Berta Cáceres Lives On, and So Does Violence by Honduran Government and Dam Company

Berta Cáceres Lives On, and So Does Violence by Honduran Government and Dam Company
Wednesday, 20 April 2016 00:00
By Beverly Bell, Other Worlds | Op-Ed

Fifteen hundred people from at least 22 countries convened in Honduras from April 13-15, 2016 for the "Peoples of ¡Berta Vive!" International Gathering. They came to honor slain global movement leader Berta Cáceres and to commit themselves to keeping her legacy alive.

Members of the international gathering also experienced the violence of the Honduran government and Desarrollos Energéticos S.A. -- DESA, the foreign-backed company illegally constructing a dam on the indigenous ancestral Gualcarque River -- which shadowed Berta throughout her final years and ended her life this past March 2.

Berta Cáceres' "Emancipatory Vision"

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the group Berta founded in 1993 and ran until her assassination, and two other Honduran organizations hosted the gathering. The final declaration gave the context of the meeting.

In this land which has struggled for more than 500 years, with the sound of the free-running rivers, the strength of the mountains, the neighborhoods and communities; with the fury and tenderness of the beings of nature; with the spirit of the ancestors, and the hope and pain of men, children, and women (who are) all people of Berta... We are convened here for her memory and her rebellious life.

Omar Khadr engaged to human rights activist who helped in Gitmo release

Omar Khadr engaged to human rights activist who helped in Gitmo release

Colombia to use glyphosate in cocaine fight again

Colombia to use glyphosate in cocaine fight again

Use of herbicide suspended last year due to cancer concerns, but will now be applied manually, not by crop dusters

Associated Press
Tuesday 19 April 2016 00.18 EDT

Colombia will resume using weed killer to destroy illegal coca crops less than a year after suspending its use due to cancer concerns, the government said Monday.

The defense minister, Luis Carlos Villegas, said instead of dumping glyphosate from American-piloted crop dusters, as Colombia did for two decades, the herbicide will now be applied manually by eradication crews on the ground.

“We’ll do it in a way that doesn’t contaminate, which is the same way it’s applied in any normal agricultural project,” Villegas told La FM radio, adding he hoped final approval to initiate the work would be completed this week.

President Juan Manuel Santos last year banned use of glyphosate following a World Health Organisation decision to classify it as a carcinogen. The ban was heralded by leftists and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia who have long compared the program to the United States’ use of Agent Orange in Vietnam.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/19/cocaine-colombia-to-resume-using-glyphosate-to-destroy-illegal-coca-crops

Brazil’s Rousseff — ex-guerilla in fight for political life

Brazil’s Rousseff — ex-guerilla in fight for political life

Sebastian Smith — Updated 23 minutes ago

RIO DE JANEIRO: Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff survived torture as a guerrilla member under the military dictatorship. Four decades later, as president, she’s fighting for her political survival.

After those dark days in the 1970s, when Rousseff belonged to a violent Marxist underground group, she rose to become Brazil’s first woman president.

But less than a year into her second term, the lower house of Congress voted on Sunday to send her impeachment case to the Senate, which is expected to decide in May whether to open a trial.

The impeachment charges centre on Rousseff’s government’s allegedly illegal juggling of funds to cover budget holes leading up to her re-election in 2014.

Brazil’s 68-year-old “Iron Lady” calls the impeachment a coup and has fought fiercely, trying to repair a coalition left in tatters by the defection of her vice president and the country’s largest party, the PMDB.

More:
http://www.dawn.com/news/1252921/brazils-rousseff-ex-guerilla-in-fight-for-political-life

Oh look - the 'empty Venezuelan shelves' are in New York

Oh look - the 'empty Venezuelan shelves' are in New York

By Lucas Koerner
Friday, Apr 15, 2016


Iconic Photo of Shortage-Ridden Venezuelan Supermarket Taken in New York

A report by the Spanish website FCINCO has revealed that a photo widely circulated by international media as a depiction of chronic shortages in Venezuela was actually taken in New York in 2011.

The now iconic photograph, which shows a woman in a supermarket gazing at empty shelves, was reposted by news outlets hundreds of times over the last three years as evidence of Venezuela’s economic crisis.

However, a closer examination of the photo demonstrates that it was taken by Reuters photographer Allison Joyce in a New York supermarket on the eve of Hurricane Irene with the caption, “A shopper passes by empty shelves while looking for bottled water at a Stop and Shop at Rockaway Beach in New York, August 26, 2011.”


