17 June 23
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Ellsberg’s renown for openly challenging the mentalities of militarism began on June 23, 1971, when he appeared on CBS Evening News ten days after news broke about the Pentagon Papers that he’d provided to journalists. Ellsberg pointedly said that in the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents, “I don’t think there is a line in them that contains an estimate of the likely impact of our policy on the overall casualties among Vietnamese or the refugees to be caused, the effects of defoliation in an ecological sense. There’s neither an estimate nor a calculation of past effects, ever.”
And he added: “The documents simply reflect the internal concerns of our officials. That says nothing more nor less that that our officials never did concern themselves with the effect of our policies on the Vietnamese.”
Ellsberg told anchor Walter Cronkite: “I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions.”
The functions of overseeing the war on Vietnam had become repugnant to Ellsberg as an insider. Many other government officials and top-level consultants with security clearances also had access to documents that showed how mendacious four administrations had been as the U.S. role in Vietnam expanded and then escalated into wholesale slaughter.
Unlike the others, he finally broke free and provided the Pentagon Papers to news media. As he said in the CBS interview, “The fact is that secrets can be held by men in the government whose careers have been spent learning how to keep their mouths shut. I was one of those.”
Ellsberg’s mouth, and heart, never stayed shut again. For the 52 full years that followed his release of the Pentagon Papers, he devoted himself to speaking, writing and protesting. When the war on Vietnam finally ended, Ellsberg mainly returned to his earlier preoccupation -- how to help prevent nuclear war.
This spring, during the three months after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, Ellsberg made the most of every day, spending time with loved ones and speaking out about the all-too-real dangers of nuclear annihilation. He left behind two brilliant, monumental books published in this century -- “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers” (2002) and “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” (2017). They illuminate in sharp ghastly light the patterns of official lies and secrecy about military matters, and the ultimate foreseeable result -- nuclear holocaust.
Ellsberg was deeply determined to do all he could to help prevent omnicide. As he said in an interview when “The Doomsday Machine” came out, scientific research has concluded that nuclear war “would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn't be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on earth. It probably wouldn't cause extinction. We're so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.”
During the profuse interviews that he engaged in during the last few months, what clearly preoccupied Ellsberg was not his own fate but the fate of the Earth’s inhabitants.
He was acutely aware that while admiration for brave whistleblowers might sometimes be widespread, actual emulation is scarce. Ellsberg often heard that he was inspiring, but he was always far more interested in what people would be inspired to actually do -- in a world of war and on the precipice of inconceivable nuclear catastrophe.
During the last decades of his life, standard assumptions and efforts by mainstream media and the political establishment aimed to consign Ellsberg to the era of the Vietnam War. But in real time, Dan Ellsberg continually inspired so many of us to be more than merely inspired. We loved him not only for what he had done but also for what he kept doing, for who he was, luminously, ongoing. The power of his vibrant example spurred us to become better than we were.
In a recent series of short illustrated podcasts created by filmmaker Judith Ehrlich -- who co-directed the documentary “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” -- Ellsberg speaks about the growing dangers of global apocalypse, saying that nuclear war planners “have written plans to kill billions of people,” preparations that amount to “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near omnicide, the death of everyone.” And he adds: “Can humanity survive the nuclear era? We don’t know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
Norman Solomon is national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine was published this week by The New Press.
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A Ukrainian soldier guards his position. (photo: Mstyslav Chernov/AP)
Deputy defence minister tells Guardian that Ukrainian forces are making progress, with far fewer deaths than Russia
Hanna Maliar, a deputy defence minister, said the most active fighting was no longer around Bakhmut, in the eastern Donetsk region, but in the south, and specifically in the direction of the two coastal cities of Berdiansk and Mariupol.
“If in the first week the epicentre was the east, now we see that the fighting is moving to the south and now we see the most active areas are Berdiansk and Mariupol,” Maliar said. “In the east, the enemy has turned on all the forces to stop our offensive. And they are massing forces there to stop us. In the south they are not very successful.”
“There is progress on all southern directions, and there are several of them,” the minister added. “If we talk about losses, in the Bakhmut sector, nine times more Russians were killed than Ukrainians. And in the southern direction, Russians died 5.3 times more than Ukrainians.”
The movement towards Mariupol, infamous for the devastation visited upon it in the first months of the full-scale invasion, is still incremental, with the front said to have been pushed back by about a kilometre.
In his nightly video address, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that movement forward was “the most critical thing”. He added: “Every soldier, every new step we take, every metre of Ukrainian land freed from the enemy is of utmost importance.”
Maliar said the specific numbers of losses endured by both sides remained classified information. “We don’t have huge losses, but of course it is a war and there are losses.”
The UK has donated 14 Challenger 2 tanks. They form part of the western hardware, along with German Leopard tanks and US Bradley armoured vehicles, that has equipped nine new mechanised brigades for the offensive launched two weeks ago.
Only one Challenger 2 tank has ever been destroyed in combat, when it was hit by friendly fire in Basra during the Iraq war.
Maliar dismissed Vladimir Putin’s claims that much of the weaponry donated by the west had been destroyed.
She said: “On the contrary, western equipment has shown that it can save the lives of the crews and they really help to liberate our territories. That is why we are very grateful for the weapons and equipment provided by our western partners, including the UK.
“The Challenger tanks are at the disposal of the airborne assault troops. They are now waiting for their time. They are loaded, armed, but they are still waiting.”
Putin also suggested, without evidence, on Friday that Ukraine’s losses were 10 times as heavy as those endured by Russia, while the Russian defence ministry said its forces had killed about 500 Ukrainian soldiers and destroyed five tanks in Donetsk in the last 24 hours.
Russia’s president claimed that Ukraine would soon be out of home-manufactured hardware and that he remained focused on his aim of “denazifying” Ukraine, adding, in a bizarre aside, that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was “not a real Jew”.
“I have a lot of Jewish friends,” Putin told an annual economic forum in St Petersburg. “They say that Zelenskiy is not Jewish, that he is a disgrace to the Jewish people. I’m not joking.”
Maliar said Russian reserves had been moved from the south to the east in recent days. “Last week I went to deliver a letter to two brigades in the Bakhmut sector who have successfully advanced there,” she said. “The president personally handwrote a letter of gratitude to them and I personally handed them this letter.”
On Friday, Kyiv came under attack again from cruise and ballistic missiles as the South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, joined a group of African leaders in Ukraine’s capital on a peace mission. They will visit Moscow next.
The Ukrainian air force said it had shot down six Russian Kalibr cruise missiles, six Kinzhal hypersonic ballistic missiles and two reconnaissance drones.
At the end of a meeting of Nato defence ministers in Brussels, Germany’s Boris Pistorius said his country would deliver another 64 Patriot missiles to Ukraine to help shield it against Russia’s aerial attacks.
A delegation of security officials, diplomats and journalists supposed to be accompanying the South African president to Kyiv was stranded on a separately chartered plane at Warsaw’s airport for more than 24 hours after the Polish authorities found that they were carrying undocumented firearms.
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A demonstration in response to the death of Manuel Terán, who was killed during a police raid inside Weelaunee People's Park, the planned site of a "Cop City" project, in Atlanta. (photo: Cheney Orr/Reuters)
Effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days
The effort requires organizers to collect about 70,000 signatures from Atlanta registered voters in 60 days. Then the question of the city canceling its agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation to build the $90m center can be added to municipal election ballots in November.
