INTL Latin America and the Islands: Politics, Economics, and Military- September 2021

[Plain Jane]

August thread is here:

INTL - Latin America and the Islands: Politics, Economics, Military- - August 2021

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Colombia court refuses to try general accused in 104 murders

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A court refused Monday to allow a trial for a retired general accused of offering incentives that led soldiers to murder 104 civilians and pass them off as guerrilla fighters killed in combat during Colombia's long civil conflict.

apnews.com

Colombia court refuses to try general accused in 104 murders
By MANUEL RUEDAyesterday

FILE - In this Oct. 17, 2018 file photo, former Army General Mario Montoya arrives to testify before a peace tribunal investigating his role in extrajudicial killings of civilians during Colombia's long, armed conflict in Bogota, Colombia. Bogota’s Superior Tribunal ruled Monday, August 30, 2021, that Montoya is not under the jurisdiction of ordinary courts because he is cooperating with a special tribunal created by the 2016 peace deal between the government and the now disbanded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and has refused to allow a trial for the retired general accused of offering incentives that led soldiers to murder 104 civilians and pass them off as guerrilla fighters killed in combat during Colombia’s long civil conflict. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A court refused Monday to allow a trial for a retired general accused of offering incentives that led soldiers to murder 104 civilians and pass them off as guerrilla fighters killed in combat during Colombia’s long civil conflict.

Mario Montoya had appeared at a court hearing last week, where he was going to be charged with murder by the Attorney General’s Office. But Bogota’s Superior Tribunal stopped prosecutors from pressing charges while they considered the case.
The court ruled Monday that Montoya is not under the jurisdiction of ordinary courts because he is cooperating with a special tribunal created by the 2016 peace deal between the government and the now disbanded Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The ruling will be appealed by relatives of civilians killed by soldiers under Montoya’s command, who are hoping that the case sets a powerful precedent.


Montoya was commander of Colombia’s army between 2006 and 2008 and is the highest ranking officer who has faced charges so far over the executions of civilians, who were abducted by soldiers, killed and presented as rebel fighters in what is known as the “false positives” scandal.

Prosecutors say they have gathered evidence proving Montoya pressured his subordinates to increase the number of enemy fighters killed in combat and rewarded soldiers who provided the most kills with vacations and promotions. This policy allegedly motivated some soldiers to abduct civilians, murder them and present them as dead guerrilla fighters.

Montoya denies the charges. He says he sought only to get tactical results from his subordinates in fighting the rebels and did not seek greater kill rates.

Under Colombia’s peace deal with the FARC, soldiers and guerrilla fighters accused of war crimes can choose to collaborate with the tribunal known as the Special Jurisdiction for Peace. Those who help investigations and tell the truth about war crimes can avoid time in prison, and will instead receive alternative sentences that include paying reparations to victims or conducting community service.

Montoya has been cooperating with the tribunal since 2018.

Attorney General Francisco Barbosa, however, argued in a radio interview last week that he was constitutionally entitled to investigate accusations against the former general and did not want human rights abusers to “profit from the inaction of prosecutors.” Barbosa said evidence gathered against Montoya will be handed over to the peace tribunal, which can use it to further its own investigations.


According to the peace tribunal, at least 6,402 civilians were murdered by the Colombian army and presented as “false positives” between 2002 and 2008, when the killings were first revealed by journalists. In all, an estimated 262,000 people died as a result of the five-decade conflict.

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexican authorities and migrants continue to clash in south

TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — Another group of about 200 migrants started walking north from the southern Mexico city of Tapachula on Wednesday despite a heavy presence of National Guard troops and immigration agents that had dispersed similar groups in recent days, including earlier in the day.

apnews.com

Mexican authorities and migrants continue to clash in south
yesterday


TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — Another group of about 200 migrants started walking north from the southern Mexico city of Tapachula on Wednesday despite a heavy presence of National Guard troops and immigration agents that had dispersed similar groups in recent days, including earlier in the day.

Federal authorities have recently been allowing migrant groups to walk for hours and tire under sweltering heat before swooping in to detain them. Before dawn Wednesday, officials surprised migrants sheltering from the rain in in the nearby town of Mapastepec, chasing them between houses and businesses.

The enforcement efforts in Chiapas state follow an encounter over the weekend when media outlets, including The Associated Press filmed immigration agents kicking a migrant who was already on the ground. Mexican officials announced Tuesday that two agents involved had been suspended.


Mexican officials have not reported how many migrants have been detained in these operations or said where they have been taken.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said in his third state of the nation address Wednesday that “the human rights of migrants have not been violated.”

“The exceptional case from days ago, in which two immigration officials kicked a Haitian citizen, was attended to that same day and they were relieved of their duties and turned over to the corresponding internal control organ,” he said.
The majority of the migrants departing Tapachula in groups in recent days have been Haitian, though Cubans and Central Americans have also been present. The pressure has been building for weeks in Tapachula, where the few shelters are at capacity and migrants seeking asylum have grown frustrated at the slow advance of their cases.
The government has made clear it intends to contain migrants in southern Mexico. Last Friday, Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval said the main objective of the armed forces and National Guard is “to detain all migration” and “cover the northern border, the southern border with soldiers.”

Under criticism from human rights groups and international organizations, Mexico’s National Immigration Institute said Wednesday it was looking to work with United Nations agencies and the Roman Catholic Church “to establish a humanitarian camp in the state of Chiapas where the Haitian migrant population can receive attention.”

 

[Plain Jane]

Nicaragua presidential aspirant charged, will face trial

One-time Nicaragua presidential aspirant Cristiana Chamorro and one of her brothers were among five people formally charged with money laundering Thursday.

apnews.com

Nicaragua presidential aspirant charged, will face trial
yesterday



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FILE - In this May 21, 2021 file photo, Cristiana Chamorro, former director of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation for Reconciliation and Democracy, and daughter of a former president, arrives at the public Ministry where she was called for a meeting to explain alleged "inconsistencies" in financial reports filed with the government between 2015 and 2019 in Managua, Nicaragua. Nicaraguan authorities have accused on Tuesday, August 24, 2021, all of the children of former President Violeta Chamorro, journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro who is in exile in Costa Rica, Cristiana Chamorro who was running for president before being thrown into house arrest and Pedro Juaquin Chamorro who has been imprisoned, on money laundering charges. ( AP Photo/Esteban Felix, File)

MANAGUA, Nicaragua (AP) — One-time Nicaragua presidential aspirant Cristiana Chamorro and one of her brothers were among five people formally charged with money laundering Thursday, prosecutors announced.

In a statement, prosecutors said Chamorro, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and three former employees of the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation will be tried for money laundering and other alleged crimes.

Cristiana Chamorro has been under house arrest since June 2. Her arrest was one of the first of a wave of detentions against opposition leaders, including seven potential presidential candidates. President Daniel Ortega is seeking a fourth consecutive term in office Nov. 7.

Chamorro has maintained her innocence. She is the daughter of former President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

To clear the path toward re-election, Ortega’s government has moved against a number of nongovernmental organizations it views as opposition. The president has claimed that organizations receiving funding from abroad were part of a broader conspiracy to remove him from office in 2018.

Following the arrest of Chamorro and other former foundation employees, the U.S. State Department said in a statement, “Their detention on trumped up charges is an abuse of their rights, and it represents an assault on democratic values as well as a clear attempt to thwart free and fair elections.”

In January, she stepped down from her role at the foundation. A month later, it closed its operations in Nicaragua after passage of a “foreign agents” law designed to track foreign funding of organizations operating in the country.

The nongovernmental Nicaraguan Human Rights Center said Thursday the hearing took place at the Managua prison where many political prisoners are being held. There was no access for family members or the public.

Prosecutors said Thursday that five other accused in the case, including another Chamorro brother, journalist Carlos Fernando Chamorro, are fugitives in the case.

 

[Plain Jane]

US Coast Guard repatriates 91 migrants to Dominican Republic

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. Coast Guard said it repatriated 91 migrants to the Dominican Republic on Friday after they were recently detained in waters near Puerto Rico.

apnews.com

US Coast Guard repatriates 91 migrants to Dominican Republic
yesterday


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — The U.S. Coast Guard said it repatriated 91 migrants to the Dominican Republic on Friday after they were recently detained in waters near Puerto Rico.
The agency said the migrants were traveling aboard three different makeshift boats located early Thursday in various locations along the U.S. territory’s northwest coast.

The treacherous Mona Passage between Puerto Rico and the island of Hispaniola shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic has long been used as a smuggling route for migrants who are sometimes abandoned on nearby uninhabited islands.

 

[Plain Jane]

Could the Taliban join forces with Mexico's drug cartels? – DW – 09/04/2021

As the Taliban take control of Afghanistan, they will further tighten their grip on opium poppy cultivation. This in turn will have an impact on the global drugs trade and in particular Mexico's powerful cartels.

www.dw.com

Could the Taliban form an alliance with Mexico's drug cartels?
As the Taliban take control of Afghanistan, they will further tighten their grip on opium poppy cultivation. This in turn will have an impact on the global drugs trade and in particular Mexico's powerful cartels.




A huge proportion of global heroin stems from poppies grown in Afghanistan

Afghanistan and Mexico might appear distant from one another on a world map and are also separated by major historical, sociological and religious differences. But the Taliban and the Mexican cartels are united by the fact that they are both financially dependent on drug trafficking and use extreme violence to expand their political power and control of territory. Ahead of the elections in Mexico in June, numerous candidates were threatened and killed by the cartels, which supported other candidates and bought votes more openly than ever before.

The Mexican drug cartels are notoriously violent
In 2009, renowned experts had already presented evidence to the US Congress of the global perils posed by the Taliban and Mexico's cartels as "transnational drug-trafficking organizations" at a US Congress hearing, pointing out dangerous similarities that have only increased since then.

Afghanistan, Mexico and Myanmar control 95%
Roughly 95% of the world's opium poppies are cultivated in Afghanistan, Mexico and Myanmar, with all the illegal production and trafficking of heroin and other opiates that this entails. In Mexico, drug cartels are responsible for this and have the support of government officials. In Afghanistan, according to US and UN documents, producers are in direct contact with the Taliban. They also were complicit with the government — including the US-backed one. Experts at the US Congress hearing in 2009 estimated that 50% of Afghanistan's GDP that year stemmed from the proceeds of the illegal drugs trade.

Often Afghan farmers cannot afford to cultivate other crops than poppies

The Taliban have always had an ambiguous attitude: Consumption of opiates is banned but not the cultivation and sale of opium poppies. According to a US State Department report released early this year, most opium production in Afghanistan was taking place in regions already under Taliban control or at least their influence. It said that the Taliban derived a considerable income from the trade, pointing out that this fueled conflict, undermined the state of law, encouraged corruption and was also a contributing factor to drug abuse in the country.

Watch video01:53
How the Taliban fund themselves with drugs, mining and extortion
A UN report published in April corroborated these findings and drew a direct link between the Taliban and opium poppy cultivation. It said that the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan had increased between 2019 and 2020 from 163,000 to 224,000 hectares (402,780 to 553,500 acres). Moreover, though 21 hectares had been eradicated in 2019, none had been in 2020.

Could rivals work together?
The international narcotics business has spawned a number of cartels in Mexico. The Sinaloa Cartel is currently the fastest-growing one and controls the land where poppy cultivation is most profitable. It is thus a potential rival for the Taliban. But the fact that the cartel and the Islamist group serve different markets means that they could actually complement each other.

Opium poppy production is illegal in Mexico but highly lucrative

According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Sinoloa Cartel almost has a monopoly on the US heroin market. The Pentagon believes it to be present in 60% of the world's countries from EU and West African states to India, China and Russia — all nations where drugs from Afghanistan are also sold. For the moment, the Mexican cartel is mostly responding to demand for South American-made cocaineand synthetic drugs. But it would not be the first time that organizations, which are actually in competition, came together to increase their profits and political influence.

Translated from a German adaptation of a Spanish text written by the Mexican journalist and author Anabel Hernandez, who has been living in Europe ever since receiving threats in her home country. In 2019, she won the DW Freedom of Speech Award.

 

[Plain Jane]

Migrant caravan broken up again in southern Mexico

Mexican border agents and police have broken up a caravan of hundreds of migrants who had set out from southernmost Mexico.

apnews.com

Click to copy
Migrant caravan broken up again in southern Mexico
By MARCO UGARTEyesterday



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Mexican immigration agents detain a Central American migrant who is part of a caravan heading north in Huixtla, Chiapas state, Mexico, Sunday, Sept. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

HUIXTLA, Mexico (AP) — Mexican border agents and police broke up a caravan of hundreds of migrants Sunday who had set out from southernmost Mexico — the fourth such caravan officials have raided in recent days.

The group of about 800 — largely Central Americans, Haitians, Venezuelans and Cubans — had spent then night at a basketball court near Huixtla, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) up the road from the border city of Tapachula where they had been kept awaiting processing by Mexican immigration officials.

But shortly before dawn, immigration agents backed by police with anti-riot gear went into the crowd, pushing many into trucks.

Hundreds of the migrants escaped running toward a river and hid in the vegetation.

“They began to hit me all over,” a woman said amid tears, alleging that police also beat her hustband and pulled one of her daughters from her arms.

“Until they give me my daughter, I’m not leaving,” she told an Associated Press camera crew. But immigration agents surrounded the woman, her husband nd other child and detained them.
The group was at least the fourth to be broken up over the past week after heading out in a caravan north, frustrated by the slow pace of of

The government has insisted that excessive force against a Haitian migrant caught on camera the past weekend was an aberration and two immigration agents were suspended.

