21 May 22
Serious Fund-Raising, Here and Now
Reader Supported News is surviving and maintaining services in the most challenging fundraising environment our organization has ever seen. But just barely. Today we ask for the support of all RSN readers who can afford to give. This will be a good fund-raiser.
Thanks to all in advance.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
21 May 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
There is a need to ensure that Ukraine is “permanently able to defend itself”, and this also applies to other “vulnerable states” such as Moldova, which is not a Nato member – she added.
Russia “absolutely” poses a security threat to Moldova, she said, as Vladimir Putin “has been clear about his ambitions to create a greater Russia.”She told The Telegraph: “What we’re working on at the moment is a joint commission with Ukraine and Poland on upgrading Ukrainian defences to Nato standard.”
When asked whether she wants to see the West provide weaponry and intelligence to Moldova, Ms Truss said: “I would want to see Moldova equipped to Nato standard. This is a discussion we’re having with our allies.”
Key Points
- Moscow claims to take full control of Mariupol after three-month siege
- Situation in Ukraine’s Donbas is ‘hell’, says Zelensky
- Russia using food as weapon in Ukraine - Antony Blinken
- Putin is surrounded by doctors and takes breaks during meetings for treatment, claims ex-British spy
Russia trying to destroy Severodonetsk city, says local offical
08:30 , Lamiat Sabin
Russia has apparently launched a major attack to seize the last remaining Ukrainian-held territory in Luhansk.
Luhansk, in southeastern Ukraine, is one of two provinces – together with Donetsk – that Moscow proclaims as independent states.
Serhiy Gaidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said in a social media post early this morning that Russia was trying to destroy the city of Severodonetsk and that there has been fighting on the outskirts of the city.
“Shelling continues from morning to the evening and also throughout the night,” he said in a video post on the Telegram messaging app.
Capturing Luhansk and Donetsk provinces would allow Moscow to claim victory after announcing last month that this has been its current objective. Russia changed its plan after it had failed to capture Kyiv.
“This will be the critical next few weeks of the conflict,” said Mathieu Boulegue, an expert at London’s Chatham House think tank. “And it depends on how effective they are at conquering Severodonetsk and the lands across it.”
Russia ‘could be experiencing shortage of drones’ – MoD
08:00 , Lamiat Sabin
Russia is likely experiencing a shortage of appropriate reconnaissance Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) said.
The drones are used to identify targets to be struck by combat jets or artillery.
The shortage is exacerbated by limitations in its domestic manufacturing capacity resulting from worldwide sanctions imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine, the MoD’s report said.
If Russia continues to lose UAVs at current rate, Russian forces’ ability to garner intelligence and conduct surveillance reconnaissance will be further degraded, it adds.
Finland cut-off from Russian gas supply, Gazprom confirms
07:30 , Lamiat Sabin
Russia’s Gazprom has confirmed that it had cut-off gas exports to neighbouring Finland.
Earlier, Finnish system operator Gasgrid Finland said: “Gas imports through Imatra entry point have been stopped.”
It came after Gazprom Export has demanded that European countries pay for Russian gas supplies in roubles because of sanctions imposed over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine – which Finland has refused to do so.
Moody's cuts Ukraine's debt rating
06:49 , Sravasti Dasgupta
Moody’s on Friday downgraded Ukraine’s foreign currency sovereign credit rating to “Caa3” from “Caa2”.
The ratings agency cited increased risks to the government’s “debt sustainability” following Russia’s invasion.
“While Ukraine is benefiting from large commitments of international financial support, helping to mitigate immediate liquidity risks, the resulting significant rise in government debt is likely to prove unsustainable over the medium term,” it said in a statement.
It added that it expects the war in Ukraine to be more prolonged than initially assumed and forecasts that the country’s real gross domestic product (GDP) would shrink by about 35 per cent in 2022.
Russia halts gas flow to Finland
06:22 , Sravasti Dasgupta
Russia’s state energy giant Gazprom has stopped exporting natural gas to Finland.
“Gas imports through Imatra entry point have been stopped,” Gasgrid Finland said in a statement.
The Finnish gas system operator said that the latest escalation comes amid an energy payments dispute with Western nations.
Moscow said it took the decision because Finland had refused to pay for gas in roubles, something the Putin regime demanded after western sanctions were imposed.
Fedir, 85, stops to drink vodka while clearing debris from his war-damaged home in the village of Zalissya, northeast of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Wednesday, May 18, 2022. (photo: Ivor Prickett/NYT)
School official Iryna Homenko walks in the hall of a school damaged by an airstrike from Russian forces in Chernihiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 13, 2022. (photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP)
Amid relentless bombing, she’d opened School 21 in Chernihiv as a shelter to frightened families. They painted the word “children” in big, bold letters on the windows, hoping that Russian forces would see it and spare them. The bombs fell anyway.
