In Brief
Argentina: Dismantling an Authoritarian Legacy BUENOS AIRES-The new administration of Fernando de la Rta has taken several important steps to reduce the power of the Argentine intelligence...
...law when it approved a $200 million loan to the Enron corporation for an environmentally and socially destructive gas pipeline linking Bolivia and Brazil...
...The arrests, which were made during a police initiative to "get tough" on illegal immigrants, raise concerns that Honduran children are being exploited by drug dealers, leaving them vulnerable to other forms of abuse...
...Access roads along the pipeline route have not been restored or closed and pose the threat of additional deforestation and new colonization in the area...
...The administration also reduced SIDE's budget, from around $360 million in 1999 to $138 million in 2000, and announced a $150 million reduction in the military budget...
...Abiding by its policy of returning all migrants stopped at sea, the INS "repatriated" 407 of the freighter's passengers to Haitiincluding Rhinvil's two children...
...Bruce Harris, the Regional Director of Casa Alianza Latin America, says that after escaping the poverty in their own country, poor-and often illegal-immigrant children become perfect fodder for unscrupulous drug barons...
...SIDE is also suspected of impeding investigations of two unsolved bombings, of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and the Jewish-Argentine Mutual Association in 1994...
...Intelligence reports discussed internal conflicts in the UCR, the Peronist electoral campaign, and activities within the national university...
...The First Continental Conference was hosted by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in July 1996 in Chiapas, Mexico...
...She is also a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...Continued on page 51 CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2 After announcing his Vieques plan, Clinton also said he would immediately seek $2.5 million-not to determine why Viequenses suffer a cancer rate 28% higher than Puerto Ricans living in other municipalities, nor to begin clean up of the Navy's environmental disaster zone, but for yet another referendum on the status of Puerto Rico...
...Chanting "Justice," the crowd blocked traffic for more than an hour as it made its way to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) building at Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast 79th Street...
...The announcement stunned Puerto Rico...
...policies that allow Cuban migrants who reach U.S...
...This means they are vulnerable not only to drug dealers but also to child sex abusers who are aware that these children desperately need money to feed their own addictions...
...Many were holdovers from the dictatorship, with histories of extortion and kidnapping, torture, disappearances and assassination...
...During the 1999 presidential campaign, the Alianza, the coalition of the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) and the center-left Frepaso that de la Rfia represents, pledged to bring SIDE under democratic control or even abolish it...
...Both harbor extreme right, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic factions...
...One reason is the vagueness of the offer...
...At one panel, "500 Years of Resistance in Brazil and the Americas," Rodney Bobwash-a Canadian and the only North American indigenous participant at the event-shared his experiences with members of the Afro-Brazilian movement, indigenous peoples from Brazil and two Zapatista delegates...
...Bossi has repeatedly argued for military internal security and intelligence capabilities to combat "narcoterrorism," a mission prohibited by Argentine law...
...One ex-army captain in Battalion 601, Rafael L6pez Fader, was part of a 1970s paramilitary group linked to infamous extortion and kidnapping cases...
...On February 21, some 300,000 people took to the streets to voice their dissent in the largest demonstration in the history of Puerto Rico...
...The pipeline route slices through the Chiquitano Forest, the world's largest remaining dry tropical forest, as well as through part of the Pantanal wetlands, affecting 38 indigenous and other non-indigenous communities...
...Enron and Shell took control of Bolivia's oil and gas transportation infrastructure as a result of the 1995 partial privatization of Bolivia's state-owned oil company...
...Lucia, a Tzotzil Mayan EZLN delegate, shared her experience of women's struggle in Chiapas...
...In 1998, the intelligence division of the air force was found to be conducting illegal surveillance of journalists and a women's group that had criticized the air force's management of airports...
...The real problem is that the Presidential Directive ignores the virtually unanimous support for an immediate end to U.S...
...Two SIDE operatives, Rub6n Visuara and Eduardo Ruffo, were part of a 1970s death squad based in Automotores Orletti, a clandestine detention and torture center for Operation Condor...
...Clinton also promised to ask Congress to return one of the threequarters of Vieques currently occupied by the Navy to the people of Vieques and stated that he will "also implement measures to meet the health, safety, environmental and economic concerns of the people of Vieques...
...The organization says its staff witnessed Honduran youths making cash transfers to their families in Honduras with funds allegedly earned from illicit drug sales...
...The agreement sets aside $2 million for land titling programs and an Indigenous Development Plan (IDP...
...True enough...
...He awarded SIDE large secret funds from "reserved accounts" that escaped congressional oversight...
...The pro-statehood New Progressive Party is now arguing that Rossell6's inability to kick the Navy out of Vieques is due to Puerto Rico's colonial status...
