In a big boost to the sclerotic campaign to divest from companies that do business with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which includes East Jerusalem, the Church of England reversed earlier expectations, voting to divest from the Caterpillar corporation:… Read moreChurch of England votes to divest from Caterpillar
After a month-long volley of op-eds in neo-con pubs, misquotes in Jewish papers, capped with an attack by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the powers-that-be are now comparing Chavez to Hitler. How predictable. From the New York Times: February 3, 2006… Read moreRummy: Chavez Hitler
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Freddy Pressner, president of the Venezuela Confederation of Israelite Associations (CAIV) meet over the recent flap over allegations of anti-Semitic remarks by Chavez: Venezuela’s Chavez, Jews reconcile President of Jewish community satisfied, says president not… Read moreChavez meets with Venezuelan Jewish leaders
Danny Rubinstein, longtime journalist and Palestinian affairs analyst for the respected Israeli daily Ha’aretz, believes that Arafat was poisoned, but felt proscribed from writing about his conclusions in Ha’aretz. Rubinstein explained why in an interview to Keshev, The Center for… Read moreArafat poisoned: Israeli journalist
From the AP Jan. 30: Bombs in Iraq target 5 Christian buildings BAGHDAD – Car bombs exploded in quick succession Sunday near four Christian churches and the office of the Vatican envoy, killing three people and raising new concerns about… Read moreIraq: Christian buildings bombed
Interview with Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas’ Politboro, from Jan. 27 print version of Italy’s La Repubblica: by Alix Van Buren “The Super-Most Wanted” Meshal DAMASCUS—The day of Hamas’ triumph, the supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, keeps his euphoria in check… Read moreInterview with Hamas chief Khaled Meshal
Hamas won 76 seats out of 132 contested in the Palestinian parliament. The Hamas victory surprised many, defying all polls. In the last few days, it was revealed the US pumped millions into Fatah’s campaign. A Palestinian commented that since… Read moreHebrew, Arabic press on Hamas victory
Electronic Journal & Daily Weblog “BIONOIA” Part 2 The Nuts, Bolts and Crimes of Biological Warfare by Mark Sanborne SOUTH AMERICAN PIPELINE WARS Chavez Bloc Races with Oil Cartel to Grid the Continent by Bill Weinberg BOLIVIA: A COMING TRIAL… Read moreIssue #. 118. February 2006
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
ENTRE RIOS: PAPER MILL PROTESTS CONTINUE
On Dec. 30, hundreds of protesters blocked traffic along three bridges which span the Uruguay River, linking Argentina’s Entre Rios province with Uruguay, to protest the Uruguayan government’s decision to allow the construction of paper mills along the river. Residents say the mills will pollute the river and cause serious harm to the environment.
The largest protests were led by residents and local officials of Gualeguaychu, Argentina; protesters there blocked the General San Martin bridge leading to the Uruguayan city of Fray Bentos, in Rio Negro department, where the paper mills are being built by the Finnish company Botnia and the Spanish company Ence. Another group of protesters blocked traffic for several hours across the Gen. Jose Artigas bridge linking the Argentine city of Colon with the city of Paysandu in Uruguay’s Paysandu department. Eventually the demonstrators opened one lane of traffic and allowed cars and trucks to pass, but the protest caused serious delays for travelers. The third protest was held on the bridge linking Concordia in Argentina to the city of Salto in Salto department, Uruguay. There residents distributed informational flyers to travelers. The protests were timed to cause maximum impact at a time when Argentine holiday vacationers traditionally flock to Uruguay’s beaches.
Gualeguaychu mayor Daniel Irigoyen supports the protest; a spokesperson for his office, Hernan Rossi, told AFP that if Uruguayan authorities don’t cancel construction of the paper mills, residents will carry out “programmed and surprise blockades” along the bridges throughout the summer vacation period. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, Dec. 31 from AFP; AP, Dec. 30; Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 30) Entre Rios governor Jorge Busti also supports the protests. The Argentine national government said on Dec. 29 that it would send 200 gendarmes (federal border police agents) to the region to control traffic during the protests.
