Despite "the anti-capitalist discourse of Brother Evo," Pablo Regalsky charged that "foreign capital" still often plays a decisive role in Bolivia's development policies.
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
April 20, 2010
[World War 4 Report editor and WBAI host Bill Weinberg is in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for the World People's Conference on Climate Change. He plans to post daily on-the-scene reports.]
As the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC) convened for a second day April 20 at Tiquipaya, outside the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba, Aymara indigenous leaders held their own dissident "Table 18" on social conflicts related to climate change. Barred by organizers from the official summit grounds on the campus of the University del Valle (Univalle), Aymara elders of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Cullasuyu (CONAMAQ) and their allies convened the dissident forum in a Brazilian restaurant just off the campus.
Cleared of tables to make room for rows of chairs, the premises filled with pungent smoke as incense and coca leaves were ritually burned for the opening ceremony. With many drawn by the controversy, the unofficial Table 18 was as well-attended as the many tables held at the official proceedings on the campus--despite a contingent of UTOP, the national police anti-riot force, stationed at the restaurant's door. [...]
Read the full report:
http://www.ww4report.com/node/8550
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
WNU #1029: Honduras Government Settles With Campesinos
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1029, April 18, 2010
1. Honduras: Lobo Settles With Aguán Campesinos
2. Honduras: OAS Annual Report Cites Violations
3. Haiti: Government, UN Evict More Quake Victims
4. Haiti: Clinton Warns of Violence Like Mexico’s
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Honduras: Lobo Settles With Aguán Campesinos
On Apr. 18 Honduran president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa signed an agreement with the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) granting some 2,600 campesino families about 11,000 hectares of land in the lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras. MUCA has fought since 2001 for 20,000 hectares which the group says were bought illegally by three wealthy business owners, Miguel Facussé Barjum, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales. The agreement came after several months of heightened tension in the area, with four murders of MUCA members in March and April; around Apr. 11 Lobo’s government launched an unprecedented mobilization of soldiers and police agents into the area, with troops surrounding some campesino communities [see Update #1028].
Under the agreement the government is to grant the campesino families 3,000 hectares of land for planting African oil palm trees and 3,000 hectares of uncultivated land; within a year the government will turn over another 1,000 hectares for African palms and 4,000 hectares of uncultivated land. In exchange, the families will leave the private estates they have been occupying. Despite early reports, the government apparently didn’t agree to a withdrawal of the troops and police agents.
Government and MUCA negotiators worked out a preliminary agreement on Apr. 14 after a 14-hour bargaining session. All but three of the 28 cooperatives that make up the MUCA ratified the agreement on Apr. 17. The remaining cooperatives will continue with pending court actions to regain land that they claim should be theirs.
Hundreds of campesinos and other activists used the Apr. 18 signing ceremony, which took place in the colonial city of Trujillo in Colón department, to protest President Lobo’s rightwing policies. “Golpistas [coup perpetrators] out of the Aguán,” they chanted, referring to a June 28, 2009 coup d’état that removed then-president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales; current president Lobo backed the coup and was elected in a vote organized in November by the de facto government that replaced Zelaya. Protesters also repeated a demand of the grassroots resistance for a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution.
"This agreement isn’t a definitive solution to the conflict,” Rafael Alegría, who heads the local branch of the international campesino organization Vía Campesina, said on Apr. 14, “but it brings calm to the region.” The big landowners involved seemed less satisfied, although the government is apparently compensating them for any land taken from them. A few hours after the signing ceremony a report circulated that Miguel Facussé Barjum had filed a legal action against the president’s decision. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/14/10; Prensa Latina 4/14/20; Nicaragua y Más blog 4/18/10 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras))
*2. Honduras: OAS Annual Report Cites Violations
On Apr. 15 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued its 2009 report on human rights in the hemisphere. For the first time the IACHR included Honduras among the countries that it “believed warranted special attention.” The inclusion of Honduras is based on a report, “Honduras: Human Rights and the Coup d’État,” by an IACHR commission that visited Honduras in August 2009 to investigate the human rights situation following a June 28 military coup [see Update #1001].
According to an IACHR press release from Apr. 15, the commission “confirmed during its visit to Honduras that…there have been grave human rights violations, including deaths, arbitrary declaration of a state of siege, repression of public demonstrations using disproportionate force, criminalization of social protest, arbitrary arrests of thousands of people, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and poor conditions of detention, militarization of the territory, an increase in instances of racial discrimination, violations of the rights of women, serious and arbitrary restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, and grave violations of political rights.”
The four other countries cited in the 2009 report have been criticized in previous IACHR annual reports: Colombia for a “persistent pattern of violation of the rights to life and to humane treatment”; Cuba for “structural situations that seriously affect the full enjoyment of human rights”; Haiti for “structural situations that seriously affect the enjoyment of the fundamental rights of its inhabitants”; and Venezuela for problems including the absence of “conditions…for human rights defenders and journalists to freely perform their occupations.” The report also criticized the US for its 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. (Hoy Digital (Dominican Republic) 4/15/10 from EFE; IACHR press release 4/15/10, English and Spanish)
In remarks published on Apr. 16 the Honduran government’s national human rights commissioner Ramón Custodio [see Update #979] said the IACHR had the “bad faith to want to damage the interests of the Honduran state and people.” It has “stopped being an ethical organization,” he said. “It’s an organization that serves political interests. Its president is a Venezuelan professional of recognized political membership.” (La Tribuna (Honduras) 4/17/10) [Apparently Custodio was implying that IACHR president Luz Patricia Mejía Guerrero had acted in support of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, despite the report's criticisms of Venezuela.]
*3. Haiti: Government, UN Evict More Quake Victims
The Haitian government, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration (OIM) have been intensifying efforts to relocate Port-au-Prince area residents left homeless by a Jan. 12 earthquake and now living in as many as 900 improvised encampments in the capital and its suburbs. After having forcibly removed some 7,335 people from the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium the weekend of Apr. 9 [see Update #1028], on Apr. 12 the government said it was starting to relocate another 10,000 people.
The government opened a site it had prepared at Corail–Cesselesse, 20 km north of the city, on Apr. 12, and as of Apr. 16 it had moved 248 families, 896 individuals, there from a golf course in the upscale suburb of Pétionville. The OIM said it was expecting to move 2,500 people from an encampment in the Bourdon Valley in Port-au-Prince to a site in Tabarre Issa (apparently in the northwestern suburb of Tabarre).
According to the government, earthquake survivors needed to be moved to safer locations as the rainy season begins; it said the relocations were voluntary. But observers found that many of the homeless were unwilling to relocate and that the removals seemed to target improvised camps on private property that the owners wanted to put back into service. “We were told we had a week to leave, and we could go in Tabarre Issa,” Mathieu Thomson, who had been living in a tent near the Saint-Louis de Gonzague prep school, told the Agence France Presse (AFP) wire service. “But there's nothing there. No toilets, no showers.” According to the OIM, the Tabarre Issa site has sanitation services, schools, a community garden and a soccer field.
The site in Corail–Cesselesse is “isolated,” residents told the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GAAR), a Haitian nonprofit group, on Apr. 14 at “Camp KID,” where about 2,000 people were living at the entrance to Christ-Roi Street. People who were to be moved to Corail from the Pétionville golf course told GARR on Apr. 10 that they didn’t know how they would get to their schools and their jobs. “We’ll be far away from downtown Port-au-Prince, where, for better or worse, you could find little jobs,” one said, “but what will there be for us up there? Nothing.” “Sending us to Corail, isn’t that another way of leaving us to our fate, of exiling us?” asked a group of young girls. (AFP (English) 4/13/10 via France 24); Radio Métropole, Haiti, 4/16/10, 4/17/10, __)
On Apr. 17 members of Haiti Response Coalition (HRC), a coalition of nonprofits and international solidarity groups, reported on plans to remove 213 families, about 1,000 individuals, that morning from the grounds of a church and a private school, the Centre Pédagogique Rural Protestant, Ecole Normale de Frères, at Delmas 95. There seemed to be no effort to provide a new location for the temporary residents, who said the Methodist pastors who ran the school hadn’t spoken to them for two weeks and that they had been denied use of the facility’s water and the restrooms. The residents, many of them camped out on a basketball court, thought private security guards would be carrying out the eviction. A sign at the camp’s gate read, in French: “NOTICE TO CAMP, the Methodist yard must be cleared out on Saturday, Apr. 17, 2010.” (Email report from HRC 4/17/2010)
*4. Haiti: Clinton Warns of Violence Like Mexico’s
Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy for Haiti, said on Apr. 17 that the international community needs to stay involved in Haiti if it wants to prevent violence from breaking out there. "We know one thing for sure: If you like the gunfight that's going on in northwest Mexico, you will love Haiti 10 years from now," he told reporters during a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. "If that's what thrills you--this horrible chaos from Monterrey to the border--you will just love Haiti if you walk away from it."
Clinton--who apologized on Mar. 10 for his role in the virtual destruction of Haitian rice production [see Update #1026]--said he loved Haiti and its people and was optimistic about plans to rebuild the country. Along with former president George W. Bush (2001-2009), Clinton sent a letter to the US Congress earlier in the week asking it to extend the 2008 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity Through Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II) to 2025. The act gives preferential treatment to Haitian apparel exports to encourage the development of garment assembly plants in Haiti. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 4/17/10, some from AP; Examiner.com 4/17/10 from AP)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico
Locals and Indigenous Groups Combat Big Real Estate in Greater Buenos Aires
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/2445-preserving-culture-protecting-the-environment-locals-and-indigenous-groups-combat-big-real-estate-in-greater-buenos-aires-
A Short Talk With Fernando Henrique Cardoso
https://nacla.org/node/6513
Indians and Activists March Against Amazon Mega-dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2449-indians-and-activists-march-against-amazon-mega-dam
Bolivia: remains of "disappeared" guerilla exhumed
http://ww4report.com/node/8540
Masonic connection seen in Bolivian separatist plot
http://ww4report.com/node/8539
Campesino, squatter actions rock Bolivia
http://ww4report.com/node/8538
Bolivia’s Lithium Challenge
https://nacla.org/node/6510
World War 4 Report to blog Bolivia climate confab
http://ww4report.com/node/8543
Peru: campesinos block roads to protest mining operation
http://ww4report.com/node/8541
Colombia: indigenous journalist assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/8531
Indigenous Justice Threatened in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2448-indigenous-justice-threatened-in-colombia
Fighting Corruption or Persecuting Political Opponents in Venezuela?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2450-fighting-corruption-or-persecuting-political-opponents-in-venezuela-a-response-to-the-new-york-times
Honduran campesinos under the gun
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5013
WOLA Statement on Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2451-wola-statement-on-honduras
Disappearing Truth in Honduras: Commissions Cover Up Demands for New Constitution
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/component/content/article/2443-disappearing-truth-in-honduras-commissions-cover-up-demands-for-new-constitution
The Second Killing of Pablo Bac: Deafened by Canadian Silence and Impunity in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2452-the-second-killing-of-pablo-bac-deafened-by-canadian-silence-and-impunity-in-guatemala
Mexico: US consulate in Nuevo Laredo closed following attack
http://ww4report.com/node/8532
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1029, April 18, 2010
1. Honduras: Lobo Settles With Aguán Campesinos
2. Honduras: OAS Annual Report Cites Violations
3. Haiti: Government, UN Evict More Quake Victims
4. Haiti: Clinton Warns of Violence Like Mexico’s
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Honduras: Lobo Settles With Aguán Campesinos
On Apr. 18 Honduran president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa signed an agreement with the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) granting some 2,600 campesino families about 11,000 hectares of land in the lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras. MUCA has fought since 2001 for 20,000 hectares which the group says were bought illegally by three wealthy business owners, Miguel Facussé Barjum, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales. The agreement came after several months of heightened tension in the area, with four murders of MUCA members in March and April; around Apr. 11 Lobo’s government launched an unprecedented mobilization of soldiers and police agents into the area, with troops surrounding some campesino communities [see Update #1028].
Under the agreement the government is to grant the campesino families 3,000 hectares of land for planting African oil palm trees and 3,000 hectares of uncultivated land; within a year the government will turn over another 1,000 hectares for African palms and 4,000 hectares of uncultivated land. In exchange, the families will leave the private estates they have been occupying. Despite early reports, the government apparently didn’t agree to a withdrawal of the troops and police agents.
Government and MUCA negotiators worked out a preliminary agreement on Apr. 14 after a 14-hour bargaining session. All but three of the 28 cooperatives that make up the MUCA ratified the agreement on Apr. 17. The remaining cooperatives will continue with pending court actions to regain land that they claim should be theirs.
Hundreds of campesinos and other activists used the Apr. 18 signing ceremony, which took place in the colonial city of Trujillo in Colón department, to protest President Lobo’s rightwing policies. “Golpistas [coup perpetrators] out of the Aguán,” they chanted, referring to a June 28, 2009 coup d’état that removed then-president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales; current president Lobo backed the coup and was elected in a vote organized in November by the de facto government that replaced Zelaya. Protesters also repeated a demand of the grassroots resistance for a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution.
