May 25, 2013

Natl Catholic Reporter: Beyond the caricature, the poor people’s president (Hugo Chavez Frias)

Beyond the Caricature, The Poor People’s President
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By Bart Jones, May 26th 2013

Hugo Chávez and I were sitting across from each other in a small cabin in his presidential jet, flying over Venezuela. It was the start of interviews that spread over two days for a biography I was writing about the controversial leader. I had lived in Venezuela for eight years and was a front-row witness to Chávez’s rise to power.

I began the interview by asking him what were the events and experiences that had played the greatest role in his formation. The first thing he talked about -- a bit to my surprise -- was the Bible and Jesus Christ.

When he was an altar boy in his small rural village of Sabaneta, he recalled, the parish priest often read him the Bible. One thing Chávez said he could never understand was “why Jesus was born among animals in a manger, with so many other places and him being the son of God.”

His grandmother, Rosa Ines, tried to explain, saying, “When the poor die, we are going to heaven.” Chávez told me, “But I couldn’t understand that, why you had to die to go to heaven. Why couldn’t we live better here?”

Later in life, he began to understand why Jesus was born in such dire circumstances, he said. “Christ came to be born among the poorest of the poor, to look for the road of liberation.”

Chávez himself came from similarly poor roots. And he saw his mission in life as leading that liberation.

Six years after those interviews, Chávez is dead, succumbing to a battle against cancer March 5. The battle to define his legacy has begun. In life, he was demonized by elites in Venezuela and the United States, and by much of the mainstream media. Now, according to the media watchdog group FAIR, he is being demonized in death.

Conventional wisdom tells us Chávez was a despot who destroyed a once vibrant democracy in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves. For millions around the world, he turned into some kind of evil monster, a crazed, bloodthirsty dictator. For them, he was a South American Pol Pot.

Among the detractors was the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church in Venezuela. Their dislike ran so deep they participated in a coup against Chávez in 2002.

How did Chávez become such a hated figure? And why were both sides of the story about him rarely told?

Chávez, after all, was not massacring people; he was not lining opponents up against walls before firing squads. This was not Pinochet killing or “disappearing” at least 3,000 people after he was installed as an actual dictator through a CIA-orchestrated coup in Chile in 1973. Nor was it the death squad government of El Salvador in the 1980s. That regime killed peasants, teachers, priests and nuns, including the four American churchwomen, Archbishop Oscar Romero, and the six Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter.

Despite his flaws, Chávez hardly had blood on his hands. And he generally remained within the bounds of democracy. He won a string of elections that even the U.S. government at times recognized as legitimate. But he offended people in high places and was a threat to the established order.

And for that he paid a price.

The image of Chávez as crazed dictator is more cartoon caricature than realistic portrait. His government, like any, had its flaws. It didn’t do enough to combat crime, corruption and bureaucracy. It was too centered on “El Comandante” as a one-man show. And Chávez didn’t just debate or defeat opponents. He insulted them and sought to verbally annihilate them.

The surprisingly poor showing of his less charismatic anointed successor, Nicholas Maduro, who won the April 14 election to replace him by less than 2 percentage points, underscored the weaknesses of the Bolivarian Revolution, and where it needs to improve.

But Chávez also did some positive things rarely noted. For the first time in Venezuela’s history, he redirected its vast oil wealth to the poor majority. He sent thousands of Cuban doctors into slums, where they lived and provided free, 24-hour basic medical care. He launched a massive literacy and free education program, giving maids a shot at a high school diploma and others a college degree. Poverty was cut in half.

Above all, he gave the poor hope.

His supporters would argue that these and other initiatives amounted to fulfilling the social justice teachings of the Roman Catholic church.

In pre-Chávez Venezuela, a tiny elite controlled the oil wealth. They lived in gated mansions and flew off to Europe while the majority lived in tin shacks and struggled to eat.

It was an unsustainable social structure, not to mention -- Chávez and his supporters would say -- un-Christian. It was bound to collapse someday and easily led to the rise of a firebrand like Chávez who turned the established order upside down.

Chávez was the poor people’s president, the first in Venezuela’s history.

Charles Hardy, a former Maryknoll associate priest from Wyoming who has lived in Venezuela for 25 years, called Chávez “a holy man.” Chávez, he said, “had a great love for Jesus, but he would talk about Jesus being a subversive” who wanted to overturn unjust structures, very much in line with liberation theology.

