The Self-Delusions of James Cason

12.27.04 (11:40 am)   [edit]

Cuban Deja Vu All Over Again, All Over Again

By SAUL LANDAU

On December 10, US Interest Section Chief in Havana James Cason offered yet another Bush Administration policy missile to overthrow the Cuban government and replace it with a "democratic" regime, i.e.; one that would revere private property and kiss Washington's butt. Bush had already tightened the harsh trade and travel restrictions on Cuba, following this year's presidential panel recommendations. Headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Cuba policy panel listed measures Washington should take to foster a post-Castro transition. Cuban Vice President Ricardo Alarcon dismissed these measures as nothing more than a blueprint for overthrowing the government. Cason denies any such intentions.

Cason seems neither to learn from his false predictions nor forget his passionate rhetoric. Apparently oblivious to flagrant human rights abuses committed by US personnel at the Guantanamo Gulag, Cason used International Human Rights Day to throw a bash at his posh Havana residence, where Senator Jack Kennedy once cavorted. Cuban dissidents drank and mingled with the Havana press corps, when Cason announced, according to the Associated Press, that Castro's government "is on its last legs."

Some imbibers spilled their rum over this remark. Oswaldo Paya, leader of the Varella Project, which collected 10 thousand plus signatures on a "pro-democracy" petition, offered a prayer: "Would God grant that our children and the Cuban people do not inherit our hates and miseries but rather our faith so that they can construct their own history.'"

Cason apparently thought that Paya's reference to Divine intervention validated his own fact free conclusion: "Even regime supporters are discreetly preparing for the inevitable democratic transition." He neither named "regime supporters" nor acknowledged that state security agents had penetrated the US-backed dissident movement. Indeed, a dozen infiltrators surfaced at the March 2003 trial to testify against 75 of those most favored by the US government which, contrary to Cuban law, paid them in goods and services.

In recent weeks however, to repair relations with the EU countries, which had criticized the trials, Cuba released several dissidents. In fact, the United States holds more political prisoners than Cuba at Guantanamo; and in sub-human conditions.

Political prisoners obfuscate the essence of Cuba's relations with the United States. Castro's main opponents live in south Florida and have little interest in democracy, unless democracy means terrorism. Indeed, in May the US government permitted indicted terrorists Guillermo Novo, Gaspar Jimenez and Pedro Remon to dance smilingly into Miami's international airport after Panama's outgoing President pardoned them--apparently as the result of bribes. Each of the three participated in assassinations and other terrorist activities.

Possibly Cason forgot about these characters or deluded himself. He and other US diplomats have repeatedly predicted Castro's impending demise. In 1995, Scott Armstrong and I shared a delusional experience in Havana with US Interest Section Chief Joseph Sullivan and Gene Bigler, a member of his staff.

Predicting Castro's forthcoming departure, they recounted the summer 1994 riot. During this period of Cuba's severest economic hardship, lack of electricity, water and jobs, a Cuban policeman encountered a man attempting to hijack a boat. Supposedly, the hijacker shot the policeman and then was killed by other cops. That incident ignited the already raw nerves of the frustrated population of Old Havana. Angry men marched along Havana's sea wall shouting "down with Fidel." Onlookers chanted with them. When hotel construction workers further along the sea wall heard about the demonstration, they stopped work and confronted them. The two groups fought. As the melee ebbed, Castro arrived and stared some of the protesters down. The goading onlookers now began to shout "Fi-del, Fi-del."

Armstrong and I checked the story with political officers at the French, British and Canadian embassies. All agreed that some 700-900 demonstrators had fought a lesser number of construction workers. Unarmed police -- except for billy clubs--had tried to break it up. Castro had then appeared.

Sullivan and Bigler, however, claimed that the number of anti-Castro protestors had reached 10 thousand and that dissidence was growing. Unlike their counterparts at the other Western embassies, the US diplomats did not videotape the fracas and analyze the tape for crowd count analysis. Even though the fighting occurred under Sullivan's office window, he apparently failed to make even a rough count. During the remainder of the 1990s no viable political movement emerged; nor did one develop in the first years of the 21st Century.

But Cason reflects the Bush Administration in confusing wishful thinking with reality. For 45 years, ten US presidents have tried and failed to kill Castro and overthrow his government. During this period, the anti-Castro forces have not evolved toward democracy or internal coherence.

In December 1960, I waited with a group of sixty students to board a Cubana airliner from Miami to Havana. Angry protestors screamed slogans at us: "No Travel to Communist dictatorship Cuba." Some spit at the students, who tried to talk to the anti-Castro crowd.

"If Cuba's as terrible as you say," one student asked an antagonist, "you should encourage us to go, so we can tell the world about the awful conditions in Cuba."

The protestor looked puzzled. A group leader in Spanish ordered the perplexed demonstrator: "Don't argue, just spit."

I asked an airport cop to stop the spitting. He looked at the ceiling and said: "I didn't see any spitting."

One Cuban exile whispered in accented English. "You're crazy. Do you think the United States will allow Castro to have communism so close to its shores?"

Hours later, the spittle wiped clean from skin and clothing, we landed in Havana and saw for ourselves. Young Cubans hoisted four barreled Czech anti-aircraft guns onto the mezzanine roof of Havana's Riviera Hotel, they dug trenches and planted explosives under bridges: preparation for a US invasion, which came in April 1961 at the Bay of Pigs.

43 plus years later, after one invasion fiasco, thousands of terrorist attacks--including possible biological warfare -- and hundreds of assassination attempts, Castro prevails, broken knee and all.

He outfoxed Kennedy who, after accepting defeat at the Bay of Pigs, authorized a protracted terror campaign that led Castro to accept Soviet nuclear missiles. President Johnson, occupied with Vietnam, maintained hostile economic policies, but lowered the terrorist confrontations. Nixon escalated the terror campaign. Ironically, some of "his Cubans" got caught at the 1972 Watergate burglary that led to his downfall.

Ford pursued a brief détente, but Jimmy Carter saw an opportunity to wage an aggressive human rights and immigration campaign, which Castro countered by allowing 120 thousand Cubans to migrate (Marielitos). US authorities did not easily handle that number of immigrants.

Reagan talked tough but did little. Domestically, however, he delivered US Cuba policy to the Cuban American National Foundation, a far-right group whose leader, Jorge Mas Canosa, promoted lobbying and secretly financed terrorism. This privatization of policy did not help US diplomacy. But it did strengthen the hand of the most reactionary exiles.

Since then, presidential candidates routinely seek the anti-Castro gang's money and votes in South Florida and promise to do nasty things to their pesky neighbor.

In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton ran short of money. He hastened to Florida, endorsed anti-Cuban legislation (the Torricelli Bill, which became the Cuba Democracy Act) and chastened Bush (41) for not "bringing down the hammer on Castro."

He received a hefty check from the rich anti-Castro crowd for that remark. Like previous presidents, Clinton spent little time actually dealing with Cuba, except for the periodic crisis that inevitably results when hostility characterizes relations between close neighbors.

By allowing the anti-Castro "Brothers to the Rescue" to use US soil to fly over Cuba and drop leaflets, however, Clinton opened the way for the predictable denouement. In late February 1996, Cuban MIGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue Planes that had over flown Cuban air space. To retaliate, Clinton signed the draconian Helms-Burton bill, which punished non-US companies for trading with or investing in Cuba. This brought retaliatory threats from US trading partners.

Bush's aggressive anti-Castro economic plans will certainly cause more hardship for Cubans. But to bring "freedom to 11 million Cubans," Bush cannot rely on economic measures alone. Escalating threats almost inevitably lead to provocations. In 1961, inexperienced Cuban soldiers defeated a better trained and equipped invading force at the Bay of Pigs. Cuba's contemporary armed forces and citizenry have experience and have just completed two weeks of military exercises--no longer trying to hoist weapons with primitive tools onto a hotel roof. Bush deserves his aggressive reputation. He invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. But since then, belligerent statements have fallen into the "empty threat" category.

He's unlikely to invade North Korea, Iran, Syria, Zimbabwe and Cuba. After the losses and frustrations suffered by US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush will not easily convince Congress to unleash troops--which don't exist--to fight an endless enemies list for God and freedom. In the meantime, Bush should commend Cason for escalating the war of empty words. He posted outside the US Interests Section in Havana a Happy Holiday sign that also supports the 75 dissidents. The Cubans countered by placing across the street from Cason's office photos of Iraqi prisoners tortured by US troops at Abu Ghraib. Merry Christmas and Bah Humbug to you Mr. Cason!

Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University, where he is the director of Digital Media Programs and International Outreach, and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He is also the co-author of "Assassination on Embassy Row," which is about the Letelier and Moffitt murders. His new book is The Business of America.

 

Honduras

12.26.04 (8:10 pm)   [edit]

Gunmen Kill 28 on Bus in Honduras; Street Gangs Blamed

By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: December 25, 2004

EXICO CITY, Dec. 24 - Gunmen thought to be street gang members opened fire at a city bus in Honduras on Thursday night, killing 28 people, including 4 children, who were on their way home from work and last-minute Christmas shopping.

The attack happened about 7 p.m., the authorities said, in one of the poorest sections of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula. About six men in a dark-colored pickup truck cut in front of the moving bus, which was packed with more than 70 passengers, and opened fire with automatic weapons.

A spokesman for the Security Ministry, Leonel Sauceda, said 28 passengers, including 4 children ranging in age from 2 to 15, had been killed. An additional 29 passengers were wounded.

The attackers left a large note taped to the bus windshield. In it, Mr. Sauceda said, the gunmen claimed they were members of a leftist guerrilla group, the Cinchoneros, which had long been thought to be defunct.

The note cursed President Ricardo Maduro; the president of Congress, Porfirio Lobo Sosa; and Security Minister Óscar Álvarez, Mr. Sauceda said. It blamed the government's anticrime campaigns for the attack and warned that there would be more bloodshed.

Mr. Sauceda said the government was investigating all leads. But he said most of the evidence gathered so far indicated that the attack had been committed by street gangs, known as maras, which have caused a devastating crime wave across Central America and Mexico over the last decade.

The police arrested one suspect on Thursday night, Mr. Sauceda said. He would not identify the man except to say he was a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, one of the country's largest gangs.

The suspect, Mr. Sauceda said, was driving a truck that matched the description of the truck involved in the shooting and was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. The truck was full of spent casings from automatic weapons, he said.

Flanked by the ministers of security and defense, President Maduro addressed the nation on television on Thursday night and said his government would not bow to such attacks.

"This is a barbaric and cowardly act like few we have seen in the history of Honduras," he said. "We will punish those responsible with the full weight of the law. "We will not rest. We will not back down."

The police have estimated that there are more than 100,000 gang members in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico. The two largest gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, were started in Los Angeles among the children of men and women who fled Central America during the civil wars of the 1980's.

