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
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/
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haiti. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
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, 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/
Monday, 5 November 2012
WNU #1150: Sandy Kills at Least 68 in the Caribbean
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1150, November 4, 2012
1. Haiti: Hurricane Sandy Kills 54, Threatens Food Supplies
2. Jamaica: Sandy’s Damage Won’t Affect IMF Austerity Plan
3. Cuba: Sandy Is Latest in Decade of Devastating Storms
4. Caribbean Region: Will Sandy Force Real Discussion of Climate Change?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Haiti: Hurricane Sandy Kills 54, Threatens Food Supplies
Tropical storm Sandy began hitting southern Haiti with heavy rain on Oct. 23, just as it was intensifying into a Category 1 hurricane; the rain continued through Oct. 26. Haiti suffered the worst damage of the Caribbean nations that Sandy affected, even though the storm’s center never passed over the country. At least 54 people died, roads and bridges were damaged, and homes were destroyed. About 200,000 people suffered from the effects of the hurricane, according to official figures, with the damage concentrated in five departments: South, Southeast, Grand Anse, Nippes and West.
Crops were ruined in the southwestern peninsula, including local staples like bananas and breadfruit. The new destruction followed the devastation of other crops by the hurricane Isaac on Aug. 24 and comes at a time when rising prices on international markets have driven up the cost of imported food, sparking large demonstrations in September to protest the high cost of living [see Update #1146]. Since August the price of a marmite (about five pounds) of black beans has risen from 200 gourdes ($4.75) to 300 gourdes ($7.12). “The economy took a huge hit,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told the Reuters wire service. “[F]ood security will be an issue.” Another concern is that the contamination of water by flooding may lead to an increase in cholera cases. More than 7,000 Haitians have died of the disease since it was brought to the country in October 2010 by troops of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) [see Update #1134]. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 10/24/12, 10/27/12, 10/31/12; Reuters 10/29/12)
At an Oct. 30 press conference Agriculture Minister Thomas Jacques announced ambitious plans for distributing seeds to farmers, subsidizing the repair and maintenance of irrigation systems, restoring damaged roads, and carrying out an agricultural reform that would enable Haitian farmers to supply 60% of the country’s food needs within three years; he put the current level at 45%. But Jacques acknowledged that government failures in the past were responsible for much of the damage from Sandy. One of the main causes of the flooding was the lack of river maintenance over the past decade, he said. Jacques also noted the absence of an agricultural insurance system, with the result that farmers won’t receive compensation for their losses. (AlterPresse 10/31/12)
Also on Oct. 30, Prime Minister Lamothe and President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) declared a one-month state of emergency. Under the 1987 Constitution a state of emergency gives the president powers that include ordering evacuations, allocating funds without reference to the official budget, and using accelerated procedures to sign contracts. The president doesn’t have the power to limit free speech or other political activities under the state of emergency. (Haïti Libre (Haiti) 10/31/12) [President Martelly has tried to exceed his constitutional powers in the past, however; see Update #1148.]
*2. Jamaica: Sandy’s Damage Won’t Affect IMF Austerity Plan
The tropical storm Sandy, now a Category 1 hurricane, hit eastern Jamaica directly on Oct. 24, with the eye making landfall on the southeast coast around 2 pm. One person was killed when a boulder rolled over a house in St. Andrew parish, which includes Kingston, and dozens of people lost their homes in the eastern parishes: St. Thomas, Portland and St. Mary. There was damage to crops and to public infrastructure. Local Government Minister Noel Arscott accompanied Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller in an aerial tour of the area on Oct. 25. “Looking from the air, you could see the entire destruction of the banana crops. Not so much for coconuts, but cash crops and banana plantations have been hit severely,” he told reporters. (The Gleaner (Jamaica) 10/25/12, 10/26/12)
Preliminary estimates of the damage came to almost $5 billion, and on Oct. 24 Prime Minister Simpson Miller expressed her hope that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would take Jamaica’s losses into consideration in ongoing negotiations for a new loan to the country. But on Oct. 30 Finance Minister Peter Phillips said the lending institution would not relax its demand for austerity measures. Funds for dealing with hurricane damage will have to come from grants and reallocation within the government’s budget, he said. (The Gleaner 10/31/12)
*3. Cuba: Sandy Is Latest in Decade of Devastating Storms
Tropical storm Sandy had become a Category 2 hurricane by the time it slammed into eastern Cuba early on Oct. 25. Eleven people were killed in the eastern provinces of Santiago and Guantánamo. Official sources reported that 132,733 homes were damaged in Santiago province, of which 15,322 were destroyed; 1,052 homes were leveled in just two communities, Banes and Antilla, on the northeastern coast in neighboring Holguín province. The dozen homes that made up the little fishing village of Tortuguilla in Guantánamo province were swept away. In the central provinces heavy rains caused flooding; an official in Encrucijada municipality in Villa Clara province told the local press that the floods there were the worst in 30 years.
Sandy follows a pattern of severe hurricanes striking Cuba in recent years, including Michelle in 2001 and Dennis in 2005, and the combined effect of Gustav, Ike and Paloma in 2008. Economic damage was extensive, with banana, coffee, bean and sugar crops ruined throughout the region. As of Oct. 27 Venezuela had promised to send a total 611 tons of humanitarian aid to be split between Cuba and Haiti. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/27/12 from correspondent; AP 10/28/12 via Miami Herald)
*4. Caribbean Region: Will Sandy Force Real Discussion of Climate Change?
Although the worst damage from Sandy took place in Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba, the storm also affected other parts of the Caribbean. One man died in Juana Díaz in southern Puerto Rico on Oct. 26 when he was swept away by a river swollen because of rain from the edges of the storm, and 3,500 homes were damaged in the Dominican Republic. Sandy hit the Bahamas after leaving Cuba, and one man was killed there. The total number of deaths from Sandy in the Caribbean islands was at least 68. (AP 10/28/12 via Miami Herald) [The reported death toll in the US, which Sandy struck starting on Oct. 29, was 110 as of Nov. 4. (CNN 11/4/12)]
Although the region has always been susceptible to damage from hurricanes, “[t]he two dozen island nations of the Caribbean, and the 40 million people who live there, are in a state of increased vulnerability to climate change,” according to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Climate Change Center. “Higher temperatures, rises in sea level, and increased hurricane intensity threaten lives, property and livelihoods throughout the region.” (NACLA 11/3/12)
The relation of climate change to extreme weather remains controversial in the US, but it seems to be widely accepted in the Caribbean. On Oct. 31 Cuba’s official news agency, Prensa Latina, discussed a call by Carlos Rodríguez, a researcher at the government’s Physical Planning Institute, to prioritize preventive measures against disasters like Sandy that are related to climate change. By 2050 more than 2,500 square kilometers of Cuban territory may be submerged because of the rising sea level, he said, and the number could go up to 5,600 square kilometers by 2100. Studies by Cuban institutions agree that this will affect some 577 settlements identified as vulnerable, according to Rodríguez, who insisted that this issue needed to be considered in all planning for the island. (PL 10/31/12)
On Nov. 4 centrist French politician Brice Lalonde, a founder of the small Ecology Generation party and now the coordinator of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, noted that Sandy damaged both Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, and New York, the largest city in the US. “This is also a moral question,” he wrote. “If climate change increases the intensity of hurricanes, and if the gases released by coal, gasoline and natural gas are the main agents of climate change, then Manhattan, the economic capital of a great country that is greedy for fossil fuels, will probably have its share of the responsibility for future flooding in Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. Will Sandy push American voters to reflect on climate change?…. Will a part of America go on ignoring climate change?” (Le Journal du Dimanche (France) 11/4/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Agribusiness as Usual: The Death of Peasant Farming in Argentina
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3950-agribusiness-as-usual-the-death-of-peasant-farming-in-argentina
Chile: Violence and Repression against the Mapuche Population
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3944-violence-and-repression-against-the-mapuche-population
Brazil: Indigenous Community Faces Eviction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3943-brazil-indigenous-community-faces-eviction
Bolivia Returns to the Global Bond Market
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/2/bolivia-returns-global-bond-market
Peru's Sendero Luminoso back—and the "dirty war"?
