Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1070, March 6, 2011
1. Panama: Martinelli Backs Down on Open-Pit Mining
2. Mexico: Did US Let Guns “Walk” to Drug Cartels?
3. Mexico: Calderón Fights WikiLeaks Fallout in DC
4. Venezuela: Jailed Unionist Convicted, Then Released
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Puerto Rico
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Panama: Martinelli Backs Down on Open-Pit MiningRightwing Panamanian president Ricardo Martinelli announced in San Félix, Chiriquí, on Mar. 3 that he would ask the National Assembly to rescind a mining law that opponents said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies and endanger the environment. “A president like me will always listen to his people,” Martinelli wrote in his Twitter account, following nearly a month of demonstrations led by the Ngöbe-Buglé indigenous group [see Update #1068]. Polls reportedly showed 75% of Panamanians opposing the mining industry. (Adital (Brazil) 3/3/11)
On Mar. 4 Martinelli’s government sent the National Assembly the formal request for rescinding the law, which was passed less than a month earlier, on Feb. 11. Discussions are to start after the conclusion of Carnaval (Mardi Gras) festivities on Mar. 8. (Prensa Latina 3/4/11) The main beneficiary of the law would have been the Canadian firm Inmet Mining, which planned to get financing from foreign state-owned financial firms like Korea Resources Corp to construct a copper mine worth some $4.3 billion. Inmet president Jochen Tilks said on Mar. 4 that his company would be able to proceed with the mine despite the overturning of the law, which he called “the correct decision.” (Reuters 3/4/11)
Martinelli’s about-face on the mining law came after indigenous Panamanians intensified their protests for four days, culminating in blockades of the Pan American Highway at various points in Veraguas and Chiriquí provinces on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27. Confrontations broke out between protesters and police agents during the blockades, with injuries reported on both sides; the Front for the Defense of Economic and Social Rights (Frenadesco) said 10 indigenous people were wounded. (Adital 2/28/11, some from AFP and Prensa Latina) The Spanish journalists Paco Gómez Nadal and Pilar Chato were arrested while covering one of the demonstrations on Feb. 26, on charges that Gómez Nadal, a freelancer for Spanish daily El País and Panama's La Prensa, was inciting the demonstration. The two were deported on Feb. 28. (EFE 3/1/11 via Latin American Herald Tribune)
This is the second time in less than a year that grassroots protests have forced Martinelli to withdraw major legislation. On Oct. 10 the government agreed to rescind Law 30—known as the “sausage law” (“ley chorizo”) because of the various elements stuffed into it, including anti-union measures and the weakening of environmental safeguards. The law had provoked militant protests in July [see Update #1053].
*2. Mexico: Did US Let Guns “Walk” to Drug Cartels?Mexico’s Foreign Relations Secretariat (SRE) said on Mar. 5 that it had requested “detailed information” from the US government on Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 2,000 firearms to enter Mexico illegally in an effort to trace the activities of gun smugglers. The operation was said to be carried out without the knowledge of the Mexican government. (La Jornada (Mexico) 3/6/11) Gun running from the US is considered a major source of weapons for drug cartels in Mexico, which has stricter gun control laws than several US states near the border.
The first report about Fast and Furious--part of Project Gunrunner, an ATF program intended to stop the flow of weapons to Mexico--appeared on CBS News on Feb. 23. According to unnamed sources, including six veteran ATF agents and executives, in late 2009 the bureau learned about cash purchases of semi-automatic versions of military-type rifles and pistols at seven gun stores in the Phoenix, Arizona area; these are weapons favored by Mexican drug traffickers. The sources told CBS News that several gun shops wanted to stop the sales but ATF managers decided instead to use a tactic known as “letting the guns walk”—allowing the weapons to be bought so that agents can gather intelligence on their use. “The numbers are over 2,500 on that case, by the way,” one source said. “That's how many guns were sold--including some 50-calibers they let walk.”
The operation unraveled on Dec. 14, 2010, when US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent Brian Terry was killed in a shootout with bandits near Rio Rico, Arizona. Two assault rifles found at the scene were among the weapons that suspected gun smuggler Jaime Avila of Glendale, Arizona bought a year earlier, at a time when the ATF was keeping an eye on Avila but allowing him to make purchases. Avila and 33 others were arrested after Terry’s death. (CBS 2/23/11)
After further investigation, the Washington, DC-based Center for Public Integrity and the Los Angeles Times reported that “1,765 guns were sold to suspected smugglers during a 15-month period of the investigation. Of those, 797 were recovered on both sides of the border, including 195 in Mexico after they were used in crimes, collected during arrests or intercepted through other law enforcement operations.”
Several agents objected vehemently to the practice. "With the number of guns we let walk, we'll never know how many people were killed, raped, robbed,” Agent John Dodson told the Center for Public Integrity. “There is nothing we can do to round up those guns. They are gone.” The dissent reached a point in March 2010 where the operational supervisor, David J. Voth, warned the agents in an email against “petty arguing, rumors or other adolescent behavior.” “Whether you care or not, people of rank and authority at HQ are paying close attention to this case, and they also believe we…are doing what they envisioned the Southwest Border Groups doing,” Voth wrote. He suggested that if they didn’t like the program, the ATF agents might prefer working at the Maricopa County Jail, where “you can get paid $30,000 (instead of $100,000) to serve lunch to inmates all day.”
Agent Dodson gave an example of the ATF’s attitude to possible victims of the operation when the guns circulated in Mexico. “If you're going to make an omelet, you've got to scramble some eggs,” a supervisor said, according to Dodson. “I took it to mean that whatever crimes these guns were going to be involved in, those were the eggs, those were acceptable,” Dodson explained.
On Mar. 3 US attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. asked Justice Department officials to look into the possibility of an investigation of Fast and Furious. Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the leading Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has started his own inquiry. (LAT 3/3/11) It should be noted that Grassley is an opponent of gun control, with an “A” rating from the National Rife Association (NRA). (On the Issues website, accessed 3/6/11)
*3. Mexico: Calderón Fights WikiLeaks Fallout in DCUS president Barack Obama expressed strong support for Mexico’s “war on drugs” during a joint press conference in Washington, DC on Mar. 3 with Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinijosa. “I have nothing but admiration for President Calderón and his willingness to take this on,” Obama said, referring to Calderón’s militarization of the fight against drug trafficking since he took office in December 2006. Some 35,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since then, and many Mexicans reject the militarization strategy [see Update #1068].
The US “will support [Calderón] in any ways we can to help him achieve his goals, because his goals are our goals as well,” Obama said, promising that the US would speed up the delivery of military assistance under the Mérida Initiative program [see Update #1065], do more to stop the flow of weapons from the US to Mexican drug traffickers, and focus more on using education, prevention and treatment to cut down the demand for drugs in the US. However, the only substantive agreements that came out of the meeting were aimed at ending a longstanding dispute over access to the US by Mexican truckers. Negotiators are expected to come up with a draft agreement soon to allow trucking by Mexican carriers—as provided for in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994. (New York Times 3/3/11)
When the Mexican government announced on Feb. 23 that Calderón would be visiting Washington a week later, the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada speculated that the purpose was damage control after several embarrassments for the Mexican president. One was the killing of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jaime Zapata on Feb. 14 while he and another US immigration agent were driving from Monterrey, Nuevo León, to Mexico City. Another problem for Calderón was La Jornada’s publication, starting on Feb. 10, of a series of secret US diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks group. A number of the cables showed growing doubts among US diplomats over the efficacy of the same “drug war” that Obama praised on Mar. 3, as did cables published by the Spanish daily El País in December [see Updates #1059, 1067]. (LJ 2/24/11)
Adding to Calderón’s difficulties, three US cables from 2006 suggested a remarkably close relationship between US diplomats and Calderón as he was running for the presidency. A classified Jan. 18 cable describes a meeting of Calderón with then-US ambassador Antonio O. Garza, Jr. and others on Jan. 10, shortly before Calderón’s campaign officially started. The future president was concerned that the “negative spin on migration in the Mexican press”—Mexican anger over plans to extend a fence on the US side of the border and a harsh anti-immigrant bill sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI)—would help the center-left coalition candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, widely known as “AMLO.” Calderón explained that “[h]e couldn't allow AMLO to take one vote on the migration issue, and would have to speak out against a ‘border wall’ as well.” Garza agreed that “[c]ertainly it was politic to reject the border fence.” (LJ 2/21/11)
The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) declared Calderón the winner in the July 2 election by a minuscule margin; López Obrador promptly denounced the results as fraudulent and led massive protests in Mexico City. Calderón and Garza met on Aug. 2 at Calderón’s request, “primarily to express thanks for President [George W.] Bush's early and friendly congratulatory call,” according to a confidential Aug. 4 cable. “Calderon expressed his regret about the ongoing PRD protests (which have blocked key arteries leading to the embassy's neighborhood).”
When Calderón and Garza met again on Aug. 29, there was little question that the electoral court, the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Republic (TEPJF), would uphold the IFE’s declaration of Calderón’s victory, but Garza’s classified Sept. 1 cable shows his concern about Calderón’s situation. “Calderón will come into office Dec. 1 in the weakest possible situation politically,” Garza wrote. “We risk stagnation on our highest-profile issues unless we can send a strong signal of support, prompt the Calderón team into a vigorous transition, and reinforce Calderón's agenda and leadership…. I recommend that President Bush make a second call to Calderón once the TEPJF results are released, offering formal congratulations on his victory. At that point my mission team will engage energetically with Calderón's transition team to invigorate progress on our priority areas.”
Garza didn’t try to hide his contempt for López Obrador and the Mexican left. He referred to the protests against suspected electoral fraud as “AMLO’s harassment,” “AMLO's dramatic gesticulations” and “his constant barrage of attacks.” The leftist candidate was “increasingly inconsiderate and obstructive,” Garza wrote. (LJ 2/21/11)
*4. Venezuela: Jailed Unionist Convicted, Then ReleasedOn Mar. 3 Venezuela’s highest court, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ), ordered the conditional release of union leader Rubén González, who had been in prison since Sept. 29, 2009 [see Update #1037]. Just two days before the TSJ order, Bolívar state judge Magda Hidalgo sentenced González to seven and a half years in prison for instigating a job action and blocking a highway in Ciudad Guayana at the government-owned Ferrominera Orinoco (FMO), an iron ore mining subsidiary of CVG, the national heavy industry holding company. González is general secretary of the Ferrominera Workers Union (Sintraferrominera). Under the terms of the conditional release, he is required to report every 15 days to the authorities in Ciudad Guayana.
González’s release followed two days of protests by students and unionists representing both opponents and supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez Frías, including sections of the pro-Chávez National Workers Union (UNT) and of the anti-Chávez Venezuelan Workers Confederation (CTV). When he was freed, González expressed his thanks “to all the labor forces of Guayana, to all those who have supported me and have been in solidarity with this struggle.” He called for unity in the workers’ movement, despite its differences and particular interests. (EFE 3/3/11 via Venezuelasite.com; El Universal (Caracas) 3/6/11; Aporrea.org (Venezuela) 3/5/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Puerto Rico
From Latin America to the Arab World – What’s going on in Libya?
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6035
Argentina: trial begins over "Dirty War" baby thefts
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9557
Brazil: judge blocks construction of Belo Monte dam
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9549
Amazon Indians Protest in London as Judge Blocks Brazil Dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2935-amazon-indians-protest-in-london-as-judge-blocks-brazil-dam
Motorist mows down Porto Alegre Critical Mass (Brazil)
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9572
Transport strike, floods paralyze Bolivia
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9550
Ongoing, Unresolved Issues Likely to Perpetuate Tension in Bolivia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2937-ongoing-unresolved-issues-likely-to-perpetuate-tension-in-bolivia
Gasolinazo Challenges Bolivia’s 'Process of Change'
https://nacla.org/node/6903
Peru: government cracks down on illegal Amazon gold miners
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9552
Peru: WikiLeaks impact seen on elections
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9551
WikiLeaks Peru: secret cable reveals timber certificates faked
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9570
Peru: violence and protest sweep Amazon regions
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9569
Colombian "gold rush" funds conflict, threatens environment
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9575
Colombia, Venezuela sign pacts to mend relations —amid borderlands unrest
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9574
WikiLeaks Colombia: cable documents armed forces collaboration with paras
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9573
WikiLeaks: Colombia’s Uribe Authorized “Clandestine Cross Border Operations” into Venezuela
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2932-wikileaks-colombias-uribe-authorized-clandestine-cross-border-operations-into-venezuela
Adios, Uribe (Colombia)
https://nacla.org/node/6905
Hugo Chávez to mediate in Libya crisis? (Venezuela)
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9568
Women at the Forefront of Grassroots Organising in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/2933-women-at-the-forefront-of-grassroots-organising-in-el-salvador
Military Coups are Good for Canadian Business: The Canada-Honduras Free Trade Agreement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2930-military-coups-are-good-for-canadian-business-the-canada-honduras-free-trade-agreement
Honduras: right marches against crime, left to boycott elections
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9548
Ciudad Juárez: slaughter of the children
http://www.ww4report.com/node/9571
The Reyes Salazar Family and the Hidden Toll Behind Mexico's Execution-meter
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2934-the-reyes-salazar-family-and-the-hidden-toll-behind-mexicos-execution-meter
Presidential Meeting Puts US-Mexico Relations Back on Track–In the Wrong Direction
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4068
On the Puerto Rican People: 'You Will Not Silence Them and You Will Not Silence Me'
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-luis-gutierrez/on-the-puerto-rican-peopl_b_830307.html
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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Monday, March 7, 2011
Monday, February 28, 2011
WNU #1069: Indigenous Chileans Acquitted of “Terrorism”
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1069, February 27, 2011
1. Chile: Mapuche Activists Acquitted of “Terrorism”
2. Mexico: Reyes Salazars Demand an End to the “Stupid War”
3. Puerto Rico: ACLU May Investigate Rights Situation
4. Haiti: Groups Campaign Against Neoliberal Accords
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, 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. Chile: Mapuche Activists Acquitted of “Terrorism”
In a significant setback for Chilean prosecutors, judges in Cañete in the central province of Arauco voted on Feb. 22 not to convict 17 indigenous Mapuche activists on “terrorism” charges relating to a fire and an attack on a prosecutor, Mario Elgueta, in Tirúa in October 2008 [see Update #985]. The judges acquitted most of the defendants of all charges, but they found four of the activists--Héctor Llaitul, Ramón Llenaquileo, José Huenuche and Jonathan Huillical—guilty of attempted homicide, a common crime, in the attack on Elgueta.
