Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalFormer CIA agent, now in Havana, discusses Gadhafi’s ‘secret world’
Posted on Mon, Apr. 21, 2014
Former CIA agent, now in Havana, discusses Gadhafi’s ‘secret world’
By Juan O. Tamayo
jtamayo@ElNuevoHerald.com
U.S. fugitive and renegade CIA agent Frank Terpil is still living in Havana and easily recounting his days helping former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to murder his political enemies, according to a recently released British documentary.
Co-producer Michael Chrisman said Terpil, 74, was interviewed at his Havana home in December and gave the impression of leading a somewhat bored life, “with little to do (and) spending much time frequenting Havana watering holes nursing a drink.”
He has a much younger Cuban girlfriend, and asks friends and visitors to supply him with the occasional English language book, said Chrisman. The Showtime documentary is titled “Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi.”
The interview focused on Terpil’s relations with the Libyan dictator, killed in a 2011 revolt, and not on his links to his Cuban hosts because “he was no doubt taking a gamble upsetting them by doing the interview,” the co-producer added.
Terpil, a CIA operative who resigned from the agency in 1970, is one of more than 70 U.S. fugitives reported to have received safe haven in Cuba. Many are viewed by Havana as victims of U.S. political persecution, such as black-rights militant Joanne Chesimard.
More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/21/v-print/4072447/former-cia-agent-now-in-havana.html#storylink=cpy
Reading the hieriglyphic staircase on the Maya in Honduras
Reading the hieriglyphic staircase on the Maya in Honduras
By Pat Brennan, For Postmedia News April 17, 2014
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Visitors to Copan can explore a large complex of Mayan step-pyramids, plazas and palaces.[/font]
Don’t be too sure we dodged a bullet in December 2012 when the world didn’t come to an abrupt end, as predicted by an ancient Mayan calendar.
It could be that the predicted doomsday date of Dec. 21, 2012 is actually Dec. 21, 2021.
It all depends on how accurately archeologists are re-assembling the Mayan calendar on which the prophecy is based.
The calendar is actually a huge story book assembled as a wide staircase leading to the top of a Mayan temple in Honduras.
More:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/travel/Reading+hieriglyphic+staircase+Maya+Honduras/9750238/story.html
Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts
Beware of aid agencies bearing gifts
USAID’s so-called ‘democracy promotion programmes’ are designed to foment dissent against governments unfriendly to Washington
By Linda S.Heard | Special to Gulf News
Published: 20:00 April 21, 2014
There is no such thing as a free lunch as states that are recipients of western aid understand only too well. The naive may believe that foreign aid is a tool to help developing countries; sceptics are convinced it’s a quid pro quo enabling wealthy powers to exercise geopolitical policy objectives. In a documentary, filmmaker John Pilger made the case that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are “The New Rulers of the World” on behalf of their largest donor countries — the US, the UK, Germany, France and Japan. But some less powerful nations are alleging that one agency — the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — is acting as a front for the CIA.
When the Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled and shutdown USAID in his country last year for alleged attempts to undermine his leftist government, he wasn’t being paranoid after all. As a recent expose by the Associated Press shows USAID’s so-called “democracy promotion programmes” are designed to foment dissent against governments unfriendly to Washington.
“In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency,” asserted Mark Weisbrot, an economist with a Washington-based think tank, the Centre for Economic and Policy Research.
In the late 70s, under the headline “Police programme is called CIA cover” the New York Times revealed that the USAID police training initiative facilitated the CIA to “plant men with local police in sensitive places around the world” as well as recruit “prime candidates for enrolment as CIA employees.”
More:
http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/beware-of-aid-agencies-bearing-gifts-1.1322393
Bolivian Vice President: "Bolivia Marked the Start of a Major Indigenous Awakening"
Bolivian Vice President: "Bolivia Marked the Start of a Major Indigenous Awakening"
Monday, 21 April 2014 09:25
By Marianela Jarroud, Inter Press Service | Interview
SANTIAGO - He describes himself as someone who was drawn to Marxism as a result of his commiseration with the plight of indigenous people in his country, and he is considered one of the most influential Latin American thinkers of the 21st century.
Álvaro García Linera, 51, is seen as the “right hand man” of Bolivia’s leftist President Evo Morales.
Bolivia’s 51-year-old vice president took part in the foundation of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, whose aim was to support the indigenous insurgency. In 1997 he was released after five years in the San Pedro prison in La Paz.
He is also one of the main forces behind the lawsuit against Chile that Bolivia filed at the International Court of Justice in The Hague to reclaim access to the Pacific Ocean, which his country lost in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific.
