Argentina, Maradona, World Cup: It’s More Than Football

The four German goals that destroyed Argentina’s dream of winning the football World Cup this year rekindled another: that of the Argentine Right and its sinister pointsman, Mauricio Macri. The real target of the Argentine Right and its allied “media generals”, as President Cristina Fernándes calls them, is Diego Maradona, revered in Argentina for his football achievements and for his political journey to the Left.

Maradona has since resigned as the team’s technical director and the Clarín, the unforgiving Right-wing rag, started ripping into him. However, the people turned up in thousands to cheer the return of the defeated team with two slogans to chill the Right's ardour. The first, 'he who does not jump is English', was a throwback to the celebrations of the 1986 victory over England in which Maradona entered Argentinean legend as a cheeky devil with his first, handball goal and as a demi-god with his second solo effort, accepted by most people as the best World Cup goal. It was seen as revenge for defeat in the Malvinas. The second rallying cry, 'uh-ah, Maradona no se va' (Maradona's not going away), was borrowed from the Venezuelan Chávez supporters, of whom Maradona is one.

The President invited the team to the presidential palace. The team led by Maradona said they were not worthy of the honour. Holding back her tears, Cristina Fernándes said they were mistaken, they were indeed worthy of it. All this might seem melodramatic to outsiders but Argentineans live and breathe the game. What Eduardo Galeano said of the Uruguayans holds true of the neighbouring Argentineans, that they are suckers for the beautiful game and are born shouting goooaaal. As it happens, Clarín's owner was away from the country when the team returned, reportedly in the USA, escaping it seems from the revelation that her children were adopted during the military dictatorship (1976-1983), brothers whose parents were murdered by the military regime. President Fernández forced the Argentine Football Association to make sure that the World Cup matches were accessible to all rather than the pay-per-game scheme which would have translated into millions of dollars in profit for the Clarin media group. Ever since, they have had the President and the "golden kid" in their sights.

Mauricio Macri's father, who established himself as a fabulously wealthy businessman, made most of his money during the dictatorship years. Mauricio apparently decided to take to politics while he was briefly kidnapped and held for ransom by a group of policemen. His family is said to have paid a huge fortune for his release. Mauricio took over the Boca Juniors football club, where Maradona made his name as a precocious youngster and a senior player who would not go to the rival, well-heeled River Plate for more money. Mauricio stabilised the club and this paid him political dividends. He was elected Mayor of Buenos Aires with most votes coming not only from the fashionable neighbourhoods but also the poorer parts where most Boca supporters live. As the Buenos Aires Mayor, Macri has given early hint of what his rule could be like. He has unleashed violent police crackdown on demonstrations, spied on his rivals and colleagues using the capital's notorious police force, brought in ex-FBI advisors for them, stood by wealthy residents who tried to erect walls to keep out the poor from sight, and recently admitted that he made some appointments based on advice from the CIA and Mossad. Maradona’s Left turn imperils the Macri project of becoming Argentina's next President on the lines of Chile's billionaire President Piñera. Diego has defended Cristina Fernándes, who lacks her husband, the former President Nestor Kirchner's popularity.

World Cups hold bittersweet memories for Argentineans. The 1986 victory in Mexico gave them Maradona. The first time they held the Jules Rimet trophy was in 1978. The country was then ruled by a military dictatorship and dissidents were being held and killed a thousand metres away from the main stadium. The River Plate stadium was being used as a clandestine holding centre. Even today, a bad football game in the continent is known as a ‘Pinochet’, filling up a football stadium for a horror show. Argentina's Dutch rivals in the finals were advised not to go. They and the others did and the military used the victory for its counter-human rights campaign with the slogan, “Argentineans are right and human”. General Jorge Rafael Videla, the architect of the dirty war, is on trial now. His policy of making people "disappear" (the disappeared were neither dead nor living, he clarified at his first trial, they had merely dis-a-ppeared) has become a template for the coupsters of Latin America. The Dutch crown princess, born Máxima Zorreguieta in Buenos Aires, is the daughter of the Agriculture Minister during the dictatorship and holds dual Dutch-Argentinean citizenship.

