López narrates how her 19-year-old daughter, Jahaira Guadalupe Vaena López, was abducted in Tlacolula, Oaxaca. She describes her efforts to get the authorities to investigate the crime, how she was warned not to press the matter, how informants told her that her daughter was murdered in a turf battle between fractured drug gangs. Just days before leaving for the United States with the Caravan for Peace, she faced one of the assassins who had been apprehended and listened as he described in detail how her daughter was raped and beheaded.

Margarita has joined some 50 grieving family members to accompany caravan leader Javier Sicilia on a trip across the United States. Sicilia, a poet who lost his son to drug war violence in March of 2011, catalyzed a movement of victims and Mexican citizens fed up with the bloodshed that has claimed more than 60,000 lives and left tens of thousands more disappeared since former President Felipe Calderon launched the drug war five years ago.

Mexico’s Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity decided to organize the U.S. caravan after taking two caravans from Mexico City–one north to Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border, and one south to the border with Guatemala. Both drew out victims of the drug war and registered their cases to provide support for family members seeking justice and solace.

The decision to take their pain across the border came after discussion with the San Francisco-based group Global Exchange. Soon a coalition came together that included Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the Latin American Working Group, the RFK Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, our CIP Americas Program, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities, among the key players. The coalition later expanded to include the NAACP, and local organizations in each of the cities along the route.

A binational meeting in June defined five demands of the U.S. caravan: to open public debate on humane alternatives to drug prohibition, to ban the import of assault weapons and crack down on illegal gun smuggling over the border, to combat money-laundering with full investigation and strict enforcement, to suspend all aid to the Mexican armed forces and end the war on drugs abroad, and to halt the militarization of the border and criminalization of migrants.

I joined the caravan on the final east coast leg of its 6,000-mile trip. I had heard most of the stories before in Mexico, having accompanied the northern caravan and numerous marches and meetings.

I was curious to see the impact on people in the United States. As the women in the room told their stories, each one struck like a cold blade in the heart. Although women are a minority of the war’s deaths, attacks on women usually include brutal sexual violence, and women make up the majority of those actively seeking justice and an end to the war.

Along the route, caravan members like these women have become confident and eloquent spokespersons to end the drug war. They speak from the heart and appeal to the heart. Their empowerment as leaders is one of the most important achievements of the caravan. Another is the sympathy and outrage their testimonies evoke.

And it’s not a one-way street. Caravan members also listened to the stories of U.S. citizens. Like Kimberly Armstrong in Baltimore, whose 16-year-old son was shot and killed by a 14-year-old in endemic drug violence. Or Carole Eady, who struggled her way out of the stigma and life disruption of imprisonment for a drug offense in New York City.

The threads begin to come together. In her brilliant book The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander notes that in Washington, D.C., the caravan’s last stop, it’s estimated that three out of four black men can expect to serve time in prison. She calls this mass incarceration of black people a new racial caste, the latest Jim Crow system of social control, where young black men and women are jailed, stigmatized, and in many cases disenfranchised for life by discriminatory drug laws.

Based on the shared sorrow of losing loved ones to jail, violence, death, or disappearance, Mexicans and Americas found they fight the same unjust system of social control of the poor and people of color. The drug war generates profits for the defense industry and siphons public funds into perpetuating itself. It rips apart families and communities, north and south of the border. The bogus attempt to eliminate rather than regulate something in great demand creates a multibillion-dollar black market run by groups that become more violent as they are selectively attacked. It pits security forces against the public, providing them with the tools to violate human rights and life with impunity. It erodes democracy and the rule of law it purports to uphold.

Whether it’s through imposing a military/police state in Mexico or shunting youth into the margins of society, the drug war machine runs on the human lives it destroys.

A binational peace movement?

The caravan’s call to end the drug war resonated in city after city. But has the caravan forged a binational movement for peace?

Not yet. As the Mexican caravaners go back home, their U.S. hosts return to daily life. Many will simply guard the memory of Mexico’s pain and begin to read the news a little differently.

But others will act. The Peace Caravan has already achieved something remarkable. It brought together groups in U.S. cities that scarcely knew each other before. Some community organizers in the scores of cities from San Diego to the nation’s capital plan to continue the dialogue with the Mexican movement and among themselves.

In New York City, the Latino and African-American communities plan a meeting to discuss the impact of mass arrests and detention. In Baltimore, the movement to block construction of yet another multimillion-dollar prison in one of the nation’s most economically devastated cities is making common cause with movements for drug policy reform, racial justice, and youth rights.

In Texas, faith-based organizations advocating stricter enforcement of gun laws are intensifying their campaign against gun show sales and arms smuggling after seeing close up the human cost of the flow of guns to Mexico. In Arizona, human rights organizations working against the militarization of the border and the death and detention of migrants came face-to-face with activists protesting Mexico’s militarized drug war in a cross-border reflection. In Washington, members of Congress received caravan lobbyists whose power to convince came not from money or influence, but from human empathy and reason.

The way many U.S. citizens understand the drug war has changed through meeting the Mexicans who bear the brunt of it. While U.S. politicians and media portray it as a necessary fight against the threat that organized crime supposedly poses to national security in both countries, the victims spoke of the violence that resulted from the war on drugs itself. Audiences and congressional representatives were surprised to learn that many of the victims on the caravan accused not gangs but the U.S.-funded Mexican police and military for the murder or disappearance of their loved ones.

Organizers now face the question of how the moral victory can lead to a political one. On the drug policy front, U.S. society seems to be moving toward a tipping point despite push-back from law enforcement and private prison interests that make big money off incarceration, as well as from politicians who convert insecurity into “law and order” votes. A recent poll shows Colorado could legalize marijuana in the November elections after a similar measure narrowly lost in California. The award-winning film The House I Live In presents a stunning indictment of the domestic drug war through the words of its enforcers, its participants, and its victims.

But the federal government continues to be on the wrong side of the trend. Some hope that President Obama, if he is reelected, could make bolder moves toward reorienting a policy that imprisons so many mostly African-American youths and costs the nation $51 billion a year, according to the DPA. I’m inclined to agree with a LEAP editorial that warns the reform movement to watch the actions, not the rhetoric, of the Obama administration. It will take a stronger push from constituents to get the administration to take on the interests that benefit from sustaining America’s longest war.

Moral victories plant seeds that are often slow to bear fruit. Evaluating the experience on the last morning in a church hall, exhausted caravan members saw a mix of catharsis and consciousness-raising that gave them strength. Lopez noted that the “the tragedy I’m living through can be useful to a lot of people.” Melchor Flores, whose son was arrested in January of 2009 in Monterrey and never seen again, stated that the caravan had “touched consciences”.

He added, “Wherever my son is, he should be satisfied because he knew I wouldn’t let him down.”

Teresa Carmona, a tiny, white-haired woman whose son Joaquin was murdered in Mexico City, has become a powerful voice before the public and the media. She believes the caravan met its goal.

“We brought the faces of our beloved children, parents, and relatives all the way here, and so we legitimated this pain and this reality.”

In the nation that first invented the drug war and exported it to their country with deadly results, the Mexican bereaved have left a mark in the hearts of thousands of men and women. Sometimes it takes tragedy to make change. The cumulative histories recounted in the peace caravan represent a tragedy of mammoth proportions.

That should be more than enough to act on.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

On October 8, the Chihuahua government announced that it had captured the assassin of Marisela, who confessed to authorities. José Enrique Jiménez, (“El Wicked”)  told the press that he shot Escobedo on orders from the Zetas. He said Sergio Barraza, who murdered Rubí, was a member of the Zetas and Escobedo’s very public mission to bring him to justice upset the nation’s most ruthless organized crime group.

But human rights organizations have their doubts regarding the resolution of the crime. Luz Esthela Castro, Escobedo’s attorney noted in Reforma (Oct. 9, 2012) that the government already “solved” the case, announcing in December 2011 it stated that investigations had established the guilt of Hector Flores, a decesased crime figure. But videos of the crime show only one shooter.