"This agreement isn’t a definitive solution to the conflict,” Rafael Alegría, who heads the local branch of the international campesino organization Vía Campesina, said on Apr. 14, “but it brings calm to the region.” The big landowners involved seemed less satisfied, although the government is apparently compensating them for any land taken from them. A few hours after the signing ceremony a report circulated that Miguel Facussé Barjum had filed a legal action against the president’s decision. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/14/10; Prensa Latina 4/14/20; Nicaragua y Más blog 4/18/10 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras))
*2. Honduras: OAS Annual Report Cites Violations
On Apr. 15 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), a Washington, DC-based agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued its 2009 report on human rights in the hemisphere. For the first time the IACHR included Honduras among the countries that it “believed warranted special attention.” The inclusion of Honduras is based on a report, “Honduras: Human Rights and the Coup d’État,” by an IACHR commission that visited Honduras in August 2009 to investigate the human rights situation following a June 28 military coup [see Update #1001].
According to an IACHR press release from Apr. 15, the commission “confirmed during its visit to Honduras that…there have been grave human rights violations, including deaths, arbitrary declaration of a state of siege, repression of public demonstrations using disproportionate force, criminalization of social protest, arbitrary arrests of thousands of people, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and poor conditions of detention, militarization of the territory, an increase in instances of racial discrimination, violations of the rights of women, serious and arbitrary restrictions on the right to freedom of expression, and grave violations of political rights.”
The four other countries cited in the 2009 report have been criticized in previous IACHR annual reports: Colombia for a “persistent pattern of violation of the rights to life and to humane treatment”; Cuba for “structural situations that seriously affect the full enjoyment of human rights”; Haiti for “structural situations that seriously affect the enjoyment of the fundamental rights of its inhabitants”; and Venezuela for problems including the absence of “conditions…for human rights defenders and journalists to freely perform their occupations.” The report also criticized the US for its 50-year-old trade embargo against Cuba. (Hoy Digital (Dominican Republic) 4/15/10 from EFE; IACHR press release 4/15/10, English and Spanish)
In remarks published on Apr. 16 the Honduran government’s national human rights commissioner Ramón Custodio [see Update #979] said the IACHR had the “bad faith to want to damage the interests of the Honduran state and people.” It has “stopped being an ethical organization,” he said. “It’s an organization that serves political interests. Its president is a Venezuelan professional of recognized political membership.” (La Tribuna (Honduras) 4/17/10) [Apparently Custodio was implying that IACHR president Luz Patricia Mejía Guerrero had acted in support of Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez, despite the report's criticisms of Venezuela.]
*3. Haiti: Government, UN Evict More Quake Victims
The Haitian government, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration (OIM) have been intensifying efforts to relocate Port-au-Prince area residents left homeless by a Jan. 12 earthquake and now living in as many as 900 improvised encampments in the capital and its suburbs. After having forcibly removed some 7,335 people from the Sylvio Cator soccer stadium the weekend of Apr. 9 [see Update #1028], on Apr. 12 the government said it was starting to relocate another 10,000 people.
The government opened a site it had prepared at Corail–Cesselesse, 20 km north of the city, on Apr. 12, and as of Apr. 16 it had moved 248 families, 896 individuals, there from a golf course in the upscale suburb of Pétionville. The OIM said it was expecting to move 2,500 people from an encampment in the Bourdon Valley in Port-au-Prince to a site in Tabarre Issa (apparently in the northwestern suburb of Tabarre).
According to the government, earthquake survivors needed to be moved to safer locations as the rainy season begins; it said the relocations were voluntary. But observers found that many of the homeless were unwilling to relocate and that the removals seemed to target improvised camps on private property that the owners wanted to put back into service. “We were told we had a week to leave, and we could go in Tabarre Issa,” Mathieu Thomson, who had been living in a tent near the Saint-Louis de Gonzague prep school, told the Agence France Presse (AFP) wire service. “But there's nothing there. No toilets, no showers.” According to the OIM, the Tabarre Issa site has sanitation services, schools, a community garden and a soccer field.
The site in Corail–Cesselesse is “isolated,” residents told the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GAAR), a Haitian nonprofit group, on Apr. 14 at “Camp KID,” where about 2,000 people were living at the entrance to Christ-Roi Street. People who were to be moved to Corail from the Pétionville golf course told GARR on Apr. 10 that they didn’t know how they would get to their schools and their jobs. “We’ll be far away from downtown Port-au-Prince, where, for better or worse, you could find little jobs,” one said, “but what will there be for us up there? Nothing.” “Sending us to Corail, isn’t that another way of leaving us to our fate, of exiling us?” asked a group of young girls. (AFP (English) 4/13/10 via France 24); Radio Métropole, Haiti, 4/16/10, 4/17/10, __)
On Apr. 17 members of Haiti Response Coalition (HRC), a coalition of nonprofits and international solidarity groups, reported on plans to remove 213 families, about 1,000 individuals, that morning from the grounds of a church and a private school, the Centre Pédagogique Rural Protestant, Ecole Normale de Frères, at Delmas 95. There seemed to be no effort to provide a new location for the temporary residents, who said the Methodist pastors who ran the school hadn’t spoken to them for two weeks and that they had been denied use of the facility’s water and the restrooms. The residents, many of them camped out on a basketball court, thought private security guards would be carrying out the eviction. A sign at the camp’s gate read, in French: “NOTICE TO CAMP, the Methodist yard must be cleared out on Saturday, Apr. 17, 2010.” (Email report from HRC 4/17/2010)
*4. Haiti: Clinton Warns of Violence Like Mexico’s
Former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy for Haiti, said on Apr. 17 that the international community needs to stay involved in Haiti if it wants to prevent violence from breaking out there. "We know one thing for sure: If you like the gunfight that's going on in northwest Mexico, you will love Haiti 10 years from now," he told reporters during a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. "If that's what thrills you--this horrible chaos from Monterrey to the border--you will just love Haiti if you walk away from it."
Clinton--who apologized on Mar. 10 for his role in the virtual destruction of Haitian rice production [see Update #1026]--said he loved Haiti and its people and was optimistic about plans to rebuild the country. Along with former president George W. Bush (2001-2009), Clinton sent a letter to the US Congress earlier in the week asking it to extend the 2008 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity Through Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE II) to 2025. The act gives preferential treatment to Haitian apparel exports to encourage the development of garment assembly plants in Haiti. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 4/17/10, some from AP; Examiner.com 4/17/10 from AP)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico
Locals and Indigenous Groups Combat Big Real Estate in Greater Buenos Aires
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/2445-preserving-culture-protecting-the-environment-locals-and-indigenous-groups-combat-big-real-estate-in-greater-buenos-aires-
A Short Talk With Fernando Henrique Cardoso
https://nacla.org/node/6513
Indians and Activists March Against Amazon Mega-dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2449-indians-and-activists-march-against-amazon-mega-dam
Bolivia: remains of "disappeared" guerilla exhumed
http://ww4report.com/node/8540
Masonic connection seen in Bolivian separatist plot
http://ww4report.com/node/8539
Campesino, squatter actions rock Bolivia
http://ww4report.com/node/8538
Bolivia’s Lithium Challenge
https://nacla.org/node/6510
World War 4 Report to blog Bolivia climate confab
http://ww4report.com/node/8543
Peru: campesinos block roads to protest mining operation
http://ww4report.com/node/8541
Colombia: indigenous journalist assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/8531
Indigenous Justice Threatened in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2448-indigenous-justice-threatened-in-colombia
Fighting Corruption or Persecuting Political Opponents in Venezuela?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2450-fighting-corruption-or-persecuting-political-opponents-in-venezuela-a-response-to-the-new-york-times
Honduran campesinos under the gun
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=5013
WOLA Statement on Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2451-wola-statement-on-honduras
Disappearing Truth in Honduras: Commissions Cover Up Demands for New Constitution
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/component/content/article/2443-disappearing-truth-in-honduras-commissions-cover-up-demands-for-new-constitution
The Second Killing of Pablo Bac: Deafened by Canadian Silence and Impunity in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2452-the-second-killing-of-pablo-bac-deafened-by-canadian-silence-and-impunity-in-guatemala
Mexico: US consulate in Nuevo Laredo closed following attack
http://ww4report.com/node/8532
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
WNU #1028: Haitian Cops Evict Earthquake Survivors
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1028, April 11, 2010
1. Haiti: Cops Evict Earthquake Survivors
2. Haiti: President Satisfied With Donor Meeting
3. Honduras: Army Moving in on Aguán Campesinos?
4. Mexico: Electrical Workers Plan Hunger Strike
5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Operation Condor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Haiti: Cops Evict Earthquake Survivors
On the evening of Apr. 9 agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) began removing some 1,300 families—about 7,335 people—from Port-au-Prince’s Sylvio Cator soccer stadium, where they had camped out since a Jan. 12 earthquake destroyed much of the city, killing as many as 230,000 people and leaving some 1.3 million without homes. “Soccer has to be brought back to life,” said stadium director Rolny Saint-Louis. “There are players waiting to be able to play and feed their families from their work.” The stadium’s managers say the Taiwanese are planning to repair the bleachers and replace the artificial turf, which the earthquake survivors had reportedly damaged.
“When they throw us out without telling us where we’re going to sleep in the evening, without offering us an alternative, it’s irresponsible, because families are going to end up in the street,” one camp resident told the local station Radio Métropole. “Nothing’s been prepared to receive them in another center,” said a man wandering in the stadium. “The government’s not serious.” The stadium managers offered each family a tent to replace the improvised shelters the police agents had smashed during the removal, but one resident said the tents were too small: only two or three people could fit in each tent, while many of the families were quite large.
Heavy rains fell on the city in the evening as some of the stadium’s former residents were still looking for a new place to camp out. (Radio Métropole (Haiti) 4/10/10; Haiti Press Network 4/9/10; Asia One News (Singapore) 4/12/10 from AFP)
There are about 400 encampments in the metropolitan area, many on private property. Some 11,000 people are living on the St-Louis Gonzague prep school’s field. The school failed to reopen on Apr. 5, the date the government set for a partial resumption of classes. Other homeless people are camped out at a golf course in Pétionville, an upscale suburb southeast of Port-au-Prince; the authorities say the encampment is overcrowded and prone to mudslides and flooding.
The Haitian government and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have a plan to move people out of many of these camps as the rainy season starts. In contrast to the forced removal at the Sylvio Cator stadium, the authorities claim that people in other encampments will voluntarily relocate to two new sites the government has prepared. One is at Corail–Cesselesse, 20 km north of the city; the other isn’t ready yet.
People are understandably reluctant to leave the existing camps, where residents have often organized themselves and some aid groups have set up facilities. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has established a field hospital at the St-Louis Gonzague field and has constructed latrines. "We’ll see what the government’s going to do, and then we’ll react,” Salha Issoufou, MSF’s mission head in Haiti, said about the plan to move the homeless people. “It’s not in our nature to help displacements of population.” (L’Express (France) 4/8/10 from correspondent; Asia One News (Singapore) 4/12/10 from AFP)
*2. Haiti: President Satisfied With Donor Meeting
Speaking at an Apr. 6 press conference at the ruined National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haitian president René Préval expressed his satisfaction with the results of an international donors meeting held by the United Nations (UN) in New York on Mar. 31 to discuss the reconstruction of Haiti after the devastation of the Jan. 12 earthquake [see Update #1026]. The donors pledged nearly $10 billion in aid and about $350 million in direct support for the government’s 2010 budget. During the next 18 months the management of the various projects will be overseen by a commission made up of Haitians and international representatives. Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now the UN’s special envoy for Haiti, are currently the co-chairs of the commission. Préval insisted that the Haitian president would always have the last word on the plans.
Préval, who is not permitted to succeed himself when his term ends on Feb. 7, 2011, insisted that national elections will be organized in the fall. These would combine the presidential election with legislative elections that were scheduled for Feb. 28 but were postponed because of the earthquake. “Elections are necessary,” he said. “It’s important for stability, for the reconstruction.” He admitted that there are serious administrative problems, including the destruction of voting offices and the displacement of a large number of voters from their places of residence. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 4/6/10)
*3. Honduras: Army Moving in on Aguán Campesinos?
The pro-government Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported on Apr. 11 that Honduran president Porfirio Lobo Sosa had ordered a “strong militarization” of the lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras, the site of a land conflict between influential landowners and some 3,000 campesino families. “Today, the lower Aguán has been totally militarized, and we’ve detected at least 30 military vehicles with troops carrying high-caliber weapons,” said Yony Rivas, a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), which has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by three wealthy business owners, Miguel Facussé Barjum, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales.
Andrés Pavón, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), said the troop movements are unusual, since “the police, not the military, resolve conflicts of a civilian character.” (El Heraldo 4/11/10; Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/11/10)
The militarization followed a week of growing tension in the Aguán region.
