Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1151, November 11, 2012
1. Dominican Republic: Student Killed During Protest Against “Reform”
2. Honduras: Four Dead in Latest Aguán Violence
3. Mexico: 14 Police Are Charged in Attack on CIA Agents
4. Puerto Rico: Fortuño Loses--But Did Statehood Win?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/policy, 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. Dominican Republic: Student Killed During Protest Against “Reform”
Dominican medical student Willy Warden Florián Ramírez was shot dead on Nov. 8 as police attempted to break up a demonstration by students at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD) protesting a “fiscal reform” that the Chamber of Deputies passed that day. Police reportedly used tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition as masked students threw rocks at the agents and at passing cars. According to the human rights organization Amnesty International (AI), witnesses said police agents shot Florián and then used tear gas against people who tried to come to his aid. Police officials claim a video shows a masked protester firing at police agents. At least three other students, two police officers and a bus ticket collector were injured in the clashes. (El Diario-La Prensa (New York) 11/8/12 from correspondent via La Opinión (Los Angeles); AP 11/9/12 via Hoy (Dominican Republic); AI press release 11/9/12)
Although police officials said they were waiting for the results of a forensic examination of the bullet that killed Florián, they appeared to agree with witnesses that police agents were responsible. The officials said on Nov. 9 that at least 19 of the agents at the demonstration were being investigated. President Medina called the killing a “crime” and ordered the chief of police, Maj. Gen. José Armando Polanco Gómez, to clarify the circumstances that led to the student’s death. (EDLP 11/10/12 from correspondent)
The “fiscal reform”--proposed by the government of President Danilo Medina and passed by the Chamber of Deputies in a 103-66 vote on Nov. 8--will raise the country’s sales tax from 16% to 18% as of Jan. 1 and will establish new taxes on some staple foods, on Christmas bonuses and on fuel. According to Medina the increases are needed to cover a budget deficit of some 187 billion pesos (about US$4.704 billion), according to one source; another source gives 148.564 billion pesos (US$3.373 billion) as the number.
The budget deficit is inherited from Medina’s three-term predecessor, Leonel Fernández (1996-2000, 2004-2008 and 2008-2012), a leader of Medina’s centrist Dominican Liberation Party (PLD). Critics charged that the shortfall resulted from spending for electoral purposes during the last two Fernández administrations and from corruption among Fernández allies, including Senator Félix Bautista, a construction contractor who has been accused of payoffs to successive Haitian governments [see Update #1124]. Ramón Tito Ramírez, a spokesperson for a coalition that protested the tax increase with a march from the UASD to the National Congress on Nov. 6, told reporters that “this disaster should be paid for by those who provoked it, enriching themselves with both hands without caring that their irresponsible actions were increasing the poverty of our people.” The protesters were also calling for 5% of the national budget to be allocated to public universities like the UASD.
Another group, the Political Action Network (RAP), is planning to try Fernández on Nov. 21 at a people’s tribunal. For eight years the public “has been paying for fiscal reforms with the promise that the funds will go to social services,” according to a RED statement, “but it hasn’t happened.” The group cited the continuing “inefficiency of the health services and the non-fulfillment of the funds designated for education.” (EDLP 11/7/12 from correspondent; EFE 11/7/12 via Univision; AP 11/9/12 via Hoy)
Florián’s death made police accountability an additional issue for the protesters. Holding candles, about 50 representatives of various civil organizations demonstrated outside police headquarters in Santo Domingo the evening of Nov. 9. “We’re asking the police to stop their repression, since in any case people are going to continue the protests” against the fiscal reform, Alexander Mundaray, a spokesperson for the protesters, told the Associated Press wire service. (AP 11/9/12 via Hoy)
Amnesty International issued a statement on Nov. 9 saying that “Florián’s killing should give Dominican authorities pause to reflect on how the country’s police have been allowed to violate human rights continually with impunity.” AI said it had “previously documented soaring levels of abuse by police in the Dominican Republic, including torture and unlawful killings. An October 2011 report cited myriad cases of individuals killed by police--a tenth of all murders in the country the previous year were the result of police abuse.” (AI press release 11/9/12)
*2. Honduras: Four Dead in Latest Aguán Violence
Three Honduran campesinos--Orlando Campos, Reynaldo Rivera Paz and José Omar Paz--were killed in a drive-by shooting the weekend of Nov. 3 while they were waiting for transportation in the city of Tocoa in the northern department of Colón. The killings took place in the Lower Aguán Valley, which has been the scene of violent struggles between campesinos and large landowners since late 2009, when members of several campesino cooperatives occupied a number of estates they said were on land reserved for small farmers under an agrarian reform program from the 1980s. As many as 80 people have died in the land disputes, most of them campesinos [see Updates #1143, 1145].
On Nov. 4 the Colón departmental police announced that they had arrested Marvin Noé García Santos, a police agent from Atlántida department, in the murders. Colón police chief José Amílcar Mejía said García Santos was part of a criminal gang that included campesinos occupying the Paso Aguán estate; one source says the victims were also part of the occupation there. According to Mejía the killings resulted from a dispute among three groups over the cutting and selling of African oil palms, the main commercial crop in the Aguán. But one of the main campesino groups in the region, the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), blamed the murders on the ongoing dispute between campesinos and landowners. The group asked for “national and international organizations defending human rights to provide accompaniment to this campesino struggle” and called on Honduran president Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa to “rein in this violence against the campesinos of the Lower Aguán.” (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 11/4/12; Noticias Aliadas 11/7/12)
A fourth Aguán campesino was mudered later in the same week. According to Julián Hernández, president of the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), three armed “men dressed in blue, security guards for landowners,” kidnapped MARCA member José Cecilio Pérez on Nov. 9 after he and other MARCA members withdrew the equivalent of $16,000 from a Tocoa bank for the salaries of members of the nearby El Despertar cooperative. Pérez’s body was found the next day near an African oil palm plantation. Hernández discounted simple robbery as the motive. “It’s a strategy of the landowners to make it appear that it was robbery,” he said, insisting that the kidnappers were wearing security guards’ uniforms. (AFP 11/10/12 via Terra.com)
The company with the largest holdings in the Aguán is Grupo Dinant, founded by Honduran cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, whose security guards have been blamed for many of the killings. In 2009 Dinant received a $30 million loan from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), in part to fund increased cultivation of African oil palms [see Update #1058]. The Canadian-based organization Rights Action is asking for letters to World Bank president Jim Yong Kim (at The World Bank Group, 1818 H Street NW, Washington, DC 20433) calling on the bank to suspend the loan. (Upside Down World 11/8/12) An anthropologist and physician, Kim is a co-founder, along with Dr. Paul Farmer, of Partners in Health, which provides community-based health care in Haiti and other countries.
*3. Mexico: 14 Police Are Charged in Attack on CIA Agents
After more than two months of investigation, on Nov. 9 Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) confirmed that it was formally charging 14 federal police agents for an Aug. 24 attack on a US embassy van on a road near the Tres Marías community, south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos [see Update #1147]. The agents claimed they mistook the van’s occupants—two agents of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a Mexican marine—for members of a gang connected to a local kidnapping. The two CIA agents were wounded in the incident.
The PGR charged that the 14 Mexican police agents “tried to take the lives” of the three men in the embassy vehicle. Investigators determined that the police agents were driving private cars and were in civilian clothes when they attacked the embassy’s van, which was surrounded by the police agents’ vehicles. Investigators said the van, which was heavily armored, was hit with 152 bullets. The PGR’s formal charges didn’t mention possible links to organized crime, but PGR sources indicated that they thought three of the police agents had ties to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel. The 14 agents are being held in maximum-security prisons in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and in Puente Grande, Jalisco. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/10/12)
*4. Puerto Rico: Fortuño Loses--But Did Statehood Win?
On Nov. 7 Puerto Rican governor Luis G. Fortuño conceded defeat in his bid for a second four-year term in an election the day before that also included voting for the legislature and the municipal governments, and a non-binding referendum on the island’s status. With 96.35% of the ballots counted, Fortuño, the candidate of the pro-statehood New Progressive Party (PNP), had received 47.04% of the votes; Senator Alejandro García Padilla, running for the centrist Popular Democratic Party (PPD), won narrowly with 47.85%. Juan Dalmau Ramírez of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) came in third with 2.53%, less than the 3% required to maintain the party’s ballot status. Three smaller parties split the remaining votes. (Prensa Latina 11/7/12; Claridad (Puerto Rico) 11/8/12)
The PNP is close to the US Republican Party, and Fortuño’s aggressive promotion of neoliberal austerity policies sparked protests from unionists opposing budget cuts and layoffs, students opposing tuition hikes and environmentalists opposing a planned natural gas pipeline across the island [see Updates #1008, 1111, 1118].
The vote on Puerto Rico’s status came in two parts. In the first, voters were asked if they wanted to maintain the current relationship with the US as a Free Associated State (ELA, for its initials in Spanish, sometimes called “commonwealth” in English). The “no” won easily with 54% of the votes against 46% for “yes.” In the second part, voters were given a choice between independence, a vaguely defined “Sovereign Free Associated State,” and statehood in the US. Statehood won with 802,179 votes (61.15% of valid votes), followed by “Sovereign Free Associated State” with 436,997 votes (33.31%), and independence with just 72,551 votes (5.53%).
Pedro Pierluisi, a PNP member and Fortuño ally who won reelection as Puerto Rico’s resident commissioner (non-voting representative) to the US Congress, quickly hailed the vote as a victory for statehood. “The ball has gone into the court of the [US] Congress, and if they don’t act with speed, it can certainly pass on to international bodies,” he said in an interview that the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día published on Nov. 9.
But others denied that statehood had won a clear victory. During the campaign the PPD had opposed all three choices, implying that voters shouldn’t mark their ballots for this question, and in fact a total of 468,478 ballots were left blank. The combined total for the blank ballots, the votes for independence and the votes for “Sovereign Free Associated State” came to 978,026--175,847 more than the votes for statehood--suggesting that Puerto Ricans remain divided on the issue. In the last referendum on status, in 1998, voters were given “none of the above” as an option; it won with about 50.3% of the vote [see Update #463]. (Claridad 11/8/12; EFE 11/9/12 via Univision)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/policy, US/immigration
Argentina: indignados occupy Buenos Aires
http://ww4report.com/node/11679
Argentina freezes Chevron assets in Ecuador case
http://ww4report.com/node/11678
New Media Law, New Voices in Argentina
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3954-new-media-law-new-voices-in-argentina
Earth’s Most Threatened Tribe Make Unprecedented Visit to Brazil’s Capital
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3957-earths-most-threatened-tribe-make-unprecedented-visit-to-brazils-capital-
Peru: Water Tribunal indicts Conga project
http://ww4report.com/node/11680
God, Oil, and the Theft of Waorani DNA: A Tale of Biopiracy in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3961-god-oil-and-the-theft-of-waorani-dna-a-tale-of-biopiracy-from-ecuador
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
What U.S. Voters Can Learn from Venezuela’s Election
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/5/what-us-voters-can-learn-venezuelas-election
Venezuela: indigenous protest for land rights
http://ww4report.com/node/11677
Campaign to Legalise Abortion in Venezuela Gains Publicity
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7452
Central American Mothers Organize to Find Their Missing Migrant Children
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3956-central-american-mothers-organize-to-find-their-missing-migrant-children
El Salvador Urged to Respond to El Calabozo Massacre Survivors’ Demands
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3955-el-salvador-urged-to-respond-to-el-calabozo-massacre-survivors-demands
Is the World Bank Funding Death Squads in Honduras?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3958-is-the-world-bank-funding-death-squads-in-honduras
Citizen uprisings spread in Mexico
http://www.riograndedigital.com/2012/11/04/citizen-uprisings-spread-in-mexico/
Obama's Election and the Caribbean: What Does it Mean?
