Discussion of All Things Political

A corruption scandal rocking one of Argentina's leading human rights organisation is now tainting the country's president, Christina Kirchner.

Al Jazeera's Lucia Newman reports.

BUENOS AIRES, Jun 17, 2011 (IPS) - Above and beyond the impact it might have on Argentina's Oct. 23 general elections, few doubt that the government of Cristina Fernández will feel the effects of the fraud scandal involving the alleged misuse of public funds by the former right-hand man of the head of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association.

The latest survey by pollster Enrique Zuleta found that nearly 53 percent of respondents believe the scandal is a serious problem that will have far-reaching consequences for politics and the country's institutions, and that the effects are not merely limited to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

The Mothers, a world-renowned human rights group, emerged 34 years ago during the 1976-1983 dictatorship to protest the forced disappearance of their children.

The scandal involves Sergio Schoklender, who was the chief adviser to activist Hebe de Bonafini – the head of the Mothers Association – and the financial manager of the foundation set up by the human rights group.

Early this month the Association fired Schoklender and several of his associates after legal charges were brought against them for fraud, illegal enrichment and money laundering in relation to government funds that went to the foundation for the purpose of building low-income housing to replace slums.MORE

It’s known as the School of Assassins among the poor of Latin America; a vessel for the spread of democracy among its U.S. military proponents; and one of the world’s most infamous human rights offenders for the thousands of protesters who gather in Fort Benning, Georgia, each November to honor the names of union leaders, campesinos, priests, and children who have been gunned down by its alumni.

This week, activists led by longtime peacemaker Father Roy Bourgeois are fasting in Washington, D.C. to demand the closure of the “School of the Americas,” a training center, funded by U.S. taxpayers, for tens of thousands of Latin American soldiers and police forces.

The institution was initially founded to curb the spread of communism in the region—training, arming, and supporting some of the 20th century's most deadly regimes in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Bolivia, and on. With an eerily Orwellian turn of phrase, the school, originally founded in Panama in 1946 before it was relocated to U.S. soil in 1984, was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHINSEC, in 2001.

"We rely on what our leaders tell us is true, and we don't know what our foreign policy means to those on the receiving end."

According to Bourgeois' watchdog group, the School of the Americas Watch, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people—from Jesuit priests to village children—have been traced to the more than 60,000 graduates trained during the school's 59 years of operation. Bourgeois, a veteran and firsthand witness to the carnage in Vietnam, first went to work in Latin America in 1972 as a priest. Five years living with the poor on the outskirts of La Paz, Bolivia, exposed him to the United States' complicity in atrocities committed by General Banzer’s regime. “I met my country there,” he says. “We were the ones giving them guns and teaching them how to use them.”

Bourgeois' outspokenness eventually got him arrested and effectively deported, but it also got him rolling. Every Sunday, he spoke at different churches throughout the U.S., explaining how our own military might, money, and expertise were supporting some of the world's most merciless oppressors.

In 1989, a congressional task force investigating the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their co-worker, and her teenage daughter, revealed that some of the killers had been trained at Fort Benning. Bourgeois organized a 35-day fast at the base’s gate.

Two decades later, Bourgeois' activism has spread, with tens of thousands of participants from all over the world demanding the closure of the school. Bourgeois has personally petitioned leaders—from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Bolivian President Evo Morales—to discontinue their militaries’ involvement with the school.

Bourgeois believes that American people must find new ways to be in relationship with the rest of the world—with or without the official support of our leaders. Militarism, he argues, has been an American addiction for years. But with drastic unemployment, languishing social services, widespread insecurity, and the creeping consolidation of power, we may finally learn how to say, enough is enough. MORE

Back in May, @viewfromthecave tweeted that The Kristof was taking questions from readers to be answered via YouTube. This is the question I asked:

Your columns about Africa almost always feature black Africans as victims, and white foreigners as their saviors.

There was more to it than that, but I can't find the original post. At any rate, the gist of the question was, "Why not feature more of the work that Africans are doing to solve their countries' problems?"


