country:mexico

Border fence meets a wall of skepticism in Tijuana, where residents say U.S.-Mexico ties transcend any physical barriers

▻http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-ln-trump-visit-border-prototypes-20180312-story.html

Nouveau tag: #effet_Tur-Tur #Tur_Tur #Tur-Tur

Vigilantes Not Welcome : A Border Town Pushes Back on Anti-Immigrant Extremists

In late August last year, 39-year-old Michael Lewis Arthur Meyer exited La Gitana bar in Arivaca, Arizona, took out his phone, and started recording a video for his Facebook page: “So down here in Arivaca, if you like to traffic in children, if you like to make sure women and children have contraceptives before handing them off to the coyotes to be dragged through the desert, knowing they’re going to get raped along the way, if you’re involved in human trafficking or dope smuggling, these individuals have your back.”

Meyer, who had a trim red beard, dark sunglasses, and a camouflage American flag hat, aimed his cellphone camera at a wooden awning on a small white bungalow across the street from La Gitana, panning between two signs with the words “Arivaca Humanitarian Aid Office” and “Oficina De Ayuda Humanitaria” in turquoise letters.

The video went on for nine and a half minutes, as Meyer, the leader of a group called Veterans on Patrol, which had more than 70,000 followers on Facebook, talked about stopping border crossers and searching abandoned mineshafts for evidence of trafficked women and children. Every couple of minutes he would return to the aid office.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_07.jpg https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_05.jpg

“If you’re ever down here in Arivaca,” he told his audience, “if you want to know who helps child traffickers, if you want to know who helps dope smugglers, if you want to know who helps ISIS, if you want to know who helps La Raza, MS-13, any of ’em, any of the bad guys, these people help ’em.”

The claims were false and outrageous. But Meyer had an audience, and people in town were well aware of how media-fueled anti-­immigrant vitriol and conspiracies could spill over into real-world violence. It had happened there before.

Arivaca sits just 11 miles north of the Mexico border in a remote area of the Sonoran Desert. For about two decades, anti-immigrant vigilante groups have patrolled the region to try to remedy what they perceive as the federal government’s failure to secure the border. In 2009, the leader of one of these groups and two accomplices murdered two residents—a little girl and her father—during a home invasion and robbery planned to fund their activities. Meyer’s video brought that trauma back and was quickly followed by a series of incidents revolving around various vigilante groups, La Gitana, and the humanitarian aid office. When I visited in mid-September, the town was clearly on edge. “If we don’t do something about [the situation], we’re going to have bodies here again,” Arivaca’s unofficial mayor, Ken Buchanan, told me.

Shortly before making his video, Meyer had been sitting in La Gitana with several volunteers from Veterans on Patrol. Megan Davern, a 30-year-old meat cutter with work-worn hands and long brown hair, was tending bar. She had heard that a rancher living along the border was having issues with a vigilante group trespassing and flying drones over his property.

“I walked into the bar at four o’clock one day to start a shift, and I saw this big group of people in fatigues with empty gun holsters and a drone on the table, and I felt it was probably them,” Davern recalled.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_09.jpg

Davern had heard the group’s name before and quickly did some internet research, reading highlights as the men drank. The group was founded to provide support to homeless veterans. Then, in May 2018, Meyer—who is not a veteran and has a criminal history—claimed he had discovered a child sex trafficking camp at an abandoned cement factory in Tucson. The camp, he said, was part of a pedophilia ring, and on his Facebook page he shared posts linking it to the Clintons, George Soros, and Mexican drug cartels.

Meyer, who showed up for rancher Cliven Bundy’s 2014 armed standoff with authorities in Nevada and was present during Bundy’s sons’ occupation of an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016, declined an interview request. But the story he was spreading mimicked right-wing conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon, and though Tucson police investigated and debunked his claims, Meyer gained tens of thousands of social-media followers. With donations of supplies and gift cards pouring in from supporters, he vowed to gather evidence and save the women and children he claimed were being victimized.

Davern watched as Meyer and the other Veterans on Patrol volunteers left La Gitana and started filming the first video. Toward the end of the video, she stepped out of the bar to confront them. “We’ve been hearing about you for a long time,” she said, as Meyer turned the camera on her. “I’d appreciate if you don’t come in anymore.”

Banning Veterans on Patrol, Davern told me, was an easy decision: “We have a strict no-militia policy at the bar because of the history of militia violence in this town.”

Arivaca is a quirky place. To start with, it’s unincorporated, which means there’s no official mayor, no town council, no police force. The 700 or so residents are an unlikely mix of miners, ranchers, aging hippies, artists, and other folks who stumbled across the odd little community, became enchanted, and decided to make it home. A single road runs through it, linking an interstate highway to the east and a state highway to the west. The next town is 30 minutes away; Tucson is 60 miles north.

There’s no official mayor, no town council, no police force…The next town is 30 minutes away.

Jagged hills covered in scraggly mesquite spread in every direction until they meet towering mountains at the distant southern horizon. The vast landscape swallows up the dividing line with Mexico, but the presence of the border looms large.

By the early 2000s, a federal policy called Prevention Through Deterrence had pushed border crossers from urban areas to more hostile terrain like the desert around Arivaca. Migrant deaths skyrocketed, and Arivaca eventually became a staging ground for volunteers caching water and food in the desert. Some settled down, and residents opened the humanitarian aid office in 2012.

The border crossers also caught the attention of vigilante groups, many of which had formed in the late ’90s in Texas and California, and which ranged from heavily armed paramilitary-type organizations to gangs of middle-aged men sitting on lawn chairs with binoculars. “They realized that ground zero was really on the Arizona border,” said Mark Pitcavage, who researches right-wing extremism at the Anti-Defamation League.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_02.jpg https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_01.jpg

One group known as the Minutemen started organizing Arizona border watches in 2005. “It was a big deal in the press,” said Heidi Beirich, a hate group expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Beirich credits the Minutemen with helping mainstream the demonization of undocumented migrants, calling the media-savvy group “probably the thing that started off what ultimately becomes Donald Trump’s anti-­immigrant politics.”

But by 2007, the organization was splintering. One spinoff, Minutemen American Defense (MAD), was led by a woman named Shawna Forde, a name that no one in Arivaca would soon forget.
“The whole town has those emotional scars.”

Just before 1 a.m. on May 30, 2009, Forde and two accomplices murdered nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her 29-year-old father, Raul, in their home. They also injured Brisenia’s mother, Gina Gonzales, before she drove them away by grabbing her husband’s gun and returning fire.

Raul Flores was rumored to be involved in the drug trade, and Forde, a woman with a long criminal history, had devised a plan to rob his home and use the money to finance MAD.

The murders shook Arivaca. “The whole town has those emotional scars,” Alan Wallen, whose daughter was friends with Brisenia, told me.

The day that Meyer filmed that first Facebook video in Arivaca, Terry Sayles, 69, a retired schoolteacher with a long-standing research interest in far-right groups, was at his home in Green Valley, some 45 minutes away. Sayles had been following Veterans on Patrol since the cement plant conspiracy theory first surfaced. When he saw Meyer’s video outside La Gitana, he called the bar with a warning. “You guys know that you’re on Facebook?” he asked.