Castro also noted that the latest alleged assassin used unusual legal terms in his confession, implying he had been coached. The governor of Chihuahua, Cesar Duarte, reacted angrily to the doubts raised by human rights organizations.

“Whoever doubts, is simply adding elements to try to make sure that things are not resolved,” he told Reforma.

The murders of Marisela Escobedo and her daughter Rubí are on a short list of crimes against women presented to the Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR) by an international delegation of women human rights defenders and journalists led by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams. These crimes were identified as priorities for the gravity of the crimes and as a signal that the Mexican government was serious about investigating and prosecuting crimes of violence against women.

Everyone wants to see this brutal assassin behind bars–that’s why as the Mexico host committee and the delegation we included the case on the list of priorities. But there has been a recent spate of captures and cases being closed in the final days of the Calderón government that are surrounded

For more information on Marisela Escobedo’s case and the demand to the PGR, see the report from the delegation organized by Just Associates and the Nobel Women’s Initiative that I had the privilege of being part of here.

After talking with colleagues in JASS and others about the recent developments in this important case, the concern is, first, that we could be seeing another case of scapegoats presented to deflect public pressure and criticism.

Second, if this is the assassin, the problem remains that the men who hired him and Sergio Barraza who killed Rubí are still at large. The justice system that repeatedly failed to prosecute and then imprison the guilty is still deeply flawed. And the public safety system that stood by as a woman human rights defender was shot practically on the steps of the state building still cannot guarantee women’s safety.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

Sr Ollanta Humala Tasso, Presidente de la República del Perú

Your Excellency

I am William Nicholas Gomes, Human Rights Ambassador for Salem-News.com.

I came to know about the situation from Front Line – The International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders.

Human rights lawyer Mr Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal, who is currently on trial on charges of aggravated violence against a public authority, could face up to 15 years imprisonment if he is found guilty on 17 September 2012.

The lawyer is the legal representative of a group of people affected by forced evictions in the vicinity of Pómac Forest in Lambayeque Province.

Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal has been accused of being the instigator of the violence which resulted in the deaths of three police officers and the injuries sustained by other police officials on 20 January 2009 during the carrying out of a forced eviction. If found guilty, he could face up to 15 years imprisonment under Article 367 of the Penal Code.

The charges brought against the human rights defender supposedly stem from a talk he gave to a group of people in Palería, Lambayeque Province, on 10 January 2009.

In this talk, Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal spoke about the injustice of the then imminent forced evictions and advised the local population on their rights and the defence of their rights using non-violent means.

He asserted that the forced eviction of approximately 600 families who had been living in the community they had constructed for 20 years would be in contravention of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, highlighting the fact that the victims of the forced evictions were not going to be resettled elsewhere or compensated for the value of their homes or their crops.

At no point did he mention or encourage the use of violence.

These charges have been brought against the human rights lawyer in spite of the fact that those individuals accused of carrying out the acts of violence during the eviction have stated that they do not know Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal and that they were not present at the talk he gave on 10 January 2009. Furthermore, the authorities have failed to produce any evidence linking the human rights lawyer to the accused.

The Coordinadora Nacional de Derechos Humanos – CNDDHH (National Coordinating Committee of Human Rights) submitted an amicus brief to the court on 12 September 2012, highlighting inter alia the fact that in order for a person to be considered the instigator of a crime, he or she must have been in communication with the person who carried out the crime.

I believe that the criminal charge against Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal is solely motivated by his peaceful and legitimate activities in the defence of human rights, particularly his efforts to advise people facing forced eviction of their rights.

I urge the authorities in Peru to:

1. Immediately drop all charges against human rights lawyer Jhon Kennedy Vega Carrascal, as it is believed that these measures have been taken against him solely on account of his legitimate and peaceful work in defence of human rights;
2. Guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders in Peru are able to carry out their legitimate human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions including judicial harassment.

AUTHOR: William Nicholas Gomes
URL: www.williamgomes.org
E-MAIL: williamgomes.org [at] gmail.com

Women prepare food for participants outside the Tribunal, credit: James Rodriguez

“A few years ago, our people, the people you can see around you, we began to realize what was happening,” Maudilia López told the hundreds gathered to attend the first ever People’s Health Tribunal in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. The event was packed, even as some attendees spilled out of the entrance of the crowded room, others shuffled to find a spot.

The International Peoples’ Health Tribunal (IPHT) took place on the second floor of the parish hall of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a municipality in Guatemala’s Western Highlands of roughly 60,000 people, a majority of whom are Maya-Mam. San Miguel Ixtahuacán is the main site of the Marlin mine, an open pit gold mine that is one of the most important projects of Canadian gold mining giant Goldcorp Inc.

The gathering, held on July 14-15, was the result of an organizing effort originating from communities affected by the Marlin mine. Also present were people affected by Goldcorp’s Los Filos mine in Mexico and its San Martín mine in Honduras, as well as representatives from throughout Central America (El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama), who provided a regional examination and critique of the resource extraction model and its effects on communities.

“For now, we will ask, before this community, that you will swear to arrive at a conclusion based on what you have heard people say,” López continued, turning her attention to the panel of judges in front of her.

Sitting in front of the audience were the Tribunal’s twelve judges on a panel comprised of prominent human rights defenders and ecologists, health specialists, and scientists from five different countries. Among them was Robert Goodland, a Canadian Tropical Ecologist who worked for 23 years as an environmental consultant to the World Bank; Dr. A. Chicas, doctor, public health specialist, and Secretary of the Ethics Board for the Medical Profession in El Salvador; Jesús Lara Chivarra, indigenous authority of the Wixarika Nation (Mexico) and member of the Wirikuta Defense Front; Yolanda Chalí of the Association for Community Health Services of Guatemala; and Rachel Sieder from the Center for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology, Mexico. They travelled from both north and south to listen to dozens of ordinary people, technical experts, women, men, mine workers, indigenous leaders, and even children, tell how open pit mega-mining has impacted their lives.

While the tribunal carried on, women prepared large pots of caldo and heaps of tamalitos to feed the hundreds of attendees. Community radio stations from San Marcos, Huehuetenango, and Guatemala City transmitted the event live. An independent media room on the first floor prepared materials to be disseminated internationally as the first day of testimony officially began.

People’s Health Tribunal: What is it?

The IPHT was modeled off of a popular practice of public justice known as Permanent People’s Tribunals, which have been used throughout the Americas to denounce harms caused by multinational corporations that otherwise enjoy full impunity from national and international legal systems. The IPHT was unprecedented in that it marked the first attempt by a popular tribunal to tackle the issue of health systematically.

The tribunals are meant to give voice. They provide a space for people to speak out, have their grievances heard, and hear the grievances of others – a space for information to be systematized and for experiences to be transmitted and shared with a broader public. Their results are not legally binding, but they aim to break the impunity of corporations, at least symbolically.

The premise of the IPHT, which was inspired in part by a study conducted by registered nurse and doctoral student Susana Cajax, was to look at the holistic health impacts of open-pit mining in the region. Despite the mining industry’s long history of accumulation through dispossession in the Americas, little attention has been paid to determining the extent of impacts on human health. The communities and the organizers of the event were determined to approach health in a different way, focusing both on physical health as well as the psychosocial health of individuals and communities as a whole.

As for physical health impacts, clear commonalities emerged from the three Goldcorp mines used as case studies: respiratory diseases, skin diseases, increased instances of cancer, premature births, an increase in birth defects and miscarriages, and physical violence such as assassinations and government repression.

The psychological and social dynamics are more abstract. What people described as impacts on the social fabric of their communities, on their psychological state, and on their ability to exercise self-determination over their lives are often neglected. These problems stem from the initial imposition of mining projects, a violation of the right to free, prior, and informed consent upheld by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the right to be properly consulted, as protected by the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169.

As Mexican representative Gustavo Lozano explained:

This is also about psychosocial health. Communities live with great anxiety because they’ve lost control over their own lives. This directly impacts their dignity. In fact, we could say that this is one of the definitions of dignity. All of a sudden, you don’t know what will happen with your life. The mining industry is like a trauma for communities. They bring us irreparable harms, harms that have no price, that last for hundreds of years. But they also bring repression… They bring us martial law, military bases, criminalization in the form of unjustified arrest warrants and drug trafficking charges, personal threats to our lives, and even rape.