On Dec. 29 the Uruguayan government announced that the construction of the paper mills was “irreversible,” while unofficial sources reported that the Argentine government was urging Uruguay to move the paper mills elsewhere, a proposition expected to cost between $10 million and $14 million. On Dec. 27, Argentine deputy foreign minister Ricardo Garcia Moritan said his government is urging Uruguay to halt construction of the paper mills until an impartial environmental impact study is carried out. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Dec. 30)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 1
CHACO: VIOLENT SQUATTER EVICTION
On Jan. 5, some 400 agents of the provincial police of Chaco province, Argentina, used violence to carry out an eviction order against 200 families who had taken over public housing units earlier that day in Puerto Vilelas, 21 kilometers south of Resistencia, the provincial capital. The families, including many children, took over the recently built houses after having lost their homes in a storm on Dec. 16, and having unsuccessfully sought help from the government. In scenes recorded by news cameras and viewed around the country, police agents from Infantry and Cavalry units and the Special Operations Command–protected by helmets, shields and bullet-proof vests–fired rubber pellets at residents and used whips, clubs and kicks against those who fell to the ground or who were handcuffed. A number of people were treated for injuries. German Pomar, a photographer for the daily newspaper Norte was hit with 12 rubber pellets in his leg. (Prensa Latina, Jan. 5)
POLICE SENTENCED IN PIQUETERO KILLINGS
On Jan. 9, the Oral Tribunal No. 7 of Lomas de Zamora sentenced former police inspector Alfredo Fanchiotti and former sergeant Alejandro Acosta to life in prison for the killing of piquetero (organized unemployed) activists Dario Santillan and Maximiliano Kosteki during a demonstration on June 26, 2002, in the Buenos Aires suburb of Avellaneda. Fanchiotti and Acosta were also convicted of attempted homicide for wounding seven other demonstrators with live bullets.
Former police inspector Felix Vega and ex-police agents Carlos Quevedo and Mario de la Fuente were each sentenced to four years of prison for aggravated concealment. Former police agents Gaston Sierra and Lorenzo Colman got three and two years, respectively, for aggravated concealment, but will not go to jail. Francisco Celestino Robledo, a retired police agent who carried out arrests during the 2002 protest despite not being in active service, gota suspended sentence of 10 months in prison for usurping authority.
More than 400 uniformed and plainclothes police agents took part in the operation against protesters who tried to march across the Pueyrredon bridge into the city of Buenos Aires. The agents were from three federal units (Gendarmeria, Prefectura and Federal Police) and the Buenos Aires provincial police. Retired agents were also called up to take part in the operation. (Resumen Latinoamericano, Jan. 12; Cronica, Buenos Aires, Jan.. 22)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 22
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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html
See also WW4 REPORT #117
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1439
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
US, Israeli and Palestinian Artists Unite Across Borders
by Robert Hirschfield
Transposed upon the face of the famous Wall, in the photo-shop print by Suleiman Mansour, is Michaelangelo’s hand of God and hand of Adam reaching toward one anotherâonly separated by a chasm, not a inch, as on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Mansour’s print is part of the Three Cities Against The Wall exhibit that began Nov. 9 in Ramallah, Tel Aviv and New York. The New York site, ABC NO RIO, a gallery in an old tenement building on the Lower East Side that evolved from a squat into a center for art and activism, was chosen by artist Seth Tobocman, the primary organizer of the show in the US.
“We knew that ABC was very independent, and wouldn’t allow themselves to be prevented from doing the show,” he said.
The idea for the show grew out of Tobocman’s meeting with artist Tayseer Barakat in Ramallah four years ago. Israeli artists were not included in their original plans, but when Tobocman discussed the show with Steven Englander, the director of ABC NORIO, he thought it would be good to have Israeli participation in the project to broaden its political scope.
“I wrote Tayseer a proposal for Three Cities Against The Wall. I chose to focus on the Wall because that was one area where the young Israeli artists I knew had proven themselves. They had been involved in actions the Wall where people had been shot by the soldiers. They were legitimate activists.”
Barakat appointed Mansour as his outreach person to the Israelis, as he was a Palestinian artist from East Jerusalem who was more easily able to travel around Israel and keep in contact with the Israeli artists.
“Suleiman,” said Tobocman, “has been a major figure in the resistance of Palestinian artists to Israeli occupation.”
