Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1132, June 10, 2012
1. Honduras: Aguán Land Dispute Partially Settled
2. Panama: Indigenous Wounaan Finally Get Land Title
3. Mexico: Did Politicians Pay Off the TV Giant Televisa?
4. Latin America: Left Leaders Diss OAS Rights Group
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
1. Honduras: Aguán Land Dispute Partially Settled
The government of Honduran president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa signed an agreement on June 5 under which some 4,000 hectares of farmland in the north of the country will be granted to members of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), a large campesino collective that has been staging land occupations in the area since December 2009. The government is to buy the land from cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum for some $20 million and resell it to MUCA members, who are to pay the government back with a loan from the Banco Hondureño de Producción y Vivienda (Banhprovi), a private bank. They will need to repay the loan in 15 years with a 6% annual interest rate after a three-year grace period.
Talks between MUCA and the government stalled in late January over the financing of the loan. The impasse was apparently broken when a deadline for purchasing the land passed on May 31 and Facussé got a judge to issue an eviction order against campesinos occupying parts of his estates. This pushed the government to move faster to finalize an agreement. (Based on a garbled report from the Associated Press on June 4, US media said the campesinos had “agreed to move out”; in fact, the campesinos will remain on the land under the agreement. The AP report was partly corrected the next day.)
The campesinos signed the agreement “at gunpoint, under threats and pressure,” MUCA spokesperson Vitalino Alvarez told reporters. “The fight continues.” The June 5 agreement falls far short of a deal President Lobo signed in April 2010 granting MUCA members 11,000 hectares [see Update #1029]. For MUCA members the latest accord is only a partial, unsatisfactory settlement to a dispute that has reportedly left at least 47 campesinos dead since 2009, along with 10 security guards and two police agents.
The campesinos deny that Facussé and other large landowners in the area have any right to the disputed land, which they bought illegally, according to the campesinos, since it was dedicated to use in the country’s agrarian reform program. President Lobo himself, a member of the center-right National Party (PN), supports the campesinos’ claim. On June 5 he described the land dispute as “a problem that was generated by an error in other administrations in which men and women of the countryside were allowed to sell their lands, in a period which an agrarian counter-reform took place. An error was committed, which needs to be corrected.”
The campesinos are also concerned about the cost of the bank loan. César Ham, the head of the government’s National Agrarian Institute (INA), said the campesinos will be able to pay the loan off by selling the fruit of African oil palms, a major product of the Lower Aguán Valley, to companies that can process it into palm oil—that is, to companies like Facussé’s Grupo Dinant [see Update #1077]. “In other words,” the Honduras Culture and Politics blog notes, “MUCA is being asked to take on a large debt to a private bank, for funds that are being passed on, via the Honduran government, to the private individual who MUCA argues does not have a defensible claim to the land, and then to spend the next fifteen years at the mercy of the processing plants owned by the same individual (and others).” (Honduras Culture and Politics 6/4/12; AP 6/6/12 via CBS News; Prensa Latina 6/6/12)
[There have been no media references recently to earlier plans for Alba-Petróleos, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), to pay for a processing plant for the campesinos; see Update #1116.]
2. Panama: Indigenous Wounaan Finally Get Land Title
After a 30-year struggle, on June 4 two indigenous Wounaan collectives in the eastern Panamanian province of Darién received titles from the government to their traditional lands. Puerto Lara and Caña Blanca were the first communities to benefit from Law 72, which was passed in 2008 to recognize indigenous communities that were left out of the process in which Panama created five comarcas, large, semi-autonomous regions for many of the country’s indigenous peoples. Thousands of Wounaan and Emberá are awaiting titles in another 39 communities in eastern Panama. Indigenous people in these communities say the lack of titles has left their territories open to invasions by ranchers and loggers. (Rainforest Foundation 6/1/12, 6/5/12)
Two people were killed and at least three injured in two clashes between Wounaan and loggers on Mar. 30 near the Wounaan community of Platanares. Community members had approached a tractor being used by loggers working for the Maderera company to cut Cocobolo timber, an endangered variety of rosewood. One of the loggers shot Platanares leader Aquilino Opúa, who managed to return to the community but died there soon afterwards; community members then attacked the loggers, and a tractor driver, Ezequiel Batista, was killed. (Rainforest Foundation 3/31/12; Intercontinental Cry 4/4/12)
3. Mexico: Did Politicians Pay Off the TV Giant Televisa?
In an article dated June 7, the British daily The Guardian said it had received documents apparently showing that Mexico’s largest television network, Televisa, was paid in 2005 to have its news and entertainment programs influence voters’ perceptions of various politicians. The documents are in the form of computer files given the paper by someone who formerly worked with Televisa.
One document is a PowerPoint presentation, dated Apr. 4, 2005, whose stated goal is to make sure center-left presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (“AMLO”) “does not win the 2006 elections.” Other documents show payments to give prominence to Enrique Peña Nieto, who was then starting his 2005-2011 term as governor of México state. There are also documents indicating that while in office former president Vicente Fox Quesada (2000-2006) had Televisa bill the government in ways that would conceal how much the presidency was paying the network, which the British paper calls “the largest media empire in the Spanish-speaking world.”
Two of the politicians in the Guardian’s story are the leading candidates in this year’s July 1 presidential election: former México state governor Peña Nieto is the candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), while former Mexico City mayor López Obrador is again running as the candidate of a center-left coalition, after narrowly losing the 2006 election in the official count. The Guardian article appeared as Peña Nieto’s lead was slipping in the polls and students had started protesting the favorable coverage he had gotten from the media, principally Televisa and the second largest network, TV Azteca. After a slow start this year, López Obrador has moved into second place [see Update #1131].
Televisa initially wouldn’t comment on the documents; later it dismissed them as forgeries. The Guardian said that it couldn’t authenticate the computer files but “extensive cross checks have shown that the names, dates and situations mentioned largely line up with events.” Several ideas proposed in the documents appeared later on Televisa programs. The paper posted one of the documents on its website on June 8, a budget for promoting Peña Nieto while he was governor. The Mexican magazine Proceso obtained and published a hardcopy version of the same budget in 2005; Peña Nieto and Televisa have always maintained that that it could be a forgery. (The Guardian 6/7/12)
Although Peña Nieto is still well ahead of López Obrador in most opinion polls, Mexico’s political class seems concerned about the possibility of a center-left candidate winning the presidency. On June 3 former president Fox threw his support behind Peña Nieto, deserting Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of his own center-right National Action Party (PAN), who has fallen into third place. (Ironically, Fox’s election to the presidency in 2000 broke the PRI’s 71-year hold on the executive branch.) On June 9 the PRI tried to shift concerns about corruption to López Obrador: the party filed a complaint with the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) charging that the candidate was violating campaign financing laws by raising money through the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), a nonparty association he founded last year. (Milenio (Mexico) 6/4/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 6/10/12)
4. Latin America: Left Leaders Diss OAS Rights Group
The 42nd General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS), held June 3-5 in Cochabamba, Bolivia, was dominated by calls from leftist South American leaders for restructuring the group and ending domination by the US. Bolivian president Evo Morales, the host of the meeting, set the tone by declaring that “for the OAS there are two roads: either it dies in the service of imperialism, or it is reborn to serve the peoples of America.” Headquartered in Washington, DC, the OAS includes every country in the hemisphere except Cuba, which was denied representation in 1962 under pressure from the US.
A special target for leaders on the left was the OAS rights organization, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), which is based in Washington, DC, with an affiliated human rights court in San José, Costa Rica. “If it doesn’t want to watch over individual guarantees in the US, it’s better that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights should disappear,” Morales said at the General Assembly. Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who was criticized by the IACHR in a dispute he had with the Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo, described the organization as a “defender of the freedom of the press to extort” that “is totally influenced by hegemonic nations, by the NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and the interests of big capital.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/4/12 from AFP, Xinhua, Reuters)
[Peru made similar criticisms of the IACHR in January, when the commission agreed to hear a case concerning accusations that Peruvian security forces carried out summary executions in the 1997 hostage rescue mission at the Japanese ambassador's residence in Lima; see World War 4 Report 4/13/12.]
Rightwing Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer pointed out on June 9 that the IACHR has in fact frequently criticized the US, along with US allies in Latin America. “Last year,” he wrote, “the commission passed 11 resolutions requesting the United States to take urgent actions to correct human rights abuses. The only country that received more commission requests for urgent corrective actions was Honduras, which was the target of 12 commission resolutions. Colombia ranked third among the countries with the most commission urgent action requests, Mexico fourth, and Argentina and Cuba were tied for fifth place, with three requests each. By comparison, the commission passed only one urgent action request against Venezuela, one against Bolivia and one against Ecuador last year.” Oppenheimer noted that in 2011 the IACHR had criticized the US government’s routine detention of undocumented immigrants, the deportation of Haitians with health problems, and the indefinite detention of Muslim prisoners in the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. (Kansas City Star 6/9/12)
Oppenheimer didn’t note, however, that the US government and media paid little attention to the IACHR’s criticisms of the US in 2011. Probably very few people in the US were aware of the IACHR documents Oppenheimer cited; or of the commission’s statements on the judicial executions of Manuel Valle, Mark Anthony Stroman and Humberto Leal García in the US; or of an IACHR rapporteur’s “concern over the arrests and assaults on journalists and media workers during the coverage of the demonstrations of the Occupy Wall Street groups in Nashville and Oakland” in November 2011.
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Argentina's Desaparecidos – the Epilogue
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3671-colombia-and-guatemala-again-ranked-1st-and-2nd-in-murders-of-trade-unionists
Elders in Peruvian Andes Help Interpret Climate Changes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3666-elders-in-peruvian-andes-help-interpret-climate-changes-
Peru: lawmakers resign from ruling party as mining conflicts escalate
http://ww4report.com/node/11147
Colombia and Guatemala Again Ranked 1st and 2nd in Murders of Trade Unionists
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3671-colombia-and-guatemala-again-ranked-1st-and-2nd-in-murders-of-trade-unionists
Venezuelan Anti-Capitalists March in Solidarity with Global Movements
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7039
Pacific Rim Ruling Threatens El Salvador’s National Sovereignty
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/8/pacific-rim-ruling-threatens-el-salvador%E2%80%99s-national-sovereignty
World Bank tribunal grants PacRim Mining jurisdiction in case against El Salvador
http://ww4report.com/node/11148
Honduras: US claims success in drug war militarization
http://ww4report.com/node/11149
Next for Honduras: "charter city" neocolonialism?
http://ww4report.com/node/11150
Laboratory, Honduras: Dueling truth commissions, ongoing repression, and Canada’s role in the new Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3673-laboratory-honduras
Protesters in the United States Shape Media Coverage of Porfirio Lobo (Honduras)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/4/protesters-united-states-shape-media-coverage-porfirio-lobo
Media Analysis: 'This American Life' Digs for Truth about the Dos Erres Massacre in Guatemala, but Fails to Unearth the Role of the United States
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3668--media-analysis-this-american-life-digs-for-truth-about-the-dos-erres-massacre-in-guatemala-but-fails-to-unearth-the-role-of-the-united-states
Photo Essay: Third Month of Resistance Against a Radius Gold-owned Mine in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3669-photo-essay-third-month-of-resistance-against-a-radius-gold-owned-mine-in-guatemala
Mexico’s G20 Summit: In the Eye of the Storm
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6923
Man Arrested in 2006 Brad Will Murder–Finally a Step Toward Justice? (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6932
Mexico: Year of the Grasshopper
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june072012/year-grasshopper.php
Typical: The Economist Fails Caribbean History
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/7/typical-economist-fails-caribbean-history
As Caracol Industrial Park Progresses, Scrutiny of Problems Grows
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/as-caracol-industrial-park-progresses-scrutiny-of-problems-grows
Bringing the Battlefield to the Border: The Wild World of Border Security and Boundary Building in Arizona (immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/7/bringing-battlefield-border-wild-world-border-security-and-boundary-building-arizona
Your Local Police Officer in Northern Washington State: A U.S. Border Patrol Agent (immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/6/your-local-police-officer-northern-washington-state-us-border-patrol-agent
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
WNU #1131: Mexican Presidential Race Heats Up as Students Protest
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1131, June 3, 2012
1. Mexico: Presidential Race Heats Up; Student Protests Continue
2. Mexico: Indigenous Leader Murdered in Michoacán
3. Guatemala: Pérez Molina Downsizes Peace Archives
4. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: Last week’s Update was misdated. The date should have been May 27, 2012.
