Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1156, December 16, 2012
1. Mexico: HSBC Gets Off Easy in "Drug War" Case
2. Argentina: Ford Motor Investigated for “Dirty War” Torture
3. Colombia: Petroleum Workers Leader Murdered
4. Haiti: "Earthquake Relief" Helps Build New Luxury Hotel
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: HSBC Gets Off Easy in "Drug War" Case
The London-based corporation HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, will pay the US government $1.92 billion in fines for its failure to prevent money laundering through some of its affiliates, including its Mexican branch, US assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer announced at a press conference in Brooklyn on Dec. 11. However, the US Justice Department has decided not to bring criminal charges against the bank. Breuer noted that bank executives faced some penalties. “HSBC has replaced virtually all of its senior management,” he said, “and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials” over a five-year period.
As indicated in a 330-page report by the US Senate in July, Mexican drug cartels were major beneficiaries of the bank’s decision not to institute standard precautions against laundering [see Update #1137]. According to Breuer, the bank “failed to monitor over $670 billion in wire transfers from HSBC Mexico between 2006 and 2009, and failed to monitor over $9.4 billion in purchases of physical US dollars from HSBC Mexico over that same period.” “From 2006 to 2010 the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico, the Norte del Valle Cartel in Colombia, and other drug traffickers laundered at least $881 million in illegal narcotics trafficking proceeds through HSBC Bank USA,” Breuer said. Traffickers “would sometimes deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows in HSBC Mexico’s branches.” The US also accused the bank of circumventing US trade sanctions against several countries, including Cuba, Iran and Sudan.
Analysts indicated that the Justice Department failed to press criminal charges for fear that this would put one of the world’s largest banks at risk and might destabilize the international financial system. Since 2010 the Justice Department and the Treasury Department have investigated at least six banks—Credit Suisse, ING and Barclays in Europe, and JP Morgan Chase, Wachovia and Citigroup in the US—for similar failures to monitor transfers. The investigations have brought the US government more than $2 billion in fines, not counting the HSBC settlement, but to date no bank or bank executive has faced criminal charges. (New York Times 12/11/12; US Department of Justice 12/11/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 12/12/12 from correspondent)
Noting that HSBC’s $1.92 billion fine represents about five weeks’ income for the bank, Rolling Stone financial columnist Matt Taibbi proposed in a blog posting that the Justice Department should treat the bank the way it regularly treats “ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases”—by jailing all the executives involved and confiscating their bank accounts and personal property, along with HSBC’s entire holdings. “[B]y approving this settlement,” Taibbi concluded, “Breuer removed the government's moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn’t already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.” (Rolling Stone blog 12/13/12)
The HSBC case isn’t Lanny Breuer’s first contact with Mexico’s bloody “war on drugs.” The New York Times reported in September that the Justice Department had admonished him in connection with Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US allowed thousands of guns to be purchased illegally and smuggled into Mexico, largely for use by the drug cartels. In 2011 he reportedly proposed to Mexican officials that the US and Mexico cooperate in a similar program to monitor illegal gun purchases as a way of tracking gun smuggling operations [see Update #1145].
*2. Argentina: Ford Motor Investigated for “Dirty War” Torture
On Dec. 5 Argentine judge Alicia Vence opened an investigation into the possible involvement of four former executives of Ford Motor Company’s Argentine subsidiary in the kidnapping and torture of at least 25 autoworkers during the “dirty war” against suspected leftists under the 1976-83 military dictatorship. According to prosecutor Félix Crous, former Ford Motor Argentina president Nicolás Courard, former manufacturing director Pedro Müller, former industrial relations director Guillermo Galarraga and former security chief Héctor Sibilla are suspected of collaborating with the military in the abuses, which took place in 1976 next to the company’s plant in the city of General Pacheco in Buenos Aires province, just north of the city of Buenos Aires.
Previously the only person facing charges in the case had been military commander Santiago Riveros, who has already been convicted of other crimes of state terrorism. Ford Motor acknowledges that it asked for military protection during the period, saying two executives were murdered and two others were wounded in attacks by the Montoneros rebel groups from 1973 to 1975, but the company denies that its plant was used as a torture center.
Workers were a principal target of the “dirty war”; 30% of the estimated 30,000 people disappeared worked in factories. Executives from a number of companies are now under investigation for possible human rights abuses during the dictatorship. The companies include Mercedes-Benz Argentina and Acindar, a metal manufacturing firm now owned by ArcelorMittal. José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the dictatorship’s economy minister from 1976 to 1981, is a former Acindar president; he was arrested in May 2010 in connection with the kidnapping of industrialist Federico Gutheim and his son Miguel Gutheim [see Update #1032]. Food processing and biofuel magnate Carlos Pedro Blaquier also faces charges of collaborating with the military during the period [see Update #1090]. Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, now an adviser to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies’ Human Rights Commission, is supporting Blaquier’s claim of innocence. (El País (Madrid) 12/6/12 from correspondent)
These charges come while a court in the capital is hearing the third trial on crimes committed at the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) during the dictatorship. Some 5,000 detainees were held there; most never returned. The trial is the largest ever dealing with the “dirty war”: 68 defendants are charged with crimes against 789 people, with about 900 witnesses expected to testify over two years. The trial started on Nov. 28; as of Dec. 9 the charges were still being read.
In the first trial the only defendant, former navy officer Héctor Febres, was charged with participating in torture, kidnapping and other crimes. Febres was found dead in his cell on Dec. 11, 2007, two days before he was to be sentenced; he died of a heart attack, but traces of cyanide were found in his body, and the death is considered a suicide [see Update #929]. The second trial resulted in the conviction of 16 former military and police officers; 12 of them, including former Navy captain and spy Alfredo Astiz (“The Blond Angel of Death”), were sentenced to life in prison on Oct. 26, 2011, while four received shorter sentences [World War 4 Report 10/27/11].
The current trial is the first to deal with the notorious “death flights,” in which as many as 1,000 of the ESMA detainees were drugged with pentothal, loaded on to planes, flown over the Río de la Plata, the Atlantic or the Paraná River delta, and then pushed out, naked and with their hands and feet bound. Some of the defendants were already convicted of other crimes in the second trial: Astiz, Están Jorge Acosta (“The Tiger”), Juan Antonio Azic, Adolfo Donda and Ricardo Cavallo. The new trial includes eight men charged with piloting the planes, including Juan Alberto Poch, who was working as a pilot for the Dutch airline Transavia when he was arrested in September 2009 [see Update #1032].
An important part of the evidence against the defendants comes from several corpses that washed ashore in 1977. Forensics experts identified them in 2005 as the bodies of detainees who disappeared from the ESMA, including several women from a group that Astiz had infiltrated; two founding members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group that demonstrated each week in central Buenos Aires to demand the return of their disappeared children; and the French nun Léonie Duquet. Another missing nun, Alice Domon, was apparently killed on the same flight, but her body was never found; naval personnel at the base reportedly joked that Duquet and Domon were the “flying nuns.”
Another important part of the evidence resulted from investigations by Argentine journalist Miriam Lewin, who herself was detained in the ESMA. She located a plane used in the death flights, one of five Irish-built Skyvan planes that the Argentine coast guard acquired in 1971. This allowed prosecutors and human rights organizations to investigate flight logs and other records. The plane is currently used to carry goods from south Florida to the Bahamas. (IPS 12/3/12 via Upside Down World ; Christian Science Monitor 12/7/12; El País 12/9/12 from correspondent)
*3. Colombia: Petroleum Workers Leader Murdered
Two unidentified men on a motorcycle gunned down Colombian labor leader Milton Enrique Rivas Parra on Dec. 11 in Puerto Gaitán, a city in the central department of Meta. He was hit by 17 bullets, according to his family. Rivas was a leader in the Meta section of the Workers’ Labor Union of the Petroleum Industry (USO) and in a local grassroots organization, the Villa Ortiz Community Action Council. He had been receiving death threats, which he first reported to Colombian prosecutors on Aug. 25.
The USO has been carrying out an organizing drive over the last year at several companies, including the Canadian-Colombian multinational Pacific Rubiales. Vivas was involved in organizing at Termotecnica Coindustrial S A, a subcontractor for Cepcolsa, the Colombian subsidiary of the Spanish company CEPSA. Negotiations between the company and the union were held in November; the newly formed European industrial union federation IndustriALL joined with the USO negotiating committee as a demonstration of international support. But the talks broke off on Nov. 24 without an agreement.
Citing unidentified sources, the Meta police claimed that Vivas may have quit the union a month before his death and may have been involved in an argument with another unionist on Dec. 10. Labor leaders dismissed the implication that Vivas’ murder resulted from disputes within the union, noting that 2,500 labor leaders and activists have been killed in Colombia in less than 20 years, largely by rightwing forces. On Dec. 14 the USO wrote that its members would continue a strike against Termotecnica despite the “tense situation” in Puerto Gaitán after Vivas’ death. “The workers and leaders of the USO unanimously reject the accusations by the police,” the union said, “and warn that they will file complaints with the relevant national and international organizations, where they will present recordings in which members of the ESMAD [the police force’s Mobile Anti-Riot Squad (ESMAD)] announce that they will murder the participants in the protest against Termotecnica.” (IndustriALL website 11/30/12; El Tiempo (Bogotá) 12/12/12; USO website 12/14/12; Rebelión (Spain) 12/16/12)
*4. Haiti: "Earthquake Relief" Helps Build New Luxury Hotel
The Clinton Bush Fund, which former presidents Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and George W. Bush (2001-2009) established shortly after Haiti’s January 2010 earthquake, is closing down on Dec. 31, the group’s vice president for marketing and communications said on Dec. 7. The fund will have disbursed all of the $54.4 million it raised, she indicated. The organization says on its website that its goal was “to assist the Haitian people in building their own country back better.” The group says it has “[d]irectly created or sustained 7,350 jobs and counting” and “[d]irectly trained 20,050 people and counting.” (New York Times 12/7/12 from AP)
One of the fund’s projects—the Oasis Hotel in Pétionville, a suburb southeast of Port-au-Prince—opened on Dec. 12 with a soiree and 800 invitation-only guests. Munching hors-d’oeuvres and sipping “free-flowing wine,” the Miami Herald’s Jacqueline Charles wrote, the participants observed “the bamboo, locally grown orchids and sexy white furniture that lined the expansive courtyard.” The 128-room hotel cost $35 million to build; $2 million was provided by the Clinton Bush Fund [see Update #1080]. President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) called the hotel “a symbol of the new Haiti.”
According to Tourism Minister Stephanie Balmir Villedrouin, Martelly’s government has approved a $161 million hotel project that will bring a total of 1,200 new hotel rooms to the country next year. A 106-room Best Western and an El Rancho with 72 rooms and 13 apartments are set to open in the coming months; Comfort Suites and Marriott are also planning hotels in Port-au-Prince. (Miami Herald 12/13/12)
On Dec. 10, two days before the Oasis opening, the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA), a grassroots housing coalition, issued a press release charging that Port-au-Prince area mayors, police agents, justices of the peace and property owners—some with questionable land titles—were continuing forcible evictions of people left homeless by the 2010 earthquake. Some 150 families were threatened, according to the group, which said the displaced persons camps at risk were Vilambeta at Caradeux in the northeastern suburb of Tabarre; Camp Gaston Margron, in the Mariani Zone of Carrefour, southwest of the capital; Fortuna Guery in Port-au-Prince; and Camp Cr3, at Delmas 60, a neighborhood in the Delmas commune east of downtown Port-au-Prince. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 12/10/12)
Some 360,000 people are still living in the camps or other temporary shelters almost three years after the earthquake—4% of Haiti’s population, according to Johan Peleman, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Haiti. “There’s still not enough construction of new housing going on,” Peleman told the Reuters wire service’s AlertNet, which notes that “just over half the $6.04 billion in aid to Haiti pledged by donors from 2010 to 2012 has been disbursed.” (AlertNet 12/13/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, US/immigration
Americas: Human Rights Defenders Increasingly Targeted and Attacked
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4026-americas-human-rights-defenders-increasingly-targeted-and-attacked-
Interview: Noam Chomsky on Latin America
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/12/13/interview-noam-chomsky-latin-america
Look from Above or Look from Below: An Interview with Raúl Zibechi (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/4017-look-from-above-or-look-from-below-an-interview-with-raul-zibechi
What really happened in Curuguaty? (Paraguay)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8601
Bolivia: End of the Road for TIPNIS Consulta
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/12/13/bolivia-end-road-tipnis-consulta
Environmental Dissonance: Global Warming and Bolivia’s Kallawaya Healers
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/4020-environmental-dissonance-global-warming-and-bolivias-kallawaya-healers
Native Communities in Peru Take Charge of Environmental Monitoring
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4019-native-communities-in-peru-take-charge-of-environmental-monitoring
Peru: Multinationals Undermining Justice
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4021-peru-multinationals-undermining-justice
Colombia puts security forces under martial jurisdiction
http://ww4report.com/node/11632#comment-391748
Armed Peace does not Equate with Civil Peace (Colombia)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8633
Colombia: Dismantling a Half-Century of Conflict
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8725
The End of the Chávez Era? (Venezuela)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/12/14/end-ch%C3%A1vez-era
Venezuelan President Chavez’s “Complex” Recovery Creates Uncertainty
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7550
Unions March in Venezuela over Labor Rights
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7549
Universal Health Care in El Salvador – A Personal Reflection
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4015-universal-health-care-in-el-salvador-a-personal-reflection
Congress vs. the Supreme Court: The Power Grab (Honduras)
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/12/congress-vs-supreme-court-power-grab.html
Ismael and Manuelita Died in Defense of Three Basic Rights (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8650
Mexico bans Maya ceremony at ancestral temples
http://ww4report.com/node/11791
Lead Poisoning Underscores Mexico’s Need to Hasten Toxic Waste Inventory
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8684
Killing Spree on the Border (Mexico/US)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8735
Why Build a Border Wall? (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/12/11/why-build-border-wall
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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Tuesday 18 December 2012
Tuesday 11 December 2012
WNU #1155: Colombia GM Workers Resume Hunger Strike
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1155, December 9, 2012
1. Colombia: Injured GM Workers Resume Hunger Strike
2. Mexico: Evidence Mounts of Police Repression on Dec. 1
3. Mexico: Will Court Ruling Legalize Same-Sex Marriage?
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago
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. Colombia: Injured GM Workers Resume Hunger Strike
On Nov. 20 Jorge Parra, a former employee of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), resumed a liquids-only hunger strike that he and 11 other former employees started last summer to pressure the company to reinstate them and compensate them for work-related injuries [see Update #1142]. They had suspended the fast on Aug. 24 after General Motors agreed to enter mediation, but they decided to go back on strike when management appeared unwilling to meet their demands. The former workers say Colmotores fired them because they developed disabilities due to injuries on the job, repetitive stress injuries or other work-related illnesses.
