Global Affairs
No power, no water: Civilians in Donbas region feel effects of escalating Ukraine-Russia crisis | International
The dogs were extremely restless when Pavel Kolomoizev arrived at the farm on Sunday. The first thing that greeted him at the muddy entrance was a gaping hole where the mortar shot had dented and broken the metal fence. Inside the property, the wall of the building where the farm workers cook, rest and sometimes sleep was chipped and peppered with holes. There was no more glass in the windows. “Fortunately, I was not here that night,” noted Kolomoizev.
Wearing a black hat pulled down to his eyebrows, the 48-year-old farm operator spent all that day picking up bits of projectile, sweeping the broken glass and covering the holes with plastic sheeting. “Just when you think that you’re finally going to have peace, that things are cooling down and that we can move on, everything starts all over again,” he said, pouring a little tea from a thermos into a cup.
Villages like Krasnohorivka, located just a few miles from the frontlines, are feeling the effects of intensifying violence in the Donbas region of southeastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists backed by the Kremlin and the Ukrainian army have been clashing for the last eight years. A fragile ceasefire signed in 2019 (the umpteenth one) has been constantly violated, and there have been attacks ever since the conflict began in 2014, according to an observer mission sent by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). But the situation has become “much worse” since Thursday of last week, said Vasili Grebinik, a 73-year-old retired miner who lives in the area.
Officials in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, on one side and the secessionist leaders of the Donetsk and Luhansk areas on the other have been blaming each other for the bombings. Two civilians died on Monday in two attacks in Novoluhanks, within Ukrainian-controlled territory. On Sunday, the heads of the self-proclaimed “Popular Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, in the Donbas, announced the death of two more civilians. They also accused the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of sabotaging critical infrastructure and of planning an attack to take back the entire region. Kiev denied this and said it’s a carefully planned operation by the Kremlin to start an incursion into the separatist regions, which Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday recognized as independent republics, arguing that their populations must be protected from what his own security aides have described as “a Nazi regime.”
With political statements picking up speed and diplomatic talks moving into high gear in a bid to de-escalate a rapidly ballooning crisis, the bombing of the Donbas region continues unabated. Projectiles have already brought down power lines and damaged pipes in the towns closest to the frontlines. In Krasnohorivka, a farming village, local residents have been without electricity since Sunday. Víktor, the foreman at a kolkhoz (a collective farm), and several neighbors were attempting to fix the cables and the transformer themselves, aided by a tractor with a front loader bucket. “We can’t be without light, without refrigerators; some people don’t even have heating,” said Víktor.
There is nothing left of the wealth once on display in the Donbas, an industrial and mining region that was an important driver of economic growth during Soviet times. The latest war in Europe has already claimed around 14,000 lives from both sides and forced over 1.5 million people to leave their homes. The conflict is also bleeding the economy of eastern Ukraine and of the country as a whole. The landscape has been scarred by projectiles and is dotted with abandoned buildings. There is also a lot of land lying fallow, according to Alexander Vasilievich, who used to work for an agricultural company. “Everything is in such bad shape that it’s hard to see which are the old shot marks and which are the new,” he said, shrugging. A detonation went off in the distance, but Vasilievich did not even flinch.
The city of Marinka, in the Donetsk Oblast (province), was the scene of intense fighting at the beginning of the war and it briefly came under separatist control for a couple of days. On Monday, Luba Vetrova and a group of friends were having a lively conversation on the benches of a city park, soaking in the rays of the winter sun. “What else can we do, there’s no electricity at home,” said Vetrova, 69. All the women sounded furious, blaming the government for the war and the escalation of violence. They said that everything would be better if the Ukrainian soldiers would just go away, and even suspected that Ukraine, not Russia, might have been behind some of the projectiles targeting the city. “Whether accidentally or not, all I know is that my roof has been broken four times. Whoever it was, we’re right in the middle,” said one of the women. Vetrova, who lives off a modest pension, said she misses the days of the Soviet Union when she could afford to go on vacation to the Black Sea or to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. “I haven’t been out of here for two decades,” she lamented.
Tamara Mavrova was also feeling a bit nostalgic, but in her case, it was for the city that might have been but whose future was cut short by the war. “Last year the circus came to town and we bought tickets for my granddaughter,” she explained. “But there were several attacks and they were unable to perform.” Mavrova, 70, used to work in a small retail store until it was shut down because of the war. For the last two days, she has been without electricity or running water. Her house is filled with candles, flashlights and large water bottles. “At the start of the war, we moved in with relatives in a different area. But we are elderly and we don’t know where to go,” she said. Despite the years that have gone by, she still can’t get used to the sound of the bombs. “When it comes, I bite my tongue and I sit to wait until it goes away.”