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/8/obamas-election-and-caribbean-what-does-it-mean
Haiti: Hidden Costs of the Industrial Zone
http://ww4report.com/node/11671
Zokiki – Unavoidable “juvenile delinquency?” (Haiti)
http://haitigrassrootswatch.squarespace.com/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/11/5/zokiki-unavoidable-juvenile-delinquency.html
Will the International Response to Hurricane Sandy Be Any Better than the Response to Haiti’s Quake or Cholera Disasters?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/will-the-international-response-to-hurricane-sandy-be-any-better-than-the-response-to-haitis-quake-or-cholera-disasters
Islamo-Bolivarianism: The Green-and-Red Menace in Latin America (US/policy)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3959-islamo-bolivarianism-the-green-and-red-menace-in-latin-america
Obama VS. Romney for Latin America: Carrying or Swinging the "Big Stick" (US/policy)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3953-obama-vs-romney-for-latin-america-carrying-or-swinging-the-qbig-stickq
Remembering Jose Antonio: Day of the Dead in Nogales (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/6/remembering-jose-antonio-day-dead-nogales
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 Puerto Rico. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Puerto Rico. Show all posts
Monday, 12 November 2012
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 /
Monday, 13 August 2012
WNU #1140: New Puerto Rican Law to “Intimidate” Activists
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1140, August 12, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: New Law to "Intimidate" Unions and Students
2. Chile: High Students Occupy Schools to Demand Reform
3. Dominican Republic: Residents Protest New Barrick Gold Mine
4. Mexico: Did Romney Donor’s Casino Launder Drug Money?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Mercosur, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Puerto Rico: New Law to "Intimidate" Unions and Students
On July 30 Puerto Rican governor Luis Fortuño signed into law a new Penal Code that he and legislators said would counter a recent rise in crime [see Update #1111] by imposing much stiffer prison sentences for a wide range of crimes. The new law, which replaces the Penal Code of 2004, also defines the seduction of minors through the internet as a criminal offense and gives the government the power to fire any public employee who commits a crime while carrying out a public function. “We’re not going to let the criminals take over Puerto Rico,” Fortuño said at the signing ceremony.
Fortuño insisted that the new code wouldn’t limit rights of free expression. But Puerto Rican legal experts noted that the revisions dramatically increased penalties for civil disobedience. For example, participating in a protest on the steps of the Capitol building that impedes the work of Puerto Rico’s legislature—like one carried out by students in June 2010 [see Updates #1039, 1100]--could now be punished with three years in prison, while in the 2004 Penal Code the penalty only applied if legislative work was interrupted through “intimidation, violence or fraud,” language which was removed in the new law.
Attorney César Rosado, a human and civil rights specialist who represents several unions, told the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día that the new law “tries to intimidate the unions and other pressure groups—like the student movement—which historically have distinguished themselves by presenting resistance to any measure they consider unjust. Establishing a three-year sentence is a big deterrent for protest.” Activists have frequently used nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest in Puerto Rico, most famously in the mass arrests that led to the removal of the US Navy proving grounds from the small island of Vieques in 2003. “In democracy it’s important to allow activism,” constitutional law professor Hiram Meléndez Juarbe told the newspaper, “even if at times it’s inconvenient for the government.” (END 7/30/12, 7/31/12)
In the US the maximum penalty for interrupting a session of Congress is six months in prison and/or a $500 fine. El Nuevo Día noted that the punishment for six Puerto Rican independence activists who interrupted Congress by singing patriotic hymns on May 6, 2009, was a fine. (END 7/31/12)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Aug. 7 challenging the new law. The challenge was presented as an amendment to a complaint the ACLU filed against the Puerto Rico Police Department on June 27 alleging that the department violated the rights of protesters [see World War 4 Report 6/28/12]. (Jurist 8/8/12)
*2. Chile: High Students Occupy Schools to Demand Reform
Students had occupied several of the public high schools in Santiago by the morning of Aug. 10 in the latest protest against the privatization of Chile’s educational system that started under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chilean high school and university students launched a militant movement in the spring of 2011 to demand free, high-quality public education; current demands also include rejection of the so-called “Hinzpeter Law,” legislation proposed by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera last year to impose severe penalties on people who occupy schools or public or private buildings, or who cause damage in protests. Student actions included some 40 marches in 2011 and five so far this year [see Updates #1130, 1135].
Radio Bío Bío reported on Aug. 10 that Special Forces from the carabineros militarized police used tear gas to remove some 30 students who had been occupying the Santiago Superior Institute of Commerce. The students responded with “rocks, paint and eggs,” according to the radio station, and then “fled and took refuge in the Darío Salas High School,” which remained occupied.
Two days earlier, on Aug. 8, marches sponsored by the Secondary Students Coordinating Assembly (ACES), with support from university student federations, ended violently. Santiago authorities refused the high school students permission to march in the central Alameda (Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins Avenue). When the crowd of 5,000-10,000 protesters tried to use the avenue, they were attacked with tear gas, a water cannon and mounted police. The youths threw rocks at police agents and built barricades; acts of vandalism included the burning of three buses. Some 75 protesters were arrested and 49 agents were reportedly injured. A demonstration in the seaside resort city of Viña del Mar ended with 11 people arrested and a pharmacy and supermarket destroyed. There were also marches in La Serena and Valdivia.
The student demonstrations have regularly ended with vandalism by hooded youths, and student organizers have sometimes suggested that infiltrators were behind the violence. After the Aug. 8 march ACES spokesperson Eloísa González said it was “quite suspicious” that with such a large police deployment it wasn’t possible to prevent the isolated activity of the people involved in setting vehicles on fire. Senator Guido Girardi, from the social democratic Party for Democracy (PPD), said there should be an investigation of why each demonstration involved people who “have the same interest as the government, that violence should be what occupies the pages [of the newspapers] and not the fundamental issue.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/9/12 from correspondent; EFE 8/9/12 via Latin American Herald Tribune; Prensa Latina 8/10/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Residents Protest New Barrick Gold Mine
Residents of the area around the city of Cotuí, the capital of the Dominican Republic’s central province of Sánchez Ramírez, held a protest against the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation on Aug. 8, charging that the company’s giant Pueblo Viejo gold mine was contaminating drinking water and affecting residents’ health and their crops. The residents also complained that the company’s trucks had been causing accidents. The Pueblo Viejo, constructed on the site of a state-owned mine shut down in 1999, is scheduled to open this month [see Update #1139].
Barrick Gold is the largest open-pit gold mining company in the world; it maintains 27 mines, in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Tanzania and the US. (Adital (Brazil) 8/8/12 from TeleSUR; Prensa Latina 8/8/12)
The company has had two setbacks recently at its massive Pascua Lama mine in the Andes on the border between Argentina and Chile: dramatic cost overruns and an adverse decision from Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice [see Update #1138]. Former Barrick CEO Aaron Regent was fired at the beginning of July; his replacement, Jamie Sokalsky, is the company’s third CEO in less than four years.
Barrick’s problems are not unique. The gold mining industry has been expanding rapidly as the price of gold jumped to five times what it was 11 years ago—and protests about environmental damage have increased in parallel with the increase in mining. But gold’s price has only gone up 3.1% so far this year, and the New York Stock Exchange’s index of 16 gold-mining companies has fallen 17%, suggesting that the period of rapid expansion may be over. (BusinessWeek 7/27/12; Bloomberg News 8/7/12)
*4. Mexico: Did Romney Donor’s Casino Launder Drug Money?
According to an Aug. 4 report in the Wall Street Journal, the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles is investigating possible money laundering by Chinese-Mexican pharmaceutical entrepreneur Zhenli Ye Gon in the middle 2000s through the Las Vegas Sands Corp. casino company. The company, whose CEO and largest shareholder is US billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to the Republican Party, reportedly failed to tell the authorities about suspicious money transfers by Ye Gon until the publication of a newspaper article about him in 2007. Adelson himself is apparently not being investigated at this point.
Ye Gon is in US custody awaiting extradition to Mexico on drug charges. He is accused of importing chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, and there are suspicions that he is connected with the Sinaloa drug cartel. In March 2007 police raided his Mexico City home and found almost $207 million in cash; the authorities described the raid as “the largest single drug cash seizure the world has ever seen.” Ye Gon reportedly transferred millions of dollars through Sands and was such a good customer at the company’s Venetian casino that he was given a Rolls Royce. He also transferred some $90 million through the Mexican subsidiary of the London-based corporation HSBC during the same period [see Update #1137].
Adelson was a major donor to former US House speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign to be the Republicans’ 2012 presidential candidate. When Gingrich dropped out of the race, the casino magnate switched to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is now considered certain to win the Republican nomination. Adelson plans to donate $100 million to this fall’s Republican campaigns. He is also a strong supporter of rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was in Jerusalem in July when Romney and Netanyahu held a meeting there. (Reuters 8/4/12; Business Insider 8/7/12)
Adelson was having public relations problems even before the Ye Gon allegations appeared in the media. On Aug. 8 he filed a $60 million defamation suit against the Washington, DC-based National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). The group had quoted news reports carrying allegations by former Adelson employee Steven Jacobs that Adelson had approved of prostitution at his businesses in Macau, China.
“Referencing mainstream press accounts examining the conduct of a public figure and his business ventures--as we did--is wholly appropriate,” the NJDC said in response. “We know that we were well within our rights, and we will defend ourselves against this SLAPP [strategic lawsuit against public participation] suit as far and as long as necessary. We simply will not be bullied, and we will not be silenced.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency 8/8/12; The Jewish Week 8/9/12 from JTA)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Mercosur, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
Americas: Governments Prioritize Profit over Indigenous Peoples’ Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3807-americas-governments-prioritize-profit-over-indigenous-peoples-rights
From the Green Economy to Communality (South America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7690
Geopolitical Tsunami in the Southern Cone
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7698
The New York Times Publishes Misplaced Concerns Over Mercosur
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/6/new-york-times-publishes-misplaced-concerns-over-mercosur
Stolen As Infant, Argentine Man Reunites With Biological Family
http://latindispatch.com/2012/08/10/stolen-as-infant-argentine-man-reunites-with-biological-family/
In the Shadow of the Coup: Social Movements for Democracy Mobilize in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3801-in-the-shadow-of-the-coup-social-movements-for-democracy-mobilize-in-paraguay
Brazil mobilizes troops to southern borders in anti-narco drive
http://ww4report.com/node/11353
Bolivia: TIPNIS Communities Divided As Road Consultation Begins
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/5/bolivia-tipnis-communities-divided-road-consultation-begins
Peru: Cajamarca dialogue nears collapse
http://ww4report.com/node/11355
Peru: state of emergency extended in VRAE
http://ww4report.com/node/11358
Peru: more protests over mining, water
http://ww4report.com/node/11359
Ecuador to export via north Peru pipeline
http://ww4report.com/node/11354
Colombia: blows against narco-para network?
