The Guardian: Operation Condor: the cold war conspiracy that terrorised South America

 It has taken decades to fully expose this system, which enabled governments to send death squads on to each other’s territory to kidnap, murder and torture enemies – real or suspected – among their emigrant and exile communities. Condor effectively integrated and expanded the state terror unleashed across South America during the cold war, after successive rightwing military coups, often encouraged by the US, erased democracy across the continent. Condor was the most complex and sophisticated element of a broad phenomenon in which tens of thousands of people across South America were murdered or disappeared by military governments in the 1970s and 80s. [...]

Although Condor operatives hunted down targets in all member states, their work focused on Argentina in particular, which was a refuge for exiles escaping military dictatorships across the continent before it, too, fell under military control. Condor squads dispatched to Argentina from Uruguay and Chile used a series of makeshift jails and torture centres provided by their hosts. The first was the abandoned car repair garage, Automotores Orletti, where Anatole Larrabeiti was held and his mother Victoria was last seen alive. Larrabeiti still recalls seeing a jar of glittering metal in the garage, in which victims’ wedding rings were kept. [...]

The new information about the rigged cryptography machines follows the revelations, from a declassified document handed to Argentina by the US last year, that West German, British and French intelligence services even explored the possibility of copying at least part of the Condor method in Europe. A heavily redacted CIA cable from September 1977 is headed: “Visit of representatives of West German, French and British intelligence services to Argentina to discuss methods for establishment of an anti-subversive organization similar to Condor”. The visit coincided with cross-frontier terror campaigns by Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades and the Irish Republican Army. According to the cable, the visitors explained that “the terrorist/subversive threat had reached such dangerous levels in Europe that they believed it best if they pooled their intelligence resources in a cooperative organization such as Condor”.

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UnHerd: Welcome to the new Springtime of the Peoples

This may have some elements of exaggeration. It is difficult to see what protestors in Catalonia and Iraq have in common; the former are restricting political ties to ethnic identity, the latter are expanding them. But even when distinct, they march together, and ultimately the uprisings of 2019 have a common thread that links them, tied together by technological change, economic pressure, and the shifting axis of power from West to East. [...]

Today the dialectic of revolution is very different. Rather than starting from the heavens and trying to bring them down to earth, protestors everywhere fill the streets to seek redress for a specific grievance: the extradition law in Hong Kong, the fuel tax in France, the price increase of the Santiago Metro ticket in Chile (the 30 pesos which cannot but remind us of the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus). [...]

And yet the specific grievance is never a cause. To see it as such would be a serious mistake, one that authorities all over the world are prone to make, but which we can and should avoid. In all these demonstrations ,the protest is an occasion, a beginning, an incitement, a vehicle for a much deeper urge. Once the protests start, they take on a life of their own. Sharper collective awareness and a growing list of political demands are a consequence rather than a cause. [...]

And the Western vision of the future is receding, something particularly obvious in India. The consensus around a Western, secular model for the country has collapsed, but how can Indians agree on a new path to be built from scratch? Cultural and political independence have an irresistible appeal, but with independence comes a life of danger.

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Rare Earth: The Nazi Pedophile Apocalypse Cult

The Guardian view on abortion: protecting a human right

No law can end abortions, however severe its restrictions and however harsh its penalties. Each day almost 70,000 unsafe abortions are carried out around the world, and they are vastly more likely to happen in countries with strict laws. What such legislation does do is force some women to continue pregnancies against their wishes, while risking the lives and wellbeing of others. Women in the US have seen their ability to terminate pregnancies dismantled piece by piece. Now states are racing to outlaw or dramatically curb abortions with extreme and unconstitutional bills. The aim is to directly challenge Roe v Wade, the US supreme court ruling that established that abortion is legal before the foetus is viable outside the womb, at around 24 weeks. Last Tuesday, the governor of Georgia signed a bill essentially banning abortions after six weeks from 2020. Some described it as a sign that men who wish to control women’s bodies have no idea of how they actually work. More likely, those who pushed hardest for the change understand all too well that many women will not know they are pregnant until it is too late.

