The Senate rejected competing proposals to end the partial government shutdown on Jan. 24. The Fix's Aaron Blake analyzes what could happen next.(Monica Akhtar /The Washington Post)
Republican senators clashed with one another and confronted Vice President Pence inside a private luncheon on Thursday, as anger hit a boiling point over the longest government shutdown in history.
“This is your fault,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) at one point, according to two Republicans who attended the lunch and witnessed the exchange.
“Are you suggesting I’m enjoying this?” McConnell snapped back, according to the people who attended the lunch.
Johnson spokesman Ben Voelkel confirmed the confrontation. He said Johnson was expressing frustration with the day’s proceedings — votes on dueling plans to reopen the government, both of which failed to advance.
The people who attended the lunch spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a closed-door session. Aides to McConnell, citing regular policy on GOP lunches, declined to comment on the gathering.
The argument was one of several heated moments in a lunch that came just before the Senate voted on the opposing plans to end the shutdown offered by President Trump and Democrats.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) walks out of the Senate chamber after holding two votes on the shutdown that failed to pass on Thursday. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
The outbursts highlighted the toll the shutdown has taken on Republican lawmakers, who are dealing with growing concerns from constituents and blame from Democrats, all while facing pressure from conservatives to stand with Trump in his demand for money to build a wall on the border with Mexico.
The votes the Senate cast on Thursday were the first on the shutdown since it began Dec. 22, with McConnell and other GOP lawmakers previously refusing to vote on anything this year unless it had Trump’s approval — a policy that has drawn widespread criticism.
The day ended with some limited signs of progress. After the votes, McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) engaged in a face-to-face negotiation that senators hoped would lead to a solution in the near future.
The first proposal, which Trump put forward, would have allocated $5.7 billion for wall funding in exchange for temporary protections for some immigrants. Only one Democrat voted for it. Two Republicans rejected the plan.
One of the Republicans, Sen. Mike Lee (Utah), also spoke out in the lunch. He explained that if Thursday’s votes were merely a party-line exercise, there should be more changes to the nation’s asylum laws, according to one of the people who attended the lunch. Lee also expressed concerns about getting assurances for votes on his amendments.
Senator Mitt Romney (R-Ut.) speaks to journalists while walking to the Senate floor for votes on competing Republican and Democratic plans to end the government shutdown on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
Six Republicans broke ranks to vote for the Democratic plan, which would have reopened shuttered government agencies through Feb. 8, without any wall money. Among them was Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who explained in the lunch why he planned to vote for both bills.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted for Trump’s bill but opposed the Democratic plan, started to interrupt him and Romney snapped back, according to one of the people who attended the lunch and another person familiar with it. The exchange was lively but not particularly angry, they said.
Representatives for Romney, Tillis and Lee did not immediately comment.
Senators also voiced their concerns about the shutdown directly with Pence, who was in attendance.
“Nobody was blaming the president,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), speaking about the lunch to reporters afterward. “But there was a lot of frustration expressed about the situation we find ourselves in.”
Also during the lunch, McConnell made clear to Pence and others in the room that the shutdown was not his idea and was not working. According to Republicans familiar with his comments, he quoted a favorite saying that he often uses to express his displeasure with government shutdowns: “There is no education in the second kick of a mule.”
McConnell started using that saying after the 2013 shutdown, which lasted 16 days and ended after the public largely blamed Republicans.
That specific exchange was first reported by the Hill newspaper.
THE number of foreign workers in Japan has doubled in the last year, after a government push to hire from overseas in a bid to tackle the country’s dire labour shortages.
According to official government figures released Friday, there were 1.46 million foreign workers in Japan, 14.2 percent higher than the previous year. The number has tripled from 486,000 in 2008 to reach the current record high.
Workers from China made up the highest proportion of newcomers with nearly 390,000 in Japan as of October 2018. This was up 4.5 percent from the previous year. Vietnam came in second with 317,000, up 32 percent from 2017. And the Philippines supplied the third most, with 164,000.
The biggest industry for foreign workers was manufacturing with 30 percent, followed by retail, and hospitality.
