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To: U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives
End Legal Slavery in U.S. Prisons
Sign Petition at:
https://diy.rootsaction.org/petitions/end-legal-slavery-in-u-s-prisons
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On the anniversary of the 26th of July Movement’s founding, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research launches the online exhibition, Let Cuba Live. 80 artists from 19 countries – including notable cartoonists and designers from Cuba – submitted over 100 works in defense of the Cuban Revolution. Together, the exhibition is a visual call for the end to the decades-long US-imposed blockade, whose effects have only deepened during the pandemic. The intentional blocking of remittances and Cuba’s use of global financial institutions have prevented essential food and medicine from entering the country. Together, the images in this exhibition demand: #UnblockCuba #LetCubaLive
Please contact art@thetricontinental.org if you are interested in organising a local exhibition of the exhibition.
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Rashid just called with the news that he has been moved back to Virginia. His property is already there, and he will get to claim the most important items tomorrow. He is at a "medium security" level and is in general population. Basically, good news.
He asked me to convey his appreciation to everyone who wrote or called in his support during the time he was in Ohio.
His new address is:
Kevin Rashid Johnson #1007485
Nottoway Correctional Center
2892 Schutt Road
Burkeville, VA 23922
www.rashidmod.com
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Freedom for Major Tillery! End his Life Imprisonment!
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Governor's Press Office
Friday, May 28, 2021
(916) 445-4571
Governor Newsom Announces Clemency Actions, Signs Executive Order for Independent Investigation of Kevin Cooper Case
SACRAMENTO – Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that he has granted 14 pardons, 13 commutations and 8 medical reprieves. In addition, the Governor signed an executive order to launch an independent investigation of death row inmate Kevin Cooper’s case as part of the evaluation of Cooper’s application for clemency.
The investigation will review trial and appellate records in the case, the facts underlying the conviction and all available evidence, including the results of the recently conducted DNA tests previously ordered by the Governor to examine additional evidence in the case using the latest, most scientifically reliable forensic testing.
The text of the Governor’s executive order can be found here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5.28.21-EO-N-06-21.pdf
The California Constitution gives the Governor the authority to grant executive clemency in the form of a pardon, commutation or reprieve. These clemency grants recognize the applicants’ subsequent efforts in self-development or the existence of a medical exigency. They do not forgive or minimize the harm caused.
The Governor regards clemency as an important part of the criminal justice system that can incentivize accountability and rehabilitation, increase public safety by removing counterproductive barriers to successful reentry, correct unjust results in the legal system and address the health needs of incarcerated people with high medical risks.
A pardon may remove counterproductive barriers to employment and public service, restore civic rights and responsibilities and prevent unjust collateral consequences of conviction, such as deportation and permanent family separation. A pardon does not expunge or erase a conviction.
A commutation modifies a sentence, making an incarcerated person eligible for an earlier release or allowing them to go before the Board of Parole Hearings for a hearing at which Parole Commissioners determine whether the individual is suitable for release.
A reprieve allows individuals classified by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation as high medical risk to serve their sentences in appropriate alternative placements in the community consistent with public health and public safety.
The Governor weighs numerous factors in his review of clemency applications, including an applicant’s self-development and conduct since the offense, whether the grant is consistent with public safety and in the interest of justice, and the impact of a grant on the community, including crime victims and survivors.
While in office, Governor Newsom has granted a total of 86 pardons, 92 commutations and 28 reprieves.
The Governor’s Office encourages victims, survivors, and witnesses to register with CDCR’s Office of Victims and Survivors Rights and Services to receive information about an incarcerated person’s status. For general Information about victim services, to learn about victim-offender dialogues, or to register or update a registration confidentially, please visit:
www.cdcr.ca.gov/Victim_Services/ or call 1-877-256-6877 (toll free).
Copies of the gubernatorial clemency certificates announced today can be found here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/5.28.21-Clemency-certs.pdf
Additional information on executive clemency can be found here:
https://www.gov.ca.gov/clemency/
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Mumia Abu Jamal Appeal Denied!
https://mobilization4mumia.com
We regret to share with you some alarming news on the continued case of Political Prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio)—The Pennsylvania Superior Court has challenged Mumia Abu-Jamal’s latest effort for an overturned conviction and new trial—nearly 40 years after he was convicted of killing Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.
The high court said Abu-Jamal’s appeal was untimely, adding that the lower court shouldn’t have reinstated any part of his appeal because it lacked jurisdiction.
This fifth appeal attempt—filed in 2016—was based on a federal ruling involving former Philadelphia District Attorney Ron Castille, who later became a state Supreme Court justice and ruled on a death penalty appeal. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Castille had an “unconstitutional risk of bias” as the district attorney.
ABU-JAMAL’S ATTORNEYS ARGUED TO A PHILADELPHIA JUDGE IN 2018 THAT CASTILLE WAS ALSO THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY WHEN ABU-JAMAL WAS CONVICTED, AND A STATE SUPREME COURT JUDGE WHEN HE APPEALED.
And, they pointed to a letter Castille penned to the governor in 1990, urging the death penalty be used to send a “clear and dramatic message to all police killers that the death penalty in Pennsylvania actually means something.”
The Pennsylvania Superior Court concluded that “the 1990 letter cannot create a reasonable inference that Justice Castille had a personal interest in the outcome of the litigation,” court documents say. “There is no evidence that Castille had ever personally participated in the prosecution of Abu-Jamal.
“The 1990 letter is not evidence of prior prosecutorial participation. It is evidence that while acting as an advocate, District Attorney Castille took a policy position to advance completion of the appellate process for convicted murderers: ‘I very strongly urge you immediately to issue death warrants in each and every one of these cases. Only such action by you will cause these cases to move forward in a legally appropriate manner.’ He was not arguing that the law should be changed or should be ignored. Rather, he simply took a position to facilitate collateral review of death sentences which was subscribed to by many prosecutors at the time.” But, the state Superior Court noted, Castille didn’t list Abu-Jamal, and they say Abu-Jamal didn’t file a new petition, using the letter as an argument, in time.
“Further,” the decision reads, “the 1990 letter was dated June 15th. At that time, Abu-Jamal’s direct appeal was still pending before the Supreme Court of the United States. … As such, Abu-Jamal was not even in the class of litigants that District Attorney Castille was referencing in the letter. The 1990 letter therefore cannot create a reasonable inference that Justice Castille was personally biased against Abu-Jamal.”
RELATED
Pa. Supreme Court denies widow’s appeal to remove Philly DA from Abu-Jamal case
Abu Jamal was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder of Faulkner in 1982. Over the past four decades, five of his appeals have been quashed.
In 1989, the state’s highest court affirmed Abu-Jamal’s death penalty conviction, and in 2012, he was re-sentenced to life in prison.
Abu-Jamal, 66, remains in prison. He can appeal to the state Supreme Court, or he can file a new appeal.
