ECUADOR: CAMPESINOS OCCUPY OIL WELLS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Some 200 Ecuadoran campesinos occupied the roads leading to the Coca-Payamino installation of the French oil company Perenco on the morning of June 19 to protest the company’s “indifference” to the environmental damage they said it had caused. The campesinos came from three communities–15 de Abril, Asociacion Campesina Payamino and Asociacion Campesina Punino–in Orellana province in northeastern Ecuador. The campesinos said company representatives repeatedly failed to come to meetings called to resolve the problems.

During the morning the approximately 20 Ecuadoran soldiers that had been guarding the facility for the last three weeks were reinforced by 20 soldiers arriving in helicopters and by six local police agents coming on foot, according to local residents. The governor of Orellana and a ranking military officer also arrived and ordered the removal of the campesinos at noon. “The police and military forces repressed the campesinos by hurling a large number of tear gas grenades and shooting rubber bullets, resulting in two people wounded, two arrested and the end of the occcupation of the oil installation,” the Human Rights Office of the Coca reported.

One of the people injured was Wilman (or Wilmer) Adolfo Jimenez Salazar, a member of the Orellana Human Rights Committee who was acting as a human rights observer when he was shot six times with rubber bullets at close range, in the leg, arm and abdomen. He was then arrested. He was taken to the Orellana Civilian Hospital for treatment, but Orellana judicial police agents later removed him. Human rights groups and the municipal government of Francisco de Orellana designated Jimenez a “disappeared person” and filed a habeas corpus petition for his release.

Orellana prefect Guadalupe Llori told the Associated Press she was attempting to mediate the situation. Although the campesinos were removed on June 19, “I think they’ve gone back to reoccupy” the area, she said on June 20. “They play cat and mouse. Today they’re removed, tomorrow they’re back.” Perenco has been operating in Ecuador since 2002, exploring and drilling in the Amazonian region, according to its website. (Yahoo Noticias Argentina, June 20; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 20 from AP; Diario Hoy, Ecuador, June 20 from AFP; Francisco de Orellana press release, June 20)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 27

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2032

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingECUADOR: CAMPESINOS OCCUPY OIL WELLS 

COLOMBIA: SOLDIERS CHARGED IN MASSACRE

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On June 1, Colombian chief federal prosecutor Mario Iguaran announced that an army platoon had deliberately killed 10 agents from a US-trained anti-narcotics unit of the Judicial Police Department (DIJIN) on May 22 in the village of Potreritos, Jamundi municipality, in Valle del Cauca department. “This was not a mistake, it was a crime–a deliberate, criminal decision,” said Iguaran. “The army was doing the bidding of drug traffickers.”

The police agents had arrived at the site of a planned raid when a platoon of 28 soldiers ambushed them. A ballistics investigator found that the soldiers fired 150 bullets and seven grenades at police. A civilian informant who led police to the raid scene, promising they would find a large stash of cocaine, was also killed with a bullet to the head. Gen. Carlos Alberto Ospina, the top commander of Colombia’s armed forces, claimed the attack was an accident, and that soldiers had mistaken the agents for leftist rebels. But ballistic investigators said some of the victims were shot in the back and at a range of only a few yards. And when police reinforcements arrived at the scene with lights flashing, they were driven back by gunfire.

On June 1, the day Iguaran announced his findings, seven soldiers and their unit commander, Col. Bayron Carvajal–who was not at the scene but is believed to have planned and directed the ambush from Cali, the departmental capital–were arrested in connection with the killing. Seven more soldiers were ordered to turn themselves in on June 17. All will face charges of aggravated homicide.

According to an article by Miguel Suarez, Director of Radio Cafe Stereo, the massacre likely stems from a conflict between DIJIN director Oscar Naranjo Trujillo–described by AP as “one of Washington’s most trusted allies in the war on drugs”–and powerful drug trafficker and paramilitary leader Diego Fernando Murillo, known as “Don Berna.” Naranjo is the brother of drug trafficker Juan David Naranjo, arrested in Germany last May 3. (AP, June 17/; article by Miguel Suarez posted on Colombia Indymedia, June 18)

In Washington on June 9, the US House of Representatives voted 174-229 against an amendment introduced by Rep. James McGovern (D-MA), which would have cut US aid to Colombia’s military and police next year by 5%, $30 million. (AP, June 17)

MEDELLIN: COMMUNITY LEADER MURDERED

On June 13, former community activist Gerardo Gonzalez left his home in the Llanadas neighborhood of Medellin, Colombia, to make a phone call. After he stopped on the street to talk with a local vendor selling arepas (a Colombian staple food made from corn), four armed men arrived and sprayed Gonzalez and the vendor with bullets, killing them both.

Gonzalez and his wife (whose name was omitted from an action alert to protect her safety) were community leaders in the municipality of El Penol, Antioquia, in 2000 when paramilitary groups unleashed a campaign of repression there. A number of leaders were killed, including Carlos Andres Buitrago, Gonzalez’s stepson. The persecution forced the Gonzalez family and other community leaders and their families to flee El Penol. In 2004, the paramilitaries filed a formal accusation with the attorney general’s office, accusing Gonzalez and other community leaders of being leftist guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN). More than 10 of the displaced leaders from El Penol were arrested on July 29, 2004, in connection with the charges. The court eventually threw the charges out for lack of evidence, but the community leaders were unable to return to El Penol and instead had to permanently relocate to Medellin. The persecution by paramilitaries continued in Medellin, and on April 23 of this year Jhon Henry Hincapie and Arley Garcia–both former El Penol residents named in the court case–were disappeared. Their whereabouts remain unknown.

On June 5, Gonzalez and his wife, along with other people who had been arrested on the false charges, filed a formal complaint with the Antioquia prosecutor’s office, charging that a group of paramilitaries led by Jorge Ivan Alzate (alias Claudio Redondo) had been harassing them with threatening calls and surveillance of their homes. At one point, three heavily armed individuals arrived at the Gonzalez home in a white Ford pickup truck with polarized windows. Alzate claims to work with government security forces such as the Judicial Investigations and Intelligence Service (SIJIN) of the National Police, and the Unified Action Group for the Liberty of Persons (GAULA), a combined police and army unit allegedly focused on rescuing kidnapping victims. (Colectivo de Derechos Humanos Semillas de Libertad-CODEHSEL, June 14)

According to official figures, a total of 30,944 right-wing paramilitaries have demobilized. But on June 16, Colombian Defender of the People Volmar Perez reported that armed right-wing paramilitary groups have regrouped “in the department of Valle del Cauca; in Catatumbo, on the border with Venezuela [in Norte de Santander department]; in Montes de Maria [in the northern departments of Bolivar and Sucre] and areas of [the northern departments of] Magdalena, Cesar and Sucre.” (Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias-ABN, Caracas, June 17) According to a confidential report revealed at the Defense Ministry’s May 30 National Intelligence Board summit, 22 new illegal armed groups have emerged, boasting 2,500 armed members currently and likely to expand. (Revista Cambio, June 16)

Paramilitary leaders are warning that more of their members will likely regroup because of a May 18 Constitutional Court ruling which overturned part of the “Peace and Justice Law” that allowed their demobilization. The high court overturned a clause that would have set an eight-year limit on prison terms for demobilized paramilitaries convicted of crimes such as drug smuggling, massacre and torture. The ruling is retroactive, requiring those who were sentenced prior to the law’s passage to serve their full original terms. (El Tiempo, Bogota, June 16; Reuters, June 14; statement from Movement of Victims of State Crimes, May 24)

SANTANDER: ANTI-PRIVATIZATION PROTESTS

On June 14 nearly 1,500 people marched to the municipal building in Barrancabermeja, in the northeastern department of Santander, to reject plans to privatize Aguas de Barrancabermeja, the municipal water and sewer company. (Vanguardia Liberal, Bucaramanga, June 14)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 18

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2030

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA: SOLDIERS CHARGED IN MASSACRE 

BOLIVIA: LAND REFORM DECREED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On June 3, Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma signed decrees instituting a large-scale national agrarian reform program. In a ceremony in the eastern Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, Morales handed out the first titles under the new program, distributing 30,000 square kilometers of state-owned land to indigenous campesino communities in what he called the start of a “true agrarian revolution.” Thousands of representatives of indigenous, campesino and social organizations attended the ceremony in the city’s Chiriguano Plaza.