...But judicial sources told the media they had proof that intelligence operatives in C6rdoba reported to the chiefs of Army Intelligence and Counterintelligence...
...As women we are not worth anything to the capitalist system and the government...
...Email: wnu@igc.apc.org Nicole Karsin currently works with indigenous women's cooperatives in Chiapas, Mexico...
...Weekly News Update on the Americas Popular Movements Globalize Their Struggle BELeM--One week after activists shut down the World Trade Organization talks in downtown Seattle, another gathering of popular resistance to globalization took place in South America...
...Enron and the Bolivian government negotiated an agreement with the indigenous communities near the pipeline route, who were represented by the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of the Oriente, Chaco and Amazonia of Bolivia (CIDOB...
...Under the Clinton-Rossell6 agreement, weapons training is to be limited to "inert" weapons, to be fired not--as in the past-every other day, for a total of 180 days a year, but once every four days, a total of 90 per year...
...Unless something is done to help these children, they will increasingly fall victim to those people all too willing to exploit them," said Harris...
...shores to stay while forcing other nationals to go through a difficult asylum process...
...Ann Birch is a freelance journalist based in Costa Rica...
...Elidn is staying with distant relatives in Miami while his father seeks his return to Cuba...
...lawmakers, OPIC approved the U.S...
...In January and February, the President ordered the dismissal of hundreds of agents from two notorious intelligence structures, the army's Battalion 601 (renamed the Center for Military Intelligence in the 1980s) and the Secretariat of State Intelligence (SIDE), and said that Battalion 601 would be dissolved and its intelligence headquarters sold...
...The proposed referendum ballot comes with an economic incentive: an additional $50 million if residents vote to allow bombing with live ammunition...
...In 1996, the Gendarmeria, a militarized police force, conducted secret surveillance of shantytown dwellers and priests...
...Weekly News Update on the Americas is a publication of the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of New York...
...Indeed, the announced "agreement" came as conflict was brewing between the Administration and Navy stalwarts in Congress over the Vieques impasse...
...Menem was also criticized for using SIDE and "parallel" intelligence groups against his political opponents...
...Some 150 people gathered near the downtown Miami waterfront and again called for an end to the unequal treatment of Cubans and Haitians...
...The nation's substantial gas reserves are situated near the mushrooming Brazilian energy market, and Enron and Shell have stated they aim to convert Bolivia into the energy-generation and transportation hub for South America...
...they request that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights take emergency measures to protect the lives and safety of the people of Vieques...
...nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), who claim that Shell and Enron have failed to adhere to the social and environmental safeguards contained in the OPIC loan agreement...
...Natural gas is Bolivia's largest export, accounting for 26% of all exports in 1998...
...Land and cultural preservation were prominent themes throughout the conference...
...The purge of Battalion 601 takes place after recent military spying scandals that cast doubt on the view held by many observers that the Argentine military is thoroughly democratized...
...This is essentially the same offer rejected on December 3 and January 25, except that it "authorizes" the people of Vieques to hold a referendum in which they may tell the Navy to stop the bombing-not immediately as Viequenses are demanding, but on May 1, 2003...
...OPIC refused to require that Enron and its partner, Royal Dutch Shell, build the pipeline along an alternative route proposed by indigenous and environmental organizations that would have bypassed the most ecologically vulnerable areas...
...Rhinvil and her children were among the more than 400 refugees, most of them Haitian, who were intercepted on January 1 when the wooden freighter they were in ran aground two miles off the Florida coast...
...The demonstrators were demanding a review of U.S...
...indigenous and environmental groups are charging that the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) violated U.S...
...The Haitian protest came as right-wing Cuban-American sectors in Miami are trying to block INS efforts to return six-year-old Elidn Gonzilez to his father in Cuba...
...and finally, they assert their rights under international law to continue the struggle for self-determination until their nation can take its place among equals at the UN and in the community of nations...
...According to the report, children involved in child prostitution usually have drug addictions...
...If impoverished Viequenses choose to forego the $50 million bribe, the Navy will stop all bombing on May 1, 2003...
...They asserted that peace is not possible in Colombia until the factors causing the current war disappear...
...In a more explosive 1999 case, ajudge in C6rdoba discovered that the intelligence branch of the Third Army Corps was carrying out surveillance of witnesses and lawyers involved in a trial investigating baby kidnapping by the military during the "dirty war...
...Shell and Enron Build Controversial Gas Pipeline SANTA CRUZ-Bolivian and U.S...
...The administration discharged some 1,100 civilian and military personnel and at least 1,000 contracted agents from SIDE, and 500 civilian agents from Battalion 601...
