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

[Plain Jane]

July's thread is here:

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

June's thread is here: https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/latin-america-and-the-islands-politics-economics-military-june-2021.601709/ Main Coronavirus thread beginning page 1358: https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/main-coronavirus-thread.566780/page-1358...

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Main Coronavirus thread beginning page 1369 is here:

CORONA - Main Coronavirus thread

https://news.gab.com/2021/07/29/important-download-covid-vaccine-religious-exemption-documents-here/ IMPORTANT: DOWNLOAD COVID VACCINE RELIGIOUS EXEMPTION DOCUMENTS HERE Post authorBy Andrew Torba Post dateJuly 29, 2021 I have been receiving dozens of direct messages on Gab over the past...

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Mexico's referendum on trying ex-presidents falls short

A referendum in Mexico has cost the country about $25 million, but only a fraction of the necessary voters to make it binding have participated.

apnews.com

Mexico to hold referendum on accountability of ex-presidents
By MARK STEVENSON2 hours ago



1 of 2
Commuters walk past an advertisement showing images of several Mexican former presidents, obscuring their eyes with red bars, and calling for citizens to participate in a referendum on whether ex-presidents should be tried for their alleged crimes during their time in office, in Mexico City, Saturday, July 31, 2021. The yes-or-no referendum on Sunday is going to cost Mexico about $25 million, and the vote is being held in the middle of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Christian Palma)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — A referendum in Mexico on Sunday is going to cost Mexico about $25 million, few like the poorly written, yes-or-no question on the ballot, and the vote is being held in the middle of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

To top it off, critics say the referendum question is so obvious that it’s offensive to submit it to a vote.
So why is Mexico holding a nationwide referendum on whether ex-presidents should be tried for any illegal acts they may have committed? Mexico has no formal amnesty for former leaders, and there is nothing in current law saying they can’t be brought to justice if there is evidence they have committed a crime.
As opponents say in a slogan, “The law must be applied, not put up for a vote.”
To comprehend the exercise, one has to understand President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who pushed for the referendum. A populist, he likes large crowds, and the pandemic has prevented him from holding the kind of mass rallies of hundreds of thousands of people he used to have regularly in Mexico City’s main plaza when he was a candidate.

He needs 40% of registered voters to participate — about 37 million people — to participate Sunday or the referendum won’t be binding. While the president is unlikely to get that many out to vote, he has to draw at least several million, and he has pulled out the stops to mobilize voters.

“The people want participative democracy, not just representative democracy,” López Obrador said last week. “You have to have faith in the people, you have to have confidence in the people and their free choice, not be afraid of the people.”

José Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Training, called the referendum “strictly an exercise in politics and media exposure,” noting the outcome of the ballot question isn’t in doubt.
“The question isn’t whether the “yes” option will win, we know that 90% or more will vote yes,” said Crespo. “The question is, how many people will go out to vote? A lot of us don’t want to be used in a manipulation. It will be an indicator of how many people still support López Obrador, of how much capacity he has to mobilize people.”
After two unsuccessful runs for the presidency — which he says he was cheated out of — López Obrador won on the third try in 2018, promising “revenge is not my strong suit” and forging a cordial transition with former president Enrique Peña Nieto.

Crespo, like many Mexicans, believes López Obrador struck a non-aggression pact with Peña Nieto, agreeing not to go after him in return for promises of a clean presidential race in 2018.


But the whole thing, while perhaps necessary, left López Obrador short on his main promise, to eradicate corruption; three years into his term he has few high-profile convictions to show for it. The corruption allegations made by the former head of the country’s state-owned oil company against Peña Nieto and top officials of the previous administration have proved hard to bring to trial.

So López Obrador is seeking the blessing of the public to change course and go after ex-presidents, two of whom — Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Vicente Fox (2000 to 2006) — have been among his harshest critics.
In all, Mexico has six living ex-presidents, the oldest of whom is 99. The statute of limitations has expired on many of the abuses they are accused of committing, most involving massive corruption, kickbacks, wasting government money and criminal economic mismanagement.

Peña Nieto has kept quiet, but many believe that, if directly provoked, he may have damaging information on López Obrador. Two of the president’s brothers were caught on tape accepting packets of cash while López Obrador was a perennial candidate from 2006 to 2018, which might help explain the president’s decision to throw the choice to the people.

In a way, it looks somewhat like history repeating itself. Fox became the first opposition candidate to peacefully win the presidency in Mexico’s history in 2000, raising hopes with promises to clean the “vermin and black snakes” out of government. He didn’t keep that promise.

López Obrador likes referendums, even though his past, less formal votes on specific projects have drawn few voters. Moreover, he needs some mass effort to rally supporters whose enthusiasm may be lagging after a tough first three years marked by continued drug cartel violence and a pandemic that has left a crushingly high death toll estimated to be around 360,000.

But if the bet was to inspire people with the referendum, it has fallen flat. Electoral regulators rewrote the referendum question into mush, purportedly to prevent the impression that the ex-presidents were being pre-judged.

In the end, the question came to read like a wet noodle: “Do you agree or not that, within the constitutional and legal framework, actions should be carried out to clear up the political decisions made by politicians in the past, with the aim of guaranteeing justice and the rights of potential victims?”

“Not only does it require a pause to take a breath to finish reading it, it requires rereading it two or three times to understand what it says,” wrote columnist Maite Azuela in the newspaper El Universal.

 

[Plain Jane]

Brazil: Bolsonaro supporters back voting system changes – DW – 08/02/2021

President Jair Bolsonaro claims that electronic voting allows fraud, casting doubt on the 2022 presidential election. Thousands marched in cities to show support, though he remains unpopular in opinion polls.

www.dw.com

Brazil: Bolsonaro supporters push for changes to voting system
President Jair Bolsonaro claims that electronic voting allows fraud, casting doubt on the 2022 presidential election. Thousands marched in cities to show support, though he remains unpopular in opinion polls.




Bolsonaro supporters carry a banner reading: 'TSE, why so afraid of the printed vote?' — referencing the country's electoral tribunal

Thousands of Brazilians marched in cities over the weekend to show support for far-right President Jair Bolsonaro's call to introduce printed paper ballots for next year's presidential race.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly claimed that the electronic voting system of the country have allowed electoral fraud. Critics say the comments are a way to undermine trust in the vote next year.

What happened at the protests?
Bolsonaro said that elections will not be held next year "if they are not clean and democratic" in a video shown to demonstrators across the country.

In Rio, some 3,000 people marched on Copacabana beach, many without face masks.

Brazil is reeling from one of the world's deadliest outbreaks of the coronavirus. Some 20,000 people tested positive on August 1.


Watch video01:54
Brazil: Thousands protest against President Bolsonaro
In the video message, Bolsonaro called people who think electronic vote was safe and subject to audit "liars."

He added that he would do "whatever necessary" to ensure there are paper printouts of votes cast in 2022 elections.

People also took to the streets in capital Brasilia and Sao Paulo, the country's most populous city.

In a separate message to people in Sao Paulo, Bolsonaro also said that "the will of the people must prevail."

What does Bolsonaro want?
Bolsonaro claims that the electronic system of voting, introduced in 1996, has allowed for fraud. He has not provided any evidence to back his claims.

Critics say his claims are one way of sowing doubts in the electoral system since his popularity is at a record low and he faces the prospect of losing next year.


Watch video01:23
Not enough – COVID-19 emergency aid for Brazil’s poor
Bolsonaro has repeatedly asserted that "printable and auditable" paper ballots are the only way to make sure that elections are conducted fairly next year.

In a Facebook Live event last week, the president spoke for more than two hours, claiming there was fraud in the last two presidential elections.

The 66-year-old is under fire for his poor handling of the coronavirus situation that has killed more than half a million Brazilians.

What are supporters saying?
One protester told news agency AFP she wanted votes that "can be recounted publicly for there to be more transparency, because there have been suspicions of fraud."

Another told the news agency that "voting strictly electronically is theft" and that voting with "printed receipts is not complicated, people will adapt."

Thousands attended a rally to support voting system changes in the capital Brasilia

Bolsonaro's supporters also carried signs that read "Democratic Election" or "Printed Vote" in marches in different cities.

Do others accept the claims?
Brazil's top electoral court and members of Supreme Court said there has not been any fraud in voting system. They said it was efficient and votes could be audited.

Bolsonaro has called the court's president an "imbecile" for suggesting that introducing paper ballots could give way to manipulation.

A congressional committee will vote this week on a bill proposing paper ballots. It is expected to face defeat.

According to a poll conducted by Datafolha, 51% of people disapproved of Bolsonaro's policies as of early July.

It was the worst result since he took charge as head of the state in 2019.
rm/rs (Reuters, AP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexico's referendum on trying ex-presidents falls short

A referendum in Mexico has cost the country about $25 million, but only a fraction of the necessary voters to make it binding have participated.

apnews.com

Mexico’s referendum on trying ex-presidents falls short
By MARK STEVENSONtoday



1 of 12
Commuters walk past an advertisement showing images of several Mexican former presidents, obscuring their eyes with red bars, and calling for citizens to participate in a referendum on whether ex-presidents should be tried for their alleged crimes during their time in office, in Mexico City, Saturday, July 31, 2021. The yes-or-no referendum on Sunday is going to cost Mexico about $25 million, and the vote is being held in the middle of a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo/Christian Palma)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A referendum in Mexico on Sunday cost the country about $25 million, but drew only a fraction of the voters needed to make it binding.

Few people liked the poorly written question on the ballot, and the vote was held in a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic.

The nationwide referendum asked whether ex-officials should be tried for any illegal acts. The National Electoral Institute reported that while over 90% of those who participated voted “yes,” only about 7% of eligible voters turned out, well below the 40% threshold needed.

Critics noted that Mexico has no formal amnesty for former leaders, and there is nothing in current law saying they can’t be brought to justice. As opponents say in a slogan, “The law must be applied, not put up for a vote.”

Turnout at some Mexico City polling places appeared light Sunday.

José Francisco Espinosa Cortés, 60, who drives a taxi and runs a computer repair business, was one of only about 60 people to have voted by midmorning at a polling station in the middle-class San Rafael neighborhood.

“A lot of people have fallen for the propaganda of ’why go out and vote, nothing is going to change,” said Espinosa Cortés. “But if we don’t end impunity, we’ll never end corruption,” he said calling the referendum “a historic chance for Mexico to get justice.”

“There should be a line of people out to here,” he said, gesturing to the empty sidewalk in front of the polling place.

Photographer Santiago Ruiseñor, 43, preferred to take his daughter to a Mexico City park to play Sunday rather then vote. “This is a farce,” Ruiseñor said. “This is pure cynicism, an act that is only being used to increase the president’s popularity.”

To comprehend the exercise, one has to understand President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who pushed for the referendum. A populist, he likes large crowds, and the pandemic has prevented him from holding the kind of mass rallies of hundreds of thousands of people he used to have regularly in Mexico City’s main plaza when he was a candidate.

He needed 40% of registered voters to cast ballots — about 37 million people — for the referendum to be binding. Still, drawing nearly 7 million was no mean feat in the face of the pandemic.

“The people want participative democracy, not just representative democracy,” López Obrador said last week. “You have to have faith in the people, you have to have confidence in the people and their free choice, not be afraid of the people.”

José Antonio Crespo, a political analyst at Mexico’s Center for Economic Research and Training, called the referendum “strictly an exercise in politics and media exposure,” noting the outcome of the ballot question was never in doubt.

“The question isn’t whether the “yes” option will win, we know that 90% or more will vote yes,” said Crespo. “The question is, how many people will go out to vote? A lot of us don’t want to be used in a manipulation. It will be an indicator of how many people still support López Obrador, of how much capacity he has to mobilize people.”

After two unsuccessful runs for the presidency — which he says he was cheated out of — López Obrador won on the third try in 2018, promising “revenge is not my strong suit” and forging a cordial transition with former president Enrique Peña Nieto.

Crespo, like many Mexicans, believes López Obrador struck a non-aggression pact with Peña Nieto, agreeing not to go after him in return for promises of a clean presidential race in 2018.
But the whole thing, while perhaps necessary, left López Obrador short on his main promise, to eradicate corruption; three years into his term he has few high-profile convictions to show for it.

The corruption allegations made by the former head of the country’s state-owned oil company against Peña Nieto and top officials of the previous administration have proved hard to bring to trial.

So López Obrador is seeking the blessing of the public to change course and go after ex-presidents, two of whom — Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Vicente Fox (2000 to 2006) — have been among his harshest critics.

In all, Mexico has six living ex-presidents, the oldest of whom is 99. The statute of limitations has expired on many of the abuses they are accused of committing, most involving massive corruption, kickbacks, wasting government money and criminal economic mismanagement.
Peña Nieto has kept quiet, but many believe that, if directly provoked, he may have damaging information on López Obrador. Two of the president’s brothers were caught on tape accepting packets of cash while López Obrador was a perennial candidate from 2006 to 2018, which might help explain the president’s decision to throw the choice to the people.

In a way, it looks somewhat like history repeating itself. Fox became the first opposition candidate to peacefully win the presidency in Mexico’s history in 2000, raising hopes with promises to clean the “vermin and black snakes” out of government. He didn’t keep that promise.

López Obrador likes referendums, though his past, less formal votes on specific projects have drawn few voters. Moreover, he needs some mass effort to rally supporters whose enthusiasm may be lagging after a tough first three years marked by continued drug cartel violence and a pandemic that has left a crushingly high death toll estimated to be around 360,000.

But if the bet was to inspire people with the referendum, it has fallen flat. Electoral regulators rewrote the referendum question into mush, purportedly to prevent the impression that the ex-presidents were being pre-judged.

In the end, the question came to read like a wet noodle: “Do you agree or not that, within the constitutional and legal framework, actions should be carried out to clear up the political decisions made by politicians in the past, with the aim of guaranteeing justice and the rights of potential victims?”

“Not only does it require a pause to take a breath to finish reading it, it requires rereading it two or three times to understand what it says,” wrote columnist Maite Azuela in the newspaper El Universal.
___
Associated Press reporter Fabiola Sánchez contributed to this report

 

[Plain Jane]

Médecins sans Frontières closes hospital in Haiti amid rising gang violence

Medical charity Doctors Without Borders has permanently closed its hospital in an impoverished neighborhood of Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince due to gang violence, it said in a statement Monday.

www.france24.com

Médecins sans Frontières closes hospital in Haiti amid rising gang violence
Issued on: 03/08/2021 - 07:56Modified: 03/08/2021 - 07:57

People walk on the deserted road ahead of gang shootings in downtown in Port-au-Prince, on December 20, 2019. © Chandan Khanna, AFP
Text by:NEWS WIRES
2 min
Medical charity Doctors Without Borders has permanently closed its hospital in an impoverished neighborhood of Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince due to gang violence, it said in a statement Monday.

The hospital in Martissant, in the south of Port-au-Prince, offered free medical treatment to roughly 300,000 people in the poorest country in the Americas, and had been operated by the charity -- known by its French acronym MSF -- since 2006.

But for the last two months, armed gangs have been fighting for control of Martissant, with the area effectively under siege.

Police had already abandoned the neighborhood after the local station was attacked by the gangs when the violence broke out in early June.

Several thousand residents have already fled, while banks and businesses have been looted by the armed groups.

MSF's hospital was hit by gunfire at the end of June, though no one was wounded and the charity did not appear to have been deliberately targeted.

At the time, it said it was evacuating the facility to keep its staff safe.

"Unable to guarantee the safety of its staff and patients, and wanting to draw attention to the unbearable situation in Martissant, MSF is forced to close its doors after 15 years of presence in the area," the NGO said.

It said it has not had time to remove its logos from the building, and that it declines "any responsibility for what might happen in the former buildings of the Emergency Center."

The Nobel peace prize-winning charity said it remained determined to "help the Haitian population in general and the poorest in particular," and was in discussions to relocate the center to another part of Port-au-Prince.

"The care provided concerned the management of trauma, medical and gynecological-obstetrical emergencies," its statement said.

"MSF continues to call on armed actors in Haiti to respect the safety of health personnel, patients, equipment and medical facilities; vehicles and ambulances must also be able to circulate safety."

The new prime minister, Ariel Henry, who took power in Haiti after the assassination of president Jovenel Moise on July 7, has vowed to bring peace and security.

But the Caribbean nation remains mired in political and security chaos, with a marked uptick in the number of kidnappings for ransom by armed gangs, and an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases.

Non-governmental organizations play a key role in providing medical care in Haiti, where the government devotes less than five percent of its budget to health care.
MSF has been working in Haiti for 30 years.
(AFP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Fears over impunity grow as Haiti probes president's slaying

Haitian police have detained more than 40 suspects in the killing of President Jovenel Moïse, but many people fear the country's crumbling judicial system could result in the assassination going unpunished.

apnews.com

Fears over impunity grow as Haiti probes president’s slaying
By DÁNICA COTOyesterday



1 of 8
This photo provided by Doctors Without Borders shows locals standing outside its emergency clinic in the Martissant neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Sunday, Dec. 2, 2020. Officials said Monday, August 2, 2021, that Doctors Without Borders has closed the Martissant emergency clinic in Haiti's capital amid gang violence that has left more than 19,000 people homeless. (Guillaume Binet/Doctors Without Borders via AP)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Police have detained more than 40 suspects in the killing of President Jovenel Moïse, but many people fear Haiti’s crumbling judicial system could result in the assassination going unpunished.