In 1978, Juan then 22, was transferred together with 15 other political prisoners from the Sierra Chica jail to the concentration camp of La Perla in Córdoba as hostages to be executed if guerrillas committed any attack during the World Cup. That group of 16 was kept for the period of the championship handcuffed behind their back, blindfolded, seated on the floor against the wall but with a rare privilege: if Argentina played, their guards handcuffed them in front so they could celebrate and wave them about when the team scored (which they heard over the radio). In June 1978, Ernesto, then 23 and political prisoner in Magdelana jail, was taken out of his cell during the night, beaten to pulp with sticks, made to bath in freezing water and put through several mock executions and later thrown into a punishment cell where he stayed squatting for ten days because it was too small for him to stand up. From that cell, Ernesto heard the cheers of the hangmen each time that Mario Kempes tore through the other team. Ernesto also celebrated but sensed that each Argentine goal could prolong his captivity. It was only years later that they saw the famous photos of the military junta celebrating the title in the palace and remembered those goals that they celebrated, and suffered, in the darkness of their dungeons.

The Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Space for Memory Institute) tried to heal the wound between the footballers who won the Cup and the victims of the military regime by hosting the "Other Final" in 2008. Among those players present were Luque, Villa and Houseman who, like a large part of Argentine society, were unaware of the magnitude of the massacres. Some of the players did not join that act, and indeed criticised it, while the then coach, Menotti, stayed away. Medals were handed over to the participants saying: “In recognition of your participation in the ‘Other Final’. The match for life and human rights.” Houseman shed tears, Luque was noticeably emotional and Villa, pioneer in recognising that horror, was at all the microphones. Joaquín, Manuel and Sebastián, children of Ernesto and Juan, had their Argentine shirts signed by the players. Before travelling to Cape Town, this Argentinean team had themselves photographed holding a huge banner saying, 'We support the Mothers of the Plaza (a group of women who stood up to the dictatorship) for the Nobel Peace Prize'. Would that have been possible without Maradona's consent?

Maradona turned to the Left during his worst personal crisis while battling a drug addiction. He travelled to a detoxification clinic in Cuba and Fidel Castro mentored him at that time. Today, Maradona sports a Che tattoo on his arm and one of Fidel in his calve. The "golden kid" was an iconic presence at the 2005 demonstrations at Mar del Plata, where he sported a George Bush war criminal tee shirt and called him human garbage. One of those present at that demonstration was a Boca Junior fan who had always dreamt of meeting Maradona -- Evo Morales, now the Bolivian President. Maradona might not be all that stands between the Argentinean Right and a presidential victory but "el diez" (the perfect one in reference to his No 10 shirt), warts and all, is part of the Argentine, Latin American and international Left. Even English socialists must feel like jumping at this.

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Argentine Media Spews Hate Against Maradona

By Guillermo Almeyra

Diego Maradona was an extraordinary player, but is a sorry man and a very bad coach of any team and, still more, that of the national team as the results show. I think that as a person, together with his massive defects and bad habits, he is generous and has an instinctive position against the powerful like how as member of the international footballers’ union he denounced FIFA boss Blatter, of Switzerland, as a mafioso: or in Argentina Julio Grondona of the Argentine Football Association, something both will always remember, or how he spoke out against the last Argentinian dictatorship and in favour of Alba and Cuba and against oligarchy, something that is neither forgotten nor forgiven.

On the other hand, football some time ago ceased to be a sport and the clubs are no longer that but businesses which kill the sport to promote good players, not to form a good, stable team constructed through years of common work, but to sell them abroad for much more than what is declared to the treasury and to the members. The club directors pay… Argentinian football hooligans…and rent them to reactionary political forces like the anti-poor police of Buenos Aires municipality, recruited from the hooligans of San Lorenzo who are “crows” on the field and vultures on the urban streets.

Now the sky has opened on Maradona because, with the fine elegance and style that characterised it, he said his critics could “go suck” (without being more explicit about what he was referring to). Grondona hinted at throwing him out on the street. Blatter threatened him with a large fine and suspension for five games (possibly World Cup games) and the poisonous media of Argentina, in the great majority unbridled and limitless in its opposition to Cuba, Chavez, the national government, AFA, the team and Maradona, have discovered suddenly that they themselves are well-spoken and moralists, breathing fire on the loud mouth.

Well, the television programme with the highest rating simulates intercourse and shows a great profusion and variety of bottoms in the “famous” pole dances and television news…says that the Kirchners are “like the Ceausescu and should end up like them” (or be lynched), which is much more serious than the obscenities of a brusque footballer…

Who is behind this hate for the team, the hope clearly formulated that they do not win, with the intention of doing away with Maradona…? To start with the $4-billion-dollar business that just ended for the Clarín (media) group for the pre-paid transmission of football matches on cable television.