...What "measures" can a lame-duck President implement to cure the high rate of cancer on Vieques and to remedy the effects of 60 years of exploding lead and other metals-including over 200 "lost" depleted uranium bullets...
...She also discussed the role of women in rejecting state violence and defending the autonomous Zapatista municipalities from government attempts to dismantle them...
...But other government initiatives are less encouraging...
...Police in Vancouver first highlighted the suspected use of Honduran children by illegal drug rings in late 1998...
...In response to the arrests, the special prosecutor for the protection of children in Honduras, Rigoberto Portillo, said that the Honduran government will do everything necessary to bring the children home...
...plans to resume training on Vieques, the Governor announced in his "state of the nation" message just days later that he had accepted a substantially similar Presidential Directive providing for the immediate resumption of Navy weapons training in Vieques...
...Navy's actions in Vieques...
...Representing the Center for Constitutional Rights, they have filed a Petition in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States concerning the U.S...
...So why are Puerto Ricans protesting in the street...
...Also, the new administration has backed the promotions of officers accused of dirty war abuses despite protests from human rights groups...
...they carry out massive, peaceful marches in Puerto Rico and the United States...
...some were associated with Operation Condor...
...They do what those who have kept the Navy from bombing Vieques have done since April 19, 1999: they set up permanent civil disobedience camps in the target zones...
...William Harrell is the Executive Director of the National Police Accountability Project of the National Lawyers Guild...
...At The Mercy Of The Drug Rings: Honduran Children Arrested In Canada VANCOUVER-A police raid in Vancouver, Canada in January resulted in the arrest of 40 Latin Americans, the majority of them Honduran children...
...Foreign Assistance Act prohibits OPIC from funding projects in "primary tropical forests," but OPIC officials contend that the Chiquitano is a degraded secondary forest, a conclusion that contradicts the findings of the project's own Environmental Impact Assessment as well as independent ecological studies...
...These scandals demonstrated that the Argentine military continued to carry out vast political intelligence operations against "internal enemies"-a function expressly forbidden by law...
...marshals to remove the hundred or more demonstrators currently camped in the Navy's designated target zones...
...Workers' camps have been built directly adjacent to existing communities, leading to crime, prostitution and pollution of local water supplies...
...The land titling program for the Chiquitano and Ayoreo indigenous communities affected by the pipeline remains stalled...
...Linda Backiel is an attorney in San Juan...
...financing of the "war on drugs," which funds the Colombian military and thus indirectly supports paramilitary groups...
...The U.S...
...We are denied the opportunity to go to school," she said...
...Rhinvil, meanwhile, was taken to Miami for medical treatment...
...Rossell6 and Clinton's Private Vieques Agreement NEW YORK CITY-Despite the "official policy of Puerto Rico" of "not one more bullet, not one more shot" announced by Governor Pedro Rossell6 last June and reiterated as late as January 25 as the reason for rejecting U.S...
...Alarmed by the arrests, the child advocacy group Casa Alianza/ Covenant House Latin America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the defense and rehabilitation of street children in Mexico and Central America, says that the Honduran authorities are not doing enough to halt the flow of illegal child immigrants northwards...
...Battalion 601 and SIDE played a central role in the state terrorism of the socalled "dirty war...
...Navy activity on Vieques, and against leaving the power to decide Vieques' fate where it has laid for the last 60 years: with the U.S...
...The Menem Administration (1989-1999) cultivated close relations with the security and intelligence forces and incorporated numerous military officers and political personnel from the former dictatorship into government bureaucracies and intelligence structures...
...The Second Continental Conference For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism was held December 6-11, 1999 in Bel6m, in northeastern Brazil...
...Some had received death threats...
...But a colonized people who seek to implement their human right to self-determination do not surrender to the colonizer to prove their impotence, and then ask permission to be absorbed into the colonial "melting pot...
...Representatives of Quilombos, communities of descendants of runaway slaves in Brazil, talked about their ongoing struggle to obtain land titles...
...Members of the National Liberation Army (ELN), the second largest guerrilla group in Colombia, were also present at the event...
...Another is that Clinton can do little more than petition the Republican Congress-which has been notoriously nasty in matters relating to Puerto Ricoto approve the vague "measures" promised...
...The C6rdoba investigation gradually uncovered army surveillance of students, the media, judges, unionists, well-known political party leaders and the governor-elect of the province...
...Ann Birch Haitians Protest Unequal Treatment MIAMI-Hundreds of Haitian Americans and African Americans carried black-draped coffins in a mock funeral procession through Miami's Little Haiti district on the night of January 12 to commemorate those who have died trying to reach Florida's shores and to demand equal treatment under U.S...
...The Clinton-Rossell6 agreement also requires a commitment of support from the Puerto Rican police for U.S...