The push comes after an estimated thousand people who showed up at City Hall on 5 June proved insufficient to stop Atlanta’s city council from approving about $67m for Cop City. Meanwhile, machines have already begun clear-cutting trees on the project’s 171-acre footprint in South River Forest.
The referendum faces what one organizer called “an atmosphere of repression” – including two activists being charged with felonies last week while putting up fliers, bringing total arrests since December to 50.
The largest group of arrests, on 5 March in a public park in the forest near where the project is planned, was followed by local government closing the park, in effect shutting off tree-sitting protests by “forest defenders” that had gone on for more than a year.
“We’re at the stage where they’ve pushed people out of the forest, they’ve arrested people … they’ve fenced off the forest, they’ve even begun clear-cutting,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of local group Community Movement Builders. “We’re at the stage where the most direct, legal mechanism to stop this project is by referendum.”
Cop City came to global attention after police shot dead Manuel Paez Terán, an environmental protester, in a January raid on the forest – the first incident of its kind in US history. The state says Paez Terán shot first and a special prosecutor is evaluating the case.
Meanwhile, the movement opposing the project has drawn a wide range of people locally, nationally and internationally who oppose police militarization, urban forest destruction amid climate change and environmental racism. Most residents in neighborhoods surrounding the forest are Black.
Most of the organizations driving the referendum are also Black-led, including the regional chapter of Working Families Power, Black Voters Matter and the NAACP. Officials from the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, down to the mayor have consistently referred to opposition against the center as the work of white “outsiders”.
“That narrative is false,” said Britney Whaley, regional director of Working Families Power. “This has been national, but it’s also been community-grown for a few years now.”
Ashley Dixon, an Atlanta-area organizer, has led canvassing efforts to inform neighborhoods around South River Forest about the center for nearly a year. Her team has spoken to more than a thousand people. About 80% opposed the project once they knew about it, she said.
The only academic poll on the issue to date, from Atlanta’s Emory University, showed slightly more Black respondents opposed the project than supported it, with the opposite being true for whites. Atlanta’s population is 48% Black.
The idea for the referendum came from one that succeeded in stopping a spaceport from being built in coastal Georgia, said Will Harlan, founder of Forest Keeper, a national forest conservation organization. “To me, Cop City is the most important issue in conservation in the south-east,” Harlan said. “A referendum is the smartest, most democratic solution … [and] a way to find resolution and closure.”
Although the 2022 spaceport referendum affected a county of only 55,000 people, similarities between the two controversies point to the role voters can play when other efforts fall short.
In that case, local officials “dug their heels in” and stopped responding to press requests or providing transparent information to the public, said Megan Desrosiers, who led the referendum. In the case of Cop City, the Atlanta Police Foundation has stopped answering press requests for at least a year, and the city of Atlanta was recently discovered to be understating the project’s cost to taxpayers by about $36m.
The project is planned on land the city owns that is located in neighboring DeKalb county. Because of Atlanta’s ownership, only Atlanta voters can participate in the referendum.
Although the city’s voters haven’t seen an effort like this before, California has a long record of asking voters to decide on environmental issues, said Keith Mako Woodhouse, author of The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.
Over time, industry and political opponents have wielded tactics ranging from creating competing propositions to airing ad campaigns to discredit environmentalists, he said.
“There’s always going to be scary counter-arguments. It’s a matter of coming up with clear messaging” to be successful, he added.
Organizers of the Cop City referendum pointed to the state’s heavy-handed approach to protesters as a primary concern. There have been 42 domestic terrorism charges to date. A bail and legal defense fund’s members were also arrested and the state added fundraising to its criminal description of the training center’s opposition.
In that context, it took about a dozen attempts at finding a legally required fiscal sponsor for the referendum, which may need as much as $3.5m to reach success, said spokesperson Paul Glaze.
Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter – one of two organizations that agreed to take the sponsorship role – said the recent Atlanta Solidarity Fund arrests were done “to send a message, in hopes it would have a chilling effect. We’re not naive about what the threats are – but we believe our community cares about this issue.”
Getting into Atlanta’s communities will take a massive campaign, said Mary Hooks, national field secretary for Movement for Black Lives and part of the team overseeing the signature gathering. Hooks hopes to get canvassers into at least 200 of the city’s 243 neighborhoods, and said more than 3,000 volunteers had already signed up.
“This is an opportunity to protect direct democracy … when so many people are being left out,” she said.
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Horseshoe crabs are bled at a facility in Charleston, S.C. (photo: Ariane Müller/NPR)
But humans began to want something from the crabs, too — their blood. In the 1960s, scientists discovered that the sky blue blood inside horseshoe crabs would clot when it detected bacterial toxins. Vaccines, drugs and medical devices have to be sterile before they're put inside people. A better toxin-detection system meant less contamination risk for patients, so fishermen soon started collecting and selling the prehistoric animals to be bled.
A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn't shrinking. It's growing. Five companies along the East Coast — with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Maryland — drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That's more than any other year since officials started keeping track in 2004. Since then, the number of crabs bled by the industry has more than doubled. At least 80 million tests are performed each year around the world using the blood-derived ingredient.
As the industry has expanded, coast-wide regulation has been limited and the companies have become increasingly secretive. Records obtained by NPR indicate that in some states, fishermen paid by the bleeding companies have handled crabs in ways that research has shown to cause harm or have violated harvest laws without punishment. Meanwhile, the process of approving the alternative in the U.S. has stalled even as the number of birds in the sky has plummeted.
The federal government designated one of the migratory shorebird species that depends on horseshoe crab eggs, the red knot, as threatened. About 94% of red knots have disappeared over the past 40 years. Horseshoe crabs have become moderately depleted along the Atlantic coast, the International Union for Conservation of Nature determined. The ones around New England are noted as particularly vulnerable to extinction.
"We're up against this system that really prioritizes money over the health of the stock," said Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist and leader of the nonprofit Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition. "And the consequences show it."
A profitable gray area
Depending on which state they're harvested in, the crabs are either taken by hand from the beaches or pulled up from the bottom of the ocean with nets. Hundreds are piled on top of each other in boats, loaded into trucks and delivered to bleeding facilities. There, lab technicians pierce the crabs through their hearts and drain them alive, sometimes for eight minutes, which can deplete them of more than half their volume of blue blood. In Massachusetts, some of the bled crabs are then sold to be killed and used as bait. In states like South Carolina and New Jersey, the animals are delivered back to the fishermen, who return them to the ocean.
That makes the bleeding business unique among the industries it straddles. It's an unusual fishery, because the animals are not sold to be eaten. It's an atypical utilization of animals in medicine, since the crabs are not bled in the research stage, and they're not warm-blooded. They're not even crustaceans — horseshoe crabs are more closely related to scorpions than they are to snow crabs.
The business is also different from extractive industries like mining and logging, because the harvested natural resource is supposed to be returned to the environment alive.
"They sort of fall through the cracks a little bit in terms of what you could call the regulatory imagination," said Rich Gorman, a research fellow at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England. "Everyone assumes that everyone else is regulating it."
Family businesses used to own many of the smaller facilities in the earlier days of bleeding. Now, the industry is dominated by giant multinational firms, like a facility in Virginia owned by the Japanese conglomerate Fujifilm, and Charles River Laboratories, a publicly traded company based in Massachusetts that took over a local operation in South Carolina.
