A rural Peruvian woman stands in front of police officers who guard the streets of Lima during the ongoing protests demanding immediate elections to resolve the current political crisis. She is part of the delegations from the country’s southern Andes highlands, one of the rural regions neglected by the overwhelming centralism of Lima and its elites. CREDIT: Walter Hupiú/IPS

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Feb 20 2023 (IPS)

The current political and social upheaval in Peru is not a temporary problem, but has to do with deeply-rooted inequality and social hierarchies, according to historian José Carlos Agüero.

In this South American country, 59 people have died in the two months since Dina Boluarte was named president, 47 directly due to the crackdown on the protests that began on Dec. 7. The 60-year-old president has stood firmly behind the armed forces and the police despite the death toll caused by their actions.

Peru has been a republic for 200 years, but due to the acute Lima-oriented centralism deep-seated problems of inequality and discrimination especially affect rural Amazonian and indigenous Quechua and Aymara populations.

“What a social upheaval can bring are not solutions, but momentum that can help combat the most deadly effects of this combination of factors that is so dangerous to people, which is what matters to me above all,” Agüero said in an interview with IPS.

In 2021, according to the latest official statistics, urban poverty stood at 22 percent and rural poverty at 40 percent, especially high in the country’s highlands and Amazon rainforest. Regions such as Ayacucho, Huancavelica and Puno – some of the centers of the current wave of protests – had the highest levels of poverty, ranging from 37 to 41 percent.

Lima is home to more than 10 million people, nearly a third of the total population of 33 million. The capital receives a large influx of people from the provinces, who flock to the city seeking opportunities that do not exist in their places of origin.

Agüero, 48, is a historian, essayist and writer who won the National Literature Award for non-fiction in 2018. In his work he reflects on the country and its past. He himself is the son of two members of the Maoist armed group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), who were extrajudicially executed in the 1980s.

In his analysis of the causes of what is currently happening in Peru, he mentions various aspects raised by other historians such as cultural and ethnic aspects in relation to how the groups that hold power in the capital have not paid enough attention to the regional dynamics of the country’s Andes highlands, and have underestimated the region’s tradition of protests.

He also cites the crisis shaking the political system of parties and representation, which sociologists and political scientists have been pointing to for more than two decades, without managing to bring about any solution.

And he refers to – and disagrees with – anthropological interpretations by observers who argue that the country is in the grip of a process of indigenous, especially Aymara, people demanding and gaining respect for their rights.

Agüero’s explanations are based on his studies of history and racism, which he says reflect the burden of failing to dismantle the social hierarchy still in place in Peru in the 21st century.

“Reactions break out against the caste-like hierarchical relations periodically, not just now. Outbreaks are ready to occur at any time,” he said, referring to the social protests that have been ongoing since Boluarte was sworn in as president on Dec. 7, after President Pedro Castillo was impeached by Congress.

Castillo, a 53-year-old rural schoolteacher and trade unionist, became president in July 2021, thanks to strong support in rural Peru, with the backing of a far-left party, which later turned its back on him. His government was characterized by poor management and a rejection of politicians and the traditional elites.

The impeachment and imprisonment of Castillo sparked mass demonstrations, especially in the central and southern Andes, by people demanding that early elections be held this year and calling for a citizen consultation on a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution. Boluarte finally agreed to bring elections forward to October 2023, but Congress shelved the bill.

“Overt racist interactions are not the only aspect we can talk about, but also the constant belittling and snubs, which are perhaps the most powerful driving force behind our relations when it comes to the moment of truth, when it is either kill or be killed, or when you have to decide on the distribution of wealth, or the legitimacy of a protest or a political proposal,” said Agüero.

He said that according to this logic, there are people who will be left out of the national pact because they are seen as less worthy or less equal. “All of that has been put back into play to explain what is happening right now,” he said.

Rocío Quispe, a 64-year-old indigenous Quechua woman, worked hard to build her house in the hills of the Santa María neighborhood in the working-class Ate Vitarte district in eastern Lima, after her family fled the highlands department of Ayacucho, the epicenter of poverty that was hard-hit by the 1980-2000 internal armed conflict. In the photo she sits with her six-year-old granddaughter and the family pet. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Coming from a ‘forgotten people’

Rocío Quispe, a Quechua woman from the central Andean department of Ayacucho, one of the areas hardest hit by the internal armed conflict that ravaged Peru between 1980 and 2000, lives in the Santa María neighborhood in the Ate Vitarte district in the east of Lima, one of the most populous with just over 700,000 inhabitants, mainly of middle to low socioeconomic status.

She is 64 years old and lives with her 27-year-old daughter and six-year-old granddaughter in a house that she has built little by little in the hilly area of ​​Santa María on the outskirts of the capital. She does not have a steady job and does what she can, selling food for instance, to get by. She is one of the millions of people from other parts of Peru who have come to Lima in search of a better future.

“We came because of terrorism, we dropped out of school, we left everything behind. So many people were shot dead there, they would come in your house and kill you. First my sister came, then I came and we have worked here without stealing, without harming anyone,” she told IPS.

She said her aim was to live in peace, free of the fear she faced in her home region.
Her family had fields in the rural community of Soccos, where a massacre of 32 women, men, girls and boys was committed by a police unit called Los Sinchis in 1983.

“Many of us from Ayacucho came to Lima to have a life because we felt abandoned,” Quispe said. In the capital she worked hard to buy a piece of land and help her parents, and when she got pregnant her top priority became her daughter’s education.

Like many of her neighbors, Quispe protested in December outside the Barbadillo prison where Castillo was initially detained, accused of staging a coup d’état for trying to dissolve Congress and install an emergency government, ahead of an impeachment vote by legislators.

“Because we are protesting they call us terrorists. But the real terrorists are the people who sell out their homeland, who forget about our people, who from their positions in power accuse us just because we want our children to have a good school, a good education,” she said indignantly.

When she speaks there is strength in her voice: “We are a neglected people from Ayacucho where we grew potatoes, corn, wheat and barley, and for them to call us terrorists makes us very angry. They call us terrorists, they call us stinky ‘serranos’ (hillbillies), cholos (a derogatory term for indigenous or mixed-race people), they call us all sorts of things.”

And she complains that Congress, which she sees as a corrupt center of power, conspired to overthrow Castillo.

“These people who they despise elected a president who was a provincial ‘serrano’ schoolteacher. Maybe he didn’t really know how everything worked, but the lawmakers didn’t leave him alone, until they drove him to desperation,” Quispe said.

The protests continue, although with less intensity. There are roadblocks in regions such as Cuzco, Puno, and Arequipa, while Boluarte began a round of talks with political parties on Feb. 15 to address the crisis.

The measure was seen as a grasping at straws to hold onto the office of president, given the documented reports about a number of killings committed by the security forces during the crackdown, which Boluarte has not condemned.

Historian, essayist and writer José Carlos Agüero is photographed at the presentation of his book Persona (Person), in September 2018 in the north Lima district of Los Olivos. In his critical reflection on the current social outbreak in Peru, he says the elites form a network of privilege that is also racist, neglecting the country’s rural indigenous and mixed-race majority. CREDIT: Courtesy Rossana López

Not one, but many Limas

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics, in Lima 65 percent of the population consider themselves ‘mestizo’ or mixed-race, 19 percent indigenous, eight percent black and five percent white. Nevertheless, racism is a daily feature of life and has turned many people intensely against those who are protesting in their regions or have come to the capital to make themselves heard.

Why don’t the elites recognize that there are many Limas? Although Agüero said he could not give a definitive answer because there are few studies on the elites in Peru, he said he could talk about their behavior and the way they organized in politics.

He believes that it is not a question of ignorance; it is not that they do not understand. “There are highly educated people who have studied in foreign universities and are part of what we call the elite. They have demographic data, surveys, everything necessary to understand that Lima is a very large metropolis, now made up of several different Limas,” the writer added.

“But they rule like elites in other parts of the world. They maintain the conviction that they are privileged. In Peru, it seems to me that they form a network of privilege in a way that is also racist,” he remarked.

Agüero said that this position isolates them but at the same time puts them in a role of paternalistic control.

“What matters most to me is that the distribution of power, real, economic and symbolic, should stop being a matter of privilege and in the control of an elite network that is also racist. For me that is the issue,” he said.

View of a demonstration by social organizations in a Buenos Aires square in July. The scene occurs almost every day in the capital of Argentina, a country where poverty has held steady at around 40 percent of the population since before the COVID-19 pandemic. The possibility of a social uprising is one of the fears in the face of the deepening socioeconomic crisis. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

By Daniel Gutman
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 27 2022 (IPS)

Darío is a locksmith in Flores, a traditional middle-class neighborhood in the Argentine capital, who will have to stop working in the next few days. “Suppliers have suspended the delivery of locks, due to a lack of merchandise or because of prices,” he laments. His case is an illustration of an economy gone mad in a country that once again finds itself on the brink of the abyss.

The problems that have been dragging on in this South American country, where the vast majority of the population has become poorer over the last four years and social unrest is on the rise, exploded this month with an exchange and financial crisis that created enormous uncertainty about what lies ahead.

The Central Bank ran out of dollars, and imports, which in large part are a source of inputs for domestic production, were restricted to the maximum. The result is fear, speculation, increased social unrest and out-of-control inflation, which is causing price references to be lost and some companies and businesses are hedging their bets with preventive increases, or they even decide not to sell.

Today, in the streets and in the media, the questions raised are whether the country is on the eve of a social outbreak and whether President Alberto Fernández, so politically isolated that he is questioned by his own government coalition, will reach the end of his term in December 2023.

At that time, Argentina will be celebrating 40 years of democracy, marked by a succession of economic crises that have left an aftermath of growing inequality and have caused distrust to spread easily in society at the first signs that things are not going well.

The crisis deepened at the beginning of the month, when the Jul. 2 resignation of then Economy Minister Martín Guzmán triggered a 50 percent drop in the parallel exchange rate — known locally as the dollar blue — the only one that can be freely acquired in a country with exchange controls, and this, in turn, further fuelled inflation, which in 2021 stood at 50 percent and this year is already expected to end above 90 percent.

“There has been a series of imbalances in Argentina’s macroeconomy for years, which means that today the government does not have the tools to deal with exchange rate and financial pressures,” Sergio Chouza, an economist who teaches at the public University of Buenos Aires (UBA), told IPS.

“In this country the value of the dollar dominates expectations about prices and as a result it is increasingly difficult to avoid a ‘spiral’ of inflation. At the same time, government bonds have collapsed and are already yielding less than those of Ukraine,” he adds.

Chouza says that the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the major contributing factors in triggering a situation that seems to have gotten out of control.

“There was an expansion of public spending, as in most of the world. But the problem is that while most countries financed it with credit, Argentina could not do so because it was already over-indebted,” the expert explains.

Homeless people who survive by picking through garbage in Buenos Aires sleep on the corner of a central street in Argentina’s capital. In 2021 the country experienced an economic recovery after the first year of the pandemic, but a rise in inflation in 2022 has aggravated the crisis once again. CREDIT: Daniel Gutman/IPS

Social protests

The square in front of the Palacio de Tribunales, in the heart of downtown Buenos Aires, is overflowing with people. The youngest protesters hold banners from social movements from poor outlying neighborhoods, but there are also entire families with small children in their arms. Traffic in the surrounding area is completely cut off as the columns of marchers continue to pour in.

It is a Thursday in July, but this is an image that can be seen practically every day in the Argentine capital, where the most vulnerable social sectors are staging a series of protests because, in the midst of the crisis, the government has suspended the expansion of the Potenciar Trabajo program.

This is the name of the National Program for Socio-productive Inclusion and Local Development, which offers a stipend from the government in exchange for four hours of work in social enterprises, such as soup kitchens or urban waste recyclers’ cooperatives.

“In our neighborhoods things have been very hard for many years, but now it’s getting worse because we can no longer afford to put food on the table,” Fernando, who preferred not to give his last name, told IPS. He is a young man from Laferrere, one of the poorest localities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, who was a waiter in a bar before becoming unemployed in 2021. Today he does occasional construction work.

Santiago Poy, a researcher at the Observatory of Social Debt at the private Argentine Catholic University (UCA) tells IPS that, with the combination of currency devaluation and inflation since 2018, wages have lost around 20 percent of their purchasing power.

“Poverty stood at around 25 percent in 2017, climbed to 40 percent in 2019 and remained steady after that. Today there is a feeling of widespread impoverishment, despite the fact that the unemployment rate is only seven percent, because 28 percent of workers are poor,” says Poy, describing the situation in this Southern Cone country of 47.3 million people.

After the height of the pandemic in 2020, social indicators improved in 2021 but are worsening again this year and the vast social assistance network does not seem to be sufficient to curb the decline.

“Social aid is not going to solve things in Argentina, because the macroeconomy is a permanent factory of poverty,” says Poy.

One of the operations carried out last weekend by Economy Ministry personnel in supermarkets in Buenos Aires, in order to control price hikes on basic products and “dismantle speculative maneuvers,” as reported. CREDIT: Economy Ministry

The price race

“I am ashamed to set some prices at which I have to sell such basic things as bread, flour or sugar,” Fernando Savore, president of the Federation of Grocery Stores of the province of Buenos Aires, which groups 26,000 businesses in the country’s most populous region, tells IPS.

Savore says that since the beginning of the year the price hikes by suppliers have been constant, but that they skyrocketed in the first week of July, after the economy minister resigned.

“We have seen increases of more than 10 percent in food and more than 20 percent in cleaning products. I don’t think they are justified, but every time the dollar goes up, prices go up,” says Savore, who adds that grocers are hesitant to sell some products because of uncertainty about the costs of restocking them.

And in a context of overall jitters, the government unofficially leaks rumors about economic measures, which do not then materialize but fuel the sense of uncertainty.

President Fernández said that the lack of dollars would be solved if agricultural producers sold a good part of their soybean harvest, which they are currently withholding, worth 20 billion dollars.

They are obliged to export at the official exchange rate, whose gap with the parallel dollar has reached a record level of more than 150 percent, and they are apparently waiting for a devaluation.

On Jul. 25, the new economy minister, Silvina Batakis, met in Washington with the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, to assure her that this country will comply with the agreement signed with the multilateral lender this year, which includes goals to reduce the fiscal deficit and increase the Central Bank’s reserves.

But in Argentina, few people dare to predict where the crisis is heading, and how quickly it will evolve.

The social networks have played an important role in citizens’ initiatives to organise protests against the gas price hike in Mexico and in the government’s strategy to curb cyber-activism. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 19 2017 (IPS)

The scene in the video is simple: a bearded man with a determined look on his face sitting in front of a white wall witha portrait of Emiliano Zapata, symbol of the Mexican revolution.

“Mexicans to the battle cry, the moment has come to overthrow the corrupt political system we are under, it is now or never. We will show what we are made of. With just two steps we will be able to write a new history, which our children and grandchildren will also enjoy,” lawyer Amín Cholác says emphatically.

In the video titled “Mexicans to the cry of: Peña out!,” Cholác urges people to take part in demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience against the rise in fuel prices adopted Jan. 1 by the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto.

“I made this video because we cannot stand it anymore, this country cannot take it any longer,” the founder of the non-governmental organisation Dos Valles Valientes, who lives in the southern state of Chiapas, told IPS.

The video has thousands of views on Youtube, and in other video networks, and has also spread over Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp.

“It has been well received, people from all over the country have joined, they have communicated via social networks or by phone. But I have also been threatened, they put an image of hitmen, they insulted my mother, but if I had been scared, I wouldn’t have done it,” said Cholác.

The activist, whose organisation fights increases in electricity rates, said “the networks are a double-edged sword. They have worked extraordinarily well for us, because they are very accessible and cheap. Whatsapp reaches every corner, as do text messages.”

But activists are also threatened through the networks, said Cholác, whose Facebook account was cloned twice. “I opened another one, and I promised myself that for every Facebook account that was cloned, I would open three,” he said.

The video’s wide dissemination reflects the growing use of the Internet in Mexico to drive political and social movements, such as the resistance to fuel price increases. But the social networks also serve to promote counter-attacks against citizen initiatives by the political powers-that-be and the spreading of misinformation and propaganda by the other side.

The up to 20 per cent hike in fuel prices unleashed the latent social discontent, with dozens of protests, looting of shops, roadblocks, and blockades of border crossings throughout the country, as well as a wave of lawsuits filed by trade unions and organisations of farmers, students and shopkeepers.

The simultaneous price rises for fuel, electricity and cooking gas were a spark in a climate of discontent over the public perception of growing impunity, corruption and social inequality.

The protests, which have waned somewhat but show no signs of stopping, have led to at least six deaths, the arrests of 1,500 people, and the looting of dozens of stores.

Topics addressed by accounts implicated in the dissemination of fear messages in the social networks to neutralise the protests against the fuel price hikes in Mexico, which were also promoted over the same networks. Credit: Courtesy of Rossana Reguillo

“The protests in response to the price rises arose from spontaneous calls disseminated on WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. A call started to circulate for people to not fill their gas tanks for three days, and around new year’s day the calls for protests started, mainly along the border,” said Alberto Escorcia, with the group Loquesigue TV.

On Jan. 4, the group published an analysis of the rumours and calls to violence, which were fed by 650 Twitter accounts and more than 7,600 messages – allegedly false accounts used to fight back against the protests.

As a result of the group’s publications, Escorcia received threats, he told IPS.

According to a study carried out last year, in 2015 Internet penetration in Mexico was 59 per cent, in a population of 122 million, in spite of there being almost one mobile phone per inhabitant. This is an indication of the relative power of digital democracy in this country.

Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and Twitter are the social networks preferred by Mexicans.

“Between Jan. 2 and 3 the ‘gasolinazo’ (the price rise) was going to be an important trending topic, because it is a noble theme, in the sense that it attracts a variety of sectors and affects society as a whole,” expert Rossana Reguillo told IPS.

“But on Jan. 4, the countertrend started. ‘Bots’ and ‘trolls’ gained visibility, giving rise to other trends. The (protests against the) gasolinazo started to lose ground,” said Reguillo, the head of the interdisciplinary laboratory Signa Lab, at the private Western Institute of Technology and Higher Education.

The lab examined Twitter and detected more than 10,000 accounts involved in the dissemination of some 15,000 messages aimed at neutralising the social unrest. Standing out in this effort were the online groups Legión Hulk and SomosSecta100tifika (which translates into ‘We are a scientific sect‘). The latter promotes the trending topic #GolpeDeEstadoMx (Pro Coup D’etat Mexico).

This counteroffensive shows how the citizens‘ online mobilisation triggers a response from the powers under attack, as well as threats against activists, such as the ones received by Cholác and Escorcia.

“We have found a pattern of fear-mongering and anonymous calls similar to what we saw ahead of the inauguration of Peña Nieto (in December 2012), when weeks before, rumours of looting began to circulate,” said Escorcia.

In his opinion, “this time there was greater damage, because the fear of going out and the encouragement for people to get involved in the looting spread from the web to the streets,” he said.

A precedent to this was the reaction sparked by the notorious quote by then Attorney-General Jesús Murillo, who said “I´ve had enough“ in November 2014, referring to the unresolved case of the forced disappearance in September of that year of 43 student teachers in Ayotzinapa, in the southern state of Guerrero.

That expression generated the trending topic on Twitter #YaMeCansé (“I‘ve had enough“), as well as an attempt to neutralise it.

A study “On the influence of social bots in online protests; Preliminary findings of a Mexican case study“, published last September by academics from Mexico and the United States, concluded that there was an important presence of bots, which simulate human beings, affecting discussions online about the case of the missing students.

This phenomenon is widespread, and in Latin America the experts consulted by IPS mention in particular the case of Brazil, during the lengthy process that lead to former president Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and removal from office, in August 2016.

Their hypothesis is that companies dedicated to these services work for governments and political parties to silence online dissent.

In the case of Mexico, Escorcia said “there are companies that generate anything from online attacks to fake news items and political campaigns, which have worked for all kinds of organisations: left-wing, right-wing, and obviously for the PRI,” the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party.

For Reguillo, who has also been a victim of social network attacks on several occasions, the main question is who is behind this cyber activity.

“There is money involved here, it’s not a group of young people who say ‘let‘s crash the web‘. There is a clear strategy to silence debate, to invade the public space and turn Twitter into a battlefield. They destabilise the space for discussion,” she commented.

“Nobody can stop this. People have become aware and are protesting,” said Cholác, who is calling for mass demonstrations on Feb. 5.

Another fuel price hike scheduled for early February will spark further online battles.

Exasperated by the government's performance in economic and social matters, thousands of Mexicans have protested since January 1 against the rise in oil prices, in demonstrations that have already left at least six dead, and led to looting and roadblocks. One of the demonstrations had its epicentre in the symbolic Independence Angel, on Paseo de la Reforma, in Mexico City. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jan 11 2017 (IPS)

“We are absolutely fed up with the government’s plundering and arbitrary decisions. We don´t deserve what they’re doing to us,“ said Marisela Campos during one of the many demonstrations against the government´s decision to raise fuel prices.

Campos, a homemaker and mother of two, came to Mexico City from Yautepec, 100 km to the south, to protest the recent economic decisions taken by the administration of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto.

“Everything’s going to go up because of the gasolinazo“ – the popular term given the 14 to 20 per cent increase in fuel prices as of Jan.1, said Campos, while she held a banner against the measure, in a Monday Jan. 9 demonstration.

The measure unleashed the latent social discontent, with dozens of protests, looting of shops, roadblocks, and blockades of border crossings throughout the country, carried out by trade unions, organisations of farmers, students and shopkeepers.“It is too big of an increase. It is a very big, direct and precise blow to people's pockets. They are feeling it. People do not understand the reform, because they don't read laws, not even those on taxes.“ -- Nicolás Domínguez

The simultaneous price hikes for fuel, electricity and domestic gas were a spark in a climate of discontent over growing impunity, corruption and social inequality.

The protests, which show no signs of subsiding, have led to at least six deaths, some 1,500 people arrested, and dozens of stores looted.

