Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1136, July 15, 2012
1. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, 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. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
The US Senate is expected to issue a report on July 17 about international money laundering through the London-based corporation HSBC, Europe’s largest bank; much of the focus is reportedly on the laundering of drug money through the group’s Mexican subsidiary, HSBC Mexico. The US Justice Department is also investigating, and the bank is expected to end up paying a fine of more than $1 billion, both for the Mexican operation and for HSBC’s business activities with parties in Iran, in violation of US trade sanctions against that country.
The Reuters wire service reports that it has reviewed documents showing that “US law-enforcement agencies have examined Mexican money that moved from [Mexican] exchange houses, known as casas de cambio, into the HSBC banking system” and that “[t]he transactions were tied to laundered drug proceeds.” The HSBC subsidiary is one of Mexico’s five largest banks. The country has 42 banking companies, but the top five hold 70% of the assets; four of them are owned by foreign companies, a result of neoliberal measures in the 1990s that opened Mexican banking up to foreign investment.
Mexico’s government has introduced measures to control money laundering, but according to the US State Department’s 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, drug money continues to flow back and forth between Mexico and the US, in part because of the “combination of a sophisticated financial sector and a large cash-based informal sector” in Mexico. In addition to laundering money into the US banking system through exchange houses in Mexico, the drug cartels also ship drug sale proceeds from the US into Mexico, mostly “via couriers, armored vehicles, and wire transfers,” the report says. US authorities estimate that “drug trafficking organizations send between $19 and $39 billion annually to Mexico from the United States.” The Mexican government disputes the number. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/14/12 from Reuters, 7/15/12 from staff; Reuters 7/14/12 via Latinos Post)
[Much of the drug money remains in the US. A United Nations official reported in 2010 that the majority of the gross profits from cocaine sales never leave the US; see Update #1038]
Until now the largest case of money laundering by Mexican cartels through a foreign-owned bank involved the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, North Carolina, which was acquired in 2008 by Wells Fargo & Company. In 2010 Wachovia paid the US $160 million in penalties for allowing $378.3 billion to pass from Mexican exchange houses into its system from 2004 to 2007 without adequate safeguards against money laundering. As of 2011 investigators said about $20 billion of this money appeared to have “suspicious origins.” Some of the money that passed through Wachovia was used to buy a DC-9 airplane the Mexican military intercepted in April 2006 in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche; it was carrying 5.7 tons of cocaine. (The Guardian (UK) 4/2/11)
*2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
As of early on July 6, with 99.51% of polling places counted, Mexican officials said former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been elected president with 38.22% of the valid votes cast on July 1. Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador followed with 31.57% of the votes, and Josefina Vázquez Mota from the ruling center-right National Action Party (PAN) came in third with 25.42%. Gabriel Quadri, the candidate of the centrist New Alliance Party (Panal), trailed with 2.28%. The results--which matched a rapid count the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) carried out the evening of July 1 [see Update #1135]—followed a substantial recount of the votes after charges of irregularities.
López Obrador’s showing this year was not as good as in 2006, when he lost by about 0.5% in a questionable official count. However, his total was much larger than most opinion polls had predicted, although some pollsters had suggested that he was gaining momentum towards the end of the race [see Update #1131]. The states he carried—Guerrero, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Tlaxcala, along with the Federal District (DF, Mexico City)—are the impoverished southern states that have tended to be the center of much of Mexico’s political activism. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/6/12)
Like López Obrador, the center-left coalition that backed him performed well in the July 1 voting, although not as well as a similar coalition had done in 2006. The Progressive Movement regained the number-two position in the Chamber of Deputies of the federal Congress with 136 of the 500 seats—101 for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), 19 for the Labor Party (PT) and 16 for the Citizens’ Movement. The PRI and its ally, the small Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), got a combined total of 240 seats, 11 less than the absolute majority it needs to avoid compromises with other parties. The PAN slipped to third place with 114 seats. Panal won 10.
The center-left parties slipped in the Senate, whose members are elected every six years. The PRI and PVEM will have 61 of the 128 seats, followed by the PAN with 38, the Progressive Movement with 28 (22 for the PRD, four for the PT and two for the Citizens’ Movement). Panal won one seat. The PAN was the largest group in the previous Senate, followed by the PRI-PVEM and the center-left parties. (El Universal (Caracas) 7/10/12)
The center-left coalition did better in the DF and in the seven states that elected governors on July 1. Progressive Movement candidates won in Morelos and Tabasco, two states the left had never succeeded in winning before. The PRI held on to Yucatán and took Jalisco from the PAN, while the PVEM won Chiapas in alliance with the PRI and Panal. The PAN retained Guanajuato, its only win in the state races. The PRD continues to dominate politics in the DF, which it has governed since 1997; PRD candidate Miguel Ángel Mancera was elected the head of government (mayor) with 63.56% of the vote. (Informador (Guadalajara) 7/9/12; El Economista (Mexico) 7/3/12)
*3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
Mexico City residents responded to the country’s July 1 presidential and legislative elections with a massive and apparently spontaneous demonstration on July 7 repudiating the official results. Thousands marched from the Angel of Independence to the Zócalo plaza to protest what they called the “imposition” of Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). They charged his electoral victory was the result of fraud, vote buying and biased publicity by the media.
The protesters’ targets included the giant television network Televisa, which reportedly has taken money over the years to promote Peña Nieto’s political career [see Update #1135], and Organización Soriana, Mexico’s second-largest retailer; the PRI reportedly gave out thousands of Soriana gift cards to voters if they agreed to mark their ballots for Peña Nieto.
Some of the marchers took their protest to the Regina Coeli church, where comedian Eugenio Derbez and actor and singer Alessandra Rosaldo were being married in a wedding transmitted by Televisa. “Peña didn’t win, Televisa helped him!” they chanted, and “Fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud.” “Turn around, the news is here,” they told news photographers, who had their cameras pointed toward the entrance to the church. “Sold-out press!” the protesters added.
Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came in second, has rejected the official results, but he hasn’t called on his supporters to protest, as he did after his very narrow loss in the official tally in 2006. Apparently there was no need. Opposition to Peña Nieto has been growing since May, when a student protest movement known as #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”) emerged. “This isn’t for López Obrador, it’s for the nation,” read one sign at the July 7 march, which reportedly was organized through social networks and by word of mouth. Student movement members supported the march but said they didn’t organize it. (La Jornada 7/8/12)
There have also been smaller local demonstrations. On July 14 a little group of people stood at the entrance to a Soriana store in Mexico City’s Tlalpan delegación (borough) with signs and leaflets charging that “five million votes were bought, and Soriana helped with half of them.” The group quickly grew larger, and when the number was around 100, the protesters pushed inside the store chanting: “From Chetumal to Tijuana, don’t buy in Soriana” and “If there’s imposition, there will be revolution.”
In another Soriana store in Tlalpan, protesters filled shopping carts with merchandise and then left them in the store, to symbolize “the purchases that would have been made if Soriana hadn’t participated in vote buying.” (LJ 7/15/12)
*4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
Unidentified persons seized Gregorio Chávez, a 69-year-old campesino, on July 2 while he was working near the Paso Aguán estate in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. Residents of the nearby Panamá community said they heard gunshots and found signs that someone had been dragged toward the estate. After searching for four days, on July 6 residents found Chávez’s body buried on the estate, with evidence that the campesino had been tortured, according to a communiqué by the Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán.
Chávez’s murder indicates that the violence in the Aguán is not subsiding despite several agreements between the government and a number of campesino organizations aimed at ending the region’s longstanding agrarian conflict [see Update #1133]. The Paso Aguán estate is owned by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, probably the richest man in Honduras and the focus of many of the land disputes. Panamá residents accused Facussé’s security guards of kidnapping and murdering Chávez, who was reportedly not a member of any campesino organization but supported the large Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA).
After giving Chávez a proper burial, local people occupied the entrance to the estate and held it until July 7, when police agents and soldiers from the 15th Infantry Battalion cleared a space so trucks could carry out African palm oil, the estate’s main product.
Murders continued in the region over the next two days. On July 7 campesino Jacobo López Erazo was shot dead near his home in the community of Quebrada de Arena. He had worked with MUCA organizations. On July 8 campesino José Luis Dubón, a member of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), was shot and killed near the La Lempira settlement. Another campesino, Francis Bueso, was wounded; he received emergency surgery in a hospital in Tocoa, Colón department. Local people responded to the new killings with a second demonstration at the Paso Aguán estate on July 8. The protesters demanded an end to the killing of campesinos, the immediate withdrawal of troops from the Aguán, a definitive solution to the agrarian conflict and the approval of a Law of Agrarian Transformation.
The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán suggested that the latest outbreak of violence was a reaction to a court ruling upholding a claim by another campesino group, the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), to land held by Facussé. According to Facussé, an appellate court has now overturned the lower court's ruling. (Adital (Brazil) 7/11/12; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 7/12/12)
*5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
On July 12 Puerto Rican environmentalist Alberto de Jesús arrived at Fort de France, capital of the French overseas department of Martinique, the latest stop in a 1,100 journey from Venezuela to Puerto Rico by kayak that the activist has undertaken to publicize the situation of Oscar López Rivera, an independence fighter who has been imprisoned in the US for 31 years. De Jesús, who is widely known as “Tito Kayak,” began his trip on June 20 at the Venezuelan town of Macuro, on the Paria peninsula. Despite an injury to his wrist and damage to the kayak during the first days of the journey, De Jesús was determined to continue to Puerto Rico; afterwards he may go on to the US East Coast.
López Rivera was arrested in 1981 and accused of conspiracy to overthrow the US government in Puerto Rico. The US government said he was linked to the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which carried out bombings in New York City and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s that caused several deaths, but US prosecutors never connected him directly to any bombings. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
De Jesús is known for a number of daring protests, especially during the campaign that led to the withdrawal of the US Navy from the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003. In 2000 he placed a Puerto Rican flag on the crown of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and in 2007 he was imprisoned in Israel for flying a Palestinian flag on a tower in the wall that separates that country from the Palestinian territories. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/27/12; InterNews Service 7/12/12 via Claridad (Puerto Rico); Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 7/12/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guayana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
Student Forum in Rosario: From the University to the Territory (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7413
Argentina: A Decade Without Dario and Maxi (Argentina)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3732-a-decade-without-dario-and-maxi-
Argentina: ex-dictators sentenced in baby thefts
http://ww4report.com/node/11256
Express Coup Rattles Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3750-express-coup-rattles-paraguay
Brazil: indigenous tribes occupy Belo Monte dam site
http://ww4report.com/node/11249
Domitila Chungara, Revolutionary Heroine of Bolivia: An Interview
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3745-domitila-chungara-revolutionary-heroine-of-bolivia-an-interview
Bolivia: TIPNIS Marchers Return Home, Pledge to Resist Government Consulta
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/bolivia-tipnis-marchers-return-home-pledge-resist-government-consulta
Bolivia: police attack indigenous protest camp in La Paz
http://ww4report.com/node/11254
Peru: three dead in Cajamarca anti-mining protests
http://ww4report.com/node/11248
Peru: one more dead in Cajamarca; protest leader detained
http://ww4report.com/node/11252
Peru: Sendero Luminoso attacks spread
http://ww4report.com/node/11255
Peru: Cajamarca martyrs put to rest amid ongoing civil strike
http://ww4report.com/node/11261
Peru: national solidarity builds with Cajamarca struggle
http://ww4report.com/node/11266
Peruvian Government Urged to Halt Violence against Citizens Opposed to Mining Projects
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3749-peruvian-government-urged-to-halt-violence-against-citizens-opposed-to-mining-projects
Colombia: Embera people strike deal for return of usurped lands —as terror continues
http://ww4report.com/node/11267
Sao Paulo Leftists Debate Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Caracas (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7097
Everything That Glitters Isn’t Green in Guyana
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/everything-glitters-isn%E2%80%99t-green-guyana
Botched DEA Raid in Honduras Exposes How Militarization Terrorizes Communities Around the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3752-botched-dea-raid-in-honduras-exposes-how-militarization-terrorizes-communities-around-the-world
We want Pencils, not Weapons: San Juan Sacatepéquez rejects new Military Brigade in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3728-we-want-pencils-not-weapons-san-juan-sacatepequez-rejects-new-military-brigade-in-guatemala
Student eviction does not stop Guatemalan movement against privatization
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3737-student-eviction-does-not-stop-guatemalan-movement-against-privatization
Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
Stranded Central American Migrants Await Aid in Mexico
http://latindispatch.com/2012/07/13/stranded-central-american-migrants-await-aid-in-mexico/
Observing in Ecatepec–Who’s in Charge Here? (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7419
From the “Perfect Dictatorship” to the Imperfect Democracy (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7444
The Mexican Election: Not Yet a Done Deal
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/4/mexican-election-not-yet-done-deal
Mexico’s hot political summer
http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2012/07/mexicos-hot-political-summer/
Denied the Right to Vote in Mexico’s Presidential Election
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7458
Photo essay: Yo Soy 132 in New York City
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/3/photo-essay-yo-soy-132-new-york-city
The Cause of Drug War Violence: Interview with Author Peter Watt
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3747-the-drug-war-in-mexico-politics-violence-and-neo-liberalism-in-the-new-narco-economy-interview-with-author-peter-watt
Colombia and Mexico: Drug War Capitalism
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3756-colombia-and-mexico-drug-war-capitalism
Mexico Fails to Tackle Increased Levels of Violence Against Women
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3753-mexico-fails-to-tackle-increased-levels-of-violence-against-women
Outlook Dim for Mexican Workers
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/07/13/outlook-dim-for-mexican-workers/
The Morne à Cabri mystery houses (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/7/9/the-morne-a-cabri-mystery-houses.html
In MINUSTAH Abuse Case, Cover-Up Goes Unpunished (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-minustah-abuse-case-cover-up-goes-unpunished
Haiti’s Military Monster Makes a Creeping Comeback
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3736-haitis-military-monster-makes-a-creeping-comeback
Under Tents: Taking Action for Haiti’s Homeless
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/6/under-tents-taking-action-haiti%E2%80%99s-homeless
'Secure Communities' and the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement: Lessons from New York State (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/11/secure-communities-and-us-immigrant-rights-movement-lessons-new-york-state
Guest Workers Take On Wal-Mart in Lower Manhattan (US/immigration)
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2012/07/119444.html
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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Monday, July 16, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
WNU #1135: Paraguayan Coup Backers Push for US Bases
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1135, July 1, 2012
1. Paraguay: Coup Backers Push for US Military Bases
2. Chile: Students Protest Profiteering in Education
3. Mexico: The PRI Regains the Presidency
4. Mexico: New Facts Emerge on Fast and Furious
5. Haiti: Quake Victims March to Protect Their Homes
6. Links to alternative sources on: Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration, US/policy
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: There will be no Update on July 9, 2012. Publication will resume the following week.
