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THE QUEENS BLACKOUTS: KENNETH LAY’S REVENGE?

by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT

It’s a neat little ironic juxtaposition of headlines that the July 5 passing of former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay—while awaiting sentencing on securities fraud and a host of related charges—came just days before several neighborhoods in the New York City borough of Queens were plunged into darkness and sweltering heat. Certainly the Queens blackouts are nothing so dramatic as those which plagued California in 2000-1, when Enron and its ilk were riding high. Nor are they likely as intentional—although the degree to which Enron contrived the California crisis was never revealed until months after the fact. But the chaos and misery in Queens is likewise the bitter fruit of energy deregulation.

On July 21, when many Queens residents had been without power for five days, local politicians began calling for dramatic action. Assemblyman Michael Gianaris of Astoria demanded a “criminal investigation of Con Edison on the grounds of reckless endangerment.” City Councilman Peter Vallone, also of Queens, chimed in: “Heads need to roll. Con Ed has sent us back to the dark ages. People of this community want to storm Con Ed with…pitchforks.”

Con Ed estimated that 25,000 customers were without power in the neighborhoods of Astoria, Sunnyside, Woodside, Long Island City and Hunters Point. Streetlights were dead and usually bustling commercial districts were deserted. Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who had been giving the utility the benefit of the doubt, said he was “annoyed” that its original estimate of those without power was just 25,000. Bloomberg said that 25,000 paying customers translated into 100,000 people without electricity.

On July 19, when the blackouts were at their worst, even local subway lines were slowed. Brutally, this also corresponded with the peak of a local heat wave. Con Ed, which claimed not to know the cause of the failure, reported that day that 10 of the 22 feeder cables that supply the area with power were down simultaneously

On July 21, New York’s WABC News reported that a check of New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) data showed continued under-spending on maintenance. In a three-year period in which Con Ed budgeted $32 million dollars for maintenance in Queens and Brooklyn, the utility actually only spent $27 million, the report found. Gerald Norlander of the Public Utility Law Project told ABC: “Maintenance data suggests that Con Ed is spending less on regular preventative maintenance in the system and that needs to be investigated.”

WABC also quoted Ariel Antonmarchi, a former Con Ed worker who said he was fired for blowing the whistle on poor maintenance: “It’s not only the feeders. That’s what Con Ed is leading the public to believe. It’s the whole infrastructure. In Queens, and in certain areas, it is not being kept up.” Con Ed, of course, disputed the claims, insisting it has spent billions upgrading the system.

But as early as January, 2003, Con Ed and other New York utilities were petitioning the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) for new rules that would reduce their legal liability for damages arising from blackouts or system failures.

The New York PSC already exempts Con Ed from liability for “ordinary” negligence. Lawyers for the City of New York were able to prove “gross” negligence on Con Edison’s part following the devastating July 1977 New York blackout, even though it was initially precipitated by a lightning strike. However, the liability of utilities for damages due to the August 2003 Northeast blackout—the first significant outage of the post-deregulation era—remains uncertain.

The very structure of deregulation makes the grid more vulnerable, many experts warn. FERC’s Order 888 mandated the “wheeling” of electric power across utility lines as one of the first steps towards deregulation in 1996. Order 888 was held up in litigation until March 2000, when it was approved by the US Supreme Court and took effect. But critics—including some in the federal government—warned that the new policy would have a destabilizing effect. “The system was never designed to handle long-distance wheeling,” Loren Toole, a transmission-system analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory told The Industrial Physicist journal in an article following the 2003 blackout.

The bitter irony is that, having effectively gotten out of the generation business under New York state’s deregulation plan, nearly all Con Ed has to do these days is to maintain the cables. The 2003 blackout—although apparently originating from a power surge at Ohio’s Toledo Edison—was the first indication that New York’s grid was seriously vulnerable.

Under the deregulation regime, which took effect in New York in the summer of 1999, out-of-state companies are encouraged to purchase or build local power plants and sell the electricity to the local utility, which is to serve as a broker rather than a producer. So California’s Pacific Gas & Electric was compelled to purchase from Texas-based Enron, and finally forced into bankruptcy by the power disruptions. This same PG&E was simultameously building a natural gas plant at Athens, on New York’s Hudson River—to sell power to Northeast utilities, which are likewise getting out of the local generation biz. (After PG&E’s bankruptcy, the Athens plant was taken over by a consortium led by Morgan Stanley.)

Queens residents are especially miffed that their communities host a disproportionate share of the city’s power plants, which have been the focus of local citizen campaigns around their health impacts. The three plants currently operating in the western Queens area have all been sold off by Con Ed. The largest is the 1,753-megawatt Ravenswood Generating Station, owned by KeySpan Energy; the 1,090-megawatt Astoria Generating Station is owned by Orion Power Holdings, and the 1637-megawatt Poletti Power Plant is owned by the New York State Power Authority (which actually purchased it from Con Ed when it was first built in the ’70s).

KeySpan, owner of the massive Ravenswood, is the successor company to the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO), which was forced to relinquish control of the grid in Long Island’s suburban Nassau and Suffolk counties by state regulators in 1998 as the price of a bailout of its debt-crippled Shoreham nuclear power plant. Just days after the deal was closed, it was revealed that LILCO had awarded its top executives a severance package of more than $67 million, including $42 million to CEO William J. Catacosinos. The payments came despite the fact that Catacosinos and his fellow officers had secured similar positions in KeySpan. New York state Attorney General Elliot Spitzer charged that “a pattern of deception by the company’s CEO and senior officers, as well as a dereliction of duty by the company’s board, led to an outrageous giveaway.” (The bad publicity shamed Catacosinos, at least into stepping down—but not relinquishing his golden parachute.) Relieved of its Shoreham debt, LILCO’s new incarnation moved from suburban Long Island to inner-city Queens. KeySpan is now seeking approval from federal and state authorities for its pending $11.8-billion takeover by the British energy giant National Grid. Rather than progress towards accountability to the consumer, it looks more like an elaborate game of musical chairs.

In June 2000, after a brief blackout on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, then-City Council Speaker Peter Vallone (the incumbent councilman’s father) publicly suggested that Con Ed, in connivance with its new deregulation partners, was using power disruptions to pressure the state PSC to approve new power plants. And the new plants were proposed, not surprisingly, for poor areas of city, including post-industrial and gentrifying but still-bleak Long Island City. Other targeted neighborhoods are Brooklyn’s immigrant enclaves of Williamsburg and Sunset Park, and the Harlem River Yards and Port Morris in the South Bronx. Con Ed is also proposing increased capacity at the 14th Street plant on the Lower East Side (not yet divested), adjacent to low-income public housing projects, to make up for the closure of its plant up the East River near the United Nations–where developer Donald Trump wants to build a luxury residential high-rise.

And notwithstanding the brief incident on the upscale Upper East Side, it was generally the low-income areas that were hit with the blackouts. Manhattan’s Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights was without power for 18 hours in the midst of a heatwave in July 1999, just weeks before the state deregulation hit in—again due to feeder cables burning out.

In its investigation of the Washington Heights blackout, the state PSC found that “managers had been told to reduce the operation and maintenance budget in each of the four years leading up to the black out.” And Gerald Norlander of Public Utility Law Project, in words almost identical to those he would utter after the 2006 Queens blackout, stated: “The company, despite growing demand for service, [was] spending less and less each year on maintenance.”

There were certainly reasons for discontent with the status quo ante. Con Ed charged among the highest rates in the country. In August 1994, New York Newsday, citing leaked documents, revealed the Con Ed was paying bonuses of up to $20,000 per executive to the very mangers who had slashed spending on pollution control citing budgetary constraints. The costs for these bonuses were passed on to the rate-payer. Deregulation was pushed as a formula to bring down rates.

But in August 2000, in the first summer after deregulation, New York’s consumers were shocked to find that rates were actually 40% higher over the previous summer—resulting in city officials blasting the provision allowing Con Ed to base its rates on wholesale market costs (a supposed hedge against California-style chaos). The Public Service Commission blamed high oil princes, and the temporary closure of Con Ed’s Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor some 30 miles up the Hudson River—a frequent occurrence. Indian Point was soon to be divested under the deregulation plan, but its shut-downs would remain frequent—and Con Ed’s rates would remain among the nation’s highest.

In the wake of the Queens blackouts, concerns were raised of Enron-type market manipulations under the deregulation regime. Assemblyman Paul Tonko, chair of the state Assembly’s Energy Committee, told Newsday July 27 that KeySpan and the other generating companies had clearly “gamed” the market “at the expense of the consumers.” He pledged his committee would “fully investigate these market manipulations that are artificially raising electric prices, and make those who are responsible for this disgrace accountable.”

Health and safety concerns were also dire under the old regime. In 1995, Con Ed was slapped with a $2 million fine for lying about the release of asbestos at an August 1989 steam pipe explosion at Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, in which two workers died. In a November 1999 settlement, Con Ed again paid $2 million to 270 New York firefighters and rescue workers exposed to toxic chemicals when they responded to a fire at the utility’s Arthur Kill plant on Staten Island the previous September. In October 1999, Ravenswood (by then owned by KeySpan) was evacuated following a spill of a cleaning compound outside the plant, sending acrid fumes into the building.

The daily functioning of these plants is ultimately a greater concern. In April 2000, Rep. Carolyn Maloney complained to the Queens Tribune: “More than 35,000 Queens schoolchildren already suffer from asthma and a 1998 federal study found that the presence of three dirty power plants, two major airports and six major highways has made air quality in Queens particularly toxic.”

The three Queens plants, already under construction, were “grandfathered” in when the Clean Air Act took effect in 1970, exempting them from the new standards. Therefore, they can continue to emit quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx), and sulfur dioxide (SO2) that would be illegal in newer plants. Although Ravenswood was built to burn coal, it has now switched to natural gas and may at this point be in compliance with the Clean Air Act—even though it is still not required to be. This progress has been the fruit of a long activist campaign by Queens residents—not deregulation.

After the Queens blackouts, a July 26 New York Times story found that the affected areas, especially Long Island City, had a disproportionate rate of cable failures, and some local cables had parts that were up to 67 years old. For all the emphasis on shiny new generators, the aging transmission system was being allowed to deteriorate—and, not surprisingly, being allowed to deteriorate the fastest in the very neighborhoods slated for the power plants.

One of the real tragedies of the push to build new generators in the city’s low-income neighborhoods is that it has pitted urban clean-air activists against upstate opponents of nuclear power. The closure of Indian Point would make the new power plants in the city inevitable, the argument goes, and the health impacts shouldn’t be shifted to low-income urban residents. However, given that Indian Point is far closer to New York City than Chernobyl was to Kiev, the safety issues at the reactors should be a concern to down-staters too.

In 2000, the Louisiana-based Entergy Corp. bought the Indian Point 3 reactor from the public New York Power Authority (which had relieved Con Ed of it following massive cost-overruns in 1975), and the following year purchased Indian Point 2 from Con Edison. (Indian Point 1 had been permanently closed when the Power Authority took over reactor 3.) Since 9-11, local residents in Peekskill, NY, and surrounding communities have been increasingly demanding the plant be closed down—or at least the airspace above it be closed to commercial flights. Entergy has responded by officially changing the facility’s name from the “Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant” to the “Indian Point Energy Center.” All area signs indicating the plant have been changed, removing the word “nuclear,” and the utility has also launched a local PR blitz plugging the plant’s supposed “safety.” One recent newspaper ad urged readers to “Take confidence in the security of Indian Point Energy Center.”

The Indian Point reactors are among the oldest and most decrepit in the country, and Entergy’s record in keeping them up and running has been little better than Con Ed’s or the Power Authority’s. The most recent shut-down of Indian Point 3, prompted by an electrical mishap, came on July 21—in the very midst of the Queens blackout. The reactor was brought back on line the next day, and Entergy claimed it had no impact on consumers.

Westchester County’s Rep. Sue Kelly has introduced a measure in Congress to require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to authorize an Independent Safety Assessment at Indian Point—a measure advocated by the local Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, which has collected 5,000 signatures in support of the bill.

The Queens blackout will doubtless be used as propaganda against both advocates of closing Indian Point and opponents of the new urban generators. With nerves still frayed, it may be a while before the argument can be made openly. However, while local Queens politicians play to their pissed-off constituency, New York’s Sen. Charles Schumer is not only a proponent of the new plants, but is calling for deregulation to be mandated at the national level by federal legislation. (Nearly half the states have already imposed some kind of deregulation plan, although the pace has slowed since the Enron scandal.)

Mayor Bloomberg has already played a blackout card in a bid to wear down public resistance to new plants and pylons. “Nobody wants to have a power line going through their backyard, but we have to face the issue that if you want to have electricity—and we really have no choice, we have to have electricity, our society depends on large amounts of electricity and it has to be reliable—that means building power plants, upgrading power plants and building transmission lines,” Bloomberg said in the aftermath of the 2003 blackout.

But the 2003 blackout was caused by a breakdown in the transmission system, and the 2006 blackout by a failure in the distribution network—neither by insufficient generation. And today we all understand (hopefully) that the 2000-1 California blackouts were not caused by a deficit of power any more than Stalin’s bureaucratically-induced Ukraine famine was caused by a deficit of grain.

New York’s deregulation program was supposedly designed more cautiously than California’s. But the same measures which allow the utilities to pass increased costs on to rate-payers as a hedge against bankruptcy and chaos also hurt the consumer—canceling out the still-ephemeral savings of the “spot market” overseen by the New York Independent System Operator. This is the entity created by the PSC for the deregulation regime, which supposedly directs the cheapest power where it is needed at a given moment.

The California Independent System Operator’s own records indicate that blackouts were happening when demand was considerably below peak—indicating that supplies of electricity were being held back. Meanwhile, at the very height of the California crisis in early 2001, Kenneth Lay was meeting with Dick Cheney—who then headed the White House energy task force. The task force report, explicitly invoking “electricity shortages and disruptions in California,” called for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, harnessing the oil resources of post-Soviet Central Asia, and a “renewal” of the nuclear industry. And although Cheney’s task force was not so indiscrete as to mention it, the California crisis helped set the tone for a war for oil in the Persian Gulf.