“We are opposed to Peña Nieto’s way of governing. The price rises and budget cutbacks have been going on since 2014. Now there will be an increase in the cost of the basic food basket and transport rates,“ Claudia Escobar, who lives on the south side of Mexico City, told IPS during another demonstration.

Escobar, a mother of three, decided to join the protests because of what she described as “serious social disintegration and turmoil.“

In response to the social discontent, the government argued that the price rises were in response to the increase in international oil prices since the last quarter of 2016, and insisted that without this measure, budget cuts with a much more damaging social impact would have been necessary.
But the rise has its origin more in the elimination of a fuel subsidy which up to 2014 absorbed at least 10 billion dollars a year, as well as in the state-run oil company Pemex’s limited productive capacity.

To this must be added the government’s tax collection policy, where taxes account for 30 per cent of the price of gasoline.

In addition, energy authorities seek to make the fuel market more attractive, because its freeing up is part of the energy reform which came into force in 2014, and opened the oil and power industries to private capital.

Peña Nieto, in office since December 2012, promised Mexicans that this energy reform would guarantee cheap gasoline for the domestic market.

Pemex’s oil extraction has been in decline since 2011, and in 2016 it fell 4.54 per cent in relation to the previous year.

In November, crude oil production amounted to 2.16 million barrels a day, the lowest level in three decades, due to an alleged lack of resources to invest in the modernisation of infrastructure.

Gas and diesel production suffered a similar decline over the past two years, with a 15.38 per cent decrease between 2015 and 2016, when Pemex refined 555,200 barrels equivalent a day of both fuels combined.

This forced a rise in fuel imports, mainly from the United States, with Mexico importing in November 663,300 barrels equivalent a day, 15.88 per cent more than in the same month the previous year.

Traditionally, Pemex contributed 33 per cent of the national budget, but the collapse in international prices since 2014, and its contraction in activity, reduced its contribution to 20 per cent, which compels the government to obtain income from other sources.

For Nicolás Domínguez, an academic at the state Autonomous Metropolitan University, the government is facing the complex situation with “simplistic and incomplete“ explanations.

“It is too big of an increase. It is a very big, direct and precise blow to people’s pockets. They are feeling it. People do not understand the reform, because they don’t read laws, not even those on taxes.“ he told IPS.

But the public “do understand when they go shopping and they can’t afford to buy what they need. That makes them angry. And when they ask for explanations, the government tells them that in United States gasoline prices have gone up, that they have gone up everywhere.”

The common prediction of critics of the gasolinazo is its impact on the cost of living, which in the last few months has been spiraling upwards, with inflation standing at around 3.4 per cent by the end of the year, according to still provisional figures.

The non-governmental organisation El Barzón, which groups agricultural producers, warns that the price of essential goods could climb by 40 per cent over the next months.

“It is likely that there will be serious repercussions on national agricultural production and in households,“ the organisation’s spokesman, Uriel Vargas, told IPS. He predicted that the impact of the rise in fuel prices will be “an increase in the levels of inequality, which are already a major problem.”

For Vargas, “the government must take action to avoid a rise in prices.“

According to 2014 official figures, 46 percent of Mexico’s 122 million people were living in poverty – a proportion that has likely increased in the last two years, social scientists agree.

The gasolinazo canceled out the four percent rise in the minimum wage adopted this month, which brought the monthly minimum to 120 dollars a month.

As demonstrated by the Centre for Multidisciplinary Analyses of the Mexico National Autonomous University, the minimum monthly wage, earned by about six million workers, does not satisfy basic needs.

In its “Research Report 126. The minimum salary: a crime against the Mexican people,“ the Centre concluded that the minimum wage has lost 11 per cent in buying power since Peña Nieto took office.

The study states that it takes three minimum wages just to put food on the table.

To make matters worse, Mexico’s economic growth will range only between 1.5 and 2 per cent, and a further weakening of the economy is possible, according to several projections, due to the impact of the protectionist policies of Donald Trump, who will take office as U.S. president on Jan. 20.

In an attempt to calm things down, Peña Nieto presented this Monday Jan. 9 an “Agreement for Economic Strengthening and Protection of the Domestic Economy,“ which includes a 10 per cent cut in the highest public sector wages.

But for observers, these are merely bandaid measures.

“What the government wants is to calm people down. These are small remedies and what people want is a drop in gas prices. The question is what direction do they want Mexico to move in. If it is about improving the well-being of families, this is not the best way. If the demonstrations spread, the government will have to back down,“ said Domínguez.

For people such as Campos and Escobar, the starting point is reversing the increase in oil prices.

“We will persist until the rise is reverted and there is a change,“ said Campos, while Escobar added “we hope that they understand that we will not stay quiet.“

On February 4 there will be another price adjustment, another spark to the burning plain that Mexico has become.

Students from the high school attended by José Luis Alberto Tehuatlie, during the boy’s Jul. 22 funeral in the town of San Bernardino Chalchihuapan, in the Mexican state of Puebla. Credit: Daniela Pastrana /IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
SAN BERNARDINO CHALCHIHUAPAN, Mexico , Jul 31 2014 (IPS)

People in this town in the central Mexican state of Puebla found out the hard way that protesting can be deadly.

A new law passed in Puebla makes it possible for police to use firearms or deadly force to break up demonstrations.

Local inhabitants felt the impact of the measure during a harsh crackdown on a protest against another law that they say undermines their autonomy.

A dead 13-year-old boy, another who lost three fingers, a third with a broken jaw and teeth knocked out, a driver who lost an eye, and 37 others injured by beatings and tear gas were the price this Nahua indigenous town of 3,900 people paid for blocking a road to demand the repeal of a state law that transferred responsibility over civil registries from local community authorities to the municipalities.

“It’s not fair that they attack the people like this just because we are asking that our community life, our authorities, be respected,” Vianey Varela, a first year high school student, told IPS.

On Jul. 9, when local residents blocked the Puebla-Atlixco highway some 150 km from Mexico City, the state police first used the powers given to them by the Law to Protect Human Rights and Regulate the Legitimate Use of Force by the police, which the state legislature passed in May.

The “Ley Bala” or Bullet Law, as it was dubbed by journalists, allows Puebla state police to use firearms as well as “non-lethal weapons” to break up “violent” protests and during emergencies and natural disasters.

The roadblock was mounted to protest another state law approved in May, which took away from the local authorities the function of civil registry judges or clerks and put it in the hands of the municipal governments.Since May, in at least 190 villages and towns in the state, no one has been born, no one has died, and no one has been married – at least officially, because there are no records.

As a result, since May, in at least 190 villages and towns in the state, no one has been born, no one has died, and no one has been married – at least officially, because there are no records.

Javier Montes told IPS that he became “presidente auxiliar”- a post just under mayor – of San Bernardino Chalchihuapan in May, but added that “I still haven’t signed a thing. The archives are in our care, but we don’t have stamps or the necessary papers. And in the municipal presidency [mayor’s office] they don’t know what to do, so in the meantime nothing is being registered.”

“We sent letters to all the authorities,” said Montes, who has received anonymous threats for speaking out. “They never responded. When the ink and paper ran out, and our fingers were worn out from so much typing, we went out to protest and this is what happened.”

The town is in the municipality of Ocoyucan and the local inhabitants belong to the Nahua indigenous community. According to the latest estimates by the government’s National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples, the native population of Puebla is one million people – one quarter of the state’s total population.

In Mexico’s municipalities there is a “presidente” or mayor, and “presidentes auxiliares”, who are the highest level authorities in the communities, many of which are remote and located far from the seat of the municipal government.

The presidentes auxiliares name the police chief and run the town. And up to May they were also the civil registry judges or clerks..

They are directly elected by local voters without participation by the political parties, and they tend to be highly respected local leaders who are close to the people.

In the Jul. 9 police crackdown, 13-year-old José Luis Alberto Tehuatlie was hit by a rubber bullet in the head and died after 10 days in coma.

The Puebla state government initially denied that rubber bullets had been used. But the public outrage over the boy’s death forced Governor Rafael Moreno to announce that he would repeal the law.

Puebla is not the only place in Mexico where there have been attempts to regulate public protests. In the last year, the legislatures of five states have discussed similar bills.

The first was, paradoxically, the Federal District, in Mexico City, which has been governed by the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) since 1997.

In the capital street protests are a daily occurrence, but since the very day that Enrique Peña Nieto was sworn in as president, on Dec. 1, 2012, demonstrations and marches have frequently turned violent.

A Federal District bill on public demonstrations, introduced in December 2013 by lawmakers from the rightwing opposition National Action Party, failed to prosper.

In April, the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, ruled by the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), became the first part of Mexico to regulate protests.

A state law, the “Ley de Ordenamiento Cívico”, known as the “anti-protest law,” is a toned-down version of another initiative that would have required demonstrators to apply for a permit to protest at least 48 hours ahead of time.

But the law maintains the ban on roadblocks and allows the police “to take pertinent measures” against demonstrators.

Other initiatives to regulate and allow the “legitimate use of force” have been adopted in the states of San Luis Potosí and Chiapas.

Global rights groups like Article 19 and Amnesty International have spoken out strongly against these laws aimed at regulating demonstrations, pointing to a worrisome tendency towards the criminalisation of social protests in Mexico since 2012.

But the governmental National Human Rights Commission has failed to make use of its legal powers to promote legal action challenging the anti-protest initiatives as unconstitutional.

On the contrary, in October 2013 it recommended that the Senate amend article 9 of the constitution referring to the freedom to hold public demonstrations and to the use of public force.

The Jul. 9 protest was not the first time rubber bullets have been used in Puebla.

Just hours before Tehuatlie’s death was confirmed, the Puebla state secretary of public security, Facundo Rosas, showed a document from the secretariat of national defence which indicated that the government had not purchased rubber bullets under the current administration.

However, in December 2011 the state human rights commission rebuked the Puebla police chief for the use of rubber bullets to evict local residents of the community of Ciénega Larga, when 70-year-old Artemia León was injured, as reported by the Eje Central online news site.

It became clear in conversations that IPS held with people in San Bernardino Chalchihuapan that they are very angry. Hundreds of people attended the boy’s funeral, on Jul. 22, where many of them called for the governor’s resignation.

“Why doesn’t he try the rubber bullets on his own kids,” said one man after the funeral, which was attended by some 40 “presidentes auxiliares” from other communities.

So far no one has been held accountable for the boy’s death.

The Israeli offensive in Gaza has killed 1,050 people, mostly civilians, as of Jul. 26, 2014. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
NEW YORK, Jul 27 2014 (IPS)

Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets in multiple protests this past week against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, which has left at least 1,049 Palestinians dead and over 6,000 injured since Jul. 8.

Among demonstrators’ many demands was that the U.S. government end its massive flow of aid and arms to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

The Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation estimates that the United States has shelled out over 100 billion dollars’ worth of military and economic aid since 1949.

Protests on Thursday, Jul. 24 drew over a thousand people, holding signs proclaiming U.S. complicity in the war on Gaza. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

In 2007, the U.S. government pledged to provide 30 billion dollars worth of weapons to Israel in the decade 2009-2018. This year, according to the FY2015 budget submitted to Congress, the Barack Obama administration set aside three billion dollars for military aid.

The protests also had particular significance for New York City, whose former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced in 2011 his support for a 100-million-dollar partnership between Cornell University and Israel’s Institute of Technology (the Technion) that would allow the construction of a state-of-the-art new complex on Roosevelt Island.

Thousands of U.S. citizens have called on the government to end military aid to Israel. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

An alliance known as New Yorkers Against the Cornell-Technion Partnership (NYACT) says the Technion is “complicit in Israeli’s violation of international law and the rights of Palestinians”, namely its mandate to develop and design weapons and technologies that are used to enforce the occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza.

Among other ‘achievements’, students at Technion were instrumental in creating the remote-controlled Caterpillar D-9 bulldozer, the IDF’s weapon of choice in demolishing Palestinian homes; and its Autonomous Systems Program (TASP) was responsible for developing the so-called ‘stealth drone’, capable of carrying two 1,100-pound ‘smart bombs’ for a distance of up to 2,000 miles.

Highly visible at both protests were members of the organisation known as ‘Neturei Karat International: Jews Against Zionism’, who carried signs proclaiming, “Jews reject the Zionist state of Israel and its atrocities”.

A statement prepared by the organisation ‘Jews Against Zionism’ appeals to world leaders to “stop the latest ongoing cruelty and the attack on the people of Gaza.” Credit: Kanya DAlmeida/IPS

Others waved placards claiming “New York Jews Say ‘Not in Our Name’.”

Thursday’s action, which brought out over 2,000 people, was part of the National Day of Action for Gaza, endorsed by over 55 U.S.-based human rights groups. The protest followed on the heels of a demonstration by Jewish Voice for Peace on Jul. 22, which saw the arrest of nine Jewish activists for occupying the office of The Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in Manhattan.

The Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) has cost Israel billions of dollars in investments. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

One of the co-organisers of the march, Adalah-NY, handed out leaflets urging demonstrators to support the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel, a non-violent civil society-based campaign modeled on the international boycott movement that was instrumental in dismantling apartheid in South Africa.

Roadside vendors joined a massive protest on Friday, Jul. 25, that snaked through lower Manhattan. Credit: Kanya D’Almeida/IPS

Government and opposition leaders in Venezuela held a nationally televised debate as a first step to working towards solutions for the economic, social and political crisis marked by over two months of protests.

The demonstrations and the crackdown have cost 41 lives, including those of seven police officers, and left 600 injured and 2,300 arrested – with 100 still behind bars – and 70 reports of torture.

Foreign ministers Luiz Figueiredo of Brazil, María Ángela Holguín of Colombia, and Ricardo Patiño of Ecuador, and the Vatican apostolic nuncio to Venezuela Aldo Giordano, brokered the six-hour talks hosted by President Nicolás Maduro Thursday night.

The president issued a call “to acknowledge each other and reject the pressure from those who want to impose extreme ways, of violence.” He also called on his adversaries “not for a pact or negotiations, but for a willingness for peace. We want a model of coexistence, of tolerance.”

The leaders of the Mesa de Unidad Democrática (MUD – Roundtable of Democratic Unity), a multicolour coalition of opposition parties ranking from the right wing to former leftist guerrillas, met with Maduro and his closest associates in the Miraflores presidential palace.

The main political instigators of the protests, including the jailed Leopoldo López, boycotted the talks.

The university students who started the protests in the capital and dozens of cities around the country did not take part in the meeting. Their main leader, Juan Requesens of the Central University in Caracas, warned that “we will continue our peaceful protests, because there are many reasons to protest.”

“The uncertainty and scepticism surrounding this first meeting will continue while people wait for the government, above all, to send out concrete signals of change in its measures and policies,” Carlos Romero, a graduate studies professor of political science, told IPS.

The protests broke out on Feb. 4 in the southwest city of San Cristóbal and spread to Caracas on Feb. 12, driven by university students who complained about crime on their campus.

The demonstrations grew as the hardline opposition began to demand an end to Maduro’s government, and marches and roadblocks often turned into violent clashes with the military and police and government supporters.

The protests, in which mainly middle-class demonstrators are backing the students, are happening against a backdrop of economic difficulties such as a nearly 60 percent annual inflation rate, scarcity of some food and other basic items, and long, exhausting queues of people waiting to buy products sold under a rationing system.

The high crime rates – more than 24,000 homicides were committed in 2013 – and the poor functioning of services like electricity, water and public hospitals, especially outside of Caracas, are also fuelling the protests.

On Thursday Apr. 10, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) said in a preliminary report that Venezuela has the second-highest murder rate in the world, with 53.7 homicides per 100,000 population.

Maduro, the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and leaders of the armed forces say they managed to block a plan backed by Washington to subvert the constitutional order and overthrow the government, with the help of the protests.

The president won the Apr. 14, 2013 elections after Hugo Chávez, who governed the country since 1999, died of cancer on Mar. 5.

Like a snowball effect, the initial reasons for the protests gave way to others, such as the demand that the deaths of people killed – mainly shot – at the roadblocks be investigated, that those responsible for human rights violations be held to account, and that the detainees be released.

The people still in jail include López and two opposition mayors, from San Cristóbal and from a city in the central state of Carabobo, who the Supreme Court removed from office in what was described by some as a summary trial. They were sentenced to a year in prison for ignoring orders to remove the roadblocks set up by protesters in their municipalities.

The release and restitution of the mayors was another demand set forth by the opposition in the meeting that ended in the early hours of Friday morning.

The opposition is also demanding that armed irregular civilian groups de disarmed.

In the talks, the government and MUD leaders outlined their conflicting visions of the country, the economy and democracy, with each side sounding a litany of complaints about the conduct of the other over the past 15 years.

“The prospects for reaching an agreement on the underlying questions are still remote, because of the conflicting visions, at the end of a first meeting which seemed more like group therapy than a dialogue or negotiations,” political science professor José Vicente Carrasquero commented to IPS.

The foreign minister of Ecuador, Patiño, said that “despite the difficulties, the meeting was positive; a catharsis was necessary; they needed to meet face to face.”

MUD coordinator Ramón Aveledo, a Christian Democratic politician, proposed dates for further talks, starting with a meeting between the government and the students.

MUD called again for respect for the 1999 constitution, the separation of powers, measures against crime, and an amnesty law.

The opposition’s proposed amnesty would involve the release of those in prison for the current protests and others serving lengthy terms for involvement in the violent demonstrations that led to a short-lived coup that toppled Chávez for 48 hours. Thursday was the 12th anniversary of the coup.

Maduro designated a government commission to evaluate the issues and the next meetings. One of the members, Foreign Minister Elías Jaua, said “the president has the mandate of the people and can’t just do what MUD wants.”

The governor of the state of Miranda, Henrique Capriles, the leader of the moderate opposition who was Maduro’s rival in last year’s elections, also took part in the debate. “Things have to change, or this will burst,” he said at the end of his address in the meeting.

The police battling protesters in Kiev. Concerns continue about unrest even if the violence dies down. Credit: Natalia Kravchuk/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Feb 21 2014 (IPS)

As Ukraine’s capital experiences the worst violence in its post-Soviet history, some protestors are warning that the festering discontent with the regime which led to the current crisis is unlikely to disappear overnight even if a solution to the current impasse is found.

When the anti-government protests began in November they were ostensibly a mass reaction to the decision by President Viktor Yanukovych to turn his back on the first stage of EU accession.“People having had enough of Yanukovych, the corruption and the economic situation have all aroused the anger that has brought people onto the streets." -- Masha Kostishyn, an unemployed economist

But they soon became as much an expression of distaste and frustration with the ruling regime as any single political decision.

“This all started with the abrupt decision not to sign the agreement with the EU, but there was more to it than that. Everyone was completely fed up with Yanukovych’s regime,” Valerii Drotenko, a 45-year-old protestor told IPS.

Since coming to power in 2010, civil liberties have been eroded, political opponents have faced severe repression, and the independence and integrity of law enforcement agencies has all but disappeared, local and international rights groups say.

At the same time the perception of massive corruption, cronyism and nepotism within the regime has grown among the general population. Critics have pointed to Yanukovych concentrating political power in his own office and at the same time building his own family into a wealthy and socially dominant force.

On top of all this, Ukraine’s economy has struggled desperately since the financial crisis in 2008. Its currency is close to collapse, trade and budget deficits have ballooned and the country has been stuck in a recession for the last 18 months.

Masha Kostishyn, 34, an unemployed economist who lives in Kiev, told IPS: “People having had enough of Yanukovych, the corruption and the economic situation have all aroused the anger that has brought people onto the streets. But this would all be more civilised if the economic situation was better. As it is, at the moment it only helps to create chaos and anger.”

Ukraine’s dire economic situation and an accompanying inability to attract foreign investment has pushed it to be more and more reliant on trade with Russia, especially in the east of the country where much of Ukraine’s heavy industry is concentrated.

Already culturally close – one-sixth of the Ukrainian population is ethnic Russian – this has given the Kremlin an extra lever to strengthen its political influence on Kiev.

But, experts say, this has only pushed more of the population away from the government, especially in Western Ukraine which has traditionally been seen as more pro-European.

The sudden U-turn in late November when Yanukovych backed out of the deal and appeared to pledge the country’s future direction to its Eastern neighbour was the breaking point for many who feared Ukraine would become little more than a Kremlin puppet state embracing Russia’s model of state capitalism, and political and social repression.

Violence and killings over the past month, particularly the horrendous bloodshed of the past few days, has only deepened the general resentment towards the regime.

But while the opposition sticks to its calls for Yanukovych to go, even if they succeed in their demands eventually, many protestors say they hold little faith in the potential replacements.

The main opposition party, The Fatherland, is viewed by some as little more than another corrupt part of the political establishment.

Drotenko told IPS: “The authorities are criminal by their nature [but the] opposition is just another side of the same coin.

“They were pretty comfortable in their role as a ‘puppet’ or ‘decorative’ opposition, being paid by the same oligarchs as the ruling party and ignoring the voices of the people in the same way as Yanukovych has.”

He added: “Most of the people out protesting in Kiev are far from zealous backers of the opposition.”

Others have pointed to the radical far-right politics of the Svoboda party which is one of the major opposition movements involved in the protests.

Some protestors have blamed a lack of cohesion and inaction among opposition leaders in the past months for not bringing a swift end to the crisis in the early weeks of the protests.

“Yanukovych is certainly stupid and is to blame because of his criminal actions, but the opposition is also culpable for its not taking action quickly and decisively in the weeks after the protests began,” said Drotenko.

The horrific violence of the last few days has prompted a flurry of diplomatic action from the EU, the U.S. and Russia and early Friday a deal was agreed between the opposition, Yanukovych’s administration and Russian and EU diplomats to bring an end to the crisis. A key element of that deal is an early election.

But there is disappointment among some in Kiev that diplomatic efforts have come only now, and there is continuing unease over the underlying tensions.

Olga Kovalchuk, 37, a teacher in Kiev, told IPS: “Perhaps while this was a purely political conflict, before it escalated into violence, some form of action from the EU or Russia might have worked, but not any more. They missed their chance.”