The Argentine government, in effect, came to an agreement with the mafioso Grondona and with the clubs… imposing a law which established that the games would be freely available in the open television channels and that the state would be able to sell the rights abroad… The approval of the broadcasting law affected the possibilities of misinforming and poisoning public opinion. The Opposition groups and those that lost in the football business are now taking aim at Maradona to end the agreement between the government and AFA. It is not about, well, morals or condemning the more than colourful language… For that, in this case, I am defending the dreadful Maradona.

Abridged

Source: La Jornada
Related Article: Dark History of the 1978 Football World Cup

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The Good Swede Harald Edelstam

By Marcelo Medrano

They were pleading, begging, crying. Behind them, the soldiers were getting ready to intervene. The grilled doors would not give way while the cries and shouts to let them in became louder. He looked at the desperate crowd, looked at the soldiers and ordered the opening of the gates. They came in worried, fearful, disconcerted, taking refuge in the Swedish Embassy in Chile. The Ambassador ordered the gates shut. Many lives were saved.

Harald Edelstam, Swedish Ambassador, had worked out the intention of the trucks and the tens of soldiers who had surrounded the building, firing at it, destroying windows and cutting off the light and electricity, about to enter it at any moment. In the middle of the shooting, alone and defiant, with the Swedish flag in one hand and his diplomatic passport in the other, he entered the besieged Cuban Embassy and, in a brave and historic act, declared it under the protection of the Swedish government. From the day of the fascist coup against the government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973, Edelstam, a forgotten hero, would challenge the military dictatorship in his own way, risking his life, as he had done so many times in the past.

In his youth, he was a diplomat in Berlin in 1941 and helped many Jewish families flee the Nazi regime; later, as Ambassador in Norway, he defended the right to confront the Nazi occupation and protected many in the resistance. Guatemala would be his new post between 1969 and 1971. There, against the wishes of the dictatorship, which preferred fearful diplomats who were not awkward, Edelstam defended the work of the popular organisations and human rights activists.

In 1972, he supported the initiatives of the socialist government of Allende, sympathising with its ideas and intentions. He was witness to the start of the cruel dictatorship, during which time he did not tire of interceding on behalf of hundred of refugees and the political victims, collaborating with the resistance. Nothing left him tired: neither the constant military siege nor the daily nocturnal helicopter flights above the Embassy.

That crowded Embassy, full of people and closed by Pinochet’s fascist regime, was an open door for asylum, protection and escape for many. It is thought that Edelstam’s actions saved the lives of more than 1,300 people in Chile and more than 50 Uruguayans whom he took out of the terrifying national stadium that had been converted into a centre for torture, disappearance and killings. In his life, Edelstam would have saved thousands of lives.

Asa Faringer and Ulf Hultberg have made a grand homage in the film, The Black Pimpernel. April 16 will be 20 years of his death and it is necessary to rescue from oblivion the contemporary epic.

More about the film at: http://www.listal.com/video/1569024
Harald Edelstam Foundation: http://haraldedelstam.cl
Source: ArgenPress

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War Debases The Self: Adolfo Esquivel

By Adolfo Pérez Esquivel

[Esquivel is an Argentinean Nobel Peace Prize winner]

War is the game of the powerful, the great public vice playing with the life of the people, in which everyone gets involved. Everyone has to live or die. But the true emotion of the game proceeds from the “suspension of conscience”. All through the game, the real conditions have to be dispensed with.

In war, one supposes that not only is one just but also it is necessary to kill. The great sacrifice in war is not so much the sacrifice of life as the suspension of conscience which, nevertheless, the majority of the people find easy and agreeable provided they all do it at the same time.

The great danger of war is precisely that universal necessity of “massive immorality” which provides such satisfaction in playing it. This is what Thomas Merton says, remembering Lanza del Vasto (Italian philosopher influenced by Gandhi), on the deep connection between game and war.

In these days of sadness and death in the Gaza Strip, the media have reported that the electoral programme in Israel turns the war into a game to entertain the audience. In their macabre game, they say, “We have killed a thousand Palestinians and they have killed only 13 Israelis. We beat them by a mile.” Actor Tal Friedman of Eretz Neheredet (a satirical Israeli television programme) says, “The results are good but we cannot be satisfied with this advantage: we have to extend it.” Everyone heads to war as a party but everyone returns defeated with the death of the soul.

