Four years and an impeached president later, Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre is still in the shadows

Four years and an impeached president later, Paraguay's Curuguaty Massacre is still in the shadows

Fernanda Canofre 2 June 2016

Even if in Paraguay people know that Curuguaty did not happen as stated in the official version, they also doubt that we will ever know for sure what really happened.



The early morning of June 15, 2012 shifted Paraguay’s history. Sixty landless campesinos (peasants) — men, women and children — occupying a plot of public land measuring 2,000 square meters in the city of Curuguaty woke up to the sound of helicopters flying above their heads. Soon, 300 armed officers from the Paraguayan Army and police Special Forces arrived at the property, demanding the landless to leave the place.

It did not take long for the shooting to start. A few hours later, 17 people — 11 campesinos and six police officers — were dead. And seven days later, President Fernando Lugo would be impeached.

Almost four years after the Curuguaty massacre, the case is still dragging through Paraguay’s courts. Fourteen people, one of them a minor, were charged with crimes related to the tragedy, including criminal association, attempted homicide and the deaths of six police officers. Eleven of them are facing prosecution together in a trial that has been postponed time and again over the past year.
No police officer was ever indicted over the massacre. Not one person was formally accused of involvement in the deaths of the 11 landless campesinos.

From the beginning, complaints of rights violations have dogged authorities’ handling of the case. The United Nations’ Human Rights Committee expressed concerns over the investigation, and a UN rapporteur pointed to the fact that only campesinos were pursued for the bloodshed as indicative of the judiciary's bias.

Observers have indentified other inconsistencies in the official narrative. For instance, even though police officers claimed they were not armed when they entered the Marinakue area — the public-private land that the campesinos were occupying — photographic evidence proved otherwise.

More:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/democraciaabierta/fernanda-canofre/four-years-and-impeached-president-later-paraguays-curuguaty-mass

Meet the Fujimoris: Peru power family with a dark past

Meet the Fujimoris: Peru power family with a dark past

By Roland Lloyd Parry (AFP) 3 hours ago .

The father is in jail for crimes against humanity. Uncles and aunts have fled corruption charges. And the daughter? She's tipped to follow in dad's footsteps by becoming president.

The Fujimoris may look like one of Peru's most dysfunctional families, but they are also one of its most powerful.

Although ex-president Alberto Fujimori, 77, is in jail and in frail health, his children are looking to cement a dynasty.

His daughter Keiko, 41, leads the opinion polls as she seeks to become Peru's first female president in a presidential runoff election this coming Sunday.



Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/meet-the-fujimoris-peru-power-family-with-a-dark-past/article/466882#ixzz4ASZ0OzAL

Forgotten through time, ancient Kuelap in Peru an ethereal escape

Forgotten through time, ancient Kuelap in Peru an ethereal escape

MELANIE CHAMBERS
KUELAP, PERU — Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Jun. 02, 2016 3:28PM EDT
Last updated Thursday, Jun. 02, 2016 3:58PM EDT


[font size=1]
Matched in grandeur only by the Machu Picchu, the ruined citadel city of Kuelap is made up of milions of cubic feet and
stones. (Rafal Cichawa)
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The taxi climbs endless switchbacks until we’re level with the clouds. Then, after a two-kilometre walk to a breathless elevation of 3,000 metres, I’m a speck against the ancient and dramatic 20-metre-high stone walls of Kuelap, dubbed the Machu Picchu of the North.

Not much is known about the mysterious ruins or the Chachapoyas, the Cloud Warriors, who lived here in the northern Andes almost 800 years before the Incas.

Feeling like the walls are closing in as I walk through the narrow west entrance, I pass under giant red bromeliad flowers and twisted mossy trees busting through the stones. The site was discovered in 1843 – abandoned after the Incas conquered the Chachapoyas before the Spanish arrived. Much of it was damaged by poor water drainage, fires and wind erosion.

In 2004, Kuelap was put on the World Monuments Watch list. Much of the ruins in the region are steadily deteriorating and still unknown to travellers – even to locals, as I discover.