http://ww4report.com/node/11653
Peru: threats against Cajamarca movement
http://ww4report.com/node/11659
Peru and Ecuador Set to Auction Off More of Amazon for Oil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3942-peru-and-ecuador-set-to-auction-off-more-amazon-for-oil
The Military's Human Rights Record and the Peace Process in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/3/militarys-human-rights-record-and-peace-process-colombia
Venezuela’s Mission Robinson Literacy Program Celebrates 9 Successful Years
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7402
Honduras Truth Commission Releases Report about Coup-Related Violence and Repression
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3941-honduras-truth-commission-releases-report-about-coup-related-violence-and-repression
Guatemala's Palm Industry Leaves Locals Contemplating an Uncertain Future
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3946-guatemalas-palm-industry-leaves-locals-contemplating-an-uncertain-future
Monsanto’s bile against Mexico’s honey
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8375
Indigenous Communities in Mexico Fight Corporate Wind Farms
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3952-indigenous-communities-in-mexico-fight-corporate-wind-farms
Climate Change and the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/3/climate-change-and-caribbean
Over 50 Dead from Hurricane Sandy in Haiti
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/over-50-dead-from-hurricane-sandy-in-haiti
Assessing the Beginnings of Haiti’s Latest Unnatural Disaster
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/assessing-the-beginnings-of-haitis-latest-unnatural-disaster
Ground Zero: The Tohono O'odham Nation (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/2/ground-zero-tohono-oodham-nation
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 #1150, November 4, 2012
1. Haiti: Hurricane Sandy Kills 54, Threatens Food Supplies
2. Jamaica: Sandy’s Damage Won’t Affect IMF Austerity Plan
3. Cuba: Sandy Is Latest in Decade of Devastating Storms
4. Caribbean Region: Will Sandy Force Real Discussion of Climate Change?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Haiti: Hurricane Sandy Kills 54, Threatens Food Supplies
Tropical storm Sandy began hitting southern Haiti with heavy rain on Oct. 23, just as it was intensifying into a Category 1 hurricane; the rain continued through Oct. 26. Haiti suffered the worst damage of the Caribbean nations that Sandy affected, even though the storm’s center never passed over the country. At least 54 people died, roads and bridges were damaged, and homes were destroyed. About 200,000 people suffered from the effects of the hurricane, according to official figures, with the damage concentrated in five departments: South, Southeast, Grand Anse, Nippes and West.
Crops were ruined in the southwestern peninsula, including local staples like bananas and breadfruit. The new destruction followed the devastation of other crops by the hurricane Isaac on Aug. 24 and comes at a time when rising prices on international markets have driven up the cost of imported food, sparking large demonstrations in September to protest the high cost of living [see Update #1146]. Since August the price of a marmite (about five pounds) of black beans has risen from 200 gourdes ($4.75) to 300 gourdes ($7.12). “The economy took a huge hit,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told the Reuters wire service. “[F]ood security will be an issue.” Another concern is that the contamination of water by flooding may lead to an increase in cholera cases. More than 7,000 Haitians have died of the disease since it was brought to the country in October 2010 by troops of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) [see Update #1134]. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 10/24/12, 10/27/12, 10/31/12; Reuters 10/29/12)
At an Oct. 30 press conference Agriculture Minister Thomas Jacques announced ambitious plans for distributing seeds to farmers, subsidizing the repair and maintenance of irrigation systems, restoring damaged roads, and carrying out an agricultural reform that would enable Haitian farmers to supply 60% of the country’s food needs within three years; he put the current level at 45%. But Jacques acknowledged that government failures in the past were responsible for much of the damage from Sandy. One of the main causes of the flooding was the lack of river maintenance over the past decade, he said. Jacques also noted the absence of an agricultural insurance system, with the result that farmers won’t receive compensation for their losses. (AlterPresse 10/31/12)
Also on Oct. 30, Prime Minister Lamothe and President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) declared a one-month state of emergency. Under the 1987 Constitution a state of emergency gives the president powers that include ordering evacuations, allocating funds without reference to the official budget, and using accelerated procedures to sign contracts. The president doesn’t have the power to limit free speech or other political activities under the state of emergency. (Haïti Libre (Haiti) 10/31/12) [President Martelly has tried to exceed his constitutional powers in the past, however; see Update #1148.]
*2. Jamaica: Sandy’s Damage Won’t Affect IMF Austerity Plan
The tropical storm Sandy, now a Category 1 hurricane, hit eastern Jamaica directly on Oct. 24, with the eye making landfall on the southeast coast around 2 pm. One person was killed when a boulder rolled over a house in St. Andrew parish, which includes Kingston, and dozens of people lost their homes in the eastern parishes: St. Thomas, Portland and St. Mary. There was damage to crops and to public infrastructure. Local Government Minister Noel Arscott accompanied Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller in an aerial tour of the area on Oct. 25. “Looking from the air, you could see the entire destruction of the banana crops. Not so much for coconuts, but cash crops and banana plantations have been hit severely,” he told reporters. (The Gleaner (Jamaica) 10/25/12, 10/26/12)
Preliminary estimates of the damage came to almost $5 billion, and on Oct. 24 Prime Minister Simpson Miller expressed her hope that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would take Jamaica’s losses into consideration in ongoing negotiations for a new loan to the country. But on Oct. 30 Finance Minister Peter Phillips said the lending institution would not relax its demand for austerity measures. Funds for dealing with hurricane damage will have to come from grants and reallocation within the government’s budget, he said. (The Gleaner 10/31/12)
*3. Cuba: Sandy Is Latest in Decade of Devastating Storms
Tropical storm Sandy had become a Category 2 hurricane by the time it slammed into eastern Cuba early on Oct. 25. Eleven people were killed in the eastern provinces of Santiago and Guantánamo. Official sources reported that 132,733 homes were damaged in Santiago province, of which 15,322 were destroyed; 1,052 homes were leveled in just two communities, Banes and Antilla, on the northeastern coast in neighboring Holguín province. The dozen homes that made up the little fishing village of Tortuguilla in Guantánamo province were swept away. In the central provinces heavy rains caused flooding; an official in Encrucijada municipality in Villa Clara province told the local press that the floods there were the worst in 30 years.
