Peru Declares Emergency over Influx of Venezuelan Migrants

At least this massive migration is not a cultural assault like Islam migrating into Europe. But it is a lot for a relatively small and poor country to deal with. Venezuela's Maduro is almost completely to blame for his people deserting the country. The US is not without some fault here.

By Danielle Haynes

Venezuelan citizens arrive at the border with Peru, in Huaquillas, Ecuador, on Sunday.

Photo by José Jácome/EPA-EFE

(UPI) -- Peru declared a 60-day health emergency Tuesday as the country deals with an influx of thousands of Venezuelan migrants fleeing an economic crisis back home.

Health officials in Peru are worried about the spread of communicable diseases in the north as Venezuelans crossed the border ahead of new immigration rules. The two countries don't share a common border, but Peruvian authorities say more than 300,000 Venezuelans have immigrated to the country this year.

There are 400,000 Venezuelans living in Peru, 178,000 of which have permission to be there, Voice of America reported.

Peru started requiring passports for Venezuelans entering the country as of Aug. 25.

The International Organization for Migration and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said last week that more than 2.3 million Venezuelans are living abroad and more than 1.6 million have left the country since 2015. The U.N. agencies expressed concerns over Peru's new passport requirement.

"We recognize the growing challenges associated with the large scale arrival of Venezuelans. It remains critical that any new measures continue to allow those in need of international protection to access safety and seek asylum," U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said.

Peruvian Foreign Minister Nestor Popolizio told Radio Programas the government has asked the United Nations for assistance with the influx of Venezuelan migrants, Bloomberg reported.

Venezuela's economic crisis, exacerbated by a fall in oil prices, has caused basic goods, including food and medicine, to be in short supply, unavailable or unaffordable.

U.N. Report Cites Deaths, Abuses in Nicaraguan Human Rights Crisis

A reporter from NPR spoke to protestors who explained that while the initial issue was about the pension reform, the uprisings that spread across the country reflected many grievances about the government's time in office, and that the fight is for President Ortega and his Vice President wife to step down. - Wikipedia

Ortega is serving his 4th term as President and 3rd consecutive term, which required an act of parliament to enable. Outside observers are not allowed in Nicaraguan elections.

By Ed Adamczyk

Protesters participate in an anti-government demonstration Managua, Nicaragua, on July 12, 2018. A United Nations report released on Wednesday said there have been 300 killings and numerous human rights violations in a four-month crackdown. File Photo by Jorge Torres/EPA-EFE

(UPI) -- A United Nations report, released Wednesday, condemned Nicaragua's human rights record and urged action and accountability in the Central American nation.

The 41-page report by the U.N. Human Rights Office covers the period from April, when protests in Nicaragua against planned social security cuts began, to August. It identifies a disproportionate use of force by police, sometimes resulting in deaths; killings, disappearances and widespread arbitrary detentions; torture and violations of the right to freedom of opinion and peaceful assembly.

At least 300 people have been killed and at least 2,000 injured, mostly men under 30, the U.N. said. The casualty count reflects the protesters, who included university students and young professionals, the report said. At least 22 police officers died as well.

"The level of brutality in some of these episodes, including burning, amputations and desecration of corpses illustrates the serious degeneration of the crisis," the report said.

At least 300 civilians have been prosecuted on charges of terrorism and organized crime in courts that do not observe due process, the U.N. report said citing data from non-governmental organizations. Teachers, doctors and civil servants have been fired from jobs for criticizing the government, and authorities have harassed or stigmatized protesters and defenders of human rights, the U.N. report said.

"Repression and retaliation against demonstrators continue in Nicaragua as the world looks away. The violence and impunity of these past four months have exposed the fragility of the country's institutions and the rule of law, and created a climate of fear and mistrust," said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein.

The report urges the Nicaraguan government to guarantee the independence of the country's judiciary and resume a dialogue with its adversaries.

Venezuela Lops Five Zeros Off Currency Amid Soaring Inflation

Corruption is Everywhere - in Venezuela

it is combined with spectacular incompetence

Economists say confusing measures likely to accelerate hyperinflation rather than address economic problems.

