Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1143, September 2, 2012
1. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/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. Chile: Mapuche Prisoners Start Latest Hunger Strike
As of Aug. 31 six Mapuche activists were on hunger strike to protest what they consider the Chilean government’s repression of struggles by the indigenous group, the country’s largest. The strikers include five prisoners in Angol, in the southern region of Araucanía, and Pascual Catrilaf, a machi (healer and spiritual authority) who lives in Temuco, also in Araucanía. A seventh striker, Mewlen Huencho, a werkén (spokesperson) for the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, ended her six-day fast at the Santiago offices of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) after speaking to UNICEF officials on Aug. 31.
The five prisoners in Angol are from the Wente Winkul Mapu community in Ercilla commune, Araucanía, a village where an agent of the carabineros militarized police was fatally wounded in April [see Update #1124]. They began their open-ended hunger strike on Aug. 27 to protest what they called the “discriminatory, racist and political” prison sentences of 11 years and eight months that two of the prisoners-- Paulino Levipán Coyán and Daniel Levinao Montoya--were given by court in Angol on Aug. 13. They had been convicted of attempted homicide and illegal possession of firearms in an attack on carabineros near Chequenco, Araucanía, on Nov. 2, 2011; they are appealing the conviction.
In addition to demanding the annulment of the sentences for Levipán and Levinao, the hunger strikers called for adherence by the Chilean government to International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 169, which protects the rights of indigenous peoples; an end to the use of protected witnesses in Mapuche cases; an end to raids on Mapuche communities; and the release of all political prisoners and the return of indigenous lands to the communities.
Mewlen Huencho began fasting on Aug. 25 after sitting in at the UNICEF office for a month to promote demands for the international organization to denounce police attacks on women, children and the elderly in Chile; the sit-in was precipitated by a July 23 raid by carabineros on the Temucuicui community in Araucanía in which two children were shot with pellets and badly injured [see Update #1138]. Huencho suspended her hunger strike after Tom Olsen, UNICEF Representative in Chile, promised to go to Ercilla and meet with Mapuche authorities the afternoon of Sept. 3.
Machi Pascual Catrilaf began his hunger strike in solidarity with the other protests on Aug. 27.
Mapuche activists charge that that the government uses excessive force and unjust applications of criminal law to repress their actions, with which they seek the return of ancestral lands now being exploited by timber companies and other businesses. Some 34 Mapuche prisoners participated in a liquids-only hunger strike in the summer and fall of 2010, some for more than two months, and four Mapuche prisoners fasted for almost three months in the spring of 2011 [see Updates #1052, 1083]. Maricheweu International, a group in solidarity with Mapuche struggles, says letters to “convey your support and encouragement to the hunger-strikers, and to request information on their state of health” can be sent to UNICEF’s Thierry Lemaresquier (infochile@unicef.org) and the Angol prison authorities (bessie.castillo@gendarmeria.cl). (TeleSUR 8/28/12; Maricheweu International 8/29/12, 8/31/12; País Mapuche (Chile) 8/27/12, 8/30/12; Terra (Peru) 8/13/12)
*2. Honduras: Five Killed in Continuing Aguán Violence
A Honduran campesino, Marvin Orlando Rivera Mejía, was killed around 6 am on Sept. 1 during a confrontation between security guards and a campesino group at the Boleros estate, at the edge of Trujillo in the northern department of Colón. The victim was reportedly not involved in the confrontation and was shot unintentionally. A guard, José Reyes González, was hit by a bullet in the back and was taken to a clinic in the city of San Pedro Sula. The campesinos fled when police and soldiers arrived; an unknown number were wounded. Departmental police chief José Mejía claimed the campesino group was heavily armed.
Apparently the campesinos were attempting to occupy land on the estate. Campesinos have taken over thousands of hectares in the region, the Lower Aguán Valley, since late 2009 in an effort to get possession of land they say big landowners acquired illegally during the 1990s [see Update #1142]. Vitalino Álvarez, a spokesperson for the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA), said tensions would continue in the countryside unless the government treated the land problem seriously on a national level. Until now, he said, César Ham, the minister in charge of the National Agrarian Institute (INA), has only provided palliatives by arranging to transfer land ownership to members of some big campesino groups like MUCA. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 9/2/12)
Rivera Mejía’s violent death was the fifth in the Aguán region in less than a week, and the second that appeared to be related to the land struggle. On Aug. 27 José Braulio Díaz López, secretary of the campesino group Tranvío, a MUCA affiliate, was shot dead by heavily armed men near the city of Tocoa as he was checking a problem with his car. Mario Roberto Hernández, who was helping him with the car, was wounded. According to MUCA, the men who shot Díaz were driving a vehicle belonging to security guards employed by cooking oil magnate Miguel Facussé Barjum, a major landowner in the Aguán and one of the richest people in Honduras. MUCA said the national police removed all of Díaz’s possessions from the scene, including legal documents relating to the transfer of land to campesinos; as of Aug. 28 the police had not handed the documents over to MUCA.
Three other killings that occurred in the region from Aug. 27 to Aug. 29 seemed to be the result of common crimes or personal disputes, but they undercut government claims that it was limiting violence by banning firearms in the Aguán. Two young married people were killed while at their home in Sabá, and an unidentified man was beaten to death with a stone in Tocoa’s San Isidro neighborhood. Also in Tocoa, a 15-year-old girl was wounded by gunfire intended for someone else, and three members of one family were wounded in their home in a drive-by shooting.
One other shooting may have been politically motivated. A compesino identified as Daniel Sosa was wounded when a MUCA vehicle was shot up near the San Isidro African palm plantation, which is claimed by Facussé. (MUCA statement 8/28/12 via Vos el Soberano (Honduras); La Tribuna 8/29/12)
*3. Dominican Republic: Denied an Abortion, Teen Cancer Patient Dies
The case of a pregnant 16-year-old Dominican with leukemia has reignited controversy over the amended 2010 Constitution’s Article 37, which holds “that the right to life is inviolable from conception until death.” The anti-abortion amendment was part of a series of constitutional changes pushed by rightwing forces; other amendments in the 2010 document ban same-sex marriage and limit citizenship to people with Dominican parents, in effect leaving many Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless [see Update #1141].
The pregnant teenager—called “Esperanza” or “Esperancita” in the media; her name was withheld because of her age—entered the Teachers’ Medical Insurance (Semma) hospital in Santo Domingo on July 4. The chemotherapy used to treat leukemia was likely to harm the fetus she was carrying, but the doctors refused to perform a therapeutic abortion from fear of being prosecuted under Article 37. They apparently also feared prosecution if the fetus died as a result of the chemotherapy, which they failed to provide until forced to by public pressure 20 days after the patient was admitted.
“Esperanza” didn’t respond to the chemical treatment, and her body rejected a blood transfusion on Aug. 16, according to the hospital’s Dr. Antonio Cabrera, who said she had a miscarriage the morning of Aug. 17 and then died of cardiac arrest. Since autopsy results weren’t immediately released, it was unclear whether the miscarriage was the direct cause of the girl’s death or what her chances of survival would have been if she’d had an abortion or had been given chemotherapy at the beginning of July. According to her mother, Rosa Hernández, “Esperanza” had become hopeful about her chances of recovery and had begun talking about the start of the new school year.
Feminist groups in the Dominican Republic and abroad blamed Article 37 for the girl’s death. An Aug. 18 statement by the Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Health Network (RSMLAC, for its initials in Spanish) said the treatment of “Esperanza” “was a form of unacceptable violence and torture” and called her death “a femicide carried out by political-religious alliances.” Hernández, an impoverished employee of the school system, had pleaded for a therapeutic abortion. “My daughter’s life is what’s most important,” she said. “I know that [abortion] is a sin and is illegal, but my daughter’s life comes first.” (CNN 8/17/12; RSMLAC statement 8/18/12; Servicio de Noticias de la Mujer de Latinamerica y el Caribe (SEMLAC) 8/20/12 via Diario Rotativo (Querétaro, Mexico); Adital (Brazil) 8/30/12)
*4. Mexico: PRI Candidate Declared Winner, Students Protest
Mexico’s 2012 presidential election came to a close on Aug. 31 when the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Republic (TEPJF) officially declared former México state governor Enrique Peña Nieto the winner of the July 1 vote. One day earlier the tribunal had dismissed charges by the coalition backing center-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador that Peña Nieto’s 6.62% lead over López Obrador was the result of fraud, vote buying and media manipulation by Peña Nieto’s centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico’s ruling party from 1929 to 2000 [see Update #1137]. (La Jornada (Mexico) 8/31/12, 9/1/12)
These results were expected, and #YoSoy132 (“I’m number 132”), the student movement that formed suddenly in the spring to oppose what its supporters called the “imposition” of the PRI candidate, had already planned a “funeral for democracy” to be held in Mexico City the afternoon of Aug. 31. Starting from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) campus, the protesters, some carrying cardboard coffins, marched through the city for about 10 km, tying up traffic at various points. About 5,000 people participated, far less than the estimated 50,000 protesters who came out for demonstrations against the PRI in the week after the July 1 vote. (LJ 9/1/12)
*5. Mexico: Peace Caravan “Disarms Houston”
In an unusual and dramatic protest against lax gun control laws in the US, relatives of victims of drug-related violence in Mexico destroyed a .357 Magnum pistol and an AK-47 assault rifle in Houston’s Guadalupe Plaza Park on Aug. 27 and buried the remains in cement. The protesters were part of a Caravan for Peace that started a month-long tour of the US in San Diego on Aug. 12 to raise awareness of the US role in a “drug war” that has cost some 50,000 lives in Mexico since the beginning of 2007. The tour is to end in Washington, DC on Sept. 12.
Two caravan supporters bought the firearms at a High Caliber Gun & Knife Show in Pasadena, Texas, on Aug. 25 to show how easily gun smugglers can purchase weapons in Texas; the US is the main source of illegal guns recovered from crime scenes in Mexico. The pistol was purchased in a five-minute transaction by a woman with a foreign accent who was not asked for identification. A man with US citizenship bought the AK-47, the favorite weapon of Mexican drug traffickers, after a 10-minute background check.
The Caravan for Peace was organized by the Movement for Peace With Justice and Dignity (MPJD), an organization started in 2011 by Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, whose son Juan Francisco was killed in late March of that year, apparently by gang members [see Update #1079]. The movement opposes the militarized fight against the drug cartels started by President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, with funding and political support from the US government, shortly after he took office in December 2006.
Sicilia sawed the barrels of the weapons in Houston with an electric metal saw provided by an undocumented Mexican immigrant who works in Texas as a welder. Then other relatives of victims smashed the weapons with sledgehammers.
Araceli Rodríguez wept as she put fragments of the guns in a wooden box and buried them in cement. Her son, Luis Ángel León Rodríguez, a Mexican federal police agent stationed in Hidalgo, Michoacán, was kidnapped in November 2009, apparently by members of the so-called “Michoacán Family” drug cartel; his body was never found. She said after the protest that for her the burial of the guns symbolized the Christian burial she would never be able to give her son in Mexico. (Presente.org video 8/27/12; Fellowship of Reconciliation blog 8/28/12; Vanguardia (Mexico) 8/30/12)
In related news, the Mexican daily La Jornada reported on Aug. 28 that the two US agents wounded in a shooting incident near Tres Marías in Morelos on Aug. 24 [see Update #1142] were from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), not the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Citing unidentified “official sources close to the investigation,” the newspaper also said the attack was carried out by five vehicles, not four, and that the shooting began after the assailants were able to see the victims close up. The agents were driving a heavily armored US embassy car, a Toyota Land Cruiser, on their way to a Navy training facility, apparently to provide instruction to marines involved in the “war on drugs.” According to later reports, the US agents survived only because of the car’s armor.
While the first reports said only federal police agents were implicated in the attack, there are indications that members of a criminal organization were directly involved. The official sources cited 18 attackers in civilian clothes, but only 12 federal police agents have been detained so far. (LJ 8/28/12, 8/29/12)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Dominican Republic/Haiti, US/immigration
Before Occupy Wall Street, there was La Victoria (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3835-before-occupy-wall-street-there-was-la-victoria
Brazil: Supreme Court Judge Overturns Suspension of Belo Monte Dam
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3841-brazil-supreme-court-judge-overturns-suspension-of-belo-monte-dam
Brazil: quilombo threatened by rancher gunmen
http://ww4report.com/node/11452
Brazil: judge agrees to first war crimes trial for members of dictatorship
http://ww4report.com/node/11458
Bolivia: TIPNIS Consulta on Hold, Communities Reject Militarization
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/bolivia-tipnis-consulta-hold-communities-reject-militarization
Women In the Forefront of Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3836-women-in-the-forefront-of-bolivias-tipnis-conflict
Ecuador not to deport Belarussian whistle-blower
http://ww4report.com/node/11415#comment-345463
Colombian Ex-General Sentenced in Death Squad Case
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3840-colombian-ex-general-sentenced-in-death-squad-case
Colombia's ex-security chief pleads guilty to para collaboration
http://ww4report.com/node/11462
Water and Sanitation Socialism in Caracas: Interview with Victor Díaz (Venezuela)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/venezuela-archives-35/3834-water-and-sanitation-socialism-in-caracas-interview-with-victor-diaz
41 Killed in Gas Explosion in Venezuela, 3 Days of National Mourning Declared
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/7206
Venezuela: refinery disaster politicized
http://ww4report.com/node/11461
Venezuela: Yanomami massacred by outlaw miners
http://ww4report.com/node/11451
El Salvador: Killed in Cold Blood on the Banks of the River at El Calabozo
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3837-el-salvador-killed-in-cold-blood-on-the-banks-of-the-river-at-el-calabozo
Media Ignore New Report Questioning U.S. Role in Honduras Drug Raid
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/28/media-ingore-new-report-questioning-us-role-honduras-drug-raid
Guatemala: Swiss arrest ex-police commander
http://ww4report.com/node/11459
Goldcorp Organizes Junket for Canadian Parliamentarians to Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3839-goldcorp-organizes-junket-for-canadian-parliamentarians-to-guatemala
Outer Darkness in Coatzacoalcos: The Plight of Migrants in Mexico
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3842-outer-darkness-in-coatzacoalcos-the-plight-of-migrants-in-mexico
Mexico’s Independent Unions Prepare to Confront the Pri
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1488
Mexican Miners Reelect Napoleón Gómez Urrutia; Chart Course
http://www.ueinternational.org/MLNA/mlna_articles.php?id=204#1489
Life in a Border Town Marred by Tension (Dominican Republic/Haiti)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/8/27/life-border-town-marred-tension
Families Divided: Dateline Nogales (US/immigration)
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/8/30/families-divided-dateline-nogales
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
Your support is appreciated. Back issues and source materials are available on request. 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 women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Monday, 3 September 2012
Monday, 16 April 2012
WNU #1125: Argentina Coup Aimed at Creating Market Economy
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1125, April 15, 2012
1. Argentina: 1976 Coup Aimed at Creating a Market Economy
2. Dominican Republic: Is a General Plotting Against Haiti’s President?
3. Mexico: Activist Stages Mock Crucifixion to Demand Child’s Return
4. Honduras: AFL-CIO Protests Labor Rights Violations
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/ For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Argentina: 1976 Coup Aimed at Creating a Market Economy
Imprisoned former Argentine dictator Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the military disappeared—detained and killed--thousands of people and sometimes abducted the victims’ children during its 1976-1983 “dirty war” against leftists and others [see Update #1110]. The killings “were the price that regrettably Argentina had to pay to go on being a republic,” Videla said in one of several interviews journalist Ceferino Reato held with him from October 2011 to March 2012 in the Campo de Mayo prison. Now 86, the former dictator was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for crimes against humanity. Human rights groups estimate that the military disappeared some 30,000 people in the violence and turned over several hundred of their children to foster parents.
