Fausta's Blog

American and Latin American Politics, Society, and Culture

Archives for August 2016

August 29, 2016 By Fausta

The last Monday in August Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean

The big news of the week: The announcement that the FARC and the Colombian government had finalized a peace agreement, which, from the looks of it, will not be signed by the president of Colombia or the FARC’s top leader.

Almost unnoticed: Iran’s LatAm tour.

ARGENTINA
Vile: Argentinian pupils wearing Nazi armbands attack Jewish students in ‘Mengele village’

#Iran #Argentina #Latinoamérica y #Nisman. Todo en una misma nota:https://t.co/ICO3IeTvbI

— Damian Pachter (@damianpachter) August 21, 2016

BOLIVIA
Bolivian miners lift roadblock after deputy minister beaten to death

BRAZIL
Spats in Brazil Senate Slow Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. Insult-slinging lawmakers impede process before suspended president takes the stand next week

Brazil Police Seek Charges Against Ex-President Lula da Silva and His Wife. Prosecutors to decide on asking judge to indict the couple over alleged corruption

How USA Today unraveled Ryan Lochte’s Rio drama; US swimmer Lochte ‘won’t respond’ to Brazil false claim charge. Cynics would say that Lochte provides a useful distraction.

CHILE
Chile’s pensions:The perils of not saving. A pioneering system, now in need of reform

COLOMBIA
Colombia’s opposition paints apocalyptic picture of post-conflict, for good reason.

CUBA
Iranian press gloats over Iran’s new Latrine sphere of influence

Chávez y la brujería: cómo Castro llenó Venezuela de espías-babalawos Read more here: http://www.elnuevoherald.com/noticias/mundo/america-latina/venezuela-es/article98079552.html#storylink=cpy

Captive Nations Presentation: Cuba, Human Rights and U.S. Policy

ECUADOR
Iran, Ecuador discuss ways to strengthen oil prices

HAITI
Latest Email Leaks Keep Exposing Clinton Foundation Corruption. Still more evidence that the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s State Department were one and the same

When Clinton was secretary of state, donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation correlated to large increases in weapons exports from the U.S. to the countries which donated. With Clinton’s help, Clinton Foundation donor Claudio Osorio won a $10 million loan in 2010 from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation meant to be used to build houses in Haiti. Corrupt Venezuelan banker Gonzalo Tirado hired Jonathan Mantz, a Clinton fundraiser, and made a donation to the Clinton Foundation in order to avoid being extradited to Venezuela.

MEXICO
Morelos: Mexican state buries over 100 people in mass grave, including torture victims

Of the 117 bodies found, 17 could not be identified as they were either too badly decomposed or because they had been decapitated or were missing other body parts. Four of the 84 showing signs of having suffered violent deaths had bullet holes in their skulls.

Records Debunk Mexican First Lady’s Story in Miami Condo Scandal. New Investigation Suggests Nieto’s Wife Paid Taxes Legally

According to an investigation by Univision, Rivera asked Pierdant to pay her taxes on the property as “a favor between friends.”

An information request to the Miami-Dade County Tax Office revealed the actress actually hired two law firms to cover those taxes, including during the years of 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2015.

PANAMA
The Lost Girls of Panama: The Full Story. The mysterious deaths of two young tourists in Panama puzzled examiners and shocked nations on both sides of the Atlantic; now secretly leaked documents reveal what happened.

PERU
Ayahuasca: a brain-altering chemical, rife with dangerous side-effects, taken in an isolated locations, what could possibly go wrong? Filipino tourist dies in hallucinogenic ritual in Peru.

PUERTO RICO
Last person out, please turn off the lights: Puerto Rico: An island’s exodus

ST. KITTS
ATIP docs for [Justin] Trudeau’s St. Kitts trip reveal undisclosed costs for “Tour Manager”

Not only were taxpayers on the hook for the costs of bringing the government-funded nanny—even though she didn’t appear on one version of the flight manifest—but also thousands of dollars for Trudeau’s tour manager to tag along, even though it wasn’t an official trip of any kind.

