killings. (CNN México 9/27/14, some from Notimex; La Jornada (Mexico) 9/28/14, 9/28/14; Informador (Mexico) 9/28/14)
*2. Guatemala: Police Occupy Town After Violence
On Sept. 22 Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina declared a 30-day state of emergency in San Juan Sacatepéquez municipality in response to the deaths of at least eight indigenous Kaqchikel in a confrontation the night of Sept. 19-20 in the municipality’s Pajoques community [see Update #1234]. Some 600 police agents were sent to the municipality; according to one report they were backed up by 1,000 soldiers. Under the state of emergency the police are free to break up any demonstration or public meeting held without government authorization. On Sept. 23 the police arrested five community members, charging them with murder, attempted murder, arson and illegal meetings and protests; there are warrants for several dozen other community members.
There is little agreement on what happened the night of Sept. 19-20, even on the number of deaths: press reports range from eight to 11. The confrontation was between supporters and opponents of two construction projects, a huge cement factory in the municipality and a section of a beltway around Guatemala City, and the two sides gave radically different accounts. Construction supporters—generally residents who have been hired by the cement factory’s owners or have sold land for one or both of the construction projects—claim that the resistance activists are thieves and rapists who regularly harass and rob other community members.
Opponents of the construction charge that the incident started when 10 armed men from the factory entered Pajoques and fired on opponents, killing one and wounding two others. Community members say they called the national police soon after the shooting began but the police never arrived. All five of those arrested on Sept. 23 appear to belong to the resistance. Two claimed they had solid alibis. Celestino Turuy Pajoj, the director of a local school, said he was at a private university taking a law course, while José Dolores Pajoj Pirir said he was at a hospital with one of his sons at the time of the killings he is charged with. Two of his sons were shot at the beginning of the confrontation; one died and the other was hospitalized with injuries.
The Guatemalan firm Productos Mineros Limited, a subsidiary of Cementos Progreso, is the principal owner of the cement factory, holding 80% of the shares; the remaining 20% are held by the Swiss multinational cement company Holcim Ltd. Cementos Progreso is controlled by Guatemala’s rightwing Novella family, which has contracts for millions of dollars worth of development projects arranged by President Pérez Molina and his Patriot Party (PP), according to a Sept. 22 report by the Guatemalan Independent Media Center. Cementos Progreso made large contributions to Pérez Molina’s campaign in the 2011 presidential election. (Latin American Herald Tribune 9/23/14 from EFE; Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 9/24/14, 9/27/14 from EFE; TeleSUR 9/25/14; NACLA 9/26/14)
*3. Haiti: Women Protest 1835 Abortion Law
Some 30 Haitian women held a protest in front of the Ministry for the Feminine Condition and Women’s Rights (MCFDF) in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 26 to demand the decriminalization of abortion. Under Article 262 of Haiti’s Criminal Code, in effect since 1835, the sentence for a woman having an abortion and for anyone who helps her is life in prison. The law is apparently never enforced, but because of it all abortions in Haiti are clandestine and unregulated. The country has the highest rate of maternal deaths in the Americas, with 530 deaths for each 100,000 births; 100 of these deaths follow abortions. In a 2012 survey of 352 women who had abortions since 2007, 40% reported having complications. “Criminalization isn’t a solution,” the protesters, mostly young women, chanted. “We want to be educated sexually to be able to decide.” The demonstration was sponsored by a number of women’s rights organizations, including the Initiative for an Equitable Development in Haiti (Ideh), Kay Fanm (“Women’s House”) and Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA).
The Sept. 26 protest was in observance of the annual Global Day of Action for Access to Safe and Legal Abortion, which is officially observed two days later on Sept. 28, but the issue had gained additional attention in Haiti because of a Sept. 20 article in the French newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. According to the article, in May 2013 a group of doctors, feminists and religious leaders adopted a resolution for decriminalization after a colloquium on abortion organized by Haiti’s Ministry of Public Health and Population (MSPP). “Haiti must remove the vagueness existing currently in its legislation on abortion by adopting a law that abrogates Article 262 of the Criminal Code of1835,” the resolution read. However, it has been kept secret and hasn’t been presented to the Parliament for legislative action. (Le Nouvel Observateur 9/20/14; AlterPresse (Haiti) 9/25/14, 9/27/14)
*4. Nicaragua: Contra-Drug Series Was CIA “Nightmare”
On Sept. 18 the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a number of classified articles from its in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, including an article about “Dark Alliance,” a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News that linked the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels to the sale of crack in South Central Los Angeles in the 1980s. Other US media, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, harshly criticized the series’ author, investigative reporter Gary Webb, noting, and often exaggerating, flaws in his reporting. Webb lost his job at the Mercury News and was never employed by a major newspaper again; he was found dead on Dec. 10, 2004 in an apparent suicide [see Update #777].
The CIA journal article, by a Directorate of Intelligence staffer named Nicholas Dujmovic, described the initial public reaction to the series as a “nightmare” and “a genuine public relations crisis.” Although the contras’ links to cocaine trafficking had been reported previously, Webb’s series had more effect, in part because it connected the contras to the explosion of crack use in African-American communities. It was also one of the first major stories to gain traction through circulation over the internet. Dujmovic attributed the popularity of “Dark Alliance” to “societal shortcomings.” “We live in somewhat coarse and emotional times-–when large numbers of Americans do not adhere to the same standards of logic, evidence, or even civil discourse as those practiced by members of the CIA community,” he complained.
The CIA’s response largely relied on “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists,” Dujmovic wrote. The agency managed to discourage “one major news affiliate” from covering the story, and in another case it helped out a reporter by making “a rare exception to the general policy that CIA does not comment on any individual’s alleged CIA ties.” But to a large extent the mainstream media did the job on Webb without prompting from the CIA. The Los Angeles Times, for example, assembled a group of 17 reporters in what one member called the “get Gary Webb team.” The group “put [Webb’s series] under a microscope,” another of the reporters, Jesse Katz, said in a 2013 radio interview. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.” The result of the media attack was a “success,” according to Dujmovic, although only “in relative terms.” (The Intercept 9/25/14)
The story has never completely disappeared from public consciousness, however. A 1997 report by the CIA’s then-inspector general, Frederick Hitz, confirmed the contras’ link to drug trafficking, and a new story about contra drug dealing appeared in October 2013 in both the rightwing US-based Fox television network and the left-leaning Mexican weekly Proceso [see Update #1198]. A feature film about Gary Webb, “Kill the Messenger,” is scheduled for release on Oct. 10.
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, US/immigration
Global Drug Report: Don't Just Decriminalize, Demilitarize (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5063-global-drug-report-dont-just-decriminalize-demilitarize
REDD: A controversial mechanism (Latin America)
http://alainet.org/active/77477
Biodiversity Offsetting Advances in Latin America Amid Controversy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5056-biodiversity-offsetting-advances-in-latin-america-amid-controversy
Until the Rulers Obey: Learning from Latin America’s Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/5060-until-the-rulers-obey-learning-from-latin-americas-social-movements
How one Latin American peace group has persevered over 40 years
http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/40-years-serpaj-continues-peace-work-throughout-latin-america/
Trucks Set on Fire in Mapuche Conflict Zone, Chile
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Trucks-Set-on-Fire-in-Mapuche-Conflict-Zone-Chile-20140928-0002.html
What is at stake in Brazil
http://alainet.org/active/77401
An indigenous nation in the industrialized heart of South America (Brazil)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12904
Police Violence and Forced Evictions in São Paulo: An Interview with Benedito “Dito” Barbosa (Brazil)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/police-violence-and-forced-evictions-in-sao-paulo-an-interview-with-benedito-dito-barbosa
Washington Snubs Bolivia on Drug Policy Reform, Again
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5061-washington-snubs-bolivia-on-drug-policy-reform-again
Peru: rural mayor killed in jungle unrest
http://ww4report.com/node/13561
Peru: Newmont behind water authority shake-up?