Though she didn’t know it yet, 70 children she’d ordered to shelter in the basement would survive the blast. But at least nine people, including one of her students — a 13-year-old boy — would not.
“Why schools? I cannot comprehend their motivation,” she said. “It is painful to realize how many friends of mine died … and how many children who remained alone without parents, got traumatized. They will remember it all their life and will pass their stories to the next generation.”
This story is part of an ongoing investigation from The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and an upcoming documentary.
The Ukrainian government says Russia has shelled more than 1,000 schools, destroying 95. On May 7, a bomb flattened a school in the eastern village of Bilohorivka, which, like School No. 21 in Chernihiv, was being used a shelter. As many as 60 people were feared dead.
Intentionally attacking schools and other civilian infrastructure is a war crime. Experts say wide-scale wreckage can be used as evidence of Russian intent, and to refute claims that schools were simply collateral damage.
But the destruction of hundreds of schools is about more than toppling buildings and maiming bodies, according to experts, to teachers and to others who have survived conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, in Syria and beyond. It hinders a nation’s ability to rebound after the fighting stops, injuring entire generations and dashing a country’s hope for the future.
In the nearly three months since Russia invaded Ukraine, The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” have independently verified 57 schools that were destroyed or damaged in a manner that indicates a possible war crime. The accounting likely represents just a fraction of potential war crimes committed during the conflict and the list is updated daily.
In Chernihiv alone, the city council said only seven of the city’s 35 schools were unscathed. Three were reduced to rubble.
The International Criminal Court, prosecutors from across the globe and Ukraine’s prosecutor general are investigating more than 8,000 reports of potential war crimes in Ukraine involving 500 suspects. Many are accused of aiming deliberately at civilian structures like hospitals, shelters and residential neighborhoods.
Targeting schools — spaces designed as havens for children to grow, learn and make friends — is particularly harmful, transforming the architecture of childhood into something violent and dangerous: a place that inspires fear.
A geography teacher, Elena Kudrik, lay dead on the floor of School 50 in the eastern Ukrainian town of Gorlovka. Amid the wreckage surrounding her were books and papers, smeared in blood. In the corner, another lifeless body — Elena Ivanova, the assistant headmaster— slumped over in an office chair, a gaping wound torn into her side.
“It’s a tragedy for us ... It’s a tragedy for the children,” said school director Sergey But, standing outside the brick building shortly after the attack. Shards of broken glass and rubble were sprayed across the concrete, where smiling children once flew kites and posed for photos with friends.
A few kilometers away, at the Sonechko pre-school in the city of Okhtyrka, a cluster bomb destroyed a kindergarten, killing a child. Outside the entrance, two more bodies lay in pools of blood.
Valentina Grusha teaches in Kyiv province, where she has worked for 35 years, most recently as a district administrator and foreign literature instructor. Russian troops invaded her village of Ivankiv just as school officials had begun preparations for war. On Feb. 24, Russian forces driving toward Kyiv fatally shot a child and his father there, she said.
“There was no more schooling,” she said. “We called all the leaders and stopped instruction because the war started. And then there were 36 days of occupation.”
They also shelled and destroyed schools in many nearby villages, she said. Kindergarten buildings were shattered by shrapnel and machine-gun fire.
Despite the widespread damage and destruction to educational infrastructure, war crimes experts say proving an attacking military’s intent to target individual schools is difficult. Russian officials deny targeting civilian structures, and local media reports in Russian-held Gorlovka alleged Ukrainian forces trying to recapture the area were to blame for the blast that killed the two teachers there.
But the effects of the destruction are indisputable.
“When I start talking to the directors of destroyed and robbed institutions, they are very worried, crying, telling with pain and regret,” Grusha said. “It’s part of their lives. And now the school is a ruin that stands in the center of the village and reminds of those terrible air raids and bombings.”
UNICEF communications director Toby Fricker, who is currently in Ukraine, agreed. “School is often the heart of the community in many places, and that is so central to everyday life.”
Teachers and students who have lived through other conflicts say the destruction of schools in their countries damaged an entire generation.
Syrian teacher Abdulkafi Alhamdo still thinks about the children’s drawings soaked in blood, littered across the floor of a schoolhouse in Aleppo. It had been attacked during the Civil War there in 2014. The teachers and children had been preparing for an art exhibit featuring student work depicting life during wartime.
The blast killed 19 people, including at least 10 children, the AP reported at the time. But it’s the survivors who linger in Alhamdo’s memory.