The interviews appear in Reato’s book Final Disposition, which went on sale on Apr. 14; some interviews were also videotaped and are available on the internet.
“Our objective” in the Mar. 24, 1976 coup that started the seven years of bloody military rule “was to discipline an anarchized society,” Videla explained to Reato. The generals wanted “to get away from a populist, demagogic vision; in relation to the economy, to go to a liberal market economy. We wanted to discipline unionism and crony capitalism.” Argentine business owners were directly involved in the killings, Videla added, although “they washed their hands” of the actual violence. “They said, ‘Do what you have to do,’ and later they would add some on. How many times they told me, ‘You’ve come up short, you should have killed a thousand more, 10,000 more’!”
The coup leaders decided they needed to keep the extent of the killings secret. “[L]et’s say there were 7,000 or 8,000 people who had to die [so we could] win the war against subversion. We needed for it not to be obvious, so that society wouldn’t notice.” The remains had to be eliminated “so that there wouldn’t be protests inside or outside the country.” In the case of Mario Santucho of the Revolutionary Army of the People, for example, if the body appeared it would “provide an occasion for homages, for commemorations. It had to be made opaque.” The title of Reato’s book comes from the Argentine military term “disposición final” (final disposition or disposal), which is used for getting rid of worn-out clothes or equipment. The generals used the term for the process of eliminating the bodies of their victims. (InfoBAE (Argentina) 4/14/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 4/14/12 from correspondent; Reuters 4/14/12)
*2. Dominican Republic: Is a General Plotting Against Haiti’s President?
Retired Dominican general Pedro Julio (“Pepe”) Goico Guerrero has been heading a plot to destabilize the administration of Haitian president Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”), Dominican president Leonel Fernández’s information secretary, Rafael Núñez, announced at a Santo Domingo press conference late on Apr. 12. The alleged plot also involves a Haitian citizen, Pierre Kanzki, according to Núñez, who was accompanied by Dominican foreign affairs minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, Haitian justice minister Michel Brunache, Dominican attorney general Radhamés Jiménez, and ambassadors Fritz Cineas (Haiti) and Rubén Silie (Dominican Republic). Returning to Haiti on Apr. 13, Justice Minister Brunache announced that his department was investigating Kanzki; he didn’t mention any criminal charges against either of the two men named in the alleged plot. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 4/13/12, ___)
The accusation that Gen. Goico was plotting against Martelly came a little less than two weeks after Dominican reporter Nuria Piera charged that two of Dominican senator Félix Bautista’s construction firms, which have contracts for replacing buildings destroyed in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, had paid some $2.5 million to President Martelly over the past two years [see Update #1124].
Some observers connect both of these accusations with the Dominican Republic’s general elections on May 20, in which Danilo Medina, the candidate of Fernández’s centrist Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), is in a tight race against former president Hipólito Mejía (2000-2004), the candidate of the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). Sen. Bautista belongs to the PLD and is close to Fernández; the suggestion that he might be bribing Haitian officials comes on top of accusations of illegal enrichment in the past when he headed the Public Works Supervisory Office. Gen. Goico was in charge of security for Mejía during his administration and remains close to the former president. On Apr. 13 Mejía dismissed the claim that Goico was plotting against Martelly as “a smokescreen to cover up Félix Bautista’s scandals.”
Meanwhile, Mejía was facing criticism for a reference he made to US president Barack Obama during a recent visit to New York. “If Obama, who came from Africa, was born there and is [US] president,” he told a group of PRD supporters, “why can’t one of you make it, you who are a more attractive mixture than Obama?” On Apr. 13 the Dominican Senate, which the PLD controls, made an official apology to the US that was probably meant to add to Mejía’s embarrassment over the incident. (EFE 4/12/12 via Univision; El Nuevo Diario (Dominican Republic) 4/13/12; AlterPresse 4/13/12)
Opinion polls are split on the presidential race. A survey that the JZ Analytics firm released on Apr. 3 gave Mejía a five-point advantage over Medina, while a poll the New Link Group published a few hours later showed Medina with 49.1% of the vote against 44% for Mejía. The day before, a poll by Asisa Research had Medina winning with 52.8% to 45%. (Prensa Latina 4/4/12) The uncertainty of the polls reflects widespread disaffection with both parties. Asked which candidate they’d vote for, respondents have given such answers as: “Elections don’t matter to me,” “The two parties are the same thing,” “I don’t vote,” “For the devil,” “For Jesus Christ,” and “I don’t believe in politicians.” (Listín Diario (Santo Domingo) 4/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Activist Stages Mock Crucifixion to Demand Child’s Return
After 15 days on hunger strike, on Apr. 10 Antonia López Cruz sewed her lips together and had herself tied to the fence outside the federal Senate building in Mexico City in a mock crucifixion to demand the return of her six-year-old daughter, Concepción (“Cuco”) Antonia Fernández López. Puebla state Public Ministry coordinator Leticia Villaraldo took the child from her parents on Mar. 21 and turned her over to the state Integral Family Development (DIF) service, claiming she was an abuse victim because of an injury to her arm.
The father, Antonio Fernández Sánchez, who was encamped with López Cruz and their two sons outside the Senate, told reporters that the girl’s arm was hurt while she was playing with her little brother. “They took our daughter Concepción Antonia as a reprisal because my wife and I defend indigenous people and campesinos against arbitrary acts by the Puebla government, which is headed by [Gov.] Rafael Moreno Valle,” he said. “Villaraldo told us we should abandon the defense of indigenous and campesino human rights and then she’ll return our daughter.” Fernández Sánchez said he and López Cruz are members of an organization called the Supreme Mexican Fraternal Alliance in Defense of Human Rights.
Sen. Rosario Ibarra de Piedra [see Update #946], a longtime activist who heads the Senate Human Rights Commission, came out to meet with López Cruz. Ibarra then sent a request to the Puebla state attorney general for a report on the case, and spoke with the state governance under secretary, asking him to meet with the family. (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/11/12)
On Apr. 5 activist José Luis Castillo Carreón and his son were put in preventive detention in the northern state of Chihuahua on charges of armed robbery of a Ciudad Juárez massage parlor in August 2008. Castillo became politically active after his 14-year-old daughter Esmeralda Castillo Rincón disappeared in May 2009. He and his son participated in protests demanding government action to end the wave of violence that has left more than 500 women and girls dead in the Juárez area since 1993 [see Update #1121]. The police said the owner of the massage parlor identified the two men from photos in media coverage of the demonstrations. (Vanguardia (Mexico) 4/6/12; EFE 4/11/12 via Latin American Herald Tribune)
*4. Honduras: AFL-CIO Protests Labor Rights Violations
On Mar. 29 the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, joined with two Honduran union federations to file a petition with the US Department of Labor’s Public Office of Trade and Labor Affairs (OTLA) asking the US to push the Honduran government to address labor violations. Evangelina Argueta Chinchilla, representing Honduras’ General Workers Central (CGT), and Francisco Joel López Mejía, deputy general secretary of the smaller Independent Federation of Workers of Honduras (FITH), traveled to Washington to file the petition.
The federations’ complaint is based on provisions for labor rights in the US-sponsored Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). Unions and grassroots movements in the affected countries strongly opposed the agreement when it was proposed [see Update #988] and had little confidence in the labor right provisions. Six years after the agreement went into effect, the labor provisions have not in fact been meaningfully enforced in Honduras, according to the union representatives.
“For many years our government has neglected workers and even has violated their own promises,” Argueta said. “They have ignored Honduras’ unions, while dealing openly with corporations. They have passed laws that undermine unions and reduce standards of living.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stressed “the long-term cooperation and commitment of the AFL-CIO and the Honduran labor movement to promote and protect worker rights.” (Honduras Weekly 3/30/12; People’s Weekly World 4/9/12)
In other news, on Apr. 13 the military detained two campesinos, Juan Galindo López and Oveniel (or Obeniel) Cáceres in the Marañones settlement in the Lower Aguán Valley, the site of a long-running conflict between campesinos and large landowners over land rights [see Update #1123]. On Apr. 14 the Canadian-based organization Rights Action reported that Galindo had been released but Cáceres was apparently still in detention. (Adital (Brazil) 4/13/12 from Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH); Rights Action posting 4/13/12; Rights Action email 4/14/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti
Obama in Cartagena: No Change, Dwindling Hope (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3576-obama-in-cartagena-no-change-dwindling-hope-
South American Fiber Optic Ring
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6734
Dismantling the monoculture mentality (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6741
Argentina Thirty Years After the Malvinas War: Demanding Sovereignty and Healing the Wounds of War
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3568-argentina-thirty-years-after-the-malvinas-war-demanding-sovereignty-and-healing-the-wounds-of-war-
Brazil: judge suspends Teles Pires dam, upholds indigenous rights
http://ww4report.com/node/10976
Brazil, U.S. Deepen Ties Ahead of Obama's Latin America Week
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3566-brazil-us-deepen-ties-ahead-of-obamas-latin-america-week
Bolivia: Evo Morales cancels contract for controversial Amazon highway
http://ww4report.com/node/10985
Shifting Alliances in Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/4/6/shifting-alliances-bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-conflict
Peru: Sendero Luminoso take Camisea workers hostage
http://ww4report.com/node/10974
Peru defies UN breakthrough on uncontacted tribes
http://ww4report.com/node/10975
Peru: trapped miners freed —and scapegoated
http://ww4report.com/node/10983
Peru: civil strike against mining project shuts down Cajamarca —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10994
Peru: state of emergency as Sendero demands ransom for Camisea workers
http://ww4report.com/node/10984
Peru: Sendero fires on police helicopter in Camisea hostage crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/10989
Peru: Sendero hostages freed —but how?
http://ww4report.com/node/10995
Peru's President Humala faces "dirty war" complaint before OAS rights commission
http://ww4report.com/node/10988
Ecuador: A Revolutionary March Versus a Counter-Revolutionary March
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3564-ecuador-a-revolutionary-march-versus-a-counter-revolutionary-march
More mining projects for Ecuador rainforest
http://ww4report.com/node/10907#comment-341809
Colombians Commemorate First Official Day Honoring Conflict Victims (photo essay)
http://nacla.org/colombians-commemorate-first-official-day-honoring-conflict-victims-photo-essay
Small-Scale Miners in Nariño Face Crackdown as Foreign Companies Set Sights on Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3567-small-scale-miners-in-narino-face-crackdown-as-foreign-companies-set-sights-on-colombia
New Low for Obama on Colombia Worker Rights; Reportedly Plans to Throw Away Trade Leverage at Summit
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3570-new-low-for-obama-on-colombia-worker-rights-reportedly-plans-to-throw-away-trade-leverage-at-summit
Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre (Venezuela)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/4/11/llaguno-bridge-keys-massacre-video
New Agreements Between Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba for Social and Economic Development
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6920
Canada Deepens Ties with Deadly Regime in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3575-canada-deepens-ties-with-deadly-regime-in-honduras
Honduran Campesinos in the Crosshairs
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3565--honduran-campesinos-in-the-crosshairs-
Gathering in Bajo Aguán: Oligarchy and Human Rights Violations in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3574-gathering-in-bajo-aguan-oligarchy-and-human-rights-violations-in-honduras
Mexican Candidates Blast the Airwaves, Stir Up the Social Networks
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/04/mexican-candidates-blast-the-airwaves-stir-up-the-social-networks.php
A Colonial WikiLeaks? The Migrated Archives and the Caribbean Pt.1
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/4/12/colonial-wikileaks-migrated-archives-and-caribbean-pt1
Haiti Reconstruction Fund: Building Back …When?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-reconstruction-fund-building-back-when
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 #1125, April 15, 2012
1. Argentina: 1976 Coup Aimed at Creating a Market Economy
2. Dominican Republic: Is a General Plotting Against Haiti’s President?
3. Mexico: Activist Stages Mock Crucifixion to Demand Child’s Return
4. Honduras: AFL-CIO Protests Labor Rights Violations
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/ For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. Argentina: 1976 Coup Aimed at Creating a Market Economy
Imprisoned former Argentine dictator Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla has admitted for the first time that the military disappeared—detained and killed--thousands of people and sometimes abducted the victims’ children during its 1976-1983 “dirty war” against leftists and others [see Update #1110]. The killings “were the price that regrettably Argentina had to pay to go on being a republic,” Videla said in one of several interviews journalist Ceferino Reato held with him from October 2011 to March 2012 in the Campo de Mayo prison. Now 86, the former dictator was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for crimes against humanity. Human rights groups estimate that the military disappeared some 30,000 people in the violence and turned over several hundred of their children to foster parents.
The interviews appear in Reato’s book Final Disposition, which went on sale on Apr. 14; some interviews were also videotaped and are available on the internet.
“Our objective” in the Mar. 24, 1976 coup that started the seven years of bloody military rule “was to discipline an anarchized society,” Videla explained to Reato. The generals wanted “to get away from a populist, demagogic vision; in relation to the economy, to go to a liberal market economy. We wanted to discipline unionism and crony capitalism.” Argentine business owners were directly involved in the killings, Videla added, although “they washed their hands” of the actual violence. “They said, ‘Do what you have to do,’ and later they would add some on. How many times they told me, ‘You’ve come up short, you should have killed a thousand more, 10,000 more’!”
The coup leaders decided they needed to keep the extent of the killings secret. “[L]et’s say there were 7,000 or 8,000 people who had to die [so we could] win the war against subversion. We needed for it not to be obvious, so that society wouldn’t notice.” The remains had to be eliminated “so that there wouldn’t be protests inside or outside the country.” In the case of Mario Santucho of the Revolutionary Army of the People, for example, if the body appeared it would “provide an occasion for homages, for commemorations. It had to be made opaque.” The title of Reato’s book comes from the Argentine military term “disposición final” (final disposition or disposal), which is used for getting rid of worn-out clothes or equipment. The generals used the term for the process of eliminating the bodies of their victims. (InfoBAE (Argentina) 4/14/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 4/14/12 from correspondent; Reuters 4/14/12)
*2. Dominican Republic: Is a General Plotting Against Haiti’s President?