*1. Mexico: Presidential Race Heats Up; Student Protests Continue
Former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto is still favored to win Mexico’s July 1 presidential elections, but polls released at the end of May showed his lead over the other candidates slipping. After being considered the certain winner for months, Peña Nieto, the candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was only four percentage points ahead of former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a poll published by the conservative daily Reforma on May 31. Peña Nieto led voter intentions with 38%, according to Reforma, down from 45% in March; López Obrador, who is running with a center-left coalition, followed closely with 34%, up from 22% in March; and Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the governing center-right National Action Party (PAN), came in third with 23%, down from 32% in March.
Three other polls from the same period showed Peña Nieto with a larger lead and López Obrador and Vázquez Mota close to each other in voter intentions. Milenio/GEA-ISA, for example, showed Peña Nieto with 45.9%; López Obrador was far behind with 24.9% and was virtually tied with Vázquez Mota, who had 24.3%. However, most polls agreed that Peña Nieto and Vázquez Mota were losing ground and López Obrador was gaining. “The possibility exists that [the Reforma poll] is going in the right direction, that the contest is moving that way,” Roy Campos, from the rival Consulta Mitofsky polling company, told a reporter. (ADNpolitico.com (Mexico) 5/31/12)
Peña Nieto and his campaign advisers are said to be concerned by the improved numbers for López Obrador, who lost the 2006 presidential race by a very narrow margin in a disputed official count. The left-leaning daily La Jornada reports that PRI leaders don’t believe that López Obrador is just four points behind their candidate--but they also don’t believe Peña Nieto is ahead by 20 or 21 points. The student protests that have started to plague Peña Nieto’s public appearances are another factor worrying the candidate’s advisers, according to La Jornada. (LJ (Mexico) 6/2/12)
The student movement--widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) and sometimes as “Mexican Spring”—appeared suddenly in May to challenge media coverage of the campaign and the perception that the PRI candidate was sure to win [see Update #1130]. While continuing to march against Peña Nieto and the television networks, the students are now also developing links with other Mexican protest movements.
A meeting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City on June 1 called on students to participate in the capital’s annual LGBT Pride march the next day and in a protest on June 3 in defense of the Wirikuta, a site in the north central state of San Luis Potosí that is sacred to the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous group; the Wixárika say the site is threatened by a mining concession granted to the Canadian firm First Majestic Silver Corp (FMS) [see Update #1081]. On June 4 students planned to protest in solidarity with some of the parents of the 49 children that died in a fire in the Guardería ABC, a childcare center in Hermosillo, Sonora on June 5, 2009. (LJ 6/2/12; Terra (Mexico) 6/2/12)
Correction: Last week’s Update described a May 19 march in Mexico City as sponsored by university students. Students accounted for much of the participation, but no group sponsored the demonstration, which was organized through social networks.
*2. Mexico: Indigenous Leader Murdered in Michoacán
The body of indigenous teacher and activist Teódulo Santos Girón was found on May 16 in the town cemetery in La Ticla in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. According to official sources, Santos Girón, who had just finished his term as a local official in the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, had been kidnapped in La Ticla the night before; he was shot in the head and in the body.
Santos Girón was active in promoting maintenance of the Náhuatl language and culture, and he was a strong supporter of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who also admired the indigenous rebels of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN), based in the southeastern state of Chiapas. He helped lead the movement of Ostula residents that occupied disputed land near the Pacific coast in the summer of 2009. The occupiers were subsequently granted more than 1,000 hectares by Michoacán’s state government, but drug dealers and other forces have been trying to drive the community out of the area. As of last December, 28 community members had been murdered, including leaders Trinidad de la Cruz Crisóstomo (“Don Trino”) and Pedro Leyva Domínguez [see Update #1110]. (La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico) 5/18/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/19/12)
Another Michoacán indigenous activist, Jesús Sebastián Ortiz, was found dead on May 24 in the Cherán autonomous municipality, where he was a community leader. He had left his home a week earlier to go to a ranch, but he never returned. Community members feared he had been attacked by forcesengaged in illegal logging; eight people were killed near Cherán the morning of Apr. 18 during a dispute between Cherán residents and loggers [see Update #1126]. But the state Attorney General’s Office said on May 25 that an autopsy showed Sebastián Ortiz had died of a heart problem. An older brother accepted the autopsy results, saying that the community leader, who was 70, had suffered from heart disease. (LJ 5/25/12; El Universal (Mexico) 5/25/12)
*3. Guatemala: Pérez Molina Downsizes Peace Archives
During the last week of May the government of Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina began a process that human rights defenders charge will virtually close down the Peace Archives, the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country’s bloody 1960-1996 civil war. Newly appointed Peace Secretary Antonio Arenales Forno announced that the agency was unnecessary. Its function, he said, is “to computerize and analyze military archives to establish human rights violations, but this is the responsibility of the human rights community, and the investigation of crimes is the responsibility of the Prosecutor’s Office.”
The government notified 17 workers in the Peace Archives on May 28 that they would be laid off at the end of June, and Arenales Forno indicated that there more than 100 unnecessary positions in the Peace Secretariat that might be eliminated. The government hasn’t decided where the Archives’ records will kept, but they may be divided between several different Guatemalan agencies and the General Archives of Central America.
Mandated by the peace accords of 1996 and put into operation in 2008, the Peace Archives has already computerized two million documents and published nine reports on topics ranging from the National Police archives to forced disappearances during the war years and the illegal adoptions of children. Staffers from the agency have served as expert witnesses in trials for genocide and crimes against humanities, including the ongoing trial of former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983).
Kate Doyle, a director of investigations at the Washington, DC-based research group National Security Archive, wrote on June 1 that “[t]he closing of the Peace Archives ends an important source of support to human rights prosecutions in Guatemala, and may in part reflect the current government’s particular distaste for the genocide cases.” President Pérez Molina has denied that there was ever genocide in the military’s counterinsurgency campaigns. The president himself was a major in the army during the Ríos Montt dictatorship, operating around Nebaj, El Quiché department, in the Ixil Mayan region [see Updates #1114, 1115]. (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 5/31/12; EFE 6/1/12 via Terra.com (Peru); National Security Archive blog 6/1/12)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Rocky Road to Gender Equality in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3661-rocky-road-to-gender-equality-in-latin-america
The Pentagon Seeks to Regain the Initiative in South America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3658-the-pentagon-seeks-to-regain-the-initiative-in-south-america
Peru: four dead, mayor arrested in Cuzco mining conflict
http://ww4report.com/node/11132
Peru: police fire on protesters in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11133
Peru: Mick Jagger drawn into dispute over expansion of Camisea gas fields
http://ww4report.com/node/11134
Colombia: "armed strike" against glyphosate spraying
http://ww4report.com/node/11129
Colombia signs pact with China for trans-oceanic pipeline
http://ww4report.com/node/11130
The Path of the Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the United States
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6911
Colombia Denounced for Continued Impunity for Human Rights Crimes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3656-colombia-denounced-for-continued-impunity-for-human-rights-crimes
DEA-linked Deaths Show Faults in Central American Drug Plan
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3657-dea-linked-deaths-show-faults-in-central-american-drug-plan
U.S. Human rights activists document U.S. participation in massacre of Moskito people
http://www.rightsaction.org/action-content/us-human-rights-activists-document-us-participation-massacre-moskito-people
World Press Freedom Day: An Opportunity to Ignore Honduras
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/30/world-press-freedom-day-opportunity-ignore-honduras
Human Rights Violations in Guatemala: Hearing Indigenous Voices
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3660-human-rights-violations-in-guatemala-hearing-indigenous-voices
'Dirty War' Tactic of Disappearances Reappears in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3659-dirty-war-tactic-of-disappearances-reappears-in-mexico-
The Mexican State Goes on Trial in Ciudad Juarez
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/2012/05/30/the-mexican-state-goes-on-trial-in-ciudad-juarez/
Two Murders in Veracruz, Mexico
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/29/two-murders-veracruz-mexico
A Civil War in Mexico?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/29/civil-war-mexico
A Mexican Spring begins to blossom
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/05/a-mexican-spring-begins-to-blossom/
"No Matter What the Result, We Will Continue to Resist," Says Mexican Electrical Workers Union Leader
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9534-no-matter-what-the-result-we-wil
Going for Broke: The Corporate Players Behind the Demise of the Caribbean Banana Trade (Part 2)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/31/going-broke-corporate-players-behind-demise-caribbean-banana-trade-part-2
GOLD RUSH IN HAITI! – Who will get rich?
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/journal/2012/5/30/gold-rush-in-haiti-ruee-vers-lor-en-haiti.html
Video: The Migrant Trail Walk
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/1/video-migrant-trail-walk
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1131, June 3, 2012
1. Mexico: Presidential Race Heats Up; Student Protests Continue
2. Mexico: Indigenous Leader Murdered in Michoacán
3. Guatemala: Pérez Molina Downsizes Peace Archives
4. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: Last week’s Update was misdated. The date should have been May 27, 2012.
*1. Mexico: Presidential Race Heats Up; Student Protests Continue
Former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto is still favored to win Mexico’s July 1 presidential elections, but polls released at the end of May showed his lead over the other candidates slipping. After being considered the certain winner for months, Peña Nieto, the candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was only four percentage points ahead of former Mexico City mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a poll published by the conservative daily Reforma on May 31. Peña Nieto led voter intentions with 38%, according to Reforma, down from 45% in March; López Obrador, who is running with a center-left coalition, followed closely with 34%, up from 22% in March; and Josefina Vázquez Mota, the candidate of the governing center-right National Action Party (PAN), came in third with 23%, down from 32% in March.
Three other polls from the same period showed Peña Nieto with a larger lead and López Obrador and Vázquez Mota close to each other in voter intentions. Milenio/GEA-ISA, for example, showed Peña Nieto with 45.9%; López Obrador was far behind with 24.9% and was virtually tied with Vázquez Mota, who had 24.3%. However, most polls agreed that Peña Nieto and Vázquez Mota were losing ground and López Obrador was gaining. “The possibility exists that [the Reforma poll] is going in the right direction, that the contest is moving that way,” Roy Campos, from the rival Consulta Mitofsky polling company, told a reporter. (ADNpolitico.com (Mexico) 5/31/12)
Peña Nieto and his campaign advisers are said to be concerned by the improved numbers for López Obrador, who lost the 2006 presidential race by a very narrow margin in a disputed official count. The left-leaning daily La Jornada reports that PRI leaders don’t believe that López Obrador is just four points behind their candidate--but they also don’t believe Peña Nieto is ahead by 20 or 21 points. The student protests that have started to plague Peña Nieto’s public appearances are another factor worrying the candidate’s advisers, according to La Jornada. (LJ (Mexico) 6/2/12)
The student movement--widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) and sometimes as “Mexican Spring”—appeared suddenly in May to challenge media coverage of the campaign and the perception that the PRI candidate was sure to win [see Update #1130]. While continuing to march against Peña Nieto and the television networks, the students are now also developing links with other Mexican protest movements.
