Martyr’s anniversary

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 22, 2010

Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of the assassination of El Salvadoran Bishop Óscar Romero by right-wing thugs. They shot him to death while he was saying mass. Tim’s El Salvador Blog has been doing a bang-up job during the last week or so blogging on the upcoming anniversary.

Of particular note is a recent post on a lengthy article published on ElFaro.net interviewing Álvaro Saravia, one of the very few people involved in Romero’s killing who is still alive. The article is kind of intense:

That’s how I was expecting to find one of the murders of Bishop Romero: Fat, tan, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Instead I found a gaunt old man, thin, with scarred and withered skin. His face was hidden behind a grizzled beard, and there was a rancid odor about him. He looked so small.

“And why do you want to talk now?

“For my children. Even they look at me like I’m Hitler.”

Álvaro Saravia denies being the trigger man and blames the son of a former president. Then for some reason, since the story was published on ElFaro.net, the site has been down. Huh. Tim was good enough to grab the content from the Google cache and drop it into a PDF. It’s 24 pages of good stuff.

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False positives documentary

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 22, 2010

Colombian journalist Felipe Zuleta has produced an excellent two-part documentary on the “False Positives” scandal that rocked Colombia in 2008. Basically, it turned out the army was taking poor youths from Bogota’s slums and killing them to pump up their supposed FARC body counts.

So, not so much false positives as murders.

Current presidential front-runner Juan Manuel Santos was defense minister at the time. Neither he nor any other higher-ups were held responsible. It’s possible (likely?) that the false positives incident was not an isolated one. The Council on Hemispheric Affairs has more. Many thanks to the Center for International Policy’s Colombia Program for adding the subtitles. (The original videos are available here.)

Part II:

Posted in Colombia, Human Rights | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Vote tallying company also hired Blackwater mercenaries

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 21, 2010

Who's counting?

Private military contracting and vote counting are two things you probably don’t want done by the same company. But if you’re Colombian, too bad.

Semana is reporting that the subcontractor responsible for gumming up release of the vote tally during Colombia’s legislative elections last week – ID Systems S.A. – is the same company that recruited 35 mercenaries on behalf of Blackwater four years ago. The company sent the men to Iraq, then left them stranded with no pay and no plane ticket home:

ID Systems’ headquarters is in the Teusaquilo neighborhood in Bogota. Right now it is stuffed with documents, computer disks, and projectors, but it was also the meeting place for the mercenaries who showed up enamored with offers of millions that, according to their complaints, they never received.

At that time, ID Systems worked as a subcontractor for multinational defense and security company Blackwater, which has always stated that it paid what it offered for each mercenary sent from Colombia, and that it is not responsible if its affiliate didn’t pay its men. The mercenaries say that (ID Systems majority shareholder) Zuluaga called them in Baghdad and told them over speakerphone that “this is a business and he had to earn money from each hire.”

Capitan Gonzalo Guervara, who coordinated the ID Systems operation, was murdered in Bogota a year later. One of the hypotheses of the investigating authorities is that the crime had to do with his participation in the mercenary business.

Also, an earlier iteration of the company had a juicy government contract to make national ID cards in the 1990s, at the same time various scandals broke over the personal data of Colombians being secretly leaked to U.S. companies.

Maybe it’s time to review the contracting process.

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Welcome Home, Hugo Chávez

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 21, 2010

Thank the Blogger Gods, Hugo Chávez is going to launch his very own blog. This is the perfect medium for the long-winded and famously workaholic president, and frankly, I can’t wait to see what he writes about.

My only piece of advice is: Do not enable comments. Anti-Chávez commenters are about as insightful and polite as a bag of flaming dog crap.

Posted in Politics, Venezuela | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Snip snip

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 21, 2010

Sorry fellas.

This week was a tough call for Creepy Colombia Story of the Week. I almost went with The Farmer who Fathered Seven of his 17 Children Via his Daughter, but instead I think I’ll stick with similarly- yet opposite-themed Rich Guy who Pays Peasants To Get Sterilized.

The former story almost argues for the latter’s premise, except no, not at all. Dairy farm heir Erwin Goggel figures that the best way to get rid of the poor is to stop them from propagating in the manner of rabbits:

Goggel is offering nine-acre plots rent-free to poor men and women who agree to have vasectomies and tubal ligations. He pays for all the surgical procedures, including the 10 operations performed late last month in Monteria, the capital of Cordoba state, about 30 miles south of here.

“The middle-class lifestyle as we know it, with a car, a refrigerator and a good education for the kids, is out of the question for these people,” said Goggel, whose shock of gray curly hair hints at his hippie past. “They are in a vicious cycle that a high rate of reproduction perpetuates. Big, poor families are in an economic hole that they can’t see out of.”

