Issue 1 bulletin 2018 by Venezuelan Embassy in Nairobi

Bulletin Bolivarian Government of Venezuela

Ministry of Peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Power for Foreign Affairs Office of the Deputy Minister for Africa

Embassy of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Kenya Concurrent to Rwanda,Uganda, Tanzania and Somalia

Embassies of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in the World

Volume 6, Issue 1- 2018

A World of Migrants

-12 Victories of President Maduro - Jerusalem is Palestine - Koreaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tensions - 5 ways the world is pulling apart

Editorial Content 1) Editorial 2) The refugee crisis is a crisis of imperialism 3) Migration is our history, reality and future 4) Pope Francis: Migrants and refugees are men and women in search of peace 5) caricom, African union slams Trump's antiimmigrant remarks 6) The unseen, but real US war in Africa 7) Israel oﬀers to pay African migrants to leave, threatens jail 8) The 12 Victories of President Maduro in 2017 9) Democracy in Venezuela: Three elections, three victories 10) 2018: Latin America’s electoral roller coaster 11) Tokyo warns of war, US wary as Seoul asserts itself and pursues peace talks with North 12) In search of the 'merits' of colonialism 13) Venezuela condemns US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel 14) The South should prepare for the next ﬁnancial crisis 15) 5 ways the world is pulling apart 16) 'The Most Dangerous Negro' : The radical legacy of Martin Luther King

In 2008, a global crisis broke out that shook all stock exchanges and stock markets in the world and bankrupted hundreds of banks. This crisis is still latent and has disarticulated the relations between many countries, generating the most disgusting social disasters and the most abominable wars of conquest. Thus, in recent years armed conflicts have multiplied in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and there are latent threats to Latin America with blood. The results are pathetic. Millions of deaths in secret wars, millions of displaced people and migrants of whom many of them unfortunately die, including thousands of children and the elderly. In this convulsed world, generated by the unstoppable greed of World Imperialism that sees its days numbered, it has resorted to the most atrocious crime that is the production of massive migrations that fundamentally affect the peoples still subjected by neocolonialism and submerged by force in backwardness, hunger, misery and desolation. And what nobody says is that forced migration has two sides: the one shown by the media, in which the big culprits try to compensate for the damage with supposed humanitarian aid, in which the fate of the refugees is decided as if they were tokens of a large board; and the hidden face of the business of war, of "terrorism", of cheap labor, of human trafficking and reification of the lives of victims who have no voice before the media and before the history written by the powerful . In this bleak scenario, there are still standing people and governments like the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela that despite facing the most brutal aggression from North American Imperialism, stand fully in solidarity with countries subjected to similar aggression. A clear example is the position of Venezuela in relation to the step taken by the Trump Administration about recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a fact which an overwhelming majority of countries in the UN have rejected categorically. The aftermath of the structural crisis of capitalism-knowing that it has its days numberedovershadows the destiny of the human beings on the planet through the ferocity of its response. We do not have to wait for the corpse of imperialism to pass in front of the house of the world, but we must use means in order to dig its final grave which will then be able to liberate the condemned of the Earth.

Migrants & Refugee Crisis

The Refugee Crisis is a Crisis of Imperialism

by T.J. Petrowski

the feudal landlords and fundamentalist mullahs to sow chaos across the country, bringing rise to elements that later formed al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The responsibility for the large number of refugees and migrants coming to Europe, ﬂeeing climate change, poverty, war and violence, must be laid squarely at the feet of the imperialist system

The Afghan people were once more dealt a severe punishment by the forces of Western imperialism following 9/11, despite a lack of conclusive evidence linking either the Taliban or al-Qaeda to the attacks. 30 years of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan have left the people of Afghanistan impoverished, traumatized, and desperate.

The real tragedy is the refusal of Western leaders to acknowledge the cause of the refugee crisis – Western imperialism’s genocidal and never ending wars on the people of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.

The conﬂicts in Libya and Syria are eerily similar to the Western destabilization of Afghanistan. In 2011, when the Arab Spring protests swept across the Middle East and North Africa, Western imperialism hijacked legitimate grievances of the masses as a pretext for intervention in the name of the “responsibility to protect” and “democracy promotion”.

There are now more refugees than at any time since World War, and the number of refugees has increased markedly since the start of the “Global War on Terror”. Wherever the U.S. and its imperialist allies have intervened, whether through direct military action or indirect proxy wars, economic sabotage, and coups, in the name of “democracy”, the “War on Terror”, or the “responsibility to protect”, death and despair have been forced upon millions of innocent people, who have been left no other choice than to abandon their native lands to embark on a dangerous future of desperate struggle.

Prior to the 2011 U.S./NATO intervention, Libya was among the wealthiest and most stable countries in Africa, with the continent’s highest standard of living. Housing was enshrined as a human right, education and healthcare services were free for all citizens, and the country was pushing to establish an African currency linked to gold to help end the endless cycle of debt and impoverishment of the African masses by Western imperialism [5]. Under the cloak of the United Nations, Western imperialism, using the pretext of protecting the people of Libya from Gaddaﬁ’s murderous rule, launched airstrikes on Libya and allied themselves with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other Libyan extremists [6]. NATO airstrikes killed hundreds of civilians and forced Libya back into the Stone Age; Gaddaﬁ was mercilessly tortured and murdered by the rebels. Thousands have been killed as rival tribal and extremist factions, some now allied with ISIS, battling for control of the country.

In Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Korea, Vietnam, East Timor, Sudan, Ukraine, and elsewhere the livelihoods of millions have been destroyed by the forces of U.S. and Western imperialism. In the 1980s, Afghanistan had a “genuinely popular government”, according to John Ryan, retired professor from the University of Winnipeg, that was implementing widespread reforms. Labour unions were legalized, a minimum wage was established, hundreds of thousands of Afghans were enrolled in educational facilities, and women were freed from age-old tribal bondage and able to earn an independent income. U.S. and Western imperialism, fearful of that kind of equitable distribution of wealth, supported 3

their applications. Conditions are so poor for refugees that while waiting for processing newborn babies have died in Greece [13].

The conflict in Syria has frequently been referred to as “Libya 2.0”. U.S. imperialism with the support of Israel, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States, trained and financed “moderate” rebels to overthrow the secular and popularly supported government of Bashar al-Assad. The “Free Syrian Army”, i.e., the “moderate” rebels, has been virtually eliminated in the conflict despite millions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and its regional allies [7]. FSA fighters have deserted to the ranks of ISIS en masse, itself a product of the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq that killed 1 million Iraqis.

On the Macedonia-Greece border, where more than a thousand refugees are crossing daily, refugees that broke through the barbed wire fences were shot at with stun grenades, and the Macedonian police have treated refugees as rioters, according to Amnesty International [14]. Italian police forcibly removed African refugees camping out at the French border after France refused to grant them asylum [15]. Hungary is building a fortiﬁed wall, similar to the barbaric wall that divides the U.S.-Mexico border, to stop refugees from crossing the border [16].

There is overwhelming evidence that the U.S. and its allies have been actively training and supporting ISIS elements since the start of the proxy war in Syria [8][9]. It wasn’t until ISIS invaded Iraq with its new Toyota technicals, curtesy of U.S. imperialism, that ISIS was declared a threat to the world. Western imperialism changed its tactic from supporting ISIS to airstrikes on Iraq and Syria, with the support of other Western imperialist states, Turkey (which is also conveniently bombing anti-ISIS Kurdish fighters [10]), Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf States, but without consultation with the Syrian government, Iran, or Hezbollah that have been fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda elements since the start of the conflict. Hundreds of thousands have died in the West’s proxy war against the Syrian government.

The thousands of refugees that seek asylum in Australia are detained in Australia’s detention facilities in Papua New Guinea and the small island nation of Nauru, dubbed the “Guantanamo Bay of the Pacific” [17]. Refugees can be detained for several years in these facilities, where social workers have observed “profound damage” to those detained through “prolonged deprivation of freedom, abuse of power, confinement in an extremely harsh environment, uncertainty of future, disempowerment, loss of privacy and autonomy and inadequate health and protection services” [18]. An Australian Senate investigation received reports of guards raping women on tape and sexually exploiting children as young as 2-years-old [19]. Just as Britain refuses to assist drowning refugees in the Mediterranean out of fear that it will encourage more migrants to seek asylum [20], the unannounced policy of Australian authorities is to make refugees suffer abuse and inhumane living conditions to deter them from seeking asylum in Australia, as if Australian imperialism hasn’t inflicted enough suffering on the people of the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.

From Libya to Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and Somalia, U.S. and Western imperialist interventions, coups, and sanctions have displaced and killed millions of people. Physicians for Social Responsibility estimates that in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan alone Western imperialist interventions have caused the deaths of 1.3 million people [11]. It is no wonder then that hundreds of thousands seek asylum elsewhere; however, after traveling huge distances overland and on water, refugees ﬁnd themselves abused, discriminated against, held in detention, or rejected from Europe, Canada, the U.S., and Australia.

U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the “refugee crisis”. Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the “War on Terror” will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries.

More than 2, 500 have died this year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe, while the International Organization for Migration estimates that 30, 000 could die by the end of 2015 [12]. Refugees attempting to enter Europe, even if they are granted asylum in a mainland European country such as Germany, have been met with police violence in Greece, Italy, and other countries on the Mediterranean that are the ﬁrst landing points for boats sailing from North Africa and Turkey.

www.counterpunch.org www.nytimes.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

Greek riot police have beaten refugees protesting the failure of local governments to process 4

Migration is our history, reality and future By; William Lacy Swing, Director General, International Organization for Migration

Secretary-General’s Report for the United Nations Summit on Refugees and Migrants, In Safety and Dignity: Addressing Large Movements of Refugees and Migrants, does not speak about “illegal migration” but rather of “irregular migration”. These two terms are often conﬂated. Political leadership should be enhanced in order to combat the currently toxic migration discourse. The beauty of diversity should be embraced.

People have always been on the move. Migration is not a catastrophe, nor is it an invasion. Often, it is not even an emergency. Throughout human history it has mostly been, simply, one thing: inevitable. Migration is history’s oldest and most eﬀective anti-poverty measure, a natural human response to challenges and a facilitator of greater opportunities. At least 244 million people today live outside the borders of their homelands (UNDESA). People move to improve their lives, whether that means access to a better food supply, access to more sustainable employment, education opportunities or to save their own lives and the lives of their family.

Anti-migrant sentiment has also brought with it another negative and false stereotype: the criminalization of migrants. Too many are too willing to criminalize human ambition, a parents’ desire to rescue their family from danger, a families need to be reunited, a young person’s drive to make their way out of extreme poverty and so on. When we criminalize these simple human responses to poverty, conﬂict and ambition, we condemn members of our own family to unspeakable punishment.

Sadly, unprecedented levels of migration have led growing anti-migrant sentiment globally. Migrants embody the essence of multiculturalism, as they are the bridges between countries of origin, transit and destination. It is time that all actors – including States, civil society, the media, international organizations and the private sector, migrants and communities – eﬀectively and factually communicate about migration. Political leaders and the media have an important role to play in combatting xenophobic narratives on migration that leads to limited perceptions of migrants and to reshaping public discourse 5

In 2013 – at Lampedusa, Italy – I watched as 366 corpses were prepared for burial, the victims of unscrupulous criminals in Libya who were willing to stuﬀ migrants into unsafe vessels bound for Europe. A year later the tragedy has only worsened, with more horriﬁc incidents of drownings. Often the passengers themselves realize how unsafe the crafts are and refuse to board. Often they are battered into submission, tortured and then forced out to sea.

When we speak of migrants, we are speaking of people. And our responses to migrants must place people at the centre. Honoring the dignity of the migrant should be seen as honoring human dignity. And destiny. This is a reaﬃrmation of our commitments in the new Sustainable Development Agenda, where we collectively agreed to “leave no one behind”. We may not all look or speak the same but strip away the veneers of nationality, religion, language and race, and we are all human beings – each with the same basic dreams and hopes for the well-being of our families and communities.

At the International Organization for Migration, we have heard of nearly identical crimes taking place oﬀ the coasts of Bangladesh and Thailand, and recently have chronicled the rising tide of death on routes connecting the Horn of Africa with the Arabian Peninsula. And believe me, the tragic loss of life is not limited to this migration routes. As the headlines of the last few years show us, migrants unable to ﬁnd safe, legal means of travel often turn to some of the planet’s most vicious criminal gangs for relief, which often leads to recklessness, even murder.

Certainly countries have a right, indeed an obligation, to control their borders. And, yes, economic downturns make migrants easy scapegoats for unemployment or depressed wages. It is not diﬃcult to understand why indiﬀerence to migrants’ hardships has led to hostility, fear and resistance to their arrival. But it is no longer acceptable to let fear dictate how we act.

Safe, legal and orderly migration should be the only reality that we accept. It is time to stand up and protect the rights of refugees and migrants. We can no longer allow them to fall prey of criminal gangs and inhumane migration policies. This is why the United Nations Summit for Refugees and Migrants in New York is as historic an opportunity, as it is perfectly timed. World leaders, organizations working in migration, community leaders, private sector and many more partners are coming together for the ﬁrst time ever with the hope of agreeing on a better response to large movements of both refugees and migrants.

The UN Summit will set in motion a much longer process focused on migration. It provides an opportunity to work toward a global compact on safe, regular and orderly migration that upholds the human rights of migrants and their families, irrespective of migration status, enhances their wellbeing, and promotes inclusive growth and sustainable development in societies of origin, transit and destination. Increasingly, although to varying degrees, all countries are all three simultaneously.

I will have the privilege to take part in the UN Summit, bringing with me the voices, stories and hope of the millions of migrants and refugees IOM has had the honour to work with over the past 65 years. During the UN Summit, I will sign an agreement making IOM part of the UN system. This shows us the raising the proﬁle of migrant issues in such an august body setting mankind on a path towards change.