Mexico has faced immigration pressures from the north, south and within its own borders in recent weeks as thousands of migrants have crossed its southern border, the United States has sent thousands more back from the north and a U.S. court has ordered the Biden administration to renew a policy of making asylum seekers wait in Mexico for long periods of time.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday the strategy of containing migrants in the south was untenable on its own and more investment is needed in the region to keep Central Americans from leaving their homes.

Thousands of mostly Haitian migrants stuck in Tapachula have increasingly protested in recent weeks. Many have been waiting there for months, some up to a year, for asylum requests to be processed.

Mexico’s refugee agency has been overwhelmed. So far this year, more than 77,000 people have applied for protected status in Mexico, 55,000 of those in Tapachula, where shelters are full.

Unable to work legally and frustrated by the delay and poor conditions, hundreds have set out north.

 

[jward]

Michele Florio
@MikiAV8BHarrier

Tensions between #Argentina and #Chile over territorial disputes in the far south. Chile moves a quota of #F16 to the south in support of the #F5 located in the area In the meantime, the Argentine sailing training ship ARA Libertad cancels the visit to Valparaiso

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1434419713149444098

View: https://twitter.com/MikiAV8BHarrier/status/1434419713149444098?s=20

 

[Plain Jane]

Bolsonaro supporters force entry into Brazil capital's mall

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro broke through police roadblocks Monday night that had sought to prevent access to the capital's central mall on the eve of a demonstration scheduled to coincide with Brazil's Independence Day.

apnews.com

Bolsonaro supporters force entry into Brazil capital’s mall
today



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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro waves to supporters outside Planalto presidential palace in Brasilia, Brazil, Monday, Sept. 6, 2021. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Supporters of President Jair Bolsonaro broke through police roadblocks Monday night that had sought to prevent access to the capital’s central mall on the eve of a demonstration scheduled to coincide with Brazil’s Independence Day.

The Federal District’s security secretariat said in a statement that officers had been deployed in an effort to control the situation. Video shared on social media showed trucks progressing while blaring their horns as hundreds of people dressed in the national green-and-yellow colors walked alongside and cheered.

Bolsonaro has been working to mobilize his biggest nationwide street demonstration yet and project strength following a string of setbacks, particularly at the hands of Brazil’s Supreme Court. But it carries risk of embarrassment if crowd numbers fall short or if there is violence perceived as stemming from the president’s influence.


Forced entry into the mall, called the Esplanade of Ministries, heightened a sense of alert ahead of Tuesday’s demonstration, which some analysts have warned runs a risk of resembling the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. For over a month, Bolsonaro has been aiming his ire at two of the top court’s justices in particular.

As of late Monday, Bolsonaro supporters had reached the opposite end of the mall, where police stood guard behind metal barricades outside the Congress and the Supreme Court.

Convoys of trucks and busses have been streaming toward the capital of Brasilia and Brazil’s biggest city, Sao Paulo, where the nation’s two biggest demonstrations are set to take place Tuesday and Bolsonaro will speak.

 

[Plain Jane]

Brazilians stage mass rallies in support of Bolsonaro’s battle with judiciary

Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions…

www.france24.com

Brazilians stage mass rallies in support of Bolsonaro’s battle with judiciary
Issued on: 07/09/2021 - 04:54

People take part in a demonstration to support President Jair Bolsonaro on Brazil's independence day in Sao Paulo on September 7, 2021. © Paulo Lopes, AFP
Text by:NEWS WIRES
9 min
Listen to the article
Tens of thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets in Brazil Tuesday in a show of support on independence day for President Jair Bolsonaro, who is locked in an all-out political battle with institutions including the Supreme Court.


Anti-Bolsonaro protesters also gathered for huge demonstrations in cities across the country, making the annual national day festivities a high-risk event, with just over a year to go to elections that polls currently put the far-right president on track to lose.

Bolsonaro, whose popularity is at an all-time low, is seeking to fire up his base and flex his political muscle in the face of a flagging economy, soaring unemployment and inflation, and a series of investigations targeting him and his inner circle.
With hardline supporters urging a military intervention to give Bolsonaro unfettered power, there are fears the day's rallies could turn violent, with echoes of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in support of former president Donald Trump -- to whom Bolsonaro is often compared.


"This is a day for the Brazilian people, who will tell us which way to go," Bolsonaro said in brief comments outside the presidential residence, where he kicked off the day's events presiding over a flag-raising ceremony and military show of strength complete with Air Force flyover, paratroop landing and special forces display.

"Our country can't continue to be held hostage by one or two people," said the former army captain.
"I'm going to keep playing within the four lines (of the constitution). But from now on, I'm not going to let one or two other people play outside them."

That was an apparent reference to Supreme Court Justices Alexandre de Moraes and Luis Roberto Barroso, whom Bolsonaro accuses of attacking him and blocking his ability to govern.
Bolsonaro, 66, has declared all-out political war on both justices, including a request for Moraes to be impeached.

The Supreme Court has notably ordered an investigation of Bolsonaro and his inner circle over allegations of systematically spreading fake news from within the government.

The president also faces a Senate inquiry into his government's widely criticized handling of Covid-19, which has claimed more than 580,000 lives in Brazil, second only to the United States.

Pro-Bolsonaro Brazilians rally as president criticises Supreme Court justices

03:44
'Ultimatum'
Heavy security measures have been implemented in major cities including Brasilia and Sao Paulo to avoid clashes. If all goes according to plan, pro- and anti-Bolsonaro protesters will not cross paths.

Bolsonaro later took off for a helicopter flyover of the Esplanade of Ministries, where a large crowd of cheering, flag-waving supporters awaited him.

Security forces had set up a heavy cordon around the nearby square flanked by the presidential palace, Congress and the Supreme Court, where hundreds of pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators tore down a police blockade late Monday.

Bolsonaro plans to attend rallies in both Brasilia and economic capital Sao Paulo on Tuesday, which marks 199 years since Brazil declared independence from Portugal.

He has vowed to draw a crowd of more than two million to Sao Paulo's Avenida Paulista.
Bolsonaro said last week that the Supreme Court judges should consider the rallies an "ultimatum" -- the latest in a long list of ominous warnings aimed at Congress and the courts.

'Taking our freedom'
Security experts are concerned over the presence of armed military and police during the demonstrations -- two key groups of Bolsonaro backers.

With polls putting him on track to lose badly to leftist ex-leader Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva in next year's elections, Bolsonaro is hoping to use the rally to energize his supporters.

"I'm here to fight for our freedom, to free Brazil from this filthy band of corrupt politicians on the Supreme Court who want to take away our freedom," one, 45-year-old security guard Marcio Souza, told AFP in Brasilia.

"We voted for President Bolsonaro but we're being governed by the Supreme Court," said another, dentist Morgana Barcelos Freitas, 27.
"He's not able to govern the country."
(AFP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Guyana again rejects Venezuelan claims to its territory

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Venezuela's socialist government and its opposition have agreed on at least one thing: Both claim that most of the neighboring nation of Guyana should be part of Venezuela.

apnews.com

Guyana again rejects Venezuelan claims to its territory
yesterday


GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Venezuela’s socialist government and its opposition have agreed on at least one thing: Both claim that most of the neighboring nation of Guyana should be part of Venezuela.

Guyana’s government on Wednesday formally denounced the accord signed this week by Venezuelan negotiators who are trying to find a way out of their nation’s political impasse. It called the agreement “an overt threat to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Guyana.”

“Guyana cannot be used as an altar of sacrifice for settlement of Venezuela’s internal political differences,” it said. “While the government of Guyana welcomes domestic accord within Venezuela, an agreement defying international law and process is not a basis for mediating harmony.”

The Venezuelan negotiators held the first of what are expected to be several rounds of talks in Mexico over the weekend and reached only vague agreements on finding some way to help Venezuelans meet their needs and fight the coronavirus pandemic.


But they did sign a pact reasserting Venezuela’s claim to about two thirds of what is now Guyana.

Venezuelan governments have long rejected an 1899 demarcation of the border by an international tribunal that had included the US, Britain and Russia. Guyana has taken the issue to the World Court in The Netherlands, but Venezuela has said it will not recognize any ruling by that body.

The issue has become more tense since 2015, when oil companies found large deposits of oil and gas in waters claimed by both nations. In 2019, a Venezuelan military helicopter tried to land on a vessel operated by ExxonMobil that was conducting surveys off Guyana’s coast.

 

[Plain Jane]

Brazil: Pro-Bolsonaro truckers end blockade – DW – 09/10/2021

Truckers in Brazil protesting in support of President Jair Bolsonaro have ended their three-day strike. The blockade caused paralysis on federal highways across the country.

www.dw.com

Brazil: Pro-Bolsonaro truckers end blockade
Truckers in Brazil protesting in support of President Jair Bolsonaro have ended their three-day strike. The blockade caused paralysis on federal highways across the country.




The truck drivers' protests had blocked access to the Brazil's Supreme Court headquarters

Truck drivers in Brazil ended their multi-day blockade of federal highways on Thursday, after clogging roads for days in support of President Jair Bolsonaro.

The protests sparked concerns that the far-right president had lost control of some of his most ardent supporters following his inflammatory comments against the country's top court earlier this week.

What is the latest?
Semi-trucks were still heavily concentrated along roads in 13 of 27 states, but there were "no remaining blockages on the national road network," Brazil's Infrastructure Ministry said.
The move comes after Bolsonaro issued a reluctant audio message calling for them to stop.

"Tell our allies the truckers that the blockades are hurting the economy. It causes shortages, inflation — it harms everyone, especially the poor," he said in a message on Wednesday.

The president also met with several truckers on Thursday in an effort to defuse the situation.

Watch video02:24
Bolsonaro draws rival rallies on Brazil's Independence Day
The three-day blockade began on Tuesday during the country's Independence Day. Bolsonaro held massive rallies where he instigated against perceived political enemies on the Supreme Court and in the country's election commission.

Brazilian truckers in support of Bolsonaro
While Bolsonaro was eager to avoid a major strike like the one that crippled the Brazilian economy in 2018, he also does not want to alienate a key constituency.

He gained the support of many of the country's truckers by lending support to their earlier protest. Bolsonaro has long sided with truckers over high fuel prices.

In an audio message that circulated among their group chats Wednesday night, Bolsonaro addressed them directly.

Watch video01:50
Vaccine skepticism declining in Brazil
The Associated Press reported that many truckers were weary of believing the audio was genuine, but Infrastructure Minister Tarcisio Gomes de Freitas confirmed it was in a follow up video message.

"We know everyone is concerned with improving the country's situation, everyone is concerned with resolving serious problems, but we can't try to resolve a problem by creating another, particularly hurting the most vulnerable people,'' he said.

Gomes de Freitas added: "That's the president's concern. I ask you all to listen attentively, hear the president's words.''

Bolsonaro poll numbers in decline
Bolsonaro is facing several battles on multiple fronts. He has presided over the world's second-deadliest outbreak of COVID-19 while grappling with double-digit inflation, persistent unemployment — all of which have contributed to his declining poll numbers.

Watch video12:01
COVID-19 Special: Facing Latin America's worst outbreak
The truckers have assisted him in showing strength as his approval ratings slide and early polling shows him losing reelection next year.

After his incendiary words on Tuesday's holiday for Brazilian Independence Day, truckers mobilized in force, even parking among the ministries of the capital, Brasilia, with protests signs that read "Military intervention with Bolsonaro in power," and "Prison for the corrupt justices of the Supreme Court."

Not every trucker was wholly supportive of the effort, with some saying their vehicles had been sabotaged by coworkers who are supportive of Bolsonaro.

Bruno Rodrigues, 32, who was carrying auto parts in his truck and said he had been stopped an hour south of Sao Paolo at 4 a.m. by men who tried to smash his windshield with rocks but had succeeded in slashing a tire of his vehicle.

He said he was losing time for deliveries on the road and would have to pay for the tire out of pocket.

"It's outrageous. If the stoppage had some benefit, OK, but they are hurting their own brothers of the road," he told Reuters news agency.
rs, ar/sms (AFP, AP, Reuters)

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti's PM 'invited' to testify in president slaying case – DW – 09/11/2021

A prosecutors' invitation to interview Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he had been in contact with one of the key suspects in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

www.dw.com

Haiti's PM Ariel Henry 'invited' to testify in president slaying case
A prosecutors' invitation to interview Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he had been in contact with one of the key suspects in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.




Henry was appointed as Haiti's prime minister in July

Haiti's chief prosecutor on Friday invited Prime Minister Ariel Henry for an interview on why he allegedly spoke to one of the main suspects in the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

According to prosecutor Bedford Claude's invitation to the prime minister, there had been a number of calls between Henry and wanted fugitive Joseph Felix Badio.


Watch video02:18
Key suspect in Haiti president's killing arrested: police
Geolocation of calls allegedly pinpoints suspect's position
The prosecutor said it was "confirmed" that Henry had exchanged two phone calls with Badio on July 7, three hours after the murder took place.

According to the geolocation of the calls, the prosecutor noted that Badio had been in Pelerin 5, the neighborhood of the president’s residence and the scene of the crime.

Haitian police have posted a $60,000 (€51,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of Badio or two other suspects wanted in connection with planning the assassination.

Investigators claim Badio, a former Justice Ministry official, may have ordered Moise's murder.

Watch video03:59
Political chaos in Haiti: Prof. Günter Maihold speaks to DW
An invitation, not a summons
In the letter to Henry, the prosecutor explained that the request was an invitation and not a summons.

