Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1153, November 25, 2012
1. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Latin America: Leaders and Movements Protest Attack on Gaza
In a Nov. 17 statement the leaders of the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), a trade bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay (suspended), Uruguay and Venezuela, expressed their “strongest condemnation of the violence unleashed between Israel and Palestine” and their “concern with the disproportionate use of force” since Israel began a military offensive against Gaza on Nov. 14. Mercosur also expressed “its support to the request from the state of Palestine to obtain the status of [United Nations] observer member.”
The four active Mercosur members are among the 11 Latin American countries that have recognized Palestine as a state [see Update #1063]; the others are Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru. Mercosur signed a “free trade” agreement with the Palestinian National Authority in December 2011; it signed a similar trade agreement with Israel in 2007, a move opposed by many leftists, who feel cutting off trade with Mercosur would put pressure on the Israeli government. Israel’s annual exports to Mercosur are worth about $700 million; Brazil by itself is the third largest recipient of Israeli exports in the world. (MercoPress (Montevideo) 11/17/12; Aporrea.org (Venezuela) 11/19/12; People’s Daily (China) 11/21/12)
[Paraguay was suspended from Mercosur after the legislature's sudden impeachment of President Fernando Lugo on June 22 but remains a member; see Update #1135.]
Some Latin American leaders were stronger than others in their condemnation of the Israeli operation, codenamed “Pillar of Defense,” which was suspended in a ceasefire agreement on Nov. 21. On Nov. 19 Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner said “the first step” for resolving the conflict “should be the creation of a free and independent Palestinian state that can negotiate peace as an equal with the state of Israel.” Also on Nov. 19, El Salvador’s governing leftist party, the Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN), condemned the offensive as a “new massacre…against the people of Palestine” and charged that Israel had provoked the conflict. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez had characterized “Pillar of Defense” as “savage” a few days earlier, while the Cuban government repeated its “most firm support for the just cause of the Palestinian people and their inalienable rights, which include the creation of an independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
“[W]e back the right of the Palestinian people to be able to have their own free, independent and autonomous state,” Chile’s rightwing president, Sebastián Piñera, said during a visit to Turkey on Nov. 19, but he stressed that Chile “also support[s] Israel’s right to count on secure borders in peace.” According to the Spanish wire service EFE, Chile has the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East.
Many groups in the region held protests against the Israeli offensive. About 30 Uruguayans demonstrated in Montevideo on Nov. 19 in front of the Israeli embassy, calling Israel a “genocidal state.” Dozens of members of the Salvadoran Palestinian Association and other organizations protested the same day in front of the Israeli embassy in El Salvador. (EFE 11/19/12 via Diario de Yucatán (Mexico))
A Mexican group protested at the Angel of Independence in Mexico City on Nov. 20, and another demonstration was held in front of the Israeli embassy. Activists were planning a further show of support for the Palestinians in front of the United Nations (UN) office in Mexico City on Nov. 27, two days before Palestinian National Authority president Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) is scheduled to ask the UN General Assembly for observer status for Palestine. (Adital (Brazil) 11/22/12) Hundreds of Colombians and resident Palestinians demonstrated at the Israeli embassy in Bogotá on Nov. 20; the protest tied up traffic in the city center for about two hours. A protest in Managua the next day by Nicaraguans, resident Palestinians and US citizen Nan McCurry targeted the US embassy. “I’m asking the government of my country to stop supporting Israel so that this war will end immediately,” McCurry said in a brief speech. (People’s Daily 11/21/12, 11/21/12)
A number of Arab and Palestinian groups, with the support of Brazil’s Unified Workers’ Central (CUT), are holding a Free Palestine World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in southern Brazil from Nov. 28 to Dec. 1. The goal is “to consolidate and strengthen the international solidarity movement for the rights of the Palestinians.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/20/12)
*2. Argentina: Unions Call First General Strike in 10 Years
Argentina’s largest union federation, the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), and the more radical Federation of Argentine Workers (CTA) sponsored a nationwide general strike on Nov. 20 to protest President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s economic policies. The majority of the country’s unions supported the strike call, as did leftist parties and the leftist Classist and Combative Current (CCC), but the CGT section led by Antonio Caló, representing 33 industrial and service unions, ignored the strike call. Organizers called the action a success, while President Fernández dismissed it as “a phenomenon limited to some service unions and to the area around the federal capital.”
The strikers blocked the main highways into Buenos Aires and other major cities. Schools, courts, banks and gas stations were closed in Buenos Aires province, where about a third of the country’s population lives, and hospitals only accepted emergency cases. In the central province of Santa Fe, the strike shut down Rosario, the main port for the export of agricultural goods; oil production was affected in Río Negro, Neuquén and La Pampa provinces. Airports remained open but had many less flights than usual.
In addition to blocking roads, strikers reportedly threw stones at buses and punctured tires to keep people from going to work. CTA Pablo Micheli leader said strikers had blocked roads at 300 points; the media estimated that the number was 160. While claiming that hundreds of thousands of workers supported the strike, Micheli admitted that without the blockages “the strike wouldn’t have had the rate of observation that it had.” “[I]n Argentina there’s no right to strike,” he said. “We were forced to have piquetes [militant road blockages] so that the workers could justify not having gone to their work places.”
The strikers’ demands included an increase in the minimum wage and in social assistance programs; the elimination of a tax on workers’ incomes; and an increase in retirement pensions. The groups supporting the strike protested the loss of purchasing power by much of the population; some private economists claim the annual inflation rate will come to 25% this year.
The Nov. 20 action was Argentina’s first general strike since December 2002, and it marked the end of a long-time alliance between CGT general secretary Hugo Moyano and the faction of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) formed by President Fernández and her late husband, former president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007) [see Update #988]. (Terra.es (Spain) 11/21/12 from Europa Press and unidentified wire services;La Jornada (Mexico) 11/21/12 from correspondent)
*3. Mexico: Torture and Disappearances Are on the Rise
Complaints about abuses by Mexican police and soldiers have increased dramatically over the past seven years, according to testimony by Raúl Plascencia Villanueva, the president of the government’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), to the Mexican Senate’s Human Rights Commission on Nov. 21. Plascencia was reporting principally on the period from Jan. 1, 2005 to July 31, 2012, which overlaps the administration of President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and his militarization of the “war on drugs.” Calderón took office on Dec. 1, 2006; he will be succeeded this Dec. 1 by Enrique Peña Nieto.
During the 2005-2012 period the CNDH received 5,568 complaints about alleged failures to follow required procedures in issuing or executing warrants for searches, Plascencia said. The agency is also investigating 2,126 cases of people who were reportedly disappeared. There were more than 9,000 complaints citing arbitrary detentions, a 121% increase during the period. In 2005 there was only one complaint of torture; in 2011 the number of complaints about torture or other cruel and degrading treatment had risen to 2,040. Since 2005 the CNDH has received a total of 34,385 complaints against federal public servants, with an 84% increase just in the last three years. The alleged abuses were “mainly concentrated under the headings of illegal searches, forcible disappearances, arbitrary detentions, executions and torture,” Plascencia said. (La Jornada (Mexico) 11/22/12)
On Nov. 21 Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre Rivero publicly apologized at a ceremony in Acapulco for the deaths of two students and a gas station worker during a confrontation on Dec. 12, 2011 between police and students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College, located in the Guerrero village of Ayotzinapa. The apology was in response to a March recommendation by the CNDH, which also required compensation for the victims’ families and for people injured in the incident [see Update #1123]. Víctor Hugo Pérez, human rights director for the federal Public Security Secretariat (SSP), was also present to offer his “profound and heartfelt apology” for the role of federal police agents in the confrontation.
The brother of the gas station worker was the only relative of a victim to attend. The other families and students from the college boycotted the ceremony; instead, they held a press conference where they demanded punishment for the officials they say are responsible for the killings. State police agents Ismael Matadamas Salinas and Rey David Cortés Flores are the only suspects detained in the case, although the Guerrero legislature is considering a petition for lifting the immunity of former state chief prosecutor Guerrero Alberto López Rosas and former state public security secretary Ramón Almonte Borja. (LJ 11/20/12, 11/22/12)
*4. US: SOA Protests Continue; Church Expels Activist Priest
The 22nd annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), brought several thousand activists to the Army's Fort Benning base in Columbus, Georgia, for a series of events from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18. One demonstrator, Robert Norman Chantal of Americus, Georgia, was arrested when he climbed over the base's fence during the concluding event, a symbolic funeral march, on Nov. 18. He was released later on his own recognizance, according to a Fort Benning representative. Chantal, who faces a possible six-month sentence, will be tried in a US District Court on Jan. 9.
The protest’s sponsor, SOA Watch, opposes the US Army’s training of Latin American soldiers, charging that SOA graduates have been among the region’s most notorious human rights violators. The group’s protests have gained some sympathy in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela have ended their relations with the school, and in September Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega told a human rights delegation that Nicaragua will withdraw from SOA/WHINSEC [see Update #1144]. There may also some movement in US ruling circles. On Nov. 14 Denis McDonough, national deputy security adviser to US president Barack Obama, met with an SOA Watch delegation; the group asked for the school to be shut down by executive order. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) is planning to introduce legislation in Congress in January to suspend operations at the school and investigate human rights abuses in Latin America. (SOA Watch press release 11/18/12; Columbus (GA) Ledger-Enquirer 11/18/12)
On Nov. 19, the day after this year’s protests, the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, a Catholic religious order, issued a statement confirming that the Vatican was dismissing SOA Watch’s founder, Father Roy Bourgeois, from the priesthood and from his order for participating in an August 2008 rite ordaining a woman as a priest. Bourgeois said that the dismissal was “very difficult and painful” but that his “only regret is that it took me so long to confront the issue of male power and domination in the Catholic Church.” (Religion News Service 11/21/12 via Washington Post)
The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH) responded to the decision with a statement noting Bourgeois’ solidarity with Hondurans after the June 2009 military coup and praising him as “a humanist, a tireless fighter for the imparting of justice, a defender of the poor and a companion to social struggles throughout the continent.” (Adital (Brazil) 11/23/12) Bourgeois’ supporters have started an online petition at http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/727/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=11972 where people can express their solidarity with his “decision to follow his conscience.”
