27 June 22
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The 78-year-old Giuliani was slammed in the back by an unidentified ShopRite worker, according to the New York Post. The assault reportedly left him shaken, the report said.
“I was stunned,” eyewitness Rita Rugova-Johnson told The Post after the attack at the supermarket. “I was shoulder-to-shoulder with Rudy inside ShopRite,” Rugova-Johnson said. “We’re talking, and all of a sudden an employee came out of nowhere and open-handedly slapped him in the back and said, ‘Hey, what’s up, scumbag?’
The worker was arrested at the store. His charges and identity were not immediately available.
Giuliani was campaigning for his son, Andrew Giuliani, who is in a Republican primary race for governor.
A former attorney and adviser for President Donald Trump, Giuliani caused a stir earlier this year when he was unmasked as an exiting costumed contestant in Season 7 episode of Fox’s popular primetime series The Masked Singer. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke left the stage in protest of Giuliani’s appearance when his identity was revealed.
Giuliani was also subject to ridicule for his unwitting appearance in the 2020 film Borat Subsequent Moviefilm. He was lured into a hotel bedroom on the pretext of an interview by a conservative news outlet. The uncomfortable confrontation with actress Maria Bakalova appears to be heading toward a sexual encounter, but ends with Borat running into the room and shouting ““She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
A Russian missile wrecked a nine-story apartment block in central Kyiv. (photo: Getty Images)
Dozens of Russian missiles have struck targets across Ukraine, with the capital Kyiv enduring the heaviest barrage in months.
Ukraine says 14 missiles were fired at the Kyiv region on Sunday, but the strikes extended far beyond the city.
Other areas included the central city of Cherkasy, where one person died, and the north-eastern Kharkiv region.
The strikes came as leaders of the G7 group of the world's richest nations began a three-day summit in Bavaria, southern Germany, with the war in Ukraine top of the agenda. They are expected to promise further military support for Kyiv and impose more sanctions on Moscow.
"We have to stay together," US President Joe Biden told Germany's Chancellor Olaf Scholz just before the summit at Schloss Elmau.
"[Russian President Vladimir] Putin has been counting on it from the beginning, that somehow Nato would, and the G7 would splinter and... but we haven't, and we're not going to.
"So, we can't let this aggression take the form it has and get away with it," President Biden said.
BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale, who is at the summit, says Western unity over the war has faltered in recent weeks, with some leaders discussing long-term relationships with Russia and others stressing strong, lasting support for Ukraine.
But the G7 leaders meeting in Bavaria were determined to put those divisions to bed, our correspondent adds.
In Kyiv, a large blast crater was gouged in a nursery school playground, near a nine-storey building whose top floors were ripped apart. The injured girl's mother - a Russian citizen - was also pulled from the rubble and taken to hospital, officials said.
They said the girl later underwent a surgery and was "in stable condition".
Ukraine's military says some missiles were launched from Tupolev bombers over the Caspian Sea, some 1,450km (900 miles) away. And on Saturday, it said, Russian missiles were fired from Tupolevs flying over neighbouring Belarus.
The Russian defence ministry said high-precision weapons struck Ukrainian army training centres on Sunday in the regions of Chernihiv, north of Kyiv, and Zhytomyr and Lviv west of the capital.
The strike on Starychi district in Lviv was just 30km (19 miles) from the border with Nato member Poland.
Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said the attacks were an attempt to intimidate Ukraine ahead of this week's G7 summit.
The last major Russian missile strike on Kyiv was on 5 June when a railway repair facility was hit.
Russia has become internationally isolated through far-reaching sanctions since its 24 February invasion of Ukraine.
After big early setbacks, Russia has made some advances in the east despite fierce Ukrainian resistance, and on Saturday finally captured Severodonetsk, a city now in ruins.
Military analysts say it is now a war of attrition in the industrial eastern Donbas region, though Kyiv's forces are outgunned by Russian artillery and missiles.
Ukraine has urged the West again to speed up deliveries of heavy long-range weapons.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson met French President Emmanuel Macron at the G7 summit. A spokesperson for Mr Johnson said "they agreed this is a critical moment for the course of the conflict, and there is an opportunity to turn the tide in the war".
