On eve of crisis election, Peru more than doubles its COVID-19 death count

Bill Van Auken

Just days before a sharply polarized second-round presidential election, the Peruvian government acknowledged that the country’s death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic is at least 2.5 times higher than previously acknowledged.

Based on the advice of Peruvian and international health experts, the number of deaths was revised from nearly 70,000 to 180,000. This makes Peru, with a population of 33 million, the country with the highest fatality rate in the world and the fifth highest in terms of absolute numbers of deaths.

The change in the fatality count was based upon including not just those who died after having tested positive for the virus, but also those who died with symptoms corresponding to COVID-19 or who had “an epidemiological link to a confirmed case.”

Families wait in a line for a free meal in Lima, Peru, June 17, 2020. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

Even the new number undoubtedly underestimates the real death toll. This is not merely a Peruvian phenomenon. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently declared that up to three times more people may have died from the pandemic than is reflected in official figures. This would put the real global death toll at over 10 million.

The president of Peru’s Medical Federation, Dr. Godofredo Talavera, told the BBC that the higher number came as no surprise and was a product of the breakdown of the country’s health care system and the policies of its government.

“We believe this occurs because our health system does not have the necessary conditions to care for patients.

“There has been no government support with oxygen, with intensive care beds. We do not have enough vaccines at the moment. The first line of care has not been reactivated. All this makes us the first country in the world in mortality,” he said.

Compounding the crisis has been the rapid spread of the more contagious and lethal variants of the virus, including the one that originated in the Amazonian city of Manaus, Brazil, as well as the government’s mismanagement of the purchase and rollout of vaccines, with still barely 70,000 vaccinations taking place daily. Former President Martín Vizcarra, who failed to organize vaccine contracts, was embroiled in a scandal after secretly having himself, his wife and closest political associates vaccinated and then falsely claiming they were part of a vaccine trial.

More than half of the deaths have taken place in this year’s second wave of the pandemic.

The government’s admission of the catastrophic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic came just six days before Peruvians are set to go to the polls in one of the most politically polarized elections in the country’s history.

In a second-round ballot on June 6, Pedro Castillo, a former teachers strike leader, will face Keiko Fujimori, leader of the Peruvian right and daughter of the former dictator Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving prison sentences on charges related to corruption and police-state massacres.

According to the latest poll, Castillo is leading Fujimori by 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent. Fujimori has managed to close what had been a two-to-one lead by Castillo in the aftermath of April’s first round election, with the bulk of the corporate media echoing her virulent anticommunist campaign, linking Castillo to “terrorism” and claiming his election would turn Peru into another Venezuela.

The right-wing candidate and her supporters also managed to exploit a May 23 massacre of 16 people in the central Amazonian region of Junín. Gunmen killed 16 people in attacks on two bars that reportedly doubled as brothels.

Without even going to the scene of the crime, the military and police immediately blamed the killings on Sendero Luminoso, the Maoist guerrilla movement that was defeated in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that left tens of thousands dead in the 1980s. While splinters from the movement have operated in the region in collaboration with drug gangs, there is no history of them carrying out such attacks.

Castillo has appealed to the immense popular hostility to the major parties, including Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular, and their ties to the wholesale corruption that has seen every living ex-president charged in bribery and kickback schemes. Keiko Fujimori was herself arrested and jailed on charges of corruption and leading a criminal organization, i.e., her party.

In the face of the anticommunist campaign of Fujimori and the unions, Castillo has repeatedly sworn his allegiance to private property and his support for foreign investment, insisting that his main aims are to improve tax collection and drive better bargains with the transnational mining companies.

The prospect of a Castillo victory has sparked talk of a potential coup by Peru’s military or a nullification of his presidency by Congress. There is every indication, however, that if elected Castillo would follow a similar path as former President Ollanta Humala, who ran as a left nationalist and once in office pursued a right-wing, pro-capitalist policy.

The crisis in Peru is mirrored throughout Latin America. The World Health Organization’s emergencies chief Michael Ryan said on Tuesday that eight of the 10 countries reporting the highest COVID-19 mortality rates in the last week were in the region.

“The situation in South America right now remains of very high concern,” he told reporters. “South America was really in a difficult situation only a couple of months ago, and that situation again is starting to turn in the wrong direction.” He noted that death rates have increased by 20 percent in Bolivia and Paraguay over the past week and pointed to stunningly high test positivity rates in a number of countries: 37 percent in Paraguay, 33 percent in Argentina and 30 percent in Colombia.

At the same time, he said, the fact that “case fatality rates in South America [are generally] higher than in many parts of the rest of the world” was attributable to the deterioration of health care systems on the continent “for a very long time,” under the impact of successive IMF-directed austerity measures.

“The transmission of the disease in the region is intense, the health care systems are under great pressure, and this is reflected in the high mortality rates,” Ryan concluded.

The pandemic crisis gripping the region has found expression in the chaos surrounding plans for the Copa America soccer championship, which was cancelled last year due to the onslaught of the coronavirus. Initially, Colombia and Argentina were to host the games between 10 South American teams. The Colombian government was forced to pull out in the face mass popular protests that have continued into a second month, while Argentina withdrew this week because of surging infection rates.

Now an invitation has been extended by the Brazilian government of fascistic President Jair Bolsonaro, who dismissed COVID-19 as a “little flu” and has presided over the uncontrolled spread of the virus and the second largest recorded death toll, or 463,000, in the world.