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, Trade
#Radical Media: Communication Unbound (Latin America)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/11/20/radical-media-communication-unbound
Latin America’s Left Turn Collides with Indigenous Movements
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3974-latin-americas-left-turn-collides-with-indigenous-movements
Argentina fights US order to pay $1.33 billion debt
http://ww4report.com/node/11719
Industrial Soy and Sugar Cane Fuel Native Land Conflicts in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3978-industrial-soy-and-sugar-cane-fuel-native-land-conflicts-in-brazil
Brazil: crime wars rock Sao Paulo
http://ww4report.com/node/11728
Brazil: Amazon native killed by federal police
http://ww4report.com/node/11727
Brazil: violence halts work at Belo Monte dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11726
Bolivia: dissent over indigenous identity in census
http://ww4report.com/node/11725
Peru: Amazonian leaders press land demarcation
http://ww4report.com/node/11724
Peru: campesino alliance with "illegal" miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11723
Colombia: indigenous peace proposal advanced
http://ww4report.com/node/11722
Colombia rejects Hague ruling in Nicaragua maritime dispute
http://ww4report.com/node/11729
Mass Participation in Debate on Venezuela’s Socialist Plan
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7498
EL Salvador: Proposed Culture Law Would Provide Healthcare and Funding for Artists
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3985-el-salvador-proposed-culture-law-would-provide-healthcare-and-funding-for-artists
Murders of Teenagers and Opposition Party Members Underscore Impunity in Honduras and the Failure of U.S. “Vetting”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3977-murders-of-teenagers-and-opposition-party-members-underscore-impunity-in-honduras-and-the-failure-of-us-vetting
Honduras’ Party Primaries: Voters Went to the Polls, But Can Next Year’s Elections be “Free and Fair”?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/honduras-party-primaries-voters-went-to-the-polls-but-can-next-years-elections-be-free-and-fair
Action Alert! Protect Pacific Resistance in San José del Golfo, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3983-action-alert-protect-pacific-resistance-in-san-jose-del-golfo-guatemala
Canadian Mining on Trial (Guatemala)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3980-canadian-mining-on-trial
Guatemala’s ‘Little School of the Americas’
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3976-guatemalas-little-school-of-the-americas
Should Chiapas Farmers Suffer for California’s Carbon? (Mexico)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3975-should-chiapas-farmers-suffer-for-californias-carbon
War or Peace in Mexico?
http://www.grass-roots-press.com/2012/11/24/war-or-peace-in-mexico/
Mexico: pressure mounts for drug legalization
http://ww4report.com/node/11730
Returning Migrant Children Pose Educational Challenge in Mexico
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/11/returning-migrant-children-pose-educational-challenge-in-mexico.php
The Caribbean’s Agricultural Crisis
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/11/23/caribbean%E2%80%99s-agricultural-crisis
Cholera Continues to Spread After Hurricane Sandy (Haiti)
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/cholera-continues-to-spread-after-hurricane-sandy
Quebec fracking ban challenged under NAFTA
http://ww4report.com/node/11731
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human rights. Show all posts
Tuesday, 27 November 2012
Tuesday, 30 October 2012
WNU #1149: Chilean Court Annuls Two Mapuche Convictions
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1149, October 28, 2012
1. Chile: Supreme Court Annuls Two Mapuche Convictions
2. Chile: Court Approves Call for US Officer’s Extradition
3. Mexico: Torture and Abuse Cases Continue to Increase
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, Grenada, Haiti, US
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Supreme Court Annuls Two Mapuche Convictions
By a unanimous vote, on Oct. 24 Chile’s Supreme Court of Justice overturned the convictions of two young Mapuche prisoners for the attempted homicide of Gen. Iván Besmalinovic, a commander of the carabineros militarized police, in November 2011. The two prisoners had been on a liquids-only hunger strike along with two other Mapuche prisoners since Aug. 27 in the city of Angol in the southern region of Araucanía [see Update #1148]. After receiving word of the court’s decision, the hunger strikers met with members of their home community, Wente Winkul Mapu, and on Oct. 25 they decided to end their fast.
“We assess the decision positively,” Wente Winkul Mapu spokesperson Daniel Melinao told the Associated Press wire service on Oct. 24. “[W]e’ve been saying for a long time that the brothers didn’t intend to murder the general, and today the court agreed that at no time there was an attempted homicide.” Mapuche activists hold that they are subjected to exaggerated charges and inflated sentences—sometimes under an “antiterrorist” law from the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet—for political actions caried out in their struggle to regain ancestral land.
A criminal court in Angol had sentenced Paulino Levinao Montoya and Paulino Levipán Coyán to 10 years in prison on Aug. 13 on the attempted homicide charge, plus 541 days for illegal possession of firearms. In its Oct. 24 decision the Supreme Court ordered a retrial of Levinao Montoya, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of intending to kill police agents. In the case of Levipán Coyán the justices found that the youth had wounded carabineros as they carried out a raid on Wente Winkul Mapu, but the court determined that he hadn’t fired with an intention to kill. His sentence was reduced to three years, which he can serve on parole. The court upheld the sentences for arms possession for both prisoners.
The two other hunger strikers, the brothers Erick and Rodrigo Montoya, are awaiting trial for attempted homicide of a police agent in a separate incident.
Five Mapuche prisoners in the city of Temuco ended a 23-day hunger strike on Oct. 23 when prison authorities agreed to their demand to be moved to the Angol prison, where they would be closer to their communities and other Mapuche prisoners. They went without food or water for the last five days of their fast. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/24/12 from correspondent, 10/25/12 from correspondent and unidentified wire services, 10/26/12 from correspondent; AP 10/25/12 via Univision)
*2. Chile: Court Approves Call for US Officer’s Extradition
A panel of Chile’s Supreme Court of Justice voted 4-1 on Oct. 17 to approve a request for the extradition of former US Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis to stand trial for his involvement in the murders of two US citizens, journalist Charles Horman and graduate student Frank Teruggi, in the days after the Sept. 11, 1973 military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende Gossens. Chilean investigative judge Jorge Zepeda asked for the extradition in November 2011 when he indicted Davis for allegedly failing to prevent the murders; the indictment was based in part on declassified US documents [see Update #1108]. The court’s one dissenter held that a 15-year statute of limitations applied in the case, but the majority held that the charges were for a crime against humanity and therefore were not subject to the limitation.
Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, has persistently sought justice in the case. In 1977 the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a suit on her behalf in the US charging former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and other high-ranking US officials with complicity in the murders. The suit was eventually dismissed after the US government used “national security” as a pretext to prevent the discovery of evidence. Later Joyce Harmon filed a suit in Chile with the assistance of Chilean attorney Sergio Corvalán and CCR vice president Peter Weiss, and this led to Judge Zepeda’s 2011 indictment.
“It is gratifying that, while our own government invoked the state secrets doctrine in the US case, the investigating judge in the Chilean case spent years of determined effort to get at the truth,” Weiss said in response to the Supreme Court’s decision. According to the CCR, this is probably the first time a country has sought the extradition of a high-ranking US military official in a human rights case. (CCR press release 10/18/12; El Mostrador (Chile) 10/18/12; New York Times 10/18/12)
*3. Mexico: Torture and Abuse Cases Continue to Increase
Mexico’s Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH) held a press conference in Mexico City on Oct. 23 to announce the release of a report on the alleged torture of Israel Arzate Meléndez, a resident of Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua, by state police and the military. According to the report, Tortured, Imprisoned and Innocent, two soldiers arrested Arzate on Feb. 3, 2010, charging him with participation in the massacre of 15 youths in Ciudad Juárez’s Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood the previous Jan. 30 [see Update #1065]. The report says the soldiers took Arzate to a military installation, stripped him naked, tied up his hands and feet, placed a plastic bag over his head and tortured him with electric shocks to get him to confess to involvement in the killings.
Torture and arbitrary detention “continue to be daily bread” in Mexico, Javier Hernández Valencia, the Mexico representative of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the press conference. These are “a mechanism for investigation which the police and military never give up resorting to,” he added. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (CSJN) has agreed to consider the Arzate case. (Milenio (Mexico) 10/23/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 10/24/12)
On Oct. 24 government officials denied that there is systematic use of torture by the police and the military. “The only public servants in the armed forces that haven’t had a course on human rights are the new ones,” Governance Secretary Alejandro Poiré said, “but in practice they are given this course within three or four months of joining.” (LJ 10/25/12)
Complaints of torture and other abuse by the police and the military have increased dramatically since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa escalated the military's involvement in Mexico’s “war on drugs” shortly after he took office in December 2006. The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) released a report on Oct. 11 charging that the Calderón administration has “effectively turned a blind eye” to the problem. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received 1,669 reports of police and military torture and abuse in 2011, almost three times as many in 2008, when the commission received 564 complaints, according to the report, Known Abusers, but Victims Ignored: Torture and Ill-Treatment in Mexico. (Los Angeles Times 10/11/12)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, Grenada, Haiti, US
Contradictions and Discrepancies: Media Coverage in Argentina
http://nacla.org/news/2012/10/25/contradictions-and-discrepancies-media-coverage-argentina
The Chilean Safe Abortion Hotline: Assisting Women With Illegal, But Safe, Misoprostol Abortion
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3933-the-chilean-safe-abortion-hotline-assisting-women-with-illegal-but-safe-misoprostol-abortion
Uruguay rejects “the war on drugs”
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8271
Brazil: Guarani threaten mass suicide?
http://ww4report.com/node/11647
Bolivia enacts new "Law of Mother Earth"
http://ww4report.com/node/11643
Peru: OAS rights commission to hear Conga case
http://ww4report.com/node/11639
Peru: indigenous development plan for Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/11640
Peru: will land titling undercut Sendero?
http://ww4report.com/node/11641
Peru: land, water conflicts grow in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11650
Riots rock Lima —in footsteps of Hillary Clinton (Peru)
http://ww4report.com/node/11642
UN experts urge Colombia to reconsider reform of military criminal law
http://ww4report.com/node/11632
FARC factionalizing amid peace talks?