[font size=1]
The original high resolution photo. Original caption: "A shopper passes
empty shelves while looking for bottled water at a Stop and Shop at
Rockaway Beach in New York, August 26, 2011. As North Carolina braced
on Friday for a direct hit from Hurricane Irene, cities along the East Coast
were on alert and millions of beach goers cut short vacations to escape
the powerful storm. With more than 50 million people potentially in Irene's
path, residents stocked up on food and water and worked to secure
homes, vehicles and boats. States, cities, ports, oil refineries and nuclear
plants scrambled to activate emergency plans." (Allison Joyce/Reuters)
[/font]
The image was first erroneously associated with Venezuela by several small blogs in 2012 and 2013, but only in 2014 did it begin to circulate massively, including among prominent news media such as El Nacional, Prensa Libre, La Patilla, Entorno Inteligente, El Nuevo Siglo, Mercopress, Elsalvador.com and Ahora Visión.

More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_73734.shtml

Colombian Communities Reveal Crisis of Paramilitary Violence

Colombian Communities Reveal Crisis of Paramilitary Violence
Published 15 April 2016

Paramilitary activity is on the rise as the government nears a peace deal with the FARC and threatens to undermine a definitive end of the internal conflict.


As Colombia continues to inch toward peace with the FARC, the Congress held a public hearing on Friday to hear testimonies of how groups from all over the country are impacted by paramilitary activity, one of the gravest threats to the impending peace deal that will bring an end to over 50 years of internal armed conflict.

Representatives of Indigenous and campesino organizations, peace activists, and human rights lawyers gathered at the National Congress in Bogota to raise awareness nationally and internationally about the harsh reality lived by communities affected by paramilitaries.

David Flores of the Marcha Patriotica movement argued that the continuation of paramilitaries exposes the fact that the administration of President Juan Manuel Santos is not fully committed to definitively ending the conflict.

“The presence and dominance of paramilitaries in these regions, about a third of Colombia, show that the government is not serious about the accord,” Flores said. He added that the paramilitary problem represents a rejection not only of the peace process as a whole, but also the various partial deals that have been reached as part of the talks, including agreements on land reform.

More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Colombian-Communities-Reveal-Crisis-of-Paramilitary-Violence-20160415-0045.html

Brazil Remembers Campesino Massacre Amid 'Political Coup'

Brazil Remembers Campesino Massacre Amid 'Political Coup'
Published 17 April 2016

Brazil’s largest workers’ movement says the impeachment of the president and rural violence are “two faces of the same class struggle.”


Twenty years ago, 21 members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) were slaughtered in the northern state of Para, while 69 campesinos were severely injured.

According to the official investigation, most of them were shot down at point blank range in the back of the neck on April 17, 1996 by over 150 military police officers - in what Attorney General Marco Aurelio Nascimiento called “a real bloodbath,” in an interview with daily Brasil de Fato.

One of the campesinos was killed with a knife, and was left with a third of his head cut, he added.

Survivors of the massacre recounted that the victims were among a group of 1,500 men, women and children, who were marching toward Para's capital, Belem, to protest against their eviction from a land lot known as the Hacienda Macaxeire in the town of Eldorado dos Carajas. The landless campesinos had been occupying the lot since November 1995.

More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Remembers-Campesino-Massacre-Amid-Political-Coup-20160417-0045.html

Why You Need to Go to Chile’s Atacama Desert, in 17 Spellbinding Photos

Why You Need to Go to Chile’s Atacama Desert, in 17 Spellbinding Photos

Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert takes the prize for being the world’s driest, as well as one of earth’s most surreal adventure destinations. From lunar landscapes that NASA used for testing Martian rovers to nighttime star fields you might as well reach up to touch (plus archeological sites, dune surfing, and pink flamingos), you can do it all without wanting for luxury. Here’s how.


by Nic McCormack

The Atacama Desert’s 41,000 square miles of diverse terrain includes spurting geysers best visited at dawn, wind-sculpted golden dunes perfect for surfing, salt lagoons for a bracing float, and cliffs of colorfully striped strata known as Rainbow Valley. Those are just the terrestrial offerings.

It’s also one of the best locations on earth to appreciate our Milky Way’s glittering collection of stars, with April through September the best time to see it. For the darkest skies, time your visit to a waning rather than a full moon—or better yet, a Lunar Eclipse (the next will come on March 23). Prepare to be wowed by the most amazing natural light show on earth.