All outrage aside, Goggel is technically correct. People – especially poor, Catholic people – have way, way too many children. It affects their standard of living, and it also affects the rest of us when those children grow up to be unemployed muggers. I had thought, however, that a better solution would be:

  1. Stop deliberately excluding the poor from the rest of society with horrible public policy; and
  2. Teach people how to use condoms, hypocrite bishops be damned.

Maybe Goggel tried that route already, faced failure, and decided on a more direct means to his ends. Still, you could buy an awful lot of condoms with the sale of nine acres of land.

(Image courtesy Gilberto Santa Rosa)

Posted in Colombia, Human Rights, Odd | Leave a comment

Harder than it looks

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 21, 2010

Chile is good at a lot of things, but it turns out tallying up death tolls is not one of them.

First we were told it was over 800. Then the government revised it down to 279 because a municipal government had counted a bunch of missing people as dead. Then the death toll went back up to 700 when many of those missing were added to the list of the dead. Then it went back down to 452 from 497 (wait, what?) with 96 people still missing. And now Diario del Sur is reporting that the official official list of the dead – with ID numbers and death certificates – is 342, revised down from 359 after it was discovered that 17 names on the list (PDF) were duplicates.

The official number is sure to go up again as more missing people are added to the list of the dead, but maybe they could just stop releasing numbers until they get the whole thing sorted.

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Lula for SecGen?

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 21, 2010

I have no idea if this is credible, but there are rumors that Brazilian President Lula Da Silva is interested in running for U.N. Secretary General after his term ends this year. The Secretary General spot will up for a vote in 2011, though Lula would have to run against incumbent Ban Ki Moon.

This comes from the Times Online quoting mostly “diplomats” and speculation in the Brazilian media, so, you know, salt grain. The closest they come to getting anything on the record is this:

Asked by The Times, Marco Aurélio Garcia, the President’s top foreign policy adviser, declined to rule out the possibility: “He has a great interest in international questions, in the process of integration in South America,” Mr Garcia said. “He has a real passion for Africa. He really wants to do something to help Africa.”

It would be extremely interesting if someone like Lula got the top spot at the U.N. However, diplomacy isn’t supposed to be interesting, and anyway he’s probably stuck his finger in the eye of the Empire one too many times.

(Original image courtesy of Agência Brasil.)

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Wrong way

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 20, 2010

Chaos: Typical.

Costa Ricans are terrible drivers, and they know it. Pretty much every day in this country of 4.5 million, I can open the newspaper and read about someone dying somewhere on the roads: Pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, head-on collisions, drunk drivers, people driving off cliffs.

I have no idea if it’s a statistically significant number of traffic deaths, but it feels like a massacre.

Like I said, the Ticos know this, so a few years ago the media went on a campaign to get the government to crack down, outlaw drunk driving, and generally pass a law to get Costa Ricans to stop killing each other on the roads. This was a good idea.

What was not a good idea, however, was the actual law that got passed, which sets first-world traffic regulations for third-world driving conditions while doing almost nothing to improve enforcement. Now we have ridiculously huge fines (US$400 for running a stop sign, in a country where that’s how much a cop makes in month) and comically specific regulations (wait, why am I required to have aspirin in my car again?).

A perfect illustration of the stupidity currently in force is the jaywalking part of the law. Reports La Nación on the government’s glorious efforts at enforcing the new traffic law:

In the case of pedestrians, the fine … for crossing the street without respecting traffic signals, not using sidewalks, or passing in front or behind of a vehicle whose motor was running… is ¢58,680 (US$110).

Basically, this makes it illegal to walk, pretty much anywhere, as there are often no sidewalks, definitely no traffic signals, and as a result, no place to cross without wading into traffic.

Other than just pissing me off, the serious implication of this law is that it disenfranchises the poor. The reason you occasionally see whole families scuttling across highways and pulling other crazy-dangerous traffic stunts is because there is literally no other way to get from Point A to Point B. These people can’t afford cars, they can’t afford to live on the right side of the highway, and they sure as hell can’t afford a US$110 fine for doing what they have to do to survive.

The Legislature is working on an amendment to cut the fines down by as much as 60%, but that amendment will also gut the few enforcement initiatives the law does contain, like the point system for licenses.

It’s like three steps sideways and one step backward, which sounds like a children’s game, but is actually the lawmaking process in Costa Rica.

(Original image courtesy ahrenw.)

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Here’s hoping for more episodes

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 20, 2010

I laughed at this for a very long time.