Sandy follows a pattern of severe hurricanes striking Cuba in recent years, including Michelle in 2001 and Dennis in 2005, and the combined effect of Gustav, Ike and Paloma in 2008. Economic damage was extensive, with banana, coffee, bean and sugar crops ruined throughout the region. As of Oct. 27 Venezuela had promised to send a total 611 tons of humanitarian aid to be split between Cuba and Haiti. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/27/12 from correspondent; AP 10/28/12 via Miami Herald)
*4. Caribbean Region: Will Sandy Force Real Discussion of Climate Change?
Although the worst damage from Sandy took place in Haiti, Jamaica and Cuba, the storm also affected other parts of the Caribbean. One man died in Juana Díaz in southern Puerto Rico on Oct. 26 when he was swept away by a river swollen because of rain from the edges of the storm, and 3,500 homes were damaged in the Dominican Republic. Sandy hit the Bahamas after leaving Cuba, and one man was killed there. The total number of deaths from Sandy in the Caribbean islands was at least 68. (AP 10/28/12 via Miami Herald) [The reported death toll in the US, which Sandy struck starting on Oct. 29, was 110 as of Nov. 4. (CNN 11/4/12)]
Although the region has always been susceptible to damage from hurricanes, “[t]he two dozen island nations of the Caribbean, and the 40 million people who live there, are in a state of increased vulnerability to climate change,” according to the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Climate Change Center. “Higher temperatures, rises in sea level, and increased hurricane intensity threaten lives, property and livelihoods throughout the region.” (NACLA 11/3/12)
The relation of climate change to extreme weather remains controversial in the US, but it seems to be widely accepted in the Caribbean. On Oct. 31 Cuba’s official news agency, Prensa Latina, discussed a call by Carlos Rodríguez, a researcher at the government’s Physical Planning Institute, to prioritize preventive measures against disasters like Sandy that are related to climate change. By 2050 more than 2,500 square kilometers of Cuban territory may be submerged because of the rising sea level, he said, and the number could go up to 5,600 square kilometers by 2100. Studies by Cuban institutions agree that this will affect some 577 settlements identified as vulnerable, according to Rodríguez, who insisted that this issue needed to be considered in all planning for the island. (PL 10/31/12)
On Nov. 4 centrist French politician Brice Lalonde, a founder of the small Ecology Generation party and now the coordinator of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, noted that Sandy damaged both Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, and New York, the largest city in the US. “This is also a moral question,” he wrote. “If climate change increases the intensity of hurricanes, and if the gases released by coal, gasoline and natural gas are the main agents of climate change, then Manhattan, the economic capital of a great country that is greedy for fossil fuels, will probably have its share of the responsibility for future flooding in Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince. Will Sandy push American voters to reflect on climate change?…. Will a part of America go on ignoring climate change?” (Le Journal du Dimanche (France) 11/4/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Agribusiness as Usual: The Death of Peasant Farming in Argentina
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3950-agribusiness-as-usual-the-death-of-peasant-farming-in-argentina
Chile: Violence and Repression against the Mapuche Population
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3944-violence-and-repression-against-the-mapuche-population
Brazil: Indigenous Community Faces Eviction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3943-brazil-indigenous-community-faces-eviction
Bolivia Returns to the Global Bond Market
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/2/bolivia-returns-global-bond-market
Peru's Sendero Luminoso back—and the "dirty war"?
http://ww4report.com/node/11653
Peru: threats against Cajamarca movement
http://ww4report.com/node/11659
Peru and Ecuador Set to Auction Off More of Amazon for Oil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3942-peru-and-ecuador-set-to-auction-off-more-amazon-for-oil
The Military's Human Rights Record and the Peace Process in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/3/militarys-human-rights-record-and-peace-process-colombia
Venezuela’s Mission Robinson Literacy Program Celebrates 9 Successful Years
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7402
Honduras Truth Commission Releases Report about Coup-Related Violence and Repression
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3941-honduras-truth-commission-releases-report-about-coup-related-violence-and-repression
Guatemala's Palm Industry Leaves Locals Contemplating an Uncertain Future
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3946-guatemalas-palm-industry-leaves-locals-contemplating-an-uncertain-future
Monsanto’s bile against Mexico’s honey
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8375
Indigenous Communities in Mexico Fight Corporate Wind Farms
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3952-indigenous-communities-in-mexico-fight-corporate-wind-farms
Climate Change and the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/3/climate-change-and-caribbean
Over 50 Dead from Hurricane Sandy in Haiti
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/over-50-dead-from-hurricane-sandy-in-haiti
Assessing the Beginnings of Haiti’s Latest Unnatural Disaster
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/assessing-the-beginnings-of-haitis-latest-unnatural-disaster
Ground Zero: The Tohono O'odham Nation (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/2/ground-zero-tohono-oodham-nation
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 /
Friday, 26 October 2012
Bernie McFall, ¡Presente!
We are holding a memorial for Bernie on Friday, November 30, 2012, 6:30 pm at the 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.) Please join us.
Longtime solidarity activist Bernie McFall died of complications from pneumonia in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens on Oct. 16. He was 76 and had been fighting two forms of cancer.
Bernie was a reliable presence at demonstrations, vigils and picket lines in the New York area for more than two decades, with a special focus on solidarity with the peoples of Central America, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. During the contra war of the 1980s Bernie worked with the California-based organization TecNica in Nicaragua as a volunteer consultant on IBM mainframes. In the 1990s he traveled to the West Bank to observe conditions there, and he visited Cuba in the early 2000s.
Although he was probably best known for his dedication in handling the routine work of political organizing—photocopying, leafleting, mailing out fliers—Bernie was knowledgeable in many areas, especially Middle Eastern history. He could read an astonishing number of languages, including French, Spanish, German, Italian, Latin, Greek and some Mandarin. He studied Fijian in the 1970s when he was in the Peace Corps, and he learned Arabic in a US military school during the late 1950s, when he was stationed in Eritrea, which was then annexed to Ethiopia. Years later he would smile and say: “They wouldn’t necessarily approve of how I’ve used what they taught me.”
The New York-based Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti was a close friend, and he was staying at Bernie’s apartment in April 2002 when a joint task force of immigration agents and the New York City police arrested him in what quickly became a cause célèbre. Bernie worked steadily in the two-year campaign that finally won Farouk's release; the federal judge who freed Farouk described the Palestinian’s imprisonment as “Kafkaesque.” Bernie himself was threatened and harassed by the police and others during the campaign; filmmaker Konrad Aderer provides more information on Bernie's role at the Life or Liberty website.
Bernie was involved with the Weekly News Update from its first days in 1990, working tirelessly to select and clip articles to be summarized and often arranging for photocopying. We will be joining with others to honor him with a memorial; we’ll announce the plans as soon as we know them.
