Global Chaos

I am struck by how much U.S. life seems to be proceeding on a business as usual basis when immense upheavals have defined recent history in so much of the globe, even though I am reluctant to use this to "normalize" Donald Trump's unprecedented missteps. 

But, even in the U.S., a series of natural disasters and ineffective responses to them in Puerto Rico have led to sustained malaise in that U.S. Commonwealth, and there are been recent epic wildfires in California.

Here are some of the big upheavals around the world for those who haven't been paying attention (and I'm sure I've missed at least one or two, if not more, notable cases):

* Coronavirus originating in Wuhan, China is becoming a global pandemic, killed thousands in China, and caused the nation to go into lockdown and schools to close for a month.

* Coronavirus has shut down schools for a month in Japan. Meanwhile, Japan is in the midst of an intense economic downturn with GDP falling at a more than 6% annualized rate in the last quarter of 2019.

* Months of intense rioting in Hong Kong over efforts by China to strip away its distinct freedoms and democratic institutions.

* China has put more than a million Uyghur Muslims in concentration camps and is terrorizing this entire society.

*  India is facing continuing mass street riots that have bubbled into a full on massacre in Delhi over a Hindu Nationalist government's immigration bill that has been perceived as anti-Muslim.

*  The ongoing insurgency/conflict in Kashmir recently entered as hot and violent phase.

* Myanmar recently had a government led genocidal expulsion of Rohingya Muslims with a mass refugee flight to India.

* Ethnic conflict and more put masses on the streets and led to military brinksmanship in Thailand. This is related to a sixteen year old and ongoing "South Thailand Insurgency".

* Indonesia had a week of mass street protests in September last year across the nation, over governments efforts to eliminate anti-corruption institutions in the country.

* Wildfires and heatwaves across Australia have dramatically disrupted life there and horribly disrupted the ecological balance.

* Antarctica has had unprecedented high temperatures accelerating glacial melting that could trigger rapidly rising sea levels. So has Greenland.

* An active civil war/Saudi Arabian war against Shiites is raging in Yemen.

* The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians seems to have escalated and gotten more violent, mostly due to Israel being more aggressive.

* An active civil war is raging in Syria with Russian backing.

* An active civil war is raging in Libya.

* An active civil war is raging in Somalia which still doesn't really have a functioning and universally recognized central government.

* An active civil war is raging in the Eastern Ukraine with Russian backing.

* Far right movements have surged in parts of Europe such as Hungary and Poland that have shredded democratic institutions and tolerance.

* An active civil war is continuing with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan.

* There are violent active, verging on genocidal insurgencies and Muslim-Christian clashes across the African Sahel.

* France has had months of general strikes and large scale fairly violent street protests.

* While less violent and disorderly, the United Kingdom has left the U.K. as Brexit happened.

* The economy and social cohesion of Venezuela has totally melted down into hyperinflation and chaos. This has also produced mass street protests.

*  Much of Mexico and Central America has descended into an orgy of cartel and gang violence with extremely high murder rates. More than 35,000 people were killed in 2019 in the "Mexican Drug War" which has killed 115,000 people since it began in 2006. Many of these countries have had massive street demonstrations (including parts of Mexico) and this has triggered a surge of refugees headed for the United States. Costa Rica, however, seems to have been mostly spared.

* Bolivia recently had a coup also involving massive street demonstrations.

* Haiti has had recent mass unrest.

* Brazil under a far right President has epic levels of crime and its interior has turned into a free for all of violent self-help of resource industry capitalists in anti-indigenous people oriented actions. Massive wild fires, some intentionally set, have been burning in the Amazon where other forms of deforestation haven't already occurred.

* Peru is in a continuing constitutional crisis also involving wave after wave of massive corruption.

Worst Killer In Americas Puportedly Captured

There have been something on the order of 4,000 murders in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, which is just across the border from El Paso, Texas, in the last fifteen months. Now, Mexican law enforcement officials have arrested a purported drug gang leader, Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, 32, leader of Los Aztecas, who they claim has confessed to having ordered 80% of those killings personally, including a massacre of fifteen teenagers at a January 31 birthday party, a U.S. Consulate employee and an El Paso County, Texas jail guard. The confessions, if true, put him in the same league of Osama bin Laden for the sheer carnage he has caused.