Bolivia has not had diplomatic ties with Chile since 1978. But during Chilean President Michelle Bachelet’s first term (2006-2010), relations warmed with Morales – in office since 2006 – although they cooled again under the government of Chile’s right-wing former president Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014).
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23204-qa-bolivia-marked-the-start-of-a-major-indigenous-awakening
Masked Venezuelan rightwingers clash again with riot police
Masked Venezuelan rightwingers clash again with riot police
Monday 21st Apr 2014
Rich protesters trying to oust President Nicolas Maduro again take to the streets of Caracas
Hooded rightwingers rampaged through Caracas streets on Sunday night, hurling rocks and Molotov cocktails at Venezuelan riot police.
Masked youths battled police, protesters burned and hanged effigies of socialist President Nicolas Maduro from lamp-posts while marchers demanded the "resurrection" of democracy.
Disgraced and dismissed opposition MP Maria Corina Machado joined several hundred members of the right-wing Voluntad Popular (Popular Will), a far-right party whose leader Leopoldo Lopez has been jailed since February.
Ms Machado was barred from the National Assembly after speaking to the US-dominated Organisation of American States as part of a Panamanian delegation.
Four people were injured in unrest that erupted in Caracas's up-market Chacao neighbourhood after police returned fire with rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannon.
More:
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-0c9d-Masked-Venezuelan-rightwingers-clash-again-with-riot-police#.U1WC3WePLmQ
Childhood behind bars: 1500 Bolivian children raised in prison by parents
Childhood behind bars: 1500 Bolivian children raised in prison by parents
By The Guardian
Sunday, April 20, 2014 17:26 EDT
Rosy is a young working mother who drops her two daughters off at school each morning before scouring the markets for ingredients to make the meals she cooks and sells later in the day. Every afternoon she picks her daughters up from school and they head home to San Pedro, Bolivia’s most notorious prison.
“In the beginning I was afraid. I thought that anything could happen here, but the days went by,” Rosy says, of raising her children behind bars. “Everything depends on the parents, how we organise to protect and take care of the children. Outside it’s the same.”
According to official figures, 1,500 Bolivian children live with a parent behind bars, but the total could be much higher – especially during school holidays when children visit incarcerated parents.
Hundreds of women and children living alongside prisoners, pass out through the metal gates every day for work or school.
According to national law, children must leave prison by the time they turn six, but many stay much longer with parents who do not want to let them go. They fear their children will be abused in homes and do not trust extended-family members, many of whom are extremely poor, to provide for them. That leaves some parents feeling that growing up in prison is a child’s best – or only – option.
More:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/20/childhood-behind-bars-1500-bolivian-children-raised-in-prison-by-parents/
Honduras: Three Legislative Profiles in Courage (U.S.)
Honduras: Three Legislative Profiles in Courage
Sunday, 20 April 2014 11:39
By Larry Birns, Council on Hemispheric Affairs | Op-Ed
- Despite a positive recent declaration, what is needed is more than just another shrug of horror lamenting the further deterioration of Honduras, Washington’s best friend in Central America.
- Today marks the return of Central America’s notorious unsinkable aircraft carrier and arguably the rebirth of Latin America’s most persistent human rights violator.
Congress- The best and the worst
Honduras is known for being an egregious human rights transgressor and a scene of violence against individual journalists and media organizations, as well as a number of conscience-driven trade unionists. Unfortunately, calls made for the safety of journalists and transparency in cases where dissident journalists risk their own safety by practicing their profession in the face of extreme danger are all but ignored. The demands by Representative McGovern, Farr, and Schakowsky, while inspiring due to their personal courage and sense of principle they were determined to uphold, are a striking anomaly amidst the cheap political practices and political maneuvering regularly engaged by U.S congressmen, including Senator Robert Menendez, Congresswoman Ileana Ross-Lehtinen and their supporters. The latest cycle of vengeance and violence was sparked by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she defended the 2009 coup against the constitutionally-elected President Manuel Zelaya who was overthrown by the Honduran military over the protest of most of the members of the OAS and in violation of the OAS charter.
For decades the U.S. government has looked upon Honduras’ constitutional democratic institutions as a huge joke and a doormat for Washington’s abusive and inherently dismissive foreign policy, often brushing aside human rights violations and respect for the sovereignty of Honduras. During the 1980s in the decade-long Contra war against the Sandinistas, Honduras provided a series of staging areas to mount the U.S. backed contra campaigns. Honduras also served the United States as a base site for the enormous amount of military equipment that was absorbed by the airbase at the military and CIA facility at Palmerola.
As pleads are being made for a reversal of this tendency and various U.S. authorities in order to reveal a greater sense of priority to the alarming deterioration of the human rights situation in the Central American country, a return to the bad days in the region seem all-but inevitable.
