Workers Party’s Lula wins Brazil’s presidential run-off

Oct. 30 (AGR)— With 61 percent of the vote, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva won the Brazillian presidential run off election on Mon., Oct. 28.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva,
Brazil’s new president-elect.

“Lula,” as the president-elect is popularly known, is a founding member of the leftist Workers Party (PT), a fact that attracted both the vote of Brazil’s working class and the attention of world governments and financial institutions.

He has announced plans to govern through a Council for Economic and Social Development, which will bring together business, trade unions, non-governmental organizations, and other representatives of civil society in a “social pact.”

Lula also seeks the rapid development of the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc into an organization modeled after the European Union, with a common parliament and dovetailed industrial, agricultural, trade, technology, education, and cultural policies, as well as the creation of a common Central Bank and a single Mercosur currency.

Lula and the PT leadership have also announced they will propose a “regional integration pact” to the rest of the countries of Latin America, and particularly those of South America.

The PT government platform states that an alliance with neighboring nations “is fundamental in order to confront the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),” the hemisphere-wide trade zone currently being negotiated.

A future PT administration would not reject the negotiations for creating the FTAA, but would engage in the talks defending Brazilian national interest with the same determination with which the US protects its own, asserts Lula.

He says that recent decisions in Washington to expand subsidies for US farmers and agricultural exports and to compel import restrictions in the trade agreements currently being debated does not bode well for balanced negotiations with the rest of the region.

The PT platform indicates that Lula would seek closer ties with countries outside the region to expand bilateral relations and to articulate efforts to “democratize” the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO).

The Wall Street Journal has warned that Lula “must convince investors that he can nurse South America’s biggest economy back to growth and avoid a default on Brazil’s heavy debt.”

Brazil is in the throes of a financial crisis that has crippled its currency and public debt totals $260 billion.

Lula has repeatedly stated that he would honor all IMF agreements. According to the BBC, Lula has moved away from the anti-capitalist rhetoric characterizing three previous bids for president, actively reached out to the financial community, and won the approval of Brazilian businesses by selecting a member of the center-right Liberal Party as a running mate.

Financial analysts interviewed by the Journal have warned that Lula, in order to stay in the good graces of investors and the international finance community, must not “give into populist pressures and abandon prudence,” “has got to be careful to talk the talk investors want to hear,” and that investors will be on the lookout for actions that “would indicate a move to some populist action.”

Lula’s stated social policy, which, when put into action, will be closely scrutinized by global investors anxious for signs of “tightened spending” and “budget cuts,” according to the Journal, will involve laying the groundwork to eradicate hunger within a generation.

Nearly 10 million families are threatened by hunger in Brazil, which has a total population of 170 million people. Guaranteeing adequate food for all would require boosting agricultural production, particularly that of peasant farmers, according to the PT platform.

The PT says expansions of rice and bean production would generate 350,000 new jobs and include an agrarian reform project. Additional food products could be acquired from neighboring Mercosur countries.

In addition to a hungry population and a national financial crisis, unemployment in Brazil is also at its highest since early 2000.

Crime is also a serious problem for Brazil which, after Colombia, has the worlds highest murder rate, fueled by warfare between rival drug gangs and extremely inequitable wealth distribution.

Lula, who has just four years of formal schooling, became a trade unionist in 1975 and was nationally known for heading strikes during the rule of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship.

He was elected to the lower house of Parliament in 1986 and ran for president in 1989, 1994, and 1998.

Sources: BBC, IPS, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal

Puerto Ricans outraged over secret medical experiments

By Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero

San Juan, Puerto Rico, Oct. 21 (IPS)— Puerto Rican activists are outraged by news that local residents were used as guinea pigs in two sets of secret medical experiments.

The first tests were allegedly carried out by a doctor whose cancer research in a local hospital in the 1930s reportedly included injecting unknowing patients with cancer cells.

The second experiments, using biological and chemical weapons, were performed by the US military in the 1960s and 1970s at various locations in the United States and beyond, including in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

The military’s revelation of those tests more than a week ago has added fuel to local demands that the US Navy leave the island territory.

