Essential Afro-Latino/ Caribbean Current Events

[Yehuda]

Aragua cimarrones speak about the events in Chuao

Wednesday, May 6, 2020 | 02:27 AM

Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo, Aragua State Chapter. Credit: Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo

Following the arrest of a group of mercenaries captured by fishermen from the town of Chuao, the Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo, speaks about this event that highlights the coastal town on the coast of Aragua:

“Recently, Chuao, a town on the coast of the Aragua State, was put on the world geopolitical map, after the incursion of a group of mercenaries from the Venezuelan radical opposition along with some green berets from the Donald Trump government, who were captured by cimarrón militiamen affiliated with the Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo.

Once again the coherent anti-colonial and anti-imperialist tendency of the Afro-descendant peoples was shown. In innumerable meetings both in the Vice Presidency of the Republic and in some ministries, it has been raised — unfortunately without the proper attention — that the Afro-descendant peoples are located in areas of military geopolitics such as the Barlovento region, where a suspicious ship, La Tortuga Island, located 60 km from Higuerote was detected by our Navy.

On May 3, other mercenaries were also detected, which led to a confrontation in Macuto (La Guaira State), an area that we have called a military geostrategic area, as is the entire coast of this geographical area.

Now, on May 4, it corresponded to Chuao Beach where these mercenaries arrived, fleeing from the Vargas coast to the Aragua coast, where our alert cimarrones proceeded to capture these mercenaries paid by the US empire. Thus we also highlight the participation of the impostor, self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó, who signed a contract with the highly specialized mercenaries participating in the war against Iraq. They are part of the network that General Clíver Alcalá created in Barranquilla with the Colombian government under the command of President Iván Duque.

In the face of these events, once again, the Afro-Revolutionary Movement reaffirms its anti-imperialist vocation and at the same time we call on the Venezuelan State to give the greatest protection and security to the cimarrones who participated in this fight against imperialism.

At the same time, we take the opportunity to inform the President and his team that public services in our communities are in an advanced process of deterioration, being that strategic services such as electricity and communication are almost non-existent, as well as the areas of health and economic sustainability.

The Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo in a next statement will expose to the national government the critical situation we are going through, however, we are clear on who is the main enemy. Our sovereignty and anti-imperialism will not be contested.

Thus we begin the month of Afrovenezolanidad decreed on May 10 by the National Assemby chaired in May 2005, by the current legitimate president of the Bolivarian Republic, Nicolás Maduro Moros, in honor of the May 10, 1795 uprising of cimarrón José Leonardo Chirino at Sierra de Falcón. We began the month of Afrovenezolanidad in a dignified way with the anti-imperialist feat of the cimarrones of Chuao”.



Aragua cimarrones speak about the events in Chuao

 

[Yehuda]

Genocide and military occupation: the five most important clauses of the contract between Guaidó and Silvercorp

May 10, 2020

President Nicolás Maduro shows the passports of the two American Silvercorp mercenaries captured in Venezuela after the failed raid in Macuto. Photo: AFP

Finally, the full content of the contract signed by Juan Guaidó, Sergio Vergara and J.J. Rendón with the signature of American mercenaries Silvercorp, under the responsibility of ex-military Jordan Goudreau, was released.

The Venezuelan Minister of Communication Jorge Rodríguez, in a press conference from the Miraflores Palace a couple of days ago, made a detailed tour of the clauses of the contract and explained its scope and objectives, including the physical elimination of President Nicolás Maduro and of high authorities of the Venezuelan state.

With the evidence revealed so far, it has been established that Juan Guaidó had detailed knowledge of the contract he signed with the aim of promoting the mercenary intervention against Venezuela that ran ashore on May 3.

Although the self-proclaimed deputy has denied all ties through statements and evasive statements, his adviser J.J. Rendón has confirmed the veracity of the contract while, on the other hand, the leak of a new audio has revealed the conversation between Goudreau and Guaidó at the time of closing the agreement.

The content of the signed contract indicates that the physical elimination of President Nicolás Maduro and the top leadership of the Venezuelan state was the first objective in an operation that had as its general purpose the prolonged military occupation of the country at the hands of a private army of mercenaries.

1. The contract establishes that Silvercorp's presence in the country would be 495 continuous days, acting as the “security force” of the fake government in order to “stabilize the country”.

While the operation to “capture / detain / eliminate Nicolás Maduro, eliminate the current Regime and install the renowned Venezuelan President Juan Guaido (sic)” was the primary objective, Guaidó promised to honor the monthly payments to Silvercorp, even if the the legitimate Venezuelan president, was removed from his post for other reasons before the armed incursion.

Following these clauses, Silvercorp would act as a financial intermediary between the fake government of Guaidó and capitalists interested in obtaining an economic return from the illegal operations of mercenaries in Venezuelan territory. Consequently, the contract was also a financial adventure and the chart of artillery neo-liberalism. Goudreau's company would become the star contractor for oil, mining and industrial companies that had to hire Silvercorp's services to operate in Venezuela “safely”.

This relationship between transnational corporations and private mercenary firms is usual in Colombia, Iraq or Afghanistan, where corporations hire private security firms to protect their businesses in the midst of a low or medium intensity armed conflict. War profiteering.

2. According to the contract, Silvercorp would act hand in hand with the fake government of Juan Guaidó and above the defense and national security institutions conceived in the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela such as the National Bolivarian Armed Forces (FANB).

Goudreau's power would be supra-constitutional and would only be accountable to Guaidó. He would be above the FANB, the intelligence services and the police, exercising a capacity for unilateral action in various fields of military activity.

Therefore, the clauses of the contract imply the dissolution of the Bolivarian Republic, its public institutions and the human rights guarantee system established in the country's Magna Carta. The FANB would be replaced by a private occupation army and those responsible for the public powers would be designated as “hostile forces”.

The contract highlights that figures such as Diosdado Cabello, Nicolás Maduro and their “supporters” would be declared as such, which in concrete terms implied the persecution and capture of all public and institutional positions in the Venezuelan state.

It was a scorched-earth operation, where mayors, governors, judges, prosecutors, ministers and other authorities designated as “Chavistas” would be captured, persecuted or killed. Applying these techniques typical of state terrorism, the fake government of Guaidó would reorganize the Venezuelan state in all its organizational units.

Taking advantage of the de facto state of siege and with the Silvercorp thugs on the streets of the country, the dismantling of the Bolivarian Republic would be forged, the physical disappearance of Chavismo as a political and institutional force and the conditions would be created for the auction of public companies in benefit of transnational companies.

3. It would have been catastrophic (and also unprecedented) that a private contract with a mercenary company would be the source of the dissolution of Venezuela as we have known it. This is unparalleled in our republican history and one would have to inquire whether there are examples in other countries that could come close.

The contract signed by Guaidó establishes a reorganization of the state and a rewriting of our legal system. For example, one of the clauses establishes the installation of a Venezuelan Strategic Command (VSC), to which Silvercorp would respond. That alleged Command, who would have an undefined but surely Silvercorp commander, would authorize illegal military operations against “hostile forces”, operational maneuvers to contain riots and demonstrations, and how arrests of people identified with Chavismo would be made.

Logically, the text assumes that once the Venezuelan constitutional government was overthrown, protests and riots would come demanding the coup. To whitewash the illegal and murderous persecution against the Chavista backlash movement in the streets, Silvercorp designates any expression against the fake government of Guaidó as “hostile forces”.