Retired Dominican general Pedro Julio (“Pepe”) Goico Guerrero has been heading a plot to destabilize the administration of Haitian president Michel Martelly (“Sweet Micky”), Dominican president Leonel Fernández’s information secretary, Rafael Núñez, announced at a Santo Domingo press conference late on Apr. 12. The alleged plot also involves a Haitian citizen, Pierre Kanzki, according to Núñez, who was accompanied by Dominican foreign affairs minister Carlos Morales Troncoso, Haitian justice minister Michel Brunache, Dominican attorney general Radhamés Jiménez, and ambassadors Fritz Cineas (Haiti) and Rubén Silie (Dominican Republic). Returning to Haiti on Apr. 13, Justice Minister Brunache announced that his department was investigating Kanzki; he didn’t mention any criminal charges against either of the two men named in the alleged plot. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 4/13/12, ___)
The accusation that Gen. Goico was plotting against Martelly came a little less than two weeks after Dominican reporter Nuria Piera charged that two of Dominican senator Félix Bautista’s construction firms, which have contracts for replacing buildings destroyed in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, had paid some $2.5 million to President Martelly over the past two years [see Update #1124].
Some observers connect both of these accusations with the Dominican Republic’s general elections on May 20, in which Danilo Medina, the candidate of Fernández’s centrist Dominican Liberation Party (PLD), is in a tight race against former president Hipólito Mejía (2000-2004), the candidate of the social democratic Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD). Sen. Bautista belongs to the PLD and is close to Fernández; the suggestion that he might be bribing Haitian officials comes on top of accusations of illegal enrichment in the past when he headed the Public Works Supervisory Office. Gen. Goico was in charge of security for Mejía during his administration and remains close to the former president. On Apr. 13 Mejía dismissed the claim that Goico was plotting against Martelly as “a smokescreen to cover up Félix Bautista’s scandals.”
Meanwhile, Mejía was facing criticism for a reference he made to US president Barack Obama during a recent visit to New York. “If Obama, who came from Africa, was born there and is [US] president,” he told a group of PRD supporters, “why can’t one of you make it, you who are a more attractive mixture than Obama?” On Apr. 13 the Dominican Senate, which the PLD controls, made an official apology to the US that was probably meant to add to Mejía’s embarrassment over the incident. (EFE 4/12/12 via Univision; El Nuevo Diario (Dominican Republic) 4/13/12; AlterPresse 4/13/12)
Opinion polls are split on the presidential race. A survey that the JZ Analytics firm released on Apr. 3 gave Mejía a five-point advantage over Medina, while a poll the New Link Group published a few hours later showed Medina with 49.1% of the vote against 44% for Mejía. The day before, a poll by Asisa Research had Medina winning with 52.8% to 45%. (Prensa Latina 4/4/12) The uncertainty of the polls reflects widespread disaffection with both parties. Asked which candidate they’d vote for, respondents have given such answers as: “Elections don’t matter to me,” “The two parties are the same thing,” “I don’t vote,” “For the devil,” “For Jesus Christ,” and “I don’t believe in politicians.” (Listín Diario (Santo Domingo) 4/15/12)
*3. Mexico: Activist Stages Mock Crucifixion to Demand Child’s Return
After 15 days on hunger strike, on Apr. 10 Antonia López Cruz sewed her lips together and had herself tied to the fence outside the federal Senate building in Mexico City in a mock crucifixion to demand the return of her six-year-old daughter, Concepción (“Cuco”) Antonia Fernández López. Puebla state Public Ministry coordinator Leticia Villaraldo took the child from her parents on Mar. 21 and turned her over to the state Integral Family Development (DIF) service, claiming she was an abuse victim because of an injury to her arm.
The father, Antonio Fernández Sánchez, who was encamped with López Cruz and their two sons outside the Senate, told reporters that the girl’s arm was hurt while she was playing with her little brother. “They took our daughter Concepción Antonia as a reprisal because my wife and I defend indigenous people and campesinos against arbitrary acts by the Puebla government, which is headed by [Gov.] Rafael Moreno Valle,” he said. “Villaraldo told us we should abandon the defense of indigenous and campesino human rights and then she’ll return our daughter.” Fernández Sánchez said he and López Cruz are members of an organization called the Supreme Mexican Fraternal Alliance in Defense of Human Rights.
Sen. Rosario Ibarra de Piedra [see Update #946], a longtime activist who heads the Senate Human Rights Commission, came out to meet with López Cruz. Ibarra then sent a request to the Puebla state attorney general for a report on the case, and spoke with the state governance under secretary, asking him to meet with the family. (La Jornada (Mexico) 4/11/12)
On Apr. 5 activist José Luis Castillo Carreón and his son were put in preventive detention in the northern state of Chihuahua on charges of armed robbery of a Ciudad Juárez massage parlor in August 2008. Castillo became politically active after his 14-year-old daughter Esmeralda Castillo Rincón disappeared in May 2009. He and his son participated in protests demanding government action to end the wave of violence that has left more than 500 women and girls dead in the Juárez area since 1993 [see Update #1121]. The police said the owner of the massage parlor identified the two men from photos in media coverage of the demonstrations. (Vanguardia (Mexico) 4/6/12; EFE 4/11/12 via Latin American Herald Tribune)
*4. Honduras: AFL-CIO Protests Labor Rights Violations
On Mar. 29 the AFL-CIO, the main US labor federation, joined with two Honduran union federations to file a petition with the US Department of Labor’s Public Office of Trade and Labor Affairs (OTLA) asking the US to push the Honduran government to address labor violations. Evangelina Argueta Chinchilla, representing Honduras’ General Workers Central (CGT), and Francisco Joel López Mejía, deputy general secretary of the smaller Independent Federation of Workers of Honduras (FITH), traveled to Washington to file the petition.
The federations’ complaint is based on provisions for labor rights in the US-sponsored Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). Unions and grassroots movements in the affected countries strongly opposed the agreement when it was proposed [see Update #988] and had little confidence in the labor right provisions. Six years after the agreement went into effect, the labor provisions have not in fact been meaningfully enforced in Honduras, according to the union representatives.
“For many years our government has neglected workers and even has violated their own promises,” Argueta said. “They have ignored Honduras’ unions, while dealing openly with corporations. They have passed laws that undermine unions and reduce standards of living.” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka stressed “the long-term cooperation and commitment of the AFL-CIO and the Honduran labor movement to promote and protect worker rights.” (Honduras Weekly 3/30/12; People’s Weekly World 4/9/12)
In other news, on Apr. 13 the military detained two campesinos, Juan Galindo López and Oveniel (or Obeniel) Cáceres in the Marañones settlement in the Lower Aguán Valley, the site of a long-running conflict between campesinos and large landowners over land rights [see Update #1123]. On Apr. 14 the Canadian-based organization Rights Action reported that Galindo had been released but Cáceres was apparently still in detention. (Adital (Brazil) 4/13/12 from Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras (COFADEH); Rights Action posting 4/13/12; Rights Action email 4/14/12)
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Caribbean, Cuba, Haiti
Obama in Cartagena: No Change, Dwindling Hope (Latin America)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3576-obama-in-cartagena-no-change-dwindling-hope-
South American Fiber Optic Ring
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6734
Dismantling the monoculture mentality (Argentina)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6741
Argentina Thirty Years After the Malvinas War: Demanding Sovereignty and Healing the Wounds of War
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3568-argentina-thirty-years-after-the-malvinas-war-demanding-sovereignty-and-healing-the-wounds-of-war-
Brazil: judge suspends Teles Pires dam, upholds indigenous rights
http://ww4report.com/node/10976
Brazil, U.S. Deepen Ties Ahead of Obama's Latin America Week
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3566-brazil-us-deepen-ties-ahead-of-obamas-latin-america-week
Bolivia: Evo Morales cancels contract for controversial Amazon highway
http://ww4report.com/node/10985
Shifting Alliances in Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/4/6/shifting-alliances-bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-conflict
Peru: Sendero Luminoso take Camisea workers hostage
http://ww4report.com/node/10974
Peru defies UN breakthrough on uncontacted tribes
http://ww4report.com/node/10975
Peru: trapped miners freed —and scapegoated
http://ww4report.com/node/10983
Peru: civil strike against mining project shuts down Cajamarca —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10994
Peru: state of emergency as Sendero demands ransom for Camisea workers
http://ww4report.com/node/10984
Peru: Sendero fires on police helicopter in Camisea hostage crisis
http://ww4report.com/node/10989
Peru: Sendero hostages freed —but how?
http://ww4report.com/node/10995
Peru's President Humala faces "dirty war" complaint before OAS rights commission
http://ww4report.com/node/10988
Ecuador: A Revolutionary March Versus a Counter-Revolutionary March
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3564-ecuador-a-revolutionary-march-versus-a-counter-revolutionary-march
More mining projects for Ecuador rainforest
http://ww4report.com/node/10907#comment-341809
Colombians Commemorate First Official Day Honoring Conflict Victims (photo essay)
http://nacla.org/colombians-commemorate-first-official-day-honoring-conflict-victims-photo-essay
Small-Scale Miners in Nariño Face Crackdown as Foreign Companies Set Sights on Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3567-small-scale-miners-in-narino-face-crackdown-as-foreign-companies-set-sights-on-colombia
New Low for Obama on Colombia Worker Rights; Reportedly Plans to Throw Away Trade Leverage at Summit
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3570-new-low-for-obama-on-colombia-worker-rights-reportedly-plans-to-throw-away-trade-leverage-at-summit
Llaguno Bridge: Keys to a Massacre (Venezuela)
http://nacla.org/news/2012/4/11/llaguno-bridge-keys-massacre-video
New Agreements Between Haiti, Venezuela and Cuba for Social and Economic Development
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6920
Canada Deepens Ties with Deadly Regime in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3575-canada-deepens-ties-with-deadly-regime-in-honduras
Honduran Campesinos in the Crosshairs
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3565--honduran-campesinos-in-the-crosshairs-
Gathering in Bajo Aguán: Oligarchy and Human Rights Violations in Honduras
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/3574-gathering-in-bajo-aguan-oligarchy-and-human-rights-violations-in-honduras
Mexican Candidates Blast the Airwaves, Stir Up the Social Networks
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/04/mexican-candidates-blast-the-airwaves-stir-up-the-social-networks.php
A Colonial WikiLeaks? The Migrated Archives and the Caribbean Pt.1
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/4/12/colonial-wikileaks-migrated-archives-and-caribbean-pt1
Haiti Reconstruction Fund: Building Back …When?
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/haiti-reconstruction-fund-building-back-when
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, 12 March 2012
WNU #1121: Latin American Women March and Petition on Women’s Day
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1121, March 11, 2012
1. South America: Activists March and Petition on Women’s Day
2. Central America: Women Demand Political Equality, No More Impunity
3. Mexico: Government Apologizes in 2002 Rape Case
4. Haiti: Women’s Groups Protest UN Troops, Duvalier Impunity
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. South America: Activists March and Petition on Women’s Day
This year the United Nations (UN) designated Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, as an occasion to honor rural women, but as in previous years, many of the marches and protests celebrating the day focused on violence against women [see Update #1071]; others emphasized demands for abortion rights and equality in political representation.
Some 10,000 Chileans celebrated International Women’s Day in Santiago with a march from the Plaza Italia to La Moneda, the presidential residence. The demonstration, entitled “Power, Rights, Freedoms,” was organized by women’s organizations and the Unified Workers Confederation (CUT), the country’s largest labor federation, and included union presidents and leaders of last year’s student strike. As often happens in Chile, the march concluded with confrontations near La Moneda between the carabineros militarized police and hooded youths. Police agents used water cannons and tear gas on protesters, while unidentified youths set a microbus on fire, along with some partitions and chairs from a bank; 20 people were reportedly arrested.
The government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera marked the day by sending Congress an initiative for reducing the maximum workweek for domestic workers from 72 to 45 hours, in line with the workweek for other workers; the proposed law would allow another 15 hours but at a higher rate of pay. (AFP 3/8/12 via Univision; EFE 3/9/12 via lainformacion.com) [Piñera’s popular support has declined as his neoliberal policies face challenges from the student movement and from protests in the Aysén region in the south; see Updates #1110, 1120.]
In Argentina activists gathered postcards in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo calling on President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the 257 legislative deputies in Congress to legalize abortion. “Not one more woman dead from clandestine aboritions” and “Neither husband nor boss, my body, my choice” were some of the signs the activists displayed. Clandestine abortions are the main cause of death for women of child-bearing age in Argentina, with a toll of one death every two days, according to Laura Velazco, an activist in the center-left Free of the South Movement.
In Uruguay activists posted signs on buildings and statues on Mar. 8 to call for decriminalization of abortion, while Paraguayan protesters banged on pots and pans in a cacerolada to demand that public institutions provide more aid for pregnant women.
In Brazil the Senate approved a bill during the week of International Women’s Day to impose fines on companies that pay less to women than to men doing the same work. In 2011 Brazilian women’s pay was 72.3% of the pay for men, unchanged since 2009, according to the governmental Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.
In Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, some women marked Mar. 8 by donating their hair to make wigs for women who had lost their own hair when men assaulted them with acid, a form of violence against women that has been on the rise. According to statistics released by Presidential Adviser on Equality for Women Cristina Plazas, 1,444 women were murdered in Colombia in 2010, 26% of them in their own homes. Women represent 84% of the victims of sexual crimes, with 16,916 cases in 2010; 51% of the crimes were committed by relatives. (AFP 3/8/12 via La Nación (Costa Rica); EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
*2. Central America: Women Demand Political Equality, No More Impunity
Nicaragua’s National Assembly observed International Women’s Day on Mar. 8 by unanimously passing a law which requires political parties to have women as at least 50% of their candidates for municipal posts. The government’s special attorney for women, Deborah Gradinson, said Nicaraguan society remains in many ways “tolerant” of violence against women, with at least 17 women murdered so far in 2012 by partners, former partners or acquaintances. The María Elena Cuadra Movement of Working and Unemployed Women reported that only half of the 81 cases of women killed by violence in 2011 ever reached a court. “Justice for women, no more impunity” should be the slogan for the day, according to human rights activist Vilma Núñez.
