23 December 20
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23 December 20
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Juan Cole | Trump Aping Mideast Tinpot Dictators and Raving About Declaring Martial Law
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
Cole writes: "With Trump raving in White House meetings, prompted by the equally certifiable Michael Flynn, about declaring martial law, it sets an old Middle East hand like me thinking."
In my part of the world, leaders declare martial law or a “state of emergency” at the drop of a helmet. And once they declare it, it often sticks around forever.
Syria has been under a “state of emergency” or martial law off and on since its first modern military coup d’etat in 1949. The country became independent of France in 1946 and had an elected government with president and parliament by 1948. But in March of 1949 the CIA backed a coup by Gen. Husni Zaim. Then from late 1948 until late 1951, civilian government returned, with a new constitution and parliament. Col. Adib Shishakli made another coup. He was overthrown by another general in February 1954. But then that general went back to the constitution and allowed a parliament to be elected. By 1957 martial law was lifted briefly.
I can’t go through all the coups and declarations of martial law in modern Syria. Suffice it to say that there were more, including in 1963. But that one stuck. The 1963 declaration of martial law just stayed in force, even after the 1970 coup that brought Hafez al-Assad to power in 1971. His son Bashar al-Assad succeeded him, and lifted martial law in 2011 in hopes of tamping down the Arab Spring. But then the civil war broke out that summer. I don’t know if al-Assad bothered to re-invoke martial law or a state of emergency, but it is the de facto state of affairs, after coming up on 10 years of civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced half the country.
Trump wants desperately to be like a Syrian dictator.
I guess it is a good thing for us that the CIA apparently doesn’t much like Trump.
The Turkish military used to make a coup roughly every ten years. They would declare martial law until their membership in NATO made them go back to the barracks and bring back the civilian politicians. But after martial law in 1978-1983, the military government announced a state of emergency that lasted until 2002. In the late 1990s, the military made a “soft coup.” After the 2016 failed coup, President Tayyip Erdogan has been acting as though there were martial law in the country, essentially discounting constitutional rights.
In September, 1978, Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the shah or king of Iran, had troops massacre protesting crowds on “Black Friday.” Effectively, martial law was declared, and by November, the shah brought in a military government. He was nevertheless overthrown.
The constitution of the subsequent Islamic Republic of Iran does not permit the executive to declare martial law– any such move needs parliamentary approval.
Iran’s is a deeply authoritarian government, but even it has the old revolutionary’s distrust of martial law as an instrument.
You have to wonder if the US needs a provision like that.
Trump supporters at a 'Stop the Steal' rally outside of the Georgia state capitol on 21 November. (photo: Nathan Posner/Rex/Shutterstock)
Trump Threatens to Not Sign COVID-19 Bill, Wants Bigger (2K) Stimulus Checks
Reuters
Excerpt: "President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to not sign an $892 billion coronavirus relief bill that includes desperately needed money for individual Americans, saying it should be amended to increase the amount in the stimulus checks."
U.S. government operations are being funded on a temporary basis through Dec. 28, waiting for the $1.4 trillion in federal spending for fiscal 2021 that is also part of the bill.
Failure to either pass another stopgap bill or override a possible Trump veto of the legislation could result in a partial government shutdown. The threat by the outgoing Republican president, who has less than a month left in office, throws into turmoil a bipartisan effort in Congress to provide help for people whose lives have been upended by the pandemic.
“The bill they are now planning to send back to my desk is much different than anticipated,” Trump said in a video posted on Twitter. “It really is a disgrace.”
The U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate both passed the legislation overwhelmingly on Monday night.
Trump said he wants Congress to increase the amount in the stimulus checks to $2,000 for individuals or $4,000 for couples, instead of the “ridiculously low” $600 for individuals that is in the bill.
Trump also complained about money provided for foreign countries, the Smithsonian Institution and fish breeding, among other spending that is in the part of the legislation to fund the U.S. government.
“I’m also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation, and to send me a suitable bill, or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package. And maybe that administration will be me,” said Trump, who has continued to push baseless claims that he won re-election in November.
