Experts estimate COVID-19 death toll in India at over one million

Wasantha Rupasinghe

Millions of Indians continue to suffer as COVID-19 takes thousands of lives and new infections are recorded every day. On May 9, the country passed another grim milestone of almost 22.3 million coronavirus cases, after reporting 403,738 new cases in the previous 24 hours. The official death toll climbed by 4,092 to 242,362.

India, which has experienced 10 million new cases in the last four months, now accounts for 20.24 percent of all active cases and 7.12 percent of all deaths globally.

The figures find concrete expression in the grim news reports of frantic scenes at hospitals, overcrowded crematoriums and round-the-clock pyres burning in city after city across the country, including in the national capital, Delhi.

Commuters wearing face masks jostle for a ride on a bus in Kolkata, India, Tuesday, July 21, 2020. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)

A May 8 editorial in the Lancet medical journal, citing statistics from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, estimates that India will see a staggering one million COVID-19 deaths by August 1.

However, according to Dr. Murad Banaji, a Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Middlesex University, that catastrophic figure has already been reached.

Banaji told Karan Thapar, a journalist with the Wire, on May 8, that “80 percent of deaths” in India “have been missed… [and] for every five deaths which have occurred, only one has been counted.” In other words, he said, “over one million people have already died” from the coronavirus.

Commenting on predictions that the daily death toll could reach 6,800 over the next two weeks, Banaji said the daily death numbers could be even higher because “infections are many times higher than daily cases… but most infections don’t get detected (because of low tests numbers).”

Thapar pointed out that although the Indian government claims that 86 percent of all deaths have been registered, “only 22 percent have actual doctor’s medical certificates.” He referred to the situation in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where COVID-19 medical death certificates are just 5 percent and 2.4 percent respectively.

Many of those who fall ill and die from COVID-19 are not recorded as coronavirus victims, Banaji said, because they had no prior access to doctors or were not tested.

On May 6, the Washington Post cited examples gross under-counting of coronavirus deaths. In Bhopal, a large city in central India, the official COVID-19 death figure did not exceed 10 for a single day between April 11 and April 24. However, records at the city’s Bhadhada crematorium, the newspaper reported, bore “little resemblance to the official count.”

Analysing Union Health Ministry data, the Times of India noted on May 9 that over 40 percent of India’s 741 districts, or 301 of them—mainly in rural areas—recorded a 20 percent or higher test positivity rate between May 1 and May 7. About 15 percent of 741 districts reported a 50 percent, or higher, test positivity rate for the same period.

These catastrophic figures are the direct responsibility of the Modi government and the Indian ruling elite who criminally ignored expert medical advice and imposed its deadly policy of so-called herd immunity, placing the profit interests of big business over human lives.

Prime Minister Modi’s claim in early April that his government is successfully winning the battle against COVID-19 was bogus and has led to a national disaster of catastrophic proportions.

Amid these worsening conditions, the Indian government still refuses to impose a national lockdown or to allocate the necessary financial resources to expand and upgrade the under-funded and overwhelmed public healthcare system.

Modi continues to falsely insist that his government’s vaccination program will contain the pandemic. Last December, the government said it would vaccinate 300 million of its most vulnerable citizens, including healthcare and frontline workers, by July 2021.

The Indian Express reported yesterday that, “less than three months from the July deadline, India has so far administered around 15.5 crore [155 million] vaccines or 25 percent of the target.” To be fully vaccinated requires two shots, meaning 600 million doses have to be administered to reach the target.

The newspaper also noted that daily vaccinations have been falling because of vaccine shortages—from 3.5 million shots each day in the first week of April; 2.1 million shots in the last week of April; and 1.6 million in May.

According to figures cited by the New York Times only 9.7 percent of the population has received one dose of the vaccine and just 2.4 percent two doses.

While masses of people are attempting to deal with the horrific situation, Indian billionaires have further enriched themselves, nearly doubling their total wealth in the past 12 months to $US596 billion.

In the midst of the tsunami of coronavirus infections, Indian workers and the rural poor are being hit by unemployment, wage cuts and inflation.

The Modi government’s short-term national lock-down in April last year, called with less than four hours’ notice and no social support, saw mass sackings and plunged millions further into poverty.

India’s unemployment rate rose to nearly 8 percent in April, the highest in four months, up from 6.5 percent, with more than seven million jobs lost in April alone.

According to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), the number of employees fell from 398.1 million in March to 390.8 million in April, the third straight monthly decline. In January, the number of people employed in India was 400.70 million.

Workers engaged in the so-called informal sector have been severely affected by the economic downturn. A national survey of 16,900 informal workers in 400 districts in 23 states by the Action Aid Association between August and September last year—the so-called unlock phase—highlights the devastating impact.

“In the absence of adequate State support and secure livelihoods people were becoming extremely reliant on debt, turning to moneylenders once they have exhausted their network of family and friends,” the report states. “They were also being pushed into taking up more and more precarious forms of livelihoods, and there have been several reports indicating that incidences of child labour are rapidly increasing.”

The survey found that nearly half of its respondents were unemployed and one in four had zero wages. “Around 42 percent of those who said they were rendered unemployed by the lockdown during the first round of the survey in May last year, remained unemployed nearly four months later in September. The recovery in unemployment has been much slower than expected, especially in urban areas, while the wages have plummeted both in the formal and informal sector.”