Despite growing public skepticism of the energy giants and deregulation, this dynamic still seems to be at work. Conveniently, on July 26, just as power was being restored to the last suffering residents of western Queens, blackouts hit several communities in Staten Island, leaving an estimated 16,000 consumers without power for several hours. Meanwhile, 80,000 households in Missouri and Illinois were without power after storms brought down power pylons. Right on cue, the US Senate began debate on an energy bill that would expand oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and seems assured of passage. The House version goes even further in removing federal controls on offshore drilling.

The Queens blackouts may not have been as contrived a crisis as that which shook California five years ago. If Con Ed was a monolithic bureaucracy under the old regime, today it is the public face of a Kafkaesque labyrinth of often out-of-state companies with no roots in the communities they now serve. While the California blackouts were the design of the out-of-state firms like Enron to make a mint and (it seems) create a political climate conducive to war and corporate resource-grabs, the Queens blackout really seems the work of the old utility that still controls the lines. But it has similar roots in the erosion of public accountability under the deregulation dogma. More ominously, it may end up helping to serve similar aims.

RESOURCES:

“Why is Con Ed having all these problems?” WABC Eyewitness News, July 21, 2006
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=investigators&id=4388181

“States pull the plug on electricity dereg,” by Eric Kelderman, Stateline.org, July 21, 2005
http://www.stateline.org/live/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=136&languageId=1&conten tId=44242

“What’s wrong with the electric grid?” by Eric J. Lerner, The Industrial Physicist, October-Novemeber 2003
http://www.aip.org/tip/INPHFA/vol-9/iss-5/p8.html

“After the Blackout: Going Back to the Experts,” by Kate Stohr, The Gotham Gazette, Aug. 18, 2003 http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/feature-commentary/20030818/202/496

“Does the Power Kill? Balancing the Energy Environment,” by Josh Kaufman, the Queens Tribune, April 20, 2000 http://www.queenstribune.com/archives/featurearchive/feature2000/0420/

“Report Finds LILCO Payout Irretrievable,” New York State Attorney General’s Office, April 29, 1999
http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/1999/apr/apr29a_99.html

Public Utility Law Project
http://www.pulpny.org/

See also:

“The Real Culprit in Northeast Blackout: Deregulation,” WW4 REPORT #92, September-October 2003
/static/92.html#shadows3

“Two Counties Pull Out of Indian Point Emergency Plan,” WW4 REPORT #84, May 5, 2003 /static/84.html#nuke2

Special Issue on Enron and Energy, WW4 REPORT #19, Feb. 2, 2002
/static/19.html

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Special to WORLD WAR 4 REPORT, Aug. 1, 2006
Reprinting permissible with attribution

THE “SI SE PUEDE” INSURRECTION

A Class Analysis

by George Caffentzis, Metamute

And my coyote, Virgil, said to him when he refused to take me, a living man, over the Acheron to Hell, “Charon, do not be angry, but this undocumented passage has been decided upon in the place where what is wanted always happens. So don’t ask any more questions.”

—Dante, Inferno, Canto III, lines 94-96.

Introduction: Invisible to Visible

There were more demonstrations in more places with greater participation between March 24 and May Day 2006 than any other six-week period in US history. For a number of days marches of more than half a million people overwhelmed the centers of major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Dallas, halting business, while there were literally hundreds of smaller gatherings in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Salem, Oregon; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Along with the public outpouring of bodies, there were dozens of student walk-outs in high schools around the country as well as a nation-wide immigrants’ “general strike” called for May Day that was heeded by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of workers, including truck drivers who shut down the Port of Los Angeles (one of the main supply links in the commodity trade with China, South Korea, and Japan). The demonstrators’ demands were amnesty for all undocumented immigrants and the defeat of pending draconian anti-immigrant legislation. In the process, they intermittently stopped or stalled the cycle of production, circulation and reproduction in the US for this six-week period. The slogan of these remarkable demos, whose size consistently surprised both their organizers and the authorities, became “Si Se Puede” [“Yes It Is Possible” in Spanish], implying their awareness of a new political power in the Americas.

Even though the demonstrations, walk-outs and strikes were remarkably orderly and non-violent, their harshest opponents, the anti-immigrant vigilante group called the Minuteman Project, described them as an “insurrection.” And indeed it was an insurrection, at least in a legal sense of being an “organized opposition or resistance to a government or established authorities”—because the demos were largely composed of undocumented workers, their families, friends and immediate supporters who, strictly speaking, were “illegal” and “criminals” but yet were demanding that they ought to be “decriminalized”! By their millions they spoke the words, “We are workers not criminals!,” implying that the government intent on further criminalizing them is the true criminal.

Indeed, in these demonstrations the very symbol of the US, the “stars and stripes” flag, and the one that the right-wing in the US has used insufferably—especially since 9-11—as a weapon of attack on immigrants, was overturned and subtracted from the state. If anything burned the Minutemen on May Day 2006, it must have been seeing tens of thousands of American flags in the hands of an ocean of people they called “criminal thugs” and “an invading army,” who now made it a symbol of their struggle.

Surely it is crucial for us to know what caused this political earthquake. However, every effort to find the cause of significant developments in working-class history must recognize that they are both over-determined (since they usually have multiple, often conflicting sources) and under-determined (since they always involve new powers emerging from collective actions). Bearing this caveat in mind, I will present two kinds of explanations of this emergence of the immigrant movement this year: one obvious, historical and legalistic, and the other rooted in a class analysis of the contemporary political composition of both the working class and capital in the US. Together these explanations can help us draw the landscape of political possibilities posed by the new immigrant movement more clearly.

The Obvious Cause: Immigration Legislation

It is not hard to find the obvious stimulus for the “Si Se Puede” demonstrations. You could read it announced on their banners again and again: “HR 4437,” the designation of a piece of legislation entitled “The Border Protection, Anti-Terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.” It is also often referred to as the “Sensenbrenner Act” after its sponsor, a Republican Rep. James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin. The House of Representatives passed this legislation by a vote of 239-182 on Dec. 16, 2005. The Senate passed its own immigration bill on May 25, designated S 2611—and the two bills must be “reconciled” to a common Act before it is sent on to the president for signing.

HR 4437 is what is called an “enforcement-only” bill because its conception of undocumented immigration is that of “crime control”—i.e., a crime is determined and penalties are devised to punish and “control” it. First, it defines a new legal criminal category, “unlawful or illegal presence”—which is any violation of any immigration law or regulation, even if it is a technical one. This crime would be considered “an aggravated felony,” allowing indefinite detention or expedited removal as well as the denial to undocumented immigrants of many forms of administrative or judicial review. “In essence, the bill makes every immigration violation, however minor, into a federal crime” (Justice for Immigrants 2006).

Second, “anyone or any organization who ‘assists’ an individual without documentation ‘to reside in or remain’ in the US knowingly or with ‘reckless disregard’ as to the individual’s legal status would be liable for criminal penalties and up to five years in prison.” Church personnel who provide shelter or other basic needs assistance to an undocumented individual could be prosecuted under this law and “property used in this act would be subject to seizure and forfeiture” (Justice for Immigrants 2006). Labor organizers unionizing production sites where undocumented immigrants predominate could also be prosecuted. Included in this act are also employer sanctions—i.e., it would be a crime for an undocumented person to hold a job in the US and his/her employer would be complicit in this crime.

Other aspects of this bill include:

*the Department of Homeland Security would be required to erect up to 700 miles of fencing along the Southwest border (and further militarize the 2,000-mile long border);

*“State and local law enforcement officers are authorized to enforce federal immigration laws. State and local governments which refuse to participate would be subject to the loss of federal funding”;

*“Document fraud would be considered an aggravated felony and would subject an asylum-seeker to deportation and bars to re-entry” (Justice for Immigrants 2006).

In other words, HR 4437 is the kind of law the anti-immigration movement has been calling for, one that categorizes undocumented workers as criminals to be tried, convicted, jailed and then deported—pure and simple. If enacted, the bill would transform almost every person in the US (not only police officers) into either its violators or its enforcers, or classify them as criminally complicit with its violators.

After Sensenbrenner’s bill passed the House of Representatives in late December, Congress went into recess and not much was done legislatively to deal with it, for the second step in the legislative procedure was to be taken by the Senate. However, alarm about the law spread throughout the Catholic church, the unions and immigrant rights organizations quickly over the Christmas holidays. I know from my comrades in the immigrant workers’ rights movement that, after a decade of legislative defeats, they saw HR 4437 as their endgame. If the Sensenbrenner bill became law, they intoned, they too would be headed for prison, if they continued to do their work!

Two and a half months later an amazing transformation in the immigrant communities of the US took place that could only be seen by those with religious sensibilities as miraculous. The dire message concerning the impact of HR 4437 clearly reached these communities: unless something drastic was done, the Senate would pass a similar bill and President Bush, after some griping, would sign it into law. Undocumented immigrants especially had to make an important decision: would they take the risk of making themselves socially visible to protest HR 4437 after surviving in the US on the basis of their invisibility? They decided by the millions to take the risk both individually and collectively, to publicly declare that they are workers and not criminals (and to implicitly charge that those who brand them as criminals are the criminals).

Surely this spring’s immigrant insurrection in the streets of the US stopped the political momentum behind HR 4437. The senators bitterly debated a number of immigration bills, but they decisively rejected the option of passing a copy of the Sensenbrenner bill. Many recognized that HR 4437 was so sweeping and draconian that it actually helped to unite the immigrants, especially the undocumented ones. They looked at the huge demonstrations and the May Day national strike with apprehension and determined that they must find a way to undermine the most powerful self-defined working class movement since the mid-1970s.

On May 25, the Senate passed its own bill, S2611, by a vote of 62-36. This bill, though it has a wide number of punitive measures similar to HR 4437, still offers possibilities for some of the undocumented to gain legal status.

The Senate deployed a classic strategy in this bill to defeat the immigrant workers’ new power and unity: divide and conquer. S 2611 literally divides up the present set of undocumented immigrants into three mutually exclusive subsets: (a) those who have been in the US for less than two years, (b) those who have been in the US between two and five years and (c) those who have been in the US for more than five years. Group (a) members must leave immediately on passage of the bill or face deportation. Group (b) members “must leave the country, and apply to re-enter through some currently unknown process.” Group (c) members would be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship, provided they pay back taxes, learn English and have no serious criminal records.” This division, the senators clearly thought, would tempt many undocumented immigrants to turn against each other, especially those who were in Group (c). I should also make it clear that though this bill does not identify all undocumented immigrant workers with either criminals or terrorists as HR 4437 does, its other less-publicized provisions make it almost as draconian. They include:

*6,000 National Guard troops would be assigned to border duty to assist Border Patrol agents, money would be provided for aerial surveillance and the building of a 370-mile fence or wall along the Mexican border. The bill “vastly increases detention and deportation practices and further militarizes the border,” according to the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

*“The Senate bill also establishes guest worker programs, allowing employers to recruit workers outside the country on temporary visas. These new contract workers would be vulnerable to employer pressure, since their visa status would be dependent on their employment,” according to labor journalist David Bacon.

*“The bill makes document fraud an aggravated felony and grounds for deportation, resulting in the criminalization of the millions of immigrants who have had to provide false Social Security cards to employers to get hired,” writes Bacon.

The next step in the legislative process involves the negotiation to “reconcile” HR 4437 and S 2611. Without the “Si Se Puede” demonstrations the political initiative would have been totally in the hands of the politicians. But after May Day 2006 there is a new subject haunting the corridors of Congress: the undocumented immigrant, and this unpredicted and unpredictable presence is putting a new sense of caution in the deliberations there. There is now even hope among the immigrant rights activists that this Congressional anxiety will lead to the failure of the reconciliation process. If that happens, there would be no new immigration legislation this year, which, perhaps, is the best possible outcome, and one that would not have been possible without the “Si Se Puede” demonstrations.

Thus the specific “who, what, why and when” of these demonstrations have been explained in the above account, though the end of the story is still undetermined. In another sense, however, there is much still unexplained. For example, why are there between 11 and 12 million of undocumented immigrant workers in the US in the first place? Why is Congress so divided about immigration? How did the undocumented immigrant workers get the sense that they could become politically visible in such a dramatic way?

To answer these questions concerning the frame of the story, another, at times subterranean, path must be taken through the analysis of the classes in struggle against each other and within themselves. This is not an easy path to take, but one that the slogan of the movement—”We are workers not criminals—points us to. For the immigrants quite properly see themselves as playing an essential role in the history of the US working class.

Capital’s Dilemma: Labor Flexibility vs. Workers’ Autonomy

A class analysis of the “Si Se Puede” demos is a bit hellish because the issue of immigration, especially of undocumented workers, divides both workers and capitalists in the US. Consequently, there are many “strange bedfellows” revealed in this analysis, and even stranger victories and defeats. There is no clear inter-class cut concerning this issue, so it is important to be careful about our terms. Consider two conundrums:

(1) although the recent anti-immigrant politics is firmly identified with the Republican Party, many capitalists who normally prefer Republican positions are firmly against legislation like HR 4437,

(2) although the AFL-CIO supports amnesty for undocumented workers, many white, some black, and even a few Hispanic workers are against it because they believe that the undocumented are threats to their wages and working conditions. So one cannot simply conclude that the capitalist class is against the demands of the “Si Se Puede” demonstrators and the working class is for them. There is a complex set of conditions and dilemmas that both classes are now struggling with.

Let us deal first with the capitalists. US capital has largely been supportive of official, documented immigration since 1965 when the very restrictive immigrant laws of the 1920s were repealed and the annual quota for immigrants, especially from South America and Asia, was gradually expanded. It is, of course, no accident that 1965 was also the year of the Voting Rights Act and the legislative beginning of the end of the US apartheid regime. At the very moment that black workers were beginning to have expanded rights to contract for their labor power, capital began to increase the number of immigrants from around the world.

But capitalists do not want just any immigrant worker, at any time and any place. They want him/her to have specific skills, training, physiognomy, docility and cost. One of their most important questions is whether the immigrants can be hired and fired at the boss’s discretion and whether they can be forced to leave the country “when they are not wanted.” This is what is called “labor flexibility” and is most treasured by capitalists, since it puts in their hands the power of choosing whether to use or expel a worker. The problem with officially sanctioned immigrant workers who have various forms of work authorization is that within a relatively short time they can become resident aliens and then citizens, with all the rights of other US workers (however meager they might be). This transition reduces their “flexibility” both individually and collectively.

