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Javier E

How El Salvador's State of Emergency Has Impacted the Crime Rate - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-state-of-emergency-crime.html

El Salvador repression gangs emergency

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Between January and the end of October, 463 people were killed in El Salvador, a 50 percent drop compared with the same period last year,
  • The emerging picture underscores a fundamental tension: In a country traumatized by chronic gang warfare, the crackdown has brought a respite from the violence, outweighing fears of democratic backsliding and giving an increasingly autocratic leader leverage to carry out his policies.
  • Extortion, a key revenue stream for gangs, has also appeared to have plunged. According to the country’s security minister, extortion cases have fallen by 80 percent since the state of emergency began. The figure is difficult to verify independently, but several business leaders interviewed by The New York Times said extortion had gone down significantly.
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  • While a lack of transparency by the Bukele government makes it hard to assess the credibility of official crime data, experts say there is little doubt that there has been a notable reduction in violence since the start of the emergency decree.
  • “This crackdown has been unprecedented,” said Tiziano Breda, Central America analyst at the International Crisis Group, an independent research organization. “Without a doubt this has weakened the gangs.”
  • if criminal groups have been crippled, so too have many of El Salvador’s civil liberties.
  • “Similar policies of mass incarceration and an iron fist in El Salvador and the rest of the region have shown that in the long term they don’t achieve sustainable results and bring back surges of violence,”
  • Mr. Bukele’s approval ratings, according to polls, have remained above 80 percent, suggesting that many Salvadorans crave greater safety, even if it means a more repressive system.
  • “They were so desperate because of the levels of violence and the control of the gangs,” said José Miguel Cruz, an expert on El Salvador’s gang violence at Florida International University, “that they will accept that sort of deal with the devil.”
  • even if there is less violence in El Salvador, such a dip is likely to be temporary without addressing the root causes, including grinding poverty and corruption, some analysts warn.
  • And indiscriminately imprisoning young men who may have done nothing wrong alongside gang members could result in a large population of disaffected youth who might make easier recruits for gangs.
  • Since March, the Legislative Assembly, controlled by Mr. Bukele’s party, has approved legislation allowing judges to imprison children as young as 12, limiting freedom of expression, expanding the use of pretrial detention and permitting prosecutors and judges to try people in absentia.
  • The state of emergency has been used as a blunt instrument, according to the Human Rights Watch report, with police commanders establishing a quota system requiring officers to arrest a certain number of people every day.
  • The prison system is at a breaking point, with close to 100,000 people behind bars as of November, more than three times the capacity of the country’s penal system
  • At least 90 people have died in custody since the state of emergency began
  • The crackdown has swept up not just gang members, but also children, women and the physically and mentally disabled. Some residents in poor neighborhoods who once feared gang members, say they are more fearful of the Salvadoran police.
  • “The government can do many worse things to you,”
  • Ms. Solórzano’s younger brother Adrián, 30, was arrested in April and accused of terrorism. “It was a shock when the police arrived and said that they had to take him away,” she said, adding that her brother had done nothing wrong.
  • Then on July 5, representatives from a funeral home came to the family’s home and gave them the news: Adrián was dead, strangled to death while in custody. It was unclear how he was killed or by whom.
Javier E

'Climate of panic': bombings in Brazil reveal growing power of gangs | Jo Griffin | Glo... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-reveal-growing-power-of-gangs

