Around the World briefs
By Associated Press
Transit of migrants through the Darien Gap resumes as Colombian boat companies end work stoppage
BOGOTÁ, Colombia | Migrants bound for the U.S. are once again crossing the Darien Gap in large numbers, officials in Colombia said on Monday, after being stranded for much of last week in a small town along the country’s Caribbean coast due to a work stoppage by local boat captains.
Johann Wachter Espitia, deputy mayor of Necoclí, said that 3,000 migrants have left the town since Friday on boats headed towards the Darien jungle, with another 400 people waiting and sleeping in tents, as they gather money to pay for their tickets.
From Necoclí migrants board boats that take them to two remote villages, where the treacherous trails that cross the Darien Gap begin.
The dense and roadless rainforest divides South America from Central America and in recent years it has become a common, yet perilous route for hundreds of thousands of South Americans, Asians and Africans headed to the United States.
From Monday to Thursday of last week transit across the Darien dwindled as boat companies in Necoclí went on strike over the arrest of two of their boat captains by Colombia’s navy.
The captains had been intercepted after they left Necoclí in two boats carrying around 150 migrants and were accused by authorities of transporting migrants in unsafe conditions, and of contributing to human trafficking.
The two companies operating boat services from Necoclí towards the Darien Gap stopped their services in protest for four days. They resumed activities on Friday after holding several meetings with municipal and national government officials, who were concerned over the large numbers of migrants stranded in the small town. According to Colombia’s Human Rights Ombudsman, around 8,000 migrants were stranded in Necoclí by Thursday, generating the potential for a public health crisis.
According to Wachter Espitia, the companies agreed to a request that migrants boarding their boats register on a government app. More details on the conditions for transporting migrants will be discussed in another meeting later this week, he said.
Colombia has long allowed migrants from different nations to transit through its territory without visas.
But the South American nation has come under increasing pressure from U.S. officials to stem the flow of migrants headed north, as record numbers of people seek asylum at the U.S. border.
Last year 520,000 people crossed the Darien Gap on foot, according to authorities in Panama, where most migrants register with officials in villages on the northern side of the jungle before they continue their journey to the United States.
Panama’s Security Minister Juan Pino said Monday that the number of migrants crossing the Darien could increase this year, with more than 73,000 crossings registered in the first two months of 2024, a 52% increase from the same period last year. Most of those crossings this year have been Venezuelans escaping their nation’s economic crisis, followed by migrants from Haiti, China and Ecuador.
Despite its growing popularity, the Darien Gap continues to be a dangerous route where migrants have drowned while crossing swollen rivers and are exposed to robberies, sexual violence and tropical diseases.
On Friday Doctors Without Borders said it had treated 233 victims of sexual violence at its health posts in the Darien Gap during the first two months of this year.
In a report published last year, Human Rights Watch said the Colombian side of the Darien is run by the Gulf Clan, a drug trafficking group that is taking a hefty cut from the fees that migrants must pay to guides and porters that lead them to the border with Panama.
Indigenous women in Greenland sue Denmark over involuntary contraception in the 1960s and 1970s
COPENHAGEN, Denmark | A group of Indigenous women in Greenland has sued Denmark for forcing them to be fitted with intrauterine contraceptive devices in the 1960s and 1970s and demanded total compensation of nearly 43 million kroner, their lawyer said Monday.
The 143 Inuit women say Danish health authorities violated their human rights when they fitted them with the devices, commonly known as coils. Some of the women — including many who were teenagers at the time — were not aware of what happened or did not consent to the intervention.
They each are demanding 300,000 kroner, the women’s lawyer, Mads Pramming, told The Associated Press.
The purpose was allegedly to limit population growth in Greenland by preventing pregnancies. The population on the Arctic island was rapidly increasing at the time because of better living conditions and better health care. The small T-shaped device, made from plastic and copper and fitted in the uterus, prevents sperm from fertilizing an egg.
Danish authorities say as many as 4,500 women and girls — reportedly half of the fertile women in Greenland — received coil implants between the 1960s and mid-1970s.
In September 2022, the governments of Denmark and Greenland launched an investigation into the program. The outcome of the probe is due next year.
But Pramming said they won’t wait until then, and that the only option for the women is to seek justice through the court.
“The oldest of us are over 80 years old, and therefore we cannot wait any longer,” one of the women, Naja Lyberth, told Greenland public broadcaster KNR. “As long as we live, we want to regain our self-respect and respect for our wombs.”
Lyberth was 14 when she had a coil fitted and was among the first to talk about it.
The Danish government has offered psychiatric counseling to those affected.
Last year, 67 women filed an initial lawsuit against Denmark over the forced contraception.
