Corruption is Everywhere - In Thailand It Silences Political Opponents

Thai progressive party leader charged with sedition

By Sommer Brokaw

Thai Future Forward Party co-founder and leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit (C) talks to media

after meeting with police at the Pathumwan Police Station in Bangkok, Thailand, on Saturday.

Photo by EPA-EFE/Narong Sangnak

(UPI) -- Thailand's military junta filed a sedition charge Saturday against a 40-year-old progressive party leader.

The sedition charge is among three that Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit faces in connection with a pro-democracy rally he attended four years ago.

Since the sedition charge relates to national security, he will be tried in military court, which Thanathorn said he was slightly worried about.

Thanathorn also faces a charge of helping a suspect escape and a charge of assembling of more than 10 causing unrest. If convicted of all charges, he could serve up to nine years in prison, including seven years for the sedition charge alone.

The junta, called the National Council for Peace and Order, has ruled Thailand since a 2014 military coup forced the democratically elected government out.

Police allege Thanathorn "provided assistance" to a leader of demonstrators against the coup who violated the junta's ban on gatherings of more than five people.

Thanathorn, the billionaire leader of the youth-backed Future Forward Party, which he formed last year, said the complaint's timing, after his party tentatively came in third with 6.3 million votes in last month's contested elections, was not coincidental.

"We're convinced that this case is politically motivated," Thanathorn said.

The March 24 election was Thailand's first election in eight years and showed inconclusive results. With more than 90 percent of the vote counted, the pro-military party led with 7.59 million votes, and the populist party trailed closely behind with 7.12 million votes, and the FFP came in third.

Thanathorn's progressive policy ideas and use of social media has attracted youth to his campaign.

He has denied the charges and has a May 15 deadline to give written testimony to police.

He also faces a separate cybercrime charge over criticizing the Junta on Facebook in July. Thanathorn has denied the charge.

Prosecutors will decide on April 26 whether he will face trial for the cybercrime charge.

Argentine ‘Death Flight’ Pilots get Life for 100s of Junta Opponents Thrown into Ocean

Images of junta victims at ESMA Museum in Buenos Aires © espaciomemoria / YouTube

Judges in Argentina have given life sentences to the former ‘death flights’ pilots after hundreds of people opposing the country’s 1976-83 military junta – including a close friend of Pope Francis – were thrown into the ocean.

A military junta ousted Isabelle Peron in 1976. She had authorized the liquidation of opposing  (read left-wing, Marxist) factions, but the practice barely began before the military took over and ramped up the killing on a spectacular scale. Between 7 and 30 thousand people disappeared in the next 7-8 years, and many more were tortured and imprisoned.

According to Wikileaks, Henry Kissinger congratulated the junta for their excellent job of dealing with the left-wing insurgency.

A major ruling on Wednesday marked the “first” such Argentinian judgment against pilots involved in the notorious ‘death flights,’ local media reports. During the operations, opponents of Argentina’s military regime that ruled the country from 1976 until 1983 were thrown into the waters of the Atlantic.

According to the verdict, the announcement of which lasted almost four hours, 29 former service members were sentenced to life imprisonment, 19 were sentenced to eight to 25 years, and six were acquitted, local media report.

There are 54 defendants in the major trial. It also involves cases of 789 victims of a secret detention center – known as the Navy Mechanics Higher School (ESMA) – where up to 5,000 people opposing the repressive junta regime are believed to have vanished.

The five-year trial – called the ‘mega cause’ in Argentina – exposed the chilling practices of systematic torture and the killing of thousands of people, including left-wing opponents of the regime and members of Argentina’s urban guerrilla groups, but also human rights activists and relatives of those forcibly disappeared by junta forces. 

In a series of hearings, it emerged that numerous victims were drugged, loaded onto ‘death flight’ aircraft, and thrown into the freezing waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Among ESMA victims was Esther Careaga, a close friend of Jorge Bergoglio, who later became Pope Francis. Careaga was thrown to her death from a plane one night in December 1977, along with two French nuns and nine others.

“Careaga was a good friend and a great woman,” Beroglio said when the body was identified in 2003. The future pontiff met Careaga, a biochemist and his boss at the time, when he worked as an apprentice at a pharmaceutical laboratory in Buenos Aires in the early 1950s.