On Apr. 2 MUCA charged that the military, police and paramilitaries were planning to remove thousands of campesinos “in a violent and bloody manner” from lands they had occupied in the Aguán region. The area is used for cultivating African oil palm trees, a source of cooking oil; a Facussé family business, Grupo Dinant, is exploring ways to use palm oil in biofuel production as well [see Update #1027].
On Apr. 5 the government rejected a plan from MUCA that would restore 28 cooperatives formed under the country’s agrarian reform law, giving each of the 3,000 campesino families about five hectares of land. The government has proposed buying 4,500 hectares from the landowners and distributing the land to the campesinos, which would give about 1.5 hectares for each family. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/9/10)
On Apr. 7, two men on a motorcycle killed a MUCA leader, José Manuel Álvarez Guerra, with five shots as he arrived at his home in the Manga Seca neighborhood in Tocoa, capital of Colón department. This was the fourth murder of a MUCA member in less than a month [see Update #1027]. (El Financiero (Mexico) 4/7/10, some from Notimex; Prensa Latina 4/8/10)
On Apr. 9 the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP, apparently the former National Front Against the Coup d’Etat, a coalition of labor and social organizations) charged that US soldiers were carrying out patrols in two Black Hawk helicopters on both sides of the Aguán River. The helicopters were taking off from the US miliary’s Soto Cano Air Base (the former Palmerola base) in the central department of Comayagua, the FNRP said. From inside the Black Hawks “US military personnel take photographs and carry out observation, search and intelligence-gathering work over the terrain.” (Prensa Latina 4/9/10)
On Apr. 12 the Quixote Center, a Washington, DC-based human rights group, called for people to contact Ambassador Craig Kelly at the US State Department (202-647-6754), the State Department Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs (202-647-0834, WHAAsstSecty@state.gov ) and the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/ or 202-456-1111) to “express alarm” over the situation in the Aguán region and possible US air support for Honduran military repression. (Quixote Center email 4/12/10)
*4. Mexico: Electrical Workers Plan Hunger Strike
On Apr. 11 the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) announced that some 2,300 members were planning to start a mass hunger strike in Mexico City’s central plaza, the Zócalo, as part of the union’s continuing protest against President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10. The union says 17,247 of the 44,000 LFC workers laid off in the liquidation have refused to accept the government’s severance package; they are demanding either the reopening of the LFC or jobs at the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), which has taken over LFC’s operations. These workers have carried out a series of protests, often large and militant, over the last six months, but without success [see Update #1020].
The SME leadership said some 5,000 workers volunteered for the hunger strike. A medical laboratory provided examinations and determined that 2,300 of the workers were healthy enough to undertake a hunger strike. “The strike will be open-ended,” SME labor secretary Eduardo Bobadilla said. The protest “isn’t an act of desperation, but a sign that we electrical workers will fight to the end.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/11/10)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Operation Condor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Americas Program Biodiversity Report—March 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6706
New Evidence: Kissinger Rescinded Warning Against Condor Assassinations
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2442-new-evidence-kissinger-rescinded-warning-against-condor-assassinations
Argentina: Central Bank Independence ... Independent from Whom?
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6691
Earthquake and Tsunami in Chile: The Militarization of Natural Disasters
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6700
Brazil: A Tragedy of Local and Global Dimensions
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50985
Bolivia: Moderate Gains for Morales' MAS Party
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/2440-bolivia-moderate-gains-for-morales-mas-party
Peru to Investigate Uncontacted Tribes’ ‘Possible’ Existence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2436-peru-to-investigate-uncontacted-tribes-possible-existence
Terrorist Attack Points to Ongoing Violence in Key City for US-Colombia FTA
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2434-terrorist-attack-points-to-ongoing-violence-in-key-city-for-us-colombia-fta-
Chavez Fuels the South Bronx
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/2441-chavez-fuels-the-south-bronx
Venezuelan Yukpa Appeal for Use of Indigenous Legal Customs in Murder Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2437-venezuelan-yukpa-appeal-for-use-of-indigenous-legal-customs-in-murder-case-
El Salvador: Monsignor Romero, 30 years later
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/2431-el-salvador-monsignor-romero-30-years-later
U.S. covering up reality in Honduras
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4977
WOLA vs. Honduran Democracy
http://www.counterpunch.org/pine04122010.html
Coca-Cola Sued for ‘Campaign of Violence’ in Guatemala
https://nacla.org/node/6504
Goldcorp Mining Project in Guatemala Faces Cross Border Opposition
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2435-goldcorp-mining-project-in-guatemala-faces-cross-border-opposition
Mexican Soldiers Murder Two Children, US Media Covers Up the Crime
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/04/mexican-soldiers-murder-two-children-us.html
Cananea Mine Battle Reveals Anti-Labor Offensive in Mexico, United States
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6694
Mexico: Phase 2 of the Drug War
http://americas.irc-online.org/updater/6715#1
National Assembly of Environmentally Affected Groups Warns of an "Environmental Disaster" in Mexico
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6675
Mexico's New Dirty War
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6714
NGOs and the Business of Poverty in Haiti
https://nacla.org/node/6501
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1028, April 11, 2010
1. Haiti: Cops Evict Earthquake Survivors
2. Haiti: President Satisfied With Donor Meeting
3. Honduras: Army Moving in on Aguán Campesinos?
4. Mexico: Electrical Workers Plan Hunger Strike
5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Operation Condor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Haiti: Cops Evict Earthquake Survivors
On the evening of Apr. 9 agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) began removing some 1,300 families—about 7,335 people—from Port-au-Prince’s Sylvio Cator soccer stadium, where they had camped out since a Jan. 12 earthquake destroyed much of the city, killing as many as 230,000 people and leaving some 1.3 million without homes. “Soccer has to be brought back to life,” said stadium director Rolny Saint-Louis. “There are players waiting to be able to play and feed their families from their work.” The stadium’s managers say the Taiwanese are planning to repair the bleachers and replace the artificial turf, which the earthquake survivors had reportedly damaged.
“When they throw us out without telling us where we’re going to sleep in the evening, without offering us an alternative, it’s irresponsible, because families are going to end up in the street,” one camp resident told the local station Radio Métropole. “Nothing’s been prepared to receive them in another center,” said a man wandering in the stadium. “The government’s not serious.” The stadium managers offered each family a tent to replace the improvised shelters the police agents had smashed during the removal, but one resident said the tents were too small: only two or three people could fit in each tent, while many of the families were quite large.
Heavy rains fell on the city in the evening as some of the stadium’s former residents were still looking for a new place to camp out. (Radio Métropole (Haiti) 4/10/10; Haiti Press Network 4/9/10; Asia One News (Singapore) 4/12/10 from AFP)
There are about 400 encampments in the metropolitan area, many on private property. Some 11,000 people are living on the St-Louis Gonzague prep school’s field. The school failed to reopen on Apr. 5, the date the government set for a partial resumption of classes. Other homeless people are camped out at a golf course in Pétionville, an upscale suburb southeast of Port-au-Prince; the authorities say the encampment is overcrowded and prone to mudslides and flooding.
The Haitian government and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have a plan to move people out of many of these camps as the rainy season starts. In contrast to the forced removal at the Sylvio Cator stadium, the authorities claim that people in other encampments will voluntarily relocate to two new sites the government has prepared. One is at Corail–Cesselesse, 20 km north of the city; the other isn’t ready yet.
People are understandably reluctant to leave the existing camps, where residents have often organized themselves and some aid groups have set up facilities. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has established a field hospital at the St-Louis Gonzague field and has constructed latrines. "We’ll see what the government’s going to do, and then we’ll react,” Salha Issoufou, MSF’s mission head in Haiti, said about the plan to move the homeless people. “It’s not in our nature to help displacements of population.” (L’Express (France) 4/8/10 from correspondent; Asia One News (Singapore) 4/12/10 from AFP)
*2. Haiti: President Satisfied With Donor Meeting
Speaking at an Apr. 6 press conference at the ruined National Palace in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haitian president René Préval expressed his satisfaction with the results of an international donors meeting held by the United Nations (UN) in New York on Mar. 31 to discuss the reconstruction of Haiti after the devastation of the Jan. 12 earthquake [see Update #1026]. The donors pledged nearly $10 billion in aid and about $350 million in direct support for the government’s 2010 budget. During the next 18 months the management of the various projects will be overseen by a commission made up of Haitians and international representatives. Haitian prime minister Jean Max Bellerive and former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now the UN’s special envoy for Haiti, are currently the co-chairs of the commission. Préval insisted that the Haitian president would always have the last word on the plans.
Préval, who is not permitted to succeed himself when his term ends on Feb. 7, 2011, insisted that national elections will be organized in the fall. These would combine the presidential election with legislative elections that were scheduled for Feb. 28 but were postponed because of the earthquake. “Elections are necessary,” he said. “It’s important for stability, for the reconstruction.” He admitted that there are serious administrative problems, including the destruction of voting offices and the displacement of a large number of voters from their places of residence. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 4/6/10)
*3. Honduras: Army Moving in on Aguán Campesinos?
The pro-government Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported on Apr. 11 that Honduran president Porfirio Lobo Sosa had ordered a “strong militarization” of the lower Aguán River Valley in northern Honduras, the site of a land conflict between influential landowners and some 3,000 campesino families. “Today, the lower Aguán has been totally militarized, and we’ve detected at least 30 military vehicles with troops carrying high-caliber weapons,” said Yony Rivas, a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), which has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by three wealthy business owners, Miguel Facussé Barjum, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales.
Andrés Pavón, director of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras (CODEH), said the troop movements are unusual, since “the police, not the military, resolve conflicts of a civilian character.” (El Heraldo 4/11/10; Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/11/10)
The militarization followed a week of growing tension in the Aguán region.
On Apr. 2 MUCA charged that the military, police and paramilitaries were planning to remove thousands of campesinos “in a violent and bloody manner” from lands they had occupied in the Aguán region. The area is used for cultivating African oil palm trees, a source of cooking oil; a Facussé family business, Grupo Dinant, is exploring ways to use palm oil in biofuel production as well [see Update #1027].
On Apr. 5 the government rejected a plan from MUCA that would restore 28 cooperatives formed under the country’s agrarian reform law, giving each of the 3,000 campesino families about five hectares of land. The government has proposed buying 4,500 hectares from the landowners and distributing the land to the campesinos, which would give about 1.5 hectares for each family. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 4/9/10)
On Apr. 7, two men on a motorcycle killed a MUCA leader, José Manuel Álvarez Guerra, with five shots as he arrived at his home in the Manga Seca neighborhood in Tocoa, capital of Colón department. This was the fourth murder of a MUCA member in less than a month [see Update #1027]. (El Financiero (Mexico) 4/7/10, some from Notimex; Prensa Latina 4/8/10)
On Apr. 9 the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP, apparently the former National Front Against the Coup d’Etat, a coalition of labor and social organizations) charged that US soldiers were carrying out patrols in two Black Hawk helicopters on both sides of the Aguán River. The helicopters were taking off from the US miliary’s Soto Cano Air Base (the former Palmerola base) in the central department of Comayagua, the FNRP said. From inside the Black Hawks “US military personnel take photographs and carry out observation, search and intelligence-gathering work over the terrain.” (Prensa Latina 4/9/10)
On Apr. 12 the Quixote Center, a Washington, DC-based human rights group, called for people to contact Ambassador Craig Kelly at the US State Department (202-647-6754), the State Department Office of Western Hemisphere Affairs (202-647-0834, WHAAsstSecty@state.gov ) and the White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/ or 202-456-1111) to “express alarm” over the situation in the Aguán region and possible US air support for Honduran military repression. (Quixote Center email 4/12/10)
*4. Mexico: Electrical Workers Plan Hunger Strike
On Apr. 11 the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME) announced that some 2,300 members were planning to start a mass hunger strike in Mexico City’s central plaza, the Zócalo, as part of the union’s continuing protest against President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s sudden liquidation of the government-owned Central Light and Power Company (LFC) the night of Oct. 10. The union says 17,247 of the 44,000 LFC workers laid off in the liquidation have refused to accept the government’s severance package; they are demanding either the reopening of the LFC or jobs at the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), which has taken over LFC’s operations. These workers have carried out a series of protests, often large and militant, over the last six months, but without success [see Update #1020].
The SME leadership said some 5,000 workers volunteered for the hunger strike. A medical laboratory provided examinations and determined that 2,300 of the workers were healthy enough to undertake a hunger strike. “The strike will be open-ended,” SME labor secretary Eduardo Bobadilla said. The protest “isn’t an act of desperation, but a sign that we electrical workers will fight to the end.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/11/10)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Operation Condor, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Americas Program Biodiversity Report—March 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6706
New Evidence: Kissinger Rescinded Warning Against Condor Assassinations
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2442-new-evidence-kissinger-rescinded-warning-against-condor-assassinations
Argentina: Central Bank Independence ... Independent from Whom?