brazil gangs education

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The current crisis is now a perfect storm as gang leaders in overstuffed jails prey on young people with “no exit door from gangs”, says Roseno, while Ceará’s governor, Camilo Santana, from the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT), is “worried about not looking weak”. So far the response of Santana has echoed the tough rhetoric of Bolsonaro, calling for military reinforcements and promising stern action in his Facebook posts.
  • Da Silva, a social worker with young people at risk of joining gangs, says many areas are now too dangerous for him and co-workers to enter. “The authorities cannot step back for fear of looking weak, but this is going to lead to more serious problems,” Da Silva says. “Where is the intelligent response to these problems in Brazil? We have a super-ministry of security but where’s the super-ministry of education?”
  • Roseno says: “The question is: how can we reduce the power of the gangs? How can we not just get rid of the weapons and cut off financial resources but offer young people a different life? These gangs operate by offering a sense of brotherhood, self-esteem, money. They are filling the space where there are no public policies.”
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  • Luiz Fábio Paiva, a sociologist at the federal university of Ceará and researcher with the Laboratory for the Study of Violence (LEV), says the assertions from the state government, which is “preoccupied excessively with manifesting and demonstrating a hyper-masculine show of fighting violence with violence”, are reckless.
  • This has contributed to a sharp rise in Brazil’s prison population to 700,489 – the world’s third largest. Of all inmates nationwide, 34.2% are on remand and Ceará holds the record for most prisoners who have not been convicted of a crime.
  • As well as providing more staff and resources for prisons, judicial practice must change in order to reduce mass incarceration, he says. Despite a law in 2006 decriminalising possession of a small amount of drugs for personal consumption, “they began prosecuting anyone found with drugs, [even] a small quantity at home, as if they were serious traffickers”.
  • Without investment and reform of the prison system, the cycle of violence and crime continues. “It is right for the state to re-engage with command of the prisons but [Albuquerque] made a mistake by saying he would not respect gangs without [having] a plan.”
  • “We haven’t changed the prison policy for 30 years, and we just repeat the same mistakes,” says Roseno, who heads a campaign to stop murders of adolescents. “The government needs a policy of penal reform but it doesn’t have one. A prison should aim to [reintegrate] the criminal into society, but only 5% of inmates are studying and only 7% are working – they need skills and education.”
Javier E

When Cops Check Facebook - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...390882

law enforcement Big Data criminal

shared by Javier E on 21 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • The fundamental problem with policing via social-media data is that it misrepresents what social networks actually look like on the ground. Despite what techno-evangelists might wish, not all social relationships can be described using computational logic
  • A like button is merely a tool. Humans use tools in breathtakingly creative ways—this is one of the many exciting and inspiring things about social uses of technology. However, the meaning a person imparts to an action on a social-media platform does not always correspond to the actual intent. In real-life social interactions, nuance is everything. On social media, where that nuance is obscured, we ought to be hyper-critical about the ethical ramifications of using social media data for real-world judgments.
  • On Facebook, there are only two options for a post: either you click the like button, or you don’t click the like button. There’s no field for someone like Jelani Henry to indicate “I clicked the like button on this post so I wouldn’t get harassed on my way to school.” A like is simply a number used as a flag, true (1) or false (0). Humans are the ones who invest likes with context and meaning. The computer only displays the results of its computation.
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  • When you click to show the list of people who “liked” a post, you probably think you’re getting a list of people who expressed positive sentiment toward a particular combination of sentences. But computationally, what you’re getting is slightly different. “Show me a list of the people who liked a Facebook post” is actually a command more like “Display a list of FirstName and LastName for usernames where the flag LikedThisPost = True.” There are a lot of assumptions built in there.
  • There’s the assumption that the username corresponds to a single real person, which is not always true—people have multiple Facebook accounts, and some accounts have multiple people posting to them, and some accounts are fake
  • There’s the assumption that the agent that clicked the like button is the same person referred to by the username—not necessarily true. People often forget to log out of their Facebook accounts on desktops and laptops, or use other people’s phones to browse social media
  • The problem is structural and epistemological. Like all computer programs, databases are ultimately based on binary logic. If you want shades of meaning, you have to explicitly build that capability into your system. And building nuance is far harder than it seems.
  • For the kid listed in a gang database, it can be unclear how to get out of it. In the world of human interaction, we accept change through behavior: the addict can redeem himself by getting clean, or the habitual interrupter can redeem himself by not interrupting. We accept behavior change. But in the database world, unless someone has permission to delete or amend a database record, no such change is possible
  • The National Gang Center, in its list of gang-related legislation, shows only 12 states with policies that specifically address gang databases. Most deny the public access to the information in these databases. Only a few of these twelve mention regular purging of information, and some specifically say that a person cannot even find out if they have a record in the database
  • . “The last time that the gang unit purged its files, however, was in 1993—approximately 4 years before this study was conducted,” he wrote. “One clerk who is responsible for data entry and dissemination estimated, ‘At a minimum, 400 to 500 gang members would be deleted off the gang list today if we went through the files.
  • n predict what book I want to buy next, hasn’t this problem already been solved?” The answer is inevitably no. When computer scientists were building the Internet in the late 1990s, there weren’t any widely adopted or established ethical guidelines because we were building these systems for the first time in human history.
  • We also need to acknowledge that computer systems are not a panacea. “Your program really does stink, and the sooner you get used to the idea, the better,” writes Nathan S. Borenstein in Programming as if People Mattered. “The inadequacies of your software are simply a reflection of your frail, shortsighted, and limited human nature. Every program ever built is doomed to eventual obsolescence.” We need to put people before programs, and if programs don’t reflect our human values, we need to change the code. And if programmers can’t write code that is fair and just, we should consider relying on people instead of programs.
  • If American law enforcement is going to go deeper into the brave new world of data-driven policing, we need to create systems that have human values embedded in them. If our technological systems are entrapping innocent citizens or tampering with the presumption of innocence, should they be used?
Javier E

