06 June 22
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As Kyiv district authorities investigate possible war crimes perpetrated by Russian troops, volunteers shoulder the harrowing task of exhuming bodies.
The men then stumble over the wet, uneven ground as they carry the body away from the grave. One of them begins to retch from the smell as they place the remains on the ground.
Forty-nine-year-old Bugeruk says he buried his mother, Lydia Chichko, on March 13 as heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces raged around Kyiv’s suburbs. He recalls the heavy thud of shelling that lit up the night sky as he dug her makeshift grave.
He says his 70-year-old mother, a woman with short auburn hair and a fair complexion, had been preparing lunch earlier in the afternoon when the area came under heavy shelling. He believes she must have heard explosions around her house and run towards the makeshift bomb shelter at the bottom of her garden.
She never made it. A mortar landed nearby, blowing out several windows and sending shrapnel 150 metres (492 feet) in all directions. Chichko died after being struck by a large shard of glass.
A month later, at Bugeruk’s request, her body is being exhumed as the Kyiv district authorities investigate possible war crimes perpetrated by Russian troops in which they allege civilians and infrastructure vital to their survival were deliberately attacked.
After Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, its troops occupied the area north of Kyiv as they attempted to storm the capital city.
Fierce Ukrainian resistance stalled the Russians’ progress, eventually forcing them to withdraw in early April, revealing in their wake the brutality of life under occupation.
More than 4,000 civilians, including 200 children, have been killed in the entire country since the invasion began, according to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR). With satellite imagery appearing to show mass graves in occupied territory, the number of civilians killed is likely to be higher.
Since April, France has deployed an on-the-ground forensic team with expertise in DNA to support the Kyiv police in war crimes investigations.
Irina Pryanishnikova, spokeswoman for the Kyiv police, says more than 10 mass graves have been uncovered in that region. To the northwest of the city, more than 1,000 corpses were found in the district that includes the town of Bucha, where Ukraine accuses Russian forces of carrying out one of the most notorious massacres.
She estimates that about half the bodies sustained bullet wounds, often from snipers, while others had died directly from shelling or other causes, such as beatings with blunt objects.
“The cruellest episode in Buchansky took place at a children’s camp where five men were executed. Several more men were executed in the surrounding streets and their bodies burned,” says Pryanishnikova.
“Every exhumation is a tragedy, but for me, the worst thing is to see dead children. I remember when we opened their graves, we would see small hands and feet, but no head.”
A harrowing task
The village of Buzova, sandwiched between a small airfield and a sprawling film studio complex, is on the western outskirts of Kyiv. The village bore witness to several atrocities during the Russian occupation, including the shelling of a private maternity clinic. After the village was liberated, bodies of civilians were found dumped in a well at a local petrol station.
Vitaliy Sukhinin, a squat, matter-of-fact police investigator, unravels the cloth covering Chichko’s body as it begins to pour with rain. Bugeruk, standing under an umbrella, turns away and watches proceedings from the corner of his eye.
The corpse is partially decomposed but still recognisable. Bugeruk stands frozen with shock for half a minute before turning his eyes away and staring out into the thick forest surrounding the village cemetery.
Ludmila Zakabluk, a sociable and conscientious woman in her 60s who heads the Buzova village council, walks over to Bageruk to offer a few words of comfort. She then stands quietly by his side as the rain hammers the umbrella above their heads.
Police investigators briefly surround the body, documenting it with their cameras before discretely moving on to another grave.
The gravediggers then regroup around the burial site of Bugeruk’s 20-year-old son, who was known by his patronymic, Oleksandrovych. They discuss how best to remove his remains from the grave they had dug up earlier. Most of those exhuming bodies around Kyiv are volunteers with no previous experience and a couple of them appear to find the task visibly nauseating.
They decide that since the remains are relatively light, it is easier for one of them to physically enter the grave and lift them up from below. A wiry man in a blue beanie and torn trousers offers to do it. After a lung-busting struggle, he hoists the remains out of the grave, and the rest of the men carefully place them by Lydia’s Chichko body.
It was on February 28 that Bugeruk received the call from a friend telling him that his son had been killed while helping people evacuate from Irpin, a town 20km (12 miles) north of Kyiv. Oleksandrovych, a tall taxi driver with short brown hair, large square glasses and a neat circle beard, had been helping locals evacuate since Russian troops had entered the region a few days earlier.
A Russian tank had fired directly at his car, leaving his body so badly mutilated that only parts could be recovered from the wreckage.
Devastated but determined, Bugeruk embarked on the treacherous journey in the direction of Kyiv, where he picked up his son’s remains and wrapped them in a few bedsheets, which he tied with a knot. He buried them later that night.
“What can I say?” he says looking at the ground, with a heavy sigh as he attempts to describe how it felt to bury his son.
Today, Sukhinin approaches the remains and attempts to undo the knot, grimacing as the putrid smell fills his lungs. He briefly catches a glimpse of the body through an opening in the sheets before averting his eyes.
He announces that he cannot identify the son’s remains but that the condition of his grandmother suggests that her death was a war crime. “They were not part of the armed forces; they were civilians,” he says, before adding that the bodies will be removed for further investigation.
‘Beastly and cruel’
Bugeruk had initially requested that the authorities exhume the bodies to receive dignified burials. However, the police and security services launched an investigation once the authorities were notified of the case.
Zakabluk, the town council head, moves aside as a black cargo van, reappropriated for transporting exhumed bodies, pulls up alongside the two corpses. Two young men jump out and slowly approach a couple of the gravediggers. They discuss how to best place the bodies in the body bags.
They manage to fit Chichko’s corpse into the body bag, and one of them zips it up, turning his head towards the sky as he seals it over her face.
Her grandson’s remains prove much more awkward to move, and it takes several attempts before the men can roll them into the body bag. They are unable to secure the zipper and eventually give up, simply heaving the two corpses into the van and driving off, leaving Bugeruk alone in the rain, surrounded by a dispersing cloud of exhaust fumes.