This was due to the fact that only a president could authorize an official summons. Considering the country was now without a president, the prosecutor said the prime minister was therefore being "invited."

"The head of the criminal prosecution would be grateful if you could present yourself... to cooperate with Haitian justice if you so wish, taking into account the restrictions given your status as a senior state official," the letter read.

Dozens in custody
Haitian authorities say there are 44 people held in custody on suspicion of taking part in Moise's assassination. They include 18 Colombians and 12 members of Moise's security detail.

Moise was gunned down when heavily armed assassins stormed his residence in the country's capital Port-au-Prince on July 7. His wife was also shot, but survived. Moise's killing plunged even deeper into turmoil.


Watch video01:16
Assassination of President Jovenel Moise deepens crisis in Haiti

 

[Plain Jane]

Peru: Abimael Guzmán, head of Shining Path insurgency, dies

The Peruvian government says Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, has died in a military hospital after an illness.

apnews.com

Peru: Abimael Guzmán, head of Shining Path insurgency, dies
By FRANKLIN BRICEÑOtoday



1 of 8
FILE - In this Sept. 1992 file photo, Abimael Guzman, the founder and leader of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, shouts inside of a jail cell after being captured in Lima, Peru. The Peruvian government reported Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021, that Guzman died after an illness. (AP File Photo)

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the brutal Shining Path insurgency in Peru who was captured in 1992, died on Saturday in a military hospital after an illness. He was 86.
Guzmán died at 6:40 a.m. after suffering from an infection, Justice Minister Aníbal Torres said.

Guzmán, a former philosophy professor, launched an insurgency against the state in 1980 and presided over numerous car bombings and assassinations in the years that followed.
Guzmán was captured in 1992 and sentenced to life in prison for terrorism and other crimes.

President Pedro Castillo tweeted that Guzmán was responsible for taking ’’countless″ lives.

“Our position condemning terrorism is firm and unwavering. Only in democracy will we build a Peru of justice and development for our people,” Castillo said.

Even so, Castillo has faced criticism over alleged links of some of his Cabinet ministers to the Shining Path. Primer Minister Guido Bellido has been investigated by authorities over his alleged sympathy for the group. Last week, a media outlet made public police records from the 1980s that describe Labor Minister Iber Maraví as a Shining Path member and a fugitive.

“We do not forget the horror of that time, and his death will not erase his crimes,” Economy Minister Pedro Francke said.

Guzmán preached a messianic vision of a classless Maoist utopia based on pure communism, considering himself the “Fourth Sword of Marxism” after Karl Marx, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mao Zedong. He advocated a peasant revolution in which rebels would first gain control of the countryside and then advance to the cities.

Guzmán’s movement declared armed struggle on the eve of Peru’s presidential elections in May 1980, the first democratic vote after 12 years of military rule.

Throughout the 1980s, the man known to his followers as Presidente Gonzalo built up an organization that grew to 10,000 armed fighters before his capture inside a Lima safehouse in September 1992 by a special intelligence group of the Peruvian police backed by the United States. Since then, he was housed in a military prison on the shores of the Pacific that was built to hold him.

By the time Guzmán called for peace talks a year after his arrest, guerrilla violence had claimed tens of thousands of lives in Peru, displaced at least 600,000 people and caused an estimated $22 billion in damage.

“Unlike other leftwing insurgent groups in the region, (the Shining Path) targeted civilians and actively sought to terrorize them, both in the cities and in the countryside,” Noam Lupu, associate director of the Latin American Public Opinion Project at Vanderbilt University, said in an email about Shining Path. “The fear that this generated in Peru was extraordinary, and it has marked Peruvian politics and society since. Shining Path’s violence is a big part of why Castillo’s is the first explicitly leftist presidential administration in Peru since the 1980s.”

A truth commission in 2003 blamed the Shining Path for more than half of nearly 70,000 estimated deaths and disappearances caused by various rebel groups and brutal government counterinsurgency efforts between 1980 and 2000.

Yet it lived on in a political movement formed by Guzmán’s followers that sought amnesty for all “political prisoners,” including the Shining Path founder. The Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Right failed, however, to register as a political party in 2012 in the face of fierce opposition from Peruvians with bitter memories of the destruction brought by the Shining Path.

In its songs and slogans, the Shining Path celebrated bloodletting, describing death as necessary to “irrigate” the revolution.

Its militants bombed electrical towers, bridges and factories in the countryside, assassinated mayors and massacred villagers. In the insurgency’s later years, they targeted civilians in Lima with indiscriminate bombings.

For 12 years, Peruvian authorities could not crack the Shining Path’s ranks, organized in a near-impenetrable vertical cell structure. Guzmán was nearly captured at a safehouse in Lima in June 1990, but slipped away.

A January 1991 police raid in Lima found a videotape showing Guzmán and other rebel leaders mourning at the funeral of his wife, Augusta La Torre, known as “Comrade Norah.” About 15 years Guzmán’s junior, La Torre was No. 2 in the Shining Path’s command structure before dying under mysterious circumstances in 1988.

Analysts believe she may have been murdered or forced to commit suicide over an internal political dispute.

The video showed a portly Guzmán, wearing thick glasses and snapping his fingers as he drunkenly danced to music from the 1960s movie “Zorba the Greek.” It was the first image Peruvians had seen of him since a mug shot taken during a 1978 arrest.

After La Torre died, she was replaced as No. 2 by Elena Iparraguirre, alias “Comrade Miriam,” who later also became Guzmán’s wife.

Guzmán married Iparraguirre in 2010 at the maximum-security prison inside the naval base in Lima where he was serving a life term. Iparraguirre, also captured in 1992, was brought from the women’s prison for the ceremony.

Guzmán was initially sentenced to life imprisonment by a secret military tribunal, but Peru’s top court ruled in 2003 that the original sentencing was unconstitutional and ordered a new trial. He also received a life sentence at the 2006 retrial.

The Shining Path was severely weakened after Guzmán’s capture and his later calls for peace talks. Small bands of rebels have nevertheless remained active in remote valleys, producing cocaine and protecting drug runners.

Guzmán was born the illegitimate son of a prosperous trader in Tambo, Arequipa, in Peru’s southern Andes on Dec. 3, 1934.

He studied law and philosophy at the University of San Agustin in Arequipa, where he wrote two graduate theses: “The Theory of Space in Kant” and another on law titled “The Democratic-Bourgeois State.”

“Mr. Guzmán was an extraordinarily brilliant man, very studious, very disciplined,” recalled Miguel Rodriguez Rivas, one of his professors.

Guzmán took a teaching job in 1963 at the state University of San Cristobal de Huamanga in Ayacucho, an impoverished central Andean capital neglected for centuries by Peru’s traditional power elite in coastal Lima.

In Ayacucho, he joined the pro-Chinese Bandera Roja political party, or “Red Flag,” becoming head of its “military commission” and visiting China in 1965.

Later returning to Ayacucho, Guzmán discovered that political rivals had expelled him from the party and he formed his own splinter group.

A descendant of the white elite that had governed Peru since the Spanish destroyed the Inca empire nearly 500 years earlier, Guzmán recruited the sons and daughters of Quechua-speaking Indigenous peasants as he gradually took control of the university.

During the 1970s, his student followers spanned out into the countryside to conduct detailed studies of communities that would be used years later to consolidate guerrilla control in the zone.

Over 10 years, Guzmán patiently planned before launching his war on what he characterized as Peru’s “rotten and antiquated” state, taking the government by surprise.

Peruvian officials were debating what to do with Guzmán’s body.

Torres told state television they would study the possibility of cremation and warned that “paying homage to or mobilizing in the memory of Abimael Guzmán” would be considered an apology for terrorism.

Sebastián Chávez, Guzmán’s lawyer, said that by law the decision belongs to his wife, Iparraguirre, who is in a prison in Lima.

“She will decide what steps will be taken,” he said.

 

[Plain Jane]

Brazil protests show low street support for impeachment push

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Turnout at protests across Brazil against President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday was far smaller than rallies the president called earlier this week, underscoring that pressure from the streets remains insufficient to drive efforts seeking his impeachment.

apnews.com

Brazil protests show low street support for impeachment push
By MARCELO SILVA DE SOUSAyesterday



1 of 7
Opposition groups extend a giant banner that reads in Portuguese "Bolsonaro Get Out, Impeachment now," during a protest against Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, at Avenida Paulista, Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sunday, Sep. 12, 2021. Opposition groups marched against President Jair Bolsonaro, demanding his resignation for mishandling the pandemic, corruption over vaccine contracts and a poor economy. (AP Photo/Marcelo Chello)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Turnout at protests across Brazil against President Jair Bolsonaro on Sunday was far smaller than rallies the president called earlier this week, underscoring that pressure from the streets remains insufficient to drive efforts seeking his impeachment.

Many of those protesting dressed all in white, as instructed by political groups that organized the demonstrations in at least 19 states. There was a notable absence of leftist political parties, which diminished turnout.

“Bolsonaro is in the middle of a political crisis, but public opinion has so far not exerted pressure on lawmakers from the center for impeachment,” said Leonardo Avritzer, professor of political science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais. “Impeachment can come if lawmakers understand that they begin to run risks of not being elected in 2022 by continuing to support the Brazilian president.”

Sunday’s protest targeted the government for allegedly mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic and surging inflation, particularly for mainstays like food and electricity. But, for some, the demonstration acquired fresh urgency after Sept. 7 rallies at which Bolsonaro stepped up his attacks on the Supreme Court and threatened to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis.

Centrist lawmakers told The Associated Press this week that turnout at Sunday’s demonstrations would be decisive in determining whether to push for impeachment.

“Enough of the orders of this psychopath (Bolsonaro). We want vaccines in the arm and food on our plates,” said Alessandra Amorim, an accountant who joined a rally in Sao Paulo. “It looks like we are defeated, that we don’t have strength. We want vaccines in our arms and food on our plates. Enough of Bolsonaro.”

The president’s approval ratings have steadily declined throughout the year, but he remains far more popular than prior presidents who were impeached — most recently Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party in 2016.

Unlike in 2016, people aren’t broadly united behind an alternative or project, said Leandro Consentino, a professor of political science at Insper, a university in Sao Paulo. In addition, he said many political leaders want to resolve the political crisis with the 2022 elections, when Bolsonaro is expected to seek another term.

As Tuesday’s pro-Bolsonario demonstrations showed, the president is still able to energize his followers. He got a rousing reception from demonstrators in Sao Paulo and the capital, Brasilia, as he lit into the Supreme Court. He declared he will no longer abide by rulings from Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who will assume the presidency of the nation’s electoral tribunal next year. He also said only God can remove him from the presidency.

Many called his comments “undemocratic,” including Supreme Court Chief Justice Luiz Fux, who said that disobeying judicial rulings or encouraging others to do so would constitute an impeachable crime. Bolsonaro later backtracked in a statement claiming his comments were made in the “heat of the moment” and he hadn’t meant to attack other government branches.

Over 130 impeachment requests have been filed since the start of Bolsonaro’s administration, but the lower house’s speaker, Arthur Lira, and his predecessor have declined to open proceedings.

Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers Party, one of the parties with greatest capacity to mobilize street protests, didn’t participate in Sunday’s demonstrations. Party president Gleisi Hoffman said it wasn’t invited to join the events, although it supported the cause.

But the party may not want impeachment given that da Silva holds a significant lead in early polls for the 2022 presidential contest, said Consentino, the political science professor.

“Lula is in a comfortable setting to go to an election with Bolsonaro,” Consentino said.

“Defeating him would be the best scenario for the Workers Party to return triumphant to the presidency.”

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti ombudsman demands PM resignation amid slaying probe

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection posted a video Monday demanding that Prime Minister Ariel Henry step down as authorities seek to interview him about telephone calls he allegedly had with a key suspect in the president’s assassination.

apnews.com

Haiti ombudsman demands PM resignation amid slaying probe
By EVENS SANON and DÁNICA COTOyesterday

FILE - In this July 20, 2021 file photo, Haiti's designated Prime Minister Ariel Henry gestures during his appointment ceremony in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, weeks after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise on July 7 at his home. Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection is demanding on Monday, Sept. 13, 2021, that Prime Minister Henry step down as authorities seek to interview him about telephone calls he allegedly had with a key suspect in the president’s assassination. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn, File)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection posted a video Monday demanding that Prime Minister Ariel Henry step down as authorities seek to interview him about telephone calls he allegedly had with a key suspect in the president’s assassination.

Attorney Renan Hédouville, who directs the ombudsman-like office, said Henry should appear at the public prosecutor’s office as requested to help shed light on the July 7 killing of Jovenel Moïse at his private home. He described the office’s decision to call for Henry’s resignation as “objective and courageous” and it also urged the international community to stop supporting Henry.

“We would all love to know the content of that conversation,” Hédouville said of the reported calls between Henry and Joseph Badio, a fugitive who once worked at Haiti’s Ministry of Justice and at the government’s anti-corruption unit until he was fired in May amid accusations of violating unspecified ethical rules.

On Friday, Bedford Claude, chief prosecutor for the capital of Port-au-Prince, issued a letter to Henry asking to meet with him this week if the prime minister agreed. Claude said he has evidence that the men talked twice in the pre-dawn hours shortly after the assassination and was seeking details about the content of those phone calls.

“The prime minister cannot remain in his post without clearing up these dark areas,” Hédouville said. “He must wash away all suspicion.”