In that unit they include Hezbollah, the Colombian guerrilla group ELN, the “illegitimate Venezuelan forces”, collectives and the FANB itself. This clause fits perfectly with the narrative of the “presence of Hezbollah in Venezuela”, spread by the hawks and especially by Mike Pompeo and the head of the Southern Command, so it is evident that Silvercorp could associate with US troops, with the Air Force and Southern Command (deployed by the Pacific with several destroyers and one specifically lent by the Fourth Fleet) to pursue alleged “terrorist factors”.

The diplomatic and illegal recognition of Juan Guaidó as “president in charge” would suffice to “legalize” the operations of the US Navy, the Air Force and the landing of special forces on our territory to collaborate with the elimination of alleged Hezbollah targets, the ELN, and other hostile forces. It would even enable the political conditions for the permanent installation of US military bases and the conclusion of illegal treaties that allow the activities of US agencies such as the CIA, the FBI or the DEA, just as it happened in Colombia with “Plan Colombia” and in Mexico with the “Mérida Initiative”.

In general terms, the contract opened the door to a conventional US intervention, unilateral and on the fringes of the United Nations Security Council, to control power in the face of a generalized military and civil uprising after the coup d'état, since Chavismo would still retain military, police and popular structures to confront the invaders.

4. The contract also dissolves Venezuelan legislation in legal terms and de facto suspends all institutions charged with ensuring the protection of the elementary rights of the population.

Silvercorp establishes that through the irregular OSC unit, and by unilateral order of the alleged VSC, arrests of people, search of spaces and houses, captures and other measures of repression may be carried out against “hostile forces” or that are presumed to be collaborating with the “allied forces of the old regime”. In this sense, it establishes what the post-coup “crimes” will be: being a Chavista, an official, a police officer or a military man who does not surrender to the Silvercorp thugs “sent” by Guaidó, its “Commander in Chief”, according to the contract.

These arrests would be carried out illegally when there are “reasonable suspicions”, and would not be subject to any institutional mandate, therefore, those arrested and persecuted would have institutions such as the Prosecutor's Office or the judicial system to defend themselves. Goudreau's army of thugs would become both a prosecution, a court, and an executioner.

To massify these state terrorism techniques, the contract grants an alleged legality to the murder of innocent civilians after falsely accusing them of belonging to the “hostile forces” described in the document. Accusing a head of CLAP, or a group of community leaders from the neighborhoods of Caracas of being “collaborators of the ELN or Hezbollah”, of “hindering a mission”, or “being associated with terrorists or drug trafficking”, would be enough to kill someone.

In this sense, the Silvercorp contract is a tool to carry out a genocide, as identified by the International Criminal Court (ICC). It is genocide:

“Any of the acts mentioned below, perpetrated with the intention of totally or partially destroying a national, ethnic, racial or religious group such as: a) Massacre of members of the group; b) Serious injury to the physical or mental integrity of the members of the group; c) Intentional submission of the group to conditions of existence that must lead to its physical destruction, total or partial”.

5. Silvercorp also offered its services to install an Assets Unit with which to pursue and capture the country's assets in the hands of the state. According to the contract, Guaidó should pay a rate of 14% in relation to the real value of the “recovered” goods.

However, the financial and legalistic jargon that they try to give to the wording of this clause fails to cover up that they would be authorizing a mega-operation of trafficking in cultural property, typical of mercenary groups, and condemned by United Nations resolutions.

Likewise, as stated in the contract, Silvercorp would assume the reins of the Venezuelan state by being empowered to carry out police activities, shaping legislation to outlaw Chavismo and authorizing military maneuvers against the civilian population and government structures falsely accused of “collaborating” with “Hostile forces”. The use of antipersonnel mines and large-scale armed operations is enabled directly against public institutions, FANB structures and headquarters of the Bolivarian Government where the “crimes” previously defined by Goudreau are committed.

Although the operation is based on an underestimation of Chavismo's resistance capacity, it is important to note that the contract itself establishes in its calculations the form of government that Venezuela would have after the elimination of Maduro. It is a declaration of intent.

The “state model” projected by the contract is dangerously similar to the “Commonwealth” with which the United States justified its military and political occupation of the Philippines after the war for its colonial rule with the Spanish Empire. The similarity with the Platt Amendment applied to Cuba at the beginning of the 20th century and the current colonial status of Puerto Rico is also scandalous.

They seek to build a military regime of occupation with annexationist features.

The ideas that have shaped the contract establish that Venezuela would lose its status as a sovereign Republic, to become a military regime, with parliamentary disguise (where the Guaidó puppet would come into play), occupied and directed by the United States.

This pattern of thinking is related to the US occupation (misnamed stabilization) in Iraq.

Let us recall that after the military intervention, Washington appointed Paul Bremer (hawk linked to dikk Cheney and Henry Kissinger) as its administrator for Iraq, transferring powers that were within the competence of the Hussein government.

Behind former President George W. Bush is dikk Cheney, then the American Vice President and one of the masterminds behind the Iraq war. Photo: Mark Wilson

As president of the Coalition Provisional Authority (APC), Bremer would be charged with “rebuilding the country” by authorizing oil contracts with US companies, facilitating military incursions and creating a new framework for persecuting Ba'athism. The United States ruled the country by militarizing and expanding the lofty British colonial model.

The neocolonial management of Bremer updated, according to the hawks' geopolitical prism, the model of governance through an occupying army that would lead the destinies of the country and control of the institutions for the benefit of private corporations.

For this reason, Silvercorp's contract establishes the military route of neoliberalism, illegally transferring the country's security and defense powers to Goudreau's mercenary firm.

With these tools, the country would be pushed into a phase of fragmentation, institutional dissolution and “Somalization”, where large corporations could take control — by hiring mercenaries — of oil wells, gas fields and gold mines before the annulment of the rule of law and the destruction of the country's monopoly over its strategic resources.

The current coordinates of the geopolitical conflict also weave the clauses of the contract: the voracity of a capitalism in crisis, in times of pandemic and disputes with the nation-state for the control of higher rates of profit and exploitation.

In the Venezuelan chapter of this rising Third World War, the document exposes the geopolitical drive to reduce state obstacles to the benefit of the flow of liquid capital, flexible and without border and institutional control.

And Washington selected the military route to precipitate this operation of constitutional and political resetting of the Homeland.

Genocide and military occupation: the five most important clauses of the contract between Guaidó and Silvercorp

 

[Yehuda]

Silvercorp: Foiled Venezuela Mercenary Group In Brazil During 2018 Election

NATHALIA URBAN , MAY 6, 2020

It has come to light that agents of the private security contractor behind a mercenary invasion group that was captured by Venezuelan forces on May 3-4, were based in Brazil during the 2018 election.

The paramilitary group behind the foiled operation, called Gedeon, was based around security contractor Silvercorp USA, which has been linked to U.S. President Donald Trump. The State Department denied prior knowledge, yet U.S.- backed Juan Guiadó, the self-declared interim President of Venezuela, and figurehead of several failed coup attempts was revealed to have had a contract with the mercenaries, which include two former Green Berets. The $212 million dollar contract between Guiadó, opposition strategist J. J. Rendon, “US advisors” and Silvercorp included “strategic planning,” “equipment procuring” and “project execution advisement”.



Silvercorp USA also claimed that they have forces in Venezuela already, training for a terror campaign, which included a threat to the life of President Maduro, whom the U.S. Government had recently placed a $15m dollar reward for information leading to his arrest.



