The US Border Security Industry Could Be Worth $740 Billion by 2023

Michelle Chen, 

Truthout

October 6, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/the-us-border-security-industry-could-be-worth-740-billion-by-2023/

Over the course of a few days in early 2019, Selene Saavedra-Roman went from starting her dream job as a flight attendant to scrubbing toilets in a dreary Texas detention center.

“I knew not to argue or talk back — refusing to obey the guards’ commands would end up hurting us greatly,” she recalled in her testimony last week at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on immigrant detention. Saavedra-Roman, who was born in Peru and came to the U.S. 24 years ago at the age of 4, was in the process of applying for legal residency. But she was detained at the airport in Houston, Texas, after flying in from Mexico. Recalling the trauma of being locked up with other migrant women in desolate squalor, she testified, “If you volunteered for the work program [in the migrant jail], you would be compensated $1 an hour,” though it was understood that refusing to “volunteer” could jeopardize their immigration cases.

While Saavedra-Roman’s harrowing experience in the migrant jail came as a shock to her, the system she was trapped in had been building up from the time she first crossed the border as a child. Her unjust detention was the product of the Trump administration’s hardline deportation agenda. But the militarized border that had ensnared her was the product of a massive security infrastructure that has been building up for decades. Although Trump’s unabashedly anti-immigrant agenda has amplified the brutality of the border regime, he is merely capitalizing on a massive, entrenched network of corporate power and political influence.

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The Border-Industrial Complex

An analysis of the “border-industrial complex” by the Transnational Institute shows that the budgets of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have exploded in recent years. The combined budgets of the agencies have more than doubled since the mid-2000s — and are now 60 times higher than the immigration enforcement system received in 1980. By one estimate, the border security industry will more than double in value from approximately $305 billion in 2011 to some $740 billion in 2023.

Much of the funding is plowed into public-private contract deals with large firms that furnish immigration agencies with everything from tear gas canisters to detainee health care. Altogether, the Transnational Institute found that three border-related agencies under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “ICE, CBP and Coast Guard, together issued more than 344,000 contracts for border and immigration control services worth $80.5 billion between 2006 and 2018” — about six times the entire 2018 foreign aid budget. By contrast, the Office for Refugee Resettlement, an agency under the Department of Health and Human Services that handles the care of unaccompanied migrant children, has suffered massive budget shortfalls in recent months.

Todd Miller, author of the Transnational Institute report, told Truthout that Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and his signature vow to “build the wall,” echo a long history of border crackdowns. In the mid-1990s, just as the Mexican economy was getting ravaged by the trade disruption caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Clinton administration rolled out Operation Gatekeeper, an expansion of border enforcement that choked off major crossing points, drove migrants toward more dangerous routes through the desert and contributed to a subsequent influx of deaths of border crossers.

Another turning point came after 9/11, Miller added, when a surge in counterterrorism efforts led to “both a centralized border enforcement build-up, and a massive upsurge in corporate participation, [with] more contracts, more campaign contributions, more lobbying, more pressure to grow.”

The Business of Borders

The major border security contractors include military equipment firms such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and tech firms such as IBM, Amazon and Palantir, which help provide the digital backbone for ICE and CBP’s surveillance activities. The scope of corporate border militarization reaches far beyond the border itself, since enforcement activity can extend up to 100 miles inland. That leaves about 200 million people nationwide within striking distance of border authorities.

Meanwhile, migrant jails, euphemistically described as “detention centers,” have mushroomed across the country. The leading vendors for immigrant detention, CoreCivic and GEO Group, which run private prisons and ICE facilities, are guaranteed business under a federally designated “bed quota” for immigration detention. Many of these contractors have been exposed for their egregious human rights abuses and mismanagement scandals. Not only do they help train and equip Border Patrol officers, they are also associated with the dysfunctional management of prison-like detention facilities. Over the years, scandals have surfaced about abuses by ICE’s contracted health care programs (notorious for dysfunctional management, medical neglect and lately, disease outbreaks). Part of the “maintenance” of these facilities is subcontracted to detainees themselves, through institutionalized “voluntary” work programs like the one Saavedra-Roman experienced, which have routinely paid detainees as little as $1 per day for doing chores for the facility.

Despite their abysmal human rights records, security contractors invest heavily in burnishing their reputations on Capitol Hill to keep the spigot of federal dollars flowing. After Trump took office, industries tied to border enforcement significantly upped their spending on lobbying in Washington compared to the end of the Obama administration: For-profit prison companies and defense-electronics firms spent roughly $3.8 million and $24.4 million respectively on lobbying in fiscal year 2018 alone. The private prison industry also contributed a record amount to candidates in the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

In early 2018, The Wall Street Journal quoted CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger boasting that his company was experiencing “probably the most robust kind of sales environment we’ve seen in probably 10 years.” DHS did not respond to Truthout’s request for comment.

Pedro Rios, director of the U.S.-Mexico Border Program of the social justice group American Friends Service Committee, said pro-migrant advocacy groups were tremendously outgunned by the security industry lobby. “We go to D.C., and we make our case for increasing humanitarian efforts along the border and holding border agencies accountable, … yet, some of these corporations have lobbyists every single day of the year in D.C. And so how we can compete with that is just absolutely nonexistent,” he told Truthout.

An even more direct interface between officialdom and the border security industry is the massive “revolving door” between Washington and its contractors and consultancies. The circular flow of personnel leads many former officials to secure positions as lobbyists or “strategists” for companies that do business with federal agencies. From 2006 to 2019, the Transnational Institute report documents 177 individuals who have crossed between the Department of Homeland Security and related corporations. Former head of Homeland Security under George W. Bush, Michael Chertoff, went on to found a high-profile security consultancy, and in 2009, was entangled in a controversy over a brand of body scanners that he promoted publicly without disclosing his firm’s financial ties to the manufacturer.