“Oh, great,” Davern remembered thinking. Until then, she hadn’t realized Meyer’s video was online. “I didn’t know what the ramifications would be. Were people going to come into my work and harass me? Threaten me with violence? Were they going to find out where I live?”

Around the time of Davern’s confrontation outside the bar, La Gitana put up a sign saying that members of border vigilante groups were not welcome inside. It didn’t mention Veterans on Patrol but instead singled out another group: Arizona Border Recon (AZBR).

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_04.jpg

Tim Foley, the leader of AZBR, had moved to Arivaca in the summer of 2017. Before starting the group in 2011, Foley, who has piercing blue eyes and leathery skin from long hours in the sun, worked construction jobs in Phoenix until 2008, when the financial crisis hit. “Everything fell apart,” he told me over the phone.

Foley said that after years of seeing immigration violations on work sites go unpunished, he went down to the border and decided to dedicate himself to stopping undocumented crossers. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers AZBR a nativist extremist group, but Foley now says his main mission is gathering intelligence on Mexican drug cartels.

Just before I visited Arivaca, Foley was in Washington, DC, speaking at “The Negative Impact of Illegal Alien Crime in America,” a rally hosted by families of people killed by undocumented immigrants. Other speakers included former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who is also a Trump pardon recipient; presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway; and Rep. Steve King, a Republican from Iowa with a history of racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric.

A few days after Meyer filmed his video, a BearCat armored vehicle—the kind used by SWAT teams—came rolling into Arivaca. It had a mock .50-caliber machine gun affixed to a turret on its roof and belonged to the Utah Gun Exchange, a marketplace and media company based near Salt Lake City with a mission to build what one of its co-owners, 46-year-old Bryan Melchior, described as “web platforms that allow free speech and that promote and protect the Second Amendment.”

Before coming to Arivaca, the group had followed survivors of the Parkland high school shooting around the country during the teens’ “March for Our Lives” tour. But after President Trump threatened to shut down the government over funding for his border wall, Melchior shifted his attention. “Ultimately, we came here to tell stories from the border, and that’s what brought us to Arivaca, because there are some outspoken public figures here. Tim Foley is one of them,” Melchior told me.

Melchior, stocky with a scruffy salt-and-pepper beard and an ever-present sidearm, and his crew decided to get dinner at La Gitana. Davern was tending bar and asked the group what they were up to. When Melchior said they were a media company in town to tell border stories and that they were in touch with Foley, “the whole thing went to hell in a handbag,” he recalled.

Davern said she left their initial conversation feeling optimistic that the Utah Gun Exchange’s platform could be a good avenue to reach a different audience with information about what life was actually like at the border. But when she found out it had a channel called BuildTheWallTV, she changed her mind.

Melchior was down by the border when somebody sent him a picture of a new sign in La Gitana’s window listing the Utah Gun Exchange and Veterans on Patrol as groups that were not welcome. He later went into La Gitana with an open container of alcohol from a store across the street to ask about the sign. The interaction did not go well.

The next day, Meyer came back to town ready to film again. Playing to an audience watching in real time on Facebook Live, he walked up to La Gitana, showed the signs hanging in the window, and knocked. “Do you stand by your convictions to tell tens of thousands of supporters [that they’re not welcome]?” he asked the bartender working that day.

“Sure. Absolutely,” she replied.

Meyer went on to say that Veterans on Patrol was going to build a wall around Arivaca to make it part of Mexico. He then walked across the street to again film the humanitarian office: “This town’s made it apparent they don’t want us. They’d rather have the illegals crossing over. They’d rather help traffic the children and the women.”

To many Arivaca residents, it felt like things were building toward cataclysm. “People are terrified,” Davern told me. “These people come to town and they’re threatening. Extremely threatening.”
To many Arivaca residents, it felt like things were building toward cataclysm.

So they called a town meeting. It was held on September 9, and about 60 people came. Terry Sayles, the retired teacher from Green Valley, was there. He suggested that the town report Veterans on Patrol’s page to Facebook. The residents set up a phone tree in case they needed to quickly rally aid—local law enforcement is at least an hour away. Kelly and a couple of others formed a neighborhood watch of sorts. “We had a strategy that we had rehearsed so that if in fact there was some attempt by somebody to do harm, we could de-escalate it in a hurry and quietly defuse it,” he said.Arivacans weren’t so much concerned about Foley, Meyer, or Melchior, but about their followers, who might see their inflammatory videos and posts about Arivaca and take matters into their own hands. “Our greatest fear was some person incensed at the thought of this community engaged in sex traffic would come out here and have a shootout at our local tavern,” Dan Kelly, a Vietnam War veteran who lives in Arivaca, told me.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/20190408_arivaca_03.jpg

One of the most important things, though, was channeling the spiraling fear into a productive reaction. “We worked hard to separate the emotional response to it and try to look at it logically and coldly,” Kelly said. “The visceral side, the emotional side, was the impetus to get organized and take a rational response.”

Their containment approach worked. A couple of days after the meeting, Veterans on Patrol’s main Facebook account was taken down, stripping Meyer of his audience. The Utah Gun Exchange eventually packed up and left. Many people had refused to talk to the outlet. “Arivaca is the most unwelcoming town I’ve ever been to in my life,” Melchior complained to me.

In January, Melchior was charged in Utah with felony drug and weapons possession. Meyer also faces legal trouble, some of it stemming from videos he took of himself trespassing on private property around Tucson. He currently has several cases pending in the Pima County court system.

“There’s been significantly less obvious militia activity in Arivaca, which I contribute to a victory on our part,” Davern told me during a recent phone call. “There’s a lot less fear going around, which is great.” Town meetings continued for a while but have stopped for now. But to Davern, as long as Tim Foley is still in town, the issue isn’t resolved. “That person needs to leave,” she said, describing him as a magnet for conflict. High Country News detailed an incident in early March when locals eager to keep the peace dissuaded a group of reportedly self-described anarchists who had come to town to confront him.

Foley knows what Davern and others in Arivaca think about him but insists there’s a silent majority in town that supports his presence. “They can keep calling me the bad guy. I already know I’m not, or else I still wouldn’t be walking the streets,” he told me. “I’m not moving. I’m staying in Arivaca. They can keep crying for the rest of their lives. I really don’t care.”

Even at the height of their fear, a question hovered over the town’s residents: Were they overreacting?

It’s a question more people across the country confront as they wake up to the reality of right-wing extremism and violence. When I was in Arivaca, the answer was clear to Clara Godfrey, whose nephew Albert Gaxiola was Shawna Forde’s accomplice in the Flores murders. He and Forde had met at La Gitana. “We can never say, ‘We didn’t know,’ again,” Godfrey told me. “If anything happens, we have to say, ‘We knew, and it was okay with us.’”

▻https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/immigrant-vigilantes-arizona-border-arivaca

Commentaire de Reece_Jones sur twitter :

A truism of borders: the people who live there hate the way people in the interior politicize and militarize their homes.

▻https://twitter.com/reecejhawaii/status/1116404990711492608
... ce qui me fait penser au fameux effet Tur_Tur !

JR a installé une de ses œuvres à la frontière mexicaine, pile à temps pour dénoncer la suppression du DACA
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=83&v=IHF8wKSVYEQ

Je sais pas si ca aura de l’impacte mais bravo à cette famille mexicaine, à Kikito et à JR pour la cause qu’illes défendent.