They agreed to sustain military support for Ukraine, and Mr Johnson "stressed any attempt to settle the conflict now will only cause enduring instability" by giving "licence" to President Putin. He said leaders must be honest about the war's rising costs, but the price of Russia succeeding was "far higher".
Mr Scholz, hosting the G7, said unity over Ukraine was the group's clear message to Mr Putin.
"We are united by our world view and by our belief in democracy and rule of law," he said.
Samuel L. Jackson. (photo: Samuel L. Jackson/AP)
The same rationale the conservative court employed to reverse the 1973 decision on abortion rights could now be used to eliminate the right to same-sex marriage, contraception and interracial marriage, which was protected in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, lawmakers and scholars fear.
Jackson bashed Thomas as “Uncle Clarence” in a Friday night tweet, referring to the excessively servile Black character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pre-Civil War novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!
— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) June 25, 2022
The Roe decision suggested that the legal underpinnings of the constitutional protection for abortion were weakly based on arguments that have supported other Supreme Court cases guaranteeing various rights, including the right to contraception and same-sex and interracial marriage.
In a solo concurring opinion Friday, Thomas suggested that the court should “correct the error” by withdrawing granted rights now protected under the “substantive due process clause” of the 14th Amendment.
Justice Thomas concurs, saying overruling Roe isn't enough. "For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell." That's right to privacy, contraception, marriage equality,etc
— Neal Katyal (@neal_katyal) June 24, 2022
But Thomas specifically named only the rights to same-sex marriage and contraception. He side-stepped the Loving case, which, if overturned as Roe was, could threaten his own interracial marriage to Ginni Thomas.
Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff behind the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, said Friday that Thomas omitted Loving v. Virginia on his list of top court decisions to “reconsider” because it “affects him personally.”
That “affects him personally, but he doesn’t care about the LGBTQ+ community,” Obergefell said on MSNBC’s “The Reid Out.”
Though some Thomas supporters criticized Jackson for what they called a “racist” attack on the justice, the actor’s Twitter followers mostly applauded the dig — and the issue:
Damn! Samuel Jackson, hot Damn!
— save democracy🇺🇦🟥 (@defenestrate161) June 25, 2022
way to tell him! https://t.co/b00cVHvRzF
🎯
— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) June 25, 2022
NEW: Samuel L. Jackson just called out Clarence Thomas’ hypocrisy for calling to overturn same-sex marriage and contraception but not interracial marriage, which was decided on the same grounds: “How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!”
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 25, 2022
How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!
— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) June 25, 2022
Exactly. pic.twitter.com/1VR0zRzdRH
— Hypocrisy Now. (@Hypocrisy_45) June 25, 2022
How’s Uncle Clarence feeling about Overturning Loving v Virginia??!!
— Samuel L. Jackson (@SamuelLJackson) June 25, 2022
Well seeing as marriage isn't a constitutional right, it wouldn't matter if it was overturned. If "marriage" was left up to the states how many do you think would make any type of marriage illegal? Come on Samuel, you're smarter than this.
— Ol' Broken Paratrooper (@OlBroken82nd) June 25, 2022
Odd that it's the only one he didn't specify in his list of precedents that should be revisited.
— Schrödinger's Zen...(or Roger) (@RWNJ_) June 25, 2022
That's weird, right?
Thousands gathered at the Washington Square Park in New York to protest against the supreme court's decision to overturn Roe v Wade, which enshrined the right to an abortion. (photo: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
In abruptly scrapping the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy the court went against the popular will – only 25% of Americans now have confidence in the institution
“It’s heartbreaking,” said the 28-year-old, who works in sports marketing. “The people who have legally gotten abortions in the United States are mostly Black and brown women, yet the five justices able to have the final word were four powerful men and one white woman. We’re allowing more access to guns yet we’re taking away the rights of women. It just seems like we’re going backwards.”
