[RD] News Thread of the Americas

[W|M]

No king rules alone

 

[r16]

school of Americas , dear boy . As in it is always safer to satisfy the desire for starting something where like there is nothing that can be peer or something . Watching Middle East lately , where nothing goes according to the plans ? ln South America things will match exactly whatever people betted in a restaurant over dinner in Washington D.C. Also Peru has some Russian gear to be destroyed by Western gear in the 1990s or something .

 

[innonimatu]

Juan Guaidó's Assembly held a ‘popular consultation’ which had more than six million people participating last Saturday, forcing them to extend the original deadline by a couple of hours, even with Maduro's militias disrupting the vote and trying to steal ballot boxes.

If Guaido had 6 million supporters why can't he ever get as much as a thousandth of that to show up for his antics?

Who was invited to observe this "consultation"? Perhaps those who refused invites to observe the actual elections? They were invited three months ahead and still didn't bother coming up with a better excuse than Venezuela "call them at short notice".
The EU's real reason to refuse observing the legitimate elections was that its puppet had refused to run. And then the EU would be forced to either recognize the result of the election as legitimate and drop the puppet, or make up even more lies, which could be challenged and would produce media attention, to justify opposing the result of the election. Just refusing to observe with one lie passed without attention.

 

[innonimatu]

At least 6400 people were murdered in Colombia by the colombian army during a 6 year period in order to "boost statistics" or fill in death quotas!

A special peace tribunal in Colombia has found that at least 6,402 people were murdered by the country’s army and falsely declared combat kills in order to boost statistics in the civil war with leftist rebel groups. That number is nearly three times higher than the figure previously admitted by the attorney general’s office.
The killings, referred to in Colombia as the “false positives scandal”, took place between 2002 and 2008, when the government was waging war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc), a leftist guerrilla insurgency, which ultimately made peace with the government in 2016. Soldiers were rewarded for the manipulated kill statistics with perks, including time off and promotions.

It's good that this is finally being officially admitted and investigated. and finally comes to the news also. It'll be interesting to see what the people so offended by the occasional deaths they attribute to the security forces of the neighboring country (and some must happen there) have to say about the scale of what went on in Colombia...

 

[r16]

school of Americas , best place in the world ... With instructors of past with massive personal experience in Vietnam . Where one American division had special cold facilities to keep bodies intact so that a Cong could be counted as 5 or 10 , according to the needs .

 

[Takhisis]

The heck is money for when you’re already king in your country?

Power. The more you have, the more you need. Most people who have it are or become pathological egomaniacs. See my recent posts in the Coronavirus thread for how governments here are vaccinating their relatives and supporters and withholding vaccines from those actually at risk such as medical staff and the elderly (for once the NYT hasn't blocked me with a paywall).

tl;dr think of most Latin American rulers being as selfless and collected as, well, Donald Trump.

Yesterday was the day when Néstor Kirchner's alter ego Lázaro Báez, his three sons and daughter, plus a couple dozen over people, were all handed what must add up to over a century's worth of jail terms for money laundering. They engaged in a real-life re-enactment of Scarface, being caught on camera with cigars and whisky and literal piles of cash so big that counting machines were inefficient so instead they just weighed it.

 

[Takhisis]

The EU's real reason to refuse observing the legitimate elections was that its puppet had refused to run.

Oh shut up! You may not watch Telesur but I do and I was watching it during the last campaign when Nicolás Maduro admitted to overruling the elections every time the opposition won.

 

[Kyriakos]

Oh shut up! You may not watch Telesur but I do and I was watching it during the last campaign when Nicolás Maduro admitted to overruling the elections every time the opposition won.

But if someone other than Maduro became the leader, would they too be tied to Chavez by the astral plane?

 

[Takhisis]

That is actually an excellent question. If it were to be Cabello, given that his name is a literal translation of ‘Theodoros’ then I suspect so.

 

[EnglishEdward]

It seems that Lula is back!

Brazil: Lula has convictions quashed, leaving him free to challenge Bolsonaro

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ulled-by-brazil-judge-bolsonaro-election-2022

 

[Takhisis]

I've taken some time to sift through Folha and Globo, paywalls be damned.

So far what has happened is not exactly that: one single judge in the Supreme Court has ordered that the case be retried by a different judge because of an issue of venue alone.
Procedurally that means that Lula can still be convicted again if the convictions are upheld at the proper venue and/or a greater number of judges from the same court decide to overrule this one judge… as usual, procedural law is a mess.
The real danger comes from Moro himself being used to dismantle the entire prosecution, not only of the self-proclaimed innocent Lula, but also of those in Odebrecht and the like who, for example, should all be given life sentences just for the people they killed in the construction of the stadia for 2014 and 2016.

The political sterility of Brazil's party system is shown by how Lula mirrors Bolsonaro by saying ‘all right, I'll be president and I'll personally make everything better with my magical aura’ and the rest of each man's political discourse is expanding on that until the microphone's switched off.

 

[Takhisis]

Today (vice-?)presidentess Cristina Kirchner has managed to force the Senate (which she presides) to approve the appointment of one of her personal attorneys to the bench of one of the federal courts in charge of investigating current and former officials (herself included) for corruption and abuses of power. The vote was clearly split along party lines.

