Coastal view from the Kalinago Territory in Dominica. Credit: Alison Kentish/IPS
by Alison Kentish (united nations)
Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 26 (IPS) – According to the 2021 World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report, extreme events have worsened the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Region, especially for the small island states of the Caribbean.The highest deforestation rates since 2009. The third most active hurricane season on record. Extreme rainfall, floods, and landslides displaced tens of thousands of people. Rising sea levels. Glaciers in Peru lost more than half their size. Add the devastating impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the mix, and 2021 was a challenging year for Latin America and the Caribbean.
It states that “sea levels in the region continued to rise in 2021 at a faster rate than globally, notably along the Atlantic coast of South America south of the equator, and the subtropical North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico,” a worrying development for the small island states of the Caribbean and large populations concentrated in coastal communities.
The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season brought 21 named storms that included seven hurricanes and was the sixth consecutive above-average season.
It adds that extreme rainfall led to tens of thousands of homes being destroyed or damaged and hundreds of thousands of people displaced
The record-setting drought in Chile continued in 2021, marking the 13th consecutive year of the “Central Chile Mega-drought,” which placed the country at the center of the region’s water crisis.
“Increasing sea-level rise and ocean warming are expected to continue to affect coastal livelihoods, tourism, health, food, energy, and water security, particularly in small islands and Central American countries,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Head of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Mami Mizutori said as the second most disaster-prone region in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean are proof of how complex risks can be, adding that shocks that affect one sector can create damaging consequences in another, impacting the most at-risk communities.
“The COVID-19 pandemic offers a quintessential example of how interconnected risks can create severe upheaval, particularly when intersecting with climate change impacts. Last year, the fallout from hurricanes Eta and Iota collided with lingering COVID-19 impacts. The result was that 7.7 million people in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua faced high levels of food insecurity,” she said.
While the report outlines the dire impacts of extreme weather and climate change on the region, it is also prescriptive in its calls for long-term regional and national solutions.
One of these is a ‘risk to resilience’ goal.
The UNDRR head says the Bali Agenda for Resilience is a critical instrument in understanding the nature of risks and promoting mitigation and adaptation measures. The document promotes policies to shield communities from climate and other disasters and thwart a predicted global rate of 1.5 disasters a day by 2030.
“First and foremost is the need for risk management to become a shared responsibility across sectors. Getting on track to achieve the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction and the Sustainable Development Goals requires decision makers to adopt comprehensive climate and disaster risk management that puts people first, using current data and timely information.”
The report also recommends the expansion of access to multi-hazard early warning systems (EWS). Investment in these systems has been touted as one of the most powerful tools to adapt to climate change, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has challenged the WMO to present an action plan that ensures all people everywhere are covered by an early warning system in the next 5 years. The WMO is expected to present that plan to the 2022 UN Climate Conference in Egypt in November.
“Altogether, there is a need for a 1.5 billion US dollar investment in the next 5 years to get 100 percent coverage of early warning services and improve basic observing systems. We have major gaps in island states, Africa, and some parts of Latin America, and that needs to be improved,” the WMO Secretary-General said.
The report’s launch coincides with the impending peak of the annual Atlantic hurricane season. According to officials of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNECLAC), there is no question that countries in the region, particularly the small states of the Caribbean and Central America, remain highly vulnerable to the impacts of a changing climate
“2021 was yet another very active season. Many countries experienced major flooding and landslides that were compounded by a volcanic eruption in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, causing major dislocation, damage, and loss, and there was heavy rainfall and floods across Guyana, Suriname, and regions of Central America, affecting housing, fresh water sources and increasing food insecurity,” said ECLAC’s Subregional Office Chief Diane Quarless.
Quarless added that for small states in the region, the post-disaster need to continually source or reassign already scarce resources has eroded the ability of countries to build back better. ECLAC is supporting the call to strengthen and expand early warning systems to improve forecasting and planning for multi-hazards.
The State of the Climate in Latin America and the Caribbean report provides science-based, timely information for policymakers on the realities of climate change and weather-related events and the best course of action.
The representatives of the UN agencies involved in sourcing and compiling the report says that the region has the needed data. It is now time to act.
A hundred Central American migrants were rescued from an overcrowded trailer truck in the Mexican state of Tabasco. It has been impossible to stop people from making the hazardous journey of thousands of kilometers to the United States due to the lack of opportunities in their countries of origin. CREDIT: Mesoamerican Migrant Movement
by Edgardo Ayala (san salvador)
Inter Press Service
SAN SALVADOR, Jul 19 (IPS) – The immigration agreement reached in Los Angeles, California at the end of the Summit of the Americas, hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden, raises more questions than answers and the likelihood that once again there will be more noise than actual benefits for migrants, especially Central Americans.
And immigration was once again the main issue discussed at the Jul. 12 bilateral meeting between Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Biden at the White House.
At the meeting, López Obrador asked Biden to facilitate the entry of “more skilled” Mexican and Central American workers into the U.S. “to support” the economy and help curb irregular migration.
Central American analysts told IPS that it is generally positive that immigration was addressed at the June summit and that concrete commitments were reached. But they also agreed that much remains to be done to tackle the question of undocumented migration.
That is especially true considering that the leaders of the three Central American nations generating a massive flow of poor people who risk their lives to reach the United States, largely without papers, were absent from the meeting.
Just as the Ninth Summit of the Americas was getting underway on Jun. 6 in Los Angeles, an undocumented 15-year-old Salvadoran migrant began her journey alone to the United States, with New York as her final destination.
She left her native San Juan Opico, in the department of La Libertad in central El Salvador.
“We communicate every day, she tells me that she is in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and that everything is going well according to plan. They give them food and they are not mistreating her, but they don’t let her leave the safe houses,” Omar Martinez, the Salvadoran uncle of the migrant girl, whose name he preferred not to mention, told IPS.
She was able to make the journey because her mother, who is waiting for her in New York, managed to save the 15,000-dollar cost of the trip, led as always by a guide or “coyote”, as they are known in Central America, who in turn form part of networks in Guatemala and Mexico that smuggle people across the border between Mexico and the United States.
The meeting of presidents in Los Angeles “was marked by the issue of temporary jobs, and the presidents of key Central American countries were absent, so there was a vacuum in that regard,” researcher Silvia Raquec Cum, of Guatemala’s Pop No’j Association, told IPS.
In fact, neither the presidents of Honduras, Xiomara Castro, of Guatemala, Alejandro Giammattei, or El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, attended the conclave due to political friction with the United States, in a political snub that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago.
Other Latin American presidents boycotted the Summit of the Americas as an act of protest, such as Mexico’s López Obrador, precisely because Washington did not invite the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, which it considers dictatorships.
From rural communities like this one, the village of Huisisilapa in the municipality of San Pablo Tacachico in central El Salvador, where there are few possibilities of finding work, many people set out for the United States, often without documents, in search of the “American dream”. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
More temporary jobs
Promoting more temporary jobs is one of the commitments of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection adopted at the Summit of the Americas and signed by some twenty heads of state on Jun. 10 in that U.S. city.
“Temporary jobs are an important issue, but let’s remember that economic questions are not the only way to address migration. Not all migration is driven by economic reasons, there are also situations of insecurity and other causes,” Raquec Cum emphasized.
Moreover, these temporary jobs do not allow the beneficiaries to stay and settle in the country; they have to return to their places of origin, where their lives could be at risk.
“It is good that they (the temporary jobs) are being created and are expanding, but we must be aware that the beneficiaries are only workers, they are not allowed to settle down, and there are people who for various reasons no longer want to return to their countries,” researcher Danilo Rivera, of the Central American Institute of Social and Development Studies, told IPS from the Guatemalan capital.
The Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection states that it “seeks to mobilize the entire region around bold actions that will transform our approach to managing migration in the Americas.”
The Declaration is based on four pillars: stability and assistance for communities; expansion of legal pathways; humane migration management; and coordinated emergency response.
The focus on expanding legal pathways includes Canada, which plans to receive more than 50,000 agricultural workers from Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean in 2022.
While Mexico will expand the Border Worker Card program to include 10,000 to 20,000 more beneficiaries, it is also offering another plan to create job opportunities in Mexico for 15,000 to 20,000 workers from Guatemala each year.
The United States, for its part, is committed to a 65 million dollar pilot program to help U.S. farmers hire temporary agricultural workers, who receive H-2A visas.
“It is necessary to rethink governments’ capacity to promote regular migration based on temporary work programs when it is clear that there is not enough labor power to cover the great needs in terms of employment demands,” said Rivera from Guatemala.
He added that despite the effort put forth by the presidents at the summit, there is no mention at all of the comprehensive reform that has been offered for several years to legalize some 11 million immigrants who arrived in the United States without documents.