A meeting at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City on June 1 called on students to participate in the capital’s annual LGBT Pride march the next day and in a protest on June 3 in defense of the Wirikuta, a site in the north central state of San Luis Potosí that is sacred to the Wixárika (Huichol) indigenous group; the Wixárika say the site is threatened by a mining concession granted to the Canadian firm First Majestic Silver Corp (FMS) [see Update #1081]. On June 4 students planned to protest in solidarity with some of the parents of the 49 children that died in a fire in the Guardería ABC, a childcare center in Hermosillo, Sonora on June 5, 2009. (LJ 6/2/12; Terra (Mexico) 6/2/12)
Correction: Last week’s Update described a May 19 march in Mexico City as sponsored by university students. Students accounted for much of the participation, but no group sponsored the demonstration, which was organized through social networks.
*2. Mexico: Indigenous Leader Murdered in Michoacán
The body of indigenous teacher and activist Teódulo Santos Girón was found on May 16 in the town cemetery in La Ticla in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. According to official sources, Santos Girón, who had just finished his term as a local official in the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, had been kidnapped in La Ticla the night before; he was shot in the head and in the body.
Santos Girón was active in promoting maintenance of the Náhuatl language and culture, and he was a strong supporter of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) who also admired the indigenous rebels of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN), based in the southeastern state of Chiapas. He helped lead the movement of Ostula residents that occupied disputed land near the Pacific coast in the summer of 2009. The occupiers were subsequently granted more than 1,000 hectares by Michoacán’s state government, but drug dealers and other forces have been trying to drive the community out of the area. As of last December, 28 community members had been murdered, including leaders Trinidad de la Cruz Crisóstomo (“Don Trino”) and Pedro Leyva Domínguez [see Update #1110]. (La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico) 5/18/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/19/12)
Another Michoacán indigenous activist, Jesús Sebastián Ortiz, was found dead on May 24 in the Cherán autonomous municipality, where he was a community leader. He had left his home a week earlier to go to a ranch, but he never returned. Community members feared he had been attacked by forcesengaged in illegal logging; eight people were killed near Cherán the morning of Apr. 18 during a dispute between Cherán residents and loggers [see Update #1126]. But the state Attorney General’s Office said on May 25 that an autopsy showed Sebastián Ortiz had died of a heart problem. An older brother accepted the autopsy results, saying that the community leader, who was 70, had suffered from heart disease. (LJ 5/25/12; El Universal (Mexico) 5/25/12)
*3. Guatemala: Pérez Molina Downsizes Peace Archives
During the last week of May the government of Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina began a process that human rights defenders charge will virtually close down the Peace Archives, the agency in charge of preserving and investigating military and police records from the country’s bloody 1960-1996 civil war. Newly appointed Peace Secretary Antonio Arenales Forno announced that the agency was unnecessary. Its function, he said, is “to computerize and analyze military archives to establish human rights violations, but this is the responsibility of the human rights community, and the investigation of crimes is the responsibility of the Prosecutor’s Office.”
The government notified 17 workers in the Peace Archives on May 28 that they would be laid off at the end of June, and Arenales Forno indicated that there more than 100 unnecessary positions in the Peace Secretariat that might be eliminated. The government hasn’t decided where the Archives’ records will kept, but they may be divided between several different Guatemalan agencies and the General Archives of Central America.
Mandated by the peace accords of 1996 and put into operation in 2008, the Peace Archives has already computerized two million documents and published nine reports on topics ranging from the National Police archives to forced disappearances during the war years and the illegal adoptions of children. Staffers from the agency have served as expert witnesses in trials for genocide and crimes against humanities, including the ongoing trial of former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983).
Kate Doyle, a director of investigations at the Washington, DC-based research group National Security Archive, wrote on June 1 that “[t]he closing of the Peace Archives ends an important source of support to human rights prosecutions in Guatemala, and may in part reflect the current government’s particular distaste for the genocide cases.” President Pérez Molina has denied that there was ever genocide in the military’s counterinsurgency campaigns. The president himself was a major in the army during the Ríos Montt dictatorship, operating around Nebaj, El Quiché department, in the Ixil Mayan region [see Updates #1114, 1115]. (Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 5/31/12; EFE 6/1/12 via Terra.com (Peru); National Security Archive blog 6/1/12)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Rocky Road to Gender Equality in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3661-rocky-road-to-gender-equality-in-latin-america
The Pentagon Seeks to Regain the Initiative in South America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3658-the-pentagon-seeks-to-regain-the-initiative-in-south-america
Peru: four dead, mayor arrested in Cuzco mining conflict
http://ww4report.com/node/11132
Peru: police fire on protesters in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11133
Peru: Mick Jagger drawn into dispute over expansion of Camisea gas fields
http://ww4report.com/node/11134
Colombia: "armed strike" against glyphosate spraying
http://ww4report.com/node/11129
Colombia signs pact with China for trans-oceanic pipeline
http://ww4report.com/node/11130
The Path of the Free Trade Agreement between Colombia and the United States
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6911
Colombia Denounced for Continued Impunity for Human Rights Crimes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3656-colombia-denounced-for-continued-impunity-for-human-rights-crimes
DEA-linked Deaths Show Faults in Central American Drug Plan
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3657-dea-linked-deaths-show-faults-in-central-american-drug-plan
U.S. Human rights activists document U.S. participation in massacre of Moskito people
http://www.rightsaction.org/action-content/us-human-rights-activists-document-us-participation-massacre-moskito-people
World Press Freedom Day: An Opportunity to Ignore Honduras
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/30/world-press-freedom-day-opportunity-ignore-honduras
Human Rights Violations in Guatemala: Hearing Indigenous Voices
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3660-human-rights-violations-in-guatemala-hearing-indigenous-voices
'Dirty War' Tactic of Disappearances Reappears in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3659-dirty-war-tactic-of-disappearances-reappears-in-mexico-
The Mexican State Goes on Trial in Ciudad Juarez
http://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/2012/05/30/the-mexican-state-goes-on-trial-in-ciudad-juarez/
Two Murders in Veracruz, Mexico
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/29/two-murders-veracruz-mexico
A Civil War in Mexico?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/29/civil-war-mexico
A Mexican Spring begins to blossom
http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/05/a-mexican-spring-begins-to-blossom/
"No Matter What the Result, We Will Continue to Resist," Says Mexican Electrical Workers Union Leader
http://truth-out.org/news/item/9534-no-matter-what-the-result-we-wil
Going for Broke: The Corporate Players Behind the Demise of the Caribbean Banana Trade (Part 2)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/31/going-broke-corporate-players-behind-demise-caribbean-banana-trade-part-2
GOLD RUSH IN HAITI! – Who will get rich?
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/journal/2012/5/30/gold-rush-in-haiti-ruee-vers-lor-en-haiti.html
Video: The Migrant Trail Walk
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/1/video-migrant-trail-walk
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, May 28, 2012
WNU #1130: Chilean Students March, Support Quebec Strikers
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1130, May 27, 2012
1. Chile: Students March, Support Quebec Strikers
2. Mexico: Students March Against PRI, Media
3. Honduras: Police Chief Removed After Reporter’s Murder
4. Haiti: Is the Government Cracking Down on Ex-Soldiers?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Students March, Support Quebec Strikers
Tens of thousands of Chilean students demanding education reform held their second large national demonstration of the 2012 school year on May 16, continuing a movement that shut down many of the country’s secondary schools and universities with a strike last year. Protesters marched in Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Copiapó and other cities; student leaders estimated the total turnout nationwide at about 100,000.
The students continued to call for a return to free higher education, dismissing as inadequate the concessions made recently by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera, who proposed raising the corporate tax rate so that the government can provide low-interest student loans [see Update #1127]. “We’re going to go on being rebels, because the student movement isn’t going to settle for corrections to a few excesses,” Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) president Gabriel Boric said. “We’re here to fight for a new type of democracy. This struggle isn’t going to come to an end this year.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 5/17/12 from correspondent)
The Chilean student movement is the largest and the best known of a number of such movements that have sprung up in the Americas over the past two years, starting with a 62-day strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in the spring of 2010 and continuing with protests in Honduras, Colombia and other countries in 2011 [see Updates #1037, 1093, 1106, 1107]. In February this year some students in Canada’s Quebec province began boycotting classes to protest a plan by the provincial government to raise tuitions at public universities. The movement has now grown to include tens of thousands of students in what they call “Maple Spring” (Printemps érable, a play on Printemps arabe, French for Arab Spring).
On May 24 a number of Chilean academics and student leaders, including FECH president Boric and vice president Camila Vallejo Dowling, signed a declaration of support for the Quebec movement. The signers strongly denounced Law 78, which the Quebec government passed on May 19 in an effort to end the student strike by criminalizing many types of protest and penalizing calls for these protests. “The people of Quebec have stood with the people of Chile during long years in active solidarity,” the Chileans wrote. “It is for this reason that we feel called upon to express and demonstrate our broadest solidarity with their student organizations and their leaders, with their union federations and with the whole citizens’ movement.
“We do this in solidarity, but also because we understand that any attack against freedoms anywhere in this globalized world is an attack against our freedoms. The so-called ‘Hinzpeter law’ promoted by the Chilean government [an effort by Chilean interior minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter to limit student protests last year; see Update #1100] follows the same repressive and anti-democratic perspective. The struggle of the Québécois students, academics and workers is also our struggle.” (“Nous Sommes Tous des Québécois! ¡Todos Somos Quebequenses,” declaration 5/24/12)
Tens of thousands of Québécois have responded to Law 78 by taking to the streets in the evenings and beating on pots and pans; Chileans responded the same way last year to Hinzpeter’s repression. Some of the more than 10,000 Chileans living in Quebec province pointed out that this form of protest—the cacerolazo—was first popularized in Chile. In the early 1970s upper middle-class Chileans beat on pots and pans to protest the socialist government of then-president Salvador Allende, paving the way for the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973. But Pinochet’s opponents took up the tactic in the 1980s as a broad section of society began protesting his brutal military regime--although as Chilean-born University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) history professor José del Poso pointed out, anti-Pinochet protesters held their cacerolazos indoors, because “they risked blows from nightsticks and could even have been killed” if they had demonstrated in public.
Cacerolazos have also been used in Bolivia, in Uruguay and in Argentina, notably during Argentina’s 2001-2002 economic crisis, and have spread to European countries, including Spain and Ireland. (Le Soleil (Quebec City) 5/26/12; Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, vol. 20, #1, 2004)
*2. Mexico: Students March Against PRI, Media
Private and public university students sponsored a massive march in Mexico City on May 19 to protest media coverage of the July 1 presidential and legislative elections and the widely expected victory of former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The marchers also rejected the candidate of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), Josefina Vázquez Mota, who shares second place in most polls with center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“One, two, three; not one vote for the PRI,” the protesters chanted in a combination of English and Spanish as they moved from the city’s main plaza, the Zócalo, to the Angel of Independence. “Three, two, one; not one vote for the PAN.” “Peña Nieto’s got the TV, but we’ve got the streets and the social networks,” “I’m working-class, but I know how to read” were among the slogans. The marchers also expressed their distrust of the media’s crowd estimates: “We’re not one, we’re not 100; sold-out press, count us well.” (The television networks gave contradictory accounts of the turnout: on Twitter the giant Televisa network cited the capital’s center-left government as putting the crowd at 10,000, while CNN México gave the same source for its Twitter report of 46,000.) (La Jornada (Mexico) 5/20/12)
Mexico City authorities estimated participation at 15,000 for a second student demonstration, on May 23. This time the focus was on calls for democratizing the media, especially the two giant private networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, whose programming focuses on telenovelas (soap operas). Slogans included: “We want schools, not telenovelas”; “Lucero, Gaviota [references to a TV star and to a telenovela character played by Peña Nieto’s wife, Angélica Rivera]: the idiot box is done for”; and “Education is the vaccine against media manipulation.” Emphasizing the nonpartisan nature of the protest and widespread disaffection with all the political parties, some marchers heckled novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II when he hinted during a speech that the students should support López Obrador. (LJ 5/24/12)
The new student movement and its opposition to Peña Nieto have surprised some Mexican analysts, who noted that youths today were children in 2000 when the PRI lost the presidency after ruling Mexico for 71 years, often through repression and corruption.