According to Cajax, the tribunal was designed to value the popular knowledge of communities, since scientific studies conducted by Western institutions are not sufficient to understand the complexities of health impacts or how people are experiencing them.

ged from the three Goldcorp mines used as case studies: respiratory diseases, skin diseases, increased instances of cancer, premature births, an increase in birth defects and miscarriages, and physical violence such as assassinations and government repression.

The psychological and social dynamics are more abstract. What people described as impacts on the social fabric of their communities, on their psychological state, and on their ability to exercise self-determination over their lives are often neglected. These problems stem from the initial imposition of mining projects, a violation of the right to free, prior, and informed consent upheld by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the right to be properly consulted, as protected by the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Convention 169.

As Mexican representative Gustavo Lozano explained:

This is also about psychosocial health. Communities live with great anxiety because they’ve lost control over their own lives. This directly impacts their dignity. In fact, we could say that this is one of the definitions of dignity. All of a sudden, you don’t know what will happen with your life. The mining industry is like a trauma for communities. They bring us irreparable harms, harms that have no price, that last for hundreds of years. But they also bring repression… They bring us martial law, military bases, criminalization in the form of unjustified arrest warrants and drug trafficking charges, personal threats to our lives, and even rape.

According to Cajax, the tribunal was designed to value the popular knowledge of communities, since scientific studies conducted by Western institutions are not sufficient to understand the complexities of health impacts or how people are experiencing them.

“You can’t understand health without understanding reality,” said Cajax. She said her research also consisted of gathering qualitative evidence in order to understand peoples’ experiences. She found that people were stressed about their health and well-being, which resulted in “a strong psychological suffering on a collective level.”

“There’s a lot of alcoholism and a rise in HIV/AIDS, increased violence against women, domestic violence,” added Cajax. “And of course the physical harms also have a profound psychological effect.”

Dr. Juan Almendares, Honduran doctor and founder of the Honduran Science Academy, has been conducting community health analyses in the Siria Valley of Honduras, where Goldcorp’s San Martín mine operated from 2000 to 2008 (initially as a Glamis Gold operation). During expert testimony at the tribunal, Almendares noted the importance of taking a more holistic approach to health by incorporating popular knowledge into analyses.

“If we want to analyze health, we need to talk about not just one system, but all the systems…We need to integrate science, spirituality, and the social conscience,” he said. “Knowledge isn’t just created in universities, but also among people…We need to listen to each other, to listen to each other’s knowledge and wisdom.”

Dirty Business in Guatemala

“They’ve always wanted to buy my land and they’ve always threatened me for not wanting to sell it. Once I had my grandson in my arms and they put a machete to my neck. It wasn’t until my grandson cried, that is what saved my life,” testified Diodora Hernandez, who has repeatedly refused to sell her land to Goldcorp.

Hernandez explained the threats to her life that have resulted from the mining company’s presence in her community. In 2009 she was shot in the eye by two former mine employees, but survived the attack. “This is what they have done and continue to do,” she continued, “and I have committed no other crime than not wanting to sell my land.”

In addition to facing pressure, threats, and coercion from mining company employees to sell their land, communities surrounding Goldcorp’s Marlin mine used the tribunal to denounce the health, environmental, and human rights violations that the mine has caused, which stand in stark contrast to the picture the company has painted to shareholders and the media.

Marlin is one of Goldcorp’s most important and lowest-cost projects in Latin America, with an estimated total of 1,250,000 ounces of extractable gold. It was constructed in 2005 by subsidiary Montana Exploradora, with the help of a $45 million dollar World Bank loan and without the free, prior, and informed consent of the affected Maya-Mam communities.

“The No. 1 and most important factor is that we are operating the mine to international standards from the very beginning,” said GoldCorp CEO Chuck Jeannes in May 2011 in response to allegations of human rights violations and environmental damage. Jeannes earned $11.4 million in total compensation that year, making him one of Canada’s top ten highest paid corporate executives. This was only a year after the Inter American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures for 18 of the communities around the mine, calling on the Guatemalan government to suspend Marlin’s operations immediately to safeguard the health and safety of the population. However, Guatemala did not comply, and the Marlin mine continues to operate without community consent.

Many in San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa, the two municipalities touched by the Marlin concession, attribute the severity of community divisions and social conflict they are now experiencing to this initial lack of consultation. In fact, to formalize their position in response to the Guatemalan government’s failure to uphold its international legal responsibilities, on June 18, 2005, communities in Sipacapa had held a referendum on the mine. The result was an overwhelming rejection of the mine: 2,486 people voted against the mine, 35 in favor, and 32 abstained. The vote was deemed non-binding by Guatemala’s highest court after Goldcorp placed a legal challenge against the referendum.

In the years following Goldcorp acquired Glamis Gold (which initially brought the mine into production), numerous media reports, studies, and testimonies have come out offering evidence that the mining project has in fact been causing harm to the integral health of the communities.

A man affected by Goldcorp’s San Martin mine in Honduras shows his skin problems at the Tribunal

An analysis of Goldcorp’s Environmental and Social Impact Assessment conducted by Etech International found “mine wastes have a moderate to high potential to generate acid and leach contaminates.” It also found “existing data suggest that tailings seepage may be migrating to the drainage downstream of the tailings dam” and “that water treatment will not address leakage of contaminants into groundwater.”

Inaccurate environmental impact assessments appear to be an industry-wide problem. In December 2006 EARTHWORKS, an extractive industry watchdog, conducted a study of 25 mines in the United States, where regulations and oversight far exceed those of its Central American neighbors. Earthworks found “76 percent of studied mines exceeded water quality standards, polluting rivers, and groundwater with toxic contaminants, such as lead, mercury, arsenic and cyanide.”

In 2010 Physicians for Human Rights released an independent study of the Marlin mine and determined “some residents living near the mine have relatively high levels of lead in their blood and arsenic in their urine.”

Political persecution and criminalization were also denounced as contributing factors to the psychological and social trauma within affected communities. Throughout the life of the Marlin mine thus far, at least 15 arrest warrants have been issued against community members who are opposed to the mine. They have been subject to various allegations, including sabotage, harboring intentions to commit a crime, and sedition. Eight of the persecuted community members were women, some of whom had to flee their community to avoid being detained.

But Gregoria Crisanta Perez, who had two separate arrest warrants issued against her in 2008, testified, “We live from the earth. We eat beans and corn. I’d give my life to defend everything that sustains us.”

Toxic Legacy in Honduras

“We must defend life with life itself! We come from the Siria Valley to give our testimony on how we have been gravely damaged by Goldcorp’s San Martin mine,” declared Carlos Amador, from the Siria Valley Environmental Committee in Honduras, during the Tribunal.

Amador spoke about how communities in the Siria Valley have been affected by and struggling against the environmental destruction and subsequent health problems associated with Goldcorp’s mining activities.

“Why do the transnational mining companies who come from Canada only care about money, money, money, and don’t care about us people,” added Amador. “We are suffering from 10 years of destructive mining. They are killing us slowly. [And] the Honduran government is helping them.”

Since 2004, independent studies have concluded that Goldcorp’s San Martin mine in the Siria Valley, department of Francisco Morazán, Honduras, has been a source of contamination of both the environment and of the bodies of local residents. These studies have shown dangerous levels of toxic chemicals, such as cyanide and arsenic, heavy metals such as lead, and the occurrence of acid mine drainage.

In a May 2006 article for London’s The Independent, journalist Andrew Buncombe noted that Goldcorp’s San Martin mine “highlights how – with the world’s most accessible gold reserves having already been taken – mining companies are now using highly destructive and toxic methods in the developing world to feed our enduring demand for this precious metal.”

Buncombe also pointed out that the methods of mining that Goldcorp uses, which can “produce up to 30 tons of toxic waste for each ounce of gold produced,” have been dismissed as a source of health problems by the company. He quoted one company official as linking health problems to local Hondurans’ “bad diet.”