To promote these eﬀorts, IOM will announce commitments at the UN Summit in various areas like global climate, risk and adaptation, protection and assistance for migrants in vulnerable situations, migrant health, countering-xenophobia and more. IOM looks forward to partnering with other members of the UN family, Governments, communities (migrant, diaspora, local, etc.) and other partners to carry out our mandate of providing direct assistance and protection to migrants in need, as well as, to internally displaced persons all over the world.

We must rediscover our compassion, and use the UN Summit to take positive action. The challenge of addressing large movements of refugees and migrants is not beyond our reach, if the international community shares responsibility. For the UN Summit and any other endeavors taken on from that point to be beneficial, we must work together to acknowledge and address the many factors that compel people to move. Demography is one of the biggest. For the most part, migration is a byproduct of the quadrupling of the human population over a single century and the effects that this causes to economies, the environment and fragile states. We also see that rising global consumption feeds rising international labour demand, which offers citizens of poorer countries the prospect of rising family incomes by migrating.

We must and can work together to ensure safety and dignity for all, leave no one behind, and celebrate the richness and vibrancy that migrants and migration brings. www.refugeesmigrants.un.org The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

POPE FRANCIS: Migrants and refugees are men and women in search of peace 1. Heartfelt good wishes for peace

prudence, government leaders should take practical measures to welcome, promote, protect, integrate and, “within the limits allowed by a correct understanding of the common good, to permit [them] to become part of a new society.”[3] Leaders have a clear responsibility towards their own communities, whose legitimate rights and harmonious development they must ensure, lest they become like the rash builder who miscalculated and failed to complete the tower he had begun to construct.[4]

Peace to all people and to all nations on earth! Peace, which the angels proclaimed to the shepherds on Christmas night,[1] is a profound aspiration for everyone, for each individual and all peoples, and especially for those who most keenly suffer its absence. Among these whom I constantly keep in my thoughts and prayers, I would once again mention the over 250 million migrants worldwide, of whom 22.5 million are refugees. Pope Benedict XVI, my beloved predecessor, spoke of them as “men and women, children, young and elderly people, who are searching for somewhere to live in peace.”[2] In order to find that peace, they are willing to risk their lives on a journey that is often long and perilous, to endure hardships and suffering, and to encounter fences and walls built to keep them far from their goal. In a spirit of compassion, let us embrace all those fleeing from war and hunger, or forced by discrimination, persecution, poverty and environmental degradation to leave their homelands.

2. Why so many refugees and migrants? As he looked to the Great Jubilee marking the passage of two thousand years since the proclamation of peace by the angels in Bethlehem, Saint John Paul II pointed to the increased numbers of displaced persons as one of the consequences of the “endless and horrifying sequence of wars, conﬂicts, genocides and ethnic cleansings”[5] that had characterized the twentieth century. To this date, the new century has registered no real breakthrough: armed conﬂicts and other forms of organized violence continue to trigger the movement of peoples within national borders and beyond.

We know that it is not enough to open our hearts to the suﬀering of others. Much more remains to be done before our brothers and sisters can once again live peacefully in a safe home. Welcoming others requires concrete commitment, a network of assistance and goodwill, vigilant and sympathetic attention, the responsible management of new and complex situations that at times compound numerous existing problems, to say nothing of resources, which are always limited. By practising the virtue of

Yet people migrate for other reasons as well, principally because they “desire a better life, and not infrequently try to leave behind the ‘hopelessness’ of an unpromising future.”[6] They set out to join their families or to seek professional or educational opportunities, for those who cannot enjoy these rights do not live in peace. Furthermore, as I noted in the 7

world who open their doors and hearts to migrants and refugees, even where resources are scarce.

Encyclical Laudato Si’, there has been “a tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental degradation”.[7] Most people migrate through regular channels. Some, however, take different routes, mainly out of desperation, when their own countries offer neither safety nor opportunity, and every legal pathway appears impractical, blocked or too slow.

A contemplative gaze should also guide the discernment of those responsible for the public good, and encourage them to pursue policies of welcome, “within the limits allowed by a correct understanding of the common good”[11] – bearing in mind, that is, the needs of all members of the human family and the welfare of each.

Many destination countries have seen the spread of rhetoric decrying the risks posed to national security or the high cost of welcoming new arrivals, and thus demeaning the human dignity due to all as sons and daughters of God. Those who, for what may be political reasons, foment fear of migrants instead of building peace are sowing violence, racial discrimination and xenophobia, which are matters of great concern for all those concerned for the safety of every human being.[8]

Those who see things in this way will be able to recognize the seeds of peace that are already sprouting and nurture their growth. Our cities, often divided and polarized by conﬂicts regarding the presence of migrants and refugees, will thus turn into workshops of peace.

4. Four mileposts for action Offering asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and victims of human trafficking an opportunity to find the peace they seek requires a strategy combining four actions: welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating.[12]

All indicators available to the international community suggest that global migration will continue for the future. Some consider this a threat. For my part, I ask you to view it with conﬁdence as an opportunity to build peace.

“Welcoming” calls for expanding legal pathways for entry and no longer pushing migrants and displaced people towards countries where they face persecution and violence. It also demands balancing our concerns about national security with concern for fundamental human rights. Scripture reminds us: “Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it.”[13]

3. With a contemplative gaze The wisdom of faith fosters a contemplative gaze that recognizes that all of us “belong to one family, migrants and the local populations that welcome them, and all have the same right to enjoy the goods of the earth, whose destination is universal, as the social doctrine of the Church teaches. It is here that solidarity and sharing are founded.”[9] These words evoke the biblical image of the new Jerusalem. The book of the prophet Isaiah (chapter 60) and that of Revelation (chapter 21) describe the city with its gates always open to people of every nation, who marvel at it and ﬁll it with riches. Peace is the sovereign that guides it and justice the principle that governs coexistence within it.

“Protecting” has to do with our duty to recognize and defend the inviolable dignity of those who ﬂee real dangers in search of asylum and security, and to prevent their being exploited. I think in particular of women and children who ﬁnd themselves in situations that expose them to risks and abuses that can even amount to enslavement. God does not discriminate: “The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the orphan and the widow.”[14]

We must also turn this contemplative gaze to the cities where we live, “a gaze of faith which sees God dwelling in their houses, in their streets and squares, […] fostering solidarity, fraternity, and the desire for goodness, truth and justice”[10] – in other words, fulﬁlling the promise of peace. When we turn that gaze to migrants and refugees, we discover that they do not arrive empty-handed. They bring their courage, skills, energy and aspirations, as well as the treasures of their own cultures; and in this way, they enrich the lives of the nations that receive them. We also come to see the creativity, tenacity and spirit of sacriﬁce of the countless individuals, families and communities around the 8

6. For our common home

“Promoting” entails supporting the integral human development of migrants and refugees. Among many possible means of doing so, I would stress the importance of ensuring access to all levels of education for children and young people. This will enable them not only to cultivate and realize their potential, but also better equip them to encounter others and to foster a spirit of dialogue rather than rejection or confrontation. The Bible teaches that God “loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”[15]

Let us draw inspiration from the words of Saint John Paul II: “If the ‘dream’ of a peaceful world is shared by all, if the refugees’ and migrants’ contribution is properly evaluated, then humanity can become more and more a universal family and our earth a true ‘common home’.”[18] Throughout history, many have believed in this “dream”, and their achievements are a testament to the fact that it is no mere utopia. Among these, we remember Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini in this year that marks the hundredth anniversary of her death. On this thirteenth day of November, many ecclesial communities celebrate her memory. This remarkable woman, who devoted her life to the service of migrants and became their patron saint, taught us to welcome, protect, promote and integrate our brothers and sisters. Through her intercession, may the Lord enable all of us to experience that “a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”[19]

“Integrating”, lastly, means allowing refugees and migrants to participate fully in the life of the society that welcomes them, as part of a process of mutual enrichment and fruitful cooperation in service of the integral human development of the local community. Saint Paul expresses it in these words: “You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people.”[16]

5. A proposal for two international compacts

Message of his Holiness PopeF francis for the celebration of the 51st World Day of Peace. 1 January 2018From the Vatican, Memorial of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, Patroness of Migrants The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

It is my heartfelt hope this spirit will guide the process that in the course of 2018 will lead the United Nations to draft and approve two Global Compacts, one for safe, orderly and regular migration and the other for refugees. As shared agreements at a global level, these compacts will provide a framework for policy proposals and practical measures. For this reason, they need to be inspired by compassion, foresight and courage, so as to take advantage of every opportunity to advance the peace-building process. Only in this way can the realism required of international politics avoid surrendering to cynicism and to the globalization of indiﬀerence.

[1 Luke 2:14. [2] Angelus, 15 January 2012. [3] JOHN XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris, 106. [4] Luke 14:28-30. [5] Message for the 2000 World Day of Peace, 3.. [6] BENEDICT XVI, Message for the 2013 World Day of Migrants and Refugees. [7] No. 25. [8] Cf. Address to the National Directors of Pastoral Care for Migrants of the Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of Europe, 22 September 2017. [9] BENEDICT XVI, Message for the 2011 World Day of Migrants and Refugees. [10] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 71. [11] JOHN XXIII, Encyclical Letter Pacem in Terris, 106. [12] Message for the 2018 World Day of Migrants and Refugees. [13] Hebrews 13:2. [14] Psalm 146:9. [15] Deuteronomy 10:18-19. [16] Ephesians 2:19. [17] “20 Pastoral Action Points” and “20 Action Points for the Global Compacts”, Migrants and Refugees Section, Rome, 2017. See also Document UN A/72/528. [18] Message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees 2004,, 6. [19] James 3:18.

Dialogue and coordination are a necessity and a speciﬁc duty for the international community. Beyond national borders, higher numbers of refugees may be welcomed – or better welcomed – also by less wealthy countries, if international cooperation guarantees them the necessary funding. The Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development has published a set of twenty action points that provide concrete leads for implementing these four verbs in public policy and in the attitudes and activities of Christian communities.[17] The aim of this and other contributions is to express the interest of the Catholic Church in the process leading to the adoption of the two U.N. Global Compacts. This interest is the sign of a more general pastoral concern that goes back to the very origins of the Church and has continued in her many works up to the present time. 9

Caricom, African Union Slams Trump's Anti-Immigrant Remarks

Salvadorans." "El Salvador formally protests and energetically rejects this kind of comment," he wrote on Twitter.

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who was present at the White House meeting, told the AFP that Trump ﬁrst raised the question, "Do we need more Haitians?

The 55-nation African Union also condemned Trump's remarks, saying they were "clearly racist." "The African Union Mission wishes to express its infuriation, disappointment and outrage over the unfortunate comment made by Mr. Donald Trump, President of the United States of America, whose remarks dishonor the celebrated American creed and respect for diversity and human dignity," the African Union said in a statement.

The Caribbean Community, or Caricom, has slammed U.S. President Donald Trump for using "repulsive language" to describe Haiti and African countries. "Caricom condemns in the strongest terms the unenlightened views reportedly expressed," the 15-nation bloc's Guyana-based headquarters said in a statement. "(CARICOM) is deeply disturbed by reports about the use of derogatory and repulsive language by the President of the United States in respect of our member state, Haiti, and other developing countries."

Caricom nations also comprise of descendants of African slaves, along with ancestors of many others who were indentured laborers from India. Caricom also expressed its full support for the Haitian government.

Trump reportedly referred to immigrants from countries like El Salvador and Haiti as people from "shithole countries" during a meeting with the lawmakers in White House on.

"It should be recalled that Haiti is the second democracy in the Western hemisphere after the United States and that Haitians continue to contribute signiﬁcantly in many spheres to the global community and particularly to the United States of America," added the bloc, which includes former British, Dutch and French colonies.

Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, who was present at the White House meeting, told the AFP that Trump ﬁrst raised the question, "Do we need more Haitians?" "Shithole was the exact word used not once, not twice, but repeatedly," Durbin said, adding that the word was speciﬁcally used in the context of African countries, according to The Guardian.

The African group of ambassadors to the United Nations has demanded an apology from Donald Trump, after the US president reportedly aimed a racist remark at some Caribbean nations and Africa. Trump criticised immigration to his country from El Salvador, Haiti and the African continent, by calling the group

Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren said Trump's words had "struck at the dignity of 10

"shithole countries" at a meeting with Congress members at the White House on Thursday, according to US media. "The African Union mission to the UN is extremely appalled at, and strongly condemns the outrageous, racist and xenophobic remarks attributed to the US president as widely reported by the media," Martha Ama Akyaa Pobee, Ghana's ambassador to the UN, said on Friday the 12th January. The group has demanded a retraction and apology from Trump.According to US media reports, citing people with knowledge of the conversation, Trump asked during a conversation about immigration: "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" Trump suggested the US should instead focus its immigrant entry policy on countries such as Norway.

Following an emergency session of the African diplomats, Pobee added that the group "is concerned at the continuing and growing trend from the US administration towards Africa and people of African descent to denigrate the continent and people of colour". The ambassadors' reaction comes after the 55-nation African Union said it was "frankly alarmed". "Given the historical reality of how many Africans arrived in the United States as slaves, this statement flies in the face of all accepted behaviour and practice," AU spokeswoman Ebba Kalondo said. www.telesurtv.net www.aljazeera.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Embassy

Causes of Migration:

The unseen, but real US war in Africa According to a VICE News special investigation, U.S. troops are now conducting 3,500 exercises and military engagements throughout Africa per year, an average of 10 per day. U.S. mainstream media rarely discusses this ongoing war, thus giving the military ample space to destabilize any of the continent’s 54 countries as it pleases.

It will be many years before Africa and its 54 nations are truly free from the stubborn neocolonial mindset, which is grounded in racism, economic exploitation and military interventions. There is a real - but largely concealed - war which is taking place throughout the African continent. It involves the United States, an invigorated Russia and a rising China. The outcome of the war is likely to deﬁne the future of the continent and its global outlook.

"Today’s ﬁgure of 3,500 marks an astounding 1,900 percent increase since the command was activated less than a decade ago, and suggests a major expansion of U.S. military activities on the African continent," VICE reported.

