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“A shooting, and Mr. Welch is down,” the driver yelled.
Estes grabbed his coat and ran outside, ignoring his girlfriend’s pleas to stay.
At Welch’s house in the Greek capital, Estes saw the station chief lying on his back on the sidewalk, his wife, Kika, kneeling beside him. Blood covered Welch’s face, and Estes could see immediately that he was dead. “I didn’t need to feel for a pulse,” he said in an interview. A police car arrived, and Estes asked the officer to call an ambulance. When no ambulance arrived, they hauled the body into Welch’s car and Estes and Welch’s driver followed the police officer, siren blaring and lights flashing, through the streets of Athens to the nearest hospital. A medical team was waiting; they quickly placed Welch on a gurney and took him to an examining room. There, a doctor placed a stethoscope on Welch’s chest and confirmed to Estes that he was dead.
Welch was 46 years old. A career CIA officer, he had been the CIA’s Athens station chief for six months.
At the hospital, Welch’s driver finally caught his breath and told Estes what had happened. He had driven Welch and his wife home from a Christmas party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, then stopped in front of the walled compound that enclosed Welch’s house to open the front gates. As Welch and his wife got out, three armed men in a black car pulled up behind them, burst out of the car, and confronted Welch.
“Put your hands up!” one of the men told Welch in Greek.
“What?” Welch asked in English.
One of the gunmen leveled his .45 caliber handgun and fired three times. An autopsy later showed that the first shot hit Welch in the chest, rupturing his aorta and killing him instantly. The three men got back in their car and sped away. That’s when Welch’s driver rushed to get Estes.
The hospital lobby soon filled with journalists, who had most likely heard about the shooting by monitoring the city’s police radio. Estes realized that many of them already seemed to know that Welch had been the CIA’s station chief. Steven Roberts, a New York Times reporter in Athens who covered Welch’s murder, wrote the next day that he had been talking with Welch at the ambassador’s Christmas party an hour before the shooting.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Embassy arrived, and Estes slipped away from the crowd of reporters. The police found the gunmen’s car, which had been stolen, abandoned several blocks from Welch’s home.
Back at the CIA station, Estes sent cables to CIA headquarters and talked on a secure phone with a top agency official. “When I finished briefing him, he said, ‘I could only hear about half of what you said.’” Estes recalled. “‘Send me a cable repeating what you said immediately. We’ve got to go to the president.’”
Welch’s assassination was huge news and struck a painful political nerve in Washington, coming at the end of a year of stunning disclosures about the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community by the Senate’s Church Committee, which, throughout 1975, had been conducting the first major congressional investigation of the CIA. The Church Committee uncovered so many secrets and generated so many headlines that pundits were already calling 1975 “the Year of Intelligence.”
Before the Church Committee was created in January 1975, there had been no real congressional oversight of the CIA. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees did not yet exist, and the Church Committee’s unprecedented investigation marked the first effort by Congress to unearth decades of abusive and illegal acts secretly committed by the CIA — and to curb its power.
Sen. Frank Church, the liberal Democrat from Idaho who chaired the committee, had come to believe that the future of American democracy was threatened by the rise of a permanent and largely unaccountable national security state, and he sensed that at the heart of that secret government was a lawless intelligence community. Church was convinced it had to be reined in to save the nation.
To a great degree, he succeeded. By disclosing a series of shocking abuses of power and spearheading wide-ranging reforms, Church and his Committee created rules of the road for the intelligence community that largely remain in place today. More than anyone else in American history, Church is responsible for bringing the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the government’s intelligence apparatus under the rule of law.
But first, Church and his committee had to withstand a brutal counterattack launched by a Republican White House and the CIA, both of which wanted to blunt Church’s reform efforts. The White House and CIA quickly realized that the Welch killing, which occurred just as the Church Committee was finishing its investigations and preparing its final report and recommendations for reform, could be used as a political weapon. President Gerald Ford’s White House and the agency falsely sought to blame the Church Committee for Welch’s murder, claiming, without any evidence, that its investigations had somehow exposed Welch’s identity and left him vulnerable to assassination.
There was absolutely no truth to the claims, but the disinformation campaign was effective. The Ford administration’s use of the Welch murder to discredit the Church Committee was a model of propaganda and disinformation; an internal CIA history later praised the “skillful steps” that the agency and the White House “took to exploit the Welch murder to U.S. intelligence benefit.”
The Welch case has long since served as a classic example of how to exploit and weaponize intelligence for political purposes. The George W. Bush administration’s efforts to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq by claiming that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11; the Republican obsession with the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, and their use of it to discredit then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and Donald Trump’s efforts to portray himself as the victim of a “deep state” conspiracy can all be traced back to the way U.S. leaders exploited Welch’s 1975 killing.
The White House and CIA were aided in their propaganda campaign by the fact that Estes did not go public at the time with his account of what really happened in Athens. Now, nearly 50 years later, Estes has finally broken his silence. In interviews for our new book, “The Last Honest Man,” he talked in detail about the murder and its causes with a journalist for the first time, supplying new evidence that Welch’s assassination stemmed from the toxic politics of Athens — not Washington.
Welch’s killing was a direct result of the feverish political climate that gripped Greece in the mid-1970s. In July 1974, the right-wing military junta that ruled Greece backed a coup in Cyprus to oust the island’s president and create a union between Greece and Cyprus. Making Cyprus fully Greek was a longtime objective of Greek right-wing ultranationalists, but the move immediately prompted a Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Greek junta leader Dimitris Ioannidis bitterly blamed the United States for not stopping the Turkish invasion.
Greek hostility toward the United States spread. On August 19, 1974, a pro-Greek mob attacked the U.S. embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus, and both U.S. Ambassador Rodger Davies and a local embassy employee were killed. After a ceasefire, Cyprus was divided into Greek and Turkish zones; the disastrous outcome of the coup in Cyprus later led to the collapse of the military junta in Athens. But anger in Greece toward the United States continued unabated.
The relationship between the CIA and Greece’s Central Intelligence Service, known as the KYP, was also poisoned. Soon, someone had leaked the names of Welch and a few other officers in the CIA’s Athens station to the Greek press.
In November 1975, Welch’s name and home address were published in English language and Greek language newspapers in Athens. The information “was obviously leaked by hostile KYP officers,” Estes said in the interview, “because the only names leaked were those in liaison contact with KYP.” (CIA overseas stations often included officers who were in liaison contact with the intelligence service of the local country — their identities as CIA officers thus declared to the service so they could meet with them and trade intelligence — and others who were not identified so they could spy without the knowledge of the local government.)
Welch was not hard to find; he lived in a luxurious villa that had been the official residence of the CIA station chief for decades. After his name and home address were published in the press, Estes talked to him about whether he should move. But Welch and Estes concluded that the threat was minimal. “We both agreed that political assassination was not part of the fabric of Greek history or culture,” Estes recalled.
It was a fatal miscalculation. Welch’s murder was carried out by a new, extremely violent Greek leftist guerrilla organization called 17 November. While right-wing Greek nationalists hated the United States for betraying Greece over Cyprus, left-wing Greeks blamed the United States for helping to install the military junta in Athens in 1967. The 17 November group was named for an anti-junta protest by students that was brutally broken up on November 17, 1973. Welch was 17 November’s first target. (The group continued to conduct terrorist attacks in Greece, including the murders of other American officials, until it was finally crushed in 2002.)
Estes reported the truth back to CIA headquarters: that Welch had been murdered by Greek terrorists after being publicly exposed by the KYP, the Greek intelligence service. His story was buried in the service of a more helpful political narrative.
