B.C. First Nation and partners propose new $10B LNG megaproject
Kyle Bakx 

© Nisga’a Lisims Government Construction of the Ksi Lisims liquified natural gas facility could begin in 2024. The proposed site is located at Wil Milit, approximately 15 kilometres northwest of Gingolx, a B.C. coastal community about 80 kilometres north of…

A First Nation in British Columbia is proposing a new liquified natural gas (LNG) export facility to be built on the community's treaty land and is making an environmental pledge to reach net-zero emissions within three years of commencing operations.

The Nisga'a Nation, whose territory is north of Prince Rupert near the Alaska border, is partnering with a group of Western Canadian natural gas producers called Rockies LNG Partners and a Texas-based energy company called Western LNG.

The project is called Ksi Lisims LNG and would include a pipeline to transport natural gas from the northeast corner of the province to the coast. The facility itself is estimated to cost $10 billion.

The chilled natural gas would be loaded onto ships and exported to Asia.

The project proponents are scheduled to announce the project on Monday, and will begin applying for the necessary government permits and start formal talks with communities in the region.

The project will undergo an environmental assessment as part of a joint-regulatory review by the federal, provincial and Nisga'a governments.

In 2000, the Nisga'a and the governments of Canada and B.C. signed a treaty that gave the Nisga'a control over about 2,000 square kilometres of territory in the Nass Valley in B.C.'s northwest.

© CBC News The proposed site for the Ksi Lisims LNG project.

"We want to bring sustainable economic activity, not only to the Nass Valley but to the region. It's going to also assist in helping to fight poverty and to bring a prosperous future," said Nisga'a Nation President Eva Clayton, in an interview.

The project comes at a time when many other LNG proposals for B.C.'s coast have either been shelved or cancelled.

Asian prices for LNG are at multi-year highs as global demand for natural gas is robust to meet the power generation needs of many countries this summer.
Negotiations for pipeline construction

Ownership of Ksi Lisims LNG is still being determined as the proponents continue to finalize commercial agreements.

The economic impact of Ksi Lisims LNG is estimated to be $55-billion including the facility, pipeline and the production of natural gas over 30 years.

"It is a big project. It's a lot of money. But will the economics be there for it in the long run?" said Martin King, a natural gas analyst with RBN Energy.

"That's the ultimate arbiter of everything that happens in building these projects — will it meet economic thresholds?"

Ksi Lisims LNG is negotiating with two companies to build a pipeline.

Enbridge's Westcoast Connector Gas Transmission project and TC Energy's Prince Rupert Gas Transmission project both already have environmental approvals in place as they were meant to transport natural gas for now-cancelled LNG export projects in the Prince Rupert area.
Net-zero goal

Company officials say the LNG facility could be operational in late-2027 or 2028 and reach net zero emissions within three years of startup through the use of hydroelectricity, energy efficiency, carbon offsets and potential carbon capture and storage.

Net-zero emissions mean that any emissions of greenhouse gases produced are offset by other measures.

"The nation is very much concerned with the ever-changing climate," said Clayton. "We want to be able to assist with providing low-carbon energy."

The floating liquefaction facility would be located near the village of Gingolx, a coastal community about 80 kilometres north of Prince Rupert. The project will be capable of producing 12 million tonnes of LNG per year and generate 4,000 construction jobs.

The facility would be nearly the same size as the first phase of the LNG Canada project, which is led by Shell Canada and is now under construction near Kitimat. The initial phase would be able to export 14 million tonnes of natural gas.

A much smaller project near Squamish, Woodfibre LNG, is expected to reach a final investment decision later this year on its proposed facility, which will produce 2.1 million tonnes of LNG per year.

Last month, the Haisla Nation announced a partnership with Pembina Pipeline on a three-million-tonnes planned project near Kitimat called Cedar LNG.

No matter the project, some environmental leaders say natural gas projects may struggle to compete financially with renewable sources of energy, since the cost of wind and solar electricity has fallen considerably in recent years.

Critics also say hydrogen is emerging as a competing source of energy to the LNG industry.

"The long-term future isn't LNG, it's cleaner fuels," said Merran Smith, executive director of Clean Energy Canada.

climate change conference 2021

Move faster to cut emissions, developing world tells rich nations

More than 100 poorer nation governments demand action from rich world before Cop26 climate talks

A woman collects drinking water in Satkhira, Bangladesh. Bangladesh is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change. 

Photograph: Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock


Fiona Harvey

Environment correspondent
Thu 15 Jul 2021 

Rich countries must move faster to cut greenhouse gas emissions and provide financial assistance to their less wealthy counterparts to cope with the climate crisis, governments from the developing world have said.

Poor nations have been frustrated with the slow progress at the recent G7 leaders’ summit and meetings of the G20 group of major economies.

More than 100 developing country governments have joined together in Thursday’s demand for clear action from the rich world before Cop26, the vital UN climate talks to be held in Glasgow in November. Cop26 is the most important meeting on the climate emergency since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015, and is intended to put the world on track to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Sonam P Wangdi of Bhutan, the chair of the least developed countries (LDC) group at Cop26, said: “Despite Covid understandably taking the headlines, climate change has been getting worse over the past year as emissions continue to rise and the lives and livelihoods on the frontline suffer.

“We vulnerable countries are not asking for much – just that richer countries, who have caused this problem, take responsibility by cutting their emissions and keeping their promise to help those their emissions have harmed.”

Countries responsible for about two-thirds of global emissions have declared long-term targets of reaching net zero emissions by around the middle of this century, but many have not set out clear plans for doing so. Scientists say emissions must halve this decade to stay within 1.5C, beyond which extreme weather will take hold.

The LDC group has published five demands, calling for developed countries to bring forward and strengthen their national plans for cutting their emissions this decade; provide $100bn (£73bn) a year in climate finance to the poor world; help poor countries to adapt to the ravages of extreme weather; accept their responsibilities in contributing to loss and damage to poor countries from the impacts of climate breakdown; and bring the Paris agreement into full effect.

One of the major sticking points for the Cop26 talks is the rich world’s failure to make good on a promise originally made in 2009 that $100bn a year in climate finance would flow to poor countries by 2020 to help them cut emissions and cope with the impacts of global heating.

Tanguy Gahouma-Bekale of Gabon, the chair of the Africa group of negotiators, said: “Developed countries are currently not pulling their weight or keeping their promises on their obligations to provide climate finance. Like any negotiation, you need to have faith that pledges and commitments will be met. In 2009 and 2015, they promised to deliver climate finance by 2020. Yet this is still to be met, and we don’t have a clear plan to achieve it.”


