Chilean President Sebastian Pinera on Tuesday asked lawmakers to allow troops back on the streets to defend key public infrastructure, even as a human rights group reported “grave” abuses by security forces over five weeks of sometimes violent riots.
The continuing protests in Chile over inequality and a shortfall in some social services have left at least 26 dead and thousands injured. They have also hobbled the capital’s public transport system, once the envy of Latin America, and caused billions in losses for private business.
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera arrives to La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 4, 2019.
Riots have erupted in countries across Latin America, including Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia in recent weeks as regional unrest has spiraled into violence and demands for broad-based reforms.
Pinera sent a bill to Congress Tuesday morning to allow the military to protect transmission lines, electric plants, airports, hospitals and other public infrastructure in order to assure “basic services.”
He said the move would “free up the police force … to protect the security of our citizens.”
Pinera’s announcement came shortly after international rights group Human Rights Watch said in a report that police had brutally beat protesters, shot teargas cartridges directly at them, and ran over some with official vehicles or motorcycles.
“There are hundreds of worrying reports of excessive force on the streets and abuse of detainees,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, director of Human Rights Watch’s Americas division, after meeting with Pinera on Tuesday.
The group stopped short of alleging the abuses had been systematic, but its conclusions were in line with a report last week by Amnesty International on the seriousness of many violations. More than 200 Chileans have suffered severe eye injuries alone in clashes with police using rubber bullets.
Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have recommended an immediate overhaul of police protocols and accountability measures to address the mounting allegations of abuse.
Police and military officials have said any cases of alleged abuse are under investigation by civilian courts.
New clashes
Roadblocks snarled traffic around the Chilean capital Santiago on Tuesday around midday, as protesters set up burning barricades on major streets and highways around the city.
Police used water cannons to disperse protesters in front of the La Moneda presidential palace shortly after Pinera’s speech there. Many took to the city’s main boulevard afterward, bringing traffic to a standstill.
“This never ends,” Rosa Olarce, a pharmacy worker, told Reuters as she waited for a bus. “We’ll see what comes of it.”
Pinera in his speech Tuesday morning ticked off a list of reforms, from boosting the minimum wage to slashing the prices of medicines and public transportation, aimed at quelling the protests.
The country’s normally fractious political parties have also agreed to work together on a new constitution.
However, protests continue, in smaller numbers but with intense violence at their fringes, driven by mistrust that politicians will keep their promises to bring significant change, and enduring fury over the police handling of demonstrators.
Thanksgiving came early for a group of New York City commuters who enjoyed a holiday feast on a subway train.
Video footage shows riders standing behind a white-clothed table covered with plates of turkey, mashed potatoes and cornbread in the middle of a Brooklyn-bound L train on Sunday.
Stand-up comedian Jodell “Joe Show” Lewis tells the New York Post he organized the Thanksgiving dinner to “bring a little excitement to commuters” and feed any New Yorkers who might be hungry.
Lewis says he chose the L train after he saw how “dreary and upset” riders were at the inconvenience of a construction project that has cut service on the line.
In September 1789, members of America’s first Congress approached the nation’s first president, George Washington, and asked him to call for a national Thanksgiving.
That seemingly benign request ignited a furor in Congress over presidential powers and states’ rights. Critics had two main concerns with the idea of a presidential proclamation to declare a national Thanksgiving.
First, some viewed Thanksgiving as a religious holiday, which put it outside of the purview of the president. Secondly, opponents of the measure believed the president did not have the authority to call a national Thanksgiving because that was a matter for governors.
It was a challenging time for the young nation. America had won the Revolutionary War but the country — made up of the 13 former colonies — was not fully unified yet. Calling a national Thanksgiving was a way to bring Americans together.
Painting of George Washington with his family, wife Martha and her grandchildren, by artist Edward Savage.
In the end, Washington did issue a proclamation, the first presidential proclamation ever, calling for a national “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” He also came up with a solution designed to appease the opposition.
“When he issued the proclamation, he sent copies of that to governors of each of the states, 13 at the time, and asked them to call a national Thanksgiving on the day that Washington specified, the last Thursday of November,” says Melanie Kirkpatrick, author of “Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience,” and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. “And, of course, Washington’s prestige being what it was, every governor did.”
Yet the battle over a national Thanksgiving did not end there.
As president, Thomas Jefferson refused to issue Thanksgiving proclamations, even though he had done so as governor of Virginia. John Adams and James Madison did issue proclamations calling for days of “fasting, prayer, and thanksgiving.”