Bugeruk did not cry during the exhumations, but his face betrays a deep sorrow. He remains standing for some time, his eyes focused on the horizon, occasionally muttering under his breath.
The bodies will be taken to the morgue for forensic examination, after which they will be returned and given a conventional burial by the authorities.
Zakabluk, who has attended two other exhumations in recent weeks, is unsure where the bodies will eventually be buried. Russian troops had, according to her, deliberately taken a diversion to destroy the village’s graveyard, driving their tanks repeatedly over the graves. Today, the broken tombstones and mangled fences lay strewn over the ground.
She describes the Russian soldiers that occupied her village as “beastly and cruel”. She recalls that they would drive around in tanks “destroying everything”, adding angrily, “I wish no one in any society will ever have to meet a Russian soldier”.
SCOTUS. (photo: Getty Images)
The United States of America will be a vastly different country by the end of the month.
Is behind-the-scenes friction stemming from last month’s leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization affecting the justices’ work? There are some signs of sluggishness in their usual output. Bloomberg’s Greg Stohr noted earlier this week that the court has only handed down decisions in fewer than half of its argued cases this term—the ones that go through the full briefing and oral arguments process. Using numbers from SCOTUS stats guru Adam Feldman, Stohr reported that this is the furthest behind that the court has been on deciding cases by this point in the calendar since at least 1950.
As a younger legal journalist, I used to occasionally have stress dreams where the Supreme Court would hand down all its major decisions on the same day, and I would have to write about each of them simultaneously. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would almost wonder if the justices were intentionally planning something like that to get back at the press corps for violating the sanctity of its inner workings with the Dobbs leak. But there are two far more likely explanations for the court’s eleventh-hour rush this year.
One possibility is that the justices have been busy with the unusual number of major cases on the shadow docket this term. In recent years, this docket went from being a mechanism to handle emergency and administrative motions from the lower courts to a venue for deciding consequential legal disputes. While the justices didn’t hand down any rulings in argued cases this week, they did block Texas from implementing its new social media censorship law in a 5–4 ruling. Shadow-docket cases can look deceptively simple because they almost never come with written opinions by the majority. But the justices do circulate dissents and concurring opinions in them from time to time, as three of the dissenting justices did here, and deliberate over the outcome on a hastened schedule.
Complicating matters for the court this year is the added burden of election-related cases on the shadow docket. The court hears its fair share of these cases every two years, of course. But this term also coincided with the once-in-a-decade redistricting process that followed the 2020 Census. That confluence brought an additional layer of legal battles to the shadow docket: The justices dealt with redistricting cases from Alabama, Wisconsin, and other states. Their work here might not yet be done, either, with Ohio’s redistricting mess now drawing in the federal judiciary after a three-judge panel ordered the state to use maps that the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled unconstitutional.
The other factor here is that the remaining cases aren’t easy ones—insofar as any Supreme Court case is ever “easy,” that is. Looming over everything else is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That case centers on a legal challenge to Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion. It was already fairly clear that the court was poised to significantly curtail access to the procedure; the only real questions were by how much and how quickly they would do it. Thanks to the historic leak of Alito’s draft opinion, it now appears virtually certain that they’ll do it in one fell swoop, overturning Roe v. Wade outright and allowing states to ban most abortions for the first time in almost a half-century.
Thanks to the leak, we have a better understanding of the Dobbs timeline than any other case on the court’s docket right now. Alito circulated his initial draft to the other justices in early February. Politico reported on May 11 that the three dissenting justices had not yet circulated their dissenting opinion(s) in the case. Once they do, Alito may circulate a second draft that addresses their criticism or makes other changes. Given the gravity of the situation and the extraordinary stakes of Dobbs, it would not be surprising if this one went down to the wire before the court’s de facto recess in early July.
Another case that drew renewed interest in recent weeks is New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen. The court is widely expected to rule that New York’s current scheme for obtaining concealed-carry permits won’t survive a Second Amendment challenge brought against it by local gun owners. As I noted last week, however, how exactly the justices craft the decision could have far-reaching implications. The Supreme Court has not tackled the scope of the Second Amendment’s protections since the justices found an individual right to bear arms in that amendment more than a decade ago.
A narrow ruling in Bruen that focuses on the peculiarities of New York’s scheme and its arbitrary enforcement would not directly imperil other restrictions on when and how Americans can carry firearms in public. A more expansive ruling by the justices on the Second Amendment’s scope, however, could invite legal challenges to a host of other carry regulations, an outcome sought by gun rights activists and feared by gun-control groups. Since the Supreme Court has spoken so infrequently on gun rights, every word and phrase they use will matter even more for when lower courts resolve future disputes.
As abortion rights and gun rights are often central issues in American politics, those two cases are likely to garner the lion’s share of public attention. But there is no shortage of other cases where the court could deliver consequential rulings in the weeks ahead. The justices heard oral arguments in March in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency. At issue in that case is a phantasmal back-and-forth battle between the EPA, power plants, and red-state attorneys general over a defunct carbon emission rule drafted two presidencies ago.
There are two big questions in the case. First, can the EPA regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act? The Supreme Court appears poised to say no, which could make it all but impossible for the U.S. to meet the international climate change commitments to which it has agreed. Second, how will the Supreme Court say no if it does? Some of the conservative justices have invoked something called the major-questions doctrine to rule that federal agencies are acting outside of their congressionally authorized mandates, which those justices happen to interpret pretty narrowly these days. If all of that sounds like a boring milestone in the conservatives’ campaign against federal regulatory agencies, then the good news is that it will all matter a lot less if Earth becomes uninhabitable in the next century.