Chávez was raised by a grandmother who was an upright Catholic and prayed in her mud hut home, where Chávez was born. She taught him to have solidarity with the less fortunate.

As president, Chávez would often brandish a cross during speeches and television appearances, and refer to Jesus Christ. He was surely one of the few world leaders who would talk about Jesus at international political summits.

Chávez’s relationship with the Catholic church, like his relationship with the country in general, was polarized. Many poor Catholics at the grassroots level worshiped him as a messiah. They now see him as a martyred saint, cut down in his prime by cancer.

Some Catholic clergy were sympathetic to him, including Jesuit Fr. Jesus Gazo, his unofficial spiritual advisor. Bishop Mario Moronta of San Cristóbal de Venezuela said a prayer at Chávez’s funeral.

But most of the church hierarchy was unremittingly hostile to Chávez. It was the bishops’ perception of him that got transmitted to the worldwide church authorities and audience, just as the oligarchy’s view of Chávez was mostly the one that got transmitted through the Venezuelan and international media. The other side of the story rarely got told.

In December 1999, mudslides killed an estimated 15,000 people in Caracas and its environs. The archbishop of Caracas at the time, Antonio Ignacio Velasco, suggested from the altar it was a punishment from God against the people. That day they had approved the new constitution that Chávez had promoted.

In April 2002, when Chávez was overthrown in a coup and disappeared for two days after military rebels essentially kidnapped him, church leaders supported the putsch. Velasco showed up at a ceremony at the presidential palace. He was smiling as businessman Pedro Carmona swore himself in as president and shut down the Congress, Supreme Court and constitution. Also arriving and sharing bear hugs with the celebrants was Archbishop Baltazar Porras of Mérida.

Ironically, one of the bishops’ chief complaints against Chávez was that he wanted to install a dictatorship.

Chávez, of course, was not always diplomatic in his dealings with them. He had called the bishops “devils in vestments,” and Porras in particular a “pathetic ignoramus.”

Another of the complaints about Chávez from the bishops and others was that he was trampling on human rights, including free speech. Chávez, they said, “shut down” broad sectors of the “independent” media that were critical of him.

The truth, of course, was more complex. In Venezuela, the private media, including the major television stations, were largely controlled by the oligarchy, and mostly transmitted its views. The day of Carmona’s swearing in, many of the media moguls showed up at the palace.

In fact, they had helped engineer the coup. In the hours leading up to the putsch, the TV stations ran constant ads urging people to attend a massive anti-Chávez demonstration “for liberty and democracy” and to get rid of him. On the day of the march, they provided blanket nonstop coverage for hours, pre-empting regular programming.

When shooting broke out as the marchers clashed with Chávez supporters near the presidential palace, one station manipulated footage to make it appear the Chávistas had shot the marchers in cold blood.

Then, after Chávez was kidnapped and thousands of his supporters flooded the streets for two days to demand the return of their democratically elected president, the stations imposed a news blackout. Amid one of the most dramatic events in modern Latin American history, with the president missing, the stations instead showed Hollywood movies.

One of those stations, RCTV, instructed its workers “cero Chávez” -- no Chávez.

If CBS, NBC, ABC or CNN had done the same thing in the United States, they probably would have been yanked off the air in five minutes. In Venezuela, RCTV remained on the air for five years more. When its license to use the limited public airways came up for renewal, the government declined. But RCTV continued on cable.

Still, in the narrative presented to the world of Chávez, he was a repressive dictator shutting down the free press. The reality is that there was and still is a vigorous opposition media that freely criticizes the government.

* * *

I first met Chávez in 1994. He had just gotten out of jail. We were sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Caracas. I was able to land the first interview by a foreign journalist with the man who had led a coup against the government two years earlier.

He was already a sensation among the poor masses. They hailed him as a hero for standing up to a hated government that had mowed down hundreds if not several thousand people in the wake of riots a few years prior.

The wealthy elites, meanwhile, were eyeing him warily. They weren’t entirely sure what to make of him. But they didn’t think it was anything good.

Nearly five years later, I was standing near him the night he first won the presidency in December 1998. He made his way up a winding, packed staircase to an outdoor balcony to greet a throng on the street. We were all nearly crushed. The scene on the street was electric. Floodlights lit up a crowd that was in a frenzy over his victory.

