Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalStatement of concern regarding the beating of the director of Casa Alianza, Honduras
Statement of concern regarding the beating of the director of Casa Alianza, Honduras
16 May 2014
We express our deep concern regarding the brutal beating of José Guadalupe Ruela García, the director of Casa Alianza of Honduras, allegedly by members of the Honduran Military Police. According to the Coalition for the Rights of Children, in which Casa Alianza participates, on May 8th in Tegucigalpa, Mr. Ruela was beaten by members of the Military Police, detained and then released the next day.
Casa Alianza is a well-known humanitarian organization that advocates for homeless children in Central America and Mexico. The latest monthly report by Casa Alianza’s Honduras office, which Mr. Ruelas presented on April 23, noted that in the first three months of the new government’s tenure, 270 children and young people under 23 in the country have suffered violent deaths.
We urge the Honduran authorities to conduct a prompt, full and effective investigation of these events and to ensure the safety of Mr. Ruela.
We express our solidarity with Casa Alianza and urge that embassies and other members of the international community do the same.
—
Alliance of Baptists
American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)
American Friends Service Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America (CRLN)
Church World Service
Colombia Human Rights Committee
Conference of Major Superiors of Men
Friendship Office of the Americas
International Labor Rights Forum
Latin America Working Group (LAWG)
Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Sisters of Mercy of the Americas - Institute Justice Team
Solidarity Center United Church of Christ, Justice and Witness Ministries
Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)
Witness for Peace
http://www.wola.org/news/statement_of_concern_regarding_the_beating_of_the_director_of_casa_alianza_honduras
The best of Nature's disssssguises you'll ever see: The caterpillar that looks and even acts like a
The best of Nature's disssssguises you'll ever see: The caterpillar that looks and even acts like a snake to scare off predators
Green caterpillar expands certain parts of its body so it looks like a snake
Hemeroplanes species behaves like the reptile in its larvae stage by striking harmlessly at predators so it does not get eaten
A biologist at the University of Pennsylvania photographed the unusual insect while working in the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste, Costa Rica
By Sarah Griffiths
Published: 05:43 EST, 28 May 2014 | Updated: 10:40 EST, 28 May 2014
Some predatory spiders pose as ladybirds and even tree stumps to look as unthreatening as possible.But this caterpillar takes the opposite approach by masquerading as a snake in an attempt to scare away predators.
The vivid green 'snake caterpillar' creates the illusion of looking like a dangerous reptile by retracting its legs and expanding the end of its body, which have markings that look like eyes.
Professor Daniel Janzen captured the images as part of his work cataloguing caterpillars and says it is part of the hemeroplanes species.
As well as looking like a snake, the cunning caterpillar even behaves like one.
When in a larval state, before transforming into a moth, the creature can strike in defence if it is approached – even though it doesn't have a snake’s capability of administering a bite.
More:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2641537/The-best-disssssguise-Caterpillar-looks-acts-like-snake-scare-predators.html#ixzz331vjfRZy
Plan Colombia’s Genocidal Legacy
May 27, 2014
Extinction Forecast for Indigenous Colombians
Plan Colombia’s Genocidal Legacy
by NICK ALEXANDROV
Extinction may well be the shared fate awaiting some 40 Colombian indigenous groups, UN official Todd Howland announced last month. Howland’s assessment underlined the risks mining operations pose to these communities, and echoes the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia’s finding, presented last year, that 66 of the country’s 102 indigenous communities could soon vanish—“victims of a genocide that is forcing cultural and physical extermination.” The government, for its part, considers mining “one of five ‘engines’ of the Colombian economy,” the U.S. Office on Colombia notes, adding that, in “the last twelve years, over 1.5 million hectares of Colombian land have been sold off to large-scale mining corporations for exploration and exploitation of Colombia’s extensive mineral deposits [.]”
These land sales mark one success of former President Álvaro Uribe’s (2002-2010) “Democratic Security and Defense Policy,” rolled out in 2003, and geared towards “defending Colombia’s sovereignty, the integrity of the territory and the constitutional order,” the government claimed. The state’s expanded presence, consolidation of territorial control, and subsequent auctioning of acquired regions seem to be the real legacies of the Plan Colombia era, too often discussed in “counterdrug” terms, and thus dismissed as a failure. A 2008 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) document, for example, pointed out that “coca cultivation and cocaine production levels [had] increased by about 15 and 4 percent, respectively” since the Plan’s 1999 launch, while Amnesty International mentions that “US policy has failed to reduce availability or use of cocaine in the US,” one indication that “Plan Colombia is a failure in every respect [.]”