Interrogations are continuing, while dozens of suspects, including an ex-Haitian senator and former justice official, are still at large. But the judicial process has already hit significant snags, among them death threats and allegations of evidence tampering.

Experts and even Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection, an ombudsman-like government agency, warn that the country faces many challenges to properly handle such a complicated case.
“The judicial system is held hostage by certain sectors and weakened by a disciplinary body ... that protects dishonest and corrupt judges but persecutes, through bogus human rights NGOs, those who are honest,” the agency said in a Sunday statement.

Brian Concannon, an adviser for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said he worries about “so much intentional misdirection” as the Moïse investigation moves forward.
“The big issue is are you going to have a structure that can deliver the truth?” he said. “It’s possible there are good people that are getting at the truth, but there is enough misdirection, intimidation (and) people apparently manipulating evidence. ... I’m not confident that we’re getting closer to the truth with the current process.”

Haiti’s Office of Citizen Protection noted that 32 high-profile killings dating from 1991 have never been resolved, including those of former government officials, lawyers, academics and journalists. It also accused corrupt judges of freeing suspects arrested by police, noting that in the past two decades there has been no significant criminal process in well-known murder cases.
The agency urged judicial officials, especially Haiti’s chief prosecutor, “not to be intimidated by the pressure or the unfair maneuvers of individuals of all stripes who want at all costs to sabotage the investigation into the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in order to reinforce the phenomenon of impunity in Haiti.”
Bedford Claude, the Port-au-Prince prosecutor overseeing the case, did not return messages for comment.

A recent report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned what it called chronic impunity in Haiti and the lack of an independent justice sector.

“The judiciary remains in a state of chronic dysfunction,” the report said, blaming increased political interference, threats against judicial officials and lack of resources among other things. “Corruption is rampant and there are clear indications of the judiciary acting to vindicate political and other ends, rather than those of justice.”



The report said Haiti’s judicial system remains marred by lengthy pretrial detentions and paralyzed by the government’s failure to pay the salaries of clerks and other workers. It also accused authorities of failing to adequately protect judicial officials.

Among those investigating Moïse’s killing who have received death threats is Carl Henry Destin, a justice of the peace who told the AP that he has gone into hiding. He declined to provide other details, including how the threats might be hampering the investigation into the July 7 attack at Moïse’s private home in which his wife, Martine Moïse, was seriously wounded.

Another targeted official is court clerk Marcelin Valentin, who filed a complaint July 20 with the chief prosecutor saying he received serious death threats by phone. He said that in one two days after the assassination, a caller threatened to kill him if he didn’t modify names and statements in his report.

One of the messages he received in Creole translates roughly to: “Clerk, you’ve got a bullet to the head waiting for you.”

Valentin said the threats forced him to remain in hiding and stay away from his office.
“My family is obligated to take a forced vacation out of fear that something bad will happen to them,” he said in the report.

Deaths threats issued during the investigation of high-profile slayings in Haiti is nothing new. In one recent case, a judge overseeing the 2020 killing of Monferrier Dorval, head of the bar association in Port-au-Prince, went into hiding out of fear for his life. The case has since been at a standstill.

Among the significant challenges in Dorval’s case are the theft of evidence from the crime scene and from the courthouse, and there are worries that could be repeated in the Moïse investigation.

Haitian authorities have not disclosed what kind of evidence they have collected in the president’s slaying with the help of the FBI, and they have released only limited details at news conferences during which they have largely refused to take questions.

Among those arrested are 18 former Colombian soldiers. The government of Colombia has said the majority of them were duped and did not know about the real operation that was brainstormed in Florida and Haiti.

A growing concern is where the soldiers and other suspects arrested in the case are being held. A June 2021 report issued by the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti said that more than 80% of detainees in the country’s extremely overcrowded prisons have not been tried and that most live in cells without proper ventilation or clean water and get one daily ration of food and have limited or no access to health care.

“The conditions of detention ... represent a situation of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” the report said.

On Tuesday, Colombia’s government said the detained soldiers needed urgent medical care. It said an official mission to Haiti found they were constantly in handcuffs and some were tired and had lost weight: “One of them was limping and the other couldn’t stand up by himself and had to be helped by his colleague.”

Another concern are the upcoming Haitian presidential and legislative elections, which newly installed Prime Minister Ariel Henry has pledged to hold as soon as possible as he promised to bring to justice all those responsible for Moïse’s murder. The first round of voting had been scheduled for late September before Moïse was killed, and it is unclear if the date will change.

Concannon, adviser for the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said the outcome of the Moïse investigation could depend largely on whether the candidate elected is “somebody who has the mandate and ambition to really get to the truth of this.”
___
Associated Press reporters Evens Sanon in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and Astrid Suárez in Bucaramanga, Colombia contributed to this report.

 

[Plain Jane]

Nicaragua charges ex-beauty queen running for election – DW – 08/05/2021

Berenice Quezada has been disqualified from running as vice president in the upcoming vote. She is the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.

www.dw.com

Nicaragua charges ex-beauty queen running for election
Berenice Quezada has been disqualified from running as vice president in the upcoming vote. She is the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.




Quezada was the running mate of the opposition presidential candidate Oscar Sobalvarro

Nicaraguan prosecutors charged former beauty queen and opposition candidate for the presidential vote Berenice Quezada with inciting terrorism, the attorney general said Wednesday.

Quezada was placed under house arrest a day earlier amid a crackdown against President Daniel Ortega's opponents ahead of the November 7 election.

The charges against Quezada relate to her participation in the 2018 anti-government protests, which Ortega's regime had deemed a coup attempt.

She was released pending trial.

Quezada out of the race
Quezada's arrest came just one day after she officially registered herself as the right-wing Citizens for Freedom Alliance (CxL) candidate for vice president.

The 27-year-old winner of the Miss Nicaragua 2017 beauty pageant was running alongside Oscar Sobalvarro, a former guerrilla leader who fought against Ortega's left-wing Sandinista party.

Quezada can no longer run for elections because of her charges

CxL had officially registered the pair despite calls from some opposition parties to boycott the election instead of giving it a thin veil of legitimacy.

A sweeping crackdown
In the past two months, Nicaraguan authorities detained dozens of opposition figures; Quezada was the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.

Electoral authorities previously barred two opposition parties from running any candidate at all.

Unsurprisingly, the Sandinista party officially nominated Ortega for president and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, as his running mate.

The United States and the European Union have recently imposed sanctions against Murillo and other top officials, warning that the elections would not be free, with most contenders jailed.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti boosting security for judges amid assassination case

A Haitian judicial official says authorities have secured armed guards to bolster security for court personnel as they prepare to announce the judge who will oversee proceedings involving the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

apnews.com

Haiti boosting security for judges amid assassination case
By EVENS SANON and DÁNICA COTOtoday



1 of 2
A picture of late Haitian President Jovenel Moise hangs on the wall of his former residence, behind interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph giving a press conference in Port-au-Prince, Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Moise was assassinated in his home on July 7. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haitian authorities have secured armed guards to bolster security for court personnel as they prepare to announce the judge who will oversee proceedings involving the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, a judicial official said Thursday.

Magistrate Bernard Saint-Vil, who is dean of the Court of First Instance in Port-au-Prince, said some judges he recently contacted about the case had told him they were worried about their safety.

He said he is not obligated to take such concerns into consideration as he decides who will be assigned the case, saying that “the first characteristic of a magistrate is courage, because a judge is called upon to make decisions.”

But Saint-Vil added that officials recognize additional security measures are needed since some judicial officials have already gone into hiding amid death threats. Court clerks have reported receiving threatening demands that they revise names and other details in reports on the July 7 attack that killed Moïse and seriously wounded his wife.

“We demanded that these means be available because even before choosing the judge, we must check that everything is in place,” Saint-Vil said after meeting privately with several judges.

Saint-Vil did not say whether any judges had refused to take on the Moïse case.

The boost in security that he requested comes amid concerns over the wellbeing of suspects in the case who have been transferred from police holding cells to a prison where conditions have been likened to torture by the United Nations and where thousands of inmates remain held for years without so much as a court hearing, let alone a trial.

“The conditions of detention are generally appalling,” defense attorney Samuel Madistin told The Associated Press. “I hope everything will be done to allow justice to do its job.”

Madistin represents two of the more than 40 suspects detained in the assassination case. He said that he had not been allowed to meet with his clients and that one one of them, Reynaldo Corvington, is diabetic and has high blood pressure.

“There are judges who have refused to take the case. Pre-trial detention is likely to be prolonged,” Madistin said.

Similar concerns have come from human rights activists as well as Colombia’s government, which is worried about the health of 18 former Colombian soldiers arrested in the case.

Colombia has said they have limited access to water and some are exhausted and have lost weight. It says one was limping and another couldn’t stand without help from a colleague.

Colombia’s government also has said the majority of former soldiers were duped into their participation.

U.S. and Haitian authorities continue to investigate the assassination as new details keep emerging.

Attorneys for Antonio Intriago, the owner of a small Miami-based private security company that authorities say hired the former Colombian soldiers for the mission, said he is innocent and the victim of what they called “an elaborate scheme.”

In a statement Wednesday, the lawyers said Intriago, of CTU Security, was led to believe that he was helping with a redevelopment and humanitarian project in Haiti’s southern coastal city of Jacmel. They said that prior to Moïse being killed, Intriago was told that security had a “change in direction” and was being requested to accompany a judge and Haitian police to serve the president with an arrest warrant.

“At the time of President Moïse’s murder, Mr. Intriago thought that his unarmed security contractors were still awaiting official security and firearms permits from the Haitian police,” his attorneys said. “Mr. Intriago was not in any way involved in the plotting to or killing of President Moïse.”

The lawyers said the security contractors did not kill Moïse and were told their role was to guard officials while police carried out the arrest warrant.

“When they entered the presidential residence, they found the president deceased, his wife wounded and the house ransacked. It is our belief that the president’s own bodyguards betrayed him,” the attorneys said.

None of the president’s security detail was injured in the attack, and at least a dozen police officers have been arrested while several top security officials remain detained.

Intriago’s attorneys also provided documents alleging that Wendelle Coq Thélot, a former Haitian Supreme Court judge, was involved in the plan to supposedly arrest Moïse. A person alleging to be Thélot wrote in an Aug. 1 tweet: “I firmly denounce the political persecutions of which I am the object at this time.”

Police have issued arrest warrants for Thélot and others including a former judicial official and an ex-Haitian senator.
___
Associated Press writer Evens Sanon reported this story in Port-au-Prince and AP writer Danica Coto reported from San Juan, Puerto Rico. AP writer Gisela Salomón in Miami contributed to this report.

 

[Plain Jane]

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants

SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

apnews.com

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants
By KATHIA MARTINEZtoday



1 of 9
Panamanian border police stand guard outside a migrant camp before the visit of the foreign ministers from Panama and Colombia, in San Vicente, Darien province, Panama, near the border with Colombia, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. The foreign ministers of Panama and Colombia met Friday near their common border to discuss how to handle a surge in migration through the Darian jungle. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)

SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

The foreign ministers of both countries said they will announce a target number for migrants next week. The figure will be determined at a meeting in Colombia Monday between both countries’ security and immigration officials.

So far this year, Panama estimates about 49,000 migrants have come through the dangerous, jungle-clad gap. Officials estimate about 16% of them are children or youths.

Both countries said they will also cooperate to prosecute criminal gangs that rob migrants and traffic drugs through the largely roadless area.

The goal is to set “a number of migrants that can be received in a safe manner on the Panamanian side,” said Panama’s Foreign Minister, Erika Mouynes.


“We do not want these migrants to risk drowning, or things like that,” said Colombia’s Marta Lucía Ramírez de Rincón, “and neither, obviously, do we want them to pass through Darien, where we know there are so many risks.”

At a migrant shelter in the Panamanian town of San Vicente, which the ministers visited, Cubans Otamaris Ojeda Pompa, 50, and Yerald Montejo, 44, sat with inflamed and cracked feet after crossing the gap. The couple left Cuba on July 15 and traveled through Guyana, Uruguay and Colombia.

“In my experience, what I can tell people is, not to do it,” Ojeda Pompa said of the nine-day trek. “Don’t go through there, it is the most terrible thing in the world.”

She said she saw at least 11 corpses along the trail. “One sees a lot of things on the trail. Some of the remains are just bones,” she said. “Some bodies were just decomposing, women and young people, too.”

Recent rains have made the crossing even more dangerous.

“It is a really worrisome situation, because if crossing the jungle during the dry season was dangerous, it is even more dangerous now,” said Santiago Paz, who works in the area for the U.N. International Organization for Migration.

Haitian migrant Elizabeth Henry, 33, crossed with her three-year-old son, Javier Jean Paul Henry.

Despite the danger, Henry still has her sights set on reaching the United States. She left her job as a cleaner in Chile, where she has lived for five years, because she didn’t make enough to send money back to her family in Haiti.

Many migrants like Henry headed first to South America, where some countries sheltered Haitians after a 2010 earthquake devastated that country.

While many migrants enter Colombia illegally, officials have made little effort to deport them. Immigration officials have said it would be too costly to fly so many home.

There has been a sharp rebound in the number of migrants from last year, when pandemic restrictions reduced mobility for locals and migrants alike.

Local officials estimate more than 10,000 migrants have massed recently in Necocli, a Colombian city that has become a bottleneck on the global migrant trail that winds through South and Central America, and on to Mexico and then the U.S. southern border.

Necocli residents say they have never seen so many migrants and city authorities have declared a “public calamity” because of water shortages caused by the additional demand from the migrants.

A common migrant route runs from the Ecuadorian border through Colombia to Necocli, where ferries carry people across the Gulf of Uraba to the even smaller border town of Capurgana — and then into the Darien Gap.

In the end, the two countries’ efforts may lead some migrants to hike through even more difficult terrain at other passes.

Panama’s Security Minister, Juan Pino, said the two countries agreed “we are going to control, bilaterally, the flows through Colombia from Necocli,” but noted “there is another overland route that, because of the terrain, is very hard to control.”

 

[Plain Jane]

St. Vincent prime minister injured in anti-vaccine protest

St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves has been hospitalized after a demonstrator threw a rock at his head during an anti-vaccine protest in the eastern Caribbean island.

apnews.com

St. Vincent prime minister injured in anti-vaccine protest
August 6, 2021

FILE - In this Sept. 27, 2019 file photo, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly at the U.N. headquarters. Gonsalves was hospitalized after a demonstrator threw a rock at his head during an anti-vaccine protest in the eastern Caribbean island, officials said late Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen, File)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, was hospitalized after a demonstrator threw a rock at his head during an anti-vaccine protest led by nurses and other workers in the eastern Caribbean island, officials said late Thursday.

Gonsalves was bleeding profusely but is expected to recover, according to a statement from his office.

However, the prime minister will be flown to Barbados for further medical treatment including an MRI scan, Finance Minister Camilo Gonsalves told Parliament on Thursday, according to local media.

Authorities said Gonsalves was injured when he stepped out of his car and tried to walk into Parliament amid a crowd of some 200 people that had blocked the entrance as they set roadblocks on fire.

“Such an act is to be unequivocally condemned,” his office said.

The attack was criticized by others including Ronald Sanders, ambassador to the Organization of American States.

“This development in Caribbean politics is reprehensible,” he said.

Local media quoted Senator Julian Francis saying that an unidentified woman had been arrested. No further details were immediately available.

The protest was organized by unions representing nurses, police and other workers who claimed that the government planned to mandate vaccines for certain employees. Gonsalves clarified that he would not make vaccines mandatory.

 

[DWD58]

Thank you Jane for your reports on how bad it is in the southern countries., Something has to be done to resolve these issues. Letting them over run the USA is not the answer.

 

[Plain Jane]

US is flying Central Americans to Mexico to deter crossings

Two U.S. officials say the Biden administration has begun flying some Central American families deep into Mexico as authorities encounter more families and unaccompanied children at the U.S.

apnews.com

US is flying Central Americans to Mexico to deter crossings
By ELLIOT SPAGAT and GISELA SALOMONAugust 6, 2021



1 of 2
FILE - In this May 11, 2021 file photo three young migrants hold hands as they run in the rain at an intake area after turning themselves in upon crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Roma, Texas. An official says the Biden administration has begun flying some Central American families deep into Mexico as authorities encounter more families and unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)

SAN DIEGO (AP) — The Biden administration has begun flying Central American families expelled from the United States deep into Mexico as authorities encounter more families and unaccompanied children at the U.S.-Mexico border, two American officials said Friday.

For years, the U.S. government has intermittently flown deported Mexican migrants back home to make it more difficult to try to cross the border again, but this appears to be the first time it has flown Central Americans to Mexico instead of their home countries.