The catalyst appears to have been an appearance by the PRI candidate on May 11 at the Ibero-American University (widely known as “Ibero”), a Jesuit school in an exclusive Mexico City neighborhood. Booing by many students forced Peña Nieto to leave the auditorium. The PRI announced that the hecklers weren’t students from the university, and Ibero authorities suggested that López Obrador supporters had organized the booing. The students responded with a video posted on YouTube in which 131 Ibero students showed their student IDs. Supporters quickly adopted the hashtag “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”). (El Universal (Venezuela) 5/27/12)
Now referred to both as “Yo Soy 132” and as “ Mexican Spring,” the new student movement quickly spread to other private schools and to the public universities. On May 17 representatives of students in 17 universities met at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City and agreed to continue building a movement that would be nonpartisan but not apolitical. They expressed support for many other groups, including the campesinos of San Salvador Atenco; the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity (MPJD) started by the poet Javier Sicilia, and activists in Ciudad Juárez and other cities fighting for justice for the victims of femicide [see Updates #1039, 1109, 1121].
Later in the day student groups held a rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at the Tlatelolco housing project, the site of a massacre by the police and military that shattered Mexico’s 1968 student movement. Speakers made proposals for extending their movement beyond the schools and past the July 1 elections. “If we want to be successful in this struggle,” UNAM students said, “we need to go outside the social networks—to make contact with the people in the streets, in the parks, as much as we can, to promote why we’re struggling, but also so that [citizens] participate in the electoral process in a critical manner, so that they reflect on their vote.” Another demonstration is planned for May 29. (LJ 5/27/12)
Correction: Students accounted for much of the participation in the May 19, but no group sponsored the demonstration, which was organized through social networks.
*3. Honduras: Police Chief Removed After Reporter’s Murder
The body of Honduran journalist Angel Alfredo Villatoro Rivera, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was found in Tegucigalpa on the evening of May 15, six days after he was kidnapped while driving to work [see Update #1129]. He had been shot twice in the head, according to Security Ministry spokesperson Héctor Iván Mejía; local media reported that the body was dressed in a police uniform. (EFE 5/15/12 via Univision)
As of May 21 the police had arrested five people in connection with the kidnapping and murder. Two of the suspects were serving prison sentences in Danlí, El Paraíso department, at the time of the murder: Miguel Angel Alvarez Ortez, a former Preventive Police agent convicted of being an accomplice in a murder, and Juan Ramón Fonseca, who was serving time for robbery. According to the authorities they had called Villatorio’s family repeatedly from the prison to demand a ransom payment. Members of the Honduran police have been accused of numerous crimes, including the murder last October of the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) and a member of the government’s Truth Commission [see Update #1104]. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 5/12/12)
On the night of May 21 President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa fired National Police chief Ricardo Ramírez del Cid, who was appointed last October in an earlier effort to crack down on crime within the force. His replacement is Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, a graduate of the carabineros police academy in Chile who was accused in 2002 of belonging to “Los Magnificos,” a group of former and active Honduran police agents said to have carried out extrajudicial executions of suspected gang members. He was acquitted when the prosecutor quit the case. During recent assignments in Copán and Olancho departments, he reportedly exposed police agents who were collaborating with drug traffickers, and this may be why he has been chosen to clean up the police department.
In a related move, President Lobo called the National Congress back from its recess to approve several new measures: the elimination of due process guarantees for police agents in dismissal proceedings, the creation of a new Executive Branch Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence, and an anti-doping law allowing drug tests of police agents. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 5/22/12, 5/24/12)
*4. Haiti: Is the Government Cracking Down on Ex-Soldiers?
More than 100 people claiming to be former members of the disbanded Armed Forces of Haiti (Fad’H) marched to Port-au-Prince from Carrefour, on the capital’s southwestern outskirts, on May 18 to mark Haiti’s Flag Day. They were wearing combat fatigues and some were armed. A few admitted to a reporter that they were too young to have been in the military in 1995 when it was disbanded by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004); others were women, even though the Fad’H had been all male. The marchers were calling on the government of President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) to restore the old military.
Inside Port-au-Prince the march was met by agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) and soldiers from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH); about 50 people were arrested. Junior Public Security Minister Reginald Delva described the group as a criminal association, but the ex-soldiers’ leaders say they will continue their activities, which since January have included training exercises, occupations of old military bases and camps, and an armed march on the Parliament [see Updates #1117, 1127).
Their latest demonstration came just two days after President Martelly officially installed Laurent Lamothe as his prime minister, the second in the year since Martelly took office. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 5/18/12; Radio Métropole (Haiti) 5/18/12, 5/19/12)
On May 25 one of the ex-soldiers, former sergeant Serge Réginald, told Haiti’s Radio Kiskeya that the government’s new attitude—as expressed in the May 18 arrests and in the retaking of some camps from the group since then--amounted to “treason.” Speaking from the former Lamentin camp in Carrefour, Réginald implied that previously Martelly and his government had backed the ex-soldiers and given them aid. (Radio Kiskeya 5/25/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Disappearing Andean glaciers, devastating Amazon floods signal hemispheric climate shift (Environment)
http://ww4report.com/node/11118
Repsol Sues Argentina for $10 Billion Over YPF Nationalization
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3650-repsol-sues-argentina-for-10-billion-over-ypf-nationalization
Bolivia’s TIPNIS March in a Changing Political Environment
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/23/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-march-changing-political-environment
Bolivia: Aymara stand up to authorities over Potosí mining project
http://ww4report.com/node/11121
Peru: more peasant protests over mining projects
http://ww4report.com/node/11119
Peru: new mobilization against Conga mine prepared
http://ww4report.com/node/11120
United States Sends Combat Commanders to Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3646-united-states-sends-combat-commanders-to-colombia
Chávez's Economics Lesson for Europe (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6990
Honduras: Which Side Is the US On?
http://www.thenation.com/article/167994/honduras-which-side-us
Echoing the State: The New York Times on Honduras
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/22/state-departments-priorities-honduras-permeate-nyt-coverage
Honduras: Miskito villagers demand answers after deadly raids
http://ww4report.com/node/11117
Guatemalan judge orders second genocide trial for former dictator
http://ww4report.com/node/11108
Guatemalan Communities Have No Say in Exploitation of Resources
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3648-guatemalan-communities-have-no-say-in-exploitation-of-resources
Guatemala: assassination, state of siege in conflict over hydro-dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11122
The New Migration Law: Mexico’s Continuing Failure to Protect Migrants
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3651-the-new-migration-law-mexicos-continuing-failure-to-protect-migrants
Threatened With Death, an Activist Priest Leaves Mexico (for a while)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/22/threatened-death-activist-priest-leaves-mexico-while
Mexico: Freedom of Expression Still Under Attack as Six Journalists Killed
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3655-mexico-freedom-of-expression-still-under-attack-as-six-journalists-killed
Mexican Farmers Block New Law to Privatize Plants
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6840
Urgent Action: Workers' Rights Activist Kidnapped and Tortured (Mexico)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=201#1446
Please Support Striking Garment Workers (Mexico)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=201#1457
Mexico: Tens of Thousands March against PRI’s Presidential Candidate
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3652-mexico-tens-of-thousands-march-against-pris-mexican-presidential-candidate-
Mexico: Populist Candidate Lopez Obrador Appeals to Business
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3647-mexico-populist-candidate-lopez-obrador-appeals-to-business
Anti-Austerity Fight Crosses Borders (Mexico, US)
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/05/24/anti-austerity-fight-crosses-borders/
Going for Broke: The Corporate Players Behind the Demise of the Caribbean Banana Trade (Part 1)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/24/going-broke-corporate-players-behind-demise-caribbean-banana-trade-part-1
HGW discovers: Partners in deforestation and slumification
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/5/20/partners-in-deforestation-and-slumification.html
OCHA White Washes Forced Evictions as New Threats Loom (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/ocha-white-washes-forced-evictions-as-new-threats-loom
Photo Essay: A Long and Silent Border War (US, immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/25/photo-essay-long-and-silent-border-war
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
===========================
For New Yorkers:
SPRING BENEFIT FOR TIPITAPA
THURSDAY, MAY 31st, 6:30-8:30 pm
You’re invited to the Annual Dos Pueblos Garden Extravaganza!
Please join us for a fun evening of song, dance and commentary, support our children’s libraries and clean water projects and celebrate the launch of our preventive health education program in the beautiful Upper West Side home and garden of Brian and Jeanne Kerwin.
RSVP here: http://dospueblosbenefit.eventbrite.com/ (address will be sent after RSVP)
More information: http://www.tipitapa.org/
===========================
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1130, May 27, 2012
1. Chile: Students March, Support Quebec Strikers
2. Mexico: Students March Against PRI, Media
3. Honduras: Police Chief Removed After Reporter’s Murder
4. Haiti: Is the Government Cracking Down on Ex-Soldiers?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Students March, Support Quebec Strikers
Tens of thousands of Chilean students demanding education reform held their second large national demonstration of the 2012 school year on May 16, continuing a movement that shut down many of the country’s secondary schools and universities with a strike last year. Protesters marched in Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Copiapó and other cities; student leaders estimated the total turnout nationwide at about 100,000.
The students continued to call for a return to free higher education, dismissing as inadequate the concessions made recently by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera, who proposed raising the corporate tax rate so that the government can provide low-interest student loans [see Update #1127]. “We’re going to go on being rebels, because the student movement isn’t going to settle for corrections to a few excesses,” Federation of University of Chile Students (FECH) president Gabriel Boric said. “We’re here to fight for a new type of democracy. This struggle isn’t going to come to an end this year.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 5/17/12 from correspondent)
The Chilean student movement is the largest and the best known of a number of such movements that have sprung up in the Americas over the past two years, starting with a 62-day strike at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) in the spring of 2010 and continuing with protests in Honduras, Colombia and other countries in 2011 [see Updates #1037, 1093, 1106, 1107]. In February this year some students in Canada’s Quebec province began boycotting classes to protest a plan by the provincial government to raise tuitions at public universities. The movement has now grown to include tens of thousands of students in what they call “Maple Spring” (Printemps érable, a play on Printemps arabe, French for Arab Spring).
On May 24 a number of Chilean academics and student leaders, including FECH president Boric and vice president Camila Vallejo Dowling, signed a declaration of support for the Quebec movement. The signers strongly denounced Law 78, which the Quebec government passed on May 19 in an effort to end the student strike by criminalizing many types of protest and penalizing calls for these protests. “The people of Quebec have stood with the people of Chile during long years in active solidarity,” the Chileans wrote. “It is for this reason that we feel called upon to express and demonstrate our broadest solidarity with their student organizations and their leaders, with their union federations and with the whole citizens’ movement.