The capture of American mercenaries in Venezuela has caused uproar throughout Latin America. Especially after the statements made by Jordan Goudreau, director of Silvercorp USA, about the operation that was intended to foment a coup in the Bolivarian country. In a televised confession, captured mercenary Luke Denman said that Goudreau was under the direct command of President Donald Trump.

Silvercorp USA’s activities in the region were not limited to Venezuela, and we are able to exclusively reveal that the same organisation behind the failed invasion of Venezuela in was also previously active in Brazil.

Examination of the social media accounts of Silvercorp USA and its personnel revealed that the company was present during the election, at which the U.S.-backed far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro came to power, in already controversial circumstances.

Private security contractor Silvercorp USA was present in Brazil during the 2018 election

2018’s elections were extremely turbulent, with candidate Lula da Silva’s political imprisonment, carried out in collusion with the United States via the Operation Lava Jato task force, which prevented him from running. This resulted in a last minute “Plan B” candidacy of former São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad. The election was also marked by the stabbing of Jair Bolsonaro on a campaign rally in the city of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais.

The election was considered the most tumultuous since democracy was restored in 1989, with the vote held within an unprecedented climate of hatred. Research conducted by Agência Publica showed that Bolsonaro’s supporters carried out at least 50 violent attacks across the country, including multiple murders.

Bolsonaro himself, who at the time was still hospitalized from the knife attack, said during an interview he gave to journalist José Luiz Datena in September 2018, that he would only accept the election result if he won.

This was seen by many as an affront to the electoral authorities and worse, as an explicit threat of a coup, something Bolsonaro had publicly threatened for decades. Since the return to direct elections, a candidate with a chance of victory has never made such an explicit and pre-emptive threat that they will not recognize the results.

Bolsonaro, a retired army captain and whose deputy is a general, was asked if the military would react in the event of an electoral victory for PT Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro replied: “About military institutions accepting the result, I cannot speak for military commanders. I, from what I see on the streets, I cannot accept any election result other than my victory. This is a closed point of view.’. When asked if his speech could not be interpreted as anti-democratic, Bolsonaro countered, saying he does not accept an electronic voting system. At another point in the interview, Bolsonaro also said that, in the event of an eventual Haddad government, the Armed Forces could act “on the first fault” that he or his party the PT committed.

The recently defunct Twitter account of Silvercorp USA posted automatically from its Instagram on October 18 ,2018 – 11 days after the first round of elections, and 10 days before the runoff – that they were leaving Brazil, after an unspecified amount of time. The original Instagram post and photo was deleted first.

Job opportunities on the Silvercorp USA website

The purpose of Silvercorp USA’s 2018 presence in Brazil is unclear. Job opportunities advertised on its website include the categories, “Psycological (sic) Operations Agent”, “Strikeforce Agent”, and “Tactics Trainer”.

Silvercorp USA’s social media posts focus on school shooting safety training, a more palatable area of their services, using hashtags such as “#activeshooter# and “#school”. Such training, especially in the context of education, would need to be authorised by the either relevant Federal Ministry, State or Municipal Government secretariats. These school safety training courses in Colombia appear to have been operating concurrently with mercenary-related activity, and also coinciding with Presidential election campaigns earlier in 2018. At time of publication, no evidence of Brazilian in-school training programmes conducted by Silvercorp USA could be found.

The presence of foreign mercenaries in Latin America is itself nothing new, Silvercorp USA itself has readily publicized that it performed services in Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, and Mexico, but in the past days both posts and accounts linked to the company and its personnel have been deleted, including that of the its director, and reported leader of the mercenary group, Jordan Goudreau.

Silvercorp: Foiled Venezuela Mercenary Group In Brazil During 2018 Election

 

[loyola llothta]

La guerra de la CIA contra Cuba I Capitulo 1

YouTube


Florentino Aspillaga’s Revelation About Cuba Shocked the CIA

 

[loyola llothta]

 

[Yehuda]

 

[Yehuda]

How the United States killed Brazil’s Democracy. Again.

Brasil Wire , April 14, 2020

Buried under a global pandemic is the most important Brazil story for decades. Unless the role of the United States in Brazil’s democratic collapse is acknowledged and understood, no useful sense can be made of its present, or its future, and no honest appraisal can be made of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.

Brazil’s recent history is one of national sabotage, of international collusion, and of a fifth column, fighting an unconventional war, behind an institutional smokescreen. It is a story of an independent, sovereign country, transformed almost silently into a satellite of the United States.

The result of leaked conversations from “anti-corruption purge” Operation Lava Jato or Car Wash, published by the Intercept, has been to expose its centrality to each phase of the slow coup which ended Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, and brought to a close twenty years of unprecedented progress and stability in Brazil.

Left in Lava Jato’s wake are a chaotic, extreme-right kakistocracy under Jair Bolsonaro, and Brazil’s international reputation in tatters.

Rousseff recently remarked that just a decade ago, a period when her country’s GDP overtook the United Kingdom’s, “…Brazil manufactured aircraft, ships and oil platforms. Today it cannot manufacture disposable masks”.

On March 12 2020, nine months after the original leaks, the Intercept finally published further conversations revealing how United States Department of Justice was illegally involved in Operation Lava Jato from the very beginning, operating in secret – at the behest of the U.S. agents – and deliberately bypassing the Brazilian Government. The importance of this cannot be overstated.

Context: After his retirement, two time head of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and Ambassador to Brazil from 2009-2013, Tom Shannon Jr, remarked that the Lula and Dilma Governments had been an obstacle to United States plans for Latin America. Lula’s 2005 rejection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), Brazil’s leadership on projects for regional integration, and its protagonism within the BRICS grouping, had bothered the Bush and then Obama administrations under which Shannon served.

Operation Lava Jato, and not the bogeyman of corruption it was supposed to eradicate, bears principal responsibility for Brazil’s current plight. The damage done will take a generation or more to heal. Thus the U.S. Government’s documented role in it, and the resulting capitulation of the world’s sixth most populous nation, should be the most important Latin American story of our times. Yet there has been little honest mainstream repercussion.

Lawfare, the US-led “War on Corruption” in Latin America, and specifically DoJ involvement in Lava Jato, are topics that Brazilian independent media and ourselves have reported extensively for years. For the most part this was based on analysis of information in the public domain, with over 100 articles published on the subject. We were not clairvoyant, we simply knew where to look, and we were not afraid of any potential professional repercussions from investigating this subject.

These stories were met by a wall of silence from international corporate media, through to high profile progressive publications.

Six years since its initiation, Operation Lava Jato is now disgraced, itself exposed for the very corruption it was pursuing. The full ramifications of the latest expose, however, have yet to be acknowledged, especially by those whose reputations would suffer most, were they ever to be.

The fog of war

There is six years worth of lingering fog to negotiate when attempting to appraise Lava Jato, especially in the English language. Its promotion internationally, by organisations such as Council of the Americas, Atlantic Council, American Enterprise Institute, Wilson Center, and Transparency International, was unusual, as was the deification of Sérgio Moro – a mediocre regional judge who was elevated to international hero status by the likes of Time Magazine. Lava Jato was depicted as an essential stage in Brazil’s development, which would propel it to an efficient, corruption-free future.