The Associated Press 

Shoppers look for products at a supermarket in Caracas on Saturday. A recent fall in oil prices accompanied

by corruption and mismanagement have left the economy in crisis. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Venezuela on Monday began to launch dramatic reforms announced by President Nicolas Maduro to rescue a downward-spiraling economy, including a new currency and a more-than-3,000 per cent hike in the minimum wage.

The changes start with the introduction of a currency that lops five zeros off the country's fast-depreciating bills. Maduro says he'll also raise gasoline prices to international levels — a combination of measures critics say will only make things worse.

Opposition leaders seized on tension among residents, calling for a nationwide strike and protest Tuesday. They hope to draw masses into the streets against Maduro's socialist ruling party — something they've failed to do in over a year.

Banks remained closed Monday as they prepare to release the "sovereign bolivar," the new currency printed with five fewer zeroes in a bid to tame soaring inflation. Maduro's government says that in late-September, the world's cheapest gas will rise to international levels to curtail rampant smuggling across borders.

Maduro said Sunday that beginning Sept. 1, the minimum wage will also jump dramatically.

Economists say the package of measures is likely to accelerate hyperinflation rather than address its core economic troubles, like oil production plunging to levels last seen in 1947.

"The bolivar's redenomination will be like going under the knife of one of Caracas' famed plastic surgeons," Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke wrote on Forbes.com. "Appearances change, but, in reality, nothing changes. That's what's in store for the bolivar: a facelift."

'You have to be patient'

Lines on Saturday were longer than normal at a Caracas street market, where people stocked up due to uncertainty about what will come this week. Many were frustrated by bank card readers that were slow to register or that failed altogether, forcing some to leave their goods and walk away empty-handed.

"You have to be patient," a shop worker selling grains told a growing line of customers. Many other stores remained closed, uncertain what prices to set for their goods.

Venezuela was once among Latin America's most prosperous nations, holding the world's largest proven oil reserves, but a recent fall in oil prices accompanied by corruption and mismanagement under two decades of socialist rule have left the economy in a historic economic and political crisis.

A 2.4-kilogram chicken is pictured next to 14,600,000 bolivars, its price, which is the equivalent of $2.22 US,

at a mini-market in Caracas on Thursday. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Inflation this year could top one million per cent, according to economists at the International Monetary Fund.

Inflation has made it difficult to find paper money. The largest bill under the outgoing cash system was the 100,000-bolivar note, equal to less than three cents on the commonly used black market exchange rate. A cup of coffee cost more than two million bolivars.

The new paper bills will have two coins and paper denominations ranging from two up to 500. The lowest represents the buying power of 200,000 current bolivars while the highest stands in for 50 million.

The next few days will be very confusing for both consumers and the private sector, especially commercial retailers.

- Asdrubal Oliveros, director of Ecoanalitica

The old and new currencies will remain in circulation together during a transitional period.

The government made a similar move in 2008, when then-President Hugo Chavez issued new currency that eliminated three zeros to combat soaring inflation.

Maduro announced Friday a more than 3,000 per cent leap in the minimum wage, bringing it up to around $30 US at the widely used black market rate.

New cryptocurrency

Adding to confusion, Maduro said he wants to peg wages, prices and pensions to the petro — a cryptocurrency announced in February but which has yet to start circulating. He said one petro would equal $60, with the goal of moving toward a single floating exchange rate in the future tied to the digital currency.

"The next few days will be very confusing for both consumers and the private sector, especially commercial retailers," said Asdrubal Oliveros, director of Caracas-based Ecoanalitica. "It's a chaotic scenario."

A coalition of opposition leaders and union officials said Sunday they are calling for a strike and protest on Tuesday.

Medical staff shout slogans during a protest against the government of President Nicolas Maduro in

Caracas, Venezuela, on Thursday. (Fernando Llano/Associated Press)

"The measures announced on Friday are not any economic recovery plan for the country," opposition leader Andres Velasquez said. "On the contrary, they represent more hunger, more ruin, more poverty, more suffering, more pain, more inflation, more deterioration of the economy."