Human Rights Watch El Salvador report: 138 deportees killed - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...a-91ab-ce439aa5c7c1_story.html

salvador refugees gang murder crisis history

shared by Javier E on 06 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • At least 138 Salvadorans have been killed in the past seven years after being deported by U.S. authorities, a rights group said Wednesday in a report that highlighted the risk of returning migrants to the Central American nation.
  • “U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” Parker told The Washington Post. “Therefore they should not have done it.
  • Many of those killed after their return to El Salvador were targeted by gangs, which control huge swaths of the country.
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  • Human Rights Watch also identified 70 cases of deportees who disappeared after their return or suffered sexual violence, torture or other abuse, often by gangs.
  • The 138 cases included Salvadorans who had fled their homeland trying to escape the grip of gangs, as well as police who had been hounded by gangs and sought shelter in the United States. The majority were slain within a year of their return.
  • The number of Salvadorans seeking asylum in the United States skyrocketed as violence surged in their country — from about 5,600 in 2012 to more than 60,000 in 2017.
  • Homicides have declined sharply in El Salvador since 2015, plunging last year to 2,390 — or about 36 per 100,000 people.
  • But that’s still about seven times the U.S. rate, and thousands more people disappeared in 2019. Gangs and security forces both kill their victims secretly and hide the bodies to avoid prosecution.
Javier E

Trump's 'Animals' Remark Is Threatening to Immigrants - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...560762

dehumanization animals trump immigrants

shared by Javier E on 21 May 18 - No Cached
  • “It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out,” Sanders said, referring to the case of an unidentified man killed in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in 2017. “Frankly I think the term ‘animal’ doesn’t go far enough, and I think that the president should continue to use his platform and everything he can do under the law to stop these types of horrible, horrible disgusting people.”
  • There’s a certain moral clarity to these kinds of comments that allows them to be wielded as incredibly effective weapons, both in mobilizing support and in kneecapping opponents.
  • People who oppose this straightforward moral assessment are cast as either misconstruing the speaker or choosing to defend monsters. In this brutally simplistic worldview, one must either side with the “animals” or the humans sent to contain them.
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  • there are policy and human-rights implications to what the president says and does. Dehumanizing rhetoric is a powerful real-world tool, especially when it’s coming from the president of the United States.
  • As with his remarks on Wednesday, it’s unclear whether Trump was referring specifically to gang members or to undocumented immigrants as a whole. This ambiguity could perhaps be chalked up to the president’s imprecise speech, but it’s connected to real policy. This unclarity is a key mechanism in the federal government’s targeting of immigrants across the country.
  • In 2017, ICE arrested and detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a young undocumented immigrant who’d been shielded from deportation by enrolling in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ICE tried to strip him of his protected status and deport him, all because they claimed a tattoo of his birthplace proved his affiliation with a gang. According to criminal-justice and immigration advocates, the number of MS-13 arrests is inflated by these flimsy cases. In the Ramirez case, a federal judge criticized ICE for lying even in the court of law about Ramirez’s affiliation, saying the “agency [offered] no evidence to this Court to support its assertions.”
  • According to The Marshall Project, immigrants only have to meet some very loose criteria in order to fall into the gang dragnet, including hanging out where gang members usually frequent or being labeled as a gang member by a “reliable source,” such as a teacher.
  • the treatment of individuals caught up in the dragnet—from frigid detention centers to the separation of mothers from children—certainly still resembles what might be reserved for animals.
  • the combination of draconian rhetoric and the elision of nuance between real and perceived criminal elements is a crux of how racism has worked for centuries in this country and around the world.
  • “superpredator” originates as a zoological term for apex predatory animals—to mobilize massive public support for new criminal-justice policies and provide a moral high ground to marginalize any opponents.
  • any reasonable assessment of mass incarceration in black America will show that the damage has long been done. In Illinois, for example, over 80 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole under the superpredator dragnet were minorities. Driven to bloodlust against an ill-defined population of black youths made to be less than human, America strained against the Constitution and the basic precepts of human rights to stamp out a threat—based on a theory that has since been discredited.
  • The true peril of Trump’s comments on Wednesday is this: that the state will be further empowered to suspend human rights.
  • Dehumanization is not just a buzzword, but a descriptor of a specific and well-known psychological and sociological process, by which people are conditioned to accept inflicting increasingly inhumane conditions and punishments on other people
  • dehumanization means both a broadening of what’s acceptable and just who is unacceptable.
  • The most likely outcome of Trump’s “animals” rhetoric isn’t a return to some mythological Pax Americana, as his supporters might suggest. Quite the opposite: It could fuel more informing on neighbors, more regular harassment for people of color, a deeper and wider dragnet, and an increased acceptance of brutality and extralegal practices. That’s what happens when people stop being people.
sidneybelleroche

