Voice of Salvadoran rebels becomes guardian of historical memory

Online News EditorJanuary 13, 2022

 

By Hugo Sanchez

San Salvador, Jan 13 (EFE).- On the day of the signing of accords ending 12 years of civil war in El Salvador, Santiago came down from the mountains for the final transmission of the rebels’ Radio Venceremos from San Salvador Cathedral, a moment he now recalls nostalgically as the curator of a museum devoted to the conflict.

Venezuelan-born Carlos Henriquez Consalvi arrived in El Salvador from Nicaragua just before Christmas 1980 to establish Radio Venceremos (“We will prevail”).

And on Jan. 10, 1981, Henriquez – using the nom de guerre Santiago – was on the air to report the launch of the leftist FMLN guerrillas’ first major offensive against the Salvadoran military.

The project that would eventually take the form of the Museum of Word and Image (MUPI) in San Salvador “began amid the armed conflict, when we began to preserve photographs, videos,” he tells Efe.

“The Radio Venceremos collective took it upon ourselves to leave a register of this very important part of the history of El Salvador,” he says.

The first fruit of the MUPI initiative appeared in 1996 with the publication of Luciernagas en El Mozote (Fireflies in El Mozote), a book about the December 1981 massacre of nearly 1,000 men, women and children by an elite unit of the Salvadoran army.

Following the end of the war in 1991, “we gave ourselves the task of repatriate all those important archives that were spread around the world and constitute what is today the Museum of Word and Image,” Santiago recounts.

MUPI has amassed 60,000 images and 4,000 hours of film and video pertaining not only to the war, which claimed 75,000 lives, but to Salvadoran cultural life and the legacy of indigenous peoples.

The museum’s holdings include the archives of distinguished figures such as writer and artist Salarrue (Salvador Salazar Arrue) and poet Roque Dalton, slain in 1975 as part of a power struggle within the ERP rebel group, and the personal photographs of the martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was canonized by Pope Francis in 2018.

But Santiago says that one of MUPI’s greatest achievements is to have “rescued women buried by official history, as in the case of Prudencia Ayala,” a women’s rights campaigner who tried to run for president in 1930.

“The museum is 25 years old and for many years, being an independent citizen initiative always distant from power, it has been difficult to maintain those archives, especially when there is no greater interest in their protection, but the strength of the museum has been society,” he says.

Acknowledging the many disappointments of the decades since the Jan. 12, 1992, agreements, Santiago says that one must distinguish between the accords, which ended the war and created the conditions for democratization, from “what happened later with the sectors that signed those accords.”

The accords’ success in closing the door on conflict and “60 years of military governments” made them a signpost of peace processes in other countries, he points out.

“More than ever, El Salvador needs its historical memory when from diverse poles of society there are calls for the construction of a society different from the one we left behind with the Peace Accords,” Santiago says. EFE

hs/dr

Haitian migrants ask Mexican authorities to regularize their status

Online News EditorJanuary 13, 2022

 

Mexico City, Jan 13 (EFE).- Several dozen Haitian migrants on Thursday continued protesting for the third day asking Mexican authorities to regularize their immigration situation, a protest that led to a confrontation with police.

“Here in Mexico City we have no work and we have to support our families, but we don’t have documents. We’re protesting until the authorities give us papers,” one of the approximately 30 migrants told the media.

The migrants staged their protest in front of the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees (Comar) headquarters and asked to meet with a representative of both that institution and the National Immigration Institute.

The Haitians blocked the entrance to the building and tried to enter it, at which point agents belonging to the Security and Citizen Protection Secretariat intervened.

Tensions mounted as the migrants and police confronted one another, with the Haitians hurling sticks and trash cans at the officers, but the clash soon ceased because Comar personnel assured the migrants that they would be attended to.

The protesters insisted on the urgency of having the authorities deal with their situation, since many of them have been in the Mexican capital for months and have been unable to find work that would enable them to pay their rent or attend to their families’ basic needs.

“We want to live here in Mexico and so we need a temporary (residence) card. We’re asking immigration authorities to resolve our cases. We want legal documents for ourselves,” one of the Haitians said.

About 13,000 irregular migrants, most of them from Haiti, have been stranded since September in an improvised camp under the international bridge linking Del Rio, Texas, with the Mexican city of Ciudad Acuña in Coahuila state.

The Haitians arrived in Mexico via Brazil and Chile after, in August, the US Department of Homeland Security announced the expansion of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, a move that migrant smugglers distorted, thus enticing a number of Haitians to undertake the illegal journey to Mexico hoping ultimately to get to the US, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said on Tuesday.

Given the difficulties they are facing on Mexico’s northern border, some of the migrants decided to head to Mexico City to try and obtain the proper papers so that they can remain legally in Mexico.

However, so far they are continuing to await a positive response from Mexican authorities.

The region is experiencing a record wave of migrants trying to get to the US, where Customs and Border Protection has detected more than 1.7 million undocumented migrants on the border with Mexico during Fiscal 2021, which ended on Sept. 30, 2021.

Meanwhile, Mexico intercepted more than 252,000 undocumented migrants between January and November 2021 and deported more than 100,000 during the same period, according to the Mexican Government Secretariat’s Immigration Policy Unit.

Comar received a record 131,488 requests for refuge from migrants in 2021.

EFE ia/esc/laa/bp

US nurses protest working conditions amid Covid-19 surge

Online News EditorJanuary 13, 2022

Los Angeles, Jan 13 (EFE).- Nurses gathered outside Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles on Thursday as part of a national day of action to protest working conditions for health care workers as the United States endures a surge in Covid-19 cases spurred by the Omicron variant.

