Special Report: Peruvian coca farmers to Paris pushers, coronavirus upends global narcotics trade

Gabriel Stargardter, Drazen Jorgic APRIL 22, 2020
RIO DE JANEIRO/MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Countries around the world have spent billions of dollars bailing out businesses affected by the coronavirus outbreak. Peru’s coca farmers, who grow the bushy plant used to make cocaine, say they want help, too.

FILE PHOTO: A cocaine brick seized during an operation is displayed to the media at the Peruvian police headquarters in Lima, Peru July 11, 2017. REUTERS/Mariana Bazo

Prices for coca leaves sold to drug gangs have slumped 70% since Peru went on lockdown last month, according to Julián Pérez Mallqui, the head of a local growers’ organization. He said his members cater to Peru’s tightly regulated legal coca market, but acknowledged some growers sell on the black market. Peruvian officials say more than 90% of the country’s coca crop goes to traffickers who are now struggling to move product.

With the sector in turmoil, Pérez’s group is crafting a plan to ask the government to buy up excess coca inventory.

Peru “has to design clear intervention strategies for coca,” Pérez said. “We’re screwed, just like everyone else in the world.”

A spokesman for Peru’s anti-drugs agency said it may funnel more development aid to hard-hit areas.

The coronavirus outbreak has upended industries across the globe. The international narcotics trade has not been spared. From the cartel badlands along the U.S.-Mexico border and verdant coca fields of the Andes, to street dealers in London and Paris, traffickers are grappling with many of the same woes as legitimate businesses, Reuters has found.

On three continents, Reuters spoke with more than two dozen law enforcement officials, narcotics experts, diplomats and people involved in the illicit trade. They described a business experiencing busted supply chains, delivery delays, disgruntled workers and millions of customers on lockdown. They also gave a window into the innovation - and opportunism - that are hallmarks of the underworld.

Cecil Mangrum, a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, said an informant recently got a call from a Mexican connection offering 25 pounds of methamphetamine for $3,200 a pound. That’s more than triple the going rate from just a few weeks ago, and the highest price that he has seen for the powerful stimulant in his decade on the drugs beat.

“I wish there was a website (where) you could report the cartels for price gouging, because the prices are ridiculous,” Mangrum said.

Latin America is the epicenter of a global drugs trade that is estimated to be worth up to $650 billion a year, according to Global Financial Integrity, a U.S.-based think tank. Gangs reap huge profits producing and transporting cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl that is sold worldwide.

The disruptions are likely to be short-lived, some anti-narcotics experts said. Cartels have proven adept at surmounting any obstacles. The pandemic will eventually ease, trade routes will open, customers and dealers will come out of their homes.

Still, coronavirus has managed to do what authorities worldwide have not: slow the global narcotics juggernaut almost overnight and inflict a measure of pain on all who participate.

In Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel has faced many threats over the years, including the jailing of former leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. But never one like the coronavirus pandemic.

Disruptions to global trade have jacked up prices for imported chemicals such as ephedrine that are needed to manufacture meth, a major piece of the organization’s narcotics empire. Meanwhile, a partial shutdown of the U.S.-Mexico border to slow the spread of the virus has complicated distribution, according to two Sinaloa Cartel members who spoke with Reuters.

“As the border is closed, we are having problems crossing it,” said one of the people, who helps produce the synthetic opioid fentanyl for the syndicate.

Thousands of kilometers to the south in Brazil, drug gangs face similar distribution woes. At the giant seaport of Santos, the launching point for a substantial portion of South American cocaine headed for Europe, seizures last month were down 67% compared to March 2019, according to Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service. Ciro Moraes, the chief federal police officer in Santos, said it’s a sign that traffickers are experiencing their own personal “recession,” courtesy of COVID-19.

“This cripples their business,” he said, if only temporarily.

MEXICAN STANDSTILL

The United States is Mexico’s top trade partner and the No. 1 consumer of its illegal drugs. Last year some 950,000 people entered the United States daily on foot or in vehicles through dozens of checkpoints along the 1,954-mile (3,145km) border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Most narcotics are smuggled in passenger cars that face far fewer checks than commercial trucks, security analysts said. The March 21 closing of the border to all non-essential travel has thrown a monkey wrench in that well-oiled machine.

“Everything has stopped at the border,” said the Sinaloa Cartel fentanyl “cook” who spoke with Reuters.

Wholesale prices are up about 10% in recent weeks, he added. A kilogram of fentanyl sold wholesale by his organization to a drug buyer in Sinaloa would go for about 12,000 pesos ($490), he said, but that price would soar to about $50,000 a kilo if delivered to New York.

Raw materials are also bedeviling the cartel. Fentanyl and meth, which kill tens of thousands of Americans each year, are made with chemicals often manufactured in China, India and Germany, Mexican and U.S. officials said.

They said factory closures, staff shortages, shipping slowdowns and tighter borders all along the methamphetamine precursor supply chain have created scarcity. A Sinaloa Cartel meth producer told Reuters that the outbreak had led to a threefold jump in prices for some ingredients, pressuring profit margins.

Seven anti-narcotics officials in the United States, including three U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials, described a U.S. drugs market in flux.

Methamphetamine has been the most affected, with half of the DEA’s domestic offices reporting price rises, said one senior DEA source familiar with the agency’s nationwide assessment of coronavirus disruptions.

Supplies of fentanyl, the leading cause of U.S. overdose deaths, appear to be holding steady, several authorities said.

John Callery, Special Agent in Charge of the DEA’s San Diego Field Office, said drug prices in his sector were up about 20% across the board, except for methamphetamine, whose price has more than doubled in the last couple of weeks to as much as $2,000 a pound. Price gouging could be to blame, he said.

In cities with looser coronavirus lockdowns, illicit activity is more resilient, police said.

In Houston, the drugs market was holding up fine, as dealers still had hefty stockpiles, said Lieutenant Stephen Casko of the Houston Police Department. “As those reserves get used up, that’s when you’re going to start to feel the stress,” he said.

Jerome Washington, a sergeant in the El Paso County Sheriff’s office in Texas, said the decline in vehicle traffic had prompted dealers to reduce the number of drug runs they make across the border.

“They are just being more selective,” Washington said. “It’s like a numbers game: The more cars on roads, the more cars you can send across that will blend in.”

Cartels appear to be looking for alternative transport, U.S. officials said. There are signs the gangs are moving more product through cross-border tunnels, according to a senior CBP official. Increased sightings of drones and ultralight aircraft at the border suggest gangs may be ramping up aerial deliveries, he added.

“The smuggling tactic has changed,” the official said. Traffickers “either go over or under.”

Repatriating drug money to Mexico has also proved to be a headache, anti-narcotics agents said.

In Los Angeles, Mexican cartels launder illicit proceeds through storefront businesses in the city’s garment district, according to a senior DEA investigator in California. Profits from U.S. drug sales flow south in the form of exported household goods that the cartels sell in Mexico to get their cash, the agency said. But the closure of nonessential businesses in California has impeded that scheme, the DEA investigator said.

‘EVERYTHING IS PARALYZED’

South America was awash in cocaine long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. Record production in recent years has weighed on prices. Drug gangs ramped up exports, authorities said, shipping unprecedented quantities to longstanding markets in the United States and Europe, while cultivating new customers in the Middle East and Asia.

In the United Kingdom, cocaine seizures in the 2018/19 financial year reached 9.65 tonnes, the highest total since records began in 1973, and up nearly 200% compared with the 2017/18 total, the Home Office said.

In Peru, the world’s No. 2 producer behind Colombia, a national lockdown to stem the virus has functioned like a shutoff button on the country’s cocaine conveyor belt, according to Miguel Ángel Ramírez Vásquez, a senior member of Peru’s anti-narcotics police. With borders closed, flights reduced and roads more rigorously patrolled, he said gangs are having trouble moving drugs.

“Everything is paralyzed. Nobody is buying and nobody is selling,” Ramírez said.

Among the hardest-hit areas is the verdant valley of the Apurímac, Ene and Mantaro rivers. Known as the VRAEM, it produces around 43% of Peru’s 50,000-hectare harvest, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Pérez, the coca growers’ representative, said almost all of the region’s 500,000 people live off the crop.

The state-run National Coca Company (ENACO) purchases some of the country’s production for pharmaceuticals and beverages at prices well below what drug traffickers normally pay. But an estimated 93% of Peru’s crop is converted illegally into cocaine, ENACO has said.

