People Before Profit blog

Tudeh Party of Iran strongly condemns crimes against women

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 14:45:00 +0000

According to media reports, peoples' anger boiled over on October 16 after the serial acid attacks on women in the city of Esfahan, the capital of Esfahan Province in Iran.

Protesters gathered in front of the Esfahan's Prosecutor's Office, but as usual the prosecutor and other officials at the provincial and national level tried to hide the connection between these crimes and their own reactionary social-cultural policies. They promised immediate investigation of these criminal activities. Cries of "catch them" and "lock them up" were raised from the mouthpiece of every state institute and official, in order to perhaps pour cold water on peoples' blazing anger.

An Iranian Students' News Agency (ISNA) report on October 18, entitled "Fall of Security in Half the World" and in interviews with victims of these crimes, the significant point is that all four female victims were in their own vehicles, had "modest Islamic covers," were speaking on their cell phones and were employed. In terms of appearance, these are all signs that are contrary to the reactionaries' model of a woman. In addition, none of these girls and women who were victims of this barbarism had any specific enmity in their personal lives, and all were targeted by "motorcyclists."

The practical silence of President Hassan Rouhani's government of "prudence and hope" and the widespread media campaign of the ruling reactionaries against those who protested these inhumane actions (including arresting several people at the protest gatherings in Tehran and other cities), once again confirms the fact that in the theocratic regime of Iran the principle of oppression and trampling the basic rights of citizens is an inseparable and institutionalized nature of a regime which is willing and prepared to commit any crime in order to safeguard its survival.

On October 19, in line with this media blitz, Raja-News [an ultra-conservative, religious, pro-government news site] wrote that just as Ayatollah Larijani (the head of the Judiciary) last week spoke of his special instruction to the prosecutor to deal with those media which are trying to spread "provocative" news about economic corruption in the society, the Judiciary must also get involved in the "acid attack matter" to prevent the suspicious media from "disturbing society's psychological security and spreading the counter revolution's unfounded claims against the revolutionary forces and Islamic veil (hijab) in this regard."

The barbaric attack on the rights of the women of our country, women who have been, and will be a militant and relentless part of the social forces in the struggle against reaction and for freedom and reforms in our country is by no means an accidental matter. Intimidating and forcing women to stay at home and surrender to the medieval ideas of a bunch of backward-thinking criminals who are controlling our country's fate is one of the aims of such plots. In the minds of the regime, the refusal to submit to its medieval models for women is one of the "sins" of these women and girls.

By no means accidental is the timing of organizing these crimes, so shortly after the remarks of some of the clergies and reactionary perpetrators and commanders of the "Ansar Hezbollah" [militant, conservative, paramilitary, pro-regime organized groups] about the need for "forbidding wrong" and confronting the process of growing popular efforts to open up the social and cultural atmosphere of the society. It is the Iranian mothers, wives and sisters who are paying the price for factional fighting inside the theocratic regime.

In spite of all the malicious ploys specific to this reactionary regime, the women movement in our country will continue its struggle for achieving the true rights of the brave women and girls of Iran, including freedom and social safety.

Tudeh Party of Iran condemns these criminal acts and demands the prosecution and punishment of the primary organizers and perpetrators of the acid attacks on the nation's women in recent days. Only with a widespread protest across the country and around the world can such inhumane acts of the security apparatus of the regime and its beneficiaries be stopped.

Tudeh Party of Iran

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Again, UN General Assembly rejects U.S anti-Cuban blockade

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 11:41:00 +0000

The United Nations General Assembly voted Oct. 28 for the 23rd consecutive year on a Cuba resolution calling upon the United States to end its economic blockade against the island. The results highlight U.S. isolation in the diplomatic community; 188 UN nations voted "Yes," and only two, the United States and Israel, rejected the resolution. The Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia, island-nations in the Pacific allied to the United States, abstained.

The tally was similar to that of 2013. Since 1994, over 100 nations have supported the resolution, with 180 or more nations doing so since 2005. Beginning in 1998, only Israel, the United States, and at times one of the Pacific island-nations have voted "No."

Before and after the vote, 39 delegates representing individual nations or regional groups spoke before the Assembly. Multinational alliances represented in the debate included: the CARICOM group of Caribbean nations, the South American trade association Mercosur, the Western Hemisphere (minus Canada and the United States) CELAC alliance, the Non-Aligned Group of Nations, the G77 nations (134 nations in all), and the African Union. Both the United Nations and TeleSur news service communicated the proceedings worldwide live via the Internet.

Speakers emphasized themes that Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez also covered. Among them were: freedom for the three Cuban Five prisoners still in U.S. jails, Cuba's international humanitarian outreach, U.S. violations of international law, and Cuba's inclusion on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Addressing the Assembly, Minister Rodriguez began by insisting that the "world community" pay attention because the vote "concerns International Law that protects big and little states, rich and poor, and guarantees independence for all of them."

Rodriguez characterized the present era as "unprecedented" with its "old and new problems tending to make human life unsustainable." And, "none are solvable if our attitude does not change for the sake of genuine cooperation,[specifically] the way we face and deal with reality."

He accused the United States of having intensified its economic blockade, which "presents serious obstacles for the economic development of Cuba. Cuba has never been a threat to U.S. national security," he declared, and in fact "the U.S. and Cuban peoples have always had deep ties."

Rodriguez reported that "diverse tendencies" and experts in the United States "recognize that these policies have failed and don't respond to the national interests of that power.

"It's enough to read the New York Times editorials of recent weeks," he explained. And besides, "Cuba will never renounce its sovereignty or the road its people freely chose to build a more just and efficient, more prosperous and sustainable, socialism."

Juan Carlos Mendoza, speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 countries, stated, "Human lives are threatened and public health is debilitated due to the blockade, same with education, culture, sports, finance, banking, external commerce, [and] foreign investment."

Poland's UN delegate representing EU member states conveyed EU "rejection of all unilateral measures directed against Cuba which negatively affect third parties' interests and thereby violate commonly accepted rules of international trade."

Once more Ronald Godard, listed as "U.S. Senior Area Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs," took on the annual task of explaining U.S. policies before the United Nations. His nation is attending to "national interests and its principles," he declared. At issue are "human rights and fundamental freedoms" for the Cuban people.

"[T]he Cuban economy will not thrive until [Cuba] opens its state monopolies to private competition and adopts the sound macro-economic policies that have contributed to the success of Cuba's neighbors in Latin America."

So Mr. Godard seems to be discounting that sentiment in the U. S. Declaration of Independence paying honor to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

Godard called upon Cuba to free jailed U.S. contractor Alan Gross. After all, he stated, Gross was only "facilitating Internet access for Cuba's small Jewish community." Nevertheless, according to both the NACLA organization and Tracy Eaton's report, Gross' larger task was anti-government subversion.

Paradoxically, despite all the fuss, both the United States and Israel do engage commercially with Cuba. Pressure from U.S. agricultural and food processing businesses induced Congress in 2000 to authorize cash-only food sales to Cuba. Their yield since then has ascended into the billions of dollars.

The Israeli-financed Grupo BM company, headquartered now in Panama, years ago undertook joint-venture projects with Cuban partners. Its "Jagüey Grande" citrus plantation in Matanzas province became an export powerhouse for Cuban agriculture. And rental income from office buildings of its "Miramar Trade Center" presumably still flows to Israeli investors.

Photo: The shadow of Juan Carlos Lazo, who sells donuts in Havana, is cast along the cement next to his motorized vehicle. The UN General Assembly overwhelmingly condemned the U.S. commercial, economic, and financial embargo for the 23rd year in a row. The embargo was first put in place when Cuba placed companies that had been draining the island's resources and exploitiing its workers under public control.The idea behind the U.S. embargo is to punish Cuba and its people for opting for this socialist approach to their economy. Franklin Reyes/AP

Oaxacans want the right not to migrate

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:08:00 +0000

OAXACA DE JUAREZ, Mexico - For six weeks hundreds of teachers in the southern Mexico state of Oaxaca have been living in tents, in the capital city's main plaza, the zocalo. Bonifacio Garcia, one of the protestors, declares, "We will stay here until the state Chamber of Deputies agrees that our education reform will move forward in all our schools."

Each week teachers from one of Oaxaca's regions take a turn at sleeping in the tents. This is the week for the schools on the coast, including the communities of people whose ancestors were slaves. Garcia comes from Santiago Tapextla, near Pinotepa Nacional, where most people trace part of their ancestry back to Africa.

On the coast, family trees are very mixed. Most also reveal other ancestors among the indigenous people who were here long before the Spanish conquerors arrived. "Spaniards brought slaves with them from the Caribbean and Africa," Garcia explains. "After Mexico outlawed slavery in 1821 we became an autonomous community. But in Mexico African people aren't considered an original people, the way indigenous people are. We're still not really recognized, so we have to fight for our rights."

Garcia is principal of a "telesecondaria" -- a secondary school in a remote area where part of the instruction is given through a national televised curriculum. While he uses that TV program, he and his fellow teachers reject most of the other reforms Mexico's national government has attempted to impose. Oaxacan teachers and their union, Section 22 of the National Union of Education Workers, say the Federal education reforms rely too heavily on standardized testing, and punish teachers for the low scores of their students.

Instead, Section 22 formulated its own education reform plan five years ago, the Program to Transform Education in Oaxaca (PTEO). It seeks to develop an intensely cooperative relationship between teachers, students, parents and the surrounding community. Lulu, a young preschool teacher from Huatulco, further south along the coast, says, "I have a much closer relationship now to the parents of my children than we did before."

For Garcia, the central purpose of PTEO is to help students get a better education, especially those in rural areas who speak pre-Hispanic languages like Mixteco, Zapoteco or Triqui -- Oaxacans speak 23 indigenous tongues. But education, he believes, should also provide an alternative to the out-migration that is devastating small farming communities.

"I know the cost of migration very well, " he says. "I lived for four years in Elgin, Illinois, working for an organization there that helped immigrants understand their rights. So I know how hard life can be in the north. Migration also hollows out our communities here. If we want young people to stay, we have to have an alternative that is attractive to them. That starts with education. That's why our program to change the schools is so important, and why we're willing to sit here in the zocalo until the government agrees."

Oaxaca has about 3.5 million people, who began leaving the state because of intense rural poverty in the 1970s. At first people migrated to work on the industrial farms of northern Mexico. But then indigenous Oaxacan towns, dependent on growing corn and other agricultural products, were hit hard by the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 1990, before the agreement was implemented, about 527,000 people had already left. A decade later that number had mushroomed to 663,000.

Beginning in the 1980s, Oaxacan migrants began crossing the border, first into California, and then dispersing into states all over the U.S. By 2008 about 12.5 million Mexican migrants were living north of the border (up from 4.6 million in 1990) -- 9.4 percent of the population of Mexico. But even in this huge wave, Oaxacans have been over-represented -- 19 percent of its people are migrants.

Rufino DomÆnguez, who heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone. One result has been an explosion of Oaxacan culture in exile. Currently, at least 16 Guelaguetzas (the annual festival that showcases the elaborate dances of Oaxaca's many regions) take place, not just in California (where there are 11), but also in Seattle WA, Poughkeepsie NY, Salem OR, Odessa TX, and Atlantic City NJ.

Beautiful dances, however, are performed by communities that live on the economic margin. Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study, says surveys reveal that among California indigenous Mexican farm workers (about 120,000 people) a third earn minimum wage, while a third are paid illegal wages below that. The U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market, he elaborates.

California has a farm labor force of about 700,000 workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up a majority. Indigenous people constituted seven percent of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before NAFTA. In 2006-8, they made up 29 percent - four times more. The rock-bottom wages paid to this most recent wave of migrants sets the wage floor for all the other workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor costs of California growers low, and their profits high.

It was no surprise, therefore, that anger over discrimination, displacement, migration and poverty ran through many denunciations heard last week in Oaxaca at the triennial assembly of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations (FIOB). "We are not people who were 'discovered' by the Spaniards, the Americans or anyone else," thundered Romualdo Juan Gutierrez Cortez, FIOB's new binational coordinator. "We are people in struggle!"

Gutierrez is a teacher with a long political history in Oaxaca. He was elected a decade ago to the state Chamber of Deputies, and after his term ended, was jailed in reprisal by the governor from Mexico's old ruling party, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution. When a teachers' strike spiraled into a virtual insurrection in 2006, the following governor put his name on a list of activists to be arrested yet again. When the PRI lost the governorship for the first time in 70 years in 2010, Gutierrez went to work in the state's migrant assistance agency.

FIOB is a unique organization created in 1992 by both Oaxacan migrants in California, and by the communities in Oaxaca from which they come. It has chapters in four California cities, in several towns in Baja California in north Mexico where Oaxacans work as migrants, and in many indigenous towns in Oaxaca itself. Many FIOB activists are teachers because educators play such an important role in community life. Now FIOB will be headed by two of them -- Gutierrez and Ezequiel Rosales, who led the union during the 2006 strike.

