Arcadia Foundation

Mobile phones have allowed African farmers to check the market price of their crop and migrants to send cash back home. Might one of their less familiar benefits be the foiling of kidnappings in Colombia?

That is the claim made in a new paper by Santiago Montenegro and Álvaro Pedraza, two economists linked to Bogotá’s University of the Andes, and republished in the article below, from the Economist’s online edition.

Colombia suffered a surge in kidnappings, peaking first in the early 1990s and then at a higher level at the end of the decade. Illegal armed groups—left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries—were responsible for most of them. But in recent years the number of kidnaps has fallen dramatically. Read Full Paper

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has threatened to nationalize Toyota Motor’s assembly plant and turn it over to a Chinese company. The incendiary statement came as Chávez accused Toyota of failing to produce enough vehicles appropriate for rural areas of the South American country. He made the same threat to Fiat and General Motors, which also operate plants in the country and also said the international automakers are not transferring enough of their corporate new technology to local plants.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Chávez as saying in a televised speech that his trade minister will inspect the Toyota plant and if it doesn’t meet standards, “We’ll take it, we’ll expropriate it, we’ll pay them what it is worth and immediately call on the Chinese.” Toyota built some 13,000 vehicles in Venezuela last year, the paper reported.

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Colombian officials stated yesterday that FARC guerrillas slit a state governor’s throat hours after they kidnapped him during a brazen raid in one of worst rebel strikes during President Alvaro Uribe’s government.

Armed rebels, dressed in military uniforms, blasted through the door of Luis Cuellar’s house in a southern Colombian city late on Monday, killed a police guard and dragged the governor away from his wife and into a waiting jeep.

Cuellar’s body was found on Tuesday as troops scoured the remote jungle in hopes of rescuing him. The kidnapping was a reminder of the darker days of Colombia’s conflict when lawmakers were easy prey for rebel squads.

“He had his throat cut, they slaughtered him miserably,” Uribe said in a national broadcast after Cuellar’s body was discovered near the vehicle abandoned by rebels as they fled into jungle near Florencia city.

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The trial of the internationally renowned dissident Liu Xiaobo is set to start tomorrow in Bejing. Although he was promised an open trial, European and U.S. diplomats have been refused access to the hearing. Chinese reform activists and his wife say they have been warned not to attend the trial.

Chinese court officials called Liu’s attorneys last weekend to deliver formal notice of the date of the trial.

The 53-year-old former literature professor, who was held for over a year without charge, has now been charged with “inciting subversion of state power” after co-authoring Charter 8, a petition that calls for political reform. Liu faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted, his lawyer says.

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Khadija Sharife, a journalist and a visiting scholar at the Centre for Civil Society (CCS) based in South Africa, presented the following paper at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation conference ‘The Global Crisis and Africa: Struggles for Alternatives” in Randburg, South Africa on 19 November 2009. In a geopolitical climate where hungry investors are looking to capitalize on third-world markets surging in opportunity from the settled dust of economic recession, even as those developed nations attempt to secure supplies of food and biofuels to mitigate the impacts of climate change on the food and energy security of their populations, Khadija Sharife writes about the rush by foreign investors to buy up agricultural land across Africa, all too often at the expense of the wellbeing and livelihoods of local communities.

It has been called the next golden commodity by investment firms, and ‘neocolonialism’ by the now repentant director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Jacques Diouf.

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Diggers tore into a Soviet World War Two memorial in Georgia on Thursday to make way for a new parliament in the former Soviet republic, drawing condemnation from Russia.

Pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose country was defeated by Russia in a brief war last year, wants parliament sessions to be relocated to Georgia’s second city of Kutaisi under an initiative to revitalise the former industrial hub.

Russia’s defence ministry said it was “concerned” by the the demolition of the 46-metre-high (150-feet) concrete and bronze war memorial at the proposed construction site. Parliament member and former prime minister Sergei Stepashin called it “sacrilege“.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the move was “disrespectful” to Georgians who had fought in the Soviet army during World War Two, of whom some 300,000 were killed.

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Venezuela’s narcissist-Leninist President Hugo Chavez is not getting his money’s worth for the billions of dollars he is spending in public relations abroad: According to a new poll, his approval ratings in Latin America could hardly be worse.

The Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer has published a newly-released poll of 20,200 people in 18 Latin American countries originally conducted by Latinobarometro, a Chilean-based firm, showing that when asked to evaluate foreign leaders on a scale from zero to 10 — with zero being “very bad” and 10 being “very good” — Latin Americans gave Chavez the worst rating among a list of 17 regional and world leaders.

What may be just as bad news for the Venezuelan president: The leader who topped the list was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, who got a score of seven.

Obama was followed by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, with a rating of 6.4; Spain’s King Juan Carlos, with 5.9, and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero and Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, with 5.8 each. Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Costa Rica President Oscar Arias received 5.7 each.

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Below is a NEW achievement of the Arcadia Foundation’s work in Honduras. A former Judge that illegally ruled to favor an in-law of former President Manuel Zelaya, a man by the name of Jesús Kafati and gave Kafati the majority ownership of stock in a major a coffee company in Honduras was convicted of abuse of power yesterday in a unanimous decision made by the three judges that conform the Tribunal de Sentencia of Siguatepeque in Honduras.

The Arcadia Foundation, including founder Robert Carmona-Borjas (seen right) has denounced attributes this as one of many cases we’re still investigating within the region of a newly-reformed Honduras.

El Heraldo yesterday  reported that the Arcadia Foundation has helped set an example to the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean of a Honduras in which the laws are respected.

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Writing currently from Canada, the following piece by Peter Worthington in the Toronto Sun caught my eye. It is truly rare that Canadian media takes a gander at the nation of Zimbabwe, and in this brief perspective, I feel Mr. Worthington truly is hitting a major point which needs to be further examined in order for Zimbabwe to grow as a government, as an economy, as a country.

Below is further proof of the atrocities that shape a Mugabe government. Its is the hope of the Arcadia Foundation that talk of a unity government unfolding or reaching is end are just the musings of a madman.

And so, read on for the article on ‘Zimbabwe’s Beacon of Hope’, in a time still shrouded in darkness.

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A group of civic activists and North Korean defectors have urged an international tribunal to investigate alleged human rights abuses in the Stalinist country and put dictator Kim Jong-Il on trial.

About 150 defectors signed a petition calling for the International Criminal Court to investigate reports of human rights violations in the North, such as extreme torture, sexual slavery and prison brutality. The group visited the Hague, Netherlands, this week to file its petition with the court.

“We were subjected to reduced food rations so extreme that we literally saw scores of our fellow prisoners die of malnutrition, starvation and disease,” the petition said.

The letter was also sent to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

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