KYW Newsradio reached out to Abu-Jamal’s attorneys for comment. They shared this statement in full:
“Today, the Superior Court concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to consider issues raised by Mr. Abu-Jamal in prior appeals. Two years ago, the Court of Common Pleas ordered reconsideration of these appeals finding evidence of an appearance of judicial bias when the appeals were first decided. We are disappointed in the Superior Court’s decision and are considering our next steps.
“While this case was pending in the Superior Court, the Commonwealth revealed, for the first time, previously undisclosed evidence related to Mr. Abu-Jamal’s case. That evidence includes a letter indicating that the Commonwealth promised its principal witness against Mr. Abu-Jamal money in connection with his testimony. In today’s decision, the Superior Court made clear that it was not adjudicating the issues raised by this new evidence. This new evidence is critical to any fair determination of the issues raised in this case, and we look forward to presenting it in court.”
https://www.audacy.com/kywnewsradio/news/local/pennsylvania-superior-court-rejects-mumia-abu-jamal-appeal-ron-castille
Questions and comments may be sent to: info@freedomarchives.org
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Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Thank you!
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
- Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
- San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
- Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
Know Your Rights Materials
The NLG maintains a library of basic Know-Your-Rights guides.
- Know Your Rights During Covid-19
- You Have The Right To Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Encounters with Law Enforcement
- Operation Backfire: For Environmental and Animal Rights Activists
WEBINAR: Federal Repression of Activists & Their Lawyers: Legal & Ethical Strategies to Defend Our Movements: presented by NLG-NYC and NLG National Office
We also recommend the following resources:
Center for Constitutional Rights
Civil Liberties Defense Center
- Grand Juries: Slideshow
Grand Jury Resistance Project
Katya Komisaruk
Movement for Black Lives Legal Resources
Tilted Scales Collective
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By The Editorial Board, Dec. 18, 2021
The Committee to Protect Journalists has recorded another dismal milestone in the onslaught of authoritarian leaders against a free press — a new high over the past year in the number of journalists jailed around the world.
In its annual report on reporters jailed for their work, the organization, which is a nongovernmental nonprofit, said 293 journalists were imprisoned around the world, an increase of 13 from 2020. At least 24 journalists have been killed so far this year, the committee reported; 18 others died in circumstances “too murky to determine whether they were specific targets.”
China remained the top jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 locked up. Myanmar moved up to second place because of a military coup in February and the media crackdown that followed. Egypt, Vietnam and Belarus were the next three.
The Committee to Protect Journalists is usually on the conservative side among organizations that monitor press freedoms in reporting on the abuse, arrest or killing of journalists, because of its stringent verification protocols. Even so, this is the sixth consecutive year that it has recorded at least 250 journalists jailed for their reporting, a trend it attributes to “a growing intolerance of independent reporting” by increasingly arrogant autocrats prepared to flout due process and international norms to stay in power.
The fact that dictators cannot abide a free press is in itself a measure of its importance. The strongman of Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, was prepared to face full-throated condemnation, at least from the West, for diverting an international flight just so he could arrest a self-exiled journalist, Roman Protasevich, and send a message to other critics.
But then other authoritarian leaders such as Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Mohammed bin Salman — the latter responsible for one of the most gruesome murders to date of a journalist, that of Jamal Khashoggi — have not been shy about disregarding international norms and elemental decency to rid themselves of meddlesome reporters.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia did drop out of the top five nations imprisoning journalists in 2021, but that was not necessarily progress, the committee noted. Since a failed coup attempt in 2016, Turkey has effectively crushed the country’s mainstream media, and some journalists have been released from jail to await trial. In Saudi Arabia, the murder and dismemberment of Mr. Khashoggi probably served to dissuade many critics. In many authoritarian states, the committee said, governments are finding more sophisticated ways to block independent reporters and organizations, such as internet shutdowns and better surveillance.
Societies can and do agree to set limits on freedom of speech with criminal penalties; for example, for child sexual abuse imagery, libel or spreading dangerous misinformation. A roiling debate is underway over whether social media, with its vast powers to swiftly disseminate news both real and fake, should be controlled. But these questions are debated openly and cautiously, and their purpose is to safeguard society, not control it.
Authoritarian leaders, by contrast, seek to control and manipulate what is said and written with the sole purpose of remaining in power and above the law. They know full well that this violates freedoms enshrined in law and convention, which is why they so often attack journalists obliquely, using trumped-up charges like tax evasion and terrorism or drawing on vague and arcane laws to arrest reporters and shut down their operations.
To arrest Jimmy Lai and close down the popular Hong Kong tabloid he founded, Apple Daily, China used a catchall clause in its draconian national security law banning “collusion with external forces.” On Monday, Mr. Lai and seven other pro-democracy activists were sentenced to prison on another charge — gathering last year to commemorate the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.
In mainland China, journalists face an array of bizarre charges such as “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which is what the journalist Zhang Zhan was accused of doing when she criticized China’s response to Covid-19. In Turkey, insulting the president is a crime; in Russia, a favorite weapon against journalists and media outlets is to label them “foreign agents.”
Condemning the persecution of journalists is not about protecting a profession or an industry. For its reporting, the Committee to Protect Journalists identifies journalists as “people who cover the news or comment on public affairs in any media, including print, photographs, radio, television and online.” That, with the internet and social media, covers a vast array of people who are basically exercising their fundamental right to speak out against the excesses of those in power — or anything else on their mind.
That tension is also a prerequisite for keeping tabs on those in power, as America’s founders understood. The press was far more partisan, less restrained and more often unscrupulous back when James Madison argued for what became the First Amendment. Yet he declared, and the legislators agreed, that “the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”
When China imprisons Ms. Zhang, who is currently on a hunger strike, or Belarus kidnaps Mr. Protasevich, whose parents say was coerced into confessing that he tried to topple Mr. Lukashenko, or any other journalist is thrown in jail for not kowtowing to the powers that be, that bulwark is being brutally and deliberately violated. That this is happening in record numbers should sound loud alarms the world over.
For Americans, there has been an increasing infringement on press freedom in recent decades that once seemed anathema to the country’s ideals. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama each waged their battles with the press. President Donald Trump went much further, calling some news outlets the “enemy of the people.” President Biden’s administration has shown courage on certain fronts, such as standing down on efforts by federal prosecutors under Mr. Trump to secretly obtain phone and email records of journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists report, however, coincided with the ruling of a British court that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, can be extradited to the United States to face charges under the Espionage Act.
It is most unfortunate that the U.S. government has chosen to continue to use a law as potent as the Espionage Act to pursue Mr. Assange. There is a debate about whether Mr. Assange is a journalist, but equating the publication of classified materials received from government sources with espionage strikes at the very foundations of a free press and should be rejected by Mr. Biden.