According to the Japan Times, the labour ministry attributed the rise to the government’s policy of promoting the hiring of highly skilled workers, students as part-timers, and trainees from developing countries under its technical intern programme.
Despite the steep rise in immigration, foreign workers still constitute only 2 percent of Japan’s total workforce. But this looks set to rise significantly in the coming years following changes to immigration laws.
In December, Japan eased visa restrictions to be able to accept more foreigners in 2019. The changes come into force in April.
People stage a rally against a bill to allow more foreign workers in front of parliament in Tokyo on December 7, 2018. Japan’s ruling parties aim to pass through parliament on a bill to bring more blue-collar foreign workers into the country. Source: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP
The new rule allows more workers to take up jobs in sectors, such as construction, farming and nursing, and gives them a pathway to permanent residency. The scheme is aimed at tackling Japan’s labour shortage, brought on by a low birth rate and an ageing population.
Unemployment is at its lowest level since the early 1990s, and last year job availability rose to its highest in 44 years, with 150 jobs open to every 100 people seeking work.
The government estimates more than 345,00 foreigners will enter the country in the next five years to work in sectors facing a labour crunch.
The new law has raised concerns of exploitation as employers use the change to secure cheap labour in sub-standard conditions.
A labour ministry investigation found that of the 6,000 firms that currently hire a total of 260,000 technical trainees, about 70 percent had broken labour regulations on illegal and unpaid overtime.
On Friday, Mitsubishi Motors, Panasonic and two other companies were forced to cancel their technical internships after they were found to have left the foreign workers in charge of work they were not authorised to carry out under the programme.
The new push to hire from outside of Japan is a big turnaround in the government’s approach to immigration. The country has historically only granted working visas for highly skilled people with professional training, such as doctors and teachers.
In an interview with Channel 4 News, the port’s CEO said: “We still don’t have firm direction on really what is going to be required… It comes down to how they want to treat the border.”
The head of the Port of Dover says the government has given no “firm direction” on technology for additional security checks, in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Doug Bannister, the new Chief Exec of Europe’s busiest ferry port, told Channel 4 News: “We haven’t got any physical comfort. We haven’t seen increased manpower, we haven’t seen any new systems or processes.
“For us, the most important thing is what are the physical checks on the dock. If those are minimal, then we can maintain operations. If a hard border therefore means that we have to do physical checks on the docks within our estate, then that is going to create a lot of problems for us.”
In the interview, to be broadcast tonight at 7pm, Doug Bannister also tells Channel 4 News that the government have yet to tell him that this will not be the case.
He says: “It does seem to me to be a very huge task to get it all in, tested and operational before the 29th of March. It comes down to how they want to treat the border.
“So far – while we know the guys and gals across government are working really, really hard on putting programmes in place and getting an understanding and not just in the United Kingdom but also in the European Union as well, about how this is all working – we still don’t have firm direction on really what is going to be required.”
UAE minister threatens use of 'calibrated force' against Houthis in Yemen's Hodeidah as Saudi-led coalition frees seven rebel fighters
Saudi-led coalition troops outside the Yemeni port city of Hodeidah, November 2018 (AFP/File photo)
Wednesday 30 January 2019
The Saudi-led coalition in Yemen has warned it may use "force" against the country's Houthi rebels to make them abide by a United Nations-backed truce, a United Arab Emirates minister and coalition source both said.
"The coalition is prepared to use ... force to prod Houthi compliance with [the] Stockholm agreement," a coalition source told AFP news agency on Wednesday, referring to a ceasefire clinched at peace talks in Sweden last month.
Anwar Gargash, the UAE's minister of state for foreign affairs, similarly said on Twitter that the coalition may use "calibrated force" to push the Houthis to withdraw from the strategic port city of Hodeidah.
Yemen's warring parties agreed to withdraw from Hodeidah at the negotiations in Sweden. But they have failed to pull out their respective troops, reviving the threat of an all-out assault on the city, which serves as a critical entry point for food and humanitarian aid entering the country.