Global Affairs
Twenty victims of pedophilia denounce the Society of Jesus of Bolivia for covering up rapes | International
A pedophilia scandal is cornering the Society of Jesus in Bolivia. Half a year after the publication of the diary of the late Spanish Jesuit priest Alfonso Pedrajas, in which he admitted to having abused dozens of Bolivian children while his superiors looked the other way — and which triggered a series of accusations against a dozen priests in the Latin American country — a group of victims on Tuesday brought legal action against the Roman Catholic organization for covering up the abuse, for protecting pedophile clerics and for silencing the victims.
The plaintiffs, former students at several Jesuit-run schools who suffered sexual assaults between 1972 and 1995, had already independently brought complaints against their attackers months ago. Now, they have filed a class action suit against the current provincial of the religious order in Bolivia, Bernardo Mercado, “as the highest authority” of the institution. The plaintiffs are accusing the Society of Jesus of being the author “by omission” of the crimes of rape of minors, since for years officials were aware of the sexual abuse that was going on and did nothing to stop it. This is the first class action complaint by victims against the order in Bolivia.
Although the Bolivian penal code indicates that pedophilia crimes expire four years after the victim has reached the age of majority, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, José Luis Gareca, argues that the cases of pedophilia committed by the Jesuits and their cover-up are “crimes against humanity,” which have no statute of limitations as per the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of the United Nations. “Article 7 of this statute establishes that crimes against humanity must have been committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack and must be directed against a civilian population, as happened in the case of the plaintiffs,” says Gareca.
The complaint, filed in the Cochabamba Prosecutor’s Office, is based on the investigation that this newspaper carried out on the diary that Pedrajas, known among his students as “Pica,” wrote between 1964 and 2006. In its pages he wrote repentantly about the sexual assaults he had committed against at least 85 children and how several senior officials of his order looked the other way when he told them what he had done. He also explained that they protected him when several victims reported the abuses they suffered.
Some of these former provincials (the highest position of the Jesuit order in Bolivia) are Ramón Alaix and Marcos Recolons, both Spaniards who, like Pedrajas, traveled to Bolivia as missionaries. Recolons, in addition to being a close friend of Pedrajas, as noted in his diary, held a high position in the Vatican between 2004 and 2008. In total there were seven superiors and a dozen other clerics who, according to the memoirs of Pedrajas, covered up the crimes.
The original story about Pedrajas was followed by other reports of new victims who accused other Spanish Jesuits of pedophilia at several schools, but mainly at the Juan XXIII school of Cochabamba, where Pedrajas was the principal for two decades and where more of his victims have surfaced. But there were other schools in Oruro, Santa Cruz and Sucre. In some of these cases, those affected said that they told various officials and superiors of the order about what was going on, but that, far from being listened to, they were threatened and punished. The accused Jesuits are Antonio Gausset (a deceased Spaniard), Luis Tó (a deceased Spaniard who in 1992 was transferred to Bolivia after a conviction for abusing a girl in Barcelona), Alejandro Mestre (a deceased Spaniard who became archbishop of La Paz and president of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference), Jorge Vila (a deceased Spaniard and founder of the humanitarian association DNI), Lucho Roma (a deceased Spaniard), Carlos Villamil (a deceased Bolivian and deputy principal at Juan XXIII), Francisco Pifarré (who also served as principal at Juan XXIII) and Francesc Peris (a Spaniard who taught at Juan XXIII in 1983, also accused of abusing girls in Barcelona until 2005). The Jesuit order, both in Bolivia and in Spain, never reported the cases to the authorities when these were first brought to their attention.
The group of victims recalls in the complaint that the Society of Jesus itself has acknowledged in several statements published in recent months that it knew about these abuses and that it did nothing about it. “We recognize that, in the past, some actions in this regard have not corresponded to the dimension of the crime perpetrated. For this reason we must ask for forgiveness. But it would be useless to recognize it if we do not act now to meet the circumstances,” says one of these statements. The first action by Jesuit leaders was to provisionally remove eight priests who held the position of provincial: five who held the position during the years in which Pedrajas committed the abuses, and another three who did so after his death. The Society of Jesus states that there is an ongoing internal investigation into all such cases of abuse.
