06 February 21
We Need to Raise a Budget — It’s No Joke
We meet our financial obligations. We pay our staff, our independent journalists and a full suite of service providers that make RSN possible.
We are not a Wall Street funny-money organization. We are a grassroots organization putting ourselves on the line for change.
When we say “funds are needed” you can believe they are.
They are.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts, CA 95611
05 February 21
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Tom Brady, the Super Bowl and the Aging Athlete's Mind-Body Problem
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Guardian UK
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "It's too early to tell whether Brady's legacy will be just a bunch of impressive stats or something more lasting. Maybe the true measure of one's legacy is how many people you inspire who have never seen you play."
rofessional athletes are mayflies. The mayfly rises magnificently into the air on translucent wings, only to die within 24 hours. According to the NFL Players’ Association, the league average playing career lasts 3.3 years. That’s not long considering the many years of grueling daily training, various physical injuries, and social sacrifices athletes endure to play those three years. Compared to the NBA (4.5 to 6.5 years), the NHL (5 years), and MLB (5.6 years), the NFL has the shortest career lifespan. Worse, 78% of those NFL players go broke within three years of retirement.
Then there’s Tom Brady. Brady, considered by many to be the greatest quarterback of all time, is no mayfly. On Sunday, he will make his bid to win his seventh Super Bowl. At 43, he is the oldest active NFL player and, after playing 21 seasons, he is closing in on George Blanda’s 26-season record.
I was 42 when I retired from the Lakers. After 20 seasons, I had a lot of NBA records and very little hair. Some of those records have since been broken, some remain to be broken at a time to be decided. I did learn some lessons about being a middle-aged athlete in a league where the average age is 26, which is also the age of the average NFL player. Some of those lessons were about playing, some were about being a player – two very different things.
Playing on a professional level against well-trained athletes 20 years younger is a challenge. The court seems much longer, the legs seems heavier, the hoop seems smaller. That’s when you come face-to-face with what philosophers call the mind-body problem: the relationship between the consciousness of the mind and the stubborn bag of meat that is your body.
As a young athlete, the mind and body seem inexorably intertwined, best friends frolicking in mutual stimulation and reward. In other words, the mind tells the body what to do, the body obeys and both enjoy the results. But aging for an athlete is a betrayal. The body doesn’t respond with the same quickness, the same intensity, the same accuracy. Your best friend has become a complaining companion, kvetching about cold drafts, back pain and sore knees. When you’re young, your only opponent is the other team. When you’re older, you have two opponents: the other team and your reluctant body.
That’s when you make a truce with your body. In order to keep playing at a elite level, you promise to treat it better, eat healthier, stretch more, find the balance in your mind that soothes the body. I did that through yoga and martial arts. Both gave me more control over my body and helped me reduce the number of injuries I suffered. Both helped me be mindful of what I could and couldn’t do, yet let me push myself to perform at my peak levels. For Brady, it’s smoothies, massages, resistance bands, online brain exercises and a strict dietary regimen – with the occasional pizza.
The aging athlete hears a nagging thrum on continuous loop inside the brain: “Do I still have it? Do I even belong in this game? Don’t embarrass yourself.” In a very visceral way, it is like facing death. Not the cessation of bodily functions, but rather the cessation of one’s identity. How you see yourself. How others see you. Your value as a human being. There is a vast difference between being an active player earning fresh accolades and being a retired player resting on past accomplishments. As those accomplishments grow smaller in the rearview mirror, you feel more like a fraud still milking them so many years later.
This is why after I retired from the NBA, rather than spend my life as just a former athlete, I decided to redefine my identity through my achievements as a social activist and my new career as a writer. In choosing a new career, I needed the same challenge I had as an athlete, except this time the body would rest and the mind would take the lead. I knew that at first, my writing would be a curiosity. Some would dismiss it as capitalizing on my fame, like Steven Seagal’s album Songs from the Crystal Cave. I have written articles about politics and popular culture, books about African American history, novels, graphic novels, movies, and TV scripts. Fortunately, the novelty that I could string words together cohesively passed and my work as a writer – which I have been doing for longer than I played in the NBA – has been taken seriously.
I had already been an activist throughout my college and professional basketball careers, but now I had more time to give to fighting for social equity for all marginalized people. I did this through my writing, through my Skyhook Foundation and through showing up wherever I was needed to speak out. It is at this late stage of your career where you decide what kind of player you want to be, even after you retire. Aside from your excellence in your sport, what do you stand for, what values do you represent?
It’s still not certain what kind of player Tom Brady will be. In 2014, he sidestepped the subject of players taking stands on social issues: “I try to stay in my lane. All of those things, none of it’s really my business or my control. I’ve just been focusing on the games and what I can do better.” When asked about the possibility of being a spokesman on behalf of the players, he shook it off. “I certainly have a lot of personal feelings toward all those things, but it’s just, there’s nothing I can do … I really don’t want to be involved in any of those things … I just don’t want my name mentioned in any of those situations that are happening.”
However, in September of 2020, following the summer of national Black Lives Matter protests, he offered more direct support of the activists’ cause: “Everyone should deserve the opportunity to reach their fullest potential. Being in the locker room for 20 years and being around guys with every different race, religion, skin color, background and different states. Everyone [brings] something different to the table and you embrace those things. They expand you in ways that you couldn’t have been expanded if you weren’t exposed all those different things.” That suggests to me that he’s becoming a player who wants to use his voice to help achieve equity among Americans.
The great Spanish soccer player Xavi once said: “In football, the result is an impostor … There’s something greater than the result, more lasting – a legacy. ” Brady will be considered a great football player no matter what his politics. But when an athlete gets to be his age and is nearing the end of his career, maybe his legacy should be more than just being a great player but also being a great man.
It’s too early to tell whether Brady’s legacy will be just a bunch of impressive stats or something more lasting. Maybe the true measure of one’s legacy is how many people you inspire who have never seen you play.
Capitol rioters. (photo: Getty)
Crowdfunding Hate: How White Supremacists and Other Extremists Raise Money From Legions of Online Followers
Will Carless, USA TODAY
Carless writes: "Some of the income streams exploited by America's extremist movements have come under increased scrutiny after last month's attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which some far-right extremists fundraised online."
mysterious $500,000 Bitcoin transfer. Online stores selling sham nutritional supplements and buckets of protein powder. Inane, live-streamed video game sessions, full of dog whistles and racial slurs, fed by a steady flow of cryptocurrency donations in the form of virtual lemons.
Some of the income streams exploited by America's extremist movements have come under increased scrutiny after last month’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, for which some far-right extremists fundraised online.
Even as extremists are removed from platforms that serve as reliable sources of followers and money, they find new ways to wring financial support from an army of online haters.
“A good analogy is that for every five people who would buy a $20 T-shirt, there’s probably 500 people who would pay a dollar or 50 cents to their favorite streamer to hear them say the N-word or mock minorities online,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who has studied how extremists fundraise online. “The numbers are substantially larger, both in the number of people participating and the number of times they donate.”