http://ww4report.com/node/13562
Peru: massacre victims exhumed in Ayacucho
http://ww4report.com/node/13569
Peru: record coke bust points to Mexican cartels
http://ww4report.com/node/13566
Colombia's indigenous communities at risk: report
http://ww4report.com/node/13572
Colombia's Ecopetrol to process fracking licenses
http://ww4report.com/node/13568
Venezuela’s Maduro Responds to Scathing US Editorials and Blames Capitalism for ‘Environment Collapse’
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/10928
When A Cement Factory’s Progress Drive Turns Deadly (Guatemala)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/9/26/when-cement-factorys-progress-drive-turns-deadly
El Salvador: Total Ban on Abortion is Killing Women and Girls and Condemning Others to Decades Behind Bars
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/5063-global-drug-report-dont-just-decriminalize-demilitarize
Mexico Police Kill 2 Students During Protest, 25 Missing
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Mexico-Police-Kill-2-Students-During-Protest-25-Missing-20140928-0013.html
Sonora Spill adds to the Social and Environmental Consequences of Free-Market Mining in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/5066-sonora-spill-adds-to-the-social-and-environmental-consequences-of-free-market-mining-in-mexico
Memorial Planned for Famed Border Writer (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/memorial-planned-for-famed-border-writer/
Climate Ironies Expose the Vulnerable Borderlands (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/climate-ironies-expose-the-vulnerable-borderlands/
Bring on the Casinos-Tax Free! (Mexico)
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/bring-on-the-casinos-tax-free/
ISIS to attack US through Mexico —not!
http://ww4report.com/node/13579
Mexico: protests for imprisoned vigilante leader
http://ww4report.com/node/13578
The Growing Divide Between Democrats and Latino Voters (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/news/2014/9/29/growing-divide-between-democrats-and-latino-voters
Expanding Insecurity (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2014/9/24/expanding-insecurity
DHS Argues It Has Evidence That Locking Up Immigrant Families Deters Migration. One Problem: It’s So Wrong. (US/immigration)
https://www.aclu.org/blog/immigrants-rights/dhs-argues-it-has-evidence-locking-immigrant-families-deters-migration-one
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://org.salsalabs.com/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/
http://intercontinentalcry.org/
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/index.php
http://nacla.org/
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/index.html
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.org/
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
WNU #1165: Chile’s Pinochet Planned New Coup in 1988
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1165, February 24, 2013
1. Chile: Pinochet Was Planning New Coup in 1988
2. Honduras: US-Trained Unit Implicated in Aguán Abuses
3. Mexico: Juárez Rights Activist Seeks Asylum in US
4. Dominican Republic: Protesters Demand Review of Barrick Contract
5. Haiti: Duvalier and UN Blow Off Victims’ Claims--Again
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. 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. Chile: Pinochet Was Planning New Coup in 1988
Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) had plans to foment violence and declare a state of emergency if he lost an Oct. 5, 1988 plebiscite on his regime, according to declassified US documents that the DC-based research group National Security Archive posted on its website on Feb. 22. The plebiscite, mandated by Pinochet’s own 1980 Constitution, gave Chileans a choice between voting “yes” to have the general remain president for eight more years or voting “no” to end the dictatorship and hold a presidential election in 1989. The “no” option won with 54.7% of the vote to 43% for “yes”; some 98% of eligible voters participated.
According to the declassified documents, as early as May 1988 the military became concerned about a possible loss and decided that the “no” couldn’t be allowed to win. On Sept. 30 then-US ambassador Harry Barnes warned the administration of US president Ronald Reagan about the “imminent possibility of government-staged coup.” US intelligence had provided “a clear sense of Pinochet’s determination to use violence on whatever scale is necessary to retain power,” Barnes said. The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported that Pinochet supporters “are said to have contingency plans to derail the plebiscite by encouraging and staging acts of violence. They hope that such violence will elicit further reprisals by the radical opposition and begin a cycle of rioting and disorder.” The military would then step in, and “the elections would be suspended, declared invalid, and postponed indefinitely.”
Although the US government had supported the bloody 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power, the Reagan administration felt that Pinochet was a polarizing figure whose presence was strengthening the Chilean left and weakening the center. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) provided some $1.6 million for voter registration and other work for the plebiscite, while Ambassador Barnes clearly supported the “no” vote, leading Pinochet to issue denunciations of “Yanqui imperialism.” US military and intelligence officials warned their Chilean counterparts not to support plans for a coup.
At 1 am on Oct. 6, after the voting results were clear, the military junta held a meeting at which Pinochet—“nearly apoplectic,” according to a participant—suggested having the military seize control of Santiago. The other military rulers refused to back Pinochet, who had to concede the loss and allow an election.
The National Security Archive posting of the documents was timed to coincide with the presentation of the Oscar awards by the US film industry on Feb. 24. “NO,” a fictionalization of the 1988 campaign, was one of the movies nominated for the best foreign film award. Noting that “[t]he complexity of the story is not depicted on screen,” the Archive said it wanted to use the recognition of the film to “draw attention to the fuller story.” (National Security Archive 2/22/13; La Jornada (Mexico) 2/24/13)
In other news, union leader Juan Pablo Jiménez Garrido was shot dead with a single bullet to the head the afternoon of Feb. 21 inside the offices of Ingeniería Eléctrica Azeta, an electrical contracting firm which provides services to the private electric company Compañía Chilena de Electricidad (CHILECTRA). Jiménez, the president of the Azeta Workers Federation, was last seen sitting on a bench near an office while he reviewed union business. Tensions had been growing between the union and the company over a contract and alleged labor workplace violations. Hundreds of people attended Jiménez’s funeral on Feb. 23, chanting: “Justice, truth, no to impunity.” Bárbara Figueroa, president of the Unified Workers Confederation (CUT), the main Chilean labor federation, stressed the “tremendous seriousness” of the killing and the need for a thorough investigation. (El Ciudadano (Chile) 2/22/13; La Nación (Chile) 2/23/13)
*2. Honduras: US-Trained Unit Implicated in Aguán Abuses
Rights Action, a human rights organization based in Toronto and Washington, DC, released a report on Feb. 20 documenting killings and other abuses carried out since late 2009 during land disputes between campesinos and major landowners in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. The 64-page report, “Human Rights Violations by US-backed Honduran Special Forces Unit,” finds that soldiers from the Honduran military’s 15th Battalion are directly implicated in at least 34 abuses, including “kidnappings, killings, threats, torture and abuse of authority,” according to the report’s author, Annie Bird.
Since 2008 or earlier, Bird says, the battalion has “received assistance and training from the Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) of the United States Armed Forces.” Honduran media have reported that Spanish and Israeli special forces have also trained the soldiers; local informants say Colombian and Panamanian trainers have been participating as well.
Based on dozens of interviews and on reports from the Honduran media and human rights groups, Bird compiled a list of at least 88 campesinos killed since January 2010, including two killed on Feb. 16, right before the report’s release [see Update #1164]. An additional five people were apparently killed because they were mistaken for campesinos. According to the report, “at least 77” of the campesino deaths “clearly have the characteristics of death squad killings, contradicting reports from the Honduran government human rights commission CONADEH [the National Human Rights Commission] and US State Department that characterize the killings as the result of ‘confrontations.’” Bird also cites as many as 13 killings of security guards employed by the big landowners, noting that many of the guards are themselves campesinos; there are suspicions that some of these killings were carried out by other security forces.
In announcing the report, Rights Action wrote that the “vast majority of the killings and other violations that have been perpetrated in Bajo Aguán since 2010 have not been investigated, generating a level of impunity that suggests complicity between state and local authorities and those responsible for the killings and other abuses.” The group asked for readers to “send copies of this information, and your own letters, to your Canadian and American politicians (MPs, Congress members and senators) and to your own media.” (Rights Action 2/20/13)
*3. Mexico: Juárez Rights Activist Seeks Asylum in US
Mexican human rights activist Karla Castañeda Alvarado applied for political asylum in the US on Feb. 13 after secretly leaving her home in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua with four of her children. US authorities have granted her six months to provide documentation to justify her application. The Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Disappeared Young Women, in which Castañeda was active, said it was better for her to seek asylum, noting the example of activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, who was shot dead by an unidentified man on Dec. 16, 2010, as she was protesting in front of the main government office in the state capital, also named Chihuahua [see Update #1061].
Castañeda started her political activity after her daughter Cinthia Jacobeth, then 13 years old, disappeared in Juárez on Oct. 24, 2008. This January Castañeda was part of a 400-km walk by members of the Committee of Mothers to the state capital to present a petition to Gov. César Duarte Jáquez. The governor left for the southeastern state of Chiapas--to participate in the launching of a “National Crusade Against Hunger”--before the activists arrived. Duarte finally met with the committee in Juárez on Feb. 2 and agreed to some of their proposals for fighting the disappearances. However, after the meeting Castañeda was subjected to harassment by the authorities. Municipal police agents raided her home on Feb. 4; unidentified men attempted to enter her yard at about 3 am on Feb. 6; and state police and agents from the prosecutors’ office went to her house on Feb. 9 and told her mother-in-law that Castañeda was getting “too deep” in the search for her daughter.