http://ww4report.com/node/11351
Colombia: UN calls for dialogue with indigenous movement
http://ww4report.com/node/11352
Colombia: Minga of Resistance Launched against Quimbo Dam and Other Resource Extraction Projects
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3797-colombia-minga-of-resistance-commences-aminga-of-resistance-launched-against-quimbo-dam-and-other-resource-extraction-projects-
Former GM Workers' Hunger Strike Grows in Colombia
http://nacla.org/news/2012/8/10/former-gm-workers-hunger-strike-grows-colombia
Venezuela with Two Months to Go till the Presidential Elections
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7161
Honduran President Puts “Tigers” Police Force on the Stree
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3802-honduran-president-puts-tigers-police-force-on-the-streets
Photo Essay: The "Caravan for Land and Territory" in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3798-photo-essay-the-qcaravan-for-land-and-territoryq-in-mexico
Mexican Communities Fight Mini-Dams
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3800-mexican-communities-fight-mini-dams
The Wal-Mart Corruption Case: Innocents Abroad? (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11369
Mexican Mobility and Canada: Hardening Boundaries and Growing Resistance
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/8/mexican-mobility-and-canada-hardening-boundaries-and-growing-resistance
Mexico’s Peace Movement Heads to the US
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3806-mexicos-peace-movement-heads-to-the-us
The Mexican Diaspora Rises
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/august062012/mexican-diaspora.php
Cholera Continues to Spread as Response and Surveillance Weaken (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
==> Be sure to check out World War 4 Report’s new and much improved format:
http://ww4report.com/node/
Issue #1140, August 12, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: New Law to "Intimidate" Unions and Students
2. Chile: High Students Occupy Schools to Demand Reform
3. Dominican Republic: Residents Protest New Barrick Gold Mine
4. Mexico: Did Romney Donor’s Casino Launder Drug Money?
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Mercosur, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Puerto Rico: New Law to "Intimidate" Unions and Students
On July 30 Puerto Rican governor Luis Fortuño signed into law a new Penal Code that he and legislators said would counter a recent rise in crime [see Update #1111] by imposing much stiffer prison sentences for a wide range of crimes. The new law, which replaces the Penal Code of 2004, also defines the seduction of minors through the internet as a criminal offense and gives the government the power to fire any public employee who commits a crime while carrying out a public function. “We’re not going to let the criminals take over Puerto Rico,” Fortuño said at the signing ceremony.
Fortuño insisted that the new code wouldn’t limit rights of free expression. But Puerto Rican legal experts noted that the revisions dramatically increased penalties for civil disobedience. For example, participating in a protest on the steps of the Capitol building that impedes the work of Puerto Rico’s legislature—like one carried out by students in June 2010 [see Updates #1039, 1100]--could now be punished with three years in prison, while in the 2004 Penal Code the penalty only applied if legislative work was interrupted through “intimidation, violence or fraud,” language which was removed in the new law.
Attorney César Rosado, a human and civil rights specialist who represents several unions, told the Puerto Rican daily El Nuevo Día that the new law “tries to intimidate the unions and other pressure groups—like the student movement—which historically have distinguished themselves by presenting resistance to any measure they consider unjust. Establishing a three-year sentence is a big deterrent for protest.” Activists have frequently used nonviolent civil disobedience as a form of protest in Puerto Rico, most famously in the mass arrests that led to the removal of the US Navy proving grounds from the small island of Vieques in 2003. “In democracy it’s important to allow activism,” constitutional law professor Hiram Meléndez Juarbe told the newspaper, “even if at times it’s inconvenient for the government.” (END 7/30/12, 7/31/12)
In the US the maximum penalty for interrupting a session of Congress is six months in prison and/or a $500 fine. El Nuevo Día noted that the punishment for six Puerto Rican independence activists who interrupted Congress by singing patriotic hymns on May 6, 2009, was a fine. (END 7/31/12)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit on Aug. 7 challenging the new law. The challenge was presented as an amendment to a complaint the ACLU filed against the Puerto Rico Police Department on June 27 alleging that the department violated the rights of protesters [see World War 4 Report 6/28/12]. (Jurist 8/8/12)
*2. Chile: High Students Occupy Schools to Demand Reform
Students had occupied several of the public high schools in Santiago by the morning of Aug. 10 in the latest protest against the privatization of Chile’s educational system that started under the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Chilean high school and university students launched a militant movement in the spring of 2011 to demand free, high-quality public education; current demands also include rejection of the so-called “Hinzpeter Law,” legislation proposed by rightwing president Sebastián Piñera last year to impose severe penalties on people who occupy schools or public or private buildings, or who cause damage in protests. Student actions included some 40 marches in 2011 and five so far this year [see Updates #1130, 1135].
Radio Bío Bío reported on Aug. 10 that Special Forces from the carabineros militarized police used tear gas to remove some 30 students who had been occupying the Santiago Superior Institute of Commerce. The students responded with “rocks, paint and eggs,” according to the radio station, and then “fled and took refuge in the Darío Salas High School,” which remained occupied.
Two days earlier, on Aug. 8, marches sponsored by the Secondary Students Coordinating Assembly (ACES), with support from university student federations, ended violently. Santiago authorities refused the high school students permission to march in the central Alameda (Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins Avenue). When the crowd of 5,000-10,000 protesters tried to use the avenue, they were attacked with tear gas, a water cannon and mounted police. The youths threw rocks at police agents and built barricades; acts of vandalism included the burning of three buses. Some 75 protesters were arrested and 49 agents were reportedly injured. A demonstration in the seaside resort city of Viña del Mar ended with 11 people arrested and a pharmacy and supermarket destroyed. There were also marches in La Serena and Valdivia.
The student demonstrations have regularly ended with vandalism by hooded youths, and student organizers have sometimes suggested that infiltrators were behind the violence. After the Aug. 8 march ACES spokesperson Eloísa González said it was “quite suspicious” that with such a large police deployment it wasn’t possible to prevent the isolated activity of the people involved in setting vehicles on fire. Senator Guido Girardi, from the social democratic Party for Democracy (PPD), said there should be an investigation of why each demonstration involved people who “have the same interest as the government, that violence should be what occupies the pages [of the newspapers] and not the fundamental issue.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/9/12 from correspondent; EFE 8/9/12 via Latin American Herald Tribune; Prensa Latina 8/10/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Residents Protest New Barrick Gold Mine
Residents of the area around the city of Cotuí, the capital of the Dominican Republic’s central province of Sánchez Ramírez, held a protest against the Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corporation on Aug. 8, charging that the company’s giant Pueblo Viejo gold mine was contaminating drinking water and affecting residents’ health and their crops. The residents also complained that the company’s trucks had been causing accidents. The Pueblo Viejo, constructed on the site of a state-owned mine shut down in 1999, is scheduled to open this month [see Update #1139].
Barrick Gold is the largest open-pit gold mining company in the world; it maintains 27 mines, in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Tanzania and the US. (Adital (Brazil) 8/8/12 from TeleSUR; Prensa Latina 8/8/12)
The company has had two setbacks recently at its massive Pascua Lama mine in the Andes on the border between Argentina and Chile: dramatic cost overruns and an adverse decision from Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice [see Update #1138]. Former Barrick CEO Aaron Regent was fired at the beginning of July; his replacement, Jamie Sokalsky, is the company’s third CEO in less than four years.
Barrick’s problems are not unique. The gold mining industry has been expanding rapidly as the price of gold jumped to five times what it was 11 years ago—and protests about environmental damage have increased in parallel with the increase in mining. But gold’s price has only gone up 3.1% so far this year, and the New York Stock Exchange’s index of 16 gold-mining companies has fallen 17%, suggesting that the period of rapid expansion may be over. (BusinessWeek 7/27/12; Bloomberg News 8/7/12)
*4. Mexico: Did Romney Donor’s Casino Launder Drug Money?
According to an Aug. 4 report in the Wall Street Journal, the US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles is investigating possible money laundering by Chinese-Mexican pharmaceutical entrepreneur Zhenli Ye Gon in the middle 2000s through the Las Vegas Sands Corp. casino company. The company, whose CEO and largest shareholder is US billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a major donor to the Republican Party, reportedly failed to tell the authorities about suspicious money transfers by Ye Gon until the publication of a newspaper article about him in 2007. Adelson himself is apparently not being investigated at this point.
Ye Gon is in US custody awaiting extradition to Mexico on drug charges. He is accused of importing chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine, and there are suspicions that he is connected with the Sinaloa drug cartel. In March 2007 police raided his Mexico City home and found almost $207 million in cash; the authorities described the raid as “the largest single drug cash seizure the world has ever seen.” Ye Gon reportedly transferred millions of dollars through Sands and was such a good customer at the company’s Venetian casino that he was given a Rolls Royce. He also transferred some $90 million through the Mexican subsidiary of the London-based corporation HSBC during the same period [see Update #1137].
Adelson was a major donor to former US House speaker Newt Gingrich’s campaign to be the Republicans’ 2012 presidential candidate. When Gingrich dropped out of the race, the casino magnate switched to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who is now considered certain to win the Republican nomination. Adelson plans to donate $100 million to this fall’s Republican campaigns. He is also a strong supporter of rightwing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and he was in Jerusalem in July when Romney and Netanyahu held a meeting there. (Reuters 8/4/12; Business Insider 8/7/12)
Adelson was having public relations problems even before the Ye Gon allegations appeared in the media. On Aug. 8 he filed a $60 million defamation suit against the Washington, DC-based National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC). The group had quoted news reports carrying allegations by former Adelson employee Steven Jacobs that Adelson had approved of prostitution at his businesses in Macau, China.
“Referencing mainstream press accounts examining the conduct of a public figure and his business ventures--as we did--is wholly appropriate,” the NJDC said in response. “We know that we were well within our rights, and we will defend ourselves against this SLAPP [strategic lawsuit against public participation] suit as far and as long as necessary. We simply will not be bullied, and we will not be silenced.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency 8/8/12; The Jewish Week 8/9/12 from JTA)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Mercosur, Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Haiti
Americas: Governments Prioritize Profit over Indigenous Peoples’ Rights
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3807-americas-governments-prioritize-profit-over-indigenous-peoples-rights
From the Green Economy to Communality (South America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7690
Geopolitical Tsunami in the Southern Cone
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7698
The New York Times Publishes Misplaced Concerns Over Mercosur
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/6/new-york-times-publishes-misplaced-concerns-over-mercosur
Stolen As Infant, Argentine Man Reunites With Biological Family
http://latindispatch.com/2012/08/10/stolen-as-infant-argentine-man-reunites-with-biological-family/
In the Shadow of the Coup: Social Movements for Democracy Mobilize in Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3801-in-the-shadow-of-the-coup-social-movements-for-democracy-mobilize-in-paraguay
Brazil mobilizes troops to southern borders in anti-narco drive
http://ww4report.com/node/11353
Bolivia: TIPNIS Communities Divided As Road Consultation Begins
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/5/bolivia-tipnis-communities-divided-road-consultation-begins
Peru: Cajamarca dialogue nears collapse
http://ww4report.com/node/11355
Peru: state of emergency extended in VRAE
http://ww4report.com/node/11358
Peru: more protests over mining, water
http://ww4report.com/node/11359
Ecuador to export via north Peru pipeline
http://ww4report.com/node/11354
Colombia: blows against narco-para network?