Mr. Assange plans to appeal, and his legal odyssey could stretch out even longer than it already has. And the drawn-out effort by the United States to try Mr. Assange in an open court where he could contest the charges under the First Amendment’s protection of press freedoms is qualitatively different from the incarceration of journalists by authoritarian leaders who seek nothing more than unchallenged power.
But if Mr. Assange’s and his colleagues’ methods and motives are sometimes murky — they released numerous documents leaked by an Army private without removing the names of confidential sources, putting lives in danger — his case could set dangerous precedents that could interfere with a free press monitoring the shenanigans of those in power. That should be inviolable.
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BY SALVADOR RANGEL, DECEMBER 17, 2021
“The forest is a socialist community, and trees work in harmony to share the sunlight”
-Coach Beard
Ted Lasso has become one of the most popularly streamed shows. One common theory behind the show’s reception is that it came out during the pandemic, at a time when audiences were looking for feel-good shows amid the stress and anxiety caused by COVID 19. TV critics, however, had noted an increase appeal for shows depicting earnest, feel-good characters, and storylines, well before the pandemic. The pandemic likely only intensified a trend that had been emerging since the Great Recession of 2008–that is the increased appeal of socialism. The advent of the pandemic and accompanying economic and social chaos represented an intensification of already-existing discontent with capitalism and a desire for alternatives.
By the way, the fact that you are still reading, and that this piece was published in the first place, is in further evidence of this trend. The show sets up a subtle but poignant contrast between the values of capitalist and socialist values. The actions of the individual characters that either make the team better or help each other out in some way are the result of socialist ethics. Whereas the type of actions or attitudes that bring people down or make the team less cohesive are the result of self-interested, self-serving ethics. That is because capitalist ethics prioritize the individual over the community. Recall Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no such thing” as society, but only “individual men and women”.
From a capitalist perspective, people are seen as inherently self-interested, seeking to maximize their own individual well-being even at the expense of their community. The interests of the individual are often seen as directly in conflict with those of the community. This is why the ideas behind the so-called “tragedy of the commons” (whose author, by the way, was a eugenicist and white supremacist and whose ideas have been thoroughly debunked) are so popular with the advocates of capitalism. From this paradigm, relationships are seen as transactional, with each individual seeking to improve their own lot. Since the gains an individual makes come at the expense of another, there is also a necessary emphasis on hierarchies and statuses.
Socialist ethics on the other hand, are inherently egalitarian and eschew statuses and hierarchies. It is not so much that the individual is not valued but rather that their fate and well-being is inextricable from that of the community. Contrary to capitalist ethics, the interests of the individual are not in opposition to those of the community–as the community thrives so does the individual and vice versa.
There is perhaps not a better illustration of this tension between capitalist and socialist ethics within the show, than that embodied by Nate Shelley–the “kit manager.” At the beginning of the show, we see capitalist ethics reigning supreme. There is a clear hierarchy among the boss and the players and among the players and Nate. In this hierarchy, Nate is at the bottom of the pecking order and regularly bullied by the players. Not all players participate in the bulling, but none is willing to challenge the bullies. Within this system, they don’t stand to benefit in any way from standing up to the bullies on Nate’s behalf. As Coach Lasso not only embodies but also encourages prosocial ethics, Nate’s fate begins to improve, and he becomes an important and influential member of the team. Unfortunately, as we see towards the end of the show, Nate proves unable to emulate the socialist ethics that rescued him from the pit of despair and instead embraces the kind of behavior and ethics associated with his former tormentor (and utter personification of capitalist ethics, at least in the beginning,) Jamie Tart.
Tart’s unrelenting selfishness, competitiveness, and lack of any of regard for the rest of the team stand in stark contrast with the socialist ethics promoted by Lasso and increasingly embraced by Roy Kent and other players in the team. He is never happier than when hearing his own name being chanted by the crowd (and himself!). His constant preoccupation with his “brand” is part of these distinctly capitalist ethics, which also lead him to pursue scoring goals by himself, even when passing the ball to other players, such as Sam Obisanya, would more likely result in more scored goals. It is Kent who finally decides to put an end Tart’s reign of terror. He realizes, following Lasso’s lead, that the well-being of the individual and the community are intertwined and that better morale among the individual players will translate to a more cohesive and better performing team.
If Tart, and perhaps later Nate, represent the damaging results of capitalist ethics, Sam Obisanya (a football player from Nigeria) represents what can be achieved through embracing socialist ethics. Sam, much like Nate in the beginning, is subject to constant undermining by Tart which impacts his performance on field. Coach Lasso counters Sam’s alienation by drawing him into the collective of the team. With Ted’s encouragement, the team celebrates Sam’s birthday by pooling money and sharing cake after a stunning football match loss. Their celebration despite the loss reinforces the team’s value and shared humanity beyond their abilities as laborers.
As Sam comes to feel more a part of his team-community, he feels more emboldened to stand up for his other community–the one back home. These views are first hinted at when Sam reminds Ted Lasso that his gifts of plastic toy soldiers represent American imperialism and rampant capitalism in Africa and the broader, Global South. Sam, with the support of this teammates, later takes a more visible stance against capitalist ethics. He boycotts his team’s sponsor, who funds a Nigerian oil magnate with a dubious human and environmental rights record, even when doing so will affect his livelihood and compromise his future with the team. His team, in a demonstration of the interconnectedness between individual and community well-being, offers to support his public activism by similarly altering their jerseys to hide the sponsor.
Ted Lasso and its representation of what socialist ethics can achieve stands in contrast to another recent runaway show, Squid Game. While Ted Lasso depicts the society we may want to be part of, Squid Game represents the worst excess of the capitalist society we currently inhabit. The games within the show are only an exaggerated (and dramatized) version of the despair and desperation in which many people are forced to live in our current society. Capitalist ethics are present not only in the games depicted in the show, but also in the social context in which the games take place. The people who ultimately end up becoming players in the games by and large agreed to do so out of the despair of not being able to have any kind of decent life under the current socioeconomic system. They are only in the games because they are already victims of the reality another rigged game–capitalism.
Salvador Rangel is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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American policy decisions are vital to understanding Haiti’s political instability, and why it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
By Chris Cameron, Dec. 19, 2021
"A bloody history of American influence looms large, and a century of U.S. efforts to stabilize and develop the country have ultimately ended in failure.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/19/us/politics/us-haiti-intervention.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=US%20Politics
In September 1994, the United States was on the verge of invading Haiti.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the country’s first democratically elected president, had been deposed in a military coup three years earlier. Haiti had descended into chaos. Gangs and paramilitaries terrorized the population — taking hostages, assassinating dissidents and burning crops. International embargoes had strangled the economy, and tens of thousands of people were trying to emigrate to America.
