Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalChild Slavery Refuses to Disappear in Latin America
By Fabiana Frayssinet
A little girl peels manioc to make flour in Acará, in the state of Pará, in the northeast of Brazil's Amazon region. In the
rural sectors of Brazil, it is a deeply-rooted custom for children to help with family farming, on the grounds of passing
on knowledge. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet / IPS
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 14 2018 (IPS) - Child labour has been substantially reduced in Latin America, but 5.7 million children below the legal minimum age are still working and a large proportion of them work in precarious, high-risk conditions or are unpaid, which constitute new forms of slave labour.
For the International Labor Organisation (ILO) child labour includes children working before they reach the minimum legal age or carrying out work that should be prohibited, according to Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labour, in force since 2000.
The vast majority of these children work in agriculture, but many also work in high-risk sectors such as mining, domestic labour, fireworks manufacturing and fishing.
Three countries in the region, Brazil, Mexico and Paraguay, exemplify child labour, which includes forms of modern-day slavery.
More:
http://www.ipsnews.net/2018/05/child-slavery-refuses-disappear-latin-america/
Uribe's cartel years
Uribe’s cartel years
by Adriaan Alsema May 14, 2018
Investigating Colombia’s former president Alvaro Uribe has been met with extreme violence ever since judicial authorities found evidence of ties between his family and the Medellin Cartel in 1984.
Criminal investigations have been hampered by violence targeting police, journalists, prosecutors and judges alike.
Bribery used by cartel chief Pablo Escobar and his successors further weakened the justice system to the point it is only able to solve 5% of crimes in the country.
While hundreds of honest officials lost their lives, corrupt officials have enjoyed almost full impunity while embarking on successful careers.
Some, like former cartel associate Uribe, are now among the most powerful and feared politicians in Colombia and have become virtually untouchable for the country’s justice system.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/uribes-cartel-years/
Who is killing witnesses against Colombia's former president?
Who is killing witnesses against Colombia’s former president?
by Adriaan Alsema May 14, 2018
In true mafia fashion, witnesses against Colombia’s former President Alvaro Uribe have become targets in what increasingly appears to be a coordinated effort to eliminate them.
One witness has been assassinated and two witnesses have reportedly survived assassination attempts since the Supreme Court ordered the investigation of the former president in February.
The latest victim in the apparent persecution of witnesses is the wife of former paramilitary fighter Juan Guillermo Monsalve. Her armored car was intercepted on Thursday in Bogota by two men on a motorbike without license plates.
. . .
Monsalve, who grew up on one of the Uribe family ranches, is one of the last living witnesses who have testified about Uribe’s alleged responsibility in the formation of the “Bloque Metro” paramilitary group.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/who-is-killing-witnesses-against-colombias-former-president/
Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016206653
Including a painting which everyone other than fascists finds eloguent:
(Note: during Pinochet's terrorism against the political left. real or suspected left, this river regularly carried the bodies of government-murdered suspected "dissidents" on their way out of town. People walking on the sidewalks on the banks often saw dead Chileans floating rapidly past them. The picture represents an old man searching the water for his government-kidnapped daughter.)
Graffiti on the banks. Pinochet did employ a squadron of helicopters to go from town to town, running down suspected anti-Pinochet people and murdering them by shooting the bejesus out of them. They called it the "Caravan of Death" hoping to make even a more horrible image to paralyze innocent people with fear, so they would be less inclined to become righteously indignant and consider protesting his sadistic, 100% evil right-wing rule.
Nothing like actual Cuban salsa, as actual Cubans dance it.
To add, there are, of course, Chinese descended Cubans, something unknown by US Americans, who have been banned from travel to Cuba since the Revolution, which US Americans can't bring themselves to ponder, and ask "why." They automatically "think" it's all "those commie Cubans' " fault.
It is never too late to encourage people capable of growing to start researching, and keep researching, and THINKING about what you are reading, really giving it a good hard squint, and don't give up until you do see the truth which has been buried by mass-perception molding propaganda. Put in the effort to break through to awareness which will change your life, eventually, make you feel as if you have finally awakened, after a long, stupid sleep.
A new way discovered to fire up the goblins of Chile's fascist right-wing.
Shocking to hear they are publicly agitating there, too, to bring back hell to Chile's masses.
Please review info. on Osvaldo Romo, Pinochet's most effective torturer:
Last Updated: Wednesday, 4 July 2007, 19:42 GMT 20:42 UK
Infamous Pinochet-era agent dies
One of the most notorious figures from the regime of former military ruler of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet, has died in prison, officials have said.
Osvaldo Romo, who was serving 15 years in jail for killing three dissidents during Gen Pinochet's rule, died of heart and respiratory problems.
Known as "El Guaton" (The Fat One), he was awaiting trial for human rights abuses committed between 1973 and 1990.