*1. Paraguay: Coup Backers Push for US Military Bases
A group of US generals reportedly visited Paraguay for a meeting with legislators on June 22 to discuss the possibility of building a military base in the Chaco region, which borders on Bolivia in western Paraguay. The meeting coincided with the Congress’s sudden impeachment the same day of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, who at times has opposed a US military presence in the country. In 2009 Lugo cancelled maneuvers that the US Southern Command was planning to hold in Paraguay in 2010 as part of its “New Horizons” program.
More bases in the Chaco are “necessary,” rightwing deputy José López Chávez, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Defense, said in a radio interview. Bolivia, governed by socialist president Evo Morales, “constitutes a threat for Paraguay, due to the arms race it’s developing,” according to López Chávez. Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over the sparsely populated Chaco from 1932 to 1935, the last major war over territory in South America.
The US has been pushing recently to set up military bases in the Southern Cone, including one in Chile and one in Argentina’s northeastern Chaco province, which is close to the Paraguayan Chaco, although it doesn’t share a border with Paraguay [see Update #1129]. Unidentified military sources say that the US has already built infrastructure for its own troops in Paraguayan army installations near the country’s borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil; for example, an installation in Mariscal Estigarribia, some 250 km from Bolivia, has a runway almost 3.8 km long, in a country with a very limited air force. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/12 from correspondent in Argentina)
The Chaco is thought to have some oil reserves. Richard González, a representative of Texas-based Crescent Global Oil, announced on June 28 that the company was investing $10 million in the region, starting with exploratory drilling in September or October of this year. The announcement came after Crescent’s representatives met with Federico Franco, who was Lugo’s vice president before being appointed president by Congress. Supporters of Lugo’s ouster claim the investment by the US company could ease Paraguay’s total dependence on foreign oil. Venezuela, which supplies 30% of Paraguay’s oil, cut off shipments after the removal of the elected president. (Prensa Latina 6/29/12; La Nación (Paraguay) 6/29/12)
*2. Chile: Students Protest Profiteering in Education
Joined by mineworkers and other supporters, tens of thousands of Chilean students marched in Santiago on June 28 to protest the highly privatized educational system put in place during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The protesters say the government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera is stalling in talks over their demand for free, high-quality education, a demand that triggered a seven-month student strike in 2011. Despite rain and cold weather, the march was the largest demonstration so far in the current school year [see Update #1130], according to organizers, who estimated the crowd at 120,000. There were also protests in other cities, including Concepción, Copiapó, Valparaíso and Valdivia.
As has happened repeatedly in marches by Chilean students, the generally peaceful and festive demonstration ended with acts of vandalism by hooded youths. Police agents used tear gas and water cannons on protesters and arrested dozens.
A week before the June 28 protest, the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Education issued a report showing that seven supposedly nonprofit private universities and one public institution had circumvented laws that require them to reinvest any profits back into the institutions. In some of the cases, the universities set up “mirror corporations” which owned the buildings used by the schools and charged them rent. The legislative committee referred the schools to Public Ministry head Sabás Chaguán, who will appoint a special prosecutor “due to the magnitude of the apparent crimes.” (AP 6/28/12 via Terra.com; La Jornada (Mexico) 6/29/12 from correspondent)
*3. Mexico: The PRI Regains the Presidency
On July 1 Mexicans went to the polls to elect a new president, and all 128 senators and all 500 legislative deputies in the federal Congress. New governors were being voted on in six of the 31 states--Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Tabasco and Yucatán—while the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) was choosing a new head of government, the 66 DF Assembly members and the 16 delegates who represent the city’s delegaciones (boroughs). Some 79 million Mexicans were eligible to vote. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/12)
Shortly before midnight Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) president Leonardo Valdés announced the results of the rapid count for the presidential race. According to the IFE, former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of a coalition including the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had won with 37.93-38.55% of the votes counted. Former DF head of government Andrés Manuel López Obrador, running for the center-left Progressive Movement coalition, received 30.90-31.86% of the votes, and Josefina Vázquez Mota, representing the center-right National Action Party (PAN) came in third with 25.10-26.03%. Gabriel Quadri, candidate of the centrist New Alliance Party (Panal), only won 2.27-2.57% of the votes. Valdés said turnout was a little above 62%. (Prensa Latina 7/2/12)
The PAN has held the presidency for the last 12 years. Before the PAN’s victory in 2000, the PRI had held the presidency and dominated the country's politics for 71 years, making Mexico virtually a one-party state.
Although Peña Nieto regularly led in opinion polls, his popularity began to slip when a student movement known as #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”) emerged in May to question his record as México state governor and, especially, his favorable coverage on television. The British daily The Guardian ran several articles indicating that the country’s largest network, Televisa, may have taken money to have its news programs promote Peña Nieto in 2005 and 2006, his first two years as governor [see Updates #1132, 1133].
In her latest exposé, published June 26, Guardian correspondent Jo Tuckman wrote that according to documents and unidentified sources, in 2009 Televisa set up a secret unit known as “team Handcock” that “commissioned videos promoting [Peña Nieto] and his PRI party and rubbishing the party's rivals.... The documents suggest the team distributed the videos to thousands of email addresses, and pushed them on Facebook and YouTube, where some of them can still be seen.” Televisa was careful to make sure the videos didn’t appear to come from the network, according to one source. “Team Handcock” members were “encouraged not to use their Televisa email addresses or Televisa IPs to distribute material,” Tuckman wrote.
At least one US company was apparently paid to advise Televisa’s campaign--Blue State Digital. In one document that the Guardian saw, an employee of the US company inquired about payment for “several tasks for Televisa,” including “many conference calls and meetings to discuss the web strategy for Handcock.” Blue State Digital helped develop the internet strategy for US president Barack Obama's successful 2008 presidential campaign. (The Guardian 6/26/12)
*4. Mexico: New Facts Emerge on Fast and Furious
The US House of Representatives voted on June 28 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena for documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled program in which the Arizona office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) inadvertently let about 2,000 firearms pass into Mexico during 2009 and 2010 [see Update #1134]. The ATF is an agency of the Justice Department, which the attorney general heads.
This was the first time in US history that Congress cited a sitting member of the president’s cabinet for contempt, but it would have little practical effect unless the Justice Department chose to enforce the contempt citation. Holder and the department insist they are withholding the documents legally, since US president Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege in the case.
The 255-67 vote on the contempt motion in the House, which is controlled by the Republicans, was clearly intended to hurt President Obama, a Democrat, as he runs for reelection on Nov. 6. Only 17 Democrats supported for the motion, and about 100 walked out of the chamber to protest the vote. What is “curious” about the move, as the correspondent for the Mexican daily La Jornada notes, is that the gun lobby was energetically promoting it; the politically powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) warned the 435 members of the House that voting to support Holder might cause them problems when they stand for reelection in November.
The scandal would seem to focus attention on lax gun control laws in the US which allow “straw buyers” to purchase weapons in states like Arizona and then smuggle them to drug cartels in Mexico, but the Republicans and the gun lobby have come up with a conspiracy theory that would put the onus on supporters of gun control. Republican politicians claim the Obama administration purposely let the guns go to the drug cartels so that the resulting bloodbath in Mexico could be used to justify strict federal gun control legislation. As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since the end of 2006. (LJ 6/29/12)
A June 27 investigative piece by Fortune magazine reporter Katherine Eban undercuts the conspiracy theory. Based on interviews she held with ATF agents and documents she obatined, Eban concluded that ATF officials in Arizona wanted to arrest the straw buyers and confiscate the weapons but were prevented from doing this by the local US Attorney’s office. The Arizona ATF group only let illegally purchased guns “walk” on one occasion, in June 2010, when agent John Dodson provided six AK Draco pistols to suspected gun trafficker Isaiah Fernandez. Seven months later, in February 2011, agent Dodson--who was feuding with his boss, David J. Voth--suddenly started acting as a whistleblower. Dodson appeared on CBS News claiming the ATF had purposely “walked” all the guns and that he had opposed the practice [see Update #1070].
Eban wrote that the investigation of Fast and Furious by the House over the last year has seriously damaged ATF efforts to stop the flow of guns from Arizona to Mexico; between 2010 and 2011, gun seizures by the ATF in Phoenix dropped by 90%. She noted that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who has led the investigation, “has a personal history on this issue: In 1972, at age 19, he was arrested for having a concealed, loaded .25-caliber automatic in his car.”
But while Eban’s reporting seems to clear the ATF of some of the responsibility, it implicates other operatives of the Justice Department: the US attorneys in Arizona who refused to prosecute straw buyers. More revelations may come in a few months when the Justice Department’s inspector general produces a report on the case. “Among the discoveries,” Eban wrote, is the fact that “Fast and Furious’ top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] informants who were receiving money from the bureau.” Like the ATF, the FBI is an agency of the Justice Department. (Fortune 6/27/12 via CNN Money)
*5. Haiti: Quake Victims March to Protect Their Homes
More than 1,000 Haitians marched through downtown Port-au-Prince on June 25 to protest a plan to destroy homes they have built on hillsides overlooking the city. Haitian police and members of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) fired tear gas canisters to disperse the protesters when they tried to approach the National Palace; some protesters threw rocks at the police and at passing cars. This was the second demonstration on the issue in a week.
The protesters came from poor neighborhoods on the capital’s southern flank, such as Jalousie in the generally well-to-do Pétionville section and Morne l’Hôpital in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood. The Environment Ministry reportedly wants to have some 400 houses razed in these improvised communities so that the hills can be reforested and channels can be dug to prevent the flash flooding that affects Port-au-Prince during the rainy season; the hillside dwellers themselves sometimes lose their homes and even their lives in the floods.
But many of the residents are among the hundreds of thousands who lost their homes in the devastating earthquake that struck southern Haiti in January 2010 earthquake. Some built on the hillsides after they were driven out of displaced persons camps without any provisions to get them new housing, and they are furious that the government of President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) is now planning to drive them out of their new homes. “Martelly wants to destroy houses while he doesn’t build any,” some protesters shouted, alluding to the promises the president made when he took office last year that he would build housing to replace homes lost in the quake.