But just days before the first U.S. troops would land in Haiti, Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a senator on the Foreign Affairs Committee, spoke against a military intervention. He argued that the United States had more pressing crises — including ethnic cleansing in Bosnia — and that Haiti was not especially important to American interests.
“I think it’s probably not wise,” Mr. Biden said of the planned invasion in an interview with television host Charlie Rose.
He added: “If Haiti — a God-awful thing to say — if Haiti just quietly sunk into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot in terms of our interest.”
Despite Mr. Biden’s apprehension, the invasion went forward and the Haitian military junta surrendered within hours. Mr. Aristide was soon restored to power, and the Clinton administration began deporting thousands of Haitians.
Nearly a decade later, Haiti’s constitutional order would collapse again, prompting another U.S. military intervention, more migrants and more deportations. As rebels threatened to invade the capital in 2004, Mr. Aristide resigned under pressure from U.S. officials. A provisional government was formed with American backing. The violence and unrest continued.
That cycle of crisis and U.S. intervention in Haiti — punctuated by periods of relative calm but little improvement in the lives of most people — has persisted to this day. Since July, a presidential assassination, an earthquake and a tropical storm have deepened the turmoil.
Mr. Biden, now president, is overseeing yet another intervention in Haiti’s political affairs, one that his critics say is following an old Washington playbook: backing Haitian leaders accused of authoritarian rule, either because they advance American interests or because U.S. officials fear the instability of a transition of power.
Making sense of American policy in Haiti over the decades — driven at times by economic interests, Cold War strategy and migration concerns — is vital to understanding Haiti’s political instability, and why it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, even after an infusion of more than $5 billion in U.S. aid in the last decade alone.
A bloody history of American influence looms large, and a century of U.S. efforts to stabilize and develop the country have ultimately ended in failure.
The American Occupation (1915-34)
The politics of slavery and racial prejudice were key factors in early American hostility to Haiti. After the Haitian Revolution, Thomas Jefferson and many in Congress feared that the newly founded Black republic would spread slave revolts in the United States.
For decades, the United States refused to formally recognize Haiti’s independence from France, and at times tried to annex Haitian territory and conduct diplomacy through threats.
It was against this backdrop that Haiti became increasingly unstable. The country went through seven presidents between 1911 and 1915, all either assassinated or removed from power. Haiti was heavily in debt, and Citibank — then the National City Bank of New York — and other American banks confiscated much of Haiti’s gold reserve during that period with the help of U.S. Marines.
Roger L. Farnham, who managed National City Bank’s assets in Haiti, then lobbied President Woodrow Wilson for a military intervention to stabilize the country and force the Haitian government to pay its debts, convincing the president that France or Germany might invade if America did not.
The military occupation that followed remains one of the darkest chapters of American policy in the Caribbean. The United States installed a puppet regime that rewrote Haiti’s constitution and gave America control over the country’s finances. Forced labor was used for construction and other work to repay debts. Thousands were killed by U.S. Marines.
The occupation ended in 1934 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy. As the last Marines departed Haiti, riots broke out in Port-au-Prince, the capital. Bridges were destroyed, telephone lines were cut and the new president declared martial law and suspended the constitution. The United States did not completely relinquish control of Haiti’s finances until 1947.
The Duvalier Dynasty
The ruthless dictator François Duvalier took power in 1957, as Fidel Castro led a revolution in Cuba and as U.S. interests in the region were becoming increasingly focused on limiting the influence of the Soviet Union.
Duvalier, like many other dictators in the Caribbean and Latin America, recognized that he could secure American support if he presented his government as anti-communist. U.S. officials privately described Duvalier as “the worst dictator in the hemisphere,” while deeming him preferable to the perceived risk of a communist Haiti.
When the United States suspended aid programs because of atrocities committed soon after Duvalier took office, the Haitian leader hired public relations firms, including one run by Roosevelt’s youngest son, to repair the relationship.
Duvalier — and later his son Jean-Claude — ultimately enjoyed significant American support in the form of aid (much of it embezzled by the family), training for Haitian paramilitary forces who would go on to commit atrocities and even a Marine deployment in 1959 despite the protests of American diplomats in Haiti.
By 1961, the United States was sending Duvalier $13 million in aid a year — equivalent to half of Haiti’s national budget.
Even after the United States had tired of Duvalier’s brutality and unstable leadership, President John F. Kennedy demurred on a plot to remove him and mandate free elections. When Duvalier died nearly a decade later, the United States supported the succession of his son. By 1986, the United States had spent an estimated $900 million supporting the Duvalier dynasty as Haiti plunged deeper into poverty and corruption.
Favored Candidates
At crucial moments in Haiti’s democratic era, the United States has intervened to pick winners and losers — fearful of political instability and surges of Haitian migration.
After Mr. Aristide was ousted in 1991, the U.S. military reinstalled him. He resigned in disgrace less than a decade later, but only after American diplomats urged him to do so. According to reports from that time, the George W. Bush administration had undermined Mr. Aristide’s government in the years before his resignation
François Pierre-Louis is a political science professor at Queens College in New York who served in Mr. Aristide’s cabinet and advised former Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis. Haitians are often suspicious of American involvement in their affairs, he said, but still take signals from U.S. officials seriously because of the country’s long history of influence over Haitian politics.
For example, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, American and other international diplomats pressured Haiti to hold elections that year despite the devastation. The vote was disastrously mismanaged, and international observers and many Haitians considered the results illegitimate.
Responding to the allegations of voter fraud, American diplomats insisted that one candidate in the second round of the presidential election be replaced with a candidate who received fewer votes — at one point threatening to halt aid over the dispute. Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, confronted then-President René Préval about putting Michel Martelly, America’s preferred candidate, on the ballot. Mr. Martelly won that election in a landslide.
A direct line of succession can be traced from that election to Haiti’s current crisis.
Mr. Martelly endorsed Jovenel Moïse as his successor. Mr. Moïse, who was elected in 2016, ruled by decree and turned to authoritarian tactics with the tacit approval of the Trump and Biden administrations.
Mr. Moïse appointed Ariel Henry as acting prime minister earlier this year. Then on July 7, Mr. Moïse was assassinated.
Mr. Henry has been accused of being linked to the assassination plot, and political infighting that had quieted after international diplomats endorsed his claim to power has reignited. Mr. Martelly, who had clashed with Mr. Moïse over business interests, is considering another run for the presidency.
Robert Maguire, a Haiti scholar and retired professor of international affairs at George Washington University, said the instinct in Washington to back members of Haiti’s political elite who appeared allied with U.S. interests was an old one, with a history of failure.
Another approach could have more success, according to Mr. Maguire and other scholars, Democratic lawmakers and a former U.S. envoy for Haiti policy. They say the United States should support a grass-roots commission of civic leaders, who are drafting plans for a new provisional government in Haiti.
That process, however, could take years.