One area where the court may surprise everyone again is on tribal sovereignty. The justices heard two cases in February on the matter, one involving double jeopardy for prosecutions by tribal law enforcement and another that addresses tribal gaming powers on a reservation in Texas. Both of those rulings could be accompanied by the court’s decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a follow-up to its blockbuster 2020 ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. In McGirt, the Supreme Court effectively recognized that roughly half of Oklahoma was still Indian Country, prompting a furious backlash from Oklahoma’s governor and some local officials. Whether the justices will narrow McGirt by expanding the states’ powers to prosecute some crimes on reservations—and the broader implications that would have for tribal sovereignty—is an open question after oral arguments last month.
Other major decisions may draw fewer headlines but still have a significant long-term impact. In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the court will likely rewrite or clarify (depending on who you ask) its past precedents on when and how school employees can pray on the job with students. Vega v. Tekoh is a curious case on Miranda warnings and Section 1983 that could signal whether a critical mass of conservative justices are now willing to let police not read suspects their rights under the now-famous warning. And in one of the many Biden v. Texas–es out there, the justices will weigh in on the Trump-era “remain-in-Mexico” policy and whether the current president can now unwind it.
The court has previously met tight deadlines when it found itself overloaded in the last term, and it probably won’t end up missing its end-of-term deadline at the end of June. A more interesting question is whether the last-minute flurry is good for the justices’ decision-making process. There is no reason why the justices need to leave town before the Fourth of July weekend other than Washington, D.C.’s abysmal climate. Indeed, the Supreme Court no longer actually goes into recess at the end of each term; the court technically stays in session year-round so that they can keep hearing shadow-docket cases in the “off-season,” so to speak. It’s impossible to say whether the eleventh-hour haste affects the quality of the court’s work, of course. One hopes that their desire to get these cases done on time won’t affect their ability to get them done right. Then again, by the time June ends, the matter of whether the high court fulfilled its obligations to justice is likely to be the subject of considerable debate regardless of whether they fulfill their obligations to the calendar.
A storefront window with bullet holes is seen at the scene of a fatal shooting on South Street in Philadelphia on Sunday morning. (photo: Michael Perez/AP)
In Pennsylvania, police say multiple shooters fired into a crowd late Saturday night on South Street, a famous Philadelphia drag known for its nightlife, character and vibrancy. Authorities said three people were killed by the gunfire, and at least 11 others were wounded. Police said multiple handguns were recovered at the scene, but no arrests have been made.
"Once again, we see lives lost and people injured in yet another horrendous, brazen and despicable act of gun violence," Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in a statement on Sunday.
Gunfire in Chattanooga leads to three dead
In Chattanooga, Tenn., police responded early Sunday to a shooting near a nightclub. Three people were killed and 14 others were injured, according to police chief Celeste Murphy.
Two people died from gunshot wounds, while a third person died of injuries after being hit by a vehicle, Murphy said. The police chief said multiple people are thought to have opened fire, but no arrests had been made as of Sunday afternoon. Last week, six people were wounded in a gunfire exchange in downtown Chattanooga.
Bullets tore apart a graduation party in South Carolina
Meanwhile, in South Carolina, at least eight people were shot at a graduation party in what authorities in Clarendon County described as a suspected drive-by shooting. A 32-year-old woman was killed, while seven others were wounded. Six of the seven injured were age 17 or younger, authorities said.
Police say the incident may have been gang-related.
"This was a school graduation party and you've got all these innocent children that were there that were hit by gunfire," Sheriff Tim Baxley said.
Multiple weekend shootings rattle Arizona
A 14-year-old girl was killed and eight others were injured during a shooting early Saturday at a Phoenix strip mall, The Associated Press reported.
Nine people were hospitalized, including the 14 year-old girl, who later died. Two women were transported with life-threatening injuries.
"Seems we can't go a day without another mass shooting," Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego tweeted Saturday. "This time, it's Phoenix, at 10th Ave … Hatcher. Time has run out. Change must happen now."
The next day, a shooting outside a bar in Mesa, Ariz. early Sunday morning left two people dead and two others injured, according to the AP.
156 days, at least 240 mass shootings
Mass shootings also happened in Texas, Georgia, New York and Michigan over the weekend, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a group that tracks mass shootings.
Some 156 days into 2022, the country has now seen at least 246 mass shootings, according to the group's tally. That puts the U.S. on track for one of the deadliest years on record since the archive began tracking gun deaths. The site defines a mass shooting as any incident in which four or more people are killed or injured by a gun.
Since May 14, when a racist attack at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket took the lives of 10 people, there have been at least four dozen mass shootings in the U.S., according to data from the group. That includes the attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin ponders a question at his recall campaign headquarters in San Francisco on May 26, 2022. (photo: Eric Risberg/AP)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We turn now to California to look at the effort to recall Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco. Boudin was elected in 2019 on a platform to end cash bail and curb mass incarceration. He’s part of a growing number of prosecutors around the country who have vowed to use the district attorney’s seat to end tough-on-crime tactics and restore civil rights.
During his time in the office, Boudin has taken many historic actions, from charging an officer for manslaughter to creating a wrongful conviction unit that recently led to the freedom of a man wrongfully imprisoned for 32 years. Chesa Boudin has also cut the juvenile jail population in half.
But his efforts to reform the system have faced a backlash, funded in part by the real estate industry and ultra-wealthy donors. Key backers of the recall include the billionaire Republican donor William Oberndorf; former PayPal executive David Sacks; Ron Conway, an early Doordash investor; and Garry Tan, an investor in Instacart.
Chesa Boudin’s critics blame him for what they describe as a rise in crime in San Francisco, but these claims have been challenged. The San Francisco Chronicle recently reported, “The data shows that crime shifted dramatically during the pandemic. But now that San Francisco is returning to pre-pandemic behavior, so are its crime rates,” the Chron writes.
Chesa Boudin is the child of Weather Underground activists Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert. He grew up with both parents in prison. His mother, who died last month, was released in 2003. His father was only released late last year after serving 40 years in prison.
San Franciso District Attorney Chesa Boudin joins us now.
Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Chesa. You face this recall — first of all, condolences on the death of your mother.
