Dear Friend,
Medea Benjamin writes an eye witness report from Bolivia.
According to reports from the Marshall Islands, plutonium is leaking into the Pacific Ocean from a massive concrete bunker the United States built in the 1950s to dispose of nuclear waste. A potential disaster is looming.
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“They’re killing us like dogs” – A Massacre in Bolivia and a Plea for Help
by Medea Benjamin
I am
writing from Bolivia just days after witnessing the November 19 military massacre at the Senkata gas plant in the indigenous city of El Alto, and the tear-gassing of a peaceful funeral procession on November 21 to commemorate the dead. These are examples, unfortunately, of the modus operandi of the de facto government that seized control in a coup that forced Evo Morales out of power.
I am writing from Bolivia just days after witnessing the November 19 military massacre at the Senkata gas plant in the indigenous city of El Alto, and the tear-gassing of a peaceful funeral procession on November 21 to commemorate the dead. These are examples, unfortunately, of the modus operandi of the de facto government that seized control in a coup that forced Evo Morales out of power.
The coup has spawned massive protests, with blockades set up around the country as part of a national strike calling for the resignation of this new government. One well-organized blockade is in El Alto, where residents set up barriers surrounding the Senkata gas plant, stopping tankers from leaving the plant and cutting off La Paz’s main source of gasoline.
Determined to break the blockade, the government sent in helicopters, tanks and heavily armed soldiers in the evening of November 18. The next day, mayhem broke out when the soldiers began teargassing residents, then shooting into the crowd. I arrived just after the shooting. The furious residents took me to local clinics where the wounded were taken. I saw the doctors and nurses desperately trying to save lives, carrying out emergency surgeries in difficult conditions with a shortage of medical equipment. I saw five dead bodies and dozens of people with bullet wounds. Some had just been walking to work when they were struck by bullets. A grieving mother whose son was shot cried out between sobs: “They’re killing us like dogs.” In the end, there were 8 confirmed dead.
The next day, a local church became an improvised morgue, with the dead bodies–some still dripping blood–lined up in pews and doctors performing autopsies. Hundreds gathered outside to console the families and contribute money for coffins and funerals. They mourned the dead, and cursed the government for the attack and the local press for refusing to tell the truth about what happened.
The local news coverage about Senkata was almost as startling as the lack of medical supplies. The de facto government has threatened journalists with sedition should they spread “disinformation” by covering protests, so many don’t even show up. Those who do often spread disinformation. The main TV station reported three deaths and blamed the violence on the protesters, giving airtime to the new Defense Minister Fernando Lopez who made the absurd claim that soldiers did not fire “a single bullet” and that “terrorist groups” had tried to use dynamite to break into the gasoline plant.
It’s little wonder that many Bolivians have no idea what is happening. I have interviewed and spoken to dozens of people on both sides of the political divide. Many of those who support the de facto government justify the repression as a way to restore stability. They refuse to call President Evo Morales’ ouster a coup and claim there was fraud in the October 20 election that sparked the conflict. These claims of fraud, which were prompted by a report by the Organization of American States, have been debunked by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a think tank in Washington, D.C.
Morales, the first indigenous president in a country with an indigenous majority, was forced to flee to Mexico after he, his family and party leaders received death threats and attacks–including the burning of his sister’s house. Regardless of the criticisms people may have of Evo Morales, especially his decision to seek a fourth term, it is undeniable that he oversaw a growing economy that decreased poverty and inequality. He also brought relative stability to a country with a history of coups and upheavals. Perhaps most importantly, Morales was a symbol that the country’s indigenous majority could no longer be ignored. The de facto government has defaced indigenous symbols and insisted on the supremacy of Christianity and the Bible over indigenous traditions that the self-declared president, Jeanine Añez, has characterized as “satanic.” This surge in racism has not been lost on the indigenous protesters, who demand respect for their culture and traditions.
Jeanine Añez, who was the third highest ranking member of the Bolivian Senate, swore herself in as president after Morales’ resignation, despite not having a necessary quorum in the legislature to approve her as president. The people in front of her in the line of succession – all of whom belong to Morales’ MAS party – resigned under duress. One of those is Victor Borda, president of the lower house of congress, who stepped down after his home was set on fire and his brother was taken hostage.