Hate groups move from selling CDs to taking PayPal
In the 1980s and 1990s, when hate groups operated exclusively on terra firma, they raised money three ways: selling music and merchandise like T-shirts, holding events like concerts, and charging members annual or monthly dues, said Heidi Beirich, chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. She has tracked extremist organizations for more than 20 years.
Those were lucrative times for hate groups, Beirich said. The music trade, especially, brought in a lot of money for American groups that exported cassette tapes and CDs to skinheads and other extremists in Europe, where hate-filled music was banned in many countries.
“The Americans would ship it into Europe and it was like an illicit product, so it had a premium,” Beirich said. “The music business was so profitable that Europol put out a study in the late '90s saying that it rivaled the hashish trade in Europe.”
In the mid-2000s, hate groups largely shifted online and discovered PayPal and Amazon, Beirich said. For more than a decade, just about every extremist group’s website featured a PayPal button, she said. Many extremist organizations posted Amazon links on their websites, which kicked back money for every dollar their followers spent after clicking through.
That was the heyday of online fundraising for groups like the white supremacist organization American Renaissance, Beirich said. But online platforms started clamping down on extremists in about 2015. By August 2017, PayPal, GoFundMe and other payment processors had begun banning people associated with far-right extremism and white supremacy.
That month, the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, opened many Americans’ eyes to the far-right movement feeding off the election of President Donald Trump. Spurred by images of white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” in the center of an American city, platforms that had started targeting individuals and groups who spread hate accelerated their efforts.
“I remember the year before Charlottesville, I went to the DC offices of PayPal with a PowerPoint showing screenshots of all the hate groups — Klan groups, Nazis, everything, and how they all had PayPal accounts and the guy at the time was like, ‘I don’t see what the problem is.’” Beirich said. “Well, the Tuesday after Charlottesville, we got a call from the general counsel at PayPal saying, ‘What do we need to do?’”
A spokesman for PayPal disputed Beirich’s account and said the company took extremist fundraising seriously for years before Charlottesville.
“PayPal has a longstanding and consistently enforced Acceptable Use Policy, and we remain deeply committed to working to ensure that our services are not used to accept payments for activities that promote hate speech, violence or other forms of intolerance,” said PayPal spokesman Justin Higgs. He provided examples of articles outlining PayPal’s actions against extremists pre-Charlottesville.
But as payment processors and mainstream crowdfunding sites began shutting their doors to extremists, many in the movement were already migrating to a new income stream: cryptocurrency.
Cashing in on cryptocurrency
On Dec. 8, 2020, someone sent at least a dozen far-right groups and personalities 28.15 Bitcoin in a single transaction, valued at approximately $522,000, according to blockchain data and analysis company Chainalysis.
The recipients included Nick Fuentes, a 22-year-old far-right internet personality who has been banned from YouTube and other platforms because of his hateful content. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, and a French Holocaust denier also received some of the money.
Fuentes received the lion’s share: 13.5 Bitcoin worth about $250,000. On Jan. 6, he protested outside the U.S. Capitol, though he maintains he did not incite the insurrection or enter the building.
The Bitcoin donation was traced to a terminally-ill French programmer with a history of supporting far-right groups. While it was notable for its size, the donation was just one of thousands made to extremist groups over the last few years, according to John Bambenek, who has tracked Bitcoin donations to such groups and publicizes them under the Twitter handle @NeoNaziWallets.
Bambenek said there are a number of reasons the far-right is attracted to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. They wrongly assume Bitcoin is anonymous, when in fact every transaction can be viewed by anyone.
And there's a philosophical reason.
“The neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic wing of the alt-right in particular, they believe their own propaganda about the whole Jewish world conspiracy — that the Jews own all the banks and so forth,” Bambenek said. “Well, if you really believe that, and you don’t want to be part of that, then cryptocurrency is all you have left.”
The Daily Stormer, led by neo-Nazi troll Andrew Anglin, has been particularly vocal in its support for cryptocurrency. So has white supremacist media personality Christopher Cantwell, who gained notoriety as the “Crying Nazi” after he posted a video of himself weeping about being charged with a crime after the Charlottesville rally. He later pleaded guilty to assault.
Recently, the Daily Stormer stopped asking readers for Bitcoin and shifted to Monero, a cryptocurrency with in-built privacy features that experts say make it all but untraceable.
“If the government wants to see the records underlying Monero, they’re screwed,” said Danny Nelson, who writes about cryptocurrency for the website CoinDesk. “The Monero blockchain doesn’t record that information in a way for it to be retrievable.”
But he said law enforcement agencies and others can limit extremist trade in cryptocurrencies by monitoring the “entry and exit points” for Bitcoin, Monero and others.
“It’s all well and good that you have all this Monero, but what are you going to do with it?” Young said. “As soon as you take it to an exchange to cash it out, then that is an event that can be associated with you.”
In order to buy most goods and services with cryptocurrency, one has to transfer it into U.S. dollars, Euros or another fiat currency, which means passing it through a cryptocurrency exchange. And, like payment processors a few years ago, those exchanges are wising up to the fact that extremists are using their services.
Elliott Suthers, a spokesman for Coinbase, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, said the company's "compliance programs are modeled on those of the world’s most trusted global banks and are specifically designed to identify and restrict the activities of any bad actors on our platform.
"We work closely with law enforcement agencies globally and do not hesitate to cooperate with investigations, when necessary."
Video streaming revenue goes crypto
Many of the most well-known members of the far-right owe their fame, and their net worth, to one platform: YouTube.
For years, YouTube allowed white supremacists and other hate groups to post extremist videos on its platform, racking up tens of thousands of subscribers and raking in advertising dollars. Experts say the site radicalized more users than any other platform on the internet.
"When you talk to folks who were in the (white supremacist) movement, or when you read in the chat rooms these people talk in, it's almost all about YouTube," Squire said.
"Their 'red pill' moment is almost always on YouTube," Squire said, using the far-right's term to describe when someone buys into a conspiracy theory or the beliefs of an extremist group.
YouTube finally started banning large numbers of hateful accounts in June 2019. Another wave followed in 2020 when YouTube removed channels run by white supremacists Richard Spencer, David Duke and others.
Unable to monetize their hate on the world’s biggest video platform, the far-right scattered across the internet. Some groups started podcasts. Other personalities, who were dependent on their video-streaming for followers, decamped to a gaming-centric, youth-focused video streaming website called DLive.
Squire, who has made it her life’s mission to follow hate groups and far-right media personalities into the deepest bowels of the internet, started collecting data from DLive last year. Though it doesn't have the reach of YouTube, the site offered something else: the ability for viewers to donate in real-time using cryptocurrency.
A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center in November laid out Squire's findings, revealing that several of the leaders of the white nationalist movement, including Fuentes and Daily Stormer writer Robert "Azzmador" Ray, made a lot of money on DLive. Viewers on the site could buy credits or earn them by watching videos, and they passed those credits on to live-streamers, Squire found.
“Credits are accrued over time by watching livestreams aired on DLive and come in the form of ‘lemons,’ with each lemon valuing at $0.012," the SPLC reported. "The fake currency lemons, which are more commonly accrued by a user transferring money into their own account, can then be turned into cash donations, given from DLive account holders to extremists.”