http://ww4report.com/node/11644
Colombia: judge orders return of usurped lands
http://ww4report.com/node/11645
Venezuelan Think Tank Panelist Condemns 100 Percent of Venezuelans
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/22/think-tank-panelist-condemns-100-percent-venezuelans
Venezuela’s Chavez to Ministers: Now is the Time for Self-Criticism
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7383
Venezuela joins Mercosur: A New Strategic Alliance
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8360
Panama: strikes halt trade zone land sale
http://ww4report.com/node/11646
Guatemala: Peaceful Resistance in the Face of Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3934-guatemala-peaceful-resistance-in-the-face-of-violence
Criminal gangs threaten Maya Biosphere Reserve (Guatemala, Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11648
“Walking the True Word Around the World”: State Violence, Global Solidarity, and a New Campaign to Support the Zapatistas
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3935-walking-the-true-word-around-the-world-state-violence-global-solidarity-and-a-new-campaign-to-support-the-zapatistas
Treaty Tolls Death Knell for Mexican Countryside
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3928-treaty-tolls-death-knell-for-mexican-countryside
Mexico: lives claimed in Chihuahua water wars
http://ww4report.com/node/11649
Labor Law Reform Stalled as Mexican Congress Debates Process
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=206#1505
Despite Major Legal Victory, Electrical Workers Not Back at Work
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=206#1512
Yaqui Resistance: Against the Aqueduct, Agricultural Chemicals and Transgenics Crops on their Ancestral Lands (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8290
The Fight for Corn (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8337
A Bitter Anniversary: Remembering the Invasion of Grenada
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/22/bitter-anniversary-remembering-invasion-grenada
Celebrities and Foreign Officials Tout Caracol, While Report Finds 95% of Factories Fail to Pay Minimum Wage
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/celebrities-and-foreign-officials-tout-caracol-while-report-finds-95-of-factories-fail-to-pay-minimum-wage
Double defeat for the White House and the Pentagon (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8244
The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes: Better Than Ever This Year (US)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/24/maria-moors-cabot-prizes-better-ever-year
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 #1149, October 28, 2012
1. Chile: Supreme Court Annuls Two Mapuche Convictions
2. Chile: Court Approves Call for US Officer’s Extradition
3. Mexico: Torture and Abuse Cases Continue to Increase
4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, Grenada, Haiti, US
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Chile: Supreme Court Annuls Two Mapuche Convictions
By a unanimous vote, on Oct. 24 Chile’s Supreme Court of Justice overturned the convictions of two young Mapuche prisoners for the attempted homicide of Gen. Iván Besmalinovic, a commander of the carabineros militarized police, in November 2011. The two prisoners had been on a liquids-only hunger strike along with two other Mapuche prisoners since Aug. 27 in the city of Angol in the southern region of Araucanía [see Update #1148]. After receiving word of the court’s decision, the hunger strikers met with members of their home community, Wente Winkul Mapu, and on Oct. 25 they decided to end their fast.
“We assess the decision positively,” Wente Winkul Mapu spokesperson Daniel Melinao told the Associated Press wire service on Oct. 24. “[W]e’ve been saying for a long time that the brothers didn’t intend to murder the general, and today the court agreed that at no time there was an attempted homicide.” Mapuche activists hold that they are subjected to exaggerated charges and inflated sentences—sometimes under an “antiterrorist” law from the 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet—for political actions caried out in their struggle to regain ancestral land.
A criminal court in Angol had sentenced Paulino Levinao Montoya and Paulino Levipán Coyán to 10 years in prison on Aug. 13 on the attempted homicide charge, plus 541 days for illegal possession of firearms. In its Oct. 24 decision the Supreme Court ordered a retrial of Levinao Montoya, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to convict him of intending to kill police agents. In the case of Levipán Coyán the justices found that the youth had wounded carabineros as they carried out a raid on Wente Winkul Mapu, but the court determined that he hadn’t fired with an intention to kill. His sentence was reduced to three years, which he can serve on parole. The court upheld the sentences for arms possession for both prisoners.
The two other hunger strikers, the brothers Erick and Rodrigo Montoya, are awaiting trial for attempted homicide of a police agent in a separate incident.
Five Mapuche prisoners in the city of Temuco ended a 23-day hunger strike on Oct. 23 when prison authorities agreed to their demand to be moved to the Angol prison, where they would be closer to their communities and other Mapuche prisoners. They went without food or water for the last five days of their fast. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/24/12 from correspondent, 10/25/12 from correspondent and unidentified wire services, 10/26/12 from correspondent; AP 10/25/12 via Univision)
*2. Chile: Court Approves Call for US Officer’s Extradition
A panel of Chile’s Supreme Court of Justice voted 4-1 on Oct. 17 to approve a request for the extradition of former US Navy Capt. Ray E. Davis to stand trial for his involvement in the murders of two US citizens, journalist Charles Horman and graduate student Frank Teruggi, in the days after the Sept. 11, 1973 military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende Gossens. Chilean investigative judge Jorge Zepeda asked for the extradition in November 2011 when he indicted Davis for allegedly failing to prevent the murders; the indictment was based in part on declassified US documents [see Update #1108]. The court’s one dissenter held that a 15-year statute of limitations applied in the case, but the majority held that the charges were for a crime against humanity and therefore were not subject to the limitation.
Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, has persistently sought justice in the case. In 1977 the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a suit on her behalf in the US charging former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and other high-ranking US officials with complicity in the murders. The suit was eventually dismissed after the US government used “national security” as a pretext to prevent the discovery of evidence. Later Joyce Harmon filed a suit in Chile with the assistance of Chilean attorney Sergio Corvalán and CCR vice president Peter Weiss, and this led to Judge Zepeda’s 2011 indictment.
“It is gratifying that, while our own government invoked the state secrets doctrine in the US case, the investigating judge in the Chilean case spent years of determined effort to get at the truth,” Weiss said in response to the Supreme Court’s decision. According to the CCR, this is probably the first time a country has sought the extradition of a high-ranking US military official in a human rights case. (CCR press release 10/18/12; El Mostrador (Chile) 10/18/12; New York Times 10/18/12)
*3. Mexico: Torture and Abuse Cases Continue to Increase
Mexico’s Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH) held a press conference in Mexico City on Oct. 23 to announce the release of a report on the alleged torture of Israel Arzate Meléndez, a resident of Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua, by state police and the military. According to the report, Tortured, Imprisoned and Innocent, two soldiers arrested Arzate on Feb. 3, 2010, charging him with participation in the massacre of 15 youths in Ciudad Juárez’s Villas de Salvárcar neighborhood the previous Jan. 30 [see Update #1065]. The report says the soldiers took Arzate to a military installation, stripped him naked, tied up his hands and feet, placed a plastic bag over his head and tortured him with electric shocks to get him to confess to involvement in the killings.
Torture and arbitrary detention “continue to be daily bread” in Mexico, Javier Hernández Valencia, the Mexico representative of the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights, said at the press conference. These are “a mechanism for investigation which the police and military never give up resorting to,” he added. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (CSJN) has agreed to consider the Arzate case. (Milenio (Mexico) 10/23/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 10/24/12)
On Oct. 24 government officials denied that there is systematic use of torture by the police and the military. “The only public servants in the armed forces that haven’t had a course on human rights are the new ones,” Governance Secretary Alejandro Poiré said, “but in practice they are given this course within three or four months of joining.” (LJ 10/25/12)
Complaints of torture and other abuse by the police and the military have increased dramatically since President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa escalated the military's involvement in Mexico’s “war on drugs” shortly after he took office in December 2006. The London-based human rights organization Amnesty International (AI) released a report on Oct. 11 charging that the Calderón administration has “effectively turned a blind eye” to the problem. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received 1,669 reports of police and military torture and abuse in 2011, almost three times as many in 2008, when the commission received 564 complaints, according to the report, Known Abusers, but Victims Ignored: Torture and Ill-Treatment in Mexico. (Los Angeles Times 10/11/12)
*4. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico, Grenada, Haiti, US
Contradictions and Discrepancies: Media Coverage in Argentina
http://nacla.org/news/2012/10/25/contradictions-and-discrepancies-media-coverage-argentina
The Chilean Safe Abortion Hotline: Assisting Women With Illegal, But Safe, Misoprostol Abortion
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3933-the-chilean-safe-abortion-hotline-assisting-women-with-illegal-but-safe-misoprostol-abortion
Uruguay rejects “the war on drugs”
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8271
Brazil: Guarani threaten mass suicide?
http://ww4report.com/node/11647
Bolivia enacts new "Law of Mother Earth"
http://ww4report.com/node/11643
Peru: OAS rights commission to hear Conga case
http://ww4report.com/node/11639
Peru: indigenous development plan for Amazon
http://ww4report.com/node/11640
Peru: will land titling undercut Sendero?
http://ww4report.com/node/11641
Peru: land, water conflicts grow in Cajamarca
http://ww4report.com/node/11650
Riots rock Lima —in footsteps of Hillary Clinton (Peru)
http://ww4report.com/node/11642
UN experts urge Colombia to reconsider reform of military criminal law
http://ww4report.com/node/11632
FARC factionalizing amid peace talks?