Federal laws require some animals used by biomedical industries to be treated humanely. The Animal Welfare Act protects some warm-blooded animals, like monkeys, that are used in scientific research. The Health Research Extension Act covers other vertebrates, like mice, that aren't included in the Welfare Act.
But coast-wide regulations regarding humane treatment of the crabs are virtually nonexistent or unenforced. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission manages stocks of fish meant to be quickly killed, like sea bass and flounder. It also manages horseshoe crabs, though the animals can spend dozens of hours alive above water during the harvest and bleeding process.
"Thinking of horseshoe crabs as a fishery, it really complicates and muddies the debate," said Gorman. "The aftercare that's involved in any scientific procedure that's carried out on an animal is really important."
The fisheries commission does publish a description of "Best Management Practices" for the industry, but those are guidelines, not laws. And they're often disregarded.
NPR obtained audio recorded during a meeting in January when those best practices were being discussed. Participants on the call can be heard mentioning that research shows picking crabs up by their tails harms the animals. That can prevent the crabs from being able to right themselves if they've flipped onto their backs, which can eventually kill them.
"Picking up by the tail is not proper handling technique," said one participant on the call. "Damage to the tail can increase their chances of not being able to flip over and dying when coming up to spawn."
But Benjie Swan, the head of a smaller company that bleeds crabs in New Jersey, can be heard admitting to that and opposing changing the practices to make it more clear that fishermen shouldn't.
"My people do pick the crabs up by the tail," she said. "I just think that if we give too much detail, we're opening ourselves up for scrutiny."
A biologist at the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Steve Doctor, added that fishermen in his state typically handle crabs by the tail "all the time." Videos from South Carolina show fishermen grabbing the crabs by the tail and tossing them on top of each other into boats. Since at least 2020, instructions from the state's Department of Natural Resources have said not to pick up horseshoe crabs by their tails.
A representative for the fisheries commission on the call reminded the group that even if the guidelines were changed to appear stricter, they would not be required to follow them. State governments, however, police the industry as they choose. Those restrictions can vary widely.
In Maryland, fishermen are not allowed to begin harvesting female crabs until after June 6, when Doctor, the biologist, says many of the crabs have finished mating and the birds have had a chance to devour some of their eggs.
"It's less stress on them if they're done spawning," said Doctor. "We're trying to give them the most opportunity possible."
Other states operate differently. Charles River Laboratories is one of the industry's biggest players: It reportedly provides half of the world's supply of the blood-derived test, called limulus amebocyte lysate. Regulations in South Carolina have allowed fishermen for the company to harvest in the early spring — when the crabs are beginning to mate and the migratory birds have started looking for eggs. The fishermen have also been permitted to keep an unlimited number of male crabs trapped in holding ponds located off the beaches before they're delivered to the bleeding facility. Fishermen are not required to feed the crabs while they're there.
Environmental groups are now suing the company and state.
"A black box of information"
Charles River Laboratories has been scrutinized for how its suppliers treat animals before. The company is currently under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over its shipment of monkeys from Cambodia, which it suspended in February after links to a smuggling ring were revealed. In South Carolina, fishermen supplying crabs to the company were repeatedly caught taking horseshoe crabs from off-limits islands along the coast and inside a national wildlife refuge.
But after two environmental groups sued the company and the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources in 2022 for allowing horseshoe crabs to be kept away from the birds in secluded holding ponds, the agency asked the court to allow it to keep details about the industry confidential in the court documents. The judge agreed.
"It's just really a black box of information," said Catherine Wannamaker, a lawyer for the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit.
Still, not everything was kept secret. NPR reviewed a redacted copy of the documents submitted in court. Though some of the words are excluded from the documents, the files indicate fishermen for Charles River broke permit requirements last year. Only male crabs were allowed to be kept in the ponds. But the documents indicate something else happened.
Additional documents obtained by NPR from the state's Department of Natural Resources through an open records request reveal that no fishermen were punished for breaking those rules. Wannamaker said that is not unusual.
"Historically, those conditions have not been enforced or complied with," she said.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Charles River Laboratories declined an interview with NPR. In an emailed statement, a company representative said they do their work with a "healthy respect for the need to protect the horseshoe crab population for generations to come."
The company also declined to allow reporters to visit its facilities. But NPR licensed photos from one of the last photographers allowed to witness the bleeding process, in 2014.
This year, fewer horseshoe crabs from South Carolina will likely be harvested. Though both the state and Charles River Laboratories denied liability in the lawsuit, the judge found the evidence against them convincing enough to pause the collection of crabs from 30 of the state's beaches in 2023. But Charles River is now paying harvesters in other places. This season, fishermen for Charles River are harvesting crabs from Cape Cod, Mass., and Chincoteague, Va.
Those states also withhold information about the bleeding industry. When NPR requested annual reports from the five states where the bleeding facilities are based, the state governments often redacted the number of crabs collected and the numbers left dead owing to the process. Most leaned on exemptions in public records laws that allow trade secrets or business information to be kept hidden.
In response to an open records request from NPR, New Jersey redacted the number of crab deaths and crabs collected despite a court order from a previous case that required the state to provide that information to the public. When asked why the state did not share those numbers though the courts required it before, a representative from New Jersey did not respond with a comment by the time of publication.
The states are not the only ones with access to the collection and mortality numbers. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission also knows them. But the group doesn't share the numbers publicly, either. Instead, it publishes an estimate derived from research studies that tried to mimic the bleeding process. Since some of the mortality numbers published in those studies varied, the commission settled on an approximation of 15%. That would amount to over 100,000 dead crabs in 2021. But some scientists say that underestimates the long-term consequences of the process. Other research has shown the crabs mate less after they're bled. And few of those studies tracked how many crabs bled by the industry died more than two weeks after they were released back into the ocean.
"It could be that they're bleeding so many crabs, they're not only killing, but they could also be preventing crabs from spawning," said Niles, the biologist from New Jersey. "We just don't know."
Representatives from the bleeding industry have said horseshoe crabs are not harmed by the bleeding process. When NPR reached out, however, all of the companies either declined interviews or did not respond.
When turning down NPR's request for an interview in an email, one representative took the opportunity to mention a new product his company had recently started selling: a synthetic, recombinant copy of the clotting ingredient inside horseshoe crabs that requires no blood to keep vaccines free of contamination.
"It has been an exciting couple of years indeed," wrote Brett Hoffmeister, the lysate production manager of a company that bleeds crabs in Massachusetts, Associates of Cape Cod.
But the standard-setting body in the U.S. tasked with approving the synthetic tests has stalled, and few pharmaceutical companies are using them.
"We have seen that it is better"
As the pandemic raged, the experts at the European Pharmacopoeia were poised to take action.
It was those scientists' job to determine whether there was enough data to conclude the synthetic tests worked just as well or better than the crab-derived ones. By 2017, they had already decided the research did support that. And in 2020, Eli Lilly, a major pharmaceutical company, was putting the science into practice. The company produced all of its COVID-19 antibody medications using the newer method.
"It's actually been cost advantageous for us," said Jay Bolden, the scientist who pushed Eli Lilly to use the synthetic, a move that required additional approval from the FDA since the U.S. Pharmacopoeia does not recognize it as equivalent. "Then from a quality perspective, we have seen that it is better."