The US Department of Defense admitted having conducted chemical and biological warfare experiments after complaints of ill health from 55 veterans, who claim to have served as guinea pigs in these tests.

The experiments were performed outdoors, meaning civilians might also have been exposed to harmful chemical and biological agents, say observers. Apart from Vieques, tests were also performed in Alaska, Hawaii, Florida, Canada, the Marshall Islands, and the UK.

In Vieques, the military sprayed trioctyl phosphate on troops at a firing range in May 1969. According to the local Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques (CRDV), the substance can harm the skin, eyes, and respiratory system, and is known to cause cancer in animals.

Since April 1999, Vieques has been the site of a prolonged and massive civil disobedience campaign against the US Navy presence there.

Well over 1,000 activists have been arrested and imprisoned for trespassing on the firing range, including actor Edward James Olmos, environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr., Reverend Al Sharpton, and US Congressman Luis Gutierrez.

The United States invaded Puerto Rico in 1898 and now holds the island as an unincorporated territory; it has neither independence nor statehood, and no voice in the US Congress or in the United Nations.

Roosevelt Roads naval base, in the town of Ceiba, is the largest US Navy base outside of the territorial United States.

“This new evidence of the grave danger that the Navy and its training maneuvers pose to the health of our people calls for an epidemiological study,” said Rafael Rivera Castano, a retired epidemiologist in Vieques.

“An executive order from [US] President Bush that guarantees the Navy’s departure as well as environmental cleanup, is more necessary now, in view of this terrifying new information from the Pentagon,” said CRDV spokesman Ismael Guadalupe.

Puerto Rico Justice Secretary Anabelle Rodriguez was to hold meetings last week with the government’s lobbyists in Washington, DC, to discuss the disclosures. “It is a serious and grave matter that will require a profound investigation,” Rodriguez told media.

The military tests came to light just as the Puerto Rico independence movement began a campaign to persuade the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) to change the name of an award named after a scientist that the movement accuses of conducting unethical medical experiments on Puerto Ricans.

The prize in question, the Cornelius P. Rhoads Scientific Achievement Award, is given yearly to outstanding young cancer researchers. In the 1930s, Rhoads worked in the Puerto Rico Presbyterian Hospital under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation for Medical Research.

“In 1931 (Rhoads) used the Puerto Rican population as guinea pigs, injecting patients with cancer cells without their knowledge,” said San Juan doctor Hector Pesquera.
“At least 13 people died as a result of these experiments.”

In a letter that was prominently displayed by the local media last week, Rhoads openly bragged about killing Puerto Ricans. “What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population,” said the letter.

The letter also contained this opinion of Puerto Ricans: “They are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere.”

According to the Internet newsletter CounterPunch, “Rhoads went on to head the US Army Biological Weapons division and to serve on the Atomic Energy Commission, where he oversaw radiation experiments on thousands of US citizens.”

In an Oct. 16 letter to the AACR, Washington DC attorney Flavio Cumpiano said, “Cornelius P. Rhoads is to Puerto Ricans what Josef Mengele is to Jews.”
“Clearly, establishing an award in honour of Dr. Josef Mengele would be a monumental insult to Jews, regardless of Dr. Mengele’s contributions to medicine,” added Cumpiano, who represents the CRDV, a group of Vieques residents.

“Accordingly, regardless of Dr. Rhoads’ contributions in the field of cancer research, your organization’s establishment of the ‘AACR-Cornelius P. Rhoads Memorial Award’ is either an unfortunate oversight or an egregious insult to the more than 8 million Puerto Ricans.”

The AACR has not responded to the letter.

Iraqis ask: ‘why do Americans hate us?’

Compiled by Eamon Martin

Oct. 29 (AGR)— If President George W. Bush believes that ordinary Iraqis will welcome US troops with open arms, he may be in for a rude surprise.

However much they may fear to say what they think under the rule of President Saddam Hussein, their feelings of deep-seated hatred towards Bush are only too clear.

