In Surprise #Impeachment Vote, #Peru President Ousted by Congress

#Peru's President Vizcarra Ousted in Surprise Impeachment Vote by congress 5 months before elections. 

Vizcarra is accused of taking 2.3 million soles ($641,000) in bribes from companies building infrastructure projects in the Moquegua region, where he was governor from 2011 to 2014. He denies receiving kickbacks and reiterated that he's ready to cooperate with prosecutors investigating the case.

The president's position was weakened in the last few hours after several local media outlets published excerpts of text messages between him and a former cabinet minister in which they appear to discuss meeting with construction executives alleged to have paid him bribes. 

The reports said the text messages also suggest that he may have had contacts with the opposition during an attempt to impeach his predecessor Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2018, something which he has denied. 

In a statement from his office, Vizcarra said the reports showed nothing illegal and are designed to damage the population's trust in his government.

See the whole story here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-10/peru-president-ousted-after-losing-impeachment-vote-in-congress

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#Venezuela’s President #Maduro’s ‘Go-To-Guy’ For All Shady Deals, Colombian dealmaker Alex Saab arrested in Cabo Verde

Alex Saab's arrest in Cape Verde © YouTube

Venezuela's opposition regards Mr Saab as the president's chief dealmaker and frontman — the man suspected of helping the regime import petrol from Iran in defiance of US sanctions, buying state-subsidised food in Mexico and exporting illegally-mined Venezuelan gold to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, channelling money through a web of companies in Panama, Hong Kong and elsewhere."

"He's the go-to guy," said Vanessa Neumann, envoy to the UK of Venezuela's US-backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó. "He knows who to call in Iran, who to call in Turkey, how to set up a business in Panama. Not many people have that skillset, or that Rolodex, or that loyalty."

President Nicolás Maduro's fixer at centre of tug of war between Washington and Caracas

#Venezuela's Suffering Shows Where Illiberalism Leads

An excellent piece on Venezuela by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic, showing that what we are witnessing there is but a microcosm of so many of the ailments we see in so many countries' political systems / situations throughout the world today.

Long read, but worth it. 

Venezuela Is the Eerie Endgame of Modern Politics

Citizens of a once-prosperous nation live amid the havoc created by socialism, illiberal nationalism, and political polarization.

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is a senior fellow of the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her latest book is Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.

February 27, 2020

Emin Ozmen/Magnum Photos

Last month, Juan Guaidó appeared in Washington in the role of political totem. Venezuela's main opposition leader—the man who is recognized by that country's National Assembly, millions of his fellow citizens, and several dozen foreign countries as the rightful president of Venezuela—was one of the special guests at the State of the Union address. President Donald Trump welcomed Guaidó as living evidence that his own administration was "standing up for freedom in our hemisphere" and had "reversed the failed policies of the previous administration"; he called Venezuela's current leader, Nicolás Maduro, an illegitimate ruler whose "grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken." He gave no details of how that would happen. Trump, who has never been to Venezuela or shown any prior interest in it—or, for that matter, shown any interest in freedom anywhere else —presumably knows that the country matters to some voters in South Florida. To their credit, members of Congress gave a bipartisan standing ovation to Guaidó nevertheless.

Trump is not the only world leader to cite Venezuela for self-serving ends.

Regardless of what actually happens there, Venezuela—especially when it was run by Maduro's predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez—has long been a symbolic cause for the Marxist left as well. More than a decade ago, Hans Modrow, one of the last East German Communist Party leaders and now an elder statesman of the far-left Die Linke party, told me that Chávez's "Bolivarian socialism" represented his greatest hope: that Marxist ideas—which had driven East Germany into bankruptcy—might succeed, finally, in Latin America. 

Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left leader of the British Labour Party, was photographed with Chávez and has described his regime in Venezuela as an "inspiration to all of us fighting back against austerity and neoliberal economics." 