Fuentes amassed more than $61,000 on the site from April through October, Squire reported. A far-right comedian named Owen Benjamin was the highest earner on DLive, making $62,000.
Squire identified 56 extremist accounts that raked in $465,572.43 from April to October.
DLive suspended the accounts of Fuentes, Benjamin and several other streamers after Squire's report was published. Fuentes has since tried to launch his own streaming service, but without a platform, his anti-Semitic and racist views reach far fewer people, Squire said.
“The problem for them is there aren’t a lot of sites that will let you stream live and make money,” Squire said. “The live aspect is really important to this culture, and finding sites that will let you get away with that and have a decent interface is pretty rare.”
Back to T-shirts: fundraising comes full-circle
With online fundraising hobbled and facing an army of sleuths who report their hate speech, there are signs extremists are returning to fundraising methods used decades ago.
In 2019, by studying payments made on the app Venmo, Squire concluded that members of the far-right group the Proud Boys were paying dues. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio has long denied that his members pay dues. He has said his main source of income is selling T-shirts and other merchandise to fellow Proud Boys.
Tarrio’s merchandise gambit backfired on him in January when he was arrested in Washington, D.C., carrying two high-capacity ammunition magazines emblazoned with the Proud Boys logo. Tarrio told police he was delivering the magazines to someone who had bought them from him online.
High-capacity magazines are illegal in the District of Columbia. Tarrio was charged with two felonies and faces years in federal prison.
Another far-right leader who has invested heavily in the merchandising trade is conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
Jones, who uses his Infowars website to hock products with names like “Alpha Power” and “Super Male Vitality,” has been banned from most mainstream social media platforms and YouTube, where he once marketed his snake oils to millions of fans.
A quick perusal of the website last week indicates Jones is trying to move those products. Every one of the supplements on the “best sellers” list was discounted, some by as much as 60 percent.
Stimulus check. (photo: AP)
The Chamber of Commerce Wants to Slash COVID-19 Relief Checks. We Can't Let Them.
Andrew Perez, Jacobin
Excerpt: "The US Chamber of Commerce is pushing Democrats to slash COVID-19 relief checks for millions of people. And corporate Democrats appear to be listening."
he nation’s biggest business lobby is pushing Democrats to slash COVID-19 relief checks for middle-class families, despite new census data showing that nearly half of those families have lost income because of the pandemic. Top Democrats are now reportedly considering excluding millions of those families from the checks, and President Biden himself has said he is willing to negotiate with Republicans on limiting eligibility for the checks.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which spent $82 million lobbying in Washington last year, sent a letter to the White House and Congress on Tuesday urging them to consider “targeting any additional stimulus checks based on income, loss of employment, or similar criteria.”
The corporate lobbying group — whose members undoubtedly benefit from a desperate workforce — attempted to twist census data showing broad economic devastation to make the point that families earning more than $50,000 don’t need new survival checks.
“While the pandemic induced recession has created near unprecedented levels of hardship, the impact has not been universal,” the chamber wrote. “The Census Bureau Pulse survey indicates that while a majority of households with less than $50,000 in income have experienced a loss of employment income, a majority of household with more than $50,000 in income — including those between $50,000 and $150,000 — have not experienced any loss in earned income.”
This is a misleading way to frame the census survey results. Recent census data shows that 45 percent of households earning between $50,000 and $150,000 have experienced a loss of employment income since March 2020 — including 48 percent of households earning between $50,000 and $75,000. Nearly a quarter of households earning between $50,000 and $150,000 say they expect to lose employment income over the next four weeks.
The chamber is adding its voice to a chorus of pleas in the Beltway to limit who’s eligible for COVID-19 relief checks. The campaign was first kicked off by discredited austerity economist Larry Summers and columnists at the Washington Post and Bloomberg News, which are owned by billionaires Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg, respectively.
President Biden’s COVID-19 relief plan would send full $1,400 survival checks to individuals earning up to $75,000 and couples earning up to $150,000. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) has repeatedly demanded the relief checks be more “targeted.”
Senate Republicans on Monday proposed that Congress limit full stimulus checks to individuals earning up to $40,000 and couples earning $80,000 — a move that would deny checks to an additional eighty million people, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
The White House indicated it doesn’t support the GOP’s proposed income caps, but Biden and his team have continually said they are open to further limiting eligibility.
The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reported on Tuesday that some senior Democrats are “looking at lowering threshold on stimulus payments so they start phasing out above $50K for single taxpayers; $75K for heads of households; & $100K for married couples.” He cautioned the talks are still “fluid.”
At the same time, top congressional Democrats are floating new tax cuts that could primarily benefit the wealthy.
The campaign to limit survival check eligibility was recently boosted by a study by economists at Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University think tank bankrolled by the family foundations of billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, and Bill Gates.
The study, based on consumer spending data, found that “households with incomes above $78,000 will spend only $45 of the $600 payments they received” within the first month of the checks being sent. The authors wrote that “these households have largely returned to work, and have even accrued additional savings.”
While lower-income households have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, census data suggests that huge swaths of Americans, across income levels, have been impacted by COVID-19.
Democrats just took control of the US Senate because they won two miracle runoff races in Georgia last month, campaigning at all levels on a promise to give voters $2,000 checks (not $1,400).
Fifty-three percent of all Georgia households have reported losing employment income during the pandemic, including 51 percent of Georgia households earning between $50,000 and $150,000.
The Opportunity Insights study notably lumps together all households earning more than $78,000, when census data indicates that families earning between $75,000 and $150,000 are significantly more likely to have experienced a loss in income during the pandemic than households earning more than $200,000.
There’s one glaring problem with the push to limit who receives a survival check. Eligibility for the next checks will be determined based on 2019 tax returns — before the pandemic started.
“People have not filed their taxes for 2020, meaning that targeted checks would go out based on income information that is now one to two years out of date, with a pandemic and mass job loss having occurred in the interim,” Matt Bruenig of the People’s Policy Project told the Washington Post.
“This is not targeting,” he said. “It is the illusion of targeting, an illusion that will end up hurting tens of millions of people who are currently in need but weren’t in 2019.”
Maria Puga, center, stands at a rally with a poster showing her husband Anastacio Hernandez Rojas, who was killed by Border Patrol agents, at the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro, California, February 23, 2013. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/Getty)
Border Patrol Beat an Immigrant to Death and Then Covered It Up
Ryan Devereaux, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Former DHS supervisors say the killing and cover-up were part of a pattern."
aria Puga has been telling the story for more than a decade now. On May 28, 2010, her husband, Anastasio Hernandez Rojas, suffered a brutal and ultimately fatal beating at the hands of U.S. homeland security personnel at the San Ysidro Port of Entry on the southern edge of San Diego.The father of five was hogtied at a secure facility while at least eight agents and officers from the nation’s three border and immigration enforcement agencies punched and kicked him; a crowd of their colleagues circled around and watched. They knelt on his neck and body. Crying out for help, Hernandez was repeatedly tased while handcuffed. He suffered five broken ribs, internal organ hemorrhage, and bruising on his face and torso. He died of cardiac arrest and brain damage three days later. The coroner’s office ruled the case a homicide. Despite the federal agents erasing the video taken by eyewitnesses, the violent episode was caught on film and broadcast on national television. No agents or officers were punished, let alone charged for the killing. Puga has been protesting ever since.