Millions of women had just lost access to abortion on Friday after America’s highest court overturned a near-50-year-old ruling and other precedents enshrining that right. The conservative justice Samuel Alito wrote in the court’s majority opinion that Roe v Wade was “egregiously wrong and deeply damaging”, and that states should decide whether to limit or criminalise the procedure.
The court’s liberal minority responded: “With sorrow – for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection – we dissent.” The ruling is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states, although the timing of those laws taking effect varies.
The decision, though widely expected a draft opinion leaked last month, was nevertheless a stunning aftershock of Donald Trump’s presidency and sure to enflame America’s divisions. It also cemented the supreme court’s emergence an alternative centre of power that threatens to rupture the delicate governing balance of executive, legislature and judiciary.
Just 24 hours earlier, the justices had struck down New York state’s limits on carrying concealed handguns in public, potentially opening the way to fresh legal challenges to other state-level gun laws despite recent mass shootings in California, New York and Texas. It was a triumph for the gun lobby and a blow to Joe Biden’s efforts to curb violence.
Simon Schama, a leading historian, tweeted on Friday: “American democracy is in deep trouble. It can’t survive in its present form if the constitution is manipulated to impose minority rule.”
The back-to-back decisions were the fruit of a long campaign by conservatives to shift the judiciary to the right, powered by influential groups such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation. The Republican presidents George HW Bush and George W Bush appointed Clarence Thomas, John Roberts (now chief justice) and Alito to the supreme court.
A democratic deficit opened when Senate Republicans blocked Barack Obama’s last nominee for the court, Merrick Garland, on the spurious grounds that it was an election year. Then Trump, a one-term president who had lost the national popular vote by 3m, appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. It has proven his most significant legacy.
The court struck down Roe v Wade against the wishes of a Democratic president, Democratic-controlled Congress and the citizenry. The majority of Americans (61%) believed that Roe should remain the law of the land, and only 36% supported overturning it, according to the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank. Even most religious Americans wanted to see Roe upheld.
Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “I’m afraid it’s extremely undemocratic. You now have the least democratic branch of the federal government on an ideological agenda to roll back liberties that are extremely popular with the general public in America.
“It is a recipe for potential unrest, certainly demonstrations and political turmoil, as they seem intent on a course of action that will run counter to the will of the public.”
The surge of judicial activism has knocked both the White House and Congress back on their heels. In Washington abortion rights protesters crowded outside the fenced-off supreme court on Friday, opposite the gleaming dome of the US Capitol, where their elected representatives vented frustration at the demise of Roe but were powerless to intervene.
Two miles away at the White House, even the president seemed politically impotent. A solemn group of female staff, including domestic policy adviser Susan Rice and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, gathered beneath a staircase in the cross-hall to watch Biden deliver a response. Portraits of Bill Clinton and George W Bush, presidents in an era when Roe seemed sacrosanct, looked on from opposing walls.
Calling it “a sad day for the court and the country”, Biden said: “It was three justices named by one president – Donald Trump – who were the core of today’s decision to upend the scales of justice and eliminate a fundamental right for women in this country.
“Make no mistake: this decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law. It’s a realisation of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the supreme court, in my view.”
He added: “With this decision, the conservative majority of the supreme court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country. They have made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world.”
The president admitted that he cannot take executive action to secure a woman’s right to choose. The only hope is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe v Wade as federal law, which in turns depends on Democrats winning the midterm elections. “This fall, Roe is on the ballot,” he said. “Personal freedoms are on the ballot.”
Others argue that there is another solution to offset minority rule: expanding the supreme court beyond its current total of nine justices. The pressure group Demand Justice pointed to this week’s rulings on guns and abortion as proof that reform is needed.
Christopher Kang, its co-founder and chief counsel, said: “This is part of the decades-long Republican agenda to accomplish through the supreme court what they cannot through the democratically elected branches of Congress. We’ve seen in the last couple of days decisions making it harder for lawmakers to combat gun violence in the wake of some of the worst mass shootings in our country’s history. We’ve seen, now, overturning the right to an abortion.
“These are things that are supported by 70 to 80% of the American people and I think we’ll see it again next week in a big case concerning whether or not the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to take action to fight climate change, another thing supported by 70 to 80% of the American people. This is a further example of what Republicans are doing through our unaccountable courts that they couldn’t do through Congress or the White House.”