In 2010 both FIOB and the union supported the candidate who defeated the PRI -- Gabino Cue, the former mayor of Oaxaca's capital city. That gave teachers enough political influence to insist that the Oaxaca Institute for Public Education, which administers the state schools, begin implementing their PTEO reform. It's been a fight, however. Two years ago, Claudio Gonzçlez, one of Mexico's wealthiest and most powerful businessmen and head of a national group backing standardized testing, warned Governor Cue that he had to "break the hijacking of education by Secciùn 22". He called the teachers "tyrants." Under pressure from the PRI administration in Mexico City, Oaxaca's state government is backtracking on its commitment to PTEO. That's the reason for the encampment in the zocalo.

When Cue was elected, FIOB met with him to ask that he appoint Dominguez, FIOB's former binational coordinator, to head the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. Cue then declared that his administration was dedicated to implementing the "right to not migrate." This right, a centerpiece of FIOB's political program for a decade, calls for alternatives to forced migration, including better schools, higher agricultural prices, jobs, and health care in rural areas. If people have an alternative, FIOB activists argue, they can choose freely if they want to leave home or not.

FIOB's outgoing binational coordinator, Bernardo Ramirez, says people in the U.S. don't really understand what causes migration. "The wage here in Oaxaca is 73 pesos ($6) a day," he explains, "and in some of the poorest areas people are living on 30 pesos a day. They'll eat if they produce their own corn for tortillas and beans, but they just have enough money to buy an egg. When the free trade agreement came in, they lost the market for the little they were producing. The products coming in from the U.S. had government support and subsidies. Mexicans couldn't compete with that. People see migration as their only option to survive."

In a poor state like Oaxaca it is difficult to provide the alternative. High hopes for Cue led to frustration and anger when the state couldn't deliver on many promises of economic development. FIOB has tried to encourage its own rural development projects. "We want people to produce what we eat," Ramirez says, depending less on buying processed food, or instance.

FIOB also goes into the schools, especially secondary schools where young people are already thinking of leaving, to dispel illusions that life is always better in the north. "The people who come back just talk about the good part of migration," Ramirez charges bitterly. "They don't talk about how many days they had to walk through the desert. They don't mention that seven or eight people were sleeping on the floor in the room where they were living. They don't say they were robbed or beaten while they were traveling, and the government did nothing."

Therefore, in addition to advocating the right to not migrate, FIOB also says people have the right to migrate, and to basic human and civil rights when they do. Deportations from the U.S. were on everyone's mind. FIOB members in California have been marching for months to demand a halt to the separation of families, and to support the thousands of migrants who spend time in detention centers every year. In Oaxaca, people in almost every community have had a deportation experience that has left its bitter memories.

The California section of FIOB has criticized for years U.S. proposals for immigration reform, because of their emphasis on enforcement and guest worker programs. It has called for a progressive alternative, based on labor and human rights, and at the Oaxaca meeting voted to join a U.S. network of organizations supporting it, the Dignity Campaign.

Last year FIOB activists implemented this formal position by helping Oaxacan farm workers organize an independent union in Washington State. During that fight the grower employing them, Sakuma Farms, fired several workers, denied families a space to live in the company labor camp, and tried to keep wages at the level of the state's minimum. When workers organized to protest, ranch owners tried to bring in a replacement force of guest workers from Mexico, under the H2A work visa program.

During the workers' strike last year, Ramirez went to Washington State. FIOB and the new union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia, then mobilized opposition that kept the U.S. Department of Labor from approving the farm's application. In last week's assembly one worker, Herminio Ortiz Espinoza, described his four years as a guest worker in Canada. "The bosses always yelled at us and treated us as though we were inferior," he recalled. "I had a friend who protested, and he was deported right away. After that, we were all afraid to say anything."

"We've talked with 70 percent of the people recruited in Oaxaca, and there are enormous violations of the rights of workers by guest worker programs," Ramirez adds. "We're also concerned about the Oaxacans who are already living in the United States. Sakuma Farms already had a lot of workers, very good ones. But the grower wanted to keep them from organizing, defending themselves and demanding higher wages. He knew people here in Mexico are desperate for work, and that he could make them work for the minimum. He wanted to put Oaxacans into competition with other Oaxacans. That's why in FIOB we want an immigration reform in the U.S. that doesn't have guest worker programs. Migrants need the right to come and work, but to work with rights."

At the end of the assembly, FIOB reiterated its support for the union at Sakuma Farms, and its opposition to guest worker programs. When it announced its opposition a decade ago, it was virtually alone among migrant organizations in Mexico in doing so. Today, as guest worker programs grow in the U.S., and the number of people who return with direct experience in them grows as well, so does that opposition.

As the delegates left at the end of the assembly, a number went to talk with the teachers in the zocalo, sharing their outrage over the students killed and kidnapped at the teachers' training school in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. This issue is convulsing Mexico. Banners and signs hung everywhere in the encampment, expressing revulsion at the attack.

The assembly itself accused the government of responsibility for Ayotzinapa, calling it "state terrorism that the government is implementing in order to suppress social protest." Back in the U.S., FIOB members mounted protests at consulates in Los Angeles, Santa Maria, San Diego, Oxnard, and Fresno. In a letter delivered in each, FIOB's new officers also demanded that the U.S. government recognize its responsibility "for the economic and political instability of Mexico, because it is the greatest consumer of drugs, because it supports the big corporations that produce the arms used by Mexican criminal groups, and because it imposed on Mexico the North American Free Trade Agreement and other neoliberal policies."

The letter added, "We want a Mexico with democracy, justice and liberty, where young people who are the future of our country can thrive and participate with their knowledge and skills in building a healthy, strong and dignified country."

Today people speaking Oaxaca's indigenous languages live in very distant places, separated by thousands of miles and a militarized border. But whether in the zocalo or the FIOB assembly, they increasingly function as a single community. Anti-immigrant hysteria may have come to dominate politics in the rich countries of the north, but Oaxacans are moving in the opposite direction. They are asserting the right to decide when and how crossing borders is in their interest. And instead of being simply divided by borders, they are organizing across them.

Photo: Teachers Bonifacio Garcia and Gabriel Vielma Monjaroz talk with another teacher in their encampment in the main plaza of Oaxaca. David Bacon

New York Times editorializes against U. S. anti-Cuban blockade

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 11:49:00 +0000

The New York Times first engaged with the Cuban Revolution in late 1956, when Times reporter Herbert Matthews hiked into Cuba's Sierra Maestra Mountains to interview insurgent leader Fidel Castro. Most recently, on Oct. 12, the Times called upon President Obama to "End the Embargo on Cuba."

Commenting a day later, Fidel Castro, retired now after serving as Cuba's President, asks, "[W]hy doesn't it [the Times] mention this straight away, that in no way is this society comparable to that which Harry S. Truman bequeathed to us when his ally and great public treasury looter Fulgencio Batista took power on March 10, 1952... This can never be forgotten."

Castro read the editorial as "seeking the greatest benefit for U.S. policy in a complex situation, in the midst of increasing political, economic, financial and commercial problems." He recalled his encounter 56 years ago with Matthews. Quoting from the editorial, he succeeded in communicating its actual content to Cuban readers.

For the Times, it's now "politically feasible to re-establish formal diplomatic relations and dismantle the senseless embargo." The Times sees Cuban Americans registering opposition to blockade policies and their older and more intransigent elders disappearing. Cuban trade with powers like China and Russia clearly worries the newspaper. "The embargo was an utter failure," the editors admit, presumably reflecting on the Cuban Revolution's continued survival.

The New York Times wants Cuba off the U.S. list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and it hopes that ending the blockade will improve U.S. relations with Latin America. The editorial envisions adjustments like U. S. corporations "developing the island's telecommunications network," U.S. financing of "private Cuban businesses," and allowing Cuban Americans to send more money to relatives on the island. The newspaper wants U.S. travel to the island opened up.

José Manzaneda, Cubainformación news service coordinator, believes improving the trade competitiveness of some U.S. companies is the main U.S. motive for ending economic sanctions. One editorial suggestion particularly concerns him, the idea that with the blockade gone there "would [be] opportunities to empower ordinary Cubans, gradually eroding the government's ability to control their lives." There lies the potential, he says, for "naming dissidents" [to be] sustained by the United States."

Although the editorial is "one step more along the right road," it ultimately wants to replace "Cuban social democracy" with "a model of neo-colonial capitalism subjected to the interests of the United States."

Many critics of U.S. policies have already set forth particular objections to the blockade that are ignored in the editorial, for example, the blockade's cruelty, illegality, and even immorality; international disapproval registered through UN General Assembly resolutions; and continuing imprisonment of three of the Cuban Five political prisoners.

The editorial allows as how, "Fully ending the embargo will require Congress's approval." Indeed, legislation remains in force subjecting third-country corporations to U.S. penalties if they export goods to Cuba that contain U.S. components or were produced with U.S. financing. According to U.S. law, ships calling at Cuban ports may not dock in the United States for the following six months. And humanitarian agencies and third-country financial institutions dealing with Cuba regularly face U.S. sanctions if they handle U.S. dollars.

The Times wonders if a U.S. opening to Cuba might not lead to U.S. citizen Alan Gross's release from a Cuban jail. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had funded Gross's delivery of high-technology communications equipment to private citizens in Cuba, a known illegal activity. That's maybe why the newspaper identifies him as "an American development contractor." It gets low marks for fact-checking.

USAID actually funded Developmental Alternatives Inc. (DAI) to pay and supply Gross. A redacted copy of DAI's proposal to USAID for launching an anti-Cuban subversion program involving Gross appeared recently on reporter Tracey Eaton's website. DAI's mission, and so too with Gross, was "to facilitate a democratic transition in Cuba through targeted support to Cuban civil society [and] to bolster the effectiveness of independent voices within Cuba.

Overall, and unsurprisingly, the New York Times takes on the U.S. blockade in piecemeal fashion. Any demand for Congress to act, for example, is not on the agenda.

Reporter Herbert Matthews had a hand in some of that reluctance. In early 1957 he gave the lie to the Batista dictatorship by revealing that Fidel Castro was still alive. He indicated Castro's small force was making gains and that Batista's army was in trouble. Then with the victory of the Revolution two years later and the continuing sway of U.S. anti-communism, criticism emerged of Matthew's favorable reporting on the guerrillas and his subsequent association with the newspaper. Caution on Cuba became the rule thereafter for the New York Times.

Photo: Franklin Reyes/AP

Ukraine Elections: Free and democratic?

Tue, 28 Oct 2014 11:50:00 +0000

I lived in Chicago, Illinois for 35 years and was active in that city's politics for the whole time. I saw some pretty strange electoral practices, but nothing to compare with the legislative "elections" that happened on Sunday, October 26, in Ukraine.

The official results are not to be announced until this week some time. Ukraine also has a complicated system of legislative elections whereby some legislators are elected from single member constituencies and others from party lists. So we have only an approximate idea of what the new Rada, as the legislature is called, will look like.

It would appear, based on exit polls, that the political parties headed by President Petro Poroshenko (the "Poroshenko Bloc") and caretaker Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk (the So-called "People's Front") got the largest share of the vote, estimated at 21.52 percent and 21.94 percent respectively. Third in line was the church-oriented Self Reliance Party with 11.09 percent. The Fatherland Party of former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko is greatly reduced, down to 5.67 percent. Former President Yanukovych's Party of the Regions, which won the most seats in 2012, is gone, to some extent being replaced by a small loosely organized "Opposition" grouping (9.61 percent). The far-right Svoboda may or may not have received enough votes to enter the legislature. The Communist Party of Ukraine, which had 32 seats after the 2012 elections, is now completely absent from the chamber. The fascist Right Sektor also did not meet the five percent threshold for seats in the Rada.

Why did the Communist Party of the Ukraine, which in the last elections won 32 seats with 13.18 percent of the overall popular vote suddenly disappear from the parliament entirely?

First of all the Crimean Peninsula seceded from Ukraine and was annexed by Russia. Crimea had been a major Communist Party stronghold.

Secondly, the Communists were also strong in Eastern Ukraine, particularly in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces, where the Russian speaking population predominates. But both of these provinces, have effectively separated from Ukraine, and decided not to participate in the October 26 poll, choosing instead to run their own elections on November 2. So turnout for the Sunday election was extremely low in the East.

But repression also played a role. Sectors of the ultra-right with fascist and Nazi origins were allowed to run riot by the "respectable" conservatives who took over the Ukrainian government in February. Two groups coming out of the far west of the country, Svoboda ("Freedom" and Pravy Sektor ("Right Sector") have been on the rampage all year, not confining themselves to knocking down statues of Lenin but also to physically attacking communists and others that they consider "unpatriotic." Their heroes are Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevich, known for their collaboration with Hitler's Germany during World War II. Although the subservient corporate press in Europe and the United States tries to play down the fascist roots of these groups as mere "Russian propaganda," they have shown their fascist roots in word and deed, over and over again. It was these groups that, by armed action, destroyed a compromise settlement that had been worked out between Ukrainian political factions and the European Union that might have avoided the thousands of deaths that have occurred since the protests in Kiev took a violent turn in February.

Odessa on the Black Sea had also been a stronghold of the Communist Party. On May 2, fascist elements trapped numbers of opponents of the Kiev regime in the Trade Union House in that historic city, and burned or beat them to death. A number of communists lost their lives.

The Communist Party's legally elected deputies were thrown out of the Rada through a tricky legal maneuver in July. The party is being prosecuted for unpatriotic behavior, and there is a threat that party members will be stripped of government positions in the famous "lustration" process now being advocated.