Bookended by a rain forest to the east and a canyon to the west, this unrestored and quiet area, part cloud forest and part tropics, is like a new world for a lover of unusual and distinctive places. But that will soon change. In July (local workers predict that it will be more like October), the region will open a high-speed gondola from the village of Tingo Nuevo. It will take 20 minutes to reach Kuelap, compared with the current hour-and-half drive or four-hour hike.

More:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/forgotten-through-time-ancient-kuelap-in-peru-an-ethereal-escape/article30248270/

Amazon Tribes Resist US Anthropologists' Attempt to Forcibly Contact the Uncontacted

Amazon Tribes Resist US Anthropologists' Attempt to Forcibly Contact the Uncontacted
Wednesday, June 01, 2016
Common Dreams

In the absence of government support, Indigenous peoples are increasingly speaking out in defense of uncontacted tribes

Lauren McCauley, staff writer

Fighting back against the notion, put forth by American academics, that isolated tribes must be forced into contact with the modern world, Amazonian Indians are warning of another potential Indigenous "genocide" if such ideas come to pass.

U.S. anthropologists Kim Hill, a professor at Arizona State University, and University of Missouri associate professor Robert Walker, have argued that in order to ensure the survival of the most remote tribal people they must be "contacted in a controlled way."

However, the people of the Amazon disagree.

Survival International, an international nonprofit that champions the rights of tribal people, said in a press statement Tuesday that at least one local tribe, the Guajajara, "have acted to protect nearby uncontacted Awá people in the absence of greater government support."

Olimpio Guajajara, the leader of the "Guajajara Guardians," as they call themselves, said in a video uploaded by the organization: "We are here...monitoring the land and defending the uncontacted Indians and the Guajajara who live here. Why? Because there are some people, some anthropologists in other countries who want, once again, to violate the rights of the uncontacted Indians in the country."

"We are aware that some anthropologists have been calling for 'controlled contact' with the uncontacted Indians," Olimpio continued. "We will not allow this to happen because it will be another genocide of a people...of an Indigenous group which doesn’t want contact."

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/06/01/amazon-tribes-resist-us-anthropologists-attempt-forcibly-contact-uncontacted

Hillary’s Role in Honduran Coup Sunk US Relations With Latin America to a New Low

June 1, 2016
Hillary’s Role in Honduran Coup Sunk US Relations With Latin America to a New Low

by Dan Beeton – Ming Chun Tang

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down with the New York Daily News editorial board in April, she was asked what must have been a surprising and unwelcome question. In the years since the 2009 coup in Honduras, there has been remarkably little scrutiny in the major media of how Clinton’s State Department handled it, and she has had to answer few questions about it.

But Juan González asked why she resisted cutting off aid to the coup regime and instead brokered a deal for new elections. Clinton controversially doubled down on defending the coup, outrageously suggesting that the oligarchs and generals who had forced President Manuel Zelaya out had a legal justification. Worse, she suggested that Honduras emulate Plan Colombia: the U.S.-funded war on drugs and guerrillas that sparked the biggest internal refugee crisis in the world outside of Syria, involved the deliberate killing of thousands of innocent civilians by Colombian armed forces, and fostered death squads now poised to stick around even as the country nears an end to its civil war.

Honduras also pops up in Clinton’s memoir, “Hard Choices.” The paperback edition, published shortly after she launched her presidential campaign, is roughly 100 pages shorter than the original hardcover edition, but some of the abridgments seem rather convenient. In her original account of the coup and its aftermath, which was entirely deleted from the paperback, Clinton openly admits to having intervened directly to prevent Zelaya from returning to office:

In the subsequent days (after the coup) I spoke with my counterparts around the hemisphere, including Secretary Espinosa in Mexico. We strategized on a plan to restore order in Honduras and ensure that free and fair elections could be held quickly and legitimately, which would render the question of Zelaya moot and give the Honduran people a chance to choose their own future.