Kiev in flames on Tuesday night. Credit: Natalia Kravchuk/IPS.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Feb 19 2014 (IPS)

Bloody clashes that have left more than a score dead and more than a 1,000 injured in the Ukrainian capital could continue for weeks. Local people say there is now “no way back” for either side in what has become the worst crisis in the country’s post-Soviet history.

Protests began in Kiev at the end of November after President Viktor Yanukovych turned his back on a deal which would have seen Ukraine forge closer ties with the European Union and move towards eventual accession to the group.“I know that all the hospitals in the country are emptying out non-essential patients and making room for the people that will be injured in these clashes."

They turned violent in mid-January after the passing of a set of controversial laws designed to stifle anti-government demonstrations and opposition movements.

There was some hope of progress at the start of this week when an amnesty was granted to hundreds of people detained during the protests and the government appeared to be considering concessions. But violence flared as Yanukovych pulled back on plans to agree the appointment of a new government or to have his own wide-ranging powers curtailed.

Protestors marched on parliament and ransacked buildings while security forces began firing on them.

As deadly battles raged and parts of the city became what residents told IPS are a “flaming battleground”, emergency meetings between opposition leaders and the government failed to produce any resolution, with each side blaming the other for causing the violence.

Protestors have told IPS that the death toll will rise in coming days, and that they see no end in sight to the bloody conflict.

Alexander Pyvovarov, a volunteer doctor who has been working at field hospitals set up near the main protest areas in Kiev, told IPS: “Things will escalate and get worse. I am expecting weeks more violence. People are really angry and there is no away back now for either side.

“I know that all the hospitals in the country are emptying out non-essential patients and making room for the people that will be injured in these clashes. Everyone knows what is coming.”

He added that the capital had been gripped by fear. “We’re all scared for our lives. We’re afraid this is going to be a massacre.”

The killings this week have been a turning point in the protests, according to many locals, some of whom had until now a neutral stance towards the protestors.

One Kiev resident, who asked not to be named, told IPS that he had closely watched the protests and seen “violent and stupid behaviour” from both the security forces and anti-government demonstrators.

But, he said: “Whether it is 25 killed or 125 killed, it doesn’t matter. The government has crossed a line and everyone is angry.”

Western leaders have condemned the violence and called on President Yanukovych to calm the situation. The EU is considering sanctions against Ukraine. And in what appeared to be co-ordinated statements earlier this week, both Kiev and the Russian foreign ministry blamed Western powers for fomenting the confrontation.

Ukraine has strong cultural and economic ties to Russia – a sixth of the population is ethnic Russian and another sixth speaks Russian as its first language.

Apparently alarmed by the protests, and in a bid to keep Kiev within its sphere of influence, Moscow agreed late last year on a vast package of financial and economic help for Ukraine. In January the government passed a series of controversial laws, some of which were modeled on existing Russian laws, which were seen by the international community as designed solely to muzzle anti-government dissent.

The close ties between Yanukovych’s regime and the Kremlin have fuelled rumours that Russian security forces were helping the local police.

There have also been reports in western media that the current crisis could split Ukraine, with one section moving towards even closer ties with Russia and the other looking towards Europe. President Yanukovych’s largest support base is in the eastern half of the country while the West is generally seen as more pro-European and anti-Russian.

However, many local people say this scenario is unlikely as there are no clear fault lines between populations in both parts of the country.

Although opposition leaders have, since the start of the protests, held meetings with foreign heads of state and EU officials to seek support, the Yanukovych regime appears resolute against any external involvement, even in the form of independent mediation, to end the crisis.

What is clear to many, however, is that the current situation needs to be resolved as soon as possible. Vladimir Onichenko, 47, a car mechanic from Kiev, told IPS: “The only way to solve the situation is for both sides to sit down for talks mediated by an independent body.

“What is happening at the moment cannot go on. Talking on the basis of the reality of what’s going on is the only way to stop this violence and the damage to the country.”

Political protests in Thailand have led to gender attacks on the Prime Minister. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS.

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK, Jan 28 2014 (IPS)

Supaa Prordeengam, a 48-year-old businesswoman, came to take part in the anti-government rallies that have been continuing in the Thai capital for nearly three months now. But disturbed by the sexist speeches emanating from the protest platforms, she said, “We need to be critical, not invade women’s rights.”

The favourite target of the vitriol spewed by the opposition-led agitation is Yingluck Shinawatra, the country’s first woman prime minister. The 46-year-old leader of the governing Pheu Thai Party has been called all sorts of abusive names by the opposition that has occupied five busy intersections here.“Sexism has been prevalent in Thailand for a long time, but it has lately become a part of political tactics."

It is such words that prompted reflection by Supaa, who is from Samut Sakhon, a province that borders the Thai capital. She was here to join tens of thousands of protestors on the streets and on Blue Sky, the television station that amplifies the views of the opposition Democrat Party.

“They are very emotional, the speeches,” she told IPS. “But it is not right to talk about sexual stuff.”

Many like her have been witness to how the original rallying cry – against government corruption, abuse of parliamentary majority and disrespect of the country’s revered monarch – has morphed into demagogy.

Those making the speeches are from Thailand’s educated class that is being tapped by Suthep Thaugsubana, former Democrat Party deputy chief and leader of the street agitators. The political veteran of over 30 years is eyeing them for his pool of “good people” to serve in his non-elected “People’s Councils” that, he believes, should govern the country for at least a year.

The open comments at the Bangkok rallies, and the rapturous applause they receive, have prompted some soul-searching in the Southeast Asian kingdom about the spectre of ugly sexism in the male-dominated political landscape.

It has taken a while, but Thailand’s mainstream women’s rights groups have finally broken their silence.

“When a network of women’s rights groups issued a statement denouncing a medical doctor for his ugly sexist attacks on caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, I admit I felt quite relieved,” wrote Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist on social justice issues with the English language Bangkok Post. Going by her weekly commentaries, she is certainly no fan of the Yingluck administration.

“For a long time I’ve been wondering why women’s rights groups have remained silent about the slew of degrading, sexist tirades made against Ms. Yingluck by various detractors.”

Among the few groups that have raised the red flag are the Coalition of Democracy and Sexual Diversity Rights. It has berated the “use of sexist, misogynist and denigrating language” as a political weapon. “The continuation of this rhetoric of violence, discrimination and hate cannot be permitted,” it said in a statement.

Yingluck’s rise as the country’s first woman leader has served as a reality check for Thailand’s feminist and women’s rights advocates. The latter gave her a cold shoulder when she led the Phue Thai Party to a thumping win at the July 2011 general elections to become, at 44, the youngest prime minister in 60 years.

Her position, they argued, was not the result of her own doing but the machinations of her elder brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, the twice-elected former prime minister who was deposed in a military coup in September 2006. Statements by Thaksin, who lives in self-imposed exile to avoid a two-year jail term for corruption, did not help.

When he plucked Yingluck out of her career as a businesswoman and nominated her to head the Phue Thai weeks before the poll, he publicly declared that the younger Shinawatra was his “clone”.

The typical display of Thaksin’s arrogance was grabbed by the largely Bangkok-based women’s groups known for being closer to the Democrats, who have not won a parliamentary majority in 20 years.

“How can we be proud? The whole world knows it’s about Thaksin,” commented a leading figure at the Gender and Development Research Institute in a newspaper report, under the headline, “Thailand’s first female PM no victory for feminism”.

“It is worth noting that while many leading Thai feminists are lukewarm at best or dismissive at worst at Yingluck’s sudden rise to power, men seem more willing to withhold judgement at this early stage,” Kaewmala, a prolific Thai blogger who comments on social issues, wrote at the time. “As most observers are tentative of the kind of leadership Ms. Yingluck will offer, her current support comes more often from men.”

By August last year, when Yingluck marked her second anniversary as premier, she was receiving kudos for a non-confrontational and consultative style of leadership that had managed to usher a sense of normalcy on Bangkok’s streets. Comparisons were made between her elected administration and the two-and-a-half-year administration that preceded her – a coalition government led by the Democrats that came to power through a backroom deal hatched by the powerful military.

The Democrat administration was tainted by the bloody showdown on Bangkok’s streets in May 2010 during a clash between pro-Thaksin protesters and the military. It left 91 people dead, at least 80 of them civilians, and more than 2,000 injured.

Yingluck’s beleaguered administration has avoided a hawkish response, enabling the would-be revolutionaries rallying to topple her government to lay siege on many government buildings. Confrontations with the riot police, clashes between the agitators and pro-Thaksin sympathisers, sporadic shootings and grenades lobbed at rally sites have resulted in nine deaths, with over 550 injured since November.

But what is really different since the 2010 showdown on Bangkok’s streets is the “sexist war” – perhaps reflecting the growing frustration of the agitators and a new low in Thailand’s political turmoil that has steadily divided the country since the 2006 coup.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academic at the Southeast Asian Centre at Kyoto University in Japan told IPS, “Sexism has been prevalent in Thailand for a long time, but it has lately become a part of political tactics. It has intensified since Yingluck become prime minister. I have never seen anything like this, on this scale.”

A social worker providing clean syringes to injection drug users in Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine. Credit: International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine.

By Pavol Stracansky
KIEV, Jan 25 2014 (IPS)

Groups battling one of the world’s worst HIV/AIDS epidemics say their task may get “catastrophically” harder following the introduction of controversial laws in Ukraine in response to months of anti-government protests.

Among legislation introduced this week – dubbed a “charter for oppression” by some international rights groups – is a new law forcing NGOs that receive foreign funding to register as “foreign agents” or face hefty fines and closure.For many years Ukraine has had one of the world’s fastest growing HIV/AIDS epidemics.

Copied almost exactly from similar legislation introduced recently in Russia, the law not only puts a label with derogatory Cold War connotations on civil society groups, but, crucially for many, also forces them to pay tax on foreign income.

For organisations in the front line of response to the country’s raging HIV/AIDS epidemic, this could spell disaster.

Pavel Skala, a senior policy manager at the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine, the largest NGO in the country working on tackling the disease, told IPS: “The new law will be catastrophic for local NGOs, making things harder for organisations working with HIV/AIDS sufferers and providing harm reduction services. The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Ukraine would only get worse.”

For many years Ukraine has had one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV/AIDS epidemics, according to United Nations figures, and currently has the highest rate of HIV infection in Europe.

Successive governments have been criticised over their approach to the disease. Local and international health groups have highlighted poor and muddled policy and inadequate funding while there have also been accusations of corruption and incompetence leading to shortages of life-saving anti-retroviral drugs.

According to UNAIDS, the Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS, less than 40 percent of people with HIV in Ukraine receive anti-retroviral drugs. For comparison, the rate in some sub-Saharan African countries is around 80 percent.

Meanwhile, despite the epidemic having been historically driven by injection drug use – there are an estimated 290,000 injecting drug users in the East European state – authorities have been either hostile to, or reluctant to adopt, harm reduction practices that have been hailed a success in helping halt the spread of HIV/AIDS in many Western states.

The government’s approach to the disease has already had consequences for how its spread is tackled. When it was discovered that the government in 2004 had paid more than 25 times the market price for anti-retroviral drugs, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria started to channel much of its funding to civil society groups.

This has led to the front line response to HIV/AIDS among high-risk groups such as drug addicts and sex workers being taken up by third sector groups.

These organisations have focused on prevention programmes, including harm prevention.

These services already seem to have had some success. In 2012, for the first time, the rate of new HIV infections in Ukraine dropped. This was put down to the widespread implementation of harm reduction programmes.

But provision of these services may now be at risk.

Under current national legislation, Global Fund financing is exempt from any taxation. But there are doubts that this will continue to be the case following the introduction of the new “foreign agent” law.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine implements the largest HIV prevention programme in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, supporting 170,000 drug users in more than 300 cities through its own services and those of more than 170 partner organisations across the country it helps finance.

The organisation is registered as a charity and, as such, should be free of any tax on its own funding from the Global Fund. But many of its partners, which are sub-recipients of that money, are civil society groups and will be forced to register as foreign agents.

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine has told IPS that under the new laws it will not be able to pass on Global Fund financing to its local partners as the subsequent taxes would force them to close.

UNAIDS country coordinator for Ukraine, Jacek Tyszko, told IPS: “We are very concerned about this [new legislation]. It is potentially a very negative development for the situation in the country because so much of the HIV/AIDS response is carried out by civil society in the Ukraine.

“The problem is that …money from the Global Fund should be tax free but the law is unclear and so there is now doubt. We have spoken to partners in the Ukrainian Health Ministry and they are all of the opinion that the Global Fund money will still be tax free. But they are not the only ones involved.”

Since September last year, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine has been battling tax and customs officials over duties it claims authorities are wrongly trying to impose on its import of syringes. It argues that it should be exempt under laws related to Global Fund financing and its activities as a specific healthcare provider.

As the dispute has dragged on, millions of syringes remain impounded and have to be stored at a special facility at the Alliance’s cost.

This does not bode well for certain state bodies’ approach to the group under the foreign agent law.

“There have already been problems with the tax authorities over taxes for the import of syringes and it looks like the Ukrainian tax authorities are unwilling to make any exceptions. Now we fear there may be further problems with this [Global Fund money],” said Tyszko.

But even if civil society groups working on the front line of the HIV/AIDS response in Ukraine find some way to carry on without vital foreign funding, the new law will still hinder their work, said Skala.

He told IPS: “Organisations will be marked out as foreign agents, seen as spies, and the legislation will give law, tax and other government authorities the opportunity to carry out checks on these organisations when they want and try and change what they do.

“Social workers may be targeted by authorities, there will be a hostile atmosphere for them to work in, and people at these organisations will be afraid. Everything would be harder for them.”

This appears to be the case already. The International HIV/AIDS Alliance Ukraine told IPS its partners are already worried, with at least one having been contacted by the state security service and questioned about their funding.

Demonstrators in downtown Bangkok. Credit: Kalinga Seneviratne/IPS.

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jan 19 2014 (IPS)

Street demonstrations in the Thai capital reflect the disillusionment of growing middle classes across Asia that see multi-party democracy as a playground for the corrupt rather than a process that elects lawmakers to serve society and the nation.

“For more than 20 years, Thai democracy has seen one incompetent and corrupt government after another,” Thai political and social commentator Voranai Vanijaka wrote in the Bangkok Post this week.“For more than 20 years, Thai democracy has seen one incompetent and corrupt government after another."

“Many protesters in the streets today are frustrated with the democratic process. Many have lost faith and want to start anew by first tearing down the present form of Thai democracy and then building up a new one.”

Anger against corruption expressed by India’s urban middle class resulted in the dramatic rise of the Aam Aadmi Party, or the party of the “common man”, that recently won power in the national capital, Delhi, just a year after it was launched.

There are similar moves afoot in countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines whose political systems are also producing lawmakers who are seen to come to power to serve themselves and not society.

Thailand’s anti-corruption movement gathered steam two months ago when the ruling Phue Thai Party, led by Thailand’s first female Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, tried to pass a blanket amnesty bill through Parliament that would have absolved politicians convicted of corruption and serious crimes linked with political conflicts since 2004.

The government dressed it up as a bill of reconciliation and unity after years of fierce political battles between the urban “yellows shirts”, who represent the traditional power elites of Bangkok, and the “red shirts”, or the rural electors, mainly from the northeast of the country, who make up about 70 percent of the electorate that firmly supports the Shinawatra government.

Though the amnesty would have covered all sides of politics, it was widely seen in Thailand as a bill designed to allow former prime minister and Yingluck’s brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, to come back to the country a free man.

The billionaire businessman-turned-politician has a two-year jail term for corruption hanging over him and has been living in self-imposed exile in Dubai after he was overthrown by a military coup in 2006.

The Shinawatras, through their enormous wealth, have created a powerful political machine which, their opponents allege, buys votes from the rural poor by offering them populist policies such as higher prices for rice farmers, village health centres and generally helping improve rural infrastructure.

The traditionally wealthy and powerful urban middle class have felt powerless against this machinery which has been able to deliver one election victory after another and propel the Shinawatras into national power without depending on urban support.

Two months ago this minority was able to mobilise enough people from the wealthy, the middle class and even the poor of Bangkok, and took on Thailand’s most potent political machine. They forced Prime Minister Yingluck to shelve the bill that would have granted amnesty to her brother. Not a shot was fired, no blood spilled, no bombs thrown and no buildings burnt.

Thus the latest incarnation of a Thai anti-corruption movement came about.

“These citizens have diagnosed a worsening corruption problem in Thai bureaucracy and politics and are refusing to tolerate it any longer. Their call for change is justified and credible. Thailand is crying out for a more just society in which the law is fairly enforced,” argued The Nation newspaper in an editorial on Jan. 16.

Propelled by this success, the movement has now embarked on a campaign to shut down government agencies and force the Shinawatra government to postpone elections scheduled for Feb. 2 that the ruling party is certain to win because its rural support base is still intact.

The opposition Democrat Party, which is supporting the protests, is boycotting the elections. By doing so, it has created a scenario where even if the elections are held as scheduled, and the Phue Thai Party wins, it may not be able to form a government.

With 28 constituencies with no candidates and 22 others with only one candidate each, the likelihood is high that the election will not deliver the required 95 percent of MPs in Parliament.

The protest leaders are calling for an unelected “people’s council” of nominees to be set up to reform the electoral system before elections are held. Some city people are even arguing that the one-person-one-vote system does not work, and they deserve more weight for their votes because they are the ones who pay taxes and not the rural voters.

Professor Pasuk Phongpaichit at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok disagrees with this argument. In a comment published in both the Bangkok Post and Singapore’s Straits Times this week, she noted that in the past two decades Thailand’s per capita income has increased three-fold, and this has benefited rural people, who have also become taxpayers and have been empowered politically.

“Political parties have lagged behind these social changes,” she argues. “They often act like special interest groups which seek political power to benefit themselves.”

There are allegations being made about the leader of the protest movement, former Democratic Party lawmaker Suthep Thaugsuban, such as building business interests in land and rubber while being in politics.

Pasuk is against suspending the political system to craft reforms. She sees hope in the moves behind the scenes by military, academic and business leaders to broker a solution to the current political conflict.

“It is better to keep the parliamentary system in place, and channel the extraordinary energy of the recent protests into ensuring that reforms are real,” she argues. “A major part of reform should consist of measures to make political parties more democratic, more transparent, more accountable, and more open to representing the needs and aspirations of people.”

As anti-government protests in the Ukraine move into their third week, there are growing concerns among individuals and civil society organisations in the country over the regime’s approach to protestors.

Rights groups say that there are already similarities to the sinister crackdown on individual rights and freedoms that were seen in Belarus following the bloody end to protests there after presidential elections at the end of 2010.

They say students are being targeted by police and prosecutors, and some have been afraid to go to school for fear they could be expelled and cut off from the education system for taking part in protests.“While it is early days there are some disturbing similarities emerging between what happened in Belarus and what happened in the Ukraine.”

Meanwhile, the arrests of ten people so far, with more expected, on apparently fabricated cases of involvement in mass civil disturbances, and their controversial pre-trial incarceration, has given rise to worries that the regime will use them as an example to deter other protestors.

“While it is early days there are some disturbing similarities emerging between what happened in Belarus and what happened in the Ukraine,” Yulia Gorbunova, Ukraine researcher for Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“The pre-trial detentions of protestors, the reported intimidation of students – these are things that happened in Belarus. We can only hope the Ukrainian regime will not take the same path as the Belarusian authorities did.”

The protests in Kiev, which began following the government’s decision not to sign an EU Association Agreement, have drawn hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to the capital’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, and other locations in the city.

Initially passing off peacefully, a brutal police crackdown on Nov. 30, which saw riot police indiscriminately attack hundreds of people, beating them and leaving some in hospital, changed the tone of the protests.

Arrests of protestors on charges of taking part in “mass disturbances” came soon after. Lawyers for those arrested, their relatives and local activists have publicly questioned the evidence used to bring the charges against them.

Their pre-trial detention has also been questioned by international rights groups.

Heather McGill, researcher for Ukraine at Amnesty International, told IPS: “These were people taking part in a peaceful demonstration but who have been arrested for taking part in ‘mass disorder’. They were immediately sent to prison to be held in pre-trial detention, despite legal regulations clearly stating that this should only happen in exceptional circumstances.

“They could face a maximum eight-year jail sentence. And things do not look good for them with there being, on average, in the Ukraine, a one percent chance of acquittal once charges are bought.

“We could soon be seeing prisoners of conscience in the Ukraine, which would be a huge step backwards.”

Meanwhile, there have been growing reports of student protestors being targeted by law enforcement agencies.

Some have received anonymous threatening phone calls while prosecutors have allegedly asked universities for lists of student attendance on protest days.

The interior ministry has said there is no truth in the reports while police officials have claimed that they are only arresting ‘troublemakers’.  

With more arrests and detentions expected in the coming weeks, combined with the threats to students, the regime appears to be using similar methods to those used by Belarusian authorities in the aftermath of mass protests following the re-election of autocratic president Alexander Lukashenko three years ago.

In the weeks after the protests in Minsk were brutally ended by police, hundreds of people were arrested and jailed for taking part in them. Meanwhile, students were also singled out by police as protestors and thrown out of universities and denied any further education. There was also a dramatic crackdown on civil society groups in the country, many of whom were accused of helping foment the protests.

“We can only hope that the Ukrainian authorities respect the right to freedom of assembly,” said Gorbunova.

But the authorities’ targeting of protestors appears likely to simply strengthen their resolve. Many locals in Kiev say they view the protests as being as much against the regime’s treatment of protestors and the police crackdown at the end of November as about the government’s refusal to sign an agreement with the EU.

Kiev resident Marina Kovalenko, 26, told IPS: “Many protestors are refusing to go home until there is a full investigation into the police and who did what to the protestors, and why their son, or brother, or friend was beaten up or had their bones broken. They want to see someone held to account for it.”

So far Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko has rejected calls for his resignation over the police crackdown, although an investigation has been promised.