After Welch’s murder, emotions were running high in the CIA station in Athens. On the night of the assassination, Estes had to restrain another CIA officer after he grabbed a pistol and threatened to seek revenge by killing the KGB’s Athens Rezident, Welch’s Soviet counterpart.
Welch’s murder hit Estes hard as well. He and Welch had come up through the ranks of the agency together, and by 1975, they were close friends who met to play chess every Sunday. Welch and Estes had previously served together in Cyprus, and they understood the island’s status as a battlefield in the long-running conflict between Turkey and Greece. While serving in Cyprus, Estes said, Welch had recruited the personal secretary of Cypriot President Makarios III to spy for the CIA.
Estes was eager to solve his friend’s murder, without waiting for the Greek police. At the time, he didn’t know about the new leftist 17 November organization since Welch’s killing was its first operation. Instead, Estes focused his investigation on a right-wing terrorist group.
He and other CIA officers in Athens grilled their local sources and found that a gunman associated with a Greek-Cypriot right-wing paramilitary group known as EOKA had left Athens on a flight to Nicosia, Cyprus, the day after Welch’s killing. The gunman was known to have killed people in Cyprus with a .45 handgun — the same kind of weapon used to kill Welch.
When he worked in Cyprus years earlier, Estes had recruited an EOKA hitman to work for the CIA. “When I left Cyprus, he told me that whenever the CIA wanted something done that it didn’t want to do itself, call me,” recalled Estes. “So, after Welch was killed, I sent a case officer to Nicosia to meet him and tell him that Ron Estes sent him.”
The CIA officer asked the Cypriot agent if he knew the EOKA killer who had flown from Athens to Cyprus the day after Welch’s murder. The hitman said he did. The CIA officer told the hitman to go meet the man and ask him if he’d killed Welch.
The hitman reported that, when he confronted the EOKA killer, the other man was so scared that he offered to plead his innocence to the CIA himself. An American case officer then met with the man in Laranca, Cyprus, where he passed a CIA-administered polygraph.
Estes’s conviction that Welch had been exposed by the KYP and murdered by Greek terrorists, and the fact that CIA officers were conducting their own murder investigation on the ground in Cyprus, were not made public in Washington at the time. That information would only have gotten in the way of the campaign to exploit Welch’s murder to discredit the Church Committee.
By late 1975, Ford and the CIA were both worried about their public standing. The Church Committee’s disclosures of intelligence abuses had weakened the CIA, and the White House was concerned about the political impact of the committee’s disclosures on Ford, the first commander-in-chief who had never been elected either president or vice president. Ford had been the obscure House minority leader in 1973 when he was chosen as vice president under the 25th Amendment by then-President Richard Nixon and Congress. Ford replaced Spiro Agnew, who had been forced to resign amid a corruption scandal; he became president when the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign in August 1974. Ford was headed into a tough presidential election campaign in 1976, and he wasn’t even assured of winning the Republican nomination. He faced a formidable challenge on the right from former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, and so Ford was eager to prove his conservative bona fides.
Now, with Welch’s assassination, the White House and CIA quickly realized they had been handed a political gift — a martyred hero whose death they could lay at the feet of liberal Democrat Church.
It didn’t matter that Welch’s murder had nothing to do with the Church Committee. It didn’t matter that Estes had told CIA headquarters that the Greek intelligence service had leaked Welch’s name and address to the Greek press as revenge for U.S. policy in Cyprus. Largely through innuendo, the White House and the CIA blamed the Church Committee for Welch’s death, claiming that its investigations had somehow led to his exposure.
The day after Welch’s murder, Welch’s father, who had been living in Athens with his son, asked Estes to see if Welch could be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Welch had never served in the military, so burial at Arlington would require a special exemption.
Estes says he cabled CIA headquarters about the request, and Ford quickly gave his approval. That led to a grand political moment, stage-managed by the White House.
A U.S. Air Force plane flew Welch’s body from Athens to Washington. Welch’s son, a Marine lieutenant wearing his dress blues, accompanied his father’s body on the flight. The plane delayed its landing, circling Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington for 45 minutes so its arrival could be broadcast live during the morning network television news programs.
Daniel Schorr, a CBS News correspondent who covered the event, wrote in his personal journal, which was published in Rolling Stone in 1976, that “the public relations people explain that the big cargo plane, already overhead, will stay in a holding pattern and land at 7 a.m. so that it will be available for live televising on network morning news programs. We do in fact carry it live on the CBS Morning News.”
Welch’s January 6, 1976, funeral service at Arlington was attended by Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and CIA director William Colby. No president had ever before attended the funeral of a slain CIA officer.
After the funeral service, Ford stood beside Welch’s widow while Welch’s coffin was placed on a horse-drawn caisson. “We watch, and film … the same caisson that carried the body of President Kennedy, the folded flag given to the widow by Colby,” wrote Schorr in his journal.
“It is the CIA’s first public national hero,” Schorr wrote. “I have a sense that Welch, dead, has one more service to render the CIA. He will be turned into a symbol in the gathering counter-offensive against disclosure.”
While Ford, Kissinger, and Colby attended Welch’s funeral, the FBI was investigating a death threat against Church in retaliation for Welch’s murder, sent by a group calling itself Veterans Against Communist Sympathizers.
Another prominent Washington official also attended Welch’s funeral: George Herbert Walker Bush, who had just been nominated to succeed Colby as CIA director. Ford had chosen Bush after firing Colby, who Ford believed had cooperated too readily with the Church Committee’s inquiries. The opening battle between the White House, the CIA, and Church would be fought over Bush’s confirmation in the Senate.
Church saw Bush’s nomination as an effort by Ford to put a partisan hack at the CIA, someone who would do the bidding of the White House just as Congress was seeking to curb the agency’s abuses. Church viewed Bush’s nomination as a direct attack on the Church Committee.
The chance to be CIA director came at a critical moment in Bush’s career. Until then, he had a poor record in elected politics. He won a House seat from Texas and served two terms but then lost a campaign for the Senate in 1970. After that, Bush started to rise in the Republican ranks through a series of appointed positions. He served as chair of the Republican National Committee during Watergate, a job that forced him to make repeated public excuses for Nixon but earned him credit for party loyalty. He also served as United Nations ambassador under Nixon and as head of the U.S. Liaison Office in China under Ford.
Ford was considering Bush to be his running mate in 1976; the job as CIA director seemed like a stepping stone. But first, Bush had to get past Frank Church.
Even as he was still working on his committee’s investigations and reports, Church went all out to block Bush’s confirmation. On December 16, 1975, Church testified as a witness against Bush during his confirmation hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Bush’s confirmation was “ill-advised,” Church told the committee, because of his partisan political background and because he had refused to rule out running as vice president in 1976. Church complained that the White House was using the CIA as a “grooming room” for Bush “before he is brought on stage next year as a vice presidential running mate.”
But Welch’s murder quickly changed the political calculus of the confirmation fight in favor of Bush — and against Church.
The White House and CIA followed a subtle but effective strategy to use the Welch murder to help get Bush confirmed, while also poisoning the political climate for Church and his Committee. Immediately after Welch’s murder, the CIA sought to blame the Fifth Estate, a left-wing group based in Washington that published Counter Spy, a small left-wing magazine that had previously printed long lists of CIA officials’ names, including Welch’s when he served in Peru. Agency officials also blamed Philip Agee, a former CIA officer who had just published “Inside the Company,” a controversial book that had listed the names of hundreds of CIA officers and agents.
Many observers saw the CIA’s efforts to blame Counter Spy and Agee as a way to shift the blame for Welch’s murder from Greek terrorists to the CIA’s American critics. And if the public inferred that those American critics also included Church and his committee, so be it.