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6691
Earthquake and Tsunami in Chile: The Militarization of Natural Disasters
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6700
Brazil: A Tragedy of Local and Global Dimensions
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50985
Bolivia: Moderate Gains for Morales' MAS Party
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/2440-bolivia-moderate-gains-for-morales-mas-party
Peru to Investigate Uncontacted Tribes’ ‘Possible’ Existence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2436-peru-to-investigate-uncontacted-tribes-possible-existence
Terrorist Attack Points to Ongoing Violence in Key City for US-Colombia FTA
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2434-terrorist-attack-points-to-ongoing-violence-in-key-city-for-us-colombia-fta-
Chavez Fuels the South Bronx
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/2441-chavez-fuels-the-south-bronx
Venezuelan Yukpa Appeal for Use of Indigenous Legal Customs in Murder Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2437-venezuelan-yukpa-appeal-for-use-of-indigenous-legal-customs-in-murder-case-
El Salvador: Monsignor Romero, 30 years later
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/2431-el-salvador-monsignor-romero-30-years-later
U.S. covering up reality in Honduras
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4977
WOLA vs. Honduran Democracy
http://www.counterpunch.org/pine04122010.html
Coca-Cola Sued for ‘Campaign of Violence’ in Guatemala
https://nacla.org/node/6504
Goldcorp Mining Project in Guatemala Faces Cross Border Opposition
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2435-goldcorp-mining-project-in-guatemala-faces-cross-border-opposition
Mexican Soldiers Murder Two Children, US Media Covers Up the Crime
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/04/mexican-soldiers-murder-two-children-us.html
Cananea Mine Battle Reveals Anti-Labor Offensive in Mexico, United States
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6694
Mexico: Phase 2 of the Drug War
http://americas.irc-online.org/updater/6715#1
National Assembly of Environmentally Affected Groups Warns of an "Environmental Disaster" in Mexico
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6675
Mexico's New Dirty War
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6714
NGOs and the Business of Poverty in Haiti
https://nacla.org/node/6501
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
WNU #1027: New Violence in Honduran Land Dispute
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1027, April 4, 2010
1. Honduras: New Violence in Aguán Land Dispute
2. Dominican Republic: Thousands March Against Barrick Gold
3. Argentina: “Dirty War” Witness Murdered
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Honduras: New Violence in Aguán Land Dispute
A private guard shot Honduran campesino Miguel Alonso Oliva dead on Apr. 1 when a group of campesinos attempted to occupy an African palms farm in the northern Honduran department of Colón, according to the German-based organization FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN). The victim was a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a group based in the Aguán River Valley that has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by a group of influential landowners, Miguel Facussé, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales [see Update #1022]. Morales holds the title to the farm where the Apr. 1 killing took place.
FIAN reports that this was the third killing of MUCA members in less than a month. José Antonio Cardoza and José Carías, directors of the Brisas de COHDEFOR cooperative in Bonito Oriental, were murdered on Mar. 17, according to FIAN. (Prensa Latina 4/2/10, 4/4/10; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 4/4/10)
On Apr. 2 MUCA charged that the military, police and paramilitaries were planning to remove thousands of campesinos “in a violent and bloody manner” from the land they are living on in the Aguán region, and that this operation might come as early as Apr. 6. The security forces to be used were trained in the Fourth Infantry Battalion facilities in La Ceiba, Atlántida department, MUCA said, under the command of retired captain Fernando “Billy” Joya Amendola. There was also training in a number of other locations, according to MUCA, including a factory belonging to Exportadora del Atlántico, a subsidiary of the Facussé family’s food company, Grupo Dinant.
Billy Joya was a notorious leader of the Battalion 316 death squad in the 1980s. A Honduran court ordered him and nine others arrested in October 1995 in connection with the 1982 abduction and torture of six students; at the time he was living in Spain [see Update #445]. Apparently Joya has been operating freely in Honduras at least since the military carried out a coup in June 2009. (Prensa Latina 4/4/10; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 4/3/10)
Conservative Honduran media have been depicting MUCA as a violent and intransigent armed group receiving help from Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported that the campesinos were armed during the Apr. 1 incident at the Morales farm and that two security guards were killed, although the paper gave no further information about the guards. According to El Heraldo, the government of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa was trying to resolve the conflict by offering to buy 3,000 hectares where Miguel Facussé now grows African palms; presumably the land would be distributed to the campesinos. El Heraldo said MUCA hadn’t responded as of Apr. 2.
The paper also reported that “thousands of Hondurans employed by the Dinant company took to the streets to demand that private property be respected, along with national investment and the right to have a job. At the head of the peaceful demonstration was business leader Miguel Facussé himself; it ended in the Presidential House” in Tegucigalpa. The article didn’t give the date of the demonstration. (EH 4/2/10; Honduras Culture and Politics blog 3/4/10)
Founded by Miguel Facussé Barjum in 1960, Grupo Dinant produces snacks, other food products and cooking oil (including the Central American brand of Mazola). In June 2009 the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC) approved a $7 million loan for Dinant, in part to help finance increased cultivation of palm trees. At that time the company had started working on biodiesel production based on oil from palm trees, jatropha, and tempate. (CentralAmericaData.com 6/16/09; ICC 1/16/09)
*2. Dominican Republic: Thousands March Against Barrick Gold
Up to 3,000 Dominicans marched in Cotuí in the central province of Sánchez Ramírez on Apr. 3 to protest against the Pueblo Viejo gold mine, which is operated by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. Many of the protesters were local, but several dozen youths had walked the 105 km from Santo Domingo, starting on Mar. 31. An encampment was set up in Cotuí by the same young activists that successfully demonstrated last year for a suspension of construction of the Consorcio Minero Dominicano’s cement factory near Los Haitises National Park [see Update #994].
The protests against Barrick targeted what the organizers said were irregularities in the government’s contract with the company, which owns 60% of the mine--the Vancouver-based multinational Goldcorp Inc. owns the other 40%. The protesters also accused Barrick of damaging the environment and archeological sites.
Rice farmers joined the protest because of pollution issues; Mauricio María, president of the National Rice Producers Federation, said the rice farmers of the northeast would disappear if Barrick and the government couldn’t control pollution of the water going into the Hatillo dam near Cotuí, a source of water for rice farms. Juan Rodríguez Acosta, director of the Museum of the Dominican Man, has charged that Barrick Gold is dynamiting mountains whose caves contain traces of the indigenous Taino culture.
Adding to the bad publicity for Barrick, 326 workers from the mine’s night shift had to be hospitalized on Mar. 15 for food poisoning—nearly 10% of the operation’s 3,500 employees. Barrick said the problem was bacterial and blamed it on the company that contracts to supply food at the mine, but the Academy of Sciences and the Autonomous University said the cause was a toxic agent of chemical origin. (El Nuevo Diario (Dominican Republic) 4/3/10; El Nacional (DR) 4/3/10; La Raza (Chicago) 4/3/10 from El Diario-La Prensa correspondent; Primicias (DR) 4/4/10; Winnipeg Free Press 3/15/10 from AP)
*3. Argentina: “Dirty War” Witness Murdered
On the morning of Mar. 29 unidentified people assaulted and stabbed Silvia Suppo in her crafts shop in the small town of Rafaela in Argentina’s northeastern Santa Fe province; she suffered 22 knife wounds and died later that day in a hospital.
As a teenager Suppo was kidnapped, tortured and raped by the military during the “dirty war” carried out against leftists by a 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Recently Suppo was a witness in the trial of former federal Víctor Brusa, Juan Calixto Perizotti, Héctor Colombini, María Eva Aebi, Mario Facino and Eduardo Ramos, who on Dec. 21, 2009 were given prison sentences of 19 to 21 years for the crimes they had committed against her in the 1970s. Suppo was also pursuing the case of Reinaldo Hammeter, her companion at the time of her kidnapping; he was kidnapped and disappeared on Jan. 25, 1977.
Police say some objects were missing from the shop, pointing to a robbery, but Supppo’s friends and local human rights activists considered the killing political. This was “a murder in her capacity as a witness,” said attorney Lucila Puyol, from H.I.J.O.S. Santa Fe, the local branch of an organization dedicated to seeking justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/2/10 from correspondent; H.I.J.O.S. communiqué 3/30/10 via argentina.indymedia.org
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Argentina: Fathers of the Disappeared
https://nacla.org/node/6494
Update: Communitarian Socialism in Bolivia
https://nacla.org/node/6499
Climate Change: From Copenhagen to Cochabamba
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2425-climate-change-from-copenhagen-to-cochabamba
Latin America's Indigenous Reject Market Mechanisms as Solution to Climate Change
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2427-latin-americas-indigenous-reject-market-mechanisms-as-solution-to-climate-change
Freed FARC Hostage Thanks Efforts of Venezuelan President to Win His Liberation
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2426-freed-farc-hostage-thanks-efforts-of-venezuelan-president-to-win-his-liberation
A Human Rights Perspective on Clinton's Visit to Central America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2428-a-human-rights-perspective-on-clintons-visit-to-central-america
Honduras: Deadliest Month Ever for Reporters
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50872
Disappeared But Not Forgotten: A Guatemalan Community Achieves a Landmark Verdict
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2429-disappeared-but-not-forgotten-a-guatemalan-community-achieves-a-landmark-verdict-
Mexico: Coalition Takes on the PRI in Oaxaca's Crucial 2010 Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2422-mexico-coalition-takes-on-the-pri-in-oaxacas-crucial-2010-elections
Interview: Climate Justice Organizing in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2424-interview-climate-justice-organizing-in-mexico
Mexico Backslides on the Merida Initiative’s Human Rights Conditions
https://nacla.org/node/6491
The Upcoming Donors' Conference for Haiti Tectonic Shifts?
http://www.counterpunch.org/schuller03262010.html
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1027, April 4, 2010
1. Honduras: New Violence in Aguán Land Dispute
2. Dominican Republic: Thousands March Against Barrick Gold
3. Argentina: “Dirty War” Witness Murdered
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Honduras: New Violence in Aguán Land Dispute
A private guard shot Honduran campesino Miguel Alonso Oliva dead on Apr. 1 when a group of campesinos attempted to occupy an African palms farm in the northern Honduran department of Colón, according to the German-based organization FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN). The victim was a member of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a group based in the Aguán River Valley that has fought since 2001 for some 20,000 hectares of land it claims were bought illegally by a group of influential landowners, Miguel Facussé, Reinaldo Canales and René Morales [see Update #1022]. Morales holds the title to the farm where the Apr. 1 killing took place.
FIAN reports that this was the third killing of MUCA members in less than a month. José Antonio Cardoza and José Carías, directors of the Brisas de COHDEFOR cooperative in Bonito Oriental, were murdered on Mar. 17, according to FIAN. (Prensa Latina 4/2/10, 4/4/10; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 4/4/10)
On Apr. 2 MUCA charged that the military, police and paramilitaries were planning to remove thousands of campesinos “in a violent and bloody manner” from the land they are living on in the Aguán region, and that this operation might come as early as Apr. 6. The security forces to be used were trained in the Fourth Infantry Battalion facilities in La Ceiba, Atlántida department, MUCA said, under the command of retired captain Fernando “Billy” Joya Amendola. There was also training in a number of other locations, according to MUCA, including a factory belonging to Exportadora del Atlántico, a subsidiary of the Facussé family’s food company, Grupo Dinant.
Billy Joya was a notorious leader of the Battalion 316 death squad in the 1980s. A Honduran court ordered him and nine others arrested in October 1995 in connection with the 1982 abduction and torture of six students; at the time he was living in Spain [see Update #445]. Apparently Joya has been operating freely in Honduras at least since the military carried out a coup in June 2009. (Prensa Latina 4/4/10; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 4/3/10)
Conservative Honduran media have been depicting MUCA as a violent and intransigent armed group receiving help from Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. The Tegucigalpa daily El Heraldo reported that the campesinos were armed during the Apr. 1 incident at the Morales farm and that two security guards were killed, although the paper gave no further information about the guards. According to El Heraldo, the government of President Porfirio Lobo Sosa was trying to resolve the conflict by offering to buy 3,000 hectares where Miguel Facussé now grows African palms; presumably the land would be distributed to the campesinos. El Heraldo said MUCA hadn’t responded as of Apr. 2.
The paper also reported that “thousands of Hondurans employed by the Dinant company took to the streets to demand that private property be respected, along with national investment and the right to have a job. At the head of the peaceful demonstration was business leader Miguel Facussé himself; it ended in the Presidential House” in Tegucigalpa. The article didn’t give the date of the demonstration. (EH 4/2/10; Honduras Culture and Politics blog 3/4/10)
Founded by Miguel Facussé Barjum in 1960, Grupo Dinant produces snacks, other food products and cooking oil (including the Central American brand of Mazola). In June 2009 the Inter-American Investment Corporation (IIC) approved a $7 million loan for Dinant, in part to help finance increased cultivation of palm trees. At that time the company had started working on biodiesel production based on oil from palm trees, jatropha, and tempate. (CentralAmericaData.com 6/16/09; ICC 1/16/09)
*2. Dominican Republic: Thousands March Against Barrick Gold
Up to 3,000 Dominicans marched in Cotuí in the central province of Sánchez Ramírez on Apr. 3 to protest against the Pueblo Viejo gold mine, which is operated by the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. Many of the protesters were local, but several dozen youths had walked the 105 km from Santo Domingo, starting on Mar. 31. An encampment was set up in Cotuí by the same young activists that successfully demonstrated last year for a suspension of construction of the Consorcio Minero Dominicano’s cement factory near Los Haitises National Park [see Update #994].