The mobilization by National Nurses United (NNU), a union representing more than 175,000 nurses, was to include events from coast-to-coast culminating in a candlelight vigil in Washington the 481 nurses who lost their lives to Covid-19.

NNU is demanding that hospitals boost staffing levels and that President Joe Biden reverse recent moves by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).

The CDC cut in half the recommended isolation time for people infected with Covid-19, from 10 days to five, while OSHA said it planned to withdraw pandemic protections for health care workers.

“As we enter year three of the deadliest pandemic in our lifetimes, nurses are enraged to see that, for our government and our employers, it’s all about what’s good for business, not what’s good for public health,” NNU President Zenei Triunfo-Cortez said.

“Our employers claim there is a ‘nursing shortage,’ and that’s why they must flout optimal isolation times, but we know there are plenty of registered nurses in this country. There is only a shortage of nurses willing to work in the unsafe conditions created by hospital employers and this government’s refusal to impose lifesaving standards,” she said.

The US leads the world in coronavirus deaths, 844,000, and cases, 63.6 million.

On Tuesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said, US hospitals were treating upwards of 145,900 people for Covid-19, exceeding the previous high of 142,246 from a year ago.

New cases are averaging more than 754,200 a day, according to Johns Hopkins University data, nearly three times the peak of January 2021. EFE /dr

2031

NASA: Crucial global warming ceiling to be reached in 10 years

Online News EditorJanuary 13, 2022

 

By Eduard Ribas i Admetlla

Washington, Jan 13 (EFE).- Planet-wide temperatures continued to increase in 2021 and will reach a level of 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels in a decade, an upper limit established in the Paris Agreement with the goal of avoiding the most catastrophic climate consequences.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, both based in Washington DC, revealed in separate reports published Thursday that last year’s global average surface temperature was the sixth-hottest since reliable record-keeping began in 1880 and indicated that the temperatures of the last seven years have been the warmest on record.

“We’re at around an 0.8 C or 0.9 C (increase). If the pattern that’s being seen continues, in 10 years, around 2031 or 2032, we’d be arriving at that point (1.5 C),” Edil Sepulveda, an earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Efe.

In the 2015 Paris Agreement, the international community agreed to a series of measures aimed at limiting global warming to well below 2 C, and preferably to 1.5 C, compared to pre-industrial levels.

Global warming above that level would not “mean there would be cataclysms” that same day, according to Sepulveda, although he cautioned that if temperatures are not reined in by then there will be parts of the planet where it will be “very difficult to live.”

The NOAA’s “Assessing the Global Climate in 2021” report said the Earth’s average land and ocean surface temperature in 2021 was 14.7 C, or 0.84 of a degree above the 20th-century average.

That made 2021 the sixth-warmest year on record after 2015, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020.

To date, the two hottest years have been 2016 and 2020, but experts say the slight cooling in 2021 does not indicate a reversal of the warming trend.

Last year was one of the warmest of the past 141 years even though it “began in the midst of a cold phase … known as La Niña, (which) tends to cool global temperatures slightly,” the NOAA report said.

“Being among the hottest years even with La Niña lets us see that 2021 has followed the pattern of the last decade on the planet,” Sepulveda said.

The report also noted that 2021 “marks the 45th consecutive year (since 1977) with global temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average.”

In addition, the summer of 2021 was the hottest ever in the northwestern United States, and South America saw its third-warmest December on record.

Global warming is caused by the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where they trap solar radiation and enhance the so-called greenhouse effect on Earth.

“There’s a very large consensus that global warming is caused by humans, that there’s no doubt at all about that,” Sepulveda said.

And the effects of the steadily increasing warming of the Earth above pre-industrial levels are already apparent, the expert said.

Rising temperatures are the “main ingredient” for heat waves like those that battered the US last summer, forest fires and droughts, according to the scientist.

The high temperatures also lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere which results in heavy rains and flash floods like those that occurred last July in Germany, or to higher sea levels triggered by the melting of the polar ice caps.

The NOAA also said in its report that the amount of heat stored in the upper levels of the ocean, known as ocean heat content, reached a record high in 2021, exceeding the previous mark set in 2020.

“The greenhouse gases are going to be in the atmosphere for decades,” Sepulveda said. “That’s why it’s important that action be taken in the next few years.” EFE

Tarnished Gold: Illegal Amazon gold seeps into supply chains

FILE - A gold miner weighs his weekly production at an illegal mine in the Amazon jungle, in the Itaituba area of Para state, Brazil, Aug. 22, 2020. Nuggets are spirited out of the jungle by prospectors to the nearest city where they are sold to financial brokers. (AP Photo/Lucas Dumphreys, File) | Photo: AP


By DAVID BILLER and JOSHUA GOODMAN
Updated: January 13, 2022 

SAO PAULO (AP) - The medals were billed as the most sustainable ever produced.

To match the festive spirit of South America's first Olympics, officials from Brazil, the host country for the 2016 games in Rio de Janeiro, boasted that the medals hung around the necks of athletes on the winners' podium were also a victory for the environment: The gold was produced free of mercury and the silver recycled from thrown away X-ray plates and mirrors.

Five years on, the refiner that provided the gold for the medals, Marsam, is processing gold ultimately purchased by hundreds of well-known publicly traded U.S. companies - among them Microsoft, Tesla and Amazon - that are legally required to responsibly source metals in an industry long plagued by environmental and labor concerns.

But a comprehensive review of public records by The Associated Press found that the Sao Paulo-based company processes gold for, and shared ownership links to, an intermediary accused by Brazilian prosecutors of buying gold mined illegally on Indigenous lands and other areas deep in the Amazon rainforest.