http://ww4report.com/node/11644
Colombia: judge orders return of usurped lands
http://ww4report.com/node/11645
Venezuelan Think Tank Panelist Condemns 100 Percent of Venezuelans
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/22/think-tank-panelist-condemns-100-percent-venezuelans
Venezuela’s Chavez to Ministers: Now is the Time for Self-Criticism
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7383
Venezuela joins Mercosur: A New Strategic Alliance
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8360
Panama: strikes halt trade zone land sale
http://ww4report.com/node/11646
Guatemala: Peaceful Resistance in the Face of Violence
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3934-guatemala-peaceful-resistance-in-the-face-of-violence
Criminal gangs threaten Maya Biosphere Reserve (Guatemala, Mexico)
http://ww4report.com/node/11648
“Walking the True Word Around the World”: State Violence, Global Solidarity, and a New Campaign to Support the Zapatistas
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3935-walking-the-true-word-around-the-world-state-violence-global-solidarity-and-a-new-campaign-to-support-the-zapatistas
Treaty Tolls Death Knell for Mexican Countryside
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3928-treaty-tolls-death-knell-for-mexican-countryside
Mexico: lives claimed in Chihuahua water wars
http://ww4report.com/node/11649
Labor Law Reform Stalled as Mexican Congress Debates Process
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=206#1505
Despite Major Legal Victory, Electrical Workers Not Back at Work
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=206#1512
Yaqui Resistance: Against the Aqueduct, Agricultural Chemicals and Transgenics Crops on their Ancestral Lands (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8290
The Fight for Corn (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8337
A Bitter Anniversary: Remembering the Invasion of Grenada
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/22/bitter-anniversary-remembering-invasion-grenada
Celebrities and Foreign Officials Tout Caracol, While Report Finds 95% of Factories Fail to Pay Minimum Wage
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/celebrities-and-foreign-officials-tout-caracol-while-report-finds-95-of-factories-fail-to-pay-minimum-wage
Double defeat for the White House and the Pentagon (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/8244
The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes: Better Than Ever This Year (US)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/10/24/maria-moors-cabot-prizes-better-ever-year
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Feel free to reproduce these updates, or reprint or re-post any information from them, but please credit us as “Weekly News Update on the Americas” and include a link. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, 11 September 2012
WNU #1144: Nicaragua to Withdraw From the SOA
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1144, September 9, 2012
1. Nicaragua: Ortega Announces Withdrawal From SOA
2. Central America: Dole Starts to Pay in Pesticide Settlement
3. Honduras: “Model Cities” Project Set to Begin?
4. Mexico: Persecuted Gay Teacher Wins Asylum in US
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Curaçao, 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. Nicaragua: Ortega Announces Withdrawal From SOA
Nicaragua will no longer send military personnel to the US military’s controversial Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), President Daniel Ortega said during a meeting with a delegation of human rights activists in Managua on Sept. 4. Nicaragua will be the first Central American country to withdraw from the school, which critics say has trained many of Latin America’s most notorious human rights violators since its founding in 1946. Five South American nations have ended their relations with SOA/WHINSEC: Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, and, as of June 27, Ecuador (see World War 4 Report 6/28/12).
“The SOA is an ethical and moral anathema,” President Ortega said during the meeting. “All of the countries of Latin America have been victims of its graduates. The SOA is a symbol of death, a symbol of terror.” Nicaragua has reduced its participation in the school since he returned to the presidency in 2007, Ortega said, sending five soldiers in 2011 and none this year. The country has also withdrawn from the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR, for its initials in Spanish), a military pact linked to the Organization of American States (OAS).
Ortega is the leader of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and served a term as Nicaragua's president from 1985 to 1990, at a time when the US was funding and training the rightwing contra rebels fighting against the FSLN government. Withdrawing from SOA/WHINSEC “is the least that we can do,” Ortega said. “We have been its victims.” But he indicated that the move was difficult, since Nicaragua is a small, impoverished nation whose economy is largely dependent on its ties to the US.
The human rights delegation was organized by two US-based organizations: the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), which seeks the closing of SOA/WHINSEC, and the Nicaragua Network, an organization promoting solidarity with Nicaragua. Delegation members included SOAW founder Father Roy Bourgeois, SOAW Latin America coordinator Lisa Sullivan and Alejandro Ramírez, a member of a Honduran human rights organization, the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH). SOAW is planning a delegation to meet with representatives of the government of US president Barack Obama on Sept. 17 to push for closing the school.
SOA/WHINSEC trained nearly 14,000 military and police personnel from 2001 to 2011. Almost half were from Colombia; Chile and Peru also sent large numbers of soldiers and police agents. The Central American countries with the greatest participation from 2008 to 2011 were Honduras, with 234 soldiers, and El Salvador, with 227. (Adital (Brazil) 9/5/12; SOAW press release 9/6/12)
*2. Central America: Dole Starts to Pay in Pesticide Settlement
On Sept. 4 the giant California-based fruit and vegetable producer Dole Food Company, Inc. finally began funding a settlement it made more than a year earlier with some 5,000 former banana workers in Central America who said their health had been damaged by exposure to the pesticides Nemagon and Fumazone, brand names for dibromochloropropane (DBCP). Dole had refused to pay until all judgments against it had been dismissed and each of the plaintiffs had signed a release agreeing not to sue Dole again for injuries linked to DBCP.
Speaking in Chinandega in northwestern Nicaragua on Sept. 6, Dole spokesperson Humberto Hurtado confirmed that the money was available. The settlement covers 3,157 Nicaraguans along with 780 Costa Ricans and 1,000 Hondurans; they all worked for Dole during the period from 1973 to 1980 when the company used the pesticides, which are now banned. Many of the workers spent 16 years struggling to win the settlement, which covers five lawsuits in the US and 33 in Nicaragua; the Nicaraguan suits were for a total of $9 billion in damages.
Only the former banana workers represented by the Texas-based law firm Provost Umphrey are included in the settlement. Another 13,874 Nicaraguan workers have pending cases being handled by other law firms [see Update #1094]. Hurtado said Dole “might be available for possible agreements with other groups.”
Dole wouldn’t reveal the size of the settlement, but the company indicated that the payments wouldn’t significantly affect its financial condition. A statement from Dole executive vice president C. Michael Carter insisted that “there is no reliable scientific basis for alleged injuries from the agricultural field application of DBCP.” (Ventura County Star (California) 9/6/12; La Prensa (Nicaragua) 9/7/12)
*3. Honduras: “Model Cities” Project Set to Begin?
Honduran National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández announced on Sept. 4 that the government’s Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Alliances (COALIANZA) had signed an agreement for the first of three “model city” projects--semi-autonomous regions mandated under a 2010 constitutional amendment [see World War 4 Report 6/9/12]. COLIANZA claims the project, which still needs approval from the Congress, will create 5,000 direct and indirect jobs this year, 15,000 jobs in 2013, 30,000 in 2014, and 45,000 in 2015.
The project is likely to be located near Puerto Cortés or Puerto Castilla on the Atlantic coast, or in Choluteca department on the country’s narrow Pacific coast. “It should be noted that these model cities will be established in depopulated areas of Honduras,” Hernández told the media. “It does not imply the displacement of people or social groups.” The Honduras Culture and Politics blog noted: “None of these regions is completely vacant. Reading between the lines, what Hernández is saying is that there are no large cooperatives or powerful landowners in these regions, groups that might vocally protest the expropriation of the land on which they live and work.”
The main funding for the “model city” is coming from an unidentified Canadian company. Other funders include a US company identified as the “NKG Group” or “MKG Group,” and a start-up called Future Cities Development Corporation. Both companies seem to have rightwing libertarian orientations. A leading executive at NKG Group, Michael Strong, appears to be associated with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey; a Michael Strong is listed with Mackey as a co-founder of FLOW, an organization dedicated to “liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good.” One of Future Cities Development Corporation’s founders is Patri Friedman, the grandson of University of Chicago economist and neoliberal theorist Milton Friedman. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/5/12)
Some 14 groups or individuals--including campesino organizations and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH)—filed a legal challenge to the “model cities” law on Sept. 7, citing a motion filed in October 2011 by Oscar Cruz, a former government attorney for constitutional issues. Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the presidential candidate of the leftist Freedom and Refoundation (LIBRE) party and the wife of former president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009), issued a statement denouncing the law as “incompatible with the concept of sovereignty, independence and equality of opportunity for national and foreign investment.” She warned people who start these projects that “they are exposing themselves to the loss of their investments.”
LIBRE was formed in June 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition of unions and grassroots organizations that led the resistance to the June 2009 military coup that removed former president Zelaya from office.
The project has even received criticism from Paul Romer, the New York University professor whose “charter cities” concept is the basis for the Honduran “model cities” law. Romer reportedly may quit the Honduran transparency commission he was chairing because he feels he hasn’t been give sufficient information and authority to carry out his responsibilities. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/7/12; Xiomara Castro de Zelaya statement 9/7/12 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras))
*4. Mexico: Persecuted Gay Teacher Wins Asylum in US
The Mexican daily La Jornada reported on Sept. 6 that the US had granted political asylum to Mexican teacher Agustín Estrada Negrete, who claimed he had suffered persecution and torture from officials of México state because of his homosexuality. Estrada was removed from his post as a school principal after he had appeared in women’s clothes at a festival against homophobia in May 2007. Following a march demanding his reinstatement in 2009, México state police arrested Estrada in Toluca and took him to the La Palma prison, where he said he was beaten and gang-raped. He arrived in San Diego in September 2010 in a wheelchair to seek asylum.
Jaime López Vela, the president of the sexual diversity collective Agenda LGBT, told La Jornada that the grant of asylum to Estrada “shows that the human rights violations he reported have been fully proven.” “Throughout the process we always demanded that his labor rights be restored, but there were only rejections by the México state authorities, based on homophobia, since they said that as long as he continued with his ‘homosexual attitudes,’ he wouldn’t go back to work.” The state’s governor during the period was Enrique Peña Nieto, the official winner of this year’s July 1 presidential election; his inauguration takes place in December.