Trump, who will leave office on Jan. 20 when President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in, did not use the word “veto” in his statement.
The 92-6 vote in the Senate and the 359-53 vote in the House both are well over the two-thirds majority needed to override a presidential veto, though some Republicans might balk at overriding a veto if Trump used that power.
A bill can be amended if congressional leadership wants to do so. If they don’t, Trump’s choices are to sign the bill into law, veto it, or do nothing and let it become law.
If the bill is amended, doing so by Dec. 28 could be very difficult. It took months for the parties to agree to the thousands of elements in not only the coronavirus aid part, but the $1.4 trillion agreement to fund much of the U.S. government.
Even if leadership wants to amend the bill, it still would have to be voted upon by the full House and Senate. Also, many Republicans might balk at the $2,000 direct payments because that would boost the cost of the bill to well over $1 trillion.
Two years ago, a record-long, 35-day government shutdown was sparked when Congress sent Trump a government spending bill it thought he would support, only to see him reject it over what he said was insufficient funding for building his vaunted U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Trump also said a two-year tax break for corporate meal expenses was “not enough” to help struggling restaurants.
The White House did not signal any objections to the legislation before it passed and gave every expectation that Trump would sign it. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was involved in the negotiations over the bill.
White House officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s intentions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a tweet that Republicans would not say during negotiations what amount Trump wanted the stimulus checks to be. She said Democrats are ready to bring his proposal for $2,000 checks to the House floor for a vote this week. She did not address Trump’s other concerns.
Trump’s complaints came just as the 5,500-page bill was being processed for sending to the White House for signing by the president, who is scheduled to leave on Wednesday afternoon to spend the rest of the year at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump’s video was taped in private at the White House, without reporters present, continuing a recent boycott of appearing at public events where he might be exposed to questions about his failed attempt to challenge the results of the Nov. 3 election.
Demonstrators gather outside of Irwin county detention center in September. (photo: John Arthur Brown/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock)
More Immigrant Women Say They Were Abused by ICE Gynecologist
Victoria Bekiempis, Guardian UK
Bekiempis writes: "More women have joined an official legal petition alleging that they were medically abused by a gynecologist while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in a move that significantly expands a case that has shocked America."
More than 40 women submitted testimony claiming abuse, alleging they underwent invasive and unnecessary procedures
The legal petition outlining these alleged abuses were filed in the Middle District of Georgia federal court late Monday night. More than 40 women have submitted written testimony attesting to claims of abuse, one attorney on their case said.
These women, who have been detained by Ice at Irwin county detention center in Georgia, have alleged that they underwent invasive and unnecessary medical procedures. The women’s attorneys have also alleged that these women endured retribution for speaking out, including deportation in some cases. The petition largely echoed past legal filings and accounts by accusers.
“Petitioners were victims of non-consensual, medically unindicated and/or invasive gynecological procedures, including unnecessary surgical procedures under general anesthesia, performed by and/or at the direction of [gynaecologist Dr Mahendra Amin],” the petition said. “In many instances, the medically unindicated gynecological procedures Respondent Amin performed on Petitioners amounted to sexual assault.”
Officials were aware of this alleged misconduct since 2018, the petition further alleged, “but have nonetheless continued a policy or custom of sending women to be mistreated and abused by Respondent Amin … The experiences Petitioners had at the hands of Respondent Amin form part of a disturbing pattern of inhumane medical abuse and mistreatment at ICDC.”
“This is an effort to protect women who have suffered horrendous medical atrocities while detained in US custody, and every effort has been made by both Ice and the contractors at this facility to cover up these medical abuses,” said Elora Mukherjee, director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, a leading attorney on the case.
She added: “For more than two years, both the government, and the private contractors who run this facility, have turned a blind eye to the enormous suffering and intentional harm–and intentional medical abuse – that has taken place here.”
“It’s unlike anything I ever expected to see in America,” Mukherjee said.