Parra, the president of the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol), was in the US to attend the annual protest at Fort Benning, Georgia against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), Nov. 16-18 [see Update #1153]. United Auto Workers (UAW) president Bob King, who was also at the protest, told Parra that the mediation was going nowhere, leading to the decision to resume the strike. Melvin Thompson, a Detroit autoworker and former president of UAW Local 140, went on a water-only hunger strike as a statement of solidarity with the Colmotores workers, and eight Colombian workers joined the hunger strike at the encampment they’ve maintained in front of the US embassy in Bogotá since Aug. 1, 2011. Parra remained in the US, demanding a meeting with top GM executives.
About 50 UAW members and other supporters protested at GM headquarters in Detroit on Nov. 29, chanting “down with exploitation, up with mediation!” A small group also demonstrated outside the US State Department in Washington, DC, where Hillary Clinton was presenting the department’s annual Award for Corporate Excellence. Although GM didn’t win, it was selected to be one of the 11 finalists. [As a result of a 2009 bailout, the US government is GM’s largest shareholder; see Update #1141.] On Dec. 7 more than a dozen protesters held a candlelight vigil outside the Rochester, Michigan home of GM vice president Cathy Clegg, the company official in charge of labor relations.
Former UAW local 909 president Frank Hammer noted in an interview with The Real News Network that the strong solidarity by US autoworkers was partly a result of the pressure unionists in Michigan are under as rightwing forces push for the state legislature to pass an anti-labor “right-to-work” law. “I think that here in Michigan, our union rights are on the chopping block,” Hammer said. “[I]f General Motors had its way, we would look a lot more like Colombia.”
Brazilian unionists have also expressed solidarity. “We know that not only in Brazil are we being attacked by GM’s plans,” Herbert Claros da Silva, vice president of the metalworkers union in San José dos Campos in Brazil, wrote in a letter to US activists. “We also know that in Colombia, Mexico, France and Germany, [GM wants] to end the jobs and workers’ rights.” (Workday Minnesota 12/3/12 from Labor Notes; The Oakland Press (Pontiac, Michigan) 12/7/12; TRNN 12/9/12)
Supporters of the Colmotores workers have started an online petition calling on GM chair and GEO Dan Akerson, GM South America president Jaime Ardila, US ambassador to Colombia Peter McKinley, Colombia labor minister Rafael Pardo Rueda, and US labor secretary Hilda Solis to reach an agreement that will end the strike. The petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/gm-resolve-situation-of-workers-dismissed-for-occupational-injuries?utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition
*2. Mexico: Evidence Mounts of Police Repression on Dec. 1
On Dec. 9 Mexican authorities released 56 of the 69 people who had been in detention for more than a week on suspicion of “attacking public peace” during protests in Mexico City against the inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. A total of 106 people were reportedly arrested on a day which included violent confrontations between police and protesters and widespread destruction of property [see Update #1154], but 28 were quickly released. Judge María del Carmen Mora Brito of the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) court system ordered the Dec. 9 releases after “analyzing videos, testimonies and expert witnesses’ reports,” the DF Superior Court of Justice (TSJDF) announced in a communiqué. (Europa Press 12/10/12)
The judge's action followed a week of demonstrations against police repression and charges that agents had repeatedly attacked, beaten and arrested peaceful protesters and bystanders while failing to arrest the people who had been engaged in vandalism. There were also accusations that agents provocateurs had infiltrated the protests. Complaints about the police seemed to be supported by videos that circulated widely on the internet. One, a compilation by the student video collective Imágenes En Rebeldía, appears to show unprovoked police attacks, arrests of nonviolent protesters, and men dressed in civilian clothes and armed with crowbars and chains standing and walking among uniformed federal police agents behind metal barriers around the Chamber of Deputies building.
On Dec. 6 the DF Human Rights Commission (CDHDF) reported that the DF police had arrested at least 22 people arbitrarily and that four people showed signs of having been tortured. A total of 88 people claimed to have been arrested without justification, the governmental commission said; 15 youths were charged with taking part in vandalism on Juárez Avenue even though the vandalism occurred after the time of their arrests. Among the people arrested on Dec. 1 was Mircea Topolenau, a Romanian photographer covering the events for a magazine. CDHDF president Luis González Placencia noted that his organization was only reporting actions by the DF police and that it was up to the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to investigate alleged abuses by the federal police. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/7/12)
On Dec. 7 the Mexican branch of the London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) presented President Peña Nieto and Miguel Angel Mancera, the head of the DF government, with 20,000 signatures from Mexican citizens demanding an investigation of police abuses. “Every innocent person arrested, accused of a crime he or she didn’t commit, not only represents a tragedy in itself and a clear violation of human rights, but is also a reflection of a system of justice that has failed to try the guilty party and is maintaining impunity,” AI Mexico impact and mobilization coordinator Daniel Zapico said. (LJ 12/8/12) Mancera took office on Dec. 5, succeeding Marcelo Ebrard; both men are members of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which has governed the DF since 1997.
Two protesters were seriously injured during the Dec. 1 protests. Drama teacher Francisco Kuykendall Leal was hit by a tear gas canister and was hospitalized with cranial injuries. He is an active supporter of The Other Campaign, a political movement inspired by the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) [see Update #832]. Uriel Sandoval Díaz, a student majoring in environmental and climate change studies at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), lost an eye and suffered fractures when he was hit by a rubber bullet. “This struggle won’t end until poverty ends,” Uriel said from a wheelchair as he was being released from the General Hospital on Dec. 6. “An eye is nothing [when] every day thousands of human beings have nothing to eat.” (Kaos en la Red 12/4/12 from Desinformémonos; Milenio (Mexico) 12/7/12)
In related news, an online petition has been started calling on Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust to withdraw the offer of a fellowship at the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to outgoing president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012). Tens of thousands of Mexicans have died in the militarized “war on drugs” Calderón initiated soon after he took office in December 2006. The petition is at http://www.change.org/petitions/harvard-university-president-faust-deny-outgoing-mexican-president-felipe-calderon-employment-at-harvard
*3. Mexico: Will Court Ruling Legalize Same-Sex Marriage?
A four-justice panel of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) decided unanimously on Dec. 5 to uphold a challenge that three same-sex couples brought against the marriage law in the southern state of Oaxaca. State authorities had refused to marry the couples last year under Oaxaca Civil Code Article 143, which defines marriage as “a civil contract carried out between one man and one woman, who join together to perpetuate the species and to provide mutual aid.” The justices ruled that the requirement “to procreate to perpetuate the species violates the constitutional principle of self-determination of persons and the right of each individual to the free development of personality.” The SCJN ordered the Oaxaca Civil Registry to act on the applications the three couples made for marriage authorization and not to discriminate against them.
The decision doesn’t completely invalidate Article 143, but it opens the way for same-sex couples denied the right to wed in any of the country’s 31 states to appeal to the Supreme Court. One of the justices, José Ramón Cossío, told the Mexican daily La Jornada that the SCJN didn’t strike the law down because if it had, “in a practical sense we would have left the Oaxaca Civil Code without an article [on marriage], and it would have affected people of the same sex as much as heterosexuals.” But in the future the justices might make a general declaration of unconstitutionality, Cossío said, and “afterwards it is foreseeable that the effect might be broader”—that is, the court could rule to legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/5/12)
The Federal District (DF, Mexico City) already permits same-sex marriage. The SCJN ruled in August 2010 that same-sex marriages performed in the DF are valid in all the country’s states; it also upheld the DF’s legalization of adoption by same-sex couples [see Update #1044].
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago
Argentina’s Biggest Human Rights Trial Begins
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/4001-argentinas-biggest-human-rights-trial-begins
ICJ opens hearings in Chile-Peru maritime dispute
http://ww4report.com/node/11750
Paraguayan Government Deploys Joint Military-Police Force to Monitor Upcoming Human Rights March for "Violent Infiltrators"
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/4013-paraguayan-government-deploys-joint-military-police-force-to-monitor-upcoming-human-rights-march-for-qviolent-infiltratorsq
Peru's cabinet in bid to save Conga project
http://ww4report.com/node/11752
Ecuador's Correa Seeks South American Allies in Conflict with Anti-Mining Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4006-ecuadors-correa-seeks-south-american-allies-in-conflict-with-anti-mining-social-movements
A Dream Come True for the Mining Industry: A Response to Correa's Proposal to "Deal With Radicals"
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4012-a-dream-come-true-for-the-mining-industry-a-response-to-correas-proposal-to-qdeal-with-radicalsq
Ecuador: indigenous protests as oil blocs sold
http://ww4report.com/node/11751
International Court Investigates Colombia for “False Positive” Killings
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4008-international-court-investigates-colombia-for-false-positive-killings
Colombian Military and a Local Businessman Agree to Build a Base on Stolen Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4005-colombian-military-and-a-local-businessman-agree-to-build-a-base-on-stolen-land
Venezuela’s Chavez’s Cancer Returns, Leaves Vice-President in Charge
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7532
Latin leaders legitimize legalization (Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica)
http://globalganjareport.com/content/latin-leaders-legitimize-legalization
Canal intrigues behind Nicaragua border disputes
http://ww4report.com/node/11749
Honduras: Drug War as Counterinsurgency?
http://ww4report.com/node/11757
'Outing' Honduras: A Human Rights Catastrophe in the Making
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/29/outing-honduras-human-rights-catastrophe-making
Honduran President Calls Supreme Court an Enemy of the State
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/12/lobo-supreme-court-is-enemy-of-state.html
Deaf Ear Turned to Local Opposition to Mines in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4011-deaf-ear-turned-to-local-opposition-to-mines-in-guatemala
Peña’s Promises (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8435
Mexico’s presidential inauguration marked by vows and violence
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8449
A New Era for Mexico, Juarez?
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/12/05/a-new-era-for-mexico-juarez/
Convicts, Collateral Damage, and the “War on Drugs” in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/12/5/convicts-collateral-damage-and-%E2%80%9Cwar-drugs%E2%80%9D-us-mexico-borderlands
New Report Finds Economic Insecurity Increasingly Puts Haitian Girls at Risk of Violence
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/new-report-finds-economic-insecurity-increasingly-puts-haitian-girls-at-risk-of-violence
Hunger Strike against Trinidad Highway Continues
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/caribbean-archives-45/4007-hunger-strike-against-trinidad-highway-continues
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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 #1155, December 9, 2012
1. Colombia: Injured GM Workers Resume Hunger Strike
2. Mexico: Evidence Mounts of Police Repression on Dec. 1
3. Mexico: Will Court Ruling Legalize Same-Sex Marriage?
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago
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. Colombia: Injured GM Workers Resume Hunger Strike
On Nov. 20 Jorge Parra, a former employee of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), resumed a liquids-only hunger strike that he and 11 other former employees started last summer to pressure the company to reinstate them and compensate them for work-related injuries [see Update #1142]. They had suspended the fast on Aug. 24 after General Motors agreed to enter mediation, but they decided to go back on strike when management appeared unwilling to meet their demands. The former workers say Colmotores fired them because they developed disabilities due to injuries on the job, repetitive stress injuries or other work-related illnesses.
Parra, the president of the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol), was in the US to attend the annual protest at Fort Benning, Georgia against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), Nov. 16-18 [see Update #1153]. United Auto Workers (UAW) president Bob King, who was also at the protest, told Parra that the mediation was going nowhere, leading to the decision to resume the strike. Melvin Thompson, a Detroit autoworker and former president of UAW Local 140, went on a water-only hunger strike as a statement of solidarity with the Colmotores workers, and eight Colombian workers joined the hunger strike at the encampment they’ve maintained in front of the US embassy in Bogotá since Aug. 1, 2011. Parra remained in the US, demanding a meeting with top GM executives.
About 50 UAW members and other supporters protested at GM headquarters in Detroit on Nov. 29, chanting “down with exploitation, up with mediation!” A small group also demonstrated outside the US State Department in Washington, DC, where Hillary Clinton was presenting the department’s annual Award for Corporate Excellence. Although GM didn’t win, it was selected to be one of the 11 finalists. [As a result of a 2009 bailout, the US government is GM’s largest shareholder; see Update #1141.] On Dec. 7 more than a dozen protesters held a candlelight vigil outside the Rochester, Michigan home of GM vice president Cathy Clegg, the company official in charge of labor relations.
Former UAW local 909 president Frank Hammer noted in an interview with The Real News Network that the strong solidarity by US autoworkers was partly a result of the pressure unionists in Michigan are under as rightwing forces push for the state legislature to pass an anti-labor “right-to-work” law. “I think that here in Michigan, our union rights are on the chopping block,” Hammer said. “[I]f General Motors had its way, we would look a lot more like Colombia.”