Romo fled to Brazil afterwards, but was eventually extradited back to Chile.
A former officer in the feared Dina secret police force, Romo was accused by his victims of being a sadistic torturer.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6271462.stm
God only knows how many people had that image burned into their mind, soul, before their spirits surrendered to suffering.
Please remember in the last week or so Trump wildly endorsed torture as "TORTURE" and shouted he wanted to go way beyond waterboarding.
Don't forget we are temporarily in hell. Doesn't matter, hell is STILL going to be defeated. Good people are going to do it, the very same people who have been the prey of these filthy predators since forever. There IS an actual New World ahead, or what has been the purpose of life, at all?
~ ~ ~
Thread with useful information:
Museum to Chile's Pinochet sickens victims
Fri Dec 12, 2008 9:29pm GMT
SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Family and friends of former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet quietly inaugurated a museum in his memory on Friday, replete with uniforms and medals he wore, to the horror of victims of his rule.
Among items displayed at the new Pinochet Foundation museum in an upscale quarter of the capital, Santiago, are the last uniform he used as commander in chief of the Chilean Army along with dozens of his medals.
"I am happy because this is a way of doing some justice to what he represented and what he did," said Lucia Hiriart, his widow, flanked by family and some former ministers and retired military. The event was low-key.
Pinochet led a bloody coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973, ushering in 17 years of dictatorship in which 3,000 people died or disappeared and around 28,000 were tortured.
Victims of his rule, some of whom complain the wheels of justice turn too slowly in Chile, were disgusted.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-chile-pinochet-museum/museum-to-chiles-pinochet-sickens-victims-idUKTRE4BB6TH20081212?rpc=401&feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&rpc=401
Democratic Underground, from 12/12/08
https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3643144
THE BUTCHER OF BOLIVIA
THE BUTCHER OF BOLIVIA
04 Nov, 2012 | Laetitia Grevers
History & Politics
After WWII, the infamous Nazi Klaus Barbie found sanctuary in Bolivia, where he influenced national politics, helped overthrow a democratic government, and profited from the drug trade
Again, the topic of the Nazis’, says Nicolas Bauer, the president of Club Aleman, in an impatient voice. He lights another cigarette. ‘Well, what else could I have expected from someone who wants to write about German immigrants?’ For Bauer, it is difficult to say which of the Germans was not a Nazi before the end of World War II. Many Germans who immigrated before 1945 came to spread the Nazi way of life in Bolivia discreetly – several also came after 1945. In particular, many German teachers immigrated during the 1930s and 1940s and spread the National Socialist ideology. Ironically, many German Jews also immigrated to Bolivia during and after the war.
After the war, several ex-Nazis escaped to South America and Bolivia via ‘ratlines’, the notorious escape routes for Axis war criminals that were organized by members of the Catholic Church. US intelligence agencies also assisted, using the fugitives as assets during the Cold War. Among the most notorious was Klaus Barbie, the former chief of the Gestapo in Lyon. Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon’, tortured French Resistance leader Jean Moulin to death during the war, and was the man responsible for the deportation of 44 Jewish orphans to Auschwitz and their subsequent deaths. ‘I came to kill’ was the first thing he said upon reaching France. In Bolivia, Barbie became a tireless hustler and eccentric, wheeling and dealing with the German business community, politicians, and arms and drug traffickers. He held court in the Club La Paz near Plaza San Francisco, where former Nazis would meet with him to discuss old times.
During his stay in Bolivia, Barbie (who went by the name of Altmann) worked for the Department of the Interior as a lieutenant colonel and as an instructor for the Bolivian security forces, teaching them the finer points of torture and ‘disappearance’ of political dissidents. Together with Hans Stellfeld, another ex-Nazi officer, Barbie was instrumental in the ascendance of General Luis Garcia Meza Tejada, who took over the country as a dictator after a coup d’état in 1980. Called the ‘Cocaine Coup’, this takeover was financed through deals with wealthy cocaine producers in Santa Cruz, who gave kickbacks to Garcia Meza; Barbie was responsible for eliminating rival drug lords through his paramilitary group ‘the Fiancés of Death’.
In 1983, after the restoration of the civilian government in Bolivia, Barbie was finally arrested and extradited to France. He was condemned to life in jail and died there in 1991. His surviving family lives in Germany still. His Nazi comrades do not. They are still at home in Bolivian society. And they do not want to hear about the past.
More:
http://www.bolivianexpress.org/blog/posts/the-butcher-of-bolivia
Bolivia's 'Cocaine Coup' dictator Luis Garcia Meza dies at 88
Bolivia's 'Cocaine Coup' dictator Luis Garcia Meza dies at 88
Luis Garcia Meza's regime was characterized by mass human rights violations, including genocide and extrajudicial killings. He rose to power in the early 1980s in what was largely described as the "Cocaine Coup."