Morales called Bolivia’s 1953 agrarian reform “insufficient” and said his new program is broader and deeper. On June 6, Alfredo Rada, deputy minister of coordination with the country’s social movements, announced that the program would redistribute 2.2 million hectares of land over the next four months. About 20 million hectares–a fifth of Bolivia’s total land area–is expected to be redistributed over the next five years.

In addition to handing out land parcels, the government will provide subsidies, credits and equipment to small-scale agricultural producers under the reform plan. In his June 3 speech, Morales also pledged his government’s support for “ecological products” and called for turning Bolivia into an “organic country” which produces crops without chemical fertilizers or pesticides.

While the reform program’s initial distributions involve state-owned land, Morales said his government will also confiscate private lands that are deemed non-productive. He denied accusations by large-scale landowners that their lands are being stolen. In talks with those business sectors, Morales said, he asked them to prove such claims and they declined. “They, their grandparents, have stolen our land for 500 years,” said Morales. “They have to give the lands back to their original owners.” (BBC News, June 4; Resumen Latinoamericano, June 7; La Jornada, Mexico, June 7; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 10 from AP)

The federation representing large-scale landowners in the eastern Bolivian departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando violently opposes the land reform. When its leaders walked out of talks with the government during the week of May 29, they warned that their members would form paramilitary “self-defense” groups to protect their estates from confiscation. (BBC News, June 4; LJ, June 7)

Santa Cruz governor Ruben Costas also tried to fight the agrarian reform by announcing his own reform plan on May 23, allegedly with the goal of distributing land to campesinos and indigenous people in Santa Cruz, the country’s largest and most economically powerful department. The national government called Costas’ plan illegal and unconstitutional. (LJ, June 7) On June 9, the Santa Cruz business sectors named Costas as their representative for possible land reform talks with the Morales government. (LJ, June 10)

According to a public statement from the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB), the Morales government’s new land reform decrees were developed in consensus among Bolivia’s indigenous and campesino organizations and were approved in the National Agrarian Commission. Federations representing large-scale farmers and ranchers were invited to participate in the Commission but declined, said CIDOB.

The Commission was established under Law 1715, the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) Law, pushed through in October 1996 by the government of then-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada despite fierce protests by campesino and indigenous sectors. The latest decrees, which must still be approved by Congress, modify Law 1715 and, according to CIDOB, seek to correct “injustices and illegalities” in decrees promulgated in May 2005. One of these, Decree 28140, created a new form of property–“forest property”–favoring powerful economic sectors in eastern Bolivia. (CIDOB Statement, June 9) Decree 28140 was one of 46 decrees issued by President Carlos Mesa Gisbert on May 17, 2005, a day after mass protests began against his administration. He was forced from office three weeks later, on June 6. (National Department of Social Communication)

SANTA CRUZ: LANDOWNER INSTIGATES CLASH

Over the weekend of June 3, Bolivian businessperson Luis del Rio hired a group of Ayoreo indigenous people, armed with bows, arrows and sticks, to attack other indigenous people allegedly squatting on property he claims to own in Ascencion de Guarayos, in the eastern department of Santa Cruz. The Ayoreo–who were apparently drunk during the attack–burned the squatters’ makeshift homes, the alternative news agency Bolpress reported. Two indigenous people were wounded. (La Jornada, June 7; El Nuevo Herald, June 10 from AP; Confederacion de Pueblos Indigenas de Bolivia-CIDOB statement, June 9)

Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said on June 9 that neither Del Rio nor the squatters have any property titles for the land in Guayaros, and that both groups will be evicted. Speaking in Santa Cruz, Rural Development Minister Hugo Salvatierra accused the Guarayos deputy mayor and the mayor of El Puente of “inciting violence among indigenous people.” Salvatierra said the two municipal officials also sought to kidnap a national government commission investigating land invasions in the area, in order to “aggravate the problem.” (LJ, June 10)

The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB) accused large landholders of creating a “false conflict” in Guarayos, “making it seem as if the Ayoreo people are in confrontation with the campesinos, which is not true.” According to CIDOB, “Once the Ayoreo brothers have been tricked by land speculators taking advantage of their economic need, they are hired and paid to defend the lands of those who claim to be the owners–without proving it–of land occupied by Ayoreos and campesinos.” (CIDOB Statement, June 9)

A similar land conflict involving Ayoreo indigenous people who were hired as thugs took place May 8-12, 2005, on the Los Yuquises estate in Santiesteban province, in Santa Cruz. See WW4 REPORT #110.

ORURO: ONE DEAD IN URBAN EVICTION

On June 9, a land conflict erupted in Oruro department in southwestern Bolivia when police agents and soldiers moved to evict hundreds of members of the Homeless Movement (MST) from urban properties on the outskirts of the city of Oruro, the departmental capital. The MST had been occupying the properties, which belonged to private owners and the departmental government, for a month and a half. Police agents and soldiers used tear gas and rubber bullets to dislodge the squatters, who responded with rocks, sticks and dynamite, according to a report from the Erbol radio network. At least 10 squatters were treated in a local hospital for injuries; one police agent was killed by a bullet. More than 30 people were arrested by the Technical Judicial Police (PTJ). (La Jornada, Mexico, June 10; El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 10)

Oruro governor Alfredo Aguilar said he ordered the eviction based on a court order. Alfredo Rada, deputy minister of coordination with social movements, expressed the national government’s support for the action taken by Oruro authorities. (ENH, June 10) Rada said the government talked with the MST to try to find a solution, “but we found an intransigence among the representatives and we decided on the eviction. We knew the risks, but we had no alternative but to restore legality.” (LJ, June 10)

Presidency Minister Juan Ramon Quintana said the police agent who died was a “member of the Battalion of Private Physical Security.” Rada said the agent was dressed in civilian clothing during the operation. “The circumstances of the death are under investigation,” said Rada. (ENH, June 10 from AP)

Quintana denied that the police had used firearms, “not even rubber bullets.” The use of lethal weapons “does not fit within the logic or the policy of our government; the maximum use of chemical agents was ordered for this task,” said Quintana.

The MST responded to the eviction with a protest march on the evening of June 8, and 70 of its members began a hunger strike at the offices of the Departmental Workers’ Federation (COD). (LJ, June 10)

Quintana blamed the Oruro violence on the right-wing Democratic and Social Power (Podemos) party led by ex-president Jorge Quiroga, which he accused of working with elements of the “radical left” in an effort to erode support for the ruling Movement to Socialism (MAS) as the July 2 elections for a Constituent Assembly draw near. (AP, June 11)

The Constituent Assembly, which will have the task of rewriting Bolivia’s Constitution, is scheduled to begin sessions on Aug. 6. (Resumen Latinoamericano, June 7) Congress approved the law convening the Constituent Assembly on March 4, Morales promulgated it on March 6 and candidates for the Assembly’s 255 seats had to be registered by April 3. The MAS is set to benefit from the short timeline, since only political parties, duly recognized citizen groups or undefined “indigenous peoples” can offer candidates. Any social organization lacking such status would have had to obtain–in less than a month–signatures representing 2% of registered voters on a departmental or national level. (“Bolivia: Proceso Abierto,” article by Raquel Gutierrez & Luis A. Gomez, April 30 via Resumen Latinoamericano, June 9, AP, June 11)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 11

