http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHLBD-FqmvI

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is continuing following Hillary Clinton’s win over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary. Democracy Now! hosts a roundtable discussion on the 2008 race with Clinton supporter Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women; Obama supporter Bill Fletcher, the executive editor of The Black Commentator; and Cynthia McKinney supporter Ted Glick, a member of the Green Party. Part two is included in this post. 

Part Two

The airwaves of “Radio Copala, the Voice That Breaks the Silence” only cover a few hectares in an indigenous region in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. But since the murder of two of the station’s four reporters, they have reached across borders.

A group of social activists joined Wednesday’s fact-finding visit to the area by inspectors sent by the governmental National Human Rights Commission to the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala, created in January by Triqui indigenous people in the heat of divisions that have split the ethnic group.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), Reporters Without Borders and the World Association of Community Broadcasters (AMARC) issued statements condemning the early April killings, and on Apr. 23 delegates of these groups and other organisations will visit Oaxaca to investigate the incident.

“We are indignant over this crime, which cannot go unpunished,” Aleida Calleja, vice president of AMARC, told IPS.

On Apr. 7, 22-year-old Felicitas Martínez and 24-year-old Teresa Bautista were ambushed and shot to death on a rural road in their municipality.

The murders left the Radio Copala community station with only two reporters.

A couple and their young son were also injured in the attack.

Calleja blamed the murders on “the spiral of violence, division and poverty that reigns in the Triqui region and their fight for self-determination, which clashes with certain interests.”

Florentino López, spokesman for the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca (APPO), a coalition of dozens of leftist and anti-establishment groups that was clamped down on harshly in late 2006 after a six-month uprising against the notoriously corrupt state government, concurred with Calleja that the double murder “is linked to the division among the Triquis and the terrible poverty in which they live.”

“But from our point of view, the government of Oaxaca (headed by Governor Ulises Ruiz of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which has ruled the state for over seven decades) has infiltrated the indigenous community to create irregular armed groups that maintain a state of terror and impunity in the Triqui area,” López told IPS by telephone from Oaxaca.

Radio Copala began to operate in January, parallel to the creation of the autonomous municipality, but it does not have a permit from Oaxaca authorities to operate legally.

The station, which is dedicated to promoting indigenous culture, broadcasts for just four or five hours a day, and reaches only a few surrounding hectares.

Martínez and Bautista broadcast messages on health and education, in which they provided advice on a range of subjects. But they never discussed the divisions among their people.

Read the entire story here.

An indigenous woman has an excellent chance of winning a seat in Congress for the first time in the history of Paraguay, in Sunday’s general elections.

Margarita Mbyvângi, a “cacique” or tribal chief of the Aché people, is second on the list of Senate candidates for Tekojoja (Equality), a leftwing movement belonging to the opposition alliance backing former Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo, the presidential candidate who is leading the polls.

According to the latest opinion polls, 7.8 percent of interviewees in different parts of the country plan to vote for Tekojoja’s senate list, which would secure at least two of the 45 seats in the upper house for the movement.

More than 2.8 million Paraguayans are registered to vote on Sunday, to elect the country’s president and vice president, 45 senators, 80 members of the lower house, 17 governors, 214 provincial lawmakers, and 18 members of the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) Parliament.

The presidential candidates are Lugo of the centre-left Patriotic Alliance for Change (APC), Blanca Ovelar of the governing Colorado Party, former general and coup leader Lino Oviedo, conservative businessman Pedro Fadul and several candidates representing smaller parties.

The aspiring indigenous senator is preceded on her party list by small farmer Sixto Pereira, one of the founders of the movement that first promoted Lugo’s candidacy, and the alternate would be Catalino Sosa, of the Mbya Guaraní people.

Mbyvângi is a leader of the Kuêtuvy community, 157 kilometres into the jungle from the capital of the northern province of Canindeyú, and she is president of the Aché Association of Paraguay, made up of seven indigenous villages with 1,200 residents.

“The government has forgotten about us, we are dying off, and they are killing our forests,” Mbyvângi told IPS. She said her candidacy “is a very important opportunity” to help not only her own people, but all the indigenous communities in the country. “It’s a very big responsibility, and it will also be a challenge to go into politics for the first time,” she added.

Mbyvângi said she has an in-depth understanding of the needs of indigenous people, and of the deprivation and needs of other poor Paraguayans. Official estimates say 35 percent of the country’s more than six million people are living below the poverty line.