The first flight Thursday fell short of its targeted number of passengers because of elevated COVID-19 rates among migrants, according to two officials who are familiar with the policy change and spoke on the condition of anonymity because details were not intended to be made public. Reuters first reported on the change.

The flights were expected to continue, with plans for Mexico to deport the migrants to their home countries in Central America, the officials said. One official said the planes have capacity for 135 people.

The U.S. Homeland Security Department confirmed that it began expelling migrants by air to Mexico under a pandemic-related authority that prevents migrants from seeking asylum at the border. The department, which did not respond to a question about the nationalities of those aboard Thursday’s flight, said the frequency of repeat crossers and transmissibility of the delta variant of the coronavirus necessitated the move.

Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department and immigration agency did not respond to requests for comment Friday.

The flights are the Biden administration’s latest attempt to confront growing numbers of migrants.

David Shahoulian, Homeland Security assistant secretary for border and immigration policy, said in a recent court filing that July will likely mark the highest number of unaccompanied children picked up at the border and second-highest number of people arriving in families.
There are “significantly increased rates” of migrants testing positive for COVID-19, he said without offering more specifics.

The administration also began fast-track deportation flights July 30 for Central American families who are not subject to the pandemic-related expulsions. Manuel Padilla, the Border Patrol’s chief of operations, said Friday that those flights have gone to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras and will continue weekly.

“Anyone who doesn’t have legal status in the United States will be returned to their home countries and will not be allowed to stay here,” Padilla said in a conference call for Spanish-language media.

The accelerated efforts to expel Central American families have prompted pro-immigration groups to draw parallels to Donald Trump’s presidency.

“It is surprising and disappointing to see the U.S. administration implementing such harsh measures at a time when humanitarian needs could not be higher,” said Olga Byrne, director of immigration at the International Rescue Committee.
The Trump administration flew many Mexican adults deep into Mexico last year in an effort to deter repeat crossings, which have become common under the pandemic-related authority because there are no legal consequences for getting caught. Those flights, often to Mexico City, Guadalajara, Queretaro or Villahermosa, tapered off early in the Biden administration.

The Biden administration also appears to be flying more migrants out of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, by far the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, to other U.S. border cities. Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flights, said there were likely 24 flights from Brownsville, Texas, to El Paso, Texas, during July and likely five to San Diego and four to Tucson, Arizona, in the last few days of July.

It is unclear how many flown from Rio Grande Valley to other U.S. cities were allowed to remain in the United States to seek asylum and how many were expelled to Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has not responded to questions about those flights.
___
Salomon reported from Miami. Associated Press reporter Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed.

 

[Plain Jane]

Mysterious crates washing up on Brazil's beaches – DW – 10/19/2019

Oil spills have been plaguing Brazil's northern coastline for weeks. But before that, another mystery had been puzzling local scientists: shipping crates, thought to be from a German vessel that sank in 1944.

www.dw.com

Mysterious crates washing up on Brazil's oil-stained beaches
Oil spills have been plaguing Brazil's northern coastline for weeks. But before that, another mystery had been puzzling local scientists: shipping crates, thought to be from a German vessel that sank in 1944.





During a walk along Praia Bela, literally a "beautiful beach" in Brazil's northern state of Ceara, Carlos Teixeira comes across an odd-looking crate. It's not the first time the marine researcher from Ceara's state university has seen one.

"They've been showing up along the coast of northeastern Brazil since October 2018," he told DW. "We just don't know where they've come from."

Between 200 and 300 such crates have appeared since then, Teixeira said, possibly from a shipwreck, but that has not been confirmed.

Interest in the crates rose when oil began washing up along the same beaches in September.

"I told my colleagues this can't be a coincidence," he said. That's when Teixeira began taking a closer look at the crates, which are said to have been carrying "crude rubber in bales." One crate was marked with "French Indochina," the Southeast Asian colony that ceased to exist after 1954.

Read more: Brazil’s fight against dengue a race against time

Oil spills along the coastline have been puzzling scientsts in northern Brazil for weeks

World's deepest shipwreck
Not long after, Teixeira found information online about the German blockade runner, SS Rio Grande. It was sailing from Japan to Europe in January 1944 when Allied ships intercepted and sank it off the Brazilian coast. Its cargo: crude rubber in bales.
The location of the shipwreck has been known since 1996. Blue Water Recoveries found it 540 nautical miles (1,000 kilometers) off Brazil's northeastern coast at a depth of 5,762 meters (18,904 feet). That makes it the world's deepest shipwreck found to date.

Blue Water Recoveries sent Teixeira images of the wreck, and he identified crate-like objects similar to those that have washed ashore. Then he set out to see if such crates could have made their way to Brazil. For that, he constructed a simulation with "dots originating from the shipwreck site. These dots came to the northeastern coast. That leads me to believe that the wreck is the source of the crates."

The mysterious crates are believed to be from the SS Rio Grande, which sank in 1944

Teixeira further sees a connection between the crates and the oil.

"The wreck was one of the hypotheses for where the oil was coming from," as news media had reported. "But we spoke with Petrobras (the state oil company), and they said the oil was new. If the oil came from the wreck, it'd be more than 70 years old. Also, the oil is crude, not fuel."

Read more: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil

'Far from shore'
Although the source of the oil remains a mystery, Teixeira supports his simulation of the currents, adding whatever the source is, it must be near the wreck.
"I think it came from a latitude even with the state of Pernambuco, between 500 and 1,000 kilometers from the coast." That would be near the wreck. "Because the oil is really spread out. If the oil were coming from closer to shore, it wouldn't be in so many areas all at once."

Between 200 and 300 shipping crates have washed up along Brazil's beaches since last year

Oil has appeared along a 2,000 kilometer (1,200 mile) stretch of coastline. One theory has attributed it to an accident at a Petrobras refinery in Pernambuca in August. But Teixeira notes that the oil is in the sea far from the coast, which suggests its presence is not due to an accident at the Petrobras facility.

"The currents wouldn't have brought the oil north. It has to be coming far from shore," he said.

One question is what do with the crates that have washed up on shore. "Some were thrown away. Others have been left on the beach. No one's said anything about putting them in a museum," Teixeira said. And since each crate weighs between 80 and more than 100 kilograms (176 to 220 pounds), "they're not so easy to carry off."

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Brazil Faces 10 Million Bag Loss Of Coffee: Preliminary Assessment

BY TYLER DURDEN
TUESDAY, AUG 10, 2021 - 05:45 AM
A wicked cold snap and massive drought in July have devastated Brazil's coffee belt. According to Bloomberg, preliminary reports show the South American country may lose millions of bags of arabica coffee.

A formal damage report of Brazil's coffee belt is due in the coming weeks. The government report is set to show up to ten million bags (each bag weighing 132 pounds) of arabica coffee, or one-third of annual purchases by the U.S. may have been damaged.

The view is part of a government official who asked not to be named because the figures are internal data.

Days after the freak cold snap, we noted how coffee prices were erupting as estimated losses were 1-2 million bags - now the figures are much worse and suggest coffee prices will remain elevated.



It's only a matter of time before coffee inflation, sparked by volatile weather, is passed on to U.S. consumers.

 

[Plain Jane]

Colombian tribunal: Guerrillas recruited 18,600 children

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A Colombian tribunal that investigates war crimes on Tuesday said the country’s largest guerrilla group recruited at least 18,600 children into its ranks between 1996 and 2016, when it made peace with the government.

apnews.com

Colombian tribunal: Guerrillas recruited 18,600 children
By MANUEL RUEDAtoday

FILE - In this Dec. 21, 2000 file photo, soldiers guard three captured teenage rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, in the mountains of Santander state in northwestern Colombia. A Colombian tribunal that investigates war crimes said on Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, that the FARC recruited at least 18,600 children into its ranks between 1996 and 2016, when it made peace with the government. (AP Photo/Scott Dalton, File)

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A Colombian tribunal that investigates war crimes on Tuesday said the country’s largest guerrilla group recruited at least 18,600 children into its ranks between 1996 and 2016, when it made peace with the government.

The Special Jurisdiction for Peace said it will call on former leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to testify as it continues to investigate the forced recruitment of children into the now-demobilized guerrilla army.

The estimate published by the peace tribunal comes from 31 databases compiled by government investigators, human rights groups and relatives of children who were recruited into the guerrilla group. It surpasses a previous estimate by Colombia’s Attorney General which said in 2016 that the FARC had forcibly recruited 11,500 children into its ranks.

The issue of forced recruitment has been a controversial topic in Colombia, where wounds from the four-decade long conflict between the FARC and the Colombian government are still fresh.

In an interview last year with local newspaper El Tiempo, former FARC commander Rodrigo Londoño denied the guerrillas had a policy of recruiting children under 15. Londoño said many 15, 16 and 17 year-olds joined the guerrilla group “voluntarily” and that in rural Colombia people over 15 were already considered to be adults.

Under Colombian law however only people 18 and over are defined as adults.

According to the peace tribunal, the FARC recruited at least 5,600 children 14 and under in a span of two decades.
The tribunal will continue its investigation by summoning 26 former leaders of the FARC’s Eastern Block, which is believed to have been heavily involved in the recruitment of minors.
Under the 2016 peace deal, former fighters who collaborate with the peace tribunal can avoid prison time if judges determine they told the truth about war crimes. But the tribunal can order them to provide reparations to victims. Those who don’t collaborate and are found guilty can be barred from holding public offices and face 20-year prison sentences.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti postpones election date to replace slain president

Haiti will hold presidential elections last scheduled for September on November 7, officials said Wednesday, with the assassination of president Jovenel Moise still shrouded in mystery.

www.france24.com

Haiti postpones election date to replace slain president
Issued on: 12/08/2021 - 09:05

People walk on a deserted road ahead of gang shootings in downtown in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on December 20, 2019. © Chandan Khanna, AFP
Text by:NEWS WIRES
2 min
Haiti will hold presidential elections last scheduled for September on November 7, officials said Wednesday, with the assassination of president Jovenel Moise still shrouded in mystery.

A hit squad burst into the presidential residence and shot Moise dead in the early hours of July 7. His wife Martine was wounded but survived.

The provisional electoral council said polling day will include the first round of the presidential election, legislative elections that should have been held in 2019, and a constitutional referendum that Moise supported.

The referendum was twice postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the new electoral calendar, the second round of presidential and legislative elections will be on January 23, 2022 at the same time as municipal and local elections, which have also been delayed for years.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who was sworn in last month, has vowed to restore order in the country and organize the long-delayed elections sought by Haitians and the international community.

Haiti currently has no working parliament and only a handful of elected senators.

Police say they have arrested 44 people in connection with the president's killing, including 12 Haitian police officers, 18 Colombians who were allegedly part of the commando team, and two Americans of Haitian descent.

The head of Moise's security detail is among those detained.

Moise had been ruling the impoverished and disaster-plagued nation by decree, with gang violence spiking and Covid-19 spreading rapidly in recent months.
(AFP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexico City marks fall of Aztec capital 500 years ago

Walking for hours through the gritty streets in the center of Mexico City, you can hear the daily urban soundtrack.

apnews.com

Mexico City marks fall of Aztec capital 500 years ago
By MARIA VERZAtoday



1 of 12
Workers build a replica of the Aztec Templo Mayor, with an image of the Pre-columbian god Quetzalcoatl adorning the surrounding buildings, at Mexico City´s main square the Zocalo, Monday, Aug. 9, 2021. Mexico City is preparing for the 500 anniversary of the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, today´s Mexico City, on Aug. 13, 2021. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Walking for hours through the gritty streets in the center of Mexico City, you can hear the daily urban soundtrack: Car engines, the call of the man who buys scrap metal and the handbells that announce the passing of a garbage truck.

It’s hard to imagine that some of these streets trace the outline of what was, five centuries ago, Tenochtitlan, a sophisticated city on an island in a bridge-studded lake where a great civilization flourished.

The Aztec emperors who ruled much of the land that became Mexico were defeated by a Spanish-led force that seized the city on August 13, 1521.

Despite all that was lost in the epic event 500 years ago — an empire and countless Indigenous lives — much remains of that civilization on the anniversary of its collapse. Vestiges lie beneath the streets, in the minds of the people, and on their plates.

Then, as now, the city’s center was dedicated to commerce, with vendors laying out wares on blankets or in improvised stalls, much as they would have done in 1521.

Artists, intellectuals and the government are trying to show what it was all like and what remains, in novel forms: they plan to paint a line on the streets of the city of 9 million to show where the boundaries of the ancient city of Tenochtitlan ended. The drying up of lakes that once surrounded the city long ago erased that line.

Officials have also built a near life-size replica of the Aztecs’ twin temples in the capital’s vast main plaza.

It is part of a project to rescue the memory of the world-changing event, which for too long has been mired in the old and largely inaccurate vision of Indigenous groups conquered by the victorious Spaniards.

“What really was the Conquest? What have we been told about it? Who were the victors, and who were the defeated?” asks Margarita Cossich, a Guatemalan archaeologist who is working with a team from the National Autonomous University. “It is much more complex than simply talking of the good versus the bad, the Spaniards against the Indigenous groups.”

For example, expedition leader Hernán Cortés and his 900 Spaniards made up only about one percent of the army of thousands of allies from Indigenous groups oppressed by the Aztecs.
But the official projects pale in comparison to the real-life surviving elements of Aztec life. The line delimiting the old city boundaries will run near where women sell corn tortillas, whose ingredients have varied not at all since the Aztecs.

Other stands sell amaranth sweets mixed with honey or nuts; in Aztec times, the amaranth seeds were mixed with blood of sacrificed warriors and molded into the shapes of gods. And then eaten, as historian Hugo García Capistrán, explains, but with a sense of ritual.

Not everything ended on Aug. 13, 1521, when the last leader of the Aztec resistance, the Emperor Cuauhtemoc, was taken prisoner by the Spaniards.

There is only a simple plaque marking the spot, in the tough neighborhood of Tepito.

“Tequipeuhcan: ‘The place where slavery began.’ Here the Emperor Cuauhtemotzin was taken prisoner on the afternoon of Aug. 13, 1521,” reads the plaque on a church wall.

A few blocks away, Oswaldo González sells figurines made of obsidian, the dark, glass-like stone prized by the Aztecs.

“Everything the Spaniards couldn’t see and couldn’t destroy, remains alive,” González says.
There also remain traces of Cortés, though they’re neither very public or prominent; Mexicans have learned at school for generations to view him as the enemy. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has promoted telling the Indigenous side if the story, and has asked Spain to apologize for the murder, disease and exploitation of the Conquest. Spain hasn’t, and the Spanish ambassador was not invited to the 500th anniversary ceremonies scheduled for Friday.

Archaeologist Esteban Mirón notes that there isn’t a single statue to Moctezuma — the emperor who welcomed Cortés — in the city.

Nor are there any statues of Cortés. As Mirón traces the route that the Spaniard took into the city in 1519 — welcomed at first, the Conquistadores were later expelled — there is a stone plaque commemorating the first meeting between Cortés and the Aztec emperor.

Inside a nearby church, another plaque marks the niche where Cortés’ bones are believed to lie.
It was said he wanted to be buried here, near the site of his greatest victory, made possible by feats like constructing a fleet of wooden warships to assault the lake-ringed island city.

Tenochtitlan was completely surrounded by a shallow lake crossed by narrow causeways, so the Spaniards built attack ships known as bergantines — something akin to floating battle platforms — to fight the Aztecs in their canoes

A street nearby marks the place where Cortés docked those ships, but again, there is no monument.

Tenochtitlan also marked some terrible defeats for the Spaniards. They had entered the city in 1519, but had been chased out with great losses a few months later, leaving most of their plundered gold behind.
On June 30, 1520, the so-called “Sad Night,” now re-dubbed “The Victorious Night,” Cortés was forced to flee, leaving many dead Spaniards behind. “The historical record say that they left walking through the lake, which was not very deep, on top of the bodies of their own comrades,” Mirón notes.

In 1981, a public works project in the area unearthed a bar of melted Aztec gold — a small part of the loot that the Spanish soldiers dropped in their retreat.

But it’s not just artifacts; the spirit of ancient Mexico remains very much alive.

Mary Gloria, 41, works making embroidery in a squatter’s settlement near where the edge of the old city.

Gloria just finished embroidering a figure of “Mictlantecuhtli,” the Aztec god of death, to mark the city’s huge toll in the coronavirus pandemic.

Similar plagues — smallpox, measles and later cholera — nearly wiped out the city’s Indigenous population after the conquest. Survival, above all, was the main Indigenous victory from 1521.
Now, Gloria wants to redeem Malinche, the indigenous woman who helped the Spaniards as a translator. Long considered a traitor, Malinche ensured the survival of her line.

“It is up to us rewrite the script,” Gloria says.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haitian judge overseeing Moïse slaying case withdraws

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The Haitian judge assigned to oversee the investigation into the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse has withdrawn from the case citing personal reasons, a decision that might delay the much-anticipated probe.

apnews.com

Haitian judge overseeing Moïse slaying case withdraws
By EVENS SANONyesterday

A man touches a portrait of the late Haitian President Jovenel Moïse outside the Cathedral where a memorial service for him takes place in Cap-Haitien, Haiti, Thursday, July 22, 2021. Moïse was killed in his home on July 7. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — The Haitian judge assigned to oversee the investigation into the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse has withdrawn from the case citing personal reasons, a decision that might delay the much-anticipated probe.