Deadly heat: how rising temperatures threaten workers from Nicaragua to Nepal

As the host of Cop26, the UK has caused particular concern among poor nations by cutting overseas aid by about a third, from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%, a cut MPs confirmed in a vote this week. Climate experts, senior diplomats and political leaders in the developing world have repeatedly said this sends a poor signal to developing countries, whose backing will be crucial to seal a climate deal at Glasgow ahead of Cop26.

Gahouma-Bekale said Cop26 “comes as countries are rebuilding from the Covid pandemic. This is a rare chance to build back better and put the world on course for a safe climate”.

The LDC group’s five points are similar to the aims set out by the UK presidency, including strengthening targets on emissions cuts. In setting out their aims three months before the talks begin, however, developing countries are showing thier frustration with the slow pace of negotiations.

Mohamed Adow, the director of the thinktank Power Shift Africa, said: “Developing countries see the lack of progress being made by the likes of the G7 and G20 and have fired the starting gun on the negotiations. Considering the lack of leadership we’ve seen from richer countries, it’s good we’re seeing vulnerable nations upping the urgency.”

A COP26 spokesperson said: “We have been clear that for COP26 to be a success, the voices of climate vulnerable countries must be heard loud and clear. These objectives align closely with the ambitious goals we have set out for COP26, and which the COP26 President has been pressing in his regular conversations with leaders, decision-makers, civil society and businesses around the world. On each of these issues we are bringing countries together to resolve differences and set the direction for our shared future.”

Politicians from across world call for ‘global green deal’ to tackle climate crisis


New alliance urges governments to work together to deliver a just transition to a green economy

Flood damage in Schuld, Germany on Sunday. Ilhan Omar, a US congresswoman for Minnesota, said the recent extreme weather around the world should serve as a warning. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images


Fiona Harvey

Environment correspondent
Mon 19 Jul 2021 

People around the world need a “global green deal” that would tackle the climate crisis and restore the natural world as we recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of politicians from the UK, Europe and developing countries has said.

The Global Alliance for a Green New Deal is inviting politicians from legislatures in all countries to work together on policies that would deliver a just transition to a green economy ahead of Cop26 UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.

The alliance includes Caroline Lucas, the Green party’s only MP, and Labour’s Clive Lewis, as well as MEPs, representatives in Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia and the US among other countries.

Ilhan Omar, a US congresswoman for Minnesota, said the recent extreme weather in the US and around the world should serve as a warning. “Climate change is here and it is an existential threat to humanity. We have already seen the horrifying repercussions of failing to act – wildfires raging across the west coast [of the US], extreme hurricanes, heatwaves in Australia, massive flooding around the world. Natural disasters like these will only get worse unless we act as a global community to counteract this devastation.”


How data could save Earth from climate change

The alliance wants governments to put measures in place that would boost the green economy as well as collaborating on global vaccine access for Covid and debt restructuring for the world’s poorest nations. They will seek to share knowledge around the world of successful initiatives, such as the decarbonisation plan recently put forward in Costa Rica

Many government leaders have promised to “build back better” from the pandemic but few countries are investing in the new infrastructure needed. Recent research by Vivid Economics found that only about a tenth of the $17tn being spent globally on rescuing stricken economies was going on projects that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions or restore nature.

However, more than $3tn was being poured into measures and industries that actively harmed the environment, such as coal and other fossil fuels.

Manon Aubry, a French MEP, said governments must focus on social justice and the climate. “As the consequences of the climate crisis become more and more alarming, inequalities are growing and the poorest are hit hardest by the impacts of a changing climate. If we want fair, systematic and effective climate policies, we need a radical shift away from free trade and free-market ideology.”

The alliance currently has 21 members from 19 countries. Joenia Wapichana, the first indigenous woman ever to be elected federal representative in Brazil, said: “I understand how important it is that we all take responsibility for a green new deal. That’s why I am joining this alliance – to join forces so my work in parliament can contribute to the strengthening of the legislative process in defence of collective rights, the environment and in defence of indigenous peoples.”

Paola Vega, Costa Rican congresswoman and president of the special permanent commission for the environment of the legislative assembly of the Republic of Costa Rica, said a green deal would require a transformation of the way governments treat ecological problems, and in the way people live.

“Unless our countries, and the diverse alliances and range of powers that govern them, create enough pressure for collective action that changes the rules of the game, we will fall short of the urgent measures that we need to be able to address the massive challenges that we face today,” she said. “It’s important that we are clear that this means an absolute change of paradigm: a change in the way we live, the way we consume and produce.

ECOCIDE & FEMICIDE

Land defenders: will the Cáceres verdict break the ‘cycle of violence’ in Honduras?

Conviction of businessman who conspired in murder of indigenous rights activist Berta Cáceres raises hopes of end to impunity

A vigil by the indigenous rights group Copinh at the trial of Roberto David Castillo. Photograph: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty

Global development is supported by


Lizzy Davies
Thu 15 Jul 2021 1

When Bertha Zuñiga heard that a former Honduran army intelligence officer and businessman had been found guilty of collaborating in the murder of her mother, Berta Cáceres, she breathed a big sigh of relief. Five years after the environmental campaigner was assassinated by hired hitmen, this was the verdict her family and friends had been waiting for.

“I know there is still a long road, maybe very long and very hard, but to have achieved a guilty verdict against the [former] president of a corporation, [who is] connected to the armed forces: it is unprecedented in our country,” says Zuñiga, 30.

For her, last week’s conviction of Roberto David Castillo, the former head of the hydroelectric company Desarrollos Energéticos, or Desa, as a co-conspirator in the murder sends a clear message “of hope in a country of so much impunity and so much violence”.

Roberto David Castillo, former head of the Desa hydroelectric company, was found to have used paid informants and his military contacts to monitor Berta Cáceres for years. Photograph: Fredy Rodriguez/Reuters

But the fact that the message was needed shows how much work there is yet to do in a country regularly cited among the most dangerous places in the world to be an environmental or land defender.

“We have to continue the fight,”says Zuñiga, who took over her mother’s role as general coordinator of the indigenous rights organisation Copinh. “Our work, our struggle for justice in the case of our mother, will contribute to this important cause of ensuring there is no repetition of this kind of crime in our country.”
To have achieved a guilty verdict against the former president of a corporation is unprecedented in HondurasBertha Zuñiga

The murder of Cáceres in March 2016 briefly focused international attention on the situation in Honduras. The 45-year-old was killed after spending years opposing the construction of a hydroelectric dam in an area of western Honduras deemed sacred to the Lenca people.

But, despite the global outrage, there has been no improvement in the plight of Honduran activists, who complain of facing intimidation, ranging from harassment and smear campaigns to death threats and illegal detention. According to a new analysis, the number of incidents involving female human rights defenders rose from 203 in 2016 to 475 in 2017.