It is easy to pin the blame on U.S. President Donald Trump, his erratic agenda and impulsive statements. But the truth is, the current U.S. military expansion in Africa is just another step in the wrong direction. It is part of a strategy that had been implemented a decade ago, during the administration of President George W. Bush, and actively pursued by President Barack Obama.

Following the death of four U.S. Special Forces soldiers in Niger on October 4, U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, made an ominous declaration to a Senate committee: these numbers are likely to increase as the U.S. is expanding its military activities in Africa.

In 2007, under the pretext of the "war on terror," the U.S. consolidated its various military operations in Africa to establish the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). With a starting budget of half a billion dollars, AFRICOM was supposedly launched to engage with African countries in terms of diplomacy and aid. But, over the course of the last 10 years, AFRICOM has been transformed into a central command for military incursions and interventions.

Mattis, like other defense officials in the previous two administrations, justifies the U.S. military transgressions as part of ongoing 'counter-terrorism' efforts. But such coded reference has served as a pretense for the U.S. to intervene in, and exploit, a massive region with a great economic potential. The old colonial "Scramble for Africa" is being reinvented by global powers that fully fathom the extent of the untapped economic largesse of the continent. While China, India and Russia are each developing a unique approach to wooing Africa, the U.S. is invested mostly

However, that violent role has rapidly worsened during the ﬁrst year of Trump's term in oﬃce. Indeed, there is a hidden U.S. war in Africa, and it is fought in the name of "counterterrorism." 12

Keeping in mind that Africa has 22 Muslim majority countries, the U.S. government is divesting from any long-term diplomatic vision in Africa, and is, instead increasingly thrusting further into the military path.

in the military option, which promises to inﬂict untold harm and destabilize many nations. The 2012 coup in Mali, carried out by a U.S.-trained army captain, Amadou Haya Sanogo, is only one example.

The U.S. military push does not seem to be part of a comprehensive policy approach, either. It is as alarming as it is erratic, reﬂecting the U.S. constant over-reliance on military solutions to all sorts of problems, including trade and political rivalries.

In a 2013 speech, then U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned against a "new colonialism in Africa (in which it is) easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay oﬀ leaders and leave." While Clinton is, of course, correct, she was disingenuously referring to China, not her own country.

Compare this to Russia's strategic approach to Africa. Reigniting old camaraderie with the continent, Russia is following China's strategy of engagement (or in this case, re-engagement) through development and favorable trade terms.

China's increasing inﬂuence in Africa is obvious, and Beijing’s practices can be unfair. However, China's policy towards Africa is far more civil and trade-focused than the military-centered U.S. approach.

But, unlike China, Russia has a wide-ranging agenda that includes arms exports, which are replacing U.S. weaponry in various parts of the continent. For Moscow, Africa also has untapped and tremendous potential as a political partner that can bolster Russia’s standing at the U.N.

The growth in the China-Africa trade ﬁgures are, as per a U.N. News report in 2013, happening at a truly "breathtaking pace", as they jumped from around $10.5 billion per year in 2000 to $166 billion in 2011. Since then, it has continued at the same impressive pace.

Aware of the evident global competition, some African leaders are now laboring to ﬁnd new allies outside the traditional western framework, which has controlled much of Africa since the end of traditional colonialism decades ago.

But that growth was coupled with many initiatives, entailing many billions of dollars in Chinese credit to African countries to develop badly needed infrastructure. More went to ﬁnance the "African Talents Program," which is designed to train 30,000 African professionals in various sectors.

A stark example was the late November visit by Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir to Russia and his high-level meeting with President Vladimir Putin. "We have been dreaming about this visit for a long time," al-Bashir told Putin, and "we are in need of protection from the aggressive acts of the United States."

It should come as no surprise, then, that China surpassed the U.S. as Africa's largest trading partner in 2009. The real colonialism, which Clinton referred to in her speech, is, however, under way in the U.S.'s own perception and behavior towards Africa. This is not a hyperbole, but in fact a statement that echoes the words of U.S. President Trump himself.

The coveted "protection" includes Russia's promised involvement in modernizing the Sudanese army. Wary of Russia’s Africa outreach, the U.S. is ﬁghting back with a military stratagem and little diplomacy. The ongoing U.S. mini war on the continent will push the continent further into the abyss of violence and corruption, which may suit Washington well, but will bring about untold misery to millions of people.

During a lunch with nine African leaders last September at the U.N., Trump spoke with the kind of mindset that inspired western leaders’ colonial approach to Africa for centuries.

There is no question that Africa is no longer an exclusive western "turf," to be exploited at will. But it will be many years before Africa and its 54 nations are truly free from the stubborn neocolonial mindset, which is grounded in racism, economic exploitation and military interventions.

Soon after he invented the none-existent country of "Nambia," Trump boasted of his "many friends (who are) going to your (African) countries trying to get rich." "I congratulate you," he said, "they are spending a lot of money." The following month, Trump added Chad, his country's devoted "counter-terrorism" partner to the list of countries whose citizens are banned from entering the U.S.

www.telesurtv.net www.straightlinelogic.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

Israel offers to pay African migrants to leave, threatens jail

Israel is offering a stark choice to tens of thousands of African migrants in the country: Agree to leave voluntarily by the end of March, with a plane ticket and a grant of $3,500, or face possible incarceration. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in public remarks at a cabinet meeting on the payment program, said a barrier Israel completed in 2013 along its border with Egypt had effectively cut off a stream of “illegal infiltrators” from Africa after some 60,000 crossed the desert frontier.

Prime Minister Netanyahu meets leaders and representatives of African states.

Some have lived for years in Israel and work in low-paying jobs that many Israelis shun. Israel has granted asylum to fewer than one percent of those who have applied and has a years-long backlog of applicants.

The vast majority came from Eritrea and Sudan and many said they ﬂed war and persecution as well as economic hardship, but Israel treats them as economic migrants.

Rights groups have accused Israel of being slow to process African migrants’ asylum requests as a matter of policy and denying legitimate claims to the status. Netanyahu has called the migrants’ presence a threat to Israel’s social fabric and Jewish character, and one government minister has referred to them as “a cancer”.

The plan in the first week of January 2018 offers African migrants a $3,500 payment from the Israeli government and a free air ticket to return home or go to “third countries”, which rights groups identified as Rwanda and Uganda. “We have expelled about 20,000 and now the mission is to get the rest out,” Netanyahu said. An immigration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there are some 38,000 migrants living illegally in Israel, and some 1,420 are being held in two detention centers.

Teklit Michael, a 29yr old-asylum seeker from Eritrea living in Tel Aviv, said in response to the Israeli plan that paying money to other governments to take in Africans was akin to “human traﬃcking and smuggling”. “We don’t know what is waiting for us (in Rwanda and Uganda),” he told Reuters by telephone. “They prefer now to stay in prison (in Israel) instead.”

“Beyond the end of March, those who leave voluntarily will receive a signiﬁcantly smaller payment that will shrink even more with time, and enforcement measures will begin,” the oﬃcial said, referring to incarceration.

In his remarks, Netanyahu cited the large presence of African migrants in Tel Aviv’s poorer neighborhoods, where he said “veteran residents” - a reference to Israelis - no longer feel safe. 14

The new plan — promoted by Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, and Gilad Erdan, the public security minister, who is from Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party — is the latest phase of a long-running political and legal struggle over the African migrants’ fate.

“So today, we are keeping our promise to restore calm, a sense of personal security and law and order to the residents of south Tel Aviv and those in many other neighborhoods,” he said. “Every country must guard its borders,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, announcing the plan. “The inﬁltrators have a clear choice — cooperate with us and leave voluntarily, respectably, humanely and legally, or we will have to use other tools at our disposal, which are also according to the law.”

Critics have denounced the campaign as an eﬀort to distract from corruption investigations against Mr. Netanyahu, and have asserted that the timing is political, given the whiﬀ of possible early elections in the air. In the past, threats to jail the migrants en masse have not been realized, not least because of the cost and a space shortage in prisons.

Later, on Facebook, Mr. Netanyahu wrote, “The government approved a plan today that will give every inﬁltrator two options: a ﬂight ticket out or jail.” It is the latest phase of Israel’s long campaign to expel tens of thousands of African migrants and asylum seekers, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese, who entered the country illegally. At least 20,000 have already left Israel. “The mission now,” Mr. Netanyahu said, “is to deport the rest.”

About 60,000 migrants have surreptitiously crossed into Israel over the once-porous border with Egypt since 2005, most of them Sudanese or Eritreans who cannot be sent back home because of international conventions that prevent the repatriation of asylum seekers to home countries where they could face persecution.

Mr. Netanyahu said a few months ago that Israel had reached understandings with African countries willing to absorb the migrants, but without identifying the countries. Based on testimonies of people who have already left, Israeli rights groups say the main destination appears to be Rwanda.

Israeli officials insist that most of the Africans were not fleeing persecution, but came as economic migrants looking for work. After protests by the residents of south Tel Aviv, where the new arrivals were concentrated, Israel announced in 2012 that it was stepping up efforts to deter, detain and deport the migrants. Measures including the construction of a steel barrier along Israel’s border with Egypt have since cut the flow of African migrants to almost zero. None arrived in 2017, according to the immigration authority.

According to a news report in Rwanda, the country’s foreign aﬀairs minister said in November that it was in negotiations with Israel to take in African migrants who did not want to return to their countries of origin, and that up to 10,000 asylum seekers could eventually be settled in Rwanda.

A detention center, known as Holot, which was built in the desert to house up to 3,000 migrants who entered illegally, is to close down soon, after the Israeli Supreme Court placed limits on the time migrants could be held there and the authorities found it to be no longer eﬀective in encouraging them to leave Israel.

The United Nations refugee agency has expressed concern over such proposals. The agency, and Israeli rights groups, say they are concerned that people who have gone to Rwanda have not found adequate safety or a durable solution to their plight, and have continued on dangerous journeys within Africa or to Europe.

The process of seeking asylum in Israel is a slow one. Of nearly 14,000 asylum applications submitted by Eritrean and Sudanese migrants to the Israeli authorities over the last ﬁve years, only 10 people have been granted refugee status — eight from Eritrea and two from Sudan, according to Ms. Sadot and the United Nations refugee agency.

“They are not being granted any status or work permits there, nor a safe haven,” said Dror Sadot, a spokeswoman for Hotline for Refugees and Migrants, an Israeli nonproﬁt group that collected dozens of testimonies from those who left previously for Rwanda and for other countries including Uganda, some of whom later made it to Europe.

The agency said another 200 Sudanese from Darfur had recently been granted humanitarian status in Israel. Thousands of asylum requests are pending. The Immigration Authority did not respond to a request for information.

“They keep going on their journey — many ﬁnd themselves in Libya,” Ms. Sadot said, adding that many were then exposed to threats such as torture and human traﬃcking.

Anwar Suleiman Arbab, 38, left the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan in 2003 and went to Libya. After ﬁve years there, he tried to make it to Europe but failed. “A friend told me Israel is a good place,” he said in an interview.

Given a choice in 2014 of leaving for Africa or being detained in Holot, he chose Holot. He had applied for asylum a year earlier, he said, and has still not received an answer. He said that there was fear and concern among African migrants in Israel as new measures continued to be introduced, but that his answer had not changed.

So in 2008 Mr. Arbab paid Bedouins to help him cross the border into Israel from Egypt. He was detained for ﬁve months and released, and then later detained again for 18 months in Holot. For the last two years he has been living in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, on a temporary visa, working in a small restaurant and studying English.

“Today,” he said, “if it’s between going back to Africa or to jail in Israel, I’ll go to jail.” www.reuters.com www.nytimes.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

Venezuela

The 12 Victories of President Maduro in 2017 By Ignacio Ramonet Miguez:

For his part, the President responded to that coup attempt by organizing a massive civic-military exercise called "Zamora 200 integral anti-imperialist action" on Jan. 14. Some 600,000 were mobilized including military, militiamen and militants of social movements, and in doing so gave an impressive demonstration of the unity between the armed forces, the government, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and the popular masses. That was the ﬁrst victory of 2017.

Maduro has conﬁrmed - with his twelve brilliant victories of 2017- that he continues to be "indestructible." To begin with, we must remember that President Nicolás Maduro is the most unjustly harassed, slandered and assaulted president in the history of Venezuela. Even more than Hugo Chávez himself, founder of the Bolivarian Revolution ... Ousting Nicolás Maduro from the Miraﬂores palace by whatever means has been and is the unhealthy goal of the internal reactionary opposition and its powerful international allies, especially the government of the States United of America.

Encouraged by the election in the United States of Donald Trump - candidate of the right-wing who took office in Washington on Jan. 20, the Venezuelan opposition tried to intimidate the Maduro government with a large march in Caracas on Jan. 23, the date of the fall of the dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958. But here they failed pathetically. This was because, among other reasons, President Maduro had responded by organizing on the same day the transfer of the remains of Fabricio Ojeda, revolutionary leader during the overthrow of Pérez Jiménez, to the National Pantheon. At the call of the president, hundreds of thousands of Caracas residents flocked to fill the avenues of the capital. And it was possible to clearly see how popular Chavismo dominates the streets, while the opposition exhibited its divisions and squalor. That was President Maduro's second victory.

As soon as 2017 began, the attacks against the President started immediately. The ﬁrst aggression came from the National Assembly, controlled by counterrevolutionary forces, who decided on Jan. 9 to "disavow" the President and accused Nicolas Maduro of having "abandoned his position" - something false and absurd. Faced with this attempt at a constitutional coup d'état -inspired by the parliamentary coup model that overthrew Dilma Rousseﬀ in Brazil in 2016 - the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) intervened to point out that, under the Constitution, the National Assembly cannot dismiss the head of state, directly elected by the people. 12 17

defeated by the solid strategy enacted by President Maduro, based on facts and reality, political honesty and ethics. Finally, in April, Caracas decided to withdraw from the OAS, accusing the organization of "intrusive actions against the sovereignty of Venezuela." With imagination and audacity, in this complex international scenario, Nicolas Maduro achieved his third great victory in 2017.