In addition to his US asylum bid, Estrada filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), which issued a precautionary measure, number MC 222/09, in April 2010 calling on México state to protect the lives and physical integrity of Estrada and his family. According to CIDH spokesperson María Isabel Rivero, the measure is still active, since Estrada’s mother and sister remain in Mexico. (La Jornada 9/6/12; Los Angeles Press 9/6/12)
In an interview with the Spanish-language website Los Angeles Press in April 2012, Estrada claimed that he and Peña Nieto were secretly lovers for seven years and implied that the president-elect had persecuted him in an effort to conceal the affair. (Los Angeles Press 4/25/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Curaçao, Haiti, US/immigration
South America: Soy's Great Homeland
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3849-south-america-soys-great-homeland
Enforced Disappearances in the Americas are a Crime of the Present
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3846-enforced-disappearances-in-the-americas-are-a-crime-of-the-present
Interview with Camila Vallejo: “Another Chile Is Possible, with Greater Democracy and Social Rights” (Chile)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3847-interview-with-camila-vallejo-another-chile-is-possible-with-greater-democracy-and-social-rights
Chile: The Disappeared of Cuartel Simón Bolivar
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3851-chile-the-disappeared-of-cuartel-simon-bolivar
Brazil: Landowners Declare War against Indigenous Guarani-Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3844-brazil-landowners-declare-war-against-indigenous-guarani-kaiowa-in-mato-grosso-do-sul
Bolivia: TIPNIS consultation extended amid protests over militarization
http://ww4report.com/node/11473
Peru: protests as "terrorism denial" law introduced
http://ww4report.com/node/11491
Indigenous Consultations in Peru to Debut in Amazon Oil Region
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3848-indigenous-consultations-in-peru-to-debut-in-amazon-oil-region
Peru: mine tailing spill contaminates Río Huallaga
http://ww4report.com/node/11471
Peru: justice sought in slaying of mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11492
A Tale of Two Asylums: Assange, Palacio, and Media Hypocrisy (Ecuador)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/6/tale-two-asylums-assange-palacio-and-media-hypocrisy
Colombia: army general gets 25 years for para collaboration
http://ww4report.com/node/11470
Colombia: peace talks announced with rappin' FARC
http://ww4report.com/node/11474
Hope in the Colombian Peace Talks
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/2/hope-colombian-peace-talks
Colombia: no ceasefire during peace talks
http://ww4report.com/node/11490
Venezuelan authorities deny Yanomami massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11476
Venezuelan Opposition Legislator Decries MUD “Hidden Agenda”, Expelled Hours Later
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7238
OAS rights body presses for truth in Yanomami massacre claims (Venezuela)
http://ww4report.com/node/11489
Goldcorp on Trial: First International People's Health Tribunal Held in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11484
Guatemala: Swiss arrest ex-police commander
http://ww4report.com/node/11459
Guatemala ex-president to be extradited to US for embezzlement trial
http://ww4report.com/node/11472
Nueva Esperanza, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3852-nueva-esperanza-guatemala
Mexico ex-prez gets immunity in massacre suit
http://ww4report.com/node/11488
Mexico’s Felipe Calderon Defends Security Policies in Final Speech
http://latindispatch.com/2012/09/04/mexicos-felipe-calderon-defends-security-policies-in-final-speech/
“We won’t back down,” assert Zapatistas in response to a series of aggressions (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7909
Mexican Peace Caravan Occupies Wall Street: Opposing the "Drug War" on Both Sides of the Border
http://ww4report.com/node/11493
PDVSA oil spill fouls Curaçao
http://ww4report.com/node/11475
Reduced Charges Against Uruguayan MINUSTAH Troops Latest Example of Lack of UN Accountability
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/reduced-charges-against-uruguayan-minustah-troops-latest-example-of-lack-of-un-accountability
In the Name of Anti-Trafficking: Racism, Detention, and Deportation (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/4/old-anti-trafficking-propaganda-same-new-anti-trafficking-propaganda
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 #1144, September 9, 2012
1. Nicaragua: Ortega Announces Withdrawal From SOA
2. Central America: Dole Starts to Pay in Pesticide Settlement
3. Honduras: “Model Cities” Project Set to Begin?
4. Mexico: Persecuted Gay Teacher Wins Asylum in US
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Curaçao, 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. Nicaragua: Ortega Announces Withdrawal From SOA
Nicaragua will no longer send military personnel to the US military’s controversial Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), President Daniel Ortega said during a meeting with a delegation of human rights activists in Managua on Sept. 4. Nicaragua will be the first Central American country to withdraw from the school, which critics say has trained many of Latin America’s most notorious human rights violators since its founding in 1946. Five South American nations have ended their relations with SOA/WHINSEC: Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, and, as of June 27, Ecuador (see World War 4 Report 6/28/12).
“The SOA is an ethical and moral anathema,” President Ortega said during the meeting. “All of the countries of Latin America have been victims of its graduates. The SOA is a symbol of death, a symbol of terror.” Nicaragua has reduced its participation in the school since he returned to the presidency in 2007, Ortega said, sending five soldiers in 2011 and none this year. The country has also withdrawn from the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR, for its initials in Spanish), a military pact linked to the Organization of American States (OAS).
Ortega is the leader of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) and served a term as Nicaragua's president from 1985 to 1990, at a time when the US was funding and training the rightwing contra rebels fighting against the FSLN government. Withdrawing from SOA/WHINSEC “is the least that we can do,” Ortega said. “We have been its victims.” But he indicated that the move was difficult, since Nicaragua is a small, impoverished nation whose economy is largely dependent on its ties to the US.
The human rights delegation was organized by two US-based organizations: the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW), which seeks the closing of SOA/WHINSEC, and the Nicaragua Network, an organization promoting solidarity with Nicaragua. Delegation members included SOAW founder Father Roy Bourgeois, SOAW Latin America coordinator Lisa Sullivan and Alejandro Ramírez, a member of a Honduran human rights organization, the Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH). SOAW is planning a delegation to meet with representatives of the government of US president Barack Obama on Sept. 17 to push for closing the school.
SOA/WHINSEC trained nearly 14,000 military and police personnel from 2001 to 2011. Almost half were from Colombia; Chile and Peru also sent large numbers of soldiers and police agents. The Central American countries with the greatest participation from 2008 to 2011 were Honduras, with 234 soldiers, and El Salvador, with 227. (Adital (Brazil) 9/5/12; SOAW press release 9/6/12)
*2. Central America: Dole Starts to Pay in Pesticide Settlement
On Sept. 4 the giant California-based fruit and vegetable producer Dole Food Company, Inc. finally began funding a settlement it made more than a year earlier with some 5,000 former banana workers in Central America who said their health had been damaged by exposure to the pesticides Nemagon and Fumazone, brand names for dibromochloropropane (DBCP). Dole had refused to pay until all judgments against it had been dismissed and each of the plaintiffs had signed a release agreeing not to sue Dole again for injuries linked to DBCP.
Speaking in Chinandega in northwestern Nicaragua on Sept. 6, Dole spokesperson Humberto Hurtado confirmed that the money was available. The settlement covers 3,157 Nicaraguans along with 780 Costa Ricans and 1,000 Hondurans; they all worked for Dole during the period from 1973 to 1980 when the company used the pesticides, which are now banned. Many of the workers spent 16 years struggling to win the settlement, which covers five lawsuits in the US and 33 in Nicaragua; the Nicaraguan suits were for a total of $9 billion in damages.
Only the former banana workers represented by the Texas-based law firm Provost Umphrey are included in the settlement. Another 13,874 Nicaraguan workers have pending cases being handled by other law firms [see Update #1094]. Hurtado said Dole “might be available for possible agreements with other groups.”
Dole wouldn’t reveal the size of the settlement, but the company indicated that the payments wouldn’t significantly affect its financial condition. A statement from Dole executive vice president C. Michael Carter insisted that “there is no reliable scientific basis for alleged injuries from the agricultural field application of DBCP.” (Ventura County Star (California) 9/6/12; La Prensa (Nicaragua) 9/7/12)
*3. Honduras: “Model Cities” Project Set to Begin?
Honduran National Congress president Juan Orlando Hernández announced on Sept. 4 that the government’s Commission for the Promotion of Public-Private Alliances (COALIANZA) had signed an agreement for the first of three “model city” projects--semi-autonomous regions mandated under a 2010 constitutional amendment [see World War 4 Report 6/9/12]. COLIANZA claims the project, which still needs approval from the Congress, will create 5,000 direct and indirect jobs this year, 15,000 jobs in 2013, 30,000 in 2014, and 45,000 in 2015.
The project is likely to be located near Puerto Cortés or Puerto Castilla on the Atlantic coast, or in Choluteca department on the country’s narrow Pacific coast. “It should be noted that these model cities will be established in depopulated areas of Honduras,” Hernández told the media. “It does not imply the displacement of people or social groups.” The Honduras Culture and Politics blog noted: “None of these regions is completely vacant. Reading between the lines, what Hernández is saying is that there are no large cooperatives or powerful landowners in these regions, groups that might vocally protest the expropriation of the land on which they live and work.”
The main funding for the “model city” is coming from an unidentified Canadian company. Other funders include a US company identified as the “NKG Group” or “MKG Group,” and a start-up called Future Cities Development Corporation. Both companies seem to have rightwing libertarian orientations. A leading executive at NKG Group, Michael Strong, appears to be associated with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey; a Michael Strong is listed with Mackey as a co-founder of FLOW, an organization dedicated to “liberating the entrepreneurial spirit for good.” One of Future Cities Development Corporation’s founders is Patri Friedman, the grandson of University of Chicago economist and neoliberal theorist Milton Friedman. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/5/12)
Some 14 groups or individuals--including campesino organizations and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH)—filed a legal challenge to the “model cities” law on Sept. 7, citing a motion filed in October 2011 by Oscar Cruz, a former government attorney for constitutional issues. Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, the presidential candidate of the leftist Freedom and Refoundation (LIBRE) party and the wife of former president José Manuel (“Mel”) Zelaya Rosales (2006-2009), issued a statement denouncing the law as “incompatible with the concept of sovereignty, independence and equality of opportunity for national and foreign investment.” She warned people who start these projects that “they are exposing themselves to the loss of their investments.”
LIBRE was formed in June 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front (FNRP), a coalition of unions and grassroots organizations that led the resistance to the June 2009 military coup that removed former president Zelaya from office.
The project has even received criticism from Paul Romer, the New York University professor whose “charter cities” concept is the basis for the Honduran “model cities” law. Romer reportedly may quit the Honduran transparency commission he was chairing because he feels he hasn’t been give sufficient information and authority to carry out his responsibilities. (Honduras Culture and Politics 9/7/12; Xiomara Castro de Zelaya statement 9/7/12 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras))
*4. Mexico: Persecuted Gay Teacher Wins Asylum in US
The Mexican daily La Jornada reported on Sept. 6 that the US had granted political asylum to Mexican teacher Agustín Estrada Negrete, who claimed he had suffered persecution and torture from officials of México state because of his homosexuality. Estrada was removed from his post as a school principal after he had appeared in women’s clothes at a festival against homophobia in May 2007. Following a march demanding his reinstatement in 2009, México state police arrested Estrada in Toluca and took him to the La Palma prison, where he said he was beaten and gang-raped. He arrived in San Diego in September 2010 in a wheelchair to seek asylum.
Jaime López Vela, the president of the sexual diversity collective Agenda LGBT, told La Jornada that the grant of asylum to Estrada “shows that the human rights violations he reported have been fully proven.” “Throughout the process we always demanded that his labor rights be restored, but there were only rejections by the México state authorities, based on homophobia, since they said that as long as he continued with his ‘homosexual attitudes,’ he wouldn’t go back to work.” The state’s governor during the period was Enrique Peña Nieto, the official winner of this year’s July 1 presidential election; his inauguration takes place in December.