Pérez said his group, known as FEPAVRAE, is discussing ways to get ENACO to buy up their excess coca. He declined to share details.

“It’s an internal discussion within the organization,” he said. “We’re working on it.”

Cristian Galarza, the general manager of ENACO, said he had not heard of the internal FEPAVRAE plan. But he was not surprised.

“Because of the coronavirus situation, everyone has to get creative and find alternatives,” he said. Still, he said it’s unlikely that ENACO, which has annual sales of about 35 million soles ($10.34 million), could help many of those affected.

“If there is a coca grower ... who has been selling illegally, we won’t work with them,” Galarza said. “If they go to the other side, it’s difficult, they’ve crossed a line.”

Rubén Vargas, the head of Peru’s anti-drug agency DEVIDA, was also unaware of the coca growers’ plan. He said DEVIDA had already budgeted 70 million soles ($20.68 million) this year for rural development projects in the VRAEM, and may provide more to help areas most affected by the outbreak.

“We will work with all the social organizations and producers who have additional proposals in the framework of this emergency that we’re living,” he said.

Ramírez, the anti-drugs cop, was apoplectic about the growers’ plan.

“When it’s going well for them, they sell to drug traffickers; and when it’s going badly, they stick out their hand for government support,” he said. “What do they think they’re growing? Pineapples?”

SUPPLY PRESSURE

Across the border in Brazil, traffickers face the opposite problem: Cocaine prices are up sharply due to dwindling supplies, according to a federal police officer who spoke on condition of anonymity.

He said the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine has risen 40% to 20,000 reais ($3,735) in recent weeks in the northern Amazon city of Manaus, a transit hub for moving Andean cocaine through Brazil and on to Europe.

While drugs are piling up in Colombia and Peru, “here (in Brazil) the price is expensive, as there is no product,” the federal cop said.

In the southeastern Brazilian port of Santos, Latin America’s biggest, seizures of Europe-bound cocaine have dwindled, according to Moraes, the federal police chief there. Customs officials nabbed just over a tonne of cocaine in March 2020, compared with 3 tonnes in the same month last year.

Moraes believes less cocaine is entering Brazil. He also suspects European demand is down, in part because trafficking outfits there are struggling to move the product amid lockdowns.

In France, the shutdown of bars and party venues has led to a decrease in the use of recreational drugs like cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and LSD, the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) said in an April report examining the impact of the pandemic on the nation’s illicit drugs trade.

Dealers have been quick to react to the new reality, the report said, with some maintaining a safe distance from clients and even “selling hand sanitizer, gloves and masks.”

Reporting by Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro and Drazen Jorgic in Mexico City; Additional reporting by Mark Hosenball in Washington; Andrew Hay in Taos, N.M.; Jesus Bustamente in Culiacan, Mexico; Lizbeth Diaz in Mexico City; Michael Holden in London; Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, David Lewis in Nairobi; Marco Aquino in Lima; Daniela Desantis in Asuncion; and Luis Jaime Acosta in Bogota; Editing by Marla Dickerson

‘Cartels are scrambling’: Virus snarls global drug trade

CORONAVIRUS VS CRIMINAL CAPITALISM

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This March 2020 photo provided by the U.S. Border Patrol's San Diego Tunnel Team shows a tunnel under the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, Calif. Federal authorities seized a panoply of narcotics inside the newly discovered underground passage connecting a warehouse in Tijuana with south San Diego. The bust of $30 million worth of street drugs was also notable for its low amount of fentanyl - about 2 pounds. (U.S. Border Patrol via AP)


APRIL 19,2020

NEW YORK (AP) — Coronavirus is dealing a gut punch to the illegal drug trade, paralyzing economies, closing borders and severing supply chains in China that traffickers rely on for the chemicals to make such profitable drugs as methamphetamine and fentanyl.

One of the main suppliers that shut down is in Wuhan, the epicenter of the global outbreak.

Associated Press interviews with nearly two dozen law enforcement officials and trafficking experts found Mexican and Colombian cartels are still plying their trade as evidenced by recent drug seizures but the lockdowns that have turned cities into ghost towns are disrupting everything from production to transport to sales.


Along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border through which the vast majority of illegal drugs cross, the normally bustling vehicle traffic that smugglers use for cover has slowed to a trickle. Bars, nightclubs and motels across the country that are ordinarily fertile marketplaces for drug dealers have shuttered. And prices for drugs in short supply have soared to gouging levels.

“They are facing a supply problem and a demand problem,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former official with CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency. “Once you get them to the market, who are you going to sell to?”

Virtually every illicit drug has been impacted, with supply chain disruptions at both the wholesale and retail level. Traffickers are stockpiling narcotics and cash along the border, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration even reports a decrease in money laundering and online drug sales on the so-called dark web.

This March 2020 photo provided by the U.S. Border Patrol shows drugs seized from a tunnel under the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, Calif. Federal authorities seized a panoply of narcotics inside the newly discovered underground passage connecting a warehouse in Tijuana with south San Diego. The bust of $30 million worth of street drugs was also notable for its low amount of fentanyl - about 2 pounds. (U.S. Border Patrol via AP)

“The godfathers of the cartels are scrambling,” said Phil Jordan, a former director of the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center.

Cocaine prices are up 20 percent or more in some cities. Heroin has become harder to find in Denver and Chicago, while supplies of fentanyl are falling in Houston and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the price of methamphetamine has more than doubled in recent weeks to $1,800 per pound.

“You have shortages but also some greedy bastards who see an opportunity to make more money,” said Jack Riley, the former deputy administrator of the DEA. “The bad guys frequently use situations that affect the national conscience to raise prices.”

Synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl have been among the most affected, in large part because they rely on precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels import from China, cook into drugs on an industrial scale and then ship to the U.S.

“This is something we would use as a lesson learned for us,” the head of the DEA, Uttam Dhillon, told AP. “If the disruption is that significant, we need to continue to work with our global partners to ensure that, once we come out of the pandemic, those precursor chemicals are not available to these drug-trafficking organizations.”


Cartels are increasingly shifting away from drugs that require planting and growing seasons, like heroin and marijuana, in favor of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which can be cooked 24/7 throughout the year, are up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and produce a greater profit margin.

Though some clandestine labs that make fentanyl from scratch have popped up sporadically in Mexico, cartels are still very much reliant upon Chinese companies to get the precursor drugs.

Huge amounts of these mail-order components can be traced to a single, state-subsidized company in Wuhan that shut down after the outbreak earlier this year, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, which monitors Chinese websites selling fentanyl.

This April 17, 2020 image from a website shows an offer for a chemical known as "99918-43-1" made in China. According to C4ADS, a Washington research group, the price of the chemical, which can be used to make fentanyl, has risen since late February 2020.

“The quarantine of Wuhan and all the chaos there definitely affected the fentanyl trade, particularly between China and Mexico,” said Ben Westhoff, author of “Fentanyl, Inc.”

“The main reason China has been the main supplier is the main reason China is the supplier of everything — it does it so cheaply,” Westhoff said. “There was really no cost incentive for the cartels to develop this themselves.”

But costs have been rising and, as in many legitimate industries, the coronavirus is bringing about changes.

Advertised prices across China for precursors of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cutting agents have risen between 25% and 400% since late February, said Logan Pauley, an analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington-based security research nonprofit. So even as drug precursor plants in China are slowly reopening after the worst of the coronavirus crisis there, some cartels have been taking steps to decrease their reliance on overseas suppliers by enlisting scientists to make their own precursor chemicals.

“Because of the coronavirus they’re starting to do it in house,” added Westhoff.

This April 16, 2020 image from a website shows an offer for the chemical xylazine made in China. According to C4ADS, a Washington research group, the price of the chemical, which can be used as a cutting agent for heroin, has risen since late February 2020.Some Chinese companies that once pushed precursors are now advertising drugs like hydroxychloroquine, which President Donald Trump has promoted as potential treatment for COVID-19, as well as personal protective gear such as face masks and hand sanitizers.

Meanwhile, the gummed up situation on the U.S.-Mexico border resembles a stalled chess match where nobody, especially the traffickers, wants to make a wrong move, said Kyle Williamson, special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso field division.

“They’re in a pause right now,” Williamson said. “They don’t want to get sloppy and take a lot of risks.”

Some Mexican drug cartels are even holding back existing methamphetamine supplies to manipulate the market, recognizing that “no good crisis should be wasted,” said Joseph Brown, the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Texas.