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2031

“Bolivia: Evo launches ‘land revolution,'” June 6
/node/2057

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBOLIVIA: LAND REFORM DECREED 

VENEZUELA: CAMPESINOS PROTEST PARAS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On June 17 some 4,000 Venezuelan campesinos, most of them from the eastern plains region, marched in Guasdualito, Apure state, against paramilitary attacks and in support of the “Bolivarian revolution” led by President Hugo Chavez Frias. (Frente Nacional Campesino Ezequiel Zamora, June 17 via Colombia Indymedia)

On June 3, some 15,000 students from universities, high schools and technical schools throughout Venezuela marched in Caracas to call for elimination of the proof of academic aptitude (PAA) test, a mandatory university entrance exam. The marchers, many wearing red t-shirts to symbolize support for the “Bolivarian revolution,” also rejected the actions of right-wing campus groups like the March 13 Movement, which led violent protests over several days in late May at the University of Los Andes in Merida. During those protests, armed provocateurs fired at police and National Guard members, leaving dozens wounded, some seriously. The Merida protests were prompted by a court decision to delay elections for the university’s student union on the grounds that opposition-controlled university authorities had exerted undue influence. (Green Left Weekly, June 7, 14)

On June 4, more than 10,000 Venezuelans marched from Catia, a poor suburb in western Caracas, to the center of the capital in support of the demands of homeless people and those lacking housing security. The march was called by the National Foundation of the Homeless, which held an even larger march on May 21. The marchers support Chavez; “The intention is to pressure the government to appropriate for us some land that was expropriated in [the suburbs of] La Vega and Antimano to construct houses,” said Wilma Alejo, according to the May 22 edition of the Ultimas Noticias newspaper. (Green Left Weekly, June 14)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 17

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2033

“Venezuela: student protests rock Merida,” June 6
/node/2059

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingVENEZUELA: CAMPESINOS PROTEST PARAS 

CENTRAL AMERICA: TICOS PROTEST CAFTA

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Thousands of workers from Costa Rica’s Social Security Institute, Electricity Institute, National Insurance Institute and other companies marched in San Jose on June 7 to oppose the US-sponsored Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) and to protest a recent Constitutional Court decision annulling a series of benefits public workers had won through collective bargaining. According to the march organizers, 15,000 people participated.

The unionists said the court decision was intended to “smooth the way for CAFTA.” “The first victims of this CAFTA are the labor rights we’ve won,” National Association of Public and Private Employees (ANEP) general secretary Albino Vargas told the ACAN-EFE wire service. “With CAFTA, Costa Rica will have to agree to downgrade its labor legislation with the rest of the Central American countries, which means taking away rights from those who won them through struggle.” Costa Rica signed on to DR-CAFTA, but it is the only signatory nation whose legislature hasn’t ratified the agreement. President Oscar Arias, who was inaugurated on May 8, is a strong supporter of the accord. Arias was on a visit to Europe on June 7, and Vargas charged that the new president would be holding a “chat” with the International Labor Organization (ILO) in Europe while his country is “violating labor rights.” (La Nacion, Costa Rica, June 7)

The march came two weeks after a May 24 armed robbery at the office of the country’s largest labor organization, the Rerum Novarum Workers Confederation (CTRN). [Rerum Novarum is an 1891 papal encyclical on worker’s rights.] Unidentified assailants burst into the office in the morning and held pistols to the heads of two union staffers. The intruders robbed all the staffers present of their personal possessions, and then searched the office, taking a computer which had the text of a complaint the union was filing with the ILO. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) wrote to Arias demanding an “exhaustive” investigation of the incident to find the authors of these “intimidating and threatening” acts. (Yahoo de Argentina, June 5 from Europa Press; Upside Down World, June 7)

GUATEMALA: BREAK-IN AT WOMEN’S GROUP

On May 28 or 29 robbers broke into the central office of the Women’s Sector (Sector de Mujeres) organization in Guatemala City, stealing cell phones and the fax machine, rifling through files, and leaving traces of blood close to the windows and on the floor. In its 12 years of operation, Women’s Sector has organized and spoken out against violations of women’s rights and reported on the government’s failure to implement parts of the 1996 peace accords. It is one of the organizations sponsoring a legal action challenging the constitutionality of Guatemala’s participation in the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA). (La Semana en Guatemala May 29-June 4; Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA urgent action, June 5)

The Women’s Sector office was robbed again two weeks later, apparently on June 6. This time the intruders destroyed furniture and left a piece of glass covered with blood, apparently to intimidate the staffers. Sandra Moran, a member of the group, said the new break-in might be connected to a comparison Women’s Sector made between the current wave of murders of women in Guatemala and the methods used by paramilitaries during the country’s 36-year civil war. Another organization, the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG), reported that its office in Chimaltenango was also robbed in the early morning of June 6. The intruders stole computer equipment with important information and searched through desks. (Guatemala Hoy, June 7; La Jornada, Mexico, June 8)

On June 5–before the second break-in at the Women’s Sector–the Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC)/USA asked for letters to Guatemalan president Oscar Berger Perdomo (e-mail: presidente@scspr.gob.gt, fax +502 2251 2218) and Attorney General Juan Luis Florido (fax +502 251 2218), with copies to GHRC-USA (e-mail: ghrc-usa@ghrc-usa.org), urging a thorough investigation and noting that the government is required under the peace accords to “take special measures to protect those persons or entities working in the field of human rights.” (GHRC-USA urgent action, June 5)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 11

GUATEMALAN SENIORS ON HUNGER STRIKE

On June 5 some 35 Guatemalans between the ages of 60 and 95 began a liquids-only hunger strike in front of the Constitutional Court (CC) in Guatemala City to protest an effort to overturn the Law of the Older Adult, which would guarantee a minimum pension for seniors. As of June 13, 32 of the strikers remained in the encampment living on water and some liquid nutrients, although at least 25 had been taken at various times to a public assistance center. “We’d rather die of hunger here in front of the CC than on our knees waiting for the government to take pity on us,” Hector Montenegro, 70, president of the National Association of Older Persons Without Social Coverage (ANPTESCS), told the Spanish wire service EFE. This was reportedly the first mass hunger strike ever carried out by Guatemalan seniors.

Congress passed the law last year, but President Oscar Berger vetoed it November. A technical error in the veto allowed the law to be restored, but the CC suspended it in early June, before it had gone into effect, so that the court could consider a challenge to the law’s constitutionality by private attorney Rafael Zetina, who claimed the government lacked resources to pay the pensions and that the law would encourage “vagrancy.”

The law mandates a monthly pension of 578 quetzales (about $76). According to Zetina and the government, about 60,000 older Guatemalans qualify and the pension will cost the government an extra $35 million. ANPTESCS calculates that the total additional cost is about $31.5 million, which the group says can be covered by 1.85% of the Value-Added Tax (IVA, a sales tax). (El Nuevo Herald, June 5 from AP; Prensa Latina, June 9; Univision TV, June 13 from EFE)

In the early morning of June 19, police agents forcibly removed a group of seven hunger strikers who had encamped in front of the Presidential Office in solidarity with the protesters at the CC. “There were probably more than 50 [agents], and they dragged away the little old ladies,” ANPTESCS president Montenegro said. “They took them to the general hospital.” Rosa Maria de Frade insisted that the police took the protesters “because they showed symptoms of dehydration, but it was a mutually agreed-on action.” The Guatemala Human Rights Commission-USA (GHRC-USA) reported that some of those refusing to go were beaten, and that Ramiro Ortiz, 84, said police clubbed him on the back. (ENH, June 19; GHRC-USA urgent action, June 12)

As of June 20, the encampment at the Presidential Office had grown to include some 60 seniors. “We are putting up with hunger, heat and rain to see if President Oscar Berger will pay attention,” said 68-year-old Regina Morales. “We won’t leave here until we talk with the president,” others said.