“More than anything we want justice,” Puga told The Intercept in an interview Tuesday night, speaking in Spanish from a San Diego park that she and Hernandez used to visit.
In the years since her husband was killed, Puga said, she has never received a word of condolence from the U.S. government. The only direct communication the family has received from federal prosecutors came in 2015, when the Obama administration told them it was closing its investigation into Hernandez’s death without bringing charges. A public apology thus became a core demand in a historic international case that Puga and her family brought against the United States through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2016. Last week, they took a major step in that effort, submitting affidavits from three former senior Department of Homeland Security officials directly involved in Hernandez’s case to the commission. Those officials accuse the Border Patrol as well as current and former officials at the highest levels of DHS of engaging in obstruction of justice to protect the agents involved in Hernandez’s death and the reputation of their agency.
This was not an isolated incident, the former officials alleged in the affidavits, which were filed with the commission and shared with The Intercept. Instead, it was emblematic of an entrenched pattern in matters involving the Border Patrol, particularly in cases of lethal force.
The claims came from John Dupuy, the current deputy director at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Enterprise Assessments, who served as assistant inspector general for investigations at DHS inspector general’s office from 2012 to 2015; James Tomsheck, who served as assistant commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Internal Affairs at the time of Hernandez’s killing; and James Wong, the former CBP deputy assistant commissioner for internal affairs, who oversaw the use-of-force investigation into the case.
Together, the three former DHS officials described a staggering miscarriage of justice made possible by a culture of violence and impunity within the Border Patrol and a homeland security oversight system that utterly failed to do its job.
Without any legal authority, the Border Patrol improperly inserted itself into the Hernandez investigation, destroyed evidence, and used an administrative subpoena, potentially illegally, to obtain Hernandez’s autopsy, Tomsheck and Wong said in their affidavits (administrative subpoenas are meant for immigration cases, not for death investigations). In an 81-page brief filed with the affidavits, attorneys for Hernandez’s family said the subpoena was signed by the Border Patrol’s then-acting deputy chief patrol agent in San Diego Sector, Rodney Scott, who is now the chief of the Border Patrol, responsible for overseeing nearly 20,000 federal agents.
Pressure to justify the force used against Hernandez came directly from David Aguilar, then the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, Tomsheck and Wong claimed. CBP, the largest police agency in the country and among the largest in the world, is the institutional home of the Border Patrol; Aguilar was chief of the Border Patrol before assuming command of the agency. The two former internal affairs supervisors met with Aguilar the morning after Hernandez was killed. “His initial reaction to the reports of the Hernandez Rojas’s incident was his typical reaction,” Wong said. “He denied CBP’s involvement even before all the facts regarding the incident were available.” Tomsheck added that Aguilar ordered him “at least twice to reflect that Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was unrestrained when he was combative.”
“I informed Aguilar that this was not the case based on the facts reported,” Tomsheck said in his affidavit. “I had statements from CBP officers that said Anastasio Hernandez Rojas was face down on the ground and handcuffed behind his back when Tasered.”
Dupuy, the only one of the three men still working for the federal government, characterized DHS Office of Inspector General’s handling of the Hernandez case as a “dereliction of duty.” Tomsheck, meanwhile, has spoken out about the problems within CBP before, describing the post-9/11 surge in hiring Border Patrol agents and the unparalleled corruption that followed as “the greatest compromise of law enforcement integrity our country has ever seen.” In 2011, he filed a whistleblower complaint detailing how Aguilar, then chief of the Border Patrol, had pressured internal affairs to redefine corruption so the agency’s numbers weren’t so high. Wong corroborated the account in his affidavit.
In an interview Tuesday, Wong said his motivation for participating in the Inter-American Commission case was simple. “It’s the right thing to do,” he told The Intercept. “We were stymied within the organization.”
The former officials were also highly critical of Dennis M. McGunagle, who served as the DHS OIG’s special agent in charge in San Diego and was responsible for conducting the office’s investigation into the Hernandez case, which the OIG closed in January 2012. That same year, new cellphone video emerged showing Hernandez was handcuffed when he was beaten and shocked with a Taser, contradicting the Border Patrol’s claims in the case. In his affidavit, Dupuy said he reviewed McGunagle’s original investigation and found that it was “not more than a few pages,” “fell short of investigative standards,” and “did not follow investigative procedure.”
“When I reviewed the investigation file two years after the incident, I was shocked to see what I believe was a lack of diligence and thoroughness,” Dupuy said. “This case is an example of a pattern of dereliction of duty that I observed from the DHS OIG Office of Investigation San Diego field office in investigations involving allegations of use of force by federal agents.” Dupuy stated that the new video evidence led him to believe that the case should be reopened, and that he said as much to McGunagle. “He was adamant that nothing more should be done — the case was closed and should not be reopened,” Dupuy said. “He saw no additional value in OIG reopening the case.”
In the end, the case was not reopened. “During my time at DHS, I had other cases involving allegations of use of force overseen by McGunagle brought to my attention due to similar concerns over improper investigations,” Dupuy said.
McGunagle was eventually promoted to a deputy inspector general at the DHS OIG, where he still works. The DHS OIG declined to comment on the filings. CBP, where Scott is still employed, did not provide comment despite multiple requests from The Intercept. Aguilar, who now works in the private sector, did not respond to requests for comment.
“What’s important to understand is that the people who are involved in this case have risen in the ranks,” Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego and an attorney for the Hernandez family, told The Intercept. “This is an ongoing threat to the safety of border communities and to the security of the nation when we have this level of impunity, unchecked, at the highest levels of this agency.”
The Inter-American Commission system is best known for its role in examining incidents of state violence, massacres and enforced disappearances in Latin America. Last July, the commission ruled that it had the authority to hear the Hernandez case, marking the first time in its 61-year history that a U.S. law enforcement agency has stood accused of an extrajudicial killing. “The bread and butter of this commission is to look at extrajudicial killings, but they’ve only done so in other countries,” Guerrero said. “This is what they do best, but they have never taken a case against the United States. This is the first time that they are doing so, and they they’re doing so at a moment that is critical in the United States, where we are having a national conversation about what is acceptable use of force by police in this country.”
The case argues that Hernandez was tortured and that as an undocumented person, his killing was part of a broader pattern of violence against migrants made possible by the U.S. government’s failure to rein in its border security forces. “At every level of accountability, our government failed this family,” Guerrero argued, but “this is not only significant for the pursuit of justice for this family — it’s significant for the policing conversation going on in this country. It is a part of a national reckoning around responsible policing and its impact, especially on communities of color.”
Guerrero said the affidavits of the three former homeland security officials bring critical new information to light in the Hernandez case: “These are three high-level DHS officials who have firsthand knowledge of the investigation, and they say unequivocally that there was obstruction of justice, that there was, essentially, a shadow investigation conducted by border agents who interfered with the official police investigation.” It was through Dupuy’s affidavit, she said, that Hernandez’s widow and children learned, for the first time, that momentum for a reopening of the DHS OIG investigation was quashed from the inside — by an official now supervising oversight investigations nationwide.