This apparent public relations campaign for Lava Jato has left behind a persistent layer of what professor Kathy Swart calls “fossilised propaganda” on the record of Brazil’s modern history. With no acknowledgement or analysis of more recent revelations from papers of record such as the New York Times and Guardian, it is unclear how this distortion can ever be corrected. Silent complicity was as strong a feature of regime change narrative building as overt untruth. What little mainstream pushback there was only came after it was already too late. Even Petra Costa’s Academy Award nominated documentary “Edge of Democracy”, despite its international acclaim, did not succeed in making corporate journalists and commentariat acknowledge mistakes they had made during the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff and politically motivated prosecution of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Costa herself said that if she had known of what would be revealed about Operation Lava Jato, she would’ve delayed release of the film to include it.

Contrary to what some of its most enthusiastic proponents have since tried to argue, Lava Jato did not “lose its way” or “overreach”. It was from its inception both a political, and a geopolitical weapon, and it achieved what it was created to do, working hand in hand with U.S. Government and corporate interests, Brazil’s military and its elites.

Just as revelations of extensive U.S. spying on Dilma Rousseff’s Government were coming to light, during the June 2013 protests, a social media campaign emerged to block the approval of a constitutional amendment called PEC37, which was supported by the Brazilian Order of Attorneys, but depicted as protection for the corrupt. The amendment would have prevented public prosecutors from being able to lead their own investigations, theoretically making future abuses by Lava Jato impossible. Just weeks later, under pressure from the streets and the media to prove her Government’s commitment to anti-corruption, Rousseff would sign off on a law allowing plea bargain testimony as evidence, effectively giving birth to Lava Jato in March 2014. Following an attempt to swing the 2014 election with a story leaked to Veja magazine on the eve of the vote, we then watched the economic sabotage of 2015, as Sérgio Moro mandated the shutdown of Brazil’s civil engineering sector. This segued into Lava Jato’s centrality to the campaign for Dilma’s impeachment, ironically given additional justification through economic damage that the anti-corruption operation itself had caused. From there we see Lava Jato acting behind the scenes to block the appointment of Lula as Rousseff’s Chief of Staff, which could have theoretically averted her impeachment. By late 2016, with Rousseff gone, Lava Jato’s attention turned to Lula’s arrest and imprisonment – now proven to have been designed to prevent his return to the Presidency at the 2018 Election, where he led polls by a commanding margin.

Lava Jato and its protagonists were central to this sequence of events, and the U.S. Department of Justice was pulling strings from within.

The sabotage of Lula’s candidacy required intervention by head of the Armed Forces, General Villas Boas, with a veiled, televised threat, which swung the Supreme Court away from granting Lula habeas corpus by a single vote. As a result, former Military Captain Jair Bolsonaro was elected president, and Lava Jato Judge Sérgio Moro, who put him there, was appointed his Justice and Security Minister.

Supreme Court Minister “Toffoli described a dark scenario,” write journalists Felipe Recondo and Luiz Weber in their book ‘The Eleven’ about what was going on behind the scenes at the 2018 election. Toffoli recalled that Villas Bôas, had “300,000 armed men who mostly supported Jair Bolsonaro’s candidacy.”

Eduardo Costa Pinto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), says that the Army paved the way for Bolsonaro’s victory, “by blocking the Supreme Court. And that the conductor of the coup was Villas Bôas.” Costa Pinto notes that by bringing in Azevedo e Silva as Minister of Defense, Bolsonaro was rewarding those involved. “Thank you, Commander Villas Bôas. What we have talked about will die between us. You are responsible for me being here.” the newly elected President said. At a ceremony to mark his retirement, Villas Bôas, by then seriously ill and confined to a wheelchair, told Bolsonaro: “You bring the necessary renewal and release of the ideological bonds which hijacked free thinking.”

 

[Yehuda]

Project Bridges

Sérgio Moro infamously appears in a leaked U.S. State Department cable dated 30th October 2009, in which there are evident seeds of what would become Operation Lava Jato some years later. When it was first discovered, during the onset of Lava Jato’s positive publicity, some foreign commentators attempted to dismiss the cable’s relevance. Over time, as more information about DoJ involvement in Lava Jato came to light, the clearer its significance became.

It describes an October 2009 regional conference in Rio de Janeiro entitled “Illicit Financial Crimes” which “successfully brought together representatives from Brazil’s federal and state law enforcement community and countries from throughout Latin America.”. It reveals institutional and interpersonal meddling by the US Government in Brazil’s legal system.

The cable, signed by the Bureau of Western Hemisphere affairs’ Lisa Kubiske, reads: “PROJETO PONTES: BUILDING BRIDGES TO BRAZILIAN LAW ENFORCEMENT: Post recently concluded a successful conference on Illicit Finance Oct 4-9 (reftel), held in the regional capital of Rio de Janeiro and funded by State’s Coordinator for Counter Terrorism (S/CT).”

“This is the first regional conference conducted under post’s Projeto PONTES (Translation: Bridges Project) umbrella, a new training concept post introduced in February 2009 to consolidate bi-lateral law enforcement training. Training conducted under Projeto PONTES is unique in several ways: presentations focus on both Brazilian and U.S. best practices; the participants include, in the same venue, judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement; the topics are agreed upon by both Brazilian and U.S. counterparts; and the presentations are geared towards practical skills, not theory.”. Kubiske’s emphasis on the convergence of “judges, prosecutors and law enforcement” is particularly relevant to Lava Jato, and this inherent conflict of interest was a dominant feature of its fall from grace.

Kubiske goes on to explain that the U.S. Embassy’s Resident Legal Advisor (RLA) and FBI Legal Attaché (LEGAT) “closely followed the Projeto PONTES framework when developing the conference agenda and the list of participants. Federal judges and prosecutors from each of Brazil’s 26 states and federal district took part, and over 50 federal police agents (from throughout Brazil) participated.”. Such attention to detail regarding the conference participants suggests deep penetrative knowledge of Brazil’s judiciary.

Supreme Court Judge Gilson Dipp, whom Epoca magazine named among 2009’s 100 most influential people, “provided an overview of the legislative and political history of Brazil’s money laundering and illicit activity legislation.”

Then along comes Moro, an unremarkable regional judge from Curitiba, Paraná, yet whom already had a reputation preceding him as a national hero who would destroy the Workers Party: “Brazilian Federal Money Laundering Judge Sergio Moro then discussed the 15 most common issues he sees in money laundering cases in the Brazilian Courts. U.S. presenters discussed various aspects regarding the investigation and prosecution of illicit finance and money laundering cases, including formal and informal international cooperation, asset forfeiture, methods of proof, pyramid schemes, plea bargaining, use of direct examination as a tool, and suggestions on how to deal with Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) suspected of being used for illicit financing.”

Kubiske describes mock courtroom interrogations, and “suggestions from the Brazilians on how to work better with the U.S.”.

Under the heading ‘RESULTS: PRACTICAL TECHNIQUES USEFUL’, Kubiske explains the adoption of U.S. DoJ standards in Brazilian cases: “The participants praised the hands on training, and requested additional training on the collection of evidence, interrogation and interviewing, court room skills, and the task force model.”

“The participants also lauded the quality of the presentations and singled out the mock direct examination of a witness as a high point in the conference. They emphasized the importance of discussing practical investigative and trial techniques, and the demonstration of concrete examples of cooperation between law enforcement and prosecutors.”, “The Brazilians explained that Brazil’s democracy is barely 20 years old; therefore, Brazilian federal judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement are new to the democratic process and have not been trained in the basics of long term investigations, proactive task forces, and the successful use of courtroom advocacy.”