At the show’s opening in New Yorkâjammed with neighborhood people, as well as Palestinians, Israelis, Europeansâthe works displayed ranged from Hamadi Hijazi’s brooding oil painting of ladders with broken rungs climbing the blood red Wall into an ochre-colored sky, to a photo display by American artist Susan Greene of little children painting the Wall with flowers, with fish, with green and red streaks, with a huge yellow bird, its beak pointing skyward.
Suleiman Mansour was among the crowd. A white-bearded man with deep set eyes, he spoke of how the Wall throws his life as an artist into daily chaos.
“I live in East Jerusalem, and my studio is on the other side of the Wall, towards Ramallah. Coming back from the studio, it can take me two or three hours to get through the checkpoints.”
He shrugged. “I am desperate,” he said, “but my work is not desperate.” He was jailed three times by the Israelis, once for photographing a West Bank village he wanted to paint. He was imprisoned a month for that.
“They put sacks on my head. I was beaten. I was made to stand up for long periods of time.”
Palestinian art, he said, has tended to reflect the stages of the Palestinian struggle. In the years following the Nakba, artists painted refugees. When the Fatah was formed in the mid-sixties, they painted fighters. During the first Intifada, when the emphasis was on self-reliance and the boycotting of Israeli products, Palestinian artists stopped buying oils from Israel.
“We began using other materials. I came up with mud. I painted with the land itself.”
In the early ’70s, Mansour was one of eigtheen Palestinian artists who decided to form a union. They asked the Israeli military authorities for permission. It was denied.
“We went ahead and started our union anyhow. We called it Legal Palestinian Artists in the Occupied Territories.”
Mansour related that the shipment of American art works bound for Ramallah was seized by Israeli security at the airport in Tel Aviv. They refused to release the works until the addressee in Ramallah came to claim them. A Kafkaesque excursion, given Israeli travel restrictions.
The artists involved in the Three Cities exhibit drafted a statement. Part of it reads as follows: “Through this collaborative exhibition, the organizers and participating artists will draw attention to the reality of the Wall and its disastrous impact on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians by the separation of Palestinian communities from each other and from the fertile lands, water resources, schools, hospitals and work places, thereby ‘contributing to the departure of Palestinian populations’, as the International Court of Justice has warned.”
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This story originally appeared in the January issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
RESOURCES:
Three Cities Against the Wall page, ABC NO RIO website
http://www.abcnorio.org/againstthewall/
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
U.S. DELAYS CAFTA
On Dec. 30 Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) spokesperson Stephen Norton announced that the US was postponing implementation of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), which was scheduled to go into effect on Jan. 1. Although “various countries are almost ready for their startup, none have completed their internal procedures,” he said, referring to enabling legislation the participating countries have to pass for DR-CAFTA to go into effect. The trade pact will be implemented progressively, according to Norton, “to the extent that the countries make sufficient progress to comply with the promises set in the accord.” Until then, the countries will continue to benefit from tariff reductions under the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA).
DR-CAFTA is intended to bring Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the US together into a trade pact which would largely eliminate tariffs between the countries. Costa Rica’s legislature has yet to approve the pact; the legislatures of all the other participating countries have approved it despite major protests by labor, campesino, environmental and other groups.(El Nuevo Herald, Jan. 30, 31, quotes retranslated from Spanish)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 1
GUATEMALA: NEW VIOLENCE AT OCCUPIED RANCH
Four Guatemalan campesinos were reportedly wounded when private security guards opened fire on Jan. 20 on protesters attempting to renew their occupation of the Nueva Linda ranch in Champerico municipality, Retalhuleu department. At least two of the campesinos were injured seriously and were taken to a hospital in Retalhuleu. The names of three of the wounded were given: Roberto Gonzalez, Macario Gomez and Bernardo Guillen.
Twelve people, including protesters and police agents, were killed at Nueva Linda on Aug. 31, 2004, when hundreds of police used force to end a year-long occupation by thousands of campesinos protesting the disappearance of ranch administrator and campesino leader Hector Rene Reyes; some of the campesinos renewed their occupation in September 2004 but were removed without major violence two months later. There were conflicting reports about the Jan. 20 incident. The leftist Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) party said the campesinos had wanted to talk to people at the ranch about their demands for justice for Reyes, while the National Indigenous and Campesino Coordinating Committee (CONIC) reported that the campesinos, who have maintained a protest along the highway outside Nueva Linda, were trying to reoccupy the ranch. Other sources said they had succeeded in renewing the occupation.