It was the start of a new chapter in a life story straight out of Hollywood.

Chávez grew up dreaming of playing major league baseball. He gained admittance to the West Point of Venezuela because he thought scouts might discover him in the capital.

Instead, he discovered Simón Bolívar, the South American independence hero. He became radicalized. He went on to form a clandestine organization involving hundreds of soldiers and civilians livid over Venezuela’s social injustice. By day he was a soldier, by night a conspirator. After 10 years, he and his cohorts rose up against a government they considered had blood on its hands.

The coup failed and he went to prison for two years. After his release, he eventually ran for president. One of his main opponents was a former Miss Universe. The contest was dubbed “the beauty and the beast.”

And that was just his life before he assumed the presidency, which was another series of life-and-death roller coaster rides.

Love him or hate him, there is no denying Chávez was a remarkable figure. Some believe he will go down as the most important leftist leader in Latin America since Fidel Castro. His face, like that of Che Guevara, is already seen on T-shirts around the world.

He was vilified in life and still is in death. Chávez was not perfect, but there are other sides of him that should be remembered. Perhaps someday the world will receive a more balanced, honest portrait of the man, of what he accomplished and what he failed to do.


(Bart Jones, author of ¡HUGO!: The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution, spent eight years in Venezuela, mainly as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press.)

This work is licensed under a Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Creative Commons license

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/9591 & http://ncronline.org/news/global/beyond-caricature-poor-people-s-president

May 25, 2013

House panel approves homeland bill, bars Brazilian immigrants

May 22, 2013, 2:27 pm
House panel approves homeland bill, bars Brazilian immigrants
By Erik Wasson

The House Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved a 2014 Homeland Security funding bill with a bipartisan voice vote. The bill is expected on the House floor in June.

In a surprise development, the committee approved an amendment from Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), which would effectively end immigration from Brazil.

The provision was included in order to pressure Brazil to extradite Brazilian-born Claudia Hoerig to the United States for trial in the murder of her husband, Air Force Major Karl Hoerig. The Ryan amendment does not affect travel visas or visas for temporary workers, an aide said.

It was passed despite urgings from Homeland subcommittee Chairman John Carter (R-Texas) and ranking member David Price (D-N.C.) that it would have far-reaching implications. The text of the amendment withholds all funding from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process any immigration visa request for a Brazilian national.

...

http://thehill.com/blogs/global-affairs/americas/

May 25, 2013

AP Further Documents Evidence of Honduran Police Death Squads; U.S. State Department Hits Back

AP Further Documents Evidence of Honduran Police Death Squads; U.S. State Department Hits Back

Written by Dan Beeton
Tuesday, 14 May 2013 16:40

A new investigative feature by award-winning Associated Press correspondent Alberto Arce probes deeper into recurring police death squad activity in Honduras. Following up on his reports in March, Arce details the cases of several gang suspects who have disappeared after being taken into police custody, as well as what witnesses have described as the gunning-down, in cold blood, of suspects in the streets. The article reveals that:

At least five times in the last few months, members of a Honduras street gang were killed or went missing just after run-ins with the U.S.-supported national police, The Associated Press has determined, feeding accusations that they were victims of federal death squads.
…

In March, two mothers discovered the bodies of their sons after the men had called in a panic to say they were surrounded by armed, masked police. The young men, both members of the 18th Street gang, had been shot in the head, their hands bound so tightly the cords cut to the bone.

That was shortly after three members of 18th Street were detained by armed, masked men and taken to a police station. Two men with no criminal history were released, but their friend disappeared without any record of his detention.

A month after the AP reported that an 18th Street gang leader and his girlfriend vanished from police custody, they are still missing.

As we have previously examined, Arce has noted that U.S. support for the Honduran National Police while some officers engage in death squad activity would seem to violate the Leahy Law. Rather than proceed with greater caution or reexamine ongoing policy, the U.S. State Department has responded defensively. Arce quotes Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs William Brownfield as saying

“The option is that if we don’t work with the police, we have to work with the armed forces, which almost everyone accepts to be worse than the police in terms of the mission of policing, or communities take matters in their own hands. In other words, the law of the jungle, in which there are no police and where every citizen is armed and ready to mete out justice,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Brownfield said in Spanish during a March 28 video chat.*

Brownfield has taken a PR offensive to the Honduran and Latin American press as well. But there, rather than describe the U.S.’ Honduran police partners as police partners as an “evil” a sort of lesser evil, an EFE article yesterday reports that Brownfield said that he “respects” and “admires” the “effective work” that notorious Police Director Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla has done, and that

"I want to make it very clear that I am working with the Honduran police, and supplying aid through programs, because everyone in Honduras agrees that they are suffering a problem of violence, homicides, and drug trafficking. And to solve them we have to work with the police,” he concluded.