The danger facing the people of principle throughout Central America has been significantly radicalized in the last few years and was stepped up by some of the more extremist elements in the U.S. political party structure. These hardliners include Senators Melendez, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz as well as House Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ross-Lehtinen, who given the chance, would send all of the country’s liberals to the guillotine. By their constant bashing of regional political figures and their dissembling of hemispheric realities, these legislative figures have a destructive sense of reality and may have also done grave damage by concealing the full quality of political realities in Latin America as a whole. They have served to legitimate Miami Cubans, Venezuelan-Americans, and Salvadoran-Americans who tirelessly have raised funds for their would-be exile co-conspirators. Melendez and his extremist cohorts who have focused on Venezuela’s leftist government now would know no limitations in their support of rightwing movements in that country. Meanwhile immigrants from the region are often too frightened to confront their possible intimidators because they fear that non-enacted legislation like parole-visa statutes or temporary executive orders issued by the Obama Administration will be used against them.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/23195-honduras-three-legislative-profiles-in-courage
A 12-Year-Old’s Trek of Despair Ends in a Noose at the Border
A 12-Year-Old’s Trek of Despair Ends in a Noose at the Border
APRIL 19, 2014
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Noemi Álvarez Quillay’s death in
Mexico was ruled a suicide.
Credit José Luis Llivisaca [/font]
Noemi Álvarez Quillay took the first steps of the 6,500-mile journey to New York City from the southern highlands of Ecuador on Tuesday, Feb. 4, after darkness fell. A bashful, studious girl, Noemi walked 10 minutes across dirt roads that cut through corn and potato fields, reaching the highway to Quito. She carried a small suitcase. Her grandfather Cipriano Quillay flagged down a bus and watched her board. She was 12.
From that moment, and through the remaining five weeks of her life, Noemi was in the company of strangers, including coyotes — human smugglers, hired by her parents in the Bronx to bring her to them. Her parents had come to the United States illegally and settled in New York when Noemi was a toddler.
Noemi was part of a human flood tide that has swelled since 2011: The United States resettlement agency expects to care for nine times as many unaccompanied migrant children in 2014 as it did three years ago.
For these children wandering thousands of miles, it is a grueling journey, filled with dangers. The vast majority come from Central America. Noemi’s trip was about twice as long. She had already tried once, leaving home last May, but was detained long before she even made it halfway.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/nyregion/a-12-year-olds-trek-of-despair-ends-in-a-noose-at-the-border.html?=
COLUMN: Gabriel García Márquez, the Story-Teller of the Country of the War Without End
COLUMN: Gabriel García Márquez, the Story-Teller of the Country of the War Without End
By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 18 2014 (IPS) - The first time I read Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was when I was proofreading the galleys of “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor”, which the Editorial Sudamericana was getting ready to reprint in Argentina.
I was working in the offices of the Sudamericana publishing house, in the Buenos Aires neighbourhood of San Telmo, where I could find myself editing a gothic novel or a literary classic or a work by the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, due to the varied menu. I was 17 years old and I was mesmerised by that short tale, a journalistic report by García Márquez published in a number of instalments in the El Espectador newspaper in Bogotá, in 1955, which came out as a book in 1970.
The complete title was “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time”. Through the first-person account of the exploits of the survivor, García Márquez denounced that the shipwreck of the sailor and his seven companions, who drowned, was due to overweight contraband on the Colombian Navy’s destroyer Caldas.
Colombia at the time was under a military dictatorship, so the report led to the closure of the newspaper and the first of García Márquez’s various periods of exile. The last one began in 1997. He never returned to live in Colombia.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/04/column-gabriel-garcia-marquez-story-teller-country-war-without-end/
100 arrested, arms seized in Argentina raids
100 arrested, arms seized in Argentina raids
April 20, 2014 - 5:25:53 am
BUENOS AIRES: Around 100 suspects were arrested and 85 weapons seized when police conducted dozens of simultaneous raids in Buenos Aires province, Argentine authorities said yesterday.
The massive police operation in the southern edge of the capital comes amid a year-long public safety state of emergency declared this month by the governor of the province to fight a spike in violent crime and vigilante action against it.
The police operations yesterday also netted a reported 12 cars and 29 motorcycles, police body armour and drugs, as well as shotguns matching the type carried by Argentine security forces.
Buenos Aires Province Governor Daniel Scioli, an ally of President Cristina Kirchner with aspirations to the presidency, on April 5 decreed the state of emergency in the province that is home to 40 percent of Argentina’s 40 million people.
The decree followed a series of robbery-murders that triggered a furious response from people who attempted to lynch suspected thieves. Some of them were beaten to death in the street.
More:
http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/news/international/280513/100-arrested-arms-seized-in-argentina-raids
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