They see the United States as primarily responsible for the sanctions that have destroyed their economy and the social fabric of their once-prosperous lives, as well as leaving an estimated 1.6 million children dead and many more with stunted growth.

As much as the deprivation, they resent the humiliation of having been driven back into an almost pre-industrial age.

Nowhere are these sentiments more in evidence than at the Mansour Hospital for Children, where youngsters with cancer lie dying from what doctors believe are the effects of the 1991 Gulf War.

“Look! These are the children of Iraq,” said Nouhad Abdel-Amir pointing at the cancer ward packed with frail children with no hair, many lying unconscious with drips strapped to their bodies.

She herself was holding her one-year-old baby who had his arm amputated to stop the progress of cancer in the absence of injections doctors say are banned by the sanctions committee, which claims they have dual use as weapons technology.

“This is what the Americans did to us. This is the effect of all the bombs they fired at us. It is showing now. It is all America’s fault that our children are dying,” said Najate Salem, whose son Mohammed, five, has stomach cancer.

International medical surveys have reported a dramatic jump in cancer cases, genetic deformities, and abnormalities in children born after 1991, especially in the south where depleted uranium munitions were fired by US and British troops as they drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait.

“The Gulf War is the only indicator for the increase of cancer in Iraq. The rate of cancer has risen five- to sevenfold more than before 1991,” said Loua’i Latif Kasha, a pathologist and director of the 300-bed Mansour hospital.

He said US bombings of water treatment plants, the collapse of the health and sanitation systems , as well as a stringent embargo that made it difficult to import medicine, has led to the sharp increase in cancer among Iraqis, mainly children.

Many parents, originally from poor southern provinces, have sold household goods and furniture to buy expensive medicine.

“We’ve sold everything we own to get him medicine. We have nothing left except our mattresses and he’s dying,” said Camila Mohammed, whose son Ali, six, has kidney cancer.

Sleeping on soiled and bare mattresses in stomach-churningly smelly rooms, the children with no hair, yellow faces, and sad eyes listen to their parents venting their rage at America.

“I pray to God to hit America with a massive strike because a strike from God is much stronger than from a human being... I want them to suffer like we’re suffering. They are the reason for our misery,” said Kazema Tshaloub, 30.

Whether they like or loathe Hussein, their rage and hatred are mainly directed at the US administration.

Most, who come from areas that witnessed an anti-Hussein uprising after the Gulf War, distrust the declared intentions of Bush to end Hussein’s 23-year-old rule.

“Bush still wants to hurt us more. What more does he want? Is there anything he hasn’t done... All the destruction, sanctions and diseases aren’t enough? What have we done to him? We haven’t hurt him or attacked him,” said another mother Ghaziya Rasheed.

Every morning, like clockwork, an instrumental version of the Beatles’ song “Yesterday” forms part of the medley of 20-year-old elevator music echoing off the marble floors of the dreary and slightly threatening halls of the once-illustrious Al Rasheed Hotel. It’s a fitting anthem for Baghdad.

As a war with the United States looms, the capital’s depressed, desperate, and fearful people look out over a landscape that mocks the city’s proud past, when its eccentric emperors, lusty poets, and seafaring merchants gave rise to the legends of “1,001 Nights.” Nearly all the cars — many of them decades-old Chevrolets and Fords — have a cracked windshield. With or without war, Iraq is in shambles.

“It really is a human tragedy,” said Adil Ghaffour, a 67-year-old American-trained doctor, who once belonged to Iraq’s now-vanished middle class. “I doubt in history that a nation has suffered like Iraq.” He paused and shook his head. “For no good reason.”

In Arabic, the word “tabaghdada” means to swagger, to show off. There is little to swagger about in the city that lent its name to the word. There’s less to show off.

For Mohammed Ghani, a renowned sculptor, “tabaghdada” lost all meaning in the 1991 Gulf War, when a US-led air campaign to drive invading Iraqi forces from Kuwait promptly sent Iraq back to the Third World from which it came.