Perhaps, but does Washington even want to roll back drug smuggling? “The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich ‘consuming’ countries,” Ed Vulliamy wrote in the Guardian two years ago, summarizing two Colombian academics’ conclusions. Alejandro Gaviria and Daniel Mejía’s research determined that “a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks,” in Europe and the U.S. How many bankers has the “drug war” put in jail? Or would Washington undercut an ally’s source of funds? The Colombian paramilitaries, for example, function as the army’s unofficial “Sixth Division,” according to Human Rights Watch. And Carlos Castaño, the paramilitaries’ former leader, admitted in March 2000 that some 70% of their funding came from drug trafficking, an assessment in line with U.S. intelligence estimates, which “have consistently reported over a number of years that the paramilitaries are far more heavily involved than the FARC [guerrillas] in drug cultivation, refinement and transshipment to the US,” International Security expert Doug Stokes writes.
But while “counterdrug” efforts have been predictable failures, U.S.-supported Colombia policy has succeeded on other fronts. The Colombian Ministry of National Defense, for instance, repeatedly stressed in its progress reports a decade ago that the state was aiming to increase its territorial control, and it appears to have achieved this goal. In 1998, “the FARC controlled or operated freely in 40-60 percent of Colombian territory,” María Clemencia Ramírez Lemus, Kimberly Stanton and John Walsh write in their chapter in Drugs and Democracy in Latin America. The GAO later found that, by 2003, the Colombian government had gained control of 70 percent of the nation’s territory, and “was in full or partial control of about 90 percent of the country in 2007,” its extended reach coinciding with the killing of tens of thousands, the displacement of millions—and heightened investor confidence. “Capital is flowing back into Colombia,” a 2012 International Business Publications book on Colombia’s mining sector noted, “compared to a high rate of capital flight at the start of Plan Colombia.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/27/plan-colombias-genocidal-legacy/
Trojan Horse: The National Endowment for Democracy
Trojan Horse:
The National Endowment for Democracy
By William Blum
How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate—the Church committee of the Senate, the Pike committee of the House, and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.
Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name—The National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.
It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations, and of cynicism.
~snip~
The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.
In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of numerous foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, faxes, copiers, automobiles, and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED typically refers to the media it supports as "independent" despite the fact that these media are on the US payroll.
More:
http://www.iefd.org/articles/trojan_horse.php
The Stealth Destabilizer: The National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
Weekend Edition Feb 28-Mar 02, 2014
The Stealth Destabilizer
The National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela
by KIM SCIPES
As protests have been taking place in Venezuela the last couple of weeks, it is always good to check on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Empire’s “stealth” destabilizer. What has the NED been up to in Venezuela?
Before going into details, it is important to note what NED is and is not. First of all, it has NOTHING to do with the democracy we are taught in civics classes, concerning one person-one vote, with everyone affected having a say in the decision, etc. (This is commonly known as “popular” or grassroots democracy.) The NED opposes this kind of democracy.
The NED promotes top-down, elite, constrained (or “polyarchal”) democracy. This is the democracy where the elites get to decide the candidates or questions suitable to go before the people—and always limiting the choices to what the elites are comfortable with. Then, once the elites have made their decision, THEN the people are presented with the “choice” that the elites approve. And then NED prattles on with its nonsense about how it is “promoting democracy around the world.”This is one of the most cynical uses of democracy there is. It’s notable even in what my friend Dave Lippmann calls “Washington Deceit.”
The other thing to note about NED is that it is NOT independent as it claims, ad nauseum. It was created by the US Congress, signed into US law by President Ronald Reagan (that staunch defender of democracy), and it operates from funds provided annually by the US Government.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/28/the-national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela/
"Here the People Govern': Autonomy and Resistance in San Francisco Opalaca, Honduras
"Here the People Govern': Autonomy and Resistance in San Francisco Opalaca, Honduras
Written by Brigitte Gynther
Sunday, 25 May 2014 17:34
Every day and night for four consecutive months, the Lenca people of San Francisco Opalaca have been maintaining a 24-hour blockade and vigil at the entrance to their Mayor’s office, thus preventing the ruling party-imposed candidate from taking office. The Honduran government claims National Party candidate Socorro Sanchez won the Mayoral race in Opalaca during last November’s elections. However, the people of Opalaca know otherwise. The fraud that occurred in San Francisco Opalaca – a remote Indigenous Lenca municipality in the Honduran state of Intibuca – is a microcosm of the larger electoral fraud that many people believe occurred all across the country in November's election as the ruling National Party consolidated power and prevented the widely popular LIBRE party from winning the presidency.