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By Michelle Cottle, Dec. 20, 2021
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Bettmann and johnnyscriv, via Getty Images
Each year, more than 650,000 people are released from state and federal prisons. Nine million others churn through local jails. For many, the transition back to the outside world poses an acute risk. Studies have shown a decline in the health of the recently released, who experience significantly higher rates of death and hospitalization compared to the general populace. The first two weeks can be especially dangerous.
Among the most common killers of this population are suicide, cardiovascular disease, homicide and, topping the list, drug overdoses. A 2007 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the formerly incarcerated in Washington State were around 129 times as likely to die of an overdose in the first two weeks after their release as other state residents. The opioid epidemic has hit this cohort extra hard.
Multiple factors are fueling this tragedy. The incarcerated population already suffers from disproportionately high rates of physical and behavioral health problems, from hypertension and asthma to mental illness and substance abuse disorders. While effective treatment options can be hard to come by behind bars, returning to the community can be even bumpier, resulting in dangerous disruptions in care. People suddenly find themselves without the medication they desperately need to survive, be it insulin or antipsychotic drugs. Many face barriers to care including homelessness, unemployment and a lack of social support systems. The newly released are unusually susceptible — physically and psychologically — to overdoses.
The pressures faced during this high-risk transition period do not affect the former inmates alone. Families and communities suffer. Absent stable care, the newly released are more likely to wind up in overburdened emergency rooms — or back in trouble with the law. Experts consider improving access to and coordination of care for this population as key to reducing recidivism.
The Medicaid Re-entry Act, one of the many policy proposals thrown into limbo with the collapse of the Build Back Better Act this weekend, seeks to smooth this transition. The legislation would clear the way for states to use Medicaid to provide coverage for inmates up to 30 days before the inmates’ scheduled release. Currently, a provision of the Social Security Act known as the Medicaid inmate exclusion prohibits any federal health coverage for inmates of jails, prisons and detention centers. (There is a narrow exception for those requiring an outside hospital stay of more than 24 hours.)
When someone covered by Medicaid lands behind bars, his or her benefits are automatically suspended — and in some states terminated altogether. When the person returns to the outside world, it can take time and effort for coverage to be restored. Some states make this process easier than others.
Experts say getting inmates settled into Medicaid shortly before their release could greatly aid what is often referred to as a “warm handoff” from institutional to community-based care systems.
This unglamorous policy idea has been bumping around Capitol Hill for a couple of years, championed by Representative Paul Tonko, a Democrat from New York. (Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, is its Senate sponsor.) It has earned bipartisan support in both chambers, along with a broad coalition of outside backers. At the crossroads of the public health and criminal justice systems, the plan has brought together groups ranging from the National Alliance on Mental Illness to the National Sheriffs’ Association, lobbying for it from multiple angles.
“In the long run this will reduce recidivism and therefore ease budgetary burdens from the jail system,” Dave Mahoney, then the president of the National Sheriffs’ Association, said earlier this year. “Our taxpayers deserve that.”
Supporters of the bill have been savvy in their positioning efforts, stressing how the measure would help address the opioid crisis — a top-of-mind concern for many lawmakers. This could help increase its appeal even for members who are skittish about Big Government — for instance, Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia who has been the chief impediment to passing the Build Back Better Act but whose home state has been ravaged by opioids.
The bill is relatively modest in its aims. Mr. Tonko has stressed that it would not expand Medicaid eligibility. Neither does it seek to abolish the inmate exclusion provision wholesale, as some groups favor. Even so, it would cost money, and talk of providing any benefits to inmates can be politically tricky. As is often the case, the provision’s best bet is to get folded into a much larger legislative package. Proponents were hoping to attach it to the Covid relief bill that passed this year, to no avail. They then folded it into Build Back Better.
As the larger spending bill shatters against Mr. Manchin’s unyielding opposition, the re-entry proposal should be rescued and revived for another day. Maybe in a pared-down version of Build Back Better to be hashed out in the new year. Maybe attached to a different vehicle entirely. The plan may not be flashy, but it could make a big difference to the masses of sick and vulnerable people who emerge from America’s jails and prisons each year — and to the communities to which they return.
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By Samuel Earle, Dec. 22, 2021
Mr. Earle is a British journalist who writes on politics and culture.
"The internet now stands as a vast web designed to capture our tastes, attention and patterns of thought, and to push them along profit-making lines. The goal is not a world where anything is possible — but a world where everything is predictable and purchasable."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/opinion/the-matrix-resurrections-internet-dystopia.html
When “The Matrix” was released in 1999, hype about the internet had reached a frenzy. Time magazine had named a young Jeff Bezos Person of the Year, for embodying the two great themes of the year, “e-commerce and dot-com mania.” The BBC declared it “the year of the internet.” In The New York Times, Thomas Friedman described the web as “a symbol that we are all connected but nobody is in charge.”
Some excitedly heralded “The Matrix,” with its pioneering computer-generated special effects and cyberpunk motif, as “the first movie of the 21st century.” And over 20 years after its release, the film persists as perhaps the definitive movie of the early internet age. Its influence is everywhere, animating fashion and philosophy, as well as our technological fears and fantasies. Its iconography — from the “red pill,” which helps to awaken characters to the reality of their dystopian circumstances, to “the endless allure of Keanu Reeves’ sunglasses,” as GQ put it — are cultural mainstays. The film spawned two sequels, both released in 2003, and with “The Matrix Resurrections,” a fourth film, released Wednesday, the franchise returns to a digitized world that it has played no small part in shaping.
Given how the internet has panned out, however, it’s not an entirely happy accolade. We are in a very dark timeline — one in which the Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk could tell his 34 million Twitter followers to “take the red pill,” a concept increasingly co-opted by alt-right conspiracists, and the former first daughter Ivanka Trump can reply: “Taken!” (Lilly Wachowski, “The Matrix” co-director, was unimpressed by this exchange.) After Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced his dreary plans for a “metaverse,” a Matrix-like “embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content, you are in it,” the film franchise’s marketing team responded by tweeting a new tagline for “The Matrix Resurrections”: “Now based on real events.”
Yet in some ways, even the original “Matrix” film and its two sequels imagined a future more hopeful than the one conjured up by Silicon Valley today. On the surface, the movies presented a straightforward dystopia: a bleak world where, sometime in the late 22nd century, humans are harvested in vast fields as an abundant energy resource to fuel machine overlords. The machines have plugged humans into a simulation of the year 1999, known as the Matrix, which keeps them passive and distracted, unaware of their predicament.
So far, so depressing. Yet alongside this dark tableau, “The Matrix” also contained dreams of a better internet than our own. The eponymous computer simulation is a sinister mechanism of control, imposed upon humans to harness their energy. But after the simulation is seen as a construction (enabled by swallowing the “red pill”), people have the power to plug back in and traverse it as a truer version of themselves.