The women’s allegations emerged after a shocking whistleblower report. This report, which was submitted on behalf of a former nurse at the facility, Dawn Wooten, alleged that an alarmingly high number of hysterectomies were performed on Spanish-speaking women. Wooten and other nurses feared that these women did not understand the procedures they underwent.
Wooten alleged that the doctor performing these procedures, who was subsequently named as gynecologist Dr Mahendra Amin, had become notorious for performing these operations – so much so that she called him the “uterus collector” in her whistleblower account.
“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy – just about everybody,” Wooten stated in her complaint. “I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor, and they’ve had hysterectomies, and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going.”
Wooten also said that the medical center where these procedures were performed had unsanitary conditions, as well as poor safety measures against Covid-19.
Amin has denied the allegations and told the Intercept that he had only conducted “one or two hysterectomies in the past two [or] three years”. He did not specify whether these procedures were performed on women in Irwin.
The physician’s lawyer, Scott Grubman, said in a previous statement: “We look forward to all of the facts coming out, and are confident that once they do, Dr Amin will be cleared of any wrongdoing.” Ice contended that its records indicate just two referrals for hysterectomies at Irwin.
The accusations have spurred comparisons with the US’s disturbing history of eugenics. From 1907 to 1937, two-thirds of US states passed laws that permitted involuntary sterilization – resulting in the sterilization of more than 60,000 people.
An increase in federal funding for reproductive health procedures in the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, resulted in “tens of thousands” of women of color undergoing sterilizations.
Though forced sterilization was made illegal, it has continued. From 1997 to 2013, approximately 1,400 inmates were sterilized in California prisons.
A burnt car at the site where Blackwater guards opened fire on a crowd in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2007. Donald Trump has pardoned the four contractors jailed over the killing of 14 civilians. (photo: Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: Trump Pardons 15, Including People Convicted
in Mueller Probe
Trump Pardons Blackwater Contractors Jailed for Massacre of Iraq Civilians
Michael Safi, Guardian UK
Safi writes: "Donald Trump has pardoned four security guards from the private military firm Blackwater who were serving jail sentences for killing 14 civilians including two children in Baghdad in 2007, a massacre that sparked an international outcry over the use of mercenaries in war."
Four guards fired on unarmed crowd in Baghdad in 2007, killing 14 and sparking outrage over use of private security in war zones
The four guards – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten – were part of an armoured convoy that opened fire indiscriminately with machine-guns, grenade launchers and a sniper on a crowd of unarmed people in a square in the Iraqi capital.
The Nisour Square massacre was one of the lowest episodes of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Slough, Liberty and Heard were convicted on multiple charges of voluntary and attempted manslaughter in 2014, while Slatten, who was the first to start shooting, was convicted of first-degree murder. Slattern was sentenced to life and the others to 30 years in prison each.
An initial prosecution was thrown out by a federal judge – sparking outrage in Iraq – but the then vice-president, Joe Biden, promised to pursue a fresh prosecution, which succeeded in 2015.
At the sentencing, the US attorney’s office said in a statement: “The sheer amount of unnecessary human loss and suffering attributable to the defendants’ criminal conduct on 16 September 2007 is staggering.”
After news of the pardon emerged on Tuesday night, Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned Blackwater defendants, said: “Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison. I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
The pardons are one of several the US president has granted to American service personnel and contractors accused or convicted of crimes against non-combatants and civilians in war zones. In November last year, he pardoned a former US army commando who was set to stand trial over the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker, and a former army lieutenant convicted of murder for ordering his men to fire at three Afghans.
Supporters of the former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide had lobbied for the pardons, arguing that the men had been excessively punished.
Prosecutors asserted the heavily armed Raven 23 Blackwater convoy launched an unprovoked attack using sniper fire, machine-guns and grenade launchers. Defence lawyers argued their clients returned fire after being ambushed by Iraqi insurgents.
The US government said in a memorandum filed after the sentencing: “None of the victims was an insurgent, or posed any threat to the Raven 23 convoy.” The memorandum also contained quotations from relatives of the dead, including Mohammad Kinani, whose nine-year-old son Ali was killed. “That day changed my life forever. That day destroyed me completely,” Kinani said.