During the march demonstrators threw rocks at the construction site for the Oasis Hotel—a luxury facility financed partly by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which former US presidents Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and George W. Bush (2001-2009) set up ostensibly to aid earthquake victims [see Update #1080]. (Associated Press 6/25/12 via Boston Globe; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/26/12; Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 6/26/12)
According to the International Organization for Migration (OIM), an intergovernmental agency, there are now 390,276 displaced people living in camps in the area affected by the earthquake, a 7% decline since April. The government has been offering financial aid to get people to leave six of the largest camps; for example, a family is supposed to receive 20,000 gourdes (about $470) if it leaves the encampment near the National Palace in the Champ de Mars park. But the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) considers this no substitute for a program to provide adequate housing. Especially in the camps on private property, many people have left because of threats or physical violence, according to the group, which estimates that 100,000 families have been arbitrarily forced out of the camps. (AlterPresse 6/27/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration, US/policy
E'a: Alternative News Source From Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3708-ea-alternative-news-source-from-paraguay
Paraguay’s Political Crisis
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7323
Monsanto Strikes in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3716-monsanto-strikes-in-paraguay
Pressure from the Region Could Be Decisive in Paraguay’s Crisis
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3711-pressure-from-the-region-could-be-decisive-in-paraguays-crisis
Can Morales survive Bolivia's social unrest?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3719-can-morales-survive-bolivias-social-unrest
Bolivia: Second Tipnis March Arrives in La Paz
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3717-bolivia-second-tipnis-march-arrives-in-la-paz
Bolivia: mining engineers "kidnapped" by Aymara comunarios
http://ww4report.com/node/11234
Iran, Brazil aid Bolivian "drug war"
http://ww4report.com/node/11235
Peru: gold miners shut down Puno
http://ww4report.com/node/11228
Peru: Cajamarca protesters symbolically bury President Humala —despite threats
http://ww4report.com/node/11229
Ecuador to withdraw troops from School of the Americas
http://ww4report.com/node/11226
Judicial Reform in Colombia?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/27/judicial-reform-colombia
Colombia: indigenous mobilization against military base
http://ww4report.com/node/11230
Five More Indigenous Venezuelans Murdered
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7076
Venezuela: indigenous leaders assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/11227
"Historical Moment" as Venezuela Becomes a Full Member of Mercosur
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7081
‘We Are All Barillas’: A new moment in Guatemala’s anti-extraction movement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3715-we-are-all-barillas-a-new-moment-in-guatemalas-anti-extraction-movement
Mexico’s youth movement forges ahead
http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2012/06/mexicos-youth-movement-forges-ahead/
Tricks, Treats and Titillations: Mexico’s Elections in an Era of Climate and Culture Change
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/06/25/tricks-treats-and-titillations-mexicos-elections-in-an-era-of-climate-and-culture-change/
Third March to Protest PRI Candidate (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7278
Pity (Some of) the Poor Pollsters: Mexico Prepares to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/26/pity-some-poor-pollsters-mexico-prepares-vote
Mexico City airport shoot-out leaves three dead
http://ww4report.com/node/11221
Car bomb in Nuevo Laredo (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11234
Behind the Numbers: Haiti’s Homeless Population Drops
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/28/behind-numbers-haiti%E2%80%99s-homeless-population-drops
A Palestine-Mexico Border (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/29/palestine-mexico-border
Latin America: how the US has allied with the forces of reaction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3720-latin-america-how-the-us-has-allied-with-the-forces-of-reaction
Honduras: What's in it for the United States?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/25/whats-it-united-states
U.S. Prison Industrial Complex Moves South of the Border
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3712-us-prison-industrial-complex-moves-south-of-the-border
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 #1135, July 1, 2012
1. Paraguay: Coup Backers Push for US Military Bases
2. Chile: Students Protest Profiteering in Education
3. Mexico: The PRI Regains the Presidency
4. Mexico: New Facts Emerge on Fast and Furious
5. Haiti: Quake Victims March to Protect Their Homes
6. Links to alternative sources on: Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration, US/policy
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
Note: There will be no Update on July 9, 2012. Publication will resume the following week.
*1. Paraguay: Coup Backers Push for US Military Bases
A group of US generals reportedly visited Paraguay for a meeting with legislators on June 22 to discuss the possibility of building a military base in the Chaco region, which borders on Bolivia in western Paraguay. The meeting coincided with the Congress’s sudden impeachment the same day of left-leaning president Fernando Lugo, who at times has opposed a US military presence in the country. In 2009 Lugo cancelled maneuvers that the US Southern Command was planning to hold in Paraguay in 2010 as part of its “New Horizons” program.
More bases in the Chaco are “necessary,” rightwing deputy José López Chávez, who presides over the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Defense, said in a radio interview. Bolivia, governed by socialist president Evo Morales, “constitutes a threat for Paraguay, due to the arms race it’s developing,” according to López Chávez. Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over the sparsely populated Chaco from 1932 to 1935, the last major war over territory in South America.
The US has been pushing recently to set up military bases in the Southern Cone, including one in Chile and one in Argentina’s northeastern Chaco province, which is close to the Paraguayan Chaco, although it doesn’t share a border with Paraguay [see Update #1129]. Unidentified military sources say that the US has already built infrastructure for its own troops in Paraguayan army installations near the country’s borders with Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil; for example, an installation in Mariscal Estigarribia, some 250 km from Bolivia, has a runway almost 3.8 km long, in a country with a very limited air force. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/12 from correspondent in Argentina)
The Chaco is thought to have some oil reserves. Richard González, a representative of Texas-based Crescent Global Oil, announced on June 28 that the company was investing $10 million in the region, starting with exploratory drilling in September or October of this year. The announcement came after Crescent’s representatives met with Federico Franco, who was Lugo’s vice president before being appointed president by Congress. Supporters of Lugo’s ouster claim the investment by the US company could ease Paraguay’s total dependence on foreign oil. Venezuela, which supplies 30% of Paraguay’s oil, cut off shipments after the removal of the elected president. (Prensa Latina 6/29/12; La Nación (Paraguay) 6/29/12)
*2. Chile: Students Protest Profiteering in Education
Joined by mineworkers and other supporters, tens of thousands of Chilean students marched in Santiago on June 28 to protest the highly privatized educational system put in place during the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The protesters say the government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera is stalling in talks over their demand for free, high-quality education, a demand that triggered a seven-month student strike in 2011. Despite rain and cold weather, the march was the largest demonstration so far in the current school year [see Update #1130], according to organizers, who estimated the crowd at 120,000. There were also protests in other cities, including Concepción, Copiapó, Valparaíso and Valdivia.
As has happened repeatedly in marches by Chilean students, the generally peaceful and festive demonstration ended with acts of vandalism by hooded youths. Police agents used tear gas and water cannons on protesters and arrested dozens.
A week before the June 28 protest, the Chamber of Deputies’ Committee on Education issued a report showing that seven supposedly nonprofit private universities and one public institution had circumvented laws that require them to reinvest any profits back into the institutions. In some of the cases, the universities set up “mirror corporations” which owned the buildings used by the schools and charged them rent. The legislative committee referred the schools to Public Ministry head Sabás Chaguán, who will appoint a special prosecutor “due to the magnitude of the apparent crimes.” (AP 6/28/12 via Terra.com; La Jornada (Mexico) 6/29/12 from correspondent)
*3. Mexico: The PRI Regains the Presidency
On July 1 Mexicans went to the polls to elect a new president, and all 128 senators and all 500 legislative deputies in the federal Congress. New governors were being voted on in six of the 31 states--Chiapas, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Morelos, Tabasco and Yucatán—while the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) was choosing a new head of government, the 66 DF Assembly members and the 16 delegates who represent the city’s delegaciones (boroughs). Some 79 million Mexicans were eligible to vote. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/1/12)
Shortly before midnight Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) president Leonardo Valdés announced the results of the rapid count for the presidential race. According to the IFE, former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate of a coalition including the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had won with 37.93-38.55% of the votes counted. Former DF head of government Andrés Manuel López Obrador, running for the center-left Progressive Movement coalition, received 30.90-31.86% of the votes, and Josefina Vázquez Mota, representing the center-right National Action Party (PAN) came in third with 25.10-26.03%. Gabriel Quadri, candidate of the centrist New Alliance Party (Panal), only won 2.27-2.57% of the votes. Valdés said turnout was a little above 62%. (Prensa Latina 7/2/12)
The PAN has held the presidency for the last 12 years. Before the PAN’s victory in 2000, the PRI had held the presidency and dominated the country's politics for 71 years, making Mexico virtually a one-party state.
Although Peña Nieto regularly led in opinion polls, his popularity began to slip when a student movement known as #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”) emerged in May to question his record as México state governor and, especially, his favorable coverage on television. The British daily The Guardian ran several articles indicating that the country’s largest network, Televisa, may have taken money to have its news programs promote Peña Nieto in 2005 and 2006, his first two years as governor [see Updates #1132, 1133].
In her latest exposé, published June 26, Guardian correspondent Jo Tuckman wrote that according to documents and unidentified sources, in 2009 Televisa set up a secret unit known as “team Handcock” that “commissioned videos promoting [Peña Nieto] and his PRI party and rubbishing the party's rivals.... The documents suggest the team distributed the videos to thousands of email addresses, and pushed them on Facebook and YouTube, where some of them can still be seen.” Televisa was careful to make sure the videos didn’t appear to come from the network, according to one source. “Team Handcock” members were “encouraged not to use their Televisa email addresses or Televisa IPs to distribute material,” Tuckman wrote.
At least one US company was apparently paid to advise Televisa’s campaign--Blue State Digital. In one document that the Guardian saw, an employee of the US company inquired about payment for “several tasks for Televisa,” including “many conference calls and meetings to discuss the web strategy for Handcock.” Blue State Digital helped develop the internet strategy for US president Barack Obama's successful 2008 presidential campaign. (The Guardian 6/26/12)
*4. Mexico: New Facts Emerge on Fast and Furious
The US House of Representatives voted on June 28 to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena for documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled program in which the Arizona office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) inadvertently let about 2,000 firearms pass into Mexico during 2009 and 2010 [see Update #1134]. The ATF is an agency of the Justice Department, which the attorney general heads.
This was the first time in US history that Congress cited a sitting member of the president’s cabinet for contempt, but it would have little practical effect unless the Justice Department chose to enforce the contempt citation. Holder and the department insist they are withholding the documents legally, since US president Barack Obama has invoked executive privilege in the case.
The 255-67 vote on the contempt motion in the House, which is controlled by the Republicans, was clearly intended to hurt President Obama, a Democrat, as he runs for reelection on Nov. 6. Only 17 Democrats supported for the motion, and about 100 walked out of the chamber to protest the vote. What is “curious” about the move, as the correspondent for the Mexican daily La Jornada notes, is that the gun lobby was energetically promoting it; the politically powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) warned the 435 members of the House that voting to support Holder might cause them problems when they stand for reelection in November.
The scandal would seem to focus attention on lax gun control laws in the US which allow “straw buyers” to purchase weapons in states like Arizona and then smuggle them to drug cartels in Mexico, but the Republicans and the gun lobby have come up with a conspiracy theory that would put the onus on supporters of gun control. Republican politicians claim the Obama administration purposely let the guns go to the drug cartels so that the resulting bloodbath in Mexico could be used to justify strict federal gun control legislation. As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since the end of 2006. (LJ 6/29/12)
A June 27 investigative piece by Fortune magazine reporter Katherine Eban undercuts the conspiracy theory. Based on interviews she held with ATF agents and documents she obatined, Eban concluded that ATF officials in Arizona wanted to arrest the straw buyers and confiscate the weapons but were prevented from doing this by the local US Attorney’s office. The Arizona ATF group only let illegally purchased guns “walk” on one occasion, in June 2010, when agent John Dodson provided six AK Draco pistols to suspected gun trafficker Isaiah Fernandez. Seven months later, in February 2011, agent Dodson--who was feuding with his boss, David J. Voth--suddenly started acting as a whistleblower. Dodson appeared on CBS News claiming the ATF had purposely “walked” all the guns and that he had opposed the practice [see Update #1070].
Eban wrote that the investigation of Fast and Furious by the House over the last year has seriously damaged ATF efforts to stop the flow of guns from Arizona to Mexico; between 2010 and 2011, gun seizures by the ATF in Phoenix dropped by 90%. She noted that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), who has led the investigation, “has a personal history on this issue: In 1972, at age 19, he was arrested for having a concealed, loaded .25-caliber automatic in his car.”
But while Eban’s reporting seems to clear the ATF of some of the responsibility, it implicates other operatives of the Justice Department: the US attorneys in Arizona who refused to prosecute straw buyers. More revelations may come in a few months when the Justice Department’s inspector general produces a report on the case. “Among the discoveries,” Eban wrote, is the fact that “Fast and Furious’ top suspects—Sinaloa Cartel operatives and Mexican nationals who were providing the money, ordering the guns, and directing the recruitment of the straw purchasers—turned out to be FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] informants who were receiving money from the bureau.” Like the ATF, the FBI is an agency of the Justice Department. (Fortune 6/27/12 via CNN Money)
*5. Haiti: Quake Victims March to Protect Their Homes
More than 1,000 Haitians marched through downtown Port-au-Prince on June 25 to protest a plan to destroy homes they have built on hillsides overlooking the city. Haitian police and members of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) fired tear gas canisters to disperse the protesters when they tried to approach the National Palace; some protesters threw rocks at the police and at passing cars. This was the second demonstration on the issue in a week.
The protesters came from poor neighborhoods on the capital’s southern flank, such as Jalousie in the generally well-to-do Pétionville section and Morne l’Hôpital in the Carrefour Feuilles neighborhood. The Environment Ministry reportedly wants to have some 400 houses razed in these improvised communities so that the hills can be reforested and channels can be dug to prevent the flash flooding that affects Port-au-Prince during the rainy season; the hillside dwellers themselves sometimes lose their homes and even their lives in the floods.