The four convicted activists may receive prison terms of up to 15 years at their sentencing, scheduled for Mar. 22, but they could have been condemned to 103-year terms if prosecutors had succeeded in convicting them on “illegal terrorist association,” a charge based on Law No. 19.027, which was enacted during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The accused, said to be members of the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM), were among 34 Mapuche prisoners who participated in a hunger strike in the late summer of 2010 to protest the law, which treats land occupations and attacks on the equipment or personnel of multinational companies as acts of terrorism. Indigenous activists say they need to use these tactics to protest illegal seizures of their land [see Update #1052].
Chilean activists and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) treated the acquittals as a “positive step.” But the terrorism law remains on the books, with some modifications, and in deciding to acquit the defendants the judges cited the lack of convincing evidence, not problems with the law. (País Mapuche (Chile) 2/22/11 from Radio Biobio; AFP 2/22/11 via Terra (Peru); La Jornada (Mexico) 2/24/11 from correspondent)
National Public Defender Paula Vial, whose office defended some of the activists, charged that the trial was marked by irregularities, despite the acquittals. The four convictions were based on testimony from a “faceless witness”—a witness whose identity remains secret—and on statements by one of the accused that were apparently obtained through torture. “Is it possible to affirm that these citizens confronted the arms of the government on equal terms?” Vial asked. “Is it possible to affirm that they received a just trial?” (La Nación (Chile) 2/25/11)
*2. Mexico: Reyes Salazars Demand an End to the “Stupid War”
On the morning of Feb. 25 Mexican soldiers reported finding the bodies of María Magdalena (“Malena”) Reyes Salazar, her brother Elías Reyes Salazar and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas Soto, by the Juárez-Porvenir highway, some 3 km from their home in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, near Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. The three had been kidnapped by unidentified armed men on Feb. 7. [See Update #1067, where we reported, following our source, that they were seized while riding in a truck; some reports now say they were taken from their home.] Six members of the Reyes Salazar family have been murdered in the past two years.
Family members had responded to the abduction with protests to demand that the state and federal governments locate the three kidnapping victims and protect the rest of the family. Malena and Elías’ sisters Claudia and Marisela Reyes Salazar were carrying out hunger strikes in front of government offices—Claudia in Ciudad Juárez and Marisela in Mexico City--when they received word that the bodies had been found.
In an emotional press conference on Feb. 25, Marisela Reyes Salazar lashed out at Jorge González Nicolás, a Chihuahua state prosecutor, and at Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who ordered the militarization of the fight against narco-trafficking in the northern states soon after taking office in December 2006; the toll from this “war on drugs” is now over 35,000. González Nicolás was “useless,” Marisela Reyes said, and should resign “because he doesn’t know how to do his job.” Calderón, she continued, should “withdraw his troops” and end this “stupid and dirty war that he’s got. We, the people, didn’t ask for it, and we don’t need it.”
The series of attacks on the family began in 2008 when Josefina Reyes Salazar, another of the siblings, charged that the army had disappeared her son Miguel Ángel, who was later jailed in Tamaulipas state for alleged ties to organized crime. Another son, Julio César, was murdered in 2009. Josefina, a former local official and a member of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), continued to protest against the military. She herself was murdered on Jan. 3, 2010; afterwards the military searched her home three times. Her brother Rubén, also a former official and a PRD member, was murdered on Aug. 18. On Feb. 15 of this year, a week after the kidnapping of Malena and Elías Reyes Salazar and Luisa Ornela, unidentified persons used Molotov cocktails to set the house of Sara Salazar, the mother of Josefina, Rubén, Malena and Elías, on fire.
Some Mexican activists suspect involvement by members of the military and point to what appears to be a calculated effort to depict the family as criminals with drug connections. Malena and Elías Reyes Salazar and Luisa Ornela seem to have been buried soon after they were murdered, but once the case had drawn national and international attention, their bodies were dug up and placed in a visible location at the highway. Notes were found with the corpses; these reportedly contained death threats against Marisela Reyes Salazar and warned her to admit that she came from a family of hit men and thugs.
“How convenient, how timely,” the Cerezo Mexico Committee Human Rights Organization wrote on Feb. 25. The group, which was formed to defend three brothers imprisoned for an alleged bomb plot in 2001 [see Update #980], added: “If we forgot the causes that motivated these acts, we might…think the state is right when it explains that they were connected with crime, but let’s remember that the struggle that the Reyes Salazar family took on was and continues to be against the militarization, against the narco-paramilitary state…” (El Diario (Ciudad Juárez) 2/25/11; Cerezo Committee 2/25/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 2/26/11, 2/27/11)
*3. Puerto Rico: ACLU May Investigate Rights Situation
On Feb. 18 Puerto Rican education secretary Jesús Rivera Sánchez fired 11 members of the Executive Committee of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR) from their jobs in the public school system and cancelled their teaching certificates, depriving of them of the ability to teach in either public or private schools. In the letter terminating the teachers, Rivera Sánchez accused them of “abandonment of service,” citing a one-day strike led by the FMPR and other education workers’ unions last August to protest the system’s failure to hire enough teachers [see Update #1046]. FMPR president Rafael Feliciano called Rivera Sánchez’s action repressive and unprecedented. He said the fired teachers would continue to lead the union without pay. The FMPR, Puerto Rico’s largest union, has a long history of militancy.
Guillermo de La Paz, a spokesperson for the Socialist Front of Puerto Rico, noted that the firings came “days after a US federal judge put the president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association (CAPR) in prison and while repression continues against the student movement,” which has been protesting an $800 tuition surcharge at the University of Puerto Rico [see Update #1068]. This act “confirms once again the plans of the government [of conservative governor Luis Fortuño] to dismantle all the organizations that represent a danger to its plans to turn over all the public institutions to big capital and its cronies.” While opposing the firing of the unionists, De La Paz noted that his group had “differences” with the FMPR leadership. (Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/22/11; Prensa Latina 2/23/11)
Meanwhile, police returned to the UPR’s Río Piedras campus on Feb. 24, a little more than a week after Gov. Fortuño withdrew them following widespread complaints of police brutality in dealing with student protests [see Update #1067]. The return of the police was apparently in reaction to a one-day student strike on Feb. 23. However, an open-ended strike some protesters backed had already been suspended by a student assembly on the campus the day before. The assembly voted 1,050 to 714 to discontinue the strike but to fight the tuition surcharge with occasional “days of struggle,” starting with the one-day action on Feb. 23. (La Raza (Chicago) 2/22/11 from INS; Primera Hora 2/25/11)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has declared the civil and human rights situation in Puerto Rico a “high priority for the organization,” William Ramírez, director of the legal defense group’s Puerto Rican chapter, said during a visit to New York City the week of Feb. 21. The situation at the UPR was just one among many issues the organization was concerned about, according to Ramírez, who also mentioned the closing off of the Capitol building during the Legislature’s vote on unpopular budget cuts last June and police attacks on people who tried to exercise their right to attend the session [see Update #1039]. “This is in contrast to what’s happening in Wisconsin, where hundreds of people entered to protest without the police intervening,” he noted, referring to an occupation of the state capitol in Madison starting the week of Feb. 14 in response to an anti-union measure proposed by the governor.
Ramírez said that the ACLU would decide in March whether to respond to the situation in Puerto Rico with a full-scale investigation. This would be the first time the ACLU has carried out such an inquiry on the island since the group’s investigation of the 1937 Ponce Massacre, in which police killed 17 unarmed civilians and wounded some 235 others. (La Opinión (Los Angeles) 2/26/11 from El Diario-La Prensa (New York))
*4. Haiti: Groups Campaign Against Neoliberal Accords
Some 17 Haitian groups have launched a new campaign against the neoliberal economic policies that Haiti has followed under successive governments over the last three decades. The immediate goal is to implement a moratorium “of at least five years on the trade liberalization agreements [between the Haitian government and international lending institutions] and the putting in place of an economic and social policy outside the logic of the market and of structural adjustment policies.”
“The grassroots social movement is unanimous in recognizing that the catastrophe [of the January 2010 earthquake in southern Haiti] is the result of a socio-historical process whose principal characteristics are exclusion, injustice and social inequalities,” the groups wrote. They dismissed the “reconstruction” projects of the international community as worse than useless: “While the situation of the [earthquake] victims and the displaced tends to get worse, the plans of the imperialist powers to use the country as a paradise for free trade zones [industrial parks exploiting cheap labor] are moving along nicely.”
The focus for the first 10 months of the campaign is to be on educating the population about the neoliberal accords, with the assistance of Haitian artists, intellectuals and musicians; putting pressure on the government and on international groups; proposing alternative policies; and participating in protests and other events. Among the groups in the campaign are the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA), the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR), the Popular Democratic Movement (MODEP), the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS) and Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA). (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/25/11)
Nearly a million people continue to live outside in tents or improvised shelters more than a year after the earthquake. The rainy season is approaching, and this will be the second rainy season without proper housing for the displaced. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC, or CIRH in French and Spanish), a group set up last year by donor nations to disburse and monitor international aid, says that one of its priorities is clearing away the rubble in Port-au-Prince so that new housing can be built. On Feb. 24 CIRH executive director Gabriel Verret announced that so far 20% of the rubble has been removed from the capital, and he promised that 40% would be removed by the end of the year. According to Verret, of the $5.3 billion that the international community is supposed to supply for reconstruction over an 18-month period, just 30% has been made available. (Radio Métropole (Haiti) 2/24/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
¡Golpistas! Coups and Democracy in the 21st Century
https://nacla.org/node/6899
Latin leftist leaders in love-in with Libyan lunatic
http://ww4report.com/node/9543
UDW Editor West Coast Book Tour: Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2927-udw-editor-west-coast-book-tour-dancing-with-dynamite-in-latin-america
Governing by Obeying the People: Bolivia's Politics of the Street
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/2920-governing-by-obeying-the-people-bolivias-politics-of-the-street
Washington, Peru and Ollanta Humala: You Can’t Always Believe What You Read in WikiLeaks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2922-washington-peru-and-ollanta-humala-you-cant-always-believe-what-you-read-in-wikileaks-
Ecuador: Still a Ways to Go, After Historic Ruling Against Chevron
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2919-ecuador-still-a-ways-to-go-after-historic-ruling-against-chevron
Celebrating Popular Struggle in Cauca, Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2928-celebrating-popular-struggle-in-cauca-colombia
Leaked U.S. Cables say Colombia’s Uribe Authorized “Clandestine Cross Border Operations” into Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6022
Agro-Fuel Debate Takes Root in Central America
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54600
With Increased US Aid, Honduras Militarises Anti-Drug Fight
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2921-with-increased-us-aid-honduras-militarises-anti-drug-fight-
El Salvador's Environmental Crisis
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2925-el-salvadors-environmental-crisis-
Putting People Over Money in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2924-putting-people-over-money-in-el-salvador
The Aristegui case and other attacks on freedom of expression (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4061
Calderón Criticizes U.S. On Mexican Drug War Effort; Says Feds Not Doing Enough
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/23/calderon-criticizes-u-s-on-mexican-drug-war-effort-says-feds-not-doing-enough/
Mexico Arrests Suspects In Shooting Death Of ICE Agent; Says It Was Mistaken Identity
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/24/mexico-arrests-suspects-in-shooting-death-of-ice-agent-says-it-was-mistaken-identity/
Mexico: leader of "La Resistancia" apprehended
http://ww4report.com/node/9547
More Than 50,000 Rally for Global Days of Action on Mexico
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=184#1247
Mexican Trade Unionist Juan Linares Released from Jail
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=184#1249
Fidel Castro: NATO to occupy Libya
http://ww4report.com/node/9531
Cuban Authorities Set Date For Trial Of U.S. Contractor Alan Gross
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/25/cuban-authorities-set-date-for-trial-of-u-s-contractor-alan-gross/
Haitians Mobilize for Aristide's Return
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2929-haitians-mobilize-for-aristides-return
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1069, February 27, 2011
1. Chile: Mapuche Activists Acquitted of “Terrorism”
2. Mexico: Reyes Salazars Demand an End to the “Stupid War”
3. Puerto Rico: ACLU May Investigate Rights Situation
4. Haiti: Groups Campaign Against Neoliberal Accords
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, 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. Chile: Mapuche Activists Acquitted of “Terrorism”
In a significant setback for Chilean prosecutors, judges in Cañete in the central province of Arauco voted on Feb. 22 not to convict 17 indigenous Mapuche activists on “terrorism” charges relating to a fire and an attack on a prosecutor, Mario Elgueta, in Tirúa in October 2008 [see Update #985]. The judges acquitted most of the defendants of all charges, but they found four of the activists--Héctor Llaitul, Ramón Llenaquileo, José Huenuche and Jonathan Huillical—guilty of attempted homicide, a common crime, in the attack on Elgueta.