Human rights organizations say some 200 women, most of them young, have disappeared in Juárez since 1993, in addition to several hundred women known or presumed to have been murdered. The number of disappeared may be higher, since some families probably don’t report the disappearances for fear of reprisals. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/18/13; Desinformemonos (Mexico) 2/18/13)
*4. Dominican Republic: Protesters Demand Review of Barrick Contract
Dozens of Dominican activists demonstrated outside the Supreme Court building in Santo Domingo on Feb. 18 to protest a contract the government signed with the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation for the Pueblo Viejo gold mine in Cotuí in the central province of Sánchez Ramírez. The group called for the court to declare the agreement unconstitutional. Critics say the Dominican Republic will only receive a fraction of the proceeds from the mine while the country will be left with the job of repairing the environmental damage [see Update #1163]. Opposition deputy Juan Hubieres, who was leading the protest, charged that the government of former president Leonel Fernández (1996-2000, 2004-2012) received US$37.5 million in 2007 to repair the damage caused by the previous management of the mine, the state enterprise Rosario Dominicana, and eventually collected a total of US$75 million. Fernández “will have to explain to the country in what way this has been employed,” Hubieres said.
Other demonstrators protested a plan by current president Danilo Medina to recognize titles to properties at the Bahía de las Aguilas beach and in other parts of the Jaragua ecological reserve, located in the southwestern province of Pedernales. The government says private use of the properties for tourism will help develop the impoverished province, but opponents insist that the titles were obtained fraudulently in 1995 and 1996 from then-director of the Dominican Agrarian Institute Jaime Rodríguez, who was arrested but was never tried. The protesters cut up a cake in the shape of the Dominican Republic to dramatize the way authorities are dividing up the national territory, they said. (El Diario-La Prensa (New York) 2/19/13 from correspondent; El Día (Santo Domingo) 2/20/13)
*5. Haiti: Duvalier and UN Blow Off Victims’ Claims--Again
On Feb. 21 former Haitian “president for life” Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier (1971-1986) once again defied an order to appear before an appeals court in Port-au-Prince that is considering whether he can be criminally charged for human rights violations committed during his regime. Duvalier had refused to appear in the court twice before, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 7 [see Update #1163]. Duvalier’s defense attorney, Reynold Georges, said the former dictator’s presence was unnecessary because he had filed an appeal with the Supreme Court. Georges himself defied the court by arriving 90 minutes late. “I don’t lose,” Georges announced. “I’m Haiti’s Johnnie Cochran.” The three-judge appeals panel responded by ordering the public prosecutor to have Duvalier escorted to the court by Feb. 28.
Some human rights advocates considered the judges’ order a victory. Reed Brody, a legal consultant with Human Rights Watch (HRW), called it “a chink in [Duvalier’s] armor of impunity.” “This isn’t a victory yet, but it’s been a long struggle,” Collective Against Impunity coordinator Danièle Magloire said on Feb. 22. Still, “many doubt the government [of President Michel Martelly] wants to put Duvalier on trial,” Miami Herald correspondent Jacqueline Charles wrote. “Some of the top government posts are held by supporters of the regime, with the newly appointed minister of interior [David Bazile] also being the head of Duvalier’s political party.” (MH 2/21/13 from correspondent; Associated Press 2/21/13 via CTV News (Canada) 2/21/13; AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/22/13)
On the same day, Feb. 21, United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced through a spokesperson that the organization has no legal liability for a cholera epidemic caused in October 2010 by poor sanitation at a United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) military base in the Central Plateau. The UN's position is based on section 29 of the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN. The Feb. 21 announcement was in response to a petition filed in November 2011 by the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and its Haitian affiliate, the Bureau of International Lawyers (BAI), for compensation on behalf of 5,000 victims of the epidemic [see Update #1105]. IJDH staff attorney Nicole Philips called the UN decision “all very political” and noted that “[I]f this had been a corporation, and if it had been an environmental spill, there would have been liability.” “The United Nations can’t have humanity and impunity at the same time,” BAI managing attorney Mario Joseph said.
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence on the origin of the epidemic, Ban has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the UN’s responsibility. According to the Haitian Ministry of Public Health, as of the end of January 7,824 people had died of the disease and 350,000 had been hospitalized. UN spokespeople stressed that the organization has spent some $118 million to fight the epidemic. (AlterPresse 2/21/13; The Guardian (UK) 2/21/13 from correspondents) The UN’s budget for the MINUSTAH troops and police agents this fiscal year, July 2012 through June 2013, is currently set at $648.394 million. (MINUSTAH Facts and Figures, UN website accessed 2/25/13)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Elections 2012: What Now? (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2013/2/23/elections-2012-what-now
Think there's no alternative? Latin America has a few
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/no-alternative-latin-america-has-a-few
The Latin American Exception
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175650/
Argentina Profunda: Extractivism and Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/4138-argentina-profunda-extractivism-and-resistance
Chile: From a Social Earthquake to a Political Tsunami
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/9046
Tough Questions for Chile as Ongoing Protests Stall Patagonian Dam Project
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/4142-tough-questions-for-chile-as-ongoing-protests-stall-patagonian-dam-project
Bolivia showdown with Chile over border incident
http://ww4report.com/node/12018
Bolivia: growing Aymara dissension on Altiplano
http://ww4report.com/node/12019
Quinoa: To Buy or Not to Buy…Is this the right question? (Bolivia)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/9070
Peru: mining company rejects Conga referendum
http://ww4report.com/node/12020
Ecuador's Rafael Correa Re-elected by a Wide Margin
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4135-ecuadors-rafael-correa-re-elected-by-a-wide-margin
Interview with Alberto Acosta: The "Citizen Revolution", the Extractive Model and the Left Critiques (Ecuador)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4139-interview-with-alberto-acosta-the-qcitizen-revolutionq-the-extractive-model-and-the-left-critiques
CONAIE in the Face of Ecuador's Election Results
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4145-conaie-in-the-face-of-ecuadors-election-results
Ecuador: “First Reflections on a Defeat” for Correa's Leftist Opposition
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4144-ecuador-first-reflections-on-a-defeat-for-correas-leftist-opposition
Ecuador left opposition reacts to Correa re-election
http://ww4report.com/node/12021
Washington Post, Miami Herald Issue Embarrassingly Erroneous Editorials on Ecuador
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/washington-post-miami-herald-issue-embarrassingly-erroneous-editorials-on-ecuador
Colombia: Riot Police Attack Communities Protesting Oil Exploitation in Arauca
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4140-colombia-riot-police-attack-communities-protesting-oil-exploitation-in-arauca-
Colombia: campesino strike in oil zone
http://ww4report.com/node/12026
Colombia: land restitution advances
http://ww4report.com/node/12010
"Lost tribe" confirmed in Colombian Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/12023
Colombia: tribunal rules for Peace Community
http://ww4report.com/node/12022
Return of Chavez Sparks Flurry of Criticism from Venezuela’s Opposition
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7854
What if The New York Times Covered the United States Like Venezuela?
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/16/what-if-new-york-times-covered-united-states-venezuela
Reporting on Romer’s Charter Cities: How the Media Sanitize Honduras’s Brutal Regime
http://nacla.org/news/2013/2/19/reporting-romer%E2%80%99s-charter-cities-how-media-sanitize-honduras%E2%80%99s-brutal-regime
Guatemala’s Deadly Lifeline: Over-Reliance on the United States
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4143-guatemalas-deadly-lifeline-over-reliance-on-the-united-states
Can Guatemala’s Long Struggle for Justice Provide Lessons for Haiti?
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/21/can-guatemala%E2%80%99s-long-struggle-justice-provide-lessons-haiti
Mexico called to task over disappeared
http://ww4report.com/node/12013
Can Vigilante Justice Save Mexico?
http://ww4report.com/node/12024
Showdown over Education Reform (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/february232013/mexico-education.php
Update: Autopsy Paints Troubling Picture in Border Patrol Shooting (Mexico)
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/22/update-autopsy-paints-troubling-picture-border-patrol-shooting
Nervousness and lack of transparency surround three new mining permits (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/2/20/nervousness-and-lack-of-transparency-surround-three-new-mini.html
Both Duvalier and the UN Continue to Try to Dodge Responsibility
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/both-duvalier-and-the-un-continue-to-try-to-dodge-responsibility
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://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/
Issue #1165, February 24, 2013
1. Chile: Pinochet Was Planning New Coup in 1988
2. Honduras: US-Trained Unit Implicated in Aguán Abuses
3. Mexico: Juárez Rights Activist Seeks Asylum in US
4. Dominican Republic: Protesters Demand Review of Barrick Contract
5. Haiti: Duvalier and UN Blow Off Victims’ Claims--Again
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. 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. Chile: Pinochet Was Planning New Coup in 1988
Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) had plans to foment violence and declare a state of emergency if he lost an Oct. 5, 1988 plebiscite on his regime, according to declassified US documents that the DC-based research group National Security Archive posted on its website on Feb. 22. The plebiscite, mandated by Pinochet’s own 1980 Constitution, gave Chileans a choice between voting “yes” to have the general remain president for eight more years or voting “no” to end the dictatorship and hold a presidential election in 1989. The “no” option won with 54.7% of the vote to 43% for “yes”; some 98% of eligible voters participated.
