May 10, 2013

The New York Times on Venezuela and Honduras: A Case of Journalistic Misconduct

The New York Times on Venezuela and Honduras: A Case of Journalistic Misconduct

May 8 2013
Keane Bhatt

The day after Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez died, New York Times reporter Lizette Alvarez provided a sympathetic portrayal of “outpourings of raucous celebration and, to many, cautious optimism for the future” in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Her article, “Venezuelan Expatriates See a Reason to Celebrate,” noted that many had come to Miami to escape Chávez’s “iron grip on the nation,” and quoted a Venezuelan computer software consultant who said, bluntly: “We had a dictator. There were no laws, no justice.”(1)


Photo Credit: The Guardian

A credulous reader of Alvarez’s report would have no idea that since 1998, Chávez had triumphed in 14 of 15 elections or referenda, all of which were deemed free and fair by international monitors. Chávez’s most recent reelection, won by an 11-point margin, boasted an 81% participation rate; former president Jimmy Carter described the “election process in Venezuela” as “the best in the world” out of 92 cases that the Carter Center had evaluated (an endorsement that, to date, has never been reported by the Times).(2)

In contrast to Alvarez, who allowed her quotation describing Chávez as a dictator to stand uncontested, Times reporter Neela Banerjee in 2008 cited false accusations hurled at President Obama by opponents—“he is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koran”—but immediately invalidated them: “In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible,” she wrote in her next sentence.(3) At the Times, it seems, facts are deployed on a case-by-case basis.

The Times editorial board was even more dishonest in the wake of Chávez’s death: “The Bush administration badly damaged Washington’s reputation throughout Latin America when it unwisely blessed a failed 2002 military coup attempt against Mr. Chávez,” wrote the paper, concealing its editorial board’s own role in blessing that very coup at the time. In 2002, with the “resignation [sic] of President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator,” declared a Times editorial, bizarrely adding that “Washington never publicly demonized Mr. Chávez,” that actual dictator Pedro Carmona was simply “a respected business leader,” and that the U.S.-backed, two-day coup was “a purely Venezuelan affair.”(4)

The editorial board—an initial champion of the de facto regime that issued a diktat within hours to dissolve practically every branch of government, including Venezuela’s National Assembly and Supreme Court—would 11 years later brazenly criticize Chávez after his death for having “dominated Venezuelan politics for 14 years with authoritarian methods.” The newspaper argued that Chávez’s government “weakened judicial independence, intimidated political opponents and human rights defenders, and ignored rampant, and often deadly, violence by the police and prison guards.” After lambasting Chávez’s record, the piece concluded that the United States “should now make clear its support for democratic and civilian transition in a post-Chávez Venezuela”—as if Chávez were anyone other than a fairly elected leader with an overwhelming popular mandate.

But there is a country currently in the grip of an undemocratic, illegitimate government that much more closely corresponds with the Times editorial board’s depiction of Venezuela: Honduras, which in 2009 suffered a coup d’état that deposed its freely elected, left-leaning president, Manuel Zelaya.

While the Times criticized Chávez for weakening judicial independence, the newspaper could not be bothered to even report on the extraordinary institutional breakdown of Honduras, when in December 2012, its Congress illegally sacked four Supreme Court justices who voted against a law proposed by the president, Porfirio Lobo, who himself had came to power in 2009 in repressive, sham elections held under a post-coup military dictatorship and boycotted by most international election observers.

When it comes to intimidation of political opponents and human rights defenders, Venezuela’s problems are almost imperceptible compared with those of Honduras. Over 14 years under Chávez, Venezuela has had no record of disappearances or murders of such individuals. In post-coup Honduras, the practice is now endemic. In one year alone—2012—at least four leaders of the Zelaya-organized opposition party Libre were slain, including mayoral candidate Edgardo Adalid Motiño. In addition, two dozen journalists and 70 members of the LGBT community have been killed since the coup, including prominent LGBT anti-coup activists like Walter Tróchez and Erick Martinez (neither case was sufficiently notable so as to warrant a mention in the Times).