http://ww4report.com/node/11351
Colombia: UN calls for dialogue with indigenous movement
http://ww4report.com/node/11352
Colombia: Minga of Resistance Launched against Quimbo Dam and Other Resource Extraction Projects
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3797-colombia-minga-of-resistance-commences-aminga-of-resistance-launched-against-quimbo-dam-and-other-resource-extraction-projects-
Former GM Workers' Hunger Strike Grows in Colombia
http://nacla.org/news/2012/8/10/former-gm-workers-hunger-strike-grows-colombia
Venezuela with Two Months to Go till the Presidential Elections
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7161
Honduran President Puts “Tigers” Police Force on the Stree
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3802-honduran-president-puts-tigers-police-force-on-the-streets
Photo Essay: The "Caravan for Land and Territory" in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3798-photo-essay-the-qcaravan-for-land-and-territoryq-in-mexico
Mexican Communities Fight Mini-Dams
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3800-mexican-communities-fight-mini-dams
The Wal-Mart Corruption Case: Innocents Abroad? (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11369
Mexican Mobility and Canada: Hardening Boundaries and Growing Resistance
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/8/mexican-mobility-and-canada-hardening-boundaries-and-growing-resistance
Mexico’s Peace Movement Heads to the US
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3806-mexicos-peace-movement-heads-to-the-us
The Mexican Diaspora Rises
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/august062012/mexican-diaspora.php
Cholera Continues to Spread as Response and Surveillance Weaken (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
==> Be sure to check out World War 4 Report’s new and much improved format:
http://ww4report.com/node/
Monday, 16 July 2012
WNU #1136: Foreign Banks Investigated in Mexican Money Laundering
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1136, July 15, 2012
1. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
The US Senate is expected to issue a report on July 17 about international money laundering through the London-based corporation HSBC, Europe’s largest bank; much of the focus is reportedly on the laundering of drug money through the group’s Mexican subsidiary, HSBC Mexico. The US Justice Department is also investigating, and the bank is expected to end up paying a fine of more than $1 billion, both for the Mexican operation and for HSBC’s business activities with parties in Iran, in violation of US trade sanctions against that country.
The Reuters wire service reports that it has reviewed documents showing that “US law-enforcement agencies have examined Mexican money that moved from [Mexican] exchange houses, known as casas de cambio, into the HSBC banking system” and that “[t]he transactions were tied to laundered drug proceeds.” The HSBC subsidiary is one of Mexico’s five largest banks. The country has 42 banking companies, but the top five hold 70% of the assets; four of them are owned by foreign companies, a result of neoliberal measures in the 1990s that opened Mexican banking up to foreign investment.
Mexico’s government has introduced measures to control money laundering, but according to the US State Department’s 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, drug money continues to flow back and forth between Mexico and the US, in part because of the “combination of a sophisticated financial sector and a large cash-based informal sector” in Mexico. In addition to laundering money into the US banking system through exchange houses in Mexico, the drug cartels also ship drug sale proceeds from the US into Mexico, mostly “via couriers, armored vehicles, and wire transfers,” the report says. US authorities estimate that “drug trafficking organizations send between $19 and $39 billion annually to Mexico from the United States.” The Mexican government disputes the number. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/14/12 from Reuters, 7/15/12 from staff; Reuters 7/14/12 via Latinos Post)
[Much of the drug money remains in the US. A United Nations official reported in 2010 that the majority of the gross profits from cocaine sales never leave the US; see Update #1038]
Until now the largest case of money laundering by Mexican cartels through a foreign-owned bank involved the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, North Carolina, which was acquired in 2008 by Wells Fargo & Company. In 2010 Wachovia paid the US $160 million in penalties for allowing $378.3 billion to pass from Mexican exchange houses into its system from 2004 to 2007 without adequate safeguards against money laundering. As of 2011 investigators said about $20 billion of this money appeared to have “suspicious origins.” Some of the money that passed through Wachovia was used to buy a DC-9 airplane the Mexican military intercepted in April 2006 in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche; it was carrying 5.7 tons of cocaine. (The Guardian (UK) 4/2/11)
*2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
As of early on July 6, with 99.51% of polling places counted, Mexican officials said former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been elected president with 38.22% of the valid votes cast on July 1. Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador followed with 31.57% of the votes, and Josefina Vázquez Mota from the ruling center-right National Action Party (PAN) came in third with 25.42%. Gabriel Quadri, the candidate of the centrist New Alliance Party (Panal), trailed with 2.28%. The results--which matched a rapid count the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) carried out the evening of July 1 [see Update #1135]—followed a substantial recount of the votes after charges of irregularities.
López Obrador’s showing this year was not as good as in 2006, when he lost by about 0.5% in a questionable official count. However, his total was much larger than most opinion polls had predicted, although some pollsters had suggested that he was gaining momentum towards the end of the race [see Update #1131]. The states he carried—Guerrero, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Tlaxcala, along with the Federal District (DF, Mexico City)—are the impoverished southern states that have tended to be the center of much of Mexico’s political activism. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/6/12)
Like López Obrador, the center-left coalition that backed him performed well in the July 1 voting, although not as well as a similar coalition had done in 2006. The Progressive Movement regained the number-two position in the Chamber of Deputies of the federal Congress with 136 of the 500 seats—101 for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), 19 for the Labor Party (PT) and 16 for the Citizens’ Movement. The PRI and its ally, the small Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), got a combined total of 240 seats, 11 less than the absolute majority it needs to avoid compromises with other parties. The PAN slipped to third place with 114 seats. Panal won 10.
The center-left parties slipped in the Senate, whose members are elected every six years. The PRI and PVEM will have 61 of the 128 seats, followed by the PAN with 38, the Progressive Movement with 28 (22 for the PRD, four for the PT and two for the Citizens’ Movement). Panal won one seat. The PAN was the largest group in the previous Senate, followed by the PRI-PVEM and the center-left parties. (El Universal (Caracas) 7/10/12)
The center-left coalition did better in the DF and in the seven states that elected governors on July 1. Progressive Movement candidates won in Morelos and Tabasco, two states the left had never succeeded in winning before. The PRI held on to Yucatán and took Jalisco from the PAN, while the PVEM won Chiapas in alliance with the PRI and Panal. The PAN retained Guanajuato, its only win in the state races. The PRD continues to dominate politics in the DF, which it has governed since 1997; PRD candidate Miguel Ángel Mancera was elected the head of government (mayor) with 63.56% of the vote. (Informador (Guadalajara) 7/9/12; El Economista (Mexico) 7/3/12)
*3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
Mexico City residents responded to the country’s July 1 presidential and legislative elections with a massive and apparently spontaneous demonstration on July 7 repudiating the official results. Thousands marched from the Angel of Independence to the Zócalo plaza to protest what they called the “imposition” of Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). They charged his electoral victory was the result of fraud, vote buying and biased publicity by the media.
The protesters’ targets included the giant television network Televisa, which reportedly has taken money over the years to promote Peña Nieto’s political career [see Update #1135], and Organización Soriana, Mexico’s second-largest retailer; the PRI reportedly gave out thousands of Soriana gift cards to voters if they agreed to mark their ballots for Peña Nieto.
Some of the marchers took their protest to the Regina Coeli church, where comedian Eugenio Derbez and actor and singer Alessandra Rosaldo were being married in a wedding transmitted by Televisa. “Peña didn’t win, Televisa helped him!” they chanted, and “Fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud.” “Turn around, the news is here,” they told news photographers, who had their cameras pointed toward the entrance to the church. “Sold-out press!” the protesters added.
Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came in second, has rejected the official results, but he hasn’t called on his supporters to protest, as he did after his very narrow loss in the official tally in 2006. Apparently there was no need. Opposition to Peña Nieto has been growing since May, when a student protest movement known as #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”) emerged. “This isn’t for López Obrador, it’s for the nation,” read one sign at the July 7 march, which reportedly was organized through social networks and by word of mouth. Student movement members supported the march but said they didn’t organize it. (La Jornada 7/8/12)
There have also been smaller local demonstrations. On July 14 a little group of people stood at the entrance to a Soriana store in Mexico City’s Tlalpan delegación (borough) with signs and leaflets charging that “five million votes were bought, and Soriana helped with half of them.” The group quickly grew larger, and when the number was around 100, the protesters pushed inside the store chanting: “From Chetumal to Tijuana, don’t buy in Soriana” and “If there’s imposition, there will be revolution.”
In another Soriana store in Tlalpan, protesters filled shopping carts with merchandise and then left them in the store, to symbolize “the purchases that would have been made if Soriana hadn’t participated in vote buying.” (LJ 7/15/12)
*4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
Unidentified persons seized Gregorio Chávez, a 69-year-old campesino, on July 2 while he was working near the Paso Aguán estate in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. Residents of the nearby Panamá community said they heard gunshots and found signs that someone had been dragged toward the estate. After searching for four days, on July 6 residents found Chávez’s body buried on the estate, with evidence that the campesino had been tortured, according to a communiqué by the Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán.
Chávez’s murder indicates that the violence in the Aguán is not subsiding despite several agreements between the government and a number of campesino organizations aimed at ending the region’s longstanding agrarian conflict [see Update #1133]. The Paso Aguán estate is owned by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, probably the richest man in Honduras and the focus of many of the land disputes. Panamá residents accused Facussé’s security guards of kidnapping and murdering Chávez, who was reportedly not a member of any campesino organization but supported the large Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA).
After giving Chávez a proper burial, local people occupied the entrance to the estate and held it until July 7, when police agents and soldiers from the 15th Infantry Battalion cleared a space so trucks could carry out African palm oil, the estate’s main product.
Murders continued in the region over the next two days. On July 7 campesino Jacobo López Erazo was shot dead near his home in the community of Quebrada de Arena. He had worked with MUCA organizations. On July 8 campesino José Luis Dubón, a member of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), was shot and killed near the La Lempira settlement. Another campesino, Francis Bueso, was wounded; he received emergency surgery in a hospital in Tocoa, Colón department. Local people responded to the new killings with a second demonstration at the Paso Aguán estate on July 8. The protesters demanded an end to the killing of campesinos, the immediate withdrawal of troops from the Aguán, a definitive solution to the agrarian conflict and the approval of a Law of Agrarian Transformation.
The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán suggested that the latest outbreak of violence was a reaction to a court ruling upholding a claim by another campesino group, the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), to land held by Facussé. According to Facussé, an appellate court has now overturned the lower court's ruling. (Adital (Brazil) 7/11/12; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 7/12/12)
*5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
On July 12 Puerto Rican environmentalist Alberto de Jesús arrived at Fort de France, capital of the French overseas department of Martinique, the latest stop in a 1,100 journey from Venezuela to Puerto Rico by kayak that the activist has undertaken to publicize the situation of Oscar López Rivera, an independence fighter who has been imprisoned in the US for 31 years. De Jesús, who is widely known as “Tito Kayak,” began his trip on June 20 at the Venezuelan town of Macuro, on the Paria peninsula. Despite an injury to his wrist and damage to the kayak during the first days of the journey, De Jesús was determined to continue to Puerto Rico; afterwards he may go on to the US East Coast.