“Some cartels have given direct orders to members of their organization that anyone caught selling methamphetamine during this time will be killed,” said Brown, whose sprawling jurisdiction stretches from the suburbs of Dallas to Beaumont.

To be sure, narcotics are still making their way into the U.S., as evidenced by a bust last month in which nearly $30 million worth of street drugs were seized in a new smuggling tunnel connecting a warehouse in Tijuana to southern San Diego. Shelley said that bust was notable in that only about 2 pounds of fentanyl was recovered, “much lower than usual shipments.”

This March 2020 photo provided by the U.S. Border Patrol's San Diego Tunnel Team shows an agent in a tunnel under the Otay Mesa area of San Diego, Calif.

Trump announced earlier this month that Navy ships were being moved toward Venezuela as part of a bid to beef up counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug indictment against Nicolás Maduro.

But the pandemic also has limited law enforcement’s effectiveness, as departments cope with drug investigators working remotely, falling ill and navigating a new landscape in which their own activities have become more conspicuous. In Los Angeles County, half of the narcotics detectives have been put on patrol duty, potentially imperiling long-term investigations.

Nonetheless, Capt. Chris Sandoval, who oversees special investigations for the Houston-based Harris County Sheriff’s Office, said there’s a new saying among his detectives: “Not even the dope dealers can hide from the coronavirus.”

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Bleiberg reported from Dallas. AP writers Erika Kinetz in Rieti, Italy, Mark Stevenson in Mexico City and Stefanie Dazio in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org

EU regrets U.S. refusal to allow economic aid for Iran to fight coronavirus 

THEY SHOULD DENOUNCE IT AS A CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY 
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union has urged the United States to ease its sanctions on Iran and approve economic aid to help deal with the coronavirus pandemic, but its calls were rejected, the EU’s top diplomat said on Wednesday.

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell holds a virtual news conference at the end of a videoconference of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, April 22, 2020. Olivier Hoslet/Pool

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the United States was preventing the International Monetary Fund from assisting Iran, the Middle Eastern country most affected by the coronavirus, adding that he regretted Washington’s position.

“We supported first to soften the sanctions and second, the request by Iran to the International Monetary Fund for financial help,” Borrell told a virtual news conference after a video conference of EU foreign ministers.

“I regret that the Americans are, at this stage, opposing the International Monetary Fund from taking this decision. From a humanitarian point of view, this request should have been accepted,” he said.

Washington has said it is not letting up on its “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran despite the coronavirus, continuing to use sanctions to try to limit Tehran’s ballistic missile program and influence across the Middle East.

U.S. President Donald Trump reimposed sanctions on Tehran’s petroleum exports in 2018 after withdrawing from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers. The European Union helped to negotiate the agreement.

Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Reuters reported on April 15 that the United States opposed a massive IMF liquidity injection through issuance of new Special Drawing Rights, akin to a central bank making new money, that would have benefited Iran and other countries.

The program could have provided hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves for all of the global lender’s 189 member countries, according to sources familiar with the IMF’s deliberations. The U.S. Treasury declined to comment for the Reuters April 15 report.
Iran has almost 86,000 confirmed cases of COVID 19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and more than 5,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.

The European Union, which has provided some humanitarian aid to Iran despite U.S. sanctions, said on March 23 that it supported Iran’s request for IMF help.

Reporting by Robin Emmott;editing by Grant McCool
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Banksy's 'Girl with a Pierced Eardrum' gains a coronavirus face mask

LONDON (Reuters) - Banksy’s “Girl with a Pierced Eardrum” has been updated for the coronavirus era with the addition of a blue surgical face mask.

The mural, a take on Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” but with a security alarm replacing the pearl, was painted on a harbourside building in the street artist’s home city of Bristol in west England in 2014.

It is not known whether Banksy, whose identity is a closely guarded secret, or somebody else attached the fabric face mask to the painted girl.

The newly adorned mural did not appear on Banksy’s Instagram page where he usually posts images of his work.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already inspired the artist.

He unveiled a scene of his trademark stencilled rats running amok in a bathroom rather than on the streets last week, reflecting official advice form the British government to stay at home.

“My wife hates it when I work from home,” he commented alongside the photos.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BANKSY

Haiti receives more deportees from U.S. despite coronavirus fears

Andre Paultre

PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) - Haiti received a deportation flight on Thursday from the United States of 129 Haitians, including minors, days after three deportees who arrived on the previous flight tested positive for the new coronavirus.
Haitian migrants ride on a bus after arriving on a deportation flight from the United States, amidst the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Port-au-Prince, Haiti April 23, 2020. REUTERS/Jeanty Junior Augustin

A growing trend of contagion among deportees from the United States to Latin America has fostered criticism that it is exporting the virus to poorer countries that have fewer confirmed cases and would be devastated by a major outbreak.

Haiti Foreign Ministry senior official Israel Jacky Cantave told Reuters Haiti had asked for all deportees to be tested but the U.S. government had only agreed to test those with symptoms - a problem given many carriers are asymptomatic.

The poorest country in the Americas, which has limited testing capacity, is placing all deportees in a quarantine facility for two weeks upon arrival.

But security at such facilities has proven to be weak, with one of the three deportees from a flight two weeks ago to have tested positive for the virus last weekend having escaped.

Critics of the Haitian government blame it for not standing up to the administration of President Donald Trump which has backed President Jovenel Moise throughout the violent protests that have rocked his term in office.

Haitian Prime Minister Joseph Jouthe has said repeatedly the deportees have the right to come home although his government has issued requirements for other Haitians to return so onerous they would be hard to fulfill.

According to the new rules, made public this week, they must present proof of a negative coronavirus test and pay to be quarantined for 14 days at one of two Port-au-Prince hotels designated by the government.

The new virus has spread slowly in Haiti, which has confirmed 72 cases and 5 deaths so far. But the U.S. deportations and return of thousands of Haitian workers from the Dominican Republic, which is one of the worst affected countries in the region, could soon change that.

Doctors warn a major outbreak would be devastating as the healthcare system is already collapsing - Haiti has just 100 ventilators for 11 million residents. The supply of water and sanitation infrastructure is poor and the country is densely populated.

Moreover, with two thirds of Haitians living under the poverty level, most cannot afford to self isolate and continue to go about their daily lives. Vendors in the capital protested on Thursday against a decision by authorities to limit market days to three times a week.

THESE DEPORTEES ARE HAITIAN REFUGEES THAT HAD BEEN APPROVED FOR THE US RESIDENCE STATUS IN THE USA AS FAR BACK AS THE CLINTON PRESIDENCY!!!! BUT LIKE THE VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE, THEY ARE ALSO BEING DEPORTED BY THE REICHSFUERHER MILLER GOVERNMENT

Spray it, don't say it: Kenya graffiti artists spread health message

Ayenat Mersie

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A six-foot image of a sad-eyed man, baseball cap askew and mask covering his nose and mouth is spray painted on a building in a Nairobi slum. Next to it are the words “Corona is real”.

There are six other pieces of graffiti like it around Mathare, the Kenyan capital’s second-largest slum. One urges people to wash their hands, another to use mobile money rather than germ-ridden cash.

All are public health messages to avoid the new coronavirus. As of Wednesday, Kenya had 303 confirmed cases of the disease and 14 deaths.

In a densely crowded settlement where social distancing and working from home are a pipe dream for most, the campaign is designed to teach people tangible ways in which they can protect themselves and their community from the coronavirus.

Unlike the stuffy government news conferences on television, the campaign uses the voices of the people who live there.

The graffiti campaign is the brainchild of Antony Mwelu, a 24-year-old content creator with Light Art Club and graffiti artist Brian Musasia Wanyande.

Children look on as Brian Musasia Wanyande, an artist from the Mathare Roots's youth group, paints an advocacy graffiti against the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at the Mathare Valley slum, in Nairobi, Kenya April 19, 2020. REUTERS/Thomas Mukoya

Mwelu, who was born and raised in Mathare, realised he needed to do something after visiting the neighbourhood several weeks ago.

“I was sitting with the boys and I asked them ‘Do you believe in corona?’. Most of them were like ‘No we don’t believe it’.”

Wanyande had a similar experience.

“There’s a lot of misinformation going around,” Wanyande said. “And some of the real information has been given out in difficult English words.”


So, Wanyande said, he saw a need not only for catchy images but also accessible language to get the message across. Some of the graffiti is in Sheng, a local slang.