URUGUAY
Not very high times: Weeks From Selling Pot, Uruguay Producer Sees Future in Hemp

Weeks before selling its first ounce of pot at pharmacies, International Cannabis Corp. is already betting that hemp – a variety of cannabis – will be a much bigger market than selling the psychoactive part of the plant, according to Chief Executive Officer Guillermo Delmonte. Hemp and its extracts can be used in food, cosmetics and medicine

VENEZUELA
American Joshua Holt now a political prisoner in Venezuela

Venezuela ex-mayor Ceballos sent to prison from house arrest

Venezuela’s Inflation Rate Now Approaching Lunacy Levels

FARC soon to a Venezuelan arepera near you

Venezuela opts for cardboard coffins as wooden caskets become unaffordable. The country is adopting bio-coffins that come at one-fourth the cost of traditional caskets. “Bio-coffins.”



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Filed Under: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Carnival of Latin America, Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, FARC, Haiti, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Latin America, Lula, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Puerto Rico, Uruguay, Venezuela Tagged With: Dilma Rousseff, Fausta's blog, Joshua Holt, Justin Trudeau, Ryan Lochte, St. Kitts-Nevis

August 28, 2016 By Fausta

Sunday palate cleanser: Lucia di Lamermoor

Anna Moffo, Lucia
Lajos Kozma, Edgardo
Giulio Fioravanti, Enrico
Paolo Washington, Raimondo
Pietro Di Vietri, Arturo
Glauco Scarlini, Normanno
Ana María Segatori, Alisa
Carla Mancini, Ancella

Orchestra Sinfonica e Coro di Roma, Maestro del coro: Alfredo D’Angelo. Direttore: Carlo Felice Cillario

Synopsis.

Libretto.

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Filed Under: entertainment, music, opera Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Sunday palate cleansers

August 26, 2016 By Fausta

Colombia: Clinton’s Access Fund UPDATED

Yesterday during Ed’s podcast I mentioned the Fondo Acceso, which translates to Access Fund.

What is the Fondo Acceso?

The Fondo Accesso is the Clinton Foundation’s Colombia-based investment company, run from the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office, and (emphasis added)

registered as a “simplified stock corporation,” which legal experts said precludes it from doing business as a private equity fund.
. . .
Fondo Acceso was founded in 2010 by Bill Clinton, the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, and the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra. The Clinton Foundation and the SLIM Foundation committed $10 million each to the fund.

The Clinton Foundation is a 50 percent shareholder in the company, according to its tax records. Numerous Clinton Foundation and Clinton-Giustra Enterprise Partnership officials are listed as Fondo Acceso directors in Colombian corporate filings.
. . .
The Clinton Foundation and CGEP have declined to release a full list of Fondo Acceso’s investments.

Timeline:
2008: Hillary Clinton campaigns for president, is against the Colombia Free Trade Agreement.
2009: Hillary Clinton becomes Secretary of State. She starts lobbying members of Congress for approval of the CFTA, as revealed on emails released on February 2016.
2010: Bill Clinton, Carlos Slim, and Frank Giustra (who pledged $100million to the Foundation) open Fondo Acceso. Previously,

In June 2005, Gold Service International, a South American business group, paid Bill Clinton $800,000 to deliver four speeches in South America. Gold Service was pushing for the free trade agreement, which would help boost Colombian exports to the United States, and Clinton was supportive of the policy.

2011: The CFTA is approved, becomes effective on May 2012.
2012: FARC-Colombian government negotiations open in Havana.
2013: Hillary’s term as Secretary of State ends.

UPDATE:
Frank Giustra, The Billionaire Whose Clinton Foundation Ties Could Be Trouble for Hillary Clinton h/t JC, emphasis added)

A similar situation had unfolded in Kazakhstan in 2005. Giustra and Clinton jetted in to dine with the country’s authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Days later, Giustra’s mining company signed an agreement giving it stakes in three state-run uranium mines in addition to those it controlled in the U.S. After a $3.5 billion merger, the company was eventually acquired by the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom. Because uranium is a strategic asset, the sale required (and received) approval from multiple U.S. agencies, including the Department of State, then run by Hillary Clinton.
[Read more…]

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Filed Under: Colombia, Democrats, Hillary Clinton Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Free Trade Agreement

August 26, 2016 By Fausta

Bolivia: Deputy minister lynched

Bolivian miners have been protesting new legislation, and things have escalated into this:
Bolivian minister lynched by protesting minersGovernment locked in standoff with workers over new legislation for the sector (emphasis added)

Bolivia’s deputy interior minister, Rodolfo Illanes, was beaten to death on Thursday by striking mineworkers who had kidnapped him after he attempted to negotiate with them at a roadblock they had staged, which was cutting off the country’s main highway.