“I understood in (their) eyes that they wouldn’t go to school anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t only affect the kids who were running away, with shock and trauma. It affects all kids who heard about the massacre. How can they go back to school? You are not only targeting a school, you’re targeting a generation.”
Jasminko Halilovic was only 6 years old when Sarajevo, in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina, was besieged. Now, 30 years after the Bosnian war ended, he and his peers are the ones still picking up the pieces.
Halilovic went to school in a cellar, as many Ukrainian children have done. Desperately chasing safety, the teachers and students moved from basement to basement, leaning chalkboards on chairs instead of hanging them walls.
Halilovic, now 34, founded the War Childhood Museum, which catalogs the stories and objects of children in conflict around the world. He was working in Ukraine with children displaced by Russia’s 2014 invasion of the Donbas region when the current war began. He had to evacuate his staff and leave the country.
“Once the fighting ends, the new fight will start. To rebuild cities. To rebuild schools and infrastructure, and to rebuild society. And to heal. And to heal is the most difficult,” he said.
Alhamdo said he saw firsthand how the trauma of war influenced the development of children growing up in Aleppo. Instilling fear, anger and a sense of hopelessness is part of the enemy strategy, he said. Some became withdrawn, he said, and others violent.
“When they see their school destroyed, do you know how many dreams have been destroyed? Do you think anybody would believe in peace and love and beauty when the place that taught them about these things has been destroyed?” he said.
Alhamdo stayed in Aleppo and taught children in basements, apartments, anywhere he could, for years. Continuing to teach in spite of war, he said, is an act of defiance.
“I’m not fighting on the front lines,” he said. “I’m fighting with my kids.”
After the attack on School 50 in Gorlovka, shattered glass from blown-out windows littered the classrooms and hallways and the street outside. The floors were covered in dust and debris: cracked ceiling beams, slabs of drywall, a television that crashed down from the wall. A cell phone sat on the desk next to where one of the teachers was killed.
In Ukraine, some schools still standing have become makeshift shelters for people whose homes were destroyed by shelling and mortar fire.
What often complicates war crimes prosecutions for attacks on civilian buildings is that large facilities like schools are sometimes repurposed for military use during war. If a civilian building is being used militarily, it is a legitimate wartime target, said David Bosco, a professor of international relations at Indiana University whose research focuses on war crimes and the International Criminal Court.
The key for prosecutors, then, will be to show that there was a pattern by the Russians of targeting schools and other civilian buildings nationwide as a concerted military strategy, Bosco said.
“The more you can show a pattern, then the stronger the case becomes that this was really a policy of not discriminating between military and civilian facilities,” Bosco said. “(Schools are) a place where children are supposed to feel safe, a second home. Obviously shattering that and in essence attacking the next generation. That’s very real. It has a huge impact.”
As the war grinds on, more than half of Ukraine’s children have been displaced.
In Kharkiv, which has undergone relentless shelling, children’s drawings are taped to the walls of an underground subway station that has become not only a family shelter but also a makeshift school. Primary school-age children gather around a table for history and art lessons.
“It helps to support them mentally,” said teacher Valeriy Leiko. In part thanks to the lessons, he said, “They feel that someone loves them.”
Millions of kids are continuing to go to school online. The international aid group Save the Children said it is working with the government to establish remote learning programs for students at 50 schools. UNICEF is also trying to help with online instruction.
“Educating every child is essential to preventing grave violations of their rights,” the group said in a statement to the AP.
On April 2, Grusha’s community outside Kyiv began a slow reemergence. They are still raking and sweeping debris from schools and kindergartens that were damaged but not destroyed, she said, and taking stock of what’s left. They started distance learning classes, and planned to relocate children whose schools were destroyed to others close by.
Even with war still raging, there is a return to normal life including schooling, she said.
But Levchenko, who was in Kyiv in early May to undergo surgery for her injuries, said the emotional damage done to so many children who have experienced and witnessed such immense suffering may never be fully repaired.
“It will take so much time for people and kids to recover from what they have lived,” she said. The kids, she said, are “staying underground without sun, shivering from siren sounds and anxiety.”
“It has a tremendously negative impact. Kids will remember this all their life.”
People walk near a mural depicting a Cuban flag in Havana. (photo: CNN)
US officials have announced plans to ease tough sanctions imposed on Cuba by former President Donald Trump.
The processing of US visas for Cubans will also be speeded up.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said the move would allow Cuban citizens to pursue a life free from "government oppression".
The loosening of sanctions will see a cap on family remittances - funds sent by migrants in the US to family members in Cuba - removed. Previously migrants were prevented from sending more than $1,000 (£811) every three months.
Donations to non-family members will also be permitted under the new plans.
But US officials emphasised that they will seek to ensure such payments don't reach "those who perpetrate human rights abuses" by using civilian "electronic payment processors".