And although the Times editors decried police violence in Venezuela, the Honduran police systematically engage in extrajudicial killings of their own citizens. In December 2012, Julieta Castellanos, the chancellor of Honduras’s largest university, presented the findings of a report detailing 149 killings committed by the Honduran National Police over the past two years under Porfirio Lobo. In the face of over six killings by the police a month, she warned, “It is alarming that the police themselves are the ones killing people in this country. The public is in a state of defenselessness and impunity.”(5) Such alarm is further justified by Lobo’s appointment of Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla as director of the National Police, despite reports that he once oversaw death squads.(6)

Finally, the Times editorial board lamented Venezuelan prison violence. But consider for context that the NGO Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, consistently critical of Chávez, reported 591 prison deaths in 2012 for the country of 30 million.(7) In Honduras, a country with slightly more than a quarter of Venezuela’s population, over 360 died in just one incident—a 2012 prison fire in Comayagua, in which prison authorities kept firefighters from handling the conflagration for 30 crucial minutes while the inmates’ doors remained locked. According to survivors, the guards ignored their pleas for help as many burned alive.(8)

Given the contrast in the two countries’ democratic credentials and human rights records, obvious questions arise: How has The New York Times portrayed Venezuela and Honduras since Honduras’s 2009 coup d’état? If, in both its news and opinion pages, the Times regularly prints accusations of Venezuelan authoritarianism, what terminology has the Times employed to describe the military government headed by Roberto Micheletti, which assumed power after Zelaya’s overthrow, or the illegitimate Lobo administration that succeeded it?

The answer is revealing. For almost four years, the Times has maintained a double standard that is literally unfailing. Not a single contributor in the Times’ over 100 news and opinion articles has ever referred to the Honduran government as “autocratic,” “undemocratic,” or “authoritarian.” Nor have Times writers ever once labeled Micheletti or Lobo “despots,” “tyrants,” “strongmen,” “dictators,” or “caudillos.”

At the same time, from June 28, 2009, to March 7, 2013, the newspaper has printed at least 15 news and opinion articles in which its contributors have used any number of the aforementioned epithets for Chávez.(9) (This methodology excludes the typically vitriolic anti-Chávez blog entries that the paper features on its website, as well as print pieces like Lizette Alvarez’s, which quote someone describing Chávez as a dictator.)

During this period, the paper’s news reporters themselves have referred to Chávez as a “despot,” an “authoritarian ruler,” and an “autocrat”; its opinion writers have deemed him a “petro-dictator,” an “indomitable strongman,” a “brutal neo-authoritarian,” a “warmonger,” and a “colonel-turned-oil-sultan.” On the eve of Venezuela’s October elections, a Times op-ed managed to call the Chávez administration “authoritarian” no fewer than three times in 800 words.(10) And Chávez’s death offered no reprieve from this tendency: On March 6, reporter Simon Romero wrote about Chávez’s gait—he “strutt[ed] like the strongman in a caudillo novel”—and concluded that Chávez had “become, indeed, a caudillo.”(11)

These most basic violations of journalistic standards—referring to a democratically elected leader as a ruler with absolute power—does not simply end with its writers. On July 24, 2011, Bill Keller, then the newspaper’s executive editor, wrote the piece, “Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal,” which included a graphic of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe side by side with Chávez. Keller referred to them both when he concluded, “Autocrats will be autocrats.”(12)

But if despotism, defined as the cruel and oppressive exercise of absolute power, is to have any meaning, it must apply to the Honduran government, whose military—not just its police—routinely kills innocent civilians. On May 26, 2012, for example, Honduran special forces killed 15-year-old Ebed Yanez, and high-level officers allegedly managed its cover-up by dispatching “six to eight masked soldiers in dark uniforms” to the teenager’s body, poking it with rifles, and “[picking] up the empty bullet casings” to conceal evidence that could be linked back to the military, according to the Associated Press.13

The paradox of the Times—its derisive posture toward what it considers antidemocratic tendencies in Venezuela as it simultaneously avoids the same treatment of Honduras’s inarguable repression—can only be explained by one crucial factor: Honduras has been a firm U.S. ally since Zelaya’s overthrow.