The incident took place at Panduro, some 185 kilometers from the capital, La Paz, after Illanes was kidnapped on Thursday morning. During the day, police attempted to clear the roadblock, and in one incident, shot and killed a 26-year-old miner, named as Rubén Aparaya. There were reports police killed another miner in Cochabamba province during another standoff.

Illanes and hid assistant were on their way to talk to the striking miners, when they were ambushed and kidnapped. The assistant escaped and needed medical attention, but

Illanes made several telephone calls over the course of the day to the government calling on it to send a delegation to talk with the miners. After police moved in to try to clear the roadblock, no more was heard from him. Once the police had succeeded in their operation, a journalist reported seeing a badly beaten body tied against a lamppost.

100 people were arrested in connection with the killing.

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Filed Under: Bolivia Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Rodolfo Illanes

August 25, 2016 By Fausta

Iran’s LatAm tour

The $99,999,999.99 x 13 is in, and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif is touring Latin America, with an entourage of 120 “politico-economic” delegates.

First, Cuba and Nicaragua.

Now Ecuador,

While in Quito, Zarif is scheduled to attend a joint economic commission with his Ecuadorian counterpart Guillaume Long to be held later today. Separate meetings with President Rafael Correa, Speaker of Parliament and Foreign Minister are also on Zarif’s agenda on this one-day official visit. The two sides are also slated to sign a memorandum of understanding for economic cooperation.

Chile, Bolivia and Venezuela are next on the schedule.

Perhaps this explains what they are doing with all the money Obama gave them for his worthless nuclear deal

Smart diplomacy.



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Filed Under: Iran, Latin America Tagged With: Fausta's blog, smart diplomacy

August 25, 2016 By Fausta

Colombia: Government-FARC deal finalized UPDATED

The Marxist narco-terrorrist guerrilla get seats in Congress (emphasis added):

The accord calls for the state to work with the FARC to mitigate drug trafficking in areas where the guerrillas had influence; permits the rebel group to transform into a political party; establishes a system to investigate war crimes by both rebels and military personnel; and lays out how to compensate victims.

Under the deal, three former rebels would serve in the lower house of congress and three in the senate in a nonvoting capacity, permitting the ex-combatants to have a say in the implementation of the accords, said Sen. Manuel Enriquez Rosero, a Liberty Party politician who supports the process. In the 2018 congressional elections, the FARC would be guaranteed at least five seats in the house and five in the senate, said Sen. Antonio Navarro Wolff, himself a former rebel. The mechanism to permit former rebels to have that many seats will necessitate a constitutional reform that was agreed upon in Havana.

Under the deal, the rebels would congregate their 7,000 fighters in 23 hamlets and eight 10-acre encampments scattered across rural Colombia. There, they would turn in their weapons to a United Nations verification commission over a six-month period.

In plain words, the FARC got everything it wanted.

Former president, now senator Alvaro Uribe is against the deal:

Mr. Uribe is widely credited with the military gains that forced the rebels to the negotiating table. But he is now leading a growing campaign against the deal, saying it amounts to an unjust amnesty for the rebels.

“They will spend zero days in prison, they will be awarded with political representation,” Paloma Valencia, a senator in Mr. Uribe’s party, said of the rebels. “This deal breaks the rule of law.”

Uribe also points out that Santos will finalize in Congress unsigned agreements where the FARC asks for more concessions,

Anuncian otra trampa d Santos:radicará en el Congreso acuerdos finales no firmados por FARC que pone otras condiciones. ¡Acuerdos sin firma!

— Álvaro Uribe Vélez (@AlvaroUribeVel) August 24, 2016

The NYT asks,

Will the rebels give up not only their weapons, but their control of the lucrative drug trade as well?

The State Department calls the FARC a terrorist organization that “controls the majority of cocaine manufacturing and distribution within Colombia, and is responsible for much of the world’s cocaine supply.”