The four convicted activists may receive prison terms of up to 15 years at their sentencing, scheduled for Mar. 22, but they could have been condemned to 103-year terms if prosecutors had succeeded in convicting them on “illegal terrorist association,” a charge based on Law No. 19.027, which was enacted during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The accused, said to be members of the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM), were among 34 Mapuche prisoners who participated in a hunger strike in the late summer of 2010 to protest the law, which treats land occupations and attacks on the equipment or personnel of multinational companies as acts of terrorism. Indigenous activists say they need to use these tactics to protest illegal seizures of their land [see Update #1052].
Chilean activists and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) treated the acquittals as a “positive step.” But the terrorism law remains on the books, with some modifications, and in deciding to acquit the defendants the judges cited the lack of convincing evidence, not problems with the law. (País Mapuche (Chile) 2/22/11 from Radio Biobio; AFP 2/22/11 via Terra (Peru); La Jornada (Mexico) 2/24/11 from correspondent)
National Public Defender Paula Vial, whose office defended some of the activists, charged that the trial was marked by irregularities, despite the acquittals. The four convictions were based on testimony from a “faceless witness”—a witness whose identity remains secret—and on statements by one of the accused that were apparently obtained through torture. “Is it possible to affirm that these citizens confronted the arms of the government on equal terms?” Vial asked. “Is it possible to affirm that they received a just trial?” (La Nación (Chile) 2/25/11)
*2. Mexico: Reyes Salazars Demand an End to the “Stupid War”
On the morning of Feb. 25 Mexican soldiers reported finding the bodies of María Magdalena (“Malena”) Reyes Salazar, her brother Elías Reyes Salazar and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas Soto, by the Juárez-Porvenir highway, some 3 km from their home in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, near Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. The three had been kidnapped by unidentified armed men on Feb. 7. [See Update #1067, where we reported, following our source, that they were seized while riding in a truck; some reports now say they were taken from their home.] Six members of the Reyes Salazar family have been murdered in the past two years.
Family members had responded to the abduction with protests to demand that the state and federal governments locate the three kidnapping victims and protect the rest of the family. Malena and Elías’ sisters Claudia and Marisela Reyes Salazar were carrying out hunger strikes in front of government offices—Claudia in Ciudad Juárez and Marisela in Mexico City--when they received word that the bodies had been found.
In an emotional press conference on Feb. 25, Marisela Reyes Salazar lashed out at Jorge González Nicolás, a Chihuahua state prosecutor, and at Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who ordered the militarization of the fight against narco-trafficking in the northern states soon after taking office in December 2006; the toll from this “war on drugs” is now over 35,000. González Nicolás was “useless,” Marisela Reyes said, and should resign “because he doesn’t know how to do his job.” Calderón, she continued, should “withdraw his troops” and end this “stupid and dirty war that he’s got. We, the people, didn’t ask for it, and we don’t need it.”
The series of attacks on the family began in 2008 when Josefina Reyes Salazar, another of the siblings, charged that the army had disappeared her son Miguel Ángel, who was later jailed in Tamaulipas state for alleged ties to organized crime. Another son, Julio César, was murdered in 2009. Josefina, a former local official and a member of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), continued to protest against the military. She herself was murdered on Jan. 3, 2010; afterwards the military searched her home three times. Her brother Rubén, also a former official and a PRD member, was murdered on Aug. 18. On Feb. 15 of this year, a week after the kidnapping of Malena and Elías Reyes Salazar and Luisa Ornela, unidentified persons used Molotov cocktails to set the house of Sara Salazar, the mother of Josefina, Rubén, Malena and Elías, on fire.
Some Mexican activists suspect involvement by members of the military and point to what appears to be a calculated effort to depict the family as criminals with drug connections. Malena and Elías Reyes Salazar and Luisa Ornela seem to have been buried soon after they were murdered, but once the case had drawn national and international attention, their bodies were dug up and placed in a visible location at the highway. Notes were found with the corpses; these reportedly contained death threats against Marisela Reyes Salazar and warned her to admit that she came from a family of hit men and thugs.
“How convenient, how timely,” the Cerezo Mexico Committee Human Rights Organization wrote on Feb. 25. The group, which was formed to defend three brothers imprisoned for an alleged bomb plot in 2001 [see Update #980], added: “If we forgot the causes that motivated these acts, we might…think the state is right when it explains that they were connected with crime, but let’s remember that the struggle that the Reyes Salazar family took on was and continues to be against the militarization, against the narco-paramilitary state…” (El Diario (Ciudad Juárez) 2/25/11; Cerezo Committee 2/25/11; La Jornada (Mexico) 2/26/11, 2/27/11)
*3. Puerto Rico: ACLU May Investigate Rights Situation
On Feb. 18 Puerto Rican education secretary Jesús Rivera Sánchez fired 11 members of the Executive Committee of the Teachers' Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR) from their jobs in the public school system and cancelled their teaching certificates, depriving of them of the ability to teach in either public or private schools. In the letter terminating the teachers, Rivera Sánchez accused them of “abandonment of service,” citing a one-day strike led by the FMPR and other education workers’ unions last August to protest the system’s failure to hire enough teachers [see Update #1046]. FMPR president Rafael Feliciano called Rivera Sánchez’s action repressive and unprecedented. He said the fired teachers would continue to lead the union without pay. The FMPR, Puerto Rico’s largest union, has a long history of militancy.
Guillermo de La Paz, a spokesperson for the Socialist Front of Puerto Rico, noted that the firings came “days after a US federal judge put the president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association (CAPR) in prison and while repression continues against the student movement,” which has been protesting an $800 tuition surcharge at the University of Puerto Rico [see Update #1068]. This act “confirms once again the plans of the government [of conservative governor Luis Fortuño] to dismantle all the organizations that represent a danger to its plans to turn over all the public institutions to big capital and its cronies.” While opposing the firing of the unionists, De La Paz noted that his group had “differences” with the FMPR leadership. (Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/22/11; Prensa Latina 2/23/11)
Meanwhile, police returned to the UPR’s Río Piedras campus on Feb. 24, a little more than a week after Gov. Fortuño withdrew them following widespread complaints of police brutality in dealing with student protests [see Update #1067]. The return of the police was apparently in reaction to a one-day student strike on Feb. 23. However, an open-ended strike some protesters backed had already been suspended by a student assembly on the campus the day before. The assembly voted 1,050 to 714 to discontinue the strike but to fight the tuition surcharge with occasional “days of struggle,” starting with the one-day action on Feb. 23. (La Raza (Chicago) 2/22/11 from INS; Primera Hora 2/25/11)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has declared the civil and human rights situation in Puerto Rico a “high priority for the organization,” William Ramírez, director of the legal defense group’s Puerto Rican chapter, said during a visit to New York City the week of Feb. 21. The situation at the UPR was just one among many issues the organization was concerned about, according to Ramírez, who also mentioned the closing off of the Capitol building during the Legislature’s vote on unpopular budget cuts last June and police attacks on people who tried to exercise their right to attend the session [see Update #1039]. “This is in contrast to what’s happening in Wisconsin, where hundreds of people entered to protest without the police intervening,” he noted, referring to an occupation of the state capitol in Madison starting the week of Feb. 14 in response to an anti-union measure proposed by the governor.
Ramírez said that the ACLU would decide in March whether to respond to the situation in Puerto Rico with a full-scale investigation. This would be the first time the ACLU has carried out such an inquiry on the island since the group’s investigation of the 1937 Ponce Massacre, in which police killed 17 unarmed civilians and wounded some 235 others. (La Opinión (Los Angeles) 2/26/11 from El Diario-La Prensa (New York))
*4. Haiti: Groups Campaign Against Neoliberal Accords
Some 17 Haitian groups have launched a new campaign against the neoliberal economic policies that Haiti has followed under successive governments over the last three decades. The immediate goal is to implement a moratorium “of at least five years on the trade liberalization agreements [between the Haitian government and international lending institutions] and the putting in place of an economic and social policy outside the logic of the market and of structural adjustment policies.”
“The grassroots social movement is unanimous in recognizing that the catastrophe [of the January 2010 earthquake in southern Haiti] is the result of a socio-historical process whose principal characteristics are exclusion, injustice and social inequalities,” the groups wrote. They dismissed the “reconstruction” projects of the international community as worse than useless: “While the situation of the [earthquake] victims and the displaced tends to get worse, the plans of the imperialist powers to use the country as a paradise for free trade zones [industrial parks exploiting cheap labor] are moving along nicely.”
The focus for the first 10 months of the campaign is to be on educating the population about the neoliberal accords, with the assistance of Haitian artists, intellectuals and musicians; putting pressure on the government and on international groups; proposing alternative policies; and participating in protests and other events. Among the groups in the campaign are the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA), the Support Group for the Repatriated and Refugees (GARR), the Popular Democratic Movement (MODEP), the Haitian Platform Advocating an Alternative Development (PAPDA), the Society for the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS) and Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA). (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/25/11)
Nearly a million people continue to live outside in tents or improvised shelters more than a year after the earthquake. The rainy season is approaching, and this will be the second rainy season without proper housing for the displaced. The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC, or CIRH in French and Spanish), a group set up last year by donor nations to disburse and monitor international aid, says that one of its priorities is clearing away the rubble in Port-au-Prince so that new housing can be built. On Feb. 24 CIRH executive director Gabriel Verret announced that so far 20% of the rubble has been removed from the capital, and he promised that 40% would be removed by the end of the year. According to Verret, of the $5.3 billion that the international community is supposed to supply for reconstruction over an 18-month period, just 30% has been made available. (Radio Métropole (Haiti) 2/24/11)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
¡Golpistas! Coups and Democracy in the 21st Century
https://nacla.org/node/6899
Latin leftist leaders in love-in with Libyan lunatic
http://ww4report.com/node/9543
UDW Editor West Coast Book Tour: Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2927-udw-editor-west-coast-book-tour-dancing-with-dynamite-in-latin-america
Governing by Obeying the People: Bolivia's Politics of the Street
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/2920-governing-by-obeying-the-people-bolivias-politics-of-the-street
Washington, Peru and Ollanta Humala: You Can’t Always Believe What You Read in WikiLeaks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/2922-washington-peru-and-ollanta-humala-you-cant-always-believe-what-you-read-in-wikileaks-
Ecuador: Still a Ways to Go, After Historic Ruling Against Chevron
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2919-ecuador-still-a-ways-to-go-after-historic-ruling-against-chevron
Celebrating Popular Struggle in Cauca, Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2928-celebrating-popular-struggle-in-cauca-colombia
Leaked U.S. Cables say Colombia’s Uribe Authorized “Clandestine Cross Border Operations” into Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6022
Agro-Fuel Debate Takes Root in Central America
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54600
With Increased US Aid, Honduras Militarises Anti-Drug Fight
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/2921-with-increased-us-aid-honduras-militarises-anti-drug-fight-
El Salvador's Environmental Crisis
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2925-el-salvadors-environmental-crisis-
Putting People Over Money in El Salvador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2924-putting-people-over-money-in-el-salvador
The Aristegui case and other attacks on freedom of expression (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4061
Calderón Criticizes U.S. On Mexican Drug War Effort; Says Feds Not Doing Enough
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/23/calderon-criticizes-u-s-on-mexican-drug-war-effort-says-feds-not-doing-enough/
Mexico Arrests Suspects In Shooting Death Of ICE Agent; Says It Was Mistaken Identity
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/24/mexico-arrests-suspects-in-shooting-death-of-ice-agent-says-it-was-mistaken-identity/
Mexico: leader of "La Resistancia" apprehended
http://ww4report.com/node/9547
More Than 50,000 Rally for Global Days of Action on Mexico
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=184#1247
Mexican Trade Unionist Juan Linares Released from Jail
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=184#1249
Fidel Castro: NATO to occupy Libya
http://ww4report.com/node/9531
Cuban Authorities Set Date For Trial Of U.S. Contractor Alan Gross
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/25/cuban-authorities-set-date-for-trial-of-u-s-contractor-alan-gross/
Haitians Mobilize for Aristide's Return
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2929-haitians-mobilize-for-aristides-return
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, February 21, 2011
WNU #1068: Indigenous Panamanians Protest Open-Pit Mining
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1068, February 20, 2011
1. Panama: Indigenous Groups Protest Open-Pit Mining
2. Puerto Rico: Bar Association Head Jailed in “Rights Crisis”
3. Honduras: US Cable Blasts Coup Leaders’ “Backroom Deals”
4. Mexico: Rebels Reemerge to Denounce “Drug War”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, 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. Panama: Indigenous Groups Protest Open-Pit Mining
On Feb. 15 some 5,000 members of Panama’s Ngöbe-Buglé indigenous group held a day of national protests against changes to the Mining Resources Code that they said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies. The protests, organized by the People’s Total Struggle (ULIP), started at 10 am in San Félix, in the Ngöbe-Buglé territory in the western province of Chiriquí. Demonstrators interrupted traffic on the highway leading to Costa Rica and reportedly attacked Deputy Labor Minister Luis Ernesto Carles, who had been sent to talk with them. At noon there were demonstrations in front of the Banco General in Santiago, Veraguas province, and the Aquilino Tejera Hospital in Penonomé, Coclé province. Actions continued in the afternoon with protests at the Central Avenue in Changuinola, Bocas del Toro province, and at Vía España in Panama City.