Mathare residents – who might number as many as half a million, according to the Mathare Foundation – have taken to the new images.

As Wanyande painted the pieces urging people to use mobile money – which included a larger-than-life image of a grinning man leaning against his motorbike taxi and a woman in front of her street-side banana stall – a crowd gathered.

Dozens of residents ogled the art, with some squinting into their smartphones to take pictures.

The team includes and employs residents, too. Wanyande – who is well-known in Nairobi graffiti circles – has worked with up-and-coming Mathare artists on several pieces.

Other people have been hired to help in other ways, including with security, Mwelu said. The cash they can earn is badly needed as other casual labour dries up.

For now, the project is self-funded. Mwelu’s team is using money made on corporate campaigns.

“For the purpose and the people, rather than the profit,” he said.


Editing by Katharine Houreld, Robert Birsel

South Africa's itinerant wastepickers lose livelihood in lockdown

Tim Cocks

SOWETO, Johannesburg (Reuters) - They perform one of South Africa’s most important services, collecting recyclables that would otherwise swell the country’s rubbish dumps and burden municipal trash collection, but the coronavirus lockdown has left thousands of wastepickers jobless.

The shutdown ordered by President Cyril Ramaphosa that began on March 20, and was extended until April 30, is among the toughest in the world. It bans anyone apart from essential workers leaving their homes except to buy food or medicine.

Yet although municipal rubbish collectors were classified as essential workers, authorities excluded itinerant wastepickers who ply the streets of Johannesburg pulling heavy carts laden with more than three quarters of the city’s total recycling.

For the past decade, 55-year old grandmother Abigail Kubheka has been rising at 3 a.m. every morning in her house in the township of Soweto. She walks some 10 kilometres a day to scavenge for recyclable trash and load it onto her cart.

“If you leave much later, you’ll get nothing,” she told Reuters at a Soweto yard where other wastepickers with whom she works sorted plastic from glass bottles and aluminium cans.

Even when she goes to church on Sunday, she carries a waste bag to scoop up any promising items on the way back. Besides doing wonders for her fitness, her activities have enabled her to feed, clothe and educate three children — one is now at university — and support two grandchildren.

But with the lockdown, everything dried up.

“People think wastepickers are low down, but I find it good. I’m healthy and I’m free,” she said. “Now I’m just sitting at home because we can’t work.”

A spokesman for the environment ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

A 2016 report by South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) estimated there were up to 90,000 waste pickers in the country, which is notorious for having the world’s worst extremes of wealth and poverty.

The same report said they collect 80-90% of the paper and packaging that South Africa recycles, saving municipal authorities 750 million rand ($39.54 million) in one year.

Another report by South Africa’s plastic industry body put its recycling of plastics at 46% in 2018, compared with just 31% across Europe, thanks largely to the wastepickers’ efforts.

Wastepicking also fill stomachs in a country with 30 percent unemployment and large families often depending on a single breadwinner. Adelina Nkopane, who works with Kubheka, was pulling in 1,000 rand a week — a good wage in South Africa.

“Since the lockdown, I don’t have money to buy food or pay my rent. My husband is not working and I never manage to keep money for more than a few days. It’s a disaster,” she said, before stuffing a sack full of plastic drink bottles.

Instead, she has been queuing up for government food handouts. “If they can just allow us to work and we respect the rules and they gave us masks, we could be very happy,” she said.

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World must ensure equal access for all to COVID-19 vaccines, drugs: WHO

GENEVA/LONDON (Reuters) - All new vaccines, diagnostics and treatments against the new coronavirus must be made equally available to everyone worldwide, the World Health Organization said on Friday as it outlined a plan to accelerate work to fight COVID-19.

Launching what he called a “landmark collaboration” to speed the development of effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent and treat COVID-19, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the lung disease was a “common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach”.


“Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen,” Tedros said in a virtual conference.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that the objective at a global pledging effort in early May would be to raise 7.5 billion euros ($8.10 billion) to ramp up work on prevention, diagnostics and treatment.

“This is a first step only, but more will be needed in the future,” she told the conference.

Cyril Ramaphosa, chairman of the African Union, praised WHO’s “excellent stewardship” in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic that has swept around the world. He warned that the African continent was “extremely vulnerable to the ravages of this virus and is in need of support”.

Italy's coronavirus epidemic began in January, study shows

Another team of Italian scientists has said the coronavirus may have reached Italy from Germany, not directly from China, in the second half of January.

ROME (Reuters) - The first COVID-19 infections in Italy date back to January, according to a scientific study presented on Friday, shedding new light on the origins of the outbreak in one of the world’s worst-affected countries.
A worker wearing protective clothing disinfects a vehicle after disembarking from a ferry in Capri, as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues in Capri, Italy, April 24, 2020. REUTERS/Ciro De Luca

Italy began testing people after diagnosing its first local patient on Feb 21 in Codogno, a small town in the wealthy Lombardy region.

Cases and deaths immediately surged, with scientists soon suspecting that the virus had been around, unnoticed, for weeks.

Stefano Merler, of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, told a news conference with Italy’s top health authorities that his institute had looked at the first known cases and drawn clear conclusions from the subsequent pace of contagion.


“We realized that there were a lot of infected people in Lombardy well before Feb. 20, which means the epidemic had started much earlier,” he said.

“In January for sure, but maybe even before. We’ll never know,” he said, adding that he believed the immediate surge in cases suggested the virus was probably brought to Italy by a group of people rather than a single individual.

A separate study based on a sample of cases registered in April said 44.1% of infections occurred in nursing homes and another 24.7% spread within families. A further 10.8% of people caught the virus at hospital and 4.2% in the workplace.

Italy was the first major western country to face the viral disease, which originated in China late last year and has spread around the world. Italian authorities have recorded some 190,000 confirmed cases and 25,500 deaths.

In a bid to prevent the outbreak, Italy halted air traffic to and from China on Jan. 31 after two Chinese tourists tested positive in Rome. But scientists say it was probably too late.

Another team of Italian scientists has said the coronavirus may have reached Italy from Germany, not directly from China, in the second half of January.

Sanofi CEO warns Europe on cornavirus vaccine race

PARIS (Reuters) - Sanofi’s chief executive on Friday urged stronger European co-ordination in the hunt for a vaccine against the new coronavirus, criticising Europe for being too slow to act in a fiercely competitive global race.

April 24, 2020. REUTERS/Charles Platiau

The French drugmaker is working on two vaccine projects, including one in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline. That venture has received financial support from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

Europe risked the United States securing first access for its citizens if U.S. cash funded the successful development of a vaccine.

“It is quite conceivable that if they are successful the American government will ask for Americans to be vaccinated first,” Hudson told reporters.


“There has been too much of a lack of co-ordination at a European level. It is starting to move now but the level of preparedness to the pandemic is very, very low,” he said.

There are no approved treatments or vaccines for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus which has claimed the lives of nearly 190,000 people and infected more than 2.7 million others.

Hudson said Sanofi, which published its first-quarter results on Friday, had contacted the European Commission to discuss the matter.

“Maybe it is too complicated for them (the Commission) but we will work with member states and try to get this thing moving,” Hudson said.


“We do not want to get to next summer and not have enough vaccines for Europe.”

World leaders pledged on Friday to accelerate work on tests, drugs and vaccines against the coronavirus and to share them around the globe, but the United States did not take part in the launch of the World Health Organization (WHO) initiative.

Fires near Chernobyl pose 'no risk to human health', IAEA says

EXCEPT THEY HAVE BEEN BURNING FOR A MONTH LONGER THAN PREDICTED THE SMOKE AND PARTICULATE CREATE TOXIC AIR POLLUTION


FILE PHOTO: A view shows a wooden house on fire, as an operation to extinguish wildfires around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant continues, in Lyudvynivka in Kiev Region, Ukraine April 18, 2020. REUTERS/Volodymyr Shuvayev

VIENNA (Reuters) - Radiation from fires that have torn through forests around Ukraine’s defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant poses “no risk to human health”, the U.N. atomic agency said on Friday, based on data provided by Ukraine.

The main fire among several blazes was extinguished last week but advanced far into the 30 km exclusion zone around the plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986. Smaller fires are still burning in the exclusion zone, its administration said on Friday evening.

Footage from the site has shown plumes of smoke billowing from the charred landscape, and environmental activists have said the burning of contaminated trees and other vegetation could disperse radioactive particles, posing a health risk.