Judge Mathieu Chanlatte, who was named to oversee the case less than a week ago, announced his decision in a letter, the dean of the Court of First Instance in Port-au-Prince, Magistrate Bernard Saint-Vil, said on Friday.

Saint-Vil told The Associated Press he will choose a judge to replace Chanlatte in the coming days, likely early next week.
Chanlatte did not elaborate on why he had decided to withdraw from the case besides citing personal reasons. He left the post a day after one of his assistants, Ernst Lafortune, died under unclear circumstances.

Several days ago, court clerks investigating Moïse’s death told the AP they had gone into hiding after being threatened with death if they didn’t change some names and statements in their reports.

The National Association of Haitian Legal Clerks said Thursday in a press release that Ernst Lafortune, a clerk working for Chanlatte, died and it asked for an investigation to clarify the circumstances.

Moïse was killed on July 7, when armed men raided his private home. His wife, Martine Moïse, was seriously wounded but is recovering.

Police have arrested more than 40 suspects, but there’s still no clarity about who was behind the plot to kill him. Among the detainees are 18 former Colombian soldiers and 20 Haitian police officers .

 

[Plain Jane]

Death toll of powerful earthquake in Haiti soars to 1,297

The death toll from the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that battered Haiti is soaring as rescuers race to find survivors amid the rubble ahead of a potential deluge from an approaching storm.

apnews.com

Powerful quake adds to Haiti’s misery, killing at least 304
By REGINA GARCIA CANO and EVENS SANONtoday



1 of 18
People gather outside the Petit Pas Hotel, destroyed by the earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti, Saturday, Aug. 14, 2021. A 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti on Saturday, with the epicenter about 125 kilometers (78 miles) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, the US Geological Survey said. (AP Photo/Joseph Odelyn)

LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — A powerful magnitude 7.2 earthquake added to the misery in Haiti, killing at least 304 people, injuring a minimum of 1,800 others and destroying hundreds of homes. People in the Caribbean island nation rushed into the streets to seek safety and to help help rescue those trapped in the rubble of collapsed homes, hotels and other structures.

Saturday’s earthquake struck the southwestern part of the hemisphere’s poorest nation, almost razing some towns and triggering landslides that hampered rescue efforts in two of the hardest-hit communities. The disaster also added to the plight of Haitians, who were already grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, a presidential assassination and deepening poverty.

The epicenter of the quake was about 125 kilometers (78 miles) west of the capital of Port-au-Prince, the U.S. Geological Survey said. The widespread damage could worsen by early next week, with Tropical Storm Grace predicted to reach Haiti late Monday or early Tuesday.

Aftershocks were felt throughout the day and late into the night, when many people now homeless or frightened by the possibility of their fractured homes collapsing on them stayed in the streets to sleep — if their nerves allowed them.

In the badly damaged coastal town of Les Cayes, under darkness that was only punctured by flashlights, some praised God for surviving the earthquake.

“We are alive today because God loves us,” said Marie-claire Jean-Pierre, whose home collapsed a moment after she and her son stepped outside when they felt the ground begin to shake.

Prime Minister Ariel Henry said he was rushing aid to areas where towns were destroyed and hospitals overwhelmed with incoming patients. A former senator rented a private airplane to move injured people from Les Cayes to Port-au-Prince for medical assistance.

Henry declared a one-month state of emergency for the whole country and said he would not ask for international help until the extent of the damages was known.

“The most important thing is to recover as many survivors as possible under the rubble,” said Henry. “We have learned that the local hospitals, in particular that of Les Cayes, are overwhelmed with wounded, fractured people.”

Jerry Chandler, director of Haiti’s Office of Civil Protection, told reporters that the death toll stood at 304 Saturday night. Rescue workers and bystanders were able to pull many people to safety from the rubble.

Chandler said a partial count of structural damage included at least 860 destroyed homes and more than 700 damaged. Hospitals, schools, offices and churches were also affected.

On the tiny island of Ile-a-Vache, about 6.5 miles (10.5 kilometers) from Les Cayes, the quake damaged a seaside resort popular with Haitian officials, business leaders, diplomats and humanitarian workers. Fernand Sajous, owner of the Abaka Bay Resort, said by telephone that nine of the hotel’s 30 rooms collapsed, but he said they were vacant at the time and no one was injured.
“They disappeared — just like that,” Sajous said.
People in Les Cayes tried to pull guests from the rubble of a collapsed hotel, but as the sun set, they had only been able to recover the body of a 7-year-old girl whose home was behind the facility.

“I have eight kids, and I was looking for the last one,” Jean-Claude Daniel said through tears. “I will never see her again alive. The earthquake destroyed my life. It took a child away from me.”

The reports of overwhelmed hospitals come as Haiti struggles with the pandemic and a lack of resources to deal with it. Just last month, the country of 11 million people received its first batch of U.S.-donated coronavirus vaccines, via a United Nations program for low-income countries.
The earthquake also struck just over a month after President Jovenel Moïse was shot to death in his home, sending the country into political chaos. His widow, Martine Moïse, who was seriously wounded in the attack, posted a message on Twitter calling for unity among Haitians: “Let’s put our shoulders together to bring solidarity.”

As he boarded a plane bound for Les Cayes, Henry said he wanted “structured solidarity” to ensure the response was coordinated to avoid the confusion that followed the devastating 2010 earthquake, when aid was slow to reach residents after as many as 300,000 Haitians were killed.

U.S. President Joe Biden authorized an immediate response and named USAID Administrator Samantha Power as the senior official coordinating the U.S effort to help Haiti. USAID will help to assess damage and assist in rebuilding, said Biden, who called the United States a “close and enduring friend to the people of Haiti.”

Argentina and Chile also were among the first nations to promise help.

Humanitarian workers said gang activity in the seaside district of Martissant, just west of the Haitian capital, also was complicating relief efforts.

“Nobody can travel through the area,” Ndiaga Seck, a UNICEF spokesman in Port-au-Prince, said by phone. “We can only fly over or take another route.”

Seck said information about deaths and damage was slow coming to Port-au-Prince because of spotty internet service, but UNICEF planned to send medical supplies to two hospitals in the south, in Les Cayes and Jeremie.
People in Port-au-Prince felt the tremor and many rushed into the streets in fear, although there did not appear to be damage there.
Haiti, where many live in tenuous circumstances, is vulnerable to earthquakes and hurricanes. It was struck by a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in 2018 that killed more than a dozen people.
By late Saturday, the island had experienced six aftershocks stronger than 5.0 and nine above 4.0.
Claude Prepetit, a Haitian civil engineer and geologist, warned of the danger from cracked structures.
“More or less intensive aftershocks are to be expected for a month,” he said, cautioning that some buildings, “badly damaged during the earthquake, can collapse during aftershocks.”
___
Associated Press writer Regina Garcia Cano reported this story from Mexico City and AP writer Evens Sanon reported in Les Cayes. AP writer Tammy Webber in Fenton, Michigan, Josh Boak in Washington and Trenton Daniel in New York contributed to this report.

See this thread also:

BRKG - 7.2 earthquake in Haiti per USGS

M7.4 EARTHQUAKE HITS PETIT TROU DE NIPPES, HAITI View: https://twitter.com/eqtw/status/1426525428081070082?s=21

www.timebomb2000.com

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Death Toll In Haiti Quake Stands At 724, Thousands More Injured

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, AUG 15, 2021 - 02:01 PM
The death toll from Saturday's 7.2-magnitude earthquake in Haiti has doubled overnight to 724 people, with 2,800 injured in Saturday's in Haiti, according to the director of the Civil Protection Agency. The earthquake hit early in the morning, leveling buildings and filling streets with debris.
A one-month state of emergency was declared by Prime Minister Ariel Henry, who said that some towns were completely leveled by the quake.
People gather outside the Petit Pas Hotel, destroyed by the earthquake in Les Cayes, Haiti Credit: AP/Joseph Odelyn

"The most important thing is to recover as many survivors as possible under the rubble," said Henry, adding "We have learned that the local hospitals, in particular that of Les Cayes, are overwhelmed with wounded, fractured people."

While the International Red Cross and hospitals throughout the rest of the country are helping to care for the injured, USAID Haiti announced on Sunday that they're 65 emergency response personnel, and will send 52,000 pounds of special tools, equipment and medical supplies to support rescue operations.

The quake struck near the cities of Nippes and Jeremie along the southern peninsula. Damage was reported over 93 miles away in the capital of Port-au-Prince, while the quake was felt as far as CUba and Jamaica, according to RT.


As ITV reports, "Among those killed in Saturday's quake was Gabriel Fortune, a longtime lawmaker and former mayor of Les Cayes. He died along with several others when his hotel, Le Manguier, collapsed, the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste reported."

Philippe Boutin, 37, who lives in Puerto Rico but visits his family every year in Les Cayes, said his mother was saying morning prayers when the shaking began, but was able to leave the house.
The earthquake happened during the festivities to celebrate the town’s patron saint. Mr Boutin said the hotel was probably full and the small town had more people than usual.
“We still don’t know how many people are under the rubble,” he said.
Naomi Verneus, a 34-year-old resident of Port-au-Prince, said she was woken up by the earthquake which shook her bed.
She said: “I woke up and didn’t have time to put my shoes on. We lived the 2010 earthquake and all I could do was run. I later remembered my two kids and my mother were still inside. My neighbour went in and told them to get out. We ran to the street.” -ITV

The quake comes more than a month after president Jovenel Moise was assassinated, adding to the post-quake chaos.

"We’re concerned that this earthquake is just one more crisis on top of what the country is already facing – including the worsening political stalemate after the president’s assassination, Covid and food insecurity," said Jean-Wickens Merone, spokesman for humanitarian aid groups World Vision Haiti.

By late Saturday, Haiti had experienced six aftershocks stronger than 5.0 magnitude, and nine above 4.0.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti earthquake death toll rises above 1,200 – DW – 08/15/2021

After a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, the disaster's death toll more than doubled in one day. Rescuers are still searching for hundreds ahead of an impending tropical storm.

www.dw.com

Haiti: Death toll in massive earthquake rises above 1,200
After a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, the disaster's death toll more than doubled in one day. Rescuers are still searching for hundreds ahead of an impending tropical storm.




The quake flattened hundreds of homes and buildings

At least 1,297 people were killed in Saturday's 7.2 magnitude earthquake in Haiti, authorities said Sunday.

Hundreds of people are still missing and more than 2,800 were injured, Haiti's civil protection services added.

Sunday's figures are a tragic rise in the death toll, which was at just over 300 on Saturday.
Rescue workers are racing against the clock to pull survivors from the rubble of destroyed buildings as Haiti braces for a tropical storm.


Watch video01:43
Powerful Haiti earthquake leaves hundreds dead
What help is Haiti receiving?
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has sent a 65-person urban search and rescue team to Haiti, as well as 52,000 pounds (23.6 tons) of tools and medical supplies, the agency's chief Samatha Power said on Twitter.


Cuba and Ecuador also sent medical or search-and-rescue teams. Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Peru and Venezuela offered help.

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the body was "working to support rescue and relief efforts."

Pope Francis called on nations to send quick aid in his Sunday blessing in the Vatican. "May solidarity from everyone lighten the consequences of the tragedy," he said on Twitter.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed her "heartfelt condolences" to the Haitian people.
"My special sympathy goes to the relatives of the victims and to all those who have lost their belongings. To those injured, I wish a speedy recovery," she said in a statement issued on Sunday.

Watch video02:05
What is the situation in Haiti? Anne-Rose Schön from Port-au-Prince
What happened?
A state of emergency was declared in Haiti after what the government described as a "dramatic" earthquake — also felt in Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

An approaching tropical storm is likely to complicate rescue efforts. According to the US National Hurricane Center, Tropical Storm Grace is forecast to bring heavy rainfall over Haiti on Monday. Flash flooding is also a possibility.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1426922918232088577

View: https://twitter.com/NHC_Atlantic/status/1426922918232088577?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1426922918232088577%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dw.com%2Fen%2Fhaiti-death-toll-in-massive-earthquake-rises-above-1200%2Fa-58871540


Hundreds of Haitians lost their homes in the earthquake and several people had to sleep in the open on Saturday night.

The disaster brought memories of the magnitude 7 quake in 2010 that killed tens of thousands of people.

The country has also been mired in political turmoil since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise.

 

[Plain Jane]

Zerohedge

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

www.zerohedge.com

Escobar: Empire Warns Brazil - It's Our NATO Way Or Huawei

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, AUG 15, 2021 - 05:30 PM
Authored by Pepe Escobar and Quantum Bird for The Saker Blog,
The Empire of Chaos could never be accused of deploying Sun Tzu subtlety. Especially when it comes to dealing with the satrapies.



In the case of Brazil, former BRICS stalwart reduced to the status of a proto-neo-colony under an aspiring Soprano-style “captain”, the Men Who Run the Show applied standard procedure.

First they sent the Deep State, as in CIA’s William Burns. Then they sent National Security, as in advisor Jake Sullivan. Both visits delivered the same message: toe the line – or else.
Nuances do apply. The Deep State wants the current proto-neo-colony status of Brazil unchanged, and hopefully deepened – as it strikes the “B” in BRICS out of deeper cooperation with the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Sullivan for his part is just a cog in the Dem dementia wheel that previously conspired alongside the NSA to destroy Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, throw Lula in jail and place Bolsonaro in charge.

Lula is not the Dem’s horse for the 2022 Brazilian presidential election. But despite some woke-ish characters coming out of the closet, there’s no viable third way in the horizon acceptable for the Empire – at least not yet.

Still, the proverbial “offer you can’t refuse” had to be delivered to the people that matter: the men in uniform. Do what you gotta do, strike a deal with Lula, whatever. In the end, what we say, goes.

That poisoned carrot

The cover story for Sullivan’s trip was what amounts for all practical purposes to the Ukrainization of Central America/the Caribbean. Notorious vampire Victoria “F**k the EU” Nuland, number 3 in the State Dept., had already been dispatched to assorted chihuahuas in the region to lay down the law.

Sullivan followed the script, banging on notorious anti-imperial recalcitrants such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and extolling the platitude du jour: “The need to preserve and protect democracy in the hemisphere.” He met face to face with two of the military brass who are part of the deciding circle, Gen Augusto Heleno, who heads the all-powerful Institutional Security Cabinet, and Defense Minister Braga Netto, both under fire for corruption.

Unlike Burns, who stuck to “security” CIA interests, stressing that Brazil escaping from the Empire’s sphere of influence simply won’t be tolerated, Sullivan actually offered a carrot: drop Huawei out of the 5G auction later this year, and you may be accepted as a NATO partner.

This carrot bears similarities with the Empire offering BRICS member India to become a – lesser – member of the Quad, alongside US, Japan and Australia, to “contain” China.
So it’s always about the imperial sphere of influence: smashing BRICS from the inside, turning members into “partners”.

NATO’s “partnerships” are euphemisms for “we own you, bitch”. All “partners” have to strictly follow the parameters of the NATO 2030 agenda, which has been designed to promote a planetary Robocop patrolling/containing vast swathes of the Global South.

Even if Brazil seems to be, in fact, already a lowly NATO “partner”, as its Navy was invited to be part of the recent Sea Breeze exercise in the Black Sea, which was a major pro-Kiev, “containment of Russia” operation, it is not granted the carrot will be taken.

Indeed, an upgrade would only mean a little extra terminological glamour, as in “major non-NATO ally” or “global partner”.

The real question is who among the Brazilian men in uniform will approve this lethal blow to sovereignty. Significant dissent does exist. The Brazilian Navy, for example, will be against it – as it would be reduced to the role of patrolling the South Atlantic on behalf of the Empire, and even becoming a hostage were the Empire to turbo-charge the militarization of the South Atlantic.

If this “partnership” ever happened, the Navy’s concept of the “Blue Amazon” would be buried deep in the ocean. Not to mention that NATO does not even recognize the concept of a South Atlantic. Brazil’s own sphere of influence actually extends from the Andes to the western coast of Africa via the South Atlantic.

The “price” to be paid to accept such a Mafioso “offer you can’t refuse” is to bluntly antagonize China. Talk about the Brazilian military falling on their own tropical sword.

Brazil and China commercial affairs are intense – and multifaceted. Since the mid-1990s, the presence of Chinese commercial interests has been significant in the Brazilian economy, ranging from mining companies to huge infrastructure projects such as the bridge over the Baia de Todos os Santos.

China is also the top buyer of the huge native soy production, which is managed by the quite politically active agrobusiness Brazilian community, which is not going to stay idle while its interests are being eroded.

Brazil also boasts the largest telecommunication market in Latin America. Rebuilding and updating the Brazilian telephony and internet network, jeopardized by 1990s privatizations and 2000s business mistakes, is an opportunity Huawei simply can’t ignore.

That also configures a huge win for Brazil, able to profit from some hardware the NSA can’t easily spy on.