The research by IM-Defensoras, an organisation representing female rights defenders in Central America, found seven other women who were engaged in similar struggles had been killed. There had also been 34 attempted murders since 2016, it found. That figure dwarfs those from Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico and Nicaragua. Between 2016 and 2019, 48% of all incidents targeting female defenders in the region occurred in Honduras.

Lydia Alpízar, co-director of IM-Defensoras, said the data painted a clear picture of Honduras as a place whereenvironmentalists were at high risk, even by the standards of the troubled region. Activists say that since the 2009 coup, when the military deposed the leftwing president Manuel Zelaya, the state has worked hand in hand with big industrial companies to pursue environmentally destructive projects, with scant regard for the rights of indigenous people.

Children paint a sign during a ceremony to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the murder of Berta Cáceres, in La Esperanza, in March last year. Photograph: Orlando Sierra/AFP via Getty Images

“They are protecting their ancestral lands, and they’re in the way, and in the case of Honduras you can see clearly that opposing this model is lethal. You can get killed or criminalised, or pushed from your land,” says Alpízar.

In recent years the black indigenous Garifuna people, who are fighting to save their land from drug traffickers, palm-oil magnates and tourism developers, have been particularly badly hit. Last year five Garifuna fishermen from the town of Triunfo de la Cruz were abducted by armed men in police uniforms and have not been heard of since. At least five women involved with the struggle to protect Garifuna land and culture have been killed since 2019. One of them, María Digna Montero, a teacher, was shot several times at her home on 12 October 2019, known as the Day of Indigenous Resistance to mark the date that Columbus and his fleet landed in the Americas.

Members of the Garifuna ethnic group outside the supreme court in Tegucigalpa last year protesting at abductions from Triunfo de la Cruz by armed men in police uniform. Photograph: Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty

Activists say female defenders face different pressures to their male counterparts. Women often find themselves the target of smear campaigns in the local media, and of unwarranted police investigations; they report sexual harassment while in detention. An additional difficulty comes from within their own communities and from their families, who sometimes disapprove of their leadership role, says Alpízar.

Opposing this model [of development] is lethal. You can get killed or criminalised, or pushed from your landLydia Alpízar

“Women who dare to be defenders are completely breaking the traditional gender roles, because women are supposed to be submissive and be in the private sphere. What you’re seeing in so many of these movements … is that women are playing a very crucial role,” says Alpízar.

“And this is important because it means that when they experience violence ... it is actually exemplary violence that is trying to show other women what happens when you take these kinds of leadership roles that are strong, and that are associated with men.”

Defenders hope the conviction of Castillo will send a message that such murders will not go unpunished in future – but they accept that this would signal a big leap from the current situation. Castillo, who is expected to appeal against the verdict, is due to be sentenced next month. Seven other men have already been convicted and sentenced for their roles in the murder.

Bertha Zuñiga celebrating after a judge found Roberto David Castillo guilty of collaborating in the 2016 murder of her mother, Berta Cáceres. Photograph: Fredy Rodriguez/Reuters

Zuñiga urges global financial institutions to think carefully before they invest in projects in Honduras. “We need to stop the flow of financing, the flow of resources and international support to corporate actors that are supporting these kinds of criminal behaviours and violations,” she says.

She urged the US president, Joe Biden, to get tough with Juan Orlando Hernández, the Honduran president, arguing that if the US is to succeed in curbing migration from the “northern triangle” of Central America, it must stop supporting regimes “that are violators of human rights”.

Honduras has yet to sign the Escazú agreement, the first environmental human rights treaty in Latin America and the Caribbean, which came into force on 22 April and requires signatories to protect environmental defenders.


Berta Cáceres assassination: ex-head of dam company found guilty

Read more

Francisca Stuardo, who works for the environmental campaign group Global Witness in Latin America, said moves by the EU to require businesses to conduct due diligence throughout their supply chains were “a huge opportunity” for companies facing accusations of human rights abuses in Honduras to be held accountable.

In March, the European parliament called on the European Commission to propose legislation that would apply not only to companies based in the EU but to those doing business there, obliging them to mitigate against harmful effects in the fields of human rights, environmentalism and governance, and ensure victims of corporate abuse can hold companies liable.

“Honduras is repeating this cycle of violence because no one is being held accountable, because of impunity and also because of a lack of supervision from the international community,” says Stuardo.

“The international community now has a duty [to] support what defenders are looking for, which is nothing more than justice, democracy, a better life, a safe environment.”

Written in the wild: the best radical nature writing

The gates to the garden of nature writing are being prised open by a new generation of talent. Photograph: Garfotos/Alamy

From This Land Is Our Land to Why Rebel, the message is that if we take heed of the natural world, we can heal ourselves

Nick Hayes
Mon 19 Jul 2021 1
English nature writing can be a bit polite. Decorating nature with adjectives has become something of a fashion in the last decade, but there are some books whose verve is a wildflower seed bomb to the neat lawns of English prose.

Principal among these are any of the books written by the magus of human experience in the wild, Jay Griffiths. From Wild, to Kith, to Why Rebel, her latest collection of essays, there is an energy in her words that feels like being chased by wolves. Best of them all is Tristimania: A Diary of Manic Depression, which describes with hyperreal force the electrical storms of the mind, the eerie twilight of mania.


Jay Griffiths: ‘I walked 800km in a heatwave to get out of a severe depression’
There are many books that shine a light on the otherwise unmentioned elephant in the room of writing about English nature: that we are allowed access to so little of it. Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth deals with the issue on a global level, and Guy Shrubsole’s excellent Who Owns England? focuses on this country. Ask any land rights campaigner, and the book that inspired them was Marion Shoard’s This Land Is Our Land. Shoard worked for several years for CPRE, the countryside charity, and was fully integrated into the system of land ownership in England and yet, or thus, wrote three excoriating books about its iniquities: The Theft of the Countryside, Right to Roam, and This Land Is Our Land. The last is a comprehensive history of how we lost our rights to land, from William the Conqueror to the modern day.

At long last, the gates to the English garden of nature writing are being prised open by a new generation of talent from communities previously marginalised from both the countryside and the publishing industry. Jini Reddy’s Wanderland deals with the sense of feeling unwelcome in a predominantly white landscape. It primarily seeks a connection of magic between the human and non-human, something deeper than our obsession with leisure and recreation.

The book that most informs the dynamic of race in the English countryside for me is Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. It is a detailed account of the horror at the heart of racism, how it was used to justify the profiteering of sugar barons. It hammers home the point that by objectifying and commodifying nature, we do the same to each other.