Thousands of Salvadoran women marched in the main streets of San Salvador on Mar. 8 to demand an end to gender-based violence and full compliance with the Law of Equality, Equity and No Discrimination Against Women, which was passed in 2010. “We need a better climate for women in the country,” said Ima Guirola, a representative of the Norma Virginia Guirola de Herrera Institute of Women’s Studies (CEMUJER). UN Women, a United Nations agency for women’s rights, reports that 647 Salvadoran women were murdered in 2011, up dramatically from 193 in 2000. Also on Mar. 8, Vanda Pignato, President Mauricio Funes’ wife, criticized “the little party leadership groups that don’t let women get into power” and demanded laws to increase women’s representation in the next legislature. Only 23% of the candidates in the current Mar. 11 legislative and municipal elections are women. (AFP 3/8/12 via La Nación (Costa Rica); EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
In Honduras, women in the country’s branch of the international campesino movement Vía Campesina launched a new campaign on Mar. 8 under the slogan “for women’s dignity, we demand our right to the land.” Some 2,000 campesino, indigenous and African-descended women from around the country marched in front of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) and the National Congress in Tegucigalpa to demand a new agrarian reform law and an end to violence against women. Femicides (misogynist murders) “have increased in recent years without any investigation being carried out,” Ana Ferrera, director of the Center for Women’s Studies (CEM), told the Spanish wire service EFE. “Just this year some 50 women have been reported killed by violence.” (EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com; Adital (Brazil) 3/9/12 from Vía Campesina)
*3. Mexico: Government Apologizes in 2002 Rape Case
Mexican governance secretary Alejandro Poiré formally apologized to indigenous campesina Inés Fernández Ortega at a ceremony in Ayutla de los Libres in the southwestern state of Guerrero on Mar. 6 for her rape by three Mexican soldiers in 2002. Along with Valentina Rosendo, who was raped by soldiers in a separate incident, Fernández filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), which ruled in October 2010 that the Mexican government was responsible and must apologize to the two women. Federal attorney general Marisela Morales and Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre were also present for the apology.
The Mexican government initially denied the charges and accused Fernández of lying. In the apology he offered on Mar. 6, Poiré simply referred to the rape as “regrettable acts” and failed to mention that the perpetrators were soldiers. When Fernández’ turn came to speak, soldiers in civilian dress at first blocked her access to the podium, apparently not realizing that the indigenous woman was the guest of honor.
Fernández, who only speaks the Me’phaa (Tlapaneco) language), ignored the officials and addressed her community: “Listen to me, everyone, men, women, children: the people from the government, even though they say they’re on your side, they’re not going to come through. Don’t pay attention to them.” She said the soldiers committed the crime against her “because we are poor,” and went on to describe continuing aggressions, including checkpoints, interrogations, illegal searches, the murder of her brother Lorenzo, the theft of their crops, and orders by municipal presidents not to provide resources to her village, Barranca Tecuan. “The government doesn’t let us organize,” she charged. “The soldiers go on not letting us move freely in our communities.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 3/7/12)
The ceremony in Guerrero came just two days before International Women’s Day. “[T]here’s not much to celebrate” in Mexico, human rights activist Norma Esther Andrade told the Spanish wire service EFE, “and less on Women’s Day.” Andrade’s daughter was murdered in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua in 2001; Norma Andrade herself was attacked in Juárez in December 2011, and then again on Feb. 3 in Mexico City, where she’d moved for greater security [see Update # 1116]. The National Femicide Monitoring Center (OCNF) reports that 1,235 women were murdered from January 2010 to June 2011 in just eight of the country’s 32 federal entities (31 states and the Federal District, which includes Mexico City). (EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
*4. Haiti: Women’s Groups Protest UN Troops, Duvalier Impunity
Hundreds of Haitians marked International Women’s Day on Mar. 8 with a march in downtown Port-au-Prince to demand justice for the women who were victims of the 1957-1986 Duvalier family dictatorship and to call for the departure of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 11,200-member international police and military force.
“[Former dictator Jean-Claude] Duvalier and his accomplices must be judged,” "Impunity can’t be Haiti’s destiny,” “Down with the occupation, down with those who sell the country out,” “Good working conditions for women,” and “Women won’t step back” were among the main signs at the march, which was organized by Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA) and the labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (“Workers’ Struggle”), with support from the Women’s Network of the Bureau of International Lawyers (BAI), the Mobilization Collective for Compensation for the Cholera Victims (Komodevik) and other groups.
One focus of the demonstration was a Jan. 30 decision by investigative judge Carvès Jean that one-time “president for life” Duvalier (1971-1986) should face trial for corruption but not for the brutal crimes committed by his government. Another focus was the refusal by the United Nations (UN) to take responsibility for the cholera epidemic that started in October 2010 because of poor sanitary practices at a MINUSTAH base [see Update #1105]. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 3/9/12)
On Mar. 7, the day before the march, former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now the UN special envoy for Haiti, admitted during a visit to the country that MINUSTAH troops brought the epidemic. “I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera into Haiti, the UN peacekeeping soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said, in response to a question from independent US journalist Ansel Herz. “It was the proximate cause of cholera, that is, he was carrying the cholera strain,” Clinton went on, but then added that “what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation system.” Rather than blame the soldiers, he said, “it's better to focus on fixing it.”
This is the first time a UN official has acknowledged that the disease, which has killed 7,000 Haitians so far, came from the UN troops. (Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Relief and Reconstruction Watch 3/7/12; ABC News 3/9/12) [Note: cholera is a bacterial disease; it is not caused by a virus.]
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti
Argentine Women Refused Legal Abortions in Cases of Rape
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3492-argentine-women-refused-legal-abortions-in-cases-of-rape
Chile: Attack On Gay Man Highlights Debate On Anti-Discrimination Law
http://latindispatch.com/2012/03/08/chile-attack-on-gay-man-highlights-debate-on-anti-discrimination-law/
Peasants Launch Manifesto for Agrarian Reform after Historic Meeting in Brasilia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3503-peasants-launch-manifesto-for-agrarian-reform-after-historic-meeting-in-brasilia
Peru: successor to captured Shining Path leader captured —already
http://ww4report.com/node/10905
Peru: more strikes and protests rock mineral sector
http://ww4report.com/node/10906
CONAIE and Social Movements Mobilize in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3498-1-conaie-and-social-movements-mobilize-in-ecuador
Ecuador: anti-mining march advances; Correa intransigent
http://ww4report.com/node/10907
Colombia: Despite Diverting of the River, Movement Against Quimbo Dam Vows to Grow Stronger
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3495-colombia-despite-diverting-of-the-river-movement-against-quimbo-dam-vows-to-grow-stronger
Colombia: 'Carbon credit' scheme a cover for land grab
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3500-colombia-carbon-credit-scheme-a-cover-for-land-grab
The FARC and its Peace Initiative in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/8/farc-and-its-peace-initiative-colombia
Colombia: 49 Human Rights Activists Murdered in 2011
http://latindispatch.com/2012/03/06/colombia-49-human-rights-activists-murdered-in-2011/
Colombia’s Santos and Venezuela’s Chavez Meet in Havana, Sign Accords
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6859
US Ruling Against Salvadoran Ex-General a ‘Huge’ Victory for Victims
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3504-us-ruling-against-salvadoran-ex-general-a-huge-victory-for-victims
Hondurans Continue Protests in Bajo Aguán Region
http://nacla.org/news/2012/3/9/hondurans-continue-protests-bajo-agu%C3%A1n-region
Carbon Blood Money in Honduras
http://www.fpif.org/articles/carbon_blood_money_in_honduras
Justice for Whom? The Massacre at El Aguacate, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3496-justice-for-whom-the-massacre-at-el-aguacate-guatemala
Guatemala Women Defenders Defy Canadian Mines and Plead for Help
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3502-guatemala-women-defenders-defy-canadian-mines-and-plead-for-help-
Violence Batters Former Mexican Showcase
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/02/violence-batters-former-mexican-showcase.php
Epidemic of Sexual Assault on Migrant Trail in Mexico: Excerpt from book "Migrants Don't Matter
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3497-epidemic-of-sexual-assault-on-migrant-trail-in-mexico-excerpt-from-book-qmigrants-dont-matterq
Recovery in the U.S. and Mexico: A View From the Bottom
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/6/recovery-us-and-mexico-view-bottom
Hypocritical Justice: Police Killings Rattle Jamaica
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/8/hypocritical-justice-police-killings-rattle-jamaica
Reconstruction Money Flushed Away? (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/3/8/reconstruction-money-flushed-away.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 #1121, March 11, 2012
1. South America: Activists March and Petition on Women’s Day
2. Central America: Women Demand Political Equality, No More Impunity
3. Mexico: Government Apologizes in 2002 Rape Case
4. Haiti: Women’s Groups Protest UN Troops, Duvalier Impunity
5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/WeeklyNewsUpdat.
*1. South America: Activists March and Petition on Women’s Day
This year the United Nations (UN) designated Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, as an occasion to honor rural women, but as in previous years, many of the marches and protests celebrating the day focused on violence against women [see Update #1071]; others emphasized demands for abortion rights and equality in political representation.
Some 10,000 Chileans celebrated International Women’s Day in Santiago with a march from the Plaza Italia to La Moneda, the presidential residence. The demonstration, entitled “Power, Rights, Freedoms,” was organized by women’s organizations and the Unified Workers Confederation (CUT), the country’s largest labor federation, and included union presidents and leaders of last year’s student strike. As often happens in Chile, the march concluded with confrontations near La Moneda between the carabineros militarized police and hooded youths. Police agents used water cannons and tear gas on protesters, while unidentified youths set a microbus on fire, along with some partitions and chairs from a bank; 20 people were reportedly arrested.
The government of rightwing president Sebastián Piñera marked the day by sending Congress an initiative for reducing the maximum workweek for domestic workers from 72 to 45 hours, in line with the workweek for other workers; the proposed law would allow another 15 hours but at a higher rate of pay. (AFP 3/8/12 via Univision; EFE 3/9/12 via lainformacion.com) [Piñera’s popular support has declined as his neoliberal policies face challenges from the student movement and from protests in the Aysén region in the south; see Updates #1110, 1120.]
In Argentina activists gathered postcards in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo calling on President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the 257 legislative deputies in Congress to legalize abortion. “Not one more woman dead from clandestine aboritions” and “Neither husband nor boss, my body, my choice” were some of the signs the activists displayed. Clandestine abortions are the main cause of death for women of child-bearing age in Argentina, with a toll of one death every two days, according to Laura Velazco, an activist in the center-left Free of the South Movement.
In Uruguay activists posted signs on buildings and statues on Mar. 8 to call for decriminalization of abortion, while Paraguayan protesters banged on pots and pans in a cacerolada to demand that public institutions provide more aid for pregnant women.
In Brazil the Senate approved a bill during the week of International Women’s Day to impose fines on companies that pay less to women than to men doing the same work. In 2011 Brazilian women’s pay was 72.3% of the pay for men, unchanged since 2009, according to the governmental Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.
In Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, some women marked Mar. 8 by donating their hair to make wigs for women who had lost their own hair when men assaulted them with acid, a form of violence against women that has been on the rise. According to statistics released by Presidential Adviser on Equality for Women Cristina Plazas, 1,444 women were murdered in Colombia in 2010, 26% of them in their own homes. Women represent 84% of the victims of sexual crimes, with 16,916 cases in 2010; 51% of the crimes were committed by relatives. (AFP 3/8/12 via La Nación (Costa Rica); EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
*2. Central America: Women Demand Political Equality, No More Impunity
Nicaragua’s National Assembly observed International Women’s Day on Mar. 8 by unanimously passing a law which requires political parties to have women as at least 50% of their candidates for municipal posts. The government’s special attorney for women, Deborah Gradinson, said Nicaraguan society remains in many ways “tolerant” of violence against women, with at least 17 women murdered so far in 2012 by partners, former partners or acquaintances. The María Elena Cuadra Movement of Working and Unemployed Women reported that only half of the 81 cases of women killed by violence in 2011 ever reached a court. “Justice for women, no more impunity” should be the slogan for the day, according to human rights activist Vilma Núñez.
Thousands of Salvadoran women marched in the main streets of San Salvador on Mar. 8 to demand an end to gender-based violence and full compliance with the Law of Equality, Equity and No Discrimination Against Women, which was passed in 2010. “We need a better climate for women in the country,” said Ima Guirola, a representative of the Norma Virginia Guirola de Herrera Institute of Women’s Studies (CEMUJER). UN Women, a United Nations agency for women’s rights, reports that 647 Salvadoran women were murdered in 2011, up dramatically from 193 in 2000. Also on Mar. 8, Vanda Pignato, President Mauricio Funes’ wife, criticized “the little party leadership groups that don’t let women get into power” and demanded laws to increase women’s representation in the next legislature. Only 23% of the candidates in the current Mar. 11 legislative and municipal elections are women. (AFP 3/8/12 via La Nación (Costa Rica); EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
In Honduras, women in the country’s branch of the international campesino movement Vía Campesina launched a new campaign on Mar. 8 under the slogan “for women’s dignity, we demand our right to the land.” Some 2,000 campesino, indigenous and African-descended women from around the country marched in front of the National Agrarian Institute (INA) and the National Congress in Tegucigalpa to demand a new agrarian reform law and an end to violence against women. Femicides (misogynist murders) “have increased in recent years without any investigation being carried out,” Ana Ferrera, director of the Center for Women’s Studies (CEM), told the Spanish wire service EFE. “Just this year some 50 women have been reported killed by violence.” (EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com; Adital (Brazil) 3/9/12 from Vía Campesina)
*3. Mexico: Government Apologizes in 2002 Rape Case
Mexican governance secretary Alejandro Poiré formally apologized to indigenous campesina Inés Fernández Ortega at a ceremony in Ayutla de los Libres in the southwestern state of Guerrero on Mar. 6 for her rape by three Mexican soldiers in 2002. Along with Valentina Rosendo, who was raped by soldiers in a separate incident, Fernández filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish), which ruled in October 2010 that the Mexican government was responsible and must apologize to the two women. Federal attorney general Marisela Morales and Guerrero governor Angel Aguirre were also present for the apology.
The Mexican government initially denied the charges and accused Fernández of lying. In the apology he offered on Mar. 6, Poiré simply referred to the rape as “regrettable acts” and failed to mention that the perpetrators were soldiers. When Fernández’ turn came to speak, soldiers in civilian dress at first blocked her access to the podium, apparently not realizing that the indigenous woman was the guest of honor.