This is where a sense of nostalgia haunts a rewatching of “The Matrix”: not for the 1999 it depicts, but for the future — and the internet — it suggested could exist. It’s “a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible,” Neo (the main character, played by Mr. Reeves) declares at the end of the first film.
Dominated by a handful of mega-corporations, today’s digital sphere seems more in line with the machines’ coercive operation than the dreams of Neo and his band of rebels. The internet now stands as a vast web designed to capture our tastes, attention and patterns of thought, and to push them along profit-making lines. The goal is not a world where anything is possible — but a world where everything is predictable and purchasable.
The promise of digital self-realization that made “The Matrix” no ordinary dystopia was integral to the utopianism of the early internet. An early online user, quoted by the sociologist and clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle in 1995, declared that, on the internet, “you can be whoever you want to be … whoever you have the capacity to be … You don’t have to worry about the slots other people put you in.” Or, as a famous New Yorker cartoon playfully put it around the same time, showing a dog typing away at a computer, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
The diverse cast of “The Matrix” suggests an internet that has freed humanity from discrimination based on race, class and gender. Neo starts out as Thomas Anderson, a bored software engineer who hates his job (working for a company called, somewhat forebodingly, “Meta-cortex”), before he becomes a kung fu master who can dodge bullets. A fellow superhacker, his look-alike lover, Trinity, (played by Carrie-Anne Moss), persistently defies both gravity and the gendered expectations of her enemies. “The Matrix cannot tell you who you are,” she tells him. (Another character, Switch, was originally intended by the directors to be gender fluid: a man in the real world and a woman in the simulation.)
But the internet today does tell you who you are, and it’s hardly a place free from prejudice. Silicon Valley’s prevailing ethos has moved away from the idea that the internet can be a space to live outside society’s demands and expectations. At Facebook, Mr. Zuckerberg, for example, has argued that having a second identity is “an example of a lack of integrity,” and the social media company’s policy explains that “Facebook is a community where everyone uses the name they go by in everyday life … so that you always know who you’re connecting with.” Such strictures recall the main villain of “The Matrix,” Agent Smith, a corporate apparatchik working on behalf of the machines, who insists on calling Neo by his original name. “It seems that you have been living two lives,” Smith chides in the first film, after arresting Neo. “One of these lives has a future. One of them does not.”
Despite the pseudonyms, trolls and alter egos that still dwell in some corners of the internet, its main byways now prize consistency and transparency over the risks of anonymity and reinvention. The idea of the internet as a place to cultivate an identity outside the slots other people put you in has been eclipsed by a social media-driven focus on creating an aspirational personal brand. Self-realization is now measured in likes, shares and follower counts.
“Our digital presentations are slicker, influencer-influenced,” Ms. Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, told me. “Everyone wants to present themselves in their best light, but now we have a corporate filter of what ‘pleases.’”
The cultural shift toward holding one narrowly defined identity — online and offline, across platforms — aligns neatly with Silicon Valley’s interests. The aim of many tech companies is to know us more intimately than we know ourselves, to predict our desires and anxieties — all the better to sell us stuff. The presumption that we each hold a single “authentic” identity simplifies the task, suggesting to advertisers that we are consistent, predictable consumers.
The tech theorist Mark Andrejevic, the author of “Automated Media,” has used a provocative term for this mode of capitalism: “umbilicular commerce.” Just as an umbilical cord provides for a fetus’s needs before it can communicate them, so too do tech platforms strive to sate our desires before we have expressed them. Mr. Zuckerberg has said he wants to find “a fundamental mathematical law” that “governs the balance of who and what we all care about.” And Amazon’s predictive algorithm for what it calls “anticipatory shipping” uses artificial intelligence to predict what you’ll order and stock it in a warehouse near you, for same-day delivery. This is a vision where the internet amounts to little more than a big, mind-reading “vending machine,” providing products the moment you think of them, or earlier.
Mr. Andrejic’s term has an eerie resonance with “The Matrix,” where humans are grown in womb-like pods and then plugged into the simulation through umbilical-like cords. (The title comes from both an early term for the internet and a Latin word for “womb.”) The setup suggests our infantilization, a future where all our desires are fulfilled in advance yet agency has ceased to exist, where the darker facts of our digital existence — the alternative interests at its center — are concealed from us. It is a future very like our own.
As “The Matrix” franchise returns, the optimism around the internet in 1999 feels very far away. In our age of climate breakdown and extreme inequality, the hours we while away online are increasingly shadowed by an awareness that, like humans plugged into the Matrix, we perpetuate a system that does not have humanity’s best interests at its heart, a system that may in fact be working actively against us.
At least in “The Matrix,” humans have machines to blame. We have only ourselves, and the internet we have made.
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Federal agents infiltrated Portland’s unruly racial justice protests, dressing to blend in and capturing clandestine video. The tactics raised internal concern.
By Mike Baker, Sergio Olmos and Adam Goldman, Dec. 22, 2021
PORTLAND, Ore. — In the hours after President Biden’s inauguration this year, protesters marched once again through the streets of Portland, Ore., sending a message that putting a Democrat in the White House would not resolve their problems with a system of policing and corporate wealth that they saw as fundamentally unfair.
“No cops, no prisons, total abolition,” they chanted. Some of the activists, dressed in the trademark uniform of solid black clothing and masks that often signals a readiness to make trouble without being readily identifiable, smashed windows at the local Democratic Party headquarters.
The event — like others that had consumed the city since the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in 2020 — included a variety of anarchists, antifascists, communists and racial justice activists. But there were others mingling in the crowd that day: plainclothes agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The F.B.I. set up extensive surveillance operations inside Portland’s protest movement, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and current and former federal officials, with agents standing shoulder to shoulder with activists, tailing vandalism suspects to guide the local police toward arrests and furtively videotaping inside one of the country’s most active domestic protest movements.
The breadth of F.B.I. involvement in Portland and other cities where federal teams were deployed at street protests became a point of concern for some within the bureau and the Justice Department who worried that it could undermine the First Amendment right to wage protest against the government, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.
Some within the departments worried that the teams could be compared to F.B.I. surveillance transgressions of decades past, such as the COINTELPRO projects that sought to spy on and disrupt various activist groups in the 1950s and 1960s, according to the officials, one current and one former, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the debate.
There has been no evidence so far that the bureau used similar surveillance teams on right-wing demonstrators during the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, despite potential threats of violence against the heart of federal government — though the F.B.I. did have an informant in the crowd that day. The bureau has at times used secretive tactics to disrupt right-wing violence, such as efforts that led to charges against men accused of conspiring to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
The F.B.I. has broad latitude to conduct surveillance when agents suspect threats to national security or that federal crimes may be committed. But bureau guidelines warn that agents should not cross into actions that could have a chilling effect on legitimate protest, and should instead prioritize less-intrusive techniques.