The AP previously reported in this series that the scale of prospecting for gold on Indigenous lands has exploded in recent years and involves carving illegal landing strips in the forest for unauthorized airplanes to ferry in heavy equipment, fuel and backhoes to tear at the earth in search of the precious metal. Weak government oversight enabled by President Jair Bolsonaro, the son of a prospector himself, has only exacerbated the problem of illegal gold mining in protected areas. Critics also fault an international certification program used by manufacturers to show they aren't using minerals that come from conflict zones, saying it is an exercise in greenwashing.

"There is no real traceability as long as the industry relies on self-regulation," said Mark Pieth, a professor of criminal law at the University of Basel in Switzerland and author of the 2018 book "Gold Laundering."

"People know where the gold comes from, but they don't bother to go very far back into the supply chain because they know they will come into contact with all kinds of criminal activity."

___

Much like brown and black tributaries that feed the Amazon River, gold illegally mined in the rainforest mixes into the supply chain and melds with clean gold to become almost indistinguishable.


Nuggets are spirited out of the jungle in prospectors' dusty pockets to the nearest city where they are sold to financial brokers. All that's required to transform the raw ore into a tradable asset regulated by the central bank is a handwritten document attesting to the specific point in the rainforest where the gold was extracted. The fewer questions asked, the better.

At many of those brokers' Amazon outposts - the financial system's front door - the gold becomes the property of Dirceu Frederico Sobrinho, known universally by just his first name.

For four decades, Dirceu has embodied the up-by-your-bootstraps myth of the Brazilian garimpeiro, or prospector. The son of a vegetable grocer who sold his produce near an infamous open-pit mine so packed with prospectors - among them Bolsonaro's father - they looked like swarming ants, he caught the gold bug in the mid-1980s and began dispatching planeloads of raw ore from a remote Amazon town. He secured his first concession in 1990, one year after the nation rolled out a permitting regime to regulate prospecting.

Today, from a high rise on Sao Paulo's busiest avenue, he is a major player in Brazil's gold rush, with 173 prospecting areas either registered to his name or with pending requests, according to Brazil's mining regulator's registry. In the same building is the headquarters of the nation's gold association, Anoro, which he leads. Dirceu, until last year, was also a partner in Marsam.

But even with gold jewelry dangling from his fingers and wrist, Dirceu still proudly boasts his everyman garimpeiro roots.

"You don't motivate someone to go into the forest if they're not chasing after a dream," he said in a rare interview from his corner office studded with a giant jade eagle. "Whoever deals in gold has that: They dream, they believe, they like it."

"We have a saying among the garimpeiros: 'I'm a pawn, but I'm a pawn for gold,'" he adds.

At the center of Dirceu's empire is F.D'Gold, Brazil's largest buyer of gold from prospecting sites, with purchases last year totaling more than 2 billion reais ($361 million) from 252 wildcat sites, according to data from the mining regulator. Only two international firms that run industrial-sized gold mines paid more in royalties in 2021, a sign of how once artisanal prospecting has become big business in Brazil - at least for some.

In August, federal prosecutors filed a civil suit against F.D'Gold and two other brokers seeking the immediate suspension of all activities and payment of 10 billion reais ($1.8 billion) in social and environmental damages.

The complaint alleges the companies failed to take actions that would have prevented the illegal extraction of a combined 4.3 metric tons from protected areas and Indigenous territories, where mining is not allowed. Dirceu said his company complies with all laws and has implemented extra controls, but he acknowledged that determining the exact origin of the gold it obtains is "impossible" at present. He has proposed an industry-wide digital registry to improve transparency.�?�

The ongoing suit is the result of a study published in July by the Federal University of Minas Gerais which found that as much as 28% of Brazil's gold produced in 2019 and 2020 was potentially mined illegally. To reach that conclusion, researchers combed through 17,400 government-registered transactions by F.D'Gold and other buyers to pinpoint the location where the gold was purportedly mined. In many cases, the given location wasn't an authorized site or, when cross-checked with satellite images, showed none of the hallmarks of mining activity - deforestation, stagnant ponds of waste - meaning the gold originated elsewhere.

Dirceu's name and those of F.D'Gold and his mining company Ouro Roxo have popped up repeatedly over the years in numerous criminal investigations. He has been charged but never convicted.

A decade ago, federal prosecutors in Amazon's Amapa state accused his company of knowingly purchasing illegal gold from a national park that was later transformed into gold bars. The charges were dismissed in 2017 after a federal judge in Brasilia ruled that F.D'Gold made the purchases legally, as evidenced by the invoices. Separate money laundering charges against Dirceu were also dismissed, due to lack of evidence. Dirceu has denied wrongdoing.

___

Whatever its origin, all the raw ore purchased by F.D'Gold ends up at Marsam.

F.D'Gold accounts for more than one-third of the gold Marsam processes, according to André Nunes, an external consultant for Marsam.


After almost two years as a partner in the Sao Paulo-based refiner, Dirceu stepped down last year and his daughter, Sarah Almeida Westphal, assumed management responsibilities. It was part of an effort to put different family members in charge of their own businesses, which function as separate legal entities, said Nunes, who previously worked for F.D'Gold.

"As much as it's the same family, it's important that each monkey has its own branch," he said.

But the federal tax authority's corporate registry shows Dirceu and Westphal remain partners in a machine rental and air cargo venture based in the Amazonian city of Itaituba, the national epicenter of prospecting. And Westphal could be seen working on a computer at F.D'Gold's office on the day the AP interviewed Dirceu.