Five other states have signed similar bills; several more are considering them. (Others have introduced more incremental curbs.) The Alabama senate will this week consider a near-total ban on abortion – with prison sentences of up to 99 years for doctors – which Republicans initially tried to sneak through without even a vote. The state’s lieutenant governor said he believes Roe v Wade will be overturned thanks to Donald Trump’s appointment of conservative jurists. [...]

At this grim time there are signs of hope. New York state has sought to bolster abortion rights this year. Chile somewhat eased its ban in 2017. And last year’s landslide vote in favour of repealing Ireland’s near-total ban resonated worldwide. Yet women in Northern Ireland are no closer to enjoying the same rights as those elsewhere in the UK, even though the supreme court believes the ban there incompatible with human rights legislation. They can now access free abortion care in England, but too much confusion endures and women in abusive relationships, for example, may not be able to travel. Because this is a devolved issue, the right of women to control their own bodies is yet another casualty of the collapse of power-sharing. Northern Ireland’s politicians must find a way to work together again. When they do, overturning this cruel ban must be a priority.

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CNN: How 2018 became the Catholic Church's year from hell

The church's institutional crisis was mirrored by individual soul-searching, as American Catholics questioned whether to stay in the church. 2018 saw parents challenging priests at Mass, prominent Catholics urging the faithful to withhold donations and parents worrying whether their children are safe in the sacristy. [...]

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former Archbishop of Washington and an influential voice in the church and international politics, is removed from public ministry by Pope Francis after a church investigation finds an allegation that McCarrick sexually abused a minor in the 1970s "credible and substantiated." McCarrick said he had "no recollection" of the alleged abuse. [...]

Pope Francis accepts the resignation of Australian Archbishop Philip Wilson, the highest-ranking Catholic official ever to be convicted of covering up sex abuse. [...]

In an 11-page "testimony" released to conservative Catholic media, a former Vatican ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, accuses Francis of ignoring his warnings about McCarrick's conduct and calls on the Pope to resign.

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Jacobin Magazine: Latin America’s Re-Militarization

Law No. 13.491, passed by the Brazilian Congress in October 2017, gives military courts jurisdiction over their personnel accused of human rights violations. Prior to the law’s approval, the Ministry of Defense publicly made the case that allowing civilian courts to handle such cases would hinder policing operations. Michel Temer’s administration increasingly used the armed forces for domestic policing duties, whether in rural areas against land rights activists or in the favelas and peripheries of major cities.

Brazil’s 2008 “pacification” policy led to the deployment of military personnel to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and the militarization of policing intensified in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic games. According to Human Rights Watch, thousands of civilians are killed by the military and police each year. The new Ministry for Public Security, created in February, is led by an army general, and in May the Brazilian military was deployed in response to the nationwide truckers’ strike that blockaded highways. This was the first time the military had been used in this way since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985.[...]

Brazil is not alone in militarizing its justice system. Military courts are increasingly asserting jurisdiction throughout Latin America. In June 2015, Colombia passed a bill similar to the one adopted in Brazil, shifting jurisdiction for most crimes committed by members of the military to the military courts. The Constitutional Court struck down the first two iterations of the bill, but the government was determined to make the change and crafted a slightly narrower law that has since taken effect. Since 2005, Venezuela has been using military courts extensively to prosecute civilians involved in protests against the government. In Chile, cases of human rights violations committed by the military are still tried in military courts. [....]

Many politicians have run on platforms promising to be “tough on crime” and have deployed the military to conduct domestic policing operations, as in Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. Elected leaders, seeking to deliver results for their voters in fighting drug trafficking and gang violence, are turning to their militaries and equipping them with increased legal powers.

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openDemocracy: Attacks on women's ministries are a threat to democracy

This experience is not unique to Brazil. Many countries with women’s ministries face right-wing and religious attempts to eliminate or downgrade their influence – and in some cases, to change their mandates altogether. When this happens, it’s a strong signal that other democratic structures may also be at risk.[...]