Photo Credit: SOA Watch

In fact, the unit accused of killing Yanez was armed, trained, and vetted by the United States—even its trucks were donated by the U.S. government. As the AP further reported, in 2012, the U.S. Defense Department appropriated $67.4 million for Honduran military contracts, with an additional “$89 million in annual spending to maintain Joint Task Force Bravo, a 600-member U.S. unit based at Soto Cano Air Base.” Furthermore, “neither the State Department nor the Pentagon could provide details explaining a 2011 $1.3 billion authorization for exports of military electronics to Honduras.”14

The Times’ scrupulous, unerring record of avoiding disparaging characterizations of Honduras’s human-rights-violating government may explain why it has never once made reference to 94 Congress members’ demand that the Obama administration withhold U.S. assistance to the Honduran military and police in March 2012. Nor has the paper reported on 84 Congress members’ letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton later that year, condemning Honduras’s “institutional breakdown” and “judicial impunity.”15

When evaluating the newspaper’s relative silence on Honduras, it is worth imagining if Chávez were to have ascended to power in as dubious a manner as Lobo; if for years Venezuela’s government permitted its security apparatus to regularly kill civilians; or if the Chávez administration presided over conditions of impunity under which political opponents and human rights activists were disappeared, tortured, and killed.

As a careful examination of the language and coverage of nearly four years of New York Times articles reveals, concern for freedom and democracy in Latin America has not been an honest concern for the liberal media institution. The paper’s unwavering conformity to the posture of the U.S. State Department—consistently vilifying an official U.S. enemy while systematically downplaying the crimes of a U.S. ally—shows that its foremost priority is to subordinate itself to the priorities of Washington.


----
Notes:
1. Lizette Alvarez, ““Venezuelan Expatriates See a Reason to Celebrate,” The New York Times, March 6, 2013.

2. Keane Bhatt, “A Hall of Shame for Venezuelan Elections Coverage,” Manufacturing Contempt (blog), nacla.org, October 8, 2012.

3. Neela Banerjee, “Obama Walks a Difficult Path as He Courts Jewish Voters,” The New York Times, March 1, 2008.

4. “Hugo Chávez Departs,” The New York Times, April 13, 2002.

5. “Policías de Honduras, Responsables de 149 Muertes Violentas,” La Prensa, December 3, 2012.

6. Katherine Corcoran and Martha Mendoza, “Juan Carlos Bonilla Valladares, Honduras Police Chief, Investigated In Killing,” Associated Press, June 1, 2012.

7. Fabiola Sánchez, “Venezuela Prison Deaths: 591 Detainees Killed Country’s Jails Last Year,” Associated Press, January 31, 2013.

8. “Hundreds Killed in ‘Hellish’ Fire at Prison in Honduras,” Associated Press, February 16, 2012.

9. Author’s research, using LexisNexis database searches for identical terms in reference to the two countries. For a detailed list of examples, contact him at [email protected].

10. Francisco Toro, “How Hugo Chávez Became Irrelevant,” The New York Times, October 6, 2012.

11. Simon Romero, “Hugo Chávez, Leader Who Transformed Venezuela, Dies at 58,” The New York Times, March 6, 2013.

12. Bill Keller, “Why Tyrants Love the Murdoch Scandal,” The New York Times Magazine, July 24, 2011.

13. Alberto Arce, “Dad Seeks Justice for Slain Son in Broken Honduras,” Associated Press, November 12, 2012.

14. Martha Mendoza, “US Military Expands Its Drug War in Latin America,” Associated Press, February 3, 2013.

15. Office of Representative Jan Schakowsky, “94 House Members Send Letter to Secretary Clinton Calling for Suspension of Assistance to Honduras,” March 13, 2012. Correspondence from Jared Polis et al. to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, June 26, 2012.