Fernández, who only speaks the Me’phaa (Tlapaneco) language), ignored the officials and addressed her community: “Listen to me, everyone, men, women, children: the people from the government, even though they say they’re on your side, they’re not going to come through. Don’t pay attention to them.” She said the soldiers committed the crime against her “because we are poor,” and went on to describe continuing aggressions, including checkpoints, interrogations, illegal searches, the murder of her brother Lorenzo, the theft of their crops, and orders by municipal presidents not to provide resources to her village, Barranca Tecuan. “The government doesn’t let us organize,” she charged. “The soldiers go on not letting us move freely in our communities.” (La Jornada (Mexico) 3/7/12)
The ceremony in Guerrero came just two days before International Women’s Day. “[T]here’s not much to celebrate” in Mexico, human rights activist Norma Esther Andrade told the Spanish wire service EFE, “and less on Women’s Day.” Andrade’s daughter was murdered in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua in 2001; Norma Andrade herself was attacked in Juárez in December 2011, and then again on Feb. 3 in Mexico City, where she’d moved for greater security [see Update # 1116]. The National Femicide Monitoring Center (OCNF) reports that 1,235 women were murdered from January 2010 to June 2011 in just eight of the country’s 32 federal entities (31 states and the Federal District, which includes Mexico City). (EFE 3/8/12 via terra.com)
*4. Haiti: Women’s Groups Protest UN Troops, Duvalier Impunity
Hundreds of Haitians marked International Women’s Day on Mar. 8 with a march in downtown Port-au-Prince to demand justice for the women who were victims of the 1957-1986 Duvalier family dictatorship and to call for the departure of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a 11,200-member international police and military force.
“[Former dictator Jean-Claude] Duvalier and his accomplices must be judged,” "Impunity can’t be Haiti’s destiny,” “Down with the occupation, down with those who sell the country out,” “Good working conditions for women,” and “Women won’t step back” were among the main signs at the march, which was organized by Haitian Women’s Solidarity (SOFA) and the labor organizing group Batay Ouvriye (“Workers’ Struggle”), with support from the Women’s Network of the Bureau of International Lawyers (BAI), the Mobilization Collective for Compensation for the Cholera Victims (Komodevik) and other groups.
One focus of the demonstration was a Jan. 30 decision by investigative judge Carvès Jean that one-time “president for life” Duvalier (1971-1986) should face trial for corruption but not for the brutal crimes committed by his government. Another focus was the refusal by the United Nations (UN) to take responsibility for the cholera epidemic that started in October 2010 because of poor sanitary practices at a MINUSTAH base [see Update #1105]. (AlterPresse (Haiti) 3/9/12)
On Mar. 7, the day before the march, former US president Bill Clinton (1993-2001), now the UN special envoy for Haiti, admitted during a visit to the country that MINUSTAH troops brought the epidemic. “I don’t know that the person who introduced cholera into Haiti, the UN peacekeeping soldier from South Asia, was aware that he was carrying the virus,” Clinton said, in response to a question from independent US journalist Ansel Herz. “It was the proximate cause of cholera, that is, he was carrying the cholera strain,” Clinton went on, but then added that “what really caused it is that you don’t have a sanitation system.” Rather than blame the soldiers, he said, “it's better to focus on fixing it.”
This is the first time a UN official has acknowledged that the disease, which has killed 7,000 Haitians so far, came from the UN troops. (Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) Relief and Reconstruction Watch 3/7/12; ABC News 3/9/12) [Note: cholera is a bacterial disease; it is not caused by a virus.]
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, Jamaica, Haiti
Argentine Women Refused Legal Abortions in Cases of Rape
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3492-argentine-women-refused-legal-abortions-in-cases-of-rape
Chile: Attack On Gay Man Highlights Debate On Anti-Discrimination Law
http://latindispatch.com/2012/03/08/chile-attack-on-gay-man-highlights-debate-on-anti-discrimination-law/
Peasants Launch Manifesto for Agrarian Reform after Historic Meeting in Brasilia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3503-peasants-launch-manifesto-for-agrarian-reform-after-historic-meeting-in-brasilia
Peru: successor to captured Shining Path leader captured —already
http://ww4report.com/node/10905
Peru: more strikes and protests rock mineral sector
http://ww4report.com/node/10906
CONAIE and Social Movements Mobilize in Ecuador
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/3498-1-conaie-and-social-movements-mobilize-in-ecuador
Ecuador: anti-mining march advances; Correa intransigent
http://ww4report.com/node/10907
Colombia: Despite Diverting of the River, Movement Against Quimbo Dam Vows to Grow Stronger
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3495-colombia-despite-diverting-of-the-river-movement-against-quimbo-dam-vows-to-grow-stronger
Colombia: 'Carbon credit' scheme a cover for land grab
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3500-colombia-carbon-credit-scheme-a-cover-for-land-grab
The FARC and its Peace Initiative in Colombia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/8/farc-and-its-peace-initiative-colombia
Colombia: 49 Human Rights Activists Murdered in 2011
http://latindispatch.com/2012/03/06/colombia-49-human-rights-activists-murdered-in-2011/
Colombia’s Santos and Venezuela’s Chavez Meet in Havana, Sign Accords
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6859
US Ruling Against Salvadoran Ex-General a ‘Huge’ Victory for Victims
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3504-us-ruling-against-salvadoran-ex-general-a-huge-victory-for-victims
Hondurans Continue Protests in Bajo Aguán Region
http://nacla.org/news/2012/3/9/hondurans-continue-protests-bajo-agu%C3%A1n-region
Carbon Blood Money in Honduras
http://www.fpif.org/articles/carbon_blood_money_in_honduras
Justice for Whom? The Massacre at El Aguacate, Guatemala
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3496-justice-for-whom-the-massacre-at-el-aguacate-guatemala
Guatemala Women Defenders Defy Canadian Mines and Plead for Help
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3502-guatemala-women-defenders-defy-canadian-mines-and-plead-for-help-
Violence Batters Former Mexican Showcase
http://newamericamedia.org/2012/02/violence-batters-former-mexican-showcase.php
Epidemic of Sexual Assault on Migrant Trail in Mexico: Excerpt from book "Migrants Don't Matter
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3497-epidemic-of-sexual-assault-on-migrant-trail-in-mexico-excerpt-from-book-qmigrants-dont-matterq
Recovery in the U.S. and Mexico: A View From the Bottom
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/6/recovery-us-and-mexico-view-bottom
Hypocritical Justice: Police Killings Rattle Jamaica
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/3/8/hypocritical-justice-police-killings-rattle-jamaica
Reconstruction Money Flushed Away? (Haiti)
http://www.ayitikaleje.org/haiti-grassroots-watch-engli/2012/3/8/reconstruction-money-flushed-away.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/
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
WNU #1116: Indigenous Protester Killed in Panama
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1116, February 5, 2012
1. Panama: One Killed in Renewed Indigenous Protests
2. Argentina: Demonstrations Against Mining Spread
3. Honduras: Campesinos Detained as Aguán Land Talks Stall
4. Mexico: Anti-Femicide Activist Attacked Again
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Caribbean, 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. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com
*1. Panama: One Killed in Renewed Indigenous Protests
At least one indigenous protester was killed on the morning of Feb. 5 as Panamanian riot police cleared roadblocks that members of the Ngöbe-Buglé group had maintained for six days in the western provinces of Chiriquí and Veraguas. Protest leaders identified the victim as Jerónimo Montezuma; they said he died of a gunshot wound in the chest in San Félix, Chiriquí. The roadblocks were set up in the latest round in an ongoing dispute between the Ngöbe-Buglé, Panama’s largest indigenous group, and the government of rightwing president Ricardo Martinelli over environmental protections in indigenous territories [see Update #1103].
“The anti-riot units only have crowd control equipment and no lethal arms,” Security Minister José Raúl Mulino told the Telemetro television channel later in the day, “so this person couldn’t have died from [police] gunfire.” Mulino blamed the protesters for the violence, charging that they had thrown rocks at agents, had burned down a police station in San Félix, had tried to attack a police station in the Chiriquí capital, David, and had looted a bank branch. But Omayra Silvera, a protest leader, told RPC radio: “The riot police fired on us. We were demonstrating so quietly, peacefully, and they repressed us.” Police agents “fired bullets, birdshot [or rubber bullets] and tear gas [grenades],” Carlos de la Cruz, a Catholic priest in Tolé, Chiriquí, told the media, saying he’d taken three wounded protesters to the hospital and had seen the projectiles.
“The important thing is that traffic has been made normal,” Security Minister Mulino said, “that the police are clearing the highways of debris, tree trunks, sheet metal, and that the trucks have started to circulate.” In addition to dispersing the demonstrations, the government cut off cell phone communication in the western region.
The Ngöbe-Buglé used militant protests in February, March and October of 2011 to block President Martinelli’s efforts to change the Mining Code in ways that the Ngöbe-Buglé said would open up indigenous territories to mining. The government finally agreed to have the revised law include a ban on open-pit mining in the territories, but it refused to exclude hydroelectric projects. The Ngöbe-Buglé responded on Jan. 30 by blocking major roads, including the Pan American highway. The action largely cut off Panama’s communication with Costa Rica, stranding tourists and causing shortages in Panamanian cities.
According to Adonais Cortés, a member of a Catholic commission seeking to start a dialogue, the protesters had agreed to lift the roadblocks if the government would negotiate. Government delegates failed to attend talks set up by the church on Feb. 4. After the violence on Feb. 5, Cortés said the government no longer has any credibility; he called the burning of the San Félix police station the result of anger after Montezuma’s death. (AP 2/3/12 via Houston Chronicle; AFP 2/5/12 via Tiempo (Veracruz, Mexico); AP 2/5/12 via La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador))
As of Feb. 2 some 19 Panamanian environmental, grassroots and labor organizations, along with 15 international organizations, had endorsed a statement calling on the government to respect indigenous rights, to avoid the use of force and to resolve the issues through negotiations. (Enlace Indígena 2/2/12) A petition is posted online in English and Spanish asking the National Assembly to pass the mining law requested by the Ngöbe-Buglé and calling on President Martinelli to enter into negotiations with the mediation of the Catholic bishop of David. (Petition accessed 2/5/12)
*2. Argentina: Demonstrations Against Mining Spread
On Feb. 1 the Montreal-based Osisko Mining Corporation announced that it and the government of the northwestern Argentine province of La Rioja would suspend exploration for a proposed gold mine at the Nevados de Famatina mountain as long as “there is no social license for exploration and development in the area.” The announcement followed weeks of protests against the open-pit mining project by local residents, who selectively blocked access to the area for company employees and officials of the provincial government. Osisko and the provincial government said they were now preparing a “program of information and consultation with the community” to win local support, but assemblies formed by area residents have voted to continue the blockade. “[N]o mega-mining company or project has a social license in our territory,” the assemblies declared. (Página 12 (Argentina) 2/2/12)
Residents of the towns of Famatina and Chilecito say open-pit mining on the Andean mountain would threaten their only source of water. The protest began on Jan. 2 with about 400 people, but on Jan. 16, when the company was to begin work, some 4,000 people turned out to block access; the population of Famatina is just 6,400. The local protest won also the backing of national environmental groups like Greenpeace Argentina and celebrities like documentary filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas.
Similar protests have been taking place in the northern provinces of Catamarca and Tucumán, where residents have blocked roads to demand an end to work at the Bajo de la Alumbrera, one of the world’s main gold and copper deposits. The exploration and development there is being carried out by a consortium including the Swiss-British mining company Xstrata PLC and two Canadian companies, Goldcorp Inc. and Yamana Gold Inc. The protests In La Rioja, Catamarca and Tucumán have also reactivated activism against mining projects in Río Negro, Chubut and Mendoza provinces.
According to the national government’s Mining Secretariat, investments in mining reached a record $2.546 billion in 2011. Official data show some 600 active projects in Argentina.
As has happened in other Latin American countries with center-left governments, the exploitation of natural resources seems to be creating friction between the government and grassroots activists that have formed part of its base. Famatina mayor Ismael Bordagaray, who supports the protesters, is a member of the Front for Victory, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s left-leaning faction of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist). But La Rioja governor Luis Beder Herrera, also a Front for Victory member, supports the mining project, which includes the province’s state-owned energy and mining company, Energía y Minerales Sociedad del Estado (EMSE), as a partner. Jorge Yoma, a federal legislative deputy from the Front, said on Feb. 4 that President Fernández told him that she also supports mining operations. (Directorio Verde 1/20/12; Inter Press Service 1/25/12 via Upside Down World; El Tribuno (Salta and Jujuy) 2/4/12; EFE 2/5/12 via No a la Mina)
*3. Honduras: Campesinos Detained as Aguán Land Talks Stall
Honduran police detained 13 leaders of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) the night of Feb. 2 at a checkpoint in Arizona, in the northern department of Atlántida, according to the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH). The leaders, who were returning from Tegucigalpa, were reportedly taken to the city of Tela; one leader, Juan Angel Rodríguez, was turned over to the Public Ministry, allegedly because of a warrant for his arrest. (COPINH 2/2/12; OFRANEH 2/3/12)
The day before, on Feb. 1, police had arrested MUCA spokesperson Vitalino Álvarez in Tocoa in the northern department of Colón, apparently without a warrant. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 2/1/12)
The arrests came after a breakdown in negotiations between the MUCA and the government at the end of January over implementation of an April 2010 agreement that was supposed to resolve at least some of the violent land disputes taking place in the Lower Aguán Valley. Under the deal, the government would buy some 5,700 hectares of land from the wealthy agribusiness owner Miguel Facussé Barjum and turn it over to campesino organizations that have been pressing a claim to the land. But the campesinos balked when told they would have to pay interest at a 14% annual rate on a 600 million lempira loan (about $31.5 million) from a private bank. Vitalino Álvarez--the MUCA spokesperson arrested on Feb. 1--had denounced the proposal, noting that the plan was originally for the campesinos to pay a low interest rate.
In December there were reports that Alba-Petróleos, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), might finance the loan and help campesino organizations by building an African palm fruit processing plant for their use [see Update #1111]. Apparently Alba-Petróleos will not be financing the loan but is still planning to pay for the processing plant and guarantee a market for the palm oil it would produce. (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 1/31/12)
*4. Mexico: Anti-Femicide Activist Attacked Again
An unidentified man attacked Mexican human rights activist Norma Esther Andrade with a knife on the morning of Feb. 3 as she was leaving her current residence in the Coyoacán delegación (borough) of Mexico City. She was cut on one cheek by the attacker, who then fled without speaking. Andrade, a founder of the organization Our Daughters Return Home, has been a leader in denouncing the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. She has been staying in Mexico City since she was wounded by gunfire from unknown attackers in Ciudad Juárez on Dec. 2; local authorities claimed the attack might be a carjacking or robbery attempt [see World War 4 Report 12/7/11].