In the game of war, the gamblers shuffle the cards and gain with the life of the people, consumed by the mental and emotional garbage that turns social and political life into a disease for the masses. Each one has “reason and truth to destroy the enemy”, to justify the horror and the deaths.

The impunity with which Israel and the United States act is a threat to world peace. In the game of war, the nuclear armament is not the sole possession of the big powers; other countries possess nuclear arms, among them Israel, Pakistan and India and others are on the way to possessing them.

The United States and its allies say that irresponsible countries have to be confronted so that they do not have nuclear weapons. Can anyone say there are responsible countries for having nuclear weapons and that they will not use them when the moment comes? Arms never guarantee peace.

The arrogance with which Israel acts ignoring the rights of the Palestinian people and the demands of the international community damages the people of Israel themselves and the world. They should not forget that you sow what you reap; there is no other alternative.

Israelis and Palestinians have to learn to co-exist in diversity and share bread and peace in the Holy Land, their home and common destiny that has sadly been forgotten and transformed into the “land of blood, hate and suffering”. Till when?

It is necessary to turn the gaze inside each of us and inside each people; to find ways that permit bringing down the walls of intolerance, barbarism, destruction and death. The hope of the people is still alive despite everything. Many Israelis and Palestinians keep working to reach peace and understanding among the people and know that it is the only way to reach a new dawn.

Abridged
Source: CubaDebate

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Argentina's Growing Female Prison Population

The female population in Argentinean prisons in the past 15 years grew approximately 240% against the 145% growth in the male prison population. In the federal prisons alone, there are 1,019 female prisoners today; 18 of them are pregnant and 80 are imprisoned together with their children of less than four years. In the federal sector, there are 86 children living in prison. In the province of Buenos Aires, the female prison population is 933 and the number of children living in provincial prisons is not known.

Sixty per cent of women in federal prisons are in preventive custody, without trial. The great majority of the female prison population in the federal sector is detained for non-violent crimes: for example, 68% of the cases are for offences under the narcotics law, that is to say when the women become so-called ‘mules’. In the province of Buenos Aires, 80% of the 933 women prisoners are detained without any sentence.

The imprisoning of women has a different and direct impact not only on them but also on their families, in particular on the children in their charge. The deteriorating prison conditions and the level of anguish and anxiety that this causes can affect the physical and mental health of the pregnant women and their children. The children who live together with their mothers in the prison establishments can maintain their maternal links but at the cost of living in a prison environment and interruption of daily contact with the family. Moreover, when they complete four years of age, they have to leave prison and, if there is no family or trusted person to take charge, are diverted to substitute families.

The children who do not stay together with their mother in prison also suffer negative consequences. Different studies have shown that the children of imprisoned women suffer a great deal of psychological problems: depression, hyperactivity, aggressive or submissive behaviour, shyness, regression and eating disorders among others.

In November 2007, the Chamber of Deputies half-sanctioned a plan to establish home arrest for pregnant women and who had children below five in their charge. In December a Senate commission gave a favourable judgment but the Senate as a whole has not dealt with the project.

Source: Argenpress

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Chile Imprisons Documentary Maker

The imprisoned Chilean documentary maker, Elena Varela, has moved the Organization of American States after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal against her detention. The lower court, which sent Varela to pre-trial custody for at least six months, had denied her lawyers entry for 15 minutes into the hearing which prevented them from arguing her arrest was illegal.

Varela was arrested on May 7 as she was filming ‘Newen Mapuche’ (Universal Energy of the Mapuches) on the conflict which has pitted the Chilean state and the timber companies against the native Mapuche people. She has been put into a new privatised prison and the detention period is likely to end up being far longer as the prosecutors have charged her with consorting with Left-wing terrorist groups and being complicit in killings and armed robberies. Her camera, video footage and notes have been seized, material many fear will be used to hound others.

The accusations against Varela are as laughable as they are sinister. These are apparently the fruit of three years of ‘Operation Patience’ conducted against her by the Chilean National Intelligence Agency, modelled on the U.S. secret services and the product of legislation redolent of the Pinochet years. Forty-two-year-old Elena Marisol Varela López is hardly terrorist material. She founded a children’s orchestra and an arts school, headed a film company, was making the documentary with finances provided by a government agency and describes herself as “essentially a liberated woman, not just free but also a libertarian”.

