Remembering Thomas Sankara

The constant media line from Western capitals is that Africa would be a much better place if only its leaders were to act in the interest of their people and not line their own pockets. But what happens to the very few who act on this principle?

The assassination of a popular young President almost three decades ago in one of the continent’s poorest countries is the price that people like him have to pay for taking the message on board. 

Thomas Sankara became President of the West African nation of Upper Volta in 1983 — he renamed it Burkina Faso (land of the upright people) — a country so low down the pecking order even in Africa that the worst insult for the Soviet Union was to be called Upper Volta with rockets.

Sankara, the son of a gendarme who had fought in France, was sent to Madagascar for his officer training course. He was radicalised there after witnessing large demonstrations and strikes against a corrupt regime and became acquainted with Marxist literature. Sankara was propelled to presidency in August 1983 after a series of military coups in which he participated but was not the leading figure.

The new President lasted only four years before being killed by soldiers loyal to, Blaise Compaore, once his trusted ally, on the staircase of the presidential palace. In these four short years, Captain Sankara gained the affection of his people with his austere lifestyle, wide-ranging social care programmes and economic growth but also unforgiving hatred from the national elite as he stripped power away from them and international notoriety for challenging Western influence in the continent.  

At the start of his presidency, the President rode a bicycle to work but was persuaded to upgrade to a Renault, among the cheapest cars available in the country. He did away with air-conditioning in his office and sold off the fleet of official limousines. He lowered his own salary and forced top civil servants and army officers to donate a month’s salary for public projects. He declared his assets and his children studied in the public education system.

Sankara lived in a small brick house and dressed in locally produced cotton clothes. He was a competent jazz guitarist and all he had at the time of his death were a car, four bicycles, three guitars, a fridge and a broken freezer. His only luxury was a pistol with mother-of-pearl handle.

Food sovereignty and local production were central to Sankara’s revolution. Cotton was, and is, the main local crop but whereas it was exported to pay off debts, Sankara redirected it to support the local textile industry. This also chimed with the President’s anti-imperialism: “Where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat. These imported grains of rice, corn, and millet - that is imperialism.”

New wells and reservoirs collected the scanty rainfall and farmers were encouraged to tackle soil and erosion and produce organic fertiliser. The former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, said these measures and a massive land distribution created an agricultural boom that eradicated hunger in only four years.

A “vaccination commando” immunised 2.5 million children in 15 days against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. By 1986, a U.N. assisted programme brought river blindness under control. An “alpha commando” involving 35,000 people tackled the 90% illiteracy rate, educating people in nine indigenous languages.

Hundreds of new schools and medical dispensaries were built, many of these by communities with their own hands. Often there were not enough teachers or doctors to staff the new establishments. Burkina Faso started a huge public housing programme and nationalised the country’s mineral wealth.

Sankara was an environmentalist and women’s right advocate much before these had become part of public discourse elsewhere, much less in the continent. A campaign to plant 10 million trees was begun in 1985 to slow down the Sahara’s advance.

The President marked September 22 as a day of solidarity when men were encouraged to go to the market and prepare the family meal so that they experienced what women faced daily. A new family code set a minimum marriage age, established divorce by mutual consent and outlawed bride price. Public campaigns were undertaken against female genital mutilation, forced marriage and polygamy. Women were appointed to high offices and made up a fifth of his last two Cabinets.

Sankara began ringing alarm bells in the West as he went beyond domestic radicalism to challenging the global debt and aid industries. “Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa,” he said, “a reconquest that turns each one of us into a financial slave”. The lenders would not die if the debt were not repaid, he told the U.N. General Assembly, “but if we repay, we are going to die”. He asked African leaders in 1987 to repudiate their debts en masse.

The country’s old dispossessed elites were desperate to depose him. The soldiers who carried out his killing were trained in Ivory Coast by the Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor. They were linked to his Defence Minister Compaore, a one-time Communist and son-in-law of Ivory Coast’s President of the time.

President Francois Mitterrand was the last foreign dignitary to visit Burkina Faso, where he rebuked Sankara, hand on shoulder, for speaking too sharp and straying too far. There are suspicions that Mitterrand’s convicted arms dealer son, Jean-Cristophe, who advised him on Africa and was known in the continent as ‘Papamadit’ (daddy told me), might have been involved with the plot and was perhaps the conduit to Paris. Campaore justified his coup with the argument that Sankara had damaged relations with neighbouring Ivory Coast and France.

After his assassination on October 15, 1987, even as all the gains of the brief revolution were overturned, Sankara earned the sobriquet of Black Che. Ernesto Che Guevara too was killed in October, twenty years earlier, while trying to foment revolution in Bolivia.

Last year, Campaore was forced to flee the country after a huge popular protest when he tried to cling on to power. This September the ousted dictator’s praetorian presidential guards tried to pull off a coup, which the United States and France apparently knew beforehand. Both these countries have Special Forces stationed in the country and have a strong interest through mining corporations in Burkina Faso’s gold and manganese reserves. Another popular mobilisation forced the army to overturn the coup by the rogue unit.

Thomas Sankara was denied justice during the almost three decades of Compaore’s rule. Now his body is to be exhumed and apparently the responsibilities for the murder investigated. The legend of Thomas Sankara has refused to die down in West Africa. Thousands of young Africans make their annual pilgrimage to his nondescript grave.

Sankara very much scripted his own epitaph: “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness… I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.”

Remembering Ayotzinapa

 

Just before 6 p.m. on September 26 a year ago, about a hundred first-year students of a rural college in Aytozinapa in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, set off on two coaches for nearby towns. Their mission was to commandeer buses to take them to Mexico City for the commemoration of the October 2, 1968, student massacre days before the Olympics games.

They did not know they were being tracked from the moment they left their campus or that they had been infiltrated by an active duty soldier. Neither were they aware that for many of them it would be the last day of their lives. Three of them would be killed that night and 43 others would disappear into the darkness.

The Ayotzinapa “normal rural” (rural teacher training college), part of a dwindling chain set up almost a century ago in the heat of the Mexican revolution, caters to young men from impoverished families in a territory criss-crossed by rival drug gangs. Nearby is the glittering tourist resort of Acapulco, famed for its cliff divers and hedonistic nightlife.

The rurales have never gone down well with the clergy and the government for their insistence on social justice and political activism. The one in Ayotzinapa is more troublesome than most and counts among its former students Lucio Cabañas, who led armed guerrillas in the mountains of Guerrero state and was killed by the army in 1974.