In another public hearing in Guadalajara, Mexico in 2007, the Latin American Water Tribunal, an autonomous, independent and international organization of environmental justice, ruled that Goldcorp’s subsidiary in Honduras, Entre Mares, was “guilty and must take responsibility for inappropriate use and contamination of water sources in the [Siria Valley] region and for causing harm and risk to the ecosystem and to human health.”

There have also been reports of dead cattle showing up near the mine, skin diseases, miscarriages, birth defects, while lead and arsenic were found in the blood of local Hondurans living downstream from the mine which exceeded internationally permissible levels. Furthermore, in 2010 the government filed criminal charges against the company for water contamination “based on evidence from aid agency CAFOD” in 2009.

“Despite Goldcorp’s continual denial, this new information provides irrefutable evidence that the San Martin mine has caused pollution in Honduras. This is the latest in a long list of problems at the mine,” said CAFOD’s Extractives Policy Analyst Sonya Maldar in 2009. “Goldcorp must clean up its act so that the people of Siria Valley are not left with a toxic legacy when the company leaves Honduras at the end of the year.”

In 2008 the company started the so-called reclamation process at the site. In the company’s closure plan, missing was any program to effectively address people’s health problems from surrounding communities affected by the mine.

The judges read their verdict at the closing of the Tribunal
But the experiences of community members speak for themselves. Olanda Occosta testified at the tribunal about how she has lead and arsenic in her blood and is losing her hair.

Rodolfo Arteaga, a former Goldcorp worker, testified at the Tribunal that he was diagnosed with “serious bronchitis and a lung infection” leaving him unable to work and that he suffered psychologically from the destruction of his community, Old Palo Ramo, where he had lived for 37 years before being forced to resettle. “My community was founded in 1880,” he explained. “All it took was for a company to come in in March 2000 to destroy it in just a few days.”

Finally, Angel Torres, another former mine worker of 8 years who burned cyanide containers for the company, developed chronic leukemia and became unable to work. He testified at the tribunal that 36 of his fellow mine workers were suffering from severe illnesses and that some had become sterile, adding that women who had worked inside the mine serving food had developed uterine cancer. “We need all of the organs in our bodies,” he declared. “The mining company has done absolutely nothing for us.”

A Future Foretold in Mexico

Los Filos, the largest Gold Mine in Mexico located in the state of Guerrero, went into operation in 2007. Mexico joined the world’s top ten gold producers last year in the middle of a mining boom despite a floundering economy and a “drug war” that has left upwards of 39,000 people murdered and thousands more disappeared. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in a July 18 article, at Los Filos, “More than 70,000 metric tons of earth daily are removed with explosives and bulldozers, then trucked to a nearby site where cyanide pools are used to extract the mineral.”

Writer and photographer David Bacon, in a July 25 article in Truthout, noted that “the amount of land given in concessions reached 25 million hectares at the end of [former Mexican President Vicente] Fox’s presidency in 2006 and then more than doubled, to 51 million, in just the first four years of his successor Felipe Calderon.”

“In Mexico, in the last 12 years with a more conservative administration, we’ve seen the authorization of 26,000 mining concessions throughout the country,” stated Miguel Angel Mijangos, from the Mexican Network of Mining Affected-Communities (REMA) at the Tribunal. “It’s practically one third of all of Mexico. That’s the size of the expansion we’re seeing in Mexico, and it’s similar to what’s happening in Central America and other parts of the Third World.”

In January 2007 the mine was met with protests and encampments to block its construction. According to an article in Peace Brigades International’s (PBI) 2011 Mexico Project Newsletter, the company failed to properly consult and inform the community about the scope and potential consequences of its project from the outset.

Mijangos, from Guerrero, Mexico, testified that as of June 2012, six years since the mine started operations, it is estimated that 100 percent of households in Carrizalillo have at least one family member suffering a mining-related illness.

“I came here for my children, more than anything,” said Petra Maturana, a mother of two, affected by Los Filos mine, “because they’re more affected than me, and because they’re the ones who will be here in the future.” Maturana testified at the Tribunal that her first child was born with a deformation of the cranium. She also said that she suffered from a rash and blisters on her body.

“The truth is that almost all the money that a miner makes goes to pay for their child’s health problems. They’re not benefitted that much in the end,” said Maturana. “On the one hand, it’s good that they’re earning well, but on the other hand, they’re spending money on their illness, and it’s the children who are getting the most sick”

Mijangos also pointed out the way in which Goldcorp takes advantage of local conditions to reach lowest-common-denominator contracts with communities that maximize its profits.

“Goldcorp, in Carrizalillo, to extract one ounce of gold, invests $430. That’s what it costs, and they sell it at $1,600. Here in Guatemala, they invest $19. Between $430 and $19, there is an abysmal difference,” said Mijangos. “There they give you more, and here they give you absolutely nothing. But even what they give us there is not enough for us to heal, and that’s clear.”

Maturana added at the Tribunal, “The truth is that I’m scared to stay. Because if the mine is young and even so it affects us, imagine what it will be like with more time…I would like to leave, but I have nowhere else to go.”

Towards a Regional Movement: M4 Against the Mining Development Model

On July 15th the Tribunal’s judges demanded that Goldcorp pay reparations to the victims of its mining activities, compensate communities for past, present, and ongoing damages to health and the environment, and suspend all operations in Mesoamerica. They concluded with the following verdict: “…We find Goldcorp guilty for its activities in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, which we find to be seriously damaging to the health and the quality of life, the quality of environment, and the right to self determination of the affected Indigenous and campesino communities.”

The day following the Tribunal, representatives from Mexico, Costa Rica, Panamá, El Salvador and Guatemala gathered to announce the inception of the M4 movement. M4 refers to the Mesoamerica Movement Against the Mining and Extraction Model. It is a project of regional coordination for the advancement of territorial and national defense against mining and other imposed development models.

Grace Garcia, a representative from Costa Rica, shared the success of a country-wide campaign to pass a national ban on open-pit mining.  José Acosta shared the difficulties faced by the Salvadoran movement after Canadian company Pacific Rim sued the government of El Salvador through a closed-door arbitration process included in the Central American Free Trade Agreement’s (CAFTA) investor rights provisions. The suit was filed when the state denied the company’s extraction license due to local and national opposition to mining. Olmedo Carrasquilla of Panamá spoke of alternative development models being implemented by communities. All confirmed their belief that mining is “the single most contaminating and human-rights violating activity in Mesoamerica” and reaffirmed the need to end it. As Gustavo Lozano, representative from the Mexican Anti-mining Network (REMA) stated:

Our analysis is that mining companies have transnational strategies and we have to coordinate transnati onal struggles to confront transnational mining. The M4 has organized itself precisely to generate understanding of each of our struggles and therefore be able to unite. It is a young movement. We have started by carrying out actions in Canada at the shareholder meetings of the mining companies. We are going to bring the tribunal’s sentence to our governments and to international institutions because we cannot allow these companies to act as the new colonizers of our lands.

Nely Rivera de Silva, who works with the Center for Research on Investment and Trade in El Salvador, and who served as an expert witness in the Tribunal, said that the Tribunal served as a vehicle for education, organizing, and liberation.

“We are here because we want to build movements that will help us stop the construction of mining projects, not only in El Salvador, but everywhere,” said Rivera de Silva.

She also added that international solidarity from the North is also necessary.

“People from Canada and the U.S. have to put pressure on their countries to stop the colonial domination of our communities,” said Rivera de Silva.

Beth Geglia is an activist and independent documentarian from Washington DC. She lived in Guatemala from 2007-2009 working on human rights and environmental justice issues. She has worked on campaigns around mining in Guatemala with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala and the Center for International Environmental Law.

AUTHOR: Cyril Mychalejko
URL: http://upsidedownworld.org
E-MAIL: cmychalejko [at] gmail.com

The question then is: If a public consensus on the failure of the drug war, why hasn’t anything changed?