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May 9, 2013

Rios Montt on Trial, but Not Reagan Officials?

Rios Montt on Trial, but Not Reagan Officials?

...

But when will a judge or a prosecutor hold accountable members of the Reagan Administration, who were helping Rios Montt do his dirtiest work? Reagan himself called Rios Montt a man of “great personal integrity.”

As the great investigative reporter Allan Nairn has pointed out, “In '82 and '83, as Gen. Rios Montt was sending military sweeps into the northwest highlands, annihilating by their own count 662 rural villages, Reagan went down, embraced Rios Montt, and said Guatemala was getting a bum rap on human rights. The U.S. military general attaché at the time told me the sweep strategy was in large part his idea, and that he was working hand in hand with [the Guatemalan military] to carry it out. It's hard to overstate the U.S. role, because the U.S. role was so extensive.”

In “The Guatemalan Connection,” a cover story Nairn wrote for the May 1986 issue of The Progressive magazine, he also pointed out a State Department role. “During the Rios Montt period, as the Reagan Administration repeatedly tried and failed to win Congressional approval for sale of the $2 million worth of helicopter parts, the State Department was giving the nod to a separate, costlier deal,” Nairn wrote. “In late 1982, it quietly approved a pair of transactions worth $40 million to supply the Guatemalan air force with two transport jets and eight T-37 trainers.”

I looked long and hard at the reports in the mainstream corporate press today to try find mention of the U.S. role in the atrocities committed by Rios Montt, but I’ve found nothing.

That’s one reason why the U.S. perpetrators go free, while Rios Montt now stands trial.

https://progressive.org/rios-montt-on-trial-but-not-reagan-officials

May 9, 2013

Breaking: Pres Perez Molina announces he will withdraw the declared state of siege... (NOT REALLY)

(There's still another one in the North, in Peten, that's rarely mentioned. I hope that one's lifted too)

May 9, 2013

"Ixil group…resisted the imposition of colonization" They hung me, they hung me from a stick"

(Excerpt below)

Tiburcio Utuy:
...

There were families going to visit that woman’s house, but the military was able to see the two women, one up ahead and the other right on the road. They caught up to the first woman and they macheted her in the head and they dragged her like a dog. They took her to a house and surrounded it. The family was there wailing. The other woman went running and the military caught up to her at her house. They took her out of the house and put her on the patio in front of the house. The military had her mother in law... They tied her up by her hands and feet. They knocked her down and opened up her stomach. She was pregnant and they took the baby from the womb. When they took the baby out they threw it against a tree in front of the house. We felt a great pain, what guilt did the baby have still in the womb of the mother?

I saw this. They burned the first house and burned the whole family inside. There was screaming inside, the children, the women, they were burned to ash. Later, when the military finished killing the pregnant women, they came down to the catechist’s house. He thought they wouldn’t kill him and so he started to pray inside his house. But then they put the mayor inside and they shot at the house killing the whole family, his whole family. They killed him. After they died they took their things, clothes and bags, and they put them on top of the people and set it afire. They were in a clay house, so the house didn’t catch fire, just the people with their things on top of them, their blankets, caught fire. They were scorched. There were two or three people. Eight or nine days after February 16, the military commissioner was there, he thought because he was a commissioner they wouldn’t kill him so he didn’t leave his house. He was there with his brother, another ex-commissioner, and there were around 5 families in the same little place. The military killed everyone, they were scorched, around 15 people, the family of the military commissioner.