Americans’ faith in the supreme court has dropped to a historic low, with only 25% saying saying have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in it, down from 36% a year ago, according to a Gallup poll. Kang believes that rebuilding trust is crucial to the health of America’s increasingly fragile democracy.
“Today’s ruling shows that the supreme court is the problem and so any solution has to address the supreme court,” he added. “There are other things that the president can do or Congress, with greater majorities, could do but fundamentally we have to fix the court if we have any hope of addressing these problems.”
The calls take on even greater urgency because of what might be to come. Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion on Friday that the supreme court should reconsider other legal precedents protecting same-sex relationships, marriage equality and access to contraception. Biden warned: “This is an extreme and dangerous path this court is taking us on.”
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of NextGen America, an organisation that works to engage young voters, said: “It is the takeover of an extreme rightwing minority that seeks to roll back the gains for the LGBTQ community, for women, for people of colour.
“This isn’t the end, this is the opening salvo, and they made that clear in their decision. You had Clarence Thomas state they are going to take a look at how they can change the fundamental rights that the LGBTQ community has recently won in this country.”
Ramirez added: “We didn’t defeat fascism in 2020; we beat it back. But to kill fascism in this country is going to require a lot more than one election cycle.”
Friday’s decision is set to create a patchwork of laws from state to state. Twenty-six are certain or likely to immediately ban abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute thinktank. In Alabama, the state’s three abortion clinics stopped performing the procedure for fear providers would now be prosecuted under a law dating to 1951; women in the waiting room on Friday morning were suddenly turned away. Democratic state governors, however, promised to strengthen protections.
Back at the supreme court, the sun was shining but the mood was one of sombre defiance as hundreds of people waved placards, chanted slogans such as “the supreme court is illegitimate” and contemplated a leap into the unknown after half a century.
At 43, Tracy Tolk, a climate change and energy policy advocate, had known nothing but Roe her entire life. “I’m absolutely devastated,” she said. “I thought it would hurt less because we had a preview but it hurt more than I expected. It’s gut-wrenching. People marched on the Capitol for less than this.”
Virginia Shadron, 71, a retired academic administrator from Stone Mountain, Georgia, was wearing a badge with the face of late liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose death in 2020 allowed Trump to rush through the appointment of Barrett even with a presidential election already under way.
She said: “Millions of women will die. It sets back women and it’s only the beginning. It’s the beginning of the end of many things, as Clarence Thomas said. Next, they’ll take on contraception. Reasonable people can feel strongly and differently about abortion. I’m glad for myself, I never had to make the choice, but if I had needed to, I would have wanted a safe, legal procedure.”
There was sadness in the eyes of Maureen John, 67, who warned that the decision to overturn Roe would lead to an increase in illegal and unsafe abortions. “I’m a nurse and I’ve seen many unnecessary deaths because of the abortions done illegally,” she said.
John was born in Guyana, moved to the US in 1976 and lives in Atlanta, Georgia. “I’m from the Caribbean and I came here and I became an American citizen because of democracy which wasn’t available in my country at that time. I loved it. I love being American and now I’m being disappointed at what’s happening.”
“They’re making a mockery of democracy.”
Brittney Griner. (photo: Mike Mattina/Getty Images)
The WNBA star’s case should galvanize Americans to “use their voices to fight against marijuana prohibition, a policy that’s rooted in racism and homophobia.”
To be fair, as outrage over Brittney’s situation has grown, organizations like the National LGBTQ Task Force, GLSEN, Human Rights Campaign, and the National Black Justice Coalition condemned this act by Russia as racist and homophobic and put out statements of support for Brittney. However, most of these statements left out a timely criticism of the global “War on Drugs” and the way it has criminalized cannabis, the substance for which Griner was allegedly detained.