“It was Dupuy who posed the question, should this case be reopened after the eyewitness video came out, and the answer was no,” Guerrero said. “That is a travesty of justice. That wasn’t minor. That is major evidence that completely refuted everything that the CBP agents had been told and told the public.”
Among the myriad problems in the Hernandez case, Guerrero said, was that Border Patrol agents acted as though they were so-called 1811s: law enforcement lingo for federal investigators with specific legal authorities and investigative powers. FBI special agents, for example, have 1811 status; Border Patrol agents do not. And yet, the affidavits describe Border Patrol agents inserting themselves in the Hernandez investigation at every turn, gathering evidence that they did not turn over to the San Diego Police Department and, in some cases, actively destroying what they collected. Guerrero argued these actions reflected a deeper institutional rot within the agency.
“Through this case we understand the anatomy of the impunity that is structural and systemic at CBP,” Guerrero said. “Everything that is wrong is evident in this case.”
The Cover-Up
Together, Dupuy, Tomsheck, and Wong’s affidavits offer a detailed look behind the scenes of a notorious case of Border Patrol violence that drew international condemnation.
At the outset, CBP personnel failed to report the case, Tomsheck said. “Externally, CBP is supposed to report the incident to the state or local agency that has jurisdiction over the incident,” he said. “In the Anastasio case, CBP officers did not fully follow protocol by not immediately communicating with local police with jurisdiction over the area until the next day.” At a meeting the following morning, “Border Patrol repeatedly stated that Anastasio was not restrained, that he was standing, and that he was combative when he was Tased,” Tomsheck said. Reports from CBP’s Office of Field Operations, he added, “were the first indication that something was wrong in how the Anastasio Hernandez Rojas incident was being reported.”
“All of the Field Operations reports clearly stated that Mr. Hernandez Rojas was face down on the ground and handcuffed when Tased,” Tomsheck said; the officer who shocked him said so in his own report. During the initial briefing where the incident was discussed, “Aguilar stated that all reporting of this incident would reflect that Mr. Hernandez Rojas was standing, unrestrained, and combative when he was Tasered,” Tomsheck claimed. “I challenged Aguilar’s assertions by stating that there are reports that reflected otherwise. Aguilar was furious with me for pointing that out.” The commissioner’s desire was clear, Tomsheck said in his affidavit: “I understood that Aguilar wanted me to falsify reports and did not want this critical portion of events to be accurately documented.”
In the days and weeks that followed, Tomsheck said his office was “walled off from information by DHS OIG.” It was not until CBP Internal Affairs was ordered to conduct a “fact-finding investigation that would monitor DHS OIG’s investigation to learn as much as-possible” that Tomsheck said he “first discovered that the Border Patrol was conducting its own unauthorized investigation.”According to the affidavits, that investigation was carried out by a secretive Border Patrol unit known as “Critical Incident Investigative Team.” Tomsheck said his agent on the ground encountered “extreme resistance” from Border Patrol agents and OIG officials in San Diego. When Tomsheck got a look at the OIG’s investigation himself, the internal affairs supervisor said he found himself “in disbelief” at how lacking the inquiry had been.
As the investigation progressed, Aguilar remained adamant that the review by internal affairs conform to his preferred narrative, Tomsheck added. Suggestions that the FBI should be involved in the matter did not go over well, he said: “There was a strong desire on the side of DHS to not let the integrity problems of DHS end up in the hands of the Department of Justice.” According to the commission filing, CBP took the position that because filming at ports is prohibited, the agency was justified in destroying video of Hernandez’s beating. In retrospect, Tomsheck said he believes officials had an alternative motive. “Knowing what I know now, I believe there was an effort to conceal the video footage of the event from SDPD,” he said.
Wong, meanwhile, said that the fact that CBP obtained an administrative subpoena to access Hernandez’s autopsy was “improper if not criminal.” The Border Patrol did not have jurisdiction in the investigation. “It is incredible that they attempted to get this information through that channel and problematic that the tactic worked,” he said. “These subpoenas are administrative in nature and not supposed to allow access to something like an autopsy report.” Wong added that when he and Tomsheck took their concerns up the CBP chain of command, they were “told that the matter would be handled internally. And that was the end of that.”
Though he was not at DHS at the time of the killing, Dupuy said senior management brought the Hernandez case to his attention shortly after he joined the DHS watchdog’s office in 2012. “I was responsible for overseeing investigations and there was intense congressional and public interest in the case after news coverage revealed new video evidence,” he said. The video “directly contradicted CBP’s version of the event,” he noted. “CBP agents had claimed that Mr. Hernandez Rojas was standing and combative, but the video showed him handcuffed in a fetal position on the ground, pleading for his life.”
Dupuy examined his office’s file on the case. “The file was very thin — there was a lack of diligence and activity in investigating this case,” he said. “There was a significant discrepancy between the OIG file and the video and media reports regarding Mr. Rojas’s physical position while being Tased. The OIG file did not report that Mr. Rojas was detained at the time he was Tased.” Dupuy described voicing concerns about the “discrepancy” with his colleagues and raising the idea of reopening the investigation. Little could be done from Washington, he recalled being told: “Headquarters was in disarray.”
At the time, Dupuy said, “DHS OIG headquarters and its field offices had an atypical dynamic where headquarters gave a lot of discretion to the field offices.” If Dupuy wanted to see the case reopened, he would need to go through McGunagle. “I felt boxed in by what I could do on this case,” he said. “I felt that it should have been re-opened, but McGunagle had primary responsibility for that decision. If I forced the investigation to be re-opened, it would have been assigned to him and his case agents, and it seemed to me he had no interest in ensuring a proper investigation was carried out.”
Dupuy said McGunagle demonstrated a general “lack of interest” and a “lack of thoroughness and diligence” in use-of-force cases. “When we raised this matter with him, he blamed it on supervisors, but he was the supervisor for that office,” he said. “To my knowledge, McGunagle has never faced consequences for failing to carry out his duties and properly investigate cases involving the most serious allegations such as excessive use of force resulting in the death of an individual,” he said. “Instead, he has been rewarded.”
“A man died and the questions that should have been asked about his death, and the events leading to it, were not asked,” Dupuy said. “The OIG had a duty to properly investigate the matter and uncover the facts the [sic] led to the death of Mr. Hernandez Rojas. This was not done.”
The Green Machine
From the initial act of violence to the lack of oversight that followed, the affidavits reveal that the events in San Diego were consistent with patterns and practices the three former homeland security officials encountered across the border.
From DHS headquarters, Dupuy oversaw the performance of all investigative activities and all DHS Internal Affairs units. “It was a toxic and dysfunctional environment,” he said.
“At the case level, across the board, DHS OIG internal investigations did not comply with investigative and ethical standards.” At the time, “the entire leadership team of the DHS OIG was under criminal or administrative misconduct investigations following the indictment of the former head of the OIG office in McAllen, Texas for fabricating investigative reports.” Relationships between the inspector general’s office and outside law enforcement agencies were strained, and OIG investigators got along better with CBP officers than they did with CBP internal affairs investigators.
“It should have been the other way around,” Dupuy said. “But there was a turf war with Internal Affairs.”