In a crackdown against gangs during the mid-1990's, the United States began deporting thousands of gang members back to their native Central America. There, they began organizing new groups, and their violence turned poor neighborhoods into battlefields. Two years ago, the homicide rate increased by 50 percent in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, the authorities said.

In response to the violence, Mr. Maduro opened a crackdown against gangs - known as Mano Dura, Spanish for Tough Hand - that punishes gang members with as much as 12 years in jail. And he ordered the military to join the police in huge raids in gang neighborhoods.

More than 1,300 suspected or convicted gang members have been arrested, Mr. Sauceda said. And the homicide rate has plummeted.

"The gangs thought they were in control of the country, but now they are watching their members go to jail, and they are desperate," he said of the bus attack on Thursday.

There was some speculation on Friday that the attack was revenge for a fire in a gang cellblock in May that killed 107 suspected members of the Mara Salvatruchas. A year earlier, another suspicious fire in a gang cellblock at a prison called El Porvenir killed 68 members of the Mara 18.

An independent investigation into the fire at El Porvenir found that at least 59 of the victims had been stabbed, shot or burned to death by guards and soldiers.

In the Chamelecón neighborhood, where the bus attack happened, residents said Friday that they did not know whom to blame or whom to trust.

The attack occurred four blocks from a clinic where nurse practitioners remove tattoos from young men and women struggling to get out of gangs. On Thursday night, the clinic turned into an emergency room for victims from the bullet-riddled bus. On Friday, the nurses there were distributing tranquilizers to distressed relatives of the dead.

"What do we think? We don't know what to think," one nurse, Suyapa Bonilla, said by telephone. "It could be the gangs. It could be the police. It could be some other mafia.

"The only thing we know," she added, "is that no one feels safe anymore."

La Argentina

12.26.04 (6:54 pm)   [edit]

Argentina's Economic Rally Defies Forecasts

Tomas Munita for The New York Times A busy restaurant in Buenos Aires reflects an economic recovery in which exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs.

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: December 26, 2004

=http://www.blogdrive.com/mana... method=post Fabian Gredillas/Agence France-Presse 2001 A demonstrator in Buenos Aires protests the economic collapse of December 2001. The government responded to the crisis by spurring internal consumption first and telling creditors to get in line.

UENOS AIRES, Dec. 23 - When the Argentine economy collapsed in December 2001, doomsday predictions abounded. Unless it adopted orthodox economic policies and quickly cut a deal with its foreign creditors, hyperinflation would surely follow, the peso would become worthless, investment and foreign reserves would vanish and any prospect of growth would be strangled.

But three years after Argentina declared a record debt default of more than $100 billion, the largest in history, the apocalypse has not arrived. Instead, the economy has grown by 8 percent for two consecutive years, exports have zoomed, the currency is stable, investors are gradually returning and unemployment has eased from record highs - all without a debt settlement or the standard measures required by the International Monetary Fund for its approval.

Argentina's recovery has been undeniable, and it has been achieved at least in part by ignoring and even defying economic and political orthodoxy. Rather than moving to immediately satisfy bondholders, private banks and the I.M.F., as other developing countries have done in less severe crises, the Peronist-led government chose to stimulate internal consumption first and told creditors to get in line with everyone else.

"This is a remarkable historical event, one that challenges 25 years of failed policies," said Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group in Washington. "While other countries are just limping along, Argentina is experiencing very healthy growth with no sign that it is unsustainable, and they've done it without having to make any concessions to get foreign capital inflows."

The consequences of that decision can be seen in government statistics and in stores, where consumers once again were spending robustly before Christmas. More than two million jobs have been created since the depths of the crisis early in 2002, and according to official figures, inflation-adjusted income has also bounced back, returning almost to the level of the late 1990's. That is when the crisis emerged, as Argentina sought to tighten its belt according to I.M.F. prescriptions, only to collapse into the worst depression in its history, which also set off a political crisis.

Some of the new jobs are from a low-paying government make-work program, but nearly half are in the private sector. As a result, unemployment has declined from more than 20 percent to about 13 percent, and the number of Argentines living below the poverty line has fallen by nearly 10 points from the record high of 53.4 percent early in 2002.

"Things are by no means back to normal, but we've got the feeling we're back on the right track," said Mario Alberto Ortiz, a refrigeration repairman. "For the first time since things fell apart, I can actually afford to spend a little money."

Traditional free-market economists remain skeptical of the government's approach. While acknowledging there has been a recovery, they attribute it mainly to external factors rather than the policies of President Néstor Kirchner, who has been in office since May 2003. Increasingly, they also maintain that the comeback is beginning to lose steam.

"We've been lucky," said Juan Luis Bour, chief economist at the Latin American Foundation for Economic Research here. "We've had high prices for commodities and low interest rates. But if we want to grow in 2005, we're going to have to settle the debt question and have foreign capital come in."

The I.M.F., which Argentine officials blame for inducing the crisis in the first place, argues that the current government is acting at least in part as the I.M.F. has always recommended. It has limited spending and moved to increase revenues, a classic prescription when an economy is ailing, and has built up a surplus twice the size of what the fund had asked before negotiations were put on hold several months ago.

"The return to these encouraging numbers has been helped a lot by a fiscal discipline that is almost unprecedented by Argentine standards," said John Dodsworth, the senior I.M.F. representative here. "We've had a primary surplus which has increased steadily over these past few years at both the central and provincial levels, and that has been the main anchor on the economic side."

But some of that record budget surplus has come from a pair of levies on exports and financial transactions that orthodox economists at the I.M.F. and elsewhere want to see repealed. About a third of government revenues are now raised by those taxes, which have surged.

"The I.M.F. wants these taxes to be eliminated, but on the other hand they also want Argentina to improve its offer to creditors and also pay back the fund so it can reduce its own exposure here," said Alan Cibils, an Argentine economist associated with the independent Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Public Policy here. "In other words, they are saying, 'You have to pay out more and take in less,' which is a sure prescription for another crisis."

Because of the absence of a debt accord and a stalemate over utility tariffs, some investors, mainly European, continue to shun Argentina, citing what they call the lack of "judicial security." But others, mainly Latin Americans used to operating in unstable environments or themselves survivors of similar crises, have increased their presence here amid expanding opportunities.

"These are slogans that people repeat without thinking, as if they were parrots," Roberto Lavagna, the minister of the economy, said when asked about the predictions that investment would disappear. "In 2001 and the beginning of 2002, all kinds of contracts were destroyed," he said. "So why are they investing? Because today clearly they can get a very good rate of return."

The Brazilian oil company Petrobras bought a stake in a leading energy company. Another Brazilian company, AmBev, has acquired a large interest in Quilmes, Argentina's leading beer brand, and a Mexican company has bought up control of a leading bread and cake maker.

Asian countries, with China and South Korea in the lead, have begun to move in. During a state visit last month, the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, announced that his country plans to invest $20 billion in Argentina over the next decade.

But the bulk of the new investment comes from Argentines who are beginning to spend their money at home, either bringing their savings back from abroad or from under their mattresses. For the first time in three years, more money is coming into the country than is leaving it.

That has given Mr. Kirchner the luxury of taking a hard line with the monetary fund and with foreign creditors clamoring for repayment.

"The thing is that Argentina has a current account surplus, so they don't really need so much foreign investment," said Claudio Loser, an Argentine economist and the former Western Hemisphere director for the I.M.F. "Domestic investment is taking place because there are opportunities in agriculture, oil and gas."

Just this week, the government announced that reserves of foreign currency have climbed back to $19.5 billion, their highest level since the crash and more than double the low recorded in the middle of 2002, a year with a net outflow of $12.7 billion.

"The peak of investment in the 1990's was 19.9 percent" of gross domestic product annually "and today it is at 19.1 percent, having risen from a low of 10 percent," Mr. Lavagna said. The Kirchner administration continues to seek an accord on the $167 billion in debt that is still outstanding, and plans to make what it calls its final offer early next month. But the turnabout here has inspired such a sense of confidence that the government is not only talking about cutting its last ties to the I.M.F. but also insisting that any payback to bondholders be linked to Argentina's continued good economic health.

"It's very simple," Mr. Lavagna said. "Nobody can collect from a country that is not growing."

Censoring Christmas

12.24.04 (11:03 am)   [edit]

Public Christmas displays, like the Ten Commandments, are allowed—as long as they don't mean anything religious.

By Rob Moll | posted 12/11/2003

In Connecticut, a library is refusing to display paintings of Jesus' nativity and resurrection as part of its rotating display of local art. In Queens, New York, a woman is suing a school because it would not allow her child's nativity scene to be part of its holiday display, though it allowed a menorah and an Islamic crescent. The Indiana University School of Law caused a ruckus when it removed a Christmas tree and replaced it with a generic winter scene. Outside Detroit, the city of Troy has decided to forbid private citizens from placing Christmas displays on city property. Around the United States, it's the annual "December dilemma": how do you celebrate a religious holiday without being sued?

In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Calvary Chapel wanted to participate in a two-mile long Holiday Fantasy of Lights and submitted a design that read, "Jesus is the Reason for the Season." When the county rejected it, Calvary sued. John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, who represented the church, said, "We argued that the festival had all these other displays, and they were discriminating against the Christian symbol. Just a couple years ago in a case that we argued and won, the court said that's illegal. Once you open a forum, you cannot have religious viewpoint discrimination." In late November, a judge ruled in favor of Calvary Chapel saying the county could not prohibit Calvary Chapel's message if it allowed others.

The plastic reindeer test

Though similar instances still abound, Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, said there is little dispute over the law. "If the government is involved in putting up a religious display, the courts are likely to see that as unconstitutional," Haynes said. "However, if a government body decides to put up a display that includes a religious message or symbol but is overall a more general message, either a historical or a holiday message, that's likely to be upheld as constitutional."

Such guidelines can put municipalities in an awkward position because there is no clear line between the religious display of a crèche, and the seasonal display of Christmas trees, Santa Clause, reindeer, and candy canes. "It's laughingly sometimes called the plastic reindeer test," Haynes said. "How many reindeer do you need to make Jesus secular?" Colby May, senior counsel and director of the Washington office of the American Center for Law and Justice, said, "I know that sounds a little goofy, but the truth is all these cases really are in the details." The test is whether a reasonable observer would find a Christmas display religious. If so, it's unconstitutional.

Whitehead noted two Supreme Court cases that helped define regulations on public nativity displays. In one, the Supreme Court ruled that a nativity scene on the grand staircase of the Allegheny County courthouse in Pittsburgh was unconstitutional because standing alone it endorsed Christianity. In the Lynch v. Donnelly case "there was a nativity scene in a park and the court ruled that it was constitutional because there was Santa Claus and the reindeer, things that diminish the religious significance of it. They ruled that it had a secular purpose."