It’s easy to attribute Griner’s detention to draconian rules enforced by inhumane Russian authorities, but many Americans don’t realize that cannabis enforcement remains a defining part of the United States criminal legal system too, with over 350,000 arrests for marijuana law violations in 2021 alone. In fact, Griner could’ve been arrested and sentenced to jail time in at least 19 states, and—depending on the amount of hashish oil in her possession (currently unknown)—she could’ve been at risk of receiving a similar sentence under U.S. federal drug trafficking guidelines. This burden of cannabis criminalization falls disproportionately on Black LGBTQ+ folks like Griner. According to a 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), “sexual minority” adults were at least twice as likely to have used marijuana within the past year than the general population at 43.6 percent and 17.9 percent respectively.
Cannabis is often used by LGBTQ+ individuals to cope with discrimination or other adverse events, and selling those drugs can frequently become a means of survival. According to Black and Pink’s 2015 National LGBTQ Prisoner Survey, Black respondents were nearly 20 percent more likely to have participated in the drug trade than their white counterparts. This is indicative of the disproportionate rate at which Black people are arrested in the U.S. for cannabis which is, on average, 3.7 times higher than that of white people even though distribution and consumption levels are similar.
According to Prison Policy Initiative analysis, gay, lesbian, and bisexual (LGB) individuals were 2.25 times as likely to be arrested than straight individuals with the disparity being driven largely by lesbian and bisexual women, who are 4 times as likely to be arrested than straight women. This translates to a higher incarcerated population as evident from the National Inmate Survey which found that LGB people are incarcerated at a rate over three times that of the total adult population. Their incarceration often comes with longer sentences, disproportionate experiences of inhumane treatment (including sexual victimization), and overrepresentation in probation and parole that can lead to reincarceration.
These experiences are further exacerbated for transgender folks. According to The National Transgender Discrimination Survey, 1 in 6 trans people have experienced incarceration in their lifetime, and 1 in 5 trans people who have had police contact report experiences of violence. These experiences are especially true for Black trans individuals of which nearly half (47 percent) have been incarcerated and 38 percent have dealt with police violence. These disparities continue behind bars where 37 percent of transgender women experience assault compared to their cisgender counterparts
This is the time for LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations to join together with cannabis criminal justice reform organizations, like the Last Prisoner Project, to take unified action in fighting for the release, record-sealing, and reentry of individuals impacted by the unjust enforcement of cannabis prohibition. By spreading awareness, offering support, and taking direct action, LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations can help ensure the protection of their communities from the harmful effects of cannabis criminalization and the war already raging in the U.S…the “War on Drugs.”
#FreeBrittneyGriner
Mikelina Belaineh is the Director of Impact with the Last Prisoner Project and Stephen Post is a Campaign Strategist with the Last Prisoner Project.
The Last Prisoner Project (LPP) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to cannabis-related criminal justice reform. As the United States moves away from the criminalization of cannabis, giving rise to a major new industry, there remains the fundamental injustice inflicted upon those who have suffered under America’s unjust policy of cannabis prohibition. Through intervention, advocacy, and awareness campaigns, the Last Prisoner Project works to redress the past and continuing harms of these inhumane and ineffective laws and policies. Visit www.lastprisonerproject.org or text FREEDOM to 24365 to learn more.
San Salvador, 2017. (photo: Presidencia El Salvador)
With tens of thousands jailed and scores of reports of human rights abuses, Nayib Bukele’s project slides ever closer to a permanent state of exception.
The scale and spectacle of the March homicides revealed that President Bukele’s security measures, his Territorial Control Plan (PCT), was largely comprised of backdoor dealings with gangs. Indeed, El Faro confirmed the killing spree was the result of a breakdown in the government’s negotiations with MS-13. Consequently, the episode reactivated a longstanding Salvadoran polemic around human rights, sowing confusion by exploiting the gang menace to obscure the irreparable harm levied against thousands of Salvadoran families caught in the anti-mara dragnet.
