Latin America: Week in Review, Mexico
Castro Critical Of U.S. Attack That Killed Osama bin Laden
May 6, 2011 By Staff
Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Today in Latin America
Top Story — Fidel Castro, the former Cuban head of state, called the U.S. killing of Al Queda leader Osama Bin Laden an “abhorrent deed,” describing it as “the murder of an unarmed human being surrounded by his family.”
Castro’s criticism of the latest development in the so-called “War on Terror” was published in his Thursday column by Granma, the state-run newspaper in Cuba.
“Murdering [Osama] and consigning his body to the depths of the ocean demonstrates [US] fear and insecurity,” Castro wrote, adding that the U.S.’s action would only serve to make Bin Laden “a much more dangerous figure.”
Castro also commented on Obama’s Sunday speech in which the U.S. president announced the death of Bin Laden and highlighted the devastating impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks on 3,000 American households.
Calling it a “carefully crafted speech,” Castro said Obama’s message would “not deter honest people from remembering the unjust wars unleashed by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The United State’s two ongoing wars, Castro wrote, have left “hundreds of thousands of children forced to grow up without their mother or their father.” Mimicking a phrase Obama used Sunday, Castro said US military action in the Middle East has also left “parents who would never know the feeling of their child’s embrace.”
Castro’s remarks join a chain of similar comments issued by Hamas and other Islamic groups around the world, The Guardian reported.
In a similar vein, the Vice-President of Venezuela, Elias Jaua, also critiqued the US killing of Bin Laden. “I never cease to be surprised by how crime and murder has been naturalized and how it’s celebrated [in the United States],” Jaua said (in Spanish) on a television show Monday.
Headlines from the Western Hemisphere
North America
- U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual plans to leave Mexico by May 18 as a result of his resignation two months ago.
- At least 70 Guatemalan migrants have been reported missing in Mexico, the Foreign Ministry said.
Caribbean
- A former Cuban government minister, Alejandro Roca-Iglesias, has been jailed for 15 years at the end of a high-profile anti-corruption trial.
- Experts charged by the United Nations with probing the cause of a deadly cholera epidemic in Haiti pointed on Wednesday to fecal contamination by a riverside U.N. peacekeepers’ camp as a likely cause, but a U.N. spokesman said that could not be seen as conclusive.
Central America
- Rene Emilio Ponce, the once-powerful army general blamed for one of the most egregious atrocities in El Salvador’s civil war, the killing of six Roman Catholic priests, has died. He was 64.
Andes
- Inmates at a prison near Venezuela’s capital freed the prison director and 14 other hostages Thursday and ended an eight-day standoff over conditions at the jail.
- Relations between Venezuela and the U.S. sank so low in recent years that even a McDonald’s combo meal and a two-for-one offer from Domino’s Pizza were the subject of acrimony.
- Peruvian lawmakers will soon discuss a proposal that would safeguard $30 billion in private pension funds from meddling by future governments, the head of the Congress’s economic commission said on Thursday.
Southern Cone
- Argentina’s lower house of congress easily passed an anti-money laundering bill that will likely be approved by the senate at the end of the month. The country’s financial crimes agency UIF has passed 22 new regulations on financial transactions since the beginning of the year.
- Searchers recovered the first body in almost two years from the undersea wreckage of Air France flight 447, which crashed off the coast of Brazil in June 2009.
- Paraguayan prison officials are suspected of participating in a plot where armed men who broke into a prison in the town of Pedro Juan Caballero on Tuesday, releasing six Brazilian prisoners who had been partying with prostitutes while in detention.
- Renovations at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium for the 2014 World Cup are pricing out poorer soccer fans and may reduce locals’ access to the historic stadium.
Image: CubaDebate.
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1 Comment
Great Fidel? How many did you kill innocently, when you had your communist ? And up to this date you have them in bondage…why dont you hav free elections where any party can run for office and the people can vote for which ever party rhey want? Then you can open your big mouth.
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