As a result of these things and of the shelling and bombing of civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk, tens of thousands of refugees have streamed eastward from Ukraine to Rostov-on-Don Province in Russia and points east. Whether they might return, is at this point just a matter of conjecture.

In spite of these multiple obstacles to a fair election, the U.S. State Department hailed the process as free and fair.

So the parties that officially support the integration of Ukraine into the European Union are now in full control. Already the corporate vultures are circulating. Workers in Ukraine will now feel the full brunt of the policies of austerity, deregulation, union busting and privatization that have been imposed by the Troika (International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank and European Commission) on the poor countries of Europe, leading to years of mass protests.

And then there's the matter of NATO.

Photo: Darth Vader, previously known as Viktor Shevchenko, the leader of the Ukrainian Internet Party, waits to receive his ballot papers at polling station during parliamentary elections in Kiev Oct. 26. Efrem Lukatsky/Associated Press

Venezuelan Communist youth group attacked, right wingers blamed

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 12:36:00 +0000

Members of the Communist Youth of Venezuela (JCV) had just finished publicity work at 2:30 a.m. on Oct. 21 when incendiary devices, launched from different points, struck the façade of their headquarters building in Caracas. Evidently the deadly projectiles also entered the building, and the activists extinguished the fire in their meeting room that resulted. None were injured. They alerted firefighting and police authorities.

The attack followed by three weeks the murder in Caracas of young, charismatic socialist National Assembly delegate, Robert Serra. Colombian paramilitaries are implicated in that assassination.

The building under fire bomb attack, in the Artigas section of Caracas, serves as both JCV headquarters and offices of a local branch of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV).

That same day the National JCV Executive Commission issued a statement saying: "This deed occurs within the framework of violence imposed by fascism since February of this year carried out by mercenaries and paramilitaries serving the extreme, pro-imperialist right." The reference is to street protests prevailing from February through June, 2014 at the hands of well-funded, well- prepared right-wing youths opposed to the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro. An estimated 50 people were killed.

"Their motive is precisely to interject terror and try to demobilize the combative, revolutionary Venezuelan student movement."

Also that day the PCV Political Bureau (PB), having met with the National JCV Executive Commission, issued an "official note" which said, in part: The attack serves "to corroborate repeated indications noted by Communist leaders of the development of a plan by the most reactionary sectors of the right to frighten, demoralize, and hit at forces of the revolutionary people's movement." The Political Bureau demanded a "speedy investigation and clarification of this deed, and identification and punishment of those who are materially and intellectually responsible."

Lastly, the PB alerted the "PCV, JCV, and other revolutionary militants" that "we fight decisively for the defense and deepening of process of changes." We must "strengthen our revolutionary vigilance, our conviction in the justice of our cause and our capacity to organize, mobilize, and effectively respond against attacks and provocations of the pro-imperialist right."

President Maduro both condemned the attack and called "upon political forces of this country" to do the same. The object, he said, "was to bring our country into an atmosphere of confrontations and hatred that leads to chaos." Ernesto Villegas, a vice president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, communicated his party's solidarity with Venezuelan Communists.

The PCV and JCV received messages of solidarity from communist parties in Chile, Spain, Greece, Mexico, and the United States. In its communication, the CPUSA cited, "horror and indignation" at the incident. The CPUSA expressed concern that" "individuals and organizations in our country have been working to to demonize the Bolivarian Movement in Venezuela and other nations in the Hemisphere with a view to facilitating the destabilization of these countries and effectuating 'regime change.'"

"We demand that all these activities cease," the letter added.

Photo: Building that serves as headquarters for the Communist youth organization in Caracas. Note burn marks left by the bomb. Photo by Yury Weky

Left biggest winner in Uruguay election, but runoff needed

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 11:24:00 +0000

A preliminary calculation of the outcome of Uruguay's presidential elections on Oct. 26 show the left wing "Broad Front" candidate, former President Tabaré Vazquez, getting the highest number of votes at 46 percent, but he faces a runoff election on November 30 against the runner up, the right wing National Party's Luis Lacalle Pou, who got 31 percent.

Pedro Bordaberry of the conservative "Colorado" ("Red") party trailed with 13 percent. Eleven other candidates got much smaller votes. It is expected that the Colorados will support Lacalle Pou in the runoff.

Both Lacalle Pou and Bordaberry are sons of former right-wing presidents of Uruguay. Whoever wins the runoff will succeed incumbent President José "Pepe" Mujica, who belongs to the same left front formation as Vazquez.

Pepe Mujica, a former left wing guerrilla fighter, is extremely respected and popular in Uruguay and beyond, for his integrity, abstemious lifestyle and daringly progressive policies, but the country's constitutionally mandated term limits laws don't allow anybody to serve two consecutive terms. Tabaré Vasquez was president from 2005 to 2010 and was instrumental in distancing his country from U.S. hegemony while befriending Cuba and Venezuela. This enraged the traditional right-wing politicians, especially Bordaberry who is the son of the later former dictator Juan Maria Bordaberry, who, thanks to Vasquez and his colleagues, served prison time for his abuses when in power (he died in 2011). Vazquez had, in turn, succeeded another right-wing Colorado, Jorge Batlle Ibáñez.

The Broad Front alliance, which brought about the election of Vasquez and then of Mujica, includes eleven political parties including the Communist Party of Uruguay and the Socialist Party of Uruguay. During the dictatorship of which Bordaberry senior was part, a number of communists and other left wing activists were murdered by the authorities, who were working in conjunction with other Latin American dictators and the United States in "Operation Condor."

Lacalle Pau and Bordaberry, both sons of right-wing former presidents, find themselves toe to toe with people their fathers did their best to crush.

Some of Mujica's policies have been daring and have not had universal support in Uruguay. The ultra-right calls him a child murderer because on the abortion issue, he supported decriminalization. He also decriminalized marijuana which enraged the right as well. And he integrated Uruguay into the "Bolivarian" process of economic and political relations, which meant close coordination with people hated by the right, including Cuba's Raul Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro.

Mujica also agreed that Uruguay would take in six prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, thus helping eliminate a headache for the Obama administration. He asked, in return, that the United States free the five Cuban anti-terrorism fighters; this has not happened however. The bringing of such people to Uruguay did not get total popular support.

So in Uruguay, the presidential runoff is both a family matter and an ideological confrontation.

Photo: Tabaré Vazquez. AP

Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff re-elected in close vote

Mon, 27 Oct 2014 10:58:00 +0000

The incumbent president, Dilma Rousseff, of the left leaning Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT) won a close election on Sunday, defeating right winger Aecio Neves, of the so-called Social Democratic Party (PSDB) by a margin of about three million votes, or 51.56 percent to 48.52 percent in this huge country of 200 million people

Rousseff won most of Brazil's 26 states including Minas Gerais, Neves' home state where she was the governor from 2003 to 2010. Neves did well in a band of states in the West and South of the country, where the population is wealthier and predominantly of European ancestry, while Rousseff did well in the East and North, where there is a higher proportion of people of African and mixed African and European ancestry.

Immediately, the "Bolivarian" left in Latin America from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego breathed a massive sigh of relief, while the stock market donned mourning. Had Rousseff and her allies, which include the Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Comunista do Brasil) lost, it would be a severe blow to efforts by the left to wean the Latin America and the Caribbean countries away from the economic, political and cultural hegemony of the United States.

Brazil is the second most populous country in the Western Hemisphere after the United States, and the fifth in the world. It is one of the most industrialized countries in the region and a major supplier of oil. Although it is not a member of the most radical group of hemispheric states, the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America), it is a key member of UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) and MERCOSUR (Common Market of the South), as well as CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) and other groupings. It plays a vital role in the developing Bank of the South.

This banking institution is supposed to develop to the point of replacing the International Monetary Fund and World Bank as sources of financing for development projects among participating countries, without the imposition of neo-liberal policies of austerity, privatization, deregulation and rigged "free" trade as a condition for help. Brazil is also a key member of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group of emerging economies which is seen as a counterpoise to the overweening power of the U.S.A. and the European Union, and which is also creating its own alternative development bank.

Neves announced that he would pull back from the Bolivarian economic integration plan and move toward the Pacific Alliance, a grouping of mostly right wing governed countries whose trade concepts are neo-liberal.

In the first round of the elections on Oct. 5, Rousseff did not get the 50 percent needed to avoid a runoff. After Rousseff and Neves emerged as the two candidates in the runoff, there was a scramble to get the support of other parties and candidates. Environmental activist Marina Silva, a woman of humble, mixed African and European origins, who had been the candidate of the Socialist Party after their original candidate, Eduardo Campos, was killed in an airplane accident, finally decided to endorse Neves, as did the leadership of the Socialist Party. However, a number of Socialist Party leaders, including outgoing party leader Roberto Amaral, were scandalized by this action, which they described as a betrayal.

It is likely that most left-wing voters ended up voting for Rousseff in appreciation of the massive improvements in the life of workingclass people which have occurred during her presidency and that of her Workers' Party predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, or "Lula."

The falloff of the vote for Rousseff since her first election in 2011 can be attributed to several things: There is currently a sharp worldwide drop in the price of oil, a major Brazilian export, which has led to an economic slump. There were riots last year over the quantity of money that the government was spending on the FIFA soccer championships. While poverty has been drastically reduced, health, education and transportation services urgently need improvement.

There have also been corruption scandals, including late-breaking allegations that the national oil company, PETROBRAS, had channeled money to the PT. But at end, the government's scandals were balanced by those of the opposition, while workingclass and poor Brazilians remembered what life was like when Neves' PSDB was last in power, and realized how much their lives have been improved with the generous social welfare programs of the Lula-Dilma team, such as the Bolsa Familiar or Family Allowance, which is a direct cash transfer program that has sharply cut poverty and malnutrition in Brazil, affirmative action in college admissions and many other things.

It will not be easy for Dilma Rousseff to govern; the Congress will be split even more than it was before with several small new parties, some of which are likely to offer themselves up to either the government or the opposition (which controls a number of governorships) on a crassly materialistic basis.

Photo: Dilma Rousseff acknowledging her election in Brazil. Eraldo Peres/AP

Germany continues along austerity track

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:55:00 +0000

BERLIN - A long, warm, coatless autumn made some wonder whether climate change might cancel winter this year in a reverse of the canceled summer two centuries ago in a year called "1800-and-froze-to-death." But no, I now read that the weather will change after all. Northern blasts may soon be here.

Perhaps economically as well? Two French economy ministers clearly felt the chill when visiting Berlin on October 20^th, hoping to thaw out Angela Merkel's icy "austerity policy". Burdened with a 4.3 percent French budget deficit, above the European Union's 3 percent limit, and with President Hollande's popularity nearing the freezing point, these politicians called for a deal: If Germany would invest 50 billion Euros in projects to relieve Europe's sagging economy, France would cut its budget by 50 billion Euros.

But German leaders slapped down such a trade-off, tightly clutching their austerity policies. Sigmar Gabriel, Merkel's Minister of Economics (but, at least according to his membership card, also a Social Democrat), said more private investments by France in areas like research were better than "flash-in-the-pan schemes." France should rather see about cutting its deficit, say by slicing up more labor laws. Noting who held the better cards, Monsieur le ministre soon ate crow: "I wasn't demanding anything," he whined. "It was just a suggestion."

For Sahra Wagenknecht, however, vice-chair of the Left Party in the Bundestag, it was truly tragic "when it doesn't even occur to a Social Democratic economics minister that sorely-needed investments in infrastructure and education could be made if only taxes on the upper class were increased." That could be a more promising way to head off a threatening downturn with a further growth of poverty in Europe, even in relatively prosperous Germany.

But back to the subject of crow. I'm not referring here to the giant swarms of rooks, a European species of crow, which always spend autumns and winters in Germany (it's the South to them) and every evening soar dramatically to night-time roosting areas in the big Tiergarten park, then spread out in the morning to dig for food on every larger lawn. Hitchcock fans and many others fear or hate the dark-feathered birds. I welcome them here and am reminded of the many thousands of human migrants, fleeing from barren or bloody homelands (often in northern Africa or the Near East), hoping to find food and shelter here, at least temporarily, but also feared or hated by the ignorant.

But "eating crow" has nothing to do with these tough rooks, but rather with tough politics in the east German state of Thuringia. In September elections there, right-wing Christian Democrats came in first (33.5 percent), as every time since GDR rule ended in 1990. For the past five years they shared power with the Social Democrats (SPD) as junior partners. But for the latter, alas, the partnership was very unlucky, costing them a third of their voters and the bitter result, a paltry 12.4 percent, offered good grounds for divorce. They could renew this deal with just a 1-seat majority, but did not like the idea.

Pushing well ahead, in second place, was the LEFT party with 28.2 percent. Now if the Social Democrats and the little Greens party (with 5.7 percent) joined hands with the LEFT they could also win a majority of exactly one seat in the legislature, here again just enough to rule the roost. Was that a "lesser evil"?