Similar to the Ten Commandments

Haynes said there are similarities between Christmas display cases and Ten Commandments cases. "If it's constitutional to have a city put up a holiday display that might have a nativity scene, a menorah, and maybe Santa Claus, and if the overall impression is that this is just a celebration of the season, then it's possible the Court would say that a display about the historical roots of our laws that includes the Ten Commandments would also be constitutional."

Haynes said court holiday rulings suggest guidelines for Ten Commandments displays. "I think that the Ten Commandments movement has read these decisions very carefully. One strategy that's being tried in a number of places is to do it in the context of a historical display. That is, I think, clearly modeled on the Supreme Court decisions on holiday display cases."

While a Christmas display may be controversial, the ACLJ's May says, when done properly, either by a municipality or privately, courts will uphold such displays. Similarly, the ACLJ is winning the vast majority of Ten Commandments cases it has handled, said May.

The cases are related in another way according to the May. "We have actually seen a slight up tick in the number of inquiries we receive on the propriety of how to do it. We believe this is driven by the exposure that the Ten Commandments posting and monuments issue has created." The ACLJ has posted information on its website and sends letters to those who ask about the constitutionality of religious holiday displays.

The next battleground

The ACLJ has also received many inquiries from school choir directors and teachers responsible for Christmas concerts. May said, "When they look to the repertoire of the music of the season, the 95 plus percent of it is all religious in history. And they ask 'can we do that?' And the answer is 'of course certainly you can do that.' " Though the ACLJ has dealt with religious expression cases in schools, May said he has not seen an increase in antagonism.

However, Whitehead believes schools are the next battleground. He said last year they were besieged with cases where students were forbidden from saying "merry Christmas" or even wearing red or green. Whitehead expected to receive more this year when schools began performing Christmas concerts, and by Thanksgiving, they were dealing with a similar situation.

"A kid was asked to paint something that reminded him of Thanksgiving, something that he was thankful for, and he drew God on a cloud," Whitehead said. "And the teacher wadded it up and said you can't do that, it's illegal here." He said school cases are more difficult to argue because schools often have dress policies to prevent gang activity, and often students and teachers are not willing to stand up and fight to wear a cross or say "Merry Christmas."

Defending Christmas

As part of their Christmas Project Initiative, the Alliance Defense Fund has organized 700 attorneys who are willing to fight religious censorship in public schools. Barry Arrington, an ADF allied attorney, is representing a school in Elbert County Colorado that recently received a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Anti-Defamation League asking the school to remove any reference to Christmas, including secular ones. The ACLU and the ADF represented parents who didn't want their child exposed to Christmas references.

"The school is faced with a decision at this point to fight for its rights and the rights of the students and the parents and the teachers, or just make the whole thing go away by caving in. Usually the cheapest thing to do is cave in." Arrington said. "That's always been the ACLU's big ace-in-the-hole. Even if they're wrong, and they're wrong in this case, in order to vindicate that right, they must take someone to court, and money has to be spent on attorneys."

Currently, the ADF is dealing with 25 similar situations in schools around the country, and Arrington believes there are many more unreported cases. Jordan Lorence, senior counsel at ADF said, "The ACLU uses fear and intimidation and disinformation to get school districts and other government entities to censor Christmas in ways no court has required." Lorence said the ACLU typically will send a letter to a school saying a certain activity is unconstitutional, and often, the school complies with the letter to avoid a lawsuit. "People need to know the truth that the censorship of Christmas is not required by the constitution," Lorence said. "I find it maddeningly frustrating, that the ACLU writes these letters." According to Lorence, the Colorado appeals court has already ruled in a situation similar to the one at Elbert County Charter School. The ACLU lost that case in which a student objected to singing a religious Christmas carol, and though the student could opt out of the program, the ACLU asked the school not to sing the song. Lorence said the 10th circuit unanimously rejected the ACLU's position, yet the ACLU wrote a letter to Elbert Charter School saying the law forbids references to Christmas. Lorence said. "The Establishment Clause is not a weapon to be wielded to censor others."

Authentic displays

Whether it's singing Christmas carols in school, or posting the Ten Commandments in a courtroom, media attention tends to distort the real issue, said Hayes. "It's confused with whether or not religion is being kicked out of the public square, and it's a deeper question than that. This is an old theme in American history." Haynes said there is an anxiety particularly among evangelicals that the nation has fallen away from acknowledging its dependence on God. In response, there is an attempt to restore official acknowledgment.

"To me one of the lessons there to people of faith is that pushing the government to put up religious displays does not end well for religion. It often ends in trivializing religion, or worse yet, making the crèche a secular symbol," said Haynes. "It's better for private citizens to put up nativity scenes and the Ten Commandments, thereby they can do it in a way that's authentic."

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Chile

12.24.04 (10:41 am)   [edit]

In Chile, pace of justice quickens

By Danna Harman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

First a Chilean court stripped immunity from leaders of the country's 17-year "dirty war" last month. Then the government released a report on state-sponsored torture committed during the 1973-90 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, with President Ricardo Lagos promising compensation for the victims. Now a judge has ruled that Mr. Pinochet, after years of avoiding justice, be placed under house arrest and stand trial for his alleged involvement in the abuses.

The ruling reversed two earlier Chilean court decisions to exempt Pinochet from trial on health grounds and upheld a lower court decision to strip him of immunity from prosecution, which is granted to former presidents in Chile. It is, say prosecution lawyers, the most important in a series of legal defeats for the former general, which will serve as a precedent for other pending human rights cases in the country.
 
"We now expect other indictments will follow," attorney Eduardo Contreras told reporters.

After years of slow-motion justice, the string of high-profile moves underscores a new willingness by Chilean society to look straight at, and deal decisively with, its dark past. "The mood in Chile is changing," says Sebastian Brett, Human Rights Watch's representative in Chile. "The polarization over the military government, which took place for the first five years of transition [into democratic government], has shifted."

On Monday Judge Juan Gúzman pronounced the 89-year-old Pinochet mentally competent to stand trial for human rights abuses that took place during his regime. This came after years of international arrest warrants, exemptions for ill health, and dismissals of charges. "It was not difficult," Mr. Gúzman said of his decision.

During Pinochet's rule, an estimated 3,000 political opponents were killed or disappeared, and thousands more were tortured or driven into exile. Pinochet is now charged, specifically, in the kidnapping of nine dissidents and the death of one of them - events linked to Operation Condor, an intelligence-sharing network of South American dictators who helped one another hunt down dissidents in the 1970s and 80s.

New legal changes

The process of change in Chile has been gradual, explains Mr. Brett. In 1991, the Truth Commission report first documented the Pinochet-era abuses. This was followed a decade later by new code of penal procedures, set to go into effect next year, which has paved the way for more than 250 private lawsuits against Pinochet for alleged rights abuses.

Just last month a special commission presented harrowing accounts from 28,000 former political prisoners of the Pinochet years. Mr. Lagos has since said his government will pay up to $215 a month to about 35,000 victims. "We are taking measures to heal the wounds," he said.

"Things are looking good at the moment on the human rights front," says Brett. "There are qualitative leaps forward."

Moreover, notes Brett, support for Pinochet took a nosedive earlier this year in the wake of revelations that he secretly squirreled away millions of dollars in a US bank. In July, a US Senate report revealed that Pinochet had stashed far more than he could have earned on a government salary in Riggs Bank, based in Washington. Chile's tax authorities are investigating.

"Before, even those opposed to Pinochet would have to admit the country was in good shape economically [because of policies initiated by Pinochet], and many of his supporters could point to his honesty as a great asset," says Brett. There is a feeling now in Chile, he concludes, "that this man is rotten, through and through."

Pinochet's lawyers, contending Pinochet has a deteriorating mental condition, have called the indictment and detention a violation of his rights and have already appealed the decision - winning their client at least another day of freedom.

Twice under house arrest

Monday's decision marked the second time Pinochet has been placed under house arrest in Chile. In 2001, he was ordered held in a case related to the "Caravan of Death," a military sweep that led to the executions of more than 70 leftist activists and officials. In that case, the Supreme Court had Pinochet released after 41 days and the case dropped, saying he was mentally unfit to stand trial.

The decision to find Pinochet competent this time, says Guzman, was based on reports from court-appointed doctors, as well as on an interview Pinochet gave to a Spanish-language TV station in Miami last year.

In that interview, Pinochet said he saw himself as "a good angel" and blamed abuses on subordinates in his regime. Guzman said the former leader appeared to be lucid and concerned with how history would see him.

"I don't want people in the future to think bad [of me]," Pinochet said in the interview. "I want them to have the truth." He added: "Everything I did, I would do again."

Even if Pinochet's appeal succeeds, his problems are far from over.

In a separate case, the Santiago Court of Appeals voted recently to strip him of immunity from prosecution for a 1974 car bombing in Argentina that killed a Chilean general and his wife - a ruling that opened the possibility of a new trial.

• Ms. Harman is Latin America bureau chief for the Monitor and USA Today.

Meddlesome US

12.23.04 (7:44 pm)   [edit]

How Uncle Santa Diddles Dems from Ukraine to Venezuela

    B y Steve Weissman
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    F riday 24 December 2004

    T he coup came on April 11, 2002, when Venezuelan military forces overthrew the democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez. As many as 100 people died in the clash, which included mysterious sniper attacks on individual civilians.

    T he brass arrested Chavez, a former paratrooper, and installed in the Presidential Palace the well-established Pedro Carmona, a wealthy oil executive and head of Fedecámaras, the national Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Quickly disbanding parliament, the Supreme Court and other government bodies, Carmona revoked dozens of his predecessor's reforms, including a law that redistributed unused farmland to poor, landless peasants.

    C armona also broke ranks with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and set out to increase Venezuela's oil production for export to the United States.

    H e was in charge, Carmona told the world. Chavez had "resigned."

    T his was neither the first lie about the coup, nor the last.

    W ith telltale haste, the Bush Administration welcomed the coup as a "return to democracy" and announced official support for Carmona's new government. Otto Reich, the Cuban-born Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemispheric Affairs, immediately summoned ambassadors from Caribbean and Latin American nations to his office and repeated the official line. Since Hugo Chavez had resigned, he explained, Washington saw absolutely no threat to democracy.

    B ush Administration officials had never liked the charismatic Chavez, and never hid how they felt - or why. Sitting on the largest known oil reserves this side of Baghdad, Chavez led the effort to rebuild OPEC, limiting output in order keep crude oil prices from rapidly fluctuating up or down. His goal, he said, was to maintain a relatively stable price between $22 and $28 a barrel, a range the Clinton Administration had come to accept. Team Bush did not.

    C havez also directly threatened the profits of two American oil giants - ExxonMobil and PhillipsConoco. For 60 years the oil companies never paid Venezuela more than 16% in royalties; Chavez was demanding 30%. He wanted to use the country's oil wealth to provide literacy, basic schooling, minimal health care, and subsidized food to the vast majority of Venezuelans, who were for the most part historically disadvantaged blacks and Indios and too often lived in rural hell-holes and cardboard shanty-towns.