After the latest instance of the authorities’ failure to provide adequate protection--despite repeated threats and an order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish)--Andrade and her family are considering the possibility of seeking asylum outside Mexico. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/4/12, 2/5/12)
In other news, on Feb. 2 the federal Chamber of Deputies called on the federal government and the Guerrero state government to intensify their efforts to find environmental activists Eva Alarcón Ortiz and Marcial Bautista Valle, leaders in the Organization of Ecologist Campesinos of the Sierra de Petatlán and Coyuca de Catalán (OCESP) in Guerrero. The two were kidnapped on Dec. 7 while traveling by bus to the state capital, Chilpancingo, and are still missing. A local police commander, Cesario Espinoza Palma, was arrested in connection with the kidnapping in December [see Update #1111], but it is not clear whether any progress has been made in the case since then. (Notimex 2/2/12 via La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico))
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US
Victims of Agrochemicals Break their Silence (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6313
Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict Continues: Fanning the Flames of Discontent
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/2/3/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-conflict-continues-fanning-flames-discontent
Bolivia: pro-highway marchers arrive in La Paz
http://ww4report.com/node/10797
Terrorism and Development in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3437-terrorism-and-development-in-peru
Peru: Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Call For Action Against Oil Companies
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3435-peru-indigenous-peoples-of-the-amazon-call-for-action-against-oil-companies
Peru: more photos released of "uncontacted" Amazon peoples —as roads encroach
http://ww4report.com/node/10794
Peru: indigenous groups reject draft regulations on Law of Prior Consultation
http://ww4report.com/node/10795
Peru: national mobilization for water, against Conga mine
http://ww4report.com/node/10796
Ecuador: Kichwa announce march for water
http://ww4report.com/node/10798
Ecuador: ex-guerillas return absconded swords
http://ww4report.com/node/10799
Victims Law Decree Fails Afro-Colombian Communities
http://nacla.org/news/2012/2/3/victims-law-decree-fails-afro-colombian-communities
The Hidrosogamoso Dam: Communities pay the high price of hydro-electric power in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3432-the-hidrosogamoso-dam-communities-pay-the-high-price-of-hydro-electric-power-in-colombia
Colombia: FARC escalate attacks, indigenous pueblos caught in middle —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10800
“Bilateralizing” Relations between Peru and Venezuela
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6353
Venezuelan Workers Organise, Draft Proposals for New Labour Law
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6781
UN Praises Venezuela’s Gun Control and Disarmament Policies
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6782
Venezuela: independent gold prospectors march in Bolívar after violence
http://ww4report.com/node/10801
Inventive Nonviolence in Mexico: A Conversation With Javier Sicilia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/31/inventive-nonviolence-mexico-conversation-javier-sicilia
From Chiapas to Wall Street: “A collective awakening against global injustice”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3434-from-chiapas-to-wall-street-a-collective-awakening-against-global-injustice
The Drug War’s Invisible Victims (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6297
Ciudad Juárez: narcos declare war on police
http://ww4report.com/node/10803
Mexico Climate Politics Heats Up
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6325
Canada: A Late but Eager Partner in Policing the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/2/2/canada-late-eager-partner-policing-caribbean-1
Rights Groups Denounce Duvalier Ruling in Haiti
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3438-rights-groups-denounce-duvalier-ruling-in-haiti
Elliott Abrams' Dark History in Latin America and the Struggle for Justice (US)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3440-elliot-abrams-dark-history-in-latin-america-and-the-struggle-for-justice
Lawmakers, "Experts" Spin Tales of Iranian Terror in Latin America (US)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3441-lawmakers-qexpertsq-spin-tales-of-iranian-terror-in-latin-america
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; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1116, February 5, 2012
1. Panama: One Killed in Renewed Indigenous Protests
2. Argentina: Demonstrations Against Mining Spread
3. Honduras: Campesinos Detained as Aguán Land Talks Stall
4. Mexico: Anti-Femicide Activist Attacked Again
5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Caribbean, 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. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com. It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com
*1. Panama: One Killed in Renewed Indigenous Protests
At least one indigenous protester was killed on the morning of Feb. 5 as Panamanian riot police cleared roadblocks that members of the Ngöbe-Buglé group had maintained for six days in the western provinces of Chiriquí and Veraguas. Protest leaders identified the victim as Jerónimo Montezuma; they said he died of a gunshot wound in the chest in San Félix, Chiriquí. The roadblocks were set up in the latest round in an ongoing dispute between the Ngöbe-Buglé, Panama’s largest indigenous group, and the government of rightwing president Ricardo Martinelli over environmental protections in indigenous territories [see Update #1103].
“The anti-riot units only have crowd control equipment and no lethal arms,” Security Minister José Raúl Mulino told the Telemetro television channel later in the day, “so this person couldn’t have died from [police] gunfire.” Mulino blamed the protesters for the violence, charging that they had thrown rocks at agents, had burned down a police station in San Félix, had tried to attack a police station in the Chiriquí capital, David, and had looted a bank branch. But Omayra Silvera, a protest leader, told RPC radio: “The riot police fired on us. We were demonstrating so quietly, peacefully, and they repressed us.” Police agents “fired bullets, birdshot [or rubber bullets] and tear gas [grenades],” Carlos de la Cruz, a Catholic priest in Tolé, Chiriquí, told the media, saying he’d taken three wounded protesters to the hospital and had seen the projectiles.
“The important thing is that traffic has been made normal,” Security Minister Mulino said, “that the police are clearing the highways of debris, tree trunks, sheet metal, and that the trucks have started to circulate.” In addition to dispersing the demonstrations, the government cut off cell phone communication in the western region.
The Ngöbe-Buglé used militant protests in February, March and October of 2011 to block President Martinelli’s efforts to change the Mining Code in ways that the Ngöbe-Buglé said would open up indigenous territories to mining. The government finally agreed to have the revised law include a ban on open-pit mining in the territories, but it refused to exclude hydroelectric projects. The Ngöbe-Buglé responded on Jan. 30 by blocking major roads, including the Pan American highway. The action largely cut off Panama’s communication with Costa Rica, stranding tourists and causing shortages in Panamanian cities.
According to Adonais Cortés, a member of a Catholic commission seeking to start a dialogue, the protesters had agreed to lift the roadblocks if the government would negotiate. Government delegates failed to attend talks set up by the church on Feb. 4. After the violence on Feb. 5, Cortés said the government no longer has any credibility; he called the burning of the San Félix police station the result of anger after Montezuma’s death. (AP 2/3/12 via Houston Chronicle; AFP 2/5/12 via Tiempo (Veracruz, Mexico); AP 2/5/12 via La Prensa Gráfica (El Salvador))
As of Feb. 2 some 19 Panamanian environmental, grassroots and labor organizations, along with 15 international organizations, had endorsed a statement calling on the government to respect indigenous rights, to avoid the use of force and to resolve the issues through negotiations. (Enlace Indígena 2/2/12) A petition is posted online in English and Spanish asking the National Assembly to pass the mining law requested by the Ngöbe-Buglé and calling on President Martinelli to enter into negotiations with the mediation of the Catholic bishop of David. (Petition accessed 2/5/12)
*2. Argentina: Demonstrations Against Mining Spread
On Feb. 1 the Montreal-based Osisko Mining Corporation announced that it and the government of the northwestern Argentine province of La Rioja would suspend exploration for a proposed gold mine at the Nevados de Famatina mountain as long as “there is no social license for exploration and development in the area.” The announcement followed weeks of protests against the open-pit mining project by local residents, who selectively blocked access to the area for company employees and officials of the provincial government. Osisko and the provincial government said they were now preparing a “program of information and consultation with the community” to win local support, but assemblies formed by area residents have voted to continue the blockade. “[N]o mega-mining company or project has a social license in our territory,” the assemblies declared. (Página 12 (Argentina) 2/2/12)
Residents of the towns of Famatina and Chilecito say open-pit mining on the Andean mountain would threaten their only source of water. The protest began on Jan. 2 with about 400 people, but on Jan. 16, when the company was to begin work, some 4,000 people turned out to block access; the population of Famatina is just 6,400. The local protest won also the backing of national environmental groups like Greenpeace Argentina and celebrities like documentary filmmaker Fernando “Pino” Solanas.
Similar protests have been taking place in the northern provinces of Catamarca and Tucumán, where residents have blocked roads to demand an end to work at the Bajo de la Alumbrera, one of the world’s main gold and copper deposits. The exploration and development there is being carried out by a consortium including the Swiss-British mining company Xstrata PLC and two Canadian companies, Goldcorp Inc. and Yamana Gold Inc. The protests In La Rioja, Catamarca and Tucumán have also reactivated activism against mining projects in Río Negro, Chubut and Mendoza provinces.
According to the national government’s Mining Secretariat, investments in mining reached a record $2.546 billion in 2011. Official data show some 600 active projects in Argentina.
As has happened in other Latin American countries with center-left governments, the exploitation of natural resources seems to be creating friction between the government and grassroots activists that have formed part of its base. Famatina mayor Ismael Bordagaray, who supports the protesters, is a member of the Front for Victory, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s left-leaning faction of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist). But La Rioja governor Luis Beder Herrera, also a Front for Victory member, supports the mining project, which includes the province’s state-owned energy and mining company, Energía y Minerales Sociedad del Estado (EMSE), as a partner. Jorge Yoma, a federal legislative deputy from the Front, said on Feb. 4 that President Fernández told him that she also supports mining operations. (Directorio Verde 1/20/12; Inter Press Service 1/25/12 via Upside Down World; El Tribuno (Salta and Jujuy) 2/4/12; EFE 2/5/12 via No a la Mina)
*3. Honduras: Campesinos Detained as Aguán Land Talks Stall
Honduran police detained 13 leaders of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA) the night of Feb. 2 at a checkpoint in Arizona, in the northern department of Atlántida, according to the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) and the Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH). The leaders, who were returning from Tegucigalpa, were reportedly taken to the city of Tela; one leader, Juan Angel Rodríguez, was turned over to the Public Ministry, allegedly because of a warrant for his arrest. (COPINH 2/2/12; OFRANEH 2/3/12)
The day before, on Feb. 1, police had arrested MUCA spokesperson Vitalino Álvarez in Tocoa in the northern department of Colón, apparently without a warrant. (La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 2/1/12)
The arrests came after a breakdown in negotiations between the MUCA and the government at the end of January over implementation of an April 2010 agreement that was supposed to resolve at least some of the violent land disputes taking place in the Lower Aguán Valley. Under the deal, the government would buy some 5,700 hectares of land from the wealthy agribusiness owner Miguel Facussé Barjum and turn it over to campesino organizations that have been pressing a claim to the land. But the campesinos balked when told they would have to pay interest at a 14% annual rate on a 600 million lempira loan (about $31.5 million) from a private bank. Vitalino Álvarez--the MUCA spokesperson arrested on Feb. 1--had denounced the proposal, noting that the plan was originally for the campesinos to pay a low interest rate.
In December there were reports that Alba-Petróleos, a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), might finance the loan and help campesino organizations by building an African palm fruit processing plant for their use [see Update #1111]. Apparently Alba-Petróleos will not be financing the loan but is still planning to pay for the processing plant and guarantee a market for the palm oil it would produce. (El Heraldo (Tegucigalpa) 1/31/12)
*4. Mexico: Anti-Femicide Activist Attacked Again
An unidentified man attacked Mexican human rights activist Norma Esther Andrade with a knife on the morning of Feb. 3 as she was leaving her current residence in the Coyoacán delegación (borough) of Mexico City. She was cut on one cheek by the attacker, who then fled without speaking. Andrade, a founder of the organization Our Daughters Return Home, has been a leader in denouncing the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez in the northern state of Chihuahua. She has been staying in Mexico City since she was wounded by gunfire from unknown attackers in Ciudad Juárez on Dec. 2; local authorities claimed the attack might be a carjacking or robbery attempt [see World War 4 Report 12/7/11].
After the latest instance of the authorities’ failure to provide adequate protection--despite repeated threats and an order from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR, or CIDH in Spanish)--Andrade and her family are considering the possibility of seeking asylum outside Mexico. (La Jornada (Mexico) 2/4/12, 2/5/12)
In other news, on Feb. 2 the federal Chamber of Deputies called on the federal government and the Guerrero state government to intensify their efforts to find environmental activists Eva Alarcón Ortiz and Marcial Bautista Valle, leaders in the Organization of Ecologist Campesinos of the Sierra de Petatlán and Coyuca de Catalán (OCESP) in Guerrero. The two were kidnapped on Dec. 7 while traveling by bus to the state capital, Chilpancingo, and are still missing. A local police commander, Cesario Espinoza Palma, was arrested in connection with the kidnapping in December [see Update #1111], but it is not clear whether any progress has been made in the case since then. (Notimex 2/2/12 via La Crónica de Hoy (Mexico))
*5. Links to alternative sources on: Latin America, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti, US
Victims of Agrochemicals Break their Silence (Latin America)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6313
Bolivia’s TIPNIS Conflict Continues: Fanning the Flames of Discontent
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/2/3/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-conflict-continues-fanning-flames-discontent
Bolivia: pro-highway marchers arrive in La Paz
http://ww4report.com/node/10797
Terrorism and Development in Peru
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3437-terrorism-and-development-in-peru
Peru: Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon Call For Action Against Oil Companies
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3435-peru-indigenous-peoples-of-the-amazon-call-for-action-against-oil-companies
Peru: more photos released of "uncontacted" Amazon peoples —as roads encroach
http://ww4report.com/node/10794
Peru: indigenous groups reject draft regulations on Law of Prior Consultation
http://ww4report.com/node/10795
Peru: national mobilization for water, against Conga mine
http://ww4report.com/node/10796
Ecuador: Kichwa announce march for water
http://ww4report.com/node/10798
Ecuador: ex-guerillas return absconded swords
http://ww4report.com/node/10799
Victims Law Decree Fails Afro-Colombian Communities
http://nacla.org/news/2012/2/3/victims-law-decree-fails-afro-colombian-communities
The Hidrosogamoso Dam: Communities pay the high price of hydro-electric power in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3432-the-hidrosogamoso-dam-communities-pay-the-high-price-of-hydro-electric-power-in-colombia
Colombia: FARC escalate attacks, indigenous pueblos caught in middle —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10800
“Bilateralizing” Relations between Peru and Venezuela
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6353
Venezuelan Workers Organise, Draft Proposals for New Labour Law
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6781
UN Praises Venezuela’s Gun Control and Disarmament Policies
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6782
Venezuela: independent gold prospectors march in Bolívar after violence
http://ww4report.com/node/10801
Inventive Nonviolence in Mexico: A Conversation With Javier Sicilia
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/31/inventive-nonviolence-mexico-conversation-javier-sicilia
From Chiapas to Wall Street: “A collective awakening against global injustice”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3434-from-chiapas-to-wall-street-a-collective-awakening-against-global-injustice
The Drug War’s Invisible Victims (Mexico)
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6297
Ciudad Juárez: narcos declare war on police
http://ww4report.com/node/10803
Mexico Climate Politics Heats Up
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/6325
Canada: A Late but Eager Partner in Policing the Caribbean
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/2/2/canada-late-eager-partner-policing-caribbean-1
Rights Groups Denounce Duvalier Ruling in Haiti
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3438-rights-groups-denounce-duvalier-ruling-in-haiti
Elliott Abrams' Dark History in Latin America and the Struggle for Justice (US)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3440-elliot-abrams-dark-history-in-latin-america-and-the-struggle-for-justice
Lawmakers, "Experts" Spin Tales of Iranian Terror in Latin America (US)
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3441-lawmakers-qexpertsq-spin-tales-of-iranian-terror-in-latin-america
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; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
WNU #1114: Argentines Unite Against Subway Fare Hike
Weekly News Update on the Americas
Issue #1114, January 22, 2012
1. Argentina: Subway Workers and Riders Unite Against Fare Hike
2. Ecuador: Indigenous and Women’s Groups Slam Correa
3. Honduras: Lawyer Killed After Reporting Police Abuses
4. Guatemala: Will Ríos Montt Finally Face Genocide Charges?
5. Cuba: Government Denies Prisoner Died From Hunger Strike
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Argentina: Subway Workers and Riders Unite Against Fare Hike
Argentine judge Fernando Juan Lima ruled on Jan. 16 that the Buenos Aires city government could continue for now with a 127% increase it had imposed for the subway fare on Jan. 6. A coalition including unions, student groups and political and social organizations had filed for an emergency injunction to halt the increase, which raises the fare to 2.5 pesos (about 58 cents).