So basically to close the doors to Huawei would push Beijing to fiercely retaliate in myriad ways. The most painful consequence would be the end of Brazilian soy imports; that will drive agrobusiness honchos absolutely nuts, with unforeseen consequences.

In the end, Sullivan’s “offer you can’t refuse” actually smacks of desperation. As the Empire of Chaos is being slowly but surely expelled from Eurasia by the Russia-China strategic partnership, the imperial ace in the hole amounts to renewing control over the Monroe doctrine satrapies.

All bets are off on whether the tropical men in uniform really understand the high stakes in play.

 

[Plain Jane]

Death toll from Haiti's weekend earthquake rises to 1,941

Officials in Haiti have raised the death toll from a powerful weekend earthquake to more than 1,900.

apnews.com

Tropical depression drenching earthquake-stricken Haiti
By MARK STEVENSON and EVENS SANONtoday



1 of 26
Injured people lie in beds outside the Immaculée Conception hospital in Les Cayes, Haiti, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021, two days after a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck the southwestern part of the country. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)
LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — Tropical Depression Grace swept over Haiti with drenching rains just two days after a powerful earthquake battered the impoverished Caribbean nation, adding to the misery of thousands who lost loved ones, suffered injuries or found themselves homeless and forcing overwhelmed hospitals and rescuers to act quickly.

After nightfall, heavy rain and strong winds whipped at the country’s southwestern area, hit hardest by Saturday’s quake, and officials warned that rainfall could reach 15 inches (38 centimeters) in some areas before the storm moved on. Port-au-Prince, the capital, also saw heavy rains.

The storm arrived on the same day that the country’s Civil Protection Agency raised the death toll from the earthquake to 1,419 and the number of injured to 6,000, many of whom have had to wait for medical help lying outside in wilting heat.

Grace’s rain and wind raised the threat of mudslides and flash flooding as it slowly passed by southwestern Haiti’s Tiburon Peninsula overnight, before heading toward .Jamaica and southeastern Cuba on Tuesday.

The quake nearly wrecked some towns in the southwest in the latest disaster to befall the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Haitians already were struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, gang violence, worsening poverty and the July 7 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

“We are in an exceptional situation,” Prime Minister Ariel Henry told reporters Monday afternoon as the storm approached.

A hospital in the badly damaged town of Les Cayes was so crowded with patients after the earthquake that many had to lie in patios, corridors, verandas and hallways, but the approaching storm had officials scrambling to relocate them as best they could.

“We had planned to put up tents (in hospital patios), but we were told that could not be safe,” said Gede Peterson, director of Les Cayes General Hospital.

It is not the first time the hospital has been forced to improvise. The refrigeration in the hospital’s morgue has not worked for three months, but after the earthquake struck Saturday, staff had to store as many as 20 bodies in the small space. Relatives quickly came to take most to private embalming services or immediate burial. By Monday, only three bodies were in the morgue.

“We are working now to ensure that the resources we have are going to get to the places that are hardest hit,” said Civil Protection Agency head Jerry Chandler, referring to the hard-hit towns of Les Cayes and Jeremie and the department of Nippes.

Quake victims continued to stream to Les Cayes’ overwhelmed general hospital, waiting on stair steps, in corridors and on an open veranda.

“After two days, they are almost always generally infected,” said Dr. Paurus Michelete, who had treated 250 patients and was one of only three doctors on call when the quake hit. He added that pain killers, analgesics and steel pins to mend fractures were running out amid the crush of patients.

Meanwhile, rescuers and scrap metal scavengers dug into the floors of a collapsed hotel in the coastal town, where 15 bodies had already been extracted. Jean Moise Fortunè, whose brother, the hotel owner and a prominent politician, was killed in the quake, believed there were more people trapped in the rubble.

But based on the size of voids that workers cautiously peered into, perhaps a foot (30 centimeters) in depth, finding survivors appeared unlikely.

As work, fuel and money ran out, desperate Les Cayes residents searched collapsed houses for scrap metal to sell. Others waited for money wired from abroad, a mainstay of Haiti’s economy even before the quake.

Anthony Emile waited six hours in a line with dozens of others trying to get money that his brother had wired from Chile, where he has worked since the 2010 quake that devastated Haiti’s capital and killed tens of thousands.

“We have been waiting since morning for it, but there are too many people,” said Emile, a banana farmer who said relatives in the countryside depend on him giving them money to survive.

In Jeremie, Police Commissioner Paul Menard denied a social media report about looting.
“If it were going to happen, it would have been on the first or second night,” Menard said.
Officials said the magnitude 7.2 earthquake left more than 7,000 homes destroyed and nearly 5,000 damaged from the quake, leaving some 30,000 families homeless. Hospitals, schools, offices and churches also were destroyed or badly damaged.

Josil Eliophane, 84, crouched on the steps of Les Cayes General Hospital, clutching an X-ray showing his shattered arm bone and pleading for pain medication. Michelete said he would give one of his few remaining shots to Eliophane, who ran out of his house as the quake hit, only to have a wall fall on him.

Nearby, on the hospital’s open-air veranda, patients were on beds and mattresses, hooked up to IV bags of saline fluid. Others lay in the garden under bed sheets erected to shield them from the sun. None of the patients or relatives caring for them wore face masks amid a coronavirus surge.

Structural engineers from Miyamoto International, a global earthquake and structural engineering firm, visited hard-hit areas Monday to help with damage assessment and urban search and rescue efforts. Chief among their duties was inspecting government water towers and the damaged offices of charities in the region, said CEO and president Kit Miyamoto.

Miyamoto said he has seen places devastated by earthquakes build back stronger. He said the destruction in Port-au-Prince from the 2010 tremor led masons and others to improve their building practices. People in the capital felt the Saturday morning tremor centered about 75 miles to the west and rushed into the streets in fear but there weren’t any reports of damage there.

“Port-au-Prince building is much better than it was in 2010 — I know that,” Miyamoto said. “It’s a huge difference, but that knowledge is not widespread. The focus is definitely on Port-au-Prince.”
___
Associated Press writers Trenton Daniel in New York and Regina Garcia Cano in Mexico City contributed to this report.

 

[Plain Jane]

1,150 flee Colombia village caught between 2 armed groups

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — At least 1,150 people fled their homes in Colombia's Choco province over the weekend to escape fighting between leftist insurgents and a paramilitary group that is expanding its grip on the region, the nation's Human Rights Ombudsman said Tuesday.

apnews.com

1,150 flee Colombia village caught between 2 armed groups
today


BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — At least 1,150 people fled their homes in Colombia’s Choco province over the weekend to escape fighting between leftist insurgents and a paramilitary group that is expanding its grip on the region, the nation’s Human Rights Ombudsman said Tuesday.

In a statement, the agency said armed men identifying themselves as members of the Gaitanista Self Defense Forces of Colombia had entered the riverside village of Dipurdú del Guasimo last week and interrogated residents while spray painting buildings with their group’s initials.

A few days later, the agency said, fighting broke out between the Gaitanistas and the National Liberation Army guerrilla group, causing residents to flee to nearby villages in Choco, a province that is mostly inhabited by AfroColombians and Indigenous people.

The agency said the people who left Dipurdú del Guasimo are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. The area has few roads and most villages can be reached only through river transport.

The government is struggling to control isolated rural areas where armed groups are fighting over illegal gold mines and drug trafficking routes abandoned by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, once the country’s biggest rebel movement that signed a peace deal in 2016 and disbanded.

Fighting between these smaller groups has led to a rise in the displacement of civilians.

According to the Human Rights Ombudsman, violence forced more than 44,000 people to flee their homes in the first six months of this year. That compares to an estimated 13,900 in the same period of 2020.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti earthquake: Frustration grows over lack of aid – DW – 08/19/2021

Humanitarian aid has been slow to reach those in need, with anger festering in local communities in Haiti. The Caribbean island has raised the official death toll to 2,189 after a massive earthquake hit last weekend.

www.dw.com

Haiti earthquake: Frustration grows over lack of aid as death toll crosses 2,000
Humanitarian aid has been slow to reach those in need, with anger festering in local communities in Haiti. The Caribbean island has raised the official death toll to 2,189 after a massive earthquake hit last weekend.




Thousands of people have been cut off from humanitarian aid

A massive earthquake that hit last week has left Haiti "on its knees," Prime Minister Ariel Henry said on Wednesday, as the official death toll rose to 2,189.

Some 9,900 people were reported injured as slow trickling aid increased frustration among locals in need.

"Haiti is now on its knees," Henry said. "The earthquake that devastated a large part of the south of the country proves once again our limits, and how fragile we are."

The epicenter of Saturday's 7.2 magnitude quake hit the southwestern part of the Caribbean nation, about 78 miles (125 kilometers) west of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The powerful earthquake caused tens of thousands of houses to collapse. Shortly thereafter, a tropical storm brought torrential downpours on survivors already coping with the catastrophe.

Watch video01:20
Earthquake-stricken Haiti hit by heavy rains
Haiti is still recovering from a 2010 earthquake that killed over 200,000. The latest quake hit just weeks after the island plunged into political turmoil after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise on July 7.

Lack of aid
More than 30,000 families have been left homeless in the aftermath of the quake.
Schools, offices and churches have been destroyed or badly damaged, leaving thousands of locals to seek shelter in tents mushrooming across the country.

"We need help," said Roosevelt Milford, a pastor speaking from a tent city in Les Cayes. They lacked basic provisions like food, clean drinking water, and shelter from the rain, which has been adding pressure on relief efforts.

In L'Asile, northeast of Les Cayes, community leader Aldorf Hilaire said survivors were dependent on support from charities like Doctors Without Borders as government help had not arrived.

"We are desperate," he told Reuters news agency. "The springs are dirty: the water is not drinkable ... We had a bad night during the storm and the people need tents and tarps."

Immediate need for medical equipment
With hospitals overrun with injured residents, medical facilities in the areas worst hit by the earthquake were in desperate need of medical equipment, international aid workers said.
"The hospitals are all broken and collapsed, the operating rooms aren't functional, and then if you bring tents, it's hurricane season, they can blow right away," said Dr. Barth Green, president of Project Medishare, an organization to improve health services in Haiti, told the Associated Press.


Watch video02:11
Haiti death toll from massive quake mounts relentlessly
While US Coast Guard helicopter crews were engaged in ferrying the injured to less-stressed medical facilities, the USS Arlington, a US Navy amphibious warship, was expected to head for Haiti with a surgical team and landing craft onboard.

Frustration building against authorities
The slow pace of aid efforts pushed groups of people to gather outside the terminal at Les Cayes airport as an aid flight arrived. Warning shots were fired to disperse a group of men as supplies were loaded into waiting trucks.

"The frustration and despair of the population is understood, but ... the population is asked not to block the convoys so that civil protection can do its job," said Jerry Chandler, head of Haiti's civil protection agency.

At least 600,000 people were in need of humanitarian assistance, he said. The government aims to deliver aid to those in need within a week.
see/rs (Reuters, AP)

 

[Plain Jane]

Mexican journalist shot to death in Gulf coast state

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A radio journalist was shot and killed in the Mexican Gulf coast state of Veracruz Thursday, according to his station and state authorities.

apnews.com

Mexican journalist shot to death in Gulf coast state
today



1 of 6
An altar stands at the site where Mexican journalist Jacinto Romero was murdered in Ixtaczoquitlan, Veracruz state, Mexico, Thursday, August 19, 2021. Romero worked at Ori Estereo radio and also had a web news portal. (AP Photo/Felix Marquez)

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A radio journalist was shot and killed in the Mexican Gulf coast state of Veracruz Thursday, according to his station and state authorities.

Jacinto Romero Flores was gunned down in the community of Potrerillo, in the township of Ixtaczoquitlán, according to Hugo Gutiérrez Maldonado, the head of Veracruz state security agency, via Twitter. Gutiérrez said state police were carrying out an operation in the area following the killing.

Romero worked for Ori Stereo 99.3 FM. The station expressed its sadness for his death. “The media are not the cause nor the effect of violence in the country, but we do suffer the consequences for carrying out journalism and communication,” it said in a statement.

The State Commission for Attention to and Protection of Journalists condemned the killing and called on the state prosecutor’s office to open a full investigation, including into what role if any Romero’s journalism played in his murder.

Press freedom organization Article 19 said Romero had received threats. The U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists said via Twitter that it had “learned of and strongly condemns the murder of reporter Jacinto Romero in the state of Veracruz and urges authorities to undertake a swift, transparent and exhaustive investigation into the killing.”

Veracruz has for years been one of Mexico’s most deadly states for reporters. Multiple organized crime groups operate within the state and have infiltrated local and state government.

Journalists marched late Thursday in the port city of Veracruz to protest Romero’s killing.
Press groups say nine journalists were killed in Mexico in 2020, making it the most dangerous country for reporters outside of war zones. Romero is at least the fifth journalist killed in Mexico this year.

Earlier this month, the Jalisco New Generation cartel publicly threatened to kill a prominent television news anchor.

 

[Plain Jane]

Bolivia charges ex-president with 'genocide' – DW – 08/21/2021

Former interim leader Jeanine Anez faces charges of committing "genocide" against supporters of Evo Morales and staging a coup in Bolivia.

www.dw.com

Bolivia charges ex-president Anez with 'genocide'
Former interim leader Jeanine Anez faces charges of committing "genocide" against supporters of Evo Morales and staging a coup in Bolivia.




Ex-president Jeanine Anez if facing a long list of charges after protest deaths

Bolivian prosecutors said on Friday that former interim president Jeanine Anez will be put on trial over the deaths of 20 protesters in 2019.

The charges against her were "provisionally classified as genocide, serious and minor injury, and injury followed by death" during protests in the Bolivian towns of Sacaba and Senkata, said attorney-general Juan Lanchipa.

The move follows a report from the Organization of American States (OAS) on Tuesday that claimed that Bolivian security forces carried out a massacre when Anez took over following the resignation of Evo Morales.

Why were people protesting?
Bolivia was rocked by nationwide demonstrations after socialist leader Evo Morales won his fourth election in October 2019.
Protesters claimed that he had committed election fraud, an accusation which was later corroborated by an OAS report.

After Evo Morales fled the country fearing for his life, conservative Anez took over as president. At the time, Anez served as the most senior member of the country's parliament.
Morales' party, Movement for Socialism (MAS) boycotted the naming of Anez, accusing the interim government of staging a coup.

More protests followed, in which 37 people died. The "massacre" investigated by the OAS allegedly occurred in two demonstrations where 20 Morales supporters were killed in clashes with the police.

What happened since?
Bolivian elections held in October 2020 saw the MAS candidate, Luis Arce, become president in a landslide victory.

Arce pledged to seek justice for the dead protesters after he was sworn into office in November.

Former president Morales then returned to the country and was granted a pardon along with all those arrested in protests.

Police arrested Anez in March 2021 on accusations of leading a coup against Morales and terrorism. She has been in detention ever since.
jc/dj (AFP, EFE)

 

[Plain Jane]

Sources: Brazil's Bolsonaro vexed by central bank autonomy

Brazilian government officials have told The Associated Press that President Jair Bolsonaro has begun expressing irritation at the central bank’s newfound autonomy as surging inflation presents a threat to his 2022 reelection prospects.

apnews.com

Sources: Brazil’s Bolsonaro vexed by central bank autonomy
By DÉBORA ÁLVARES and DAVID BILLERyesterday

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to attend the annual military exercises by the Navy, Army and Air Force, in Formosa, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has begun expressing irritation at the central bank’s newfound autonomy as surging inflation presents a threat to his 2022 reelection prospects, government officials told The Associated Press.

On Thursday, during a flight home from Mato Grosso state, Bolsonaro said he regretted signing the bill into law earlier this year that granted the bank autonomy, a high-level official aboard told AP. Separately, Bolsonaro on several recent occasions has expressed discomfort with the autonomy and said he would like to interfere in monetary policy, a minister who has heard such complaints himself told AP. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The law passed in February sought to protect the bank from political meddling and burnish Brazil’s economic credibility among investors. Under the law’s terms, the president still nominates the central bank chief, but cannot fire him for disagreements about monetary policy.

Bolsonaro in 2018 provided assurances that he would remain hands-off economic policymaking, and the market celebrated his pick to lead the central bank: economist and former trader Roberto Campos Neto, who began a fixed four-year term in April.

Neither the office of the presidency nor the central bank responded to requests for comment about Bolsonaro’s statements. Following the story’s publication, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, wrote on Twitter that there is no crisis between Bolsonaro and Campos Neto.

“I give my testimony that the relationship of the government with the central bank is excellent, that autonomy of the monetary authority is an historic and irreversible advance,” Nogueira wrote.

Bank autonomy is among few significant economic reforms that Bolsonaro’s administration has managed to secure. Others have faced headwinds, including lately a tax reform proposal, at the same time as the government signals it may boost spending next year despite limited fiscal space.

That has prompted a sell-off due to concerns about Brazil’s fiscal policy outlook, as well as speculation the market could give up hope on the Bolsonaro administration’s will or ability to deliver further reforms -- particularly as the president keeps focusing energy on his simmering feud with the Supreme Court.