    M ore New Deal reformer than radical revolutionary, Chavez nonetheless terrified Venezuela's generally lighter-skinned elite and new middle class, who were Uncle Sam's local allies and the voices to whom Washington and most American media listened. These were also the Venezuelans who owned their country's major newspapers and TV stations, which tirelessly savaged Chavez as a crazy fascist tyrant with a homosexual lust for Cuba's Fidel Castro.

    I n fact, Chavez did befriend Castro, providing him with 160,000 barrels of oil a day and help with his fledgling oil industry. In return, Venezuela got Cuban sports expertise and some 10,000 doctors and other health care workers to jumpstart Chavez's effort to reduce infant mortality and the occurrence of easily treated diseases.

    E qually galling to Team Bush, Chavez also refused to cut ties with Libya and Iraq, blasted the post 9/11 bombing of Afghanistan as "fighting terrorism with terrorism," pulled Venezuelan military forces out of joint naval exercises in the Caribbean, and denied U.S. planes free access to Venezuelan airspace, which Washington claimed hampered its efforts to fight both guerrillas and drug-smugglers in neighboring Colombia.

    T his was not at all the way the colossus del Norte had come to expect our southern neighbors to behave. No matter that Chavez had won landslide victories in two national elections that outside observers found far more honest and democratic than our own.

    I n response, Team Bush put the pieces in place to provoke a coup, drawing on classic CIA destabilization campaigns that had toppled, among others, Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh (1953), Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz (1954), Guyana's Chedi Jagan (1963), Brazil's Joao Goulart (1964), and Chile's Salvador Allende (1973). The Venezuelan operation used many of the same groups now meddling in Ukraine. And, with the same straight face, they told themselves and the world that they were just helping to build democracy.

    A ccording to internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED) began working with Chavez's fiercest opponents. These included the media, extremely partisan "human rights" groups, and Pedro Carmona's Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Directly and through its usual intermediaries, NED provided money, advice, coordination, and the unmistakable message to recipients that Washington backed their efforts to overthrow Chavez.

    A mong the key groups to receive U.S. help were the oil workers, long the aristocrats of Venezuelan labor, and the generally pro-employer Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV). NED channeled money to them through the AFL-CIO's American Center for International Labor Solidarity, which replaced the American Institute for Free Labor Development and other regional bodies that had worked with the CIA in earlier destabilization campaigns.

    T he Solidarity Center provided "training" to the anti-Chavez unionists, and brought their leader Carlos Ortega to Washington to meet with American government officials.

    W orking closely with Carmona and his businessmen's group, Ortega organized the work stoppages and strikes that mobilized the mass demonstrations against Chavez. These, in turn, created the chaos and violence to which the Venezuelan coup leaders said they were responding. Needless to say, other elements of the American government were working directly with the military conspirators, and likely with some violent provocateurs as well.

    W hat's important here is that the coup quickly failed. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets to oppose it, preventing the kind of vicious crackdown that followed similar coups in Brazil and Chile. Remarkably, these Venezuelans stood up for themselves without needing Uncle Santa's money or training in democracy.

    P ro-Chavez military units also stood against the coup, and one added element swung the balance. As the BBC's Greg Palast reported, Chavez had received warning that the coup was coming, and quietly hid loyal paratroopers in the basement of the Presidential Palace. So, while the plotters held him captive, his troops had Carmona, who wisely decided to walk away in only three days. Other than the present disaster in Iraq, the Venezuelan coup that collapsed was probably the Bush Administration's greatest overseas SNAFU.

    N ever ones to admit a mistake, Team Bush continued to use NED and other groups to support the Venezuelan opposition in an effort to oust Chavez through a recall referendum, which he won with a 58% majority. Friends in the Ukraine might recall how American-funded exit polls in the recall election loudly proclaimed that Chavez had lost.

    S o, should we support the meddling we like? Or do we need to oppose and expose it all?

    T o me, the answer is obvious. If we permit the United States or any other outsiders to go unopposed in making variously colored revolutions in the former Soviet Union, we make it that much easier for them to intervene in the name of democracy wherever they want, whether in Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, or Iraq.

---

    A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.

Acevedo Vila Wins Puerto Rico Gov. Race

12.23.04 (4:50 pm)   [edit]

Acevedo Vila of the Popular Democratic Party received 961,512 votes compared to 958,328 Pedro Rossello, who was governor from 1993-2001 and favors statehood for Puerto Rico.

Officials will not officially certify a winner until Tuesday because about 2,000 votes from three ballot boxes have yet to be counted in suburban Caguas. The number of votes, however, will not affect the outcome, election officials said.

Election results from Nov. 2 showed Acevedo Vila narrowly leading Rossello, 48.38 percent to 48.18 percent, forcing the recount. Rossello and his New Progressive Party quickly challenged thousands of ballots favoring Acevedo Vila.

On Wednesday, the federal appeals court in Boston effectively put an end to Rossello's legal challenge, giving jurisdiction over the ballots to the island's Supreme Court — which supported the Popular Democratic argument — instead of a U.S. district judge who refused to adjudicate the disputed votes.

CRISIS PROFILE

12.23.04 (9:30 am)   [edit]

Is Haiti on the brink of civil war? 23 Dec 2004 Source: AlertNet By Katherine Arie

Haitian women walk down a street in Port-au-Prince in March 2004. File photo by ELIANA APONTE

LONDON (AlertNet) - Fresh fears that Haiti could be headed for civil war have surfaced as political and criminal violence continues to escalate. Some 200 people have been killed since September. Experts warn that unless all groups are disarmed, Haiti could become a permanently failed state and spread instability throughout the entire region in the form of an overflow of refugees, violence and drugs.

The poorest country in the Americas, Haiti is wracked by an ongoing political crisis. It is awash in weapons, and various armed groups -- including both supporters and opponents of former President Jean Bertrand Aristide -- operate with virtual impunity, wreaking havoc on the impoverished and war-weary population. Widespread looting and vandalism contribute to the already insecure environment.

U.N. peacekeepers, stationed in Haiti since June 2004, are charged with quelling the political violence and disarming the armed groups. But the United Nations has deployed just two-thirds of the full number of authorised troops, and the Brazilian-led forces on the ground -- just 6,000 strong -- have been unable to stabilise the country.

What happened to Aristide?

Jean Bertrand Aristide, a former Roman Catholic priest and Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, was forced from power in February 2004. Accused of corruption, Aristide fled the country in the midst of an armed revolt and under intense U.S. and French pressure. He was flown in a U.S. jet to the Central African Republic and now lives in exile in South Africa.

It wasn’t the first time Aristide had lost power. In 1991, Haiti's army overthrew the president. The United States restored Aristide to office in 1994, and he promptly disbanded the army.

A champion of Haiti’s poor, Aristide continues to command support in the poorest slums of the country. His Lavalas Family Party is still active, and his supporters have clashed with the police and the United Nations.

The interim government has blamed Aristide for fomenting violence from exile in South Africa. Aristide counters that the government has arbitrarily arrested and executed Lavalas Family Party activists and sympathisers. The government’s hard line against Aristide supporters has prompted an outcry from human rights groups, alarmed at rights violations perpetrated by police.

Who's in control of the country now?

Haiti’s interim government is nominally in control. It is headed by President Boniface Alexandre, former chief justice at Haiti's Supreme Court, and Gerard Latortue, a former Haitian foreign minister and U.N. official who was appointed prime minister in March 2004.

But the government has failed to establish authority over the country, and pro-Aristide supporters, street gangs, and rebels -- all heavily armed -- battle in the streets.

Who are the “rebels”?

The rebels are former members of Haiti’s disbanded army. They played an instrumental role in forcing Aristide from office in February and control large swaths of the country.

Human Rights Watch has criticised Prime Minister Latortue’s apparent indifference to the abuses of the rebels. Latortue has said that in his opinion the former soldiers are freedom fighters, but the once cordial relations between the rebels and the interim government soured in recent months over the soldiers’ demand to be reinstated and compensated with 10 years of back pay.

In November, disgruntled rebels seized Aristide’s former walled compound in an upscale Port-au-Prince neighbourhood, forcing a standoff with U.N. troops that threatened to plunge the country further into anarchy.

The rebels left peacefully after two days, but they blamed the government for requesting that the United Nations intervene and subsequently called for a guerrilla war to unseat the government.

What role is the U.N. playing in Haiti?

In June 2004, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), led by Brazil, replaced a U.S.-led multinational force that had moved in when Aristide left. MINUSTAH’s mandate includes assisting the Haitian police in disarming all armed groups, protecting civilians under imminent threat of physical violence and strengthening the judiciary.

MINUSTAH, which had been criticised for not intervening in the escalating violence, has responded to the government’s request to remove the rebels from Aristide’s compound and has intervened in gang violence in an attempt to halt the indiscriminate killing of innocent bystanders.

In early December 2004, U.N. troops entered Cite Soleil, a predominantly pro-Aristide slum of 500,000 people in Port-Au-Prince, where gangs had squared off against each other.

MINUSTAH has also played a humanitarian role. It has protected convoys going from Port-au-Prince to the northern town of Gonaïves after rain from Hurricane Jeanne in September 2004 flooded the town, and provided security and logistic support for both local people and humanitarian agencies.

What is the humanitarian situation in Haiti?

The humanitarian situation is dire. The political crisis has disrupted everyday life for many Haitians, interrupting health services and threatening food supplies. Without security, law and order, humanitarian agencies have struggled to reach those in need. Armed gangs, the hijacking of trucks and looting remain a problem.

A U.N. report released in November, “A Common Vision of Sustainable Development”, found that 55 percent of Haitians live on less than $1 a day and 42 percent of children under five are malnourished. It also found that one in 10 Haitians will have HIV/AIDS by 2015 and that dying during childbirth is now the second cause of death for Haitian women.

In September rain unleashed by Hurricane Jeanne led to flooding in Gonaïves in which 2,000 people were killed. Thousands of survivors were left homeless and without food or clean water.

See AlertNet’s Why is Haiti so prone to natural disaster?

Chavez in China

12.22.04 (7:36 pm)   [edit]

Venezuela's Chavez arrives in China with eye on oil deals 12-22-2004, 18h44

BEIJING (AFP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez arrived in Beijing for an official visit that aims to bolster his country's oil deals with the Asian giant, state media and officials said. During his five-day state visit, Chavez will meet with Chinese leaders including President Hu Jintao to exchange views on bilateral relations and international issues of common concern, the Xinhua news agency said. Before he departed Venezuela on his third trip to China in the last five years, Chavez described himself as "an old friend of the Chinese people". The leftist president was accompanied by Foreign Minister Ali Rodriguez, the former energy minister and a former head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). In announcing the visit on Monday, Rodriguez mentioned China's runaway economic growth and its effect on Venezuela, one of the world's leading oil producers. China's growth "translates, among other things, in a strong rise in the demand for energy," Rodriguez said. There are already business arrangements between Venezuela's state-run oil company and China Petroleum that include the purchase of Venezuelan fuel oil and power plant fuel. Chinese companies are also seeking to invest in oil exploration and production "to satisfy, in large measure, the new Chinese demand," Rodriguez said. In turn China can assist Venezuela in the fields of telecommunications, food production and culture, Rodriguez said. "There is also the national strategic interest of diversifying markets, without sacrificing any of our (current) clients," he added. US markets currently account for 85 percent of Venezuela's crude oil exports, making up 12 to 15 percent of total US consumption, according to White House statistics. Venezuela has had a tense relationship with Washington since Chavez first took office in 1998. In August, Chavez won a referendum keeping in office until 2006. Besides the capital Beijing, Chavez will also visit Shandong province in east China, Xinhua said.

