the real world
exposing how greed, corruption, and imperialism impacts the world
and exposes the leaders who benefit
february 12, 2019
Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men
Mahatma Gandhi
articles
*43 MEXICANS FREED FROM 'VERY DISTURBING' MODERN-DAY SLAVERY: 'LAST NIGHT I WENT TO BED A SLAVE. THIS MORNING, I WOKE UP A FREE MAN'(ARTICLE BELOW)
*In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*El Salvador: anti-corruption candidate Nayib Bukele wins presidential election
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The US Is Orchestrating a Coup in Venezuela
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Migrants flee violence only to find more in Tijuana – Mexico's murder capital
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*A naked escape and bribed presidents: El Chapo trial's shocking testimony
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Thousands flee north-east Nigeria after devastating Boko Haram attack
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*University of Glasgow Commits to Pay Reparations for Profiting From African Enslavement, Providing A Model for Others to Follow(ARTICLE BELOW)
*He’s been president a week – and already Bolsonaro is damaging Brazil
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Pro-Brexit activist said all Muslims should be removed from UK
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fact check: How many people are enslaved in the world today?
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Paying the price: China shoppers, stung by slowdown, take bite out of Apple
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Racism Against Black People Is Still A Big Problem In Europe, Study Finds
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
43 MEXICANS FREED FROM 'VERY DISTURBING' MODERN-DAY SLAVERY: 'LAST NIGHT I WENT TO BED A SLAVE. THIS MORNING, I WOKE UP A FREE MAN'
BY CHANTAL DA SILVA - newsweek
ON 2/12/19 AT 7:27 AM
Canadian police announced on Monday that they had freed dozens of "modern-day" slaves alleged to have been brought to Canada from Mexico by human traffickers and forced to work as hotel cleaners.
Barrie Police said in a statement that the 43 Mexicans, who are mostly men aged 20 to 46, were told what to say upon entering Canada in order to avoid scrutiny. They were then forced to live in "squalid" conditions in Barrie and Wasaga Beach in Ontario, roughly 70 miles and 90 miles away from Toronto, respectively.
Police said that the traffickers had allegedly been controlling the wages made by the forced laborers. The victims had already paid traffickers significant amounts of money to leave Mexico, in addition to being charged fees for transportation and lodging.
The Mexicans had allegedly been brought to Canada with the promise of work visas and the chance to eventually gain permanent residency status, while some had also been brought "under the pretense" of educational purposes.
Calling the case "very disturbing," Barrie Police Chief Kimberly Greenwood said in a separate statement that the "labor human trafficking" situation was discovered in a joint investigation between local and provincial police, as well as the Canada Border Services Agency, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
"It is inconceivable that this was taking place in our community," Greenwood said.
As many as 250 police officers were involved in the investigation, with 12 search warrants executed last Tuesday in Barrie and Wasaga Beach. Six of those warrants involved residencies, while another six involved vehicles, police said.
While police have yet to arrest any suspects in the case, they are investigating two people alleged to have run a Barrie-based cleaning company that employed the foreign workers. They said that with criminal charges expected to be laid in the future, police are currently focused on providing assistance to the 43 people rescued from modern-day slavery.
“Human trafficking is modern-day slavery," Ontario Provincial Police Deputy Commissioner Rick Barnum Labour said in a statement.
"Labour human trafficking is a difficult crime to investigate," he said. "At every stage, our collective concern has been to ensure these 43 victims are well cared for from a personal health and wellness perspective and that they are now safely housed.”
Police have said the workers are now being given the opportunity to remain in Canada legally, according to the CBC. Since their rescue, some have been offered legal work, as well as accommodations at a resort in the Barrie area.
Upon being rescued, one member of the group reportedly told police: "Last night, I went to bed a slave. This morning, I woke up a free man."
Barrie Police said in a statement that the 43 Mexicans, who are mostly men aged 20 to 46, were told what to say upon entering Canada in order to avoid scrutiny. They were then forced to live in "squalid" conditions in Barrie and Wasaga Beach in Ontario, roughly 70 miles and 90 miles away from Toronto, respectively.
Police said that the traffickers had allegedly been controlling the wages made by the forced laborers. The victims had already paid traffickers significant amounts of money to leave Mexico, in addition to being charged fees for transportation and lodging.
The Mexicans had allegedly been brought to Canada with the promise of work visas and the chance to eventually gain permanent residency status, while some had also been brought "under the pretense" of educational purposes.
Calling the case "very disturbing," Barrie Police Chief Kimberly Greenwood said in a separate statement that the "labor human trafficking" situation was discovered in a joint investigation between local and provincial police, as well as the Canada Border Services Agency, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
"It is inconceivable that this was taking place in our community," Greenwood said.
As many as 250 police officers were involved in the investigation, with 12 search warrants executed last Tuesday in Barrie and Wasaga Beach. Six of those warrants involved residencies, while another six involved vehicles, police said.
While police have yet to arrest any suspects in the case, they are investigating two people alleged to have run a Barrie-based cleaning company that employed the foreign workers. They said that with criminal charges expected to be laid in the future, police are currently focused on providing assistance to the 43 people rescued from modern-day slavery.
“Human trafficking is modern-day slavery," Ontario Provincial Police Deputy Commissioner Rick Barnum Labour said in a statement.
"Labour human trafficking is a difficult crime to investigate," he said. "At every stage, our collective concern has been to ensure these 43 victims are well cared for from a personal health and wellness perspective and that they are now safely housed.”
Police have said the workers are now being given the opportunity to remain in Canada legally, according to the CBC. Since their rescue, some have been offered legal work, as well as accommodations at a resort in the Barrie area.
Upon being rescued, one member of the group reportedly told police: "Last night, I went to bed a slave. This morning, I woke up a free man."
In Venezuela, White Supremacy Is a Key Driver of the Coup
BY
Greg Palast, Truthout
PUBLISHED
February 7, 2019
On January 23, right after a phone call from Donald Trump, Juan Guaidó, former speaker of Venezuela’s National Assembly, declared himself president. No voting. When you have official recognition from The Donald, who needs elections?
Say what?
---
First, we have Juan Guaidó, self-proclaimed (and Trump-proclaimed) president of the nation, with his wife and child, a photo prominently placed in The New York Times. And here, the class photo of Guaidó’s party members in the National Assembly. They appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned — especially when compared to their political opposites in the third photo, the congress members who support the elected President Nicolás Maduro.
This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as “white.”)
Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor.
In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002, he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling class finding itself displaced by a man who embraced his own Indigenous and African heritage.
In Venezuela, as in the USA, poverty and race are locked together. Why did so many Mestizo, poor Venezuelans love Chavez? As even the CIA’s surprisingly honest Fact Book states:
“Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment.”
But, just as Maduro took office, the price of oil began its collapse, and the vast social programs that oil had paid for were now supported by borrowing money and printing it, causing wild inflation. The economic slide is now made impossibly worse by what the UN rapporteur for Venezuela compared to “medieval sieges.” The Trump administration cut off Venezuela from the oil sale proceeds from its biggest customer, the US.
Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged class’s bank accounts have become nearly worthless. So, knowing that the Mestizo majority would not elect their Great White Hope Guaidó, they simply took to the streets — often armed. (And yes, both sides are armed.)
I’ve seen this movie before. When I look at today’s news reports of massive demonstrations against the so-called “dictatorship” of Venezuela’s left government, it looks awfully like 2002, when I was first in Caracas reporting for BBC Television.
Then, The New York Times, NPR and other mainstream outlets in the US reported on marches against the Chavez government,
describing the tens of thousands of Venezuelans calling for Chavez’s removal. The light-skinned protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy — and they wanted you to know it. Many of the women marched in high heels, the men peacocking in business suits, proudly displayed in the uniforms of their privileged class. The Chavistas wore patriotic yellow, blue and red T-shirts, sneakers, jeans.
To anti-Chavista protesters, race was an issue as much as class economics. I heard these opposition demonstrators shout “Chavez, Monkey!” and worse.
Many in the US have never heard this story of race war in Venezuela (and war is what it is), as the US press does not recognize its own racial bias. In 2002, as today, the massive demonstrations of the whiter Venezuelans were reported as evidence that Chavez was wildly unpopular. Yet, the day after each anti-Chavez march, I would witness and film the pro-Chavez demonstrations that flooded Caracas with an ocean of nearly half a million marchers, largely the Mestizo poor, that received little or no coverage in the US press.
The bias continues. The New York Times did not run a photo of this past week’s pro-Maduro demonstrations. But in hard-to-find photos and reports from my colleagues on the ground, the Chavista demonstrations are bigger, involving mass turnouts in several cities, not just wealthy neighborhoods in Caracas.
Why do the poor march for Maduro? Even though the Mestizo majority suffers today, they will not turn back to the pre-Chavez days of de facto apartheid.
And we must remember this is not the first time the US government has tried to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela.
In 2002, George W. Bush’s State Department cheer-led the coup. The plotters kidnapped Chavez and held him hostage. The coup was led by an oil industry leader and head of the Chamber of Commerce, Pedro Carmona, who had seized the nation’s White House, and, like Guaidó today, declared himself president. Carmona told me proudly about the fancy inaugural ball held by the nation’s elite and attended by Bush’s ambassador.
But the Bush/Carmona coup collapsed when a million mostly Mestizo, Indigenous and Black Venezuelans flooded the capital and forced the plotters to return their hero, the supposedly unpopular Chavez, to Miraflores, the presidential palace. “Presidente” Carmona fled.
Today, Guaidó’s supporters, like Carmona’s, know they can’t win an election given the overwhelming fact of the newly empowered Mestizo majority. So Guaidó has skipped the idea of an election altogether, simply replacing running for office with the “recognition” from Trump and allies which Guaidó can’t get from Venezuelans.
When I see the images and hear the chants of the anti-Chavista demonstrators now, I’m also reminded of what I saw at a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, this past November. The president slid out of Air Force One to tell the crowd — heavily weighted with white supremacists — that they needed to take back their country from those “invading” the border. Trump told them to fear gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who is Black, saying she would “turn Georgia into Venezuela.”
I don’t think Trump was talking about Abrams’s program to bring universal health care to Georgia, as Chavez did for Venezuela.
Some of the US press is quick to condemn the racial hatred on display at Trump rallies. But I have yet to hear or read in the US press what our eyes can see in the three photos from Venezuela: an uprising of white or light-skinned people wanting to “take back their country.”
The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser — a plan to control Venezuela and its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims.
Ah, yes, the oil. It’s always the oil. And Venezuela has plenty to seize: the world’s largest reserves.
We’ll get to that in Part II.
Say what?
---
First, we have Juan Guaidó, self-proclaimed (and Trump-proclaimed) president of the nation, with his wife and child, a photo prominently placed in The New York Times. And here, the class photo of Guaidó’s party members in the National Assembly. They appear, overwhelmingly light-skinned — especially when compared to their political opposites in the third photo, the congress members who support the elected President Nicolás Maduro.
This is the story of Venezuela in black and white, the story not told in The New York Times or the rest of our establishment media. This year’s so-called popular uprising is, at its heart, a furious backlash of the whiter (and wealthier) Venezuelans against their replacement by the larger Mestizo (mixed-race) poor. (Forty-four percent of the population that answered the 2014 census listed themselves as “white.”)
Four centuries of white supremacy in Venezuela by those who identify their ancestors as European came to an end with the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez, who won with the overwhelming support of the Mestizo majority. This turn away from white supremacy continues under Maduro, Chavez’s chosen successor.
In my interviews with Chavez for BBC beginning in 2002, he talked with humor about the fury of a white ruling class finding itself displaced by a man who embraced his own Indigenous and African heritage.
In Venezuela, as in the USA, poverty and race are locked together. Why did so many Mestizo, poor Venezuelans love Chavez? As even the CIA’s surprisingly honest Fact Book states:
“Social investment in Venezuela during the Chavez administration reduced poverty from nearly 50% in 1999 to about 27% in 2011, increased school enrollment, substantially decreased infant and child mortality, and improved access to potable water and sanitation through social investment.”
But, just as Maduro took office, the price of oil began its collapse, and the vast social programs that oil had paid for were now supported by borrowing money and printing it, causing wild inflation. The economic slide is now made impossibly worse by what the UN rapporteur for Venezuela compared to “medieval sieges.” The Trump administration cut off Venezuela from the oil sale proceeds from its biggest customer, the US.
Everyone has been hurt economically, but the privileged class’s bank accounts have become nearly worthless. So, knowing that the Mestizo majority would not elect their Great White Hope Guaidó, they simply took to the streets — often armed. (And yes, both sides are armed.)
I’ve seen this movie before. When I look at today’s news reports of massive demonstrations against the so-called “dictatorship” of Venezuela’s left government, it looks awfully like 2002, when I was first in Caracas reporting for BBC Television.
Then, The New York Times, NPR and other mainstream outlets in the US reported on marches against the Chavez government,
describing the tens of thousands of Venezuelans calling for Chavez’s removal. The light-skinned protesters were overwhelmingly wealthy — and they wanted you to know it. Many of the women marched in high heels, the men peacocking in business suits, proudly displayed in the uniforms of their privileged class. The Chavistas wore patriotic yellow, blue and red T-shirts, sneakers, jeans.
To anti-Chavista protesters, race was an issue as much as class economics. I heard these opposition demonstrators shout “Chavez, Monkey!” and worse.
Many in the US have never heard this story of race war in Venezuela (and war is what it is), as the US press does not recognize its own racial bias. In 2002, as today, the massive demonstrations of the whiter Venezuelans were reported as evidence that Chavez was wildly unpopular. Yet, the day after each anti-Chavez march, I would witness and film the pro-Chavez demonstrations that flooded Caracas with an ocean of nearly half a million marchers, largely the Mestizo poor, that received little or no coverage in the US press.
The bias continues. The New York Times did not run a photo of this past week’s pro-Maduro demonstrations. But in hard-to-find photos and reports from my colleagues on the ground, the Chavista demonstrations are bigger, involving mass turnouts in several cities, not just wealthy neighborhoods in Caracas.
Why do the poor march for Maduro? Even though the Mestizo majority suffers today, they will not turn back to the pre-Chavez days of de facto apartheid.