In addition to his US asylum bid, Estrada filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), which issued a precautionary measure, number MC 222/09, in April 2010 calling on México state to protect the lives and physical integrity of Estrada and his family. According to CIDH spokesperson María Isabel Rivero, the measure is still active, since Estrada’s mother and sister remain in Mexico. (La Jornada 9/6/12; Los Angeles Press 9/6/12)
In an interview with the Spanish-language website Los Angeles Press in April 2012, Estrada claimed that he and Peña Nieto were secretly lovers for seven years and implied that the president-elect had persecuted him in an effort to conceal the affair. (Los Angeles Press 4/25/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico, Curaçao, Haiti, US/immigration
South America: Soy's Great Homeland
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3849-south-america-soys-great-homeland
Enforced Disappearances in the Americas are a Crime of the Present
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3846-enforced-disappearances-in-the-americas-are-a-crime-of-the-present
Interview with Camila Vallejo: “Another Chile Is Possible, with Greater Democracy and Social Rights” (Chile)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/chile-archives-34/3847-interview-with-camila-vallejo-another-chile-is-possible-with-greater-democracy-and-social-rights
Chile: The Disappeared of Cuartel Simón Bolivar
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3851-chile-the-disappeared-of-cuartel-simon-bolivar
Brazil: Landowners Declare War against Indigenous Guarani-Kaiowá in Mato Grosso do Sul
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3844-brazil-landowners-declare-war-against-indigenous-guarani-kaiowa-in-mato-grosso-do-sul
Bolivia: TIPNIS consultation extended amid protests over militarization
http://ww4report.com/node/11473
Peru: protests as "terrorism denial" law introduced
http://ww4report.com/node/11491
Indigenous Consultations in Peru to Debut in Amazon Oil Region
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3848-indigenous-consultations-in-peru-to-debut-in-amazon-oil-region
Peru: mine tailing spill contaminates Río Huallaga
http://ww4report.com/node/11471
Peru: justice sought in slaying of mine opponent
http://ww4report.com/node/11492
A Tale of Two Asylums: Assange, Palacio, and Media Hypocrisy (Ecuador)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/6/tale-two-asylums-assange-palacio-and-media-hypocrisy
Colombia: army general gets 25 years for para collaboration
http://ww4report.com/node/11470
Colombia: peace talks announced with rappin' FARC
http://ww4report.com/node/11474
Hope in the Colombian Peace Talks
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/2/hope-colombian-peace-talks
Colombia: no ceasefire during peace talks
http://ww4report.com/node/11490
Venezuelan authorities deny Yanomami massacre
http://ww4report.com/node/11476
Venezuelan Opposition Legislator Decries MUD “Hidden Agenda”, Expelled Hours Later
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7238
OAS rights body presses for truth in Yanomami massacre claims (Venezuela)
http://ww4report.com/node/11489
Goldcorp on Trial: First International People's Health Tribunal Held in Guatemala
http://ww4report.com/node/11484
Guatemala: Swiss arrest ex-police commander
http://ww4report.com/node/11459
Guatemala ex-president to be extradited to US for embezzlement trial
http://ww4report.com/node/11472
Nueva Esperanza, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3852-nueva-esperanza-guatemala
Mexico ex-prez gets immunity in massacre suit
http://ww4report.com/node/11488
Mexico’s Felipe Calderon Defends Security Policies in Final Speech
http://latindispatch.com/2012/09/04/mexicos-felipe-calderon-defends-security-policies-in-final-speech/
“We won’t back down,” assert Zapatistas in response to a series of aggressions (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7909
Mexican Peace Caravan Occupies Wall Street: Opposing the "Drug War" on Both Sides of the Border
http://ww4report.com/node/11493
PDVSA oil spill fouls Curaçao
http://ww4report.com/node/11475
Reduced Charges Against Uruguayan MINUSTAH Troops Latest Example of Lack of UN Accountability
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/reduced-charges-against-uruguayan-minustah-troops-latest-example-of-lack-of-un-accountability
In the Name of Anti-Trafficking: Racism, Detention, and Deportation (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/9/4/old-anti-trafficking-propaganda-same-new-anti-trafficking-propaganda
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. Our weekly Immigration News Briefs has ended publication.
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
WNU #1142: Mexican Police Shoot Up US Embassy Car
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1142, August 26, 2012
1. Mexico: Police Shoot Up US Embassy Car, Wound Two
2. Honduras: Aguán Campesinos Arrested in Supreme Court Protests
3. Colombia: GM and Hunger Strikers Agree to Mediation
4. Colombia: Paramilitaries Issue Death Threats in Barrancabermeja
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Police Shoot Up US Embassy Car, Wound Two
A group of Mexican federal police agents attacked a US embassy car at around 8 am on Aug. 24 in the state of Morelos just of south of Mexico City, near the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway. The police agents shot a number of times at the car, lightly wounding two US officials who were traveling with a member of the Mexican Navy to a nearby Navy training installation. The embassy car had diplomatic license plates, while the federal police were reportedly traveling in four unmarked vehicles.
Mexican authorities detained 12 federal police agents the evening of Aug. 24 in connection with the shooting and began an investigation. The federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) is reportedly focusing on “confusion” on the part of the agents, who claimed they had been in the area to investigate a kidnapping by a criminal group that operates in Huitzilac and Cuernavaca municipalities in Morelos. The US embassy described the attack as an “ambush.”
Mexican media identified the wounded US officials as Jess Hood Garner and Stan Dove Boss, said to be shooting instructors from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They were apparently on their way to the installation to train Navy personnel. The US government strongly promotes the militarized “drug war” that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa declared shortly after taking office in December 2006, and the US supplies the Mexican military and police with training and equipment under the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative, an aid program that was launched in 2008. Since the beginning of 2007 Mexico has suffered some 50,000 drug-related deaths. (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/26/12)
On Aug. 25 the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada noted that US agents have been involved in Mexican anti-drug operations, and sometimes in operations Mexican agencies don’t know about [see Update #1103]. The newspaper charged that by interfering in drug operations the US has encouraged lack of coordination and even rivalry between different Mexican security forces, especially through US officials’ “marked favoritism for the Navy.” “[T]he strategy for combating drugs that the United States has imposed on various nations south of its border…has turned out to be detrimental for bilateral relations [between Mexico and the US]—now plunged into a mutual loss of confidence—and for national sovereignty, and has represented, at the end of the day, a risk for the security of US officials themselves in our country.” (LJ 8/25/12)
*2. Honduras: Aguán Campesinos Arrested in Supreme Court Protests
Some 45 campesinos from the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras were arrested during protests on Aug. 21 and Aug. 22 demanding that the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) issue rulings in favor of campesino struggles for land. The protests were sponsored by a number of organizations—including the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) and the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA)—that have led land occupations and other demonstrations since 2009 in an effort to obtain farmland that they say big landowners acquired illegally during the 1990s [see Update #1137].
Tensions started to mount on Aug. 20 when a group of campesinos arrived at the CSJ building in Tegucigalpa expecting to meet with judges. But according to MUCA members, CSJ president Jorge Rivera Avilés decided not to receive their representatives and in fact had already made an agreement with representatives of two major landowners, Miguel Facussé and René Morales. The protesters also reported being attacked by the police at the building that day.
On Aug. 21 a group of about 80 campesinos escalated their protest by taking over the CSJ building’s five main doors; they also set up barricades on the street in front of the court, blocking traffic. (According to the Brazilian news service Adital, a total of 350 protesters, including children and older people, were participating in the demonstration.) After the campesinos had kept employees and others from entering or leaving the building for about three hours, agents from the Preventive Police arrived and asked the protesters to end the blockade. The campesinos refused. A squadron of Cobras, the notorious anti-riot police, then appeared and carried out a surprise attack, using tear gas and nightsticks.
A total of 27 or 28 protesters were arrested, including two women, a minor, and three people who had to be taken to a hospital for emergency treatment. Some of the protesters sought refuge in the headquarters of the militant Union of Workers of the Brewery Industry and the Like (STIBYS), but police agents used tear gas on them as well
On Aug. 22 a campesino group in the Aguán Valley--at first mostly women carrying machetes and clubs--responded to the arrests in Tegucigalpa by blocking the highway that connects Saba and La Ceiba with rocks and two trucks to demand the release of the 27 detained protesters. Police and military units broke up the blockade, arresting 18 protesters; several injuries were reported.
The Aguán campesinos’ eight demands on the CSJ included the suspension of criminal cases against campesinos detained for protesting and the removal of judges that the protesters said had favored the big landowners over campesinos in their decisions; the protesters were referring especially to a case in July in which the Ceiba and Francisco Morazán Appeals Court overturned a June decision by a lower court awarding 2,000 hectares of land to MARCA members. The campesinos were also asking the CSJ to declare unconstitutional a government move to ban firearms in Colón department, which includes the Aguán region. The measure discriminates in favor of the landowners, according to Rafael Alegría, a national campesino leader. The security guards hired by the big landowners and the business owners can go around with whatever arms they want, he told reporters, but ranchers, shopkeepers and campesinos can’t.
More than 70 people have been killed in the Aguán region over the past three years, most of them campesinos. (Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 8/21/12; La Prensa (Tegucigalpa) 8/21/12, 8/22/12; Adital (Brazil) 8/22/12; Agencia Venezolana de Noticias 8/23/12)
On Aug. 22 the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) issued a statement condemning the “brutal aggression” against campesino protesters on Aug. 21. The statement also cited death threats made against Donny Reyes, the coordinator of the LGBT Rainbow Coalition, and against members of the Broad Movement for Dignity and Justice (MADJ), a group that fights against corruption and for the defense of natural resources. The statement suggested writing letters to CSJ President Jorge Rivera Avilés (presidencia@poderjudicial.gob.hn) and Justice and Human Rights Minister Ana Pineda (info@sjdh.gob). (Copinh statement 8/22/12)
*3. Colombia: GM and Hunger Strikers Agree to Mediation
A group of former employees of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), announced on the morning of Aug. 24 that they had agreed to enter into mediation to resolve a dispute with the company. As part of the agreement, they were ending a liquids-only hunger strike that 12 workers started on Aug. 1 to pressure Colmotores to reinstate them and compensate them for injuries. They said that until the dispute was settled, they would continue an encampment in front of the US embassy in Bogotá which they have maintained for more than a year [see Update #1141].