DHS has in recent years also embedded itself with the higher education system. Homeland Security has seeded research facilities known as “Science & Technology Centers of Excellence” on several university campuses, outsourcing its research and development on drones, data analytics and other security technologies to prestigious academic institutes. The University of Houston’s Borders, Trade and Immigration Institute, for example, coordinates a research consortium with various partner institutions to work on projects such as developing biometric and facial recognition systems and tracking human smuggling patterns. The industry has simultaneously boosted its commercial profile at the annual Border Security Expo, where industry representatives network with government officials while hawking innovations in border guard gear, biometrics and surveillance technology.

Miller’s report highlights the global aspect to the border-industrial complex. The same types of technology deployed by U.S. immigration authorities are helping other governments incarcerate, segregate or oppress their own migrant populations. The Israel-based contractor Elbit Systems, for example, has obtained government contracts to provide surveillance towers at the border in Texas and Arizona. But the company’s specialty is building out Israel’s border and military infrastructures, including patrolling the border wall between Israel and Palestine and developing munitions and drones for the Israeli military.

The security firm G4S provides ICE with detainee transportation services, and also serves the Israeli government with police trainings and surveillance of local Palestinian populations. G4S immigrant detention centers in the United Kingdom, moreover, have been embroiled in several abuse scandals, including the death of a detainee as he was being deported by G4S guards, and physical and emotional abuse of teens at a youth detention facility.

Raytheon says that it has established its border security products in more than 24 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Americas, and has trained 9,000 security personnel. The ties between border security and military contracting underscores how the state violence of warfare parallels the state violence of immigration restriction, as the refugees displaced by conflict end up getting thwarted and detained at foreign borders.

Exposing the Wall

In recent years, some rights groups have sought to directly target the border security contractors through divestment campaigns, which pressure higher education institutions, municipal governments and unions to cut ties with corporations linked to immigration enforcement. The American Friends Service Committee has shed light on the issue with an extensive database listing contractors and financial institutions involved with immigration enforcement, prisons and military ventures, along with recommendations on which companies to divest from. Rios said that seeking accountability from the deportation industry requires “moving away from just calling out one single elected official — in this case, Trump — and pointing out how these corporations have been profiting from this type of relationship for a long time.”

Increasingly, activists are bringing their grievances not to the White House but to the corporations that execute Washington’s directives. Earlier this year, the reports of abuse of children held in detention camps led employees of the online retailer Wayfair to walk out to protest their company selling $200,000 worth of furniture to a large nonprofit organization that was contracted to house children and adults. The New York-based community group Freedom to Thrive has managed to persuade several cities, universities and union pension funds to withdraw their funding from the financial institutions that support detention and deportation, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.

Daniel Carillo, executive director of Freedom to Thrive, described the divestment campaigns as a way to actively hold representatives accountable to the needs of communities, not corporations that are profiting from detention and deportation on a local and global scale. “The Trump administration plays a huge role in anti-immigrant policies alongside corporations,” Carillo told Truthout. “To address the problem, we must target both entities, a united front that addresses anti-Blackness, transphobia, xenophobia. We are working for the freedom of all migrants seeking safety.”

But to fully dismantle the corporate interests behind the border, Miller said, “DHS would have to be reformed to the degree that it no longer is what it is, or simply abolished and replaced with another sort of border department whose mission would be much more helpful to people in dire circumstances crossing borders.”

For now, whether or not Trump gets his wall, divestment will not fundamentally change the economic incentives driving border enforcement. The business of Homeland Security is as profitable for its contractors as it is painful for those ensnared in its grip.

What changed in Haiti? Now, the Big Other Knows

That there is corruption in Haiti isn’t a surprise. But then a senator admitted it openly





Jacqueline Charles. Miami Herald. October 04, 2019

A pro-government Haitian senator recently went on the radio and made an unexpected admission: The Haitian government, of which he is a part, runs on corruption.

Even in a country that has become numbed to such allegations the acknowledgment was stunning.

“There is always money distributed for the ratification of a prime minister,” Sen. Kedlaire Augustin said on the popular “Guest of the Day” program on Vision 2000 hosted by journalist Valéry Numa. “This is the practice. Without these actions, some senators may not be in favor of the government in question.”

Haiti finds itself in the throes of another violent uprising, this time prompted by a crippling fuel shortage, a free-falling currency, soaring inflation and allegations of graft involving public officials from the highest levels of the executive branch to the Parliament. And Augustin’s statement highlights the current state of the Caribbean nation’s volatile politics: Corruption is no longer a secret but an open and accepted practice, and whatever shred of public trust there was in government has evaporated.

Anger that was once aimed mostly at the presidency and prime minister’s offices is now spreading to everything else in the country, where protesters have set police stations and businesses ablaze, and targeted lawmakers, calling them “thieves.”

“Being poor and miserable is already bad and unacceptable, but add to that the feeling that the authorities, either Parliament or the executive branch, are getting rich at the expense of your interest, it’s the worst,” said Etzer Emile, a Port-au-Prince economist.

Emile said Augustin’s surprising statement during an interview last month added fuel to an already blazing fire. It came days after a former ruling party ally who has joined the opposition, Sen. Sorel Jacinthe, told reporters that Augustin and four others had accepted $100,000 each to confirm President Jovenel Moïse’s latest pick for prime minister, Fritz William Michel.

Jacinthe also accused Senate President Carl Murat Cantave of offering him money to vote in favor of Michel. An unknown government bureaucrat tapped by Moïse on July 22, Michel has denied the bribery allegations along with other corruption accusations that he raked in more than $16 million in government contracts, which included the sale of goats for $500 a piece to the government while he was employed in the ministries of finance and agriculture.

Cantave, meanwhile, took to Twitter to defend himself against the bribery accusation, saying Jacinthe was “delusional.”

But the fallout of the allegations, coupled with the admission of another member of Parliament, Sen. Willot Joseph, that he accepted the $100,000 and saw nothing wrong with doing so, has showed that even Haitians’ tolerance of graft has limits.