Tomsheck’s and Wong’s affidavits paint a picture of the Border Patrol as an agency where impunity for abuse is baked into the DNA. Both veteran federal investigators say the demands of senior leadership to toe the line on the Hernandez case were consistent with the agency’s approach to lethal force cases more broadly.
Tomsheck pointed to the 2010 killing of 18-year-old Juan Mendez Jr. as an example. The initial Border Patrol account of the incident was “very clear” in suggesting the agent who killed him “was almost certainly in the wrong,” Tomsheck said. The early reporting included a statement from the agent in which he said, “I am going to be prosecuted for this.” Those words were later scrubbed from the Border Patrol’s account of the incident, Tomsheck noted. The 2010 killing of 15-year-old Sergio Hernández Guereca was another example. Initially, Border Patrol agents claimed that Guereca was shot by accident after struggling with agents and then stumbled across the Rio Grande. Tomsheck, however, received an autopsy showing that the unarmed teen had been shot in the forehead. “I had been in law enforcement for more than 30-years at this point,” he said, “In my experience, I had never seen someone shot in the forehead and stumble anywhere.”
A 2018 Guardian investigation identified 97 cases of CBP personnel using deadly force near the border over a 15-year period.
The affidavits show that the Border Patrol’s ability to cover its tracks in use-of-force cases, including killings, was built into the agency’s structure. Within CBP, the Border Patrol had its own internal system for reporting on use-of-force cases. Unlike internal affairs reports, “BP reports could be altered without leaving an electronic fingerprint,” Wong said. “I have direct knowledge of multiple instances when reports uploaded onto BP’s reporting system were later significantly changed from their original version.” Tomsheck would “methodically print out” Border Patrol reports to see if he could identify changes, Wong added, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to find them, including in cases where lethal force was used.
As deputy commissioner of internal affairs, Wong said he became aware of “many instances when agents used violence against undocumented individuals without fear of repercussion” and that he read reports of agents “shooting across the border into Mexico without knowing who or what they were shooting at and without concern for innocent bystanders.” When asked to justify their actions, Wong said, agents would invoke a “‘fog of war’ mentality.”
Wong found the Border Patrol to be an institution that was profoundly hostile to outsiders. They called themselves “the Big Green Machine,” he said, and it was soon made clear to him that he would never understand them because he “never wore green.” CBP personnel but especially Border Patrol agents “see themselves as members of a ‘paramilitary organization’ and soldiers ‘on the front line’ of a war against criminal organizations and terrorism,” he said. “Many agents asserted that CBP’s mission was to protect the border at all costs, even at the expense of human life.” The mindset and the sense of untouchability came from the top. “High-ranking CBP officials took steps to shield CBP agents from accountability even in the most egregious cases, such as the over dozen lethal force incidents involving CBP agents that occurred between 2010 and 2011,” Wong said. “It did not matter if the victim was a child or if there was clear video evidence of misconduct.” When it came to shootings, he said, the default was to assume the victim had it coming: “No remorse was ever expressed.”
“I heard BP agents characterize undocumented migrants as the enemy and undeserving of any legal rights, much less the same rights as U.S. citizens,” Wong said. He was disturbed to learn that agents had a practice of destroying the water jugs humanitarian groups leave for migrants crossing the desert. “Agents justified their actions to me and their supervisors by claiming that migrants were more likely to turn themselves in to U.S. law enforcement if they did not have access to the food and water,” he said. “This view disregarded the reality that many migrants lost their lives after succumbing to the harsh conditions of the Arizona and Texas desert because they did not have access to food and water.”
Wong found that the disregard for migrants’ lives was often accompanied by a lack of understanding of the law. “BP agents were woefully ignorant of the law, including basic due process rights,” he said, adding that “many BP agents have no concept of what constituted ‘reasonable suspicion’ or ‘probable cause.’” He recounted observing several instances of warrantless searches including, in one case, an agent who he observed “driving around in a van by himself using equipment to intercept phone calls with no authority and no supervision.”
“He told me that the Patriot Act, federal legislation passed after 9-11, authorized this conduct,” Wong said. “It did not.”
Seeking Peace
Much of the work of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights focuses on analyzing cases of state violence and producing recommendations for perpetrator nations. In addition to a public apology, the legal team for the family of Anastasio Hernandez Rojas is asking the commission to make several recommendations for the U.S. government, including major changes to its use-of-force policies. Because the commission is accustomed to dealing with cases of violent security forces, it has developed clear standards for use of force, said Roxanna Altholz, co-director of UC Berkeley’s International Human Rights Law Clinic and co-counsel on the case.
“They’re global standards, they’re standards where there’s consensus that law enforcement should only use force when it’s necessary, proportionate, and for a legitimate purpose,” Altholz told The Intercept. The standard in the U.S., meanwhile, is just “objectively reasonable,” she said. “That’s really the reason why we can have situations where someone who’s handcuffed on the ground, begging for mercy in custody is tased to death, or a 9-year-old with a toy gun is shot and killed and the result can be that it was reasonable use of force.”
Altholz and her colleagues are hoping to change that standard through the Hernandez case. They are also asking the Justice Department to open an independent prosecutorial unit specifically devoted to investigating and prosecuting DHS abuses. “What’s really significant about this case is we’re arguing that the entire system is designed to shield especially border agents from accountability,” Altholz said. “It was atrocious what happened that day, but we’re thinking structurally: What were the structural reasons that led agents to take someone to a secure federal location, handcuff the person, beat them to death, and then lie about it and try to cover up?”
U.S. prosecutors fought the acceptance of the Hernandez case before the Inter-American Commission last summer, arguing that because his family had received a settlement in a lawsuit stemming from the case, they have already been given “adequate and effective remedies for the actions surrounding [his] death.” The federal government will once again have an opportunity to respond to the case in light of the recent filings, this time under a president who has vowed to break with the border legacies of his predecessor.
“If the Biden administration wants to mark a new chapter, a new commitment to human rights, this is a way for that administration to effectuate, to actually show that this administration is going to be different when it comes to the border,” Altholz said. “So the first thing I’ll be looking at is, how does the United States respond?”
When she and her husband began building a life in the U.S. together more than 30 years ago, Maria Puga said, they were innocent. They believed in the principles espoused by their adopted homeland. Her husband’s killing, and everything that came after, took that away.
After nearly 11 long years, Puga is hoping that justice is finally coming. When millions of people marched in the streets last summer following the killing of George Floyd, Puga said she identified with them. After all, the cases were remarkably similar: Both involved a knee pressed into a man’s neck by an agent of the state, both involved onlookers and agents who stood by and watched, and both involved an effort to protect the killers. Whether it was a beat cop in the city or an agent on the border, Puga said, “I see it the same.”
If she had chance to speak to the new president, Puga said, she would tell him about the man she remembers — a happy, charismatic father and husband who loved his children deeply — and she would show him the video of how his life came to an end. “After so many years of fighting for justice, I would ask for his help,” she said. “Our family needs some peace.”
Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: CSPAN)
In Powerful Speeches to Congress, AOC and Rashida Tlaib Demand Accountability for Capitol Attack
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "As the U.S Senate prepares its impeachment trial of President Trump for inciting the January 6 insurrection, House lawmakers took to the floor Thursday to detail their experiences and demand accountability."