Ghani’s 73 years give him perspective. And in it are the echoes of other Iraqis who look at their recent past as a junkyard of broken promises and entrenched misery.

“For 30 years, our life has been war and war and war,” Ghani said.

More painful, said Ghani, is the isolation that has ensued.
Long gone are the exhibitions and lectures he once gave in Europe and the United States, some of them sponsored by the government. He now complains he cannot find wood and wire for welding. Paint has become too expensive, a far cry from subsidized art supplies in the 1970s.

About 23 percent of Iraqi children are not enrolled in primary school, with twice as many girls dropping out as boys. The salaries of teachers are enough to buy three chickens a month. Fewer than half of adult women can read a newspaper, from nearly nine in 10 two decades ago.

The specter of a lost generation speaks to a curse heard often in the capital’s streets. Iraq, they say, is a rich country — with ample water, fertile land, a large population, and the world’s second-biggest oil reserves. But its very wealth gets it into trouble. Many Iraqis remain convinced that it is their country’s oil — and control over it — that is driving US plans for an invasion.

“Oil is a curse for Iraq,” insisted Suheir al-Tamimi, an engineer. As she spoke, she quickly got upset. “My father said every day that he wished the oil would dry up so the world would leave Iraq in peace.”

Peace, she suspects, is not at hand. Some Iraqis are stockpiling flour, water, and canned food. Neighbors, she said, have sold all the doors inside their homes, save the front ones, for a few dollars.

“[The US has] fought us with all their means. Our children are stunted, malnourished and illiterate,” said Sahera Khalil, whose son, Ahmed, four, has leukemia.

“In six weeks at the hospital I’ve seen eight children die,” she said. “The Americans have no mercy in their hearts. This is what they have done to the future generation of Iraq.”

Sources: Boston Globe, Reuters

Activists: UN envoy in Burma must address human rights abuses

Analysis by Marwaan Macan-Markar

Bangkok, Thailand, Oct. 22 (IPS)— The UN human rights envoy to Burma will have to come up with more than diplomatic niceties during his current visit to the military-ruled South-East Asian country, if his mission is to be a success.

The visit by Paulo Pinheiro, UN special rapporteur on human rights for Burma, “will serve as an important test case for the credibility of his mission and of the UN’s ability to improve the human rights situation in Burma,” said Sunai Phasuk of Forum-Asia, a Bangkok-based regional human rights watchdog.

“It is about time that the Burmese regime is pushed to indicate in practical terms how it intends improving the human rights situation,” added Debbie Stothard, coordinator of ALTSEAN Burma, a regional network of rights groups. “He [Pinheiro] has to get the regime to act,” Stothard said.

But few admit that the task before Pinheiro — getting Rangoon’s military junta to loosen its stranglehold over the country after developments like the May release from house arrest of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi — will be an easy one.

A spate of recent reports on a range of rights abuses reveals the daunting challenge before the UN envoy, who is on an 11-day visit to Burma that ends on Oct. 28.

On Monday, the Brussels-based International Confederation for Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) issued a report saying that forced labor in Burma was on the rise including people forced into “opium production.”

“Civilians in at least 16 villages in Burma’s Southern Tenasserim Division were forced to construct a highway between Knabauk and Maung Ma Gan,” the report points out in one of its many examples.

“Families were often forced to work for 20 days or more per month, each having to build a 20-meter long, 4-meter wide stretch of road in April 2002,” it added.

Not lost on the ICFTU is the implication of such violations, which occurred between October 2001 to September 2002. These show that Rangoon’s ruling generals have failed to uphold their promise to the international community to end forced labor.

The military government assured the International Labor Organization (ILO) that it would take steps to eradicate forced labor after the UN agency began pressing for such measures in 2001.

The US department of labor concluded early this year that “millions” of people had been driven into forced labor in Burma.

Preceding the ICFTU’s report was an exposé by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based rights lobby, which accused Burma of having the world’s highest number of child soldiers.