The National Assembly, which is dominated by the coalition supporting conservative President Ricardo Martinelli, voted 42-15 on Feb. 10 to pass the mining law changes, which supporters say will ease the way for foreign investment in the country. They also insist that the law increases controls over the mining companies by stepping up incentives, regulations and fines, and that mining will not be allowed in indigenous territories. But more than 70 Panamanian and international environmental organizations charge that open-pit mining will have serious effects in a rainy tropical climate like Panama’s. They have asked the government to carry out a dialogue on the changes.
Ngöbe-Buglé leaders called on Martinelli to revoke the new law by Feb. 17. He refused, and on Feb. 18 protesters blocked a bridge over the Pacora River east of the capital, interrupting the flow of traffic. The demonstrators fought back with clubs and stones when some 200 anti-riot agents were sent in to remove them. There were seven arrests and several police agents were injured, according to José Castillo, police chief for the metropolitan area.
Indigenous leaders set a new deadline of Feb. 23 for revoking the changes to the law and called for protests to continue. There was a demonstration in David, the capital of Chiriquí province, on Feb. 19, and a delegation of Ngöbe-Buglé were holding a vigil over the weekend of Feb. 19 at the National Assembly building in Panama City. On Feb. 20 an indigenous delegation interrupted a convention of the Panameñista Party in Chiriquí, forcing Vice President Juan Carlos Varela, the party’s leader, to hold a meeting with them.
The social democratic opposition Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) has announced that it supports the indigenous demands “publicly and unconditionally” and will revoke the law if its candidates win the 2014 elections. (Adital (Brazil) 2/15/11; Radio Temblor (Panama) 2/16/11 via Adital; AFP 2/18/11 via Terra (Peru); Telemetro (Panama) 2/20/11; EFE 2/20/11 via Qué.es (Spain))
*2. Puerto Rico: Bar Association Head Jailed in “Rights Crisis”
Chief US federal district judge José Fusté sent Puerto Rican Bar Association (CAPR) president Osvaldo Toledo Martínez to prison on Feb. 10 for refusing to pay a $10,000 fine for contempt of court. This was the latest incident arising from a federal class action suit that challenges the bar’s use of compulsory dues to buy life insurance policies for all its members. CAPR supporters say the association has discontinued the practice and the suit is politically motivated.
Last year the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld an injunction that barred the use of dues for the insurance program, but the court overturned a $4 million damages judgment and said lawyers can opt out of the class action suit. A lower court could then reduce the damages, the appeals court ruled. In defiance of a gag order barring discussion of the case, Toledo held a press conference on Feb. 8 to tell lawyers about their option to get out of the suit; he warned that the CAPR headquarters might have to be sold to pay the judgment. Judge Fusté then found Toledo in contempt and imposed the fine. Toledo surrendered on Feb. 10 at the federal courthouse in Hato Rey rather than pay. “I am here to turn myself in because I don’t want officials to break the doors to my house at 3 am,” he said, “or shoot pepper spray at my family, or bring federal patrol cars. I want my family to sleep peacefully.”
Toledo was released from jail on Feb. 14 after a motion was filed saying that he would pay the fine, but under protest and at the urging of his wife. Once he was released, Toledo treated by a urologist for a possible urinary infection and then taken to a hospital emergency room due to high blood pressure. (Caribbean Business (Puerto Rico) 2/10/11; ABA Journal 2/14/11, 2/15/11)
Coming amidst charges of repression by the administration of conservative governor Luis Fortuño against student protesters at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) [see Update #1067], Judge Fusté’s jailing of Toledo triggered strong support for the bar association president. Some 250 CAPR members and others held a vigil in front of the federal prison in Hato Rey the night of Feb. 11. Environmental activist Alberto de Jesús Mercado (“Tito Kayak”) climbed an electric power pole and unfurled a banner reading: “Osvaldo, all of Puerto Rico is with you.” The Ibero-Americana Union of Bar Associations denounced Fusté’s actions as an abuse of power and a throwback to “the ancestral debtors’ prison.” (NotiCel (Puerto Rico) 2/11/11)
The case came up in the US House of Representatives on Feb. 16, when Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) called the situation in Puerto Rico a “human rights and civil rights crisis” and compared it to Egypt during the repression of protests there in late January and early February.
Standing next to photograph of Judge Fusté, Gutierrez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, described the island as “[a] part of the world where a student strike led the university to ban student protests on campus and where students protesting the crackdown on free speech were violently attacked by heavily armed police….a part of the world where the bar association has been dismantled by the legislature because it takes stands in opposition to the government, and its leader has been jailed for fighting a politically motivated lawsuit.” Charging that Fusté has “close political ties to the ruling party and a personal history of opposing the Puerto Rico bar association,” Gutierrez entered into the Congressional Record Toledo’s instructions on how CAPR members could opt out of the suit. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 2/16/11)
Meanwhile, student protesters were planning to continue their fight against an $800 tuition surcharge at the UPR. Having won their demand for the police to be withdrawn from UPR campuses, members of the Student Representative Committee (CRE) said they would ask a Feb. 22 General Assembly of students at the Río Piedras campus in San Juan to endorse their call for a strike like the successful strike against budget cuts in the spring of 2010.
Some students who support the protesters’ demands oppose the use of the strike on strategic grounds. Even if the assembly backs the plan, the vote may not become official. Last August Gov. Fortuño signed a law requiring all student assembly decisions to be ratified by an electronic vote open to all the students. Some students say that if the assembly backs a strike plan, the administration could refuse to put it up for the electronic vote, claiming that university strikes are illegal. (END 2/20/11; Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/20/11)
*3. Honduras: US Cable Blasts Coup Leaders’ “Backroom Deals”
A US diplomatic cable released by the WikiLeaks group on Jan. 29 has raised new questions about possible corruption in the de facto regime that ruled Honduras between the June 28, 2009 coup against then-president José Manuel (“Mel’) Zelaya Rosales and the Jan. 27, 2010 inauguration of current president Porifirio Lobo Sosa.
The confidential Feb. 20, 2010 cable by US ambassador Hugo Llorens deals with a concession for the José Cecilio del Valle dam and hydroelectric plant near Nacaome, in Valle department in southern Honduras. The Honduran Congress passed a law on Jan. 16, 2010 granting the concession to a consortium including the Italian companies Italian Industrial Agency S.R.L. and B&P Altolumie SNS, and the Honduran firms Hidrocontrol S.A. and Desarrollo y Construcciones y Equipos S.A. De facto president Roberto Micheletti Bain signed the bill on Jan. 20, and it was published in a special edition of the government gazette with only about 20 copies, apparently to keep the law from attracting attention. This maneuver with the gazette and the hurried way the law was passed did in fact draw attention, and the new Lobo administration put the project on hold.
Ambassador Llorens wrote in the cable that “[a]ccording to [US] Embassy sources, Micheletti was one of the Honduran partners in the consortium granted the concession. The chief actors included [then-Congress president José Alfredo] Saavedra, Micheletti Minister of Public Works Saro Bonanno, and Micheletti intimates Johnny Kafati and Roberto Turcios. It is inconceivable that this deal could have been put together without Micheletti's knowledge.” Llorens then commented: “While Micheletti and his colleagues portrayed themselves as practitioners of efficient and honest government in contrast to President Manuel Zelaya's chaotic administration, they appear to have cut a significant number of backroom deals, which were egregious even by local standards. The approval of a huge hydroelectric deal, with such little benefit to the state, just a week before the regime left office is the prime example.”
Micheletti reacted to the leaked cable during a Feb. 15 conference organized by the rightwing Civic Democratic Union (UCD)—entitled “Antidote to 21st Century Socialism”—by announcing that that he would sue Llorens in US courts as soon as the ambassador left office and no longer enjoyed diplomatic immunity. The Honduras Culture and Politics blog noted that a private communication between Llorens and his employer, the US government, could hardly be considered either slander or defamation in the US: “This is a lot of bluster and bravado with no legal basis under US law.” (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 2/16/11; El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 2/17/11)
*4. Mexico: Rebels Reemerge to Denounce “Drug War”
Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s militarization of the struggle against drug trafficking is “a war from above” largely for the benefit of US interests, according to a letter published on Feb. 14 and written by “Sub-Commander Marcos,” the spokesperson of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which is based in the southeastern state of Chiapas.
The war, which Calderón launched when he assumed the presidency in December 2006, “grants [the US] profits, territory, and political and military control without the uncomfortable body bags and the crippled people that arrived, before, from Vietnam and now from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Marcos wrote in the letter, which is addressed to the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro Toranzo. “The results of this war won't only be thousands of dead… and juicy economic winnings. Also, and above all, it will result in a nation destroyed, depopulated, and irreversibly broken.”
Except for a communiqué after the death on Jan. 24 of former Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz García, this letter was said to be the first public statement since 2009 by the once-prolific Marcos. The EZLN, which hasn’t used arms since a brief insurrection in January 1994, has focused recently on developing the 20 communities in its own autonomous region. Gerardo González, a professor at the College of the Southern Border who studies the Zapatista movement, told the French wire service AFP that Marcos’ reappearance “can be explained by his reading of a favorable conjuncture with social movements like what is happening in Egypt, in the Arab countries, in Italy, and in other countries.” (AFP 2/15/11 via Terra (Peru); English translation of Marcos’ letter from My Word Is My Weapon blog 2/14/11)
The US House of Representatives voted 277 to 149 on Feb. 18 for an amendment that blocks a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to require some 8,500 gun dealers near the US-Mexico border to report sales within five consecutive business days of two or more semi-automatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines. The proposal was intended to help the ATF catch people running semi-automatic rifles to Mexico, where they are used by drug gangs.
The amendment, which was added to a spending bill funding the US government through September, had strong bipartisan support; it was introduced by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Ok) and was backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, it needs to pass the Senate and be signed by US president Barack Obama to become official. Mexico’s ambassador to the US, Arturo Sarukhán, called the vote “unfortunate.” Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said the amendment was “very bad news for everyone who is worried about arms trafficking to Mexico.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/20/11 from Notimex; Washington Post 2/20/11)
The vote follows the WikiLeaks group’s recent release of US diplomatic cables indicating that some of the heavy weapons used by Mexican drug gangs were originally supplied to armies in the region by the US military [see Update #1067]
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
The New Latin American “Progresismo” and the Extractivism of the 21st Century
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4025
People's Power: Participatory Budgeting from Brazil to Chicago (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2912-peoples-power-participatory-budgeting-from-brazil-to-chicago-
What Wikileaks Teaches Us About Obama and Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2909-what-wikileaks-teaches-us-about-obama-and-latin-america
In Brazil, Peasants Claim Farmland
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2917-in-brazil-peasants-claim-farmland
Rio de Janeiro’s Former Police Chief Accused of Leaking Information About Corruption Bust
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/18/rio-de-janeiros-former-police-chief-accused-of-leaking-information-about-corruption-bust/
Water Evaporates in Peru's For-Export Crops
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2910-water-evaporates-in-perus-for-export-crops
Ecuador: judge orders Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in pollution case
http://ww4report.com/node/9494
Ecuadorian Court Rules Against Chevron in Historic Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2907-ecuadorian-court-rules-against-chevron-in-historic-case
China to build trans-oceanic rail link through Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9495
Colombian navy seizes another narco-submarine
http://ww4report.com/node/9496
Obama Requests Funding for Venezuelan Opposition in 2012 Budget
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6006
Accused JFK bomb plot conspirator gets life (Guyana)
http://ww4report.com/node/8953#comment-323275
Martial Law, Repression, and Remilitarization in Guatemala
https://nacla.org/node/6879
Action Alert! Q’eqchi’ Leaders Massacred in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2913-action-alert-qeqchi-leaders-massacred-in-guatemala-
Mexican agriculture in crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/9498
Mexico: US ICE agent killed amid growing violence
http://ww4report.com/node/9497
Mexico Arrests Two Police Officers In Killing Of Nuevo Leon State Senior Officer
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/17/mexico-arrests-two-police-officers-in-killing-of-nuevo-leon-state-senior-officer/
Ciudad Juárez: escalating attacks on activists (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/9509
Mexico’s Federal Police Open Fire on Protesters, Throwing Merida Initiative Accountability Into Question
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2915-mexicos-federal-police-open-fire-on-protesters-throwing-merida-initiative-accountability-into-question
Tourism Is Poisoning the Mexican Caribbean
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2911-tourism-is-poisoning-the-mexican-caribbean
Haiti: Resettlement Plan Excludes Almost 200,000 Families
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54472
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1068, February 20, 2011
1. Panama: Indigenous Groups Protest Open-Pit Mining
2. Puerto Rico: Bar Association Head Jailed in “Rights Crisis”
3. Honduras: US Cable Blasts Coup Leaders’ “Backroom Deals”
4. Mexico: Rebels Reemerge to Denounce “Drug War”
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, 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. Panama: Indigenous Groups Protest Open-Pit Mining
On Feb. 15 some 5,000 members of Panama’s Ngöbe-Buglé indigenous group held a day of national protests against changes to the Mining Resources Code that they said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies. The protests, organized by the People’s Total Struggle (ULIP), started at 10 am in San Félix, in the Ngöbe-Buglé territory in the western province of Chiriquí. Demonstrators interrupted traffic on the highway leading to Costa Rica and reportedly attacked Deputy Labor Minister Luis Ernesto Carles, who had been sent to talk with them. At noon there were demonstrations in front of the Banco General in Santiago, Veraguas province, and the Aquilino Tejera Hospital in Penonomé, Coclé province. Actions continued in the afternoon with protests at the Central Avenue in Changuinola, Bocas del Toro province, and at Vía España in Panama City.