But many of the residents are among the hundreds of thousands who lost their homes in the devastating earthquake that struck southern Haiti in January 2010 earthquake. Some built on the hillsides after they were driven out of displaced persons camps without any provisions to get them new housing, and they are furious that the government of President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) is now planning to drive them out of their new homes. “Martelly wants to destroy houses while he doesn’t build any,” some protesters shouted, alluding to the promises the president made when he took office last year that he would build housing to replace homes lost in the quake.
During the march demonstrators threw rocks at the construction site for the Oasis Hotel—a luxury facility financed partly by the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, which former US presidents Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and George W. Bush (2001-2009) set up ostensibly to aid earthquake victims [see Update #1080]. (Associated Press 6/25/12 via Boston Globe; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/26/12; Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 6/26/12)
According to the International Organization for Migration (OIM), an intergovernmental agency, there are now 390,276 displaced people living in camps in the area affected by the earthquake, a 7% decline since April. The government has been offering financial aid to get people to leave six of the largest camps; for example, a family is supposed to receive 20,000 gourdes (about $470) if it leaves the encampment near the National Palace in the Champ de Mars park. But the Haitian Platform of Human Rights Organizations (POHDH) considers this no substitute for a program to provide adequate housing. Especially in the camps on private property, many people have left because of threats or physical violence, according to the group, which estimates that 100,000 families have been arbitrarily forced out of the camps. (AlterPresse 6/27/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration, US/policy
E'a: Alternative News Source From Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3708-ea-alternative-news-source-from-paraguay
Paraguay’s Political Crisis
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7323
Monsanto Strikes in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3716-monsanto-strikes-in-paraguay
Pressure from the Region Could Be Decisive in Paraguay’s Crisis
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3711-pressure-from-the-region-could-be-decisive-in-paraguays-crisis
Can Morales survive Bolivia's social unrest?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3719-can-morales-survive-bolivias-social-unrest
Bolivia: Second Tipnis March Arrives in La Paz
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3717-bolivia-second-tipnis-march-arrives-in-la-paz
Bolivia: mining engineers "kidnapped" by Aymara comunarios
http://ww4report.com/node/11234
Iran, Brazil aid Bolivian "drug war"
http://ww4report.com/node/11235
Peru: gold miners shut down Puno
http://ww4report.com/node/11228
Peru: Cajamarca protesters symbolically bury President Humala —despite threats
http://ww4report.com/node/11229
Ecuador to withdraw troops from School of the Americas
http://ww4report.com/node/11226
Judicial Reform in Colombia?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/27/judicial-reform-colombia
Colombia: indigenous mobilization against military base
http://ww4report.com/node/11230
Five More Indigenous Venezuelans Murdered
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7076
Venezuela: indigenous leaders assassinated
http://ww4report.com/node/11227
"Historical Moment" as Venezuela Becomes a Full Member of Mercosur
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7081
‘We Are All Barillas’: A new moment in Guatemala’s anti-extraction movement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3715-we-are-all-barillas-a-new-moment-in-guatemalas-anti-extraction-movement
Mexico’s youth movement forges ahead
http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2012/06/mexicos-youth-movement-forges-ahead/
Tricks, Treats and Titillations: Mexico’s Elections in an Era of Climate and Culture Change
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/06/25/tricks-treats-and-titillations-mexicos-elections-in-an-era-of-climate-and-culture-change/
Third March to Protest PRI Candidate (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7278
Pity (Some of) the Poor Pollsters: Mexico Prepares to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/26/pity-some-poor-pollsters-mexico-prepares-vote
Mexico City airport shoot-out leaves three dead
http://ww4report.com/node/11221
Car bomb in Nuevo Laredo (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11234
Behind the Numbers: Haiti’s Homeless Population Drops
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/28/behind-numbers-haiti%E2%80%99s-homeless-population-drops
A Palestine-Mexico Border (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/29/palestine-mexico-border
Latin America: how the US has allied with the forces of reaction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3720-latin-america-how-the-us-has-allied-with-the-forces-of-reaction
Honduras: What's in it for the United States?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/25/whats-it-united-states
U.S. Prison Industrial Complex Moves South of the Border
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3712-us-prison-industrial-complex-moves-south-of-the-border
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, June 25, 2012
WNU #1134: Could an “All-Out” Effort End Haiti’s Cholera Epidemic?
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1134, June 24, 2012
1. Haiti: Could an "All-Out" Effort End the Cholera Now?
2. Haiti: UN Troops Try to Invade Public University
3. Costa Rica: Port Workers Strike Again in Anti-Privatization Struggle
4. Honduras: Woman Dies in Airport After US Deportation Flight
5. Mexico: OAS Agency Reports 8 LGBT Murders in Guerrero
6. Mexico: Republicans Push "Fast and Furious" Conspiracy Theory
7. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Haiti: Could an "All-Out" Effort End the Cholera Now?
The cholera epidemic that has killed more than 7,200 people in Haiti since October 2010 could possibly be brought to an end “in just months,” according to a leading French cholera expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux. “But it would be necessary to go all out in the areas where cholera is being transmitted,” he added in a little-noted interview with Radio France Internationale on Apr. 16, “and, of course, we’d need to have the means of identifying [the cholera], with an epidemiological surveillance that is faster and more effective than what is being done currently.”
Piarroux is an epidemiologist and specialist in tropical medicine at a public hospital in Marseilles and at the University of Aix-Marseilles. He was the first medical expert to identify a base maintained by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) near Mirebalais as the source of the outbreak [see Update #1060]. Later studies confirmed MINUSTAH’s role in bringing the epidemic to Haiti.
In the radio interview, Piarroux based his conviction that the epidemic can ended quickly on the decline in cases earlier this year compared to the same period last year. “[W]hile there were more than 1,000 deaths because of cholera during the first trimester of 2011,” he said, “only some 40 have been counted between Jan. 1 and Mar. 27” of this year. But Piarroux warned that “there are still active centers [of the disease], particularly in the north of the island, and these centers could expand in the rainy season.” In these places “it’s necessary to fight the cholera with the maximum of tools. For example, it’s necessary to bring chlorine, to bring water, to bring soap.”
The Haitian government and the United Nations deputy special envoy for Haiti, Paul Farmer, a US doctor who started the widely respected clinics of Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante, are promoting a vaccination campaign instead of the sort of effort Piarroux described [see Update #1105]. Piarroux expressed doubts about the campaign. “[T]he vaccine that will be used is of mediocre effectiveness,” he said. “The protection afforded by this vaccine is a little above 50%. This is not a very effective vaccine.”
He also questioned the plans for the initial phase of the campaign, in which about 1% of the population would be vaccinated. This would take place in areas like the western coastal city of Saint-Marc, where there are now very few cholera cases, rather than in the active centers that remain dangerous. “Maybe if the companies that are marketing a vaccine want to test their vaccine, want to use it in field trials, that’s is where they should intervene,” Piarroux said. (Haiti Chery blog 4/20/12; interview transcript by Haiti Chery 4/20/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/15/12)
[A field trial of the cholera vaccine, Shanchol, in February 2011 on 240,000 inhabitants of Mirpur, a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, led to protests by the Health Rights Movement National Committee of Bangladesh, citing many of the same concerns raised by Piarroux. (News from Bangladesh Special Report 9/29/11)]
US media coverage has been promoting the vaccination option. In a May 26 editorial, the Washington Post wrote that “until recently, international health organizations dragged their feet on vaccines, worrying they might be too expensive or difficult to administer. They preferred a systemic infrastructure fix. That’s simply indefensible.” The editorial predicted that “[I]t would take just $40 million to administer oral vaccines to every person in Haiti,” while admitting that “there will be logistical hurdles” for a vaccination program.
The Post dismissed the claims of “thousands of Haitian cholera victims [who] have demanded millions of dollars of reparations from the United Nations, citing the disease’s introduction by the [MINUSTAH] peacekeepers.” Money from the United Nations “would be more profitably spent on a much more aggressive cholera vaccination program,” the editors wrote. (WP 5/26/12)
*2. Haiti: UN Troops Try to Invade Public University
Brazilian soldiers from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) made three attempts on June 15 to enter the Human Sciences Faculty (FASCH) of the State University of Haiti (UEH) in Port-au-Prince by force, according to faculty, students and local media. “We don’t know the reason for this criminal and inopportune visit,” the FASCH’s dean, Hancy Pierre, told the online Haitian news service AlterPresse. “It’s a disgrace for the country.” In Haiti security forces are expected to get permission from university authorities before entering a campus.
The soldiers arrived at the FASCH around 11 am. Students quickly closed the front gates, and the soldiers reacted by firing rubber bullets and sending a tear gas grenade into the school’s enclosure. “We didn’t fail to remind them that there was no one to rape at the FASCH and that we didn’t need for them to come infect us with cholera,” one student said, referring to the 10,000-member international force’s responsibility for a number of sexual abuses and for triggering the outbreak of cholera in 2010 [see Updates #1060, 1095]. MINUSTAH troops made two more attempts to enter the school in the afternoon, disrupting classes and a student-faculty assembly.
Some FASCH professors have denounced MINUSTAH as an occupation force since its arrival in Haiti in June 2004, and student organizations have protested the troops with press releases, signs and banners, including signs they have posted at the school’s entrance. On June 18 the Mobilizing Committee for Reparations for Cholera Victims issued a press release citing three other attacks by MINUSTAH soldiers on UEH students: the Jan. 20, 2009, beating of student and artist Don Camelo; the beating of student Jean Willy Belfleur the next day; and the May 24, 2010 arrest of student Frantz Mathieu Junior [see Update #1035]. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 6/15/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/18/12; Let Haiti Live website 6/19/12)
According to MINUSTAH communications director Eliane Nabaa, the Brazilian troops were carrying out “a reconnaissance patrol in the area so as to be able to identify displaced persons camps [when] suddenly they were attacked with rocks and broken bottles by the local population and the students.” The FASCH is located in a residential neighborhood; none of the camps for people who were left homeless by a January 2010 earthquake are in the area. (AlterPresse 6/21/12)
*3. Costa Rica: Port Workers Strike Again in Anti-Privatization Struggle
The 1,500 workers in Costa Rica’s two Caribbean ports, Limón and Moín, went on strike on June 12 to oppose a 30-year concession the government of President Laura Chinchilla has granted to a Netherlands-based container management multinational, APM Terminals. The two ports handle about 80% of the country’s international trade.
The strike quickly shut down shipping operations, leading to a loss of some 300 million colones ($600,000) in its first 36 hours, according to Alan Hidalgo, the head of the Board of Port Administration and Economic Development of the Atlantic Shelf (JAPDEVA), which manages the ports. On June 14 the government sent some 500 police agents to the ports, with specialized units from the Ministry of Public Security taking control of Costa Rica’s two main roads. Clashes broke out in Limón between police and unidentified persons who set a truck on fire and blocked roads with ditches.
The “acts of vandalism aren’t by the workers but by common criminals,” José Luis Castillo, the head of the JAPDEVA Workers Union (SINTRAJAP), said on June 15. Union leaders charged that the authorities had brought in Panamanian workers to staff the facilities but said the Limón port was only operating at 5% capacity despite the presence of police and strikebreakers. According to Castillo, 100% of the Costa Rican workers were participating in the strike.
The job action was the latest phase of the workers’ fight against government moves for complete privatization of the ports, which started in 2006 with a plan to sell off JAPDEVA. The union agreed in principle to the privatization of JAPDEVA in May 2010 [see Update #1033], but the concession granted to APM Terminals appears to be the first step putting the agreement in practice. The multinational is to invest some $990 million in building a port that can handle the larger ships that will take advantage of the expanded Panama Canal starting in 2014. The government claims that the building and operation of the facility, to be completed in 2016, will create 2,000 jobs directly and another 8,000 indirectly. The workers argue that the concession gives the company a monopoly over the ports and will lead to a loss of jobs.
The government and the union reached an accord on June 19 after a 15-hour negotiating session. The union agreed to end the strike, while the government promised to invest $70 million in modernizing the existing port facilities. Castillo called the strike a “first round” in the struggle against the APM concession, with subsequent actions to take place in the courts. Meanwhile, other unions are planning a one-day strike on June 26 against the government’s fiscal policies and in support of the port workers. (Prensa Latina 6/14/12; AFP 6/15/12 via Terra (Peru); EFE 6/19/12 via Siglo 21 (Guatemala))
*4. Honduras: Woman Dies in Airport After US Deportation Flight
Honduran national Cintia Yadira Herrera died of heart problems on June 18 shortly after arriving at San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras on a mass deportation flight arranged by US immigration authorities. She took a few steps after disembarking from the plane in Ramón Villeda Morales Airport and then collapsed, according to firefighters who came to her assistance; she died in the airport. Herrera was 33 or 34, according to different media reports, and was the mother of three children.
According to some of the other 102 Honduran deportees on the chartered plane, Herrera had said she felt ill from the beginning of the flight. Her family blamed the US government for her death. “The immigration authorities in the US didn’t listen to my daughter’s pleas, even though she told them she didn’t feel well,” José Herrera told reporters.