Ethel Maciel, the head professor of epidemiology and well-known coronavirus researcher at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, described the announcement that Brazil would host the games as “incredible,” noting the new spread of the variant first identified in India. “It is very sad,” she said. “It is a great irresponsibility with the lives of Brazilians. Once again, financial questions are superseding questions of public health.”

Last weekend, there were mass demonstrations throughout Brazil denouncing the government’s homicidal mishandling of the pandemic and demanding the downfall of Bolsonaro.

Danish public broadcaster reveals ongoing NSA spying on top EU officials

Alex Lantier

On Monday evening, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron protested official revelations of electronic spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), aided by Danish intelligence, targeting top German, French, Norwegian and Swedish officials. The targets included Merkel, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former social-democratic chancellor candidate Peer Steinbrück.

Eight years ago, in 2013, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed mass NSA electronic spying and data collection targeting the entire world. Since then, revelations of mass spying by NATO intelligence agencies have gone hand in hand with stepped-up monitoring and censorship of the Internet and social media. The fact that top European officials were targeted for years after Snowden’s revelations, amid US assurances that they would not be spied upon, underscores that no one is protected from the massive, ongoing electronic dragnet.

French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Snowden, now exiled in Russia, wrote on Twitter, “There should be an explicit requirement for full public disclosure not only from Denmark, but their senior partner as well.” Referring to Biden’s upcoming trip to Europe on June 11-13, Snowden pointed to Biden’s record as vice president under Obama’s NSA spying operations: “Biden is well-prepared to answer for this when he soon visits Europe since, of course, he was deeply involved in this scandal the first time around.”

NSA use of Danish assets to spy on European politicians was revealed on Sunday evening by an extensive report by Danish public television (DR), citing anonymous Danish official sources. This report, the product of high-level collaboration between leading European media, was shared with the Süddeutsche Zeitung and NDR and WDR television in Germany, Le Monde in France, Swedish public broadcaster SVT and Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

The operation, code-named “Operation Dunhammer,” involved a collaboration between the NSA and Danish Military Intelligence ( Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, FE), which handed over Internet data traffic passing through Denmark to be searched by the NSA. The FE launched its own internal investigation of the program in 2015, however. The DR writes, “The investigation was carried out by four hackers and intelligence analysts who studied US-Danish collaboration using great secrecy, so the NSA would not become aware of the FE investigation.”

They found that the NSA was searching through this data using phone numbers and other personal data of many top European officials. One Danish source told DR that the NSA “got everything they used their phones for. It is impossible to deny that this was a targeted spying operation.” Another said, “This is an affair that is emerging as the greatest intelligence scandal in Danish history.”

Due to its strategic location between Britain, continental Europe, Scandinavia and Russia, Denmark is critical for spying on EU-Russia communications. Collaboration on this, another Danish official told DR, “has strategic significance for US-Danish relations.” As a result, even after “Operation Dunhammer” was formally ended in 2015, FE officials have kept collaborating with NSA spying.

In 2018, however, the 2015 FE report on “Operation Dunhammer” was leaked to Denmark’s Intelligence Oversight Authority (TET), which investigated the report.

Last August, several top FE officials were sacked without explanation. Thomas Ahrenkiel, who ran the FE during “Operation Dunhammer,” was recalled as Danish Ambassador to Germany, and his successor Lars Findsen was sacked for hiding information on FE operations from the government. Significantly, this mass sacking of top Danish intelligence officials came just after Defense Minister Tine Bramsen received the “Operation Dunhammer” report. DR also cited a TET press statement that concluded that the FE “launched operational activities in violation of Danish law.”

These events again expose the universal character of NATO intelligence agencies’ online spying, aimed above all at the working class. While the NSA undoubtedly has dedicated the most resources and infrastructure to electronic spying, Snowden’s courageous revelations also helped bring to light mass electronic surveillance in Germany, France and other EU countries.

Moreover, NSA documents leaked by Snowden show that in 2013 the NSA already had five ongoing partnerships like the one now revealed with Denmark.

Shortly after Snowden’s revelations, the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) contrasted the mass sympathy for him with the universal hostility of capitalist governments, writing :

While Snowden’s actions have met with support and gratitude from workers and young people in the US and across the planet, that is not the case with the governments that rule them. All of them bow to the bullying from Washington. Like the US government, they defend wealthy ruling classes under conditions of ever-widening social inequality, and like Washington, they fear that their conspiracies against their own people will be exposed to the light of day.

The WSWS added that EU countries, who refused Snowden asylum, were doubtless concerned that “material in his possession will implicate their own governments in similar crimes.”

This analysis, fully borne out by subsequent events, again illuminates the EU powers’ muted initial response to this week’s revelations in Denmark. Berlin issued a statement on Monday morning that it “is in contact with all national and international partners to obtain clarification.” The Elysée presidential palace in Paris refused Le Monde ’s request for comment, instead sending Junior Minister for European Affairs Clément Beaune to speak to France-Info.

Snowden’s whistleblowing revealed US wiretapping of Washington’s EU “allies,” including Merkel, forcing Obama to issue empty promises to halt spying on EU officials in January 2014. Beaune nevertheless claimed it was unclear whether Washington spies on EU officials. “It is very serious, we must see if our EU, Danish partners committed mistakes or errors in their cooperation with US agencies,” he said. He called to “verify the correctness of the report,” adding, “And on the American side, we should see if there was … listening, spying on political officials.”