Brazilian unionists have also expressed solidarity. “We know that not only in Brazil are we being attacked by GM’s plans,” Herbert Claros da Silva, vice president of the metalworkers union in San José dos Campos in Brazil, wrote in a letter to US activists. “We also know that in Colombia, Mexico, France and Germany, [GM wants] to end the jobs and workers’ rights.” (Workday Minnesota 12/3/12 from Labor Notes; The Oakland Press (Pontiac, Michigan) 12/7/12; TRNN 12/9/12)
Supporters of the Colmotores workers have started an online petition calling on GM chair and GEO Dan Akerson, GM South America president Jaime Ardila, US ambassador to Colombia Peter McKinley, Colombia labor minister Rafael Pardo Rueda, and US labor secretary Hilda Solis to reach an agreement that will end the strike. The petition is at https://www.change.org/petitions/gm-resolve-situation-of-workers-dismissed-for-occupational-injuries?utm_medium=email&utm_source=share_petition
*2. Mexico: Evidence Mounts of Police Repression on Dec. 1
On Dec. 9 Mexican authorities released 56 of the 69 people who had been in detention for more than a week on suspicion of “attacking public peace” during protests in Mexico City against the inauguration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. A total of 106 people were reportedly arrested on a day which included violent confrontations between police and protesters and widespread destruction of property [see Update #1154], but 28 were quickly released. Judge María del Carmen Mora Brito of the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) court system ordered the Dec. 9 releases after “analyzing videos, testimonies and expert witnesses’ reports,” the DF Superior Court of Justice (TSJDF) announced in a communiqué. (Europa Press 12/10/12)
The judge's action followed a week of demonstrations against police repression and charges that agents had repeatedly attacked, beaten and arrested peaceful protesters and bystanders while failing to arrest the people who had been engaged in vandalism. There were also accusations that agents provocateurs had infiltrated the protests. Complaints about the police seemed to be supported by videos that circulated widely on the internet. One, a compilation by the student video collective Imágenes En Rebeldía, appears to show unprovoked police attacks, arrests of nonviolent protesters, and men dressed in civilian clothes and armed with crowbars and chains standing and walking among uniformed federal police agents behind metal barriers around the Chamber of Deputies building.
On Dec. 6 the DF Human Rights Commission (CDHDF) reported that the DF police had arrested at least 22 people arbitrarily and that four people showed signs of having been tortured. A total of 88 people claimed to have been arrested without justification, the governmental commission said; 15 youths were charged with taking part in vandalism on Juárez Avenue even though the vandalism occurred after the time of their arrests. Among the people arrested on Dec. 1 was Mircea Topolenau, a Romanian photographer covering the events for a magazine. CDHDF president Luis González Placencia noted that his organization was only reporting actions by the DF police and that it was up to the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) to investigate alleged abuses by the federal police. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/7/12)
On Dec. 7 the Mexican branch of the London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) presented President Peña Nieto and Miguel Angel Mancera, the head of the DF government, with 20,000 signatures from Mexican citizens demanding an investigation of police abuses. “Every innocent person arrested, accused of a crime he or she didn’t commit, not only represents a tragedy in itself and a clear violation of human rights, but is also a reflection of a system of justice that has failed to try the guilty party and is maintaining impunity,” AI Mexico impact and mobilization coordinator Daniel Zapico said. (LJ 12/8/12) Mancera took office on Dec. 5, succeeding Marcelo Ebrard; both men are members of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which has governed the DF since 1997.
Two protesters were seriously injured during the Dec. 1 protests. Drama teacher Francisco Kuykendall Leal was hit by a tear gas canister and was hospitalized with cranial injuries. He is an active supporter of The Other Campaign, a political movement inspired by the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) [see Update #832]. Uriel Sandoval Díaz, a student majoring in environmental and climate change studies at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), lost an eye and suffered fractures when he was hit by a rubber bullet. “This struggle won’t end until poverty ends,” Uriel said from a wheelchair as he was being released from the General Hospital on Dec. 6. “An eye is nothing [when] every day thousands of human beings have nothing to eat.” (Kaos en la Red 12/4/12 from Desinformémonos; Milenio (Mexico) 12/7/12)
In related news, an online petition has been started calling on Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust to withdraw the offer of a fellowship at the university’s John F. Kennedy School of Government to outgoing president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012). Tens of thousands of Mexicans have died in the militarized “war on drugs” Calderón initiated soon after he took office in December 2006. The petition is at http://www.change.org/petitions/harvard-university-president-faust-deny-outgoing-mexican-president-felipe-calderon-employment-at-harvard
*3. Mexico: Will Court Ruling Legalize Same-Sex Marriage?
A four-justice panel of Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) decided unanimously on Dec. 5 to uphold a challenge that three same-sex couples brought against the marriage law in the southern state of Oaxaca. State authorities had refused to marry the couples last year under Oaxaca Civil Code Article 143, which defines marriage as “a civil contract carried out between one man and one woman, who join together to perpetuate the species and to provide mutual aid.” The justices ruled that the requirement “to procreate to perpetuate the species violates the constitutional principle of self-determination of persons and the right of each individual to the free development of personality.” The SCJN ordered the Oaxaca Civil Registry to act on the applications the three couples made for marriage authorization and not to discriminate against them.
The decision doesn’t completely invalidate Article 143, but it opens the way for same-sex couples denied the right to wed in any of the country’s 31 states to appeal to the Supreme Court. One of the justices, José Ramón Cossío, told the Mexican daily La Jornada that the SCJN didn’t strike the law down because if it had, “in a practical sense we would have left the Oaxaca Civil Code without an article [on marriage], and it would have affected people of the same sex as much as heterosexuals.” But in the future the justices might make a general declaration of unconstitutionality, Cossío said, and “afterwards it is foreseeable that the effect might be broader”—that is, the court could rule to legalize same-sex marriage throughout the country. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/5/12)
The Federal District (DF, Mexico City) already permits same-sex marriage. The SCJN ruled in August 2010 that same-sex marriages performed in the DF are valid in all the country’s states; it also upheld the DF’s legalization of adoption by same-sex couples [see Update #1044].
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago
Argentina’s Biggest Human Rights Trial Begins
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/4001-argentinas-biggest-human-rights-trial-begins
ICJ opens hearings in Chile-Peru maritime dispute
http://ww4report.com/node/11750
Paraguayan Government Deploys Joint Military-Police Force to Monitor Upcoming Human Rights March for "Violent Infiltrators"
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/4013-paraguayan-government-deploys-joint-military-police-force-to-monitor-upcoming-human-rights-march-for-qviolent-infiltratorsq
Peru's cabinet in bid to save Conga project
http://ww4report.com/node/11752
Ecuador's Correa Seeks South American Allies in Conflict with Anti-Mining Social Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4006-ecuadors-correa-seeks-south-american-allies-in-conflict-with-anti-mining-social-movements
A Dream Come True for the Mining Industry: A Response to Correa's Proposal to "Deal With Radicals"
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4012-a-dream-come-true-for-the-mining-industry-a-response-to-correas-proposal-to-qdeal-with-radicalsq
Ecuador: indigenous protests as oil blocs sold
http://ww4report.com/node/11751
International Court Investigates Colombia for “False Positive” Killings
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4008-international-court-investigates-colombia-for-false-positive-killings
Colombian Military and a Local Businessman Agree to Build a Base on Stolen Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4005-colombian-military-and-a-local-businessman-agree-to-build-a-base-on-stolen-land
Venezuela’s Chavez’s Cancer Returns, Leaves Vice-President in Charge
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7532
Latin leaders legitimize legalization (Mexico, Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica)
http://globalganjareport.com/content/latin-leaders-legitimize-legalization
Canal intrigues behind Nicaragua border disputes
http://ww4report.com/node/11749
Honduras: Drug War as Counterinsurgency?
http://ww4report.com/node/11757
'Outing' Honduras: A Human Rights Catastrophe in the Making
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/29/outing-honduras-human-rights-catastrophe-making
Honduran President Calls Supreme Court an Enemy of the State
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/12/lobo-supreme-court-is-enemy-of-state.html
Deaf Ear Turned to Local Opposition to Mines in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4011-deaf-ear-turned-to-local-opposition-to-mines-in-guatemala
Peña’s Promises (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8435
Mexico’s presidential inauguration marked by vows and violence
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8449
A New Era for Mexico, Juarez?
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/12/05/a-new-era-for-mexico-juarez/
Convicts, Collateral Damage, and the “War on Drugs” in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/12/5/convicts-collateral-damage-and-%E2%80%9Cwar-drugs%E2%80%9D-us-mexico-borderlands
New Report Finds Economic Insecurity Increasingly Puts Haitian Girls at Risk of Violence
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/new-report-finds-economic-insecurity-increasingly-puts-haitian-girls-at-risk-of-violence
Hunger Strike against Trinidad Highway Continues
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/caribbean-archives-45/4007-hunger-strike-against-trinidad-highway-continues
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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 3 December 2012
WNU #1154: Anti-Mining Activists Assaulted in Argentina
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1154, December 2, 2012
1. Argentina: Anti-Mining Activists Assaulted in Chubut
2. Mexico: Peña Nieto Takes Office as Youths Riot
3. Honduras: Another Campesino Murdered in Aguán
4. Haiti: One Killed in Infrastructure Protest
5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, 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. Argentina: Anti-Mining Activists Assaulted in Chubut
According to Argentine environmentalist groups, dozens of opponents of large-scale mining projects were injured when hundreds of construction workers attacked them at the provincial legislature building in Rawson, the administrative capital of the southern province of Chubut, on the late afternoon of Nov. 27. At a press conference held the next day in the offices of the Chubut Education Workers Association (ATECH), local activists charged that the attack had been carried out by members of the Workers Union of Construction of the Argentine Republic Union (UOCRA) contracted by Chubut governor Martín Buzzi, of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist), and federal legislative deputy Carlos Eliceche. UOCRA general secretary Gerardo Martínez is said to have worked as a secret agent at the Campo de Mayo military base during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Local activists had been attending sessions of the provincial Chamber of Deputies twice a week for more than three months to protest against Gov. Buzzi’s effort to circumvent the province’s Law 5001, which bans open-pit mines and the use of cyanide in mining operations in Chubut. The activists, organized in a community assembly, have called for a referendum on the issue. When they arrived for the session on Nov. 27, they were confronted by construction workers armed with clubs and chains who had come to Rawson in 30 UOCRA minivans; some witnesses said mining company vehicles were also present. The most seriously injured in the attack included a boy of 15, a young woman and an older woman.
“The mining companies have taken the law into their own hands, and the government has allowed it,” local deputy Roberto Risso said, “and the officials are going to have to answer for this.” Anti-mining assemblies from other provinces sent statements of support for the Chubut activists. (Adital (Brazil) 11/28/12 from Unión de Asambleas de la Patagonia (UAP); Bariloche Opina (Argentina) 11/28/12)
The federal government and the provincial governments get significant funding from deals with international mining corporations, and the movement against large-scale mining that has developed over the past year in areas near the Andes has sometimes been met with government repression. An encampment by local environment activists in the northwestern province of Catarmarca was attacked by soldiers, police and supposed “pro-mining activists” on July 20 [see Update #1137].
*2. Mexico: Peña Nieto Takes Office as Youths Riot
Protests against Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto during his inauguration on Dec. 1 quickly turned into violent confrontations between police and demonstrators that disrupted much of downtown Mexico City. The protests were called by the National Convention Against the Imposition, a coalition of groups holding that Peña Nieto’s election last July was manipulated, and #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”), a student movement that arose in the spring in response to the election campaign [see Update #1130]. But masked youths, many of them wearing black t-shirts with anarchist symbols, quickly became the center of attention at the Dec. 1 demonstration.
The confrontations began around 7 am near the San Lázaro subway and bus stations at the heavily guarded and barricaded Chamber of Deputies, where the inauguration was to take place about three hours later. Determined to break through the metal barriers, the masked youths threw rocks, metal pipes and Molotov cocktails at the federal police, who responded with exceptional violence, using tear gas, pepper spray and water cannons. The media reported that the agents also used rubber bullets; police spokespeople denied the reports. Many #YoSoy132 supporters moved away from the masked youths, as did the famously militant teachers from the southern state of Oaxaca, although both groups organized brigades to assist protesters who were wounded or were overwhelmed by the tear gas.
Dozens of protesters were injured. At around 10 am #YoSoy132 reported that a youth named Carlos Yahir Valdés had been killed by a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet; Adrián Ramírez, president of the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDDH), said the victim was named Carlos Valdivia and had been seriously wounded but not killed.
Eventually the youths in black moved west towards the Zócalo plaza and then on to the Palacio de Bellas Artes cultural center and the Alameda park. Along the way they smashed windows, streetlights, phone booths and ATMs; looted stores and gas stations; and battled the Mexico City police. At times passers-by supplied the protesters with bricks to throw at the police, while smiling tourists took pictures. At least one private car was destroyed and one motorcycle was set on fire. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/2/12)
During his first day in office, President Peña Nieto announced “13 specific decisions” to improve the situation in Mexico, including a universal social security system, life insurance for heads of households, educational reforms, and revival of passenger railroads. He also promised to maintain a zero deficit in the budget while carrying out his programs. (LJ 12/2/12)
Outgoing president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012)--whose militarized fight against drug trafficking set off the violence in which 50,000 Mexicans died, according to critics—is planning to leave Mexico, at least temporarily. On Nov. 28 Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that Calderón will hold a one-year fellowship at the school starting in January. “This fellowship will be a tremendous opportunity for me to reflect upon my six years in office,” Calderón said in a statement.
Calderón received a master’s degree from the Kennedy school in 2000. The Reuters wire service noted that other recent students at the school include Bo Guagua, son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai, and Paula Broadwell, co-author of a book about former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned after acknowledging that he’d had an affair with her. (Reuters 11/28/12) Another former student was the late Guatemalan general Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales. At his graduation in June 1991 human rights activists served Gramajo with court papers for a federal civil suit under the Alien Tort Claims Act; nine Guatemalans charged him with acts of torture, abduction and murder during counterinsurgency operations in western Guatemala in 1982, when he was army chief of staff. Gramajo lost that and another human rights suit later in the year by default [see Update #737].