Kubiske then reveals U.S. Government consultants actually guiding changes to Brazil’s legal system, of the type that would be enacted four years later, namely the acceptance of “mafia style” plea bargain testimony, which enabled Operation Lava Jato: “Finally, many commented that they wanted to learn more about the proactive task force model, develop better cooperation between prosecutors and law enforcement, and gain direct experience in working on long term complex financial cases. Brazilian participants sought out the RLA and the LEGAT throughout the conference to discuss how to improve Brazil’s legal system, especially in the area of complex financial investigations and prosecutions.”, “For example, the RLA successfully advocated for recent changes to the Brazilian criminal procedure code, which requires direct examination of witnesses by the prosecution and the defense, rather than by the judge, and uses live testimony instead of written affidavits. Many Brazilians, however, confessed that they do not know how to use these new tools but are eager to learn.”

In a section headed ‘FUTURE TRAINING: ILLICIT FINANCE TASK FORCE’, Kubiske explains that “Specialized prosecutors and investigators bring their money laundering cases to these (Federal Money Laundering) courts, which have been more effective than most and have handled some of Brazil’s most significant cases involving corruption and high level individuals. Consequently, there is a continual need to provide hands-on training to Brazilian federal and state judges, prosecutors, and law enforcement regarding the illicit financing of criminal conduct.”

Kubiske elaborates on this mass US training of Brazilian legal personnel: “Ideally, the training should be longer-term and coincide with the formation of training task forces. Two large urban centers with proven judicial support for illicit financing cases, in particular Sao Paulo, Campo Grande, or Curitiba, should be selected as the location for this type of training. Then task forces can be formed, and an actual investigation used as the basis for training that would sequentially progress from investigation through the courtroom presentation and conclusion of the case. This would give the Brazilians actual experience in working on a long term proactive illicit financing task force, and allow access to U.S. experts for on-going guidance and support. Post can provide more detailed steps and a cost analysis septel.”

Kubiske’s singling out of “São Paulo, Campo Grande or Curitiba” is of particular note, as these three traditionally conservative cities were the most powerful bases of opposition to the Workers Party (PT).

In early 2019, with Bolsonaro now in power, the US Department of Justice, in an apparent quid pro quo, attempted to award a $682 million kickback to its Brazilian Lava Jato task force partners, for the establishment of a privately managed fund that they would administer to “fight corruption”.

The very word “corruption” has now been stripped of all meaning in Brazil, reduced to a ghastly echo of fascist rhetoric from the 1930s.

Our man in Langley

In addition to the known relationship with the Department of Justice, there were long held, but unsubstantiated suspicions that Moro was “CIA” – a generalised term for US agent. Following his ascension to Justice and Security Minister, he accompanied new President Jair Bolsonaro to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “No Brazilian president had ever paid a visit to the CIA, This is an explicitly submissive position. Nothing compares to this.” said former Foreign and Defence Minister Celso Amorim, interpreting the visit as tacit surrender of Brazilian sovereignty.

As Professor Manuel Domingos Neto observes: “Obviously, there was strategic planning. We are experiencing a new type of dispute, which some call hybrid war, and in which the judicial apparatus has a very relevant function. And he was the big piece. The military love Sérgio Moro because he’s the face of moralism. It doesn’t matter if he destroyed Brazilian engineering, if he was a judge who always acted against the law, a guy who will be accountable to history, who has a heavy debt. I don’t think his fate will be pretty, but he is a figure deified by the military. In the speech with which General Villas Boas handed over command of the Army [in January 2019], he extolled Moro. With all his manipulation of the law, with all its arbitrariness, spurious games, with all his collaboration with the Pentagon and the CIA, he continues to be considered a great man, and is still highly rated among politicians. He is even better off than the president himself. Sergio Moro is a key player, even for an eventual closed regime. His image could serve a future repressive regime very well.”

Lava Jato and Moro’s relationship with the military has been publicly visible, and often in cartoonish fashion. As each key stage of the operation was completed, he received military honours in appreciation of his work. In August 2016, just as Dilma Rousseff faced her inevitable impeachment, he received the Peacemaker Medal, which is reserved for “Brazilian or foreign military or civilian personnel who had provided services to the Army”. A year later, as Lula faced imminent prosecution, Moro was given the Order of Military Merit, the Army’s highest award, with to date only around one hundred recipients. Leading the selection committee was General Sérgio Etchegoyen, post-coup head of institutional security, who just weeks prior to Lula’s conviction held a meeting in Brasilia with the local CIA chief, Duane Norman. Etchegoyen was also the architect of the early 2018 Military intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro which was deemed, rather ominously, as a “laboratory” for Brazil.

There is another U.S. Military angle. Tom Shannon’s successor as US Ambassador to Brazil was Liliana Ayalde, who arrived in mid 2013 pledging to improve damaged relations between the two countries in the way of the revelations of NSA spying on the Dilma Rousseff Government. She left the post in January 2017, with Rousseff removed in a soft coup, yet with her own State Department insisting that Brazil’s democratic institutions were functioning correctly. Previously with USAID in Colombia and Bolivia, she was Ambassador to Paraguay until exposed in leaked State Department cables as privy to a coup plot against President Fernando Lugo. Ayalde left her Brazil post to join U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) as Civilian Deputy to the Commander and Foreign Policy Advisor.

Beyond Southcom, Military interaction between the United States, Brazil and Latin America as a whole is carried out through the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), which was formerly the notorious School of the Americas. The change of name was considered a distancing from human rights abuses associated with SOA.

“The involvement of the U.S. in facilitating the development of an organized lawfare campaign against the Rousseff, Lula, and the PT appears most tantalizingly, albeit inconclusively, in training programs held for Brazilian law enforcement and judicial officials.” writes historian Bryan Pitts, “Universities like the University of Georgia (a two-hour drive from Fort Benning, where the former School of the Americas still trains Latin American officers in counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism) developed training programs for Latin American judges and lawyers (International Trainings).”

Professor Lesley Gill describes how WHINSEC “forms part of a hydra-headed repressive apparatus—encompassing armies, police forces, paramilitaries, arms manufacturers and think tanks – that consumes ever-more public resources as cold war pretexts give way to neoliberal policies generating widespread discontent.”, “More than just military instruction, the School imparts a particular political orientation and acculturates trainees into a specific world of values that it defines as “American.” Associated privileges ensure a steady stream of recruits seeking social mobility and political power, while the U.S. emphasis on regional militarization guarantees constant demand. These privileges largely secure the collusion of officers with the U.S. imperial project. The SOA also instills loyalty by flaunting the technological sophistication and expertise of the U.S. military as evidence of innate U.S. superiority. Many trainees fortify their positions vis-à-vis local competitors for power through access to this technology and esoteric information, even though this makes them more dependent upon the United States.”

In its educational programmes for Latin American militaries that for decades have been glorified police forces, not only is alignment with the United States part of the curriculum, but an emphasis on the superiority and inevitability of free market economics.

 

[Yehuda]

Gill writes: “The School further tantalizes students with the “American way of life”—the commodity-filled, suburban lifestyle of the white middle class. Officers in the SOA’s flagship Command and General Staff Officers Course enjoy a comfortable, consumer-oriented existence. They also learn English, educate their children in U.S. schools, earn part of their salaries in crisis-proof U.S. dollars and acquire commodities for personal consumption or sale as contraband. Little wonder many graduates end up viewing themselves as separate from, and superior to, civilians. In some countries, separate neighborhoods and social clubs for officers and their families reinforce this detachment.”