López Rivera was arrested in 1981 and accused of conspiracy to overthrow the US government in Puerto Rico. The US government said he was linked to the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which carried out bombings in New York City and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s that caused several deaths, but US prosecutors never connected him directly to any bombings. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
De Jesús is known for a number of daring protests, especially during the campaign that led to the withdrawal of the US Navy from the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003. In 2000 he placed a Puerto Rican flag on the crown of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and in 2007 he was imprisoned in Israel for flying a Palestinian flag on a tower in the wall that separates that country from the Palestinian territories. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/27/12; InterNews Service 7/12/12 via Claridad (Puerto Rico); Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 7/12/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guayana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
Student Forum in Rosario: From the University to the Territory (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7413
Argentina: A Decade Without Dario and Maxi (Argentina)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3732-a-decade-without-dario-and-maxi-
Argentina: ex-dictators sentenced in baby thefts
http://ww4report.com/node/11256
Express Coup Rattles Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3750-express-coup-rattles-paraguay
Brazil: indigenous tribes occupy Belo Monte dam site
http://ww4report.com/node/11249
Domitila Chungara, Revolutionary Heroine of Bolivia: An Interview
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3745-domitila-chungara-revolutionary-heroine-of-bolivia-an-interview
Bolivia: TIPNIS Marchers Return Home, Pledge to Resist Government Consulta
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/bolivia-tipnis-marchers-return-home-pledge-resist-government-consulta
Bolivia: police attack indigenous protest camp in La Paz
http://ww4report.com/node/11254
Peru: three dead in Cajamarca anti-mining protests
http://ww4report.com/node/11248
Peru: one more dead in Cajamarca; protest leader detained
http://ww4report.com/node/11252
Peru: Sendero Luminoso attacks spread
http://ww4report.com/node/11255
Peru: Cajamarca martyrs put to rest amid ongoing civil strike
http://ww4report.com/node/11261
Peru: national solidarity builds with Cajamarca struggle
http://ww4report.com/node/11266
Peruvian Government Urged to Halt Violence against Citizens Opposed to Mining Projects
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3749-peruvian-government-urged-to-halt-violence-against-citizens-opposed-to-mining-projects
Colombia: Embera people strike deal for return of usurped lands —as terror continues
http://ww4report.com/node/11267
Sao Paulo Leftists Debate Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Caracas (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7097
Everything That Glitters Isn’t Green in Guyana
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/everything-glitters-isn%E2%80%99t-green-guyana
Botched DEA Raid in Honduras Exposes How Militarization Terrorizes Communities Around the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3752-botched-dea-raid-in-honduras-exposes-how-militarization-terrorizes-communities-around-the-world
We want Pencils, not Weapons: San Juan Sacatepéquez rejects new Military Brigade in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3728-we-want-pencils-not-weapons-san-juan-sacatepequez-rejects-new-military-brigade-in-guatemala
Student eviction does not stop Guatemalan movement against privatization
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3737-student-eviction-does-not-stop-guatemalan-movement-against-privatization
Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
Stranded Central American Migrants Await Aid in Mexico
http://latindispatch.com/2012/07/13/stranded-central-american-migrants-await-aid-in-mexico/
Observing in Ecatepec–Who’s in Charge Here? (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7419
From the “Perfect Dictatorship” to the Imperfect Democracy (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7444
The Mexican Election: Not Yet a Done Deal
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/4/mexican-election-not-yet-done-deal
Mexico’s hot political summer
http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2012/07/mexicos-hot-political-summer/
Denied the Right to Vote in Mexico’s Presidential Election
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7458
Photo essay: Yo Soy 132 in New York City
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/3/photo-essay-yo-soy-132-new-york-city
The Cause of Drug War Violence: Interview with Author Peter Watt
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3747-the-drug-war-in-mexico-politics-violence-and-neo-liberalism-in-the-new-narco-economy-interview-with-author-peter-watt
Colombia and Mexico: Drug War Capitalism
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3756-colombia-and-mexico-drug-war-capitalism
Mexico Fails to Tackle Increased Levels of Violence Against Women
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3753-mexico-fails-to-tackle-increased-levels-of-violence-against-women
Outlook Dim for Mexican Workers
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/07/13/outlook-dim-for-mexican-workers/
The Morne à Cabri mystery houses (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/7/9/the-morne-a-cabri-mystery-houses.html
In MINUSTAH Abuse Case, Cover-Up Goes Unpunished (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-minustah-abuse-case-cover-up-goes-unpunished
Haiti’s Military Monster Makes a Creeping Comeback
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3736-haitis-military-monster-makes-a-creeping-comeback
Under Tents: Taking Action for Haiti’s Homeless
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/6/under-tents-taking-action-haiti%E2%80%99s-homeless
'Secure Communities' and the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement: Lessons from New York State (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/11/secure-communities-and-us-immigrant-rights-movement-lessons-new-york-state
Guest Workers Take On Wal-Mart in Lower Manhattan (US/immigration)
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2012/07/119444.html
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1136, July 15, 2012
1. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Foreign Banks Investigated in Drug Money Laundering
The US Senate is expected to issue a report on July 17 about international money laundering through the London-based corporation HSBC, Europe’s largest bank; much of the focus is reportedly on the laundering of drug money through the group’s Mexican subsidiary, HSBC Mexico. The US Justice Department is also investigating, and the bank is expected to end up paying a fine of more than $1 billion, both for the Mexican operation and for HSBC’s business activities with parties in Iran, in violation of US trade sanctions against that country.
The Reuters wire service reports that it has reviewed documents showing that “US law-enforcement agencies have examined Mexican money that moved from [Mexican] exchange houses, known as casas de cambio, into the HSBC banking system” and that “[t]he transactions were tied to laundered drug proceeds.” The HSBC subsidiary is one of Mexico’s five largest banks. The country has 42 banking companies, but the top five hold 70% of the assets; four of them are owned by foreign companies, a result of neoliberal measures in the 1990s that opened Mexican banking up to foreign investment.
Mexico’s government has introduced measures to control money laundering, but according to the US State Department’s 2012 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, drug money continues to flow back and forth between Mexico and the US, in part because of the “combination of a sophisticated financial sector and a large cash-based informal sector” in Mexico. In addition to laundering money into the US banking system through exchange houses in Mexico, the drug cartels also ship drug sale proceeds from the US into Mexico, mostly “via couriers, armored vehicles, and wire transfers,” the report says. US authorities estimate that “drug trafficking organizations send between $19 and $39 billion annually to Mexico from the United States.” The Mexican government disputes the number. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/14/12 from Reuters, 7/15/12 from staff; Reuters 7/14/12 via Latinos Post)
[Much of the drug money remains in the US. A United Nations official reported in 2010 that the majority of the gross profits from cocaine sales never leave the US; see Update #1038]
Until now the largest case of money laundering by Mexican cartels through a foreign-owned bank involved the Wachovia Corporation of Charlotte, North Carolina, which was acquired in 2008 by Wells Fargo & Company. In 2010 Wachovia paid the US $160 million in penalties for allowing $378.3 billion to pass from Mexican exchange houses into its system from 2004 to 2007 without adequate safeguards against money laundering. As of 2011 investigators said about $20 billion of this money appeared to have “suspicious origins.” Some of the money that passed through Wachovia was used to buy a DC-9 airplane the Mexican military intercepted in April 2006 in Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche; it was carrying 5.7 tons of cocaine. (The Guardian (UK) 4/2/11)
*2. Mexico: Left Makes Moderate Gains in Elections
As of early on July 6, with 99.51% of polling places counted, Mexican officials said former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been elected president with 38.22% of the valid votes cast on July 1. Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador followed with 31.57% of the votes, and Josefina Vázquez Mota from the ruling center-right National Action Party (PAN) came in third with 25.42%. Gabriel Quadri, the candidate of the centrist New Alliance Party (Panal), trailed with 2.28%. The results--which matched a rapid count the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) carried out the evening of July 1 [see Update #1135]—followed a substantial recount of the votes after charges of irregularities.
López Obrador’s showing this year was not as good as in 2006, when he lost by about 0.5% in a questionable official count. However, his total was much larger than most opinion polls had predicted, although some pollsters had suggested that he was gaining momentum towards the end of the race [see Update #1131]. The states he carried—Guerrero, Morelos, Oaxaca, Puebla, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Tlaxcala, along with the Federal District (DF, Mexico City)—are the impoverished southern states that have tended to be the center of much of Mexico’s political activism. (La Jornada (Mexico) 7/6/12)
Like López Obrador, the center-left coalition that backed him performed well in the July 1 voting, although not as well as a similar coalition had done in 2006. The Progressive Movement regained the number-two position in the Chamber of Deputies of the federal Congress with 136 of the 500 seats—101 for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), 19 for the Labor Party (PT) and 16 for the Citizens’ Movement. The PRI and its ally, the small Ecological Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), got a combined total of 240 seats, 11 less than the absolute majority it needs to avoid compromises with other parties. The PAN slipped to third place with 114 seats. Panal won 10.
The center-left parties slipped in the Senate, whose members are elected every six years. The PRI and PVEM will have 61 of the 128 seats, followed by the PAN with 38, the Progressive Movement with 28 (22 for the PRD, four for the PT and two for the Citizens’ Movement). Panal won one seat. The PAN was the largest group in the previous Senate, followed by the PRI-PVEM and the center-left parties. (El Universal (Caracas) 7/10/12)
The center-left coalition did better in the DF and in the seven states that elected governors on July 1. Progressive Movement candidates won in Morelos and Tabasco, two states the left had never succeeded in winning before. The PRI held on to Yucatán and took Jalisco from the PAN, while the PVEM won Chiapas in alliance with the PRI and Panal. The PAN retained Guanajuato, its only win in the state races. The PRD continues to dominate politics in the DF, which it has governed since 1997; PRD candidate Miguel Ángel Mancera was elected the head of government (mayor) with 63.56% of the vote. (Informador (Guadalajara) 7/9/12; El Economista (Mexico) 7/3/12)
*3. Mexico: Thousands Protest “Imposition” of PRI
Mexico City residents responded to the country’s July 1 presidential and legislative elections with a massive and apparently spontaneous demonstration on July 7 repudiating the official results. Thousands marched from the Angel of Independence to the Zócalo plaza to protest what they called the “imposition” of Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). They charged his electoral victory was the result of fraud, vote buying and biased publicity by the media.
The protesters’ targets included the giant television network Televisa, which reportedly has taken money over the years to promote Peña Nieto’s political career [see Update #1135], and Organización Soriana, Mexico’s second-largest retailer; the PRI reportedly gave out thousands of Soriana gift cards to voters if they agreed to mark their ballots for Peña Nieto.
Some of the marchers took their protest to the Regina Coeli church, where comedian Eugenio Derbez and actor and singer Alessandra Rosaldo were being married in a wedding transmitted by Televisa. “Peña didn’t win, Televisa helped him!” they chanted, and “Fraud, fraud, fraud, fraud.” “Turn around, the news is here,” they told news photographers, who had their cameras pointed toward the entrance to the church. “Sold-out press!” the protesters added.
Center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who came in second, has rejected the official results, but he hasn’t called on his supporters to protest, as he did after his very narrow loss in the official tally in 2006. Apparently there was no need. Opposition to Peña Nieto has been growing since May, when a student protest movement known as #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”) emerged. “This isn’t for López Obrador, it’s for the nation,” read one sign at the July 7 march, which reportedly was organized through social networks and by word of mouth. Student movement members supported the march but said they didn’t organize it. (La Jornada 7/8/12)
There have also been smaller local demonstrations. On July 14 a little group of people stood at the entrance to a Soriana store in Mexico City’s Tlalpan delegación (borough) with signs and leaflets charging that “five million votes were bought, and Soriana helped with half of them.” The group quickly grew larger, and when the number was around 100, the protesters pushed inside the store chanting: “From Chetumal to Tijuana, don’t buy in Soriana” and “If there’s imposition, there will be revolution.”