“For people, that scandal meant there is no lack of resources in this country, but instead bad allocation of money,” Emile said. “They are thinking, ‘How come the country does not have enough money to subsidize gas or to support parents on back-to-school needs, while big money is buying congressmen’s votes?”

Even before last month’s vote-buying scandal, business leaders, peasant organizations and others members of Haitian society had been contemplating taking direct action regarding Parliament, from curbing its powers to dissolving it entirely.

A constitutional amendment committee led by Lower Chamber of Deputies Lawmaker Jerry Tardieu proposed that instead of the current 119 congressmen, the number should be reduced to 52. The 30-member Senate would be reduced to 10, one senator per department. The committee also proposed making it easier to take away the immunity of lawmakers accused of wrongdoing and eliminating the office of prime minister altogether.

“For the Haitian people, the Senate is a bunch of thieves; they aren’t serious but rather are a bunch of people who aren’t doing anything,” said Sen. Patrice Dumont, a first-term senator who has been outspoken about the scandals gripping the chamber. “I have people who ask, “What are you doing among those people?’ My response: Are you going to leave the country because there are thieves, there is trash, there is misery?”

Francois Pierre-Louis, a professor of political science at Queens College in New York, remembers a time when the United States and other foreign donors were consumed by the corruption issue. For example, they protested a plan under the late President René Préval that would give lawmakers money for infrastructure projects in their communities. Donors said it was an attempt to buy senators and deputies, and invited political bickering.

Now, Pierre-Louis said, donors just seem to look the other way as lawmakers sell support in exchange for control over judges, government ministries and the country’s land, sea and air borders.

“Nobody cares. The Trump administration is in turmoil because they cannot get any permanent officials to follow up,” Pierre-Louis said. “And you’ve come to a situation where Haiti can operate without financial aid from abroad because there is so much drug money in the country... and because they are not providing any services to the population. People have gotten to that situation where they are accepting it and not protesting against it and not asking anything from the state.”

But Haitians are increasingly refusing to accept it. Earlier this year, when the country’s Superior Court of Auditors — Haiti’s rough equivalent to the U.S. Government Accountability Office — issued a damning 600-plus page report on the wide-scale corruption in the Venezuela PetroCaribe oil subsidy program that Haiti joined in 2008, it intensified an anti-corruption grassroots movement calling for the resignation of Moïse.

The report accused the president of receiving millions of dollars for questionable road rehabilitation projects before he was a candidate, and of being a part of an embezzlement scheme that defrauded Haiti’s poor out of billions of dollars that should have gone to improve their lives. Moïse denied the allegation but immediately found himself on the ropes as calls for his resignation grew.

Critics say Haiti’s constitution is part of the problem. Adopted in 1987 after the fall of the nearly 30-year dictatorship of the Duvalier family, the constitution gives lawmakers stranglehold control over the executive branch, which they have used as a threat to get kickbacks and other unwarranted advantages, such as imposing often-unqualified family members, friends and allies in high-level government posts.

Rather than becoming a tool for good governance, the constitution has been bastardized, critics say, by parliamentarians as a tool for blackmail and for taking down those who don’t pay to play.

Parliament’s approval

Haiti’s government is patterned on the French, with both a president and prime minister sharing governing authority. While the president is elected, the prime minister is appointed by the president to run the country’s day-to-day affairs. To do so, however, the president must get the approval of Parliament for the prime minister’s political program and cabinet. Since the Lower House of Deputies fired the last prime minister, Jean Henry Céant, seven months ago, Haiti has been without a legitimate prime minister or working government.

Michel was tapped after opposition senators blocked Moïse’s other choice, Jean Michel Lapin — another unknown government bureaucrat — on three different occasions by resorting to tactics that critics described as more criminal than statesmanlike.

At one confirmation hearing, for example, four opposition senators vandalized the chamber and dragged the furniture onto the lawn. At another, they invited in supporters who poured gasoline on the floor after throwing chairs around the chamber to disrupt the vote. And on a third attempt last week, the scene ended in chaos, with a journalist and security guard both getting shot after a ruling party senator, Jean Marie Ralph Féthière, drew his handgun and opened fire in the Senate yard.

The incident involving Féthière, who called the shooting an act of self-defense, was just the latest in a long list of recent scandals involving the men and women elected to create the country’s laws. Some of the others:

▪ In August, an investigation by the Haiti National Police’s Bureau of Finance and Economic Affairs accused Senate treasurer Onondieu Louis, in his capacity as Senate treasurer, of masterminding a money-laundering network that misappropriated thousands of dollars in public funds. Also accused in the investigation were Louis’ chief of staff and the deputy secretary of the Senate. According to the report, obtained by the Miami Herald, the senator set up a rental car company as a front —the address was in fact a soft drink depository —to launder more than $590,857 through two bank accounts.

▪ Sen. Garcia Delva, the vice treasurer of the Senate, was accused of conspiring with a wanted gang leader, Arnel Joseph, in the kidnapping of the senator’s neighbor. Following the accusation, Delva offered to temporarily step down from his post and the U.S. State Department revoked his U.S. visa. Delva recently wrote to the Senate president asking for his job back, calling the police investigation an attempt to discredit his reputation.

▪ In April, Delva was accused of exchanging more than two dozen phone calls with Joseph, the gang leader, while Haiti National Police were engaged in a nationwide manhunt for him. The accusation was made by fellow Sen. Jean Renel Sénatus, who as head of the Senate’s justice commission said he had the phone records.

▪ Also in April, documents surfaced on social media showing that the Lower Chamber of Deputies between October and December 2018 spent nearly $2.5 million on water and coffee. Gary Bodeau, the chamber president, denied the accusation but the group “Together Against Corruption” asked the Superior Court of Auditors to audit the chamber’s books as well as those of the Senate.

▪ Prior to the bribery scandal in the Senate, congressmen in the lower chamber were accused of accepting sacks of rice and money to support Michel’s ratification, though no one publicly admitted to it.

