International – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Recoleta Mayor Daniel Jadue, at a 2022 May Day march in Chile. | People’s World}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

“After more than 10 years of corruption, crimes, and destroying the Rocoleta commune, finally the justice system begins to act and will make arrangements for the Communist mayor Daniel Jadue. I hope he goes to jail soon.” That was Richard Kast, speaking in April. Kast was the right-wing presidential candidate defeated by Chile’s President Gabriel Boric in December 2021. The food- manufacturing magnate is the son of a World War II German Army officer.

On June 3 Judge Paulina Moya ruled that Jadue would be imprisoned “preventively” on charges of bribery, mal-administration, tax fraud, and bankruptcy. Moya declared that “for Jadue to go free would endanger the safety of society.” The police in April had prevented him from boarding a flight to Caracas. She decreed “120 days of investigation” prior to Jadue’s appearance before an appeals court.

Jadue, a former professor of architecture and urban sociology, has been mayor of Recoleta municipality in the northern part of Santiago since 2012. Responding on social media, he insisted that, “They are judging me for our transformative government. I don’t have a peso in my pocket, but they are handing out the maximum restriction.”

The court’s decision had to do with the “people’s pharmacy” that Jadue devised for Recoleta in 2015. It also involves the spread of people’s pharmacies throughout Chile.Jadue is a national figure. His legal troubles take on added significance on that account.

Jadue is renowned for the reforms he inspired in Recoleta. In addition to the consumer-cooperative pharmacy project, Recoleta offers an “optician program,” a people’s dentistry program, an “open university,” and a “people’s bookstore.” The municipality invests $500,000 a year in 10 public libraries. It recruited physicians and constructed two medical office buildings. It builds architecturally-sophisticated apartment buildings with low-cost rentals.

Jadue is the unusual Communist Party leader who participated in national elections at the highest level. As presidential candidate of a left-leaning coalition in 2021, he almost defeated current president Gabriel Boric, head of a center-left coalition competing in the primary elections.

Jadue provokes the wrath of apologists of Israel. He has participated in pro-Palestine demonstrations outside Israel’s embassy and made public statements interpreted by some as antisemitic. The grandson of Palestinian immigrants, he was president of Chile’s General Union of Palestinian Students and a top organizer for Latin America’s Palestinian Youth Organization.

Jadue’s book, Palestine: Chronicle of a Siege, appeared in 2013. HispanTV recently presented his 12-part documentary presentation “Window on Palestine.” Chile is home to half a million Palestinians, the largest concentration outside of the Middle East.

The prosecutor announced criminal charges against Jadue in November 2023.The people’s pharmacies, on which the prosecution of Jadue is based, are a phenomenon. Now there are 212 of them in 170 localities. Average savings on individuals’ drug purchases are between “64% and 68%.”

Recoleta and the other municipalities together formed a purchasing cooperative known as Chilean Association of Municipalities with People’s Pharmacies (Spanish initials are ACHIFARP). Jadue has been its head. At the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, ACHIFARP was under pressure to distribute healthcare supplies reliably and inexpensively.

In 2021 the Best Quality supply company complained to national g authorities that it was approaching bankruptcy, also that ACHIFARP had neither used or paid for large quantities of supplies it had ordered. A Best Quality salesman reported that Jadue had solicited a bribe. The terms were: donate to the Communist Party headquarters in Recoleta and ACHIFARP would give assurances that Best Quality would be called upon to restock the people’s supermarkets, initiated by the government.

Barbara Figueroa, secretary general of the Communist Party released a statement saying merely that, “the precautionary measure against comrade Daniel Jadue is regrettable and disproportionate, and we believe that it should be appealed. … we respect the Courts of Justice and we hope that this public stage of the investigation and trial will end up proving Daniel’s innocence”.

Some 1000 Chileans signed a letter of support for Jadue. They were “national prize winners, legislators, trade unions leaders, heads of social organizations, academics, human rights leaders, political party leaders, city councilors, jurists, and cultural personalities.” According to the letter, “This case represents not only a political and judicial persecution of a public figure, but also a potential threat to the fundamental principles of the rule of law in Chile.”

As explained by analyst Ricardo Candia Cares,“The people’s pharmacies represent a real contribution to the health of the dispossessed who now have an alternative to the infamous pharmacy chains that collude in gouging the people … … [They] have caused the big pharmacies, or really the powerful forces powerful behind these deals, to lose huge amounts of money.”

Latin American political leaders, Daniel Jadue among them, discovered they can be removed from office or barred from electoral participation through judicial processes. In that regard, he joins presidents Fernando Lugo in Paraguay (2012), Lula da Silva in Brasil (2017), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina (2022), Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2018), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2019), and Peru’s President Pedro Castillo (2022).

They are victims of lawfare, described by Le Monde diplomatique in Spanish as “a new format of persecution and repression, but executed through the perverted use of the norm, mainly by using judges and prosecutors against opponents.”

_{^{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}}

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}

_{^{Migrants line up for processing in Eagle Pass, Texas. President Biden’s immigration policy allows a limited number of Cubans to enter the U.S. on so-called “humanitarian” grounds. The real aim is to hurt Cuba by decreasing its population of skilled workers. | Eric Gay/AP}}

_{Reposted from the People’s World}

Undocumented Migrants crossing into the United States disturb U.S. politics. Cuban migrants, part of the mix, hard-pressed like the others, but privileged, are provocative in their own way.