Why does the U.S. government continue to send millions of tax dollars to cities to fight the drug war, as they close down schools for lack of funds? Why does it waste more millions financing a bloody war in Mexico? Why does the Mexican government continue to pay the economic and political cost of a disastrous and destabilizing war? The U.S. has spent 2 billion dollars on the Mexican drug war in the past five years, mostly through the Merida Initiative and the Mexican government has spent at least four times that much.

To answer these questions, we have to look behind the scenes of the drug war. There we find that this disastrous policy has some powerful promoters.

Some fans of the drug war are open and upfront. They are politicians with clear ties to the military establishment and the business of war. Their job is to create conflict and then propose military solutions. They funnel government contracts to defense companies, and then the defense companies funnel funds into their political campaigns.

These politicians seem to have written the foreign policy part of the Republican Party platform. They have invented a new menace, “narco-terrorism”, that attempts to convince the public that the production and transit of illicit substances is equivalent to terrorism.

This is false. In Mexico, Latin America drugs are produced and trafficked. It’s an illegal business that thrives off drug prohibition. Terrorism is a violent political agenda. Anyone who cannot tell the difference between these two—drug cartels and terrorist organizations—should not be in a position to make policy.

There is no proof of terrorist cells operating permanently in Mexico or Latin America, but “narco-terrorism” is being used as an excuse to send the military out in these countries. Unfortunately, the Democrats Platform is very similar in its wholehearted endorsement of the military approach to drug trafficking.

The politicians manufacture the war for the companies that manufacture the weapons. In this cycle, the drug war is the latest market for intelligence and spy equipment, military hardware, arms and private security firms like Blackwater.

On this side of the border, security companies and local government offices that receive federal money to fight the drug war have a vested interest in continuing it. They know it doesn’t work. But it works for them.

The prison pipeline is big business now. For certain government bureaucracies, and for the private companies that run our prisons and press for more and bigger jails. They pressure for prison expansion, in places like here in Baltimore, where they figure it’s easier and more profitable to lock kids away then to educate them or provide them with decent jobs—especially African American and Latino youth. In the Southwest where the caravan passed through a few weeks ago, these same companies run the migrant detention centers, where women are raped and prisoners have died from lack of medical treatment. Where prisoners are made to feel, as one woman who had been incarcerated for drugs in New York told us, like “throwaway people”. No one is a throwaway person.

Public security, which should be the goal, is the greatest casualty of the drug war. All these victims are here to attest to the fact that fighting violence with violence generates more violence.

The drug war has also blurs the lines between security forces and criminal forces. Nothing makes sense in this insanity of violence. Two examples prove the point. Several weeks ago members of the Mexican Federal Police chased down and shot at a U.S. Embassy car carrying two CIA agents and a Mexican Navy official. The first question on everybody’s mind was: why were the Federal Police trying to kill the U.S. advisers? Aren’t they supposed to be on the same side in this war? The US has poured millions of taxpayer dollars into funding Mexico’s Federal Police and here they were not only biting, but trying to destroy the hand that feeds them. The second question, much less asked, was: Why were U.S. CIA agents training 18-year old Mexican Navy recruits to shoot their own people?

The second example comes from here in Baltimore. Yesterday we heard about a 16 year-old boy with his whole life ahead of him who was shot by a 14 year-old with an assault rifle. We learned that it’s easier to buy an assault rifle than a tomato in some neighborhoods of this city.

It’s been said before—the war on drugs is a war on people. Today we are surrounded with proof of the insanity of this war. We hear it in the voices of the victims and we see it in their tears. We honor the men and women here who have had to courage to tell these stories and to forge a movement for justice from the raw material of their pain.

No one believes that drug abuse is not a problem or that organized crime is not a problen in Mexico. They are. What we are saying is this way of dealing with real problems is not working. There are far better ways, paths toward an integral human security; health and community-based approaches. We have seen so much needless grief, we have been placed in harm’s way, by bad policy and governments that for the most part, just don’t care, in Mexico and in the United States.

Obama administration officials and those who benefit from the drug war say that the proposal to legalize marijuana is irresponsible. What is irresponsible is to continue a policy for more than 40 years when all available evidence shows it doesn’t work. It kills people. It incarcerates their bodies and lacerates their spirits.

Let us not be ambiguous

We must end the drug war now. We must reform our drug policy that makes drug use criminal and hands criminals a lucrative business. We need to take the multi-billion-dollar market away from the brutal cartels. If we stop the flow of money by ending prohibition, we cut off their lifeline.

We can end the drug war, maybe even before it reaches the ignominious hundred-year anniversary that former mayor Ken Schmoke mentioned. We can build better communities, better nations and a better relationship between our countries. But we can’t do it alone. We need to support our local organizations and we need to reach across borders.

Then we can join together, not just based on our shared sorrow and pain, but based on a common vision of a better future for ourselves and our families.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

CONTENTS

1. TIPNIS consultation extended after community resistance
The MAS government has extended the consultation in the TIPNIS for an extra two months after delays in reaching isolated communities in the region. The new deadline will be 7 November, after the government rejected calls by some MAS deputies to keep the process open-ended.

According to the Ministry of Public Works, 32 out of 69 communities had been consulted by the end of the original August deadline. Minister of Government Carlos Romero blamed the delay primarily on weather conditions, as low water levels had made it difficult for the consultation brigades to travel by river in the region. However, many communities continue to refuse to cooperate with the consultation, which has also impeded the process. Following a meeting between local community leaders and CIDOB, the lowland indigenous people’s confederation, twenty communities in the north of TIPNIS announced they will peacefully resist the consultation.

In La Paz, the Justice Tribunal threw out a legal challenge against the consultation made by the indigenous leader Fernando Vargas. Vargas had launched an appeal directed against state ministers, authorities in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly, and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), arguing that the judicial ruling on the consultation should have been made in front of a public audience, as required by the Constitution.

Finally, the indigenous magistrate Gualberto Cusi, a member of the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal, has withdrawn charges he made against the government, which he had accused of political interference in an earlier case challenging the legality of the consulta law.

2. Freedom of expression concerns as government takes legal action against newspapers
Two newspapers and a Catholic news agency have been charged by the government with ‘disseminating and inciting racism or discrimination’, prompting media in Bolivia and international watchdogs to express concern for freedom of expression. Agencia de Noticias Fides (ANF), El Diario and Página Siete were accused by the government of distorting the meaning of President Morales’s comments on differences between east and west Bolivia in a way that could provoke regional confrontation.

During a speech on food security in Tiwanaku, ANF reported Morales as saying that ‘In the east of Bolivia, where there is production all year round, I would say that it is only a lack of will that makes us poor or not have food. In the Altiplano, it’s different. If there is frost, if there is no rain or if there is hail, then there is no food. But in the east, we only go hungry because of laziness’. The two newspapers later picked up the story under headlines ‘Evo accuses eastern Bolivians of laziness’ and ‘Morales thinks the east is lazy’. The government then brought charges against all three media under the Law against Racism and Discrimination, which was sanctioned in 2010 despite considerable protest from press groups about its possible effect on free speech.

Press groups demonstrated against the charges in La Paz and in other cities, The National Association of Journalists (ANP) has argued that if there has been distortion of the president’s words, then the matter is covered under the Press Law. This would mean that the issue would be dealt with by newspaper editors through a self-regulatory mechanism, rather than being treated as a criminal matter. The ANP’s position has been supported by the international press freedom NGO, Reporters Without Borders, while the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists has also urged the MAS government to drop the lawsuit.

3. Protests over illegal coca plantations and ‘ecological’ military deployment
Consensus has been reached between the government and coca growers (cocaleros) in the Yungas de Vandiola region following protests over the eradication of crops. Cocaleros imposed a blockade at Epizana, blocking transport on the old Cochabamba-Santa Cruz road, while reports suggested that several people were injured in clashes with the authorities. Government Minister Carlos Romero denied there had been any confrontation.