*3. Honduras: Another Campesino Murdered in Aguán
Unidentified men on motorcycles shot Honduran campesino Adelmo Leiva dead the morning of Nov. 25 as he was waiting for a bus with his wife and daughter in Trujillo, in the northern department of Colón. Leiva was a member of the Despertar Cooperative, one of the cooperatives forming the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA). Along with other campesino organizations, MARCA has sponsored occupations of estates in the Lower Aguán River Valley in Colón since December 2009 to regain land that the campesinos say big landowners bought illegally in the 1990s.
Although some of the land disputes have been settled this year, other struggles continue, as has the killing of campesinos [see Update #1151]. According to the French wire service Agence France Presse, the number of dead in the violence over the past three years is now about 90, the great majority of them campesinos. After Leiva’s murder the Honduran branch of the international campesino movement Vía Campesina said that living in the Aguán region involved “high risk.” “The terror appears to be a well thought-out strategy to provoke a mass exodus from the zone with pernicious and dangerous objectives,” the group charged. (Adital (Brazil) 11/26/12; AFP 11/26/12 via La Tribuna (Honduras))
*4. Haiti: One Killed in Infrastructure Protest
A series of demonstrations that started in the city of Jérémie in the southwestern Haitian department of Grand'Anse on Nov. 27 turned violent on Nov. 30 when more than 50 agents of the Haitian National Police (PNH) arrived to reinforce the local police. Agents of the Company of Intervention for the Maintenance of Order (CIMO), the Haitian riot police, reportedly used tear gas and gunfire to disperse several hundred protesters, who responded by hurling rocks at the agents. A vendor whose name was given as Wilber Bien-Aimé by one source and Hilder Victor by another was shot dead in the Sainte-Hélène neighborhood, and three other people were wounded. Three police agents were injured by rocks.
The crowd carried the victim’s body to the local chief prosecutor, Rosny Saint-Louis, and then set fire either to the official’s house or to his mother’s house--the sources differ. No injuries were reported from the fire.
The protests came in response to delays in a project for repairing the 69-km highway from Jérémie to Les Cayes in South department. The Brazilian company Construtora OAS Ltd contracted with the Haitian government, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to carry out the project for $95 million. OAS started work in 2009 but suspended its operations in August 2012, leaving a section unfinished. Local residents charged that the company appeared to be removing its equipment and materials; this claim apparently precipitated the militant protests that paralyzed Jérémie for four days as residents blocked roads with flaming tires. On Nov. 30 Public Works Minister Jacques Rousseau promised that work would resume on the rehabilitation project. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 11/29/12, 11/30/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 11/30/12; Haiti Chery blog 8/15/12 from Le Matin (Haiti)) [Jérémie is at the tip of the long southwestern peninsula that was especially hard hit by the hurricane Sandy in October; see Update #1150.]
In other news, on Nov. 28 representatives of some 35 community radio stations demonstrated in front of the National Telecommunications Council (Conatel) and the Communication Ministry in Port-au-Prince to protest the Nov. 9 closing of Radyo Vwa Klodi Mizo (RVKM, “Voice of Claudy Museau”), a community station in Les Cayes. Conatel said it took the step because the RVKM didn’t have a license, but protesters dismissed the claim. “Pure dictatorship,” one participant said. “This is reminiscent of the practices of Jean-Claude Duvalier,” the former “president for life” (1971-1986). “Baboukèt la tonbe,” the protesters chanted—“the muzzle is gone,” a slogan that was popular after Duvalier’s ouster in 1986. Social organizations such as the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) and the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA) were also supporting the station, which is named for a teacher and activist murdered in 1992 under a 1991-1994 military regime.
The station’s directors say they have applied for a license, and an unnamed source close to Conatel told the Haitian online news service AlterPresse that meetings were under way to regularize the station’s status. “There’s hope for RVKM,” the source said. (AlterPresse 11/13/12, 11/28/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Immigration
Mapuche Indians Fight New Airport in Southern Chile
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3995-mapuche-indians-fight-new-airport-in-southern-chile
Brazilian Mining Giant Given Green Light for Perilous Railway Plan
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3993-brazilian-mining-giant-given-green-light-for-perilous-railway-plan
Using the Airwaves for Empowerment of Quechua Women in Bolivia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3992-using-the-airwaves-for-empowerment-of-quechua-women-in-bolivia
"Yes to Life! No to Gold!" Indigenous Communities in Peru Struggle to Defend Land From Mining
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3987-qyes-to-life-no-to-goldq-indigenous-communities-in-peru-struggle-to-defend-land-from-mining
Indigenous Protests Grow as Ecuador Auctions Amazon Oil Blocks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3994-indigenous-protests-grow-as-ecuador-auctions-amazon-oil-blocks
Ecuador's Election: Correa, His Opponents, and Possible Outcomes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3990-elections-ecuadorian-style
Colombia: ICC "false positive" probe advances
http://ww4report.com/node/11743
The United States and the Future Security Role of Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/26/united-states-and-future-security-role-colombia
Colombia: war with Nicaragua "last resort"
http://ww4report.com/node/11748
Gender and Sexuality Groups Rally for Greater Gender Equality in Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7514
Guyana Seeks to Shield Gold Miners from Mercury Ban
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3989-guyana-seeks-to-shield-gold-miners-from-mercury-ban
US-El Salvador: Threats to Privatize Education Meet International Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/3996-us-el-salvador-threats-to-privatize-education-meet-international-resistance
Honduras’ Party Primaries: Voters Went to the Polls, But Can Next Year’s Elections be “Free and Fair”?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4000-honduras-party-primaries-voters-went-to-the-polls-but-can-next-years-elections-be-free-and-fair
Honduras: record coke bust as US pledges Drug War support
http://globalganjareport.com/content/honduras-record-coke-bust-as-us-pledges-drug-war-support
Action Alert! Guatemalan Anti-Mining Activists Threatened
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3991-action-alert-guatemalan-anti-mining-activists-threatened-
Guatemala: Rural Farmers Lose Livestock Due to Water Contamination by Marlin Mine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3988-guatemala-livestock-deaths-after-drinking-water-contaminated-by-marlin-mine
The Skeletons in Calderon's Closet (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/12/the-skeletons-in-calderons-closet.php
Mexico: peasant ecologist killed in Guerrero
http://ww4report.com/node/11744
Mexico: more mass graves in Chihuahua, Guerrero
http://ww4report.com/node/11738
The Contradictions of the “New” Juárez (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8410
Mexico Passes Pro-business Labor Law Reform; Independent Unions Promise Resistance
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=207#1518
Two Decades of "free Trade" Is Enough: Mexican Organizations Meet, Say No to Expansion Through the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=207#1521
Haiti, D.R. to Present $2 Billion Plan to Improve Health and Sanitation Infrastructure to Fight Cholera
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-dr-to-present-2-billion-plan-to-improve-health-and-sanitation-infrastructure-to-fight-cholera
Our Resistance: An Interview With Rafael Cancel Miranda
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/27/our-resistance-interview-rafael-cancel-miranda
Divided Loyalties: Indigenous Communities Struggle Over Dual Residency (Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/30/divided-loyalties-indigenous-communities-struggle-over-dual-residency
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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 #1154, December 2, 2012
1. Argentina: Anti-Mining Activists Assaulted in Chubut
2. Mexico: Peña Nieto Takes Office as Youths Riot
3. Honduras: Another Campesino Murdered in Aguán
4. Haiti: One Killed in Infrastructure Protest
5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, 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. Argentina: Anti-Mining Activists Assaulted in Chubut
According to Argentine environmentalist groups, dozens of opponents of large-scale mining projects were injured when hundreds of construction workers attacked them at the provincial legislature building in Rawson, the administrative capital of the southern province of Chubut, on the late afternoon of Nov. 27. At a press conference held the next day in the offices of the Chubut Education Workers Association (ATECH), local activists charged that the attack had been carried out by members of the Workers Union of Construction of the Argentine Republic Union (UOCRA) contracted by Chubut governor Martín Buzzi, of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist), and federal legislative deputy Carlos Eliceche. UOCRA general secretary Gerardo Martínez is said to have worked as a secret agent at the Campo de Mayo military base during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Local activists had been attending sessions of the provincial Chamber of Deputies twice a week for more than three months to protest against Gov. Buzzi’s effort to circumvent the province’s Law 5001, which bans open-pit mines and the use of cyanide in mining operations in Chubut. The activists, organized in a community assembly, have called for a referendum on the issue. When they arrived for the session on Nov. 27, they were confronted by construction workers armed with clubs and chains who had come to Rawson in 30 UOCRA minivans; some witnesses said mining company vehicles were also present. The most seriously injured in the attack included a boy of 15, a young woman and an older woman.
“The mining companies have taken the law into their own hands, and the government has allowed it,” local deputy Roberto Risso said, “and the officials are going to have to answer for this.” Anti-mining assemblies from other provinces sent statements of support for the Chubut activists. (Adital (Brazil) 11/28/12 from Unión de Asambleas de la Patagonia (UAP); Bariloche Opina (Argentina) 11/28/12)
The federal government and the provincial governments get significant funding from deals with international mining corporations, and the movement against large-scale mining that has developed over the past year in areas near the Andes has sometimes been met with government repression. An encampment by local environment activists in the northwestern province of Catarmarca was attacked by soldiers, police and supposed “pro-mining activists” on July 20 [see Update #1137].
*2. Mexico: Peña Nieto Takes Office as Youths Riot
Protests against Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto during his inauguration on Dec. 1 quickly turned into violent confrontations between police and demonstrators that disrupted much of downtown Mexico City. The protests were called by the National Convention Against the Imposition, a coalition of groups holding that Peña Nieto’s election last July was manipulated, and #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”), a student movement that arose in the spring in response to the election campaign [see Update #1130]. But masked youths, many of them wearing black t-shirts with anarchist symbols, quickly became the center of attention at the Dec. 1 demonstration.
The confrontations began around 7 am near the San Lázaro subway and bus stations at the heavily guarded and barricaded Chamber of Deputies, where the inauguration was to take place about three hours later. Determined to break through the metal barriers, the masked youths threw rocks, metal pipes and Molotov cocktails at the federal police, who responded with exceptional violence, using tear gas, pepper spray and water cannons. The media reported that the agents also used rubber bullets; police spokespeople denied the reports. Many #YoSoy132 supporters moved away from the masked youths, as did the famously militant teachers from the southern state of Oaxaca, although both groups organized brigades to assist protesters who were wounded or were overwhelmed by the tear gas.
Dozens of protesters were injured. At around 10 am #YoSoy132 reported that a youth named Carlos Yahir Valdés had been killed by a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet; Adrián Ramírez, president of the Mexican League for the Defense of Human Rights (LIMEDDH), said the victim was named Carlos Valdivia and had been seriously wounded but not killed.
Eventually the youths in black moved west towards the Zócalo plaza and then on to the Palacio de Bellas Artes cultural center and the Alameda park. Along the way they smashed windows, streetlights, phone booths and ATMs; looted stores and gas stations; and battled the Mexico City police. At times passers-by supplied the protesters with bricks to throw at the police, while smiling tourists took pictures. At least one private car was destroyed and one motorcycle was set on fire. (La Jornada (Mexico) 12/2/12)
During his first day in office, President Peña Nieto announced “13 specific decisions” to improve the situation in Mexico, including a universal social security system, life insurance for heads of households, educational reforms, and revival of passenger railroads. He also promised to maintain a zero deficit in the budget while carrying out his programs. (LJ 12/2/12)
Outgoing president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012)--whose militarized fight against drug trafficking set off the violence in which 50,000 Mexicans died, according to critics—is planning to leave Mexico, at least temporarily. On Nov. 28 Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that Calderón will hold a one-year fellowship at the school starting in January. “This fellowship will be a tremendous opportunity for me to reflect upon my six years in office,” Calderón said in a statement.
Calderón received a master’s degree from the Kennedy school in 2000. The Reuters wire service noted that other recent students at the school include Bo Guagua, son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai, and Paula Broadwell, co-author of a book about former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Gen. David Petraeus, who resigned after acknowledging that he’d had an affair with her. (Reuters 11/28/12) Another former student was the late Guatemalan general Héctor Alejandro Gramajo Morales. At his graduation in June 1991 human rights activists served Gramajo with court papers for a federal civil suit under the Alien Tort Claims Act; nine Guatemalans charged him with acts of torture, abduction and murder during counterinsurgency operations in western Guatemala in 1982, when he was army chief of staff. Gramajo lost that and another human rights suit later in the year by default [see Update #737].
*3. Honduras: Another Campesino Murdered in Aguán
Unidentified men on motorcycles shot Honduran campesino Adelmo Leiva dead the morning of Nov. 25 as he was waiting for a bus with his wife and daughter in Trujillo, in the northern department of Colón. Leiva was a member of the Despertar Cooperative, one of the cooperatives forming the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA). Along with other campesino organizations, MARCA has sponsored occupations of estates in the Lower Aguán River Valley in Colón since December 2009 to regain land that the campesinos say big landowners bought illegally in the 1990s.
Although some of the land disputes have been settled this year, other struggles continue, as has the killing of campesinos [see Update #1151]. According to the French wire service Agence France Presse, the number of dead in the violence over the past three years is now about 90, the great majority of them campesinos. After Leiva’s murder the Honduran branch of the international campesino movement Vía Campesina said that living in the Aguán region involved “high risk.” “The terror appears to be a well thought-out strategy to provoke a mass exodus from the zone with pernicious and dangerous objectives,” the group charged. (Adital (Brazil) 11/26/12; AFP 11/26/12 via La Tribuna (Honduras))
*4. Haiti: One Killed in Infrastructure Protest
A series of demonstrations that started in the city of Jérémie in the southwestern Haitian department of Grand'Anse on Nov. 27 turned violent on Nov. 30 when more than 50 agents of the Haitian National Police (PNH) arrived to reinforce the local police. Agents of the Company of Intervention for the Maintenance of Order (CIMO), the Haitian riot police, reportedly used tear gas and gunfire to disperse several hundred protesters, who responded by hurling rocks at the agents. A vendor whose name was given as Wilber Bien-Aimé by one source and Hilder Victor by another was shot dead in the Sainte-Hélène neighborhood, and three other people were wounded. Three police agents were injured by rocks.
