Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalBrazil's environmentalist presidential candidate is now courting big agriculture
Brazil's environmentalist presidential candidate is now courting big agriculture
Longtime green activist Marina Silva has even come out in favor of genetically modified crops, sending a message that conservation and agribusiness can thrive together.
Reese Ewing, Reuters September 13, 2014 10:03
SAO PAULO, Brazil — Brazilian presidential candidate Marina Silva, an icon of the green movement, is cozying up to old adversaries in the sugar and ethanol industry as she seeks to win over the powerful farm lobby ahead of next month's election.
Since entering the race in mid-August, Silva has picked a pro-agriculture congressman as her running mate, met repeatedly with agribusiness leaders and campaigned in the farm belt, eager to make allies in an industry that accounts for a quarter of Brazil's economy.
Her message: conservation and big agriculture would thrive side-by-side in a Silva government and she would roll back the gasoline subsidies that President Dilma Rousseff has used to contain inflation. The fuel price controls have gutted Brazil's once-booming sugar cane ethanol industry.
Silva, who polls show is slightly ahead of Rousseff in an expected runoff, has also pleased crowds in the farm belt by reminding voters that she has dropped her opposition to genetically modified crops, which have been crucial to Brazil's rise in recent years as an agricultural power.
"There's this legend out there that I'm against genetically modified crops. That's not true. I support a model in which GMO and GMO-free crops co-exist," she said in a recent TV interview.
More:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/brazil/140913/marina-silva-environmentalist-courts-big-agriculture
AP PHOTOS: Survivor of Peru massacre guides team
AP PHOTOS: Survivor of Peru massacre guides team
By RODRIGO ABD and FRANKLIN BRICENO, Associated Press | September 17, 2014 | Updated: September 17, 2014 11:16pm
PACCHA, Peru (AP) — This remote hamlet on fertile Andean slopes beside the Apurimac river has been a ghost town for three decades, inhabited only by the buried bodies of villagers slain by security forces who considered them rebel sympathizers.
Earlier this month, forensic investigators began unearthing the remains of the nearly two dozen victims of the July 14, 1984, massacre in this region where government forces regularly hunted alleged collaborators of the Shining Path guerrillas.
Dolores Guzman, the sole survivor, set aside the street stand where she sells hard-boiled eggs in the capital of Lima and journeyed last week to Paccha to help forensic experts find the common graves.
Arriving was not easy. This rugged southeastern region known as "Oreja de Perro," or Dog's Ear, lacks telephones and good roads. Cocaine-trafficking remnants of the otherwise conquered Shining Path movement coexist here with young Quechua men who ferry coca paste over the Andes in backpacks.
In all, 21 sets of human remains were recovered, including those of eight children and a fetus, said Luis Rueda, the forensic archaeologist overseeing the dig. Some 70,000 people were killed in the 1980-2000 internal conflict, most of them civilians, a truth commission found.
More:
http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/AP-PHOTOS-Survivor-of-Peru-massacre-guides-team-5763353.php
Colombia army admits recruitment ‘raids’ are illegal
Colombia army admits recruitment ‘raids’ are illegal
Sep 18, 2014 posted by Matthew Sterne
Colombia’s army has acknowledged that forcing youths into trucks on the pretext of checking their military status is against the law, newspaper El Espectador reported on Thursday.
In late August, after allegations made in the media about arbitrary raids for recruitment purposes by the Army, better known as “batidas”, the then Head of Army Recruiting General Felix Ivan Muñoz was relieved of his duties. Colonel Mauricio Martinez was confirmed as the replacement and now has the role of promoting “the improvement of processes for defining the military situation of Colombian men.”
This is a recurring issue. The Colombian military has in the past been accused of forced and irregular recruitment of young people and citizens exempt from military service.
These “illegal raids” are carried out in cities where army trucks illegally and forcibly pick up young men on the pretext of checking their military status.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/army-admits-raids-illegal-strategy-recruitment/
(My emphasis.)
Afro-Colombian activist says minority is victim of ‘state racism’
Afro-Colombian activist says minority is victim of ‘state racism’
Sep 18, 2014 posted by Joel Gillin
The director of a Colombian anti-racism organization has accused three government ministers of “state racism” following their failure to attend a meeting on the development of the predominantly black Pacific region of Choco.
Ray Charrupi, who heads up the Cali-based organization Chao Racismo, told Colombia Reports that the three ministers are not familiar with, nor are they interested in becoming familiar with the undeveloped Pacific region inhabited mostly by Afro-Colombians.