. . .
Although Garcia Meza ruled for only 13 months after his "Cocaine Coup" — backed by drug traffickers — his regime was characterized by brutal repression and mass human rights violations, including genocide, extrajudicial killings and systematic use of torture.
. . .
The decision was hailed at the time by human rights groups, with Human Rights Watch (HRW) saying it marked a "milestone in the struggle for truth and justice in a hemisphere where powerful military actors are almost never brought to account for leading coups."
. . .
Last year, a tribunal in Rome convicted Garcia Meza and seven other former South American political and military leaders for the deaths of 23 Italians who were killed in the brutal crackdown launched under the former dictator.
More:
http://www.dw.com/en/bolivias-cocaine-coup-dictator-luis-garcia-meza-dies-at-88/a-43585274
Garcia Meza, left
Notice the difference in the treatment given by Associated Press:
Former military dictator of Bolivia dies
Updated 10:31 am, Sunday, April 29, 2018
LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Former Bolivian military dictator Luis Garcia Meza, who was serving a 30-year prison sentence, died Sunday. He was 88.
Garcia Meza was admitted to a military hospital in La Paz after suffering a heart attack and could not be resuscitated. A medical report said he died "from possible respiratory failure." The Cossmil military hospital told The Associated Press that the death occurred at 3 a.m.
The former army general was imprisoned for crimes including murder and economic damage to the state during his 13 months in office from 1980-1981. He was convicted in absentia and extradited to Bolivia from Brazil in March 1995, but he completed much of his sentence at the hospital where he died.
. . .
Garcia Meza's former interior minister, Luis Arce Gomez, was also sentenced to 30 years in prison for political killings and extradited to Bolivia from the United States.
More:
https://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Former-military-dictator-of-Bolivia-dies-12872911.php
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
The second life of a Nazi war criminal: German documentary reveals how 'butcher of Lyon' Klaus Barbie became a fixer for drug lords when he went on the run in South America
Barbie became known as Klaus Altmann when he went on the run in 1945
He worked as a druglord fixer in Latin America and met with Pablo Escobar
General Luis García Meza was helped into power in Bolivia by drug money
Barbie tortured top French resistance operatives and is estimated to have been directly involved in the deaths of 14,000 people
By ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 10:59 EDT, 28 July 2015 | UPDATED: 03:41 EDT, 29 July 2015
A notorious Nazi war criminal, dubbed the 'Butcher of Lyon' during World War II, worked as a druglord fixer while on the run in Latin America and helped bring a right-wing dictator into power.
Klaus Barbie, one of the Gestapo's most brutal criminals, reinvented himself with the help of western intelligence agencies after the fall of the Third Reich.
Using the money generated from the cocaine trade, Barbie helped put General Luis García Meza into power in Bolivia, a new documentary has revealed.
~ ~ ~
Murderer: Barbie was known as 'the butcher of Lyon' after he tortured top French resistance
operatives and is estimated to have been directly involved in the deaths of 14,000 people
. . .
Barbie, who adopted the name Klaus Altmann when he went on the run in 1945, was used by both the CIA and Germany's BND intelligence agency.
More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3177385/The-second-life-Nazi-war-criminal-German-documentary-reveals-butcher-Lyon-Klaus-Barbie-fixer-drug-lords-went-run-South-America.html
~ ~ ~
Wikipedia Luis Garcia Meza:
. . .
Prelude to dictatorship
García Meza graduated from the military academy in 1952, and served as its commander from 1963 to 1964. He then rose to division commander in the late 1970s.
He became leader of the right-wing faction of the military of Bolivia most disenchanted with the return to civilian rule. Many of the officers involved had been part of the Banzer dictatorship and disliked the investigation of economic and human right abuses by the new Bolivian Congress. Moreover, they tended to regard the decline in popularity of the Carter administration in the United States as an indicator that soon a Republican administration would replace it—one more amenable to the kind of pro-US, more hardline anti-communist dictatorship they wanted to reinstall in Bolivia. Many allegedly had ties to cocaine traffickers and made sure portions of the military acted as their enforcers/protectors in exchange for extensive bribes, which in turn were used to fund the upcoming coup. In this manner, the narcotraffickers were in essence purchasing for themselves the upcoming Bolivian government.
. . .
Coup d'état
This group pressured President Lidia Gueiler (his cousin) to install General García Meza as Commander of the Army. Within months, the Junta of Commanders headed by García Meza forced a violent coup d'état, sometimes referred to as the Cocaine Coup, of 17 July 1980, when several Bolivian intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz were killed. When portions of the citizenry resisted, as they had done in the failed putsch of November 1979, it resulted in dozens of deaths. Many were tortured. Allegedly, the Argentine Army unit Batallón de Inteligencia 601 participated in the coup. Former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Michael Levine had arrested the two most prominent leaders of the Roberto Suarez cartel (the primary cartel linked to the coup), and he claims that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intervened to drop charges against one of them and reduce bail for another, allowing both to escape their US trial in 1979; subsequently they returned to Bolivia and participated in the coup, along with the aid of Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. Levine has alleged CIA cooperation with the coup.[1] These allegations were the basis for the dismissal of the DEA from Bolivia by current President Evo Morales in 2007.