This situation has led to the development of an alternative source of immigrant labor—the unauthorized or undocumented worker who arrives in the US without official sanction and hence is without the contractual protections that other workers normally have. These almost right-less workers have the maximum of “flexibility” to the point that capitalists can decide fire them, not even pay them for their work and not face sanctions. Undocumented immigrant laborers have therefore been in much demand, especially by capitalists in industries where mechanization is too expensive and the available US-born workers are relatively few. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, the undocumented now constitute almost 5 percent of US waged workers.

But this “labor flexibility” for the low-tech capitalist can turn into exactly its opposite, “worker autonomy,” for undocumented workers who use their very status as unofficial workers to come and go as they will, independent of the micro- or macro-conditions of employment. They can use their very undocumented situation to shape the conditions of their lives and create communities on both sides of the borders they are crossing to aid their self-activated movements. The undocumented can turn their right-less status into a power of movement. When a whole world of cross-border movement is created independent of the needs of capital, labor flexibility turns into worker autonomy.

There is evidence that this transformation is taking place in the US, and the occurrence of the “Si Se Puede” insurrection is definitive evidence of it. In that sense, capitalists are now in a situation similar to one they faced with the rise of the “hobo worker” in the late 19th and early 20th century (after “Coxey’s Army’s” march on Washington in 1894). At first, the capitalists of the West were pleased about the fact that workers were leaving (or losing) their homes and turning hoboes by using the railroads to follow the harvests (and to disperse when the fields were picked), to swarm to new mines (and to leave when the seam was exhausted), to enter the forests and fell huge trees (and disappear once the building boom was over). This was the labor flexibility they desperately needed. However, when the hoboes began to use the railroads for free to satisfy their own needs and to develop fighting organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to defend themselves, this flexibility began to turn into something ugly for capitalists, i.e., into a measure of workers’ autonomy. For example, hoboes by the hundreds would descend on an isolated mining town that had arrested IWW organizers in a “free speech” fight by hopping freights from destinations more than a thousand miles away and overwhelming the local police force.

The struggle over a strategy to preserve the hoboes’ flexibility but destroy their autonomy was fought out among the capitalists in the first part of the 20th century. Eventually, from the 1919 Palmer raids, through the railroad police attacks on hobo “jungles,” to the New Deal housing programs, a complex strategy of violence and incentives was worked out that gradually eliminated the hobo workers’ autonomy.

The capitalists in the US are having a similar dilemma now. The conflict between capitalists represented in this spring’s debates in Congress is not about the profitability of immigration, both documented and undocumented; on this they are united. Their problem is to destroy the immigrants’ labor autonomy while preserving and even more precisely controlling their flexibility. This will require a refined and, on the surface, contradictory set of policies. Once one understands this dilemma, the conflict between the congressional supporters of HR 4437 and S 2611 can be more clearly seen not as an all-or-nothing battle, but as a disagreement over how strong a dose of repression is enough to destroy labor autonomy and how enticing must the incentives remain to preserve labor flexibility. The mixture is not easy to determine and must be continually reassessed, since its subject is clearly in the process of responding to the very policies being devised, and to larger forces in the world political economy.

Surely there is much to discuss, since the empirical consequences of the passage of an HR 4437-type immigration law are hard to predict. Such a law aims to destroy the autonomy of immigration not only by criminalizing individual undocumented immigrants, but also by criminalizing the organizations that are at the center of a supportive immigrant community: the Church, the union, the local political machine, and the network of family and homeland friends and associates. The problem with such a law from the point of view of Capital is that if it were applied successfully, it would be so rigid it might destroy the capitalist function of immigration—the preservation of labor flexibility—and therefore it would be a worse catastrophe! For Capital’s problem is that workers are using immigration as a way of advancing their agenda; they are no longer being ruled by its signals generated by “the labor market.” HR 4437, by ham-fistedly conflating the categories of “illegal immigrant” and “terrorist” creates a powerful rhetorical effect that commits the system to a rigidity that can undermine its raison d’etre. After all, employers who hire the undocumented are not only greedy, but they become in the eyes of this bill the equivalent of traitors and “fifth columnists”! On the other side, if a draconian law like HR 4437 is systematically under-enforced, then the loss of control over immigrant workers would be even more drastic. Since, from the capitalists’ conception of labor power, a lazy, toothless, barking bulldog is even less effective as a herder of labor power than a scrappy terrier with sharp teeth.

The HR 4437 defenders could point out that given the economic devastation caused by neo-liberal policies in the former colonized world, the undocumented would come and take their chances even if the law were enforced to the letter. In their defense, they could point to the death ships full of undocumented “damned of the earth” paying thousands of dollars to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to work in an Italy with an immigration law (the “Bossi-Fini” law) that is even more draconian than HR 4437—and they often end drowned on the sea floor for their troubles. That is a measure of the level of despair around this planet. The pro-HR 4437 capitalists can argue that undocumented immigrants would be even more docile, frightened, and slave-like, after the law was passed, especially in the face of the obvious failure of the “Si Se Puede” insurrection’s effort.

But the role of such workers is so crucial to the functioning of the US economy at this time that many wiser heads are loath to count on an “all-stick-no-carrot” law like HR 4437. The supporters of S 2611 (including the likes of President Bush, and Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy) are claiming that their bill will be punitive enough to end the autonomy of immigration, but not so prohibitive that it will interrupt the crucial flow of immigrants into the US as HR 4437 threatens to do.

Moreover, through its complex system of dividing undocumented immigrants into three levels (creating a Divine Comedy of immigrant labor with its own inferno, purgatory and paradise), it will make enforcement of the law in the interest of workers with more than five years residence in the US. Critics of S 2611 argue in response that it is not strong enough to crush the autonomy of immigrants and that only truly draconian legislation like HR 4437 will take the initiative away from them.

The representatives of Capital have been debating these positions (and will continue to) in a very divided Congress, for the problem of immigration legislation is not one of simply stopping “illegal immigration.” The real question is how to make the condition of immigrant workers both as slave-like (i.e., to have workers without rights) and as flexible (i.e., to have no expenses of reproduction) as possible. There is an additional problem in the summer of 2006, however. In the past immigration legislation did not have to politically deal with its object: the immigrant worker. This time, due to the “Si Se Puede” insurrection, it does.

The Working Class Dilemma: Organizing Power vs. a new “Iron Law of Wages”

The “Si Se Puede” Insurrection is a great moment in US working class history. But this is not to say that every worker approves of it. On the contrary, if the opinion polls of the Pew Hispanic Center are to be believed, there is a significant segment of the working class that is against the demands of the demonstrators. Its February 2006 poll of 2,000 adults (with a large percentage inevitably being workers) found that when asked as to what should be done with the 11 to 12 million “unauthorized” immigrant workers: 32 percent want them to stay permanently; 32 percent would create a temporary-worker program; and 27 percent would deport them all.

There is plainly an intense debate within the US working class (including immigrant workers) about whether immigrant workers in general and undocumented ones in particular increase the power of workers. The two most reasonable sides of the debate are: (a) immigrant workers increase the general level of workers’ power by their prominence in the struggles around unionization, and (b) immigrant workers (especially undocumented ones) reduce wages for US-born workers, especially blacks and Latinos, and lower working class power.

The first position is the basis of much of the AFL-CIO’s support for amnesty for undocumented workers since 2000 after being against it for decades. This reversal came about because its strategists were worried about the dramatic drop in union membership in the US (from 33% in the early post-war years to about 12% today) and were desperately surveying the class horizon for some sector where there was a possibility of reversing the trend. They found it in the immigrant workers, especially the undocumented. These workers were very well disposed to unionization and were at the forefront of the biggest and most successful union battles in the late 1990s. The idea was that if these workers were given more legal security created by an amnesty, they would be able to lead a new wave of unionization similar to how the labor “upsurge” of the 1930s was lead by the immigrants who came in the early part of the century. Moreover, if they increased the power of workers at the floor of the wage labor hierarchy, they would move the rest of the world of workers into action. This “pushing up from the bottom” strategy was a calculated risk, of course, but it was based upon two well-established facts:

(1) Union workers make much higher wages and more and better fringe benefits than do non-union workers. In 2003, the union wage premium (the difference between union and non-union wages after controlling for a variety of worker characteristics such a amount of schooling) was 15.5 percent (for black workers it was 20.9 percent and for Hispanics 23.2 percent). (Yates, 2005)

(2) In workplace after workplace, the majority of non-unionized workers have expressed through surveys the desire to be unionized. That is, unionization had a demonstrable positive impact on wages and workers knew it. So what is holding back a new wave of unionization similar to the CIO drives of the 1930s? Clearly it is the fear that if you were involved a unionization campaign, you threatened your own job and (with the bosses’ threat to relocate the workplace, if it is unionized, continually drummed into your head) the jobs of your work mates. Anything that could weaken this well-justified fear would help increase the power of workers to unionize and increase their power directly in the wage arena. But this citizen worker’s fear concerning union organizing is amplified many times over for an immigrant worker, especially if s/he is undocumented. Consequently, their terror could only be countered by the legalization their status. The consequence of amnesty, the AFL-CIO thinkers reasoned, would be an increase in unionization at the bottom that would filter up the wage scale.

This position has clearly a wide resonance in the US working class as evidenced by the fact that almost three quarters of the people in the Pew Hispanic Center poll referred to above were for an alternative to large-scale deportation of undocumented immigrants. But there are clearly many who believe that immigrants have a negative impact on their status as workers, using a “common-sense economics” that resembles the “iron law of wages” in the 19th century. That old “law” postulated that there is a fixed amount of the national product that is fated to be paid in wages, called the “wage fund,” so that the more workers competing for the wage fund, the lower the wage rate. The newer version takes a more dynamic supply-and-demand form that can be found in many modern textbooks; for example, in Paul Samuelson’s Economics: “Limitation of the supply of any grade of labor can be expected to raise its wage rate; an increase in supply will, other things being equal, tend to depress wage rates” (Samuelson is quoted in Borjas 2004).

Since immigration brings in more laborers of different “grades,” they will be “chasing” the same number of jobs they are qualified for, thus reducing the prevailing wage rate for that type of job. Conversely, a sure way to increase wages, other things being equal, is simply to reduce the number of workers chasing the same job by, for example, eliminating immigrants from the chase.

This reasoning sounds obvious, however uncomfortable it is for supporters of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. George Borjas, a Cuban-born US economist, is the most famous proponent of this application of the “law of supply and demand” to the “labor market.” His research design was straightforward: he divided the waged working class into four education levels (high school drop out/high school grad/some college/college grad) and eight work experience levels, and therefore 32 cells (or “skill groups,” as Borjas called them). He then studied for each cell the wage growth and the change in the proportion of immigrants between 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990 and 2000. On the basis of his findings he concluded that there is “a negative relation between wage growth and immigration: weekly wages grew fastest for workers in those skill groups that were least affected by immigration.” (Borjas 2004) More precisely, he calculated, counterfactually, what wages would have been if there were no immigrants:

“[T]he immigrant influx that entered the country between 1980 and 2000 lowered the wage by 7.4 percent for high school drop outs, by 3.6 percent for college graduates, and by around 2 percent for both high school graduates and workers with some college… Similarly, although this immigrant influx lowered the wages of white native workers by 3.5 percent, it lowered the wage of native-born blacks by 4.5 percent, and of native-born Hispanics by 5 percent.” (Borjas 2004)

He then uses a “supply and demand” model to explain the negative relation: “it seems that Paul Samuelson was right after all: Wages fall when immigrants increase the size of the workforce” (Borjas 2004).

It appears that the intuition of workers who want to decrease legal immigration and find “illegal immigration a serious problem,” is backed by theory and evidence. Do they have a point?

I do not think so. Borjas’ key finding was the negative correlation between the percentage of immigrants in a skill group and the growth in wage rates for that skill group: a low percentage of immigrants correlates with larger wage increases, a high percentage of immigrants correlates with lower wages increases. But correlation does not determine explanation. Even if his correlation holds, why it holds is still an open question.

Borjas immediately concludes that the correlation’s explanation resides in the supply and demand law of the labor market: the more workers the lower the wage rate. But there is no reason why this is the best explanation. After all, it might be that the correlation is accounted for by the fact that immigrants have fewer legal powers and rights and so in areas of the economy where they predominate, wage rates will increase more slowly than in areas where they are less in evidence. If this explanation of the correlation is best, then a major positive change in the legal status of immigrants, especially undocumented ones, would most likely end the negative correlation between wage growth and percentage of immigrant workers.

Even the common intuition that “immigrants, especially undocumented ones, take jobs Americans do not want” can explain the correlation as well. After all, if jobs taken by a specific skill group have very slowly-growing wages, this would make them less attractive to native workers and would draw in immigrant workers (especially undocumented ones), making for a higher percentage of immigrants in the skill groups in question. In other words, does wage growth determine the composition of the skill group or vice versa?

This inability to find a single, obvious best explanation arises from an obvious fact: the determination of wages is a complex matter. Changes in wage rates cannot be attributed to supply and demand explanations for a variety of reasons. The most important one is that wages are determined by class struggles whose rules are themselves the objects of struggle. We know, for example, that wages depend upon additional factors besides the number of workers, such as (a) the organizational power of workers, and (b) the “reproduction cost” of workers’ labor power. History has shown that workers who have organized themselves adequately have forced reluctant capitalists to accept minimum wage rates for a variety of jobs (as well as limits to the work day and better working conditions). The geographical dispersion of wages demonstrates that there is no given level of housework and commodities that is necessary to reproduce a worker’s labor power diurnally or generationally. The minimum reproduction costs for a particular kind of labor power is battled for throughout the circuit of a worker’s life, from factory, office or farm to the kitchen and bedroom with radically different results across the planet (and these differences constitute what we often call “culture”).

These additional elements of wage determination can explain why immigrant labor is attractive to capitalists. First, immigrant workers have less capacity to organize with other workers because of their reduced legal status and their being objects of racism or other forms of chauvinism. Second, the reproduction costs of immigrants’ labor power up until the time of their arrival (usually as adult but youthful workers) is borne by families, communities and the state of their home country. They arrive in the US literally as gifts to capital from the hands, hearts, and wombs especially of the women of Mexico and the rest of the Americas!