Rob Cowen’s recent collection of poems focuses on our recent year of lockdown, emphasising how desperately we need to connect with nature. Mixing the deeply personal with policy and propaganda, interweaving the callous coldness of the wild, from sparrowhawks to viruses, with the regenerative and ebullient effects of nature, The Heeding reminds us what, with a thousand years of exclusion, most of us had forgotten until lockdown: take heed of nature, and we can heal ourselves.

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us by Nick Hayes is published by Bloomsbury (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

CT Scan of Siberian Mummy Reveals Wounds and Tattoos


ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA—The Siberian Times reports that scientists at Russia’s State Hermitage Museum have taken a CT scan of a mummified head dated to between the third and fourth centuries A.D. Discovered in 1969 in a burial house made of larch logs in the Oglakhty burial ground, the masked mummy head belongs to the Tashtyk culture of Siberia’s Yenisei River Valley. “The computer scan allowed us to see, so to say, three layers—the layer of the mask, the layer of the face without the mask, and the layer of the skull,” said museum curator Svetlana Pankova. The scan revealed brown hair and a sutured wound beneath the gypsum death mask, which was painted red with black stripes. The scar, which travels from the left eye to the left ear, is thought to have been sewn after death, perhaps to repair a wound so that the mask would fit properly. Pankova said there is also a hole in the left side of the mummy’s skull, which is also thought to have been made after death in order to remove the brain and prepare the body for burial. “Expert analysis shows the hole was made by a series of blows with a chisel type or hammer type tool,” she explained. The scan also revealed the presence of tattoos on the body, the first to be found on a Tashtyk mummy. To read about tattoos adorning mummified members of the Pazyryk culture uncovered in Siberia, go to "Ancient Tattoos: Iron Age Mummy."

Survivors of California’s forced sterilizations: ‘It’s like my life wasn’t worth anything’

Kelli Dillon testifies. Dillon was forcibly sterilized as an inmate in a California prison. Photograph: Courtesy of Belly of the Beast

A new reparations program will compensate survivors of prison system sterilizations and the 20th century eugenics campaign


Erin McCormick
Mon 19 Jul 2021 

It wasn’t until years after Kelli Dillon went into surgery while incarcerated in the California state prison system that she realized her reproductive capacity had been stripped away without her knowledge.

In 2001, at the age of 24, she became one of the most recent victims in a history of forced sterilizations in California that stretches back to 1909 and served as an inspiration for Nazi Germany’s eugenics program.

But now, under new provisions signed into California’s budget this week, the state will offer reparations for the thousands of people who were sterilized in California institutions, without adequate consent, often because they were deemed “criminal”, “feeble-minded” or “deviant”.


Belly of the Beast: California's dark history of forced sterilizations

The program will be the first in the nation to provide compensation to modern-day survivors of prison system sterilizations, like Dillon, whose attorney obtained medical records to show that, while she was an inmate in the Central California women’s facility in Chowchilla, surgeons had removed her ovaries during what was supposed to be an operation to take a biopsy and remove a cyst.

The investigations sparked by her case, which is featured in the documentary Belly of the Beast, showed hundreds of inmates had been sterilized in prisons without proper consent as late as 2010, even though the practice was by then illegal.

The new California reparations program will also seek to compensate hundreds of living survivors of the state’s earlier eugenics campaign, which was first codified into state law in 1909 and wasn’t repealed until 1979.
There is a level of dignity bestowed on the survivors by the acknowledgment that this happened. If we don’t do this now, when will weWendy Carrillo

That law allowed state authorities to sterilize people in state-run institutions, who were deemed to have “mental disease which may have been inherited” and was “likely to be transmitted to descendants”. The law was later greatly expanded to include “those suffering from perversion or marked departures from normal mentality”. Those targeted were often Black or Latina women, though some men were sterilized as well.
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“California established these egregious eugenics laws, that were actually even followed by Hitler himself, in an effort to curb the population of unwanted individuals or people with disabilities,” said the state assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, who introduced the bill to create the compensation program.

Wendy Carrillo introduced the bill to create the compensation program. 

Photograph: Rich Pedroncelli/AP

She said, in all, more than 20,000 people were sterilized in California, including the historic cases prior to 1979 and hundreds of additional cases in the prisons documented until 2010. Many of the historical survivors have since died, but the state believes about 400 are still living, about a quarter of whom are expected to apply for compensation.

“No monetary compensation will ever rectify the injustice of this,” said Carrillo. “But there is a level of dignity that is bestowed on the survivors by the [state’s] acknowledgment that this happened. If we don’t do this now, when will we?”

She hopes that each qualified applicant to the program will get about $25,000 starting in 2022.

‘Saturated with racism, sexism and prejudice’

The state follows North Carolina and Virginia in developing programs to provide compensation for sterilizations that took place in the state-sanctioned eugenics programs of the mid 1900s, but California is the first to recognize and attempt to atone for much more recent cases in the prisons. Three previous attempts to create a reparations program have failed to make it through the California legislature.

From its outset at the turn of the 20th century, the state’s eugenics campaign was steeped in the kind of racist thinking that would eventually lead to the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, said Alexandra Minna Stern, a University of Michigan historian who first uncovered file cabinets filled with medical records of early California victims in 2007 in the course of researching a book on American eugenics.

“A lot of this came out as ideas of using science for the common good, human improvement, race improvement,” she said. “Of course, all that was saturated with the racism, sexism and disability prejudices of the era.”

One well-documented victim was Andrea Garcia, a 19-year-old born in Mexico, who was sterilized in 1941 under the orders of an asylum near Los Angeles for those “afflicted with feeblemindedness”. Staff there decided she shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce because she was a “mentally deficient, sex delinquent girl” from an “unfit home”, according a dissertation by Natalie Lira, a University of Michigan researcher who reviewed historic medical documents of the sterilizations uncovered by Stern.

Garcia’s mother went to court to challenge the sterilization policy, but lost her case. Both mother and daughter have since died.

Stacy Cordova, whose aunt was a victim of California’s forced sterilization program that began in 1909, holds a framed photo of her aunt Mary Franco, who was sterilised in the 1930s. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

Lira also outlined the case of 14-year-old Antonio Duran, who was sterilized in 1939, after being charged with burglary and painted as a criminal for entering a house and taking several items. The sterilization requests described him as “high tempered, unreliable, an habitual truant and a bully” and said his parents were “of low-grade Mexican mentality”.

Stern said this kind of egregious thinking wasn’t wiped out when California finally took the eugenics law off its books in 1979, around the time it also began closing the state institutions that for decades had warehoused people with mental illness and those deemed unfit for society.