The “toilet paper roll” protest in the Plaza de Armas, which kicked off Paraguay’s “indignados” movement. Credit: Natalia Ruíz Díaz/IPS

By Natalia Ruiz Diaz
ASUNCION, Nov 29 2013 (IPS)

A few hours before a human chain was to surround the Paraguayan Congress on Thursday, Senator Víctor Bogado, accused of fraud and misuse of public funds, was stripped of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution.

On Nov. 15, an earlier vote in which 23 of the 45 members of the Senate voted for the ruling Colorado Party lawmaker to keep his immunity triggered the first social media-organised protest against corruption, which ultimately ended up forcing Congress to hold a second vote and reverse the decision.

Under pouring rain, dozens of protesters gathered in front of Congress in the Plaza de Armas Thursday evening to celebrate the first victory of the demonstrations, instead of forming a human chain in protest.

And while the number of demonstrators was smaller than in the previous protests in the plaza because of the torrential rains, the police presence was heavy, with hundreds of officers and anti-riot water cannons. At times there were more police than demonstrators in the downpour.

Natalia Paola Rodríguez, a 35-year-old lawyer and university professor, arrived late “because the torrent almost swept my car away.” But she told IPS she needed to be there “to share the excitement; what we did is really important” for this country of 6.6 million people – the second-poorest country in South America after Bolivia, and one of the most unequal.

Hugo Galeano, a 23-year-old student, also defied the weather, “because the celebration had to be here.”

“Public pressure twisted the arm of one of the branches of government,” a euphoric Galeano told IPS. “This isn’t over, this will become an ongoing thing,” he added, before walking off, chanting along with the rest of the protesters.

Topo Topone R. is the alias used on the social networks by lawyer Alejandro Recalde, one of the people behind Paraguay’s protest movement, which has labelled itself #15Npy, along the lines of Spain’s 15 May (15M) movement of “indignados” or angry protesters.

The movement debuted in the Nov. 15 demonstration in the Plaza de Armas, when hundreds of protesters lobbed toilet paper rolls at the legislature, to “clean up” Congress. The protest, which got heavy media coverage, was followed by others.

Topo, 40, explained to IPS that the aim of the movement is to become a kind of citizen oversight mechanism to keep an eye on the authorities, through constant demonstrations and public participation.

“We will be wherever citizens feel alone because there is no organisation or political party fighting for their demands, until the corrupt political class, which uses the people instead of serving them, is eliminated,” he said.

A taxi driver who did not want to give his name told IPS that “we got tired of the abuses,” before pointing out that “my colleagues contributed a lot to this triumph.” Taxi drivers were the first to refuse to provide service to the 23 senators who defended Bogado in the first vote in Congress. The boycott was then joined by restaurants and other businesses in Asunción.

#15Npy is a movement organised over the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as political blogs, one of them created by Topo himself shortly after left-wing president Fernando Lugo was removed from office in June 2012 through a controversial impeachment trial.

José Carlos Rodríguez, a sociologist and political analyst, said the term “popular uprising” was not fitting in this case.

“Paraguay’s ‘indignados’ are an expression of a new middle class, which has moral grievances. They are different from the movements that have emerged in the Arab countries and in Brazil. In the Arab countries, the focus was the dictatorships, and in Brazil the protesters were demanding rights,” he told IPS.

But like the waves of demonstrations in North Africa, Spain or Brazil, the movement in Paraguay has been organised through the social media.

A precedent for #15Npy was the “after office revolucionario” (after-office revolutionary) protests held during the Lugo administration (2008-2012) to back the president’s veto of a scandalous increase in the electoral court’s budget, which had been approved by Congress, dominated by the right-wing Colorado Party and other opposition forces.

Public pressure forced the legislature to backtrack at that time too, and it cancelled the budget hike. That led to the emergence of the new contemptuous slang terms “senarratas” and “dipuchorros”, which mix up the terms “senator”, “deputy”, “rat” and “thief”.

Rodríguez believes the protests will continue. “The people are going to go for more,” he said, adding that the Bogado case is only the tip of an iceberg of impunity enjoyed by the political leadership, which Paraguayans are fed up with.

Politics in Paraguay has historically been infamous for the high levels of corruption, impunity, nepotism and perks. And in the eyes of the citizens, Congress is the biggest culprit.

A broad range of people are participating in #15Npy – from office workers and students to artists, civil servants, taxi drivers, shopkeepers and ordinary people.

Some come from a background of activism in trade unions, social organisations or even political parties. But the great majority form part of the anonymous public, which up to now had been more resigned than participative in the face of realities such as living in one of the most unequal and corrupt countries in South America.

There are no leaders in the movement, only people who serve as reference points in different groups that communicate through Facebook and Twitter. On the networks they have already made it clear that Bogado’s loss of immunity will not bring the protests to a halt.

The next one will be a mid-December march on the courthouse, the seat of justice, “one of the branches of the state where corruption flourishes, and which provides citizens with anything but justice,” Topo said.

Both he and the demonstrators in the plaza stressed that President Horacio Cartes, a business tycoon in office since August, “should also take note” of the protests.

“Either he stops the repression of campesinos [small farmers] and only thinking about privatising and addresses the people’s demands, or we will go after him,” the taxi driver said.

“We are going to work at the grassroots level and go after the three branches of government; our agenda isn’t marked by anyone,” said Professor Rodríguez, who is very active in #15Npy.

Rodríguez the political scientist said these movements “produce a change in consciousness, but they do not directly bring about transformations.” In the case of Paraguay, the analyst said the support that the demonstrations received from the press and sectors of the business community played a key role.

In the Plaza de Armas Thursday evening, the protesters called for the resignation of the 23 senators who defended Bogado. The political scientist said “demands are always maximalist, you have to call for things even if you won’t get them, but basically the big victory is that Congress has changed, and it’s not going to be the same from here on out.”

Japanese protesters are determined to defy efforts to reopen Japan’s nuclear energy installations. Credit: Suvendrini Kakuchi/IPS.

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
TOKYO, Oct 15 2013 (IPS)

Two and a half years ago, Ayako Oga, now 30, found herself helpless as an earthquake and the tsunami it triggered hit Japan and crippled four reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. She and her husband were forced to abandon their village Ookuma Machi, barely five kilometres away.

The once-farmer is a leading activist today in Japan’s growing anti-nuclear movement, joining hundreds of Fukushima residents affected by the Mar. 11, 2011 tragedy to protest against a government plan to restart Japan’s nuclear reactors.

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has been aggressively pushing an economic agenda that has come to be called Abenomics, declared at a press conference last month, “We will restart nuclear power plants on the basis of the world’s strictest safety standards.”“Representing important evidence of the dark side of nuclear power is something I have to do.”

With her worst fears come true, and now living with hundreds of evacuees in Aizu Wakamatsu, a town 100 km from the damaged plant, Oga is determined not to let this happen. “Representing important evidence of the dark side of nuclear power is something I have to do,” she told IPS.

Anti-nuclear sentiment in Japan peaked in the wake of the Fukushima incident. An opinion survey conducted by leading daily Tokyo Shimbun in July 2012 showed nearly 80 percent of the 3,000 respondents were opposed to nuclear power. Not surprising, given that the disaster forced 85,000 people to leave their homes, contaminated vast swathes of land and hit incomes of farmers and fisherfolk.

However, Oga and other anti-nuclear activists could well find themselves on the losing side now as the Liberal Democratic Party government and large corporations push for restarting the reactors, citing an energy crisis and economic losses.

Currently, Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors, which met 30 percent of the country’s energy needs, are shut down for various reasons, including routine inspection. The world’s third largest economy (GDP: 5.96 trillion dollars) imports almost 90 percent of its energy, leaving it with a trade deficit of 1.02 trillion yen (10.5 billion dollars).

With winning local approval as one of the conditions to restart the reactors, the government is publicising the stringent safety standards on the basis of which it will resume nuclear energy production.

The country had established an independent Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) in September 2012 comprising top scientists and safety experts. Its head Shunichi Tanaka, a scientist and native of Fukushima city, had officially stated that the official response and that of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which operated the Fukushima plant, was “groping in the dark.”

The NRA’s new safety guidelines, which came into force in July this year, are based on the concept of defence-in-depth. This requires a strengthening of the third and fourth layer of defence as well as the prevention of simultaneous loss of all safety functions due to earthquakes, tsunamis and other external events.

Operators are also required to check for active earthquake faults while building reactors, have higher tsunami protection walls and secondary control rooms.

People do seem to be buying into the government promise of safe nuclear reactors. Another survey by Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun in July this year registered a dip in support for abolishing nuclear power – 40 percent of its 1,000 respondents supported the restart of nuclear reactors with higher safety guidelines compared to 37 percent in February.

Mitsuhiko Tanaka, a scientist who has worked on reactor design for decades, likens the struggle of the anti-nuclear activists to a fight between David and Goliath.

“Activists are up against a powerful government and rich corporations who aim to justify nuclear power,” he told IPS. “They have the necessary clout to sway public opinion in Japan, where economic profit is what matters.”

He thinks the official moves to push safety standards and win public approval are gravely flawed.

“Besides the lack of transparency in the procedure of restarting the plants, a key point is that officials have still not scientifically revealed the real cause for the Fukushima accident,” he said.

Many scientists are critical of the official explanation that the 13-15 metres high tsunami alone damaged the reactors. With the reactors still in a crippled state, hard-core scientific evidence is yet to come, some say.

Professor Hiromitsu Ino, a nuclear safety expert and now head of the newly established Citizens’ Commission on Nuclear Energy, is one such critic. “I am not satisfied with the current official safety regulations because they do not include public interest and ethical aspects of nuclear power,” he told IPS. “This can be developed only after close discussions with people, and needs time.”

Ino also thinks that the new guidelines are not strict enough. For instance, he says, they permit energy operators an indefinite grace period to instal filters in boiling water reactors, viewed as critical to lessen the toxic impact of a hydrogen explosion.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster is believed to be the worst after Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. It remains an ongoing crisis, with the government battling to contain leaks of highly toxic ground water spilling into the sea and surrounding areas.

On Oct. 10, high levels of radioactive caesium were detected in the seawaters close to the defunct reactors, according to TEPCO.

In August, the Fukushima prefectural government released new statistics on thyroid testing on almost 200,000 children. The figures, reported in Asahi Shimbun, showed 44 children and youth diagnosed with or suspected to have the disease. They were aged between six and 18 years when the accident occurred.

Oga says her husband visited their former home in August as part of a visit arranged by the government for displaced nuclear refugees to sort out their documents and belongings.

“I did not join him even though I was keen to see my old home,” she told IPS. “I wanted to avoid radiation because I want to have a child in the future. Young people like us realise that we have only ourselves to rely on and change the world.”

Activists claim that more than one hundred people have been killed and thousands injured during demonstrations in Sudan following the removal of fuel subsidies.

Protests have been raging in Khartoum, Maddani, the second city 200 km south of the capital, Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast and various other locations since the government lifted the subsidies Monday.

Palls of black smoke are now commonplace above the city skylines. Protesters have targeted petrol stations, police stations and checkpoints. Roads have been blocked with burning vehicles, including the road to Khartoum airport. Government officials have condemned the protests as “premeditated sabotage”.

As tensions have risen, foreign embassies and companies have been put on alert, with many closing non-essential offices and cultural organisations, while their workers have been advised to stay home.

The U.S. Embassy in Khartoum has appealed for calm. In a statement it said: “We call on all sides not to resort to force and to respect civil liberties and the right to peaceful assembly,” and regretted “reports of serious injuries and attacks on property during demonstrations which turned violent”.

In the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman, the security forces have shot into the crowds from armoured vehicles and helicopters have been flying over.  Victims of the violence have been killed by gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Meanwhile, there are reports that elements of the Sudan Armed Forces are refusing to carry out orders from President Omar al-Bashir to control the situation on the streets.

Some protesters have targeted offices of the NCP ruling party, while others have gathered outside companies belonging to senior NCP members, such as the Steam soda factory. In many cases the police and agents of the National Intelligence Security Services (NISS) have tried to break up the demonstrations using extreme force.

Activists denounced that opposition party leaders were arrested before the fuel subsidies were lifted, in an attempt to prevent them from organising protests. Since then thousands of demonstrators have been taken into custody by the police and NISS.

However, the protesters remain defiant. Hafiz Ismail, an economist and commentator, told IPS: “The protesters will make the government change its policies – policies which will kill the people slowly.”

Commenting on government claims that the lifting of subsidies would help revitalise the Sudanese economy, he said: “They are lying and disrespecting the Sudanese people. Besides these measures won’t affect the rich but will only harm the poor.”

Hoyida Mohamed, 24, from Omdurman, told IPS she protested through the night, to fight the fuel price hikes and call for the government to resign. “The new policies will make our lives, which are already hard, impossible. Now we don’t have a chance to go to the university or get treatment when we get sick. We want this government out. Our lives have become very hard under this regime.”

Rishan Oshi, an activist who has participated in the demonstrations from the start, told IPS she was protesting against the government’s “disrespect for the Sudanese people. They want to fill their pockets from our wage packets

“The price increases are incredibly unjust. The people who are protesting are ordinary people and don’t belong to any political parties. I considered it like a revolution of the downtrodden and the hungry.”

The majority of the population in Sudan is poor.

Meanwhile, Internet services have been shut down in what seemed like an official attempt to stifle coverage of the protests. The Committee to Protect Journalist (CPJ) has appealed for an end to the block. “There is no justification for any government to cut off the Internet’s vital flow of information, which journalists and citizens alike rely upon,” said CPJ Middle East and North Africa Programme Coordinator Sherif Mansour.

The government has taken a hand in the way the protests have been reported. The Al-Ayam, Al-Qarar and Al-Youm al-Tali newspapers purportedly changed reports on the demonstrations following pressure from the Sudanese security forces. The Sudanese Journalists Network called for a strike, starting Thursday.

Fuel prices rose by more than 90 percent since the subsidies were lifted. And the annual inflation rate, which previously stood at 50 percent, is expected to climb to 100 percent.

This is the second time fuel subsidies have been cut since South Sudan became an independent nation in 2011, resulting in the loss of 75 percent of Sudan’s oil reserves.

Some economists have proposed alternatives to price increases to make good the shortfall, including cutting state workers’ salaries, fighting corruption, and reinvesting in agriculture.

Ismail said the government should enter into dialogue with opposition parties in order to address the country’s economic difficulties.

He said the government should seek political reconciliation, and argued that the removal of subsidies is “ineffective…These are short-sighted policies. It’s like treating cancer with Panadol (the painkiller paracetamol).”

The demonstrations are expected to continue over the next few days.

Pensioners protesting in the Praça do Município in Lisbon. Credit: Katalin Muharay/IPS

By Mario Queiroz
LISBON, Aug 16 2013 (IPS)

The elderly have taken to the streets in Portugal to protest drastic public sector pension cuts announced this week by the government of conservative Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho.

Never before had so much grey hair been seen in the frequent anti-government demonstrations. Shoulder to shoulder with employed and jobless workers and often leaning on the arms of their grandchildren, senior citizens have come out on to the streets in defence of their fragile rights.

Temporary workers, civil servants and pensioners have been hit hardest by the harsh austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the European Central Bank in exchange for a 110-billion-dollar bailout package in mid-2011.

Since then, the so-called “troika” has dictated the public finance policy of this crisis-stricken country of 10.6 million people.

The cuts announced by the government for this year and next in the state administration amount to 4.92 billion dollars – half the sum spent to bail out three private banks, the opposition and trade unions complain.

The additional cuts in pensions are even worse than “all the damage already done to pensioners,” said Jorge Nobre dos Santos, head of the Frente Sindical da Administração Pública (FESAP), a public employees’ union.

“The money has been and still is being managed by all sorts of agents, governments and politicians, without even asking the permission of its legitimate owners,” those who paid in to the Portuguese Social Security (SSP) system all their lives, dos Santos complained.

He pointed out that the measure is retroactive, violating the state’s commitments to its retired workers. The strategy is to engulf all pensions, “whether public or private,” he said.

“The state’s credibility is at stake; it is being undermined by the prime minister,” he maintained.

Teles Alcides, a representative of the Frente Comum dos Sindicatos da Administração Pública (FC), another public sector union, described the proposed cuts as “robbery.”

The FC has pledged to do everything possible to block the new measure. “The attempt to reduce pensions plunders those who have contributed to the system and have pension rights,” said Alcides.

The only alternative for hundreds of thousands of people in Portugal “is to express outrage over these measures, that are unprecedented in their harshness – a veritable robbery of what has been discounted from our pay throughout our working lives; this is money that is not the state’s, but our own,” said retiree Armindo Brandão, who faces a 9.5 percent cut in his SSP pension.

“For me, with my pension of 1,020 dollars, this is an enormous reduction, as well as being sheer robbery, but as the robbery is committed by the government, the thief is not arrested,” Brandão said.

The pensioners’ protests have turned violent, with almost daily verbal and even physical attacks on SSP or General Tax Directorate officials.

According to an association of pensioners and retirees, ARE, the protests are an uprising against the public authorities triggered by the continued attacks on this vulnerable sector of the population “which sees its retirement income dwindling daily due to new taxes and cuts.”

The situation “amounts to a confiscation of the assets of those who paid contributions all their lives and who now see their pensions cut in an unprecedented act of plunder,” says an Aug. 13 ARE communiqué.

The feeling among those most affected by the crisis is one of profound injustice, as shown by a letter sent to the Lisbon newspaper Público by a reader, Manuel Morato Gomes.

While cuts are being made even in widows’ pensions, no explanations are being given for “the exceptions for former judges and diplomats, or for the life pensions granted to former members of parliament, government ministers and presidents,” Morato Gomes complained.

Where, he asked, are the justice, morality, equity and common sense in this measure? He accused Passos Coelho of “acting only in accordance with his liberal theories, completely disregarding people’s needs.”

IPS consulted another retiree, Feliciano, a former soldier who fought in the colonial wars in Portugal’s former colonies in Africa (1961-1974), where he lost a leg. He receives a modest disability pension.

He asked to only be identified by his first name “for fear of reprisals.” “They might take away the little money that I get,” he said, lamenting “the lack of sensitivity and respect for those of us who went to Africa to fight for our flag in an unjust war that we did not even believe in.”

“I survived the war in Guinea Bissau, although I was severely injured, but I do not think I will survive this government. It only wants to get rid of the old people; let them die as soon as possible, so the state can balance its books,” he said.

Portuguese President Aníbal Cavaco e Silva has taken the precaution of asking the Constitutional Court to rule on the legality of the government’s proposed budget cuts bill, which includes lay-offs in the civil service.

An editorial in Público says that the conservative Cavaco e Silva does not remotely suppose that the law is unconstitutional. But “its provisions are so drastic, its coverage so wide and its potential consequences for the lives of thousands of citizens so devastating that no president would risk signing it into law without the Constitutional Court’s approval.”

The editorial concludes with the prediction that, if the Court vetoes the bill, “radical supporters of the austerity measures will say again that the constitution has become a blockading force that is dragging the country into the abyss. They may say so, as long as they do not then claim that the rule of law can coexist with violations of the constitution.”

Mourners gather at the funeral of opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi in Tunis. Credit: Louise Sherwood/IPS.

By Louise Sherwood
TUNIS, Jul 31 2013 (IPS)

As political divisions threaten to destabilise the national transition process in Tunisia, Prime Minister Ali Laarayedh has set deadlines for finalising the new constitution and holding elections. Not everyone is convinced these will be met.

In a televised speech Monday appealing for a calm resolution of the political crisis, Laaryedh stated: “Dissolution of the National Constituent Assembly (NCA) and the government will not help the situation…There are opportunists who are trying to take advantage of this situation. Dialogue shouldn’t be in the streets or through violence but at the table discussing strategies and plans.”

His speech was a show of strength following a wave of protests that have hit the country since the assassination of opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi on Thursday last week, the second such assassination in five months. Early shocked reactions led to protests against the government, with many chanting ‘dégage!’ (get out!), a slogan that was used during the revolution.It was expected that the constitution would be finalised within a year followed by elections but almost two years on it is still not finished.

The opposition is already unhappy with the government’s progress with the transitional process. It was expected that the constitution would be finalised within a year followed by elections but almost two years on it is still not finished. The government insists it is taking time to get it right, but critics argue it is clinging to power.

Laarayedh now says the constitution will be finalised by the end of August and that election laws will be written by Oct. 23, the date the government came to power in 2011. He announced that elections will be held on Dec. 17, the anniversary of the day three years ago when street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight, igniting the revolution in Tunisia and triggering the Arab Spring.

However Amine Ghali, programme director at the Kawakibi Democracy Centre, an international civil society organisation based in Tunis, told IPS: “There is no possibility of meeting these deadlines. For the election laws and elections we need six to eight months. Perhaps the constitution could be finished by the end of August but only if there is a genuine discussion to improve the current draft, taking into account the many shortfalls it contains.”

Anti-government protestors are also angry that not enough is being done to stop extremist Islamic groups or to secure national borders. The country was plunged into mourning once more Monday when nine Tunisian soldiers were killed and their bodies mutilated in a terrorist attack close to the Algerian border.

Following Brahmi’s funeral on Saturday both pro- and anti- government protestors demonstrated in the square in front of the NCA in Tunis. This led to clashes, and police fired tear gas into the crowds. Protests have been taking place across the country.

Reem Selmi came with her husband and 12-year-old daughter to support the government in an earlier protest on Sunday. “People want the government to solve all the problems straightaway but it’s not possible just like that,” she said. She believes the government, which is dominated by the moderate Islamic party Ennahda, is on the right path.

“This government lets everybody live the life that they want. Under [former dictator] Ben Ali we were not free to practise our religion but now we can. We are Muslims and we love Islam. Islam does not mean terrorism.”

Yet there is a danger that political divisions are being strengthened down religious lines.

“I used to want Ben Ali out because he wouldn’t allow Muslims to grow long beards or women to wear the niqab, but now I think I know why he did this,” Maher Gatri on the anti-government side of the square told IPS.

