Source: Colombia Reports


by Adriaan Alsema October 17, 2018

Colombia’s House of Representatives on Monday surprisingly voted to hold off the 2019 local elections until national elections are held in 2022.

The constitutional amendment seeks to end the separation of the elections and was approved by 24 of 32 members of the senatorial 1st Commission.

Constitutional amendment a “coup”
According to former Vice-President Humberto de la Calle, one of the authors of the 1991 constitution, the vote constitutes a “coup” and will drastically reduce regional autonomy.

According to De la Calle, the constitution purposely separated the terms of the national and local elections to avoid local elections be dominated by the political agenda of national political forces.

Read more: https://colombiareports.com/colombias-house-controversially-votes-to-hold-off-2019-local-elections-until-2022/

by Adriaan Alsema October 17, 2018

Colombia’s Inspector General absolved leftist Senator Ivan Cepeda in response to witness tampering claims made by former President Alvaro Uribe.

The Inspector General said there is no evidence Cepeda overstepped his boundaries “for investigating and receiving testimonies” over Uribe’s alleged criminal responsibility in the formation of death squads in the 1990s.

According to Inspector General Fernando Carrillo, Cepeda’s investigations and conversations with former members of the Blowque Metro fall within his powers as congressman.

The Supreme Court decided earlier this year also to absolve Cepeda and instead investigate Uribe for alleged witness tampering after the assassination of multiple witnesses who had testified that the former president formed the “Bloque Metro” death squad when he was governor of the Antioquia province.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/colombias-inspector-general-also-dismisses-uribes-witness-tampering-claim-against-leftist-senator/

16 octobre 2018

In the United States, it was not until the mid 1960s that the former slaves finally obtained the right to sit in the same buses as whites, to go to the same schools and, at the same time, accede to the right to vote. In Brazil, the right to vote for the poor dates from the 1988 constitution, just a few years before the first multi-racial elections in South Africa in 1994.

The comparison may shock: the population in Brazil is much more mixed than the two other countries. In 2010, in the last census, 48% of the population declared themselves to be ‘white’, 43% ‘mixed’, 8% ‘black’ and 1% ‘Asian’ or ‘natives’. In reality, more than 90% of Brazilians are of mixed origin. The fact remains that social and racial divisions are closely linked. While Brazil is not a country devoid of racism, it is sometimes described as the country of « cordial racism ». This is also a country where democracy is recent and fragile and at the moment is faced with a very serious crisis.

Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, at a time when the slaves still represented 30% of the population in some provinces, particularly in the sugar growing regions in the North East. Apart from the extreme case of slavery, this is a country where labour relations have long been extremely hard, in particular between the landowners and agricultural labourers or landless peasants. On the political level, the 1891 constitution was careful to specify that non-literate people would not have the right to vote, a rule that was also incorporated into the constitutions of 1934 and 1946. This permitted the exclusion of 70% of the adult population from the participation in the electoral process in 1890, and still over 50% in 1950 and 20% in 1980. In practice these were not only former slaves but more generally the poor who were thus excluded from the political scene for a century. In comparison, India had no hesitation in implementing genuine universal suffrage as from 1947, despite the huge social and status divisions inherited from the past and the immense poverty of the country.

In Brazil, despite the political exclusion of the illiterate no proactive education policy was implemented. The reason why inequality has remained so widespread in the country is primarily because the property-owning classes have never really attempted to reverse the heavy historical legacy. The quality of the public services and schools open to the majority has long remained extremely inadequate and is still insufficient today.

More:
http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2018/10/16/brazil-the-first-republic-under-threat/

This shouldn't be possible.

MICHELLE STARR 16 OCT 2018

A wee baby star at the tender age of just 2 million years has revealed itself to be quite the precocious little cosmic object.

Astronomers have discovered it has not one, but four planets in the protoplanetary disc of dust and gas that surrounds it - and they are all gargantuan, with the biggest coming in at 11 times the mass of Jupiter, and the smallest about the mass of Saturn.

Moreover, their orbits are incredibly distant. The outermost is more than 1,000 times the distance from the star than the innermost. That's the most extreme range of orbits ever observed in a planetary system; Pluto, for context, is only around 102 times the distance from the Sun as Mercury.

The star is named CI Tau, located around 500 light-years away in a star-forming region of the constellation of Taurus, and it's been a bit of a brain teaser since 2016. That's when the first of its planets - the largest of the four, the super-Jupiter named CI Tau b - was discovered, orbiting really close to the star, completing a full orbit every 9 days.

More:
https://www.sciencealert.com/ci-tau-star-protoplanetary-disc-four-gas-giants-jupiter-saturn-mass-extreme-orbit-mystery

by Adriaan Alsema October 15, 2018

Dozens of women whose sons were murdered by Colombia’s military went to mass on Sunday to demand justice for one of the worst war crimes in the history of the country’s armed conflict.

Ten years after the Washington Post and weekly Semana revealed that the military was executing civilians and falsely presenting them as guerrillas killed in combat, many of the victims’ families have yet to find out what happened.

Since the prosecution discovered the first “false positives” and the scandal broke in 2008, there have been reports indicating that the military assassinated between 4,200 and 10,000 innocent civilians after 2002.

. . .

The women successfully sued former President Alvaro Uribe for calling their murdered family members “bums,” but instead of justice for the mass murder of their loved ones they received death threats.

More:
https://colombiareports.com/10-years-after-the-military-murdered-their-sons-women-doubt-if-justice-in-colombia-will-ever-prevail/

Brazil Is Falling Under an Evil Political Spell
Brazil is falling under an evil political spell. The leading candidate in the presidential election is Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing politician. It is as if voters are sleepwalking their way to destruction of Brazilian democracy. Under the spell’s influence, they have become blind to the truth about Brazilian politics and blind to their better nature.