She said she believes it is no coincidence that this is the same time period when the state’s prison population began to explode in an unforgiving era of mass incarceration, which she said saw many of those same people, often poor people of color, being incarcerated in prisons for long periods. It isn’t a big stretch to see how prison officials could begin abusing their power in a renewed push to prevent their charges from reproducing, Stern said.

“I see a lot of similar ingredients and sets of pre-conditions that allowed for [later] sterilization abuse in the prisons,” she said.
Somebody felt I had nothing to contribute to the point where they had to find this sneaky and diabolical way to take my ability to have childrenKelli Dillon

After undergoing sterilization without her consent or knowledge, Kelli Dillon said she began experiencing menopause symptoms when she was only 24.

“They weren’t telling me what they did and my body was going haywire,” said Dillon, who was released from prison in 2009 and now runs her own non-profit domestic violence counseling and violence prevention program and serves on a family services commission for the city of Los Angeles.

At the time, she was serving a 15-year manslaughter term for killing her abusive husband, after, she said, he hit her with an iron and threatened her two young sons.

Dillon said she had authorized the prison doctors to give her a hysterectomy only if cancer was found in the surgery, but no signs of cancer were ever reported.

She said the sterilization shattered her dreams of one day restarting her family and left her struggling with anxiety and depression.

“It was like my life wasn’t worth anything,” she said. “Somebody felt I had nothing to contribute to the point where they had to find this sneaky and diabolical way to take my ability to have children.”

A quest for justice, but concerns remain

While still incarcerated at Central California women’s facility, Dillon began to realize that many of her fellow inmates were getting hysterectomies and sterilization procedures as well. Sometimes it was after giving birth, while others had procedures that they were told were necessary to look for cancers or correcting gynecological issues. And so with her attorney, Cynthia Chandler, she began gathering the stories of other inmates.

Eventually, this led to an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) that identified 132 cases of women being given tubal ligation sterilizations in the prisons without proper state approvals and a 2014 state audit, which found nearly 800 hysterectomies and other sterilizations were performed there.

One of the prison doctors told CIR that he viewed sterilization as a way to prevent prisoners from procreating and having “unwanted children” that could cost the state money.

Kelli Dillon and her attorney, Cynthia Chandler. Photograph: Courtesy of Belly of the Beast

“He articulated that it was a cost-effective way of preventing people from needing welfare,” said attorney Chandler. “He actually thought he was doing the taxpayers a favor.”

Chandler began working on the case in the early 2000s while with the prisoner rights advocacy group Justice Now, which she co-founded. She eventually helped to get a bill passed to make it clear that prison sterilizations are illegal and has been fighting to get compensation for survivors ever since.

The procedures often left patients unclear what had happened to them.

While an inmate at Valley state prison for women in 2003, Gabriela Solano underwent a surgery in which doctors said they were going to remove her swollen left ovary, but at the end they told her they had removed her right ovary instead, she told the Guardian.

When she questioned her prison doctors about it later, she said he told her “what do you care? You’re a lifer anyway.”

“I just remember him saying that to me,” she told the Guardian in a call from Mexico, where she now lives. “A lot of the girls I knew went through unnecessary hysterectomies.”

But many advocates of the new compensation program worry that the same sentiments that allowed the eugenics abuses of the past to occur still permeate American culture.

Prisoners, people with disabilities and people of color “are still considered to be at the margins of our society and not worth the bother of dignity or respect by many”, said Hafsah Al-Amin, the program coordinator for the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, which has worked with many of the current and former inmates who may be eligible for the compensation.

California is the first state to recognize and attempt to atone for much more recent cases of forced sterilization in the prisons. Photograph: Ric Francis/AP

“When people hear the term eugenics they often think of something that happened a long time ago,” said Lorena García Zermeño, the policy and communications coordinator for the California Latinas for Reproductive Justice, a co-sponsor of the bill. “But the legacy of eugenics continues to this day.”


Allegations of unwanted Ice hysterectomies recall grim time in US history

She pointed to recent reports of women detained in US immigration centers being unnecessarily sterilized. But she also said health disparities, such as the huge numbers of Black people and Latinos who have died of Covid-19, are rooted in the same sense of disregard for the lives of people of color and poor people.

“It’s extremely important for the state to confront the racist, sexist, ableist beliefs that perpetuate health disparities happening now.”

Dillon said the idea that California is finally going to compensate eugenics survivors makes her feel like spinning in the streets like the 1970s television character Mary Tyler Moore, who played a TV journalist.

What finally helped her come to terms with the fact that she couldn’t have children, she said, was getting to know her now-eight-year-old grandson.

“I was given an opportunity, praise God, to have children before I went to prison,” she said. “And, through that, I now have the chance to be a mom or mother figure to my grandchildren.”

‘Now I’ve a purpose’: why more Kurdish women are choosing to fight

All-female militias in Syria have again swelled in numbers in recent years with many women joining the call to arms despite the risks


Zeynab Serekaniye at her unit’s base in Tal Tamr. The comradeship with other women is what she likes most about her new life. Photograph: Delil Souleiman/The Guardian
Rights and freedom



by Elizabeth Flock

Rights and freedom is supported by

Mon 19 Jul 2021 06.00 BST


Zeynab Serekaniye, a Kurdish woman with a gap-toothed smile and a warm demeanor, never imagined she’d join a militia.

The 26-year-old grew up in Ras al-Ayn, a town in north-east Syria. The only girl in a family of five, she liked to fight and wear boys’ clothing. But when her brothers got to attend school and she did not, Serekaniye did not challenge the decision. She knew it was the reality for girls in the region. Ras al-Ayn, Arabic for “head of the spring”, was a green and placid place, so Serekaniye settled down to a life of farming vegetables with her mother.

That changed on 9 October 2019, days after former US president Donald Trump announced that US troops would pull out of north-east Syria, where they had allied with Kurdish-led forces for years. A newly empowered Turkey, which sees the stateless Kurds as an existential threat, and whose affiliated groups it has been at war with for decades, immediately launched an offensive on border towns held by Kurdish forces in north-east Syria, including Ras al-Ayn.

Smoke billows from the town of Ras al-Ayn, Syria, during the bombardment by Turkish forces in October 2019

Just after 4pm that day, Serekaniye says, the bombs began to fall, followed by the dull plink and thud of mortar fire. By evening, Serekaniye and her family had fled to the desert, where they watched their town go up in smoke. “We didn’t take anything with us,” she says. “We had a small car, so how can we take our stuff and leave the people?” As they fled, she saw dead bodies in the street. She soon learned that an uncle and cousin were among them. Their house would become rubble.