In addition to the corruption allegations, opposition lawmakers, some of whom have their own share of corruption scandals when they were in power, have been singled out for their almost thug-like behavior in the chamber. The behavior was strongly condemned by the international community.

▪ In May, opposition senators trashed the Senate chamber to block the vote on Lapin, the nominated prime minister, who eventually failed a total of three confirmation attempts. Four months later, opposition lawmakers in the Lower Chamber of Deputies resorted to the same tactic in hopes of blocking confirmation of Michel, Lapin’s replacement.

This time, however, Bodeau quickly replaced the broken furniture and sound system to hold one of the fastest confirmation hearings in Haiti history. During the debate, the congressmen threw chairs and desks at each other as they pushed and shoved one another before the opposition walked out. Michel was approved 76-0.

*In addition to Féthière, Joseph, the senator who admitted he had accepted the $100,000 bribe, also drew his gun in public on Sept. 23, but he did not fire. On a widely shared radio interview, Joseph told reporters he saw nothing “wrong with receiving money during difficult times.”

“I don’t “have any problem with [accepting] money that comes my way without having to sign for it, or any kind of paper trail,” he said. “I take it and I don’t have to be a hypocrite [about it] with anyone.”

▪ The same day of the shooting incident, opposition senators invited protesters onto the premises of the Senate. Féthière and others referred to the protesters as “violent militants,” and accused them of creating a threatening environment as the protesters berated pro-government senators and called them thieves.

“There is a total breakdown of rule of law in Haiti,” said Pierre-Louis, the political science professor. “The state is not functioning at all.”

Numa, the radio host who got Augustin to admit that vote-buying is a common practice even though he denied accepting the $100,000 bribe for himself, said while people have always assumed that money changes hand in Haiti, “it wasn’t something people spoke about.“

“Honestly, Parliament got like this during the last few legislatures,” said Numa, a former legislative reporter. “I used to be accredited to the Parliament... and I’ll be honest with you, there was never anything like this. It started to degenerate when they decided that members of Parliament can decide on ministers when forming a government. Sure, at a certain moment [in the past] you had lobbying that was done, but in this case... things have become too obvious.”

While the corruption in Parliament became more obvious under former President Michel Martelly and his prime minister, Laurent Lamothe, it got worse with the ascension of Moïse as president, said Marie Yolene Gilles, a human rights activist.

“It is something that has become normal since Jovenel’s government — if you don’t take the money it’s because you don’t need it. It’s a practice that has become systematic,” she said.

In 2015, Gilles predicted that legislative elections “would unleash a post-electoral crisis.” The reason, she said, was because the agency charged with vetting candidates, the Provisional Electoral Council had not removed candidates with criminal records.

Not only was her prediction correct, Gilles said, but an investigation by her organization, Fondyason Je Klere, found that between 2008 and 2018, only 10.7 percent of heads of state, prime ministers, ministers and other senior government officials had declared their assets as required by law. The situation was even more alarming for members of Parliament: 97 percent of senators and 93 percent of deputies in that time period did not declare their assets by the end of their terms. The failure to disclose meant the public had no way of tracking corruption by seeing how much a lawmaker’s wealth had grown while in office.

To make matters worse, the Citizen Observatory for the Institutionalization of Democracy recently said that the Senate and lower chamber together had voted on only seven pieces of legislation over the past three years. The group also noted that out of 80 sessions each chamber should have conducted for the year, the Senate only had 32 and the lower chamber 34.

Recognizing that corruption levels are high throughout the hemisphere, not just in Haiti, the Organization of American States is currently exploring mounting a $17.7 million anti-corruption project in the country that would bring prosecutors and investigators from other Latin American nations to Haiti to help strengthen anti-corruption institutions. Based in part on a similar effort in Honduras, the program received the blessing of Moïse earlier this year and would require donor funding.

“The country needs redemption,” said Dumont, the Haitian senator who is a well-known former sports commentator.

Just last week, the country’s chief prosecutor, Paul Eronce Villard, handed in his resignation following a radio interview in which he was critical of the two senators under police investigations and Féthière, who was not arrested after the shooting incident that injured a journalist and a security guard.

After Villard resigned he was promoted to the Court of Appeals. He declined the post in a brief letter without explanation.

Villard did not respond to a Herald request for comment, but those familiar with the incident said that after announcing his intentions on the radio to go after senators accused of wrongdoing, he saw the promotion as an attempt to buy him off.

Hondurans React to Bribe Offered by El Chapo to President: ‘We Live in a Narcostate.’

Hondurans React to Bribe Offered by El Chapo to President: ‘We Live in a Narcostate.’





Elisabeth Malkin. New York Times. October 3, 2019

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — The allegation in the Manhattan courtroom was stunning. United States prosecutors said that one of the world’s most notorious drug traffickers had given $1 million to the brother of the president of Honduras, money meant for the president himself.

But on Thursday, Hondurans tempered their outrage with resignation at the news emerging from the cocaine-trafficking trial of Juan Antonio Hernández, the younger brother of President Juan Orlando Hernández.

On the first day of the trial on Wednesday, prosecutors said that the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo had delivered $1 million to the president’s brother with the intention that the money would be funneled on to the country’s leader.

The news that American prosecutors say their president is complicit in drug trafficking only confirmed what many Hondurans already believed about their political leaders.

Indeed, many say they gave up long ago, despairing that Honduras will never address the chronic corruption, violence and criminality that has a chokehold on their country.

As a result of this pessimism, thousands leave their country every month — many headed to the United States — after losing hope for a good future for themselves and their families.

So the drug-trafficking trial of Juan Antonio Hernández, known as Tony, has only strengthened the belief of many that their government is venal and does not have their interests in mind.

“I think that a lot of information is coming out that almost the whole country knew already,” said Gracia María Avendaño Paz, 45, a lawyer. “We live in a narcostate.”