And we must remember this is not the first time the US government has tried to overthrow the elected government in Venezuela.
In 2002, George W. Bush’s State Department cheer-led the coup. The plotters kidnapped Chavez and held him hostage. The coup was led by an oil industry leader and head of the Chamber of Commerce, Pedro Carmona, who had seized the nation’s White House, and, like Guaidó today, declared himself president. Carmona told me proudly about the fancy inaugural ball held by the nation’s elite and attended by Bush’s ambassador.
But the Bush/Carmona coup collapsed when a million mostly Mestizo, Indigenous and Black Venezuelans flooded the capital and forced the plotters to return their hero, the supposedly unpopular Chavez, to Miraflores, the presidential palace. “Presidente” Carmona fled.
Today, Guaidó’s supporters, like Carmona’s, know they can’t win an election given the overwhelming fact of the newly empowered Mestizo majority. So Guaidó has skipped the idea of an election altogether, simply replacing running for office with the “recognition” from Trump and allies which Guaidó can’t get from Venezuelans.
When I see the images and hear the chants of the anti-Chavista demonstrators now, I’m also reminded of what I saw at a Trump rally in Macon, Georgia, this past November. The president slid out of Air Force One to tell the crowd — heavily weighted with white supremacists — that they needed to take back their country from those “invading” the border. Trump told them to fear gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who is Black, saying she would “turn Georgia into Venezuela.”
I don’t think Trump was talking about Abrams’s program to bring universal health care to Georgia, as Chavez did for Venezuela.
Some of the US press is quick to condemn the racial hatred on display at Trump rallies. But I have yet to hear or read in the US press what our eyes can see in the three photos from Venezuela: an uprising of white or light-skinned people wanting to “take back their country.”
The putsch in Venezuela is run by the wealthy, internationally connected minority operating by a regime-change plan designed by neocon retread John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser — a plan to control Venezuela and its oil, as Bolton openly proclaims.
Ah, yes, the oil. It’s always the oil. And Venezuela has plenty to seize: the world’s largest reserves.
We’ll get to that in Part II.
El Salvador: anti-corruption candidate Nayib Bukele wins presidential election
Former mayor of San Salvador wins landslide after campaign on the slogan ‘There’s enough money when no one steals’
Associated Press - the guardian
Sun 3 Feb 2019 23.59 ESt
Nayib Bukele, a former mayor of El Salvador’s capital, has won a landslide victory in Sunday’s presidential election, winning more votes than his two closest rivals combined to end a quarter of a century of two-party dominance in the crime-plagued Central America nation.
The supreme electoral court declared Bukele the winner, saying he had nearly 54% of the votes, with nearly 90% of ballots counted. Carlos Callejas of the Nationalist Republican Alliance was far behind in second with less than 32%, while even farther back were former foreign minister Hugo Martinez of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a minor party candidate.
Bukele surpassed the 50% threshold to avoid a March runoff, and he had already claimed victory before a jubilant crowd in San Salvador and invited supporters to celebrate in the streets.
“We have full certainty that we have won the presidency, and we have won in the first round,” Bukele said.
He stood on an anti-corruption platform and campaigned on the slogan: “There’s enough money when no one steals.”
All four candidates had promised to end corruption, stamp out gang violence and create more jobs, with crushing crime at the top of the agenda. About 67,000 Salvadorans belong to gangs that terrorise their communities with extortion, murder and other forms of violence.
The candidates proposed creating economic opportunities and restoring social values to dissuade Salvadorans from engaging in criminal behaviour.
There were no reports of major problems in voting.
Bukele, 37, made his political debut in 2012 as a small-town mayor with the now-ruling FMLN and won election in the capital three years later, automatically making him a potential presidential contender. But his frequent criticism of the leftist party’s leadership led to his expulsion, and he wound up as the unlikely standard-bearer of a small conservative party known as the Grand Alliance for National Unity, whose initials –Gana – mean “win” in Spanish.
The FMLN and the conservative Alliance, known as Arena, have dominated Salvadoran politics since a 1992 peace deal which ended a brutal civil war. But both parties have been stained by corruption scandals and neither has been able to stem gang violence.
Voter Estela Henriquez, 27, said outside a polling station in the capital: “I came to vote because I want the country to change, because we are tired of so much corruption.”
More than 4,500 election observers, including representatives of the Organization of American States and the European Union, were on hand.
El Salvador is small both in size and population, with just 6.5 million people. Close to a third of its households live in poverty, while the World Bank says per capita income is $3,560.
Salvadorans searching for a better life have joined recent caravans of migrants trekking through Mexico toward the US.
The supreme electoral court declared Bukele the winner, saying he had nearly 54% of the votes, with nearly 90% of ballots counted. Carlos Callejas of the Nationalist Republican Alliance was far behind in second with less than 32%, while even farther back were former foreign minister Hugo Martinez of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) and a minor party candidate.
Bukele surpassed the 50% threshold to avoid a March runoff, and he had already claimed victory before a jubilant crowd in San Salvador and invited supporters to celebrate in the streets.
“We have full certainty that we have won the presidency, and we have won in the first round,” Bukele said.
He stood on an anti-corruption platform and campaigned on the slogan: “There’s enough money when no one steals.”
All four candidates had promised to end corruption, stamp out gang violence and create more jobs, with crushing crime at the top of the agenda. About 67,000 Salvadorans belong to gangs that terrorise their communities with extortion, murder and other forms of violence.
The candidates proposed creating economic opportunities and restoring social values to dissuade Salvadorans from engaging in criminal behaviour.
There were no reports of major problems in voting.
Bukele, 37, made his political debut in 2012 as a small-town mayor with the now-ruling FMLN and won election in the capital three years later, automatically making him a potential presidential contender. But his frequent criticism of the leftist party’s leadership led to his expulsion, and he wound up as the unlikely standard-bearer of a small conservative party known as the Grand Alliance for National Unity, whose initials –Gana – mean “win” in Spanish.
The FMLN and the conservative Alliance, known as Arena, have dominated Salvadoran politics since a 1992 peace deal which ended a brutal civil war. But both parties have been stained by corruption scandals and neither has been able to stem gang violence.
Voter Estela Henriquez, 27, said outside a polling station in the capital: “I came to vote because I want the country to change, because we are tired of so much corruption.”
More than 4,500 election observers, including representatives of the Organization of American States and the European Union, were on hand.
El Salvador is small both in size and population, with just 6.5 million people. Close to a third of its households live in poverty, while the World Bank says per capita income is $3,560.
Salvadorans searching for a better life have joined recent caravans of migrants trekking through Mexico toward the US.
The US Is Orchestrating a Coup in Venezuela
BY
Marjorie Cohn, Truthout
PUBLISHED
February 2, 2019
As Venezuela’s second president, Simon Bolivar, noted in the 19th century, the US government continues to “plague Latin America with misery in the name of liberty.”
From engineering coups in Chile and Guatemala, to choreographing a troop landing at the Bay of Pigs intended to establish an exile government in Cuba, to training Latin American strongmen at the School of the Americas in torture techniques to control their people, the United States has meddled, interfered, intervened and undermined the democracies it claims to protect.
Now, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and the infamous Elliott Abrams are working with opposition groups in Venezuela to carry out a coup d’état.
In 2002, the George W. Bush administration, through the CIA, aided and abetted an attempted coup, according to attorney Eva Golinger, an award-winning author and journalist. Golinger, a close confidante of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, obtained evidence of US intervention from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, which she discusses in her new book, Confidante of ‘Tyrants’: The Inside Story of the American Woman Trusted By the US’s Biggest Enemies.
There is a major difference, however, between the 2002 coup attempt and the Trump administration’s current effort to change the regime in Venezuela, Golinger says. She told Truthout that unlike the situation in 2002, “when the Bush administration worked behind the scenes to back a coup d’état against Chávez with multimillion-dollar funding and political support to the opposition, the Trump administration is now pursuing regime change in Venezuela in plain sight.”
US Aided and Abetted 2002 Coup Attempt
Golinger came to Chávez’s attention after her investigation revealed proof of US involvement in the 2002 attempted coup. Since Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, the United States tried overtly and covertly to overthrow his “Bolivarian Revolution” by furnishing opposition groups working for regime change with millions of dollars, Golinger writes. Chávez used Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to eradicate illiteracy and poverty, and to provide education and universal health care.
After Chávez’s death in 2013, Nicolás Maduro was elected president after promising to carry on the Bolivarian Revolution. But the punishing sanctions President Obama imposed in 2015, combined with corruption, mismanagement and autocratic leadership, caused economic hardship. Falling oil prices in 2016 led to hyperinflation two years later, and Venezuela’s economy collapsed.
Nevertheless, Maduro was re-elected in 2018. The opposition’s boycott of the election and the US government’s support of that boycott resulted in Maduro’s victory over Henri Falcón.
Team Trump Is Engineering Regime Change in Venezuela
Elliott Abrams is a disturbing, but not surprising, choice to serve as US special envoy to Venezuela. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal and later pardoned by George H.W. Bush. The new envoy supported General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan dictator who directed the torture and mass murder of Indigenous people in the 1980s, and was later convicted of genocide. Moreover, Abrams was linked to the 2002 attempted US coup in Venezuela.
“The naming of notorious ‘dirty war’ expert Elliott Abrams to oversee the Venezuela operation, the public threats against Venezuela of ‘consequences’ should they defy the US made by Trump’s hawkish John Bolton, and Trump’s own multiple statements that a military option is ‘on the table’ for Venezuela, clearly show that the table is set,” Golinger told Truthout.
The “US is not just ‘behind’ this coup,” Ben Norton wrote in a series of tweets. “The US is openly leading the coup.”
Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported that on January 22, Pence called Juan Guaidó and “pledged” US support “if he seized the reins of government from Nicolás Maduro.” Guaidó was a little-known player whom the United States had long cultivated to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. Guaidó swore himself in as “interim president” of Venezuela the following day.
“That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret over the preceding several weeks, accompanied by talks between U.S. officials, allies, lawmakers, and key Venezuelan opposition figures, including Mr. Guaidó himself,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “Almost instantly, just as Mr. Pence had promised, President Trump issued a statement recognizing Mr. Guaidó as the country’s rightful leader.”
“Opposition leaders have already met in the White House with Pence, and Trump himself telephoned Guaidó to express US support for his de facto regime. If this is what they are doing overtly, we can only imagine the depth of their covert ops in Venezuela,” Golinger told Truthout.
In fall of 2017, Trump broached the subject of invading Venezuela with top White House officials, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then National Security Ddviser HR McMaster. Although they tried to dissuade him, Trump was “preoccupied with the idea of an invasion.” He raised the issue with the president of Colombia at a private dinner during a UN General Assembly meeting. McMaster finally talked Trump out of it.
But as recently as a few weeks ago, Trump reportedly asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), “What do you think about using military force?”
Bolton held a yellow legal pad with the words “5,000 troops to Colombia” prominently written on it at a January 28 press briefing.
Although Bolton didn’t mention sending troops to Colombia, which shares a border with Venezuela, his well-placed prop serves as an ominous warning.
Sanctions Hurt the Venezuelan PeopleOn January 28, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Venezuela that amount to an oil embargo. They forbid Venezuela’s state-owned oil company from doing business with most US companies (except Chevron and Halliburton).
These penalties are projected to deprive Venezuela of $7 billion in assets, resulting in $11 billion in export losses during the next year. That’s on top of the $6 billion that Trump’s August 2017 financial sanctions cost Venezuela in one year.
The new sanctions against Venezuela “could turbocharge what is already the world’s worst inflation, worsening fuel shortages and compromise the state’s ability to buy and distribute food,” the New York Times reported.
“[A] problematic idea driving current US policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to ordinary Venezuelans,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist, wrote in Foreign Policy. “That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine.”
As a result, Rodríguez, added, “Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.”
The United States used the same flawed strategy in 1960 when the Eisenhower administration imposed an embargo on Cuba. A State Department memo had proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Fidel Castro] government.” Although the embargo continues to hurt the Cuban people, it failed in its stated goal.
In addition to the oil sanctions, the US State Department turned over control of Venezuela’s property and bank accounts in the United States to Guaidó, in what The New York Times called “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”
Regime Change and Sanctions Are Illegal and Unwanted
Forcible regime change in Venezuela is illegal under international law.
“The shocking aggression and illegal interference against a sovereign nation by the Trump administration is a blatant violation of the charters of the United Nations and Organization of American States, which recognize the principles of national sovereignty, peaceful settlement of disputes, and a prohibition on threatening or using force against the territory of another state,” the National Lawyers Guild said in a statement.
Moreover, the organization states, “directly fomenting a coup in a sovereign nation is not only illegal and outright shunned by the international community, it fundamentally undermines any pretextual concern about interference by other nations in U.S. elections.”
Indeed, the United Nations Charter requires that countries settle their disputes peacefully and forbids the use or threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another country. Military force is only permissible in self-defense or with the assent of the Security Council. Further, the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) says no country can intervene, for any reason, in the internal or external affairs of another country.
US imposition of economic sanctions against Venezuela is also illegal. The OAS Charter proscribes the use of coercive economic or political measures to force the sovereign will of another country and obtain any advantages from it.
“Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state,” said Idriss Jazairy, a UN special rapporteur concerned with the negative impact of sanctions. “The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” Jazairy also noted that, “Precipitating an economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes.”
Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred-Maurice de Zayas says the United States is waging “economic warfare” against Venezuela. In his report to the Human Rights Council, de Zayas recommends that the International Criminal Court investigate whether “economic war, embargoes, financial blockades and sanctions regimes amount to geopolitical crimes and crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.”
Moreover, in order to impose sanctions under US law, the president must declare a national emergency and state that Venezuela constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. That claim is patently false.
De Zayas is a signatory to an open letter released last week, signed by 70 experts and academics who condemned the US-backed coup attempt against the Maduro government.
Although ostensibly aimed at helping the Venezuelan people, Team Trump’s sanctions and threats of military invasion are overwhelmingly unpopular in Venezuela. Eighty-six percent of Venezuelans oppose US military intervention and 81 percent are against sanctions.
