AMLO Hasn’t Done Enough to Address Mexico’s Gender-Based Violence Epidemic

 Jacobin

On a recent morning in the coastal village of Zipolite in Mexico’s Oaxaca State, I went for a jog on the beach with a fourteen-year-old — we’ll call her Alejandra — from Tapachula on the Mexican-Guatemalan border. Alejandra had come to Zipolite with her mother to work in a restaurant for the couple of months that constitute the high season here, and told me matter-of-factly that her older sister had traditionally accompanied her mom — but that her sister had recently been murdered by a jealous militar. Recounting how the man had beaten and strangled her sister in a Tapachula motel room, Alejandra went on to describe her mother’s barrio-permeating screams upon hearing the news. Her sister left behind a four-year-old son.

The killer, Alejandra told me, was ultimately tried and incarcerated — a relatively rare occurrence in a country where both femicides and impunity abound. An average of ten women are murdered each day in Mexico, with femicides skyrocketing 137 percent between 2015 and 2020. Given the underreporting of such crimes and the tendency to categorize femicides as ordinary homicides, the actual numbers are likely much higher. Last year, Mexico’s El Universal newspaper reported that between 2015 and 2018, a mere 7 percent of crimes against women had been investigated, and that only 5 to 7 percent of alleged criminals in these cases appeared before a judge. Nearly 80 percent of Mexican women report feeling unsafe.

The initial spike in femicides took place on the watch of right-wing president Enrique Peña Nieto, who governed Mexico from 2012 until 2018. However, the trend has continued under the left-wing rule of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), who despite presiding over a gender-equal government and decrying machismo, has reacted to femicides and violence against women in a manner that is at best odd and at worst horrifying. 

In February, shortly after twenty-five-year-old Ingrid Escamilla was stabbed, skinned, and disemboweled in her Mexico City apartment, AMLO expressed resentment during a press conference that the femicide issue should distract from the raffle of Mexico’s presidential airplane. 

The same week, also in Mexico City, seven-year-old Fátima Aldrighett was abducted, tortured, sexually abused, and murdered. The moral of the story, according to AMLO, was that the neoliberalism of previous governments had triggered societal decay and a loss of values — and that growing feminist protests in Mexico were part of a right-wing plot against his administration.

There’s no denying that neoliberalism fosters violence and subordinates women. But telling aggrieved Mexican women that they can’t think for themselves and are simply victims of right-wing manipulation is no way to go about dismantling the patriarchy. (Nor, it bears mentioning, is AMLO’s anti-neoliberal rhetoric easily reconcilable with all of his actions, which have included celebrating with Donald Trump the new iteration of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which destroyed countless Mexican lives and was linked to a surge in lethal violence against women.) Similarly, AMLO’s condescending comments about minor acts of vandalism committed by feminist protesters implies that he’s more concerned about the destruction of private property than the destruction of women’s bodies. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

'The sound of death': How Israel terrorises Lebanon from the skies

 Middle East Eye

In the wee hours of Christmas morning, I received a text message from a Lebanese Palestinian friend in Beirut, sent from the hallway of his apartment. He had run there after being jolted from his sleep by the sound of Israeli jets - later reported to be Israeli jets and/or missiles en route to targets in Syria - and the sensation that something in the vicinity was about to explode.

Of course, Israeli breaches of Lebanese airspace are nothing new. Israel has long been notorious for violating not only Lebanon’s skies - and territory in general - but also Lebanese eardrums and mental and emotional wellbeing. 

In his book Pity the Nation about the Lebanese civil war of 1975-90, late journalist Robert Fisk describes the terrific noise generated during an episode circa 1978 in which two Israeli jets “broke the sound barrier as they flew at low level over west Beirut, shattering the shop-front window panes on [the city’s iconic] Hamra Street with their sonic booms”.

And it’s been pretty much nonstop ruckus ever since. Granted, it’s not a subject that generates much media attention, but if one puts in a bit of time on Google, the issue does turn up. There’s a 2017 Reuters dispatch about the sonic booms that “broke windows and shook buildings” in the southern Lebanese city of Saida, while also causing “panic”.

Then there’s a 2007 Jerusalem Post writeup about sonic booms over Nabatiyeh and Marjayoun - the latter a majority-Christian city that formerly served as the headquarters of the South Lebanon Army, an Israeli proxy militia that tortured and terrorised with abandon during the two-decade Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon that ended in May of 2000. 

And there’s a 1998 BBC headline: “Israeli planes create sonic boom confusion over Lebanon”, concerning mock raids staged by the Israeli Air Force over Beirut and environs.

To be sure, the relative media disinterest is not for a lack of information. Lebanon hardly hesitates to publicise flagrantly illegal violations of its airspace by its hostile southern neighbour, and has on various occasions filed complaints with the United Nations - most recently this month. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

As repression in Egypt increases, so does UK cooperation with its regime

 Daily Maverick

Nearly 10 years ago, in February 2011, British prime minister David Cameron set out on a tour of the Gulf states, all close UK allies, with a bevy of representatives of the UK defence industry in tow.

Occurring in the middle of the Arab Spring, when repressive regimes were being toppled in popular uprisings, the government feared its lucrative cosiness with Gulf autocrats could send the wrong message and it tacked a last-minute stopover on to the itinerary: Egypt, where veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for 30 years, had just been overthrown. Cameron briefly descended upon Cairo’s Tahrir Square – the site of protests against Mubarak – for some photo opportunities, and then it was back to business.

