Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalUnderstanding the causes of Colombia’s conflict: political exclusion
Understanding the causes of Colombia’s conflict: political exclusion
Jan 5, 2015 posted by Joel Gillin
With Colombia’s peace talks back on track, the country is looking at what has caused the 50 years of violence that according to the government has left almost a million dead. One of the recognized causes is a political exclusion that is older than the country itself.
According to Father Fernan Gonzalez, a well-known academic and conflict analyst, “Colombian society has not established a consensus on the nature and origins of the armed conflict.”
Many believe that the conflict with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC), along with the handful of other armed leftist insurgencies that have existed throughout the last 50 years, can be attributed to the individual choices and actions of these groups seeking wealth and power.
Most historians and conflict analysts, however, would posit that there exist structural factors – for complex historical reasons – that have created an environment which is conducive to violence and armed conflict.
More:
http://colombiareports.co/understanding-causes-colombias-conflict-political-exclusion/
The “Selfless Friendship” of Cuba’s Solidarity Groups
January 05, 2015
The Release of the Cuban Five
The “Selfless Friendship” of Cuba’s Solidarity Groups
by STEPHEN KIMBER
In the sweet afterglow of last month’s historic rapprochement between the United States and Cuba, much has been made of the pivotal roles played by Pope Francis, the Canadian government, New York Times editorialists, various American politicians and their aides, even “sperm diplomacy.”
All that is true, of course, but there are many other narratives in this larger tale too, perhaps none more compelling than the against-all-odds, never-say-never global campaign to “free the Cuban Five.” For a decade and a half, small, dedicated, disparate, sometimes competing groups of political activists in the United States and around the world have demonstrated, lobbied, lettered, conferenced, tribunaled, cajoled and hectored in a seemingly quixotic quest to win the release of five imprisoned Cuban men.
The Five were members of a Cuban intelligence network dispatched to South Florida in the 1990s to infiltrate and report back to Havana on Miami exile groups that were plotting — and carrying out — deadly terrorist attacks against their homeland. In June 1998, Cuban State Security shared the fruits of its intelligence on some of those plots — including one to blow up an airplane filled with beach-bound tourists — with American authorities. Three months later, the FBI swooped in and arrested… not the terrorists but the Cuban agents. Charged in hostile-to-all-things-Castro Miami and tried against the backdrop of an emotional child custody tug-of-war between Havana and Miami over the fate of rescued rafter child Elian Gonzàlez, the Five were summarily convicted and sentenced to unconscionably long terms in American prisons. The network’s leader, Gerardo Hernandez, received a double-life-plus-15-year sentence.
For the Cuban government, winning the release of the three members of the Five still in American prisons — each of them a certifiable, first-name-basis hero at home — was the sine qua non for everything else that happened Dec. 17: freeing American USAID contractor Alan Gross, handing over a Cuban national convicted of spying for the United States, agreeing to re-establish diplomatic relations with Washington and all the possibilities and perils that will inevitably flow from that…
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/05/the-selfless-friendship-of-cubas-solidarity-groups/
Is Fusion Doing The U.S. Government’s Bidding On Cuba?
January 05, 2015
The Groundwork for Future Intervention
Is Fusion Doing The U.S. Government’s Bidding On Cuba?
by MATT PEPPE
Journalist Jorge Ramos recently leveled some serious accusations against former Cuban President Fidel Castro, accusing him of amassing a fortune stolen from Cuban taxpayers and engaging in widespread drug trafficking. Ramos, a hugely popular news personality on the Spanish language network Univision and new sister cable network Fusion, eagerly parrots the hearsay of a former Castro bodyguard who is – coincidentally – promoting a new book. With the U.S. government still bent on regime change in Cuba despite the recent announcement of the normalization of relations between the two countries, they must be pleased. The narrative Ramos creates could help lay the groundwork for future U.S. intervention in Cuba, or at least help to discredit a revolutionary hero who remains staunchly opposed to U.S. foreign policy and imperialism.
The source for Ramos’s Dec. 23, 2014 column is Reinaldo Sánchez, who allegedly served for 17 years as Castro’s bodyguard from 1977-1994. According to Ramos, Sánchez arrived in the United States in 2008 but had not gone public with his accusations until he released his book “Fidel Castro’s Hidden Life.” One could speculate that without guaranteed housing, food allowance, and health care, as Sánchez enjoyed while he was in Cuba, he may have been under financial pressure once in the States. Cuban dissident Yoani Sánchez (no relation) was under similar pressure while living abroad in Switzerland in 2004. Her inability to find work and earn a living forced her to return home in desperation, crying as she begged Cuban immigration officials to let her back into the country.