The Presidential office was the target of two other protests at the same time. Students from teacher training schools marched to the office beating on drums to protest the addition of a year to their course of studies and what they said was a disguised plan to close down government-run teacher education schools and privatize the process. Another group of protesters were demanding legal titles to lands they had settled on; one of the leaders, Roly Escobar, said the government had promised them the titles two and a half years earlier. Some 380 settlements are registered in the capital’s metropolitan area for the legalization process, according to the National Coordination of Community Residents and Marginalized Areas; a total of 567 settlements are registered nationally. “The lack of seriousness of the executive has led to more than 800,000 families not having a legalized place to live,” Escobar said.

The three simultaneous protests caused a traffic jam, tying up hundreds of vehicles in the Historic Center for more than an hour. (Prensa Libre, Guatemala, June 21)

GHRC-USA is asking for letters to President Oscar Berger (fax: +502 2251 2218) and Interior Minister Carlos Vielman (fax: +502 2362 0237, e-mail: ministro@mingob.gob.gt), with copies to GHRC-USA (ghrc-usa@ghrc-usa.org), to demand an investigation of the June 19 police operation and to urge the authorities to guarantee the rights and safety of all the elderly protesters and the organizations supporting them. (GHRC-USA urgent action June 23)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 25

NICARAGUA: STUDENTS PROTEST FARE HIKES

A decision by Managua bus cooperatives at the beginning of May to raise fares from about $0.15 to about $0.18 set off a month of violent clashes between Nicaraguan riot police and students demanding a lower fare. The cooperatives insisted that the rising cost of fuel forced them to increase the fares and that they could hold the fares down if the government provided a subsidy of about $1 million a month. The national government of right-wing president Enrique Bolanos and the Managua government, headed by Dionisio Marenco of the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), blamed each other for the failure to provide the subsidy.

A similar dispute over fares in March and April in 2005 followed almost exactly the same pattern. This year’s confrontations are taking place during the run-up to Nov. 5 presidential and legislative elections, which will pit pro-Bolanos candidates against FSLN candidates.

The violence reached a high point in the week of May 22, when university and high school students battled riot police for five consecutive days. At least 10 people were seriously injured as students used rocks and home-made mortars against police using rubber bullets and tear gas. On May 24 bus drivers began attacking protesters outside the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN) Managua campus, shooting a student in the thigh and using metal tubes and bottles to beat a young free-trade zone factory worker they mistook for a student. The students burned two buses during the week and seriously damaged three more with rocks. (Nicaragua News Service, May 23-9; Prensa Latina, May 27; La Prensa, Managua, May 23, 25; El Nuevo Diario, Managua, May 23, 24, 25)

After a brief truce, new confrontations broke out between police and students on May 31, during which students captured an agent from the anti-riot police and held him at the National Engineering University (UNI) until a mediator could arrange a release. A meeting between leaders of the students, transportation cooperatives and unions on May 31 failed to secure an agreement. On June 2 two people wearing hoods burned a vehicle belonging to the government’s Highway Maintenance Fund (FOMAV) near the UNAN campus, but it was not clear whether they were students.

Also on June 2, Gustavo Porras, general secretary of the National Workers Front (FNT), announced that students, workers and social organizations had agreed to hold a march together on June 6 to pressure the government to provide a permanent solution by allocating a transportation subsidy. Porras said the march would be followed up with sit-ins at various locations on June 7. (PL, May 31, June 2)

EL SALVADOR: PROTESTERS BLOCK HIGHWAYS

Thousands of Salvadorans protested the two-year anniversary of the election of rightwing president Antonio Saca by marching and blocking highways throughout the country. The largest protest was in San Salvador, where at least 25 activists were arrested. Actions also took place in Ahuachapan, Cojutepeque, Sonsonate, La Union, Sensuntepeque, Morazan, Guatajiagua, Chalatenango, San Vicente and Usulutan. (Adital, June 2)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 4

——

Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

See also WW4 REPORT #122
/node/2034

——————-

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCENTRAL AMERICA: TICOS PROTEST CAFTA 

“BIONOIA” Part 4

Dengue in Cuba, West Nile in New York:
When Mosquitoes Come Home to Roost

by Mark Sanborne

In previous installments in this series, we discussed the wartime use of infected fleas and lice to spread plague (definitely by Japan in China and maybe by the US in Korea), and the possibility that the pandemic of tick-borne Lyme disease was a result of secret biowar research at Plum Island, NY. But there’s another bug that has vectored its way into the history of biological warfare, and it’s one that almost everyone on the planet is intimately familiar with: the hated mosquito.

The US biowar establishment, it turns out, has long been interested in using the blood-sucking insects as vectors to transmit diseases to designated human populations. A particular favorite is the dime-sized Aedes aegypti mosquito, which has the talent of infecting people with potentially deadly yellow and dengue fevers. In fact, there is unnerving evidence that the US sought to conduct mosquito vector tests on unwitting foreign subjects, and that it may have used the knowledge it gained in such “experiments” to launch a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, with far-reaching though little-recognized consequences.

A disturbing but fascinating article, “US Attempted to Test Biowarfare in Haryana,” appeared in an Indian newspaper, the Deccan Herald, on Nov. 5, 2002. It is worth quoting in its entirety:

Admission by the United States that it released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in a Pacific island in 1965 as part of its biological warfare test programme has vindicated the Indian government’s decision to close down a similar US-sponsored mosquito project in India in the early 1970s, scientists say.

Indian scientists who had worked on the project say the latest revelation has convinced them that they were unwittingly helping the US biowarfare research under the cover of a public health programme to control malaria. NP Gupta, former director of the National Institute of Virology, told PTI that the then prime minister Indira Gandhi “acted correctly” and at the right time by ordering closure of the project before the planned massive release of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in 1975 at Sonepat, Haryana. The Sonepat project aimed at finding out the range and survival of these mosquitoes and how they dispersed and penetrated homes and other places once release from the centre of town.

Three weeks ago, the US Defense Department de-classified documents listing as many as 46 secret biological and chemical weapons tests conducted at the height of the Cold War. In one such trial, codenamed Magic Sword, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that transmit yellow and dengue fevers were released off the coast of Baker Island [in the Pacific] to obtain information on mosquito biting habits, mosquito trap technology and operational and logistical problems associated with the delivery of mosquitoes to remote sites.

Mr. PK Rajagopalan, a senior medical entomologist who was on the staff, said the Sonepat project had identical aims (as the one conducted in Baker Island) except that that it was planned on a very large scale using hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes reared at a special facility in New Delhi built with funds from the US Public Health Service routed through the World Health Organization (WHO).

Prior to its closure, the US project in India drew media criticism and a parliamentary committee probe was conducted due its preoccupation with the Aedes aegypti species that causes yellow fever, a disease which does not exist in India.

Apparently the U.S interest in development of yellow fever as a biological warfare weapon was sustained even after President Nixon supposedly ended the biological warfare program in 1970, says Gupta. Only this time the trial was conducted outside the United States in a developing country under the umbrella of the WHO, he says. Rajagopalan is also surprised at the different standards employed by the US. Baker Island was unpopulated and remote from the mainland, the trial used informed volunteers and the mosquitoes were eradicated after the trial was over. No such plans existed for the proposed release in Sonepat, whose entire population of half a million was to become unwilling volunteers while the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) was in the dark about the real intention behind the release experiment, said Rajagopalan, who retired from an ICMR institute.

Colathur Golpalan, who was ICMR director general at that time, said the US project was permitted by his predecessor and he was not responsible. “It was I who saw to the closure of the project,” he said in a telephone interview.

Ms. Indira Gandhi stopped the trial and ordered the project closed on the advice of an expert committee despite mild protests from WHO and denial by the US State Department that the project had anything to do with biological warfare. But according to Gupta, the latest revelation that the Baker Island release was indeed a biological warfare experiment vindicates the closure of the US project in India.