A reform bill to that effect is currently stalled in the U.S. Congress.
Many of the 11 million undocumented migrants in the United States come from Central America, especially Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, as well as Mexico.
While the idea of immigration reform is not moving forward in Congress, more than 60 percent of the undocumented migrants have lived in the country for over a decade and have more than four million U.S.-born children, the New York Times reported in January 2021.
This population group represents five percent of the workforce in the agriculture, construction and hospitality sectors, the report added.
Despite the risks involved in undertaking the irregular, undocumented journey to the United States, many Salvadorans continue to make the trip, and many are deported, such as the people seen in this photo taken at a registration center after they were sent back to San Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS
More political asylum
The Declaration also includes another important component of the migration agreement: a commitment to strengthen political asylum programs.
For example, among other agreements in this area, Canada will increase the resettlement of refugees from the Americas and aims to receive up to 4,000 people by 2028, the Declaration states.
For its part, the United States will commit to resettle 20,000 refugees from the Americas during fiscal years 2023 and 2024.
“What I took away from the summit is the question of creating a pathway to address the issue of refugees in the countries of origin,” Karen Valladares, of the National Forum for Migration in Honduras, told IPS from Tegucigalpa.
She added: “In the case of Honduras, we are having a lot of extra-regional and extra-continental population traffic.”
Valladares said that while it is important “to enable refugee processes for people passing through our country, we must remember that Honduras is not seen as a destination, but as a transit country.”
Raquec Cum, of the Pop No’j Association in Guatemala, said “They were also talking about the extension of visas for refugees, but the bottom line is how they are going to carry out this process; there are specific points that were signed and to which they committed themselves, but the how is what needs to be developed.”
Meanwhile, the Salvadoran teenager en route to New York has told her uncle that she expects to get there in about a month.
“She left because she wants to better herself, to improve her situation, because in El Salvador it is expensive to live,” said Omar, the girl’s uncle.
“I have even thought about leaving the country, but I suffer from respiratory problems and could not run a lot or swim, for example, and sometimes you have to run away from the migra (border patrol),” he said.
Sandy Recinos Executive Secretary against Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Trafficking in Persons (SVET) from Guatemala – Former congresswoman Rosi Orozco from México – Ann Basham Chief Executive Officer at Ascend Consulting, United States. Mobile Units for the Prevention of Sexual Violence, Exploitation and Human Trafficking “UNIVET”, which allows sharing information, preventing these crimes and also promoting the culture of reporting among its inhabitants. Credit: Rosi Orozco
Opinion by Rosi Orozco (mexico city)
Inter Press Service
MEXICO CITY, Jul 12 (IPS) – This is an alert message: if nothing stops the wave of violence in Mexico, by the end of 2024 the country could exceed the figure of 150,000 missing persons.
Just on May 17, Mexico crossed a the ultimate horror border: officially there are more than 100,000 people who cannot be located. The equivalent of the evaporation of two and a half times the population of Monaco. Most of those people are victims of organized crime.
It is an old problem in Mexico, but it has taken a new turn in recent months: in its most recent report, the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances recognized that since 2006 the phenomenon has been concentrated in men between 15 and 40 years, but the pandemic changed that profile. Now, the great national drama focuses on girls and boys from 12 to 35 years old.
The coronavirus opened gaps in inequality and poverty like no other natural phenomenon. Sexual violence, human trafficking, and femicides increased in Mexico, and forced disappearances became an effective means to hide those crimes. Criminals act with a perverse idea: without a body, there is no crime and therefore no punishment.
The problem is so severe that the Mexican government has recognized that the number of girls and women has skyrocketed in recent months to more than 24,600 women waiting to be located. Many of them are not even 10 years old.
One of the latest national sorrows is a young woman called Debanhi Susana Escobar Bazaldúa, 18 years old, who disappeared on April 8 in Nuevo León, México, on a highway that reaches Texas, United States.
Her search kept the country in suspense after a photograph was released where she appeared alone and at dawn waiting for a taxi to return home after attending a party. The image became a symbol of fear and hope.
Magistrate Delia Davila and Former Congresswoman Rosi Orozco after a meeting with specialized judges to deal with human trafficking. Credit: Rosi Orozco
But after 13 days of searching, his body was found at the bottom of a hotel cistern frequented by human traffickers. While she was wanted alive, five more missing women were found. The causes of Debanhi Susana Escobar’s death are still unclear, but the family points to a crime of a sexual nature.
The death of the young woman who dreamed of being a lawyer strucked a chord in a country numbed to the horrors of human trafficking. And amid a pain that seems to make no sense, her father demanded that the life of Debanhi Susana Escobar be a symbol against the wave of missing women.
The mourning of Debanhi Susana Escobar’s family comes at a crucial moment for Mexico if we want to avoid reaching 150,000 disappeared people in the next two years.
On one hand, the Mexican Senate president, Olga Sánchez Cordero, close to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, is promoting a series of reforms to the national general law against human trafficking that prevents the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution.
Senator Sánchez Cordero’s intention also seeks to punish whoever maintains a house of prostitution, which includes its administration, lease, or financing. That measure would meant a heavy blow to the human trafficking networks that make girls and women disappear.
This initiative comes as Mexico celebrates 10 years of the general law against human trafficking, promulgated in 2012. This law has been praised by international experts —such as the Spanish prosecutor Beatriz Sanchez, who is already studying Mexican legislation as an inspiration to create a comprehensive law and abolitionist in her country.
There’s another international experience on the southern border in Mexico from which we can all learn: in Guatemala a successful experiment is being carried out to stop sexual and labor exploitation with a novel approach.
For example, leaders like Justice Delia Dávila have taken on the responsibility of training judges to specialize in investigating human trafficking. The judges issue sentences in favor of the victims and work together with civil society, such as the World Vision organization.
In addition, Guatemala has a vehicle project known as UNIVET, which reaches the most remote communities to carry out prevention and education work for vulnerable girls, adolescents, and women.
In this way, Guatemala is at the forefront in Latin America by creating a national strategy against human exploitation, giving it the priority that this crime deserves, which is the second most lucrative globally.
The efforts in Mexico, Spain, France, Guatemala and dozens of countries with an abolitionist approach make us believe that it is possible to achieve what cynical voices tell us will be impossible: stop the trend of violence that will lead us to 150,000 disappeared people.
We have to do it for Debanhi Susana Escobar. For his family and the legacy they want to leave this country. For each missing person, for each survivor, for each future girl. For Mexico.
This is an alert message: we still have time. Let’s be brave and push for the changes that the most vulnerable need.
Mexican workers harvest produce on a farm in the western U.S. state of California. The number of temporary agricultural workers from Mexico has increased in recent years in the United States and with it, human rights violations. CREDIT: Courtesy of Linnaea Mallette
by Emilio Godoy (mexico city)
Inter Press Service
MEXICO CITY, Jul 08 (IPS) – Eduardo Reyes, originally from Puebla in central Mexico, was offered a 40-hour workweek contract by his recruiter and his employer in the United States, but ended up performing hundreds of hours of unpaid work that was not authorized because his visa had expired, unbeknownst to him.
Hired by recruiter Vazquez Citrus & Hauling (VCH), Reyes and five other temporary workers reached the United States between May and September 2017, months before starting work for Four Star Greenhouse in the Midwest state of Michigan.
In 2018, they worked more than 60 hours per week, received bad checks, and never obtained a copy of their contract, even though U.S. laws require that they be given one.
When they complained to Four Star and to their recruiter about the exploitative conditions, the latter turned them over to immigration authorities for deportation in July of that year because their visas had expired, which they had not been informed of by their agent.
In December 2017, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) authorized the arrival of 145 workers to the Four Star facilities in Carleton, Michigan. They were to earn 12.75 dollars per hour for 36 hours a week between January and July 2018.
Reyes’ case is set forth in complaint 2:20-CV-11692, seen by IPS, filed in the Southern Division of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan by six Mexican workers against the company and its manager, whom they accuse of wage gouging, forced labor and workplace reprisals.
This story of exploitation has an aggravating factor that shows the shortcomings of the U.S. government’s H-2A temporary agricultural workers program, or H-2A visa program.
The United States created H-2 visas for unskilled temporary foreign workers in 1943 and in the 1980s established H-2A categories for rural workers and 2B for other labor, such as landscaping, construction, and hotel staff.
These visas allow Mexicans, mainly from rural areas, to migrate seasonally to the U.S. to work legally on farms included on a list, with the intermediation of recruiting companies.
In 2016, the US Department of Transportation fined VCH, based in the state of Florida, for 22,000 dollars for a bus accident in which six H-2A workers were killed while returning from Monroe, Michigan to Mexico.
Two years later, the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division banned VCH and its owner for three years due to program violations in the state of North Carolina, such as failure to reimburse travel expenses and payroll and workday records. However, both continued to operate in the sector.