After large spike in Houthi violations over last few days, Coalition today struck 10 Houthi training camps outside of Hodeida Governate. Coalition prepared to use more calibrated force to prod Houthi compliance with Stockholm Agreement.
Gargash added on Twitter the Western-backed, Saudi-led coalition - to which the UAE belongs - struck 10 Houthi training camps outside Hodeidah governorate on Wednesday.
"Coalition prepared to use more calibrated force to prod Houthi compliance with Stockholm Agreement," he tweeted.
The Houthis control Hodeidah while other Yemeni factions backed by the coalition, which is trying to restore Yemen's internationally recognised government to power, are massed on its outskirts.
UN envoy Martin Griffiths has been shuttling between the parties in order to rescue the deal, the first major diplomatic breakthrough of the nearly four-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands of people and pushed Yemen to the verge of starvation.
Prisoner swap
Also on Wednesday, Saudi Arabia released seven Houthi prisoners, who were flown to the capital Sanaa on Wednesday by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the day after a Saudi prisoner freed by the Houthis arrived in Riyadh.
The apparent swap comes as Yemen’s warring parties are still hammering out details of a larger prisoner exchange that they agreed to as a confidence-building gesture at the peace talks last month.
Griffiths welcomed the release on Twitter and said he hoped it would encourage the rapid implementation of the larger prisoner swap.
The SE is very encouraged by this positive spirit from the two parties, and hopes this will give a push to the rapid implementation of the prisoner exchange agreement. #Yemen
The ICRC, which provided the planes for both the freed Saudi and the seven freed Yemenis, said in a statement it had acted as a neutral intermediary and was not involved in negotiations over the releases.
“We are delighted these persons will soon be home,” Yahia Alibi, head of the ICRC Regional delegation in Kuwait, said in a statement.
“We stand ready to act as a neutral intermediary so that thousands more affected by this conflict can return to their families.”
The organisation released a video showing a man on a stretcher being carried onto a Red Cross plane.
Citing rebel media Al-Masirah, AFP news agency named the Saudi soldier as Mussa al-Awaji and said he had been released "without conditions, as a humanitarian gesture".
The two parties agreed to exchange 15,000 detainees and have submitted lists of prisoners' names to UN mediators.
The U.S. president takes direct aim at Maduro’s power, but the economic pain could spread.
U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin hold a press briefing at the White House on Jan. 28. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
BYKEITH JOHNSON|
The oil sanctions that U.S. President Donald Trump levied on Venezuela Monday represent Washington’s strongest effort yet to oust embattled leader Nicolás Maduro by starving his regime of funds.
But the move could exact a larger strategic cost. The new U.S. sanctions, which could take lots of Venezuelan oil off the market, also will likely make it that much harder to put the screws to Iran with tougher restrictions on Tehran’s oil sales later this spring.
“The Venezuela sanctions, along with sanctions on Iran’s oil exports, will create a tighter market for heavy crude oil,” said Sara Vakhshouri, the president of SVB Energy International. Together, “that would lead to another round of 180-day U.S. waivers on Iran’s oil exports.”
After brandishing the threat of oil sanctions for a year, the Trump administration on Monday took dead aim at the lifeblood of Maduro’s government, which is almost entirely reliant on revenues from exporting crude oil. The sanctions come less than a week after the United States and many other countries in the region recognized Juan Guaidó, the head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly, as Venezuela’s legitimate president, and are meant to make it impossible for Maduro to cling to power.
“The United States is holding accountable those responsible for Venezuela’s tragic decline, and will continue to use the full suite of its diplomatic and economic tools to support interim President Juan Guaidó, the National Assembly, and the Venezuelan people’s efforts to restore their democracy,”
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. He said oil sanctions would be lifted if PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, were to pass control to Guaidó or another “democratically elected” leader.
The U.S. measures, while stopping short of a full embargo on Venezuelan exports, are still a potentially devastating double whammy.
They prohibit refiners in the United States, which imported about 580,000 barrels a day of Venezuelan oil over the last year, from buying any more crude from PDVSA. That’s especially important because the United States is one of the few destinations for Venezuelan crude that actually pays for it; countries such as Russia and China accept Venezuelan oil as partial payment for billions of dollars of debt.