Aside from the breathtaking audacity of the US subterfuge, the Sonepat project also provides further evidence for critics who claim that the WHO and other UN and international (as well as domestic) agencies have long been (and still are) stocked with “experts” who cooperate closely with the US military-intelligence complex. Such cozy covert relationships raise the possibility that Washington may have succeeded in hoodwinking other developing countries into actually allowing mosquito vector tests on their territory under the guise of malaria control. Declassified Cold War documents also indicate that US Army biowarriors at Fort Detrick, MD, conducted A. aegypti release experiments at military bases in Florida and Georgia in the late 1950s, and that war planners had determined that mosquito-transmitted yellow fever, a mostly tropical disease, could be a suitable bioweapon to employ in southern parts of the Soviet Union.

But if, as suggested, such vector tests actually did lead to a stealthy mass attack on a civilian population, where might that have occurred? Round up the usual suspect: Yes, Cuba.

CUBA AND DENGUE: MADE IN THE USA?

As noted in Part 2 of this series, from the 1960s onward Cuba appears to have been on the receiving end of an unremitting barrage of biological attacks hatched in the U.S. and carried out by anti-Castro terrorists—and even directly by State Department spray planes flying over Cuban territory. The list of targets is impressive in its Nazi-like thoroughness: sugar, tobacco, pigs, cattle, coffee, citrus, dairy cows, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, beans and other vegetables, bananas, and honey bees, to name more than a few.

Of course, some of the outbreaks may have occurred naturally, and it’s often difficult to conclusively prove one way or the other—that’s one of the great advantages of biowarfare. But many of the incidents involved infections, parasites, and blights never before seen in Cuba, and sometimes were firsts for the Western Hemisphere. And they weren’t all aimed at plants and animals—we also noted the outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever in 1981 that infected over 340,000 Cubans and killed 158, most of them children. The vector for the disease: that uncomplaining workhorse, A. aegypti.

“We share the people’s conviction and strongly suspect that the plagues that have been punishing our country, especially the hemorrhagic dengue, could have been introduced into Cuba, into our country, by the CIA,” Fidel Castro declared in a July 26, 1981, speech celebrating the Cuban revolution, during which he dealt at length with the public record of US biowar efforts and attacks. “We urge the United States government to define its policy in this field, to say whether the CIA will or will not be authorized again—or has this already been authorized?—to organize attacks against leaders of the revolution and to use plagues against our plants, our animals, and our people.”

The State Department responded that charges of Washington’s involvement in the dengue outbreak were “totally without foundation… The Cuban revolution is a failure, and it is obviously easier to blame external forces than to admit those failures.” But whatever one may think of the Cuban revolution, the fact remains that the health care system it created prevented the hemorrhagic dengue pandemic from turning into a complete catastrophe, as it likely would have in almost any other Latin American country.

“In 1981, we faced the gravest health situation ever to have confronted our country, with tens of thousands of persons hospitalized, and over 10,000 in shock and bleeding,” a Cuban health official told a Havana trial hearing evidence about the US role in the outbreak, held in July 2003 as part of Cuba’s compensation claim against the United States.

Due to the disease’s high mortality rate, medical authorities expected a minimum of 3,000 fatalities in the first few weeks, yet Cuba’s model response—combined with what one pediatrician called “collective thinking”—kept the death toll remarkably low. (In fact, Cuba’s effective approach to the dengue outbreak was subsequently adopted by the Pan American Health Organization.)

So, aside from means, motive, and opportunity, what else indicates the US may have been behind the outbreak? Let’s start with the fact that it was the first major epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue in the Americas in nearly a century. Then there are the odd particulars: the epidemic began with the discovery of simultaneous clusters of infections in three widely separated parts of Cuba (Cienfuegos, Camaguey, and Havana) that then spread like wildfire, and none of the initial victims had recently been away from home or been in contact with international travelers who might have carried the disease and transmitted it to the local mosquito population.

Oh, and how about a confession? In 1984, Eduardo Arocena, head of the Omega-7 terrorist group, on trial in the US for the murder of a Cuban UN diplomat, affirmed that his group—and he personally—had introduced “germs” into Cuba, including dengue, as part of the US biowar against Castro. (He was convicted of the murder, and revealed as an FBI informant, leading to the collapse of his group.) Previous reports had indicated Cuban terrorists also smuggled the African swine flu virus into the country in the late 1970s, forcing the slaughter of all of the island’s pigs.

Cuban counter-revolutionaries are known for their braggadocio, even in court, and in the case of the 1981 dengue pandemic it’s unclear how they could have smuggled the thousands of pre-infected A. aegypti mosquitoes into Cuba that would have been necessary to spark the outbreak. (How many mosquitoes can be crammed into a large suitcase or packing crate—or even a diplomatic pouch?)

Dengue is an arbovirus (i.e. transmissable only by insects) and cannot be transmitted between humans—each victim requires their own mosquito bite. Though one insect can infect multiple victims, it’s likely that, based on the number of Cuban afflicted, several hundred thousand mosquitoes would have had to be released to achieve the desired effect, putting the scale of the operation suspiciously in line with that of the aborted Sonepat test project. For that reason, it seems more likely that the mosquitoes were somehow dispersed from the air, dropped like covert paratroopers behind enemy lines—and indeed, the locations of the three initial outbreaks were all close by international air corridors.

THE LAW OF UNINTENDED (?) CONSEQUENCES

According to the Centers for Disease Control, dengue (pronounced “DEN-ghee”) “is the most important mosquito-borne viral disease affecting humans; its global distribution is comparable to that of malaria, and an estimated 2.5 billion people live in areas at risk for epidemic transmission.” Tens of millions of people are infected with dengue fever (DF) annually. However, while debilitating and terribly painful (it’s not known as “break-bone fever” for nothing), DF infection is relatively short-lived and fatalities are rare. But each year sees several hundred thousand cases of the more virulent dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), leading to tens of thousands of deaths among those who develop the related dengue shock syndrome (DSS)—a mortality rate of about five percent in most of the world, though it can be much higher in more undeveloped areas.

And here’s where it gets even more interesting, and frightening. There are four types of DF (DEN-1, 2, 3, and 4), and getting one type does not give the victim immunity from contracting the other types. In fact, it is known that contracting one version after having earlier been infected with another can make the victim particularly prone to developing the much more dangerous DHF/DSS.

Following World War II, mass spraying of insecticides targeted against A. aegypti succeeded in eliminating most major DF epidemics in the Western Hemisphere, though the spray campaign waned in the 1970s due to environmental concerns. By 1970, only DEN-2 was present in the Americas. Suddenly, in 1977—two years after the Sonepat project was cancelled—DEN-1 appeared in Jamaica (where another U.S. bete noire, the socialist Michael Manley, was in power) and then Cuba, the first major dengue outbreak in the country since 1944. Though it was a milder version that didn’t lead to DHF and caused no deaths, it was widespread and helped lay the epidemiological groundwork for a subsequent hemorrhagic outbreak. (A 1978 serologic survey indicated that 45% of the Cuban population had been infected with DEN-1, whereas before 1977 only 2.6% had antibodies for the virus. That’s quick work.)

Then in 1981, a “new” strain of DEN-2 exploded onto the scene in Cuba, and this one, insidiously piggy-backing on the 1977 pandemic, did lead to a mass hemorrhagic outbreak of DHF and DSS, the first in the hemisphere since the turn of the century. The CDC says the deadly new strain was from Southeast Asia, where the disease is endemic and is the leading cause of hospitalization and death among children. But Cuban and other researchers are more specific: they say it is identical to one known only from a 1944 outbreak in New Guinea. In which case, the odds of such an obscure strain suddenly appearing in multiple places in Cuba by “natural” causes seem slim indeed.

