Posts in category South Amercia
Forced evictions in Rio de Janeiro
Ahead of Rio’s World Cup and Summer Olympic Games, Brazil is pushing to clean up its favelas. But at what cost to the people?
Sterilised in Chile for having HIV
HIV-positive women in Chile are coming forward to say they were sterilised against their will after giving birth.
A new report says legal loopholes and biased doctors are to blame.
Women living with HIV in Chile, maintain that the government must take concrete actions to stop the abuse and humanise the treatment.
These women hope that by speaking out they’ll spark a wider national conversation and change the general public’s attitudes.
Al Jazeera’s Pablo Fernandez reports from Chile.
Ecuador offers residency to WikiLeaks founder
QUITO – An Ecuadorean government official has invited the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower website to live and lecture in the country, days after the site caused an international uproar by releasing additional sensitive U.S. documents.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kintto Lucas told local media that Ecuador was attempting to get in touch with WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange to invite him to the country, praising his work as an investigator.
Ecuador is part of a leftist bloc of governments in South America, including Venezuela and Bolivia, that have been highly critical of U.S. policy in the region.
Masked man’s lawyers seek Chinese media ban
VANCOUVER – The detention review for a young Chinese man who fled to Canada disguised as an old Caucasian man turned into a mini-trial for three Chinese-Canadian newspapers Monday.
Dan McLeod, lawyer for the asylum-seeker in his 20s, asked Immigration and Refugee Board adjudicator Daphne Shaw-Dyck to exclude Robert Chu of World Journal, Victoria Chang of Ming Pao and David Jang of Sing Tao should she allow media into the refugee hearings.
McLeod said his client was a member of an unspecified organization banned in China. He claimed the three outlets are controlled by the Chinese government and publicity about the case could endanger his client and his relatives.
Brazil To Make ALL U.F.O. Records Public!
August 13, 2010 News Corp
Haitian Farmers to Burn Donated Monsanto Hybrid Seed
Missouri-based agribusiness multinational Monsanto’s latest attempt to cultivate good press is being met with widespread reproach in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, where the GMO giant is donating 130 tons of pesticide-coated hybrid and conventional vegetable seeds to farmers’ associations via the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) WINNER program. More toxic seed will follow throughout the summer. Of its problematic hybrid seed, Monsanto’s Beyond the Rows blog says:
Given the choice, farmers generally select hybrid seeds because they generate more food and grain per acre or hectare. Monsanto personnel consulted with the Ministry of Agriculture in Haiti and heard very clearly the ministry sees the opportunity for increased yields that hybrid seed creates for Haitian farmers.
Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, Executive Director of Haiti’s Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called Monsanto’s gift a “new earthquake” and “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds and on what is left our environment in Haiti.” The MPP has promised to burn the seed and called for a march to protest the company’s foray into Haitian agriculture on June 5th, World Environment Day. Monsanto’s hybrid seed, in addition to bearing a poison payload of fungicides like Maxim XO and Thiram, is regarded as an egregious threat to food sovereignty by small farmers and food activists worldwide. Hybridized crops easily cross-pollinate and contaminate indigenous strains. Growers are often unwilling or unable to replant the seeds they yield the following season since they do not produce reliable copies of the original plant, resulting in a cyclical tithe to Monsanto to purchase new seed.
Did US train soldiers for massacre?
The massacre in the village of Las Dos Erres has become one of the most notorious from Guatemalas civil war, which was the longest-running conflict in the Americas in the 20th century and claimed the highest casualty rate. The vast majority of those killed were indigenous Mayan civilians and a U.N.-sponsored truth commission termed the war, genocide.
Chile 8.8 HAARP Earthquake – An Unnatural Disaster
Heres we look at some suspicious anomolies surrounding recent natural disasters, and in particular the 8.8 earthquake in Chile.
Could these so called natural disasters actually be man made? and if so , for what reason?
You decide…
‘They’re killing us!’ Dramatic video shows Peruvian air force shooting down U.S. family’s plane in bungled CIA operation’They’re killing us!’ Dramatic video shows Peruvian air force shooting down U.S. family’s plane in bungled CIA operation
A dramatic video showing fighter jets shooting down a small plane carrying an American family over Peru in a CIA operation gone tragically wrong has emerged.
The video footage was taken by a CIA surveillance plane over the Peruvian jungle in 2001.
It shows Peruvian fighter jets opening fire on the light Cessna carrying Jim and Veronica Bowers and their children Cory, 6, and adopted baby Charity, who was just seven months, as well as pilot Kevin Donaldson.
On the tape, they can be heard screaming for help.
‘They’re killing me! They’re killing us!’ Mr Donaldson can be heard yelling to ground control.