They also said that no bodies will be removed from the Cuba Restricted List, a State Department register of companies linked to the communist government in Havana with whom US citizens are barred from doing business.
A Biden administration official told CBS News that more charter and commercial flights will be made available to Havana, US consular services on the island will be expanded and family reunification programmes will be relaunched.
After an easing of tensions under former President Barack Obama, Mr Trump announced a range of sanctions on the Cuban government in 2017.
His administration slashed visa processing, restricted remittances and increased hurdles for US citizens seeking to travel to Cuba for any reason other than family visits.
At the time, Mr Trump cited human rights concerns as the reason for rolling back agreements made by the Obama administration and condemned his predecessor for doing a deal with the country's "brutal" government.
Cuba's foreign minister welcomed the announcement and said the easing of restrictions marked "a small step in the right direction".
But Bruno Rodriguez added that the policy does "not modify the embargo" in place since 1962 and argued that "neither the objectives nor the main instruments of the United States' policy against Cuba, which is a failure, are changing".
Meanwhile, a senior member of Mr Biden's Democratic party has condemned the move.
Senator Bob Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced the lifting of restrictions, saying that the Cuban regime has continued "its ruthless persecution of countless Cubans from all walks of life".
In a statement issued on Monday night, Mr Menendez said the easing of travel restrictions "risks sending the wrong message to the wrong people, at the wrong time and for all the wrong reasons".
"Those who still believe that increasing travel will breed democracy in Cuba are simply in a state of denial. For decades, the world has been travelling to Cuba and nothing has changed," he added.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio also criticised the policy and said it represented "the first steps back to the failed Obama policies on Cuba".
The news will come as relief for thousands of Cubans who are desperate to see their families in Florida and elsewhere in the US.
The island is experiencing perhaps its most acute exodus since the Cold War, with many travelling to Nicaragua and then up via Central America to the US border with Mexico.
After 2016, the Trump Administration implemented a whole raft of new economic sanctions on the communist-run island, following the easing of the same rules by President Obama.
Combined with the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic and economic mismanagement by the state, the economy in Cuba has been in dire straits in recent years.
These changes amount to the White House's first step towards some form of re-normalisation of relations with Cuba.
Abortion rights supporters rally at the state Capitol in Oklahoma City, May 3, 2022. (photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP)
The state’s new ban is the most extreme in the country, going further than Texas’s notorious S.B. 8 by banning abortion after fertilization.
“There’s no denying: This is a very dark day, and unfortunately, dark days are ahead,” Rabia Muqaddam, senior legal counsel with the Center for Reproductive Rights, said on a press call.
The latest attack on abortion in Oklahoma comes on the heels of Politico’s publication of a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito in a pending Mississippi case that would topple the constitutional right to abortion first acknowledged in Roe v. Wade. The final opinion in that case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, is expected late next month.
The new Oklahoma ban is modeled after the notorious Texas Senate Bill 8, which banned abortion after six weeks, long before many people even know they’re pregnant. Texas lawmakers sought to shield their law from court challenges by outsourcing its enforcement to private individuals as opposed to a state actor like the attorney general. The law allows literally anyone to bring a private civil suit against any health care provider they believe may have violated the ban or person they believe may have aided or abetted a patient seeking an abortion after six weeks. That could include a friend or family member who lends a patient money or drives them to a clinic. S.B. 8 also allows individuals to sue those who “intend” to take action that might violate the law.
Although S.B. 8 is blatantly unconstitutional under current law, which protects the right to abortion up until fetal viability, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene, allowing Texas’s ban to take effect last fall. The court’s decision to look the other way has unmoored states from adhering to the rule of law, prompting a host of copycat legislation, including Oklahoma’s latest and most extreme House Bill 4327.
Oklahoma’s ban goes further than Texas’s. Not only does it outlaw all abortion, but it also attempts to strip Oklahoma’s state courts from any jurisdiction to consider whether the law violates state constitutional protections. That’s important because the state’s constitution has been interpreted as granting wide privacy protections, and state courts have repeatedly blocked various abortion restrictions from taking effect.
The bill also contains an emergency clause that would allow it to take effect immediately, which would deliver a crushing blow to abortion access across the region. When S.B. 8 took effect last September, Texas patients flooded into Oklahoma and the surrounding states in search of care. That in turn has displaced home-state patients, delayed appointments, and forced more people to seek care farther from home. If Oklahoma lawmakers are successful in shutting down access altogether — even if only temporarily — the consequences will reverberate across the region’s increasingly stretched network of providers.