In San Francisco Opalaca, Socorro Sanchez came to power in the widely boycotted elections following the 2009 military coup in Honduras. For the 2013 elections, he used his position to prepare a system of fraud to ensure he stayed in power. Residents of Opalaca report that people from La Esperanza, Azacualpa, Otoro, and other places were registered to vote in Opalaca ahead of the elections. Not only were these National Party loyalists from other places reportedly registered to vote in Opalaca, but they were also reportedly brought in to work the voting stations as table representatives. Community leaders contend that the National Party purchased 32 voting table credentials from the small political parties, as they in other voting stations across the country, stacking the table workers against the new LIBRE party when it came time to count the votes. Socorro Sanchez also bought votes, pressuring residents and offering money. If you were extremely poor, he reportedly offered 500 Lempiras; if you were a little better off the offer was 1,000 to 1,500 Lempiras. One man recalls how his brother had never supported the National Party before, but after being constantly pressured by the Mayor, he felt he had no other choice than to join the party.
Despite all of the manipulations to rig the elections, the people of San Francisco Opalaca say they have had enough of Socorro Sanchez’s corruption and alliances with corporations that want to privatize Opalaca’s resources, not to mention that he didn’t get enough votes to win. Even with the National Party apparently busing in voters from other places, buying credentials to manipulate the vote counting, and offering money, the outcome was a tie between Sanchez and Entimo Vasquez, a long-time community leader and the candidate for the new LIBRE political party. So what the National Party did to fix that problem, according to community leaders, was simply add eight more votes for Socorro to one of the tally sheets. In the community of El Naranjo, the table workers counted 80 votes each for Sanchez and Vasquez, but recorded 88 votes for Sanchez on the tally sheet that was transmitted to the Electoral Tribunal. This tally sheet was posted by the Electoral Tribunal and Socorro was declared the winner of the Municipality by eight votes.
But the people of Opalaca knew what happened; those who witnessed the vote count in El Naranjo knew the tally sheet was not correct and many voters had noticed people they had never seen before voting in their small communities. They also knew that these people were not residents of Opalaca. Vasquez and his supporters tried to challenge the results, but given that the National Party had carefully consolidated control of the Electoral Tribunal, Supreme Court, and Attorney General’s office before the elections, that led nowhere.
So on January 25, 2014 when Socorro Sanchez was to be sworn in as Mayor, person after person showed up very early at the Mayor’s office. Soon hundreds gathered and they blocked the door and the entire front of the building. They would not let Socorro be sworn in as their Mayor. They held an Assembly and declared that the Honduran government cannot impose a Mayor on them. They stayed there all day. All night. The next day. And the next. And they haven’t left.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/honduras-archives-46/4865--qhere-the-people-govern-autonomy-and-resistance-in-san-francisco-opalaca-honduras
Colombian Army Escalates Attack on Communities near Tolemaida Military Base
Colombian Army Escalates Attack on Communities near Tolemaida Military Base
Luke Finn
Red Hot Burning Peace
May 14, 2014
Colombian soldiers uproot fruit trees (Peace Presence)
The communities of Yucala, Mesa Bajo, and Naranjala are facing a slow and deliberate process of displacement by a key army base used by the U.S. military in Colombia.
Seven military bases in Colombia fell under the U.S.-Colombia Defense Cooperation Agreement, which while never implemented, would have formalized an already existing relationship of U.S. Military access to Colombian bases. And one of those is Tolemaida, Cundinamarca. It was originally founded in 1954 by Colombia’s only ever dictator, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (though, of course, Colombia’s list of authoritarian rulers is much longer), and modeled on Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the School of the Americas (now WHINSEC), the infamous training ground for human rights abusers throughout the hemisphere. Like the School of the Americas, Tolemaida was to become primarily a center for training, here in anti-guerrilla (and more recently counter-insurgency) warfare, specifically through its lauded “Curso de Lanceros” course run by U.S. officers and taken by amongst others the armies of the United States, France, and Panama, as well as Colombians. Tolemaida has a permanent presence of U.S. soldiers.