“We do this in solidarity, but also because we understand that any attack against freedoms anywhere in this globalized world is an attack against our freedoms. The so-called ‘Hinzpeter law’ promoted by the Chilean government [an effort by Chilean interior minister Rodrigo Hinzpeter to limit student protests last year; see Update #1100] follows the same repressive and anti-democratic perspective. The struggle of the Québécois students, academics and workers is also our struggle.” (“Nous Sommes Tous des Québécois! ¡Todos Somos Quebequenses,” declaration 5/24/12)
Tens of thousands of Québécois have responded to Law 78 by taking to the streets in the evenings and beating on pots and pans; Chileans responded the same way last year to Hinzpeter’s repression. Some of the more than 10,000 Chileans living in Quebec province pointed out that this form of protest—the cacerolazo—was first popularized in Chile. In the early 1970s upper middle-class Chileans beat on pots and pans to protest the socialist government of then-president Salvador Allende, paving the way for the military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973. But Pinochet’s opponents took up the tactic in the 1980s as a broad section of society began protesting his brutal military regime--although as Chilean-born University of Quebec at Montreal (UQAM) history professor José del Poso pointed out, anti-Pinochet protesters held their cacerolazos indoors, because “they risked blows from nightsticks and could even have been killed” if they had demonstrated in public.
Cacerolazos have also been used in Bolivia, in Uruguay and in Argentina, notably during Argentina’s 2001-2002 economic crisis, and have spread to European countries, including Spain and Ireland. (Le Soleil (Quebec City) 5/26/12; Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, vol. 20, #1, 2004)
*2. Mexico: Students March Against PRI, Media
Private and public university students sponsored a massive march in Mexico City on May 19 to protest media coverage of the July 1 presidential and legislative elections and the widely expected victory of former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The marchers also rejected the candidate of the center-right National Action Party (PAN), Josefina Vázquez Mota, who shares second place in most polls with center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
“One, two, three; not one vote for the PRI,” the protesters chanted in a combination of English and Spanish as they moved from the city’s main plaza, the Zócalo, to the Angel of Independence. “Three, two, one; not one vote for the PAN.” “Peña Nieto’s got the TV, but we’ve got the streets and the social networks,” “I’m working-class, but I know how to read” were among the slogans. The marchers also expressed their distrust of the media’s crowd estimates: “We’re not one, we’re not 100; sold-out press, count us well.” (The television networks gave contradictory accounts of the turnout: on Twitter the giant Televisa network cited the capital’s center-left government as putting the crowd at 10,000, while CNN México gave the same source for its Twitter report of 46,000.) (La Jornada (Mexico) 5/20/12)
Mexico City authorities estimated participation at 15,000 for a second student demonstration, on May 23. This time the focus was on calls for democratizing the media, especially the two giant private networks, Televisa and TV Azteca, whose programming focuses on telenovelas (soap operas). Slogans included: “We want schools, not telenovelas”; “Lucero, Gaviota [references to a TV star and to a telenovela character played by Peña Nieto’s wife, Angélica Rivera]: the idiot box is done for”; and “Education is the vaccine against media manipulation.” Emphasizing the nonpartisan nature of the protest and widespread disaffection with all the political parties, some marchers heckled novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II when he hinted during a speech that the students should support López Obrador. (LJ 5/24/12)
The new student movement and its opposition to Peña Nieto have surprised some Mexican analysts, who noted that youths today were children in 2000 when the PRI lost the presidency after ruling Mexico for 71 years, often through repression and corruption.
The catalyst appears to have been an appearance by the PRI candidate on May 11 at the Ibero-American University (widely known as “Ibero”), a Jesuit school in an exclusive Mexico City neighborhood. Booing by many students forced Peña Nieto to leave the auditorium. The PRI announced that the hecklers weren’t students from the university, and Ibero authorities suggested that López Obrador supporters had organized the booing. The students responded with a video posted on YouTube in which 131 Ibero students showed their student IDs. Supporters quickly adopted the hashtag “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”). (El Universal (Venezuela) 5/27/12)
Now referred to both as “Yo Soy 132” and as “ Mexican Spring,” the new student movement quickly spread to other private schools and to the public universities. On May 17 representatives of students in 17 universities met at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City and agreed to continue building a movement that would be nonpartisan but not apolitical. They expressed support for many other groups, including the campesinos of San Salvador Atenco; the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity (MPJD) started by the poet Javier Sicilia, and activists in Ciudad Juárez and other cities fighting for justice for the victims of femicide [see Updates #1039, 1109, 1121].
Later in the day student groups held a rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at the Tlatelolco housing project, the site of a massacre by the police and military that shattered Mexico’s 1968 student movement. Speakers made proposals for extending their movement beyond the schools and past the July 1 elections. “If we want to be successful in this struggle,” UNAM students said, “we need to go outside the social networks—to make contact with the people in the streets, in the parks, as much as we can, to promote why we’re struggling, but also so that [citizens] participate in the electoral process in a critical manner, so that they reflect on their vote.” Another demonstration is planned for May 29. (LJ 5/27/12)
Correction: Students accounted for much of the participation in the May 19, but no group sponsored the demonstration, which was organized through social networks.
*3. Honduras: Police Chief Removed After Reporter’s Murder
The body of Honduran journalist Angel Alfredo Villatoro Rivera, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was found in Tegucigalpa on the evening of May 15, six days after he was kidnapped while driving to work [see Update #1129]. He had been shot twice in the head, according to Security Ministry spokesperson Héctor Iván Mejía; local media reported that the body was dressed in a police uniform. (EFE 5/15/12 via Univision)
As of May 21 the police had arrested five people in connection with the kidnapping and murder. Two of the suspects were serving prison sentences in Danlí, El Paraíso department, at the time of the murder: Miguel Angel Alvarez Ortez, a former Preventive Police agent convicted of being an accomplice in a murder, and Juan Ramón Fonseca, who was serving time for robbery. According to the authorities they had called Villatorio’s family repeatedly from the prison to demand a ransom payment. Members of the Honduran police have been accused of numerous crimes, including the murder last October of the son of Julieta Castellanos, the rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) and a member of the government’s Truth Commission [see Update #1104]. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 5/12/12)
On the night of May 21 President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa fired National Police chief Ricardo Ramírez del Cid, who was appointed last October in an earlier effort to crack down on crime within the force. His replacement is Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, a graduate of the carabineros police academy in Chile who was accused in 2002 of belonging to “Los Magnificos,” a group of former and active Honduran police agents said to have carried out extrajudicial executions of suspected gang members. He was acquitted when the prosecutor quit the case. During recent assignments in Copán and Olancho departments, he reportedly exposed police agents who were collaborating with drug traffickers, and this may be why he has been chosen to clean up the police department.
In a related move, President Lobo called the National Congress back from its recess to approve several new measures: the elimination of due process guarantees for police agents in dismissal proceedings, the creation of a new Executive Branch Directorate of Investigation and Intelligence, and an anti-doping law allowing drug tests of police agents. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 5/22/12, 5/24/12)
*4. Haiti: Is the Government Cracking Down on Ex-Soldiers?
More than 100 people claiming to be former members of the disbanded Armed Forces of Haiti (Fad’H) marched to Port-au-Prince from Carrefour, on the capital’s southwestern outskirts, on May 18 to mark Haiti’s Flag Day. They were wearing combat fatigues and some were armed. A few admitted to a reporter that they were too young to have been in the military in 1995 when it was disbanded by then-president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004); others were women, even though the Fad’H had been all male. The marchers were calling on the government of President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) to restore the old military.
Inside Port-au-Prince the march was met by agents of the National Police of Haiti (PNH) and soldiers from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH); about 50 people were arrested. Junior Public Security Minister Reginald Delva described the group as a criminal association, but the ex-soldiers’ leaders say they will continue their activities, which since January have included training exercises, occupations of old military bases and camps, and an armed march on the Parliament [see Updates #1117, 1127).
Their latest demonstration came just two days after President Martelly officially installed Laurent Lamothe as his prime minister, the second in the year since Martelly took office. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 5/18/12; Radio Métropole (Haiti) 5/18/12, 5/19/12)
On May 25 one of the ex-soldiers, former sergeant Serge Réginald, told Haiti’s Radio Kiskeya that the government’s new attitude—as expressed in the May 18 arrests and in the retaking of some camps from the group since then--amounted to “treason.” Speaking from the former Lamentin camp in Carrefour, Réginald implied that previously Martelly and his government had backed the ex-soldiers and given them aid. (Radio Kiskeya 5/25/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Environment, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Disappearing Andean glaciers, devastating Amazon floods signal hemispheric climate shift (Environment)
http://ww4report.com/node/11118
Repsol Sues Argentina for $10 Billion Over YPF Nationalization
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3650-repsol-sues-argentina-for-10-billion-over-ypf-nationalization
Bolivia’s TIPNIS March in a Changing Political Environment
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/23/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-march-changing-political-environment
Bolivia: Aymara stand up to authorities over Potosí mining project
http://ww4report.com/node/11121
Peru: more peasant protests over mining projects
http://ww4report.com/node/11119
Peru: new mobilization against Conga mine prepared
http://ww4report.com/node/11120
United States Sends Combat Commanders to Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3646-united-states-sends-combat-commanders-to-colombia
Chávez's Economics Lesson for Europe (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/6990
Honduras: Which Side Is the US On?
http://www.thenation.com/article/167994/honduras-which-side-us
Echoing the State: The New York Times on Honduras
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/22/state-departments-priorities-honduras-permeate-nyt-coverage
Honduras: Miskito villagers demand answers after deadly raids
http://ww4report.com/node/11117
Guatemalan judge orders second genocide trial for former dictator
http://ww4report.com/node/11108
Guatemalan Communities Have No Say in Exploitation of Resources
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3648-guatemalan-communities-have-no-say-in-exploitation-of-resources
Guatemala: assassination, state of siege in conflict over hydro-dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11122
The New Migration Law: Mexico’s Continuing Failure to Protect Migrants
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3651-the-new-migration-law-mexicos-continuing-failure-to-protect-migrants
Threatened With Death, an Activist Priest Leaves Mexico (for a while)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/22/threatened-death-activist-priest-leaves-mexico-while
Mexico: Freedom of Expression Still Under Attack as Six Journalists Killed
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3655-mexico-freedom-of-expression-still-under-attack-as-six-journalists-killed
Mexican Farmers Block New Law to Privatize Plants
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6840
Urgent Action: Workers' Rights Activist Kidnapped and Tortured (Mexico)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=201#1446
Please Support Striking Garment Workers (Mexico)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=201#1457
Mexico: Tens of Thousands March against PRI’s Presidential Candidate
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3652-mexico-tens-of-thousands-march-against-pris-mexican-presidential-candidate-
Mexico: Populist Candidate Lopez Obrador Appeals to Business
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3647-mexico-populist-candidate-lopez-obrador-appeals-to-business
Anti-Austerity Fight Crosses Borders (Mexico, US)
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/05/24/anti-austerity-fight-crosses-borders/
Going for Broke: The Corporate Players Behind the Demise of the Caribbean Banana Trade (Part 1)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/24/going-broke-corporate-players-behind-demise-caribbean-banana-trade-part-1
HGW discovers: Partners in deforestation and slumification
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/5/20/partners-in-deforestation-and-slumification.html
OCHA White Washes Forced Evictions as New Threats Loom (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/ocha-white-washes-forced-evictions-as-new-threats-loom
Photo Essay: A Long and Silent Border War (US, immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/25/photo-essay-long-and-silent-border-war
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
===========================
For New Yorkers:
SPRING BENEFIT FOR TIPITAPA
THURSDAY, MAY 31st, 6:30-8:30 pm
You’re invited to the Annual Dos Pueblos Garden Extravaganza!
Please join us for a fun evening of song, dance and commentary, support our children’s libraries and clean water projects and celebrate the launch of our preventive health education program in the beautiful Upper West Side home and garden of Brian and Jeanne Kerwin.
RSVP here: http://dospueblosbenefit.eventbrite.com/ (address will be sent after RSVP)
More information: http://www.tipitapa.org/
===========================
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Friday, May 25, 2012
Paul Baizerman, ¡Presente!
