Violence broke out Sunday, leaving at least six persons dead near the Peruvian town of Chala in the state of Arequipa, when security forces tried to break up a roadblock set up by striking wildcat miners. According to Reuters, over 20 miners and 9 police officers were also injured in the massive strike [Peru’s La Republica says 8000 workers are on strike]—what the news service dubs “the country’s latest conflict over natural resources.” This time, however, it’s President Alan García who has tried to attack his opponents for not following environmental standards, accusing laborers of dumping toxins into forests and streams. For their part, the approx. 300,000 wildcat miners represented by Peruvian miner associations say their livelihood depends on such work. They accuse the Garcia government of doing very little to alleviate rural poverty.
President Garcia has attacked his left wing rival, Ollanta Humala, for fueling much of the latest round of unrest. According to Garcia, Humala’s party helped organize the mining protests—a charge Humala rejected at the beginning of the week. “The government wants to point fingers, yet the people to blame are in the government,” Humala said. Humala is currently running a distant third in most polls ahead of 2011 elections. Garcia, unable to seek another term in office, has said he will do everything he can to see that “a centrist candidate” succeeds him.
In an unrelated story from Peru last week, IPS has a human rights report about the investigation into the murder of 37 university students by state security forces in Huancayo between 1989 and 1993. According to Victor Lizárraga of the National Human Rights Coordinator (CNDDHH), there is more than ample evidence to convict three Peruvian generals for the murders of the students who were once accused of sympathizing with left wing revolutionary groups.
To other news:
· Staying in the Andes, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa re-arranged his cabinet Monday, replacing nine ministers with the objective of “radicalizing” the country’s “citizen’s revolution.” One of the most significant moves was the designation of Katiuska King, a former planning official, as Correa’s new coordinator of economic policy. Addressing the changes, Correa emphasized that over the next three years his government plans to focus on making its management of the country more “efficient,” says BBC Mundo. The shake-up comes as US Ass’t. Sec. of State Arturo Valenzuela makes his first of three Andean stops in Ecuador today. Valenzuela, reports AFP, will be sitting down with Correa himself in a meeting that is overshadowed by a recent State Dept. report which criticized the Ecuadorean government on human rights issues. From Ecuador, Valenzuela will travel on to both Colombia and Peru later this week. For more, CIP’s Adam Isacson and Lisa Haugaard of the Latin America Working Group discuss the trip in the latest Just the Facts podcast.
· In neighboring Venezuela, Russian diplomats are following up with their Venezuelan counterparts on new military sales which Russian PM Vladimir Putin said could be in the range of $5 billion. Putin met with Hugo Chavez Friday but Putin gave few details about the exact nature of Venezuela’s forthcoming military purchases. In Washington, meanwhile, State spokesman PJ Crowley addressed the new military agreement between the two countries, saying the US was primarily concerned with the possibility of arms “migrating to other parts of the hemisphere.”
· Also, on Venezuela this morning, EFE reports that the Inter-American Human Rights Commission’s president, Felipe Gonzalez, told Venezuela’s El Universal that separations of power have disappeared in the country.
· And rounding out news from the Andes today, in Colombia, a political pact between two non-Uribista candidates (both former mayors), Bogota’s Antanas Mockus and Medellín’s Sergio Fajardo, has created a new and quite formidable challenge to Juan Manuel Santos. According to the agreement reached Monday, Mockus will go to the polls as the presidential candidate of the Green Party and Fajardo as his running mate. With an opinion on the first round of voting in Colombia, the LA Times also has an editorial this morning which argues that a fight against economic inequality must be priority #1 of the next, post-Uribe government.
· In Time, a report from Brazil looks at one of the underreported dark sides of the country’s recent economic successes: namely, ongoing violent struggles over land in resource rich states like Para. The story comes after another land reform activist was murdered last week in province. According to Time, Pastoral da Terra, the Roman Catholic Church group that monitors land conflicts, has documented more than 1,400 rural worker murders over land issues since 1985. At least 13 people killed were killed in Para alone in 2008—“almost half the national total and more than in any other state.” Issues of land ownership, deforestation, logging, land grabbing and the persistence of “slave labor” all have made rural violence an ongoing and unresolved issue in Brazil.
· In Haiti, the Miami Herald reports on the reopening of some schools in Port-au-Prince this week—what the paper calls the latest sign of some return to “normalcy.” And at NACLA, a piece looks at “the most privatized social service sector in the Americas” in Haiti. Some 80% of social services have been funneled through NGOs in the past, many of which have fallen short in the areas of transparency, argues the report.
· In the Washington Post, a report on the new leads in the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero. The piece mostly recaps what was reported two weeks ago by El Faro and repeated here.
· Cuban dissident, Guillermo Farinas, said yesterday he would carry on with his hunger strike and was willing to die if necessary. Farinas is in the 41st day of his strike, and, writes Reuters, his death “would be the second this year by a Cuban hunger striker and would likely bring further international repercussions that Castro said the government is prepared to accept.” On Sunday, Raul Castro said the Cuban government would not accede to “blackmail” by its enemies—a direct reference to dissident groups. Meanwhile, in Washington, Politico’s Laura Rozen reports that SFRC Chairman, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) has placed a temporary hold on US democracy programs in Cuba. The hold comes after Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, met with Cuban foreign minister, Bruno Rodriguez last week at the UN Haiti conference. The hold will remain in place until the State Dept. and the Foreign Relations Committee conduct a review of the programs’ effectiveness.
· Finally, a couple of opinions. In Argentina’s La Nación, Prof. Juan Gabriel Tokatlian of Torcuato Di Tella University examines the struggle against narcotrafficking, discussing the exhausted concepts of the “failed state” and “co-responsibility” in those efforts. Both models have led to an unproductive way to think about counternarcotics policy in region, argues Tokatlian. “It is necessary to stimulate a paradigmatic change,” he argues, “oriented toward reducing the human costs generated by the ‘war on drugs’ and with the aspiration of progressively resolving the phenomenon of narcotics.” Some closing paragraphs on the growing presence of organized crime across the region may also be of particular interest to some readers. On the same topic, the Latin American Herald Tribune’s Marcela Sanchez talks with Guatemalan ambassador to the US, Francisco Villagran, about drug mafias in his country, and beyond. And in the Miami Herald, Glenn Garvin with an opinion on life in the “murder city” of Juarez.
No comments:
Post a Comment