CounterVortex

SOMALIA: WHERE FUN IS FORBIDDEN

from IRIN

NAIROBI—Living in a war-torn city is hard enough for Mogadishu’s youngsters, but even those few opportunities for entertainment they used to enjoy have now been banned. Listening to music, watching football or films can earn one up to 30 lashes from the enforcers who patrol neighborhoods checking for “un-Islamic” behavior.

“We cannot watch our favourite teams, go to a movie or do anything that young people our age do,” said Loyaan Lugacade, 17, who lives in an area controlled by the militant Al-Shabab group.

The Hisbul Islam insurgent group on April 3 issued an edict claiming that playing music was un-Islamic, forcing 14 of the city’s 16 broadcasters to replace jingles with recorded gunfire, croaking frogs and crowing cockerels.

Its announcement was nothing new to Lugacade and his friends. “For six months fun was forbidden to us. Now the rest of the city is joining us,” he told IRIN.

Lugacade said the only time they could watch a football match or a film was clandestinely, at friends’ houses in areas not controlled by the insurgents.

“If you are caught you get lashed up to 30 times,” he said.

Faradheere A’day, 18, wants to watch his favourite football team, Arsenal, but not in his neighbourhood, which is controlled by insurgents, who consider it un-Islamic.

“Imagine being denied doing the most harmless things in the world! I don’t want to hurt or kill anyone. I just want to play and watch football.”

A’day was caught watching a film with friends and had to flee the enforcers to avoid being caned. “I have seen people who got lashed and it is not a pretty sight, so I run,” he told IRIN.

There is not much entertainment for young people in the war-torn city, aside from films and sport. The two Islamist groups have been fighting government troops, who are supported by African Union peacekeepers, in and around Mogadishu, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

“Movies and football used to be the only avenue of fun available to them. Now that is closed. Having fun in this town is illegal,” said a local journalist.

He said the insurgents were not winning many converts among the youth with their decrees. “I don’t think many of the youth will be lining up to join them.”

A’day said he and his friends gathered in their neighbourhoods to talk about “things like football or movies. At least talking is not forbidden – for now anyway.”

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This story first appeared April 27 on the Integrated Regional Integration Networks (IRIN), a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

From our Daily Report:

Somalia: more insurgent amputations
World War 4 Report, Oct. 12, 2009

Somalia: Islamists attack traditional dance ceremony
World War 4 Report, July 1, 2008

See also:

SOMALIA: THE NEW RESISTANCE
Successor Factions to the Islamic Courts Union
by Osman Yusuf, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, April 2007

SOMALIA CASE THREATENS WAR CRIMINALS WORLDWIDE
US Supreme Court to Rule on Sovereign Immunity
by Paul Wolf, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingSOMALIA: WHERE FUN IS FORBIDDEN 

THE MEXICAN HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY GAP

by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur

Mexico and the border are once again big news. Stories fill the press about Michele Obama and Hilary Clinton traveling south of the border to show their support for an embattled government. Report after report comes in about the latest atrocities in the so-called narco-war. Journalists rush to the border to check on the “spill-over” violence which, contrary to the assertions of Arizona Senator John McCain and others who contend the US southern border is “out of control,” has yet to materialize in a systematic way.

If my 6th grade geography lessons serve me, it would appear the violence McCain refers to is on the other side of the border line in a country called Mexico. Indeed, given the level of violence in places like Ciudad Juárez and Reynosa, it is quite noteworthy how El Paso and other places on the US side of the border are actually far less violent than many communities in the interior of the US. Is anyone proposing to send troops to Albuquerque or Oakland?

For the scary border, though, narratives are constructed, framed and then massaged into the popular consciousness. In this way, policies are shaped, sold to the public and charged to the deficit-wracked public till.

Lately, a story which has received wide exposure is the Associated Press’ piece about Chapo Guzmán gaining the upper-hand over the Juárez Cartel in the battle over Ciudad Juárez. Although the story was based on an anonymous source, it was picked up by numerous news outlets and repeated as fact in recent days.

Since the story is shrouded in secrecy, it is almost impossible to judge whether or not it is accurate. How many times have Mexican and US authorities proclaimed the death of the Tijuana cartel?

Like Tijuana, however, events on the ground strongly suggest the violence in Ciudad Juárez is far from over. Scores of people have been killed in the city this month alone, including 14 just yesterday, and nobody really knows when or if the slaughter will subside.

Last week, NPR correspondent Ted Robbins reported on the US Border Patrol training Mexican police in Nogales. The report covered a vital issue and raised key questions, but it lacked historical depth. Robbins did not mention how US military, FBI, state and local police departments and other law enforcement agencies have long trained Mexican cops—in the thousands. This has been going on for decades.

The specific skills imparted include interview/interrogation techniques, hostage taking negotiations, crime scene investigations and counterterrorism.

A good follow-up piece might examine how many of the nearly 3,400 complaints filed against Mexican soldiers with Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission since 2007 involve personnel trained by the US. A new story might look out how many of the 15,000 ex-soldiers detained during the so-called drug war, according to Mexican Defense Minister Guillermo Galvan, were trained by the US.

Will the latest round of training produce better behaved graduates?

All over the US airwaves and press these days, Tucson author Charles Bowden is a big source for Ciudad Juárez and Mexico news. Bowden provides valuable insights to a largely oblivious US public about the systemic roots and socio-economic context of the crisis raging south of the border—but he also makes some curious statements that deserve further scrutiny and comment.

For example, while speaking on Pacifica Radio this month, Bowden claimed it was difficult to find cocaine in Juarez in 1995, “because the cartels kept a lid on it.” Really? Anyone who knows the city might conclude that Bowden had arrived during a particularly bad dry spell. Cocaine has been readily available in Ciudad Juárez for decades, drug war notwithstanding.

Bowden is also quoted as saying that when he arrived in Ciudad Juárez back in the 1990s he thought he had landed in hell, but later realized it was the border city’s “Golden Age,” considering today’s slaughterhouse. Given Bowden’s experience, one must assume he was being facetious.

For scores of young women who were systematically kidnapped, raped and murdered during the 1990s, the era was anything but the Golden Age. Nor was it the Golden Age for hundreds of families which, to this day, do not know what happened to relatives, both men and women, whisked away by armed commandos only never to be seen again.

Such episodes, and the government failure to curb them, helped set the stage for the current mayhem.

Prone to the melodramatic, Bowden keeps repeating that “Ciudad Juárez is dying.” His declaration grabs the attention of radio listeners or television viewers, but is it true?

While observers will agree that Ciudad Juárez has been battered, bludgeoned and bloodied, it is quite another thing to say the city is dying. Juarenses are a tough lot, and many people are hunkering down and doing all they can to survive in and improve a place call they home.

I am thinking of the residents of Villas de Salvarcar, scene of the gruesome youth massacre last January, who are organizing a new community library, kitchen and music center for children. I am thinking of the annual Christmas Posada for the children of Lomas de Poleo. I am thinking of the young people who stood on the streets on a recent day collecting for the Red Cross. I am thinking of the young actor with the “Love Juárez” t-shirt who told director Miguel Sabido he wanted his city back.

From the numerous Juarenses who have fled to neighboring El Paso but are sticking close to home, one can observe how many people are making a long-term wager on the home base. And despite the exodus, more than one million people remain in the city.

This is not to pick on Bowden, whose contributions are duly noted, or other reporters for that matter. It’s just a reminder that is imperative for all journalists, the writer included, to scratch beyond the surface, dig into history and thoroughly probe the underbelly of the beast, so to speak.

—-

This story first appeared April 21 on Frontera NorteSur

Resources:

AP Exclusive: Sinaloa cartel wins Juarez turf war
Associated Press, April 10, 2010

Charles Bowden on “Murder City”
Democracy Now!, April 14

From our Daily Report:

Ciudad Juárez prepares monument to femicide victims
World War 4 Report, Jan. 31, 2010

Amnesty International cites Mexico on Lomas de Poleo land conflict
World War 4 Report, Dec. 13, 2009

See also:

PLAN JUAREZ
Echoes of Chiapas on Mexico’s Northern Border
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, March 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE MEXICAN HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY GAP 

IGNORING THE GRASSROOTS IN LATIN AMERICA

Powerful Popular Movements Invisible to Mainstream—and “Progressive”—Media

by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report

During several days in early August 2009, thousands of Haitian workers walked off their jobs at assembly plants near the airport in northern Port-au-Prince and marched into the center of the city to demand an increase in the national minimum wage. Supported by public university students—who back in June had added the wage increase to their own list of demands—the strikers tied up traffic, surrounded government offices, tore down United Nations flags, and threw rocks at vehicles of the 9,000-member UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), a military force which has occupied Haiti since 2004. At one point the vehicle carrying US embassy chargé d’affaires Thomas Tighe was damaged, although the embassy insisted he hadn’t been a target of the protests.