The persecution of Varela stems from her investigation of the Mapuche cause. The Chilean state does not deal lightly anyone shining light on the issue. A French film crew was arrested and released in March while two Italian film-makers were arrested in May for recording a Mapuche protest against a timber company, roughed up, ordered to leave Chile and escorted to the airport. A Catalan print journalist faced a similar fate some years ago.

The Mapuches constitute some 87% of Chile’s remaining native population who comprise 4.6% of the population. A third of the Mapuches now live in the ancestral Araucanía region whereas more than half of them lived there only a decade ago. Other Mapuches, as is the pattern throughout the continent now, have dispersed principally to the capital, Santiago, in search of insecure, low-paid work while the riches of their land are harvested by powerful transnational corporations with the backing of the Chilean state and the famed brutality of its armed police, the Carabineros. Like the Kawesqar and Yagan people, the Mapuches run the real risk of disappearing as a distinct community.

Mapuche activists who fight back are subjected to long imprisonment on terrorism charges. The Carabineros have not hesitated in killing demonstrators, rightly confident they will never face charges. The timber companies, activists allege, engage in the lucrative practice of damaging the forests themselves, collecting insurance and then blaming it on the Mapuches. The judiciary treats them shabbily and the corporate print and visual media, with close ties to the business groups and covertly to the military, ignores them. The Mapuches are Chile’s forgotten people.

The incarceration of Elena Varela is an attempt to silence the telling of the Mapuche story. While journalists have at least legal protection from having to reveal their sources, documentary makers in Chile confront legal ambiguity. The prosecutors trailed Varela as she interviewed a Mapuche activist on the run from the law who provided key information on how their land was being grabbed for commercial forestry and the rivers dammed. She was getting uncomfortably close to the main actors in the great forest heist.

Varela describes her own situation in a public letter: “I have faith justice will be done despite everything. I get the impression that the principal oppressor of this situation is the monster created during the dictorship… Fascism that has not died nor ended. I feel peace does not exist in Chile, that minimum rights are not respected. Fear was instilled during the dictatorship, killing, imprisoning for thinking differently, for defending important causes. Today it is almost the same… the torture is psychological, the oppression is the silencing.

“I believe in a wholesome world of respect and love… The solution is difficult, like it is difficult for many to share your plate of food with he has nothing to eat; sharing your roof with him who has none. The problem is not only economic but passes through the soul… The cement of the cities has locked up the free spirit that we bring with us inside. Today we have nothing of what we had: we are not a supportive community, open to constructing a more just world. At the top are the oppressors, below the oppressed and far, far away the liberty-seekers who fight day after day…”

[Do not be far away. Amnesty International provides an opportunity for solidarity with Elena Varela (document needs to be downloaded).]

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Dark History of the 1978 Football World Cup

In 1978, Juan then 22, was transferred together with 15 other political prisoners from the Sierra Chica jail to the concentration camp of La Perla in Córdoba as hostages to be executed if guerrillas committed any attack during the World Cup.

That group of 16 were kept for the period of the championship handcuffed behind their back, blindfolded, seated on the floor against the wall but with a rare privilege: if Argentina played, their guards handcuffed them in front so they could celebrate and wave them about when the team scored (which they heard over the radio).

After Argentina’s victory, and happy to be still alive, they had another present: their hangmen allowed them a bath and offered them, as a sick joke, to change their clothes for those that had belonged to the disappeared, assassinated in that secret centre.

In June 1978, Ernesto, then 23 and political prisoner in Magdelana jail, was taken out of his cell during the night, beaten to pulp with sticks, made to bath in freezing water and put through several mock executions and later thrown into a punishment cell where he stayed squatting for ten days because it was too small for him to stand up.

From that cell, Ernesto heard the cheers of the hangmen each time that Mario Kempes tore through the other team. Ernesto also celebrated but sensed that each Argentine goal was a chip in favour of the dictatorship that could prolong his captivity.

It was only years later, and by then freed, that they saw the famous photos of the military junta celebrating the title in the palace and remembered those goals that they celebrated, and suffered, in the darkness of their dungeons.

Today Juan and Ernesto have passed 50. Together with their families, they were in the “Other Final” organised by the Instituto Espacio para la Memoria (Space for Memory Institute) to heal the wound between those footballers who won the Cup and the victims of the horror whose perpetrators sought to use it to cleanse the image of the military regime.

Among those players present were Luque, Villa and Houseman who, like a large part of Argentine society, were not aware of the magnitude of the massacre but now have the courage and dignity to speak out and to remember, pinning on the flag the photographs of the disappeared who died while the crowds celebrated the world champions.