Oklahoma lawmakers have long pushed the envelope in their efforts to legislate abortion out of existence. Just this year, they’ve passed three separate bans on abortion. In addition to H.B. 4327, lawmakers passed a ban in April that would criminalize abortion and subject providers to prison time. That measure, slated to take effect in August, contains an exception in the case of a medical emergency, defined in part as “a condition which cannot be remedied by delivery of the child.” Weeks later, lawmakers passed a six-week copycat ban, Senate Bill 1503, which also strips state courts of jurisdiction to consider legal challenges. The ban includes an exception for a medical emergency, but none for pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. (The newest ban, H.B. 4327, does include a rape or incest exception, but only if the assault has been reported to police.) Stitt readily signed the first two bills into law. The six-week ban took effect May 3.
During the April signing ceremony for the criminalization bill, Stitt was asked what Oklahoma could do to “deal with” all the Texans coming to the state in search of care. “You mean have Highway Patrol arrest the Texans that come across our border?” he joked as laughter broke out in the room. “This bill will take care of that. We certainly don’t want Texans coming up to Oklahoma.”
Dr. Iman Alsaden, medical director for Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which provides abortion services in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Kansas, was anything but amused during the call after H.B. 4327 passed. “The fact that Oklahoma politicians are proud of passing today’s total abortion ban is an embarrassment to our state,” she said. “Today’s actions make clear that our government is not interested in keeping us safe or healthy. They are interested in surveilling and criminalizing our communities.”
Oklahoma’s passage of multiple bans has created confusion. In addition to the three passed this year, the state already had a trigger law on the books that would ban abortion if Roe is overturned. Two additional bans were passed in 2021, both of which are currently in litigation. The Oklahoma Supreme Court declined to block the six-week copycat law from taking immediate effect in May, but that measure is also the subject of pending litigation in the lower courts. When H.B. 4327 is signed, Muqaddam said, it will be added to the growing pile of legal challenges.
“The Oklahoma Legislature … repeatedly enacts overlapping laws in an insane way that makes no sense,” Muqaddam said. “There is no aspect of what is happening with these abortion bans in Oklahoma that is normal. It is truly insane.”
Which of Oklahoma’s bans might be the controlling law should the U.S. Supreme Court strike down Roe as expected remains to be seen. The situation has also confused patients, who have been calling clinics wondering if abortion is still legal. “It is,” said Emily Wales, interim president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, “but it has never been more in danger.” Still, providers and advocates said they will continue to do everything possible to help patients navigate their way to care.
“There’s really no rhyme or reason” to how Oklahoma is proceeding, Muqaddam said, “other than a radical attempt to just confuse people, create chaos, and wreak as much havoc as they can possibly do on people who are seeking abortion and the providers who provide it.”
People attend a rally for Gustavo Petro in Cali, Colombia. He has developed a following not seen in generations for a leftist candidate. (photo: Ernesto Guzmán Jr./EPA)
Left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro is still leading the polls ahead of this month’s Colombian presidential election. If he succeeds, Petro will have to overcome the dark legacy of Colombia’s hard-right oligarchy and a shameful history of US intervention.
While Petro’s best polling scores would still not be high enough for him to avoid a second-round runoff on June 19, the fact that he is the clear front-runner is remarkable enough in itself. Twenty years ago, when the hard-right politician and steadfast US ally Álvaro Uribe won the presidency, it was unthinkable that the Colombian left might gain power through elections.
What has changed in the meantime, and what implications might a left-wing victory in the upcoming election have for US policy toward Colombia and Latin America more broadly?
Colombia’s Long War
The answer lies in a combination of internal and external factors, from the waning influence of the United States to Petro’s rising popularity during the current president Iván Duque’s term in office since 2018. These developments have transformed a national political landscape long dominated by Álvaro Uribe, both in and out of office.
In 2016, Uribe’s successor, Juan Manuel Santos, and the largest leftist rebel army, the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), signed a historic peace agreement to end a decades-long civil war. The combination of civil conflict and the illicit drug economy had long dominated political and electoral debate in Colombia. It was extremely difficult for the Left to participate peacefully in national politics due to the constant threat of mass violence and murder at the hands of state forces and right-wing paramilitaries.
From the late 1990s, a succession of presidents who ranged from center-right to hard-right in their politics held office: Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002), Uribe (2002–10), Santos (2010–18), and most recently Duque (2018–22). They focused to varying but significant degrees on the threat of the FARC and Colombia’s drug cartels, often depicting the two as interchangeable forces, while generally neglecting the widespread poverty and inequality that helped to sustain both guerrilla insurgency and the drug trade.
These administrations also routinely denied or downplayed the far greater human rights threat that the military and paramilitaries posed under their watch to large segments of the population who the national security state deemed to be subversive. Those at greatest risk of such violence included the rural and urban poor, trade unionists, indigenous people and Afro-Colombians, and those associated with the Left.