A few weeks before he died, Bernie asked to make sure his books were made available to people who would make good use of them. Please contact us at weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com if you would like more information on the collection, which includes a number of books in Arabic.
Longtime solidarity activist Bernie McFall died of complications from pneumonia in Elmhurst Hospital in Queens on Oct. 16. He was 76 and had been fighting two forms of cancer.
Bernie was a reliable presence at demonstrations, vigils and picket lines in the New York area for more than two decades, with a special focus on solidarity with the peoples of Central America, Cuba, Haiti and Palestine. During the contra war of the 1980s Bernie worked with the California-based organization TecNica in Nicaragua as a volunteer consultant on IBM mainframes. In the 1990s he traveled to the West Bank to observe conditions there, and he visited Cuba in the early 2000s.
 |
| Photo: Life or Liberty |
The New York-based Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti was a close friend, and he was staying at Bernie’s apartment in April 2002 when a joint task force of immigration agents and the New York City police arrested him in what quickly became a cause célèbre. Bernie worked steadily in the two-year campaign that finally won Farouk's release; the federal judge who freed Farouk described the Palestinian’s imprisonment as “Kafkaesque.” Bernie himself was threatened and harassed by the police and others during the campaign; filmmaker Konrad Aderer provides more information on Bernie's role at the Life or Liberty website.
Bernie was involved with the Weekly News Update from its first days in 1990, working tirelessly to select and clip articles to be summarized and often arranging for photocopying. We will be joining with others to honor him with a memorial; we’ll announce the plans as soon as we know them.
A few weeks before he died, Bernie asked to make sure his books were made available to people who would make good use of them. Please contact us at weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com if you would like more information on the collection, which includes a number of books in Arabic.
 |
| Bernie's birthday, February 2012. Photo: Rena Cohen/NYC |
A Tribute From Bernie’s Family
Bernie was much loved by family members too numerous to mention individually--23 surviving nieces and nephews, as well as 41 second- and 14 third-generation nieces and nephews. He attended all the family reunions, weddings, special occasions, celebrations and gatherings he possibly could, and they were numerous. Bernie will be remembered as the fun-loving, playful, favorite uncle who was game for anything and everything that crossed his path.
 |
| Bernie at an immigrant rights demo |
He had a great love for life. His passions were many, encompassing all types of arts (opera, symphony, ballet, languages, paintings, and sculptures) as well as education, which consequently transferred to many family members and friends. He traveled the world never meeting a stranger and was extremely involved in defending human rights. Bernie gave much support and encouragement, not only monetarily but in any way he could.
He will be greatly missed by so many that he touched and will always have a very special place in all of our hearts.
Bernie in the 1980s. Photos: Rena Cohen/NYC
Monday, 22 October 2012
WNU #1148: Mexican Police Break Up Student Protests
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1148, October 21, 2012
1. Mexico: Police Break Up Michoacán Student Protests
2. Chile: Thousands March for Indigenous Rights on Columbus Holiday
3. Honduras: Court Quashes “Model Cities”; Investors Eye Jamaica
4. Cuba: Spanish Rightist Sentenced in Dissident’s Death
5. Haiti: Government Seeks to Arrest Human Rights Lawyers
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Police Break Up Michoacán Student Protests
Using tear gas and water cannons, hundreds of federal and state police ended student occupations at three teachers’ colleges in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán in the early morning of Oct. 15. Protesters and other students were beaten in the raids, which resulted in the arrests of 176 students—168 in the town of Tiripetío, two in the town of Arteaga and six in the autonomous indigenous municipality of Cherán. The students reportedly threw rocks at the police and set fire to 13 of the 90 vehicles, including buses and patrols cars, that they had seized during the weeklong protest. Michoacán officials said 10 police agents were injured, three of them seriously.
The students were demanding a one-year postponement of changes to the curriculum that would require them to study English and computer science; they also sought an increase in the number of fourth-level students. Mexico’s rural teachers’ colleges, which largely provide instruction for campesino and indigenous students, have suffered from neglect and budget cuts for years and have been a focal point for protests [see Update #1109]. This was the second major student protest in Michoacán so far this school year. Students started a building occupation and strike on Sept. 4 in the Michoacán University of San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH) in Morelia, the state capital; rightwing students led by a group called the “White Angels” broke up the occupation on Sept. 25 and Sept. 26.
The protesters at the teachers’ colleges received strong support from local and national groups. The Michoacán section of the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), a large rank-and-file caucus within the conservative National Education Workers Union (SNTE), backed the protests even before the Oct. 15 police operation. In Cherán local officials condemned the raid, which they said “broke into our community with great violence.” The town is the site of an often-violent struggle between residents and illegal loggers that has led the municipality to declare itself autonomous, with the municipal government chosen through indigenous customs rather than formal elections [see Update #1131]. The Network Against Violence and for Solidarity (RvsR), which grew out of solidarity work with the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southeastern state of Chiapas, denounced “the atrocious manner of humiliating The Other, the manner of treating youths who defend a just struggle with dignity. The violence has been initiated by the governments, by their reforms; they are the ones who are responsible.”
On Oct. 17 thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Morelia, tying up traffic and virtually paralyzing the city, to demand an end to the repression and the release of the 74 students who were still being detained. The protest was organized by the state CNTE; the organizers estimated the crowd at 40,000, while local authorities put the number at 15,000. Participants included local students; students from the teachers’ college in nearby Tiripetío; members of the Purépecha Nation, an organization of activists from the state’s main indigenous group; and leaders in teacher union locals from the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) and the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala and Veracruz. Later in the day, about 500 teachers’ college students seized a refrigerator truck and four buses, using them to block La Huerta Avenue, near a main highway, while about 100 other students demonstrated near the state attorney general’s office.
Demonstrations continued throughout the week. On Oct. 18 CNTE supporters and students started a sit-in at Melchor Ocampo Plaza, in Morelia’s historic center, while others began blocking Madero Avenue in two places the next day. The protesters said they would maintain the sit-in and the blockages until all the students were freed from detention. Also on Oct. 19, groups of students protested inside the state legislature building, holding up photographs that they said showed excessive use of force during the police operations. Legislators from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—which lost control of the state to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with the election of current governor Fausto Vallejo Figueroa in 2011—backed the protesters and charged that the government treated students like criminals while not touching the drug cartels that have established themselves in the state.
In the DF, some 70 students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) blocked Insurgentes Avenue for almost four hours on Oct. 19 in solidarity with the students in Michoacán. As of Oct. 20 all but eight of the students arrested on Oct. 15 had been released, either without charges or else on bail. (Adital (Brazil) 10/16/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 10/16/12, 10/18/12, 10/20/12, 10/20/12, 10/21/12; Agencia Reforma 10/21/12 via Terra (Mexico))
Outgoing Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa was scheduled to visit Cherán on Oct. 16 as part of a last official tour of Michoacán, his native state, but the Cherán visit was cancelled after the violence at the teachers’ college there. Calderón had been expected to announce promises of aid for the town. (Quadratín (Morelia, Michoacán) 10/15/12)
*2. Chile: Thousands March for Indigenous Rights on Columbus Holiday
Thousands marched in Santiago on Oct. 15 to demand respect for the rights of Chile’s indigenous peoples—the Mapuches in the south, Aymara speakers in the north, and the Pascuenses (Rapa Nui) of Easter Island. The march, sponsored by the Meli Wixan Mapu Organization, the José Guiñón communities, the community of Wente Winkul Mapu and the Temukuikui Autonomous Mapuche Community, also demanded the release of four Mapuche prisoners who had been on hunger strike in the southern city of Angol for 50 days [see Update #1147]. Media estimates for participation ranged from 3,000 to 7,000.