Just as important, the U.S. measures also prohibit the export from America to Venezuela of ultralight oil that Venezuela needs to mix with its extremely heavy oil in order to get it out of the ground. Together, the measures threaten to both starve the regime of funds in the short term and make it harder to pump more oil to sell elsewhere.
“The sanctions are really well designed. They’ll have a financial impact on Maduro and impact PDVSA’s heavy crude output,” said Kevin Book, the head of ClearView Energy Partners.
The U.S. measures, which cap a steady, yearslong escalation of financial pressure on Maduro and his inner circle, sparked an angry response in Caracas, as well as in Moscow and Beijing, two of Venezuela’s staunchest allies. Maduro said the United States was trying to steal Venezuelan assets and vowed to challenge the sanctions legally.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also accused the United States of seeking regime change with the harsh sanctions and promised to do everything to support Maduro’s embattled government. China’s Foreign Ministry also criticized the U.S. move and warned that Washington would have to be held responsible for inflicting more economic pain on a country already suffering food shortages, mass migration, and disease outbreaks.
What’s not clear is how willing Moscow and Beijing will be to throw good money after bad by supporting Maduro with either fresh loans or buying more oil. China has lent Venezuela more than $50 billion and is nervous about getting repaid, while Russia has lent Venezuela about $17 billion and is already expecting Caracas to have trouble meeting its payments.
But both countries have a stake in Maduro’s survival—and that of the Venezuelan oil industry—not just as a geopolitical foil to the United States but due to their heavy financial investments over the years.
“Russia and China are going to want to help PDVSA keep pumping the oil it needs to repay those debts,” Book said.
Mindful of the importance of Venezuelan oil for U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, and always leery of doing anything that could send gasoline prices higher, the Trump administration seems to have found a way to inflict maximum pain with a minimum of disruption to the oil market. The ban on buying Venezuelan crude doesn’t start immediately and gives companies the ability to keep using their main supplier.
But in the meantime, proceeds from those purchases won’t go to Maduro but will be held in escrow. That means that U.S. refineries could keep running as normal for the next few months, even while Venezuela’s coffers wither. U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton estimated the sanctions could cost Maduro’s regime $11 billion over the next year—if he stays in power that long and the sanctions remain in place.
“It’s clear that the administration is trying to keep the pressure squarely on Maduro and PDVSA instead of the Gulf Coast refiners,” said Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former U.S. Treasury official now at the Center for a New American Security.
Alternatively, Venezuela could try to find fresh buyers for its oil. Russia and especially China have snapped up lots of Venezuelan crude in recent years but almost exclusively in repayment for tens of billions of dollars in loans to Caracas. Venezuela would probably have to offer big discounts on its oil to entice buyers in other countries to purchase what the United States stops buying.
“It can go to a lot of places, but it cannot go anywhere anytime soon at the price refiners in the Gulf were paying,” Book said.
The impact of the new sanctions promises to be ferocious. Venezuela is about 98 percent dependent on oil sales for government revenue, so starving the regime of current sales, and the ability to pump more oil, threatens Maduro’s ability to use oil money to secure the loyalty of the military and his cronies and to win popular support by funding social programs.
On the downside, the U.S. measures, by poleaxing the one source of funds that Venezuela has, threaten to aggravate the country’s economic crisis, which has already seen hyperinflation, malnourishment, and mass unemployment. The sanctions are nothing more than “economic sabotage designed to force regime change by starving the very people we claim to be helping,” said Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Twitter. (Bolton didn’t help dispel suspicions about U.S. motives when he told an interviewer that the sanctions and a new government would be good news for U.S. oil companies, which would again be able to dive headfirst into the Venezuelan oil patch.)
“It’s always a concern with sanctions that go after big economic targets in any regime,” Rosenberg said. “There will always be different interpretations over whether U.S. sanctions amount to collective punishment or whether the burden is on the regime’s elites.”