“The recent fires in the Exclusion Zone near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine have not led to any hazardous increase of radioactive particles in the air,” the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a statement.

The Vienna-based IAEA, which acts as the U.N. nuclear watchdog but also aims to encourage the peaceful use of nuclear energy, said it was basing its assessment on data provided by Ukraine.

The IAEA said it found “the increase in levels of radiation measured in the country was very small and posed no risk to human health”.

There had been “some minor increases in radiation”, the IAEA said, adding the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine had found “the concentration of radioactive materials in the air remained below Ukraine’s radiation safety norms”

SEE 
Air quality levels in Ukraine dip to 'moderate' as fires continue to burn
APRIL 18, 2020
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/chernobyl-wildfire-air-quality-levels.html

Chernobyl fire under control, Ukraine officials say
BBC 14 April 2020
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/chernobyl-fire-under-control-ukraine.html

Chernobyl fire: Huge forest blaze moves within one kilometre of abandoned nuclear plant
Wednesday, April 14, 2020
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/chernobyl-fire-huge-forest-blaze-moves.html

POLISH NATIONAL PARK BURNS ON EARTH DAY
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2020/04/wildfire-ravages-polands-largest.html

Peru indigenous warn of 'ethnocide by inaction' as coronavirus hits Amazon tribes

Maria Cervantes
LIMA (Reuters) - Indigenous tribes in Peru’s Amazon say the government has left them to fend for themselves against the coronavirus, risking “ethnocide by inaction,” according to a letter from natives to the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

FILE PHOTO - A member of an indigenous group from the Amazon region attend a meeting with Pope Francis at the Coliseo Regional Madre de Dios in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, January 19, 2018. REUTERS/Alessandro Bianchi

The formal complaint asks the U.N. and international courts to force the government to take “concrete action” to ensure their survival, citing the 1948 U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Eight native leaders representing 1,800 communities in the Peruvian Amazon signed the letter which was published by indigenous group AIDESEP on Thursday.

Health experts have warned the spreading virus could be lethal for the Amazon´s indigenous people, who have been decimated for centuries by diseases brought by Europeans, from smallpox and malaria to the flu.

“They send messages every day about what the (government) is going to do in the cities, but nothing for indigenous peoples,” Lizardo Cauper, president of AIDESEP, told Reuters. “For us, this is discrimination.”
At least four natives from the Puerto Bethel region, a remote Amazon wilderness community two hours by river from the capital of Ucayali, have contracted the disease, according to a spokesman for the Ministry of Health.

The Ministry of Culture said earlier this week that it shipped supplies for improving sanitation and hygiene to Puerto Bethel and was monitoring the situation.

BANANA LEAVES

The natives infected with coronavirus have self-isolated in a local community, said Ronald Suarez, president of the Shipibo Konibo Xetebo ethnic group. But they have few supplies to protect themselves, he told Reuters.

“People put up banana leaves to protect themselves,” Suarez said, explaining they could be used as a makeshift mask.

He said medications and treatment options are also in short supply, forcing many to treat symptoms with medicinal plants.


Peru’s Ombudsman’s Office warned earlier this month the disease could spread quickly to other indigenous communities if officials do not take fast action.

The ombudsman says only 4 of 10 communities have health care facilities in this poor, remote region of the Amazon.

Peru reported 21,648 cases of the coronavirus on Friday, the second highest tally in Latin America, and 634 related deaths. There have been no reports of indigenous people killed by the virus.


Reporting by Maria Cervantes; Additional reporting by Marco Aquino; Writing by Dave Sherwood; Editing by Daniel Wallis

Special Report: India's migrant workers fall through cracks in coronavirus lockdown

Alasdair Pal, Danish Siddiqui

JUGYAI, India (Reuters) - Most days, you can find Dayaram Kushwaha and his wife, Gyanvati, hauling bricks for stonemasons in a booming northern suburb of New Delhi. They bring their 5-year-old son, who plays in the dirt while they work.

But now a hush has come over the clattering construction site, silenced by India’s nationwide order to shelter in place to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus. Site managers no longer come to the intersection where Dayaram and many others stand, hoping to pick up work.

And so, with no way to feed his family or pay the rent, Dayaram hoisted his son Shivam onto his shoulders and began to walk to the village where he was born, 300 miles away.

He tried not to worry about what would happen once he got there, with empty pockets instead of the money he usually sent home to help support those left behind. At least he would have a home.

By dusk on the second day, Dayaram and around 50 others from his extended family had reached a deserted expressway running south out of the capital.

The family were hungry, thirsty and tired, and the police were never far away. Every time they stopped to rest, officers would shout at them to keep moving in single file, to maintain distance from one another to avoid spreading the virus. Officers are under orders to enforce the lockdown, but on that day they were allowing people to move.

Dayaram, 28, looked around. Thousands of other migrant workers were doing the same thing, in one of the biggest mass movements of people in the country since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.

It began to rain. Dayaram’s thoughts turned to his other son, 7-year-old Mangal, who had been left behind in the village with elderly relatives because it was too hard to care for two children while he and his wife worked. He missed him.

In the middle of a pandemic, there was one consolation: “At least I will be with him.”

PUSH AND PULL

For decades, villages across India have been emptying out.

To many people, the decision is one of simple arithmetic: to earn $6 per day instead of $3 back home. In areas like the parched Bundelkhand region of Madhya Pradesh state, home to Dayaram’s ancestral village, living off the land has become increasingly difficult as rainfall recedes.

Others seek something more abstract: the prospect of escape that pulls anyone toward a big city.


But after the shutdown, the cities themselves began to empty. Dayaram and his family were among the first to move. As the days went on, and the situation became more desperate, hundreds of thousands of migrants emerged from factories and workplaces in search of a way home.

Indian officials say the shutdown is necessary to beat coronavirus in the densely populated country of 1.3 billion people, with a health infrastructure that can ill afford a widespread outbreak.

But for Dayaram and many of India’s estimated 140 million migrant laborers, the epidemic is much more than a threat to their health – it endangers their very economic survival.

In the shutdown, India has banned domestic and international travel, and factories, schools, offices and all shops other than those supplying essential services have been shut. Taken together, the measures amount to one of the harshest lockdowns in the world.

Cases here have spiked to nearly 17,000, with more than 500 deaths. On April 14, the government extended the curbs until at least May 3, prompting clashes between police and migrants trying to leave India’s financial capital, Mumbai.

Migrants are the backbone of the urban economy. Construction workers such as Dayaram are a necessity for India’s rapidly expanding cities. Others clean toilets, drive taxis and deliver takeout. They predominantly earn daily wages, with no prospect of job security, and live in dirty, densely populated slums, saving money to send back home.

That money is essential to the young and elderly left behind in villages. Around $30 billion flows from urban to rural areas in India each year, according to government and academic estimates.

Now that infusion of money, transferred through rural banks or in worn stacks of rupees borne home on rare visits, has come to a halt.
TURN BACK TIME

The journey from New Delhi deep into rural India is one not just of distance, but of traveling back in time.

Skyscrapers and well-paved toll roads give way to fields of wheat and okra. Bare-backed men till the land with buffalo; an elderly shepherd herds his goats down a dusty lane.

After four days of walking and hitching lifts on a series of goods trucks, Dayaram, Gyanvati and Shivam reached their family’s two-room concrete hut in Jugyai, a farming village of 2,000 people.

In a dingy room in the house filled with sacks of grain and clothes, an unframed poster hangs on the wall. It depicts a handsome red-roofed house on a lake, sun setting behind snow-capped mountains. A pair of mallard ducks fly overhead.



FILE PHOTO: Dayaram Kushwaha, a migrant worker, carries his 5-year-old son, Shivam, on his shoulders as they walk along a road to return to their village, during a 21-day nationwide lockdown to limit the spreading of coronavirus, in New Delhi, India, March 26, 2020. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

“I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other,” it says.

Though he can’t read the English text on the poster, Dayaram agrees with the sentiment. He misses this village that can no longer sustain him.

“It’s not that I love Delhi,” he said. “I need the money to survive. If we had it, we would have stayed here. This is home.”

His mother, 53-year-old Kesra, is more practical. She too had gone to New Delhi with her family, leaving the village behind.

“Home is wherever the family is,” she said. “At least in Delhi there is money to buy food.”

But now they are all back, and there is no money to buy food. Making it even worse, suspicion is never far away. The returnees must deal with new prejudice from villagers who used to be their friends.

“I am scared,” said Sai Ram Lal, a neighbor who works in a soybean-oil factory here.