Also quoted in the memorandum was David Boslego, a retired US army colonel, who said the massacre was “a grossly excessive use of force” and “grossly inappropriate for an entity whose only job was to provide personal protection to somebody in an armoured vehicle”.
Boslego also said the attack had “a negative effect on our mission, [an] adverse effect … It made our relationship with the Iraqis in general more strained.”
FBI investigators who visited the scene in the following days described it as the “My Lai massacre of Iraq” – a reference to the infamous slaughter of civilian villagers by US troops during the Vietnam war in which only one soldier was convicted.
After the convictions, Blackwater – which changed to Academi after being sold and renamed in 2011 – said it was “relieved that the justice system has completed its investigation into a tragedy that occurred at Nisour Square in 2007 and that any wrongdoing that was carried out has been addressed by our courts.
“The security industry has evolved drastically since those events, and under the direction of new ownership and leadership, Academi has invested heavily in compliance and ethics programmes, training for our employees, and preventative measures to strictly comply with all US and local government laws.”
The 14 victims killed by the Blackwater guards on trial were listed as Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, Osama Fadhil Abbas, Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, Ibrahim Abid Ayash, Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, Mahdi Sahib Nasir and Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein.
Warnock supporters in Georgia. (photo: Megan Varner/Getty Images)
Left Grassroots Groups Helped Biden Win Georgia. Now They're Organizing to Flip the Senate.
Nuala Bishari, In These Times
Bishari writes: "With hopes for a progressive agenda on the line, working class-led organizations are going all out to defeat the GOP in Georgia."
n the November general election, Georgia made headlines as the state that went from red to blue, earning a statewide win for Joe Biden by just under 12,000 votes. But as Biden prepares for his transition to the White House, all eyes are once again on Georgia. On Jan. 5, two run-off races in the state will determine whether Democrats or Republican will hold majority in the U.S. Senate. Democrats Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock are challenging incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, and the race looks tight.
After an exhausting outreach effort ahead of the Nov. 3 election, grassroots organizers and national political organizations have teamed up to once again get people out to the polls. But the strategies being employed this time around are different: No longer is the emphasis on flipping swing voters, but rather on holding deep, personal conversations in communities of color, both on their doorsteps and over the phone.
After the general election, Jade Brooks and her colleagues at SONG Power, a new 501©4 group born out of the LGBTQ social justice organization Southerners on New Ground, were drained. With their friends at Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) and national Latino rights group Mijente, they’d knocked on more than 150,000 doors across Georgia over the summer and fall to get out the vote for Biden.
But after Biden squeaked out a victory in Georgia, while Democrats nationwide failed to produce a “blue wave,” it soon became clear the possibility of flipping the Senate would fall to Georgians.
“We’re tired, we’re scrappy, this is kind of our first rodeo this year,” Brooks, a regional organizing lead with SONG Power, told In These Times. “But we knew there were going to be so many national groups coming into Georgia, so much money falling from the sky, what could we really do? We brought it to our members in Georgia, and through a series of conversations and calls, our members felt very strongly that we couldn’t sit the fight out.”
There’s a lot at stake. Biden’s ability to implement his agenda — from pushing through nominations, including potentially to the Supreme Court, to passing policies such as further Covid relief and more expansive healthcare — will depend heavily on whether he has a Democratic Senate to work with. If either Ossoff or Warnock lose to their Republican opponents, Mitch McConnell will retain control over the Senate, and he has already indicated his intention to block Biden and the Democrats at every turn.
Early voting has already begun in Georgia, and polls show the races running neck-and-neck. A Dec. 22 FiveThirtyEight poll shows Ossoff holding a 0.4% lead over Perdue and Warnock holding a 0.9% lead over Loeffler.
With the future of the Senate in Georgia’s hands, there has been no shortage of efforts to turn out Democratic voters — both locally and nationally. GLAHR and Mijente set the ambitious goal of knocking on approximately 290,000 Latinos’ doors across the state ahead of the runoffs. The national youth-led climate mobilization group Sunrise Movement holds phonebanks five days a week to galvanize young Georgia voters.