Shortly after the Supreme Court intervened to emphasize that the National Assembly was in a situation of "contempt" since 2016. As should be recalled, in the legislative elections of Dec. 6, 2015, there were allegations of fraud in Amazonas state. The claims were backed up by recordings in which the secretary of the state government oﬀered sums of money to groups of voters to vote for opposition candidates. Consequently, the TSJ suspended the election of those legislators. But the National Assembly persisted in swearing them in, because the addition of these three additional members of the assembly would have given the opposition an absolute majority (two thirds of the lawmakers) and the power to repeal organic laws and to limit the action of the President himself ...

Meanwhile, tensions increased in Caracas when, on March 29, the Constitutional Chamber of the TSJ declared that "as long as the situation of contempt and invalidity of the proceedings of the National Assembly persists, this Constitutional Chamber will ensure that parliamentary powers are exercised directly for this Chamber or for the body that it designates, to ensure the rule of law." Previously, the TSJ had already pointed out that the parliamentary immunity of the deputies "only covers themselves during the exercise of their functions," which was not the case when the National Assembly is "in contempt"...

Tensions between a Parliament and a Supreme Court are relatively frequent in all large democracies. In Europe, for example, when a constitutional conﬂict arises between branches of government, it is common for the Supreme Court to assume powers of Parliament. And in the United States, even such an esoteric president as Donald Trump has had to abide by recent decisions of the Supreme Court …

The anti-Chavez opposition cried to the heavens. And with the help, once again, of conservative forces internationally went on to propel a seditious counter-revolutionary plan. The long and tragic "crisis of the guarimbas" began. For four interminable months - from April to July - the counterrevolutionaries launched the most desperate and brutal war oﬀensive against the Bolivarian Government. Funded in dollars by the international right, the anti-Chavez forces - led by Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, two far right-wing organizations - did not hesitate to use paramilitaries, terrorists and mercenaries of organized crime in a deployment of simultaneous irregular tactics, along with elite experts in psychological warfare and "democratic" propaganda. All with the pathological purpose of overthrowing Nicolas Maduro. Drunk with violence, the rioters rushed to assault Venezuelan democracy. They attacked, burned and destroyed hospitals, health centers, nurseries, schools, high schools, maternity hospitals, food and medicine stores, government oﬃces, hundreds of private businesses, subway stations, buses, public infrastructure, while the barricades multiplied in the bourgeois urbanities they controlled.

But in Caracas, the counterrevolutionary forces used that debate to relaunch an international campaign on the alleged "absence of democracy in Venezuela." With the complicity of the new U.S. Administration, they mounted a colossal, global media lynching operation against Nicolas Maduro. Mobilizing dominant media outlets from CNN and Fox News to the BBC in London, along with the major media houses in Latin America and the Caribbean, the most inﬂuential global newspapers, pillars of conservative communication hegemony, as well as social media networks. At the same time, the Venezuelan right wing maneuvered with the intention of internationalizing the internal conﬂict by transferring it to the Organization of American States (OAS) - "the ministry of the colonies of the United States," according to Che Guevara. Obeying the slogans of the new government of Donald Trump and with the support of several conservative regimes in Latin America, Luis Almagro, secretary general of the OAS, assumed the deplorable role of leading the demand that the application of the Democratic Charter against Venezuela.

The violent groups, throwing Molotov cocktails, were particular in their targeting of security forces. Five officials were shot to death. On the other hand, many 'guarimberos' showed terrible savagery by mounting tensed, fine steel cables on public roads to behead motorcyclists ... Or when, overflowing with hatred and racism, they burned young Chavistas alive 29 in total, of which nine died. The result: one hundred and twenty-one people killed, thousands injured and millions of dollars lost.

But Caracas counterattacked at once and secured the diplomatic solidarity of most of the Latin American and Caribbean States. Despite the dishonest schemes and false arguments of the Secretary General of the OAS, Venezuela was never put in a minority position and won irrefutably. And the enemies of the Bolivarian Revolution, including Washington, were 18

During those four months of counterrevolutionary rapture, the opposition also made calls to attack military bases, and tried to push the armed forces to turn against the legitimate government and to assault the presidential palace. The extreme right, intent on a coup, tried everything to start a civil war, fracture the civic-military union, and destroy Venezuelan democracy. At the same time, on an international scale, the frantic media campaign continued, presenting those who burned hospitals, murdered innocents, destroyed schools and burned people alive as "heroes of freedom." It was the world in reverse - the world of 'post-truths' and 'alternative facts' ...

eight and a half million citizens went to vote, overcoming all kinds of obstacles, facing paramilitaries and 'guarimberos,' crossing blocked streets. crossing streams and rivers. Doing the impossible to fulﬁll your civic, political, ethical, moral duty ... overcoming threats inside and outside.

It was not easy to resist so much terror, so much aggression, and restore public order with a vision of democratic authority, proportionality and respect for human rights. The constitutional and legitimate President Nicolas Maduro got it, and he acheived what seemed impossible: an exit from the labyrinth of violence. He did so aith a great idea that nobody expected but upset and disconcerted the opposition: a return to the original constituent power.

Few expected such a high degree of popular mobilization, the turnout of voters and the resounding electoral success. The next day, as the President had predicted, the 'guarimbas' dispersed. The violence was fading. Peace reigned again. With subtlety, patience, courage and determination, and a ﬁne strategic intelligence, President Maduro managed in this way to defeat the 'guarimbas' and abort the evident coup attempt. He stood ﬁrmly against the threats, and he did so without altering the basis of his policies. This was his most spectacular victory of 2017.

The pretext of 'guarimbero' terrorism was, in effect, the disagreement between two legitimate bodies: that of the Supreme Court of Justice and that of the National Assembly. Neither institution wanted to allow its arm to be twisted. How to get out of the impasse? Based on articles 347, 348 and 349 of the Chavez Constitution of 1999, and using his position as Head of State and maximum arbiter, President Maduro decided to reactivate a popular constituent process. It was the only way to find, through political dialogue and words, an agreement with the opposition, to moderate the historical conflict and to devise solutions to the country's problems. He thought it out well and waited for the right moment. Until, on May 1, all the conditions were met. That day, the President announced that the election of the delegates to the Constituent Assembly would take place on July 30. It was the only option for peace.

"The arrival of the Constituent Assembly," said Nicolas Maduro, "meant, without a doubt, the arrival of a climate of peace that allowed the political offensive of the Bolivarian Revolution." And that offensive led to what many believed impossible: two other sensational and resounding electoral victories. That of the regional elections on Oct. 15, where 19 of 23 governors were won by Chavismo including Miranda and Lara, two states whose social policy was almost made extinct in the hands of the opposition. And later a triumph in Zulia, a strategic state with great demographic importance and where important deposits of oil and gas are located. Likewise, the Bolivarian Revolution won the municipal elections of Dec. 10, obtaining of 308 of 335 mayoral offices, that is, 93 percent of the municipalities. Chavismo won 22 (out of 24) capital cities, including Caracas. Meanwhile the counterrevolution confirmed their unpopularity with a sharp decline of their voters, losing more than 2,100,000 votes.

But, again, conﬁrming their desperate political blunder, the opposition rejected the outstretched hand. Amid cheers from the world press, as part of the brutal and inclement campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution, opposition parties agreed not to participate, and instead devoted themselves to sabotaging the elections, to prevent the exercise of suﬀrage, to barricade, to burn polls and threaten those who wished to exercise their right to choose.

Showing the vitality of its democratic system to the world, Venezuela was the only country that organized three major national elections in 2017 - all three won by Chavismo. While the right, demoralized

They failed. They were unable to prevent the massive showing from people who wanted to bet on democracy and against violence and terror. More than 19

by so many successive disasters, was atomized, disunited, groggy. Their leaders challenged, followers stunned. They nonetheless retained the support of their international protectors, in particular the most aggressive of them: the new president of the United States, Donald Trump. Throughout 2017 – building from the executive order signed by Barack Obama on March 8, 2015, in which Venezuela was declared an "unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. security" - Donald Trump issued a list of sanctions against the Bolivarian Revolution. In particular, on August 11, he threatened military action. Speaking to reporters at his New Jersey golf course, Trump said: "We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary." Then, on August 25, Trump prohibited that "any person, entity, company or association, legally domiciled or engaged in activities in the United States, may conduct business with new debt bonds that are issued by any instance of the Venezuelan Government, namely, bonds of the Republic issued by the Venezuelan Central Bank or the state company PDVSA." These sanctions look to push Venezuela into default (default on its external debt) because they close the state and PDVSA from accessing financial markets associated with the United States by preventing them from offering bonds there, and subsequently from being able to obtain foreign currency. Already Lawrence Eagleburger, former Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, had openly acknowledged in an interview with Fox News, that the economic war against Venezuela had been effectively designed in Washington. "We must use economic tools," said the former -Secretary of State, "to worsen the Venezuelan economy, in such a way that the influence of Chavismo in the country and in the region gets buried (...) All we can do to sink the Venezuelan economy into a difficult situation, is well done." The current Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, officially confirmed that the new sanctions aimed to "strangle Venezuela."

Faced with such insolent aggressions, Nicolas Maduro declared that default "will never come." First, because Venezuela is the South American country that has paid more of its debt than any other nation. In the last four years, Caracas paid off nearly US$74 billion ... because the Bolivarian government "will always have a clear strategy" aimed at the renegotiation and restructuring of the external debt. The president denounced that what Chavismo's enemies desire is the financial isolation of the Bolivarian Revolution until it has no possibilities to obtain credit. To drown it little by little. They want to generate fear in private investors, so they do not buy bonds, do not participate in the renegotiation of the debt and therefore, investment is no more. Nicolas Maduro explained that beyond a blockade, what Venezuela faces is an authentic "persecution" in which countries like Canada and those of the European Union also participate. Active persecution of trade, bank accounts and financial movements. But the president knew how to avoid those attacks, and he surprised, once again, his adversaries when he announced on Nov. 3 the creation of a Commission to consolidate the refinancing and the restructuring of the external debt, with the purpose of overcoming financial aggressions. "We are going to make a complete reformatting of external payments to achieve balance," he said. "We are going to break international schemes. " So it was. A few days later, in defiance of the financial blockade, and as part of the first approach to the renegotiation and restructuring proposed by the President, a group of Venezuelan debt holders from the United States, Panama, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Japan and Germany arrived in Caracas to meet with the Bolivarian Government, which was an undeniable victory for President Maduro. Here it is worth pointing out that the fourth-generation warfare declared upon the Bolivarian Revolution has several fronts and includes, simultaneously and continuously, four fronts: 1) an insurrectional war designed by experts in subversion, sabotage and mass psychology, with the use of mercenaries, cyclical explosion of criminal 'guarimbas' and terrorist 20

attacks against barracks, military targets and infrastructures (electricity network, refineries, water distribution, etc.); 2) a media war, with the press, radio, television and social networks converted into new armies of conquest through the planned use of propaganda aimed at taming minds and seducing hearts; 3) a diplomatic war with harassment in some international forums, particularly in the OAS, and attacks by the countries of the so-called "Lima group" to which the United States, Canada and the European Union are regularly added; and 4) an economic and financial war with hoarding and shortages of food and medicines, manipulation of the exchange rate of the currency, induced inflation, banking blockade and distortion of the country's debt risk.

The objective of all these blockades is to prevent the Bolivarian Government from using its resources to acquire the food and medicines that the population needs. All with the intention of pushing the people to protest and to generate chaos in the health system, endangering the lives of thousands of patients. In this case, thanks to his international relations, in November the President ensured the urgent arrival of important shipments of insulin from India. Hundreds of patients, at risk of death, were saved. Which, without a doubt, constituted a new victory for Nicolas Maduro. To break the financial blockade, the President announced another initiative in November: the creation of a digital currency, the Petro. That announcement aroused a lot of enthusiasm in the cryptocurrency investor community, placed Venezuela at the forefront of technology and global finance, and generated enormous expectations. Even more so as the price of the Petro would not be subject to the whims and speculation of the markets, but would be associated with the international value of real assets such as gold, gas, diamond and oil. Venezuela thus took an enormous step to possess a revolutionary financing mechanism that no foreign power can impose sanctions on, or boycott the arrival of capital. In that sense, the Petro is a clear victory for President Maduro.

With regard to country risk, it should not be forgotten that, in the last four years, as already stated, Caracas honored all its debt payment commitments, without exception, for more than US$74 billion, which should have drastically reduced the country risk. Well, there is no risk in lending to Venezuela as it religiously pays all its debts. However, the country risk has continued to increase. Currently, according to the JP Morgan bank, its country risk is 4,820 points, that is, thirty-eight times higher than that of Chile, which has the same debt /GDP ratio as Venezuela. So, Caracas is being made to pay high cost for having democratically chosen a socialist political system.

It should be added that in the midst of all these battles, despite the overall breakdown of model oil dependence, the President was particularly concerned that Bolivarian socialism would not be detained and that no one was missing school, work, shelter, care doctors, income, food. The revolutionary government did not stop ﬁnancing fundamental public works, nor did they stop building housing. In 2017, more than 570,000 homes were delivered. The Barrio Adentro Mission and all the Social Missions were maintained. The Plan Siembra planting program was consolidated. The Sovereign Supply Mission extended. The Sovereign Field fairs multiplied. In the middle of so many storms, President Maduro achieved the social miracle of saving the country. The counterrevolution could not stop the advance of socialism.

As for the banking blockade, throughout 2017, and particularly after the sanctions of Donald Trump, the unilateral cancellations of contracts multiplied. In July, for example, the payment agent Delaware reported that its correspondent bank, the PNC Bank of the United States, refused to receive funds from PDVSA. In August, Novo Banco de Portugal notiﬁed Caracas of the impossibility of carrying out operations in dollars due to the blockade of the U.S. intermediary banks. Later, the Bank of China Frankfurt, a Caracas ally, could not pay US$15 million owed by Venezuela to the Canadian mining company Gold Reserve. In November, more than US$39 million - a payment of 23 purchase operations of food destined to the Christmas holidays - were returned to Caracas because the intermediary banks of the suppliers did not accept money from Venezuela.