Conservative pundits quickly made the link explicit. In early January 1976, right-wing columnist Smith Hempstone wrote that the blame for Welch’s murder should be shared by “the congressional committees that for nearly a year have been holding the CIA up to ridicule and verbal abuse.” Around the same time, an anonymous, pro-CIA newsletter, the Pink Sheet, called Welch’s murder “a tragic reminder of a very basic truth: There are individuals and organizations in this country whose activities are aiding the enemies of the U.S. Are we to be impotent against such fifth columnists in our midst? Please write to your congressman and senators and ask what they propose to do about this increasingly dangerous problem. Instead of harming our internal security agencies, Senator Frank Church and his colleagues should be investigating outfits like the Fifth Estate.” The Pink Sheet’s diatribe was included in CIA files and publicly released by the CIA among other documents declassified in 2004. It is not clear whether the newsletter was published by someone affiliated with the CIA.
Meanwhile, former CIA officers began to make themselves available to the press to attack Church. One of them, Mike Ackerman, told reporters that the Church Committee shared the blame for Welch’s death, adding that the committee should have conducted its investigations without publicly disclosing agency operations.
New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis saw through the unfolding White House-CIA strategy.
“Understandably, the Welch case has brought to a boil the resentment felt by CIA veterans at critics of the agency,” Lewis wrote. “But it is another matter entirely to use the murder of Richard Welch as a political device, as President Ford and his national security assistants are evidently trying to do now.”
Colby’s “denunciation [of Fifth Estate] plainly had a larger purpose: to make the case that the CIA needs more secrecy in general than it has been getting lately,” Lewis wrote. “President Ford and his colleagues, judging by their recent comments, hope to prevent any thoroughgoing reform of the CIA. They will use the Welch case to that end, in particular to resist limits on covert action and to reduce congressional scrutiny.”
The Washington Star’s Norman Kempster agreed, noting that “only a few hours after the CIA’s Athens station chief was gunned down in front of his home, the agency began a subtle campaign intended to persuade Americans that his death was the indirect result of congressional investigations and the direct result of an article in an obscure magazine. The nation’s press, by and large, swallowed the bait.”
The campaign by the White House and the CIA to exploit Welch’s murder ensured Bush’s confirmation as CIA director. On January 27, 1976, Bush sailed through the Senate on a vote of 64-27. Ford made only one concession to the Senate before the vote: He announced that Bush would not be his running mate in 1976.
Four years later, Bush was elected vice president on the ticket with Reagan.
The false narrative that Welch had been murdered because of reckless disclosures in Washington remained powerful for years afterward, ultimately leading to legislation that made it illegal to publish the names of covert CIA officers, a law that has since often been abused by the government to crack down on whistleblowers and dissent.
After Welch’s murder, public support for the Church Committee waned. Church was stunned by the sudden reversal of the political climate and angered that Bush continued to push the false story around Welch’s killing even after he became CIA director.
During one closed hearing of the Church Committee soon after Bush had been confirmed, “Bush blurted out, ‘You were responsible for Welch’s assassination,’” recalled Fritz Schwarz, the Church Committee’s chief counsel. “It pissed off everybody. We forced Bush to apologize during the hearing.” Still, the Bush family continued to push false narratives about the Welch murder for years. In the 1990s, Agee, the former CIA officer, sued Barbara Bush for libel after she wrote in her memoir that Welch had been killed after Agee’s book blew his cover. The suit was dropped in 1997 after Bush acknowledged that Agee’s book was not responsible for Welch’s assassination.
Meanwhile, Church also had to convince other senators, whose support for his committee was wavering in the face of the White House and CIA disinformation campaign, that his investigation was not responsible for Welch’s murder.
“One of the things we did was tell other senators that we didn’t reveal Welch’s name,” recalls former Church Committee staffer Loch Johnson. “We had to make it clear to other senators that we had nothing to do with it.”
The controversy over Welch’s murder hit just as Church was about to launch his own bid to run for president in 1976. After the Church Committee had completed its investigations, Church announced his candidacy in March 1976. But by waiting until the committee’s work was done, Church started off far behind the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter. Still, Church surprisingly won several primaries before dropping out and became a leading contender to be Carter’s running mate. When Carter instead chose Walter Mondale, a Democratic senator from Minnesota, Church began to suspect that CIA officials had worked behind the scenes to torpedo his selection. Church confided to his son that, just before the Democratic convention in New York, he’d gotten a call from the CIA saying the agency had been told that The Economist magazine was going to publish a story revealing that the Church Committee had been infiltrated by the KGB.
“Can you imagine any rumor more certain to spook a presidential candidate than that his prospective vice president has overseen an operation which was infiltrated by the KGB?” Church told his son, Forrest, who recounted the conversation in his 1985 memoir.
It turned out that the reporter the CIA had told Church was writing the story did not exist, and no story was ever published. “Church’s feeling that he had been sandbagged by the CIA might have been an illusion,” Forrest Church wrote. “One thing is certain, however. There is no member of the Senate whom the leaders of our intelligence services would have less preferred sitting a heartbeat away from the presidency.”
Former Church staffer Peter Fenn corroborated that account: “We talked a good deal about the CIA torpedoing him.”
The CIA’s hatred of Church didn’t end in 1976.
In 1980, Church was facing a tough reelection campaign in Idaho. As the election loomed, Rep. Steve Symms, a hard-right Republican who represented Idaho’s first congressional district, appeared the most likely candidate to run against him. Symms, whose family owned a large fruit ranch near Caldwell, Idaho, had been plotting to take on Church for years. He had even urged Bob Smith, his friend and chief of staff, to run against Church in 1974 as a stalking horse.
But just in case Symms had any last-minute doubts, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s former chief of counterintelligence, stepped in to give him a push.
Angleton felt he had been humiliated by being forced to testify in public before the Church Committee, and Church was at the top of his personal enemies list. In the late 1970s, Angleton, who was originally from Idaho, began meeting with Symms to convince him to run against Church.
“He was from Boise, and he really despised Frank Church,” Symms said in an interview. “He used to come over to see me in the House,” he added. Angleton would recount to Symms all the damage he claimed Church had wrought on the CIA, Symms said, and then Angleton would say, “You should run against Church.”
“I got exposed to that [intelligence] stuff through Angleton,” Symms added. “I still remember him coming over to my office and sitting on my couch, and he would smoke one cigarette after another. He would kind of put his leg up and talk to me on intelligence. He wanted Church defeated.”
Symms beat Church in 1980, which was cause for celebration in CIA circles.
“After I won the Senate race, I was invited to a party at someone’s house and I was just about the only person there who was not former intelligence,” Symms recalled. “It was quite impressive to meet all these people and see how deeply they all despised Church.”
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Soldiers stand next to military vehicles in Myanmar. (photo: Reuters)
Satellite images show villages in ashes in Myanmar's Sagaing. Survivors say the army is burning opponents' homes and killing those who could not flee.
It was February 28. Columns of soldiers were approaching the village along its main roads to the north and west. There was only one way out - a dirt path to the east with a small bridge over the Yama stream. The bridge could only take motorbikes, no cars or bullock carts.
“There were about 1,000 of us. And only one exit for everyone,” said Kyaw Hsan Oo, a resident of Kone Ywar. “It was terrifying, difficult and chaotic.”
Shortly after the soldiers marched into Kone Ywar, the residents of the farming village watched in despair from afar as huge clouds of smoke began billowing up across their paddy farms, in the direction of their homes.
Kyaw Hsan Oo, a 30-year-old utility worker, said he returned to Kone Ywar the next day to find most of the village of about 600 households razed to the ground. The wooden and brick homes of some 386 families were destroyed, along with all of their belongings - clothes, furniture, pots and pans - leaving them homeless, with just the clothes on their backs.