The workers’ odyssey begins in Mexico, where they are recruited by individual contractors -workers or former workers of a U.S. employer, colleagues, relatives or friends in their home communities – or by private U.S. agencies.
Structural problem
Reyes’ case illustrates the problems of labor exploitation, forced labor and the risk of human trafficking to which participants in the H-2A program are exposed, without intervention by Mexican or U.S. authorities to prevent human rights violations.
Advocates for the rights of the seasonal workers and experts pointed to worsening working conditions, warned of the threat of human trafficking and forced labor, and complained about the prevailing impunity.
According to Lilián López, representative in Mexico of the U.S.-based Polaris Project, the design and operation of the program result in a high risk of human trafficking and forced labor, due to factors such as the lack of supervision and interference by recruiters.
“Economic vulnerability puts migrants at risk, because many workers go into debt to get to the United States, and that gives the agencies a lot of power. They can set any kind of requirement for people to get the jobs. Sometimes recruiters make offers that look more attractive than they really are. That is fraud,” she told IPS in Mexico City.
The number of calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline operated by Polaris in the US reflects the apparent increase in abuses. Between 2015 and 2017, 800 people on temporary visas, 500 of which were H-2A, called the hotline, compared to 2,890 people between 2018 and 2020 – a 360 percent increase.
Evy Peña, spokesperson for Mexico’s Migrant Rights Center, said temporary labor systems are designed to benefit employers, who have all the control, along with the recruiters.
“From the moment the workers are recruited, there is no transparency. There is a lack of oversight by the DOL, there are parts of recruitment that should be overseen by the Mexican government. There are things that the Mexican government should work out at home,” she told IPS from the northern city of Monterrey.
She said the situation has worsened because of the pandemic.
The United States and Mexico have idealized the H-2A program because it solves the lack of employment in rural areas, foments remittances that provide financial oxygen to those areas, and meets a vital demand in food-producing centers that supply U.S. households.
But the humanitarian costs are high, as the cases reviewed attest. Mexico’s Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare has 369 labor placement agencies registered in 29 of Mexico’s 33 states. For overseas labor recruitment, seven operate – including four in Mexico City -, a small number compared to the thousands of visas issued in 2021.
For its part, the DOL reports 241 licensed recruiters in the US working for a handful of companies in that country.
The ones authorized in Mexico do not appear on the US list and vice versa, in another example of the scarce exchange of information between the two partners.
The number of H-2A visas for Mexican workers is on the rise, with the U.S. government authorizing 201,123 in 2020, a high number driven by the pandemic. That number grew 22 percent in 2021, to a total of 246,738.
In the first four months of the year, U.S. consulates in Mexico issued 121,516 such visas, 18 percent more than in the same period of 2021, when they granted 102,952.
In 2021, the states with the highest demand for Mexican labor were Florida, Georgia, California, Washington and North Carolina, in activities such as agriculture, the operation of farm equipment and construction.
The United States and Mexico agreed to issue another 150,000 visas for temporary workers in an attempt to mitigate forced migration from the south, which will also include Central American seasonal workers.
Details of the expansion of the program will be announced by Presidents Joe Biden and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador at a meeting to be held on Jul. 12 at the White House, with migration as one of the main topics on the agenda.
Mexican farm workers wait to be tested for COVID-19 in 2020 in Immolakee, a town in the southeastern U.S. state of Florida. The pandemic hit H-2A visa holders, who are mainly engaged in temporary agricultural work, hard. CREDIT: Doctors Without Borders
Indifference
Lidia Muñoz, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon in the United States who has studied labor recruitment, stresses that there are no policies on the subject in Mexico, even though the government is aware of the problem.
“There are regulations for recruitment agencies that are not followed to the letter,” she told IPS from Portland, the largest city in the northwestern state of Oregon. “Most recruiters are not registered. The intermediaries are the ones who earn the most. There is no proper oversight.”
Article 28 of Mexico’s Federal Labor Law of 1970 regulates the provision of services by workers hired within Mexico for work abroad, but in practice it is not enforced.
This regulation requires the registration of contracts with the labor authorities and the posting of a bond to guarantee compliance, and makes the foreign contractor responsible for transportation to and from the country, food and immigration expenses, as well as full payment of wages, compensation for occupational hazards and access to adequate housing.
In addition, Mexican workers must be entitled to social security for foreigners in the country where they offer their services.
While the Mexican government could resort to this article to protect the rights of migrants, it has refused to apply it.
Between 2009 and 2019, the Ministry of Labor conducted 91 inspections of labor placement agencies in nine states and imposed 12 fines for about 153,000 dollars, but did not fine any recruiters of seasonal workers. Furthermore, the records of the Federal Court of Conciliation and Arbitration do not contain labor lawsuits for breach of that regulation.
In addition, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) does not know how many H-2A workers it has assisted through consular services. Likewise, it does not know how many complainants it has advised.
The Mexican consulate in Denver, Colorado received three labor complaints, dated Jul. 25, Aug. 12 and Oct. 28, 2021, which it referred to “specialized allies in the matter, who provided the relevant advice to the interested parties,” according to an SRE response to a request for information from IPS.
The consulate in Washington received “anonymous verbal reports” on labor issues, which it passed on to civil society organizations so that “the relevant support could be provided.”
Consular teams were active in some parts of the US in 2021. For example, Mexican officials visited eight corporations between May and September 2021 in Denver, Colorado.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania they visited 12 companies between April and August, 2021. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin they visited 26 companies between June 2021 and April of this year, and in Washington, DC six workplaces were visited between August and October 2021. However, the results of these visits are unknown.
These guidelines stipulate that hiring must be done in accordance with human rights, through voluntary agreements, free from deception or coercion, and with specific, verifiable and understandable conditions of employment, with no attached charges or job immobility.
Ariel Ruiz, an analyst with the U.S.-based Migration Policy Institute, is concerned about the expansion of the H-2A visa program without improvements in rights.
“There are labour rights violations before the workers arrive in the US, in recruitment there are often illegal payments, and we keep hearing reports of employers intimidating workers,” he told IPS from Washington.
“There are also problems in access to health services and legal representation” in case of abuse, added the analyst from the non-governmental institute.
Judicialization
In the last decade, at least 12 lawsuits have been filed in US courts by program workers against employers.
Muñoz, the expert from Oregon, said the trials can help reform the system.
“There have been cases that have resulted in visas for trafficking victims. But it is difficult to see changes in the United States. They may be possible in oversight. Legal changes have arisen because of wage theft from workers,” she said.
López, of Polaris, said the lawsuits were a good thing, but clarified that they did not solve the systemic problems. “What is needed is a root-and-branch reform of the system,” she said.
The United States has made trade union freedom in Mexico a priority. Peña asked that it also address the H-2A visa situation.
“If they’re serious about improving labor rights, they can’t ignore the responsibility they have for migrant workers. It’s like creating a double standard,” she said.
With regard to the expansion of the temporary visa program to Central Americans, the experts consulted expressed concern that it would lead to an increase in abuses.
This article was produced with support from the organizations Dignificando el Trabajo and the Avina Foundation’s Arropa Initiative in Mexico.
The “bodegones” are Venezuela’s new commercial boom. They sell imported products, mostly from the United States despite the sanctions, and have spread into middle and lower-middle class neighborhoods in Caracas and other cities, to attract consumers who receive remittances of foreign currency from the millions of Venezuelans who have migrated in recent years. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS
by Humberto Marquez (caracas)
Inter Press Service
CARACAS, Jul 07 (IPS) – Economic sanctions against countries whose behavior is reproached by the West operate as punishment although they fail in their declared political objectives, and in cases such as Venezuela the contrast is clearly on display in the windows of high-end stores that sell imported goods.
“Experience has shown that sanctions are an instrument that does not achieve the supposed objective, political change, as in the cases of Cuba and now also in Venezuela,” Luis Oliveros, professor of economics at the Metropolitan and Central universities of Venezuela, told IPS.
Moreover, “there is a club of sanctioned countries, they feed off each other, share information and mechanisms to circumvent sanctions, and they cooperate with each other, such as Russia with China or Iran, or Cuba and Iran with Venezuela, even obtaining support from third party countries such as Turkey,” said Oliveros.
The most commonly used sanctions are bans on exports and imports, financial transactions, obtaining technology, spare parts and weapons, and travel and trade; the freezing of assets; the withdrawal of visas; bans on entering the sanctioning country; the expulsion of undesirable individuals; and the blocking of bank accounts.
Russia became embroiled in a thick web of sanctions since its troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, and measures against its products, operations, institutions and authorities, which numbered 2,754 before the conflict, according to the private organization Statista, have now climbed to 10,536 and counting.