The comments represent a doubling-down by the State Department in the face of growing congressional pressure and concern about human rights violations committed by Honduran police and other authorities. While Brownfield -- who has been the State Department’s point person regarding the Bonilla controversy -- has previously defended ongoing U.S. support to the Honduran police, neither he nor anyone else at State seems to have previously been willing to praise Bonilla while members of Congress point fingers at him regarding past and current death squad activity.

In another sign of doubling-down and lashing back, Brownfield also dismissed what he described as “some groups’” claims regarding Bonilla and other suspect cops: “I haven't seen that any conclusion has been reached that supports the accusations of some groups about the history of the leadership of the Honduran police,” and he reiterated his misleading claim that some Honduran police units are not under Bonilla’s control:

"As a precaution, we are working with those parts of the police that do not report directly to the director general. But I understand that he has taken steps to purge the corrupt members of the police and to professionalize it, and he has been effective in delivering a better police force to the community and streets of Honduras,” he affirmed.

While Honduran officials have previously denounced statements by “groups” and individuals regarding rights violations and corruption in Honduras, it seems to be a departure from recent practice for the U.S. State Department to do so. And as we have previously noted, Bonilla’s activities a decade ago were at the time cause for great concern from the State Department. A 2003 cable made available by Wikileaks reveals that then-Western Hemisphere Affairs Deputy Assistant Secretary Dan Fisk had urged Honduran authorities “to send a strong signal about impunity by arresting fugitive policeman Juan Carlos “Tiger” Bonilla.”

While Bonilla did go to trial for murder charges in one case and was found innocent (when the prosecutor quit mid-trial), Bonilla was suspected in over a dozen others. The head of the police internal affairs department at the time, Maria Luisa Borjas claimed that her investigation was obstructed by authorities and that she received death threats.

Part of Brownfield’s PR counter-offensive focuses on aerial operations, citing this as an area in which Leahy Law restrictions were hampering police counternarcotics operations:

Brownfield assured today that the restrictions that come from the US Congress are applied fundamentally to “the country's aviation program.”

“That is due to issues that are outside the question of the national police,” he underscored. “We are in the process of resolving this issue, and if we can resolve it we will be able to supply more aid to aviation for the Honduran national police for its security operations in isolated areas of the country,” he added.

(Coincidentally, Honduran armed forces chief, general René Osorio Canales, gave an interview to Honduras’ La Tribuna newspaper today in which he described in detail areas in which he says the air force has a need for upgraded planes and helicopters.)

Various Honduras observers and authorities in Honduras have described the involvement of the Honduran police and other authorities in the drug trade.

The Honduran National Police, meanwhile, have predictably also reacted defensively to the report. Arce reports:

Honduran National Police spokesman Julian Hernandez Reyes denied the existence of police units operating outside the law. He asserted that the two gangs are murdering each other while disguised as law enforcement.

"There are no police death squads in Honduras," Hernandez said in an interview. "The only squads in place are made of police officers who give their lives for public safety."

But while Hernandez claims it is gangs dressed as cops who are committing the murders, Arce notes that plain clothes officers may also be gunning down suspects.

* May 20, 2013: This quotation, and the sentence that follows, have been changed to reflect a correction made to the original Associated Press article.

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http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/ap-further-documents-evidence-of-honduran-police-death-squads-us-state-department-hits-back

May 25, 2013

Not Writing History (Guatemala, Rios Montt and the Washington Post)

Not Writing History
Written by Sara Kozameh
Tuesday, 21 May 2013 14:29

Ten days ago Guatemalan courts convicted former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, to 80 years in prison for charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. Though the ruling has just been overturned on technical grounds, it was the first time that a country has been able to use its own criminal courts to try a former head of state for genocide, arguably making it one of the most important court decisions in decades. Despite the significance of the ruling, not just for what it represents for the more than 200,000 victims of the genocide and their families, but also for human rights worldwide, the mass media in the U.S. has mostly ignored the U.S. role in contributing to and supporting the genocide.