Twelve-month inflation is tracking at almost 9%, its fastest pace in over five years. After the government drew down pandemic welfare disbursements, the poor have been especially hard hit by double-digit increases in the prices of foodstuffs, cooking gas and electricity.

Economists surveyed by the central bank have raised their 2021 inflation forecast for 19 straight weeks, and the cost-of-living increase is expected to exceed the bank’s target for the first time in six years.

Economists expect 3.9% inflation in 2022, nearly the midpoint of the bank’s target range after creeping upward in recent weeks. Still, the minister who spoke on condition of anonymity told the AP that Bolsonaro has spoken of his concern about out-of-control inflation during the election year.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to begin analysis of the law’s constitutionality on Aug. 25. Bolsonaro voiced support for the court to uphold bank autonomy at a June 22 ceremony, during which he said everyone trusts in Campos Neto.

His statement about regretting autonomy came in response to comments hours earlier from Campos Neto, who the president said he wished he could replace with the stroke of a pen, according to the official present. Campos Neto said in an online event hosted by the Council of the Americas that “local noise” has had an impact on 2022 inflation expectations.

“There is uncertainty, or at least a higher level of noise, in the institutional part of how Brazil works and the fight between powers,” Campos Neto said, adding that the market has also understood the government is seeking to increase spending of its conditional-cash transfer program for the poor.

“In other words, the market is associating some of the actions the government is taking to a will to have a more robust program, and they’re linking some of the things the government is doing with the election, and I think that creates additional noise,” he said. ___ Biller reported from Rio de Janeiro.

 

[artichoke]

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants

SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

apnews.com

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants
By KATHIA MARTINEZtoday



1 of 9
Panamanian border police stand guard outside a migrant camp before the visit of the foreign ministers from Panama and Colombia, in San Vicente, Darien province, Panama, near the border with Colombia, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. The foreign ministers of Panama and Colombia met Friday near their common border to discuss how to handle a surge in migration through the Darian jungle. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)
SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

The foreign ministers of both countries said they will announce a target number for migrants next week. The figure will be determined at a meeting in Colombia Monday between both countries’ security and immigration officials.

So far this year, Panama estimates about 49,000 migrants have come through the dangerous, jungle-clad gap. Officials estimate about 16% of them are children or youths.

Both countries said they will also cooperate to prosecute criminal gangs that rob migrants and traffic drugs through the largely roadless area.

The goal is to set “a number of migrants that can be received in a safe manner on the Panamanian side,” said Panama’s Foreign Minister, Erika Mouynes.


“We do not want these migrants to risk drowning, or things like that,” said Colombia’s Marta Lucía Ramírez de Rincón, “and neither, obviously, do we want them to pass through Darien, where we know there are so many risks.”

At a migrant shelter in the Panamanian town of San Vicente, which the ministers visited, Cubans Otamaris Ojeda Pompa, 50, and Yerald Montejo, 44, sat with inflamed and cracked feet after crossing the gap. The couple left Cuba on July 15 and traveled through Guyana, Uruguay and Colombia.

“In my experience, what I can tell people is, not to do it,” Ojeda Pompa said of the nine-day trek. “Don’t go through there, it is the most terrible thing in the world.”

She said she saw at least 11 corpses along the trail. “One sees a lot of things on the trail. Some of the remains are just bones,” she said. “Some bodies were just decomposing, women and young people, too.”

Recent rains have made the crossing even more dangerous.

“It is a really worrisome situation, because if crossing the jungle during the dry season was dangerous, it is even more dangerous now,” said Santiago Paz, who works in the area for the U.N. International Organization for Migration.

Haitian migrant Elizabeth Henry, 33, crossed with her three-year-old son, Javier Jean Paul Henry.

Despite the danger, Henry still has her sights set on reaching the United States. She left her job as a cleaner in Chile, where she has lived for five years, because she didn’t make enough to send money back to her family in Haiti.

Many migrants like Henry headed first to South America, where some countries sheltered Haitians after a 2010 earthquake devastated that country.

While many migrants enter Colombia illegally, officials have made little effort to deport them. Immigration officials have said it would be too costly to fly so many home.

There has been a sharp rebound in the number of migrants from last year, when pandemic restrictions reduced mobility for locals and migrants alike.

Local officials estimate more than 10,000 migrants have massed recently in Necocli, a Colombian city that has become a bottleneck on the global migrant trail that winds through South and Central America, and on to Mexico and then the U.S. southern border.

Necocli residents say they have never seen so many migrants and city authorities have declared a “public calamity” because of water shortages caused by the additional demand from the migrants.

A common migrant route runs from the Ecuadorian border through Colombia to Necocli, where ferries carry people across the Gulf of Uraba to the even smaller border town of Capurgana — and then into the Darien Gap.

In the end, the two countries’ efforts may lead some migrants to hike through even more difficult terrain at other passes.

Panama’s Security Minister, Juan Pino, said the two countries agreed “we are going to control, bilaterally, the flows through Colombia from Necocli,” but noted “there is another overland route that, because of the terrain, is very hard to control.”

I've been looking for information about what's really going on at the Darien Gap, and this is very detailed.

 

[artichoke]

Sources: Brazil's Bolsonaro vexed by central bank autonomy

Brazilian government officials have told The Associated Press that President Jair Bolsonaro has begun expressing irritation at the central bank’s newfound autonomy as surging inflation presents a threat to his 2022 reelection prospects.

apnews.com

Sources: Brazil’s Bolsonaro vexed by central bank autonomy
By DÉBORA ÁLVARES and DAVID BILLERyesterday

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro arrives to attend the annual military exercises by the Navy, Army and Air Force, in Formosa, Brazil, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has begun expressing irritation at the central bank’s newfound autonomy as surging inflation presents a threat to his 2022 reelection prospects, government officials told The Associated Press.

On Thursday, during a flight home from Mato Grosso state, Bolsonaro said he regretted signing the bill into law earlier this year that granted the bank autonomy, a high-level official aboard told AP. Separately, Bolsonaro on several recent occasions has expressed discomfort with the autonomy and said he would like to interfere in monetary policy, a minister who has heard such complaints himself told AP. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

The law passed in February sought to protect the bank from political meddling and burnish Brazil’s economic credibility among investors. Under the law’s terms, the president still nominates the central bank chief, but cannot fire him for disagreements about monetary policy.

Bolsonaro in 2018 provided assurances that he would remain hands-off economic policymaking, and the market celebrated his pick to lead the central bank: economist and former trader Roberto Campos Neto, who began a fixed four-year term in April.

Neither the office of the presidency nor the central bank responded to requests for comment about Bolsonaro’s statements. Following the story’s publication, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, wrote on Twitter that there is no crisis between Bolsonaro and Campos Neto.

“I give my testimony that the relationship of the government with the central bank is excellent, that autonomy of the monetary authority is an historic and irreversible advance,” Nogueira wrote.

Bank autonomy is among few significant economic reforms that Bolsonaro’s administration has managed to secure. Others have faced headwinds, including lately a tax reform proposal, at the same time as the government signals it may boost spending next year despite limited fiscal space.

That has prompted a sell-off due to concerns about Brazil’s fiscal policy outlook, as well as speculation the market could give up hope on the Bolsonaro administration’s will or ability to deliver further reforms -- particularly as the president keeps focusing energy on his simmering feud with the Supreme Court.

Twelve-month inflation is tracking at almost 9%, its fastest pace in over five years. After the government drew down pandemic welfare disbursements, the poor have been especially hard hit by double-digit increases in the prices of foodstuffs, cooking gas and electricity.

Economists surveyed by the central bank have raised their 2021 inflation forecast for 19 straight weeks, and the cost-of-living increase is expected to exceed the bank’s target for the first time in six years.

Economists expect 3.9% inflation in 2022, nearly the midpoint of the bank’s target range after creeping upward in recent weeks. Still, the minister who spoke on condition of anonymity told the AP that Bolsonaro has spoken of his concern about out-of-control inflation during the election year.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to begin analysis of the law’s constitutionality on Aug. 25. Bolsonaro voiced support for the court to uphold bank autonomy at a June 22 ceremony, during which he said everyone trusts in Campos Neto.

His statement about regretting autonomy came in response to comments hours earlier from Campos Neto, who the president said he wished he could replace with the stroke of a pen, according to the official present. Campos Neto said in an online event hosted by the Council of the Americas that “local noise” has had an impact on 2022 inflation expectations.

“There is uncertainty, or at least a higher level of noise, in the institutional part of how Brazil works and the fight between powers,” Campos Neto said, adding that the market has also understood the government is seeking to increase spending of its conditional-cash transfer program for the poor.

“In other words, the market is associating some of the actions the government is taking to a will to have a more robust program, and they’re linking some of the things the government is doing with the election, and I think that creates additional noise,” he said. ___ Biller reported from Rio de Janeiro.

Sounds like Woodrow Wilson's reported regrets after signing the Federal Reserve Act.

 

[artichoke]

Mysterious crates washing up on Brazil's beaches – DW – 10/19/2019

Oil spills have been plaguing Brazil's northern coastline for weeks. But before that, another mystery had been puzzling local scientists: shipping crates, thought to be from a German vessel that sank in 1944.

www.dw.com

Mysterious crates washing up on Brazil's oil-stained beaches
Oil spills have been plaguing Brazil's northern coastline for weeks. But before that, another mystery had been puzzling local scientists: shipping crates, thought to be from a German vessel that sank in 1944.





During a walk along Praia Bela, literally a "beautiful beach" in Brazil's northern state of Ceara, Carlos Teixeira comes across an odd-looking crate. It's not the first time the marine researcher from Ceara's state university has seen one.

"They've been showing up along the coast of northeastern Brazil since October 2018," he told DW. "We just don't know where they've come from."

Between 200 and 300 such crates have appeared since then, Teixeira said, possibly from a shipwreck, but that has not been confirmed.

Interest in the crates rose when oil began washing up along the same beaches in September.

"I told my colleagues this can't be a coincidence," he said. That's when Teixeira began taking a closer look at the crates, which are said to have been carrying "crude rubber in bales." One crate was marked with "French Indochina," the Southeast Asian colony that ceased to exist after 1954.

Read more: Brazil’s fight against dengue a race against time

Oil spills along the coastline have been puzzling scientsts in northern Brazil for weeks

World's deepest shipwreck
Not long after, Teixeira found information online about the German blockade runner, SS Rio Grande. It was sailing from Japan to Europe in January 1944 when Allied ships intercepted and sank it off the Brazilian coast. Its cargo: crude rubber in bales.
The location of the shipwreck has been known since 1996. Blue Water Recoveries found it 540 nautical miles (1,000 kilometers) off Brazil's northeastern coast at a depth of 5,762 meters (18,904 feet). That makes it the world's deepest shipwreck found to date.

Blue Water Recoveries sent Teixeira images of the wreck, and he identified crate-like objects similar to those that have washed ashore. Then he set out to see if such crates could have made their way to Brazil. For that, he constructed a simulation with "dots originating from the shipwreck site. These dots came to the northeastern coast. That leads me to believe that the wreck is the source of the crates."

The mysterious crates are believed to be from the SS Rio Grande, which sank in 1944

Teixeira further sees a connection between the crates and the oil.

"The wreck was one of the hypotheses for where the oil was coming from," as news media had reported. "But we spoke with Petrobras (the state oil company), and they said the oil was new. If the oil came from the wreck, it'd be more than 70 years old. Also, the oil is crude, not fuel."

Read more: Genetically modified mosquitoes breed in Brazil

'Far from shore'
Although the source of the oil remains a mystery, Teixeira supports his simulation of the currents, adding whatever the source is, it must be near the wreck.
"I think it came from a latitude even with the state of Pernambuco, between 500 and 1,000 kilometers from the coast." That would be near the wreck. "Because the oil is really spread out. If the oil were coming from closer to shore, it wouldn't be in so many areas all at once."

Between 200 and 300 shipping crates have washed up along Brazil's beaches since last year

Oil has appeared along a 2,000 kilometer (1,200 mile) stretch of coastline. One theory has attributed it to an accident at a Petrobras refinery in Pernambuca in August. But Teixeira notes that the oil is in the sea far from the coast, which suggests its presence is not due to an accident at the Petrobras facility.

"The currents wouldn't have brought the oil north. It has to be coming far from shore," he said.

One question is what do with the crates that have washed up on shore. "Some were thrown away. Others have been left on the beach. No one's said anything about putting them in a museum," Teixeira said. And since each crate weighs between 80 and more than 100 kilograms (176 to 220 pounds), "they're not so easy to carry off."

But an oil spill from a shipwreck in 1944 would not still be together in the ocean over 76 years later. It would surely have dispersed. I'd believe the rubber might be from that boat, but not the oil.

 

[artichoke]

Bolivia charges ex-president with 'genocide' – DW – 08/21/2021

Former interim leader Jeanine Anez faces charges of committing "genocide" against supporters of Evo Morales and staging a coup in Bolivia.

www.dw.com

Bolivia charges ex-president Anez with 'genocide'
Former interim leader Jeanine Anez faces charges of committing "genocide" against supporters of Evo Morales and staging a coup in Bolivia.




Ex-president Jeanine Anez if facing a long list of charges after protest deaths

Bolivian prosecutors said on Friday that former interim president Jeanine Anez will be put on trial over the deaths of 20 protesters in 2019.

The charges against her were "provisionally classified as genocide, serious and minor injury, and injury followed by death" during protests in the Bolivian towns of Sacaba and Senkata, said attorney-general Juan Lanchipa.

The move follows a report from the Organization of American States (OAS) on Tuesday that claimed that Bolivian security forces carried out a massacre when Anez took over following the resignation of Evo Morales.

Why were people protesting?
Bolivia was rocked by nationwide demonstrations after socialist leader Evo Morales won his fourth election in October 2019.
Protesters claimed that he had committed election fraud, an accusation which was later corroborated by an OAS report.

After Evo Morales fled the country fearing for his life, conservative Anez took over as president. At the time, Anez served as the most senior member of the country's parliament.
Morales' party, Movement for Socialism (MAS) boycotted the naming of Anez, accusing the interim government of staging a coup.

More protests followed, in which 37 people died. The "massacre" investigated by the OAS allegedly occurred in two demonstrations where 20 Morales supporters were killed in clashes with the police.

What happened since?
Bolivian elections held in October 2020 saw the MAS candidate, Luis Arce, become president in a landslide victory.

Arce pledged to seek justice for the dead protesters after he was sworn into office in November.

Former president Morales then returned to the country and was granted a pardon along with all those arrested in protests.

Police arrested Anez in March 2021 on accusations of leading a coup against Morales and terrorism. She has been in detention ever since.
jc/dj (AFP, EFE)

Sounds like a political prosecution. How can there be a "genocide" of only 20 or 40 people?

 

[Melodi]

Sounds like a political prosecution. How can there be a "genocide" of only 20 or 40 people?

Well, she did say "Indians do not belong in Cities," which I don't think won her a lot of fans outside the capital. I think genocide is a bit much, but she did her best to make herself really unlikeable by the majority of the population in her country.

 

[artichoke]

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants

SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

apnews.com

Panama, Colombia agree to restrict flow of migrants
By KATHIA MARTINEZtoday



1 of 9
Panamanian border police stand guard outside a migrant camp before the visit of the foreign ministers from Panama and Colombia, in San Vicente, Darien province, Panama, near the border with Colombia, Friday, Aug. 6, 2021. The foreign ministers of Panama and Colombia met Friday near their common border to discuss how to handle a surge in migration through the Darian jungle. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)
SAN VICENTE, Panama (AP) — Officials of Panama and Colombia agreed Friday to restrict the growing flow of migrants, mainly Cubans and Haitians, who have been crossing the Darien Gap that marks the border between the two countries.

The foreign ministers of both countries said they will announce a target number for migrants next week. The figure will be determined at a meeting in Colombia Monday between both countries’ security and immigration officials.

So far this year, Panama estimates about 49,000 migrants have come through the dangerous, jungle-clad gap. Officials estimate about 16% of them are children or youths.

Both countries said they will also cooperate to prosecute criminal gangs that rob migrants and traffic drugs through the largely roadless area.

The goal is to set “a number of migrants that can be received in a safe manner on the Panamanian side,” said Panama’s Foreign Minister, Erika Mouynes.


“We do not want these migrants to risk drowning, or things like that,” said Colombia’s Marta Lucía Ramírez de Rincón, “and neither, obviously, do we want them to pass through Darien, where we know there are so many risks.”

At a migrant shelter in the Panamanian town of San Vicente, which the ministers visited, Cubans Otamaris Ojeda Pompa, 50, and Yerald Montejo, 44, sat with inflamed and cracked feet after crossing the gap. The couple left Cuba on July 15 and traveled through Guyana, Uruguay and Colombia.

“In my experience, what I can tell people is, not to do it,” Ojeda Pompa said of the nine-day trek. “Don’t go through there, it is the most terrible thing in the world.”

She said she saw at least 11 corpses along the trail. “One sees a lot of things on the trail. Some of the remains are just bones,” she said. “Some bodies were just decomposing, women and young people, too.”