Héctor Luís Saint-Pierre, executive coordinator of the Institute of Public Policy and International Relations at the State University of São Paulo (Unesp) explains the paradox of a Brazilian military positioned to defend US interests: “Anyone who imagined that the military’s commitment to the Bolsonaro government, national values and the defense of sovereignty would prevail can see the abandonment of these values and the surrender of sovereignty for purely ideological and even mystical reasons. Thus, one might paradoxically conclude that we have the Armed Forces to defend US interests, including the deregulation of the national economy and the appropriation of Brazilian wealth. The regional leadership granted and recognized by the South American countries to Brazil during Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s rule was deliberately abandoned and, in its place, the United States seems to propose Brazil be its prosecutor in the region, with the blood of the Brazilian soldier as a lubricant for its interests.”

We now see signs that the Generals have tired of Bolsonaro, or have even effectively removed him from the chain of command for important decisions, leaving behind only democratic packaging for de-facto Military rule. What we do not yet know is if Bolsonaro’s rearguards in the United States, in Washington, Langley, and New York, have also evaporated.

680 Park Avenue

This story overlaps with two of our other areas of focus, namely international media failure on Brazil, and the role of Council of the Americas in Brazilian politics.

Not only has Lava Jato’s centrality to regime change in Brazil been proven, so has the fact that its principal beneficiaries are US corporations. The latest leaks reveal not just what was in the open (but was being ignored) about US Department of Justice collaboration in Lava Jato, but beyond that how the Lava Jato taskforce itself was acting in the interest of US Corporations, many of whom represented by Council of the Americas, and some which openly backed Bolsonaro at the 2018 election.

Council of the Americas, also known as AS/COA (in association with sister organisation the Americas Society), is an organisation created in the early 1960s by a cartel of US business and government figures, with the express objective of controlling political outcomes in Latin America to favour its members interests. It was involved in Brazil’s 1962 elections, 1964 Military takeover and the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende.

In its modern guise, Council of the Americas facilitates US business’s lobbying access to political power in the south, and grooms future Latin American leaders to favour those US business interests. In effect it enables the capture and control of Latin American political decision making processes by its members: giants such as Cargill, Chevron, Boeing, and Bayer-Monsanto.

As well as promoting the US “War on Corruption” in Latin America through the media, including its own magazine Americas Quarterly, Council of the Americas even has its own “anti-corruption workgroup.” The very methods of lawfare used in Brazil are being replicated elsewhere in Latin America now, such as in Ecuador, again with US Department of Justice collaboration, and again with Council of the Americas generating international media cover.

Brazil’s democratic collapse has fortuitous for Council of the Americas’ corporate members, with an unprecedented windfall of accumulation and acquisitions, such as Boeing’s takeover of Brazilian rival Embraer. Companies key to Brazil’s foreign policy and technological sovereignty that had become competitors, such as Embraer, Petrobras, and Odebrecht, have been neutralised or swallowed altogether.

It is this factor, the relationship of Lava Jato with U.S. corporate power, that makes the latest intercept leaks so important.

The conversations reveal that the Curitiba-based task force hosted a delegation of U.S. officials in secret, breaking Brazilian law, in order to keep their activities hidden from the Government of Dilma Rousseff. The Intercept wrote:

“Operation Car Wash prosecutors’ relationship with their American counterparts began in March 2014, during the early days of the investigation, and culminated in a series of plea deals in 2018. The task force’s strategy for dealing with the Americans is well-illustrated in their conversations about an early set of meetings presided over by Dallagnol, the chief prosecutor. In February 2015, Dallagnol and two colleagues flew to Washington, D.C., for informal meetings with officials from the U.S. Department of Justice, Securities and Exchange Commission, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Homeland Security.”

Then, on October 5, 2015, with the Brazilian Justice Ministry in the dark, “at least 17 officials from the Justice Department, the FBI, and possibly Immigration and Customs Enforcement landed in Curitiba, the capital of the southern state of Paraná, for a four-day conference at the Operation Car Wash headquarters.”

Crucially, Deltan Dallagnol instructed his assistant to keep the meetings secret, explaining that the “Americans don’t want us to divulge things”.

Midway through, the Intercept finally pulls the trigger and makes the connection many have done ever since Lava Jato began:

“In his eight years in office, Lula had defiantly worked to build regional alliances and weaken U.S. influence in the hemisphere. Also under investigation were Petrobras, the crown jewel of Brazil’s network of state-controlled businesses, and Odebrecht, Brazil’s largest construction firm which, under Lula, ramped up operations across South America and beyond. Both companies were seen as key tools in Brazil’s foreign policy aims — and as a threat to the U.S. corporations that they supplanted. In 2013, the Rousseff government famously canceled a state visit with then-President Barack Obama, after documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency had been spying on Petrobras and the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy. The U.S. government, in other words, might have an interest in bringing down certain Brazilian corporations that went beyond pure motives to stamp out corruption.”

None of this should surprise readers of Brasil Wire, but there are still many unanswered questions: How did Council of the Americas and others came to be promoting Lava Jato and its figurehead Sergio Moro so breathlessly? How were foreign correspondents in Brazil so easily taken in? How were the worlds most influential newspapers, news networks and media platforms convinced to run propaganda on their behalf? It represents international media failure on a scale rivalling anything in the Middle East.

Brasil Wire was founded in August 2014 because of an inability and unwillingness of international media to cover such stories. We have been voicing concerns about Operation Lava Jato and its US ties since 2015, and publishing evidence directly related to the latest Intercept leaks since 2017.

There was once an opportunity for the media to avert Brazil’s catastrophe. Instead, they did the opposite, and ran unquestioningly with the narratives of far-right regime change for half a decade. As journalists we must ask how and why that happened.

We lament that this story was not taken up by mainstream outlets when we and others began publishing this evidence and analysis. If this had happened, and if the Brazilian population knew that their country was threatened by the US Trojan Horse of anti-corruption, perhaps, just perhaps, the extreme-right, would-be dictator Jair Bolsonaro would not be President today. Perhaps, just perhaps, a group of Generals would not be at the heart of Brazil’s Government.

This status quo came to be through invisible battles, fought on multiple fronts, and bound by the same common interests which underpin all imperial wars.

How the United States killed Brazil’s Democracy. Again.

 

[Yehuda]

Cimarrona Guard: between the pandemic and endless violence

Cauca, May 5, 2020 — 8:59 PM
By: David Leonardo Carranza Muñoz — dcarranza@elespectador.com

In 106 of the 113 municipalities where the Afro-Colombian population is over 20%, there are no intensive care units. The Guard checks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Armando Caracas is the national coordinator of the Cimarrona Guard. / Photo: Darwin Torres

The black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal or Palenquero population in Colombia is 4,671,160 people, or 9,34% of the country's population, according to the National Administrative Department of Statistics. Despite being a large group, it has historically been left behind by the State and violated by the armed actors that abound in its territory; phenomena that, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, are accentuated.

According to Juan David Delgado, researcher of ethnoracial inequity in Colombia, of the 113 municipalities with more than 20% Afro-Colombian population, 106 do not have intensive care units. In addition, investment in health in these territories is less than the national average.