We, the population, saw that we had to withdraw to the valley behind the community. We stayed in a large creek for 15 days, sending lookouts to see where military entered and also to check on the food that was left because they burned the houses. They destroyed the corn, the animals, the cows, sheep, dogs, and chickens. We stayed in the creek for 15 days. The military started burning the woods in various places so that the fire would kill the people. They thought we were still there, but we had retreated to the creek to later move to the large river, Xalbal. We crossed to the other side of the river to defend ourselves. We were there 15 days thinking, What are we going to do? Should we go to the other side of the river or go back to the community? But then we saw everyone from Xonca and other communities where there were massacres. They killed people there, I don’t know how many. In Pulai they filled the church and machine gunned them. They killed the people and the survivors came in groups. There were other groups from Latista, near Nebaj, who also came.

...

I tell you judges, I’m not lying. We couldn’t enter into the community because they were going to say, Why did you flee? We met as leaders, as survivors, and we communicated to see what we would do. We decided to leave because maybe they will come over land and kill us all. Thank God a fog came down and covered the mountain where we were and we were able to leave around 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon. We went up and then down and we arrived at Sumalito around 10pm. When we got there the people were still awake, they hadn’t gone to sleep yet, and they gave us a place to stay for a few hours. They said you can only stay here for a short while because if you stay here too long they might kill us too. They gave us permission to rest a few hours.

The next day we went down to the river. It was big. We had to cross two mountains but we gathered the huge group of people. We were 1,999 families. We were many people and we came from many places. That is why I said each group had their leaders, to guide us, to help us decide where to go. We crossed the river around three or four in the morning. It was hard to get all of the people, women, children, elderly, and pregnant women, across the river because they all had to cross using the pieces of wood in the river. We were thinking about what would we do when a helicopter came. They didn’t see us because we hid in a creek again. That’s how we left our community.

... We had to cross rivers, ravines, mountains.

... There was great suffering. Little by little we planted crops…We were able to plant malanga, sugar cane, yucca, guiskil, to keep ourselves fed in those places. We suffered greatly, there was nothing to eat. During those months in 1982, we had to eat…sweet potatoes…The cold in the mountains made us sick, gave us coughs, measles, diarrhea. Many children died in the mountains. The suffering [continued] when the military came in 1983 to Santa Clara. They camped out in bases in 5 places and they created a military fence around the people so we couldn’t get out. At that moment the food ran out, we didn’t even have wild grasses. We went out to get some handfuls of sugar cane…We weren't thinking that we might be ambushed. I walked calmly ahead, and all of a sudden the military grabbed me by the neck. I screamed. The other two turned back and ran back to the community. I said, don’t hit me, don’t kill me. They took me. They had burned everything in Santa Clara.

...

I said, "What do you mean? I don’t know."
"Yes you know. If you wont say, we’ll have to force you."
"How can I say, I can’t tell lies."
"You have to tell us."
"I don’t know."

They hung me, they hung me from a stick, I was hanging and I don’t know if it was minutes or hours because I lost feeling. Later, when I came to I was on the ground. Then my eyes lit up with red, black, and blue lights in my vision. When they saw I lifted my head, they sat me up. They said, "Tell us where the guerrilla is, where do they come from, who are they."

"I don’t know, I can’t tell lies, I’m telling the truth I don’t know."
"Oh, you don’t want to collaborate?"
"I don’t know what this 'collaborate' is, what I know of collaboration is to give some pennies, I don’t have any money, I’m poor."
"You don’t want to tell us?"
"Sirs, I don’t know."

…They tied me up by the feet and head. They had my legs backwards touching my head so that my stomach was exposed. Suddenly I felt burning in my stomach, they burned me on the stomach, the neck and the testicles.

I’m telling the truth, before the eyes of the world, I’m telling you I was hurt by the military. Here are my scars. I’m not lying, look, here are my scars. My intestines fell out onto the floor, and I felt this tremendous pain, I said, "Ay, what pain!" What suffering I felt at that moment when my intestines fell to the floor. I’m not here telling lies, what I experienced, the suffering I felt, what the military did to me, I am telling this to the whole world. When my intestines were outside, I was able to put my intestines back in with my fingers and my fingers reached all the way inside.