#étudiants #disparition #Mexique #AYOTZINAPA

v. aussi : ▻http://seen.li/7a0s

Incomplete smuggling tunnel found in #Nogales by Border Patrol, Mexican police

Border Patrol agents and Mexico’s Federal Police discovered an incomplete cross-border tunnel in Nogales Wednesday afternoon, authorities said.

The incomplete tunnel was found inside a cross-border storm drain that runs into the United States from Mexico, about 75 yards west of the Dennis DeConcini border crossing in downtown Nogales, said a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector.

The tunnel did not open to the U.S., but rested more than a dozen feet below a parking lot in Nogales, Ariz. Officials said the tunnel was about 17 feet long, and extended about 12 feet into the U.S., beneath the border fence that remains topped with razor wire installed by National Guard troops last fall.

The tunnel was discovered during a “cooperative bi-national tunnel sweep,” by agents “trained in illicit tunnel detection,” with Mexico’s Federal Police, as well as agents with the Border Patrol’s International Liaison Unit.

U.S. Border Patrol agents and Mexican police explored the tunnel and found “various digging and cutting tools,” the spokesman said. No one has arrested in connection with the discovery at this time, he said.

Authorities in Mexico and the United States will monitor and inspect the incomplete tunnel until it is secured and remediated, which usually involves sealing the tunnel with concrete.

In March, a traffic lane at the DeConcini port was closed after a remediated tunnel collapsed, causing a minor disruption to traffic at the port.

Last December, Border Patrol agents conducting a similar sweep found an incomplete 50-foot tunnel that extended about 44 feet into the United States just beneath the port’s parking lot.

Overall, Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector alone have found 119 tunnels, many of them in the Nogales area.

http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=/files/entryimages/053119_tunnel_nogales_cbp.jpeg&w=295&f=jpg&aoe=1&q=100#.jpg

Et ce chiffre:

Overall, Border Patrol agents in the Tucson Sector alone have found 119 tunnels, many of them in the Nogales area.

v. aussi :

▻https://seenthis.net/messages/190972

Fatal Journeys Volume 3 Part 1: Improving Data on Missing Migrants

Since 2014, more than 22,500 migrant deaths and disappearances have been recorded by the International Organization for Migration globally. The real figure could be much higher, but many deaths are never recorded. Fatal Journeys Volume 3 – Part 1 provides a global review of existing data sources, and illustrates the need for improvements in the ways that data on missing migrants are collected, analysed and communicated.

The report highlights three key ways in which to improve the collection, sharing and reporting of data on missing migrants. First, a growing number of innovative sources of data on missing migrants, such as “big data”, could be used to improve data on migrant fatalities. Second, much more could be done to gather data to increase identification rates, such as developing intraregional mechanisms to share data more effectively. Third, improving data on missing migrants also requires more thought and improved practice in the use and communication of such data. Improving information and reporting on who these missing migrants are, where they come from, and above all, when they are most at risk, is crucial to building a holistic response to reduce the number of migrant deaths.

https://publications.iom.int/sites/default/files/books/fatal_journeys_volume_3_part_1_0.jpg https://i.imgur.com/hRzxP6m.png https://i.imgur.com/meKzIfo.png

►https://publications.iom.int/books/fatal-journeys-volume-3-part-1-improving-data-missing-migrants
#données #rapport #médias #journalisme #presse #couverture_médiatique #identification #corps #ceux_qui_restent #fatal_journeys #celleux_qui_restent

Nouveau rapport de l’OIM « Fatal journeys » (publié en 2017)
Fatal Journeys Volume 3 PART 2

https://i.imgur.com/1ezg6Bn.png https://i.imgur.com/ku5UbaM.png https://i.imgur.com/c8QDzex.png https://i.imgur.com/TZTilQi.png https://i.imgur.com/IljLuAu.png https://i.imgur.com/l9nedVQ.png https://i.imgur.com/ZPTp6vz.png https://i.imgur.com/l3Uqck7.png https://i.imgur.com/fbSvE7H.png https://i.imgur.com/nX35Qtz.png

▻https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/fatal_journeys_3_part2.pdf
#cartographie #visualisation

New murals of Trump appear on wall between Bethlehem, Jerusalem

Aug. 9 (UPI) — Two murals depicting President Donald Trump have appeared on the wall that separates the Palestinian West Bank town of Bethlehem from Jerusalem.

https://cdnph.upi.com/svc/sv/upi/7531502291108/2017/1/a75a54654fa157d1d63760fe4ffcd95d/New-murals-of-Trump-appear-on-wall-between-Bethlehem-Jerusalem.jpg

Trump and #Netanyahu share a kiss on West Bank wall mural

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Another Donald Trump mural believed to be the work of Australian graffiti artist Lushsux has popped up on Israel’s barrier in the occupied West Bank, this time depicting the U.S. president sharing a kiss with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

https://i.imgur.com/VDUm6LR.png

#fentanyl #drogues #épidémie #santé #Chine #Mexique #décès

Un iceberg géant se détache de l’Antarctique
12 juillet 2017
▻https://reporterre.net/Un-iceberg-geant-se-detache-de-l-Antarctique

https://reporterre.net/local/cache-vignettes/L720xH402/arton12747-cf72f.png?1499883981

j’ai lu « 60 fois la taille de Paris » et « deux fois la surface du Luxembourg », mais cette comparaison-là est encore plus débile :)

images et cartes chez nzz.ch, explications en de

▻https://www.nzz.ch/wissenschaft/bildstrecke/antarktis-larsen-c-ld.154035#lg=1&slide=1

https://img.nzz.ch/S=W1960/O=75/http://nzz-img.s3.amazonaws.com/2017/7/12/963e2d4b-878a-4e8c-9618-0596b7c0c2a6.png

Two Luxembourgs, 10 Madrids, one Delaware: How a giant iceberg in Antarctica is described around the world — Quartz
▻https://qz.com/1027701/two-luxembourgs-10-madrids-one-delaware-how-a-giant-iceberg-in-antarctica-is-des

Here’s a tour of the world, by way of iceberg-sized places:
In Argentina the iceberg was 25 times the size of Buenos Aires
In Australia it was twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory
In Belgium it was half the size of Flanders
In Brazil it was the size of the Federal District
In Canada it was the size of Prince Edward Island
In Chile it was the size of Cordillera Province
In Cyprus it was equivalent to two Luxembourgs
In Denmark it was the size of Funen
In Finland it was twice the size of Gotland
In France it was 60 times larger than Paris
In Germany it was twice as big as Saarland
In Greece it was the size of Crete
In India it was one-and-a-half times the size of Goa
In Indonesia it was almost as large as the island of Bali
In Italy it was the size of the Liguria region
In Japan it was the size of Mie prefecture
In Mexico it was 55 times the size of Paris
In the Netherlands it was slightly larger than the province of Gelderland
In Norway it was the size of Akershus county
In Poland it was one-third the size of Malopolska Province
In Russia it was quarter the size of the Moscow region
In South Korea it was half the size of Gyeonggi Province
In Spain it was the size of 10 Madrids
In Taiwan it was one-sixth of Taiwan
In Turkey it was four times the size of Istanbul
In the UK it was a quarter the size of Wales
In Ukraine it was half the size of the Transcarpathian region
And in the US it was definitely a Delaware

So groß ist der Eisberg im Vergleich zu Ihrer Stadt
▻https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/eisberg-groessenvergleich

https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/eisberg-groessenvergleich/images/thumb1.jpg

These Images Show Just How Big the Larsen C Iceberg Is | Climate Central
▻http://www.climatecentral.org/news/images-larsen-c-iceberg-size-21612

http://assets.climatecentral.org/images/made/7_12_17_Brian_LarsenCChicagomtrainier_og_600_315_s_c1_c_c.jpg

#Iceberg_A68 désormais

Drifting Antarctic iceberg A-68 opens up clear water - BBC News
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40635883

https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/cpsprodpb/1460B/production/_96976438_f3b71203-d4b9-478e-ae80-4e936ecfd6f7.png

The giant iceberg known as A-68 that was produced in the Antarctic last week continues to drift seaward.