The students reached the centre of Iguala town a little after 9 p.m. on the hijacked buses when hooded armed men trapped their convoy in expert crossfire. Some scattered into the neighbouring streets and hid themselves on rooftops or behind bushes but 43 of them were picked up and loaded on to pickup vans, never to be seen again.

Another group of Ayotzinapa students reached Iguala around 11 p.m. to rescue their comrades. They called the local press to the site of the attack, where they were fired upon while speaking to the journalists. Two of them were left to bleed to death. The body of a third student was found in the morning with his eyes gouged out and without his facial skin. Another bus carrying the local football team was also mistakenly attacked that night with three more deaths.

The next morning, the ambitious local mayor, who had amassed an inexplicably large fortune, denied any knowledge of the night’s events, saying he was dancing at that time. His wife is from a notorious drug family and she wanted to replace him as the town’s mayor while he aimed for the state governor’s post.

The federal authorities at first blamed the students and tried to pass it off as one more crime in one of the country’s most violent states. With growing popular indignation and an international media scrum after locals began finding mass graves around Iguala in the search for the disappeared, the Mexican government scrambled for a more credible explanation.

The new official version was that the students had come to town to disrupt a function organised by the mayor’s wife. The mayor asked the local municipal police to do something. They then arrested the trainee teachers, took them to the police station and handed them over to the dreaded Guerreros Unidos (Guerreros United) drug gang, which executed them and burned their bodies to dispose off the evidence. At one time, it was suggested that wild animals might have eaten up the remains.

Twenty-two local policemen were arrested and the mayor and his wife, who had gone into hiding, were picked up in Mexico City as intellectual authors of the crime. Soon afterwards, four men admitted to the killings. The federal police and the army had played no part in the events, the government claimed.

Every single of these assertions has been proven to be demonstrably false. An investigation by the Mexican magazine Proceso, together with the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program, revealed that the students had reached Iguala at least two hours after the mayor’s wife ended her programme. They were unarmed and in grainy videos on their mobile phones they kept asking the policemen why they were being shot at. They identified federal policemen among their attackers. The local police did not possess the weapons with which the students were fired upon.

A magistrate present at the police station that night, who has since fled to the United States fearing for his life, said the students were not brought there. The only ones in the cells were some drunks who were let off after paying a fine. Some of the policemen who admitted to having turned over the students had torture marks on them. The four killers turned out to be poor builders, again tortured to confess to the crime.

One of the disappeared students somehow sent a text message to his mother some time after midnight asking her to put some money into his account. The students were either held or driven somewhere for at least four hours before the decision was taken to eliminate them.

The army was aware from the start of the goings-on. There is a military base not far from where the students were killed. A local army officer came to the police station that night on the pretext of locating a stolen motorcycle and had a good look around. Soldiers questioned and photographed some of the injured students who had made their way to the local hospital and threatened to disappear them. The army formed part of the local C4 (Control, command, communication and computation) centre where the municipal, state, federal police and the military share intelligence and CCTV footage. The government and the army are not allowing the soldiers to speak to independent inquiry teams.

Argentinean forensic anthropologists brought in by the parents of the students and specialist investigators of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) say there was nomass incineration at a garbage dump in a wooded area as the government had claimed. More than 30,000 kg of wood or 13,300 tyres would have to be lit for 60 hours to dispose of the bodies. The plume of smoke would have risen to at least 300 metres, making it clearly visible from the nearby towns, and the flames would have been enough to set off a forest fire.

Almost no one other than the parents believes the students are alive. Five buses were involved in that night’s events but the official inquiry speaks of four coaches. The emerging unofficial consensus is that the fifth bus either had a large stash of money or drugs on board for which the students were killed. Locals fear that the bodies were incinerated at a crematorium that the local army base is rumoured to have.

No one knows for sure how high on the order came from, but the negligence of the official inquiry lends credence to the belief that the state either participated directly in the killings, or is protecting those who carried it out. It took President Peña Nieto ten days to order an inquiry. At his first meeting with the Ayotzinapa parents, he made sure he looked suitably contrite but has done little more since then. Ahead of the second meeting on September 24, a second “killer” has surfaced and the remains of a second student identified. The only certainty this adds is that the government knows far more than what it is letting out.

The parents of the Ayotzinapa students have kept up a dogged campaign for a year with the battle cry: “They took them alive, we want them back alive”. Their movement has radicalised Mexico but that does not mean the state will give in easily. At the meeting with the parents on September 24, President Peña Nieto promised a second inquiry. Mexicans will be sceptical of his intentions, believing so far that his administration has been prevaricating and stalling on the issue.

The students were on their way to the capital to remember the hundreds of victims of the 1968 massacre ordered by the then President and carried out by the police and the army. The Mexican state covered up that slaughter and will hope to do the same with this one. After all, thousands of civilians have disappeared on Peña Nieto’s watch without any significant threat to his rule.

Eduardo Galeano: Nature’s Rights Are Also Human Rights

[Message the author of the Open Veins of Latin America sent to participants of the First World Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba from April 19 to 22, as an alternative to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit]

Sadly, I will not be able to be with you. Hopefully, all that is possible, and also the impossible, will be done so that the Summit of the Mother Earth becomes the first phase towards the collective expression of people who do not direct world polices, but suffer from them.

Hopefully, we will be able to carry forward the two initiatives of companion Evo (Morales, President of Bolivia)— the Climate Justice Tribunal and the World Referendum against a system of power founded on war and on waste, which scorns human life and auctions our worldly goods.

Hopefully, we will be able to speak less and do much. The wordy inflation, which in Latin America is more damaging than monetary inflation, has done us, and keeps inflicting, grave damages. And also, and above all, we are fed up with the hypocrisy of the rich countries, which is leaving us without a planet while it delivers pompous discourses to conceal the hijacking.

There are those who say that hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue. Others say that hypocrisy is the only proof of the existence of the infinite. And the babble of the so-called “international community”, that club of bankers and war-makers, proves that both the definitions are correct.

I want to celebrate, for a change, the force of the truth that words radiate and the silences born of human communion with Nature. And it is not by chance that the Summit of the Mother Earth is being realised in Bolivia, this nation of nations that is rediscovering itself after two centuries of a life of falsehood.

Bolivia has just celebrated ten years of a popular victory in the water war, when the people of Cochabamba were able to defeat an all-powerful Californian company, owner of the water by the grace of a government which said it was Bolivian and was very generous to those from afar.