The resurrection of the fascist political tradition
Bolsonaro represents the resurrection of the fascist political tradition. That tradition discards norms of decency, tolerance, compromise and due process whenever they obstruct taking power.

He is an open advocate of racism, sexism, torture, and police execution squads. Those views are paired with a neoliberal economic program which aims to savage Brazil’s welfare state and privatize key state assets. That economic program has won him the support of the business elite, which has been willing to overlook his fascist inclinations as part of the bargain.

Brazil is sleepwalking
Bolsonaro’s popularity is inconsistent with Brazil’s expressed political preferences, which is why it is as if Brazil is sleepwalking. Past polls have shown about 65 percent of Brazilians support democracy.

Even more striking is the fact that former President Lula was the most popular political figure prior to the election. However, Brazil’s corrupt political elite imprisoned him on fake corruption charges and, with Lula barred from the election, Bolsonaro has become the front-runner. That speaks to the blinding power of the evil spell since Bolsonaro is the polar opposite of Lula.

More:
http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2018/10/brazil-is-falling-under-an-evil-political-spell.html

WHO WAS OSCAR ROMERO? POPE CANONIZES LEFT-WING ARCHBISHOP KILLED FOR SUPPORTING DEMOCRACY
BY DAN CANCIAN ON 10/14/18 AT 9:04 AM

An archbishop who strongly opposed the military dictatorship in El Salvador has been canonized by Pope Francis on Sunday in Vatican City.

Oscar Romero was shot dead by a sniper while leading mass at the Church of the Divine Providence, a hospital chapel in the country’s capital, San Salvador, on March 24, 1980.

The murder came just a day after Romero had spoken to soldiers, pleading with them to stop the repression that descended into a bloody civil war. His assassination was one of the most shocking developments in the long-running conflict between the U.S.-backed regime, right-wing death squads and left-wing rebels.

Between 1979 and 1992, the Salvadoran Civil War killed almost 75,000 people and saw many Salvadorans fleeing the country. Like many priests, Romero was outspoken in criticizing both sides of the divide, blasting the rebels and the regime for inflicting untold devastation on the country’s most disadvantaged citizens.

More:
https://www.newsweek.com/who-was-oscar-romero-pope-canonizes-left-wing-archbishop-killed-supporting-1168689?piano_t=1

Supporters of presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who is leading in polls, have attacked journalists and activists

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
@domphillips
Fri 12 Oct 2018 02.00 EDT

The two contenders in Brazil’s bitterly contested presidential race have urged calm after a wave of attacks on journalists, activists and members of the LGBT community by supporters of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro including beatings, a knife attack and a murder.

Supporters of the former paratrooper – himself the victim of an assassination attempt last month – have also reportedly been targeted with violence.

But an investigation by independent journalism group Agência Publica found that an overwhelming majority of the violence was committed by supporters of Bolsonaro, who polls give a 16-point lead over his leftist opponent, Fernando Haddad, ahead of the second-round runoff on 28 October.

Agência Pública said bolsonaristas were behind 50 separate attacks since 30 September. In the same period, six Bolsonaro supporters were assaulted, the report found.

“There is a flowering of hate that I have never seen before,” said a reporter who was attacked by Bolsonaro supporters in the north-eastern city of Recife. “I am frightened because it could be anyone now.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/11/brazil-election-violence-bolsonaro-haddad

Canada Pension Plan Investment Board has $5.9m of stock in firms profiting from Trump’s ‘zero-tolerance’ Mexico border policy

This story is co-published with the Documented news website and newsletter

Max Siegelbaum of Documented
Fri 12 Oct 2018 06.00 EDT

Canadian politicians have expressed alarm that one of Canada’s biggest pension investment funds has increased holdings in two private US companies that run American prisons and incarcerate the majority of detained immigrants.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), which manages $366.6bn in pension funds on behalf of some 20 million Canadian retirees, holds US$5.9m of stock in Geo Group and CoreCivic, according to its latest US Security and Exchange Commission filings.

The move to increase holdings comes despite criticisms from Canadian politicians about US detention policies and following international outcry over the US “zero-tolerance” crackdown this summer on the US-Mexico border that led to children being separated from families.

Between August 2017 and 2018, the CPPIB grew its investment in Geo Group almost 13-fold to 153,500 shares worth $4.2m, according to filings from August 2018.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/12/canada-pension-fund-invests-in-us-immigration-detention-firms

Source: Guardian


Archbishop Óscar Romero, an advocate for the poor, was one of 75,000 killed by the country’s US-backed military

Anna-Catherine Brigida in San Salvador
Sun 14 Oct 2018 04.00 EDT

When Guadalupe Mejía began searching for her husband – a community leader who had been forcibly disappeared by Salvadoran armed forces in 1977 – it was Óscar Romero who encouraged her to speak out despite the danger.

“Unite and that’s how you’ll be able to find your loved ones,” Mejía, 75, remembers the archbishop of San Salvador telling her and other bereaved women. “He supported us and was always beside us in everything we did.”

Romero earned powerful enemies for speaking out against military death squads and advocating for the rights of the poor – and on 24 March 1980 he was shot dead while celebrating mass, marking the beginning of the country’s 12-year civil war.

But as Salvadorans celebrate his canonization, pride and joy are tempered with anger and pain: 75,000 people were killed during the civil war, the majority at the hands of the US-backed Salvadoran military.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/14/el-salvador-oscar-romero-civil-war-saint-justice