Using the synthetic also made sense for making the production of medicines more sustainable, Bolden added, since the old method relied on diminishing natural resources. When the European Pharmacopoeia announced its decision to approve the synthetic as an equivalent in July of 2020, it made the same point.
"The world currently relies on a single source of lysate, the horseshoe crab family," the European Pharmacopoeia told the press. The approval was "a significant step towards alleviating the need for animal resources."
As Europe took steps, the U.S. Pharmacopeia appeared stalled. In 2020, it published a statement defending its expert committee's decision to wait for more evidence. The horseshoe crab-derived product had kept American patients safe for 30 years, the group said, so it was reasonable to hold on until more data supported the alternatives. Two years later, after almost no public updates on its progress, the Pharmacopeia suddenly dismissed everyone on the committee.
Jaap Venema, the Pharmacopeia's chief science officer, said that considering the synthetic is a priority for the 20 new members that started to meet in 2023. But as it was with the experts those people replaced, the pace they move at is up to them. As of June, there were no upcoming deadlines or votes scheduled, the Pharmacopeia confirmed to NPR.
It's also up to pharmaceutical companies to determine whether and when they want to switch to using synthetic tests before the U.S. Pharmacopeia takes more action, like Eli Lilly did. This year, Roche Pharmaceuticals began using the synthetic in its manufacturing processes and has started preparing to test some of its medicines with it, too.
"Ultimately, patient safety is our number one priority," said Lindsey Silva, a senior scientist involved with the project. "We've been able to confirm that it's fit for its intended use and safe for patients."
Still, most pharmaceutical companies continue using the tests that require horseshoe crabs to be bled alive. Conditions generally evolve faster for species that are complex and mammalian like humans, said Rich Gorman, the researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School. But the crabs underpin the global pharmaceutical industry. He believes the best way to improve their situation — and that of the birds that depend on them — is to have more open debate about the consequences of how they're used.
"It remains this really shadowy area," Gorman said. "For the horseshoe crab, it is time to begin to think about the welfare implications of this a lot more openly and honestly."
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Lexi Rizzo. (Lauren Petracca/WP)
“I’m getting fired,” Rizzo, 25, told her co-workers through her store headset.
Her boss called her over a few seconds later. “This is not my favorite day,” the manager began. Rizzo hit record on her phone. Even though she had signed Rizzo’s notice of separation, the manager told Rizzo that she had hoped the company would not dismiss her.
“It honestly kills me,” she told Rizzo.
For months, Rizzo had clocked in before dawn convinced that the company where she had worked for nearly eight years was determined to fire her. And Rizzo thought she knew why: She was one of 49 baristas from across Buffalo who sent a letter to the company’s chief executive in August 2021 informing him that they were seeking to form a union.
Today there are about 320 unionized Starbucks stores in the United States — a rare bright spot for the shrinking labor movement. But the gains have come at a price, union officials said. Only 13 of the workers who signed the original Buffalo organizing letter are still with the company.
Rizzo, a shift supervisor, had seen the union as a solution to so many of the problems that plagued her family and her country. Like most of her co-workers, she had grown up in an era of historic inequality, raised by parents who struggled to pay their bills. She emerged from the pandemic and the labor shortage it spawned with a new sense of her worth and a determination to wrest back some power from her corporate bosses.
Now her fight had reached a critical moment with implications for service workers nationwide, the people at the core of America’s working class. At issue was whether these workers would be able to organize and press their employers for higher wages, steadier hours and better benefits. Today, only 6 percent of private-sector workers nationwide belong to unions, the lowest rate in nearly a century. The Starbucks union drive was raising existential questions for the labor movement. Was organizing large numbers of service workers even possible? Did unions have a place in the modern American economy?
In the back of Rizzo’s Starbucks, away from the customers getting their late-morning caffeine fix, her manager was struggling to finish her sentences and maintain her composure. Nearly two months earlier, on Feb. 4, Rizzo had closed the store at 7:30 p.m. and the following morning slept through her alarm, leaving her 57 minutes late to a 5:30 a.m. opening shift. The mistake triggered an investigation, the manager said.
“I think my hardest part is that you’ve been a partner for so long,” she continued. Starbucks executives regularly refer to their hourly workers as “partners.”
“You care about this store,” said the manager, who asked not to be named fearing public backlash. “You care about the people in it, and that’s the heartbreaking … You’re a great employee to me, and I value everything. …” The boss took a deep breath. “I wanna give you a hug,” she told Rizzo, wrapping her arms around her.
“I’ll be back. I’ll fight,” Rizzo replied. “Don’t you worry.”
She tucked her balled-up green apron under her arm and strode into the cafe, where her co-workers were waiting and crying. Rizzo hugged them and then glanced down at her separation paperwork. Her final misstep had occurred on March 1.
According to the document, she had been “1 minute late” to a 6 a.m. shift.
Two days before Rizzo was fired, Howard Schultz, the company’s billionaire founder, was summoned to Washington to testify before the Senate.
His forced appearance before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee was an indication of the importance of the Starbucks union drive and the crisis facing the labor movement.
The vast majority of the country’s working class does not toil on the factory floor with a union to look out for their interests. Most work in the country’s ever-expanding low-wage service economy.
Increasingly, those workers are trying to unionize. The Starbucks drive has inspired similar organizing efforts at retailers such as Trader Joe’s, Apple, REI and Chipotle — as well as fierce resistance from Schultz and his team.
In the last year, judges have ruled that Starbucks violated U.S. labor laws more than 130 times across six states, among the most of any private employer nationwide. The rulings found that Starbucks retaliated against union supporters by surveilling them at work, firing them and promising them improved pay and benefits if they rejected the organizing campaign.
The company has blamed the union’s negative influence for a higher rate of employee attrition at stores that have organized, and it has denied wrongdoing. “Starbucks has always been a different kind of company and, while not perfect, we consistently do what’s right for our partners, our customers and business,” the company said in a statement.
Starbucks’s anti-union campaign has been most intense in Buffalo, a working-class city where the union drive began. In early March, an administrative law judge found Starbucks had committed “egregious and widespread misconduct” in Buffalo and ordered the coffee giant to rehire seven “unlawfully discharged” employees.
It’s against the law to fire workers for organizing. But as Rizzo and the other Starbucks workers were learning, there’s also little to stop companies from doing it. The National Labor Relations Board, the federal agency that oversees union elections and protects workers’ rights, has struggled to hold on to staff members amid deep budget cuts. Since 2010, it is down about 520 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce. The primary penalty that it can impose on companies for dismissing pro-union employees — reinstatement with back pay — has been a paltry deterrent, labor advocates said.
And so in late March, senators were largely reduced to cajoling and shaming Schultz into obeying federal law. Schultz began the hearing by telling lawmakers that his company “had not broken the law” and that his workers did not need a union. Unions, he said, were for companies that abused their employees, not Starbucks, which offered health coverage, stock options and free online college through Arizona State University. “We do nothing that is nefarious,” he said. “We put our people first … and we have the track record to prove it.”
The company’s generosity, Schultz maintained, was born of his own childhood struggles. When Schultz was 10, he said, his father slipped on a patch of ice, broke his hip and ankle, and was “promptly fired” from his job as a truck driver. The setback “fractured our family,” he told the senators, and decades later inspired him, as Starbucks’s CEO, to build the kind of company that would give his workers a “chance at a better life.”