(H/T Structurally Maladjusted)

Posted in Arts and Culture, Odd, Politics | Leave a comment

Magician with the picana

By Peter Krupa | Published: March 20, 2010

It sounded like a straight-forward political scandal. An Argentine judge named María José Sarmiento blocked Kirchner’s controversial attempt to use Central Bank reserves to pay its foreign debt. Yesterday, the government tried to arrest her father. An outrageous example of the executive harassing the judiciary, right?

Except the judge’s father is Luis Sarmiento, a retired army colonel, a.k.a. “a magician with the picana.” What’s a picana?

The picana is a wand or prod that delivers a high voltage but low current electric shock to a torture victim. It has a bronze tip and an insulated handle, and is connected by wire to a control box with a rheostat to raise or reduce the voltage. Power is supplied by a car battery or by a transformer connected to a mains wall socket.

The victim is undressed and then tied to a chair or table or hung upside down by the ankles. Often water is thrown over the victim to reduce the electrical resistance of the skin and to increase the effect of the shocks. Two people operate the picana. One adjusts the rheostat control to increase or decrease the voltage. The other holds the picana and applies its tip to sensitive places on the victim’s naked body, such as the head, mouth, genitals, breasts and nipples.

Sarmiento is accused of torturing 23-year-old Angel Enrique Brandazza to death in 1972 in a case that was well known and well publicized, but that fell out of sight once the torturing and extrajudicial killing of the Dirty War started in earnest. He and his family have many close ties to some of the worst figures from the Dirty War, and Sarmiento also spent time working for the Argentine intelligence service in Apartheid South Africa, according to this great profile published by Página/12.

He’s a real upstanding citizen.

He was finally charged a few days ago, and law enforcement personnel tried to arrest him, but they gave up when they found the 85-year-old man in a wheel chair and poor health. The arrest warrant has now been dropped. His daughter is outraged at the attempted arrest and calls it political persecution.

Maybe it is, but the bigger outrage is that this evil old man won’t be dying alone in a concrete cell.

(Note: I found the image above on a handful of different blogs, but couldn’t figure out the name of the artist. Any ideas?)

Posted in Argentina, Human Rights, Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

  • DAILY LINKS

    • The Nation has a long, wonky, wonderful article on Mexican maize cultivation, the effects of NAFTA, and the dangers of genetically-modified seeds. Author Peter Canby backs up his excellent writing with piles and piles of meticulous research. Not to be missed. [link, via SM] (Image from Joel Penner.)

    • Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas ended his hunger strike yesterday after 134 days. Farinas decided to end his strike after the Cuban government said it would release political prisoners rounded up in the "Black Spring" crackdown of 2003. Get well soon. [link]

    • The Uruguayan selection, which has made it to the quarter finals of the World Cup, just received a shipment of half a ton of fine cuts of beef for the mother of all asados in preparation for a contest against Ghana on Friday: "450 kilos of lomo, 200 of entrecot, 75 of vacío, 75 of colita de cuadril, 150 of ojo de bife and 50 kg of picaña." [link]

    • Hitmen have assassinated the PRI candidate for governor of Tamaulipas State, Rodolfo Torre Cantú. Torre was gunned down along with six others at about 10:30 this morning on a highway on the way to a campaign event. Drug mafias are assumed to be responsible. [link]

    • From the days when coups were something of a regional sport, new documents detail a famous British ballerina's role in a plot to topple the government of Panama. The plan was to use her yacht to gather men and arms, then "land somewhere and collect in the hills." It didn't work. [link]

    • Mexico's Attorney General's Office has posted on its web site irrefutable evidence that gold-plated AR-15s and diamond-studded pistol grips are not nearly as cool-looking as they sound. The deadly knick-knack collection is said to belong to Valencia Cartel leader El Lobo. [link]

    • Two Brazilian ranchers were sentenced to 30 years in prison apiece for ordering the killing of an environmentalist nun: "Prosecutors said the pair offered to pay a gunman $25,000 to kill the 73-year-old [Dorothy] Stang because she had prevented them from stealing a piece of land that the government had granted to a group of poor farmers." [link]


    • This video of a kidnapping and car chase in Mexico is notable mainly for the bad-assitude of the TV journalists who were on this like white on rice. Well done, gentlemen.

    • The Economist takes a peak at the Mockus phenomenon in Colombia: "His moustacheless beard gives him the air of a Baltic pastor... He is financing his campaign with a bank overdraft. His supporters rely on Facebook and make their own posters; street vendors sell unofficial campaign T-shirts." [link]

    • Some cruise lines will cease traveling to Antarctica after this cruise season, as a ban on the use and carriage of heavy fuel oil goes into effect next year. The ban came after a 2007 incident when a Gap Adventures ship got punctured by ice and sank, causing a mess. [link]