Another concern is the impact of the new sanctions on the global oil market. The United States already has tough sanctions on Iranian crude oil exports, which have cut Tehran’s oil sales from about 2.5 million barrels a day to under 1 million barrels a day now. While that shortfall has been made good by increased production in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, further moves to choke off Venezuelan supplies could send oil prices creeping back up by the second quarter of the year, just ahead of the summer driving season.
At the same time, reduced global supplies would hit just as the United States has to decide how hard to squeeze Iran’s oil exports. In November, despite talk of completely shutting down Iran’s oil sector, the Trump administration gave eight countries permission to keep buying Iranian oil. In May, the administration must decide whether to grant additional waivers to buyers of Iranian oil to allow them to keep importing—or whether to push for “zero exports,” which has long been the goal of hawks within the administration.
The latest moves on Venezuela just made that tougher to achieve.
Despite the hard-liners’ quest for an end to Iranian oil exports, Book also expects market realities to temper the White House’s objectives. “The tighter the market is, the more pragmatic the administration will be,” he said. Trying to convince other countries that have long bought Iranian oil to go cold turkey is hard enough in a normal market. As global supplies dwindle, especially due to the pressure on PDVSA, that becomes an even bigger challenge.
“If the market is actually tighter, the job for State Department officials will get that much harder,” he said.
In April 2014 I was part of an international delegation which visited Syria for five days. The delegates came from many different countries. Among the notables were the Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire, a Syrian-British heart surgeon and Julian Assange’s father. We spent time in Damascus, then traveled by bus to Latakia and then Homs. In each city we had meetings with political, religious and social leaders but also had time to wander about and talk with people on the streets.
In Latakia, I met Lilly Martin, an American woman who married a Syrian and has lived there, raising a family for the past twenty-five years. She told me how wrong the western media coverage was. Contrary to media claims, she said protests in Latakia were violent from the start. After the first outbreak of violence, Syrian police and military were ordered to not carry weapons. Protesters continued to burn and destroy government offices with incidents of knifing and shooting unarmed police.
When we visited Homs I was struck by how normal it looked. The streets were full of people and the city looked fine. It was dramatically different than the images portrayed in western media. It was only when we were driving out of Homs that we passed an area where there was widespread destruction and battle damage. There was a sharp contrast between most of the city and the few neighborhoods where battle had raged.
The American journalist Marie Colvin died in February 2012 in one of those neighborhoods. It was called Baba Amr. Ten days after her death, the militants and remaining civilians had all departed Baba Amr. It’s unfortunate that Marie Colvin did not talk with Lilly Martin or visit the majority of Homs where the war was not raging. It could have provided much needed balance to her perspective.
MARIE COLVIN AND HOMS
According to many of her colleagues, Marie Colvin was charming and courageous, ambitious and fun to be with. She had a knack for including personal details, descriptions and emotions that engaged the reader. Unfortunately, Colvin’s reports and interviews from Syria were inaccurate and a huge distortion of the situation.
It is useful to examine Colvin’s reporting now, seven years later, because there is a wave of new articles, books and movies about her and how she died in Syria.
Colvin and photographer Paul Conroy were smuggled into Syria from Lebanon in February 2012. They spent some days in the town of Al Buwaydah and then were taken into the city of Homs using a drainage culvert to avoid Syrian Army checkpoints. Their guides and minders for the trip were from the Farouq Battalion associated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA).
Beginning in the Fall 2011, militants from the Farouq Battalion set up checkpoints, killed security and soldiers and gradually took control of the Homs neighborhood called Baba Amr. They called it a “liberated zone”. By the time Marie Colvin and other journalists arrived, most of the civilians had fled the fighting to stay with friends and family in other parts of the city.
Colvin and Conroy spent a few days in Baba Amr but then left through the tunnel when it was rumored that Syrian forces were going to attack. After learning that the attack did not take place, the journalists made the difficult journey back into Baba Amr. The second morning after returning, Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Olchik died as the Syrian forces launched mortar and missile attacks.