Another, more philosophical reason to doubt Borjas’ explanation of the correlation is due to the concept that both he and Paul Samuelson use, without comment, “the labor market.” The notion of the labor market assumes that human labor power is a thing that can be separated from its “owner” and sold on “the labor market” the way material objects (apples, coal, or automobiles) can be separated from their owners and be sold on a commodity market. Once such an idea is accepted, the rest of their explanatory scheme becomes “commonsensical.” Their ability to make this assumption without comment, however, shows how far capitalist ideology has penetrated the working class mind. For the very idea of “the labor market” is a great example of commodity fetishism and bad faith, i.e., the superstitious transubstantiation of social relations, especially conflictual ones, into simple relations among things. But one’s capacity to labor that is sold for a wage cannot be separated from one’s life, it is a part of one’s existence that is supposed to become another’s who puts it to use to make a profit. This transaction is justified by an impossible contract sealed with a mutual act of bad faith by worker and capitalist, since one cannot truly sell one’s life to another. To make the whole notion of a labor market work in law, therefore, the worker is recognized as the owner of his/her self, who can sell parts of this very self into a partial slavery to another! It is reminiscent of the famous bargain with the devil, where the devil “buys” a soul that is in actuality inalienable. This impossible, demonic and metaphysical feat lies at the heart of the concept of the labor market. The apparent “common sense” of the Borjas explanation of the impact of immigration on the wage is simply an illusion of power.

Finally, if this philosophical excursus into the working class condition is not acceptable as a critique, consider the following empirical comparison in Table 1 instead:

Table I (percentages)

All workers black workers Hispanic workers
“union premium” 15.5 20.9 23.2
“Borjas gap” -3.7 -4.5 -5

The two rows simply compare the different effects of unionization (according to Yates) and immigration (according to Borjas) on wage growth with respect to different categories of workers. The “union premium” swamps out the “Borjas gap” quite dramatically. For example, when black workers get unionized their wages tend to increase by almost 21 percent, while according to Borjas their wage loss due to increased immigration is 4.5 percent. Put in a counterfactual setting and ignoring the interaction between “the union premium” and the “Borjas gap,” these numbers result in the following: if a native black worker is involved in a workplace where immigrant workers successfully organize a union (after an improvement in their legal status) and s/he joins, his/her average wage increase would be 16.4 percent. Clearly in such circumstances, black workers would then be the winners from immigration. The same holds true, though for different wage gains, for white and Hispanic workers as well. If such an eventually appears throughout the economy, then there would be a dramatic increase in wages due to the increase in the rights of immigrant workers. One can conclude from Borjas’ work that if immigrants come to the US and have no rights they will be a drag on the wages of native-born members of the US working class, but if they come to the US, get the rights to organize and they use them, they will be an important stimulus to an upsurge of increased wages for all workers in the US!

The divided mind of the US working class expresses itself this summer in a race between the desire for legalizing undocumented immigrants, thereby freeing their capacity to organize to fight for the whole class, and the desire to deport all of the undocumented and try to force capital to stay put within the territorial US. Who will win out in this race is not clear, because the choice for a new possibility (the joining with the immigrants and undocumented) is risky and can lead to loss, if legalization ends only with increased competition between more workers. The “Si Se Puede” Insurrection demonstrated to the rest of the US working class, however, that the undocumented are ready to fight, all they need are the legal weapons to do so. Besides, the path of the Minutemen and their ilk is clearly a dead-end, since there is no likelihood that Capital would accept having its capital “stuck” in the US. If forced to choose, it would unambiguously accept the option of legalizing the undocumented over that eventuality. The question is, who will force Capital to choose?

Conclusion: The class situation in the summer of 2006

The complex inner conflicts within classes described above are the source of the indecision we are witnessing in both capital and the working class in the US in the aftermath of the “Si Se Puede” Insurrection. It is impossible for me to predict which side of the debate the preponderance of class powers will settle on, and, once that is settled, what the outcome of the inter-class conflict will be.

But what is clear is that the insurrection of the six week period between March 25 and May Day, with its deep connection to the recent revolutions against neo-liberalism in South America, is promising another kind of working class power in the US. It remains for native-born workers to cast their lot with the most disenfranchised part of their class. If they do not, though the undocumented will suffer most immediately, it is they who will seal their place in history’s Cocito, the frozen river at the bottom of Hell.

Parma, 17 June 2006

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacon, David, “Getting No Bill At All is Better than Senate Bill,” New America Media, May 25, 2006
http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=f4ad410327ee72 cbd6fca147644b8a1d

Borjas, George, “Increasing the Supply of Labor Through Immigration: Measuring the Impact on Native-born Workers,” Center for Immigration Studies, May, 2004
http://www.cis.org.articles/2004/back504.html

Justice for Immigrants, “Major Provisions of HR4437,” 2006
http://www.justiceforimmigrants.org/HR4437

Yates, Michael, “The Statistical Portrait of the US Working Class,” Monthly Review, April, 2005

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This story first appeared in Metamute
http://www.metamute.org/?qen/node/8052

See also:

“Operation ‘Return to Sender’ sweeps Midwest; border deaths hit high,” WW4 REPORT, July 24
/node/2228

“Chicago: immigrant workers end hunger strike; vigil continues,” WW4 REPORT, June 5
/node/2053

“NYC: Mayday mobilization report,” WW4 REPORT, May 2
/node/1914

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

COLOMBIA: INDIGENOUS DISPLACED, KILLED

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Thousands of civilians have been displaced and many more are trapped by fighting between Colombian government forces and leftist rebels in the southwestern department of Narino, bordering Ecuador, and in the northwestern Pacific coast department of Choco. In Narino, the fighting has forced at least 1,300 people from their homes [in mid-July]. In Choco, civilians have been killed and wounded, and people are trapped in the area and unable to flee. Most of those affected are indigenous people, including children and pregnant women. (IDP News Alert, July /20) The combat in Choco has left indigenous communities along the Truando river stranded and incommunicado. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is especially concerned about some 137 Embera indigenous people trapped there for over a week. (Adital, July 19)

In Narino, the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CPDH) reports that at least four teachers have been killed or disappeared in recent weeks. In Samaniego municipality, Efren Alonso Motta Acosta, a teacher in the Bellavista rural school, has been disappeared since June 27. Luis Hernando Chiran, a teacher in the El Guadual rural school in Ricaurte municipality, was abducted and his body found six days later showing signs of torture. Francisco Ernesto Garcia, who taught at the El Tambillo educational center in Sandona municipality, was found dead on July 6 in an abandoned rural area along the road to Samaniego. On July 10, teacher Ivan Nanez Munoz died, hit by seven bullets, on his way to work at the Bellavista educational center in San Pablo municipality.

The CPDH Narino section also reports that the Colombian Air Force has been bombing and strafing Awa indigenous communities in Ricaurte and Barbacoas municipalities, causing massive displacement. Hundreds of people have sought refuge in the villages of Cumbas and Guadual, where they are stranded without any food or supplies. (Comite Permanente de Derechos Humanos-Seccional Narino, July 13 via dhcolombia.info)

According to the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), three indigenous people have died in the bombings and combat in Narino between the Colombian Army’s 29th Brigade and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in Ricaurte and Cumbal municipalities. The victims include Luis Arsecio Valenzuela, a former indigenous governor of Cumbal, and another community leader, Campos Paguay. Their families have been unable to recover their bodies because the combat is continuing. Not even the Red Cross has been able to enter the area, which is being blockaded by the military. (CRIC, July 19 via Adital)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 23

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ECUADOR: OIL PROTESTS CONTINUE

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Some 22,000 residents of the northeastern Ecuadoran province of Orellana began a “progressive strike” on June 28 to protest environmental damage by the French oil company Perenco and repression by the military. The protest began with residents of the provincial capital, Francisco de Orellana, blocking roads leading to one of Perenco’s installations and threatening to block all the roads in the province, where much of the country’s oil production is concentrated. “The number [of protesters] will grow with the actions, because the communities will no longer put up with disrespect from the government and the oil companies,” Orellana province prefect Guadalupe Llori told the media.

Confrontations between the protesters and some 300 soldiers increased after protesters seized the area around the Coca airport and blocked the roads leading to it. Llori charged the military had violated the law by entering Francisco de Orellana, where it had no jurisdiction, and using rubber bullets and tear gas “against an unarmed civilian population”; two people were wounded. “[T]he soldiers made an attempt on my life,” Llori said. “They nearly killed me when they aimed a gun at me; the truth is, I don’t know how I escaped.” Later the soldiers deployed outside Coca municipality, where residents said they detained three local people.

The protesters were demanding that Perenco leave the province and pay for the damage they say it has caused. They also wanted the military to end a “state of exception” (state of emergency) it had enforced in the province for 105 days and to release human rights activist Wilmer (or Wilman) Jimenez Salazar.

According to human rights groups, the police seized Jimenez near a Perenco facility on June 19 when he was acting as a human rights observer at a protest by some 200 local campesinos, who were blocking access. Jimenez was one of two people wounded by rubber bullets. The police turned him over to military authorities, who held him for two days before notifying his family and defense attorneys. Joint Task Force #4 commander Gonzalo Meza denied a habeas corpus petition, saying Jimenez was “encountered in a fragrant act” (an error for “flagrant act”). The army says he will be tried for sabotage before a military tribunal. (El Comercio, Guayaquil. June 28; Prensa Latina, June 29; Univision, June 28 from EFE; El Universo, Guayaquil, July 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 2

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PERU: TRADE PACT PASSES, CAMPESINOS PROTEST

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

In the early morning of June 28 Peru’s Congress voted 79-14 with six abstentions to ratify the Andean Free Trade Agreement (AFTA, known locally as the Free Trade Treaty, or TLC), a trade pact Peru signed with the US in December. Some 1,000-2,000 protesters began a march in the streets of Lima to reject the TLC, which they said will destroy Peruvian agriculture and industry through competition with US products. The night before, as Congress was debating the ratification, a group of political leaders from the party of nationalist former presidential candidate Ollanta Humala pushed their way into the Congress building and forced legislators to suspend the session for a half hour.

At the June 28 march, Congress member Javier Diez Canseco, leader of the Socialist Party, said that “struggle and social pressure” were ways of attacking the accord but that he would work on legal action to have the ratification declared unconstitutional.

Other politicians pushed for legislation to mitigate the effects of the TLC. Congress has approved bills providing $171 million worth of compensation for the agricultural sector, and other measures are under discussion. Legislators from the social democratic Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) voted for the TLC, but PAP leader Alan Garcia, who takes office as president on July 28, has promised to renegotiate parts of the accord. (Punto de Noticias, Venezuela, June 28 from AFP; Univision, US, June 28 from EFE; Prensa Latina, July 1)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 2

Peruvian campesinos blocked roads and held street demonstrations on July 4 to protest the TLC. In the southern city of Pisco, police used tear gas to disperse protesters who were blocking the Panamerican South highway with stones. Campesinos in the south said on July 5 they would continue an open-ended strike and road blockades to protest the TLC.

Some 500 people marched on July 4 through the center of Lima to protest the TLC. The protesters later rallied peacefully outside the bunker-like home of US ambassador James Curtis Struble, which was guarded by 1,000 police agents, while inside the complex President Alejandro Toledo praised the TLC at an event honoring US independence day. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, July 5 from AP; AFP, July 4; Prensa Latina, July 5; Adital, July 5) Toledo flew to the US on July 9 to begin lobbying members of the US Congress to approve the trade pact. (El Comercio, Peru, July 9)

The US hopes that AFTA will eventually include Colombia and Ecuador.

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 9

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http://home.earthlink.net/~nicadlw/wnuhome.html

PARAGUAY: U.S. MARINES BACK PARAMILITARIES?

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

Thousands of Paraguayan campesinos continued to occupy estates and block roads during the week of July 17 to demand that the government of President Nicanor Duarte Frutos address the problems they face. The protests began on July 12 as part of a National Campaign for Integral Agrarian Reform.

On July 19, at least 800 campesinos from the National Coordinating Committee of Campesino Organizations (MCNOC) blocked Route 8 at a crossroads in Numi district, on the border between Guaira and Caazapa departments. Police responded with violent repression: in a communique issued the same day, MCNOC reported that eight people were badly hurt and taken to the hospital in Villarrica, Guaira, including a man with a serious head injury; 51 people were detained at the Villarrica police station, including children, a pregnant woman and two MCNOC leaders; and 200 campesinos, men and women, “were savagely tortured for more than two hours, naked, face down,” by police and possibly soldiers. (MCNOC communique, July 19 via Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales; Adital, Brazil, July 20; La Nacion, Paraguay, July 20)

The Paraguayan daily La Nacion reported that 38 people were arrested–including nine infants and children, detained with their parents–and 12 people were injured in the police crackdown at Numi. Villarrica prosecutor Perla Caceres de Bataglia issued the order to forcibly remove the protesters, and police from Guaira and Caazapa carried it out. Caceres is threatening to bring charges against the campesinos for organizing the blockade of the route, and to charge parents for allegedly using their children as “shields.”