The (vice)presidentess's secretary, who is also under investigation for a myriad crimes and is also represented by the attorney, claims the opposition's objections are ‘ideological’.

Is the government finally admitting that its ideology is to plunder the country?

 

[Takhisis]

In one same fell day, Argentina has left the Lima group and, in the official commemoration of the 1976 coup d'état Cristina Kirchner was introduced to the astroturfed audience as the president of the country rather than its vicepresident. The mask has dropped.

 

[Takhisis]

Elections in Ecuador: centre-right Guillermo Lasso beats Andrés Aráuz in the runoff 52.49% to 47.51%.

Elections in Peru: as of the last count I found, the leading candidate had no more than ~16% of the votes counted.

 

[Takhisis]

Venezuela's autocracy flees forward again: a new law against non-defined ‘hate’ (this includes retweeting anything the government doesn't like), as well as a cyberinsecurity campaign done with Chinese technical and antisocial know-how.

 

[innonimatu]

Regulating speech in "social networks" by calling some of it hate speech and prosecuting? Taking a page out of certain western hemisphere government's playbook...

 

[innonimatu]

6 dead in clashes during anti-government protests in Colombia.

It it had happened in the country next to it we'd have someone here going hysterical about the regime killing protesters. As it happened in Colombia... crickets?

 

[innonimatu]

DOJ Threatened MIT Researchers With Subpoena in Collaboration With Bolivian Coup Regime

Emails to the analysts show the Trump administration’s complicity with a Bolivian criminal investigation.

A Justice Department trial attorney repeatedly contacted Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers asking, eventually under threat of subpoena, about research they had conducted on the 2019 Bolivian presidential election, according to emails obtained by The Intercept. Sent between October 2020 and January 2021, the emails point to the existence of the Justice Department inquiry and add new evidence to support Bolivian allegations that the United States was implicated in its 2019 coup.

The emails reveal the Justice Department’s involvement in the Bolivian coup regime’s criminal investigation into alleged voter fraud, which has not previously been reported. The inquiry targeted a pair of respected MIT researchers about their work for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in which they broadly refuted suspicions that Bolivia’s socialist party had rigged the election.

The short-lived coup regime reached power following a clear script: In the weeks leading up to the Bolivian presidential election in October 2019, the opposition pumped endless propaganda through social media and television networks, warning that incumbent President Evo Morales would exploit widespread fraud to win reelection. Morales had become the first Indigenous president elected in Bolivia in 2005, at the head of his party Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, and by 2019, he was running for his fourth term. He faced intense opposition, often framed in explicitly racist terms, from a Frankenstein coalition of right-wing Bolivians of European descent and supporters of former President Carlos Mesa, once a member of Bolivia’s left revolutionary party who had become hostile to Morales’s social democratic government.

Remember the right-wingers here spreading the propaganda about the "election theft by Morales" in Bolivia? Justification for the coup to overthrow the elected government. The US was behind it and has been seeking to cover the trail.

I wonder, where else has someone preemptively claimed election fraud and sought ways to overturn an election... who says foreign policy can't be a template for home?
Wouldn't be happening in the US because the wealthy and the bureaucracy weren't backing a coup, of course. But the idea stuck it seems.

 

[Samson]

I know nothing about the area, so could be spreading fake news or saying what everyone knows, but this sounds so totally messed up:

The rise of Brazil’s neo-Pentecostal narco-militia
In Rio de Janeiro, drug trafficking factions, paramilitaries and evangelical churches have united to fight a ‘holy war’ against their rivals

Israeli flags fly from the highest spots of the hills surrounding the Cidade Alta favela in the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Checkpoints, raised to prevent the entry of police and rival groups, display the Star of David to warn passers-by whose territory they are entering. In a bunker used by drug traffickers, police find ammunition for anti-aircraft machine guns, ballistic vests and a copy of the Torah, the holy book of Judaism.

In the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic, criminal groups have taken control of five favelas in Rio’s outskirts, establishing what they call the Israel Complex (Complexo do Israel). Drug traffickers and paramilitaries, historic rivals in the dispute for territorial control, have joined forces to advance their illegal business. The Israel Complex is led by Álvaro Rosa, a drug lord who goes under the nickname Aaron - the biblical brother of Moses - in alliance with former police officers linked to the paramilitary group Crime Bureau (Escritório do Crime), a well-known death squad held responsible for several crimes, including the murder of councilwoman Marielle Franco in 2018.

Today, the group exercises control over at least 130,000 people. Residents of the region say they have lost their freedom of movement and of worship. The Israel Complex has destroyed Afro-Brazilian Candomblé temples and expelled the pais and mães de santo, Candomblé priests, from its territory. White clothing, usually associated with practitioners of Afro-Brazilian religions, is now forbidden.

The establishment of the Israel Complex marks a new phenomenon, even for crisis-prone Rio de Janeiro: the unification of drug trafficking factions, paramilitary forces, and neo-Pentecostal churches, waging a “holy war” not only against competing criminal groups, but also against Afro-Brazilian religions.
​

 

[Traitorfish]

This reads like the premise of a Far Cry game.