“Today you can look at a person and just by his clothes or appearance you can tell which party they support. We are all Tunisians and Muslims but now we are separating into two sides. This is very sad. When I am near the government supporters I feel afraid. I am a Muslim but now I am in fear of my own religion.”

The government is also facing a crisis amongst members of the NCA charged with writing the constitution. Several have withdrawn from their positions over the last few days.

“Fifty-nine [out of 217] members have withdrawn but we want them to come back,” Osama al Saghir, NCA member from the Ennahda party tells IPS. “If we find a solution we will complete the constitution on time. If they choose not to come back they will have to resign and be replaced.”

There are claims that the government itself, a coalition of three parties, the Congress for the Republic (CPR), Ettakatol, and the dominant party Ennahda, may be fragmenting.

Bannour Mohamed, spokesperson for Ettakatol, reportedly told local radio station Jawhara FM, “If Ennahda and the CPR refuse the dissolution of the government, Ettakatol will withdraw from the troika.”

Al Saghir says this is not the case. “We continue to work together with Mustapha Ben Jaafar, Ettakatol’s secretary general and president of the NCA.”

Television images of the violence in Egypt serve as a stark warning to Tunisians of where the path a violent overthrow may lead.

In a paper entitled ‘Tunisia unlikely to go Egypt’s way’ Francis Ghilès, senior research fellow at the Barcelona Centre for Foreign Affairs (CIDOB) sets out three key differences between the Egyptian and Tunisian crises which offer hope for Tunisia: Tunisia’s army does not have a strong political role, its economic and unemployment problems are not as bad, and it has a strong and vocal civil society, he argues. Many Tunisians hope he is right.

French support for the protests in Bulgaria has inspired street scenes to recreate the iconic painting by Eugene Delacroix to mark the revolution in France in 1830. Credit: Vassil Garnizov/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

For more than six weeks now, Bulgarians have been on the streets demanding an end to oligarchy and corruption.

Under the label DANSwithme, inhabitants of Bulgarian capital Sofia have been taking to the streets every day since Jun. 14. The protests were sparked by the Socialist government’s decision to appoint 32-year-old media mogul Delyan Peevski head of the national security services (DANS).

Despite Peevski’s snap removal following the public outcry, Bulgarians have continued protests to demand resignation of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski. On peak days, crowds are in the tens of thousands.

Urbanites, often youth and professionals, have vented their anger and also celebrated the rather new experience of street action. They are a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.They’re a colourful bunch, bringing along kids, often wearing theatrical costumes, using art installations to send political messages, and broadcasting it all on social media.

As if to reflect participants’ desire for a well-functioning society, people have gathered in the centre of Sofia in the mornings “to have a coffee with parliamentarians” (coffee cups were collected as proof of participant numbers) and then gone to work. In the evening, they have returned to the streets, for more elaborate marches and performances.

Remarkable for their endurance, size and creativity, the protests represent the culmination of public resentment with a political class perceived to be closely tied to business and crime groups, and with dysfunctional democratic institutions.

In Bulgaria more than in other post-socialist members of the European Union, a nexus between organised crime, businesses and the political class cemented in the early 1990s remains a feature of public life. The country is also the poorest of EU member states.

Over the past years, Bulgarians have been reacting. Environmentalists often took issue with the sell-off of natural parks or pristine beaches for tourism or sports projects by prominent business figures with a murky reputation.

It took until February this year, however, for the discontent to boil over. At the start of 2013, Bulgarians were on the streets for weeks complaining about rising electricity and heating costs, and calling for re-nationalisation of the energy system.

Those protests were led by the poor who could not afford to pay the heavy bills. There were several public suicides in cities across the country during the weeks of action.

The protests were backed by others frustrated with Bulgaria’s ruling class. The centre-right government of Boiko Borisov resigned as a result.

Following elections in May, Bulgaria is now run by a coalition of Socialists and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (a maverick party representing the country’s Turkish minority which usually allies with winners of elections to form governments). Further support from the far-right party Ataka was needed to form this government.

“The situation is very unstable at the moment, with pressure on the government increasing all the time because recently even trade unions expressed their support for the protests,” Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Sofia based Centre for Liberal Studies tells IPS. “The question seems to be no longer if but when we will have early elections again. This government has clearly lost its ability to govern.”

On Tuesday last week (Jul. 23), the protests turned tense for the first time. Crowds blockaded the parliament in the evening, trapping politicians gathered for an extraordinary session to vote amendments to the budget. Those amendments sought an increase in budget deficit to finance outstanding debts to private contractors and some social spending.

Oresharski is refusing to resign, promising that the government has “a clear plan of stabilisation” and plans “urgent measures to improve the social situation.” No details were given.

President Rosen Plevneliev has meanwhile been expressing sympathy for the protesters.

As have representatives of the EU and its member states, including EU Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding and the French and German ambassadors to Sofia. Unlike Greek or Spanish protesters targeting the EU as a main driver of austerity measures, many of the Bulgarians on the streets today still hold on to EU ideals.

Thankful for the supportive French and German ambassadors, protesters have been putting on live re-enactments of French painter Eugene Delacroix’s canvas Liberty Leading the People (strongly associated with the French Republic) and of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The French painting became iconic of the July revolution of 1830 in France. In the painting a woman personifying Liberty leads people holding up the French flag. The scene is being recreated in Sofia inspired by French support for the protests.

“In a way, these protests are producing an ideology that fits fully into the master signifiers of the post-socialist transition: anti-politics, technocratic experts, civil society, transparency, anti-communism, free market competition (an economy free from the meddling of the political class which is considered to be conducive to the mafia) – as the timing of the protests suggests,” Jana Tsoneva, a doctoral candidate from the Central European University attending the protests tells IPS.

Tsoneva adds that this mindset that distinguishes the Bulgarian movement from Greek or Turkish protests or the Occupy movement, is not necessarily shared by all participants but promoted by more prominent figures.

“As compared to the protests in February which were much more critical, for example in the stance towards foreign investors, these ones have a much more typical modernisation agenda,” Ivan Krastev tells IPS.

“Unlike in other places, like Greece, where people protested the European project, Bulgarians see Brussels as a natural ally. Therefore, officials in Europe are able to side with protesters against elites, not vice-versa.”

Both caution against symplifying the reading of these protests by linking them to one agenda or one class.

“We see on the streets people who are much more on the left, anti-capitalist, people who in the West would join Occupy, but also people with more classical liberal views who say liberals never got a chance because of the oligarchs,” adds Krastev. “This is an interesting coalition and it is interesting to see on what they agree and disagree.

“It is important that we are witnessing a big process of politicisation of the middle class and youth,” he adds, “even though the weakness of the broad, classical civic agenda of the protests is that it is unclear whether any political party can emerge from them.”

Children of a generation that fought for basic rights like having enough to eat, learning to read and being treated in safer hospitals, the over 300,000 students protesting on the streets of Brazil want more from a democratic and economic system that no longer represents them and is beginning to show its limitations. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 17 2013 (IPS)

The rise of the “global middle class” is widely attributed to the gradual eradication of extreme poverty in the developing world, even as the United Nations says that millions of people in countries such as India, China and Brazil have graduated from the ranks of the indigent.

But is there unintended negative fallout indirectly linking poverty alleviation to the current rise in middle class street protests in Brazil, Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt, among others?

Praising Latin America for its success in “lifting millions out of poverty”, Helen Clark, the administrator of the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), said last week that “protests and events around the world remind us that citizens want a greater say in the decisions which impact on their lives.”

And U.N. Assistant Secretary-General Heraldo Munoz points out that “many of the street protests in Latin America are sparked by a new middle class, increasingly indebted, who aspire for more, and demand quality public services and decent treatment.”

The challenge is to enhance institutions so they can respond to a new high-level intensity, says Munoz, who is also UNDP’s director of Latin America.

The UNDP estimates that more than 80 percent of the world’s middle class will be living in developing countries by 2030. According to the European Union Institute of Security Studies, the estimated size of the global middle class by 2030 will be about 4.9 billion, up from 1.8 billion in 2009.

In an article in the Wall Street Journal last month, Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute of International Studies, says in Turkey and Brazil, as in Tunisia and Egypt before them, political protest has been led not by the poor but by young people with higher-than-average levels of education and income.

“The new middle class is not just a challenge for authoritarian regimes or new democracies. No established democracy should believe it can rest on its laurels simply because it holds elections and has leaders who do well in opinion polls,” says Fukuyama, author of ‘the Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.’

And corporations are salivating at the prospect of this emerging middle class because it represents a vast pool of new consumers, he notes.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, told IPS, “I wouldn’t claim to be a great expert on this, but I would expect that as societies become richer and populations more educated, there will be increased demand for democracy.

“I’m sure that is part of what we are seeing in Brazil, Turkey, and Egypt, but in each case I am sure the nature of the discontent is more complicated.”

In any case, he said, an increased democratisation of society goes along with greater wealth.

In Brazil, the recent protests were directed at the rising cost of living (including an increase in bus fares), high-level political corruption and extravagant spending on next year’s World Cup soccer tournament, estimated at more than 13 billion dollars compared to the deteriorating state of schools and hospitals in poor neighbourhoods.

The protests have been described as “the awakening of the new middle class” emerging out of poverty.

Richard Jolly, honorary professor and research associate at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, told IPS, “It’s certainly an interesting theme though one to be written about with many question marks, rather than dogmatic certainties.

“I hope you will also consider some reference to the recent rise of ‘assertive religion’ – meaning fundamentalist versions of Christianity and Judaism, as well as Islam, which Emanuel de Kadt has just published a book about, with the same name.

“I think also of a book written decades ago which argued that revolution starts not when the poor are ground down in poverty but after some improvements in living standards which stirs hopes and demands for something more,” said Jolly, a former assistant secretary-general at the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF.

Dr. Yilmaz Akyuz, chief economist at the Geneva-based South Centre, however, remains sceptical.

“I find the rise of the global middle class story not very convincing,” he said.

Akyuz said it is closely linked to the “rise of the South” story – “something I questioned in various papers I have written since 2010 (see e.g. The Staggering Rise of the South? or Waving or Drowning: Developing Countries After the Financial Crisis)”.

It is now increasingly understood that this is a myth, said Akyuz, a former director and chief economist at the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

He pointed to two developments: declines in poverty and increased income and wealth inequality. “But these two do not give us bigger middle class,” he argued. “Bringing the poor above the poverty line would not make them middle class (as conventionally defined).”

This, together with greater inequality would produce hollowing out since the top would be gaining at the expense of the middle class.

Middle classes in the South are increasingly internationalised in vision and better informed through access to the internet, social media, etc. This is why Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called social media a menace, he said.

At the same time, governments in countries heavily dependent on foreign capital and vulnerable to financial instability are well aware that increased political instability could lead to capital flight and economic collapse, Akyuz said.

“This exerts a restraining influence on them against rioters. Turkey cannot become an Iran or even Malaysia because, inter alia, it lacks natural resources,” he noted. “If middles classes run away with their money, the economy could collapse.”

The “other march”: fancy trade union banners, flags and signs and powerful sound systems, everything highly organised to set forth the labour movement’s own demands. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 13 2013 (IPS)

The young people who have been protesting in Brazil over the last few weeks, who say they are apolitical and who have organised over the social networking sites, were not entirely pleased with Thursday’s demonstrations by the country’s trade unions and social and popular movements.

During a “National Day of Struggle” Thursday, strikes, protests and roadblocks were organised by the CUT central trade union and 77 urban and rural social organisations.

The demands of the new and more organised protests included better wages, a reduction of the work week to 40 hours, job security and an end to outsourcing, higher pensions, 10 percent of GDP for education, higher spending on public health, and improved public transport.

According to the organisers, 100,000 demonstrators came out on the streets nationwide.

In Rio de Janeiro, where some 10,000 people joined the march, the trade union’s flags and banners, professional-looking signs, sound systems and balloons contrasted with the hand-made placards of the students and other young people who began to take to the streets in Brazil’s cities in June.

But the student protests, initially triggered by bus fare hikes and organised over Facebook and other sites, were much bigger, reaching one million people countrywide.

Thursday’s protest “was peaceful; we’re asking for better working conditions and we’re protesting cuts in our companies,” one worker taking part in the protest, who said his name was Eduardo Henrique, told IPS.

Among the demonstrators, a group of engineers from Brazil’s Petrobras oil company called for an end to public auctions of oil industry concessions.

“We discovered enormous oil reserves, so there’s no need for foreign companies to come in,” Silvio Cidog, with the association of Petrobras engineers, told IPS.

Rural workers also made their voices heard. A small farmer who identified himself as
Osuara, with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), said it was urgent for the government’s land reform programme to speed up.

Apolitical protests

Far away from the noise of the trade union’s sound systems, a group of around 200 demonstrators blocked traffic on one of the city’s main avenues with a sit-in, to draw attention to the demands that gave rise to the movement of young people who describe themselves as apolitical.

“This is a movement without party affiliations that was organised over the Internet. They (the trade unions) took advantage of us. They have sound wagons, they buy everything, they hand out flags, the people don’t have any of those things,” said Karina Monteso, an economist.

“In Brazil, there’s a dictatorship of the left…They don’t want to release their hold on power,” said lawyer Marcio Simoes. “Our only weapon is this,” he said, holding up his iPhone, which he uses to communicate with other protesters who, demonstrating in another Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood, were preparing to march to the government palace.

Around the Guanabara Palace, things got out of hand. Isolated groups of masked protesters used stones, Molotov cocktails and flares to try to knock down bars protecting the building, and clashed with police.

Their chants focused on protesting the police repression and the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games to be hosted by Brazil.

Meanwhile, in the demonstration organised by the trade unions, urban planner Orlando dos Santos, with the NGO Observatorio de Metrópolis, was also opposed to the organisation of the two sporting events.

As a member of the non-governmental World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee, he is against the forced evictions caused by the sports-related construction projects in poor neighbourhoods.

With regard to the criticism from “the other protesters,” Dos Santos said “society is diverse. This demonstration was organised by the central trade unions, which are more classic-style organisations, and it is to be expected that there are groups that question this more traditional kind of group. But they are as democratic as the new forms of organisation,” he told IPS.

Nadine Borges, who represented a group of demonstrators from the Rio Truth Commission, called for the 1964-1985 military dictatorship’s documents to be made public so that human rights abuses committed during that period could be investigated.

“For us, historically, the defence of democracy has been based on the organisation of workers. This here is a democratic event that represents the organised central trade unions,” Borges said, in response to the criticism from other groups.

Some 100 young people dressed in black and covering their faces to avoid tear gas demonstrated in parallel to the workers’ march. “We have no words,” one of the young demonstrators told IPS. But their signs did: “Make love not war”, “Power to the people”, “Anarchist shock troops”.

Separated from the main trade union march, which filled an entire avenue, a group of young artists dressed as clowns chanted against police repression. They called themselves the “nhoque nhoque troops” – a play on words alluding to the security forces’ “tropa de choque” or “shock troops”.

Members of the governing leftwing Workers Party took part in the march organised by CUT, although without carrying party flags. After they identified themselves as party members, they said they were calling for a “deepening” of the socioeconomic improvements ushered in over the last decade by former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and President Dilma Rousseff.

This was the first reaction by organised leftwing political and social groups in Brazil in response to the wave of young people’s protests.

CUT, which supports organised participation by today’s young people, is worried that “conservative and rightwing sectors will try to influence their protests with objectives that have nothing to do with the immense majority of the people,” according to one of the union’s leaders.

He said “the organised participation of the working class in this new scenario is of fundamental importance, to make sure this situation has a positive solution.”

Non-party-political young protesters, now in the midst of an ideological battle. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 6 2013 (IPS)

The street marches in Brazil, initially non-party-political, have begun to take on the hues of leftwing political and social groupings, which are now trying to set the course of the movement that emerged from online social networks.

Augusto de Franco, founder of Escola de Redes, a research group devoted to netweaving, said the movement that originated in large cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro was driven like a “swarm of bees, a manifestation of interactions that could only occur in highly connected societies,” like what has happened in Madrid and other Spanish cities, or in Tahrir Square in Egypt.

The demonstrations were triggered by one specific issue, a hike in public transport fares. But they have grown into the largest protests in the country since 1992, when demonstrations led to the resignation of then president Fernando Collor de Melo.

This time the protests began with 5,000 young people and swelled to 1.5 million in 10 days. And they are innovative in nature, according to Franco.

“They were not centrally organised, they had no formal leadership (although several short-term leaders emerged). They were not masses convened by centralised organisations, but multitudes of people that formed constellations,” he told IPS.

The swarm, without a queen bee, is now in the middle of an “ideological tug-of-war,” according to João Pedro Stédile, leader of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) which is now joining the protests.

“Since young people do not have a mass organisation, the social classes have begun an ideological debate. They dispute the young people’s ideas in order to influence them,” Stédile said in an interview with IPS.

“On the one hand is the bourgeoisie that used Globo (Brazil’s largest broadcaster) and other media outlets to put the right’s demands in the mouths of young people and on their placards. On the other hand is the left and the working class, that are trying to get on to the streets to push their own agendas,” he said.

In Stédile’s view, the protests broke out because of an urban crisis resulting from the current stage of “financial capitalism.”

He listed factors like property speculation, which has raised rents and real estate prices by 150 percent over the last three years, and stimulation of automobile sales, which has led to “chaotic” traffic, without effective parallel investments in public transport.

“Young people are not apolitical. They are doing politics in the best way possible, in the streets. But they are not linked to political parties. They do not reject the ideology of the parties, but their methods,” Stédile said.

Sociologist Emir Sader offered other explanations, like utopian ideals, rebelliousness and “healthy disrespect for authority” that he said were characteristic of young people.

Meanwhile teenage demonstrator Rafael Farías told IPS young people have “warmth and intuition, and they heard the call.”

“We are young and we want to be noticed,” said Farías. And their voices were heard by the executive, legislative and judicial branches, which have already come up with some short-term solutions, such as lowering transport fares, creating anti-corruption mechanisms, devoting more resources to health and education and debating a much-postponed political reform.

But the voices of the young have also reached the ears of social organisations and the wide spectrum of leftwing parties, including the governing Workers’ Party (PT) of President Dilma Rousseff. Another PT leader, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), himself urged it to join the protests.

According to Lula, the right must be prevented from “appropriating” the movement and “pushing” the government to the left in order to “deepen the changes.”

Stédile said “It is not about putting slogans into the mouths of young people. They have their own, and the simple fact of taking to the streets and showing their anger is a political contribution for the whole of society.”

“The problem is how to mobilise the working class, because when it gets going it can achieve structural changes and strike at the interests of capital and the mass media,” he said.

The strategy has already shown results in the most recent demonstrations, which have had more diverse demands and participants, including trade unions and movements for the rights of women, gays, peasants and indigenous people.

“We are trying to mobilise the working class and include issues that are of interest to workers and all Brazilian people,” the MST leader said.

In addition to increased public spending on healthcare and education, they are calling for a 40-hour work week and heavier taxes for the rich and a lighter tax burden on the poor, and for elections campaigns to be fully funded by public financing.

And demands of a less urban nature are being raised, such as speeding up the demarcation of indigenous territories and land reform.

Social movements have different issues on their agendas, such as suspension of mining concessions and oil block auctions.

“In my opinion, the uprising has a social and economic basis,” Stédile said. “Instead of giving the young people political direction, it is necessary to put the working class in motion, in other words, to get poor people and workers also out on the streets. That is the challenge.”

These sectors must regain the representational space on the streets that they lost over the last decade of government by a party led by a trade union leader like Lula, with his long track record and high prestige, with whom they identified but from whom they became gradually distanced.

“The left in general became bureaucratic in its methods, although leftwing groups of young people in many cities were quite influential and were responsible for organising the protests,” Stédile said.

Sader, a PT activist, said “the left has to fight for the leadership and direction of this movement with a clearly popular and democratic orientation.”

This is a well-known strategy in Latin American history, which some analysts doubt is effective, while others support it.

“This movement has an increasingly plural agenda. People are crying ‘enough!’ Although specific political groups are trying to capitalise on the movement, its outcome has yet to be seen,” historian Marcelo Carreiro told IPS.

For his part, economist Adhemar Mineiro said: “The government would do well to depart from the tracks to which it returned with the old discourse of adjustment and competitiveness, and address the masses on the streets to discuss a new development model.”

Trade unions’ and social organisations’ ability to call people out on the streets will be seen on Jul. 11, when they have convened a national day of protests and strikes.

“We are aware that the media and conservative and rightwing sectors are attempting to influence the mobilisations with goals that are opposed to the interests of the majority of the Brazilian people,” said the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) central trade union, one of the 77 organisations behind the Jul. 11 strike.

That is why “the organised participation of the working class is vitally important in this new scenario, to ensure a positive outcome for this situation,” it said.

A poster against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Photo courtesy of Shadi Latta.

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 4 2013 (IPS)

For the small town of Kafranbel in Syria, the old saying “a pen is mightier than a sword” still rings true. Every week in Kafranbel, protesters draw posters, write banners and demonstrate against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In a twist, however, hundreds of such posters and banners are finding their way to the United States through activists’ efforts to ensure that this evidence is preserved for future generations.

Shadi Latta, a doctor based in Illinois, received the first 100 posters in February. The next set had about 20 posters, and he expects about 100 more soon, according to Latta, who was born and raised in Kafranbel.

The posters are smuggled out of Syria and stockpiled in Turkey before being shipped to the United States, Latta said, adding that taking them out of the country was probably the only way to preserve them.

With the raiding of major cities and demolition of historical sites, experts say that Syria’s cultural heritage is under threat as war rages between the rebels and Assad’s forces.

The World Heritage Committee has added six World Heritage sites in Syria to its “List of World Heritage in Danger”, and Irina Bokova, director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, condemned the continuing destruction of the ancient city of Aleppo, a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986.

For those in Kafranbel, the posters and banners are becoming an integral part of Syria’s history and as such must be preserved for future generations, said 41-year-old Raed Fares, who was behind the idea."This was a way for us to reach out to the international community and get our message out there."
-- Raed Fares

“Under constant shelling and bombing, you never know when you could lose all of these,” said Fares, who is based in Kafranbel. “We thought that it is better to ship them to the U.S. so that they are safe. Also, this was a way for us to reach out to the international community and get our message out there.”