On Monday evening, at a summit on Franco-German military cooperation on the war in Mali and plans for new joint fighter plane and tank systems, Macron and Merkel spoke on the issue. “This is not acceptable between allies, and even less between allies and European partners,” Macron said, adding, “We requested that our Danish and American partners provide all the information on these revelations and on these past facts. We are awaiting these answers.”

Merkel said she “could only agree” with Macron’s statements, adding that she was “reassured” by the Danish government’s criticisms of NSA spying. She said, “Apart from establishing the facts, this is a good starting point to arrive at relations that are truly based on mutual trust.”

In fact, these revelations again highlight the insoluble conflicts inside the NATO alliance, revealed by Trump’s earlier threats to slap billions of dollars in tariffs on EU exports to the United States and to retaliate against firms involved in EU military projects. One of these threats, which occurred as the “Operation Dunhammer” investigation was underway, was Trump’s offer to buy Greenland from Denmark. He then denounced Denmark’s refusal to sell its Arctic territory, while then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced China’s commercial presence in Greenland.

While Biden has been at pains to downplay these commercial and military tensions, casting his election as paving the way for improved US-EU relations, none of the underlying conflicts over control of world markets and strategic advantage have been resolved. Moreover, it seems likely the FE’s “Operation Dunhammer” file will reveal that Obama’s January 2014 assurances that the NSA would stop spying on top EU officials were lies.

Above all, nearly a decade after Snowden’s revelations, it is ever more apparent that the central target of electronic spying is the working class. Massive data collection programs have enabled not only surveillance but censoring of social media posts and the identification and legal targeting of workers engaged in social protests, such as the “yellow vest” movement in France. The defense of fundamental democratic rights requires the international political mobilization of the working class against the reactionary scheming of imperialist military and intelligence agencies.

Power and Corruption in El Salvador

Carmen Rodríguez

In less than a week, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and his Legislative Assembly have managed to lock in full political power in El Salvador, dismissing sitting Supreme Court justices and de facto naming new ones as well as a new attorney general, while passing legislation that grants immunity to loyal functionaries linked to irregular purchases during the pandemic.

“A blow has been struck against the Republic’s democratic institutions and the Constitution,” said Celia Medrano, a human rights activist and former candidate for secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “Democracy has been wounded, the damage done. We saw that danger to democracy with the unequivocal use of the armed forces for political coercion, starting with the military assault on the Legislative Assembly [last year], with no forceful action taken at the time.”

Bukele’s legislators removed the justices and attorney general without legal cause, and in their place named five justices who were not on the list of candidates for the process in place. Moreover, two of the de facto-seated justices are the targets of legal complaints and have direct ties to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party.

Rodolfo Delgado, the attorney general named by Bukele’s deputies, is also linked to the official party. He was the defense attorney for the pretrial hearing of the director of the National Civil Police (PNC) on charges of having participated in the military action against the Legislative Assembly on February 9, 2020. Delgado had served as head of the prosecutor’s office’s Organized Crime Unit in 2013, at which time a former agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency accused him of having ties to a drug trafficking organization known as the Texis Cartel.

“What they call removal and appointment do not comply with due process as established by the Constitution,” said constitutional scholar and former diplomat Napoleón Campos. “They are in noncompliance with a series of articles in the Constitution, making the appointments illegal. Nor has there been respect for due process in the selection of what they call the new attorney general and justices.”

The dismissed justices were given no hearing, nor were they the subject of any investigation. The legislators loyal to Bukele claimed that links to both the country’s left and right were the main reason for their removal from the court. But a document out of the Legislative Assembly states that the magistrates were removed for not supporting Bukele’s actions during the pandemic, actions that the Supreme Court had classified as human rights violations.

“There is another part of the Constitution that has to do with the right to a defense, which is a fundamental right,” Campos said. “A fraud has been perpetrated against the Constitution by the procedure used for removal, a fraud against the law for not allowing the use of the fundamental right of defense. Neither in form nor content can this action be considered anything other than a flagrant violation of the Constitution.”

For Celia Medrano, the Bukele administration’s actions since February 2020 are proof that neither the president nor the new legislators have any interest in respecting institutions, laws or the Salvadoran Constitution. The outlook, she said, is only getting darker, since the concentration of executive, legislative and judicial power in one person eliminates any protection for those citizens who file complaints or suffer violations of their rights.

“It’s been clear since the first day of the [current] Legislative Assembly that no respect for the Constitution exists, nor will it,” Medrano said. “Instead, there is individual interpretation by the sector in power that imposes its own understanding on constitutional precepts in order to justify violation of the Constitution itself. It is not a matter of ignorance; it is a matter of harnessing the power of the Assembly to take full control over the judicial branch and the public ministry.

The removal of the justices and top prosecutor was condemned by Latin American social organizations, by the IACHR, by Ecuador’s Constitutional Court and by ambassadors accredited in El Salvador. Moreover, the Organization of American States (OAS) said in a statement that it “rejects the actions of the executive that guided these decisions.”

Various Salvadoran civil organizations requested the United States to convoke the OAS’s Permanent Council to enact the inter-American democratic charter in order to “retore democratic order” in the Central American nation. “We are convinced that this crisis will only aggravate the causes that have historically generated migration toward the United States and will make impossible the creation of better living conditions,” the organizations said.