The meeting, initiated by Colombia’s Ombudsman Jorge Armando Otalora, took place in region’s capital city of Quibdo with the purpose of discussing the lack of infrastructure and violence experienced by the populace. The ministers of Interior, of Mining, and of Health were all supposed to attend, but all three failed to show up, according the website of the Ombudsman’s office.
“(The ministers) believe the Pacific region and its inhabitants are third-class Colombians who do not deserve attention, even when the Ombudsman directly summoned them,” Charrupi said.
Systematically abandoning Afro-Colombians and indigenous lands and territories amounts, according to Charrupi, to what he has termed “state racism.”
Charrupi claims that his organization has coined and uses the term “state racism” to replace the more commonly used “structural racism.”
More:
http://colombiareports.co/state-racism/
University Enrollment Rises 294 percent in Venezuela
University Enrollment Rises 294 percent in Venezuela
Published 16 September 2014
Venezuela ranks fifth in the world in the number of university students.
This Monday 2,630,000 Venezuelan students resumed their studies in public or private universities. The total number of students at the highest level shows a striking 294 percent rise in the last 14 years, from 894,418 students in the year 2000.
Venezuela now ranks fifth in the world in the number of students studying at the university level, thanks to the educational expansion and democratization achieved in the process known as the Bolivarian Revolution, say educational authorities.
They explain that this growth represents a matriculation rate of 83 percent. In other words, out of the total number of spaces available, the number of university students currently enrolled account for 83 percent, almost double the 43 percent rate in the past. The goal for 2019 is a 100 percent matriculation rate, with three million students actively engaged in university studies.
Venezuela’s Vice President of Planning and Knowledge, Ricardo Menéndez, told students at the National Experimental University of the Armed Forces (UNEFA), in the city of Chuao, state of Miranda, that prior to 1999, only military officers attended their school, but since then its doors are open to young people throughout the country.
More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/University-Enrollment-Rises-294-percent-in-Venezuela-20140916-0021.html
Argentina approves law for controlling prices
Sep 18, 6:45 PM EDT
Argentina approves law for controlling prices
By ALMUDENA CALATRAVA
Associated Press
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) -- Argentina's congress on Thursday approved a law that lets the government intervene in setting prices and profits in an attempt to tackle one of the hemisphere's worst inflation rates.
Economy Minister Axel Kicillof said the measure, approved earlier by the Senate, would defend consumers against "the innumerable abuses we suffer every day on the part of concentrated groups with monopoly power."
But local business leaders said the law is likely to aggravate shortages and inflation by discouraging people from selling price-controlled goods or making investments.
The law gives the state power to set maximum and minimum prices as well as control profit margins. Companies that set prices considered "artificial or unjustified" can be fined. However, the government bowed to earlier complaints by exempting most small and medium companies.
More:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_ARGENTINA_PRICE_LAW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-09-18-18-45-00
Venezuelan protesters discuss explosives in video
Sep 16, 10:22 PM EDT
Venezuelan protesters discuss explosives in video
By JORGE RUEDA and JOSHUA GOODMAN
Associated Press
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- Two Venezuelan activists recently deported by Colombia have surfaced in a video that purportedly shows them discussing plans to stockpile weapons and launch attacks on government targets in apparent attempt to destabilize President Nicolas Maduro's rule.
The video, which aired Monday night on a TV program known for battering the government's foes, apparently contains excerpts from a Skype video conference Lorent Saleh and Gabriel Valles had with an unidentified third person, whose voice is distorted.
It's not clear when the recording took place or how it was obtained. Its veracity could not be independently confirmed.
But in it the two students, apparently speaking from inside Colombia, freely boast of all sorts of covert plans. Operating under a diplomatic "facade" provided by a human rights group, Saleh remarks on plans for weapons training in Colombia's capital and how he obtained two bricks of C4 explosives to "blow up" liquor stores, bars and eventually storm the offices of the National Electoral Council in the western state of Tachira, a hotbed of anti-government unrest earlier this year.
"We're missing the ammunition and rifles but we're going to arrange this with the people from Bogota," Saleh says at one point.
More:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_VENEZUELA_STUDENT_ACTIVISTS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-09-16-17-42-37
The Discovery Of Mexico's First Coca Plantation Could Upend The Cocaine Business
The Discovery Of Mexico's First Coca Plantation Could Upend The Cocaine Business
VICE News
Keegan Hamilton, VICE News
Sep. 17, 2014, 7:03 AM
The Discovery Of Mexico's First Coca Plantation Could Upend The Cocaine Business
Last week marked a troubling first in the long and sordid history of the Mexican drug world. There was no bloodshed, corruption, torture, or any of the grisly hallmarks of the country's ongoing narco war. There was only a plant, or rather many plants — a field of small shrubs with green oval-shaped leaves and bright red berries. For the first time ever in Mexico, the authorities discovered a coca plantation.