In Portland, federal teams were initially dispatched in July 2020 to protect the city’s federal courthouse after protesters lit fires, smashed windows and lobbed fireworks at law enforcement personnel in the area. One demonstrator had attacked a federal officer with a hammer. But the F.B.I. role quickly widened, persisting months after activists turned their attention away from the courthouse, with some targeting storefronts or local institutions whose protection would normally be up to the local police.
Both local and federal law enforcement officials have complained that lawful peaceful protests were hijacked in many cases by criminals.
But organizers of the protests and civil rights groups, after being told of The Times’s findings, said that surveillance agents recording and following protesters in the midst of a demonstration was a form of domestic spying.
“These are all insidious tactics that chill First Amendment expression and erode trust with local officials,” said Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, one of several civil rights organizations that objected to the mass arrests and violent crackdowns that followed the protests. He called the government’s operations an “alarming” misuse of resources.
Kieran L. Ramsey, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge of the Portland field office, said the office was committed to pursuing “violent instigators who exploit legitimate, peaceful protests and engage in violations of federal law.”
“At all times, our focus was on those planning or committing significant criminal activity or acts of violence,” Mr. Ramsey said in a statement.
Police officers made more than 1,000 arrests during the course of the protests, and more than 200 people ultimately faced criminal prosecution; more than 100 cases had to be dropped because there was not sufficient evidence.
In fast-moving street gatherings where people concealed their identities and demanded that cameras not be present, working invisibly inside the crowd may have given the authorities more opportunity to identify and apprehend those engaging in the most serious mayhem.
In one case, F.B.I. agents in plain clothing were credited in court records with helping catch a man accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at law enforcement officers. He faced federal explosives charges in addition to state charges that included attempted murder.
The F.B.I. teams continued their operations among Portland’s far-left activists for months at the end of 2020 and the start of 2021. While the F.B.I. has also been investigating far-right groups, some lawmakers have blasted the bureau for failing to detect and blunt the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Renn Cannon, who was the Portland office’s special agent in charge during the demonstrations until he departed early this year, said in an interview that there were persistent protest-related crimes and tense political dynamics, leaving the bureau to try to address the crimes while also upholding First Amendment rights.
“I thought a lot about what is allowed under the Constitution,” Mr. Cannon said. “How do you do surveillance effectively, safely and legally? That was something we spent a lot of time on.”
Mr. Cannon declined to discuss specific operations or tactics but said he believed that his agents had crossed no lines while trying to make sure that laws were enforced.
In the middle of his re-election campaign, President Donald J. Trump vowed to “dominate” protesters who had taken to the streets in the wake of Mr. Floyd’s death, and he directed federal agencies to deploy personnel to protect federal property around the country. Outrage and even larger mass protests ensued in Portland after videos showed federal agents in tactical gear seizing people off the streets into unmarked vehicles and one agent beating a Navy veteran with a baton.
F.B.I. officials heeded the call for action. David L. Bowdich, who was then the F.B.I.’s second-in-command, had called the protests after Mr. Floyd’s murder “a national crisis” in a memo. He likened the situation to Sept. 11 and suggested that the bureau could make federal criminal cases against protesters by using the Hobbs Act — a law from the 1940s that was designed to crack down on racketeering in labor groups.
The F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, told lawmakers in September 2020 that the bureau was pursuing “quite a number of properly predicated domestic terrorism investigations into violent anarchist extremists, any number of whom self-identify with the antifa movement.”
The F.B.I. is aggressively investigating people associated with violent far-right groups such as Atomwaffen and the Base, and prosecutors have already brought charges against dozens of members of the far-right Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia in connection with the attack on the Capitol. Federal agents are actively pursuing additional cases against those groups and further charges are likely to be filed.
Those investigations have sometimes involved confidential informants and surveillance. But no other evidence has emerged that F.B.I. agents in recent years had blended into crowds engaged in political protests in the streets.
Later, after the overt federal crackdown in Portland ebbed and protest crowds waned, smaller groups of activists continued demonstrations that frequently included smashed windows and fires at buildings such as the headquarters of the Portland Police Association.
Agents from the F.B.I. were still on the ground. In early November 2020, according to records reviewed by The Times, federal agents at one demonstration were “conducting surveillance in the crowd.” As a group marched near the Portland State University campus, some in the crowd shattered windows at a Starbucks.
An F.B.I. special agent who reported being “in a plainclothes surveillance capacity” described witnessing one of the demonstrators break out a Starbucks window with a tire iron before placing the tire iron back inside his backpack, according to a written Portland Police Bureau summary of the federal agent’s account. In the report, the police officer wrote that he had been asked not to identify the federal agent’s name in documents.
The following week, according to an email between an F.B.I. agent and a Portland police officer, F.B.I. agents were again in the crowd conducting surveillance. One of the F.B.I. agents captured a 30-minute video of the scene as he appeared to stand next to a crowd of demonstrators while others smashed windows at a Democratic Party building. The video shows the agent then joining the crowd as it marched down the street.
One of the agents later reported in records seeing an agent from the Department of Homeland Security also on the scene.
Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, who has been scrutinizing the federal response to Portland, said in an interview that while federal officers have a right and a responsibility to protect federal property, there should be a high bar when it comes to agencies surveilling political gatherings.
“The Department of Justice needs to explain to me why it deployed those teams and provide a real record of their activities,” Mr. Wyden said. “What were they there for? Were they there primarily to chill peaceful protesters, or were they there to protect federal property?”
At the Inauguration Day demonstration in January, about 200 people gathered. “We are ungovernable,” one of their signs said.
Local and federal law enforcement records show that about half a dozen federal agents were there that day, with at least some of them doing what was described as surveillance in which they planned to follow protesters who engaged in property crimes or violence — even though the protest that day was starting on the east side of the city, far from the federal properties downtown. Agents singled out and tracked several people who had broken windows, trailing the individuals for several blocks until local law enforcement agents detained them.
Four agents testified before a local grand jury that was considering indictments against protesters who had been arrested. A person familiar with the proceedings said one of the agents testified that the federal officers had been wearing black apparel, a fact that suggests the agents were attempting to disguise themselves as protesters. F.B.I. officials declined to discuss specific tactics or clothing used during their operations.
Prosecutors obtained indictments for six people on riot and criminal mischief charges.
Mike German, a former F.B.I. special agent who specialized in domestic terrorism and covert operations and is now a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that such surveillance operations inherently run the risk of violating First Amendment rights. They should be used only when there is evidence that a serious crime may occur, he said, and they should be tailored to focus on obtaining the evidence needed to prosecute that crime.
“The F.B.I. should focus its resources on groups engaged in deadly violence, not vandals,” he said.
Mr. Cannon, the former F.B.I. supervisor in Portland, said the bureau was indeed worried about acts of violence directed at the police, the potential that the protests could escalate and the toll the demonstrations were taking on the Portland Police Bureau, whose officers were fatigued after months of near-nightly confrontations on the streets.