Dictatorship, 1980-81
Of rightwing ultra-conservative anti-communist persuasion, García Meza endeavored to bring a Pinochet-style dictatorship that was intended to last 20 years. He immediately outlawed all political parties, exiled opposition leaders, repressed trade unions and muzzled the press. He was backed by former SS officer and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and Italian neofascist Stefano Delle Chiaie. Further collaboration came from other European neofascists, most notoriously Ernesto Milá Rodríguez (accused of the 1980 Paris synagogue bombing).[2] Among other foreign collaborators were professional torturers allegedly imported from the notoriously repressive Argentine dictatorship of General Jorge Videla.
The García Meza regime, while brief (its original form ended in 1981), became internationally known for its extreme brutality. The population was repressed in the same ways as under the Banzer dictatorship. In January 1981, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs named the García Meza regime, "Latin America's most errant violator of human rights after Guatemala and El Salvador."[3] Some 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed by the Bolivian Army and security forces in only 13 months.[citation needed] The administration's chief repressor was the Minister of Interior, Colonel Luis Arce, who cautioned that all Bolivians who opposed to the new order should "walk around with their written will under their arms."
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_García_Meza
The Origins of Violence? Slavery, Extractivism and War
by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin / April 27th, 2018
And the land, hitherto a common possession like the light of the sun and the breezes, the careful surveyor now marked out with long-drawn boundary lines. Not only were corn and needful foods demanded of the rich soil, but men bored into the bowels of the earth, and the wealth she had hidden and covered with Stygian darkness was dug up, an incentive to evil. And now noxious iron and gold more noxious still were produced: and these produced war – for wars are fought with both – and rattling weapons were hurled by bloodstained hands.
(Ovid, written around 8 AD which laments humanity’s loss of its original Golden condition [Ovid Metamorphoses, Book 1, The Iron Age]). 1
The privatisation of property, extractivism, the necessity for food-producing slaves and a warrior class to sustain and further extend the aims of the elites are all neatly summed up in this quote from Ovid. What is noticeable and notable is that over the millennia very little has changed in substance. We still have today wage slaves, standing armies, extractivism and industrialised agriculture that is oriented and controlled according to the aims and agendas of a warmongering elite. However, it seems that things were not always thus.
The coming of the Kurgan peoples across Europe from c. 4000 to 1000 BC is believed to have been a tumultuous and disastrous time for the peoples of Old Europe. The Old European culture is believed to have centred around a nature-based ideology that was gradually replaced by an anti-nature, patriarchal, warrior society. According to the archeologist and anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas:
More:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2018/04/the-origins-of-violence-slavery-extractivism-and-war/
Fujimori's genocide frames Peruvian politics
ICT Staff • August 7, 2002
Peru, the most populous Indian nation in South America, now under Quechua president Alejandro Toledo, just admitted that it forcefully sterilized over 200,000 Indian women between 1996 and 2000 during the regime of former President Alberto Fujimori.
This terrible news, in the form of an actual apology by the Peruvian Health Ministry, confirms occasional reports of the past few years. What is perhaps less expected is the huge number of women subjected to the practice. From all indications, the campaign was directed at Indian women from traditional villages in the Andean Mountains. It has caused a radical demographic drop.
Peru was seriously ransacked in the 1990s during the regime of Alberto Fujimori, a Japanese-Peruvian who ruled the country through military repression. During the Fujimori years, with the consistent backing of the U.S. government, Peruvians endured dozens of massacres and thousands of individual killings. A lot of it happened at the command of Fujimori’s secret police and military squads. Fujimori is now in exile in Japan.
The sterilizations of Indian women occurred under the worst of conditions. Illegal as a birth control method in this largely Catholic country of 26 million people, sterilization for contraceptive purposes was legalized by Fujimori’s government in 1995. With substantial assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), teams of doctors and nurses scoured the highlands, targeting Quechua and Aymara communities. Officials threatened, bribed or misled women to submit to the operation. Health workers, trained by U.S. personnel, were under obligation to meet quotas. They “sometimes visited individual women several times as the hard sell for sterilization became steadily more aggressive,” according to an early report on the Peruvian sterilization controversy that appeared in Native Americas magazine (summer 2000).
More:
https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/fujimoris-genocide-frames-peruvian-politics/
Profile Information
Member since: 2002Number of posts: 160,644