Where does eating crow come in? Twice on this menu. There have been several coalitions between Social Democrats (SPD) and the LEFT, always in eastern Germany and always with the SPD stronger and the LEFT as junior partner; one such in Brandenburg is currently being renewed. But this time, for the very first time, the LEFT would be on top so the minister-president would be their man, Bodo Ramelow, 58, a West German labor official who moved eastwards after the Wall came down.

Thus the despised, castigated, reviled LEFT party would finally be represented right up there in the Upper House in Berlin (Bundesrat) with the fifteen other state bosses. Could the SPD and the Greens swallow leadership from this "offspring of the party which once ruled East Germany"? Some people objected loudly; most angrily the Christian Democratic woman who has ruled the roost till now and would thus be degraded, with her fellow CDU deputies, to the chillier seats in the opposition section of the legislature (and right next to the even further rightist deputies of the new "Alternative for Germany" party, whose campaign, aimed at "those foreigners", at gays and at one another, had won 10.6 percent of the voters and eleven seats. But they were still pariahs and carefully avoided).

Would the SPD agree to be a junior partner of the LEFT? The same Minister Gabriel who had said "Non" to the French now said "oui" to his party people in Thuringia; each state must decide for itself. On October 21^st the SPD leadership council in Thuringia voted to give it a try, unanimously! They have now put it to the entire party membership to decide - by November 4^th. It looks as if they and the Greens will say Yes; the new table for three seems likely to set an historic precedent in Germany.

But here comes a dish of crow again, a rather different species, but for some just as hard to eat! The SPD and Greens, though in the minority, have insisted on conditions for providing the LEFT such a chance. The Greens, for example, demand at least two cabinet seats. Far more controversially, they insist that in the coalition's program preamble the LEFT must agree that the GDR was an "Unrechtsstaat", which translates as "unjust state" or "unlawful state". Otherwise they won't play!

For most LEFT leaders in Thuringia this is no big problem. They want to lead a state government, and promise many improvements like doing away with a traditional West German "tracking system" separating "better pupils" planning on college from "weaker pupils" who aren't - mostly from working-class and immigrant families. They hope to do more for those with low-paid, precarious and temp jobs - or no jobs. Like the Greens they want ecological improvements. Ramelow, knowing the prejudices of fellow West Germans against the LEFT, hopes to "move a step further in dismantling Cold War thinking." So most now agree to an official rejection of the GDR in a coalition program.

But to some in the LEFT party this is "eating crow" and hardly digestible. Almost no one denies that there was plenty of injustice in the GDR. Elections were surely a farce; censorship prevailed in the media and to a varying degree in films and books. There was certainly repression. But public policy in almost every field of everyday life aimed at improving the lives of working people, students, children and pensioners, with special attention to women's rights. These humane policies, in contrast with West Germany then and all Germany today, make any sharp categorization as "just" or "unjust" very relative and very complex.

After all, West Germany outlawed the Communist Party and leftwing organizations; it spied on their members, dragged them to court, jailed some and barred thousands from their jobs. Its ruling class, in contrast with the GDR, was filled to the brim with Nazis in every field, even presidents and a chancellor, and it supported fascist governments in Spain and Chile and apartheid in southern Africa - also with weapons. After the GDR was gone it shipped its tanks and other weapons to Turkey to help kill Kurds (whom it now supports - unless they are left-wing Kurds living in Germany). It tolerates a situation where millions are jobless, thousands homeless, and 2.4 million children are affected by or threatened with poverty. It has bombed children and other civilians in Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. And war criminal corporations and banks which built up Hitler and made billions from war and slave labor - Krupp, BASF, Daimler, the Deutsche Bank - are so close to Merkel's government that it does their bidding; squeezing the poor in Spain, forcing unneeded tanks and submarines onto impoverished Greece, diluting plans to reduce carbon emissions.

Where are the lines between "just states" and "unjust states"? Opponents of such terminology warn that whenever leaders of the LEFT do eat crow new demands are made to grovel even lower and swallow even more. They insist that the entire exercise, stressed most by the once rebellious Greens, really aims at equating the GDR with the Nazi state and discrediting its main feature which, however twisted or mismanaged in many ways, was basically an attempt to abolish war, exploitation and poverty, to build socialism. This explains the many attacks against the LEFT party; these should remain its basic goals. And, these militants insist, one compromise can easily lead to another and yet another, just as it once did with the Greens and, a long, long time ago, with the SPD.

Are these critics too fearful, too radical? Isn't it worth taking a chance with this new alliance, balancing delicately on a single seat majority in the legislature, hence always threatened by blackmail attempts, but with hopes of demonstrating what the LEFT can do when it leads in at least one of Germany's 16 states? The future is not now full of sunshine; two big strikes - airline pilots and railroad engineers - have rocked the country.

Is militancy rising? Can the LEFT join - or even lead it? A large leftist party in Germany is a source of badly needed strength and inspiration all over Europe - if it defies the dangers and remains a fighting party. At the moment it looks as if a risk will be taken. Will it succeed? Will it be possible, in 2015, to avoid ending in a political year that "froze to death"?

Photo: Bodo Ramelow, top candidate of German party Die Linke for the regional parliament elections in Thuringia, talks to journalists after the elections, Sept. 14, 2014. (AP Photo/Jens Meyer)

Ebola and the challenge to humanity

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 14:59:00 +0000

Editor's note: President of Cuba Raul Castro opened the Special ALBA Summit on Ebola, initiated by Venezuela President Nicholas Maduro, hosted in Havana. His welcome speech is published below.

Cuba was the first country in the world to answer the urgent call for medical personnel to help stop the spread of Ebola in West Africa by sending 165 doctors, nurses and health care professionals to Sierra Leone. Cuba has been praised for "punching far above its weight" in its commitment, compared to the United States and other wealthy nations. Praise comes from voices as diverse as the United Nations to the New York Times.

ALBA stands for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, a trade group with a solidarity ethos, established in 2004 by Cuba and Venezuela. There are now nine ALBA member countries and several observer nations. In responding to the growing international crisis, nations of Latin America and the Caribbean are convening in Cuba to discuss how to stem the disaster in West Africa through international cooperation.

Ebola and the challenge to humanity

A dreadful epidemic is advancing today on our fraternal peoples of Africa, and threatening us all. A high number of cases have been diagnosed with Ebola and many people have perished from the disease in several countries, including two outside the African continent.

This poses a huge challenge to humanity, one that should be met with utmost urgency. The action of the international community as a whole, under the leadership of the World Health Organization, the Pan American Health Organization and the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response, is much needed.

As part of the melting pot of Latin American and Caribbean cultures, African blood flows through the veins of "Our America," contributed by those who fought for independence and helped in the creation of wealth in many of our countries and others, the United States included.

Africa and Cuba are bound together by deep affection. Over 76,000 Cuban collaborators have rendered health services in 39 countries, while 45 nations have had 3,392 physicians trained in Cuba absolutely free of charge.

At the moment, more than 4,000 Cuban health care collaborators are working in 32 African countries and, as our Public Health minister will explain; they are all joining in the preventive effort against Ebola.

On Oct. 1, in response to a request from the director general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Margaret Chan, and UN Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, a specialized Cuban medical brigade traveled to Sierra Leone to take part in the struggle against that epidemic; and Tuesday, Oct. 21, two other Cuban brigades, whose leaders are already in the field, will be leaving for Liberia and Guinea.

The numerous alerts and concerns recently manifested over the insufficient resources contributed and the pace of the actions are a reflection of the growing universal awareness on the necessity to move ahead promptly in order to avoid a humanitarian crisis of unpredictable consequences.

I stand convinced that if this threat is not held back and resolved in West Africa, through an immediate and effective international response, with sufficient resources and coordinated by the World Health Organization and the United Nations, it may evolve into one of the gravest pandemics in the history of mankind.

Actually, such a noble and urgent endeavor demands the indispensable commitment and dedication of every nation in the world, to the extent of everyone's possibilities.

We are of the view that this grave problem should not be politicized to avoid the risk of losing track of the main objective, which is helping to confront the epidemic in Africa and to prevent its expansion to other regions.

Following my conversation with the UN secretary general, Sept. 5, instructions were given to our representatives in events called by the World Health Organization and the United Nations, to reaffirm that Cuba is willing work side by side with every country, including the United States.

The modest experience accumulated by the Cuban health care system indicates that an integrating disposition is required, along with the proper organization, planning and coordination, not only of the clinical and healing work but also of preventive measures. An inescapable complementation to this would be the systemic and permanent labors of the specialists who shall exercise great discipline and seriousness in the observation of the medical protocols established. In the course of this meeting, we shall discuss the practical features of this matter.

In order to avoid being affected by the virus, we should prepare ourselves intensively, work together throughout the Americas on preventive measures, and be ready to deal with the disease and prevent its dissemination.

We wish to submit to the consideration of the member countries of ALBA and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) some collective proposals of cooperation that may help in training the health care personnel and designing and implementing comprehensive and effective preventive measures, giving a priority to Haiti and the Caribbean countries; we should all assist the most vulnerable states.

At the same time, we invite the countries of North America to also cooperate in this endeavor.

If the respective governments would agree, our health care collaborators currently working in Latin America and the Caribbean, could support, to the extent of their capabilities, the preventive actions and the training of local personnel, as well as offer advisory.

In summary, we have 45,952 Cuban health care collaborators working in 25 countries of Our America, 23,158 of them, that is, 50.4 percent are doctors, who along with their colleagues from the continent make up a powerful force capable of meeting such a challenge.

It's worthwhile recalling that many countries of our region count on 23,944 doctors graduated in Cuban universities until today, basically in the past fifteen years.

Finally, on Dec. 14, we will host another summit in Havana to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of ALBA, the fruit of the will of our peoples in the region and of the actions of Hugo Chavez Frias and Fidel Castro Ruz. We look forward to that opportunity when we shall examine the implementation of what we agree here today.

Without further delay, we declare this Special Summit open.

Thank you, very much.

Photo: This photo taken in June shows a hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, where blood samples are tested to see if someone has the Ebola virus. Cuba has sent a medical brigade to Sierra Leone to help the struggling nation reverse the epidemic (CC).

CORRECTION: In a previous version, the author was incorrectly identified as Cuba's former president, Fidel Castro. The welcome was given by Cuba's current president Raul Castro, Fidel's brother. We regret the error.

Why the U.S. concealed its chemical weapons role in Iraq

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 14:41:00 +0000

From 2004 to 2011, the Pentagon covered up injuries to U.S. troops in Iraq from chemical weaponry supplied to Saddam Hussein by the U.S. and other countries in the 1980s, according to a disturbing, detailed report in the New York Times last week. The affected troops were often denied proper treatment, were told by higher-ups not to report the real cause of their injuries, and were denied medals for their often heroic actions in trying to decontaminate the toxic materials they had uncovered during their duties in Iraq.

Why the mistreatment of U.S. soldiers, and why the cover-up?

The Bush administration claimed, in the lead-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to Americans. But as we know, there were no nuclear weapons, and the actual chemical weapons that U.S. troops encountered in Iraq - artillery shells, bombs, and other weaponry containing sarin, mustard and nerve gas - were rusting leftovers from the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, buried or dumped in places like Saddam Hussein's notorious Al Muthanna security center.

That area is now controlled by the so-called Islamic State, raising the possibility that the vicious group could use the chemicals in its onslaught against Iraq and Syria.

In the Times article, headlined "The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons," reporter C. J. Chivers wrote, "The United States had gone to war declaring it must destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, American troops gradually found and ultimately suffered from the remnants of long-abandoned programs, built in close collaboration with the West."

This is confirmed in a 2011 draft report by Anthony Cordesman and others at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on U.S. competition with Iran, which said the Iran-Iraq war became "the focal point of U.S.-Iranian competition," with the following result: "Iraq is removed from list of states sponsoring terrorism (1982) and the US begins arming Iraq against Iran, including 'dual-use' technology, and industrial goods for missile, chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and weapons."

A People's World article by Tim Wheeler in 2002 noted the role of Cold War and oil politics in the Reagan administration's actions.

In 2003, a Washington Post article by reporter Michael Dobbs was headlined "U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup Trade in Chemical Arms; Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds." The article appears to be no longer available at the Washington Post website, but is available here.

Dobbs reported that U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein "included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors." Dobbs called it "a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy ... in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators" to advance a certain agenda.

The agenda in this case was the U.S. perception that the 1979 revolution in Iran and ascendancy of extremist Shiite Islamism there threatened "the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan - a Middle East version of the domino theory in Southeast Asia."

"That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner" for the U.S., Dobbs wrote.

The 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors.

Nevertheless, Dobbs reported, "The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague."

Last week's Times article mentions two U.S. firms that in 1987 supplied "hundreds of tons" of a chemical that can be used to make toxic mustard gas. Documentation attached to the article identifies the firms as commercial chemical companies Technalloy Corp., then based in San Jose, Calif., in association with Cardinal Stabilizer, now Cardinal Chemicals, based in North Carolina, and Alcolac International, then based in Baltimore.

But the Times article does not mention Dow Chemical (of Agent Orange notoriety), which in 1988 sold $1.5 million worth of highly toxic pesticides to Iraq, according to Dobbs. Dow claimed these chemicals could not be "weaponized."

Another well-known firm, Bechtel Corp., served from 1988 to 1990 as engineering consultant for a $2 billion Iraqi military-related petrochemical complex being built by the Saddam Hussein regime.