Chávez's rhetoric also helped inspire the Spanish Marxist Pablo Iglesias to create Podemos, Spain's far-left party. Iglesias has long been suspected of taking Venezuelan money, though he denies it. 

The @ICIJorg & @NYTimes investigate #Angola’s #Kleptocracy

How U.S. Firms Helped Africa's Richest Woman Exploit Her Country's Wealth

Ms. dos Santos, estimated to be worth over $2 billion, claims she is a self-made woman who never benefited from state funds. But a different picture has emerged under media scrutiny in recent years: She took a cut of Angola’s wealth, often through decrees signed by her father. She acquired stakes in the country’s diamond exports, its dominant mobile phone company, two of its banks and its biggest cement maker, and partnered with the state oil giant to buy into Portugal’s largest petroleum company.

...A trove of more than 700,000 documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and shared with The New York Times, shows how a global network of consultants, lawyers, bankers and accountants helped her amass that fortune and park it abroad. Some of the world’s leading professional service firms — including the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and PwC — facilitated her efforts to profit from her country’s wealth while lending their legitimacy.

The empire she and her husband built stretches from Hong Kong to the United States, comprising over 400 companies and subsidiaries. It encompasses properties around the world, including a $55 million mansion in Monte Carlo, a $35 million yacht and a luxury residence in Dubai on a seahorse-shaped artificial island.

Read the whole story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/world/africa/isabel-dos-santos-angola.html?

________________________

MasterFeeds

Everything you Wanted to know about #LavaJato, but were afraid to ask... @ElAmpliPuntoCom

https://youtu.be/YB4Vz8JVEuo

From the creators of Venezuela’s leading satirical fake news site, El Chiguire Bipolar, comes a new satirical Real News site focused on Latin America, Ampli @ElAmpliPuntoCom

This is their first work.

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-- The MasterFeeds

How a #Chinese venture in #Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry - @Reuters SPECIAL REPORT

#Chavez's promises, "seemed like a revolutionary idea. Now we're starving."

Great investigative piece from Reuters on the corruption that developed from / led to the alliance between Venezuela and China... 

"The diversification [into Food production] made PDVSA the conduit through which contracts, and a growing sum of money administered by Venezuela's national development bank, were awarded. By 2010, the filings say, the bank had received $32 billion from the China Development Bank and another $6 billion from an infrastructure fund created by Chavez."

https://www.reuters.com/article/venezuela-china-food/special-report-how-a-chinese-venture-in-venezuela-made-millions-while-locals-grew-hungry-idUSL1N22D1E7

SPECIAL REPORT-How a Chinese venture in Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry

(For more Reuters Special Reports, click on)

By Angus Berwick

TUCUPITA, Venezuela, May 7 (Reuters) - The project was meant to feed millions.

In Delta Amacuro, a remote Venezuelan state on the Caribbean Sea, a Chinese construction giant struck a bold agreement with the late President Hugo Chavez. The state-run firm would build new bridges and roads, a food laboratory, and the largest rice-processing plant in Latin America.

The 2010 pact, with China CAMC Engineering Co Ltd , would develop rice paddies twice the size of Manhattan and create jobs for the area's 110,000 residents, according to a copy of the contract seen by Reuters.

The underdeveloped state was an ideal locale to demonstrate the Socialist Venezuelan government's commitment to empower the poor. And the deal would show how Chavez and his eventual hand-picked successor, President Nicolas Maduro, could work with China and other allies to develop areas beyond Venezuela's bounteous oil beds.

"Rice Power! Agricultural power!" Chavez tweeted at the time.

Nine years later, locals are hungry. Few jobs have materialized and the plant is only half-built, running at less than one percent its projected output. It hasn't yielded a single grain of locally grown rice, according to a dozen people involved in or familiar with the development.

Yet CAMC and a select few Venezuelan partners prospered.

Venezuela paid CAMC at least $100 million for the stalled development, according to project contracts and sealed court documents from an investigation by prosecutors in Europe.