From Marsam, the gold travels far and wide. More than 300 publicly traded companies list Marsam as a refiner in responsible mining disclosures they are required to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The refiner has been virtually the only supplier to Brazil's mint over the past decade, according to data provided to the AP through a freedom of information request.

"Why do they want our bars? Because they're accepted all over the world," said Nunes, who is also a member of Marsam's six-person compliance committee.

Enabling such robust sales around the world is a seal of approval from the Responsible Minerals Initiative, or RMI.

The certification program run by a Virginia-based coalition of manufacturers emerged with the passage a decade ago of legislation in the U.S. requiring companies to disclose their use of conflict minerals fueling civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Later, its standards were supplemented by tougher guidelines developed by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development or OECD

Marsam is one of just two refiners in Brazil certified as compliant with RMI's standards for responsible sourcing of gold, having successfully completed two independent audits. The last one was performed in 2018 by UL Responsible Sourcing, an Illinois-based consultancy.

But its ties to Dirceu's family and its strategic positioning at the pinch point between the Amazon rainforest and global commerce raises questions about its previously unexamined role in the processing and sale of gold allegedly sourced from off-limit areas.

Marsam hasn't been accused by prosecutors of any wrongdoing and insists that it only refines gold, not sell it, on behalf of third-party exporters and domestic vendors.

The company in 2016 introduced a supply chain policy, which it has updated over the years, requiring it to seek out information from suppliers whenever they are publicly linked to illicit activities. They are also expected to analyze a mandatory declaration of origin form submitted by each client. No such risks were identified in the most recent RMI report and Marsam was moved to a lower risk category requiring an audit once every three years.

Critics say one problem is that the OECD's guidelines that RMI measures companies against pay scant attention to environmental crimes or the rights of Indigenous communities. Instead, they are geared toward risks stemming from civil wars and criminal networks. In Latin America, only Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela - where drug cartels or guerrilla insurgencies are active - are classified as conflict-affected and high-risk areas deserving greater scrutiny for sourcing practices.

But the influx of illegal miners into Indigenous territories has been on the rise in recent years in Brazil - sometimes ending in bloodshed.

In May, hundreds of prospectors raided a Munduruku village, setting houses on fire, including one that belonged to a prominent anti-mining activist. The attack followed clashes farther north in Roraima state, where miners in motorboats and carrying automatic weapons repeatedly threatened a riverside Yanomami settlement. In one incident, two children, ages 1 and 5, drowned when a shooting sent people scattering into the woods.

In their suits against F.D'Gold and the two other brokers, prosecutors blame expanding mining activity for the illegal clearing in 2019 and 2020 of some 5,000 hectares of once pristine rainforest located on Indigenous territories as well as exacerbating "internal rifts that may be irreconcilable."

Experts say these kinds of activities barely register in corporate boardrooms where sourcing decisions are made and given the seal of approval by international certification programs.


"Certification connotes a degree of certitude that isn't at all possible in the gold industry, especially in Brazil," said David Soud, an analyst at I.R. Consilium, which recently prepared a report for the OECD on illegal gold flows from neighboring Venezuela. "The result is a lot of blind spots that can easily be exploited by bad actors."

___

Some of those blind spots are created by Brazil's own weak oversight.

Under Brazilian law, securities brokers like F.D'Gold can't be held responsible if the prospector whose ore they buy lies about its provenance. Nor is there any effective way to track the information provided at the point of sale.

It's a system that inhibits tracking and accountability at best, and at worst enables willful ignorance as a means to launder illegal gold, according to wildcat mining experts including Larissa Rodrigues of the environmental think tank Choices Institute. For starters, experts say there need to be electronic invoices feeding a database that allows information to be verified.

"The supply chain is absorbing gold that doesn't come from that chain. We know this happens," said Rodrigues. "It's a fact that fraud exists, but you can't prosecute because you can't prove it."

Dirceu didn't deny the possibility that F.D'Gold has unwittingly bought dirty gold. But he insists F.D'Gold, as an entity regulated by Brazil's powerful central bank, follows the law and goes beyond what is required - such as hiring in 2020 two companies to monitor through satellite imagery the sources of its gold.

"The moment we had knowledge this could be happening, we hired them," he said.

As president of the nation's gold association, he claims to have been pushing since at least 2017 a plan to create a digital profile of every participant in the supply chain, complete with the garimpeiro's photo, fingerprints and ID number.

"Digitalization and automation is the start of traceability," he said. "The more legality, the more security there will be for our activities."

Yet for all the apparent industry goodwill, and the support of Brazil's tax authority, the proposal remains just that - an idea that hasn't even been taken up by Congress. In the past two decades, the central bank hasn't revoked authorization for any company that purchases gold.

For its part, Marsam says it uses its "best efforts" to identify the origin of the metals it refines. That includes requiring clients to sign affidavits attesting to the metal's legality, demanding original invoices and conducting client visits to verify they have systems in place to prevent fraud.

But it doesn't visit the mines themselves - something that RMI requires of refiners operating only in high-risk jurisdictions.

"We have to be diligent, but not do work that isn't ours," Nunes said. Asked when was the last time Marsam suspended a client it suspects of trading in dirty gold he shook his head, struggling to recall.

"I don't remember it ever happening," Nunes said before finally harkening back to one instance more than a decade ago.

___

RMI wouldn't discuss prosecutors' allegations against F.D'Gold, despite its close affiliation with Marsam, citing confidentiality agreements to encourage refiners to participate in its grievance process.