(There were reports that the all of the personnel at the US Navy base at Guantanamo were vaccinated against dengue prior to the 1981 outbreak and thus were not infected. While the medical literature notes that currently there is still no publicly available vaccine against dengue, a Google search also indicates that a modern vaccine was first produced in the late 1970s and early 1980s by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and GlaxoSmithKline Biologicals—and the Pentagon has never been shy about giving its troops experimental drugs, as it did with anthrax vaccine in the first Gulf War.)

In the years following 1981, Cuba launched a rigorous program of A. aegypti eradication, vector control, and medical surveillance to keep dengue in check, though there were further smaller outbreaks in Santiago de Cuba in 1997 and Havana in 2001-2 that were contained with limited casualties. (While there is no evidence that the origins of these particular epidemics were suspicious, some have speculated that they may been designed to hurt Cuba’s growing foreign tourism industry.)

Meanwhile, in the years following the 1981 outbreak, the virulent strain of “imported” DEN-2 that caused it proceeded to metastasize rapidly throughout the Caribbean to Mexico and Central and South America. By 2003, 24 countries in the Americas had reported confirmed cases of hemorrhagic dengue where it was previously unknown, and potentially deadly DHF is now endemic in many of these countries. (The U.S. itself gets an estimated 100 imported cases of dengue a year.) If, as the evidence strongly suggests, both the 1977 and 1981 Cuban pandemics were spawned in Washington—or more specifically, Fort Detrick, MD—then the resultant devastating effects on the hemisphere as a whole are staggering to contemplate. It would represent state bioterrorism on an almost unimaginable scale.

Is this an example of the law of unintended consequences? One can only hope they were unintended, though it’s hard to see how they could not have been foreseen. Evidently, for those in a position to know, the “gain” was deemed to be worth the risk.

THE ARRIVAL OF WEST NILE

Which leads us to our last stop on Bionia’s skeeter hit parade. Remember the West Nile virus, way back in those halcyon pre-9-11 days of 1999? It made a particularly big impression on those of us who live in the New York City metropolitan region, where the disease made its first appearance in the Western Hemisphere in August of that year. Lucky us.

The first case of human infection occurred in Queens on Aug. 2. By the end of the year, there were a total of 62 cases and seven deaths in the region from the mosquito-borne illness, most of them older people with compromised immune systems. More alarming for many was the initial “cure” imposed by the administration of Mayor Rudolf Giuliani: mass spraying of the insecticide malathion, a likely carcinogen. This writer was among the many who had to dodge inside to escape swooping, spraying helicopters in Brooklyn and Queens, while some residents walking the late-night streets of Manhattan were actually hosed in the face with the poison from passing trucks.

West Nile is a member of the genus flavivirus, along with our new friends dengue and yellow fever, though WN is much less of a global health threat. About 80% of those who contract West Nile show no symptoms and are unaware they are infected, while others display mild, flu-like symptoms. In the few worse cases it can lead to deadly encephalitis and meningitis, and in fact its initial appearance was misdiagnosed as St. Louis encephalitis.

Transmitted by mosquitoes and other vectors, particularly birds, WN has since spread quickly across the country, and by 2003, 45 states and the District of Columbia had reported human cases. By 2005, a total of 19,625 cases and 882 deaths were reported by the CDC, considerably less than the annual toll from the common flu. (However, the number of those infected but undiagnosed or without symptoms probably numbers in the hundreds of thousands.) More alarmingly, while direct human-to-human transmission was initially ruled out, in 2002 it was discovered that the virus could be transmitted through donated blood, organ transplants, breast milk, prenatal exposure, and occupational exposure.

Another spooky attribute of WN is its propensity to kill birds, its most common host. An unusual number of dead birds, particularly crows, were evident around the tri-state area for a while before they were connected to the West Nile outbreak. The virus was first discovered in 1937 in Uganda, and the African variety does not affect bird or animal hosts. Other mild outbreaks occurred in Israel in the 1950s the South Africa in the 1970s, but beginning in the mid-1990s a string of more serious epidemics occurred in North Africa, Israel, Italy, Russia, and Romania that included large die-offs of local bird populations. This seems odd, because it’s generally not in the evolutionary interest of a virus to kill off its main host that gets it from place to place.

Was this creepy entourage of dead crows some sort of designer harbinger for the end of the millenium? (Perhaps an engineered Avian flu will be the Antichrist.) Is it evidence, as some observers have suggested, that the virus—which has long been held in government labs here and around the world—was modified genetically as part of some shadowy biowar project?

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

Our last installment dealt at length with the questionable history of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, located off the North Fork of eastern Long Island, particularly in regard to its possible propagation of tick-borne Lyme disease. Considerable evidence was cited from a 2004 book, Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government’s Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory, by Michael Carr, who also weighed in on the West Nile question. He wrote that Plum Island researchers were already studying the WN virus at the time of the outbreak (officials deny this), and cites the death of 18 horses in eastern Suffolk County near Plum Island in August 1999 as evidence that the North Fork was the epicenter of the epidemic.

The official story is to blame international air travel, as if that’s something new. It’s suggested that a WN-infected traveler (yet another Patient Zero) from the Middle East arrived in New York and was bitten by a local mosquito or two, who then went on a major feeding binge and spread the disease to both birds and humans far and wide. Or perhaps a few infected mosquitoes somehow hitched a ride to New York on a jet and wreaked havoc when they escaped into the environment. Or maybe an infected bird was imported or somehow made its way across the ocean. But questions of geography persist: How could such sole-source vectors initially manage to infect both horses at one end of Long Island and humans at the other end, in Queens, but very few people in between? (Though later Suffolk County did develop one of highest rates of West Nile, as it did with Lyme disease in the 1970s.) Just as in the case of the simultaneous appearance of dengue in three widely separated parts of Cuba, here is a hint of the hand of man, not nature.

Or maybe it was just an “accident.” If Plum Island (i.e. the US underground biowar complex) was somehow the source of the West Nile outbreak and/or Lyme disease, were the releases somehow inadvertent, or were they in fact something far more sinister—that is, stealthy mass attacks on domestic civilian populations? Again, considering the apparent US role in spreading a deadly version of dengue fever in the Western Hemisphere, it’s hard to give “them” the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the idea that the arrival of West Nile was a potential bioterrorist event was knocked around quite a bit by media pundits early on in the outbreak, though the short list of official suspects should not surprise anyone. In a recent web search for “West Nile and biological warfare,” these were the first four stories that came up: “West Nile Virus—Is Castro’s Bioterrorism Threat Being Ignored?”; “Castro Weaponizes West Nile Virus”; “Iraq and Cuba – Fitting Pieces in the West Nile Puzzle?”; and “West Nile Virus: Part of Hussein’s Plan—via Cuba?” This US intelligence disinformation campaign, spread by NewsMax and several right-wing Cuban-American web sites, while predictable, is at least as fanciful as a story on the CDC’s web site positing that Alexander the Great may have died of West Nile virus encephalitis.

Some accounts at the time did take note of the embarrassing fact that the CDC had provided samples of West Nile and a host of other potential biowar agents to Saddam Hussein’s then-friendly regime in the mid-1980s. While the strain delivered to Iraq was different than the one that turned up in New York, NewsMax declared that “experts have confirmed that Saddam has the ability to mutate viruses and other biological agents.” (Sounds like he’s one of the X-Men.)

But it wasn’t only right-wingers who weighed in on the subject. In the October 11, 1999 edition of The New Yorker, Richard Preston wrote a lengthy story headlined “West Nile Mystery: How Did It Get Here? The CIA Would Like to Know.” It cited the concerns of unnamed intelligence analysts, and referred to an excerpt of a book entitled In the Shadow of Saddam published in the April 6, 1999, Daily Mail, a London tabloid. The author, who called himself Mikhael Ramadan, purported to be have been one of Saddam’s body doubles before he escaped from Iraq, and claimed his boss bragged to him in 1997 that Iraq had developed a strain of WN that was “capable of destroying 97% of all life in an urban environment.”