The New York Times provided a couple of exceptions in the last week. Its “Room for Debate,” feature, which is regularly published online but not in the print edition, and allows perspectives from a broader political spectrum than is normally permitted in news articles or even the op-ed page, published a range of opinions on the extent of U.S. support and complicity for the Ríos Montt regime. And last week the New York Times published an exceptional print article about the role of the U.S. government in Guatemala, Reagan’s financial and fervent military support for Ríos Montt’s bloody dictatorship, and how this aspect of the genocide had been conspicuously absent during the trial against Ríos Montt.

Amazingly, the Washington Post chose not to report at all on the historic ruling in their print edition following the day of the ruling. Although stories on corruption scandals in India, a detained youth activist in Egypt, and voting in Pakistan did make the international section of the print edition of that day’s Washington Post, the Post found no space to print this story. Two days after the conviction was announced (and after it made headlines around the world), and buried deep in the digest section of Sunday’s print international section were a total of 73 words dedicated to what it said human rights activists called “a historic moment” in Guatemala.



This dearth of words from the Washington Post shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, not reporting or investigating news about massacres and genocide in Guatemala when it had the opportunity to do so is consistent with the Post’s reporting on the country throughout the 1980s when the U.S. government supported death squads in the countryside killing anyone and everyone that they could. Yes, the Post reported on Guatemala, and on guerrillas, and occasionally it even paid some lip-service to the idea that some people claimed that the government and army, not the guerrillas, were behind the vast majority of deaths in the country. But, despite reliable indications and reports that government-led massacres and even a genocide was in fact underway in Guatemala, for example from this October, 1982 episode of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report (see below) and this one from November of 1983 (see below) , the Post neglected the opportunity to dig up the truth during this period. The New York Times, it should be pointed out, also mostly ignored the genocide when it was taking place. This was the pre-internet era, so if these newspapers did not report on massacres, for the United States public and policy-makers, they weren’t part of the news. (However, investigative reporter Allan Nairn did get opinion pieces into the NYT and Washington Post some time after the worst massacres had occurred.)

Thirty years later human rights defenders, victims of the genocide, dedicated investigative reporters, activists, lawyers, historians, and more, have done that work, showing the world what it takes to win back some justice, and putting themselves on the right side of history. But the Washington Post, in its silence, continues to commit the same mistakes that enabled U.S. military and financial support for genocide in Guatemala or, to draw a more recent parallel, the invasion of Iraq and the deaths of perhaps more than a million people.

The latest news, from a decision made late last night on the ruling is that Guatemala’s top court has annulled the conviction against Ríos Montt. While the trial is expected to backtrack to where it stood on April 19, before again resuming, appeals from the former dictator’s lawyers have consistently stalled the process. If the trial resumes and Ríos Montt is again convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemalan courts, the Washington Post will have a rare second opportunity to offset its most recent silence, and join its peers in reporting on these important current events and the history of U.S.-Guatemalan relations.

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http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/the-americas-blog/not-writing-history

Videos originally linked in article but not linkable here:

"October, 1982 episode of PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report "

"this one from November of 1983 "

May 25, 2013

U.S. Media Continues to Treat Capriles’ Complaints Seriously Despite Lack of Evidence

U.S. Media Continues to Treat Capriles’ Complaints Seriously Despite Lack of Evidence

Written by Dan Beeton
Monday, 20 May 2013 16:53

As we have noted previously, statistical analysis shows that Venezuelan opposition challenger Henrique Capriles has an almost impossible chance of seeing the April 14 election result change through a full audit of voting machines, as he had demanded.

We have issued two press releases about this, as well as our full paper detailing our calculations step-by-step, and CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot had an op-ed on this in Aljazeera English. Mark also presented these findings at a recent high-profile conference at the Celso Furtado Center in Rio. Despite being reported in a variety of Latin American and Spanish media, including Spanish newspaper El Pais, Argentine media outlet Telam, and Venezuela’s Panorama, the U.S. media has ignored this important part of the story. We have corresponded with several reporters who initially expressed interest in the one-in-25-thousand-trillion figure. None of them has since cited the statistical improbability of Capriles’ seeing the election results change through the full audit, nor have other major U.S. media outlets. One reporter writing for a major U.S. newspaper has told us that his editors refuse to publish anything related to our statistical analysis or regarding the audit and its significance more generally.