Exhibitions

Latta has been helping Fares in this endeavour by displaying the posters in the United States, with exhibitions held in Indianapolis, Chicago and Atlanta, as well as in other areas.

Reactions have been emotional, but sometimes people are simply surprised, said Latta. Written in both Arabic and English, the posters are witty and unapologetic. “That is what people like about them,” he said.

The posters also reflect U.S. pop culture, often using Hollywood movies and cartoon characters as underlying themes to communicate with a global audience.

Latta’s personal favourite is a picture of Assad in a famous pose from the movie “Titanic”.

Though the original posters are not for sale, duplicates are made for people who want to buy them, said Latta.

The plan is to organise an exhibition in New York by the end of July. So far the exhibitions have managed to raise 650,000 dollars, which is going towards humanitarian aid in Syria, he added.

A long road

Creating these posters and getting them to the United States is no easy task, however.

It all started when Fares, who was studying medicine at Aleppo University, teamed up with Ahmad Jalal, an artist who agreed to create posters back in 2011.

When Fares and Jalal initially began their work, Kafranbel was still a battlefront, Fares recollected.

The duo would draw the posters in a makeshift tent a few miles away from Kafranbel. “Assad’s men knew we were doing it,” said Fares, who eventually dropped out of college. “They burned down our houses and destroyed all the buildings in the area. But since we were hiding they couldn’t arrest us. That is why we are still alive.”

With the Assad regime closely monitoring every anti-Assad chant or protest, demonstrators would immediately burn the posters after the protests, recalled Fares.

“But we realised that this was part of our history, and we should preserve them instead of destroying them,” Fares said. They soon began burying posters after every demonstration, until Fares realised that nearby Turkey would be the safest place to store them.

Posters were being smuggled out of Kafranbel, across  Syria’s border and into Turkey, and they are now being shipped to Latta’s home in the U.S. state of Illinois.

“When I would get the posters here, there would be particles of soil stuck on them,” Latta said. “Some of them would be moist, simply because they were buried for such a long time.”

Later, when Kafranbel, which has a population of just under 20,000, fell into the hands of the rebels, Fares and Jalal set up their own office in the town.

The “media centre” is now their official space where they carry out their work. Equipped with generators and laptops, the centre is also home to foreign journalists who arrive at Kafranbel. As an activist, Fares now films demonstrations and tries to spread awareness about the real situation in Syria.

“We are just peaceful protestors who are fighting against oppression,” Fares said. He doesn’t identify himself as a rebel or a fighter but emphasises that the people of Kafranbel are on the rebels’ side.

For those like Latta who are part of the Syrian diaspora, everyday reports of violence are unnerving. Latta’s in-laws are still in Syria, while some of his family members have left the country.

The United Nations estimates that the death toll in Syria since March 2011 has reached nearly 93,000. Still, Latta and Fares are hopeful, believing that victory will be theirs and Assad’s end is near.

"There will be no Cup," chanted thousands of demonstrators in Rio de Janeiro, referring to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 3 2013 (IPS)

The Brazilian national football team made a glorious comeback with its victory in the FIFA Confederations Cup, but the sport has lost its tight grip on society. While millions celebrated, the tournament was also another source of anger for the protesters that have filled the streets in the last few weeks.

“There will be no Cup,” chanted thousands of demonstrators, referring to the FIFA World Cup due to be held here in 2014, as they marched near Maracaná stadium in Rio de Janeiro, where Brazil defeated Spain 3-0 on Sunday, winning the tournament for the fourth time between the champions of the seven regional FIFA confederations.

The stadiums that were built or renovated for the Confederations Cup and World Cup matches were transformed into fortresses, besieged by protesters and the site of pitched battles between police and demonstrators over the past two weeks.

Rubber bullets and tear gas were the main weapons used by the police against demonstrators, some of whom threw stones, Molotov cocktails and fire crackers.

The sporting events inside the stadiums were also affected. At the inauguration of the Confederations Cup on Jun. 15 when Brazil played Japan, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was roundly booed.

At subsequent matches involving their team, Brazilian fans sang the national anthem at the top of their voices, and rebelled against the FIFA rule limiting the playing of anthems to 90 seconds by continuing to sing beyond the set time limit.

A banner calling for the “immediate annulment of the privatisation of Maracaná” was displayed in the centre of the stadium by a couple of volunteer dancers at the closing ceremony on Sunday. Similar actions broke the rules banning political demonstrations at FIFA events.

Stadiums are among the main targets of the protests that have brought more than two million people out on the streets throughout Brazil since Jun. 6.

Corruption and the use of resources that the demonstrators say should be spent on health, education and public transport were the main reasons why people have rejected the international tournaments.

The general belief is that some stadiums will be “white elephants” after the FIFA World Cup in 2014. One example is Mané Garrincha, in Brasilia, a stadium that was demolished and rebuilt with a seating capacity for 70,000 spectators.

According to observers, the country’s capital, which lacks a football tradition and has no important football clubs, will not be able to use such a large stadium, which is second only to the historic Maracaná, with capacity for 76,800 fans.

Matches between the eight national teams that participated in the Confederations Cup in June were played at six stadiums, while 12 stadiums will host the World Cup between Jun. 13 and Jul. 13, 2014.

The cost of construction, which is already seen as exorbitant by Brazilians, is still rising. The initial budget of 2.4 billion dollars for the 12 stadiums has already increased by 30 percent, according to the Comptroller General’s Office (CGU).

But costs may continue to rise, because the projects are a long way from completion and are experiencing considerable delays. Moreover, works to improve urban passenger transport for the crowds of visitors expected next year are needed. Many are convinced that corruption is the main reason for inflated costs.

The luxuriousness of the new temples of football is another complaint. Poor people are being excluded from the sport that they have for so long supported, due to the high cost of entrance tickets.

The level of quality insisted on has become a satirical reference in the protests raging in the streets of the country’s largest cities. “We want FIFA standards” for education, health and other services, like public transport, demonstrators are demanding.

FIFA has become “a state within our state,” and is today “the country’s real president,” said former football player Romário de Souza Faria on a video uploaded on the internet in support of the protests and criticising the impositions of the world football organisation.

Romário, the hero of the Brazilian triumph in the 1994 World Cup in the United States, is now a congressman for the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB).

The only country that has ever renounced hosting a World Cup was Colombia in 1986. The tournament was transferred to Mexico.

The then Colombian government rejected FIFA’s conditions on the grounds that the resources would be better spent on education, health and other areas of social development. However, these promises were apparently not kept.

In recent years, People’s Committees have been formed in the 12 state capitals that will host the official matches, to denounce the impacts of the 2014 World Cup and mobilise the population against it, especially those people who are affected by the construction works.

In Rio de Janeiro, in particular, the protests are aggravated by the Olympic Games to be held there in 2016, and the lesson learnt from the 2007 Pan American Games, which cost four times the original budget and left a legacy of next to nothing.

The committees headed demonstrations that, together with the marches against bus fare hikes – later cancelled – in São Paulo, unleashed an unprecedented wave of protests that shook Brazil´s political institutions and highlighted the crisis of representation by parties and the legislative and executive branches.

The Confederations Cup and the bus fare increases acted as detonators of a generalised uprising when they coincided in June.

The protest is not against football, but against corruption and the use made of public resources that are needed in key social sectors, the demonstrators´ placards explain.

But the stereotypical view of Brazil as “the land of football” is gone.

More important than winning the World Cup is having better public services and government, and less corruption, said the protesters, while President Rousseff’s popularity plunged from 57 to 30 percent in June.

Middle class young people take issue with Dilma Rousseff's government over public investments. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jul 2 2013 (IPS)

After 10 years of social and economic gains thanks to successful employment and public investment policies and anti-poverty programmes, Brazil is facing the challenge of broadening and accelerating a model of development that includes, for instance, the young people protesting on the country’s streets.

Since the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT) came to power in 2003, first under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and then President Dilma Rousseff, major strides have been made against poverty.

In June 2011, when the Brazil Without Poverty (Brasil Sem Miséria) plan was launched, official statistics acknowledged there were still 16.2 million people living in extreme poverty in this country of nearly 200 million people.

But conditional cash transfer programmes like Zero Hunger (Fome Zero) and family allowance (Bolsa Família), job creation strategies, higher wages and access to micro-credit, together with heavy investment in major infrastructure works, have achieved significant results.

The subsequent process of upward social mobility “should not be under-estimated,” said Leonardo Avritzer, a political analyst at the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

“The protests in Brazil today are not questioning the considerable progress made in the last 10 years. The 40 million people who were lifted out of poverty and the narrowing of the inequality gap are real advances,” he told IPS.

However, it is time to expand and extend these policies, he said.

“The root cause of the demonstrations is, in the first place, the slowing rate of reform and a certain distancing of President Rousseff from the social movements. But it is important to note that those demonstrating these days are a group of young people from the middle classes. And they are protesting over a number of urban issues,” Avritzer said.

Their demands include basic questions such as better education, health care, urban transport and infrastructure.

In the case of the “favelas” (shanty towns), where there is also a growing middle class that is beginning, timidly, to join in the demonstrations, the demands are for basic sanitation, paved streets and day care services for the children of working mothers.

Programmes like Caring Brazil (Brasil Carinhoso) and My House, My Life (Minha Casa, Minha Vida), dealing with child development and housing, respectively, are aimed at improving these problems and “consolidating” the new middle class, Maurício Santoro, a political analyst and adviser to Amnesty International, told IPS.

“Brazil has made strides in terms of wage increases and income transfers for the poorest population, and ensured access to consumer goods and housing. But there is still a long way to go before people can actually overcome their exclusion from full citizenship rights,” Santoro said.

Avritzer said that this is one of the “real questions” today. “Brazil has undergone many changes, and access to education and health systems nowadays is universal,” he said.

“However, the services are of poor quality. Part of the so-called ‘new middle class’ is trying to find better services in the private sector, but this has led to higher prices. Access to high quality public education and health care is one of Brazil’s main problems,” he said.

These are precisely the demands being voiced in the streets of Brazil’s main cities. And it is no coincidence that the spark that lit the flames of protest was the problem of public transport.

Economic growth and easy credit for car purchases, for instance, have doubled the size of the country’s vehicle fleet to over 60 million automobiles that are jamming the streets, without a strategic plan to improve roads or to expand alternative mass transportation systems like subways and long distance trains.

Orlando Santos, a sociologist and urban planning expert at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, drew particular attention to the situation in this city, Brazil’s second largest, after São Paulo.

“Large road systems are being built without taking into account the integration of the city with its outlying areas. This kind of planning is absolutely irrational and misguided, wasting public resources and reflecting the subordination of the municipal government to powerful economic interests,” Santos told IPS.

Eduardo Fagnani, an economist at the University of Campinas, referred to the case of São Paulo, “one of the five largest megacities with the lowest densities of inhabitants per square kilometre in the world.”

“Construction of the metro (subway) is advancing at a snail’s pace. In the absence of popular pressure, municipal governments have connived with business people in the industry. Public policies favour automobiles,” he told IPS, calling this the “mercantilisation” of transport.

“The voices in the streets are clamouring for rights, not consumption; they want public and private services, and a social welfare state, not a minimalist state,” he said. The protests indicate the failure of the conservative vision that targeted policies are all that are needed to attain “social welfare,” he said.

In the view of economist Adhemar Mineiro, “it all goes to show the fallacy of using poverty as the only indicator of social development.”

An expert with the Inter-Trade Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE), Mineiro sees three phases of development as promoted by Lula and Rousseff.

First came the anti-poverty programmes. “The idea was to eradicate extreme poverty and, secondly, to integrate this sector into the consumer market by means of other programmes, such as Bolsa Família. The third was to create employment, especially in the formal economy, and stimulate small and micro businesses.”

So what are the people in the streets complaining about? IPS asked.

“When it comes to a social welfare state (health, education, transport and sanitation) there is still an awful lot to be done, and the emphasis again this year on budget tightening puts those sectors even more at risk, exacerbating the problems and provoking discontent,” Mineiro said.

“The (Rousseff) administration has returned to the logic of international insertion, competitiveness and budget adjustment, and is attempting to reconnect with global markets that have been in decline since the crisis, which has curbed the dynamism of economic growth,” he said.

Avritzer said, finally, that the progress of this model does not depend on a high rate of economic growth, but on “appropriate policies” that lead to an improvement in services.

In Fagnani’s view, “the protests provide a new opportunity for confronting political, social and economic underdevelopment that has been aggravated by the long-lasting neoliberal experiment.” The lesson to be drawn, apparently, is: having put your hand to the plough, don’t look back.

Peaceful protest in Cinelandia square in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 25 2013 (IPS)

Matheus Mendes Costa, a 21-year-old university student, spent 13 hours in a three-square-metre police station holding cell after he was arrested in this Brazilian city for allegedly assaulting police officers and destroying public property.

The economics student was arrested in the early hours of Tuesday Jun. 18 at one of the many demonstrations held in hundreds of Brazilian cities in the wave of protests initially sparked by a hike in public transport fares, which was later reversed.

Costa says he was detained when he was participating peacefully alongside his father in the demonstration that night in Rio de Janeiro.

Harsh and arbitrary police crackdowns are seen by analysts as one of the factors that have contributed most to fanning the flames of the mass anti-government protests across Brazil.

Leftwing Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff herself called for restraint from the forces of law and order in her speech to the nation on Friday Jun. 21, underlining that the population has the right to protest peacefully and saying that violence and vandalism were the work of a small number of infiltrators.

On Monday Jun. 24, Rousseff invited the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL – Free Fare Movement), which started the protests, to a meeting, which was followed hours later by another with the governors of the country’s 27 states and the mayors of the largest cities. At both meetings, toning down the police response was on the agenda.

“I had my university backpack with me and I never imagined that anything would happen to me. The police grabbed me by the backpack and tore the placard I was carrying from my hands,” Costa told IPS.

He was taken to a military police station together with 10 other people, mostly students and one homeless man.

“None of us fit the profile of a vandal. A police officer tried to terrify us by threatening to launch a tear gas canister against us. The police who beat me wore no identification,” he said.

Costa and the other young people had to post bail, ranging from 300 to 1,300 dollars, to secure their release. The student said there was no set criterion for the amount of bail set.

“We were 10 people in a tiny cell, and not everyone was able to contact their families. The police subjected us to different forms of derision. Even the homeless man had to post bail, the largest sum of all, and we had to take up a collection to help him out,” he said.

Political analysts and human rights activists reported indiscriminate police crackdowns, as well as disorder and vandalism perpetrated mainly by groups of infiltrators who looted public offices and shops, overshadowing the peaceful goals of the demonstrations.

The Brazilian bar association said that in Rio de Janeiro alone, up to Friday Jun. 21, 60 arbitrary arrests had been made of demonstrators caught in battles between the security forces and groups of vandals.

“I was distressed because the police did not do their job of stopping the violence, but decided instead to beat and arrest innocent people on false accusations. I had to post bail without the opportunity to prove that I didn’t do anything wrong,” complained Costa, who faces charges of criminal association.

Eighteen-year-old Jorge Luiz de Jesus had an even worse time. He spent a week in jail, part of the time in the notoriously dangerous Bangu prison, where he had to share a cell with drug traffickers, thieves and rapists. Afterwards he was transferred to another prison where he mingled with 100 inmates.

His case was more serious because the police accused him of carrying a grenade in his backpack.

“I explained that the backpack wasn’t mine, but the police officer sprayed an aerosol in my face and said ‘Now it’s yours.’ I was framed,” Jesus told the Human Rights Commission of the Rio de Janeiro state parliament.

The Human Rights Commission is gathering testimonies on dozens of cases of arbitrary arrest during the protests in the city.

The state public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into the complaints of abuses by police and military forces, especially the military police shock troops.

To keep peaceful protesters from being accused of vandalism, the Rio de Janeiro bar association deployed 70 lawyers who are covering the streets, police stations and hospitals of the city offering legal aid.

Felipe Santa Cruz, the president of the Rio bar association, told IPS that fascist groups had infiltrated the protests. He criticised the security forces’ lack of knowledge of safety measures to protect demonstrators from the groups who attend the marches to create violent disturbances.

“The police do not have a history of repressive action, but they are militarised, and their behaviour is confrontational. This has enabled neo-Nazi infiltrators to take part, wielding iron bars, since the demonstrations began. The police ought to guarantee the right of peaceful protest, but they have wound up attacking the demonstrators,” he said.

The lack of training of the security forces is the focus of criticism. Costa’s father, Antônio Carlos Costa, a human rights activist and the president of Rio de Paz (Peaceful Rio), an NGO, said the disproportionate police response was “an attack on democracy.”

“They lack the training to police the population under normal conditions, and even more so when there are large protests. The movement was spontaneous, it won the people over, and people came out on the streets for the noblest of reasons,” said Antônio Costa.

The central demand is the reform of the country, said the activist, who sees the people’s movement as reformist and not as seeking to subvert the established order, but to carry out a “moral cleansing” of Latin America’s largest democracy.

As a result, he said, it is a mistake on the part of the government to perceive the movement as violent.

What led people to take to the streets, he said, was a revolt against the billions of dollars spent on building and remodelling stadiums for the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Confederations Cup that is now being played.

The 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup kicked off Jun. 15, shortly after the start of the protests, and ends Jun. 30. Rio de Janeiro will also host World Youth Day, an event for young people organised by the Catholic Church, which Pope Francis is to attend, from Jun. 23-28. And in 2016 it will host the Olympic Games.

“The authorities underestimated the growing awareness among the people,” said Antônio Costa.

“A great deal of political will and vast amounts of money were expended on the construction works FIFA asked for, while there are unpaid debts among our schools and hospitals. The streets have cried out in protest, and that cry must be heard,” he said.

Economy professor Arcadi Oliveres has become a popular face of the growing discontent in Spain because he calls a spade a spade.

“I have called for Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to be impeached for destroying the welfare state,” he said.

But Oliveres, from Catalonia in northeast Spain, is not alone in his mission. He and Teresa Forcades, a Benedictine nun and medical doctor, have created an unusual platform representing people who are fed up with the country’s leaders who, they say, failed to do anything to prevent the severe economic crisis tearing Spain apart.

Protests, like this demonstration against foreclosures in the southern city of Málaga, are being held almost every day in some part of Spain. Credit: Inés Benítez

The platform is also supported by leftwing parties and sectors related to health, housing and education – areas that have been drastically affected by the conservative Rajoy administration’s budget cuts.

“There are good, well-intentioned, well-educated people who don’t agree with the economic decisions and the current political process,” Oliveres told IPS. “Our mission is to bring together people from these three sectors and come up with a joint candidate for the parliamentary elections in Catalonia in 2016.”

Oliveres blames the country’s political leadership, both the governing centre-right People’s Party (PP) and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), for the crisis that has driven up unemployment levels in Spain to among the highest in Europe.

Anna Torres, a sociologist from Barcelona, concurs with Oliveres. “The leaders are not connected to the people, and the parties aren’t either. That is why people are looking for answers in social platforms,” she told IPS.

“Europe has gone through many phases and has made leaps and bounds in terms of social welfare,” she said. “It would be a pity to have to go back to working in buildings that collapse, like what happened in April in Bangladesh (where 1,127 garment factory workers were killed), or to working as slaves, like in China.”

Torres said the economic model is changing in Spain. “There is a crisis in the construction industry and traditional productive activities are disappearing, and we haven’t specialised yet in highly technological industries,” she said.

“We were in the process of doing that when the crisis hit, and now there are many trained workers who can’t find jobs,” she added.

Oliveres said his group was working for “a cooperative Catalonia infused with solidarity, without an army, that helps the Third World and is independent.

“I have recently been in Granada (in the south), Alicante (in the southeast) and the Basque Country (in the north), and after hearing me explain our ideas, people want to start doing something similar,” Oliveres told IPS in an interview in the offices of Justicia i Pau, the Christian-based NGO that he heads.

“We have nearly 40,000 people who have signed up to (the web page of) our platform Procés Constituent a Catalunya since it was launched in April, and so many speaking invitations that we could visit all of Catalonia 50 times,” he said.

The Procés Constituent is one of the numerous citizen groups and associations that have emerged in Spain since May 15, 2011, when the “indignados” or 15M movement – Spain’s “occupy” movement – was born out of a protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square.

The encampment set up at that time in the square by protesters gave birth to the movement that is opposed to the government’s austerity measures and social cuts and is demanding jobs, affordable housing, solutions to the wave of foreclosures and evictions, economic equality, social justice, and democratic control over banks and corporations.

The growing citizen movement is also protesting the unprecedented corruption that has come to light in this country, in which high-level officials and even members of Spain’s royal family are implicated.

Analysts estimate that just 15 of the 1,600 cases of embezzlement, bribes and tax evasion in the courts today involved at least seven billion dollars in public funds. More than 1,000 of the people prosecuted in connection with the cases are political leaders.

Nearly every day a protest is held somewhere in Spain, and some observers are warning about a social uprising.

Social movements like the Procés Constituent now bring together more people than the country’s traditional trade unions. Most of these new groups are organised horizontally and decisions are reached in assemblies – the legacy left by the 15M.

The protests and demonstrations have taken many forms. An association of writers from Catalonia, Poesia en Acció, held a poetry marathon to benefit the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH), one of the largest citizen associations in the country, which is helping thousands of people who are losing their homes to foreclosures.

According to a report released by PAH in January, there were 363,000 evictions in Spain between 2008 and 2012.

“Poesia en Acció is carrying out actions in solidarity with social groups that are suffering because of the crisis,” poet and literary critic Guillem Vallejo, the president of the organisation, told IPS.

“In the past two years, we have focused on helping Spanish groups due to the situation in our country. We used to help countries in Africa and other parts of the Third World,” said Vallejo, who along with 60 other poets and 80 students from the group’s workshops published the book “Poesía Solidaria” (Solidarity Poetry), whose proceeds will go to PAH.