That water war was one of the battles that this land saves for the defence of its natural resources: that is in defence of its commonness with Nature. Bolivia is one of the American countries where indigenous cultures have been known to survive, and those voices now resound with more force than ever, despite the long period of rejection and persecution.

The world, bewildered as it is and stumbling like a blind person in a shoot-out, will have to hear those voices.

These tell us, mere humans, that we are part of Nature, related to all that have legs, feet, wings or roots.

The European conquest condemned the indigenous people who lived in that communion for idolatry and, for believing in it, were whipped, beheaded or burnt alive.

From the time of the European Renaissance, Nature was converted into a merchandise or into an obstacle to human progress. And till now, that divorce between Her and ourselves has persisted, to the point that there still are people of good faith who are moved by poor Nature, so badly treated, so hurt, but they see Her from the outside. The indigenous cultures see Her from the inside.

Seeing Her, I find myself. Whatever I do against Her, is done against myself. In Her, I find myself; my legs are also the road that it walks.

Well, we celebrate this Summit of the Mother Earth. And if only the deaf do listen: human rights and the rights of Nature are two names of the same dignity.

Source: Rebelíon

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Tasers And Post-Modern Torture

By José Steinsleger

And, if after the first discharge, the detainee still moves or writhes in pain, the “representative of the law” can discharge 17, 25, 50,000 more watts, provided that it is not pointed at the eyes or the genitals, and that the suspect does not suffer from any cardiac condition or is seriously injured on falling down after receiving the discharge. The sticky publicity folder of the Taser X26 electric pistol (which does not, but can, kill) advises that to avoid “collateral damage”, the agent should be familiar with technical skills and “ethics”(sic). The weapon kit includes a defibrillator, an electric device that lets the police re-establish the normal cardiac rhythm.

In place of bullets, the Taser ejects two darts linked to a cable, which go through the clothes, insert themselves in the skin and immediately discharge an electric shock. There is more in store. The latest invented by Taser International is a projectile that can be used by conventional .12 bore shotguns. The projectile (which can target at 30 metres) comes with a battery to generate the discharge on impact with the body without the need to be tied to any cable.

Taser pistols acquired fame in September 2007 in the auditorium of Florida University. A student loudly questioned the former presidential candidate, John Kerry. When the boy exceeded his time, the police tackled him to the floor. The video turned out to be “comic”: shaking their heads, the public alternated between seeing the student screaming like a pig and hearing the police who, without batting an eyelid, responded to his questions and explained the benefits of democracy.

In the USA, the Tasers are used in 5,000 police stations and prisons in 49 states. In Canada, more than 60 police forces use the weapon against rebellious young people, the mentally challenged, drunks or unarmed people who argue with traffic police. And against children. Amnesty International (AI) related in a report the case of a 14-year-old girl who in the middle of a fight among students got into an argument with the police. She received two Taser darts in the chest.

The use of Taser is recommended against drug addicts, drunks, and people who are aggressive or know martial arts. The people who received the discharge say it feels an electric pinch which incapacitates the muscular system and paralyses them in five seconds.

In the report Volts Without Control (AI, 2007), it was estimated that 269 people have died in the United States between 2001 and 2007. However, later reports of the organisation increased the figure to more than 360 dead. “Tasers,” it explains, “are weapons of electric shock which are presented as an alternative to the use of firearms or lethal weapons, decreasing the number of dead and injured. Nevertheless, these paralysing pistols have the capacity to inflict severe pain through the discharge of 50,000 volts to the body with only the press of a button and without leaving any obvious marks, which makes them into a very dangerous instrument of torture and ill-treatment".

Employed the police force of 45 countries in the world (approximately 260, 000 are in circulation), the concept of Taser pistols corresponds to the that which the former Vice-President Dick Cheney called “refined techniques” in the CIA interrogations of supposed terrorists, permitting the “saving of lives” and “preventing attacks” (sic). An idea that matches that of Tom Smith, president of Taser International: “Our arms save lives, reduce the number of operations of detention and created more secure condition of work for all”.

Source: La Jornada

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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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Rethink War On Drugs, Say Ex-Presidents

Three former Latin American Presidents, two among the continent’s most famous authors, Mario Vargos Llosa and Paulo Coelho, and a host of newspaper editors, ex-diplomats and generals have asked for a rethink on the “war on drugs” and suggested legalising marijuana for personal use.

Latin America is the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana and is increasingly producing opium, heroine and synthetic drugs. It also has a growing population of addicts. The continent has the highest murder rates in the world for young people, El Salvador leading the pack with 92.3 per 100,000, followed by Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala and Brazil.

The billions spent fighting the drugs trade has not significantly disrupted production, supply or street prices and has instead taken money away from public services. According to former President Fernando Cardoso of Brazil, Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico and César Gaviria of Colombia, it merely transfers the problem to somebody else’s backyard.

Peru and Bolivia were the major cocaine-growing countries in the Nineties where coca leaves were converted to paste, smuggled to Colombia where it was converted to cocaine in the jungle laboratories and then shipped out. Coca cultivation boomed in Colombia when supplies from these two Andean nations were disrupted and all manner of armed groups, from paramilitaries blessed by the military to Leftist guerrillas, turned protectors of coca growers and drug traffickers. The dismantling of the major Colombian drug cartels in turn gave Mexican gangs the space to move in and now a vicious drug war has engulfed the country.

The Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy says the drug trade has criminalised politics and politicised crime. Drug cartels have infiltrated state institutions to the extent that Mexico’s former representative to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime was arrested for alleged links to a narcotics gang. It has corrupted politicians, the judiciary and the police. Turf wars between the gangs have led to a proliferation of small arms and sky-high murder rates affecting mostly the young and the poor.

The former Presidents hold the USA and the Europeans responsible as well, saying their inability to control domestic consumption is causing mayhem in Latin America. But their major criticism is against the USA for foisting a punitive model on Latin America and on international conventions which had once envisioned ending the global consumption of opium in 15 years and marijuana in 25.

The prohibitionist approach favoured by Washington, particularly its hard line on drug users, criminalises the marginalised, inflates the prison population and feeds police corruption while doing nothing to dismantle the cartels. It also stigmatises Indian tribes who use coca leaf for their rituals and religious ceremonies. The Bolivian President, Evo Morales, himself an Aymara Indian, was targeted by the Bush administration for advocating a “coca yes, cocaine no” policy.

The commission has asked for a “paradigm shift”, citing Colombia as the major example of an unproductive and damaging drug war which has as its legacy a lingering guerrilla war, proliferating paramilitary gangs and the displacement of millions from the countryside to urban shanty towns where drug lords rule, and all this without even containing the cultivation and trade in cocaine.

