US vice president visits Puerto Rico
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico, March 23, (AP): US Vice President visited Puerto Rico on Friday as part of a whirlwind trip to tout the federal aid the US territory has received following deadly hurricanes and attend a Democratic fundraiser.
Her visit comes days after US President Joe Biden launched a campaign targeting Latino voters ahead of the November general elections. While those in Puerto Rico cannot vote in US presidential elections despite being US citizens, more than 5 million Puerto Ricans live in the US mainland.
Accompanying Harris for the roughly five-hour visit to the island were US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Housing and Urban Development Deputy Secretary Adrianne Todman. Welcoming them was Gov. Pedro Pierluisi, a Democrat whose New Progressive Party has long pushed for statehood.
Harris’ first stop was to visit a new home in the northern municipality of Canovanas, located near the capital. It had been destroyed after Hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017 as a powerful Category 4 storm, killing nearly 3,000 people in its aftermath.
En route, the motorcade passed people holding their phones up as it went by. Some onlookers leaned out of their cars to take photos as they waited for the motorcade to pass, while others stood outside businesses and homes as the motorcade continued. One girl held a sign imploring help to fix their home.
“I see we are making a difference. There is still more work to do,” Harris said as she stood on the lawn of the new home draped with a large Puerto Rican flag. “We are ambitious. Yes, we are impatient.”
It was Harris’ first visit to Puerto Rico as vice president. She visited as a US senator in 2017 after devastating hurricanes Irma and Maria pummeled the island.
Harris said one of the ongoing challenges Puerto Rico faces is intermittent energy sources, with outages still occurring daily since Maria razed the power grid.
Kamala Harris ❑ ❑ ❑ Machado names substitute:
Venezuelan opposition powerhouse María Corina Machado on Friday named a substitute to her presidential bid while she fights a government ban on her running for office.
The announcement comes as Machado faces increasing political repression from the government of President Nicolás Maduro as well as pressure from foreign leaders and fellow government opponents to abandon her candidacy.
Machado made the announcement two days after authorities arrested two of her campaign staffers and issued warrants for seven more, accusing them of links to an alleged anti-government plot.
She told reporters that college professor Corina Yoris will be registered as an opposition faction’s presidential candidate ahead of a Monday deadline. The presidential election is set for July 28.
“Today is a great day and we have taken a big step, a great step, for the electoral victory in which we will defeat Nicolas Maduro,” Machado said from her campaign headquarters in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas. She said Yoris is “a person with my full confidence, honorable, who will carry out this process with the support and trust of everyone.”
As of the announcement, Machado said, Yoris was not subject to a ban on running for office.
❑ ❑ ❑ Obrador won’t fight drug cartels:
Mexico’s president said Friday he won’t fight Mexican drug cartels on US orders, in the clearest explanation yet of his refusal to confront the gangs.
Over the years, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has laid out various justifications for his “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding clashes with the cartels. In the past he has said “you cannot fight violence with violence,” and on other occasions he has argued the government has to address “the causes” of drug cartel violence, ascribing them to poverty or a lack of opportunities.
But on Friday, while discussing his refusal to go after the cartels, he made it clear he viewed it as part of what he called a “Mexico First” policy.
“We are not going to act as policemen for any foreign government,” López Obrador said at his daily news briefing. “Mexico First. Our home comes first.”
López Obrador basically argued that drugs were a US problem, not a Mexican one. He offered to help limit the flow of drugs into the United States, but only, he said, on humanitarian grounds.
❑ ❑ ❑ ‘More than 33K fled in 13 days’:
More than 33,000 people have fled Haiti’s capital in a span of nearly two weeks as gangs continue to pillage homes and attack state institutions, according to a new report from the UN’s International Organization for Migration.
The majority of those displaced have traveled to Haiti’s southern region, which is generally peaceful compared with Port-au-Prince, which has an estimated population of 3 million and remains largely paralyzed by gang violence. “Attacks and generalized insecurity are pushing more and more people to leave the capital to find refuge in provinces, taking the risks of passing through gang-controlled routes,” IOM said in its report released late Thursday.
Scores of people have been killed and some 17,000 people overall left homeless since the gang attacks began on Feb. 29, with gunmen targeting police stations and the main international airport that remains closed. They also stormed Haiti’s two biggest prisons and released more than 4,000 inmates.
❑ ❑ ❑ 65 migrants bodies found in Libya:
The UN’s migration agency expressed alarm Friday over the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of at least 65 migrants in the deserts of western Libya.
Earlier this week, Libya’s criminal investigations authority reported the grave had been found in the Shuayrif region, 350 kilometers (220 miles) south of the capital, Tripoli.
On its Facebook page, it said 65 bodies of unidentified migrants had been unearthed from the grave, samples were taken for DNA testing and the bodies were reburied in a specified graveyard for later investigation.
The UN’s International Organization for Migration said the nationalities of the discovered migrants and the circumstances of their deaths was not known, but that they likely died while being smuggled through the desert.