“We’ll give the money raised in the marathon (12 straight hours of poetry reading and a solidarity breakfast and lunch on Saturday Jun. 15) to PAH for projects that provide activities and psychological support for children whose homes are in the process of foreclosure, while the parents try to solve their legal problems,” Vallejo said.

Several associations of motorcycle riders organised a food drive for the needy on Sunday Jun. 23, in a campaign in the Canary Islands called “Moteros contra el Hambre” (Bikers against Hunger).

The national statistics institute reports that unemployment exceeds 27 percent – or six million people out of work in this country of 47 million. There are more than 70,000 families in Spain with no members working.

“We came out of Facebook," say two young Brazilians taking part in one of the mass protests that swept Brazil in 2013. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 24 2013 (IPS)

A group of young people touched a nerve in Brazil’s large cities, triggering an outpouring of urban outrage at the deterioration of transportation conditions and of the quality of life.

This is one possible interpretation of the torrent of protests on Thursday Jun. 20, involving close to a million demonstrators in a hundred cities, including Brasilia and nearly all the 26 state capitals. Bus fare increases announced in early June detonated a rebellion by young people, mostly students, which spread to wide sectors of society.

The unrest that has shaken the nation continued all last week and over the weekend to Monday Jun. 24, the day leftwing President Dilma Rousseff planned to meet with delegates of the movement that started the demonstrations. Protest organisers and social media are calling for a general strike on Jul. 1.

The often poor quality of public transport passenger services epitomises what the protesters see as a lack of respect by those responsible for public services for the rights and dignity of Brazilians, who must pay disproportionately high prices for them.

Mario Miranda Gouveia retired at age 61 because he could no longer stand the four to six hour daily commute by bus to cover barely 50 kilometres from Campo Grande, the neighbourhood on the west side of Rio de Janeiro where he has lived for the past 15 years, to his job in the city centre.

Although he wanted to carry on as a mid-level official at the state foundation for fomenting scientific research, Gouveia packed it in two months ago. “It was terrible, I would leave at six in the morning and sometimes I only arrived (at the office) at half past nine,” he said. Added to the length of the journey was the discomfort of travelling standing up, sometimes in buses whose seats had been destroyed by vandals.

Mauriceia de Sousa Silva, a young physiotherapist, sometimes arrives home in tears after two hours on a crowded bus travelling from Ipanema to Tijuca, two residential neighbourhoods in Rio 15 kilometres apart.

A fortnight ago, no one could have predicted that such a specific grievance would trigger spontaneous protests that have spread like wildfire from the south to the north of the country, with demands diversifying from more spending on health and education, the decriminalisation of marihuana, rejection of corruption and protests over the immense costs of preparing for international sports events.

Comparisons were instantly made with the wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring, with the “Indignados” movement in Spain and with the protests raging in Turkey since May 28. But the situation in Brazil is very different to the reality of these other countries.

Brazil is a strong democracy, and there is no economic or political crisis. But there are urban problems. Unemployment is only 5.8 percent, in spite of weakened growth, and President Rousseff still enjoys high popularity, although it is declining.

It all began with four marches convened on Jun. 6 by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL – Free Fare Movement) in São Paulo, four days after the announcement of a bus fare hike from 3.00 to 3.20 reals (1.40 to 1.50 dollars). A few thousand people took part.

Although smaller demonstrations were held in three other state capitals, the epicentre of the protests was São Paulo, where a police crackdown on Thursday Jun. 13 left dozens of protesters, and some journalists, injured by rubber bullets.

The violent clashes contributed to the proliferation of the protests, now driven by solidarity and the defence of the right to peaceful demonstration.

It is about “rights” and not just the extra “cents” in transport fares, said the activists’ placards and declarations, giving rise to enthusiastic ideas about a Brazilian “awakening,” especially among the young who are calling for political changes. The demands are said to be broad and “diffuse.”

But it is unlikely that the protests would have become so widespread without the uncomfortable living conditions in cities.

The generalised discontent also explains the unexpectedly tolerant attitude among local people, even shopkeepers whose business has been affected by the demonstrations, towards the disruption, the vandalism of buildings, banks and vehicles and even the looting practised by small groups.

Traffic congestion has seriously worsened in recent years because car sales have been vigorously promoted with tax breaks and credit facilities, in order to sustain economic growth. At the same time, little has been invested in urban public transport systems.

Josefa Gomes regrets having moved to São Gonçalo, a large city east of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro. It takes her two to three hours every day to get to the residential areas near the centre of Rio where she works as a domestic, and the bus journey to and from work costs her up to 24 reals (11 dollars).

Six years ago, when Gomes left a favela or shanty town to move to her present home, which is larger but farther away, “the commute was much easier,” taking half the time it does now. With no sign of improvement on the transport front, Gomes wants to go back to living in the centre of Rio de Janeiro.

Medium sized cities in the provinces are also experiencing terrible traffic jams, and now have an unprecedented wave of protests on their streets, usually besieging mayors’ offices.

In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, average vehicle speed fell last year to 18.5 km per hour during evening rush hour, 10 percent slower than in 2008. On some avenues the average speed is 6.6 km per hour, barely faster than walking pace.

Citizens of São Paulo have reached their highest level of frustration with public transport since Datafolha, a polling firm, began surveys on the subject in 1987. Currently, 55 percent of respondents in the city say it is bad or terrible, compared to 42 percent in 2011. Only 15 percent of them say it is good.

Respondents said buses, which transported 2.9 billion passengers in 2012, were the worst form of passenger transport.

Stadiums and other facilities built or expanded for the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) Confederations Cup, under way, the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games are also a major target of the protests because they are seen as diverting funds needed for education and healthcare, as well as encouraging corruption and exacerbating traffic problems as the construction works block streets and highways.

Although dozens of city governments have reversed the transport fare hikes, the demonstrations have grown and multiplied.

"The harsher the repression, the more people will join the protests," said one young demonstrator. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Children of a generation that fought for basic rights like having enough to eat, learning to read and being treated in safer hospitals, the over 300,000 students protesting on the streets of Brazil want more from a democratic and economic system that no longer represents them and is beginning to show its limitations.

The 15-to-25-year-old demonstrators who have come out in droves in response to calls on social networks like Facebook, crowding the centres of Brazil’s major cities, are not asking for food, schools or healthcare. Nor are they only protesting against the 20 cents of a real (10 cents of a dollar) hike in São Paulo urban bus fares, where the movement got its start.

The authorities announced a reversal of the public transport fare increase in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday Jun. 19, and a number of other cities have followed suit. But few analysts think that this will now put an end to the anti-government protests.

The demonstrators want more: better public transport that is cheap or free; better education and healthcare; less corruption; more leisure activities; and no police repression.

These young people were not around during the 1964-1985 dictatorship, nor are they members of the poor masses, 40 million of whom were lifted out of poverty during a decade of government by the leftwing Workers’ Party (PT), first led by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and now by President Dilma Rousseff, lightening the historic burden of inequality.

Many of them are members of the new middle class and, like 15-year-old Flavio Magalhaes, are complaining that what they spend in a month on bus fares “amounts to something you could even invest in the stock market.”

Banks have suffered the protesters’ fury. More than half the population is in debt to the banks, which are among the institutions that have benefited most over the past decade.

Another target was Congress, in Brasilia, where alliances are being forged that would have been inconceivable in the past, between progressive parties like the PT and old-style rightwing parties or those representing fundamentalist evangelical groups, that are opposed to laws demanded by the young.

“The government has no policies for youth. It does not debate decriminalising abortion, and it opposes legalising soft drugs. Only recently has it promoted the spread of the internet, but it lacks a project for democratising the media. The young have never been a specific focus,” sociologist Emir Sader, a longtime PT activist, told IPS.

“The demonstrators are protesting against corruption and complicity between forces that have a progressive image and others that are symbols of backwardness,” political scientist Williams Gonçalves, of Rio de Janeiro State University, told IPS.

During the election campaign 14 years ago, when the financial world and the middle and upper classes were in a panic about the growing popularity of the PT, afraid of losing their privileges, Catholic Bishop Mauro Morelli expressed his surprise at this fear.

“They don’t understand that Lula is not going to bring about a revolution, but will simply bring this country out of feudalism and into capitalism,” said the bishop, one of the creators of the “Zero Hunger” programme which pulled 28 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty.

The feudalism he referred to was characterised by vast unproductive large landed estates, rural slave labour, illiteracy and urban migration, a countryside lit by candle light, mediaeval standards of sanitation and violence against landless activists by gunmen in the pay of large landowners.

And this transformation was partially achieved.

Since 2003, spending on healthcare increased from the equivalent of 11 billion dollars to 35 billion dollars, and on education from three billion dollars to 17 billion dollars – expenditure worth “10 World Cup tournaments,” the PT said on social networks in response to opposition accusations and complaints.

The protesters carried placards saying “Se seu filho adoecer leve ele pró estádio” (If your child is sick, take him/her to the stadium) and other slogans critical of the billions of dollars invested in preparation for the FIFA Confederations Cup, which is now being played, the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the 2016 Olympic Games.

Rural feudalism has been overcome by Bolsa Familia, which provides cash transfers, and other programmes for more than four million small farmers, although the concentration of land in the hands of a few has not yet changed.

But people in both rural and urban areas are demanding more. They want access to housing loans and affordable home ownership; decent public health services in order not to have to resort to private healthcare; and an end to repression at the hands of the military police.

Disproportionate crackdowns on the first protests were precisely what prompted mass turnouts at later demonstrations. “I came because of the fare increase and for our right to protest. The harsher the repression, the more people will come,” said 17-year-old Brenda de Castro, demonstrating in Rio de Janeiro.

In President Rousseff’s view, “the message direct from the streets” strengthens democracy. “My government, that wants to increase access to education and health, understands that the demands of people change,” she said.

“They change when we change Brazil, because we raised incomes, increased access to employment, and increased people’s access to education. This resulted in citizens who want more, and who have a right to have more,” she said.

Gonçalves said that “people, especially young people who are entering the labour market, are not eternally grateful for what was done for them. That kind of attitude is only seen among poorer sectors.”

Marcelo Carreiro, a history professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said there are a wide range of people who are discontented, but that the protesters have one thing in common: “the repudiation of the representative democratic system and of the way it has gradually distanced itself, over a long time, from public opinion.

“This could properly be considered a historic moment in which, because of technology, the capacity to mobilise is no longer tied to the old structures that dominated and organised mass movements in a hierarchical way, such as political parties, trade unions and churches,” he told IPS.

The demonstrations in Brazil, the largest since the 1992 protests against then president Fernando Collor, who was impeached, are expressing “discontent with the state and society in its present form,” said Augusto de Franco, an expert in social networks.

“The vague feeling it expresses is outrage against old-style politics, especially against political parties, and indicates a clear rejection of the privatisation of politics,” he said.

“The left has always had difficulty understanding the young, because the classical economic scheme sheds no light on its special characteristics, which cannot be reduced to social origins. It is a special period in life, open to the utopian, to rebellion, to healthy disrespect for authority, to outrage against injustice,” said Sader.

The PT, which formerly defended those causes, today cannot assimilate young people’s special characteristics. “It has become a pragmatic party, making alliances with conservatives and the notoriously corrupt,” said Gonçalves.

“Corruption, which has become rife in the construction of football stadiums, and the media’s war-cry about inflation triggered the wave of protests,” he said.

In the weekly news magazine CartaCapital, Leonardo Avritzer said that perhaps the politics of social inclusion, “invaluable in the social mobility process,” have reached their limits.

Avritzer, a sociologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, said the focus needs to be on improving infrastructure, from public transport to roads and bridges.

But economist Adhemar Mineiro said “People want more policies along the lines of the old welfare state,”

“We see placards reading: ‘Do you have money to invest in the World Cup? Well, invest in teachers, then!’ so it is not that the inclusive model is exhausted, but rather that people want this model to expand,” he said.

Out on the street, answers are urgently awaited. “Tropical Spring? No. It’s Brazil waking up from inertia,” said Pedro, a 24-year-old biologist, as he joined the protests.

In Mikindani, a port in southern Tanzania, oil tankers are a frequent sight at the port. However, exploration has not brought economic prosperity to this area. Credit: Thembi Mutch/IPS

By Thembi Mutch
MIKINDANI, Tanzania, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

In Kilwa District in southern Tanzania local community leader and fisherman Salim Riziki stands next to a set of turbines, newly imported from Dubai, talking about the gas finds on Songo Songo, an island 15 km off the mainland.

The whirring sounds and lights from the turbines are in stark contrast to the mud and thatch houses and the few corrugated iron shacks in the village.

It is dusk. There are no cars on the road, and only the occasional labourer walks by, carrying a hoe, as the villagers make their way home. The Songo Songo gas discovery resulted in electrification in this village – but only for the lucky, wealthy few.

“Yes, we think this exploration is vital, but as citizens we are concerned. We need the truth, to have the information laid out for us so we can explore slowly what might be best for us. The government has told us their plans for hospitals, for schools, for electricity. They’ve told us on the radio, yes, but they didn’t ask (if they could go ahead with the exploration),” Riziki tells IPS.“You can discuss ethics and philosophy when you have a full belly. Our people do not have that.” -- Tanzanian government employee

At the port of Mtwara, about 250 km south of Kilwa District, the frustration of locals reached a breaking point on May 22 when government buildings were attacked. Angry stone-throwing villagers surrounded the offices of the ruling Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party, which means Party of the Revolution in Swahili.

The government’s response was extremely heavy-handed. Truckloads of soldiers from this East African nation’s capital, Dar es Salaam, descended upon the port town. Tear gas and live ammunition were used and local sources say three people were killed, including a woman who was seven months pregnant.

But those who know the region say it has been a long time coming.

Mika Minio-Paluello of international NGO Platform tells IPS: “Militarisation by government and private firms is not unusual when oil and natural gas exploration occurs. Neither is the increase in violence uncommon. This is a repeat of Nigeria, Ghana, and Angola.”

The riots were sparked after the government announced that the construction of a gas pipeline from Mtwara to Dar es Salaam would continue according to plan. That means that no facilities will be developed in Mtwara to process the gas. It also means that the 2006 exploitation of gas reserves in Mtwara’s Mnazi Bay, which borders Mozambique, has not led to the growth of manufacturing and processing industries in the region that would have ultimately brought economic prosperity to this area.

Ishmail*, a resident of Mikindani, a neighbouring port 10 km south of Mtwara, wishes he could benefit from the gas discoveries.

“We are mostly sesame and cashew farmers, or at least most of us would be, if we had work. Unemployment here in Mikindani is a massive problem. Only eight to 10 percent of us work, and we are desperate,” he tells IPS.

“What does a person need? Health, a happy family, a home, food, and work. We don’t have that, or clean water. Our problem is that the government, over 650 km away in Dar es Salaam, has abandoned us … The gas will be exported to other areas, and here we will still be left without the basics,” Ishmail says.

International oil companies are drilling from Somalia, down along the East African coast to northern Mozambique. They include the BG group, Statoil (which is a 40 percent shareholder of Exxon), Royal Dutch Shell, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Petrobras, Total, BP and Aminex.

But the theme of lack of information about the oil and gas explorations and drilling comes up repeatedly in interviews along Tanzania’s southern coast.

“The central government treats us with contempt. We are the forgotten children,” Sultan*, a tailor in Mtwara, tells IPS. He and the rest of the residents of Mtwara have not benefited from the oil and gas. And neither have the people from Kilwa and Lindi (about 100 km north of Mtwara), which also lie on Tanzania’s southern coastline.

Sultan’s own home has no electricity, and he “borrows” from the line running outside his shack in the central market so that he has enough light to see his treadle or hand-cranked sewing machine.

But despite being marginalised from the benefits of the gas discoveries, local communities are too afraid to speak out publicly.

Rob Ahearne, a lecturer at East London University in the United Kingdom and author of the study titled, “Oil and gas, citizenship, modernity and change in southern Tanzania”, tells IPS: “The communities themselves are wary of talking, they are scared of spies or informers from CCM, and are wary of being identified as troublemakers.

“These are very marginalised areas, they feel it’s a private affair, and there are very few cohesive community forums. Even from village to village there’s very little trust,” he says.

According to several consultants involved in environmental management, the foreign oil and gas companies are actually exceeding what is required of them – both in community consultations, and environmentally. But this is partly because European environmental management audits are much stricter than those followed by Tanzania.

In addition, every oil company working in Tanzania has to donate 100,000 dollars a year as a basic registration cost to the central government, according to Ahearne’s study.

Additionally, the Tanzanian government has asked for 60 percent of all revenues.

However, there is no information in the public sphere about where the money will be deposited, whom the tax will benefit, and the quotas for local employment.

And, with Tanzania’s extremely weak implementation of its Freedom of Information Act, accessing this material is impossible.

However, despite three months of trying to contact Tanzanian Minister of Energy and Minerals Professor Sospeter Muhongo, he would not talk to IPS. All efforts to get Tanzanian ministers to comment on governance issues or community consultation exercises also met with dead ends.

One government employee, who preferred to remain anonymous, tells IPS: “You can discuss ethics and philosophy when you have a full belly. Our people do not have that.”

However, Nnimmo Bassey from NGO Oilwatch Africa tells IPS that transparency is not the problem.

“The ultimate solution is not transparency in the petroleum sector – you simply will not get it. The sector will not agree to pay environmental costs that they externalise. The ultimate solution is to leave the oil in the soil. And the coal in the hole, as we say.”

Bassey is cynical: “Fossil fuel civilisation has reached its dead end.  We must accept that. Anything further just means going over the precipice.”

*Surname withheld to protect identity.

Residents of Kudankulam, a village in Tamil Nadu, protest against the Indian Supreme Court verdict approving construction of a nuclear power plant. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS

By K. S. Harikrishnan
KUDANKULAM, India, Jun 14 2013 (IPS)

The Tirunelveli district in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu may seem idyllic, dotted with lush green fields, but upon closer inspection one sees signs of a battle that does not appear to be abating.

Locals here have been waging an incessant campaign against a proposed nuclear power plant that was supposed to be operational in 2012 and which is currently sitting idle 24 kilometres from the tourist town of Kanyakumari, located on the southern tip of the Indian peninsula.

A recent report by a group of prominent Indian researches has now added another issue to a long list of grievances with the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project (KKNPP) that activists and residents have been compiling since August 2011: evidence of faulty material used in the construction of the plant itself.

Plans for the plant were first drawn up in 1988 under a bilateral agreement between Russia and India, but various political obstacles kept construction on hold for over a decade. It was not until 2001 that a fresh attempt was made to jump-start the 3.1-billion-dollar venture, which has an installed capacity of 1,000 megawatts (MW).

Fishermen and their families protesting against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. Credit K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS

Things were moving smoothly until news of the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in Japan in March 2011 went viral. Fearing a repeat performance of the tragedy, locals here took to the streets, protesting lax safety standards and possible nuclear radiation in the event of an accident.

The government has refused to address protestors’ concerns, instead issuing blanket assurances that the plant has been constructed using state of the art instrumentation and contains a passive cooling system and other mechanisms that will enable it to withstand natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.

Nalinish Nagaich, executive director of the National Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL), has repeatedly insisted that the equipment installed in the power station has undergone multi-stage quality checks.

Last month, in a 247-page ruling, a division bench of the Supreme Court of India consisting of Justices K.S. Radhakrishnan and Dipak Misra dismissed protestors’ concerns as “baseless”, adding: “The benefits we reap from KKNPP are enormous since nuclear energy remains an important element in India’s energy mix, which can replace a significant (quantity) of fossil fuels like coal, gas (and) oil.”

But new information brought to light in ‘Scandals in the Nuclear Business’, a report published by Dr. V. T. Padmanabhan, a member of the European Commission on Radiation Risk, exposes cracks in the government’s position and highlights the potential crises arising from the use of faulty parts.

According to the study, the Reactor Pressure Vessel (RPV), considered to be the “heart” of a nuclear station, has been built using an outdated, three-decade old model. In addition, various pieces of equipment supplied by Russia have been found to be faulty.

The report has only deepened a crisis of confidence that surfaced earlier this year when Russian Federal prosecutors booked Sergei Shutov, procurement director of the Russian company ZiO-Podolsk that supplied vital equipment to the KKNPP, on corruption charges.

Shutov was charged with “having sourced cheaper sub-standard steel for manufacturing components that were used in Russian nuclear installations in Bulgaria, Iran, China and India”, according to a joint letter sent by over 60 scientists to the chief ministers of Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

The New Delhi-based Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) has expressed serious concern over the recent scam, calling it a direct violation of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB)’s safety norms.

Back in April, following a series of tests, the AERB itself acknowledged that four valves in the KKNPP were defective and ordered the NPCIL to replace the parts and surrender itself for review by the regulatory authority, before resuming construction.

World Nuclear News reported last month that “technical issues discovered during the commissioning of Unit One have necessitated the replacement of several valves in the passive core cooling system, leading to further delays” in the commissioning of the KKNPP.

Dr. A Gopalakrishnan, former chairman of AERB, has urged the government to put an immediate stop to the project until allegations of corruption and faulty equipment have been adequately addressed, and the safety and quality of the parts used to house the reactor have been determined.

Police crack down on women protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

“The fact that a high-cost, high-risk nuclear reactor is (thought to have) defects…in its components and equipment even before it (has started operating) is highly unusual, and indicates gross failures at several levels in the AERB-NPCIL-Atomstroyexport (triumvirate),” he said, referring to Russia’s national nuclear vendor that stands accused of supplying low-quality parts to India.

N. Sahadevan, environmentalist and prominent campaigner against nuclear arsenals, told IPS that the recent scandal necessitated a “thorough re-examination of the safety aspects of the plant.”

Furthermore, according to Supreme Court Lawyer Prashant Bhushan, the NPCIL, which operates the KKNPP, has failed to comply with the 17 post-Fukushima safety recommendations made by a special AERB committee.

Meanwhile, thousands of villagers in and around Kudankulam continue their daily, peaceful demonstrations.