Business owners say they fear the sudden wage hike would make them unable to pay employees without sharply increasing prices, despite Maduro's call to help small and mid-sized businesses for the first three months.

Jesus Pacheco, who employs six people at his butcher shop in Caracas, said Sunday that he may have no option but to let go some of his employees to stay in business. He expects the slaughterhouse prices will go up for him.

"You're going to buy products, and they're more expensive," Pacheco said. "We are going to have to fire employees. What else can you do?"

A Plain-Spoken German Populist may have a Shot at Ousting Angela Merkel

Newly appointed leader of the Social Democratic Party and candidate for chancellor, Martin Schulz, shown in Berlin on Jan. 29, 2017. (Clemens Bilan / European Pressphoto Agency)

Erik Kirschbaum

He is a recovering alcoholic who dropped out of high school and spent most of his political career abroad.

So when Martin Schulz returned home to Germany with the goal of unseating Chancellor Angela Merkel, perhaps the world’s most powerful woman, it was understandably viewed as a suicide mission.

Merkel had made mincemeat out of the last three challengers from Schulz’s Social Democratic Party, and there was little doubt that she could do so again.

But in an era when voters worldwide seem prepared to throw off the establishment and take a chance with an untested populist, Schulz, a jovial former bookshop owner from Germany’s Rhineland region who until recently was president of the European Parliament, has quickly been embraced as a serious challenger.

In just two weeks since taking over his party’s leadership, Schulz has shattered the conventional wisdom that he and his party have no chance and has given the Social Democrats their first lead in polls over the conservatives since 2006.

After Britain’s unexpected vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s against-long-odds victory in the U.S. presidential election, the Social Democrats’ rally in opinion polls has raised serious doubts about whether Merkel can win a fourth term.

Then-European Parliament President Martin Schulz and German Chancellor Angela Merkel

at European Union Council headquarters in Brussels in June 2015.

(Julien Warnand / European Pressphoto Agency)

Her reelection was once seen so certain that even then-President Obama unexpectedly weighed in late last year, telling German voters on a visit to Berlin that if he could vote here, he would vote for Merkel. It was an unprecedented intervention on behalf of the conservative party leader —  and an astonishing affront to the party that is Germany’s closest equivalent to Obama’s Democrats.

The German election is suddenly an open contest, according to opinion polls.

The Social Democratic Party (SPD), which last beat Merkel’s center-right party outright in 1998 and lost control of the government to her party in 2005, has surged eight percentage points to 31% in the last two weeks after years of stagnating just above 20%, according to a poll by the INSA institute for Bild newspaper. Meanwhile, the conservative bloc, consisting of Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, fell from 33% to 30%.

“It’s caught everyone by surprise that Schulz was able to help the SPD make such a powerful break out of the doldrums they’d been trapped in for such a long time,” said Thorsten Hasche, a political scientist at Goettingen University. “The lesson learned is that he has proven what was until recently not thought possible: that the right candidate on the left can unify the party and mobilize the masses.”

We’ve suffered for a long time in the polls,

and now we’ve got something to cheer about.

— Martin Schulz

The Social Democrats’ sudden strength in polls is no guarantee of success in the Sept. 24 election, in which Merkel appears to have more coalition options. In Germany’s complex multi-party system, it will most likely take a two- or even-three party alliance to form the next government.

The Social Democrats would like to create a left-of-center government with the Greens and Left parties. Until recently, its only path to power was seen as being a junior partner in another “grand coalition” with Merkel’s party. Schulz’s surge has suddenly given his party a number of more palatable left-of-center options and even the chance to lead the next government.

“Schulz has managed to mobilize a lot of previously undecided voters and people on the left who had turned their backs on the SPD,” said Nils Diederich,  a political scientist at Berlin’s Free University. “There’s a lot of hope vested in Schulz right now. But I’m not sure yet if it’s just a lot of hype that will fade away by the election.”

In a country where frustration over professional politicians with fancy university degrees is growing, Schulz offers a more humble and straight-talking approach. He appears to be wooing back some supporters who abandoned the party 14 years ago when it agreed to tough, pro-business labor reforms and pension changes that hurt the working class.