These dramatic protests barely got a mention in the US corporate media. This is not surprising: US opinion makers want us to believe that the workers, mostly young women who stitch garments for big US and Canadian apparel companies, are grateful for the chance to work at backbreaking jobs for starvation wages (they were calling for a raise to $5 a day). In fact, just as the workers were protesting, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, now the UN special envoy for Haiti, was pushing a plan to expand Haiti’s assembly plant sector. Thousands of wildcat strikers marching on the capital clearly had no place in the corporate narrative.

What is more surprising is the apparent silence of the progressive US media about the protests. Important alternative sources like The Nation, In These Times, Alternet, and “Democracy Now!” seemed to have nothing to say on the subject.

Waiting for the New York Times
Unfortunately, this fits a pattern. Our independent media tend to ignore grassroots struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean until something happens that gets them covered by NPR or the New York Times.

For years a vibrant movement was growing in Honduras, bringing together labor organizing with struggles for the environment, for the indigenous and Garífuna peoples, for women’s rights and LGBT rights. Most progressives in the United States didn’t know about this movement until the Honduran oligarchy tried to crush it with a military coup last June. Our independent media paid little attention to the cocalero (coca growers) movement in Bolivia before its leader, Evo Morales, was elected president in 2005, or to indigenous struggles in the remote Mexican state of Chiapas before the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) seized control of San Cristóbal de las Casas on January 1, 1994.

Part of the problem, of course, is just budgetary. Leftist publications simply can’t afford to maintain bureaus throughout the hemisphere. But this is less of a problem than it was 20 years ago. Many of the region’s grassroots movements are now on line. We can often get news feeds, photos, and videos direct from the organizations themselves; there are even internet news services like Adital and the Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales that specialize in covering developments from the grassroots movements.

The real reason for the lack of coverage, in my opinion, is that the US left retains a middle-class view of what’s newsworthy. Like the mainstream media, we tend to overlook the concerns and activities of “ordinary” people so that we can focus on the people with guns or government offices. This weakens us significantly—and not just in our coverage of Latin America.

Reaching Our Own Grassroots
For one thing, this orientation cuts us off from much of our potential audience. We complain that US workers show little understanding of Latin American developments, and even less interest. But what they get from the mainstream media is often just demonization of individuals like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez. On the left we frequently try to compensate by focusing on the same individuals, but presenting them in a more favorable light (and sometimes treating them as virtual demigods). Is it any wonder that working people here think of news from the hemisphere as a wonkish abstraction with no relation to their own lives?

But in fact, working people in the United States are very concerned about hemispheric affairs. Think of outsourcing and immigration; these are bread-and-butter issues for people who work for a living. The problem is that the way people think about these issues is shaped by a corporate media presentation designed to turn US workers against their counterparts to the south. Progressives should be leading the struggle against this. We should be showing people that Honduran and Haitian workers don’t actually want to work for low wages and take away our manufacturing jobs—US-trained cops and UN “peacekeepers” tear-gas them when they demand higher wages. We should be explaining that Mexicans aren’t “flooding into” our country or “invading” it—they are being forced out of their own country by the same US banks and corporations that brought us the Great Recession.

Above all, we should be informing people here about the many grassroots struggles that they can identify with: about family farmers being driven off their land because they can’t compete with subsidized US agribusiness; about parents and students fighting cutbacks in education and services; about the olvidados, the forgotten people, fighting for housing, for medical services, for decent pensions, for equal pay, for freedom from discrimination.

Solidarity Among the Forgotten
If we were really doing our job, the olvidados of the United States would be out in the streets demonstrating when they see Honduran and Haitian workers being attacked by soldiers, or when they see 44,000 Mexican electrical workers suddenly thrown off their jobs.

And solidarity can go two ways. Working people here need to know about the militant and imaginative ways working people in other countries fight back, about the mass hunger strikes, the land occupations, the “liberations” of toll highways that Latin American activists routinely use to resist budget cuts, layoffs, and corporate seizures of personal or communal property. Methods of struggle can be globalized too, after all. The sit-in by 200 laid-off workers at the Republic Windows and Doors plant in Chicago in December 2008 was inspirational for many US labor activists. What most people didn’t realize was that the workers were largely from Mexico and Central America, where workers have repeatedly occupied factories to protest illegal plant closings.

Right now the grassroots movement in Haiti is finally getting some of the coverage it should have gotten last summer, mostly as a result of January’s massive earthquake. But it’s not clear how long the interest in Haitian movements will last.

In 1972 a major earthquake in Managua exposed the corruption of the Somoza family dictatorship and hastened a revolution that toppled the government seven years later. The failure of the Mexican government to respond to the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City forced residents to organize themselves and led to the growth of the powerful urban movements we see in Mexico now. A similar process already seems to be under way among earthquake survivors in the encampments in Port-au-Prince. Will we hear about it?

—-

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, July 2007) and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.

Resources:

Why They Hate Immigrant Workers, and Why We Love Them
by David L. Wilson, MRZine, January 2009

Raising Up Another Haiti
by Beverly Bell
Common Dreams, May 2, 2010

Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales

Adital

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: electrical workers plan hunger strike
World War 4 Report, April 13, 2010

Haiti: more strikes hit maquilas
World War 4 Report, Aug. 26, 2009

Haiti: maquila workers march for wage hike
World War 4 Report, Aug. 12, 2009

Honduras: coup regime says FARC funds Zelaya backers
World War 4 Report, July 30, 2009

Bogotá claims FARC link to Ecuador’s Correa
World War 4 Report, July 18, 2009

Evo: Bolivia won’t “kneel down” to US on drug war
World War 4 Report, Oct. 18, 2008

Chicago: workers occupy factory
World War 4 Report, Dec. 8, 2008

See also:

HONDURAS: IT’S NOT ABOUT ZELAYA
by David L. Wilson, MRZine
World War 4 Report, July 2009

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Special to World War 4 Report, May 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIGNORING THE GRASSROOTS IN LATIN AMERICA 

HONDURAS AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE DRUG WAR

by Nikolas Kozloff and Bill Weinberg, NACLA News

Charges of complicity in narco-trafficking make for useful propaganda in Latin American political conflicts. Illegal drugs are such a major part of the region’s economies—right up there with oil, tourism, and legal agro-exports like coffee, beef, and bananas—that allegations of narco-corruption against anyone in the region’s power elite are never hard to find. But which charges stick against which leaders in the US media appears to have more to do with politics than fact.

The latest example of this double standard took place in 2009, following the ouster of former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya. The Los Angeles Times reported in July that Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, the archbishop of Tegucigalpa and a prominent supporter of the coup, had urged the country’s attorney general to produce drug trafficking evidence against Zelaya. “My son,” the archbishop was reported as saying, “we need that proof. It’s the only thing that will help us now.”

After the June 28 coup, the de facto government launched a vigorous PR campaign against Zelaya, accusing him of being involved in drug trafficking. The campaign began with a formal request to Interpol for an international arrest warrant on Zelaya and many of his officials. In addition to the usual charges of supposed constitutional violations, the request said the Zelaya administration had been involved in drug trafficking. Interpol declined to issue the warrant, citing sovereign immunity, and did not address the allegations. Still, linking Zelaya to drugs remained a prominent feature of the coup regime’s propaganda during its seven-month reign.

The coup-installed foreign minister, Enrique Ortez, said the government had proof that Venezuelan planes loaded with cocaine and cash had landed in Honduras with the Zelaya government’s knowledge. “Every night, three or four Venezuelan-registered planes land without the permission of appropriate authorities and bring thousands of pounds…and packages of money that are the fruit of drug trafficking,” Ortez told CNN en Español. “We have proof of all of this. Neighboring governments have it. The DEA has it.” Picking up on this, Micheletti later remarked in July that “during our short period of being in power, no small plane has landed in the country loaded with drugs, which used to happen frequently.”

Later that month, however, a cocaine-laden plane crashed on a highway in northern Honduras, the second such accident involving a drug-transporting plane since the coup. In October, the de facto government’s head of national counter-narcotics, Julián Arístides González, admitted that the number of planes smuggling cocaine through Honduras had surged since the coup. In the foregoing month alone, Arístides said, authorities had found 10 planes abandoned on runways and remote highways, compared with just four all the previous year. “These are the facts. The flights have intensified,” Arístides said. But, perhaps making a virtue of necessity, he blamed the uptick on Washington’s suspension of Drug War aid in the wake of the coup.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) told the Associated Press it could neither confirm nor deny that it was investigating the matter. The US State Department declared that official corruption in Honduras “continues to be an impediment to effective law enforcement, and there are press reports of drug trafficking and associated criminal activity among current and former government and military officials.”