According to the declassified documents, as early as May 1988 the military became concerned about a possible loss and decided that the “no” couldn’t be allowed to win. On Sept. 30 then-US ambassador Harry Barnes warned the administration of US president Ronald Reagan about the “imminent possibility of government-staged coup.” US intelligence had provided “a clear sense of Pinochet’s determination to use violence on whatever scale is necessary to retain power,” Barnes said. The US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported that Pinochet supporters “are said to have contingency plans to derail the plebiscite by encouraging and staging acts of violence. They hope that such violence will elicit further reprisals by the radical opposition and begin a cycle of rioting and disorder.” The military would then step in, and “the elections would be suspended, declared invalid, and postponed indefinitely.”
Although the US government had supported the bloody 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power, the Reagan administration felt that Pinochet was a polarizing figure whose presence was strengthening the Chilean left and weakening the center. The National Democratic Institute (NDI) provided some $1.6 million for voter registration and other work for the plebiscite, while Ambassador Barnes clearly supported the “no” vote, leading Pinochet to issue denunciations of “Yanqui imperialism.” US military and intelligence officials warned their Chilean counterparts not to support plans for a coup.
At 1 am on Oct. 6, after the voting results were clear, the military junta held a meeting at which Pinochet—“nearly apoplectic,” according to a participant—suggested having the military seize control of Santiago. The other military rulers refused to back Pinochet, who had to concede the loss and allow an election.
The National Security Archive posting of the documents was timed to coincide with the presentation of the Oscar awards by the US film industry on Feb. 24. “NO,” a fictionalization of the 1988 campaign, was one of the movies nominated for the best foreign film award. Noting that “[t]he complexity of the story is not depicted on screen,” the Archive said it wanted to use the recognition of the film to “draw attention to the fuller story.” (National Security Archive 2/22/13; La Jornada (Mexico) 2/24/13)
In other news, union leader Juan Pablo Jiménez Garrido was shot dead with a single bullet to the head the afternoon of Feb. 21 inside the offices of Ingeniería Eléctrica Azeta, an electrical contracting firm which provides services to the private electric company Compañía Chilena de Electricidad (CHILECTRA). Jiménez, the president of the Azeta Workers Federation, was last seen sitting on a bench near an office while he reviewed union business. Tensions had been growing between the union and the company over a contract and alleged labor workplace violations. Hundreds of people attended Jiménez’s funeral on Feb. 23, chanting: “Justice, truth, no to impunity.” Bárbara Figueroa, president of the Unified Workers Confederation (CUT), the main Chilean labor federation, stressed the “tremendous seriousness” of the killing and the need for a thorough investigation. (El Ciudadano (Chile) 2/22/13; La Nación (Chile) 2/23/13)
*2. Honduras: US-Trained Unit Implicated in Aguán Abuses
Rights Action, a human rights organization based in Toronto and Washington, DC, released a report on Feb. 20 documenting killings and other abuses carried out since late 2009 during land disputes between campesinos and major landowners in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. The 64-page report, “Human Rights Violations by US-backed Honduran Special Forces Unit,” finds that soldiers from the Honduran military’s 15th Battalion are directly implicated in at least 34 abuses, including “kidnappings, killings, threats, torture and abuse of authority,” according to the report’s author, Annie Bird.
Since 2008 or earlier, Bird says, the battalion has “received assistance and training from the Special Operations Command South (SOCSOUTH) of the United States Armed Forces.” Honduran media have reported that Spanish and Israeli special forces have also trained the soldiers; local informants say Colombian and Panamanian trainers have been participating as well.
Based on dozens of interviews and on reports from the Honduran media and human rights groups, Bird compiled a list of at least 88 campesinos killed since January 2010, including two killed on Feb. 16, right before the report’s release [see Update #1164]. An additional five people were apparently killed because they were mistaken for campesinos. According to the report, “at least 77” of the campesino deaths “clearly have the characteristics of death squad killings, contradicting reports from the Honduran government human rights commission CONADEH [the National Human Rights Commission] and US State Department that characterize the killings as the result of ‘confrontations.’” Bird also cites as many as 13 killings of security guards employed by the big landowners, noting that many of the guards are themselves campesinos; there are suspicions that some of these killings were carried out by other security forces.
In announcing the report, Rights Action wrote that the “vast majority of the killings and other violations that have been perpetrated in Bajo Aguán since 2010 have not been investigated, generating a level of impunity that suggests complicity between state and local authorities and those responsible for the killings and other abuses.” The group asked for readers to “send copies of this information, and your own letters, to your Canadian and American politicians (MPs, Congress members and senators) and to your own media.” (Rights Action 2/20/13)
*3. Mexico: Juárez Rights Activist Seeks Asylum in US
Mexican human rights activist Karla Castañeda Alvarado applied for political asylum in the US on Feb. 13 after secretly leaving her home in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua with four of her children. US authorities have granted her six months to provide documentation to justify her application. The Committee of Mothers and Relatives of Disappeared Young Women, in which Castañeda was active, said it was better for her to seek asylum, noting the example of activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, who was shot dead by an unidentified man on Dec. 16, 2010, as she was protesting in front of the main government office in the state capital, also named Chihuahua [see Update #1061].
Castañeda started her political activity after her daughter Cinthia Jacobeth, then 13 years old, disappeared in Juárez on Oct. 24, 2008. This January Castañeda was part of a 400-km walk by members of the Committee of Mothers to the state capital to present a petition to Gov. César Duarte Jáquez. The governor left for the southeastern state of Chiapas--to participate in the launching of a “National Crusade Against Hunger”--before the activists arrived. Duarte finally met with the committee in Juárez on Feb. 2 and agreed to some of their proposals for fighting the disappearances. However, after the meeting Castañeda was subjected to harassment by the authorities. Municipal police agents raided her home on Feb. 4; unidentified men attempted to enter her yard at about 3 am on Feb. 6; and state police and agents from the prosecutors’ office went to her house on Feb. 9 and told her mother-in-law that Castañeda was getting “too deep” in the search for her daughter.
Human rights organizations say some 200 women, most of them young, have disappeared in Juárez since 1993, in addition to several hundred women known or presumed to have been murdered. The number of disappeared may be higher, since some families probably don’t report the disappearances for fear of reprisals. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/18/13; Desinformemonos (Mexico) 2/18/13)
*4. Dominican Republic: Protesters Demand Review of Barrick Contract
Dozens of Dominican activists demonstrated outside the Supreme Court building in Santo Domingo on Feb. 18 to protest a contract the government signed with the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation for the Pueblo Viejo gold mine in Cotuí in the central province of Sánchez Ramírez. The group called for the court to declare the agreement unconstitutional. Critics say the Dominican Republic will only receive a fraction of the proceeds from the mine while the country will be left with the job of repairing the environmental damage [see Update #1163]. Opposition deputy Juan Hubieres, who was leading the protest, charged that the government of former president Leonel Fernández (1996-2000, 2004-2012) received US$37.5 million in 2007 to repair the damage caused by the previous management of the mine, the state enterprise Rosario Dominicana, and eventually collected a total of US$75 million. Fernández “will have to explain to the country in what way this has been employed,” Hubieres said.
Other demonstrators protested a plan by current president Danilo Medina to recognize titles to properties at the Bahía de las Aguilas beach and in other parts of the Jaragua ecological reserve, located in the southwestern province of Pedernales. The government says private use of the properties for tourism will help develop the impoverished province, but opponents insist that the titles were obtained fraudulently in 1995 and 1996 from then-director of the Dominican Agrarian Institute Jaime Rodríguez, who was arrested but was never tried. The protesters cut up a cake in the shape of the Dominican Republic to dramatize the way authorities are dividing up the national territory, they said. (El Diario-La Prensa (New York) 2/19/13 from correspondent; El Día (Santo Domingo) 2/20/13)
*5. Haiti: Duvalier and UN Blow Off Victims’ Claims--Again
On Feb. 21 former Haitian “president for life” Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”) Duvalier (1971-1986) once again defied an order to appear before an appeals court in Port-au-Prince that is considering whether he can be criminally charged for human rights violations committed during his regime. Duvalier had refused to appear in the court twice before, on Jan. 31 and Feb. 7 [see Update #1163]. Duvalier’s defense attorney, Reynold Georges, said the former dictator’s presence was unnecessary because he had filed an appeal with the Supreme Court. Georges himself defied the court by arriving 90 minutes late. “I don’t lose,” Georges announced. “I’m Haiti’s Johnnie Cochran.” The three-judge appeals panel responded by ordering the public prosecutor to have Duvalier escorted to the court by Feb. 28.