“We’ve suffered for a long time in the polls, and now we’ve got something to cheer about,” Schulz told reporters on the campaign trail this week. “It confirms what we suspected all along, that people want an SPD government.”

Pollsters admit they were surprised by the scope of the party’s gains but aren’t sure whether they will last.

“Schulz is certainly attractive for the ‘little people’ because he understands what the working class voters are going through — they sense that he’s one of them,” said Peter Matuschek, a senior pollster at the Forsa institute in Berlin. “If you look at his resume, he's one of them: no high school diploma and no degree.”

As a young man, Schulz had wanted to be a professional soccer player, but his career was cut short by injury, leading to his bout with alcohol in the 1970s. Matuschek said he doesn’t think that past will hurt him politically — on the contrary, it might help him among voters who see someone “who made it back after hitting rock bottom." After he quit drinking, he became more and more involved in politics, becoming his town’s mayor at 31.

His unvarnished way of speaking has touched a nerve, especially among the country’s legions of working-class voters who had abandoned the Social Democrats in droves when the party’s last chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, pushed it from the left into the political center from 1998 to 2005. 

“It’s time for a change,” said Miriam Dieter, a Berlin student. “The others talk a lot without saying anything. Schulz is different. He talks directly about what’s on people’s minds.”

In one talk show interview, Schulz deftly zeroed in on Merkel’s biggest weakness: her party ally Horst Seehofer, the leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, who has attacked her relentlessly for refusing to introduce an upper annual limit of 200,000 on the number of refugees coming into Germany.

The Social Democrats have generally taken a pro-refugee position while Merkel’s conservatives remain badly split on the issue: Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU) are for allowing in refugees while the Bavarian party is opposed.

Still, the question of refugees is not expected to play a major role in the campaign. Neither Merkel’s conservatives nor the Social Democrats have any interest in putting a spotlight on the arrival of more than 1 million people seeking asylum from wars and turmoil in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Polls show a shrinking majority of Germans continue to support Merkel’s policies of opening the country’s gates to refugees. But her position is far more controversial among conservatives than among Social Democrats .

“If the CDU and CSU continue to fight about the number of refugees and don’t get their act together on that fast, it will hurt them massively in the fall election,” said Matuschek at Forsa. “The SPD under Schulz have a unified position supporting refugees. The conservatives don’t.”

'A unified position supporting refugees' is a unified determination to the eventual destruction of Germany. Look at what is happening in Sweden - criminal gangs of Muslim refugees causing extortion, assaults, drug smuggling, assaulting police, 55 no-go zones and, at least, daily rapes of Swedish women and girls - all by Muslim men. 

In Sweden, they hide this from the public by police code R291, which requires a 'secret' classification for any police action involving asylum seekers. Is there such a conspiracy of silence in Germany too; or are Germans just way smarter than Swedes?

Instead of bringing in millions of Muslim asylum seekers, why not house them temporarily some place closer to home with the goal of returning them to their home countries. Then putting forth intense efforts to secure peace in those countries instead of selling weapons to groups that will guarantee there will be no peace.

The 'Candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood': France in Primaries

The French Left has been flirting with radical Islamists since the 1980s. The full extent of this complicity has emerged in Socialist Party primaries

BY LESLIE SHAW

Benoit Hamon (Photo: Flickr)

The French Left has been flirting with radical Islamists since the 1980s, when it realized that the growing Muslim population could replace its dwindling indigenous working-class voter base to whom it failed to deliver on its promise of reducing unemployment under the presidencies of François Mitterand (1981-1995) and François Hollande (2012-2017).

The full extent of this complicity has emerged in the current Socialist Party primaries. The first round was held on January 22 and was won by Benoît Hamon, who garnered 36.83% of the 1,600,978 votes cast. The runner-up was ex-Prime Minister Manuel Valls with 31.9%. The second round will be held on January 29.