Haiti kidnap: Gang wants $17 million ransom for American and Canadian missionaries, rep... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by sidneybelleroche on 19 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • The gang that kidnapped a group of 17 American and Canadian missionaries in Haiti has asked for $1 million each for their release
  • The 16 American citizens and one Canadian were kidnapped by the powerful "400 Mawozo" gang on Saturday after visiting an orphanage in Croix-des-Bouquets, a northeast suburb of the capital Port-au-Prince
  • the missionaries were being held in a safe house right outside the suburb by the gang
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  • The FBI and Haitian police are in contact with the kidnappers, adding that negotiations could take weeks
  • The kidnapped missionaries are affiliated with the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, which confirmed the kidnapping on Sunday in a statement, saying the abducted group was made up of five men, seven women and five children.Read More
  • the five children abducted included an 8-month-old baby and minors ages 3, 6, 14 and 15.
  • Their abduction is part of a wave of indiscriminate kidnappings that has become more brazen as the country suffers from political instability, civil unrest, lack of quality healthcare and severe poverty.
  • The 400 Mawozo has been growing in strength for the past three years, numbering up to 150 members, and has essentially taken control of Croix des Bouquets
  • Kidnapping for ransom is a hallmark activity of the gang. They have abducted dozens of people this year alone, including foreign nationals
  • kidnappings have surged in Haiti this year -- with a nearly 300% increase since July, CARDH said.
  • The 400 Mawozo has typically demanded ransoms of around $20,000
peterconnelly

Salvadoran authorities are committing 'massive' human rights violations, with nearly 2%... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

human rights cnn authorities

shared by peterconnelly on 03 Jun 22 - No Cached
  • Salvadoran authorities have committed "massive" human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, torture, and ill-treatment, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
  • The report, released Thursday, found that since late March, nearly 2% of the country has been detained, with at least 18 people having died in state custody.
  • More than 36,000 people have been detained since
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  • "Hopefully, just as they care because we have captured criminals, they would care about our children, about our elderly, about our working people, about the innocent Salvadorans who have suffered at the hands of those same criminals," he said during a speech before the Legislative Assembly.
  • In one instance, a 16-year-old, who was arrested in April and held for 13 days for being an alleged member of an illegal group, was chained to a wall of the detention center, where he said he was beaten by police. Later, he was transferred to youth detention center, where he was beaten by gang members, who he said also threw a bag of urine at his head, it said.
  • Many of the detainees are being held without due process "purely because the authorities view them as having been identified as criminals in the stigmatizing speeches of President Bukele's government, because they have tattoos, are accused by a third party of having alleged links to a gang, are related to someone who belongs to a gang, have a previous criminal record of some kind, or simply because they live in an area under gang control, which are precisely the areas with high levels of marginalization and that have historically been abandoned by the state," according to Amnesty.
  • Bukele, the self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator," took office in June 2019 with broad support, after promising to stand tough against gang violence
jlessner