If Castro’s former bodyguard did indeed find himself in need of money in his new country with its large, rabid anti-Castro exile population, a tell-all story would be an easy way to raise cash. If you are going to write a book, you need some juicy details. No publisher would be very interested in a book about Castro immersed in reading at his desk or penning his Reflections columns. If Sánchez’s motivation was truly to expose the truth, why not speak with journalists and go public right away?
Whatever his motivations, one should be skeptical about the word of one person who may have political and financial motivations telling tales without any corroborating evidence or documentation. Ramos decides not to be. Instead takes everything Sánchez says at face value. He fails to even mention the possibility that one man’s unsubstantiated word might be exaggerated or outright false.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/05/is-fusion-doing-the-u-s-governments-bidding-on-cuba/
Living the high life: Stone tools reveal presence of Ice Age settlement in the Peruvian Andes
Living the high life: Stone tools reveal presence of Ice Age settlement in the Peruvian AndesStone tools reveal presence of Ice Age settlement in the Peruvian Andes
By Amina Khan
Los Angeles Times
on January 4, 2015 - 12:01 AM
Archaeologists say they’ve found the highest-known remains of Ice Age human settlements in the southern Peruvian Andes, dated to more than 12,000 years old.
The two sites, described in the journal Science, sit higher than 4,000 meters above sea level and indicate that humans may have adapted to the extremely harsh climate far sooner than many researchers had expected.
“These sites extend the residence time of humans above 4,000 (meters above sea level) by nearly a millennium,” the study authors wrote, “implying more moderate late-glacial Andean environments and greater physiological capabilities for Pleistocene humans than previously assumed.”
The two sites in the Pucuncho Basin lie nearly 3,000 feet above other settlements from around the same time period. One, called Pucuncho, is a workshop site filled with 260 formal tools such as stone scrapers and projectile points; it sits 14,288 feet above sea level and has been dated to 12,800 to 11,500 years ago. The second, Cuncaicha, hosts a rock shelter sitting 14,698 feet above sea level that dates back to 12,400 years and a workshop site 14,583 feet above sea level. The shelter is filled with soot-marked ceilings from campfires, rock art and sediments on the ground that include charred plant remains.
More:
http://www.buffalonews.com/opinion/nature-science/living-the-high-life-stone-tools-reveal-presence-of-ice-age-settlement-in-the-peruvian-andes-20150104
Victims of Colombia's civil conflict exceeds 7 million: Media yawns
Victims of Colombia's civil conflict exceeds 7 million: Media yawns
By Daniel Kovalik, teleSUR
teleSUR
Tuesday, Dec 2, 2014
A tragic milestone went virtually unreported in the English-speaking press last week, as Colombia's Victims Unit released its report indicating that the number of victims of Colombia's civil war has now surpassed 7 million. This number includes those who have been killed, disappeared or displaced since 1956. For a country of under 50 million citizens, these numbers are staggering, and certainly newsworthy, but apparently not for our mainstream media.
Of course, the violence and human rights abuses in Colombia have constituted inconvenient truths for the Western media as the U.S. has been a major sponsor of the violence and abuses in that country.
Indeed, a notable fact in the Victims Unit report is that "that the majority of victimization occurred after 2000, peaking in 2002 at 744,799 victims." It is not coincidental that "Plan Colombia," or "Plan Washington" as many Colombians have called it, was inaugurated by President Bill Clinton in 2000, thus escalating the conflict to new heights and new levels of barbarity. Plan Colombia is the plan pursuant to which the U.S. has given Colombia over $8 billion of mostly military and police assistance.
As Amnesty International has explained, these monies have only fueled the human rights crisis in Colombia:
Amnesty International USA has been calling for a complete cut off of US military aid to Colombia for over a decade due to the continued collaboration between the Colombian Armed Forces and their paramilitary allies as well the failure of the Colombian government to improve human rights conditions.
More:
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_68386.shtml
Rapprochement Between the United States and Cuba and Sanctions Against Venezuela
Weekend Edition January 2-4, 2015
A Consistent Imperial Strategy
Rapprochement Between the United States and Cuba and Sanctions Against Venezuela
by WILLIAM CAMACARO and FREDERICK B. MILLS
In a historic address on December 17, 2014 on “Cuba policy changes” President Barack Obama declared, “our shift in policy towards Cuba comes at a moment of renewed leadership in the Americas.” This “renewed leadership,” in our view, seeks to gradually undermine socialism in Cuba, check waning U.S. influence in the region, and inhibit a growing continental Bolivarian movement towards Latin American liberation, integration, and sovereignty. To be sure, normalization of relations with Cuba and the release of Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero were long overdue, and the reunification of Alan Gross with his family was an important and welcome gesture. The rapprochement between the United States and Cuba and the simultaneous imposition of a new round of sanctions by the U.S. against Venezuela, however, do not signal a change in overall U.S. strategy but only a change in tactics. As President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro remarked in a letter to President Raul Castro “there is still a long road to travel in order to arrive at the point that Washington recognizes we are no longer its back yard…” (December 20, 2014).