The crowd carried the victim’s body to the local chief prosecutor, Rosny Saint-Louis, and then set fire either to the official’s house or to his mother’s house--the sources differ. No injuries were reported from the fire.
The protests came in response to delays in a project for repairing the 69-km highway from Jérémie to Les Cayes in South department. The Brazilian company Construtora OAS Ltd contracted with the Haitian government, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to carry out the project for $95 million. OAS started work in 2009 but suspended its operations in August 2012, leaving a section unfinished. Local residents charged that the company appeared to be removing its equipment and materials; this claim apparently precipitated the militant protests that paralyzed Jérémie for four days as residents blocked roads with flaming tires. On Nov. 30 Public Works Minister Jacques Rousseau promised that work would resume on the rehabilitation project. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 11/29/12, 11/30/12; AlterPresse (Haiti) 11/30/12; Haiti Chery blog 8/15/12 from Le Matin (Haiti)) [Jérémie is at the tip of the long southwestern peninsula that was especially hard hit by the hurricane Sandy in October; see Update #1150.]
In other news, on Nov. 28 representatives of some 35 community radio stations demonstrated in front of the National Telecommunications Council (Conatel) and the Communication Ministry in Port-au-Prince to protest the Nov. 9 closing of Radyo Vwa Klodi Mizo (RVKM, “Voice of Claudy Museau”), a community station in Les Cayes. Conatel said it took the step because the RVKM didn’t have a license, but protesters dismissed the claim. “Pure dictatorship,” one participant said. “This is reminiscent of the practices of Jean-Claude Duvalier,” the former “president for life” (1971-1986). “Baboukèt la tonbe,” the protesters chanted—“the muzzle is gone,” a slogan that was popular after Duvalier’s ouster in 1986. Social organizations such as the Papaye Peasant Movement (MPP) and the Force for Reflection and Action on Housing (FRAKKA) were also supporting the station, which is named for a teacher and activist murdered in 1992 under a 1991-1994 military regime.
The station’s directors say they have applied for a license, and an unnamed source close to Conatel told the Haitian online news service AlterPresse that meetings were under way to regularize the station’s status. “There’s hope for RVKM,” the source said. (AlterPresse 11/13/12, 11/28/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Immigration
Mapuche Indians Fight New Airport in Southern Chile
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3995-mapuche-indians-fight-new-airport-in-southern-chile
Brazilian Mining Giant Given Green Light for Perilous Railway Plan
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3993-brazilian-mining-giant-given-green-light-for-perilous-railway-plan
Using the Airwaves for Empowerment of Quechua Women in Bolivia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3992-using-the-airwaves-for-empowerment-of-quechua-women-in-bolivia
"Yes to Life! No to Gold!" Indigenous Communities in Peru Struggle to Defend Land From Mining
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3987-qyes-to-life-no-to-goldq-indigenous-communities-in-peru-struggle-to-defend-land-from-mining
Indigenous Protests Grow as Ecuador Auctions Amazon Oil Blocks
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3994-indigenous-protests-grow-as-ecuador-auctions-amazon-oil-blocks
Ecuador's Election: Correa, His Opponents, and Possible Outcomes
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3990-elections-ecuadorian-style
Colombia: ICC "false positive" probe advances
http://ww4report.com/node/11743
The United States and the Future Security Role of Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/26/united-states-and-future-security-role-colombia
Colombia: war with Nicaragua "last resort"
http://ww4report.com/node/11748
Gender and Sexuality Groups Rally for Greater Gender Equality in Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7514
Guyana Seeks to Shield Gold Miners from Mercury Ban
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3989-guyana-seeks-to-shield-gold-miners-from-mercury-ban
US-El Salvador: Threats to Privatize Education Meet International Resistance
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/el-salvador-archives-74/3996-us-el-salvador-threats-to-privatize-education-meet-international-resistance
Honduras’ Party Primaries: Voters Went to the Polls, But Can Next Year’s Elections be “Free and Fair”?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/4000-honduras-party-primaries-voters-went-to-the-polls-but-can-next-years-elections-be-free-and-fair
Honduras: record coke bust as US pledges Drug War support
http://globalganjareport.com/content/honduras-record-coke-bust-as-us-pledges-drug-war-support
Action Alert! Guatemalan Anti-Mining Activists Threatened
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3991-action-alert-guatemalan-anti-mining-activists-threatened-
Guatemala: Rural Farmers Lose Livestock Due to Water Contamination by Marlin Mine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3988-guatemala-livestock-deaths-after-drinking-water-contaminated-by-marlin-mine
The Skeletons in Calderon's Closet (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/12/the-skeletons-in-calderons-closet.php
Mexico: peasant ecologist killed in Guerrero
http://ww4report.com/node/11744
Mexico: more mass graves in Chihuahua, Guerrero
http://ww4report.com/node/11738
The Contradictions of the “New” Juárez (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8410
Mexico Passes Pro-business Labor Law Reform; Independent Unions Promise Resistance
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=207#1518
Two Decades of "free Trade" Is Enough: Mexican Organizations Meet, Say No to Expansion Through the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP)
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=207#1521
Haiti, D.R. to Present $2 Billion Plan to Improve Health and Sanitation Infrastructure to Fight Cholera
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-dr-to-present-2-billion-plan-to-improve-health-and-sanitation-infrastructure-to-fight-cholera
Our Resistance: An Interview With Rafael Cancel Miranda
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/27/our-resistance-interview-rafael-cancel-miranda
Divided Loyalties: Indigenous Communities Struggle Over Dual Residency (Immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/30/divided-loyalties-indigenous-communities-struggle-over-dual-residency
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday 27 November 2012
NYC, 11/30/12: Remembering Bernie McFall
Bernie McFall was a mainstay of New York-area activism for many years: a reliable supporter of solidarity with Central America, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine; a strong unionist; a regular volunteer for WBAI and for recycling efforts; an organizer of New York contingents for the annual protests at the US Army School of the Americas.
Bernie died on Oct. 16 after battling two forms of cancer. Friends and colleagues will be holding an informal gathering on Friday, November 30 to share memories of Bernie. Filmmaker Konrad Aderer, who featured Bernie in his documentary about Farouk Abdel-Muhti, “Enemy Alien,” will show video footage of Bernie. Please join us.
Bernie left a large collection of books on Latin America and the Middle East, along with reading materials in several languages, much of it in Arabic. He wanted his books to be given to people who could make good use of them. We will make the books available to the community before and during the memorial, starting at 6 pm.
For more information, write weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com
or visit http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2012/10/bernie-mcfall-presente.html
Bernie died on Oct. 16 after battling two forms of cancer. Friends and colleagues will be holding an informal gathering on Friday, November 30 to share memories of Bernie. Filmmaker Konrad Aderer, who featured Bernie in his documentary about Farouk Abdel-Muhti, “Enemy Alien,” will show video footage of Bernie. Please join us.
Friday, November 30, 2012, 6:30 pm
AJ Muste Memorial Institute
339 Lafayette Street, buzzer 11
New York, NY
at Bleecker Street; take the 6 train to Bleecker Street, or the B,D,F or M to Broadway-Lafayette
Bernie left a large collection of books on Latin America and the Middle East, along with reading materials in several languages, much of it in Arabic. He wanted his books to be given to people who could make good use of them. We will make the books available to the community before and during the memorial, starting at 6 pm.
For more information, write weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com
or visit http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/2012/10/bernie-mcfall-presente.html
WNU #1153: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1153, November 25, 2012
1. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
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. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
In a Nov. 17 statement the leaders of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), a trade bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay (suspended), Uruguay and Venezuela, expressed their “strongest condemnation of the violence unleashed between Israel and Palestine” and their “concern with the disproportionate use of force” since Israel began a military offensive against Gaza on Nov. 14. Mercosur also expressed “its support to the request from the state of Palestine to obtain the status of [United Nations] observer member.”
The four active Mercosur members are among the 11 Latin American countries that have recognized Palestine as a state [see Update #1063]; the others are Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru. Mercosur signed a “free trade” agreement with the Palestinian National Authority in December 2011; it signed a similar trade agreement with Israel in 2007, a move opposed by many leftists, who feel cutting off trade with Mercosur would put pressure on the Israeli government. Israel’s annual exports to Mercosur are worth about $700 million; Brazil by itself is the third largest recipient of Israeli exports in the world. (MercoPress (Montevideo) 11/17/12; Aporrea.org (Venezuela) 11/19/12; People’s Daily (China) 11/21/12)
[Paraguay was suspended from Mercosur after the legislature's sudden impeachment of President Fernando Lugo on June 22 but remains a member; see Update #1135.]
Some Latin American leaders were stronger than others in their condemnation of the Israeli operation, codenamed “Pillar of Defense,” which was suspended in a ceasefire agreement on Nov. 21. On Nov. 19 Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said “the first step” for resolving the conflict “should be the creation of a free and independent Palestinian state that can negotiate peace as an equal with the state of Israel.” Also on Nov. 19, El Salvador’s governing leftist party, the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN), condemned the offensive as a “new massacre…against the people of Palestine” and charged that Israel had provoked the conflict. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had characterized “Pillar of Defense” as “savage” a few days earlier, while the Cuban government repeated its “most firm support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights, which include the creation of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
“[W]e back the right of the Palestinian people to be able to have their own free, independent and autonomous state,” Chile’s rightwing president, Sebastián Piñera, said during a visit to Turkey on Nov. 19, but he stressed that Chile “also support[s] Israel’s right to count on secure borders in peace.” According to the Spanish wire service EFE, Chile has the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East.
Many groups in the region held protests against the Israeli offensive. About 30 Uruguayans demonstrated in Montevideo on Nov. 19 in front of the Israeli embassy, calling Israel a “genocidal state.” Dozens of members of the Salvadoran Palestinian Association and other organizations protested the same day in front of the Israeli embassy in El Salvador. (EFE 11/19/12 via Diario de Yucatán (Mexico))
A Mexican group protested at the Angel of Independence in Mexico City on Nov. 20, and another demonstration was held in front of the Israeli embassy. Activists were planning a further show of support for the Palestinians in front of the United Nations (UN) office in Mexico City on Nov. 27, two days before Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is scheduled to ask the UN General Assembly for observer status for Palestine. (Adital (Brazil) 11/22/12) Hundreds of Colombians and resident Palestinians demonstrated at the Israeli embassy in Bogotá on Nov. 20; the protest tied up traffic in the city center for about two hours. A protest in Managua the next day by Nicaraguans, resident Palestinians and US citizen Nan McCurry targeted the US embassy. “I’m asking the government of my country to stop supporting Israel so that this war will end immediately,” McCurry said in a brief speech. (People’s Daily 11/21/12, 11/21/12)
A number of Arab and Palestinian groups, with the support of Brazil’s Unified Workers’ Central (CUT), are holding a Free Palestine World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1. The goal is “to consolidate and strengthen the international solidarity movement for the rights of the Palestinians.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/20/12)
*2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
Argentina’s largest union federation, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), and the more radical Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA) sponsored a nationwide general strike on Nov. 20 to protest President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s economic policies. The majority of the country’s unions supported the strike call, as did leftist parties and the leftist Classist and Combative Current (CCC), but the CGT section led by Antonio Caló, representing 33 industrial and service unions, ignored the strike call. Organizers called the action a success, while President Fernández dismissed it as “a phenomenon limited to some service unions and to the area around the federal capital.”
The strikers blocked the main highways into Buenos Aires and other major cities. Schools, courts, banks and gas stations were closed in Buenos Aires province, where about a third of the country’s population lives, and hospitals only accepted emergency cases. In the central province of Santa Fe, the strike shut down Rosario, the main port for the export of agricultural goods; oil production was affected in Río Negro, Neuquén and La Pampa provinces. Airports remained open but had many less flights than usual.
In addition to blocking roads, strikers reportedly threw stones at buses and punctured tires to keep people from going to work. CTA Pablo Micheli leader said strikers had blocked roads at 300 points; the media estimated that the number was 160. While claiming that hundreds of thousands of workers supported the strike, Micheli admitted that without the blockages “the strike wouldn’t have had the rate of observation that it had.” “[I]n Argentina there’s no right to strike,” he said. “We were forced to have piquetes [militant road blockages] so that the workers could justify not having gone to their work places.”
The strikers’ demands included an increase in the minimum wage and in social assistance programs; the elimination of a tax on workers’ incomes; and an increase in retirement pensions. The groups supporting the strike protested the loss of purchasing power by much of the population; some private economists claim the annual inflation rate will come to 25% this year.
The Nov. 20 action was Argentina’s first general strike since December 2002, and it marked the end of a long-time alliance between CGT general secretary Hugo Moyano and the faction of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) formed by President Fernández and her late husband, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) [see Update #988]. (Terra.es (Spain) 11/21/12 from Europa Press and unidentified wire services;La Jornada (Mexico) 11/21/12 from correspondent)
*3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
Complaints about abuses by Mexican police and soldiers have increased dramatically over the past seven years, according to testimony by Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, the president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), to the Mexican Senate’s Human Rights Commission on Nov. 21. Plascencia was reporting principally on the period from Jan. 1, 2005 to July 31, 2012, which overlaps the administration of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and his militarization of the “war on drugs.” Calderón took office on Dec. 1, 2006; he will be succeeded this Dec. 1 by Enrique Peña Nieto.
During the 2005-2012 period the CNDH received 5,568 complaints about alleged failures to follow required procedures in issuing or executing warrants for searches, Plascencia said. The agency is also investigating 2,126 cases of people who were reportedly disappeared. There were more than 9,000 complaints citing arbitrary detentions, a 121% increase during the period. In 2005 there was only one complaint of torture; in 2011 the number of complaints about torture or other cruel and degrading treatment had risen to 2,040. Since 2005 the CNDH has received a total of 34,385 complaints against federal public servants, with an 84% increase just in the last three years. The alleged abuses were “mainly concentrated under the headings of illegal searches, forcible disappearances, arbitrary detentions, executions and torture,” Plascencia said. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/22/12)
On Nov. 21 Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre Rivero publicly apologized at a ceremony in Acapulco for the deaths of two students and a gas station worker during a confrontation on Dec. 12, 2011 between police and students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College, located in the Guerrero village of Ayotzinapa. The apology was in response to a March recommendation by the CNDH, which also required compensation for the victims’ families and for people injured in the incident [see Update #1123]. Víctor Hugo Pérez, human rights director for the federal Public Security Secretariat (SSP), was also present to offer his “profound and heartfelt apology” for the role of federal police agents in the confrontation.
