That Recognizes the plebiscite Island voters rejected the current status of "political subordination"
WASHINGTON - The Committee of the UN Decolonization approved This Afternoon, by consensus, a resolution That reaffirms the right of Puerto Rico to self-determination and independence.
The text, presented by Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, Recognizes the rejection of the voters of Puerto Rico to the current relationship With The United States, que I describe as one of "political subordination."
Also It asks to be raised before the General Assembly of the United Nations in a comprehensive discussion of the political case of Puerto Rico.
Also The resolution calls for the decontamination and return of former military land in Vieques and Culebra, and the release of political prisoners Oscar López and Norberto Gonzalez Claudio.
Further Recognizes the Constitutional Assembly Status as one of the procedural mechanisms flag available for Puerto Rico to choose its future status in Decolonizing alternatives.
Ecuador is no human-rights darling. Left-wing President Rafael Correa has built a decidedly authoritarian reputation that includes a yen for prosecuting journalists who irk him. This week he won passage of a media bill that slashes the number of private outlets, greatly increases state-controlled broadcasting and makes Correa the nation’s de facto media censor.
But Correa does care about shielding at least one free-speech advocate: Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables. Assange, hoping to avoid extradition to Sweden to answer sexual-assault charges — and possibly extradition to the U.S. for espionage — has been holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London since last summer, when Correa granted him political asylum. Because Assange can’t leave the embassy building, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño even declared this week that the U.K. is violating the pale-complected WikiLeaker’s “fundamental right to sunbathe.” (And no, you won’t find that in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)
No wonder Assange this week said he thinks the whistle-blower of the moment, Edward Snowden — who is now in Hong Kong after admitting he leaked information about a secret and controversial U.S. domestic spying program to the media this month — should look south for sanctuary. “I would strongly advise [Snowden] to go to Latin America,” Assange told CNN.
Leon Neal / AFP / Getty Images
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange gestures as he addresses media and supporters from the window of the Ecuadorean embassy in London on Dec. 20, 2012
But here’s the flaw, at least the p.r. flaw, in Assange’s thinking. The countries most inclined to take Snowden in — that is, those with leftist governments like Ecuador, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua, which would love to hold him up as an anti-U.S. trophy — also sport some of Latin America’s more checkered human-rights records these days. Specifically, their policies tend to mock the very free-speech, free-information crusade that leakers like Assange and Snowden champion.
Ecuador and Venezuela, for example, have some of the western hemisphere’s toughest antidefamation laws. You don’t just get dragged into civil court to face libel or slander complaints; if you insult or otherwise offend government officials, you can face a criminal trial and time behind bars.
Before he died in March, Venezuela’s socialist firebrand President Hugo Chávez often used the “media responsibility” codes he enacted in the 2000s to combat what he called “the impunity of the bourgeoisie,” which was revolution-speak for opposition criticism. “Venezuela’s private, independent press has been weakened by blow after government blow over the past decade,” says Carlos Lauria, Americas director for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. “What private outlets are left really don’t broadcast news anymore as a result. Dissent gets stifled.” In Ecuador, responding to global outcry, Correa finally pardoned a journalist and three newspaper executives last year afterthey’d been convicted, sentenced to prison terms and fined $40 million for criminally defaming him.
Hence the red embassy carpet Correa rolled out for Assange months later. The Ecuadorean President hoped WikiLeaks’ liberal cachet would rub off on his otherwise caudillo profile, not to mention build up his leadership stature inside Latin America’s leftist, anti-Yanqui bloc of nations, known as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA. Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself no friend of press freedom or open government, no doubt had similar motives when he said this weekhe’d consider an asylum request from Snowden. Folks like Snowden, says Lauria, “do need to know how hypocritical it looks and sounds when countries like Ecuador try to wash their negative images and rights records by offering them asylum.”
That should have been apparent to Assange in recent years as ALBA countries led a drive to dismantle the Organization of American States’ (OAS) Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. That body, not coincidentally, has been critical of the press-muzzling policies and other antidemocratic practices gaining ground in many ALBA countries. At this month’s OAS general assembly in Guatemala, Ecuador headed a drive to pack the commission with ALBA-friendly members, but it was decisively rejected by the rest of the hemisphere.
Even in the rest of Latin America, factors like criminal and political violence against journalists — since 2010, 25 have been murdered in Honduras and 24 in Mexico — makes the region less than a place “that is really pushing forward in human rights,” as Assange somewhat naively put it this week. Granted, with the sole exception of Cuba, Latin America (and the Caribbean) is now a democratic street. But democratic elections are no guarantee of democratic governance — or of safe conditions for critical, investigative media.