Protecting women’s human rights was an issue for new democracies, and more established ones. The United States had legalised abortion in 1973, yet marital rape was exempt from the criminal code, women could be fired for being pregnant, and they couldn’t apply for a credit card. Irish women weren’t allowed to sit in pubs; women In Nigeria didn’t have the right to vote; divorce was illegal in Brazil, Chile, and South Africa.[...]

This was a groundbreaking step and a critical necessity to ensure the health, security, and basic human rights of women and girls. It was also well-received by countries internationally. At the end of the World Decade for Women in 1985, 127 UN member states had some kind of national institution focused on women. By 2010, all but four countries had an office like this.[...]

Rising populist movements with regressive social agendas are widely seen as threats to democracy. They are often defined by their anti-free press, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but they also share an open hostility to women’s human rights.

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IFLScience: Scientists Believe They Have Finally Discovered What Easter Island's Statues Were For

An 18th-century account of European first contact with the Pacific Islanders detailed natives being able to drink seawater without harm – a feat we all know is impossible today (the human body cannot process high concentrations of seawater, eventually killing a person through dehydration). By 1887, the local population of Easter Island dropped to just 110 largely due to slave trading and disease, decimating any chance of uncovering the people’s oral history. [...]

When it rains, water beneath the ground flows downhill and exits the ground where the rock meets the ocean. When tides are low, this “results in the flow of freshwater directly into the sea.” The fresh and saltwater mix to create a “brackish but potable water along the coastline” that contains low enough levels of salt to be safely consumed by humans, which the researchers think the islanders must have done.

“Although coastal groundwater sources are of poor quality, they were apparently sufficient to support the population and allow them to build magnificent statutes for which Easter Island is famous,” wrote the authors in their study published in Hydrogeology. [...]

However, others argue that small cisterns found on the island could have been used for collecting rainfall. Lipo argues that if collecting rainfall was central to the culture, then the cisterns would have been much larger (they only hold between 2-4 liters of water each). Furthermore, Rapa Nui only receives 1,240 millimeters of rainfall every year. Paired with the rate of water evaporation here, the cisterns would likely have only been a viable source of water for less than one-third of the year.

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Reuters: Chilean court orders Catholic Church to pay damages over abuse: report

Chile’s Court of Appeal has ordered the office of Santiago’s Archbishop to pay $450 million pesos ($650,000) to three men who alleged they were sexually abused for decades by Chilean priest Fernando Karadima, a local newspaper reported on Sunday.

Citing a copy of a leaked judgment, La Tercera said the three judges who heard the case on Thursday found in favor of an appeal for “moral damages” against the church for allegedly covering up the crimes. The case was previously rejected by a lower court for lack of evidence. [...]

Legal experts have said it could pave the way for more claims amid a new climate of discovery which has seen hundreds of people come forward to allege they were abused and criminal prosecutors launch scores of new investigations.[...]

Now 88 and living in a nursing home in the capital, Karadima has always denied accusations of abuse. He was never charged by civilian authorities because the statute of limitations on such crimes had expired. He was found guilty of sexual abuse in a Vatican investigation in 2011, and last month was defrocked by the Pope.

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Vox: We know ocean plastic is a problem. We can’t fix it until we answer these 5 questions.

Garbage patches the size of small countries floating on the surface of the ocean have become another powerful image of the problem, as have photos and videos of marine life choking on and filled with plastic. In the past couple of months, we’ve also seen a major mobilization around keeping plastic out of the ocean.

“Beat Plastic Pollution” was the focus of UN World Environmental Day on June 5, inspiring hundreds of beach cleanup events around the world and a remarkable commitment from India to ban single-use plastics by 2022. [...]

Since this initial report, researchers at the Santa Barbara Marine Conservancy discovered that the plastic at the ocean surface only accounts for about 1 percent of all ocean plastic. Although others have found that a large percent is absorbed into the ocean floor, it’s still not clear where all the plastic is in the ocean.

We are also not really sure what objects are the biggest component of ocean plastic. Until recently, most research into ocean plastic sources came from beach cleanups; as a result, the most common objects found were items that humans use near beaches, like cigarettes, straws, and cups. [...]