The brother of the gas station worker was the only relative of a victim to attend. The other families and students from the college boycotted the ceremony; instead, they held a press conference where they demanded punishment for the officials they say are responsible for the killings. State police agents Ismael Matadamas Salinas and Rey David Cortés Flores are the only suspects detained in the case, although the Guerrero legislature is considering a petition for lifting the immunity of former state chief prosecutor Guerrero Alberto López Rosas and former state public security secretary Ramón Almonte Borja. (LJ 11/20/12, 11/22/12)
*4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
The 22nd annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), brought several thousand activists to the Army's Fort Benning base in Columbus, Georgia, for a series of events from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18. One demonstrator, Robert Norman Chantal of Americus, Georgia, was arrested when he climbed over the base's fence during the concluding event, a symbolic funeral march, on Nov. 18. He was released later on his own recognizance, according to a Fort Benning representative. Chantal, who faces a possible six-month sentence, will be tried in a US District Court on Jan. 9.
The protest’s sponsor, SOA Watch, opposes the US Army’s training of Latin American soldiers, charging that SOA graduates have been among the region’s most notorious human rights violators. The group’s protests have gained some sympathy in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela have ended their relations with the school, and in September Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega told a human rights delegation that Nicaragua will withdraw from SOA/WHINSEC [see Update #1144]. There may also some movement in US ruling circles. On Nov. 14 Denis McDonough, national deputy security adviser to US president Barack Obama, met with an SOA Watch delegation; the group asked for the school to be shut down by executive order. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) is planning to introduce legislation in Congress in January to suspend operations at the school and investigate human rights abuses in Latin America. (SOA Watch press release 11/18/12; Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer 11/18/12)
On Nov. 19, the day after this year’s protests, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, a Catholic religious order, issued a statement confirming that the Vatican was dismissing SOA Watch’s founder, Father Roy Bourgeois, from the priesthood and from his order for participating in an August 2008 rite ordaining a woman as a priest. Bourgeois said that the dismissal was “very difficult and painful” but that his “only regret is that it took me so long to confront the issue of male power and domination in the Catholic Church.” (Religion News Service 11/21/12 via Washington Post)
The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH) responded to the decision with a statement noting Bourgeois’ solidarity with Hondurans after the June 2009 military coup and praising him as “a humanist, a tireless fighter for the imparting of justice, a defender of the poor and a companion to social struggles throughout the continent.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/23/12) Bourgeois’ supporters have started an online petition at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11972 where people can express their solidarity with his “decision to follow his conscience.”
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
#Radical Media: Communication Unbound (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/20/radical-media-communication-unbound
Latin America’s Left Turn Collides with Indigenous Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3974-latin-americas-left-turn-collides-with-indigenous-movements
Argentina fights US order to pay $1.33 billion debt
http://ww4report.com/node/11719
Industrial Soy and Sugar Cane Fuel Native Land Conflicts in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3978-industrial-soy-and-sugar-cane-fuel-native-land-conflicts-in-brazil
Brazil: crime wars rock Sao Paulo
http://ww4report.com/node/11728
Brazil: Amazon native killed by federal police
http://ww4report.com/node/11727
Brazil: violence halts work at Belo Monte dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11726
Bolivia: dissent over indigenous identity in census
http://ww4report.com/node/11725
Peru: Amazonian leaders press land demarcation
http://ww4report.com/node/11724
Peru: campesino alliance with "illegal" miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11723
Colombia: indigenous peace proposal advanced
http://ww4report.com/node/11722
Colombia rejects Hague ruling in Nicaragua maritime dispute
http://ww4report.com/node/11729
Mass Participation in Debate on Venezuela’s Socialist Plan
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7498
EL Salvador: Proposed Culture Law Would Provide Healthcare and Funding for Artists
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3985-el-salvador-proposed-culture-law-would-provide-healthcare-and-funding-for-artists
Murders of Teenagers and Opposition Party Members Underscore Impunity in Honduras and the Failure of U.S. “Vetting”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3977-murders-of-teenagers-and-opposition-party-members-underscore-impunity-in-honduras-and-the-failure-of-us-vetting
Honduras’ Party Primaries: Voters Went to the Polls, But Can Next Year’s Elections be “Free and Fair”?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/honduras-party-primaries-voters-went-to-the-polls-but-can-next-years-elections-be-free-and-fair
Action Alert! Protect Pacific Resistance in San José del Golfo, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3983-action-alert-protect-pacific-resistance-in-san-jose-del-golfo-guatemala
Canadian Mining on Trial (Guatemala)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3980-canadian-mining-on-trial
Guatemala’s ‘Little School of the Americas’
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3976-guatemalas-little-school-of-the-americas
Should Chiapas Farmers Suffer for California’s Carbon? (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3975-should-chiapas-farmers-suffer-for-californias-carbon
War or Peace in Mexico?
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/11/24/war-or-peace-in-mexico/
Mexico: pressure mounts for drug legalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11730
Returning Migrant Children Pose Educational Challenge in Mexico
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/11/returning-migrant-children-pose-educational-challenge-in-mexico.php
The Caribbean’s Agricultural Crisis
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/23/caribbean%E2%80%99s-agricultural-crisis
Cholera Continues to Spread After Hurricane Sandy (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-continues-to-spread-after-hurricane-sandy
Quebec fracking ban challenged under NAFTA
http://ww4report.com/node/11731
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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 #1153, November 25, 2012
1. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
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. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
In a Nov. 17 statement the leaders of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), a trade bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay (suspended), Uruguay and Venezuela, expressed their “strongest condemnation of the violence unleashed between Israel and Palestine” and their “concern with the disproportionate use of force” since Israel began a military offensive against Gaza on Nov. 14. Mercosur also expressed “its support to the request from the state of Palestine to obtain the status of [United Nations] observer member.”
The four active Mercosur members are among the 11 Latin American countries that have recognized Palestine as a state [see Update #1063]; the others are Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru. Mercosur signed a “free trade” agreement with the Palestinian National Authority in December 2011; it signed a similar trade agreement with Israel in 2007, a move opposed by many leftists, who feel cutting off trade with Mercosur would put pressure on the Israeli government. Israel’s annual exports to Mercosur are worth about $700 million; Brazil by itself is the third largest recipient of Israeli exports in the world. (MercoPress (Montevideo) 11/17/12; Aporrea.org (Venezuela) 11/19/12; People’s Daily (China) 11/21/12)
[Paraguay was suspended from Mercosur after the legislature's sudden impeachment of President Fernando Lugo on June 22 but remains a member; see Update #1135.]
Some Latin American leaders were stronger than others in their condemnation of the Israeli operation, codenamed “Pillar of Defense,” which was suspended in a ceasefire agreement on Nov. 21. On Nov. 19 Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said “the first step” for resolving the conflict “should be the creation of a free and independent Palestinian state that can negotiate peace as an equal with the state of Israel.” Also on Nov. 19, El Salvador’s governing leftist party, the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN), condemned the offensive as a “new massacre…against the people of Palestine” and charged that Israel had provoked the conflict. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had characterized “Pillar of Defense” as “savage” a few days earlier, while the Cuban government repeated its “most firm support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights, which include the creation of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
“[W]e back the right of the Palestinian people to be able to have their own free, independent and autonomous state,” Chile’s rightwing president, Sebastián Piñera, said during a visit to Turkey on Nov. 19, but he stressed that Chile “also support[s] Israel’s right to count on secure borders in peace.” According to the Spanish wire service EFE, Chile has the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East.
Many groups in the region held protests against the Israeli offensive. About 30 Uruguayans demonstrated in Montevideo on Nov. 19 in front of the Israeli embassy, calling Israel a “genocidal state.” Dozens of members of the Salvadoran Palestinian Association and other organizations protested the same day in front of the Israeli embassy in El Salvador. (EFE 11/19/12 via Diario de Yucatán (Mexico))
A Mexican group protested at the Angel of Independence in Mexico City on Nov. 20, and another demonstration was held in front of the Israeli embassy. Activists were planning a further show of support for the Palestinians in front of the United Nations (UN) office in Mexico City on Nov. 27, two days before Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is scheduled to ask the UN General Assembly for observer status for Palestine. (Adital (Brazil) 11/22/12) Hundreds of Colombians and resident Palestinians demonstrated at the Israeli embassy in Bogotá on Nov. 20; the protest tied up traffic in the city center for about two hours. A protest in Managua the next day by Nicaraguans, resident Palestinians and US citizen Nan McCurry targeted the US embassy. “I’m asking the government of my country to stop supporting Israel so that this war will end immediately,” McCurry said in a brief speech. (People’s Daily 11/21/12, 11/21/12)
A number of Arab and Palestinian groups, with the support of Brazil’s Unified Workers’ Central (CUT), are holding a Free Palestine World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1. The goal is “to consolidate and strengthen the international solidarity movement for the rights of the Palestinians.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/20/12)
*2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
Argentina’s largest union federation, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), and the more radical Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA) sponsored a nationwide general strike on Nov. 20 to protest President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s economic policies. The majority of the country’s unions supported the strike call, as did leftist parties and the leftist Classist and Combative Current (CCC), but the CGT section led by Antonio Caló, representing 33 industrial and service unions, ignored the strike call. Organizers called the action a success, while President Fernández dismissed it as “a phenomenon limited to some service unions and to the area around the federal capital.”
The strikers blocked the main highways into Buenos Aires and other major cities. Schools, courts, banks and gas stations were closed in Buenos Aires province, where about a third of the country’s population lives, and hospitals only accepted emergency cases. In the central province of Santa Fe, the strike shut down Rosario, the main port for the export of agricultural goods; oil production was affected in Río Negro, Neuquén and La Pampa provinces. Airports remained open but had many less flights than usual.
In addition to blocking roads, strikers reportedly threw stones at buses and punctured tires to keep people from going to work. CTA Pablo Micheli leader said strikers had blocked roads at 300 points; the media estimated that the number was 160. While claiming that hundreds of thousands of workers supported the strike, Micheli admitted that without the blockages “the strike wouldn’t have had the rate of observation that it had.” “[I]n Argentina there’s no right to strike,” he said. “We were forced to have piquetes [militant road blockages] so that the workers could justify not having gone to their work places.”
The strikers’ demands included an increase in the minimum wage and in social assistance programs; the elimination of a tax on workers’ incomes; and an increase in retirement pensions. The groups supporting the strike protested the loss of purchasing power by much of the population; some private economists claim the annual inflation rate will come to 25% this year.
The Nov. 20 action was Argentina’s first general strike since December 2002, and it marked the end of a long-time alliance between CGT general secretary Hugo Moyano and the faction of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) formed by President Fernández and her late husband, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) [see Update #988]. (Terra.es (Spain) 11/21/12 from Europa Press and unidentified wire services;La Jornada (Mexico) 11/21/12 from correspondent)
*3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
Complaints about abuses by Mexican police and soldiers have increased dramatically over the past seven years, according to testimony by Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, the president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), to the Mexican Senate’s Human Rights Commission on Nov. 21. Plascencia was reporting principally on the period from Jan. 1, 2005 to July 31, 2012, which overlaps the administration of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and his militarization of the “war on drugs.” Calderón took office on Dec. 1, 2006; he will be succeeded this Dec. 1 by Enrique Peña Nieto.
During the 2005-2012 period the CNDH received 5,568 complaints about alleged failures to follow required procedures in issuing or executing warrants for searches, Plascencia said. The agency is also investigating 2,126 cases of people who were reportedly disappeared. There were more than 9,000 complaints citing arbitrary detentions, a 121% increase during the period. In 2005 there was only one complaint of torture; in 2011 the number of complaints about torture or other cruel and degrading treatment had risen to 2,040. Since 2005 the CNDH has received a total of 34,385 complaints against federal public servants, with an 84% increase just in the last three years. The alleged abuses were “mainly concentrated under the headings of illegal searches, forcible disappearances, arbitrary detentions, executions and torture,” Plascencia said. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/22/12)
On Nov. 21 Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre Rivero publicly apologized at a ceremony in Acapulco for the deaths of two students and a gas station worker during a confrontation on Dec. 12, 2011 between police and students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College, located in the Guerrero village of Ayotzinapa. The apology was in response to a March recommendation by the CNDH, which also required compensation for the victims’ families and for people injured in the incident [see Update #1123]. Víctor Hugo Pérez, human rights director for the federal Public Security Secretariat (SSP), was also present to offer his “profound and heartfelt apology” for the role of federal police agents in the confrontation.
The brother of the gas station worker was the only relative of a victim to attend. The other families and students from the college boycotted the ceremony; instead, they held a press conference where they demanded punishment for the officials they say are responsible for the killings. State police agents Ismael Matadamas Salinas and Rey David Cortés Flores are the only suspects detained in the case, although the Guerrero legislature is considering a petition for lifting the immunity of former state chief prosecutor Guerrero Alberto López Rosas and former state public security secretary Ramón Almonte Borja. (LJ 11/20/12, 11/22/12)
*4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
The 22nd annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), brought several thousand activists to the Army's Fort Benning base in Columbus, Georgia, for a series of events from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18. One demonstrator, Robert Norman Chantal of Americus, Georgia, was arrested when he climbed over the base's fence during the concluding event, a symbolic funeral march, on Nov. 18. He was released later on his own recognizance, according to a Fort Benning representative. Chantal, who faces a possible six-month sentence, will be tried in a US District Court on Jan. 9.