Worse, returning villagers found the bodies of two 50-year-old men who had been unable to flee because of poor health. They had been shot.
The charred body of a third man was found in the ruins of his home.
“Those villagers were innocent,” said Kyaw Hsan Oo. “They are not part of the resistance, just simple villagers. This is brutal and inhumane.”
Kone Ywar
Kone Ywar was targeted, according to Kyaw Hsan Oo, because of its support for Myanmar’s jailed elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose government was toppled in a coup in February 2021. The military, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, justified the power grab with unsubstantiated claims of fraud in elections the previous November which had returned Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD) to power in a landslide.
The coup triggered mass protests across the country, including in Kone Ywar, where residents took to the streets in near-daily shows of defiance. The military cracked down with brutal force, shooting and killing unarmed protesters in cities and towns across the country, including in the biggest cities of Yangon and Mandalay. Despairing of securing change by peaceful means, the people of Myanmar have since taken up arms against the military in what a shadow administration set up by deposed legislators, the National Unity Government (NUG), has called a people’s uprising.
More than two years since the power grab, violence has engulfed vast swathes of the Southeast Asian country of 53 million people. The United Nations estimates the military has killed at least 2,940 civilians and detained more than 17,000 people, creating a “catastrophic” situation for human rights in Myanmar. The military’s indiscriminate use of air raids, artillery shelling and clashes with groups opposed to its rule - including ethnic armed groups and civilian militias known as the People’s Defence Forces (PDFs) - has displaced more than 1.5 million people nationwide and left some 17.6 million in need of humanitarian assistance.
Nowhere has the violence been as intense as in the Sagaing region of central Myanmar, where Kone Ywar is located and where reports indicate near-daily confrontations between resistance forces and soldiers, air attacks, bombings and torching of homes. The UN said it has documented at least 1,200 killings in Sagaing alone, and the razing of tens of thousands of homes - actions that it said may amount to war crimes.
The military has restricted access to Sagaing and imposes communications blackouts on an ad hoc basis, hampering journalists from reporting on the escalating conflict in the region.
Satellite images obtained by Al Jazeera’s Sanad Investigative Unit, however, reveal widespread destruction in the area, with some villages nearly completely or partially turned to ashes. Survivors from several villages told Al Jazeera by telephone that soldiers killed anyone who was too old or infirm to flee, stole valuables from their homes, destroyed documents such as identity papers and set fire to buildings and food supplies. The torchings have left hundreds of thousands of people in Sagaing in need of urgent food aid and shelter, according to the UN and local charity groups.
“They target all the villages that are not accepting them or resisting them,” said Kyaw Hsan Oo. “They burn any village that does not agree with them. And kill anyone who does not listen or obey them.”
The military, which calls itself the State Administration Council (SAC), did not respond to repeated calls and emails from Al Jazeera seeking comment.
Myanmar's central plains - home to the Buddhist-Bamar people, the country's main ethnic group - were the seat of most pre-colonial Burmese kingdoms. The semi-arid region, also known as the Dry Zone, is crisscrossed by the Irawaddy and Chindwin rivers, and populated mostly by famers, who grow crops including rice and legumes.
Before the 2021 coup, it was largely spared the fighting that broke out between Myanmar's military and the country’s various ethnic minority groups following independence in 1948.
The post-coup violence in the central plains - which includes the Sagaing, Magway and Mandalay divisions - is a “new phenomenon”, according to Shona Loong, associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). “Armed conflict on this scale has not occurred in the Dry Zone, nor among Myanmar’s Buddhist-Bamar population, since the country’s independence.”
On one side are the PDFs, which are aligned with the NUG. On the other are the military and its allied militias, known as the Pyu Saw Htee. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a monitoring group, estimates that there were 950 PDFs in the Dry Zone at the end of February this year, a number that comprises nearly half of all such armed groups active in Myanmar.
So far, the PDFs have used three main tactics to wear down the military - bombings with improvised explosive devices, targeted assassinations and ambushes on military convoys, according to Loong’s research, based on ACLED data.
When the PDFs were first gaining traction in the Dry Zone in 2021, the military primarily deployed live fire against them, she found. Then in January 2022, the military turned to air raids, targeting PDF camps, stockpiles and pro-resistance villages. And in April of that year, the military began ratcheting up the destruction of infrastructure, mostly by burning houses and villages to the ground - “to root out resistance forces concealed among civilians”.
The tactic is part of what the military calls the “four cuts” strategy, said Loong. “This refers to the military trying to sever links between insurgents and their source of food, funds, livelihoods and recruits. This was used for several decades in Myanmar's ethnic minority borderlands. But it's for the first time being used in central Myanmar.
“The military really detests the PDFs. It sees them as terrorists,” she added. The arson “doesn’t just cause temporary displacement, but destroys social ties or societies or forms of communities”.
Figures from the UN in March show that at least 39,000 civilian properties have been destroyed nationwide since the coup, with some 25,500 homes set ablaze in Sagaing, a region home to some five million people.
Data from local groups in Myanmar indicate even higher levels of destruction.
According to Data for Myanmar, some 60,459 homes have been razed across the country since the coup. The group said 47,778 homes had been destroyed in Sagaing by the end of February. While the military has blamed PDFs for some of the fires, the UN Office for the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a recent report that “the military and affiliated militias are responsible for most of those incidents”.
A dozen survivors and witnesses to the burnings of five villages in Sagaing - Kone Ywar, Myauk None, Nyaung Hla, Tint Tei and Kyun Paw - told Al Jazeera of how columns of soldiers raided village after village this year, even when there was no active fighting there.
In some villages, including Tint Tei, Nyaung Hla and Kyun Paw, the raids were preceded by artillery fire - a tactic the UN said was aimed at rushing residents out so that they would leave their valuables behind. In village after village, survivors accused soldiers of killing and immolating anyone who had not been able to flee, looting valuables and setting food supplies and storage facilities on fire.
In Myauk None, when soldiers were seen approaching on March 3, the villagers fled, except for a man with cognitive disabilities and a young woman who stayed to collect her belongings, said U Toe, a resident who asked that Al Jazeera use a pseudonym for fear of reprisals.
“When they [the soldiers and Pyu Saw Htee] came to the village, they found the mentally ill villager and killed him at his home,” U Toe said. The young woman had hid in a car that was parked in the local monastery. “But they found her inside the car, and they raped and killed her.”
U Toe said Myauk None villagers believed the woman was raped because condoms were found near the charred remains of her body.
Al Jazeera sought comment from military spokesman Zaw Min Tun on the killings, but there was no response.
Myauk None
Multiple sources on the ground, however, have confirmed the killings in both Kone Ywar and Myauk None, and local media outlets, including Myanmar Now and Radio Free Asia Burmese, reported on the deaths in the two villages at the time of the incidents.
U Toe, who said he “lost everything” in the fire, said the soldiers and militias also killed cattle. They set fire to two of his horses and shot several cows that had been left behind by others, he said.
Some villages were burned multiple times.
Residents of Nyaung Hla say soldiers have raided the village 55 times since the coup and set fire to their homes four times. The first time was in April of last year, then twice in December and then in January 23 of this year. Satellite images taken two days later, on January 25, showed clouds of black smoke continuing to billow over the ruins of the village.
A resident who asked to be identified as Nwe Naung said her house was among the more than 370 homes burned down in January.
“We came back to a field of empty ashes. Nothing was left of our house. We don’t even have plates,” said the 26-year-old teacher trainee, who had fled to a nearby village with her family when the military began firing artillery rounds at Nyaung Hla.
“They even torched our tamarind tree that had been there for about 100 years.”