They were among a long list of companies who received U.S. government licenses to export such "dual use" chemicals, equipment and services to the Iraqi dictatorship.

In addition to war with Iran, the Saddam Hussein regime was battling resistance to its rule in Iraq's Kurdish region. Just months after the 1987 chemical shipments, in March 1988, the Iraqi air force carried out a massive chemical attack against the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja, in which some 5,000 men, women and children were killed.

Following the 1990-1991 Gulf War, in October 1992 the Senate Banking Committee held an investigation into what became known as Gulf War syndrome, illnesses suffered by U.S. soldiers in the 1990-1991 war with Iraq, and into the massive U.S. military-related exports to Saddam Hussein. The committee found that: "The United States provided the Government of Iraq with 'dual use' licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological, and missile- system programs, including: chemical warfare agent precursors; chemical warfare agent production facility plans and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans); chemical warhead filling equipment; biological warfare related materials; missile fabrication equipment; and, missile-system guidance equipment."

Yet then-President George H.W. Bush had flatly claimed on several occasions during that year's presidential election campaign that the U.S. had not "enhanced" Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical or biological weapons capability. To admit to the actual U.S. role would have meant admitting to violation of international law and humanitarian principles by the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and to callous mistreatment of U.S. military personnel as part of an effort to conceal those actions. The Pentagon long refused to recognize Gulf War syndrome, suffered by thousands of U.S. troops, that is widely believed to be a result of exposure to toxic chemicals in the war.

No wonder that a decade later, his son, President George W. Bush, and top administration officials, many of whom had served under Reagan and Bush I, again tried to cover up the U.S. role as chemical weapons merchants for Saddam Hussein, and again callously mistreated U.S. soldiers suffering the effects of those chemicals.

Photo: An Iranian soldier wearing a gas mask during the Iran-Iraq War. Wikipedia

Mexico student teachers still missing, reverberations continue

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 14:53:00 +0000

Forty-three students kidnapped by police acting in cahoots with a criminal gang on September 26 are still missing, and the incident is causing serious reverberations throughout the Mexican body politic.

The students, from the Raul Isidro Burgos Rural Normal School at Ayotzinapa, state of Guerrero, a training institution for rural teachers, were taken prisoner in the small city of Iguala after police stopped them at gunpoint. They had been in Iguala to raise funds for their school, and commandeered three buses to take them back to Ayotzinapa at the end of the day. Three students and three passers-by were killed in the shooting at the buses (the students were unarmed), and some students escaped. One student was found dead. Forty-three remain missing. At first, it was thought that their bodies, dismembered and burned, were among those found in some mass graves outside Iguala, where local farm families say gangsters often bury their victims. However, at writing, the Mexican attorney general says that the bodies examined so far are not those of the students. However, everybody in Mexico knows that this poor state on the Pacific Coast has been the site of massive violence for many years, and that finding mass graves here and there is not uncommon either in Guerrero or elsewhere in Mexico.

There is a strong probability the 43 are dead; however, in other cases, kidnapped people have been held for ransom (paid by their families), enslaved by drug gangs or held secretly by police or military. So the families are saying "they took them away alive, we want them back alive".

The incident has led to large-scale protests all over Mexico and beyond. In Chilpancingo, the Guerrero state capital, protesters set fire to the government's main building. In San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, silent, disciplined rows of some 15 to 20,000 fighters from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation marched through the town.

In the Mexican Congress and among the public, government statements about the incident are being met with scorn. The municipal president (mayor) of Iguala, his wife and the police chief have fled, some think tipped off that they were about to be arrested. In the political establishment, the incident is being blamed on the "rural normal school" teacher training system itself, which was set up in the 1930s by the leftist president, Lazaro Cardenas del Rio. The schools recruit poor rural students who would not otherwise be able to attend universities, and train them to teach in impoverished rural villages, where the people often do not speak Spanish but rather indigenous languages. These "escuelas normales rurales" have thus become centers of innovation in pedagogy and particularly in bilingual methods. But they are also centers of organizing for social justice, which makes them a threat to the powerful. It is not known whether, in fact, the attack on the Ayotzinapa students, carried out police allied with a drug cartel, Guerreros Unidos (United Warriors) was in reality a terrorist action against people seen as future mass leaders of Mexico's rural poor. One of the heads of the gang, the authorities say, has committed suicide when surrounded, so his lips are sealed. Also, some of the attack on the students happened within earshot of an army base, whose commanders did not see fit to intervene or investigate.

There are political implications for the Mexican left. Both mayor Jose Luis Abarca and governor Angel Aguirre Rivero belong to the leftish Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), whose leadership has to have signed off on their candidacies. Their affiliation is with the "New Left" ("Nueva Izquierda) current in the PRD considered to be most conservative and closest to President Enrique Peña Nieto's PRI, or Revolutionary Institutional Party. The PRD was founded in 1989 by dissident elements of the PRI along with some from the Mexican Communist Party and others, in the wake of the 1988 presidential elections that were stolen from President Cardenas's son, Cuauhtémoc Carenas Solorzano. But in recent years there has been a falling away of support from the PRD, especially after the leaders of the PRD, the PRI and the right wing National Action Party, or PAN, signed the "Pact for Mexico" in December 2012, widely seen as being an agreement to cooperate in the imposition of neo-liberal policies, including the "educational reform" the Ayotzinapa students have been protesting. Even though the PRD subsequently resigned from the "Pact", the original signing is seen as a major betrayal, and has accelerated the movement of many PRD people to the new National Renovation Movement, MORENA, headed by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the PRD presidential candidate in 2006 and 2012.

This is why, when, on October 8, Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, now 80, tried to participate in one of the demonstrations in Mexico City, he was booed and roughed up.

Photo: A member the marching band from the rural teachers school with a flower on his uniform marches to protest the disappearance of 43 of their students, in Chilpancingo, Mexico, Oct. 14. According to Mexico's attorney general none of the missing students were among the bodies found in the first set of mass graves outside the town. Authorities have said police involved in "disappearing" the students were working in conjunction with a local drug gang. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Ukraine fascists turn against right-wing government

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 13:03:00 +0000

On Monday October 14, thousands of ultra-rightist Ukrainian protesters besieged the national parliament in Kiev, attacking police guards and injuring 15 of them. About 50 protesters are reported to have been arrested.

The demands of the protesters, who were led by the fascist Svoboda Party and the equally extremist Right Sector , Pravy Sektor, were for recognition of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought during World War II, mostly on the German side, to be recognized as a patriotic force. This is a fight that has been going forth in Ukraine since it got its independence when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991. In 2010 then President Victor Yushchenko acceded to the demands from the ultra right and gave the UPA the status they were demanding. The practical implication of this is that surviving UPA fighters would be eligible for pensions, besides being officially recognized by the government as patriots and heroes. However, a later court decision reversed Yuschenko's decision. When, this spring President Victor Yanukovych was overthrown by a coup in which the ultra-right groups played a major part, the issue came to the fore again.

The violence erupted when the Parliament did not pass the bill.

The UPA was an armed group which grew out of OUN-B, a Ukrainian ultra-right nationalist movement based in the area of the Western Ukraine (Galicia and Volhynia) formerly part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. This region was given to Poland in the territorial rearrangements after World War I. The Polish regime tried to "Polonize" the region by bringing in Polish settlers and suppressing the Ukrainian culture and language. This made possible the rise of Ukrainian nationalism. OUN, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, was the main organization, and a more extreme and violent split off was OUN-B, headed by Stepan Bandera. Bandera's organization carried out terrorist acts against the Polish political leadership and the Polish civilian population in Galicia.

Bandera was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, but when Nazi Germany invaded Poland at the beginning of the Second World War, Bandera was freed. He and his organization then tried to ally themselves with Germany so as to achieve independence for the whole of Ukraine. Initially, in the German view, Ukrainians were just as much "Untermenschen" as were Poles, so Bandera was jailed again. There were some violent clashes between the UPA fighters and German troop formations. But as the Soviet Army began to sweep the Wehrmacht westward, the Germans freed Bandera and used him and the UPA to fight against the Red Army.

The UPA troops struck some blows, including killing Soviet Marshal Nicolai Vatutin in 1944.

Earlier, the Bandera forces had committed atrocities against Western Ukraine's Jews and Poles, wiping out entire communities including women, children and other noncombatants. (Ethnically Ukrainian SS and police formations also were involved in these horrors). But they really hit their stride toward the end of the war, especially in the effort to ethnically cleanse Western Ukraine of Polish people. After the war officially ended, the "Banderisti" kept up action against the Soviet authorities for some time.

So the demand by the Ukrainian far right that UPA be recognized as a patriotic force essentially means that the results of World War II would be officially reinterpreted in favor of the Axis (the alliance of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan).

The far right in Ukraine has taken to marching with portraits of Bandera. They were a key shock force in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and formed armed volunteer units to fight against "separatists" in Donetsk and Lubansk, in far Eastern Ukraine. The far right was also involved in the Odessa massacre in May, and subjected communists and others on the left and center to hooligan attacks. They have been willing, so far, to play the game of the "pro-European" right-wing forces in the current Ukrainian government. But the establishment right, represented by President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arseniy Yatesenyuk, has an uneasy relationship with them.

The main goal of the former group has been to integrate Ukraine into the European Union, even though this will mean that the Ukrainian people will have to accept the austerity measures that are causing mass unrest in Greece, Portugal and Spain. Svoboda and Pravy Sektor have no interest in "being Europeans" and aim for power for themselves, based on anti-Semitic, xenophobic and authoritarian concepts. The failure of the parliament to pass legislation recognizing Bandera's followers as true Ukrainian patriots now becomes a new pretext for them.

There is a parliamentary election on October 26. Most likely, the Communist Party of Ukraine, being falsely prosecuted for "separatism", will not be allowed to run candidates. Pravy Sektor and Svoboda did not get a big vote in the presidential elections in May; we will see how they do this time.

The corporate controlled press will, no doubt, continue to downplay the neo-Nazi issue.

Photo: Demonstrators led by the fascist Svoboda Party and the equally extremist Right Sector , Pravy Sektor, protest outside the parliament in Kiev, Oct. 14, for recognition of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought during World War II, mostly on the German side, to be recognized as a patriotic force. (AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov)

Female Nobel winners are rare: One was a British communist

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 12:18:00 +0000

Malala Yousafzai, the 17-year-old Pakistani female education activist, shot and wounded but never silenced by the Taliban, became the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize recipient last week.

Few women have ever won a Nobel Prize. Of the 867 awards distributed since 1901, just 46 have gone to women.

I was researching and writing the story of another female Nobel laureate from exactly 50 years ago when I read of Malala's great news in the Morning Star.

In the autumn of 1964 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a British chemist, became one of only four women who had ever won the Nobel prize for chemistry. Her prize was awarded for her pioneering work in protein crystallography.

The prize rewarded her more than 30 years of pioneering biochemical research that helped unravel the structures of proteins, including insulin and, among many other things, advanced the control of diabetes.

Dorothy Hodgkin was born Dorothy Mary Crowfoot in 1910.

She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, but moved to Cambridge University in 1932 to work on the development of X-ray crystallography with famous communist scientist J D Bernal. The couple had a close personal and political relationship.

Over the next four years Hodgkin and Bernal produced a dozen joint crystallographic papers. They also shared a Marxist view of the world. The two were part of what at the time was often known as Red Science.

Novelist and chemist C P Snow told communist historian Eric Hobsbawm that if they took a poll of a couple of hundred of the brightest young British scientists in the mid 1930s, they would have found around 15 Communist Party members, a good 50 more on the left and a hundred more proud of their leftist views.

In 1939 Bernal wrote his book The Social Function of Science. The work focuses on the way resources were allocated to various parts of science and technology.

At the heart of Bernal's book -indeed his whole political thinking, and Hodgkin's too - is a call to organise this great human power of science to serve the many, not the few.

In 1937, Dorothy married Thomas Lionel Hodgkin although her close relationship with Bernal would continue on and off for many years.

Her published letters show that neither she, nor her husband, nor Bernal had much time for conventional relationships.

Her new husband would become an Oxford lecturer, a member of the Communist Party and an advisor to Kwame Nkrumah, who took the Gold Coast, later Ghana, to independence from British rule.

Hodgkin and her husband would spend much time with Nkrumah, often described as the Lenin of Africa, in Ghana.

In the 1950s her and her husband's communist politics would lead to her being banned from entering the US. This severely limited international research with US scientists. She was allowed just a few transatlantic visits by special permission from the CIA.

Around this time she and her old friend and mentor J D Bernal had key roles in the World Peace Council. This too brought them to the attention of the secret services on both sides of the Atlantic.

The pair worked together when the British Peace Committee attempted to host a world peace congress in Sheffield. British government obstructions caused a number of delegates to be stranded in London.

One was Pablo Picasso. At a gathering the artist drew a large dove of peace on Bernal's sitting room wall. Today the drawing can be seen at London's Wellcome Collection.

In April 1953 Hodgkin travelled from Oxford to Cambridge to see the model of the double helix structure of DNA.

Credit for the model and another Nobel Prize went to Francis Crick and James Watson, but much of the research had been carried out by another female chemist, and a close colleague of Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin.