The President and Deputies Ensure Amnesty for Corruption

Four days after what many call a “rightwing coup,” deputies loyal to Bukele approved legislation proposed by the president and promoted in the Assembly by the official party’s caucus that in essence shields from trial or audit government officials who have made or will make irregular purchases, which they justify as actions meant to fight the pandemic. The law opens a wide path to impunity.

Known as “the act for the use of products for medical treatment in exceptional public health situations occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic,” Bukele’s legislation was approved by 63 deputies of the official Nuevas Ideas party in the second legislative session. It allows the health minister, Francisco Alabí, and all the public health system’s institutions to carry out contracting and make direct purchases outside the regulations established in the Public Administration Procurement and Acquisitions Law (LACAP).

“What’s most serious is that there had already been a notable setback in the fight against impunity and corruption and now here we are up against another set of crimes against the Constitution, mainly because a self-amnesty is being decreed,” said Campos, the constitutional scholar. “No government has the right to grant itself amnesty or cleanse itself of crimes. It is another flagrant violation of the rule of law.”

Alabí himself was being investigated, accused of violating LACAP rules that prohibit public officials from doing business with the State. During the pandemic, he approved purchases by the Ministry of Health of rubber boots and medical supplies from a family business and a company owned by another government official, at a cost of more than half a million dollars over value.

Reports from the Latin American health news collective Salud con Lupa found that the company that manufactured the masks purchased by the Health Ministry was owned by Koki Aguilar, who at the time was serving as president of the Environmental Fund of El Salvador (FONAB). Aguilar, who also gave out face masks for his personal campaign, said the protective masks were produced with recycled material that the Bukele administration bought.

Moreover, the magazine Gato Encerrado, revealed that Alabí signed a contract for US$225,000 with his family’s company for the purchase of rubber boots. That’s not all. The Health and Agriculture Ministries signed contracts of more than 3.5 million dollars with foreign companies that sell other, non-medical products. Standing out among the irregular purchases mentioned is a corn purchase from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, in which the Agriculture Ministry paid 2.5 million dollars more than what a company in El Salvador would charge.

The controversial legislation was passed just six months after Raúl Melara — the attorney general removed on May 1, 2021 — launched an investigation against the health minister for indications of corruption in the irregular purchases. It also came amid other investigations of alleged corruption in the Bukele government carried out by the Inter-American Commission Against Impunity in El Salvador (CICIES, for its Spanish initials).

“We’re running against the current of universal democratic clauses at the precise moment in which an ally like the United States has announced financial support for the CICIES,” Campos pointed out. “This dislocates the country’s position and its international commitments. A serious line of impunity has been drawn that becomes another fraud. We cannot cover with a cloak of impunity the prosecutor’s office’s open investigation, through the Court of Accounts, of the irregular purchases carried out by the executive during a pandemic.”

The United States Threatens

In Washington, the dismissal of the justices did not sit well with the White House. Vice-President Kamala Harris, who oversees the working group in migration, which is exploring the causes of Central American migration and the problems of the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), issued a warning about the Biden administration’s reaction to the undermining of democracy and its institutions by Bukele and his deputies.

“This weekend, we learned that the Salvadoran Assembly moved to undermine its nation’s highest court,” she said on May 4 at a Washington DC conference on democracy in the Americas. “An independent judiciary is critical to a healthy democracy and a strong economy. On this front, on every front, we must respond.” She went on to say, “We are focused on attacking the causes and the roots of migration and among the roots we have identified corruption, impunity, the lack of good governance.”

Bukele had earlier told foreign ambassadors to El Salvador during a private meeting that the removal of the justices had been done in compliance with the law. That meeting was later made public over official government channels, making it look as though the international community supported the Salvadoran president.

“What has happened must be understood within a geopolitical analysis wider than the issue of the El Salvador government’s relations with the United States and with other governments,” Medrano said. “We only need to observe the last chain of events in which diplomatic representatives were assured that their meeting was private, and it ended up publicized. The international community is unlikely to take forceful action. We only need to see ourselves in the mirrors of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras.”

To the messages of concern out of the U.S. were added warnings about the China-El Salvador relationship. Currently, Bukele is flirting with the Asian country to encourage them to buy more than $ 1.5 billion of Salvadoran debt. This does not imply free cooperation, but rather passing the debt to a third party. Several senators and congressmen who had already sent multiple letters to President Bukele over the allegations of human rights abuses, attacks on the press and journalists, and the danger of concentrating power in the executive branch, are now expressing concern over the rapprochement with the Chinese government, and its probable negative impact on human rights, institutionalism and the rule of law.

“It is evident that the Salvadoran authorities do not expect constant monitoring of transparency and respect for human rights, as the United States has announced,” Medrano said. “It is becoming increasingly clear at the international level that we are in an authoritarian regime and that there are no limits for those who govern [and no] respect for internal laws, much less international regulations or even basic forms of understanding. We are facing a government that is not interested in having a good relationship with its neighbors or with other governments other than one in which its acions are praised and accepted.”

Carmen Aponte, a former ambassador and adviser to former U.S. President Barack Obama, warned recently that there is talk in Washington of cutting financial aid, limiting Salvadoran citizens’ ingress to U.S. territory, making public more names of officials linked to corruption, and recommending against approval of more loans to the Salvadoran government, as long as Bukele and his deputies continue to show no interest in respecting democracy and the independence of Salvadoran institutions.