CHESA BOUDIN: Thank you, Amy. I appreciate it. And it’s good to be back with you.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about your mother in moment, but I want to talk about the recall that you’re facing on Tuesday. Can you talk about — for many people in the country, it may sound unusual. You’re elected to office, and then you face a recall. But in California, recall challenges are not as unusual. Explain who’s behind this and why you think it’s happening.
CHESA BOUDIN: Thanks, Amy. Yeah, I certainly expected and hoped to be able to buckle down and do the work of fixing our broken and dysfunctional and failed criminal justice system for four years, after I was elected to a four-year term. But you’re right. In California, recalls are all the rage.
And the folks who are behind them, as we saw with the attempted recall of Governor Gavin Newsom, are Republicans and police union operatives and ultra-right-wing groups that have learned the hard way that they cannot win at the ballot box if they put their candidates or their ideas to voters. In other words, their only path to winning is not to actually tell voters what their policies or principles or values or even their candidates are, but rather to attack those of us that have won elections democratically.
As you mentioned, the primary individual donor of the recall against me is a man named William Oberndorf. And to be clear about who he is and what his values are, he has given over $6 million to the PAC controlled by one-time Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. And he helped Mitch McConnell, “Moscow Mitch,” as they called him, pack the U.S. Supreme Court. His values include eradicating gun control laws, taking away women’s right to control their own bodies and attacking the right to vote. These are not San Francisco values. But he would never be able to win with his chosen candidate.
And so, instead, they’ve spent the incredible sum of $7 million in a local election without putting forward a single concrete proposal for addressing the problems that San Franciscans face every day, without building a homeless shelter or helping to support our underfunded school teachers, without even advancing one iota of concrete policy proposals or evidence for how we can do better than what we are doing every day.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what you think are your greatest accomplishments at this point?
CHESA BOUDIN: Now, I’m tremendously proud of a lot of the work we’ve done, particularly when you look at it in the context of a global pandemic. I took office in January 2020. And two months later, I was shut out of my office, and our courts all but shut down, and we haven’t ever gotten back to full capacity. But despite that obstacle, the things I’m most proud of are — I’ll give you three examples.
First, a historic decrease in our juvenile incarceration population and our overall incarceration population. We have showed that it is possible to dramatically reduce reliance on jails and prisons, even as crime rates remain at historic lows. Our violent crime rates are lower than Oakland or Sacramento, cities nearby with supposedly tough-on-crime prosecutors. We do not need to jail our way up out of poverty or other social problems.
Second, we’ve invested the savings from decarceration in a massive expansion of victim services. I am tremendously proud of the work my victim advocates do, not focused narrowly on punitive outcomes but focused entirely on trying to support those who have been harmed by crime, regardless of what language they speak or what country they were born in. We’ve had a really, really significant increase in language access. I created 10 new victim advocate positions, and eight of the people we hired to fill those positions are fully bilingual. Chinese is the biggest second-language group by far in San Francisco. And incredibly, when I took office, we had just one Chinese-speaking victim advocate. Now we have five. That’s just a couple examples of the victim advocacy work that I’m proud of.
But I want to give you one other category of achievements that I’m proud of, and that is our work to build a justice system that works for everybody, not just the wealthy and the well-connected, our work to hold those in power accountable the same way that the system has been designed to do for generations to those who are Black and Brown or marginalized. In other words, we created a worker protection unit that has sued the very companies folks like Ron Conway and William Oberndorf have invested in and made their millions off of, because they are systematically stealing from their employees. We created an independent Innocence Commission, as you said, that exonerated a man who was wrongfully convicted by this failed system, after 32 years of incarceration. And we are holding police and others in government who are corrupt or who steal from voters and taxpayers accountable. We are doing the difficult work of taking on the entrenched status quo in a way that gives honor and dignity and meaning to the words chiseled in stone over almost every courthouse in America, “equal protection under law.”
AMY GOODMAN: In speaking to The New York Times, you talked about a man who offered to support you if you stopped supporting San Francisco as a sanctuary city. Who was that? And what happened?
CHESA BOUDIN: That was William Oberndorf. I was introduced to him back in 2019 when I was a candidate for office. We had a very short meeting, because he was rabid and livid about San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy. He was insistent that the only path to public safety was for San Francisco to start cooperating with ICE and expediting deportation of anybody who had contact with law enforcement.
I made it very clear to him, as a matter of principle, that I simply disagreed with his view. As district attorney, I told him, and I’ll tell you now, it is critical that all of our communities, including our immigrant communities here, in a city that is a proud sanctuary city, feel comfortable and safe reporting crime and cooperating with law enforcement. If a victim of domestic violence is undocumented, do we want her living in the shadows, not coming forward and seeking services and accountability because of her status? No. We want them coming forward. And we want even those people we prosecute to know that if they show up to court, they will face consequences and accountability comparable to anyone else who is charged with the same crime, but we will not engage in double punishment. We will not undermine the trust or the ability of our immigrant communities to fully participate in our society, to seek services, to be held accountable and to join us in San Francisco as residents that share this beloved city. I told him that.
He was livid and outraged, and his wife tried to calm him down, unsuccessfully. And at that point we ended the meeting, and I haven’t spoken with him since. But he has now pumped more than $650,000 into this recall effort. And half of it, Amy, amazingly, was done in a stock contribution — not cash, but stock — so that he could avoid paying capital gains on the increased value of that stock investment.
AMY GOODMAN: Chesa Boudin, can you tell us about who Joaquin Ciria is and the Innocence Commission?
CHESA BOUDIN: Joaquin Ciria is a Cuban American man who was convicted of a murder he did not commit more than 32 years ago now.
One of my promises as a candidate for district attorney was to create an independent Innocence Commission, because I recognized that it is not enough to do justice going forward; we must also look back in time and correct injustices that have been perpetrated by our office or by the broader criminal legal system. We know that, over time, science and forensic evidence standards have changed and improved. We know that our understanding of police misconduct and prosecutor misconduct and even jury and court error have improved and changed. And so, we do a significant amount of work in my office looking backwards at cases where people were potentially wrongfully convicted or other similar situations where perhaps it wasn’t a wrongful conviction but it was an egregious, draconian sentence. And we try to correct the injustices of the past even as we move forward, with more than 15,000 new criminal cases since I’ve taken office.