The protests against Barrick targeted what the organizers said were irregularities in the government’s contract with the company, which owns 60% of the mine--the Vancouver-based multinational Goldcorp Inc. owns the other 40%. The protesters also accused Barrick of damaging the environment and archeological sites.
Rice farmers joined the protest because of pollution issues; Mauricio María, president of the National Rice Producers Federation, said the rice farmers of the northeast would disappear if Barrick and the government couldn’t control pollution of the water going into the Hatillo dam near Cotuí, a source of water for rice farms. Juan Rodríguez Acosta, director of the Museum of the Dominican Man, has charged that Barrick Gold is dynamiting mountains whose caves contain traces of the indigenous Taino culture.
Adding to the bad publicity for Barrick, 326 workers from the mine’s night shift had to be hospitalized on Mar. 15 for food poisoning—nearly 10% of the operation’s 3,500 employees. Barrick said the problem was bacterial and blamed it on the company that contracts to supply food at the mine, but the Academy of Sciences and the Autonomous University said the cause was a toxic agent of chemical origin. (El Nuevo Diario (Dominican Republic) 4/3/10; El Nacional (DR) 4/3/10; La Raza (Chicago) 4/3/10 from El Diario-La Prensa correspondent; Primicias (DR) 4/4/10; Winnipeg Free Press 3/15/10 from AP)
*3. Argentina: “Dirty War” Witness Murdered
On the morning of Mar. 29 unidentified people assaulted and stabbed Silvia Suppo in her crafts shop in the small town of Rafaela in Argentina’s northeastern Santa Fe province; she suffered 22 knife wounds and died later that day in a hospital.
As a teenager Suppo was kidnapped, tortured and raped by the military during the “dirty war” carried out against leftists by a 1976-1983 military dictatorship. Recently Suppo was a witness in the trial of former federal Víctor Brusa, Juan Calixto Perizotti, Héctor Colombini, María Eva Aebi, Mario Facino and Eduardo Ramos, who on Dec. 21, 2009 were given prison sentences of 19 to 21 years for the crimes they had committed against her in the 1970s. Suppo was also pursuing the case of Reinaldo Hammeter, her companion at the time of her kidnapping; he was kidnapped and disappeared on Jan. 25, 1977.
Police say some objects were missing from the shop, pointing to a robbery, but Supppo’s friends and local human rights activists considered the killing political. This was “a murder in her capacity as a witness,” said attorney Lucila Puyol, from H.I.J.O.S. Santa Fe, the local branch of an organization dedicated to seeking justice for the crimes of the dictatorship. (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/2/10 from correspondent; H.I.J.O.S. communiqué 3/30/10 via argentina.indymedia.org
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
Argentina: Fathers of the Disappeared
https://nacla.org/node/6494
Update: Communitarian Socialism in Bolivia
https://nacla.org/node/6499
Climate Change: From Copenhagen to Cochabamba
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2425-climate-change-from-copenhagen-to-cochabamba
Latin America's Indigenous Reject Market Mechanisms as Solution to Climate Change
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2427-latin-americas-indigenous-reject-market-mechanisms-as-solution-to-climate-change
Freed FARC Hostage Thanks Efforts of Venezuelan President to Win His Liberation
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2426-freed-farc-hostage-thanks-efforts-of-venezuelan-president-to-win-his-liberation
A Human Rights Perspective on Clinton's Visit to Central America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2428-a-human-rights-perspective-on-clintons-visit-to-central-america
Honduras: Deadliest Month Ever for Reporters
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=50872
Disappeared But Not Forgotten: A Guatemalan Community Achieves a Landmark Verdict
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2429-disappeared-but-not-forgotten-a-guatemalan-community-achieves-a-landmark-verdict-
Mexico: Coalition Takes on the PRI in Oaxaca's Crucial 2010 Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2422-mexico-coalition-takes-on-the-pri-in-oaxacas-crucial-2010-elections
Interview: Climate Justice Organizing in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2424-interview-climate-justice-organizing-in-mexico
Mexico Backslides on the Merida Initiative’s Human Rights Conditions
https://nacla.org/node/6491
The Upcoming Donors' Conference for Haiti Tectonic Shifts?
http://www.counterpunch.org/schuller03262010.html
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
WNU #1026: Mexican Army Kills 2 Students in “Drug War”
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1026, March 28, 2010
1. Mexico: Army Kills 2 Students in “Drug War”
2. Costa Rica: Arias Tries to Bust Port Workers Union
3. Haiti: Clinton, Bush Visit, Promote Sweatshops
4. Haiti: Professor Killed, Union Funding Threatened
5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, IDB Megaprojects
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Mexico: Army Kills 2 Students in “Drug War”
As of Mar. 26 sources in the Mexican military had admitted that it was probably soldiers who killed two graduate students the early morning of Mar. 20 in front of the prestigious Institute of Technology and Higher Education’s Monterrey campus (ITESM) in the northern state of Nuevo León. The sources said that the soldiers had just been in a firefight with sicarios (hit men) from a drug cartel and probably confused the students with the men they had been fighting.
The two students, Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, left the university library a little after midnight; the library is open all night during examination periods. Seven minutes later they were gunned down as they headed toward their dormitory. For the first day after the killings the authorities described the victims as sicarios who had been “armed to the teeth”; apparently weapons had been planted on the bodies. There were also reports that Mercado and Arredondo, honor students working on a robotics project for the automobile industry, were beaten before being killed.
The level of violence has been rising in Monterrey, Mexico’s second largest city and its main industrial center, as a result both of wars between drug cartels and of the “war on drugs” that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa launched shortly after his inauguration in December 2006. Activists have charged that this policy has led to a deterioration of the country’s human rights situation [see Update #1008].
A week before the killing of the students, the body of a small-scale drug dealer turned up in a vacant lot; he was one of two dealers photographed earlier by the press when agents of the navy arrested them in Santa Catarina, a Monterrey suburb. This has led people to wonder how many of the “drug war” deaths were actually executions by the military. Meanwhile, middle-class Monterrey residents are increasingly using “white guards,” armed private security guards, as protection against the violence. Mauricio Fernández, the mayor of the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García, employs a dozen of these paramilitaries; the military has charged that they are members of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel.
Political analyst Javier Livas calls the situation “the total collapse of the institutions of Nuevo León. Everything is falling as if it were a house of cards.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 3/26/10, 3/28/10; EFE 3/23/10; La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico) 3/28/10)
According to Ardelio Vargas Fosado, chair of the National Defense Committee in the federal Chamber of Deputies, Mexico now has 94,540 military personnel engaged in the fight against drug trafficking, up from a few thousand as late as the middle 1980s. Vargas Fosado, a member of President Calderón’s center-right National Action Party (PAN), told a public forum in Mexico City on Mar. 27 that human rights violations by the military are “exceptions.” About 600 soldiers are currently in military prisons in connection with human rights violations, he said. (LJ 3/28/10)
Note: We gave the early morning of Mar. 20 as the time of the killings at ITESM, following the detailed chronology in the Mar. 26 La Jornada article. Other sources say the killings took place on the early morning of Mar. 19.
*2. Costa Rica: Arias Tries to Bust Port Workers Union
On Feb. 26 the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) charged that the government of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez had in effect “illegally established a ‘yellow’ (unrepresentative, undemocratic, employer-run) trade union” for the 1,500 dockworkers at the Atlantic coast city of Limón. The government’s interference in the union--“in contravention of…conventions 87 and 98” of the United Nations’ International Labor Organization--is intended to bring about “the kind of privatization that has led to joblessness and misery in Limón’s sister port of Caldera” on the Pacific side, the ITF said.
The Caldera port was privatized in August 2006 under President Arias, who began his second four-year term in May 2006. (He previously served as president 1986-1990 and won the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to broker a peace deal in Nicaragua.) So far Arias has had less success with the "modernization" of the Board of Port Administration and Economic Development of the Atlantic Shelf (JAPDEVA), the state agency which administers the Limón port.
The JAPDEVA Workers Union (SINTRAJAP), an ITF affiliate, opposed the privatization efforts with a strike in October 2006 [see Update #872]. But the union, which is part of Costa Rica’s Catholic labor federation, Rerum Novarum, remained fairly conservative until a caucus led by the socialist-oriented group Luchemos! (Let’s Fight!) won union elections in 2007 which made Ronaldo Blear the SINTRAJAP general secretary. The new leadership built support for its anti-privatization efforts from the Costa Rican labor movement, from environmental groups and from the leftist Frente Amplio (“Broad Front”) political party.
The Blear leadership was reelected to a second two-year term in January 2009, but it was removed from office by two workers’ assemblies held on Jan. 15 and Jan. 29 this year. Luchemos! supporters said the assemblies weren’t attended by the majority of workers and represented a “coup d’état” arranged by JAPDEVA management. The elected SINTRAJAP leaders and leaders of other unions protested by occupying the labor minister’s offices for six days in January. In late March legislative deputy José Merino del Río and deputy elect José María Villalta Flórez-Estrada, both of the Frente Amplio, requested an injunction from the Constitutional Court to restore Blear and other leaders to office. The court hadn’t ruled as of Mar. 27.
President elect Laura Chinchilla Miranda, a member of Arias’ National Liberation Party (PLN) who takes office on May 8, is expected to continue Arias’ neoliberal economic policies. Labor rights supporters can sign on to an ITF letter of protest to President Arias at http://www.itfglobal.org/solidarity/sintrajap.cfm/letter/45/. (ITF website 2/26/10; Diagonal (Spain) 3/24/10; Costa Rica Hoy 3/20/10; Teletica (Costa Rica) 3/27/10)
*3. Haiti: Clinton, Bush Visit, Promote Sweatshops
Former US presidents George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) visited Haiti for one day on Mar. 22 to call for international aid for the country. The visit helped set the stage for a United Nations (UN) donors’ conference which is to be held in New York on Mar. 31. Current US president Barack Obama appointed Bush and Clinton to head up US relief efforts following a Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people in Port-au-Prince and other parts of southern Haiti. This was Bush’s first visit to Haiti, but the third since the earthquake for Clinton, who is also the UN’s special envoy for Haiti.
During his visit Clinton called for the expansion of the garment assembly sector—the tax-exempt factories, known in Spanish as maquiladoras, that produce mainly for export. To further the expansion, he and Bush called for improved US trade preferences for apparel imports from Haiti. Clinton said South Korean and Brazilian firms were interested in investing if the US strengthened the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE), which he said he thought “could create more than 100,000 jobs in Haiti in short order."
Critics have argued that this would take jobs away from workers in the US and the rest of the Caribbean Basin, but Clinton indicated that the main losers would be Chinese workers. "Most of [the proposed increase for Haiti] would be shifted production from Asia to Haiti, so there'd be no greater penetration of American markets and we'd be helping our neighbor, and it could create hundreds of millions of dollars of investment,” he said on Mar. 22.
Several hundred supporters of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1995 and 2001-2004) protested Bush’s presence and called for Aristide’s return from his exile in South Africa. Aristide was removed from office in February 2004 while Bush was president. (Agence France Presse 3/22/10 via CyberPresse; Reuters 3/22/10) There were reports that Bush surreptitiously wiped his hand off on Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with an earthquake victim. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 3/24/10)
Other criticism was directed more at the UN economic proposals associated with Clinton, who as president restored Aristide to power in 1994 with a US-led military intervention; Clinton’s administration also pushed the Haitian government to carry out a drastic reduction of tariffs on imported rice (known in Haiti as “Miami rice”). On Mar. 18 a number of Haitian organizations issued a statement denouncing the UN’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment (PDNA) for rebuilding Haiti. The UN document was “produced by a group of 300 international and national functionaries,” excluding Haitian “social actors,” the statement said. The Haitian groups called for a “break with economic dependence” and for the construction of “an economic model that stimulates national production” rather than export-based industries. (“Position des Mouvements sociaux haïtiens sur le processus de ‘reconstruction’ d’Haïti,” 3/18/10)
Earlier in the month Clinton apologized for his role in promoting rice imports for Haiti, which devastated local rice production. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked,” he told the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate on Mar. 10. “It was a mistake. I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” (Associated Press 3/20/10 via Huffington Post)
*4. Haiti: Professor Killed, Union Funding Threatened
On Mar. 12 several hundred Haitian students and activists gathered at a memorial service for Jean Anil Louis-Juste, a sociology professor at the State University of Haiti (UEH) who was shot dead in downtown Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 a few hours before a massive earthquake hit the city. A well-known author and activist, Louis-Juste was a strong supporter of the militant student movement that erupted in the spring and summer of 2009 [see Update #994].
