On this day, 21 September 1976, Chilean socialist refugee Orlando Letelier and think tank worker Ronni Moffitt were murdered in Washington DC by a car bomb planted by Chilean secret police. The killings by agents of the US-backed dictator General Augusto Pinochet were part of Operation Condor, a Latin American anti-communist program supported by the US which killed up to 60,000 working class militants, socialists and anarchists. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1534339553417856/?type=3
Riot police detained hundreds of women as opposition protesters marched through the Belarusian capital Minsk demanding an end to President Alexander Lukashenko’s rule.
Approximately 2,000 women took part in the “Sparkly March” on Saturday, wearing shiny accessories and carrying red-and-white flags of the protest movement.
Police blocked the women and began dragging them into police vans as they stood with linked hands, swiftly detaining several hundred, an AFP journalist saw.
The human rights group Viasna published the names of 314 people detained during the protests on its website.
The number was about three times as high as at the protests a week ago, when masked uniformed men used brutal violence against the peaceful demonstrators for the first time.
The march was the latest in a series of all-women protests calling for the strongman president to leave following his disputed victory in elections last month.
His opposition rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya also claimed the victory.
In a statement released in advance of the march, Tikhanovskaya, who has taken refuge in Lithuania, praised the “brave women of Belarus”.
“They are marching despite being constantly menaced and put under pressure,” she said.
Among those detained on Saturday was Nina Baginskaya, a 73-year-old activist who has become one of the best-known faces of the protest movement. Police released her outside a police station shortly afterwards.
Police detained so many protesters that they ran out of room in vans, releasing approximately 10 women.
Ambulances were called after several women became unwell during their detention. One female protester was taken away in an ambulance after lying on the ground, apparently unconscious.
Al Jazeera’s Step Vaessen, reporting from Minsk, said Lukashenko had stepped up the repression against women this week.
“So the strategy now that seems to be coming from Lukashenko’s regime is basically to treat everyone as violently as possible, making sure that people are so scared and intimidated that they will stop these protests,” she said.
The world’s largest tropical wetland is not supposed to burn.
And yet, Brazil’s Pantanal is on fire.
Thick smoke rises all around the village of Poconé as the wind whips it into little tornadoes. Fire crackles and races through the brush, jumping from forest to pasture to swamp.
The flames have destroyed some 25,000 square kilometres— roughly four times the area that has burned in California in 2020 so far.
A UNESCO heritage site and one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems — home to dozens of endangered species and the densest concentration of jaguars anywhere — is in jeopardy. Charred jaguar carcasses now litter the ground, along with burned alligator-like caimans and fallen birds.
Local ranchers struggle to survive. Traditionally, they use fire to revitalize and clear the land, but not on this scale or under such dry conditions.
“It hasn’t rained in three months, and we don’t know if it will rain in September. I hope so,” said Dorvalino Camargo, fanning himself with a straw hat after helping to beat back the flames. “Cattle are suffering. We are all suffering.”
‘I feel defeated’
Preservationists who have worked most of their lives to protect the area from loggers and poachers now face a new, much deadlier threat.
“We’ve never dealt with fire conditions so big, so severe,” said Angelo Rabelo from his home in the Pantanal. “We’re just not prepared to confront it.”
Rabelo is a former police colonel who came to the region 37 years ago to stop illegal hunting, and stayed to start the environmental organization Instituto Homem Pantaneiro.
“I feel impotent and defeated,” he said. “It’s a deep pain.”
Normally the Pantanal gets abundant moisture from the Amazon rainforest, showers spawned in the vast jungle to the north which feed wetlands throughout the heart of South America, not only in Brazil but also in Bolivia and Paraguay.
But the Amazon itself is struggling with drought along with fire that experts have repeatedly linked to deforestation and human activity. More and more of the Amazon’s wilderness has been taken over by land developers, illegal logging and expanded agriculture.
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