All the latest satellite images indicate the gap between the 6,000-sq-km block and the floating Larsen C Ice Shelf from which it calved is widening.

The particular image on this page was acquired by the Deimos-1 satellite.

It is not easy getting pictures of the Antarctic at this time of year because of the long winter nights and because of cloud cover.

#BI2 #iris #contrôles_frontaliers #technologie #USA #Etats-Unis

Wouaw ! Merci pour la découverte ! C’est drôle parce que très rapidement ça m’a fait penser à l’album / documentaire « Hecho en Mexico » et à ce moment là je vois apparaitre Residente, ex Caille 13 que j’avais aussi beaucoup entendu au Mexique et à qui on doit le magnifique morceau « Latinoamérica » (featuring Totó la Momposina, Susana Baca and Maria Rita)...

#Calle_13 (con Totó la Momposina, Susana Baca, Maria Rita y Gustavo Santaolalla): Latinoamérica (Entren los que quieran, 2010)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkFJE8ZdeG8

Hecho en México Soundtrack (2012)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCCuZ7YXaWY

00:00:00 Tiempo e híbridos / Un rezo universal (Rubén Albarrán, Jose Bautista, Antonio Carrillo)
00:04:51 ¿Qué es ahora? (Mono Blanco, Carla Morrison, Mü, Sergio Arau, Luis Rey Moreno Gil)
00:09:31 México 2000 (Rojo Córdova, Cuarteto Latinoamericano)
00:12:00 Yo libre porque pienso (Residente Calle 13, Randy «El Gringo Loco» Ebright, Tito Fuentes, Paco Ayala)
00:15:37 El caminante del Mayab (Los Tres Yucatecos)
00:18:15 En mi vida secreta (Adanowsky)
00:22:13 El mexicano del sur (Ariel Guzik, Humberto Alvarez, Fernando Guadarrama, Eduardo Farrés)
00:25:01 Fronteras / We got the fucking love / Los Ilegales / Tan Lejos de Dios (Ali Gua Gua, Pato Machete, Los Tucanes De Tijuana, El Haragán, Emmanuel del Real)
00:32:36 El muy muy (Amandititita, Don Cheto, Los Macuanos)
00:37:17 Sembrar flores (Los Cojolites)
00:41:28 ¿Quién lleva los pantalones? (El Venado Azul, Banda Agua Caliente, Gloria Trevi, Instituto Mexicano Del Sonido)
00:48:09 Medley / Obsesión / La última noche (Las Maya Internacional)
00:50:39 Me gusta mi medicina (Original Banda El Limon De Salvador Lizarraga, Amandititita, Kinky, Mü, Juan Cirerol)
00:56:30 El mensajero (Carla Morrison, León Larregui)
01:01:08 Mis propios ojos (Alberto Paz, Multi Culti, Los Macuanos, Noicaruk)
01:03:40 Antes y después de la vida (Julieta Venegas)
01:08:06 Canción de las simples cosas (Chavela Vargas)
01:09:40 Cuándo llegaré / Mustak (Natalia Lafourcade, Emmanuel del Real, Yajvalel Vinajel, Slajem K’op)
01:14:14 Bajo una ceiba (Alejandro Fernández)
01:19:06 ¿Quién soy? (Sonidero Meztizo, María Moctezuma, Marlene Cruz Ramírez «Mare»)
01:24:39 Nana Guadalupe (Lila Downs, Lupe Esparza, Natalia Lafourcade)
01:30:44 Bolom Chon (Yajvalel Vinajel)
01:34:09 ¿A qué le tiras cuando sueñas, mexicano? (Lupe Esparza, Original Banda El Limon De Salvador Lizarraga, El Venado Azul)

A mettre sur la compilation de chansons contre #Donald_Trump
►https://seenthis.net/messages/727919

@najort

merci :)
#scientific_publishing

Un peu de réaction:

Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts
Diana Kwon, The Scientist, July 17, 2017
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/615916

#résistance #Elsevier #université #Allemagne #éditions_scientifiques #publications_scientifiques

#Robert_Maxwell #Reed-Elsevier #Elsevier #multinationales #business #Pergamon

With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

#profit

In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Many scientists also believe that the publishing industry exerts too much influence over what scientists choose to study, which is ultimately bad for science itself. Journals prize new and spectacular results – after all, they are in the business of selling subscriptions – and scientists, knowing exactly what kind of work gets published, align their submissions accordingly. This produces a steady stream of papers, the importance of which is immediately apparent. But it also means that scientists do not have an accurate map of their field of inquiry. Researchers may end up inadvertently exploring dead ends that their fellow scientists have already run up against, solely because the information about previous failures has never been given space in the pages of the relevant scientific publications

It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals. The long, slow, nearly directionless work pursued by some of the most influential scientists of the 20th century is no longer a viable career option. Under today’s system, the father of genetic sequencing, Fred Sanger, who published very little in the two decades between his 1958 and 1980 Nobel prizes, may well have found himself out of a job.

Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.

Scientific articles are about unique discoveries: one article cannot substitute for another. If a serious new journal appeared, scientists would simply request that their university library subscribe to that one as well. If Maxwell was creating three times as many journals as his competition, he would make three times more money.

“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. #Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology. It was edited by a young biologist named #Ben_Lewin, who approached his work with an intense, almost literary bent. Lewin prized long, rigorous papers that answered big questions – often representing years of research that would have yielded multiple papers in other venues – and, breaking with the idea that journals were passive instruments to communicate science, he rejected far more papers than he published.

Suddenly, where you published became immensely important. Other editors took a similarly activist approach in the hopes of replicating Cell’s success. Publishers also adopted a metric called “#impact_factor,” invented in the 1960s by #Eugene_Garfield, a librarian and linguist, as a rough calculation of how often papers in a given journal are cited in other papers. For publishers, it became a way to rank and advertise the scientific reach of their products. The new-look journals, with their emphasis on big results, shot to the top of these new rankings, and scientists who published in “high-impact” journals were rewarded with jobs and funding. Almost overnight, a new currency of prestige had been created in the scientific world. (Garfield later referred to his creation as “like nuclear energy … a mixed blessing”.)

And so science became a strange co-production between scientists and journal editors, with the former increasingly pursuing discoveries that would impress the latter. These days, given a choice of projects, a scientist will almost always reject both the prosaic work of confirming or disproving past studies, and the decades-long pursuit of a risky “moonshot”, in favour of a middle ground: a topic that is popular with editors and likely to yield regular publications. “Academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands,” said the biologist and Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner in a 2014 interview, calling the system “corrupt.”