Adding fuel to the fire, TV network Telemundo reported that Zelaya government officials could have been linked to Venezuelan and Colombian drug traffickers. The report fingered Héctor Zelaya, the president’s own son, as a possible mafioso. Seizing on the reports, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, met with DEA officials to discuss drug trafficking in Honduras. “Obtaining an assessment from DEA about the situation on the ground is of increasing importance in light of recent developments in Honduras and reports of possible Zelaya drug ties,” Ros-Lehtinen said.

Honduran de facto authorities even claimed that Colombia’s FARC guerilla organization was financing Zelaya supporters. The National Police said in late July that they seized a book and receipts allegedly showing payments of between $2,500 and $100,000 from the FARC to Zelaya officials to “spend in El Paraiso,” the region on the Nicaraguan border where followers of Zelaya were then gathering in wait for the ousted president’s return. Given the FARC’s disarray in the face of the Colombian government’s US-backed offensive, this seems highly improbable. Nonetheless, the Honduran attorney general’s office opened an investigation into whether Zelaya had funded demonstrations in support of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez with FARC-supplied drug money.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal on Aug. 10, columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady cited a 2005 letter purportedly intercepted by Colombian authorities from the late FARC chief Raúl Reyes to another commander listing “political contacts.” One was apparently the Honduran Democratic Unification (UD) party—which, while not Zelaya’s party, was a key voice demanding his return. So not only was this evidence pretty far removed from Zelaya, but it meant little more than that Reyes sought to propagandize the UD—even assuming the letter is real.

Decriminalization: Zelaya’s Kiss of Death?
The campaign to portray Zelaya as a drug trafficker partly rested on twisting his real position on drug policy, which evolved considerably during his time in power. In November 2008, during a regional meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Tegucigalpa, Zelaya declared his support for decriminalizing drug consumption and shifting the emphasis of anti-drug policy from interdiction to prevention. “Instead of pursuing drug traffickers,” Zelaya said, stunning the drug war stalwarts in the Honduran government, “societies should invest resources in educating drug addicts and curbing their demand.” The president went a step further the next month, when he sent President-elect Obama a letter complaining of US “interventionism” under cover of the drug war.

“The legitimate fight against drug trafficking…should not be used as an excuse to carry out interventionist activities in other countries,” he wrote, adding that it should also “not be divorced from a vigorous policy of controlling distribution and consumer demand in all countries, as well as money laundering, which operates through financial circuits and involves networks within developed countries.”

Rodolfo Zelaya, the head of a Honduran congressional commission on drug trafficking (no apparent relation to the president), told participants at the meeting that he was “confused and stunned” by the president’s new drug position. After all, this was a president who came to power on a hardline, pro-drug-war ticket.

Yet Manuel Zelaya’s new enlightened position on drugs may better reflect a growing regional consensus against the militarized approach to addressing drug trafficking. Even such conservative figures as Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón and ex-president Ernesto Zedillo have joined a growing chorus of Latin American officials who have criticized the militarized, supply-side approach to drug trafficking as both ineffective and destructive.

Nonetheless, Zelaya’s new position put him in league with other countries, especially Bolivia and Venezuela, that were no longer willing to play by Washington’s rules. Moreover, the Bush administration may have been taken aback by the Honduran’s desire to convert the US airbase at Soto Cano into a civilian airport. The base is used for Pentagon drug surveillance flights, and had housed thousands of US troops in the 1980s.

With alarm bells going off within the Bush administration, outgoing US ambassador to Honduras Charles Ford fired a warning shot across Zelaya’s bow, charging that a large portion of remittances sent by US-based Hondurans back to their home country were the product of illicit drug trafficking. Speaking to local TV media, Ford declared that 30% of the remissions were the product of money laundering. Ford was joined in his criticism by his French counterpart in Honduras Laurent Dominati, who remarked that the Central American nation was in danger of becoming a “narco-state.”

Ford’s remarks caused a diplomatic firestorm, with the Honduran foreign ministry shooting back that the ambassador’s comments were unacceptable. Having caused a diplomatic row, Ford left Tegucigalpa after three years of ambassadorial duty. And what was Ford’s next job? He served as diplomatic attaché for the US Southern Command in Miami, charged with prosecuting the Drug War in Latin America. In an interview with the Honduran daily La Prensa, Ford warned that “big people” from the Mexican, Guatemalan, and Colombian cartels had arrived in Honduras in recent years. It was up to the United States and its Latin American allies, Ford added, to counteract such influence through joint efforts such as the Merida Initiative—the multi-billion-dollar Drug War aid package for Mexico and Central America.

Zelaya himself signed on to the Merida Initiative, which includes millions in military aid. In an effort to tone down tensions, he met with new US ambassador Hugo Llorens to shore up the Merida plan. Zelaya was still critical of US drug policy, however, and declared that Washington was not doing enough to help Honduras counteract violence and the cartels. Worse, Zelaya charged that the United States was the “chief cause” of drug smuggling in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ford had been “belligerent,” Zelaya affirmed, simply because Honduras pursued diplomatic relations with Caracas, Havana, and Managua. Although Honduras received US aid, Zelaya said, this did not make his country a “vassal” of its northern benefactor.

Nostalgia for the ’80s?
To those who follow US–Latin American relations, there is a sense of déjà vu to all this. Let’s go back to the Reagan administration’s Contra war against Nicaragua some 25 years ago. In the mid 1980s, Washington launched a propaganda campaign similarly attempting to link the Sandinista government to drug trafficking.

In 1984, the CIA, which was training the Contras at the time in an effort to overthrow the Sandinistas, installed a hidden camera in the C-130 cargo plane of Barry Seal, a convicted drug runner–turned-informant. Seal then snapped an out-of-focus photo of himself with a top Sandinista official, who was likely a US spy, and a Colombian drug trafficker unloading bags of cocaine at an airstrip in Nicaragua. Oliver North, then of the National Security Agency, was intimately involved in the affair and coordinated efforts with the CIA. When the photo of Seal in Nicaragua was leaked to the press, all the major papers ran sensational articles about Sandinista drug-running. The Reagan administration used the incident for maximum PR effect, with the president displaying Seal’s photo in a nationally televised speech in March 1986.

Washington also employed a propaganda campaign in this era against Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega. In an effort to justify invasion, the US sensationalized Noriega’s links to drug trafficking. Yet throughout the 1980s, the CIA collaborated with Noriega and Colombia’s Medellín Cartel to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. “Privatized” CIA assets maintained Honduran and Costa Rican airstrips as transfer points for coke going north and guns coming south for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels. Officially derided as “conspiracy theory,” this fact has been abundantly documented since the so-called Contragate scandal broke in 1986.

In July 1989, just months before the United States invaded Panama, five key US figures associated with the Contragate scandal—North, Maj. Gen. Ricard Secord, former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, former Ambassador Lewis Tambs, and former local CIA station chief Joe Fernández—were barred from returning to the territory of US ally Costa Rica after a special commission of the country’s congress concluded that the Contra resupply network they had established on the Nicaraguan border doubled as a cocaine-smuggling operation.

After the scandal, Noriega became more useful as a scapegoat than a client. On Christmas 1989, the United States invaded Panama and installed the client regime of Guillermo Endara. President Endara was also ensconced with the cartels. As an attorney he had represented companies run by Carlos Eleta, a Panamanian business tycoon arrested in Georgia that April for conspiring to import more than half a ton of cocaine each month into the Untied States. (The indictment would be dropped after the invasion.) His vice president, Guillermo “Billy” Ford, was a co-founder and part owner of the Dadeland Bank in Miami, named in federal court testimony in the US as a repository for Medellín Cartel money.

These rather salient facts went down the Orwellian Memory Hole as the media portrayed a one-sided US victory over a corrupt narco-regime in the Christmas 1989 invasion of Panama.

Drug Charges Against US Allies Don’t Stick
A decade later, when fiery Hugo Chávez came to power in Venezuela, the US-led Drug War once again became the topic du jour. A fierce critic of US militarization in neighboring Colombia, Chávez prohibited Pentagon over-flights of Venezuelan airspace and ceased cooperating with the DEA, accusing the agency of drug running and espionage.

The Bush administration fired back, accusing the Chávez government of having “failed demonstrably” to halt the flow of drugs through Venezuela. When Chávez allied with Bolivia after the rise of the leftist former coca-growers leader Evo Morales in 2005, Washington once again went on the offensive. US officials were dismayed by Morales’ coca policy, which sought to increase the amount of coca that could be legally grown for traditional and medicinal purposes and asked farmers to voluntarily tear up their plantings above half an acre. The policy, which promised to crack down on cocaine, abandoned previous efforts of government-forced eradication of coca plants. The US State Department lambasted Bolivia for supposedly backsliding in the counter-narcotics effort.