One of the issues on which the candidates differ substantially is radical Islam. While Valls took a tough stance during his term as Prime Minister and staunchly defended the secular principles of the French Republic, Hamon is more ambiguous and is seen by some as a fellow-traveler of Islamist lobby groups such as the CCIF (Collective Against Islamophobia in France).

The CCIF was set up in 2003 during the controversy on the banning of the hijab in French schools. It went from campaigning on this single issue to a range of missions, the main one being to denounce and file criminal lawsuits against journalists and intellectuals for “Islamophobic” statements. It publishes statistical reports documenting “Islamophobia,” inflating the figures through including closures of Salafist mosques and deportation of Islamic terrorists.

The CCIF website includes practical advice on how to respond to airport identity checks on veiled women, wearing of full-length skirts at school and halal dietary demands in school canteens. There is also a dedicated guide for Islamists whose homes are raided by the police due to the state of emergency law.

There is no doubt that the CCIF has close ties with radical Islam. Founding President Samy Debah is a former preacher of Tablighi Jaamat, the global Sunni Islamic revivalist movement. In November 2015, the CCIF signed a press release condemning the police raids that followed the November 2015 attacks in Paris.

Spokesman Marwan Muhammad has shared platforms with radical Islamists such as Imam Hassen Bounamcha and Salafist preachers Nader Abou Anas and Rachid Abou Houdeyfa.

The CCIF diverts attention from its real goal of advocacy for Islam by couching its operations in terms of human rights, individual liberty and discrimination, thus enabling it to fraternize with the French Left including a potential candidate in the 2017 presidential election, Benoît Hamon.

Evidence emerged this week showing that Hamon’s campaign spokesman, MP Alexis Bachelay, attended a CCIF fund-raising dinner in May 2014 with fellow Socialist Party MP and spokesman Razzy Hammadi. In June 2015, Hammadi sponsored a bill in parliament to introduce class action lawsuits, which are not permitted under French law.

The CCIF published a statement on its website backing the bill and urging its supporters to lobby lawmakers to vote in favor, arguing that it would be a formidable weapon in its war on Islamophobia.  “Class action is a legal tool that could for example be used to great effect in cases of discrimination against young girls who wear long skirts to school.”

Hammadi suffered considerable embarrassment in December 2013 when a video posted on Twitter and YouTube showed him involved in a late-night street brawl in Montreuil, an eastern suburb of Paris. In the clip he can be heard shouting racist insults and threating to bring out “toutes les cités de Montreuil,” i.e. the gangs from the local housing projects.

Bachelay also has close links to Marwan Muhammad and in December 2015, they exchanged messages of mutual support on their Twitter accounts in which Bachelay stated, “We have to stick together, times are hard.”

Aside from his campaign spokesman rubbing shoulders with members of an organization that is a satellite of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamon himself has made statements that could be construed as pro-Islamist.

Questioned as to his position on the revelation that women are effectively barred from cafés in some Parisian suburbs, he replied, “Historically, there were no women in working-class cafés,” apparently justifying the gender segregation imposed by radical Islamists."

In a radio interview on January 23, he went even further, saying, “What I do not accept is that behind the expression ‘religious separatism,’ there is the assertion that Islam is incompatible with the French Republic. That is not true. It is unacceptable that people continue to make the faith of millions of our fellow-citizens a problem in French society.”

In a 2016 interview with the left-wing Libération newspaper, Hamon said the debate on the place of Islam in French society following the terrorist attacks amounted to “dangerous political hysteria” and explained the attraction of jihadism to young French Muslims by the failure of the French state to deliver equality to all its citizens. More dangerously, he offered a rationale for the ideology of Islamic State, saying:

“For my part, I try to understand why young Muslims are motivated by the narrative of Islamic State, whose message incarnates values that are absent from our public debate: unity, represented by the Caliphate; dignity, offered to young people in quest of recognition; purity of faith in an impure world; and salvation, that gives meaning to their death, having failed to find it in life.”

OMG - Dignity? Purity of faith? Salvation (through murder and martyrdom)? Are you serious? The things we will sell our soul for!