It’s the Oil, Stupid
Why is the United States so intent on regime change? Because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, and the United States is its biggest customer.
Within two days of his self-inauguration as “interim president,” Guaidó began a process to restructure and privatize Venezuela’s oil industry for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Drawing a parallel with George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) tweeted, “It’s about the oil … again.” Indeed, Halliburton, exempted from the new sanctions against Venezuela, is once again benefitting from regime change, like it did in Iraq.
Bolton didn’t pull any punches when he stated at a press conference that, “We’re in conversation with major American companies now. … It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot of stake here.”
The Trump administration appears intent on privatizing Venezuela’s oilin order to maximize the profits of US oil companies at the expense of the Venezuelan people and the rule of law.
Yes, I’ll Chip In
From engineering coups in Chile and Guatemala, to choreographing a troop landing at the Bay of Pigs intended to establish an exile government in Cuba, to training Latin American strongmen at the School of the Americas in torture techniques to control their people, the United States has meddled, interfered, intervened and undermined the democracies it claims to protect.
Now, Vice President Mike Pence, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and the infamous Elliott Abrams are working with opposition groups in Venezuela to carry out a coup d’état.
In 2002, the George W. Bush administration, through the CIA, aided and abetted an attempted coup, according to attorney Eva Golinger, an award-winning author and journalist. Golinger, a close confidante of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, obtained evidence of US intervention from multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, which she discusses in her new book, Confidante of ‘Tyrants’: The Inside Story of the American Woman Trusted By the US’s Biggest Enemies.
There is a major difference, however, between the 2002 coup attempt and the Trump administration’s current effort to change the regime in Venezuela, Golinger says. She told Truthout that unlike the situation in 2002, “when the Bush administration worked behind the scenes to back a coup d’état against Chávez with multimillion-dollar funding and political support to the opposition, the Trump administration is now pursuing regime change in Venezuela in plain sight.”
US Aided and Abetted 2002 Coup Attempt
Golinger came to Chávez’s attention after her investigation revealed proof of US involvement in the 2002 attempted coup. Since Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, the United States tried overtly and covertly to overthrow his “Bolivarian Revolution” by furnishing opposition groups working for regime change with millions of dollars, Golinger writes. Chávez used Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to eradicate illiteracy and poverty, and to provide education and universal health care.
After Chávez’s death in 2013, Nicolás Maduro was elected president after promising to carry on the Bolivarian Revolution. But the punishing sanctions President Obama imposed in 2015, combined with corruption, mismanagement and autocratic leadership, caused economic hardship. Falling oil prices in 2016 led to hyperinflation two years later, and Venezuela’s economy collapsed.
Nevertheless, Maduro was re-elected in 2018. The opposition’s boycott of the election and the US government’s support of that boycott resulted in Maduro’s victory over Henri Falcón.
Team Trump Is Engineering Regime Change in Venezuela
Elliott Abrams is a disturbing, but not surprising, choice to serve as US special envoy to Venezuela. Abrams was convicted of lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal and later pardoned by George H.W. Bush. The new envoy supported General Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan dictator who directed the torture and mass murder of Indigenous people in the 1980s, and was later convicted of genocide. Moreover, Abrams was linked to the 2002 attempted US coup in Venezuela.
“The naming of notorious ‘dirty war’ expert Elliott Abrams to oversee the Venezuela operation, the public threats against Venezuela of ‘consequences’ should they defy the US made by Trump’s hawkish John Bolton, and Trump’s own multiple statements that a military option is ‘on the table’ for Venezuela, clearly show that the table is set,” Golinger told Truthout.
The “US is not just ‘behind’ this coup,” Ben Norton wrote in a series of tweets. “The US is openly leading the coup.”
Indeed, The Wall Street Journal reported that on January 22, Pence called Juan Guaidó and “pledged” US support “if he seized the reins of government from Nicolás Maduro.” Guaidó was a little-known player whom the United States had long cultivated to undermine the Bolivarian Revolution. Guaidó swore himself in as “interim president” of Venezuela the following day.
“That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret over the preceding several weeks, accompanied by talks between U.S. officials, allies, lawmakers, and key Venezuelan opposition figures, including Mr. Guaidó himself,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “Almost instantly, just as Mr. Pence had promised, President Trump issued a statement recognizing Mr. Guaidó as the country’s rightful leader.”
“Opposition leaders have already met in the White House with Pence, and Trump himself telephoned Guaidó to express US support for his de facto regime. If this is what they are doing overtly, we can only imagine the depth of their covert ops in Venezuela,” Golinger told Truthout.
In fall of 2017, Trump broached the subject of invading Venezuela with top White House officials, including former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and then National Security Ddviser HR McMaster. Although they tried to dissuade him, Trump was “preoccupied with the idea of an invasion.” He raised the issue with the president of Colombia at a private dinner during a UN General Assembly meeting. McMaster finally talked Trump out of it.
But as recently as a few weeks ago, Trump reportedly asked Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), “What do you think about using military force?”
Bolton held a yellow legal pad with the words “5,000 troops to Colombia” prominently written on it at a January 28 press briefing.
Although Bolton didn’t mention sending troops to Colombia, which shares a border with Venezuela, his well-placed prop serves as an ominous warning.
Sanctions Hurt the Venezuelan PeopleOn January 28, the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Venezuela that amount to an oil embargo. They forbid Venezuela’s state-owned oil company from doing business with most US companies (except Chevron and Halliburton).
These penalties are projected to deprive Venezuela of $7 billion in assets, resulting in $11 billion in export losses during the next year. That’s on top of the $6 billion that Trump’s August 2017 financial sanctions cost Venezuela in one year.
The new sanctions against Venezuela “could turbocharge what is already the world’s worst inflation, worsening fuel shortages and compromise the state’s ability to buy and distribute food,” the New York Times reported.
“[A] problematic idea driving current US policy is the belief that financial sanctions can hurt the Venezuelan government without causing serious harm to ordinary Venezuelans,” Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist, wrote in Foreign Policy. “That’s impossible when 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenue comes from oil sold by the state-owned oil company. Cutting off the government’s access to dollars will leave the economy without the hard currency needed to pay for imports of food and medicine.”
As a result, Rodríguez, added, “Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.”
The United States used the same flawed strategy in 1960 when the Eisenhower administration imposed an embargo on Cuba. A State Department memo had proposed “a line of action that makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and the overthrow of the [Fidel Castro] government.” Although the embargo continues to hurt the Cuban people, it failed in its stated goal.
In addition to the oil sanctions, the US State Department turned over control of Venezuela’s property and bank accounts in the United States to Guaidó, in what The New York Times called “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America.”
Regime Change and Sanctions Are Illegal and Unwanted
Forcible regime change in Venezuela is illegal under international law.
“The shocking aggression and illegal interference against a sovereign nation by the Trump administration is a blatant violation of the charters of the United Nations and Organization of American States, which recognize the principles of national sovereignty, peaceful settlement of disputes, and a prohibition on threatening or using force against the territory of another state,” the National Lawyers Guild said in a statement.
Moreover, the organization states, “directly fomenting a coup in a sovereign nation is not only illegal and outright shunned by the international community, it fundamentally undermines any pretextual concern about interference by other nations in U.S. elections.”
Indeed, the United Nations Charter requires that countries settle their disputes peacefully and forbids the use or threat of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of another country. Military force is only permissible in self-defense or with the assent of the Security Council. Further, the Charter of the Organization of American States (OAS) says no country can intervene, for any reason, in the internal or external affairs of another country.
US imposition of economic sanctions against Venezuela is also illegal. The OAS Charter proscribes the use of coercive economic or political measures to force the sovereign will of another country and obtain any advantages from it.
“Coercion, whether military or economic, must never be used to seek a change in government in a sovereign state,” said Idriss Jazairy, a UN special rapporteur concerned with the negative impact of sanctions. “The use of sanctions by outside powers to overthrow an elected government is in violation of all norms of international law.” Jazairy also noted that, “Precipitating an economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela is not a foundation for the peaceful settlement of disputes.”
Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred-Maurice de Zayas says the United States is waging “economic warfare” against Venezuela. In his report to the Human Rights Council, de Zayas recommends that the International Criminal Court investigate whether “economic war, embargoes, financial blockades and sanctions regimes amount to geopolitical crimes and crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute.”
Moreover, in order to impose sanctions under US law, the president must declare a national emergency and state that Venezuela constitutes an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the United States. That claim is patently false.
De Zayas is a signatory to an open letter released last week, signed by 70 experts and academics who condemned the US-backed coup attempt against the Maduro government.
Although ostensibly aimed at helping the Venezuelan people, Team Trump’s sanctions and threats of military invasion are overwhelmingly unpopular in Venezuela. Eighty-six percent of Venezuelans oppose US military intervention and 81 percent are against sanctions.
It’s the Oil, Stupid
Why is the United States so intent on regime change? Because Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, and the United States is its biggest customer.
Within two days of his self-inauguration as “interim president,” Guaidó began a process to restructure and privatize Venezuela’s oil industry for the benefit of multinational corporations.
Drawing a parallel with George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) tweeted, “It’s about the oil … again.” Indeed, Halliburton, exempted from the new sanctions against Venezuela, is once again benefitting from regime change, like it did in Iraq.
Bolton didn’t pull any punches when he stated at a press conference that, “We’re in conversation with major American companies now. … It would make a difference if we could have American companies produce the oil in Venezuela. We both have a lot of stake here.”
The Trump administration appears intent on privatizing Venezuela’s oilin order to maximize the profits of US oil companies at the expense of the Venezuelan people and the rule of law.
Yes, I’ll Chip In
Migrants flee violence only to find more in Tijuana – Mexico's murder capital
Homicides in Tijuana have skyrocketed recently, returning the city to levels of hyper-violence it last saw a decade ago
Ed Vulliamy in Tijuana
the guardian
Sat 26 Jan 2019 05.00 EST
This week, the Trump administration pushed ahead with its plan to return asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are considered, moving the first group through San Diego’s San Ysidro crossing late on Friday.
Meanwhile, far to the south, thousands of Central Americans are waiting at Mexico’s southern frontier for humanitarian visas. Several hundred have already hopped the border, and are following the route of previous migrant caravans north towards Tijuana.
What neither group may be aware of, however, is that the city they are heading for is – once again – Mexico’s murder capital.
Last year the country broke its own homicide record, with prosecutors opening 28,816 murder cases, 15% more than the previous year. And the city with most killings was Tijuana.
Three murders on New Year’s Eve took the total to 2,502 – a rate of 126 per 100,000 inhabitants, returning the city to levels of hyper-violence it last saw a decade ago.
And the numbers are still climbing: on 17 January, police announced 127 murders to date this year. Early that same evening, three more men were gunned down on streets across town in plain view; 24 hours later another three people were killed, including two women.
While external observers fear a return to cartel turf wars over smuggling routes into the US, the city’s district attorney, José Alberto Álavarez Mendoza, highlights a pandemic of petty drug dealing on the local market, as neighbourhood gangs fight block-by-block for ‘tienditas’, outlets for mainly synthetic drugs.
Tijuana’s leading expert on narco-traffic, Victor Clark Alfaro, says: “The cartel leaders – not the kind of people you’d meet at the country -club – have lost control of the low-level street dealers.”
The violence is the worst since Tijuana witnessed all-out war between the local Arellano Félix syndicate and the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is currently on trial in New York.
Broadly speaking, Guzmán won.
“Those years were also characterised by extortion and kidnapping, which affected every citizen,” says Álvarez. “But these are now down. What we have is a tragic level of homicide largely among petty dealers in the domestic market for methamphetamine.
“The drugs going north are getting through, but smuggling into the US is not violent right now – the killing is local, more intimate.”
Álvarez says “these homicides are often people that know each other. They stake out turf, then defend or expand it. These are not cartels, they are splinters, cells.”
The method of killing leaves hardly any evidence, he says. “I have a body, but no gun, no bullet or witness prepared to come forward. The revenge of the friends or family of the victim is not through the law, but another killing on the street. Sometimes I don’t even have an ID – 30% of our victims are buried anonymously in the common cemetery.”
Victor Clark Alfaro has monitored crime and narco-traffic in Tijuana since the 1980s, for his Binational Commission for Human Rights here, and as a professor at San Diego State University across the border. Yet again, he is this week preparing a file as expert witness in a drugs trial in California.
The cartels are still forceful in Tijuana, he says. But whereas up to 10 years ago, the ‘narco-juniors’ of the Arellano Félix clan would flash their wealth around discos and restaurants, “their heirs are invisible. They are businessmen, the people you’d meet at the country club. For the first time in three decades, I cannot name their leaders to you.”
The Sinaloa cartel is still around, he says. And the defeated Arellano Félix Tijuana cartel has been revived, led by the original brothers’ sister, Enedina Arellano Félix, her children, nephews and nieces, reformed as the Tijuana Cartel Nueva Generación – and supported by the rising power in the Mexican organised crime world, the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
“But the old cartels are fragmenting inside themselves,” says Clark, “across Mexico, and here. They still smuggle cocaine and meth – though now we’re seeing more fentanyl – and big meth producers are still selling on the domestic market. Six months ago, a meth lab was raided in Tecate capable of producing $10m-worth of meth a day.”
But while the Arellano Félix clan carefully nurtured and controlled the domestic market, he says, the new generation doesn’t need to. “They do business, sell to the middleman for profit, but are separate from the killing between people who are usually on drugs themselves – where the drug dens are, in the poorest barrios where maquiladora [assembly plant] workers live, and hundreds live on the street.”
He adds: “Why should they care? They know that every time 10 people are killed on the street, 1o more will take their place. What matters to them is the money.”
Clark insists, however, that “we have always to factor in the role of the police – either dealing the drugs themselves, or allowing it to happen. We must ask: ‘Why is there never a bullet or gun?’ And ask that question all the way to the top, police and politicians: there are meth labs everywhere, and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] monitors what happens here carefully – why are the big seizures so rare?”
Low sun sets over the troubled Nido de los Aguilas (Eagles’ Nest) neighbourhood, and Horacio Vallez is sitting on the steps of his house near the new, reinforced steel border fence.