CIA officers, realising their mistake, can be heard shouting: ‘Don’t shoot! No more, no más!’
But by the time the guns stopped, it was too late.
Mrs Bowers and Charity both died in the horrific accident when a single bullet pierced the plane’s hull and passed through both their bodies.
The pilot managed to crash land the plane in a river, where Mr Bowers and his son watched Mrs Bowers’ body float away as they clung to the debris.
The Bowers, an American family of missionaries, were returning to Iquitos in Peru from a routine trip to Brazil on April 20, 2001 when they were spotted by the CIA.
The skies over the Peruvian jungle are a hotspot for drug traffickers. Since 1995 the CIA and Peru’s air force have been operating a joint program to intercept traffickers – shooting them down if necessary.
Cargo firms delivering aid also involved in arms trafficking, says report
Air cargo companies involved in illicit arms and drug trafficking have been repeatedly contracted by the UN and other aid agencies to deliver humanitarian aid, a leading thinktank reveals today.
Evidence that arms dealers have comprehensively penetrated the world market in aid, peacekeeping and stability operations is disclosed in a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). At least 90% of international air cargo carriers named in UN security council and other arms trafficking-related reports have also supplied UN agencies, EU and Nato governments, and non-government organisations, as well as private contractors in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, it says.
The report, Air Transport and Destabilising Commodity Flows, shows how air cargo carriers involved in humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations have also transported a range of other “conflict-sensitive” goods such as cocaine, diamonds and precious minerals.
It cites as an example how UN peacekeeping missions in Sudan continued to use aircraft operated by Badr Airlines even after the UN security council said the company should be banned for allegedly breaking arms embargos. Unicef used Juba Air Cargo, also based in Sudan, even though the UN said it had documented evidence showing the company violated an arms embargo, the Sipri report says.
It says DynCorp, a large US private military company which supplies the US army, contracted Aerolift, a company described in a UN sanctions committee report as illicitly supplying arms to al-Shabab, the Islamist group in Somalia.
US accused of ‘occupying’ Haiti as troops flood in
The French minister in charge of humanitarian relief called on the UN to “clarify” the American role amid claims the military build up was hampering aid efforts.
Alain Joyandet admitted he had been involved in a scuffle with a US commander in the airport’s control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight.
“This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti,” Mr Joyandet said.
Geneva-based charity Medecins Sans Frontieres backed his calls saying hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers.
But US commanders insisted their forces’ focus was on humanitarian work and last night agreed to prioritise aid arrivals to the airport over military flights, after the intervention of the UN.
The diplomatic row came amid heightened frustrations that hundreds of tons of aid was still not getting through. Charities reported violence was also worsening as desperate Haitians took matters into their own hands.
The Militarization of Emergency Aid to Haiti: Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?
Haiti has a longstanding history of US military intervention and occupation going back to the beginning of the 20th Century. US interventionism has contributed to the destruction of Haiti’s national economy and the impoverishment of its population.
The devastating earthquake is presented to World public opinion as the sole cause of the country’s predicament.
A country has been destroyed, its infrastructure demolished. Its people precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair.
Haiti’s history, its colonial past have been erased.
The US military has come to the rescue of an impoverished Nation. What is its Mandate?
Is it a Humanitarian Operation or an Invasion?
The main actors in America’s “humanitarian operation” are the Department of Defense, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). (See USAID Speeches: On-The-Record Briefing on the Situation in Haiti, 01/13/10). USAID has also been entrusted in channelling food aid to Haiti, which is distributed by the World Food Program. (See USAID Press Release: USAID to Provide Emergency Food Aid for Haiti Earthquake Victims, January 13, 2010)
The military component of the US mission, however, tends to overshadow the civilian functions of rescuing a desperate and impoverished population. The overall humanitarian operation is not being led by civilian governmental agencies such as FEMA or USAID, but by the Pentagon.
US doctors beg their government to admit critically injured children from Haiti
American doctors are begging their Government to accept critically injured Haitian children after one baby girl was airlifted to hospital in Florida.
Meanwhile, in an exercise dubbed Operation Pierre Pan, the Catholic Church in Miami is drawing up plans to rescue thousands of Haitian orphans, mirroring the Operation Pedro Pan airlift of 1960 in which 14,000 Cuban children were taken to the city.
US immigration officials had been refusing to allow children into the country until next weekend. However, as Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, arrived to assure Haitians that America stood ready to help “in any way we can”, doctors managed to persuade the US authorities to allow in Jean, a four-month-old Haitian girl for treatment. The orphaned child has cut through immigration rules used to bar entry to the US for Haitians even in extreme circumstances.