Following Russia on that list of punishments of various kinds are Iran, which faces 3,616 sanctions, Syria (2,608), North Korea (2,077), Venezuela (651), Myanmar (510), and Cuba (208).
The major sanctioners are the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel and Switzerland.
In the case of Iran and North Korea, sanctions have mainly punished their nuclear development programs. Pyongyang has not stopped its missile tests and Tehran flips the switch on its nuclear program according to the vagaries of Washington’s international policy.
A pro-government march in Caracas against the sanctions imposed by the United States on civilian and military officials and several public companies, as a measure of pressure against the government of President Nicolás Maduro. The president blames the sanctions for all the country’s problems, which have driven 6.1 million people to migrate since he first took office. CREDIT: VTV
The Russian impact
Like a boomerang, sanctions sometimes hurt their proponents, and in the case of Russia their effects are felt in every corner of the planet.
Chinese President Xi Jinping warned on Jun. 23 that sanctions “are becoming a weapon in the world economy.”
Mulder, an assistant professor in the history department of Cornell University in the U.S. state of New York, argues that “not since the 1930s has an economy the size of Russia’s been placed under such a wide array of commercial restrictions as those imposed in response to its invasion of Ukraine.” He was referring to measures against Italy and Japan after the invasions of Ethiopia and China.
The difference is that “Russia today is a major exporter of oil, grain, and other key commodities, and the global economy is far more integrated. As a result, today’s sanctions have global economic effects far greater than anything seen before,” says Mulder.
Industrialized economies in Europe and North America have been impacted by energy price hikes, and as sanctions remove Russian raw materials from global supply chains, prices are rising and affecting the cost of imports and the finances of less developed countries, says the author.
In Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, there are fears of increased food insecurity as supplies of grain, cooking oil and fertilizers from Ukraine and Russia have been disrupted and the costs have been driven up.
“The result of these changes is that today’s sanctions can cause graver commercial losses than ever before, but they can also be weakened in new ways through trade diversion and evasion,” Mulder warned in a paper released in June by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Nazanin Armanian, an Iranian political scientist exiled in Spain, argues that “the tactic of shocking the economy of rivals and enemies suffers from two problems: neglecting the risk of radicalization of those who feel humiliated and ignoring the network of connections in a world that is a village.”
She cites the example of Iran, which has found multiple ways to export its oil. That is also the case of Cuba, which has endured and circumvented U.S. sanctions for more than 60 years.
With respect to Cuba, it was then President Barack Obama (2009-2017) who said on Dec. 17, 2014 that “It is clear that decades of U.S. isolation of Cuba have failed to accomplish our enduring objective of promoting the emergence of a democratic, prosperous, and stable Cuba.”
The U.S. sanctions against Venezuela do not prevent luxurious commercial establishments in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities from selling U.S. and European products for consumption by a minority with ample access to foreign currency, benefited by the tax exemption on remittances. Meanwhile, four-fifths of the population are immersed in poverty. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez/IPS
The case of Venezuela
It was also Obama who on Mar. 15, 2015 declared in an executive order the government of Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,” and that year sanctions were initiated against Venezuelan authorities, companies and public institutions.
Since then, Washington has sanctioned with a range of measures dozens of officials and their families, military commanders, government leaders, businesspersons who negotiate with the government and some one hundred companies, both public and private.
The EU also adopted sanctions, as did Canada and Panama, and U.S. sanctions also affect third country companies that do business with the Venezuelan government.
When the United States stopped buying Venezuelan crude oil and banned the sale of supplies to produce gasoline, Caracas appealed with some success to Iran, which has also sent equipment and personnel to refurbish Venezuela’s rundown refineries.
But the most visible demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the sanctions is that imported products are displayed and sold in hundreds of stores in Caracas and other cities and towns, even if only a minority can afford to buy them regularly.
There has been a proliferation of “bodegones” – up to 800 have been counted in Caracas, a crowded city of 3.5 million people located in a valley surrounded by mountains – the name given to new or quickly refurbished stores to give them a sophisticated appearance and satisfy tastes or the need to acquire imported foodstuffs and other perishable products, after years of widespread shortages.
The bodegones, as well as appliance stores and a handful of high-end restaurants and bars, have been the battering ram of the de facto dollarization that reigns in Venezuela, alongside the disdain for the bolivar as currency and the use of the Brazilian real and the Colombian peso in the border areas with those two countries.
Washington allows the export of food, agricultural, medicinal and hygiene products, while U.S. brands or imitations are imported from Asia, as well as household appliances, telephone and computer equipment and accessories. Wines, liquors and cosmetics arrive without major problems from Europe.
An apparent “bonanza bubble” has arisen, limited to trade and consumption by a minority, fed with income from the State – which sells minerals and other resources with a total lack of transparency -, and with remittances from the millions of Venezuelans who have migrated to escape the crisis over the last eight years.
In that period, poverty has expanded until reaching four-fifths of the country’s 28 million inhabitants and they have also suffered three years of hyperinflation. For this crisis, the government of President Nicolás Maduro tirelessly and systematically blames the sanctions from abroad.
The sanctions “have been an excellent business for the Maduro administration, because not only did it unify its forces based on a common external objective, but it forgot about paying the foreign debt and, under a state of emergency, exports without transparency or accountability, in a black market,” said Oliveros.
.
In addition, “a good part of the opposition put all its eggs in the sanctions basket and forgot about doing political work, and that is why the public, after so many years of difficulties, are questioning the results of that strategy,” he added.
In short, “instead of helping to bring about political change, what the sanctions have done is to keep Maduro in power,” said Oliveros.
In the cases of Venezuela and Iran, Washington and its European partners are interested in obtaining gestures of change – in the Venezuelan case, resumption of dialogue with the opposition – that would justify a relaxation of sanctions, which in turn would lead to an increase in oil supplies, now that Russian oil is facing restrictions.
Meanwhile, with respect to Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, as well as countries opposed by the West on other continents, sanctions continue to function, in the eyes of public opinion in the countries that impose them, as a sign of political will to punish governments considered enemies, troublemakers or outlaws.
Tomasa Chávez, bundled up against the cold of the southern hemisphere winter, works at the Central Market in Buenos Aires, where she was hired in 2021 to separate edible waste that can be recovered. Until then, she went there daily on her own for 30 years to look for food and other recyclable materials among the waste that has now been given new value. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
by Daniel Gutman (buenos aires)
Inter Press Service
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 06 (IPS) – For 30 years, Tomasa Chávez visited the Central Market of Buenos Aires and rummaged through the tons of fruits and vegetables that the stallholders discarded, in search of food. Today she continues to do so, but there is a difference: since 2021 she has been one of the workers hired to recover food as part of a formal program launched by the Central Market.
“Before, I used to come almost every day and collect whatever was edible and whatever could be sold in my neighborhood. Food, cardboard, wood… Now I still come to separate edible food, but I work from 7:00 to 15:00 and I get paid some money,” the short, good-natured woman told IPS.
The Central Market of the Argentine capital is a universe that seems vast and unfathomable to those who venture into it for the first time.
Covering 550 hectares in the municipality of La Matanza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, it is full of life; to describe it merely as a central market that supplies fruits and vegetables to a metropolis of 15 million inhabitants would be an oversimplification.
In the market there are large companies and small businesses, streets, avenues, warehouses, buildings and even areas taken over by homeless people and a rehabilitation center for people with substance abuse problems. In some places people are crowded among crates of fruit and the noise is overwhelming, but there are also large empty areas where everything is quiet.
Nearly 1,000 trucks enter the Central Market every day to pick up fresh food that is sold in the stores of the city and Greater Buenos Aires. Every month, 106,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold, according to official data.
There is also a retail market with food of all kinds, attended by thousands of people from all over the city, in search of better prices than in their neighborhoods, in a context of inflation that does not stop growing – it already exceeds 60 percent annually – and which is destroying the buying power of the middle class and the poor.
View of one of the 12 bays where the fruits and vegetables that supply the 15 million inhabitants of the Greater Buenos Aires region are sold wholesale. The activity begins at 2:00 a.m. and every day some 1,000 trucks enter the market and some 10,000 people work there. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
As a reflection of the social situation in Argentina, where even before the COVID-19 pandemic the poverty rate exceeded 40 percent, a common image of the Market has been that of hundreds of people like Chávez rummaging through the waste, looking for something to eat or to sell.
But since August 2021, much of that energy has been poured into the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program, which is based on two main ideas: to use food fit for consumption for social assistance and the rest for the production of compost or organic fertilizer to promote agroecology.
“There was a social and environmental problem that needed to be addressed. Today we have fewer losses, we provide social assistance and create jobs,” Marisol Troya, quality and transparency manager at the Central Market, told IPS.