Some human rights advocates considered the judges’ order a victory. Reed Brody, a legal consultant with Human Rights Watch (HRW), called it “a chink in [Duvalier’s] armor of impunity.” “This isn’t a victory yet, but it’s been a long struggle,” Collective Against Impunity coordinator Danièle Magloire said on Feb. 22. Still, “many doubt the government [of President Michel Martelly] wants to put Duvalier on trial,” Miami Herald correspondent Jacqueline Charles wrote. “Some of the top government posts are held by supporters of the regime, with the newly appointed minister of interior [David Bazile] also being the head of Duvalier’s political party.” (MH 2/21/13 from correspondent; Associated Press 2/21/13 via CTV News (Canada) 2/21/13; AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/22/13)
On the same day, Feb. 21, United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced through a spokesperson that the organization has no legal liability for a cholera epidemic caused in October 2010 by poor sanitation at a United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) military base in the Central Plateau. The UN's position is based on section 29 of the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN. The Feb. 21 announcement was in response to a petition filed in November 2011 by the Boston-based Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH) and its Haitian affiliate, the Bureau of International Lawyers (BAI), for compensation on behalf of 5,000 victims of the epidemic [see Update #1105]. IJDH staff attorney Nicole Philips called the UN decision “all very political” and noted that “[I]f this had been a corporation, and if it had been an environmental spill, there would have been liability.” “The United Nations can’t have humanity and impunity at the same time,” BAI managing attorney Mario Joseph said.
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence on the origin of the epidemic, Ban has repeatedly refused to acknowledge the UN’s responsibility. According to the Haitian Ministry of Public Health, as of the end of January 7,824 people had died of the disease and 350,000 had been hospitalized. UN spokespeople stressed that the organization has spent some $118 million to fight the epidemic. (AlterPresse 2/21/13; The Guardian (UK) 2/21/13 from correspondents) The UN’s budget for the MINUSTAH troops and police agents this fiscal year, July 2012 through June 2013, is currently set at $648.394 million. (MINUSTAH Facts and Figures, UN website accessed 2/25/13)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Elections 2012: What Now? (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2013/2/23/elections-2012-what-now
Think there's no alternative? Latin America has a few
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/19/no-alternative-latin-america-has-a-few
The Latin American Exception
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175650/
Argentina Profunda: Extractivism and Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/4138-argentina-profunda-extractivism-and-resistance
Chile: From a Social Earthquake to a Political Tsunami
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/9046
Tough Questions for Chile as Ongoing Protests Stall Patagonian Dam Project
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/4142-tough-questions-for-chile-as-ongoing-protests-stall-patagonian-dam-project
Bolivia showdown with Chile over border incident
http://ww4report.com/node/12018
Bolivia: growing Aymara dissension on Altiplano
http://ww4report.com/node/12019
Quinoa: To Buy or Not to Buy…Is this the right question? (Bolivia)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/9070
Peru: mining company rejects Conga referendum
http://ww4report.com/node/12020
Ecuador's Rafael Correa Re-elected by a Wide Margin
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4135-ecuadors-rafael-correa-re-elected-by-a-wide-margin
Interview with Alberto Acosta: The "Citizen Revolution", the Extractive Model and the Left Critiques (Ecuador)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4139-interview-with-alberto-acosta-the-qcitizen-revolutionq-the-extractive-model-and-the-left-critiques
CONAIE in the Face of Ecuador's Election Results
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4145-conaie-in-the-face-of-ecuadors-election-results
Ecuador: “First Reflections on a Defeat” for Correa's Leftist Opposition
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4144-ecuador-first-reflections-on-a-defeat-for-correas-leftist-opposition
Ecuador left opposition reacts to Correa re-election
http://ww4report.com/node/12021
Washington Post, Miami Herald Issue Embarrassingly Erroneous Editorials on Ecuador
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/washington-post-miami-herald-issue-embarrassingly-erroneous-editorials-on-ecuador
Colombia: Riot Police Attack Communities Protesting Oil Exploitation in Arauca
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4140-colombia-riot-police-attack-communities-protesting-oil-exploitation-in-arauca-
Colombia: campesino strike in oil zone
http://ww4report.com/node/12026
Colombia: land restitution advances
http://ww4report.com/node/12010
"Lost tribe" confirmed in Colombian Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/12023
Colombia: tribunal rules for Peace Community
http://ww4report.com/node/12022
Return of Chavez Sparks Flurry of Criticism from Venezuela’s Opposition
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7854
What if The New York Times Covered the United States Like Venezuela?
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/16/what-if-new-york-times-covered-united-states-venezuela
Reporting on Romer’s Charter Cities: How the Media Sanitize Honduras’s Brutal Regime
http://nacla.org/news/2013/2/19/reporting-romer%E2%80%99s-charter-cities-how-media-sanitize-honduras%E2%80%99s-brutal-regime
Guatemala’s Deadly Lifeline: Over-Reliance on the United States
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/4143-guatemalas-deadly-lifeline-over-reliance-on-the-united-states
Can Guatemala’s Long Struggle for Justice Provide Lessons for Haiti?
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/21/can-guatemala%E2%80%99s-long-struggle-justice-provide-lessons-haiti
Mexico called to task over disappeared
http://ww4report.com/node/12013
Can Vigilante Justice Save Mexico?
http://ww4report.com/node/12024
Showdown over Education Reform (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/february232013/mexico-education.php
Update: Autopsy Paints Troubling Picture in Border Patrol Shooting (Mexico)
http://nacla.org/blog/2013/2/22/update-autopsy-paints-troubling-picture-border-patrol-shooting
Nervousness and lack of transparency surround three new mining permits (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2013/2/20/nervousness-and-lack-of-transparency-surround-three-new-mini.html
Both Duvalier and the UN Continue to Try to Dodge Responsibility
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/both-duvalier-and-the-un-continue-to-try-to-dodge-responsibility
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://wagingnonviolence.org/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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Monday, September 3, 2012
WNU #1143: Mapuche Prisoners on Hunger Strike Again
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1143, September 2, 2012
1. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/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. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
As of Aug. 31 six Mapuche activists were on hunger strike to protest what they consider the Chilean government’s repression of struggles by the indigenous group, the country’s largest. The strikers include five prisoners in Angol, in the southern region of Araucanía, and Pascual Catrilaf, a machi (healer and spiritual authority) who lives in Temuco, also in Araucanía. A seventh striker, Mewlen Huencho, a werkén (spokesperson) for the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, ended her six-day fast at the Santiago offices of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) after speaking to UNICEF officials on Aug. 31.
The five prisoners in Angol are from the Wente Winkul Mapu community in Ercilla commune, Araucanía, a village where an agent of the carabineros militarized police was fatally wounded in April [see Update #1124]. They began their open-ended hunger strike on Aug. 27 to protest what they called the “discriminatory, racist and political” prison sentences of 11 years and eight months that two of the prisoners-- Paulino Levipán Coyán and Daniel Levinao Montoya--were given by court in Angol on Aug. 13. They had been convicted of attempted homicide and illegal possession of firearms in an attack on carabineros near Chequenco, Araucanía, on Nov. 2, 2011; they are appealing the conviction.
In addition to demanding the annulment of the sentences for Levipán and Levinao, the hunger strikers called for adherence by the Chilean government to International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which protects the rights of indigenous peoples; an end to the use of protected witnesses in Mapuche cases; an end to raids on Mapuche communities; and the release of all political prisoners and the return of indigenous lands to the communities.
Mewlen Huencho began fasting on Aug. 25 after sitting in at the UNICEF office for a month to promote demands for the international organization to denounce police attacks on women, children and the elderly in Chile; the sit-in was precipitated by a July 23 raid by carabineros on the Temucuicui community in Araucanía in which two children were shot with pellets and badly injured [see Update #1138]. Huencho suspended her hunger strike after Tom Olsen, UNICEF Representative in Chile, promised to go to Ercilla and meet with Mapuche authorities the afternoon of Sept. 3.
Machi Pascual Catrilaf began his hunger strike in solidarity with the other protests on Aug. 27.