It did not refer to regulation of fishing equipment, which is believed to be the largest source of ocean plastic. It did not demand reduction of plastic production. And notably missing from the charter were the United States and Japan. Greenpeace called the proposals “tepid,” saying they were mostly voluntary and “must be met with significant legislative action.”

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The Washington Post: Why the Vatican continues to struggle with sex abuse scandals

The church has had more than three decades — since notable abuse cases first became public — to safeguard victims, and itself, against such system failures. And, in the past five years, many Catholics have looked to Francis as a figure who could modernize the church and help it regain its credibility.

But Francis’s track record in handling abuse is mixed, something some outsiders attribute to his learning curve or shortcomings and others chalk up to resistance from a notoriously change-averse institution. [...]

Whereas transparency is typically advised, the church remains quiet about its investigations and disciplinary procedures. It does not release any data on the inquiries it has carried out. A proposed tribunal for judging bishops accused of negligence or coverup was quashed by the Vatican department that was supposed to help implement it. And, rather than being fired and publicly admonished, offending church leaders are typically allowed to resign without explanation. [...]

“I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer,” said Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. “We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened.”

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Associated Press: Chile's bishops resign en masse over sex abuse cover-up

Calls for mass resignations had mounted after details emerged of the contents of a 2,300-page Vatican report into the Chilean scandal leaked early Friday. Francis had cited the report in footnotes of a 10-page document that he handed over to each Chilean bishop at the start of the summit.

In those footnotes, Francis accused the bishops of destroying evidence of sex crimes, pressuring church investigators to minimize abuse accusations and showing “grave negligence” in protecting children from pedophile priests. [...]

The whole report hasn’t been made public, but even the highlights Francis included in his footnotes were astonishing. The gravity of the accusations appeared to lay the foundation for a full-scale Vatican investigation of Chilean dioceses, seminaries and religious orders. Such an investigation was ordered up after a similar 2010 summit that Pope Benedict XVI called for Irish bishops over their dismal record dealing with abuse. [...]

For years, sex abuse victims have blasted the Chilean hierarchy for discrediting their claims, protecting abusers and moving them around rather than reporting them to police and then handing out light sentences when church sanctions were imposed.

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The Conversation: When it comes to election meddling, America is as guilty as Russia

There is some irony to this. The United States has been covertly interfering in other nations’ politics—including elections—for at least three-quarters of a century. It still does today. Latin America, the focus of my own research, has been a frequent target.

Rather than using Facebook and Twitter to create make-believe organizations, the CIA organized front groups. Rather than creating bots to spread fake news, the CIA bribed foreign journalists, financed foreign newspapers and set up false flag radio stations. The disruptive goals of information warfare have not changed over the decades, only the technology has. [...]

The US feared that Western European Communist parties would ascend to power by winning elections. One of the very first covert actions by the CIA’s new operational wing, directed by Frank Wisner, was a concerted effort to prevent the Italian Communist Party from winning the 1948 election. Washington funneled several million dollars to the conservative, pro-American Christian Democrats. [...]

A decade later, the CIA enlisted La Prensa, Nicaragua’s main newspaper, to play a similar role in a covert war to overthrow the Sandinista leftist government. As in Chile, the CIA funneled funds to a wide variety of opposition political parties, private sector groups and voluntary organizations—not to mention creating a counterrevolutionary paramilitary army, the “contras,” in neighboring Honduras. The Reagan administration’s funding of the contras in defiance of a congressional ban led to the Iran-contra scandal.

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The Atlantic: The Architect of the Radical Right

Why does all this matter today? Well, we might begin with the first New Yorker elected president since FDR, a man who has given new meaning to the term copperhead (originally applied to Northern Democrats who opposed the Civil War). Lost amid the many 2016 postmortems, and the careful parsing of returns in Ohio swing counties, was Donald Trump’s prodigious conquest of the South: 60 percent or more of the vote in Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia, with similar margins in Louisiana and Mississippi. And the message is still being missed. We’ve heard much about the “older white men” in the administration, but rather less about where they come from. No fewer than 10 Cabinet appointees are from the South, in key positions like attorney general (Alabama) and secretary of state (Texas), not to mention Trump’s top political adviser, Steve Bannon, who grew up in Virginia. [...]