In Itapua department, campesinos said they would blockade Route 6 in the area of Maria Auxiliadora to impede participation in a mayoral primary election for the ruling Colorado Party. Between 300 and 1,000 campesinos have been blocking Route 6 intermittently on a daily basis near the 8 de Diciembre settlement in Tomas Romero Pereira district. There have also been intermittent blockades of Route 7 in Jose Domingo Ocampos district, Caaguazu department. (LN, July 20)

Also on July 19, some 3,000 campesinos from the MCNOC marched along Route 10 in Capiibary, San Pedro department, to protest a police attack on protesters there the previous week which left several people injured. Among those hurt was Fidelina Aquino, who was eight months pregnant and lost her unborn child as a result of the attack. (LN, July 20; Prensa Latina, July 20)

Meanwhile, more than 300 indigenous people from the Mbya Guarani nation have been camped out since July 6 in the main plaza of the city of San Juan Nepomuceno, Caazapa department, demanding “land and freedom” as well as autonomy for indigenous peoples. The protesters are from Karumbey, Kokuere Guazu and other communities in Caazapa. They are also demanding the removal of missionaries from their communities. (Adital, July 21)

From Weekly News Update, July 23

The occupations began on July 12, when some 5,000 landless families invaded 20 estates owned by Paraguayans and foreigners in seven of Paraguay’s 17 departments, in a coordinated action to demand a speedy agrarian reform. “The occupation of private properties is a legitimate action; it may not be legal, but it’s the only way to get the attention of the authorities,” said Luis Aguayo, a leader of the MCNOC. (AP, July 12)

The owners’ claims to the 20 properties occupied by MCNOC members on July 12 are of “spurious origin,” said Aguayo, since the lands were “adjudicated to characters connected with the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989),” and many lack legal titles. The occupied estates are located in the departments of Caaguazu, Caazapa, Itapua, Canindeyu, Misiones, San Pedro and Paraguari. The date of the land invasion was chosen because July 12 marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of two campesinos by soldiers, Aguayo noted. (Notimex, July 12)

Aguayo said that a year ago the MCNOC presented President Duarte Frutos with a plan for expropriating large tracts of idle lands owned by foreigners. “We did the same with the legislators, but we haven’t received a favorable response, so we have no other option than to occupy the lands,” Aguayo explained. There are 300,000 landless families in Paraguay, according to Aguayo. (AP, July 12) Official statistics show that 80% of the land in Paraguay is in the hands of less than 10% of the population. (Adital, July 14)

Duarte reacted to the land occupations on July 12 by holding a meeting with Agriculture Minister Carlos Santacruz; Santacruz then announced that the government would increase a credit line for campesino cotton producers who had suffered drought losses. (Notimex, July 12)

Virgilio Barboza, chief of public order for the National Police, said his agency was implementing “dialogue as a way to avoid frictions or violent actions; through conversations with the campesino leaders we are trying to persuade them to start leaving the private properties peacefully.” Barboza said the police had managed to peacefully end two of the occupations so far.

“We won’t use force because it won’t be the solution, besides which the National Police doesn’t have enough agents to control all the invasions,” said Barboza. (AP, July 12) However, according to press reports, some 100 police agents intervened to remove a group of 3,000 campesinos from the MCNOC who were blocking a highway in Capiibary, San Pedro department. Two people were arrested and nine injured. The campesinos have camped out nearby and say they will invade other estates. (Adital, July 14)

U.S. MARINES BLAMED FOR DEATHS

On July 12, Paraguayan campesino groups and social organizations held a press conference to announce that US Marines and special groups acting as paramilitaries “are responsible for more than 30 disappearances and deaths” since April of workers and campesinos in Paraguay. “In less than three months there were more than 30 disappearances and several deaths, all at the hands of the landowners of each place,” Nicolas Barreto of the Paraguayan Campesino Movement (MCP) told the Argentine news agency Telam. (Telam, July 12)

Paraguayan armed forces spokesperson Col. Elvio Antonio Flores Servin told Telam the charges were untrue: “There is not a single US Marine here in Paraguay,” he said. But according to Barreto, “in Paraguay, the army and the paramilitary groups act in the evictions with brutal repression against campesinos, leaving people wounded, dead and disappeared, with the direct control and intervention of [US] marines. (Territorio Digital, Posadas, Misiones [Argentina], July 14)

“Recently the boy Silvino Talavera died in Itapua from toxic agrochemicals, his mother reported it and in vengeance they dismembered her brother and threw him out there so everyone could see what these people are capable of doing,” Barreto explained. That incident apparently took place in Mariscal Estigarribia, where activists charge the US Southern Command has posted a force of 2,800 Marines. In the same area, the Paraguayan government has created a Citizen Security Guard, a special group that acts as a sort of legalized paramilitary group. Barreto said the paramilitary groups recruit their members from among the children of the campesinos. When human rights groups recently called on the government to dismantle the groups, deputy interior minister Commissary General Mario Agustin Saprisa responded: “in the United States and Colombia [similar groups] exist and have had good results.”

Barreto said the violence has emerged in response to stepped-up campesino struggles. “With his announced zero tolerance policy, President Duarte Frutos militarized the struggle and gave it a framework of unusual violence,” said Barreto. “To such a point that the Marines participate in the repression and even occupy agricultural schools. That is, they act like a true occupation army.” (Telam, July 12)

“The Marines are the ones who are instructing the Paraguayan forces for repression, linking campesino organizations with terrorist cells whose existence has never been proven,” agreed Vidal Acevedo of the Peace and Justice Service (SERPAJ) of Paraguay. Acevedo said the repression consists of “a joint action to stop campesino organizations.” (TD, July 14)

The US Southern Command had permission to stay in Paraguay until the end of 2006, but Vice President Luis Castigilione announced that the permission has been extended for an additional year. In Mariscal Estigarribia, a 3,800-meter-long airstrip has been built to handle large planes. Mariscal Estigarribia is in the Chaco region of northwestern Paraguay, close to lithium mines in Argentina’s Salta province and the largest gasfields in the region, across the border in the Bolivian department of Tarija. (Telam, July 12)

The US embassy in Asuncion responded to the criticisms on July 12 with a communique, insisting that the US soldiers in Paraguay are carrying out “humanitarian and medical assistance to poor communities as well as military training,” and that the US “has no intention whatsoever to establish a military base anywhere in Paraguay.” (Agencia Periodistica del Mercosur, July 13) US Embassy press attache Bruce Clainer told Telam the accusation about the military base “is a complete myth.” (Telam, July 12)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 16

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

See also:

“Paraguay: march against US troops,” WW4 REPORT, June 21
/node/2113

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

CENTRAL AMERICA: DEADLY REPRESSION AS CAFTA HITS IN

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

GUATEMALA: TRADE PROTESTERS SEIZE ESTATES

The Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) went into effect in Guatemala on July 1 amid protests against the US-sponsored pact, which seeks to bring Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the US together in a trade bloc. The agreement took effect in El Salvador on March 1, and in Honduras and Nicaragua on May 1. Costa Rica’s legislature has not yet approved the pact. (Yahoo en Espanol, July 1 from AFP)

DR-CAFTA was scheduled to go into effect in the Dominican Republic on July 1, but the implementation was delayed by a disagreement over US demands for legislation protecting industrial secrets for pharmaceutical companies. “We’re not giving in,” Marcelo Puello, Dominican assistant secretary for foreign trade, said on June 30. “The negotiating team closed this chapter, and the people in charge of implementation agree that we won’t give in on something that would be outside the text of the treaty.” (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, July 1)

For DR-CAFTA to go into effect in Guatemala, Congress had to meet US demands by passing an Implementation Law and by ratifying three international treaties: the Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, enforced by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV).

Under DR-CAFTA, 94% of Guatemala’s exports to the US will be exempt from tariffs, while 82% of US exports to Guatemala will be exempt, according to Economy Minister Marcio Cuevas. Guatemala imports about twice as much from the US as the US imports from Guatemala; in 2005 total Guatemalan exports were worth $3.378 billion, with 52.5% going to the US; Guatemala’s imports were worth $8.815 billion, with 38.7% coming from the US. Cuevas predicted that the trade pact could generate 10,000 new jobs in its first year, but Guatemalan-US Chamber of Commerce executive director Carolina Castellanos warned: “Let’s remember that the free trade pact isn’t a magic wand which goes into effect on Saturday and on Sunday we all already have jobs and are exporting.” (Yahoo, July 1 from AFP; Cadena Global, Venezuela, July 1)

On June 30 Guatemala’s National Coordinating Committee of Campesino Organizations (CNOC), the Social Organizations Collective and other groups announced plans for protests against DR-CAFTA on July 1. “The TLC [Free Trade Treaty] will submerge millions of people in extreme poverty, especially in the countryside,” CNOC leader Aparicio Perez charged. Some sectors had pushed for Congress to pass a Rural Development Law and other compensatory legislation that would help Guatemalan producers meet the competition of heavily subsidized US agricultural products, but Congress postponed discussion of the laws. (Prensa Latina, June 30, July 2) [CNOC experienced two break-ins in offices it was using in May 2005; see WW4 REPORT #110.]

Hundreds of campesinos started protesting even before July 1, occupying five government-owned estates on June 29. CNOC coordinated the occupations, which were carried out by two of its affiliates, the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC) and the Verapaz Union of Community Organizations (UVOC). According to CNOC the estates were: La Nube, in Gualan, Zacapa department, occupied by 50 families; San Jose las Lagrimas, Esquipulas, Chiquimula department, invaded by 120 families; Santa Ines, in Santa Cruz Verapaz, Alta Verapaz department, occupied by 22 families; Sexan, in Chisec, Alta Verapaz, invaded by 80 families; El Zapotal, in Chisec, Alta Verapaz, invaded by 25 families. As of July 2 campesinos had occupied a sixth estate.

At least one of the estates, San Jose las Lagrimas, belongs to the military. According to Aparicio Perez, the occupations were also intended to protest the military, which was about to celebrate Army Day, June 30. “We reject the plundering of lands that community members suffered at the hands of the military governments during the [1960-1996] armed conflict, and today we are demanding that the lands be returned,” he said. CNOC also condemned the role of the military in the evictions of landless campesinos who have invaded estates in the past. (Prensa Libre, Guatemala City, June 30; PL, July 2; Yahoo Argentina, June 26)

This year the military held its first public Army Day parade in Guatemala City since the civil war ended in 1996. Some 300 human rights activists protested, shouting “Murderers, murderers” at the soldiers. The parade came as Spanish judge Santiago Pedraz was visiting Guatemala in connection with genocide charges that activist Rigoberta Menchu Tum filed against four former military officers and two civilians in 1999. (El Nuevo Herald, Miami, June 30 from AP) [See related story, below.]

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 2

ALTA VERAPAZ: NINE DEAD IN LAND STRUGGLE

At least nine Guatemalan campesinos were reportedly killed on July 7 during an attempt by some 230 families to occupy the Moca estate in the community of Senahu in the northern department of Alta Verapaz. The health center in nearby La Tinta municipality reported that it had received at least 21 people injured in the confrontation. Police agents and representatives of the Human Rights Prosecutor’s Office were sent to the estate on July 8 to investigate.

According to local media and activists, the families had already occupied and been driven from the estate three times, the most recent in April. The estate has “historically been the property of our great-great-grandfathers, grandfathers, fathers and now us,” local indigenous leader Mateo Yat Caal said. When the families tried to invade again, the owner sent 800 workers and private security guards to stop the occupation, according to Yat. Daniel Pascual, leader of the Campesino Unity Committee (CUC), charged that the owner had provided the guards with arms for the attack. Local radio stations reported that the guards had automatic rifles and pistols.

Campesinos continue to occupy some 20 private estates and 10 government-owned estates to push demands for the government to distribute land to them. (La Jornada, Mexico, July 9 from AFP; Prensa Latina, July 8; El Diario-La Prensa, NY, July 9 from EFE)

On July 5, Constitutional Court (CC) secretary Martin Guzman announced that Guatemalan president Oscar Berger had filed for an injunction with the court to prevent a law from taking effect that would guarantee a minimum pension for about 60,000 seniors. The law is already on hold because of a suit filed by a private lawyer. A group of seniors have been participating, in shifts, in a hunger strike outside government offices in downtown Guatemala City to demand that the law be allowed to take effect. (El Nuevo Herald, July 5 from AP)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 9

SPAIN INDICTS GUATEMALAN EX-OFFICERS

On July 7 Spanish National Court judge Santiago Pedraz issued arrest warrants for eight former Guatemalan officials accused of genocide during a 1960-1996 civil war. The judge also issued an order to freeze the defendants’ assets. The defendants named on the arrest warrants are former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, former head of government Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, former defense minister Gen. Angel Anibal Guevara Rodriguez, former National Police director Pedro Garcia Arredondo, former police chief German Chupina Barahona, former head of Army General Staff Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia, former governance minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz and former president Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia. Lucas Garcia died in May in Venezuela, but his case remains open until Spain is officially notified.

Judge Pedraz took this action after returning from Guatemala on July 1 after a one-week visit. He had expected to interrogate the defendants during his trip, but he was thwarted when they filed last-minute appeals with the Guatemalan Constitutional Court. Spain’s Constitutional Court ruled on Oct. 5, 2005, that under the “principle of universal jurisdiction” Spain can try people for genocide or crimes against humanity, even if the crimes occurred outside Spain and no Spanish nationals were involved. (Center for Justice and Accountability press release, July 7; Adital, July 11; New York Times, July 7 from Reuters)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 16

HONDURAS: LENCA LEADERS ACQUITTED

On June 23, the Honduran Supreme Court of Justice acquitted Lenca indigenous activists Marcelino and Leonardo Miranda of the murder of Juan Reyes Gomez. The Miranda brothers are leaders of the Lenca community of Montana Verde in Lempira department; they were arrested in January 2003 in a violent raid on the community, and were convicted of the Reyes Gomez murder in December 2003 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Last January, Amnesty International declared the Miranda brothers to be prisoners of conscience and began an international campaign to win their freedom [see WW4 REPORT #119].

Their actual release is expected to take several weeks, since the ruling must be officially certified by the Supreme Court Secretariat and must then go back through the judicial system to the appeals court in Santa Rosa de Copan and the local court in Gracias. In a June 22 press release announcing the court decision, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Civic Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) said the brothers’ acquittal “would not have been achieved if not for solidarity and pressure on a local, national and international level.” Human rights groups say Honduran authorities fabricated charges against the Montana Verde leaders in reprisal for their work to win communal land titles.

Another Montana Verde leader, Margarito Vargas Ponce, was released from prison on June 28. He had been jailed since January 2006. In the end he was cleared of more serious charges but sentenced by Judge Hermes Moncada of the Gracias court to three years for complicity in battery against Demetrio Reyes Benitez, one of the community’s longtime persecutors. Under the new penal code, his sentence may be served in “provisional liberty” (parole). Vargas must present himself before local judicial authorities every two months, and if found guilty of any other crime within the next five years, will have to serve time in jail for both charges.

Rights Action, a North American group working in solidarity with the Montana Verde community, reports that less than 24 hours after his release, Vargas was participating with other members of the Civic Council of Grassroots and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) in a struggle to defend communities’ rights, lands and development from the threat of the El Tigre binational hydroelectric dam that will flood entire communities in southwestern Honduras. (COPINH press releases, June 22, 28; Amnesty International Public Statement, June 30; Rights Action, June 23, 30; Honduras News in Review, July 3)

ATLANTIDA: GARIFUNA LEADER THREATENED

On June 22, a man entered the home of Jessica Garcia, a leader of the Honduran Garifuna community of San Juan, on the Tela Bay in Atlantida department. Garcia is the president of the San Juan Tela Patronato, a local group representing community interests to government institutions. The intruder offered Garcia money to sign a document stating that her community recognizes the rights of the private real estate and tourism company Promotur to San Juan’s communally-owned lands. When Garcia refused, the man held a gun to her head and forced her to sign the document.