Other players of the team supported the act and some preferred not to, even making declarations against it, as if to jog their memories and self-criticism would take the shine off their sporting achievements.

The ineffable Menotti stayed away when he had the chance to stand up for justice and remembering. In that World Cup, he certainly allowed the dictatorship to make use of his charisma, his prestige and his figure to hide from the world the magnitude of their crimes.

Medals were handed over to the participants saying: “In recognition of your participation in the ‘Other Final’. The match for life and human rights.” Houseman shed tears, Luque was noticeably emotional and Villa, pioneer in recognising that horror, was at all the microphones.

Joaquín, Manuel and Sebastián, children of Ernesto and Juan, had had their Argentine shirts signed by the players. If only they do not have to wait for another 30 years for the missing signatures.

Source: Página 12

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Chile's Torture Ship On Goodwill Tour

The U.S. Navy is certainly not the first to torture prisoners aboard its ships. It was beaten to that moral wasteland by Pinochet’s Chile and the obscenity is that the graceful tall ship, La Esmeralda, known affectionately as the White Lady, once a torture centre in Valparaiso, is now the country’s floating ambassador. Having just set out on its 54th round the world voyage this year, it will call at ports like Haifa (Israel), Alexandria (Egypt) and Cochin (India) with a crew that for the first time includes Bolivian personnel.

The Chilean Navy was the advance guard of Pinochet’s coup. Soon after the overthrow of the Allende government, naval patrols began scouring the streets of Pablo Neruda’s beloved Valparaiso, asking people, whose names were read over loudspeakers or on the radio, to hand in themselves. Among them was the Anglo-Chilean worker priest, Father Michael Woodward. At first Woodward fled to a friend’s house but returned to his own – which he had himself built – in the working class district of Cerro Placeres after a few days, saying he had nothing to hide. He dismissed the idea of taking help from the British authorities.

Father Woodward was arrested at his home by a naval patrol and taken to the headquarters of the local Carabineros, Chile’s notoriously brutal armed police, where he was badly assaulted. He was transferred to a cargo ship, Lebu, commandeered by the Navy as a holding vessel for the prisoners at Valparaiso and then to La Esmeralda where he was tortured. Close to death, he was taken in an ambulance to the Navy hospital but died en route. The hospital doctors made the risible claim he had died of a heart attack on public highway.

The Navy refused the church’s request that Father Woodward be given a burial. His body was dumped at a mass grave on the edge of the Playa Ancha cemetery in the city. Later that part of the cemetery was built over, allegedly as part of a road building programme, and many bodies were tipped over to the Pacific at that time or burnt by acid by the Carabineros. His remains have never been located.

Michael Woodward, the son of a British father and Chilean mother, was born in Valparaiso but had his education in England, where he qualified as a civil engineer. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1968 and returning to Chile became drawn to liberation theology. He joined MAPU, a political party formed by Christians who had split from the Christian Democrats in 1969. A staunch defender of the Popular Front government, he headed his neighbourhood committee against food shortages induced by the Right preparatory to the eventual coup (food was pioneered as a political weapon in Chile and the same tactic was played out in Venezuela during the 2002 oil strike, with echoes of it now in Argentina).

Michael Woodward was the most prominent of those tortured on La Esmeralda but certainly not the only one. Several hundred detainees passed through it and the quest for justice has moved only a few clumsy steps. One of Father Woodward’s sisters and some of the other former prisoners have been navigating Chile’s judicial system. Their case should have been speeded up after the 1991 (Rettig) Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which recognised torture aboard La Esmeralda “by state agents”, but successive governments have been obstructive.

Only six relatively junior naval officers charged with playing a part in Father Woodward’s death were charged, arrested and granted bail. The torture on the ship could not have been carried out without complicity or express orders from the very top but no high-ranking navy officer has been investigated which the Chilean state was legally obliged to do. The Chilean Navy has shown no remorse, or even acknowledgement of its part in these and other crimes. Post-Pinochet Centrist governments have chosen the path of wilfully-induced amnesia. Every time La Esmeralda sets sail, Chilean Presidents and the Navy brass deny that the training ship is stained by torture.

This year there were scuffles between rival demonstrators the day La Esmeralda set sail. The ultra-Right in the Chilean parliament, instigated by a former admiral in their ranks, raised the bogey of the Navy being defamed, provoking the President of the Chamber of Deputies, Juan Bustos, to say that the Right has still not internalised respect for human rights. The magistrate investigating the Woodwards case has received death threats and faces a campaign of innuendoes from Pinochet’s parliamentary gang.