“It was spreading in Delhi, and I am worried that they have brought it here. We keep our distance. We don’t interact with them like we used to before.”

For Dayaram, that has left him an outsider in his own village.
“WE ARE LIKE GARBAGE”

The Bundelkhand region is famous for the towering 16th century sandstone temples and mausoleums of nearby Orchha. It has its own distinct culture, and young men still listen to high-tempo music in the local Bundeli language on their mobile phones.

The region used to get up to 35 inches of rain per year, according to the India Meteorological Department, but over the last decade, that has almost halved.

For many of the villagers, who have traditionally earned their living farming, it is a slow-motion disaster, forcing most able-bodied men and women to migrate in search of work.

It is early April, and even before the full onset of the fierce Indian summer, where temperatures climb toward 50 degrees Celsius, or 120 Fahrenheit, the air is already uncomfortably dry.


In a neighboring village where the majority of Dayaram’s extended family lives, two dozen men stood idling by the road.

Only one, 62-year-old Lal Ram, has never been to Delhi. “I had some money, so I never went,” he said with a shrug.

He’s also the only one with a ration card, a sore point for those who migrated to Delhi. The Targeted Public Distribution Scheme allows India’s poorest to purchase 5 kilograms of subsidized grains per month each. But because the migrant workers are no longer permanent residents, they’re left without access to the food doled out from a nearby grain silo.

“Nobody listens to us,” one of the men said bitterly. “We are like garbage.”

Harshika Singh, the top government official in the district where both villages lie, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the migrants’ case.

After this story was published, Indian government spokesman K.S. Dhatwalia issued a statement to Reuters on Friday outlining measures being taken to assist the poor during the pandemic. The government was offering food and cash for essential supplies to poor and marginalized people, Dhatwalia said, and relief camps have been set up in different parts of the country.

Dayaram’s father, 58-year-old Takur Das, was the first in the family to set off for New Delhi in search for work when it became increasingly difficult to make a living off the parched land.

That was a decade ago. Eventually, he sent for his son, too. The work there was hard, but it was steady.

“We can get some money for your wedding,” he told Dayaram.

Many people in New Delhi would struggle to find Alipur, the Delhi suburb where they settled, on a map. It rarely makes the national news but for misfortune involving laborers: 25 children rescued by authorities in a series of warehouse raids; four men, including two brothers, crushed to death by sacks of rice.

Dayaram says his heart sank when he saw the crowded, tarpaulin-roofed slum where the family slept 12 to a room. His first thought was to run away back to the village.

But he stayed. What else could he do?

Dayaram talks continuously about fate. His marriage, his move to New Delhi, his flight back home – all were decisions made not out of choice, but necessity.

Dayaram’s maternal aunt played matchmaker when it came time for him to marry. He and Gyanvati were from the same Kushwaha caste, from a lower rung of India’s ancient social order who traditionally worked in agriculture.


Slideshow (16 Images)

They first met a month before their wedding day.

“She was OK,” Dayaram said, a smile briefly crossing his face, remembering their meeting.

“But whatever is in my fate is fine, whether it is good or bad.”

After Mangal was born, Gyanvati stayed behind in Jugyai to look after him. When he was 1½, she came to New Delhi with him, too.

But after Shivam was born, they were faced with a choice: take Mangal, too, or leave him in the village.

“It’s easier to carry one child while working, but two is too difficult,” Gyanvati said. “So we had to leave him behind.”

NO ALTERNATIVE

The family’s return this month coincided with harvest of the winter wheat crop. One morning, after a night on a rope-strung bed under the light of the pink supermoon, Dayaram put on a shirt ripped at the left armpit and headed to a nearby field.

His sons trailed behind, picking unripe berries from a bush. Shivam, wearing the same faded shirt in yellow checks as when he left New Delhi, put his hand on his elder brother’s shoulder.

Dayaram, Gyanvati and three other relatives began cropping stalks by hand with well-worn scythes. After three days there, harvesting almost a ton of wheat, they received no payment – just 50 kilograms of the crop to take to the village flour mill.

The family’s basket of lumpen potatoes would last a week. When that ran out, they would have to survive on bread alone.

In good months in New Delhi, they were able to save 8,000 rupees, or about $100, a month to send back home, and to repay a loan taken out when Gyanvati fell sick early in their marriage.

But soon, Dayaram said, he would be forced to borrow again from local money lenders, charging interest at 3% a month – a rate that can quickly spiral into unpayable debts.

Despite being separated for months at a time, Mangal and Shivam are still close. Both have their father’s broad nose and mother’s lively eyes, the same matching bowl haircuts with unevenly shorn sides.


“They cut each other’s hair,” said Gyanvati, laughing. “That’s why they look like that.”

Both boys shrugged when asked if they wanted to go school, as if the issue had never really been discussed.

Dayaram worries that the shutdown will end any hope of providing his children with an education.

“No parent wants their child to work as a laborer,” he said. But there is no alternative, he said: “They will have to do what I have done.”

Beneath the brilliant red blossoms of the Indian coral tree, the family finished

FREE WESTERN PAPUA

Indonesia convicts Papua activists of treason for holding protest

Agustinus Beo Da Costa

JAKARTA (Reuters) - An Indonesian court convicted six activists of treason for organising a protest demanding independence for the easternmost province of Papua, in a verdict slammed by rights groups.


FILE PHOTO: Dano Anes Tabuni, Ambrosius Mulait, Paulus Suryanta Ginting, Arina Elopere, Charles Kossay, and Isay Wenda, pro-Papuan activists who were arrested on suspicion of treason, sing a solidarity song as they arrive at the courtroom before their trial at Central Jakarta District Court in Jakarta, Indonesia, December 19, 2019. REUTERS/Willy Kurniawan

The peaceful protest of about 100 people had been held outside the presidential palace and military headquarters on Aug. 28 in the capital of Jakarta and followed a period of unrest in Papua.

In a sentencing hearing on Friday held online due to the coronavirus outbreak, Judge Agustinus Setya Wahyu Triwiranto said he had found the six defendants “guilty of treason”.

Activists Ambrosius Mulait, Surya Anta, Charles Kossay, Dano Tabuni, and Arina Elopere were convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison, while Isay Wenda was given an eight-month sentence.

All six have been held in prison since August. Prosecutors accused them in December of organising a rally demanding the Indonesian government allow a vote in Papua to let it separate from Indonesia.

International rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch criticised the convictions, stating that the activists had been attending a peaceful rally over perceived ethnic discrimination.

“The six who were sentenced today did nothing but attend a peaceful protest, enjoying their rights to freedom of expression and assembly,” said Amnesty International Indonesia director Usman Hamid.
Amnesty noted the six activists are part of 57 “prisoners of conscience” from Papua being held for peacefully expressing their views.

Resource-rich Papua was a Dutch colony that was incorporated into Indonesia after a controversial U.N.-backed referendum in 1969, which has since endured decades of mostly low-level separatist conflict.

Thousands of Papuans staged rallies in August to protest an incident that saw a racist slur against Papuan students who were hit by tear gas in their dormitory and detained in the city of Surabaya. The resulting protests were the biggest in years and triggered some calls for independence.

Oky Wiratma, the lawyer for the activists, told Reuters on Saturday the verdict was disproportionate, and the Papuan activists had “protested peacefully against racism”.

He said the six activists were expected to be released in the coming weeks based on the time already served, barring a decision by prosecutors to appeal.

Prosecutors had originally sought 18-months sentences for the activists. Prosecutors were not immediately reachable for comment.

Reporting by Agustinus Beo Da Costal; Writing by Fanny Potkin; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman

Exclusive: Venezuela Socialists, opposition leaders begin secret talks amid pandemic - sources

Corina Pons, Mayela Armas


CARACAS (Reuters) - Allies of both Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his bitter foe, opposition leader Juan Guaido, have secretly begun exploratory talks as concerns grow about the possible impact of the spread of the coronavirus, according to sources on both sides.



FILE PHOTO: Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro speaks during a news conference at Miraflores Palace in Caracas, Venezuela, March 12, 2020. REUTERS/Manaure Quintero/File Photo

The discussions emerged from concerns about the respiratory illness COVID-19, hyperinflation and growing fuel shortages, as well as worries among some members of the ruling Socialist Party about how to ensure their political survival under a possible change of government as Washington tightens sanctions, the sources said.