For this reason, in areas such as northern Cauca, the community councils decided to exercise contingency actions in the face of the pandemic. The organization in charge of self-protection is the Cimarrona Guard, made up of 634 men and women. For now, they are present in 12 municipalities: 11 in Cauca and one in Valle del Cauca. In seven of them there are cases of COVID-19.

In addition to the coronavirus, these communities face the relentless threat of criminal groups that even under this circumstance do not give up on killings and intimidation. Since March 6, the day the first COVID-19 case was registered in the country, 17 leaders have been killed, according to the Peace and Reconciliation Foundation. In Cauca, one of the departments where 20% of the population recognizes itself as belonging to black communities, the escalation of violence during the pandemic caused the death of nine leaders as of April 25.

In this department there is a presence of the ELN, the Clan del Golfo, the EPL and the Sinaloa cartel, among others. The territories of these communities are disputed because there is a strong interest in the control of illicit crops and drug trafficking, illegal mining, and the possession of land for planting sugar cane. Armando Caracas, national coordinator of the Cimarrona Guard, told El Espectador about the actions they are implementing to prevent an outbreak of the virus in the communities of both departments.

What measures did the Cimarrona Guard take to deal with the pandemic?

In the case of the community councils of the black and indigenous territories, which are more vulnerable due to the difficult access to health services, we implemented the territorial protection and self-protection scheme that we have. That is the responsibility of the Cimarrona Guard. When the first isolation decree is issued, we apply these entrance controls to the municipalities of southern Valle del Cauca and north and south of Cauca.

How do you control these checkpoints?

We set up a gate or use some other materials, like sand, to make the car slow down. At these checkpoints there is a group of colleagues who disinfect with a motorized sprayer all the vehicles that are going to enter the municipality. Also, all the people who arrive have their hands washed and their clothes disinfected. We check their temperature and blood pressure. Of course, they are people who are within the municipality and go out to another to do some activity. In regard to people who are not from the municipalities we have decided that they cannot enter because we do not know if they are taking care of themselves. Until this pandemic has passed, the entry of third parties to the territory is restricted.

In which municipalities do these operations take place?

We are in Buenos Aires, Suárez, Santander de Quilichao, Caloto, Guachené, Puerto Tejada, Villa Rica, Miranda, Padilla, in northern Cauca. In the south we are in Algeria and El Tambo, and the indigenous community supports us with its guard in Toribío, Cajibío and Timbío. In Valle del Cauca we are in Jamundí.

Do you receive any kind of aid from the government?

So far only one mayor has helped us. The one from Buenos Aires, Óscar Edwin López. We have not received the required support from the other municipalities, neither from the Cauca government nor from the national government. They say that some aid will come, but as of today nothing has arrived.

Does the guard have the necessary health security elements to carry out the protection tasks?

That's what we suffer the most from. There is where the famous tonga (a community collection) comes into play. We need any amount so that we can make masks that are sewn by the same comrades of the guard. Scraps of cloth are bought and they make them. In the case of soaps it is more complex because they got very expensive. We find the blue soap (for clothes) to be very good, it's melted and applied to people to wash their hands well. Hand sanitizer has been much more concerning. The Cauca sugar mill donated 250 gallons, but it was not enough. We have to look for it because alcohol gel is urgent.

Of the places where the guard is present, what are the points of greatest risk?

All of them because this is a passageway for many actors. In all these checkpoints there are interests of third parties, large interests, of transnational or multinational corporations, of drug trafficking groups, of dissents. This includes mining, illicit crops, the issue of land tenure, sugar cane crops. When we want territorial control, that interest generates pressure.

Cimarrona Guard: between the pandemic and endless violence

 

[loyola llothta]

 

[loyola llothta]

The blockade is lifted.

Trump has failed.

The 1st of 5 Iranian Petrochemical tankers is now within the neutral maritime boundary of Trinidad & Tobago (a leading member of CARICOM & a country that has opposed U.S. coup attempts in Venezuela).



The @UNCTnT, the Trinidadian (Trini) opposition party, is raising the same points as the US funded Ven opposition

The opportunists leading the UNC have actually asked the US empire to investigate carrying out possible sanctions on their own country.https://newsday.co.tt/2020/05/23/young-tt-will-not-facilitate-iranian-ships-with-oil-to-vzuela/ …

https://t.co/gcc9MrY06d

 

[loyola llothta]

BLOWBACK

The US Keeps Trying, and Failing, to Deport a Former CIA Operative Back to Haiti

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant was supposed to board an ICE deportation flight along with 100 other Haitian nationals in what is the third such flight the Trump administration has carried out to Haiti in the last several weeks.

by Raul Diego

May 11th, 2020

Emmanuel “Toto” Constant exercised his insurance clause as soon as he was apprehended in the Spring of 1995 in New York by the extant Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), now a part of the Department of Homeland Security. The infamous leader of Haiti’s Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH) had to flee his home country after his CIA-backed militia massacred supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the Raboteau massacre.

Today, Constant was supposed to board an ICE deportation flight along with 100 other Haitian nationals in what is the third such flight the Trump administration has carried out to Haiti in the last several weeks. The Haitian government has called for a moratorium on deportations in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic after three passengers on an earlier flight tested positive for the virus.

The fact that Emmanuel Constant, who is currently serving time in a New York State prison for a 2008 conviction of mortgage fraud and grand larceny, was scheduled to be on Monday’s flight caused unfavorable reactions in some quarters. The Miami Herald carried a quote from Michigan Democrat, Andy Levin, denouncing the deportation: “The idea that the U.S. would deport Toto Constant back to Haiti under these circumstances is terrifying”, asserted Levin adding that Constant’s status as a war criminal in Haiti coupled with that nation’s corrupt court system represented “a huge problem in itself.”



Toto cashes his insurance policy
What’s clear from the notorious death squad leader’s history with the U.S. and its own court system is that many influential people in several of our alphabet agencies do not want Constant on trial in any courtroom.

The first time Constant’s ties to U.S. intelligence became a problem was the result of a lawsuit brought by New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in the mid-nineties on behalf of a gang rape victim by Constant’s FRAPH forces. When CCR’s counsel subpoenaed documents relating to the FRAPH in possession of the CIA and DIA – both of which Constant had implicated after his first arrest – the intel agencies admitted to being in possession of a single document, but reserved their right to withhold it from the proceedings on the grounds that it was “privileged.”

People protest outside of the New York home of Emmanuel ‘Toto” Constant, Aug. 9, 1997. Emile Wamsteker | AP

Eventually, the Department of Defense would cop to having possession of 60,000 pages regarding the creation of FRAPH, which nevertheless remain hidden in their vaults. Constant’s early revelations, such as his direct contact with Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) handlers and claims of U.S. encouragement to form the anti-Aristide mercenary brigade, bought him an early reprieve from his first close call with deportation.



ICE melts in Fire
Constant is being held at the ICE federal detention facility in Buffalo, NY, where he has been awaiting deportation after being released early from a 37-year sentence related to his fraud convictions in 2008. Some, including the National Network for Human Rights (RNDDH) and 15 Democratic Senators have raised concerns over the ongoing deportation flights. Rosy Auguste, from RNDDH, underlined the danger faced by the “large number” ICE deportees “who have never faced a judge and have been held indefinitely while facing only minor charges” going back to a country undergoing a “crisis of impunity”.