For some contrast, let’s look at the situation in the closest US ally in South America—Colombia, where President Alvaro Uribe now hopes to open the country to permanent US military bases to police the rest of the continent against drug trafficking. Somehow, evidence of Uribe’s ties to the cartels doesn’t seem to stick.

In 2004, a single New York Times story noted the emergence of a 1991 report from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) naming Uribe as a high-level operative of the Medellín Cartel. The DIA report was released under the US Freedom of Information Act to a DC-based research group, the National Security Archives. The report asserts that Uribe, then a senator from the department of Antioquia, was “dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels.” It named him as a “close personal friend” of cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, and claimed he helped Escobar secure his seat as an auxiliary congressman.

Both Uribe and the US State Department denied the charge. But the National Security Archives’ Michael Evans said: “We now know that the DIA, either through its own reporting or through liaison with another investigative agency, had information indicating that Álvaro Uribe was one of Colombia’s top drug-trafficking figures.”

Washington portrays Uribe as a key ally in the war on drugs and terrorism, boasting that his administration has extradited 150 accused traffickers to the US, more than twice the number extradited in his predecessor’s four-year term. But there have been persistent claims that as chief of Colombia’s civil aviation authority in the late 1980s, Uribe protected drug flights. When he was governor of Antioquia between 1995 and 1997, paramilitary activity exploded in the department.

Another study in contrast is provided by Peru—second to Colombia as a US ally and anti-drug aid recipient in South America. According to the latest report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), coca cultivation fell in Colombia last year (after several years of growth) but rose 6% in Bolivia and 4.5% in Peru. Yet, the two countries are treated entirely differently. While the US has entered into a free trade agreement with Peru, it has just cut trade preferences with Bolivia—a move that could cost thousands of jobs in the country’s export industries—on the grounds the government of Evo Morales is not doing enough to combat coca cultivation.

Who Ran Honduran “Narco State”—Zelaya or Micheletti?
Some reports emerged indicating that de facto Honduran President Roberto Micheletti may have been himself tied to traffickers. The Havana-based website Cuba Debate sports a scanned version of what purports to be an undated document from the Honduran Defense Ministy that names one “Roberto Michelleti Bain” (with an evident mis-spelling) on a list of several Honduran nationals with international drug trafficking connections. His “connection” is named as the Calí Cartel and his area of operations is named as Yoro. In the ’80s, when the Calí Cartel was at its peak of power, Micheletti was a member of the local council in Yoro department, in the north of the country near the Caribbean coast. He would later successfully run for congress from Yoro.

Jean Guy Allard, the author of the article, did not answer e-mails to clarify where he acquired the document implicating Micheletti in drug trafficking. This did not stop others from the left-leaning nations of the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA) from repeating the accusations. In August, José Vicente Rangel, who has served in various high level posts within the Chávez government, made reference to the Cuban report on Venezuelan TV.

ALBA leaders said the drug spin about Zelaya was, in fact, all backwards: It is the CIA, the Pentagon, the Southern Command and drug smugglers who were really behind the coup in Honduras. Rafael Correa has voiced similar concerns—the Ecuadoran president said he had “intelligence studies showing that after Zelaya, the next destabilization effort would be me.”

“Honduras was not an isolated occurrence,” Correa said. “A de facto government which is so crude and insulting could not maintain itself without external assistance and it gets this help from powerful groups in the US and the Latin American oligarchy.”

Correa has denounced a supposed domestic and international media campaign designed to destabilize his country and link him with FARC guerrillas in Colombia. In a video which surfaced in Colombia, a FARC leader named Jorge Briceño says that his organization helped to finance Correa’s presidential campaign in 2006. Correa believes the video is part of a right-wing strategy to destabilize progressive governments in the region.

Correa rejected the claims as “clownish talk,” “idiocies” and “barbarities” (cantinfladas, tonterías and barbaridades). But he said he would appoint a commission to investigate whether any member of his campaign received “even 20 centavos from any extremist group.”

—-

A shorter version of this story appeared April 20 on the website of the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of Revolution! South America and the Rise of the New Left (Palgrave, 2008). Visit his website to see more of his work. Bill Weinberg is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000). He is the editor of World War 4 Report.

Resources:

Micheletti, vinculado al cartel de Cali, en una lista de narcos del ministerio de la Defensa
CubaDebate, July 17, 2009

From our Daily Report:

Honduras: OAS annual report cites rights violations
World War 4 Report, April 20, 2010

Honduras: cocaine flights surge in wake of coup
World War 4 Report, Oct. 15, 2009

Honduras: coup regime says FARC funds Zelaya backers
World War 4 Report, July 30, 2009

Bogotá claims FARC link to Ecuador’s Correa
World War 4 Report, July 18, 2009

Evo: Bolivia won’t “kneel down” to US on drug war
World War 4 Report, Oct. 18, 2008

See also:

HONDURAS: THE BANANA CONNECTION —AGAIN
by Nikolas Kozloff, Señor Chichero
World War 4 Report, August-September 2009

FAREWELL, GARY WEBB
The “Dark Alliance” Imbroglio and the Dark End of an Embattled Journalist
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2005

COLOMBIA: URIBE FINGERED AS DRUG-TRAFFICKER
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, September 2004

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, May 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHONDURAS AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE DRUG WAR 

FALKLANDS DISPUTE: ARGENTINE SOVEREIGNY WON’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM

by Nikolas Kozloff, Huffington Post

With Britain now moving to explore for oil and gas in the Falkland Islands, Argentina has cried foul. Buenos Aires claims that the Falklands, or the Malvinas as Argentines refer to the islands, represent a “colonial enclave” in the south Atlantic. The islands have been a British possession since 1833, and the local inhabitants consider themselves thoroughly British. Yet, Argentina claims the Malvinas as the country inherited them from the Spanish crown in the early 1800s. In 1982 Argentina seized the islands but was later expelled by a British naval force. The war was short but bloody, costing 650 Argentine and 250 British lives.

Since then the Falklands issue has moved to the backburner, but now the two countries are again at loggerheads as a result of energy resources. That’s because recently, the Brits started to drill for oil and gas beneath the Falklands seabed. But ominously, just 150 miles west of the British drilling, Argentine-Spanish consortium Repsol YPF also wants to drill, thus raising the prospect of a hydrocarbon race in the area.

There’s a lot of oil and profits to be made here: geologists estimate that there are up to 60 billion barrels of oil near the Falklands. Britain is hardly the military superpower it once was, but would probably win another showdown. The Brits have an airfield on Port Stanley with four Typhoon jets and other air defenses. That’s not very much, but the Royal Navy has already dispatched a submarine and other vessels to the area.

Recently, ARA Drummond, an Argentine vessel, had an encounter on the high seas with HMS York, a British destroyer. Drummond withdrew, but Argentine nationalism has been ratcheted up with veterans of the 1982 war protesting London outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. Argentina says it has no desire for a military confrontation, but insists it has the right to seize international supply ships headed to the Falklands and argues that British ships need permission to head into the area. Britain rejects any such notion.

Argentina has brought its claims to the United Nations, where the South American nation might attract diplomatic support. However, the Argentines undermine their cause by emphasizing narrow-minded energy sovereignty and ongoing plans for oil and gas exploration. The South Atlantic needs less oil exploration, not more.

Patagonia, a rugged region stretching hundreds of miles into Tierra del Fuego, has been particularly hard hit by oil development. The plight of one emblematic local animal, the Magellanic penguin, highlights Argentine negligence and bodes ill for the South American nation’s Falklands bid.

Plight of the Penguin
White and grey Magellanic penguins are more than two feet tall and weigh 10 to 12 pounds. They do not live in Antarctic waters, preferring instead to spend their time in temperate areas of the Southern Hemisphere. As a result, the creatures come into more frequent contact with humans and pollution than the four other penguin species that breed in Antarctica.

Like Magellan, these penguins are consummate mariners and spend half the year at sea in and around the Falklands, Argentina and southern Chile. More than a million breeding pairs are thought to nest in rookeries off the southern tip of South America and the Falklands, a neighboring archipelago. Magellanic penguins typically live in burrows and feed on offshore fish.

For the sake of the marine environment and the Magellanic penguin, Britain and Argentina need to ratchet back oil development, not promote further exploration. In recent years, scientists have grown increasingly concerned about oil pollution and its effects on these captivating animals.

Researchers are particularly concerned with the Magellanic penguin breeding home and rookery located at Punta Tombo in Argentina. Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, scientists believe the penguin population at Punta Tombo may have peaked at about 400,000 breeding pairs. But by 1997 that number had gone down to some 250,000 pairs of penguins and some ten years later the population stood at 200,000 breeding pairs.

While scientists believe that over fishing and coastal development may account for this plummeting population, oil pollution also plays a role. As they ingest oil from preening their feathers, the penguins’ immune systems are put at risk and the animals become more prone to disease. What’s more, the oil gives rise to lesions in the penguins’ stomachs and as a result the animals have difficulty digesting food.