In one case, the case of Joaquin Ciria, we found a man who had been convicted of murdering his own friend. There was no real motive. There was no forensic evidence whatsoever connecting him to the case. And we saw many of the red flags of wrongful convictions around the country: no forensic evidence, coerced confessions, a grant of immunity to another person who was in fact a suspect to testify against him, coercive interrogation tactics by police on a juvenile. I could go on.
What we did in that case, once we identified it, was the only thing consistent with the facts and the law and our ethical duty, the oath of office I swore, and that was we asked the court to vacate his conviction and release him. Thankfully, after we had fully briefed the court — the court had reviewed the evidence, as well — the court granted our request, and Joaquin Ciria is now a free man.
I was tremendously privileged to be able to meet him at an event celebrating his release, to speak with him in — it was a fun conversation. It was in Spanglish. We both speak both languages, and we flipped back and forth. And he has a tremendously big heart. He’s not bitter or resentful. He is ecstatic to be with his wife and his family, and to be able to move forward after 32 years of wrongful conviction.
AMY GOODMAN: Chesa Boudin, I wanted to turn to an ad supporting your recall. This was financed by the group San Franciscans for Public Safety.
SAN FRANCISCAN 1: District Attorney Chesa Boudin is telling you …
SAN FRANCISCAN 2: We are racist?
SAN FRANCISCAN 3: Anti-Chinese?
SAN FRANCISCAN 1: Republican?
SAN FRANCISCAN 4: You’ve got to be kidding me.
SAN FRANCISCAN 5: Billionaire? I wish.
SAN FRANCISCAN 6: We’re proud Democrats.
SAN FRANCISCAN 1: Democrats.
SAN FRANCISCAN 7: Progressives.
SAN FRANCISCAN 4: Uniting to recall Chesa Boudin now.
SAN FRANCISCAN 8: Because he is failing to do his job.
SAN FRANCISCAN 9: Supporting the recall was a tough decision for me.
SAN FRANCISCAN 3: But he lets repeat offenders back out on the street without any consequences.
SAN FRANCISCAN 10: We can’t wait until the next election.
SAN FRANCISCANS: Vote yes on H. Recall Chesa Boudin.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that as was put out by San Franciscans for Public Safety. Tell us who they are and respond to the ad’s allegations.
CHESA BOUDIN: Amy, the name of one of the official recall committees is San Franciscans for Public Safety. It’s a fairly disingenuous name, as is that ad. And, frankly, every ad and piece of mail they’ve put out is rife with lies and political spin and propaganda. It’s particularly frustrating to see a Democratic stronghold like San Francisco taking a page out of the playbook of the national Republicans and police unions that are attacking criminal justice reformers like Larry Krasner and Kim Foxx and so many others from coast to coast.
What they are doing is exactly what we are seeing in the efforts to stop criminal justice reform, to undermine policies based in evidence that actually make our communities safer and that begin the long and difficult job of eradicating racial disparities from our criminal legal system. These folks have accepted millions of dollars from Republicans. They pretend that it is a Democrat-led movement. They’ve hired spokespeople. They have recruited folks that were fired or pushed out of my office because they represented the status quo and they refused to think more holistically about how we could build safer, more just communities. And what they do is they invent lies. They take one case, they cherry-pick it, they misrepresent what happened, and they directly straight-up lie to voters.
I’ll give you one example. They had another ad that you didn’t show where a former prosecutor in my office claimed that I disbanded a auto burglary operation team and refused to let her prosecute auto burglary cases. The reality is that I have led — and it’s now public; it was on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle a few weeks ago — what is likely the biggest-ever sting operation involving auto burglary stolen goods in San Francisco history. We led that operation while she was in the office. We have emails from her that were published by the media that show she was well aware of that operation when she left the office. And she went on TV in an ad backed by Republican billionaires like William Oberndorf and lied directly to the camera and said we stopped prosecuting auto burglaries and stopped investigating auto burglary crimes. We led the biggest operation in San Francisco history. She didn’t want to be part of our work. That’s all right.
But what’s so disingenuous and so dishonest is that rather than advancing solutions to the real challenges we face of wealth inequality, of an addiction crisis and public health crisis playing out on our streets, of a backlogged court system, of state laws that desperately need modernization — instead of advancing concrete ideas about how we can do better in promoting safety and justice and accountability, these folks do nothing but attack and spin and lie. They are a scourge to democracy. They are anathema to all people of conscience who are fighting for change and criminal justice reform. In fact, one of the leaders of a separate recall committee just yesterday in The Guardian was quoted. When he was asked about what policies they would advance, what solutions they were advocating for, he was quoted as saying, “We don’t do policy or analysis. We just attack criminal justice reformers.” That’s what he said. That’s what they’re doing. And San Francisco voters are smart enough not to fall for their lies.
AMY GOODMAN: Chesa, before we go, I wanted to ask you about the recent death of your mother, the longtime prison activist and educator Kathy Boudin, who died at the age of 78, May 1st. Kathy Boudin was a former member of the Weather Underground, served 22 years in prison. She was in jail for most of your childhood. After her release, Kathy Boudin co-founded the Center for Justice at Columbia University. Brave New Films recently produced this short video featuring you, Chesa, and your mom.
KATHY BOUDIN: During all the ’60s, I was tyring to figure out, in a deep way, who was I in society, and ultimately spent 22 years in prison.
CHESA BOUDIN: My mom, Kathy, was in a prison that welcomed programming. She received her master’s degree while in prison. She was a founder and facilitator in a group called ACE, AIDS Counseling and Education. It became a national model for AIDS education and prevention, using a peer education approach. My mom also was involved in parenting programs. I’m using much of what she learned herself parenting me.