Latin America

12.21.04 (7:09 pm)   [edit]

Venezuela Keeps Hope Alive 
    B y Saul Landau
    T he Progreso Weekly   1 6-22 December 2004 Edition

    W hen Latin American leaders declare their intention to redistribute wealth downward in their countries, a Pavlovian bell rings in Washington. Like the dog in Russian scientist's experiments, the U.S. national security gang respond with aggressive intervention to the very mention of taking some of the ill-gotten gains from the filthy rich and distributing them to the miserably poor.

    L ook at a partial list in Latin America alone.

    1954, the CIA overthrew Guatemala's elected government under President Jacobo Arbenz because he intended to expropriate - with payment - some of the United Fruit Company's vast, and unused, acreage in his country.

    1959, Fidel Castro became an object for destabilization and terror because he redistributed wealth.

    1964, the United States backed a military coup in Brazil to prevent nationalist President Joao Goulart from reforming Brazil's economic structure.

    1965, U.S. troops stopped Juan Bosch from becoming president of the Dominican Republic.

    1970-73, CIA destabilized Chile under Allende and backed a bloody, military coup.

    1980, the CIA tried to derail the reforms of Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. The Agency waged covert war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas from 1979-90 and cooperated in ousting President Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti - twice.

    T he CIA knew about the planned April coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. An April 6, 2002 Agency document reports that "dissident military factions, including some disgruntled senior officers and a group of radical junior officers, are stepping up efforts to organize a coup against President Chavez, possibly as early as this month." The report placed the coup within the context of a strike by oil workers. "To provoke military action, the plotters may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations slated for later this month or ongoing strikes at the state-owned oil company PSVSA." Washington did not inform Venezuelan authorities of this information. Accessories to a crime? That the CIA "knew" of the coup surprised me as much as George Bush dropping a malaprop.

    A s I arrived on December 2, I scanned Caracas' Simon Bolivar International Airport for likely looking CIAniks. Apparent serenity prevailed, but exciting social change was taking place throughout the country.

    O n December 3, I traveled to Guarenas, a city of about 140,000 people, about 15 miles east of Caracas. I had joined hundreds of Artists and Intellectuals in Defense of Humanity, among them actor Danny Glover, former Algerian Prime Minister Ben Bella and Nobel Prize laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel. We spent eight hours applauding grandmas showing off their newly acquired reading skills and pointing proudly to the North Pole on the map after taking a geography course. The education program ("Mision  Robinson," named after Samuel Robinson, one of Simon Bolivar's teachers) now extends into the most remote rural areas. Cuban teachers help Venezuelan educators bring literacy and more advanced learning to areas that were previously deprived.

    W e also met scores of Cuban doctors, nurses, X-ray and lab technicians. They appeared to have routine and friendly interaction with poor patients at primary health care clinics in Oropeza Castillo, a slum neighborhood of eroding high rise apartments.

    T he Cubans, indistinguishable from the Venezuelans by skin color - slightly different accents and wearing white lab coats - proudly described how their primary health care programs and diagnostic centers treat thousands daily in facilities that the residents previously lacked. A group of women bystanders agreed that the Cubans treated them with dignity and professionalism, from physical exams through x-ray and lab work.

    B efore I had left for Venezuela, one wealthy Venezuelan student told me that "Castro's doctors deprive Venezuelan physicians. They treat patients for nothing. How will our own doctors survive?"

    B efore the Cuban doctors came, I asked one middle-aged woman, "What kind of medical attention did you receive?"

    S he laughed. "When students graduated from medical school, they would come and treat us, but without any support system. They did their best, but the public hospitals were filthy and often had inadequate staff, even when we came in with emergencies," another said. "Look how many babies died in childbirth!" She named neighbors who lost their babies.

    T he next day President Hugo Chavez provided exact figures. "Before we began the new primary care programs," Chavez said, "our infant mortality rate was 24 to every 1000 births. We've reduced it in the last year to 17, a major drop, but still too high." Imagine an oil rich country with such mortality figures! The Cuban doctors are helping to bring the rate down further.

    C havez' barrio adentro (inside the neighborhood) program also includes public dining rooms and markets where the government offers free or subsidized food to the poorest residents.

    A t the "Casa de Alimentacion Auricela Diaz," the residents served us rice, beans, shredded pork and fried bananas. Residents said they received meals like this on a regular basis, thanks to Hugo Chavez. In a school yard, Cuban physical education teachers had organized a potato sack race and other games involving parents and kids. Several neighbors commented on how the quality of life had improved since the arrival of the Cubans. "They're very much like us," a woman told me after her daughter had won a prize in a coordination contest. "You know, Caribbean people."

    A Cuban doctor from Santi Espiritu told me that his "grandparents were illiterate guajiros (peasants) and every time they see me my grandmother bursts out crying. She still can't believe I'm a doctor. I'm repaying my debt to my country by helping people here in Guarenas. I feel good about it."

    E nough barefoot kids ran around to assure me that I was not seeing Caribbean versions of the Potemkin village, an ideal community set up to please Catherine the Great.

    " This is my revolution," Asia, a young dark-skinned woman proudly tells me. "And it belongs to us because we voted for it several times." She referred to both the 1998 election when Venezuelans overwhelmingly chose Hugo Chavez president and to the August 2004 referendum when almost 60% opted for him. He vowed to end the Kleptocracy that had governed the country for decades and to spread the wealth to the poor. "I feel proud to be Venezuelan," she said. "I really feel as if Bolivar's spirit is alive with Hugo Chavez."

    T he wealthy behaved in Venezuela as they did in Cuba after the 1959 revolution, in Chile after the 1970 election of Allende and in Nicaragua after the 1979 Sandinista triumph. They responded to the loss of some power and privilege by mounting a vicious campaign against the new government.

    A fter four years of incessant propaganda on how Chavez was a dictator, stupid, gay, a Castro tool, a terrorist and incompetent, the old privileged class convinced the their corrupt union leader buddies in the oil industry to stage a crippling strike. In April 2002, with the Bush Administration blessing, they staged an unsuccessful coup. Following that, they sought to recall Chavez through a referendum. When almost 95% of the electorate turned out, the old ruling elite understood they could not use a democratic ritual against the first Venezuelan President that had given the word democracy real meaning.

    C havez won despite unrelenting opposition from the two main daily newspapers (Universal and Nacional) and the leading television stations. Chavez is a "black monkey," his white opponents smirked. Even Colin Powell took offense as he endorsed policies to overthrow Chavez.

    H e spoke to the delegates at the Defense of Humanity Meeting about why he rejected the IMF model. "It brought us the 'Carracazo' [1989 anti-IMF riots]." The rich imposed austerity policies on the poor and then the repressive forces shot down as many as 2,000 people. These neo-liberal policies have led to a million kids living in Venezuelan slums. Indeed, Egypt, Indonesia, Argentina and scores of third world countries have also been IMF'd. Neo-liberal economic policies, Chavez told the assembled delegates, produced an oil-rich nation with 1 million plus illiterate adults. For decades, alternating Social Democratic and Christian Democratic governments looted the treasury.

    C havez sang the praises of the 10,000 Cuban doctors, plus nurses and technicians, in the more than 11,000 urban and rural clinics. Chavez has also invested in housing and agrarian reform for poor farmers - 117,000 farm families will have received almost 5 million acres by January. "We've done very little," Chavez said. "The big job is ahead." He expected to win a larger majority in 2006, based on the performance of his government. He said that Venezuela can't do it alone, that a block of Latin American nations must form to insure proper development. Chavez has taken steps, along with Cuba's Castro and Brazil's Lula to start such a process.  "The world needs development and peace and the only road to peace," he concluded, "is justice."

    C havez quoted Bolivar, Marti, O'Higgins and contemporary authors in his discourse, hardly the picture of the military hick that his enemies paint. He showed intellect, a sense of humor, iron will and determination to push ahead with his ambitious and just programs. He laid out a reasonable social democracy model as his goal.

    O n the road back to the airport, I passed elegant high rises and wealthy neighborhoods. The class struggle will undoubtedly intensify. The unanswered question: how to stop Bush from further intervention and defend humanity in Venezuela? 

---

    Saul Landau is the Director of Digital Media and International Outreach Programs for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences - California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Axing the International Criminal Court

12.21.04 (6:29 pm)   [edit]

Axing the ICC 12/20/2004 @ 11:27am  permalink

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Outrageous details of Congress's bloated spending bill for next year keep surfacing. The latest: An amendment on page 219 that prevents $2.5 billion in US foreign aid from reaching countries who have joined the International Criminal Court (ICC), but refused to specifically exempt US soldiers from the court's jurisdiction. A host of US allies will now be deprived of critical aid: Jordan loses $250 million in funds for economic growth and governance reform; Northern Ireland and Cyprus lose $12 million and $13.5 million for their respective peace processes; Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela sacrifice $32.5 million to strengthen democracy and the rule of law; four Caribbean states lose $9 million designed to impede the international drug trade; South Africa--which has already forfeited $7.6 million--loses an additional $1 million destined to combat counterfeiting; eight East African democracies, including Niger--the world's poorest Muslim country--lose $11 million in counter-terrorism assistance. The list goes on. The Bush Administration has approached the world's first international war crimes tribunal with hostility since its inception. After much browbeating, the Administration famously "unsigned" Bill Clinton's earlier agreement to join the ICC in 2002. Claiming US soldiers would be unfairly targeted, the new position put the US at odds with many of its key allies, including the entire EU. Tellingly, the three-sentence "unsigning" letter was penned by hawkish Under Secretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton. (Since its founding two years ago, the ICC has set up tribunals for crimes against humanity in Congo and Uganda while rejecting allegations against the US and UK in Iraq.) Despite the ICC's numerous safeguards against unfair prosecutions, Congress has repeatedly passed anti-ICC legislation, extending a ban on military aid to all forms of foreign assistance for countries who don't follow Washington's directives. As of October 2004, the Administration had convinced 92 countries to sign bilateral agreements insulating US troops (only 80 of which were publicly announced). Fifty-seven countries refused to sign after claiming the concession violated international law and undercut the ICC's effectiveness. The recent amendment to the spending bill, sponsored by Rep. George Nethercutt (R-WA), is the latest consequence of Washington's ineffective maneuvering. Most disturbingly, many of the countries now facing aid cuts are identified by the State Department as key strategic partners in the war of terror. Bitter irony now passes for Bush Administration diplomacy.