After Serekaniye’s family was forced to resettle farther south, she surprised her mother in late 2020 by saying she wanted to join the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ). The all-female, Kurdish-led militia was established in 2013 not long after their male counterparts, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), ostensibly to defend their territory against numerous groups, which would come to include the Islamic State (Isis). The YPG have also been linked to systematic human rights abuses including the use of child soliders, forced displacements and looting.
If these people come here, they will do the same to us. We will not accept that, so we will stand against themViyan Rojava

Serekaniye’s mother argued against her decision, because two of her brothers were already risking their lives in the YPG.

But Serekaniye was unmoved. “We’ve been pushed outside of our land, so now we should go and defend our land,” she says. “Before, I was not thinking like this. But now I have a purpose – and a target.”

Serekaniye is one of approximately 1,000 women across Syria to have enlisted in the militia in the past two years. Many joined in anger over Turkey’s incursions, but ended up staying.

“In discussions [growing up], it was always, ‘if something happens, a man will solve it, not a woman’,” says Serekaniye. “Now women can fight and protect her society . This, I like.”

YPJ fighters at a military parade on 27 March 2019, to celebrate the elimination of Islamic State’s last bastion in eastern Syria

According to the YPG, a surge in recruitment has also been aided by growing pushback against and awareness of entrenched gender inequality and violence over recent years. In 2019 the Kurds’ Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria passed a series of laws to protect women, including banning polygamy, child marriages, forced marriages and so-called “honour” killings, although many of these practices continue. About a third of Asayish officers in the Kurdish security services in the region are now women and 40% female representation is required in the autonomous government. A village of only women, where female residents can live safe from violence, was built, evacuated after nearby bombings, and resettled again

The Kurdish enclave of Afrin in January 2018, when Turkey and Free Syrian Army rebels it backed launched Operation Olive Branch

Yet evidence of the widespread violence that women continue to face is abundant at the local Mala Jin, or “women’s house”, which provide a refuge and also a form of local arbitration for women in need across Syria. Since 2014, 69 of these houses have opened, with staff helping any woman or man who come in with problems they’re facing including issues of domestic violence, sexual harassment and rape, and so-called “honour” crimes, often liaising with local courts and the female units of the Asayish intelligence agency to solve cases.

On a sun-scorched day in May, three distraught women arrive in quick succession at a Mala Jin centre in the north-eastern city of Qamishli. The first woman, who wears a heavy green abaya, tells staff that her husband has barely come home since she’s given birth. The second woman arrives with her husband in tow, demanding a divorce; her long ponytail and hands shake as she describes how he’d once beaten her until she had to get an abortion.

The third woman shuffles in pale-faced and in a loose dress, with rags wrapped around her hands. Her skin is raw pink and black from burns that cover much of her face and body. The woman describes to staff how her husband has beaten her for years and threatened to kill a member of her family if she left him. After he poured paraffin on her one day, she says, she fled his house; he then hired men to kill her brother. After her brother’s murder, she set herself on fire. “I got tired,” she says.

The Mala Jin staff, all women, tut in disapproval as she speaks. They carefully write down the details of her account, tell her they need to take photographs, and explain they plan to send the documents to the court to help secure his arrest. The woman nods then lies down on a couch in exhaustion.

Behia Murad, the director of the Qamishli Mala Jin, an older, kind-eyed woman in a pink hijab, said says the Mala Jin centres have handled thousands of cases since they started, and, though both men and women come in with complaints, “always the woman is the victim”.

A growing number of women visit the Mala Jin centres. Staff say that this doesn’t represent increased violence against women in the region, but that more women are demanding equality and justice.

A Syrian woman reads the Qur’an near the grave of her daughter, a former fighter in the Women’s Protection Forces, in the city of Qamishli

The YPJ is very aware of this shift and its potential as a recruitment tool. “Our aim is not to just have her hold her gun, but to be aware,” says Newroz Ahmed, general commander of the YPJ.

For Serekaniye it was not just that she got to fight, it was also the way of life the YPJ seemed to offer. Instead of working in the fields, or getting married and having children, women who join the YPJ talk about women’s rights while training to use a rocket-​propelled grenade. They are discouraged, though not banned, from using phones or dating and instead are told that comradeship with other women is now the focus of their day to day lives.

Commander Ahmed, soft-spoken but with an imposing stare, estimates the female militia’s current size is about 5,000. This is the same size the YPJ was at the height of its battle against Isis in 2014 (though the media have previously reported an inflated number). If the YPJ’s continued strength is any indication, she adds, the Kurdish-led experiment is still blooming.

The number remains high despite the fact that the YPJ has lost hundreds, if not more, of its members in battle and no longer accepts married women (the pressure to both fight and raise a family is too intense, Ahmed says). The YPJ also claim it no longer accepts women under 18 after intense pressure from the UN and human rights groups to stop the use of child soldiers; although many of the women I met had joined below that age, though years ago.

Driving through north-east Syria, it is no wonder that so many women continue to join, given the ubiquitous images of smiling female shahids, or martyrs. Fallen female fighters are commemorated on colourful billboards or with statues standing proudly at roundabouts. Sprawling cemeteries are filled with shahids, lush plants and roses growing from their graves.

The fight against Turkey is one reason to maintain the YPJ, says Ahmed, who spoke from a military base in al-Hasakah, the north-east governorate where US troops returned after Joe Biden was elected. She claims that gender equality is the other. “We continue to see a lot of breaches [of law] and violations against women” in the region, she says. “We still have the battle against the mentality, and this is even harder than the military one.”

Tal Tamr, the YPJ base where Serekaniye is stationed, is a historically Christian and somewhat sleepy town. Bedouins herd sheep through fields, children walk arm-in-arm through village lanes, and slow, gathering dust storms are a regular afternoon occurrence. Yet Kurdish, US and Russian interests are all present here. Sosin Birhat, Serekaniye’s commander, says that before 2019 the YPJ base in Tal Tamr was tiny; now, with more women joining, she describes it as a full regiment.

The base is a one-storey, tan-coloured stucco building once occupied by the Syrian regime. The women grow flowers and vegetables in the rugged land at the back. They do not have a signal for their phones or power to use a fan, even in the sweltering heat, so they pass the time on their days off, away from the frontline, having water fights, chain smoking and drinking sugary coffee and tea.




Daily life for Zeynab Serekaniye at Tal Tamr

Yet battle is always on their minds. Viyan Rojava, a more seasoned fighter than Serekaniye, talks of taking back Afrin. In March 2018, Turkey and the Free Syrian Army rebels it backed, launched Operation Olive Branch to capture the north-eastern district beloved for its fields of olive trees.


Women warriors: the extraordinary story of Khatoon Khider and her Daughters of the Sun

Since the Turkish occupation of Afrin, tens of thousands of people have been displaced – Rojava’s family among them – and more than 135 women remain missing, according to media reports and human rights groups. “If these people come here, they will do the same to us,” says Rojava, as other female fighters nod in agreement. “We will not accept that, so we will hold our weapons and stand against them.”