KATHY BOUDIN: The years that I spent in prison were ones of being very deeply rooted in building community, being part of a community of women. We learned from each other, worked together and, one by one, made it home. I got my doctoral degree in — at Teachers College at Columbia. I grew up wanting to be a doctor. We built a program at a major hospital in New York with, like, five or six different women that I was in prison with. That program was to provide welcoming medical care for people coming home from prison, men and women. We initiated what ended up being the Center for Justice at Columbia. The entire university, different disciplines, would get involved in thinking about the prison system. We all have a way to contribute to reimagining what a system of justice would look like.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Kathy Boudin. She died just a month ago here in New York of cancer. Chesa, can you talk about your mom and what she meant to you? You grew up visiting both your parents in prison.
CHESA BOUDIN: Amy, it’s hard. I loved my mom. If she were here, she’d be watching your show. She loved watching — she loved watching your show. And she found ways every day, from prison during her 22 years behind bars and after she came home, to love me, to support me and to give back to everybody around her. You know, we’re celebrating the tremendously full and rich life that she lived, the generous life that she lived, even as we mourn her loss. And we have so much, so much to be thankful for. You know, she was fighting cancer for seven years, and she lived long enough to be the first person to welcome my son home from the hospital when he was born nine months ago today. She lived long enough to welcome my father home after 40 years in prison. So, I’m sorry it’s emotional, but she was a wonderful mother. And we miss her.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Chesa, before we go, I wanted to ask how your father is doing, just recently released from prison after 40 years and then losing your mother, Kathy Boudin.
CHESA BOUDIN: He’s doing really well, Amy. Thank you for asking. He didn’t expect, of course, to come home and have my mother’s health take such a precipitous decline. But he dove headfirst into being a caretaker for her. And he and I were able to be with her at her bedside when she died, actually listening to the same Nina Simone album that they listened to when she brought me into the world.
AMY GOODMAN: Chesa Boudin, we thank you so much for being with us. Again, condolences on the death of your mother, Kathy Boudin. Chesa is district attorney of San Francisco. He faces a recall vote on Tuesday.
CHESA BOUDIN: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you. Coming up, the Biden administration has canceled almost $6 billion in student loan debt for borrowers who attended the now-defunct network of for-profit schools known as Corinthian Colleges. We’ll get response.
Alejandra Chavez rallies residents of Westside Mobile Home Park in Durango, Colo., during their March campaign to buy the land under their homes. (photo: Westside Mobile Home Park Cooperative)
As gentrification sweeps the West, investors are buying up mobile home parks. Residents of this Colorado park got together and bought it themselves.
Chavez, 30, moved to the area 18 years ago to join her parents, who fled economic desolation in Mexico and found work in Durango. In 2008, the family bought their trailer in Westside Mobile Home Park for $12,000. It was in rough shape, but Chavez’s father, who owns a construction company, spent years and some $20,000 renovating it into a comfortable home. Westside, Chavez says, has been a good place to live — a neighborhood where Latino, Native American and white families raise their kids together.
As is common in trailer parks, however, the Chavezes and most of their neighbors own their homes but not the land beneath them. In December 2021, they received notice that the park was for sale. Chavez pictured their homes being torn down to make way for a hotel, a gas station or some other amenity for ski resort-goers. Or their homes might simply become unaffordable: In recent years, an inrush of tourists, remote workers and investors has driven land and housing prices out of control in Durango and across the West. The park’s prospective buyer, Harmony Communities, raised lot rents by 50 percent when it bought a trailer park in Golden, Colo., in 2021.
Chavez and the other Westside residents saw one other option — one way to turn private tragedy into collective victory. On Jan. 14, residents formed a cooperative, elected representatives (including Chavez to the role of vice president), and voted to try to buy the park themselves.
The $5.46 million asking price was daunting, but residents knew the cost of failure. Chavez has friends who pile in six to a car and drive 2.5‑hour commutes to Durango from cheaper towns in New Mexico, casualties of this new, outdoorsy form of gentrification.
The land rush has not spared mobile home parks, which speculators buy up as investment properties. Two such investors even started “Mobile Home University” (MHU) to sell online courses in how to do it. In a blog post titled “How to Make Huge Returns on Mobile Home Parks,” MHU co-founder Frank Rolfe sums up the strategy: “It costs $3,000 to move a mobile home.… As a result, tenants cannot leave when you raise their rents.”
Thanks to a new Colorado law, however, IQ Mobile Home Parks, the New York-based company that owns Westside, had to give residents notice of its intent to sell and 90 days to make their own offer. And Westside residents had a model: In June 2021, residents of Animas View Mobile Home Park across town bought their park with guidance from ROC USA, a program that connects trailer park residents to financing so they can buy and run their parks cooperatively. The Animas View website lists some of the benefits of self-ownership: “There is no profit margin in your rent” and “no commercial owner who can decide to close the community.”
On March 15, with Denver-based Elevation Community Land Trust (ECLT) negotiating on their behalf, Westside residents made an offer at asking price, contingent on financing. IQ rejected it in favor of Harmony’s cash offer, but gave residents a week to come up with a cash offer of their own, according to Stefka Fanchi, president and CEO of ECLT. Residents launched a GoFundMe and hosted a fundraising dinner, bringing in nearly $50,000 in a few days. La Plata County, the Colorado Impact Development Fund, the Local First Foundation and ECLT offered loans and grants to cover the rest. On March 31, after what Fanchi called “a miraculous act of financial gymnastics,” IQ accepted the offer.
Michael Peirce thinks it shouldn’t take a miracle for residents to be able to buy their own parks. Peirce is project manager for the Colorado Coalition of Manufactured Home Owners (CoCoMHO) and president of the resident co-op that bought Sans Souci park outside Boulder in June 2021. But such successes are the exception: Of the 68 parks that have sold since Colorado’s opportunity-to-purchase program took effect in 2020, only four (including Westside) have been successfully purchased by residents. To lower the barriers, CoCoMHO is supporting a bill in the Colorado legislature that would extend the offer timeline to 180 days and impose penalties on owners who don’t negotiate in good faith.