As regularly occurs in Chile, near the end of the march carabineros militarized police attacked the protesters with tear gas and water cannons. According to the Associated Press wire service, the police were responding to about 100 hooded youths who joined the march and began vandalizing banks, while the correspondent from the Mexican daily La Jornada indicated that the police attacks may have begun without provocation.
The march took place on a national holiday celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in October 1492. “We have nothing to celebrate,” Mapuche spokesperson Natividad Llanquileo told reporters. The Mapuches resisted the Spanish for some 300 years but were defeated militarily in the late nineteenth century and were forced into the southern region of Araucanía. They continue to struggle to regain ancestral land; these struggles have intensified over the past few years and have been met with government repression.
The four Angol hunger strikers, who began fasting on Aug. 27, were moved to a hospital in Concepción on Oct. 11, but they asked to be returned to Angol in order to be closer to their communities. A local court granted the request for three of the prisoners--Daniel Levinao, Paulino Levipán and Rodrigo Montoya—on Oct. 18; the fourth, Erick Montoya, was to stay in the hospital pending a medical report. Five other Mapuche prisoners had been on a liquids-only hunger strike in the city of Temuco since Oct. 1, demanding to be moved to join the other strikers in Angol. They reported harassment by the prison authorities, who they said would bring them food to tempt them to eat, and on Oct. 19 they intensified the hunger strike by refusing liquids as well as solid food. (AP 10/15/12 via Calgary (Canada) Times; LJ 10/16/12 from correspondent; AFP 10/18/12 via Radio Nederland; Radio Bío Bío 10/21/12)
*3. Honduras: Court Quashes “Model Cities”; Investors Eye Jamaica
By a 13-2 vote on Oct. 17, the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) ruled that Decree 283-2010, the constitutional change enabling the creation of privatized autonomous regions known as “model cities,” is unconstitutional. The decision confirmed an Oct. 3 ruling by a five-member panel of the CSJ; the full court had to vote because the panel’s ruling was not unanimous [see Update #1147]. The “model cities” concept was promoted by North American neoliberal economists as a way to spur economic development in Honduras. The autonomous zones, officially called Special Development Regions (RED), would “create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Honduras,” according to Grupo MGK, the US startup that was to manage the first project. (Honduras Culture and Politics 10/17/12)
The CSJ decision clearly upset congressional promoters of the “model cities.” Ricardo Cardona, National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández’s private secretary, said the project “had failed because of the opposition of the extreme left and the extreme right in Honduras…the same ones who conspired to bring about the coup d’état in 2009.” Now they have “conspired so that 205,000 Hondurans have lost the opportunity to get employment in the ‘model cities,’” he claimed.
Grupo MGK reacted to the CSJ decision by pulling out of Honduras. “Michael Strong, MGK’s president, went to Jamaica and met with high officials of that country and will bring the money that he was thinking of investing in Honduras,” the company’s Honduran representative, Guillermo Peña, said on Oct. 19 during an appearance on Channel 10 television. “Since there aren’t the conditions we asked for [in Honduras], we’ll bring the capital to other countries of the world,” Peña added. MGK was carrying on conversations with various Caribbean and Eastern European countries, according to Peña, who claimed that Greece would be attractive for investment, since “this plan allows them to get out of the economic crisis.” (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 10/19/12; La Prensa (Tegucigalpa) 10/19/12)
*4. Cuba: Spanish Rightist Sentenced in Dissident’s Death
Cuban television announced on Oct. 15 that a court in the eastern province of Granma had found Spanish national Angel Francisco Carromero Barrios guilty of causing an automobile accident that killed the well-known dissident Oswaldo Payá and another dissident, Harold Cepero, on July 22 [see Update #1147]. Carromero, the leader of the New Generations youth movement of Spain’s governing rightwing Popular Party (PP), had been visiting Payá and was driving the dissidents in a rented car when the accident occurred. Prosecutors charged that Carromero had been speeding, while the defense blamed the condition of the road and a lack of warning signs. The court sentenced Carromero to four years in prison instead of the seven years requested by the prosecution.
Spain’s consul in Cuba, Tomás Rodríguez, described the trial as “clean, open and procedurally impeccable.”
Cuba’s criminal code leaves open the possibility that Carromero might be able to return to Spain before he has finished serving the full sentence, and there is speculation that the Cuban and Spanish governments might make a deal. Relations between the governments were tense after the PP took power in elections last November, but the situation seems to have improved. Spanish foreign minister José María García-Margallo met with his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodríguez, in New York during the opening of the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September; the Carromero case was reportedly one of the issues they discussed. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/16/12 from correspondent)
*5. Haiti: Government Seeks to Arrest Human Rights Lawyers
On Sept. 27 Haitian justice minister Jean Renel Sanon abruptly fired Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Jean Renel Sénatus, the chief prosecutor for the capital and the fifth person to hold the position since President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) took office in May 2011. Sénatus’ replacement, Elco Saint-Armand, was only in office one day before he was replaced by Gérald Norgaisse. On Sept. 28 Sénatus announced on the radio that he had been removed because he refused to obey orders to arrest 36 government opponents, including three human rights attorneys: Mario Joseph, Newton Saint-Juste and André Michel.
Mario Joseph is a prominent human rights lawyer who heads the International Lawyers Office (BAI). He has filed a complaint against former “president for life” Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc,” 1971-1986) for human rights violations during his administration, and in July Joseph wrote to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in French), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), asking for the commission to investigate a long list of alleged human rights violations by the Martelly government. Saint-Juste and Michel have filed complaints against Martelly’s wife and son for alleged corruption and embezzlement of public funds. All three lawyers report having received death threats by phone.