As Maxwell had predicted, competition didn’t drive down prices. Between 1975 and 1985, the average price of a journal doubled. The New York Times reported that in 1984 it cost $2,500 to subscribe to the journal Brain Research; in 1988, it cost more than $5,000. That same year, Harvard Library overran its research journal budget by half a million dollars.

Scientists occasionally questioned the fairness of this hugely profitable business to which they supplied their work for free, but it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created. The librarians used university funds to buy journals on behalf of scientists. Maxwell was well aware of this. “Scientists are not as price-conscious as other professionals, mainly because they are not spending their own money,” he told his publication Global Business in a 1988 interview. And since there was no way to swap one journal for another, cheaper one, the result was, Maxwell continued, “a perpetual financing machine”. Librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies. There were now more than a million scientific articles being published a year, and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.

With the purchase of Pergamon’s 400-strong catalogue, Elsevier now controlled more than 1,000 scientific journals, making it by far the largest scientific publisher in the world.

At the time of the merger, Charkin, the former Macmillan CEO, recalls advising Pierre Vinken, the CEO of Elsevier, that Pergamon was a mature business, and that Elsevier had overpaid for it. But Vinken had no doubts, Charkin recalled: “He said, ‘You have no idea how profitable these journals are once you stop doing anything. When you’re building a journal, you spend time getting good editorial boards, you treat them well, you give them dinners. Then you market the thing and your salespeople go out there to sell subscriptions, which is slow and tough, and you try to make the journal as good as possible. That’s what happened at Pergamon. And then we buy it and we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out and you wouldn’t believe how wonderful it is.’ He was right and I was wrong.”

By 1994, three years after acquiring Pergamon, Elsevier had raised its prices by 50%. Universities complained that their budgets were stretched to breaking point – the US-based Publishers Weekly reported librarians referring to a “doomsday machine” in their industry – and, for the first time, they began cancelling subscriptions to less popular journals.

In 1998, Elsevier rolled out its plan for the internet age, which would come to be called “The Big Deal”. It offered electronic access to bundles of hundreds of journals at a time: a university would pay a set fee each year – according to a report based on freedom of information requests, Cornell University’s 2009 tab was just short of $2m – and any student or professor could download any journal they wanted through Elsevier’s website. Universities signed up en masse.

Those predicting Elsevier’s downfall had assumed scientists experimenting with sharing their work for free online could slowly outcompete Elsevier’s titles by replacing them one at a time. In response, Elsevier created a switch that fused Maxwell’s thousands of tiny monopolies into one so large that, like a basic resource – say water, or power – it was impossible for universities to do without. Pay, and the scientific lights stayed on, but refuse, and up to a quarter of the scientific literature would go dark at any one institution. It concentrated immense power in the hands of the largest publishers, and Elsevier’s profits began another steep rise that would lead them into the billions by the 2010s. In 2015, a Financial Times article anointed Elsevier “the business the internet could not kill”.

Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)

Elsevier says its primary goal is to facilitate the work of scientists and other researchers. An Elsevier rep noted that the company received 1.5m article submissions last year, and published 420,000; 14 million scientists entrust Elsevier to publish their results, and 800,000 scientists donate their time to help them with editing and peer-review.

In a sense, it is not any one publisher’s fault that the scientific world seems to bend to the industry’s gravitational pull. When governments including those of China and Mexico offer financial bonuses for publishing in high-impact journals, they are not responding to a demand by any specific publisher, but following the rewards of an enormously complex system that has to accommodate the utopian ideals of science with the commercial goals of the publishers that dominate it. (“We scientists have not given a lot of thought to the water we’re swimming in,” Neal Young told me.)

Since the early 2000s, scientists have championed an alternative to subscription publishing called “open access”. This solves the difficulty of balancing scientific and commercial imperatives by simply removing the commercial element. In practice, this usually takes the form of online journals, to which scientists pay an upfront free to cover editing costs, which then ensure the work is available free to access for anyone in perpetuity. But despite the backing of some of the biggest funding agencies in the world, including the Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, only about a quarter of scientific papers are made freely available at the time of their publication.

The idea that scientific research should be freely available for anyone to use is a sharp departure, even a threat, to the current system – which relies on publishers’ ability to restrict access to the scientific literature in order to maintain its immense profitability. In recent years, the most radical opposition to the status quo has coalesced around a controversial website called Sci-Hub – a sort of Napster for science that allows anyone to download scientific papers for free. Its creator, Alexandra Elbakyan, a Kazhakstani, is in hiding, facing charges of hacking and copyright infringement in the US. Elsevier recently obtained a $15m injunction (the maximum allowable amount) against her.

Elbakyan is an unabashed utopian. “Science should belong to scientists and not the publishers,” she told me in an email. In a letter to the court, she cited Article 27 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserting the right “to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.

Whatever the fate of Sci-Hub, it seems that frustration with the current system is growing. But history shows that betting against science publishers is a risky move. After all, back in 1988, Maxwell predicted that in the future there would only be a handful of immensely powerful publishing companies left, and that they would ply their trade in an electronic age with no printing costs, leading to almost “pure profit”. That sounds a lot like the world we live in now.

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►https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
#Butterworths #Springer #Paul_Rosbaud #histoire #Genève #Pergamon #Oxford_United #Derby_County_FC #monopole #open_access #Sci-Hub #Alexandra_Elbakyan

Publish and be praised (article de 2003)

It should be a public scandal that the results of publicly-funded scientific research are not available to members of the public who are interested in, or could benefit from, such access. Furthermore, many commercial publishers have exploited the effective monopoly they are given on the distribution rights to individual works and charge absurdly high rates for some of their titles, forcing libraries with limited budgets to cancel journal subscriptions and deny their researchers access to potentially critical information. The system is obsolete and broken and needs to change.

▻https://www.theguardian.com/education/2003/oct/09/research.highereducation

Sur Robert Maxwell...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Robert_Maxwell_1989.jpg/520px-Robert_Maxwell_1989.jpg

A Flawed Asylum System in Mexico, Strained Further by U.S. Changes

MEXICO CITY — As the Trump administration pushes forward with its plans to harden the southwest border, Mexico has found itself under pressure to take in an increasing number of asylum seekers making their way north from Central America, many of them fleeing gang violence.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/world/americas/mexico-central-america-migrants-refugees-asylum-comar.html?_r=0

#murs #frontières #barrières_frontalières #USA #prototype #projet

Arizona company building Trump border-wall prototype has checkered environmental record

On Aug. 31, 2017, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced winning construction contracts for President Trump’s proposed wall between the United States and Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection

▻http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/border-issues/2017/09/17/fisher-sand-gravel-building-border-wall-prototype-checkered-environmental-record/643189001
#prototype

As border wall prototype construction starts, Arizona geographer speaks up

PHOENIX – Leaving behind violence and poverty, a Central American family travels thousands of miles by foot, train, and bus. Once they finally arrive at the U.S. border, they have one more difficult decision to make: carry a bag full of marijuana and cross the desert with some help, or risk their life and cross alone.

▻https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2017/09/28/border-lecture

Trump said he’ll pick a border wall design himself. Turns out, he can.

Experts on government contracting said Tuesday that as head of the executive branch, the president has the authority to direct an agency to award a contract to a particular bidder, though they strongly advise against it.

▻https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2017/09/26/trump-said-pick-border-wall-design-turns-can

’Another brick in the wall’: 8 prototypes of Trump’s US-Mexico border wall are put on display in San Diego - as seen from Tijuana

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Eight Ways to Build a Border Wall

SAN DIEGO — They all stand neatly in a row: eight large panels on a barren dirt patch just a few hundred yards from the San Diego border with Mexico. Unveiled in late October, these are the prototypes for the border wall President Trump has vowed to erect on the southern border. Later this year, the federal government will test the panels for strength and effectiveness.

https://i.imgur.com/9ggbjqT.png

Trump’s border wall through the eyes of an architecture critic

As for their looks? This was the most surprising thing of all. When I first caught sight of them from the SUV, I worried about making even basic distinctions among them. They looked virtually identical. But as I spent more time in this odd open-air architecture gallery, it became clear that the aesthetic spectrum the prototypes covered was very wide.

The one furthest east, by #Fisher_Sand_&_Gravel, was the idea of a wall stripped to its essence, suggesting a kind of accidental minimalism, a section of a Peter Zumthor facade after a trip through the federal bureaucracy. Made of three panels that matched almost perfectly the color of the dirt at its feet, it was the simplest of the group and also — at $365,000 — among the least expensive to produce.

A very different sensibility was evident in the slab designed by #ELTA. Its bottom half was concrete, its upper half metal. The concrete section (though only on the side facing the U.S., per the official guidelines) was painted white and blue, as if it were covering a split-level ranch house outside Phoenix.

Also in this decorative vein was the concrete wall by #Texas_Sterling_Construction, which featured a white faux-brick pattern stamped into its American side. The argument these two walls made was pragmatism à la HGTV: that any piece of construction could be humanized, even made cheerful, with some measured, cost-effective ornament.

What the prototypes didn’t resemble, in any practical sense, was a wall. (A swatch of fabric is not a shirt; a lone panel from an umbrella won’t keep you dry when it rains.) It wasn’t just that they suggested Potemkin slices, architectural stand-ins to match the human ones Trump’s campaign invited to the news conference kicking off his White House bid.

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Is Donald Trump, Wall-Builder-in-Chief, a Conceptual Artist?

That’s the intriguing possibility put forth in an online petition Tuesday that seeks to have the group of eight prototypes for Mr. Trump’s controversial Mexican border wall designated a national monument.

▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/arts/design/is-donald-trump-wall-builder-in-chief-a-conceptual-artist.html

Should Donald Trump’s border wall prototypes be considered #art?

Swiss-Icelandic artist #Christoph_Büchel claims that the significant cultural value of the president’s structures should be recognized – not everyone agrees

▻https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/12/should-donald-trumps-border-wall-prototypes-be-considered-art

Art Industry News: Artists Condemn Christoph Büchel’s Trump Border Wall Project + More Must-Read Stories

Plus, a new survey seeks to promote salary transparency in the art world and a business tycoon renames his Picasso painting.

▻https://news.artnet.com/art-world/art-industry-news-february-7-2018-1217951

Venezuelan asylum seekers in Mexico surge as crisis deepens

During just the first six months of this year, 1,420 Venezuelans have sought asylum in Mexico, a nearly four-fold jump compared to the 361 total Venezuelan asylum applicants for all of 2016.

▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-venezuela-migration-idUSKBN1AL0QC

America Latina: dichiarazione regionale sulla situazione della popolazione migrante venezuelana

In America Latina, il flusso migratorio di persone di nazionalità venezuelana si è diretto finora principalmente verso Colombia, Ecuador, Perù, Cile, Argentina, Messico, Repubblica Dominicana e Costa Rica.

▻http://it.jrs.net/news_dettaglio?TN=NEWS-20170828033245

How Latin America Is Responding to Venezuelan Refugees

Following Latin American traditions of solidarity, Peru and Brazil have taken in many Venezuelans fleeing their country. Yet government responses have critical gaps, which could leave many more unprotected if Venezuela’s crisis escalates, say three regional experts.

▻https://www.newsdeeply.com/refugees/community/2017/11/28/how-latin-america-is-responding-to-venezuelan-refugees

Porous Colombia’s Futile Deportations of Venezuelans

With crisis-stricken Venezuela spilling refugees into Colombia and Brazil, politically expedient deportations make the situation worse. Aid groups are calling for international help.

https://newsdeeply.imgix.net/20180228125005/AFP_ZD2BC.jpg?w=640&fit=max&q=60&dpr=2#.jpg

Brazil declares emergency over Venezuelan migrant influx

The UN says it has seen an increase in the number of Venezuelans leaving their country over the past two weeks to escape the severe economic crisis.

▻https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/03/brazil-declares-emergency-venezuelan-migrant-influx-180301130154099.html

Guidance Note on the Outflow of Venezuelans

▻http://www.refworld.org/country,,,,VEN,,5a9ff3cc4,0.html

The crisis next door. Mass exodus of desperate Venezuelans is overwhelming neighboring countries

Thousands of Venezuelans are pouring out of their crippled nation in one of the biggest migration crises in Latin American history, causing growing alarm in the region and prompting neighboring countries to rush thousands of soldiers to the border.

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Colombie : violence et afflux de réfugiés vénézuéliens préoccupent l’UE

La Colombie est confrontée à deux « situations humanitaires », en raison de l’afflux de réfugiés fuyant « la crise au Venezuela » et d’"un nouveau cycle de violence" de divers groupes armés, a dénoncé le commissaire européen Christos Stylianides.

▻https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/colombie-violence-et-afflux-de-refugies-venezueliens-preoccup
#Colombie

As Colombia tightens its border, more Venezuelan migrants brave clandestine routes

Stricter entry regulations have decreased official crossings by 30 percent, but the real number entering is now harder to gauge

▻https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/03/13/colombia-tightens-its-border-more-venezuelan-migrants-brave-clandestine-ro
#fermeture_des_frontières

Half a million and counting: Venezuelan exodus puts new strains on Colombian border town

The sun is burning at the Colombian border town of Cúcuta. Red Cross workers attend to people with dehydration and fatigue as hundreds of Venezuelans line up to have their passports stamped, covering their heads with clothing and cardboard to fashion what shade they can.

▻https://www.irinnews.org/feature/2018/03/07/half-million-and-counting-venezuelan-exodus-puts-new-strains-colombian-bor

Venezuelans flee to Colombia to escape economic meltdown

The Simon Bolivar bridge has become symbolic of the mass exodus of migrants from Venezuela. The crossing is also just one piece in the complex puzzle facing Colombia, as it struggles to absorb the increasing number of migrants prompted by its neighbour’s economic and social meltdown.

Up to 45,000 migrants cross on foot from Venezuela to Cúcuta every day. The Colombian city has become the last hope for many fleeing Venezuela’s crumbling economy. Already four million people, out of a population of 30 million, have fled Venezuela due to chronic shortages of food and medicine.