Also on Monday, Haitian Justice Minister Rockfeller Vincent issued a strongly worded letter to the chief of Haiti’s National Police demanding he immediately increase security for Claude, whom he said had received “important and disturbing” threats in the past five days.

Vincent also ordered Police Chief Léon Charles to tell all officers not to carry out any political orders without basis, especially those that might be illegal. He did not elaborate and could not be immediately reached for comment.

Henry has not directly addressed Claude’s letter in public, but during a meeting with political leaders Saturday to sign an accord, he said he would keep pushing to help stabilize Haiti.

“Rest assured that no distraction, no summons or invitation, no maneuver, no threat, no rearguard combat, no aggression will distract me from my mission,” Henry said. “The real culprits, the intellectual authors and co-author and sponsor of the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse will be found and brought to justice and punished for their crimes.”

More than 40 suspects have been arrested in the case, including 18 former Colombian soldiers. Authorities are still looking for additional suspects, including Badio and a former Haitian senator.

The justice minister tweeted last week that people he did not identify were trying to control Haitian judges, prosecutors and other officials to help cover up for those involved in the killing and to persecute political adversaries.

“With me, that macabre plan will remain an illusion,” Vincent wrote.
___
Associated Press writer Evens Sanon reported this story in Port-au-Prince and AP writer Danica Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

[Plain Jane]

If Haiti ever gets to the bottom of this assassination, it will be a miracle.

Haiti: PM sacks prosecutor tying him to president's murder – DW – 09/14/2021

Prime Minister Ariel Henry has sacked the prosecutor investigating the murder of President Jovenel Moise, just a few hours after the prosecutor called for charges against Henry.

www.dw.com

Haiti: PM dismisses prosecutor tying him to president's murder
Prime Minister Ariel Henry has sacked the prosecutor investigating the murder of President Jovenel Moise, just a few hours after the prosecutor called for charges against Henry.




Prime Minister is accused of having contacted a suspect the night of the murder

Haiti's chief prosecutor on Tuesday asked a judge to charge Prime Minister Ariel Henry in connection with the assassination of President Jovenel Moise, who was killed on July 7.

Henry subsequently dismissed Port-au-Prince prosecutor Bed-Ford Claude from his position in a publicly disseminated letter. "I have the pleasure of informing you that it was decided to terminate your post," the prime minister wrote.

What did the prosecutor say?
Claude had asked officials to bar the PM from leaving the country earlier on Tuesday. "There are enough compromising elements ... to prosecute Henry and ask for his outright indictment,'' the public prosecutor wrote in a letter to Judge Garry Orelien.

The judge is required to investigate Claude's request and has three months to decide if the facts in the case justify legal action.

Under normal circumstances, the Haitian prime minister can only legally be questioned with the president's authorization. However, Haiti currently has no president.

The killing of Jovenel Moise has plunged Haiti into political turmoil

Henry was designated by Moise to take the position of prime minister shortly before being assassinated. He replaced the interim-PM Claude Joseph on July 20.

What is the PM accused of?
The prosecutor said in a two-page report that phone records showed Henry had communicated with a key suspect in Moise's killing on the night the assassination occurred.

Claude said phone calls were made at 4:03 and 4:20 a.m. on July 7, adding that evidence showed the chief suspect, Joseph Badio, was in the vicinity of Moise's residence at that time.
That suspect, a former justice ministry official whom Henry has publicly defended, is currently on the run.

On Monday, Justice Minister Rockfeller Vincent ordered the chief of Haiti's National Police to boost security for the country's top prosecutor because he had received "important and disturbing" threats over the past five days.

Authorities have arrested 44 people in connection with the killing so far, including 18 Colombians and two US citizens.

Moise was shot dead after assailants stormed his private residence in the hills above the Haitian capital, plunging the impoverished nation deeper into turmoil.

 

[Plain Jane]

Thousands protest against Bukele government in El Salvador

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Thousands of people gathered in El Salvador's capital Wednesday for the first mass march against President Nayib Bukele, who protesters say has concentrated too much power, weakened the independence of the courts and may seek re-election.

apnews.com

Thousands protest against Bukele government in El Salvador
By MARCOS ALEMÁNyesterday



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A Chivo digital wallet ATM, which exchanges cash for Bitcoin cryptocurrency, burns after being torched during a protest against President Nayib Bukele in San Salvador, El Salvador, Wednesday, Sept. 15, 2021. Thousands marched against the government of President Bukele, centered on fears Bukele may try for re-election in 2024. (AP Photo/Ivan Manzano)

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Thousands of people gathered in El Salvador’s capital Wednesday for the first mass march against President Nayib Bukele, who protesters say has concentrated too much power, weakened the independence of the courts and may seek re-election.

Some marchers are also protesting the controversial decision by Bukele’s government to make the cryptocurrency Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador, the first country to do so. Officials rolled out a digital wallet known as the “Chivo” one week ago, but the system has been down frequently for maintenance.

Some marchers wore T-shirts that read “NO To Bitcoin.” A few demonstrators vandalized the special ATM machines set up to handle Bitcoin transactions, but which have been inoperable anyway for much of the week. The cubicle housing one ATM machine was destroyed.

“They say the ‘vandalism’ was the work of ‘infiltrators,’ but there has been vandalism in ALL their demonstrations,” Bukele wrote in his Twitter account. “And why weren’t there any shouts of ‘stop,’ or ‘Don’t do that?’”

The populist president elected in 2019 has maintained high popularity with his vows to stamp out corruption that was rampant among the country’s traditional parties. But some Salvadorans say he is becoming “a dictator” and Wednesday’s march was the first large protest against his government.

“The time has come to defend democracy,” said one of the protesters, former Supreme Court justice Sidney Blanco. “This march is symbolic, it represents weariness with so many violations of the Constitution.”

Bukele’s New Ideas party won a congressional majority this year and immediately after taking its seats in the National Assembly in May, it replaced the five members of the Constitutional Chamber and the independent attorney general who had balked at several of Bukele’s earlier actions.

Soon after, the Constitutional Chamber tossed aside what had long been interpreted as a constitutional ban on consecutive presidential reelection, setting the stage for Bukele to potentially seek a second term in 2024. Bukele has not so far announced plans to seek reelection, but critics assume he will.

Milton Brizuela, leader of the country’s medical association, said “judicial independence is important to us.”

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement congratulating Central American countries on their shared independence day Wednesday; the region won independence from Spain 200 years ago.

But Blinken warned that “anti-democratic developments pose a growing threat to Central America’s future,” adding “The United States stands with all those speaking truth to power.”
The digital wallet appears to have been overloaded by the sheer number of Salvadorans looking to take advantage of the $30 bonus that the government put in each account to incentivize adoption.

Bukele, the main promotor of using the cryptocurrency, acknowledged the government’s three-month rollout may have been too ambitious. He said technical glitches had prevented the app from working on some kinds of phones.

There has been skepticism about the government’s enthusiastic adoption of bitcoin as a legal tender along with the U.S. dollar since Bukele announced it in a video recorded in English and played at a bitcoin conference in Miami in June. Bitcoin is subject to wild swings in value in a matter of minutes.

Any business with the technological capacity to do so is required to accept payment in bitcoin, but no private citizen is required to use it.

Recent public opinion surveys in El Salvador have said a majority of Salvadorans oppose making it an official currency. Still Bukele says there are now a half million users of the digital payment system in the Central American nation.

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

US Pork Exports To Dominican Republic Spike Amid Pig Ebola Outbreak

BY TYLER DURDEN
THURSDAY, SEP 16, 2021 - 08:10 PM
The first outbreak of African Swine Fever (ASF) in the Western Hemisphere in four decades began on July 28 in the Dominican Republic and was confirmed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The presence of ASF has led to massive hog culling on the Caribbean island that borders Haiti. Bloomberg notes the island may have to slaughter more than half a million pigs to prevent the deadly swine fever virus from spreading.

Pork supplies are dwindling, and Dominican importers are panic buying from U.S. slaughterhouses. The latest USDA data shows U.S. exporters shipped a whopping 3,500 metric tons of pork to the Caribbean nation earlier this month - the highest on record.



Steve Meyer, an economist at Partners For Production Agriculture based in Ames, Iowa, said during a previous ASF outbreak in the 1970s, the Dominican Republic ramped up pork supplies from the U.S.

"Exporting pork to there would be easier now as more companies are set up" to do it, Meyer said.

The U.S. has taken pre-emptive measures to suppress the outbreak by creating a "protection zone" around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.



"USDA is committed to assisting the Dominican Republic in dealing with ASF, is offering continued testing support, and will consult with them on additional steps or actions to support response and mitigation measures," USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service said. "We will also offer similar help to Haiti, which borders the Dominican Republic and is at high risk for ASF detections."

ASF outbreaks have ravaged hog populations in parts of Asia and Europe over the last several years. There is no vaccine against the virus, and outbreaks are usually contained by culling herds. This will only push up pork prices and drive food inflation higher - thus irritating consumers.

 

[Plain Jane]

I have no knowledge of sports icons but Pele is one I remember from my younger years. This is sad.

Pele back in intensive care after surgery – DW – 09/18/2021

Edson Arantes do Nascimento, best known in the sporting world as Pele, is back in the ICU. The Brazilian soccer great just had surgery to remove a tumor from his colon.

www.dw.com

Brazil: Soccer great Pele returns to ICU after surgery
Edson Arantes do Nascimento, best known in the sporting world as Pele, is back in the ICU. The Brazilian soccer great just had surgery to remove a tumor from his colon.




Concerns grew over Pele's condition after local media reported he was taken back to intensive care unit

Brazilian soccer legend Pele is back in an intensive care unit of a Sao Paulo hospital on Friday following surgery to remove a tumor from his colon.

The Albert Einstein hospital in Sao Paolo which is treating Pele said in a statement that he had a "brief breathing stability" issue Thursday night that necessitated that he be in "semi-intensive care."

The hospital did not elaborate on further details, but said that he is in stable condition and "continues recovering."

On Tuesday after his surgery, he was removed from intensive care.

'Little step back' in recovery
Pele's daughter Kely Nascimento posted a photograph of her father in the hospital to Instagram and said he is "recovering well."

"The normal recovery scenario for a man of his age after an operation like this is sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Yesterday he was tired and took a little step back," she wrote in the post.

"Today he took two forwards!" she added.

Pele's surgery occurred on September 4. Doctors found the tumor during a routine check up in August.

The soccer legend won three World Cup victories in 1958, 1962 and 1970 and is Brazil's all-time top scorer with 77 goals in 92 games.
ar/rs (AP, Reuters)

 

[Plain Jane]

US to accelerate flights abroad for thousands of migrants in Texas border town

U.S. authorities moved some 2,000 people to other immigration processing stations on Friday from a Texas border town that has been overwhelmed by an influx of Haitian and other migrants, the Department…

www.france24.com

US to accelerate flights abroad for thousands of migrants in Texas border town
Issued on: 19/09/2021 - 07:27

Thousands of migrants wait to be processed near the Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas after crossing the Rio Grande river into the US from Mexico on September 18, 2021. © Adrees Latif, Reuters
Text by:NEWS WIRES
5 min
Listen to the article
U.S. authorities moved some 2,000 people to other immigration processing stations on Friday from a Texas border town that has been overwhelmed by an influx of Haitian and other migrants, the Department of Homeland Security said on Saturday.

Such transfers will continue "in order to ensure that irregular migrants are swiftly taken into custody, processed, and removed from the United States consistent with our laws and policy," DHS said in a statement.

While some migrants seeking jobs and safety have been making their way to the United States for weeks or months, it is only in recent days that the number converging on Del Rio, Texas, has drawn widespread attention, posing a humanitarian and political challenge for the Biden administration.

DHS said that in response to the migrants sheltering in increasingly poor conditions under the Del Rio International Bridge that connects the Texas city with Ciudad Acuna in Mexico, it was accelerating flights to Haiti and other destinations within the next 72 hours.

DHS added it was working with nations where the migrants began their journeys - for many of the Haitians, countries such as Brazil and Chile - to accept returned migrants. Officials on both sides of the border said most of the migrants were Haitians.

Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry expressed solidarity with the mass of migrants at the border in a series of posts on social media late on Saturday, saying "arrangements have already been made" to warmly receive those who return to the Caribbean nation.

"I share their suffering and say to them welcome home," he wrote.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection was sending 400 additional agents to the Del Rio sector in the coming days, DHS said, after the border agency said on Friday that due to the influx it was temporarily closing Del Rio's port of entry and re-routing traffic to Eagle Pass, 57 miles (92 km) east.

"We have reiterated that our borders are not open, and people should not make the dangerous journey," a DHS spokesperson told Reuters.

Del Rio's mayor, Bruno Lozano, said in a video on Saturday night that there were now just over 14,000 migrants under the bridge.

As it became clear U.S. authorities were sending migrants back to their homelands, Mexican police officers began asking migrants who were buying food in Ciudad Acuna to return to the American side of the river on Saturday morning, according to Reuters witnesses. The migrants argued they needed supplies, and police eventually relented.

'Sleeping next to garbage'
On the Texas side, Haitians have been joined by Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans under the Del Rio bridge, where migrants say conditions are deteriorating.

"There is urine, feces and we are sleeping next to garbage," said Venezuelan migrant Michael Vargas, 30, who has been at the camp with his wife and two children for three days.

Vargas said they had been given ticket number 16,000 and authorities were currently processing number 9,800. He said people were being separated into three groups: single men, single women and families.