“We’ve seen it all here. We’ve got the fence behind our backs,” he says, “and before our eyes on the streets every week: another killing, another body here in the dust, more police, soldiers, plastic tape. But no one gets arrested.”
Meanwhile, far to the south, thousands of Central Americans are waiting at Mexico’s southern frontier for humanitarian visas. Several hundred have already hopped the border, and are following the route of previous migrant caravans north towards Tijuana.
What neither group may be aware of, however, is that the city they are heading for is – once again – Mexico’s murder capital.
Last year the country broke its own homicide record, with prosecutors opening 28,816 murder cases, 15% more than the previous year. And the city with most killings was Tijuana.
Three murders on New Year’s Eve took the total to 2,502 – a rate of 126 per 100,000 inhabitants, returning the city to levels of hyper-violence it last saw a decade ago.
And the numbers are still climbing: on 17 January, police announced 127 murders to date this year. Early that same evening, three more men were gunned down on streets across town in plain view; 24 hours later another three people were killed, including two women.
While external observers fear a return to cartel turf wars over smuggling routes into the US, the city’s district attorney, José Alberto Álavarez Mendoza, highlights a pandemic of petty drug dealing on the local market, as neighbourhood gangs fight block-by-block for ‘tienditas’, outlets for mainly synthetic drugs.
Tijuana’s leading expert on narco-traffic, Victor Clark Alfaro, says: “The cartel leaders – not the kind of people you’d meet at the country -club – have lost control of the low-level street dealers.”
The violence is the worst since Tijuana witnessed all-out war between the local Arellano Félix syndicate and the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is currently on trial in New York.
Broadly speaking, Guzmán won.
“Those years were also characterised by extortion and kidnapping, which affected every citizen,” says Álvarez. “But these are now down. What we have is a tragic level of homicide largely among petty dealers in the domestic market for methamphetamine.
“The drugs going north are getting through, but smuggling into the US is not violent right now – the killing is local, more intimate.”
Álvarez says “these homicides are often people that know each other. They stake out turf, then defend or expand it. These are not cartels, they are splinters, cells.”
The method of killing leaves hardly any evidence, he says. “I have a body, but no gun, no bullet or witness prepared to come forward. The revenge of the friends or family of the victim is not through the law, but another killing on the street. Sometimes I don’t even have an ID – 30% of our victims are buried anonymously in the common cemetery.”
Victor Clark Alfaro has monitored crime and narco-traffic in Tijuana since the 1980s, for his Binational Commission for Human Rights here, and as a professor at San Diego State University across the border. Yet again, he is this week preparing a file as expert witness in a drugs trial in California.
The cartels are still forceful in Tijuana, he says. But whereas up to 10 years ago, the ‘narco-juniors’ of the Arellano Félix clan would flash their wealth around discos and restaurants, “their heirs are invisible. They are businessmen, the people you’d meet at the country club. For the first time in three decades, I cannot name their leaders to you.”
The Sinaloa cartel is still around, he says. And the defeated Arellano Félix Tijuana cartel has been revived, led by the original brothers’ sister, Enedina Arellano Félix, her children, nephews and nieces, reformed as the Tijuana Cartel Nueva Generación – and supported by the rising power in the Mexican organised crime world, the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
“But the old cartels are fragmenting inside themselves,” says Clark, “across Mexico, and here. They still smuggle cocaine and meth – though now we’re seeing more fentanyl – and big meth producers are still selling on the domestic market. Six months ago, a meth lab was raided in Tecate capable of producing $10m-worth of meth a day.”
But while the Arellano Félix clan carefully nurtured and controlled the domestic market, he says, the new generation doesn’t need to. “They do business, sell to the middleman for profit, but are separate from the killing between people who are usually on drugs themselves – where the drug dens are, in the poorest barrios where maquiladora [assembly plant] workers live, and hundreds live on the street.”
He adds: “Why should they care? They know that every time 10 people are killed on the street, 1o more will take their place. What matters to them is the money.”
Clark insists, however, that “we have always to factor in the role of the police – either dealing the drugs themselves, or allowing it to happen. We must ask: ‘Why is there never a bullet or gun?’ And ask that question all the way to the top, police and politicians: there are meth labs everywhere, and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] monitors what happens here carefully – why are the big seizures so rare?”
Low sun sets over the troubled Nido de los Aguilas (Eagles’ Nest) neighbourhood, and Horacio Vallez is sitting on the steps of his house near the new, reinforced steel border fence.
“We’ve seen it all here. We’ve got the fence behind our backs,” he says, “and before our eyes on the streets every week: another killing, another body here in the dust, more police, soldiers, plastic tape. But no one gets arrested.”
A naked escape and bribed presidents: El Chapo trial's shocking testimony
A New York court has heard how the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán eluded capture with his mistress while paying millions to politicians and police
Ed Vulliamy in New York
the guardian
Sat 19 Jan 2019 12.35 EST
That Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán – on trial in New York for heading the world’s biggest drug cartel – escaped a raid through a tunnel beneath his bath is legend; what is not known is that he did so stark naked with the mistress with whom he was abed when the Mexican marines arrived.
That Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel bribed politicians and senior military officers is presumed by most Mexicans; that he bribed presidents would surprise few – what we had not heard is that he allegedly haggled down a presidential demand for $250m protection money to $100m.
But this is what emerges as Guzmán’s prosecutors home in on the closing stages of their case at the US federal court in Brooklyn.
When Guzmán’s former mistress Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López took the stand on Thursday, El Chapo knew it was coming: journalists had been tipped off by defence counsel last week that she might testify.
Guzmán’s wife Emma Coronel – loyally present almost every day of the trial – probably braced herself too; the couple had been married for seven years – since 2007 – when the bathroom incident occurred, and their twin daughters were two years old.
Sánchez told the court she was Guzmán’s lover and “housewife” for three years from 2011. And rather more: she was a scout for, and dispatcher of, marijuana from the Mexican states of Durango and Sinaloa. Guzmán “would ask me for the three Bs”, she explained, “Buena, bonita y barata” – good, pretty and cheap.
The relationship was complex, with suggestions of intimidation: “I had my reasons,” she said. “First of all, so he didn’t think I would rat him out. I didn’t want him to mistrust me so he wouldn’t hurt me. Second, I didn’t want to have my siblings involved” – as Guzmán had apparently urged. She sent Guzmán a text about her business role, saying: “I like it. At least I feel useful.”
That night in early 2014, the couple were in bed when a squad of marines and US DEA agents surrounded the Miramar Hotel in Mazatlán. They were spotted by Guzmán’s most trusted gatekeeper, codenamed “El Condor”, who ran into the bedroom to warn his boss.
Guzmán bounded naked into the bathroom, followed by Sánchez, El Condor and another member of the inner circle, and flipped the bathtub to reveal the tunnel.
“He said, ‘love, love, come in here,’” recalled Sánchez. “There was like a lid on the bathtub that came up. I was scared. I was like, ‘Do I have to go in there?’ It was very dark.”
It is not clear whether voters in Sinaloa knew the story when, later that year, they elected Sánchez as a deputy to the state assembly. She served two years before being arrested in 2017 while entering the US, for drug trafficking and money laundering. Awaiting sentence, she joined the now long line of trusted confidants who have turned state’s witness against the cartel chief.
But as well as unveiling such personal betrayals, the trial has also exposed shocking allegations of relations between narco-trafficking and political power in Mexico and beyond.
For years journalists have charted the entwinement between cartels, police, military and politics – and many Mexican reporters have paid with their lives for doing so. Yet even so, the detail of testimony in the trial is astonishing.
This week the major Colombian narco Alex Cifuentes Villa took the stand for a second time to implicate the apex of power in Mexico.
Under cross-examination, Cifuentes said that Enrique Peño Nieto, president from 2012 until last year, approached Guzmán (rather than the other way round) to propose that a payment of $250m would call off the manhunt against him. Cifuentes said the two men eventually compromised on the sum of $100m, duly paid.
Cifuentes said his PA, Andrea Vélez Fernández, had once sent him photographs of suitcases full of cash. When Guzmán’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman asked if they were “destined for Mr Peña Nieto”, prosecutors successfully objected on grounds of relevance.
But Vélez turned out to have two jobs, the other for the Venezuelan political consultant JJ Rendón, who Peña Nieto had hired for his presidential campaign.
In the trial’s early stages, the brother of the cartel’s co-founder with Guzmán, Jesús Zambada García, had been due to testify on bribes to Mexican presidents including Felipe Calderón – who governed from 2006 to 2012 – leading Lichtman to say in his opening statements that “current and former presidents of Mexico received hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes”. The prosecution had successfully argued that further information should be inadmissible.
But on Wednesday, prosecutors failed to prevent the unsealing of one of their own motions which mentions bribes paid to a senior adviser to the current president, Ándres Manuel López Obrador during his unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign. Previous court papers mention bribes also paid to an official in his administration as mayor of Mexico City.
The officials have been named in Mexican media reports, but not in privileged court proceedings.
All three presidents have strongly denied the allegations. Calderón and Peño Nieto dismissed Lichtman’s comments at the start of the trial, and Peña Nieto issued a fresh statement this week calling Cifuentes’s claim “false, defamatory and absurd”. López Obrador’s office told Vice News he would not comment on remarks by a protected witness in a trial outside Mexico.
Mexican reporters have for years investigated the convergence of interests between Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican army, often in pursuit of hegemony over other, rival cartels.
But never before has an insider described the army acting as a hit squad for the cartel.
This week, however, Cifuentes said that Guzmán authorized payments of between $10m and $12m to military units to “either kill or capture” operatives of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, founded by brothers initially loyal to Guzmán, but who broke away – incurring his special wrath.
Zambada had testified that federal and highway police escorted consignments of cocaine, and there has been testimony on Guzmán paying police commanders, but not on police trafficking drugs themselves.
Cifuentes coolly testified about the time he sent federal police photographs of baggage full of cocaine being sent from Argentina to Mexico, so that they would be allowed through airport customs. But the police, he said, impounded the consignments and sold the drugs themselves.
All told, Cifuentes said with a shrug of his 40-year career in the drug trade, he had led “a good life”.
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WHILE ATTENTION FOCUSES ON A MAFIA BOSS ON TRIAL IN BROOKLYN, THE BILLIONAIRE HEADS A POWER ELITE PRESERVING INEQUALITY IN MEXICO
That Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel bribed politicians and senior military officers is presumed by most Mexicans; that he bribed presidents would surprise few – what we had not heard is that he allegedly haggled down a presidential demand for $250m protection money to $100m.
But this is what emerges as Guzmán’s prosecutors home in on the closing stages of their case at the US federal court in Brooklyn.
When Guzmán’s former mistress Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López took the stand on Thursday, El Chapo knew it was coming: journalists had been tipped off by defence counsel last week that she might testify.
Guzmán’s wife Emma Coronel – loyally present almost every day of the trial – probably braced herself too; the couple had been married for seven years – since 2007 – when the bathroom incident occurred, and their twin daughters were two years old.
Sánchez told the court she was Guzmán’s lover and “housewife” for three years from 2011. And rather more: she was a scout for, and dispatcher of, marijuana from the Mexican states of Durango and Sinaloa. Guzmán “would ask me for the three Bs”, she explained, “Buena, bonita y barata” – good, pretty and cheap.
The relationship was complex, with suggestions of intimidation: “I had my reasons,” she said. “First of all, so he didn’t think I would rat him out. I didn’t want him to mistrust me so he wouldn’t hurt me. Second, I didn’t want to have my siblings involved” – as Guzmán had apparently urged. She sent Guzmán a text about her business role, saying: “I like it. At least I feel useful.”
That night in early 2014, the couple were in bed when a squad of marines and US DEA agents surrounded the Miramar Hotel in Mazatlán. They were spotted by Guzmán’s most trusted gatekeeper, codenamed “El Condor”, who ran into the bedroom to warn his boss.
Guzmán bounded naked into the bathroom, followed by Sánchez, El Condor and another member of the inner circle, and flipped the bathtub to reveal the tunnel.
“He said, ‘love, love, come in here,’” recalled Sánchez. “There was like a lid on the bathtub that came up. I was scared. I was like, ‘Do I have to go in there?’ It was very dark.”
It is not clear whether voters in Sinaloa knew the story when, later that year, they elected Sánchez as a deputy to the state assembly. She served two years before being arrested in 2017 while entering the US, for drug trafficking and money laundering. Awaiting sentence, she joined the now long line of trusted confidants who have turned state’s witness against the cartel chief.
But as well as unveiling such personal betrayals, the trial has also exposed shocking allegations of relations between narco-trafficking and political power in Mexico and beyond.
For years journalists have charted the entwinement between cartels, police, military and politics – and many Mexican reporters have paid with their lives for doing so. Yet even so, the detail of testimony in the trial is astonishing.
This week the major Colombian narco Alex Cifuentes Villa took the stand for a second time to implicate the apex of power in Mexico.
Under cross-examination, Cifuentes said that Enrique Peño Nieto, president from 2012 until last year, approached Guzmán (rather than the other way round) to propose that a payment of $250m would call off the manhunt against him. Cifuentes said the two men eventually compromised on the sum of $100m, duly paid.
Cifuentes said his PA, Andrea Vélez Fernández, had once sent him photographs of suitcases full of cash. When Guzmán’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman asked if they were “destined for Mr Peña Nieto”, prosecutors successfully objected on grounds of relevance.
But Vélez turned out to have two jobs, the other for the Venezuelan political consultant JJ Rendón, who Peña Nieto had hired for his presidential campaign.
In the trial’s early stages, the brother of the cartel’s co-founder with Guzmán, Jesús Zambada García, had been due to testify on bribes to Mexican presidents including Felipe Calderón – who governed from 2006 to 2012 – leading Lichtman to say in his opening statements that “current and former presidents of Mexico received hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes”. The prosecution had successfully argued that further information should be inadmissible.
But on Wednesday, prosecutors failed to prevent the unsealing of one of their own motions which mentions bribes paid to a senior adviser to the current president, Ándres Manuel López Obrador during his unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign. Previous court papers mention bribes also paid to an official in his administration as mayor of Mexico City.