Pastrana, Clinton, and Plan Colombia
In 1998, Andrés Pastrana’s campaign centered on three main points: fighting drug cartels, improving Colombian-US relations after tensions under the previous government of Ernesto Samper (1994–98), and negotiating with the FARC. Upon election, Pastrana sought international financial support for his ambitious agenda, although the United States remained his principal ally.
According to then senator Joseph Biden’s report on illegal drugs, published in May 2000, Colombia was “the source of up to 75 percent of the world’s processed cocaine.” Biden’s report also warned that coca production was growing dramatically: “In the last four years, net coca cultivation has more than doubled in terms of area, from 51,000 hectares in 1995 to 122,500 hectares in 1999,” far more than in Peru and Bolivia.
Despite Biden’s characterization of Colombia as a drug-infested nation, Pastrana did not initially propose a militarized solution to the drug issue or the armed conflict. Instead, he pursued negotiations with the FARC and proposed an economic plan for peasants to substitute other types of crops for coca leaves. Pastrana’s original plan, published in May 1999, did not even mention drug trafficking, military aid, or fumigation. Its primary focus was on achieving peace and reducing the perpetual crime and violence that had made Colombia one of the world’s most dangerous countries.
However, the Bill Clinton administration would only support Pastrana’s request for aid in return for a complete transformation of his plan. In 2000, when both governments unveiled Plan Colombia, it had little in common with Pastrana’s previous blueprint. The US-mandated changes were so extensive that the first draft of Plan Colombia was released only in English, with the Spanish version materializing months later. The new program eliminated any reference to rural poverty as a cause of illegal crop cultivation for drug production.
The primary purpose of Clinton’s Plan Colombia was to militarize drug policy. Biden’s report to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations requested billions in funding for the project:
Helping Colombia is squarely in America’s national interest. It is the source of many of the drugs poisoning our people. It is not some far-off land with which the United States shares little in common. It is an established democracy in America’s backyard — just a few hours by air from Miami.
The reference to “our people” implicitly alluded to middle- and upper-class whites in the United States — the demographic most responsible for driving demand for drugs.
In the more than fifty pages of Biden’s report, there were only two that acknowledged the existence of “a dire human rights situation in Colombia,” without specifying clear accountability measures that would link US aid to minimum human rights standards.
The Rise of Uribe
Several years of tense negotiations between the Pastrana administration and the FARC unfolded in this context of US-led militarization and ultimately ended in failure. A deep economic crisis triggered by a domestic mortgage crisis and an external currency-exchange crisis originating in Asia aggravated Colombia’s already volatile sociopolitical situation. The economic crisis in 1999 caused Colombian GDP to fall by 4.2 percent — one of the worst declines of the twentieth century.
Álvaro Uribe ran for the presidency soon after the breakdown of the peace process with the FARC. He blamed the guerrillas for the failure of negotiations — and for the economic crisis — campaigning on the slogan “Firm Hand, Big Heart” (Mano firme, corazón grande). Popular frustration over the country’s deteriorating economic and security conditions helped Uribe project an image of national patriarch and savior. Once in office, he rejected the idea of further negotiations, seeking to defeat the FARC militarily.
Uribe’s hard-right turn and branding of the FARC as terrorists dovetailed with the second Bush administration’s “war on terror” after 9/11. Colombia bucked the continental “Pink Tide” trend of left-of-center presidents winning elections in Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia, all of which resisted US hegemony and neoliberal economic policies in various ways during the 2000s. Congress approved an additional multibillion-dollar infusion at the request of the George W. Bush administration. US military aid upgraded the Colombian army’s weapon and intelligence capabilities so that it could take the offensive in vast FARC-controlled areas.
A high guerrilla body count was the principal metric of “success” for the Colombian army and the right-wing paramilitaries, who frequently worked together. They presented every combat death of a guerrillero as proof that the army was wresting control of territory away from the FARC. In their eager pursuit of high body counts, many Colombian soldiers assassinated innocent civilians from poor rural and urban areas and then disguised them as guerrilleros killed in combat. As former army major Gustavo Soto recently confessed, “Arrests did not matter, only deaths.”
This strategy of producing “false positives” fostered the macabre notion that anyone sympathizing with the FARC — or more likely, accused of sympathizing — deserved to die. Uribe’s government either enabled or actively aided and abetted such egregious human rights violations, while consistently associating left-of-center politicians, activists, and trade unionists with the FARC. This put their lives at grave risk.