'Meddling' In Ukraine

12.21.04 (8:17 am)   [edit]

Democracy is not an American plot.

Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page A25

At Guantanamo, a Prison within a Prison

12.20.04 (8:33 pm)   [edit]

  

C.I.A. has run a secret facility for some Al Qaeda detainees, officials say.

    W ithin the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.

    T he buildings used by the CIA are shrouded by high fences covered with thick green mesh plastic and ringed with floodlights, officials said. They sit within the larger Camp Echo complex, which was erected to house the Defense Department's high-value detainees and those awaiting military trials on terrorism charges.

    T he facility has housed detainees from Pakistan, West Africa, Yemen and other countries under the strictest secrecy, the sources said. "People are constantly leaving and coming," said one U.S. official who visited the base in recent months. It is unclear whether the facility is still in operation today. The CIA and the Defense Department declined to comment.

    M ost international terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are held not by the CIA but by the Defense Department at the Guantanamo Bay prison. They are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.

    C IA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far greater secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment. The roster of CIA prisoners is not public, but current and former U.S. intelligence officials say the agency holds the most valuable al Qaeda leaders and many mid-level members with knowledge of the group's logistics, financing and regional operations.

    T he CIA facility at the Guantanamo Bay prison was constructed over the past year as the agency confronted one of its toughest emerging problems: where to hold terrorists for interrogations that could last for years.

    D uring the 1990s, the CIA typically had custody of half a dozen terrorists at any time and usually kept them in foreign prisons, mostly in Egypt and Jordan. But just two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, CIA paramilitary teams working with foreign intelligence services had arrested dozens of people thought to have knowledge of upcoming attacks on the United States.

    T he CIA is believed to be holding about three dozen al Qaeda leaders in undisclosed locations, U.S. national security officials say. Among them are pivotal Sept. 11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida and the leader of Southeast Asia's Islamic terrorist movement, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, who is also known as Hambali.

    C IA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean.

    M aintaining facilities in foreign countries is difficult, however, said current and former CIA officials. Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida were believed to have been taken to Thailand immediately after capture. The Thai government eventually insisted that they be transferred elsewhere.

    " People are willing to help but not to hold," said one CIA veteran of counterterrorism operations.

    T he U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay thus provided the CIA with an isolated venue devoid of the sensitive international politics. But it came with strings attached.

    T he U.S. military, which controls the base, required the agency to register all detainees, abide by military detention standards and permit the ICRC some level of access.

    " If you're going to be in my back yard, you're going to have to abide by my rules" is how one defense official explained it.

    A rmy officials investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal concluded that the CIA had held "ghost detainees" at the prison, inmates who were not registered or officially acknowledged, a violation of military rules.

    A sked about the arrangement with the CIA at Guantanamo Bay, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he could not comment on operations of other agencies. "As we have stated since the beginning of detention operations at Guantanamo, the ICRC has access to detainees at Guantanamo and is permitted to meet with them, consistent with military necessity," Whitman said in a statement. Pentagon policy "is that all [Defense] detainees, including those at Guantanamo, are treated humanely, and in accordance with applicable law," the statement continued.

    O ne U.S. official knowledgeable about the arrangement with the ICRC considered it a positive step forward. "There is no one in Gitmo who is not identified," he said, using Guantanamo Bay's nickname.

    R ed Cross officials declined to say where they had been permitted to visit, or whom. "We have been granted broad access to the camp," the ICRC said in a prepared statement. "We are confident we have visited all of the people detained at Guantanamo, in all of the places they are being detained."

    T he CIA has worked at Guantanamo Bay since the early days of the prison camps, which opened in January 2002 when the first men captured in the Afghan war were transferred to a collection of chain-link cages called Camp X-Ray. The CIA has kept an office at the Navy base and takes part in interrogation sessions of Defense Department detainees alongside FBI agents, military intelligence officers and others in what are called Tiger Teams.

    M any of the interrogations have been conducted inside trailers set up within the perimeter of Camp Delta, a more permanent compound of steel cages that took the place of Camp X-Ray by the end of 2003.

    T he facility used by the CIA is in Camp Echo, which also houses high-value military detainees. The camp consists of more than a dozen single-story concrete-block huts built away from the main prison complex. Each hut is divided in half. Inside is a steel cage, a restroom, and a table for interviews and interrogations, according to sources familiar with the facility.

    T he CIA's facility has been "off-limits to nearly everyone on the base," said one military official familiar with operations at Guantanamo Bay.

    O ne of the huts at Camp Echo has been occupied by a detainee named Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, according to one source familiar with the new compound. Slahi, a Mauritanian businessman, acted as the liaison between a group of Islamic radicals living in Hamburg and al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, according to the Sept. 11 commission.

    A ccording to statements given by the key plotter, Binalshibh, Slahi persuaded the men to go to Afghanistan, rather than Chechnya, to fight.

    H e arranged their travel and for them to meet al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, who in turn arranged a meeting between Binalshibh and bin Laden.

    S lahi was arrested by secret police in Mauritania during the night on Sept. 27, 2001, members of his family told local media at the time. By December, he was in U.S. custody.

 Dana Priest and Scott Higham  

U.S. Takes Border War on the Road

12.20.04 (7:57 pm)   [edit]
Boats being sunk near Ecuador

By Bruce Finley
Denver Post Staff Writer

Manta, Ecuador - U.S. counterterrorism officials have set up a high-seas gantlet deploying Coast Guard cutters off Latin America and arresting foreign nationals trying to leave their own countries.

Coast Guard crews have blocked at least 37 Ecuadoran boats and detained more than 4,575 suspected illegal migrants over the past four years, records show. Then, over the past two years, they've sunk a dozen emptied migrant boats they deemed "unseaworthy" - setting them ablaze and firing on them with their .50-caliber guns.

The crackdown fits into a new worldwide strategy that U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials describe as "pushing our borders out." Enforcing U.S. laws abroad is crucial, they contend, to control record illegal immigration, estimated at 500,000 a year, and close security gaps terrorists could exploit.

"The president has authority to secure the borders of the United States," said Lt. Cmdr. Brad Kieserman, operations legal chief at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Not only off Ecuador, but "anywhere in the world," Kieserman said, Coast Guard and Navy ships will "go to the source of transnational crime and interdict it before it gets to the United States."

Ecuador protests to the extent it can. Ecuador's fragile democratic government controls a military base U.S. military commanders count on, one of three newly refurbished "Forward Operating Locations" around Latin America.

And U.S. foreign policy experts warn that effective world policing means balancing benefits with backlash.

Today a new bitterness pulses through port streets here, where a centuries-old fishing culture fuses with the business of smuggling people north.

Coast Guard commanders "at least should have brought my boat back here and put it in the hands of Ecuadoran authorities," said Segundo Moreiro- Vegos, 41, owner of the 70-foot Diego Armando, sunk Feb. 22. He said he didn't know, when he rented it for fishing, that smugglers would cram on 103 migrants.

U.S. gunners "sink boats to show the power they have to stop migrants, to show the other fishermen not to (get involved) ... They board with machine guns, put everyone on the floor, tie hands," Moreiro-Vegos said.

"Before, I was feeling good about American people being down here. Now, I don't want to see them. We suffer so much because of these people."

Gunboat diplomacy

Some analysts see this as contemporary gunboat diplomacy. If foreign armed forces stopped U.S. boats in this way, "we'd call it an act of war," said John Pike, director of the Washington think tank Global Security. "There is no world government to enforce international law. It's always been the case that the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must."

Others say U.S. officials are pushing too far, straining the already faint goodwill and support that the United States needs to fight terrorism, the illegal spread of weapons, and other threats.

"To have U.S. ships off the coast of Ecuador sinking boats is not the best public relations for the United States," said Robert Leiken, director of immigration and security studies at the Nixon Center think tank in Washington.

If stopping illegal immigration is the goal, cracking down on U.S. employers who hire illegal workers would be far more effective, Leiken said.

"Basically, we have one continent which is so far not penetrated by Islam; there's very little Muslim radicalism in Latin America," he said. "I'd think we'd want these people on our side.

"We're going to need people from Ecuador, El Salvador and other countries. To have anti-Americanism whipped up for what seem to be extraneous, unnecessary reasons ... I'm not so sure this is the way to be aggressive. As long as we aren't willing to close our own internal border by pursuing interior enforcement, how can we go out into other countries?"

U.S. courts have affirmed a right to enforce U.S. laws abroad if crimes affect the United States.

Neither the United States nor Ecuador has signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that would provide a forum for hashing out disputes.

Intercepting migrants off Latin America essentially "is a power play, it is pre-emption," said professor Ved Nanda, an international law expert at the University of Denver.

Small countries like Ecuador "have no leverage" and can't really retaliate, Nanda said. "But in the long run, this is not in our interests if we are trying to promote the international rule of law."

The key is whether the United States "pushes out our border" with permission of other countries, said Harvard University professor Joseph Nye. Asking for permission determines "whether you create ill will or not." And ill will can impede cooperation the U.S. needs, Nye said. Terrorism, drug-dealing, and mutating infectious diseases are growing problems the United States can't solve alone, "no matter how big our military is. ... We are going to need that much more cooperation."

Seeking a better life

Migrants worldwide increasingly risk travel on leaky, often-unsafe boats to reach the United States - frequently via Guatemala and Mexico.

Poverty and inequality compel them. In Ecuador, the economy nearly collapsed in 1999. And as impoverished peasants demonstrated against worsening living conditions, the government adopted the U.S. dollar as Ecuador's currency in an effort to bring stability. The dollar helped banks. But prices shot up, hurting the poor majority. Jobs that pay livable wages were ever-more scarce.

The result: Tens of thousands of Ecuadorans left for Europe and the United States - many as illegal migrants. Ecuador's government estimates nearly a fourth of its 13 million people are gone.

Now Ecuador, like low-income countries worldwide, relies more and more on money sent home from migrant fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who work in faraway cities.

But U.S. Homeland Security officials say the migration must stop.

Coast Guard crews have found people from dozens of countries all over the world on intercepted migrant boats - raising the possibility terrorists could enter the United States that way.

"Ecuador has become the central Western Hemisphere country for smuggling aliens," a base for more than 200 smuggling networks, said Drew Orsinger, special assistant for border and transportation security at Homeland Security headquarters.

On Wednesday, Ecuadoran officials facing popular pressure to respond said they've protested privately in Washington.

"There is no international rule that allows the sinking of boats," said former ambassador to the United States Diego Stacey, now secretary of sovereignty in Ecuador. "We do not agree on the sinking of boats."