In a tweet after the allegation was made, the president denied receiving any money and called the allegations “false, absurd and ridiculous.”

But to many Hondurans, hearing and absorbing the news for the first time on Thursday, the allegations rang true, even though prosecutors have yet to present evidence.

“How didn’t he know what his brother was doing?” said Francisco Antonio Velásquez, 33, a hotel employee in Tegucigalpa, the capital, of the president. “This tars him, it does. In my opinion, he has touched the narcos’ dirty money.” The president, too, should be prosecuted, Mr. Velásquez said.

The trial started just days after President Trump reached a deal with the Honduran president that will make it more difficult for asylum seekers to reach the United States. This has given many Hondurans the impression that the United States is more concerned with stopping migration than with drug trafficking.

President Hernández has been the country’s dominant political figure over much of the past decade: first, as president of Congress, and since 2014, as the country’s leader.

He has denied any involvement in drug trafficking, arguing that the allegations are the invention of convicted drug traffickers angered by his tough anti-crime policies. In Congress he pushed for a law that allowed Honduras to extradite accused drug traffickers to the United States and, as president, he began to send them north to stand trial.

On Thursday, the president told reporters at a news conference that more “novelistic stories” about him were likely to emerge at his brother’s New York trial as part of an effort by drug traffickers to attack him.

Raúl Pineda, a former legislator from President Hernández’s National Party, said that the allegations against the president put him in a “highly uncomfortable” situation, but he is still very much in control of the country.

“National public opinion is quite unfavorable,” Mr. Pineda said. “But it won’t have an effect because of his control over the attorney general, the judiciary, the armed forces and most of the media.”

“The fear of reprisal leads to a kind of silent acceptance,” he added.

The one hope that many Hondurans have, Mr. Pineda said, is that pressure from outside the country will force some kind of change — perhaps evidence from the trial will prompt a serious investigation inside Honduras of the president’s actions. “His control is strong but it is not absolute,” Mr. Pineda said.

Long before the arrest last November of his brother, who is accused of trafficking cocaine through Honduras for at least 12 years, President Hernández saw popular opinion in Honduras turning against him.

A surge of unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala who fled to the United States in 2014 snapped attention to conditions in the region, where gang violence produced the highest murder rates in the world.

The following year, demonstrators poured into the streets to protest Honduras’s rampant corruption, forcing President Hernández to accept a panel of international prosecutors to investigate graft. That group, working with the prosecutor’s office, has begun to reveal how politicians pocket public funds, confirming Hondurans’ long-held suspicions about why money destined to build schools, clinics and roads never reaches them.

More than 60 percent of Hondurans lived in poverty in 2018 according to the World Bank. In rural areas, one in five people live on less than $1.90 a day.

Remittances from Hondurans working abroad account for about 20 percent of the country’s economy.

In 2017, President Hernández won re-election after a disputed vote count. A United Nations investigation determined that 23 people died in the ensuing protests, at least 16 of them at the hands of security forces.

“There is not one single area where you can say the country is doing well,” said Dr. Suyapa Figueroa, the president of the Honduran medical association, who said she has watched health services decline over the past 10 years.

Budgets for health and education have dropped as a proportion of overall spending, said Ismael Zepeda, an economist with Fosdeh, a Tegucigalpa research institution.

In 2010, the health budget accounted for some 12 or 13 percent of the whole government budget, he said. Next year, it will be 6 percent.

The trial is a far-off concern, though, in the rural villages where people live hand-to-mouth, and it is the government’s neglect that stings most.

In the municipality of Cedros, about 50 miles outside the capital, the signs of abandonment by the state are everywhere — in the dry fields, the pitted dirt roads and the rudimentary schools.

A local resident, Wilmer Valdez said he has twice tried to reach the United States, and twice he was sent back. But with a new baby to support, he may try again.

“You look for a future because here there is only enough to get by from day to day — nothing more,” Mr. Valdez said.

Prosecutors present 'drug ledger' with notes of drug shipments that allegedly mention the president of Honduras and his brother

Prosecutors present 'drug ledger' with notes of drug shipments that allegedly mention the president of Honduras and his brother


JEFF ERNST. Univision. October 3, 2019

Federal prosecutors in the New York drug trafficking case against the brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, introduce evidence on Thursday from a supposed 'drug ledger' seized last year which allegedly documents part of the cocaine dealing by former congressman Juan Antonio ‘Tony’ Hernanadez.

Univision obtained a complete copy of the 350 pages of notes, the validity of which it was able to confirm with a high-level law enforcement official with knowledge of the case. Compiled from 11 notebooks, they detail numerous cocaine shipments in the hundreds of kilos that were allegedly received by Tony Hernandez and then distributed to his conspirators, including Nery Orlando Lopez Sanabria, purportedly one of the largest traffickers left in Honduras.

The notebooks also detail payments to someone identified as “JOH,” which are the initials widely associated in Honduras with Juan Orlando Hernandez, as well as his “employees.” Univision requested a comment from President Hernandez regarding the ledgers but did not receive an immediate response.

Univision was unable to verify if the references to 'Tony' and 'JOH' in the ledger referred to the Hernandez brothers.

In a stunning opening statement on Wednesday, prosecutor Jason Richman accused President Hernandez of having received millions of dollars in bribes from narcotraffickers – including $1 million personally delivered by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman to Hernandez’s brother. Richman described 'Tony' Hernandez as “a violent cocaine trafficker of epic proportions.”

Witness testimony began Thursday morning in the trial against Hernandez, who has pleaded non guilty to four counts of drug trafficking and other weapons charges.

"Alice in Wonderland"
President Hernandez's office issued a statement Wednesday night, in which it rejected the prosecutor's allegations saying it was a "100% false, absurd, ridiculous, accusation ... Alice in Wonderland crazy."

