The Guardian: How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war

A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night. [...]

The murders that occurred here happened in the middle of a truce that the government negotiated between the rival gangs, which was credited with halving the homicide rate. But the reality, the informant says, is that it taught them to hide their victims in clandestine graves such as these. Ticas was not formally trained in forensics, and many of the techniques he uses he discovered himself. But he is not the only one learning in the process. [...]

Rather than a problem to be deported away, however, the reality of the gang is considerably more complex. Born out of the ecology of Los Angeles’s fierce gang warfare, MS-13 was founded in the 1980s by Salvadoran refugees who had been hardened in a brutal civil war still raging at home. In time, the gang expanded to include other nationalities, and it spread to other American cities. Today, in the US, it numbers no more than 10,000 members and functions mostly – its penchant for sensational violence aside – like an average American street gang, fighting to control neighborhood turf and local drug sales.

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New Statesman: Keir Starmer: The sensible radical

Starmer tends to speak in a language of moral absolutes, but his speech that evening was neither a Corbynite meditation on good and evil, nor a clarion call for a new kind of politics. Rather, it was a straightforward elevator pitch. With a flair and levity that seems to escape him on television, he told members that he was the best person to take on – and defeat – Boris Johnson. “I really do think that man is dangerous,” he said. Corbyn and his politics, he told them, had been unfairly maligned by the press – but had still lost Labour December’s general election. He could break the cycle. [...]

Yet few will profess to knowing the real Keir Starmer. Some even contend that his leadership campaign has been an exercise in hiding from view. His pledges over the course of the campaign have, at times, seemed contradictory: he will not “oversteer” away from Corbyn’s radicalism on the economy, but he will curb the leadership’s worst excesses, win back lost ground in the south, as well as the north and Midlands, and exorcise the demons of factionalism from Labour’s ranks. Officially, Starmer calls it the politics of unity: a word that is emblazoned across his campaign material and baked into almost every line of his stump speeches. Corbyn’s enforced departure presented Labour MPs, the trade unions and its membership with an existential choice: does it continue along the road that led to a fourth successive election defeat, or veer away? If Long-Bailey’s pitch is the former, and Nandy’s the latter, then Starmer’s aim is to convince members that they can have both. [...]

His politics are continental but are not the “bland centrism” criticised by supporters of Long-Bailey. “He was very much what Europeans would now call a red-green,” said the QC Gavin Millar, who interviewed Starmer for his pupillage in 1987 and later shared rooms with him in a set of Middle Temple chambers run by Emlyn Hooson, the radical Liberal MP who had defended the Moors murderer Ian Brady. Growing up, Starmer had never knowingly met a lawyer: Geoffrey Robertson, another QC and pioneer of the progressive bar, described how he turned up for the interview in a cardigan, was “nervous and awkward”, and “looked about 14”. By then Starmer had moved into a flat above a brothel in Highgate, where he devoted himself to work. Stacked high about his room were boxes of Socialist Alternatives, an obscure and atrociously written Trotksyite pamphlet, for which he was once a co-editor. [...]

Starmer decided against prosecuting the police officers responsible for the killings of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube having been wrongly identified as a terror suspect following the London attacks of 2005, and of Ian Tomlinson, the London newspaper seller pushed to his death at the G20 protests in 2010. Under his leadership, the CPS charged anti-austerity protesters for staging a sit-in at Fortnum & Mason in 2012; one academic accused Starmer, who once defended the rights of acid house ravers, of criminalising peaceful assembly and protests.

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WorldAffairs: Xi Jinping Won the Coronavirus Crisis

Two months ago, Chinese President Xi Jinping looked like he would emerge from the novel coronavirus pandemic with his legitimacy and his ambitions for Chinese global leadership in tatters. Today, as the Chinese government lifts its lockdown on the city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Xi can present himself instead as a forceful and triumphant leader on the world stage. Leaders in Europe and the United States are increasingly looking to China for help as they struggle to contain the virus in their own countries. [...]