Gustavo Petro, then a senator in the Colombian Congress, was one of those targeted in this manner. Uribe referred to Petro as a “terrorist wearing civilian clothes” because he fearlessly denounced the military escalation, fueled by Plan Colombia, that had turned Colombia into a human rights disaster zone.
Santos and the Peace Process
It is important to acknowledge that Uribe’s reelection as president in 2006 did not rest upon fear and violence alone. Nor can we explain the survival of Uribismo as a potent political force after he left office in such terms. Substantial segments of the Colombian population in both rural and urban areas felt safer because of Uribe’s hard-line policies. At the same time, they benefited from a continentwide economic boom fueled by high commodity prices that were driven in part by high Chinese demand.
As a result, Juan Manuel Santos, who had served in Uribe’s government, promised continuity when he ran for president in the 2010 election. However, Santos broke with Uribe after taking office and begin to seek a negotiated solution to the civil war. He conducted secret talks with the FARC that were hosted by Venezuela and Cuba and brokered at the end by the Barack Obama administration.
The divergence between Santos and Uribe partly stemmed from their very different social backgrounds. Santos belonged to a traditional family of politicians representing a more socially progressive and educated urban upper-class layer. In contrast, Uribe cast himself as an outsider to this class: he was aligned with the rural upper class of landowners who represented more conservative social values.
Once in power, Santos managed to garner significant political support without Uribe’s backing, since his long experience in politics helped him to forge alliances with opposing political parties. He successfully stood for reelection in 2014 against the Uribe-backed right-wing candidate, Óscar Iván Zuluaga.
Santos also differed from Uribe by decreasing dependence on US aid and diversifying Colombia’s sources of foreign aid, focusing less on the military and more on socioeconomic development. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama supported this more moderate approach. However, this change in US policy was mostly tactical and limited to Colombia during Obama’s first term.
Elsewhere in the region, Obama largely continued US bipartisan imperialist business as usual, condoning the 2009 coup in Honduras that ousted its elected left-wing president, Manuel Zelaya. He also continued Bush’s sanctions on Venezuela under the democratically elected leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, supposedly imposed because of human rights violations that were, at the time, much less severe than those in US ally Colombia.
Duque’s Double Game
Uribe’s protégé Iván Duque was elected president in 2018 at a time of acute social discontent and rising opposition to Santos. Despite the achievements of Santos in negotiating the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC and improving national economic and social indicators, his lack of charisma limited his ability to expand his political base.
Indeed, when Santos called a popular referendum on the peace agreement in October 2016, it was narrowly defeated on a low turnout of just over 37 percent after a “No” campaign that channeled the international discourse of right-wing populism. Santos made some minor alterations to the agreement and pressed ahead without calling a second referendum.
Santos’s approval rating also suffered from his tax reforms targeting the upper-middle classes. With Uribe’s support, Duque devised the slogan “lower taxes and higher wages.” Ironically, his administration would later provoke massive demonstrations in spring 2021 after Duque proposed to increase taxes amid the severe economic crisis triggered by COVID-19.
As a candidate, Duque tried to reconcile the interests of the upper rural and urban classes by presenting himself as an educated, well-mannered, and pragmatic politician. He also benefited electorally when Sergio Fajardo, the centrist candidate who placed third in the first round of the 2018 election, urged his supporters to cast blank votes in the second-round runoff between Gustavo Petro and Duque. This call hurt Petro far more than it did Duque.
Nevertheless, Duque’s victory was electorally underwhelming. Once in power, he found himself between a rock and a hard place when it came to the peace process and other international commitments. On the one hand, Duque’s most fervent supporters actively opposed the agreement with the FARC, and he could not antagonize them. On the other hand, the peace agreement was both a national and international one to which subsequent Colombian presidents, regardless of their ideology, were legally bound.
Foreign aid greatly depended on Colombia meeting its international commitments. Trying to thread the delicate needle between the domestic and international spheres, Duque championed the peace process abroad, claiming to lead a progressive government that was also committed to mitigating climate change in accordance with the Paris Climate Accord of 2015 and subsequent global climate negotiations. On the home front, however, Duque changed his tune for his hard-right supporters, criticizing the peace agreement and promoting fracking and mining.
A Waning Force
Duque was constitutionally barred from seeking reelection this time around. The main candidate of the right, Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez, is unlikely to defeat a left-wing challenge once again spearheaded by Petro. In the past few years, despite the defeat of the referendum and Duque’s undermining of the peace agreement, the conflict with the FARC and the criminalization of the unarmed left have receded. These specters no longer scare the Colombian middle and upper classes as they did in decades past.