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to Capitol Hill. The U.S. Senate is preparing to begin its impeachment trial of President Trump for inciting the deadly January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Democratic House lawmakers warned on Thursday about the dangers of ignoring or minimizing the violence of the insurrection. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York organized a special session to give lawmakers a chance to talk about what happened that day.
REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Twenty-nine days ago, on January 6th of 2021, insurrectionists attacked our Capitol seeking to overturn the results of our nation’s election. Twenty-nine days ago, the glass in and around this very chamber was shattered by gunshots, clubs, by individuals seeking to restrain and murder members of Congress, duly elected to carry out the duties of their office. Twenty-nine days ago, officer Sicknick, who just laid in honor yesterday in our nation’s Capitol, was murdered on the steps just outside this hallowed floor. Two Capitol Police officers have lost their lives since, in addition to the four other people who died on the events of January 6th. Twenty-nine days ago, food service workers, staffers, children ran or hid for their lives from violence deliberately incited by the former president of the United States.
Sadly, less than 29 days later, with little to no accountability for the bloodshed and trauma of the 6th, some are already demanding that we move on or, worse, attempting to minimize, discredit or belittle the accounts of survivors. In doing so, they not only further harm those who were there that day and provide cover for those responsible, but they also send a tremendously damaging message to survivors of trauma all across this country, that the way to deal with trauma, violence and targeting is to paper it over, minimize it and move on.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking Thursday. Her sister Squad member, Congressmember Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, also spoke.
REP. RASHIDA TLAIB: This is so hard, because, as many of my colleagues know, my closest colleagues know, on my very first day of orientation, I got my first death threat. It was a serious one. They took me aside. The FBI had to go to the gentleman’s home. I didn’t even get sworn in yet, and someone wanted me dead for just existing. More came later, uglier, more violent, one celebrating, in writing, the New Zealand massacre and hoping that more would come, another mentioning my dear son Adam — mentioning him by name. Each one paralyzed me each time.
So, what happened on January 6th, all I could do was thank Allah that I wasn’t here. I felt overwhelming relief. And I feel bad for Alexandria, so many of my colleagues that were here. But as I saw it, I thought to myself, “Thank God I’m not there.” I saw the images that they didn’t get to see until later.
My team and I decided at that point we’d keep the death threats away. We try to report them, document them, to keep them away from me, because it just paralyzed me. And all I wanted to do was come here and serve the people that raised me; the people that told my mother, who only had eighth-grade education, that she deserves human dignity; people that believed in me. And so it’s hard. It’s hard when my seven brothers and six sisters beg me to get protection, many urging me to get a gun for the first time.
And I have to tell you, the trauma from just being here, existing as a Muslim, is so hard, but imagine my team, which I lovingly just adore. They are diverse. I have LGBTQ staff. I have a beautiful Muslim that wears her hijab proudly in the halls. I have Black women that are so proud to be here to serve their country. And I worry every day for their lives because of this rhetoric. I never thought that they would feel unsafe here.
And so, I ask my colleagues to please try not to dehumanize what’s happening. This is real. And you know many of our residents, from the shootings in Charlottesville to the massacre at the synagogue — all of it. All of it is led by hate rhetoric like this. And so I urge my colleagues to, please, please take what happened on January 6 seriously. It will lead to more death. And we can do better. We must do better. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Detroit Congressmember Rashida Tlaib, speaking on the House floor. During her testimony, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came over and put her hand on her back to comfort her.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. When we come back, President Biden pledges to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, describing it as a “humanitarian catastrophe.” But will this end the war? Back in 30 seconds.
Supporters of Ecuadorean presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso gather before his closing campaign rally in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on February 4. (photo: Santiago Arcos/Reuters)
Ecuador to Vote Amid Economic Crisis and Widespread Discontent
Kimberley Brown, Al Jazeera
Brown writes: "Ecuadorians will head to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president amid widespread discontent over the country's handling of the coronavirus pandemic, an economic crisis worsened by COVID-19, and several corruption scandals."
Economy and handling of COVID-19 pandemic figure largely on minds of voters ahead of February 7 presidential polls.
Sixteen presidential candidates will be on the ballot, though most have polled under two percent support and are not expected to be major contenders on voting day.
The race is shaping up to be a fight between ex-banker and longtime presidential hopeful Guillermo Lasso, and Andres Arauz, an economist and former head of the central bank, who are leading in most recent polls with around 25 to 30 percent support.
Lasso, with the right-wing Creating Opportunities (CREO) party, has pledged to create jobs through more international investments and oil extraction projects, while Arauz of the Democratic Center party has promised to return to the socialist policies of former President Rafael Correa.
Third in recent polls, at about 10 to 15 percentage points behind the pair, is Yaku Perez of Pachakutik, the party of the country’s Indigenous movement, who is known for his opposition to mining and support for greater environmental protections.
Experts say it is unlikely that anyone will get the 40 percent support and at least a 10-point lead over their opponents that is needed to win the presidency, which means a runoff will be held on April 11 between the top two candidates.
The elections will be monitored by more than 2,500 local and 225 international observers, including the Organization of American States, the European Union, and the Inter-American Union of Electoral Organizations.
Voters will also elect lawmakers to fill 137 seats in the National Assembly.
Whoever wins will need to address several pressing challenges, including widespread public discontent; more than 89 percent of Ecuadorians say the country is on the wrong track, according to a December poll by the Cedatos firm.
“Corruption has been permanent, and scandals have consistently appeared in the media,” said Decio Machado, a political analyst based in Quito, the capital. “People have a lot of distrust in politics today.”
‘Mixed feelings’
Current President Lenin Moreno, who is not up for re-election, will end his single term in office drastically unpopular. His approval rating has long been hovering around seven percent, down from 77 percent in his first months in office.
Moreno was elected in 2017 as the successor to Correa, who increased public spending, cut ties with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, and endorsed regional integration with other socialist countries in Latin America.
But shortly after he was elected, Moreno changed course and pursued more business-friendly policies, such as cutting taxes for international mining investors and securing loans from the IMF and World Bank to fund the country’s foreign debt and fiscal deficit.
His popularity plummeted in October of 2019 after he tried to pass IMF austerity measures that included cutting public funding and eliminating fuel subsidies that many families depend on. His effort sparked 11 days of violent protests across the country.
Dayana Leon, a political communications consultant based in Quito, said those protests polarised Ecuador, as a large part of the population did not support those demonstrating.
Leon told Al Jazeera the protests, coupled with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, recent corruption scandals and high unemployment, mean many Ecuadorians will “have mixed feelings when voting” – unsure of whether to vote for their preferred candidate or to vote strategically to prevent an undesired outcome.
COVID-19, economic woes
The country has been badly hit by the coronavirus, with hospitals at maximum capacity in Quito and the coastal city of Guayaquil, where healthcare and mortuary services collapsed in April.
Ecuador has reported more than 10,000 coronavirus-related deaths, according to government figures, but experts warn the actual number is likely much higher due to Ecuador’s low rates of testing for COVID-19. It has also recorded more than 251,000 infections.