Payback Politics
The homicide spike prompted Bukele’s government to mete out a swift response. The state deployed police and military across El Salvador, strategically stationing patrols across the poorest neighborhoods like Soyapango, Mejicanos, San Martín, San Marcos, Santa Rita—places today stigmatized by their gang presence. During Bukele’s mass gang sweep, the government began rounding people up indiscriminately—men, women, children—all suspected of being gang members or of being “affiliated” with gangs. Bukele’s security policies have now become at once random and comprehensive, employing a tactic of “catch now, ask questions later.” Politically, this retaliatory logic of “getting even” has also helped to preserve the political capital lost after journalists revealed that Bukele—referred to by alias “Batman” in audio recordings between a senior official and at least one MS-13 member—was, as a key part of PCT, actively negotiating with gangs.
Accordingly, Bukele has continued to wage a propaganda war on Twitter. Recent tweets have riffed on common anti-mara sensibilities, circulating images from the military and police to display the unyielding might of his Territorial Control Plan. As many now recognize, Bukele’s opaque PCT is simply the current naming of old forms of punitive power: iron fist approaches, a state favorite to discipline the gang scourge. As the homicide spike exposed many political weaknesses, Bukele scrambled to restore integrity to his security efforts and to ignore reports of internal dealings. This security strategy—intensified militarization alongside secret negotiations—has brought some of the longest stretches of zero reported homicides in the country since the end of the Salvadoran Civil War.
The state and the gangs are both fickle, and security policy is a fragile endeavor. The homicide spike was not some senseless act nor an irregularity: it was a direct message to Bukele’s government, expressing with corpses the gangs’ dissatisfaction with the breakdown of negotiations. As part of the deal, the state and gangs traded homicide reductions for improved prison and street-level conditions. While the revelation that Bukele’s government was transacting with gangs was generally unsurprising to Salvadorans, it did make the public recall the gang truce that the FMLN government of President Mauricio Funes secretly negotiated in 2012. Similarly, homicides shot up again after the truce collapsed, and the controversial negotiations damaged the FMLN’s reputation.
Zoning the Poor
Salvadoran gang command is known to work through the prison system, where leaders of la ranfla nacional or national directorate broadcast orders from within. On the outside, gang cliques—street-level cells—penetrate every hamlet and neighborhood, where their presence is an ordinary part of everyday life. In these desperate worlds of the poor, gangs continue to offer opportunities as well as forcefully recruit the most vulnerable of the Salvadoran underclasses to join their ranks. Socially and politically, the gang has become a flexible signifier and dog whistle that now represents all the country’s dysfunction. Their mistreatment—discursively and otherwise—continues to offer astonishing political currency and has turned it into a criteria for sorting the poor, between deserving and undeserving. Ideologically, Salvadoran politics continues to publicly wear its tough-on-crime guise, despite that pragmatically, negotiating with gangs is a political necessity.
The outsized footprint of gangs has transformed them into local mediators for accomplishing anything politically. Municipal leaders, town mayors, and local chapters of political parties must, in many cases, interface with local gang leadership to serve their terms peacefully. For Salvadoran politics in general, this has precipitated a host of bipolar policies at all levels: performing the spectacle of policing as a response to unending moral panic, while continuing to secretly deal with gang leadership. This approach, coupled with political short-termism, has led to the criminalization and stigmatization of entire sectors of the Salvadoran population. Poor and working-class areas—from Apopa to Sesuntepeque, Ciudad Delgado to Cojutepeque—are now zones of abandonment: unsafe, “gang-infested” communities stigmatized for their economic poverty and their related social disorder. Marginalized rural hamlets, those cantoncitos near and far, are also commonly cast as anthills of gang activity.
As watchdog organizations like Cristosal remind us, the state of exception is a human rights emergency. The Bukele government has deployed a blunt instrument to address a delicate, socially intricate, and embedded political economic problem. Sharpened through practice, the criminal profiling of gang members has transformed into an indiscriminate criminalization of the poor. And human rights defenders who seek the protection of constitutional guarantees for all have been slandered as protecting the maras, as siding with terrorists.