There have also been further revelations about the scale and scope of the “false positives” scandal. Last year, the special tribunal for peace estimated that the Colombian security forces had killed at least 6,402 civilians in this manner, primarily between 2002 and 2008. Last month, in exchange for lighter sentences, an army general and several officers publicly admitted to the families of 120 victims that they had committed crimes against humanity. “We assassinated innocent people: campesinos,” said Nestor Guillermo Gutiérrez, a former member of the Colombian army.
In addition to this scandal that has sullied the legacy of his mentor Uribe, Duque stoked up popular frustration through his unwillingness to alleviate high levels of unemployment and informality (particularly among young people), inequality, and poverty, all of which have been exacerbated by COVID-19. This contributed to the massive protests of 2021. Using the time-honored smear of conflating the protesters with the FARC and its sympathizers, Duque’s government cracked down harshly, and the national police killed dozens of protesters.
In spite of this, Joe Biden did not condemn Duque for weeks, let alone suspend any portion of the $450 million in aid earmarked for Colombia that year. There was a striking contrast with Biden’s immediate condemnation of a much less violent crackdown on similar protests that erupted in Cuba two months later, and which also received saturation coverage from US corporate media, unlike the events in Colombia. It was another example of the blatant double standards applied by Washington to right-wing and left-wing governments in Latin America.
Petro’s Challenge
Petro’s campaign is promising to address the social demands that Duque refused to deal with. It is also highlighting other issues that are important to a younger generation of Colombians, such as environmental protection and support for refugees from Venezuela and elsewhere. For the first time in decades, the obsessive focus of the Colombian right on the FARC and the drug war is no longer a winning political and electoral approach.
However, there are many reasons to be wary about whether Petro, in the likely event he is elected, can carry out his ambitious agenda, even with a Democrat in the White House. While Biden may not seek to actively undermine the first elected left-wing president in one of Latin America’s largest countries, that does not mean he will be willing to fundamentally change the militarized framework of US-Colombian relations. Indeed, Biden has a long history of supporting that framework.
Moreover, polls suggest that the Republican Party will sweep the midterm congressional elections this fall. The Republicans have wide connections with extreme-right forces in Latin America and have sought to emulate their authoritarian tactics in challenging Biden’s election with groundless claims of electoral fraud.
Confronted with this political context, Biden will probably be less willing to move US foreign policy in a more progressive direction lest he be criticized as “soft on Communism.” After all, even after the Democratic victory of 2020 in both Congress and the White House, Biden broke his campaign pledge to change Donald Trump’s hard-line policies towards Cuba and even strengthened the sanctions, despite the humanitarian crisis sparked by COVID-19. (An even more dire situation exists in Venezuela, although in the latter case, Biden did not promise during his campaign to change Trump’s policy.)
No matter how Biden is going to respond to Petro’s likely victory, the latter’s campaign promises to implement progressive social reforms — reducing inequality, expanding access to education and health care, combating climate change — that would help address the long-neglected needs of the majority of Colombians. Yet however weakened Colombia’s hard right may now be in comparison to earlier periods, it still casts a long, dark shadow over the current political landscape. A large part of Colombia’s population fears the kind of progressive changes that the country’s first left-wing government would strive to bring about and will vehemently resist those reforms if Petro becomes president.
Emergency crews battle a wildfire in Texas. (photo: Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
The Mesquite Heat Fire prompted evacuations and burned more than 50 homes, officials said.
NBC affiliate KRBC of Abilene reported the Mesquite Heat Fire in Taylor County had burned 50 or 60 homes as of midday Thursday. The fire was only 5 percent contained.
Abilene Mayor Anthony Williams provided the number of affected homes Thursday morning on Facebook Live. He said the number of burned homes was just an estimate, the station reported.
The wildfire, which ignited Tuesday, took a turn for the worse, the Taylor County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement Wednesday. The fire was 30 percent contained earlier in the week; however, as weather conditions worsened, it grew to over 9,000 acres, and containment dwindled to only 5 percent as of Thursday afternoon.
The county judge, or chief executive, signed a declaration of disaster Wednesday, citing several areas in the county where residents needed to evacuate, including the town of Buffalo Gap.
Taylor County is in central Texas about 170 miles west of Fort Worth.
Authorities dropped fire retardant over flames Wednesday, but only in areas that were not populated, according to the sheriff’s office.
The county’s expo center has been providing shelter to livestock and domestic animals, the sheriff’s office said.
Elsewhere in the state, a Texas A&M Forest Service firefighter sustained multiple burn injuries Tuesday working the Coconut Fire in Wilbarger County, which is about 160 miles north of Taylor County, the forest service said.
That wildfire, which had burned 25,000 acres, was 20 percent contained Thursday, according to the Texas Wildfire Public Viewer, which tracks ongoing wildfires in the state.
According to the public viewer website, there were 11 wildfires in Texas as of Thursday afternoon.
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.