Coping with the crisis
The 12 gigantic bays where fruits and vegetables are sold wholesale are the heart of the Central Market, which employs 800 people and where a total of 10,000 people work every day.
At 2:00 a.m. the activity begins every day in the market with frenetic movement of crates containing local products from all over Argentina and neighboring countries, which are a festival of colors. Each bay has 55 stalls.
Three people look for food in a container of discarded products at the Central Market of Buenos Aires, where more than 100,000 tons of fruits and vegetables are sold every month to supply retail stores in the Argentine capital and its suburbs. With the recovery program, the Market seeks to provide environmental and social solutions. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
“The search for food among the Market’s waste was spurred by the economic crisis and the pandemic,” said Marcelo Pascal, a consultant to the management. “We realized very quickly that there was a lot of merchandise in good condition that was discarded for commercial reasons but could be recuperated.
“There were even small stands that used vegetables found in the garbage. A lot of edible products were recovered, but the process was disorderly, so an effort was made to organize it,” he told IPS.
From August 2021 to June 2022, 1,891 tons of food were recovered for social aid, while 3,276 tons have been used to make compost, according to official figures from the Central Market, which is run by a board of directors made up of representatives of the central, provincial and city governments.
“We have reduced by 48 percent the amount of garbage that the Market was sending to landfills for final disposal, which was 50 tons a day,” agronomist Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction Program, told IPS.
Fabián Rainoldi, head of the Waste Reduction and Recovery Program of the Central Market of Buenos Aires, stands in front of one of the mountains of organic waste that are used to produce compost, which serves as fertilizer for agroecological enterprises. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
Orderly recovery of edible products
Justo Gregorio Ayala is working in an esplanade next to one of the wholesale bays. In front of him he has a crate of bruised tomatoes, impossible to sell at a store, but many of which are ripe and edible. His task is to separate the edible ones from the waste.
“I live here in the Market, in the Hogar de Cristo San Cayetano, and six months ago I got this job,” Ayala said, referring to the rehab center for addicts that opened in 2020 inside the Market itself.
“There were always a lot of products to recover in the Market, but now we do it better,” added Ayala, who is one of the workers hired for the Program.
He clarified, however, that the scenario varies depending on the temperature. “In summertime, because of the heat, the fruits and vegetables last much less time and the stallholders throw away more products. Now in winter we don’t find so much.”
The workers work in eight of the market’s 12 bays. There are a total of 24 workers, divided into groups of three, who separate the merchandise that the stallholders are asked to leave in the center of the bay.
The recovered goods are loaded onto trucks that are taken to a huge warehouse in the Community Action section of the Market, where they are prepared for use in social aid projects.
Justo Gregorio Ayala is one of the 24 workers who select edible fruits and vegetables discarded by vendors at the Buenos Aires Central Market. Since August last year, almost 19,000 tons of food fit for human consumption have been recovered and have gone to soup kitchens and other kinds of social assistance. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS
“We deliver food to 700 soup kitchens, according to a weekly schedule: about 130 per day,” said Martin Romero, head of the Community Action section, where 22 workers perform their duties, as the first vehicles begin to arrive to pick up their cargo.
“We also put together eight-kilo bags, with whatever we have available, which we deliver to 130 families,” he added to IPS.
What is not fit for human consumption ends up in the composting yard, a plot of land covering almost three hectares, where the process of decomposition of organic matter takes about four months.
“The organic waste is mixed with wood chips made from the crates, which absorb water and reduce the leachate that contaminates the soil. The organic compost is donated to agroecological gardens which use it for fertilization and the recovery of degraded soils,” explained Rainoldi.
The goal is a Central Market that makes use of everything and does not send waste to the dump. It’s a long road that has just begun.
The large Citizen Action warehouse in downtown Rio de Janeiro is filled with food donated by people in solidarity for distribution to poor and hunger-stricken communities. There are 33.1 million Brazilians suffering from hunger, according to a survey by a network of researchers on the subject. CREDIT: Tânia Rêgo /Agência Brasil
by Mario Osava (rio de janeiro)
Inter Press Service
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 05 (IPS) – A campaign against hunger, a problem that affects 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, seeks to mobilize society once again in search of urgent solutions, inspired by a mass movement that took off in the country in 1993.
“Now it’s more difficult, hunger has spread throughout the country, in cities where there was none, it has expanded,” said Rodrigo Afonso, executive director of Citizen Action, one of the social organizations spearheading the campaign.
“Besides, society is anesthetized with so many tragedies, exhausted after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, so many losses,” he lamented in an interview with IPS.
And we cannot count on the current government, which in addition to deactivating policies that had been strengthening food security, adopted negative measures, the activist added, saying that for now they are looking towards civil society and companies.
“Brazil feeds one billion people in the world, we provide food security for one-sixth of the world’s population,” President Jair Bolsonaro exaggerated in his speech at the Summit of the Americas on Jun. 10 in Los Angeles, California.
But according to Brazilian agricultural researchers, who made a simple calculation based on the country’s growing grain production, Brazil’s food exports feed 800 million people.
If Brazil accounts for 10 percent of the world’s grain production, about 270 million tons this year, according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, then it feeds 10 percent of humanity.
The country is the world’s largest producer of soybeans, coffee and sugar, as well as the largest exporter of meat.
A green sea of soy is the landscape in vast areas of Brazil, especially in the midwest and southern regions of the country. They are held up as the “success” of Brazilian agriculture, which, according to President Jair Bolsonaro, feeds one billion people around the world. But paradoxically, 33.1 million Brazilians suffer from hunger. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
Food for other countries, shortages at home
But the production boasted of by political leaders and large agricultural producers is basically destined for export and livestock feed. Brazilians consume only a small portion of the corn and an even smaller portion of the soybeans the country produces – most of it is exported or used for animal feed.
At the same time, Brazil is a net importer of wheat and beans, key products in the diet of the country’s inhabitants. And the production of rice, another staple, just barely meets domestic demand.
Bolsonaro and his far-right government, closely allied with export agriculture, seek to defend a sector that faces international criticism, due to its association with deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, harassment and mistreatment of indigenous peoples and the overuse of agrochemicals.
Penssan, headed by researchers from universities and other public institutions, but open to all interested parties, released its second National Survey on Food Insecurity in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Jun. 8.
The study based on data collected between November 2021 and April 2022 pointed to a 73 percent increase over the 19.1 million hungry people reported in the first edition, published in late 2020.
In other words, in just over a year of pandemic, the number of people suffering from severe food insecurity or frequent food deprivation increased by 14 million: from nine to 15.5 percent of the Brazilian population, today estimated at 214 million.
The crisis especially affects people in the North and Northeast (the poorest regions), blacks, families headed by women and with children under 10 years of age, and rural and local populations that also suffer from water insecurity. Inequalities have intensified.
Wearing a T-shirt reading “Hunger, the greatest violence”, Herbert de Souza, Betinho (C), is honored as a symbol of the Brazilian fight against hunger. He led a massive campaign starting in 1993 and unleashed a process that allowed Brazil to be removed from the FAO hunger map in 2014. But the country returned to the map in 2018 and hunger worsened with the pandemic and the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2021. CREDIT: Facebook
Reviving the movement against hunger
To face this new emergency situation, Citizen Action called a National Meeting against Hunger, which brought together representatives of social movements, non-governmental organizations and food security councils that operate in the Brazilian states, from Jun. 20 to 23 in Rio de Janeiro.
The meeting approved a letter addressed to the public with a proposal for ten priority measures, ranging from an increase in the national minimum wage to a fair tax reform, the resumption of agrarian reform and the demarcation of indigenous lands, interrupted under the current government, and the restoration of food security policies also abolished under the Bolsonaro administration.
These demands will serve as the basis for the new anti-hunger campaign that will be officially launched in the coming weeks, Afonso announced.
The present outlook is due to the economic crisis Brazil has been suffering since 2015 and the pandemic, aggravated as “a product of recent government decisions, which dismantled food security policies and imposed new contrary measures,” the executive director of Citizen Action told IPS.
The Bolsonaro administration has not raised the minimum wage, for example, merely adjusting it each year to keep up with the official inflation rate. The current inflation rate of 11.73 percent accumulated in the 12 months up to May reduces the purchasing power of the minimum wage month by month.
The minimum wage, set at 1,212 reais (233 dollars) a month for this year, is no longer enough to cover the cost of the basic basket of food and hygiene products for a family of four in the southern city of São Paulo, which currently costs 1,226 reais, according to the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies.
Bolsonaro replaced the Bolsa Familia program with Auxilio Brasil, a stipend of 400 reais (77 dollars) – double the previous amount – to 18 million families, in an attempt to win votes among the poor, a sector in which he is highly unpopular according to polls for the October presidential elections.
But there are “almost three million very poor families” still excluded from the program, who are going hungry, Afonso stressed.