In another Soriana store in Tlalpan, protesters filled shopping carts with merchandise and then left them in the store, to symbolize “the purchases that would have been made if Soriana hadn’t participated in vote buying.” (LJ 7/15/12)
*4. Honduras: Three Die in Continuing Aguán Violence
Unidentified persons seized Gregorio Chávez, a 69-year-old campesino, on July 2 while he was working near the Paso Aguán estate in the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras. Residents of the nearby Panamá community said they heard gunshots and found signs that someone had been dragged toward the estate. After searching for four days, on July 6 residents found Chávez’s body buried on the estate, with evidence that the campesino had been tortured, according to a communiqué by the Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán.
Chávez’s murder indicates that the violence in the Aguán is not subsiding despite several agreements between the government and a number of campesino organizations aimed at ending the region’s longstanding agrarian conflict [see Update #1133]. The Paso Aguán estate is owned by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, probably the richest man in Honduras and the focus of many of the land disputes. Panamá residents accused Facussé’s security guards of kidnapping and murdering Chávez, who was reportedly not a member of any campesino organization but supported the large Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA).
After giving Chávez a proper burial, local people occupied the entrance to the estate and held it until July 7, when police agents and soldiers from the 15th Infantry Battalion cleared a space so trucks could carry out African palm oil, the estate’s main product.
Murders continued in the region over the next two days. On July 7 campesino Jacobo López Erazo was shot dead near his home in the community of Quebrada de Arena. He had worked with MUCA organizations. On July 8 campesino José Luis Dubón, a member of the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), was shot and killed near the La Lempira settlement. Another campesino, Francis Bueso, was wounded; he received emergency surgery in a hospital in Tocoa, Colón department. Local people responded to the new killings with a second demonstration at the Paso Aguán estate on July 8. The protesters demanded an end to the killing of campesinos, the immediate withdrawal of troops from the Aguán, a definitive solution to the agrarian conflict and the approval of a Law of Agrarian Transformation.
The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán suggested that the latest outbreak of violence was a reaction to a court ruling upholding a claim by another campesino group, the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA), to land held by Facussé. According to Facussé, an appellate court has now overturned the lower court's ruling. (Adital (Brazil) 7/11/12; Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 7/12/12)
*5. Puerto Rico: Environmentalist Kayaks for Prisoner's Release
On July 12 Puerto Rican environmentalist Alberto de Jesús arrived at Fort de France, capital of the French overseas department of Martinique, the latest stop in a 1,100 journey from Venezuela to Puerto Rico by kayak that the activist has undertaken to publicize the situation of Oscar López Rivera, an independence fighter who has been imprisoned in the US for 31 years. De Jesús, who is widely known as “Tito Kayak,” began his trip on June 20 at the Venezuelan town of Macuro, on the Paria peninsula. Despite an injury to his wrist and damage to the kayak during the first days of the journey, De Jesús was determined to continue to Puerto Rico; afterwards he may go on to the US East Coast.
López Rivera was arrested in 1981 and accused of conspiracy to overthrow the US government in Puerto Rico. The US government said he was linked to the Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN), which carried out bombings in New York City and Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s that caused several deaths, but US prosecutors never connected him directly to any bombings. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison.
De Jesús is known for a number of daring protests, especially during the campaign that led to the withdrawal of the US Navy from the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in 2003. In 2000 he placed a Puerto Rican flag on the crown of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, and in 2007 he was imprisoned in Israel for flying a Palestinian flag on a tower in the wall that separates that country from the Palestinian territories. (El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/27/12; InterNews Service 7/12/12 via Claridad (Puerto Rico); Primera Hora (Guaynabo) 7/12/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guayana, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, US/immigration
Student Forum in Rosario: From the University to the Territory (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7413
Argentina: A Decade Without Dario and Maxi (Argentina)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3732-a-decade-without-dario-and-maxi-
Argentina: ex-dictators sentenced in baby thefts
http://ww4report.com/node/11256
Express Coup Rattles Paraguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3750-express-coup-rattles-paraguay
Brazil: indigenous tribes occupy Belo Monte dam site
http://ww4report.com/node/11249
Domitila Chungara, Revolutionary Heroine of Bolivia: An Interview
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/bolivia-archives-31/3745-domitila-chungara-revolutionary-heroine-of-bolivia-an-interview
Bolivia: TIPNIS Marchers Return Home, Pledge to Resist Government Consulta
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/bolivia-tipnis-marchers-return-home-pledge-resist-government-consulta
Bolivia: police attack indigenous protest camp in La Paz
http://ww4report.com/node/11254
Peru: three dead in Cajamarca anti-mining protests
http://ww4report.com/node/11248
Peru: one more dead in Cajamarca; protest leader detained
http://ww4report.com/node/11252
Peru: Sendero Luminoso attacks spread
http://ww4report.com/node/11255
Peru: Cajamarca martyrs put to rest amid ongoing civil strike
http://ww4report.com/node/11261
Peru: national solidarity builds with Cajamarca struggle
http://ww4report.com/node/11266
Peruvian Government Urged to Halt Violence against Citizens Opposed to Mining Projects
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3749-peruvian-government-urged-to-halt-violence-against-citizens-opposed-to-mining-projects
Colombia: Embera people strike deal for return of usurped lands —as terror continues
http://ww4report.com/node/11267
Sao Paulo Leftists Debate Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Caracas (Venezuela)
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7097
Everything That Glitters Isn’t Green in Guyana
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/13/everything-glitters-isn%E2%80%99t-green-guyana
Botched DEA Raid in Honduras Exposes How Militarization Terrorizes Communities Around the World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3752-botched-dea-raid-in-honduras-exposes-how-militarization-terrorizes-communities-around-the-world
We want Pencils, not Weapons: San Juan Sacatepéquez rejects new Military Brigade in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3728-we-want-pencils-not-weapons-san-juan-sacatepequez-rejects-new-military-brigade-in-guatemala
Student eviction does not stop Guatemalan movement against privatization
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3737-student-eviction-does-not-stop-guatemalan-movement-against-privatization
Guatemalan Femicide: The Legacy of Repression and Injustice
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
Stranded Central American Migrants Await Aid in Mexico
http://latindispatch.com/2012/07/13/stranded-central-american-migrants-await-aid-in-mexico/
Observing in Ecatepec–Who’s in Charge Here? (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7419
From the “Perfect Dictatorship” to the Imperfect Democracy (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7444
The Mexican Election: Not Yet a Done Deal
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/4/mexican-election-not-yet-done-deal
Mexico’s hot political summer
http://www.nmpolitics.net/index/2012/07/mexicos-hot-political-summer/
Denied the Right to Vote in Mexico’s Presidential Election
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7458
Photo essay: Yo Soy 132 in New York City
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/3/photo-essay-yo-soy-132-new-york-city
The Cause of Drug War Violence: Interview with Author Peter Watt
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3747-the-drug-war-in-mexico-politics-violence-and-neo-liberalism-in-the-new-narco-economy-interview-with-author-peter-watt
Colombia and Mexico: Drug War Capitalism
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3756-colombia-and-mexico-drug-war-capitalism
Mexico Fails to Tackle Increased Levels of Violence Against Women
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3753-mexico-fails-to-tackle-increased-levels-of-violence-against-women
Outlook Dim for Mexican Workers
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/07/13/outlook-dim-for-mexican-workers/
The Morne à Cabri mystery houses (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/7/9/the-morne-a-cabri-mystery-houses.html
In MINUSTAH Abuse Case, Cover-Up Goes Unpunished (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-minustah-abuse-case-cover-up-goes-unpunished
Haiti’s Military Monster Makes a Creeping Comeback
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/haiti-archives-51/3736-haitis-military-monster-makes-a-creeping-comeback
Under Tents: Taking Action for Haiti’s Homeless
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/6/under-tents-taking-action-haiti%E2%80%99s-homeless
'Secure Communities' and the U.S. Immigrant Rights Movement: Lessons from New York State (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/7/11/secure-communities-and-us-immigrant-rights-movement-lessons-new-york-state
Guest Workers Take On Wal-Mart in Lower Manhattan (US/immigration)
http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2012/07/119444.html
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Monday, 18 June 2012
WNU #1133: English to Replace Spanish in Puerto Rican Classrooms
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1133, June 17, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
The Puerto Rican public school system is about to start a program intended to replace Spanish with English as the language used in teaching most courses, Education Secretary Edward Moreno Alonso told the Spanish wire service EFE on June 8. The change will begin this August at 66 of the system’s 860 schools: at 31 schools children ages 5-9 will be taught all courses in English except history and Spanish; the other 35 schools will offer at least some of the course work in English. The government plans to complete the switch to English in all schools within 10 years.
Moreno Alonso said the change is in response to parents' demands, but critics suggested that the real motive lay in an effort by Gov. Luis Fortuño and his rightwing New Progressive Party (PNP) to have Puerto Rico annexed to the US as its 51st state. Héctor L. Pesquera, co-president of the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH), predicted that the program would be a failure. “[R]egrettably our students will be the victims of this pedagogical and political blunder,” he told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina on June 9.
“It may be that many [teachers] know English,” María Elena Lara, president-elect of the Teachers’ Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR), said in a radio interview on June 8, “but they weren’t trained to teach in English.” Like Pesquera, she expected “a big failure.” “Much of our school population is in special education because they have trouble learning in their maternal language,” Aida Díaz, president of the smaller Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), said on the same program. “Imagine [learning] mathematics and science in English!”
Both union leaders said they supported teaching English as a second language, along with other languages. Mandarin is an important language to learn for business, Díaz noted; the problem “is wanting to substitute one language for another purely as an ideological matter.”
Both English and Spanish are official languages in Puerto Rico, but only 30% of Puerto Rico’s 3.9 million residents speak English at a high level, according to EFE, while Spanish is the primary language for 96%. English was used as the language of school instruction starting in 1900, two years after the US took control of the island from Spain; the practice was ended in 1948. (EFE 6/8/12 via Fox News Latino; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/8/12; Prensa Latina 6/9/12)
In other news, on June 15 Norberto González Claudio, a former member of the rebel Boricua Popular Army (EPB)-Macheteros, pleaded guilty in a Connecticut federal court to charges stemming from the group’s 1983 armed robbery of $7.1 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford. In exchange for the plea, US prosecutors agreed to recommend a five-year prison sentence. González Claudio spent 25 years as a fugitive before being arrested in Puerto Rico in May 2011 [see Update #1095]. In a letter to federal judge Alfred Covello, González Claudio wrote that “[t]he circumstances surrounding the struggle for Puerto Rican independence are different today from when I was younger.” He expressed hope that the struggle would now follow a “path…of peace and understanding.” (END 6/15/12; EFE 6/16/12 via Fox News Latino)
*2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
Early in the morning of June 11 some 200 Honduran security agents--including Preventive Police, National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) agents and soldiers from the 105th Infantry Brigade—evicted campesinos occupying more than 4,000 hectares on three estates in San Manuel in the northern department of Cortés. About 30 people were arrested, mostly women, according to press reports, but DNIC sub-director Reinaldo Rubio said the agents only found 20 people at the site and arrested them for land usurpation. The eviction was authorized by a judge in the nearby city of San Pedro Sula.
The soldiers and police “were dishonest and didn’t have the courage to tell us what they’d come for,” one of the occupiers, María Reyes, told a reporter. “They just indicated that they were going to explain some matter to us, but minutes later they arrested us and put us in a bus, as if we were criminals.” After removing the campesinos, the security forces brought in tractors and razed the structures the occupiers had built out of bamboo and metal sheets, including three small shops. The security forces “didn’t spare anything,” according to another women, who was arrested while she collected plastic bottles to sell to recyclers.