From Embargo to Deployment of U.S. Soft Power in Cuba
The Obama gambit arguably seeks to move Cuba as far as possible towards market oriented economic reforms, help build the political community of dissidents on the island, and improve U.S. standing in the region, and indeed in the world. In a Miami Herald op-ed piece (December 22, 2014), John Kerry (Secretary of State), Penny Pritzker (Secretary of Commerce) and Jacob J. Lew (Treasury Secretary) wrote that normalization of relations between the U.S. and Cuba will “increase the ability of Americans to provide business training and other support for Cuba’s nascent private sector” and that this will “put American businesses on a more equal footing.” Presumably the op-ed is referring to “equal footing” with other nations that have been doing business for years with Cuba despite the embargo. The essay also indicates that the U.S. will continue its “strong support for improved human-rights conditions and democratic reforms in Cuba” by “empowering civil society and supporting the freedom of individuals to exercise their freedoms of speech and assembly.” Such a version of “empowering civil society” is probably consistent with decades of U.S. clandestine attempts to subvert the Cuban government, documented by Jon Elliston in Psy War on Cuba: The declassified history of U.S. anti-Castro propaganda (Ocean Press: 1999). It is also in line with more recent efforts, through USAID funded social media (phony Cuban Twitter) and a four year project to promote “Cuban rap music” both of which ended in 2012, designed to build dissident movements inside Cuba. In December 2014, Matt Herrick, spokesman for USAID, defended the latter unsuccessful covert program saying, “It seemed like a good idea to support civil society” and that “it’s not something we are embarrassed about in any way.” Moreover, a fact sheet on normalization published by the U.S. Department of State mentions that funding for “democracy programming” will continue and that “our efforts are aimed at promoting the independence of the Cuban people so they do not need to rely on the Cuban state” (December 17, 2014). The Cuban government, though, has a different take on the meaning of “independence of the Cuban people.” They emphasize “sovereign equality,” “national independence,” and “self determination.” In an address on normalization, Raul Castro insisted on maintaining Cuban sovereignty and stated “we have embarked on the task of updating our economic model in order to build a prosperous and sustainable Socialism” (December 17, 2014). Obviously the ideological differences between Washington and Havana will shape the course of economic and political engagement between these two nations in the months and years ahead.
Rapprochement Between the U.S. and U.S. Isolation in Latin America
Through normalization of relations with Cuba, the U.S. also seeks to end its increasing isolation in the region. Secretary of State John Kerry, in his Announcement of Cuba Policy Changes, remarked that “not only has this policy [embargo] failed to advance America’s goals, it has actually isolated the United States instead of isolating Cuba” (December 17, 2014). In October 2014, the United Nations General Assembly voted against the U.S. Cuba embargo for the 23rd year in a row, with only the U.S. and Israel voting in favor. The inclusion of Cuba in the political and, to a certain degree, economic life of Latin America, has also been part of a larger expression of Latin American solidarity that clearly repudiates regional subordination to Washington. Since the sixth Summit of the Americas in Cartagena (April 2012), the U.S. has been on very clear notice by the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) that there will be no seventh Summit of the Americas in Panama in April without Cuba, a condition to which Washington has ceded.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/02/approchement-between-the-united-states-and-cuba-and-sanctions-against-venezuela/
In Miami, deportation fears rise as U.S. revives relations with Havana
In Miami, deportation fears rise as U.S. revives relations with Havana
By Nora Gámez Torres and Alfonso Chardy -
achardy@elnuevoherald.com
01/03/2015 6:50 PM
| Updated: 01/03/2015 7:05 PM
President Barack Obama’s order to normalize relations with Cuba has spread fear through the ranks of thousands of Cuban exiles facing deportation to the island.
Many of those who have never become U.S. citizens now believe their removal, a remote possibility before, may now be imminent. Immigration authorities say there are 34,525 Cubans with final orders of deportation and an additional 2,264 with pending removal cases in immigration court. Under U.S. immigration law, foreign nationals can be deported if they have a final order of deportation, meaning the order has withstood appeals and other legal challenges. Foreigners with pending cases in immigration court generally cannot be deported.
While U.S. officials say they have not changed policies barring deportation of most Cubans to the island, those assurances are small comfort for the people in the midst of proceedings or who have final orders of expulsion.
“I became worried the day they ordered me deported,” said Luis, a 73-year-old exile who in the 1960s participated in covert U.S. operations against the Fidel Castro regime. “But now, when the president in the White House wants relations with Cuba, my worries are much deeper.”