Citizen Action is the non-governmental organization heir to the massive movement unleashed in 1993 by sociologist Herbert de Souza, known as Betinho, which awakened the public to the extent of hunger in the country and mobilized the solidarity of millions of people in municipal, factory, school, neighborhood and community committees.
The campaign, called Citizen Action against Hunger and Poverty and for Life, triggered a process that culminated in the creation of a national food security system, governmental but with broad participation by society in councils at the national, state and municipal levels.
“We still have regional and local committees in all 26 Brazilian states” seeking to collect food donations and mobilize the population to prioritize the fight against hunger, Afonso said.
Many companies support the campaign that will also try to mobilize political leaders, delivering the letter approved at the Meeting against Hunger to all presidential candidates in the October elections, announced the activist, confident in a new awakening of society to the problem, despite the current adverse circumstances.
The municipality of Puchuncaví in central Chile turns greens after days of rain, but next to it are the smokestacks of the industries located in this development pole that turned this town and the neighboring town of Quintero into “sacrifice zones”, with the emission of pollutants that damaged the environment and the health of local residents, which will finally begin to be dismantled. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
by Orlando Milesi (quintero, chile)
Inter Press Service
QUINTERO, Chile, Jul 04 (IPS) – A health crisis that in 20 days left 500 children poisoned in the adjacent municipalities of Quintero and Puchuncaví triggered the decision to close the Ventanas Smelter, in a first concrete step towards putting an end to a so-called “sacrifice zone” in Chile.
The measure was supported by President Gabriel Boric who reiterated his determination to move towards a green government.
The decision by the state-owned National Copper Corporation (Codelco), the world’s leading copper producer, was announced on Jun. 17, following a temporary stoppage of the plant eight days earlier, and was opposed only by the powerful Federation of Copper Workers.
The union reacted by calling a strike, which ended after two days, when the leaders agreed to discuss an organized closure of the smelter, which will take place within a maximum of five years. The smelting and refining facility will be replaced by another modern plant at a site yet to be determined.
The smelter is an outdated facility that has suffered repeated episodes of sulfur dioxide pollution, one of the chemicals causing the deteriorating health of the inhabitants of Quintero, a city of 26,000, and Puchuncaví, population 19,000.
In the last three years Codelco invested 152 million dollars to modernize the smelter but without success, admitted Codelco’s president, Máximo Pacheco.
Pacheco argued that the closure was due to “the climate of uncertainty that has existed for decades, which is very bad for the workers, their families and the community.”
Sara Larraín, executive director of the non-governmental organization Sustainable Chile, said the definitive closure of the plant does justice.
“It is the first step for Quintero and Puchuncaví to get out of the category of damage that is called a ‘sacrifice zone’ where for decades the emission standards have been exceeded,” she told IPS.
“Sacrifice zones” are areas that have suffered excessive environmental damage due to industrial pollution. Residents of poor communities in these areas bear a disproportionate burden of pollution, toxic waste and heavy industry.
The back of the Ventanas Smelter reveals the poor operating conditions of the copper processing facility in Chile, which will be replaced by a new one within a maximum of five years at an as yet undefined site. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
The two adjacent municipalities, 156 kilometers west of Santiago, qualify as a sacrifice zone, as do Mejillones, Huasco and Tocopilla, in the north, and Coronel in southern Chile, because the right to live in a pollution-free environment is violated in these areas.
In Quintero and Puchuncaví the main source of sulfur dioxide is the Ventanas Smelter, responsible for 61.8 percent of emissions of this element, causing widespread health problems.
Fisherman-diver forced to move away returns to Quintero
Carlos Vega, a fishermen’s union leader in Quintero, is the third generation of divers in his family.
“My grandfather, a fisherman, taught me how to make fishing nets. He had a restaurant on the coast,” he told IPS, visibly moved, adding that his two brothers are also fishermen and divers, who catch shellfish among the rocks along the coast.
“Fishing was profitable here. We were doing well and making money,” he said.
He added that people are well-organized in the area. “At one time we were the largest producer” of seafood and fish for central Chile, “because we had management and harvesting areas. But they had to close because of the pollution,” he said, describing the poverty that befell the local fishers in the late 1980s.
Then the health authorities found copper, cadmium and arsenic in the local seafood and banned its harvest. As a result, the small fishermen’s bay where they keep their boats and sell part of their catch lost their customers.
The crisis forced him to move to the south where he worked for 15 years as a professional diver in a salmon company.
Carlos Vega, a fisherman, diver and trade union leader, and Kata Alonso, spokeswoman for Women of Sacrifice Zones in Resistance, pose for a photo in the bay of Quintero, during the celebrations in that town and in neighboring Puchuncaví for the announcement of the definitive closure of the Ventanas Smelter of the state-owned Codelco copper company, whose polluting emissions have damaged the local environment and made local residents sick for decades. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Today, back in Quintero, with two sons who are engineers and a daughter who is a teacher, he continues to dive, albeit sporadically. He participates along with 27 fishermen in the management area granted to the north of the sacrifice zone, where they extract shellfish quotas two or three times a year.
“The social fabric was broken down here, that is the hardest thing that has happened to us,” said Vega.
Codelco is not the only polluter
Codelco is the main exporter in Chile, a long narrow country of 19.1 million people sandwiched between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains where the big mines are located. In 2021 it produced 1.7 million tons of copper and its pre-tax income totaled nearly 7.4 billion dollars.
“Chile is the leading global copper producer and the world is going to become more electric every day,” said Pacheco. “And copper is the conductor par excellence, there is no substitute. We have to be ready for copper to be increasingly in demand in this energy transition.”
The president of Codelco emphasized that the wealth does not lie in exporting concentrate, which has 26 percent copper, but anodes with 99 percent purity, “and for that we need a smelter and a refinery.”
Young residents of Quintero and Puchuncaví came out in a drum line to celebrate the closure of the Ventanas Smelter and participate in a Festival for Life which lasted eight hours and was joined by a hundred local and national artists. Thousands of people gathered in the square which is on the edge of Quintero on Saturday, Jun. 25. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
But the smelter, he explained, must be modern and not like Ventanas, which only captures 95 percent of the gases released. In the last three years, Codelco has lost 50 million dollars in the Ventanas smelter, which has a production scale of 420,000 tons. A modern Flash furnace produces 1.5 million tons and captures 99.8 percent of the gases.
The Ventanas Smelter employs 348 people and another 400 in associated companies. Half of them do not live in the area but in Viña del Mar, Villa Alemana or Quilpué, towns that are also in the region of Valparaíso, but are located far from the pollution.
The smelter is part of an industrial cluster that includes 16 companies.
After the latest health crisis, the authorities decreed contingency plans in plants and maritime terminals of six companies for emitting volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and applied an Atmospheric Prevention and Decontamination Plan.
Four coal-fired thermoelectric plants also pollute the area, one of which was definitively closed in December 2020 and another that was to be closed last May, although the measure was postponed.
According to environmentalist Larraín, when the smelter and the four thermoelectric plants are closed “better standards can be achieved, at least with respect to sulfur dioxide and heavy metals,” in Quintero and Puchuncaví.
View from the road of the Ventanas Smelter, in central Chile, which has been temporarily shut down since Jun. 9 and whose antiquated facilities will be permanently closed in a maximum of five years. They are adjacent to populated areas that have been turned into so-called “sacrifice zones” where local residents periodically suffer environmental and health emergencies due to sulfur dioxide fumes. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Kata Alonso, spokeswoman for the Mujeres en Zona de Sacrificio en Resistencia (Women in Sacrifice Zone in Resistance) collective, told IPS that “the prevention plan is good so that people don’t continue to be poisoned, so that they can breathe better, and so that the companies that pollute can close their doors, instead of the schools.
“There are companies that were built before the environmental law was passed that have not taken health measures. So what we are asking is for each company to be evaluated, and those that do not comply with the regulations must leave,” she said.
The repeated crises occur despite the fact that Chile’s environmental standards are below those of the World Health Organization (WHO).
For level 10 particulate matter, the mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets in the air, the ceiling in Chile is 150 milligrams per cubic meter (m3) and the WHO ceiling is 50.
For particulate matter 2.5 (fine inhalable particles), in Chile the limit is 50 milligrams per m3, while the WHO guideline is 25. And the Chilean ceiling for sulfur dioxide is 250 milligrams per m3 compared to the WHO’s limit of 20.
Three years ago, the Chilean Pediatric Society and the Chilean Medical Association requested that Chile raise its emission standards to WHO levels.