Senator Edward Kennedy had said in the past "the Statue of Liberty would weep at the sight of La Esmeralda entering the gateway of freedom at New York Harbor." Given the more recent reports of crimes on high seas by Pinochet’s coup sponsors, the U.S. military-intelligence complex, Chile needs reminding that without acknowledgement of what happened and justice for its many victims La Esmeralda will remain a ship of shame. Is she the best brand ambassador Chile can muster?


There are two documentaries on La Esmeralda and Father Woodward in English and Spanish respectively: ‘The Dark Side of the White Lady’ by Patricio Henríquez and ‘Una Vida Verdadera: El Sacrificio de Miguel Woodward’ by Andrés Brignardello and José Acevedo.

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Argentina Drowns In Sea Of Soya

Soya cultivation is advancing faster than any pandemic in the humid pampas of Argentina with disastrous consequences: driving up prices, destroying crop diversity and pricing fruit and vegetable out of the reach of many Argentinians, still recovering from the enforced hardships early this century when children were dying of malnutrition in that once-rich country.

The reasons for soya’s impressive advance is the profitability of the bean given its high international price, the possibility of obtaining two harvests and the availability of the genetically modified seeds. An Argentinian official report has this to say on the blight of the soya cultivation:

En 1998 the total cultivated area was 26.2 million hectares, of which 5 million was soya. In 2008, the total cultivated area is 30.2 million, of which soya takes up 16.6 million.

Cultivation of vegetables and fruit went down by 200,000 hectares. As a consequence, the prices of grapefruit, orange and lemon have since 2001 increased by 299%, 295% and 290% respectively. Leafy vegetables have lost half their growing area and the price of lettuce and tomato has increased by 282% and 277% respectively.

Soya covers 54% of the cultivated area but only 2% of the bean is consumed by Argentinians: 95% of it is exported and 3% is used for animal feed. The cultivated area under wheat, the true staple of the Argentinians, has declined from 7.3 million hectares a decade ago to 5.6 million hectares and production fell from 15.9 million tons in the past to 14.6 million tons in 2007 despite the huge advances in productivity.

Mixed vegetable oil, 90% of it sunflower oil, is the most popular cooking medium for the Argentinians. A decade ago, it was cultivated on 4.2 million hectares, now it is hardly 2.3 million, and production has fallen from 7.1 to 3.5 million tons. The price of a bottle has mixed cooking oil has gone up 458%.

Argentinians consume 70 kg of meat a year, and eat chicken at least once a week. Most poultry, as also pigs, feed on maize, and its oil is also used for cooking. Maize is cultivated in 3.5 million hectares in place of the 4.1 a decade ago, but increased productivity has taken its production from 19.3 to 21.7 million tons. Still a one-litre bottle of maize oil now costs 580% more than in 1999.

Rice popularly accompanies fish dishes. A decade ago it was grown on 290,000 hectares in provinces where no soya was grown. In 2007, its cultivated area fell to 168,000 hectares, production fell from 1.7 to 1 million tons, and prices rose 270%.

“Nicer than Quaker,” was used to describe a generous person. Now the cultivation of oats, often the first solid for babies in Argentina, has fallen from 177,000 hectares a decade ago to 66,000 in 2007 and its production from 555,000 to 242,000 tons. The production of rye, consumed mostly in bread, fell from 120,000 to 54,000 tons and the forecast for 2008 is less than 40,000 tons.

The production of tomato has fallen 15% in ten years. Lettuce has lost half its cultivated area and citrus fruits only 2% of its production in this period. The advance of soya not only puts Argentina’s food security at risk but the rising prices first hit those with the least resources.

Source: Página/12

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Penguins Rise Up Against Latin 'Jaguar'

By Marco Coscione

Chile’s image, skilfully sold abroad, is that of “the Jaguar of Latin America”, now living one of its best times thanks to the strong demand of copper from China. What the media, academics and politicians who tell this entertaining tale forget to mention is the Chile with children at risk, entire families eating at soup kitchens, the homeless labourers, people in the slums, the family of the disappeared still awaiting justice, the Mapuches, the conscientious objectors in what is still a highly militarised society. Chile is one of the most unequal societies on the planet. Aaccording the 2007 Human Development Report it ranks 13th in the world in terms of inequality.