▻http://www.euronews.com/2018/03/26/colombia-s-venezuelan-migrant-influx

v. aussi : ▻http://seen.li/ekzd

Venezolanos en Colombia: una situación que se sale de las manos

La crisis venezolana se transformó en un éxodo masivo sin precedentes, con un impacto hemisférico que apenas comienza. Brasil y Colombia, donde recae el mayor impacto, afrontan un año electoral en medio de la polarización política, que distrae la necesidad de enfrentarla con una visión conjunta, estratégica e integral.

http://pacifista.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/FronteraCucuta.jpg

via @stesummi

Desespero venezolano llega a la frontera de Colombia con Ecuador

Miles de venezolanos permanecen en el puente de Rumichaca en una situación de inhumanidad que debería avergonzar a los dos países. Ricardo Angoso estuvo allí

▻https://www.las2orillas.co/caos-tragedia-y-exodo-en-la-frontera-con-ecuador
#Equateur

Hungry, sick and increasingly desperate, thousands of Venezuelans are pouring into Colombia

For evidence that the Venezuelan migrant crisis is overwhelming this Colombian border city, look no further than its largest hospital.

The emergency room designed to serve 75 patients is likely to be crammed with 125 or more. Typically, two-thirds are impoverished Venezuelans with broken bones, infections, trauma injuries — and no insurance and little cash.

“I’m here for medicine I take every three months or I die,” said Cesar Andrade, a 51-year-old retired army sergeant from Caracas. He had come to Cucuta’s Erasmo Meoz University Hospital for anti-malaria medication he can’t get in Venezuela. “I’m starting a new life in Colombia. The crisis back home has forced me to do it.”

The huge increase in Venezuelan migrants fleeing their country’s economic crisis, failing healthcare system and repressive government is affecting the Cucuta metropolitan area more than any other in Colombia. It’s where 80% of all exiting Venezuelans headed for Colombia enter as foreigners.

Despite turning away Venezuelans with cancer or chronic diseases, the hospital treated 1,200 migrant emergency patients last month, up from the handful of patients, mostly traffic collision victims, in March 2015, before the Venezuelan exodus started gathering steam.

The hospital’s red ink is rising along with its caseload. The facility has run up debts of $5 million over the last three years to accommodate Venezuelans because the Colombian government is unable to reimburse it, said Juan Agustin Ramirez, director of the 500-bed hospital.

“The government has ordered us to attend to Venezuelan patients but is not giving us the resources to pay for them,” Ramirez said. “The truth is, we feel abandoned. The moment could arrive when we will collapse.”

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An average of 35,000 people cross the Simon Bolivar International Bridge linking the two countries every day. About half return to the Venezuelan side after making purchases, conducting business or visiting family. But the rest stay in Cucuta at least temporarily or move on to the Colombian interior or other countries.

For many Venezuelans, the first stop after crossing is the Divine Providence Cafeteria, an open-air soup kitchen a stone’s throw from the bridge. A Roman Catholic priest, Father Leonardo Mendoza, and volunteer staff serve some 1,500 meals daily. But it’s not enough.

One recent day, lines stretched halfway around the block with Venezuelans, desperation and hunger etched on their faces. But some didn’t have the tickets that were handed out earlier in the day and were turned away.

“Children come up to me and say, ’Father, I’m hungry.’ It’s heartbreaking. It’s the children’s testimony that inspires the charitable actions of all of us here,” Mendoza said.

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The precise number of Venezuelan migrants who are staying in Colombia is difficult to calculate because of the porousness of the 1,400-mile border, which has seven formal crossings. But estimates range as high as 800,000 arrivals over the last two years. At least 500,000 have gone on to the U.S., Spain, Brazil and other Latin American countries, officials here say.

“Every day 40 buses each filled with 40 or more Venezuelans leave Cucuta, cross Colombia and go directly to Ecuador,” said Huber Plaza, a local delegate of the National Disasters Risk Management Agency. “They stay there or go on to Chile, Argentina or Peru, which seems to be the preferred destination these days.”

Many arrive broke, hungry and in need of immediate medical attention. Over the last two years, North Santander province, where Cucuta is located, has vaccinated 58,000 Venezuelans for measles, diphtheria and other infectious diseases because only half of the arriving children have had the shots, said Nohora Barreto, a nurse with the provincial health department.

On the day Andrade, the retired army sergeant, sought treatment, gurneys left little space in the crowded ward and hospital corridors, creating an obstacle course for nurses and doctors who shouted orders, handed out forms and began examinations.

Andrade and many other patients stood amid the gurneys because all the chairs and beds were taken. Nearby, a pregnant woman in the early stages of labor groaned as she walked haltingly among the urgent care patients, supported by a male companion.

Dionisio Sanchez, a 20-year-old Venezuelan laborer, sat on a gurney awaiting treatment for a severe cut he suffered on his hand at a Cucuta construction site. Amid the bustle, shouting and medical staff squeezing by, he stared ahead quietly, holding his hand wrapped in gauze and resigned to a long wait.

“I’m lucky this didn’t happen to me back home,” Sanchez said. “Everyone is suffering a lot there. I didn’t want to leave, but hunger and other circumstances forced me to make the decision.”

Signs of stress caused by the flood of migrants are abundant elsewhere in this city of 650,000. Schools are overcrowded, charitable organizations running kitchens and shelters are overwhelmed and police who chase vagrants and illegal street vendors from public spaces are outmanned.

“We’ll clear 30 people from the park, but as soon as we leave, 60 more come to replace them,” said a helmeted policeman on night patrol with four comrades at downtown’s Santander Plaza. He expressed sympathy for the migrants and shook his head as he described the multitudes of homeless, saying it was impossible to control the tide.

Sitting on a park bench nearby was Jesus Mora, a 21-year-old mechanic who arrived from Venezuela in March. He avoids sleeping in the park, he said, and looks for an alleyway or “someplace in the shadows where police won’t bother me.”

“As long as they don’t think I’m selling drugs, I’m OK,” Mora said. “Tonight, I’m here to wait for a truck that brings around free food at this hour.” Mora said he is hoping to get a work permit. Meanwhile, he is hustling as best he can, recycling bottles, plastic and cardboard he scavenges on the street and in trash cans.

Metropolitan Cucuta’s school system is bursting at the seams with migrant kids, who are given six-month renewable passes to attend school. Eduardo Berbesi, principal of the 1,400-student Frontera Educational Institute, a public K-12 school in Villa de Rosario that’s located a short distance from the Simon Bolivar International Bridge, says he has funds to give lunches to only 60% of his students. He blames the government for not coming through with money to finance the school’s 40% growth in enrollment since the crisis began in 2015.

“The government tells us to receive the Venezuelan students but gives us nothing to pay for them,” Berbesi said.

Having to refuse lunches to hungry students bothers him. “And it’s me the kids and their parents blame, not the state.”

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#Cucuta

On a recent afternoon, every street corner in Cucuta seemed occupied with vendors selling bananas, candy, coffee, even rolls of aluminum foil.

“If I sell 40 little cups of coffee, I earn enough to buy a kilo of rice and a little meat,” said Jesus Torres, 35, a Venezuelan who arrived last month. He was toting a shoulder bag of thermoses he had filled with coffee that morning to sell in plastic cups. “The situation is complicated here but still better than in Venezuela.”

That evening, Leonardo Albornoz, 33, begged for coins at downtown stoplight as his wife and three children, ages 6 months to 8 years, looked on. He said he had been out of work in his native Merida for months but decided to leave for Colombia in April because his kids “were going to sleep hungry every night.”