And, lo and behold, Kristof answered. NYT Picker thankfully has the transcript for those of us on dial-up connections:
This is a really important issue for a journalist. And it's one I've thought a lot about.

I should, first of all, from my defensive crouch, say that I think you're a little bit exaggerating the way I have reported. Indeed, recently, for example, among the Africans who I have emphasized, the people who are doing fantastic work are the extraordinary Dr. Dennis Mukwege in the Congo, Edna Adan in Somaliland, Valentino Deng in Sudan, Manute Bol in Sudan, and there are a lot of others.


But I do take your point. That very often I do go to developing countries where local people are doing extraordinary work, and instead I tend to focus on some foreigner, often some American, who’s doing something there.


And let me tell you why I do that. The problem that I face -- my challenge as a writer -- in trying to get readers to care about something like Eastern Congo, is that frankly, the moment a reader sees that I'm writing about Central Africa, for an awful lot of them, that's the moment to turn the page. It's very hard to get people to care about distant crises like that.


One way of getting people to read at least a few grafs in is to have some kind of a foreign protagonist, some American who they can identify with as a bridge character.


And so if this is a way I can get people to care about foreign countries, to read about them, ideally, to get a little bit more involved, then I plead guilty.

As NYT Picker aptly notes, the persons to whom Kristof refers have either not been mentioned in his print columns or are typically only mentioned briefly.Texas in Africa proceeds to fisk this white liberal racist BS as it deserves

PORT-LOUIS , Jul 14, 2010 (IPS) - "Instead of moaning all the time, why don’t you create your own (political) party?" some men asked Brigitte Rabemanantsoa Rasamoelina, a female politician from Madagascar. She accepted the challenge and in February formed Ampela Mano Politika, a political party which started with only 22 female members and now has over 5,000 female members ... and 10 men.


With female political representation standing at only 3.75 percent in Madagascar, a women’s lot is very precarious, says Rasamoelina.


And so too is the situation for many women in most of the Indian Ocean Islands. Female political representation is a mere three percent in Comoros, 18 percent in Mauritius and 23.5 percent in the Seychelles.


It is one of the reasons why Rasamoelina and 30 other women from the Indian Ocean Islands, gathered recently in Mauritius to identify ways to attain parity among men and women in politics in an event organised by the Indian Ocean Commission and Women in Politics (WIP).MORE

Film industry claims that iiNet, Australia’s third-largest internet service provider, was responsible for its users’ illegal file sharing were dismissed.
Justice Cowdroy also provided one of the clearest legal statements ever of an ISP’s role:

An ISP such as iiNet provides a legitimate communication facility which is neither intended nor designed to infringe copyright. It is only by means of the application of the BitTorrent system that copyright infringements are enabled, although it must be recognised that the BitTorrent system can be used for legitimate purposes as well. iiNet is not responsible if an iiNet user chooses to make use of that system to bring about copyright infringement.

Justice Cowdroy acknowledged the widespread public interest in the trial both in Australia and abroad, believing it to be the first trial of its kind to proceed to hearing and judgement. As Crikey has previous explained, this case has global importance.MORE

ECUADOR: President Rafael Correa´s double about-face on an intrepid plan to preserve one of the most biodiverse corners of the Amazon rain forest has put the initiative at risk.

Correa had invited the international community for donations of US$3.50 billion over 10 years if Ecuador did not drill in the oil-rich fields located in the Yasuní National Park, the country´s largest.

The Ishpingo Tiputini Tambococha, or ITT fields, sit within the park, which is also home to a number of indigenous communities, and hold 856 million barrels of crude, which could generate US$7 billion for the cash-strapped government.

The diversity of plant and animal life in Yasuní is one of the most dramatic in the world, and the park is constitutionally protected from extractive industry.

Correa´s broad social programs, including universal health care and education, as outlined in the country´s new constitution, requires a constant injection of cash, which the ITT fields could provide.

But in April 2009, nearly two years after the proposal was first announced, Correa formally asked the international community for $3.5 billion, half the amount he said the government could earn if it drilled in the ITT.