Corruption scandals have also erupted during the pandemic, as at least nine public hospitals are being investigated for embezzlement.
A network of public officials was recently found selling disability cards – which provide benefits to people with physical disabilities – for inflated prices or using them to import goods with tax exemptions, while Health Minister Juan Carlos Zevallos is also under scrutiny for giving one of Ecuador’s few COVID-19 vaccine doses to his mother.
Meanwhile, unemployment hit 6.6 percent in September, almost double what it was in December 2019, while poverty levels have increased from 43 to 48.5 percent, according to UNICEF Ecuador. The group also estimates that six out of every 10 households with children are now in extreme poverty without access to education, healthcare, food, jobs or social security.
“With the impact of the pandemic, the situation has worsened notably,” said the analyst, Machado. “The political debate is centred around the economy.”
‘Correismo vs anti-Correismo’
The top presidential candidates have vowed to tackle the economic crisis facing many families.
Arauz, 35, who was director of Ecuador’s central bank under Correa, has promised to bring back economic stability by reimplementing the former president’s socialist policies.
But Correa is a polarising figure in Ecuador.
His supporters remember him for decreasing poverty and increasing spending in public infrastructure during a commodities boom, but his administration was accused of corruption – and Correa himself was charged with violating campaign finance laws, which he continues to fight from his home in Belgium.
“The main electoral debate is between Correismo and anti-Correismo,” said Machado.
Both have strong support across the country, but the current government has been “the best validator of Correa’s politics”, he said. “Many people have this feeling that the past was better; there were more jobs, better purchasing power, the economic crisis was managed in a better way.”
Political platforms
Arauz’s proposals include increasing taxes on transnational companies, reinstating public spending, strengthening the Central Bank, and refusing to comply with IMF austerity measures. He also promised to give $1,000 to one million Ecuadorian families who have suffered during the pandemic to stimulate the local economy.
For his part, Lasso, 65, has promised to crack down on corruption – a nod to Correa and the current Moreno government – and proposed an international anti-corruption commission. This is his third time running for president, including in 2017 when he lost by a narrow margin to Moreno.
Lasso has tried to position himself as distinct from the last two governments, blaming the country’s current economic crisis on the last 14 years of bad governance, said Machado.
In his current campaign, Lasso has promised to cut taxes and create one million jobs by attracting international investment, particularly in oil and mining. He also said he supports flexible work contracts, where wages and hours can be negotiated, to allow employers to hire more workers.
Perez, 51, of Pachakutik, positions himself as part of the “Ecological Left” and is a firm critic of both established right-wing politicians and Correismo. He is also a strong advocate of transitioning into a post-extractive economy and renegotiating the country’s external debt with China and the IMF.
Critics say it is unclear how he will create jobs or a stable national economy without the extractive sector, which accounts for almost nine percent of Ecuador’s GDP.
Carlos Mazabanda, Ecuador field coordinator for environmental group Amazon Watch, said Perez’s anti-mining activism has “played an important role” in defending the environment, but there is concern about whether he could maintain that stance in office in the face of a powerful mining lobby.
But Perez is supported by the many in the Indigenous community, which numbers some 1.1 million people, and environmentalists as he is the only candidate to speak at length about environmental issues and the need to address climate change.
Voting mandatory
Beyond that, Leon said climate change and human rights were “completely absent” from debates leading up to the vote, with some candidates even showing “total ignorance of international human rights agreements”.
Most candidates said women’s rights were important, but a discussion on reproductive rights – which have come under increasing attention after Argentina legalised abortion in December – was also noticeably missing from the campaign.
A plan to address regional migration, as hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have sought refuge in Ecuador, also remains unclear, as most presidential candidates only spoke about the issue through a public security lens.
Still, more than 13 million people are registered to vote – and voting is mandatory in Ecuador, with anyone who does not turn in a ballot facing a fine of 10 percent of the minimum monthly wage ($40).
People must vote in person, following public health guidelines such as wearing a mask, to prevent the potential spread of the coronavirus.
During the 2017 elections, the abstention rate reached 17 percent and Machado said if voting was not mandatory, the abstention rate this year would be “extremely high” this time around, as well. “There is a lot of disbelief felt towards the proposals of politicians in general,” he said.
Human noise pollution can prevent clownfish from finding their native coral reefs. (photo: Getty)
Human Noise Pollution Is Harming Ocean Creatures
Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Rosane writes: "Humans are changing the way the ocean sounds, and it is having a profound impact on marine life."
A major new literature review published in Science on Thursday found that noise from vessels, sonar, seismic surveys and construction can damage marine animals' hearing, change their behaviors and, in some cases, threaten their ability to survive.
"When people think of threats facing the ocean, we often think of climate change, plastics and overfishing," Neil Hammerschlag, a University of Miami marine ecologist who was not involved with the paper, told The Associated Press. "But noise pollution is another essential thing we need to be monitoring."
Sound is key to how ocean animals communicate with each other and navigate their environments. Underwater, it is only possible to see for tens of yards and to detect a chemical signal from hundreds of yards away, The New York Times explained. Sound, on the other hand, can travel thousands of miles, which is why many marine creatures have evolved to detect and emit it.
However, the singing of whales and groaning of coral reefs contribute to an underwater soundscape that is significantly changing because of human activity. To better understand, a 25-author research team reviewed more than 10,000 papers on the topic.
For one, the researchers wrote, overfishing and habitat loss have decreased the sounds generated by ocean life.
"[T]hose voices are gone," Carlos Duarte, study lead author and Red Sea Research Center marine ecologist, told The Associated Press.
The climate crisis is also altering sounds from geophysical sources such as sea ice and storms, the study found.
Then there is the noise humans have added through shipping traffic, fossil fuel exploration and even intentional attempts at deterrence. Evidence shows that these noises harm marine mammals, but several studies show that they impact fish, invertebrates, sea birds and reptiles as well.
For example, salmon farms in British Columbia's Broughton Archipelago installed sonic harassment devices to keep seals from eating the fish, The New York Times reported. This had the unintended consequence of driving away killer whales until the devices were removed.
Another example are clownfish, who rely on sounds to guide them back to the coral reefs where they were born, after drifting on the open ocean as larvae. But human-caused noise can now obscure the cracking and snapping of coral, forcing some clownfish to drift forever.
"The soundtrack of home is now hard to hear, and in many cases has disappeared," Duarte told The New York Times.
While this is distressing, the good news is that something can be done about it. Noise is what is known as point-source pollution, the study explained, meaning you can identify the place or activity that is causing the problem and remove it, reversing its effects.
"In theory, you can reduce or turn off sound immediately — it's not like plastics or climate change, which are much harder to undo," Francis Juanes, study coauthor and University of Victoria ecologist, told The Associated Press.
Despite this, noise is not mentioned in the UN's Law of the Sea B.B.N.J. agreement or its 14th sustainable development goal, which focuses on ocean life, The New York Times reported. Researchers hope that their work will inspire policy makers to take ocean noise seriously and deploy already available solutions.
"Slow down, move the shipping lane, avoid sensitive areas, change propellers," Steve Simpson, study co-author and University of Exeter marine biologist, told The New York Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.