The Republicans on the committee praised Schultz for creating tens of thousands of jobs and building a global corporation. The Democrats, meanwhile, warned him that the company’s past generosity didn’t give it free rein to break federal labor laws. And they tried to convince him that his unionizing workers were no different from his dad.
“Your father had no rights, and your family paid the price. That’s how your workers now feel,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told him. “These workers are just like your father.”
Rizzo’s childhood was marked by frequent evictions and parents who served prison sentences for drug-related crimes. At 17, she dropped out of high school and found work at a Starbucks in Naples, Fla. She was promoted to shift supervisor and in 2017, eager to escape the poverty and disorder of home, moved to Buffalo to live with her cousin. “Having a drug-addicted parent puts you in the position of being their parent,” Rizzo said. “I had to take care of my mom. She didn’t take care of me.”
Rizzo settled in Buffalo and got hired at Starbucks No. 23917, which sat beside a busy six-lane road, sandwiched between several chain hotels and Buffalo Niagara International Airport.
Starbucks offered a solid wage. She earned about $23 an hour as a shift supervisor, though she sometimes struggled to get full-time hours. The job also brought stability. “The first family environment I’ve ever experienced,” she said. Rizzo got her GED and earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Arizona State through Starbucks’s free online college program. Her managers praised her dedication to her store and co-workers. “Lexi was an exemplary partner,” said David Almond, one of her former managers in Buffalo. “She loves coffee and Starbucks with all of her soul.”
In August 2021, Rizzo was among the first Starbucks employees in Buffalo to join the nascent union’s organizing committee. Rizzo hoped a union would yield better health insurance. Even though she had been covered by the company’s plan, a stack of medical bills, totaling more than $5,000 for multiple surgeries, sat on the same bookshelf as her college diploma. “At some point I stopped opening them,” she said of the bills. “I told myself that I’d worry about them when I was healthy.”
She also hoped the union would help workers negotiate pay raises and more reliable hours, which were frequently cut in January and February when customer traffic slowed. Rizzo didn’t know much about organized labor beyond the experience of an aunt who worked as a Southwest Airlines flight attendant. But her long history with Starbucks, her calm manner and edgy look helped her win over co-workers. Rizzo’s wardrobe came from secondhand clothing stores. She wore a stud in the space between her nose and upper lip. Sleeves of tattoos covered her arms.
“We’ve got the cool baristas on our side,” one of her colleagues recalled thinking when she walked into the organizing committee’s first meeting.
Within a week, Rizzo had persuaded all of the hourly workers at her store to sign union cards, expressing support for an election. The company responded by doubling the number of employees at her store to more than 40 in an attempt to dilute the voting pool, according to the judge’s ruling in the Buffalo case. Starbucks also flooded the Buffalo market with dozens of managers from around the country. In Rizzo’s store the extra bosses donned headsets — even when they weren’t serving customers — so that they could monitor the workers’ conversations, the judge found. Starbucks officials said that the changes were necessary to help underperforming stores, an argument the judge deemed not credible.
Sometimes they ordered Rizzo to stop talking about the union with her co-workers, according to testimony from Rizzo and other workers. As the election approached, Starbucks slashed her store’s hours, making it difficult for longtime employees to pay their bills. Some of the workers blamed the union drive.
“It was bad before, but that’s not even comparable to the chaos it is now,” one of the baristas complained in the employee text chain as the election approached. “I just want to make coffee and not think about it after work.”
“We can’t work here without feeling suffocated,” another barista wrote.
“The general feeling is simply that we f---ed ourselves,” a shift supervisor added. The Washington Post is not naming the workers to protect them from possible reprisals.
Rizzo fought to win back their support, reminding them that their efforts were already producing results. Shortly after the union push was announced, the company had promised to raise wages and institute credit card tipping. She reassured her co-workers that she wouldn’t be angry if they voted against the union.
“We’ve been treated as disposable for a long time and I want us to be worth more to this company,” she wrote in the group chat. “I’m not stuck on how that happens for us. I just know we deserve better.” In December 2021, Rizzo’s store and another on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo voted to become the first U.S. Starbucks to unionize.
Their early improbable victory caught the attention of baristas in dozens of cities around the country, who petitioned for their own votes. Congratulations poured in from the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
Rizzo knew that the company was still determined to crush the union and that winning a contract could take years. But she felt as if she were fighting for something bigger than herself, her store or even Starbucks. She expected that politicians and celebrities would pressure the coffee giant to bargain with them in good faith. She believed the NLRB and the federal courts would force the company to follow the law. She imagined that if they succeeded, other service workers at places such as McDonald’s and Burger King would also seek to unionize. “Starbucks is banking on us giving up,” she said in an interview a few weeks after her store voted to unionize. “We’re not going to.”
Rizzo had little sense of how Starbucks would fight. Nationwide, the union said, Starbucks has dismissed more than 200 employees who backed the union drives. In his Senate testimony, Schultz said the company had not targeted pro-union workers. “Starbucks Coffee Company unequivocally has not broken the law,” he told lawmakers.
Shortly after the union campaign launched in the summer of 2021, managers began citing Rizzo for minor dress code infractions — small rips in the knees of her jeans, an unauthorized suicide awareness button on her apron — that she said were previously never an issue. The company reassigned Rizzo from closing shifts, which she had worked for her entire career, to opening the store as early as 4:30 a.m. In 2021 she was late to three shifts and then went 12 months without any incidents of tardiness. In August 2022, Rizzo said she was suffering from a migraine that hit her “like a truck” and didn’t wake up for her 4:30 a.m. opening. She rose to a concerned co-worker banging on her door around 9:45 a.m. and immediately called and texted her manager.
“I am so sorry from the bottom of my heart,” she wrote. “I feel awful.”
“I know,” the manager replied. “Accidents happen, just happy you are ok.” The store remained closed that day until noon.
The company gave her a “final written warning,” the step before dismissal, and changed her schedule a few weeks later. She was now often responsible for closing the store on Friday at 7:30 or 8:30 p.m. and then reopening Saturday at 5:30 a.m. Because she lived about 30 minutes away, she would have to wake up for work only eight or nine hours after returning home. Rizzo said she was the only person at her store, other than the manager, assigned to close and then open.
When Rizzo complained, her store manager told her that she didn’t have any other workers who could take the shifts. A Starbucks official, who was authorized by the company to speak on the condition of anonymity, said Rizzo had asked her manager for at least 30 hours a week because she was “financially struggling.” The new schedule was an attempt to meet her needs, the official said.
The final written warning meant that Rizzo was now one mistake away from being fired. She worried constantly about not waking up for her shift, which made it even harder to fall asleep. “I walk into work every day feeling like I might be walking into my own execution,” she told The Post in December 2022.
Her solution, she said, was to try harder than anyone in her store. “If I can just tough this out, if they need me enough, if I’m perfect every day, then they can’t fire me,” she recalled thinking. As a teenager Rizzo had struggled with anorexia, which she said was a product of her chaotic childhood and feeling as though she had no control over her life. Amid all the stress, her eating disorder returned.
For the first time in years, she began seeing a psychiatrist and taking prescription medication for her condition.
In early February of this year, she closed the store on a Friday night and overslept, leaving her 57 minutes late for her opening shift the following morning. Nearly two months later, on March 31, she was fired. Rizzo’s separation document cited her lateness in early February, which the company said was the cause of her firing. It also included four other instances in which she was an average of 2 minutes and 40 seconds late.