Said Napoleón Campos, “This makes us a pariah in the international sphere because it labels us as anti-democratic and anti-institutional at a time when all mechanisms of accountability should be reinforced. This has a financial as well as political dimension, because the messages of impunity that we are sending out can affect the country financially, in the placement of bonds, for example. Or when it comes to requesting loans, this government will absolutely face serious questions.”

Strikes and protests hit UK schools

Harvey Singh

Educators across the UK continue to fight attacks on their jobs, pay and conditions, the academisation of schools, and victimisation.

A spree of strikes and protests since the reopening of schools has been called attention to earlier this month and last month on the World Socialist WebSite. Despite the common issues confronting education workers all over the country, the education unions have worked to keep strikes isolated to single schools and colleges.

School staff at Tendring Technology College are fighting a staffing restructure by the Academy Enterprise Trust (AET) that will result in teaching and support staff job losses, a cut in the hours worked by school nurses and the slashing of £700,000 from the school’s annual budget from September. A three-day strike took place from May 25.

Staff on the picket line at Tendring Technology College on May 25 (credit: @neueastern)

Ian Silverton, head of history at the college, explained to ITV News, “As much as it can be sold in terms of restructuring, we fundamentally will have less people in the school. There will be less pastoral care, there will be less teachers able to have an effective role, because their hours might be greatly increased. There’s also the situation where essentially we’re losing staff like midday assistants.”

Parents are especially concerned about the loss of pastoral support. Jessica Davis told BBC News, “I’m absolutely passionate about the plight of our [Tendring Technology] teachers. They were called into a meeting and told there was excessive staffing.

“We’ve had two children who have lost their lives in our local community in the last nine weeks... and their response to those needs, unfortunately, is to cut the support. It is dangerous, it is really, really dangerous. If we’ve lost those children with those staff in situ, what is going to be the situation with those support staff cut?”

The AET runs 58 schools. Its head, Julian Drinkall, receives £290,000 a year. It has been claimed that the trust takes £1,250 per pupil from the £4,500 given by the Department for Education, though the trust’s managers claim the figure is £575. According to National Education Union (NEU) representative Jerry Glazier, Tendring Technology College “had a surplus in its budget last year and was projected to have one this year”.

Following the strike and talks with the NEU, the AET offered to pause the restructure.

Staff at Nottingham Academy, part of the Greenwood Academies Trust, took strike action on May 11 and 18 against a forced reorganisation by school management. The second reorganisation in two years threatened higher workloads and teachers being forced to compete with their colleagues in applying for their own jobs. The NEU suspended planned strike action on May 20, claiming to have “won significant concessions from the employer.” No details of the agreement have emerged.

Another restructuring is taking place at Merrill Academy and Lees Brook Community School in Derby, both taken over by the Archway Learning Trust in February. At least 20 jobs are slated to go, and dozens of staff member will receive reduced wages. The Trust intends to make savings of around £1 million.

The NEU and the National Association of School Master Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) previously criticised the restructuring as “ill-timed” and “unreasonable”, given the pandemic, calling for it to be postponed. The NEU said staff will be balloted for strike action but has not set a date.

Around 100 teachers at City and Islington sixth form college in London held a three-day strike beginning Tuesday last week. The dispute is over management’s demand that teachers work additional evenings and afternoons interviewing prospective students. They have threatened not to grant teachers a recommended pay award if they participate in the strike.

Two schools on the south coast are fighting academisation. Academisation of schools was first introduced under the Blair Labour government. A half-way house to the privatisation of education, Academies are publicly financed but privately run and are exempt from teachers’ national pay and conditions agreements. Peacehaven Primary school’s governing body was instructed by East Sussex County Council in 2019 to explore academy conversion but decided against following strikes and protests. The council then imposed an Interim Executive Board (IEB), with a direction from the Department for Education to “actively consider a sponsored academy solution.”

A consultation on conversion is due this autumn but the IEB has already applied for academy status.

Parent Caroline Gridley was quoted in the Brighton & Hove News as saying, “The fact that they have applied for an academy order before any consultation is a joke. IEB chair Penny Gaunt has already told parents that it is a consultation and not a referendum which suggests she’s not listening to parents, staff or the local community.”

NEU members held a one day strike last week, protesting outside County Hall in Lewes where the council was in session. Staff last walked out on May 5, when many parents and children joined them on the picket line to show support before marching through the town centre.

On May 15, school staff and parents marched through Brighton to oppose the academisation of Moulsecoomb Primary school by the Pioneer Academy Trust. The government imposed an Academy Order on the school in 2019 after it was rated “inadequate” by Ofsted. However, parents and teachers say the school has significantly improved since then and the order should be revoked. Recently, 96 percent of parents voted to keep the school under the control of the local authority.

The two-year dispute has resulted in four days of strikes by teachers and three academy trusts have so far been deterred from taking over the school. Earlier this month, parents padlocked the gates of the school to prevent a visit by the CEO and representatives of the Pioneer Academy Trust. On May 25, campaigners delivered 93 pledges from parents to Pioneer’s head office in Farnborough threatening to withdraw their children if the trust takes over

Two victimised teachers, both NEU reps, have been reinstated after local strikes and protests. Louise Lewis, of North Huddersfield Trust school, was reinstated after four days of strikes, with more planned, by her colleagues. She was suspended last year after trying to organise individual and whole school risk assessments regarding COVID-19.