Cintia Herrera left her home in the eastern department of Olancho in March to join her husband, Luis Matute, in the US. She was captured by US immigration authorities the day she arrived in the country and was held in detention until she was put on the flight. Humanitarian organizations estimate that each day about 100 Hondurans leave their country to look for work in the US. About one million Hondurans now live in the US, and remittances from US-based Hondurans to Honduras exceed $2.5 billion a year. The US deports more than 20,000 Hondurans annually. (La Prensa (San Pedro Sula) 6/20/12; EFE 6/21/12 via Univision)
*5. Mexico: OAS Agency Reports 8 LGBT Murders in Guerrero
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), reported on June 18 that eight members of the LGBT community in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero have been murdered since the beginning of the year. The latest victim was 18-year-old Antonio Calderón Peralta, whose body was found in Chilpancingo, the state capital, on June 9. The youth, who was dressed in women’s clothes, had been beaten to death. The discovery of Calderón’s body came two days after Guerrero’s LGBT community held a march in Chilpancingo supporting sexual diversity.
The IACHR called on the Guerrero government to investigate the killing, to determine “whether this murder was committed because of the victim’s gender identity or sexual orientation,” and “to punish the persons who are found to responsible.” The agency noted that the killings have taken place “in a context of impunity and lack of due investigation of these deeds.” (AFP 6/19/12 via Noticias de Querétaro; La Jornada de Guerrero 6/22/12)
*6. Mexico: Republicans Push "Fast and Furious" Conspiracy Theory
US president Barack Obama invoked executive privilege on June 20 to justify the Justice Department’s refusal to provide the House of Representatives with some of its documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled program in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) inadvertently let about 2,000 firearms “walk” into Mexico during 2009 and 2010. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had subpoenaed the documents from the Justice Department. The House of Representatives could vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to comply with the subpoena.
The bickering between Obama, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled House over Fast and Furious comes as Obama campaigns to win reelection on Nov. 6 in what is expected to be a close race with the presumed Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Rep. Issa denies that there is any political motivation in his investigation of Fast and Furious. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/21/12 from AFP)
Issa and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) vigorously pursued the Fast and Furious investigation last year, but the probe appeared to lose momentum in October when the two Congress members learned that the administration of Republican former president George W. Bush (2001-2009) had run a similar program, Operation Wide Receiver [see Update #1104]. Another drawback for the investigation was the way it focused attention on the lax gun control laws in the US; these law make it relatively easy to purchase weapons in Southwestern states and then smuggle them to drug cartels in Mexico, where nearly 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since the end of 2006. Issa and Grassley are both strong opponents of gun control [see Update #1095].
But recently Fox News and other rightwing media have started promoting a conspiracy theory—originated by Michael Vanderboegh, a blogger reportedly connected to anti-government militias—that makes the Fast and Furious investigation more acceptable to gun control opponents. According to Vanderboegh, the Obama administation purposely let the guns go to the drug cartels so that the resulting bloodbath in Mexico could be used to justify strict federal gun control legislation.
Issa and Grassley have picked up on this idea. Grassley cited it in a television interview, while Issa asked at the National Rifle Association’s April convention: “Could it be that what they really were thinking of was in fact to use this walking of guns in order to promote an assault weapons ban? Many think so.” Issa went further on Fox News. “Very clearly,” he said, “they made a crisis and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s 2nd Amendment rights.” (Los Angeles Times 6/22/12; New York Times 6/22/12)
While acknowledging the political motive for the Republicans’ Fast and Furious inquiry, the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada reminded Mexican readers that the Obama administration is in fact holding back information on an operation that “exhibits the government in Washington as a provider of arms for the drug cartels that operate in our country.” The new government elected in Mexico’s presidential and legislative voting on July 1 will “need to analyze seriously the appropriateness of continuing” with the current militarized “war on drugs,” which La Jornada described as “a security strategy promoted by the US that not only has been ineffective in [achieving] its objective and has generated counterproductive effects for the country; it has also implied an unacceptable abandonment of national sovereignty and has exposed Washington’s hypocrisy in its supposed promise to combat narco trafficking and eradicate violence.” (LJ 6/21/12)
*7. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico, US/immigration
Repsol Sues Argentina Over YPF Nationalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11184
Uruguay plans to legalize marijuana sale
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3697-uruguay-plans-to-legalize-marijuana-sale
Paraguay: deadly clash as police evict armed peasant squatters
http://ww4report.com/node/11167
Paraguay: 'There are More Dead Comrades'
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3699-paraguay-there-are-more-dead-comrades
Paraguay: "express coup d'etat" in wake of peasant massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11206
What will Washington do about Fernando Lugo's ouster in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3701-what-will-washington-do-about-fernando-lugos-ouster-in-paraguay
Tragic Week in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3705-tragic-week-in-paraguay
Rio+20: Declaration of Kari-Oca II Adopted by Five Hundred Indigenous Representatives in Sacred Ceremony (Brazil)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3698-rio-20-declaration-of-kari-oca-ii-adopted-by-five-hundred-indigenous-representatives-in-sacred-ceremony
Brazil Takes Steps to Confiscate Property of Landowners Using Slave Labour
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3693-brazil-takes-steps-to-confiscate-property-of-landowners-using-slave-labour
Bolivia: police mutiny, mineral interests protest nationalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11202
Bolivian police mutiny over pay widens
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3700-bolivian-police-mutiny-over-pay-widens
Bolivia: Evo fetes Ahmadinejad, betrays Iran's indigenous Kurds
http://ww4report.com/node/11179
Bolivian indigenous leaders "unmask" Evo Morales at Rio People's Summit
http://ww4report.com/node/11197
Bolivia: Aymara mark year 5520 with pledge to fight for Mother Earth
http://ww4report.com/node/11212
Democracy from Below in Bolivia: An Interview with Oscar Olivera
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3695-democracy-from-below-in-bolivia-an-interview-with-oscar-olivera
Peru: new violence in Cajamarca anti-mining struggle
http://ww4report.com/node/11205
REDD: Land-Grab In The Name Of Climate Change Mitigation? Peruvian Rainforest Dwellers Charge Privatization Scheme
http://ww4report.com/node/11183
Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuadorean embassy in London
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3696-julian-assange-seeking-asylum-in-ecuadorean-embassy-in-london-
Assange to Ecuador: three questions nobody (on the left) is asking
http://ww4report.com/node/11201
Colombia: Movement for the Defense and Liberation of Mother Earth Commences the Festival of the Sun
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3706-the-movement-for-the-defense-and-liberation-of-mother-earth-commences-the-festival-of-the-sun
Our Man in Caracas: The U.S. Media and Henrique Capriles
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/18/our-man-caracas-us-media-and-henrique-capriles
Accused mastermind in Facundo Cabral slaying faces charges in three countries (Central America)
http://ww4report.com/node/11203
U.S. Hand in Honduran Massacre
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7246
Honduras: DEA agent kills in Miskito Coast narco raid
http://ww4report.com/node/11211
Occupy Guatemala: Shantytown Dwellers Occupy Congress—And Win
http://ww4report.com/node/11185
Guatemala: Exhumation Inside Coban’s Military Garrison
http://latindispatch.com/2012/06/19/guatemala-exhumation-inside-cobans-military-garrison/
Peña Nieto signals further "Colombianization" of Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/11179
Mexico: El Chapo's son not arrested; hidden war in Tamaulipas goes on
http://ww4report.com/node/11208
Behind the Headlines in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3694-behind-the-headlines-in-mexico
Mexican Student Movement Challenges Media Manipulation of Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3691-mexican-student-movement-challenges-media-manipulation-of-elections
Inside Mexico’s New Youth Rebellion
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/06/19/inside-mexicos-new-youth-rebellion/
The Mexican Campaign: AMLO Against the Polls
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/19/mexican-campaign-amlo-against-polls
Bullets and Blood: The High Price of Anti-Mining Resistance in San José del Progreso
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7267
Violence Forces Mexican Workers Center to Close
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=202#1463
Women Workers at Flex-N-gate Demand Their Labor Rights
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=202#1468
Mexican High-Tech Workers Demand Justice
http://ww4report.com/node/11187
UNASUR Debates Reduction of MINUSTAH Contingent (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/unasur-debates-reduction-of-minustah-contingent
Undeserved Confidence: A Broken System of Aid in Haiti – Part 2
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/21/undeserved-confidence-broken-system-aid-haiti-%E2%80%93-part-2
ACLU report: Puerto Rico police abusing power
http://ww4report.com/node/11210
ALBA Expels USAID from Member Countries (US)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7069
Barack Obama’s Immigration Reform for Youth: A Dream Deferred? (US/Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/22/barack-obama%E2%80%99s-immigration-reform-youth-dream-deferred
Supreme Court partially strikes down Arizona immigration law (US/Immigration)
http://ww4report.com/node/11213
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:
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Issue #1134, June 24, 2012
1. Haiti: Could an "All-Out" Effort End the Cholera Now?
2. Haiti: UN Troops Try to Invade Public University
3. Costa Rica: Port Workers Strike Again in Anti-Privatization Struggle
4. Honduras: Woman Dies in Airport After US Deportation Flight
5. Mexico: OAS Agency Reports 8 LGBT Murders in Guerrero
6. Mexico: Republicans Push "Fast and Furious" Conspiracy Theory
7. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Haiti: Could an "All-Out" Effort End the Cholera Now?
The cholera epidemic that has killed more than 7,200 people in Haiti since October 2010 could possibly be brought to an end “in just months,” according to a leading French cholera expert, Dr. Renaud Piarroux. “But it would be necessary to go all out in the areas where cholera is being transmitted,” he added in a little-noted interview with Radio France Internationale on Apr. 16, “and, of course, we’d need to have the means of identifying [the cholera], with an epidemiological surveillance that is faster and more effective than what is being done currently.”
Piarroux is an epidemiologist and specialist in tropical medicine at a public hospital in Marseilles and at the University of Aix-Marseilles. He was the first medical expert to identify a base maintained by the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) near Mirebalais as the source of the outbreak [see Update #1060]. Later studies confirmed MINUSTAH’s role in bringing the epidemic to Haiti.
In the radio interview, Piarroux based his conviction that the epidemic can ended quickly on the decline in cases earlier this year compared to the same period last year. “[W]hile there were more than 1,000 deaths because of cholera during the first trimester of 2011,” he said, “only some 40 have been counted between Jan. 1 and Mar. 27” of this year. But Piarroux warned that “there are still active centers [of the disease], particularly in the north of the island, and these centers could expand in the rainy season.” In these places “it’s necessary to fight the cholera with the maximum of tools. For example, it’s necessary to bring chlorine, to bring water, to bring soap.”
The Haitian government and the United Nations deputy special envoy for Haiti, Paul Farmer, a US doctor who started the widely respected clinics of Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante, are promoting a vaccination campaign instead of the sort of effort Piarroux described [see Update #1105]. Piarroux expressed doubts about the campaign. “[T]he vaccine that will be used is of mediocre effectiveness,” he said. “The protection afforded by this vaccine is a little above 50%. This is not a very effective vaccine.”
He also questioned the plans for the initial phase of the campaign, in which about 1% of the population would be vaccinated. This would take place in areas like the western coastal city of Saint-Marc, where there are now very few cholera cases, rather than in the active centers that remain dangerous. “Maybe if the companies that are marketing a vaccine want to test their vaccine, want to use it in field trials, that’s is where they should intervene,” Piarroux said. (Haiti Chery blog 4/20/12; interview transcript by Haiti Chery 4/20/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/15/12)
[A field trial of the cholera vaccine, Shanchol, in February 2011 on 240,000 inhabitants of Mirpur, a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, led to protests by the Health Rights Movement National Committee of Bangladesh, citing many of the same concerns raised by Piarroux. (News from Bangladesh Special Report 9/29/11)]
US media coverage has been promoting the vaccination option. In a May 26 editorial, the Washington Post wrote that “until recently, international health organizations dragged their feet on vaccines, worrying they might be too expensive or difficult to administer. They preferred a systemic infrastructure fix. That’s simply indefensible.” The editorial predicted that “[I]t would take just $40 million to administer oral vaccines to every person in Haiti,” while admitting that “there will be logistical hurdles” for a vaccination program.
The Post dismissed the claims of “thousands of Haitian cholera victims [who] have demanded millions of dollars of reparations from the United Nations, citing the disease’s introduction by the [MINUSTAH] peacekeepers.” Money from the United Nations “would be more profitably spent on a much more aggressive cholera vaccination program,” the editors wrote. (WP 5/26/12)
*2. Haiti: UN Troops Try to Invade Public University
Brazilian soldiers from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) made three attempts on June 15 to enter the Human Sciences Faculty (FASCH) of the State University of Haiti (UEH) in Port-au-Prince by force, according to faculty, students and local media. “We don’t know the reason for this criminal and inopportune visit,” the FASCH’s dean, Hancy Pierre, told the online Haitian news service AlterPresse. “It’s a disgrace for the country.” In Haiti security forces are expected to get permission from university authorities before entering a campus.