Part of the audience at the Festival for Life, which celebrated the closure of a copper smelter, that along with 15 other industrial plants turned the municipalities of Quintero and Puchuncaví into “sacrifice zones” in central Chile. Performances by musicians and other artists from around the country were interspersed with messages calling for a life free of pollution in the area. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi / IPS
Alonso the activist said that “my two neighbors died of cancer, whoever you ask in Puchuncaví has relatives who died of cancer. Today people are dying younger, breast and uterine cancer have increased in young women, and there are so many miscarriages.
“The statistic we have is that one in four children in Puchuncaví are born with severe neurological problems, down syndrome, autism. Here in Quintero there are two special education schools and many children with learning disabilities,” she said.
Larraín called for “government support for those who have been affected by irreversible diseases, asthma, lung cancer and others that have been proven to be caused by coal combustion and heavy metals.”
The Catholic University conducted a study using data on hospitalizations and mortality in Tocopilla, Mejillones, Huasco, Quintero and Puchuncaví.
“The rates for cardiovascular disease associated with industrial processes are clear. In some cases they are 900 percent higher. Calling them sacrifice zones is real, it refers to impacts that are occurring today,” said Larraín.
The environmentalist said it would be difficult to revive Quintero Bay “because it has a gigantic layer of coal at the bottom, dead phyto and zooplankton because water is used for cooling in industrial processes and is dumped back out with antialgaecides that kill marine life.”
She believes, however, that “over the years, the capacity for regeneration is possible, even in agriculture that has been lost due to sulfur dioxide emissions. There may also be a recovery in fishing and tourism.”
But Larraín demanded “a just transition that restores healthy levels and regenerates ecosystems so that local communities can sustain their economy in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment.”
Children at the San José Obrero School use the primary school’s computer lab. At their homes in the municipality of Peñalolén, to the east of Santiago de Chile, many do not have computers because 90 percent of them come from poor families. CREDIT: Courtesy of San José Obrero
by Orlando Milesi (santiago)
Inter Press Service
SANTIAGO, Jul 01 (IPS) – A Chilean government plan seeks to ensure connectivity in remote areas, in a first step to address a deep digital divide among the country’s inhabitants that includes a lack of access to technology and digital education deficits, exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, during the social isolation at the height of the pandemic, 76 percent of children in higher income segments had their own computer, laptop or tablet and 23 percent had access to a shared one.
But in the lowest income segments, only 45 percent of children had their own computer or laptop, while 16 percent had none. The rest managed to get access to a shared computer or tablet.
There are also notable differences according to the type and location of schools.
One school that illustrates the gap
“People here don’t have computers, although it may seem strange,” said Cecilia Pérez, principal of the San José Obrero School in Peñalolén. “Computers are just a dream for many. Nor do they have their own connection, or wi-fi. They have cell phones with prepaid minutes or very cheap plans that do not give them a good enough connection to support a lesson.”
In a conversation with IPS at the school, she said “this is a disadvantage that has nothing to do with the children’s desire to study, their intelligence, or their worried families. It is something external that is difficult to solve.”
To illustrate, Pérez said that “if homework is posted on the platform, it is very hard for children to read it and do it from their cell phones.”
Her school is in a poor neighborhood located at the end of Las Parcelas Avenue, in the Andes foothills of Santiago, the capital. Most of the first to eighth grade students come to school on foot.
At the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, in the foothills surrounding the Chilean capital, 90 percent of the students come from poor families, with parents who work as street vendors, cleaners or similar trades. Parental support for homework is almost non-existent, says the principal of the primary school, Cecilia Pérez. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
This public primary school in the municipality of Peñalolén, which serves 427 students, is an example of the connectivity problems faced by students in the most deprived urban and rural areas.
In this South American country of 19 million people, there are 3.6 million primary and secondary students. Two million students are enrolled in the first to eighth grades (six to 13 years of age) and the rest are in secondary school (13 to 17 years of age).
Of the total number of students, 53 percent study in state-subsidized private schools, 40 percent in municipal schools and seven percent in private schools.
“We have third grade students today who started first grade in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when they had to learn to read and write. These children had only gone to kindergarten and are now coming to class in the third grade with a very significant delay,” she said, referring to the effects of distance learning during the pandemic.
Because of this, Pérez said, “we had to set priorities in the curriculum and reinforce language and math which are super important to continue learning.”
She added that another serious problem is that many of their students experience situations of domestic violence. “Their emotional and social support is the school, and when they couldn’t be with their classmates, they lost two years of socializing,” she said.
“We have children between the fifth and eighth grades who have experienced a lot of violence, a lot of individualism, a lot of sexualization that never happened before. Partly because there is no parental control over cell phones at home,” she said.
An additional problem is connectivity because in Peñalolén “there are many hills and in some parts the internet does not work. There are families who returned the ‘router’ (a device that receives and sends data on computer networks) that we lent them because the signal does not reach their homes.”
Older children at the San José Obrero School in the municipality of Peñalolén, near Santiago de Chile, stay two hours longer at the school, doing sports and other activities as part of their education. In this way they avoid excessive leisure time and a lack of supervision at home, which can be dangerous for them. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
Tackling inequality
The deep digital divide among Chileans is aggravated by the difficulties in accessing the internet in isolated villages, rural localities and also in poor urban neighborhoods where telecommunication companies do not provide service or where criminals steal the cables.
“Inequality in our country is also manifested in internet access,” said leftist President Gabriel Boric, in office since March. “Thousands of students were unable to exercise their right to education during the pandemic due to a lack of connectivity.”
To address this situation, he said in a recent communiqué, “our Zero Digital Divide Plan will ensure, by 2025, that all the country’s inhabitants have access to connectivity.”
“This requires a sustained effort to continue with current initiatives such as the Internet as a Basic Service Bill and the generation of new projects that will allow us to reach isolated and rural areas,” he said.
As an example, Boric mentioned the town of Porvenir, which a month ago became the southernmost part of this long narrow South American country with access to the 5G network.
The 36-year-old president won the elections in the wake of the huge 2019 protests, in which one of the demands was to end the social inequality gap, one of the largest in the world according to international organizations, and where more equitable access to education was one of the main points.
Paulina Romero, a first-year chemistry and pharmacy university student, became a symbol of the digital divide that Boric seeks to eliminate, when two years ago images of her climbing onto the roof of her house in the small community of San Ramón, in the southern region of La Araucanía, in a dangerous attempt to find a signal to be able to do her assigned homework, went viral.
A colorful mural decorates the staircase leading to the second story of classrooms at the primary school in Peñalolén, located in the snowy Andes foothills seen here in the background in the middle of Chile’s southern hemisphere winter. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
Plans to close the gap
Claudio Araya, undersecretary of telecommunications, told IPS that all efforts are focused on improving connectivity.
“A bill was approved in Congress a month ago that guarantees internet access for students,” he said. He pointed out that in part this access already exists but it is not operational for schoolchildren, because “many students in areas with coverage had problems with distance learning because their families could not afford cell phone plans.”
Araya added that a project is being implemented to ensure that all public schools, whether run by municipalities or the State, as well as subsidized private schools, have coverage for remote areas and connection speed.
“One part of the project is being completed now, by August, for 8,300 schools, a second part with 500 more by March 2023, and a third with a call for bids before 2023, which will cover just over a thousand schools,” he explained.
His office has also allocated resources for a new project, called “last mile”, which seeks to bring connectivity to isolated or rural areas. “We have already invested some 200 million dollars and we are contemplating an additional 150 million dollars to provide service coverage to the communities,” he said.
There are 40 computers available at the San José Obrero School for the children to search for information and complete their learning in various subjects under the supervision of the teacher in charge. But there is no possibility of laptops that they can take to their homes, where most of them have no computers. CREDIT: Courtesy of the San José Obrero School
Another school stumbling over connectivity issues
Connectivity is the main problem for the 73 students at the school in the small town of Samo Alto, in the Andes foothills area of the municipality of Rio Hurtado, 440 kilometers north of Santiago.
“We are educating 21st century children with 20th century resources and technology,” Omar Santander, principal of the primary school, told IPS by telephone.
“The connection to the global world does not exist. You turn on a computer, log on to the network and all the other computers disconnect. It is impossible to work online. We have computers and tablets, but there they are, and they can only be used with resources and programs downloaded ad hoc,” he said.
The students cannot communicate and “these are gaps that keep us from providing greater opportunities,” he said.
“The lack of computers is the smaller problem. We have achieved internet efficiency and we have the equipment. The big problem is connectivity,” Santander stressed, adding that an antenna they made to capture the signal was not enough.
He said that “last year when we held hybrid classes, half at home and half at school, one day we tried to connect and it was a terrible disappointment.
“There is a wealth of information, of pedagogical resources available to students that unfortunately we don’t have access to,” Santander complained.
The principal explained that “everything that has to do with access to resources that enrich reading, writing, calculus and mathematics is there and we cannot make use of it.”