Nyaung Hla
When Nyaung Hla was first burned, “nearby villages were helping us to rebuild our houses and were sharing their belongings with the fire victims,” said Nwe Naung. “But it has been so long and so many villages burned, so people cannot help any more. They also have their own struggle. There are more victims; more villages are suffering.”
What has made the situation worse is that soldiers have stolen or destroyed food supplies, victims said. Residents of Nyaung Hla and Tint Tei said soldiers set fire to their rice mills and the barns where they stored the crop.
In Tint Tei, which soldiers razed on February 12 of this year, “they stole thousands of rice sacks from the rice mill and then they burned the rice mill too”, said Ko Nai, a 36-year-old farmer who told Al Jazeera he had been sheltering in the forest since the incident.
“In our village, many families own granaries that can store 5,000 - 10,000 tin grain,” he said (One tin is equivalent to about one bushel or 20kg of rice). “We lost 400 plus buildings in the burning, and around 150 of them are granaries, and the rest are houses. At the time of burning, almost every family had at least 2,000 - 5,000 tin of grain in their granaries that were burned together with the houses. So, we lost millions in the fire.”
Analysis of satellite images conducted by Al Jazeera shows at least 261 buildings were damaged in the attack. That is about 45.6 percent of the village, and included the village’s library, according to Ko Nai.
Tint Tei
The farmer said his identity papers were also destroyed in the fire, meaning he will not be able to relocate elsewhere, much less travel out of his village. “Our only choice is to survive in our village,” he said.
“We have been working so hard for generations to build these houses and own this land, but they burned our homes and our grain in just one day,” he added. “They want us to become so poor that we do not resist them. I think they believe that if we are left with nothing, we would not resist. But they are wrong.”
The UN and rights groups say the Myanmar military must be held accountable for its actions in Sagaing.
“You have literally thousands of people displaced from their homes. They have lost everything they own. They’ve lost their homes. They’ve lost their cattle and livestock. And in some cases, they’ve lost cars or other forms of transport. Whatever they were not able to take with them as they fled in front of a Myanmar military invasion of their area is now gone,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director for Asia at Human Rights Watch.
“It makes it impossible for people to return to those homes that they have lived in for generations … What we are seeing are clearly war crimes.”
Robertson described the military as a “criminal organisation” engaged in a “campaign of terror” against its own people and said there has to be international accountability from Min Aung Hlaing downwards.
But hopes for justice, much less an end to the violence roiling Myanmar, appear dim.
Russia and China have blocked meaningful UN Security Council action against Naypyidaw, even abstaining in December from a vote on a resolution that demanded an end to violence and called for the release of political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi.
Min Aung Hlaing - who has been sanctioned by the West over the coup - has meanwhile refused to heed calls from Myanmar’s southeast Asian neighbours for dialogue or humanitarian access to violence-wracked areas. Instead, in March, he ordered decisive action against the NUG and the PDFs, whom he accused of "terrorism" and devastating the country.
Amid the diplomatic impasse, Myanmar’s generals are planning elections that observers say are designed to entrench the military’s role in politics. Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD has already been banned from contesting for failing to register under a tough new election law.
The International Crisis Group, a think tank, has warned that given the widespread opposition to the plan, the planned elections, which may take place by November, are likely to be “the bloodiest in the country’s recent history”.
As the violence escalates, the humanitarian situation in Myanmar has become increasingly dire.
The UN said that some 761,000 people were displaced in Sagaing at the start of May and has expressed concern over the risk of starvation in restive rural areas where the military has also limited access to humanitarian aid.
Charity groups on the ground told Al Jazeera that the displaced urgently need food aid and shelter.
“Food is the priority,” said a spokesperson for the Depayin War Displaced Support Group, who asked to be referred to by the pseudonym Ko Han Lay. “Although we are trying our best, there are displaced people who are passing their day without meals … The population of people who need humanitarian assistance is high. So people have to eat less than before and change their lifestyle.”
Some 6018 families remain without shelter in Depayin, a township that includes Nyaung Hla village, according to Ko Han Lay, with many continuing to take refuge in monasteries or schools, unable to return to their homes.
In some cases, people are living in makeshift shelters, built with bamboo poles, palm thatch and any sheets of roofing they could salvage from the fires.
“The villagers are facing harsh conditions with heavy rain and scorching hot sun,” said Ko Han Lay. “We are trying our best to cope with the situation and help as much as we can, but we need a lot of help.”
If the suffering was meant to destroy people’s will to resist, it does not appear to have worked.
In the village of Kyun Paw, which was razed on January 23, one woman called for the people of Myanmar to persevere in their fight against the military.
“I cannot forgive Min Aung Hlaing who made us homeless,” Ma Nyunt said in a video filmed for Al Jazeera.
Visibly angry as she sifted through the burned remains of her kitchen, including blackened pots, pans and plates, Ma Nyunt said, “I had to flee while they were shooting everywhere … I had to run for my life with a pair of clothes that I was wearing. Now, I don’t know when I can live with my sons again.”
“I will only be happy when we win. I urge everyone to resist them,” she said. “I want to urge to fight till we win, so we can live in peace.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Intercept)
Donald Trump has been found liable by a jury for an act of sexual violence perpetrated nearly 30 years ago.
That result is astonishing. This is a former president of America, being found liable by a jury—of his peers—for defamation resulting from an act of sexual violence perpetrated nearly 30 years ago. The verdict is a sign of two competing truths about American society today: The country has become more willing to hold powerful men to account for their behavior and yet, at the same time, is still willing to give them power, again and again.
The shock of the verdict is not because the allegation was particularly difficult to believe. On one side was Carroll, whose account of the incident was clear, consistent, and nauseating in its specificity. Carroll sued Trump for defamation after he brushed off the allegation by saying, “She’s not my type.”
On the other was Trump. The former president faced a challenge in defending himself in the case. Much of Carroll’s account matched a modus operandi that at least 26 women who accused Trump of sexual assault have described. Carroll interviewed five of them for a series in The Atlantic in 2020. (Trump denies the allegations.) Trump himself described his approach in the infamous leaked recording from Access Hollywood in which he boasted about sexually assaulting women. “You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
Trump also didn’t bother to show up for the trial, claiming he wanted to spare New Yorkers the traffic jams his presence would cause. Last week, while in Ireland, he said he would fly home to appear in court but, surprising no one, he didn’t. Trump’s absence might have reflected a recognition from the outset that he was likely to lose, and a desire to distance himself from the case. And although it’s impossible to determine how much it was a factor in the trial’s outcome, by failing to show up, he sent a message to the jury that he wasn’t invested in defending himself. His lawyers reinforced the message by declining to call a witness and instead trying to pick apart Carroll’s case during cross examination. (What kind of witness would Trump have called anyway? Finding an alibi witness for a moment 27 years ago would be tough, and who would be a convincing character witness?)
Carroll’s lawyers made Trump a presence in the courtroom anyway, playing excerpts from a deposition for the case to devastating effect. In one instance, going straight at Trump’s “not my type” defense, Carroll’s lawyer showed him a photograph of Carroll. Asked to identify her, he mistook Carroll for his ex-wife Marla Maples, whom Trump had to admit was his type.
More appalling was his discussion of the Access Hollywood tape. Trump, both in the past and in the deposition, wrote that off as “locker-room” talk. But he couldn’t bring himself to repudiate or even distance himself from the comments, even now, nearly two decades later.
“Well, historically, that’s true with stars,” he said.
“True with stars that they can grab women by the pussy?” Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan asked.
“Well, that’s what—if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true,” Trump said. “Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.”
Unfortunately or fortunately.
“And you consider yourself to be a star?” Kaplan prodded.
“I think you can say that, yeah,” Trump replied smugly.