Following talks between community leaders from Machu Yungas and the vice-minister for social defence and controlled substances, Felipe Cáceres, it was agreed that 42 catos (a traditional measurement equalling around 40m2) planted by recent arrivals to the area could be eradicated by the government. Local leader Mario Torrico said that the coca growers who are to lose their plantations would be given help in growing fruit as a substitute.

There was further anger at government plans to send in three hundred soldiers to the Carrasco National Park to prevent further illegal plantations once the programme of eradication had been completed. The Juan Maraza ‘ecological regiment’ will also to be deployed in other protected areas, including the TIPNIS, to prevent illegal logging and drug-trafficking.

4. Tensions mount over Colquiri mine
Tensions are mounting in a three-way conflict between the government and two groups of miners in Colquiri, following the nationalisation of the site in June. After the Swiss-owned commodities giant Glencore had its licence revoked by the government, the majority of the mine was given to the state Mining Corporation (Comibol), but a section (the Rosario seam) was awarded to the 26th February Cooperative. Salaried miners insist the mine belongs wholly to Comibol, and have prevented the cooperative from working its concession. Over eighty soldiers and twenty police have been deployed to prevent a deterioration of the situation, while vice-minister for mining Freddy Beltrán has called for tripartite discussions to overcome the tensions.

Comibol has offered to absorb those who work for the cooperative into its ranks as a solution, and many have already taken up the offer. Héctor Córdova, president of Comibol, has said his organisation has the capacity to hire the remaining cooperativistas, but said he needed consensus between all those involved before taking this step. Meanwhile, the cooperativistas are threatening to bring large numbers of their people to La Paz to make their point heard.

Cooperativistas have also seized part of the San Vicente mine, Potosí department, demanding employment. Although the mine is owned by Comibol, it is managed by the Canada-based Pan-American Silver Cooperation, which apparently has been limiting job opportunities to local miners. Conflicts in the mining sector have continued to trouble the Morales government in recent weeks, including a dispute over the Mallku Qhota mine that resulted in its nationalisation.

5. MAS plans to eradicate extreme poverty by 2025 Bicentenary
In a speech given at the Plurinational Legislative Assembly to mark the 187th anniversary of Bolivian independence, President Morales set out the challenges facing the country which he hoped would be overcome by the time of the bicentennial celebrations in 2025.

Morales, who was recently nominated by MAS as its presidential candidate for the 2014 elections, said his government would work to eradicate extreme poverty by 2025, and ensure that everyone in Bolivia had access to electricity, drinking water, sewerage and telephones. Morales also said that he hoped Bolivia would become self-sufficient in food production during the same period. The president stressed that his government had successfully met previous targets contained in the 2006-2011 National Development Plan, although he accepted failings in terms of tackling corruption and undertaking a programme of reforestation.

Analysts have reacted with scepticism to Morales’s targets. The former president of the Central Bank, Armando Méndez, suggested that even if Bolivia were to achieve annual growth rates of 10% (around twice the current figure) it would take twenty-five years to eradicate extreme poverty. Javier Gómez, the director of the Bolivian think tank CEDLA (Centre for Labour and Agrarian Development Studies) argued that if the government wanted to reduce poverty, it must do more in terms of job creation. Gómez also said that more must be done to reduce economic dependency on natural resources.

6. Sacha Llorenti named as ambassador to the UN amid questioning
Former minister Sacha Llorenti has been controversially appointed as Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, replacing Rafael Archondo. The move has been criticised by indigenous groups, human rights organisations and opposition politicians due to Llorenti’s alleged role in events during the march against the proposed TIPNIS road in September 2011.

Llorenti resigned as minister of government following a violent police intervention against the march in Chaparina, Beni, but denies ordering police to use force against the protesters. Llorenti’s appointment to the UN came soon after he was excluded by the Public Prosecutor’s Office from its inquiry into the Chaparina events, raising fears that no-one will be held responsible for the repression. Ombudsman Rolando Villena criticised the prosecutor’s decision, suggesting it could create a climate of impunity in Bolivia.

7. National census to take place
The government has announced that a national census will be conducted on Wednesday 21 November this year, with two additional days scheduled for rural areas. Planning and Development Minister Viviana Caro said the information gathered on population and housing would help improve government policies. More than thirty institutions will cooperate under the umbrella organisation La Ruta del Censo to undertake the work and around 230,000 census takers will work across the country to collect data.

Some controversy has arisen over the type of information the government has decided to collect in the census. The ethnic category of mestizo will not be included in list of options for self-identification, with the government arguing that the racial dimension of the word is potentially discriminatory. The census will also not collect information on either religion or sexual orientation. Caro insisted that while the government strongly supported human rights in those areas, but the information was not relevant for public policy. Religious groups and sexual equality campaigners criticised the decision.

AUTHOR: Bolivia Information Forum
URL: http://www.boliviainfoforum.org.uk/
E-MAIL: enquiries [at] boliviainfoforum.org.uk

Kimberly Armstrong of Baltimore shares a hug with a caravan mother

As the peace caravan arrived in Baltimore yesterday morning, many of the 100-some people on board still slept, hunched over their seats or slumped on the shoulders of their bus mates. With a light summer rain falling, we began to pass row after row of abandoned houses. A member of a Baltimore host organization explained the background of a city that has been bombed out–not by aerial strikes, but by economic crisis. The results were strikingly similar.

Along North Avenue and Fulton Avenue, entire blocks of houses were boarded up and abandoned. Some have been gutted by time or rehab speculators. Others stand as they have for more than a hundred years, ready to house families behind their strong brick walls. Except that money, racism and the perversion of the financial system have blocked their doors. Families are on the street while houses remain empty.

We drove up to Irvington Park where a coalition of Baltimore groups hosted a picnic with the theme “Keep Them Home”. Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle (LBS), a community organization that works with imprisoned and recently released youth, greeted the caravan, along with the NAACP, Casa Maryland and others.

Two women rappers/singers performed works protesting the construction of yet another prison in a community that lacks basic services. Local groups like LBS have managed to block the prison so far and are working to have the multi-million dollar project cancelled altogether.

“I don’t know Spanish,” she told the caravan. “But I know a lot about losing a loved one.”

On Sept. 27, 2004, Armstrong’s sixteen year old son Eric was shot and killed. Just this February, she said, she heard a knock on the door. “It was the police. They told me they found my son’s murderer. he was shot with a 9mm rifle by a 14-year old.”

“I thought to myself, ‘why do we have 9mm rifles on the ground? how can it be that we live in a neighborhood where it’s easier for a 14-year old to get a gun, than it is to get a tomato.’”

Among the crowd, the many mothers and other relatives of the murdered and disappeared nodded. One woman’s lost son became the brother of the other’s.

“Now they are all my angels,” said Araceli Rodriguez, displaying the photo of Armstrong’s son alongside that of her own, kidnapped and disappeared in the state of Michoacan.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

Since the Wikileaks and Assange affair, and than the denial to extradite Alexander Barankov, Ecuador positioned itself as the champion of human rights and a defender of free speech.

It is a very positive sign that Latin American government step up the plate, and show that democracy indeed has become a fixed feature of the continent.

The Colombian President has announced the beginning of informal talks with FARC as precursor for peace, beginning next November in Oslo. The peace process is widely supported by the people and legislature who drafted a bill to create a framework for ‘amnesty’, or as Human Rights Watch puts it Amnesty in disguise. But the Colombian people want peace more than anything, and if they support amnesty for the rebels than indeed amnesty will help enforce the peace talks and provide an impetus for lasting peace after more than half a century of war and conflict.

Are the developments in Colombia and Ecuador indeed signs of democratic consolidation and politicization?
But before we start hollering hooray and doling out balloons in celebration of Latin American democracy lets take a closer at the underlying factors that brought on these actions. Before continuing with this issue I want to introduce into the discussion, the impeachment of the Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, rather the fact that it invoked negative reactions in Latin America. I don’t believe that said reactions are symbolize increasing democratization, of human rights, quite the contrary!