The two had discussed Franklin's early X-ray photographs of the double helix a decade before Crick and Watson got their DNA Nobel prize. Franklin has never been given the credit she deserves for her work on DNA. Many think she should have been a third Nobel nomination along with Crick and Watson.

Hodgkin published as Dorothy Crowfoot until 1949, when she was persuaded to use her married name.

Hodgkin was always just as concerned about political and world issues as her scientific research. She was president of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs from 1976 to 1988.

Pugwash is an international organisation that brings together scientists, scholars and public figures to work toward reducing the danger of armed conflict and to seek solutions to global security threats.

It was founded in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, in 1957 by Joseph Rotblat and Bertrand Russell. Rotblat and the Pugwash Conference jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for their efforts on nuclear disarmament.

Sadly Hodgkin's reputation took a knock when she was swept into a scientific fraud involving Elena Ceausescu, the wife of the president of communist Romania.

Hodgkin wrote the foreword to the English edition of a scientific paper supposedly written by Ceausescu. Hodgkin quoted Ceausescu's "outstanding achievements" and "impressive" career.

We now know that Ceausescu never finished secondary school, never attended university, that her scientific credentials and work were a complete fraud.

All the research published under her name throughout her life was written by a team of uncredited scientists. The incident cast a dark shadow over Hodgkin's reputation as well as on science from the communist world.

As well as her Nobel Prize Hodgkin received many other honours.

Even the US forgave her communist politics. In 1958, she was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She was only the second woman to receive the Order of Merit in 1965 - the first was Florence Nightingale. Hodgkin was awarded the Soviet Union's Lenin Peace Prize in 1987. She died in 1994.

Hodgkin had some interesting, if unexpected, admirers. In the 1940s, one of her chemistry students was Margaret Roberts, who would become Prime Minister Maggie Thatcher.

Thatcher hung a portrait of Hodgkin in 10 Downing Street - probably the only communist portrait ever to grace those walls.

Malala Yousafzai has shown just how impressive a woman needs to be to win a Nobel Prize.

Fifty years ago Dorothy Hodgkin did exactly the same and she remains the only British woman to have ever won one of the science Nobel Prizes.

Let's salute these two women, half a century apart but who both demonstrate that, as a man called Mao Zedong once said, "women really do hold up half the sky" whatever the Nobel Prize judging panel may usually think.

This article was reposted from Morning Star.

Photo: AP

Duvalier: Dead but not gone

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 16:07:00 +0000

Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, responsible for the death of thousands and the theft of millions, who moved openly in the society of Haitian elites protected by the government, died on Oct. 4 a free man. He reportedly suffered a heart attack at the home of an associate in a wealthy enclave above Port-au-Prince.

Meanwhile former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who helped build the movement to drive Duvalier from power in 1986, who was twice elected president with huge majorities only to be overthrown by U.S. backed coups, and who as president created more schools in a decade than had been created in all of Haiti's previous 200 year history, is now forced to live under "house arrest," a concept unknown in Haitian law, with his home surrounded by heavily armed police wearing black ski masks. He's falsely accused of "corruption," charges levied and dismissed for the past 10 years in Haitian and Miami courts.

Baby Doc may be dead, but Duvalierism is embedded in this upside down Haiti of Bill and Hillary Clinton and their presidential puppet, Michel Martelly.

Duvalierism is embedded in the Royal Oasis Hotel, partially funded by the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund, a "symbol of the new Haïti" that now provides tourists, NGO and foreign officials an "oasis" to shield them from the lives of the overwhelming majority of Haitians.

It lives in the increasing rule by decree without parliamentary input, and federal government appointments to replace locally elected officials.

It's embedded in a Martelly administration filled with Duvalierists including former Haitian army officer David Bazile the Interior Minister, and Magalie Racine, daughter of former Tonton Macoute militia chief Madame Max Adolphe, the Youth and Sports Minister. Public Works Secretary of State Philippe Cinéas is the son of longtime Duvalierist figure Alix Cinéas. In addition Duvalier's son, Nicolas, is a close Martelly advisor.

Duvalierism is embedded in a corrupt legal system that allows Martelly to appoint Lamarre Belizaire as a judge although he was not qualified, and despite the fact the Port-au-Prince bar has banned Belizaire from practicing law for 10 years for collaboration in the arrest of attorney Andre Michel, who brought corruption charges against Martelly's wife and son. It was Belizaire who issued the house arrest warrant for Aristide and the recent warrant for Jean Nadal Aristide, arrested on October 4^th, one of the outspoken leaders of the march on September 30^th held to commemorate the 1991 coup against Aristide and to protest his house arrest.

It lives in the corruption of a $1.50 tax on money transfers and a 5 cent per minute tax on phone calls to Haiti to support "education," never ratified by or presented to Haiti's Parliament making them illegal, as most Haitians continue to face unaffordable school fees, and most Haitian teachers have not been paid for months.

It lives in Martelly's travel per diem of $20,000 a day, as his wife receives $10,000, his children $7,500, and others in his inner circle get $4,000 daily.

It lives in the destruction of encampments of tens of thousands of still homeless earthquake survivors, condemning them to a purgatory of barren land far from any basic services.

It lives in the dubious use of "eminent domain" to seize homes and properties of downtown Port-au-Prince residents under the guise of "redevelopment," to benefit Martelly cronies.

It survives in the illegal seizure of property rights of those who have lived for generations on the island of Ile a Vache, plowing down beautiful forest land to build an airport and roads to develop luxury resorts.

It's embedded in the Caracol sweatshop free trade zone, partially funded by the Clinton Foundation, constructed in the north with earthquake funds, although the earthquake didn't affect the north.

It's embedded in the creation of a new army being trained to replace the United Nations MINUSTAH occupation force - an army of dictatorship that will be used to terrorize its own people, like those men now standing in black ski masks outside the home of President Aristide. One of the most popular acts of Aristide's first administration was to disband the predatory army in 1995.

Haitians have worked tirelessly to purge their country of Duvalierism since they forced Baby Doc to flee in 1986, but like a zombie that just won't stay dead, he returned in 2011 with the blessing of Michel Martelly. Duvalierism won't die because it's embedded in an economic system controlled by international capital and imposed by an international military force, whose driving imperative is to create massive individual wealth and power for the few at the expense of the many. The gross excesses of the Duvaliers are but one example.

But Haitians do not forget the great accomplishments of the Aristide and Lavalas governments, and they're not willing to go back to the torture, murder, and rape of the Duvalier days. They protest in the streets almost daily and watch over the Aristide home in driving rain.

And from his home, Aristide continues to do exactly what he promised he would do when he returned - educate. UNIFA, the University of the Aristide Foundation, just opened for its third year with over 1000 students. The original Medical school has grown to include schools in Nursing, Law and Physical Therapy.

During the 2004 coup, the United States army closed the school and seized the grounds to make it their military headquarters. Aristide and his wife, Mildred, reopened it upon their return from forced exile. UNIFA and the Aristide Foundation headquarters serve as vibrant community centers for education and organizing. As such they present a challenge to Martelly's corrupt administration, whose brutality and vengefulness threaten not only Aristide's person and the institutions he's founded, but the essence of democracy in Haiti.

Sent by Haiti Action Committee

www.haitisolidarity.net and on FACEBOOK

Photo: A family next to their few belongings after being evicted from a camp for displaced people of the 2010 earthquake, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The camp that was erected on Haiti's only golf course in the days after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit the country, was cleared by police in January leaving many homeless. Jean-Claude Duvalier, son of former dictator Francois Duvalier, lived an extravagant lifestyle while ruling over one of the poorest countries in the world. (AP Photo/Dieu Nalio Chery)

Globalization and NAFTA caused migration from Mexico

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 13:03:00 +0000

When NAFTA was passed two decades ago, its boosters promised it would bring "first world" status for the Mexican people. Instead, it prompted a great migration north.

Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants, estimates that there are about 500,000 indigenous people from Oaxaca living in the U.S., 300,000 in California alone.

In Oaxaca, some towns have become depopulated, or are now made up of only communities of the very old and very young, where most working-age people have left to work in the north. Economic crises provoked by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other economic reforms are now uprooting and displacing these Mexicans in the country's most remote areas, where people still speak languages (such as Mixteco, Zapoteco and Triqui) that were old when Columbus arrived from Spain. "There are no jobs, and NAFTA forced the price of corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore," Dominguez says. "We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative."

According to Rick Mines, author of the 2010 Indigenous Farm Worker Study, "the total population of California's indigenous Mexican farm workers is about 120,000 ... a total of 165,000 indigenous farm workers and family members in California."Counting the many indigenous people living and working in urban areas, the total is considerably higher. Indigenous people made up 7 percent of Mexican migrants in 1991-3, the years just before the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In 2006-8, they made up 29 percent-four times more.

California has a farm labor force of about 700,000 workers, so the day is not far off when indigenous Oaxacan migrants may make up a majority. They are the workforce that has been produced by NAFTA and the changes in the global economy driven by free-market policies. Further, "the U.S. food system has long been dependent on the influx of an ever-changing, newly-arrived group of workers that sets the wages and working conditions at the entry level in the farm labor market," Mines says. The rock-bottom wages paid to this most recent wave of migrants-Oaxaca's indigenous people-set the wage floor for all the other workers in California farm labor, keeping the labor cost of California growers low, and their profits high.

Linking trade and immigration

U.S. trade and immigration policy are linked. They are part of a single system, not separate and independent policies. Since NAFTA's passage in 1993, the U.S. Congress has debated and passed several new trade agreements-with Peru, Jordan, Chile, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement. At the same time, Congress has debated immigration policy as though those trade agreements bore no relationship to the waves of displaced people migrating to the U.S., looking for work. Meanwhile, heightened anti-immigrant hysteria has increasingly demonized those migrants, leading to measures to deny them jobs, rights, or any equality with people living in the communities around them.

To resolve any of these dilemmas, from adopting rational and humane immigration policies to reducing the fear and hostility towards migrants, the starting point must be an examination of the way U.S. policies have produced migration-and criminalized migrants.

Trade negotiations and immigration policy were formally joined together by the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. Immigrants' rights activists campaigned against the law because it contained employer sanctions, prohibiting employers for the first time on a federal level from hiring undocumented workers and effectively criminalizing work for the undocumented. IRCA's liberal defenders argued its amnesty provision justified sanctions and militarizing the border, as well as new guest worker programs. The bill eventually did enable more than 4 million people living in the U.S. without immigration documents to gain permanent residence. Underscoring the broad bipartisan consensus supporting it, the bill was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.

We come to the U.S. to work because we can't get a price for our product at home. There's no alternative. - Rufino Dominguez, Director of the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants

Few noted one other provision of the law. IRCA set up a Commission for the Study of International Migration and Cooperative Economic Development to study the causes of immigration to the United States. The commission held hearings after the U.S. and Canada signed a bilateral free trade agreement, and made a report to President George H.W. Bush and Congress in 1990. It found that the main motivation for coming to the U.S. was poverty. To slow or halt the flow of migrants, it recommended that "U.S. economic policy should promote a system of open trade ... the development of a U.S.-Mexico free trade area and its incorporation with Canada." But, it warned, "It takes many years-even generations-for sustained growth to achieve the desired effect."

The negotiations that led to NAFTA started within months. As Congress debated the treaty, then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari toured the United States, telling audiences unhappy at high levels of immigration that passing NAFTA would reduce it by providing employment for Mexicans in Mexico. Back home, he made the same argument. NAFTA, he claimed, would set Mexico on a course to become a first-world nation. "We did become part of the first world," says Juan Manuel Sandoval of Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History. "The back yard."

Increasing pressure

NAFTA, however, did not lead to rising incomes and employment in Mexico, and did not decrease the flow of migrants. Instead, it became a source of pressure on Mexicans to migrate. The treaty forced corn grown by Mexican farmers without subsidies to compete in Mexico's own market with corn from huge U.S. producers, who had been subsidized by the U.S. Agricultural exports to Mexico more than doubled during the NAFTA years, from $4.6 to $9.8 billion annually. Corn imports rose from 2,014,000 to 10,330,000 tons from 1992 to 2008. Mexico imported 30,000 tons of pork in 1995, the year NAFTA took effect. By 2010, pork imports, almost all from the U.S., had grown over 25 times, to 811,000 tons. As a result, pork prices received by Mexican producers dropped 56 percent.

According to Alejandro Ramírez, general director of the Confederation of Mexican Pork Producers, "We lost 4,000 pig farms. Each 100 animals produce five jobs, so we lost 20,000 farm jobs directly from imports. Counting the indirect jobs dependent on each direct job, we lost over 120,000 jobs in total. This produces migration to the U.S. or to Mexican cities-a big problem for our country."Once Mexican meat and corn producers were driven from the market by imports, the Mexican economy was left vulnerable to price changes dictated by U.S. agribusiness or U.S. policy. "When the U.S. modified its corn policy to encourage ethanol production," he charges, "corn prices jumped 100 percent in one year."

NAFTA then prohibited price supports, without which hundreds of thousands of small farmers found it impossible to sell corn or other farm products for what it cost to produce them. Mexico couldn't protect its own agriculture from the fluctuations of the world market. A global coffee glut in the 1990s plunged prices below the cost of production. A less entrapped government might have bought the crops of Veracruz farmers to keep them afloat, or provided subsidies for other crops.