In citing the last million years as precedent, he seemed to believe he was still living in them. Trump is not the first man to be both president and a sexual assaulter, but he is the first to have a jury find so. The verdict against him shows that in at least one case, with one high-profile and unrepentant defendant, the old world in which powerful men could do anything they wanted to women has passed away. Things have changed a little in the past one million years—or at least in the past 30.
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Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Meta sank tens of billions into its CEO’s virtual reality dream, but what will he do next?
So delighted was he that he had even renamed his family home in her honour. Henceforth, what was formerly called “Facebook” would be known as “Meta”. In a presentation at the company’s annual conference, Zuckerberg announced the name change and detailed how his child would grow up to be a new version of cyberspace. She “will be the successor to the mobile internet”, he told a stunned audience of credulous hacks and cynical Wall Street analysts. “We’ll be able to feel present – like we’re right there with people no matter how far apart we actually are.” And no expense would be spared in ensuring that his child would fulfil her destiny.
On that last matter, at least, Zuck was as good as his word. He set out to hire 10,000 engineers in Europe alone and blow uncountable piles of money to ensure this vision would become a reality. Up to the end of last October, the project had soaked up $36bn (about £30bn), with little to show for it but an expensive video in which Zuck (who always manages to look like his virtual-reality avatar) talked about how good it was going to be – “the experiences you’re going to have, what the creative economy will build and the technology that needs to be invented”. Note that last phrase: what actually emerged was a virtual-reality platform called Horizon Worlds, accessible only via naff and clunky Oculus headsets (think an uncomfortable version of Zoom) and a virtual wasteland populated by textureless, featureless, legless avatars and landscapes that, as Forbes put it, “look like bad Roblox levels”.
Sadly, Zuck’s promising adoptee turned out to be a sickly, feeble child. And so, on or about 18 March, he quietly had her put down. For he had just discovered that a new candidate for the role of The Future had suddenly arrived, and he was chagrined to realise that while he had been nursing the weakling, he had not noticed the newcomer on the block. It went by the name “AI”, and now Meta was lagging behind in the race to get to this new Future.
In those circumstances, you’d have thought someone who had just blown $36bn of his company’s money in the pursuit of a personal obsession would have been a mite apologetic, wouldn’t you? Not a bit of it. Why? Because he has absolute control over the company. In case you think I’m exaggerating, here’s the relevant section in the company’s annual SEC filing:
“Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman, and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets. This concentrated control could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support, or conversely this concentrated control could result in the consummation of such a transaction that our other stockholders do not support … In addition, Mr Zuckerberg has the ability to control the management and major strategic investments of our company as a result of his position as our CEO and his ability to control the election or, in some cases, the replacement of our directors.”
Translation: he can do what he likes – including selling the company over the heads of its board of directors – and nobody could stop him. It’s clear that at least some shareholders had become restive about Zuckerberg’s pursuit of a fatuous virtual-reality fantasy, but that unease was mitigated by the fact that other parts of the company – boring, old-fashioned Facebook, for example, or Instagram (once it got over its near-death experience called TikTok) – continued to make healthy profits.
But what if he now decides to bet the ranch on large language models and AI? And does so in a time when the old, profitable lines of business are beginning to flag? Suppose that, next time, the unstoppable supreme leader brings the entire edifice down? In which case, the world would finally realise that it is Zuckerberg, not Rupert Murdoch, who is the Citizen Kane de nos jours. Just think: the Zuckerberg story could fill a gap in the market: after all, Succession will soon come to an end. We just need a new Orson Welles to play the lead.
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Elon Musk. (image: CNN)
In an announcement posted Friday evening, at approximately 6 a.m. in the country, Twitter's official Global Government Affairs account declared the platform would "restrict access to some content in Turkey" in response to legal requests made of the social media site.
Turkey's presidential election — the most closely contested in years, The Washington Post reported — is set for May 14.
"The day before a critical election in Turkey, Twitter appears to be acquiescing to the demands of the country's autocratic ruler, Erdogan, and is censoring speech on the platform," California Representative Adam Schiff tweeted in response to the news. "Given Twitter's total lack of transparency, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Musk's promises of free speech have again fallen away."
Schiff's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
Targeted Turkish dissidents
The details of the legal request and which specific accounts were targeted were not made public. Still, Dr. Tuğrulcan Elmas, a postdoctoral researcher focusing on social media manipulation at Indiana University Bloomington, told Insider he tracked roughly a half dozen accounts posting content related to the Turkish election that had been suspended.
According to Elmas, accounts chosen for restriction were some the Turkish government has traditionally targeted because they had ties to political opposition or whistleblowers who have been critical of the country's right-wing leader, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
One account, that of Kurdish businessman Muhammed Yakut, was among those restricted. Yakut had previously shared information about Erdogan's governmental dealings and alleged the Turkish leader had been involved in the disappearance of his son-in-law, Turkish Minute reported last week.
Yakut had also hinted at sharing background information before the election related to a failed 2016 coup in the country, Turkish Minute reported on Saturday, insinuating that Erdogan and his allies had staged the whole thing.
While Yakut and other political opponents were censored, Elmas noted, one troll account known for impersonating a whistleblower named Ali Yeşildağ was not removed from Twitter — despite impersonation being against the platform's terms of service and the account posting fake nude photos of politicians in Turkey that oppose Erdogan.
The troll account not being banned, Elmas hypothesized, is reason to believe the account may be tied to the Turkish government as a propaganda tool, used to discredit Erdogan's opponents by painting them out to be blackmailing each other.
"The fact that the government didn't censor this account is kind of evidence of a false flag operation," Elmas said.
Elmas told Insider that the four or five targeted accounts restricted on the social media site likely would not impact the election outcome since targeted users could still post content to YouTube and Facebook or use a VPN to avoid an IP-address-based ban.
"I think Twitter takes this path because the government demanded it," Elmas said. "I think they also think that these bans can all be easily circumvented, so blocking accounts isn't impactful, so they can just say yes to the government."
Since his takeover last year, Musk's Twitter has complied with more than 80% of government requests for censorship or surveillance of users, according to a report by the technology publication Rest of World — up from a compliance rate of about 50% before his leadership.
Musk's defensive response
Observers were quick to seize on Musk's decision to throttle Twitter accounts at the behest of the Turkish government, which has become more authoritarian since Erdogan took power in 2014, with some Twitter users declaring Musk a "free speech opportunist" in response to the news.
Musk, who has touted the social platform as a public town square, did not take kindly to the criticism.
"The Turkish government asked Twitter to censor its opponents right before an election and @elonmusk complied," Matt Yglesias, a Bloomberg columnist, tweeted on Saturday, prompting Musk to fire back in defense of his decision.
"Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias?" Musk replied. "The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?"
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, chimed in on the thread, saying: "What Wikipedia did: we stood strong for our principles and fought to the Supreme Court of Turkey and won. This is what it means to treat freedom of expression as a principle rather than a slogan."
Wikipedia was banned in Turkey from 2017 to 2020 over an article about state-sponsored terrorism, where the country was described as a sponsor of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorist groups. After a lengthy legal battle escalated to the country's highest court, the Turkish block of Wikipedia was lifted in January 2020.
Defenders of Musk were quick to label Wales' comparison to Wikipedia as a false equivalency because the encyclopedia site operates as a nonprofit, while Twitter is a for-profit business — to which Wales responded: "If Elon is now saying "We don't care about freedom of expression if it interferes with making money" then he should just say that."
Elon and Erdogan
Twitter's decision to throttle access to accounts from Turkey comes as Musk's business ties to the country have solidified following increasing communication between Erdogan and Musk, Elmas noted, based on news coverage of their interactions.