The National Assembly, which is dominated by the coalition supporting conservative President Ricardo Martinelli, voted 42-15 on Feb. 10 to pass the mining law changes, which supporters say will ease the way for foreign investment in the country. They also insist that the law increases controls over the mining companies by stepping up incentives, regulations and fines, and that mining will not be allowed in indigenous territories. But more than 70 Panamanian and international environmental organizations charge that open-pit mining will have serious effects in a rainy tropical climate like Panama’s. They have asked the government to carry out a dialogue on the changes.
Ngöbe-Buglé leaders called on Martinelli to revoke the new law by Feb. 17. He refused, and on Feb. 18 protesters blocked a bridge over the Pacora River east of the capital, interrupting the flow of traffic. The demonstrators fought back with clubs and stones when some 200 anti-riot agents were sent in to remove them. There were seven arrests and several police agents were injured, according to José Castillo, police chief for the metropolitan area.
Indigenous leaders set a new deadline of Feb. 23 for revoking the changes to the law and called for protests to continue. There was a demonstration in David, the capital of Chiriquí province, on Feb. 19, and a delegation of Ngöbe-Buglé were holding a vigil over the weekend of Feb. 19 at the National Assembly building in Panama City. On Feb. 20 an indigenous delegation interrupted a convention of the Panameñista Party in Chiriquí, forcing Vice President Juan Carlos Varela, the party’s leader, to hold a meeting with them.
The social democratic opposition Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD) has announced that it supports the indigenous demands “publicly and unconditionally” and will revoke the law if its candidates win the 2014 elections. (Adital (Brazil) 2/15/11; Radio Temblor (Panama) 2/16/11 via Adital; AFP 2/18/11 via Terra (Peru); Telemetro (Panama) 2/20/11; EFE 2/20/11 via Qué.es (Spain))
*2. Puerto Rico: Bar Association Head Jailed in “Rights Crisis”
Chief US federal district judge José Fusté sent Puerto Rican Bar Association (CAPR) president Osvaldo Toledo Martínez to prison on Feb. 10 for refusing to pay a $10,000 fine for contempt of court. This was the latest incident arising from a federal class action suit that challenges the bar’s use of compulsory dues to buy life insurance policies for all its members. CAPR supporters say the association has discontinued the practice and the suit is politically motivated.
Last year the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston upheld an injunction that barred the use of dues for the insurance program, but the court overturned a $4 million damages judgment and said lawyers can opt out of the class action suit. A lower court could then reduce the damages, the appeals court ruled. In defiance of a gag order barring discussion of the case, Toledo held a press conference on Feb. 8 to tell lawyers about their option to get out of the suit; he warned that the CAPR headquarters might have to be sold to pay the judgment. Judge Fusté then found Toledo in contempt and imposed the fine. Toledo surrendered on Feb. 10 at the federal courthouse in Hato Rey rather than pay. “I am here to turn myself in because I don’t want officials to break the doors to my house at 3 am,” he said, “or shoot pepper spray at my family, or bring federal patrol cars. I want my family to sleep peacefully.”
Toledo was released from jail on Feb. 14 after a motion was filed saying that he would pay the fine, but under protest and at the urging of his wife. Once he was released, Toledo treated by a urologist for a possible urinary infection and then taken to a hospital emergency room due to high blood pressure. (Caribbean Business (Puerto Rico) 2/10/11; ABA Journal 2/14/11, 2/15/11)
Coming amidst charges of repression by the administration of conservative governor Luis Fortuño against student protesters at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) [see Update #1067], Judge Fusté’s jailing of Toledo triggered strong support for the bar association president. Some 250 CAPR members and others held a vigil in front of the federal prison in Hato Rey the night of Feb. 11. Environmental activist Alberto de Jesús Mercado (“Tito Kayak”) climbed an electric power pole and unfurled a banner reading: “Osvaldo, all of Puerto Rico is with you.” The Ibero-Americana Union of Bar Associations denounced Fusté’s actions as an abuse of power and a throwback to “the ancestral debtors’ prison.” (NotiCel (Puerto Rico) 2/11/11)
The case came up in the US House of Representatives on Feb. 16, when Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill) called the situation in Puerto Rico a “human rights and civil rights crisis” and compared it to Egypt during the repression of protests there in late January and early February.
Standing next to photograph of Judge Fusté, Gutierrez, who is of Puerto Rican descent, described the island as “[a] part of the world where a student strike led the university to ban student protests on campus and where students protesting the crackdown on free speech were violently attacked by heavily armed police….a part of the world where the bar association has been dismantled by the legislature because it takes stands in opposition to the government, and its leader has been jailed for fighting a politically motivated lawsuit.” Charging that Fusté has “close political ties to the ruling party and a personal history of opposing the Puerto Rico bar association,” Gutierrez entered into the Congressional Record Toledo’s instructions on how CAPR members could opt out of the suit. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 2/16/11)
Meanwhile, student protesters were planning to continue their fight against an $800 tuition surcharge at the UPR. Having won their demand for the police to be withdrawn from UPR campuses, members of the Student Representative Committee (CRE) said they would ask a Feb. 22 General Assembly of students at the Río Piedras campus in San Juan to endorse their call for a strike like the successful strike against budget cuts in the spring of 2010.
Some students who support the protesters’ demands oppose the use of the strike on strategic grounds. Even if the assembly backs the plan, the vote may not become official. Last August Gov. Fortuño signed a law requiring all student assembly decisions to be ratified by an electronic vote open to all the students. Some students say that if the assembly backs a strike plan, the administration could refuse to put it up for the electronic vote, claiming that university strikes are illegal. (END 2/20/11; Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/20/11)
*3. Honduras: US Cable Blasts Coup Leaders’ “Backroom Deals”
A US diplomatic cable released by the WikiLeaks group on Jan. 29 has raised new questions about possible corruption in the de facto regime that ruled Honduras between the June 28, 2009 coup against then-president José Manuel (“Mel’) Zelaya Rosales and the Jan. 27, 2010 inauguration of current president Porifirio Lobo Sosa.
The confidential Feb. 20, 2010 cable by US ambassador Hugo Llorens deals with a concession for the José Cecilio del Valle dam and hydroelectric plant near Nacaome, in Valle department in southern Honduras. The Honduran Congress passed a law on Jan. 16, 2010 granting the concession to a consortium including the Italian companies Italian Industrial Agency S.R.L. and B&P Altolumie SNS, and the Honduran firms Hidrocontrol S.A. and Desarrollo y Construcciones y Equipos S.A. De facto president Roberto Micheletti Bain signed the bill on Jan. 20, and it was published in a special edition of the government gazette with only about 20 copies, apparently to keep the law from attracting attention. This maneuver with the gazette and the hurried way the law was passed did in fact draw attention, and the new Lobo administration put the project on hold.
Ambassador Llorens wrote in the cable that “[a]ccording to [US] Embassy sources, Micheletti was one of the Honduran partners in the consortium granted the concession. The chief actors included [then-Congress president José Alfredo] Saavedra, Micheletti Minister of Public Works Saro Bonanno, and Micheletti intimates Johnny Kafati and Roberto Turcios. It is inconceivable that this deal could have been put together without Micheletti's knowledge.” Llorens then commented: “While Micheletti and his colleagues portrayed themselves as practitioners of efficient and honest government in contrast to President Manuel Zelaya's chaotic administration, they appear to have cut a significant number of backroom deals, which were egregious even by local standards. The approval of a huge hydroelectric deal, with such little benefit to the state, just a week before the regime left office is the prime example.”
Micheletti reacted to the leaked cable during a Feb. 15 conference organized by the rightwing Civic Democratic Union (UCD)—entitled “Antidote to 21st Century Socialism”—by announcing that that he would sue Llorens in US courts as soon as the ambassador left office and no longer enjoyed diplomatic immunity. The Honduras Culture and Politics blog noted that a private communication between Llorens and his employer, the US government, could hardly be considered either slander or defamation in the US: “This is a lot of bluster and bravado with no legal basis under US law.” (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 2/16/11; El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 2/17/11)
*4. Mexico: Rebels Reemerge to Denounce “Drug War”
Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s militarization of the struggle against drug trafficking is “a war from above” largely for the benefit of US interests, according to a letter published on Feb. 14 and written by “Sub-Commander Marcos,” the spokesperson of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which is based in the southeastern state of Chiapas.
The war, which Calderón launched when he assumed the presidency in December 2006, “grants [the US] profits, territory, and political and military control without the uncomfortable body bags and the crippled people that arrived, before, from Vietnam and now from Iraq and Afghanistan,” Marcos wrote in the letter, which is addressed to the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro Toranzo. “The results of this war won't only be thousands of dead… and juicy economic winnings. Also, and above all, it will result in a nation destroyed, depopulated, and irreversibly broken.”
Except for a communiqué after the death on Jan. 24 of former Chiapas bishop Samuel Ruiz García, this letter was said to be the first public statement since 2009 by the once-prolific Marcos. The EZLN, which hasn’t used arms since a brief insurrection in January 1994, has focused recently on developing the 20 communities in its own autonomous region. Gerardo González, a professor at the College of the Southern Border who studies the Zapatista movement, told the French wire service AFP that Marcos’ reappearance “can be explained by his reading of a favorable conjuncture with social movements like what is happening in Egypt, in the Arab countries, in Italy, and in other countries.” (AFP 2/15/11 via Terra (Peru); English translation of Marcos’ letter from My Word Is My Weapon blog 2/14/11)
The US House of Representatives voted 277 to 149 on Feb. 18 for an amendment that blocks a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to require some 8,500 gun dealers near the US-Mexico border to report sales within five consecutive business days of two or more semi-automatic rifles greater than .22 caliber with detachable magazines. The proposal was intended to help the ATF catch people running semi-automatic rifles to Mexico, where they are used by drug gangs.
The amendment, which was added to a spending bill funding the US government through September, had strong bipartisan support; it was introduced by Rep. Dan Boren (D-Ok) and was backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA). However, it needs to pass the Senate and be signed by US president Barack Obama to become official. Mexico’s ambassador to the US, Arturo Sarukhán, called the vote “unfortunate.” Andrew Selee, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, said the amendment was “very bad news for everyone who is worried about arms trafficking to Mexico.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/20/11 from Notimex; Washington Post 2/20/11)
The vote follows the WikiLeaks group’s recent release of US diplomatic cables indicating that some of the heavy weapons used by Mexican drug gangs were originally supplied to armies in the region by the US military [see Update #1067]
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
The New Latin American “Progresismo” and the Extractivism of the 21st Century
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/4025
People's Power: Participatory Budgeting from Brazil to Chicago (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/2912-peoples-power-participatory-budgeting-from-brazil-to-chicago-
What Wikileaks Teaches Us About Obama and Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2909-what-wikileaks-teaches-us-about-obama-and-latin-america
In Brazil, Peasants Claim Farmland
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2917-in-brazil-peasants-claim-farmland
Rio de Janeiro’s Former Police Chief Accused of Leaking Information About Corruption Bust
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/18/rio-de-janeiros-former-police-chief-accused-of-leaking-information-about-corruption-bust/
Water Evaporates in Peru's For-Export Crops
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2910-water-evaporates-in-perus-for-export-crops
Ecuador: judge orders Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in pollution case
http://ww4report.com/node/9494
Ecuadorian Court Rules Against Chevron in Historic Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2907-ecuadorian-court-rules-against-chevron-in-historic-case
China to build trans-oceanic rail link through Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9495
Colombian navy seizes another narco-submarine
http://ww4report.com/node/9496
Obama Requests Funding for Venezuelan Opposition in 2012 Budget
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6006
Accused JFK bomb plot conspirator gets life (Guyana)
http://ww4report.com/node/8953#comment-323275
Martial Law, Repression, and Remilitarization in Guatemala
https://nacla.org/node/6879
Action Alert! Q’eqchi’ Leaders Massacred in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2913-action-alert-qeqchi-leaders-massacred-in-guatemala-
Mexican agriculture in crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/9498
Mexico: US ICE agent killed amid growing violence
http://ww4report.com/node/9497
Mexico Arrests Two Police Officers In Killing Of Nuevo Leon State Senior Officer
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/17/mexico-arrests-two-police-officers-in-killing-of-nuevo-leon-state-senior-officer/
Ciudad Juárez: escalating attacks on activists (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/9509
Mexico’s Federal Police Open Fire on Protesters, Throwing Merida Initiative Accountability Into Question
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2915-mexicos-federal-police-open-fire-on-protesters-throwing-merida-initiative-accountability-into-question
Tourism Is Poisoning the Mexican Caribbean
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2911-tourism-is-poisoning-the-mexican-caribbean
Haiti: Resettlement Plan Excludes Almost 200,000 Families
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54472
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Weekly News Update Turns 21
The Weekly News Update started 21 years ago this month as a few photocopied pages with news about the impending elections in Nicaragua.