They suggest that Latin America adopt the liberal European model which views drug consumption as a public health issue and that the continent’s governments make resources available for innovative campaigns against drug use on the lines of proven anti-smoking campaigns, provide commercially feasible alternatives for farmers and involve the people in designing alternative work opportunities and better education. And they want the decriminalising the personal consumption of marijuana, saying the taboo on discussing radical change needs to be broken.

The first reaction has predictably been negative. Colombia’s President Alvaro Uribe, who has persistently denied lingering accusations that he was involved in the trade and whose regime depends in large measure on the billions that it gets from the Plan Colombia programme, has refused rethinking policy on marijuana use. Neither is his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderon, likely to demur as he too eyes U.S. largesse to combat the epidemic of drug-related violence in his country.

The commission perhaps anticipated this, suggesting that Latin American public opinion is shifting and that the Obama administration might be more willing to do a rethink. In which case, Uribe, Calderon and co can be counted on to fall in line.

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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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Galeano: Operation Lead Unpunished

To justify itself, state terrorism manufactures terrorists: it sows hate and harvests alibis. Everything indicates that this slaughterhouse of Gaza, which according to its perpetrators is for finishing off the terrorists, will achieve boosting them.

***
Since 1948, the Palestinians live condemned to perpetual humiliation. They cannot even breathe without permission. They have lost their country, their land, their water, their freedom, everything of theirs. They do not even have the right to choose their governments. When they vote for those they should not, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It turned into a mousetrap without exit since Hamas cleanly won the elections of 2006. Something similar happened in 1932 when the Communist Party triumphed in the elections of El Salvador. Drenched in blood, the Salvadorans atoned for their bad behaviour and since then have lived under military dictatorships. Democracy is a luxury which not everyone deserves.

***
The rockets which the cornered militants of Hamas clumsily aim in Gaza, on land that had been Palestinian and which the Israeli occupation usurped, are the children of impotence. And desperation, on the edge of suicidal madness, is the mother of the threats that deny the right of Israel’s existence: ineffectual cries, while the very efficient war of extermination is denying, for years, the right of Palestine’s existence.

Little remains of Palestine. Step by step, Israel is erasing the map.

The colonialists encroach, and after them the soldiers rush to the border. Bullets sanctify plunder as legitimate defence.

There is no aggressive war that does not say is defensive. Hitler invaded Poland to prevent Poland invading Germany. Bush invaded Iraq to prevent Iraq invading the world. In each of the defensive wars, Israel has swallowed up another piece of Palestine: the luncheon continues. The devouring is justified by the property rights the Bible granted, for the two thousand years of persecution that the Jewish people suffered and for the panic that the Palestinians lying in wait generate.

***
Israel is a country that never complies with either the recommendations or the resolutions of the United Nation, that never obeys the judgments of the international tribunals, that mocks international laws, and is also the only country that has legalised the torture of prisoners.

Who has gifted it the right to deny all the rights? Where does this impunity, with which Israel is carrying out the killings in Gaza, derive from? The Spanish government could not have bombed Basque country with impunity to finish off ETA; neither could the British government have destroyed Ireland to liquidate the IRA. Perhaps the tragedy of the Holocaust entails a policy of everlasting impunity? Or that the green light comes from the bigshot power which has in Israel the most unquestioning of its vassals?

***
The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by error. It kills by horror. The civilian victims are called collateral damages, according to the dictionary of the other imperial wars. In Gaza, three of every ten collateral damages are children. And the maimed add up to thousands, victims of human mutilation that the war industry is successfully rehearsing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And as always, always the same: in Gaza, a hundred for one. For each hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli.

Dangerous people –warning of another bombardment – in charge of the enormous manipulative media that invite us to think that each Israeli life is worth as much as a hundred Palestinian lives. And those media also invite us to think that the two hundred atom bombs of Israel are humanitarian, and that a nuclear power called Iran was the one that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

***
The so-called international community, Does it exist?

Is it anything more than a club of merchants, bankers and war-makers? Is it anything more than an artistic name that the United States attaches when it engages in theatre?

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the worldwide hypocrisy shows up once again. As ever, the indifference, the vacuous discourses, the empty declarations, the high sounding declamations, the ambiguous postures are a tribute to sacred impunity.

Before the tragedy of Gaza, the Arab countries wash their hands off. As always. And, as ever, the European countries wring their hands.

Old Europe, so capable of war and malignancy, sheds a tear or so, while secretly celebrating this master move. Because hunting the Jews was always a European custom, but since half a century that historical debt is being paid for by the Palestinians who also are Semites and who never were, nor are, anti-Semites. They are paying, in blood money, the price of others.

(This article is dedicated to my Jewish friends assassinated by the Latin American dictatorships to which Israel acted as consultant)

Source: Brecha

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Gaza Update: Boliviia, Venezuela Snap Ties

Jan 17:

• Portugal has closed its airspace to aircraft transporting weapons to Israel and this measure will last so long as the Gaza offensive continues, according to the Portuguese premier José Sócrates
• Bolivia is preparing papers to file at the International Criminal Court against Israel’s war crimes
  

Jan 15:

• Venezuela and Bolivia have broken off diplomatic relations with Israel. Venezuela had earlier expelled the Israeli ambassador and the Israeli spin machine was at work, saying Caracas would take back its ambassador. President Evo Morales of Bolivia said the Nobel prize committee should withdraw the peace prize accorded to the current Israeli president Simon Peres in 1994 and that charges against Israel should be pressed in the International Criminal Court.