However, after Madison, no U.S. president issued a Thanksgiving proclamation until Abraham Lincoln. He did so in the middle of the U.S. Civil War in 1863 in an effort to unify the country.
“The Battle of Gettysburg had been fought a few months earlier. It was becoming clear that the Union was going to win,” Kirkpatrick says. “Every family in America was deeply affected by that terrible war. In the midst of all that, he was talking about the blessings of the country and what we had to be grateful for. And then he asks the people to come together as one, with one heart and one voice, to celebrate the holiday.”
Since then, every president has called for a national Thanksgiving.
President Abraham Lincoln’s signature, (left) on his Thanksgiving proclamation issued in 1863.
It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who stirred the pot again in 1939, by moving Thanksgiving to the third Thursday in November. Up until then, Americans had marked the holiday on the last Thursday in November, a date first specified by Lincoln.
The new date was Roosevelt’s bid to lengthen the Christmas shopping season and boost the nation’s economic recovery after the Great Depression.
“It was very annoying to some businesses. For example, the calendar industry, which had printed its calendars for the next year already,” Kirkpatrick says. “But one of the most vocal groups were colleges and universities, specifically the football coaches, because a tradition had developed of having Thanksgiving football championship games on Thanksgiving weekend.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt carves the turkey during Thanksgiving dinner for polio patients at Warm Springs, Ga., with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt beside him, Dec. 1, 1933.
The divide over when to celebrate the holiday was so deep that half of the states adopted the new day, while the other half stuck to the traditional day. Roosevelt eventually reversed his decision, and Congress ended the long national debate over Thanksgiving in 1941 by passing a law making the fourth Thursday in November a legal holiday.
Today, Thanksgiving continues to unify millions of Americans who gather to celebrate the holiday with family and friends. Many will serve traditional foods like turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.
George Washington made a point of declaring that Thanksgiving should be celebrated by people of all faiths, a distinction that still resonates for Americans, including immigrants marking their first Thanksgiving.
“It’s 398 years since the so-called first Thanksgiving. It’s America’s oldest tradition,” Kirkpatrick says. “It’s tied up with a lot of seminal events in our history, such as the Revolution and the Civil War, and it’s also a rite of passage for new Americans. The idea is that once you celebrate Thanksgiving, you know you are truly participating in a national festival that cements your position as an American.”
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order creating a White House task force on missing and slain American Indians and Alaska Natives.
The task force will be overseen by Attorney General William Barr and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. It is tasked with developing protocols to apply to new and unsolved cases and creating a multi-jurisdictional team to review cold cases.
Trump on Tuesday called the scourge of violence facing Native American women and girls “sobering and heartbreaking.”
The National Institute of Justice estimates that 1.5 million Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including many who are victims of sexual violence. On some reservations, federal studies have shown women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.
On this episode of Healthy Living, what is autism and how does it affect the brain’s normal development of social and communication skills? Dr. Usifo Edward Asikhia, Clinical Director of the International Training Center for Applied Behavior Analysis, tells us more. Also, we head to the Democratic Republic of Congo for a look at how one school is providing care for children with disabilities, a recent study has the answer to how humans get infected with Malaria, and in our “What’s New?” segment, bioengineers are working to create human organs from a 3D printer. Tune in for these topics and more this week on Healthy Living.
More than 60 doctors have written to British authorities asserting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange urgently needs medical treatment at a university hospital.
The doctors said in a letter published Monday that Assange suffers from psychological problems including depression as well as dental issues and a serious shoulder ailment.
Assange is in Belmarsh Prison on the outskirts of London in advance of an extradition hearing set for February. He is sought by the U.S. on espionage charges relating to his WikiLeaks work.
The letter was sent to Home Secretary Priti Patel.
Dr. Lissa Johnson of Australia said an independent medical assessment is needed to determine if Assange is “medically fit” to face legal proceedings.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday offered another conflicting account of a leadership shakeup at the Pentagon, while defending his decision to intervene on behalf of a Navy SEAL convicted of battlefield misconduct during the fight against the Islamic State terror group in Iraq.
FILE – Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer addresses graduates during the U.S. Naval War College’s commencement ceremony, in Newport, Rhode Island, June 14, 2019.
Asked about Sunday’s firing of the U.S. Navy’s top civilian, Secretary Richard Spencer, Trump told White House reporters, “We’ve been thinking about that for a long time.”