Serekaniye listens intently as Rojava speaks. In the five months since she joined the YPJ, Serekaniye has transformed. During military training in January, she broke a leg trying to scale a wall; now, she can easily handle her gun.

As Rojava speaks, the walkie-talkie sitting beside her crackles. The women at the base were being called to the frontline, not far from Ras al-Ayn. There is little active fighting these days, yet they maintain their positions in case of a surprise attack. Serekaniye dons her flak jacket, grabs her Kalashnikov and a belt of bullets. Then she gets into an SUV headed north, and speeds away.

Additional reporting by Kamiran Sadoun and Solin Mohamed Amin

In the UK, call the national domestic abuse helpline on 0808 2000 247, or visit Women’s Aid. In the US, the domestic violence hotline is 1-800-799-SAFE (7233). In Australia, the national family violence counselling service is on 1800 737 732. Other international helplines may be found via www.befrienders.org.


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‘Tell those stories’: Kurds call for torture prison to be turned into place of healing


Fears Turkey’s ‘culture centre’ plan for Diyarbakır military prison could whitewash history

Military Prison No 5 in Diyarbakır, Turkey, has become a symbol of Kurdish resistance against the state. Photograph: Cenk Ertekin/Alamy



Bethan McKernan in Istanbul
Sun 18 Jul 2021 05.00 BST


Altan Tan was 24 when Diyarbakır’s notorious Military Prison No 5 was built, just before Turkey’s 1980 military coup. Not long after that, his father was thrown inside, never to emerge.

“He was only there for a few weeks before he was tortured to death. I never had the chance to go inside and visit him,” the Kurdish politician and writer said. “There are no Kurds, no families who don’t have memories associated with this building.”

Diyarbakır, a city of 1.8 million in Turkey’s south-east, is the country’s unofficial Kurdish capital, with a complex, proud and bloody history of resistance against the state.

For many, the prison is the ultimate manifestation of the pain of the Kurdish struggle: in the 1980s and 90s, thousands of Kurdish men and women were imprisoned there and subjected to horrific forms of torture, earning it the reputation of being one of the worst prisons in the world.

The abuses committed inside its walls fuelled the rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, or PKK, which has fought against the Turkish state ever since.


Erdoğan vows to expand fight against PKK after deaths of 13 hostages

Diyarbakır prison is still a functioning jail today. But on a rare visit to the city last week, his first in two and a half years, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that the site would be turned into a cultural centre.

The decision has been met with a mixed reaction, in large part because no one knows exactly what the president means by “cultural centre”. Almost everyone agrees the prison should be closed down, but some worry that if the project is not sensitively managed an important piece of Kurdish history will be lost – or even whitewashed.

Other restoration and regeneration projects undertaken during Erdoğan’s time in office have been fiercely criticised for damaging important historical sites.

“When the peace process [between the Turkish government and the PKK] was at its peak 10 years ago, we had a similar discussion,” said Dilan Kaya Taşdelen, a Diyarbakır-based urban planner. “The president said then we should just demolish the prison, but in my opinion we have to keep it in order to both confront the past and heal as a community. At the time there was a big push from civil society to turn it into a museum to tell those important stories.

“There’s a big difference between a cultural centre and a museum … I don’t know if the new idea really suggests that we are going to create something which shows what we have learned from history. Erasing those memories would be wrong.”

A spokesperson for Turkey’s ministry of culture did not respond to requests for further information about plans for the prison.

Erdoğan’s visit to Diyarbakır comes at a sensitive time: his ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), which has long enjoyed the support of working-class and conservative voters, including Kurds, has hit an all-time low owing to the government’s mishandling of Turkey’s economic woes.

Since 2015, when a ceasefire between the PKK leadership and the Turkish government collapsed, Ankara has pursued the PKK with fury across south-east Turkey, northern Iraq and north-east Syria, inflicting heavy losses and curtailing the militants’ movements.

At the same time, thousands of Kurdish activists and politicians inside Turkey have been removed from office or jailed, and the Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), the main pro-Kurdish political party, which Erdoğan alleges is the same as the PKK, is facing the prospect of being outlawed altogether.

“Like a lot of Erdoğan’s political gestures, the idea of a cultural centre or a museum at the site of Diyarbakır prison is highly symbolic,” said Abdulla Hawez, a Kurdish affairs researcher.

“What he was communicating is, ‘We have turned a page on the Kurdish issue, it’s time to move on.’ Of course the truth is the total opposite: in the same speech he also doubled down on the government’s position on the PKK and HDP. That’s what makes this idea problematic … Turning the prison into something else is about narrative control.”


Turkey: the rise and fall of the Kurdish party that threatened Erdoğan

After six years of crackdown, Turkey’s Kurdish opposition is tired. A 2020 study by Rawest, an independent research centre based in Diyarbakır, also found that young Kurds in Turkey differ from previous generations with a marked “disinterestedness” in politics compared with older people when they were the same age: only 28.5% of those interviewed believed that Kurds’ position in society would improve in the next five years, no matter who was in charge.

For Taşdelen, the urban planner, it is important that future generations are able to connect with and understand the past. She sees Johannesburg’s Constitution Hill, a former jail that is now the site of South Africa’s constitutional court, as a good potential model for Diyarbakır prison.

“When you visit that museum, the door opens at the end to the court, where human rights are respected,” she said. “It creates a sense of hope. There’s no reason we can’t do that here too, but it needs to be a collaborative process, and Kurdish society needs to be involved.”

‘I’m surprised it took so long’: Cubans find anger in their souls

Thousands took to the streets last week in unprecedented protests. Our writer meets some of those trying to force change

A special forces patrol in central Havana on 13 July after the protests. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

Ruaridh Nicoll in Havana
@Ruaridhnicoll

THE OBSERVER
Sun 18 Jul 2021

There’s a man from the government playing love songs in the park. Orlando Fuentes has a table, an awning against the hard Caribbean sun, and a sound system from which floats Silvio Rodríguez’s Cita con Ángeles. A woman says that she can’t listen, that it’s a beautiful song ruined by being played at too many government rallies.

After 16 months of pandemic and a week of unprecedented protests, the Cuban government wants to soothe the anger. Music is being played in parks across the country.

“I call for solidarity and not to let hatred take over the Cuban soul, which is a soul of goodness, affection and love,” tweeted Cuba’s president Miguel Díaz-Canel.

Only days before he had called supporters on to the streets to face down those protesting against shortages of food and medicines, rising prices and hours-long power cuts, people he’d called “vulgar, indecent and delinquent”.