“It appears that the vast majority of new recruits [for Burma’s army] are forcibly conscripted, and there may be as many as 70,000 soldiers under the age of 18,” states the HRW study, “My Gun Was as Tall as Me,” released Tuesday last week.

These children, some of whom are as young as 11 years old, “are subject to beatings and systematic humiliation during training” under the “Tatmadaw Kyi,” as the Burmese national army is known, adds the 220-page study.

“Once deployed, they must engage in combat, participate in human rights abuses against civilians, and are frequently beaten and abused by their commanders,” the report declares.

Earlier, two minority rights groups accused the Burmese army of raping close to 625 women and girls between 1996 and 2001 in the country’s eastern Shan State.
Released in mid-June, the report titled “Licence to Rape,” triggered Pinheiro’s current visit, his second for the year and fourth since being appointed to this post.
Rangoon said last week that it had invited the UN envoy to investigate the rape charges, which the junta dismissed soon after the report’s release.

The State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), as the military government is officially known, has also forcefully relocated villagers in the rape-affected areas, says Hseng Noung, spokeswoman for the Thai-based Shan Women’s Action Network, one of the rights groups that brought out the report.

“We have requested him [Pinheiro] to come to the border areas to meet people who have been victims,” she says, referring to areas on the Thai side of the border across Burma.

Pinheiro has already informed his Rangoon hosts that he does not plan to visit the Shan state to investigate cases of alleged rape of Shan women. This is welcomed by rights activists, who say the government-arranged visit would not have allowed rape victims to speak openly to Pinheiro anyway.

But the UN envoy is expected to visit political prisoners in the notorious Insein prison in the Burmese capital. There are over 1,200 political activists behind bars, despite the SPDC’s periodic release of political prisoners since early last year.

Suu Kyi’s release in May after 19 months of house arrest was the most prominent one.

Yet as the months since have shown, freedom for Suu Kyi and other activists was more of a public relations exercise by the SPDC, says Teddy Buri, president of a group of Burmese parliamentarians in exile.

The release of political dissidents was done “to please the international community” and is not “an indicator of the SPDC’s commitment to human rights,” Buri said.

Said Stothard: “There has been time since his [Pinheiro’s] appointment for the SPDC to change, but it has not. The situation is coming down to the crunch.”

WORLD BRIEFS

Afghanistan opium production rises

The annual United Nations survey on opium production in Afghanistan has confirmed that the country’s farmers produced an estimated 3,400 metric tons of opium in 2002, 18 times higher than last year’s unusually low figure of 185 tons. There had been a ban on cultivation of opium poppies imposed by the Taliban in the last year of their rule.

The UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, which released the survey, blames the increase on poverty-stricken farmers taking advantage of the power vacuum which preceded the collapse of the Taliban government. These results mean that drug production there is now back up to late 1990 levels, bad news for the UN’s drug control program and also for the British Government, which is coordinating international efforts to help stamp out opium production in Afghanistan. (BBC News)

UK to identify ‘criminal of
the future’

Lord Warner, chairman of the Youth Justice Board in England, has outlined what he admitted were “controversial” plans to identify potential criminals among eight-year-olds. He accepted that there would be fears that children would become “stigmatized,” but he claimed parents of unruly youngsters would welcome the idea. He said new Youth Inclusion and Support Panels, which will aim to identify potential serious offenders among eight to 13-year olds, would be set up in the government’s 10 street crime hotspots.

Details of the plan emerged yesterday as the Government claimed that evaluation of an existing program to give parenting classes to mothers and fathers of unruly children had led to a decline in offenses. Convictions of children whose parents attended the courses fell by about a third in the year after the program, while the number of offenses recorded fell by half in the same period.
Oliver Letwin, the shadow Home Secretary, said he welcomed proposals to “intervene at an early stage” but said children should be targeted when they begin attending school at the ages of four and five. “The problems have already often become intractable by the age of eight,” he said. (Independent UK)

Ecuadoran Plan Colombia foe may be headed for presidency

Lucio Gutierrez, an Army colonel cashiered after he joined a popular indigenous rebellion that overthrew the Ecuadoran government and briefly seized power in 2000, won the first round of that country’s presidential election on Oct. 27. Gutierrez won 19.5 percent of the vote, compared to 17.6 percent for the runner-up and second-round challenger Alvaro Noboa, a banana magnate and the country’s wealthiest man. Socialist Leon Roldos came in third with 15.8 percent. The run-off election is scheduled for Nov. 24.

