US Navy told to stop bombing Vieques
On Thursday 1 March, Puerto Rico won another round in the long-running battle to stop the US Navy using the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for combat training.
US Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld revealed that he ordered the Navy to call off planned training this month on Vieques for members of the USS Enterprise battle group and a contingent of Marines. Rumsfeld made the decision after a private meeting on Tuesday with Puerto Rican Governor Sila Calderon, who has taken a hard stance against any further Navy training on Vieques, a 19-mile-long island used by the Navy for more than half a century.
She has renounced an agreement her predecessor reached with President Clinton in January 2000 to allow Navy training until the 9,400 residents of Vieques vote in November on whether to permit the Navy to stay or force its withdrawal. The deal included a Navy concession not to use live bombs on Vieques and to train on few days.
On Tuesday 27 February, Calderon met with Rumsfeld in his Pentagon office. She asked Rumsfeld to delay Navy training exercises on Vieques until he reviews a study suggesting noise from the bombing has caused heart disease among residents.
Asserting military training has destroyed people's health, the economy and the island's environment, representatives in the US Congress began circulating a letter urging President Bush to halt the practice. ``This is not a national security issue, it's a health and human rights issue,'' said Anibal Acevedo-Vila, Puerto Rico's Democratic delegate to the House of Representatives.
According to official Puerto Rican figures, cancer rates on the island are soaring, with the numbers of people suffering from cancer of the breast, cervix and uterus up by 300% over the past 20 years. They are claiming more than $100m in damages from the US Navy over accusations that ammunition, including depleted uranium (DU) shells, have caused an epidemic of cancers there.
Campaigners on the island made an order through the Freedom of Information Act to force the Navy to publicly admit it had fired DU shells onto a range on the eastern tip of the island in 1999. The Navy said this was done by mistake after the wrong ammunition was loaded onto a fighter jet and they made efforts to recover the radioactive shell casings afterwards. They only managed to find around 50 of them, however.
The Navy owns two-thirds of Vieques, including a bombing range that covers 900 acres - less than 3 percent of the island. The Navy says Vieques is vital for national defence because its geography uniquely allows for simultaneous air, sea and land manoeuvres. But at the same time, they ignore security and health worries of the inhabitants of Vieques.
A few days before leaving office, Clinton ordered federal health authorities to investigate a Puerto Rican government study showing 49 of 50 volunteers tested on Vieques had a thickening of the sac surrounding the heart, a condition called vibroacoustic disease.
The Navy disputes any link between its training activities and health problems on Vieques.
Opposition to the Navy's use of the island intensified after two off-target bombs killed civilian guard David Sanes on the range in 1999. Demonstrators invaded the range, preventing exercises for a year until US marshals forcibly removed them in May.
Drug companies sue South Africa
Pharmaceutical companies faced off in court on Monday 5 March against the South African government in a case that activists say is a landmark in the developing world's efforts to get cheap AIDS medications.
More than three dozen drug companies are suing the government to try to overturn a 1997 law they argue would allow the health minister to arbitrarily ignore patents on medications. Legal arguments began over the application of the Treatment Action Campaign, an AIDS activist organisation, to join the case in support of the government.
To AIDS activists, the case is quite simple: The pharmaceutical industry is trying to stop the developing world from getting cheap, generic AIDS drugs. Pharmaceutical manufacturers say the case is simply about an unclear South African law that could violate their patent rights.
The lawsuit has stirred strong emotions, as more than 25 million of the 36 million people infected with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the world's most impoverished regions. In 2000, 2.4 million people in the region died from the effects of AIDS.
With little access to the medicines that have turned AIDS from a fatal to a chronic disease in the West, the overwhelming majority of these people - and the millions infected in other poor countries - will die.
To help fight the disease, which now afflicts about 10% of South Africa's 45 million inhabitants, the country passed a law in 1997 giving the health minister a limited right to import generic versions of patented drugs or license their domestic production.
The law has never been used.
The pharmaceutical manufacturers sued in 1998, arguing the law was too broad and unfairly targeted drug manufacturers over other patent holders.
The hearing in the Pretoria high court was expected to last more than a week, and a ruling might not come before the end of the year.
Mexican Indigenous call for Bill of Rights
Thousands of Indians, students and foreign supporters opened the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico on Saturday 3 March, calling for the passage of an Indian rights bill they believe would bring respect to the indigenous people in the Central American country.
Although they differ in what they want and where they come from, the Indians are united in their demand that the San Andres accord be implemented. This was an agreement signed by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the Mexican government in 1996 which spells out the rights demanded by the indigenous people in Chiapas. The indigenous people believe this would help them preserve their diverse cultures, their languages and their land.
``What we want is a place in history, a place we have a right to,'' said Comandante Tacho, one of 24 Zapatista rebel leaders from the southern state of Chiapas who are touring the country and will be speaking as indigenous people from the southwest of Mexico before the Congress on Monday 12 March.
The National Indigenous Congress was largely inspired by the EZLN uprising on 1 January 1994.
Zapatiata leader Subcomandante Marcos is among those fighting for Indian rights. During a speech at the opening of the meeting, he declared himself Indian, saying village elders had told him: ``You are no longer you. You are one of us.''
He also criticized President Vicente Fox, saying he was no different from past presidents - including former President Ernesto Zedillo, who rejected the Indian rights bill. ``In the place of the one that fell, there is another,'' Marcos said. ``But he doesn't look any different, he looks the same.''
Marcos called Fox ``he who talks a lot and listens very little''. But he added in front of the 5,000 people gathered at the congress, ``now is the time for words. Put away your machetes, and start sharpening up your words.''
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