In that regard, the Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAP), centralized direct distribution model continued to evolve throughout the country and reach four million Venezuelans from popular sectors who are being protected from the shortages caused by the economic war.

On the other hand, in early September, it was learned that the ﬁnancial company Euroclear, a subsidiary of the U.S. bank JP Morgan, blocked a payment of US$1.2 billion made by the Bolivarian government to buy medicines and food. This prevented the acquisition of 300,000 doses of insulin. At the same time, a Colombian laboratory, belonging to the Swedish group BSN Medical, refused to accept the payment by Venezuela of a shipment of primaquine, medicine for the treatment of malaria.

In addition, throughout 2017 President Maduro launched new social initiatives. The most spectacular was the Carnet de la Patria, a new identiﬁcation document that uses QR codes to identify the 21

such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, etc. All these weapons of mass manipulation try to degrade the ﬁgure of the President and manipulate the Venezuelan reality, invisibilize the level of real support of broad sectors of the population towards the president, and hide the violence of the opposition. The objective is political: to defeat Bolivarian Venezuela, a key player in the global system, not only because of its considerable wealth but, above all, because of its revolutionary social model. And obviously because of its geopolitical importance as an anti-imperialist power of regional inﬂuence.

socioeconomic status of citizens and through this provide favorable access to the socialist missions for families in need. At the end of December 2017, a total of 16.5 million citizens had registered for the Carnet de la Patria. The President also promoted the creation of the 'Somos Venezuela' movement in order to speed up the process of allocating social aid. The 200,000 volunteers of 'Somos Venezuela' have as their task the identiﬁcation, house by house, of the needs of the registered families. They then allocate aid to families according to the real needs. Another of the important objectives of the 'Somos Venezuela' movement is to guarantee 100 percent of pensioners throughout the country, as Nicolas Maduro promised.

So far, all those plans to ruin Nicolas Maduro have failed. As he himself said: "Imperialism has not been able to suﬀocate us, nor can it be against the Bolivarian Revolution in any of the ﬁelds that seek us." On the contrary, the President has been strengthened in 2017.

The President also proposed the 'Youth Gig' plan aimed at young people aged between 15 and 35 years old, with a view to incorporating them into employment ﬁelds aimed at satisfying human needs identiﬁed through the Carnet de la Patria areas, and framed in the 'Somos Venezuela' movement. The plan is aimed, in particular, at unemployed university students, out-of-school youth, single mothers with family responsibilities, and young people living on the street. It is estimated that this new plan will generate some 800,000 jobs.

This has allowed him to resume the strategic initiative for the pacification of the country. Concerned about defending the great national interests, and adhering to the principles of honesty and humility, Nicolas Maduro has proposed sitting down with the opposition at the negotiating table and resuming dialogue on the basis of respect and mutual recognition. This time in the neutral scenario of Santo Domingo, with the idea of restoring a permanent national negotiation as a democratic method to defend the best interests of the nation and to regulate the conflict that naturally arises from political differences in the midst of a revolution. Such progress towards peace has been perhaps the President's most appreciated victory.

All these social advances constituted, without any doubt, some of the most prized victories of President Maduro in 2017. We could also mention the successes obtained in the ﬁeld of foreign policy, in particular the extraordinary international tour of the President in October, through Belarus, Algeria, Russia and Turkey, which led to the successful signing of important bilateral agreements aimed at winning the battle against economic warfare. Or the incessant negotiations maintained by the President with the oil producing countries (OPEC and non-OPEC) that permitted a spectacular increase in barrel prices by more than 23 percent in 2017!

In this heroic year of brutal attacks and inﬁnite aggressions, Chavismo has demonstrated its strength and ability to excel. And it has managed to expand its base of support, increasing the political and social forces in favor of the revolution. There it stands, more solid than ever. Which means a relief and a hope for all of Latin America. Despite his enemies, President Nicolas Maduro has conﬁrmed - with his twelve brilliant victories of 2017 - that he continues to be, as his followers say, "indestructible."

We could also mention the great oﬀensive against corruption that ﬁnally began in November with the announcement of several dozens of spectacular arrests among the top management and executives of Pdvsa and Citgo, including front-line leaders. Nothing similar had happened in a hundred years of Venezuelan oil industry. This was undoubtedly the most commented on victory of President Maduro at the end of 2017.

www.telesurtv.net The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

To conclude, it is necessary to point out again that the destruction of the image of Nicolas Maduro is the main purpose of the world propaganda campaign directed by large media corporations. Without forgetting the permanent digital war in the internet through multiple platforms on the web, and social networks

By Ignacio Ramonet Miguez:

Is a Spanish journalist and writer and was the editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique from 1991 until March 2008

Summary

Victories of President Maduro in 2017

1. Faced with the attempt of a parliamentary coup: Soliders of Integral Action Zamora Antiimperialist 200. Unity FANB, Government, PSUV and the People

7. Faced with the intention of Venezuela to remain in Default and financially isolated, a commission was created to consolidate the refinancing and restructuring of external debt

2. Faced with the "Great Marchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;â&#x20AC;&#x2122; called by the opposition: The remains of Fabricio Ojeda were transferred to the National Pantheon accompanied by thousands of Caracans

8. Faced with the blockade against acquiring medicines: The urgent arrival to the country of important shipments of insulin coming from India was announced

3. Faced with the attempt to apply the Democratic Charter in the country: The diplomatic solidarity of most of the Latin American and Caribbean States was achieved

9. Against the financial blockade, The creation of Petro was announced

4. Faced with the guarimbas: Call for mass action and installation of the National Constituency Assembly

10. All the social advances achieved thanks to the Carnet of the Fatherland, We are Venezuela, Chamba Youth Plan and the CLAP

5. The victory of October 15th together with the conquest of 18 governorates and later on that of Zulia

11. Great Offensive against Corruption

6. The victory of the municipal elections of December 10 with the obtaining of 308 mayorships out of 335 (93% of the municipalities of the country)

12. Brought the opposition to the table of dialogue

DEMOCRACY IN VENEZUELA: THREE ELECTIONS, THREE VICTORIES

S N O I T C ELE

"We can conceive a world dominated by an invisible tyranny that uses forms of democratic government" Kenneth Boulding

looting those countries. The nascent capitalist development realized early on that in order to consolidate itself, expansion and territorial domination were necessary. Svetlan Todorov in his book "The Conquest of America and the other" points out that Spanish imperialism, the most powerful of its time, plucked blood and ﬁre from its colonies in America, between 1500 and 1560, 184 thousand tons of gold and 16 million tons of silver, enough to give the ﬁnal boost and consolidate the incipient European capitalism.

The dominance of ﬁnancial capital over the media has tried to make us believe that democracy only exists in some countries: Called First World (USA, Europe, Canada, Australia), while the rest (Latin America, Africa, Asia) are weak and inferior countries and whose forms of governments must be modiﬁed by force under their tutelage. Since the French Revolution has tried to relate democracy with progress, and progress with capitalism; that is, progress and democracy with a market as Samir Amin states.

In times of post modernity, the USA and the European Union have chosen to place or allow docile rulers that respond to their interests and have been given the task of persecuting, harassing and threatening other "dictators". But on this occasion, the latter are not their partners; they have stopped the despoliation and are opposed to the savage and brutal sacking, the only way to overcome backwardness and poverty. But, through a real plot of infamies and lies, they have tried to discredit authentic democracies as it is happening with the Bolivarian Democracy in Venezuela.

But this propaganda concept is not a reality. It is enough to walk through the string of dictatorships, imposed and sustained mainly by the USA, Great Britain and France in Africa, Asia and Latin America, to realize that it is a clever stratagem of neo-colonial domination taking as an alibi the Cold War. The names of Somoza, Duvalier, Trujillo, Batista and Pinochet in Latin America; Idi Amin, Bokassa, Mobutu in Africa: and Suharto, Dihn Diem in Asia are known for their bloody career and the complicity of those powers that never invoked any democracy before the most appalling crimes committed by this list of murderers.

With the advent of the Chavez Revolution, we begun to stop the negative data of our population. According to studies by FUNDACREDESA, a strategic research center long before the Bolivarian Revolution, the following data was released in 1993: 8% were living in opulence; the middle class was reduced to 14%; 70% of the population was in a state of poverty, of which

They were his partners and hid their faces in the face of the most frightful crimes and spoliation. While the old and new settlers rubbed their hands 24

41.72 were living on the verge of misery; children without schools and with severe malnutrition. The Bolivarian Revolution immediately begun to work hard towards reversing these negative data, thus achieving gains in social investment.

Three decisive electoral victories point to Venezuela as a democratic country and President Nicolás Maduro as a champion of democracy: the convocation to the National Constituent Assembly of which 8,000,300,000 voters participated and most importantly, which brought a stop of the violence. The elections held for voting in governors and later mayors, brought a great popular victory to the Bolivarian Revolution and an overwhelming defeat to the enemies.

Since then, the government of the United States of America has not stopped looking for a pretext in order to attack Venezuela. All their aggressions range from permanent disqualiﬁcation, interventionism, ﬁnancing of violence, ignorance of state agencies, the economic war that seeks to bend our people by hunger, to the threats of military aggression uttered by President Donald Trump.

For a " a ruthless dictator" it would be extremely hard for three consecutive elections to be held in less than half a year, for right-wing leaders to openly call for the overthrow of a democratically elected government, that the press expresses itself to the president and other revolutionary leaders through insult and infamy and there is no retaliation by them going to look for them in their homes at night and throw them into dungeons or kill them, protesters who go out into the streets in "peaceful" demonstrations armed with mortars and other firearms and set buses on fire, universities and day-care centers, protesters who attack an important military barrack with mortars and heavy weapons without obtaining fire response, protesters that burn human beings for being black, so that the concept of "dictatorship and dictator" goes through a deep revision and is not used for the worst projects that have filled our Latin America with blood.

The people of Venezuelan however, have responded with a high degree of consciousness. Three electoral events testify to this, while at the same time conﬁrming the strength of their democratic institutions in full exercise. In the face of the violence unleashed by neo-fascist parties that operate freely and express themselves freely, the government of President Nicolás Maduro has given a demonstration of its democratic spirit and in the period between April and July of 2017 did not resort to violent repression which was the cause of more than 120 deaths, mostly caused by the same protesters, being that the excess number of unauthorized police excess was dealt with accordingly by the Venezuelan justice.

By: Mr. Alfredo Lugo First Secretary, Embassy of Venezuela in Nairobi

2018: Latin America’s Electoral Roller Coaster "I say this... because I take it for granted that the US government will continue to interfere in the internal aﬀairs of Latin America unless unity becomes a reality, writes

Four Cases Previewed In 2018, 12 Latin American countries from Mexico to Peru will hold elections at diﬀerent levels: presidential, legislative and municipal. Of the 12 elections, seven are for their respective presidents in Costa Rica, Cuba, Paraguay, Colombia, México, Brazil, and Venezuela. What are the expectations? I will focus on four of those elections: Mexico and Colombia, because they might represent more typical or traditional electoral processes in Latin America and also because they have certain relevance in the region; and Venezuela and Cuba, because they operate on distinct social premises, and they represent unique processes based on special circumstances, like Venezuela, or based on independently developed social model like Cuba.

President Trump threatening with deportations and a closure of the border with a solid wall, that by all accounts is a contentious issue among Mexicans on both sides of the border. On the trade front, Mexico is under the insecurity of what will happen with the NAFTA agreement. Will it be revised or canceled altogether? This may turn out to be a divisive issue among voters bound to sway them to one or the other candidate if they even make it to the polls. Perhaps AMLO’s popularity is making a few people in Washington nervous when they also hear that he is considered to be another Hugo Chavez determined to increase public expenditures to ﬁght poverty, which is not a minor issue in Mexico.

Mexico

It is important to mention that there are no socialist parties candidates because parties like the Communist Party of Mexico or the Workers’ Revolutionary Party are not oﬃcially registered and therefore do not take part in the elections.

Geopolitical analyst Andrew Korybko wrote a year ago in The Duran, “Donald Trump is inspiring a new generation of Mexican nationalists.” This may well explain the reported lead of left-leaning nationalist Andrés Manuel López Obrador (nicknamed AMLO) at the polls. He had been an unsuccessful challenger in previous presidential elections and is now running as a candidate for the coalition Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (MORENA – Movement of National Regeneration).

Colombia

Elections in Colombia will take place in May and cannot be dismissed because the country is the main U.S. political-military grip on the rest of the region through its U.S. bases, and therefore holds unique inﬂuence. Venezuela is surely watching this outcome with some concern. That situation is expected to continue even when candidates are forming new alliances to distance themselves from the old conservative guard, and a brand new political party is in the picture.

His next contender may be rightwing Ricardo Anaya, candidate for an odd coalition of the conservative Partido Accion Nacional (PAN – National Action Party) – that formed government twice with Vicente Fox (2000) and Felipe Calderon (2006) – and the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD – Party of the Democratic Revolution).

The former FARC, now a political party using the same initials but renamed Fuerza Alternativa Revolucionaria del Común (Alternative Revolutionary Force of the Common [People]), will participate in the

The reasons why elections in Mexico are important are multiple. On the social front, Mexico is the recipient of the new anti-immigration policy of U.S. 26

wellbeing of the population and has consistently called to peace and dialogue with the opposition despite the street violence of 2017.

elections following the recent Peace Accord with the Santos government. The FARC ex-commander, Rodrigo Londoño (aka Timoleón Jiménez or Timochenko) is now a presidential candidate. His chances of winning the elections are not great but he deﬁnitely represents a diﬀerent option if Colombians would like to seek one. Londoño has a clear advantage among farmers and indigenous people in small rural areas where the FARC had support, however, he must appeal to the urban population with clear programmatic alternatives in order to hold real chances.