In other testimony on Thursday, confessed Honduran drug trafficker, Victor Hugo Diaz Morales, alias ‘El Rojo’, told the court he began working with Tony Hernandez in 2004, paying him $5,000 a load to protect his cocaine shipments with information on Honduran police and military operations on drug routes off the coasts and along the main roads.

Diaz Morales recalled a meeting where Hernandez assured him: " While the payments continue like this there's no risk."

140 tons and a Tommy Hilfiger-inspired logo
One of four co-defendants in the Hernandez case, Diaz Morales told the court he smuggled a total of 140 tons of cocaine with Tony Hernandez over more than a decade in western Honduras along the Guatemala border before he was arrested in 2017 in Guatemala City.

Diaz Morales said he also gave $40,000 to Juan Orlando Hernandez for a congressional campaign in 2005 when the future president’s political career was still in its early stages.

In 2008, he said he started buying cocaine directly from Tony Hernandez who began packaging his product with a TH logo modeled on the Tommy Hilfiger fashion brand. Describing a load of TH stamped cocaine he told the court; “That cocaine was sold to me by Tony Hernandez.”

The revelations are the latest in a string of bombshells that paint an increasingly shocking picture of Honduras as a narco-state, further complicating relations with the U.S. government, which has called President Hernandez a "fantastic" ally in its efforts to contain the flow of Central American migrants. It also appears to provide evidence of the Honduran government’s own complicity in the rise of violence that made Honduras one of the world’s most dangerous countries and forced countless migrants to flee north.

'Drug ledger'
The first witness on Thursday was a Honduran counter-narcotics agent who testified about the 'drug ledger' that was seized in Honduras last year during the arrest of Lopez Sanabria, which Richman said documents “a small portion of the [Tony’s] cocaine dealing.”

On June 6, 2018, a special Honduran police force unit received a tip regarding the whereabouts of Lopez Sanabria that led to his capture on a highway in the northern department of Cortes. Lopez Sanabria had faked his own death several years prior in an elaborate scheme that involved photos taken of him lying in a coffin and a falsified death report. Since then, he had been living under the assumed name of Magdaleno Meza Funez, according to police.

Inside the car in which Lopez Sanabria was travelling, the police who executed the capture found nearly $200,000 in cash stuffed in a hidden compartment under the back seat along with two grenades, guns, jewelry and several ledgers. The ledgers detail mundane activities such as the upkeep on Lopez Sanabria’s cattle ranch, but also cocaine shipments as large as 750 kilos.

Since his capture, Lopez Sanabria has been subjected to multiple attempts against his life, according to his lawyer, Carlos Chajtur, including an alleged attempted poisoning and an attempt by an inmate to smuggle a grenade into the jail where he was being held. Chajtur also confirmed to Univision that his client, who remains in jail in Honduras, was captured in possession of the notebooks and noted that “it was strange that they weren’t presented in [Honduran] court.”

Through his lawyer, Univision sent questions about the notebooks to Lopez Sanabria in jail, but received no response. Chajtur declined to discuss the contents of the noteooks.

Pages of drug shipments
The reason the notebooks weren’t presented might have to do with their content. Page after page details large-scale cocaine shipments allegedly imported to Honduras by Tony Hernandez and then distributed to downstream traffickers such as Lopez Sanabria to send on to the United States, Spain and Switzerland.

One page notes the loss of a shipment of 476 kilos of cocaine in Guatemala, which is corroborated by news reports of a seizure of an airplane carrying the same amount that was captured after it was detected on radar coming from Honduras. Another page outlines the distribution of a load, with 490 kilos of cocaine pertaining to Tony and 160 kilos to Meza. Each kilo was valued at $9,300, or one-third of the street value in the United States.

The name ‘Tony’ is mentioned repeatedly in the notebook involving cocaine shipments totaling thousands of kilos and tens of millions of dollars. The last mention is dated February 27, 2018, only six months before he was arrested in Miami and well after his October 25, 2016 voluntary meeting with the DEA in which he was presented with video evidence of a meeting with a member of the Cachiros crime family who will also be a witness in the trial.

The initials ‘JOH’ are mentioned several times in connection with payments, including a note dated May 11, 2018 and titled “JOH y su gente,” which also details $440,000 in payments to his “employees.”

Another entry, dated November 13, 2017, notes a “pago a jefes de fiscales por sacar carro de papa” for $28,500, and also in “the coded language of a drug transaction,” as the prosecutor put it, “pago a JOH por fumigacion” for $135,000.

President Hernández is widely known throughout Honduras for his initials, 'JOH'. Violent protests against his government in recent years have resulted in the appearance of street slogans and spray-painted posters with the words "Abajo JOH" (Down with JOH) or "Viva JOH" (Long live JOH).

A letter sent by the Department of Justice to its Honduran counterpart dated April 10, 2019 and titled “Request for Assistance in the matter of Juan Antonio Hernandez Alvarado,” solicits “copies of the investigative records, evidence and reports pertaining to” multiple criminal cases in Honduras, including the arrest of Lopez Sanabria.

The other two witnesses expected to testify on Thursday are DEA agents, one who interviewed ‘Tony’ Hernandez when he traveled voluntarily to Miami for an interview in 2015, and the other who took his declaration after his November 2018 arrest.

Fearful of Lula’s Exoneration, His Once-Fanatical Prosecutors Request His Release From Prison. But Lula Refuses.

Fearful of Lula’s Exoneration, His Once-Fanatical Prosecutors Request His Release From Prison. But Lula Refuses.


Glenn Greenwald. The Intercept. October 4 2019

THE SAME BRAZILIAN PROSECUTORS who for years exhibited a single-minded fixation on jailing former President Lula da Silva are now seeking his release from prison, requesting that a court allow him to serve the remainder of his 11-year sentence for corruption at home. But Lula — who believes the request is motivated by fear that prosecutorial and judicial improprieties in his case, which were revealed by the Intercept, will lead to the nullification of his conviction — is opposing these efforts, insisting that he will not leave prison until he receives full exoneration.