Jeff Jeune, a 27-year-old Haitian, was among several migrants who said it was taking longer to process families than single adults, leaving young children sleeping on the ground in clobbering 99 degree Fahrenheit (37 degrees Celsius) heat. Jeune said his two sons, ages 1 and 10, had fallen ill with fever and cold-like symptoms.

In two photos sent to Reuters by a migrant at the camp, dozens of adults and children are shown squeezed together under the bridge, some sitting on cardboard or thin blankets spread on the packed dirt. Belongings were stacked in neat piles. There appear to be tents made of reeds and wooden sticks in the background.

Typically, migrants who arrive at the border and turn themselves in to officials can claim asylum if they fear being returned to their home country, triggering a long court process. The Trump administration whittled away at protections, arguing many asylum claims were false.

A sweeping U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention public health order known as Title 42, issued under the Trump administration at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, allows most migrants to be quickly expelled without a chance of claiming asylum. President Joe Biden has kept that rule in place though he exempted unaccompanied minors and his administration has not been expelling most families.

A judge ruled Thursday the policy could not be applied to families, but the ruling does not go into effect for two weeks and the Biden administration is appealing it in court.

Rising numbers of migrants at border
A mass expulsion of Haitians at Del Rio is sure to anger immigration advocates who say such returns are inhumane considering the conditions in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. In July, Haiti's president was assassinated, and in August a major earthquake and powerful storm hit the country.

The Biden administration extended temporary deportation relief to around 150,000 Haitians in the United States earlier this year. That relief does not apply to new arrivals. Deportation and expulsion differ technically - expulsion is much quicker.

U.S. officials briefly halted removals to Haiti following an Aug. 14 earthquake.

The number of Haitian migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border has been steadily rising this year along with an overall increase in migrants, according to CBP data.

Many of the Haitians interviewed by Reuters said they used to live in South America and were headed north now because they could not attain legal status or struggled to secure decent jobs. Several told Reuters they followed routes shared on WhatsApp to reach Del Rio.

More than a dozen Haitians in southern Mexico's Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, told Reuters on Friday that messages in WhatsApp groups spread lies about the ease of crossing the border.
(REUTERS)

 

[Plain Jane]

Latin American leaders divided on OAS at regional meeting

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants to leave questions of human rights and democracy to the United Nations, as part of his continuing criticisms of the Organization of American States.

apnews.com

Latin American leaders divided on OAS at regional meeting
September 18, 2021



1 of 8
In this handout photo provided by the Miraflores Press Office, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks at the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC summit, in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021. (Miraflores Press Office via AP)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants to leave questions of human rights and democracy to the United Nations, as part of his continuing criticisms of the Organization of American States.

López Obrador spoke Saturday at the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, which includes almost all countries in the region except Brazil. Unlike the OAS, the U.S. and Canada don’t belong to CELAC.

The summit took up questions plaguing the region, like mass migration and the coronavirus pandemic. But some leaders angered by the OAS’ criticism of leftist regimes in the region have hoped CELAC could replace it.

López Obrador has suggested the OAS is interventionist and a tool of the United States. But he did not formally propose leaving the organization. Rather, he opposed any kind of sanctions and said questions of human rights and democracy should only be considered if a country accused of violations requests that.


“Controversies over democracy and human rights should be worked out in truly neutral forums created by the countries of the Americas, and the last word should be left to the specialized agencies of United Nations,” López Obrador said.

The President of Uruguay, Luis Lacalle, defended the OAS.

“You can disagree with how it is managed, but you cannot discount the organization,” said Lacalle, who also openly and by name criticized Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua for anti-democratic practices.

El Salvadoran Vice President Felix Ulloa criticized what he called “partisan” behavior in the OAS, but noted “we are not expecting nor do we think that a substitute will emerge from this.”

Panama’s Foreign Relations Minister, Erika Mouynes, called attention to the region’s problem of migration. Mouynes said that while only about 800 migrants were entering Panama a few months ago — mainly from Colombia — now about 20,000 are arriving every month. Panama is struggling to feed and care for the influx.

“This phenomenon can only be handled in a regional manner,” Mouynes said.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was one of the unexpected leaders who arrived late Friday in Mexico City for the meeting. This is his first trip outside Venezuela since the U.S. government indicted him on drug trafficking and terrorism charges in March 2020, and offered a reward of up to $15 million for him.

Maduro challenged Uruguay’s Lacalle to a debate on democracy.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel railed against the criticism of his country’s crackdown on protests in July. He called the demonstrations “an opportunistic campaign of slander, financed by U.S. federal funds and which still threatens the stability, integrity and sovereignty of my country.”

Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who U.S. prosecutors have signaled as having funded his political ascent with bribes from drug traffickers, spoke in a lengthy defense of his record. He has not been formally charged, and accused the DEA of having employed drug traffickers who testified about his alleged drug ties.

″“There has been a tsunami, and avalanche of false testimonies,” Hernández said.

He has denied any wrongdoing. His brother, former federal lawmaker Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernández, was sentenced in New York in March to life in prison.

Newly inaugurated Peruvian President Pedro Castillo gave a fairly moderate address in his first summit appearance since taking office, focusing on Peru’s status as one of the countries with the world’s highest COVID-19 death tolls, which Castillo put at “more than 200,000.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a taped message to the meeting that “China will continue to provide assistance to Latin American and Caribbean countries to the best of its ability, to help them defeat the virus at an early date.” Chinese coronavirus vaccines have been used by some countries in the region.

 

[Plain Jane]

Bomb at bar in Mexico kills 2, as gangs turn to explosives

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A man on a motorcycle delivered a package containing explosives to a bar in north-central Mexico, and the explosion killed two men and injured four.

apnews.com

Bomb at bar in Mexico kills 2, as gangs turn to explosives
September 20, 2021 GMT


MEXICO CITY (AP) — A man on a motorcycle delivered a package containing explosives to a bar in north-central Mexico, and the explosion killed two men and injured four.

The bomb blew up seconds after the victims received the package Sunday at the bar next to a casino in the city of Salamanca in Guanajuato state, Gov. Diego Sinhue said Monday.
Video posted on social media showed one man standing on the street outside the bar, bloodied and with apparently severe injuries, after the attack.

While prosecutors earlier said the package had been delivered by two men, Sinhue said it was dropped off by an express delivery driver who was apparently among the wounded.
“This is a terrorist attack unprecedented in the state,” Sinhue said.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Guanajuato has seen an increase in the use of explosives by criminals. Guanajuato is gripped by a turf war between the Jalisco cartel and other gangs backed by the rival Sinaloa cartel.

“In the state of Guanajuato, more than in other places, for some time now they have begun using explosives to commit crimes, and to try to spread fear and terror,” López Obrador said, adding, “This is a delicate situation.”

The president identified the two victims as the owner and the manager of the bar, which also served as a restaurant. He said it was the owner’s birthday, which may have made him less wary of delivery of an unexpected package.

Explosives are sometime used by drug gangs in Mexico, but grenades are more common. Some gangs have begun attaching explosives to drones for aerial attacks.

Prosecutors said they are investigating what type of device was used; López Obrador said the case was likely to be taken over by federal prosecutors, because criminal use of explosives is a federal crime.

The homegrown Santa Rosa de Lima cartel — which is backed by Sinaloa in its fight against the Jalisco cartel — has used car bombs at least twice in Guanajuato, but they either didn’t go off or injured no one.

Security analyst David Saucedo suggested the local cartel may lack expertise in handling bombs.

That has happened elsewhere in Mexico; in the neighboring state of Michoacan earlier this year, a member of a local cartel was reportedly killed when trying to assemble a bomb-laden drone.

In recent weeks, the same gang was able to capture a Jalisco cartel drone attached to a mortar round that failed to explode.

But Saucedo said Sunday’s attack may mark a refinement in Santa Rosa de Lima’s bomb skills.

“Yesterday’s bomb showed a greater level of ability in handling explosives,” Saucedo said. “They used exactly the right amount needed to kill whoever opened the box. An explosive wave of 5 meters (yards) in diameter, a highly precise job.”

Casinos and bars in Mexico have been frequent targets of extortion demands by drug cartels, which have set fire to businesses or sprayed them with gunfire to enforce such demands in the past.

Bombings were frequent in Colombia when drug gangs were battling the government in the 1980s. But the Colombian cartels are believed to have hired foreigners with expertise in explosives.

While there were several hundred fewer killings in Guanajuato in the first seven months of this year compared to 2020, Guanajuato remains the state with the highest number of homicides.

 

[jward]

Americas
Venezuela says Colombian drone violates its airspace as U.S. admiral visits
Reuters

• 
  
• 
  
• 
  

1 minute read

Venezuela's Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino speaks during a news conference in Caracas, Venezuela January 11, 2021. REUTERS/Manaure Quintero

CARACAS, Sept 21 (Reuters) - Venezuela on Tuesday said a Colombian military drone violated its airspace in what it called a "blatant threat" to its national security that took place during a visit by a U.S. military commander to the neighboring nation.

General Vladimir Padrino said in a statement that a Colombian Air Force drone flew over the Venezuelan border state of Zulia on Monday afternoon.
"This was neither involuntary nor coincidental, as it coincides with the presence in Colombia of Admiral Craig Faller, chief of the United States Southern Command ... to supposedly discuss 'cooperation on security matters,'" Padrino said in the statement posted on the defense ministry's Twitter account.
Colombia's Air Force and the U.S. State Department did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Padrino in June spoke out against a visit by Faller to the Colombian city of Puerto Carreno near the Venezuelan border.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro cut diplomatic ties with Colombia in 2019 and expelled Colombian diplomats in response to Colombian President Ivan Duque's support for an effort by Venezuela's opposition to bring humanitarian aid into the country.
The United States maintains a broad Venezuela sanctions program that was created to force Maduro from power.
Reporting by Vivian Sequera, writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Venezuela says Colombian drone violates its airspace as U.S. admiral visits

Venezuela on Tuesday said a Colombian military drone violated its airspace in what it called a "blatant threat" to its national security that took place during a visit by a U.S. military commander to the neighboring nation.

www.reuters.com

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexico finds a Latin American ally in Venezuela – DW – 09/21/2021

Mexico is presenting itself as the new champion of Latin American integration. To do that, it appears willing to embrace the continent's isolated autocratic leftist leaders. But it's a risky move.

www.dw.com

Mexico finds a Latin American ally in Venezuela's Maduro
Mexico is presenting itself as the new champion of Latin American integration. To do that, it appears willing to embrace the continent's isolated autocratic leftist leaders. But it's a risky move.




Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro was a surprise guest at the recent CELAC summit

The recent summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Mexico was the first big meeting of its kind since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Participants ranged from Cuban head of state Miguel Diaz-Canel to Ecuador's laissez-faire conservative president, Guillermo Lasso. Even Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro made a last-minute appearance — though he is wanted by the United States on charges of drug trafficking, with a $15 million (€12.8 million) reward for information leading to his arrest.

Yet, in many ways Maduro's flying visit to the CELAC summit was not so surprising. The continent's authoritarian leftist states, which include Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, are beset by economic sanctions and damning UN reports on human rights violations, and their leaders are looking to Mexico for support.

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has proposed replacing the Organization of American States (OAS) with CELAC, a body that does not include the United States or Canada. His motion came in response to demands from countries such as Nicaragua, Venezuela and Bolivia, which have called the OAS an interventionist tool of the US.

What are Mexico's motives?
Political analysts have said the Mexican government is signaling its discontent with the OAS's agenda, ending its two-year CELAC presidency with a bang. Most of Lopez Obrador's term has been characterized by reserved and integrationist diplomacy, concentrating on concrete projects like acquiring COVID vaccines rather than on ideological differences, which threatened to split the alliance.

Is Mexico giving Latin America's leftist autocrats a veneer of respectability?

This strategy has not been completely successful. Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro pulled out of CELAC in January 2020, and the alliance lost its biggest and most-populous member. And even during the summit itself, there were tensions and fierce verbal clashes between Argentina and Nicaragua and Uruguay and Cuba, which had to be smoothed over by Mexico's Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard.

"This summit has increased the pressure to reform the OAS," said Jose Antonio Crespo, a historian and political scientist at Mexico's Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE). He doesn't rule out the idea that it's a maneuver engineered by Ebrard to raise his profile as a potential contender in Mexico's next presidential election, in 2024.

The foreign secretary is said to be very keen to become Lopez Obrador's successor — and he can count on the president's support. Both men have been critical of the OAS; Crespo said that for many Latin American left-wingers, Lopez Obrador is a substitute figure for the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died in 2013.


Watch video02:33
Latin American environmentalists face murder threats
Lopez Obrador's decision to invite the Cuban president to take part in the military parade during Mexican Independence Day celebrations would appear to back up Crespo's thesis. But that move also provoked sharp criticism.

"It is now evident that Lopez Obrador has become an accomplice of the new totalitarian governments in Latin America," Tulio Hernandez, a Venezuelan sociologist who lives in exile in Colombia, told DW. "By flirting with Diaz-Canel and Maduro, Lopez Obrador is siding with those who are undermining democratic progress and regional integration."

Avoiding open confrontation with the US
Mexican political scientist Ruben Aguilar said it was impossible to interpret Lopez Obrador's refusal to interfere in other states' internal affairs as an act of neutrality. "Rejecting sanctions imposed because of grave human rights violations means that you are aligning yourself with dictatorial countries," he said.

Aguilar also underlined the Mexican president's contradictory approach to the OAS. "First of all, he said that he wanted to replace the OAS with CELAC, i.e to establish a purely Latin American mechanism of integration," he said. "Then he corrected himself and invited Canada and the United States, too. Ultimately, he said the investment to boost Latin America's economic development should come from there, which would give North America a more important role than ever before."