...Navy...
...There are approximately 230 Quilombos communities in the state of Pard, but only 27 have won land titles...
...According to police Sergeant Douglas Mackay Dunn, these latest arrests show that some 250 Honduran children aged between 12 and 18 are involved with "entrenched" drug organizations...
...Throughout Latin America, politicized intelligence forces inherited from military dictatorships continue to operate with little democratic control...
...It reversed what may well have been the first public policy in the island's history to reflect a consensus among all political parties and religious and social sectors...
...In addition, Vieques will receive $40 million, primarily for infrastructure improvements...
...We do not exist in the eyes of the unjust system...
...Over 2,500 people participated in the Bel6m event, which was organized by the Workers' Party (PT), including individuals from 24 Brazilian states, 24 countries and 31 Indigenous Nations...
...She was released from the INS's Krome detention center on January 12 and allowed to remain in the United States pending the outcome of her asylum hearing...
...Dan Jaffee is a doctoral student in Environmental Studies and Rural Sociology at the University of WisconsinMadison, and teaches an undergraduate field course in Michoacan, Mexico on conservation and grassroots development issues...
...The 170-mile gas line is a spur of the much larger 2,100-mile Bolivia-Brazil pipeline completed in 1999 and, at $2 billion, it is the largest single privatesector investment ever in Latin America...
...Last June, despite pressure from over 60 environmental organizations and 25 U.S...
...Casa Alianza sent two of its Honduran staff to Vancouver, where they interviewed more than 80 Honduran youth...
...SOURCES J. Patrice McSherry is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University-Brooklyn and author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina (New York: St...
...He was also an adviser to the Contras in Central America-and was reportedly decorated by the CIA for his role...
...Martin's Press, 1997...
...The administration is reportedly considering a recently retired, general, Emesto Bossi, to head a key executive intelligence agency...
...The Third Army Corps commander said that the spying was done by marginal groups "nostalgic for the nefarious practices of the past...
...For subscription information: 339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012 (212) 674-9499...
...They were also demanding the reunion of Haitian citizen Yvena Rhinvil with her two children, ages eight and ten, who were sent back to Haiti without her...
...The struggle over the pipeline has been marked by growing cooperation between Bolivian and U.S...
...The new spur will supply Bolivian natural gas to a new gasfired power plant being built by Enron in Cuiabd, Brazil...
...Contrary to participants' expectations, Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement (MST) did not participate in the encounter...
...The two transnationals, under the partnership name Transredes, were awarded 50% ownership and operating control in exchange for investments to modernize pipelines and other facilities...
...It also revealed a secret process carried out behind the backs of Rossell6's own "Special Commission on Vieques" appointed to carry out the official "not one more bullet" policy...
...According to the ELN, Colombia's biggest problem is narcotrafficking because it has created an environment in which the paramilitaries, nourished by their drug profits, can operate freely...
...Democratizing the state in Argentina is an ongoing struggle...
...The Menem years saw recurrent scandals involving intelligence forces that illegally spied on Argentine citizens...
...In one 1993 scandal, for example, official surveys were sent to teachers nationwide asking about the ideological tendencies and political activities of students...
...Another problem is U.S...
...In a report released in January, the Canadian Council on Social Development said that illegal child immigrants are increasingly being exploited by the child sex trade, which generates an estimated 100 offenses each day in Vancouver alone...
...A second BoliviaBrazil gas line is already in the works...
...According to Jos6 Martinez, director of the IDP, the communities came to the table at a great disadvantage and without access to vital information, resulting in "one of the worst examples of negotiation on a mega-project, because all the groups involved lost...
...The geographic distance aside, these speakers concluded that they shared common experiences of racism, exploitation and struggle against the legacy of European domination as well as neoliberalism...
...The conference illustrated that just as governments and corporations convene, forge new relations and globalize, so can the popular movements that resist them...
...taxpayer-funded loan...
...On January 13, the INS, faced with the media attention contrasting the Haitian case with that of Elidn, granted Rhinvil's children humanitarian parole so that they can live in the United States for 90 days while their mother's political asylum claim is decided...
...Haitian and African-American activists also staged a rally on January 15 to commemorate the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr...
...Governor Rossell6-who wants statehood for Puerto Rico more than he wants peace for Vieques-has, in effect, decided to sacrifice Vieques for his own personal interests...
...Argentina: Dismantling an Authoritarian Legacy BUENOS AIRES-The new administration of Fernando de la Rta has taken several important steps to reduce the power of the Argentine intelligence apparatus, a legacy of the military dictatorship (1976-1983...
...immigration law...
...The de la Rtia Administration's purge of the intelligence apparatus is a significant-and overduestep...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 5