In a statement, Starbucks said Rizzo was “a valued and contributing shift supervisor … Had it not been for continued punctuality issues that impacted her peers and customers she would still be employed.”
For Rizzo, the dismissal couldn’t have come at a worse time. Her longtime partner had been hit by a car while biking two weeks earlier, shattering his knee and wrist and leaving him unable to walk or work his bartending job. Rizzo’s job was their only source of income. Her situation in that moment was reminiscent of Schultz’s story of his father’s injury and firing. The Starbucks CEO had told it dozens of times in speeches, books and before Congress.
No one at Starbucks, though, seemed to hear the echo. Even after Rizzo’s firing, the company continued to level new allegations, unrelated to her dismissal. A Starbucks official accused her in an interview of falsifying time logs to cover for her lateness. “She could have been fired for that,” the official said. “That’s an integrity issue.”
The company cited only one example. Store video showed Rizzo arriving at work at 5:36 a.m. on Feb. 26 of this year. Rizzo wrote 5:34 a.m. as her start time in the log. Rizzo said she had spent the two minutes in the parking lot waiting for her co-worker to arrive. (Starbucks employees aren’t permitted in the store alone.) A text message from the day backs up her account. “I’m running late,” her co-worker had written her around 5:20 a.m.
In the days after she was fired, Rizzo applied for food stamps, Medicaid and unemployment benefits. In the near term there wasn’t much she could do to fight back. No celebrities were urging a boycott of the company. No senators were demanding that Starbucks rehire her. Rizzo filmed a video that was posted to the union’s TikTok page and got about 640,000 views.
“What would you say to Howard Schultz?” one of her colleagues prompted.
“You have hundreds of thousands of people giving everything that they have so you can make another dollar,” she replied. “Then you treat us like dirt. It’s disgusting.”
Rizzo wasn’t the only union supporter in Buffalo under scrutiny. Less than an hour after Rizzo was dismissed, Starbucks managers issued a written warning to Gianna Reeve, a 22-year-old shift supervisor who had traveled to Washington and confronted Schultz as he left the Senate hearing room. “Don’t have this be your legacy!” she called out to him.
Two days after Schultz’s hearing on March 29, Reeve received a disciplinary notice for closing blinds and turning off lights at her store while it was still open to customers. The alleged incident had occurred in late January. A Starbucks official declined to explain why the company had waited more than 60 days to discipline Reeve. Her written warning said that she had failed to “create a clean, welcoming, safe environment” in the store. Reeve, who still works for Starbucks, said she had no memory of the day but worried she too would soon be fired. “The floor is made of eggshells,” she said.
Sometimes Rizzo wondered if unionizing was worth the struggle. The bargaining sessions with the company over a first contract were going nowhere — most lasted less than 10 minutes before the Starbucks attorneys walked out. Each side was accusing the other of negotiating in bad faith. “The company is not really suffering,” Rizzo said. “The people who are really suffering are all the people that I love and care about. I think about everything that my store partners have been through because of what I started and, yeah, I have a lot of moments of doubt.”
Shortly after Rizzo’s firing, her former co-workers voted unanimously to launch a two-day strike. The company brought in managers to run the drive-through. Rizzo and her co-workers stood in the store parking lot and tried to persuade customers to turn away. Eventually, the managers called the police, who shooed the striking workers down the street. Rizzo knew none of it was enough to hurt Starbucks, which had reported record sales in the first quarter of 2023 and had recently announced plans to grow its footprint in China to 9,000 stores.
In mid-April, a dozen fired Starbucks workers met for a potluck at the union’s Buffalo offices in a converted Ford factory. Nearly 18 months earlier, Rizzo had gathered with her colleagues in the same century-old building to celebrate the new union’s first win.
When the victory was announced, Rizzo, who was tracking the vote count on a legal pad, leaped into the air and shouted with joy. Now she was holding a dish of mashed potatoes in the parking lot with three of her fired colleagues who had celebrated alongside her that day. They were waiting on a person with the key to the union offices.
“Is everyone fashionably late?” one of the workers asked.
“That’s why we all got fired,” Rizzo joked.
Most of the former workers at the potluck were going to testify in the coming week at a second Starbucks trial in Buffalo. The judge’s ruling in the first trial, issued about a month before Rizzo was fired, concluded that “Starbucks’ widespread coercive behavior … had permeated every store in the Buffalo market.”
This time the NLRB complaint consisted of more than 30 charges, including 10 cases of Starbucks allegedly firing workers in Buffalo for union activity.
“This is the trial where I get my job back,” said Sam Amato, a 34-year-old shift supervisor who was dismissed last summer after 13 years with the company.
“Are you excited?” Rizzo asked.
“More nervous,” he replied.
Amato was fired last summer after his short-staffed store switched to drive-through-only operations without management approval. The shift supervisor who preceded Amato at work said that she alone had ordered the change and locked the cafe doors while Amato was rushing to serve customers. Amato, a prominent union supporter, was the only person fired. Starbucks officials said that because Amato had begun his shift, he was in charge and therefore responsible. They also noted that Amato had received a “final written warning” for an unrelated incident that occurred nearly two years earlier.
Even if the judge ruled in Amato’s favor, Starbucks could appeal, and the government’s lawyers told him that it was unlikely he would get his job back before next year. Still, after months of waiting, he was eager for his day in court. “I’m hoping it’ll be therapeutic,” he told Rizzo.
Rizzo would also be testifying at the trial about last summer’s final written warning, which the board was asking the judge to expunge. Her firing probably would be part of a third trial in the future.
The former Starbucks workers drank wine, ate lasagna and talked about Schultz’s Senate appearance. Amato had been in the hearing room that day, one of a dozen or so workers sent by the union. He was sitting just a few yards from Mellody Hobson, the chair of the company’s board, who was clad in a Starbucks green blazer. Amato had looked up her Instagram account, which was packed with pictures of artists and liberal icons, such as Maya Angelou and Shirley Chisholm. He had wanted to tell her in person that day how much he loved his job and how his firing had left him feeling angry and depressed. But Hobson had left the room before he had the chance. In an email, Hobson said that she was “completely unaware” anyone was trying to speak with her and that she backed the company.
The fired workers’ potluck was drawing to a close. “I wonder how much they know about us?” Amato asked, thinking of Hobson and Schultz.
“I think they know everything,” said Victoria Conklin, who was fired last summer after five years with Starbucks. The NLRB was also calling for her to be reinstated. In the interim she had found work as an Olive Garden waitress.
Around 10 p.m., the fired workers drifted out to the parking lot. Rizzo hugged Amato. They had been friends since she moved to Buffalo six years earlier. She had rushed to his store to support him on the day he was fired and picketed with him and his co-workers in the parking lot afterward. “Good luck with your testimony,” she told him. Amato waved and drove off.
Three days later, on April 18, Rizzo was sitting in the witness chair being questioned by Starbucks’s attorney about her record at the company and the incident last August that had led to her final written warning.
The union’s lawyer told her that the Starbucks attorney would try to fluster her and make her lose her temper on the stand. “I’m going to talk to him the way I would to any man who’s angry because his latte isn’t right,” she told herself. She hoped she wouldn’t cry. Rizzo wore black jeans with small rips in the knee. The Starbucks attorney questioning her was clad in a dark gray suit.
“Isn’t it true that you received multiple time and attendance corrective actions in the years that you’ve been working for Starbucks?” the lawyer began.