Bukele, disregarding all naysaying to his approach, has used the state of exception to suspend citizen rights of free assembly and due process while continuing to capture anyone tangentially linked to gangs. Relying on this terribly imprecise metric, Bukele’s government has now arrested thousands, using these very numbers to celebrate the successes of their operation and justify the construction of a new “gigantic penitentiary” to support the PCT. State communiques defend the accuracy of their targeting, communicating that drug dealers, extortionists, gang members, and abusers are among the captured, now off the streets and rotting in prison. Fundamentally, the gang crackdown has violated citizen rights and constitutional guarantees, trashed habeas corpus, and pointlessly harmed the innocently detained. Bukele’s state of exception has produced the very emergency it aims to resolve, relying on the deep-seated punitive culture that has made every Salvadoran a suspect.
Suspicion and Security
Fear remains a prime mover in Salvadoran society and politics where suspicion has always been a favored vehicle to articulate security policy. In the Salvadoran Civil War, for example, poor people were often “suspected” of being affiliated with the guerrilla movement, and their poverty equated them with being, if not militants themselves, rebel collaborators. On the other hand, clandestine groups were suspicious of the Salvadoran state, as they were known for placing undercover agents in their midst, and many members were found to be cops or soldiers. These forms of suspicion have left a lasting imprint on Salvadoran society, becoming a kind of political emotion that has made the poor indistinguishable from the criminal. Arbitrary detention, capture, kidnapping, and execution were common wartime acts that have since continued, now mutated into present-day practices of disappearance, mass jailing, intentional homicide, and punitive spectacle.
As the “gang problem” swelled over the last 20 years, certain physical traits became linked with gang affiliation. These characteristics congealed into a criminal type—a young, poor, able-bodied Salvadoran man—meriting the utmost suspicion. Across administrations, male bodies marked by tattoos, piercings, and certain clothing styles became commonsense shorthand to the state and the public. Criminal profiling—strategies derived from U.S. urban policing practices—fused with local security and surveillance practices, becoming indispensable to Salvadoran statecraft. Beginning under the government of Francisco Flores with the first zero-tolerance mano dura policy in the early 2000s—and continuing under the administrations of Tony Saca, the left interlude with Funes and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, and now Bukele—poverty became a criminalized terrain where people, whether young men, women, or even children, have become the collateral damage of anti-mara operations.
Bukele continues touting that there have been zero homicides in the country since he decreed the state of exception. He continues to discursively split the Salvadoran public between the good and the morally derelict, for whom el presidente
holds no compassion. While some of the captured have since been released, families of the newly detained are waiting outside the decrepit Mariona and Izalco prisons, wondering about the welfare of their interned loved ones. Packed tightly in dungeon-like cells, the captured are undergoing ghastly experiences, their day-to-day shattered by Bukele’s emergency. These people remain without due process, among them those who likely once thought themselves among the righteous supporters of the politics against the wicked. In mid-2022, Bukele’s state of exception has become an instrument for everyday rule, where a routine ID check that reveals you’re from the wrong neighborhood might be enough to prompt arrest, detention, and express sentencing.
A Permanent Emergency
Over 3,000 complaints about human rights abuses have been filed with the country’s Human Rights Ombudsman since the start of the emergency period on March 27. Families—mothers, friends, wives, daughters—have recently gathered at the capital’s Salvador del Mundo Plaza to express their dissatisfaction with Bukele’s treatment of their relatives. Nighttime vigils have sought to convince President Bukele to reconsider the extended emergency—recently renewed until late July—and to free their loved ones who have been arbitrarily stripped of liberty. Quoting scripture and offering collective prayer, these now-illegal gatherings are aimed at appealing to Bukele’s morality, requesting divine intervention to secure the speedy return of the captured. Some have even expressed a sense of betrayal with Bukele, underscoring that although they may have voted for him, they did not consent to this abuse of power.
The Bukele project is moving towards a permanent state of emergency, where Salvadorans must accept the arbitrary dictates of a strongman state aimed at the gangster-terrorist and its associates. To the directly affected, the arbitrary detentions have provided a type of political clarity that is only gained via first-hand experience. For the unaffected and fortunate others, Bukele, by never yielding to terrorist intimidation, has once again proved his political effectiveness in controlling the gangs. Both groups, however, are working from their own, situated, cost-benefit analysis of the country’s reality. There are even reports of people singling out their neighbors to police, inflaming community-level antagonisms and familial disputes. Others applaud the temporary end of extortion payments and the sensation of safety brought about by emergency measures. In this knotted social field where safety is never taken for granted, the curbing of civil liberties for utilitarian benefit remains acceptable to many. For others, even a single abuse of human rights is a direct attack on the civil liberties of all, moving the country ever closer to authoritarianism.