Bus Driver in Delhi Gang Rape Blames Victim - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hi-gang-rape-mukesh-singh.html

culture

shared by jlessner on 03 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • jlessner on 03 Mar 15
     
    NEW DELHI - In the months after a young woman was brutalized and gang-raped on a moving bus in New Delhi in 2012, thousands of politicians, activists and ordinary citizens crowded onto India's airwaves and into its public spaces to say their piece about the crime.
hannahcarter11

Startup Helps Those Affected By Gangs And Gun Violence Find A Way Out : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...nd-gun-violence-find-a-way-out

gangs gun violence

shared by hannahcarter11 on 31 May 21 - No Cached
  • Today, he and a partner run a small startup in Portland, Ore., called Leaders Become Legends. They mentor people involved with gun violence and connect them with companies who are hiring for green jobs, like solar panel installation companies and recycling facilities.
  • Through Leaders Become Legends, Rouse has been working with a local energy company to assemble and install solar panels. He says the most important skill he's gained in this program is not technical; it's how to compartmentalize.
  • In the last year, Portland, Ore., — like much of the country — has seen a devastating rise in gun violence. Homicide rates here are higher than they've been in two decades.
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  • City leaders are scrambling to address the problem with law enforcement strategies including increased police presence and working with the FBI. The Leaders Become Legends program, by contrast, is funded through the city's economic development arm, far upstream from law enforcement.
  • Tax incentives and legal requirements for green energy are driving a healthy demand for this trade. For the most part, says Jackson, bosses in this industry are supportive and colleagues friendly. But not always. Part of the training, says Jackson, is managing expectations.
  • "Our total mission is to not let them go back to prison, or be dead," Jackson says. "As well as dealing with our trauma from just being so called Black in America."
  • Despite their frequency, the police stops never get easier. Between these encounters and the violence in his community, Churn acknowledges that he lives with a lot of fear and deep sense of injustice.
Javier E

The future belongs to Right-wing progressives - UnHerd - 0 views

unherd.com/...ngs-to-right-wing-progressives

technopoly utopianism right-wing fascism progressive culture politics crisis UK US

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • the only subset of Right-wing thought in the West today that doesn’t feel moribund is actively anti-conservative. The liveliest corner of the Anglophone Right is scornful of cultural conservatism and nostalgia, instead combining an optimistic view of technology with a qualified embrace of global migration and an uncompromising approach to public order.
  • in much the same way as the Western Left seized on Venezuela under Chávez as a totemic worked example of this vision, so too the radical Right today has its template for the future: El Salvador under Nayib Bukele
  • These moves have drastically reduced the murder rate in a previously notoriously dangerous country
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  • Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.
  • This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety
  • yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.
  • Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room
  • Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.
  • is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.
  • We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.
  • For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model
  • As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity
  • Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.
  • As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.
  • Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.
  • Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites
  • Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.
  • There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.
  • At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.
  • How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask
  • Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.
  • The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho
  • od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.
  • In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.
rachelramirez

Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge - but the saga is far from ov... - 0 views