Particular emphasis is being placed on turning out Black voters. The grassroots group Black Voters Matter is driving a bus around the state, meeting voters face-to-face, handing out free meals and hosting concerts.
“With this latest bus tour, we’re sending a strong message across the state of Georgia: Black voters made history on Election Day, and we can do it again,” said Black Voters Matter cofounder Cliff Albright in a statement. “From the streets of Atlanta to rural communities like Ware County, Black voters in Georgia turned out in record numbers and exercised their voting power. Now, we have another opportunity to make our voices heard, hold our leaders in the Senate accountable, and remind them that we’ve got the power.”
The New Georgia Project, founded by former Georgia congressperson and gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, has thousands of volunteers hitting the pavement to help people of color vote, with plans to reach one million households before the polls close.
Nse Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, believes the Black vote is key to flipping the Senate. “The opportunity to impact the balance of power in the Senate is absolutely driving Georgians to come back out and vote,” she said on the podcast Runoff the Jewels earlier this month. “When we talk about this multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multigenerational progressive majority that exists in the deep South, I want people to know that it’s real.”
SONG Power, meanwhile, has teamed up with People’s Action, a national grassroots organization that centers the demands of working-class people of color. Together, they created a robust plan to place thousands of “deep canvassing” calls to rural Georgians ahead of the election, with the goal of listening to their experiences — and inspiring them to hit the polls in support of Ossoff and Warnock.
“There’s so many national groups that are coming in with calls and texts, and frankly, they have more bells and whistles than us,” Brooks said. “So we leaned into partnerships. The phone canvassing we’re doing with People’s Action is really cool because it enables us to have volunteers from all over the country do something meaningful. “
Danny Timpona, People’s Action’s deputy director of distributed organizing, was relieved when the group connected with SONG Power. People’s Action rallies people across the country to campaign and phonebank for races through close collaborations with on-the-ground groups in each state. But despite having member organizations in more than 30 states across the country, Georgia wasn’t one of them.
“That in itself was like ‘oh my gosh, how are we going to do this?’” Timpona recalled. People’s Action began reaching out to progressive organizations led by people of color, for what Timpona said was an intense two-week vetting process.
They were cautious about not wanting to parachute in. “It was an exploratory phase first of all, to see ‘are we needed?’ If we are needed, what provides the best list for folks who are organizing on the ground?” Timpona said.
In the end, SONG Power was one of several organizations People’s Action teamed up with to develop a canvassing plan.
For SONG Power, the help was appreciated, and not only to get them through this next election. The partnership is growing their contact list, enhancing opportunities to mobilize Georgians for future down-ballot races.
“We want to be able to call people after January,” Brooks said. “After some of this national attention moves away from Georgia, we want to make sure they get a call from a locally-rooted group inviting them into the movement long term.”
The collaboration goes beyond just the sharing of contacts and technology. Due to the nature of deep canvassing — where phone calls can require in-depth knowledge of regions, politics and local issues — People’s Action’s volunteers needed proper training. Together with SONG Power, they developed an hour-long training video that teaches callers how to listen, and not just regurgitate facts. Those well-trained volunteers make calls with People’s Action three days a week, while SONG Power runs smaller phonebanks to its existing base.
“We really lean into the fact that facts don’t change people’s minds, emotions and stories and values do,” Timpona explained. “It’s so rare for people to actually feel listened to, and to think that this person on the end of the line actually cares. Our volunteers really take a lot of pride in creating that space and knowing how important this is not just for this election, but for everything we’re navigating during the pandemic.”
In some ways, the pivot to focusing on just one state has made things simpler.
“In the fall we called into a different state each night,” Timpona said. “It was like, Monday is Wisconsin, Tuesday is North Carolina, Wednesday is Pennsylvania, Thursday is Michigan, and Friday is Minnesota. So in one sense it’s a little easier now, because we have more focus. But this is also a new state, new issue.”