The Update learned recently that longtime solidarity activist Paul Baizerman died last December in New York at the age of 67. A retired public school teacher, Paul dedicated much of his time to the Skilled Trades Task Force, a group he helped found to promote solidarity exchanges between trade unionists in Nicaragua and trade unionists in the US.
Paul’s work in Nicaragua began in the middle 1980s when he volunteered with TecNica, a California-based organization that brought technical assistance to Nicaragua at the height of the US-sponsored contra war against the new revolutionary government there. Paul quickly saw the potential and the need for developing direct solidarity between the labor movements in the two countries. With fluent Spanish and years of experience in the politics of the New York teachers’ union, he formed a close relationship with unionists in Nicaragua and began sending US unionists to Nicaragua and organizing tours of Nicaraguan unionists to the US.
The Skilled Trades Task Force was started as part of TecNica, but it continued to operate after the Sandinistas’ 1990 electoral defeat brought TecNica itself to an end, along with many other solidarity groups. Far from being discouraged, Paul expanded the project to include work with Cuban unionists and labor activists from other Latin American countries.
Paul was typically modest about his work. Generally he only talked about his role in providing material aid, such as the way he would drive tools and spare machine parts to Nicaragua in beat-up old VW bugs, which he donated along with the other equipment to Nicaraguan unions. When conversations got too ideological, he would shrug and say: “I don’t understand any of this crap; I’m from Brooklyn.” But he did understand, much better than most of us did at the time.
Now the idea of cross-border solidarity has won acceptance across a wide range of groups and people, from Occupy Wall Street activists to leaders of the AFL-CIO. But we must never forget that this acceptance is the result of the vision, dedication and hard work of Paul Baizerman and others like him.
For more information, go to:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=paul-baizerman&pid=154952698&fhid=1083 1
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/linder25years/message/15
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/paul-baizerman-presente/
For two articles by Paul, go to:
http://www.yachana.org/reports/nica2001/baizerman.html
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2007/12/merit-pay-in-ed-notes-april-2001.html
 |
| Paul leading a delegation in Nicaragua |
The Skilled Trades Task Force was started as part of TecNica, but it continued to operate after the Sandinistas’ 1990 electoral defeat brought TecNica itself to an end, along with many other solidarity groups. Far from being discouraged, Paul expanded the project to include work with Cuban unionists and labor activists from other Latin American countries.
Paul was typically modest about his work. Generally he only talked about his role in providing material aid, such as the way he would drive tools and spare machine parts to Nicaragua in beat-up old VW bugs, which he donated along with the other equipment to Nicaraguan unions. When conversations got too ideological, he would shrug and say: “I don’t understand any of this crap; I’m from Brooklyn.” But he did understand, much better than most of us did at the time.
Now the idea of cross-border solidarity has won acceptance across a wide range of groups and people, from Occupy Wall Street activists to leaders of the AFL-CIO. But we must never forget that this acceptance is the result of the vision, dedication and hard work of Paul Baizerman and others like him.
For more information, go to:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=paul-baizerman&pid=154952698&fhid=1083 1
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/linder25years/message/15
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2012/03/28/paul-baizerman-presente/
For two articles by Paul, go to:
http://www.yachana.org/reports/nica2001/baizerman.html
http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/2007/12/merit-pay-in-ed-notes-april-2001.html
Monday, May 21, 2012
Links but No Update for May 20, 2012
[There is no Update this week; we'll be back next week. Below are links to stories from other sources.]
Buenos Aires Offers Same-Sex Marriage to Foreign Couples
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3642-buenos-aires-offers-same-sex-marriage-to-foreign-couples
Repsol Sues Argentina for $10 Billion Over YPF Nationalization
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15729
Belo Monte: Brazil's Damned Democracy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3638-belo-monte-brazils-damned-democracy-
Chile’s Native Communities Find Ally in Supreme Court; Canadian Mining Project Halted
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3632-chiles-native-communities-find-ally-in-supreme-court-canadian-mining-project-halted
Chile Commemorates International Day Against Homophobia And Transphobia
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/17/chile-commemorates-international-day-against-homophobia-and-transphobia/
Israeli power company expands in Peru —but gets nationalized in Bolivia
http://ww4report.com/node/11096
Peru: army, cabinet shake-up in fallout from Amazon hostage crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/11094
Peru: Asháninka indigenous people fight hydro scheme in new war zone
http://ww4report.com/node/11095
Peru: Humala Takes Off His Gloves
http://nacla.org/news/2012/5/17/peru-humala-takes-his-gloves
Colombia: Community Takes on Uribe and Allies Over Controversial Tunnel
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3633-colombia-community-takes-on-uribe-and-allies-over-controversial-tunnel
Colombia's Resistance to Corporate Mining Excess has Lessons for the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3631-colombias-resistance-to-corporate-mining-excess-has-lessons-for-the-world
Venezuelan Authorities Regain Control of La Planta Prison after Violence
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6997
Venezuela demands extradition of exiled judge from US
http://ww4report.com/node/11089
CNN: The Latest Outlet for Roger Noriega’s Paranoid Speculations (Venezuela)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/14/cnns-latest-outlet-roger-noriegas-paranoid-speculations
Consequences of the Military Occupation in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3634-consequences-of-the-military-occupation-in-honduras
Honduras: A Violence, Repression and Impunity Capital of the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3641-honduras-a-violence-repression-and-impunity-capital-of-the-world
Honduras: angry protests on Miskito Coast over US militarization
http://ww4report.com/node/11097
Collateral Damage (Honduras)
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/05/collateral-damage.html
Honduras: campesinos protest hydro-electric plan that would flood their lands
http://ww4report.com/node/11098
Mexican Families March on Mother’s Day on Behalf of Disappeared Relatives
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3637-mexican-families-march-on-mothers-day-on-behalf-of-disappeared-relatives
Mexico: crackdown on armed forces narco links?
http://ww4report.com/node/11099
Mexico: journalists targeted in wave of torture killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11100
Mexico’s Cananea Strikers: Fighting for the Right to a Union
http://www.inthesetimes.org/working/entry/13220/fighting_for_the_right_to_a_union_and_to_stay_in_mexico/
Another Score for the Tiger of the Monsanto Law (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6840
Judge Rejects Declassification Of CIA Volume On Bay of Pigs (Cuba)
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/15/judge-rejects-declassification-of-cia-volume-on-bay-of-pigs/
Streamlining the Border Patrol (Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/16/streamlining-border-patrol
Buenos Aires Offers Same-Sex Marriage to Foreign Couples
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3642-buenos-aires-offers-same-sex-marriage-to-foreign-couples
Repsol Sues Argentina for $10 Billion Over YPF Nationalization
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15729
Belo Monte: Brazil's Damned Democracy
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3638-belo-monte-brazils-damned-democracy-
Chile’s Native Communities Find Ally in Supreme Court; Canadian Mining Project Halted
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3632-chiles-native-communities-find-ally-in-supreme-court-canadian-mining-project-halted
Chile Commemorates International Day Against Homophobia And Transphobia
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/17/chile-commemorates-international-day-against-homophobia-and-transphobia/
Israeli power company expands in Peru —but gets nationalized in Bolivia
http://ww4report.com/node/11096
Peru: army, cabinet shake-up in fallout from Amazon hostage crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/11094
Peru: Asháninka indigenous people fight hydro scheme in new war zone
http://ww4report.com/node/11095
Peru: Humala Takes Off His Gloves
http://nacla.org/news/2012/5/17/peru-humala-takes-his-gloves
Colombia: Community Takes on Uribe and Allies Over Controversial Tunnel
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3633-colombia-community-takes-on-uribe-and-allies-over-controversial-tunnel
Colombia's Resistance to Corporate Mining Excess has Lessons for the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3631-colombias-resistance-to-corporate-mining-excess-has-lessons-for-the-world
Venezuelan Authorities Regain Control of La Planta Prison after Violence
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6997
Venezuela demands extradition of exiled judge from US
http://ww4report.com/node/11089
CNN: The Latest Outlet for Roger Noriega’s Paranoid Speculations (Venezuela)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/14/cnns-latest-outlet-roger-noriegas-paranoid-speculations
Consequences of the Military Occupation in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3634-consequences-of-the-military-occupation-in-honduras
Honduras: A Violence, Repression and Impunity Capital of the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3641-honduras-a-violence-repression-and-impunity-capital-of-the-world
Honduras: angry protests on Miskito Coast over US militarization
http://ww4report.com/node/11097
Collateral Damage (Honduras)
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/05/collateral-damage.html
Honduras: campesinos protest hydro-electric plan that would flood their lands
http://ww4report.com/node/11098
Mexican Families March on Mother’s Day on Behalf of Disappeared Relatives
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3637-mexican-families-march-on-mothers-day-on-behalf-of-disappeared-relatives
Mexico: crackdown on armed forces narco links?
http://ww4report.com/node/11099
Mexico: journalists targeted in wave of torture killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11100
Mexico’s Cananea Strikers: Fighting for the Right to a Union
http://www.inthesetimes.org/working/entry/13220/fighting_for_the_right_to_a_union_and_to_stay_in_mexico/
Another Score for the Tiger of the Monsanto Law (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6840
Judge Rejects Declassification Of CIA Volume On Bay of Pigs (Cuba)
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/15/judge-rejects-declassification-of-cia-volume-on-bay-of-pigs/
Streamlining the Border Patrol (Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/16/streamlining-border-patrol
Monday, May 14, 2012
WNU #1129: Chilean Activists Protest New US Base
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1129, May 13, 2012
1. Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New US Base
2. Peru: Questions Persist on 1997 Hostage Rescue
3. Honduras: One Journalist Murdered, One Kidnapped
4. Mexico: Demand Grows for Release of Chiapas Schoolteacher
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New US Base
A US military training center in the port city of Concón, in the central Chilean province of Valparaíso, will be used for exercises “clearly oriented toward the control and repression of the civilian population,” according to an open letter that more than 20 human rights organizations sent Defense Minister Andrés Allamand on May 7. The US government has spent $460,000 constructing the installation, which opened on Apr. 5 at the Chilean military’s Fort Aguayo naval base. UPI Business News writes that the site “is growing into a major destination for regional military trainers and defense industry contractors.”
According to the US Southern Command (USSC), which heads US military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the installation will be used for training in Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) by Latin American soldiers as they prepare for international operations, such as United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions. But the human rights groups wrote in their letter that the Fort Aguayo training ground—a simulation of an urban zone, with eight buildings and sidewalks and roads—suggests plans for military intervention in civilian society. The groups noted that the installation was opened at a time when “broad and massive social demonstrations are developing on the part of the citizenry throughout the country.” [The government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera has been shaken over the past year by militant protests by students, the indigenous Mapuche, residents of the southern region of Aysén, and other groups; see Updates #1122, 1127].
The human rights organizations said the US lacks “the moral quality to teach ‘peace operations,’” since “it has promoted coups, financed destabilization operations in sister countries, and has promoted war in the world. We don’t forget that in 2009 the Soto Cano base in Honduras, with US military personnel, was used to implement the coup d’état” against former president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales [2006-2009]. The letter also held the US responsible for the brutal 1973 coup in Chile and for training “the worst human rights violators in our country” at the US Army’s School of the Americas. (El Ciudadano (Chile) 5/9/12; Adital (Brazil) 5/10/12; People’s World 4/26/12; UPI Business News 4/30/12)
The Southern Command is also planning to build an installation in Argentina, at the airport in Resistencia, capital of the northeastern province of Chaco. The plan seems to contradict center-left president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s policy against allowing foreign military bases, although the province’s governor, Jorge Milton Capitanich, insists that the installation isn’t a “base,” since the US now describes its facilities with terms like “Cooperative Security Location” (CSL) and “Forward Operating Location” (FOL).