The campesinos, members of the San Manuel Campesino Movement (MOCSAM), had occupied the land since May 23. They occupied the same estates for a little more than one day on Apr. 17 as part of a massive demonstration in which some 3,500 families took over land in different parts of the country to mark the International Day of Campesino Struggles [see Update #1126].
The titles to the three estates are held by Compañía Azucarera Hondureña, SA (CAHSA), a sugar company; another company, Inversan (Inversiones San Manuel); and an individual named José Jacobo Zacapa. MOCSAM says the occupation is justified by a recent ruling from the National Agrarian Institute (INA) that the lands were designated for agrarian reform and the current owners had therefore bought them illegally. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 6/12/12; Agencia Púlsar 6/13/12; EFE 6/13/12 via Latin American Herald)
Land disputes continue to create tensions throughout northern Honduras, despite a partial settlement the government made with one group of campesinos on June 5 in the Lower Aguán Valley, in Colón department [see Update #1132]. The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, an organization formed by Honduran and international groups last fall, has accused the government of carrying out a “remilitarization” of the valley. “Groups of up to 60 soldiers do guard duty in the landowners’ African palm oil processing plants, in the African palm plantations and at points considered strategic for the security of the landowning companies’ properties,” the organization wrote. There are monitoring operations located “at little distance from campesino settlements to keep close to the campesino population, which is the object of permanent repression.” (Adital (Brazil) 6/11/12)
On June 13 two indigenous activists were shot at in the La Cuchía community, in the northwestern department of Santa Bárbara, as they were driving from a meeting about a local land conflict and the imprisonment of a community member. Two men on a motorbike fired at least twice at Juan Vásquez and Sotero Chavarría, members of the Executive Committee of the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), causing their vehicle to crash. The two activists weren’t hurt, but the vehicle, which belongs to the organization, was damaged.
COPINH says that for several months the group and its members have been subjected to a “campaign of threats, intimidation and aggression…on the part of armed men from the Honduran government and paid members of companies that plan to develop megaprojects in indigenous territories.” (COPINH 6/14/12; Frontline Defenders 6/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
Backed up by Mexican soldiers, state homicide detectives arrested the municipal police chief and six other police agents in Lagos de Moreno in the western state of Jalisco on June 6 for allegedly participating in the kidnapping of three men five months earlier. The victims—attorney César Raúl Alcalá Gaona; his assistant, Jorge Alejandro Arredondo Siller; and construction worker Jorge Alberto Bustos Nájera, all from Saltillo, Coahuila—were found dead from asphyxiation and beating a few hours after they were kidnapped. The police agents are believed to have been working for Jalisco New Generation, a drug gang.
Videotapes from security cameras at a hotel showed police agents and men in civilian clothes entering the hotel and removing the victims, handcuffed and in their underwear--in the early morning of Jan. 20. The victims had apparently come to Jalisco to collect rent for a ranch, but the killers may have mistaken them for members of a rival drug cartel based in Coahuila.
Jalisco attorney general Tomás Coronado Olmos released the videos to the media on June 13, and parts were shown on Mexican television. “One assumes that in some cities ... the municipal police work for the drug cartels," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on security and drug trafficking at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, told the Associated Press wire service. “But what is different here is that there is a video. It’s not the same thing to imagine that this going on, and to see it.” Chabat noted that in 2010 seven local police agents in Santiago in the northern state of Nuevo León were arrested on charges of working for the Zetas drug gang and kidnapping and murdering Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos, who had been trying to cut corruption. (Milenio (Mexico) 6/13/12; AP 6/14/12 via Miami Herald)
As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began militarizing the “war on drugs” in late 2006. Federal and local authorities generally attribute the violence to drug cartels, but it is unclear how much should be blamed on the security forces. Last November Mexican human rights attorney Netzaí Sandoval filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague charging the federal government with responsibility in at least some of the killings [see Update #1107].
*4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
Tens of thousands marched through the center of Mexico City on June 10 in a festive protest against former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner in the July 1 presidential election, and against the television networks that the demonstrators said were promoting his candidacy. The march was the latest in a series of protests since a new student movement widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) appeared suddenly in May in opposition to Peña Nieto and the likely return of his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power; the PRI dominated Mexican politics for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000.
The capital’s police estimated the crowd at 90,000 on June 10, about twice the police estimate for a similar march on May 19 [see Update #1130]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/11/12)
Some 600 Mexico City youths attended a protest performance the evening of June 13 outside the Chapultepec Avenue offices of Televisa, Mexico’s most powerful television network. The youths used one of the building’s walls to project videos showing various incidents for which they blamed the PRI, including the 1968 massacre of students and their supporters at the Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City; the suspected fraud in 1988 through which former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) is thought to have defeated center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano; and the violent repression of campesinos in San Salvador Atenco in México state in May 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor [see Update #1039]. Students have also been carrying their message to the subway system with political theater. (LJ 6/14/12)
Students aren’t the only people questioning Peña Nieto’s favorable coverage in Mexico’s media. The Mexico correspondent of the British daily The Guardian has pointed out that US diplomats were secretly suspicious of the media coverage and the opinion polls when he was still a governor. In a confidential Jan. 26, 2009 cable from the US embassy, released last year by the WikiLeaks group, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Bassett wrote that “analysts and PRI party leaders alike have repeatedly expressed to [US political officers] their belief that [Peña Nieto] is paying media outlets under the table for favorable news coverage, as well as potentially financing pollsters to sway survey results.” (The Guardian 6/11/12)
On June 15, Camila Vallejo Dowling, one of the leaders of last year’s massive student strike in Chile, visited the Xochimilco campus of Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). She told an audience of hundreds of students that Latin America needed a network of the various social movements, “with a common platform of horizons for struggle, which doesn’t imply forgetting or marginalizing local demands.” At a forum earlier in the day she warned that activists needed to give up the old forms in which “one demands of the usual people changes which we know they are never going to carry out…. We still haven’t resolved how we are approaching the dispute over power; there is no full awareness of this process.” (LJ 6/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Chile protesters rally against Pinochet film
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3682-chile-protesters-rally-against-pinochet-film
There's Something About Mary Anastasia O'Grady (Chile)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/theres-something-about-mary-anastasia-ogrady
Paraguay probe of ranchers' attempted land-grab in indigenous territory
http://ww4report.com/node/11166
Bolivia: another Aymara leader arrested
http://ww4report.com/node/11121#comment-343088
Peru: Amazon highway moves ahead in Congress, indigenous leaders protest
http://ww4report.com/node/11159
Peru: dialogue in Espinar mining conflict —but new violence in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11165
Connecting with an International Historical Reality: Book Review of "Jose Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology" (Peru)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3685-connecting-with-an-international-historical-reality-book-review-of-qjose-carlos-mariategui-an-anthologyq
Bolivia: indigenous opposition to Amazon highway fractures
http://ww4report.com/node/11160
Land Restitution in Colombia: Failure, Rising Expectations, and Armed Opposition
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/land-restitution-colombia-failure-rising-expectations-and-armed-opposition
International Criminal Court to probe Colombian army in civilian killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11168
US sends combat commanders to Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9391#comment-343096
Colombia: US charges ex-security chief with drug trafficking
http://ww4report.com/node/11173
Venezuela Happiest Country in South America
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7044
Central America: Still a Long Way to Go in Fight Against Sexual Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3680-central-america-still-a-long-way-to-go-in-fight-against-sexual-violence
Support Mounts for Salvadoran Gang Truce
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6966
International Hearing Highlights Abuses in Honduras While Government Signs Loan to Buy Part of Contested Territory
http://nacla.org/news/2012/6/15/international-hearing-highlights-abuses-honduras-while-government-signs-loan-buy-part
Guatemala: attentat against gold mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11164
Guatemala: Photo Essay of Exhumation Inside Coban’s Former Military Garrison
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3684-guatemala-photo-essay-of-exhumation-inside-cobans-former-military-garrison
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over US medical experiments in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11169
Struggle for Release of Indigenous Political Prisoners Patishan and Santiz Lopez Continues in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3677-struggle-for-release-of-indigenous-political-prisoners-patishan-and-satiz-lopez-continues-in-mexico
A Candidate is Marketed as Mexicans Prepare to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/13/candidate-marketed-mexicans-prepare-vote
Pena Nieto or Lopez Obrador? (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/06/pena-nieto-or-lopez-obrador.php
Mexico’s Long and Bloody Electoral Road
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6990
Mexico's Spiral of Violence Causes Spike in PTSD
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3679-mexicos-spiral-of-violence-causes-spike-in-ptsd
Another reporter killed in Veracruz (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11100#comment-343143
Time to Rein in the Global Arms Trade (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7008
Ruidoso racetrack raided in crackdown on stateside Zeta network
http://ww4report.com/node/11163
In Wake of Scandals and Cholera, Anger Rises Against Minustah (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-wake-of-scandals-and-cholera-anger-rises-against-minustah
Will Obama’s Actions Finally Offer Relief for Some Undocumented Youth? (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/16/will-obama%E2%80%99s-actions-finally-offer-relief-some-undocumented-youth
Congressman to sue Obama over new immigration policy
http://ww4report.com/node/11170
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1133, June 17, 2012
1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Puerto Rico: English to Replace Spanish in Classrooms
The Puerto Rican public school system is about to start a program intended to replace Spanish with English as the language used in teaching most courses, Education Secretary Edward Moreno Alonso told the Spanish wire service EFE on June 8. The change will begin this August at 66 of the system’s 860 schools: at 31 schools children ages 5-9 will be taught all courses in English except history and Spanish; the other 35 schools will offer at least some of the course work in English. The government plans to complete the switch to English in all schools within 10 years.
Moreno Alonso said the change is in response to parents' demands, but critics suggested that the real motive lay in an effort by Gov. Luis Fortuño and his rightwing New Progressive Party (PNP) to have Puerto Rico annexed to the US as its 51st state. Héctor L. Pesquera, co-president of the Hostosian National Independence Movement (MINH), predicted that the program would be a failure. “[R]egrettably our students will be the victims of this pedagogical and political blunder,” he told the Cuban wire service Prensa Latina on June 9.
“It may be that many [teachers] know English,” María Elena Lara, president-elect of the Teachers’ Federation of Puerto Rico (FMPR), said in a radio interview on June 8, “but they weren’t trained to teach in English.” Like Pesquera, she expected “a big failure.” “Much of our school population is in special education because they have trouble learning in their maternal language,” Aida Díaz, president of the smaller Teachers’ Association of Puerto Rico (AMPR), said on the same program. “Imagine [learning] mathematics and science in English!”
Both union leaders said they supported teaching English as a second language, along with other languages. Mandarin is an important language to learn for business, Díaz noted; the problem “is wanting to substitute one language for another purely as an ideological matter.”