In a statement, it said that it takes all allegations "very seriously" and works with companies to address concerns. As part of that process, refiners are expected to trace activities all the way back to the mine whenever red flags are detected. If they don't then address the concerns, they will be removed from the conformant list.

A 2018 report by the OECD found that while RMI's standards are aligned with its guidelines there are significant gaps in the way RMI and other industry initiatives carry out audits, relying more on a refiner's policies and procedures than its due diligence efforts. RMI-approved auditors also demonstrated a lack of basic technical skills and familiarity with the OECD guidelines, the study found.

"There was also an observed absence of curiosity, professional skepticism and critical analysis," according to the report. RMI said it has since strengthened implementation efforts and is awaiting the outcome of a new assessment being conducted for the European Union.

Additional analysis in 2017 by Kumi, a London-based consulting firm that advises the OECD, found that only 5% of 314 end-user companies then registered with RMI, most of them U.S. based, had policies on sourcing conflict materials that were in line with the OECD guidelines.

"End-user companies set the tone for what happens in their supply chains," said Andrew Britton, managing director of Kumi, which is conducting a new assessment of certifiers now for the European Commission. "It's really important that companies' due diligence on their supply chains really probes into potential risks and is not simply a box-ticking exercise."

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While land grabbing by ranchers, loggers and prospectors is hardly new in the Amazon, never before has Brazil had a president as outspokenly favorable to such interests.

Bolsonaro campaigned for the nation's top job with promises of unearthing the Amazon's vast mineral wealth, and his support for prospectors has encouraged a modern-day gold rush.

Bolsonaro's father prospected for gold at Serra Pelada, where Dirceu first saw gold mining, and the president sometimes draws on his upbringing to rally support from prospectors. While campaigning, he aired videos in the Amazon region in which he boasted of sometimes pulling over at jungle stream and pulling a pan from a car to try his luck.

"Interest in the Amazon isn't about the Indians or the damn trees; it's the ore," he told a group of prospectors at the presidential palace in 2019, vowing to deploy the armed forces to allow their operations to continue unfettered.

Then in May 2021, he attacked environmentalists for trying to criminalize prospecting.

"It's really cool how people in suits and ties guess about everything that happens in the countryside," he said sarcastically.

Beyond the rhetoric, Bolsonaro's administration recently introduced legislation that would open up Indigenous territories to mining - something federal prosecutors have called unconstitutional and activists warn would wreak vast social and environmental damages.

Dirceu said he opposes allowing mining of Indigenous lands unless local people support the activity and are given first priority to pursue it themselves. But even as he fashions himself a reformer from the inside, he's also benefitted from the current free-for-all. For one, he doesn't even consider prospectors working without a permit to be illegal - just irregular.

Given persistent efforts to deregulate gold extraction, calls by Dirceu and the gold association to increase accountability over the gold supply chain "ring hollow," said Robert Muggah, who oversees an initiative on environmental crime in the Amazon at think tank Igarape Institute.

Soon, Dirceu may stand to profit even more. Recently, F.D'Gold received approval to begin exporting directly. Dirceu said the company is currently seeking clients abroad and hopes to begin shipments soon.

If he succeeds, it means that, for the first time, someone will have a hand in the entirety of Brazil's gold supply chain: from the Amazon where the gold is mined, to the outposts where it is first sold, to the planes that bring the ore to his daughter's refinery in Sao Paulo and, finally, into the hands of foreign buyers.

"It's really important to understand that the nature of gold extraction in countries like Brazil is linked, ineluctably, to the global markets," said Muggah.

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Goodman reported from Miami. Follow Biller and Goodman on Twitter at @DLBiller and @APjoshgoodman

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Why Cuba’s extraordinary Covid vaccine success could provide the best hope for low-income countries

PUBLISHED THU, JAN 13 2022
Sam Meredith@SMEREDITH19

KEY POINTS

Cuba’s prestigious biotech sector has developed five different Covid vaccines to date, including Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus — all of which Cuba has said provide upwards of 90% protection against symptomatic Covid when administered in three-dose schemes.

The country of roughly 11 million remains the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean to have produced a homegrown shot for Covid.

The WHO’s potential approval of Cuba’s nationally produced Covid vaccines would carry “enormous significance” for low-income nations, John Kirk, professor emeritus at the Latin America program of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, told CNBC via telephone.


Workers transport a shipment of the Cuban Soberana Plus vaccine against the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, to be donated by the Cuban government to Syria, at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana, on January 7, 2022.
YAMIL LAGE | AFP | Getty Images

Cuba has vaccinated a greater percentage of its population against Covid-19 than almost all the world’s largest and richest nations. In fact, only the oil-rich United Arab Emirates boasts a stronger vaccination record.

The tiny Communist-run Caribbean island has achieved this milestone by producing its own Covid vaccine, even as it struggles to keep supermarket shelves stocked amid a decades-old U.S. trade embargo.

“It is an incredible feat,” Helen Yaffe, a Cuba expert and lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, told CNBC via telephone.

“Those of us who have studied biotech aren’t surprised in that sense, because it has not just come out of the blue. It is the product of a conscious government policy of state investment in the sector, in both public health and in medical science.”

To date, around 86% of the Cuban population has been fully vaccinated against Covid with three doses, and another 7% have been partly inoculated against the disease, according to official statistics compiled by Our World in Data.

These figures include children from the age of two, who began receiving the vaccine several months ago. The country’s health authorities are rolling out booster shots to the entire population this month in a bid to limit the spread of the highly transmissible omicron Covid variant.

I think it is clear that many countries and populations in the global south see the Cuban vaccine as their best hope for getting vaccinated by 2025.