Hit hardest by poverty and marginalisation are indigenous people, who are divided into 17 ethnic groups and make up 1.6 percent of the Paraguayan population, according to the last official census in 2002.

The candidate, who is trained as a nurse, said that one of her major tasks will be to promote health in the native communities, which are highly vulnerable to diseases spread by the non-indigenous population.

The Aché community was one of the last indigenous groups in Paraguay to establish contact with the rest of Paraguayan society.

Read the entire article here.

Women’s rights groups that fought hard for a new law to crack down on trafficking in persons in Argentina are opposed to the legislation that was finally passed by Congress after years of debate because it requires victims over the age of 18 to prove that they did not give their consent to be sexually exploited.

“It’s not what we wanted; we are going to ask the executive branch to veto it,” feminist lawyer Marta Fontenla, with the Women’s Association for Work and Studies (ATEM), told IPS.

ATEM forms part of the Red No a la Trata de Mujeres (No to Trafficking in Women Network), which also rejects the new legislation.

The law, which makes trafficking in persons a federal crime, was approved late Wednesday by the Chamber of Deputies by a vote of 157 to 35, with six abstentions, based on a draft law introduced by ruling Justicialista (Peronist) Party lawmaker Vilma Ibarra with the backing of the Interior Ministry.

The new legislation had already made it through the Senate. It must now either be signed into law or vetoed by President Cristina Fernández.

Ibarra and other advocates of the law say it protects women’s right to voluntarily engage in prostitution.

However, the Association of Women Prostitutes of Argentina (AMMAR) was also opposed to passage of the new law, Elena Reynaga, the head of the group, told IPS. 

“To put an end to trafficking in persons, we have to put an end to hypocrisy, because in Argentina there are a number of crimes related to trafficking that are already punishable by law, but the problem is that these laws are not enforced, whether due to negligence or intentionality on the part of the political powers-that-be or the judicial authorities. For example, procuring is a crime, but it is practiced anyway,” she said.

The No to Trafficking in Women Network has worked for over a decade to raise awareness of the problem and increase its visibility.

In Argentina, around 90 percent of the cases of trafficking in persons involve commercial sexual exploitation, while the remainder involves slave labour, domestic servitude, illegal adoptions or organ theft.

According to the Network, some 500 missing women in Argentina are presumed to have fallen prey to forced prostitution rings. In some cases they were kidnapped, but the majority were lured in by promises of well-paid jobs or other forms of deception.

The Network and other human rights groups, with support from the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), lobbied for a federal law against trafficking, in order to accelerate legal cases that often run into hurdles and are bogged down because the victims are moved from one province to another.

The penal code now establishes prison sentences of three to six years for those convicted of participating in the entrapment, recruitment, transportation or reception of people for the purposes of sexual or labour exploitation or organ harvesting. If the victim is younger than 13, the maximum sentence climbs to 15 years.

The women’s organisations agree with that part of the law. But the new legislation also states that in the case of victims over the age of 18, the state or the victims themselves must prove that they were recruited by means of deception, fraud, violence, threat, intimidation, coercion or abuse of authority.

“This law is a setback, because it creates the idea that there is illegitimate trafficking that is penalised and legitimate trafficking in which the victims supposedly give their consent to be prostituted,” said Fontenla. “But we believe that no one can consent to their own exploitation.”

Read the entire story here.

For gay couples, the April 15 tax filing deadline can be a reminder of the disparities they face, even in a nation that is becoming more accepting of same-sex couples.

Gay couples often pay higher taxes because they don’t get the federal tax benefits that go with marriage. And for couples in state-sanctioned domestic partnerships, civil unions or same-sex marriages, filing federal income taxes can involve doing three sets of paperwork instead of one.

“It’s a significant financial disability,” said Beth Asaro, who last year entered into one of New Jersey’s first legally recognized civil unions.

While the debate over government recognition of gay marriage is a political hot-button with arguments about morality, civil rights and tradition, the tax issue is a mostly practical one for hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples.

Most states ban gay marriage and don’t recognize same-sex unions in any way. Only in Massachusetts can gay couples legally marry. Since 1997, nine other states and Washington D.C. started offering civil unions or domestic partnerships that give some or all the legal protections of marriage.

Those protections include allowing gay couples to file state taxes jointly — and potentially save them money. But they can also make tax filing more complicated for the couples. 