U.S. officials add to the pressure on Ecuador's government, withholding $7 million in aid because Ecuador refuses to grant U.S. government personnel immunity from prosecution in the International Criminal Court.

That money was to help Ecuadoran villages resist cocaine barons who "now have a special route through Ecuador to the USA," Stacey said last week in an interview. Holding it back "will affect the USA."

And the Manta military base matter looms.

An agreement allowing U.S. use of the base - for counterdrug surveillance - expires in 2009. U.S. officials spent $67 million improving the runway and building offices and a residential compound.

Military commanders this year told Congress they're trying to ensure U.S. access here and in other countries by renewing leases well in advance.

But Ecuador's Stacey said: "I don't think now is the time to consider the renewal of the agreement. These kind of actions that we don't consider legitimate have an important impact in the public opinion. ... It will take some time, even a few more years, until we can start speaking about what is going to happen with the Manta base."

Traditionally, the Coast Guard mostly protected U.S. coasts while venturing out on occasional specialized missions. In the 1990s, cutters patrolled the Caribbean as crises in Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic churned out desperate migrants on rafts.

Today in the eastern Pacific, growing numbers of Coast Guard vessels motor out thousands of miles, with U.S. Navy support. The initial mission was catching drug smugglers. The number of vessels is classified, officials said. An $11 billion Project Deepwater expansion is to boost U.S. control of the high seas.

The Ecuador situation is still playing out.

U.S. officials now propose to seek consent before sinking boats - if the boats fly Ecuador's flag and Ecuadoran officials can respond on short notice and take control of intercepted boats. Smugglers often don't display flags.

Ecuadoran officials say they lack boats and fuel, let alone satellite and aerial surveillance data, to fully cover coastal waters. They refuse to put migrants in jail.

Meanwhile, at the Manta military base, U.S. airmen and Marines labor to improve public relations. They teach English, raise money for a hospital, and hire Ecuadorans to work at a fancy new firehouse by the runway.

"Here at my level, relations are fantastic," said Col. Bill Brinley, the U.S. commander.

But boat interceptions aren't making his job any easier. After Brinley spoke, 45 students and civic group leaders gathered in a Manta auditorium to denounce boat interceptions as "violations of Ecuadoran sovereignty." Some questioned benefits of the base, too, saying an extended U.S. presence will mean more poverty.

Elsewhere in Ecuador, simmering resentments surface.

In Quito, the capital, teacher Carmen Gutierrez, 58, recently returned to her private, elite high school after a three-year exchange teaching Spanish at Rampart High School in Colorado Springs. And when she put up a U.S. flag in her classroom, she said, Ecuadoran students "were really, really mad. They demanded an explanation. 'Why did you put that on the window? Take it off!"'

Gutierrez insisted on keeping the flag. But she remains troubled, trying to persuade her students that U.S. people are not like their government, she said. "They are very generous, worried about others."

Staff writer Bruce Finley can be reached at 303-820-1700 or at bfinley@denverpost.com .

The Coup Connection

12.19.04 (9:55 pm)   [edit]
How an organization financed by the U.S. government has been promoting the overthrow of elected leaders abroad.

    I n early 2004, chaos overwhelmed Haiti. In January, a rebellion erupted against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former slum priest who had frequently angered the United States with his leftist rhetoric. Aristide had twice been elected, but he had alienated many Haitians with his increasing demagoguery and use of violence against the opposition. Yet polls showed that Aristide remained relatively popular, so even experienced Haiti watchers were surprised when, in late February, armed militias marched on the nation's capital while demonstrators shut down the streets. In the violence, some 100 Haitians were killed. At dawn on February 29, with the militias closing in, Aristide left Haiti on a U.S. government plane.

    B ut did the rebellion really spring from nowhere? Maybe not. Several leaders of the demonstrations - some of whom also had links to the armed rebels - had been getting organizational help and training from a U.S. government-financed organization. The group, the International Republican Institute (IRI), is supposed to focus on nonpartisan, grassroots democratization efforts overseas. But in Haiti and other countries, such as Venezuela and Cambodia, the institute - which, though not formally affiliated with the GOP, is run by prominent Republicans and staffed by party insiders - has increasingly sided with groups seeking the overthrow of elected but flawed leaders who are disliked in Washington.

    I n 2002 and 2003, IRI used funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to organize numerous political training sessions in the Dominican Republic and Miami for some 600 Haitian leaders. Though IRI's work is supposed to be nonpartisan - it is official U.S. policy not to interfere in foreign elections - a former U.S. diplomat says organizers of the workshops selected only opponents of Aristide and attempted to mold them into a political force.

    T he trainings were run by IRI's Haiti program officer, Stanley Lucas, the scion of a powerful Haitian family with long-standing animosity toward Aristide - Amnesty International says some family members participated in a 1987 peasant massacre. "To have Lucas as your program officer sends a message to archconservatives that you're on their side," says Robert Maguire, a Haiti expert at Trinity College in Washington, D.C.

    I RI's anti-Aristide focus appeared to have support from the Bush administration. The former U.S. diplomat in Haiti says Lucas was in constant contact with Roger Noriega, the administration's top Latin America official, who had previously worked for Senator Jesse Helms and had long sought to oust Aristide. Noriega and conservative Republican congressional staffers kept in close touch with IRI-trained opposition leaders and pushed for additional funding for IRI's Haiti activities. "The USAID director in Haiti was under enormous pressure [from Congress] to fund IRI," says the former diplomat.

    A ccording to an internal report by the USAID inspector general obtained by Mother Jones, in July 2002 the U.S. Embassy in Haiti protested that IRI's actions were undermining the official U.S. policy of working with all sides in Haiti and that Lucas was spreading unsubstantiated rumors about the U.S. ambassador. In response, USAID barred Lucas from running the IRI program for 120 days. Lucas, according to several observers, threatened to use Bush administration connections to have embassy officials fired. He continued to essentially run the IRI Haiti program while serving as a "translator," in what IRI officials acknowledged was a violation of USAID's ban, according to the inspector general's report.

    I n 2004, several of the people who had attended IRI trainings were influential in the toppling of Aristide. Among them, according to Kim Ives, a journalist with the newspaper Haiti Progres, was André Apaid, a conservative Haitian politician who had backed a previous anti-Aristide coup in 1991. Apaid became one of the leaders of the Group of 184, which organized the street demonstrations against Aristide. Other members of the group trained in the Dominican Republic were in close contact with the thuggish armed opposition - participating in rebel meetings, serving as liaisons between the armed groups and foreign embassies, and negotiating for the militia leaders. Among them was Paul Arcelin, a leading member of the opposition who had served as an ambassador under Haiti's previous military junta. Arcelin told Canadian reporters that he and other opposition leaders frequently met with Guy Philippe, the leader of the armed rebels, to "prepare for Aristide's downfall."

    W hen the uprising against Aristide began in late 2003, the White House did little to stop it. In February 2004, as the militias were marching on Port-au-Prince, President Bush issued a statement blaming Aristide for the violence. In late February, the administration urged Aristide to leave Haiti, and on February 29 he was flown into exile in the Central African Republic on a U.S. plane dispatched by the Pentagon. Today, conservative politicians and the military are reinstalling themselves in power, Haiti experts report; the country's infamous intelligence services are being re-created, and violence against Aristide supporters is commonplace.

    H aiti is not unique. In Venezuela, Cambodia, and other nations, IRI-unlike other government-funded democratization groups-has increasingly focused on training opposition parties intent on toppling elected governments. The institute is one of several democracy-promotion groups financed by U.S.AID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); others include the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the AFL-CIO's international wing. Under their bylaws, the groups are supposed to work with actors across the political spectrum in democracies. In Haiti, for example, NDI, which is controlled by Democrats, worked with members of Aristide's party as well as opposition parties, and was lauded for its grassroots efforts.

    I RI, by contrast, has increasingly come under attack for choosing sides. In Venezuela, the institute dramatically expanded its presence in 2001 and 2002 as President Hugo Chavez ratcheted up his anti-U.S. rhetoric. IRI's Latin America program was led by Georges Fauriol, who had previously worked at a conservative Washington think tank alongside Otto Reich, who has been Bush's closest adviser on Latin America policy. Reich, who according to Congress' Government Accountability Office conducted "prohibited covert propaganda" on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, is a former ambassador to Venezuela who had frequently denounced Chavez.

    I n Venezuela, IRI staffed its program with Bush allies and campaign supporters; in turn, in 2001 the administration increased funding for IRI's activities in Venezuela sixfold, from $50,000 to $300,000 - the largest grant any of NED's democracy-promotion organizations received that year.

    A t the time, all the major U.S. democracy-promotion groups were active in Venezuela, including both IRI and NDI. But documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that while NDI worked with parties across the political spectrum, IRI staffers spent much of their time cultivating the opposition. IRI worked closely with Acción Democrática, a group that, IRI's own documents acknowledge, "refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Chavez presidency." IRI also tutored opposition figures, including Caracas mayor Alfredo Peña, an outspoken Chavez critic, on how to create a political party. And despite a warning from the National Endowment for Democracy not to take sides in Venezuela, IRI also used its own money to bring opposition figures to Washington, where they met with top U.S. officials.

    I n April 2002, a group of military officers launched a coup against Chavez, and leaders of several parties trained by IRI joined the junta. When news of the coup emerged, democracy-promotion groups in Venezuela were holding a meeting to discuss ways of working together to avoid political violence; IRI representatives didn't attend, saying that they were drafting a statement on Chavez's overthrow. On April 12, the institute's Venezuela office released a statement praising the "bravery" of the junta and "commending the patriotism of the Venezuelan military."

    T hat drew a sharply worded email from NED president Carl Gershman, a copy of which was obtained by Mother Jones. Gershman wrote: "By welcoming [the coup] - indeed, without any apparent reservations-you unnecessarily interjected IRI into the sensitive internal politics of Venezuela."

    A t roughly the same time that IRI issued its statement, Reich announced that Chavez had resigned - though he had not - and said the United States would support the new government in Venezuela. But within a day, Chavez was restored to power by popular demonstrations, the presidential guard, and segments of the army. At least 40 people were killed in the violence surrounding the coup.

    I RI's selective approach to democracy-building has also been in evidence in Cambodia, where it has thrown its support behind the Sam Rainsy Party, an opposition group led by a former banker who is popular in conservative Washington circles. Institute staff members have written speeches and managed campaigns for Rainsy, according to several sources. "IRI people were part of the [Rainsy] machine," says one human rights expert who focuses on Cambodia.

    C ambodian prime minister Hun Sen, like Chavez and Aristide, is no saint. He has been linked to political violence and has little respect for civil liberties. "In some ways, IRI [is] leveling the playing field," says the Cambodia expert. Similarly, in Haiti, says another observer, there was a legitimate need to help the opposition organize because Aristide was becoming so abusive of his power.