They said, "Está sabroso? Is it tasty?" That's what they said. The planes that passed by said that there was amnesty, that there was peace. I said to the officer, "Is this peace? They said, "Por bruto no quieres decir. Because you are stubborn, you don't want to answer." I said, "I have my animals, my sheep, my cows, my horse, my chickens. I’m not a thief, I’m not lying, I'm an agricultural worker." This is why I am telling this to the eyes and ears of the world, this is the suffering we felt then.

Later they tied me up again, seated on the floor. An officer came with a large stick, one meter long and three inches wide. They first blow was to my mouth. The force he hit me with made me fall to the floor. I turned my head because I wanted to see if he was going to keep killing me. The next blow came to my head and I fell to the other side. Then the third one was to my mouth. I lifted my head, I still had some feeling. I was left dead, for seven or eight hours, from 10am to 5:30pm. That’s what I remembered, that around 5pm I was on the floor. I was hurt with the beating they gave me, blood in my mouth, all of my clothes were already burned and now were running with blood. I woke. Then I saw that it was starting to get dark out. There was a soldier watching me and I was left outside in the drizzle all night. There was a change of guard and the soldier said, "What happened to you?" I said, "I’m in so much pain because of the military." "Because you were stupid, you didn’t collaborate." In the morning, I was there beneath the rain. Around 8am a helicopter came. They woke me. They untied my hands and feet.

They took me to the helicopter and brought me to Nebaj. In Nebaj they presented me to the people in Nebaj, to all the people that were gathered there. They put green clothes on me, a shirt, pants and cap. They said, look at the guerrilla, we captured him but they had put those clothes on me. Because I was so beaten they said to the people, "If any of you join the guerrilla, the same thing will happen to you." They brought me again to the military base, except it was not a base exactly, it was a medical post that they had turned into a military base. The officer there interviewed me.

...

They brought me to a car and there were two Galil weapons there. They brought me to Quiche and shut me up in a room larger than this one. This room was full of blood... The shoes, the belts were piled two meters high and wide, you could see the traces of people who had been killed there. They tied me up and left me sitting in blood.

This pain, this suffering, I was there in the blood of my dear brothers and sisters who had been killed. What does this mean, what does this mean? Could it be that there was not genocide during this year? I mean, by the people in the government that year, Ríos Montt. I suffered with my own body, my pain and suffering. It’s a lie when they say there was no genocide. I am telling the truth that happened because I saw it. That is what happened in 1983.

(court testimony, public record in Guatemala, no copyright)

http://nisgua.blogspot.com/2013/04/genocide-on-trial-day-7-i-am-telling.html

May 9, 2013

Guate: Rios Montt genocide trial / 2nd day of conclusions, Prosecution wraps up

May 8, 2013

Shell presses ahead with world's deepest offshore oil well (Mexico)

May 8, 2013

Mexican Worker-Run Tire Factory a Success

Mexican Worker-Run Tire Factory a Success

Union wins years long struggle against vulture capitalists and now helms one of Mexico's most successful tire factories - May 8, 13

Related thread: How Mexican Tire Workers Won Ownership of Their Plant With a 3yr Strike and Are Now Running It

...

All that changed when Enrique Peña Nieto recently passed a reform to the labor laws, a very damaging one for the workers and unions. So in November 16, 2001, in the general assembly, the possibility of accepting the money and closing the factory was discussed, just like what happened with two tire factories before ours, Good Year Oxo and Uniroyal-Michelin. In those two factories the workers were not organized. They took the compensation money and they were sent home defeated.

In our case in Euskadi, we decided we would take a very different path and fight the multinational and our government, which supported it. We needed to find a way to fight such a multinational corporation that also had the full support of the federal and state government. After all, we were only about a 1,000 workers.