The officials have been named in Mexican media reports, but not in privileged court proceedings.
All three presidents have strongly denied the allegations. Calderón and Peño Nieto dismissed Lichtman’s comments at the start of the trial, and Peña Nieto issued a fresh statement this week calling Cifuentes’s claim “false, defamatory and absurd”. López Obrador’s office told Vice News he would not comment on remarks by a protected witness in a trial outside Mexico.
Mexican reporters have for years investigated the convergence of interests between Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel and the Mexican army, often in pursuit of hegemony over other, rival cartels.
But never before has an insider described the army acting as a hit squad for the cartel.
This week, however, Cifuentes said that Guzmán authorized payments of between $10m and $12m to military units to “either kill or capture” operatives of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, founded by brothers initially loyal to Guzmán, but who broke away – incurring his special wrath.
Zambada had testified that federal and highway police escorted consignments of cocaine, and there has been testimony on Guzmán paying police commanders, but not on police trafficking drugs themselves.
Cifuentes coolly testified about the time he sent federal police photographs of baggage full of cocaine being sent from Argentina to Mexico, so that they would be allowed through airport customs. But the police, he said, impounded the consignments and sold the drugs themselves.
All told, Cifuentes said with a shrug of his 40-year career in the drug trade, he had led “a good life”.
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Thousands flee north-east Nigeria after devastating Boko Haram attack
More than 8,000 refugees cross border into Cameroon after Nigerian town of Rann is burned to the ground
Ruth Maclean in Dakar
the guardian
Thu 17 Jan 2019 08.53 EST
People who fled the Nigerian town of Rann after an attack by Boko Haram cross a river to seek shelter in Bodo, Cameroon. Most are women and children in need of water, food and shelter. Photograph: MSF
Thousands of people have fled into Cameroon from north-east Nigeria following violent attacks by a faction of the militant group Boko Haram, which looted and destroyed large parts of a major town.
More than 8,000 refugees have crossed the border into Bodo after the attacks on the Nigerian town of Rann on Monday, in which at least 10 people are thought to have been killed. Homes and humanitarian organisations’ buildings were burned down.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said it was preparing to help 15,000 people with food, water and medicine. The organisation released photos showing smouldering buildings that had been burned to the ground, and columns of fleeing people crossing a river, their few belongings balanced on their heads.
“What struck me when we arrived was the silence. Usually Rann bustles with life, but yesterday it was eerie and quiet, like a graveyard. The town has been devastated and I was devastated to see it,” said Isa Sadiq Bwala, an MSF nurse.
It was unclear which faction of Boko Haram was responsible, but some sources in the north-east said the attacks were the work of Abubakar Shekau, the militant behind the 2014 abduction of the Chibok girls, who later appeared dishevelled in a video released online vowing to “sell them in the market”. Most of the girls were later freed.
Rann, in the eastern part of Borno, has been the target of several bloody attacks in recent years.
Two midwives who were abducted from Rann in March were later executedby Boko Haram, despite pleas from the International Committee of the Red Cross, their employer, to show mercy.
“I’m deeply sadden by the brutality of the latest violence in Rann, Baga and other parts of Lake Chad,” the ICRC’s Mamadou Sow said on Thursday. “To see tens of thousands of already displaced families fleeing again aimlessly for safety in four different countries is devastating. Enough is enough; people are tired and must be protected.”
Andrew Mews, MSF’s country director in Nigeria, said the attacks gave the lie to suggestions of improved stability in the country’s north-east.
“The emergency is not over yet,” said Mews. “There’s been quite a lot of talk that perhaps the situation is stabilised, and that we could start looking at doing more development activities in the north-east, but the reality is the context doesn’t allow that. We wish that was the case.”
He said that both the international organisations and the Nigerian authorities needed to stay and ensure a “proper humanitarian response” was delivered.
There has been a pattern of increased attacks in Borno state, the epicentre of the Boko Haram crisis, in recent months, with militants briefly taking over the town of Baga and storming a military base, killing many soldiers and looting weapons. They belonged to the other major Boko Haram faction, Islamic State West Africa Province, which broke off from Shekau’s camp in 2016.
The Maiduguri offices of one of Nigeria’s leading newspapers was raided and its bureau chief arrested after it published what the army said was sensitive information about a planned operation to retake Baga.
More than 8,000 refugees have crossed the border into Bodo after the attacks on the Nigerian town of Rann on Monday, in which at least 10 people are thought to have been killed. Homes and humanitarian organisations’ buildings were burned down.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said it was preparing to help 15,000 people with food, water and medicine. The organisation released photos showing smouldering buildings that had been burned to the ground, and columns of fleeing people crossing a river, their few belongings balanced on their heads.
“What struck me when we arrived was the silence. Usually Rann bustles with life, but yesterday it was eerie and quiet, like a graveyard. The town has been devastated and I was devastated to see it,” said Isa Sadiq Bwala, an MSF nurse.
It was unclear which faction of Boko Haram was responsible, but some sources in the north-east said the attacks were the work of Abubakar Shekau, the militant behind the 2014 abduction of the Chibok girls, who later appeared dishevelled in a video released online vowing to “sell them in the market”. Most of the girls were later freed.
Rann, in the eastern part of Borno, has been the target of several bloody attacks in recent years.
Two midwives who were abducted from Rann in March were later executedby Boko Haram, despite pleas from the International Committee of the Red Cross, their employer, to show mercy.
“I’m deeply sadden by the brutality of the latest violence in Rann, Baga and other parts of Lake Chad,” the ICRC’s Mamadou Sow said on Thursday. “To see tens of thousands of already displaced families fleeing again aimlessly for safety in four different countries is devastating. Enough is enough; people are tired and must be protected.”
Andrew Mews, MSF’s country director in Nigeria, said the attacks gave the lie to suggestions of improved stability in the country’s north-east.
“The emergency is not over yet,” said Mews. “There’s been quite a lot of talk that perhaps the situation is stabilised, and that we could start looking at doing more development activities in the north-east, but the reality is the context doesn’t allow that. We wish that was the case.”
He said that both the international organisations and the Nigerian authorities needed to stay and ensure a “proper humanitarian response” was delivered.
There has been a pattern of increased attacks in Borno state, the epicentre of the Boko Haram crisis, in recent months, with militants briefly taking over the town of Baga and storming a military base, killing many soldiers and looting weapons. They belonged to the other major Boko Haram faction, Islamic State West Africa Province, which broke off from Shekau’s camp in 2016.
The Maiduguri offices of one of Nigeria’s leading newspapers was raided and its bureau chief arrested after it published what the army said was sensitive information about a planned operation to retake Baga.
University of Glasgow Commits to Pay Reparations for Profiting From African Enslavement, Providing A Model for Others to Follow
By David Love - atlanta black star
January 12, 2019
The University of Glasgow has announced it made £200 million ($255 million) from the transatlantic slave trade according to a comprehensive report, and because of that, will make reparations through a “reparative justice program” and by establishing ties with the University of the West Indies. (Photo: National Library of Jamaica.)
Even as those who oppose reparations argue it is unfeasible or too costly, one British university is proving that it is both possible and necessary to make amends for the enslavement and genocide of African people. While the steps made so far may not seem so substantial, this institution could provide a model for others to follow.
The University of Glasgow made £200 million ($255 million) from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to a comprehensive report, and because of that will make reparations through a “reparative justice program” and establishing ties with the University of the West Indies. Reparative justice — which is known by various terms such as “restorative justice,” “communitarian justice,” “making amends,” “positive justice,” “relational justice” and “community justice” — responds to criminal behavior by balancing the needs of the community, the victims and offenders, according to the United Nations.
As opposed to retributive justice — which focuses on criminal punishment for the offender of an individual act, such as retaliation or “an eye for an eye” — reparative justice is about a people’s collective responsibility for committing wrongs, for stealing that which they had no legitimate right to own during times of enslavement or genocide. The reparations do not necessarily take the form of a cash payment to victims to alleviate suffering. According to Restorative Justice International, a global criminal justice reform association advocating for an expansion of victims-driven restorative justice, such a system places victims first, while holding the offenders accountable by having them learn how to make things right from the victims’ perspective.
“Restorative justice repairs the harm caused by crime. When victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, the results can be transformational,” notes the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation.
In the report “Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow,” which was released in September 2018, the university “acknowledges that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it received some gifts and bequests from persons who may have benefitted from the proceeds of slavery. Income from such gifts and bequests has been used in supporting academic activity undertaken by the students and staff of the University.” The University of Glasgow says it never owned or traded in enslaved people. The educational institution graduated the first African-American in medicine, and much of its staff had a clear pro-abolitionist position. Nevertheless, the university resolved to decide how to address and understand this history, and, looking ahead, use its resources to increasing understanding of the legacy of slavery, eliminating racism, and promoting racial equality in education and the greater society. (VIDEO)
Although the University of Glasgow points to its abolitionist past with pride, it had forgotten that it benefited financially from the profits of enslavement, and trade in goods produced by enslaved people, according to the report. Between 1727 and 1838, at least 133 of its students (3 percent) came from the Caribbean, typically the sons of planters and merchants who enslaved others. Some of these students were likely the children of Scottish men and enslaved or free Black women. “Many Scottish graduates went on to live and work in the slave societies of the Caribbean and North American colonies. As Glaswegian and Scottish merchants, planters, bankers, shipbuilders and others grew wealthy through the slave economy, some of the money they made (or left to their descendants) was passed on to the University of Glasgow, often by grateful alumni” the report noted. While the thousands of enslaved people who created this wealth are unknown, the university acknowledges, it is important to remember the lives and experiences of these people, some of whom are identified in the report.
For example, Ardoch and Beniba worked on the Lucky Hill sugar plantation in Jamaica, regarded by some historians as the harshest system of enslavement ever. These people faced violence, malnutrition, disease and oppressive 96-hour weeks, on average. This resulted in low life expectancy and high mortality for enslaved African people in Jamaica. According to the report, “at least one million enslaved Africans were disembarked on British-ruled Jamaica, yet even with natural increase only 385,000 people of African origin were still alive when the slave trade ended in 1807. With annual mortality rates ranging between 3%-7% far more enslaved people died each year than were imported from Africa or were born on the island.” One quarter of enslaved children on a typical plantation died before adulthood, and most of those who survived died before reaching age 40. “Those who survived into their thirties were by then unwell, maimed or exhausted, and the few who survived beyond their mid-forties were often considered elderly and decrepit,” the report said.
The report from Glasgow comes as other universities assess their role in the enslavement of Black people and the debt they owe, and CARICOM nations demand justice from the European colonial powers in the form of reparations. This past November, corporations have paid reparations for their wartime human rights atrocities. South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan to pay reparations to South Koreans who were forced laborers during World War II. Meanwhile, the Netherlands state-owned rail company Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) announced, under threat of being sued, that it will compensate survivors and relatives of those it delivered to the Nazi death camps. During Hitler’s regime, NS was paid £2.2 million ($2.8 million) in today’s money to transport 102,000 Jews to European concentration camps.
Taking cues from other universities that admitted they benefited from African enslavement, such Brown, Yale and Georgetown, the University of Glasgow estimated how much it profited from slavery based on many of their benefactors had ties to slavery. For example, out of 200 endowments, scholarships and prizes, 43 had a possible link to slave trade profits, and 16 had a clear connection. In some cases, the university was able to determine that some benefactors derived most or all their wealth from slavery. Although the university found that determining the exact amount of historic gifts and their present-day value is extremely difficult, it is clear the university “enjoyed a significant financial benefit from slave-holding and the profits made from slave-ownership and the trade in slave-produced goods.”
Moving forward, the University of Glasgow has undertaken a number of reparative actions, including increasing racial diversity of students and staff, and scholarships to Afro-Caribbean students; establishing ties with the University of the West Indies; an interdisciplinary center for the study of historical and modern slavery; a professorship for historical slavery and reparative justice; a new commemorative building to increase understanding of the university’s history, and other initiatives.
Attempting to repair the damage done to millions of African people and their descendants is no small task. Estimates of the debt the U.S. alone owes to Black people for the legacy of enslavement ranges in the multiple trillions of dollars. Nevertheless, repairing the damage requires a first step of admitting the crimes committed by society and its institutions and making amends for the theft, rape and pillaging. At least the University of Glasgow has taken that step.
The University of Glasgow made £200 million ($255 million) from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to a comprehensive report, and because of that will make reparations through a “reparative justice program” and establishing ties with the University of the West Indies. Reparative justice — which is known by various terms such as “restorative justice,” “communitarian justice,” “making amends,” “positive justice,” “relational justice” and “community justice” — responds to criminal behavior by balancing the needs of the community, the victims and offenders, according to the United Nations.
As opposed to retributive justice — which focuses on criminal punishment for the offender of an individual act, such as retaliation or “an eye for an eye” — reparative justice is about a people’s collective responsibility for committing wrongs, for stealing that which they had no legitimate right to own during times of enslavement or genocide. The reparations do not necessarily take the form of a cash payment to victims to alleviate suffering. According to Restorative Justice International, a global criminal justice reform association advocating for an expansion of victims-driven restorative justice, such a system places victims first, while holding the offenders accountable by having them learn how to make things right from the victims’ perspective.
“Restorative justice repairs the harm caused by crime. When victims, offenders and community members meet to decide how to do that, the results can be transformational,” notes the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation.
In the report “Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow,” which was released in September 2018, the university “acknowledges that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it received some gifts and bequests from persons who may have benefitted from the proceeds of slavery. Income from such gifts and bequests has been used in supporting academic activity undertaken by the students and staff of the University.” The University of Glasgow says it never owned or traded in enslaved people. The educational institution graduated the first African-American in medicine, and much of its staff had a clear pro-abolitionist position. Nevertheless, the university resolved to decide how to address and understand this history, and, looking ahead, use its resources to increasing understanding of the legacy of slavery, eliminating racism, and promoting racial equality in education and the greater society. (VIDEO)
Although the University of Glasgow points to its abolitionist past with pride, it had forgotten that it benefited financially from the profits of enslavement, and trade in goods produced by enslaved people, according to the report. Between 1727 and 1838, at least 133 of its students (3 percent) came from the Caribbean, typically the sons of planters and merchants who enslaved others. Some of these students were likely the children of Scottish men and enslaved or free Black women. “Many Scottish graduates went on to live and work in the slave societies of the Caribbean and North American colonies. As Glaswegian and Scottish merchants, planters, bankers, shipbuilders and others grew wealthy through the slave economy, some of the money they made (or left to their descendants) was passed on to the University of Glasgow, often by grateful alumni” the report noted. While the thousands of enslaved people who created this wealth are unknown, the university acknowledges, it is important to remember the lives and experiences of these people, some of whom are identified in the report.