Today we remember ferocious civil-rights struggles waged in Birmingham and Selma. But ground zero for the respectable defense of Jim Crow was Virginia, where one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr., ruled with the authority of an old-style feudal boss. His notorious “machine” kept the state clenched in an iron grip; the oppressions included a poll tax that suppressed black voter turnout so that it was on a par with the Deep South’s (and kept overall turnout under 20 percent). Byrd had allies in the president of the University of Virginia, Colgate Darden, and the newspaperman James Jackson Kilpatrick, who, long before his lovable-curmudgeon TV role on the “Point-Counterpoint” segment of 60 Minutes in the 1970s, was a fanatical and ingenious segregationist. [...]

That was Buchanan’s view, too. It wasn’t enough to elect true-believing politicians. The rules of government needed to be rewritten. But this required ideal conditions—a blank slate. This had happened once, in Chile, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the socialist Salvador Allende in 1973. A vogue for public choice had swept Pinochet’s administration. Buchanan’s books were translated, and some of his acolytes helped restructure Chile’s economy. Labor unions were banned, and social security and health care were both privatized. On a week-long visit in 1980, Buchanan gave formal lectures to “top representatives of a governing elite that melded the military and the corporate world,” MacLean reports, and he dispensed counsel in private conversations. But Buchanan said very little about his part in assisting Chile’s reformers—and he said very little, too, when the country’s economy cratered, and Pinochet at last fired the Buchananites.

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CityLab: The Dramatic Health Disparities Between Rich and Poor Americans

The U.S. has one of the largest income-based health disparities in the world, according to a new paper out in the journal Health Affairs. Among the poorest third of Americans studied, 38.2 percent report being in “fair or poor” health, compared with 12.3 percent of the richest third. Only Chile and Portugal have a larger income-based gap in the health status of their citizens.

Most of the 32 nations studied had income-based differences in how healthy their citizens are. Only in Japan and Switzerland were people about equally healthy regardless of their wealth. Poor people in the U.S. were also more likely than rich people to say they couldn’t get access to care because of the cost, and more likely to report being dissatisfied with their last visit to the doctor. “The United States exhibited large disparities in most measures, making it unique among high income countries,” the authors, Harvard health-policy researchers Joachim Hero, Alan Zaslavsky, and Robert Blendon, write. The other countries with big gaps between rich and poor on all three measures were Bulgaria, Russia, Chile, and Portugal. [...]

The U.S. respondents were interviewed in 2012, before the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. A major limitation of this study is that it didn’t take into account the ACA’s reforms to the insurance market—namely, the expansion of Medicaid to cover about 15 million low-income adults and children. However, the authors write that the U.S.’s health-status disparity ranking wasn’t affected by adjusting for insurance status.

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The Washington Post: The free press is in really bad shape around the world. A new report says populism is to blame.

This year, the experts say, things are worse than ever. In the past year, the outlook for journalists and the media has gotten worse in nearly two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed. In the past five years, the level of media freedom constraints and violations has risen 14 percent worldwide. “Violations of the freedom to inform are less and less the prerogative of authoritarian regimes and dictatorships,” the report's authors write. “Once taken for granted, media freedom is proving to be increasingly fragile in democracies as well.”

A key explanation for this is the rise of populism around the world, the report's authors say. They write, “discrediting the media is the preferred weapon of those who are 'anti-system.' " So outsider candidates such as President Trump call the media “among the most dishonest human beings on earth” and accuse them of spreading “fake news.” (In part because the report says Trump has set off a “witch-hunt against journalists,” the United States dropped two spots in 2016.) Nigel Farage, of the anti-immigration U.K. Independence Party, frequently disparaged the media during his Brexit campaign. Beppe Grillo, the comedian who heads Italy's xenophobic Five Star Movement, prefers blogging to answering questions from the journalistic “caste.”

The report also raises alarm bells about another scary trend — spying on sources. Germany, for example, passed a law extending mass surveillance powers of the country's intelligence agency without an exception for journalists. This year, the United Kingdom passed a similar measure.

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