Witnesses reportedly said men on a motorcycle approached Louis-Juste at the corner of Capois Street and La Fleur du Chêne as he was leaving the university and asked for money. When Louis-Juste said he didn’t have any, the men gunned him down with one bullet to the head and two to the chest, the witnesses said. Activists expressed doubt that a killing in broad daylight in that area could have been a simple mugging. (Haiti Press Network 1/12/10; Haïti Liberté (Haiti and New York) 3/10/10-3/16/10)
In other news, General Motors de Brasil, the Brazilian subsidiary of the giant US automaker, has announced that it will block payroll check-offs that the Metal Workers Union of São José dos Campos and the Region asked to be donated for earthquake relief to Haitian grassroots organizations, including the leftist labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (Workers’ Struggle) [see Update #1022]. An assembly of 6,000 GM workers approved the one-time donation of 1% of their pay on Feb. 11. The GM workers’ pledge was part of a Brazilian campaign that has already sent about 160,000 reais ($89,000) to Haiti. (AlterPresse 3/24/10 from Brasil de Fato (São Paulo))
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, IDB Megaprojects
Chile's Billionaire President Piñera Gets a Raise
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/2417-chiles-billionaire-president-gets-a-raise
The Land Lugo Promised: Paraguayan Farmers Mobilize for Agrarian Reform
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/2421-the-land-lugo-promised-paraguayan-farmers-mobilize-for-agrarian-reform
The Brazilian Two-Step: Strategic Politics in the Lula Administration
https://nacla.org/node/6485
Free Trade Undermining Rights in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2418-free-trade-undermining-rights-in-peru
Colombia: FARC to release hostages —despite new government raids
http://ww4report.com/node/8506
Colombia: drug recrim on hold —sort of
http://ww4report.com/node/8505
Bomb blast rocks Colombian port
http://ww4report.com/node/8504
Colombia's Elections: Under the Gun
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6707
Amnesty International urges El Salvador to repeal amnesty law
http://ww4report.com/node/8501
El Salvador: 30th Anniversary of Assassination of Oscar Romero
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/03/24/el-salvador-30th-anniversary-of-assassination-of-oscar-romero/
Text Book State Terrorism in Honduras: Death Squad Kills Teacher in Front of Students
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2420-text-book-state-terrorism-in-honduras-death-squad-kills-teacher-in-front-of-students
Hondurans' Great Awakening
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100405
Mérida Initiative retooled at Mexico City summit
http://ww4report.com/node/8500
Juarez, Murder Capital of the World
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6681
IDB Megaprojects: Displacement, Destruction, and Deception
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6708
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1026, March 28, 2010
1. Mexico: Army Kills 2 Students in “Drug War”
2. Costa Rica: Arias Tries to Bust Port Workers Union
3. Haiti: Clinton, Bush Visit, Promote Sweatshops
4. Haiti: Professor Killed, Union Funding Threatened
5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, IDB Megaprojects
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Mexico: Army Kills 2 Students in “Drug War”
As of Mar. 26 sources in the Mexican military had admitted that it was probably soldiers who killed two graduate students the early morning of Mar. 20 in front of the prestigious Institute of Technology and Higher Education’s Monterrey campus (ITESM) in the northern state of Nuevo León. The sources said that the soldiers had just been in a firefight with sicarios (hit men) from a drug cartel and probably confused the students with the men they had been fighting.
The two students, Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo Verdugo, left the university library a little after midnight; the library is open all night during examination periods. Seven minutes later they were gunned down as they headed toward their dormitory. For the first day after the killings the authorities described the victims as sicarios who had been “armed to the teeth”; apparently weapons had been planted on the bodies. There were also reports that Mercado and Arredondo, honor students working on a robotics project for the automobile industry, were beaten before being killed.
The level of violence has been rising in Monterrey, Mexico’s second largest city and its main industrial center, as a result both of wars between drug cartels and of the “war on drugs” that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa launched shortly after his inauguration in December 2006. Activists have charged that this policy has led to a deterioration of the country’s human rights situation [see Update #1008].
A week before the killing of the students, the body of a small-scale drug dealer turned up in a vacant lot; he was one of two dealers photographed earlier by the press when agents of the navy arrested them in Santa Catarina, a Monterrey suburb. This has led people to wonder how many of the “drug war” deaths were actually executions by the military. Meanwhile, middle-class Monterrey residents are increasingly using “white guards,” armed private security guards, as protection against the violence. Mauricio Fernández, the mayor of the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza García, employs a dozen of these paramilitaries; the military has charged that they are members of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel.
Political analyst Javier Livas calls the situation “the total collapse of the institutions of Nuevo León. Everything is falling as if it were a house of cards.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 3/26/10, 3/28/10; EFE 3/23/10; La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico) 3/28/10)
According to Ardelio Vargas Fosado, chair of the National Defense Committee in the federal Chamber of Deputies, Mexico now has 94,540 military personnel engaged in the fight against drug trafficking, up from a few thousand as late as the middle 1980s. Vargas Fosado, a member of President Calderón’s center-right National Action Party (PAN), told a public forum in Mexico City on Mar. 27 that human rights violations by the military are “exceptions.” About 600 soldiers are currently in military prisons in connection with human rights violations, he said. (LJ 3/28/10)
Note: We gave the early morning of Mar. 20 as the time of the killings at ITESM, following the detailed chronology in the Mar. 26 La Jornada article. Other sources say the killings took place on the early morning of Mar. 19.
*2. Costa Rica: Arias Tries to Bust Port Workers Union
On Feb. 26 the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) charged that the government of Costa Rican president Oscar Arias Sánchez had in effect “illegally established a ‘yellow’ (unrepresentative, undemocratic, employer-run) trade union” for the 1,500 dockworkers at the Atlantic coast city of Limón. The government’s interference in the union--“in contravention of…conventions 87 and 98” of the United Nations’ International Labor Organization--is intended to bring about “the kind of privatization that has led to joblessness and misery in Limón’s sister port of Caldera” on the Pacific side, the ITF said.
The Caldera port was privatized in August 2006 under President Arias, who began his second four-year term in May 2006. (He previously served as president 1986-1990 and won the Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to broker a peace deal in Nicaragua.) So far Arias has had less success with the "modernization" of the Board of Port Administration and Economic Development of the Atlantic Shelf (JAPDEVA), the state agency which administers the Limón port.
The JAPDEVA Workers Union (SINTRAJAP), an ITF affiliate, opposed the privatization efforts with a strike in October 2006 [see Update #872]. But the union, which is part of Costa Rica’s Catholic labor federation, Rerum Novarum, remained fairly conservative until a caucus led by the socialist-oriented group Luchemos! (Let’s Fight!) won union elections in 2007 which made Ronaldo Blear the SINTRAJAP general secretary. The new leadership built support for its anti-privatization efforts from the Costa Rican labor movement, from environmental groups and from the leftist Frente Amplio (“Broad Front”) political party.
The Blear leadership was reelected to a second two-year term in January 2009, but it was removed from office by two workers’ assemblies held on Jan. 15 and Jan. 29 this year. Luchemos! supporters said the assemblies weren’t attended by the majority of workers and represented a “coup d’état” arranged by JAPDEVA management. The elected SINTRAJAP leaders and leaders of other unions protested by occupying the labor minister’s offices for six days in January. In late March legislative deputy José Merino del Río and deputy elect José María Villalta Flórez-Estrada, both of the Frente Amplio, requested an injunction from the Constitutional Court to restore Blear and other leaders to office. The court hadn’t ruled as of Mar. 27.
President elect Laura Chinchilla Miranda, a member of Arias’ National Liberation Party (PLN) who takes office on May 8, is expected to continue Arias’ neoliberal economic policies. Labor rights supporters can sign on to an ITF letter of protest to President Arias at http://www.itfglobal.org/solidarity/sintrajap.cfm/letter/45/. (ITF website 2/26/10; Diagonal (Spain) 3/24/10; Costa Rica Hoy 3/20/10; Teletica (Costa Rica) 3/27/10)
*3. Haiti: Clinton, Bush Visit, Promote Sweatshops
Former US presidents George W. Bush (2001-2009) and Bill Clinton (1993-2001) visited Haiti for one day on Mar. 22 to call for international aid for the country. The visit helped set the stage for a United Nations (UN) donors’ conference which is to be held in New York on Mar. 31. Current US president Barack Obama appointed Bush and Clinton to head up US relief efforts following a Jan. 12 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people in Port-au-Prince and other parts of southern Haiti. This was Bush’s first visit to Haiti, but the third since the earthquake for Clinton, who is also the UN’s special envoy for Haiti.
During his visit Clinton called for the expansion of the garment assembly sector—the tax-exempt factories, known in Spanish as maquiladoras, that produce mainly for export. To further the expansion, he and Bush called for improved US trade preferences for apparel imports from Haiti. Clinton said South Korean and Brazilian firms were interested in investing if the US strengthened the Haiti Hemispheric Opportunity Partnership Encouragement Act (HOPE), which he said he thought “could create more than 100,000 jobs in Haiti in short order."
Critics have argued that this would take jobs away from workers in the US and the rest of the Caribbean Basin, but Clinton indicated that the main losers would be Chinese workers. "Most of [the proposed increase for Haiti] would be shifted production from Asia to Haiti, so there'd be no greater penetration of American markets and we'd be helping our neighbor, and it could create hundreds of millions of dollars of investment,” he said on Mar. 22.
Several hundred supporters of former president Jean Bertrand Aristide (1991-1995 and 2001-2004) protested Bush’s presence and called for Aristide’s return from his exile in South Africa. Aristide was removed from office in February 2004 while Bush was president. (Agence France Presse 3/22/10 via CyberPresse; Reuters 3/22/10) There were reports that Bush surreptitiously wiped his hand off on Clinton’s shirt after shaking hands with an earthquake victim. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 3/24/10)
Other criticism was directed more at the UN economic proposals associated with Clinton, who as president restored Aristide to power in 1994 with a US-led military intervention; Clinton’s administration also pushed the Haitian government to carry out a drastic reduction of tariffs on imported rice (known in Haiti as “Miami rice”). On Mar. 18 a number of Haitian organizations issued a statement denouncing the UN’s Preliminary Damage and Needs Assessment (PDNA) for rebuilding Haiti. The UN document was “produced by a group of 300 international and national functionaries,” excluding Haitian “social actors,” the statement said. The Haitian groups called for a “break with economic dependence” and for the construction of “an economic model that stimulates national production” rather than export-based industries. (“Position des Mouvements sociaux haïtiens sur le processus de ‘reconstruction’ d’Haïti,” 3/18/10)
Earlier in the month Clinton apologized for his role in promoting rice imports for Haiti, which devastated local rice production. "It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked,” he told the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate on Mar. 10. “It was a mistake. I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else.” (Associated Press 3/20/10 via Huffington Post)
*4. Haiti: Professor Killed, Union Funding Threatened
On Mar. 12 several hundred Haitian students and activists gathered at a memorial service for Jean Anil Louis-Juste, a sociology professor at the State University of Haiti (UEH) who was shot dead in downtown Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12 a few hours before a massive earthquake hit the city. A well-known author and activist, Louis-Juste was a strong supporter of the militant student movement that erupted in the spring and summer of 2009 [see Update #994].
Witnesses reportedly said men on a motorcycle approached Louis-Juste at the corner of Capois Street and La Fleur du Chêne as he was leaving the university and asked for money. When Louis-Juste said he didn’t have any, the men gunned him down with one bullet to the head and two to the chest, the witnesses said. Activists expressed doubt that a killing in broad daylight in that area could have been a simple mugging. (Haiti Press Network 1/12/10; Haïti Liberté (Haiti and New York) 3/10/10-3/16/10)
In other news, General Motors de Brasil, the Brazilian subsidiary of the giant US automaker, has announced that it will block payroll check-offs that the Metal Workers Union of São José dos Campos and the Region asked to be donated for earthquake relief to Haitian grassroots organizations, including the leftist labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (Workers’ Struggle) [see Update #1022]. An assembly of 6,000 GM workers approved the one-time donation of 1% of their pay on Feb. 11. The GM workers’ pledge was part of a Brazilian campaign that has already sent about 160,000 reais ($89,000) to Haiti. (AlterPresse 3/24/10 from Brasil de Fato (São Paulo))
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, IDB Megaprojects
Chile's Billionaire President Piñera Gets a Raise
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/2417-chiles-billionaire-president-gets-a-raise
The Land Lugo Promised: Paraguayan Farmers Mobilize for Agrarian Reform
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/2421-the-land-lugo-promised-paraguayan-farmers-mobilize-for-agrarian-reform
The Brazilian Two-Step: Strategic Politics in the Lula Administration
https://nacla.org/node/6485
Free Trade Undermining Rights in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2418-free-trade-undermining-rights-in-peru
Colombia: FARC to release hostages —despite new government raids
http://ww4report.com/node/8506
Colombia: drug recrim on hold —sort of
http://ww4report.com/node/8505
Bomb blast rocks Colombian port
http://ww4report.com/node/8504
Colombia's Elections: Under the Gun
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6707
Amnesty International urges El Salvador to repeal amnesty law
http://ww4report.com/node/8501
El Salvador: 30th Anniversary of Assassination of Oscar Romero
http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/03/24/el-salvador-30th-anniversary-of-assassination-of-oscar-romero/
Text Book State Terrorism in Honduras: Death Squad Kills Teacher in Front of Students
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2420-text-book-state-terrorism-in-honduras-death-squad-kills-teacher-in-front-of-students
Hondurans' Great Awakening
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100405
Mérida Initiative retooled at Mexico City summit
http://ww4report.com/node/8500
Juarez, Murder Capital of the World
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6681
IDB Megaprojects: Displacement, Destruction, and Deception
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6708
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, March 22, 2010
Links but No Update for March 21, 2010
[We are unable to send out an Update this week. We'll be back next week. Below are links to stories from other sources.]