With all eyes on Georgia, the scale of operations is enormous. Ahead of the presidential election, People’s Action contacted 47.3 million voters in battleground states and had more than 280,000 in-depth phone conversations.
Ahead of the runoffs, the group plans to call 1 million people in rural Georgia alone.
Now that early voting has started, the strategy has shifted slightly to actively turning out voters.
“There just hasn’t been information about where people can go to vote, where early voting is, should they return ballots in the mail, or should they return it in person,” Timpona said. “We’re really digging in and making sure people have all the answers they’re looking for, and all the information they need.”
On the ground in Georgia, Brooks said SONG Power plans to continue its canvassing efforts until the polls close on election day.
“During the general election there were tons of groups giving rides to the polls,” she said. “We may just offer resources to other groups that are solely focused on that. But we do have this old church bus that’s kind of broken down… maybe we’ll see if we can put that little beast in formation.”
Regardless of the results on Jan. 5, both Timpona and Brooks see this massive outreach effort in Georgia as a way to build future relationships.
“It’s a very strong thread through all the conversations that we’re having that a lot of people don’t feel a strong connection with how the Senate could actually impact their life,” Timpona said. “Whether it’s rent, utilities, climate justice, a job in healthcare – there’s understandably the question ‘what can the government do for me?’
“That’s the great thing about partnering. We know now that we can hand off the people that we talk to to race-building, power-building organizations after the election, so these conversations we’re having are not just to turn out votes for January 5.”
People participate in a ceremony in Acteal in October 2020 to commemorate the 1997 massacre. (photo: Changiz M. Varzi/nacla)
Mexico: 23 Years of Impunity for the Perpetrators of the Acteal Massacre
Changiz M. Varzi, NACLA
Excerpt: "Survivors of the Acteal massacre have rejected the Mexican government's offer of compensation. They demand that the perpetrators and masterminds be brought to justice."
n a hut with almost no furniture, a group of Tzotzil people gather around a long wooden table and on the dirt floor, eating their breakfast: a bowl of beans, corn tortilla, habanero chili, and a big cup of coffee. The old wooden table and chairs are blackened with the smoke rising from a ground stove, where a pot of beans and a pot of coffee sit atop the fire.
Early in the morning of the 22nd of every month, young and old Tzotzil people pack this hut in Acteal, a small village in the highlands of Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas. Hailing from different communities of Chiapas’s Chenalhó municipality, they are all members of La Organización Sociedad Civil Las Abejas de Acteal, also known as Las Abejas. First, they eat their collective breakfast. Then they change out of their jeans and hoodies and into their traditional Tzotzil clothes to hold their monthly memorial of the 1997 Acteal massacre.
On December 22, 1997, over 100 armed men from the Máscara Roja paramilitary group entered Acteal, part of Las Abejas, and slaughtered 45 Tzotzil men, women and children, including four pregnant women. The paramilitaries sought to crush Indigenous communities suspected of supporting the Zapatista movement. Las Abejas, a pacifist Christian organization founded two years before the 1994 Zapatista uprising, opposed the Zapatistas’ use of armed struggle, but supported the movement’s goals of autonomy and Indigenous control over land.
Two decades later, not much has changed for the survivors and the family members of the victims of the massacre. Las Abejas, meaning The Bees, have held their monthly ceremony for the past 23 years, seeking justice. Meanwhile the perpetrators and masterminds of the massacre are still at large, enjoying unspoken impunity. In the aftermath of the massacre, 79 people were convicted and handed long-term prison sentences for their participation in the killings. However, the Mexican Supreme Court ordered their release individually and in groups in the following years.
“No matter what the government does, we will continue our fight for justice,” Simón Pedro Pérez López, a Tzotzil community leader and a member of the board of directors of Las Abejas, told me. “All we want is justice. We want the trial of those who ordered and carried out the massacre, and that the government recognize its full responsibility for the massacre.”
“No” to the Government’s Offer
On September 3, after 23 years of pressure from Mexican and international human rights activists, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration accepted that the federal government was responsible for failing to prevent the killing of unarmed civilians in Acteal. According to declassified U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents, the Mexican military tacitly backed paramilitary groups in Chiapas at the time of the massacre. However, instead of opening a new investigation to bring the perpetrators to justice, López Obrador’s government offered a friendly settlement to the families of the victims.