Helen Yaffe

LECTURER IN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW,

The country of roughly 11 million remains the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean to have produced a homegrown shot for Covid.

“Just the sheer audacity of this tiny little country to produce its own vaccines and vaccinating 90% of its population is an extraordinary thing,” John Kirk, professor emeritus at the Latin America program of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, told CNBC via telephone.

Cuba’s prestigious biotech sector has developed five different Covid vaccines, including Abdala, Soberana 02 and Soberana Plus — all of which Cuba says provide upwards of 90% protection against symptomatic Covid when three doses are administered.

Cuba’s vaccine clinical trial data has yet to undergo international scientific peer review, although the country has engaged in two virtual exchanges of information with the World Health Organization to initiate the Emergency Use Listing process for its vaccines.

Unlike U.S. pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Moderna, which use mRNA technology, all of Cuba’s vaccines are subunit protein vaccines — like the Novavax vaccine. Crucially for low-income countries, they are cheap to produce, can be manufactured at scale and do not require deep freezing.

It has prompted international health officials to tout the shots as a potential source of hope for the “global south,” particularly as low vaccination rates persist. For instance, while around 70% of people in the European Union have been fully vaccinated, less than 10% of the African population have been fully vaccinated.

A man wears a face mask as he walks down a street amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Havana, Cuba, Oct. 2, 2021.
Joaquin Hernandez | Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images

For this to hope to be realized, however, the WHO would likely have to approve Cuba’s vaccines. The WHO’s vetting process involves assessing the production facilities where the vaccines are developed, a point which Cuba’s health officials say has slowed progress.

Vicente Verez, head of Cuba’s Finlay Vaccine Institute, told Reuters last month that the U.N. health agency was assessing Cuba’s manufacturing facilities to a “first-world standard,” citing the costly process in upgrading theirs to that level.

Verez has said previously that the necessary documents and data would be submitted to the WHO in the first quarter of 2022. Approval from the WHO would be an important step to making the shots available throughout the world.

‘Enormous significance’

When asked what it would mean for low-income countries should the WHO approve Cuba’s Covid vaccines, Yaffe said: “I think it is clear that many countries and populations in the global south see the Cuban vaccine as their best hope for getting vaccinated by 2025.”

“And actually, it affects all of us because what we are seeing with the omicron variant is that what happens when vast populations have almost no coverage is that you have mutations and new variants developing and then they come back to haunt the advanced capitalist countries which have been hoarding vaccines,” she added.

Students, who are accompanied by their mother, are being vaccinated with a dose of the Soberana 2 vaccine against the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, developed in Cuba, at the Bolivar educational center in Caracas, Venezuela on December 13, 2021.
Pedro Rances Mattey | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Kirk agreed that the WHO’s potential approval of Cuba’s nationally produced Covid vaccines would carry “enormous significance” for developing countries.

“One thing that is important to bear in mind is that the vaccines don’t require the ultra-low temperatures which Pfizer and Moderna need so there are places, in Africa in particular, where you don’t have the ability to store these global north vaccines,” Kirk said.

He also pointed out that Cuba, unlike other countries or pharmaceutical companies, had offered to engage in the transfer of technology to share its vaccine production expertise with low-income countries.

“The objective of Cuba is not to make a fast buck, unlike the multinational drug corporations, but rather to keep the planet healthy. So, yes making an honest profit but not an exorbitant profit as some of the multinationals would make,” Kirk said.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned last month that a “tsunami” of Covid cases driven by the omicron variant was “so huge and so quick” that it had overwhelmed health systems worldwide.

Tedros repeated his call for greater vaccine distribution to help low-income countries vaccinate their populations, with more than 100 countries on track to miss the U.N. health agency’s target for 70% of the world to be fully vaccinated by July.

The WHO said last year that the world was likely to have enough Covid vaccine doses in 2022 to fully inoculate the entire global adult population — providing high-income countries did not hoard vaccines to use in booster programs.

Alongside pharmaceutical industry trade associations, a number of Western countries — such as Canada, the U.K. and Japan — are among those actively blocking a patent-waiver proposal designed to boost the global production of Covid vaccines.

The urgency of waiving certain intellectual property rights amid the pandemic has repeatedly been underscored by the WHO, health experts, civil society groups, trade unions, former world leaders, international medical charities, Nobel laureates and human rights organizations.

An absence of vaccine hesitancy

The seven-day average of daily Covid cases in Cuba climbed to 2,063 as of Jan. 11, reflecting an almost 10-fold increase since the end of December as the omicron variant spreads.

It comes as the number of omicron Covid cases surges across countries and territories in the Americas region. The Pan American Health Organization, the WHO’s regional Americas office, has warned a rise in cases may lead to an uptick in hospitalizations and deaths in the coming weeks.

PAHO has called on countries to accelerate vaccination coverage to reduce Covid transmission and has repeated its recommendation of public health measures such as tight-fitting masks — a mandatory requirement in Cuba.

Yaffe has long been confident in Cuba’s ability to boast one of the world’s strongest vaccination records. Speaking to CNBC in February last year — before the country had even developed a homegrown vaccine — she said she could “guarantee” that Cuba would be able to administer its domestically produced Covid vaccine extremely quickly.

“It wasn’t conjecture,” Yaffe said. “It was based on understanding their public health care system and the structure of it. So, the fact that they have what they call family doctor and nurse clinics in every neighborhood.”

Many of these clinics are based in rural and hard-to-reach areas and it means health authorities can quickly deliver vaccines to the island’s population.