BIASED AND INACCURATE REPORTING FROM SYRIA
Marie Colvin’s reports and interviews from Syria were broadcast widely in the UK and USA. She wrote an article titled “A vet is only hope for Syrian wounded”. The article begins “Wounded civilians arriving at a makeshift clinic in the Syrian city of Homs are relying on a vet to save their lives because there is no doctor to treat them.” As documented in Conroy’s book, they were not in Homs; they were in the town Buwaydah when they observed a vet working as a medic. Actually, there were hundreds of doctors performing medical duties and treating civilians and soldiers injured in the conflict in Homs.
Colvin’s major story for the Sunday Times was titled “Final dispatch from Homs, the battered city”. It begins by describing a “widows basement” with 300 “frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs”. The report of 300 women and children is an exaggeration. Another journalist estimated half that number which is likely an exaggeration itself, since the photos and video show fewer than 50 women and children.
Colvin continued her report saying, “The widows’ basement reflects the ordeal of 28,000 men, women and children clinging to existence in Baba Amr.” This is a huge falsehood; there was a tiny fraction of that number of civilians remaining in the neighborhood. Paul Conroy wrote as follows:
It became increasingly unbelievable that there were an estimated 28,000 people still living in Baba Amr. I hadn’t seen a single one.” Under the Wire (p. 188)
The night before her death, Marie Colvin did live interviews on BBC, Channel 4 and CNN. The CNN interview began by showing video of a baby dying from a shrapnel wound (above). CNN believed Marie Colvin was an eye-witness to the baby’s death. Anderson Cooper asked Colvin what it was like to be in the room. Marie Colvin replied that the room was chaotic and the baby’s death heartbreaking. She dramatized the situation by speaking about the baby’s grandmother being a volunteer in the room when the baby arrived. However, Colvin was not in the room at all. Marie Colvin and the media activists were shown the video on a laptop computer by their FSA guide. (Under the Wire p.155).
In her CNN interview Colvin described Baba Amr as:
28,000 civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless…. There are no military targets here…. So it’s a complete and utter lie that they (Syrian military) are only going after terrorists…. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.”
In reality, Baba Amr was the primary base for militants of the Farouq Battalion. If there was an “utter lie”, it was pretending that this was primarily a civilian neighborhood.
THE SYRIAN REALITY WHICH COLVIN DID NOT REPORT
Like most western coverage of Syria, Colvin’s reporting did not provide important context such as the following:
• How the conflict began in Homs. An eyewitness reported “From the start, the protest movements were not purely peaceful. From the start I saw armed demonstrators marching along in the protests, who began to shoot at the police first. Very often the violence of the security forces has been a reaction to the brutal violence of the armed rebels.”
• How Baba Amr was taken over. In October 2011 militants from the Farouq Battalion set up checkpoints within Baba Amr, attacked and killed Syrian Army soldiers and other security forces, and killed or expelled government supporters. The process was similar to what was documented by a civilian in Aleppo: “Nine days from my window in Aleppo”.
• Attacks on infrastructure. In December 2011, militants blew up the pipeline to Homs’ oil refinery, a major source of oil for the country.
In mid January, an Arab League report documented the results of their investigation. They said:
The Observer Mission witnessed acts of violence being committed against Government forces and civilians that resulted in several deaths and injuries. Examples of these acts include the bombing of a civilian bus, killing eight persons and injuring others, including women and children, and the bombing of a train carrying diesel oil. In another incident in Homs, a police bus was blown up, killing two police officers. A fuel pipeline and some small bridges were also bombed.”
Militants in Baba Amr destroyed government tanks and used their own tank to attack government forces.
On 2 February 2012, FSA militants attacked a government checkpoint, killing ten soldiers and taking another 19 as prisoners. That was evidently the last straw for the government. The next day, February 3, the intense bombardment of Baba Amr began.
PROMOTING EXTERNAL INTERVENTION
Marie Colvin’s reports from Baba Amr had a political goal of spurring Western intervention. This is made clear in emails to her Sunday Times editor.
It is sickening that the Syrian regime is allowed to keep doing this…I think again to focus on Baba Amr, 28,000 defenceless under shelling…” Under the Wire (pp 196-197)
Her reports were missing crucial facts, sensationalized the suffering on one side, ignored the suffering on the other side and demonized the government which was the target for overthrow.