People sometimes forget how much has changed since then. The internet was new and slow, and there were few alternative sources for news from Latin America and the Caribbean. Solidarity activists were confused and demoralized by events like the collapse of the East Bloc and then the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat. Many activists were unaware of the growing grassroots resistance to neoliberal policies—or even of the existence of neoliberal policies.
The many developments since 1990 have meant that the Update can provide a lot of things now that we couldn’t have imagined then.
-- Better and more timely information from the region. The dramatic growth of the region’s grassroots movements and left and left-center political forces has coincided with wider access to the internet. Now we often learn about a labor struggle, a land occupation or an act of repression as soon as they happen—both from local media and from the participants themselves.
-- A weekly digest of alternative sources. A number of online alternative media have grown up here in the US that carry news on Latin America and the Caribbean. Good information is now available from sources like NACLA’s website, Upside Down World, World War 4 Report and many others. Instead of trying to cover everything ourselves, now we can provide links to important articles at progressive sites and concentrate on the stories we feel the others may have missed.
-- Quick access to primary sources. Most of our source material is now available on the web, so we can provide links from the blog version of the Update, enabling you to follow up on our sources. We also try to link to the websites of the groups that we’re writing about.
-- News at no cost. As our readers increasingly switched to the online Update, we were able to drop the printed version and save the costs of duplication and mailing. We’re an all-volunteer operation, so this means we’ve been able to make the Update free.
Through all the changes, we’ve kept our focus on the dangers of neoliberal polices and US intervention and on the resistance from below: on the struggles of the Mapuche in Chile for their land, the connection between Honduran sweatshop owners and the 2009 coup, the hunger strikes by laid-off Mexican electrical workers and Costa Rican environmentalists, the protests against cutbacks by Puerto Rican students, the evidence that UN “peacekeepers” caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic.
But we feel these stories aren’t reaching enough people. If you think the information is important, you can help by circulating the Update yourselves.
-- You can forward the Update to your lists (please include the link to the blog so people can access the extra information there).
-- If you have a website or blog, you can add a link there, or repost items from the Update.
-- You can also click on the buttons at the bottom of each Update to forward the issue by email, add it to your own blog, or share it by Twitter or a social network.
-- Write comments. Do you have a correction or additional information? Do you want to express your own opinion? Just remember that we moderate the comments to keep out spam, so your comment won’t appear until an editor gets a chance to approve it.
As always, we appreciate your support over the years.
David L. Wilson, Weekly News Update
PS. You may have noticed that we didn’t ask for money, but if you want to contribute, make checks or money orders payable to “Nicaragua Solidarity Network,” PO Box 20587, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009.
Also, if you’re in the New York metropolitan area, we’re planning to have a book sale/giveaway in the near future, with proceeds going to help close the office. We’ll keep you posted on that.
People sometimes forget how much has changed since then. The internet was new and slow, and there were few alternative sources for news from Latin America and the Caribbean. Solidarity activists were confused and demoralized by events like the collapse of the East Bloc and then the Sandinistas’ electoral defeat. Many activists were unaware of the growing grassroots resistance to neoliberal policies—or even of the existence of neoliberal policies.
The many developments since 1990 have meant that the Update can provide a lot of things now that we couldn’t have imagined then.
-- Better and more timely information from the region. The dramatic growth of the region’s grassroots movements and left and left-center political forces has coincided with wider access to the internet. Now we often learn about a labor struggle, a land occupation or an act of repression as soon as they happen—both from local media and from the participants themselves.
-- A weekly digest of alternative sources. A number of online alternative media have grown up here in the US that carry news on Latin America and the Caribbean. Good information is now available from sources like NACLA’s website, Upside Down World, World War 4 Report and many others. Instead of trying to cover everything ourselves, now we can provide links to important articles at progressive sites and concentrate on the stories we feel the others may have missed.
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Through all the changes, we’ve kept our focus on the dangers of neoliberal polices and US intervention and on the resistance from below: on the struggles of the Mapuche in Chile for their land, the connection between Honduran sweatshop owners and the 2009 coup, the hunger strikes by laid-off Mexican electrical workers and Costa Rican environmentalists, the protests against cutbacks by Puerto Rican students, the evidence that UN “peacekeepers” caused Haiti’s cholera epidemic.
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PS. You may have noticed that we didn’t ask for money, but if you want to contribute, make checks or money orders payable to “Nicaragua Solidarity Network,” PO Box 20587, Tompkins Square Station, New York, NY 10009.
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Thursday, February 17, 2011
Two Memorials for Rebel Journalist John Ross (1938-2011)
========================
Mexico City, February 22
========================
22 febrero, 2011
19:00 – 22:30
Teatro de la Ciudad
"Esperanza Iris"
Donceles 36
con la participación de
Elena Cepeda, representante de la Ciudad de México
Dante Ross y Carla Ross-Allen, hijo e hija de John Ross
Jaime Avilés
Oscar Gómez-Cesar
y otros amigos y colegas de John
===========================
San Francisco, February 26
===========================
Ross Memorial
In celebration of poet, author + rabble-rouser
John Ross (1938-2011)
Saturday, February 26 at 3-5 p.m.
* 3-5 p.m. - Words + music by family + friends
United Mission Presbyterian Church
23rd St. and Capp
* 5 p.m. - Jazz parade to Cafe La Boheme
24th St. and Mission
for reception and public remembrances
Catering provided by La Boheme / no-host bar
Bring stories, photos, artwork + poems for the remembrance book.
(Updated 2/18/11)
================================
For updated information, go to:
http://johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
Mexico City, February 22
========================
22 febrero, 2011
19:00 – 22:30
Teatro de la Ciudad
"Esperanza Iris"
Donceles 36
con la participación de
Elena Cepeda, representante de la Ciudad de México
Dante Ross y Carla Ross-Allen, hijo e hija de John Ross
Jaime Avilés
Oscar Gómez-Cesar
y otros amigos y colegas de John
===========================
San Francisco, February 26
===========================
Ross Memorial
In celebration of poet, author + rabble-rouser
John Ross (1938-2011)
Saturday, February 26 at 3-5 p.m.
* 3-5 p.m. - Words + music by family + friends
United Mission Presbyterian Church
23rd St. and Capp
* 5 p.m. - Jazz parade to Cafe La Boheme
24th St. and Mission
for reception and public remembrances
Catering provided by La Boheme / no-host bar
Bring stories, photos, artwork + poems for the remembrance book.
(Updated 2/18/11)
================================
For updated information, go to:
http://johnross-rebeljournalist.com/
Monday, February 14, 2011
WNU #1067: Puerto Rican Professors Go on Strike
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1067, February 13, 2011
1. Puerto Rico: University Professors Strike, President Resigns
2. Mexico: US Holds Murdered Activist’s Son and Granddaughter
3. Mexico: WikiLeaks Cables Treat “Drug War,” FARC Links
4. Guatemala: Cable Claims Zetas Are Taking Over the North
5. Haiti: US Liberals Push for Aristide’s Return
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, 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. Puerto Rico: University Professors Strike, President Resigns
A confrontation between police and University of Puerto Rico (UPR) students on Feb. 9 at the Río Piedras campus in San Juan quickly escalated into what appeared to be the most violent event in two months of protests against an $800 tuition surcharge imposed this year [see Update #1066].
The day began with two separate demonstrations. A group of students started to paint protest slogans on a street inside the campus, while administrative workers, members of the Brotherhood of Exempt Non-Teaching Employees (HEEND), took over the office of UPR rector Ana Guadalupe to demand the removal of the police from campus. Police agents attempted to photograph the student protesters, who claimed they were exercising their constitutional right to free speech. Shoving matches led to beatings and the use of pepper spray by helmeted riot police. Agents arrived on horseback and motorcycles while a helicopter circled over the campus. The students fled, but then regrouped twice and fought back against the police as many other students joined the protest. Outside supporters of the students organized two marches into the campus.
By the evening there were reports that 23 students had been arrested and 14 agents were injured, as were an unknown number of students; some agents, students and journalists had been splashed with the paint that was intended for writing slogans. Students hung a banner from the campus’ landmark tower reading: “We will win.” (WAPA-TV (Puerto Rico) 2/9/11, some from CyberNews; Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/9/11; Indymedia PR 2/10/11; NCM Noticias 2/13/11 via Indymedia PR)
There are indications that the conservative administration of Gov. Luis Fortuño had made plans to escalate the violence, even though police tactics in earlier protests had already brought charges of brutality and sexual abuse. The Puerto Rican Association of University Professors (APPU), which represents UPR professors, said it had information about a high-level meeting on Feb. 7 in which it was remarked that “everything was turning out well” in the UPR crisis and that “all that’s missing” is a death to blame on the students. (NCM Noticias 2/13/11)
If the Puerto Rican government was trying to provoke an incident, the tactic misfired badly. Even police superintendent José Figueroa Sancha admitted in a radio interview that the police response had been excessive. The APPU and the HEEND called a 24-hour strike for Feb. 10 to protest the police presence on UPR campuses and to shut down Río Piedras in order to prevent more violence. Campus maintenance workers joined the strike, which was extended through Feb. 11 despite the university’s announcement that it would dock the strikers’ pay. (Prensa Latina 2/11/11)
As the strike was in progress on Feb. 10, UPR president José Ramón de la Torre sent a letter to police superintendent Figueroa Sancha requesting “the withdrawal of the police from the University of Puerto Rico.” De la Torre, who had previously supported the police presence, then resigned “for family reasons.” The resignation was made official on Feb. 11. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 2/11/11; TeleSUR 2/12/11)
On Feb. 12, thousands of students and supporters turned out for “I Love the UPR,” a march to demand the withdrawal of the police. Supported by 72 social organizations and opposition political parties, the mass protest moved through San Juan streets, with motorists honking in support, and marched into the campus, with chants of “Out, out,” past police agents who were unable or unwilling to stop the procession. “If this is the minority, where is the majority?” protesters asked, referring to claims that only a small minority of students and other Puerto Ricans support the protests. Even former governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá (2005-2009) joined the march, although some protesters jeered him because of his efforts to break a teachers’ strike in 2008 [see Update #936].
“Whoever thinks this movement has run out of gas should look at this demonstration and think again,” Student Representative Committee (CRE) spokesperson Ian Camilo Cintrón told the crowd. “The police are in the university to guarantee a project for the privileged and the elite and not a project for the majority. What’s at stake here is accessibility for young people who can’t count on the resources to be able to come to this institution.” (END 2/13/11; NCM Noticias 2/13/11)
As the crisis continued in Puerto Rico, on Feb. 11 Gov. Fortuño was in Washington, DC, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The governor is considered a rising star in the US conservative movement, and Republican strategists feel he might help the party reach out to Latino voters. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is hoping for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, has mentioned Fortuño as a potential running mate. (Times of India 2/11/11 from AP; The Virginian-Pilot 2/8/11 from Politico)
Update, Feb. 14: Today Gov. Fortuño announced the partial removal of police agents from the Río Piedras campus. “The police shouldn’t be in the UPR,” he said. “They should be in the streets.” Agents were seen gathering their equipment and preparing to move out. (END 2/14/11)
*2. Mexico: US Holds Murdered Activist’s Son and Granddaughter
Friends of the Women of Juárez, an organization based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, has written US Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to call for the release of three-year-old Mexican national Heidi Barraza Frayre and her uncle, Juan Manuel Frayre, to the care of relatives in El Paso, Texas. The granddaughter of slain Mexican activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, Heidi Frayre is in US custody while the government investigates whether her El Paso relatives will be able to care for her. She has been staying in a Houston shelter for immigrant children run by a Catholic charity. Juan Manuel Frayre, one of Escobedo’s sons, is in immigration detention in Chaparral, New México.
Heidi Frayre’s father, Rafael Barraza Bocanegra, confessed to murdering her mother, Rubí Marisol Frayre Escobedo, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in 2008, but a Chihuahua court ordered him released. Marisela Escobedo then devoted herself to caring for her granddaughter and to seeking justice for her daughter. She was gunned down last Dec. 16 while protesting in front of the main government office in the city of Chihuahua. After her husband’s lumber store was set on fire and her brother-in-law was kidnapped on the day of her funeral, Dec. 18 [see Update #1061], Escobedo’s brother and her two sons fled with Heidi Frayre to Texas, where they applied for asylum for themselves and their niece.
US immigration authorities released Escobedo’s brother and one of her sons pending a decision on their asylum claims but decided to hold Heidi and Juan Manuel Frayre. Luis Benjamin Lara Escobedo, director of protection for the Mexican Consulate in Houston, spoke with the child in late January. “She wanted to know when she could go back and play with her toys,” Lara, who is not related to the family, told the Houston Chronicle. (Houston Chronicle 2/2/11; El Paso Times (Spanish) 2/10/11)
Three relatives of another slain activist, Josefina Reyes, were kidnapped by armed men in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, east of Ciudad Juárez, on Feb. 7. Reyes’ sister Malena, her brother Elías and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas, were traveling in a truck with Reyes’ mother, Sara Salazar, and Reyes’ small daughter. The armed men seized Ornelas and Malena and Elías Reyes and then drove off, leaving Salazar and the child by the side of the road.