The pair first met in 2017, Forbes reported, before sitting down in 2021 to discuss lithium batteries for electric vehicles and launching satellites. That year, Turkey signed its deal with SpaceX to launch its domestically produced communications satellite, Türksat 6A. In 2022, per Forbes, Musk and Erdogan shook hands at the World Cup.
Last month, after years of delays, Turkey's first domestic and national observation satellite was launched into space — with the help of a Falcon 9 rocket created by Musk's company, SpaceX, local news outlet Türkiye Newspaper reported. While the deal's financial details remain unclear, Space.com noted that a single Falcon 9 rocket flight costs roughly $62 million.
In February, Musk and Erdogan were also in contact after Turkey declined Musk's offer to activate Starlink capabilities in the region after a deadly earthquake rattled the country and left more than 40,000 people dead. The country's communications systems were not disrupted to the point of needing the Starlink system, Insider previously reported.
Twitter was blocked in the region for about 12 hours following the earthquake, Scientific American reported, amid Turkey's concerns of disinformation circulating on the platform. However, the outage may have hampered the initial emergency response.
"I'm sure this is just a coincidence," users on Twitter posted, some sarcastically, circulating news of Musk's business dealings with Turkey. In contrast, others argued his ties with the authoritarian country were evidence that the self-styled free speech icon "may not be cheap, but he is for sale."
Musk and representatives for Twitter, SpaceX, and the Republic of Turkey did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.
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Eight migrants were struck by a car and killed waiting at a bus stop on May 7, 2023, in Brownsville, Texas. (photo: NYT)
The hate-crime narrative that emerged after migrants were killed in Brownsville ignored details about history and life in the border town.
The driver was identified as George Alvarez. The police charged him with manslaughter, and they are investigating whether he committed hate crimes or acted intentionally. During a press conference, Brownsville Police Chief Felix Sauceda pointed to a list of Alvarez’s numerous criminal priors. One was “assaulting a public servant.”
Sauceda failed to clarify that it was Brownsville police who assaulted Alvarez years ago, not the other way around. For contesting that false claim in court, Alvarez was once considered a civil rights hero. (More about this later.) Meanwhile, the narrative around the killings has ignored details about history and current conditions in Brownsville — about animus against people like Alvarez that spans generations. That hostility may bode badly in the coming weeks and months, in Texas and throughout the country as we reach the end of Title 42.
Title 42 is an obscure regulation that allows the U.S. to turn back people at borders during public health emergencies. Former President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant Rasputin, Stephen Miller, revived it in 2020 during the Covid crisis, to keep people from applying for asylum. President Joe Biden has since used it to excuse his administration’s fear of aggressively crafting policy to help millions of asylum-seekers from South and Central America to move north to safety. On Thursday night, the rule expired. With its end and without robust federal assistance to help settle an anticipated wave of refugees, local communities are susceptible at worst to murderous hostility fueled by the right, and at best to pathological indifference.
The canary in the coal mine for these risks might be the chokehold. We’ve heard much about it lately in New York City, following the fatal strangulation of Black subway entertainer Jordan Neely, who had a history of mental illness, by white former Marine Daniel Penny, assisted by other riders. We’ve heard less about the chokehold’s use against people like Alvarez, in Texas.
Brownsville is an antique city. Downtown, it looks Caribbean the way New Orleans does, with French Quarter-style architecture dating from the 19th century. True to its appearance, the city’s history is Southern. It served as a cotton-smuggling port for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and a monument to Jefferson Davis stood in a park until 2020.
The city is 94 percent Latino, mostly Mexican American. Its poverty rate is over twice the national average. It is filled with Border Patrol and ICE agents, who take these jobs because they pay well over twice the local per capita income. In Brownsville, almost every Mexican American has a relative who is an immigration agent.
I lived there during the Trump administration. I reported on endemic dehumanization of poor people by law enforcement, and not just against immigrants. In the whirlpool of my nice gym in a nice part of town, I used to hear muscled men and well-coiffed women joke about this injustice, particularly when it came to migrants. A small crew of local rights activists resisted this generalized nastiness, but they barely made a dent.
I knew about the Ozanam Center, a nonprofit shelter for unhoused people and the site of Sunday’s tragedy. The eight migrants were staying there before they were killed. It’s been operating for decades. When I first moved to Brownsville to do reporting on immigration, an activist suggested that I go to Ozanam and offer some Hondurans $20 an hour plus lunch to help unload the moving van. I did so. After that, I heard nothing about the place. It was low key and out of the way.
Ozanam lies on the corner of Houston Road, which, along with nearby Travis and Crockett roads, are named after leaders of the 1835 Texas independence war with Mexico. Historians now concur that the rebellion was started by U.S. Southerners eager to import their Black chattel into Texas — where importation was illegal because Mexico owned Texas, and Mexico outlawed slavery.
Crossing Houston Road is Minnesota Avenue, not far from Iowa, Indiana, and North Dakota avenues. Midwestern whites migrated to Brownsville in the early 20th century and leveled the Latino ranching economy, replacing it with agribusiness fruit and vegetable farms. Along with their crops, they institutionalized the segregation of Mexican Americans, whom they derided as mixed-race “mongrels.”
Today, Alvarez lives in this neighborhood, where the houses near Ozanam are cramped and run-down. A friend who knows the area calls it “a very sad place.”
As a ninth-grade special-education student in 2005, Alvarez was arrested on suspicion of burglarizing a vehicle. He’d just turned 17 and, according to a later court filing, already was having problems with substance abuse. In his cell, he became frustrated about a broken phone and banged it. An officer who weighed 200 pounds threw 135-pound Alvarez to the ground and put him in a chokehold, with other officers assisting, the filing states. Alvarez was then charged with assaulting a public official, a major felony.
The incident had been captured on video, but the recording was never given to internal investigators. In a legal complaint he filed years later, Alvarez said he had feared that if he went to trial he would be convicted on the officer’s word and given a long sentence. Still a minor, he pleaded guilty and agreed to eight years of probation. Within months, he’d lapsed into drug addiction and violated probation. He was sent to state prison for eight years.
A few years later, according to court documents, another man, accused of the same crime by the same officer, found the recording of his own stay in detention, which proved the officer had lied and perpetrated the assault himself. Alerted that recordings existed, Alvarez demanded and received his and discovered the same lie. A judge ordered him freed after four years of hard time. He sued the city of Brownsville in federal court, a jury awarded him $2.3 million, and his case was listed in the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations.
But Brownsville appealed the decision, and the case went to the notoriously conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans. Judges there overturned the jury’s verdict, reasoning that prosecutors do not have to reveal exculpatory evidence if a defendant pleads guilty. Alvarez’s lawyer went to the Supreme Court, which in 2019 declined to consider the case. Alvarez was denied a financial win that might have changed his life.
According to his lawyer, he now works at an industrial sandblasting company and has six children. But he is covered with tattoos that mark a brown man on the border as a lumpen, a pariah. He’s had additional arrests for driving while intoxicated and for assaulting other people, though most charges have been misdemeanors and most have been dismissed. He seems angry if not broken.
On Tuesday the Brownsville police said that toxicology tests were still being done on Alvarez, but early findings documented cocaine and marijuana in his system, as well as benzodiazepines — the ingredient in Valium, Xanax, Ativan, and Klonopin. These are highly addictive sedatives used to treat conditions including anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, and bipolar disorder. They alter reflexes and can make driving dangerous. High doses of cocaine can cause agitation, paranoia, aggression, and dizziness.