news.vice.com/...-but-the-saga-is-far-from-over

militia oregon wildlife US

shared by rachelramirez on 29 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Jury acquits militia that occupied Oregon wildlife refuge — but the saga is far from over
  • In a stunning conclusion to a five-week trial, a jury acquitted seven defendants who faced a slew of conspiracy and weapons charges related to their armed takeover of a wildlife refuge earlier this year.
  • U.S. marshals tackled the attorney for the group’s leader and used a Taser on him.
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  • Ammon and Ryan Bundy, who led a group of armed militia members as they occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeast Oregon in what they claimed was a protest against federal land management
  • The Bundy brothers, along with their father, Cliven, still face an array of felony charges in Nevada for another armed standoff with federal agents in 2014.
  • Mumford was reportedly taken into custody, cited for both failure to comply with a federal lawful order and disturbance, and released with orders to return to federal court in January.
  • the timing of the verdict with recent events in North Dakota, where Native American tribes have been protesting against the construction of an oil pipeline. Violence erupted on Thursday when riot police descended on the demonstration and tried to clear out the protesters, after hundreds of arrests a few days before. Others claimed the acquittals were proof of a double standard in the U.S. justice system that benefits white men like the Bundys
  • an FBI agent testified that the agency found 16,636 rounds of ammunition and nearly 1,700 spent shell casings, according to the Associated Press.
  • Ammon Bundy even compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. when he took the stand in his own defense.
  • Jurors for the case were pulled from across Oregon, which may have helped the Bundys since many parts of the state are rural, conservative, and distrustful of the federal government. One of the jurors was even dismissed for bias during deliberations
  • It’s exceedingly rare for federal prosecutors to lose one case during a trial, let alone seven at once.
  • But the fallout of Thursday’s not guilty verdict could have troubling implications for the rise of paramilitary groups in the United States.
  • militias operating along the U.S.–Mexico border, more than 275 such groups are believed to be operating in at least 41 states
Javier E

Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Near Certainty of Anti-Police Violence - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...490541

police repression violence culture US History

shared by Javier E on 17 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.
  • Less appreciated is the danger illegitimacy ultimately poses to those who must do the policing. For if the law represents nothing but the greatest force, then it really is indistinguishable from any other street gang. And if the law is nothing but a gang, then it is certain that someone will resort to the kind of justice typically meted out to all other powers in the street.
  • something that went very wrong, long ago, with law enforcement, something that we are scared to see straight. That something has very little to do with the officer on the beat and everything to do with ourselves. There’s a sense that the police departments of America have somehow gone rogue. In fact, the police are one of the most trusted institutions in the country. This is not a paradox. The policies which the police carry out are not the edicts of a dictatorship but the work, as Biden put it, of “the greatest democracy in the history of the world.” Avoiding this fact is central to the current conversation around “police reform” which focuses solely on the actions of police officers and omits everything that precedes these actions
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  • But analyzing the present crisis in law enforcement solely from the contested street, is like analyzing the Iraq War solely from the perspective of Abu Ghraib. And much like the Iraq War, there is a strong temptation to focus on the problems of “implementation,” as opposed to building the kind of equitable society in which police force is used as sparingly as possible
jlessner

U.N. Finds 'Alarmingly High' Levels of Violence Against Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-violence-against-women.html

violence US culture history

shared by jlessner on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi sets off an unusual burst of national outrage in India. In South Sudan, women are assaulted by both sides in the civil war. In Iraq, jihadists enslave women for sex. And American colleges face mounting scrutiny about campus rape.
  • Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels,” according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday.
  • About 35 percent of women worldwide — more than one in three — said they had experienced physical violence in their lifetime,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says.
  • 38 percent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.Continue reading the main story
  • Where there are laws on the books, like ones that criminalize domestic violence, for instance, they are not reliably enforced.
redavistinnell

Fake ambulance drug smugglers jailed for between 18 and 28 years | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...g-smugglers-jailed-18-28-years

ambulance news fake the guardian

shared by redavistinnell on 11 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Fake ambulance drug smugglers jailed for between 18 and 28 years
  • Three drug smugglers have been jailed for at least 18 years each for transporting as much as £1.6bn worth of cocaine and heroin into the UK using a fleet of fake ambulances.
  • A third man, Richard Engelsbel, 51, was given an 18-year jail term after admitting that he acted as a driver or driver’s assistant on 25 smuggling trips purporting to be journeys to pick up injured patients.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The National Crime Agency (NCA) established that the gang trafficked drugs, packaged in colour-coded parcels and hidden behind false panels in the ambulances, from the Netherlands to the UK.
  • Sources within the NCA said they believed 20 different gangs around the UK relied on the ambulance racket for supplies of class A drugs.
  • He said: “The prosecution suggest this was a top-level, audacious, and – up to the point of interception and the arrests – a successful and lucrative criminal conspiracy.”
  • Inside the back of the ambulance, concealed behind panels in six “hides”, were neatly stacked, colour-coded packets of class A drugs, including cocaine with a street value of more than £30m and heroin worth £8m. Officers also found 60,000 ecstasy tablets.
  • The court was told that the company’s records showed the fake ambulance journeys had been “going on over weeks and months”. In all, at least 45 trips were made in 14 months.
  • Bijlsma was described in the court as Schoon’s right-hand man. The prosecution told the jury that a rivet gun was found with Bijlsma’s DNA on it. It said this gun was used to fasten the panels inside the ambulance.
malonema1