Hamon is also in favor of bringing in religious educators from states he describes as “cradles of Islam” to train French Imams. In other words, he supports the import of the Salafist ideology that has radicalized an entire generation and resulted in the current wave of Islamic terror.

He has proposed a tax on halal meat that would be used to fund the construction of mosques, suggesting that the money be allocated by the CFCM (French Council of the Muslim Faith), an organization that sued Charlie Hebdo for caricaturing the prophet, thereby “humiliating and provoking 2 billion Muslims.”

A Socialist Party minister has described Hamon as “the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood,” an accusation that may not be as outrageous as it appears. The links between the CCIF and the left wing of the Socialist Party echo the strategies of coalition, absorption and co-operation outlined in the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategic plan to Islamize the USA.

Leslie Shaw is an Associate Professor at the Paris campus of ESCP Europe Business School and President of FIRM (Forum on Islamic Radicalism and Management).

South American Socialist Hold-Outs Chile and Venezuela in Big Trouble, Especially Venezuela

Venezuela opposition accuse Maduro of 'coup'

after referendum quashed

© JUAN BARRETO, AFP | Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro force their way to the National Assembly during an extraoridinary session called by opposition leaders, in Caracas on October 23, 2016

by NEWS WIRES

Venezuela is bracing for turbulence after the socialist government blocked a presidential recall referendum in a move opposition leaders are calling a coup.

The opposition is urging supporters to take to the streets, beginning with a march on a major highway Saturday led by the wives of jailed activists, while a leading government figure is calling for the arrest of high-profile government critics.

Polls suggest socialist President Nicolas Maduro would lose a recall vote. But that became a moot issue on Thursday when elections officials issued an order suspending a recall signature drive a week before it was to start.

"What we saw yesterday was a coup," said former presidential candidate Henrique Capriles, who had been the leading champion of the recall effort. "We'll remain peaceful, but we will not be taken for fools. We must defend our country."

He had to say that they will remain peaceful or he would most likely have been arrested for treason and we would never hear from him again.

International condemnation was swift. Twelve western hemisphere nations, including the U.S. and even leftist-run governments such as Chile and Uruguay, said in a statement Friday that the suspension of the referendum and travel restrictions on the opposition leadership affects the prospect for dialogue and finding a peaceful solution to the nation's crisis.

In another sign of growing regional tensions, Colombia's flagship airline briefly grounded all flights to Caracas after a Venezuelan air force jet came close to an Avianca Boeing 787 with about 200 people aboard.

The commercial jet landed safely at its intended destination of Bogota 90 minutes later. The airline said Saturday that flights would be resumed Sunday following clarification from the two governments.

The socialists won power nearly two decades ago with the election of the popular former President Hugo Chavez, and for years enjoyed easy election victories. But with the economy in free fall, polls show most Venezuelans have turned against the party, and over the years, the administration has gradually become increasingly autocratic.

Critical television stations have been closed and several leading opposition activists have been imprisoned. The country's supreme court, packed with government supporters, has endorsed decree powers for Maduro and said he can ignore Congress following a landslide victory for the opposition in legislative elections.

The election commission, which has issued a string of pro-government rulings, halted the recall process on grounds of alleged irregularities in a first-round of signature gathering.

Polls suggest 80 percent of voters wanted Maduro gone this year, and the electoral council on Tuesday also ordered a delay of about six months in gubernatorial elections that were slated for year-end which the opposition was heavily favored to win. It gave no reason for the delay.

The opposition charges that the socialist party has simply decided to put off elections indefinitely in the face of overwhelming voter discontent.

The opposition coalition has called for a massive street protest Wednesday, on what would have been the start of the signature-gathering campaign.

Maduro was traveling outside the country, but in a televised address Friday he urged calm at home.

"I call on everyone to remain peaceful, to engage in dialogue, respect law and order and not to do anything crazy," he said.

Meanwhile, one of his most powerful allies, Diosdado Cabello, said top opposition leaders should be jailed for attempting election fraud. And opposition leaders said a local court blocked eight of their leaders from leaving the country.

Amid the rising tensions, former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero, who for months has been attempting to mediate dialogue between the two sides, is in Caracas and expected to meet Saturday with representatives of the opposition and the government.