The $3 million installation in Chaco will ostensibly be a humanitarian aid center for dealing with natural disasters, but critics suspect the real goal is to monitor the sensitive Triple Frontier region, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, and the Guaraní Aquifer, one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water. The US officer in charge of the project is Col. Edwin Passmore, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2008 on a charge that he had engaged in espionage while serving as US military attaché there. In November 2011 Passmore was involved in an incident in which a US military plane landed in Buenos Aires carrying undeclared electronic monitoring equipment, medications, and intelligence transmission devices.
The US currently has about 800 bases worldwide, with 22 in Latin America, including bases in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru; naval stations in Aruba and Curaçao; and a “CSL” under construction in the Dominican Republic. (People’s World 4/26/12; El Ciudadano 5/5/12)
*2. Peru: Questions Persist on 1997 Hostage Rescue
The Peruvian military held a ceremony at its Chorrillos base, near Lima, on Apr. 20 to commemorate a commando operation 15 years earlier that freed 71 hostages who had been held by rebels from the leftist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) for 126 days at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in the capital. One hostage, two soldiers and all 14 rebels were killed in the operation, which took place on Apr. 22, 1997. The raid, codenamed Operation Chavín de Huántar, was ordered by the government of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), then a US ally; Fujimori is now serving a 25-year prison term in Peru for corruption and for ordering killings and kidnappings [see Update #1109].
The brief military ceremony, broadcast on national television, included a reenactment of the rescue using a full-scale replica of the ambassador’s residence built at the base under the Fujimori administration; the Japanese government tore down the original building a few months after the rescue. (AFP 4/20/12 via Univision)
A small unit of the now-defunct MRTA seized the ambassador’s residence on Dec. 17, 1996, during a reception honoring the Japanese emperor’s birthday. A large part of Peru’s political class was attending, and the rebels initially took about 700 hostages, although most were freed within days. The successful rescue in April 1997 helped diminish the embarrassment the MRTA’s seizure of the residence caused the security forces and the Fujimori government. But the success was marred almost immediately by reports from a few police agents and freed hostages that at least three of the rebels had been executed after they surrendered [see Update #378].
Relatives of Eduardo (“Tito”) Cruz Sánchez, one of the MRTA rebels allegedly executed, repeatedly tried to get the Peruvian court system to act on the reports; currently the charges are included in proceedings against Fujimori’s intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, that have been languishing in the courts for years. Starting this year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) has taken up the case as well, infuriating the government of President Ollanta Humala, a former military officer [see World War 4 Report 3/18/12, 4/13/12].
Hidetaka Ogura, a former hostage who was first secretary at the Japanese embassy in the 1990s, is an important witness in the case; he says he saw “Tito” Cruz Sánchez alive and bound after the rescue. The Peruvian military has dismissed Ogura’s testimony and has suggested that he might have collaborated with the MRTA. Another important source of evidence for the case is a secret cable dated June 10, 1997, from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the National Security Archive, a Washington, DC-based research group, obtained it from the US government in 2007 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The cable cites an intelligence source apparently involved in the rescue who graphically described a commando killing an unarmed rebel, Roli (“Arabe”) Rojas Fernández, and said an unnamed “female MRTA militant was also executed during the operation after she surrendered.” The intelligence source said Fujimori had given a “take no prisoners” order.
On Apr. 29, a little more than a week after the 15th anniversary celebration, the Peruvian daily La República reported that Kate Doyle, a director of investigations at the National Security Archive, had testified recently at the Montesinos trial on the Callao military base. In addition to confirming that the DIA cable was authentic, she noted that declassified US government documents had been used “in various trials in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and in Perú, in the Fujimori case.” (Three former military officers are being tried along with Montesinos: Gen. Nicolás Hermoza Ríos, Col. Roberto Huamán Azcurra and Col. Jesús Zamudio Aliaga.) (National Security Archive press release 12/10/07; EFE 4/29/12 via Univision)
There have also been persistent questions about the killing of Supreme Court Justice Carlos Giusti Acuña, the one hostage to die in the rescue and an opponent of Fujimori’s changes to the Constitution. In 2002 a protected witness told a Peruvian prosecutor that Montesinos had ordered Giusti's death and had put Col. Huamán Azcurra in charge of carrying out the killing, according to La República. In March of this year Argentine lawyer Alejandro Teitelbaum, citing a 1997 investigation by the Association of American Jurists, charged that Giusti was wounded in the leg and left to bleed to death. (LR 5/16/02; El Diario Internacional 3/13/12)
*3. Honduras: One Journalist Murdered, One Kidnapped
The body of Honduran journalist and LGBT rights activist Erick Alex Martínez Avila was found by a highway in the Tegucigalpa metropolitan area on May 7. He had reportedly been strangled, and the murder is believed to have taken place the day before. Martínez Avila was the communications director for Kukulcan, an organization that defends the rights of the LGBT community, and he was a founder of the Movement of Diversity in Resistance (MDR) and a member of the leftist group Los Necios Political Organization (“los necios” means “the obstinate ones”). Martínez Avila was also running in the Nov. 18 primary elections to be a candidate for legislative deputy in 2013 on the line of the Freedom and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), a new party formed by the grassroots National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP).
According to the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP), Martínez Avila was the 22nd Honduran journalist to be murdered since June 2009, when President José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales [2006-2009] was overthrown in a military coup. The MDR says the journalist was also the 20th member of the LGBT community to be murdered since President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa took office in January 2010. (InfoBAE (Argentina) 5/8/12 from DPA, AFP; Adital (Brazil) 5/8/12, 5/10/12)
Alfredo Villatoro, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was kidnapped in Tegucigalpa in the early morning of May 9 while he was on his way to work. The police quickly arrested former police sergeant Gerson Basilio Godoy, who was driving a Toyota pickup that had been seen parked in front of Villatorio's house that morning; the truck had also collided with the reporter's car, as was shown by paint marks from the other vehicle. The Public Prosecutor’s office released Godoy after 10 hours, saying the evidence was insufficient.
Godoy was dismissed from the police force in September 2011 on suspicion of belonging to a band of kidnappers and extortionists [see Update #1104 for more on corruption in the police force]. In March he was questioned about a robbery attempt against an official, but he was not charged. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 5/9/12; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 5/9/12) As of May 13 Villatorio was still missing, and the Honduran government had brought in police experts from Colombia and the US to help in the investigation. (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 5/13/12)
*4. Mexico: Demand Grows for Release of Chiapas Schoolteacher
Groups in Argentina, Brazil, France, England, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the US are planning events in the May 15-22 “Week of Global Struggle for the Liberation of Alberto Patishtán Gómez and Francisco Sántiz López,” two indigenous prisoners from the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. The week of actions was initiated by the New York-based Movement for Justice in El Barrio.
Patishtán Gómez, in prison since 2000, is serving a 60-year sentence for his alleged involvement in the June 2000 killing of seven police agents in El Bosque municipality. Local authorities initially suspected drug traffickers, but prosecutors later shifted their attention to supporters of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Most of El Bosque had been part of a pro-EZLN autonomous municipality, San Juan de la Libertad, from 1995 until 1998, when it was dismantled in a violent military operation [see Update #542]. Patishtán Gómez, a local schoolteacher, was the only suspect convicted in the case, and the only witness against him was Rosemberg Gómez, the son of Manuel Gómez Ruiz, then El Bosque’s mayor. Years later Rosemberg Gómez reportedly would tell people when he was drunk that he’d lied on instructions from his father, and that he got a new van as a reward.
Sántiz López, an EZLN supporter, was arrested in December 2011 on charges of leading a confrontation in Tenejapa municipality on Dec. 4 in which one person was killed. Twelve witnesses testify that he wasn’t present during the fight. (Radio Zapatista 4/18/12; Upside Down World 5/11/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/12/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico
The Failure of the Summit of the Americas VI
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6811
Will Latin America Become the New Middle East?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3621-1-will-latin-america-become-the-new-middle-east
Chomsky: Latin America, Social Movements, Neo-Liberalism, Free Trade Agreements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3620-chomsky-latin-america-social-movements-neo-liberalism-free-trade-agreements
Unasur Nations Reveal Military Spending, Deepen Cooperation
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6979
The Right to Identity: Argentine Congress Affirms Transgender Rights in Historic Vote
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3626--the-right-to-identity-argentine-congress-affirms-transgender-rights-in-historic-vote
An Argentine Perspective on Degrowth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3627-an-argentine-perspective-on-degrowth
Chilean Congress Approves “Zamudio Law” Against Discrimination
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/11/chilean-congress-approves-zamudio-law-against-discrimination/
Chile: high court blocks Patagonia hydro scheme
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11079
Che: Behind the CIA’s Killing of a Revolutionary (Bolivia)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/5/8/che-behind-cia%E2%80%99s-killing-revolutionary
Nationalization, Bolivian Style: Morales Seizes Electric Grid, Boosts Oil Incentives
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/10/nationalization-bolivian-style-morales-seizes-electric-grid-boosts-oil-incentives
Indigenous Peruvian Community Locked in Dispute with Oil Company
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3624-indigenous-peruvian-community-locked-in-dispute-with-oil-company
Peru: police arrest villagers following anti-mining protest
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11078
Controversy surrounds (supposed) surrender of Colombian kingpin
http://ww4report.com/node/11069
A Rejuvenated Grassroots Movement in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/7/rejuvenated-grassroots-movement-colombia
Embedded NYT Reporter Boosts US War in Honduras (and Why We Shouldn’t Listen)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3623-embedded-nyt-reporter-boosts-us-war-in-honduras-and-why-we-shouldnt-listen
Update: The Guatemalan Death Squad Diary and the Right to Truth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3622-update-the-guatemalan-death-squad-diary-and-the-right-to-truth
Recognizing—and Assisting—the Victims in Mexico
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/8/recognizing%E2%80%94and-assisting%E2%80%94-victims-mexico
Mexico’s Peace Movement and Javier Sicilia: One Year On
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3619-mexicos-peace-movement-and-javier-sicilia-one-year-on
National and International Campaign for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Chiapas Presses On (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3630-national-and-international-campign-for-the-freedom-of-political-prisoners-in-chiapas-presses-on
A Stellar Record of Failure: The IMF and Jamaica
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/11/stellar-record-failure-imf-and-jamaica
Puerto Rico Governor: Students Should Speak Fluent English by 2022
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/09/puerto-rico-governor-students-should-speak-fluent-english-by-2022/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1129, May 13, 2012
1. Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New US Base
2. Peru: Questions Persist on 1997 Hostage Rescue
3. Honduras: One Journalist Murdered, One Kidnapped
4. Mexico: Demand Grows for Release of Chiapas Schoolteacher
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Human Rights Activists Protest New US Base
A US military training center in the port city of Concón, in the central Chilean province of Valparaíso, will be used for exercises “clearly oriented toward the control and repression of the civilian population,” according to an open letter that more than 20 human rights organizations sent Defense Minister Andrés Allamand on May 7. The US government has spent $460,000 constructing the installation, which opened on Apr. 5 at the Chilean military’s Fort Aguayo naval base. UPI Business News writes that the site “is growing into a major destination for regional military trainers and defense industry contractors.”
According to the US Southern Command (USSC), which heads US military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the installation will be used for training in Military Operations on Urban Terrain (MOUT) by Latin American soldiers as they prepare for international operations, such as United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions. But the human rights groups wrote in their letter that the Fort Aguayo training ground—a simulation of an urban zone, with eight buildings and sidewalks and roads—suggests plans for military intervention in civilian society. The groups noted that the installation was opened at a time when “broad and massive social demonstrations are developing on the part of the citizenry throughout the country.” [The government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera has been shaken over the past year by militant protests by students, the indigenous Mapuche, residents of the southern region of Aysén, and other groups; see Updates #1122, 1127].