The Tolemaida base is located on a plateau, overlooking the river Sumapaz, an area that amongst other things contains the largest páramo ecosystem in the world, noted even within Colombia for its bio-diversity. Prior to 1954, a community on the plateau, named their settlement “El Mirador,” or “La Mesa.” One man I met, who still remembered those days, told me proudly that they had both a butcher and a soccer field. But then came La Violencia and the new military base, and the communites moved further down the hillside to the veredas of Yucala, Naranjala, and Mesa Bajo, clearing the land and planting their crops.
The community has been in a state of near constant harassment ever since the base’s construction, and even more so as the base looks to expand. For example, back in the 1980’s the military cut electricity to the community. The 150 campesino families affected today, experience three main forms of harassment as part of the Colombian Army’s petty and vindictive campaign.
More:
https://nacla.org/blog/2014/5/14/colombian-army-escalates-attack-communities-near-tolemaida-military-base
US Corporation Evicts Guatemalan Blockade Against Gold Mine
US Corporation Evicts Guatemalan Blockade Against Gold Mine
By Kelsey-Alford-Jones, Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA
Popular Resistance
Sunday, May 25, 2014
[font size=1]
Local leader Yolanda Oquelí, who suffered an assassination attempt on June 2012 due to
her involvement, warns the Guatemalan government will be held responsible for any
blood spilled. [/font]
Yesterday, after more than two years of non-violent resistance against a gold mine, the communities in resistance of “la Puya” were evicted from their blockade at the entrance to the mine.
Police arrived early in the morning to escort mining company trucks and heavy machinery. By the afternoon, hundreds of police – including many in full riot gear – moved in on the protesters with tear gas and flash bombs, beating those who refused to move. Women formed the front lines of resistance. Over twenty people were injured.
Rob — the Director of our Guatemala office — was on the scene, documenting the eviction and denouncing acts of violence. His updates provided timely information that we used to advocate on behalf of the communities. Many of you probably saw the photos he posted to Facebook throughout the day. Photographer James Rodriguez has also posted a moving photoblog (See below).
~snip~
After two years and two months of peacefully blocking the entrance to U.S.-based Kappes, Cassiday & Associates (KCA) El Tambor gold mine, local residents of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc were violently evicted by Guatemalan Police forces in order to introduce heavy machinery inside the industrial site. Led by the local women, members of the La Puya resistance prayed and sang until they were faced with tear gas. Numerous locals were injured and detained.
http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_66644.shtml
They Looked Like Birds, But What They Saw Up Close Surprised Them
05/24/2014
They Looked Like Birds, But What They Saw Up Close Surprised Them
From a helicopter, they look like birds flying over the water, but upon closer inspection, The National Geographic crew realized they were filming the largest school of mobular rays ever caught on camera. They were spotted off the coast of Baja California in the Sea of Cortez, and will appear on their show Untamed Americas. Continue reading for the unbelievable video.
More:
http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/they-looked-like-birds-but-what-they-saw-up-close-surprised-them
U.S.-Mexico border wreaks havoc on lives of an indigenous desert tribe
U.S.-Mexico border wreaks havoc on lives of an indigenous desert tribe
John Moore / Getty Images
If you are Tohono O’odham and live on the Mexican side, it’s a second-class life
May 25, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Kate Kilpatrick
SAN MANUEL, Mexico — Jesús Manuel Casares Figueroa needs a catheter or he will die. His bloated chest pressed against his blue jacket as he sat in a wheelchair in front of his uncle’s modest concrete-block home, one of a handful in this traditional village of the O’odham in the Sonoran desert. His mother touched a gold-colored earring that dangled from Jesús Manuel’s left ear. Her son was born with spina bifida, she explained, and a chronic kidney infection has complicated his condition.
In February, the doctor said Jesús Manuel urgently needed the operation. His family didn’t have the money then, and they don’t have it now.
So in a few hours mother and son will go door to door asking for donations in the neighboring O’odham village, about 60 miles south of Nogales.
For thousands of years, the Tohono O’odham (meaning “Desert People”) inhabited what is today southern Arizona and the northern state of Sonora in Mexico. But the O’odham were there long before either Mexico or the U.S. existed as nations. “We’ve always been here,” said Amy Juan, 28, a young activist on the reservation. “Nobody can argue that we weren’t here first.”
More:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/25/us-mexico-borderwreakshavocwithlivesofanindigenousdesertpeople.html
Profile Information
Member since: 2002Number of posts: 160,530