Wages were also extremely low during the “unlock phase.” Almost half of the respondents were earning less than 5,000 rupees ($US68) per month, while only 8 percent were earning more than 10,000 rupees per month.

The Modi government’s reaction to the escalating economic crisis is no different to its murderous “herd-immunity” response to the coronavirus pandemic—i.e., to impose the burden on the working class and step up its free-market, job destruction policies.

US ruling class moves to slash jobless aid

Marcus Day

Against the backdrop of mass poverty and social dislocation triggered by the COVID-19 crisis, the US corporate, political and media establishment are ramping up their campaign to slash jobless aid in order to compel workers back into low-wage jobs.

Last Wednesday, Montana’s Republican governor announced that he would be cutting off the state’s participation in the $300 federal unemployment supplement early, withdrawing from the program next month. The $300 weekly additional payment was enacted as part of the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus plan passed in March and is set to expire throughout the US on September 6, in less than four months. Following Montana’s announcement, first South Carolina and then Arkansas said that they would also be ending federal unemployment payments early.

But a major new stage in this campaign was launched with the publication of Friday’s jobs report. Ahead of the report, official media surveys of economists had predicted the creation of a million new jobs—a figure almost without precedent in postwar American history.

Hundreds of people wait in line for bags of groceries at a food pantry at St. Mary’s Church in Waltham, Mass. in 2020. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The report showed that the US added 266,000 jobs in April, a significant number by historical standards, but 700,000 jobs short of what the media’s surveys of economists showed.

But despite the fact that no one could explain how the economists got the figure so wrong, the “underwhelming” jobs report was immediately put to use in a tightly choreographed campaign.

An hour after the report was released, the largest American corporate lobbying group, the US Chamber of Commerce, led the way, issuing a statement calling for federal unemployment aid to be cut off, writing, “The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market.”

More state governments are now signaling that they will stop their distribution of federal aid. Indiana and Arizona have indicated they are also looking at cutting off federal jobless aid, and other states such as Florida have announced that they plan to reimpose restrictions on access to benefits.

The moves to cut off the $300 federal unemployment supplement will mean that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of families will be faced with utter destitution.

Last month, a new study showed that the US poverty rate rose to 11.7 percent, up from 10.3 percent in March 2020 and hitting the highest level since the pandemic.

Already, large numbers of the unemployed have found their benefits halted without explanation, while others have simply given up filing claims, fed up with the byzantine, antiquated, and frequently overloaded state unemployment systems. In many states, those who have been receiving aid for a year undergo an automatic review by state agencies, according to CNBC, which often delays, lowers, or completely cuts off their payments.

During the pandemic, millions of people have stayed home and out of the labor force in order to care for a child or an elderly relative, or in an effort to shield a family member with vulnerable health from infection. For many of these families and others who simply cannot find work, the extended federal unemployment aid—deliberately allowed to lapse late last summer while the Trump administration and both parties in Congress negotiated how much to cut the previous weekly amount of $600—has allowed them to merely scrape by.

The aim of the corporate media campaign to slash unemployment aid is to somehow market a deliberate and brutal policy that will lead to poverty and misery for large numbers of people as an unavoidable necessity, one which is necessary to defend the “economic recovery.”

But on Friday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, the voice of the most ruthless elements of the financial aristocracy, bluntly revealed the real underlying aims of the drive to slash jobless benefits.

Noting recent pay increases in some industries, the newspaper noted, “The risk is that these wage increases will become embedded in expectations and lead to a more general inflation” (emphasis added). The policy lesson is to ease government constraints on supply. That means repealing the federal bonus not to work.”

As usual, the Wall Street Journal says crassly and openly what other sections of the political establishment say quietly and to themselves: Under no circumstances can wages be allowed to rise, because if workers’ wages rise, the wealth of the rich will grow more slowly!

This suppression of wages has been the central guiding tenet of every administration, Democratic and Republican since Jimmy Carter, who initiated a manufactured recession in the name of fighting “inflation,” a policy continued under Reagan. From the Clinton administration slashing the social safety net under the slogan of “ending welfare as we know it,” through the Bush years, to Obama’s extension of the 50 percent wage cut for newly hired autoworkers in 2009, on through the Trump administration, wages have continued to stagnate.

Now, in the midst of the greatest public health crisis in American history, the ruling class turns to the workers and says: You can work for poverty wages, or you can starve!

The unstated premise in the argument of the Wall Street Journal and others is that there is just not enough money to substantially raise wages or pay all those unable to work. This is a lie.

And yet stock market indices continue to reach new heights. In fact, both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 surged to record or near-record highs Friday following the release of the April jobs report.

The endless run-up in the stock markets, fueled by the Fed’s cheap money policies, has inflated the corporate oligarchs’ fortunes to unprecedented levels, with the creation of a whole new layer of “centibillionaires,” those with wealth over $100 billion.

Between March 2020 and April 2021, the wealth of US billionaires—roughly 700 individuals—exploded upwards over $1.62 trillion, reaching a total of over $4.56 trillion, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This is approximately four times the wealth owned by the bottom half of the US population, 165 million people.