Many liberal-minded Chinese intellectuals and officials had hoped that the crisis would lead to more openness and transparency. After the 2002–3 SARS epidemic, the government revised the Law on the Prevention and Treatment of Infectious Diseases to improve information flow and at least give the impression of greater transparency. But the coronavirus crisis has had the opposite effect. The public demands for reform after Dr. Li’s death appear to have alarmed Chinese leaders, prompting a crackdown on critical social media users and even more intense state censorship at government media outlets, some of which have been instructed not to cover the economic ramifications of the pandemic.[...]

The Chinese government has turned the crisis to its advantage internationally, as well. A triumphant Xi, having evidently halted the COVID-19 epidemic at home, is now projecting his nation’s soft power abroad with “mask diplomacy.” He has sent test kits and personal protection equipment to 82 different countries, although there have been reports that some of the equipment has been faulty. And as of March 10, 25 Chinese provinces had proposed economic recovery packages worth $7 trillion, which will be used both to stimulate China’s domestic economy and to support the Belt and Road Initiative, Xi’s ultra-ambitious global development strategy that spans nearly 70 countries in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

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Social Europe: Eurobonds: why they are needed, how they would work (10th April 2020)

The ECB enjoys the power of monetising public debts—a privilege most eurozone members would not enjoy if they kept their pre-euro national currencies. The PEPP is a step in the right direction, granting fiscal space to the governments of the euro area. [...]

First, as with the ECB, the finance ministers grouped in Ecofin could decide to enforce the SGP after 2020 and thus force countries on to an austerity path of adjustments once again. Secondly, increasing fiscal deficits means increasing bond spreads between eurozone countries. The temporary character (and limited scope) of the PEPP does not guarantee public debts in the long term and it opens the door to solvency problems, as in the 2010-12 crisis, for most eurozone members. What we need is a financing mechanism which guarantees no austerity in the future. [...]

Two institutions are already in place. The European Stability Mechanism (ESM) has announced that it has at its disposal €410 billion (3.4 per cent of eurozone GDP), to be lent to euro-area members in amounts up to 2 per cent of their GDP. To finance the rescue packages of Greece or Spain, the ESM has already been issuing de facto eurobonds, guaranteed by all eurozone members, to the extent of their share in the ESM capital. The problem is that countries gaining access to the ESM funds would do so through the Precautionary Conditioned Credit Line, conditioned by a memorandum of understanding (MoU).

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Social Europe: EUR-bonds in the corona crisis and beyond (10th April 2020)

In crisis times like these, sovereign debt is of pivotal importance as safe assets. Due to their countercyclical price movement, safe sovereign bonds serve as an anchor of macroeconomic stability. In an economic downturn or after an exogenous shock, a flight to safety increases the price of these bonds, simultaneously lowering their yield. The lower financing costs increase the fiscal space, while the higher price improves the banking system’s balance sheets. [...]

It is debatable whether the president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, acted wisely when she said that ‘we are not here to close spreads … there are other actors to actually deal with those issues’. Yet, despite the unfortunate timing, she raised a valid point: it was the responsibility of governments in 2010 to dispel fears of a Greek default and it is their responsibility to have each other’s back in today’s crisis. In the same vein, Lagarde called upon euro-area governments to act and issue eurobonds, a demand also formulated by groups of economists on March 20th and March 21st, as well as by nine of the 19 euro-area governments on March 26th. [...]

The governments simply agree, in this time of crisis, to ask the ECB to package their bonds into EUR-bonds as a signal and an instrument of solidarity, unity and determination. The ECB could even buy these bonds on the secondary market as part of its purchase programme. Ideally, however, EUR-bonds would be purchased by banks and other investors as safe assets, whereas the ECB would focus its purchasing programmes on eliminating any sovereign-yield differentials which may persist—despite the signals sent out by euro governments in issuing debt together.

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