In her interview with CNN, Colvin used the video of the dying little baby to urge western intervention. “That baby probably will move more people to think, ‘What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?”
In her final article for the Sunday Times Colvin says, “In Baba Amr, the Free Syrian Army (FSA)…. have virtually unanimous support from civilians who see them as their defenders.” This claims is highly dubious. The vast majority of civilians had left Baba Amr. All that were left were family members of FSA militants and others who had nowhere to go.
The bias in Marie Colvin’s reports and interviews was not unique. On the contrary, nearly all NATO and Gulf state reporting on Syria has been biased. Stephen Kinzer would later write “The media are misleading the public on Syria.” Patrick Cockburn would later write that “Nearly everything you have read about Syria and Iraq could be wrong”.
HOW MARIE COLVIN DIED
It is claimed that Marie Colvin was intentionally targeted by the Syrian government. This is unlikely. Her death brought opprobrium on Damascus and helped the militant opposition. A few months after Marie Colvin’s death, a prominent British journalist reported that the same Syrian rebels tried to get him and his team killed.
“I’m quite clear the rebels deliberately set us up to be shot by the Syrian Army. Dead journos are bad for Damascus.”
It is also claimed that Syrian intelligence determined the location of Marie Colvin by identifying a satellite phone signal used in her interviews. This is false. Colvin told to her editor at the Sunday Times that the Thuraya satellite phones did not work. For her skype interviews she used the same antenna uplink used night and day by media activists in Baba Amr.
Marie and Remi were working in a battle zone, guided and effectively embedded with armed insurgents. Their deaths were another tragic consequence of the war.
Ten days after Colvin’s death, the militants and remaining civilians withdrew from Baba Amr. There was no massacre, just a street parade and celebration in other parts of Homs.
The deaths of Marie Colvin and Remi Olchik sparked many tributes and widespread publicity. Largely unknown in the West, hundreds of Syrian journalists have also died in the conflict. In a sense, they are all victims of the proxy war on Syria. In another sense, the equivalence is not fair. The war has been encouraged by some and imposed on others.
Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be contacted at rsterling1@gmail.com
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Goldbarg shows a can of jalapenos to the jury during the trial of Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, in this courtroom sketch, in Brooklyn federal court in New York City, U.S., January 30, 2019. REUTERS/Jane Rosenberg
CULIACAN, Mexico (Reuters) - In Mexico’s drug trafficking heartland, the northwestern state of Sinaloa, admiration for captured kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman burns brightly even as the government makes progress in the fight against cartel violence.
Rising from humble origins to become Mexico’s most wanted man, Guzman is on trial in a New York federal court, facing the prospect of spending his final years behind bars after an unparalleled career that made him a criminal sensation.
In his home state, the government says it has contained his Sinaloa Cartel, bolstered by military reinforcements.
During 2018, the first full year since Guzman was extradited to the United States, Sinaloa’s share of Mexico’s murder tally fell to its lowest since records began over two decades ago, bucking a trend of record murders sweeping the country.
Yet mistrust of government runs deep in the restive region split between inaccessible mountain villages and sunny beaches that has produced most of Mexico’s top capos, and some residents say the cartel itself has sought to calm things down.
In the sprawling state capital Culiacan, where dazzling luxury rubs shoulders with stark poverty, support for Guzman is strong.
“He does what the police don’t do. He protects the people,” said of the capo Antonio Pinzon, a 45-year-old farm worker on a pilgrimage to the chapel of bandit folk saint Jesus Malverde.
By lauding Guzman in likening him to Malverde, a Robin Hood-like figure revered by some Roman Catholics and drug traffickers, Pinzon spoke for countless residents of Sinaloa, local politicians, journalists and security experts say.
Born in a poor mountain village in Sinaloa, where smugglers have grown opium and marijuana since the early 20th century, Guzman began rising through the ranks of the Mexican underworld in the 1980s as older kingpins fell.
Captured in 1993, Guzman broke out of jail eight years later and set about establishing his Sinaloa outfit as Mexico’s top cartel. Eliminating rivals and buying off officials, he even earned himself a place on the Forbes rich list.