“I worked there for a very long time.” Rizzo replied. “So probably.”
The lawyer handed her a corrective action form that detailed a “documented coaching” for tardiness six years earlier and asked Rizzo if she recalled it. Rizzo looked at the piece of paper for several seconds. “This was so long ago that I don’t remember it happening, personally,” she told him. “But that’s my signature.”
The cross-examination continued for about 45 minutes. The lawyer pressed her to explain a half-dozen incidents of lateness amassed over the course of more than 1,000 workdays since she started with the company in 2015. On one of those days, Rizzo’s text messages showed that she was late because she had been admitted to the hospital, where she was kept overnight.
Eventually, the lawyer arrived at the morning in question: Aug. 28, 2022.
Rizzo talked about going to sleep with a migraine, waking to a co-worker banging on her door and calling her store manager to apologize. “I was in a full-blown panic,” she testified. “I started sobbing uncontrollably.”
The Starbucks attorney asked if she had ever sought an accommodation from the company for her migraines, and Rizzo explained that they were a byproduct of prescription medication she had been taking for severe abdominal pain caused by her chronic endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. She said she had called Starbucks’s human resources department but was told that her pain was too “irregular and erratic” and that there wasn’t anything the company could do for her.
“I could go on an indefinite medical leave or try to keep working,” Rizzo testified, “and that’s what I did because I couldn’t afford not to work.” Several months later she got a hysterectomy, she said, and the pain went away.
The judge asked her if she needed a break. She wiped her eyes with a tissue and took a deep breath. After a few more questions, her time on the stand was done. She hugged the union’s lawyer and another Starbucks worker in the hallway outside the courtroom.
For Rizzo, the court proceedings weren’t therapeutic or empowering. The entire day felt dehumanizing, as if her nearly eight years with the company, her medical problems and her physical pain had been reduced to nothing more than malingering and scattered incidents of tardiness. “They’re trying to make these implications that I’m a bad person who doesn’t care about my job, and I know that’s not true,” she said.
The judge is expected to rule this summer on whether Starbucks will have to remove the final written warning from Rizzo’s personnel file. Even if Rizzo prevails, Starbucks can appeal that ruling. Last month, the NLRB’s New York office found merit to the charge that she was fired for her union activity and indicated that it will file a complaint seeking her reinstatement, according to the union’s lawyer.
Rizzo will have to return to court for a third trial and is likely to face the same questions from the same group of Starbucks lawyers. At best, a year — more likely two — will pass before the courts rule, the appeals have been exhausted and Rizzo is potentially eligible to get her job back.
Rizzo had believed that there were laws that could protect her and her colleagues. Now, she said, she knew how the system really worked. She rode down the elevator and rushed past the building security guards out onto the sidewalk. She was no longer crying. She was livid.
“I wanted to scream,” she said. “I honestly wanted to scream.”
Instead, she got in her car and drove home. She needed to make a résumé. She needed to find a job.
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Journalist José Rubén Zamora is escorted in handcuffs to a court hearing in Guatemala City on May 30. (photo: Moises Castillo/AP)
Critics have denounced the case against investigative journalist Jose Ruben Zamora as an attack on press freedom.
José Rubén Zamora, a 66-year-old journalist and newspaper founder, was sentenced to six years in prison for money laundering.
In his final comments before the verdict on Wednesday, Zamora proclaimed his innocence, saying his rights had been violated during the court proceedings.
“They treated us like criminals,” he said of the authorities who pursued the case. “They destroyed evidence.”
In announcing Wednesday’s verdict, the court in Guatemala City claimed Zamora had “harmed the Guatemalan economy”. The public prosecutor’s office had sought a 40-year sentence in the case.
Zamora was acquitted on charges of blackmail and influence peddling.
The journalist, known for exposing corruption in Guatemala, still faces two other criminal cases, one pertaining to signatures on customs documents that did not match. That case was filed just days ahead of the sentencing.
The trial that concluded on Wednesday lasted only 11 sessions – held over 20 days – and has generated widespread concern and condemnation.
“My father is innocent,” the journalist’s son Jose Zamora told Al Jazeera ahead of Wednesday’s conviction.
“The [Guatemalan] state has kidnapped him,” he said. “They have subjected him, within this fabricated case, to a process that has been totally a violation of his due process.”
While the public prosecutor’s office has long maintained the case against Zamora was not about his journalism, critics say the accusations and rapid nature of the trial suggest otherwise.
The case stems from allegations made by Ronald Garcia Navarijo, a former banker accused of corruption, about a deposit of $38,000 that Zamora allegedly asked someone to make on his behalf, as part of a money-laundering scheme.
The Salvadoran newspaper El Faro reported that prosecutors prepared the case against Zamora within 72 hours of receiving the accusation.
Zamora was arrested in July 2022 and kept in pre-trial detention without being able to make his first appearance before the judge for nearly two weeks.
Other irregularities occurred throughout the trial, including Zamora being forced to change lawyers eight times, with at least four of his lawyers facing criminal charges related to the case.
Zamora and the newspaper he founded in 1996, El Periodico, have long worked to expose government misconduct. The paper has played a key part in uncovering alleged corruption in the current administration of President Alejandro Giammattei, publishing over 120 investigations into the government since January 2020.
But El Periodico was forced to close on May 15 amid the fallout from the Zamora case. Its journalists were investigated, and the newsroom had been targeted multiple times in recent years for tax audits.
In a statement, El Periodico’s leadership blamed “persecution” for shuttering the newsroom, as well as “the harassment of our advertisers”. Both Zamora’s case and El Periodico’s closure have raised concerns in the international community.
“They’re using all these tools to basically put [Zamora] out of business,” Carlos Martinez de la Serna, programme director with the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists, told Al Jazeera.
“[This is] sending a very chilling message to journalists – that basically reporting on corruption is a crime,” he said.
Attacks on press freedom
As the case against Zamora comes to a close, another case against journalists from El Periodico is set to begin.
In February, a judge authorised the investigation of nine journalists and columnists from El Periodico on charges of “conspiracy to obstruct justice”, following a request from the lead prosecutor in Zamora’s case. The charges stem from the publishing of stories critical of the legal proceedings against Zamora.
On June 5, the public prosecutor’s office officially requested all the stories published since July by the journalists and columnists in the case.
But the persecution against journalists extends beyond El Periodico’s newsroom, according to observers.
“The press is being harassed at the level of exposure of Jose Ruben Zamora, as well as other low-profile journalists and even community journalists,” Renzo Rosal, a political scientist at Guatemala’s Landivar University, told Al Jazeera.
“Journalists who carry out their work in the interior of the country are victims of the same logic: the logic of persecution, the logic of criminalisation, so that no one investigates anything,” he explained.
Critics say the criminalisation of journalists has become further entrenched since President Giammattei took the oath of office in 2020. A number of renowned journalists have been forced into exile, while others have faced criminal charges and threats.
For example, Anastasia Mejía, a community journalist in Joyabaj, El Quiche, was arrested in 2020 on charges of sedition and arson following her coverage of protests against the mayor of the largely Indigenous municipality in Guatemala’s western highlands. The charges were dropped a year after she was first accused.
In another case from 2022, Carlos Choc, a community journalist from the eastern municipality of El Estor, faced the criminal charge of “instigation to commit a crime” following his coverage of anti-mining protests.
Eventually, Choc was exonerated, but the threats against journalists in El Estor remain, as police continue to intimidate other journalists working in the area.