The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) is asking for letters in French or English to Minister of Justice and Public Security Jean Renel Sanon (secretariat.mjsp@yahoo.com) and Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Gérald Norgaisse (parquetpap@yahoo.fr), with copies to the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (info@ijdh.org), urging them to investigate the accusation of threats against the lawyers and to provide them with appropriate protection; to explain the alleged order to arrest 36 political opponents; and to ensure that anyone charged is given a fair trial in compliance with international standards. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 9/27/12; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 9/29/12; AI urgent action 10/4/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
It’s Time to Abandon Nixon’s War on Drugs (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8181
Guarani Women Arise! Indigenous Leader Matilde Lucio Wins International Rural Women's Day Prize (Argentina)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3915-guarani-women-arise-indigenous-leader-matilde-lucio-wins-international-rural-womenas-day-prize
Camila Vallejo's Letelier-Moffitt Acceptance Speech (Chile)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3921-camila-vallejos-letelier-moffitt-acceptance-speech
Women’s Groups Say Uruguay’s New Abortion Law Falls Short
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/uruguay-archives-48/3924-womens-groups-say-uruguays-new-abortion-law-falls-short
Peruvians Stand Up to Newmont Mining
http://ww4report.com/node/11578
Peru: campesino vigilance at Conga mine site
http://ww4report.com/node/11610
Citibank to take over "Peru's Chernobyl"
http://ww4report.com/node/11609
Bolivia: New Road Contract Ramps Up Stakes in TIPNIS Conflict
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/20/bolivia-new-road-contract-ramps-stakes-tipnis-conflict
Peru: narco-mineral integration
http://ww4report.com/node/11608
Communal Land Titling at a Standstill in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3918-communal-land-titling-at-a-standstill-in-peru
High court rejects Chevron appeal in Ecuador case
http://ww4report.com/node/11607
In Colombia the Winds of Peace Are Blowing: Interview with Piedad Córdoba
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8049
Colombians for Peace: Peace taken hostage and the need for an urgent change to achieve it
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8032
Santos's End Game and the Prospects of a Durable Peace in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/19/santoss-end-game-and-prospects-durable-peace-colombia
Colombia: riot police attack student protesters
http://ww4report.com/node/11606
Colombia apologizes for Amazon genocide
http://ww4report.com/node/11605
Chavez Wins Venezuelan Presidential Election with 54% of the Vote
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7331
Latest Step in a Long Road: The Venezuelan Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3911-latest-step-in-a-long-road-the-venezuelan-elections
Honduras: Model Cities Definitively Unconstitutional
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/10/model-cities-definitively.html
How Low Can Honduras Go?
http://www.thenation.com/article/170543/how-low-can-honduras-go#
Guatemala under Pressure to Investigate Shooting of Native Protesters
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3908-guatemala-under-pressure-to-investigate-shooting-of-native-protesters
Guatemala: arrests in peasant massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11604
Guatemala claims arrest of local Zetas boss
http://ww4report.com/node/11603
‘I don’t want to die without seeing justice’: Sexual Slavery During Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8211
MS-13 gang makes US "criminal organization" list (El Salvador)
http://ww4report.com/node/11602
Behind the Chicago Connection (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11611
Mexico: Zetas kingpin in cadaver caper?
http://ww4report.com/node/11590
Heart-to-Heart on the Drug War (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8109
Mexico: Arzate against the State
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3910-mexico-arzate-against-the-state
Mexican Authorities Urged to End Torture Epidemic
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3916-mexican-authorities-urged-to-end-torture-epidemic
Bradley Will slaying back in the news... (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11601
Over 300 Days in Prison: Francisco Sántiz L?pez, Zapatista Political Prisoner, is Innocent!
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3907-over-300-days-in-prison-francisco-santiz-lpez-zapatista-political-prisoner-is-innocent
Indigenous Communities Rise Up in Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/11624
Mexico's Labor Law Reform Sparks Massive Protests
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14023/mexicos_labor_law_reform_sparks_massive_protests/
On Both Sides of the Border, Teachers Fight Corporatization
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13977/on_both_sides_of_the_border_teachers_drive_labor_fights/
Post-Election Shake-ups in Mexico
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october152012/mexico-elections.php
Urban Agriculture in Cuba (Photo Essay)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/10/18/urban-agriculture-cuba-photo-essay
MINUSTAH’s Upcoming Renewal: A Setback for Democracy in Haiti
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/11/minustah%E2%80%99s-upcoming-renewal-setback-democracy-haiti
Forced Evictions Remain Constant Threat as Permanent Housing Solutions Lag
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/forced-evictions-remain-constant-threat-as-permanent-housing-solutions-lag
Public Support Grows for Threatened Human Rights Attorney Mario Joseph (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/public-support-grows-for-threatened-human-rights-attorney-mario-joseph
The Development-Industrial Complex in Haiti
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/the-development-industrial-complex-in-haiti
Friendly fire blamed for Border Patrol death (US/immigration)
http://ww4report.com/node/11589
It’s Time to Question Border Patrol Use of Deadly Force (US/immigration)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3926-its-time-to-question-border-patrol-use-of-deadly-force
Back Home, an Undocubus Rider Continues the Fight (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/12/back-home-undocubus-rider-continues-fight
Men With Guns, Boys With Rocks in a Dangerous Land (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/17/men-guns-boys-rocks-dangerous-land
The Penalty is Exile: How Immigration and Criminalization Collide (US/immigration)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3920-the-penalty-is-exile-how-immigration-and-criminalization-collide
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 #1148, October 21, 2012
1. Mexico: Police Break Up Michoacán Student Protests
2. Chile: Thousands March for Indigenous Rights on Columbus Holiday
3. Honduras: Court Quashes “Model Cities”; Investors Eye Jamaica
4. Cuba: Spanish Rightist Sentenced in Dissident’s Death
5. Haiti: Government Seeks to Arrest Human Rights Lawyers
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Police Break Up Michoacán Student Protests
Using tear gas and water cannons, hundreds of federal and state police ended student occupations at three teachers’ colleges in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacán in the early morning of Oct. 15. Protesters and other students were beaten in the raids, which resulted in the arrests of 176 students—168 in the town of Tiripetío, two in the town of Arteaga and six in the autonomous indigenous municipality of Cherán. The students reportedly threw rocks at the police and set fire to 13 of the 90 vehicles, including buses and patrols cars, that they had seized during the weeklong protest. Michoacán officials said 10 police agents were injured, three of them seriously.
The students were demanding a one-year postponement of changes to the curriculum that would require them to study English and computer science; they also sought an increase in the number of fourth-level students. Mexico’s rural teachers’ colleges, which largely provide instruction for campesino and indigenous students, have suffered from neglect and budget cuts for years and have been a focal point for protests [see Update #1109]. This was the second major student protest in Michoacán so far this school year. Students started a building occupation and strike on Sept. 4 in the Michoacán University of San Nicolás de Hidalgo (UMSNH) in Morelia, the state capital; rightwing students led by a group called the “White Angels” broke up the occupation on Sept. 25 and Sept. 26.
The protesters at the teachers’ colleges received strong support from local and national groups. The Michoacán section of the National Education Workers Coordinating Committee (CNTE), a large rank-and-file caucus within the conservative National Education Workers Union (SNTE), backed the protests even before the Oct. 15 police operation. In Cherán local officials condemned the raid, which they said “broke into our community with great violence.” The town is the site of an often-violent struggle between residents and illegal loggers that has led the municipality to declare itself autonomous, with the municipal government chosen through indigenous customs rather than formal elections [see Update #1131]. The Network Against Violence and for Solidarity (RvsR), which grew out of solidarity work with the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in the southeastern state of Chiapas, denounced “the atrocious manner of humiliating The Other, the manner of treating youths who defend a just struggle with dignity. The violence has been initiated by the governments, by their reforms; they are the ones who are responsible.”