Mapuche activists charge that that the government uses excessive force and unjust applications of criminal law to repress their actions, with which they seek the return of ancestral lands now being exploited by timber companies and other businesses. Some 34 Mapuche prisoners participated in a liquids-only hunger strike in the summer and fall of 2010, some for more than two months, and four Mapuche prisoners fasted for almost three months in the spring of 2011 [see Updates #1052, 1083]. Maricheweu International, a group in solidarity with Mapuche struggles, says letters to “convey your support and encouragement to the hunger-strikers, and to request information on their state of health” can be sent to UNICEF’s Thierry Lemaresquier (infochile@unicef.org) and the Angol prison authorities (bessie.castillo@gendarmeria.cl). (TeleSUR 8/28/12; Maricheweu International 8/29/12, 8/31/12; País Mapuche (Chile) 8/27/12, 8/30/12; Terra (Peru) 8/13/12)
*2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
A Honduran campesino, Marvin Orlando Rivera Mejía, was killed around 6 am on Sept. 1 during a confrontation between security guards and a campesino group at the Boleros estate, at the edge of Trujillo in the northern department of Colón. The victim was reportedly not involved in the confrontation and was shot unintentionally. A guard, José Reyes González, was hit by a bullet in the back and was taken to a clinic in the city of San Pedro Sula. The campesinos fled when police and soldiers arrived; an unknown number were wounded. Departmental police chief José Mejía claimed the campesino group was heavily armed.
Apparently the campesinos were attempting to occupy land on the estate. Campesinos have taken over thousands of hectares in the region, the Lower Aguán Valley, since late 2009 in an effort to get possession of land they say big landowners acquired illegally during the 1990s [see Update #1142]. Vitalino Álvarez, a spokesperson for the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), said tensions would continue in the countryside unless the government treated the land problem seriously on a national level. Until now, he said, César Ham, the minister in charge of the National Agrarian Institute (INA), has only provided palliatives by arranging to transfer land ownership to members of some big campesino groups like MUCA. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 9/2/12)
Rivera Mejía’s violent death was the fifth in the Aguán region in less than a week, and the second that appeared to be related to the land struggle. On Aug. 27 José Braulio Díaz López, secretary of the campesino group Tranvío, a MUCA affiliate, was shot dead by heavily armed men near the city of Tocoa as he was checking a problem with his car. Mario Roberto Hernández, who was helping him with the car, was wounded. According to MUCA, the men who shot Díaz were driving a vehicle belonging to security guards employed by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, a major landowner in the Aguán and one of the richest people in Honduras. MUCA said the national police removed all of Díaz’s possessions from the scene, including legal documents relating to the transfer of land to campesinos; as of Aug. 28 the police had not handed the documents over to MUCA.
Three other killings that occurred in the region from Aug. 27 to Aug. 29 seemed to be the result of common crimes or personal disputes, but they undercut government claims that it was limiting violence by banning firearms in the Aguán. Two young married people were killed while at their home in Sabá, and an unidentified man was beaten to death with a stone in Tocoa’s San Isidro neighborhood. Also in Tocoa, a 15-year-old girl was wounded by gunfire intended for someone else, and three members of one family were wounded in their home in a drive-by shooting.
One other shooting may have been politically motivated. A compesino identified as Daniel Sosa was wounded when a MUCA vehicle was shot up near the San Isidro African palm plantation, which is claimed by Facussé. (MUCA statement 8/28/12 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras); La Tribuna 8/29/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
The case of a pregnant 16-year-old Dominican with leukemia has reignited controversy over the amended 2010 Constitution’s Article 37, which holds “that the right to life is inviolable from conception until death.” The anti-abortion amendment was part of a series of constitutional changes pushed by rightwing forces; other amendments in the 2010 document ban same-sex marriage and limit citizenship to people with Dominican parents, in effect leaving many Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless [see Update #1141].
The pregnant teenager—called “Esperanza” or “Esperancita” in the media; her name was withheld because of her age—entered the Teachers’ Medical Insurance (Semma) hospital in Santo Domingo on July 4. The chemotherapy used to treat leukemia was likely to harm the fetus she was carrying, but the doctors refused to perform a therapeutic abortion from fear of being prosecuted under Article 37. They apparently also feared prosecution if the fetus died as a result of the chemotherapy, which they failed to provide until forced to by public pressure 20 days after the patient was admitted.
“Esperanza” didn’t respond to the chemical treatment, and her body rejected a blood transfusion on Aug. 16, according to the hospital’s Dr. Antonio Cabrera, who said she had a miscarriage the morning of Aug. 17 and then died of cardiac arrest. Since autopsy results weren’t immediately released, it was unclear whether the miscarriage was the direct cause of the girl’s death or what her chances of survival would have been if she’d had an abortion or had been given chemotherapy at the beginning of July. According to her mother, Rosa Hernández, “Esperanza” had become hopeful about her chances of recovery and had begun talking about the start of the new school year.
Feminist groups in the Dominican Republic and abroad blamed Article 37 for the girl’s death. An Aug. 18 statement by the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (RSMLAC, for its initials in Spanish) said the treatment of “Esperanza” “was a form of unacceptable violence and torture” and called her death “a femicide carried out by political-religious alliances.” Hernández, an impoverished employee of the school system, had pleaded for a therapeutic abortion. “My daughter’s life is what’s most important,” she said. “I know that [abortion] is a sin and is illegal, but my daughter’s life comes first.” (CNN 8/17/12; RSMLAC statement 8/18/12; Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinamerica y el Caribe (SEMLAC) 8/20/12 via Diario Rotativo (Querétaro, Mexico); Adital (Brazil) 8/30/12)
*4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
Mexico’s 2012 presidential election came to a close on Aug. 31 when the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Republic (TEPJF) officially declared former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto the winner of the July 1 vote. One day earlier the tribunal had dismissed charges by the coalition backing center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador that Peña Nieto’s 6.62% lead over López Obrador was the result of fraud, vote buying and media manipulation by Peña Nieto’s centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party from 1929 to 2000 [see Update #1137]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/31/12, 9/1/12)
These results were expected, and #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”), the student movement that formed suddenly in the spring to oppose what its supporters called the “imposition” of the PRI candidate, had already planned a “funeral for democracy” to be held in Mexico City the afternoon of Aug. 31. Starting from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) campus, the protesters, some carrying cardboard coffins, marched through the city for about 10 km, tying up traffic at various points. About 5,000 people participated, far less than the estimated 50,000 protesters who came out for demonstrations against the PRI in the week after the July 1 vote. (LJ 9/1/12)
*5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
In an unusual and dramatic protest against lax gun control laws in the US, relatives of victims of drug-related violence in Mexico destroyed a .357 Magnum pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle in Houston’s Guadalupe Plaza Park on Aug. 27 and buried the remains in cement. The protesters were part of a Caravan for Peace that started a month-long tour of the US in San Diego on Aug. 12 to raise awareness of the US role in a “drug war” that has cost some 50,000 lives in Mexico since the beginning of 2007. The tour is to end in Washington, DC on Sept. 12.
Two caravan supporters bought the firearms at a High Caliber Gun & Knife Show in Pasadena, Texas, on Aug. 25 to show how easily gun smugglers can purchase weapons in Texas; the US is the main source of illegal guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico. The pistol was purchased in a five-minute transaction by a woman with a foreign accent who was not asked for identification. A man with US citizenship bought the AK-47, the favorite weapon of Mexican drug traffickers, after a 10-minute background check.
The Caravan for Peace was organized by the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity (MPJD), an organization started in 2011 by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, whose son Juan Francisco was killed in late March of that year, apparently by gang members [see Update #1079]. The movement opposes the militarized fight against the drug cartels started by President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, with funding and political support from the US government, shortly after he took office in December 2006.
Sicilia sawed the barrels of the weapons in Houston with an electric metal saw provided by an undocumented Mexican immigrant who works in Texas as a welder. Then other relatives of victims smashed the weapons with sledgehammers.
Araceli Rodríguez wept as she put fragments of the guns in a wooden box and buried them in cement. Her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, a Mexican federal police agent stationed in Hidalgo, Michoacán, was kidnapped in November 2009, apparently by members of the so-called “Michoacán Family” drug cartel; his body was never found. She said after the protest that for her the burial of the guns symbolized the Christian burial she would never be able to give her son in Mexico. (Presente.org video 8/27/12; Fellowship of Reconciliation blog 8/28/12; Vanguardia (Mexico) 8/30/12)
In related news, the Mexican daily La Jornada reported on Aug. 28 that the two US agents wounded in a shooting incident near Tres Marías in Morelos on Aug. 24 [see Update #1142] were from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), not the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Citing unidentified “official sources close to the investigation,” the newspaper also said the attack was carried out by five vehicles, not four, and that the shooting began after the assailants were able to see the victims close up. The agents were driving a heavily armored US embassy car, a Toyota Land Cruiser, on their way to a Navy training facility, apparently to provide instruction to marines involved in the “war on drugs.” According to later reports, the US agents survived only because of the car’s armor.