Iain Forsyth has been reinstated at Leaways Special School in Hackney, London, after colleagues took 20 days of strike action since December 2020. He was sacked for making complaints to management regarding work conditions, including sick pay, which was being paid for only seven days in a year. Staff were also unhappy with the lack of provision for students.

The reinstatement of these local union representatives underscores the criminal role played by the NEU nationally. The union has never even compiled a list of those members suffering victimisation (in line with its earlier non-recording of educators who had died from COVID-19 ), let alone consulted its members on any national, or even regional, action. They have thrown their reps to the wolves, leaving them to fight on a school-by-school basis. Thanks to the solidarity and support of colleagues and parents, several have been reinstated, but many more are still sacked or suspended.

Whatever the fate of individual reps, the education unions have so fully sabotaged any fight for safety measures in schools that the requirement to wear masks in secondary school classrooms has been withdrawn even as infections surge .

At Leaways, Forsyth was reinstated with the promise that the school will provide sick pay for 10 days a year rather than the seven it had been paying. This is a fraction of the days received by most teachers: full pay for 25 working days and half pay for another 25 for teachers in their first year of service, up to 100 at full pay plus 100 at half after four years of service. Any Leaways staff members left with serious health complications in a new wave of COVID-19 will quickly be left destitute.

Two Cubans dead, 10 missing after raft capsizes off Key West

Alexander Fangmann

The United States Coast Guard announced Sunday that it was suspending the search for 10 Cuban migrants, who were lost at sea after their vessel capsized 16 miles south of Key West, Florida. Aside from the missing 10, two other Cubans were found dead, while just eight survived the voyage.

While the number of Cuban migrants attempting to reach the US is well below the number seen prior to 2017, deteriorating economic conditions on the island following the collapse of tourism and the fall-off in subsidies from Venezuela have led increased numbers to attempt the dangerous journey.

A small boat crew from the Coast Guard Cutter Dauntless approaches a rustic vessel with Cuban migrants onboard south of Marathon, Fla., on June 13, 2016. (U.S. Coast Guard photo)

Reports indicate the group of Cubans left the port of Mariel, west of Havana, on May 23, only to see their vessel capsize and disappear Wednesday night. Neovys Morales, a friend of the family of one of the migrants, told ABC Miami, “It was a rustic boat—what the Cubans call ‘un balsa’—a raft made of barrels.”

The disaster is the largest loss of life among Cuban migrants since last November, when a group of 17 left northwest Cuba in a fishing vessel and were never heard from again. In a separate incident, a group of 11 migrants was interdicted by the Coast Guard off Islamorada, a small group of islands in the Florida Keys. One man on the raft was dead, apparently due to a loss of necessary medication when the boat capsized during the journey.

Most of those picked up at sea by the Coast Guard are expected to be “repatriated,” that is, returned to Cuba, though it is not clear if that will be the fate of the eight who were found off Key West. In just the past week, two different groups of Cubans, numbering 29 in all, were interdicted and sent back to the island. Already, since the beginning of the fiscal year in October, the Coast Guard says it has caught 308 Cubans at sea, a large increase from the previous year, in which only 49 were caught making the attempt.

These numbers are a far cry from the number of those who attempted the journey before former US President Barack Obama ended the “wet foot, dry foot” policy beginning January 2017, in one of his last acts in office. Under that policy, which began in 1995, Cuban migrants who were able to make it to land were able to easily remain in the US and claim residency. In 2016, 1,845 Cubans made it to the US in this way, while in 2018 the number fell to just 107.

Since the end of the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, Cuban migrants have been treated just as monstrously by US immigration officials as other migrants and refugees. Additionally, legal avenues for migration have all but disappeared following the shutdown of consular services at the US Embassy in Cuba by the Trump administration in September 2017.

Previously, 20,000 visas per year were allocated to Cubans wishing to migrate legally to the US. However, State Department officials shut down visa processing due to alleged “attacks” causing brain injuries and other murky symptoms it claimed were suffered by CIA agents and US diplomats stationed in Cuba.

Although no real evidence was produced which would substantiate these allegations, the shutdown of consular services was entirely in line not only with the anti-immigrant position of the Trump administration. Trump also rolled back many of the Obama administration’s moves to normalize relations with Cuba in an attempt to exacerbate the crisis on the island and foment regime change, a long-term goal of reactionaries in both Miami and Washington D.C.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the growing crisis, which had already reached an advanced stage owing to the continued tightening of the economic screws by the Trump administration and the economic collapse of Havana’s close ally Venezuela. The latter had been supplying Cuba with oil on extremely preferable terms since 2000. Due to falling Venezuelan output, driven by US sanctions and the fall in the price of crude oil and other commodities in 2014, Cuba’s shipments from Venezuela fell by nearly half, from around 110,000 barrels per day to about 55,000 from 2016 on.

Although Cuba was less hard hit than many other countries in Latin America due to its relatively advanced public health infrastructure and has registered only around 950 deaths, the Cuban government has estimated the economy shrank 11 percent last year, the biggest contraction since 1993. Restrictions on travel around the world led to a sharp fall-off in tourism, with visitors to the island numbering only 1.1 million in 2020, compared to around 4 million in most recent years. Minister of Economy and Planning Alejandro Gil has indicated the country only expects to see 2.2 million visitors in 2021.