Preston acknowledged that the claims “sounded crazy,” but went on to suggest that there might be at least a germ of truth behind the story, displaying only slightly more skepticism than the American press later did in the trumpeting of Iraq’s nonexistent WMD threat during the run-up to the 2003 invasion. So here’s a final suggestion for all those official experts out there: Next time an incidence of possible bioterrorism pops up on the media’s radar, try to avoid the usual projection of guilt upon the empire’s victims, and instead take a look in the mirror.

RESOURCES:

Granma International on Cuban Dengue outbreak
http://www.granma.cu/cubademanda/ingles/demanda13-i.html

CDC official history of dengue (note: read between the lines)
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/dengue/

Medical Service Corp. International hisotry of dengue
http://www.mscionline.com/projects/diseases/dengue.htm

“West Nile Mystery,” by Richard Preston, The New Yorker, Oct. 18 & 25, 1999
http://www.newsmakingnews.com/artwestnilenewyorker.htm

CDC on Alexander the Great and West Nile Virus
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol9no12/03-0288.htm

From our weblog:

“Desert Storm vets demand Rumsfeld resignation,” Oct. 21, 2002
/static/56.html#iraq15

“Is Baghdad next?” Oct. 20, 2001
/static/4.html#shadows2

See also:

“Bionoia,” Pt. 3, WW4 REPORT #121
/node/1898

——————-
Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, July 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue Reading“BIONOIA” Part 4 

THE DA VINCI CODE: DECODING THE PHENOMENON

The Paradoxes of Mainstreaming Esotericism

by Mark Sanborne

Dizzy from all the Decoding? Tired of endless yammering about Tom Hank’s hair? Ready to move on from the “Greatest Coverup in Human History”? Well, welcome to the cult, er, club. The perfect media-publicity storm and religio-cultural zeitgeist-tickler that is The Da Vinci Code, the second coming of Dan Brown’s controversial super-blockbuster 2003 novel, has at last arrived in theaters. So let the deconstruction begin…

Despite being roundly panned by most critics, the movie is, unsurprisingly, making tons of money—nearly $150 million in its first two weeks—attracting both the book’s legions of fans along with many others curious what all the fuss is about. For those of you who may have been hiding in a tomb the last few years, here’s the gist:

Both the novel and movie posit that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who was not a prostitute (a folk tradition added later by Rome) but a lady of high standing who fled Palestine after the crucifixion with the couple’s child—a girl, Sarah—and settled among the Jewish community in southern France. After hundreds of years their descendants, carrying the royal blood of the house of the biblical King David, eventually got around to intermarrying with the Merovingians, the myth-shrouded first line of French kings who lived in the fifth through eighth centuries. Ever since, the Roman Catholic Church has been obsessed with extirpating this sacred lineage to prevent the explosive secret from getting out, beginning with the supposed assassination of Dagobert II in 679. (Much of Brown’s speculative information came from a 1982 British book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, about which more below.)

In response, a secret society known as the Priory of Sion was formed during the First Crusade in 1099 to protect the putative royal bloodline. The Priory, in turn, was said to have formed the real-life Knights Templar, the order of warrior-monks who served as the Crusader armies’ shock troops and went on to establish the first international banking system before being accused of heresy and suppressed by the greedy King Philippe IV of France in 1307.

Meanwhile, the Priory had also been busy behind the scenes propagating the Grail romances that became all the rage in the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly those by Chretien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, which included a Grail Family guarded by Templars. However, rather than being a sacred cup or chalice—the San Graal, or Holy Grail—it actually represented the Sang Raal, or Royal Blood, transformed from a pagan fertility symbol like the Horn of Plenty into a covert reference to the womb of the Magdalene, the Sacred Feminine suppressed by the church, and the secret lineage of the King of the Jews.

But wait, there’s more. The Priory of Sion supposedly has continued to exist down through the centuries, with grand masters of the order ranging from the first, Jean de Gisors, to such luminaries as Nicolas Flamel, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Fludd, Robert Boyle, Issac Newton, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy, and Jean Cocteau. However, the only “grand master” we can be sure of is one Pierre Plantard “de Saint-Clair,” an eccentric Frenchman who died in 2000 and who may have been the man behind the curtain who pulled the levers on the whole thing.

TELL & SHOW

Enough gist for now, let’s review the movie in question. In most key respects it is indeed faithful to the book—many might argue to a fault, though clearly director Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman felt they couldn’t afford to alienate the novel’s vast readership. (Similar logic lies behind the Star Trek movies: first satisfy the trekkie fan base, then everything else is gravy.)

That faithfulness means the movie consists largely of exposition, with patches of competently staged action serving as brief bridges to the next set of esoteric talking points. (Despite Brown’s hammy prose, reading the novel seemed faster than watching the film, though Hans Zimmer’s score is nicely evocative.) And a fair amount of the special-effects “action” consists of brief, sepia-tinted historical flashbacks to such events as the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the First Crusade, and the suppression of the Templars.

In brief, for the lucky few who have not read or seen The Da Vinci Code, the movie follows the adventures of Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon (Hanks), who while visiting Paris is called to the Louvre to view a dead and self-mutilated curator laid out on the floor like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Langdon quickly hooks up with Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), a police cryptographer who turns out to be the estranged grand-daughter of the dead man—who in fact is the latest grand master of the Priory of Sion.

The two are quickly on the run from Bezu Fache (Jean Reno), a French cop, and Silas (Paul Bettany), a cowl-wearing albino assassin, both of whom are acting under orders from a bishop of Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic society. The bishop (Alfred Molina) is seen conspiring with several shadowy Vatican figures, discussing the need for “sacrifices” to cover up the church’s dirty laundry. Meanwhile, Ian McKellen steals the show in the role of Grail expert Sir Leigh Teabing, who employs hi-tech computer wizardry to demonstrate to Sophie that the person to the left of Jesus in da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” is actually Mary Magdalene. He seems to be the only one in the movie having fun, and offers viewers a knowing smirk like he did when playing Gandalf smoking a bowl of Hobbit-weed back in the first installment of The Lord of the Rings.

Needless to say, I was not disturbed by the book or film’s cavalier treatment of orthodox Christian tradition. (For the record, I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, but my instinctive adolescent doubts were even more confirmed when I learned that “my” Anglican religion had been created so that Henry VIII could get laid. That early cynicism, combined with my early interest in anthropology, eventually helped make me the scientific Taoist-Gnostic I sort of am today.) In fact, by far the most disturbing thing in the movie came early on, in a scene showing Silas demonstrating an X-treme form of the “corporal mortification” practiced by some Opus Dei adherents, pulling the sharp barbs of a “cilice” from the bloody and suppurating flesh of his thighs as he lashes his back with a cat-o-nine-tails and the camera lingers far too long on his naked white butt crack.

The action, such as it is, moves from France to London, but once McKellen leaves the scene the movie slows to a crawl, and the last 15 minutes seemed painfully endless. In their search for the Grail—which apparently consists of the bones of the Magdalene and some bloodline documents—Langdon and Sophie finally get to Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, a hotbed of esoteric speculation built in the 1400s that includes Templar and pagan influences. Our loveless couple encounters a crowd of locals looking like they’d stepped out of an English country catalog who turn out to be members of the Priory “family,” and Sophie finds out (SPOILER ALERT!) that she, too, is carrying the royal blood. Langdon ends up back in Paris at the Louvre, but I’ll save the final plot “twist” for those still don’t know and insist on going to the movie.