The opposition had centered its energy on rallying Venezuelans to sign petitions next week demanding a referendum on Maduro's removal. That would require collecting and validating 4 million signatures from 20 percent of the electorate within three days in each of the country's 24 states.

But the campaign had already become mostly symbolic because the election board ruled in September that no vote would take place this year.

That timing is crucial. A successful vote to oust Maduro this year would have triggered a presidential election and given the opposition a good shot at winning power. If Maduro is voted out in 2017, though, his vice president will finish the presidential term, leaving the socialists in charge.

The electoral council said Thursday the decision was based on rulings by courts in four states that found there was fraud in the initial stage of the petition drive, when the opposition collected signatures from 1 percent of electorate.

The council itself had validated those signatures in August and allowed the process to move forward. It gave no indication if or when the process would resume.

The move sparked a new round of international condemnation of the socialist government.

Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called Friday for increased sanctions on Venezuela, the head of the Organization of American States promised concrete consequences for violating democratic norms, and U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said the elections board was being used to block voters' "right to determine the direction of their country."

(AP)

Chile's embattled Bachelet put to test in local polls

     
 
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet takes part in celebrations for the 206th anniversary of the country's independence, in Santiago on September 19, 2016  © AFP/File / by Paulina Abramovich 

SANTIAGO (AFP) - 

Chile's opposition is leading with a razor-thin margin in local elections that could deal a disappointment to embattled President Michelle Bachelet by returning conservatives to power.

Seen as a litmus test for her ruling center-left coalition one year before her term ends, with 95.79 percent of the vote counted, a conservative coalition Chile Vamos (Let's go Chile) was leading with 38.53 percent against 37.07 percent for the ruling New Majority coalition.

Opinion polls had given Bachelet's center-left coalition a razor-thin lead before polls opened.

"We've got to do things better. That's what the people are asking for," Bachelet said on Sunday after learning the results.

The local polls are the last vote before general elections in 2017 that will decide the Socialist leader's successor, at a time when the left in Chile -- as in much of Latin America -- is struggling.

In the elections, which serve as the unofficial opening of the 2017 campaign season, some 14 million voters are choosing 346 mayors, plus city councils.

The vote came as Bachelet, Chile's first woman president, has been sideswiped by a corruption scandal involving her son and is struggling to deliver on the reform agenda that got her elected by a landslide in 2013.

After testing political waters in the local polls, the country's parties will nominate presidential candidates and launch their campaigns.

The 65-year-old Bachelet -- serving for a second time as the South American country's president -- urged people to participate in the election, amid fears Sunday's polls would be marred by low turnout.

- Looking ahead to 2017 -

Bachelet is one of the last remaining leaders from a "pink tide" of left-wing governments that swept Latin America in the last decade.

She served a first term from 2006 to 2010, and -- constitutionally barred from immediate re-election -- returned in 2014.

But her popularity has plunged since accusations emerged last year that her son and his wife used political influence and inside information to make $5 million on a shady real estate deal.

A separate campaign-finance scandal involving some of the country's biggest firms and political parties has also been damaging.

Bachelet herself has not been implicated in either scandal, although they have hurt her image as a squeaky clean reformer.

Elected with 66 percent of the vote, her popularity now stands at just 23 percent.

The top name on the left currently being floated for a presidential run is Isabel Allende -- not to be confused with her distant relative of the same name who is a best-selling novelist.

She is a senator and the daughter of former president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by late dictator Augusto Pinochet in a 1973 coup.

Journalist and independent Senator Alejandro Guillier also scores well in opinion polls, while former president Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) has thrown his hat in the ring, too.

On the right, former president Sebastian Pinera (2010-2014) is tipped as the likely nominee, but has yet to declare his candidacy.

The local polls come amid an economic slowdown in Chile, hit hard -- like much of the region -- by the plunge in global commodity prices.

Chile, the world's top copper producer, will see economic growth of just 1.75 percent this year, before a pickup of 2.25 percent in 2017, the government forecasts.

by Paulina Abramovich