While the first reports said only federal police agents were implicated in the attack, there are indications that members of a criminal organization were directly involved. The official sources cited 18 attackers in civilian clothes, but only 12 federal police agents have been detained so far. (LJ 8/28/12, 8/29/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/Haiti, US/immigration
Before Occupy Wall Street, there was La Victoria (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3835-before-occupy-wall-street-there-was-la-victoria
Brazil: Supreme Court Judge Overturns Suspension of Belo Monte Dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3841-brazil-supreme-court-judge-overturns-suspension-of-belo-monte-dam
Brazil: quilombo threatened by rancher gunmen
http://ww4report.com/node/11452
Brazil: judge agrees to first war crimes trial for members of dictatorship
http://ww4report.com/node/11458
Bolivia: TIPNIS Consulta on Hold, Communities Reject Militarization
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/bolivia-tipnis-consulta-hold-communities-reject-militarization
Women In the Forefront of Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3836-women-in-the-forefront-of-bolivias-tipnis-conflict
Ecuador not to deport Belarussian whistle-blower
http://ww4report.com/node/11415#comment-345463
Colombian Ex-General Sentenced in Death Squad Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3840-colombian-ex-general-sentenced-in-death-squad-case
Colombia's ex-security chief pleads guilty to para collaboration
http://ww4report.com/node/11462
Water and Sanitation Socialism in Caracas: Interview with Victor Díaz (Venezuela)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3834-water-and-sanitation-socialism-in-caracas-interview-with-victor-diaz
41 Killed in Gas Explosion in Venezuela, 3 Days of National Mourning Declared
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7206
Venezuela: refinery disaster politicized
http://ww4report.com/node/11461
Venezuela: Yanomami massacred by outlaw miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11451
El Salvador: Killed in Cold Blood on the Banks of the River at El Calabozo
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3837-el-salvador-killed-in-cold-blood-on-the-banks-of-the-river-at-el-calabozo
Media Ignore New Report Questioning U.S. Role in Honduras Drug Raid
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/28/media-ingore-new-report-questioning-us-role-honduras-drug-raid
Guatemala: Swiss arrest ex-police commander
http://ww4report.com/node/11459
Goldcorp Organizes Junket for Canadian Parliamentarians to Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3839-goldcorp-organizes-junket-for-canadian-parliamentarians-to-guatemala
Outer Darkness in Coatzacoalcos: The Plight of Migrants in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3842-outer-darkness-in-coatzacoalcos-the-plight-of-migrants-in-mexico
Mexico’s Independent Unions Prepare to Confront the Pri
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1488
Mexican Miners Reelect Napoleón Gómez Urrutia; Chart Course
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1489
Life in a Border Town Marred by Tension (Dominican Republic/Haiti)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/8/27/life-border-town-marred-tension
Families Divided: Dateline Nogales (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/families-divided-dateline-nogales
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1143, September 2, 2012
1. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/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. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
As of Aug. 31 six Mapuche activists were on hunger strike to protest what they consider the Chilean government’s repression of struggles by the indigenous group, the country’s largest. The strikers include five prisoners in Angol, in the southern region of Araucanía, and Pascual Catrilaf, a machi (healer and spiritual authority) who lives in Temuco, also in Araucanía. A seventh striker, Mewlen Huencho, a werkén (spokesperson) for the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, ended her six-day fast at the Santiago offices of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) after speaking to UNICEF officials on Aug. 31.
The five prisoners in Angol are from the Wente Winkul Mapu community in Ercilla commune, Araucanía, a village where an agent of the carabineros militarized police was fatally wounded in April [see Update #1124]. They began their open-ended hunger strike on Aug. 27 to protest what they called the “discriminatory, racist and political” prison sentences of 11 years and eight months that two of the prisoners-- Paulino Levipán Coyán and Daniel Levinao Montoya--were given by court in Angol on Aug. 13. They had been convicted of attempted homicide and illegal possession of firearms in an attack on carabineros near Chequenco, Araucanía, on Nov. 2, 2011; they are appealing the conviction.
In addition to demanding the annulment of the sentences for Levipán and Levinao, the hunger strikers called for adherence by the Chilean government to International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which protects the rights of indigenous peoples; an end to the use of protected witnesses in Mapuche cases; an end to raids on Mapuche communities; and the release of all political prisoners and the return of indigenous lands to the communities.
Mewlen Huencho began fasting on Aug. 25 after sitting in at the UNICEF office for a month to promote demands for the international organization to denounce police attacks on women, children and the elderly in Chile; the sit-in was precipitated by a July 23 raid by carabineros on the Temucuicui community in Araucanía in which two children were shot with pellets and badly injured [see Update #1138]. Huencho suspended her hunger strike after Tom Olsen, UNICEF Representative in Chile, promised to go to Ercilla and meet with Mapuche authorities the afternoon of Sept. 3.
Machi Pascual Catrilaf began his hunger strike in solidarity with the other protests on Aug. 27.
Mapuche activists charge that that the government uses excessive force and unjust applications of criminal law to repress their actions, with which they seek the return of ancestral lands now being exploited by timber companies and other businesses. Some 34 Mapuche prisoners participated in a liquids-only hunger strike in the summer and fall of 2010, some for more than two months, and four Mapuche prisoners fasted for almost three months in the spring of 2011 [see Updates #1052, 1083]. Maricheweu International, a group in solidarity with Mapuche struggles, says letters to “convey your support and encouragement to the hunger-strikers, and to request information on their state of health” can be sent to UNICEF’s Thierry Lemaresquier (infochile@unicef.org) and the Angol prison authorities (bessie.castillo@gendarmeria.cl). (TeleSUR 8/28/12; Maricheweu International 8/29/12, 8/31/12; País Mapuche (Chile) 8/27/12, 8/30/12; Terra (Peru) 8/13/12)
*2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
A Honduran campesino, Marvin Orlando Rivera Mejía, was killed around 6 am on Sept. 1 during a confrontation between security guards and a campesino group at the Boleros estate, at the edge of Trujillo in the northern department of Colón. The victim was reportedly not involved in the confrontation and was shot unintentionally. A guard, José Reyes González, was hit by a bullet in the back and was taken to a clinic in the city of San Pedro Sula. The campesinos fled when police and soldiers arrived; an unknown number were wounded. Departmental police chief José Mejía claimed the campesino group was heavily armed.
Apparently the campesinos were attempting to occupy land on the estate. Campesinos have taken over thousands of hectares in the region, the Lower Aguán Valley, since late 2009 in an effort to get possession of land they say big landowners acquired illegally during the 1990s [see Update #1142]. Vitalino Álvarez, a spokesperson for the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), said tensions would continue in the countryside unless the government treated the land problem seriously on a national level. Until now, he said, César Ham, the minister in charge of the National Agrarian Institute (INA), has only provided palliatives by arranging to transfer land ownership to members of some big campesino groups like MUCA. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 9/2/12)
Rivera Mejía’s violent death was the fifth in the Aguán region in less than a week, and the second that appeared to be related to the land struggle. On Aug. 27 José Braulio Díaz López, secretary of the campesino group Tranvío, a MUCA affiliate, was shot dead by heavily armed men near the city of Tocoa as he was checking a problem with his car. Mario Roberto Hernández, who was helping him with the car, was wounded. According to MUCA, the men who shot Díaz were driving a vehicle belonging to security guards employed by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, a major landowner in the Aguán and one of the richest people in Honduras. MUCA said the national police removed all of Díaz’s possessions from the scene, including legal documents relating to the transfer of land to campesinos; as of Aug. 28 the police had not handed the documents over to MUCA.
Three other killings that occurred in the region from Aug. 27 to Aug. 29 seemed to be the result of common crimes or personal disputes, but they undercut government claims that it was limiting violence by banning firearms in the Aguán. Two young married people were killed while at their home in Sabá, and an unidentified man was beaten to death with a stone in Tocoa’s San Isidro neighborhood. Also in Tocoa, a 15-year-old girl was wounded by gunfire intended for someone else, and three members of one family were wounded in their home in a drive-by shooting.