In seeking his release from prison, Lula’s prosecutors are almost certainly not motivated by humanitarian concerns. Quite the contrary: those prosecutors have often displayed a near-pathological hatred for the two-term ex-President. Last month, the Intercept, jointly with its reporting partner UOL, published previously secret Telegram messages in which the “Car Wash” prosecutors responsible for prosecuting Lula cruelly mocked the tragic death of his 7-year-old grandson from meningitis earlier this year, as well as the 2017 death of his wife of 43 years from a stroke at the age of 66. One of the prosecutors who participated publicly apologized, but none of the others has.

Far more likely is that the prosecutors are motivated by desperation to salvage their legacy after a series of defeats suffered by their once-untouchable, widely revered “Car Wash” investigation, ever since the Intercept, on June 9, began publishing reports based on a massive archive of secret chats between the prosecutors and Sergio Moro, the judge who oversaw most of the convictions, including Lula’s, and who now serves as President Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and Public Security.

The prosecutors’ cynical gambit, it appears, is that the country’s Supreme Court — which two weeks ago nullified one of Judge Moro’s anti-corruption convictions for the first time on the ground that he violated core rights of defendants — will feel less pressure to nullify Moro’s finding of guilt in Lula’s case if the ex-President is comfortably at home in São Paulo (albeit under house arrest) rather than lingering in a Curitiba prison.

But this strategy ran into a massive roadblock when Lula demanded that he not be released from prison unless and until he is fully exonerated. He wants to ensure that nobody — least of all Supreme Court judges who will rule on his appeal — feel relieved of their obligation to decide correctly by telling themselves that there is no need to take such a drastic step as nullifying Lula’s conviction given that he is no longer in jail but at home.

“I won’t trade my dignity for my freedom,” the former President proclaimed in a hand-written letter “to the Brazilian People,” explaining why he would resist efforts to swap his home for his cage as his prison. “I’ve already proven that the accusations against me are false. It is [the Car Wash prosecutors and Sergio Moro], not me, who are now prisoners of the lies they told Brazil and the world,” he added.

In response, Deltan Dallagnol, the task-force’s nominal chief and a prime subject of the Intercept’s reporting, insisted that Lula has no say in that matter: that if he is ordered to leave prison, he has no power to resist or reject the terms. So weakened is the Car Wash prosecution that, in a surreal spectacle, the prosecutors who worked for years and broke numerous rules to ensure Lula’s imprisonment are now demanding that he leave prison (albeit on their terms), while Lula categorically refuses to do so absent full acquittal of the crimes of which they accused him.

THE CAR WASH PROSECUTORS HAVE good reason to worry that the gross misconduct by them and Judge Moro could lead to a nullification of Lula’s conviction. Beyond the alarming-to-them Supreme Court ruling from two weeks ago, numerous developments reflect a newfound hostility to their work.

On Friday morning, Brazil’s largest newspaper, Folha of São Paulo, reported that the Supreme Court is now moving to judicially authenticate the Intercept’s archive so that its contents can be used in judicial proceedings to review the legitimacy of the anti-corruption probe’s convictions. Meanwhile, the President of the Court, Dias Toffoli, announced this week that the Court will shortly decide several looming questions about Car Wash that could, by themselves, lead to an annulment of Lula’s conviction.

Beyond the Supreme Court, Moro’s “anti-crime” package — which is principally designed to fulfill Bolsonaro’s dream of immunizing the police and military when they kill poor, innocent favela residents — has suffered multiple defeats in Congress. Bolsonaro’s choice for Chief Prosecutor, Augusto Aras, was confirmed by the Senate in September only after he publicly condemned the “excesses” of the Car Wash prosecutors, claiming the prosecutors’ youth and lack of adult supervision made them believe they could cross all ethical lines.

Long-time defenders of the Car Wash probe — including one of the center-right leaders in the Senate of the 2016 impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, as well as the former Chief Prosecutor in his new book — have expressed remorse about the unethical components of the prosecutors’ actions as revealed by the Intercept’s last several months of reporting. One Supreme Court minister, Gilmar Mendes, this week read from the Intercept’s published Telegram chats to accuse Moro and the prosecutors of engaging in “organized criminality” and being “torturers” (for using the tactic of “preventative imprisonment” as a means of forcing defendants to accuse others as a condition for being released).

A new bill to punish prosecutors and judges for abusing their power — aimed at least in part at the abuses of Moro and the prosecutors — easily passed both houses of Congress last month, and most of Bolsonaro’s vetoes of parts of the bill were swiftly overridden. Numerous disciplinary proceedings are pending against the chief prosecutor, Deltan Dallagnol, and at least several harsh punishments are expected. A clear anti-Car-Wash momentum is now driving many of Brazil’s key institutions.

And the erosion of Moro and Car Wash’s credibility is now global: last month, 17 leading anti-corruption scholars from around the world – including one, Yale Law School’s Susan Rose-Ackerman, repeatedly heralded by Dallagnol as the “world leading anti-corruption expert – signed a letter that, citing the Intercept’s reporting, condemned Moro’s “illegal and immoral practices” and demanded Lula’s immediate release; on Thursday, the Paris City Council, citing the Intercept’s reporting, voted to make Lula an honorary citizen of Paris; last month, members of the Democratic House caucus wrote a letter to the Justice Department which, referencing the Intercept’s reporting, proclaimed that “these reports appear to confirm that the actions of both Judge Moro and the Lava Jato prosecutors have been motivated by a political agenda that seeks to undermine the electoral prospects of Brazil’s Worker’s Party.”

To be sure, there will be significant pressure applied to, and even not-so-subtle threats against, the Supreme Court to avoid anything that would exonerate Lula. Each time Lula’s case has made its way to the highest court, members of the military, both active and retired, have warned the Court in quite explicit terms that they were being watched, and expected the Court to keep Lula where he was. Shortly prior to his father’s successful election victory, Jair Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo (who the President is currently attempting to nominate as his Ambassador to the U.S.) warned that any adverse Supreme Court decisions could be addressed by “sending a solider and a corporal” to the doors of the court.