S. P. Udayakumar, leader of the People’s Movement Against Nuclear Energy, told IPS that the Fukushima catastrophe categorically proved that nuclear power projects are not aligned with the welfare of the people, especially those living in the vicinity, and are incapable of providing any kind of “security”, energy or otherwise.

Activists have also exposed discrepancies in the government’s claim that nuclear power is crucial for the Indian economy, pointing out that the country currently has just 4,880 MW of existing capacity, “which contribute to only 2.7 percent of the total electricity generation in the country,” according to Dr. E. A. S. Sarma, former Union Power Secretary of India.

“Peace at home, peace in the world” is the official motto of the Turkish Republic. Coined in 1931 by the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, it implies a causal relationship, but the events this week in Istanbul and dozens of other cities of Turkey suggest that causality can work in reverse order, too.

With protests continuing over the past week, two years of Arab Spring and intense socioeconomic unrest in southern Europe seem to be spilling into Turkey, which until now had stayed out of trouble.

Still, the economy is strong, although not as strong as it has generally been in the past decade. As a result, the similarities Turkey shares with northern and southern Mediterranean countries that are also going through a crisis have more to do with poor leadership.

Financial success, fuelled by foreign direct investment (FDI) in luxury real estate in Istanbul and along Turkey’s Aegean coast and by massive privatisation of state enterprises, has given the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has unparalleled popularity as well as an increasing feeling of invincibility."

Since AKP’s 2011 electoral victory, this sentiment has translated into diminishing transparency and accountability by key government figures. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, AKP’s leader and the Turkish prime minister, and a handful of close collaborators have ostentatiously disregarded calls by trusted advisors to consider the average citizen’s concerns and be more inclusive of the 50 percent of Turkey’s population that has not voted for AKP.

Lack of government transparency, such as in southern Europe, and arrogance towards citizens and their fundamental freedoms, such as in the Middle East, have paved the way to an explosive manifestation of the sense that enough is enough, resulting in three deaths, over 1,000 injuries and 1,700 arrests.

Some observers claim that the crisis started with a kiss, referring to a ban in May by Ankara’s authorities of displays of affection by couples in public areas that triggered youth demonstrations in the capital. Others point to earlier signs of discontent.

In May 2012 and the following fall, Erdogan challenged women’s rights to abortion and caesarean section for giving birth, repeatedly proclaiming that women should have a minimum of three children. Women’s associations took to the streets.

More recently, the Turkish parliament, where the AKP holds 326 of 550 seats, passed legislation severely restricting the promotion and consumption of alcohol, and Erdogan has promised high taxes on alcoholic drinks.

Secularist Turks, some of whom have voted AKP in past elections because of the government’s economic performance, have begun complaining that Erdogan is interfering with people’s lifestyles in an unacceptable way.

At the same time, citizens are tired of an excessively liberal economy that has increased the income gap between the bourgeoisie and the working classes.

The decision to turn Gezi, the only green park in central Istanbul, into a shopping mall and luxury apartment complex was the trigger rather than the cause of the Gezi revolt. Cumhuriyet Avenue, adjacent to the park, has already been demolished to make way to a large complex of expensive shops, residences and shopping malls, while Taksim Square, a landmark of Istanbul, will be converted to a large mosque.

Independent research by a non-governmental organisation published in 2012 showed that Turkey, with a total population of 75 million, possesses 85,000 mosques, 17,000 of which were built in the past 10 years.

In comparison, the country has 67,000 schools, 1,220 hospitals, 6,300 health care centres and 1,435 public libraries. The annual budget of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism is less than half of that of the Directorate General of Religious Affairs, which represents the Sunni Muslims of the country (80 percent of the population).

FDI that has flowed into Turkey since 2002, mostly from Qatari and Saudi investors and U.S. and Dutch pension funds, has concentrated on speculative high-end real estate projects. The number of shopping malls grew from 46 in 2000 to 300 in 2012. Istanbul alone currently has 2 million square metres of malls under construction, according to CBRE, an international consulting firm.

A series of privatisations announced this year – a railway system, the national airline, major energy state enterprises, the highways and bridges network – will provide funds for undertaking grandiose construction projects: a third bridge over the Bosporus, a third airport in Istanbul, an artificial second Bosporus that will facilitate even more premium real estate developments, and the largest mosque in the Middle East, to be built in Istanbul.

The demonstrations that began ten days ago were spontaneous and peaceful and appeared to reflect citizen frustration with aloof state governance, but the zero-tolerance attitude adopted by the police and incendiary statements by Erdogan and certain ministers have transformed them into an unexpected political crisis that has uncertain implications for Turkish democracy.

IPS has spoken with political personalities and well known journalists who have been reluctant to discuss the situation as it evolves.

The personal secretariat of Fetullah Gulen, a Turkish Muslim theologian and head of a worldwide movement promoting moderate Islam and inter-faith dialogue, told IPS that Gulen will issue a statement at the end of this week. Currently living in self-exile in the state of Pennsylvania in the United States, he is followed by millions of Muslims.

As rallies continued Wednesday and student mobilisation has been announced for Thursday, the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul, and the vice prime minister, Bulent Arinc, both known for political maturity and moderation, have tried to offer limited excuses for police excessive force.

The true litmus test for the evolution of Turkey’s political climate will take place upon Erdogan’s return from North Africa later this week. But statements similar to those he made before his departure, such as “I will press with the Gezi project—if you don’t want a mall I will build a mosque” or labelling the protesters “marauders”, are unlikely to restore social peace.

To old hands in Turkish politics, the current unrest is reminiscent of the hegemonic style of the Democrat Party leadership of the 1950s.

“In 1957, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes and President Celal Bayar were quite confident because they had received 47 percent of the votes in the elections,” said Huseyn Ergun, a veteran politician and current chairman of the Social Democrat Party (SODEP), described.

“They had started to put sanctions on the opposition party and its deputies. They also had an investigation commission in parliament against the opposition and destroyed Istanbul landmarks. You know how all this ended.”

Indeed, their reign ended in 1960 with a military coup, history that Turks are not eager to see repeated in their lifetimes.

Protestors armed with bamboo sticks faced police in riot gear in Dhaka on May 4, 2013. Credit: Kajul Hazra/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 8 2013 (IPS)

Adding to a long list of domestic woes, including a factory collapse that left hundreds dead last month, Bangladesh is now grappling with a wave of violence that threatens to deepen the gulf between secular sections of society and religious fundamentalists.

Earlier this week at least 27 people were killed on the streets of the capital, Dhaka, as police clad in riot gear clashed with Islamic hard-liners calling for radical changes to the country’s constitution.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971." - Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj'
Sparked by a massive rally organised by the religious group Hifazat-e-Islam (Protectorate of Islam) on Sunday, May 4, the violence left hundreds injured with bullet wounds, fighting for their lives in hospitals across the city.

Chanting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), the nearly 100,000 demonstrators wielding bamboo sticks and banners demanded implementation of the Hifazat’s 13-point programme, which calls, among other things, for the execution of “atheists” or anyone accused of blaspheming the Prophet Muhammed.

Aware of the group’s plans, the government had requested Hifazat leaders to postpone their mass rally in light of the national tragedy that occurred on Apr. 24, when a building in the Dhaka suburb of Savar housing several factories collapsed, leaving over 800 dead.

Undeterred by a daily mounting death toll from the Rana Plaza catastrophe, the worst garment sector disaster in history, the group pushed ahead with what it called the “Dhaka Seize”, cutting off access to all six entry-points into the capital and occupying all the main thoroughfares.

Witnesses to the street battles, which carried on into Monday, say protestors vandalised buildings, torched scores of businesses and looted shops, all the while chanting anti-government slogans.

Shyamal Dutta, editor of the leading Bengali newspaper ‘Bhorer Kagoj’, described the violence as a veritable “war against the state”.

“We have not witnessed violence of this magnitude since the Liberation War in 1971,” he told IPS, referring to the bloody independence struggle that resulted in the secession of what was then East Pakistan from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, leaving at least three million dead, by the most conservative estimates.

Ever since the creation of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, this Muslim majority country of 160 million has been governed by a secular constitution.

Dutta believes Hifazat-e-Islam, an alliance of about 12 religious groups, is now seeking to dismantle the pluralism that has for years been enshrined in the constitution and “destroy the nation’s social, cultural and democratic values”.

Other demands on the group’s 13-point agenda include bans on anti-Islamic “propaganda” (in the form of social media) and the “intermingling” of men and women in public spaces, as well as mandatory religious education from primary to higher secondary levels.

Though the group claims to uphold the Islamic faith, many religious scholars like Moulana Ziaul Ahsan, president of the Bangladesh Sammilita Islamic Jote, have denounced their actions as “unconstitutional”.

Meeting violence with violence

Soon after the official rally ended late Sunday night, police tried to disperse the crowds, but activists hailing mostly from madrashas (religious schools) refused to clear the streets until the government agreed to implement a new anti-blasphemy law.

While many eyewitnesses say the protestors provoked police reprisals by throwing homemade explosives, bricks, stones and sticks, other sources claim the government must be held accountable for deploying the elite Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) police force and the paramilitary Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) with instructions to “shoot to kill”.

“I have never seen such violence before,” Kajul Hazra, a photojournalist who has 22 years of experience working in Bangladesh, told IPS, adding that over 12,000 police were dispatched to quell the riot.

“The protestors used drums of petrol to torch trees cut from islands on the streets, broke window panes and set fire to parked vehicles, banks and offices…ambulance sirens, flames and tear gas smoke filled the air of Motijheel area (Dhaka’s commercial hub),” he recalled.

Police Spokesman Masudur Rahman told the press on Monday that his men were “forced” to use “rubber bullets, tear gas and sound grenades to control the violence.”

But human rights advocates say the decision to fire on unarmed protestors amounts to a violation of democratic principles.

“They (the police) fired on the demonstrators late at night, into the darkness, which was really cruel,” Farida Akhter, a leader of the United Women’s Forum, told IPS, adding that such actions “are those of a dictator government and completely unacceptable in a democratic society.”

A visibly shaken public sees the incident as a frightening reminder of the deep divisions in the political sphere.

According to Rokeya Prachy, a prominent social activist, Hifazat enjoys the support of the main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), as well as the Jamat-e-Islami, whose leaders are currently being tried for war crimes allegedly committed on behalf of the West Pakistan military junta during the 1971 Liberation War against pro-independence activists.

In February and March, tens of thousands of civilians took to the streets when the International Crimes Tribunal of Bangladesh failed to mete out the long-anticipated death penalty to former Jamat leader Abdul Quader Mollah.

Hifazat and its supporters have called attention to the discrepancies between the government’s acceptance of the anti-Jamat rallies earlier this year – popularly known as the ‘Shahbag protests’– and its violent response to this week’s Hifazat march.

Others say the different government tactics were based on the nature of each protest, with the demonstrations in Dhaka’s Shahbag Square being peaceful sit-ins, compared to the Hifazat’s vandalism and aggression.

“Why should the government’s actions (on Sunday and Monday) be termed undemocratic when security forces acted to protect the lives and properties of innocent people?” asked Abul Barkat, chairman of the economics department at the University of Dhaka, in an interview with IPS.

“I think the police were very careful in their operation to save lives,” he said.

Political parties, meanwhile, have fallen back on the usual blame game: at a press conference at the BNP’s Dhaka branch Monday, spokespeople for the opposition accused members of the ruling Awami League of instigating the violence, a claim the latter has stoutly denied, insisting that the BNP and its ally, the Jamat, were behind the chaos.

While political leaders pointed fingers, the violence quickly spread to the southern city of Khulna, to Sylhet in the north-east, Rajshahi in the north-west and to the southeastern port city of Chittagong, where a day-long clash with law enforcers left at least seven people including one police officer dead, with over 50 people still suffering from severe bullet wounds.

Protest in Rio de Janeiro by residents affected by Vale mining company operations. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 18 2013 (IPS)

Representatives of social movements and communities affected by Brazilian mining company Vale’s operations have bought shares in the company, to make their voices heard.

The purchase of shares in transnational corporations, which grants the right to take part in shareholders’ meetings, is now standard practice among social movements and NGOs in order to set forth their demands and protests directly to investors.

Six activists of the Articulaçao Internacional dos Atingidos pela Vale (International Network of People Affected by Vale) attended a shareholders’ meeting of the company in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday Apr. 17.

Public companies listed on the stock market are compelled by law to hold an annual general meeting at least once a year at their headquarters.

At these meetings, investors receive information about the company’s results and can question management about what was done in the previous year, as well as take payment of dividends.

“This is the fourth time the Network has adopted this initiative. The meeting was successful. The annual general meeting anticipates that shareholders will participate, and our only opportunity to do so was when a vote was taken on the agenda. That’s when we asked for permission to speak,” lawyer Danilo Chammas told IPS about his participation in the three-hour meeting involving 50 shareholders.

While the activists took the floor, most of those present kept silence, but there were moments of tension when questions and criticisms were put forward.

“The opportunity for dialogue was positive, but there were no great prospects of change. Our aim is to draw attention to an aspect of which shareholders are ignorant, that should also be taken into account,” Chammas said.

According to estimates by social organisations, Vale, privatised in 1997, destroyed a total of 742 square kilometres of land in 2010.

Meanwhile, dozens of demonstrators belonging to the Network, an umbrella group for organisations in 10 of the 38 countries where Vale operates, gathered in front of the company offices in the centre of Rio de Janeiro to protest.

“As shareholders, we explain what the company’s risk-taking and violations mean for the affected communities,” activist Sandra Quintela, of the Institute for Alternative Policies for the Southern Cone (PACS), told IPS.

In her view, their strategy multiplies the pressure on the company and on the justice system.

“We try to strengthen the struggle, link the different resistance efforts and come up with common strategies. The way this company behaves in the mining areas is extremely cruel. It isn’t development, it’s destruction,” she said.

This is the second year that six residents from the village of Piquiá de Baixo, in the municipality of Açailândia in the northeastern state of Maranhão, have come to Rio to lodge their complaint.

A pig iron works has been installed in the village of 380 families, polluting the air, water and soil. For the past five years, local residents have been demanding relocation to a safe area.

“Piquiá de Baixo will cease to exist. We are obliged to move somewhere else, there is no alternative. The train that Vale loads with mineral ore crosses the town and the ore deposit is above our town. The five ironworks are practically on top of our vegetable gardens,” said 69-year-old “Seu” Edvard Dantas.

He has lived in Piquiá for 26 years and has witnessed the village’s decline. Before the ironworks arrived, it was a rural area. Seu Edvard grew rice, maize and cassava to feed his large family.

Now only his wife and one daughter still live with him. His other five children have left Piquiá, as have many other former residents.

Lung cancer, respiratory diseases and allergies are now common. “In the garden and on the tiled roof of my house there is a permanent layer of dust. We are suffering badly, and we hope it will not take more than two years before we are transferred to a new home,” he said. But he added that the new houses where they are to reside have still not been built.

Different country, same problems

Fabião Maniça, of the Tete Communities Association for Support and Legal Assistance in the central region of Mozambique, where Vale obtained a 35-year concession to exploit the Moatize coal mine, said “We’re joining forces to voice our demands.

“The company is not opening up opportunities for direct negotiations with the associations or the communities,” he said.

The main problem in the southeast African country is the relocation of 1,300 families displaced by the coal mine, because the new houses built for them are already showing structural flaws.

“The families moved a year and a half ago, and cracks have appeared – the dwellings are badly built. There is no drinking water for the children. There is no land to grow crops or room to raise children. They promised they would help us for one year, giving us food, free transport and jobs, but they haven’t kept their promises,” he said.

In some cases, families were relocated up to 50 kilometres away from where they used to live, Maniça said.

“We were in fertile areas, and our main activity is agriculture…My father is buried on our land. People were forced to abandon their ancestors and go far away,” he complained.

At IPS’s request, Vale handed over a communiqué saying it “respects the right to free expression” and is “available to listen to suggestions and criticisms of its enterprises.”

The company said it is participating in the relocation process for families from Piquiá de Baixo. In July 2012 it signed an agreement with the public prosecutor’s office to earmark some 200,000 dollars for the new housing estate.

In the case of Mozambique, two areas were selected for relocating the families, with “public participation consisting of three hearings, 20 theatre performances in the most widely spoken local language (Nyungwe), 110 meetings with the community and its leaders, 4,927 home visits and 639 consultations through the permanent services provided at the start of relocation,” according to Vale.

As part of the Moatize coal mine project, in addition to housing, schools were constructed or rebuilt, and health posts, a maternity clinic, a police station and streets were provided. Electricity was installed on the main avenues. The houses with structural problems, said Vale, are already being repaired.

A call for freedom in Tunis. Credit: Lassad Ben Achour/IPS.

By Giuliana Sgrena
TUNIS, Apr 14 2013 (IPS)

Ela, a young Tunisian woman whose face is barely visible behind her niqab, says she has spent five months protesting a university ban against the religious garment in the classroom “to no avail”. On the other side of the capital Tunis, a group of students decked out in djellabas and keffiyehs (traditional Tunisian costumes) with the Tunisian flag wrapped around their shoulders, perform the Harlem Shake: a dance form that originated in the United States in the early 1980s but has recently gone viral online as a popular meme.

The two scenes represent the latest battle in Tunisia, between ultra-religious Salafists and staunchly secular Tunisians who say the rise of Islamists after the fall of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011 represents an erosion of the gains made during the revolution.

Ela, clad from head to toe in black, represents the conservatives’ desire for reverence and conformity, while the “protest dancers” symbolise the new generation that was born out of the uprising, a vivid, colourful and diverse mix of people who say culture has become the new frontline in the ongoing fight for democracy in post-revolutionary Tunisia.

“Dancing is not only a non-violent protest, the body is itself an expression of liberation and of well-being."
Recently, the rap singer who goes by the name ‘Weld el 15’ was condemned to two years in prison in retaliation for his song Boulicia Kleb (meaning “policeman are dogs”), which was viewed over 650,000 times on YouTube. The music video’s director and lead actress each received six-month sentences.

“The police often use the law against drugs to arrest singers, in particular rap singers, because of the use of marijuana,” Adnen Meddeb, a young film-maker who shot the revolution from inside Tunisia, tells IPS.

Oussama Bouajila and Chahine Berriche, two graffiti artists from the group Zwelwa (meaning “the poor”) were arrested on Nov. 3, 2012 for the mural they painted on the walls of the industrial city of Gabes, entitled, “The people want rights for the poor”. Their verdict was released on Apr. 10: each was charged a 50-dollar fine for “defacing government property” and ordered to clean the walls.

Zwela has denounced the artists’ trial as a “political trial, which reminds us of the methods used under Ben Ali.”

The Ministry of Interior has emerged as one of the most common sites of cultural resistance where, every Wednesday, a group of activists stage a sit-in to protest the Feb. 6 assassination of Chokri Belaïd, leader of the leftist Popular Front opposition coalition.

A demonstration in honour of slain opposition leader Chokri Belaid in Burghiba Avenue in Tunis. Credit: Giuliana Sgrena/IPS

“Every Wednesday we sit here to force the ministry to answer the question: ‘Who killed Belaïd?’,” Amor Ghadamsi, painter and general secretary of the Tunisian Artists Trade Union, tells IPS.

He says the assassination was the “gravest incident in a climate of mounting violence, and it shocked the country. Before this, people did not realise the extent of the danger they faced. Now we want the Tunisian authorities to investigate and find the perpetrators,” he stressed.

The artists took up this weekly demonstration after a statue they produced to honour Belaïd’s death, erected outside the slain leaders’ home, was destroyed by the Salafists. “Culture is our resistance now,” Ghadamsi said, referring to the widespread use of graffiti, and the proliferation of political rap with lyrics that honour the revolution.

The choice to hold the protest outside a government building symbolises a growing distrust with the ruling Ennahda Party, which contested – and won – the country’s first free elections in October 2011 on a moderate, secular platform.

But the group has come under fire for allowing religious extremists to operate with impunity.

One of these extremist groups is the League for the Protection of the Revolution (LPR), an association that is widely believed to have close ties to the  government and has been involved in many confrontations with opposition parties and activists with the Union General Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT), the country’s leading trade union.

LPR members claimed responsibility for the fatal beating of Lotfi Nakbou, a leader of the Nida Tounes party in the southern Tunisian city of Tataouine in October 2012, and for the destruction of the statue of Belaid.

“These people work in the name of Ennahda. They are people from Ennahda, close to Ennahdha, former convicts hired by Ennahda, and people whose consciences Ennahda has bought,” Jilani Hammami, spokesperson of the Workers’ Party, insisted in an interview with Tunisia Live back in January.

Though the government has dismissed the claim, locals here point out that the LPR are never persecuted for their criminal actions. The UGTT has called repeatedly for the dissolution of the LPR to no avail.

With the government turning a blind eye to violence, scores of Tunisians feel they have no choice but to turn to immaginative, creative and non-violent protests.

Their staunch ally during the revolution, the Internet has resurfaced as a crucial tool in the cultural war, which activists say began in earnest on Mar. 25, 2012 when Salafist gangs attacked artists celebrating World Theatre Day on Bourguiba Avenue in central Tunis. Witnesses to that scene told IPS the police either assisted the mobs, or simply stood by.

Dances like the Harlem Shake and other cultural protest videos quickly go viral, sometimes even attracting the attention of the mainstream media.

Meanwhile young Tunisians have repeatedly “occupied” Bourguiba Avenue to commemorate the clashes that sparked this wave of cultural resistance, halting traffic by sitting in the middle of the street to read books in an act of defiance against state security forces.

In the same vein, a group calling itself Art Solution initiated the “I will dance in spite of everything” movement. Directed by Bahri ben Yahmed, the dancers perform in every possible public space they can claim: in front of the national theatre, in the Belvedere gardens, in Kasbah Square, but also in the poor outskirts of Tunis.

Often, on-lookers and passersby join the dancers, creating the feeling of the kind of spontaneous protests that were familiar sights during the early days of the revolt.

“Dancing is not only a non-violent protest, the body is itself an expression of liberation and of well-being,” commented the writer Jamila Ben Mustapha.

(END)