• Hamas have sent a letter to Hugo Chavez which reads in parts: We, the people of Palestine, commend your courage to speak and act upon your conscience regardless of your detractors’ criticism or cowardice.Throughout history, in a just conflict, there always emerges a champion, a single hero who, by his actions, embodies all the virtues the masses aspire to. You have demonstrated that you are such a man.Mr. President, we were eager to meet you in the summer of 2007; but unfortunately yet another blockade by the Israelis, who control our ports and borders, suspended our plans. As we began the truce which we initiated, they were already planning the destruction of our infrastructure.We salute the citizens of Venezuela for choosing President Chavez; and we commend you for being among the few leaders of this age who put people before politics."
• Hundreds of Palestinians in Chile marched to TV stations protesting against their silence before the Israeli killings in Gaza and accusing them of being accomplices to the genocide
  

Earlier:

• Brazil’s President Lula says all parties will have to sit down for talks and that will have to include Hamas. Palestinians and Israelis can have their own states with diplomatic relations and live in peace, as Arabs and Jews do in Brazil. Brazil’s Foreign Minister is touring the Middle East. Earlier he had said the UN had proved completely ineffective
• The Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero demanded a cease-fire in Gaza, the first west European leader to do so. He said things would begin to change with Obama. However, Spain has admitted selling arms to Israel six months ago
• President Hugo Chavez says Barack Obama can stop the carnage in Israel if he wants to as Tel-Aviv, “the executioner arm of the empire”, will have to listen to him. Let’s see what he does when he assumes office, the Venezuelan President said.
• Miguel D’Escoto, Nicaraguan President of the UN General Assembly, says the world body is not acting the way the people in whose name it was created want it to
• The Israeli Communist Party has thanked President Hugo Chavez for expelling the Israeli ambassador

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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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I Will Risk My Life For Truth: Lydia Cacho

Lydia Cacho is a Mexican journalist, human rights activist and feminist who exposed child sex trade in her country involving very rich businessmen helped by very powerful politicians in her book, Demons of Eden. For this, she was imprisoned, threatened with rape and, when she moved the Supreme Court, against those who harassed her, the court ruled her persecutors had no case to answer. This is her speech after being awarded Unesco's Guillermo Cano Freedom of Speech 2008 award.

Mr President, Mr Director general of Unesco, Ministers, Ladies, Gentleman and fellow colleagues:

I feel honored to be with you tonight. This award may not protect me from death threats or from death itself. But it certainly helps to protect my written work and to enable a broader audience to know and understand the Mexican reality and the impact of the global crimes of trafficking in persons and of child pornography.

By honoring me tonight you are recognizing the talent of my teachers, of the hundreds of women, men and children who have trusted me with their personal histories, their tragedies and their triumphs. Somehow they knew I would honor their trust by doing my job as a journalist.

When I was tortured and imprisoned for publishing the story of a network of organized crime in child pornography and sex tourism, I was confronted with the enduring question of the meaning of life. Should I keep going? Should I continue to practice journalism in a country controlled by 300 powerful rich men? Was there any point to demanding justice or freedom in a country where 9 out of every 10 crimes are never solved? Was it worth risking my life for my principles? Of course the answer was… yes.

Mexico, my homeland, is a country of 104 million people, a land of great landscapes, of magnificent rivers and unending green fertile mountains. Nonetheless Mexico exports 400 thousand people every year, men and women who flee to the United States, to escape hunger, poverty and violence.

I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Mexico City. My mother, a feminist psychologist, took me to the slums around town and told me that those kids—kids who were just like me—had no food and no chance to get an education. In this way she prepared me to be a citizen and what is now called a human rights activist. I was born a woman. I found in feminism a philosophy based on equality and peace. It led me to view life from a gender perspective.

For years I have lived and moved between two worlds: being a feminist advocate against violence is the way I act as a citizen; being a journalist is the way I practice my profession. Every day I try to enlarge my ability to listen, to understand, to feel empathy, to question, to be truthful, to be ethical. By listening to peoples’ stories I learn ways to add insight and perspective to my coverage of human tragedy and human development. And also I test - as many of my colleagues do - my ability to stay alive.

I am 45 years old, and I have spent most of my life trying to understand human nature. What makes us able to survive, to change, to evolve, to save or to harm each other? I’ve been watching the news and reading newspapers most of my life. I thought I understood the macro structures of oppression. I knew how the political system works to protect the rights of the elites, at the expense of the majority.

But I was not aware what it felt like to be the subject of repression myself. When the mechanisms of state repression were used against me, I found myself in the strange position of being seen as a heroine simply for exercising –with some dignity– my right to freedom and justice. Thousands of people marched on my behalf. Most of the Mexican media covered my case for almost two years, until the powerful were finally able to buy the silence of some of them.

Millions of citizens echoed my demand for freedom of the press and for the rights of the child victims I wrote about. I stood before the Supreme Court with a heart full of hope that they would defend our constitutional right to tell the truth without being tortured or incarcerated. Many thought there was so much hard evidence in this case that there would be no room for corruption.

It seemed all of Mexico was hoping for a chance to believe that change was possible. Standing against us was a handful of well-dressed lawyers in dark blue suits who defended the politicians I had accused of an unsavory relationship with pedophiles. But this handful of men was able to lobby the majority of Supreme Court judges to dismiss my freedom of the press case relating to child pornography and organized crime.

And so I lost and so did my country. But here I am. I was lucky enough to elude death. I had the opportunity to report my own case, to live inside the story of an orchestrated campaign to protect the marriage between organized crime, businessmen and a corrupted government. But most of all I had the chance to keep my promises to the little girls who were abused by pedophiles and child pornographers, and who asked me to tell their stories.

We journalists tend to believe that the shock provoked by reading such stories cannot fail to unite people of good will. That is one of the reasons we keep going against all odds. We know the power of compassion. As journalists we should never become messengers of the powers that be. Nor should we surrender to fear and self censorship. And that is why we are here in Mozambique. We know there is something wrong with a world that favors a war economy instead of education, that favors silence instead of freedom and truth.

A world in wich millions of children orphans of the HIV-AIDS pandemic are unimportant to the rest of the world. There is something wrong in a world where racism and sexism separates us from each other.

This gathering symbolizes our determination to keep on going…with cool heads and warm hearts…and to keep on writing. To keep on living with hope.

— Lydia Cacho Ribeiro
Maputo, Mozambique. May 3rd 2008

The original article appeared at: lydiacacho.net
Related article: Mexican author's no to exile

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Mass Graves Found In Peru Army Barracks

A Peruvian daily, La Republica, reports that about a thousand people were imprisoned, tortured and killed in the ‘Los Cabitos’ military barracks in the Ayacucho region during the armed conflict between 1980 and 2000 with the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas and the Revolutionary Túpac Amaru Movement (MRTA). Their remains are being found in mass graves being dug up by forensic experts.

This period coincided with the presidencies of Fernando Belaúnde, Alan García (the currently re-elected President and Washington favourite) and Alberto Fujimori (facing trial in Lima and already handed out one prison sentence). The chief of Peru’s Legal Medicine Institute (IML), Luis Bromley, said 500 families were reclaiming their loved ones, and not just one, but two or three who were interned in the ‘Los Cabitos’ by the military and then disappeared.

From the first diggings in January 2005, the team of 20 forensic anthropologists has found 81 bodies and human remains in a small plot of land. Another 15 places remain to be investigated. The common cause of death was a shot in the head or in the back of the neck and many of the victims showed signs of torture and had their hands tied behind their back.