On Oct. 17 thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Morelia, tying up traffic and virtually paralyzing the city, to demand an end to the repression and the release of the 74 students who were still being detained. The protest was organized by the state CNTE; the organizers estimated the crowd at 40,000, while local authorities put the number at 15,000. Participants included local students; students from the teachers’ college in nearby Tiripetío; members of the Purépecha Nation, an organization of activists from the state’s main indigenous group; and leaders in teacher union locals from the Federal District (DF, Mexico City) and the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tlaxcala and Veracruz. Later in the day, about 500 teachers’ college students seized a refrigerator truck and four buses, using them to block La Huerta Avenue, near a main highway, while about 100 other students demonstrated near the state attorney general’s office.
Demonstrations continued throughout the week. On Oct. 18 CNTE supporters and students started a sit-in at Melchor Ocampo Plaza, in Morelia’s historic center, while others began blocking Madero Avenue in two places the next day. The protesters said they would maintain the sit-in and the blockages until all the students were freed from detention. Also on Oct. 19, groups of students protested inside the state legislature building, holding up photographs that they said showed excessive use of force during the police operations. Legislators from the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)—which lost control of the state to the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) with the election of current governor Fausto Vallejo Figueroa in 2011—backed the protesters and charged that the government treated students like criminals while not touching the drug cartels that have established themselves in the state.
In the DF, some 70 students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) blocked Insurgentes Avenue for almost four hours on Oct. 19 in solidarity with the students in Michoacán. As of Oct. 20 all but eight of the students arrested on Oct. 15 had been released, either without charges or else on bail. (Adital (Brazil) 10/16/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 10/16/12, 10/18/12, 10/20/12, 10/20/12, 10/21/12; Agencia Reforma 10/21/12 via Terra (Mexico))
Outgoing Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa was scheduled to visit Cherán on Oct. 16 as part of a last official tour of Michoacán, his native state, but the Cherán visit was cancelled after the violence at the teachers’ college there. Calderón had been expected to announce promises of aid for the town. (Quadratín (Morelia, Michoacán) 10/15/12)
*2. Chile: Thousands March for Indigenous Rights on Columbus Holiday
Thousands marched in Santiago on Oct. 15 to demand respect for the rights of Chile’s indigenous peoples—the Mapuches in the south, Aymara speakers in the north, and the Pascuenses (Rapa Nui) of Easter Island. The march, sponsored by the Meli Wixan Mapu Organization, the José Guiñón communities, the community of Wente Winkul Mapu and the Temukuikui Autonomous Mapuche Community, also demanded the release of four Mapuche prisoners who had been on hunger strike in the southern city of Angol for 50 days [see Update #1147]. Media estimates for participation ranged from 3,000 to 7,000.
As regularly occurs in Chile, near the end of the march carabineros militarized police attacked the protesters with tear gas and water cannons. According to the Associated Press wire service, the police were responding to about 100 hooded youths who joined the march and began vandalizing banks, while the correspondent from the Mexican daily La Jornada indicated that the police attacks may have begun without provocation.
The march took place on a national holiday celebrating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in October 1492. “We have nothing to celebrate,” Mapuche spokesperson Natividad Llanquileo told reporters. The Mapuches resisted the Spanish for some 300 years but were defeated militarily in the late nineteenth century and were forced into the southern region of Araucanía. They continue to struggle to regain ancestral land; these struggles have intensified over the past few years and have been met with government repression.
The four Angol hunger strikers, who began fasting on Aug. 27, were moved to a hospital in Concepción on Oct. 11, but they asked to be returned to Angol in order to be closer to their communities. A local court granted the request for three of the prisoners--Daniel Levinao, Paulino Levipán and Rodrigo Montoya—on Oct. 18; the fourth, Erick Montoya, was to stay in the hospital pending a medical report. Five other Mapuche prisoners had been on a liquids-only hunger strike in the city of Temuco since Oct. 1, demanding to be moved to join the other strikers in Angol. They reported harassment by the prison authorities, who they said would bring them food to tempt them to eat, and on Oct. 19 they intensified the hunger strike by refusing liquids as well as solid food. (AP 10/15/12 via Calgary (Canada) Times; LJ 10/16/12 from correspondent; AFP 10/18/12 via Radio Nederland; Radio Bío Bío 10/21/12)
*3. Honduras: Court Quashes “Model Cities”; Investors Eye Jamaica
By a 13-2 vote on Oct. 17, the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) ruled that Decree 283-2010, the constitutional change enabling the creation of privatized autonomous regions known as “model cities,” is unconstitutional. The decision confirmed an Oct. 3 ruling by a five-member panel of the CSJ; the full court had to vote because the panel’s ruling was not unanimous [see Update #1147]. The “model cities” concept was promoted by North American neoliberal economists as a way to spur economic development in Honduras. The autonomous zones, officially called Special Development Regions (RED), would “create hundreds of thousands of jobs in Honduras,” according to Grupo MGK, the US startup that was to manage the first project. (Honduras Culture and Politics 10/17/12)
The CSJ decision clearly upset congressional promoters of the “model cities.” Ricardo Cardona, National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández’s private secretary, said the project “had failed because of the opposition of the extreme left and the extreme right in Honduras…the same ones who conspired to bring about the coup d’état in 2009.” Now they have “conspired so that 205,000 Hondurans have lost the opportunity to get employment in the ‘model cities,’” he claimed.
Grupo MGK reacted to the CSJ decision by pulling out of Honduras. “Michael Strong, MGK’s president, went to Jamaica and met with high officials of that country and will bring the money that he was thinking of investing in Honduras,” the company’s Honduran representative, Guillermo Peña, said on Oct. 19 during an appearance on Channel 10 television. “Since there aren’t the conditions we asked for [in Honduras], we’ll bring the capital to other countries of the world,” Peña added. MGK was carrying on conversations with various Caribbean and Eastern European countries, according to Peña, who claimed that Greece would be attractive for investment, since “this plan allows them to get out of the economic crisis.” (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 10/19/12; La Prensa (Tegucigalpa) 10/19/12)
*4. Cuba: Spanish Rightist Sentenced in Dissident’s Death
Cuban television announced on Oct. 15 that a court in the eastern province of Granma had found Spanish national Angel Francisco Carromero Barrios guilty of causing an automobile accident that killed the well-known dissident Oswaldo Payá and another dissident, Harold Cepero, on July 22 [see Update #1147]. Carromero, the leader of the New Generations youth movement of Spain’s governing rightwing Popular Party (PP), had been visiting Payá and was driving the dissidents in a rented car when the accident occurred. Prosecutors charged that Carromero had been speeding, while the defense blamed the condition of the road and a lack of warning signs. The court sentenced Carromero to four years in prison instead of the seven years requested by the prosecution.
Spain’s consul in Cuba, Tomás Rodríguez, described the trial as “clean, open and procedurally impeccable.”