For many years and even now displaced Cubans are portrayed as victims of a brutal dictatorship and as recipients of “rescue” by freedom-loving Americans. Cubans who have special skills are often lured out of the country with promises of “the good life” in the U.S. and with the intent of hurting Cuba as it loses people with skills needed their at home.

Changing U.S. regulations and new migration patterns highlight the anomaly of special U.S. dispensation for migrating Cubans.

U.S. district judge Drew Tipton on March 8 ruled that migrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti may enter the United States via humanitarian parole. The plaintiffs had been 21 Republican-governed states that had unsuccessfully claimed that immigrants enabled by humanitarian parole required services they could not pay for.

Under humanitarian parole, a program the Biden administration announced on January 6, 2023, migrants entering from those four countries are assured of legal residence for two years – renewable at that point – and a work permit.

Humanitarian parole is limited to 30,000 immigrants arriving every month from the four countries. Migrants need sponsors in the United States.

Instituted under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the program allowed entry into the United States of refugees from the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and other countries. This time, 138,000 Haitians, 86,000 Venezuelans, 58,000 Nicaraguans, and 74,000 Cubans – a total 357,000 migrants –entered via humanitarian parole as of February, 2024.

The would-be migrants from the four countries travel by air to ports of entry inside the United States, pass quickly through immigration screening, and proceed to new homes. Before leaving their home country or a third country, they had found sponsors, presented documentation to U.S. immigration officials, and been approved– all via the Internet.

An analyst claims that, “Combined with the other parole process at the U.S.-Mexican border …, parole has transformed most migration from [the four] countries from mostly illegal to mostly legal in less than a year.” And, “This policy has transformed migration to the United States. By July 2023, parole had already redirected about 316,000 people away from long, perilous treks through Mexico.”

The Biden administration adopted the parole system in part because of difficulties associated with repatriating migrants from the four countries. They stemmed from a U.S. lack of full diplomatic relations and repatriation agreements with those countries. Normal relations with Mexico and the northern Central American countries allow for more convenient U.S. handling of refugees from those countries.

Humanitarian parole came into effect after the administration’s repeal of Title 42, its role having been to exclude migrants because of health risk. Many migrants saw an opening and attempted a border crossing. But many of those from the four countries opted for humanitarian parole.

Scoring political points

By diverting migrants to other locations and relieving pressures along the southern border, the administration might have scored political points, had not administrative delays with humanitarian parole led to big backlogs of migrants waiting to enter.

Cuban migrants to the United States are a special case. Immigration officials on the southern border have long used an “Order of Release on Recognizance,” the so-called “Form I-220A,” to release border-crossers from custody. Officials dealing with Cubans being released ended up accommodating Form I-22A with the objectives of the Cuban Adjustment Act (CAA).

The aim of that legislation passed in 1966 was to legalize the already large population of Cubans who had arrived in the United States after Cuba’s Revolution in 1959 and the many who would follow, all presumed to be enemies of the Revolution. The CAA enables newly arrived Cubans immediately to receive social services and a work permit and, after a year, to be granted permanent-resident status, a pathway to citizenship.

No other migrant from any other country is so favored. The displaced Cubans are portrayed as victims of a brutal dictatorship, and the U.S. government and people as their rescuer.

To apply the CAA to the fate of those Cuban migrants released from custody according to Form I-220A is now off limits, as per a ruling by a U.S. immigration court in September 2023. But now they can make use of humanitarian parole.

Curiously, the governments of three of the countries whose migrants benefit from humanitarian parole – Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – are socialist in nature, and the U.S. government regularly harasses them.

Humanitarian parole entices migrants to the extent that great numbers of citizens depart for the United States. As a result, the human resources of Cuba and the other countries are depleted so much so as to impinge upon the countries’ future development.

The U.S. government with its humanitarian-parole policy, at the very least, has stumbled upon a tool that contributes to destabilizing three governments that variably represent the threat of a good example – Cuba’s government more than the others.

The 425.000 Cuban migrants who arrived in the United States in 2022 and 2023 constituted the greatest exodus since the one following the victory of the Revolution in 1959. Factors pushing Cubans to emigrate are low pay, inflation, and shortages of food, electrical power, medical supplies and drugs. These factors reflect the impact of the U.S. economic blockade, as aggravated by effects of the COVID pandemic and declining tourist income.

Emblematic of the great challenges to Cuba’s future development are the nine percent of Cuba’s healthcare workers who departed in 2021 and 2022, and the loss of teachers at all levels of education – 17,278 posts being unfilled in October 2023.

Speaking at a multi-national meeting on migration taking place in Chiapas, Mexico in October, 2023, Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel declared that, “The hostile policy of the United States is what stimulates the potential of Cuban migration in a very significant way.” U.S. hostility is expressed, he indicated, primarily through “the economic blockade that, reinforced in recent years in a criminal manner, … is by definition aimed at depressing the standard of living of the Cuban population.”

He might have mentioned U.S. economic and political interventions in most of the region’s countries that leave their governments unable to serve and protect their people; their option is to leave home and head north.

_{We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!}

_{W.T. Whitney Jr.}_{is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}