“The pain, physically and emotionally, that they have experienced is still there today,” Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said.
Denmark’s past actions in Greenland have been haunting Danish authorities in recent years.
In 2020, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen apologized to 22 Greenland children who were forcibly taken to Denmark in 1951 in a failed social experiment.
The plan was to modernize Greenland and give children a better life, but it ended with an attempt to form a new type of Inuit by reeducating them and hoping they would later return home and foster cultural links.
We “apologize to those we should have looked after but failed,” Frederiksen said, adding that “the children lost their ties to their families and lineage, their life history, to Greenland and thus to their own people.”
Greenland, which is part of the Danish realm, was a colony under Denmark’s crown until 1953, when it became a province in the Scandinavian country.
In 1979, the island was granted home rule, and 30 years later, Greenland became a self-governing entity. But Denmark retains control over its foreign and defense affairs. In 1992, Greenland took over control of its health sector from Copenhagen.
Puerto Rico’s power company
holds a massive debt. A key hearing
to restructure it has started
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico | A key hearing over the future of Puerto Rico’s crumbling power company and its staggering $9 billion debt began Monday in federal court following years of acrimonious talks between the U.S. territory’s government and creditors seeking to recover their investments.
The hearing, which is expected to last up to two weeks, will focus on a proposed debt-restructuring plan. It comes nearly seven years after Puerto Rico’s government filed for the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. municipal history after announcing it was unable to pay its more than $73 billion debt following decades of corruption, mismanagement and excessive borrowing.
Scores of protesters gathered outside the courthouse before the hearing, decrying that power bills, already among the highest in a U.S. jurisdiction, would increase again if the plan is approved, leading to an even higher cost of living in the U.S. Carribean territory.
“Every dollar we pay bondholders is a dollar that is not available for the energetic transformation that Puerto Rico urgently needs,” Juan Rosario, who previously represented consumers on the power company’s board, said before the hearing.
The island of 3.2 million people is still struggling through chronic power outages more than six years after Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico as a powerful Category 4 storm, razing its electric grid.
Officials have noted that aging infrastructure and lack of maintenance also is to blame, with Puerto Rico currently relying on generators from the federal government to help meet its energy needs.
More than 800 people have objected to the debt-restructuring plan in a document that lawyers filed in court, and more protests are expected.
The plan was crafted by a federal control board appointed by U.S. Congress to oversee Puerto Rico’s finances. In a meeting held days before the hearing, Robert Mujica, the board’s executive director, called the plan “fair and equitable.”
“We believe it’s confirmable,” he said.
That remains to be seen, with Judge Laura Taylor Swain on Monday hearing from an array of attorneys who have noted that the majority of creditors don’t approve of the plan. Swain also is scheduled to hear from Puerto Rican retirees, business owners and others on Tuesday.
Previous debt-restructuring plans have been scrapped in recent years, further enflaming already bitter discussions between creditors and the government.
The debt held by Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority is the largest of any of the island’s government agencies and the only one that hasn’t been restructured.
Government officials have said that restructuring the debt is key to boosting Puerto Rico’s economy and attracting new investors.
France seeks personal accounts
of liberation from the Nazis,
80 years after the D-Day landings
PARIS | French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday called on the public to collect photos, films, personal journals and testimony from witnesses to liberation at the end of World War Two, as the country prepares to mark the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings which heralded the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany.
“Let’s share and inscribe our families’ memories in our nation’s history,” Macron said in a video message posted on X, formerly Twitter. “Let’s honor our liberators and let the young generation carry our memories into the future.”
In June, France plans to show its gratitude towards World War II veterans with a ceremony at Omaha Beach to commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, when 160,000 troops from the U.S., Britain, Canada and other nations landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
Many veterans are expected to return to Normandy beaches, some after a long trans-Atlantic journey, despite advanced age, fatigue and physical difficulties.
Macron specifically called on schoolchildren and teachers around the country to help research heroes from Africa, the Pacific, and elsewhere in the world, who helped liberate France. He emphasized the importance of linking the last witnesses of the war and those who sacrificed for freedom and liberty, enjoyed by the today’s youth.
“These young women and young men, like young people today, had their dreams and their plans for the future,” Macron said. “They had the courage to fight for freedom, against the Nazi barbarity, and often paid the price with their lives.”
A ceremony at Omaha Beach, with many heads of state expected to be present, will honor the contribution of the Allied troops. Over the coming months, France will also pay tribute to Resistance fighters from France and abroad, to soldiers recruited in its colonies in Africa, and to the civilians who suffered during the war.
In the past couple of years, commemorations in Normandy also have taken on extra significance as war returned to Europe with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
—From AP reports