Upon taking power, Áñez’s government threatened to arrest MAS legislators, accusing them of “subversion and sedition”, despite the fact that this party holds a majority in both chambers of congress. The de facto government then received international condemnation after issuing a decree granting immunity to the military in its efforts to reestablish order and stability. This decree has been described as a “license to kill” and “carte blanche” to repress, and it has been strongly criticized by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The result of this decree has been death, repression and massive violations of human rights. In the week and a half since the coup, 32 people have died in protests, with more than 700 wounded. This conflict is spiraling out of control and I fear it will only get worse. Rumors abound on social media of military and police units refusing the de facto government’s orders to repress. It is not hyperbole to suggest that this could result in a civil war. That’s why so many Bolivians are desperately calling for international help. “The military has guns and a license to kill; we have nothing,” cried a mother whose son had just been shot in Senkata. “Please, tell the international community to come here and stop this.”
I have been calling for Michelle Bachelet, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former president of Chile, to join me on the ground in Bolivia. Her office is sending a technical mission to Bolivia, but the situation requires a prominent figure. Restorative justice is needed for the victims of violence and dialogue is needed to defuse tensions so Bolivians can restore their democracy. Ms. Bachelet is highly respected in the region; her presence could help save lives and bring peace to Bolivia.
Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of CODEPINK, a women-led peace and human rights grassroots organization. She has been reporting from Bolivia since November 14.
Rising seas threaten US Pacific nuclear dump
by John Braddock
According to reports from the Marshall Islands, plutonium is leaking into the Pacific Ocean from a massive concrete bunker the United States built in the 1950s to dispose of nuclear waste. A potential disaster is looming.
According to reports from the Marshall Islands, plutonium is leaking into the Pacific Ocean from a massive concrete bunker the United States built in the 1950s to dispose of nuclear waste. A potential disaster is looming.
Situated mid-way between Hawaii and Australia, the Marshall Islands has a population of 53,000 people. The island chain was occupied by Allied forces in 1944 and placed under US administration in 1947. It achieved nominal independence in 1986 under a so-called Compact of Free Association.
Between 1946-1958, Washington carried out 67 atmospheric and underwater nuclear explosions and a series of biological weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. Irradiated soil from the Enewetak and Bikini atolls, used as “ground zero” for the tests, was poured into a crater left from the detonations, mixed with concrete and covered with a shallow concrete dome.
Called the Runit Dome, the 18-inch thick structure holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet of radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 10 that climate change is breaking open the aging and weathered dome as it “bobs up and down with the tide,” threatening to spill nuclear waste into the ocean.
Throughout the Pacific, rising sea levels pose an existential threat as they inundate low-lying islands. The Marshall Islands is likely to see many of its 29 atolls under water within 10 to 20 years. On Enewetak atoll, tides are creeping up the sides of the US nuclear dump, advancing higher every year, while cracks are appearing in the dome.
According to Marshall Islands President Hilda Heine, debris from the dome is already seeping into the nearby lagoon. Following a visit to the White House in May, accompanied by the presidents of Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia, Heine told Reuters she “saved her breath” rather than futilely try to persuade US President Trump of their concerns about climate change.
According to the LA Times, the Marshall Islands government lobbied Washington for help, but American officials declared the dome is the responsibility of the Marshallese government.
Based on documents and interviews with US and Marshallese officials, the LA Times found that the American government withheld key pieces of information about the dome’s contents and its weapons testing program before the countries signed the 1986 Compact which released the US from liability.
The US did not reveal that in 1958 it shipped 130 tons of soil from atomic testing grounds in Nevada to the islands. Washington also did not inform the Marshall Islands authorities that a dozen biological weapons tests had been conducted on Enewetak, including experiments with an aerosolized bacteria designed to kill enemy troops. Over 600 people currently live on parts of the atoll.
Over a period of five visits to the Marshall Islands, LA Times reporters documented extensive coral bleaching, fish kills and algae blooms, as well as major disease outbreaks such as dengue fever. Michael Gerrard from Columbia University’s law school told the paper that “the Marshall Islands is a victim of the two greatest threats facing humanity—nuclear weapons and climate change,” for which the “United States is entirely responsible.”
Scientists from Columbia University released a report in July concluding that radiation levels across the islands were “significantly” higher than at Fukushima and Chernobyl. On Bikini atoll, plutonium concentrations were “up to 15–1,000 times higher than in samples from areas affected by the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.”
The report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), said soil samples from four uninhabited islands had concentrations of gamma radiation “well above” the legal exposure limit established in agreements between the US and the Marshall Islands.