Security experts say the billions of dollars generated by the cartel give it power that cash-strapped local authorities are wary of challenging. That uneasy equilibrium has fed a widespread perception of political corruption.
Without the consent of capos, it was almost impossible to get elected in parts of Sinaloa, a senior politician from the state told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Still, pointing to lower crime rates, Cristobal Castaneda, Sinaloa’s minister of public security, said the government went after all gangs with equal determination.
While murders in Mexico leapt by a third to more than 33,000 last year, they fell in Sinaloa by nearly a fifth to 1,072 - or 3.2 percent of the total, according to interior ministry data.
A decade earlier, as Guzman’s star was in the ascendant, the state accounted for nearly 9 percent.
Castaneda complained that depictions of traffickers in TV series like “Narcos” and “El Chapo” distracted from Guzman’s crimes.
“They make him look like Robin Hood,” he told Reuters. “Instead of exalting the authorities, they exalt the criminal.”
‘MAGNIFICENT PERSON’
After more than a decade on the loose, Guzman was finally caught again in 2014. But in a humiliating turn for the government, he broke out of his prison cell through a mile-long tunnel in July 2015. He was recaptured six months later.
Slideshow (4 Images)
Mexico extradited him in January 2017, and since November he has been on trial in Brooklyn, charged with trafficking cocaine, heroin and other drugs into the United States. A verdict is expected in the next few days.
Witnesses have alleged he spent millions of dollars bribing officials and ordered or personally carried out murders of rivals. His defense lawyers say the real mastermind behind the Sinaloa Cartel is his associate Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and that the 61-year-old Guzman is a scapegoat.
Few in Sinaloa dispute Guzman played a leading role, but Zambada’s influence is also widely acknowledged.
“From what we Sinaloans can see, (Zambada) was the one in charge,” said Manuel Clouthier, a Culiacan native and former independent federal congressman. “When (Guzman) fell, nothing changed, because the head didn’t fall.”
Since Guzman’s arrest, Zambada has steadily consolidated the cartel’s power, said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Diversification into other criminal activities, demand for newer drugs and blows to its main rival, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, has enabled the gang to grow its business by about 15 to 20 percent, Vigil estimated.
Zambada has also kept a lid on violence, said a bookseller outside Culiacan cathedral named Ismael, who spoke wistfully of Guzman.
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“We know he’s involved in a bad business. But he himself is a magnificent person,” he said. “It’s such a pity he won’t be able to escape from the United States.”
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Castaneda said Sinaloa “ideally” needed 9,000 police to guarantee law and order - more than double its present tally. But he said the narcos have also become more discreet since Guzman’s heyday.
“They’re using compact cars now. They’re not so ostentatious,” he said. “It’s evolved. It’s mutated.”
At the Jardines del Humaya cemetery, where some fallen kingpins are buried in pharaonic tombs, workers said Guzman’s absence had not hurt business.
“We’ve got lots of work,” said carpenter Santiago Rojo as he put finishing touches on an air-conditioned two-storey mausoleum with a marble staircase, bathroom and television screen.
Estimating up to 40 percent of Culiacan’s economy drew on illicit funds, ex-lawmaker Clouthier said the Sinaloa Cartel had become expert at laundering money through legitimate avenues.
But cash of uncertain origin flows freely. Under colored parasols in the Mercadito area of downtown Culiacan, dozens of mostly female vendors buy and sell dollars below market rates - a practice widely believed to facilitate money laundering.
Periodic raids have been staged, but a dollar hawker named Juan estimated the number of selling posts had doubled in the past three years.
Here too, Guzman’s shadow looms large.
Before becoming a drug trafficker herself, the protagonist of Spanish writer Arturo Perez Reverte’s novel La Reina del Sur (The Queen of the South) sold dollars in the very same place.
The book became a successful TV show, and its star, Kate del Castillo, made headlines after it emerged she and U.S. actor Sean Penn had visited El Chapo while he was in hiding. DVDs of the series were found in Guzman’s final hideout.
Reporting by Dave Graham; Editing by Daniel Flynn and James Dalgleish