In addition, penguins which encounter oil on the high seas have problems staying warm in cold south Atlantic waters. The oiled penguins wind up seeking refuge on land, but many of the shivering creatures will perish. That’s because oil destroys the insulating quality of penguins’ feathers. Consequently, the oiled penguin dies of hypothermia. For years, penguins have been washing up on the Patagonian shore coated with oil. At Punta Tombo the scene has been pitiful: arriving penguins must pass over other dead penguins covered in oil.

One particularly horrifying episode occurred in 1991, when a mysterious oil spill in Patagonia enveloped tens of thousands of Magellanic penguins with crude as the animals were migrating south to Punta Tombo. At the time, scientists reported that at least 16,000 penguins, and possibly double that number, perished as a result of oil contamination.

Tracing down the criminals proved more difficult: sailors told scientists that local fishermen were dumping unneeded diesel fuel into the water so that their boats could hold more fish. It’s unlikely, however, that fishermen were the sole culprits: around the time of the spill a tanker carrying crude oil had a spill or discharged its oily ballast at precisely the same time as penguins were migrating south. At the time, few companies had tankers plying Patagonian waters, just Exxon, Shell and YPF (notably, the same Argentine-Spanish firm which currently seeks to explore for oil around the Falklands).

Dr. Dee Boersma is a professor of zoology and environmental studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and a leading penguin expert. After tagging penguins with tiny sensors and radio transmitters which were glued to the animals’ back feathers, Boersma followed the creatures through use of satellite technology. What she found alarmed her: the Magellanic penguins’ foraging range, once thought to be relatively close to shore, was getting larger.

Because of oil pollution resulting from spills and the dumping of oil-contaminated bilge close to shore, penguins were obliged to hunt so far from Argentine rookeries that chicks would starve to death waiting for food. Indeed, penguins would have to cover up to 324 miles, or 147 miles from the Punta Tombo rookery, to find sustenance. Back at the nest, the bird’s mate had no other choice but to let offspring die of hunger: to leave the nest would expose the chicks to predators.

Penguins in the Crossfire
The Falklands archipelago is an important part of the wildlife equation in the South Atlantic. South Jason, an island about four miles long, supports populations of black-browed albatross (also known as mollymawks), endangered rockhopper penguin, Magellanic penguin, and prions (a small white seabird similar to a petrel).

The longstanding territorial dispute between Britain and Argentina over the Falklands, now being exacerbated by oil rivalry, complicates matters further for local penguins. Indeed, as Boersma herself has noted, the political tension “does not make negotiation of conservation treaties easier, but somehow those penguins urgently need international protection.” Boersma’s words have the ring of truth: in recent years, penguins have suffered as a result of the longstanding military legacy in the Falklands.

During the 1982 Falklands war, the Argentines laid thousands of mines on the islands. One mined area is Kidney Cove, a beach lying across from Port Stanley which is home to gentoo, king, rockhopper and Magellanic penguins. In the best of times, such restricted areas proved a boon to penguins as they were no-go zones for people. But in 2001, British troops started a fire on Jason Island, a nature reserve owned by the Falklands government, which wreaked havoc on penguins. The soldiers lit the fire in an effort to remove unexploded ordinance from the 1982 Falklands war.

At the time, conservationists claimed that the blaze, which burned for five days, killed hundreds of rockhopper penguin and albatross chicks, in addition to some adult birds. When the fire got out of control, the British military dropped water from helicopters and called out local fire crews. Teams deployed from Port Stanley reported seeing burnt penguins pitifully crawling through the grass as they attempted to flee the blaze, fanned by gusty winds. By the time the conflagration had subsided, 90% of tussock grass housing the nesting colonies was destroyed.

Falklands Murder Mystery
The military rivalry between Britain and Argentina spells bad news for penguins, and the oil race to the bottom will surely make matters worse. However, perhaps even more seriously, all that oil development in the south Atlantic will add more carbon emissions to the atmosphere and this in turn will cause disturbances to the world’s oceans, thereby destabilizing the penguins’ environment yet further.

In light of the recent past, we can’t afford to go down that road: in June, 2002, rockhopper penguins in the Falklands suffered mass starvation. On Saunders Island, more than 2,000 of the adult animals died, which represented more than a quarter of the colony’s population. While scientists declared that the cause was unclear, they added that melting Antarctic ice had left deep waters near the Falklands colder than usual. The cold waters, researchers reported, could have disrupted plankton production and reduced food availability [the 2002 die off was not the first time, however, that rockhoppers had been decimated: a similar mass killing occurred in 1986, which resulted in a halving of the population].

As if things could become no worse, six months after the rockhoppers died off Magellanic and gentoo penguins in the Falklands got hit by a mysterious ailment. As penguins washed up dead, paralyzed and dying on island shores, researchers grew puzzled. Why had the animals failed to reach their breeding grounds? Scientists had no clear explanation, though one possible hypothesis was poisoning via “red tide.” Penguins affected by the phenomenon turn up with empty stomachs which look as if they have been washed with acid. Otherwise, however, the animals appear well fed and healthy.

Red tide has been linked to an explosive increase of a type of sea plant called dinoflagellates, microscopic red phytoplankton. Scientists say these algal blooms are increasing in frequency and intensity around the world, a trend which could be associated with climate change and alterations in surface water temperatures, amongst other causes. While melting glaciers may cool waters, red tide is thought to be associated with warmer temperatures. Problematically, larger animals feed on the tiny plants which concentrate toxins in tissues.

Penguin from Ipanema
Brazilian beaches are known for scanty bathing suits and tanning lotion, not penguins. Yet, in recent years pleasure seekers have been shocked to find an enormous number of these creatures washing up on shore. While ocean currents could be expected to propel some Magellanic penguins as far as Brazil, far from their homes in southern Argentina, 2008 was different.

In that year, more than 1,000 penguins floated ashore looking gaunt and exhausted. Some had lost three quarters of their body weight. On Copacabana Beach, lifeguards watched dumbfounded, brushed up on how to administer first aid to the animals, and set up triage stations for the birds. Drying the penguins with blankets and towels, the guards arranged for the animals’ transport to local zoos. Sometimes, guards would have to stop beachgoers from seeking to take care of the birds. Not knowing any better and thinking that the penguins would enjoy the cold, locals would place the creatures in buckets of ice.

In desperation, zoos built new storage spaces for the traumatized arrivals. Veterinarians attended penguins with broken flippers or open wounds, while injecting the animals with vitamins, glucose injections and antibiotics. Some penguins lay catatonic in plastic crates. In order to relieve the pressure on zoos and marine centers, some Brazilian animal lovers took in other survivors. In a surreal scene, people purchased plastic igloos for the penguins and attempted to feed the young with whole sardines. When that failed, caretakers prepared fish smoothies in the blender.

Scientists did not know what had caused the massive penguin exodus, though one possibility was that ocean currents had been disrupted. Normally, Magellanic penguins leave their colonies in southern Argentina and ride the cold and plankton-laden waters of the Falklands Current, looking for sardines. The Falklands Current flows north along the coast of South America and eddies from a second current, the Benguela, flow across the Atlantic towards Brazil. Normally, penguins would turn back after coming into contact with warmer Benguela waters, but in 2008 the current was exceptionally cold.

Today, scientists are only beginning to gather information on eddies moving across the Atlantic and seek to understand where and why the Falklands Current ends. Antonio Busalacchi, an oceanography and climate expert at the University of Maryland, declares “Clearly we’ve been seeing changes in the ocean circulation in the Southern Hemisphere. The question for the future, and we don’t have an answer yet, is how is that going to shift against the backdrop of climate change?”

Perhaps, human activity has thrown off penguins’ migratory cycle. “The penguin population is intimately linked to their supplies of food, so this suggests something is happening to the population of fish they eat,” remarks Marcelo Bertellotti, a biologist at the National Patagonic Centre in Puerto Madryn, Argentina. “It appears the penguins are not finding fish where they normally do, and one reason could be that warming waters and climate change have impacted the fish population,” he adds.

Falklands: Further Oil Development Must Be Halted
In light of these disturbing developments, what is urgently needed right now is more scientific study and international environmental cooperation in the south Atlantic, not saber rattling. Unfortunately, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner seems to be whipping up nationalist fervor in order to divert public attention from her own political problems on the domestic front, much as the Argentine military junta calculated in 1982.

Perhaps, if Argentina wished to attract more sympathy for its claims on the Falklands, it would declare a moratorium on oil exploration in the archipelago. Were Kirchner to make such an argument and have credibility, however, she would have to come to grips with the pernicious environmental effects of oil development in her own country.

Kirchner knows all about it as she’s had longstanding ties to Patagonia. Her husband and Argentine president before her Néstor Kirchner was at one time a governor in the region. Cristina, meanwhile, held several positions in the local legislature. It might be said that the Kirchners are, in fact, true “penguins,” as inhabitants of Patagonia are known in Argentina.