Until now, coca — the raw plant material used to manufacture cocaine — has been grown almost exclusively in the Andes. But there is virtually nothing to stop Mexican drug cartels from cultivating the plant domestically, and experts say it's actually surprising that it has taken this long for the crop to migrate north from South America. Now that the shift has seemingly begun, the consequences could be profound.
The coca crop in Mexico was located in Chiapas state in the southwest corner of the country, not far from the border with Guatemala. According to the Mexican newspaper Reforma, 1,639 plants were found on approximately 1,250 square meters of land (about one-third of an acre) near the tiny municipality of Tuxtla Chico.
The crops were destroyed by the Mexican military and border police, and three suspects were detained at a nearby residence where unprocessed coca leaves were also found.
Read more: https://news.vice.com/article/the-discovery-of-mexicos-first-coca-plantation-could-upend-the-cocaine-business#ixzz3DdBStxCu
World’s Most Unequal Region Sets Example in Fight Against Hunger
World’s Most Unequal Region Sets Example in Fight Against Hunger
By Marianela Jarroud
[font size=1]
A woman and her daughter, beneficiaries of Brazil’s Bolsa Familia programme, one of the country’s social plans cited as
examples in the global fight against hunger. Credit: UNDP [/font]
SANTIAGO, Sep 17 2014 (IPS) - Latin America and the Caribbean, the world’s most unequal region, has made the greatest progress towards improving food security and has become the region with the largest number of countries to have reached the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people.
However, social and geographic inequalities persist in the region, and rural women and indigenous people continue to face high rates of food insecurity and poverty, says the State of Food Insecurity in the World (SOFI 2014) report, which underscores Brazil and Bolivia’s anti-hunger policies as successful strategies.
“These policies have had a general impact and all groups have benefited, but there are segments that need greater specificity when it comes to policy design,” said Raúl Benítez, regional representative of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), at the regional office based in Santiago.
“There are sectors that need more focalised and tailored policies,” he added in an interview with IPS. “This is like going over it with a fine-tooth comb, but there are things that need an even finer-toothed comb.”
SOFI 2014, presented Tuesday Sept. 16 in Rome, revealed that the proportion of people suffering from undernutrition in Latin America was reduced from 15.3 percent in the 1990-1992 period to 6.1 percent in 2012-2014.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/09/worlds-most-unequal-region-sets-example-in-fight-against-hunger/
Spectacular progress the Americas have made since the hard right oligarchs started losing their iron fisted grip over the governments of most of the countries. May the progressives not fail so they can reach the humanitarian goals for their WHOLE countries, rather than just the white elites, instead, as it used to be.
Argentina tries doctors for 'baby theft' during military rule
Source: BBC News
17 September 2014 Last updated at 21:06 ET
Argentina tries doctors for 'baby theft' during military rule
[font size=1]
Mothers of "disappeared" children protest in Argentina in this 1977 photo[/font]
Two doctors and a midwife have gone on trial in Argentina charged with kidnapping babies born in captivity to left-wing political prisoners during the 1976-83 military government.
It is the first case of medical staff being tried for allegedly falsifying the babies' birth certificates.
An estimated 500 children were stolen at birth from their mothers during what was known as the Dirty War.
They were then given illegally to other families who raised them as their own.
The real parents were either killed or disappeared.
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-29248974
New Memo: Kissinger Gave the "Green Light" for Argentina's Dirty War
—By David Corn
| Tue Jan. 14, 2014 4:23 PM EST
Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter's Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina's neo-fascist military junta the "green light" for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.
In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as "terrorists"
. The memo notes that Hill told Derian about a meeting Kissinger held with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti the previous June. What the two men discussed was revealed in 2004 when the National Security Archive obtained and released the secret memorandum of conversation for that get-together. Guzzetti, according to that document, told Kissinger, "our main problem in Argentina is terrorism." Kissinger replied, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures." In other words, go ahead with your killing crusade against the leftists.
The new document shows that Kissinger was even more explicit in encouraging the Argentine junta. The memo recounts Hill describing the Kissinger-Guzzetti discussion this way:
The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.
In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.
More:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/new-memo-kissinger-gave-green-light-argentina-dirty-war
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