The soldiers arrived at the FASCH around 11 am. Students quickly closed the front gates, and the soldiers reacted by firing rubber bullets and sending a tear gas grenade into the school’s enclosure. “We didn’t fail to remind them that there was no one to rape at the FASCH and that we didn’t need for them to come infect us with cholera,” one student said, referring to the 10,000-member international force’s responsibility for a number of sexual abuses and for triggering the outbreak of cholera in 2010 [see Updates #1060, 1095]. MINUSTAH troops made two more attempts to enter the school in the afternoon, disrupting classes and a student-faculty assembly.
Some FASCH professors have denounced MINUSTAH as an occupation force since its arrival in Haiti in June 2004, and student organizations have protested the troops with press releases, signs and banners, including signs they have posted at the school’s entrance. On June 18 the Mobilizing Committee for Reparations for Cholera Victims issued a press release citing three other attacks by MINUSTAH soldiers on UEH students: the Jan. 20, 2009, beating of student and artist Don Camelo; the beating of student Jean Willy Belfleur the next day; and the May 24, 2010 arrest of student Frantz Mathieu Junior [see Update #1035]. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 6/15/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 6/18/12; Let Haiti Live website 6/19/12)
According to MINUSTAH communications director Eliane Nabaa, the Brazilian troops were carrying out “a reconnaissance patrol in the area so as to be able to identify displaced persons camps [when] suddenly they were attacked with rocks and broken bottles by the local population and the students.” The FASCH is located in a residential neighborhood; none of the camps for people who were left homeless by a January 2010 earthquake are in the area. (AlterPresse 6/21/12)
*3. Costa Rica: Port Workers Strike Again in Anti-Privatization Struggle
The 1,500 workers in Costa Rica’s two Caribbean ports, Limón and Moín, went on strike on June 12 to oppose a 30-year concession the government of President Laura Chinchilla has granted to a Netherlands-based container management multinational, APM Terminals. The two ports handle about 80% of the country’s international trade.
The strike quickly shut down shipping operations, leading to a loss of some 300 million colones ($600,000) in its first 36 hours, according to Alan Hidalgo, the head of the Board of Port Administration and Economic Development of the Atlantic Shelf (JAPDEVA), which manages the ports. On June 14 the government sent some 500 police agents to the ports, with specialized units from the Ministry of Public Security taking control of Costa Rica’s two main roads. Clashes broke out in Limón between police and unidentified persons who set a truck on fire and blocked roads with ditches.
The “acts of vandalism aren’t by the workers but by common criminals,” José Luis Castillo, the head of the JAPDEVA Workers Union (SINTRAJAP), said on June 15. Union leaders charged that the authorities had brought in Panamanian workers to staff the facilities but said the Limón port was only operating at 5% capacity despite the presence of police and strikebreakers. According to Castillo, 100% of the Costa Rican workers were participating in the strike.
The job action was the latest phase of the workers’ fight against government moves for complete privatization of the ports, which started in 2006 with a plan to sell off JAPDEVA. The union agreed in principle to the privatization of JAPDEVA in May 2010 [see Update #1033], but the concession granted to APM Terminals appears to be the first step putting the agreement in practice. The multinational is to invest some $990 million in building a port that can handle the larger ships that will take advantage of the expanded Panama Canal starting in 2014. The government claims that the building and operation of the facility, to be completed in 2016, will create 2,000 jobs directly and another 8,000 indirectly. The workers argue that the concession gives the company a monopoly over the ports and will lead to a loss of jobs.
The government and the union reached an accord on June 19 after a 15-hour negotiating session. The union agreed to end the strike, while the government promised to invest $70 million in modernizing the existing port facilities. Castillo called the strike a “first round” in the struggle against the APM concession, with subsequent actions to take place in the courts. Meanwhile, other unions are planning a one-day strike on June 26 against the government’s fiscal policies and in support of the port workers. (Prensa Latina 6/14/12; AFP 6/15/12 via Terra (Peru); EFE 6/19/12 via Siglo 21 (Guatemala))
*4. Honduras: Woman Dies in Airport After US Deportation Flight
Honduran national Cintia Yadira Herrera died of heart problems on June 18 shortly after arriving at San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras on a mass deportation flight arranged by US immigration authorities. She took a few steps after disembarking from the plane in Ramón Villeda Morales Airport and then collapsed, according to firefighters who came to her assistance; she died in the airport. Herrera was 33 or 34, according to different media reports, and was the mother of three children.
According to some of the other 102 Honduran deportees on the chartered plane, Herrera had said she felt ill from the beginning of the flight. Her family blamed the US government for her death. “The immigration authorities in the US didn’t listen to my daughter’s pleas, even though she told them she didn’t feel well,” José Herrera told reporters.
Cintia Herrera left her home in the eastern department of Olancho in March to join her husband, Luis Matute, in the US. She was captured by US immigration authorities the day she arrived in the country and was held in detention until she was put on the flight. Humanitarian organizations estimate that each day about 100 Hondurans leave their country to look for work in the US. About one million Hondurans now live in the US, and remittances from US-based Hondurans to Honduras exceed $2.5 billion a year. The US deports more than 20,000 Hondurans annually. (La Prensa (San Pedro Sula) 6/20/12; EFE 6/21/12 via Univision)
*5. Mexico: OAS Agency Reports 8 LGBT Murders in Guerrero
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), reported on June 18 that eight members of the LGBT community in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero have been murdered since the beginning of the year. The latest victim was 18-year-old Antonio Calderón Peralta, whose body was found in Chilpancingo, the state capital, on June 9. The youth, who was dressed in women’s clothes, had been beaten to death. The discovery of Calderón’s body came two days after Guerrero’s LGBT community held a march in Chilpancingo supporting sexual diversity.
The IACHR called on the Guerrero government to investigate the killing, to determine “whether this murder was committed because of the victim’s gender identity or sexual orientation,” and “to punish the persons who are found to responsible.” The agency noted that the killings have taken place “in a context of impunity and lack of due investigation of these deeds.” (AFP 6/19/12 via Noticias de Querétaro; La Jornada de Guerrero 6/22/12)
*6. Mexico: Republicans Push "Fast and Furious" Conspiracy Theory
US president Barack Obama invoked executive privilege on June 20 to justify the Justice Department’s refusal to provide the House of Representatives with some of its documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled program in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) inadvertently let about 2,000 firearms “walk” into Mexico during 2009 and 2010. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), the chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, had subpoenaed the documents from the Justice Department. The House of Representatives could vote to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to comply with the subpoena.
The bickering between Obama, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled House over Fast and Furious comes as Obama campaigns to win reelection on Nov. 6 in what is expected to be a close race with the presumed Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. Rep. Issa denies that there is any political motivation in his investigation of Fast and Furious. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/21/12 from AFP)
Issa and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) vigorously pursued the Fast and Furious investigation last year, but the probe appeared to lose momentum in October when the two Congress members learned that the administration of Republican former president George W. Bush (2001-2009) had run a similar program, Operation Wide Receiver [see Update #1104]. Another drawback for the investigation was the way it focused attention on the lax gun control laws in the US; these law make it relatively easy to purchase weapons in Southwestern states and then smuggle them to drug cartels in Mexico, where nearly 50,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since the end of 2006. Issa and Grassley are both strong opponents of gun control [see Update #1095].
But recently Fox News and other rightwing media have started promoting a conspiracy theory—originated by Michael Vanderboegh, a blogger reportedly connected to anti-government militias—that makes the Fast and Furious investigation more acceptable to gun control opponents. According to Vanderboegh, the Obama administation purposely let the guns go to the drug cartels so that the resulting bloodbath in Mexico could be used to justify strict federal gun control legislation.
Issa and Grassley have picked up on this idea. Grassley cited it in a television interview, while Issa asked at the National Rifle Association’s April convention: “Could it be that what they really were thinking of was in fact to use this walking of guns in order to promote an assault weapons ban? Many think so.” Issa went further on Fox News. “Very clearly,” he said, “they made a crisis and they’re using this crisis to somehow take away or limit people’s 2nd Amendment rights.” (Los Angeles Times 6/22/12; New York Times 6/22/12)
While acknowledging the political motive for the Republicans’ Fast and Furious inquiry, the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada reminded Mexican readers that the Obama administration is in fact holding back information on an operation that “exhibits the government in Washington as a provider of arms for the drug cartels that operate in our country.” The new government elected in Mexico’s presidential and legislative voting on July 1 will “need to analyze seriously the appropriateness of continuing” with the current militarized “war on drugs,” which La Jornada described as “a security strategy promoted by the US that not only has been ineffective in [achieving] its objective and has generated counterproductive effects for the country; it has also implied an unacceptable abandonment of national sovereignty and has exposed Washington’s hypocrisy in its supposed promise to combat narco trafficking and eradicate violence.” (LJ 6/21/12)
*7. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Central America, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Puerto Rico, US/immigration
Repsol Sues Argentina Over YPF Nationalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11184
Uruguay plans to legalize marijuana sale
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3697-uruguay-plans-to-legalize-marijuana-sale
Paraguay: deadly clash as police evict armed peasant squatters
http://ww4report.com/node/11167
Paraguay: 'There are More Dead Comrades'
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3699-paraguay-there-are-more-dead-comrades
Paraguay: "express coup d'etat" in wake of peasant massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11206
What will Washington do about Fernando Lugo's ouster in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3701-what-will-washington-do-about-fernando-lugos-ouster-in-paraguay
Tragic Week in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3705-tragic-week-in-paraguay
Rio+20: Declaration of Kari-Oca II Adopted by Five Hundred Indigenous Representatives in Sacred Ceremony (Brazil)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3698-rio-20-declaration-of-kari-oca-ii-adopted-by-five-hundred-indigenous-representatives-in-sacred-ceremony
Brazil Takes Steps to Confiscate Property of Landowners Using Slave Labour
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3693-brazil-takes-steps-to-confiscate-property-of-landowners-using-slave-labour
Bolivia: police mutiny, mineral interests protest nationalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11202
Bolivian police mutiny over pay widens
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3700-bolivian-police-mutiny-over-pay-widens
Bolivia: Evo fetes Ahmadinejad, betrays Iran's indigenous Kurds
http://ww4report.com/node/11179
Bolivian indigenous leaders "unmask" Evo Morales at Rio People's Summit
http://ww4report.com/node/11197
Bolivia: Aymara mark year 5520 with pledge to fight for Mother Earth
http://ww4report.com/node/11212
Democracy from Below in Bolivia: An Interview with Oscar Olivera
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3695-democracy-from-below-in-bolivia-an-interview-with-oscar-olivera
Peru: new violence in Cajamarca anti-mining struggle
http://ww4report.com/node/11205
REDD: Land-Grab In The Name Of Climate Change Mitigation? Peruvian Rainforest Dwellers Charge Privatization Scheme
http://ww4report.com/node/11183
Julian Assange seeking asylum in Ecuadorean embassy in London
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3696-julian-assange-seeking-asylum-in-ecuadorean-embassy-in-london-
Assange to Ecuador: three questions nobody (on the left) is asking
http://ww4report.com/node/11201
Colombia: Movement for the Defense and Liberation of Mother Earth Commences the Festival of the Sun
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3706-the-movement-for-the-defense-and-liberation-of-mother-earth-commences-the-festival-of-the-sun
Our Man in Caracas: The U.S. Media and Henrique Capriles
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/18/our-man-caracas-us-media-and-henrique-capriles
Accused mastermind in Facundo Cabral slaying faces charges in three countries (Central America)
http://ww4report.com/node/11203
U.S. Hand in Honduran Massacre
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7246
Honduras: DEA agent kills in Miskito Coast narco raid
http://ww4report.com/node/11211
Occupy Guatemala: Shantytown Dwellers Occupy Congress—And Win
http://ww4report.com/node/11185
Guatemala: Exhumation Inside Coban’s Military Garrison
http://latindispatch.com/2012/06/19/guatemala-exhumation-inside-cobans-military-garrison/
Peña Nieto signals further "Colombianization" of Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/11179
Mexico: El Chapo's son not arrested; hidden war in Tamaulipas goes on
http://ww4report.com/node/11208
Behind the Headlines in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3694-behind-the-headlines-in-mexico
Mexican Student Movement Challenges Media Manipulation of Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3691-mexican-student-movement-challenges-media-manipulation-of-elections
Inside Mexico’s New Youth Rebellion
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/06/19/inside-mexicos-new-youth-rebellion/
The Mexican Campaign: AMLO Against the Polls
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/19/mexican-campaign-amlo-against-polls
Bullets and Blood: The High Price of Anti-Mining Resistance in San José del Progreso
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7267
Violence Forces Mexican Workers Center to Close
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=202#1463
Women Workers at Flex-N-gate Demand Their Labor Rights
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=202#1468
Mexican High-Tech Workers Demand Justice
http://ww4report.com/node/11187
UNASUR Debates Reduction of MINUSTAH Contingent (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/unasur-debates-reduction-of-minustah-contingent
Undeserved Confidence: A Broken System of Aid in Haiti – Part 2
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/21/undeserved-confidence-broken-system-aid-haiti-%E2%80%93-part-2
ACLU report: Puerto Rico police abusing power
http://ww4report.com/node/11210
ALBA Expels USAID from Member Countries (US)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7069
Barack Obama’s Immigration Reform for Youth: A Dream Deferred? (US/Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/22/barack-obama%E2%80%99s-immigration-reform-youth-dream-deferred
Supreme Court partially strikes down Arizona immigration law (US/Immigration)
http://ww4report.com/node/11213
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, June 18, 2012
WNU #1133: English to Replace Spanish in Puerto Rican Classrooms
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1133, June 17, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
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. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
The Puerto Rican public school system is about to start a program intended to replace Spanish with English as the language used in teaching most courses, Education Secretary Edward Moreno Alonso told the Spanish wire service EFE on June 8. The change will begin this August at 66 of the system’s 860 schools: at 31 schools children ages 5-9 will be taught all courses in English except history and Spanish; the other 35 schools will offer at least some of the course work in English. The government plans to complete the switch to English in all schools within 10 years.