Yet, President Kirchner is an unlikely environmental champion on the international stage as she has already heralded oil development in the Gulf of San Jorge in Patagonia. Reportedly, Venezuela’s state oil company PdVSA will contribute to oil exploration in the area, hardly a promising sign given the firm’s negative environmental track record at home.

Boersma, who has become a veritable Jane Goodall of penguins, recently published a paper in the journal Bioscience. In it, she warned that some penguin species might be headed for extinction because of catastrophic changes in oceans and coastlines. She wants a broad international group to check on the most substantial colonies of each penguin species at least once every five years to look after populations, determine the most severe threats to them, and interpret what any changes might signify for the well-being of the world’s oceans.

Boersma has made a succinct case for further action. Hopefully, Britain and Argentina are paying attention.

—-

This story first appeared March 15 on Huffington Post

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet, to be released in a couple of weeks with Palgrave-Macmillan. Visit his website at http://www.nikolaskozloff.com

From our Daily Report:

Falklands war redux?
World War 4 Report, Feb. 21, 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, April 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution
 

Continue ReadingFALKLANDS DISPUTE: ARGENTINE SOVEREIGNY WON’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM 

“REBUILDING HAITI”—THE SWEATSHOP HOAX

by David Wilson, MRZine

Within days of a January 12 earthquake that devastated much of southern Haiti, the New York Times was using the disaster to promote a United Nations plan for drastically expanding the country’s garment assembly industry, which employs low-paid workers to stitch apparel for duty-free export, mainly to the US market. This, according to several opinion pieces in the Times, is the way to rebuild Haiti.

The outlines of the plan were drawn up a year earlier, in January 2009, by Oxford economist Paul Collier, but the leading proponents of development through sweatshops have been liberal Democrats in the United States.

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus pushed hard for HOPE and HOPE II, the 2006 Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement Act and its 2008 extension; these acts make the plan possible by giving preferential treatment to US imports of apparel assembled in Haiti.

UN Special Envoy for Haiti Bill Clinton, the former US president, has provided much of the PR for the plan; in the fall of 2009 he organized a special meeting to encourage foreign business investment in Haiti. Liberal US financier and philanthropist George Soros is helping build a new $45 million industrial park near Port-au-Prince’s impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood as part of the plan’s implementation.

Adding to the project’s liberal credentials, in August 2009 Bill Clinton made Dr. Paul Farmer his deputy UN special envoy. Harvard professor Farmer is widely respected for his medical work in Haiti; he is a founder of Partners in Health/Zanmi Lasante and is on the board of directors of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH), a US-based left-liberal advocacy group.

The Fall of the Maquiladoras
The plan’s liberal supporters sometimes admit that assembly plant jobs may not be the very best type of employment. But Haitians need work, they say, and the new sweatshops will create jobs—as many as “several hundred thousand,” according to Prof. Collier’s description of the plan. What the liberals don’t explain is where they think the jobs will come from.

The garment export industry in the Caribbean Basin has been in a sharp decline for the past five years. The current round of jobs losses in the region’s apparel maquiladoras—the Spanish name for the assembly plants—started with the growth of competition from industrial powers like China and has intensified with the economic crisis in the United States, the main market for the industry’s products.

The Dominican Republic, Haiti’s closest neighbor, lost 73,000 garment jobs from 2005 through 2007, according to an informative article by Marion Weber and Jennifer Blair in the July/August 2009 NACLA Report on the Americas. The six countries that signed on to the 2005 Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA)—in addition to the Dominican Republic, the US-sponsored trade zone includes Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua—saw their combined exports fall from a 13.3% share of the US import market in 2004 to 9.8% in 2008.

The job situation continues to deteriorate. Garment jobs in the Dominican “free trade zones” (FTZs)—the special areas where the maquilas are clustered—fell another 15.05% in 2008, from 58,546 to 49,735. In Honduras, site of Latin America’s most recent coup d’état, textile and apparel production for the first six months of 2009 was down by 17.9% compared to the same period the year before. The Honduran maquiladora sector lost 15,000 jobs in 2008 and about 8,000 in the first eight months of 2009, leaving it with some 114,000 employees.

By September 2009 Guillermo Matamoros, a leader in the Honduran assembly industry, was giving up on apparel and pushing a new type of maquiladora: call centers and software centers in the north of the country, which he said could generate 25,000 to 40,000 new jobs because of the large number of Hondurans who are bilingual in English and Spanish.

Magical Thinking on Jobs
Of course, the US market for imported apparel is expected to grow back if the economic crisis recedes, but it’s hard to see how that by itself would produce several hundred thousand new jobs for Haiti.

People in the United States tend to think irrationally about things like job creation. Many of us believe that immigration reduces the number of jobs available for US citizens, while the same people often swallow the idea that building new industrial parks in Port-au-Prince will magically create jobs for Haitians.

The reality is exactly the opposite. If Haitian immigrants were stitching garments in New York or Los Angeles at jobs with standard wage rates, they and their dependents would be able to pay for decent housing and staples like food and clothing. This would stimulate job creation, and the new jobs would make up for the jobs the immigrants had taken—as in fact happened in the past when the United States produced its own apparel in union shops. But if the same Haitians work in assembly plants in Port-au-Prince or in the FTZ near the Dominican border in Ouanaminthe, they have to accept wages at about one-twentieth the rate they would get in the United States. These workers are barely able to scrape by; their spending can do little to stimulate job creation either in Haiti or in the region as a whole.

But the UN plan isn’t really about creating jobs; it’s about relocating them. The key, according to Prof. Collier, lies in Haiti’s “propitious fundamentals”—its “poverty and relatively unregulated labor market” and “labor costs that are fully competitive with China.” Add Haiti’s location near the United States: it’s “on the doorstep of its market.” Haiti is the “only low-wage economy in the region,” Collier writes, meaning that the maquilas in nearby countries just can’t compete with Haitian factories paying a minimum wage of around $3.05 a day, approximately half the minimum in the Dominican FTZs.

So when the professors and politicians say they will help Haitian workers by giving them jobs, what they really mean is that they plan to take the jobs away from Dominican, Mexican, and Central American workers—and pay the Haitians even less for doing the same work. It’s no wonder that the American Apparel and Footwear Association (AAFA), a US manufactures’ organization, hopes to “play a responsible and proactive role in Haiti’s overall recovery.”

Rerunning the Race to the Bottom
The jobs the Haitians will get are only temporary, in any case. Haitian workers have been through all this before.

Haiti pioneered export-based development plans in the 1970s under Jean-Claude Duvalier (“Baby Doc”). Once assembly plants started operating in Haiti, other parts of the region followed suit under the Reagan administration’s 1984 Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI). The brief boom in the Caribbean apparel industry ended when jobs started going to Mexico because of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexican workers became still more “competitive” after 1994, thanks to an economic crisis and a currency devaluation (a de facto wage cut). The Mexicans in turn lost jobs to lower-paid Chinese workers as the new millennium started. Dominican and Central American manufacturers responded with DR-CAFTA and, predictably, more wage cuts. And yet the job losses have continued.

Anti-sweatshop activists Barbara Briggs and Charlie Kernaghan used to warn back in the 1990s that this type of “economic development” would create a “race to the bottom” in which workers in different countries would have to compete by accepting lower and lower wages. And that’s exactly what happened.

Haitians have learned not to listen to people like Prof. Collier and Special Envoy Clinton. In August 2009 thousands of Haitian sweatshop workers went on strike to demand a higher minimum wage. They ignored arguments that they needed to keep their wages competitive—it took tear gas and UN troops to get them back into the factories. Grassroots organizations meeting in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake have been working on proposals for rebuilding Haiti through a sustainable development plan rooted in Haitian reality. “Not more of the same,” Camille Chalmers of the Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA) said in late January, “but something really alternative and popular.”

Maybe it’s time to listen to the Haitians for a change.

—-

This story first appeared March 4 in Monthly Review’s online MRZine

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, July 2007) and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas. He was in Port-au-Prince to interview Haitian activists about the UN development plan when the earthquake struck on January 12.

Resources:

Some Frank Talk about Haiti
Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, January 20, 2010

Building Haiti’s Economy, One Mango at a Time
Paul Collier and Jean-Louis Warnholz, New York Times, January 28, 2010

Thinking About a New Haiti
editorial, New York Times, February 1, 2010

The “Shock Doctrine” for Haiti,
Ashley Smith, Socialist Worker, February 8, 2010

Food Wars
Walden Bello and Mara Baviera, Monthly Review, July-August 2009.