The human rights organizations said the US lacks “the moral quality to teach ‘peace operations,’” since “it has promoted coups, financed destabilization operations in sister countries, and has promoted war in the world. We don’t forget that in 2009 the Soto Cano base in Honduras, with US military personnel, was used to implement the coup d’état” against former president José Manuel Zelaya Rosales [2006-2009]. The letter also held the US responsible for the brutal 1973 coup in Chile and for training “the worst human rights violators in our country” at the US Army’s School of the Americas. (El Ciudadano (Chile) 5/9/12; Adital (Brazil) 5/10/12; People’s World 4/26/12; UPI Business News 4/30/12)
The Southern Command is also planning to build an installation in Argentina, at the airport in Resistencia, capital of the northeastern province of Chaco. The plan seems to contradict center-left president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s policy against allowing foreign military bases, although the province’s governor, Jorge Milton Capitanich, insists that the installation isn’t a “base,” since the US now describes its facilities with terms like “Cooperative Security Location” (CSL) and “Forward Operating Location” (FOL).
The $3 million installation in Chaco will ostensibly be a humanitarian aid center for dealing with natural disasters, but critics suspect the real goal is to monitor the sensitive Triple Frontier region, where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay meet, and the Guaraní Aquifer, one of the world’s largest sources of fresh water. The US officer in charge of the project is Col. Edwin Passmore, who was expelled from Venezuela in 2008 on a charge that he had engaged in espionage while serving as US military attaché there. In November 2011 Passmore was involved in an incident in which a US military plane landed in Buenos Aires carrying undeclared electronic monitoring equipment, medications, and intelligence transmission devices.
The US currently has about 800 bases worldwide, with 22 in Latin America, including bases in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Paraguay and Peru; naval stations in Aruba and Curaçao; and a “CSL” under construction in the Dominican Republic. (People’s World 4/26/12; El Ciudadano 5/5/12)
*2. Peru: Questions Persist on 1997 Hostage Rescue
The Peruvian military held a ceremony at its Chorrillos base, near Lima, on Apr. 20 to commemorate a commando operation 15 years earlier that freed 71 hostages who had been held by rebels from the leftist Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) for 126 days at the Japanese ambassador’s residence in the capital. One hostage, two soldiers and all 14 rebels were killed in the operation, which took place on Apr. 22, 1997. The raid, codenamed Operation Chavín de Huántar, was ordered by the government of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), then a US ally; Fujimori is now serving a 25-year prison term in Peru for corruption and for ordering killings and kidnappings [see Update #1109].
The brief military ceremony, broadcast on national television, included a reenactment of the rescue using a full-scale replica of the ambassador’s residence built at the base under the Fujimori administration; the Japanese government tore down the original building a few months after the rescue. (AFP 4/20/12 via Univision)
A small unit of the now-defunct MRTA seized the ambassador’s residence on Dec. 17, 1996, during a reception honoring the Japanese emperor’s birthday. A large part of Peru’s political class was attending, and the rebels initially took about 700 hostages, although most were freed within days. The successful rescue in April 1997 helped diminish the embarrassment the MRTA’s seizure of the residence caused the security forces and the Fujimori government. But the success was marred almost immediately by reports from a few police agents and freed hostages that at least three of the rebels had been executed after they surrendered [see Update #378].
Relatives of Eduardo (“Tito”) Cruz Sánchez, one of the MRTA rebels allegedly executed, repeatedly tried to get the Peruvian court system to act on the reports; currently the charges are included in proceedings against Fujimori’s intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, that have been languishing in the courts for years. Starting this year, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish) has taken up the case as well, infuriating the government of President Ollanta Humala, a former military officer [see World War 4 Report 3/18/12, 4/13/12].
Hidetaka Ogura, a former hostage who was first secretary at the Japanese embassy in the 1990s, is an important witness in the case; he says he saw “Tito” Cruz Sánchez alive and bound after the rescue. The Peruvian military has dismissed Ogura’s testimony and has suggested that he might have collaborated with the MRTA. Another important source of evidence for the case is a secret cable dated June 10, 1997, from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the National Security Archive, a Washington, DC-based research group, obtained it from the US government in 2007 through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The cable cites an intelligence source apparently involved in the rescue who graphically described a commando killing an unarmed rebel, Roli (“Arabe”) Rojas Fernández, and said an unnamed “female MRTA militant was also executed during the operation after she surrendered.” The intelligence source said Fujimori had given a “take no prisoners” order.
On Apr. 29, a little more than a week after the 15th anniversary celebration, the Peruvian daily La República reported that Kate Doyle, a director of investigations at the National Security Archive, had testified recently at the Montesinos trial on the Callao military base. In addition to confirming that the DIA cable was authentic, she noted that declassified US government documents had been used “in various trials in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala and in Perú, in the Fujimori case.” (Three former military officers are being tried along with Montesinos: Gen. Nicolás Hermoza Ríos, Col. Roberto Huamán Azcurra and Col. Jesús Zamudio Aliaga.) (National Security Archive press release 12/10/07; EFE 4/29/12 via Univision)
There have also been persistent questions about the killing of Supreme Court Justice Carlos Giusti Acuña, the one hostage to die in the rescue and an opponent of Fujimori’s changes to the Constitution. In 2002 a protected witness told a Peruvian prosecutor that Montesinos had ordered Giusti's death and had put Col. Huamán Azcurra in charge of carrying out the killing, according to La República. In March of this year Argentine lawyer Alejandro Teitelbaum, citing a 1997 investigation by the Association of American Jurists, charged that Giusti was wounded in the leg and left to bleed to death. (LR 5/16/02; El Diario Internacional 3/13/12)
*3. Honduras: One Journalist Murdered, One Kidnapped
The body of Honduran journalist and LGBT rights activist Erick Alex Martínez Avila was found by a highway in the Tegucigalpa metropolitan area on May 7. He had reportedly been strangled, and the murder is believed to have taken place the day before. Martínez Avila was the communications director for Kukulcan, an organization that defends the rights of the LGBT community, and he was a founder of the Movement of Diversity in Resistance (MDR) and a member of the leftist group Los Necios Political Organization (“los necios” means “the obstinate ones”). Martínez Avila was also running in the Nov. 18 primary elections to be a candidate for legislative deputy in 2013 on the line of the Freedom and Refoundation Party (LIBRE), a new party formed by the grassroots National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP).
According to the Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP), Martínez Avila was the 22nd Honduran journalist to be murdered since June 2009, when President José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales [2006-2009] was overthrown in a military coup. The MDR says the journalist was also the 20th member of the LGBT community to be murdered since President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa took office in January 2010. (InfoBAE (Argentina) 5/8/12 from DPA, AFP; Adital (Brazil) 5/8/12, 5/10/12)
Alfredo Villatoro, a reporter and news coordinator for the HRN radio chain, was kidnapped in Tegucigalpa in the early morning of May 9 while he was on his way to work. The police quickly arrested former police sergeant Gerson Basilio Godoy, who was driving a Toyota pickup that had been seen parked in front of Villatorio's house that morning; the truck had also collided with the reporter's car, as was shown by paint marks from the other vehicle. The Public Prosecutor’s office released Godoy after 10 hours, saying the evidence was insufficient.
Godoy was dismissed from the police force in September 2011 on suspicion of belonging to a band of kidnappers and extortionists [see Update #1104 for more on corruption in the police force]. In March he was questioned about a robbery attempt against an official, but he was not charged. (Honduras Culture and Politics blog 5/9/12; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 5/9/12) As of May 13 Villatorio was still missing, and the Honduran government had brought in police experts from Colombia and the US to help in the investigation. (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 5/13/12)
*4. Mexico: Demand Grows for Release of Chiapas Schoolteacher
Groups in Argentina, Brazil, France, England, New Zealand, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the US are planning events in the May 15-22 “Week of Global Struggle for the Liberation of Alberto Patishtán Gómez and Francisco Sántiz López,” two indigenous prisoners from the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. The week of actions was initiated by the New York-based Movement for Justice in El Barrio.
Patishtán Gómez, in prison since 2000, is serving a 60-year sentence for his alleged involvement in the June 2000 killing of seven police agents in El Bosque municipality. Local authorities initially suspected drug traffickers, but prosecutors later shifted their attention to supporters of the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Most of El Bosque had been part of a pro-EZLN autonomous municipality, San Juan de la Libertad, from 1995 until 1998, when it was dismantled in a violent military operation [see Update #542]. Patishtán Gómez, a local schoolteacher, was the only suspect convicted in the case, and the only witness against him was Rosemberg Gómez, the son of Manuel Gómez Ruiz, then El Bosque’s mayor. Years later Rosemberg Gómez reportedly would tell people when he was drunk that he’d lied on instructions from his father, and that he got a new van as a reward.
Sántiz López, an EZLN supporter, was arrested in December 2011 on charges of leading a confrontation in Tenejapa municipality on Dec. 4 in which one person was killed. Twelve witnesses testify that he wasn’t present during the fight. (Radio Zapatista 4/18/12; Upside Down World 5/11/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 5/12/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Puerto Rico
The Failure of the Summit of the Americas VI
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6811
Will Latin America Become the New Middle East?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3621-1-will-latin-america-become-the-new-middle-east
Chomsky: Latin America, Social Movements, Neo-Liberalism, Free Trade Agreements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3620-chomsky-latin-america-social-movements-neo-liberalism-free-trade-agreements
Unasur Nations Reveal Military Spending, Deepen Cooperation
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6979
The Right to Identity: Argentine Congress Affirms Transgender Rights in Historic Vote
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3626--the-right-to-identity-argentine-congress-affirms-transgender-rights-in-historic-vote
An Argentine Perspective on Degrowth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3627-an-argentine-perspective-on-degrowth
Chilean Congress Approves “Zamudio Law” Against Discrimination
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/11/chilean-congress-approves-zamudio-law-against-discrimination/
Chile: high court blocks Patagonia hydro scheme
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11079
Che: Behind the CIA’s Killing of a Revolutionary (Bolivia)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/5/8/che-behind-cia%E2%80%99s-killing-revolutionary
Nationalization, Bolivian Style: Morales Seizes Electric Grid, Boosts Oil Incentives
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/10/nationalization-bolivian-style-morales-seizes-electric-grid-boosts-oil-incentives
Indigenous Peruvian Community Locked in Dispute with Oil Company
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3624-indigenous-peruvian-community-locked-in-dispute-with-oil-company
Peru: police arrest villagers following anti-mining protest
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11078
Controversy surrounds (supposed) surrender of Colombian kingpin
http://ww4report.com/node/11069
A Rejuvenated Grassroots Movement in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/7/rejuvenated-grassroots-movement-colombia
Embedded NYT Reporter Boosts US War in Honduras (and Why We Shouldn’t Listen)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3623-embedded-nyt-reporter-boosts-us-war-in-honduras-and-why-we-shouldnt-listen
Update: The Guatemalan Death Squad Diary and the Right to Truth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3622-update-the-guatemalan-death-squad-diary-and-the-right-to-truth
Recognizing—and Assisting—the Victims in Mexico
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/8/recognizing%E2%80%94and-assisting%E2%80%94-victims-mexico
Mexico’s Peace Movement and Javier Sicilia: One Year On
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3619-mexicos-peace-movement-and-javier-sicilia-one-year-on
National and International Campaign for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Chiapas Presses On (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3630-national-and-international-campign-for-the-freedom-of-political-prisoners-in-chiapas-presses-on
A Stellar Record of Failure: The IMF and Jamaica
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/5/11/stellar-record-failure-imf-and-jamaica
Puerto Rico Governor: Students Should Speak Fluent English by 2022
http://latindispatch.com/2012/05/09/puerto-rico-governor-students-should-speak-fluent-english-by-2022/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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