However, the extreme rightwing opposition has refused to participate in most elections and has claimed electoral fraud without any foundation. This attitude is likely hiding the lack of popular support that would become evident if the largely divided opposition participated in elections. So far Venezuelans have given a clear mandate to Chavismo and the governing party Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV - United Socialist Party of Venezuela) in what is called Bolivarian Revolution. The ideology is based on an unrelenting sense of sovereignty and independence with a strong commitment to a constitutional and democratic process leading to peace, and a declared rejection of any type of U.S. intervention.

Supporters listen as FARC leader Rodrigo Londono, known by his nom de guerre Timochenko, speaks during the launching of the new political party Revolutionary Alternative Common Force, at the Plaza de Bolivar in Bogota, Colombia Sept 1, 2017. Reuters

Cuba

The fourth important election in 2018 will take place in Cuba on April 19. Although the election is for the more than 600 members of the National Assembly of the People’s Power, the event has implications for the country’s presidency due to its unique process.

The other aspiring candidates try hard to appear to be diﬀerent to the Colombian voters by forming new coalitions. For instance, the rightwing Centro Democrático (Democratic Centre), founded by former president Alvaro Uribe, has elected Ivan Duque as its presidential candidate and has an alliance with the Partido Conservador (Conservative Party), but they both coincide in their ﬁerce opposition to the Peace Accord and in favour of giving a tax break to multinationals.

Raul Castro declared last year that he would not seek re-election to the legislature; so Cubans can expect a change in what is called the “historical leadership”. But according to observers, the change will have no transcendence on the Cuban social system and people’s lives.

On the other hand, the center-left Coalición Colombia (Colombia Coalition) will present Sergio Fajardo as its candidate. It is another alliance of several parties that favors the Peace Accord with the FARC and promises to ﬁght corruption.

There are several reasons that make the Cuban election unique: 1) There are no political parties involved, not even the Communist Party of Cuba can nominate or have candidates. 2) Individual candidates (who are not required to be party members) are nominated at their community (district) level and elected by direct secret ballot to become members of the National Assembly of People’s Power (or Parliament) for a ﬁve-year mandate. 3) Half of the National Assembly members must come from social organizations, i.e. students, women, labor organizations, etc. in order to have a cross-sectional representation of society in the decision making. 4) It is the newly elected legislative body that elects, from among themselves, 31 members of the Council of State to run the daily tasks of the country while the National Assembly is not in session. 5) The Council of State, in turn, selects who will be the president of the country and other high ministerial oﬃcials.

It is unlikely that the president will be elected in the ﬁrst round of polls. The second round will take place in June.

Venezuela

If the previous two elections in Venezuela in 2017 for governors and city mayors are any indication, without doubt, Nicolas Maduro will be re-elected as president in November 2018 if not earlier. Despite the serious U.S. threats of military intervention, severe sanctions and virtual financial blockade affecting Venezuela’s oil industry, Maduro’s main political platform is based on social programs, together with fighting corruption and strengthening the economy that is now seriously critical. The Maduro government has shown a tangible commitment to the 27

As mentioned before, the accusations of electoral fraud from some elements of a divided opposition may be more a pretext for excluding themselves from the election process for fear of showing the poor popular support they have. In the presidential elections this year it is expected that the Venezuelan opposition will do the same.

Because of this unique electoral process with no direct vote for a predetermined presidential candidate, predictions are also more complex. The one thing that we can safely predict is that Cuba will remain socialist for the foreseeable future.

Concluding remarks

There is no doubt that in 2017 Operation Condor 2.0 has been underway in Latin America and has caused a regressive impact in the region, which makes the round of new elections in 2018 particularly important to watch.

However, at the time of writing, conversations on “coexistence” and “combating economic aggression” are taking place in the Dominican Republic between some more moderate groups of the opposition and the government. That may change things as an agreement may be reached and other presidential candidates may be postulated.

Under normal circumstances in democratic and internally determined processes, we would focus on the political issues been oﬀered by candidates and political parties during their election campaigns. However, elections in Latin America, and in many other countries for that matter, present more intricacies and often are those intricacies that determine the outcome of presidential elections. More speciﬁcally, lack of transparency, foreign interference or electoral fraud is a real prospect when democracy is just a handy label but not the practice. Let the current situation in Honduras be a case in point.

From an international point of view it is disconcerting that some governments like Canada, the U.S. and the European Union would take sides and become protectors of the more radical opposition instead of supporting those within the opposition that are willing to negotiate. This requires a separate analysis but what transpires is not edifying for those “democratic” governments. Outstanding as an outlier is the electoral system in Cuba. It is rarely spoken about and when it is, the mainstream media describes it as “not democratic”. But there is more to it than meets the eye. Most strikingly, at no point, there is money involved in the process. In fact, there are no expensive political campaigns and, with a few exceptions, National Assembly members do not receive additional pay aside from what they perceive from their regular job, which they maintain during their mandate. In such an open and decentralized system with no parties or money interest, it is hard to conceive any possibility of fraud. In fact, if the trend of previous elections continues, more than 95% of the population will turn out to vote freely with only a fraction of spoiled ballots. This must be looked at in comparison with the voters turn out in multiparty systems.

If Mexicans would dare to lean to the left with Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an electoral fraud becomes a real possibility as political analyst Andrew Korybko suggests and AMLO himself fears. In fact, a U.S. pre-emptive info war, which is accusing Russia of “meddling” in the Mexican elections, has already started. We all know where that leads. A similar situation could arise in Colombia where voters could see the FARC, the new player in the game, as a clear break from the traditional bourgeois parties and their morphed versions. However, given the lack of support for the referendum on the peace accord in 2016 with less than 50% of votes and about 60% abstentions, the rightwing parties may be feeling safe.

Finally, the year 2018 might turn out to be a very busy year for the U.S. State Department, CIA and the Southern Command headquarters (SOUTHCOM), located in Doral, Florida. To watch and control so many elections requires a high state of alert, intelligence gathering, and readiness to intervene in order to defend their kind of “democracy.” I say this quite consciously because I take it for granted that the US government will continue to interfere in the internal aﬀairs of Latin America unless unity, “not only economic but political,” becomes a reality, as Fidel Castro said.

In a diﬀerent scenario, Colombians, especially those who have normally abstained from voting, may be alerted and react to the fact that, in the same year that the Santos government was recognized for its achievement on peace, 170 social leaders were murdered in the country. Contrary to mainstream media propaganda, Venezuela has proven to have transparent and fair elections. When in 2015 the governing party, PSUV, lost the majority in the National Assembly, there was no cry of fraud. Instead, the rightwing Assembly botched its opportunity of push their political agenda by attempting to swear in deputies fraudulently for which it was declared in contempt.

www.telesurtv.net 28

Korea’s tensions

Tokyo warns of war, US wary as Seoul asserts itself and pursues peace talks with North As South and North Korea begin a cautious, deliberate and "sincere" process of peace talks in the hope of defusing regional tensions in a neighborly manner, right-wing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has suddenly sounded alarm bells over the "unacceptable" moves by Pyongyang, playing up its nuclear program and weapons development as a reason to bolster Japanese military might in a move he claims would protect the Japanese people.

side of the village of Panmunjom located in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between the two nations, according to South Korea's reuniﬁcation ministry.

The message comes at the start of a potential breakdown in relations between Japan and South Korea, both of whose present governments were formed under the close supervision of post-World War II U.S. occupation authorities and who have since played crucial roles as lynchpins in the United States' Asia-Paciﬁc security architecture. Japan, like its ally Washington, has looked askance toward the Korean Peninsula as Seoul has demanded redress for Tokyo's historic crimes while warmly greeting Pyongyang's icebreaking gestures toward rapprochement.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the security environment surrounding Japan is at its severest since World War Two," Prime Minister Abe told a New Year news conference. "I will protect the people's lives and peaceful living in any situation."

North and South Korea announced Friday that they will hold oﬃcial peace talks on Jan. 9 after Pyongyang sent a statement accepting Seoul's oﬀer for dialogue next week. The person-to-person talks will be held at the Peace House, located on the South Korean

Moon came to power in May promising improved inter-Korean relations and an assertive government that puts Korean interests over foreign ones after the removal of his disgraced predecessor, Park Geun-hye.

Despite the moves toward ending the longest war on the continent, Japan still claims that it faces the possibility of regional conﬂict, potentially the worst since World War II when Axis Japan was a principal aggressor against nations such as Korea and China.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in met women who were forced to work in Japanese wartime brothels, sex slaves euphemistically termed "comfort women" by Japan. As many as 200,000 Korean women were among those across Asia who were forced to work in the brothels.

Moon has criticized Park's right-wing conservative government for striking a deal with Japan over a 2015 settlement on the issue of sexual slavery by Imperial Japanese forces. He called it a "political agreement that excludes victims and the public" and violates general principles in international society concerning resolution of historical grievances. Under the 2015 deal, Japan apologized to victims and provided 1 billion yen (US$8.8 million) to a fund to help the former sex-slaves in exchange for South Korea providing no support for an overseas statue-raising campaign by advocates of the "comfort women" and agreeing to refrain from calling the women "sex slaves" on the world stage. While the United States stood ﬁrmly behind the deal – and, some argue, pushed for Seoul to accept it – the UN Committee Against Torture has recommended its revision, citing a failure "to provide redress and reparation, including compensation and the means for as full rehabilitation as possible as well as the right to truth and assurances of non-repetition." The 32 surviving women want Japan to take legal, binding responsibility for its actions, and some have even told Moon that the 2015 pay-out should be returned to Japan. Japan, however, has said that the agreement resulted from "legitimate negotiations" and any revisal of the deal would render bilateral relations between Seoul and Tokyo "unmanageable." Moon's public complaints about the deal has raised consternation in Japan, where media reported that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may decide not to visit South Korea for the Winter Olympics there next month. The rancor is the latest product of the bitter history between the two countries, including Japanese colonization of the Korean peninsula. Abe, along with a large percentage of lawmakers sitting in the Japanese Diet or parliament, adheres to the belligerent ideology of Nippon Kaigi, or Japan Conference, an ultra-nationalist society founded in 1997 that seeks a return to Japan's pre-WWII “beautiful traditional national character.” Known for extolling

and attempting to rehabilitate the bloody policies of the Empire of Japan, the group represents the most aggressive layers of Japanese elites and counts in its ranks prominent businessmen, bureaucrats, academics and ultra-right lawmakers. For Nippon Kaigi, Japan has had its "legs and hands bound" by the US-drafted 1947 "paciﬁst" Constitution that restricts the country's international role to what it calls "humiliating apology diplomacy" enshrining the country's wartime atrocities as well as the humiliation of abject defeat and unconditional surrender that Imperial Japanese policies culminated in. According to a 2014 report by the US Congress, Nippon Kaigi believes "Japan should be applauded for liberating much of East Asia from Western colonial powers, that the 1946-1948 Tokyo War Crimes tribunals were illegitimate, and that the killings by Imperial Japanese troops during the 1937 'Nanjing massacre' were exaggerated or fabricated." Nippon Kaigi also enjoys close ties to the anti-immigrant Zaitokukai, a hard-right extremist group that has held anti-Korean, xenophobic marches advocating violent attacks on and killings of Tokyo's Korean community, many of whom are sympathetic to North Korea. For years, Seoul and Tokyo have been at loggerheads over the matter of comfort women — the thousands of girls and women, many of them Korean, who were forced to work in Japan's military brothels during World War II. The two countries reached an agreement in 2015, in which Tokyo shelled out US$8.8 million to a fund for victims, but Moon on Thursday criticized that deal, saying it "cannot solve the comfort women issue." His comments came after a South Korean panel concluded that the 2015 treaty failed to meet victims' demands for compensation. In response to the panel's ﬁndings, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono warned that any attempt to revise the agreement "would make Japan's ties with South Korea unmanageable." The matter is a topic of national importance in South Korea, where protesters last week called on the government to nullify the deal. The move is considered crucial to Moon's populist base. "We will see a fracture develop in terms of US-South Korea-Japanese cooperation in dealing with the North," Stephen Nagy, a senior associate professor at Tokyo's International Christian University, told CNBC. "Pressing Tokyo on the comfort women issue while attempting to engage Pyongyang has the risks of alienating Tokyo from Seoul."

Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force's Izumo carrier. | Photo: Reuters

Also last month, Abe's cabinet formally committed to expanding its ballistic missile defense system with US-made ground-based Aegis radar stations and interceptors.

Meanwhile, regional tensions rose in 2017 as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's oﬃcial title, conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test in September. In November, it then said it had successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach all of the US mainland. The country held a record number of missile tests throughout 2017.

Despite Japan's claims for a need to boost militarization of the region, regional powers such as China are hoping renewed ties between North and South Korea following Pyongyang's overtures will bear fruit and calm tensions in East Asia.

While Kim Jong Un noted that he had a "nuclear button" on his desk during his New Year's Day address, he also declared that the DPRK had achieved the "historic accomplishment" of nuclear power and was prepared to move onto economic development. He pointedly said that "Pyongyang would not use nuclear weapons against any nation unless its sovereignty is encroached upon by any hostile force with nuclear weapons," an important message that went almost entirely unnoticed by Japanese media.

The "peace oﬀensive" has not been warmly received in Tokyo or Washington, yet President Trump had no choice but to relent Thursday when South Korean President Moon requested that joint South Korea-US military exercises be placed on hold during the upcoming Pyeongchang Winter Olympics to ensure that the DPRK does not respond with another missile test. In essence Trump agreed, albeit temporarily, to what the Chinese and Russians had long urged Washington to accept: the so-called "double freeze" plan

For Abe and his right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, the alleged "threat" posed by the DPRK's deterrence arsenal and an increasingly powerful China has provided a covenient excuse to advance the Japanese right's long-held ambition of revising Article 9 of the US-drafted 1947 Constitution, which renounced the use of war or threats of force to settle international disputes and outlawed the maintenance of the country's land, sea and air forces.