In an official apology ceremony, Alejandro Encinas, the Mexican deputy interior minister responsible for human rights, said to Tzotzil community leaders: “Accept our solidarity with your causes and our commitment to fulfill our inherent responsibilities...never again another Acteal.”
Tired of over two decades of injustice, a group of Tzotzil victims and survivors separated from Las Abejas and accepted the government’s offer of financial compensation. The government announced that it would close the case.
However, Las Abejas has firmly rejected the government’s solution.
“Fatigue has not defeated us, weariness has not bent us, the blows have not knocked us down, and hopelessness has not seized our hearts,” Las Abejas wrote in a statement rejecting the government’s offer.
“No promise of economic compensation is enough to make us settle for a public apology that does not get at the root of the truth, that allows all those responsible to go unpunished, and that therefore does not guarantee that another Acteal will not happen again in our territories. We have not settled for this crumb of justice,” the statement continued.
Pérez Lopéz believes that the López Obrador administration’s formal apology is not sincere and that by paying compensation, the government wants to silence demands for justice.
“Here in Chiapas, the government has done nothing to end the presence of the paramilitaries and still our lives are at risk,” Pérez Lopéz said. “We see with our own eyes that the sons of those who killed our families are now joining the ranks of new paramilitary groups, harassing Indigenous communities. The government is lying, they are still systematically killing the Indigenous people in Chiapas.”
Other members of Las Abejas suggest that the government’s friendly settlement is a part of a larger strategy to manipulate the survivors of the massacre in an attempt to close the case of the Acteal massacre at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Las Abejas filed the case against the Mexican state in 2005.
“Obviously the government wants to close the case, but we don’t accept that,” Guadalupe Vázquez Luna, a survivor of the massacre stressed. Vázquez Luna was 10 when the paramilitaries entered Acteal and killed her parents and five siblings. Now she is an Indigenous rights activist and an outspoken advocate of Las Abejas members who are seeking justice.
“The government’s apology will not give life to our parents, brothers, sisters and children whom we lost in the massacre. We don’t need an apology, we want to see those who were responsible for the massacre punished,” Vázquez Luna said.
Vázquez Luna and other members of Las Abejas demand prosecution of those who played a vital role in the massacre, including the politicians who supported and armed the paramilitaries during the 1990s. Former president Ernesto Zedillo is on the top of their list. He is known as one of the main supporters of the army’s Campaign Plan Chiapas 94 that paved the way for paramilitaries to do the government’s dirty work of suppressing Indigenous resistance.
“Ernesto Zedillo is still enjoying lots of benefits. He has a high position and receives millions of pesos, while we are waiting for justice. He should be in prison,” Vázquez Luna said. “What kind of justice is this, that you carry out a massacre and then you just apologize?”
Fear of More Massacres
Human rights lawyers have also condemned the government for offering compensation without holding the perpetrators accountable, suggesting that this provides greater impunity.
“Las Abejas are simply saying that they are not going to sell their dead,” Pedro Faro Navarro, director of Fray Bartolome Human Rights center of San Cristobal de las Casas (Frayba), told me.
“The government has offered a public apology, but has not yet accepted the state’s role in the massacre. This government is putting all the blame on previous administrations, instead of accepting the responsibility that the Mexican state had in this massacre,” he added.
According to Frayba’s investigations, the army forces in bases close to Acteal could hear the sounds of shooting during the massacre, but they did nothing to stop the killing. The massacre lasted several hours and even the police forces stationed near Acteal did not intervene. This kind of complicity is a widely known counterinsurgency strategy deployed by the Mexican government.
“Yet the government has not said anything about its role in counterinsurgency and the presence of paramilitaries in the region, which is still going on. The paramilitaries in this region have had well-established military organizations and strategies, with diffused linkages with the state. It is diffused, but it [still] exists,” Faro explained.