Cuba’s criminal code leaves open the possibility that Carromero might be able to return to Spain before he has finished serving the full sentence, and there is speculation that the Cuban and Spanish governments might make a deal. Relations between the governments were tense after the PP took power in elections last November, but the situation seems to have improved. Spanish foreign minister José María García-Margallo met with his Cuban counterpart, Bruno Rodríguez, in New York during the opening of the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September; the Carromero case was reportedly one of the issues they discussed. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/16/12 from correspondent)
*5. Haiti: Government Seeks to Arrest Human Rights Lawyers
On Sept. 27 Haitian justice minister Jean Renel Sanon abruptly fired Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Jean Renel Sénatus, the chief prosecutor for the capital and the fifth person to hold the position since President Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”) took office in May 2011. Sénatus’ replacement, Elco Saint-Armand, was only in office one day before he was replaced by Gérald Norgaisse. On Sept. 28 Sénatus announced on the radio that he had been removed because he refused to obey orders to arrest 36 government opponents, including three human rights attorneys: Mario Joseph, Newton Saint-Juste and André Michel.
Mario Joseph is a prominent human rights lawyer who heads the International Lawyers Office (BAI). He has filed a complaint against former “president for life” Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc,” 1971-1986) for human rights violations during his administration, and in July Joseph wrote to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in French), an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), asking for the commission to investigate a long list of alleged human rights violations by the Martelly government. Saint-Juste and Michel have filed complaints against Martelly’s wife and son for alleged corruption and embezzlement of public funds. All three lawyers report having received death threats by phone.
The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) is asking for letters in French or English to Minister of Justice and Public Security Jean Renel Sanon (secretariat.mjsp@yahoo.com) and Port-au-Prince Government Commissioner Gérald Norgaisse (parquetpap@yahoo.fr), with copies to the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (info@ijdh.org), urging them to investigate the accusation of threats against the lawyers and to provide them with appropriate protection; to explain the alleged order to arrest 36 political opponents; and to ensure that anyone charged is given a fair trial in compliance with international standards. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 9/27/12; Haïti Libre (Haiti) 9/29/12; AI urgent action 10/4/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
It’s Time to Abandon Nixon’s War on Drugs (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8181
Guarani Women Arise! Indigenous Leader Matilde Lucio Wins International Rural Women's Day Prize (Argentina)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3915-guarani-women-arise-indigenous-leader-matilde-lucio-wins-international-rural-womenas-day-prize
Camila Vallejo's Letelier-Moffitt Acceptance Speech (Chile)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3921-camila-vallejos-letelier-moffitt-acceptance-speech
Women’s Groups Say Uruguay’s New Abortion Law Falls Short
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/uruguay-archives-48/3924-womens-groups-say-uruguays-new-abortion-law-falls-short
Peruvians Stand Up to Newmont Mining
http://ww4report.com/node/11578
Peru: campesino vigilance at Conga mine site
http://ww4report.com/node/11610
Citibank to take over "Peru's Chernobyl"
http://ww4report.com/node/11609
Bolivia: New Road Contract Ramps Up Stakes in TIPNIS Conflict
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/20/bolivia-new-road-contract-ramps-stakes-tipnis-conflict
Peru: narco-mineral integration
http://ww4report.com/node/11608
Communal Land Titling at a Standstill in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3918-communal-land-titling-at-a-standstill-in-peru
High court rejects Chevron appeal in Ecuador case
http://ww4report.com/node/11607
In Colombia the Winds of Peace Are Blowing: Interview with Piedad Córdoba
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8049
Colombians for Peace: Peace taken hostage and the need for an urgent change to achieve it
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8032
Santos's End Game and the Prospects of a Durable Peace in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/19/santoss-end-game-and-prospects-durable-peace-colombia
Colombia: riot police attack student protesters
http://ww4report.com/node/11606
Colombia apologizes for Amazon genocide
http://ww4report.com/node/11605
Chavez Wins Venezuelan Presidential Election with 54% of the Vote
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7331
Latest Step in a Long Road: The Venezuelan Elections
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3911-latest-step-in-a-long-road-the-venezuelan-elections
Honduras: Model Cities Definitively Unconstitutional
http://hondurasculturepolitics.blogspot.com/2012/10/model-cities-definitively.html
How Low Can Honduras Go?
http://www.thenation.com/article/170543/how-low-can-honduras-go#
Guatemala under Pressure to Investigate Shooting of Native Protesters
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3908-guatemala-under-pressure-to-investigate-shooting-of-native-protesters
Guatemala: arrests in peasant massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11604
Guatemala claims arrest of local Zetas boss
http://ww4report.com/node/11603
‘I don’t want to die without seeing justice’: Sexual Slavery During Guatemala’s Armed Conflict
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8211
MS-13 gang makes US "criminal organization" list (El Salvador)
http://ww4report.com/node/11602
Behind the Chicago Connection (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11611
Mexico: Zetas kingpin in cadaver caper?
http://ww4report.com/node/11590
Heart-to-Heart on the Drug War (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8109
Mexico: Arzate against the State
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3910-mexico-arzate-against-the-state
Mexican Authorities Urged to End Torture Epidemic
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3916-mexican-authorities-urged-to-end-torture-epidemic
Bradley Will slaying back in the news... (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11601
Over 300 Days in Prison: Francisco Sántiz L?pez, Zapatista Political Prisoner, is Innocent!
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3907-over-300-days-in-prison-francisco-santiz-lpez-zapatista-political-prisoner-is-innocent
Indigenous Communities Rise Up in Mexico
http://ww4report.com/node/11624
Mexico's Labor Law Reform Sparks Massive Protests
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14023/mexicos_labor_law_reform_sparks_massive_protests/
On Both Sides of the Border, Teachers Fight Corporatization
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13977/on_both_sides_of_the_border_teachers_drive_labor_fights/
Post-Election Shake-ups in Mexico
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/october152012/mexico-elections.php
Urban Agriculture in Cuba (Photo Essay)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/10/18/urban-agriculture-cuba-photo-essay
MINUSTAH’s Upcoming Renewal: A Setback for Democracy in Haiti
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/11/minustah%E2%80%99s-upcoming-renewal-setback-democracy-haiti
Forced Evictions Remain Constant Threat as Permanent Housing Solutions Lag
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/forced-evictions-remain-constant-threat-as-permanent-housing-solutions-lag
Public Support Grows for Threatened Human Rights Attorney Mario Joseph (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/public-support-grows-for-threatened-human-rights-attorney-mario-joseph
The Development-Industrial Complex in Haiti
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/the-development-industrial-complex-in-haiti
Friendly fire blamed for Border Patrol death (US/immigration)
http://ww4report.com/node/11589
It’s Time to Question Border Patrol Use of Deadly Force (US/immigration)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3926-its-time-to-question-border-patrol-use-of-deadly-force
Back Home, an Undocubus Rider Continues the Fight (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/12/back-home-undocubus-rider-continues-fight
Men With Guns, Boys With Rocks in a Dangerous Land (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/17/men-guns-boys-rocks-dangerous-land
The Penalty is Exile: How Immigration and Criminalization Collide (US/immigration)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3920-the-penalty-is-exile-how-immigration-and-criminalization-collide
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:
Posts (Atom)