Notwithstanding those pressures and threats, Moro and the legitimacy of the Car Wash probe are far weaker and more vulnerable than they were four months ago. The prosecutors clearly fear that the crowning jewel of their work — Lula’s head on a stake — is in jeopardy. Much of their legitimacy has already been eroded, but any reversal of what they regard as their most cherished accomplishment would be a fatal blow.

Trying to get Lula out of his jail cell and into a more palatable prison — his home — is a desperate attempt to avert that catastrophe. And Lula knows it, which is why — remarkably — he is so insistent on remaining in prison until he receives the full acquittal he believes he is due and which, with the truth about Moro and the prosecutors’ actions finally known, he believes is imminent.

As more revelations continue to be published by the Intercept and its reporting partners about the misconduct of Moro and the prosecutors, the likelihood of a full reckoning for the once-revered prosecutors and the Judge who led them increases. Lula’s calculation that he should remain in prison until he is fully cleared may prove to be erroneous, but there is certainly a solid basis in fact for his conclusion.

Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case

Jair Bolsonaro pictured with second accused in Marielle Franco murder case





Sam Cowie. The Guardian. October 3, 2019

Brazilian opposition figures and human rights observers are seething after a photo emerged of the country’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, grinning and giving the thumbs up alongside a man arrested in connection with the murder of the Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco.

It was the second time the president has been photographed alongside a suspect in Brazil’s most high-profile political murder in a decade.

In March, a photo of Bolsonaro with Élcio Vieira de Queiroz, a former policeman accused of driving the car used in Franco’s killing, circulated on social media.

Queiroz’s arrest appeared to support suspicion that Franco had been targeted by the paramilitary gangs known as “militias” that control large swaths of Rio and are usually made up of or commanded by active or retired police officers.

“Another [suspect] who has a photo with the president. Bolsonaro’s relations with the militias need to be urgently investigated,” tweeted Guilherme Boulos, a leftwing politician.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald, a friend of Franco, tweeted: “None of this means Bolsonaro was involved in Marielle’s assassination. That is unlikely. But it shows how intertwined, multi-pronged & close are the Bolsonaro Family’s ties to militias.”

Franco, a popular socialist councillor and rising star in Rio politics who fought against police brutality in the city’s favelas, was killed last year with her driver Anderson Gomes when a gunman sprayed the car they were driving in.

Josinaldo Lucas Freitas, a martial arts instructor, was arrested on Thursday. He is accused of disposing of the guns used in the murder by throwing them in the sea.

Soon after his arrest, two photos of him posing with Bolsonaro and one with the president’s Rio councillor son Carlos were published by the conservative-leaning weekly magazine Veja.

“This demands an answer,” said Antônio Carlos Costa, founder of the Rio NGO Rio de Paz (Rio of Peace). “The president must explain to the public what kind of relationship he had with this guy.”

Three others were also arrested on Thursday morning, including the wife of Ronnie Lessa; a former special forces police captain and alleged leader of a gang of contract killers.

Lessa is accused of firing the fatal shots and is awaiting trial in a federal prison.

But it remains unclear who ordered the assassination.

“We continue to follow the development of the investigations and, still, with great concern about the delay in discovering the intellectual authors of the crime,” Jurema Werneck, executive director of Amnesty International Brazil, wrote in a press note.
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The primary problem with mainstream economics
October 5, 2019Lars SyllLeave a commentGo to comments



from Lars Syll




https://rwer.wordpress.com/2019/10/05/the-primary-problem-with-mainstream-economics/





Jamie Morgan: To a member of the public it must seem weird that it is possible to state, as you do, such fundamental criticism of an entire field of study. The perplexing issue from a third party point of view is how do we reconcile good intention (or at least legitimate sense of self as a scholar), and power and influence in the world with error, failure and falsity in some primary sense; given that the primary problem is methodological, the issues seem to extend in different ways from Milton Friedman to Robert Lucas Jr, from Paul Krugman to Joseph Stiglitz. Do such observations give you pause? My question (invitation) I suppose, is how does one reconcile (explain or account for) the direction of travel of mainstream economics: the degree of commonality identified in relation to its otherwise diverse parts, the glaring problems of that commonality – as identified and stated by you and many other critics?

Lars P. Syll: When politically “radical” economists like Krugman, Wren-Lewis or Stiglitz confront the critique of mainstream economics from people like me, they usually have the attitude that if the critique isn’t formulated in a well-specified mathematical model it isn’t worth taking seriously. To me that only shows that, despite all their radical rhetoric, these economists – just like Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas Jr or Greg Mankiw – are nothing but die-hard defenders of mainstream economics. The only economic analysis acceptable to these people is the one that takes place within the analytic-formalistic modelling strategy that makes up the core of mainstream economics. Models and theories that do not live up to the precepts of the mainstream methodological canon are considered “cheap talk”. If you do not follow this particular mathematical-deductive analytical formalism you’re not even considered to be doing economics …

The kind of “diversity” you asked me about, is perhaps even better to get a perspective on, by considering someone like Dani Rodrik, who a couple of years ago wrote a book on economics and its modelling strategies – Economics Rules (2015) – that attracted much attention among economists in the academic world. Just like Krugman and the other politically “radical” mainstream economists, Rodrik shares the view that there is nothing basically wrong with standard theory. As long as policymakers and economists stick to standard economic analysis everything is fine. Economics is just a method that makes us “think straight” and “reach correct answers”. Similar to Krugman, Rodrik likes to present himself as a kind of pluralist anti-establishment economics iconoclast, but when it really counts, he shows what he is – a mainstream economist fanatically defending the relevance of standard economic modelling strategies. In other words – no heterodoxy where it would really count. In my view, this isn’t pluralism. It’s a methodological reductionist strait-jacket.

Real-World Economics Revi