The talks, which have no clear agenda, show that allies of both Maduro and Guaido remain unconvinced they can defeat the other amid a global pandemic and a broad U.S. sanctions program meant to push Maduro from office.

“There are two extremes: Maduro and those who believe that the virus will end Guaido’s leadership, and those on the other side (who) hope this crisis will bring down Maduro,” said an opposition legislator in favor of the rapprochement.

“I think we have to find solutions.”

Reuters was unable to determine when the talks began, where or how they are taking place, and how Maduro and Guaido view them. Seven sources, who represent both sides of Venezuela’s deep political divide, confirmed the talks.

Maduro and Guaido are competing with one another to help combat the effects of the pandemic, with each side convinced the outbreak will undermine the other politically, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.

Activists and rights groups around the world have urged the two factions to seek a truce in order to coordinate the delivery of aid and boost gasoline imports.


The U.S. State Department in March offered to begin lifting parts of the sanctions if members of the Socialist Party form an interim government without Maduro, a plan backed by Guaido but quickly shot down by the government.

Venezuela’s information ministry and Guaido’s press team did not reply to a request for comment about the current talks.

Guaido later on Tuesday denied the approach after the initial Reuters story was published. “This information is false,” he wrote on his Twitter account. “The democratic alternative is united in its cause and there is only one possible agreement to save Venezuela: to form a National Emergency Government, without drug traffickers in Miraflores, that can access international aid that we need.”

A source in Washington familiar with the matter told Reuters on Tuesday: “There are many private conversations among people in the regime and the opposition, especially since the U.S. announced the transition plan.” The person added: “And there are certainly efforts by Guaido and others to get more aid in to fight the pandemic. That’s led to more conversations by individuals in the opposition and individuals in the regime. What has not happened is any political negotiation.”

The State Department confirmed conversations between representatives of the opposition and officials in Maduro’s government.

“For weeks, Interim President Juan Guaido has been urging the former Maduro regime to take the pandemic more seriously and has been seeking ways to use Venezuelan official funds he can access in the United States to help the struggle against COVID-19,” said a representative of the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs. “This has led to many conversations by representatives of international organizations with regime officials, and some direct conversations between opposition representatives and regime officials, seeking a practical way forward.”

Maduro has frequently said he is willing to hold dialogue.

“We are ready for dialogue, to understand one another and reach a humanitarian agreement to attend to the coronavirus (pandemic),” Maduro said during a televised broadcast over the weekend, without making reference to any specific set of talks.


Guaido, head of the national assembly who assumed an interim presidency last year after disavowing Maduro’s 2018 re-election, is recognized by the United States and more than 50 countries as the nation’s legitimate leader. But other powers such as China and Russia still back Maduro.

One source linked to the government acknowledged the talks were going on.

“There are proposals coming and going” between Maduro allies and members of the four principal opposition parties, said the source.

“There are approaches,” said one opposition deputy who is aware of the discussions. “There are key elements in the government that want to negotiate their salvation.”

The two sides last year participated in a dialogue brokered by Norway in which the opposition had pressed for a new presidential election. But Maduro’s side walked away from the process in protest of U.S. sanctions.

Maduro assures his government has controlled the coronavirus outbreak in Venezuela with the support of China, while Guaido accuses him of using the pandemic as an excuse for disastrous economic policies.

A senior Trump admninistration official said Maduro alone was responsible for “the humanitarian toll in Venezuela, compounded by the recent COVID-19 crisis and the gas shortages.”

Venezuela as of Monday had reported 285 coronavirus infections. The United Nations has called it one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to the virus due to the lack of soap and water in hospitals and the overall impoverishment of the population.

Guaido, who controls Venezuelan government funds held in offshore accounts, is seeking to provide $20 million to the Pan American Health Organization to acquire supplies, according to three sources.

But Maduro’s government is aiming to block the operation via the United Nations, which still recognizes his government.

The Venezuelan offices of the Pan American Health Organization and the United Nations did not respond to requests for comment.

Guaido has offered to pay $100 per month to doctors and nurses with the help of the Organization of American States, a mechanism that has not yet started.


Reporting by Corina Pons, Mayela Armas and Sarah Kinosian in Caracas, and Humeyra Pamuk and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Writing by Brian Ellsworth; Editing by Alistair Bell and Matthew Lewis

Lebanon legalizes cannabis farming for medicinal use
BACK IN THE DAY WE GOT GREAT HASHISH FROM LEBANON AND THEN A WAR BROKE OUT
FILE PHOTO: A farmer is seen tending to cannabis plants in a field in the Yammouneh area west of Baalbek, Lebanon, August 13, 2018. REUTERS/Mo
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Lebanese parliament legalized cannabis farming for medicinal use on Tuesday, a potentially lucrative export for an economy in dire need of foreign currency as it grapples with a paralyzing financial crisis.

Although growing the plant is illegal in Lebanon, cannabis has long been farmed openly in the fertile Bekaa Valley.


Parliament’s decision was “really driven by economic motives, nothing else”, said Alain Aoun, a senior MP in the Free Patriotic Movement founded by President Michel Aoun. “We have moral and social reservations but today there is the need to help the economy by any means,” he told Reuters.

The move would bring revenue for the government and develop the agricultural sector while legalizing cultivation which was in any case going on illegally, he said. “We don’t want to speculate on numbers ... but let’s say it is worth a try”.


Hezbollah, a Shi’ite Islamist group backed by Iran, was one of the only parties to oppose the legislation approved in a session on Tuesday.

The idea of legalizing cannabis cultivation with the aim of producing high value-added medicinal products for export was explored in a report by consultancy firm McKinsey commissioned by Lebanon in 2018.

Last month, Lebanese police carried out the country’s biggest drug bust when they seized about 25 tonnes of hashish that were set to be smuggled to an African state.


Reporting by Tom Perry; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Famed Buenos Aires opera house turns its sewing machines to mask masking

Women sew face masks at the Colon Theater's sewing workshop during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Buenos Aires, Argentina April 24, 2020. 

REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian

(Reuters) - A Buenos Aires landmark and one of the world’s great opera houses, Teatro Colon has adapted its enormous basement workshops to making face masks, churning out 1,500 a week to help Argentina’s health workers cope with the coronavirus pandemic.

“This is a factory of dreams,” said stage director Enrique Bordolini. “The Colon has this advantage that everything you see on stage, when the curtain opens, is made right here.”

More than 50 volunteers who normally work to create stage props, sew tutus, and manage special effects, have been cutting and stitching felt and cloth to make face masks, stamped with the theatre’s logo.

“I feel the same joy that I do when I make costumes. For me, it’s the same pride and I do it just as happily,” said Stella Maris Lopez, the Colon’s head seamstress.

All performances and tours of the theatre have been suspended. Most public places have been closed since March 20 in Argentina, which has reported over 3,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 167 deaths.

Despite risks, auto workers step up to make medical gear

This photo provided by Cindy Parkhurst. shows Cindy Parkhurst working at the Ford Flat Rock Assembly Plant in Flat Rock, Mich. Like hundreds of workers at Ford, General Motors, Toyota and other companies, Parkhurst has gone back to work to make face shields, surgical masks and even ventilators in a wartime-like effort to stem shortages of protective gear and equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.(Cindy Parkhurst via AP)

DETROIT (AP) — Cindy Parkhurst could have stayed home collecting most of her pay while the Ford plant where she normally works remains closed due to coronavirus fears.

Instead, she along with hundreds of workers at Ford, General Motors, Toyota and other companies has gone back to work to make face shields, surgical masks and ventilators in a wartime-like effort to stem shortages of protective gear and equipment.

“I didn’t give it a second thought,” said Parkhurst, 55, a tow motor driver who is now helping Ford and its partner 3M manufacture and ship respirators. “It’s a neat thing to do for the community, for the first responders who definitely need this kind of protective gear.”

All over the country, blue-collar and salaried workers have raised their hands to make medical equipment as companies repurpose factories to answer calls for help from beleaguered nurses, doctors and paramedics who are treating patients with the highly contagious virus. Workers also are making soap and hand sanitizer, which early in the crisis were in short supply.

At Ford, over 800 people returned to work at four Detroit-area sites. General Motors, which President Donald Trump had alternately criticized and praised for its work, has about 400 at a now-closed transmission plant in suburban Detroit and an electronics factory in Kokomo, Indiana, working on shields and ventilators. About 60 Toyota workers, both salaried and blue-collar, are making protective equipment in Kentucky, Texas, Michigan and Alabama.