Mexican officials have something of a track record of reporting confessions while not obtaining convictions, however, and it isn't clear why someone would make such a broad confession if it were true, so the report has to be viewed with some skepticism. It is one of several high profile cartel leader arrested or killed in the past year in Mexico.

In July, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested another gang leader, Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, known as the Camel. . . . Over the past year, the Mexican government has had several notable successes against the drug cartels, arresting or killing top leaders of the Beltrán Leyva drug trafficking organization, and a high-ranking leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Most recently, marines surrounded and killed Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, a top leader of the Gulf cartel in Matamoros on Nov. 5.

The violence is mostly attributed to a turf war between rival gangs in the wake of a militarized assault on drug gangs led by Mexican President President Felipe Calderón that has sprung up in different regions across the country killing tens of thousands of people.

Police in Brazil meanwhile have made a major effort to retake the slums of Rio from criminals in a massive armed effort that left 36 suspects dead.

Brazilian Mayhem

São Paulo, Brazil's streets are running with blood.



Map courtesy of Wikipedia (Geography of Brazil entry).

A wave of violence directed mostly at police, by the kingpin of the dominant organized crime organization in Sao Paulo, and an intense police counter-attack have played out the last week. The violence has subsided for now, but police are patroling the streets with submachine guns and a major show of force to make it so. Some say the police have entered into a truce with the gang, while officials publicly deny it.

[A] five-day wave of violence . . . left at least 133 dead by Tuesday . . . police struck back late Monday and early Tuesday, killing 33 suspected gang members in less than 24 hours . . . 40 police and prison guards[have been] killed since Friday after the jailed leaders of a notorious gang ordered attacks on city streets. . . . authorities later announced killing 71 suspected criminals, four bystanders and 18 prison inmates whose bodies were found after officials quelled rebellions in dozens of prisons.

According to another source things are starting to return to normal now:

The state government told local media that it had recorded a total of 251 attacks principally targeting police since Friday. The First Capital Command (PCC), Sao Paulo's main organized crime group, was believed to be behind the violence.

The PCC orchestrated the violence after its leaders -- including Williams Herbas Camaacho, the gang boss -- were moved to a maximum security prison on Thursday night, according to authorities.

Among the slain were 29 police, three metropolitan Guard officers, eight prison officers, four ordinary citizens and 71 suspected gangsters.

Police have arrested 115 people in connection with the riots.

The gangsters launched attacks by shooting up police stations and patrol cars. They soon extended their attacks to other targets, setting 80 city buses on fire and robbing 15 banks. The rampage caused panic, forcing the closedown of shops, malls, schools and colleges.

The violence began to calm down on Monday night amid rumors that Sao Paulo authorities, who had rejected federal government help to fight the violence, had negotiated a truce with the PCC.

Williams Herbas Camaacho appears to be Brazil's answer to Al Capone:

The gang . . . has used discipline, technology and business alliances to gain a near monopoly on organized crime.

The First Command of the Capital gang, or PCC, has orchestrated 45 prison uprisings and 150 attacks on police and civilian targets since Friday, using clandestine phone banks that allow imprisoned leaders to communicate using smuggled cellular telephones. . . . Willians Herbas Camacho, or Marcola, the PCC's leader, ordered the uprisings to protest his transfer and those of five lieutenants to a super-maximum security prison, partly because the shift would sever or impair their ability to communicate, and run the syndicate.

Many crime experts declared the PCC dead in 2002 after heavy police repression and an internecine war that killed 15 of its directors. But since his ascension in 2003, Marcola has reorganized the PCC and won a reputation as a savvy innovator. . . . Born in the crowded state prison system in 1993, the PCC in the last three years has heavily invested outside of the jailhouse walls.

Marcola has formed partnerships with dozens of independent criminal groups, offering protection and bigger operating budgets in return for a cut of their profits. The PCC is involved with drug trafficking, mass robberies of fortified residential condominiums, kidnappings and armored car heists. . . Marcola uses alliances to thwart the creation of major rivals. . . the PCC [is] a crime monopoly . . . with an estimated 100,000 affiliates.

The city "is the industrial and financial center of Brasil generating over 30% of the GNP. . . . It is a city of immigrants and ethnic neighbourhoods where almost 18 million people live, many of them descendants of Italian, Japanese, and Lebanese migrants."

The Denver Post gave the story second page coverage in a collection of news briefs today, which is the first time I've seen any mention of it, or of the fact that Sao Paulo is under the thumb of one of the most powerful gangs the world has seen in the past century.