Recent rains have made the crossing even more dangerous.

“It is a really worrisome situation, because if crossing the jungle during the dry season was dangerous, it is even more dangerous now,” said Santiago Paz, who works in the area for the U.N. International Organization for Migration.

Haitian migrant Elizabeth Henry, 33, crossed with her three-year-old son, Javier Jean Paul Henry.

Despite the danger, Henry still has her sights set on reaching the United States. She left her job as a cleaner in Chile, where she has lived for five years, because she didn’t make enough to send money back to her family in Haiti.

Many migrants like Henry headed first to South America, where some countries sheltered Haitians after a 2010 earthquake devastated that country.

While many migrants enter Colombia illegally, officials have made little effort to deport them. Immigration officials have said it would be too costly to fly so many home.

There has been a sharp rebound in the number of migrants from last year, when pandemic restrictions reduced mobility for locals and migrants alike.

Local officials estimate more than 10,000 migrants have massed recently in Necocli, a Colombian city that has become a bottleneck on the global migrant trail that winds through South and Central America, and on to Mexico and then the U.S. southern border.

Necocli residents say they have never seen so many migrants and city authorities have declared a “public calamity” because of water shortages caused by the additional demand from the migrants.

A common migrant route runs from the Ecuadorian border through Colombia to Necocli, where ferries carry people across the Gulf of Uraba to the even smaller border town of Capurgana — and then into the Darien Gap.

In the end, the two countries’ efforts may lead some migrants to hike through even more difficult terrain at other passes.

Panama’s Security Minister, Juan Pino, said the two countries agreed “we are going to control, bilaterally, the flows through Colombia from Necocli,” but noted “there is another overland route that, because of the terrain, is very hard to control.”

With a bit of internet browsing I discovered that there actually are border towns, Sapzurro Colombia / La Miel Panama, that are a sort of ecotourist resort area, with a small friendly border station between them. But presumably the border station would reject them. (Would it?) Somebody's coast guard is apparently out in the ocean to catch border crossers there. But it's not hard to hike to Sapzurro, and if they could just go around a bit instead of straight into Sapzurro, they could probably slip the back way into La Miel, which is the Panama side, and take a boat north from there.

Most of the distance is in Panama. That's where they spend days hiking in the jungle. So it would be much easier if they could get to La Miel and take a boat. They're spending money all along the way so the price of the boat would probably be cheaper than that smugglers rip them off for, theft, personal risk, etc.

Colombia is happy enough to see them follow this route because it gets them out of Colombia efficiently and they spend some money there. Panama isn't thrilled about their coming in but when they go thru the middle of the jungle I guess they don't patrol it. Even though it seems there's one river they end up on, and patrolling it would not be too hard. But then what would they do with them? It's easier to let them go thru and ignore them.

In the USA when they get here we don't get to ignore them. They attach themselves to our social services and never leave, having passed thru about 10 safe countries on the way.

 

[artichoke]

Well, she did say "Indians do not belong in Cities," which I don't think won her a lot of fans outside the capital. I think genocide is a bit much, but she did her best to make herself really unlikeable by the majority of the population in her country.

The difference between hurt feelings and murder charges is a lot less clear than it used to be.

 

[Plain Jane]

Haiti police commit more units to protecting earthquake aid

Haiti’s National Police force says it has deployed additional units south of the capital to protect aid shipments being taken to the country's earthquake-damaged southwestern peninsula.

apnews.com

Click to copy
Haitian gang boss offers to help in quake relief efforts
By EVENS SANON and MARKO ALVAREZtoday



1 of 13
Earthquake victims reach for water being handed out during a food distribution in the Picot neighborhood in Les Cayes, Haiti, Sunday, Aug. 22, 2021, eight days after a 7.2 magnitude earthquake hit the area. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix)

LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — A gang leader is offering a truce as well as help for communities in southwestern Haiti that were shattered by an earthquake, raising a glimmer of hope for relief operations that have been disrupted by the looting of aid trucks and other disorder.

It remained to be seen whether anything would come from Sunday’s offer by Jimmy Cherizier, alias “Barbecue.” While he is a powerful crime boss, Cherizier is far from the only gang leader in Haiti, and widely spread social media reports of a supposed earlier gang truce have failed to prevent attacks on the expanding relief effort.

The offer came as many Haitians returned to religious services in or outside damaged churches, sometimes for the first time since the magnitude 7.2 quake hit Aug. 14. Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency also raised list of confirmed dead to 2,207.
Since the disaster, gangs have blocked roads, hijacked aid trucks and stolen supplies, forcing relief workers to transport supplies by helicopter. In places, desperate crowds have scuffled over bags of food.

In a video posted on Facebook, Cherizier addressed the hardest-hit parts of the Haiti’s southwestern peninsula, saying: “We want to tell them that the G9 Revolutionary Forces and allies, all for one and one for all, sympathize with their pain and sorrows.”

“The G9 Revolutionary Forces and allies ... will participate in the relief by bringing them help. We invite all compatriots to show solidarity with the victims by trying to share what little there is with them,” he said.

The increase in the death toll was the first since late Wednesday, when the government had reported 2,189 fatalities. The government said Sunday that 344 people were still missing, 12,268 people were injured and nearly 53,000 houses were destroyed by the quake.

A field hospital erected in Les Cayes by the humanitarian group Samaritan’s Purse scheduled four surgeries Sunday, the day after it opened.

Three of the 10 operating rooms that serve the region were not functioning after the earthquake, so the U.S.-based group opened its hospital on the Haiti campus of Central American University. The field hospital adds not only an operating room, but lab, pharmacy and X-ray capabilities.

Even a week after the earthquake, helicopters ferried in four seriously injured patients from remote areas Sunday.

Nurse Ali Herbert was preparing the operating room — a large tent — for a hand surgery Sunday afternoon. A surgery on a broken femur was scheduled for later. The fans to move the sweltering air and the open flaps on the tent to allow ventilation were major differences from a sterile operating theater, but far cleaner than the conditions most patients have been in until they arrive, she said.
“A normal operating room would not have this kind of setup,” Herbert said. “We just have to do what we can and keep it as clean as we can and hopefully the patients do okay.”


Some patients have received some initial treatment, but require more care. Others are being treated for the first time, she said.

People needing help also showed up at the public hospital across town Sunday. Space is at a premium and some are on beds outside the wards. If their injury is less serious they might be sitting on the ground on a square of cardboard.

Rousseau Hussein, a resident working in the emergency room, said the situation had calmed in the past week, but they continue to receive patients injured in the earthquake from outlying areas.
The hospital has been receiving support and at the moment had the supplies it needed to treat the cases he sees in the ER.

In Les Cayes, many attended church Sunday to mourn those lost and give thanks for their own survival.

At an evangelical church in the Bergeaud neighborhood, parishioners sang hymns under beams of sunlight streaming through holes in the roof and walls.
Pastor Sevrain Marc Dix Jonas, said Sunday’s service was special because until now his congregation had been unable to meet since the quake.

“Today was a must,” Dix Jonas said, standing below a gaping opening high in his church’s facade. “To thank God. He protected us. We did not die.”

His church was one of the few where congregants could worship inside. At many others, services were held in the street outside collapsed sanctuaries.

Taking that into account, the Roman Catholic church in Les Cayes moved its morning service to 6:30 a.m. to avoid the heat of day.
___
Associated Presswriter Christopher Sherman contributed to this report.

 

[Melodi]

The difference between hurt feelings and murder charges is a lot less clear than it used to be.

I did say I think the charges are way over the top from what I know of the situation. On the other hand, the government was trying to use food as a weapon, especially in the village mountain areas.

But I would want to see concrete proof that was the reason specific people died, otherwise it just looks like another third world country swinging back and forth (especially in Latin America). One day someone is the President and the next they are sitting in jail (usually for "corruption") then they get out or their spouse/son/daughter gets "elected" to the job, rinse repeat.

This was one reason the Second Trump impeachment which was so obviously political theater really annoyed me (and a lot of other people) because even if there had been issues other than the Democrats trying to shut the government down until January 6th; it looked like the worst of "Banana Republic."

So do these murder charges unless there is some game-changing information that comes up in the evidence.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

State Weakness and Transnational Power: Explaining the Crisis in Venezuela | Small Wars Journal

Venezuela, once one of the more prosperous and democratic nations in Latin America, is currently experiencing the region’s most severe political and economic crisis. This article focuses on the Venezuelan state during the crisis, and how its exercise of “despotic” capacity made it a repressive...

smallwarsjournal.com

1. El Centro

Fri, 08/20/2021 - 7:38pm
State Weakness and Transnational Power: Explaining the Crisis in Venezuela
Frederick M. Shepherd

Venezuela, once one of the more prosperous and democratic nations in Latin America, is currently experiencing the region’s most severe political and economic crisis. Over five million people have been displaced, the economy is in a tailspin, poverty has grown dramatically to plague as much as 80% of the population, and the nation’s political divisions have deepened.[1] Scholars and policymakers have, appropriately, focused on a wide variety of factors in explaining this crisis: the personalities of Venezuela’s leftist leaders Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro; the early and more recent steps toward authoritarianism and away from democracy; and the influence of the United States on events in Venezuela. This article focuses on the Venezuelan state during the crisis, and how its exercise of “despotic” capacity made it a repressive actor in relation to its citizens, and a weak actor in relation to powerful transnational groups. The larger outcome has been a Venezuelan nation increasingly vulnerable to transnational criminal organizations and other external forces.

Introduction
The current crisis has been deeply influenced by a combination of the Venezuelan state’s fundamental weakness and the strength of transnational forces within Venezuelan national boundaries.[2] The body of the article explores Chávez and Maduro’s failed efforts to transform and dominate Venezuelan society in this larger context. The enduring weakness of the Venezuelan state,[3] in a setting of a transnationalized society, helps to explain the nation’s sudden descent into crisis, authoritarianism, and desperate poverty.

This counterintuitive claim about the weakness of the Venezuelan state, as the Maduro government brutally represses its people, calls for deeper discussion of state strength. Based on the work of Michael Mann, this article’s discussion of state strength uses the more nuanced term “capacity,” and is based on a key distinction between two distinct types of state capacity. “Despotic capacity” refers to the ability of the state to dominate all that is narrowly political. It does not imply a large-scale state engagement with society, but rather a capacity to monopolize the political system, in the halls of power and national capital, but often not beyond.[4] Mann’s “infrastructural capacity” implies a far different, more thorough-going type of state strength. He describes it as “the ability to reach down and centrally coordinate the activities of society.”[5]

This type of capacity implies a state that influences the daily lives of citizens and institutions, within national boundaries in which it genuinely exercises authority. Scholars have used policy areas such as provision of education, economic management and regulation, law and order, social welfare, and the nature and scope of taxation, to assess infrastructural capacity. Latin American governments have frequently exercised despotic capacity, and have, with a few exceptions, struggled to exercise even basic infrastructural capacity. The evolution of state capacity in nations like Venezuela has been profoundly influenced by the power of external forces, which have sharply circumscribed the power of Latin American states. This article explores the impact of these forces on the current crisis in Venezuela.

Recent events in Venezuela are deeply influenced in several ways by processes begun in colonialism and extended in the subsequent 200 years of formal nationhood. First, colonialism put in place an alien, European-oriented political system that privileged colonial interests over those of indigenous Latin Americans. In a closely related process, structures of external domination were set up during and after colonialism. Most notable in the Venezuelan case was the emergence of powerful transnational corporations in the oil sector, as Venezuela became the largest oil exporter in the world by the early 1930s. Until 1975, this oil was extracted from enclaves beyond the reach of the Venezuelan state. Venezuela exhibited all of the features of a “rentier” state, as oil came to dominate the national economy and political system.[6]

Second, formal independence in the early 19th century did little to create a sense of Venezuelan nationalism or to strengthen the governing institutions of the new nation. As pointed out by Miguel Angel Centeno, the almost total absence of international military conflict in Latin America allowed national states throughout Latin America, including Venezuela, to remain aloof from their citizens, and weak as national actors.[7] As Charles Tilly and other theorists of the “bellicist” approach note, frequent international military conflict led to stronger states and greater nationalism in Europe.[8] War increased the infrastructural capacity of those states that survived wars. These newly ascendant states were able to take meaningful steps to curtail the power of entrenched local or transnational non-state actors. This process was largely absent in Latin America.

Transforming Venezuela? State Initiatives in a Transnationalized Setting
All of these historical and conceptual points serve as a backdrop to the crisis that began with Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in the 1998 national elections. Chávez initially presented himself as an alternative to a corrupt political elite, offering a socialist and nationalist critique of neoliberal policies that had increased inequality in Venezuela during the 1980s and 1990s. This approach was encouraged by his political survival during the 2002 coup, which was backed by Venezuelan elites and the Bush administration.

Sympathetic observers point out that he and his allies consistently won about 60% of the vote in national elections during his first decade of rule;[9] more critical observers point to fraud and discrepancies that grew in significance with each passing election, until his triumphs could hardly be described as democratic by the time of his passing in 2013.[10] The creation of a new legislature and new judicial institutions, which came to be dominated by Chávez supporters, ultimately enabled Chávez, and later Nicolás Maduro, to consolidate political power.

The promulgation of restrictive media laws also represented an important step in the direction of authoritarianism.[11] In this setting, corruption flourished as well: Transparency International ranked Venezuela as the seventh most corrupt nation in the world in 2019, and the terms “kleptocracy” and “super network” of corruption have been applied to Chávez and Maduro’s rule.[12] The more focused analysis that follows explores policies intended to transform Venezuelan society, in highly transnationalized sectors (such as oil) and in other domestic sectors. A central concern will be the complex and multi-level relations among external forces, the Venezuelan state, and Venezuelan citizens.

The state-run Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. (PDVSA) was created in 1976. Yet in the following two decades, Venezuela followed the regional trend toward neoliberalism, gradually reducing the state presence in the oil sector and providing opportunities for global oil companies.[13] Falling oil prices in 1998 had a direct impact on the lives of many Venezuelans, and led many of them to question the prevailing neoliberal approach. Chávez’s nationalist approach to oil first took the form of an aggressive effort to lead OPEC to a more active global presence and to keep prices high. In November 2001, Chávez crafted a new law which mandated state majority control in any joint venture with transnational companies. This policy was among the main grievances of the (US-supported) leaders of the 2002 coup attempt against Chávez, and was the central factor in the subsequent three-month work stoppage in the oil sector. Chávez emerged ascendant in the wake of both of these threats to his power. This series of events enabled Chávez to link the Venezuelan opposition to the Bush administration and to neoliberal oil interests. He and his allies subsequently tightened control over PDVSA and, in 2006, increased the required government stake in the oil sector to 60%.

In the meantime, with rising oil prices during the 2004-2008 period, Chávez made oil central to his agenda by publicly promising to use the proceeds to bankroll his ambitious social policies, and arranged for these proceeds to flow directly into the government institutions—including the military—administering them.[14] This arrangement contributed to Chávez’s popularity at the time. But it also further politicized PDVSA, and discouraged reinvestment of oil profits back into the oil sector. The larger result was, according to Daniel Hellinger, that “PDVSA in the Chávez years stagnated as a productive entity.”[15] The Venezuelan oil industry was dealt massive blows with the 2008 global economic crisis and, especially, falling oil prices in 2014. All of this took place as dependence on oil for export earnings dramatically increased, from 68.7% in 1998 to 96.0% in 2015.[18] As a result, the Maduro government made comprehensive overtures to international oil companies in 2016 to invest in certain sectors, which, given the international setting, bore little fruit.[17] And the Trump administration applied sanctions on PDVSA in 2019. These “targeted” sanctions had a massive impact, as they focused on the very heart of the Venezuelan economy.[18]

Venezuelan leaders also attempted to promote Venezuela’s export-oriented mining sector, including copper, coltan, diamonds and especially gold. The Orinoco Mining Arc (OMA), created by a Maduro government decree in 2016, designated 112,000 square kilometers in east-central Venezuela as a special area for mining. It was officially intended to regulate informal and illicit mining activity in the area, and to attract foreign investment. No reputable foreign companies have shown interest in OMA mining opportunities, and the national government has only been able to exert influence in a corrupt and arbitrary way. Most of the mining is being overseen by organized crime groups linked in varying degrees to drug networks and Colombian guerrilla organizations.[19] The illicit groups charge the people doing the mining a “tax” of between 30 and 80 percent, with members of the military often taking a share of the proceeds as well. Both the military and the criminal organizations have been accused of large-scale human rights violations in the region, and OMA has had a dire impact on an area that is home to much of the nation’s fresh water. The Trump Administration placed sanctions on Venezuelan gold exports in 2019, with the European Union taking similar steps in mid-2020. OMA’s original intention of opening this region to foreign mining companies represented a concession to transnational power and state weakness. The reality of OMA is far more extreme, as groups that transcend Venezuela’s boundaries “function as a local proto-state: a political entity that fills the lack of state sovereignty in the territory.”[20]

Soon after his rise to power, Chávez launched large-scale social projects intended to transform Venezuelan society in a wide variety of areas. In an effort “to introduce Bolivarian nationalism into the educational sphere,” Chávez and his allies created the New Bolivarian Curriculum in 2007, and then, from 2011 to 2015, distributed roughly 100 million Coleccion Bicentenario textbooks to primary schools around the nation.[21]

Basing its policies on the concept of “food sovereignty,” the Chávez government implemented a nationwide program for free breakfasts and lunches in schools, expanded soup kitchens, established price controls on basic foods, and created state-subsidized food markets.[22] And in the area of land reform, the Land Laws of 2001 and 2005 led to the distribution of over 5.5 million hectares of land to 180,000 families by 2010.[23] Yet these policies were plagued by a series of technical, political and economic problems driven by, and contributing to, the larger divisions within the nation.