Migrant caravan seeking asylum faces a tough uncertain future - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...tough-uncertain-future-n870156

US history crisis

shared by malonema1 on 01 May 18 - No Cached
  • TIJUANA, Mexico — More than a hundred migrants who made a grueling journey to the U.S. border were stranded on the last leg of their trip on Monday as they waited to plead their case to seek asylum after immigration officials said the crossing was at capacit
  • How long the asylum seekers will have to wait to plead their case is just the beginning of the uncertain and potentially monthslong process ahead of them. The port of entry remained at capacity Monday morning, an official with Customs and Border Protection said in a statement.
  • She broke down crying the day before after learning she would not be allowed to make her claim for asylum that day. She said she was seeking asylum after gang members came after her and her daughter because her boyfriend owed them money.
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  • Mensing said the group was prepared to wait outside the port of entry and was willing to risk the hurdles ahead because they were fleeing violence and persecution in their home countries. Many of the migrants are from Central America, predominantly Honduras.“No one is asking for some sort of immediate citizenship — the people on this caravan know that the most likely thing for them is that they will be detained indefinitely, they may be separated from their children,” said Mensing. “They’re not coming here because they think it’s easy, they’re coming here because they’re fearing for their lives.
  • The asylum seekers began their trek together near the Guatemalan border on March 25, making their way on foot, by train and by bus north through Mexico before coming to their destination at the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. At one point the caravan numbered roughly 1,200, but its numbers have dwindled after some chose to seek asylum in Mexico and others decided not to risk turning themselves in to immigration authorities.
  • Immigration judges vary in whether they accept claims based on fear of violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Some judges permit asylum for women and children targeted by criminal gangs for recruitment, finding that they are persecuted due to "membership in a particular social group," but other judges do not
anonymous

Tamaulipas crisis: Mexico seeks talks over 'silenced zone' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-latin-america-44325898

terror crisis mexico

shared by anonymous on 01 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Mexico has requested urgent talks with the UN after a report linked security forces to mass disappearances in the north-eastern state of Tamaulipas.The UN report says at least 21 people have gone missing since February after being detained by the security forces in and around Nuevo Laredo.
  • "It is particularly horrific that at least five of the victims are minors, with three of them as young as 14. These crimes, perpetrated over four months in a single municipality, are outrageous."
  • More than 200,000 people have been killed or have disappeared since Mexico's government declared war on organised crime in December 2006.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The military offensive has led to the destruction of some drug gangs, splits within others and the emergence of new groups.
  • The state prosecutor in that case said that the students had been handed by corrupt local police to a criminal gang, who killed them and burned their bodies
honordearlove

In Syria's War, 'Mental Health Is The Last Priority' | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ty_us_59b316f9e4b0dfaafcf810f7

crisis healthcare mental-health Syria war

shared by honordearlove on 12 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • AFTER SIX YEARS of conflict and extended exposure to trauma, Syria is in the throes of a mental health crisis
  • “There has been a huge increase in psychological trauma since the start of the crisis, including depression and anxiety. Especially among the vulnerable populations, which include children, women, the elderly and the disabled,” Sahloul said.
  • People who suffer from even common mental health conditions like anxiety or depression refuse to seek help or take medication because of the stigma that they will receive from their family members and society. People with mental health conditions are called “majnun,” which means crazy in Arabic.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Untreated mental health issues can lead to addiction, domestic violence, the disintegration of families and may even make adolescents susceptible to recruitment from gangs and terror groups, he added.
  • There are multiple factors that affect the development of brain function and mental health in children in Syria. There is extreme stress related to violence, the loss of family members and witnessing multiple episodes of destruction of your home and neighborhood.
  • My suspicion is that we will see widespread incidents of mental health problems developing in the areas where children witness bombings and violence. For children, this can have a lasting impact on their lives because, left untreated, mental health issues can affect how they interact with people: They can increase domestic violence, addiction, and job loss, and make these children fertile ground for recruitment to gangs and terrorist groups who exploit mental health conditions.
  • These terror groups indoctrinate them [in a way] that makes it easier to deal with mental health issues, such as the belief in ultimate victory or promises of an afterlife. 
  • If we don’t address the mental health crisis early, the scars will stay for a long time and it will be [more] difficult to treat, especially in children. It is very important that when there are bombings, violence, grief over the loss of immediate family members, that psychiatric aid and counseling are provided right away.
criscimagnael