Among the victims were at least 50 children and adolescents between the ages of 3 and 16 who were detained with their parents between 1983 and 1994. Among the remains was that of a five-year-old girl found in the same grave with two adults who would have been her parents.

The IML was trying to identify victims from DNA traces and build up a list of the victims. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission says ‘Los Cabitos’ was a key point in the counter-insurgency operations. It thinks at least 136 people were executed, a figure much lower than what the forensic investigators consider more likely. At least 70,000 people died in the conflict in Peru.

The Peruvian army, meanwhile, has donated the land where the remains are being dug up to a housing organisation of army officers despite protests from human rights groups which say this is an attempt at literally covering up the crimes. The families of the victims have started a vigil to prevent this from happening.

Sources:
La Republica, El Mundo

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Dear President Zapatero, What About Some Solidarity With the Cuban Five?

By Pascual Serrano

Dear José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, President of Spain:

I checked in the Press that you sent a letter of solidarity to the wife of a Cuban prisoner subjected to trial in my country.

In it you expressed that (she) “can have the confidence that Spain will do everything possible for the liberation of political prisoners”. You also showed your admiration of the work of the so-called “Women in White”, wives and mothers of the prisoners on the island. Your letter of solidarity, by chance, coincided with that of George Bush.

I’m not going to detail the reasons for that imprisonment, based on Cuban penal code that establishes, just like the Spanish one, the crime of working for an enemy power. But I certainly like to express my sadness at not having received from you any letter of solidarity for the detention of my husband or his four companions imprisoned since ten years in the United States.

We cannot demonstrate in the country where they are serving their prison terms because they either rarely grant us visas or they would extradite or imprison us just for demonstrating in Washington asking for their liberty. Two of us have never been able to visit them in prison or travel to the United States.

The five Cubans of whom I speak to you are condemned to long or life imprisonment only for trying to know of terrorist plans that some organisations in Florida were plotting against Cuba, such as they have been doing for many years. I do not believe you think that this mission is reason for them to spend the rest of their life in prison, as your companion in sending the letters of solidarity, George Bush, thinks.

Neither do I want to be selfish and seek only your solidarity for my husband and his four companions. At Guantánamo base, there are hundreds of prisoners without legal assistance, family visits or legal guarantees. It is a pity not to take advantage of the post to Cuba to include some letters to the wives and mothers of those detained.

Take into account that even seeking justice can be unjust when it is sought in an uneven manner. Hypocritical even if motivated by reasons not strictly humanitarian.

I expect, therefore, your letter of support as a sign that the reasons that have moved you to write to that Cuban wife are truly that of solidarity.

Sincerely,
The wife of one of the Cuban Five imprisoned in the United States.

Note: My apologies to Rosa, Adriana, Olga and Elizabeth for the simulation.

Source: PascualSerrano.net

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Gypsies, The Forgotten Holocaust

The women were sterilised as they were not considered worthy of reproducing. Later, began what was termed the “destruction of useless lives”. In all of occupied Europe the “gypsy hunt” was effected, first in 1939 and later in 1941 and 1943. The extermination of five to six hundred thousand nomads was carried out mostly in Polish camps.

In reality, the persecution of the Children of the Wind started before the Nazis came to power, with laws to control the “gypsy plague” from 1926. Two years later, the surveillance became permanent. “Eugenic sterilisation” was imposed in 1933, mixed marriages prohibited in 1934-35 and finally the first concentration camps of Dachau in 1936.

In the autumn of 1939, there were massive deportations. In February 1940 in Buchenwald, the Nazis tested Zyklon B on 200 gypsy children. In Ravensbruck, pseudo-scientific operations were carried out on the gypsies. That policy spread to all of occupied Europe. According to the Nazis, half the gypsy population of Europe was annihilated. And an additional tragedy: the gypsy victims were not even mentioned in the Nuremberg trials.

It is time to pay homage to the gypsy victims who were among the most implacable members of the Resistance. Very soon, this free and proud people understood the fate reserved for them. They immediately united with the clandestine fight which the Dutch historian, Jan Yoors called the “secret war of the gypsies”. Hardened and astute, they used a thousand stratagems to hoodwink the Nazis, carrying messages or transporting arms and explosives. Many fugitives were saved thanks to the gypsies. Many of the “terrorist” attacks against the Hitlerite enemy were carried out by them.

In 1945, the Nazis, cornered, still perpetrated multiple massacres against the gypsy prisoners in the German camps. On the night of 31 July 1944 alone, 20,000 gypsies were exterminated in Auschwitz. On August 1, an official of the SS in Auschwitz wrote, after sending the gypsies to the gas chambers, “mission accomplished, special treatment carried out”. In Dachau, they were killed the same day or the day after they arrived, simply because they were born gypsies.

The resistance members who survived did not get to enjoy, after the war, the promise of social integration made to them. Some European countries kept them imprisoned for months. They did not find anyone to defend them or even remember the disappeared. The gypsy people suffered in silence, crying through their flamenco songs.

France: Traditionally, the settled population distrusted the nomads. From 1912, the travelling population was assigned an anthropometric card that they had to produce while entering or leaving towns. The Vichy government hardened the policy and from the autumn of 1940, interned the gypsies in concentration camps in Argeles-sur-Mer and Barcares in the eastern Pyrenees, camps initially created to receive Spanish and Jewish refugees. About 3,000 gypsies were interned in the French camps between 1940 and 1946.

A single camp was created exclusively for the nomads in 1942, Saliers. Three hundred nomads had to pile up in small houses with electricity. The fate of the people was especially difficult and obviously could not go to school. With change of clothes, they were covered in rags. The camp was closed in July 1944. Those who survived the inferno kept the memory of the camp alive but there is no trace of it in the place where it was located.

Like the Jews, the gypsies were victims of the Nazi ideology, of a racist policy that tried to achieve pure German blood and create a space for greater Germany freed from impure elements. Not a voice to defend the cause of the discriminated, sterilised, persecuted, exploited and exterminated gypsies.

No memory, no compensation, no commemoration. Nothing. Absolute emptiness. Absolute ostracism.

Source: Vamos a Cambiar El Mundo

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Colombian Displaced People Create Their Own Humanitarian Zones

Forcibly displaced people have established “humanitarian zones” (HZ) in the north-western department of Chocó (a Colombian state), near the frontier with Panama with the intent of clinging on to their land and their way of life. . In the words of one of the leaders of the internally displaced persons (IDP), “it is better to die by bullet at home than of hunger and desperation in a municipal centre”.