For example, Ardoch and Beniba worked on the Lucky Hill sugar plantation in Jamaica, regarded by some historians as the harshest system of enslavement ever. These people faced violence, malnutrition, disease and oppressive 96-hour weeks, on average. This resulted in low life expectancy and high mortality for enslaved African people in Jamaica. According to the report, “at least one million enslaved Africans were disembarked on British-ruled Jamaica, yet even with natural increase only 385,000 people of African origin were still alive when the slave trade ended in 1807. With annual mortality rates ranging between 3%-7% far more enslaved people died each year than were imported from Africa or were born on the island.” One quarter of enslaved children on a typical plantation died before adulthood, and most of those who survived died before reaching age 40. “Those who survived into their thirties were by then unwell, maimed or exhausted, and the few who survived beyond their mid-forties were often considered elderly and decrepit,” the report said.
The report from Glasgow comes as other universities assess their role in the enslavement of Black people and the debt they owe, and CARICOM nations demand justice from the European colonial powers in the form of reparations. This past November, corporations have paid reparations for their wartime human rights atrocities. South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered Mitsubishi Heavy Industries of Japan to pay reparations to South Koreans who were forced laborers during World War II. Meanwhile, the Netherlands state-owned rail company Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS) announced, under threat of being sued, that it will compensate survivors and relatives of those it delivered to the Nazi death camps. During Hitler’s regime, NS was paid £2.2 million ($2.8 million) in today’s money to transport 102,000 Jews to European concentration camps.
Taking cues from other universities that admitted they benefited from African enslavement, such Brown, Yale and Georgetown, the University of Glasgow estimated how much it profited from slavery based on many of their benefactors had ties to slavery. For example, out of 200 endowments, scholarships and prizes, 43 had a possible link to slave trade profits, and 16 had a clear connection. In some cases, the university was able to determine that some benefactors derived most or all their wealth from slavery. Although the university found that determining the exact amount of historic gifts and their present-day value is extremely difficult, it is clear the university “enjoyed a significant financial benefit from slave-holding and the profits made from slave-ownership and the trade in slave-produced goods.”
Moving forward, the University of Glasgow has undertaken a number of reparative actions, including increasing racial diversity of students and staff, and scholarships to Afro-Caribbean students; establishing ties with the University of the West Indies; an interdisciplinary center for the study of historical and modern slavery; a professorship for historical slavery and reparative justice; a new commemorative building to increase understanding of the university’s history, and other initiatives.
Attempting to repair the damage done to millions of African people and their descendants is no small task. Estimates of the debt the U.S. alone owes to Black people for the legacy of enslavement ranges in the multiple trillions of dollars. Nevertheless, repairing the damage requires a first step of admitting the crimes committed by society and its institutions and making amends for the theft, rape and pillaging. At least the University of Glasgow has taken that step.
stupid people elected a fool , just like americans!!!
He’s been president a week – and already Bolsonaro is damaging Brazil
Eliane Brum - the guardian
Thu 10 Jan 2019 02.00 EST
The world needs to understand what Brazil has become, before it’s too late. Jair Messias Bolsonaro’s Brazil is not just another country that elected a far-right president at a time when the world’s most powerful nation is led by Donald Trump. It’s not just South America’s version of the current trend of countries sliding into authoritarianism, like we’ve seen in Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines. It’s not simply a peripheral nation with a pathetic leader. Brazil has become the apocalyptic vanguard that signals how radical this moment is – one with the power to worsen the climate crisis at top speed and blight the entire planet.
The election of Bolsonaro is a response to what we might call civilisation’s new discontent. Maybe people can’t identify the source of their anxiety, which has driven up the consumption of tranquillisers and sedatives. The average citizen might apply more familiar labels to the corrosion of their quality of life, air, and water; to a relentless fear of the “other”; to the feeling they’re walking in quicksand. But what’s underpinning this new discontent pervading all areas of human experience is our climate crisis.
Bolsonaro was elected in October, on his pledge to go back “50 years”. Fifty years ago, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. For Bolsonaro and his followers, who are outright defenders of torture and the elimination of adversaries, it was a glorious era. Despite the terrifying menace of nuclear war, the world was still a place where science promised nothing but progress and solutions – it delivered no bad news, like global warming, that led to limitations on an individual’s daily life or on government actions. It was a time when white, heterosexual men held power and knew precisely who they were. They may have faced some resistance from minorities, but they still enjoyed absolute hegemony.
We cannot comprehend what is now happening in Brazil – and around the world – unless we understand that our culture wars are tightly bound up with humanity’s need to say goodbye to 20th-century illusions of power and face a planet made more hostile by human hand. Things will soon reach catastrophic levels if nations and their residents do not unite in a global effort to do something extremely hard and unpopular: impose limits on ourselves to counteract global warming.
The election of Bolsonaro ties all this together like no other event. The Bolsonaro administration promises a “new era” – a return to a time free of doubts and insecurity, with certainty about what a man is and what a woman is and a clear sense who’s in charge of the public sphere and the family. Their ultra-conservatism is at times corny, at times biblical – but never innocent.
Soon after Bolsonaro’s inauguration last week, the minister of women, family, and human rights, Damares Alves – an evangelical pastor – stated in a video that now “girls wear pink and boys, blue”. Beside her, a supporter held an Israeli flag. Some neo-Pentecostals likewise waved Israeli flags at the inauguration. These religious groups, who are growing numerically and wielding greater power in Brazil, voted overwhelmingly for Bolsonaro.
A significant portion of them believe Jews will play a role in fulfilling scriptural prophesies about the return of the Messiah. It must be remembered that Bolsonaro was baptised in the River Jordan, in Israel, a couple of years before the presidential campaign. Now in power, he has announced that Brazil will move its embassy to Jerusalem, which, say these evangelicals, will be the “stage for Armageddon”. In a recent visit to Brazil, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared: “We have no better friends in the world than the evangelical community.”
Ernesto Araújo, the dogmatic foreign minister, said Bolsonaro’s rise will be marked by “God through the nation”. He has also written that climate change is an “ideology” dreamed up so imperialist nations could determine Brazil’s future. “The people who say there are no men and women are the same ones who preach that countries don’t have the right to protect their borders,” Araújo stated in his inaugural speech.
This Brazil, stitched from a patchwork of dogmas, might be a fascinating topic of study if it didn’t put the whole planet at risk. Ideological discourse serves to instil the notion of destiny and to ensure cohesion within a population frightened about everything it might lose, from salaries and jobs to symbolic positions in the realms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. When Bolsonaro says he’s going to “free Brazil from political correctness”, he’s pledging to break both the “chains” that force people to respect minorities and those that curtail devastation of the Amazon forest.
In his first days in power, the president shifted responsibility for demarcation of indigenous and quilombola territory – which makes up a large part of the protected Amazon – to the agriculture ministry. This government sector is controlled by agribusiness, responsible for much of deforestation and eager to get their hands on the remaining forest. Bolsonaro promised to turn the public land occupied by indigenous peoples into private land where mining and agribusiness concerns can reap profits. The goal is to make more forest land available for capitalist speculation: cattle, soybeans, mining, and major construction projects.
This is why government ideologues fabricated the idea that “communism” – a system never implemented in Brazil and now largely irrelevant worldwide – is a looming threat to Brazilians. The supposed “international Marxist plot” serves to justify turning the forest into a commodity. In this fantasy, indigenous peoples, who are the chief barrier to destruction of the Amazon, are portrayed as a “threat to national sovereignty”.
The deforestation rate for 2018 was the highest in a decade. The mere possibility that Bolsonaro might win had a liberating effect on deforesters and further inflamed conflicts in a country where more environmental defenders are killed than in any other.
Without the world’s biggest tropical forest, there is no way to control global warming. If Bolsonaro’s messianic capitalism is not stopped, life on this planet will be much worse for everyone. For a contingent of neo-Pentecostal evangelicals, this may be welcomed as an apocalypse preceding the final salvation of “true believers”. For most of humanity, it will bring nothing but horror and suffering – perpetuated by the stupidity of a species with delusions of grandeur.
The election of Bolsonaro is a response to what we might call civilisation’s new discontent. Maybe people can’t identify the source of their anxiety, which has driven up the consumption of tranquillisers and sedatives. The average citizen might apply more familiar labels to the corrosion of their quality of life, air, and water; to a relentless fear of the “other”; to the feeling they’re walking in quicksand. But what’s underpinning this new discontent pervading all areas of human experience is our climate crisis.
Bolsonaro was elected in October, on his pledge to go back “50 years”. Fifty years ago, Brazil lived under a military dictatorship. For Bolsonaro and his followers, who are outright defenders of torture and the elimination of adversaries, it was a glorious era. Despite the terrifying menace of nuclear war, the world was still a place where science promised nothing but progress and solutions – it delivered no bad news, like global warming, that led to limitations on an individual’s daily life or on government actions. It was a time when white, heterosexual men held power and knew precisely who they were. They may have faced some resistance from minorities, but they still enjoyed absolute hegemony.
We cannot comprehend what is now happening in Brazil – and around the world – unless we understand that our culture wars are tightly bound up with humanity’s need to say goodbye to 20th-century illusions of power and face a planet made more hostile by human hand. Things will soon reach catastrophic levels if nations and their residents do not unite in a global effort to do something extremely hard and unpopular: impose limits on ourselves to counteract global warming.
The election of Bolsonaro ties all this together like no other event. The Bolsonaro administration promises a “new era” – a return to a time free of doubts and insecurity, with certainty about what a man is and what a woman is and a clear sense who’s in charge of the public sphere and the family. Their ultra-conservatism is at times corny, at times biblical – but never innocent.
Soon after Bolsonaro’s inauguration last week, the minister of women, family, and human rights, Damares Alves – an evangelical pastor – stated in a video that now “girls wear pink and boys, blue”. Beside her, a supporter held an Israeli flag. Some neo-Pentecostals likewise waved Israeli flags at the inauguration. These religious groups, who are growing numerically and wielding greater power in Brazil, voted overwhelmingly for Bolsonaro.
A significant portion of them believe Jews will play a role in fulfilling scriptural prophesies about the return of the Messiah. It must be remembered that Bolsonaro was baptised in the River Jordan, in Israel, a couple of years before the presidential campaign. Now in power, he has announced that Brazil will move its embassy to Jerusalem, which, say these evangelicals, will be the “stage for Armageddon”. In a recent visit to Brazil, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared: “We have no better friends in the world than the evangelical community.”
Ernesto Araújo, the dogmatic foreign minister, said Bolsonaro’s rise will be marked by “God through the nation”. He has also written that climate change is an “ideology” dreamed up so imperialist nations could determine Brazil’s future. “The people who say there are no men and women are the same ones who preach that countries don’t have the right to protect their borders,” Araújo stated in his inaugural speech.
This Brazil, stitched from a patchwork of dogmas, might be a fascinating topic of study if it didn’t put the whole planet at risk. Ideological discourse serves to instil the notion of destiny and to ensure cohesion within a population frightened about everything it might lose, from salaries and jobs to symbolic positions in the realms of race, gender, and sexual orientation. When Bolsonaro says he’s going to “free Brazil from political correctness”, he’s pledging to break both the “chains” that force people to respect minorities and those that curtail devastation of the Amazon forest.
In his first days in power, the president shifted responsibility for demarcation of indigenous and quilombola territory – which makes up a large part of the protected Amazon – to the agriculture ministry. This government sector is controlled by agribusiness, responsible for much of deforestation and eager to get their hands on the remaining forest. Bolsonaro promised to turn the public land occupied by indigenous peoples into private land where mining and agribusiness concerns can reap profits. The goal is to make more forest land available for capitalist speculation: cattle, soybeans, mining, and major construction projects.
This is why government ideologues fabricated the idea that “communism” – a system never implemented in Brazil and now largely irrelevant worldwide – is a looming threat to Brazilians. The supposed “international Marxist plot” serves to justify turning the forest into a commodity. In this fantasy, indigenous peoples, who are the chief barrier to destruction of the Amazon, are portrayed as a “threat to national sovereignty”.
The deforestation rate for 2018 was the highest in a decade. The mere possibility that Bolsonaro might win had a liberating effect on deforesters and further inflamed conflicts in a country where more environmental defenders are killed than in any other.
Without the world’s biggest tropical forest, there is no way to control global warming. If Bolsonaro’s messianic capitalism is not stopped, life on this planet will be much worse for everyone. For a contingent of neo-Pentecostal evangelicals, this may be welcomed as an apocalypse preceding the final salvation of “true believers”. For most of humanity, it will bring nothing but horror and suffering – perpetuated by the stupidity of a species with delusions of grandeur.
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TRUTH IS THEY ARE JUST A BUNCH OF RACISTS!!!
Pro-Brexit activist said all Muslims should be removed from UK
Video found of James Goddard, part of group who barracked Anna Soubry, arguing Islam should be banned from west
Peter Walker Political correspondent
THE GUARDIAN
Wed 9 Jan 2019 08.32 EST
The most prominent of the protesters who have harassed MPs and journalists outside the Houses of Parliament in recent weeks argued last year that all Muslims should be removed from the UK, saying he wanted to “ban Islam from the west”, it has emerged.
In another indication of the far-right views held by several of the self-styled yellow vest activists stationed outside parliament, ostensibly to call for Brexit, a video exists of James Goddard arguing that Islam should be removed from the UK.
Goddard, who has regularly filmed himself and other activists harassing and abusing people including the Conservative MP Anna Soubry, has built up his profile by live-streaming confrontations to Facebook and seeking donations to finance his actions.