From the San José Obrero School, Santiago de Chile can be seen in the background, under a cloudy sunset after a recent rain on the first day of the southern hemisphere winter in Chile. CREDIT: Orlando Milesi/IPS
More than internet access
Luciano Ahumada, head of the School of Informatics and Telecommunications at the Diego Portales University, said that “reducing the digital divide goes far beyond having an internet plan.”
“It also involves promoting the use and daily impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to maximize people’s well-being. It is a much more complex and time-consuming challenge than access,” he told IPS.
In his view, “we must work on access, but also on economic, ethnic and gender barriers and establish a framework concept of cybersecurity or basic concepts in the population to live in a healthy way in this new world.
“There is an economic gap, an age gap, an ethnic gap, which in different countries has become very evident,” he said.
Ahumada said that “access is just the starting-point. It is a good initiative, necessary to massify internet access, but we must think about massification of high-speed connections because with networks of the past we cannot carry out actions of the future and establish the basis for an information society.”
Electricity generation in the city of La Paz in the northwestern state of Baja California Sur depends primarily on a thermoelectric plant that burns fuel oil, a highly polluting fuel. The Mexican government plans to replace it with gas. CREDIT: Cerca
by Emilio Godoy (mexico city)
Inter Press Service
MEXICO CITY, Jun 30 (IPS) – Liquefied gas does not occupy a prominent position in Mexico’s energy mix, but the government wants to change that scenario, to take advantage of the crisis unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need for new sources of the fuel due to the sanctions against Russia.
The war modified the global outlook for gas by accentuating Europe’s dependence on natural gas and forcing it to look for other suppliers due to the sanctions against Russia. If prior to the war that began on Feb. 24 there was an oversupply and a lack of interest in financing gas projects, now the equation has changed radically.
ln addition to promoting the installation of private plants, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced on Jun. 11 the construction of a three billion dollar natural gas liquefaction plant in the southern state of Oaxaca, to be run by the state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE).
A new gas pipeline to be laid between Oaxaca and Coatzacoalcos, in the southeastern state of Tabasco, will help feed the liquefied natural gas (LNG) processing plant using gas from the United States.
In July 2021, the Mexican government created the state-owned company Gas Bienestar, to sell the fuel at subsidized prices and thus cushion the impact of the international rise in fuel prices, driven by the increase in demand after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has doubled since the invasion of Ukraine.
Mexico depends on U.S. gas for residential and industrial consumption, transported mostly by pipelines belonging to U.S. companies, which are now looking for ways to sell it in third party markets, re-exporting it from Mexico after liquefying it in processing plants built here.
But this model is criticized for chaining Mexico to gas in the long term and reinforcing dependence on fossil fuels, thus breaking with the commitment to an energy transition to decarbonize domestic consumption.
“This dependence is not sustainable,” Jaqueline Valenzuela, director of the non-governmental Center for Renewable Energy and Environmental Quality, told IPS from the northwestern city of La Paz. “What we are seeing is that we are receiving gas from fracking after the government promised to stop supporting that technology. It is incoherent.”
In La Paz, the capital of the state of Baja California Sur, most of the power generation depends on fuel oil, a highly polluting petroleum derivative that is also harmful to human health.
Since the 2013 energy reform, which opened the sector to private foreign and local capital, Mexico has become a recipient of gas from the United States, obtained through hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a technique that requires large amounts of polluting chemicals and water, and transported through pipelines.
A network of gas pipelines has been created in this country of 131 million people, with 27 state and private pipelines, for distribution over a territory of almost two million square kilometers.
The recipients of the gas are some 50 thermoelectric combined cycle plants – which burn gas to generate steam for electricity – and turbogas units, both state-owned and private.
Increasingly, however, the LNG processed in Mexico will also be destined for markets in other continents, which are now eager for suppliers that are not facing Western sanctions.
Opportunism
Among the beneficiaries of the new world gas scenario are Mexican facilities that receive the fuel, liquefy it and re-export it by ship, to take advantage of the rising cost of the material.
Four private plants supply LNG in the northeast and northwest of the country, mainly for thermoelectric plants and industrial consumption.
Since 2008, the private Energía Costa Azul (ECA), located in the municipality of Ensenada, Baja California, has been operating with a capacity of one billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas per day, owned by Infraestructura Energética Nova (IEnova), a Mexican subsidiary of the US company Sempra Energy, which invested some 1.2 billion dollars in the facility.
In the Port of Pichilingue, also in Baja California Sur, the terminal of the same name, with the capacity to process three million tons of LNG per year and owned by the U.S. company New Fortress, has been operating since July 2021. The processing plant supplies the derivative to a local thermoelectric plant.
In Manzanillo, in the western state of Colima, the KMS Terminal, owned by Korean and Japanese corporations, has been operating since 2012 with a capacity of 3.8 million tons per year.
On the other side of the country, in Altamira, in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, the terminal of the same name, co-owned by the Dutch company Vopak and Enagás from Spain, has been operating since 2006 with a capacity of 5.7 million tons per year.
Mexico as a producer
Mexico is the 12th largest oil producer in the world and the 17th largest gas producer. In terms of proven crude oil reserves, it ranks 20th, and 41st in natural gas, but its hydrocarbon industry is declining due to the scarcity of easily extractable deposits.
In Mexico, Latin America’s second largest economy, between 2019 and May this year natural gas production ranged between 4.6 and 4.8 bcf per day, according to official data.
Extraction is lower than domestic demand and to balance the deficit Mexico imports gas, especially from the United States, from which it imported a maximum of 935 million and a minimum of 640 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) over the last three years, according to figures from state-owned oil giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex).
In addition, LNG processing has been falling. In 2019, the country refined 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) equivalent, which fell to 84,000 in 2021. And in April 2022, the total dropped to 43,000 bpd.
Imports of LNG vary widely: Mexico imported almost 54 billion bpd in 2019, a total that fell by one billion in 2020 and rose to 67 billion bpd in 2021, dropping again to 27 billion bpd last April. In addition, it has not exported LNG since July 2020, due to the demand of the domestic market.
Meanwhile, U.S. pipeline exports to Mexico have quadrupled in recent years, according to data from the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration.
“While the U.S. must help its allies in need, the ability of U.S. gas to provide reliable and affordable energy to the world is quite limited,” Tyson Slocum, director of the Energy Program at the nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, told IPS from Washington.
Slocum said that “our concern is that U.S. exports to Mexico will simply feed Mexican exports of liquefied gas.”
Addiction
The greed for gas attracts private and public companies alike. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has issued at least five permits to export LNG and to re-export it via Mexico since 2016. In addition, one project is under construction and three others are planned on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
IEnova and France’s TotalEnergies are building phase one of ECA, a plant with a capacity of 3.25 million tons of LNG per year with an investment of two billion dollars, scheduled to start operating in 2024. Meanwhile, phase two is under design, to produce an additional 12 million tons per year.
Mexico Pacific Limited LLC (MPL), owned by three U.S. private investment funds, is building another regasification plant in Puerto Libertad in the northwestern state of Sonora, with an investment of 2.5 billion dollars, which is projected to export 14 million tons of LNG annually to Asia.
The first stage is to begin in 2025, with 4.7 million tons, President López Obrador said at one of his morning press conferences.
In December 2018, the DOE authorized MPL to export up to 1.7 bcf per day from the future facility, an endorsement required to export the fuel from the U.S.
In addition, the Vista Pacifico LNG project planned by Sempra in Topolobampo, in the northwestern state of Sinaloa, is to transport fuel from the Permian Basin oil-and-gas-producing area in West Texas for re-export to Asia and Europe, in addition to several destinations in South America.
In April 2021 Vista Pacifico received permission from the DOE to export 40 bcf per year – 110 mcf per day – to Mexico. Of that total, 200 bcf of gas per year – 550 mcf per day – would be for liquefaction and re-export.
Last January, Mexico’s state-owned CFE and U.S.-based Sempra signed a voluntary memorandum of understanding for the probable construction of a plant for this purpose.
Also in Sinaloa, the private LNG Alliance of Singapore is building the Amigo LNG plant, which will begin operations in 2027 with the capacity to process 3.9 million tons per year.
“The country continues to bet on the fossil fuel extractivist model. We do not see another energy alternative being built in the face of the climate emergency,” complained Edmundo del Pozo, coordinator of the Territory, Rights and Development area of the non-governmental Fundar Center for Research and Analysis.
The expert told IPS that the modernization of hydroelectric plants and the strengthening of Pemex promoted by López Obrador since he took office in December 2018 have favored gas consumption.
“Continuing with fossil fuels is not an option. We are fighting for the inputs used to generate electricity to be local,” such as sunlight, said Valenzuela, the head of the non-governmental Center for Renewable Energy and Environmental Quality.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