The San Juan community’s attempts to win legal recognition of its territorial rights have resulted in ongoing conflicts with Promotur and its owner, Jaime Rosenthal Oliva, a powerful businessperson and Liberal Party politician. Rosenthal is one of the richest men in Honduras; according to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia he owns Grupo Continental, Banco Continental, several maquiladoras (tax-exempt assembly plants producing mainly for export), a cement company, the Hotel Intercontinental Tegucigalpa, the El Tiempo daily newspaper and a television network. Rosenthal’s son, Yani Rosenthal Hidalgo, is currently the presidency minister under President Manuel Zelaya, and is a key investor in the Los Micos Beach & Golf Resort, a massive tourism complex planned between the Garifuna communities of Tornabe and Miami, next to San Juan in the Tela Bay. The Los Micos project is financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Central American Economic Integration Bank (BCIE) and investors from Italy and Spain.

The June 22 incident was the latest in a series of attacks against the San Juan community and its leaders. Last November, the home of San Juan Lands Defense Committee president Wilfredo Guerrero was burned to the ground, with all of his possessions and the committee’s archives inside. The homes of other community members were destroyed this past March and April.

Last Jan. 14, Promotur representatives entered the community accompanied by a number of hooded men armed with AK47 semi-automatic assault rifles (which are apparently illegal in Honduras). Last Feb. 25, young San Juan community members Epson Andres Castillo and Yino Eligio Lopez were detained near Tornabe by agents of the public security forces allegedly assigned to protect the zone for the Los Micos tourism project. The bodies of the two young men were found the next day in a lagoon near the community of La Ensenada, along the Tela Bay.

The Garifuna community is demanding an investigation into those deaths, and immediate protection for Garcia. Rights Action urges people to send messages protesting the attacks against the San Juan community, urging protection for Garcia, Guerrero and other community leaders and their families, and pressing for the recognition of the San Juan community’s legal rights to their full communal territory. Messages can be sent to the Honduran embassies in the US (embassy@hondurasemb.org) or Canada (embhonca@magma.ca); to the Honduran special prosecutor for ethnic groups, Jany del Cid Martinez (janydelcid@yahoo.es, fax +504-221-5620); and to the public prosecutor’s office in Tela (fax +504-448-1758). (Rights Action, June 30; Honduras News in Review, July 3 from Hondudiario, June 28, COPINH press release, June 29)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 9

PRIDE MARCH IN SAN PEDRO SULA

On June 18, hundreds of people marched through the streets of San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city and main commercial center of Honduras, to demand respect for gender diversity and an end to discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. Ramon Valladares, one of the leaders of the march, promised that Article 60 of the Honduran Constitution, which prohibits discrimination, would be used to proceed legally against those who continue to violate LGBT rights. Valladares referred specifically to religious and political leaders who discriminate against the LGBT community. (Honduras News in Review, July 3 from Proceso Digital June 19)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 16

EL SALVADOR: DEATHS IN STUDENT PROTEST

On July 5, Salvadoran student protesters occupied a busy intersection outside the gates of the National University of El Salvador (UES) in San Salvador during morning rush hour to protest a $0.05 increase in bus fares and a 14% electricity rate hike. The protest held up traffic for blocks. A large group of high school students from the Francisco Menendez Institute (INFRAMEN) marched peacefully to join the demonstration, and riot police massed in preparation to break up the protest. When police violently grabbed and tried to arrest two 15-year-old students from the march, other protesters responded with rocks, while some attacked a bank ATM. Police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets, and amid the chaos a sudden volley of gunshots erupted. Two agents from the Order Maintenance Unit (UMO), an elite riot squad of the National Civilian Police (PNC), were killed by bullets, apparently from a semi-automatic, high-caliber weapon, and seven other agents were hospitalized. An undetermined number of students were wounded, and some sources reported that as many as three students were killed.

Most of the students sought refuge inside the university gates. Police helicopters then fired on protesters inside the university complex, injuring Herbert Rivas, director of multidisciplinary faculty. Police locked down the university–in violation of laws protecting the institution’s autonomy–and threatened to search its buildings and arrest anyone who remained there. Students were allowed to leave the university grounds only after being searched by police agents. According to one witness, a number of students were arrested at another police checkpoint near the university; police appeared to target students who had beards or long hair, or t-shirts with the image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara or with phrases in English that the agents couldn’t understand.

Human Rights Ombudsperson Beatrice Alamani de Carrillo said: “I’m still waiting for a complete report, and from no point of view can one identify with the use of violence. The deaths of the agents are reprehensible, just as the increase in bus fare is reprehensible.” (Christians for Peace in El Salvador- CRISPAZ, July 7; Eyewitness report sent by a UES professor via e-mail, July 5; Message from Comunidades de Fe y Vida-COFEVI, July 5 via Adital)

The government of President Elias Antonio Saca was quick to blame the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) for the violence, although at the time of the incidents most of the FMLN leaders were in Suchitoto, 45 miles northeast of San Salvador, offering their condolences to longtime FMLN activist and Radio Venceremos co-founder Marina Manzanares for the death of her parents. (Eyewitness report sent by a UES professor via e-mail, July 5) On July 2, Francisco Antonio Manzanares and Juana Monjaras de Manzanares were brutally tortured for hours before being murdered in their home in Suchitoto. Their bodies were slashed and lye had been spread on their faces. Marina Manzanares said the family had been the target of multiple death threats in recent months. The week before her parents were killed, a box of bones arrived at their home with a note that said, “This is how you’ll receive your daughter’s bones.”

Police suggest the murder was carried out as part of a common robbery, because valuables were allegedly taken from the Manzanares home. But the killings have sparked terror in the community and rumors of a resurgence in death squad activity. “This is a crime that revisits all of the markings of the crimes committed by death squads back in the times of military dictatorship and the years of the armed conflict,” said FMLN legislative deputy Sigfrido Reyes. Alamani de Carrillo, the ombudsperson, said death squads began to resume activities in 2005; she urged the attorney general and police to undertake a serious investigation. (CRISPAZ, July 5)

On June 30, PNC agents arrested student Ricardo Gonzales Hernandez in San Salvador as he was on his way to school. Gonzales is the nephew of Frankie Flores, who represents the FMLN in California, is a member of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC) International and is active with School of the Americas Watch. According to Flores, Gonzales was taking a bus to class at the Industrial Technical Institute (ITI) when he saw a group of students preparing to demonstrate over transport hikes, so he ran to catch another bus to avoid getting stuck in traffic. The bus he boarded was stopped a few blocks later by PNC special forces agents, who arrested Gonzales, claiming he had planned to commit a robbery on the bus. Flores said his nephew has never been in trouble, and divides his time between home, school and church. Flores, who lives in Los Angeles, has himself received death threats recently after writing articles about the resurgence of death squads in El Salvador. (Message from Flores, undated but probably July 1, via Resumen Latinoamericano, July 2)

At 4 PM on July 5, the Union Coordinating Committee of Salvadoran Workers (CSTS) held a press conference at its offices, pointing to the police violence at the student march as further evidence of a wave of repression against the country’s labor and grassroots movements. At 3 AM on July 6, police raided the CSTS offices without a warrant, holding CSTS press and propaganda secretary Daniel Ernesto Morales for three hours and hitting him on the head and face while demanding to know “where the weapons were.” The agents searched the offices and took equipment, cameras and $2,000 in cash. In the end they arrested Morales, supposedly because of a pistol they found in the CSTS offices, although the gun was legally registered and was at the site because it belonged to a member of the union that represents private security guards. (Centro de Estudios y Apoyo Laboral-CEAL, El Salvador, July 6) The raid took place a day after the Salvadoran government was informed that the CSTS intended to participate in a hearing before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission on the government’s systematic violation of labor rights. (UnionVoice action alert, undated)

The protests against the fare hikes continued on July 7, with hundreds of people blocking major roads in and around the capital and elsewhere in the country. The protests were called by the Social Popular Bloc (BPS) of El Salvador, which represents labor, student, campesino, veteran and religious groups, among others. The BPS blames the July 5 violence on “infiltrators” trying to damage the image of the social movements. (El Diario-La Prensa, NY, July 8)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 9

FMLN BLAMED FOR VIOLENCE

Fallout continued in El Salvador during the week of July 10 over the shooting death of two police agents at a July 5 student protest. Over the weekend of July 8, the police finally left the University of El Salvador campus, and 20-30 students arrested July 5 were released due to lack of evidence. On July 11, Union Coordinating Committee of Salvadoran Workers (CSTS) press and propaganda secretary Daniel Ernesto Morales was released; he had been arrested during a police raid on the CSTS office in the early hours of July 6.

Police have arrested a man they say was giving cover to the person who fired an M-16 during the demonstration, and are searching for Mario Belloso Castillo, who they claim fired the weapon. Both men have been members of the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN); the ruling right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) is blaming the FMLN for the attacks and calling it a terrorist organization. The FMLN responded by condemning the use of violence at protests and pointing out that it cannot control the individual actions of its 100,000 party members.

News photos apparently show Belloso wielding an M-16 at the July 5 demonstration, but Human Rights ombudsperson Beatrice Alamani de Carrillo said on July 13 that the media footage isn’t proof that he killed the two riot agents. Alamani said the government’s only source of information–an anonymous informant–is insufficient, and only a thorough investigation will reveal who killed the agents. Alamani said “the deaths appeared to be very exact sniper executions that hit one police officer in the head and the other in the heart, to kill. This indicates that there has been a specific will to provoke this outcome.” (CISPES Update, July 13)

Meanwhile, FMLN activist Marina Manzanares Monjaras reported from Suchitoto on July 13 that she has been receiving continuing threats and intimidation since the July 2 murder of her elderly parents, Francisco Antonio Manzanares and Juana Monjaras de Manzanares. (Message from Marina Manzanares, July 13)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, July 16

——

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

IIRSA: THE FTAA’S HANDMAIDEN

South American “Infrastructure Integration” for Free Trade

by Raul Zibechi

The project for Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA, by its initials in Spanish), is swiftly but silently moving forward.

IIRSA is the most ambitious and encompassing plan to integrate the region for international trade. If completed in full, the project would connect zones containing natural resources (natural gas, water, oil, biodiversity) with metropolitan areas, and both of these with the world’s largest markets.

From August 31-September 1, during the 2000 South American Presidential Summit in Brasilia initiated by President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB) presented its “Plan of Action for the Integration of South American Infrastructure.” In essence, it formed the foundation for what would become IIRSA, an ambitious plan to facilitate regional and global trade by carrying out physical projects and effecting changes in legislation, statute, and national regulations.

IIRSA is a multi-sectoral project that aims to develop and integrate transportation, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure over the next 10 years. The goal is to reorganize the continent’s landscape based on the development of a physical infrastructure of land, aerial, and river transport; oil and gas pipelines; waterways; maritime and river ports; and power lines and fiber optic cables, to name a few. These projects are organized in 12 integration and development axes—corridors where investments can be concentrated to increase trade and create chains of production connected to global markets.

To carry out this megaproject a number of physical, statutory, and social “barriers” must first be overcome. This requires harmonizing national legislation in the 12 affected countries, and occupying the key territories that tend to have low populations but are major reserves of raw materials and biodiversity.

An Ambitious Project

The December 2000 IADB study “A New Push for Regional Infrastructure Development in South America” suggests that the main obstacles to accomplishing physical integration, and therefore, to improving the flow of merchandise, are the “formidable natural barriers like the Andes Mountains, the Amazon Rainforest, and the Orinoco river basin.” Carlos Lessa, former president of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES, by its initials in Portuguese) agrees, pointing out, “The Andes mountain range is certainly beautiful, but it’s a terrible engineering problem.” This kind of logic that regards nature as a “barrier” in some places and a “resource” in others pervades all aspects of the plan.

During the September 2003 Sub-regional Seminar, IIRSA’s Technical Coordination Committee defined three goals:

1. Support the integration of markets to improve intra-regional trade.

2. Promote new chains of production to become competitive in major global markets.

3. Reduce the “South American cost” by creating a solid logistical platform that is well-inserted into the global economy.

According to studies, another objective of this integration project is to conquer South America’s natural resources and put them at the disposal of North American and European markets.

These objectives can be easily observed on maps of the development and integration axes, each of which encompasses several countries. The nine axes already defined (two are still under development) are:

1. Andean Axis (Venezuela-Colombia-Ecuador-Peru-Bolivia)

2. Amazon Axis (Colombia-Ecuador-Peru-Brazil)

3. Central Inter-oceanic Axis (Peru-Chile-Bolivia-Paraguay-Brazil)

4. Capricorn Inter-oceanic Axis (Antofagasta/Chile-Jujuy/Argentina-Asuncion/Paraguay-Porto Alegre/Brazil)

5. Guyana Shield Axis (Venezuela-Brazil-Suriname-Guyana)

6. Mercosur-Chile Axis(Brazil-Uruguay-Argentina-Chile)

7. Southern Axis (Talcahuano-Concepcion/Chile-Neuquén-Bahía Blanca/Argentina)

8. Southern Amazon Axis ( Peru-Brazil-Bolivia)

9. Atlantic and Pacific Maritime Axis (all countries)

The two axes still under development are the Parana-Paraguay waterway and a megaproject to unite the Orinoco, Amazon, and Rio de la Plata river basins through a connection of 17 rivers to permit river transportation from the Caribbean to Rio de la Plata.

Each axis involves a variety of infrastructure projects. For example, the Amazon Axis, which unites the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic and crosses three large ecosystems (coastal, Andean mountain, and rainforest), must tie the Amazon River and its tributaries to the ports of Tumaco (Colombia), Esmeraldas (Ecuador), and Paita (Peru). This will require major improvements to existing roads and construction of others. Since the axis aims to create a dense network of river transportation systems, several rivers will be dredged and straightened, while in other places river ports will have to be completely overhauled. These infrastructure projects and the spike in transportation flows they generate will result in massive environmental impacts on the Amazon ecosystem.