However, following calls from the Speaker, John Bercow, as well as from more than 100 MPs for a stronger response from the police after a group including Goddard barracked Soubry as she walked to parliament, his Facebook and Paypal pages were removed.
Goddard’s page on the mass-funding website Patreon, on which he styled himself a “political activist” and sought donations, has also been suspended.
The video, uploaded in September, shows Goddard engaged in a long debate about Islam with Jaffer Ladak, the imam of a mosque in Stanmore, north London.
During the conversation, Goddard said that the estimated 2,000 mosques around the UK “shouldn’t be there” and he would “get rid of them”.
Asked what this meant in practice, Goddard said: “I wouldn’t blow them up. If I ever got into power I’d give you all £5,000 to £10,000 and ask you to leave. I don’t believe that Islam should be in the west, no. This is a Christian country.”
If Muslims refused to leave voluntarily, “then we’d have to think of a legal way that we could do it”, he said.
Goddard said he wanted to “ban Islam from the west”, calling the faith “a threat to every man, woman and child in this country”. He added: “I just don’t think that Islam is compatible with the west. I just don’t think that people who believe in child marriage and terrorism should be in the United Kingdom, or Europe for that matter. That book poses a threat, and as long as that book exists there will never be peace in the west.”
Goddard has previously posted anti-Islam statements on Gab, a social media site popular with the far right, and has supported Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the English Defence League street movement.
Other yellow vest activists outside the Houses of Parliament, who model their tactics on the French gilets jaunes movement, have said they do not share such views, and insist Goddard is not a leader of the group.
However, the group Hope Not Hate has said that the emergence of the movement raises fears that amid the Brexit process, “the threat from the far right is growing and the risk of disorder and violence is on the rise”.
In recent weeks, members of the group outside parliament have also blocked Westminster Bridge, shouted sometimes sexist and racist abuse at TV crews, stormed into the offices of a radio station and the Labour party, and held small demonstrations in a number of cities.
In another indication of the far-right views held by several of the self-styled yellow vest activists stationed outside parliament, ostensibly to call for Brexit, a video exists of James Goddard arguing that Islam should be removed from the UK.
Goddard, who has regularly filmed himself and other activists harassing and abusing people including the Conservative MP Anna Soubry, has built up his profile by live-streaming confrontations to Facebook and seeking donations to finance his actions.
However, following calls from the Speaker, John Bercow, as well as from more than 100 MPs for a stronger response from the police after a group including Goddard barracked Soubry as she walked to parliament, his Facebook and Paypal pages were removed.
Goddard’s page on the mass-funding website Patreon, on which he styled himself a “political activist” and sought donations, has also been suspended.
The video, uploaded in September, shows Goddard engaged in a long debate about Islam with Jaffer Ladak, the imam of a mosque in Stanmore, north London.
During the conversation, Goddard said that the estimated 2,000 mosques around the UK “shouldn’t be there” and he would “get rid of them”.
Asked what this meant in practice, Goddard said: “I wouldn’t blow them up. If I ever got into power I’d give you all £5,000 to £10,000 and ask you to leave. I don’t believe that Islam should be in the west, no. This is a Christian country.”
If Muslims refused to leave voluntarily, “then we’d have to think of a legal way that we could do it”, he said.
Goddard said he wanted to “ban Islam from the west”, calling the faith “a threat to every man, woman and child in this country”. He added: “I just don’t think that Islam is compatible with the west. I just don’t think that people who believe in child marriage and terrorism should be in the United Kingdom, or Europe for that matter. That book poses a threat, and as long as that book exists there will never be peace in the west.”
Goddard has previously posted anti-Islam statements on Gab, a social media site popular with the far right, and has supported Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the founder of the English Defence League street movement.
Other yellow vest activists outside the Houses of Parliament, who model their tactics on the French gilets jaunes movement, have said they do not share such views, and insist Goddard is not a leader of the group.
However, the group Hope Not Hate has said that the emergence of the movement raises fears that amid the Brexit process, “the threat from the far right is growing and the risk of disorder and violence is on the rise”.
In recent weeks, members of the group outside parliament have also blocked Westminster Bridge, shouted sometimes sexist and racist abuse at TV crews, stormed into the offices of a radio station and the Labour party, and held small demonstrations in a number of cities.
Fact check: How many people are enslaved in the world today?
The Conversation - raw story
08 JAN 2019 AT 05:40 ET
Modern slavery is a crime against humanity. Although some types of enslavement, like sex trafficking, are widely known, others hide in plain sight. Enslavement happens in many industries – including restaurants, domestic work, electronics, construction, textiles, steel and seafood.
But exactly how many people live in slavery today? Whether it’s measuring modern slavery in the U.S. or across the globe, there are different, inconsistent, estimates.
As someone who researches modern slavery, I know that calculating its prevalence is like finding a needle in a haystack. A valid figure is elusive – and yet essential for better policies to free enslaved persons and help them make the difficult transition to liberation.
Defining modern slavery
Definitions of modern slavery have shifted over time.
In 1926, the League of Nations defined slavery as the “status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The U.N. broadened this definition in 1956 to include forced marriage and more protections for women’s rights.
Things changed again in 2000. The U.N. introduced the term “trafficking in persons” and omitted references of forced marriage from the widely adopted Palermo Protocol. But by 2013, the U.N. General Assembly recognized forced marriage as a form of enslavement.
Definitions matter because they influence how the public and policymakers interpret the issue. In a court of law, for instance, the term “human trafficking” might be more persuasive to jurors than a term like “slavery.”
For researchers, nuances also matter when it comes to estimating the number of people enslaved. Some organizations include forced marriage in their estimates of modern slavery; others do not.
Still others disagree about when harsh labor conditions merit the label “enslavement.” The International Labor Organization has said, “Not all children who are exposed to hazardous work are ‘slaves,’ and not all workers who don’t receive a fair wage are forced.”
Among published estimates of forced marriage, the numbers are staggering. Based on its calculations, UNICEF estimates that approximately 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthday.
Slavery in the US today
Researchers have struggled to estimate the number of people enslaved within the U.S.
For over a decade, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center has operated a hotline for any tips related to trafficking within America’s borders. In 2017, they documented 8,524 human trafficking cases, mostly in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Sex trafficking was the most common type of enslavement reported.
These hotline data are useful because they detail more of where and who is trafficked in America today. But the figures are not from a national survey. Anyone can call and report a tip. So, after a movie like “Taken,” there may be a spike in tips about sex trafficking from an anxious public.
In 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that, at any given moment, there were 14,500 to 17,500 people trafficked in the U.S. But this research could not be replicatedand verified.
Some organizations suggest there could be upwards of 100,000 youth at risk for trafficking in the U.S. at any moment, but the National Academies of Sciences has debunked this.
Backing away from national figures, other researchers have begun to focus on trafficking hotspots, like along the U.S.-Mexico border. In one detailed study of 641 homeless youth and human trafficking in the U.S., more than 14 percent had been trafficked for sex. Another 8 percent had been trafficked for other types of forced labor.
Inconsistent data
For a long time, global and regional players that track this sort of data – often competing for the same funding or prestige – would seldom share their data.
This lack of cooperation explains how independent organizations may come up with different estimates.
For example, in 2005, the International Labor Organization estimated that 12.3 millionpersons were enslaved. Then, in 2012, it adjusted this figure to 21 million persons. The International Labor Organization has rarely published country-level results, instead focusing on regional figures.
In a desire to generate country-level estimates, the Walk Free Foundation launched The Global Slavery Index in 2013. The first index estimated 29.8 million persons enslaved. But this was later updated to 35.8 million, and then 45.8 million.
Each iteration of the Global Slavery Index and International Labor Organization figures reflected changes in their methods. Although these changes often reflected stronger methodologies, the changing estimates invited criticism.
Global estimates
Through new partnerships, more nonprofit organizations and countries are beginning to meet and share their data. Walk Free, the International Labor Organization and dozens of other state and nonstate actors came together in 2016 to form Alliance 8.7. In 2017, the coalition jointly estimated there were some 40 million people enslaved worldwide.
However, scholars from the outside don’t have access to the coalition’s raw data. This makes a critical analysis of the methodology a challenge.
Alliance 8.7 also held a conference in October of this year that established clearer guidelines on how to measure instances of enslavement.
Prior to this, researchers did not always agree on when a moment of enslavement should be counted. For example, a researcher might interview respondents about their prior experiences of forced labor. During that interview, a respondent might say that he had been a victim of forced labor in 1997. Should that be counted at the time of the survey or not counted since it happened so long ago?
Scholars are also getting more involved and applying novel estimation techniques that are cost-effective. There are also new data resources – like the Gallup World Poll, which now includes questions about modern slavery in its surveys in some developing countries. These surveys are based on random sample surveys – some of the best data collection methods around.
A valid estimate of slavery and trafficking worldwide remains the holy grail of modern slavery studies. The public may never know the true number of persons enslaved today, because modern slavery is a hidden crime. But more precise estimates can begin to shed more light on who is enslaved and where. If the public doesn’t know who today’s enslaved are and where they are, their presence will remain invisible.
But exactly how many people live in slavery today? Whether it’s measuring modern slavery in the U.S. or across the globe, there are different, inconsistent, estimates.
As someone who researches modern slavery, I know that calculating its prevalence is like finding a needle in a haystack. A valid figure is elusive – and yet essential for better policies to free enslaved persons and help them make the difficult transition to liberation.
Defining modern slavery
Definitions of modern slavery have shifted over time.
In 1926, the League of Nations defined slavery as the “status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The U.N. broadened this definition in 1956 to include forced marriage and more protections for women’s rights.
Things changed again in 2000. The U.N. introduced the term “trafficking in persons” and omitted references of forced marriage from the widely adopted Palermo Protocol. But by 2013, the U.N. General Assembly recognized forced marriage as a form of enslavement.
Definitions matter because they influence how the public and policymakers interpret the issue. In a court of law, for instance, the term “human trafficking” might be more persuasive to jurors than a term like “slavery.”
For researchers, nuances also matter when it comes to estimating the number of people enslaved. Some organizations include forced marriage in their estimates of modern slavery; others do not.
Still others disagree about when harsh labor conditions merit the label “enslavement.” The International Labor Organization has said, “Not all children who are exposed to hazardous work are ‘slaves,’ and not all workers who don’t receive a fair wage are forced.”
Among published estimates of forced marriage, the numbers are staggering. Based on its calculations, UNICEF estimates that approximately 650 million girls and women alive today were married before their 18th birthday.
Slavery in the US today
Researchers have struggled to estimate the number of people enslaved within the U.S.
For over a decade, the National Human Trafficking Resource Center has operated a hotline for any tips related to trafficking within America’s borders. In 2017, they documented 8,524 human trafficking cases, mostly in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Sex trafficking was the most common type of enslavement reported.
These hotline data are useful because they detail more of where and who is trafficked in America today. But the figures are not from a national survey. Anyone can call and report a tip. So, after a movie like “Taken,” there may be a spike in tips about sex trafficking from an anxious public.
In 2004, the U.S. State Department reported that, at any given moment, there were 14,500 to 17,500 people trafficked in the U.S. But this research could not be replicatedand verified.
Some organizations suggest there could be upwards of 100,000 youth at risk for trafficking in the U.S. at any moment, but the National Academies of Sciences has debunked this.
Backing away from national figures, other researchers have begun to focus on trafficking hotspots, like along the U.S.-Mexico border. In one detailed study of 641 homeless youth and human trafficking in the U.S., more than 14 percent had been trafficked for sex. Another 8 percent had been trafficked for other types of forced labor.
Inconsistent data
For a long time, global and regional players that track this sort of data – often competing for the same funding or prestige – would seldom share their data.
This lack of cooperation explains how independent organizations may come up with different estimates.
For example, in 2005, the International Labor Organization estimated that 12.3 millionpersons were enslaved. Then, in 2012, it adjusted this figure to 21 million persons. The International Labor Organization has rarely published country-level results, instead focusing on regional figures.
In a desire to generate country-level estimates, the Walk Free Foundation launched The Global Slavery Index in 2013. The first index estimated 29.8 million persons enslaved. But this was later updated to 35.8 million, and then 45.8 million.
Each iteration of the Global Slavery Index and International Labor Organization figures reflected changes in their methods. Although these changes often reflected stronger methodologies, the changing estimates invited criticism.
Global estimates
Through new partnerships, more nonprofit organizations and countries are beginning to meet and share their data. Walk Free, the International Labor Organization and dozens of other state and nonstate actors came together in 2016 to form Alliance 8.7. In 2017, the coalition jointly estimated there were some 40 million people enslaved worldwide.
However, scholars from the outside don’t have access to the coalition’s raw data. This makes a critical analysis of the methodology a challenge.
Alliance 8.7 also held a conference in October of this year that established clearer guidelines on how to measure instances of enslavement.
Prior to this, researchers did not always agree on when a moment of enslavement should be counted. For example, a researcher might interview respondents about their prior experiences of forced labor. During that interview, a respondent might say that he had been a victim of forced labor in 1997. Should that be counted at the time of the survey or not counted since it happened so long ago?
Scholars are also getting more involved and applying novel estimation techniques that are cost-effective. There are also new data resources – like the Gallup World Poll, which now includes questions about modern slavery in its surveys in some developing countries. These surveys are based on random sample surveys – some of the best data collection methods around.
A valid estimate of slavery and trafficking worldwide remains the holy grail of modern slavery studies. The public may never know the true number of persons enslaved today, because modern slavery is a hidden crime. But more precise estimates can begin to shed more light on who is enslaved and where. If the public doesn’t know who today’s enslaved are and where they are, their presence will remain invisible.
apple's greed backfiring!!!
Paying the price: China shoppers, stung by slowdown, take bite out of Apple
Cate Cadell, Josh Horwitz - reuters
JANUARY 3, 2019 / 3:51 AM
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Shanghai student Xu Yechuyi wanted to buy a new iPhone last year but couldn’t afford one at Apple Inc’s flagship store, so she opted for a used, three-year-old iPhone 6S at less than a third of the sticker price.
The purchase made Xu, 22, one of many consumers priced out of stores and resorting to China’s rapidly growing second-hand handset market, bartering via text-messaging apps and spending money on Apple products that never reaches Apple.