“The other aspect is they don’t have a movement of vaccine hesitancy, which is something that we are seeing in many countries,” Yaffe said.

Student loans worsen racial inequalities in America




By: Newsy Staff
 Jan 12, 2022

Special Education teacher Tameka Jackson has been renting a house on the south side of Chicago for over 10 years.

"I want a home, but according to all of this, will I ever be able to afford a home," Jackson said.

She dreams of buying her first home and moving her family to a safer neighborhood.

"I have a 16-year-old that I worry about because it is gang violence over here, they are recruiting," Jackson said.

But she is trapped because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars she owes in student loans.

"I'm not able to sustain and live comfortably," Jackson said.

Growing up poor, Jackson charted a new course by doing what no one in her family had ever done, pursuing higher education. It was something she was only able to afford by taking on many student loans.

"School was the only thing that kind of saved my life," she said. "I had no money. My mom was strung out on drugs."

Today, she says her loans add up to more than $500,000.

The 40-year-old mother says multiple family tragedies and her modest salary as a public school teacher made it all but impossible to reach financial stability.

Her financial situation illustrates a troubling fact about student loans in America: they worsen racial inequalities.

"Student loan debt is contributing to racial wealth gap, largely because Black people have been discriminated against and the wealth divide is enormous," said Andre Perry, a senior fellow at Brookings.

The average white family has nearly eight times the wealth of the average Black family. As a result, Black students are more likely to take out student loans and borrow more.

That wraps them up financially for longer periods of time.

"The reason why many more, as a percentage, Black and brown people, particularly Black people, have to take out student loans is because we were denied wealth building opportunities for most of the history of the United States," Perry said.

For a disproportionate number of Black Americans, paying back the debts often turn out to be a life-long struggle.

Twenty years after starting college, the average Black borrower still owes 95% of their student debt.

Brandeis University researchers say that compares to only 6% for the average white student.

As for Jackson, she urges lawmakers to cancel as much student debt as possible to free people like her from stifling financial burden.

This story was originally reported on Newsy.com.

SERIOUSLY?

US women charged after attacking man with glitter

Jose Martinez Jan 13 2022

GETTY/JOSE LUIS MAGANA/AFP

Two Florida women have been charged with attacking a man with glitter (file photo).

Two women were arrested after attacking a man with several containers of glitter during a dispute at his Clearwater, Florida apartment, WFLA reports.

Kaitlin O’Donovan, 27, and Sarah Franks, 29, arrived at the unidentified man’s residence shortly before 3am Monday (Florida time) where an argument ensued as he stood on his fenced balcony. O’Donovan and Franks struck the man’s head and torso with glitter.

Franks then climbed over the balcony fence as the victim went into his apartment, and followed him inside. She threw more containers of glitter before opening the front door for O’Donovan, who tossed even more glitter at him.

The two women left the apartment before local police arrived, but were eventually found at Franks’ home by tracing the vehicle they used to flee the scene. Authorities noticed that there was glitter inside the car, which police said was still warm.

Franks and O’Donovan have been charged with felony burglary with assault or battery. Franks was also given a misdemeanour criminal mischief charge because, according to police, she kicked a window while leaving the apartment until it broke.

It’s unclear if the man suffered any injuries from the glitter attack. The Charlotte Eye Ear Nose & Throat Associates warns that even the tiniest piece can be detrimental if it gets in a person’s eye, potentially scratching their cornea, causing light sensitivity, bloodshot eyes, and more. If left untreated, the eye can worsen into a corneal ulcer.

Police disperse Bedouin protesters in southern Israel

Thu., January 13, 2022



APTOPIX Bedouin protesters clash with Israeli forces following a protest against an afforestation project by the Jewish National Fund in the southern Israeli village of Sa'we al-Atrash in the Negev Desert, southern Israel, Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022. 

(AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police on Thursday fired tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades to disperse hundreds of Bedouin Arabs protesting a tree-planting campaign they say is aimed at pushing them off disputed land.

It was the third consecutive day of demonstrations by Bedouin residents of southern Israel's Negev desert against a forestry project they say is aimed at seizing land near unrecognized villages.

Video footage from the scene shows hundreds of people blocking the desert highway. Police then intervene with tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades to clear the road. They said 13 people were arrested in what they described as a violent disturbance. Police released video clips showing people throwing rocks at cars. They said three people were hospitalized with minor injuries.

Thursday's demonstration came a day after the government announced a compromise to suspend the tree-planting campaign, which is being conducted by a quasi-governmental organization. The forestry project caused a crisis within the fragile ruling coalition, which includes a small Islamist party with significant support among Bedouins in southern Israel.

The Bedouin view the forestry project as part of a larger attempt by authorities to confiscate grazing lands and force them into planned communities, a perceived assault on their traditional lifestyle. Israel says they need to move into planned towns so it can provide public services.

The latest flare-up in the dispute, which goes back decades, risks dividing Israel’s government, the first to include an Arab party.

The Bedouin are one of Israel's poorest communities and are part of Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up some 20% of the country’s population. They have citizenship, including the right to vote, but face discrimination. Arab citizens of Israel have close family ties to the Palestinians and often identify with their cause.

Israeli police and Bedouin clash in tree-planting protests

Israeli security forces clash with Bedouins during protest against forestation at the Negev desert village of Sawe Al-Atrash on Thursday. (Reuters) BEDOUIN RIDERS

AFP
January 13, 2022

Protesters have held demonstrations in recent days over the environmental scheme in southern Israel's arid desert region

Bedouin, who are part of Israel's 20 percent Arab minority, have long opposed tree-planting initiatives in the Negev

NEGEV, Israel: Israeli police and Bedouin protesters clashed Thursday in the latest unrest over a tree-planting project in the Negev desert, a day after authorities appealed for compromise, AFP journalists said.