The Guatemala Human Rights Commission-USA (GHRC-USA) is calling for letters to President Oscar Berger Perdomo (fax: +502-2251-2218), Interior Minister Carlos Vielman (fax: +502-2362-0237, e-mail: ministro@mingob.gob.gt) and others to demand a full investigation of the current incident and prosecution of those responsible for Reyes’ disappearance and the deaths in 2004. (GHRC-USA urgent action, Jan. 20)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 22
GUATEMALAN RESEARCHER THREATENED
On Jan. 9 Fredy Peccerelli, the head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), received a text message on his mobile phone with a death threat against his brother, Gianni Peccerelli. “Stop the exhumations, sons [of bitches],” the message ended, referring to the FAFG’s work exhuming mass graves of those killed by the Guatemalan military and their civilian adjuncts in the early 1980s.
On Jan. 10 Fredy Peccerelli’s sister, Bianka Peccerelli Monterroso, and her husband, Omar Giron de Leon, who is the laboratory coordinator for the FAFG, received an anonymous letter deposited in their mailbox. “We’re going to kidnap your sister and rape her again and again,” the letter read, “and if you don’t stop, we’ll send her to you piece by piece. Omar will be a widower, but only for a few minutes. Then we’re going to put a bullet in your head. One by one we will kill you. Death to the anthropologists.”
Fredy Peccerelli, his family and other members of the FAFG have received numerous threats over the last several years. After an earlier threat to Bianka Peccerelli and Giron de Leon, the government provided some police protection. But the police agents began skipping shifts in December and stopped guarding the couple completely on Jan. 7. The human rights organization Amnesty International is recommending letters expressing concern to Vice-Minister of the Interior Julio Cesar Godoy Anleu (+502 2361 5914) and Head of Special Prosecutor’s Office on Human Rights Rosa Maria Salazar Marroquin (+502 2230 5296), with copies to Ambassador to the US Jose Guillermo Castillo (fax: 202-745-1908, e-mail: info@guatemala-embassy.org). (AI Urgent Action, Jan. 13)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 15
HONDURAS: INDIGENOUS ARRESTED
On Jan. 12, Margarito Vargas Ponce and Marcos Reyes, members of the Honduran indigenous community of Montana Verde, presented themselves in court in the town of Gracias, Lempira department, in an attempt to end their persecution by security forces. The judge acceded to their written request to revoke an arrest order against them. Then, according to the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), another judge at the court, Hermes Omar Moncada, vacated the order in what COPINH called an “abuse of authority.” COPINH noted that Moncada is the same judge who refused to dismiss charges against “Luciano Pineda” (Feliciano Pineda), a member of the Montana Verde community who was jailed last June after being shot and wounded by paramilitaries. (COPINH press release, Jan. 17)
On Jan. 19, Amnesty International began an international campaign to win the release of Feliciano Pineda and two other Montana Verde activists, Marcelino and Leonardo Miranda. All three were charged with the 2001 murder of Juan Reyes Gomez, another community member, in an alleged land dispute. Last December, Pineda was acquitted of homicide charges in the case, but the judge refused to dismiss theft and vandalism charges, even though the statute of limitations on those crimes had run out. The Miranda brothers were arrested on Jan. 8, 2003; they were convicted of murder in December 2003 and are each serving 25-year prison sentences, even though evidence showed that the charges were falsified in retaliation for their efforts to win recognition of their community’s land rights.
AI has adopted Pineda and the Miranda brothers as prisoners of conscience and is demanding their immediate release, as well as a full and thorough investigation into the murder of Juan Reyes Gomez. “The criminal charges against Feliciano Pineda and the Miranda brothers are part of a campaign against indigenous leaders and human rights defenders in Honduras that aims to deter them from their work to secure land titles and to protect the environment,” said AI in a press release. (AI press release, Jan. 20)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 22
EL SALVADOR: TORTURE VERDICT UPHELD
On Jan. 4 a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta reversed its own earlier ruling and upheld a jury’s $54.6 million verdict against two retired Salvadoran generals accused of responsibility for torture by soldiers under their command. The same panel had thrown the verdict out on Feb. 28, 2005, saying a 10-year statute of limitations had expired. But the panel reversed its decision after concluding that it had made factual errors on the dates. “I have never, ever heard of such a thing,” the defendants’ attorney, Kurt Klaus, Jr., said on learning that the panel had reversed its own decision.
