By Francisco Dominguez and Roger D. Harris on April 16, 2025
Detainees at the Cecot mega-prison in Tecoluca, El Salvador
Donald Trump has launched an aggressive campaign that targets Latino migrants – particularly Venezuelans – as scapegoats in a broader geopolitical agenda. Bolstered through a controversial alliance with the Salvadoran president, Trump has overseen mass deportations, detentions in Guantánamo Bay and El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, and invoked 18th-century war powers to justify these actions. (more…)
April 14, 2025
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has opted not to declare a position on the presidential elections in Ecuador, where current President Daniel Noboa is leading the results with 55.88% of valid votes compared to 44.12% for the Citizen Revolution Party candidate, Luisa González, according to data from the National Electoral Council (CNE) with over 90% of the votes counted. (more…)
By Atilio Boron on April 15, 2024 from Buenos Aires
Few in the United States have realized the momentous change that has taken place on the world geopolitical chessboard. Photo: AFP
There is much talk, and will be for a long time, about the “tariff war” unleashed by Donald Trump. And there is a risk that the issue will be reduced to the commercial aspect, to the balance of imports and exports between the United States and its trading partners. But it would be a serious mistake to limit the discussion to that point. (more…)
By Hedelberto López Blanch on April 14, 2025
The electoral fraud in Ecuador was planned and structured long before the voting on April 13th between the candidate Luisa González of the Citizens’ Revolution movement and the far-right Daniel Noboa of National Democratic Action. (more…)
By Carlos Fazio on April 14, 2025
Marco Rubio, foto: AFP
With his peculiar “statesman” language, on March 8th the impudent occupant of the White House, Donald Trump, claimed that foreign leaders had “servilely” sought him out to “kiss his ass” in order to negotiate a reduction in the tariffs that came into effect the following day. A prototype of the malignant narcissist, after his return to the Oval Office, in just three months Trump has surpassed the mafia standards of his first term. It is true that most US presidents have used gangster methods, and some, as Noam Chomsky said, if the Nuremberg principles were applied, would have been hanged as war criminals. But what characterizes Trump is that he does it openly and brutally, in stark contrast to the more subtle ways of his predecessors who were attached to the “big stick policy,” Theodore Roosevelt’s famous imperialist epigraph: “Speak softly, carry a big stick, and you will go far.”
Thus, the corrupt profile of Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems peccata minuta. The double standards of the opportunistic former Republican senator from Florida were on display when he went from being the main instigator, political blackmailer and lobbyist – together with former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, sentenced to 11 years in prison for bribery, extortion, conspiracy and obstruction of justice – in favor of funds from the US Agency for International Development for subversion and promoting regime change in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, to cut those budgets and defend Trump’s policy.
An exponent of the Republican Party’s hawks — in conflict with the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, represented by Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell — Rubio’s priorities are focused on irregular migration to the US, curbing China’s influence in the region, and exercising coercive diplomacy in accordance with his boss’s two stated objectives: “regain” control of the Panama Canal and impose “secondary” tariffs of 25 percent on countries that buy hydrocarbons from Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA). For this objective – aimed at using Venezuela for the hemispheric containment of China – in consultation with the Secretaries of the Treasury, Commerce and Homeland Security, Rubio will be able to make discretionary use of the executive order signed by Trump on March 24.
A supporter of the policy of “maximum pressure” against Nicolás Maduro during Trump’s first term, Rubio is involved in the dispossession and theft of assets of CITGO Petroleum Corporation, PDVSA’s US subsidiary, in which the State Department, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Bank of England and Exxon Mobil figure as part of the network that gave international legitimacy to the fake government of Juan Guaidó.
According to reports in the South Florida media, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Department of Justice have received information from a source at CITGO linking Rubio and his old friend and political ally, former Cuban-American Congressman David Rivera, to corruption associated with the corporation. However, influential Republicans in Florida have blocked the investigation. From October 2020 to April 2021, a whistleblower who applied for the federal witness protection program provided information to Christopher J. Woehr, Little Duane and Claudia Mulvey, and George Stephan (special agent of the Treasury Department in charge of IRS criminal investigations) about irregular transactions and alleged money laundering from CITGO, through Luisa Palacios (a member of its board of directors), to banks in Switzerland, Austria, Hong Kong and Mexico, and to accounts of David Rivera, Diana Rivera McKenzie (David’s sister) and Esther Nuhfer (linked to Rubio) at Chase Bank in Miami Dade.
Some of the transfers were made to 10925 N.W. 43rd Lane, Miami, Florida, 33178, headquarters of Interamerican Consulting Inc, a strategic consulting services firm where David Rivera resided. Between 2017 and 2020, most of the transfers went to bank accounts of Viviana Bovo, who used her name to cover for her boss, Rubio, then a very influential senator from Florida. According to the source, Rubio had agreed with Rivera to lobby to obstruct a Justice Department investigation against CITGO for possible violations including money laundering, fraud, wire fraud and other crimes under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and other laws.
The informant said he witnessed that when Rivera was at the CITGO headquarters in Houston, Texas, he communicated with Rubio, and suggested an investigation of his cell phone. He claimed that Gina Coon, the company’s treasurer, has documents that would confirm the fraudulent actions between Rivera, Rubio, and associates.
According to the Florida program Código (Code) Abierto 360°, at the behest of David Rivera — who in his political beginnings was closely linked to the Díaz-Balart brothers, conspicuous beneficiaries of the Cuban counter-revolution industry in Miami and worked for the Cuban Broadcasting Office (Radio Martí) — Rubio arranged the meeting of Lilian Tintori, wife of the fugitive Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López, with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on February 16, 2017.
Rivera was arrested in 2022 for having worked illegally as a “foreign agent.” The accusation refers to a certain “senator 1” for Florida, who that year had only two federal senators: former governor Rick Scott and Rubio. Just on March 29, 2025, Venezuela New reported that Alejandro Terán, director of the Latin American Association of Petroleum Entrepreneurs in Texas, claimed that, as a senator, Rubio received corrupt money from the Simón Bolívar Foundation of CITGO, which was run by Guaidó. And he accused him of being an Exxon Mobil lobbyist.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English
By Alejandra Garcia and Bill Hackwell on April 13, 2025
Luisa Gonzalez calls fraud in Ecuadorian elections.
Today Ecuadorians were called to the polls for the runoff elections, which pitted leftist candidate Luisa Gonzalez against incumbent President and Trump supported Daniel Noboa. The election day was marked by a series of setbacks, including complaints of irregularities, violations of democracy and the activation of a new state of emergency which allowed the most extreme militarization the country has ever experienced. (more…)
By Raúl Antonio Capote on April 13, 2025
They say that the cause of the intellectual decline present in 21st-century human beings is due to the pollution caused by lead, used as a gasoline additive since the beginning of the last century, a “great invention” of the General Motors Company that poisoned the earth in proportions still unknown. (more…)
By Jorge Luis Lora Moran on April 12, 2025
The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has barred scientists from China and five other “countries of concern” from accessing 21 biomedical databases, which contain information on genetic variation, cancer cases, neurodegenerative diseases and more. (more…)