In the meantime, Chavez offers this encouragement to other trailer park residents interested in buying their parks: “Look out for each other. Ask your community for help. If we did it, I’m pretty sure others can.”
Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and vice presidential candidate Francia Márquez offer a press conference in Bogotá, May 31, 2022. (photo: Juan Pablo Pino/AFP/Getty Images)
Left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro faces a runoff against a far-right populist, Rodolfo Hernández, for Colombia’s presidency. Predictably, the traditional establishment is lining up to support his self-styled “antiestablishment” opponent.
In our view, the first-round results confirm that Petro still has a good chance of winning the presidency if he is able to capitalize on his strengths and rapidly adjust his strategy to confront an unexpected and unconventional opponent: the insurgent right-wing populist Rodolfo Hernández.
A Shift to the Left
Petro’s rise this year began when his political party, Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact), received the most votes in March’s congressional elections. This was the first time the Left had ever won the highest vote share for Congress. Petro went on to win the first round of the presidential election with around 8.5 million votes, or 40.3 percent. This was a major improvement on 2018, when Petro placed second in the first round with 4.8 million votes, or 25 percent.
This year, Petro won 412 municipalities (districts) out of 1124, having only won 255 in 2018. He also increased his share of the total vote in 1058 municipalities. In other words, Petro had a greater proportion of the votes, compared with 2018, in 94 percent of Colombia’s municipalities. His vote share only went down in 64 municipalities (5 percent of the total), and just nine municipalities flipped from him to Rodolfo Hernández.
Most impressively, Petro flipped 127 municipalities (more than 10 percent) that had voted for the right-wing candidate Iván Duque in 2018’s first round. These districts were mostly concentrated in the western part of the country, the south, and the Caribbean. Petro also took another 39 municipalities where rival candidates had won in 2018, adding up to a total of 166.
Petro’s Support Base
The Petro-Márquez ticket came first in cities like Bogotá, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Valledupar, Ibagué, Neiva, and Pereira, and received overwhelming support in Colombia’s most marginalized and rural zones. Our statistical analysis, which received assistance from Laura Ortíz of Colombia’s Universidad de los Andes, shows a strong correlation between Petro’s vote share and the percentage of people living in poverty at the municipal level. This correlation was already visible in 2018, but this year it was more pronounced.
In the poorest regions of Colombia, such as La Guajira, Cauca (where Francia Márquez is from), and Nariño, Petro won all the municipalities. In Chocó, another traditionally neglected region, he came first in all but just one municipality. With majority Afro-Colombian and indigenous populations, these regions voted most enthusiastically for progressive change. They hope that a Petro-Márquez victory will make the national government attentive to their social needs and demands and give them representation in the national government for the first time.
The Hernández Vote
Petro’s first-round victory may not have been surprising, since his polling scores during the campaign averaged 40 percent. However, it is still a historic achievement in a country where the Right has long used extreme violence to eliminate the Left or keep it from gaining power by democratic means at the national level. Both Petro and Márquez have themselves faced the threat of assassination.
The real surprise of the election was the breakthrough for Rodolfo Hernández in second place with 5.9 million votes (28.1 percent), edging past the establishment right-wing candidate Federico Gutiérrez (5 million votes, or 23.9 percent). As a result, Petro now faces Hernández in the runoff vote due to be held on June 19 to decide the presidency.
The defeat of Gutiérrez revealed how much antiestablishment feeling there is among the Colombian electorate. It also presents an additional challenge for the Petro-Márquez campaign. Gutiérrez had the support of the traditional political parties as well as the implicit endorsement of the current, deeply unpopular president Iván Duque, which made him an easy target for criticism. Hernández, in contrast, emerged as an outsider, capturing part of the dissatisfied electorate that Petro expected to win over in the second round.
Hernández is a seventy-seven-year-old business tycoon and former mayor of Bucaramanga, a city of half a million people in eastern Colombia. He took advantage of the traditional Colombian right’s political decline to surge in the polls with a simplistic, populist, and TikTok-fueled “anti-corruption” and “anti-system” message. It was the same kind of strategy that previously succeeded for antiestablishment right-wing populists like Donald Trump in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
As with Trump and Bolsonaro, Hernández’s rhetoric flies in the face of his own track record. He is mired in a corruption case of his own for irregularly awarding contracts when he was mayor, for which he will face trial on July 21. If found guilty, he may not even be able to take office.
In another nod to Trump, Hernández boasts about his wealth and has promised that he is not running for the presidency for personal gain. He also projects an authoritarian, macho persona by using foul language, giving the false impression that he is a “straight talker” instead of the dishonest blusterer that he actually is. Hernández even punched a member of Bucaramanga’s city council for questioning him about another corruption case involving his son.
Style vs. Substance
These antics certainly appeal to many politically disaffected Colombians who are angry with the establishment. However, Hernández’s base does not appear to be as loyal to him as that of Trump. This means that some of his first-round voters could well change their minds.
This divergence may work to Petro’s advantage. His own base is more solid, and he has real proposals to offer Colombians on a variety of important issues. Hernández’s vague attacks on corruption merely serve to distract the public from his authoritarianism and lack of concrete policies.
On economic policy, for example, Petro has proposed new mechanisms to redistribute land so that agricultural productivity can increase. He has also emphasized the need to accelerate the clean energy transition and reduce Colombia’s dependency on oil exports, and has proposed raising taxes on the four thousand richest families to make the country’s tax system fairer to the majority. While the Colombian right claims that Petro would bankrupt Colombia and turn it into another Venezuela, his tax agenda is in fact quite conservative, prioritizing fiscal responsibility and macroeconomic stability to secure revenue for the government to spend on social programs.