Three Salvadorans living in the US filed the suit on May 11, 1999 under the 1991 Torture Victim Protection Act against former defense ministers Gen. Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova and Gen. Jose Guillermo Garcia, who both left El Salvador in 1989 and now live in Florida. A federal jury found the generals liable for torture in July 2002. Vides Casanova left office as defense minister on May 31, 1989, less than 10 years before the suit was filed. In addition, in its new ruling the panel decided that the statute of limitations did not apply until 1992, when the Salvadoran government signed a peace accord with the rebel Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), since until then the government “remained intent on maintaining its power at any cost and acted with impunity to do so.” (New York Times, Jan. 8)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 8
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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html
See also WW4 REPORT #117
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1440
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
from Weekly News Update on the Americas
On Jan. 5, paramilitaries who identified themselves as members of the “Autodefensas del Llano” (Plains Self-Defense) group murdered four people in the community of Matabambu, in Puerto Lleras municipality, in the southern Colombian department of Meta. The victims were campesinos Arelis Diaz, Alcibiades Pachon, Luis Guillermo Gonzales and Rafael Quinto Orjuela Diaz. The paramilitaries also forcibly disappeared four siblings–Rafael, Amir, Yurley and Esteban Rodriguez–from the La Laguna farm owned by Rafael Rodriguez in Matabambu. The two youngest siblings are minors: Yurley is 17 and Esteban is 13. Among the paramilitaries were two men recognized as active duty soldiers from the army’s Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 42.
The massacre culminated a week of attacks on area residents by military and paramilitary forces. On Dec. 31, troops from the “Motilones” Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 17 of the Mobile Brigade No. 2, headed by Lt. Avila, arbitrarily detained Norberto Lujan in the community of El Vergel, village of Santo Domingo in Vistahermosa municipality, Meta department. On Jan. 3, soldiers arbitrarily detained eight campesinos in the village of Santo Domingo, accusing them of being guerrilla sympathizers. On Jan. 4, paramilitaries who identified themselves as members of “Autodefensas del Llano” forcibly disappeared Ecelino Pineda Pena, a campesino from the community of Santa Lucia. Pineda was on a bus headed from Granada to Puerto Toledo when the paramilitaries abducted him at a roadblock. On Jan. 6, in Villa La Paz, Puerto Lleras municipality, paramilitaries detained and disappeared campesino Gildardo de Jesus Salinas Piedrahita. Pineda, Lujan and Salinas all remained missing as of Jan. 18.
Another area resident, Rosabel Rincon, was forcibly disappeared by the paramilitaries at a roadblock in an area known as Cano Blanco. She also remained missing as of Jan. 18. Rincon was abducted while returning from Vista Hermosa, where she had gone on Jan. 4 to try to get information about her daughter, Marilyn Martinez Rincon, one of the eight people detained on Jan. 3 in Santo Domingo. The eight were all supposedly released on Jan. 5 in Vista Hermosa, although only one of them managed to return home. As of Jan. 18, the whereabouts of the others were still unknown.
A number of residents were apparently wounded during the paramilitary attack in Matabambu. While paramilitaries were still in the area, members of the Human Rights Comission of the Guejear River Region in Puerto Toledo went to see Lt. Garcia, in charge of the Counter-Guerrilla Battalion No. 42 of the army’s Mobile Brigade No. 4, to ask him to provide security for the community; Garcia responded that he had not committed himself to providing security. Soldiers under his command told Commission members that the same thing that happened in Matabambu would soon happen in Puerto Toledo. Lt. Garcia then blocked residents of Puerto Toledo from fleeing the town. (Communiques from Comision Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz, Jan. 4, 5 via Red de Defensores No Institucionalizados)
Weekly News Update on the Americas, Jan. 22
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Weekly News Update on the Americas
http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html
See also WW4 REPORT #117
http://www.ww3report.com/node/1434
See our last update on state terror in Colombia:
/node/1489
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Reprinted by WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Feb. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution
