Arcadia Foundation

The Venezuelan government has taken control of more than 600 farms (2.5 million hectares, equivalent to about 6.2 million acres) during the regime of authoritarian President Hugo Chavez. They’ve spent more than USD 8 billion in weapons purchases. The so-called “strong bolivar” (BsF) has lost 55% of its purchasing power.

Such are intriguing facts about Venezuela that Mr. Chavez would rather you not know. Truly in an age where former allies like Honduras are showing individualism and even going so far as to express their adamancy for freedom by breaching the social and fiscal chains of ALBA. An age where the socializing of hotels, restaurants and banks is too erratic, too outrageous to censor is where articles like the following are eeking their way out from the region and exposing a crumbling cabinet. Read Full Paper

Imagine that you are an old lady from a poor household in a town in the outskirts of Chennai city, India. All you have wanted desperately for the last year and a half is to get a title in your name for the land you own, called patta. You need this land title to serve as a collateral for a bank loan you have been hoping to borrow to finance your granddaughter’s college education. But there has been a problem: the Revenue Department official responsible for giving out the patta has been asking you to pay a little fee for this service……That’s right – a bribe.

However, you are poor (you are officially assessed to be below the poverty line) and you do not have the money he wants. And the most absurd part about the scenario you find yourself in is that this is a public service that should be rendered to you free of charge in the first place.

What would you do? You might conclude, as you have done for the last 1-1/2 years, that there isn’t much you can do…but wait, you just heard about a local NGO by the name of 5th Pillar and it just happened to give you a powerful ally: a zero rupee note.

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Free and fair elections are a pillar for tangible change in government. The Arcadia Foundation has long strived to see the fruition of democracy in all of its values reach contemporary Latin America, more recently taking to task the former Honduran government of dubious dealings and questionable practices. Our anti-corruption campaigns shone a spotlight on ‘sweetheart‘ deals and abuses of power within the higher echelons of the Zelaya government, and today we are seeing the fruits of the labor from both our team and those who understood likewise and wished for greater transparency and less corruption-susceptible enactors of rule of law. Today, Porfirio Lobo assumes the presidency of Honduras, the result of democratic elections in the region.

Lobo, 62, has recently vowed to unite the Central American country by naming a commission to investigate last year’s ouster against then-President Manuel Zelaya and by appointing opposition members to his Cabinet. Zelaya, 57, who has holed up at Brazil’s Embassy in the capital, Tegucigalpa, since September, says he’ll leave for the Dominican Republic after Lobo is installed.

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A silent victim of the Chavez, Medvedev and Ahmadinejad regimes are the very foundations of international law. Indeed, human rights are under attack, and language is the weapon. The very grammar of justice has fallen into the wrong hands, instrumentalized in the elaborate and sensational theaters of due process. A trial without any rights of defense is still called a “trial,” a conviction ordered down from an autocratic president rather than a judge is still called a “conviction,” and there continues to exist an overwhelming and damaging perception that the law and courts work just fine, because of the presumption of such principles—a presumption eagerly embraced by the financial community looking to toss heaps of capital into subprime judicial environments.

International attorney Robert Amsterdam has written an insightful piece in the Wall Street Journal on the very grammar of justice having fallen into the wrong hands.

When Mikhail Khodorkovsky was put on trial for the first time in 2004, the government applied all its media powers to project the language of justice: They held him in shackles, placed him in a cage on television, and put on a good show trial where a judge pretends to listen to the defense as though the verdict would not arrive via a call from the Kremlin. This is what the Russians call “telephone justice.”

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China and America’s on-again, off-again dialogue on human rights faces postponement yet again amid discord between the two powers over internet censorship.

Talks were meant to take place last year, but a date was never set.

The two countries agreed in November, during Barack Obama’s visit to China, that they would resume discussions by the end of February at the latest. Following Mr. Obama’s departure from China came a slew of show trials for former tiananmen square protestors, easy convictions which were never truly brought up from the west.

“We are still continuing to work with the Chinese to schedule,” said a state department official. “Human rights dialogue is a priority for the US.”

Although critics complain the dialogue has achieved little, advocates say it is an opportunity to raise important issues and individual cases of concern directly.

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Multiple reports have been emanating from Zimbabwe, claiming that Robert Mugabe’s Zanu PF has established secret militia bases in Masvingo and some parts of Manicaland province.

We at the Arcadia Foundation can only document the reasoning behind and the existence of these bases as unsurprisingly abhorrent and furthering the lack of fundamental human rights that has plagued Zimbabwe. However, Radio VOP’s correspondents in Masvingo and Nyanga continue to report that the party had indeed deployed youths at the bases which were being used to intimidate villagers.

With elections imminent and no doubt in dire need of severe international scrutiny and with current governance at a perpetual standstill, this is distressing news for the once-breadbasket of Africa.

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Ugandan and American human rights activists came together today to testify against the proposed Uganda “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” at a hearing of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission of the U.S. Congress. The hearing is the latest in a series of actions by the U.S. government to signal its disapproval of the measure under consideration in the Ugandan parliament.

The “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” introduced in the Ugandan parliament last October, would increase the penalty for “same sex sexual acts” to life in prison, limit the distribution of information on HIV through a provision criminalizing the “promotion of homosexuality,” and establish the crime of “aggravated homosexuality” punishable by death for anyone in Uganda who is HIV positive and has consensual same-sex relations. Further, the bill includes a provision that could lead to the imprisonment for up to three years of anyone who fails to report within 24 hours the identities of everyone they know who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender to the government.

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Jackson Diehl, Deputy Editorial Page Editor for the Washington Post has published a thought-proking piece on Hugo Chávez’s 21st century socialism campaign, most recently seen in the closing of a popular Venezuelan television station that didn’t always side with the autocrat. While the world has no doubt been preoccupied with the crisis in Haiti, Latin America has indeed passed through a tipping point in the ideological conflict that had polarized the region — and according to Mr. Diehl, paralyzed U.S. diplomacy — for most of the past decade.

“The result boils down to this: Hugo Chávez’s “socialism for the 21st century” has been defeated and is on its way to collapse.”

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At this point, Hugo Chavez may redefine erratic behavior.

Russia Today is reporting that Venezuelan dictator Huge Chavez claims the recent earthquakes in Haiti were caused by the United States.

More specifically, he claims the U.S. Navy used a weapon that was powerful enough to induce earthquakes. You can watch the video below and draw your own conclusion.

The commissioner of the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, Ramtane Lamamra, said the African Union stands by its decision that the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) indictment of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir is counter-productive.

Last March, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for President Bashir for crimes against humanity in Sudan’s Western Darfur region, reports Voice of America.

Lamamra reiterated the AU’s position reached last July that the ICC indictment could hamper efforts to achieve peace and reconciliation in Sudan.

“We said very clearly that the indictment has the potential to pour fuel on fire, that the indictment could be counterproductive with respect to the efforts toward achieving peace and national reconciliation without endangering the need for justice,” he said.

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