“I think there is real demand for this sort of second-hand market from less affluent consumers like me,” said Xu.
The second-hand trend adds to challenges Apple faces in the world’s biggest smartphone market, where it has long been losing ground to domestic makers of high-end yet lower-priced handsets such as market leader Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL].
The first iPhones in China in 2009 brought Apple record profit. But the launch last year of its most expensive handset ever - priced 9,599 yuan ($1,397) - coincided with economic downturn and a slowing smartphone market, while deteriorating Sino-U.S. trade relations stoked support for local rivals.
Poor iPhone sales in China prompted Apple on Wednesday to lower its quarterly revenue forecast for the first time in over a decade, hammering its shares and those of its suppliers. Chief Executive Tim Cook blamed the trade war and the economy.
“We did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” said Cook.
Several leading Chinese technology companies also lowered forecasts in the past year, including e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and search engine provider Baidu Inc, with both citing the impact of the trade war.
Meanwhile consumer confidence has tumbled since the middle of last year, with its impact rippling through the economy, from overall retail numbers to box office receipts and car sales.
As confidence falls and the economy continues to slow, analysts said the market for used smartphones can only expand. China’s iiMedia Research forecast 144 million users of second-hand smartphones in 2019, up a third versus last year.
“The macro environment is just not in Apple’s favor,” said Singapore-based IDC senior research manager Kiranjeet Kaur. “People’s spending power is coming down.”
In west Beijing’s tech district, one worker surnamed Zhou at a phone refurbishing firm said she had seen a rise in users looking to upgrade old iPhones instead of purchasing new ones.
“Quite a few people choose to continue using their older iPhones by changing the battery and updating to iOS 12,” agreed one user on Weibo, referring to Apple’s latest operating system.
“BUY CHINESE BRANDS”
On Thursday, popular threads on microblog site Weibo largely blamed the price for a drop in sales of what was once a must-have status symbol, with some comments taking on a patriotic bent.
“Only fools buy expensive iPhones. Sane people buy top quality, cheap Huawei,” wrote one user in a comment ‘liked’ several hundred times. “Support Chinese brands!”
Support for local smartphone brands gained momentum in the past year as the U.S. imposed import tariffs on Chinese goods. Netizens responded by calling for a boycott of Apple - a company widely regarded as being representative of the United States.
Apple started 2018 with a market share of 15 percent but that had fallen to roughly 9 percent by July-September, showed data from Counterpoint Research. Huawei, whose high-end phone retails at 70 percent of the price of fifth-ranked Apple, saw its share rise to 23 percent from 20 percent.
The Chinese handset maker gained further support last month after the arrest of its chief financial officer in Canada at the request of the United States.
At an Apple shop in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping district on Thursday, fashion worker Zhang Lijun was considering buying an iPhone X or the competing Huawei P20, which runs on Alphabet Inc’s Android operating system.
“I think the price is too high,” she said, referring to the iPhone. “Huawei has been trending in the past two years, maybe because there’s been more awareness about supporting local brands.”
The purchase made Xu, 22, one of many consumers priced out of stores and resorting to China’s rapidly growing second-hand handset market, bartering via text-messaging apps and spending money on Apple products that never reaches Apple.
“I think there is real demand for this sort of second-hand market from less affluent consumers like me,” said Xu.
The second-hand trend adds to challenges Apple faces in the world’s biggest smartphone market, where it has long been losing ground to domestic makers of high-end yet lower-priced handsets such as market leader Huawei Technologies Co Ltd [HWT.UL].
The first iPhones in China in 2009 brought Apple record profit. But the launch last year of its most expensive handset ever - priced 9,599 yuan ($1,397) - coincided with economic downturn and a slowing smartphone market, while deteriorating Sino-U.S. trade relations stoked support for local rivals.
Poor iPhone sales in China prompted Apple on Wednesday to lower its quarterly revenue forecast for the first time in over a decade, hammering its shares and those of its suppliers. Chief Executive Tim Cook blamed the trade war and the economy.
“We did not foresee the magnitude of the economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China,” said Cook.
Several leading Chinese technology companies also lowered forecasts in the past year, including e-commerce firm Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and search engine provider Baidu Inc, with both citing the impact of the trade war.
Meanwhile consumer confidence has tumbled since the middle of last year, with its impact rippling through the economy, from overall retail numbers to box office receipts and car sales.
As confidence falls and the economy continues to slow, analysts said the market for used smartphones can only expand. China’s iiMedia Research forecast 144 million users of second-hand smartphones in 2019, up a third versus last year.
“The macro environment is just not in Apple’s favor,” said Singapore-based IDC senior research manager Kiranjeet Kaur. “People’s spending power is coming down.”
In west Beijing’s tech district, one worker surnamed Zhou at a phone refurbishing firm said she had seen a rise in users looking to upgrade old iPhones instead of purchasing new ones.
“Quite a few people choose to continue using their older iPhones by changing the battery and updating to iOS 12,” agreed one user on Weibo, referring to Apple’s latest operating system.
“BUY CHINESE BRANDS”
On Thursday, popular threads on microblog site Weibo largely blamed the price for a drop in sales of what was once a must-have status symbol, with some comments taking on a patriotic bent.
“Only fools buy expensive iPhones. Sane people buy top quality, cheap Huawei,” wrote one user in a comment ‘liked’ several hundred times. “Support Chinese brands!”
Support for local smartphone brands gained momentum in the past year as the U.S. imposed import tariffs on Chinese goods. Netizens responded by calling for a boycott of Apple - a company widely regarded as being representative of the United States.
Apple started 2018 with a market share of 15 percent but that had fallen to roughly 9 percent by July-September, showed data from Counterpoint Research. Huawei, whose high-end phone retails at 70 percent of the price of fifth-ranked Apple, saw its share rise to 23 percent from 20 percent.
The Chinese handset maker gained further support last month after the arrest of its chief financial officer in Canada at the request of the United States.
At an Apple shop in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping district on Thursday, fashion worker Zhang Lijun was considering buying an iPhone X or the competing Huawei P20, which runs on Alphabet Inc’s Android operating system.
“I think the price is too high,” she said, referring to the iPhone. “Huawei has been trending in the past two years, maybe because there’s been more awareness about supporting local brands.”
Racism Against Black People Is Still A Big Problem In Europe, Study Finds
By David Love - atlanta black star
December 29, 2018
Being Black in the European Union is difficult, and racial discrimination and harassment are a chronic issue, according to a recently released report that paints a “dire picture” of racism. The report from the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) — “Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey: Being Black in the EU” — examined the experiences of 6,000 people of African descent in 12 EU member nations (Finland, Ireland, Austria, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Malta, Sweden, France, Italy, UK and Portugal), including mostly first-generation immigrants from 59 countries, but also those Black people who were born in Europe. The survey examines racial discrimination, hate crimes, racial profiling and social exclusion against people of African descent.
The report is important, necessary and timely, because while Black people have been present in Europe for ages, and nearly two decades have passed since the EU enacted anti-discrimination laws, they face “widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion.” The report says the EU cannot tolerate this state of affairs, given the EU was founded on the principles of human rights, the rule of law, freedom, democracy, equality and minority rights. The EU intends to offer their findings so that its member states can formulate legal and policy responses to promote the full inclusion of Black people.
“The International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination emphasises in its preamble that racial barriers are ‘repugnant to the ideals of any human society’, and that ‘there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice’. Yet the survey results paint a dire picture of reality on the ground,” wrote FRA agency director Michael O’Flaherty, noting that racial discrimination and harassment are common.
Among the key findings of the survey, 30 percent of respondents experienced racial harassment in the five years before the report, most commonly nonverbal harassment followed by threatening comments and threats of violence. Further, 21 percent said they experienced such treatment in the 12 months before the survey was conducted. Results varied widely by country, ranging from 20 percent of respondents in Malta and 21 percent in the United Kingdom, to 63 percent of in Finland. Only 14 percent of victims reported the incidents to the authorities. Meanwhile, 5 percent were the victims of racial violence in the prior five years — 3 percent in the preceding 12 months — with 35 percent of victims reporting the incidents to the police. Black men (23 percent) were far less likely to report racial violence attacks than Black women (50 percent).
Unlawful and discriminatory police stops and racial profiling of Blacks are prevalent in Europe, with one quarter of respondents stopped by police in the previous five years, of which four in ten said was due to racial profiling. And 2 percent of people interviewed experienced a racist physical assault by law enforcement in the five years before the survey. Nearly two-thirds of police brutality victims failed to report the violence because of a fear or mistrust of the police (28 percent) or because they did not think doing so would make a difference (34 percent).
People of African descent face widespread racial discrimination in all facets of daily life, including barriers to inclusion in employment and housing, the EU survey concluded. For example, 39 percent of the Black people surveyed reported experiencing racial discrimination in the previous five years, one quarter in the past year. A quarter of black people experienced racial discrimination at work or during their job search, and 14 percent were denied rental housing from a landlord.
Particularly unsettling to the EU agency producing the report is that younger Black people are experiencing more discrimination and exclusion than older generations. Also providing context to the economic implications of racism is the fact that 55 percent of the respondents live below the poverty level.
Nearly 50 million members of racial and ethnic minority groups live in the European Union, amounting to 10 percent of the population of the bloc. However, 1 percent of the staff in EU institutions are non-white, and some European nations do not collect data on race. Over the past decade, Europe’s African population rose dramatically, with 1 million migrants from sub-Saharan Africa arriving in Europe between 2010 and 2017. An estimated 7 million people of African descent lived in Europe as of 2011. This comes as many European nations have witnessed a rise in popularity of right-wing, nationalist political parties, including groups with Nazi ties and sentiments, who are united in their anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia and opposition to the EU. The reemergence of fascist and authoritarian sentiments, racist attacks and Nazi salutes in Europe is a concern.
The EU survey comes as a survey from The Guardian sheds light on racial bias in Britain. The poll of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found that 43 percent were overlooked for a promotion in the past five years and 38 percent were wrongly suspected of shoplifting, with Black people especially likely to be suspected. Nonwhite people were more than twice as likely to experience abusive or rude behavior from a stranger in the past week, and 53 percent thought they were treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, as opposed to 29 percent of white people. Some 8.5 million nonwhite people live in Britain, out of a population of 66 million. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an investigation into widespread racial harassment on university campuses.
These recent revelations suggest Europe has a long way to go to address the issues of systemic racism in its midst, particularly as it related to discrimination against people of African descent.
The report is important, necessary and timely, because while Black people have been present in Europe for ages, and nearly two decades have passed since the EU enacted anti-discrimination laws, they face “widespread and entrenched prejudice and exclusion.” The report says the EU cannot tolerate this state of affairs, given the EU was founded on the principles of human rights, the rule of law, freedom, democracy, equality and minority rights. The EU intends to offer their findings so that its member states can formulate legal and policy responses to promote the full inclusion of Black people.
“The International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination emphasises in its preamble that racial barriers are ‘repugnant to the ideals of any human society’, and that ‘there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice’. Yet the survey results paint a dire picture of reality on the ground,” wrote FRA agency director Michael O’Flaherty, noting that racial discrimination and harassment are common.
Among the key findings of the survey, 30 percent of respondents experienced racial harassment in the five years before the report, most commonly nonverbal harassment followed by threatening comments and threats of violence. Further, 21 percent said they experienced such treatment in the 12 months before the survey was conducted. Results varied widely by country, ranging from 20 percent of respondents in Malta and 21 percent in the United Kingdom, to 63 percent of in Finland. Only 14 percent of victims reported the incidents to the authorities. Meanwhile, 5 percent were the victims of racial violence in the prior five years — 3 percent in the preceding 12 months — with 35 percent of victims reporting the incidents to the police. Black men (23 percent) were far less likely to report racial violence attacks than Black women (50 percent).
Unlawful and discriminatory police stops and racial profiling of Blacks are prevalent in Europe, with one quarter of respondents stopped by police in the previous five years, of which four in ten said was due to racial profiling. And 2 percent of people interviewed experienced a racist physical assault by law enforcement in the five years before the survey. Nearly two-thirds of police brutality victims failed to report the violence because of a fear or mistrust of the police (28 percent) or because they did not think doing so would make a difference (34 percent).
People of African descent face widespread racial discrimination in all facets of daily life, including barriers to inclusion in employment and housing, the EU survey concluded. For example, 39 percent of the Black people surveyed reported experiencing racial discrimination in the previous five years, one quarter in the past year. A quarter of black people experienced racial discrimination at work or during their job search, and 14 percent were denied rental housing from a landlord.
Particularly unsettling to the EU agency producing the report is that younger Black people are experiencing more discrimination and exclusion than older generations. Also providing context to the economic implications of racism is the fact that 55 percent of the respondents live below the poverty level.
Nearly 50 million members of racial and ethnic minority groups live in the European Union, amounting to 10 percent of the population of the bloc. However, 1 percent of the staff in EU institutions are non-white, and some European nations do not collect data on race. Over the past decade, Europe’s African population rose dramatically, with 1 million migrants from sub-Saharan Africa arriving in Europe between 2010 and 2017. An estimated 7 million people of African descent lived in Europe as of 2011. This comes as many European nations have witnessed a rise in popularity of right-wing, nationalist political parties, including groups with Nazi ties and sentiments, who are united in their anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia and opposition to the EU. The reemergence of fascist and authoritarian sentiments, racist attacks and Nazi salutes in Europe is a concern.
The EU survey comes as a survey from The Guardian sheds light on racial bias in Britain. The poll of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found that 43 percent were overlooked for a promotion in the past five years and 38 percent were wrongly suspected of shoplifting, with Black people especially likely to be suspected. Nonwhite people were more than twice as likely to experience abusive or rude behavior from a stranger in the past week, and 53 percent thought they were treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, as opposed to 29 percent of white people. Some 8.5 million nonwhite people live in Britain, out of a population of 66 million. The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission has launched an investigation into widespread racial harassment on university campuses.
These recent revelations suggest Europe has a long way to go to address the issues of systemic racism in its midst, particularly as it related to discrimination against people of African descent.
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