The protest’s sponsor, SOA Watch, opposes the US Army’s training of Latin American soldiers, charging that SOA graduates have been among the region’s most notorious human rights violators. The group’s protests have gained some sympathy in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela have ended their relations with the school, and in September Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega told a human rights delegation that Nicaragua will withdraw from SOA/WHINSEC [see Update #1144]. There may also some movement in US ruling circles. On Nov. 14 Denis McDonough, national deputy security adviser to US president Barack Obama, met with an SOA Watch delegation; the group asked for the school to be shut down by executive order. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) is planning to introduce legislation in Congress in January to suspend operations at the school and investigate human rights abuses in Latin America. (SOA Watch press release 11/18/12; Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer 11/18/12)
On Nov. 19, the day after this year’s protests, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, a Catholic religious order, issued a statement confirming that the Vatican was dismissing SOA Watch’s founder, Father Roy Bourgeois, from the priesthood and from his order for participating in an August 2008 rite ordaining a woman as a priest. Bourgeois said that the dismissal was “very difficult and painful” but that his “only regret is that it took me so long to confront the issue of male power and domination in the Catholic Church.” (Religion News Service 11/21/12 via Washington Post)
The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH) responded to the decision with a statement noting Bourgeois’ solidarity with Hondurans after the June 2009 military coup and praising him as “a humanist, a tireless fighter for the imparting of justice, a defender of the poor and a companion to social struggles throughout the continent.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/23/12) Bourgeois’ supporters have started an online petition at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11972 where people can express their solidarity with his “decision to follow his conscience.”
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
#Radical Media: Communication Unbound (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/20/radical-media-communication-unbound
Latin America’s Left Turn Collides with Indigenous Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3974-latin-americas-left-turn-collides-with-indigenous-movements
Argentina fights US order to pay $1.33 billion debt
http://ww4report.com/node/11719
Industrial Soy and Sugar Cane Fuel Native Land Conflicts in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3978-industrial-soy-and-sugar-cane-fuel-native-land-conflicts-in-brazil
Brazil: crime wars rock Sao Paulo
http://ww4report.com/node/11728
Brazil: Amazon native killed by federal police
http://ww4report.com/node/11727
Brazil: violence halts work at Belo Monte dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11726
Bolivia: dissent over indigenous identity in census
http://ww4report.com/node/11725
Peru: Amazonian leaders press land demarcation
http://ww4report.com/node/11724
Peru: campesino alliance with "illegal" miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11723
Colombia: indigenous peace proposal advanced
http://ww4report.com/node/11722
Colombia rejects Hague ruling in Nicaragua maritime dispute
http://ww4report.com/node/11729
Mass Participation in Debate on Venezuela’s Socialist Plan
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7498
EL Salvador: Proposed Culture Law Would Provide Healthcare and Funding for Artists
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3985-el-salvador-proposed-culture-law-would-provide-healthcare-and-funding-for-artists
Murders of Teenagers and Opposition Party Members Underscore Impunity in Honduras and the Failure of U.S. “Vetting”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3977-murders-of-teenagers-and-opposition-party-members-underscore-impunity-in-honduras-and-the-failure-of-us-vetting
Honduras’ Party Primaries: Voters Went to the Polls, But Can Next Year’s Elections be “Free and Fair”?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/honduras-party-primaries-voters-went-to-the-polls-but-can-next-years-elections-be-free-and-fair
Action Alert! Protect Pacific Resistance in San José del Golfo, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3983-action-alert-protect-pacific-resistance-in-san-jose-del-golfo-guatemala
Canadian Mining on Trial (Guatemala)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3980-canadian-mining-on-trial
Guatemala’s ‘Little School of the Americas’
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3976-guatemalas-little-school-of-the-americas
Should Chiapas Farmers Suffer for California’s Carbon? (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3975-should-chiapas-farmers-suffer-for-californias-carbon
War or Peace in Mexico?
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/11/24/war-or-peace-in-mexico/
Mexico: pressure mounts for drug legalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11730
Returning Migrant Children Pose Educational Challenge in Mexico
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/11/returning-migrant-children-pose-educational-challenge-in-mexico.php
The Caribbean’s Agricultural Crisis
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/23/caribbean%E2%80%99s-agricultural-crisis
Cholera Continues to Spread After Hurricane Sandy (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-continues-to-spread-after-hurricane-sandy
Quebec fracking ban challenged under NAFTA
http://ww4report.com/node/11731
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday 20 November 2012
WNU #1152: Mexican Congress Passes “Labor Reform”
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1152, November 18, 2012
1. Mexico: “Labor Reform” Passes; Economists Are “Upbeat”
2. Chile: Pascua Lama Mine Suspended Over Safety Issues
3. Dominican Republic: Austerity Protests Spread Abroad
4. Haiti: Students Protest Killing by Police Agent
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, 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: “Labor Reform” Passes; Economists Are “Upbeat”
The Mexican Senate voted 96-28 on Nov. 13 to approve changes to the 1970 Federal Labor Law (LFT) that will legalize the use of part-time and contract employees, allow the hiring of workers for trial periods, and limit the amount of back pay businesses are required to give laid-off workers [see Update #1146]. The controversial “labor reform,” which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies the week before, was sent on to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who was expected to sign it into law.
The labor code changes were pushed through--after a total of 71 days of debate in the two chambers--by legislators from the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with the support of two small centrist parties, the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) and the New Alliance Party (PANAL). Both President Calderón, a member of the PAN, and president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, a PRI member who is to succeed Calderón on Dec. 1, supported the changes. The only opposition in the Senate came from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the small leftist Labor Party (PT).
PAN and leftist legislators worked together in the past to include articles in the bill that would promote union democracy. The PRI, which historically has a base among conservative union leaders, strongly opposed these articles, and the Chamber of Deputies stripped them out of the final bill. An alliance of the PAN and the left in the Senate restored two of the articles, 388 and 390, by a vote of 65-61 during the Nov. 13 session; these would allow workers to use the secret ballot to choose the union that represents them and to vote on whether to approve a contract. But the Senate leadership separated these two articles from the bill and sent them back to the Chamber of Deputies for discussion; the rest of the bill was sent to Calderón to become law.
“[N]o one will be able to hide the fact that this bosses’ reform is being imposed by Peña Nieto, in association with the one who’s leaving [Calderón],” Senator Manuel Bartlett, the coordinator of the PT bench, announced. Bartlett, a PRI governor of Puebla state in the 1990s before reemerging as a leftist, expressed his confidence that Mexican workers would fight the new law and demand social justice, the way European workers were fighting similar attacks on labor—apparently a reference to anti-austerity strikes many European unions were planning for Nov. 14. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/14/12; Americas Blog 11/15/12)
A blog at the US business weekly Barron’s called the new bill a “much-needed labor reform” and said “economists are still upbeat” even though “[t]he reform is watered-down a bit.” Marco Oviedo, the head Mexican economist for the British banking group Barclays, described the bill as a “very important structural advance” that could lead to a 1.5 to 2% increase in Mexico’s GDP growth over the next decade. (Barron’s 11/14/12)
*2. Chile: Pascua Lama Mine Suspended Over Safety Issues
The Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation has had to suspend some of its operations at Pascua Lama--a giant open-pit gold, silver and copper mine being built in the Andes at the border between Argentina and Chile--as a result of an inspection by Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service (Sernageomin) on Oct. 24. Sernageomin ordered the suspension on Oct. 31 after its inspectors found unsafe levels of fine particles in the air at the mine; a report blamed “incorrect technical monitoring” of the earth being excavated. Barrick said it suspended the operations voluntarily on Oct. 27. Chilean mining minister Hernán de Solminihac indicated that the suspension may last several weeks. (Radio Universidad de Chile 11/10/12; Bloomberg News 11/11/12 via BusinessWeek)
Workers at the mine have reported safety issues in the past, and on Aug. 4 group of 23 contract workers protested conditions at the facility by occupying the San Ambrosio Church in Vallenar, capital of the northern Chilean province of Huasco [see Update #1139]. The $8 billion mining project has also been the subject of protests in both Chile and Argentina by environmentalists who say the mine threatens glaciers and the local water supply [see Update #1140]. The two issues “are part of the same problem,” according to Lucio Cuenca, director of the Santiago-based Latin American Monitoring Center for Environmental Conflicts (OLCA). The location of the mine high in the Andes “is negative for the workers because of altitude conditions, but climatic conditions have environmental impact effects and effects on workers’ health,” he said. “When you talk about the dust that affects the health of the workers, it’s the same dust that’s destroying the glaciers.” (Radio Universidad de Chile 11/13/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Austerity Protests Spread Abroad
A large crowd of Dominicans, mostly youths, demonstrated in the Plaza de la Bandera in Santo Domingo the evening of Nov. 17 to protest a “fiscal reform” package proposed by President Danilo Medina and passed by the Congress the week before [see Update #1151]. The government says the package, which will raise the country’s sales tax from 16% to 18% and will establish some new taxes, is necessary to make up for a deficit of 187 billion pesos (about US$4.704 billion); the protesters charge that they are being made to pay for wasteful spending by former president Leonel Fernández (1996-2000, 2004-2008 and 2008-2012) and are being subjected to an austerity program demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some media reported that thousands participated in the Nov. 17 action and described the demonstration as the largest yet in the two weeks since the anti-austerity protests started.
Students in the crowd insisted that they weren't political opponents of the governing Dominican Liberation Party (PLD). “Our only party is the Dominican Republic,” they told reporters. “This is Dominican youth who have become indignant, who have finally opened their eyes and realized that what the political class here does is exploit society and not work for the people—and they even deny the right to education and social security for the poorest people,” one youth said. “Our country deserves better treatment.” Other protesters called on the international media to cover the movement, “since the media here are sold out.” (La Nación Dominicana (Santo Domingo) 11/18/12; Listín Diario (Santo Domingo) 11/18/12)
Dominicans living abroad also protested the austerity measures; many of the actions have been organized through a special website, “No DR Fiscal Reform.” About 50 Dominicans, mostly arts and graduate students, protested in front of their country’s embassy in Argentina on Nov. 14. A delegation tried to present a letter to the embassy staff, but an Argentine police agent said no embassy official was present to receive it—even though 30 people are listed as working in the embassy. The protesters agreed to organize further actions. (El Nuevo Diario (Santo Domingo) 11/14/12)
Dominicans in Spain protested at the consulate in Barcelona on Nov. 17 as President Medina visited Spain to attend a meeting of the Ibero-American Summit. There were also protests in Italian cities that day, and dozens of Dominicans gathered in front of the consulate in New York’s Times Square to demand imprisonment for the politicians responsible for the deficit. Other protests were reportedly planned in Florida, Mexico and Berlin. (almomento.net (Santo Domingo) 11/17/12; La Nación Dominicana 11/18/12)
Protesters also targeted repression by the police. Medical student Willy Warden Florián Ramírez was shot dead in Santo Domingo on Nov. 8 by police as they were trying to break up a student protest against the fiscal reform. Schoolteacher Angela Moquete Méndez was wounded by police the same day during a demonstration protesting a water shortage in the Villa Estela neighborhood in the southwestern city of Barahona; she died of her wounds the night of Nov. 9 in a clinic in Santo Domingo. Moquete Méndez was a leader in the teachers’ section of the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). (Hoy (Santo Dominigo) 11/10/12)
*4. Haiti: Students Protest Killing by Police Agent
Damaël D’Haïti, an economics student at the State University of Haiti (UEH), was shot dead the evening of Nov. 10 during an event at the university’s Faculty of Law and Economics (FDSE) facility in Port-au-Prince. According to witnesses, the killer was an agent of the Haitian National Police (PNH), Macéus Pierre-Paul (or Pierre-Paul Macéus); the motive was unclear. Pierre-Paul was detained, and Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Lucmane Délile, the chief prosecutor for the capital, insisted that justice would be carried out in this case.
UEH students began a series of protests on Nov. 12, with hundreds of youths setting up barricades of burning tires and blocking traffic along Christophe Avenue in downtown Port-au-Prince. Police from the PNH and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) used tear gas and shots in the air to disperse the protesters. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 11/12/12) The students were back on Nov. 13, joining a demonstration by several teachers’ unions demanding better working conditions and protesting a 2% tax the government has imposed since October on salaried employees. Regular and riot police used tear gas and firearms against students in the large Champ de Mars park near the National Palace; the students responded by throwing rocks. The confrontations continued for hours, paralyzing much of the downtown area. According to press reports, armed criminals took advantage of the chaos to rob passers-by. By the end of the day, two students had been wounded. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 11/14/12)
Protests continued throughout the week. On Nov. 14 police and students confronted each other in the Champ de Mars and in front of several different UEH schools. Students set up barricades outside the Faculty of Humanities (FASCH) on Christophe Avenue; the police agents chased them into the small campus and then hurled tear gas canisters over the gate, causing panic among the students trapped inside. The tear gas also affected neighborhood residents and students at nearby schools. Meanwhile, Josué Mérilien, coordinator of the National Union of Haitian Teachers (UNNOH), charged in a press briefing that the police were the ones responsible for the chaotic situation on Nov. 13; he demanded the release of three students who had been arrested.