According to the former employees’ organization, the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol), some 200 of the company’s workers have disabilities caused by injuries on the job, repetitive stress injuries or work-related illnesses. Asotrecol says the company simply fires injured workers instead of compensating them and moving them to jobs they can handle. Colomotores management has repeatedly denied Asotrecol’s claims, but apparently it decided to accept mediation rather than face the negative publicity being generated in the US by the three-week hunger strike and by photographs of seven fasters who sewed their lips shut. The workers’ supporters in the US include the nonprofit organization Witness for Peace and the main US labor confederation, the AFL-CIO.
The US Labor Department issued a statement on Aug. 24 welcoming the accord and highlighting its own role, along with the US embassy in Bogotá and the US Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, in brokering the deal. The statement failed to mention that the US government itself is a party to the dispute, since it is General Motors’ largest shareholder as a result of a major bailout in 2009. “To us it seems unjust and a double standard,” Asotrecol president Jorge Parra told reporters, “for the government of [US president Barack] Obama to demand respect for labor rights in Colombia and the same time allow the abuses that have happened to us.” (AFP 8/24/12 via Univision; AFL-CIO Now blog 8/24/12; US Labor Department press release 8/24/12)
*4. Colombia: Paramilitaries Issue Death Threats in Barrancabermeja
A reconstituted paramilitary group, “Los Rastrojos Urban Commandos,” made a series of death threats the week of Aug. 13 against members of four human rights organizations and one union in Barrancabermeja in the northern Colombian department of Santander. The first threats came in a manila envelope found on Aug. 14 at the home of human rights activist Himad Choser. The envelope contained a 9 mm bullet and a pamphlet by “Los Rastrojos” declaring Choser an enemy because he had been “denouncing and attacking our economic structure, based on drug trafficking in the region.” The pamphlet described Choser as “at the service of the FARC,” the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The pamphlet also named four organizations and the National Union of Food Industry Workers (SINALTRAINAL) as collaborators with Choser.
On Aug. 18 another "Los Rastrojos" pamphlet was left in the office of the People in Action Organization, a group that defends LGBT rights. In this pamphlet the paramilitaries declared a “death sentence against Mr. Ovidio [Nieto], of the organization that defends the gays”; against “the guerrilla William Mendoza,” the local SINALTRAINAL president; and against Choser, “so that this defender of fags won’t agitate the city.” “We’re going to be blunt,” the pamphlet continued. “We won’t give more warnings.”
Local human rights organizations called on the authorities “to fulfill their role as guarantor[s] of the life and tranquility of the residents of our city,” and they asked the international community to monitor and publicize the threats and to demand that the national government take action against criminal groups. (Communiqué 8/20/12 posted on SINALTRAINAL website) [Earlier in the month Colombian unionists called for international solidarity for SINALTRAINAL president Mendoza, who says the government is trying to have him sentenced to prison, where he fears he will be killed; see Update #1141.]
"Los Rastrojos" is one of several criminal groups that carry on the work of rightwing paramilitary groups which ostensibly demobilized during the middle 2000s [see Updates #1086, 1087, World War 4 Report 5/8/12]. On Aug. 18 the Colombian radio station Caracol reported that a leading paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), acquired weapons from criminal groups in the US in 2004 and 2005, at the same time that the group claimed to be demobilizing. Basing its report on documents from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Caracol said the AUC acquired 200 M16 rifles, 100 fragmentation grenades, 150 rocket-propelled grenades and 50,000 .22 cartridges from Miami in just one year.
The last section of the AUC to demobilize, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, officially gave up its arms on Aug. 16, 2006. Some of its former members then formed “Los Urabeños,” which the Medellín-based news service Colombia Reports describes as “one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Colombia and in control of the drug routes in what used to be the heartland of the AUC.” (Colombia Reports 8/19/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
Proven model predicts higher food prices if speculation is not reined in (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7773
Marketing Consent: A Journey into the Public Relations Underside of Canada's Mining Sector in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3829-marketing-consent-a-journey-into-the-public-relations-underside-of-canadas-mining-sector-in-latin-america
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel: 'There is No Political Will to Respect Native Peoples' in Argentina
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3832-adolfo-perez-esquivel-qthere-is-no-political-will-to-respect-native-peoplesq-in-argentina
Chile urged to ensure justice for victims of enforced disappearances
http://ww4report.com/node/11422
Hydropower Dam to Flood Sacred Amazon Indigenous Site in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3825-hydropower-dam-to-flood-sacred-amazon-indigenous-site-in-brazil
Brazil: court blocks mega-hydro to protect Pantanal
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11435
Brazil: high court orders release of rancher convicted in Dorothy Stang slaying
http://www.ww4report.com/node/1143
Bolivia: Aymara communities occupy Oruro mine
http://ww4report.com/node/11420
Peru: Newmont Mining to abandon Conga project?
http://ww4report.com/node/11419
To the Colombian Military: “Don’t be afraid of peace!”
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7794
The Colombian Paradox: Capital Mobility, Land, and Power
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/22/colombian-paradox-capital-mobility-land-and-power
Colombia: Despite Repression, the Minga in Huila Continues for the Liberation of Mother Earth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3830-colombia-despite-repression-the-minga-in-huila-continues-for-the-liberation-of-mother-earth
Colombian GM Workers on Hunger Strike Until Death Sew Their Mouths Shut
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8720
US Carter Center: Venezuelan Electoral System one of the Most Automated in the World
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7177
U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3827-us-funded-war-in-el-salvador-casts-shadow-over-romneyryan-campaign
Broken Anvil: Victims Fight for Justice After DEA Operation Leaves Four Dead in Honduras
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#label/wnu1142/1394c720240c7ea2
Lost and Found (Honduras)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7779
Guatemala: The Spoils of an Undeclared War
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3823-guatemala-the-spoils-of-an-undeclared-war
Guatemala: ex-National Police chief gets 70 years for "disappearance"
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11436
Mining, Repression and the Rhetoric of Democracy and the Rule of Law in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3824-mining-repression-and-the-rhetoric-of-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law-in-guatemala
Mexico: victory for campesino struggle against La Parota dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11421
Mexican Farmers Battle Canadian Mining Company for Control of Their Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3822-mexican-farmers-battle-canadian-mining-company-for-control-of-their-land
Miners in Coahuila Died for Seven Dollars a Day (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7831
Stop, Frisk and Demolish in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/august212012/ciudad-stops-kp.php
The Caravan for Peace Begins a Long Ride Across the USA
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/21/caravan-peace-begins-long-ride-across-usa
Caravan of Peace, Cities of Death
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/08/caravan-of-peace-cities-of-death.html
On Haiti, Jared Diamond Hasn't Done His Homework
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/20/haiti-jared-diamond-hasnt-done-his-homework
A Twenty-First Century Border: The Ever-expanding U.S. Boundary (Dominican Republic, US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/22/twenty-first-century-border-ever-expanding-us-boundary
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 #1142, August 26, 2012
1. Mexico: Police Shoot Up US Embassy Car, Wound Two
2. Honduras: Aguán Campesinos Arrested in Supreme Court Protests
3. Colombia: GM and Hunger Strikers Agree to Mediation
4. Colombia: Paramilitaries Issue Death Threats in Barrancabermeja
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Mexico: Police Shoot Up US Embassy Car, Wound Two
A group of Mexican federal police agents attacked a US embassy car at around 8 am on Aug. 24 in the state of Morelos just of south of Mexico City, near the Mexico City-Cuernavaca highway. The police agents shot a number of times at the car, lightly wounding two US officials who were traveling with a member of the Mexican Navy to a nearby Navy training installation. The embassy car had diplomatic license plates, while the federal police were reportedly traveling in four unmarked vehicles.
Mexican authorities detained 12 federal police agents the evening of Aug. 24 in connection with the shooting and began an investigation. The federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) is reportedly focusing on “confusion” on the part of the agents, who claimed they had been in the area to investigate a kidnapping by a criminal group that operates in Huitzilac and Cuernavaca municipalities in Morelos. The US embassy described the attack as an “ambush.”
Mexican media identified the wounded US officials as Jess Hood Garner and Stan Dove Boss, said to be shooting instructors from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They were apparently on their way to the installation to train Navy personnel. The US government strongly promotes the militarized “drug war” that President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa declared shortly after taking office in December 2006, and the US supplies the Mexican military and police with training and equipment under the $1.4 billion Mérida Initiative, an aid program that was launched in 2008. Since the beginning of 2007 Mexico has suffered some 50,000 drug-related deaths. (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/26/12)
On Aug. 25 the left-leaning Mexican daily La Jornada noted that US agents have been involved in Mexican anti-drug operations, and sometimes in operations Mexican agencies don’t know about [see Update #1103]. The newspaper charged that by interfering in drug operations the US has encouraged lack of coordination and even rivalry between different Mexican security forces, especially through US officials’ “marked favoritism for the Navy.” “[T]he strategy for combating drugs that the United States has imposed on various nations south of its border…has turned out to be detrimental for bilateral relations [between Mexico and the US]—now plunged into a mutual loss of confidence—and for national sovereignty, and has represented, at the end of the day, a risk for the security of US officials themselves in our country.” (LJ 8/25/12)
*2. Honduras: Aguán Campesinos Arrested in Supreme Court Protests
Some 45 campesinos from the Lower Aguán Valley in northern Honduras were arrested during protests on Aug. 21 and Aug. 22 demanding that the Supreme Court of Justice (CSJ) issue rulings in favor of campesino struggles for land. The protests were sponsored by a number of organizations—including the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) and the Authentic Claimant Movement of Aguán Campesinos (MARCA)—that have led land occupations and other demonstrations since 2009 in an effort to obtain farmland that they say big landowners acquired illegally during the 1990s [see Update #1137].
Tensions started to mount on Aug. 20 when a group of campesinos arrived at the CSJ building in Tegucigalpa expecting to meet with judges. But according to MUCA members, CSJ president Jorge Rivera Avilés decided not to receive their representatives and in fact had already made an agreement with representatives of two major landowners, Miguel Facussé and René Morales. The protesters also reported being attacked by the police at the building that day.
