Best columns: International NEWS 15
MEXICO
SOUTH AFRICA
Drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán
escaped twice from prison in Mexico, said Sal-
vador García Soto. He won’t get the chance to
stage a third breakout. The Sinaloa cartel leader
was sentenced to life plus 30 years by a New
York court last week and will end his days in a
federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo. That
facility houses the worst of the worst, men like
“Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, Boston Marathon
bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and 9/11 conspira-
tor Zacarias Moussaoui. Guzmán, 62, won’t be
able to trade stories with these criminals, though,
because he will spend 23 hours a day isolated inhis 6-foot-by-11-foot cell, which contains a toilet,
bed, and desk. During his one hour out in the
yard, he will be watched over by snipers—if he
ever gets out, that is. That part of Colorado has
extreme weather, with temperatures soaring into
the 90s in summer and blizzards bringing feet of
snow in winter. Guzmán will surely suffer: At his
sentencing he whined about the “mental torture”
of solitary confinement. But Mexicans still living
through the drug war he helped start—a war that
has claimed 150,000 lives since 2006—have little
pity. Nothing can make up for the “pain and vio-
lence he inflicted” on this country.South Africa’s bitter former president, Jacob
Zuma, is hurling dangerous accusations, said
Yolisa Pikie. Zuma, who was forced to resign in
early 2018, started testifying last week at a public
inquiry into the many allegations of corruption
against him, including that he facilitated the plun-
dering of state assets by his friends and family. In
his opening statement, Zuma, 77, complained that
there had been multiple conspiracies against him
for decades, and he dropped the bombshell claim
that two of his own former cabinet ministers—
Ngoako Ramatlhodi and Siphiwe Nyanda—had
collaborated with the hated apartheid regime. Heoffered “no proof. Just a mere assertion.” South
Africans of a certain age, like me, well remem-
ber the days when accusations like that led to
“necklacing”—when an angry mob would grab
the alleged snitch, put a tire over his head to pin
his arms against his sides, and set fire to him with
gasoline. Zuma is hoping that the section of the
ruling African National Congress party that is
still loyal to him and not to his successor, Cyril
Ramaphosa, will go on a witch hunt and forget
his crimes. South Africans must recognize that
Zuma is “a danger to society” and treat his testi-
Ne mony as “the rambling of a troubled mind.”
ws
co
m
A prison
that can hold
El Chapo
Salvador García Soto
El UniversalAccusations
can easily
lead to murder
Yolisa Pikie
GroundUp.org.zaAmericans are finally admitting what the
rest of the world has known for years:
Their president is a racist, said Corentin
Pennarguear in Le Temps (Switzerland).
Again and again, the deferential U.S.
news media has bent over backward to
give Donald Trump the benefit of the
doubt, referring, for example, to his
lies as “misleading statements” that are
“not based in fact.” Even though Trump
has long trafficked in racism— calling
Mexicans rapists, saying President
Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.,
demanding that all Muslims be turned
back at the border—many Americans have hesitated to label
him a bigot. It has taken this latest, most egregious case of xeno-
phobia, when he tweeted that four brown-skinned Democratic
congresswomen—all of whom are U.S. citizens and three of whom
are American-born—should “go back” to their countries of origin,
for a few U.S. outlets to face the truth. CNN now mentions “rac-
ist tweets” in its chyron, and last week the Los Angeles Times
even titled an editorial “Trump is truly America’s bigot-in-chief.”We’re a long way from the America that once sheltered me
as a refugee, said Cuban author Carlos Alberto Montaner
in La Nación (Costa Rica). Trump’s words are “the worst
and most dangerous kind of extremism,” implying that only
those who agree with him are true Amer i cans. This is what
“Hitler and Mus so li ni said in relation to Ger many and Italy,”
and “what Stalin and Cas tro said in relation to the USSR and
Cuba.” Trump is so opposed to taking in brown-skinned refu-
gees that he is willing to “violate the laws of his nation andinternational treaties” to refuse them
entry. It’s tempting to “call Trump
a fascist,” said Pat Kane in The
National (Scotland). First came the
caging of toddlers at the southern
border, and now the threats to deport
nonwhite Americans. His rallies are
creepy, and the demonization of the
fact-based press as “fake news” is
dangerous. Yet academics say there
are crucial differences: The fascism
of the 1930s was a “bourgeois na-
tionalist response to a radicalized and
internationalist working class,” while
Trumpism is the reverse, a white working class that sees itself as
oppressed by globalist elites. The Trump phenomenon is much
more “incoherent, contingent—and therefore opposable—than
the juggernaut of cruelty and perversion implied by ‘fascism.’”Trump’s racist rhetoric isn’t just America’s problem, said The
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) in an editorial. It has global
repercussions. What do you think China hears when the U.S.
president divides Americans “into two racially defined classes,”
implying that foreign-born citizens of color and their descendants
“have less right to speak than ‘real’ white Americans”? Now,
when people criticize China’s horrific re-education camps, where
a million Uighur Muslims are being brainwashed or disappeared,
Beijing can point to Trump’s statements “to show that America
is just as bad or worse.” America’s “moral leadership on human
rights” has always been stronger than its military might in the
fight to uphold the democratic world order. In abandoning even
lip service to equality, Trump emboldens oppressors everywhere.How they see us: A nation led by a ‘racist’
Rep. Ilhan Omar: Told to ‘go back’ by Trump