Teachers’ organizations had not been consulted about education reform, and took a highly politicized stance against the government’s efforts, which in turn became increasingly “exclusionary” and confrontational.”[24] Food policy was from the start plagued by bureaucratization and politicization, and price controls on basic foods created economic distortions.[25] The food sector was eventually engulfed by the larger economic crisis. Land reform’s initial emphasis on distributing state lands to land-poor Venezuelans was soon replaced by expropriation of private lands, which led to polarization in the countryside. As state institutions became more directly involved in administering land reform, state weakness and bureaucratization became more evident.[26]

Because they are primarily concerned with raising resources from society, tax policies bring into sharp relief the state’s infrastructural capacity. This is particularly the case in Latin America, where rates of taxation are historically low. And low taxing capacity is also a common feature of “rentier” states, such as Venezuela. The tax reforms that did take place under Chávez generally focused on the oil sector, with significant and politically sensitive increases promulgated in 2001 and 2005.[27] These were not accompanied by major changes elsewhere in the tax system, despite a regional trend of nations pursuing comprehensive tax reform and significantly increasing tax revenue.[28] As a result, Venezuela was the only nation in the region that experienced a decrease in tax revenue as a proportion of gross domestic product from 1990 to 2011.[29] The dramatic growth of the informal economy in recent years has left much economic activity out of the reach of the Venezuelan tax system.[30] The Venezuelan state’s tax weakness is most evident in the criminalization and corruption in border regions no longer controlled by the government. As noted above, groups linked to Colombian rebels and drug networks have implemented an unofficial tax system of their own in these areas.

There is some truth to the claim that the early policies of the Chávez regime were based on popular mobilization. As many as 8 million Venezuelans, or 33.5% of the adult population, took part in Chavista Communal Councils. Genuine collaboration between the state and these groups, marked by independence and initiative from the bottom up, would have represented an important element in state infrastructural capacity. Grass-roots organizations also played a central role in implementing Chávez’s social policies.

Carlos de la Torre’s careful analysis of these groups notes that these groups created “a new sense of dignity and inclusion” and “strong loyalties to Chávez that were partially transferred to his successor, Nicolás Maduro.” Yet, especially as crisis and polarization kicked in, the reality was far more top-down in nature. De la Torre’s final verdict on Chávez’s popular mobilizations, echoed by most others’ analysis, is that they were “autocratic,” they had the effect of “controlling civil society and the public sphere,” and that they “strangled pluralism.”[31] Rather than a means for state infrastructural capacity, they became a tool for an increasingly despotic Venezuelan state.

The general accounts above demonstrate that the Venezuelan political system has grown increasingly authoritarian. In a more specific sense as well, the Venezuelan state no longer delivers on many elements of the basic function of law, order, and justice. Large chunks of the nation have effectively been taken over by transnational crime organizations and drug networks. The Maduro regime “is losing and negotiating away its monopoly of violence in Venezuela and its control over its territory to illegal armed groups.”[32] Venezuela had historically been able to avoid the fate of Latin American nations caught up in the global drug trade. This is no longer the case.[33] Organized crime networks with local, national, and global ties now challenge the state in Caracas, most major cities, the countryside, and especially along the border. Throughout Venezuela, powerful transnational organizations have effectively usurped the state in providing basic assurances of order.

In a more hopeful development, calls for genuine justice in Venezuela are increasingly coming from transnational human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and from the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. The Maduro regime has long resisted these organizations. Yet, there are signs in mid-2021 that Maduro may be open to a United Nations presence to monitor human rights, especially in remote areas in which the regime fears losing control of national territory.[34]

The Catholic Church has become an increasingly effective opposition force. Even as Pope Francis has struck a strongly anti-Maduro tone, his political credibility may enable him to mediate between the government and the opposition. Both the Catholic Church and transnational human rights groups have played crucial roles in Latin American nations pursuing justice in the wake of dictatorship. There is no reason they can’t do the same in Venezuela, and exert transnational influence in a way that benefits Venezuelans. Policymakers should, in this regard, view the transnationalization that has plagued Venezuela, as also providing political openings and opportunities.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

Yet this external involvement in the search for democracy and reconciliation has its liabilities as well. Even as it has fought the good fight against the repressive Maduro regime, the domestic opposition has left itself vulnerable to accusations of being overly close to external actors: Juan Guaido appeared as a high-profile guest at Donald Trump’s 2020 State of the Union Address, and signed off on an ill-fated “Bay of Piglets” anti-Maduro military operation led by retired US military operatives.[35] Given the history of US intervention in Venezuela and elsewhere in Latin America, it is essential that external influence be channeled through multinational and genuinely global channels.

Conclusions
Theoretical analysis should not distract from the overwhelming tragedy of the Venezuela’s slide into instability, repression, and poverty. Yet deeper analysis can provide important insights. The lesson this article draws is one of state weakness in a setting of transnationalization. This point may seem counterintuitive, as the Maduro regime monopolizes political power and represses its citizenry. Yet a close examination of events in Venezuela reveals that the state is unable to perform many basic state functions. This is a classic case of despotic capacity flourishing in a setting of state infrastructural weakness. External forces have stymied and hemmed in the Venezuelan state, at key moments and in crucial sectors. And the state’s very existence has been challenged by powerful external forces, which have bent the state to its will and exerted state-like authority in large chunks of Venezuelan territory. The growing power of transnational criminal organizations in Venezuela is merely the latest chapter in a long history of external domination.

Hugo Chávez scattered virtually all of his speeches with references to revolution, and continually asserted nationalist themes in much of what he did and said. But, for all of his initial popular support, he did not come to power on the wave of a thoroughgoing revolution. And, Venezuela was saddled with a state demonstrating little infrastructural capacity at the time of Chávez’s rise. Just as significantly, powerful transnational forces remained in place, deeply penetrating the Venezuelan nation. Chávez and his successors simply didn’t have the means to transform Venezuelan society. It seemed that this transformation might take place, as Chávez’s initiatives were initially buoyed by high oil prices. But, Venezuela was wrenched back to reality by transnational forces, and the nation rapidly descended into crisis. A brief moment of transformation (which seemed to resemble genuine state infrastructural capacity) soon became nothing more than despotic rule. The irony is that the Venezuelan state has emerged as a far weaker actor—barely controlling large areas of the nation it is supposed to rule This weakness leaves the entire nation in a vulnerable position as the Covid crisis spreads.[36] The people of Venezuela, ruled by a despotic regime showing neither the inclination nor the capacity to confront this crisis, will continue to suffer as a result.

Endnotes
[1] Jon Lee Anderson, “Protests in Colombia, Elections in Peru, and Other Chaos in the Andes.” The New Yorker. 4 June 2021, Protests in Colombia, Elections in Peru, and Other Chaos in the Andes.
[2] This perspective is based on my recent book on transnational actors in Latin America, which focuses on the complex interactions among citizens, national governments, and transnational forces. See Frederick M. Shepherd, The Politics of Transnational Actors in Latin America: Power from Afar. New York: Routledge, 2021.
[3] I use the term “state” to refer to the set of governmental institutions that claim to rule within the boundaries of a nation. I occasionally use the term government and regime when referring to specific historical moments. The term “state” does not refer to sub-national geographical units such as the 50 units that make up the United States.
[4] Michael Mann, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” in John A. Hall, Ed. States in History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 188-191.
[5] Ibid, p. 190.
[6] Terry Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998; and Daniel Hellinger, “Oil and the Chavez Legacy.” Latin American Perspectives. Vol. 44, no. 1. January 2017: pp 54-77, SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals.
[7] Miguel Angel Centeno, Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
[8] Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Eds., Bringing the State Back In. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 169-195.
[9] Steve Ellner, “Defying Globalization’s Logic.” NACLA Report on the Americas. Vol. 39, no. 2. September/October 2005: pp 20-24, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2005.11722355; and Gabriel Hetlund, “Chavismo in Crisis.” NACLA Report on the Americas. Vol. 48, no.1. Spring 2016: pp. 8-11, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10714839.2016.1170289.
[10] Javier Corrales, “Backsliding through Electoral Regularities: The Case of Venezuela.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Issue 109, 2020: pp 41-65, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
[11] Mark Dinneen, “The Chavez Government and the Battle over the Media in Venezuela.” Asian Journal of Latin American Studies. Vol. 25, no. 2, 2012: pp 27-53, http://www.ajlas.org/v2006/paper/2012vol25no202.pdf.
[12] Bram Ebus and Thomas Martinelli, “Venezuela’s Gold Heist: The Symbiotic Relationship between the State, Criminal Networks and Extraction.” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2021: p. 5, Error - Cookies Turned Off; and Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán and Luis Jorge Garay-Salamanca, Super Network of Corruption in Venezuela: Kleptocracy, Nepotism and Human Rights Violation. Tampa: Scientific Vortex LLC and Fundación Vortex, 2021.
[13] Op. cit. Hellinger, “Oil and the Chavez Legacy,” pp. 63-64
[14] Leonardo Vera, “Venezuela 1999-2014: Macro-Policy, Oil Governance, and Economic Performance.” Comparative Economic Studies. Vol. 57, no. 3. September 2015, (PDF) Venezuela 1999–2014: Macro-Policy, Oil Governance and Economic Performance; and op. cit. Salcedo-Albarán and Garay-Salamanca, “Super Network of Corruption.”
[15] Op. cit. Hellinger, “Oil and the Chavez Legacy,” p. 70
[16] Op. cit. Hetland, “Chavismo in Crisis,” p. 10
[17] Julian de Cardenas Garcia, “The New Integrated Oil Service Contracts in a Venezuela in Dire Straits.” Journal of Energy and Natural Resources Law. Vol. 35, no. 4. November 2017: pp. 417-431, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02646811.2017.1371412.
[18] Benedicte Bull and Antulio Rosales, “Into the Shadows: Sanctions, Rentierism and Informalization in Venezuela.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Vol. 109, 2020: pp. 107-133, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
[19] Antulio Rosales, “Statization and Denationalization Dynamics in Venezuela’s Artisanal and Small Scale–Large-Scale Mining Interface.” Resources Policy. Vol. 63, 2019: pp. 1-9, Statization and denationalization dynamics in Venezuela's artisanal and small scale-large-scale mining interface.
[20] Op. cit. Ebus and Martinelli, “Venezuela’s Gold Heist,” p. 3.
[21] Jared Abbott, Hillel David Soifer, and Matthias Vom Hau, “Transforming the Nation? The Bolivarian Education Reform in Venezuela.” Journal of Latin American Studies. Vol. 49, no. 4. November 2017: p. 886, Transforming the Nation? The Bolivarian Education Reform in Venezuela | Journal of Latin American Studies | Cambridge Core.
[22] Patrick Clark, “Sowing the Oil? The Chavez Government’s Policy Framework for an Alternative Food System in Venezuela.” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations. Vol. 33, no.1-2. 2011: pp. 143-144, https://www.researchgate.net/public...k_for_an_Alternative_Food_System_in_Venezuela.
[23] Laura Enriquez, “The Paradoxes of Latin America’s “Pink Tide”: Venezuela and the Project of Agrarian Reform.” Journal of Peasant Studies. Vol. 40, no. 4, 2013: pp 621-629, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2012.746959.
[24] Op. cit. Abbott et al, “Transforming the Nation?” p. 907.
[25] Op. cit. Clark, “Sowing the Oil?” pp. 148-151.
[26] Op. cit. Enriquez, “The Paradoxes of Latin America’s ‘Pink Tide,’” p. 629.
[27] ECLAC (Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean), Tax policy in Latin America: Assessment and guidelines for a second generation of reforms. New York: United Nations. June 2014, p. 27.
[28] ECLAC, Fiscal Panorama of Latin America and the Caribbean: Tax Policies for Resource Mobilization in the Framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. New York: United Nations, 2019; and James E. Mahon, “Tax Incidence and Tax Reforms in Latin America.” Woodrow Wilson Center Update on the Americas, 2012: pp. 1-27, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/tax-incidence-and-tax-reforms-latin-america.
[29] Op. cit. ECLAC, “Tax Policy in Latin America,” pp. 12-15.
[30] Op. cit. Bull and Rosales, “Into the Shadows.”
[31] Carlos de la Torre, “Left-Wing Populism: Inclusion and Authoritarianism in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador.” Brown Journal of World Affairs. Vol. 23, no.1. Fall/Winter 2016. pp 68, 62, https://bjwa.brown.edu/23-1/left-wi...ritarianism-in-venezuela-bolivia-and-ecuador/. Also see, Laura Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins: Strategies against the Erosion of Democracy in Colombia and Venezuela,” Comparative Politics. Vol. 49, no. 4. July 2017: pp 457-477, https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...mboa/fc7cf72ecee9622cab3528beb89f0e0d42d4374d; and op. cit. Hetland, “Chavismo in Crisis.”
[32] Leiv Marsteinredet, “With the Cards Stacked Against You: Challenges to a Negotiated Democracy in Venezuela.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Vol. 109. 2020: p. 98, https://www.erlacs.org/articles/abstract/10.32992/erlacs.10553/.
[33] Op. cit. Bull and Rosales, “Into the Shadows,” p. 126.
[34] Paul Angelo, “The UN’s Moment in Venezuela Has Arrived.” Foreign Policy. 20 April 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/20/the-u-n-s-moment-in-venezuela-has-arrived/.
[35] Jon Lee Anderson, “In Venezuela, Americans Attempt to Stage a Bay of Piglets. ” The New Yorker. 13 May 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dail...a-americans-attempt-to-stage-a-bay-of-piglets.
[36] John P. Sullivan and Robert J. Bunker, Eds., Covid-19, Gangs, and Conflict. Bloomington: Xlibris, 2020; especially Chapter 10, Keith Mines and Steven Hege, “Venezuela: Could the Coronavirus Threat Be an Opportunity?”
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About the Author(s)
Frederick M. Shepherd
Dr. Frederick M. Shepherd is the author of Christianity and Human Rights: Christians and the Struggle for Global Justice (Lexington, 2009), as well as numerous contributions to volumes and journals on Latin America, religion, politics, human rights and genocide. His current work focuses on genocide and human rights, and he has been affiliated with the Lilly Foundation, the Holocaust Education Fund, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial and Museum. He received a B.A. from Amherst College and a PhD from Georgetown University. He is currently at work on studies of comparative genocide with a special focus on Guatemala.

 

[Melodi]

I can confirm that The Catholic Church is playing a role in trying to keep people alive (my friend the Priest feeds people by hosting dinners and food distribution).

He can't say very much, but I could tell from some of his posts on Facebook that he and his monastic brothers are not happy at all with the current government or the situation.

 

[20Gauge]

Nicaragua charges ex-beauty queen running for election – DW – 08/05/2021

Berenice Quezada has been disqualified from running as vice president in the upcoming vote. She is the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.

www.dw.com

Nicaragua charges ex-beauty queen running for election
Berenice Quezada has been disqualified from running as vice president in the upcoming vote. She is the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.




Quezada was the running mate of the opposition presidential candidate Oscar Sobalvarro

Nicaraguan prosecutors charged former beauty queen and opposition candidate for the presidential vote Berenice Quezada with inciting terrorism, the attorney general said Wednesday.

Quezada was placed under house arrest a day earlier amid a crackdown against President Daniel Ortega's opponents ahead of the November 7 election.

The charges against Quezada relate to her participation in the 2018 anti-government protests, which Ortega's regime had deemed a coup attempt.

She was released pending trial.

Quezada out of the race
Quezada's arrest came just one day after she officially registered herself as the right-wing Citizens for Freedom Alliance (CxL) candidate for vice president.

The 27-year-old winner of the Miss Nicaragua 2017 beauty pageant was running alongside Oscar Sobalvarro, a former guerrilla leader who fought against Ortega's left-wing Sandinista party.

Quezada can no longer run for elections because of her charges

CxL had officially registered the pair despite calls from some opposition parties to boycott the election instead of giving it a thin veil of legitimacy.

A sweeping crackdown
In the past two months, Nicaraguan authorities detained dozens of opposition figures; Quezada was the eighth candidate to be arrested since May.

Electoral authorities previously barred two opposition parties from running any candidate at all.

Unsurprisingly, the Sandinista party officially nominated Ortega for president and his wife and vice president, Rosario Murillo, as his running mate.

The United States and the European Union have recently imposed sanctions against Murillo and other top officials, warning that the elections would not be free, with most contenders jailed.

Hey! Just like our riot at the capital. Protest some and they will call it rebellion!!