The Nitty-Gritty of Democratization, Human Rights and the Latin American Left

The Political Left in Latin American is founded on neo-Marxism, Leninism and Maoist conceptions; it is radical, typified by its consistent call for revolution and uprising of the poor against the Latifundia and Caudillo. Another characteristic is its penchant to go underground, fight guerrillero type of wars, seemingly with the peasantry and for the peasantry. Guerrillo movements such as FARC (Colombia) Sendero Luminoso (Peru), Sandinista (Nicaragua) teach that oftentimes the peasantry and the people in the rural areas fall prey to the whimsicality of a guerrillo warfare; they are oftentimes caught in the middle, forced to co-operate with the rebels because they are told that the fight is to advance their plight and loathed by the officials because the fight is to advance their plight! And the peasants? They are up to this point unaware that some people or a movement are/ is defending their cause! All they want is peace! And peace never comes, only more mayhem. Both FARC and the SANDINISTAS have contributed to the impoverishment of rural Colombia and Nicaragua. In the case of Nicaragua, research by for example Anja Nygren, demonstrates that the Sandinistas were responsible for the eviction of peasants from their lands and their homes, for crimes against humanities and for the steady stream of refugees to neighboring Costa Rica. The FARC by the same token has left a trail of destruction specifically in rural Colombia, abducting children and forcing them to become a soldier in the FARC. Many poor people in the rural areas of Colombia fear for their lives and for the lives of their families, confronted with the criminality and atavistic nature of the soldiers of the FARC, as they pass through their neck of the woods. In the case of El Salvador similar patterns have been attributed to the FMLN; Several publications mention the controversial role of the FMLN as freedom fighters and perpetrators (see for example: http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/truth-com.html;

http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/1669)

In broad terms, the Commission finds the FMLN responsible for having committed “grave acts of violence” including assassinations, disappearances and kidnappings during the war that violated human rights and humanitarian law. The Commission received more than 800 denunciations of grave violations by the FMLN, including nearly 400 killings and over 300 disappearances. The Commission calls on the FMLN to renounce forever all forms of violence in the pursuit of political ends.

The sense of impunity, of injustice that proliferated among especially the poor, the landless and the disenfranchised hampered democratization in the last decade of the 21st century. No longer did the people believe in a Revolution would transform the society into a Socialist Nirvana of some sorts. Of course, there was Venezuela, were the Bolivarian revolution raged on, firmly establishing the reign of Hugo Chavez, a case that in essence corroborated the idea that the :Latin American left failed to deliver on its promise, to create a more just and verdant society. The failure of the left is best illustrated by their failure to transform the economy; only in the case of Brazil (President Lula) and Chile (President Bachelet) did Leftist governments manage to establish a platform to reduce poverty; Venezuela on the other hand, turned to mercantilism in an attempt to resolve the rich-poor divide, but failed miserably in its quest to do so.

It is therefore uncanny that many leftist leaders on the continent modeled their platform inspired by Bolivarianism. Evo Morales, Fernando Lugo and Ollanta Humala exemplify the new Latin American left that modeled their movements inspired by the success of Chavisimo.

The positive aspect of the strengthening of this type of leftist movements is the increasing involvement of the grass-roots in politics, rallying behind a type of leader who looked like them and who spoke their language, and who empowered them to rally behind a platform of liberation. The optimism that came from this type of movement, the fact that its leaders were able to articulate and aggregate demand of the previously disenfranchised gave hope, specifically among anti neo-liberal proponents. But the very people that rallied behind the grass roots, in support of these new leaders of the left are now confronted with what can be qualified as the backlash. Are these leaders still the champions of the poor? How can one explain the fact that president Morales of Bolivia turned on his own people, using violence against the protesters. Striking is that Mr Morales started his MAS movement in protest against pollution of the Indigenous Habitat, but today he as the president feels that a road build with money from Brazil should and will have to cut through Indigenous lands.

The same can be argued about the Paraguayan case, President Lugo became impeached after he ordered the use of violence on protesters. He and his supporters argued said impeachment was in fact a coup, but the bi-cameral legislature of Paraguay did not act on a whim, in fact their move became backed by the Supreme Court. The reaction of the Latin American community was therefore very peculiar; Mercosur in fact condemned the actions by the Paraguayan legislature, in fact pushing the country out of the movement, in favor of Venezuela. No mention was made of the fact that Mr Lugo had used violence to evict landless peasants who are locked in the struggle to regain possession of their land. Latin American leaders did not spoke out in defense of the people who struggle for justice, in fact they seem to condemn the Paraguayan government for taking actions against the anti-democratic actions of the presidency.

Farmers’ leader Jose Rodriguez told Paraguayan radio that those killed “were humble farmers, members of the landless movement, who’d decided to stay and resist”.The farmers said the land was illegally taken during the 1954-1989 military rule of Gen Alfredo Stroessner and distributed among his allies. According to the Paraguayan Truth Commission, 6.75 million hectares of land were sold or handed over under “irregular circumstances” during military rule. The Commission says that almost 20% of Paraguayan land can be qualified as “ill-gotten gains” Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18474444

Social Movement, Radical Ideas and Status Quo

One of the immediate drawback of the social movements described in this posting, is in my view the consistent denial of the status quo, the idea that they would be able to overturn the old nomenclature to create a new political order, a total and complete disengagement from the existing political establishment. The idea that one can reconstruct a new political order based on ideas of neo-Marxism, Gramsci and so called autonomist neo-Marxist intellectuals sums up what I call the immediate failure of these political movements (Motta 2009). Indeed, the empirical overwhelming teaches that it is not possible to deconstruct and then again reconstruct a new political order; it is only possible to de-align from a certain partisan structure, or from a certain political system. Completely deconstructing a political system attenuates to radical change and transformation, to a revolution.

Harking back to the earlier mentioned radical leftist movements FARC, Sendero Luminoso, Sandinistas and FMNL to argue that none of these movements succeeded in their quests. None of these movements managed to radically break with the traditional political order. Machiavelli in his writings warns of this pitfall, that political leaders typically fall prey to the same foibles, as power corrupts and distorts. Today, we see that one of the seminal leaders of the Sandinista’s, Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua has two faces, a more moderate and placid face, that covers up his hard-line Marxist and militant predisposition that is corrupt and controversial, at best. No longer the champion for the poor and the disenfranchised, president Ortega today is unabashedly corrupt, gaining wealth and possessions rivaling that of the Samosa family that he once ousted from office:

Ortega and Sandinista leaders, in fact, have unabashedly used chunks of the money [donated by president Chavez, from Venezuela] to purchase private ownership of Nicaraguan companies, sometimes as mixed Venezuelan-Sandinista business ventures, and to corner entire industries in Nicaragua. It’s startlingly reminiscent of the personal fiefdom that the Somozas — the dictator family the Sandinistas overthrew in 1979 — made of Nicaragua during their long rule: Source: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2098720,00.html#ixzz25m1mqezA

Conclusion

In closing, I want to return to my primary position, that democratization in Latin America is cause for optimism and hope. Has Ecuador indeed become the champion of rights, defending free speech and freedom of expression so vehemently that it risks a diplomatic clash with Great Britain? Or is Latin America telling the world that it is no longer the Backyard of the USA? Is Julian Assange the symbol of Latin American autonomy and strive for regional identity? The handling of the Paraguayan affair within Mercosur and the OAS teach us that Latin America is indeed working to gain more autonomy from the USA by increasing its internal cohesion, just like the ASEAN (Association South East Asian Nations). Colombia is indeed working to bring peace and free the society from mayhem and the arbitrariness of the FARC. Disarmament of the FARC is also of utmost (military) strategic importance, to stabilize relations with neighboring Venezuela and to regain a seminal position within the ranks of the Latin American community. Indeed president Hugo Chavez is a crucial force when it comes to Latin American stability. The cases of Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia and Suriname show that President Hugo Chavez is working diligently to spread his Bolivarian revolution. And despite the fact that an increasing number of Latin American citizens feel that democracy is the most preferred system of governance, many are still economically too weak, to accept political moderation and this is the reason why many will continue to support and trust politicians who promise change and liberation, instead of trusting the very institutions on which democracy rests.