In a press release, the White House noted that the agreement intended to "de-conﬂict the Olympics." Regardless, Washington remains suspicious of the sunshine dawning on Seoul-Pyongyang ties. An editorial in China's state-owned Global Times noted: "The (hostile) relationship between the United States and North Korea is at a critical stage where it cannot continue in such a fashion. And South Korea can no longer endure the pain their relationship has caused. Seoul has never wanted a war on the peninsula and took it upon themselves to resume contact without asking for Washington's permission, but because of South Korea's allied bond with the United States and Japan, they view Seoul's recent action as an act of cowardice and deceit.

The document was an attempt by occupying Allied forces to prevent the country from directing its still-formidable industrial base toward reassembling the war machine that waged aggressive campaigns across Asia in an alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The campaign claimed well over 10 million civilian lives as the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy committed war crimes, including genocide, in pursuit of expansionist attempts to conquer the region.

"It is interesting that as one of the important parties directly involved with the peninsula crisis, South Korea does not play a dominant role in shaping or inﬂuencing its course. Instead, South Korea is viewed as a strategic military force readily available in the event of a conﬂict on the peninsula or anywhere throughout the Northeast Asian region."

But Japanese governments, encouraged by Washington, have interpreted the Constitution to allow a military exclusively for "self-defense." Japan's well-funded military currently retains over 227,000 personnel and enjoys an arsenal stocked with various high-tech weapons. "I would like this to be a year in which public debate over a constitutional revision will be deepened further," Abe said in his address. However, the public remains divided over changes to the charter. In a year-end analysis by Asahi Shimbun, the Japanese daily noted that Prime Minister Abe's government is exploring the possibility of converting the Maritime Self-Defense Force helicopter carrier Izumo into a full-blown aircraft carrier capable of having F-35B ﬁghters operate from its ﬂat-top deck.

www.telesurtv.net The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

Opinion: Palestine/Israel conflict

In search of the 'merits' of colonialism

Singapore's Raﬄes Hotel, which opened in 1887, is named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raﬄes, who established British colony on the island [File photo: Wong Maye-E/AP]

British newspapers these days bristle with opinion pieces waxing sentimental about Britain's colonial past. One Oxford don who is launching a research project to celebrate the ethical merits of the British empire admonishes the readers of The Times to not "feel guilty about our colonial history".

and brutally exploited workers, peasants, sailors, soldiers and the like for proﬁts shipped to banks in London; not to mention the use of Singapore's port as a gloriﬁed fuel depot for colonial navies, and the deployment of military force in and around the colony to quash any resistance to the empire.

After all, remembering imperial atrocities could stop the British from tackling the world's problems, presumably at the point of bayonets or under an umbrella of aerial bombardment.

And more often than not, colonialism has left behind hardened sectarian and ethnic divisions and racialised class structures. The authoritarian rulers to whom the colonial masters handed the keys to the city pay lip service to democracy but stiﬂe political participation by unruly publics; and in this they are supported by former colonial masters who value their "stability" and loyalty.

Another opinion piece, woefully ignorant of Singapore's history or of British imperial ventures more generally, tells us that "Singapore shows us that colonialism can work".

Apologists for empire put the economic and ecological devastation, de-development, exploitation, and global inequalities wrought by colonialism on one side of the ledger. On the other side, they acclaim the railways, the parliaments, the infrastructures, and the modern bureaucracies.

The author does mention its rise on the back of opium trade, but does not seem to know that Singapore, like so many other Indian Ocean port cities, was ruthlessly exploited by the British, and if the colony became prosperous, it was not because of the glories of imperial management or economic liberalism.

The Victorian buildings the author praises were constructed by local and regional merchant capital (not imperial investment), using local workers, some of whom were forced into bonded, indentured or corvee labour.

In their hagiographies of the empire, there is an echo of the famous scene in The Life of Brian in which a Judean revolutionary played by John Cleese issues a call to arms: "What have the Romans ever done for us?" His comrades respond by listing the range of infrastructures the Roman Empire had built in ancient Judea: aqueducts, roads, sanitation, irrigation and so on.

If anything, throughout the British colonies, imperial intervention stunted economic growth, introduced limitations and barriers to already existing trade,

Fascinatingly, this Monty Python scene is based on a Talmudic passage in which a Rabbi Judah also praises Roman infrastructural projects. Rabbi

The 'merits' of colonialism: railroads and parliaments

Simon, however, challenges this simplistic obsequy to empire, "All that they made they made for themselves; they built market-places, to set harlots in them; baths, to rejuvenate themselves; bridges, to levy tolls for them." The Oxbridge-educated members of the Python comedy collective chose to exclude this critical Talmudic passage from their ﬁlm. The arguments of subsequent cheerleaders for empire and colonialism similarly elide the problems fundamental to such colonial policies.

A statue of Sir Stamford Raﬄes stands next to the Victoria Theatre in the Central Business District of Singapore [Reuters/Edgar Su]

Another false claim of a colonial 'success' story

these technologies were either developed by the military's intelligence research arm, or via incubators paid for by the Israeli military.

The colonisation of Palestine is an exemplary instance of the reality of colonialism belying successive colonial regimes' claims of their developmental aims. The oft-repeated Zionist cliche that the European settlers colonised "a land without a people" and "made the desert bloom" ignores that the earliest colonies were abjectly failed experiments in agriculture.

The Israeli government has in turn exported these technologies to some of the most repressive regimes around the world, including Arab states with which it supposedly does not have any relations. Gaza and the West Bank have been repeatedly used as laboratories in which instruments of colonial suppression could be forged.

It was only after the early 20th century colonists began observing and taking lessons from Palestinian peasants and farmers that they were able to adapt their methods to the semi-arid ecological conditions in a countryside with which they were unfamiliar.

Beyond technology, brick-and-mortar techniques of military control have been the bread and butter of Israeli colonisation of Palestine. The concrete wall that encircles Palestinian enclaves in the Occupied Territories is a prime example. Interestingly, the idea of using a wall as a counterinsurgency measure was a gift given to the Israeli military by their early colonial sponsors. The British Mandatory government, with the help of the Jewish labour union, Histadrut, was the ﬁrst governmentto build a wall in Palestine in the 1930s, as a means of quelling rebellion by Palestinians.

From very early on, the colonists planted foreign species of plants throughout the parts of the country occupied in the 1948 Nakba ("Catastrophe"). This sowing of alpine vegetationaccelerated after the establishment of the Israelis state on lands and territories from which the majority of its Palestinian inhabitants were forcibly expelled between 1947 and 1949.

The Israeli military has even used supposedly non-military infrastructures such as roads as a means of expanding settlements in the West Bank territorially and as a way to control the movement of Palestinians there. And so much of the construction, agricultural prosperity, technological innovation, and economic development of which the Israeli boasts has been the result of abuse of underpaid, exploited, heavily controlled Palestinian labour force (whether from the Occupied Territories or citizens of Israel).

These pine forests deliberately erased the footprints of demolished Palestinian villages. In parts of the country, they also proved to be a drain on the country's aquifers, more suited to hardy species of ﬂora and trees adapted to surviving the semi-arid conditions of the Mediterranean landscapes. Israeli politicians today boast more about the country's hi-tech industry than its agricultural advances. Whatever innovations have occurred in that sector have come out of massive Israeli military investment in technologies of repression.

These Palestinian workers, even those holding Israeli citizenship, are paid far less than their Jewish counterparts and can be ﬁred at will.

Smart city algorithms, facial recognition software, drones, robotics, surveillance applications, wiretapping systems, data-mining programmes used to collate open-source data about ordinary people, all

The prosperity of one people in Israel is predicated on the continued colonial control of another people, the Palestinians, on their enduring economic exploitation, and on the continued violence against them. 33

More than a decade ago, Paul Gilroy caustically and accurately described a British attachment to "a resolutely air-brushed version of colonial history in which gunboat diplomacy was moral uplift, civilising missions were completed, the trains ran on time and the natives appreciated the value of stability."

However, the continued colonisation of Palestinian, an early 20th century instance of British colonialism morphed into Israeli settler colonial project, shows that colonialism is anything but the glorious developmental mission its advocates acclaim.

The intervening time has only made this nostalgia more fervent, as memories of the catastrophic US and European interventions in Iraq have begun to fade, and as Brexit has brought out the worst of Little Englander xenophobia and fantasies of past glory (which only ever existed for a sliver of the British population at any rate).

www.aljazeera.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reďŹ&#x201A;ect the oďŹ&#x192;cial position of the Embassy

Venezuela condemns US decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel

World leaders line up to condemn President Donald Trump’s decision to formally recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to later move the U.S. embassy there. They painted the decision as unilateral and outside the vision of a negotiated peace between Israelis and Palestinians and warned of heightened tensions or even violence across the Middle East. The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros, on behalf of the Bolivarian People and Government, expressed his strongest repudiation and condemnation of the arbitrary decision of the US government to recognize the City of Jerusalem, illegally occupied by Israel, as capital of the State of Israel, as well as to transfer to that City its Embassy. Venezuela rejects any arbitrary, unilateral and un-consulted action that seeks to strengthen the illegal presence of the State of Israel over the Occupied Palestinian Territory and its de facto annexation of the City of Jerusalem, facts that undermine the sovereignty of the Palestinian State and its people, undermine the peace and stability of the region, and tragically influence international efforts in search of a dialogued, peaceful, just and long-lasting solution. Venezuela, from the Presidency of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries (NAM), and as a brotherly country of the just causes of the Arab world, considers this fact as a flagrant violation of International Law, for which it calls for attachment to the Charter of the United Nations, and all those

resolutions of the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations that have been approved in this regard, within the framework of the joint efforts of the International Community to move towards a dialogue solution and the cessation of hostilities and abuses against the Palestinian nation. In that regard, with special emphasis on resolution 2334 (2016), in which the Security Council stated that it “will not recognize any change to the lines of June 4, 1967, even with regard to Jerusalem, which are not those agreed upon by the parties through negotiations “, also calling on the parties” to refrain from acts of provocation and incitement and to make statements that inflame the mood, in order, among other things, to defuse the situation the terrain, restoring confidence, demonstrating through policies and measures a genuine commitment to the two-State solution and creating the necessary conditions to promote peace”. The Bolivarian People, historically committed to the just cause of Palestine, takes the opportunity to reaffirm their unrestricted commitment to the achievement of a dialogued, peaceful and lasting solution to the conflict, as well as for the concretion of the full sovereignty and independence of the brotherly State of Palestine , reiterating its willingness to face together with the brave Palestinian people all those arbitrary and unjust actions that, like this one, undermine the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, and only seek to continue sowing chaos in the Middle East region. www.nrv.gob.ve 35

The South should prepare for the next Financial Crisis

July. “The possibly greatest danger is a collapse in global cooperation, perhaps even an outbreak of conﬂict,” he said.

The Asian financial crisis started 20 years ago and the global financial crisis and recession 9 years back. When a new global financial crisis strikes, the developing countries could be more damaged than in the last crisis as they have become less resilient and more vulnerable. They thus need to prepare from being overwhelmed.

“That would destroy the stability of the world economy on which all depend…We in the high-income countries allowed the ﬁnancial system to destabilise our economies. We then refused to use ﬁscal and monetary stimulus strongly enough to emerge swiftly from the post-crisis economic malaise.

A debate is taking place as to whether the time is now ripe for a new crisis. Most economists and commentators think not, as an economic recovery, admittedly weak, appears to be taking place in developed economies.

“We failed to respond to the divergences in economic fortunes of the successful and less successful. These were huge mistakes. Now, as economies recover, we face new challenges: to avoid blowing up the world economy, while ensuring widely shared and sustainable growth. Alas, we seem likely to fail this set of challenges.”

On the surface, the present situation seems quite good. The US, Europe and Japan are having very good economic growth rates compared to the most recent years and China’s GDP may grow close to 7% in 2017, according to one estimate.

A comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the global economic situation and how it aﬀects developing countries is given in a recent paper by the South Centre’s chief economist Yılmaz Akyüz, assisted by Vicente Yu.

There has not been big capital outﬂows, as feared, from developing countries in response to the phasing out of the quantitative easing policies in the US and now Europe. Most mainstream economists are optimistic about world economic prospects in 2018. But below the calm surface, the waters are boiling and churning. Whether the deep-seated problems boil over shortly into full-blown crisis, or continue to fester for some time more, is hard to predict. But the world economy is in trouble.

The US and Europe have wrongly managed the aftermath of the 2008 crisis by policies that will have very adverse eﬀects on most developing countries, according to the paper, “The Financial Crisis and the Global South: Impact and Prospects.” The developing countries went through the 2008 crisis without much harm, because of certain conditions, which no longer exist.

Amidst a weak global economy recovery, many serious risks remain, wrote Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economics commentator, on 5 36

counter-cyclical policy response to deflationary shocks is much more limited than in 2009; they have significantly lost monetary policy autonomy and lost control over interest rates due to their deepened global financial integration; and flexible exchange rate regimes are no panacea in the face of financial shocks.

Meanwhile, these countries have recently built up new and dangerous vulnerabilities which expose them to serious damage when the next crisis strikes. It is thus imperative that the developing countries review their precarious situation and act to protect their economies to the extent possible to reduce the eﬀects of the new turmoil.

“Most developing economies are in a tenuous position similar to the 1970s and 1980s when the booms in capital ﬂows and commodity prices ended with a debt crisis as a result of a sharp turnaround in US monetary policy, costing them a decade in development,” warns Akyüz. It would be hard for some of them to avoid international liquidity or even debt crises and loss of growth in the event of severe ﬁnancial and trade shocks.

Akyüz says the post-2008 crisis has moved in a third wave to several emerging economies after having swept from the US to Europe. A central reason is the wrong crisis response policies of the US and Europe. “There are two major shortcomings: the reluctance to remove the debt overhang through orderly restructuring, and ﬁscal orthodoxy,” adds Akyüz. “These resulted in excessive reliance on monetary policy, with central banks going into uncharted waters including zero and negative interest rates and rapid liquidity expansion through large bond acquisitions.