In areas covered by the axis, there is major hydroelectric power potential as well as large oil reserves already under development, in addition to soybean crops, wood extraction, fishing, and fish farms. The axis will connect with three others (Andean, Central Inter-oceanic, and Guyana Shield) and reduce transportation costs for Pacific countries to Europe, and Brazil to Japan, thus encouraging more trade. The construction of two gas pipelines is being considered for areas deep in the Brazilian Amazon, one extending from Coari to Manaos and the other from Urucu to Port Velho, at a total cost of $750 million. This would allow natural gas to be exported from key points in the Amazon and Southern Amazon Axes. The first contains the important port of Manaos, and the second Port Velho, Brazil, which would be united with the Peruvian ports on the Pacific. This would also allow transportation of the area’s grain production—where soy, corn, and wheat production are the fastest growing—in addition to Camisea’s natural gas from Peru.

The majority of the axes are interconnected. Of the nine, four cover the Amazon and five unite the Pacific with the Atlantic. Under this plan, the continent’s natural resources will be made available to international markets.

The IIRSA project has defined five processes of sectoral integration to address institutional and statutory obstacles. They are:

1. regional energy markets

2. functional systems of aerial, maritime, and multimodal transport

3. promotion of information and telecommunication technologies

4. the facilitation of border crossings

5. finance modalities.

Total investment is expected to be on the order of $37 billion. The project will be financed by the IADB, the Andean Promotional Corporation (CAF, by the Spanish), and the Financial Fund for the Development of the Rio de la Plata Basin (FONPLATA), in addition to the important contributions of the Brazilian Development Bank.

InterAmerican Development Bank (IADB)

Regional financial institution created in 1959 to encourage the economic and social development of Latin America and the Caribbean. It has 46 members: 26 from Latin America and the Caribbean; the United States; Canada; and 18 additional member countries from out of the region. Its highest authority is the Assembly of Governors, made up of the secretaries of treasury from each country.

The right to vote is determined by the number of shares: Latin America and the Caribbean have 50%, the United States 30%, Japan 5%, Canada 4%, and the rest 11%. Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico taken together have the same number of shares as the United States.

From 1961-2002, the IADB approved loans totaling $18.82 billion: 51% for energy projects, 46% for ground transportation, and 3% for telecommunications, maritime, river, and aerial transport. Brazil received 33% of the resources.

Andean Promotional Corporation (CAF)

Multilateral financial institution created in 1970. By 1981, it had approved $618 million in operations, but from 1995-1999, it underwent a huge expansion, approving $12.33 billion in operations

It is the largest financial agent for infrastructure projects in Latin America. Made up of 16 member countries, it is the number one financier for countries belonging to the Andean Community of Nations. It is a major financier of the Atrato-Truando or Atrato-Cacarica-San Miguel canal, which will allow the connection between IIRSA and Puebla-Panama Plan.

Financial Fund for the Development of the Rio de la Plata Basin (FONPLATA)

Created in 1971 to finance integration projects for the river basin. Brazil and Argentina each hold 33.3%; Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay 11.1%. It finances multi-million dollar projects for transportation, agriculture and livestock, industry, exports, and health.

Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES)

Brazilian public bank created in 1952. Under the Lula da Silva government, it has been directed to finance large infrastructure projects in South America. It has extensive resources—greater than any other financial institution in the region—and it is implementing important energy and hydroelectric projects in Venezuela and Ecuador, among others. It has projects that exceed a billion dollars with Venezuela and Argentina.

In reality, these projects are already underway, though not in direct connection with IIRSA. According to CAF’s 2002 Annual Report, some 300 physical integration projects have been identified in South America, 140 of which were ready to begin at any moment. Sixty IIRSA-related projects were already underway: 40 for transportation, 10 for energy, and 10 for telecommunications.

Territories and Markets

Overcoming the physical, legal, and social barriers to implementing IIRSA will require profound changes in geography, legislation, and social relations. The South American continent is sometimes considered a collection of five separate “islands” that should be united:

1. the Caribbean Plate

2. the Andean Mountains

3. the Atlantic Plate

4. Central Amazon Enclave

5. Southern Amazon Enclave

The integration and development axes unify these “islands” by breaking down what is called in technocratic language natural “barriers.”

From a geographical perspective, this unification would demand major undertakings in infrastructure to “correct” the obstacles imposed by nature, speed up the flow of transportation and trade, and greatly reduce costs. The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis, for example, seeks to create an access path from Brazil’s agricultural industry, in the Southern Amazon Enclave, to Pacific ports without having to first travel north through the Amazon river basin. To accomplish this, efficient highways crossing the Andes must be built, in addition to the infrastructure projects necessary for river transport. The path paved by nature will be modified, through huge investments, so that South American merchandise can more rapidly reach the global market.

As Andres Barreda points out, “Starting in the 1980s, the flow of commercial traffic from the Pacific began to displace flow on the Atlantic side. In the 1990s, port traffic on the Pacific was outpacing the Atlantic’s; and in the year 2000, the United States’ Pacific port traffic saw double the volume of its Atlantic ports. There is a problem when the global economy shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” This shift caused the Panama Canal to lose its significance and in its place corridors connecting the two oceans are beginning to appear. According to Barreda, South America has a “strategic bottleneck” in Bolivia, where five of the 12 corridors cross.

South America is one of the few regions on earth that contains all four strategic natural resources: hydrocarbons, minerals, biodiversity, and water. The profound changes to the landscape do not follow a model for integrating the continent as a whole, but rather, for inserting it into the global market . IIRSA, it could be said, centers on an “outward-facing” or exogenous type of integration, rather than an “inward-facing” one. In addition, the axes or corridors must have certain characteristics. Barreda: “To make real-time connections, the Internet is fundamental. To make just-in-time connections, intermodality is fundamental.” As such, the corridors must combine a modern-day telecommunications system with the necessary infrastructure for intermodal transportation.

Intermodality is based on the “container revolution.” The system must be exactly the same for ground, aerial, and river transportation, and merchandise must be able to transfer from one system to another seamlessly. This requires a system of highways and semi trucks, airports and plane fleets, and river barges capable of transporting freight containers, which are now replacing the old system of storage or deposit that the merchandise sector had traditionally utilized. This transformation is linked to the emergence of “global factories” that operate under the just-in-time premise. A sort of “global automaton” has been created by large businesses that employ remote-control operation techniques and cover the planet in the form of a network. But this global automaton, “industrially and productively integrated, now operates with new center-periphery hierarchical relations of an industrial character,” as evidenced by the maquiladora boom. IIRSA is the South American link to integrate the continent into this process, in a subordinate manner.

To overcome the various legal and statutory barriers, IIRSA has adopted the neoliberal strategy of deregulation and weakening the state. Adapting national legislation to the needs of global trade requires homogenization of the rules. This would inevitably lead to each country or region losing its distinguishing characteristics, and states would lose their autonomy to multinationals and the governments of developed countries.

Finally, the “social barriers” must also be overcome. Just one example of this among dozens is the 260-mile Coari-Manaos gas pipeline that passes through the Amazon River as well as one of the best-preserved areas of the rainforest. The two companies primarily interested in the project are Brazil’s Petrobras and the US-based El Paso (world leader in natural gas and one of the world’s largest in the energy sector). In 1998, Petrobras built the first part of the gas pipeline (174 miles), which united the Urucu reserves with the city of Coari. The project caused enormous social and environmental impacts. Writes Brazilian journalist Elisangela Soldatelli: “It reduced fishing levels, affecting river populations that depend on fish to survive; it affected areas where Brazil nut is extracted, crucial to the surrounding areas; the Coari population grew considerably, as the city houses the workers that arrive from different areas; and there has been a dramatic increase in prostitution, violent crime, and cases of malaria.” The Urucu-Port Velho gas pipeline will affect 13 indigenous communities and five municipalities where 90% or more of the population is indigenous.

The benefits gained by a small handful of multinationals will create irreversible social and environmental damages, and further weaken the autonomy of marginalized states, giving them even less recourse to deal with their problems.

Two Cases: Brazil and Bolivia

IIRSA affects each country in the region differently, but in general, we can define “winners” and “losers” in terms of the benefits and damages the implementation of IIRSA will generate. One of the problems with the project is that it will deepen the gaps between countries, regions, and the rich and poor social sectors of society, since different regions will be integrated into the global market on an unequal footing based on current “comparative advantages.” Brazil, one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, illustrate this point well.

In Bolivia, the only thing poor is the indigenous majority. The country boasts important hydrocarbon reserves, the second largest on the continent behind Venezuela. It also occupies a key geographical position: five of the integration and development axes connecting the Pacific with the Atlantic must pass through its territory. It is also rich in biodiversity. Consequently, in its plan “Cambio Para Todos” (Change for All), the international banks call for Bolivia “to become a thoroughfare for the subcontinent and central distributor of gas and other sources of energy,” according to a report from the Bolivian Forum for Environment and Development (Fobomade). As a country providing passage, corridors for exporting goods and services will form part of important binational projects for hydro- and thermoelectric energy generation and distribution.

According to plans defined by IIRSA, Bolivia must construct a new “Fundamental Network of Highways” that will leave entire zones isolated but connect hydrocarbon reserves to global markets. The Central Inter-oceanic Axis that seeks to unite the Brazilian port Santos with the Chilean ports Arica and Iquique, crosses through the middle of Bolivia and is critical to countries like Brazil and Chile, which are especially interested in establishing bi-oceanic trade. The Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis would unite the Brazilian state Rondonia with the Pacific and gain access to its large-scale soy production, thereby “taking advantage of one of the regions where crossing the Andes presents the least difficulty,” writes Fobomade. Bolivia is about to become the object of huge investments for the construction of the five corridors that will fracture its national territory.

Brazil finds itself in the opposite situation. Exogenous integration will permit it to “advance its goal of dominating Latin America, a result of its 1980s strategy to reach a position of regional leadership by gaining influence over its closest neighbors: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, first, then Bolivia and Chile, and finally, the rest of the Andean community and all of South America, the ultimate goal being to strengthen its economy in the face of the FTAA.”

Brazil will be in a position similar to that of the world’s industrialized nations the moment it begins to benefit from IIRSA. In reality, Brazil’s relationship with the rest of South America—Argentina being the exception—is similar to that which most center countries have with peripheral countries. In the first place, Brazil has a major interest in channeling its industrial and agribusiness production through the Pacific. Second, several of the businesses set to develop infrastructure are Brazilian, like Petrobras or Norberto Odebrecht Construction, which has investments all over the region. Third, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) is one of the principal financiers of IIRSA.

The Madeira River Complex, which is a nucleus of the Peru-Brazil-Bolivia Axis, is perhaps the best example. Carlos Lessa, ex-president of the BNDES, maintains that under this project “Brazil can promote its vision of conquering the West, a jungle zone with neighboring Peru and Bolivia. Its megaproject illustrates the dream of Latin American integration, an area that is ripe for development.” The Madeira River Complex project includes two hydroelectric dams in Brazil; floodgates for making the river navigable, which will require the elimination of a zone of waterfalls that “interrupt” navigation; a hydroelectric dam on the Beni River in Bolivia; and ports for the Madeira-Gupore-Beni-Madre de Dios waterway in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru. The project will allow “significant supply of low-cost energy and consolidate the agribusiness Development Pole in the western region of Brazil and the Bolivian Amazon.” This would permit a reduction in the cost of transportation for grains, and other commodities.

The project will have an enormous impact on the environment and will benefit only Brazil. “Brazilian businesses will be the only buyers of the energy produced, allowing them to impose conditions on buying, contracts, and prices.” The project will involve a $6 billion investment, benefiting Brazilian-owned businesses Odebrecht, Furnas Centrais Electricas, and the Tedesco Maggi group (largest soy producer in Brazil). The latter has invested $100 million into making the Madeira River navigable, “where it has the largest fleet of barges and tugboats, with a river transportation capacity of 210,000 tons per month,” writes Patricia Molina of Fobomade.

Taken in perspective, projects like the Rio Madeira Complex make up part of Brazil’s geopolitical expansion west to occupy “empty” territories and control strategic resources like Bolivia’s hydrocarbons. Journalist Guilherme Carvalho writes: “Brazil’s leaders believe that increasing their competitiveness in the international market depends, in large part, on South American integration,” It is, however, a kind of subordinate integration on two levels: Brazil over the rest of South America, and global markets and business over the region as a whole.

IIRSA in the World

IIRSA is closely linked to the FTAA, to the point where they can be seen as two sides of the same coin. “The FTAA deals very concretely with judicial and administrative issues, while IIRSA deals with infrastructure,” according to a report from Uruguay Friends of the Earth. Both form part of a much larger project that includes the Puebla-Panama Plan. IIRSA is, however, unique in at least one way: it is a type of integration that has been conceived of by the South, engineered in large part by the continent’s elite, and will primarily benefit those sectors best inserted into the global market. The demand for infrastructure projects has grown out of the need for global markets to access a stable and increasing flow of raw materials and natural resource exports. Accessing these resources has to be done as “competitively” (which is to say, as cheaply) as possible. It’s clear that this type of development will only generate more poverty and greater inequalities, further concentrate wealth on a local and global scale, and create profound environmental impacts. Among other negative consequences, the external debt of South American countries will continue to rise. The current practice of overexploiting resources could create a situation where a few decades down the road, countries that today depend on oil and natural gas to generate income will exhaust their reserves without ever having truly benefited from them.

One of the most worrisome aspects of IIRSA is the way in which it is being implemented: silently. While the continent furiously debates the FTAA and other free trade agreements, IIRSA projects are taking place without the participation of civil society or social movements and without the release of information by governments. This method of implementation clearly seeks to avoid debate altogether. At the same time, projects are starting up in separate areas to be linked at a later date—a technique that prevents vigilance, weakens the control of affected communities, and facilitates the sidestepping of environmental regulations. Formally, IIRSA began in the year 2000, but a good part of its projects have their roots in the previous decade.

The most disturbing prospect of IIRSA’s large network of infrastructure projects is that they may well accomplish the same goals as the FTAA, only without that name, with no debate, and imposed from the top down by global markets and national elites. If this is the case, a few decades from now South America will have quietly completed a gigantic, continent-wide remodeling project that affects every one of its inhabitants. The elite know–as recent experience has shown them–that openly debating their plans will only condemn them to failure.