Beyond the controversy surrounding ICE’s very existence and its methods, the situation on the ground in Haiti at present is deteriorating quickly as the country’s fragile economic reality meets the global coronavirus shutdowns and the sinister free-market incentives that keep scarce healthcare supplies from reaching Haiti. While COVID-19 has pushed their hospitals to capacity and thousands try their luck across the border in the Dominican Republic, Haitian Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe revealed during a radio interview last Tuesday that supplies are being held up by air cargo companies serving the highest bidders.



Jouthe also exposed U.S. duplicity when he disclosed that American officials had assured him detainees on the ICE deportation flights had all been tested prior to boarding. Had the Haitian government accepted the information at face value, Haiti would have a much more serious outbreak on its hands.

As Haiti demands that ICE deportation flights be halted, the attempted deportation of Constant at this particular moment raises many questions. DHS tried to deport him once before in 2008 when it tried to keep Constant out of the courtroom and requested the federal judge on his case sentence the Haitian fugitive to time served. But, the judge balked and ordered the son of a Duvalier commander to stand trial for mortgage fraud.



Opaque intentions

Toto Constant modeled the FRAPH on the “Tonton Macoutes” paramilitary units that terrorized Haiti during the Francois Duvalier dictatorship. He asserts that the idea came directly from a DIA attache, and Constant’s first handler, Col. Patrick Collins, to do “intelligence” work in Haiti against pro-Aristide groups.

Constant’s relationship to the U.S. intelligence community was known in Haiti from the very beginning and was convicted by Haitian courts in absentia after the U.S. refused to extradite him when Haiti issued a warrant for his arrest.

Given that elements within Haiti’s present-day government still have ties to the same interests that backed Constant’s FRAPH and have managed to release other FRAPH mercenaries convicted for their roles in the massacre, as well as the persistent and deleterious presence of U.S. deep state entities in the country, the real motive behind Constant’s deportation remains elusive.

Link:
The US Keeps Trying, and Failing, to Deport a Former CIA Operative Back to Haiti

 

[Yehuda]

Afro-Colombian Day is everybody's business

May 21, 2020

In Colombia, around 3 million people recognize themselves as black, Afro-descendant, Raizal and Palenquero, a reflection of the nation's multi-ethnicity and the country's need to tell the truth about black people.

May 21 marks Afro-Colombian Day, a date to recognize the cultural wealth, contributions, struggles and resistance of the black people.

The contribution of black people to nation-building started from the libertarian processes of the colonial era, cimarronaje (runaway slaves), the forming of rochelas (settlements founded by escaped slaves) and the economic opening, until the peace processes to end the recent armed conflict.

(Monument in memory of Benkos Biohó, cimarrón leader of Palenque de San Basilio, Bolívar)

To speak about the black people of Colombia leads to not only delving into the exclusion and inequality gaps that are manifested in the regions with the largest black population, but also forces one to understand differentially the impacts and damages suffered by these peoples in the context of the armed conflict.

According to the Victims Unit, more than a million black people are recognized as victims of the armed conflict. This means that nearly a third of all black people in Colombia have suffered the ravages of violence.

Women have suffered stigmatization and hypersexualization as an imprint of the colonial days that they bear imprinted on their memory and on their bodies. However, they are the first to lead peace and coexistence processes.

Many of the territories where most black people live lack supply in higher education, access to public services and decent housing. All this constitutes a poverty trap that throws many young people into armed groups.

In the task of clarifying the truth, black people have revealed the racial dimension in the armed conflict, of the violence experienced in their bodies, their cultural practices and their territory.

Listening to these voices, for more than a year, has allowed the Truth Commission to implement the methodology of the ethnic approach against racism, racial discrimination and related forms of intolerance, with the purpose of explaining the armed conflict in a broad and diverse way.

“The truth leads to respect for my U'wa brother, my white brother, my bear brother, Mother Earth's blood, my Brother River, my Mountain Sisters; it leads to balance. What one speaks and does is tied to truth”, explains Natán Sáenz Sum, an U'wa man and ethnic liaison officer of the Truth Commission. The law enacted dictates that this people must answer for their word (and not make promises that they will not keep) and for the actions for the balance of Mother Earth.

The men and women of the black, Afro-descendant, Raizal and Palenquero population persist in the search for truth and in the construction of new laws that allow them to forge a new way of living with guarantees that the violence will not reoccur and with the strengthening of their own forms of organization.

Afro-Colombian Day is everybody's business

 

[Yehuda]

The racist opposition in Venezuela wants to import Trump's model of racial extermination

The Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo condemns the systematic racial extermination that is being implemented in the United States against the African American population, an extermination that has been exacerbating since Donald Trump came to power.

The Ku Klux Klan, the 19th century racial extermination organization in the United States, has been reborn with its most iconic figures being Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and Trump, who lead interventionist policies in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.

The reorientation of police brutality is channeled under a great racial prejudice against African-Americans, Latinos, indigenous people, among others. This brutality has crossed the limits of institutional legality. They are licensed to kill under racial prejudice.

The recent events in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, are part of a chain of brutality and racial extermination that is becoming more acute every year. Let us recall the case of May 20 in Atlanta, Georgia, when a white man and his son shot and killed 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery. We cannot forget that the technique of respiratory asphyxiation has been put into practice by the police since 2014 when African-American Eric Garner was suffocated in New York City — “I can't breathe, I can't breathe” — until he was killed by the police. The officer was acquitted a few months later.

The racist police in the city of Minneapolis repeat the same action against African-American George Floyd, who shouted “please, I can't breathe, I can't breathe”, before the passive gaze of other white police officers. Floyd was murdered cowardly last Monday. The Minneapolis Police department immediately fired the four officers. Soon, outraged people from the south, north, and center of Minneapolis came out to protest and demand that the police define that they be detained, prosecuted, and this time not be released as they were in the Eric Garner case in New York. In the early hours of Thursday, another Afro-descendant man was shot in the middle of the Minneapolis riots.

Police brutality is a whole system that, added to Covid-19, is doing an ethnic cleansing in the United States in the Trump government. That is the type of police some aspire to have in Latin America, specifically in Venezuela with the white and racist opposition in our country, led by Popular Will, (who in 2017 burned nineteen Afro-descendants) begging for a desperate military intervention. It is a system that is being reproduced in the fascist minds of the governments that Trump has under his rule in Latin America.

As an Afro-Revolutionary Movement we demand that this case be brought to the United Nations, as it is contradictory that racial extermination in the United States, Colombia, Brazil and Honduras has worsened in the International Decade for People of African Descent.

We condemn the complicit silence of OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro.

We demand that the Donald Trump government cease the criminal blockade against the Venezuelan people.

We call on organizations at the continental level to speak out against police brutality not only in the United States, but in Colombia, Brazil and Honduras.

In the name of the Afro-Revolutionary Movement Juan Ramón Lugo, the following organizations:

• Afroaragueños
• Fundación Afroamerica
• AfroTV
• Asociación Jose Leonardo Chirino
• Cumbre Ibarra (Puerto Cabello)
• Autóctono La Vega
• Asociación Panecillos
• Cimarrones de Vargas
• IETPA JUAN DE DIOS DIAZ (Sucre State)
• Grupo Elegua
• Cimarrones de Yaracuy
• Red de Organizaciones Afrovenezolanas
• Red Afrodescendientes de Venezuela

The racist opposition in Venezuela wants to import Trump's model of racial extermination