The protests started last Sunday in the town of San Antonio de los Baños, on the outskirts of Havana. Residents were complaining of blackouts that lasted more than eight hours.

Videos of people chanting “libertad” (freedom), swiftly spread on social media, on a mobile internet that Cubans have only been allowed to use for the past three years. Protests flared the length and breadth of the island. Police cars were turned over and rocks were thrown. A few of the hated MLC stores – where necessities are sold only in foreign currencies – were looted.

Hundreds of arrests were made, often documented in harrowing videos. Nothing like it had been seen in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, shaking the population and the government. Raúl Castro, Fidel’s 90-year-old brother who retired as first secretary of the communist party last April, came back to advise.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Florida Straits, Francis Suarez, mayor of Miami, suggested the US government consider airstrikes.

Ana, a museum curator in her late 20s, doesn’t want to give her real name. She was at home in her neighbourhood of 10 de Octubre last Sunday when she heard a noise. “Outside were the people of my neighbourhood claiming their rights,” she told me. This was around 3pm.

Cars, including a police car, overturned in a street in Havana during the demos. Photograph: Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty

“We were 60 people when we left,” she said. “There were policemen but everything was peaceful. People were saying ‘we want medicines, we want food’. We walked towards the centre, about 7km away. People had gone out without water, without money, without their IDs.”

Ana reached El Capitolio, the vast building at the edge of Havana’s old town that is a copy of the US Capitol. There, she says, she met the police in numbers: “We also felt the presence of the quick response brigades. They are state security but are dressed as civilians. They were the first to provoke.”

She pushed on towards the Malecón, Havana’s corniche. “There we faced the special brigades, special units for repression. By the Museum of the Revolution there were masses of people dressed as civilians with sticks in their hands.” She estimated the protesters at 2,000. “There was pepper spray. There was a lot of violence.”

In every Cuban kitchen, there is a pressure cooker. It’s how the population makes its staple rice and beans. Most are old and worn – everyone knows how dangerous they are.
Cuba

Five years ago Barack Obama tried to ease the pressure in Cuba and sweep away what he called the “last remnants” of the cold war. He stepped off Air Force One at Havana’s airport, asking: “¿Que bolá Cuba?” - What’s up Cuba? He reopened the US embassy, but drew the line at ending a 60-year-old embargo Cubans call “El bloqueo”.

His successor took a different approach. Donald Trump banned cruise ships from visiting, pursued companies that traded with the island, placed Cuba back on a list of state sponsors of terrorism, and most crucially stamped down on the diaspora’s ability to send money back to their families.

Cuba, meanwhile, is crumbling. After 62 years of revolution, agricultural land has returned to bush, sugar mills are metal skeletons, railway tracks rust. It still has its school system, its arts and its fabled health service, but all exist within a fading infrastructure, starved of money and technology.

Boosted by Obama’s detente, but having lost Venezuela’s financial backing, Cuba’s communist rulers bet on tourism. An economic wing of the military built vast numbers of hotels. But then the pandemic hit and the economy contracted by 11% in 2020.

The state refuses to cede control of importing and exporting, more worried now about the destabilising effect of US capital than any invasion. The problem is that without tourists, the government can’t pay its bills abroad so there isn’t enough food coming into the country.

Cuba created its own vaccines against Covid but the virus is now raging through the population. Medicines are traded on WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Sixty vitamin C tablets cost $32, although the price depends on people’s access to US dollars or euros. The poorest, on the wrong end of a currency black market, pay the most. The message boards are harrowing. Recently a young woman was asking what she needed to stop her breasts producing milk: her baby had died of Covid.

When asked about the protests almost all Cuba watchers say, as Canadian lawyer and long-time resident Gregory Biniowsky put it: “In truth I’m surprised it took so long.”

Wimar Verdecia is a cartoonist and graphic artist. He attended a protest last November which, while only gathering 300 artists outside Cuba’s Ministry of Culture, is now seen as a watershed in a country where such protests are banned.

An anti-Cuban government protest in New Jersey in the US on 13 July. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters

He went to witness Sunday’s march, watching it pass through Centro Habana, struck but not surprised by the number of young taking part. “All young people want to migrate because it’s a country where there is no future, where you can’t think of a prosperous and dignified life.”

But videos show it was by no means just the young taking part. Magazine editor Maykel González Vivero, who said he was manhandled by police, wrote on Twitter of “an older woman in her 60s… wiping the blood from her nose”.

Images of the police dragging away protesters by their necks have shocked the country. Many protesters disappeared without trace into police stations and interrogation centres. On Friday, Michelle Bachelet, UN high commissioner for human rights, called for the prompt release of all those detained.

Concerned by the videos circulating, the government cut the internet for much of the week, put those hurt by thrown rocks and looting on television, and created a segment on the news dedicated to the false rumours being passed round.

But state media chose not to show images of the protesters, unless windows were being broken or cars overturned. A group of protesters who turned up at the TV station to offer their views were bustled away by a chanting mob.

Such a response has led to a withering response from many of Cuba’s most famous cultural figures. Leo Brouwer, Los Van Van, Haydée Milanés, Leoni Torres, Adalberto álvarez, Carlos Acosta all spoke out. Members of the Elito Revé orchestra wrote: “Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.”

In this country that takes huge pride in its arts, and whose artists are often silenced if they cross the authorities, it felt like another first in a week full of them.

On Thursday Joe Biden finally weighed in. He called Cuba a “failed state”, and made plain that he wouldn’t be following Obama’s lead.

In the past, in times of great hardship on the island, say after the collapse of its sponsor, the Soviet Union, Cubans flooded north into the US. Alejandro Mayorkas, the US homeland security secretary, last week scuppered that idea, saying those who took to the sea would be returned.

It appears the US is sticking to Trump’s plan. “What do they actually want?” asks Carlos Alzugaray, Cuba’s former ambassador to the EU. “Do they want major riots and the collapse of the Cuban government? Do they really want that? What happens next?”

What is certain is Obama’s detente is truly dead. In the neighbourhood of 10 de Octubre, Ana is avoiding the police, although she says she did nothing wrong. “I have a cousin who, for 72 hours, we didn’t know where he was. Yesterday we learned that he is in a prison, accused of inciting public unrest.” She says there are still many people unaccounted for. “I have to be attentive because several times the police have come here. I have no police record so I don’t know what they have come for.”

No one knows what comes next, or at least no one I spoke to. Instead they talked of the fear and sadness in the country. When asked, people would shake their heads and say, “it’s too much” or even start crying.

In the park, Orlando Fuentes told me he was there, playing music, to “remind people we are here”. He meant the government. Silvio Rodríguez, Cuba’s greatest troubadour, was still singing, “Guardian angels fly, always jealous of their vows, against abuses and excesses.”