For the plaintiffs, says their lawyer, the silence imposed by the order and the impunity with which the pedophiles acted “has given rise to an institutional conduct of criminal permissiveness” in which hundreds of children fell “into the clutches of sexual predators and pedophiles who took it upon themselves to write diaries, take photos and film their victims.” They also emphasize that civil justice “can in no way be replaced by the canonical law” that to date the Church uses to internally manage many of these cases, and where the aggressors typically purge “‘their errors’ via confessions and transfers to new locations to evade criminal sanctions.”
Several investigations underway
The tsunami caused by the publication of the Pica case forced the Bolivian Episcopal Conference to launch a general investigation of past cases of pedophilia. The Bolivian president, Luis Arce, wrote to Pope Francis requesting from the Vatican all the files on cases of pedophilia committed by clerics in Bolivian territory. This request is still waiting to be fulfilled. In May, Arce also presented a bill in the Bolivian Legislative Assembly to eliminate the statute of limitations on pedophilia crimes and to create a truth commission to investigate all past cases. This initiative is still undergoing parliamentary processing. Meanwhile, the Bolivian Senate has created another investigative committee exclusively focused on cases of pedophilia by members of the cloth in that country.
The Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office is still investigating both the attacks committed by Pedrajas and those reported in recent months. Prosecutors already have a copy of the diary and internal documentation of the Society of Jesus that was found after the police searched several offices of the order in La Paz, where its headquarters and some of its offices are located.
EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has an updated database with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to us at: abusos@elpais.es. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.
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Global Affairs
Safe Mobility Initiative Faces Challenges In Delivering On Its Promises For Latin American Migrants
In June, the United States introduced the Movibilidad Segura, or Safe Mobility, program, a new immigration initiative aimed at expanding legal routes for refugees and migrants from South and Central America.
The program’s objective is to reduce irregular migration and strengthen transportation and communication links between the Americas. While the intentions behind Safe Mobility are commendable, its execution has faced several challenges, leaving thousands of applicants in limbo.
For many hopeful migrants like Eliezer Briceño, a 40-year-old Venezuelan residing in Ciudad Bolívar, Colombia, the application process has proven to be a complex and tedious endeavor.
Briceño’s experience highlights the technological barriers that applicants face, emphasizing the need for reliable internet access and suitable devices for successful registration.
Unfortunately, these prerequisites pose significant challenges for those without adequate resources.
Migrants cross a river in the Darién rainforest, October 2022.Fernando Vergara (AP)
The overwhelming response to the program has led to the temporary closure of the website in Colombia, further complicating the application process. With quotas quickly filled during the limited application periods, the backlog of hopeful migrants has grown, exacerbating the frustration and uncertainty surrounding Safe Mobility.
Of the nearly 29,000 applicants from Colombia, less than 1% have progressed through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) as of August 28. This statistic underscores the significant delays and challenges faced by applicants. Eliezer Briceño, like many others, anxiously awaits news about his application status, armed only with a receipt indicating a forthcoming call.
Safe Mobility, while a response to the migration crisis in Latin America, is one of several initiatives addressing the challenges faced by millions of displaced individuals.
Its collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) demonstrates a multi-lateral effort to find solutions to the region’s complex humanitarian, political, and economic issues.
A group of Haitian migrant women & their children wait to board a boat from Necocli, Colombia to Capurgana & then cross the Darién Gap to Panama.
However, the program’s operational secrecy, with undisclosed office locations, underscores the challenges faced by its administrators.
The need to protect both applicants and program staff from potential overcrowding and disruptions mirrors the situation in Tapachula, Mexico, where large groups of migrants have sought assistance, albeit without violent incidents.
The interview process for Safe Mobility applicants introduces another layer of complexity, marked by confidentiality agreements.
While applicants are required to sign agreements consenting to share personal data with program partners, the imposition of non-disclosure clauses appears unusual and unprecedented.
The UNHCR argues that confidentiality is crucial for the protection of individuals in need of international refuge.
The uncertainty persists even after interviews, as those rejected receive prompt notifications while others remain in a state of perpetual waiting. The apparent randomness of selections and the lack of clear communication only heighten the frustrations of applicants.
As Safe Mobility nears the midpoint of its announced six-month pilot period, questions about its effectiveness and future persist.
While the initiative addresses a critical need, its slow start and operational challenges highlight the complexity of addressing the migration crisis in the Americas.
Cooperation from multiple nations, alongside initiatives like Safe Mobility, will be essential in finding lasting solutions to this pressing global issue.
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