12 Remaining Members of a U.S. Group Kidnapped in Haiti Have Been Released - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...haiti-hostages-released.html

shared by criscimagnael on 17 Dec 21 - No Cached
  • The 12 remaining members of a group of 17 North American missionaries who had been kidnapped in Haiti two months ago have been released,
  • The group, which included children, was made up of 16 Americans and one Canadian. They were taken in October by a gang called 400 Mawozo in a nei
  • ghborhood of Port-au-Prince after visiting an orphanage.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Haiti’s caretaker government had asked for U.S. military assistance to safeguard critical infrastructure after Mr. Moïse’s murder, but the request was swiftly rejected in Washington. The United States has a long and troubled history of armed intervention in Haiti.
  • Gangs have steadily taken over new sections of the capital after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, in July, effectively seizing control of all overland supply routes to and from the city.
  • “If I don’t get what I need, these Americans, I’d rather kill them all,” Mawozo’s leader, Wilson Joseph, said in a video released on social media in late October, after police killed five of his gang’s members. “I’ll unload a big gun in the head of each one of them.”
criscimagnael

Journalists in El Salvador Targeted With Spyware Intended for Criminals - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...vador-journalists-spyware.html

shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • El Salvador’s leading news outlet, El Faro, said on Wednesday that the phones of a majority of its employees had been hacked with the spyware Pegasus, which has been used by governments to monitor human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
  • the spyware had been installed on the phones of 22 reporters, editors and other employees between July 2020 and November 2021.
  • El Faro was investigating the Salvadoran government’s clandestine connections to the country’s gangs and corruption scandals. The government has denied any connection to local gangs.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “It’s completely unacceptable to spy on journalists,” said Carlos Dada, the founder and director of El Faro. “It endangers our sources, it limits our work and it also endangers our families.”
  • An El Faro journalist’s phone had been reinfected with the spyware over 40 times, the most persistent hacking attempt by Pegasus yet to be discovered.
  • Revelations that Pegasus software has been used to unjustly spy in El Salvador may not come as a complete surprise, but there is no match to our outrage.”
  • El Salvador’s government denied responsibility, and a spokesperson with NSO Group would not say whether Pegasus spyware had been provided to El Salvador’s governments, past or present.
  • “The government of El Salvador is investigating the possible use of Pegasus,”
  • a prized Israeli technology company whose spyware has long been under scrutiny for its ability to capture all activity on a smartphone — including a user’s keystrokes, location data, sound and video recordings, photos, contacts and encrypted information — and for mounting allegations of misuse by repressive governments.
  • The spokesman added that the company does not know who the targets of its customers are, but that NSO works to ensure that its tools are used only for authorized purposes.
  • The Biden administration blacklisted NSO Group in November, stating that the company had knowingly supplied spyware used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of human rights activists, journalists and others.
  • After the American government blacklisted NSO Group, the company promised that Pegasus was only licensed to governments with good human rights records.
  • But in December it was announced that the iPhones of 11 American Embassy employees working in Uganda had been hacked using Pegasus spyware.
  • In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for NSO Group, who declined to provide their name, maintained the company only provides its software to legitimate intelligence agencies and to law enforcement agencies to fight criminals and terrorists.
  • In August it was revealed that Pegasus had been secretly installed on the smartphones of at least three dozen journalists, activists and business executives across the world, including close associates of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
  • The Israeli military has also been criticized for its human rights violations at home and abroad.
  • El Salvador has been criticized for intimidating and censoring local media.
  • El Salvador’s president, Mr. Bukele, has come under withering criticism from the United States government and rights groups for using the military to interfere with the legislature and to suspend Supreme Court judges and the attorney general.
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