Port-au-Prince commissioner Délile appealed for calm and repeated that the investigation into Damaël D’Haïti's death was continuing. (AlterPresse 11/15/12; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 11/15/12) Délile himself was a student leader in 2004 in the movement against former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004). He is the eighth person to be appointed Port-au-Prince commissioner since President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) took office in May 2011 [see Update #1148]. (Radio Kiskeya 11/12/12)
An unidentified young man was shot dead near the Champ de Mars during a student protest on Nov. 16. Students initially blamed the PNH and MINUSTAH, but both organizations denied responsibility. According to police spokesperson Frantz Lerebours, the victim was a robber who was killed by an unknown individual, not the police. An accomplice of the victim was wounded in the incident and the police had detained him, Lerebours said. (AlterPresse 11/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
Argentine Judge Freezes Chevron Assets To Pay $19 Billion Ecuador Fine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3965-argentine-judge-freezes-chevron-assets-to-pay-19-billion-ecuador-fine
Trouble at Brazil's Belo Monte Dam Stops Construction for Now
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3967-action-alert-leader-of-sogamoso-river-defense-in-colombia-disappeared
Earth First? Bolivia’s Mother Earth Law Meets the Neo-Extractivist Economy
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/16/earth-first-bolivia%E2%80%99s-mother-earth-law-meets-neo-extractivist-economy
The Descent of the Colombian Army
http://ww4report.com/node/11703
Colombia: Diary of a Displacement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3968-colombia-diary-of-a-displacement
Action Alert: Leader of Sogamoso River Defense in Colombia Disappeared
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3967-action-alert-leader-of-sogamoso-river-defense-in-colombia-disappeared
Former Colombian Defence Minister Admits Sending Drones into Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7492
Venezuelan Government to Hold Assembly With Yukpa Indigenous Group
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7495
The Task of Reading Guatemala’s Bones
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3972-the-task-of-reading-guatemalas-bones
Mexican Senate Passes Labor Reform Bill, Weakening Worker Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3969-mexican-senate-passes-labor-reform-bill-weakening-worker-rights
Blood on the Silver: The High Cost of Mining Concessions in Oaxaca
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/9/blood-silver-high-cost-mining-concessions-oaxaca
Mexico: People’s Tribunal Defends Native Villages from Dams
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3964-mexico-peoples-tribunal-defends-native-villages-from-dams
OAS Human Rights Commission Demands Protection for Activists (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/november122012/saving-mexico-activists.php
Despite Global Opposition, United States Votes to Continue Cuban Embargo
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/15/despite-global-opposition-united-states-votes-continue-cuban-embargo
Haiti's Excluded Majority Opposes Army's Re-Creation
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3973-haitis-excluded-majority-opposes-armys-re-creation
The Hell that is Haiti
http://socialistaction.org/2012/11/the-hell-that-is-haiti /
Cholera as a Human Rights Issue (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-as-a-human-rights-issue
Ronald Reagan and Comprehensive Immigration Reform (US/immigration)
https://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/15/ronald-reagan-and-comprehensive-immigration-reform
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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 #1152, November 18, 2012
1. Mexico: “Labor Reform” Passes; Economists Are “Upbeat”
2. Chile: Pascua Lama Mine Suspended Over Safety Issues
3. Dominican Republic: Austerity Protests Spread Abroad
4. Haiti: Students Protest Killing by Police Agent
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, 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: “Labor Reform” Passes; Economists Are “Upbeat”
The Mexican Senate voted 96-28 on Nov. 13 to approve changes to the 1970 Federal Labor Law (LFT) that will legalize the use of part-time and contract employees, allow the hiring of workers for trial periods, and limit the amount of back pay businesses are required to give laid-off workers [see Update #1146]. The controversial “labor reform,” which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies the week before, was sent on to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who was expected to sign it into law.
The labor code changes were pushed through--after a total of 71 days of debate in the two chambers--by legislators from the center-right National Action Party (PAN) and the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), with the support of two small centrist parties, the Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM) and the New Alliance Party (PANAL). Both President Calderón, a member of the PAN, and president-elect Enrique Peña Nieto, a PRI member who is to succeed Calderón on Dec. 1, supported the changes. The only opposition in the Senate came from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the small leftist Labor Party (PT).
PAN and leftist legislators worked together in the past to include articles in the bill that would promote union democracy. The PRI, which historically has a base among conservative union leaders, strongly opposed these articles, and the Chamber of Deputies stripped them out of the final bill. An alliance of the PAN and the left in the Senate restored two of the articles, 388 and 390, by a vote of 65-61 during the Nov. 13 session; these would allow workers to use the secret ballot to choose the union that represents them and to vote on whether to approve a contract. But the Senate leadership separated these two articles from the bill and sent them back to the Chamber of Deputies for discussion; the rest of the bill was sent to Calderón to become law.
“[N]o one will be able to hide the fact that this bosses’ reform is being imposed by Peña Nieto, in association with the one who’s leaving [Calderón],” Senator Manuel Bartlett, the coordinator of the PT bench, announced. Bartlett, a PRI governor of Puebla state in the 1990s before reemerging as a leftist, expressed his confidence that Mexican workers would fight the new law and demand social justice, the way European workers were fighting similar attacks on labor—apparently a reference to anti-austerity strikes many European unions were planning for Nov. 14. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/14/12; Americas Blog 11/15/12)
A blog at the US business weekly Barron’s called the new bill a “much-needed labor reform” and said “economists are still upbeat” even though “[t]he reform is watered-down a bit.” Marco Oviedo, the head Mexican economist for the British banking group Barclays, described the bill as a “very important structural advance” that could lead to a 1.5 to 2% increase in Mexico’s GDP growth over the next decade. (Barron’s 11/14/12)
*2. Chile: Pascua Lama Mine Suspended Over Safety Issues
The Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation has had to suspend some of its operations at Pascua Lama--a giant open-pit gold, silver and copper mine being built in the Andes at the border between Argentina and Chile--as a result of an inspection by Chile’s National Geology and Mining Service (Sernageomin) on Oct. 24. Sernageomin ordered the suspension on Oct. 31 after its inspectors found unsafe levels of fine particles in the air at the mine; a report blamed “incorrect technical monitoring” of the earth being excavated. Barrick said it suspended the operations voluntarily on Oct. 27. Chilean mining minister Hernán de Solminihac indicated that the suspension may last several weeks. (Radio Universidad de Chile 11/10/12; Bloomberg News 11/11/12 via BusinessWeek)
Workers at the mine have reported safety issues in the past, and on Aug. 4 group of 23 contract workers protested conditions at the facility by occupying the San Ambrosio Church in Vallenar, capital of the northern Chilean province of Huasco [see Update #1139]. The $8 billion mining project has also been the subject of protests in both Chile and Argentina by environmentalists who say the mine threatens glaciers and the local water supply [see Update #1140]. The two issues “are part of the same problem,” according to Lucio Cuenca, director of the Santiago-based Latin American Monitoring Center for Environmental Conflicts (OLCA). The location of the mine high in the Andes “is negative for the workers because of altitude conditions, but climatic conditions have environmental impact effects and effects on workers’ health,” he said. “When you talk about the dust that affects the health of the workers, it’s the same dust that’s destroying the glaciers.” (Radio Universidad de Chile 11/13/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Austerity Protests Spread Abroad
A large crowd of Dominicans, mostly youths, demonstrated in the Plaza de la Bandera in Santo Domingo the evening of Nov. 17 to protest a “fiscal reform” package proposed by President Danilo Medina and passed by the Congress the week before [see Update #1151]. The government says the package, which will raise the country’s sales tax from 16% to 18% and will establish some new taxes, is necessary to make up for a deficit of 187 billion pesos (about US$4.704 billion); the protesters charge that they are being made to pay for wasteful spending by former president Leonel Fernández (1996-2000, 2004-2008 and 2008-2012) and are being subjected to an austerity program demanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some media reported that thousands participated in the Nov. 17 action and described the demonstration as the largest yet in the two weeks since the anti-austerity protests started.
Students in the crowd insisted that they weren't political opponents of the governing Dominican Liberation Party (PLD). “Our only party is the Dominican Republic,” they told reporters. “This is Dominican youth who have become indignant, who have finally opened their eyes and realized that what the political class here does is exploit society and not work for the people—and they even deny the right to education and social security for the poorest people,” one youth said. “Our country deserves better treatment.” Other protesters called on the international media to cover the movement, “since the media here are sold out.” (La Nación Dominicana (Santo Domingo) 11/18/12; Listín Diario (Santo Domingo) 11/18/12)
Dominicans living abroad also protested the austerity measures; many of the actions have been organized through a special website, “No DR Fiscal Reform.” About 50 Dominicans, mostly arts and graduate students, protested in front of their country’s embassy in Argentina on Nov. 14. A delegation tried to present a letter to the embassy staff, but an Argentine police agent said no embassy official was present to receive it—even though 30 people are listed as working in the embassy. The protesters agreed to organize further actions. (El Nuevo Diario (Santo Domingo) 11/14/12)
Dominicans in Spain protested at the consulate in Barcelona on Nov. 17 as President Medina visited Spain to attend a meeting of the Ibero-American Summit. There were also protests in Italian cities that day, and dozens of Dominicans gathered in front of the consulate in New York’s Times Square to demand imprisonment for the politicians responsible for the deficit. Other protests were reportedly planned in Florida, Mexico and Berlin. (almomento.net (Santo Domingo) 11/17/12; La Nación Dominicana 11/18/12)
Protesters also targeted repression by the police. Medical student Willy Warden Florián Ramírez was shot dead in Santo Domingo on Nov. 8 by police as they were trying to break up a student protest against the fiscal reform. Schoolteacher Angela Moquete Méndez was wounded by police the same day during a demonstration protesting a water shortage in the Villa Estela neighborhood in the southwestern city of Barahona; she died of her wounds the night of Nov. 9 in a clinic in Santo Domingo. Moquete Méndez was a leader in the teachers’ section of the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). (Hoy (Santo Dominigo) 11/10/12)
*4. Haiti: Students Protest Killing by Police Agent
Damaël D’Haïti, an economics student at the State University of Haiti (UEH), was shot dead the evening of Nov. 10 during an event at the university’s Faculty of Law and Economics (FDSE) facility in Port-au-Prince. According to witnesses, the killer was an agent of the Haitian National Police (PNH), Macéus Pierre-Paul (or Pierre-Paul Macéus); the motive was unclear. Pierre-Paul was detained, and Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Lucmane Délile, the chief prosecutor for the capital, insisted that justice would be carried out in this case.
UEH students began a series of protests on Nov. 12, with hundreds of youths setting up barricades of burning tires and blocking traffic along Christophe Avenue in downtown Port-au-Prince. Police from the PNH and the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) used tear gas and shots in the air to disperse the protesters. (Radio Kiskeya (Haiti) 11/12/12) The students were back on Nov. 13, joining a demonstration by several teachers’ unions demanding better working conditions and protesting a 2% tax the government has imposed since October on salaried employees. Regular and riot police used tear gas and firearms against students in the large Champ de Mars park near the National Palace; the students responded by throwing rocks. The confrontations continued for hours, paralyzing much of the downtown area. According to press reports, armed criminals took advantage of the chaos to rob passers-by. By the end of the day, two students had been wounded. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 11/14/12)
Protests continued throughout the week. On Nov. 14 police and students confronted each other in the Champ de Mars and in front of several different UEH schools. Students set up barricades outside the Faculty of Humanities (FASCH) on Christophe Avenue; the police agents chased them into the small campus and then hurled tear gas canisters over the gate, causing panic among the students trapped inside. The tear gas also affected neighborhood residents and students at nearby schools. Meanwhile, Josué Mérilien, coordinator of the National Union of Haitian Teachers (UNNOH), charged in a press briefing that the police were the ones responsible for the chaotic situation on Nov. 13; he demanded the release of three students who had been arrested.
Port-au-Prince commissioner Délile appealed for calm and repeated that the investigation into Damaël D’Haïti's death was continuing. (AlterPresse 11/15/12; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 11/15/12) Délile himself was a student leader in 2004 in the movement against former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (1991-1996, 2001-2004). He is the eighth person to be appointed Port-au-Prince commissioner since President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) took office in May 2011 [see Update #1148]. (Radio Kiskeya 11/12/12)
An unidentified young man was shot dead near the Champ de Mars during a student protest on Nov. 16. Students initially blamed the PNH and MINUSTAH, but both organizations denied responsibility. According to police spokesperson Frantz Lerebours, the victim was a robber who was killed by an unknown individual, not the police. An accomplice of the victim was wounded in the incident and the police had detained him, Lerebours said. (AlterPresse 11/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, US/immigration
Argentine Judge Freezes Chevron Assets To Pay $19 Billion Ecuador Fine
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3965-argentine-judge-freezes-chevron-assets-to-pay-19-billion-ecuador-fine
Trouble at Brazil's Belo Monte Dam Stops Construction for Now
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3967-action-alert-leader-of-sogamoso-river-defense-in-colombia-disappeared
Earth First? Bolivia’s Mother Earth Law Meets the Neo-Extractivist Economy
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/16/earth-first-bolivia%E2%80%99s-mother-earth-law-meets-neo-extractivist-economy
The Descent of the Colombian Army
http://ww4report.com/node/11703
Colombia: Diary of a Displacement
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3968-colombia-diary-of-a-displacement
Action Alert: Leader of Sogamoso River Defense in Colombia Disappeared
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3967-action-alert-leader-of-sogamoso-river-defense-in-colombia-disappeared
Former Colombian Defence Minister Admits Sending Drones into Venezuela
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7492
Venezuelan Government to Hold Assembly With Yukpa Indigenous Group
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7495
The Task of Reading Guatemala’s Bones
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3972-the-task-of-reading-guatemalas-bones
Mexican Senate Passes Labor Reform Bill, Weakening Worker Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3969-mexican-senate-passes-labor-reform-bill-weakening-worker-rights
Blood on the Silver: The High Cost of Mining Concessions in Oaxaca
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/9/blood-silver-high-cost-mining-concessions-oaxaca
Mexico: People’s Tribunal Defends Native Villages from Dams
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3964-mexico-peoples-tribunal-defends-native-villages-from-dams
OAS Human Rights Commission Demands Protection for Activists (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/november122012/saving-mexico-activists.php
Despite Global Opposition, United States Votes to Continue Cuban Embargo
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/15/despite-global-opposition-united-states-votes-continue-cuban-embargo
Haiti's Excluded Majority Opposes Army's Re-Creation
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3973-haitis-excluded-majority-opposes-armys-re-creation
The Hell that is Haiti
http://socialistaction.org/2012/11/the-hell-that-is-haiti /
Cholera as a Human Rights Issue (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-as-a-human-rights-issue
Ronald Reagan and Comprehensive Immigration Reform (US/immigration)
https://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/15/ronald-reagan-and-comprehensive-immigration-reform
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. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. 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/
Subscribe to:
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