Protesters have held a series of demonstrations in recent days over the environmental scheme in southern Israel’s arid desert region, posing a thorny challenge for the fragile coalition government.

Bedouin, who are part of Israel’s 20 percent Arab minority, have long opposed tree-planting initiatives in the Negev, blasting them as a de facto government land grab in areas they call home.

“Police dispersed the demonstrators who blocked a road in the Negev and threw stones at the police,” the security forces said in a statement.

Thirteen people were arrested in the events, the statement added.

An AFP photographer was lightly injured during the clashes.

The latest unrest in the decades-long dispute has attracted fresh attention given the make-up of Israel’s coalition government, led by right-wing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Bennett’s government counts on the backing from the leader of the Islamist Raam party, Mansour Abbas, whose core political support comes from Bedouin in the Negev.

Nearly half of Israel’s 300,000 Bedouin live in unrecognized villages in the Negev.

Abbas told Israel’s Channel 12 news on Tuesday that his party will not vote with the coalition unless the tree planting is halted and formal negotiations with Bedouin leaders are launched to seek a compromise.

On Wednesday, Social Affairs Minister Meir Cohen said that a “compromise” had been reached that would allow for “accelerated negotiations” to take place.

But clashes have continued.

The right-wing Regavim environmental group called on Bennett’s government “to take a firm position against the Raam Party’s threats” and to ensure tree-planting projects continue.

Hundreds of Bedouins clash with police over controversial Negev tree planting

Demonstrators block highway; officers respond with tear gas, stun grenades; 3 hospitalized, 13 arrested during 3rd day of protests

By EMANUEL FABIAN and TOI STAFF

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against an forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

Hundreds of Bedouin protesters clashed with police on Thursday afternoon for the third day in a row over a controversial forestation project in the Negev Desert, despite reports indicating the government was seeking a compromise.

The demonstrators blocked the Route 31 highway near the southern village of Sawe al-Atrash, and some hurled stones at officers, according to police.

Video posted online showed officers using stun grenades and tear gas to disperse the demonstration.




At least 12 demonstrators were reportedly hurt during the clash, of whom three were hospitalized at Beersheba’s Soroka Medical Center.

Police said 13 people were arrested at Thursday’s protest.

Police said that due to the demonstration, the highway remained closed from Shoket Junction to Tel Arad Junction. “We will allow freedom of protest as long as it is done according to the law, and we will act with zero tolerance against disturbance,” the police statement read.

The demonstrations came following a Jewish National Fund planting in the region, seen by the Bedouin communities as part of a government effort to expel them from their unrecognized hamlets.

Police said Thursday morning that 21 rioters were arrested during the night in Tel Sheva, Segev Shalom and Rahat. On the previous night, 18 people were arrested.

Citing unnamed sources with knowledge of the matter, the Kan public broadcaster reported Wednesday that an “unprecedented” plan was to be advanced by the government that would include recognition of 10 to 12 Bedouin villages that are currently illegal.

The report said that planned planting in the most contentious areas — where the Bedouin al-Atrash clan lives — won’t resume next week to give the negotiations a chance to progress, though it will resume elsewhere.

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)

The planting and the ensuing violent clashes with police threatened to topple Israel’s nascent, motley coalition, with the Islamist Ra’am party vowing to boycott plenum votes as long as Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael-Jewish National Fund’s (KKL-JNF) work continued in the Negev, where they enjoy the largest bloc of support.

In response to the announcement from Ra’am chairman Mansour Abbas, Yamina MK Nir Orbach announced Wednesday that he too would not attend plenum votes so long as Ra’am refused to do so. And Meretz MK Yair Golan threatened to do the same too, after Housing Minister Ze’ev Elkin of the New Hope party vowed that the tree-planting would continue.

Explainer: Why tree planting in the Negev sparked protests, riots and a coalition crisis

With a narrow 61-seat majority in the Knesset, the absences threatened to prevent the coalition from passing any legislation so long as the crisis continues.

Indeed, with the coalition lacking numbers, opposition lawmakers began submitting legislation for preliminary approval before the plenum on Wednesday evening. To avoid the embarrassment, coalition MKs left the plenum and several pieces of legislation advanced overwhelmingly, including a bill from Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi that would require police officers to wear body cameras when securing protests. The opposition’s bills are still unlikely to pass subsequent readings, but the events concluded a humiliating day for the coalition.

Bedouin protesters and Israeli forces clash during a protest in the southern Israeli village of Sawe al-Atrash in the Negev Desert against a forestation project by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), on January 13, 2022. (Menahem KAHANA / AFP)

KKL-JNF chairman Avraham Duvdevani told Kan on Wednesday that his organization was just a government contractor and wasn’t setting policy.

“We have been planting trees in the Negev for 15 years in the same format as right now,” Duvdevani said. “There was nothing different from what we have been doing all these years. We have no idea what’s different now. The instructions to halt plantings have been sporadic, and we resumed full work after a few days.

“We will continue planting in the entire Negev. This is part of the Zionist vision.”

Negev Bedouin have a contentious relationship with the state. For decades, the government has sought to move them into recognized, planned cities, but many still live in a constellation of illegal hamlets that sprawl across Israel’s southern desert.

Bedouins accuse KKL-JNF of seeking to displace them, but the organization says it is merely fulfilling a request by other government bodies on public land. KKL-JNF works across Israel on nature and conservation projects, but some charge the organization has a political agenda.