These zones are occupied by groups that have united to remain in the surroundings from which they were expelled in the wake of an important campaign undertaken by the Colombian army and paramilitary forces in 1996 against guerrilla groups of the Left. Though the security situation improved between 1999 and 2000, many of those displaced by the conflict could not return to their land.

The HZ are delimited areas where members deny access to armed groups and insist on neutrality, refusing to provide information to armed groups or offering logistical help. Many have established warning systems in case of threats or abuses against their members. In November 2006, there were five HZ in Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, housing approximately 400 of the 2,125 people who lived in these settlements before the start of the counter-insurgency operations in 1996. In 2005, there were more than 50 HZ or similar initiatives in Colombia.

Soon after the inhabitants were displaced, private companies, cultivator of African palm in the production of biocombustibles, started establishing plantations in Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó, two communities in the department of Chocó. The Colombian government has provided political and financial support to the development of plantations of African palm as part of the effort to eradicate illicit cultivation, promote regional development and, from what has come to be known, to offer economic incentive to the paramilitaries to hand over their arms in keeping with the government programme of the law of “Justice and Peace”.

A HZ was established in Chocó in April 2006 within a palm plantation, on land awarded to a settler in the Eighties by a rural development agency. The landowner, who in turn was displaced by the paramilitaries, in place of yielding before the threats of the African palm companies, helped other displaced families to establish the zone on his land. The establishment of the zone entailed felling palms, a huge risk for the inhabitants.

From September 2006, the seven occupying families had to cross barbed wire fences installed by the African palm company to arrive at the zone. The conditions of living were precarious, as they could not clear enough land to cultivate for their own needs and all they needed, foodstuff and otherwise, had to be brought from the closest town and the paramilitaries and the companies controlled the routes. Members of a recently-established HZ were living under plastic sheets, without electricity, with access only to surface water and with schools for the children. Members of the most developed HZ have erected wooden houses, organised educational services and have harvested part of the land they were forced to abandon.

The African palm companies, with the apparent support of the local paramilitary forces, have pressured the displaced so they sell up or otherwise hand over their land. The members of the HZ have been exposed to persistent threats and pressured to abandon their intent to recover their land. The nature of the pressure has changed with time, from open military and paramilitary violence, including assassinations, torture, forced sales and death threats to offers of food and medical service distributed by the military.

While the communities of Jiguamiandó and Curvaradó have rejected these offers, members of a HZ in an area very close to the border with Panama have accepted them. The result was a rise in social tension, as much as among members of the community who accepted the offer as with neighbouring communities who rejected it.

The IDPs of Chocó have complained of more than 100 crimes committed by the paramilitary groups acting in collusion or with material support of the army from the start of the counter-insurgency in 1996. In 2007, two leaders of the displaced were shot and seriously injured in a paramilitary-style attack. In February 2007, the Procurator-General opened formal investigation against military personnel accused of having killed eight members of an IDP community in the area. Still the majority of attacks against the civil population has not been investigated.

Link: http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/7E236B356E816D93C125738A002EE88A/$file/Colombia_SCR_Nov07_Spanish.pdf
The original report was published by:
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Norwegian Refugee Council
Chemin de Balexert 7-9
CH-1219 Châtelaine (Geneva),
Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 799 0700, Fax: +41 22 799 0701

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Piedad Cordóba, Colombian Peacemaker

Piedad Cordóba is a rising star of the Latin American Left, propelled to attention for her uncompromising role alongside Hugo Chávez in trying to secure the release of hostages and taking on the bully of a President of her country, Colombia. For this, she says, her assassination has been ordered by a high functionary of the Colombian state. Piedad advocates the cause of the African descendants in Colombia and gays and lesbians. Even mainstream Colombian newspapers have had to nominate her as woman of the year or personality of the year.

El Espectador: All her political capital is at play including, it could be said, her own life. She has been brave, irreverent and stubborn. She spoke to President Uribe and he asked her to be facilitator for a humanitarian accord. She went to Chávez and convinced him to manage it. She went into the mountain to speak with Raúl Reyes, spokesman of FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). She felt fear, grief, happiness and felt like crying. And though many would say she failed in her intent, thanks to her the theme of the kidnapped revived in the national and international scenario…

She committed errors. There are those who don’t pardon her the kiss of greeting with Reyes and much less posing with the guerrilla beret on her head and receiving flowers from the other subversive chief, Iván Márquez. Her extreme friendship and closeness with the Bolivarian cause… also was annoying. But Piedad Córdoba made the humanitarian accord her cause. One of the many that she has assumed along her journey as a social and political activist, in which at some moments destiny put her confronting her kidnap as well. It was in May 1999, when Carlos Castaño, then chief of the AUC (a right-wing death squad with close ties to the current establishment, including reportedly the President) kidnapped her in Medellín. During the days of captivity she felt the chill of death. Castaño accused her of belonging to the ELN (a left-wing guerrilla group) but never calculated that the country and the world would mobilise for her. He had to set her free and her position against the AUC has become more radical.

She has been threatened with death: she was in exile with her four children, Juan Luis, Natalia Maria, Camilo Andrés and César Augusto, she suffered attacks. And though many times she has felt discouraged, her fighting spirit has always inspired respect.

Piedad, the elder of nine siblings, always wanted to follow in the steps of her father, Sabulón Córdoba, a sociologist who was Dean of the faculty of sociology at the Bolivarian University of Medellín, and of her uncle, Diego Luis Córdoba, founder of the Chocó (department) and one of the great orators of the Liberal Party in the Senate towards the end of the Forties. At eight years of age, she was already marching together with civic organisations and of African descendants. She studied law and since then she forged fame as a rebel and nonconformist. Her first political steps brought her together with the disappeared Liberal activist, William Jaramillo Gómez. She was his general secretary in the municipality, sub-controller in Medellín, councillor, Deputy, representative in Chamber and Senator in 1996.

In political questions, there does not seem to be intermediate points with her. She is loved or loathed. And she is called La Negra, out of love or rancour. The humanitarian accord is her cause now.”

El Nuevo Siglo: Nobody can intimidate her, nobody can terrorise her. Kidnapped by the paramilitaries, persecuted by the extreme Right, hated by the elites who accuse her of being a guerrilla, lesbian and stateless (unpatriotic), Piedad has more than enough of courage and intelligence to confront and survive all these threats.