One other shooting may have been politically motivated. A compesino identified as Daniel Sosa was wounded when a MUCA vehicle was shot up near the San Isidro African palm plantation, which is claimed by Facussé. (MUCA statement 8/28/12 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras); La Tribuna 8/29/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
The case of a pregnant 16-year-old Dominican with leukemia has reignited controversy over the amended 2010 Constitution’s Article 37, which holds “that the right to life is inviolable from conception until death.” The anti-abortion amendment was part of a series of constitutional changes pushed by rightwing forces; other amendments in the 2010 document ban same-sex marriage and limit citizenship to people with Dominican parents, in effect leaving many Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless [see Update #1141].
The pregnant teenager—called “Esperanza” or “Esperancita” in the media; her name was withheld because of her age—entered the Teachers’ Medical Insurance (Semma) hospital in Santo Domingo on July 4. The chemotherapy used to treat leukemia was likely to harm the fetus she was carrying, but the doctors refused to perform a therapeutic abortion from fear of being prosecuted under Article 37. They apparently also feared prosecution if the fetus died as a result of the chemotherapy, which they failed to provide until forced to by public pressure 20 days after the patient was admitted.
“Esperanza” didn’t respond to the chemical treatment, and her body rejected a blood transfusion on Aug. 16, according to the hospital’s Dr. Antonio Cabrera, who said she had a miscarriage the morning of Aug. 17 and then died of cardiac arrest. Since autopsy results weren’t immediately released, it was unclear whether the miscarriage was the direct cause of the girl’s death or what her chances of survival would have been if she’d had an abortion or had been given chemotherapy at the beginning of July. According to her mother, Rosa Hernández, “Esperanza” had become hopeful about her chances of recovery and had begun talking about the start of the new school year.
Feminist groups in the Dominican Republic and abroad blamed Article 37 for the girl’s death. An Aug. 18 statement by the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (RSMLAC, for its initials in Spanish) said the treatment of “Esperanza” “was a form of unacceptable violence and torture” and called her death “a femicide carried out by political-religious alliances.” Hernández, an impoverished employee of the school system, had pleaded for a therapeutic abortion. “My daughter’s life is what’s most important,” she said. “I know that [abortion] is a sin and is illegal, but my daughter’s life comes first.” (CNN 8/17/12; RSMLAC statement 8/18/12; Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinamerica y el Caribe (SEMLAC) 8/20/12 via Diario Rotativo (Querétaro, Mexico); Adital (Brazil) 8/30/12)
*4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
Mexico’s 2012 presidential election came to a close on Aug. 31 when the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Republic (TEPJF) officially declared former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto the winner of the July 1 vote. One day earlier the tribunal had dismissed charges by the coalition backing center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador that Peña Nieto’s 6.62% lead over López Obrador was the result of fraud, vote buying and media manipulation by Peña Nieto’s centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party from 1929 to 2000 [see Update #1137]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/31/12, 9/1/12)
These results were expected, and #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”), the student movement that formed suddenly in the spring to oppose what its supporters called the “imposition” of the PRI candidate, had already planned a “funeral for democracy” to be held in Mexico City the afternoon of Aug. 31. Starting from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) campus, the protesters, some carrying cardboard coffins, marched through the city for about 10 km, tying up traffic at various points. About 5,000 people participated, far less than the estimated 50,000 protesters who came out for demonstrations against the PRI in the week after the July 1 vote. (LJ 9/1/12)
*5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
In an unusual and dramatic protest against lax gun control laws in the US, relatives of victims of drug-related violence in Mexico destroyed a .357 Magnum pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle in Houston’s Guadalupe Plaza Park on Aug. 27 and buried the remains in cement. The protesters were part of a Caravan for Peace that started a month-long tour of the US in San Diego on Aug. 12 to raise awareness of the US role in a “drug war” that has cost some 50,000 lives in Mexico since the beginning of 2007. The tour is to end in Washington, DC on Sept. 12.
Two caravan supporters bought the firearms at a High Caliber Gun & Knife Show in Pasadena, Texas, on Aug. 25 to show how easily gun smugglers can purchase weapons in Texas; the US is the main source of illegal guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico. The pistol was purchased in a five-minute transaction by a woman with a foreign accent who was not asked for identification. A man with US citizenship bought the AK-47, the favorite weapon of Mexican drug traffickers, after a 10-minute background check.
The Caravan for Peace was organized by the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity (MPJD), an organization started in 2011 by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, whose son Juan Francisco was killed in late March of that year, apparently by gang members [see Update #1079]. The movement opposes the militarized fight against the drug cartels started by President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, with funding and political support from the US government, shortly after he took office in December 2006.
Sicilia sawed the barrels of the weapons in Houston with an electric metal saw provided by an undocumented Mexican immigrant who works in Texas as a welder. Then other relatives of victims smashed the weapons with sledgehammers.
Araceli Rodríguez wept as she put fragments of the guns in a wooden box and buried them in cement. Her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, a Mexican federal police agent stationed in Hidalgo, Michoacán, was kidnapped in November 2009, apparently by members of the so-called “Michoacán Family” drug cartel; his body was never found. She said after the protest that for her the burial of the guns symbolized the Christian burial she would never be able to give her son in Mexico. (Presente.org video 8/27/12; Fellowship of Reconciliation blog 8/28/12; Vanguardia (Mexico) 8/30/12)
In related news, the Mexican daily La Jornada reported on Aug. 28 that the two US agents wounded in a shooting incident near Tres Marías in Morelos on Aug. 24 [see Update #1142] were from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), not the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Citing unidentified “official sources close to the investigation,” the newspaper also said the attack was carried out by five vehicles, not four, and that the shooting began after the assailants were able to see the victims close up. The agents were driving a heavily armored US embassy car, a Toyota Land Cruiser, on their way to a Navy training facility, apparently to provide instruction to marines involved in the “war on drugs.” According to later reports, the US agents survived only because of the car’s armor.
While the first reports said only federal police agents were implicated in the attack, there are indications that members of a criminal organization were directly involved. The official sources cited 18 attackers in civilian clothes, but only 12 federal police agents have been detained so far. (LJ 8/28/12, 8/29/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/Haiti, US/immigration
Before Occupy Wall Street, there was La Victoria (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3835-before-occupy-wall-street-there-was-la-victoria
Brazil: Supreme Court Judge Overturns Suspension of Belo Monte Dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3841-brazil-supreme-court-judge-overturns-suspension-of-belo-monte-dam
Brazil: quilombo threatened by rancher gunmen
http://ww4report.com/node/11452
Brazil: judge agrees to first war crimes trial for members of dictatorship
http://ww4report.com/node/11458
Bolivia: TIPNIS Consulta on Hold, Communities Reject Militarization
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/bolivia-tipnis-consulta-hold-communities-reject-militarization
Women In the Forefront of Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3836-women-in-the-forefront-of-bolivias-tipnis-conflict
Ecuador not to deport Belarussian whistle-blower
http://ww4report.com/node/11415#comment-345463
Colombian Ex-General Sentenced in Death Squad Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3840-colombian-ex-general-sentenced-in-death-squad-case
Colombia's ex-security chief pleads guilty to para collaboration
http://ww4report.com/node/11462
Water and Sanitation Socialism in Caracas: Interview with Victor Díaz (Venezuela)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3834-water-and-sanitation-socialism-in-caracas-interview-with-victor-diaz
41 Killed in Gas Explosion in Venezuela, 3 Days of National Mourning Declared
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7206
Venezuela: refinery disaster politicized
http://ww4report.com/node/11461
Venezuela: Yanomami massacred by outlaw miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11451
El Salvador: Killed in Cold Blood on the Banks of the River at El Calabozo
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3837-el-salvador-killed-in-cold-blood-on-the-banks-of-the-river-at-el-calabozo
Media Ignore New Report Questioning U.S. Role in Honduras Drug Raid
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/28/media-ingore-new-report-questioning-us-role-honduras-drug-raid
Guatemala: Swiss arrest ex-police commander
http://ww4report.com/node/11459
Goldcorp Organizes Junket for Canadian Parliamentarians to Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3839-goldcorp-organizes-junket-for-canadian-parliamentarians-to-guatemala
Outer Darkness in Coatzacoalcos: The Plight of Migrants in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3842-outer-darkness-in-coatzacoalcos-the-plight-of-migrants-in-mexico
Mexico’s Independent Unions Prepare to Confront the Pri
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1488
Mexican Miners Reelect Napoleón Gómez Urrutia; Chart Course
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1489
Life in a Border Town Marred by Tension (Dominican Republic/Haiti)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/8/27/life-border-town-marred-tension
Families Divided: Dateline Nogales (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/families-divided-dateline-nogales
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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