A Helping Hand for Haiti
Rep. Kendrick Meek, The Louisiana Weekly, June 20, 2008

Still Fragile, Haiti Makes Sales Pitch,” New York Times, October 5, 2009.
Marc Lacey, New York Times, October 5, 2009

Haiti-based WIN Group and Soros Economic Development Fund Announce a $45 Million Commercial Zone in Haiti
Business Wire, October 6, 2009, via Reuters

After Sweatshops? Apparel Politics in the Circum-Caribbean
Marion Werner and Jennifer Bair, NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2009

Textiles and Apparel Will Play Key Role in Haiti Recovery
Textile World, February 9, 2010

Raising Up Another Haiti
Beverly Bell, Common Dreams, February 23, 2010;

Camille Chalmers: “We Call for Solidarity Between the People”
Anarkismo.net, February 3, 2010

Haitian Platform to Advocate Alternative Development (PAPDA)
http://www.papda.org/

Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti
http://ijdh.org/

From our Daily Report:

Haiti: more strikes hit maquilas
World War 4 Report, Aug. 26, 2009

Haiti: maquila workers march for wage hike
World War 4 Report, Aug. 12, 2009

Honduras: will maquilas survive the coup?
World War 4 Report, Sept. 30, 2009

Honduras: economy could “quickly buckle”
World War 4 Report, Sept. 3, 2009

See also:

HELPING HAITI: OUR DOLLARS AREN’T ENOUGH
by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, February 2010

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, April 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue Reading“REBUILDING HAITI”—THE SWEATSHOP HOAX 

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Fischbach, Michael, The Peace Process and Palestinian Refugee Claims, United States Institute of Peace, Washington DC, 2006

Fischer, Louis, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology, Vintage Books, New York, 1963

Fisher, Sydney Nettleton, The Middle East: A History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1969

Flapan, Simha, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987

Gee, John R., Unequal Conflict: The Palestinians and Israel, Olive Branch Press, Brooklyn, NY, 1998

Gerner, Deborah J., One Land, Two Poeples: The Conflict Over Palestine, Westview Press, Boulder, 1994

Gilbert, Martin, The Arab-Israeli Conflict, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1974

Gross, Feliks, European Ideologies: A Survey of 20th Century Political Ideas, Philosophical Library, New York, 1948

Hadawi, Sami, Palestine: Loss of a Heritage, Naylor, San Antonio 1963

Hadawi, Sami, Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine, Olive Branch Press, New York, 1989

al-Haq /Law in the Service of Man, Punishing A Nation: Israeli Human Rights Violations During the Palestinian Uprising, December 1987-December 1988, South End Press, Boston, 1988

Hertzberg, Arthur, ed., The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis and Reader, Atheneum, New York, 1970

Herzog, Chaim, The Arab-Israeli Wars, Vintage Books, New York, 1984

Hitti, Philip K., The Arabs: A Short History, Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1943

Hourani, Albert, A History of the Arab Peoples, Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002

Karmi, Ghada & Cotran, Eugene, eds., The Palestinian Exodus, 1948-1998, Ithaca Press, Reading, UK, 1999

Khouri, Fred J., The Arab-Israeli Dilemma, Syracuse University, 1968

Kimmerling, Baruch, Politicide: The Real Legacy of Ariel Sharon, Verso Books, London, 2003

Kinross, John Patrick Douglas Balfour, Baron, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire, Morrow Quill, New York, 1977

Lartéguy, Jean, The Walls of Israel, Lippincott, New York, 1968

Lee, Martin A., The Beast Reawakens, Little Brown, Boston, 1997

Lewis, Bernard, The Arabs in History, Oxford University, 1950

Lewis, Bernard, The Jews of Islam, Princeton University, 1984

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Morris, Benny, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, Vintage Books, New York, 2001

Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge University, 2004

Najeebabadi, Akbar Shah, The History of Islam, Darussalam, Riyadh, 2000

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Continue ReadingBibliography 

THE RUINS OF JUAREZ

Echoes of Chiapas on Mexico’s Northern Border

from Frontera NorteSur

Approaching Ciudad Juárez from the south, passengers on a commercial bus got a hard look at the world’s most violent city. Halted at a checkpoint outside the city limits, the bus was inspected by Mexican soldiers before being allowed to proceed. Heading into the crime-torn city, the bus chugged past the twisted piles of steel and mounds of rubble that pock-mark junkyards. Federal police, who arrived in reinforced numbers this month, roamed about on motorcycles or in pick-up trucks.

At the city bus terminal, Mexican soldiers forced passengers to open their bags. Next in line, an official from the National Immigration Institute asked to see identifications. For those travelers heading on to El Paso, Texas, just across the border, additional inspections awaited before departing the bus station: the random red light/green light search conducted by Mexican Customs and a mandatory one conducted by more Mexican soldiers whose probing hands methodically combed through personal belongings.

Off to El Paso, the bus skirted the Camino Real Hotel, where just the previous day President Felipe Calderón spoke to an elite gathering about what might be termed Plan Juárez.

Officially, the federal government’s Plan Juárez is touted as a comprehensive response to a multifaceted crisis that has transformed this border city into a war zone between competing criminal gangs.

Plunging into Ciudad Juárez, the bus roared by the endless campaign posters for the Chihuahua gubernatorial campaign and the hefty billboard boasting of the success of the recently completed Conejos-Medanos aqueduct, the privatized water delivery system managed by one of Carlos Slim’s companies.

Zipping through light traffic, the bus glided by empty commercial buildings where “For Sale” or “For Rent” signs proliferated. Fences, gates, iron grills and barbed wire stood out as architectural amenities.

Aesthetically, Ciudad Juárez is a landscape of exclusion and enclosure, with even the view along El Paso’s Paisano Drive on the other side of the Rio Grande blocked by a new fence constructed on the US side.

To keep bus passengers in the mood, a local radio station, 107.5 FM, “La Zeta,” blasted romantic songs and hot cumbias. Ads promoted the opening of a new disco, and recurrent spots from the Federal Electoral Institute proclaimed, “Our Democracy Grows.”

Suddenly, as the bus entered the final approach to the Bridge of Americas leading into El Paso, the traffic came to a halt. Emerging from the shadows, a Mexican soldier scoured commercial trucks with a hand-held drug detection device. Another soldier soon jumped aboard the bus and ordered all the men to get off with their carry-on bags. “Routine revision,” he barked.

One by one, each man was hand-patted and his bags searched. No incriminating evidence was found, and the women passengers were not searched. In all, the bus passengers traveling through Ciudad Juárez that day were stopped, searched, carded or green-lighted/red-lighted six times before arriving to US Customs, where a final ID check and baggage scan was carried out. Anyone surviving the Lucky Seven was now on US soil.

Plan Juárez
Despite the deployment of thousands of Mexican soldiers and a reinforced contingent of Federal Police ostensibly to suppress the criminal gangs, violence has only worsened in Ciudad Juárez since January 2008, when the long-simmering drug war exploded in fury. More than 4,600 people have been slain, and anywhere from 30,000 to 420,000 people have fled from a city that was nudging 1.5 million inhabitants prior to the war, according to wildly varied estimates.

Although it is impossible to know the exact number of refugees due to the silent and secret nature of the population flight, 100,000 or more people might have simply slipped across the Rio Grande to El Paso. Others have fled north to New Mexico or south to Veracruz, among other refuges.

Ciudad Juárez residents had long been fleeing the insecurity of their city, but the 2008 war turned a steady trickle of refugees into a torrent of expatriates.

Coinciding with the deepest economic crisis in decades, about 10,000 businesses have shut their doors in Ciudad Juárez since 2007, according to the Mexican employers’ organization Coparmex. Another business association, the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, estimates that at least 2,000 businesses have suffered extortions at least once. Mom and pop neighborhood stores, the beloved “changarros” of former President Vicente Fox, have been especially hard hit.

The blood of Ciudad Juárez burst onto Mexican national television when 15 people, mostly teenagers, were gunned down at a party held in the Villas de Salvarcar neighborhood on Jan. 30.

Responding to the national outcry, President Calderón rolled out Plan Juárez. Combining a strengthened military and police presence with an initial investment of $50 million in new educational, health, drug rehabilitation and welfare programs, Plan Juárez proposes to reconstruct a shredded social fabric and restore the hegemony of the state.

Headed by Ciudad Juárez native and Secretary of Agrarian Reform Abelardo Escobar, a troika was appointed by President Calderón to oversee a campaign that is officially dubbed “Todos Somos Juárez,” or “We are all Juárez.” The name is an ironic appropriation of the 1994-95 grassroots slogan, “We are all Marcos,” which emerged in support of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas.

Echoes of Chiapas surround Plan Juárez. A second member of the troika is iconic National Action Party (PAN) politician Luis H. Alvarez, who served as a point man in the Mexican government’s unsuccessful dealings with the Zapatista rebels.