But once free-market structures were in place prohibiting government intervention to help them, those farmers paid the price. Campesinos from Veracruz, as well as Oaxaca and other major corn-producing states, joined the stream of workers headed north. There, they became an important part of the workforce in U.S. slaughterhouses and other industries.

U.S. companies were allowed to own land and factories, eventually anywhere in Mexico. U.S.-based Union Pacific, in partnership with the Larrea family, one of Mexico's wealthiest, became the owner of the country's main north-south rail line and immediately discontinued virtually all passenger service. Mexican rail employment dropped from more than 90,000 to 36,000. Railroad workers mounted a wildcat strike to try to save their jobs, but they lost and their union became a shadow of its former self.

According to Garrett Brown, head of the Maquiladora Health and Safety Network, the average Mexican wage was 23 percent of the U.S. manufacturing wage in 1975. By 2002, it was less than an eighth. Brown says that after NAFTA, real Mexican wages dropped by 22 percent, while worker productivity increased 45 percent.

Attracting investors, repelling workers

Low wages are the magnet used to attract U.S. and other foreign investors. In mid-June, 2006, Ford Corporation, already one of Mexico's largest employers, announced it would invest $9 billion more in building new factories.14 Meanwhile, Ford closed 14 U.S. plants, eliminating the jobs of tens of thousands of U.S. workers. Both moves were part of the company's strategic plan to cut labor costs and move production. When General Motors was bailed out by the U.S. government in 2008, it closed a dozen U.S. plants, while its plans for building new plants in Mexico went forward without hindrance.

These policies displaced people, who could no longer make a living as they'd done before. The rosy predictions of NAFTA's boosters that it would raise income and slow migration proved false. The World Bank, in a 2005 study made for the Mexican government, found that the extreme rural poverty rate of around 37 percent in 1992-4, prior to NAFTA, jumped to about 52 percent in 1996-8, after NAFTA took effect. This could be explained, the report said, "mainly by the 1995 economic crisis, the sluggish performance of agriculture, stagnant rural wages, and falling real agricultural prices."16

By 2010, 53 million Mexicans were living in poverty, according to the Monterrey Institute of Technology-half the country's population. The growth of poverty, in turn, fueled migration. In 1990, 4.5 million Mexican-born people lived in the U.S. A decade later, that population more than doubled to 9.75 million, and in 2008 it peaked at 12.67 million. Approximately 9.4 percent of all Mexicans now live in the U.S., based on numbers from Pew Hispanic. About 5.7 million were able to get some kind of visa; but another seven million couldn't, and came nevertheless.

From 1982 through the NAFTA era, successive economic reforms produced migrants. The displacement had already grown so large by 1986 that the commission established by IRCA was charged with recommending measures to halt or slow it. Its report urged that "migrant-sending countries should encourage technological modernization by strengthening and assuring intellectual property protection and by removing existing impediments to investment" and recommended that "the United States should condition bilateral aid to sending countries on their taking the necessary steps toward structural adjustment." The IRCA commission report acknowledged the potential for harm, noting (in the mildest, most ineffectual language possible) that "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering."

In 1994, however, the year the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, U.S. speculators began selling off Mexican government bonds. According to Jeff Faux, founding director the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, DC-based progressive think tank, "NAFTA had created a speculative bubble for Mexican assets that then collapsed when the speculators cashed in."In NAFTA's first year, 1994, one million Mexicans lost their jobs when the peso was devalued. To avert a flood of capital to the north, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin engineered a $20 billion loan to Mexico, which was paid to bondholders, mostly U.S. banks. In return, U.S. and British banks gained control of the country's financial system. Mexico had to pledge its oil revenue to pay off foreign debt, making the country's primary source of income unavailable for the needs of its people.

As the Mexican economy, especially the border maquiladora industry, became increasingly tied to the U.S. market, tens of thousands of Mexican workers lost jobs when the market shrank during U.S. recessions in 2001 and 2008. "It is the financial crashes and the economic disasters that drive people to work for dollars in the U.S., to replace life savings, or just to earn enough to keep their family at home together," says Harvard historian John Womack.

Immigrants, migrants or displaced people?

In the U.S. political debate, Veracruz' uprooted coffee pickers or unemployed workers from Mexico City are called immigrants, because that debate doesn't recognize their existence before they leave Mexico. It is more accurate to call them migrants, and the process migration, since that takes into account both people's communities of origin and those where they travel to find work.

But displacement is an unmentionable word in the Washington discourse. Not one immigration proposal in Congress in the quarter century since IRCA was passed has tried to come to grips with the policies that uprooted miners, teachers, tree planters, and farmers. In fact, while debating bills to criminalize undocumented migrants and set up huge guest worker programs, four new trade agreements were introduced, each of which has caused more displacement and more migration.

Photo: Rosario Ventura, immigrant from Oaxaca who lives in Madena, Calif. is seen here with her children.

President Morales and Bolivian socialists score big election win

Tue, 14 Oct 2014 16:53:00 +0000

Bolivia's leadership team of President Evo Morales and Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera won another overwhelming, if this time unsurprising, victory in national elections on October 12. Their Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party took two thirds majorities in both houses of the Bolivia's Legislative Assembly, thus ensuring support for any constitutional amendments to be advanced by the government.

Non-official estimates place Morales' plurality at 60.5 percent. Almost 89 per cent of eligible citizens voted. MAS now controls 24 of 36 Senate seats and 80 of 130 seats in the House of Deputies. Conservative presidential candidates Samuel Doria Media and Jorge Quiroga, a former president, followed in the polls with 25.1 and 9.6 percent of the votes, respectively.

Morales' new term, his second under the Bolivian constitution ratified in 2009, runs from 2015 to 2020. When he won his first presidential election in late 2005, Morales became the first indigenous president of Bolivia, a majority indigenous nation. All his victory margins have been large enough for his MAS party not to have had to deal with second round voting.

The day after the elections, well-known Argentinian political writer Atilio Boron explained that, "Evo is the parting of the waters in Bolivian history; there is a Bolivia before his government and another one, different and better, ever since his arrival at [Bolivia's Government Palace] (...) This new Bolivia [thus] definitively buried the other: colonial racist, elitist, that nothing or no one could resuscitate."

The Morales victory extended to eight out of nine Bolivian departments (states), a marked change since 2009 when a rightwing separatist upsurge, anti-Morales to its core, was flourishing in four eastern departments. This year even Santa Cruz, epicenter of that rebellion, registered support for Morales.

Morales' election victory took place in conjunction with a remarkable increase in resources now available to the Bolivian people as the result of a burgeoning economy. Analysts disagree on the extent to which economic growth accounts for the now firm MAS hold on power, but there is consensus that, more than anything else, it derives from the government's nationalization of natural gas and oil production in 2006. Before, transnational corporations controlled 82 percent of production. Now that same amount, more or less, remains in state hands.

The data are striking. The gross national product rose from $9.5 billion in 2005 to $30.4 billion in 2013, with average GDP per capita moving from $1,010 annually to $2,757 over the same period. International cash reserves grew from $1.7 billion in 2005, to $14.3 billion in 2013. Bolivia's most recent 47 percent ratio of international reserves to GDP is the highest in Latin America.

Extreme poverty fell from 39 percent in 2005 to 18 percent in 2013; the minimum salary rose from $72 monthly to $206 per month. Bolivia's unemployment rate is the lowest in Latin America. Total pubic investment in infrastructure, production development, and social resources has moved from $600 million in 2005 to $4.5 billion at present.

Speaking before multitudes of supporters in La Paz after the voting, President Morales reminded Bolivians of his government's plans "to convert Bolivia into an energy center for the region." The government envisions a massive increase in exports of both electricity and hydrocarbon products. A nuclear energy program is contemplated.

Observers say Morales' election victory marks the transition of the MAS party from its roots in traditional left activism to its current make-up primarily of social movements. This metamorphosis involves surprising new affiliations, reports Bolpress.com; "MAS now includes former members of fascist movement shock teams and opposition propagandists who now don't lose the opportunity - if they have it - to have photos taken with Morales, whom they refer to as "my president."

In his remarks to supporters, President Morales declared, "Here two models have been debated: privatization and nationalization. Nationalization won. (...) Only we, a united and organized people, can show that, 'Yes, we can!'" He announced that, "In your name this triumph of the Bolivian people is dedicated to all the peoples in Latin America and in the world who struggle against capitalism and against imperialism. This victory is dedicated to Fidel Castro, to Hugo Chavez, may he rest in peace!"

Photo: Bolivia's President Evo Morales speaks to supporters from the balcony of the presidential palace in La Paz, Oct. 12 At left is Vice President Alvaro Garcia.(AP Photo/Martin Mejia)

Child rights activists Malala and Satyarthi win Nobel Peace Prize

Fri, 10 Oct 2014 16:07:00 +0000

OSLO, Norway (AP) - Education advocate Malala Yousafzai became the youngest Nobel winner ever as she and Kailash Satyarthi of India won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for working to protect children from slavery, extremism and child labor at great risk to their own lives.

By honoring a 17-year-old Muslim girl from Pakistan and a 60-year-old Hindu man from India, the Norwegian Nobel Committee linked the peace award to conflicts between world religions and neighboring nuclear powers as well as drawing attention to children's rights.

"This award is for all those children who are voiceless, whose voices need to be heard," said Malala, who chose to finish her school day in the central English city of Birmingham before addressing the media. "They have the right to receive quality education. They have the right not to suffer from child labor, not to suffer from child trafficking. They have the right to live a happy life."

She said it was an honor to share the prize Satyarthi, who has worked tirelessly to protect children, and invited the prime ministers of both India and Pakistan to attend the Nobel ceremony in December.

Satyarthi has been at the forefront of a global movement to end child slavery and exploitative child labor, which he called a "blot on humanity."

"Child slavery is a crime against humanity. Humanity itself is at stake here. A lot of work still remains, but I will see the end of child labor in my lifetime," Satyarthi told The Associated Press at his office in New Delhi.

News of the award set off celebrations on the streets of Mingora, Malala's hometown in Pakistan's volatile Swat Valley, with residents greeting each other and distributing sweets. At the town's Khushal Public School, which is owned by Malala's father, students danced in celebration Friday, jumping up and down.

When she was a student there, Malala was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman two years ago for insisting that girls as well as boys have the right to an education. Surviving several operations with the help of British medical care, she continued both her activism and her studies.

Malala was in chemistry class when the Nobel was announced and remained with her classmates at the Edgbaston High School for girls.

Her father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, said the decision will further the rights of girls.

"(The Nobel will) boost the courage of Malala and enhance her capability to work for the cause of girls' education," he told the AP.

Malala is by far the youngest Nobel laureate, eight years younger than the 1915 physics prize winner, 25-year-old Lawrence Bragg. Before Malala, the youngest peace prize winner was 2011 co-winner Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, a 32-year-old women's rights activist.

In Washington, President Barack Obama called the Nobel announcement "a victory for all who strive to uphold the dignity of every human being."

"Malala and Kailash have faced down threats and intimidation, risking their own lives to save others and build a better world for future generations," he said in a statement.

In a tweet, first lady Michelle Obama said of the two: "You're heroes to me and millions around the world."

Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland said it was important to reward both an Indian Hindu and a Pakistani Muslim in the common struggle for education and against extremism. The two will split $1.1 million.

"There is a lot of extremism coming from this part of the world. It is partly coming from the fact that young people don't have a future. They don't have education. They don't have a job," Jagland told the AP.

Pakistani Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan said the decision "has given pride to the whole of Pakistan." India's President Pranab Mukherjee said the prize recognized "the contributions of India's vibrant civil society in addressing complex social problems such as child labor."

By highlighting children's rights, the committee widened the scope of the peace prize, which in its early days was only given for efforts to end or prevent armed conflicts.

"In conflict-ridden areas in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence from generation to generation," the Nobel committee said.

Commentators around the world praised the decision to focus on children's rights.

"The biggest threat to the Taliban is a girl with a book," said Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's foreign minister and a former U.N. envoy on Sexual Violence in Conflict.

"The true winners today are the world's children," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Raised in Pakistan's ruggedly beautiful, politically volatile Swat Valley, Malala was barely 11 years old when she began championing girls' education, speaking out in TV interviews. The Taliban had overrun her hometown of Mingora, terrorizing residents, threatening to blow up girls' schools, ordering teachers and students into all-encompassing burqas.

She was critically injured on Oct. 9, 2012, when a Taliban gunman boarded her school bus and shot her in the head. She survived through luck - the bullet did not enter her brain - and by the quick intervention of British doctors visiting Pakistan.

Flown to Britain for treatment at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, she underwent numerous surgeries but made a strong recovery. Malala now lives with her father, mother and two brothers in Birmingham. She has been showered with human rights prizes, including the European Parliament's Sakharov Award.

Yet her memoir, "I Am Malala," published last year, reminded the world that she was still just a teenager - one who likes TV shows such as "Ugly Betty" and the cooking show "MasterChef," who worries about her clothes and her hair and wishes she was taller.