Josefina Reyes was shot dead on Jan. 3, 2010; her brother Rubén was killed on Aug. 18. Amnesty International (AI) says Josefina Reyes was “active in protests against violence in the area being carried out by organized criminals and human rights violations committed by the military.” She participated in an August 2009 Forum on Militarization and Repression in Ciudad Juárez. AI called for Mexican authorities to “take urgent steps to find [the three kidnapping victims] while providing protection for [the] rest of the family." (AI 2/10/11)
Four Reyes Salazar family members began a hunger strike in front of the state prosecutor’s Ciudad Juárez office on Feb. 9 to demand that state and federal authorities work actively to rescue their kidnapped relatives. They warned that if the three were abandoned in a deserted area they might die from the cold wave hitting the region. The hunger strikers, who were being guarded by two state police patrol cars, said they planned to emigrate from Ciudad Juárez once their missing relatives were returned. (El Universal (Mexico) 2/10/11)
*3. Mexico: WikiLeaks Cables Treat “Drug War,” FARC Links
The left-of-center Mexican daily La Jornada announced on Feb. 10 that it had received some 3,000 US diplomatic cables from Sunshine Press Productions, which is presided over by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The cables deal with Mexican issues and provide “a window on the background and the tone of the bilateral relation between Mexico and the US,” La Jornada’s editors wrote. The paper said it “has taken on the task of reading, systematizing and treating [the material] journalistically.” (LJ 2/10/11)
The first article in the paper’s WikiLeaks series dealt with some 100 cables from the US consulate in Monterrey, in the northern state of Nuevo León, from 2007 into 2010. The cables, written by Consul Luis Moreno and his successor, Bruce Williamson, show growing doubts over the efficacy of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s effort to control drug trafficking in the northern states by bringing in the military. A Feb. 26, 2010 confidential cable describes metropolitan Monterrey as “Zeta territory,” referring to the Los Zetas drug gang. “Zeta influence here is longstanding and widespread throughout local and state government,” Williamson wrote. The consulate’s sources said former Nuevo León governor Natividad González Parás (2003-2009) was involved with another drug trafficking organization, the Sinaloa cartel.
The consulate was also concerned with the heavy arms being used by the drug traffickers, some of them with markings for US military equipment, including an M26 A2 fragmentation grenade thrown in an attack against the Monterrey station of the Televisa television network, along with 21 other grenades found in a gang’s arsenal. Apparently the grenades were part of a 1990 shipment from the US to the Salvadoran military, which the US was then backing against the rebel Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN). (LJ 2/10/11)
In response to the article, former governor González Parás denied charges that he was involved with the Sinaloa cartel. The current US consul in Monterrey, Nace Crawford, said that the cables from his predecessor were informal reports that do not reflect the policy of the US. (Prensa Latina 2/11/11)
On Feb. 13 La Jornada wrote about a Mar. 28, 2008 secret cable on alleged links between the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and leftist and criminal groups in Mexico. Media stories about FARC connections in Mexico picked up after four Mexicans, three of them students, were killed in a Mar. 1, 2008, bombing raid by the Colombian military against a FARC camp inside Ecuadorian territory. The Mexican Attorney General's Office (PGR) started an investigation of the four dead Mexicans and the one surviving Mexican, Lucía Morett Alvarez, on Mar. 3. Morett and the victims’ relatives said the students had been in Ecuador for a “Bolivarian Congress,” a meeting of Latin American leftists, and had decided to visit the FARC camp to observe it [see Update #939].
According to the cable, officials of Mexico’s Center for Investigations and National Security (CISEN) thought that in fact “[m]ost of the students attending the Bolivarian Congress in Quito shortly before the attack on the FARC camp were clearly political tourists.” A US agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), investigated charges that the FARC was supplying weapons to drug cartels or Mexican rebel groups like the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). These charges too did not hold up. “[T]here is no evidence that the FARC is supplying guns or ordnance to Mexican drug cartels, the EPR or any other groups in Mexico,” the ATF concluded, according to the cable. (LJ 2/13/11)
*4. Guatemala: Cable Claims Zetas Are Taking Over the North
Some 100 members of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug gang, had settled in the north central Guatemalan city of Cobán, capital of Alta Verapaz department, by early 2009 and were enjoying protection from “corrupt” police who were reportedly “allied with traffickers,” according to a Feb. 6, 2009 confidential diplomatic cable by US ambassador Stephen McFarland. The cable was one of about 3,000 US diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks organization that were given to the Mexican daily La Jornada because they dealt with issues relating to Mexico. The Los Zetas gang grew out of a group of Mexican Special Forces soldiers, some of them reportedly trained in counterinsurgency by the US military.
The report was based on an investigation in Cobán by two US officials, who found that “some judges and prosecutors are too frightened to do their jobs properly; others are in league with the traffickers.” The police “sometimes even provide…escort” to the traffickers, the investigators said. One source told an investigator that “immigration authorities are helping the Zetas obtain Guatemalan passports and other documents to normalize their status in the country. The Zetas also are believed to operate a training camp in the area.” Another source “said Zetas freely use the airport, even during daylight hours.”
McFarland concluded the cable with a warning that the Guatemalan government had already lost control in six of the country’s 22 departments: “Zacapa and Izabal fepartments, as well as parts of Jutiapa, Chiquimula, San Marcos, and Petén departments.” “Without outside intervention, Cobán will join the growing list of areas lost to narcotraffickers,” McFarland wrote, without specifying what he meant by “outside intervention.” (LJ 2/13/11)
*5. Haiti: US Liberals Push for Aristide’s Return
On Feb. 7 Haiti’s Immigration and Emigration Service issued a diplomatic passport for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004), who has lived in exile in South Africa since he was forced from office in 2004. The passport is good for five years, with an expiration date of Feb. 6, 2016. Aristide’s US lawyer, Ira Kurzban, arrived in Haiti several days earlier to pick up the document for his client. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 2/7/11)
It was not clear whether the US government would take steps to block the former president’s return. At a Feb. 9 news briefing in Washington, DC, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said the US “would hate to see” anything that might cause problems with Haiti’s presidential and legislative elections, now scheduled for Mar. 20 [see Update #1065]. “I think that we would be concerned that if former president Aristide returns to Haiti before the election, it would prove to be an unfortunate distraction,” he said. “The people of Haiti should be evaluating the two candidates that will participate in the runoff, and that I think that should be their focus.” (Voice of America 2/9/11)
A spokesperson for Aristide’s Lavalas Family (FL) party, Félix Ansyto, denounced the State Department position as “an intimidation maneuver.” “It’s not up to the US to know what’s going to disturb or not disturb the country,” he added. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/11/11) But Ira Kurzban seemed more optimistic about the US government, which flew Aristide out of the country in 2004, during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2009), a conservative Republican. Asked by Haiti’s Radio Métropole about relations with France and the US, Kurzban said that the new governments of these countries had a different view of the situation, presumably referring to current US president Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat. (Radio Métropole 2/11/11)
In fact, US liberals linked to the Democratic Party have been pushing for Aristide’s return. A number of liberal celebrities, including actor Harry Belafonte, civil rights veteran Rev. Jesse Jackson and film director Oliver Stone, signed a full-page ad, “Return Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti,” that ran in the Miami Herald on Jan. 23. Another signer was Dr. Paul Farmer, who serves as the deputy to United Nations special envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton, a former US president (1993-2001) and the husband of current secretary of state Hillary Clinton. (San Franciso Bay View 1/23/11)
An opinion piece in the British daily Guardian said that the current US policy on Haiti was also “meeting…resistance” from an important group of Democratic legislators, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The CBC “forced then-President Bill Clinton to restore Aristide to the presidency in 1994,” according to the article. (Guardian 2/2/11) [The US returned Aristide to office in October 1994 after 20,000 US troops had occupied Haiti and Aristide had agreed to follow a neoliberal economic plan.]
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
International Speculation Culprit in Rising Food Prices
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/3968
Bolivia: protests over food prices
http://ww4report.com/node/9476
Hundreds Protest against Ecuadorian Indigenous Leader’s Arrest
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2901-hundreds-protest-against-ecuadorian-indigenous-leaders-arrest-
Ecuador: Serious Concern Over the Misuse of Terrorism Charges
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2896-ecuador-serious-concern-over-the-misuse-of-terrorism-charges
Colombia’s FARC Releases Politician Taken In 2009 As Gesture Of Peace
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/10/colombias-farc-releases-politician-taken-in-2009-as-gesture-of-peace/
Increasingly Broad Social Movements Fight Mining in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2897-increasingly-broad-social-movements-fight-mining-in-colombia
Liliany Obando: Political Prisoner in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2899-liliany-obando-political-prisoner-in-colombia-
January Reports Indicate Dismal Times Ahead for Colombia's 7,500 Political Prisoners
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2900-january-reports-indicate-dismal-times-ahead-for-colombias-7500-political-prisoners
As Egypt Attacks Press, teleSUR Staff in Cairo Detained, Threatened and Released (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5990
Venezuelan Workers March in Support of Government, Push for New Labor Law
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5992
February 2011 12:44 Central American Nations Seek 'Plan Central America'
http://insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/545-central-american-nations-seek-plan-central-america
Democracy There, Democracy Here: Honduras
http://www.thenation.com/blog/158345/democracy-there-democracy-here-honduras
Labor Resistance in Post-Coup Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2898-labor-resistance-in-post-coup-honduras
Surviving the Sexist Genocide in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2903-surviving-the-sexist-genocide-in-guatemala
Don Samuel Ruíz, bishop who brokered Zapatista peace talks, dead at 86
http://ww4report.com/node/9463
Mexico - Don Samuel Ruiz García: From the People, Below and to the Left
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2902-mexico-don-samuel-ruiz-garcia-from-the-people-below-and-to-the-left
Three Teenagers Killed In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Two U.S. Citizens
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/08/three-teenagers-killed-in-ciudad-juarez-mexico-two-u-s-citizens/
Virtual Warfare Escalates on U.S.-Mexico Border
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54388
US army high official invokes "insurgency" in Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/9462
States of Exception—Haiti’s IDP Camps
http://www.monthlyreview.org/110201kaussen.php
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1067, February 13, 2011
1. Puerto Rico: University Professors Strike, President Resigns
2. Mexico: US Holds Murdered Activist’s Son and Granddaughter
3. Mexico: WikiLeaks Cables Treat “Drug War,” FARC Links
4. Guatemala: Cable Claims Zetas Are Taking Over the North
5. Haiti: US Liberals Push for Aristide’s Return
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, 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. Puerto Rico: University Professors Strike, President Resigns
A confrontation between police and University of Puerto Rico (UPR) students on Feb. 9 at the Río Piedras campus in San Juan quickly escalated into what appeared to be the most violent event in two months of protests against an $800 tuition surcharge imposed this year [see Update #1066].
The day began with two separate demonstrations. A group of students started to paint protest slogans on a street inside the campus, while administrative workers, members of the Brotherhood of Exempt Non-Teaching Employees (HEEND), took over the office of UPR rector Ana Guadalupe to demand the removal of the police from campus. Police agents attempted to photograph the student protesters, who claimed they were exercising their constitutional right to free speech. Shoving matches led to beatings and the use of pepper spray by helmeted riot police. Agents arrived on horseback and motorcycles while a helicopter circled over the campus. The students fled, but then regrouped twice and fought back against the police as many other students joined the protest. Outside supporters of the students organized two marches into the campus.
By the evening there were reports that 23 students had been arrested and 14 agents were injured, as were an unknown number of students; some agents, students and journalists had been splashed with the paint that was intended for writing slogans. Students hung a banner from the campus’ landmark tower reading: “We will win.” (WAPA-TV (Puerto Rico) 2/9/11, some from CyberNews; Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 2/9/11; Indymedia PR 2/10/11; NCM Noticias 2/13/11 via Indymedia PR)
There are indications that the conservative administration of Gov. Luis Fortuño had made plans to escalate the violence, even though police tactics in earlier protests had already brought charges of brutality and sexual abuse. The Puerto Rican Association of University Professors (APPU), which represents UPR professors, said it had information about a high-level meeting on Feb. 7 in which it was remarked that “everything was turning out well” in the UPR crisis and that “all that’s missing” is a death to blame on the students. (NCM Noticias 2/13/11)
If the Puerto Rican government was trying to provoke an incident, the tactic misfired badly. Even police superintendent José Figueroa Sancha admitted in a radio interview that the police response had been excessive. The APPU and the HEEND called a 24-hour strike for Feb. 10 to protest the police presence on UPR campuses and to shut down Río Piedras in order to prevent more violence. Campus maintenance workers joined the strike, which was extended through Feb. 11 despite the university’s announcement that it would dock the strikers’ pay. (Prensa Latina 2/11/11)
As the strike was in progress on Feb. 10, UPR president José Ramón de la Torre sent a letter to police superintendent Figueroa Sancha requesting “the withdrawal of the police from the University of Puerto Rico.” De la Torre, who had previously supported the police presence, then resigned “for family reasons.” The resignation was made official on Feb. 11. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 2/11/11; TeleSUR 2/12/11)
On Feb. 12, thousands of students and supporters turned out for “I Love the UPR,” a march to demand the withdrawal of the police. Supported by 72 social organizations and opposition political parties, the mass protest moved through San Juan streets, with motorists honking in support, and marched into the campus, with chants of “Out, out,” past police agents who were unable or unwilling to stop the procession. “If this is the minority, where is the majority?” protesters asked, referring to claims that only a small minority of students and other Puerto Ricans support the protests. Even former governor Aníbal Acevedo Vilá (2005-2009) joined the march, although some protesters jeered him because of his efforts to break a teachers’ strike in 2008 [see Update #936].