Twenty-three years after the Acteal massacre, Indigenous residents of Aldam, a village 12 miles away from Acteal, are now under sporadic attack by paramilitary groups. This strategy mirrors the violence Acteal suffered before the massacre. Human rights activists in Chiapas suggest that accepting the friendly settlement for the Acteal massacre would encourage the paramilitaries to continue their attacks on Indigenous communities in Aldama with no fear of punishment. Activists such as Vázquez Luna are worried that if the impunity continues, a new generation could suffer the same fate.
“We were raised without our parents and we lived without having a family,” Vázquez Luna said. “This is exactly what we don’t want to happen to other Indigenous communities.”
A giraffe in the Nairobi National Park with the Nairobi skyline in the background in Nairobi, Kenya on Sept. 27, 2017. (photo: Buena Vista Images/Stone/Getty Images)
Nearly 90% of Land Animals Could Lose Habitat by 2050, Study Finds
Emily Denny, EcoWatch
Denny writes: "Unless global food systems are transformed, the world could face severe ecological damage in just a few decades. A recent study in Nature Sustainability suggests that nearly 90% of land animals could lose some of their habitat by 2050 if current agricultural systems continue as is."
"We need to change what we eat and how it is produced if we are going to save wildlife on a global scale," said David Williams, one of the study's lead authors, according to The Guardian. Without a proactive policy, current agricultural systems could cause the loss of millions of square kilometers of natural ecosystems.
From eating less meat to reducing food waste, the study examined how potential changes could make an impact on food systems in various geographical regions.
The team from the University of Leeds and the University of Oxford designed a geographically specific model for agricultural land use, adding outputs with species-specific habitat preferences for almost 20,000 species of terrestrial vertebrates, according to the study.
"Nearly 1,300 species are likely to lose at least a quarter of their remaining habitat, and hundreds could lose at least half," Williams said according to Science Daily. "This makes them far more likely to go extinct."
The majority of this loss is projected to take place in sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil, eastern Argentina, and parts of South and Southeast Asia, Yale Environment 360 reported.
The study provides both a tool for scientists to estimate how agriculture expansion will contribute to species and biodiversity loss and suggests solutions food systems could undertake for the transformation necessary. The study's results "highlight the importance of proactive efforts to safeguard biodiversity by reducing demand for agricultural land," Michael Clark, another lead author of the study said, as reported by Science Daily.
"The good news is that if we make ambitious changes to the food system, then we can prevent almost all these habitat losses," he added.
The study proposed a multi-pronged technique that is region-specific, suggesting closing crop yield gaps, promoting healthier diets, curtailing food loss and waste, and implementing early planning when it comes to land-use to avoid conflict between food production and habitat protection.
"No one approach is sufficient on its own. But with global coordination and rapid action, it should be possible to provide healthy diets for the global population in 2050 without major habitat losses," Clark said according to The Guardian.
The study's publication comes at the same time 135 groups called on president-elect Joe Biden to sign an executive order, urging him to prioritize the extinction crisis as a threat to humanity in the U.S., according to a press release by the Center for Biological Diversity.
"The unsustainable exploitation of wildlife can have profound consequences, as evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, which almost certainly came about due to the trade in wildlife," the proposed executive order states.
Among its goals to protect 30% of America's lands and waters by 2030, the proposed order requires all federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, to review how its actions cause harm to endangered species and biodiversity.
The order calls for federal agencies to develop conservation programs that comply with Section 7(a)(2) of the Endangered Species Act, which states that any action authorized by a federal agency must not "jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat."
When nearly 75% of global lands and 66% of ocean areas have been altered by people, and nearly 25% of global greenhouse emissions are attributed to agriculture, studies like the one published by Nature Sustainability and demands by the Center for Biological Diversity could motivate drastic change in food systems and promote sustainable land management, reversing both international and national trends towards ecological destruction via their agricultural systems.
"The time for half measures has passed," Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity said in a press release. "President Biden must take bold, immediate action to end extinction because the survival of not just wildlife but humanity is now at stake."
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