That’s because the state protections do not help with federal taxes. Under the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, the government defines marriage as being allowed only between a man and a woman.

“You’re running one household,” said John Traier, a partner in the Butler, N.J. accounting firm Hammond & Traier. “But the federal government and a lot of states treat them as two households.”

The same is true for straight unmarried straight couples who are living together.

There are two main effects of the different treatment under federal law.

One is the tax rate. Take two couples where one partner has a taxable income of $20,000 and the other makes $40,000. If they can file their federal taxes jointly, the tax bill would be $8,217.50. Filing separately, the combined bill would be $9,032.50 — more than $800 higher.

Another disparity comes with the federal government’s treatment of employer-provided health insurance, which also affects unmarried heterosexual couples.

Read the entire story here.

Brazilians, especially women, are among the global leaders in taking meticulous care of their bodies and exhibiting them to advantage. This is a significant factor in climbing social and economic ladders, establishing identities and competing successfully in markets, from employment to romance.

The result is explosive growth in the beauty industry, frenzied consumption of cosmetics and slimming products, enthusiasm for exercise programmes and widespread use of plastic surgery, even among teenagers.

This cult of physical perfection is a central research theme for anthropologist Mirian Goldenberg, a professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who has just launched a book, “O corpo como capital” (The Body as a Capital Asset), in which she takes her analysis further.

But not any kind of body is an acceptable capital asset. It must be “young, slim and well sculpted,” which requires costly “investments,” such as many hours of systematic exercise, rigid diets, and cosmetics for the skin, hair and every part of the body, according to the anthropologist.

Well-off, middle- and lower-income women “invest heavily in their bodies,” Goldenberg told IPS.

This is “a Brazilian characteristic” that contrasts with, say, Germany, where women cultivate different values, but which also can be found in a less intense form in other Latin American countries, and in Mediterranean countries in Europe, she said.

Preoccupation with the body mobilises an army of professionals, from nutritionists to personal fitness trainers. If these are powerless to help, doctors or pharmacists step in with amphetamines, appetite suppressants, hormones, anabolic steroids and also surgery.

Current standards of beauty can induce women to pursue slimness to the point of obsession, and this has resulted in a substantial rise in eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia.

Brazil has the highest per capita consumption of weight-reducing medication, according to the United Nations International Narcotics Control Board (INCB).

Its market for fitness gyms, cosmetics and plastic surgery vies with that of the United States. But considering that incomes are 14 times higher in the United States, Brazil’s expenditure in these areas is hugely out of proportion.

Brazil is a major exporter of professionals who depend on their bodies for a living. Kaká, Ronaldinho and Robinho are national brand names in the wealthy world of European football, as is Gisele Bündchen in the glamorous world of fashion.

Brazilian women’s penchant for exposing as much of their bodies as possible is not a sign of “liberation, but a kind of prison, a restriction on freedom,” because they subject themselves to a body image of “thinness and perfection,” and to a set of standards that must be met in order for the “sacrifice” to be rewarded, Goldenberg said.

Read the entire story here.

The United States has begun a new programme to reunite Cuban families, which has renewed the hopes of potential migrants from the island who have family members in the United States. The U.S. government hopes to fulfil the goal of issuing 20,000 immigration visas a year, as agreed in a longstanding bilateral treaty.

“The U.S. Interests Section (USINT) in Havana is pleased to announce the first official travel documents have been delivered to an eligible Cuban family under the Cuban Family Reunification Programme (CFRP),” which ensures legal, safe and orderly immigration from Cuba, Consul General Sean Murphy told journalists on Thursday.

What is new about this programme is that families will now be able to obtain a “parole” document to enter U.S. territory, instead of staying in Cuba to apply for permanent legal residence in the United States, thus dramatically shortening the waiting period.

The parole document is a temporary authorisation to travel, which would be replaced in the United States by a resident permit. According to Murphy, under the previous rules people might have to wait for a visa for up to 10 years, whereas now the waiting period will be no more than 10 weeks.

“The purpose of the programme is to expedite family reunification through safe, legal and orderly channels of migration to the United States and to discourage dangerous and irregular maritime migration,” says a press release distributed by USINT to the foreign press.

Julio (last name withheld), a 33-year-old Cuban who has tried several times in the past to reach the United States aboard precarious watercraft, admitted to IPS that the sea route is “very dangerous,” even in fast motorboats, which “can turn over, or leave you stranded on some key” along the way if the traffickers are not paid on time.