Stargazing–

Adhemar Duro’s stunning nighttime photograph (and video) of Monjes de la Pacana was taken in such strong winds that he had to pile rocks on the base of his tripod to stop it from shaking. The monolith pictured is the most emblematic of the desert's gigantic rock formations. A perfect combination of altitude, dry air, and a lack of light pollution means the Atacama is one of the best stargazing locations on earth. Cloudless skies April through September is a peak period to appreciate the stars, as well as Jupiter and Saturn. You won’t even need a telescope to see the breathtaking light show above. Darker skies are best, so avoid visiting during a full moon. (Still, that spectacle is beautiful in itself.)

Photographer: Adhemar Duro/Flickr

. . .




Coyote Lookout–

Mountain bikes are an excellent way to get around San Pedro de Atacama and venture farther afield. It’s a short ride to the nearby salt lagoons, and hardier adventurers can also ride into rugged terrain. Coyote Lookout is a popular stop (and photo op), thanks to a nail-biting drop to Cordillera de la Sal.

Source: Alto Atacama Desert Lodge & Spa

More:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/photo-essays/2016-03-09/chile-atacama-desert-travel-guide-san-pedro-hotel-adventure-sights

‘Bone Rooms’: Where scientific racists stored their ‘evidence’

‘Bone Rooms’: Where scientific racists stored their ‘evidence’
By Barbara J. King April 15 at 11:18 AM


Skeletons and mummified remains of nearly 30,000 people dwell in the vaults of the Smithsonian Institution. Though their voices have long been silenced, what we say about them speaks volumes. In “Bone Rooms,” biological anthropologist Samuel J. Redman describes the cutting-edge technology brought to bear on these remains and the ethical issues Smithsonian scientists grapple with as they consult some of the descendant communities of the individuals represented in the vaults.

Redman’s primary focus is the years between the Civil War and World War II, a period when anthropologists collected these remains — and thousands of others that lined the shelves in places like Chicago’s Field Museum and Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum — with no regard for ethics. “Bone Rooms” tells the story of “the worst legacies of colonial anthropology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” The bodies of women and men who were loved by their families and might have been honored by them in death became mere objects for study. A strong motivating factor for the extensive research Redman undertook to write “Bone Rooms” was this haunting question: “Given the centrality of death and burial in the human experience, how could seemingly sacred principles be violated so directly and systematically?”

The book’s subtitle clues us in to part of the answer: scientific racism. Interest in the “exotic bodies of nonwhite races” drove research for decades. At the Army Medical Museum in the second half of the 19th century, for instance, “the number of American Indian and African American bodies that the museum acquired vastly outpaced the number of European American remains” collected. In the case of Native Americans, skeletons were simply grabbed up from battlefields such as Little Bighorn and, as the American West opened up, from archaeological sites such as the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings in Colorado. And if “indigenous bodies were considered to be commodities,” the same was true of African American bodies, Redman explains.

(‘Scientific’ racism is creeping back into our thinking. )

An effort to classify our species by race lay behind much of the earliest work in U.S. bone rooms. The notion that humans across the globe could be carved up into a discrete number of races — the tripartite scheme of white, black and yellow-brown was popular — was taken for granted. Visitors to large exhibitions, such as San Diego’s “Science of Man” in 1915, were treated to exhibits implying that some nonwhite races still maintained primitive features, and assumptions of white supremacy were veiled thinly, if at all.

In the mid-20th century, questions of human prehistory and evolution slowly began to replace those of racial classification in the museum world. A central figure in this evolving story is Ales Hrdlicka, a Czech-born anthropologist who in 1903 was named the Smithsonian’s first curator of physical anthropology. Hrdlicka’s personality was as acerbic as his ethics were rocky; he essentially encouraged looting of human remains and aligned himself with the eugenics movement.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/bone-rooms-where-scientific-racists-stored-their-evidence/2016/04/14/d6aeae46-eed7-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html

Honduras foreign minister resigns over police murder scandal

Source: Agence France-Presse

Honduras foreign minister resigns over police murder scandal

By AFP 2 hours ago.

Honduran Foreign Minister Arturo Corrales resigned on Friday after being mired in a scandal in which a cabal of corrupt top police officers reportedly ordered hits on anti-crime officials.

The office of President Juan Orlando Hernandez said the head of state "has today (Friday) accepted the resignation of the secretary for foreign affairs and international cooperation, Arturo Corrales."

Corrales was Orlando's security minister during an alleged cover-up of the police involvement, which came to light through recent reporting by the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo.

The daily cited a security ministry document revealing that senior police officers ordered the assassination of Honduras' top anti-drugs official, Aristides Gonzalez, in December 2009.



Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/honduras-foreign-minister-resigns-over-police-murder-scandal/article/462942#ixzz45w0UUq4I