Earthquake and Tsunami in Chile: The Militarization of Natural Disasters
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6700
Israeli foreign minister snubs Lula's "peace mission" (Brazil)
http://ww4report.com/node/8486
Report to UN Reveals Shocking Situation of Guarani Tribe in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2409-report-to-un-reveals-shocking-situation-of-guarani-tribe-in-brazil-
Bolivia: general who captured Che Guevara questioned in destablization plot
http://ww4report.com/node/8483
Bolivia: prison party over for García Meza
http://ww4report.com/node/8467
Bolivia’s New Political Space: An Interview With Ambassador Pablo Solón
https://nacla.org/node/6473
Bolivia Creates a New Opportunity for Climate Talks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2411-bolivia-creates-a-new-opportunity-for-climate-talks-
Bolivia’s New Political Space: An Interview With Ambassador Pablo Solón
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2410-bolivias-new-political-space-an-interview-with-ambassador-pablo-solon
The Militarization of the Peruvian Countryside
https://nacla.org/node/6482
FARC commander "Ivan Vargas" gets 20 years in US prison (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/8482
Colombia: peasant human rights defender assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/8481
Colombian journalist assassinated after exposing paras
http://ww4report.com/node/8487
Colombia: Canadian free trade agreement advances —despite rights concerns
http://ww4report.com/node/8480
U.S. Bases in Colombia Rattle the Region
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2412-us-bases-in-colombia-rattle-the-region
Colombia Elections 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6703
For Venezuela, There is No Going Back: A Discussion with Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/2413-for-venezuela-there-is-no-going-back-a-discussion-with-federico-fuentes-and-kiraz-janicke
Third Honduran journalist gunned down in two weeks
http://ww4report.com/node/8470
Honduras: Repression Intensifies, Resistance Deepens, and Washington Promotes Recognition of the Post-Coup Regime
https://nacla.org/node/6480
U.S. Tries to Divide Honduran Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2414-us-tries-to-divide-honduran-resistance
Honduras: Poll Proposed by Resistance Challenges Regime
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2406-honduran-resistance-challenges-regime
Guatemala: In Memory of Our Martyrs and Bloodshed in Comalapa
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2403-guatemala-in-memory-of-our-martyrs-and-bloodshed-in-comalapa
National Strike Begins in Mexico, Police Respond With Violence
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/03/national-strike-begins-in-mexico-police.html
Federal Police Attack Five More Electricians' Blockades, One Electrician Shot
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/03/federal-police-attack-five-more.html
Cartel gunmen block roads in northern Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/8479
Haiti’s Earthquake Victims in Great Peril
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/2408-haitis-earthquake-victims-in-great-peril
Post-disaster reconstruction: Putting Haitian citizens into the equation
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/post-disaster-reconstruct_b_499110.html
Haiti's Excluded
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/lindsay
Student Protests in Dominican Republic Shut Down Universities
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2405-student-protests-in-dominican-republic-shut-down-universities
Earthquake and Tsunami in Chile: The Militarization of Natural Disasters
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6700
Israeli foreign minister snubs Lula's "peace mission" (Brazil)
http://ww4report.com/node/8486
Report to UN Reveals Shocking Situation of Guarani Tribe in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2409-report-to-un-reveals-shocking-situation-of-guarani-tribe-in-brazil-
Bolivia: general who captured Che Guevara questioned in destablization plot
http://ww4report.com/node/8483
Bolivia: prison party over for García Meza
http://ww4report.com/node/8467
Bolivia’s New Political Space: An Interview With Ambassador Pablo Solón
https://nacla.org/node/6473
Bolivia Creates a New Opportunity for Climate Talks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2411-bolivia-creates-a-new-opportunity-for-climate-talks-
Bolivia’s New Political Space: An Interview With Ambassador Pablo Solón
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2410-bolivias-new-political-space-an-interview-with-ambassador-pablo-solon
The Militarization of the Peruvian Countryside
https://nacla.org/node/6482
FARC commander "Ivan Vargas" gets 20 years in US prison (Colombia)
http://ww4report.com/node/8482
Colombia: peasant human rights defender assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/8481
Colombian journalist assassinated after exposing paras
http://ww4report.com/node/8487
Colombia: Canadian free trade agreement advances —despite rights concerns
http://ww4report.com/node/8480
U.S. Bases in Colombia Rattle the Region
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2412-us-bases-in-colombia-rattle-the-region
Colombia Elections 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6703
For Venezuela, There is No Going Back: A Discussion with Federico Fuentes and Kiraz Janicke
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/2413-for-venezuela-there-is-no-going-back-a-discussion-with-federico-fuentes-and-kiraz-janicke
Third Honduran journalist gunned down in two weeks
http://ww4report.com/node/8470
Honduras: Repression Intensifies, Resistance Deepens, and Washington Promotes Recognition of the Post-Coup Regime
https://nacla.org/node/6480
U.S. Tries to Divide Honduran Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2414-us-tries-to-divide-honduran-resistance
Honduras: Poll Proposed by Resistance Challenges Regime
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2406-honduran-resistance-challenges-regime
Guatemala: In Memory of Our Martyrs and Bloodshed in Comalapa
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/2403-guatemala-in-memory-of-our-martyrs-and-bloodshed-in-comalapa
National Strike Begins in Mexico, Police Respond With Violence
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/03/national-strike-begins-in-mexico-police.html
Federal Police Attack Five More Electricians' Blockades, One Electrician Shot
http://mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com/2010/03/federal-police-attack-five-more.html
Cartel gunmen block roads in northern Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/8479
Haiti’s Earthquake Victims in Great Peril
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/2408-haitis-earthquake-victims-in-great-peril
Post-disaster reconstruction: Putting Haitian citizens into the equation
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beverly-bell/post-disaster-reconstruct_b_499110.html
Haiti's Excluded
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/lindsay
Student Protests in Dominican Republic Shut Down Universities
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2405-student-protests-in-dominican-republic-shut-down-universities
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
WNU #1025: Chilean Grassroots Groups Respond to Quake
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1025, March 14, 2010
1. Chile: Grassroots Groups Respond to Quake
2. Honduras: Cops Evict Thousands of Squatters
3. Peru: Old Crimes Catch Up With Ex-Officers
4. Links to alternative sources on: Regional, Environment, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Canada
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Chile: Grassroots Groups Respond to Quake
Some 12 Chilean social and grassroots organizations have formed a solidarity network in response to what they consider the authorities’ failure to act quickly and appropriately when a 8.8 magnitude earthquake devastated much of central and southern Chile on Feb. 27. The network will work for Chileans to “reconstitute ourselves as an organized people to confront the present tragedy in an effective and dignified manner,” the groups said in an undated statement posted on the website of Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation, on Mar. 10.
The statement criticized the army for its failure to provide accurate information to the government that could have saved “hundreds of lives.” It also criticized the incoming government of rightwing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, whose term as president began on Mar. 11. The right tried “to take political advantage of the country’s misfortune,” the groups said, while the other political parties failed to react. (Presumably this includes the Socialist Party of outgoing president Michelle Bachelet). More generally, the statement called the “slow, disorganized and individualistic way” in which aid was delivered a “direct consequence of forms of centralized, authoritarian organization” and of social practices “based on repression of organizations and political debate.” The damage to housing, schools, bridges, hospitals and highways was, according to the statement, the “product of a business sector that spent decades making profits, acting in an irresponsible and criminal manner.”
The groups said they would promote “real and effective social participation" in decisions about reconstruction and aid distribution so that the process “doesn’t become a big business for the big companies” or a way for politicians to create divisions in different sectors. The military could have a “vital role in support for logistics and infrastructure,” they said, but without “the repressive role it played in the past.”
In addition to the Chilean branch of Vía Campesina, the organizations in the network include the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), the Ranquil Confederation, the World March of Women's Chile branch and the Center of National Studies for Alternative Development (CENDA). (“Chile: Organizando Red Solidaria--Pueblo y Organización” declaration 3/10/10; Adital (Brazil) 3/10/10)
*2. Honduras: Cops Evict Thousands of Squatters
On Mar. 12 hundreds of Honduran soldiers, police and agents of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) removed thousands of families from some 200 manzanas (about 340 acres) of land they were living on in the Montes de León, La Mesa, Santa Rosa and Loarque Sur neighborhoods in Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa’s twin city. Deputy Police Commissioner Leandro Osorio said the operation was in compliance with an eviction order issued by a Tegucigalpa court. According to the authorities, the land belongs to the Social Fund for Housing (Fosovi) and was occupied illegally. After the residents were removed, bulldozers destroyed their homes, which had been built mostly from materials like sheet metal and pieces of wood.
The Agence France Presse (AFP) wire service reported that 2,000 families were living at the site, while the San Pedro Sula daily La Prensa put the number at 15,000. La Prensa, which supported the June 28, 2009 coup d’état against former president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, called the police operation “peaceful” and reported one arrest. AFP said the removal was violent and quoted Deputy Commissioner Osorio as saying dozens of people were arrested.
"They lied to us,” resident Carolina Amador told AFP, referring to the authorities. “They promised us they were going to negotiate with us, and they came and surprised us.” Amador said her husband works as a street vendor; the couple has two small children. “We don’t have anywhere to go—what are we going to do?” she asked. The capital is surrounded by improvised settlements of people who have left the countryside; these settlements are largely concentrated in Comayagüela, which is south of Tegucigalpa; the two cities form the country’s Central District. (AFP 3/12/10 via Vos el Soberano website (Honduras); La Prensa 3/13/10; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 3/12/10)
Armed masked men seized two farm workers, Ramón Ulises Castellanos and Miguel Sauceda, the evening of Mar. 8 at their homes in El Naranjo community in the northern department of Atlántida. Their bodies were found beside a highway the next day with bullet wounds in the head, chest and abdomen. The masked men reportedly identified themselves as DNIC agents. “They all had black vests and ski masks. One of them had the initials ‘DNIC’ on his vest,” said the wife of one of the victims. (Prensa Latina 3/9/10)
Correction: This item originally described La Prensa as a "Tegucigalpa daily." It's published in San Pedro Sula.
*3. Peru: Old Crimes Catch Up With Ex-Officers
According to a report in the Peruvian daily La República on Mar. 5, Jesús Sosa Saavedra, a former agent of Peru’s Army Intelligence Service (SIE), has confessed to prosecutor Alicia Chamorro Bermúdez that he participated in the 1988 “Operation Lucero,” in which the SIE captured and executed alleged Ecuadorian spy Enrique Duchicela and Lt. Marco Barrantes, a Peruvian officer also accused of espionage. Sosa Saavedra said Col. Oswaldo Hanke Velasco, then the head of the SIE, ordered the operation. According to La República, this testimony may bring Hanke Velasco to trial; he had avoided prosecution in the past.
Sosa Saavedra--nicknamed "Kerosene" because he used the fuel to kill his victims--was already in prison as a former member of the Colina Group, a death squad organized by military intelligence and allegedly reporting to former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for causing deaths and serious injuries while in office [see Update #1019]. (Los Tiempos (Cochabamba, Bolivia) 3/5/10 from EFE)
On the night of Mar. 11 Peruvian judicial police captured another former SIE agent, army captain Víctor Penas Sandoval, who had been in hiding. The First Special Tribunal of Lima has accused Penas Sandoval of carrying out terrorist acts on the orders of Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s intelligence adviser and the founder of the Colina Group; Montesinos too is now a prisoner.
Penas Sandoval allegedly made and sent at least five letter bombs in 1991, while he was stationed in Lima. Attorney Augusto Zúñiga Paz, of the Human Rights Commission (Comisedh), lost an arm when he opened the first of these letter bombs on Mar. 15; Víctor Ruiz León was killed on June 21 when he opened the second, which was intended for a neighbor, the director of Cambio, a magazine supporting the rebel Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA); on June 28 the third blew off the arm of a caretaker at El Diario, a publication supporting the rebel Communist Party of Peru (PCP, Sendero Luminoso); the fourth killed Cambio editor Melissa Alfaro Méndez on Oct. 10. Penas Sandoval was moved out of Lima after he failed in an effort to assassinate leftist legislative deputy Ricardo Letts Colmenares by letter bomb.