Or, for that matter, for leakers, whistle-blowers and other defiant democrats (or traitors, depending on how you look at it) like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. It’s something they should keep in mind before seeking refuge in countries that might be shielding them simply as a way to shield themselves from human-rights criticism — or as an easy way to kick the U.S. in the shins.
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A new website, www.HR2000PR.com, is presenting a bill to citizens in a new way. Visitors can choose between English and Spanish, and receive full information about the Puerto Rico Status Resolution Act in their chosen language.
The homepage explains how the bill, HR2000, provides a clear path to statehood for Puerto Rico:
- OFFER OF STATEHOOD
- ACCEPTANCE
- ADMISSION
Each of these steps is explained when visitors click through to read more.
Visitors who scroll down will see an invitation to support the bill. Click through, and you’ll be offered an easy way to send a letter of support to your representatives in the House and Seante. U.S. Mainland residents choose their state first, while Puerto Rico residents are provided an appropriate option on a separate screen.
After visitors send a letter, they are returned to the homepage automatically and thanked on screen and in a bilingual email delivered automatically to the email provided. If they continue to scroll, they can subscribe to the newsletter or follow links to resources such as the full text of the bill and theCosponsor.gov website.
The website includes an aggregate of press on the subject of the bill as well as contact information and FAQs. HR2000 appears to be the only bill with its own website.
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Could PR be decolonized through elections?
ReplyDeleteImpossible. Why?
The 1% makes the laws of the United States (US) government for the 99%. And that 1%, of course, is above the law. This is why the 1 % wants Puerto Rico to pay the cost of her colonial relationship with the United States in what many are calling the “Puerto Rico’s debt”. The 1 % never wants to lose!
Noam Chomsky says on page 146 of his book PROFIT OVER PEOPLE that over 2 hundred years ago in the leading democracy of his day, Oliver Goldsmith observed that “laws grind the poor, and the rich men make the law”. “He who makes the law makes the trap” is a popular Puerto Rican saying. Pedro Albizu Campos said that if Puerto Rico’s independence were possible through elections, the US government would abolish them. Trying to decolonize Puerto Rico via elections would be like trying to win in a casino that is rigged, so that the players will always lose. So why do 80% of Puerto Ricans vote in the colonial elections in Puerto Rico?
The US government has brainwashed our minds. History is always written by the winner. The US government has had 117 years to mold Puerto Ricans to serve its interest. The 1 % knows that it could stay in power forever, if it could control our minds. If the 99% ever knew the truth, it could use its numerical power to stop the 1%, despite its enormous wealth and power. How have we been brainwashed?
It has been achieved through the Puerto Rico education system, the imposition of US citizenship against our will, state terrorism like the Rio Piedras, Utuado, and Ponce Massacres, the assassinations like in the Cerro Maravilla and the Machetero leader Filiberto Ojeda Ríos.
Most Puerto Ricans believe that it is their duty to vote, and if they don’t vote, than they shouldn’t complain later. Many believe that Puerto Rico is a democracy, although they know that Washington has the final word on what happens here. So how do we decolonize ourselves?
We know that the United Nations (UN) will not do it. It is controlled by the US government. How do we know that?
The UN has thus far issued 34 resolutions asking the US government to immediately decolonize Puerto Rico, and it has ignored them all! The morning session’s video, of the last Puerto Rico decolonization hearing where the Chairperson said that he felt disrespected when the UN at the last minute decided not to broadcast live the hearing after telling him it would, has never been available for public viewing on its WEBCAST as it is normally done. The resolution of this year’s hearing has never been published on the UN website as it usually does. Obviously, the US government wants to hide to the world its colonial relationship with Puerto Rico!
We know that it will take a long time to reverse 117 years of brainwashing. But, as more and more Puerto Ricans become convinced that we are destined to be its colony forever, more and more Puerto Rican could choose to stop voting in the colonial elections. This way we can say to the world that we are not the democracy that the US government wants it to believe!
Instead, we should protest permanently and peacefully. Once we get the tsunami of people necessary, and demand once again our inalienable right to self-determination and independence, the US government, like in Vieques, will have no other choice, but to comply with the 34 UN resolutions.
Once we become our own nation, we must permanently stay vigilant, because the US government will try to install, as it has done so many times before in many parts of the world, a puppet government to continue exploiting us. We must do so, because those who govern only for the 1%, definitely don’t believe in JUSTICE FOR ALL! www.TodosUnidosDescolonizarPR.blogspot.com