The Nobel committee said Satyarthi was carrying on the tradition of another great Indian, Mahatma Gandhi, who remains the most notable omission in the 113-year history of the Nobel Peace Prize.

"Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi's tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain," the committee said.

A.N.S. Ahmed, a well-known sociologist in India, said the award should prod the Indian government to do more in a country where a large number of children must support their families by engaging in dangerous jobs.

"The award will have a deep impact not just on the Indian government, but also on the civil society, to work with passion and improve the condition of children by enforcing their rights," he said.

The founder of the Nobel Prizes, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, said the prize should go to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

The committee has interpreted those instructions differently over time, widening the concept of peace work to include efforts to improve human rights, fight poverty and clean up the environment.

The Nobel Prizes in medicine, chemistry, physics and literature were announced earlier this week. The economics award will be announced on Monday.

All awards will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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Ritter reported from Stockholm. Danica Kirka in Birmingham, England; Jill Lawless in London; Muneeza Naqvi in New Delhi; Sherin Zada in Mingora, Pakistan; Kathy Gannon in New York; and Josh Lederman in Washington contributed to this report.

Photo: Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai addresses the members of the European Parliament in the plenary session, making a passionate plea for more education, as she accepted the 2013 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought during a ceremony in Strasbourg. © European Union 2013 - European Parliament. (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Creative Commons license).

Tribunal takes up Mexico’s migrant hell

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 12:56:00 +0000

MEXICO CITY - Just before judges heard testimony on migration at the Permanent People's Tribunal in Mexico City two weeks ago, the Mexican government announced a new measure that might have been deliberately intended to show why activists brought the Tribunal to Mexico to begin with, three years ago. Interior (Gobernacion) Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong told the press that the speed of trains known by migrants as "La Bestia" (The Beast) would be doubled.

Photos of "La Bestia" have become famous around the world, showing young migrants crowded on top of boxcars, riding the rails from the Guatemala border to near the U.S. It's a slow train, but many boys and girls have lost arms and legs trying to get on or off, and wind up living in limbo in the Casas de Migrantes -- the hostels run by the Catholic Church and other migrant rights activists throughout Mexico. Osorio Chong said Mexico would require the companies operating the trains - a partnership between mining giant Grupo Mexico and the U.S. corporation Kansas City Southern - to hike their speed to make it harder for the migrants.

In the Tribunal, young people, giving only their first names out of fear, said they'd see many more severed limbs and deaths as a result, but that it wouldn't stop people from coming. Armed gangs regularly rob the migrants, they charged, and young people get beaten and raped. If they're willing to face this, they'll try to get on the trains no matter how fast they go. "Mexico is a hell for migrants already," fumed Father Pedro Pantoja, who organized the Casa de Migrantes in Saltillo.

Outrage wasn't limited to the Tribunal hearings. Former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, now the head of one of Mexico's left parties, the Movement for National Renovation, asked, "How can the government keep them from freely moving through Mexico, when they're trying to stay alive, and find work so their families survive?" If Osorio Chong really wanted to reduce migration, he told La Jornada, Mexico's leftwing daily, "he'd support the farmers, so that people have work and don't have to leave to seek life on the other side of the border."

While the Tribunal hearings offered an insight into the way the Mexican left sees migration to the U.S. and Canada, the Tribunal itself is an international institution based in Rome. It was first organized by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell to investigate U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. Since then it has held hearings about the violations of human rights during the "dirty wars" under the military dictatorships in Latin America, as well as in the Philippines, El Salvador, Afghanistan, East Timor, Zaire and Guatemala.

In 2011 the Tribunal announced it would hold hearings in Mexico on a wide spectrum of issues, including attacks on unions, farmers, the environment and women. Of them, the hearings on migration have been the most extensive, including three pre-hearings in Mexico, three in the U.S., and a weeklong debate at the national autonomous university (UNAM). Bishop Raul Vera declared at their start, "We are experiencing the breakdown of the social order and the militarization of the fight against drugs [and] actions imposed by a state whose leaders are full of ambition, where it is not political proposals that count, but business and theft."

For many Mexican migrant rights activists, the most serious violations are committed against migrants passing through Mexico. In August of 2010 seventy-two people were found massacred outside San Fernando, a small town in northern Mexico. All were migrants passing through Mexico, and had been kidnapped and murdered. The following April 193 bodies of migrants were discovered in 47 graves. Many were Central Americans, but others were Mexicans. In May of 2012 another 49 graves were found.

While the perpetrators of these crimes were, according to Tribunal testimony, members of drug cartels and their paramilitaries, the accusation submitted to the judges charged the Mexican government was ultimately responsible. Not only did the government fail to protect migrants, knowing that they were being kidnapped regularly for extortion, but it did not recognize their right to migrate at all, treating them instead as criminals. "All these acts are the predictable and preventable result of its policies and actions," emphasized Mexican academic Camilo Perez at the hearing's start.

Judges urged to examine causes

He urged the judges to use the massacre in San Fernando as a lens through which to examine the causes of migration and the reasons for the vulnerability of migrants. "Government policies actually depend on migration at the same time it criminalizes migrants," he cautioned. "The responsibility is structural, not just the actions of individuals."

Raul Ramirez Baena testified before the Mexico City hearing by Skype from Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, just across the border from California's Imperial Valley. Ramirez Baena, Baja's former human rights prosecutor, argued that U.S. border enforcement policies were also linked to violence against migrants south of the border.

"U.S. border enforcement really got going when NAFTA took effect in 1994," he explained, "and national security became a major justification, even extending U.S. authorities' reach to Guatemala. At the same time, it established a policy of deportation, which made the problems of poverty and gangs here worse. Then Mexican government militarized the Mexican side, using the war on drugs as a pretext. The killings and kidnappings in northern Mexico are a consequence of this joint policy."

There was something very Mexican about focusing on the situation of Central American migrants passing through Mexico. In one way it highlights a generosity of spirit - "their situation is worse than ours" - and responds to the extreme brutality of kidnapping and murder. But it also reflects the way Mexicans, especially on the left, have looked at the migration of their own countrymen. Historically, many leftwing activists saw those who left for the U.S. as people who had abandoned the struggle for social change at home. In addition, they sometimes argued, migration relieved the social pressure of poverty on the Mexican government.

Yet at the same time, Mexican political activists have not only come to the U.S. (sometimes fleeing repression themselves), but they've become increasingly outraged by the treatment Mexicans get there. And the increase in migration has been phenomenal. Today there is no town in Mexico so isolated that people haven't left for the U.S., and to which dollars now flow from those working in the north. The most important achievement of the Tribunal, therefore, was not just assigning responsibility for the violence, but digging into the reasons and responsibility for the migration itself.

According to the conceptual framework established at the beginning of the hearing by Ana Alicia Peña Lopez, an economist at UNAM, "Mexicans and Central Americans are forced to leave home because of their precarious economic and social conditions. These are the product of neoliberal reforms, especially the free trade treaties implemented in Mexico and the rest of this region."

Peña Lopez listed several changes in migration in the free trade era -- most important, its massive size. In 1990 4.4 million Mexican migrants were living in the U.S. At the beginning of the economic crisis in 2007 it was 11.9 million and in 2013 it was still 11.8 million. In other words, jobs in the U.S. might have been harder to find, but people didn't go home because the conditions causing them to leave hadn't changed. Money sent home by Mexicans reached $27 billion by 2007, even during the crisis.

But, she also noted, migrants now include women, young people, indigenous people and even children. "Employers take advantage of this to lower their labor costs," she charged. "Criminalizing migrants hasn't simply led to the violation of their rights, but has made their labor even cheaper. And Mexico pushed this process, through reforms that lower wages and make jobs less secure, that drive rural communities off the land to enable mining and energy projects, and that put basic services like health and education out of the reach of more and more people."

The Tribunal's report on migration will be presented to another set of judges in November, where it will be included with those on other human rights issues. The tribunal has no power to bring legal charges against the Mexican, U.S. or Canadian governments over human rights crimes. But it can focus international attention on violations, and create a climate in which progressive jurists can try to use their own legal systems.

Throughout Latin America, in the wake of military dictatorships and civil wars, truth commissions were established to counter the culture of impunity - that governments can jail and murder people with no consequences for those who give the orders. Mexico has never had such a commission, nor has the U.S. or Canada. The Tribunal hearings certainly found evidence and witnesses that testify to widespread abuses, and provide an argument for further proceedings with more formal consequences.

But to Andres Barreda, another UNAM economist involved in setting up the hearings, the ultimate goal is also to ask Mexicans themselves what direction they choose for their country. "Trade agreements and economic reforms have undermined Mexico's national sovereignty, and led to its economic and political subjugation to the United States," he says. "Mexico has a right to a national economic system that protects sovereignty and autonomy, and therefore places the needs of its people before the profits of corporations and an economic elite. Unless we face this, we can't resolve the situation of migrants, whether our own or those passing through Mexico."

David Bacon was one of the judges in the PPT hearing in Mexico City.

Photo: Mexican police escort migrants attempting to reach the U.S. off "La Bestia." Rebecca Blackwell/AP

First round election results in Brazil leave left hopeful

Wed, 08 Oct 2014 13:59:00 +0000

On Sunday Oct. 5, Brazil held its general elections, after a campaign that was anything but boring. Voters went to the polls to elect the president, the governors of Brazil's 27 states, all 513 members of the Chamber of Deputies, and a third of the 81 member Senate.

The leftist incumbent, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) now will face Acelo Neves, candidate of the Social Democratic Party of Brazil.

Rousseff was fighting against the results of an economic slump, some corruption scandals and protests and rioting earlier this year against the hosting of the FIFA world soccer championship. But for a while, it looked as if he would win easily.

Then fate stepped in and removed, in an airplane crash, the candidate of the centrist Brazilian Socialist Party, Eduardo Campos, who had been polling in single digits. He was replaced by Marina Silva, a person with African ancestry and a humble background, who had made a name for herself in the ecological movement. Silva had been Environmental Minister in the cabinet of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, but had resigned in a dispute about the balance between developmentalist and environmentalist emphases in the government. Silva joined the Green Party for a while, before agreeing to be Campos' running mate.

After the death of Campos, Silva's figures in the opinion polls took off, and for a while it looked as she was going to push ahead of Rousseff on Oct.5 and beat her in a runoff on Oct. 26. Racism is a fact of life in Brazil, as it is in the United States, but it looked as if Silva was going to be able to overcome this.

Silva had also pulled ahead of Neves, the candidate whose party is misnamed as "social democratic." He was the chief right-wing candidate in the race.

But when the votes were counted after Sunday's election, it turned out that there will be a runoff, not between Rousseff and Silva, but between Rousseff and Neves. Almost at the last minute, Silva faded and Rousseff and Neves both surged. The figures are as follows:

Dilma Rousseff, Workers' Party: 41.59 percent

Aceio Neves, Social Democratic Party of Brazil 33.54 percent

Marina Silva, Socialist Party 21.37 percent.

The rest of the vote was divided among eight smaller parties, including the Brazilian Communist Party, which ran its own presidential candidate, Mauro Lasi. The Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) supported Rousseff.

Why did Silva fade? It would appear that in her effort to reach out to bankers, agribusiness and other wealthy and privileged sectors, she somewhat spoiled her original image as a humble outsider battling power. Rousseff benefited from this. Also, Silva is an Evangelical Christian, and created a bad impression by appearing to be influenced by her doctrinal background in changes she asked for in her party's platform, especially as regards gender issues.

This means that to win the run off, Neves will have to get almost all of Silva's voters, or motivate people who did not vote in the first round, or get people to abandon Rousseff, or some combination. So Rousseff is favored. But after so many surprises, nobody is taking anything for granted, especially not Rousseff and her team.

First off, both Rousseff and Neves are trying to get the endorsement of Silva. Then Rouseff will be pointing to the fact that Neves' party was in power from 1995 to 2003 under the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a time of neo liberal policies, including large scale privatizations, when poor and working class Brazilians were suffering great privation. Rousseff will point out the huge advances the country has made under her and Lula's governments, including a reduction in the poverty rate of 55 percent and extreme poverty by 65 percent within a growing economy and only 4.9 percent inflation.

Neves will stress current and recent woes, and will try to convince workers that if elected, he will not take Brazil back to the pre-Lula days.

In the Chamber of Deputies, several large political parties lost seats, including Rousseff's Workers' Party and Neves' Social Democratic Party, as well as the PMDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), a Rousseff ally. In governorships, the big news is that the candidate of the Communist Party of Brasil (Partido Comunista do Brasil), Flavio Dino, has won the governorship of the state of Maranhão by an overwhelming margin.

A Neves victory would be good news for multinational corporations and the Brazilian and international right. It would also be a big blow against the Bolivarian movement which has been working to promote Latin American independence from U.S. control while increasing cooperation in economic development among the region's countries. Although Brazil is not part of the most radical Bolivarian grouping, the Bolivarian Alliance for Our America (ALBA), it is still the largest and most industrialized country in Latin America, with its 200 million people. A Neves government might also pull Brazil out of the BRICS group emerging powers.

For the Brazilian and international left, these are things to be avoided at all cost.

Photo: A man reads newspaper headlines reporting the results of the Brazilian presidential election in Brasilia, Brazil Oct. 6. Eraldo Peres/AP