In 1993 a military court charged Penas Sandoval with the October 1992 murder of eight drug traffickers and the theft of 300 kilos of drugs in Balsayacu, Alto Huallaga. Penas Sandoval decided to respond by exposing military crimes, and he arranged to meet with officials at the US embassy in Lima on June 30, 1994. He is apparently the unnamed officer cited in a declassified document released by the National Security Archives, a Washington, DC-based nongovernmental organization; the document reports on a lengthy conversation in which a Peruvian intelligence officer admitted to making the letter bombs and said they were ordered by Montesinos. The officer also told the officials about the army’s routine practice of torturing, raping and murdering captives during military operations against rebels during the 1980s. He sometimes chuckled while describing torture techniques.
Penas Sandoval reportedly asked to be admitted to the US. The embassy officials recommended against admitting him, but it is not clear what action the US took, if any, in response to his revelations of terrorist acts by the Peruvian government, a US ally. (AFP 3/12/10; La República 3/13/10; “The Search for Truth: The Declassified Record on Human Rights Abuses in Peru,” Document 26, National Security Archives 8/28/03)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Regional, Environment, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Canada
Abortion in Latin America - Still Illegal, Still Killing, Despite Growing Awareness
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2397-abortion-in-latin-america-still-illegal-still-killing-despite-growing-awareness
Central Bank Independence ... Independent from Whom?
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6691
Americas Program Biodiversity Report—February 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6689
Chile's Social Earthquake
http://globalalternatives.org/node/112
The Homeless in Bahia: The Utopia of "Good Living" (Brazil)
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6693
Bolivia, Uruguay sign deal on pipeline, sea access
http://ww4report.com/node/8455
Bolivia unseals files from military dictatorship
http://ww4report.com/node/8454
Is Bolivia Heading for Andean-Amazonian Capitalism?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2401-is-bolivia-heading-for-andean-amazonian-capitalism
International Delegation Issues Preliminary Findings on Pre-electoral Conditions in Colombia
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6699
Conservatives Revive Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2398-conservatives-revive-canada-colombia-free-trade-agreement
Venezuela: Bari Indians Speak at Landmark Supreme Court Hearing
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2400-bari-indians-speak-at-landmark-supreme-court-hearing
Venezuela: Chávez calls for Internet controls
http://ww4report.com/node/8453
Venezuela buys Chinese jets for drug war
http://ww4report.com/node/8452
Cananea Mine Battle Reveals Anti-Labor Offensive in Mexico, United States
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6694
Mexico: Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno Released From Prison for (Not) Killing Brad Will
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2396-juan-manuel-martinez-moreno-released-from-prison-for-not-killing-brad-will-
Mexico: Guerrero narco-violence breaks grisly record
http://ww4report.com/node/8451
Chomsky Post-Earthquake: Aid to Haitian Popular Organizations, not Contractors or NGOs
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/2394--chomsky-post-earthquake-aid-to-haitian-popular-organizations-not-contractors-or-ngos
Haiti's Excluded
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/lindsay
Canada Moves to Oversee Mining Firms
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2392-canada-moves-to-oversee-mining-firms
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1025, March 14, 2010
1. Chile: Grassroots Groups Respond to Quake
2. Honduras: Cops Evict Thousands of Squatters
3. Peru: Old Crimes Catch Up With Ex-Officers
4. Links to alternative sources on: Regional, Environment, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Canada
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Chile: Grassroots Groups Respond to Quake
Some 12 Chilean social and grassroots organizations have formed a solidarity network in response to what they consider the authorities’ failure to act quickly and appropriately when a 8.8 magnitude earthquake devastated much of central and southern Chile on Feb. 27. The network will work for Chileans to “reconstitute ourselves as an organized people to confront the present tragedy in an effective and dignified manner,” the groups said in an undated statement posted on the website of Vía Campesina, the international peasant federation, on Mar. 10.
The statement criticized the army for its failure to provide accurate information to the government that could have saved “hundreds of lives.” It also criticized the incoming government of rightwing billionaire Sebastián Piñera, whose term as president began on Mar. 11. The right tried “to take political advantage of the country’s misfortune,” the groups said, while the other political parties failed to react. (Presumably this includes the Socialist Party of outgoing president Michelle Bachelet). More generally, the statement called the “slow, disorganized and individualistic way” in which aid was delivered a “direct consequence of forms of centralized, authoritarian organization” and of social practices “based on repression of organizations and political debate.” The damage to housing, schools, bridges, hospitals and highways was, according to the statement, the “product of a business sector that spent decades making profits, acting in an irresponsible and criminal manner.”
The groups said they would promote “real and effective social participation" in decisions about reconstruction and aid distribution so that the process “doesn’t become a big business for the big companies” or a way for politicians to create divisions in different sectors. The military could have a “vital role in support for logistics and infrastructure,” they said, but without “the repressive role it played in the past.”
In addition to the Chilean branch of Vía Campesina, the organizations in the network include the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women (ANAMURI), the Ranquil Confederation, the World March of Women's Chile branch and the Center of National Studies for Alternative Development (CENDA). (“Chile: Organizando Red Solidaria--Pueblo y Organización” declaration 3/10/10; Adital (Brazil) 3/10/10)
*2. Honduras: Cops Evict Thousands of Squatters
On Mar. 12 hundreds of Honduran soldiers, police and agents of the National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) removed thousands of families from some 200 manzanas (about 340 acres) of land they were living on in the Montes de León, La Mesa, Santa Rosa and Loarque Sur neighborhoods in Comayagüela, Tegucigalpa’s twin city. Deputy Police Commissioner Leandro Osorio said the operation was in compliance with an eviction order issued by a Tegucigalpa court. According to the authorities, the land belongs to the Social Fund for Housing (Fosovi) and was occupied illegally. After the residents were removed, bulldozers destroyed their homes, which had been built mostly from materials like sheet metal and pieces of wood.
The Agence France Presse (AFP) wire service reported that 2,000 families were living at the site, while the San Pedro Sula daily La Prensa put the number at 15,000. La Prensa, which supported the June 28, 2009 coup d’état against former president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, called the police operation “peaceful” and reported one arrest. AFP said the removal was violent and quoted Deputy Commissioner Osorio as saying dozens of people were arrested.
"They lied to us,” resident Carolina Amador told AFP, referring to the authorities. “They promised us they were going to negotiate with us, and they came and surprised us.” Amador said her husband works as a street vendor; the couple has two small children. “We don’t have anywhere to go—what are we going to do?” she asked. The capital is surrounded by improvised settlements of people who have left the countryside; these settlements are largely concentrated in Comayagüela, which is south of Tegucigalpa; the two cities form the country’s Central District. (AFP 3/12/10 via Vos el Soberano website (Honduras); La Prensa 3/13/10; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 3/12/10)
Armed masked men seized two farm workers, Ramón Ulises Castellanos and Miguel Sauceda, the evening of Mar. 8 at their homes in El Naranjo community in the northern department of Atlántida. Their bodies were found beside a highway the next day with bullet wounds in the head, chest and abdomen. The masked men reportedly identified themselves as DNIC agents. “They all had black vests and ski masks. One of them had the initials ‘DNIC’ on his vest,” said the wife of one of the victims. (Prensa Latina 3/9/10)
Correction: This item originally described La Prensa as a "Tegucigalpa daily." It's published in San Pedro Sula.
*3. Peru: Old Crimes Catch Up With Ex-Officers
According to a report in the Peruvian daily La República on Mar. 5, Jesús Sosa Saavedra, a former agent of Peru’s Army Intelligence Service (SIE), has confessed to prosecutor Alicia Chamorro Bermúdez that he participated in the 1988 “Operation Lucero,” in which the SIE captured and executed alleged Ecuadorian spy Enrique Duchicela and Lt. Marco Barrantes, a Peruvian officer also accused of espionage. Sosa Saavedra said Col. Oswaldo Hanke Velasco, then the head of the SIE, ordered the operation. According to La República, this testimony may bring Hanke Velasco to trial; he had avoided prosecution in the past.
Sosa Saavedra--nicknamed "Kerosene" because he used the fuel to kill his victims--was already in prison as a former member of the Colina Group, a death squad organized by military intelligence and allegedly reporting to former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000). Fujimori was sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for causing deaths and serious injuries while in office [see Update #1019]. (Los Tiempos (Cochabamba, Bolivia) 3/5/10 from EFE)
On the night of Mar. 11 Peruvian judicial police captured another former SIE agent, army captain Víctor Penas Sandoval, who had been in hiding. The First Special Tribunal of Lima has accused Penas Sandoval of carrying out terrorist acts on the orders of Vladimiro Montesinos, Fujimori’s intelligence adviser and the founder of the Colina Group; Montesinos too is now a prisoner.
Penas Sandoval allegedly made and sent at least five letter bombs in 1991, while he was stationed in Lima. Attorney Augusto Zúñiga Paz, of the Human Rights Commission (Comisedh), lost an arm when he opened the first of these letter bombs on Mar. 15; Víctor Ruiz León was killed on June 21 when he opened the second, which was intended for a neighbor, the director of Cambio, a magazine supporting the rebel Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA); on June 28 the third blew off the arm of a caretaker at El Diario, a publication supporting the rebel Communist Party of Peru (PCP, Sendero Luminoso); the fourth killed Cambio editor Melissa Alfaro Méndez on Oct. 10. Penas Sandoval was moved out of Lima after he failed in an effort to assassinate leftist legislative deputy Ricardo Letts Colmenares by letter bomb.
In 1993 a military court charged Penas Sandoval with the October 1992 murder of eight drug traffickers and the theft of 300 kilos of drugs in Balsayacu, Alto Huallaga. Penas Sandoval decided to respond by exposing military crimes, and he arranged to meet with officials at the US embassy in Lima on June 30, 1994. He is apparently the unnamed officer cited in a declassified document released by the National Security Archives, a Washington, DC-based nongovernmental organization; the document reports on a lengthy conversation in which a Peruvian intelligence officer admitted to making the letter bombs and said they were ordered by Montesinos. The officer also told the officials about the army’s routine practice of torturing, raping and murdering captives during military operations against rebels during the 1980s. He sometimes chuckled while describing torture techniques.
Penas Sandoval reportedly asked to be admitted to the US. The embassy officials recommended against admitting him, but it is not clear what action the US took, if any, in response to his revelations of terrorist acts by the Peruvian government, a US ally. (AFP 3/12/10; La República 3/13/10; “The Search for Truth: The Declassified Record on Human Rights Abuses in Peru,” Document 26, National Security Archives 8/28/03)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Regional, Environment, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, Canada
Abortion in Latin America - Still Illegal, Still Killing, Despite Growing Awareness
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2397-abortion-in-latin-america-still-illegal-still-killing-despite-growing-awareness
Central Bank Independence ... Independent from Whom?
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6691
Americas Program Biodiversity Report—February 2010
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6689
Chile's Social Earthquake
http://globalalternatives.org/node/112
The Homeless in Bahia: The Utopia of "Good Living" (Brazil)
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6693
Bolivia, Uruguay sign deal on pipeline, sea access
http://ww4report.com/node/8455
Bolivia unseals files from military dictatorship
http://ww4report.com/node/8454
Is Bolivia Heading for Andean-Amazonian Capitalism?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2401-is-bolivia-heading-for-andean-amazonian-capitalism
International Delegation Issues Preliminary Findings on Pre-electoral Conditions in Colombia
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6699
Conservatives Revive Canada-Colombia Free Trade Agreement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2398-conservatives-revive-canada-colombia-free-trade-agreement
Venezuela: Bari Indians Speak at Landmark Supreme Court Hearing
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2400-bari-indians-speak-at-landmark-supreme-court-hearing
Venezuela: Chávez calls for Internet controls
http://ww4report.com/node/8453
Venezuela buys Chinese jets for drug war
http://ww4report.com/node/8452
Cananea Mine Battle Reveals Anti-Labor Offensive in Mexico, United States
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/6694
Mexico: Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno Released From Prison for (Not) Killing Brad Will
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2396-juan-manuel-martinez-moreno-released-from-prison-for-not-killing-brad-will-
Mexico: Guerrero narco-violence breaks grisly record
http://ww4report.com/node/8451
Chomsky Post-Earthquake: Aid to Haitian Popular Organizations, not Contractors or NGOs
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/2394--chomsky-post-earthquake-aid-to-haitian-popular-organizations-not-contractors-or-ngos
Haiti's Excluded
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/lindsay
Canada Moves to Oversee Mining Firms
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2392-canada-moves-to-oversee-mining-firms
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://americas.irc-online.org/
http://nacla.org/articles
http://upsidedownworld.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. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
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