On Aug. 21 a group of about 80 campesinos escalated their protest by taking over the CSJ building’s five main doors; they also set up barricades on the street in front of the court, blocking traffic. (According to the Brazilian news service Adital, a total of 350 protesters, including children and older people, were participating in the demonstration.) After the campesinos had kept employees and others from entering or leaving the building for about three hours, agents from the Preventive Police arrived and asked the protesters to end the blockade. The campesinos refused. A squadron of Cobras, the notorious anti-riot police, then appeared and carried out a surprise attack, using tear gas and nightsticks.
A total of 27 or 28 protesters were arrested, including two women, a minor, and three people who had to be taken to a hospital for emergency treatment. Some of the protesters sought refuge in the headquarters of the militant Union of Workers of the Brewery Industry and the Like (STIBYS), but police agents used tear gas on them as well
On Aug. 22 a campesino group in the Aguán Valley--at first mostly women carrying machetes and clubs--responded to the arrests in Tegucigalpa by blocking the highway that connects Saba and La Ceiba with rocks and two trucks to demand the release of the 27 detained protesters. Police and military units broke up the blockade, arresting 18 protesters; several injuries were reported.
The Aguán campesinos’ eight demands on the CSJ included the suspension of criminal cases against campesinos detained for protesting and the removal of judges that the protesters said had favored the big landowners over campesinos in their decisions; the protesters were referring especially to a case in July in which the Ceiba and Francisco Morazán Appeals Court overturned a June decision by a lower court awarding 2,000 hectares of land to MARCA members. The campesinos were also asking the CSJ to declare unconstitutional a government move to ban firearms in Colón department, which includes the Aguán region. The measure discriminates in favor of the landowners, according to Rafael Alegría, a national campesino leader. The security guards hired by the big landowners and the business owners can go around with whatever arms they want, he told reporters, but ranchers, shopkeepers and campesinos can’t.
More than 70 people have been killed in the Aguán region over the past three years, most of them campesinos. (Vos el Soberano (Honduras) 8/21/12; La Prensa (Tegucigalpa) 8/21/12, 8/22/12; Adital (Brazil) 8/22/12; Agencia Venezolana de Noticias 8/23/12)
On Aug. 22 the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) issued a statement condemning the “brutal aggression” against campesino protesters on Aug. 21. The statement also cited death threats made against Donny Reyes, the coordinator of the LGBT Rainbow Coalition, and against members of the Broad Movement for Dignity and Justice (MADJ), a group that fights against corruption and for the defense of natural resources. The statement suggested writing letters to CSJ President Jorge Rivera Avilés (presidencia@poderjudicial.gob.hn) and Justice and Human Rights Minister Ana Pineda (info@sjdh.gob). (Copinh statement 8/22/12)
*3. Colombia: GM and Hunger Strikers Agree to Mediation
A group of former employees of GM Colmotores, the Colombian subsidiary of the Detroit-based General Motors Company (GM), announced on the morning of Aug. 24 that they had agreed to enter into mediation to resolve a dispute with the company. As part of the agreement, they were ending a liquids-only hunger strike that 12 workers started on Aug. 1 to pressure Colmotores to reinstate them and compensate them for injuries. They said that until the dispute was settled, they would continue an encampment in front of the US embassy in Bogotá which they have maintained for more than a year [see Update #1141].
According to the former employees’ organization, the Association of Injured Workers and Ex-Workers of Colmotores (Asotrecol), some 200 of the company’s workers have disabilities caused by injuries on the job, repetitive stress injuries or work-related illnesses. Asotrecol says the company simply fires injured workers instead of compensating them and moving them to jobs they can handle. Colomotores management has repeatedly denied Asotrecol’s claims, but apparently it decided to accept mediation rather than face the negative publicity being generated in the US by the three-week hunger strike and by photographs of seven fasters who sewed their lips shut. The workers’ supporters in the US include the nonprofit organization Witness for Peace and the main US labor confederation, the AFL-CIO.
The US Labor Department issued a statement on Aug. 24 welcoming the accord and highlighting its own role, along with the US embassy in Bogotá and the US Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, in brokering the deal. The statement failed to mention that the US government itself is a party to the dispute, since it is General Motors’ largest shareholder as a result of a major bailout in 2009. “To us it seems unjust and a double standard,” Asotrecol president Jorge Parra told reporters, “for the government of [US president Barack] Obama to demand respect for labor rights in Colombia and the same time allow the abuses that have happened to us.” (AFP 8/24/12 via Univision; AFL-CIO Now blog 8/24/12; US Labor Department press release 8/24/12)
*4. Colombia: Paramilitaries Issue Death Threats in Barrancabermeja
A reconstituted paramilitary group, “Los Rastrojos Urban Commandos,” made a series of death threats the week of Aug. 13 against members of four human rights organizations and one union in Barrancabermeja in the northern Colombian department of Santander. The first threats came in a manila envelope found on Aug. 14 at the home of human rights activist Himad Choser. The envelope contained a 9 mm bullet and a pamphlet by “Los Rastrojos” declaring Choser an enemy because he had been “denouncing and attacking our economic structure, based on drug trafficking in the region.” The pamphlet described Choser as “at the service of the FARC,” the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The pamphlet also named four organizations and the National Union of Food Industry Workers (SINALTRAINAL) as collaborators with Choser.
On Aug. 18 another "Los Rastrojos" pamphlet was left in the office of the People in Action Organization, a group that defends LGBT rights. In this pamphlet the paramilitaries declared a “death sentence against Mr. Ovidio [Nieto], of the organization that defends the gays”; against “the guerrilla William Mendoza,” the local SINALTRAINAL president; and against Choser, “so that this defender of fags won’t agitate the city.” “We’re going to be blunt,” the pamphlet continued. “We won’t give more warnings.”
Local human rights organizations called on the authorities “to fulfill their role as guarantor[s] of the life and tranquility of the residents of our city,” and they asked the international community to monitor and publicize the threats and to demand that the national government take action against criminal groups. (Communiqué 8/20/12 posted on SINALTRAINAL website) [Earlier in the month Colombian unionists called for international solidarity for SINALTRAINAL president Mendoza, who says the government is trying to have him sentenced to prison, where he fears he will be killed; see Update #1141.]
"Los Rastrojos" is one of several criminal groups that carry on the work of rightwing paramilitary groups which ostensibly demobilized during the middle 2000s [see Updates #1086, 1087, World War 4 Report 5/8/12]. On Aug. 18 the Colombian radio station Caracol reported that a leading paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), acquired weapons from criminal groups in the US in 2004 and 2005, at the same time that the group claimed to be demobilizing. Basing its report on documents from the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Caracol said the AUC acquired 200 M16 rifles, 100 fragmentation grenades, 150 rocket-propelled grenades and 50,000 .22 cartridges from Miami in just one year.
The last section of the AUC to demobilize, the Elmer Cárdenas Bloc, officially gave up its arms on Aug. 16, 2006. Some of its former members then formed “Los Urabeños,” which the Medellín-based news service Colombia Reports describes as “one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Colombia and in control of the drug routes in what used to be the heartland of the AUC.” (Colombia Reports 8/19/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Haiti, Dominican Republic, US/immigration
Proven model predicts higher food prices if speculation is not reined in (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7773
Marketing Consent: A Journey into the Public Relations Underside of Canada's Mining Sector in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3829-marketing-consent-a-journey-into-the-public-relations-underside-of-canadas-mining-sector-in-latin-america
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel: 'There is No Political Will to Respect Native Peoples' in Argentina
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3832-adolfo-perez-esquivel-qthere-is-no-political-will-to-respect-native-peoplesq-in-argentina
Chile urged to ensure justice for victims of enforced disappearances
http://ww4report.com/node/11422
Hydropower Dam to Flood Sacred Amazon Indigenous Site in Brazil
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3825-hydropower-dam-to-flood-sacred-amazon-indigenous-site-in-brazil
Brazil: court blocks mega-hydro to protect Pantanal
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11435
Brazil: high court orders release of rancher convicted in Dorothy Stang slaying
http://www.ww4report.com/node/1143
Bolivia: Aymara communities occupy Oruro mine
http://ww4report.com/node/11420
Peru: Newmont Mining to abandon Conga project?
http://ww4report.com/node/11419
To the Colombian Military: “Don’t be afraid of peace!”
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7794
The Colombian Paradox: Capital Mobility, Land, and Power
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/22/colombian-paradox-capital-mobility-land-and-power
Colombia: Despite Repression, the Minga in Huila Continues for the Liberation of Mother Earth
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3830-colombia-despite-repression-the-minga-in-huila-continues-for-the-liberation-of-mother-earth
Colombian GM Workers on Hunger Strike Until Death Sew Their Mouths Shut
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=8720
US Carter Center: Venezuelan Electoral System one of the Most Automated in the World
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7177
U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3827-us-funded-war-in-el-salvador-casts-shadow-over-romneyryan-campaign
Broken Anvil: Victims Fight for Justice After DEA Operation Leaves Four Dead in Honduras
https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#label/wnu1142/1394c720240c7ea2
Lost and Found (Honduras)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7779
Guatemala: The Spoils of an Undeclared War
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3823-guatemala-the-spoils-of-an-undeclared-war
Guatemala: ex-National Police chief gets 70 years for "disappearance"
http://www.ww4report.com/node/11436
Mining, Repression and the Rhetoric of Democracy and the Rule of Law in Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3824-mining-repression-and-the-rhetoric-of-democracy-and-the-rule-of-law-in-guatemala
Mexico: victory for campesino struggle against La Parota dam
http://ww4report.com/node/11421
Mexican Farmers Battle Canadian Mining Company for Control of Their Land
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3822-mexican-farmers-battle-canadian-mining-company-for-control-of-their-land
Miners in Coahuila Died for Seven Dollars a Day (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7831
Stop, Frisk and Demolish in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico)
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/august212012/ciudad-stops-kp.php
The Caravan for Peace Begins a Long Ride Across the USA
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/21/caravan-peace-begins-long-ride-across-usa
Caravan of Peace, Cities of Death
http://bsnorrell.blogspot.com/2012/08/caravan-of-peace-cities-of-death.html
On Haiti, Jared Diamond Hasn't Done His Homework
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/20/haiti-jared-diamond-hasnt-done-his-homework
A Twenty-First Century Border: The Ever-expanding U.S. Boundary (Dominican Republic, US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/22/twenty-first-century-border-ever-expanding-us-boundary
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, 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/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)