Additionally, Cuban sugar producer AZCUBA has reported the sugar harvest this year is around one-third lower than expected, and at 816,000 tons, the smallest harvest since 1908. Sugar production was hit by a combination of a lack of fuel for sugar milling and harvesting, as well as COVID-19 outbreaks among sugar industry workers.

The reduction in hard currency as a result of these developments and others has led to shortages of all kinds of imports, which dropped 40 percent over the previous year. Cuba imports around 80 percent of its food and other necessary commodities. The scarcity of hard currency and the pressure on imports also led to the end of the dual currency system in January of this year, which effectively served as a subsidy for both Cuban industry and individuals.

Cuban state-owned companies are being given a year to balance their books, but it is expected that many state companies will be rendered insolvent by the change, which leaves them unable to take advantage of previous favorable exchange rates. Prices have risen dramatically due to these measures, with official inflation estimated at 160 percent. Salaries and pensions of public sector workers were increased between 400 percent and 500 percent in an attempt to soften the blow, but the increase does not apply to those working in the increasingly growing private sector, which officially numbers around 600,000 people, or around 13 percent of the labor force.

Far from offering any help to its close neighbor, the Biden administration has maintained Trump’s policies in regard to Cuba. While he had campaigned on reversing measures that “have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights,” nothing has changed since Biden entered the White House. Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on May 14 that Cuba was being placed on a list of countries that are “not cooperating fully with United States antiterrorism efforts,” along with Iran, North Korea, Syria and Venezuela. In regard to Cuba, the move was largely symbolic, since Trump already placed Cuba on the list of state sponsors of terrorism before he left office.

Juan S. Gonzalez, the White House National Security Council’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere, told the Miami Herald’s Andres Oppenheimer, the Biden administration has “no major urgency to invest a lot of time” on Cuba “unless we see concrete things,” noting “Human rights will be a key factor in any conversation that we may have with the regime.”

Biden no doubt hopes his aggressive stance in regard to Cuba will translate into electoral support for the Democrats among right-wing Cuban Americans in Florida.

In the midst of this crisis, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) held its Eighth Congress on April 16-19. Notably, Raúl Castro stepped down from his position as First Secretary of the PCC, handing the office over to Miguel Díaz-Canel, marking the first time since the Cuban Revolution that a Castro has not held an official leading position. President of Cuba since 2019, Díaz-Canel is a trusted functionary, whose main goal is to find a way to maintain the bureaucracy’s grip on political power while it attempts to appropriate the country’s remaining assets and expose more of its economy to market forces.

More changes in this direction were announced in February, when the government announced an expansion of the private sector. The list of approved private sector activities was increased from just 127 to more than 2,000, although supplies and credit remain scarce.

In a speech to the congress, Díaz-Canel noted that while the US embargo and sanctions represented an enormous obstacle, “In asserting this truth, there is no intent to hide the deficiencies of our own reality, which has been repeatedly discussed. In the last three decades, the economic, commercial, and financial blockade [has been] intensified opportunistically and with evil intent in periods of great crisis so that hunger and misery might provoke a social explosion that undermines the legitimacy of the Revolution.”

Tire workers die of COVID in Argentina after pseudo-left-led union enforces return to work

Andrea Lobo

In a matter of five days last week, two workers at the tire factory of the Argentine company FATE died of COVID-19 after the Tire Worker Union (SUTNA) led by the Partido Obrero (PO; Workers Party) collaborated with management and the Peronist government to keep the plant operating despite growing outbreaks.

Víctor Sotelo, 42, passed away on Tuesday and Javier Gimenez died on Saturday, both due to COVID-19.

FATE plant at San Fernando (Wikimedia Commons)

Workers immediately called attention to the SUTNA’s responsibility, with one writing on the union’s Facebook page, “Gentlemen, adopt different measures; don’t come looking for votes from your co-workers, they are risking their lives and those of their families. I’m greatly saddened by what happened to Javier, a great friend and co-worker who passed away today from Covid…”

With hundreds more that have been infected at the FATE, Pirelli and Bridgestone plants where the SUTNA is present, the pandemic has exploded the claims of the Partido Obrero and its pseudo-left partners in the union leadership that they represent a “combative,” “left” and even “revolutionary” alternative to the right-wing Peronist bureaucrats that dominate the Argentine unions.

At the service of the multinationals and the Argentine oligarch and owner of FATE, Javier Madanes Quintanilla (whose net worth was listed as $1.6 billion in 2018), the SUTNA and its pseudo-left leaders used their radical phraseology as a tool to better suppress opposition among workers to keeping the factories during almost the entire pandemic.

This week, beyond a minute of silence for Giménez, the union refused to even shut down the plant where there is clearly an ongoing outbreak.

Just like the openly right-wing unions, the SUTNA not only failed to mention that Gimenez died of COVID-19 in its official statement, but the union did not even report the death of Sotelo, who worked as a contractor for a third party.

While competing for the SUTNA leadership from the Partido Obrero, even the union officials that belong to the Morenoite Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS; Socialist Workers Party) have joined the union’s secretary general Alejandro Crespo, a longtime Partido Obrero official, in seeking to deflect blame from the union.

On Saturday, the PTS members of the SUTNA Steering Committee, Victor Ottoboni and Enzo Pozi, along with the union delegate at FATE, Hernán Minguez, wrote a piece reporting both deaths and indicating that Giménez got infected inside the plant.