“That didn’t just happen,” he added during an appearance in the Oval Office with the Bulgarian prime minister. “I have to protect my war fighters.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper attends a press conference, Nov. 15, 2019.
Trump also defended ordering Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Sunday to cancel a review board hearing for Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher.
Gallagher was acquitted by a military jury earlier this year of charges he murdered a wounded Islamic State terror group fighter during his deployment to Iraq in 2017. But he was found guilty of posing with the teenager’s body and demoted.
Earlier this month, Trump intervened, restoring Gallagher’s rank and pay. But some Navy officials, including Spencer, had said Gallagher would still need to appear before a review board, which would decide whether he could still retire as a SEAL and keep the Trident pin awarded to members of the elite unit.
“They wanted to take his pin away, and I said, No,'” the president told reporters Monday, calling Gallagher a “tough guy” and “one of the ultimate fighters.”
Hours earlier, Esper defended Trump’s order to abort the review board hearing for Gallagher.
“The president is the commander-in-chief. He has every right, authority and privilege to do what he wants to do,” Esper told reporters at the Pentagon.
But Esper’s account of the events that led to Spencer’s dismissal as Navy secretary appears to differ from Trump’s characterization that the firing had been under consideration “for a long time.”
Specifically, Esper alleged he learned after a White House meeting on Friday that Spencer had gone behind his back and tried to make a deal regarding the Gallagher case with White House officials.
“We learned that several days prior Secretary Spencer had proposed a deal whereby if president allowed the Navy to handle the case, he [Spencer] would guarantee that Eddie Gallagher would be restored a rank allowed to retain his trident and permitted to retire,” Esper told reporters.
“I spoke with the president late Saturday informed him that I lost trust and confidence in Secretary Spencer and I was going to ask for Spencer’s resignation,” the defense secretary added. “The president supported this decision.”
The White House late Monday pushed back against the idea that the president’s version of events and the Pentagon’s version were not aligned.
“Both of those things are true,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham told VOA, regarding Trump’s assertion that there had been plans to fire Spencer prior to his conduct in the Gallagher matter.
Yet other discrepancies remain.
In a letter acknowledging his termination Sunday, Spencer made no mention of the Pentagon’s allegations that he tired to broker a deal with the White House.Instead, he argued he could not abide by the president’s desire to bypass the review board process as required by the military justice system.
“The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries,” he wrote. “I cannot in good conscience obey an order that I believes violates the sacred oath I took in the presence of my family, my flag and my faith to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Spencer kept to that account late Monday in an interview with CBS News, his first since his firing.
“What message does that send to the troops?” Spencer said of the president’s interfence, answering, “That you can get away with things.”
“We have to have good order and discipline. It’s the backbone of what we do,” he added.
But, Esper on Monday insisted Spencer’s assertions did not match with what the former Navy secretary had told him directly.
Esper also contradicted claims made by Spencer on Saturday that he had never threatened to resign.
I would like to further state that in no way, shape, or form did I ever threaten to resign. That has been incorrectly reported in the press. I serve at the pleasure of the President.
“Secretary Spencer had said to me that … he was likely, probably going to resign if he was forced to work to try to retain the Trident [pin for Gallagher],” Esper said. “I had every reason to believe that he was going to resign, that it was a threat to resign.”
“I cannot reconcile the personal statements with the public statements with the written word,” the defense secretary added.
Already, the president’s intervention in the Gallagher case and the firing of the Navy secretary have some Democratic lawmakers calling for an investigation.
“Throughout my work with Secretary Spencer, I’ve known him to be a good man, a patriotic American, and an effective leader,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Monday.
“We have many unanswered questions,” Kaine said, calling Spencer one of several officials who “served our country well despite having to work under an unethical commander-in-chief.”
FILE – Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) speaks during Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Nov. 1, 2017.
“We’re working to get the facts,” the committee’s top Democrat, Senator Jack Reed, added in a separate statement. “Clearly, Spencer’s forced resignation is another consequence of the disarray brought about by President Trump’s inappropriate involvement in the military justice system and the disorder and dysfunction that has been a constant presence in this Administration.”
But the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe, indicated late Sunday he was ready to move on.
The president and defense secretary “deserve to have a leadership team who has their trust and confidence,” Inhofe said, acknowledging, “It is no secret that I had my own disagreements with Secretary Spencer over the management of specific Navy programs.”
Trump has nominated Ken Braithwaite, a former admiral and the current U.S. ambassador to Norway, to become the next Navy secretary.
White House Correspondent Patsy Widakuswara contributed to this report.