At about 8:29 on Sunday morning, Alvarez was driving a mile from his home. He ran a red light and barreled into the migrants. He himself was injured, and witnesses said he seemed disoriented. Some survivors kicked and beat him as he yelled anti-immigrant epithets. In subsequent interviews, some migrants cited these slurs as evidence that Alvarez committed a hate crime, and the press has pushed that narrative. Yet police have presented no evidence that Alvarez was motivated by hate, and none of his insults surpass the border shit talking I used to hear from the good citizens of Brownsville in the whirlpool.
Alvarez’s carnage may well turn out to have been an accident, and its location by a migrant shelter simply a horrible coincidence. Even so, publicity surrounding the crimes has suddenly turned Ozanam into a hate magnet. According to management, some people have blamed the organization’s sheltering of migrants for the killings. Earlier this week a young man tried to enter the parking lot while brandishing a handgun. Police charged him with reckless driving and drug possession.
Meanwhile, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott warns of a migrant “invasion” and is sending 450 National Guard members to the border. Biden is sending 1,500 troops, even as he announced this week that migrants will not be allowed to apply for asylum if they traversed another country first and did not apply there. Several border cities have issued disaster declarations.
In the north, New York City Mayor Eric Adams this week suspended “right to shelter” entitlement for asylum seekers. He has said New York City has no more resources for migrants. Until a few weeks ago, he’d averred that they were welcome. In the face of his new coolness, will ordinary New Yorkers cool too? Will they grow hateful?
Such questions bring us back to chokeholds. The mayor has lately scared straphangers about subway passengers with mental illness and argued that increased policing is necessary to control them. A civilian fatally choked Neely. But despite strong evidence that the killer acted as a vigilante, the district attorney’s office did not announce until 10 days later that he would be criminally charged — and only for manslaughter.
Across the country, anti-immigrant rhetoric is hardening into policy. Policy is churning out more rhetoric. Both are pushing people to the brink who are already addled and enraged. Under such pressure, will we be able distinguish anymore between hate crimes and accidents? Is there even a difference?
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A grain of gold after being processed with the aid of mercury. (photo: César Araújo/Amazonia Real)
Lula wasted no time, immediately revoking two of his predecessor's executive orders that had sped up irregular gold mining. He went on to dispatch security forces to evict the miners from besieged Yanomami territory, sanctioned a provisional decree to crack down on the purchase of illegal gold, and set aside more than 2,300 square miles as protected Indigenous land. In early May, he sent three ministers to the region to assess the damage.
Brazil's latest rhetorical pivot from plunder to preservation drew accolades at home and abroad. At the COP27 climate conference last year, Lula declared Brazil was back as a climate champion and would not tolerate any illegal deforestation. Whether the world's largest tropical forest can survive Lula's broader ambitions — to remake his country into a regional power broker, bolster the clout of developing countries and help ring in a new multipolar world order — is another matter.
Little more than four months in office, Lula has crossed continents and oceans, calling on President Biden in Washington and Xi Jinping in Beijing. His hyperactive diplomacy is part of a wider Brazilian campaign to show that Latin America's largest country is beholden to neither the United States or China and will blaze its own nonaligned path. To press the point, Lula has sent emissaries to meet with Russia, dissed the faltering U.S. dollar, talked up doing business in China's yuan currency, and offered to set up a "peace club" to resolve the war in Ukraine.
Lula's boosters argue this is nothing more than diplomatic boilerplate for strengthening the hand of nations of the so-called Global South. But here's the paradox. Owing to geopolitical uncertainty, Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine, a simmering U.S. and European banking crisis and wider global recession concerns, the dollar has tumbled on international markets. And as the greenback slides, gold — that age-old safe harbor of security and wealth in troubled times — has soared.
Having risen nearly sixfold in the last 20 years, the troy ounce recently breached $2,000 and may reach $2,200 by year's end. Central banks are leading the scramble for gold; nine of the top 10 official buyers are in the developing world, including Brazil. Cue the acceleration of the 21st century Amazon gold rush, and with it, an even steeper challenge for Lula, whose global ambitions may well ride on the fate of the rainforest.
Word travels fast in gold country. Every fluctuation in the price of the precious metal sends new waves of prospectors streaming to the hinterland, especially the states that make up the so-called Legal Amazon in Brazil. In recent years, tens of thousands of gold miners have diffused across the Brazilian Amazon (20,000 of them in Yanomami territory alone), many using mercury to extract the precious metal, spewing the toxic substance into rivers in the process. Artisanal gold mines (garimpos) expanded at three times the rate of industrial mines from 2010 to 2020, overtaking the land area for corporate prospecting in the Amazon.
In Roraima, a gold rush state in Brazil's far north, the number of gold brokers, smiths and jewelers has exploded in recent years. The frenzy is facilitated by the region's notoriously lax oversight, overstretched state institutions, local corruption and feeble command and control in mining regions. So even as authorities order episodic raids and inspections in the region, fortune hunters and their deep-pocketed sponsors decide the prize is worth the risk. Little wonder that clandestine airstrips and wildcat mining have multiplied in the nine states that make up Brazil's Amazon, with garimpos alone expanding 632% on vulnerable Indigenous lands from 2010 to 2021.
Illegal mining may not be the biggest environmental threat to the Amazon basin. Clear-cutting the forest for cattle, bootleg timber operations and land-grabbing are by far the region's leading drivers of deforestation, which has spiked in recent years and now threatens to push the world's signature tropical forest beyond the ecological tipping point of regrowth and natural recovery.
Yet the dirty secret of the Amazon is that predation isn't just an accumulation of transgressions but an ecosystem of criminality with interdependent accomplices who flourish in the shadows, studies by the Igarapé Institute have shown. Beyond the prospector is an elaborate web of buyers, sellers, suppliers, financiers and middlemen, many who conspire to usurp the rule of law for private gain.
Ask the Brazilian authorities who are struggling to crack down on illegal gold miners and their moneyed enablers. A recent writ before the Brazilian Supreme Court shows that, between 2021 and 2022, federal police launched 92 raids, which rendered 1,527 investigations into illegal gold prospecting and trade. Federal police found that roughly 30% of all the gold produced in Brazil is illegal, that production has spiked on nominally off-limits Indigenous land and conservation units, and that the whole enterprise is built on fraudulent financial certificates.
Much of the Amazon free-for-all is rightly attributed to Lula's predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who, during his 2019-2022 term, pandered to Amazon miners, timbermen and ranchers by easing environmental restrictions and scaling back inspections and policing. Yet the recent gold rush also owes to earlier measures to stimulate the Amazon economy by eliminating bureaucratic controls. Consider Law 12.844, a sprawling bill, signed in 2013 by then-President Dilma Rousseff, of Lula's Workers Party, which authorized the purchase, sale and transport of gold from artisanal mines, under the thinnest of pretenses. By signing an affidavit of good faith, miners, brokers and jewelers could bypass official oversight institutions to offer garimpo gold directly on the open market. At the end of April, the Brazilian court overturned that rule.
Such lenience, in the name of slashing red tape and job creation, created a regulatory fast lane for dirty gold by relaxing controls over buyers and sellers. In the process it weakened the "traceability of gold production and commerce, increasing opportunities for illicit practices," the federal police's Amazon and environment division concluded last month.
The new Lula government did the right thing not just by clamping down on the legions of wildcat miners but also in targeting the shadowy network of buyers and sellers who work the institutional blind spots, co-opt local officials and game the porous legal code to trade in tainted gold. Recent investigations show that much of this gold finds its way to foreign buyers, including in the U.S. and the Arab Gulf states.
Taking back the Amazon from bad-faith dealers and resource pirates who profit by putting rainforest inhabitants in jeopardy is crucial to restore Brazil's tarnished sovereignty and rule of law. That Lula's wider geopolitical ambitions for Brazil in a de-dollarized, multipolar world order could also help usher in the next Amazon gold rush also shows just how complicated that mission will be.
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