Henrique Capriles’ recent comments demonstrate why the ongoing vote audit, and more importantly, the first audit (conducted on April 14) is still relevant. In an El Pais article from May 9, Capriles says that 400,000 more people voted for him than Maduro, and that therefore the CNE’s vote count must have been wrong:

“If they rescind the electoral records we have questioned in the electoral dispute we have filed with the Supreme Court - which make up 55.4 percent of the votes cast – we would win the elections by 400,000 votes, two percent in our favor. And that’s without going into details,” he says with righteous conviction.

It appears that Capriles is still alleging the vote count was stolen in a way that would have been detectable in the first audit, and hence the statistical analysis still applies. If tens of thousands of voters voted multiple times, it would be very difficult to stuff the receipt boxes to match the multiple voting, without having some discrepancies between the machine and the paper count. The receipt boxes are in plain sight of all observers and it would be impossible for a voter to stuff multiple pieces of paper through the thin slot without anyone seeing. It would also be impossible to vote more than once without not only the collaboration of observers to fix the machines to allow this, but a conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people, with no subsequent leaks.

The audits of a large majority of voting machines, however, have not found these discrepancies. The initial “hot audit” was done on site, in the presence of the observers from both the Capriles and Maduro campaigns, as well as witnesses from the community. There were no reports from witnesses or election officials on site of discrepancies between the machine totals and the hand count.

Statistical analysis shows that it would be almost impossible – less than a one in 25 thousand trillion chance – for the first 53 percent of voting machines not to show discrepancies if there were sufficient discrepancies in the remaining 46 percent that would overturn the election results.

If Capriles feels this lucky, he should play the lottery. His odds of winning the Powerball jackpot in the U.S. or any other lottery would be vastly greater.

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May 25, 2013

Bolivia Calls the DEA's Drug War a Total Failure

SATURDAY 25 MAY 2013

Bolivia Calls the DEA's Drug War a Total Failure



24/05/13.- Bolivia's government today described the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA) war on drugs in Latin America as a failure.

At a press conference, the Minister of the Presidency, Juan Ramón Quintana accused the institution of being responsible for thousands of deaths, money laundering and increased arms sales in the region.

...

"What are the DEA's achievement in 40 years? About 70,000 people dead in Mexico, more than 150,000 people dead in Central America, selling weapons, more drug trafficking, more money laundering. 40 years of failure," he said.

...

The day before, more than three weeks after President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Washington ordered the removal of the Narcotics Affairs Section (NAS), which had operated in the country for over 40 years.

The president stated that USAID committed acts of conspiracy and political interference in the peasant unions and other social organizations to destabilize his government, as had the US Embassy.

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http://www.ciudadccs.info/?p=427288

May 25, 2013

Rafael Correa: "There are millions of Chavezes"

At the end of the article, he talks about attacks from transnational corporations, in collusion with some international organizations, and how the Latin American countries need to strengthen their unity. He says the whole idea of "Patria Grande isn't just an ideal, a dream of Simon Bolivar's, but "is an ideal of survival, a shield against exploitation, against neocolonialism"

Correa proposed creating their "own bodies to resolve investment disputes: the new regional financial architecture, our own bank, the Bank of the South, and a trade and compensation system." All of this is so that "together, we will impose conditions on transnational capital, according to the will of the people."

May 25, 2013

Protests against Monsanto in Costa Rica Today

Related:

May 25, 2013

Honduran Educational System Abandoned by Porfirio Lobo government

Abandonment denounced in the Honduran educational system

Tegucigalpa, May 25 (Prensa Latina) The newspaper El Heraldo, reported today that the Honduran public education system is abandoned by the government of Porfirio Lobo, who has made ​​significant cuts in the sector.

Ariel Lopez, Advisor School Building and Infrastructure of the Ministry of Education, admitted that 70 percent of schools have various infrastructure problems, but the most serious is the health service. "When it comes to healthcare, we estimate that 95 percent of schools require support," he said.

According to the newspaper, in the national education system is short about 400 000 desks and four thousand classrooms.

A similar situation faced by 70 schools for children with special needs, following the government's decision to cut the annual budget for these schools.

...

http://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&idioma=1&id=1447751&Itemid=1

May 25, 2013

Nicaragua refuses entry to Venezuela's Right Wing Opposition. El Salvador network denounces them