Moreno Alonso said the change is in response to parents' demands, but critics suggested that the real motive lay in an effort by Gov. Luis Fortuño and his rightwing New Progressive Party (PNP) to have Puerto Rico annexed to the US as its 51st state. Héctor L. Pesquera, co-president of the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH), predicted that the program would be a failure. “[R]egrettably our students will be the victims of this pedagogical and political blunder,” he told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina on June 9.
“It may be that many [teachers] know English,” María Elena Lara, president-elect of the Teachers’ Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR), said in a radio interview on June 8, “but they weren’t trained to teach in English.” Like Pesquera, she expected “a big failure.” “Much of our school population is in special education because they have trouble learning in their maternal language,” Aida Díaz, president of the smaller Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), said on the same program. “Imagine [learning] mathematics and science in English!”
Both union leaders said they supported teaching English as a second language, along with other languages. Mandarin is an important language to learn for business, Díaz noted; the problem “is wanting to substitute one language for another purely as an ideological matter.”
Both English and Spanish are official languages in Puerto Rico, but only 30% of Puerto Rico’s 3.9 million residents speak English at a high level, according to EFE, while Spanish is the primary language for 96%. English was used as the language of school instruction starting in 1900, two years after the US took control of the island from Spain; the practice was ended in 1948. (EFE 6/8/12 via Fox News Latino; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/8/12; Prensa Latina 6/9/12)
In other news, on June 15 Norberto González Claudio, a former member of the rebel Boricua Popular Army (EPB)-Macheteros, pleaded guilty in a Connecticut federal court to charges stemming from the group’s 1983 armed robbery of $7.1 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford. In exchange for the plea, US prosecutors agreed to recommend a five-year prison sentence. González Claudio spent 25 years as a fugitive before being arrested in Puerto Rico in May 2011 [see Update #1095]. In a letter to federal judge Alfred Covello, González Claudio wrote that “[t]he circumstances surrounding the struggle for Puerto Rican independence are different today from when I was younger.” He expressed hope that the struggle would now follow a “path…of peace and understanding.” (END 6/15/12; EFE 6/16/12 via Fox News Latino)
*2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
Early in the morning of June 11 some 200 Honduran security agents--including Preventive Police, National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) agents and soldiers from the 105th Infantry Brigade—evicted campesinos occupying more than 4,000 hectares on three estates in San Manuel in the northern department of Cortés. About 30 people were arrested, mostly women, according to press reports, but DNIC sub-director Reinaldo Rubio said the agents only found 20 people at the site and arrested them for land usurpation. The eviction was authorized by a judge in the nearby city of San Pedro Sula.
The soldiers and police “were dishonest and didn’t have the courage to tell us what they’d come for,” one of the occupiers, María Reyes, told a reporter. “They just indicated that they were going to explain some matter to us, but minutes later they arrested us and put us in a bus, as if we were criminals.” After removing the campesinos, the security forces brought in tractors and razed the structures the occupiers had built out of bamboo and metal sheets, including three small shops. The security forces “didn’t spare anything,” according to another women, who was arrested while she collected plastic bottles to sell to recyclers.
The campesinos, members of the San Manuel Campesino Movement (MOCSAM), had occupied the land since May 23. They occupied the same estates for a little more than one day on Apr. 17 as part of a massive demonstration in which some 3,500 families took over land in different parts of the country to mark the International Day of Campesino Struggles [see Update #1126].
The titles to the three estates are held by Compañía Azucarera Hondureña, SA (CAHSA), a sugar company; another company, Inversan (Inversiones San Manuel); and an individual named José Jacobo Zacapa. MOCSAM says the occupation is justified by a recent ruling from the National Agrarian Institute (INA) that the lands were designated for agrarian reform and the current owners had therefore bought them illegally. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 6/12/12; Agencia Púlsar 6/13/12; EFE 6/13/12 via Latin American Herald)
Land disputes continue to create tensions throughout northern Honduras, despite a partial settlement the government made with one group of campesinos on June 5 in the Lower Aguán Valley, in Colón department [see Update #1132]. The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, an organization formed by Honduran and international groups last fall, has accused the government of carrying out a “remilitarization” of the valley. “Groups of up to 60 soldiers do guard duty in the landowners’ African palm oil processing plants, in the African palm plantations and at points considered strategic for the security of the landowning companies’ properties,” the organization wrote. There are monitoring operations located “at little distance from campesino settlements to keep close to the campesino population, which is the object of permanent repression.” (Adital (Brazil) 6/11/12)
On June 13 two indigenous activists were shot at in the La Cuchía community, in the northwestern department of Santa Bárbara, as they were driving from a meeting about a local land conflict and the imprisonment of a community member. Two men on a motorbike fired at least twice at Juan Vásquez and Sotero Chavarría, members of the Executive Committee of the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), causing their vehicle to crash. The two activists weren’t hurt, but the vehicle, which belongs to the organization, was damaged.
COPINH says that for several months the group and its members have been subjected to a “campaign of threats, intimidation and aggression…on the part of armed men from the Honduran government and paid members of companies that plan to develop megaprojects in indigenous territories.” (COPINH 6/14/12; Frontline Defenders 6/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
Backed up by Mexican soldiers, state homicide detectives arrested the municipal police chief and six other police agents in Lagos de Moreno in the western state of Jalisco on June 6 for allegedly participating in the kidnapping of three men five months earlier. The victims—attorney César Raúl Alcalá Gaona; his assistant, Jorge Alejandro Arredondo Siller; and construction worker Jorge Alberto Bustos Nájera, all from Saltillo, Coahuila—were found dead from asphyxiation and beating a few hours after they were kidnapped. The police agents are believed to have been working for Jalisco New Generation, a drug gang.
Videotapes from security cameras at a hotel showed police agents and men in civilian clothes entering the hotel and removing the victims, handcuffed and in their underwear--in the early morning of Jan. 20. The victims had apparently come to Jalisco to collect rent for a ranch, but the killers may have mistaken them for members of a rival drug cartel based in Coahuila.
Jalisco attorney general Tomás Coronado Olmos released the videos to the media on June 13, and parts were shown on Mexican television. “One assumes that in some cities ... the municipal police work for the drug cartels," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on security and drug trafficking at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, told the Associated Press wire service. “But what is different here is that there is a video. It’s not the same thing to imagine that this going on, and to see it.” Chabat noted that in 2010 seven local police agents in Santiago in the northern state of Nuevo León were arrested on charges of working for the Zetas drug gang and kidnapping and murdering Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos, who had been trying to cut corruption. (Milenio (Mexico) 6/13/12; AP 6/14/12 via Miami Herald)
As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began militarizing the “war on drugs” in late 2006. Federal and local authorities generally attribute the violence to drug cartels, but it is unclear how much should be blamed on the security forces. Last November Mexican human rights attorney Netzaí Sandoval filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague charging the federal government with responsibility in at least some of the killings [see Update #1107].
*4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
Tens of thousands marched through the center of Mexico City on June 10 in a festive protest against former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner in the July 1 presidential election, and against the television networks that the demonstrators said were promoting his candidacy. The march was the latest in a series of protests since a new student movement widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) appeared suddenly in May in opposition to Peña Nieto and the likely return of his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power; the PRI dominated Mexican politics for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000.
The capital’s police estimated the crowd at 90,000 on June 10, about twice the police estimate for a similar march on May 19 [see Update #1130]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/11/12)
Some 600 Mexico City youths attended a protest performance the evening of June 13 outside the Chapultepec Avenue offices of Televisa, Mexico’s most powerful television network. The youths used one of the building’s walls to project videos showing various incidents for which they blamed the PRI, including the 1968 massacre of students and their supporters at the Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City; the suspected fraud in 1988 through which former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) is thought to have defeated center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano; and the violent repression of campesinos in San Salvador Atenco in México state in May 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor [see Update #1039]. Students have also been carrying their message to the subway system with political theater. (LJ 6/14/12)
Students aren’t the only people questioning Peña Nieto’s favorable coverage in Mexico’s media. The Mexico correspondent of the British daily The Guardian has pointed out that US diplomats were secretly suspicious of the media coverage and the opinion polls when he was still a governor. In a confidential Jan. 26, 2009 cable from the US embassy, released last year by the WikiLeaks group, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Bassett wrote that “analysts and PRI party leaders alike have repeatedly expressed to [US political officers] their belief that [Peña Nieto] is paying media outlets under the table for favorable news coverage, as well as potentially financing pollsters to sway survey results.” (The Guardian 6/11/12)
On June 15, Camila Vallejo Dowling, one of the leaders of last year’s massive student strike in Chile, visited the Xochimilco campus of Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). She told an audience of hundreds of students that Latin America needed a network of the various social movements, “with a common platform of horizons for struggle, which doesn’t imply forgetting or marginalizing local demands.” At a forum earlier in the day she warned that activists needed to give up the old forms in which “one demands of the usual people changes which we know they are never going to carry out…. We still haven’t resolved how we are approaching the dispute over power; there is no full awareness of this process.” (LJ 6/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Chile protesters rally against Pinochet film
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3682-chile-protesters-rally-against-pinochet-film
There's Something About Mary Anastasia O'Grady (Chile)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/theres-something-about-mary-anastasia-ogrady
Paraguay probe of ranchers' attempted land-grab in indigenous territory
http://ww4report.com/node/11166
Bolivia: another Aymara leader arrested
http://ww4report.com/node/11121#comment-343088
Peru: Amazon highway moves ahead in Congress, indigenous leaders protest
http://ww4report.com/node/11159
Peru: dialogue in Espinar mining conflict —but new violence in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11165
Connecting with an International Historical Reality: Book Review of "Jose Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology" (Peru)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3685-connecting-with-an-international-historical-reality-book-review-of-qjose-carlos-mariategui-an-anthologyq
Bolivia: indigenous opposition to Amazon highway fractures
http://ww4report.com/node/11160
Land Restitution in Colombia: Failure, Rising Expectations, and Armed Opposition
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/land-restitution-colombia-failure-rising-expectations-and-armed-opposition
International Criminal Court to probe Colombian army in civilian killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11168
US sends combat commanders to Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9391#comment-343096
Colombia: US charges ex-security chief with drug trafficking
http://ww4report.com/node/11173
Venezuela Happiest Country in South America
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7044
Central America: Still a Long Way to Go in Fight Against Sexual Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3680-central-america-still-a-long-way-to-go-in-fight-against-sexual-violence
Support Mounts for Salvadoran Gang Truce
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6966
International Hearing Highlights Abuses in Honduras While Government Signs Loan to Buy Part of Contested Territory
http://nacla.org/news/2012/6/15/international-hearing-highlights-abuses-honduras-while-government-signs-loan-buy-part
Guatemala: attentat against gold mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11164
Guatemala: Photo Essay of Exhumation Inside Coban’s Former Military Garrison
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3684-guatemala-photo-essay-of-exhumation-inside-cobans-former-military-garrison
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over US medical experiments in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11169
Struggle for Release of Indigenous Political Prisoners Patishan and Santiz Lopez Continues in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3677-struggle-for-release-of-indigenous-political-prisoners-patishan-and-satiz-lopez-continues-in-mexico
A Candidate is Marketed as Mexicans Prepare to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/13/candidate-marketed-mexicans-prepare-vote
Pena Nieto or Lopez Obrador? (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/06/pena-nieto-or-lopez-obrador.php
Mexico’s Long and Bloody Electoral Road
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6990
Mexico's Spiral of Violence Causes Spike in PTSD
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3679-mexicos-spiral-of-violence-causes-spike-in-ptsd
Another reporter killed in Veracruz (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11100#comment-343143
Time to Rein in the Global Arms Trade (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7008
Ruidoso racetrack raided in crackdown on stateside Zeta network
http://ww4report.com/node/11163
In Wake of Scandals and Cholera, Anger Rises Against Minustah (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-wake-of-scandals-and-cholera-anger-rises-against-minustah
Will Obama’s Actions Finally Offer Relief for Some Undocumented Youth? (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/16/will-obama%E2%80%99s-actions-finally-offer-relief-some-undocumented-youth
Congressman to sue Obama over new immigration policy
http://ww4report.com/node/11170
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 #1133, June 17, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
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. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
The Puerto Rican public school system is about to start a program intended to replace Spanish with English as the language used in teaching most courses, Education Secretary Edward Moreno Alonso told the Spanish wire service EFE on June 8. The change will begin this August at 66 of the system’s 860 schools: at 31 schools children ages 5-9 will be taught all courses in English except history and Spanish; the other 35 schools will offer at least some of the course work in English. The government plans to complete the switch to English in all schools within 10 years.