Piedad never gives up because people like her, born in the depths of the black communities, a natural leader, tempered in difficulties and made by the fights with no quarters given against inequality, nothing appears too big, nothing scares her, nothing defeats her.

Sources:
El Espectador, December 14, 2007 Link:
http://www.elespectador.com/elespectador/Secciones/Detalles.aspx?idNoticia=19310&idSeccion=113
El Nuevo Siglo, (problematic) Link:
http://www.elnuevosiglo.com.co/noticia_busq.php

Piedad Website (in Spanish)
Piedad photographs at Flickr

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Horrid Little Girl Who Kills For Bananas

For being so malignant, this Little Girl (Chiquita) despite completing 80 years has not grown either in dignity or in nobility. Infamy dwarfs her. This is her fate because of the suffering and misfortunes brought to the people like that of Guatemala, Cuba and Colombia. She and her sisters form a shadowy empire, that 80 years ago turned many towns into ‘banana republics’ and that today tries ot maintain Colombia as a ‘cocaine republic’.

Eighty years ago, the anxiety of the inhabitants of the empire was drowned with banana split ice creams and now she is calmed inhaling cocaine. On November 19, during the EMI awards in the United States, the presenter mocked Colombia for its production of cocaine… he should have weighed up which deserves more criticism, to be a country producing narcotics or an empire addicted to it.

Eighty years ago, the United Fruit Company arrived and now the name has been changed to that of Chiquita Brands, though its aggressive and plundering essence has not altered; on the contrary, it has worsened. On December 6, 1928, it massacred 3,000 striking workers in Ciénaga. Our national writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez has told us of this massacre in his works while another great Colombia, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, denounced this crime against humanity in his time and demanded justice for the assassins: the oligarchy and imperialism.

This same dwarf, through the CIA, defeated President Arbenz of Guatemala in 1954 as the law of democratic agrarian reform that he approved affected its large estates (latifundios) in that Central American country. In Cuba, after the triumph of the revolution in 1959, it was expelled at once and its sugarcane estates and factories were expropriated. That is how United Fruit paid for its alliance with the dictator Batista – expelled by the revolutionaries.

In Colombia, she expanded her possessions till the frontier with Panama and established herself as Chiquita Brands in the banana plantations of Urabá, where she spent decades enriching herself with Colombian resources and labour without much being known of her. The dwarf became a public issue when it was reported that when its containers, which arrived at the port of Turbo to load up bananas, did not come empty but with rifles and ammunition for the paramilitary mafias of the Castaño Gil clan. It was admitted that this way the not neglible quantity of 3,400 rifles and 4 million bullets entered the country.

The mafia bands also admitted that Chiquita and other land-owning banana companies paid them 3 cents in the dollar for each box they exported. Between 1997 and 2004, more than 472 million boxes of bananas were exported through the port of Turbo, of which 17% were the dwarf’s property.

Chiquita Brands admitted before tribunals in the United States that it had financed paramilitary brands but did not accept the charge of arms trafficking. For this it had to pay to the North American exchequer the measly sum of $25 million. The shadowy empire and its businesses do not stop fattening themselves while the people put up with deaths and riches like the fumes of its imperial machinery. This unjust order shall soon come to an end.

Published in Argenpress, Dec 10, 2007 Link: http://www.argenpress.info/nota.asp?num=050037&Parte=0

Related Article: Chiquita in the dock for murder
Related Book: Walter Lafeber (Author) Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America
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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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Impunity for Salvadoran Killer

Decio Machado Flores

Sixteen years after the assassination of the Basque volunteer, Begoña García Arandigoien in El Salvador, the main person implicated in the crime visits the Spanish state with absolute impunity...

“It was 10 September, 1990, in the foothills of the Santa Ana volcano (in north-east El Salvador). Two days ago guerrillas had held meetings and acts of publicity in the territory and consequently a unit of the Popular Revolutionary Army (ERP) was still in the area,” said Domingo, using an alias of at that time by former guerrilla combatants of the ERP, one of the five groups that made up the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

“Early in the afternoon the guerrilla column in which Alba (the name by which Begoña was popularly known) was present was ambushed by the army; she was injured and captured by the soldiers. It was a hard blow because all who had the good fortune to know her, loved her a lot”. Two days later, the rebel radio station, Venceremos, announced: “Begoña García was savagely assassinated by the army in a field hospital in the department of Santa Ana, hours after her capture.”

Begoña was a young medic born in Navarra. She arrived in Nicaragua and just a year later went to El Salvador as a health worker for the FMLN guerrillas. The official version was that she died “in combat” as a result of a crossfire between the guerrillas and the army. After efforts by the Spanish embassy, her body was exhumed four days later and the autopsy at the Hospital of Navarra, where Begoña worked before leaving for Central America, did not leave room for doubt: the young woman had been assassinated with a shot with “the barrel touching the nape”.

Moreover, before that she suffered five other shots in different parts of the body and fractures in the femur and both arms. Everything indicates that before being shot point-blank, she had been tortured by the Salvadoran army.

The Truth Commission that was formed in 1998 to investigate the human rights violation and crimes against humanity that took place in the conflict that buffeted El Salvador between 1980 and 1991, studied the case of the young volunteer. According to the commission, Begoña García “was executed extra-judicially by the fourth company of the Second Infantry Brigade under the immediate command of Lieutenant Roberto Salvador Hernández and the higher command of Lieutenant-Colonel Jose Antonio Almendáriz Rivas”. The general amnesty of 1993, which were “pardoned” thousands of crimes against humanity in El Salvador, allowed Almendáriz to be exonerated for the crimes committed during the war.

Vicente Neto, communal leader and once a combatant of the Popular Liberation Front, another of the armed organisations which made up FMLN, said: “José Antonio Almendáriz Rivas is a Deputy of the National Conciliation Party and is currently placed to head the party’s list for the presidential elections that will take place in 2009. Moreover two years ago he publicly acknowledged his responsibility in Alba’s assassination, going on to say he committed the crime in a moment of hate”.

Almendáriz formed part of a delegation of Salvadoran Deputies which travelled to Spain in October to study the Spanish transition as a possible model applicable to El Salvador. Guillermo Garcia, the victim’s father, contacted the External Affairs Ministry with little luck with the demand that the Salvadoran Deputy be detained and stopped from leaving Spanish territory. Asked about the crime, Almendáriz limited himself to saying: “I asked pardon for it”.
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Abridged. Published in the November 29, 2007 issue of DIAGONAL. Link: http://www.diagonalperiodico.net/article4919.html
Related article: El Salvador Turn Left Again