When the light turned red, Albornoz approached cars and buses stopped at the intersection to offer lollipops in exchange for handouts. About half of the drivers responded with a smile and some change. Several bus passengers passed him coins through open windows.

From the sidewalk, his 8-year-old son, Kleiver, watched despondently. It was 9:30 pm — he had school the next morning and should have been sleeping, but Albornoz and his wife said they had no one to watch him or their other kids at the abandoned building where they were staying.

“My story is a sad one like many others, but the drop that made my glass overflow was when the [Venezuelan] government confiscated my little plot of land where we could grow things,” Albornoz said.

The increase in informal Venezuelan workers has pushed Cucuta’s unemployment rate to 16% compared with the 9% rate nationwide, Mayor Cesar Rojas said in an interview at City Hall. Although Colombians generally have welcomed their neighbors, he said, signs of resentment among jobless local residents is growing.

“The national government isn’t sending us the resources to settle the debts, and now we have this economic crisis,” Rojas said. “With the situation in Venezuela worsening, the exodus can only increase.”

The Colombian government admits it has been caught off guard by the dimensions — and costs — of the Venezuelan exodus, one of the largest of its kind in recent history, said Felipe Muñoz, who was named Venezuelan border manager by President Juan Manuel Santos in February.

“This is a critical, complex and massive problem,” Muñoz said. “No country could have been prepared to receive the volume of migrants that we are receiving. In Latin America, it’s unheard of. We’re dealing with 10 times more people than those who left the Middle East for Europe last year.”

In agreement is Jozef Merkx, Colombia representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which is taking an active role in helping Colombia deal with the influx. Central America saw large migrant flows in the 1980s, but they were caused by armed conflicts, he said.

“Venezuelans are leaving for different reasons, and the mixed nature of the displaced crisis is what makes it a unique exodus,” Merkx said during an interview in his Bogota office.

Muñoz said Colombia feels a special obligation to help Venezuelans in need. In past decades, when the neighboring country’s oil-fueled economy needed more manpower than the local population could provide, hundreds of thousands of Colombians flooded in to work. Now the tables are turned.

Colombia’s president has appealed to the international community for help. The U.S. government recently stepped up: The State Department announced Tuesday it was contributing $18.5 million “to support displaced Venezuelans in Colombia who have fled the crisis in their country.”

Manuel Antolinez, director of the International Committee of the Red Cross’ 240-bed shelter for Venezuelans near the border in Villa de Rosario, said he expects the crisis to get worse before easing.

“Our reading is that after the May 20 presidential election in Venezuela and the probable victory of President [Nicolas] Maduro, there will be increased dissatisfaction with the regime and more oppression against the opposition,” he said. “Living conditions will worsen.”

Whatever its duration, the crisis is leading Ramirez, director of the Erasmo Meoz University Hospital, to stretch out payments to his suppliers from an average of 30 days to 90 days after billing. He hopes the government will come through with financial aid.

“The collapse will happen when we can’t pay our employees,” he said. He fears that could happen soon.

▻http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-venezuela-colombia-20180513-story.html

The Venezuelan Refugee Crisis : The View from Brazil

Shadowing the Maduro regime’s widely condemned May 20 presidential election, Venezuela’s man-made humanitarian crisis continues to metastasize, forcing hundreds of thousands of families to flee to neighboring countries. While Colombia is bearing the brunt of the mass exodus of Venezuelans, Brazil is also facing an unprecedented influx. More than 40,000 refugees, including indigenous peoples, have crossed the border into Brazil since early 2017. The majority of these refugees have crossed into and remain in Roraima, Brazil’s poorest and most isolated state. While the Brazilian government is doing what it can to address the influx of refugees and mitigate the humanitarian risks for both the Venezuelans and local residents, much more needs to be done.

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As part of its continuing focus on the Venezuelan crisis, CSIS sent two researchers on a week-long visit to Brasilia and Roraima in early May. The team met with Brazilian federal government officials, international organizations, and civil society, in addition to assessing the situation on-the-ground at the Venezuela-Brazil border.

▻https://www.csis.org/analysis/venezuelan-refugee-crisis-view-brazil
#Boa_Vista #camps_de_réfugiés

Le Brésil mobilise son #armée à la frontière du Venezuela

Le président brésilien Michel Temer a ordonné mardi soir par décret l’utilisation des forces armées pour « garantir la sécurité » dans l’Etat septentrional de Roraima, à la frontière avec le Venezuela.

Depuis des mois, des milliers de réfugiés ont afflué dans cet Etat. « Je décrète l’envoi des forces armées pour garantir la loi et l’ordre dans l’Etat de Roraima du 29 août au 12 septembre », a annoncé le chef de l’Etat.

Le but de la mesure est de « garantir la sécurité des citoyens mais aussi des immigrants vénézuéliens qui fuient leur pays ».
Afflux trop important

Plusieurs dizaines de milliers d’entre eux fuyant les troubles économiques et politiques de leur pays ont afflué ces dernières années dans l’Etat de Roraima, où les services sociaux sont submergés.

Michel Temer a ajouté que la situation était « tragique ». Et le président brésilien de blâmer son homologue vénézuélien Nicolas Maduro : « La situation au Venezuela n’est plus un problème politique interne. C’est une menace pour l’harmonie de tout le continent », a déclaré le chef d’Etat dans un discours télévisé.

▻https://www.rts.ch/info/monde/9806458-le-bresil-mobilise-son-armee-a-la-frontiere-du-venezuela.html

#frontières #militarisation_des_frontières

Je vais continuer cette compilation ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/719239

The Exiles. A Trip to the Border Highlights Venezuela’s Devastating Humanitarian Crisis

Never have I seen this more clearly than when I witnessed first-hand Venezuelans fleeing the devastating human rights, humanitarian, political, and economic crisis their government has created.

Last July, I stood on the Simon Bolivar bridge that connects Cúcuta in Colombia with Táchira state in Venezuela and watched hundreds of people walk by in both directions all day long, under the blazing sun. A suitcase or two, the clothes on their back — other than that, many of those pouring over the border had nothing but memories of a life left behind.

▻https://www.hrw.org/video-photos/interactive/2018/11/14/exiles-trip-border-highlights-venezuelas-devastating

Crises Colliding: The Mass Influx of Venezuelans into the Dangerous Fragility of Post-Peace Agreement Colombia

Living under the government of President Nicolás Maduro, Venezuelans face political repression, extreme shortages of food and medicine, lack of social services, and economic collapse. Three million of them – or about 10 percent of the population – have fled the country.[1] The vast majority have sought refuge in the Americas, where host states are struggling with the unprecedented influx.
Various actors have sought to respond to this rapidly emerging crisis. The UN set up the Regional Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela, introducing a new model for agency coordination across the region. This Regional Platform, co-led by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has established a network of subsidiary National Platforms in the major host countries to coordinate the response on the ground. At the regional level, the Organization of American States (OAS) established a Working Group to Address the Regional Crisis of Venezuelan Migrants and Refugees. Latin American states have come together through the Quito Process – a series of diplomatic meetings designed to help coordinate the response of countries in the region to the crisis. Donors, including the United States, have provided bilateral assistance.

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#rapport