FAITH, HOLLYWOOD, AND THE GLOBAL MARKET

Since Martin Scorsese’s 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ caused a vicious religious backlash around the world—and it only showed Jesus fantasizing about having sex with Mary Magdalene—Sony Pictures Entertainment knew it had a big problem on its hand when it acquired the rights to The Da Vinci Code in 2003. A fascinating story in the May 22, 2006 New Yorker detailed how, in the wake of the unexpectedly huge box office success of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Hollywood was learning not to totally ignore the concerns of religious-minded moviegoers.

Sony hired a faith-oriented consultant and by last year was already funding websites like www.thedavincidialogue.com, where mainstream religious experts debunk Brown’s work. The effort to proactively reach out paid off, and most clergy around the country talked more about engaging the issues than protests and boycotts, which were seen as counterproductive. Even Opus Dei spoke of the upcoming movie—which of course no one could stop from being a blockbuster, anyway—as a “teaching moment.” But this new spirit of toleration did not sit well with everyone: Barbara Nicolosi, a screenwriter and Christian blogger, called those working with Sony “useful Christian idiots” who were debating the issue “on Hell’s terms.”

Hollywood movies are one of the most reliable exports from the West to the rest of humanity, but in this most unflat world of globalization, pleasing everyone is not always easy. Ironically, while Sony was able to help temper the tone of the domestic debate about the movie, it appears to have had more problems with its customers in much of the rest of the world.

In advance of The Da Vinci Code‘s mid-May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, a variety of protests were staged in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea, and Zambia, among other places. India even put a temporary hold on the movie’s release because of complaints. Apparently, Christians outside the US, particularly those who are a minority in their own country, are more militant in defense of their faith than many god-fearing Americans. (Though thankfully the protests haven’t risen to the level caused earlier this year by Danish cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammad.)

Meanwhile, the Da Vinci Moment was the sort of thing American cable TV was made for: wall-to-wall coverage with what seemed like dozens of news reports, documentaries, profiles, and puff pieces all tied to the movie. The History and Discovery channels were particularly gung-ho in the week leading up to the premier, and my eyes glazed over as I took in as much as I could.

Several interesting examples from the History Channel stand out. One was on the network’s new hit, “Digging for the Truth” with host Josh Bernstein, a hunky Jewish Indiana Jones who travels the world taking a hands-on approach to archaeology. In this one, he actually got a French museum to donate a sample from the bones of a supposed Merovingian princess and compared its DNA to that of an ancient community of Jewish descent in Israel. Result: Supposedly the princess didn’t carry a Middle East “marker,” providing extremely-sketchy-to-the-point-of-nonsense evidence that the genes of the Semitic Jesus and Mary Magdalene did not mix with early French kings. (Whew!)

Another eye-opener: a documentary that suggested the Knights Templar, both before and after the suppression of their order, were instrumental in the formation of the five cantons of the modern Swiss state. It noted the rapidity with which Switzerland went from being a collection of isolated settlements to an organized confederation with famously well-drilled defense forces during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance periods, and developed into a center of international banking. There’s also Switzerland’s traditional neutrality in international affairs and spirit of religious tolerance, both Templar traits. And oh yeah, the Templar emblem appears on the Swiss national flag and on the flags and emblems of many of the cantons—not to mention on the Swiss Army knife! Good stuff.

Finally, while watching yet another program, I was suddenly struck by the image of a painted statue at a church in southern France dedicated, like many in the region, to the Magdalene. The statue is of both Mary and her child, Sarah, and while Mary appears European, Sarah’s skin is a chocolate brown, and her features appear to be Egyptian. A Black Madonna in waiting, perhaps?

THE PRIORY OF PIERRE PLANTARD

There were also numerous programs, on both cable and broadcast TV (including 60 Minutes) dissecting the “facts” that Brown claimed lay behind his fictional story. The prologue of his novel is preceded by this statement: “FACT: The Priory of Sion—a European secret society founded in 1099—is a real organization. In 1975 Paris’s Bibliotheque Nationale discovered parchments known as Les Dossiers Secrets, identifying numerous members of the Priory, including Sir Issac Newton, Botticelli, Victor Hugo, and Leonardo da Vinci.”

So much for the “facts”—it’s hard to know where to begin. The so-called Secret Dossiers were not “discovered” by France’s national library, but were deposited there in the 1960s by the aforementioned Pierre Plantard and his cohorts—and are generally assumed to be fraudulent. They were not “parchments” but consisted mostly of copies of modern typewritten documents, including numerous genealogies and the infamous list of Priory “grand masters.” The dossiers were uncovered in the 1970s by three British writers—Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent, and Richard Leigh—in the course of research that led to their controversial 1982 book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which first formulated and laid out the whole Priory-Merovingian-Jesus-bloodline scenario, and which Dan Brown (and his wife and principal researcher Blythe Brown) later appropriated for The Da Vinci Code.

In the novel, the name of the Ian McKellen character, Leigh Teabing, is an anagramatic tribute to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and Teabing actually points out the book on his shelf and cites its importance. But those indirect acknowledgements were not enough to prevent Baigent and Leigh from suing Random House, publisher of The Da Vinci Code, in London’s high court for copyright infringement, charging that Brown had in effect stolen the “architecture” of their nonfiction book for his novel.

This past April, Judge Peter Smith ruled against the plaintiffs while also strongly criticizing the methods and testimony of Dan Brown and the fact that his wife declined to appear before the court. In keeping with the circus-like spirit of the occasion, the judge also embedded his own gimmicky coded message in his 70-page decision (italicized letters spelled out “Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought,” an obscure reference to British Naval history), while the highly publicized trial helped pump up the sales of both Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code in the run-up to the movie’s premier.

And what about elusive Mr. Plantard? It turns out to be a story that neither begins nor ends well During the war, he formed a quasi-occult, pro-Vichy association that was both anti-masonic and anti-semitic. In 1956, he registered the Priory of Sion as an association with the French government, indicating in its statutes a desire to form a monastic order. In the 1960s he teamed up with author Gerard de Sede to begin spreading the idea the Priory was descended from the Abbey of Sion, a monastic order that records indicate indeed was formed in Jerusalem during the First Crusade but later was dissolved.

Though French researchers were already casting doubts on Plantard’s credibilty as early as the 1970s, the manufactured Secret Dossiers became a centerpiece of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, ultimately providing much of the intellectual basis for The Da Vinci Code. Finally, however, Plantard’s confabulations caught up with him, and what remained of his reputation was ruined. In 1993, an investigative judge ordered a search of his home, which turned up numerous forged documents, including some proclaiming him as the true king of France through a nonexistent Merovingian linkage. Plantard admitted to his fabrications under oath and afterwards lived quietly until his death in 2000.

BLASPHEMERS AND FUNDAMENTALISTS: PARADOXICAL UNITY

In the end, it’s hard to see clearly through all the murk. But maybe that’s sort of the point. The Da Vinci Code is successful because it taps into the deep inner stuff that makes us tick, drilled into our collective unconscious by 2,000 years of mass indoctrination.

Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln also worked the notorious anti-semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into their story, maintaining that it actually referred to the Priory of Sion, with the Jews as stand-ins for the real secret order. Meanwhile, fringe Christian end-timers view the pseudo-unveiling of the Priory as a fulfillment of prophecies in the Book of Revelations and proof of a vast anti-Christian conspiracy.

Hollywood merely appropriates the outrage of the fundamentalists as an implicit tool of the publicity machine, while the fundamentalists likewise use outrage at this evidence of society’s domination by amoral apostasy as a recruiting tool. These seeming opposites feed off each other—the same dynamic which is at work in the global showdown between Western imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism.

RESOURCES:

Sony’s “The Da Vinci Dialogue”
http://www.thedavincidialogue.com

Wikipedia page on the Priory of Sion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priory_of_Sion

See also:

“Bible scholars to crack Mafia code?,” April 23
/node/1877

———————–
Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, June 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE DA VINCI CODE: DECODING THE PHENOMENON