CELAC aims to improve cooperation on health care in the alliance
Crespo also thinks Mexico is not looking to lock horns with its biggest trading partner, the United States. "Lopez Obrador is upholding the Latin American agenda without picking a fight with the US," he said.
Aside from the rhetoric, antipathy and personal ambitions, the CELAC summit led to the organization of a Latin American space agency, a new fund to respond to natural disasters, and agreements on vaccine production and closer cooperation in health issues.
This article has been translated from German

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

JPMorgan Being Investigated By Brazilian Authorities Over Potential Oil Bribes

BY TYLER DURDEN
WEDNESDAY, SEP 22, 2021 - 09:40 PM
Another day, another "cost of doing business" fine likely on its way for one of the big banks.
J.P. Morgan is being investigated by Brazilian authorities about whether or not the bank "played a role in an alleged bribery and money laundering scheme that dated back to 2011 and involved state-run oil company Petrobras", according to a new exclusive from Reuters.
The probe is in preliminary stages, according to the report.


Authorities are looking at the purchase of 300,000 barrels of Petrobras fuel by the bank in 2011, according to court documents and sources.

The documents included email messages, witness testimony and bank records. Regulators are in the midst of trying to decypher whether or not bribery continued in subsequent years.

Testimony from a former Petrobras fuel trader named Rodrigo Berkowitz was reviewed by Reuters. The trader makes note two fuel cargoes that were sold to a JPMorgan unit in his testimony.

The investigation is one piece of a larger look by Brazilian authorities into wrongdoing in the commodity trading space. Authorities are seeking to figure out if JP Morgan secured oil shipments at artificially low prices by sending bribes to employees at Petrobras' trading desk using middlemen.

Investigations are also ongoing into some of the world's largest commodity traders after years of probes looking into whether or not bribes were offered to win contracts in countries in Latin America.

No charges have been brought in the ongoing investigation. Petrobras told Reuters it has "zero tolerance in relation to fraud and corruption."

J.P. Morgan, on the other hand, declined to comment.

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexico extradites ex-guerrilla kidnapper to Chile

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A former Chilean guerrilla convicted of kidnappings in Mexico has been extradited to his homeland and was formally notified Thursday of possible murder charges in the death of a right-wing senator.

apnews.com

Mexico extradites ex-guerrilla kidnapper to Chile
yesterday


SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — A former Chilean guerrilla convicted of kidnappings in Mexico has been extradited to his homeland and was formally notified Thursday of possible murder charges in the death of a right-wing senator.

Raúl Julio Escobar Poblete, who had been put on a flight to Chile the day before, was known by the alias “Comandante Emilio” in his home country, but lived in relative obscurity in Mexico for years before his 2017 arrest in the touristy Mexican city of San Miguel de Allende.

He has been serving a 60-year sentence in Mexico for kidnapping a French-American woman, Nancy Michelle Kendall, who was held captive for two months. Authorities say he will be sent back to Mexico to finish that sentence after any legal process in Chile.

Prosecutors say he ran a ring also blamed for kidnapping former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos.

Escobar was a member of a guerrilla force, the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, that fought the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.

A year after Pinochet left power, the group was blamed for the assassination of Sen. Jaime Guzman, an ally of the former dictator who had been arguing against a measure that would allow amnesty for people convicted under antiterrorism laws.

Escobar was being held at a prison infirmary for a 14 day pandemic quarantine before being sent to a cell and facing a judge.

Authorities have also linked him to the killing of a police officer and the kidnapping of a newspaper owner’s son.

 

[Plain Jane]

Small Fry: Peru's fishermen battle China's overseas fleet

The Associated Press with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision accompanied the conservation group Sea Shepard this summer on an 18-day voyage to observe up close for the first time the Chinese distant water fishing fleet on the high seas off South America.

apnews.com

Small Fry: Peru’s fishermen battle China’s overseas fleet
By JOSHUA GOODMANyesterday



1 of 17
In this July 2021 photo provided by Sea Shepherd, a Chinese-flagged ship fishes for squid at night on the high seas off the west coast of South America. The number of Chinese-flagged vessels in the south Pacific has surged 10-fold from 54 active vessels in 2009 to 557 in 2020, according to the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization, or SPRFMO, an inter-governmental group of 15 members charged with ensuring the conservation and sustainable fishing of the species. Meanwhile, the size of its catch has grown from 70,000 tons in 2009 to 358,000. (Isaac Haslam/Sea Shepherd via AP)

ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR in the eastern Pacific Ocean (AP) — José López proudly remembers his first catch: he was 13 and a local skipper, pitying his ragamuffin look, hired him as an extra hand. When he returned home, his pockets stuffed with a day’s wages, his mother protested.

“She thought I had stolen the money,” López recalls between boisterous greetings to younger comrades who know him simply as “Pépe.” “I had to take to her to the fisherman so she would believe me.”

Since then, fishing has been a way of life for López and dozens of other artisanal fishermen in Pucusana, a port carved from the barren, desert-like hills south of Peru’s capital. For years the fleet thrived, earning López enough to buy a few boats and send his kids to college.

But a decade ago the tuna that he once effortlessly fished started to vanish. So, the fishermen turned their brightly colored boats bearing the names of Roman Catholic icons to squid.


Now they face a new threat: China’s distant water fishing fleet.

The number of Chinese-flagged vessels lurking just outside Peru’s waters has surged from 54 active vessels in 2009 to 557 in 2020, according to the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organization, or SPRFMO, an inter-governmental group charged with ensuring the sustainable fishing of squid. Meanwhile, the size of the Chinese catch has grown from 70,000 tons in 2009 to 358,000.
__
This story is a joint project between The Associated Press and Spanish-language broadcaster Univision.
__
The Chinese fishing takes place on the high seas — beyond the reach of any nation’s jurisdiction — and at night when lights so powerful they can be seen from space are used to attract swarms of the fast-flying squid.

“It really is like the Wild West out there,” said Captain Peter Hammarstedt, director of campaigns for Sea Shepherd, an ocean conservation group. “Nobody is responsible for enforcement.”

The Associated Press with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision accompanied Sea Shepherd this summer on an 18-day voyage aboard one of its vessels to observe up close the Chinese fleet on the high seas off the west coast of South America.

The patrol was prompted by an outcry last summer when hundreds of Chinese vessels were discovered fishing near the Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO world heritage site.

Launched in the 1980s as a response to depleting fish stocks at home and the need to feed its fast-growing population, China’s distant water fishing fleet has evolved into a thriving industry and a part of the country’s geopolitical push to secure access to the world’s dwindling natural resources.

“China doesn’t do anything that Europe has not done exactly the same way,” said Daniel Pauly, a prominent marine biologist at the University of British Columbia. “The difference is that everything China does is big, so you see it.”

The vast majority of the 30 vessels observed by the AP have a history of labor abuse accusations, past convictions for illegal fishing or showed signs of possibly violating maritime law. Collectively, these issues underscore how the open ocean around the Americas — where the U.S. has long dominated, and China is now jockeying for influence — have become a magnet for the seafood industry’s worst offenders.

One vessel, the Fu Yuan Yu 7880, is operated by an affiliate of a Nasdaq-traded company, Pingtan Marine Enterprise, whose Chinese executives had their U.S. visas cancelled for alleged links to human trafficking. The company has faced also accusations of illegal fishing and forced labor around the world. Pingtan declined comment.

The Humboldt squid — named for the nutrient-rich current found off the southwest coast of South America — is one of the most abundant marine species. Some scientists believe it may even be thriving as the oceans warm and its predators, sharks and tuna, are fished out of existence.

But experts point to past disappearance of squid stocks elsewhere as cause for concern even if it’s unknown how many Humboldt squid remain.

“If you have a vast resource and it’s easy to take, then it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is limitless,” said William Gilly, a Stanford University marine biologist who has spent decades studying squid.

Last year, China imposed stricter penalties on companies caught breaking the rules. They also ordered off-season moratoriums on squid fishing in the high seas.

Seafood companies in the U.S. have started to take note of the risks posed by China’s expansion and are seeking to leverage their market power to bring more transparency to the sourcing of squid. China is responsible for around half of the $314 million in squid that the U.S. imported in 2019, the bulk served up as fried calamari in restaurants.

One alternative is to deploy technology, like publicly available tracking data, to allow consumers to eventually identify the very vessel that caught the fish.

However, boosting transparency is a challenge the industry has grappled with for decades.

To address concerns, several South American governments have proposed a number of conservation measures including banning transshipments at sea and boosting the number of observers on ships to document catch sizes and violations.
But China has opposed each proposal.

“China doesn’t really seem interested in expanding protection,” said Tabitha Mallory, a China scholar at the University of Washington who specializes in the country’s fishing policies. “They follow the letter of the law but not the spirit.”

In the absence of stricter controls, López and his cohorts have to venture farther from home and spend as much as a week at sea to haul in what they used to catch in a single day. That’s if they return at all: in June three fishermen set out never to be seen again.

Adding to the fishermen’s frustrations is Peru’s logistical support for the Chinese fleet — their direct competitors. Since 2019, 212 Chinese fishing vessels have entered Peruvian ports for repairs, crew changes and to restock supplies, according to Peru’s government.

“There’s no maritime authority that defends us,” complains López, who says he’s lost count of how many times he’s notified authorities of Chinese vessels fishing inside Peru’s waters. “I don’t know what power the foreigner has that they come to my home and do what they want.”
—
AP Writer Joe McDonald and AP researcher Yu Bing in Beijing, AP Global Investigations intern Roselyn Romero in San Luis Obispo, Calif. and AP Writer Edna Tarigan and Nini Karmini in Jakarta contributed to this report.
Follow Goodman on Twitter: @APJoshGoodman
Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tip

 

[Plain Jane]

Back in Haiti, expelled migrant family plans to flee again

The U.S. has expelled some 2,000 migrants to Haiti this week via more than 17 flights, with several more scheduled in upcoming days.

apnews.com

Click to copy
Back in Haiti, expelled migrant family plans to flee again
By EVENS SANON and DÁNICA COTOyesterday



1 of 8
Jean Charles Celestin, right, carries luggage belonging to his cousin Jhon Celestin, left, Jhon's wife Delta De Leon, and their daughter Chloe, in Port au Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. Jhon Celestin arrived in Haiti aboard the last flight Wednesday to the Haitian capital, a city the 38-year-old left three years ago in search of a better-paying job to help support his family. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — You’re lucky, the U.S. officials said. “You’re going to see your family.”

The authorities had called out numbers corresponding to raffle-like tickets the Haitians had been issued when they were detained after crossing the border into Texas. As each number was called, another bedraggled immigrant stood up.

“Everyone was happy,” recalled Jhon Celestin. “But I was not happy. I saw it was a lie.”

The prize was a one-way trip back to the place they had so desperately wanted to escape. And so it was that Celestin arrived in Haiti aboard the last flight Wednesday to the capital of Port-au-Prince, a city the 38-year-old left three years ago in search of a better-paying job to help support his family.

He is among some 2,000 migrants that the U.S. expelled to Haiti this week via more than 17 flights, with more scheduled in upcoming days. Staying in Haiti is not an option for many of them. Like Celestin, they plan to flee their country again as soon as they can.


It had stopped drizzling as Celestin left the airport and stepped out into streets choked with dust and smoke, carrying a bag in one hand and his 2-year-old daughter in the other.

Chloe, born in Chile, looked around quietly at her new surroundings as Celestin and his wife asked to borrow someone’s phone to call a taxi. It would be more expensive, but they didn’t want their toddler riding on a motorcycle — a common means of transport in city where vehicles must veer around smoldering garbage dumps, heavy traffic and the occasional burning barricade.

After a 35-minute ride, they arrived at a house whose basement they would share with a cousin who had been expelled from the U.S. the day before. The home is located a couple blocks away from where 15 people were killed in a shooting rampage in June, including a journalist and political activist. Among those charged was a police officer.

“This is not what I imagined, being here,” said Celestin’s wife, 26-year-old Delta de León, who was born in the Dominican Republic to a Dominican father and a Haitian mother. “But here I am, although I hope to leave soon because the one thing I’ve never wanted for my daughter is for her to grow up here.”

Haiti has more than 11 million people; about 60% make less than $2 a day. A cornerstone of its economy is money from Haitians living abroad -- $3.8 billion a year, or 35% of the country’s GDP.

The Haiti to which the migrants are returning is more violent, more impoverished and more politically unstable than the one they left. It is struggling to recover from the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and from a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that struck southern Haiti in August, killing more than 2,200 people and destroying or damaging tens of thousands of homes. Thousands of people live in squalid shelters after their homes were razed in recent months as a result of rampant gang violence.

Celestin and his wife don’t plan on staying long.

On his first day back in Haiti, Celestin spent several hours sprawled on the queen-sized bed he shared with his wife and daughter. He chatted on the phone with his sister, who lives in Chile, and with friends elsewhere as he planned his family’s departure. He paused only to get a haircut and to figure out how to pick up a money transfer, since he had previously sent all his identification documents to his family in Miami in hopes he would be reunited with them with this month.

The new plan is to return to Chile, where he built homes as a construction worker after obtaining a visa. With the pandemic drying up jobs and freezing the economy, the family decided to try their luck at the U.S.-Mexico border, traveling by foot, bus and boat at night for about a month.

“What hurt me the most, what frustrated me the most, was the dead people I saw,” migrants who died along the way, said de León.