The majority of the 34,525 Cubans with final deportation orders received them after having been convicted for a serious crime. Luis spent two years in prison for a drug-related conviction in the 1980s.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/cuba/article5388627.html#storylink=cpy
It’s time to change our warped view of Cuba: Guest commentary
It’s time to change our warped view of Cuba: Guest commentary
By Rachel Bruhnke
Posted: 01/02/15, 9:16 AM PST |
I welcome the apparent willingness of the U.S. government to thaw its relationship with Cuba, and I applaud the exchange of prisoners between our countries. However, I have been consistently disappointed and frustrated by reporting about Cuba in the U.S. press. There has always been a purely negative view of the country, and a complete blackout, in fact, on its impressive, very human-centered, development policies. The Cuban people have done much to develop their country along equitable, progressive lines that American visitors find thought-provoking, and at times, heart-wrenching in their prioritization of the most vulnerable segments of society.
I have taken more than 300 Americans to Cuba, as an academic researcher and later as Eco-Cuba coordinator for the U.S.-based human rights organization Global Exchange. Not one of our American participants found the country they thought they would. It is not full of oppressed, downtrodden, emaciated people to be pitied. On the contrary, Cubans are extremely proud of their particular model of development that for one has brought a single payer, cradle-to-grave, health care system to the island — to stay. Mothers and babies are cared for during pregnancy and afterwards. Children grow up in safe, nonviolent communities. Adults, young and old, are part of an economy whose purpose, although admittedly deficient, is to employ all people in meaningful, non-exploitative work. Cuba is at war with no one.
Cubans are also extremely proud of their educational achievements. They are coming on the third generation in their country to be educated, free of charge, in an internationally recognized school system where truly, no child is left behind. There are no “urban slum,” violence-ridden schools. There are no forgotten rural villages in Cuba, filled sadly with illiterate children with no hope for the future. Not one. They are so dedicated to education, in fact, that they have disseminated their literacy project, Yo Si Puedo, to dozens of countries around the world. Several of these countries are now approaching full literacy because of that collaboration.
To undo 55 years of a virtual blackout in the U.S. press about Cuba is far too great a task for a newspaper commentary. Americans themselves need to take charge of the information they are receiving on this much-maligned country, a country that is actually seen as heroic and beloved by much of the world. Who knew? Maybe we weren’t ready during the Cold War. Maybe things weren’t bad enough in the United States to think outside the box on how to solve our problems. Unfortunately, however, our problems may be bad enough now.
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/opinion/20150102/its-time-to-change-our-warped-view-of-cuba-guest-commentary
Ailing Guatemalan ex-dictator requests retrial absence (Genocide)
Ailing Guatemalan ex-dictator requests retrial absence
AFP
January 3, 2015, 5:56 am
Guatemala City (AFP) - Lawyers for Guatemalan ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt said Friday he is too sick to attend court next week, when he faces a retrial for genocide over the killings of indigenous people in the 1980s.
"The health condition of General Rios (Montt) has been deteriorating during the past year and doctors are watching him very closely to see if he's in good enough shape to attend on Monday," Luis Rosales, a lawyer for Rios Montt, told AFP.
The lawyer had asked the court if Rios Montt could be absent. He said the 88-year-old suffers from back problems due to his advanced age, as well as heart and eye issues that would worsen during a lengthy trial.
Rios Montt "is being treated with absolute rest, and doctors say he is only allowed to move to go to the bathroom, nothing else," Rosales said, noting that the military continues to keep his client under house arrest in an upscale part of the capital.
More:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/world/a/25893776/
Suicides Spread Through a Brazilian Tribe
Suicides Spread Through a Brazilian Tribe
By CHARLES LYONS
JAN. 2, 2015
FRIENDS and family gathered around the limp body of a 15-year-old boy laid out on a bed in a thatched hut near the Brazilian town of Iguatemi, close to the border with Paraguay. A shaman shook a small wooden rattle while chanting and dancing — final rites for yet another victim of a suicide epidemic that has plagued the Guaraní Indians of the western Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
The boy, Dedson Garcete, had hanged himself — one of 36 suicides among tribe members in 2014 through September, and one of about 500 among the tribe of 45,000 since 2004, according to Zelik Trajber, a pediatrician with the special secretariat for indigenous health within the Ministry of Health in Mato Grosso do Sul.
Indigenous peoples suffer the greatest suicide risk among cultural or ethnic groups worldwide. Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men ages 25 to 29 have a suicide rate four times higher than the general population in that same age group in Australia, according to the country’s Department of Health.
In the United States, suicide is the second leading cause of death, behind accidents, for American Indian and Alaska Native men ages 15 to 34, and is two and a half times higher than the national average for that age group, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/opinion/sunday/suicides-spread-through-a-brazilian-tribe.html?_r=0
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