He said that the crossing in a speedboat could cost up to 10,000 dollars. Julio gave up putting out to sea after all his previous attempts were frustrated, for one reason or another. “The last time we almost foundered, but a cruiser rescued us and handed us over to the U.S. Coast Guard, which brought us back to Cuba,” he said.

Under what is known as the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, the United States repatriates would-be Cuban immigrants intercepted at sea, but those who manage to reach dry land can obtain residence in the United States under the Cuban Adjustment Act, no matter how they entered the country.

“Well, if my mother (who lives in the United States) does something about it now, I might have the chance to get there soon,” said Julio. “I’m not interested in the jobs they offer me here. I’m a mechanic and an electrician, and that’s the work I want to do, but over there,” he added.

USINT said that approximately 12,000 immigrant visa petitioners have been notified that their family members are eligible for the CFRP and, to date, more than 5,000 of them have asked to participate in the programme.

Prospects are good for persons in the United States to be reunited with family members living in Cuba, said Murphy, who added that the programme is an open one, with no deadline, special to Cuba, and will be “key” in fulfilling the migration agreements.

Read the entire story here.

Virgin Media is facing a possible boycott after its chief executive Neil Berkett described net neutrality as “a load of bollocks” and appeared to suggest that companies could pay for a stronger internet presence.

Berkett said in an interview in Television magazine that the company is already in talks with websites to provide privileged data transmission. The news prompted leading figures on the internet to call for a boycott.

“As a Virgin customer, I am not paying to see those services that bribe Virgin to reach me. I am paying to reach the entire web, whichever bits I think are useful, as quickly as Virgin can deliver them,” said Cory Doctorow, internet activist and journalist.

“Theoretically, I am locked into a Virgin plan for another six months, but as far as I am concerned, they have just announced that they are violating the agreement by announcing that the services I can reach will be systematically slowed down unless they pay Virgin extra. 

“That means that we are now null and void. I will be calling to cancel today. Who is with me?”

Net neutrality is the principle that all data is treated equal during transmission and has been a founding principle of the internet, making it possible for websites to compete on a level playing field.

Companies like Google are pushing for laws that would actually enshrine the concept in law.

Charles Stross, the UK’s leading science fiction author, has added his voice to calls for a boycott, claiming in a blog entry that not only is Virgin intent on scrapping net neutrality but is already throttling bandwidth.

Read the entire story here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzkKjFZGUzE

This is part one of five videos of the Democracy Now! broadcast covering the “V to the Tenth” celebration in New Orleans where thousands of women gathered to celebrate the tenth anniversary of V-Day, the global movement to combat sexual violence against women and children. The focus of this historical gathering was on helping the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South. Democracy Now! spoke with activists from New Orleans, Kenya and Iraq. You can watch the broadcast in its entirety at democracynow.org or by clicking on the “read more” link below. 

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

It was an early January morning in 2008 when 42-year-old Dawn Leamon, a paramedic for a defense contractor in southern Iraq, woke up to find her entire room shaking. The shipping container that served as her living quarters was reverberating from nearby rocket attacks, and she was jolted awake to discover an awful reality. “Right then my whole life was turned upside down,” she says.

What follows is the story she told me on Monday in a lengthy, painful on-the-record interview, conducted in a lawyer’s office in Houston, Texas, while she was back from Iraq on a brief leave this week.

That dawn, naked, covered in blood and feces, bleeding from her anus, she found a US soldier she did not know lying naked in the bed next to her: his gun lay on the floor beside the bed, she could not rouse him and all she could remember of the night before was screaming and screaming as the soldier anally penetrated her while a colleague who worked for defense contractor KBR held her hand–but instead of helping her, as she had hoped, he jammed his penis in her mouth.

Over the next few weeks Leamon would be told to keep quiet about the incident by a KBR supervisor. The camp’s military liaison officer also told her not to speak about what had happened, she says. And she would follow these instructions. “Because then, all of a sudden, if you’ve done exactly what you’ve been instructed not to do–tell somebody–then you’re in danger,” Leamon says. 

As a brand-new arrival at Camp Harper, she had not yet forged many connections and was working in a red zone under regular rocket fire alongside the very men who had participated in the attack. (At one point, as the sole medical provider, she was even forced to treat one of her alleged assailants for a minor injury.) She waited two and a half weeks, until she returned to a much larger facility, to report the incident. “It’s very easy for bad things to happen down there and not have it be even slightly suspicious.”