The toll of that trip, the conditions at the border and the recent deportation flight with a sick child -- Chloe had developed an incessant cough while the family camped under a Texas bridge -- meant de León didn’t sleep much her first night in Haiti.

“I cried because I don’t want to be here,” she said.

De León intends to cross the border into the Dominican Republic with her daughter as soon as possible to reunite with her father, sister and brother while her husband flies ahead to Chile.

But first, the family planned to go to the coastal city of Jacmel in southern Haiti to see more relatives, a risky trip because it entailed crossing gang-controlled territory. Buses often form convoys for safety, and sometimes pay gangs for safe passage. The violence in that neighborhood has reached such high levels that Doctors Without Borders recently closed its clinic there after 15 years.

Breakfast on that first morning in Haiti consisted of spaghetti and bits of avocado. Normally, Chloe has milk and fruit, but de León said she was waiting on a money transfer to buy some basic food items. She worried about her daughter’s health, and about her future.

“The future I want for her is a better life, a more comfortable one, the kind a poor person can give their children,” she said. “If that life has to be in the United States, so be it. If it has to be in Chile, let it be in Chile. But let it be a better life.”

On their second day in Haiti, the couple decided to take the risk and go to Jacmel. A minibus waited as Celestin and de León grabbed their bags and put on new shoes they had bought earlier that morning: black-and-white sneakers for him, white sandals for her.

“Na pale!” Celestin’s cousin called out to them in Creole -- “We’ll talk!” And the couple boarded the minibus, placing their little girl between them as they embarked on the treacherous road to Jacmel.
___
Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

www.zerohedge.com

As Biden Releases 12K Haitians Into US, Thousands More Arrive In Panama For Northbound Trek

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, SEP 26, 2021 - 04:00 PM
Thousands of Haitian migrants have somehow made it to Panama, and have passed through the treacherous jungles of the Darien Gap on their way north to the United States, according to Reuters.

According to the report which cites two Panamanian government sources, between 3,500 and 4,000 migrants are passing through 'migration reception stations' in Darien and Chiriqui, according to one source - an official with Panama's security ministry.
But wait, there's more:

Meanwhile, some 16,000 migrants are stuck in the northern Colombian beach town of Necocli, awaiting their turn on limited boat transport toward the Darien Gap, where smugglers guide groups through one of the most dangerous and impassable regions of Latin America. read more
Colombia and Panama agreed last month that 500 migrants could cross per day, but local officials have repeatedly urged them to raise the quota, saying it is far too low to keep pace with the up to 1,500 migrants who arrive in town daily. -Reuters

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has released around 12,000 Haitians into the United States - unvaccinated, while school children are forced to wear masks and unvaccinated Americans are losing their jobs because... science.

More from Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday that a significant number of Haitian illegal immigrants who had amassed along the U.S.-Mexico border last week are being released into the United States.



About 12,400 out of 17,000 Haitians are having their cases heard by immigration courts, Mayorkas said, adding that about 5,000 are being processed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Only approximately 3,000 are in detention, he said.

“Approximately, I think it’s about ten thousand or so, twelve thousand,” Mayorkas told “Fox News Sunday” when he was asked about the number of Haitian illegal aliens who have been released into the interior of the United States. The number could rise as 5,000 more cases are processed, he remarked further.

Mayorkas added that the figure of those being released “could be even higher” and added that the “number that are returned could be even higher.”

Striking a defensive tone, Mayorkas said, “What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it.”

“Legislative reform is needed,” he said, adding that the U.S. “immigration system is broken.”

The Department of Justice in 2017 previously estimated that about 43 percent of illegal aliens released into the U.S. miss their immigration court hearings.

When asked about what will happen to the 12,000 who were released in the past week, Mayorkas said that “it is our intention to remove” those aliens.

“We have enforcement guidelines in place that provide that individuals who are recent border crossers who do not show up for their hearings are enforcement priorities, and will be removed,” Mayorkas said.

Last week, more than 15,000 Haitians congregated underneath a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, and essentially constructed a shantytown before numerous local officials sounded the alarm that a humanitarian crisis was brewing.



Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas updates reporters on the effort to resettle vulnerable Afghans in the United States, in Washington on Sept. 3, 2021. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

DHS officials, including Mayorkas, on Sept. 24 said that the encampment under the bridge was cleared out. A day later, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said that the Texas border crossing will be partially reopened.

The agency also said it is planning to continue flights to Haiti throughout the weekend, ignoring criticism from Democratic lawmakers and some progressive groups.


The number of people at the Del Rio encampment peaked last weekend as migrants driven by confusion over the Biden administration’s policies and misinformation on social media converged at the border crossing. While Mayorkas and other White House officials have asserted that the border is closed, Republicans have said that the administration’s decisions to rescind a number of Trump-era immigrant orders have triggered a surge of illegal immigration.



All the while, Mayorkas and other senior officials have dedicated a significant amount of time in news conferences condemning some Border Patrol agents who were seen on horseback near Haitians who illegally crossed the border. The photographer who shot those pictures last week said that the agents were not whipping the migrants, as some officials and Democratic lawmakers had claimed.

“Some of the Haitian men started running, trying to go around the horses,” photographer Paul Ratje told local station KTSM, explaining the situation on the ground.

“I’ve never seen them whip anyone,” he said, referring to the agents. “He was swinging it, but it can be misconstrued when you’re looking at the picture.”

 

[Plain Jane]

Severe Brazil drought reignites debate over daylight saving

Brazil is in the throes of its worst drought in 91 years, which has returned the specter of power rationing.

apnews.com

Severe Brazil drought reignites debate over daylight saving
By DIANE JEANTETSeptember 24, 2021



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FILE - In this Aug. 25, 2021 file photo, a general view of the Jaguari dam, which is part of the Cantareira System, responsible for providing water to the Sao Paulo metropolitan area, during a drought in Braganca Paulista, Brazil. Brazil is in the throes of its worst drought in 91 years, which has returned the spectre of power rationing. (AP Photo/Andre Penner, File)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Dyane Rodrigues used to enjoy strolling along Rio de Janeiro’s iconic Ipanema beach after a hot summer’s day. Daylight saving time meant her workday went by faster, and ended early enough for her to take in the golden sunset, the 28-year-old said from her fruit stand, a stone’s throw from the seashore.

That changed in 2019, when Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro did away with the practice of changing clocks. The idea behind daylight saving time had been to make most of long summer days’ natural light, delaying by one hour the time at which households switch on their lamps. But the president said daylight saving no longer made sense, as it yielded little in energy savings and forced Brazilians to commute in the dark, and many experts agreed.
But once again, daylight saving — known here as “summer schedule” — has surged to the fore.

Brazil is in the throes of its worst drought in 91 years, which has returned the specter of power rationing. The operator of the hydroelectric-reliant grid is reviewing the scope of benefits sacrificed by the 2019 change, and federal lawmakers discussed its return this week. Associations linked to the tourism and service industries, sensing opportunity to boost evening business, are chiming in with their support.


Since implementation in 1931, summer schedule has divided Brazilians between those who bathe in morning light and those — like Dyane — who prefer their sunsets. Governments wavered in decades that followed, adopting it some years but not others. Starting in 1985, when drought caused blackouts and water rationing, summer schedule was renewed each year by presidential decree. It became a fixture in 2008.

A decade later, a Senate-led poll of nearly 13,000 people found them roughly split, with 55% in favor of ending summer schedule. Bills proposing the change didn’t advance, so Bolsonaro ended the practice by decree. He admitted he’d never been a fan, and cited studies showing negative impact on people’s biological clocks.

People like Dyane were disappointed, but at the time almost no one was worried about electricity.

Fast forward two years, and Brazil’s reservoirs are dwindling. In a country where almost two-thirds of power comes from hydroelectric generation, low rainfall has serious consequences. The situation is so bad, Bolsonaro asked Brazilians on Sept. 23 to stop using elevators when possible, and to take “much healthier” cold showers.

“Help us,” Bolsonaro pleaded on his weekly Facebook broadcast.

Reservoir levels in the southeast and center west regions are lower than in 2001 when the country last experienced an electricity crisis; power was rationed for eight months. Since then, the country has installed thermoelectric generation plants as a costlier backup supply, but experts say it wasn’t enough. This week, the governor of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s second most populous state, warned power could run out “at any time.”

“The system was not made to function with a situation like this one,” said Roberto Brandão, senior researcher at the electricity sector studies group of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. “The only reason why we’re not seeing greater problems is because of the economic crises of the last few years, and lower consumption than expected.”

This year’s drought comes at the tail-end of nearly a decade of lower-than-usual precipitation, and some experts have linked this such extreme weather to climate change. Amazon rainforest deforestation also reduces evaporation of moisture that then travels on air currents to provide rainfall far afield.

Bolsonaro’s opponents have blamed him for a delayed response to a problem experts flagged months ago. Others say this isn’t a problem that can be solved from one year to the next, nor by one administration.

“Frankly, the (power) sector is not designed to face such bad hydrology,” said Brandão, who foresees possible rationing this year.

Energy minister Bento Albuquerque, who said Bolsonaro had been briefed on a looming water crisis in October last year, has dismissed critics. Brazil has introduced a “water scarcity” electrical rate, increased energy imports from Argentina and Uruguay, accelerated infrastructure projects that can distribute power from the less affected northeast to the south, and created a national committee that can swiftly reverse regional rules to optimize power and water usage.

Earlier this month, Albuquerque asked the grid operator to analyze the benefits of restoring summer schedule, which his ministry said it is still examining. But on Sept. 17, Albuquerque said “there is no need for summer schedule to return in 2021.”

According to a 2016 Brazilian study from the State University of Mato Grosso, daylight saving existed in 76 countries, including the U.S. and Europe. Many countries across the world have chosen to abolish it. In 2016, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reintroduced daylight saving time to save energy, overturning a decree signed by his predecessor, Hugo Chávez.
The European Parliament carried out a study in 2018 among member countries, in which 84% of the people said they were against adjusting their clocks twice a year.

Ultimately the decision falls to Bolsonaro. His press office referred e-mailed questions about whether he was considering a U-turn nor when a decision is expected. In July, he reiterated his aversion, saying most Brazilians “are against it because it alters the biological clock.”
But that was before his energy minister asked for complementary studies and before the matter, once again, reached Congress.

Representatives of the restaurant, services and tourism sectors participated in a public hearing this week after sending a letter to Bolsonaro saying they could benefit from daylight saving. An extra hour of daylight would lure welcome business after losses suffered amid pandemic restrictions on activity. One of Bolsonaro’s closest allies from the private sector, Luciano Hang, a department store magnate, has also voiced his support.

Most of the hearing happened in a livestream on the Lower House’s YouTube channel. While business association representatives patiently walked lawmakers through their PowerPoint presentations, a handful of Brazilians posted impassioned comments showing the divergence over daylight saving.

“SUMMER SCHEDULE YESSSSS,” one of them wrote. “WE CAN ENJOY MUCH MORE OF THE DAY WITH OUR KIDS #ComeBackSummerHours”
Another user wasn’t convinced:
“NO SUMMER SCHEDULE!!! SUMMER SCHEDULE NEVER AGAIN!!!”
—
AP journalist Marcelo Silva de Sousa contributed to this report.

 

[Plain Jane]

Justice elusive 7 years after students abducted in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Several hundred students and political activists marched through downtown Mexico City on Sunday to demand authorities find out what happened to 43 teacher’s college students who disappeared in 2014.

apnews.com

Justice elusive 7 years after students abducted in Mexico
September 26, 2021



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Supporters and relatives of the 43 missing university students hold placards with photos of their loved ones as they march on the seventh anniversary of their disappearance, in Mexico City, Sunday, Sept. 26, 2021. Relatives continue to demand justice for the Ayotzinapa students who were allegedly taken from the buses by the local police and handed over to a gang of drug traffickers. (AP Photo/Marco Ugarte)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Several hundred students and political activists marched through downtown Mexico City on Sunday to demand authorities find out what happened to 43 teacher’s college students who disappeared in 2014.

Police in the southern city of Iguala handed the students over to drug gang members, who purportedly killed them and burned their bodies believing they were working for a rival crime group.

Marchers carrying photos of the youths chanted slogans like “Where are they?” They also held placards and banners reading “Until We Find Them!”

But seven years after the mass abduction on Sept. 26, 2014, real evidence of the students’ fate has been slow in coming.

Omar Gómez Trejo, the lead investigator in the case, said earlier this week that bone fragments found near a garbage dump near Iguala had been matched to three of the 43 students.

But unlike earlier investigations — now discredited because of allegations that suspects were tortured and evidence was mishandled — Gómez Trejo said the students’ remains were likely scattered in several places and not all had been burned at the dump.


Forensic experts have rejected conclusions reached under a previous administration that almost all the students were killed and burned at the dump. Experts said there was no evidence of any fire at the site large enough to have incinerated the 43.

Gómez Trejo said some bone fragments were found at a site almost a half mile (800 meters) away, and some had not been burned.

“Many of them had not been exposed to fire, but rather were exposed to weathering,” he said.
Instead of there being one single site and method of disposal, Gómez Trejo said cooperating witnesses — some of whom took part in getting rid of the bodies — have described “various routes with various bags” full of remains.

Over seven years of investigations into the case, Mexican authorities have found dozens of clandestine graves and 184 other bodies, but have recovered only the three fragments of the missing students.