AUTHOR: Natascha Adama
URL: http://natascha23.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: nataliapestova23 [@] yahoo.com

In his speech, called “A Time to Break Silence”, King cited his reasons to oppose the Viet Nam war. His words apply almost uncannily to the drug war today. Despite the difference in historical contexts and the differences between the two wars, their similarities and the truth of the words stand not only the test of time but the test of conscience as well.

Both wars were, and are, deadly; both unconventional for their time; both fought for motivations distinct from those professed to the people.

The first reason King listed to oppose the war was “the war as an enemy of the poor”. He had watched as advances in fighting poverty and inequality were dismantled to feed the war machine. The trade-off was starkly obvious:

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

We also know that today. With a budget in crisis, social programs have been stripped in historic rollbacks of rights and living standards as the defense budget not only maintains its girth but grows. With the Middle East conflicts waning in attention, it’s the drug war that has moved in to justify militarism’s insatiable appetite.

In Mexico, where the financial crisis, free trade and governmental indifference have created some 12 million more poor people in just a few years, the drug war has absorbed an enormous part of the budget. The war economy in both countries has powerful backers, and the added advantage for them of not only keeping the poor poor, but eliminating a large number of them, behind bars or in mass graves.

That’s, of course, his second reason.

[The war] was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

Today’s drug war doesn’t even have to send young men and women thousands of miles away. It puts them away right here at home. By the millions and with the same discriminatory criteria that sent the poor and African American to fight and die in Viet Nam.

The peace caravan from Mexico marched in a candlelight vigil through the heart of Harlem, Manhattan’s poorest areas. A place where everyday youth are plucked to fill the cells and coffers of a private prison system. Where drug laws do the dirty work of justifying criminalization based on race and poverty and treating victims as villains.

Carol Eady of Woman on the Rise Telling Her Story (WORTH), a former prisoner on drug charges who has kicked drugs and become an educator and community activist, explained at the church,

Many women in New York, and probably all over the world, are usually incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Most of the time, they started using drugs due to past abuse, abandonment by parents, victimization and sexual assaults. Instead of treating these occurrences as health hazards or diseases, when we turn to drugs to medicate our pain, they lock us up.  

More than 400 people chanted ‘No More Drug War’ and called for justice in the streets of Harlem. The “cruel manipulation of the poor” that King spoke of is the modus operandi of the drug war and the prisons are the new battlefields where young lives are lost.

King’s third reason stemmed from his deep commitment to non-violence.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. 

Likewise, if we do not oppose the drug war, we cannot claim to be non-violent and credibly stand up against more conventional wars or invasions or call ourselves non-violent. The U.S. government’s Merida Initiative promotes violence and militarization as a solution to drug trafficking. We either condone that and abandon all pretenses of non-violence or we oppose it despite its political popularity and remain consistent in our beliefs.

By keeping silent since Bush launched the Merida Initiative in 2007, we have allowed the militarized drug war model to spread. Now both political parties have elevated counter-narcotics efforts to national security, as if a white powder used to get high could blow up the world or a corner dealer were tantamount to a terrorist. This is a blatant lie. We are supporting a prohibition model where Mexican communities suffer the presence of violent and corrupt security forces and drug gangs, both funded and armed in part by our country. Violence becomes the norm and moral outrage dulls through endless repetition.

Another reason is the “vocation of sonship and brotherhood”, a religious calling that–when women are added into the language–demands making common cause and understanding the suffering of others. The caravan, above all, has sought over this past month to forge those bonds and bring out that common cause. The victims, with their photos of murdered or missing loved ones and stories of pain, have challenged the U.S. public to consider the devastation wrought by support of a drug war without end. 

The stories at Riverside, 45 years later, again broke the silence about the war. Not a war on a foreign continent, but a crossborder war that rages within our communities from Harlem to Jalisco. As the U.S. government extends the failed drug war from Colombia and Mexico, to Central America, the Caribbean and Africa king’s closing words fit now as then:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam [in the drug war] and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors.

Annihilation drags us all into more violence. We have alternatives. As hundreds of marchers moved through New York city with the pictures of the victims, calling for an end to the war–again–they carried us closer to what King called “a creative psalm of peace”.

AUTHOR: Laura Carlsen
URL: www.cipamericas.org and http://americasmexico.blogspot.com
E-MAIL: lecarlsen [at] gmail.com

S.E. Juan Manuel Santos, Presidente de la República, Colombia

Your Excellency,

I am William Nicholas Gomes, Human Rights ambassador for Salem-News.com.

I came to know from Front Line – The International Foundation for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders regarding the situation.

Throughout the month of August 2012, the human rights organisation Fundación Comité de Solidaridad con los Presos Políticos – FCSPP (Political Prisoner’s Solidarity Committee) has been subjected to a series of cyber attacks. FCSPP is an organisation dedicated to combating persecution based on political reasons, through the promotion of human rights and the provision of human rights education, particularly to the most vulnerable sectors of Colombian society. FCSPP also works to protect and promote the rights of political prisoners in Colombia.

Between 15 and 24 August 2012, FCSPP’s website, www.comitedesolidaridad.com, was the target of incessant cyber attacks. As a result of these attacks, the website was inaccessible from 15 to 18 August, and it was temporarily blocked on several other occasions until full control of the site was regained on 24 August.

Moreover, between 10 and 25 August 2012, the organisation’s email account was hacked and used to send malicious viruses and spam messages, and all employee work email accounts were deleted. During this time, the hacked email account was also used to send threatening emails to a member of the organisation based in the Antioquia Branch.

Furthermore, on 13 August 2012, the hard disk of a computer containing information relating to the work of FCSPP was stolen from the offices of the Atlántico Branch. The individual(s) who stole it replaced it with a hard disk that does not work.

At the beginning of August 2012, spyware was found installed on the computer that is used in FCSPP’s national office to maintain the organisation’s website and to manage its communications. The software was designed to record all of the information on the computer and to send it via the Internet to an unknown location.

These cyber attacks come against the backdrop of constant harassment and intimidation facing FCSPP. On 9 July 2012, Mr Walter Agredo received a death threat via text message, which made reference to several human rights organisations including FCSPP, and stated: “Moriran defensores de guerrilleros…” (You will die defenders of guerrillas). On 4 July 2012, Mr José Humberto Torres and Mr Franklin Castañeda were among 13 human rights defenders identified as “objetivos militares” (military targets) by the paramilitary group that calls itself Ejército Anti Restitución (Army against Restitution).

Furthermore, since the 12 June 2012 members of the FCSPP have been refused entry to prisons and detention centres, despite the organisation following the correct procedures for applications for visitations. Between 12 June and 22 August 2012 a total of 58 requests were denied without explanation and despite other organisations still being granted access. In 2010, in the context of the precautionary measures granted to the FCSPP, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH) requested that the Colombian State agree upon an admission protocol in order to ensure that the FCSPP have access to carry out their human rights work with prisoners.

I condemn the cyber attacks on FCSPP, and believes that they are directly related to the organisation’s peaceful and legitimate work in defence of human rights. Moreover, I am concerned that the repeated refusal of the authorities to allow FCSPP members to enter prisons and detention centres may be an arbitrary means of preventing the organisation from carrying out its human rights work.

I urge the authorities in Colombia to:

1. Carry out an immediate, thorough and impartial investigation into the acts of harassment and death threats against FCSPP members and the theft of the hard disk of a computer from the Atlántico Branch of FCSPP, with a view to publishing the results and bringing those responsible to justice in accordance with international standards;
2. Grant the FSCPP admission to the prisons and detention centres, and approve an admission protocol, as called for by the CIDH;
3. Take all necessary measures to guarantee the physical and psychological security and integrity of Messrs Walter Agredo, José Humberto Torres and Franklin Castañeda, as well as that of all FCSPP members;
4. Guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders in Colombia are able to carry out their legitimate human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of all restrictions including judicial harassment.

AUTHOR: William Nicholas Gomes
URL: www.williamgomes.org
E-MAIL: williamgomes.org [at] gmail.com