Unfortunately, the South has not been effective in reflecting on these problems nor in taking collective action. Global reforms are required to prevent the major countries from transmitting the effects of their wrong policies to developing countries; and global mechanisms are needed to prevent and manage financial crises.

“These policies not only failed to secure a rapid recovery but also aggravated the global demand gap by widening inequality and global ﬁnancial fragility by producing a massive build-up of debt and speculative bubbles. They have also generated strong deﬂationary and destabilising spillovers for developing economies.”

There have been many proposals for reform in the past but hardly any action taken due to opposition from developed countries. “Now the stakes are too high for developing countries to leave the organisation of the global economy to one or two major economic powers and the multilateral institutions they control,” concludes Akyüz.

When a new crisis comes, developing countries will be harder hit than in 2008. Their resilience to external shocks is now weak, due to three factors. First, many developing economies deepened their integration into the international financial system, resulting in new vulnerabilities and high exposure to external shocks. Their corporations built up massive debt since the crisis, reaching US$25 trillion (95% of their GDP); and dollar-denominated debt securities issued by emerging economies jumped from $500 billion in 2008 to $1.25 trillion in 2016, carrying interest rate and currency risks. Moreover, foreign presence in local financial markets reached unprecedented levels, increasing their susceptibility to global financial boom-bust cycles.

If his wide-ranging analysis is correct, then what we are experiencing at the end of 2017 is the “calm before the storm.” The financial crisis that started in 2008 has never ended but has gone through twists and turns. It will eventually enter more dangerous territory due to new factors fanning the flames. The underlying causes are known, but what is yet unknown is the specific event that will trigger and ignite a new phase of the crisis, and when that will happen. When the new crisis takes place, developing countries will be in a less fortunate position to ride through it compared to 2008, so there is even less reason for complacency.

Second, the current account balance and net foreign asset positions of many developing countries have significantly deteriorated since the crisis. In most countries, foreign reserves built up recently came from capital inflows rather than trade surpluses. They are inadequate to meet large and sustained capital outflows.

Each country should analyse its own strong and weak spots, its vulnerabilities to external shocks, and prepare actions now to mitigate the crisis in advance, rather than wait for it to happen and overwhelm its economy.

Third, the countries now have limited economic policy options to respond to adverse developments from abroad. Their “ﬁscal space” for

South Bulletin 100, 27 December 2017, South Centre www.southcentre.int www.alainet.org The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

5 ways the world is pulling apart Links between nations are eroding, and divisions in society are becoming ever wider. As world leaders, including President Trump, gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Jan 2018 to discuss how to create "a shared future in a fractured world," we take a look at some of the major forces that are driving countries and people apart.

1. Inequality

Women also remain an untapped economic resource. Just 50% of women participate in the global workforce, compared to 80% of men. There’s at least one legal obstacle to women working in 90% of countries, according to the World Bank.

Most people live in countries where income inequality is growing. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting left behind. Wages at the top are rising faster than those at the bottom.

They face many hidden costs too — from the $18,000 the average American woman spends on menstruation sanitary products over her lifetime, to the “pink tax” which makes products promoted to women more expensive than the exact same items marketed to men.

It’s not just salaries. Wealth amassed over a lifetime is even more unevenly distributed than income. That’s because much of it is held in property, stocks, and pensions – assets that can yield high returns, but are out of reach for many.

Ending economic inequality between men and women will take 217 years if the current slow rate of progress continues, the forum said.

For example, wages paid to workers in Germany increased by 5% between 2000 and 2016, while income from investments and business activities jumped by 30%.

The IMF is urging more action on equality. When women do better, the economy and everyone in it does better too, it says.

All is not lost. Researchers from the World Wealth and Income Database project say that while inequality has been rising in almost all countries, it has been growing at diﬀerent rates, which suggests governments can do something about it.

Its research suggests that getting as many women into work as men could boost GDP by 5% in the U.S., 9% in Japan and 27% in India.

Research from the International Monetary Fund and others has shown that inequality damages economic growth and makes everyone poorer.

3. Climate change

The countries most vulnerable to extreme weather and rising sea levels Verisk Maplecroft's "Climate Change Vulnerability Index" is based on exposure to climate-related natural disasters and sea-level rise as well as impacts on population patterns, resources, agriculture and conﬂicts. The index also considers each country’s preparedness and ability to combat climate change.

2. Gender gap

Percentage of women working

The countries most vulnerable to climate change are among the poorest in the world. This chart shows that even G20 countries are not immune. The IMF has warned that developing countries are facing rising ﬁnancial threats from climate change. Hurricanes in the Caribbean and Latin America, extreme ﬂoods in South Asia, and droughts in East Africa hit some of the poorest nations in their regions in 2017.

Women earn less than men doing the same job in every country, according to the World Economic Forum. That’s despite the fact that gender discrimination is illegal in many countries, including the United States and all 28 EU members. 38

At the same time, the U.S., the world’s second biggest polluter after China, has withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord under President Trump. The UN has warned that climate change is also fueling regional conﬂicts, which are forcing people to leave their homes.

Analysts at Eurasia Group have warned about the rise of Islamism, anti-Chinese and anti-other minority sentiment in southern Asia. They said that intensifying nationalism in India also poses risks to stability.

5. Education inequality

The International Organization for Migration said climate change is causing higher migration both within countries and across borders as people ﬂee extreme weather and rising sea levels.

Expected years of study for today's ﬁrst graders

4. Political polarization

Voters are becoming more partisan

More than 60 million children aged six to 11 are out of school, according to UNICEF. More than half of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa, and some 27 million live in conﬂict zones. From the U.S. to Europe and Asia, politics is becoming more polarized. Surveys from the Pew Research Center show that Republicans have become more consistently conservative, while Democrats are more consistently liberal. That means they have less common ground on key issues than in the past.

Education helps to lift people out of poverty and pushes growth rates higher. But access to schools varies massively across the world. Globally, 65% of people aged 25 and over have got at least some secondary education. In Europe and the U.S., the proportion is well above 90%. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number plunges to below 30%.

In Europe, far right and populist parties are attracting more support in several countries, including Austria, Poland, Hungary and France.

money.cnn.com The views and opinions expressed in these articles are of the author and do not necessarily reﬂect the oﬃcial position of the Embassy

An anti-immigration, anti-Muslim party placed third in Germany’s election in September, becoming the ﬁrst far-right group to enter the national parliament since 1961. 39

'The Most Dangerous Negro' :

The Radical Legacy of Martin Luther King

January 15th marked the 89th birth anniversary of legendary Black leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, a charismatic orator who played an instrumental role in the U.S. civil rights movement. But in the years following his assassination in 1968, conservatives have tried to tarnish King's image by co-opting his philosophy and by convoluting his messages and using them to promote their narrow agenda through the prism of theology. King was a theologian and promoted non-violence but not in the way commonly portrayed by conservatives. On the contrary, his radical, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist stance on a litany of issues, such as being against war, pro-choice, for LGBT rights, access to health care, immigration reform, speaks of his revolutionary acumen. "His fundamental commitment is to a radical love of humanity, and especially of poor and working people. And that radical love leads him to a radical analysis of power, domination, and oppression," Cornell West, a prominent U.S. philosopher, and scholar said in a 2015 interview with the Chicago Tribune. West said King's legacy "gets sanitized and sterilized every January..." "Underscoring his identiﬁcation with the poor, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War, and his crusade against global imperialism." One of the widely known examples is when the then U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, used an excerpt from King's signature, "I have a Dream Speech" posthumously to say something King would never approve of.

In June 1985, Reagan who was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 cited King's "content of our character" line from the speech in his argument against affirmative action, stating that King's vision of a colorblind society would not want racial hiring quotas. "The truth is, quotas deny jobs to many who would have gotten them otherwise but who weren't born a specified race or sex. That's discrimination pure and simple and is exactly what the civil rights laws were designed to stop," the former U.S. president said in a radio address on civil rights. "Although much of America did not know the radical King—and too few know today—the FBI and U.S. government did," West who edited "The Radical King," a collection of excerpts from King's speeches and other writings to shed light on King's ideas and philosophies, wrote. King, non-violent, was a powerful orator, who could move the masses that terrified the U.S. government agencies. The U.S. agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI started wiretapping King after he delivered his iconic, "I have a dream" speech. The agency later labeled him, "The most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of Communism, the Negro and national security." A 2006 essay entitled, "Martin Luther King's Conservative Legacy," penned by a Carolyn Garris for a conservative think tank, shows the crippling conservative ideology and its futile attempt to find roots in King's radical words. 40

oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. . . " West said, asking, "Could it be that we know so little of the radical King because such courage deﬁes our market-driven world?"

In the essay, Garris argues, "the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. King was no stalwart Conservative, yet his core beliefs, such as the power and necessity of faith-based association and self-government based on absolute truth and moral law, are profoundly conservative."

In 1957, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, roots of which can be traced back to the Montgomery Bus Boycott which began in December, 1955, led to the arrest of Rosa Parks who deﬁed the segregation on the bus by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on the bus.

"King's primary aim was not to change laws, but to change people, to make neighbors of enemies and a nation out of divided races," she wrote. The conservatives with Garris-like ideology have made eﬀorts to link their agendas, such as pro-life, anti-gay rights to King to insult him and attract King's ardent followers with lies and deceit.

King faced harsh criticism for his non-violent approach from the more radical leaders in the civil rights movement. He was even viewed as a sellout by the Black militants, but the ever-evolving King knew where his strength lay.

Planned Parenthood, an organization known to promote choice and safe women healthcare honored King with its highest award in 1966. "Speaking before the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago, Illinois, on March 25, 1966, Dr. King said, Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane," Planned Parenthood's statement read.

"The government has got to give me some victories if I’m going to keep people nonviolent," he said at the time. His evolution can be traced back to 1965 during the Selma voting rights march in Alabama. There was a visible shift in King's viewpoint after he heard the news of James Meredith, the ﬁrst Black student to attend segregated the University of Mississippi of being gunned down for his solo protest across the state.

"They want to claim they understand Dr. King better than Dr. King did," Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a trilogy on King, told the CNN. Branch added that the Conservatives have been muddling with King's statements even when he was alive.

King along with Stokely Carmichael, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC leader, joined hundreds of activists to complete Meredith's march in the summer of 1966.

"Most people who were uncomfortable with his message did not take it head-on and say Dr. King was wrong because his message was so powerful, and near the heart of patriotism. They would say, 'I agree with you except you shouldn't break the law,' or 'you shouldn't mix church and state' or 'stop corrupting the lives of youth,' " Branch said.

In his own words, King admitted to his "limitation.""We must admit there was a limitation of our achievement in the South,” he said at a meeting of the SCLC board in 1967. Adding, SCLC will have to call for a “radical redistribution of wealth and power.”

In a 2015 interview with Chicago Tribune, pointing to historical amnesia, West shone a light on King's forgotten core values. "It's clear that he was incredibly courageous in his critique of white supremacy, wealth inequality, and imperial power as it relates to the war in particular. But it's easy to deodorize Martin King, to sanitize or sterilize him," the renowned scholar told Tribune's, Kevin Nance. "The radical King was a democratic socialist who sided with poor and working people in the class struggle taking place in capitalist societies."

"While King refused to join more conservative black civil rights leaders in attacking the Black Power slogan as racist, he refused to support it on the grounds that it implied violence and would alienate potential white support," Lee Sustar, editor of Socialist Worker, in his essay, "The Evolution of Dr. King" for Jacobin in 2017 pointed out.

"The response of the radical King to our catastrophic moment can be put in one word: revolution—a revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life, and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from

Martin Luther King Jr was dangerous not to the country or its people, but to the maintenance of the status quo, which conservatives hold at their very core.

"Before his assassination in 1968, King broke with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War and the administration’s failure to enforce civil rights legislation in the South."

King was assassinated two days before he was supposed to deliver a sermon, "Why America May Go to Hell." He was also planning a ‘Poor People’s March’ to occupy DC with a call to attain economic justice and help the poor get jobs, decent housing, and aﬀordable healthcare. An anti-poverty legislation was also in works at the time King was killed.

"'Wait, wait for a more convenient season.' But I want you to go back and tell those who are telling us to wait that there comes a time when people get tired." The letter serves as an important reminder of King's radical power. "We will see all the facets of King that we know, but now we have the badass King and the sarcastic King, and we have the King who is not afraid to tell white people, 'This is how angry I am at you,' " Jonathan Rieder, a sociology professor at Barnard College, author of a new book on the letter called Gospel of Freedom, told the NPR.

The iconic civil rights leader radical transformation was evident in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail," in which he addressed eight white Alabama clergymen who criticized King, calling him an "extremist" and expressed concern that the civil rights campaign could lead to violent clashes. "We are tired of smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an aﬄuent society. We are tired of walking up the streets in search for jobs that do not exist. We are tired of working our hands oﬀ and laboring every day and not even making a wage adequate with daily basic necessities of life. We are tired of our men being emasculated so that our wives and our daughters have to go out and work in the white ladies’ kitchens, cleaning up, unable to be with our children, to give them the time and the attention that they need. We are tired," King wrote.

www.telesurtv.net

EDITORIAL TEAM: Jose Avila, Alfredo Lugo, Keyla Castillo, Daniel Mwangi, Lucy Ojwang’, Milka Aweyo, Antony Onyango, Laura Silva, CONTACT: UN Crescent, Opposite Diplomatic Police Gigiri, Nairobi Kenya, P. O. Box 2437- 00621, Tel: (+254 - 20) 712 06 . 48 / 712 06 . 49

“ Israel has gone mad. It is attacking, doing the same thing to Palestine and Lebanese people that they have criticised- and with reason-the Holocaust. But this is a new Holocaused”. -Hugo Chávez-

“ We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians ”. - Nelson Mandela -

“ It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews ”. - Albert Eistein -

“ Palestine belong to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home ”. - Mahatma Gandhi -

“ Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army and it calls it a war. IT IS NOT WAR, IT IS MURDER ”. - Noam Chomsky -