 

[Plain Jane]

US judge OKs extradition of Peru ex-president – DW – 09/29/2021

A US judge has cleared the way for the extradition of former President Alejandro Toledo to his native Peru. Toledo is wanted in connection with having received millions in bribe money.

www.dw.com

US judge approves extradition of Peruvian ex-President Toledo
A US judge has cleared the way for the extradition of former President Alejandro Toledo to his native Peru. Toledo is wanted in connection with having received millions in bribe money.




Alejandro Toledo is accused of influence pedding, collusion and money laundering.

A US judge authorized the extradition to Peru of former President Alejandro Toledo on Tuesday.

Toledo has been accused of accepting bribes from a Brazilian construction company in exchange of handing them over with the tender to build a highway that links Peru and Brazil.
Toledo allegedly accepted $20 million (€17 million) in payment from the Odebrecht group.
Peru had asked the US to extradite their president in 2018, following which Toledo was arrested by US authorities in 2019.

Toledo had been living in California, near the Stanford University campus, where he both studied and worked, at the time of his arrest.

He had been under house arrest, though he spent a few months in jail in the earlier stages of his extradition case.

The final approval for extradition now rests with the US Department of State.
Toledo was the president of Peru from 2001 until 2006.

What did the judge say?
US Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson heard the testimonies of Jorge Barata, the former head of Odebrecht in Peru, and that of Josef Maiman, an acquaintance of Toledo who has said he helped the former president receive the bribe money.

"Barata and Maiman's testimony, combined with Toledo's admissions in this extradition proceeding that he ultimately received approximately $500,000 (roughly €430,000) in Odebrecht bribe money... establish probable cause to believe that Toledo committed collusion and money laundering," the judge said.


Watch video02:15
Former teacher Pedro Castillo sworn as Peru's president
The judge added that the case against Toledo was not "airtight" since witnesses had contradicted themselves at times and that issues pertaining to their testimonies had to be resolved in a Peruvian trial.

But the "evidence of criminality" was sufficient to "sustain the charge of collusion and money laundering" against Toledo, Hixson said in his ruling.

Toledo has denied all accusations against him. He is one of five former Peruvian presidents whom authorities allege have engaged in corrupt practices in recent decades.
The Odebrecht group itself is mired in a multi-national corruption scandal, most notably in Brazil.

How have Peruvian officials reacted?
Peru's Justice Minister Anibal Torres, in one of the first official reactions to the news, said he "welcomed Judge Hixson's ruling that supports the Peruvian state's position on the extradition of Toledo so that he can be tried in our country."



The Odebrecht group is accused of paying millions of dollars in bribes throughout the continent to secure prominent public works contracts. The company has admitted to paying $29 million in bribes in Peru between 2005 and 2014.
rm/msh (Reuters, AP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Dozens dead in gun battle at a prison in Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil

Nearly 30 prisoners were killed in a battle between inmates equipped with firearms and grenades at a prison in Ecuador’s largest city Tuesday, officials said.

www.france24.com

Dozens dead in gun battle at a prison in Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil
Issued on: 29/09/2021 - 03:52

Inmates are seen on top of the prison roof during a riot at the Guayaquil Regional prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador on September 28, 2021. © Fernando Mendez, AFP
Text by:NEWS WIRES
1 min
Listen to the article
Nearly 30 prisoners were killed in a battle between inmates equipped with firearms and grenades at a prison in Ecuador’s largest city Tuesday, officials said.

It was the latest in a series of deadly prison clashes between rival drug gangs that have killed over 100 inmates this year.

Ecuador’s attorney general’s office said on Twitter it was investigating the deaths of 29 convicts at the Litoral Penitentiary in the city of Guayaquil, including six who were beheaded.
Officials gave conflicting statements on how many inmates were wounded, with the attorney general’s office saying 42 while the national prison bureau earlier put that number at 48.

President Guillermo Lasso retweeted an announcement from the prison bureau saying order “has been restored at the Littoral Penitentiary after the Tuesday incidents.”

Ecuador’s prison system has become a battleground between prisoners linked to Mexican drug gangs—mainly the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels.

Guayaquil, Ecuador’s main port city, is a major hub for shipping South American cocaine north, especially to the United States.

Last week police confiscated two pistols, a revolver, some 500 rounds of ammunition, a hand grenade, several knives, two sticks of dynamite and homemade explosives at one of the city’s prisons.

Two weeks ago, Guayaquil’s Prison Number 4 was attacked by drones, part of “a war between international cartels,” prison authorities said. There were no casualties in the attack.

Ecuador’s prison system has about 60 facilities designed for 29,000 inmates, but is burdened by overcrowding and staffing shortages.

The country’s human rights ombudsman said there were 103 killings in prisons in 2020.
27 inmates died in prison riots in two jails in July, in an incident that forced the government to declare a state of emergency.
(AFP)

 

[Plain Jane]

France to reduce visas for North Africans in migration spat

A French government spokesperson says France plans to reduce the number of visas issued to people in North Africa because governments there are refusing to take back deported migrants.

apnews.com

France to reduce visas for North Africans in migration spat
By ANGELA CHARLTONyesterday



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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers the closing speech at the national convention on mental health and psychiatry at the Ministry of Solidarity and Health in Paris, Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2021. Psychology appointments in France will be funded by the government starting next year, the president announced Tuesday, amid growing awareness of the importance of mental health. (Gonzalo Fuentes/Pool Photo via AP)

PARIS (AP) — France will reduce the number of visas issued to people in North Africa because governments there are refusing to take back migrants expelled from France.
The move announced Tuesday comes amid pressure from far-right politicians on centrist President Emmanuel Macron to implement tougher immigration rules and creates new tensions between France and its North African neighbors. Morocco’s foreign minister slammed the decision as “unjustified.”

Starting in a few weeks, the French government plans to slash the number of visas given to Algerians and Moroccans by half, and to Tunisians by 30%, according to government officials.
All three countries were part of France’s colonial empire, and many Europe-bound migrants and other visitors coming from those North African nations have family or other ties in France.

French spokesperson Gabriel Attal told Europe-1 radio that France decided to take action because Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia have refused recently to provide consular documents for their citizens being deported from France after arriving illegally. Virus travel restrictions have also complicated such return efforts.

A senior official in the French presidency said France notably wants North African countries to take back people flagged for extremism, and expressed hope that a solution can be found soon.

Attal said France has been trying to reach a diplomatic solution since it passed a tougher immigration law in 2018. Between January and July, French judicial authorities ordered 7,731 Algerians to leave French territory because they didn’t have residency authorization but only 22 departed because many lacked the necessary documents from Algeria, Europe-1 reported.

Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said his country has issued 400 consular documents to Moroccans being expelled from France, but the number was limited because many of them refused to take a virus test, which is required to re-enter Morocco.

That is “the problem of France, which must deal with it,” Bourita told a news conference in Rabat.

He said Morocco is trying to seek “the necessary balance between facilitating the movement of people, whether students, businessmen and those wishing to benefit from medical services, and combating clandestine immigration.”

Tunisia took a more conciliatory public stance. President Kais Saied’s office said: “We are among countries that are cooperative in this domain, and we have excellent relations with France.”

The French announcement comes as politicians on the right and far right are pushing for tougher immigration rules in advance of France’s April presidential election. Macron is expected to announce a reelection bid.

Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen gave qualified backing to the visa reduction but suggested that Macron’s government waited too long before acting. Le Pen was Macron’s main rival in the 2017 election and is seen as his principal opponent if he runs again.

“For a long, long, long, long time, I have been asking that steps be taken to oblige certain countries to respect international law,” she said, naming Algeria and Tunisia. “I am pleased that the president of the republic heard me. I find it’s a bit late.”

Le Pen was speaking in Paris at a press conference about her plans, if elected, for a referendum on her proposals for a “drastic reduction” of immigration to France.
___
Tarik El Barakah in Rabat, Morocco, Bouazza ben Bouazza in Tunis, Tunisia, and Sylvie Corbet and John Leicester in Paris contributed.
___
Follow all of AP’s migration coverage at Migration

 

[Plain Jane]

Ecuador declares prison emergency after 118 killed in riot

Ecuador’s president has declared a state of emergency in the prison system following a battle among gang members in a coastal lockup that killed at least 118 people and injured 79.

apnews.com

Ecuador declares prison emergency after 116 killed in riot
By GABRIELA MOLINAtoday



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Women hug while waiting for some information about their relatives who are inmates at Litoral Penitentiary, after a prison riot, in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Wednesday, September 29, 2021. The authorities report at least 100 dead and 52 injured in the riot on Tuesday at the prison. (AP Photo/Angel DeJesus)

QUITO, Ecuador (AP) — Ecuador’s president has declared a state of emergency in the prison system following a battle among gang members in a coastal lockup that killed at least 116 people and injured 80 in what authorities say was the worst prison bloodbath ever in the country.

Officials said at least five of the dead were found to have been beheaded.

President Guillermo Lasso decreed a state of emergency Wednesday, which will give the government powers that include deploying police and soldiers inside prisons. The order came a day after bloodshed at the Litoral penitentiary in Guayaquil that officials blamed on gangs linked to international drug cartels fighting for control of the facility.

Lasso, visibly moved by the carnage, said at a news conference that what had happened in the prison was “bad and sad.” He also said he could not guarantee that authorities had regained control of the lockup.

“It is regrettable that the prisons are being turned into territories for power disputes by criminal gangs,” he said, adding that he would act with “absolute firmness” to regain control of the Litoral prison and prevent the violence from spreading to other penitentiaries.

Images circulating on social media showed dozens of bodies in the prison’s Pavilions 9 and 10 and scenes that looked like battlefields. The fighting was with firearms, knives and bombs, officials said. Earlier, regional police commander Fausto Buenaño had said that bodies were being found in the prison’s pipelines.

Outside the prison morgue, the relatives of inmates wept, with some describing to reporters the cruelty with which their loved ones were killed, decapitated and dismembered.

“In the history of the country, there has not been an incident similar or close to this one,” said Ledy Zúñiga, the former president of Ecuador’s National Rehabilitation Council.

Zúñiga, who was also the country’s minister of justice in 2016, said she regretted that steps had not been taken to prevent another massacre following deadly prison riots last February.
Earlier, officials said the violence erupted from a dispute between the “Los Lobos” and “Los Choneros” prison gangs.

Col. Mario Pazmiño, the former director of Ecuador’s military intelligence, said the bloody fighting shows that “transnational organized crime has permeated the structure” of Ecuador’s prisons, adding that Mexico’s Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels operate through local gangs.

“They want to sow fear,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday, urging the government to temporarily cede control of the prisons to the National Police. “The more radical and violent the way they murder,” the more they achieve their goal of control, he added.

Ecuador’s president said that care points had been set up for relatives of the inmates with food and psychological support. He added that a $24 million program to address the country’s prisons will be accelerated, starting with investments in infrastructure and technology in the Litoral prison.

The former director of Ecuador’s prison bureau, Fausto Cobo, said that inside penitentiaries authorities face a “threat with power equal to or greater than the state itself.” He said that while security forces must enter prisons with shields and unarmed, they are met by inmates with high-caliber weapons.

In July, the president decreed another state of emergency in Ecuador’s prison system following several violent episodes that resulted in more than 100 inmates being killed. Those deaths occurred in various prisons and not in a single facility like Tuesday’s massacre.

Previously, the bloodiest day occurred in February, when 79 prisoners died in simultaneous riots in three prisons in the country. In July, 22 more prisoners lost their lives in the Litoral penitentiary, while in September a penitentiary center was attacked by drones leaving no fatalities.

 

[Plain Jane]

Indigenous protest in Paraguay's capital erupts in violence

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Indigenous groups demonstrated in Paraguay's capital Wednesday against a law that makes it a crime to invade private property, and the protest escalated into violence that authorities said saw seven police officers injured, four cars set on fire and other acts of vandalism.

apnews.com

Indigenous protest in Paraguay’s capital erupts in violence
yesterday



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A masked protester uses a slingshot during clashes with police during an Indigenous protest against a proposed bill that criminalizes land invasions, outside Congress in Asuncion, Paraguay, Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2021. If the bill passes it would affect several Indigenous communities who reside on improvised settlements pending the restitution of their lands. (AP Photo/Jorge Saenz)

ASUNCION, Paraguay (AP) — Indigenous groups demonstrated in Paraguay’s capital Wednesday against a law that makes it a crime to invade private property, and the protest escalated into violence that authorities said saw seven police officers injured, four cars set on fire and other acts of vandalism.

The police command said one officer was hit by an arrow shot by archers from an ethnic group not yet identified. Television coverage showed the commander of a police station about 300 meters (yards) from the Congress building lying on the ground and being hit by demonstrators with stones and sticks. Prosecutors said those protesters could not be identified as Indigenous.

The unrest began when the 80-member Chamber of Deputies approved an amendment to the land invasion law that would increase the penalty to six years in prison from four for those who illegally occupy private property.

Indigenous groups often invade properties to press their demands that land be given to poor farmers.

Teodolina Villalba, president of the National Peasant Federation, said in Guarani in a telephone interview with The Associated Press that “the modification of the law will not be a solution because thousands of poor compatriots need a piece of land to cultivate.”

The group is the largest in Paraguay representing poor farmers, some of whom own land but others who do not. It seeks justice for Indigenous people whose lands were taken away and given to others during the autocratic regime of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner in 1954-1989.
The country’s Truth and Justice Commission, created by law to investigate human rights violations during the Stroessner regime, presented a 6,000-page report in 2006 saying that nearly two-thirds of land allocated during the regime’s agrarian reform campaign went to people close to the government. It said none of those people was poor.