In this photo provided by Grand Canyon National Park, an adult bison roams near a corral at the North Rim of the park in Arizona, on Aug. 30, 2021. (photo: Lauren Cisneros/Grand Canyon National Park/AP)
The park used skilled volunteers selected through a highly competitive and controversial lottery last year to kill bison, part of a toolset to downsize the herd that's been trampling meadows and archaeological sites on the canyon's North Rim.
Introducing the sound of gunfire and having people close to the bison was meant to nudge the massive animals back to the adjacent forest where they legally could be hunted. But the efforts had little effect.
“They just kind of moved a bit from where the activity occurred, and sometimes they'd come back the next day,” said Grand Canyon wildfire program manager Greg Holm.
New surveys also have shown the herd is closer to the goal of about 200, down from an estimated 500 to 800 animals when the park approved a plan to quickly cut the size of the herd. The park is now working with other agencies and groups on a long-term plan for managing the bison, an animal declared America's national mammal in 2016 and depicted on the National Park Service logo.
Hunting over hundreds of years and a genetic bottleneck nearly left the animals that once numbered in the tens of millions extinct in the U.S. Federal wildlife authorities now support about 11,000 bison in about a dozen states, including the largest herd on public land at Yellowstone National Park.
Yellowstone, which spans 3,500 square miles in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, also is developing a new management plan for the roughly 5,500 bison there. It's working with Native American tribes, state agencies and other groups to find ways to reduce the number of bison sent to slaughter.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota regularly rounds up bison using helicopters and corrals, then transfers some of the animals to tribes, other states and national parks. Without natural predators, bison herds can grow quickly and strain the resources, the park says.
The Grand Canyon herd didn't always live within the park's boundaries, where they can be seen along the highway leading to the North Rim entrance. The bison are descendants of those brought to Arizona in the 1900s as part of a crossbreeding experiment with cattle.
The animals increasingly recognized they could be hunted on the adjacent national forest and sought refuge in the national park. Hunting isn't allowed at national parks, but the agency has authority to kill animals that harm resources, using park staff or volunteers.
Most of the bison at Grand Canyon have been removed by corralling them and transferring them to Native American tribes that have been trying to reestablish herds on their land. A controversial pilot project last fall sought skilled volunteers to shoot up to 12 of the animals.
More than 45,000 people applied for the chance. Ultimately, 10 were picked, and they were able to kill four bison. Although the animals are massive, they're quick and agile and can hide among thick stands of trees.
Grand Canyon officials say they won't repeat the program this fall, but it won't be excluded as a tool in the future. Another corralling effort is planned.
The latest bison population estimate based on aerial surveys and tracking devices shows 216 bison on the expansive Kaibab Plateau, according to Grand Canyon National Park. Agencies that manage the land and wildlife in far northern Arizona and study the bison's movement are meeting in July to start talking about the long-term plan.
Part of that discussion will include creating more gaps in the state-sanctioned bison hunting seasons outside Grand Canyon National Park to see if bison will move outside the boundaries, said Larry Phoenix, an Arizona Game and Fish Department regional supervisor.
Meanwhile, the Game and Fish Department is seeking approval to improve fencing, cattle guards and water catchments to expand the range for another herd of bison in far northern Arizona. The state imported 15 bison yearlings from a privately owned nature reserve in Montana in late 2017 and said the herd now needs more room to grow.
Phoenix is confident these bison won't follow the others into the Grand Canyon, largely because the animals don't know the other herd exists.
Environmental groups are skeptical fences can keep them from straying and adding to the overall bison population in the region where they've been difficult and costly to keep in check.
They’re asking the U.S. Forest Service to do an in-depth review of the proposal that considers climate change and impacts to plants and animals like the chisel-tooth kangaroo rat.
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