Judge Lima rejected the emergency injunction on the grounds that the increase wouldn’t “cause irreparable harm” to the system’s two million users. But the judge noted that he hadn’t issued a final ruling on the coalition’s case against the increase, and he said he would act on that within 20 days.
The coalition--the Multi-Sector Committee Against the Fare Hike in the Subte (as the subway system is known)--didn’t limit itself to using legal maneuvers to fight the fare hike. The groups also collected more than 200,000 signatures on a petition against the increase, which they said would be a hardship for poorer riders, and presented it to Judge Lima. Subway workers protested the increase by opening the turnstiles during rush hours for about a week and letting passengers ride for free. [The Union Association of Subte and Premetro Workers (AGTSyP), part of the coalition, used this tactic when it sought recognition as a union in 2009; see Update #1004.]
As of Jan. 18 the coalition was determined to continue the fight but seemed divided on what tactics to follow after Lima ruled against the emergency injunction.
At the same time that he was facing angry subway riders and workers, Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri was also in a dispute with the city’s “manteros,” vendors who sell handcrafts, blankets and clothing on Florida Street in the center of the city. On Jan. 16 the vendors blocked Corrientes Street to protest Macri’s decision the week before to send the Metropolitan police to remove them, a move that resulted in confrontations and injuries. The vendors have also protested by selling their wares in front of the Congress. They argue that their activities are protected by Article 83 of Law 1472, which allows artists and makers of handcrafts to occupy public space.
Until this year subsidies from the federal government made it possible to maintain low fares in the capital’s subway system. But the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner--the head of a left-leaning section of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) who began her second four-year term on Dec. 10--is now drastically cutting subsidies for transportation and utilities. The Argentine consulting firm Econométrica projects that the growth rate for the national economy will fall to 2% this year, down from 7% in 2011, partly as a result of the global economic crisis. Facing a shortfall, the Fernández government is retreating from generous social spending that has helped contain conflicts in the decade since Argentina’s 2001-2002 economic crisis; the president’s critics say the spending also helped her win an easy electoral victory last October.
The decision to turn the subway over to the municipal government and withdraw the subsidy has a political benefit for the president, since it shifts the problem to Macri, one of Fernández’s main rivals, and his rightwing Republican Proposal (Pro) party. The federal government has agreed to continue to pay about half the old subsidy to the end of 2012. (Wall Street Journal 1/6/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/17/12 from correspondent; TeleSUR 1/17/12; Buenos Aires Herald 1/17/12; Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST) website 1/18/12)
*2. Ecuador: Indigenous and Women’s Groups Slam Correa
On Jan. 10 the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s main indigenous umbrella group, issued a communiqué reporting a “surprising and inexplicable” police presence in the organization’s headquarters in Quito. “[A]round 9:45 am police arrived [in a ] truck [at] the CONAIE offices, and two police agents dressed in black entered inside the offices,” the group wrote. Asked to explain their presence, one agent mentioned a possible danger to CONAIE president Humberto Cholango; later the agents said they were there to protect a meeting of indigenous organizations scheduled for that day. CONAIE said it hadn’t reported any dangers or asked for protection, and the group denounced the “arbitrary and illegal acts against social organizations that [are] being implemented in Ecuador.” (CONAIE communiqué 1/10/12)
The incident shows the level of distrust that has developed between popular Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and many of the grassroots and leftist organizations that helped bring him to office five years ago. It came just as Correa was preparing to celebrate the fifth anniversary on Jan. 15 of his first inauguration and of the start of what he calls the “citizens’ revolution.”
Respected figures from the Latin American left and social movements and the arts attended festivities held in Cuenca, including Cuban musician Pablo Milanés and the Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the winner of the 1992 Nobel peace prize. But Menchú also paid a visit to CONAIE president Cholango, who gave her a document that accused Correa’s government of criminalizing social protest and of bringing legal cases against indigenous leaders. In the past five years, Cholango told Menchú, the government had failed to push forward agrarian reform, the redistribution of water rights, the democratization of the economy and the development of a state that recognizes Ecuador’s different nationalities. (El Tiempo (Quito) 1/10/12)
Camila Vallejo Dowling, the best known of the leaders of Chile’s militant student movement, was also expected at the celebration, but on Jan. 10 she announced via Twitter that she wouldn’t attend, because of “time and responsibilities here in Chile.” (El Comercio (Cuenca) 1/10/12)
Meanwhile, Correa offended women activists in his own PAIS (Proud and Sovereign Nation) Alliance with remarks he made on Dec. 31 during his weekly television program. “I don’t know if gender equality improves democracy,” he said. “What is certain is that it has improved the party”—a New Year’s Eve party for government ministers and members of the National Assembly. “What pretty Assembly members we have! We need to raise their salaries, since they didn’t have money to buy enough cloth, with all of them in miniskirts. My God…they told me they have some amazing legs.”
On Jan. 10 a group of women, including members of his party, sent Correa a letter saying that “[s]ince politics is also pedagogy and a president’s discourse can send many messages, allow us to remind you how the participation of women has improved democracy.” They noted that a democracy is incomplete if it excludes half the population, and that women have strengthened democracy by “questioning the traditional division between the public and the private spheres.” “Machismo too is violence,” they concluded. But another PAIS Alliance member, Loja province governor Alicia Jaramillo, defended Correa: “This is the first government that has included women in ministerial posts,” she said, attributing the president’s Dec. 31 remarks to his good humor. (Otra América website 1/10/12)
The Coordinating Committee for the Unity of the Lefts has chosen Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, to protest government policies with a national march “for life, democracy and the defense of natural resources.” The sponsoring coalition includes CONAIE, the National Union of Educators (UNE), the Unified Workers Front and the Federation of Secondary and University Students. (El Comercio 1/17/12)
*3. Honduras: Lawyer Killed After Reporting Police Abuses
Three unidentified men gunned down attorney José Ricardo Rosales the morning of Jan. 17 near his office or residence (the accounts differ) in the coastal city of Tela in the northern Honduran department of Atlántida. The murder came just four days after the San Pedro Sula daily El Tiempo ran a news report on Rosales’ claim that Tela police agents had been abusing detainees. Rosales may also have offended the authorities by carrying out a successful defense of Marco Joel Alvarez (“Unicorn”) against government charges that he was responsible for the March 2011 murder of radio and television journalist David Meza in the nearby city of La Ceiba. Meza had regularly criticized the police force on his programs.
Héctor Turcios, the chief of Tela’s Preventive Police, told reporters that the department didn’t have “a hypothesis for why [the killers] ended the lawyer’s existence.”
Some 30 lawyers have reportedly been killed in Honduras since 2008, while 17 journalists were murdered from 2010 through 2011. President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa has been conducting purges of the country’s 14,000 police agents over the last three months, but this has done little to end complaints that the police abuse detainees and collaborate with drug traffickers and other criminals [see Updates #1104, 1112]. Tela’s police force was removed just days before Rosales made his accusations, and a new force was brought in: the new agents were the ones Rosales accused of abusing detainees. “[I]f the previous agents go away and they send us others who are worse...we’re not accomplishing anything,” he told El Tiempo. (El Tiempo 1/13/12; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 1/18/12; AP 1/18/12 via El Nuevo Herald (Miami))
*4. Guatemala: Will Ríos Montt Finally Face Genocide Charges?
Former Guatemalan military dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) is to appear before a judge on Jan. 26 in what could become a trial for genocide. Ríos Montt headed the government during one of the bloodiest periods in a 36-year counterinsurgent war that left more than 200,000 people dead, mostly civilians. After the fighting ended in 1996 Ríos Montt re-emerged as a politician, leading the rightwing Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) and holding a seat in Congress from 2000 until this month. The legislative position gave him immunity from prosecution, which has now ended.
Guatemala’s new president, Otto Pérez Molina, who was inaugurated on Jan. 14, was a major in the army during the Ríos Montt dictatorship [see World War 4 Report 11/7/11]. He operated around Nebaj, El Quiché department, in the Ixil Mayan region, where the killings amounted to genocide according to a 1999 report by a truth commission backed by the United Nations. The new president denies any involvement in war crimes and says he’ll support efforts by the attorney general to bring human rights cases to trial. (New York Times 1/23/12)
Titular de Hoy: Guatemala, a documentary from 1983 which appeared on Finnish television, includes a scene in which Pérez Molina, then known in the Nebaj area as “Commander Tito,” is interviewed by US investigative reporter Allan Nairn. The scene, which was posted separately on YouTube in May 2011, shows Commander Tito standing near several battered corpses in Nebaj; one of his soldiers said these were captives Pérez Molina had “interrogated.” ( “Democracy Now!” 1/17/12)
*5. Cuba: Government Denies Prisoner Died From Hunger Strike
The Cuban government announced on Jan. 20 that a prisoner, Wilmar Villar Mendoza, had died the day before in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Santiago de Cuba. The government said Villar had been hospitalized six days before with pneumonia and had died of “generalized infection.” According to Villar’s wife, Maritza Pelegrino, the prisoner had been on hunger strike from Nov. 25 to Dec. 23 to protest his four-year prison sentence and had resumed the strike on Dec. 29. Elizardo Sánchez, a well-known Cuban dissident, said Villar had been active in with an opposition group since last summer.
US president Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement on Jan. 20 calling Villar “a young and courageous defender of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba who launched a hunger strike to protest his incarceration and succumbed to pneumonia.” The Cuban government denied that Villar had been on hunger strike or that he was a political prisoner; the Cubans said the US, Spain and Chile were “manipulating” the death and called them “interventionists…without moral authority.” (White House statement 1/20/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/21/12 from correspondent; El Universal (Mexico) 1/22/12 from correspondent)
On Jan. 12 the noted Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano visited Cuba for the first time since 2003, when he, along with Portuguese author José Saramago and other leftist intellectuals, criticized the Cuban government’s execution of three boat hijackers and the imprisonment of 75 dissidents. The occasion for Galeano’s visit was the Jan. 16 ceremony for the literature prize awarded annually by Casa de las Américas, a major Cuban cultural organization. “The true friend is the one who criticizes you to your face and praises you behind your back,” Galeano said during his visit, adding that he was quoting the late Carlos Fonseca Amador, a founder of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).
According to Galeano, his most famous work, The Open Veins of Latin America, failed to win the Casa de las Américas prize in 1971 because the jury didn’t consider the book “serious enough.” “It was a period in which the left still confused being serious with being boring,” he said. “Fortunately, this was changing, and in our days it is known that the best ally of the left is laughter.” (LJ 1/17/12 from correspondent)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti
Remembering the Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina: 2002 - 2012
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3411-remembering-the-social-movements-that-reimagined-argentina-2002-2012
Landless Peasants with 80 Families Occupy and Take Over Farm in Northern Uruguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3412-landless-peasants-with-80-families-occupy-and-take-over-farm-in-northern-uruguay
Brazil: Growing Pains in a Country Under Construction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3408-brazil-growing-pains-in-a-country-under-construction
Bolivia’s TIPNIS Highway Redux
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/20/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-highway-redux
Conga Mine Protests Continue as Peruvians Await Court Decision
http://nacla.org/news/2012/1/19/conga-mine-protests-continue-peruvians-await-court-decision
Regional Strike Paralyzes Hydroelectric Project in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3415-regional-strike-paralyzes-hyrdroelectric-project-in-colombia
Colombia: government blinks in regional strike against hydro project
http://ww4report.com/node/10737
Colombia: Caño-Limón pipeline blown up —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10741
Chavez: U.S Threats to Sanction Latin America Are “Absurd”
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6757
‘Removing the Veil’: El Salvador Apologizes for State Violence on 20th Anniversary of Peace Accords
http://nacla.org/news/2012/1/17/%E2%80%98removing-veil%E2%80%99-el-salvador-apologizes-state-violence-20th-anniversary-peace-accords
El Salvador: Pesticides Fill Graveyards in Rural Villages
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3407-el-salvador-pesticides-fill-graveyards-in-rural-villages
Guatemala’s Perez Molina wants to Discuss Drug Decriminalization
http://latindispatch.com/2012/01/19/guatemalas-perez-molina-wants-to-discuss-drug-decriminalization/
Mexican States Must End Impunity for Enforced Disappearances
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3418-mexican-states-must-end-impunity-for-enforced-disappearances-
The Narco’s Gag in Tamaulipas, Mexico: “Nothing left but to obey”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3409-the-narcos-gag-in-tamaulipas-mexico-nothing-left-but-to-obey
The Caribbean in 2012: Looking Forward
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/19/caribbean-2012-looking-forward
Former Dictator Lives the Good Life, as Haitian Government has “Deliberately Stalled” Investigation
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/former-dictator-lives-the-good-life-as-haitian-government-has-deliberately-stalled-investigation
Decline 'Friend' Request: Social Media Meets 21st Century Statecraft in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3410-decline-friend-request-social-media-meets-21st-century-statecraft-in-latin-america
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; for news, information and announcements in support of action for immigrant rights in the United States, subscribe to Immigrant Action at:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/subscribe/immigrantaction
You can also visit the Immigrant Action blog at:
http://immigrantaction.blogspot.com/
Order The Politics of Immigration: Questions & Answers, from Monthly Review Press, by Update editors Jane Guskin and David Wilson:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.com/
Issue #1114, January 22, 2012
1. Argentina: Subway Workers and Riders Unite Against Fare Hike
2. Ecuador: Indigenous and Women’s Groups Slam Correa
3. Honduras: Lawyer Killed After Reporting Police Abuses
4. Guatemala: Will Ríos Montt Finally Face Genocide Charges?
5. Cuba: Government Denies Prisoner Died From Hunger Strike
6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti
ISSN#: 1084 922X. Weekly News Update on the Americas covers news from Latin America and the Caribbean, compiled and written from a progressive perspective. It has been published weekly by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of Greater New York since 1990. For a subscription, write to weeklynewsupdate@gmail.com . It is archived at http://weeklynewsupdate.blogspot.com/
*1. Argentina: Subway Workers and Riders Unite Against Fare Hike
Argentine judge Fernando Juan Lima ruled on Jan. 16 that the Buenos Aires city government could continue for now with a 127% increase it had imposed for the subway fare on Jan. 6. A coalition including unions, student groups and political and social organizations had filed for an emergency injunction to halt the increase, which raises the fare to 2.5 pesos (about 58 cents).
