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Geopolitics

Latin American Violence: After Mexico, Brazil Could Be Next

Police in Sao Paulo
Police in Sao Paulo
Clóvis Rossi

SAO PAULO — During my time in the early 1980s as a correspondent for Folha de S. Paulo in Buenos Aires, I covered more demonstrations of the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” — and then of the “Grandmothers” — than I could count. Brave women, their faces furrowed by time and pain, their heads covered with white scarves, asking for the return of their sons and grandsons who had disappeared under the regime’s repression.

In truth, they had all been killed, but again and again the cries came, “You took them alive, we want them back alive.”

I heard similar shouts in Chile and Uruguay, other countries where the repressive regime’s savagery produced victims on an industrial scale. The dictatorships are gone in these three countries and in the rest of Latin America — with the exception of Cuba — and the cries were gradually replaced by official explanations, and/or by the trial and sentencing of those responsible for the state-sponsored massacres.

So for me it is simply shocking to read that in 2014, in Mexico, the same cry was heard again. “You took them alive, we want them back alive,” shouted parents and friends of the 43 students abducted in September, and missing since then.

The most tragic thing about this story is that instead of "alive," the families of the disappeared students were told this week by the attorney general that they will probably get them back in the form of ashes found in garbage bags in a river.

A sinister pact

Equally tragic is the fact that Brazil seems to be paying little attention to this landmark event for the Mexican democracy — as if Brazil was a haven of safety and there weren’t, here as well as there, a collusion between part of the repressive forces and narcotrafficking.

In a column in El País, Mexican writer and intellectual Enrique Krauze wrote, “Mexico demands a security and judicial system that protects what’s most precious: human life. The unremitting wave of crime not only must be contained, it must be reverted by the legitimate action of the law. Every day that passes, citizens — let down by all the parties, by politicians and politics — sink deeper into despair and hopelessness.”

Writing about Mexico, social scientist Rubén Aguilar Valenzuela on the website Infolatam, might have just as well been referring to Brazil. “In the modern and inclusive Mexico we all desire, the structural weakness of the security and judicial system needs to be overcome. It is an inalienable obligation and a responsibility of the three levels of government as well as society.”

Brazilians must remember the debates of the recent presidential campaign, during which both candidates, Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves, promised to get the federal government involved in an area nowadays left to the states — although they are clearly too incompetent to even contain our own “unremitting wave of crime.”

We must insist that these promises are kept. Otherwise, if things continue on their current path, Brazil risks sinking into the state of affairs we now witness in Mexico. Spanish journalist Anatonio Navalón boiled down the stakes to one sentence: “The sinister pact between political corruption and organized crime is deadly for any country.”

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Economy

Lex Tusk? How Poland’s Controversial "Russian Influence" Law Will Subvert Democracy

The new “lex Tusk” includes language about companies and their management. But is this likely to be a fair investigation into breaking sanctions on Russia, or a political witch-hunt in the business sphere?

Photo of President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda

Polish President Andrzej Duda

Piotr Miaczynski, Leszek Kostrzewski

-Analysis-

WARSAW — Poland’s new Commission for investigating Russian influence, which President Andrzej Duda signed into law on Monday, will be able to summon representatives of any company for inquiry. It has sparked a major controversy in Polish politics, as political opponents of the government warn that the Commission has been given near absolute power to investigate and punish any citizen, business or organization.

And opposition politicians are expected to be high on the list of would-be suspects, starting with Donald Tusk, who is challenging the ruling PiS government to return to the presidency next fall. For that reason, it has been sardonically dubbed: Lex Tusk.

University of Warsaw law professor Michal Romanowski notes that the interests of any firm can be considered favorable to Russia. “These are instruments which the likes of Putin and Orban would not be ashamed of," Romanowski said.

The law on the Commission for examining Russian influences has "atomic" prerogatives sewn into it. Nine members of the Commission with the rank of secretary of state will be able to summon virtually anyone, with the powers of severe punishment.

Under the new law, these Commissioners will become arbiters of nearly absolute power, and will be able to use the resources of nearly any organ of the state, including the secret services, in order to demand access to every available document. They will be able to prosecute people for acts which were not prohibited at the time they were committed.

Their prerogatives are broader than that of the President or the Prime Minister, wider than those of any court. And there is virtually no oversight over their actions.

Nobody can feel safe. This includes companies, their management, lawyers, journalists, and trade unionists.

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