Gutierrez could best be described as a military populist in the tradition of Brazilian military rebel Luis Prestes in the 1930’s, Argentina’s Juan Peron of the 1940’s and ‘50’s and Hugo Chavez, the embattled current leader of Venezuela, with whom he is often compared. Gutierrez won the first round with the support of indigenous voters, peasants, labor unions and leftist groups, running on a platform of nationalism, social justice and ending pervasive political corruption.

Gutierrez said he opposed Plan Colombia, calling it “a massacre of innocent people” and “environmental terrorism.” Nor would it end the drug trade. “A problem like the narcotics trade cannot be solved by military action, but only by addressing the underlying social and economic factors instead,” he said. (DRCNet)

‘Mass graves’
found in Guinea

Aminata Barry, spokesperson for a group of relatives of people allegedly killed by the administration of Guinea’s first president more than 30 years ago, said they have discovered mass graves where hundreds of people were buried. They were led to the graves by local people in the western town of Kindia. Barry, whose own father died during political repression, said the group planned to bring in foreign help to provide proof of what she described as the “genocide” committed by the late President Sekou Toure.

Barry said most of the victims in the graves near Kindia had been killed during the night of Oct. 17-18, 1971, when repression reached its zenith. One grave is believed to contain about 400 bodies, another, the remains of soldiers. A third was so large it was impossible to give an exact figure. 50,000 people are believed to have been killed under Toure, a figure confirmed by Amnesty International.

The group, called Children of the Victims of Boiro Camp, hopes to eventually sue the Guinean state before the International Court of Justice. (BBC)

Vatican to test for homosexuality in trainee priests

The Vatican is to introduce psychological tests to out gay seminary students and ask them to leave their training for the priesthood. The new law is also expected to demand that students who display homosexual tendencies are not ordained as priests even if they have completed their training.

Sexual evaluation tests measure attitudes, habits, and values. There are agree/disagree questions like: “I am strongly attracted to members of my own sex” and “I have been disappointed in love.”

Tim Hopkins, spokesperson for Equality Network, a campaigning organization for gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender people, said using personality tests to rid seminaries of gay men meant lessons were not being learned by the Church.

“On the one hand, the Church stands accused of taking a softy softy approach towards priests who have abused children and young people, and on the other they are wanting to be seen as taking a hard line against homosexual priests, as if the two are related. The Vatican is using gay people as a scapegoat for the abuse of children and young people by priests.”

Andrew Johnson, co-director of the Equality and Discrimination Center at Strathclyde University said testing for homosexual character traits was an unhealthy signal from the Catholic Church. He said: “When a large institution such as the Church gives a signal like this, it provides oxygen for homophobia.” (The Sunday Herald - Glasgow)

Real IRA disbands

Real IRA prisoners issued a statement Oct. 19 admitting responsibility for the 1998 Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, calling it an outrage which had “irreparably damaged” the republican cause and blamed its “corrupt” leadership for the decision to disband. The declaration marks the end of the breakaway group as a credible rallying-point for republican paramilitaries disaffected by the participation of Sinn Fein-IRA in the peace process.

Relatives of the victims of the Omagh bomb, which killed 29 and injured 200, called the move “great news” but demanded to know whether it had been prompted by promises from the British or Irish governments of early release for dissident republican prisoners.

In a statement allegedly drafted before Tony Blair’s call on Oct. 17 for republican terrorist groups to disband, the prisoners at the Portlaoise high security jail indicated that the Real IRA should end its activities. The statement reflects the growing belief of the prisoners that its remaining members outside jail have lost all interest in the achievement of republican political objectives. (Telegraph UK)