Judge Lima rejected the emergency injunction on the grounds that the increase wouldn’t “cause irreparable harm” to the system’s two million users. But the judge noted that he hadn’t issued a final ruling on the coalition’s case against the increase, and he said he would act on that within 20 days.
The coalition--the Multi-Sector Committee Against the Fare Hike in the Subte (as the subway system is known)--didn’t limit itself to using legal maneuvers to fight the fare hike. The groups also collected more than 200,000 signatures on a petition against the increase, which they said would be a hardship for poorer riders, and presented it to Judge Lima. Subway workers protested the increase by opening the turnstiles during rush hours for about a week and letting passengers ride for free. [The Union Association of Subte and Premetro Workers (AGTSyP), part of the coalition, used this tactic when it sought recognition as a union in 2009; see Update #1004.]
As of Jan. 18 the coalition was determined to continue the fight but seemed divided on what tactics to follow after Lima ruled against the emergency injunction.
At the same time that he was facing angry subway riders and workers, Buenos Aires mayor Mauricio Macri was also in a dispute with the city’s “manteros,” vendors who sell handcrafts, blankets and clothing on Florida Street in the center of the city. On Jan. 16 the vendors blocked Corrientes Street to protest Macri’s decision the week before to send the Metropolitan police to remove them, a move that resulted in confrontations and injuries. The vendors have also protested by selling their wares in front of the Congress. They argue that their activities are protected by Article 83 of Law 1472, which allows artists and makers of handcrafts to occupy public space.
Until this year subsidies from the federal government made it possible to maintain low fares in the capital’s subway system. But the administration of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner--the head of a left-leaning section of the Justicialist Party (PJ, Peronist) who began her second four-year term on Dec. 10--is now drastically cutting subsidies for transportation and utilities. The Argentine consulting firm Econométrica projects that the growth rate for the national economy will fall to 2% this year, down from 7% in 2011, partly as a result of the global economic crisis. Facing a shortfall, the Fernández government is retreating from generous social spending that has helped contain conflicts in the decade since Argentina’s 2001-2002 economic crisis; the president’s critics say the spending also helped her win an easy electoral victory last October.
The decision to turn the subway over to the municipal government and withdraw the subsidy has a political benefit for the president, since it shifts the problem to Macri, one of Fernández’s main rivals, and his rightwing Republican Proposal (Pro) party. The federal government has agreed to continue to pay about half the old subsidy to the end of 2012. (Wall Street Journal 1/6/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/17/12 from correspondent; TeleSUR 1/17/12; Buenos Aires Herald 1/17/12; Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores (MST) website 1/18/12)
*2. Ecuador: Indigenous and Women’s Groups Slam Correa
On Jan. 10 the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), the country’s main indigenous umbrella group, issued a communiqué reporting a “surprising and inexplicable” police presence in the organization’s headquarters in Quito. “[A]round 9:45 am police arrived [in a ] truck [at] the CONAIE offices, and two police agents dressed in black entered inside the offices,” the group wrote. Asked to explain their presence, one agent mentioned a possible danger to CONAIE president Humberto Cholango; later the agents said they were there to protect a meeting of indigenous organizations scheduled for that day. CONAIE said it hadn’t reported any dangers or asked for protection, and the group denounced the “arbitrary and illegal acts against social organizations that [are] being implemented in Ecuador.” (CONAIE communiqué 1/10/12)
The incident shows the level of distrust that has developed between popular Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and many of the grassroots and leftist organizations that helped bring him to office five years ago. It came just as Correa was preparing to celebrate the fifth anniversary on Jan. 15 of his first inauguration and of the start of what he calls the “citizens’ revolution.”
Respected figures from the Latin American left and social movements and the arts attended festivities held in Cuenca, including Cuban musician Pablo Milanés and the Guatemalan indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the winner of the 1992 Nobel peace prize. But Menchú also paid a visit to CONAIE president Cholango, who gave her a document that accused Correa’s government of criminalizing social protest and of bringing legal cases against indigenous leaders. In the past five years, Cholango told Menchú, the government had failed to push forward agrarian reform, the redistribution of water rights, the democratization of the economy and the development of a state that recognizes Ecuador’s different nationalities. (El Tiempo (Quito) 1/10/12)
Camila Vallejo Dowling, the best known of the leaders of Chile’s militant student movement, was also expected at the celebration, but on Jan. 10 she announced via Twitter that she wouldn’t attend, because of “time and responsibilities here in Chile.” (El Comercio (Cuenca) 1/10/12)
Meanwhile, Correa offended women activists in his own PAIS (Proud and Sovereign Nation) Alliance with remarks he made on Dec. 31 during his weekly television program. “I don’t know if gender equality improves democracy,” he said. “What is certain is that it has improved the party”—a New Year’s Eve party for government ministers and members of the National Assembly. “What pretty Assembly members we have! We need to raise their salaries, since they didn’t have money to buy enough cloth, with all of them in miniskirts. My God…they told me they have some amazing legs.”
On Jan. 10 a group of women, including members of his party, sent Correa a letter saying that “[s]ince politics is also pedagogy and a president’s discourse can send many messages, allow us to remind you how the participation of women has improved democracy.” They noted that a democracy is incomplete if it excludes half the population, and that women have strengthened democracy by “questioning the traditional division between the public and the private spheres.” “Machismo too is violence,” they concluded. But another PAIS Alliance member, Loja province governor Alicia Jaramillo, defended Correa: “This is the first government that has included women in ministerial posts,” she said, attributing the president’s Dec. 31 remarks to his good humor. (Otra América website 1/10/12)
The Coordinating Committee for the Unity of the Lefts has chosen Mar. 8, International Women’s Day, to protest government policies with a national march “for life, democracy and the defense of natural resources.” The sponsoring coalition includes CONAIE, the National Union of Educators (UNE), the Unified Workers Front and the Federation of Secondary and University Students. (El Comercio 1/17/12)
*3. Honduras: Lawyer Killed After Reporting Police Abuses
Three unidentified men gunned down attorney José Ricardo Rosales the morning of Jan. 17 near his office or residence (the accounts differ) in the coastal city of Tela in the northern Honduran department of Atlántida. The murder came just four days after the San Pedro Sula daily El Tiempo ran a news report on Rosales’ claim that Tela police agents had been abusing detainees. Rosales may also have offended the authorities by carrying out a successful defense of Marco Joel Alvarez (“Unicorn”) against government charges that he was responsible for the March 2011 murder of radio and television journalist David Meza in the nearby city of La Ceiba. Meza had regularly criticized the police force on his programs.
Héctor Turcios, the chief of Tela’s Preventive Police, told reporters that the department didn’t have “a hypothesis for why [the killers] ended the lawyer’s existence.”
Some 30 lawyers have reportedly been killed in Honduras since 2008, while 17 journalists were murdered from 2010 through 2011. President Porfirio (“Pepe”) Lobo Sosa has been conducting purges of the country’s 14,000 police agents over the last three months, but this has done little to end complaints that the police abuse detainees and collaborate with drug traffickers and other criminals [see Updates #1104, 1112]. Tela’s police force was removed just days before Rosales made his accusations, and a new force was brought in: the new agents were the ones Rosales accused of abusing detainees. “[I]f the previous agents go away and they send us others who are worse...we’re not accomplishing anything,” he told El Tiempo. (El Tiempo 1/13/12; La Tribuna (Tegucigalpa) 1/18/12; AP 1/18/12 via El Nuevo Herald (Miami))
*4. Guatemala: Will Ríos Montt Finally Face Genocide Charges?
Former Guatemalan military dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-83) is to appear before a judge on Jan. 26 in what could become a trial for genocide. Ríos Montt headed the government during one of the bloodiest periods in a 36-year counterinsurgent war that left more than 200,000 people dead, mostly civilians. After the fighting ended in 1996 Ríos Montt re-emerged as a politician, leading the rightwing Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) and holding a seat in Congress from 2000 until this month. The legislative position gave him immunity from prosecution, which has now ended.
Guatemala’s new president, Otto Pérez Molina, who was inaugurated on Jan. 14, was a major in the army during the Ríos Montt dictatorship [see World War 4 Report 11/7/11]. He operated around Nebaj, El Quiché department, in the Ixil Mayan region, where the killings amounted to genocide according to a 1999 report by a truth commission backed by the United Nations. The new president denies any involvement in war crimes and says he’ll support efforts by the attorney general to bring human rights cases to trial. (New York Times 1/23/12)
Titular de Hoy: Guatemala, a documentary from 1983 which appeared on Finnish television, includes a scene in which Pérez Molina, then known in the Nebaj area as “Commander Tito,” is interviewed by US investigative reporter Allan Nairn. The scene, which was posted separately on YouTube in May 2011, shows Commander Tito standing near several battered corpses in Nebaj; one of his soldiers said these were captives Pérez Molina had “interrogated.” ( “Democracy Now!” 1/17/12)
*5. Cuba: Government Denies Prisoner Died From Hunger Strike
The Cuban government announced on Jan. 20 that a prisoner, Wilmar Villar Mendoza, had died the day before in the intensive care unit of a hospital in Santiago de Cuba. The government said Villar had been hospitalized six days before with pneumonia and had died of “generalized infection.” According to Villar’s wife, Maritza Pelegrino, the prisoner had been on hunger strike from Nov. 25 to Dec. 23 to protest his four-year prison sentence and had resumed the strike on Dec. 29. Elizardo Sánchez, a well-known Cuban dissident, said Villar had been active in with an opposition group since last summer.
US president Barack Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, released a statement on Jan. 20 calling Villar “a young and courageous defender of human rights and fundamental freedoms in Cuba who launched a hunger strike to protest his incarceration and succumbed to pneumonia.” The Cuban government denied that Villar had been on hunger strike or that he was a political prisoner; the Cubans said the US, Spain and Chile were “manipulating” the death and called them “interventionists…without moral authority.” (White House statement 1/20/12; La Jornada (Mexico) 1/21/12 from correspondent; El Universal (Mexico) 1/22/12 from correspondent)
On Jan. 12 the noted Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano visited Cuba for the first time since 2003, when he, along with Portuguese author José Saramago and other leftist intellectuals, criticized the Cuban government’s execution of three boat hijackers and the imprisonment of 75 dissidents. The occasion for Galeano’s visit was the Jan. 16 ceremony for the literature prize awarded annually by Casa de las Américas, a major Cuban cultural organization. “The true friend is the one who criticizes you to your face and praises you behind your back,” Galeano said during his visit, adding that he was quoting the late Carlos Fonseca Amador, a founder of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).
According to Galeano, his most famous work, The Open Veins of Latin America, failed to win the Casa de las Américas prize in 1971 because the jury didn’t consider the book “serious enough.” “It was a period in which the left still confused being serious with being boring,” he said. “Fortunately, this was changing, and in our days it is known that the best ally of the left is laughter.” (LJ 1/17/12 from correspondent)
*6. Links to alternative sources on: Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Guatemala, Mexico, Caribbean, Haiti
Remembering the Social Movements that Reimagined Argentina: 2002 - 2012
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/argentina-archives-32/3411-remembering-the-social-movements-that-reimagined-argentina-2002-2012
Landless Peasants with 80 Families Occupy and Take Over Farm in Northern Uruguay
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3412-landless-peasants-with-80-families-occupy-and-take-over-farm-in-northern-uruguay
Brazil: Growing Pains in a Country Under Construction
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3408-brazil-growing-pains-in-a-country-under-construction
Bolivia’s TIPNIS Highway Redux
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/20/bolivia%E2%80%99s-tipnis-highway-redux
Conga Mine Protests Continue as Peruvians Await Court Decision
http://nacla.org/news/2012/1/19/conga-mine-protests-continue-peruvians-await-court-decision
Regional Strike Paralyzes Hydroelectric Project in Colombia
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/colombia-archives-61/3415-regional-strike-paralyzes-hyrdroelectric-project-in-colombia
Colombia: government blinks in regional strike against hydro project
http://ww4report.com/node/10737
Colombia: Caño-Limón pipeline blown up —again
http://ww4report.com/node/10741
Chavez: U.S Threats to Sanction Latin America Are “Absurd”
http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/6757
‘Removing the Veil’: El Salvador Apologizes for State Violence on 20th Anniversary of Peace Accords
http://nacla.org/news/2012/1/17/%E2%80%98removing-veil%E2%80%99-el-salvador-apologizes-state-violence-20th-anniversary-peace-accords
El Salvador: Pesticides Fill Graveyards in Rural Villages
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3407-el-salvador-pesticides-fill-graveyards-in-rural-villages
Guatemala’s Perez Molina wants to Discuss Drug Decriminalization
http://latindispatch.com/2012/01/19/guatemalas-perez-molina-wants-to-discuss-drug-decriminalization/
Mexican States Must End Impunity for Enforced Disappearances
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/news-briefs-archives-68/3418-mexican-states-must-end-impunity-for-enforced-disappearances-
The Narco’s Gag in Tamaulipas, Mexico: “Nothing left but to obey”
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3409-the-narcos-gag-in-tamaulipas-mexico-nothing-left-but-to-obey
The Caribbean in 2012: Looking Forward
http://nacla.org/blog/2012/1/19/caribbean-2012-looking-forward
Former Dictator Lives the Good Life, as Haitian Government has “Deliberately Stalled” Investigation
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/relief-and-reconstruction-watch/former-dictator-lives-the-good-life-as-haitian-government-has-deliberately-stalled-investigation
Decline 'Friend' Request: Social Media Meets 21st Century Statecraft in Latin America
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3410-decline-friend-request-social-media-meets-21st-century-statecraft-in-latin-america
For more Latin America news stories from mainstream and alternative sources:
http://www.cipamericas.org/
http://latindispatch.com/
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/967/blastContent.jsp
http://www.ueinternational.org/Mexico_info/mlna.php
http://nacla.org/
http://upsidedownworld.org/
http://venezuelanalysis.com/
http://ww4report.com/node/
For immigration updates and events:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/
END
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