The team examined contamination levels in food sources, as well as the levels and composition of radioactive isotopes. The food study showed a mix of high and variable levels of contamination on fruit tested on Bikini, Naen and Rongelap islands. The fruit contained radiation higher than the safety levels established by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Japan, which have more stringent standards for limiting ingestion of radioactive particles than the US.
The nuclear tests left widespread contamination. Although six percent of US nuclear-bomb testing occurred there, the detonations and mushroom clouds generated more than half the total energy from all US testing. The largest, the Castle Bravo bomb detonated in March 1954, was 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki in Japan.
US authorities relocated people living on Enewetak and Bikini in the late 1940s. Those in Rongelap and Utirik, more than a 100 miles from the testing sites, were removed three days after they were showered by fallout from Castle Bravo. The fallout caused skin burns, hair loss, nausea and, eventually, cancer in many of the people exposed.
Washington has repeatedly asserted that locals now face little risk from radioactivity. However, Marshallese continue to distrust US assurances. At Bikini and Rongelap, residents initially returned to their islands after the US told them it was safe. The resettlement was a disaster. Cancer cases, miscarriages and deformities multiplied. By 1967, 10 years after the test, 17 of the 19 children who were younger than 10 and on the island the day Bravo exploded had developed thyroid disorders and growths. One child died of leukaemia.
Several imperialist powers occupied large tracts of the Pacific and used it for nuclear testing after World War II. The United Kingdom exploded atomic and hydrogen bombs at Malden Island and Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in 1957-1958. A total of 193 tests were carried out by France on Fangataufa and Mururoa Atolls in French Polynesia from 1966-1996, including one thermonuclear device in 1968.
Tahitians and other Pacific islanders, as well as British, New Zealand, and Fijian servicemen suffered radiation exposure. Widespread opposition developed to the horrific activities of the arrogant major powers. In a brutal attempt to forestall protests at the Mururoa test site in 1985, French secret service agents blew up the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour, killing a crewman.
Hundreds of Marshall Islanders were meanwhile exiled across the Pacific, impoverished, their homes devastated and health imperilled. An international tribunal concluded in 1988 the US should pay $2.3 billion in claims, but Congress and US courts refused. Documents cited by the LA Times show the US has paid just $4 million.
Today, the Marshall Islands is again assuming geo-strategic importance as part of Washington’s intensifying confrontation with China. In August Mike Pompeo became the first secretary of state to visit Micronesia, to negotiate an extension to a security agreement that gives the US military exclusive access to the vast airspace and territorial waters of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. This was necessary, he declared, to face off “Chinese efforts to redraw the Pacific.”
Originally published in WSWS.org
Climate needs real business leadership
by Bill Henderson
If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’,
effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. Then our kids – the world’s kids – can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.
Climate change is real, happening. It is human caused – mostly through our use of fossil fuels, and could be catastrophic, could be a tragic end to our present evolution. Without effective mitigation.
But we’ve gone three decades of failure to even slow the increase in burning coal, oil and natural gas, with consequential greenhouse gases (GHGs) increasing in the atmosphere, with a consequential rise in global temperatures, which in turn leads to more extreme weather, sea level rise, drought and forest fires, etc. Climate change damage is accelerating and becoming increasingly costly; devastating weather is already a growing threat multiplier in our tightly linked global society.
There are also latent positive feedbacks like melting permafrost or the drying Amazon. Human induced warming is predicted to accelerate these positive feedbacks and the most worrying earth systems climate science strongly suggests we are near a threshold beyond which a cascade of such feedbacks is triggered that is irreversible – nothing then we could do about it – leading to a 5-7C rise in temperature to Hothouse Earth and the certain collapse of civilization and maybe even human extinction.
Fossil fuels have been the lifeblood of our meteoric ascent to our very fortunate global civilization of wealth and opportunity today, but burning fossil fuels had an unanticipated side-effect and now adds unacceptable GHG emissions which are a potentially fatal toxin for all we know and love.
Transitioning out of fossil fuels to a new, post-carbon economy and society was never going to be easy but three decades of denial, procrastination and failure must mean urgent, emergency action is required if the society we are so intimately coevolved with is to survive and keep on evolving.
The main reason for this failure to effectively mitigate has been the success of global business at creating a business friendly global governance that protects long term investment (downsized governments wearing their golden straitjackets). While successfully boosting economic activity, wealth creation and lifestyle innovation, this ‘neoliberal’ governance has not allowed mitigation policies that could have restricted fossil fuel use or helped speed up the needed transition.
Humankind’s greatest crisis coincides with the rise of an ideology that makes it impossible to address. By the late 1980s, when it became clear that man-made climate change endangered the living planet and its people, the world was in the grip of an extreme political doctrine whose tenets forbid the kind of intervention required to arrest it. George Monbiot
” (W)e haven’t even started to talk about what might be ‘possible’ and are still mostly arguing about what is ‘feasible without compromising economic growth.’ These are of course extremely different things, and the latter will not get us anywhere near the 1.5 degrees C target.” Damon Matthews
Under neoliberalism, climate change is extraordinarily difficult to deal with.
The options that do not violate the neoliberal worldview are few, which explains why so many governments resort to little more than mild carbon pricing that stops well short of what is needed, the Trudeau government’s Pan-Canadian Framework on Climate Change being a stellar example of this. Even when facing the end of the world, neoliberal governments would at most tinker only marginally with already low levels of industry and trade regulation, taxation, public investment, economic planning, and so on. Anything more would risk interfering with a society maintained for the wealthy in the name of market liberty and efficiency. Arron Saad
It was our bad luck that this idea that markets solve all problems and that government should be left to wither away crested just at the moment when it could do the most damage. Bill McKibben
The primary commitment of the international community is to maintain the current social and economic system….The reality is that Nation States and international corporations are engaged in an unremitting and ongoing expansion of fossil fuel energy exploration, extraction and combustion, and the construction of related infrastructure for production and consumption. Clive Spash
Every barrel of oil produced and burned is wealth creation not easily forgone. You want a booming economy – ask Trump – you do whatever you can to increase fossil fuel supply. And in our now neolib societies governments dare not introduce any policies that negatively effect the economy, effect GDP, by even minor percentage points. It’s the economy, stupid is the all encompassing religion of our times.
So fossil fuel production and use, and GHGs, continue to increase even though the consequences are acknowledged (by those not in denial) as increasingly existential.
Presently we are like somebody with a potentially fatal disease that has ignored the doctors insistent advice for lifestyle change, for deep systemic change, to the point where effective treatment is now problematic and needed change is becoming just too hard to even contemplate.
This is our predicament and all of us – especially those most effected globally today and future generations – could lose big time for not making the transition we have to make. Is eliminating civilization going to be a side-effect of the neolib goal of making a better world for business?
There is now no hope of effective mitigation in time without business. Global business – especially American business – must consciously roll back the neoliberal capture of government so that ‘transforming system change’ becomes possible, so that governments can organize and fund ‘big government plans’ like the Green New Deal (GND) and, more importantly if more heretically, so that governments can effectively regulate a managed decline of fossil fuel production and use.
If business doesn’t organize itself to back off so that deep systemic change is possible urgently than we are all going to lose big time. If business doesn’t agree to and help form wartime-style coalition governments and fossil fuel proliferation treaties across trade groups, and agree to government intervention, regulation and even triage support for markets in the transition to a hopeful post-carbon society, such a transformation will not happen (at least not in the timeframe dictated by the science).
It is still possible that we could make the needed transition – renewables and dematerializing technologies have tremendous promise. There still is hope that we could conduct an emergency operation to save our very fortunate societies and come out the other side into a much more secure and even wealthier market-based governance. Even the present fossil fuel companies could survive and thrive.
But the need for effective mitigation is urgent (it is even possible that it is already too late but we must try). And business must lead instead of continuing to be the main impediment, the main villain threatening all of our futures.
It is far too late to still try and shoehorn climate mitigation into business as usual. Decarbonization where renewables out compete fossil fuels in existing markets is now just pretend mitigation. It might have succeeded if initiated with business support in the 90s but now the illusion of 100% renewables is just being used as predatory delay. Even leading decarbonization jurisdictions like California or the UK are restricted to mitigation plans to fail and won’t make even their limited emission reduction targets.
We need revolutionary change – deep systemic change. But not socialism, not anti-capitalism, because we need business innovation within markets (stabilized by government for the transition like in previous wartime examples) with creative destruction and new safe growth.
Most people think that building renewable 100% capacity is the key to needed emission reduction. Hence plans like the GND. But if you read and understand expert commentators like Smil, MacKay, Cox and Rees you have to get far more sophisticated: mitigation planning must facilitate hyper creative destruction within continued opportunity for investment so that capital is not lost and the transition can be made as rapidly as possible.
This is why we need emergency government to not only allow systemic change but to protect and stabilize continuing markets (like during WW2) so that this hyper creative destruction is possible, so that we get a kind of controlled collapse that is fast but not fatal because there is a viable opportunity for new growth.
If we can make such a transition the vast majority of citizens in our western democracies want to live in market-based economies because of the wealth and opportunity they produce, albiet with government freed from capture and with improved equity of wealth distribution and with certainly more precautionary regulatory powers for governments.
So how does business lead now in getting to this hopeful transition?
Business must accept the need for deep systemic change. Business leaders must speak out and must convince those now opposed within business and their present political supporters to get on board. Business leadership must affirm that climate change is a battle that must be fought and won, if only to protect the continuing evolution of business.
Then business must empower government by consciously stepping back. Governments must be freed from the golden straitjacket and encouraged to regulate, even where the immediate consequences are negative for business.
If business returns to government the power to introduce needed ‘transformative system change’, effective climate mitigation finally becomes possible. Then our kids – the world’s kids – can hopefully enjoy opportunity and wealth creation in a future with a safe climate for our continuing evolution.
Bill Henderson is a climate change activist
Evil Hour in Honduras: A Banana Republic Lives On
by Joseph Grosso
If motivated to find the pinnacle of callous and hypocritical American statecraft one would have no shortage of choices. Of course the Middle East alone provides quite a bevy. From the numerous betrayals of the Kurds, to the ceaseless support for the House of Saud, including in its brutal war in Yemen, to the billions of dollars regularly pumped into dictatorship in Egypt, to the continual dispossession of the Palestinians. However in terms of pure cynicism perhaps the answer is found closer to home in Central America.
If motivated to find the pinnacle of callous and hypocritical American statecraft one would have no shortage of choices. Of course the Middle East alone provides quite a bevy. From the numerous betrayals of the Kurds, to the ceaseless support for the House of Saud, including in its brutal war in Yemen, to the billions of dollars regularly pumped into dictatorship in Egypt, to the continual dispossession of the Palestinians. However in terms of pure cynicism perhaps the answer is found closer to home in Central America.
Central America since the days of the Monroe Doctrine has always been regarded as a backwater by American policy, a region of exploitable land and cheap labor. Hence the notion of ‘banana republics’- the phrase began its life as a literal term. For much of the history the lynchpin of all this, as it remains now in the Middle East, was dictatorship. The list of American clients in the region has been distinguished: the Somoza family in Nicaragua, Carlos Armas and Rios Mott in Guatemala, Carlos Romero in El Salvador to name only a few. When the inevitable uprisings by the longsuffering masses came U.S. policy spared no expense or blood to prop up the anciens régimes where they held power and to restore them where they were overthrown. When the dust more or less settled revolution was defeated.
For the most part in the post-Cold War period the old elite was still in power, the economies of the region grew at a lower rate than most of the developing world- helped in no small part by plunging coffee prices ruining small famers. Much of the local economies are dependent on remittances from abroad. Violent street gangs took root (gang culture was imported back to the region by deported war refugees who learned the trade on the streets of Los Angeles), and the drug war in nearby Mexico exploded. The murder rate throughout the region has consistently ranked near the top of the world.
The most violent country has at times been Honduras. Honduras is a country with longstanding ties to the U.S. military. It was the staging ground for the U.S. trained Contras invasion of Nicaragua. Into this vortex stepped Manual Zelaya, who was elected president in 2005. Zelaya was a card carrying member of the Honduran elite, descending from a wealthy landowning family in the lumber industry. Heading a stale Liberal Party, Zelaya even supported the Central American Free Trade Agreement that took force in 2006. Unexpectedly, in conjunction with the ‘Pink Tide’ then prominent in Central and South America, Zelaya moved to the Left. He raised the minimum wage by 60 percent, to the dismay of the business community, called for drug use to be legalized, and joined the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), the left leaning regional trade group founded in 2004.
However it was probably the land question that truly doomed Zelaya in the eyes of the elites. In 2001 an organization called the Unified Peasant Movement of the Aguan (MUCA) was formed to challenge land sales in the fertile Bajo Aguan valley stemming from a 1992 law on the grounds of fraud and corruption. In early 2009 Zelaya reached an agreement with MUCA whereby, under Decree Law 18-2008, peasants would receive land titles to properties they had occupied and produced on for ten or more years. The law would have resolved over 400 land conflicts.
The coup came on June 28th 2009. It could fairly be described as a traditional affair, paralleling earlier coups against Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Allende in Chile (1973), and the failed attempt against Chavez in Venezuela (2002). Under the guise of Zelaya allegedly seeking dictatorial power through an upcoming nonbinding referendum that was to gage public interest regarding possible constitutional reform (similar reform had already taken place in Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia) , a measure that had grassroots support- critics claimed the point of which was to allow Zelaya to run for another 4 year term that was illegal under Honduran law; but with 6 months left in his term it is a difficult charge to justify, the military, led by another School of the Americas graduate Romeo Varquez, exiled Zelaya to Costa Rica and installed conservative businessman Roberto Micheletti. All the usual trimming of press censorship and violent suppression of protest went into effect.
At the time, Washington implicitly and explicitly supported the coup from not condemning the coup when it happened (instead merely calling on ‘all political and social actors in Honduras’ to respect democracy- U.S. officials have acknowledged they were talking to the Honduran military right up to the day of the coup), never once calling for Zelaya to be returned to office (as opposed to the OAS- Organization of American States), not suspending aid, blocking an OAS from adopting a resolution that would have refused to recognize the subsequent election that took place under the oppressive coup regime and was boycotted by the opposition, and not meeting Zelaya despite numerous requests, while meeting the winner of the fraudulent election, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, in the White House.
Besides increasing lawlessness and violence in general the coup has turned the state into the main purveyor of it. Since Zelaya’s removal dozens of journalists have been murdered with barely an ounce of retribution. And paralleling the horror facing union activists in Colombia, land activists have also been killed in scores by both corrupt police and paramilitaries aligned with the state and land barons (i.e. agribusiness). A report released in 2017 by Global Witness recorded 120 land activists killed in the fertile Bajo Aguan region since 2010, most in conflicts with rapidly expanding palm oil plantations (traded globally on the carbon credit racket). Another report, this one by the Honduras based Violence Observatory (Observatorio de Violencia) found that police killed 149 civilians between January 2011 and November 2012, averaging six per month. Two-thirds of Hondurans live in poverty.
As for democratic legitimacy, the term limits that Zelaya was falsely accused of trying to eliminate for his own benefit were indeed eliminated, with nary an ounce of the outrage directed toward Zelaya, by Honduran Supreme Court in favor of conservative president Juan Orlando Hernández who was reelected in an obviously rigged vote, the result of which was immediately recognized by the Trump administration.
In 2009 the Obama administration worked to legitimize the coup government in Honduras after the overthrow of a democratically elected president. Today in Honduras the Trump administration recognizes the results of an obviously rigged election in favor of a reactionary incumbent who only stood for reelection due to a corrupt Supreme Court changing the Constitution to allow it- exactly the official and false justification for 2009 coup. Liberal adoration of Barack Obama could be as gruesome as the cult of Trump.
The perfect coda came last month when President Hernández’s brother was convicted by a New York jury of drug trafficking. Hernández, who loudly proclaims himself the sworn enemy of drug dealers everywhere, is labeled by the prosecutors as a co-conspirator. A parade of witnesses described the president as looking the other way in exchange for millions in bribes used to fund his and his party’s political campaigns. No less a figure than El Chapo himself is alleged to have passed the president’s brother Tony Hernandez a million dollars in bribes with at least some of it meant to be passed to the president. The previous president Porfirio Lobo is also alleged to have been involved in such schemes.
The same day the conviction came down on Tony Hernandez, the American embassy in Honduras, as if trying to be as Kafkaesque as possible, brazenly tweeted out: ‘The United States and Honduras have a strong bilateral relationship and our governments cooperate on a wide range of issues including migration, security, the fight against narcotics, and economic development.’ Just two days earlier the Trump administration announced it was unfreezing some ‘targeted aid’ to the region as a result of the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras agreeing to so-called asylum cooperation agreements, enabling asylum-seekers to be sent back to the countries they originated while their claims are being processed. The great majority of asylum claims end up being rejected.
Thus completes another circle of callousness and exploitation from which generations of Central Americans have been unable to escape.
Joseph Grosso A Writer and librarian in New York City
Mending Gulf fences could weaken support for US sanctions against Iran
by Dr James M Dorsey
Saudi efforts to negotiate an end to the Yemen war in a bid to open a dialogue with Iran could call into question continued Gulf support for US President Donald J. Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against the Islamic republic.
JNU Must Be Protected
by Aariz Imam
Universities are public good and assume even more importance in the environment of rising inequality, and aggravated marginalization. It is incumbent on the universities, so much as a duty to offer a critique of socio political and economic policies of the state. Institutions like JNU endow the other public institutions their knowledge and skills and also keep a vigilante eye on state excesses. But, for them we would loose another important block that is significant to keep checks and balances in our democratic setup.
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