...

During this process Continental tried to corrupt our leadership, they offer me a million dollars in exchange of letting them enter and empty our tire deposit which would have been a hard blow to our union and any hope to revive this factory, that would have meant our defeat because most people would have accepted the compensation money and the definitive closing of the factory.

...

An important factor in this fight was our family support; Oscar, you must know that we had to endure a very hard situation because not only we were prohibited to work since we were on strike, but also our wife and sons who had to assume the economic responsibility of the house, were put on a blacklist, so it was almost impossible for them to work on any of the 50 factories in our industrial belt.

...

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10179

May 8, 2013

Lawyers and civil organizations are incorporated as observers to audit tables

Lawyers and civil organizations are incorporated as observers to audit tables



08/05/13.- Lawyers and civil organizations will join as observers to the citizen verification audit is performed at 46% of the polling stations, according to the National Electoral Council (CNE) through a press release .

The observers will start their activity on Thursday to witness Phase Two, the fourth day of citizen verification, which will run until June 4.

...

...since last Monday, May 6, 21 auditors, 60 students, 60 technical operators and 24 political parties are reviewing the tables.

According to the provisions of Article 162 of the Electoral Act, the citizen verification involves the review of the paper ballots with the data contained exclusively in the voting record prepared by board members.

...

As of now, citizen verification in its second phase has reported zero errors in the Capital District and the states of Anzoategui, Apure Aragua. These three states were audited last Tuesday when 348 tables were verified and its144 935 paper ballots were counted.

...

http://www.ciudadccs.info/?p=420584

May 8, 2013

ELN insists on return of Canadian multinational mining titles (Colombia)

ELN insists on return of Canadian multinational mining titles

Bogota, May 8 (Prensa Latina) The National Liberation Army (ELN) today again insisted that the Canadian multinational Braewal Mining Corporation return the four mining titles stripped Norosí communities in the northern Colombian department of Bolivar.

In a statement released here, the guerrillas said that if the Government is worried about achieving a bloodless outcome in the retention of Canadian geologist Wobert Jernoc, whom the ELN has held since January 18, it "should expedite the return of these titles to their rightful owners, the traditional local miners. "

...

The government shows its interest in the Canadian's earliest release, but makes no effort to strip the titles from the Braewal Mining Corporation, added the text.

On 8 April, in another statement, the ELN asked the multinational to seek a nonmilitary solution to the retention of its VP of exploration (Wobert Jernoc). "A sign of their willingness to negotiate would be to return the securities coaxed from traditional communities Mina Seca (526.91 thousand hectares), The Fridge (880,32), Casa de Barro (200) and Las Nieves (36)" they said at the time.

http://www.prensa-latina.cu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&idioma=1&id=1391331&Itemid=1

May 8, 2013

Correa Reiterates Warning Against US. If you're so worried, go home and worry from there

Correa Reiterates Warning Against U.S. Interference



Quito, May 8 (Prensa Latina) President Rafael Correa reiterated his warning to U.S. Ambassador, Adam Namm, to comply with his diplomatic role instead of involving himself in anti-government political activities.

In conversations with reporters in the city of Guayaquil, the Ecuadorian president discounted the expulsion of the U.S. ambassador for now, but recommended that he be more considerate with this country.

Correa described the U.S. ambassador's participation in an activity organized by a journalists' guild opposed to the government, as "rude," where the alleged lack of freedom of speech in Ecuador was criticized.

...

Citing Namm's words that Washington is very concerned, Correa replied that he could go home and worry from there.

...

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1391501&Itemid=1

"Why don't the other ambassadors participate?" ... "Rarely have we seen so much betrayal of a calling by the U.S. ambassador, who is really trying to create an uncomfortable situation"

"This fact, I think, was a slip by the ambassador, which says a lot about his vision. He believes that he comes to impose conditions, and who has told him that is his role?"