The continued growth of the stock market and the wealth of the ruling class depends, ultimately, upon the suppression of wages and the intensification of the exploitation of the working class. Any substantial rise in pay for workers, particularly those who make the least, threatens to upend these operations and unleash the pent-up demands of workers to reverse the decades-long decline of their incomes. This, from the standpoint of the ruling class, must be avoided through all possible means, including through the cutoff of unemployment aid.

This is why Biden, who just requested the largest military spending bill in history and calls on American capitalism to deploy trillions of dollars in “competition” with China, swiftly abandoned after his inauguration his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage from its absurdly low level of $7.25 per hour.

The argument that society lacks the wealth to pay workers a decent wage and unemployment benefits is absurd. Not only must jobless benefits be continued and expanded, the minimum wage must immediately be raised to at least $25 an hour.

Workers are already initiating strikes and other efforts in pursuit of higher wages and better working conditions, from Volvo Truck workers in Virginia, to coal miners in Alabama, steelworkers in Pennsylvania and other states. These struggles must be expanded and taken out of the hands of the unions, which have facilitated the ruling class’s attacks on jobs and wages over the past 40 years, blocking strikes and forcing through concessionary contracts.

It is increasingly clear that the private ownership of the giant fortunes of the corporate and financial oligarchs is one of the greatest obstacles to meeting any of the basic needs of the working population, whether aid for the unemployed and poor, decent wages and working conditions, or the public health measures needed to bring the pandemic under control.

Declaring that France must “live with the virus,” Macron ends limited lockdown

Jacques Valentin

Middle and high schools reopened across France this week, following the reopening of primary schools a week ago. The school reopening dates were set at the beginning of the limited lockdown announced at the end of March, with Macron provocatively declaring that no “health indicators” would change his decision to reopen schools as scheduled.

Emmanuel Macron [Sebastien Nogier, Pool via AP]

In the course of the limited lockdown, the rate of reproduction of the virus (R) did not fall below 0.9 until May 3, when it reached 0.88. With an R of 0.9, it takes about a month to reduce daily cases by half. During the two previous lockdowns, the R had fallen much lower and the end to restrictions took place with a far lower number of daily cases. The seven-day average of cases was 20,866 on May 4.

Supporting Macron’s timeline, Health Minister Olivier Véran announced that he intended cases to drop quickly below 20,000 for the second stage of the reopening on May 19. He made this statement even as schools were reopened and the 10 kilometre travel limit was ended.

But the number of people hospitalised, which is independent of the variation in testing and gives a robust indicator of the evolution of cases with a time delay of about 10 days, remains high. On May 4, 1,591 people were newly hospitalised and 28,427 were being treated for coronavirus. For the past six months, 25,000 to 30,000 people have been hospitalised for COVID-19 on a permanent basis.

As in other European countries, Macron has decided to let the virus circulate at a high level under a policy, in all but name, of “herd immunity,” which he now calls “living with the virus.” European leaders are ending lockdowns at every turn, knowing full well that this will accelerate the epidemic. At most, they pretend to hope that vaccination campaigns will limit the increase in mortality.

The epidemic has been killing an average of 300 people a day since the beginning of the year, but the government considers the situation to be completely acceptable. In France and elsewhere, governments continue to trivialise the daily deaths of hundreds of people. Newspapers and the mainstream media hardly report the daily death toll as previously. The threshold of 100,000 deaths was passed in April without the media seriously examining the reasons for this catastrophe.

There is an attempt to desensitize the population to mass death, which is presented as inevitable, and not the result of well-defined policies that can be opposed and rejected.

The government announced that regions could be reopened if they were below the threshold of 400 cases per 100,000 people, which corresponds to a very active spread of the virus. The hardest-hit regions such as Île-de-France have only just fallen below this threshold.

Epidemiologist Dominique Costagliola, who previously severely criticised the limited lockdown, told Le Monde: “All other countries have much lower thresholds, 40 in Japan, 100 in many countries. In France too, we even had a threshold of 50, which was forgotten without any explanation.”

She added, “The likelihood ... of avoiding further hospital saturation is low.” She predicted “lots of deaths, lots of hospitalisations, lots of long-term coronavirus patients, which will weigh on future health costs, general demoralisation of hospital staff, restriction of other care.” This echoes modelling by the Italian epidemiologist Stefano Merler. Merler predicts that, despite the impact of the vaccines, daily mortality will rise to between 600 and 1,300 in July, due to reopening policies.

Two brothers who called for a music concert in Lyon, which brought together 250 young people on March 30, were given a three-month suspended prison sentence for endangering the lives of others. But the press never relates this severe sentence to the behaviour of the Macron government, which sends hundreds of people to an avoidable death every day. The conclusion is that they should expect to enjoy complete judicial impunity.

While the threshold of 60 and 70 percent of immunised adults had previously been cited as the level required for preventing the spread of the virus, the Pasteur Institute has estimated that with the arrival of more contagious variants vaccination coverage will have to be much higher. According to the institute, if the level of contagiousness of the variants is confirmed, and “If the vaccination campaign focuses solely on the adult population ... more than 90% of adults would have to be vaccinated for a complete relaxation of control measures to be possible.”

According to epidemiologists, in order to ensure the safety of the population, the first reopening measures should not take place until a significant proportion of the population has been vaccinated and the circulation of the virus has been reduced sufficiently to allow the tracing and isolation of all cases. Yet European governments are ending lockdowns while vaccination is largely insufficient and the number of cases is high everywhere. About 10 percent of the French population is fully vaccinated, with 24 percent having received at least one dose.

In addition to the illnesses and deaths this policy brings, it encourages the mutation and development of new variants that can bypass the immunity acquired naturally by the disease or by vaccines. For example, Brazilian and South African variants with this characteristic more than doubled in the second half of April in the Île-de-France region. This is a repeat of the policy from last year, at the end of the second wave of the virus, when the reopening allowed the English variant to establish itself massively within the space of weeks.

The irrationality of the health policy pursued by European governments is clear. The enormous economic and social sacrifices of the working class during the lockdowns is being systematically squandered by the policy of “living with the virus.”

The Macron government came to power with a programme to destroy decades of social gains of the working class and favour the most base exploitation of labour by capital. This policy, which benefits a tiny minority of the population, has produced a social catastrophe. The subordination of social life to private profit is incompatible with the rational management of a complex society that benefits the majority of the population.

Chile’s president charged with “crimes against humanity”

Mauricio Saavedra

A coalition of human rights organizations has filed a brief before the International Criminal Court charging Chile’s sitting president, Sebastian Piñera, along with former and current civilian, military and police authorities with crimes against humanity. The case, stemming from the ruthless repression meted out by the Piñera government against mass protests in 2019, has been filed in the midst of savage police-state repression against popular upheavals in Colombia by the far-right government of President Iván Duque.

Surrounded by military personnel, Sebastian Piñera signed 2019 state of emergency decree (credit: Presidencia de Chile)

Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, the Chilean Human Rights Commission (CHDH), the American Association of Jurists (AAJ) and the Centro di Ricerca ed Elaborazione per la Democrazia (CRED), sent the brief to ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda last week. The next stage is for the prosecutor Bensouda to determine whether the case falls within the ICC’s jurisdiction, whether there are grounds to maintain that there were crimes against humanity and the admissibility of the appeal, a process that takes years according to the lawyers involved.

In their 141-page brief the plaintiffs request that the ICC initiate an “investigation, file an indictment, and launch a trial (against) the President of the Republic of Chile and other civilian, political and police authorities” for “widespread and systematic” attacks against a civilian population “occurring simultaneously throughout the national territory of the Republic of Chile, from October 6, 2019 and up to the present day, which we consider to constitute Crimes against Humanity.”

Those who stand accused are the ultra-right president Sebastian Piñera, along with former and current interior ministers Andrés Chadwick, Gonzalo Blumel, Víctor Pérez and Rodrigo Delgado, the former undersecretary of the Interior, Rodrigo Ubilla, the current undersecretary of the Interior, Juan Francisco Galli, the former ministers of Defense, Alberto Espina, and Mario Desbordes, the former general director of the Carabineros, Chile’s militarized national police force, Mario Rozas and the current general director, Ricardo Yáñez, as well as the mayor of the Metropolitan Region, Felipe Guevara.

The document explains that the Piñera government pursued from the beginning a policy of state repression “to confront the demands of the rights of the population as if it were a declaration of internal war, suspending constitutional guarantees and deploying the army in the streets, thus preparing the ground for the commission of the worst State crimes.”

The brutal police actions were not isolated or independent of each other, but were part of a plan aimed at carrying out an organized, massive, extensive and systematic attack against the civilian population, with the objective of repressing manifestations of dissent, containing social demands, and exercising political intimidation.

The government continued with this policy in spite of being updated by the National Institute of Human Rights, an autonomous state agency; the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the autonomous prosecutorial body intervening in the Chilean judicial system; and the Directorate of Studies of the Supreme Court (all of which are obliged to inform the government of human rights abuses committed by state agents).

In complete disregard of reports and recommendations submitted by state, national and international human rights organizations, which tabulated violations against thousands of demonstrators, journalists, reporters and photographers, human rights personnel and health brigades, the government at first denied that its repressive arm committed any crimes, admitting to only possible individual “excesses,” and has to date encouraged the actions of the Carabineros and the high command.

Recourse to the international court is also driven by the absence of equality before the law. Thousands of cases involving egregious human rights abuses committed in a “widespread and systematic manner” by agents of the state since 2019 have languished for months or have been summarily closed.

Of 8,581 total cases initially opened for human rights violations that occurred during the social unrest, 2,013 were regrouped with other proceedings, leaving 6,568 active cases. Over the last year and a half 3,050 (46 percent of the total) of these have since been closed without formalizations, and most of them with practically no progress. Of the 1,496 cases involving children and adolescents, 420 were regrouped, leaving 1,076 active cases. In the last year and a half, the Prosecutor’s Office has closed 541 cases.

The document notes:

that the aforementioned unlawful acts, dealt with and punished by Article 7 of the Rome Statute, ratified by the Chilean State on June 29, 2009, are fraudulently classified and investigated in Chile as common crimes, with the deliberate purpose, first, of removing them from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and, second, to prepare the conditions that would favor their subsequent impunity with the possible application of the statute of limitations, or through the application of possible pardons, amnesties or end-point laws. In addition, the State agencies in charge of investigating and judging, such as the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Judiciary, have had an unjustified delay in the substantiation of these processes and their actions do not have the necessary independence and impartiality and the due respect for the principle of Equality before the Law. All this makes it appropriate and necessary to exercise the complementary jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

The report directs attention to the “Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Courts of Justice” and “calls into question their will and capacity (to) investigate and punish the massive and systematic human rights violations committed by the security forces.” It notes their asymmetrical treatment of many demonstrators who were imprisoned for supposedly committing serious crimes but have “subsequently been acquitted due to insufficient (or) false evidence.”

The brief also refers to specific cases of intimidation suffered by prosecutors (e.g., Ximena Chong) at the hands of the Carabinero police for pursuing cases against them and the sanctioning of justices (e.g., Daniel Urrutia) by the Judiciary for modifying preventive detention measures.

“The Chilean courts have failed in their duty to administer justice,” Carlos Margotta, president of the Chilean Human Rights Commission, concluded in an interview with investigative news site CIPER. Garzón added that the complaint to the ICC “seeks to highlight the impunity that is being experienced in Chile and demands an independent international investigation and that when it comes will force the Chilean justice system to (grant justice).”

While there is doubtless broad support for the criminal prosecution of Piñera and his underlings, it is necessary to bring attention to the political organizations involved and their political motives. At the forefront of the operation is the anti-Marxist and counterrevolutionary Stalinist Communist Party of Chile (PC) and the parliamentary pseudo left, whose central political function is to subordinate the working class to the capitalist state by sowing the illusion that the executive, the congress, the judiciary and its repressive arm can be reformed or refounded on democratic principles. This myth has been their central argument for decades, preceding the 1973 coup d’état and since.

This is also the political outlook of Garzón, who is a founding member of the Spanish pseudo left-Stalinist front Actúa. Formed in 2017 as a break-off from United Left (Izquierda Unida), it promotes itself as “the left that does not feel represented either by the minimal gestures of the PSOE and its pact with the PP, or by the rhetorical maximalism of Podemos.”

Garzón, a former investigating judge from Spain’s central criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, came to international prominence in 1998 when he sought to have former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was visiting Britain, extradited to Spain to face charges of torture and assassination of Spanish citizens at the hands of his regime. The attempt was thwarted in March 2000 when the British Foreign Office found Pinochet too ill to stand trial. Pinochet died in Chile six years later while tied up in court proceedings.

Garzón attempt to prosecute Pinochet raised deep concerns within the British, US, Spanish and Chilean ruling elites for competing reasons.

A trial in Spain could well have raised many awkward and long-suppressed historical questions. The transition to civilian rule in Chile in 1990 provided an amnesty for Pinochet and his fellow military criminals, similar to the one granted in post-Franco Spain, where a political shift was engineered that left the old repressive apparatus intact.

More significantly, the bloody overthrow of the Popular Unity government of Chile’s President Salvador Allende was heavily backed by Washington, which continued its support as thousands were summarily executed and many thousands more were tortured and forcibly disappeared. Universal jurisdiction, the undermining of the principle of sovereign immunity, which the imperialist powers used to try war criminals of the former Yugoslavia, could just as well be threatened against a slew of American, British and Spanish authorities for crimes in Chile, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond.

Indeed, moves to suspend Garzón from the Audiencia Nacional were initiated following his attempt to open an investigation into the systematic torture program at Guantánamo Bay in 2009 as well as his investigation into crimes against humanity committed during the fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco. He was convicted in 2012 of misconduct for illegal wiretapping during the investigation of the Gürtel corruption case and disqualified from the position of judge for 11 years.

The decision to bring the Chilean state under Piñera to the ICC took shape at the Latin American Human Rights Forum held at the beginning of 2020 at which Garzón was guest speaker. Garzón made contact with the forum organizers, pseudo-left parliamentarians Alejandro Navarro (Progresivo), Adriana Muñoz (Partido Por la Democracia) and Juan Ignacio Latorre (Revolución Democratica)—all members of the Senate Human Rights Commission. Lawyer Carlos Margotta, president of the Chilean Human Rights Commission and aligned to the Chilean Stalinist PC, agreed with the idea of going to the International Criminal Court in March 2020.

On the 22nd anniversary of Pinochet’s arrest last year, Garzón expanded on his motivations for pursuing Piñera: “I fear for what may happen on the first anniversary of the social outbreak and the subsequent plebiscite, I fear for the actions of the police, who are still in charge of those who have openly supported their subordinates and make a defense of the rotten apples without realizing that in doing so they are rotting an entire institution ... But even President Piñera himself recognizes that Carabineros de Chile must undergo profound changes. Then I ask, what are you waiting for, Mr. Piñera? How many more deaths, how many more rapes, how many more tortures must happen to undertake this profound transformation?”

Colombia’s mass protests continue amid reported “disappearance” of 379 demonstrators

Andrea Lobo

The Colombian Missing Persons Search Unit, a government-sponsored agency, announced Thursday that 379 demonstrators remain “disappeared” since mass protests began on April 28, ignited by proposed taxes on essential services, food and workers’ incomes.

Medellín, Colombia, May 5 (Twitter @LunaMeja4)

The agency investigated 471 missing-person reports from 26 different organizations and located only 92 of the protesters, including one who had been killed. The figures are a stark jump from the 89 cases of missing demonstrators reported on May 4 by the government’s ombudsman, out of which the National Police claimed to have found 47.

The real extent of the repression across the country, which has involved the deployment of the US-trained and armed military by the far-right government of President Ivan Duque, is only beginning to emerge. The NGO Temblores has documented 37 demonstrators killed and 98 injured by police gunfire. There have been 934 reported cases of arbitrary detentions and 11 cases of sexual violence by security forces, while 26 protesters have suffered eye injuries from “non-lethal” projectiles.

In just nine days, over 500 demonstrators are either missing or have been killed by the security forces. These figures alone already evoke the memory of the mass killings and “disappearances” by US-backed fascist-military dictatorships that governed much of South America during the 1960s, 70s and 80s.

The repression exposes a Colombian ruling class, backed by imperialism, that is entirely determined to force the working class to bear the entire cost of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On the other hand, the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions that have taken to the streets amidst the deadliest surge of the pandemic in the country have demonstrated the bravery and determination of the working class and youth.

This is the largest popular uprising in Latin America since the mass demonstrations that erupted in Chile and Bolivia in 2019. The death toll this week in Colombia has already surpassed the confirmed deaths of protesters at the hands of the police and military in Chile (34) and Bolivia (32).

The latest protests against the Duque administration follow a university student strike in 2018 to demand funding for advanced public education, the mass protests that began with a national strike on November 29, 2019, which was triggered by an earlier tax plan and saw three demonstrators killed, and the mass rebellions in September 2020 against police killings that were also repressed with live ammunition, resulting in 13 people killed and 75 injured by gunfire.

Moreover, the overseers of the 2016 “peace accord” with the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrillas have reported the killing of 904 local social leaders, including many disarmed combatants, as fascistic paramilitary forces continue to operate at the behest of transnational corporations and local landowners to displace peasants and seize land.

While the UN and European Union have nervously denounced the “excessive force” used by the police, the US administration of President Joe Biden has effectively given the actions of its main political and military ally in the region an endorsement by merely calling for “moderation.”

Undeterred by the repression and unconvinced by Duque’s maneuver to temporarily cancel his tax plan, thousands have continued to join marches, roadblocks and vigils for the victims across Colombia. On Friday, the capital Bogotá saw five different demonstrations led by university students and public-school teachers.

The driving force behind the recent demonstrations is the refusal of the government to take the necessary measures to treat the social and health care devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even as only 4 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated and COVID-19 deaths reach all-time highs of nearly 500 per day, the government refuses to implement lockdowns of nonessential services and provide enough income for workers and small businesses to weather the crisis.

Nearly 468,000 people lost their jobs during the pandemic, as official unemployment reaches 16 percent and 42.5 percent of the population now lives with less than $87 per month or $2.90 per day, the official poverty rate.

The Colombian opposition parties and the National Strike Committee, led by the main trade union confederations, have struggled to contain the demonstrations and channel them behind a National Dialogue with Duque, while at the same time illusions are being promoted about the pseudo-left senator and ex-guerrilla leader Gustavo Petro ahead of the 2022 general elections.

Countless commentaries in the corporate media have stated clearly that the uprising in Colombia is part of a global struggle to determine which class will pay for the pandemic crisis. The protests in Colombia, writes Foreign Policy, “offer a warning to other Latin American nations: Passing the bulk of the pandemic debt bills onto the poor and middle class could lead to significant pushback in the streets.”

After three years of growing protests, however, the recent uprising has shown an increasing inability of the politicians, NGOs and trade unions to divert social anger, as it becomes crystal clear that there is nothing to negotiate with Duque or the Colombian financial oligarchy for which he speaks.

Referring to Latin American governments, the financial outlet Bloomberg reported Wednesday that, despite increasing commodity prices, “few have money for social spending that could keep citizens afloat.” And, if taxes are “concentrated on companies and the rich… researchers warn of a scenario where companies hire less.”

In plain terms, finance capital will punish any country that raises social spending or takes consequential lockdown measures against the pandemic with capital flight, further accelerating the loss of jobs and the inflationary rise in prices.

A dialogue with Duque or his replacement by Petro or another pro-capitalist and nationalist politician would only be aimed at demobilizing the protests and politically disarming the working class as preparations for further austerity, regressive taxes and repression continue.

This was made clear by an op-ed titled “Let’s let Petro govern now!” published Thursday in El Tiempo, owned by Colombia’s richest man, Luis Carlos Sarmiento, who saw his net worth increase $2 billion to $11 billion during the pandemic.

“Let Mr. Gustavo Petro rise to power under pressure, to cover the fiscal hole left by [Duque’s predecessor] Juan Manuel Santos, to keep all the past and future subsidies, keep the teachers happy (so that they don’t strike like they did two months after Duque took office), the taxi drivers, from Uber and other platforms, health care workers, the associations, the private and public sector and the country in general.”

“Let him show the international credit risk agencies that Colombia is viable for loans and investments without the tax reform,” the piece continues, and concludes: “If installing Petro ends this chaos and achieves peace, let him rise to power today.”

Weak US jobs reports sparks calls for elimination of pandemic aid

Shannon Jones

The surprisingly weak US jobs report Friday is being used to ramp up demands to eliminate pandemic-related social support measures in order to force workers back into unsafe workplaces.

The US Labor Department reported a net of 266,000 new jobs in April, dramatically lower than the one million new jobs that were expected by economists. In fact, Goldman Sachs economists had expected a total of 1.3 million jobs in April.

People wait for a distribution of food in the Harlem neighborhood of New York, April 18, 2020. (Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

The Labor Department also revised downward its jobs total for March from 916,000 to 770,000. The unemployment rate, which had been expected to fall to 5.8 percent, instead edged upward to 6.1 percent. Nearly 500,000 filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week, still very high by historical standards. Overall, there are still more than 8.2 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic began.

The largest engine of new job growth in April was again leisure and hospitality, 331,000. This category includes businesses such as bars, hotels and restaurants that tend to pay lower wages. Manufacturing employment was down 18,000, largely in the auto industry where chip shortages have forced the temporary shutdown of some factories. Retail jobs fell by 15,000, and health care jobs declined by 4,000.

There were conflicting explanations for the dramatic fall off in new job creation under conditions where many pandemic restrictions have been eased or lifted. There were suggestions that it might be a statistical anomaly or that supply chain issues and worker shortages were a major factor.

However, from corporate interests, there were shrill complaints over the lack of able-bodied workers willing to work for paltry wages amidst a continuing pandemic. This was accompanied by demands for the ending of COVID-19-related social support measures.

On Thursday Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed the Biden administration’s stimulus package that was enacted by Congress in March for acting as an incentive for people not to work. The bill extended expanded unemployment benefits, including $300 weekly additions to state unemployment benefits, and provided a one-time $1,400 stimulus check for most Americans.

On Friday Republican Senator Marco Rubio tweeted: “I told you weeks ago that in Florida I hear from small business everyday that they can’t hire people because the government is paying them to not go back to work.”

Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said the jobs report demonstrated that the Biden administration was “sabotaging our recovery.” He added, “The White House is also in denial that many businesses—both small and large—can’t find the workers they need.”

Also on Friday the US Chamber of Commerce called for an immediate end to the $300 weekly unemployment benefit supplement. In a news release Neil Bradley, executive vice president and chief policy officer for the Chamber, said, “The disappointing jobs report makes it clear that paying people not to work is dampening what should be a stronger jobs market.”

Already South Carolina and Montana have said they plan to end the federal supplement, and other Republican-controlled states have indicated they may do the same.

This follows the ruling Wednesday by a federal judge striking down the eviction moratorium imposed by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration through June 30. This was a key measure aimed at blunting the immediate impact of the mass layoffs and wage cuts triggered by the pandemic. While the moratorium remains in effect as the Biden government appeals the ruling, it demonstrates the continuing movement toward ending pandemic-related support for workers.

Undoubtedly many workers are reluctant to return to unsafe workplaces or send their children to crowded schools while the pandemic is far from contained. For the super-wealthy, who do not face such issues, this is intolerable. As far as they are concerned workers should be forced to labor to create Wall Street profits under pain of starvation.

Pandemic-related concerns are still keeping millions from seeking work based on the well-founded concern over unsafe schools and workplaces. According to US Census Bureau Household Pulse surveys taken in late March, there were 6.3 million people not working because they needed to care for a child who was not in school or day care, and 2.1 million were caring for an older person.

Even so the US labor force is growing. There were an additional 430,000 workers either employed or looking for work in April, far more than the number of jobs created.

The suggestion that a paltry weekly supplement of $300 is keeping hundreds of thousands of workers out of the labor force is a damning indictment of the low wage regime that exists in the US. Living standards have been stagnating or falling for decades under successive Republican and Democratic administrations amid a stupendous growth in the number of superrich and their total wealth.

According to the Labor Department wages rose by 0.7 in April and 4.8 percent in leisure and hospitality, hardly a princely amount but clearly enough to raise the hackles of the financial aristocracy.

The jobs report had a silver lining for Wall Street. The weak numbers sparked a stock market rally as bad economic news is welcome news, since it means that huge government cash infusions will continue to flow to the markets. The Dow Jones average rose 200 points Friday to a record high. The S&P 500 rose 0.6 percent to an intraday record high. The Nasdaq Composite rose 1.3 percent.

Bank of America had warned that a robust jobs report for April could hit the market hard if the US Federal Reserve had dialed back its asset purchases and other financial stimulus measures aimed at propping up the markets.

For his part President Joe Biden reacted to the jobs report by issuing a statement calling for action on his infrastructure bill and American Families Plan, including child care subsidies and universal pre-kindergarten. These measures, aimed at deflecting the enormous anger in the working class over the criminal response of the ruling class to the pandemic, are insufficient in themselves to address the vast social crisis.

Whatever the tactical differences between Democrats and Republicans, all factions of the ruling class agree on the need to lift any restrictions on profit making. Schools must be reopened and measures adopted, whether the carrot or the stick, to get workers back into workplaces where they will be exposed to COVID-19.

While the Biden administration insists that the country is returning to pre-pandemic normalcy, the pandemic is far from over, with thousands in the US dying and hundreds of thousands getting sick every week. Millions are still unemployed and as ongoing strikes in the US demonstrate, workers are determined to resist the demands that they pay for the cost of the massive bailouts to Wall Street. The critical issue is the development of a socialist political leadership in the working class to provide this movement with a program and perspective.

US Secretary of State Blinken visits Kiev amidst ongoing tensions with Russia

Jason Melanovski

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday in Kiev, pledging Washington’s support as the former Soviet republic continues its military escalation with Moscow.

The visit, the first by a senior Biden administration official, comes on the heels of Russia’s announcement on April 22 that it was withdrawing the bulk of its forces near the Ukrainian border as it had completed its military drills there.

Former US Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken speaks during a news conference in Kiev, Ukraine, Friday, March 6, 2015 [Credit: AP Photo/Sergei Chuzavkov]

During his visit, Blinken reaffirmed the US commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence,” and also encouraged the country to continue to fight “corruption” and pass “reforms.” In reality, both are demands to prosecute the pro-Russian section of the Ukrainian oligarchy and to accelerate unpopular privatization measures of the Ukrainian economy.

“Ukraine is facing two challenges: aggression from outside, coming from Russia, and in effect aggression from within, coming from corruption, oligarchs and others who are putting their interests ahead of those of the Ukrainian people,” Blinken told reporters after his meeting with Zelensky.

For the Ukrainian government, the visit proved to be somewhat of a disappointment as it received no guarantees of NATO membership despite openly pleading for an invitation for months.

After a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda on Monday, Zelensky again reiterated his desire for an invitation, stating on Twitter, “Ukraine needs a clear signal about the European and Euro-Atlantic prospect. Postponing these issues for ‘later,’ ‘some day,’ ’10 years’ has to end.”

However, Blinken simply stated that Ukraine’s “Euro-Atlantic” aspirations were being discussed and said that the US was “actively looking” into strengthening its military presence there without providing any details.

In a move clearly meant to antagonize and provoke the Kremlin, the State Department’s undersecretary for political affairs, Victoria J. Nuland, accompanied Blinken on his trip to Kiev.

Nuland was one of the most vociferous supporters of the US-backed coup that overthrew the elected pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 and installed an anti-Moscow right-wing government.

In 2014, a taped conversation between Nuland, then assistant secretary of state, and the US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was released in which Nuland and Pyatt bluntly discussed their desired make-up of an incoming post-coup government in Kiev. The phone call marked a particularly revealing moment in US foreign policy as it laid bare US gangsterism. At one point, Nuland cried “F*** the EU” while criticizing some European countries for their hesitancy to immediately embrace the anti-Moscow right-wing coup.

In addition to serving in the Obama administration, Nuland also served as a foreign policy advisor to the war criminal Dick Cheney from 2003–2005 and later as US Ambassador to NATO during President George W. Bush’s second term. Nuland was a proponent of placing permanent NATO bases on its borders with Russia.

The appearance of both Blinken and Nuland in Kiev demonstrates that the US plans to continue using Ukraine to antagonize and weaken Russia militarily. At the same time, the US is using the carrot of NATO membership with the Ukrainian ruling class.

While Ukraine’s far-right paramilitary groups regularly boast of fighting for “glory” and “defending the motherland” until the last man, in reality Ukraine would stand little chance in the case of an all-out war with a militarily and economically superior Russia, facts of which both Blinken and Nuland are undoubtedly well aware.

Ukraine’s armed forces consist of just 209,000 compared to Russia’s 900,000. Despite receiving over $2 billion in military assistance since 2014, Ukraine’s defense spending in 2021 stands at $4.3 billion compared to Russia’s military budget of approximately $70 billion. In addition, Ukraine has continued to rapidly lose huge numbers of people and now numbers just 35 million. It is also Europe’s poorest country, according to the World Bank.

While in Ukraine, Blinken conspicuously failed to condemn the far-right elements that the US deployed in 2014 and which continue to play an oversized role in Ukraine due to their alliance with the Ukrainian oligarchy and Western imperialism.

Last week, the far right held a march in Kiev to celebrate the 78th anniversary of the establishment of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the 1st Galician. The Nazi unit was composed of Ukrainians and German volunteers and conscripts and was deployed against Soviet and Polish partisans during World War II.

Since 2014, such elements have been given free rein to hold marches, attack ethnic minorities and kill journalists and political opponents. The imperialist powers consider them highly useful in carrying out their war plans in the region and suppressing the working class.

It is thus no coincidence that Blinken failed to publicly condemn the march both in his remarks in Kiev and prior to his visit. Instead, he called on Russia to end its “irresponsible and destabilising behaviour” following G7 talks in London earlier in the week.

Zelensky, who himself has a Jewish background, condemned the march in a statement only nominally and sought to conflate the crimes of fascism with the Soviet Union. He released his statement only after NATO member Germany and NATO ally Israel publicly condemned the march.

The Ukrainian far right has been instrumental in preventing a negotiated settlement to the now over seven-year-long civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the lives of over 14,000 Ukrainians.

A major point of contention has been a special federated status for the separatist-controlled areas of the Donbass region. Such a move has been called a “red line” by Ukraine’s neo-fascist organizations. These organizations, including the Azov Battalion and the Right Sector, have close ties to Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and have threatened another coup in Kiev if a negotiated settlement is reached with Moscow and the separatists.

When Zelensky sought to negotiate with Germany, France and Russia—but without the US—about a ceasefire in the fall of 2019, thousands of neo-fascists marched in Ukraine against his government with the support of former President Petro Poroshenko. In early 2020, Zelensky then reshuffled his government, bringing in many figures with close ties to the US.

Zelensky has since also deepened his administration’s alliance with the far right. Most recently, he has been seeking to appoint the notorious neo-Nazi Serhiy Sternenko from the “Right Sector” as head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) in Odessa.