Both English and Spanish are official languages in Puerto Rico, but only 30% of Puerto Rico’s 3.9 million residents speak English at a high level, according to EFE, while Spanish is the primary language for 96%. English was used as the language of school instruction starting in 1900, two years after the US took control of the island from Spain; the practice was ended in 1948. (EFE 6/8/12 via Fox News Latino; El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo) 6/8/12; Prensa Latina 6/9/12)
In other news, on June 15 Norberto González Claudio, a former member of the rebel Boricua Popular Army (EPB)-Macheteros, pleaded guilty in a Connecticut federal court to charges stemming from the group’s 1983 armed robbery of $7.1 million from a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford. In exchange for the plea, US prosecutors agreed to recommend a five-year prison sentence. González Claudio spent 25 years as a fugitive before being arrested in Puerto Rico in May 2011 [see Update #1095]. In a letter to federal judge Alfred Covello, González Claudio wrote that “[t]he circumstances surrounding the struggle for Puerto Rican independence are different today from when I was younger.” He expressed hope that the struggle would now follow a “path…of peace and understanding.” (END 6/15/12; EFE 6/16/12 via Fox News Latino)
*2. Honduras: Campesinos Evicted, Indigenous Leaders Attacked
Early in the morning of June 11 some 200 Honduran security agents--including Preventive Police, National Criminal Investigation Directorate (DNIC) agents and soldiers from the 105th Infantry Brigade—evicted campesinos occupying more than 4,000 hectares on three estates in San Manuel in the northern department of Cortés. About 30 people were arrested, mostly women, according to press reports, but DNIC sub-director Reinaldo Rubio said the agents only found 20 people at the site and arrested them for land usurpation. The eviction was authorized by a judge in the nearby city of San Pedro Sula.
The soldiers and police “were dishonest and didn’t have the courage to tell us what they’d come for,” one of the occupiers, María Reyes, told a reporter. “They just indicated that they were going to explain some matter to us, but minutes later they arrested us and put us in a bus, as if we were criminals.” After removing the campesinos, the security forces brought in tractors and razed the structures the occupiers had built out of bamboo and metal sheets, including three small shops. The security forces “didn’t spare anything,” according to another women, who was arrested while she collected plastic bottles to sell to recyclers.
The campesinos, members of the San Manuel Campesino Movement (MOCSAM), had occupied the land since May 23. They occupied the same estates for a little more than one day on Apr. 17 as part of a massive demonstration in which some 3,500 families took over land in different parts of the country to mark the International Day of Campesino Struggles [see Update #1126].
The titles to the three estates are held by Compañía Azucarera Hondureña, SA (CAHSA), a sugar company; another company, Inversan (Inversiones San Manuel); and an individual named José Jacobo Zacapa. MOCSAM says the occupation is justified by a recent ruling from the National Agrarian Institute (INA) that the lands were designated for agrarian reform and the current owners had therefore bought them illegally. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 6/12/12; Agencia Púlsar 6/13/12; EFE 6/13/12 via Latin American Herald)
Land disputes continue to create tensions throughout northern Honduras, despite a partial settlement the government made with one group of campesinos on June 5 in the Lower Aguán Valley, in Colón department [see Update #1132]. The Permanent Human Rights Monitoring Center for the Aguán, an organization formed by Honduran and international groups last fall, has accused the government of carrying out a “remilitarization” of the valley. “Groups of up to 60 soldiers do guard duty in the landowners’ African palm oil processing plants, in the African palm plantations and at points considered strategic for the security of the landowning companies’ properties,” the organization wrote. There are monitoring operations located “at little distance from campesino settlements to keep close to the campesino population, which is the object of permanent repression.” (Adital (Brazil) 6/11/12)
On June 13 two indigenous activists were shot at in the La Cuchía community, in the northwestern department of Santa Bárbara, as they were driving from a meeting about a local land conflict and the imprisonment of a community member. Two men on a motorbike fired at least twice at Juan Vásquez and Sotero Chavarría, members of the Executive Committee of the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), causing their vehicle to crash. The two activists weren’t hurt, but the vehicle, which belongs to the organization, was damaged.
COPINH says that for several months the group and its members have been subjected to a “campaign of threats, intimidation and aggression…on the part of armed men from the Honduran government and paid members of companies that plan to develop megaprojects in indigenous territories.” (COPINH 6/14/12; Frontline Defenders 6/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Police Charged in Kidnapping for Drug Gang
Backed up by Mexican soldiers, state homicide detectives arrested the municipal police chief and six other police agents in Lagos de Moreno in the western state of Jalisco on June 6 for allegedly participating in the kidnapping of three men five months earlier. The victims—attorney César Raúl Alcalá Gaona; his assistant, Jorge Alejandro Arredondo Siller; and construction worker Jorge Alberto Bustos Nájera, all from Saltillo, Coahuila—were found dead from asphyxiation and beating a few hours after they were kidnapped. The police agents are believed to have been working for Jalisco New Generation, a drug gang.
Videotapes from security cameras at a hotel showed police agents and men in civilian clothes entering the hotel and removing the victims, handcuffed and in their underwear--in the early morning of Jan. 20. The victims had apparently come to Jalisco to collect rent for a ranch, but the killers may have mistaken them for members of a rival drug cartel based in Coahuila.
Jalisco attorney general Tomás Coronado Olmos released the videos to the media on June 13, and parts were shown on Mexican television. “One assumes that in some cities ... the municipal police work for the drug cartels," said Jorge Chabat, an expert on security and drug trafficking at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching, told the Associated Press wire service. “But what is different here is that there is a video. It’s not the same thing to imagine that this going on, and to see it.” Chabat noted that in 2010 seven local police agents in Santiago in the northern state of Nuevo León were arrested on charges of working for the Zetas drug gang and kidnapping and murdering Mayor Edelmiro Cavazos, who had been trying to cut corruption. (Milenio (Mexico) 6/13/12; AP 6/14/12 via Miami Herald)
As many as 50,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related killings since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa began militarizing the “war on drugs” in late 2006. Federal and local authorities generally attribute the violence to drug cartels, but it is unclear how much should be blamed on the security forces. Last November Mexican human rights attorney Netzaí Sandoval filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague charging the federal government with responsibility in at least some of the killings [see Update #1107].
*4. Mexico: Protests Continue to Target TV's Favorite Candidate
Tens of thousands marched through the center of Mexico City on June 10 in a festive protest against former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner in the July 1 presidential election, and against the television networks that the demonstrators said were promoting his candidacy. The march was the latest in a series of protests since a new student movement widely known as “#YoSoy132” (“I’m number 132”) appeared suddenly in May in opposition to Peña Nieto and the likely return of his centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to power; the PRI dominated Mexican politics for 71 years until losing the presidency in 2000.
The capital’s police estimated the crowd at 90,000 on June 10, about twice the police estimate for a similar march on May 19 [see Update #1130]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 6/11/12)
Some 600 Mexico City youths attended a protest performance the evening of June 13 outside the Chapultepec Avenue offices of Televisa, Mexico’s most powerful television network. The youths used one of the building’s walls to project videos showing various incidents for which they blamed the PRI, including the 1968 massacre of students and their supporters at the Tlatelolco housing project in Mexico City; the suspected fraud in 1988 through which former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) is thought to have defeated center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano; and the violent repression of campesinos in San Salvador Atenco in México state in May 2006, when Peña Nieto was governor [see Update #1039]. Students have also been carrying their message to the subway system with political theater. (LJ 6/14/12)
Students aren’t the only people questioning Peña Nieto’s favorable coverage in Mexico’s media. The Mexico correspondent of the British daily The Guardian has pointed out that US diplomats were secretly suspicious of the media coverage and the opinion polls when he was still a governor. In a confidential Jan. 26, 2009 cable from the US embassy, released last year by the WikiLeaks group, Deputy Chief of Mission Leslie Bassett wrote that “analysts and PRI party leaders alike have repeatedly expressed to [US political officers] their belief that [Peña Nieto] is paying media outlets under the table for favorable news coverage, as well as potentially financing pollsters to sway survey results.” (The Guardian 6/11/12)
On June 15, Camila Vallejo Dowling, one of the leaders of last year’s massive student strike in Chile, visited the Xochimilco campus of Mexico City’s Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM). She told an audience of hundreds of students that Latin America needed a network of the various social movements, “with a common platform of horizons for struggle, which doesn’t imply forgetting or marginalizing local demands.” At a forum earlier in the day she warned that activists needed to give up the old forms in which “one demands of the usual people changes which we know they are never going to carry out…. We still haven’t resolved how we are approaching the dispute over power; there is no full awareness of this process.” (LJ 6/16/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US/immigration
Chile protesters rally against Pinochet film
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3682-chile-protesters-rally-against-pinochet-film
There's Something About Mary Anastasia O'Grady (Chile)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/theres-something-about-mary-anastasia-ogrady
Paraguay probe of ranchers' attempted land-grab in indigenous territory
http://ww4report.com/node/11166
Bolivia: another Aymara leader arrested
http://ww4report.com/node/11121#comment-343088
Peru: Amazon highway moves ahead in Congress, indigenous leaders protest
http://ww4report.com/node/11159
Peru: dialogue in Espinar mining conflict —but new violence in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11165
Connecting with an International Historical Reality: Book Review of "Jose Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology" (Peru)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3685-connecting-with-an-international-historical-reality-book-review-of-qjose-carlos-mariategui-an-anthologyq
Bolivia: indigenous opposition to Amazon highway fractures
http://ww4report.com/node/11160
Land Restitution in Colombia: Failure, Rising Expectations, and Armed Opposition
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/11/land-restitution-colombia-failure-rising-expectations-and-armed-opposition
International Criminal Court to probe Colombian army in civilian killings
http://ww4report.com/node/11168
US sends combat commanders to Colombia
http://ww4report.com/node/9391#comment-343096
Colombia: US charges ex-security chief with drug trafficking
http://ww4report.com/node/11173
Venezuela Happiest Country in South America
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7044
Central America: Still a Long Way to Go in Fight Against Sexual Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3680-central-america-still-a-long-way-to-go-in-fight-against-sexual-violence
Support Mounts for Salvadoran Gang Truce
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6966
International Hearing Highlights Abuses in Honduras While Government Signs Loan to Buy Part of Contested Territory
http://nacla.org/news/2012/6/15/international-hearing-highlights-abuses-honduras-while-government-signs-loan-buy-part
Guatemala: attentat against gold mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11164
Guatemala: Photo Essay of Exhumation Inside Coban’s Former Military Garrison
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3684-guatemala-photo-essay-of-exhumation-inside-cobans-former-military-garrison
Federal judge dismisses lawsuit over US medical experiments in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11169
Struggle for Release of Indigenous Political Prisoners Patishan and Santiz Lopez Continues in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3677-struggle-for-release-of-indigenous-political-prisoners-patishan-and-satiz-lopez-continues-in-mexico
A Candidate is Marketed as Mexicans Prepare to Vote
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/13/candidate-marketed-mexicans-prepare-vote
Pena Nieto or Lopez Obrador? (Mexico)
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/06/pena-nieto-or-lopez-obrador.php
Mexico’s Long and Bloody Electoral Road
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6990
Mexico's Spiral of Violence Causes Spike in PTSD
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3679-mexicos-spiral-of-violence-causes-spike-in-ptsd
Another reporter killed in Veracruz (Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11100#comment-343143
Time to Rein in the Global Arms Trade (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7008
Ruidoso racetrack raided in crackdown on stateside Zeta network
http://ww4report.com/node/11163
In Wake of Scandals and Cholera, Anger Rises Against Minustah (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/in-wake-of-scandals-and-cholera-anger-rises-against-minustah
Will Obama’s Actions Finally Offer Relief for Some Undocumented Youth? (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/6/16/will-obama%E2%80%99s-actions-finally-offer-relief-some-undocumented-youth
Congressman to sue Obama over new immigration policy
http://ww4report.com/node/11170
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
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