Most automakers in the U.S. temporarily stopped making vehicles about a month ago after workers complained about the risks of infection at the factories. Many white-collar workers are being paid to work remotely but members of the United Auto Workers who don’t have that option are still collecting pay and unemployment benefits that equal about 95% of regular take-home wages.

Those workers making medical gear will get their full base pay, but that’s not what’s motivating them to keep coming to the factories. Many simply want to help.

Jody Barrowman has been making face masks at a repurposed former General Motors transmission factory near Detroit since early April.

“Instead of being home and not helpful, I thought I’d be productive here,” she said.

She jumped at the chance to work because GM is donating the masks to hospitals and first responders “which is where it needs to go,” she said.

Barrowman said that the operation has been so efficient that workers have been allowed to take masks home for family members.

“I dropped some off at my grandparents. My parents took a full packet of masks at my house. So, it’s not just helping the first responders. It’s helping me and my family feel safe,” she said.
This photo provided by Toyota shows Toyota employee Kirk Barber making face shields at the Toyota factory in Georgetown, Ky. Hundreds of workers at Ford, General Motors, Toyota and other companies, have gone back to work to make face shields, surgical masks and even ventilators in a wartime-like effort to stem shortages of protective gear and equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.(Toyota via AP)

Inside a building on Toyota’s giant factory complex in Georgetown, Kentucky, mechanical engineer Kirk Barber helps to ship thousands of face shields that workers are making while plants are shut down. Sometimes he personally delivers boxes to hospitals or the state government, which is distributing them.


All of the workers, he said, had to undergo a cultural change to make sure they stay more than 6 feet apart to protect themselves from possible contagion.

“It’s a hard habit to break when you’re typically up and talking to someone, pointing to a document,” Barber said. “People are very quick to point out ‘hey, you guys need to keep your distance.’”

Twenty-four UAW members have already died from COVID-19 but it’s unclear when or where they contracted the disease. Ford, GM and Toyota said they aren’t aware of any infections among workers who returned to make medical gear. Still, there’s no denying the risks are likely higher at the factories than in the safety of one’s home.
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Joseph Holt, associate professor at Notre Dame’s business school who specializes in ethics and leadership, said the workers and their companies are examples of business doing its best to quickly fill a critical unmet need.

“Courage is doing what you think is right even when it might cost you,” Holt said. “Those workers being willing to go in to work to produce the medical equipment and personal protective gear, even at personal risk — that is moral courage in action.”

The Detroit automakers are trying to restart production on their vehicles, perhaps as soon as early May, but both Ford and GM say medical gear production will continue. Ford says it has enough workers to do both while GM says it won’t need all factory workers right away because it plans a gradual restart.

Back at the Ford complex in Flat Rock, Michigan, where Parkhurst works, she’s hoping the respirators she’s helping to ship make their way to the hospital in nearby Dearborn, where nurses treated her mother with compassion before she died of a stroke about a year ago. She knows they must be “going through hell” now because the Detroit area one of the national hotspots for the virus.

“When I compared that to taking maybe a small risk and going in and making respirators, I feel all right,” she said.

____

AP Video Journalist Mike Householder contributed to this report from Warren, Michigan. This story has been corrected to show that Cindy Parkhurt’s mother died about one year ago, not 15 years ago.

Brazil becoming coronavirus hot spot as testing falters

By DAVID BILLER, DIANE JEANTET AND LEO CORREA

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A cemetery worker stands before the coffin containing the remains of Edenir Rezende Bessa, who is suspected to have died of COVID-19, as relatives attend her burial, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Wednesday, April 22, 2020. After visiting 3 primary care health units she was accepted in a hospital that treats new coronavirus cases, where she died on Tuesday. “People need to believe that this is serious, it kills", said her son Rodrigo Bessa who works at a hospital as nurse in the Espirito Santo state. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Cases of the new coronavirus are overwhelming hospitals, morgues and cemeteries across Brazil as Latin America’s largest nation veers closer to becoming one of the world’s pandemic hot spots.

Medical officials in Rio de Janeiro and at least four other major cities have warned that their hospital systems are on the verge of collapse, or already too overwhelmed to take any more patients.

Health experts expect the number of infections in the country of 211 million people will be much higher than what has been reported because of insufficient, delayed testing.

Meanwhile, President Jair Bolsonaro has shown no sign of wavering from his insistence that COVID-19 is a relatively minor disease and that broad social-distancing measures are not needed to stop it. He has said only Brazilians at high risk should be isolated.

In Manaus, the biggest city in the Amazon, officials said a cemetery has been forced to dig mass graves because there have been so many deaths. Workers have been burying 100 corpses a day — triple the pre-virus average of burials.

Ytalo Rodrigues, a 20-year-old driver for a funerary service provider in Manaus, said he had retrieved one body after another for more than 36 hours, without a break. There were so many deaths, his employer had to add a second hearse, Rodrigues said.

So far, the health ministry has confirmed nearly 53,000 COVID-19 cases and more than 3,600 deaths. By official counts, the country had its worst day yet on Thursday, with about 3,700 new cases and more than 400 deaths, and Friday was nearly as grim.

Experts warned that paltry testing means the true number of infections is far greater. And because it can take a long time for tests to be processed, the current numbers actually reflect deaths that happened one or two weeks ago, said Domingos Alves, adjunct professor of social medicine at the University of Sao Paulo, who is involved in the project.

“We are looking at a photo of the past,” Alves said in an interview last week. “The number of cases in Brazil is, therefore, probably even greater than what we are predicting.”

Scientists from the University of Sao Paulo, University of Brasilia and other institutions say the true number of people infected with the virus as of this week is probably as much as 587,000 to 1.1 million people.

The health ministry said in a report earlier this month that it has the capacity to test 6,700 people per day — a far cry from the roughly 40,000 it will need when the virus peaks.


“We should do many more tests than we’re doing, but the laboratory here is working at full steam,” said Keny Colares, an infectious disease specialist at the Hospital Sao Jose in northeastern Ceara state who has been advising state officials on the pandemic response.

Meanwhile, health care workers can barely handle the cases they have.

In Rio state, all but one of seven public hospitals equipped to treat COVID-19 are full and can only accept new patients once others have either recovered or died, according to the press office of the health secretariat. The sole facility with vacancy is located a two-hour drive from the capital’s center.

At the mouth of the Amazon, the city of Belem’s intensive-care beds are all occupied, according to online media outlet G1. As the number of cases rises in the capital of Para state, its health secretary said this week that at least 200 medical staff had been infected, and it is actively seeking to hire more doctors, G1 reported.

On Saturday, the city of Rio plans to open its first field hospital, with 200 beds, half reserved for intensive care. Another hospital erected beside the historic Maracana football stadium will offer 400 beds starting next month.

In Ceara’s capital, Fortaleza, state officials said Friday that intensive care units for COVID-19 patients were 92% full, after reaching capacity a week ago. Health experts and officials are particularly worried about the virus spreading into the poorest neighborhoods, or favelas, where people depend on public health care.

Edenir Bessa, a 65-year-old retiree from Rio’s working-class Mangueira favela, sought medical attention on April 20; she was turned away from two full urgent care units before gaining admission to a third located 40 kilometers (25 miles) away.

Hours later, she was transferred by ambulance almost all the way back, to the Ronaldo Gazzola hospital, according to her son, Rodrigo Bessa. Still, she died overnight, and he had to enter the hospital to identify her body.

“I saw a lot of bodies also suspected of (having) COVID-19 in the hospital’s basement,” said Bessa, a nurse at a hospital in another state.

The hospital released Edenir’s body with a diagnosis of suspected COVID-19, meaning that her death — like so many others — doesn’t figure into the government’s official tally. A small group of family members gathered for her burial on Wednesday, wearing face masks.

“People need to believe that this is serious, that it kills,” Bessa said.

Bolsonaro has continued to dismiss health officials’ dire predictions about the virus’s spread in the country. Last week, the president fired a health minister who had supported tough anti-virus measures and replaced him with an advocate for reopening the economy.

Bolsonaro’s stance largely echoes that of his counterpart and ally U.S. President Donald Trump, who has been stressing the need to put people back to work as unemployment figures reach Depression-era levels. Unlike Bolsonaro, however, Trump has moderated his skepticism about the virus.

The fight to reopen business “is a risk that I run,” Bolsonaro said at the swearing-in of his newly appointed health minister, Nelson Teich. If the pandemic escalates, Bolsonaro said, “it lands on my lap.”