Ecuador planned to sign an agreement with a group of donor countries, including France, Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary, represented by the United Nations Development Fund, during the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December, but Correa refused, calling it an interference in Ecuador´s sovereignty.MORE

Three Argentine universities last year rejected the use of public funds generated by mining, sparking a nationwide debate on whether to use money stemming from the lucrative, but environmentally questionable industry.

Opponents of using these funds argue that mining companies could try to play a role in curricula, while others say the money could help cushion school budgets.

Throughout 2009, 26 departments at the state-run National Universities of Córdoba, Río Cuarto and Luján rejected the use of mining funds. The calls were initiated a year earlier by the Esquel site of the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia “San Juan Bosco,” which turned down these funds.

When doing so, the advising council of this university, a public institution, highlighted that Esquel had rejected large-scale mining because of reported environmental damage, which it first signaled in 2003, when more than 80 percent of the community rejected gold mining at a nearby pit. The council added that the university was not alien to the local population´s will.MORE

In part 2 of the show we look at a new law in Argentina that looks set to drastically alter the media landscape in the country and force the dominant Grupo Clarin to shed many of its holdings.

Is this a necessary overhaul of archaic rules or simply an attempt by the government of Christina Kirchner to silence its biggest critic.

Thousands of activists from social and political organizations, the two workers' centers of the country, human rights groups, national universities, intellectuals, artists, and journalists that supported the initiative came together in Argentina to the National Congress to join the debate that would end up turning the Audiovisual Communication Services Bill into law.
The vote in question ended in the early hours of the morning but, unlike other occasions, was not characterized by its opacity or lack of public awareness. To the contrary, the topic, which was covered by the media and went through months of discussions in forums and public assemblies organized by Parliament, had an impressive public attendance due to the ferocious campaign against the country's principal newspaper companies. Both those who drove the initiative as well as those who resisted it followed very closely the ratification of a law that was filmed by all TV channels every step of the way.

Success at Last

The law was approved October 10, seven months after President Cristina Fernández introduced the draft, the 18th of last March, for its discussion in public forums prior to its submission to Congress. The official initiative was inspired by the 21 points elaborated by the Coalition for Democratic Broadcast Regulation. Participating in this collective are community radio networks like the Argentine Forum for Community Radio Stations (FARCO) and the Association of Community Radio Broadcasters of Argentina (AMARC); cooperatives; press, TV, actors, and musician unions associated with the Argentine Workers' Center (CTA) and the General Confederation of Labor (CGT); social and human rights organizations; journalists and academics from around the country primarily in the field of communication.
MORE

The workers at Argentina's largest worker-controlled factory are celebrating a definitive legal solution to a nine-year struggle for the right to work and workers' self-determination. The provincial legislature of Neuquén voted in favor of expropriating the Zanon ceramics factory giving the workers' cooperative FASINPAT the right to manage the plant definitively. Since the workers occupied Zanon in 2001, they have successfully set up a system of workers' management, created jobs, duplicated production of ceramics, supported community projects, and spearheaded a network of over 200 recuperated enterprises. Zanon, renamed FASINPAT or Factory Without a Boss, can now continue production without threat of eviction from their factory.

Zanon Belongs to the People, Support the Workers. Photo: radiouniversidad.wordpress.com.

Zanon, still Latin America's largest ceramics manufacturer, is located in the Patagonian province of Neuquén, a region with rich working class traditions, history, and mystique surrounding the red desert, rich forests, and crystalline lakes. The workers officially declared the factory under worker control in October 2001 following a lockout of the factory bosses.

In Argentina, more than 13,000 people work in occupied factories and businesses, otherwise known as recuperated enterprises. The sites, which number more than 200, range from hotels, to ceramics factories, to balloon manufacturers, to suit factories, to printing shops, and transport companies, as well as many other trades. Most of the occupations occurred following the nation's 2001 economic crisis when unemployment rates soared above 25% and poverty levels hovered over 50%. Zanon, as one of the largest and foremost factory occupations, became a symbol for millions of workers who lost their jobs during the worst economic crisis in Argentina's history, in which thousands of factories shut down. The cooperative has proved that factories can produce without a boss.MORE