The answer to the NYT’s question may lie in Emili Blasco’s August 15th article, where he reported that the Venezuelan government is colluding with the FARC to continue the drug traffic, unimpeded,

√ Maduro’s decision to open the crossings with Colombia shows that the peace accord announcement is ready

√ The guerrilla could have used the “border truce” to leave men and weapons in Venezuela

√ The verification of the existence of cocaine labs in Venezuela shows that the guerrilla wants to keep its business

Douglas Farah posts, The FARC’s Political Roadmap: From Insurgency to Criminalized Political Party? (emphasis added)

This is because the FARC, a Marxist insurgency that endured more than 50 years by developing thriving clandestine structures that became highly criminalized and enormously profitable, is not required to dismantle those structures in the peace process.

Key leaders of other Latin American revolutionary movements that successfully kept their clandestine structures intact – particularly the Communist Party faction of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador and the Ortega wing of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua – are the FARC’s most important advisers in the negotiations, and their clandestine structures have today grown into some of the most powerful criminal organizations in Central America.

These advisers, who still define themselves in their internal writings as Leninists, believe that the Marxist revolution must continue by whatever means available, much as the FARC believes. Having lost the war militarily, the FARC is now shifting to economic and political warfare, not with the idea of playing a constructive democratic role but with the goal of taking power then holding it in perpetuity following the path trod by Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Daniel Ortega, and Evo Morales.

Exit question,
“Why does never anyone answer me: Where will the kingpins be detained?
I’m asking those who claim there’ll be no impunity.
”

Por qué nunca, nadie me contesta: ¿cuál será el lugar de reclusión de los cabecillas?
Pregunta para los que dicen que no habrá impunidad.

— Claudia Bustamante (@cmbustamante) August 24, 2016

There’s a non-binding referendum scheduled for October 2. Skeptics view it as “non-binding” only if the people vote NO.

UPDATE
Here is a 297 page unsigned document titled ACUERDO FINAL PARA LA TERMINACIÓN DEL CONFLICTO Y LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DE UNA PAZ ESTABLE Y DURADERA [FINAL ACCORD FOR ENDING THE CONFLICT AND BUILDING A STABLE AND LASTING PEACE] (h/t Ed Morrissey) from the Mesa de Conversaciones website.

Mesa de Conversaciones is the official peace negotiation team hosted in Havana.

The document is on plain paper with no letterhead or apparent watermark(s), unsigned, and dated August 24, 2016, except for pages 287-291, dated August 19, detailing the UN’s jurisdiction over the Peace Tribunal, and pages 292-297 dated August 20 detailing weapons and territory.

I have not had a chance to examine it further.

Later,
I was in The Ed Morrissey Show talking about the deal (link corrected).

Linked to by Hot Air. Thank you!

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Filed Under: Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, FARC Tagged With: Fausta's blog, Juan Manuel Santos

August 24, 2016 By Fausta

Mexico: Trump says he’d meet with Peña Nieto

And

Last week, Pena Nieto said he would meet with Trump, according to a report by Reuters, despite previously comparing him to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Mexican media, both in Mexico and the U.S., are having fits over Trump.

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Filed Under: elections, Mexico Tagged With: Donald Trump, Enrique Peña Nieto, Fausta's blog

August 24, 2016 By Fausta

Brazil: Olympic success, up to a point

Low ticket sales, disappointing sponsorship, green pools and a long list of issues later, Rio’s Mayor Calls 2016 Olympics a Success.

The thing is,

Only 20% of the 2.5 million tickets for the Paralympics, which run from Sept. 7 to Sept. 18, have been sold. The event’s financing remains tenuous as organizers continue to seek additional sponsors and revenue from last-minute ticket sales.

Rio’s local government and Brazil’s federal government have pledged a combined 250 million reais ($77 million) to bail out the Rio 2016 organizing committee, which says it is short on cash to run the Paralympics. The committee has declined to open its books, and recently won a court battle to keep its finances private.
. . .
Even with the promise of taxpayer-funded help, the International Paralympic Committee is bracing for cuts that are “likely to impact nearly every stakeholder attending the Games,” Philip Craven, the committee’s president, said last week. IPC officials said transportation, media facilities and spectator services are likely to be affected.

Too late to call the whole thing off, but, after this, isn’t it time to end the Olympics?

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Filed Under: Brazil, Olympics Tagged With: #Rio2016, Fausta's blog

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