Translated for the IRC Americas Program by Nick Henry.

RESOURCES

Marcel Achkar and Ana Dominguez, “IIRSA: Otro paso hacia la des-soberania de los pueblos sudamericanos,” Programa Uruguay Sustentable-Redes Amigos de la Tierra, Montevideo, 2005.

Andrés Barreda, “Geopolitica, recursos estrategicos y multinacionales”, Dec. 20, 2005, Latin American Information Agency (ALAI)

Guilherme Carvalho, “La integracion sudamericana y Brasil,” Action Aid, Rio de Janeiro, 2006.

“El rol de Bolivia en la integración sudamericana,” Fobomade, 2005

Patricia Molina, “Bolivia-Brasil: Relaciones energeticas, integracion y medio ambiente,” Fobomade, 2005

Elisangela Soldatelli, “IIRSA. E esta a integraçao que nos queremos?”, Amigos da Terra, Porto Alegre, December 2003.

Raul Zibechi, “Brazil and the Difficult Path to Multilateralism,” March 8, 2006, IRC Americas Program
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3144

The BICECA Project: Building Informed Civic Engagement for Conservation in the Andes-Amazon http://www.biceca.org/en/Index.aspx.

Banco Nacional de Desarrollo Económicoy Social (BNDES)
http://www.bndes.gov.br

Comunidad Andina de Naciones
http://www.comunidadandina.org

Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF)
http://www.caf.com

Foro Boliviano sobre Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo (Fobomade)
http://www.fobomade.org.bo

FONPLATA
http://www.fonplata.org

IIRSA
http://www.iirsa.org

——

Raul Zibechi, a member of the editorial board of the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, is a professor and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de America Latina and adviser to several grassroots organizations. He is a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program

This story first appeared June 26 in Upside Down World
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/337/1/

It was originally published by the IRC Americas Program
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3313

See also:

“South American Pipeline Wars”
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT #118 February 2006
/node/1531

“Peru’s Camisea Gas Project: One Year Later”
by Yeidy Rosa, WW4 REPORT #114, October 2005
/node/1140

“Indigenous Opposition to Puebla-Panama Plan Faces Reppression”
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 REPORT #91 August, 2003
/puebla-panama

——————-

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

PEAK OIL PREVIEW:

North Korea & Cuba Face the Post-Petrol Future

by Dale Jiajun Wen

That peak oil is coming is no longer a question. It’s only a matter of when. The global food system we are familiar with depends crucially on cheap energy and long-distance transportation—food consumed in the United States travels an average of 1,400 miles. Does peak oil mean inevitable starvation? Two countries provide a preview. Their divergent stories, one of famine, one of sufficiency, stand as a warning and a model.

North Korea and Cuba experienced the peak-oil scenario prematurely and abruptly due to the collapse of the former Soviet bloc and the intensified trade embargo against Cuba. The quite different outcomes are partly due to luck: the Cuban climate allows people to survive on food rations that would be fatal in North Korea’s harsh winters. But the more fundamental reason is policy. North Korea tried to carry on business as usual as long as possible, while Cuba implemented a proactive policy to move toward sustainable agriculture and self-sufficiency.

The 1990s famine in North Korea is one of the least-understood disasters in recent years. It is generally attributed to the failure of Kim Il Jung’s regime. The argument is simple: if the government controls everything, it must be responsible for crop failure. But this ideological blame game hides a more fundamental problem: the failure of industrial chemical farming. With the coming of peak oil, many other countries may experience similar disasters.

North Korea developed its agriculture on the Green Revolution model, with its dependence on technology, imported machines, petroleum, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides. There were signs of soil compaction and degradation, but the industrial farming model provided enough food for the population. Then came the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Supplies of oil, farming equipment, fertilizers, and pesticides dropped significantly, and this greatly contributed to the famine that followed. As a November 1998 report from the joint UN Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program observed:

The highly mechanized DPR [North] Korean agriculture faces a serious constraint as about four-fifths of motorized farm machinery and equipment is out of use due to obsolescence and lack of spare parts and fuel… In fact, because of non-availability of trucks, harvested paddy has been seen left on the fields in piles for long periods.

North Korea failed to change in response to the crisis. Devotion to the status quo precipitated the food shortages that continue to this day.

Cuba faced similar problems. In some respects, the challenge was even bigger in Cuba. Before 1989, North Korea was self-sufficient in grain production, while Cuba imported an estimated 57 percent of its food, because its agriculture, especially the state farm sector, was geared towards production of sugar for export.

After the Soviet collapse and the tightening of the US embargo, Cuba lost 85 percent of its trade, and its fossil fuel-based agricultural inputs were reduced by more than 50 percent. At the height of the resulting food crisis, the daily ration was one banana and two slices of bread per person in some places. Cuba responded with a national effort to restructure agriculture.

Cuban agriculture now consists of a diverse combination of organic farming, permaculture, urban gardens, animal power, and biological fertilizing and pest control. On a national level, Cuba now has probably the most ecological and socially sensitive agriculture in the world. In 1999, the Swedish Parliament awarded the Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” to Cuba for these advances.

Even before the 1990 crisis, primarily in response to the negative effects of intensive chemical use as well as the 1970s energy cruch, Cuban scientists began to develop biopesticides and biofertilizers to substitute for chemical inputs. They designed a two-phase program based on early experiments with biological agents. The first stage developed small-scale, localized production technologies; the second stage was aimed at developing semi-industrial and industrial technologies. This groundwork allowed Cuba to roll out substitutes for agricultural chemicals rapidly in the wake of the 1990 crisis. Since 1991, 280 centers have been established to produce biological agents using techniques and supplies specific to each locality.

Though some alternative technologies were initially developed solely to replace chemical inputs, they are now part of a more holistic agro-ecology. Scientists and farmers recognized the imbalances in high-input monoculture, and are transforming the whole system. In contrast to the one-size-fits-all solution of the Green Revolution, agro-ecology tailors farming to local conditions. It designs complex agro-ecosystems that use mutually beneficial crops and locally adapted seeds, takes advantage of topography and soil conditions, and maintains rather than depletes the soil.

Agro-ecology takes a systemic approach, blurring traditional distinctions between disciplines and using knowledge from environmental science, economics, agronomy, ethics, sociology, and anthropology. It emphasizes learning by doing, with training programs allocating 50 percent of their time to hands-on work. The wide use of participatory methods greatly helps to disseminate, generate, and extend agro-ecological knowledge. In short, the agricultural research and education process has become more organic as well.

Important institutional changes have eased the transition. Big state farms have been reorganized into much smaller farmer collectives to take advantage of the new labor-intensive, localized methods. The change from farm-laborer to skilled farmer is not an overnight process–many newly established collectives lag behind established co-ops in terms of sustainable management, but programs are in place to help them catch up.

Cuba’s research and education system played a pivotal role in the greening of the country. The focus on human development has practically eradicated illiteracy. Cuban workers have the highest percentage of post-secondary education in Latin America. This highly educated population prepared Cuba well for the transition to the more knowledge-intensive model of sustainable agriculture.

In the 1970s and 1980s, most agricultural education was based on Green Revolution technology. The 1990s crisis rendered many agro-professionals powerless without chemical inputs, machinery, and petroleum. In response, agricultural universities initiated courses in agro-ecological training. A national center was created to support new research and the educational needs of the agricultural community. Now, courses, meetings, workshops, field days, talks, and experiential exchanges are organized for farmers. As some traditional methods of organic farming have survived among small farmers or in co-ops, farmer-to-farmer communication is widely utilized to facilitate mutual learning.

The coming of peak oil will shake the very foundation of the global food system. The hardship Cuba and North Korea experienced in the 1990s may very well be the future we all face. It will impact both already-ailing rural sectors in many Third-World countries, and highly subsidized agriculture in the North. Cuban agriculture shows that there is an alternative—increasing output and growing better food while reducing chemical inputs is possible with proper restructuring of agriculture and food systems.

It is unlikely that we will have an abrupt peak-oil scenario where half the fossil-fuel agricultural inputs disappear overnight; more likely we will have gradually yet steadily rising oil prices, making conventional chemical inputs increasingly unaffordable.

This is the advantage we have over Cuba and North Korea—while virtually nobody predicted the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc, we know peak oil is coming and have time to prepare. We have disadvantages as well: peak oil will be a global crisis, probably made worse by global warming, so there will not likely be any international aid to bail people out in the face of a major food crisis—either we deal with the problem now, or nature will deal with us.

Not only politicians, but also ordinary people need to consider the question: should we try to shore up the system and carry on business as usual for as long as possible, or should we take preemptive measures to avoid disaster? This choice may determine whether we end up with a more sustainable agriculture like Cuba, or with disastrous famine like North Korea.

RESOURCES:

Peter Rosset, “Alternative Agriculture Works: The Case of Cuba,” Monthly Review, July/August 1998

Nilda Perez & Luis L. Vazquez, “Ecological Pest Management,” in Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance: Transforming Food Production in Cuba, Fernando Funes, et al., eds. Food First Books, Oakland, 2002

Miguel A. Altieri, “The Principles and Strategies of Agroecology in Cuba,” in ibid

Luis Garcia, “Agroecological Education and Training,” in ibid.

——

Dale Wen is a visiting scholar with the International Forum on Globalization. A native of China, she specializes in China and globalization issues.

This story originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of Yes! Magazine
http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1462

See also:

“Peak Oil and National Security: A Critique of Energy Alternatives”
by George Caffentzis WW4 REPORT #113, September 2005
/node/1027

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

PERU: CAMPESINOS PROTEST FREE TRADE

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On June 8, Peruvian campesinos held a day of protest against the Andean Free Trade Agreement (known in the region as the Free Trade Treaty, or TLC) which Peru’s government signed with the US last December. (The regional pact includes Colombia and Ecuador, but the US has carried out negotiations with each country separately, and the talks with Ecuador have been suspended since March.) Hundreds of campesinos marched on the Panamerican South highway in Chincha, Ica region, blocking traffic for hours. The campesinos are demanding that Peru’s Congress make changes to the pact so it won’t hurt small-scale farmers, especially those producing cotton and corn. More than 3,000 campesinos marched to the central plaza of Tarapoto, in San Martin region, from areas including Altomayo and Huallaga Central. They threw rice during the protest to draw attention to the negative impact the TLC will have on Peruvian rice producers. (Cadena Peruana de Noticias, June 8) On June 7 or 8, before the protests began, the Constitution Commission of Peru’s Congress ruled out holding a referendum on the TLC. (Adital, June 8)

Campesino leader Jose Villanueva told the Cadena Peruana de Noticias radio network: “[President-elect] Alan Garcia in his initial speech said the signing of that treaty was irresponsible, yet now that he won the elections he is in favor and it seems he won’t say anything in the face of its ratification.” (Cadena Peruana de Noticias, June 8)

According to official results reported on June 10, with 99.77% of the ballots counted, Garcia of the Peruvian Aprista Party won the June 4 presidential runoff election with 52.6% of the vote, compared to 47.4% for nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala, who has come out more strongly against the TLC. Earlier reports showed Garcia with a lead of more than 10 percentage points over Humala. (La Jornada, Mexico, June 6 from AFP, DPA, Reuters; El Nuevo Herald, June 10 from AP) Based on the results from the April 9 general elections, Humala’s Union for Peru party will have the largest bloc in Congress, with 45 of the 120 seats, compared to 36 for Garcia’s Aprista party. (El Nuevo Herlad, Miami, June 8 from AP)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 11

PROTESTERS BLOCK MACHU PICCHU

As part of an ongoing series of protests against the Andean Free Trade Agreement, Peruvian campesinos in the southeastern region around Cusco shut down tourist visits to the Machu Picchu ruins on June 21. The campesinos used tree trunks and boulders to block railroad tracks outside Cusco; others blocked streets inside the city. The company PeruRail, which operates the only rail service to the ruins and normally carries 1,200 tourists a day, suspended operations for the day.

Peru signed the TLC in December. On June 6 the government of outgoing president Alejandro Toledo sent the 1,000-page document to Congress for ratification. He is pushing for the accord to be finalized before July 28, when a new Congress will be seated and Toledo’s successor, former president Alan Garcia (1985-1990), will take office.

The General Confederation of Peruvian Workers (CGTP) called for the June 21 action. “The TLC [creates] the cruelest unfair competition between our Andean products and highly subsidized US products; it will plunge us into poverty, destroying our agriculture and our national manufacturing sector in its early stages.” (El Nuevo Herald, June 22 from AP)

The Struggle Against the TLC National Coordinating Committee, an umbrella organization for labor and campesino groups, has scheduled another protest for July 4. On June 22 former presidential candidate Ollanta Humala, a nationalist who lost to Garcia in a June 4 runoff election, announced his support for the anti-TLC protests. Nelson Palomino, the leader of the Confederation of Peruvian Cocaleros [coca growers], who spent three and a half years jailed in the Yanamilla prison in Ayacucho, announced his intention to march at the head of the protests and demanded a meeting with Garcia to discuss the TLC. Garcia, who was on a visit to Chile, said his party didn’t unconditionally support the accord. His government would push for an “improvement…of the conditions that Mr. Toledo negotiated,” he told the Chilean radio state RPP. (Cadena Global/EFE, June 22; Cadena Peruana de Noticias Radio, June 23)

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 25

CAJAMARCA: STRIKE AT GOLD MINE

Some 1,000 workers at Yanacocha mine in the Cajamarca region of Peru went on strike April 15. The mine, owned by the US-based Newmont Mining Corp. and the Peruvian company Buenaventura, is Latin America’s largest gold mine. The union said the strike shut down operations at the mine on April 17; the company claimed only 100 workers walked out and the mine kept running on a contingency plan. On April 17, the company announced that the union had “unconditionally lifted” the strike and the workers would return to their jobs on April 18. The union said the strike was to demand benefits such as free healthcare, education and housing which the company had promised to the workers.

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, April 30

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

ECUADOR: CAMPESINOS OCCUPY OIL WELLS

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

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

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

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

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

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 27

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Weekly News Update on the Americas
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COLOMBIA: SOLDIERS CHARGED IN MASSACRE

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

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

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

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

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

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

MEDELLIN: COMMUNITY LEADER MURDERED

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

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

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

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

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

SANTANDER: ANTI-PRIVATIZATION PROTESTS

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

From Weekly News Update on the Americas, June 18

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