Over the next month and a half, she says, she faced a series of hurdles. She would be discouraged from reporting the incident by several KBR employees, she says. She would be confused by the lack of any written medical protocol for sexual assault (as the only medical person on site, she treated herself with doxycycline). She would wander through a tangled maze of interviews with KBR and Army investigators about the incident without any clear explanation of her rights. She would be asked to sign several documents agreeing not to publicly discuss the incident, she says. She describes having her computer–which she saw as her lifeline, her main access to the outside world–confiscated by KBR staff as “evidence” within hours of receiving her first e-mail from a stateside lawyer she had reached out to for help.

And eventually she would find herself temporarily assigned to sleeping quarters between two Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) officials, who, she says, assured her that it was for her own safety, since her alleged assailants were at the same camp for questioning; they roamed freely. When she wanted to move about the camp to get meals etc., she was escorted.

Leamon felt very alone. But she was not.

In fact, a growing number of women employees working for US defense contractors in the Middle East are coming forward with complaints of violence directed at them. As the Iraq War drags on, and as stories of US security contractors who seem to operate with impunity continue to emerge (like Blackwater and its deadly attack against Iraqi civilians on September 16, 2007), a rash of new sexual assault and sexual harassment complaints are being lodged against overseas contractors–by their own employees. Todd Kelly, a lawyer in Houston, says his firm alone has fifteen clients with sexual assault, sexual harassment and retaliation complaints (for reporting assault and/or harassment) against Halliburton and its former subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root LLC (KBR), as well as Cayman Island-based Service Employees International Inc., a KBR shell company. (While Leamon is technically an SEII employee, she is supervised by KBR staff as a KBR employee.)

Jamie Leigh Jones, whose story made the news in December–when she alleged that her 2005 gang rape by Halliburton/KBR co-workers in Iraq was being covered up by the company and the US government–also initially believed hers was an isolated incident. But today, Jones reports that she has formed a nonprofit to support the many other women with similar stories. Currently, she has forty US contractor employees in her database who have contacted her alleging a variety of sexual assault or sexual harassment incidents–and claim that Halliburton, KBR and SEII have either failed to help them or outright obstructed them.

Most of these complaints never see the light of day, thanks to the fine print in employee contracts that compels employees into binding arbitration instead of allowing their complaints to be tried in a public courtroom. Criminal prosecutions are practically nonexistent, as the US Justice Department has turned a blind eye to these cases.

Jones’s case was the subject of a House Judiciary hearing in December. Right now, Jones’s lawyers are awaiting a decision on whether she will get her day in court or be forced to submit to binding arbitration, which KBR is insisting on. Likewise, the company is pressuring Dawn Leamon into pursuing her claims against the company through its Dispute Resolution Program based on the contract she signed before she went to Iraq. Critics argue that the company’s arbitration system allows it to minimize bad publicity and lets assailants off the hook.

Leamon, who retained a lawyer only two weeks ago, is weighing her options.

KBR attorney Celia Ballí, responding to a letter from Leamon’s lawyer, wrote in a letter dated March 17, “The Company takes Ms. Leamon’s allegations very seriously and has and will continue to cooperate with the proper law enforcement authorities in the investigation of her allegations to the extent possible.” Ballí noted that the matter has been turned over to the CID and said that Leamon has been “afforded with counseling and referral services through the Company’s Employee Assistance Program.” Ballí wrote in the letter that there are “inaccuracies” in the description Leamon has put forward regarding her treatment after the alleged sexual assault. “Therefore, the Company requests that you fully investigate all the facts alleged by Ms. Leamon as the Company intends to pursue all available remedies should false statements be publicized.”

Such “investigation” may prove difficult for her attorney. In the next sentence, the company says it is “not in a position to release any personnel or investigative records regarding Ms. Leamon’s allegations at this time.” In response to a request for comment on this story, a company spokesperson wrote in an e-mail that Leamon’s “allegations are currently under investigation by the appropriate law enforcement authorities. Therefore, KBR cannot comment on the specifics of the allegations or investigation.” The spokesperson added, “Any allegation of sexual harassment or assault is taken seriously and investigated thoroughly.” The trouble, however, is that “appropriate law enforcement authorities” have not proved willing to address this type of crime committed by contractors in Iraq.

Read the entire story here.