“Whoever thinks this movement has run out of gas should look at this demonstration and think again,” Student Representative Committee (CRE) spokesperson Ian Camilo Cintrón told the crowd. “The police are in the university to guarantee a project for the privileged and the elite and not a project for the majority. What’s at stake here is accessibility for young people who can’t count on the resources to be able to come to this institution.” (END 2/13/11; NCM Noticias 2/13/11)
As the crisis continued in Puerto Rico, on Feb. 11 Gov. Fortuño was in Washington, DC, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The governor is considered a rising star in the US conservative movement, and Republican strategists feel he might help the party reach out to Latino voters. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who is hoping for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, has mentioned Fortuño as a potential running mate. (Times of India 2/11/11 from AP; The Virginian-Pilot 2/8/11 from Politico)
Update, Feb. 14: Today Gov. Fortuño announced the partial removal of police agents from the Río Piedras campus. “The police shouldn’t be in the UPR,” he said. “They should be in the streets.” Agents were seen gathering their equipment and preparing to move out. (END 2/14/11)
*2. Mexico: US Holds Murdered Activist’s Son and Granddaughter
Friends of the Women of Juárez, an organization based in Las Cruces, New Mexico, has written US Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano to call for the release of three-year-old Mexican national Heidi Barraza Frayre and her uncle, Juan Manuel Frayre, to the care of relatives in El Paso, Texas. The granddaughter of slain Mexican activist Marisela Escobedo Ortiz, Heidi Frayre is in US custody while the government investigates whether her El Paso relatives will be able to care for her. She has been staying in a Houston shelter for immigrant children run by a Catholic charity. Juan Manuel Frayre, one of Escobedo’s sons, is in immigration detention in Chaparral, New México.
Heidi Frayre’s father, Rafael Barraza Bocanegra, confessed to murdering her mother, Rubí Marisol Frayre Escobedo, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, in 2008, but a Chihuahua court ordered him released. Marisela Escobedo then devoted herself to caring for her granddaughter and to seeking justice for her daughter. She was gunned down last Dec. 16 while protesting in front of the main government office in the city of Chihuahua. After her husband’s lumber store was set on fire and her brother-in-law was kidnapped on the day of her funeral, Dec. 18 [see Update #1061], Escobedo’s brother and her two sons fled with Heidi Frayre to Texas, where they applied for asylum for themselves and their niece.
US immigration authorities released Escobedo’s brother and one of her sons pending a decision on their asylum claims but decided to hold Heidi and Juan Manuel Frayre. Luis Benjamin Lara Escobedo, director of protection for the Mexican Consulate in Houston, spoke with the child in late January. “She wanted to know when she could go back and play with her toys,” Lara, who is not related to the family, told the Houston Chronicle. (Houston Chronicle 2/2/11; El Paso Times (Spanish) 2/10/11)
Three relatives of another slain activist, Josefina Reyes, were kidnapped by armed men in Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, east of Ciudad Juárez, on Feb. 7. Reyes’ sister Malena, her brother Elías and Elías' wife, Luisa Ornelas, were traveling in a truck with Reyes’ mother, Sara Salazar, and Reyes’ small daughter. The armed men seized Ornelas and Malena and Elías Reyes and then drove off, leaving Salazar and the child by the side of the road.
Josefina Reyes was shot dead on Jan. 3, 2010; her brother Rubén was killed on Aug. 18. Amnesty International (AI) says Josefina Reyes was “active in protests against violence in the area being carried out by organized criminals and human rights violations committed by the military.” She participated in an August 2009 Forum on Militarization and Repression in Ciudad Juárez. AI called for Mexican authorities to “take urgent steps to find [the three kidnapping victims] while providing protection for [the] rest of the family." (AI 2/10/11)
Four Reyes Salazar family members began a hunger strike in front of the state prosecutor’s Ciudad Juárez office on Feb. 9 to demand that state and federal authorities work actively to rescue their kidnapped relatives. They warned that if the three were abandoned in a deserted area they might die from the cold wave hitting the region. The hunger strikers, who were being guarded by two state police patrol cars, said they planned to emigrate from Ciudad Juárez once their missing relatives were returned. (El Universal (Mexico) 2/10/11)
*3. Mexico: WikiLeaks Cables Treat “Drug War,” FARC Links
The left-of-center Mexican daily La Jornada announced on Feb. 10 that it had received some 3,000 US diplomatic cables from Sunshine Press Productions, which is presided over by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The cables deal with Mexican issues and provide “a window on the background and the tone of the bilateral relation between Mexico and the US,” La Jornada’s editors wrote. The paper said it “has taken on the task of reading, systematizing and treating [the material] journalistically.” (LJ 2/10/11)
The first article in the paper’s WikiLeaks series dealt with some 100 cables from the US consulate in Monterrey, in the northern state of Nuevo León, from 2007 into 2010. The cables, written by Consul Luis Moreno and his successor, Bruce Williamson, show growing doubts over the efficacy of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s effort to control drug trafficking in the northern states by bringing in the military. A Feb. 26, 2010 confidential cable describes metropolitan Monterrey as “Zeta territory,” referring to the Los Zetas drug gang. “Zeta influence here is longstanding and widespread throughout local and state government,” Williamson wrote. The consulate’s sources said former Nuevo León governor Natividad González Parás (2003-2009) was involved with another drug trafficking organization, the Sinaloa cartel.
The consulate was also concerned with the heavy arms being used by the drug traffickers, some of them with markings for US military equipment, including an M26 A2 fragmentation grenade thrown in an attack against the Monterrey station of the Televisa television network, along with 21 other grenades found in a gang’s arsenal. Apparently the grenades were part of a 1990 shipment from the US to the Salvadoran military, which the US was then backing against the rebel Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN). (LJ 2/10/11)
In response to the article, former governor González Parás denied charges that he was involved with the Sinaloa cartel. The current US consul in Monterrey, Nace Crawford, said that the cables from his predecessor were informal reports that do not reflect the policy of the US. (Prensa Latina 2/11/11)
On Feb. 13 La Jornada wrote about a Mar. 28, 2008 secret cable on alleged links between the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and leftist and criminal groups in Mexico. Media stories about FARC connections in Mexico picked up after four Mexicans, three of them students, were killed in a Mar. 1, 2008, bombing raid by the Colombian military against a FARC camp inside Ecuadorian territory. The Mexican Attorney General's Office (PGR) started an investigation of the four dead Mexicans and the one surviving Mexican, Lucía Morett Alvarez, on Mar. 3. Morett and the victims’ relatives said the students had been in Ecuador for a “Bolivarian Congress,” a meeting of Latin American leftists, and had decided to visit the FARC camp to observe it [see Update #939].
According to the cable, officials of Mexico’s Center for Investigations and National Security (CISEN) thought that in fact “[m]ost of the students attending the Bolivarian Congress in Quito shortly before the attack on the FARC camp were clearly political tourists.” A US agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), investigated charges that the FARC was supplying weapons to drug cartels or Mexican rebel groups like the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR). These charges too did not hold up. “[T]here is no evidence that the FARC is supplying guns or ordnance to Mexican drug cartels, the EPR or any other groups in Mexico,” the ATF concluded, according to the cable. (LJ 2/13/11)
*4. Guatemala: Cable Claims Zetas Are Taking Over the North
Some 100 members of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug gang, had settled in the north central Guatemalan city of Cobán, capital of Alta Verapaz department, by early 2009 and were enjoying protection from “corrupt” police who were reportedly “allied with traffickers,” according to a Feb. 6, 2009 confidential diplomatic cable by US ambassador Stephen McFarland. The cable was one of about 3,000 US diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks organization that were given to the Mexican daily La Jornada because they dealt with issues relating to Mexico. The Los Zetas gang grew out of a group of Mexican Special Forces soldiers, some of them reportedly trained in counterinsurgency by the US military.
The report was based on an investigation in Cobán by two US officials, who found that “some judges and prosecutors are too frightened to do their jobs properly; others are in league with the traffickers.” The police “sometimes even provide…escort” to the traffickers, the investigators said. One source told an investigator that “immigration authorities are helping the Zetas obtain Guatemalan passports and other documents to normalize their status in the country. The Zetas also are believed to operate a training camp in the area.” Another source “said Zetas freely use the airport, even during daylight hours.”
McFarland concluded the cable with a warning that the Guatemalan government had already lost control in six of the country’s 22 departments: “Zacapa and Izabal fepartments, as well as parts of Jutiapa, Chiquimula, San Marcos, and Petén departments.” “Without outside intervention, Cobán will join the growing list of areas lost to narcotraffickers,” McFarland wrote, without specifying what he meant by “outside intervention.” (LJ 2/13/11)
*5. Haiti: US Liberals Push for Aristide’s Return
On Feb. 7 Haiti’s Immigration and Emigration Service issued a diplomatic passport for former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004), who has lived in exile in South Africa since he was forced from office in 2004. The passport is good for five years, with an expiration date of Feb. 6, 2016. Aristide’s US lawyer, Ira Kurzban, arrived in Haiti several days earlier to pick up the document for his client. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 2/7/11)
It was not clear whether the US government would take steps to block the former president’s return. At a Feb. 9 news briefing in Washington, DC, State Department spokesperson P.J. Crowley said the US “would hate to see” anything that might cause problems with Haiti’s presidential and legislative elections, now scheduled for Mar. 20 [see Update #1065]. “I think that we would be concerned that if former president Aristide returns to Haiti before the election, it would prove to be an unfortunate distraction,” he said. “The people of Haiti should be evaluating the two candidates that will participate in the runoff, and that I think that should be their focus.” (Voice of America 2/9/11)
A spokesperson for Aristide’s Lavalas Family (FL) party, Félix Ansyto, denounced the State Department position as “an intimidation maneuver.” “It’s not up to the US to know what’s going to disturb or not disturb the country,” he added. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 2/11/11) But Ira Kurzban seemed more optimistic about the US government, which flew Aristide out of the country in 2004, during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001-2009), a conservative Republican. Asked by Haiti’s Radio Métropole about relations with France and the US, Kurzban said that the new governments of these countries had a different view of the situation, presumably referring to current US president Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat. (Radio Métropole 2/11/11)
In fact, US liberals linked to the Democratic Party have been pushing for Aristide’s return. A number of liberal celebrities, including actor Harry Belafonte, civil rights veteran Rev. Jesse Jackson and film director Oliver Stone, signed a full-page ad, “Return Former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti,” that ran in the Miami Herald on Jan. 23. Another signer was Dr. Paul Farmer, who serves as the deputy to United Nations special envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton, a former US president (1993-2001) and the husband of current secretary of state Hillary Clinton. (San Franciso Bay View 1/23/11)
An opinion piece in the British daily Guardian said that the current US policy on Haiti was also “meeting…resistance” from an important group of Democratic legislators, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). The CBC “forced then-President Bill Clinton to restore Aristide to the presidency in 1994,” according to the article. (Guardian 2/2/11) [The US returned Aristide to office in October 1994 after 20,000 US troops had occupied Haiti and Aristide had agreed to follow a neoliberal economic plan.]
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti
International Speculation Culprit in Rising Food Prices
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/3968
Bolivia: protests over food prices
http://ww4report.com/node/9476
Hundreds Protest against Ecuadorian Indigenous Leader’s Arrest
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2901-hundreds-protest-against-ecuadorian-indigenous-leaders-arrest-
Ecuador: Serious Concern Over the Misuse of Terrorism Charges
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2896-ecuador-serious-concern-over-the-misuse-of-terrorism-charges
Colombia’s FARC Releases Politician Taken In 2009 As Gesture Of Peace
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/10/colombias-farc-releases-politician-taken-in-2009-as-gesture-of-peace/
Increasingly Broad Social Movements Fight Mining in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2897-increasingly-broad-social-movements-fight-mining-in-colombia
Liliany Obando: Political Prisoner in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2899-liliany-obando-political-prisoner-in-colombia-
January Reports Indicate Dismal Times Ahead for Colombia's 7,500 Political Prisoners
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/2900-january-reports-indicate-dismal-times-ahead-for-colombias-7500-political-prisoners
As Egypt Attacks Press, teleSUR Staff in Cairo Detained, Threatened and Released (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5990
Venezuelan Workers March in Support of Government, Push for New Labor Law
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5992
February 2011 12:44 Central American Nations Seek 'Plan Central America'
http://insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/545-central-american-nations-seek-plan-central-america
Democracy There, Democracy Here: Honduras
http://www.thenation.com/blog/158345/democracy-there-democracy-here-honduras
Labor Resistance in Post-Coup Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2898-labor-resistance-in-post-coup-honduras
Surviving the Sexist Genocide in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/2903-surviving-the-sexist-genocide-in-guatemala
Don Samuel Ruíz, bishop who brokered Zapatista peace talks, dead at 86
http://ww4report.com/node/9463
Mexico - Don Samuel Ruiz García: From the People, Below and to the Left
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/2902-mexico-don-samuel-ruiz-garcia-from-the-people-below-and-to-the-left
Three Teenagers Killed In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico; Two U.S. Citizens
http://latindispatch.com/2011/02/08/three-teenagers-killed-in-ciudad-juarez-mexico-two-u-s-citizens/
Virtual Warfare Escalates on U.S.-Mexico Border
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=54388
US army high official invokes "insurgency" in Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/9462
States of Exception—Haiti’s IDP Camps
http://www.monthlyreview.org/110201kaussen.php
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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