Hernández, on the other hand, has no specific and elaborated programs to offer. His lack of support in Congress and his authoritarian character would make it very difficult for him to govern as president. Petro’s detractors in both Colombia and the United States accuse him of being a “Marxist terrorist,” but it is Hernández who has already revealed himself as authoritarian he could prove to be. He has proposed dissolving Congress for the first three months of his presidency and has even started to issue draft decrees to eliminate several state offices.
The reckless or bizarre words and actions from Hernández don’t stop there. He has lurched from proclaiming himself to be a fan of “German thinker Adolf Hitler” — he later claimed that he meant Albert Einstein — to promising to reduce the price of gas and tolls by half so that everyone can visit the coast. Hernández has also indulged in misogynist outbursts, asking why women should even serve in the government instead of staying at home, and describing Venezuelan women as “a factory of poor children.”
The Safe Option for Colombian Democracy
With Hernández now facing greater media scrutiny of his record and proposals, paradoxically it is now Petro — who has long been accused by his right-wing opponents of authoritarianism and radicalism — who represents a safer, more institutional, and more democratic option of change than Hernández. Although Hernández has rallied the support of Colombia’s traditional establishment, he offers no assurance that democratic rules will be respected, nor any commitment to strengthen Colombian public institutions and democracy.
With Gutiérrez out of the running now, traditional right-wing politicians were quick to endorse Hernández. Gutiérrez himself announced he would vote for Hernández as soon as he knew the results. Former president Álvaro Uribe and members of his party Centro Democrático also rapidly announced their support for Hernández.
There has been a greater division of opinion among centrists. Sergio Fajardo, the centrist candidate who placed fourth, has expressed more sympathy for Hernández than for Petro. However, his vice presidential running mate, Luis Gilberto Murillo, has joined Petro’s campaign. This is a significant departure from 2018, when Fajardo told his supporters to cast blank ballots, which benefitted Duque and hurt Petro. With this realignment of political forces, Hernández faces the contradiction of presenting himself as the antiestablishment “candidate of change” while at the same time having been endorsed by the very politicians and parties who epitomize that establishment.
In a different way, Petro could now appear as an establishment figure, having served in Congress for decades. But the Colombian left has always been excluded from the presidency by force or other extralegal measures, so Petro may be able to present himself more convincingly as an antiestablishment candidate than Hernández. This is even more true of his ally Márquez, who has never been a member of Congress.
In this sense, Petro’s campaign bears some resemblance to that of Bernie Sanders during the US Democratic Party primary elections of 2016 and 2020. For much of his career, Sanders was an independent and self-identified socialist, and he joined the Democratic Party as the only viable way to have a chance at winning the presidency. In the process, however, he became part of the traditionally corporate-backed two-party duopoly against which he campaigned.
The first-round results initially provoked some pessimism in left-wing circles in Colombia and abroad. However, the first opinion polls since the first round show that Petro and Hernández are statistically tied for the runoff. For Petro and Márquez to win, regional dynamics will be important. The Pacto Histórico campaign needs to quickly settle on a new strategy.
This may consist either of increasing their first-round margins in areas where they already did very well, such as Bogotá, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, or competing with Hernández for voters in potential swing regions, such as Boyacá, Huila, Tolima, and Cundinamarca. Although Hernández won in these regions, it was not by a significant margin.
Ideally, the Pacto Histórico should aim to do both, but time is scarce, and the range of possible strategies shrinks by the day. In the first round, the chief motivation to vote for the Petro-Márquez ticket was hope for a more egalitarian society. This time, Petro’s voters are likely to be motivated as much by the need to preserve the minimum standards of an already flawed Colombian democratic system.
In other words, this presidential runoff is looking like the upcoming Brazilian election between Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Bolsonaro. However, unlike Lula, who has moved to the center since he was last president, or Joe Biden when he ran against Trump in 2020, Petro won’t merely protect Colombia’s electoral democracy against a far-right threat. He is also likely to push much harder than either Lula or Biden for progressive social change.
PFAS are a class of about 9,000 chemicals used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. (photo: Jake May/AP)
Testing by the Department of Defense revealed dangerous levels of the contaminants, drawing concern from public health advocates
“You can only hope now that people know and areThe data released this week by the military shows levels for five kinds of PFAS compounds at what Scott Faber, vice-president of government affairs for Environmental Working Group, characterized as “extremely high” levels, and he said they present a health threat to residents living nearby. finding alternative sources of water because those are shockingly high levels of PFAS,” he added.
PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 chemicals used across dozens of industries to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. Though the compounds are highly effective, they are also linked to cancer, kidney disease, birth defects, decreased immunity, liver problems and a range of other serious diseases.
They are called “forever chemicals” due to their longevity in the environment.
The military’s firefighters use aqueous film-forming foam, or AFFF, which contains extremely high levels of PFAS, in training exercises and emergencies. Though AFFF is effective, it has led to widespread contamination around bases and airports, and Congress just mandated the military check for PFAS pollution at 700 facilities while earmarking $571m for cleanup, though observers say the cost will likely be much higher.
Meanwhile, the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the defense department phase out AFFF and use safer alternatives already on the market.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set an advisory health standard of 70 ppt for PFOS and PFOA, two types of PFAS used in the foam, though that may soon be lowered, and some states have already set much lower standards.
Levels of PFOS in groundwater around Whidbey Island NAS near Seattle in the Puget Sound topped 4,700 ppt, while eight sites exceeded the EPA’s advisory levels. Meanwhile, levels for three other PFAS compounds that the department tested for topped 1,150 ppt, and though no federal standard for those compounds exists, many exceeded limits some states have set.
In a statement, the DoD said it has since 2016 provided bottled water and filtration systems or connected residences to municipal water lines in locations where it has found PFAS contamination.
“DoD continues to perform routine sampling at impacted locations off-base and expand sampling to further investigate and identify locations where there is known or potential risk of PFAS release,” a spokesperson said.
But Faber said the military has known about the threat for decades, and “they are only alerting neighbors because Congress ordered them to do so”.
“In the absence of a Congressional order, they would continue to be a bad neighbor,” he said.
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