“This was a wave of protest-related crimes that had a severe impact on the community,” Mr. Cannon said. “There was a lot of pressure. It was a fraught situation.”
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Mr. Boric, 35, is now the most prominent face of a generation of Chileans who are calling for a break with the past.
By Julie Turkewitz, Pascale Bonnefoy and John Bartlett, Published Dec. 21, 2021, Updated Dec. 22, 2021
Mr. Boric at a campaign rally in Santiago in November.
Gabriel Boric rose to prominence in Chile ten years ago as a shaggy-haired student leading massive demonstrations for free quality public education. He ran for president this year, calling for a square deal for more Chileans, with more social protections for the poor and higher taxes on the rich.
Now, having won the presidency on Sunday — with more votes than any other candidate in history — Mr. Boric is poised to oversee what could be the most profound transformation of Chilean society in decades.
It’s not just that he wants to bury the legacy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship by overhauling the conservative economic model the country inherited at the end of his tenure in 1990. Mr. Boric’s government will also oversee the final stages of the writing of a new Constitution to replace the dictatorship-era document that continues to define the nation.
And then there’s who he is: Elected at 35, Mr. Boric will be the youngest president in the country’s history when he takes office in March. He never completed his law degree — the protests got in the way. He speaks openly about his obsessive-compulsive disorder. And he scandalized the Chilean establishment by showing up for his first day as a congressman in 2014 in a beige trench coat — and no tie.
For many Chileans, Mr. Boric’s win is the natural institutionalization of generational howl that has echoed throughout the country for at least a decade. He is seen as the voice of a generation that is ready to break with the past and that has taken to the streets by the tens and even hundreds of thousands to demand a more equal, inclusive country.
“Chile had already changed even before Boric was elected,” said Fernanda Azócar, 35, a voter who participated in weekslong protests in 2006 and 2011. “It’s just that now we have a president who can make these changes permanent.”
Central to the protesters’ claims has been the idea that the promises of the establishment — that the market will produce prosperity, and that prosperity will fix their problems — have failed them. More than 25 percent of the wealth produced in the country is owned by one percent of the population, according to the United Nations. Low wages, high levels of debt and underfunded public health and education systems continue to keep people waiting for opportunity.
Looming over those protests, and over the presidential campaign, has been the legacy of Chile’s bloody dictatorship. General Pinochet came to power in a violent coup in 1973, and his years in power were mired in reports of corruption and repression, including torture and extrajudicial killings.
Mr. Boric is a child of Chilean democracy. He was just four years old when General Pinochet ceded power, and he did not often mention the general on the campaign trail. But his election was in many ways a full-throated rejection of the dictator and what he meant for the country.
First, because General Pinochet was the architect of both the free market economic model and the Constitution that Mr. Boric and his allies have criticized for so long, saying that they have favored the rich and the private sector at the expense of everyone else.
“If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism it will also be its grave,” Mr. Boric shouted before a crowd after his primary win earlier this year.
And second, because the man Mr. Boric beat on Sunday, José Antonio Kast, is the brother of a former adviser to General Pinochet who has spoken favorably of aspects of the dictatorship and had proposed hard-line security measures that reminded some of the days of military rule.
Manuel Antonio Garretón, a sociologist and professor at the University of Chile, called the confluence of Mr. Boric’s election with the national vote to rewrite the Constitution “the second most important moment” in moving past the dictatorship — behind only the 1988 popular vote with which Chileans ended Pinochet’s reign.
Mr. Boric was born in Punta Arenas, in Patagonia, on Feb. 11, 1986. He has two younger brothers, and he comes from a middle class family of Croatian origin, descendants of immigrants who arrived in the late 1800s. (His last name is pronounced “Boritch.”) His father and grandfather worked in the oil industry in the province of Magallanes.
Mr. Boric attended the local private British school, where Pinochet’s rule was debated openly — not the case in many parts of Chile.
In an interview, his brother, Simón, 33, said that the family was not fiercely political, but had opposed Pinochet. One uncle was co-owner of a radio station that blasted the crimes of the regime. “More than once my family received threats,” he said, adding that “anonymous letters arrived because of my uncle’s activities.”
Months after winning his first term in Congress, Mr. Boric described his early determination to understand politics. He came from a fairly protected environment and his father’s politics were centrist. But even as a high school student in Punta Arenas, he said, he started reading up on revolutionary leaders and political processes. It was a lonely endeavor — he didn’t have a group he could discuss politics with.
So, still in high school, he decided he wanted to become a member of a far-left group that had supported armed struggle, the Revolutionary Left Movement, or MIR. The group had been largely crushed during the dictatorship. So Mr. Boric went to Google, found an email for one of its small surviving factions and wrote a letter asking how he could contribute to the revolution. No one ever answered.
In Punta Arenas, Mr. Boric helped restart his city’s high school student federation. Then, in 2004, he moved to Santiago, the capital, to study law. He completed his studies in 2009, but failed a part of the final exam, said his brother. He could have taken the test again and gotten his degree, but soon he was swept up in student activism and politics, and never went back.
In 2011, as protesters took to the streets to call for better public education, he ran for president of the University of Chile’s student federation and won, becoming one of the key leaders of the movement.
From there, he made a bid for office, becoming one of four student protest leaders to enter Congress in 2014.
For 30 years in Chile, two coalitions have alternated power — but Mr. Boric is aligned with neither.
Matías Meza, 41, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Boric is motivated by his understanding of the past, which informs his desire to move the country definitively out of the shadow of the dictatorship.
“He has a strong grasp of history and is acutely aware of his position in society and the privileges he has had,” said Mr. Meza.
Mr. Boric won the election on Sunday with 55 percent of the vote, 11 points ahead of Mr. Kast — a strong popular mandate to restructure the country in light of his promises.
They include shifting from a private pension system to a public one; pardoning student debt; increasing investment in education and public health care; and creating a care giving system that would relieve the burden on women, who do most of the work of tending to children, older relatives and others. He has vowed to restore territory to Indigenous communities and to support unrestricted access to abortion.
But now that he’s won, major hurdles stand in the way of the transformation he envisions.
Mr. Boric will face a pandemic-battered economy, a divided Congress, and the high expectations of voters: those on the left, who rallied behind him in the first round of the presidential election, and those in the center, who flocked to him in the second round, when his rhetoric became more moderate.
“He’s going to have to choose between going moderate or being radical,” said Patricio Navia, a professor of political studies at Diego Portales University in Chile. “Whatever he chooses, it’s going to alienate many voters.”
This election left clear that the majority of Chileans are demanding significant change, said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division at Human Rights Watch (and a Chilean himself).
The question is what comes next, he said, because Mr. Boric “will be judged on whether has the capacity to deliver.”