A textile industrialist by profession and a Chihuahua native by birth, Alvarez has served as mayor of Chihuahua City, federal senator and president of the PAN. With former Chihuahua State Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez now at the helm in the federal attorney general’s office, prominent Chihuahenses will have a key hand in steering Plan Juárez.

President Calderón’s plan has received decidedly mixed reviews. For instance, Dr. Felipe Fornelli Lafont, coordinator of directors for the Ciudad Juárez municipal government, wondered aloud how adding 270,000 people to a government-run medical insurance program will play out in a city already beset by insufficient services and a shortage of medical professionals.

“Where are they going to attend them?” Fornelli questioned. “The infrastructure doesn’t exist.”

The father of Rodrigo Cadena, one of the victims of the Villas de Salvarcar massacre, Adrian Cadena told a Mexican television host he was living the “saddest moments of my life.” Cadena said he trusted Mexican authorities, but stressed that he and other Villas de Salvarcar parents will carefully monitor Plan Juárez. Calling for improved educational access and better sports facilities for youths in Ciudad Juárez, Cadena criticized local schools for charging enrollment and tuition fees.

“If there is some way to relieve the pain, it is to see that young people get professional training,” Cadena said.

Civil society activists are divided over participating in the citizen committees formed to help shape Plan Juárez. At a Feb. 17 appearance in Ciudad Juárez, his second visit to the city in one week, President Calderón was shielded by a cordon of soldiers and federal cops.

Outside the Camino Real Hotel, university students and members of the National Front against Repression demanded the resignation of Calderón and the withdrawal of the Mexican army, which has been accused of hundreds of human rights abuses in Ciudad Juárez during the last two years. Besides roughing up five local reporters, federal policemen detained several demonstrators.

Chihuahua state lawmaker Victor Quintana and labor/human rights activist Cipriana Jurado, both prominent critics of the military’s presence and members of the opposition PRD party, were excluded from the Feb. 17 meeting with Calderón.

Disproportionately impacted by the violence, some youths are protesting in the streets or boldly declaring their disgust with political leaders. During a February 22 visit to a high school attended by three of the Villas de Salvarcar victims, Chihuahua Governor José Reyes Baeza was scolded by angry classmates of the murdered students.

A tearful 17-year-old identified only as Daniel, questioned the governor: “While you are here, they are killing many [people] outside. Who can tell me that when I leave school I will not be kidnapped or run across a store which is shot up because they did not pay the [extortion] quota?”

Juarez is Mexico…and the US
Villas de Salvarcar thrust Ciudad Juárez, a place viewed by many residents of the Mexican interior as a remote, god-forsaken hellhole, into the national spotlight. For days, the massacre and subsequent government response dominated the headlines and airwaves. A columnist and political analyst for the Aguascalientes edition of the national daily La Jornada, Fernando Rivera has a friend in Ciudad Juárez who is shutting down his business and moving to El Paso. Rivera wrote a column in La Jornada this month entitled “Juárez is Mexico.”

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Rivera said a grave situation exists in a city that has “more deaths than Iraq” but is located in a nation where “supposed freedom and democracy” prevail.

Concerned the Ciudad Juárez Syndrome could take hold across Mexico, Rivera cited the recent cases of two youths from Leon, Guanajuato, who were accused of being hired killers.

“They were ready to die for $200 every two weeks or $400 every month,” Rivera said. “I’m not afraid of the Mexico I am going to leave my son. I am afraid of the Mexico I live in,” he added.

A media critic, Rivera expressed skepticism that national coverage of Ciudad Juárez will extend beyond President Calderon’s trips before reverting back to trivial obsessions like the condition of singer Alejandra Guzmán’s buttocks. Rivera compared Ciudad Juárez to Chiapas in 1994, when the Zapatista uprising resulted in an infusion of government money but little or no structural change in the social, political and economic order that provoked violence in the first place.

What’s more, the writer added, killings like the 1997 massacre of scores of civilians in Acteal, Chiapas, have largely gone unpunished and left a bitter legacy of criminal impunity and historical denial.

“We can’t be like ostriches with our necks stuck in the ground and our bodies above it, and evade responsibility,” Rivera asserted. “We can’t forget Juárez. They are my countrymen. They are Mexicans.”

In a separate interview, Dr. Howard Campbell, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, told Frontera Norte the violence in his sister city had personally impacted students from Ciudad Juárez who attend the US campus.

The author of a new book chronicling the deep-rooted narco-culture that permeates both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez (Drug War Zone, University of Texas, 2009), Campbell said Villas de Salvarcar could mark a watershed in the violence that was allowed to rip apart the Mexican border city.

“It was sad to see killings without any protests,” Campbell said. “The Villas de Salvarcar massacre has finally prompted people in both cities to organize, to pressure, to do anything they can.”

Together with other intellectuals and civic leaders, Campbell supported a Feb. 9 resolution of the El Paso City Council that condemned the Ciudad Juárez violence and urged Washington to make Mexico a foreign policy priority.

But Campbell was also skeptical that Plan Juárez and “whirlwind” tours by President Calderón and other politicians could succeed in rebuilding a city that is fast becoming what amounts to a vast and violent holding pen for the poor.

“What they need is a Marshall Plan for the city,” Campbell contended. “What they’re getting is a few bones.”

The Pharaoh of Vice
The decay of Ciudad Juarez is evident to any pedestrian who saunters across the Santa Fe Bridge from El Paso to the once-bustling but now subdued Avenida Juárez. A shuttered door with a painted image, dripping red in simulation of blood, sums up the scene: “Sufferings because of these hired killers.”

Hanging next to the message, a faded poster appealed for information on the whereabouts of 43-year-old Manuela Juárez Varela, one of hundreds or even thousands of people reported vanished and forgotten in the border’s mean bowels. Down the street, a big electronic bulletin flashed news of the latest decapitations in Michoacán to the south.

Behind the Avenida, off to the right, stands the remains of the legendary Mariscal red light district, which is getting razed for gentrification.

Once the cross-border center of fun, foolishness and fraud, the Mariscal is a shell of its former self. Displayed yards from the walls where a painted Frida Kahlo butterfly and anti-femicide graffiti blend into a semi-psychedelic, gender-conscious street mural, a missing persons’ poster for 17-year-old Jessica Monserrat rose up over the rubble.

Across the street, the collapsing Pharaoh-like head above the entrance of the old Las Vegas Club signaled the end of an old empire and the possible beginning of a new one.

A man who billed himself as a “security guard” complained the urban renewal will throw many people out of work—barmen, sex workers, fast-food sellers, flower peddlers and the like. “The situation is going to be bad for people who work here,” he predicted.

A hint of what could be in store for the new unemployed was found on the nearby Santa Fe Bridge. On a late Friday afternoon, usually a peak travel time back to El Paso, the bridge was eerily deserted. At one point, not even a single car was spotted on the hump of the crossing that unites the world’s most dangerous city with one of the safest ones in North America.

While beggars were always part of the bridge scene, the panhandlers seemed more numerous and desperate than ever before. Almost tugging at walkers’ shirt-sleeves, insistent voices refused to take no for an answer and kept pleading for a few pesos.

Back in the news cycle, Ciudad Juárez television stations and newspapers resumed their daily barrage of guns, guts and gore. A man named José Guadalupe Chávez was shot and killed at a mechanic’s shop. A 19-year veteran homicide investigator for the Chihuahua state attorney general’s office, Enrique Castañeda Ogaz, was gunned down elsewhere. An additional victim was slain in broad daylight practically under the noses of the soldiers and federales stationed in and around the Santa Fe Bridge.

As US soldiers from Ft. Bliss rubbed shoulders with trendy, young juarenses in El Paso’s thriving nightclubs, the US media flashed images and sound-bites of wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Growing tensions over Iran and the Israeli Hamas assassination scandal were other stories. Locally, two El Paso-area men were arrested for kidnapping another man on the US side and delivering him to Ciudad Juárez for slaughter.

But the big story of the day, repeated over and over, was Tiger Woods’ public apology.

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This story first appeared Feb. 23 on Frontera NorteSur.

Resources:

Todos Somos Juárez
http://www.todossomosjuarez.gob.mx

Plan Estrategico de Juárez
http://www.planjuarez.org

From our Daily Report:

Ciudad Juárez marches against narco violence, militarization
World War 4 Report, Feb. 15, 2010

Juárez worse than Baghdad?
World War 4 Report, March 12, 2009

Mexico: sentences overturned in Acteal massacre
World War 4 Report, Aug. 16, 2009

Mexico: Calderon targets Chiapas
World War 4 Report, Dec. 18, 2006

See also:

MEXICO: BORDER MILITARIZATION CONTINUES IN 2010
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, February 2010

See related story, this issue:

DRUG SURVEILLANCE DRONES FREQUENT FLYERS IN LATIN AMERICA
by Marcelo Ballvé, New America Media
World War 4 Report, March 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, March 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE RUINS OF JUAREZ