“The position adopted by the national leadership of the SUTNA and the San Fernando branch, controlled by the [PO-led] Black List was to guarantee production,” they wrote, adding that the union “does not place as its first priority protecting the lives and health of the families of its members and does everything possible to prevent disrupting production.”

The original article taken down by the PTS

Without providing any explanation, the PTS website, La Izquierda Diario, took down the article shortly after it was posted and uploaded a new version on Sunday without the above-cited passages or any mention of the active role of the union in herding workers into the plant. Instead, the article complains of the “lack of intervention” by the union and its “grave error” in not convoking an assembly of members and a meeting of the Steering Committee this month—a complaint that shamelessly seeks to provide an alibi for the PTS and other forces on the Steering Committee.

After over a year of keeping the plant open, the PTS union officials cynically write that “tires are not only nonessential, but these companies have enough stock for months.” They add, “many co-workers think that we should not be working.”

Instead of fighting for these demands of the rank-and-file, however, the PTS officials ultimately propose another avenue that may ultimately be acceptable to the corporations: a 15-day shutdown to disinfect the plant and test all workers, only to send them back into the factories under the promise of vaccinations.

While mouthing slogans about “workplace democracy” and opposing the union bureaucracy, the Argentine pseudo-left organized in the PO and PTS and their electoral alliance, the so-called Left Workers Front (FIT), have been thoroughly exposed by the pandemic. Constituting an instrument for preventing workers from freeing themselves from the shackles of the union bureaucracy and their pro-corporate policies, they have assumed a direct role in enforcing a policy of mass social murder.

While the SUTNA leadership seeks to pin the blame solely on the government, the union’s drive to reopen began last April 2020, even before the government lifted its brief and initial lockdown.

Last year, bowing to pressures by the corporate and financial oligarchy, Peronist President Alberto Fernández ordered the gradual reopening of workplaces starting on April 13, while extending the official “quarantine” until April 26. It sought to mask this homicidal policy by asking companies to demonstrate that they could “guarantee the isolation and distancing among workers” before re-opening.

Anticipating this, the SUTNA leader Alejandro Crespo issued an open letter as early as April 3, 2020, with a short protocol “to re-start the activity in conditions that will protect the health of all workers.”

The measures did not go beyond those that were already proving to be fatally inadequate at workplaces all over the world. The list included temperature screening; distancing rules in the entrances, workstations, changing rooms and transportation; frequent cleaning; masking; hand sanitizer; sending workers home with symptoms and notifying workers about positive cases.

While knowingly endangering the lives of workers for profits, the Partido Obrero repeatedly declared in its publications, union and party activities that the SUTNA protocol provided an example for the “safe” reopening of other nonessential workplaces, most recently of schools. As the Partido Obrero wrote last August, when the government was initiating its campaign to reopen schools, “The solution to this crisis is easily implemented and with effective results: safety protocols in every workplace and activity… just like the SUTNA comrades have been doing.”

A few days earlier, on August 5, a FATE worker wrote on the union’s Facebook page that these measures “are worthless. More than 50 infected. The only thing that can save us is to shut down the factory for a while.”

Whenever anger surged over infections, however, the SUTNA implemented one-day “Hollywood” strikes as a safety valve, while isolating the tire workers from other sectors in Argentina and internationally facing the same situation. To no effect, a mere 24-hour strike was even carried out when Bridgestone fired two workers in January to intimidate growing opposition over the refusal of the company to even follow the existing protocols.

Last August 14, with a euphemism worthy of management, the Partido Obrero wrote that these partial strikes had achieved “the isolation of more than 700 cases” at the tire factories.

Most recently, on May 20, 2021, the government decreed a new “lockdown” while classifying several manufacturing sectors as “essential,” but not tire production. This measure was not taken until daily cases and deaths in the country had already increased fivefold since March.

Workers refused to work on Friday, May 21, only to be ordered by the union to return to work after a “lightning hearing” with Pirelli, Bridgestone and FATE, along with government officials.

In a cynical statement dated May 23, after the government issued a special decree to include tire production as “essential,” the SUTNA rushed to place the responsibility for future infections and deaths on the workers themselves.

“In these complex times, all tire co-workers must keep acting with the greatest responsibility and compromise, understanding that the worker’ organization is the one that has guaranteed (and will continue to guarantee) the safety, purchasing power, respect and interests of all workers in the tire union,” the SUTNA wrote.

This statement greatly angered the workers, with several expressing on social media the need to shut down the plant and denouncing SUTNA for betraying them. “Health is what matters now; we must stay home; there are infections every day at the factories. It takes them a weekend to turn the tables against workers,” one wrote on the union’s Facebook page.

Facing this growing opposition within the plant, the SUTNA unwisely took a page from their FIT “comrades” in the teachers’ unions, who have been using the demand of priority vaccinations to enforce a homicidal return to school policy.

Similarly, the SUTNA posted a series of illustrations demanding vaccines for their members, but workers were quick to identify this not only as an attempt by the union to deflect responsibility, but also to divide the tire workers from workers in other sectors.

A FATE worker, Anibal, wrote, “Even immunized, we could still take the virus to our homes. That already happened to a lot of us!” Another commenter wrote, “Truck delivery drivers like me are also essential and we are out on the streets every day without a vaccine.” And another added: “What is the difference with my husband who works in construction or my sons-in-law, or those in the markets, etc. etc… all of us workers are in the same situation.”