There have been popular movements and gains before. But perhaps the most impressive has been the student movements. In May 2006, the secondary students returned with their demands for educational reforms. In the Eighties the students demanded the right to have their own democratically elected unions. There were arrests and deaths but the students still took to the streets. Shortly before the fall of the Pinochet dictatorship, the military regime imposed an education law, LOCE, which privatised education and left it at the mercy of the laws of the market.

In the Eighties 80% of the students went to state schools and now it is 50%. Modifying LOCE and replacing a “mercantile” system are at the heart of the student mobilisations from May 2006. Suddenly the streets were filled with drawings of penguins. Why penguins? Because the uniforms of the secondary students make them look like penguins, especially when they are huddled together after school waiting at bus stops.

On May 21, 2006, President Bachelet said she would not tolerate vandalism and damage to property. This provoked a decisive reaction from the students. Students took to the streets, their parents brought food to the children occupying schools, the teachers supported them, as did the university population. The demonstration of May 30 was the biggest student rally in the history of student movements. The police repression was so brutal that the President, watching the images on television, expressed her “indignation” and removed the police colonel in charge.

The penguins put education at the heart of the political agenda. In 2007, the students played a more peripheral role with occasional demonstrations though it was the year in which the issue entered the confines of the palace.

Till then, the young always had been at the margins of the post-dictatorship Chilean society, totally indifferent to politics, thinking the new government would resolve issues from above. The current generation of students worries much more of the future, with public affairs and in this sense the penguins have directed the attention of civil society towards the future rather than living hedonistically in the neo-liberal present.

The penguins have shown up a country of profound inequalities, where the police still seem to behave in a militarist fashion, repressing a not too well identified “enemy within”. The institutions are not yet ready for a “citizens’ government” but it is evident that little by little they have to wake up to this new reality.

Abridged. Source: Vamos a Cambiar El Mundo

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Prison For Coupsters

Year-end 2007 is proving a bad time for Latin America’s former dictators with former soldiers in Uruguay facing prison prospects, and those in Argentina condemned to long prison terms.

Uruguay: The former commander of the Uruguayan army, Gregorio lvarez, president from 1981 to 1985 of the military junta that governed with an iron fist since the coup of 1973 has been sent to prison at the age of 82 to be tried for participating in the clandestine transfer and forced disappearance of at least 21 people between 1977 and 1978.

Judge Luis Charles gave this order… about the capture of Uruguayan political dissidents who had sought refuge in Argentina and who, after being detained with the support of the military government of the neighbouring country, were illegally transported in secret to Uruguay within Operation Condor.

In November 2006, judge Roberto Timbal ordered the detention and starting the trial against another huge emblem of the Uruguayan dictatorship. Juan María Bordaberry, who was elected constitutional President in 1971 but headed the coup of 27 June 1973 that dissolved Parliament and imposed the military regime that lasted for the next 12 years. The former ruler is now under house arrest. “For years, those responsible for the dictatorship tried to evade the legal route,” Zelmar Michelini, son of a legislator assassinated in Buenos Aires during the years of the persecution, told a local radio station. He has come to the conclusion, “Justice takes time but it comes”.

Argentina: Seven former commanders of the Argentine army and a former policeman have been condemned to prison for between 20 and 25 years in the first trial against soldiers for crimes perpetrated in the last dictatorship after the amnesty laws were annulled in 2003. Among those sentenced for the kidnapping and disappearance of some 20 members of the guerrilla movement, Montoneros… is the former army chief Cristino Nicolaides, sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Since annulling the (amnesty) laws, promulgated in the Eighties, only two former policemen had been tried and convicted, among them a priest, for crimes carried out during the last military regime. Thanks to those laws more than a thousand uniformed men and women were freed of their possible responsibility in crimes committed during the dictatorship. Parliament repealed them in 2003 and two years later (these) were also annulled by the Supreme Court.

Santiago Hoya, one of those sentenced to 25 years in prison, has died of heart attack at the age of 83 in a military hospital, according to El Clarín.

Sources:
La Jornada, Mexico Dec 18, 2007 Link:
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/18/index.php?section=mundo&article=024n1mun
El País, Spain Dec 19, 2007 Link:
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/Argentina/condena/primera/vez/ex/militares/anulacion/leyes/perdon/elpepuint/20071218elpepuint_21/Tes
El Claín, Chile, Dec 22, 2007 Link:
http://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9801&Itemid=46

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