    Y et IRI's singular focus on groups seeking to overthrow leaders seen as hostile to the United States can sometimes harm American diplomatic efforts. In Cambodia, notes one official with considerable experience in the country, "it hurt the U.S. government's credibility as an honest broker in the election processes." In Haiti, IRI has had a similar impact, experts say, by unbalancing an already volatile situation and causing people to wonder what the United States' true agenda was. In 2003, after being threatened by IRI's Stanley Lucas, the departing U.S. ambassador, Brian Dean Curran, gave a farewell speech to the Haitian chamber of commerce. "There are many in Haiti who prefer not to listen to me," he said, "but to their own friends in Washington-the sirens of extremism." Then he added, using the Haitian word for "thugs": "I call them the chimères of Washington."

Joshua Kurlantzick

---

    This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

Revealed: Haiti Bloodbath That Left Dozens Dead in Jail

12.19.04 (9:52 pm)   [edit]
Reed Lindsay is the only journalist to get into the Port-au-Prince prison since a riot three weeks ago when, it is said, guards executed inmates.

    A t first the smoke billowing from the national penitentiary in the Haitian capital seemed of no consequence.

    O n 1 December, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was visiting Haitian President Boniface Alexandre. The UN peacekeeping force in the capital, Port-au-Prince, was preoccupied with guarding the national palace where Powell's visit was taking place. But meanwhile, in the prison, something terrible was unfolding.

    A ccording to official reports, prisoners in a three-story cell block called 'Titanic' had rioted, breaking free from their cells, setting fire to mattresses and brandishing water pipes as weapons. Prison guards called in a special police unit to help put down the uprising, and officials later said that seven prisoners had been killed and more than 40 detainees and guards wounded during the fracas.

    B ut according to prisoners and others interviewed by The Observer, this is a woeful understatement. The government, they say, is concealing a savage bloodbath in which dozens of detainees were killed by police and guards.

    T he allegations are contested by officials but, if true, the killings at the penitentiary represent another black mark for Haiti's interim government, which has come under fire for allegedly perpetrating and tolerating human rights abuses ever since taking over last March from the ousted former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

    ' I saw everything,' said Ted Nazaire, 24, a prisoner who was released two days after the riot and is now in hiding. 'It was a massacre. More than 60 were killed.'

    N azaire said police opened fire on the detainees, and then went from cell to cell, forcing prisoners into a passageway and methodically executing them.

    H e claims to have witnessed the killings while hiding under a staircase. When he was later found, he said, he was badly beaten by prison guards and warned not to talk about what he had seen. His family members complain that police harass them in their home nearly every day in their search for Nazaire, who at the moment walks with a limp, is covered with finger-length lesions and has a swollen left eye and a bump on his forehead.

    E stimates made by prisoners at the number killed range from 40 to 110. 'I saw more than 30 dead people with my own eyes,' said Frantz Rubin, a detainee whose cell has a view into the passageway where prisoners allege many of the killings took place. 'We want justice.'

    P risoners and police say the riot was motivated by the decision to transfer some detainees to another penitentiary, combined with mounting frustration at the slow progress of their legal cases. Only 17 of around 1,100 prisoners at the national penitentiary have been convicted of a crime, and many detainees have not seen a judge.

    P enitentiary warden Sony Marcellus dismissed the accusations made by Nazaire and the other prisoners as lies and exaggerations. 'The prisoners will never tell the truth,' he said. '[The guards] are trained to shoot in the air, not at prisoners. They would never fire on prisoners in this way.'

    H e pointed to an affidavit signed by a justice of the peace who had seen only seven bodies at the penitentiary the night of 1 December.

    B ut Nazaire and the other prisoners are not alone in their testimonies. Two rights groups say that prison guards asking for anonymity have confirmed that the official death tally is an underestimate. And an ambulance driver who requested to remain anonymous said he transported more than 30 bodies in a Toyota Land Cruiser in three trips from the penitentiary to a dump site outside the city.

    H e added that there were two other vehicles also transporting bodies, although he refused to reveal the location of the site, saying he feared for his and his family's lives.

    P eople who live and work in the streets surrounding the penitentiary said they heard heavy continuous gunfire lasting between two and three hours. A neighbor and a reporter at a nearby radio station, both with views of a catwalk that runs along the outer walls of the jail, said they saw police officers with machine-guns firing down into the building and at prisoners' cells.

    B ut evidence that more than seven people were killed at the penitentiary has gone no further than the testimonies of prisoners and anonymous sources.

    J ean Pierre Audain, Haiti's chief prosecutor, said he has ordered an investigation of the riot and its aftermath. But the details of this investigation are not clear.

    M eanwhile, the penitentiary and its prisoners remain shrouded in secrecy. Since 1 December the authorities have barred visits from journalists, human rights observers, prisoners' lawyers and family members, all of whom were previously allowed to enter regularly.

    L ast week, at the Port-au-Prince general hospital, three prison guards stood over a wounded prisoner whose leg was manacled to a cot and prevented anyone from speaking to him.

    O utside the penitentiary last Thursday, around 30 women waiting in the shade of the building's peeling concrete façade said they had still not seen their husbands and sons. Some have received written messages or assurances from the guards that their relatives are safe, but many are left to guess.

    ' I have my son inside. Yonel Pierre,' said a frail, white-haired woman as she waited to deliver a portion of rice and beans. 'Since 1 December, I've brought food for my son, but I haven't received any news from him. Before I used to get back the dirty dishes, but now I don't get anything.'

    H er visits may be in vain. Among the seven dead confirmed by the justice of the peace is a police spokeswoman Gessy Coicou, the official death toll is now 10, as three prisoners wounded in the riot and its aftermath have died since 1 December. This list has not been made public.

    A nd the guards have not told Mrs. Pierre whether her son, who was in a cell on the second floor of the Titanic, is dead or alive.

 Reed Lindsay
    T he Observer U.K.

    S unday 19 December 2004

The Puerto Rican Colonialist Saga

12.19.04 (3:20 pm)   [edit]

 

Once more the magical realism as a literary style where the person that writes does real the imaginary thing —this through the creative invention— does not have entrance inside the colonial reality of my Puerto Rico.  That is to say, in Puerto Rico the things pass; there is not that fantasearlas, coño.  From here the one that creates that so much I Move away Carpentier —Cuban writer— or our prize Nóbel of Literature, the Colombian genius Gabriel Garcia Márquez, they had died themselves of hunger seeking our magic reality.  This reality we can appreciate it at present in the results of the colonial electioneering saga that we carry out this past month of November when we leave to elect al governing colonial of shift.  The curious thing of all this saga is that to the day of today nobody knows who he gained the elections.  Why?  Because one of the boastful personages of our colonial politics and also candidate to the government, the former-governor Peter Rosselló, like guapetón of neighborhood decided that the desire or draws, but does not lose these elections. 

In its desperation and ambition by the power, Peter mobilized its party, the Progressive New Party (PNP) —which promotes the annexation through the colonial statehood for Puerto Rico— for the purpose of achieving that the State Commission of Elections did not count the calls mixed votes —known as pivazos— that the town emitted in these elections.  The reason of this pillería is to validate the petition that they be eliminated to some/ace 28,000 mixed voters that favor to Aníbal Acevedo Vilá candidate of the colonial separatism by the Democratic Popular Party (PPD).  One must recognize that the desperation of Rosselló arises as soon as the State Commission of Elections gave a preliminary certification as the winner to Acevedo Vilá.  Here begins our saga. 

Immediately Peter Rosselló —expert in stealing— worked a colonial favoring a coup strategy through the Federal Court in Puerto Rico with the aid of three of its amigotes who are federal judges supporters of the anexionismo for Puerto Rico, although the rough and shameless work in truth was in the hands of the judge Daniel Domínguez.  The judge Domínguez treated for all the media to pass him over al Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, who demanded supreme authority in national the legal thing, and very shamelessly emits an order to stop the count of the mixed votes and in this manner to give him the victory to Rosselló. 

From here on a suit among both courts was untied with a your you tell me and I tell you that not alone showed our colonial reality, but also the colonial mentality of our political and legal leadership.  The suit they were it dizque to clarify through an appeal carried out by the PPD al Federal Court of Circuit in Boston, who this week determined that the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico and not the Federal Court, is who has jurisdiction on these electioneering matters.  That is to say, that the mixed votes are going to count. 

Interesting in all this process is it the shameless expression of Acevedo Vilá when dared to say that he would obey what the Federal Court decide.  This to weigh that he knows that was the candidate that gained these elections.  With this type of demonstration derrotista and colonial he showed what my grandmother Mrs Barbaric always was used to telling me; “my grandson who doubles a lot of him is seen the bum”. 

In all this colonial saga also one must recognize the patriotic dignity shown by the puerto rican Pro-independence Party (PIP to whom in every moment did not they validate the presence of the Federal Court in Puerto Rico and they preferred to confront their colonialism traveling through to a desacato and to be risked to go to the jail patriotically.  To this him it is known like dignity, integrity and patriotism, values of which they lack so much the PPD as the PNP. 

The last phase of the saga remains to be seen and we are in wait that the State Commission of Elections tell us who is the next colonial governor of Puerto Rico.  In the meantime we continue fighting for the decolonization and independence for Puerto Rico, through the peace with justice. 

Lbarrios@jjay.cuny.edu

 

 

Dr. Héctor Rosario Rivera

12.19.04 (3:04 pm)   [edit]

Antiwar professor speaks in U.S.

By Arturo J. Pérez Saad

Audiences in New York and Philadelphia have had the opportunity to hear about the antiwar struggles of Dr. Héctor Rosario Rivera, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Uni versity of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez.

Rosario was suspended by the university administration for six months, beginning Sept. 2, because of his activism against the ROTC and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He then declared a hunger strike on Sept. 27 in front of the Capitol in San Juan. He demanded justice for his students by being reinstated to his post and justice for those who fight against the military machine.

Because of public support and student solidarity actions at several university units, including complete lockouts at three campuses of the UPR system, his suspension was reduced to 4 months. He ended his hunger strike on Oct. 8, 15 pounds thinner, after a group of friends, family members and comrades wrote him a letter asking him to change tactics. Rosario is currently on his third month of suspension.

Rosario is a leader of the Socialist Front in Mayagüez and has worked with the Anti-Militarist Initiative and the Uni versity Front for Demilitarization and Education (FUDE), which last year rescued a university structure from the ROTC. Those actions led Mother Jones magazine to rank the UPR in Mayagüez as the most activist campus in the U.S. and its territories.

Rosario had received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2003 and prior to that was an instructor at City College. He was also a high school teacher in Man hattan for two years.

In the year 2000, while still a graduate student, he participated in civil disobedience at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium in May; a hunger strike in front of the White House in June; and in the symbolic takeover of the statue of liberty with "Tito Kayak" in November. All these actions demanded the immediate withdrawal of the U.S. Navy from Vieques, a small island in Puerto Rico.

Reprinted from the Dec. 23, 2004, issue of Workers World newspaper

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