Rolling back democracy
The verdict in the Zamora case comes within days of Guatemala’s general election on June 25, which has likewise been plagued by controversy.
The country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal has ruled to exclude three presidential candidates from the race on charges of noncompliance with the country’s election laws. Those disqualifications – which targeted at least one frontrunner – have raised questions about the fairness of the elections and Guatemala’s democratic institutions.
“Today the elections are another indicator of serious democratic erosion,” Rosal says.
Human rights observers have warned that Guatemala has recently seen a sharp rollback of its democracy and its anti-corruption efforts, even beyond the upcoming elections.
Nearly four years ago, the administration of former President Jimmy Morales oversaw the closure of the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG), a United Nations-backed initiative to address crime and corruption that enjoyed public support of 70 percent.
Giammattei’s administration has continued the trend of dismantling anti-corruption bulwarks, through prosecution of the judges, lawyers and activists involved in those efforts.
Accusations of corruption have also permeated the Guatemalan public prosecutor’s office in recent years. Both Attorney General Maria Consuelo Porras, who was controversially re-elected in May 2022, and Rafael Curruchiche, head of the Office of the Special Prosecutor Against Impunity, have been sanctioned by the United States for corruption and anti-democratic actions.
Critics say Guatemala is currently undergoing its greatest challenge since the country’s return to democracy in 1985, after decades of military rule. Back then, those democratic reforms paved the way for the 1996 peace accords that brought an end to the country’s 36-year-long internal conflict.
But for those who lived through those tumultuous times, Guatemala’s current democratic crisis is a painful setback.
“I struggled for the peace process so that there would be peace in Guatemala,” said Claudia Samayoa, a founder of the Human Rights Defenders Protection Unit in Guatemala (UDEFEGUA). Her organisation grew out of the peace accords and sought to implement its terms in the post-conflict period.
But Samoyoa explained that UDEFEGUA has likewise come under attack, with its leadership facing accusations of influence peddling in relation to Zamora’s case. The organisation has denied those allegations, dismissing them as a smear campaign against its human rights work.
“We have regressed in the exercise of the most basic right of defence,” Samayoa said. “These cases are backwards.”
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A new study shows how federal money for managed retreat may also fuel white flight. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A new study shows how federal money for managed retreat may also fuel white flight.
These homeowners have used FEMA money to move back from coastal areas and river basins from New Jersey to Texas to Iowa, usually fleeing in the wake of major floods and storms. But even though the buyout program has become the government’s primary tool for encouraging managed retreat, FEMA has never kept tabs on what happens to buyout participants after they leave their homes. As a result, there is scant information about how effective the program is at reducing flood risk — or about where these first waves of American climate migrants have gone.
A few years ago, researchers at Rice University set out to change that. In a new study published this week, they match federal records with private consumer address data to trace the path of almost 10,000 buyout households that have taken FEMA money, or around a quarter of all program participants. The study offers the clearest picture yet of how the buyout program works, and the strongest evidence so far that it reduces the risk that climate change has brought to American shores. While the findings show that most buyout homeowners move only short distances, they prove that those participants actually do seek new homes with substantially lower flood exposure.
But the study also finds that program outcomes look very different depending on the racial makeup of a given neighborhood. Homeowners in majority-white areas tend not to take buyouts unless the areas around them face extreme levels of flood risk, while homeowners in other neighborhoods are more likely to take buyouts even when the risk is more moderate. And when homeowners in white neighborhoods do take buyouts, they overwhelmingly seek new housing in other majority-white areas in the immediate vicinity of their old homes.
“Any time a color-blind policy enters a racialized housing landscape, it’s going to be segmented,” said Jim Elliott, a professor at Rice University and the lead author of the study. “The same policy is going to work differently in different places.”
The first difference is in who takes buyouts in the first place. By analyzing the flood risk levels of all the areas where households took FEMA money, Elliott found that the majority-white buyout areas were much deeper in the floodplain than majority-Black and majority-Hispanic buyout areas: The average majority-white buyout area had an almost 90 percent chance of flooding by 2050, compared to as low as around 50 percent for majority-Black buyout areas. This suggests that white households only participate in the program when the flood risk around them is severe, and otherwise tend to stay put.
Elliott points to a few reasons why households in majority-white areas might hang on longer. For one thing, local governments tend to spend more money on flood control infrastructure in areas with higher home values, which may assuage residents’ concerns about future risk. For another, households in these areas may have more luck selling their homes on the private market. Homeowners in majority-Black and Hispanic areas, meanwhile, may have no option but to take buyouts.
The destinations of migrating households also differed based on the racial composition of the neighborhoods they were leaving behind. More than 95 percent of buyout households in majority-white census tracts ended up moving to other majority-white census tracts. Residents of majority-minority neighborhoods were far more likely to move to a new neighborhood with a different demographic composition: Just 40 percent of buyout households in majority-Hispanic areas moved to other majority-Hispanic areas, and only 48 percent of buyout households in majority-Black areas moved to majority-Black areas.
The study only identifies the racial composition of neighborhoods where buyouts happen, rather than the racial identities of individual households, but Elliott has a theory about what’s going on: He believes the data shows white families in all neighborhoods using buyout money to move to wealthier and whiter areas. When the white families are leaving behind majority-white areas, they seek out other white areas, and when they’re leaving majority-Black or majority-Hispanic areas, they’re engaging in a process similar to the “white flight” housing exodus of previous generations.
“If you’re approaching a majority-white neighborhood, and you want people to move, they’re going to move if and only if they can meet three conditions,” said Elliott. “They have to have housing somewhere nearby, they want to reduce their flood risk, and the close-by safer housing has to be in a majority-white area. They’re not going to sacrifice that.”
In a previous paper that focused on Houston, Texas, Elliott found that white families in racially diverse areas were far more likely to take buyout offers from the government than were their Hispanic neighbors in the same areas.
These results offer a mixed picture of the FEMA program, which has become an essential tool in the federal government’s climate adaptation arsenal. On the one hand, it affirms that people who take buyouts do end up in safer homes rather than hopping from one flood-prone area to another, as many experts have feared they do. This benefit is strongest in large cities, where buyout households have access to relatively ample housing stock and can find safe new homes that are closer to their old ones.
On the other hand, though, FEMA money seems to grease the wheels of pre-existing processes of white flight and urban segregation, allowing white households to leave behind diversifying neighborhoods and entrench themselves in other white suburbs and towns.
A spokesperson from FEMA said the agency strives for equity in its mitigation programs.
“While FEMA does not base its assistance or programs on race, national origin, or socioeconomic status, Administrator Criswell has directed the agency to look at all our programs to determine areas where we can break down barriers, enhance equity, and increase accessibility,” the spokesperson said. “This incudes, but is not limited to, requiring states to consider equity and the impacts of climate change when implementing flood buyouts and other hazard mitigation programs.”
Elliott said these results suggest that the buyout program should be bolstered and expanded, with additional stipends that allow lower-income households to move to a wider variety of new types of housing. Furthermore, he argues, FEMA should do much more to monitor the outcomes for these de facto climate migrants as the agency continues to pour money into adaptation and buyouts.
“The policy lesson is really that it’s not just the environmental risk and the way the policy works that’s intervening to affect how it plays out for homeowners,” he said. “We need to engage communities more proactively and think about not only when they retreat, but how they retreat.”
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