It was soon revealed that British-manufactured tear gas had been used by the Egyptian authorities on the protesters in the square. But a decade on, UK arms firms continue to count Egypt as a major client. 

The country is now presided over by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the former director of military intelligence and defence minister who took power in 2014 after leading the previous year’s coup against Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president.

The aftermath of the coup was characterised by massive bloodshed. The August 2013 Rabaa Square massacre, supervised by Sisi, saw the Egyptian police and army kill more than 1,000 overwhelmingly peaceful protesters.

Since Sisi’s assumption to the presidency, Egypt has witnessed its worst human rights crisis in modern history. Arbitrary arrests are rampant, tens of thousands of political prisoners have accumulated in jails under appalling and often lethal conditions, and the United Nations Committee against Torture has arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that torture is a systematic practice in Egypt”. READ MORE AT DAILY MAVERICK.

Israel Is Refusing to Give Palestinians COVID Vaccines

 Jacobin

On the first day of the new year, Bloomberg ran an opinion article by Daniel Gordis — senior vice president at Jerusalem’s Shalem College — titled “Vaccination Miracle Brings Israel Back to Its Roots.”

The “miracle” in question refers to Israel’s aggressive coronavirus vaccination drive, thanks to which it currently leads the world in per-capita vaccinations. And while Israel’s literal “roots” lie in the uprooting and slaughter of Palestinians, Gordis prefers a more mythological version of the Israeli past: “early socialist roots” that cultivated a “sense of social cohesion [and] shared destiny,” a nation that saw itself “as a family” and that knew “how to come together when facing a mortal enemy.”

Gordis was able to get his own personal “Israel of yesteryear” fix at the sports arena in Jerusalem where he was administered the vaccine: “[A]s I looked at the eyes of other people waiting, their faces hidden behind their masks, I could tell that I was not the only one overwhelmed by a profound sense of gratitude for being part of this country.” The old Israel was also embodied by the “small army of nurses and medical techs injecting one person after another with utter efficiency.”

Efficient or not, the vaccination campaign has only underscored Israel’s roots in Palestinian oppression: the nearly 5 million Palestinians living in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip are being criminally excluded from the program. As Amnesty International notes, Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention requires occupying powers to ensure and maintain “the medical and hospital establishments and services, public health and hygiene in the occupied territory, with particular reference to the adoption and application of the prophylactic and preventive measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.” 

Not that Israel has ever done much for Palestinian medical establishments and services. Along with bombing hospitals, ambulances, and medical personnel, Israel has imposed a crippling blockade of Gaza for the last thirteen years that prevents the import of necessary medical equipment and supplies. Even before the pandemic, the coastal enclave’s health care system was already on the verge of collapse. The Israelis invoke the Oslo Accords in claiming that the Palestinians are responsible for sorting out their own vaccines, but this is kind of like cutting off a person’s legs and then telling them to jump rope. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

The ‘Iran-al-Qaeda Axis’: Here we go again

 Al Jazeera English

In September 2002, United States President George W Bush began a speech in Nashville with some typically eloquent charm: “There’s an old saying in Tennessee – I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee – that says, fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again”.

This was exactly six months before the launch of the war on Iraq in all of its carnage, which the US endeavoured to fool the world into thinking was justified by Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda. In reality, there were no weapons, and al-Qaeda only came to flourish in Iraq as a result of – what else? – the US invasion.

Fast forward nearly two decades, and the current US administration appears determined to debunk Bush’s dictum that “you can’t get fooled again”.

Now, of course, the target is Iran – but the argument is exactly the same.

While we’ve already spent the past four years of the Donald Trump presidency hearing about Iran’s diabolical nuclear ambitions, Trump & Co have, on the eve of their departure from power, decided to gift us one last hallucination – which they undoubtedly hope will swiftly contaminate the public mind and thereby convert itself into accepted fact.

Outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo presented this final hallucination in a speech on Tuesday at the National Press Club in Washington, DC: “Al-Qaeda has a new home base. It is the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Never mind that al-Qaeda and Iran are, you know, mortal enemies. The truth matters not in matters of national security. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Killing Julian Assange

 Al Jazeera English

On Monday, January 4, a London court will decide whether to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States on espionage charges. If convicted, the whistle-blower will face a prison sentence of up to 175 years in everyone’s favourite “land of the free”.

The Australian citizen is accused of having harmed the US and its allies by publishing classified documents.

Assange collaborated with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who has already been put through the horror show of the so-called US justice system for leaking classified documents related to, inter alia, the US wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Among the most notorious material published by WikiLeaks is the “Collateral Murder” video, released in 2010. It depicts a 2007 episode in Baghdad in which US Apache helicopter personnel enthusiastically slaughtered a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters staffers – a fitting hint, perhaps, as to the existential perils of journalistic efforts to document the truth.

In Assange’s case, his crime is just that: telling the truth in contravention of an official narrative of heroic, world-saving interventions by the US military.

Indeed, according to the perverse perspective of the US, it is absolutely fine to massacre Iraqi civilians – just not to talk about it.

In the end, after all, what is imperial war if not sustained butchery and devastation of civilian populations? Yet pointing out the bleeding obvious is apparently enough to land you in jail for 175 years. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.