Moreno Alonso said the change is in response to parents' demands, but critics suggested that the real motive lay in an effort by Gov. Luis Fortuño and his rightwing New Progressive Party (PNP) to have Puerto Rico annexed to the US as its 51st state. Héctor L. Pesquera, co-president of the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH), predicted that the program would be a failure. “[R]egrettably our students will be the victims of this pedagogical and political blunder,” he told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina on June 9.
“It may be that many [teachers] know English,” María Elena Lara, president-elect of the Teachers’ Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR), said in a radio interview on June 8, “but they weren’t trained to teach in English.” Like Pesquera, she expected “a big failure.” “Much of our school population is in special education because they have trouble learning in their maternal language,” Aida Díaz, president of the smaller Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), said on the same program. “Imagine [learning] mathematics and science in English!”
Both union leaders said they supported teaching English as a second language, along with other languages. Mandarin is an important language to learn for business, Díaz noted; the problem “is wanting to substitute one language for another purely as an ideological matter.”
Both English and Spanish are official languages in Puerto Rico, but only 30% of Puerto Rico’s 3.9 million residents speak English at a high level, according to EFE, while Spanish is the primary language for 96%. English was used as the language of school instruction starting in 1900, two years after the US took control of the island from Spain; the practice was ended in 1948. (EFE 6/8/12 via Fox News Latino; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/8/12; Prensa Latina 6/9/12)
In other news, on June 15 Norberto González Claudio, a former member of the rebel Boricua Popular Army (EPB)-Macheteros, pleaded guilty in a Connecticut federal court to charges stemming from the group’s 1983 armed robbery of $7.1 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford. In exchange for the plea, US prosecutors agreed to recommend a five-year prison sentence. González Claudio spent 25 years as a fugitive before being arrested in Puerto Rico in May 2011 [see Update #1095]. In a letter to federal judge Alfred Covello, González Claudio wrote that “[t]he circumstances surrounding the struggle for Puerto Rican independence are different today from when I was younger.” He expressed hope that the struggle would now follow a “path…of peace and understanding.” (END 6/15/12; EFE 6/16/12 via Fox News Latino)
*2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
Early in the morning of June 11 some 200 Honduran security agents--including Preventive Police, National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) agents and soldiers from the 105th Infantry Brigade—evicted campesinos occupying more than 4,000 hectares on three estates in San Manuel in the northern department of Cortés. About 30 people were arrested, mostly women, according to press reports, but DNIC sub-director Reinaldo Rubio said the agents only found 20 people at the site and arrested them for land usurpation. The eviction was authorized by a judge in the nearby city of San Pedro Sula.
The soldiers and police “were dishonest and didn’t have the courage to tell us what they’d come for,” one of the occupiers, María Reyes, told a reporter. “They just indicated that they were going to explain some matter to us, but minutes later they arrested us and put us in a bus, as if we were criminals.” After removing the campesinos, the security forces brought in tractors and razed the structures the occupiers had built out of bamboo and metal sheets, including three small shops. The security forces “didn’t spare anything,” according to another women, who was arrested while she collected plastic bottles to sell to recyclers.
The campesinos, members of the San Manuel Campesino Movement (MOCSAM), had occupied the land since May 23. They occupied the same estates for a little more than one day on Apr. 17 as part of a massive demonstration in which some 3,500 families took over land in different parts of the country to mark the International Day of Campesino Struggles [see Update #1126].
The titles to the three estates are held by Compañía Azucarera Hondureña, SA (CAHSA), a sugar company; another company, Inversan (Inversiones San Manuel); and an individual named José Jacobo Zacapa. MOCSAM says the occupation is justified by a recent ruling from the National Agrarian Institute (INA) that the lands were designated for agrarian reform and the current owners had therefore bought them illegally. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 6/12/12; Agencia Púlsar 6/13/12; EFE 6/13/12 via Latin American Herald)
Land disputes continue to create tensions throughout northern Honduras, despite a partial settlement the government made with one group of campesinos on June 5 in the Lower Aguán Valley, in Colón department [see Update #1132]. The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, an organization formed by Honduran and international groups last fall, has accused the government of carrying out a “remilitarization” of the valley. “Groups of up to 60 soldiers do guard duty in the landowners’ African palm oil processing plants, in the African palm plantations and at points considered strategic for the security of the landowning companies’ properties,” the organization wrote. There are monitoring operations located “at little distance from campesino settlements to keep close to the campesino population, which is the object of permanent repression.” (Adital (Brazil) 6/11/12)
On June 13 two indigenous activists were shot at in the La Cuchía community, in the northwestern department of Santa Bárbara, as they were driving from a meeting about a local land conflict and the imprisonment of a community member. Two men on a motorbike fired at least twice at Juan Vásquez and Sotero Chavarría, members of the Executive Committee of the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), causing their vehicle to crash. The two activists weren’t hurt, but the vehicle, which belongs to the organization, was damaged.
COPINH says that for several months the group and its members have been subjected to a “campaign of threats, intimidation and aggression…on the part of armed men from the Honduran government and paid members of companies that plan to develop megaprojects in indigenous territories.” (COPINH 6/14/12; Frontline Defenders 6/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
Backed up by Mexican soldiers, state homicide detectives arrested the municipal police chief and six other police agents in Lagos de Moreno in the western state of Jalisco on June 6 for allegedly participating in the kidnapping of three men five months earlier. The victims—attorney César Raúl Alcalá Gaona; his assistant, Jorge Alejandro Arredondo Siller; and construction worker Jorge Alberto Bustos Nájera, all from Saltillo, Coahuila—were found dead from asphyxiation and beating a few hours after they were kidnapped. The police agents are believed to have been working for Jalisco New Generation, a drug gang.
Videotapes from security cameras at a hotel showed police agents and men in civilian clothes entering the hotel and removing the victims, handcuffed and in their underwear--in the early morning of Jan. 20. The victims had apparently come to Jalisco to collect rent for a ranch, but the killers may have mistaken them for members of a rival drug cartel based in Coahuila.
Jalisco attorney general Tomás Coronado Olmos released the videos to the media on June 13, and parts were shown on Mexican television. “One assumes that in some cities ... the municipal police work for the drug cartels," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on security and drug trafficking at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, told the Associated Press wire service. “But what is different here is that there is a video. It’s not the same thing to imagine that this going on, and to see it.” Chabat noted that in 2010 seven local police agents in Santiago in the northern state of Nuevo León were arrested on charges of working for the Zetas drug gang and kidnapping and murdering Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos, who had been trying to cut corruption. (Milenio (Mexico) 6/13/12; AP 6/14/12 via Miami Herald)
As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began militarizing the “war on drugs” in late 2006. Federal and local authorities generally attribute the violence to drug cartels, but it is unclear how much should be blamed on the security forces. Last November Mexican human rights attorney Netzaí Sandoval filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague charging the federal government with responsibility in at least some of the killings [see Update #1107].
*4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
Tens of thousands marched through the center of Mexico City on June 10 in a festive protest against former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner in the July 1 presidential election, and against the television networks that the demonstrators said were promoting his candidacy. The march was the latest in a series of protests since a new student movement widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) appeared suddenly in May in opposition to Peña Nieto and the likely return of his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power; the PRI dominated Mexican politics for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000.
The capital’s police estimated the crowd at 90,000 on June 10, about twice the police estimate for a similar march on May 19 [see Update #1130]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/11/12)
Some 600 Mexico City youths attended a protest performance the evening of June 13 outside the Chapultepec Avenue offices of Televisa, Mexico’s most powerful television network. The youths used one of the building’s walls to project videos showing various incidents for which they blamed the PRI, including the 1968 massacre of students and their supporters at the Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City; the suspected fraud in 1988 through which former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) is thought to have defeated center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano; and the violent repression of campesinos in San Salvador Atenco in México state in May 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor [see Update #1039]. Students have also been carrying their message to the subway system with political theater. (LJ 6/14/12)
Students aren’t the only people questioning Peña Nieto’s favorable coverage in Mexico’s media. The Mexico correspondent of the British daily The Guardian has pointed out that US diplomats were secretly suspicious of the media coverage and the opinion polls when he was still a governor. In a confidential Jan. 26, 2009 cable from the US embassy, released last year by the WikiLeaks group, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Bassett wrote that “analysts and PRI party leaders alike have repeatedly expressed to [US political officers] their belief that [Peña Nieto] is paying media outlets under the table for favorable news coverage, as well as potentially financing pollsters to sway survey results.” (The Guardian 6/11/12)
On June 15, Camila Vallejo Dowling, one of the leaders of last year’s massive student strike in Chile, visited the Xochimilco campus of Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). She told an audience of hundreds of students that Latin America needed a network of the various social movements, “with a common platform of horizons for struggle, which doesn’t imply forgetting or marginalizing local demands.” At a forum earlier in the day she warned that activists needed to give up the old forms in which “one demands of the usual people changes which we know they are never going to carry out…. We still haven’t resolved how we are approaching the dispute over power; there is no full awareness of this process.” (LJ 6/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Chile protesters rally against Pinochet film
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3682-chile-protesters-rally-against-pinochet-film
There's Something About Mary Anastasia O'Grady (Chile)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/theres-something-about-mary-anastasia-ogrady
Paraguay probe of ranchers' attempted land-grab in indigenous territory
http://ww4report.com/node/11166
Bolivia: another Aymara leader arrested
http://ww4report.com/node/11121#comment-343088
Peru: Amazon highway moves ahead in Congress, indigenous leaders protest
http://ww4report.com/node/11159
Peru: dialogue in Espinar mining conflict —but new violence in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11165
Connecting with an International Historical Reality: Book Review of "Jose Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology" (Peru)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3685-connecting-with-an-international-historical-reality-book-review-of-qjose-carlos-mariategui-an-anthologyq
Bolivia: indigenous opposition to Amazon highway fractures
http://ww4report.com/node/11160
Land Restitution in Colombia: Failure, Rising Expectations, and Armed Opposition
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/land-restitution-colombia-failure-rising-expectations-and-armed-opposition
International Criminal Court to probe Colombian army in civilian killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11168
US sends combat commanders to Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9391#comment-343096
Colombia: US charges ex-security chief with drug trafficking
http://ww4report.com/node/11173
Venezuela Happiest Country in South America
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7044
Central America: Still a Long Way to Go in Fight Against Sexual Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3680-central-america-still-a-long-way-to-go-in-fight-against-sexual-violence
Support Mounts for Salvadoran Gang Truce
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6966
International Hearing Highlights Abuses in Honduras While Government Signs Loan to Buy Part of Contested Territory
http://nacla.org/news/2012/6/15/international-hearing-highlights-abuses-honduras-while-government-signs-loan-buy-part
Guatemala: attentat against gold mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11164
Guatemala: Photo Essay of Exhumation Inside Coban’s Former Military Garrison
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3684-guatemala-photo-essay-of-exhumation-inside-cobans-former-military-garrison
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over US medical experiments in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11169
Struggle for Release of Indigenous Political Prisoners Patishan and Santiz Lopez Continues in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3677-struggle-for-release-of-indigenous-political-prisoners-patishan-and-satiz-lopez-continues-in-mexico
A Candidate is Marketed as Mexicans Prepare to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/13/candidate-marketed-mexicans-prepare-vote
Pena Nieto or Lopez Obrador? (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/06/pena-nieto-or-lopez-obrador.php
Mexico’s Long and Bloody Electoral Road
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6990
Mexico's Spiral of Violence Causes Spike in PTSD
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3679-mexicos-spiral-of-violence-causes-spike-in-ptsd
Another reporter killed in Veracruz (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11100#comment-343143
Time to Rein in the Global Arms Trade (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7008
Ruidoso racetrack raided in crackdown on stateside Zeta network
http://ww4report.com/node/11163
In Wake of Scandals and Cholera, Anger Rises Against Minustah (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-wake-of-scandals-and-cholera-anger-rises-against-minustah
Will Obama’s Actions Finally Offer Relief for Some Undocumented Youth? (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/16/will-obama%E2%80%99s-actions-finally-offer-relief-some-undocumented-youth
Congressman to sue Obama over new immigration policy
http://ww4report.com/node/11170
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/
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