New Report on Honduras’s 2025 Elections Finds that Partisan Gridlock, US Interference, Procedural Irregularities, and Technical Deficiencies Undermined Their Legitimacy

Threats to the Guatemalan electoral process

Different branches of the Guatemalan State, including the executive, much of the legislature, the Supreme and Constitutional Courts, and the Attorney General’s office - all deeply compromised with organized crime – are using this period to prevent President-elect Arévalo from taking office. These measures include the disbarring of the Semilla party, actions against Guatemala’s Electoral Tribunal, the invention of legal cases and efforts to remove the legal immunity of the president, vice-president elect and congressional representatives from Semilla to try them under dubious charges, such as expressing support in social media for student pro-democracy protests.

If only Ortega had blamed the Chinese…

Ortega and Murillo’s government has been accused by the ​U.N. Human ⁠Rights Council of transforming the country “into an authoritarian state” and systematically violating human rights.

Glances at neighboring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala

shrugs

Isn’t that just how we’re running Latin American countries now?

Typical piefed user.

NATO would be dissolved and replaced with a European alliance.

The US is never going to allow that to happen.

quietly

🤮

But otherwise cool. Thank you for the link.

glorious great leader Kim Jong Un

It’s so fucking bizarre to see a country on the other side of the planet catching strays because Russians, Ukrainians, Israelis, and Palestinians are beefing.

The Westoid brain cannot comprehend a leader worse than the one running “Bad Korea”. Kim is up there with Dr. Doom and Lex Luthor as a cartoon-style supervillain.

More likely, it’s the same self-preservation instinct their Russian peers are experiencing when recruiters come calling on the east side of the front line.

Ukrainians and Russians had far more in common than in opposition. It took decades of depravation and tens of thousands of hours of warmongering propaganda to splinter them apart. Now they’re being feasted on by the oligarchs and their war machines as the territory is depopulated for the next generation of settler colonialists.

It’s been kept artificially cheap with a bunch of emergency stockpile releases used to manipulate the real market and supply chains. But even then, a bunch of our excess consumption is happening to power the AI boom.

We’ve had our foot on the accelerator on both ends of the pipe since COVID. Enormous expansion of production and consumption driven by state policies. Politicians and business executives both convinced that we’re speeding towards some kind of growth singularity and racing to get there first. Zero consideration for material resource limits, strain on the labor force, or the Climate Change elephant in the room.

It’s an enormous economic ship. And even as bits and pieces fail, we’re seeing accelerating economic activity driven by a handful of bullish private investors with state-sanctioned unlimited credit and no real regulatory oversight. I don’t really know what the future holds, though. As COVID proved, you can just as easily find yourself in a position where you’ve suddenly got too much gas in the pipeline and nowhere to send it as you can find too little.

That would require service workers to earn a living wage, which is impossible. Simply can’t be done. Would be too hard for any business to bare. Sorry.

The WaPo told me that talking about this is antisemitic

US developers and commercial investors (along with their European peers) are going to move on all that vacant Ukrainian real estate like Joey Chestnut on a hotdog cart. So much of what has kept Ukraine going to date has been Zelensky eating foreign debts that far exceed his country’s GDP. When the bill comes due, Ukraine’s going to be crushed harder than it was after the USSR collapsed.

The US will be more than happy to turn Ukraine into the next Israel, flooding it with western settlers and carving it up into a thousand different micro-states.

Once the war is over regardless of who wins you now have a large number of people specialized in drone warfare re-entering civilian life.

We’re already seeing this technology pop up throughout Iran, across Africa, and among both state and guerrilla fighters in the South Pacific. For all the lauding of Ukraine, the folks who are really making the most of this are Houthis and what’s left of the Wagner Group.

One of the ironies of this conflict is how many of these smaller militias are running circles around Silicon Valley tech firms - your Andurils and Mithrils and Raytheons and Northrop Grummonds. The Pentagon is spending a cool milly a unit to send up Reaper Drones that get knocked out by some particularly clever goat farmers with $200 in parts from Temu and a bootleg Starlink subscription.

This is a country that proudly raped prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

It’s a country that believes prison rape within the state system is part of the punishment for criminality. Literally “don’t drop the soap” used as a threat aimed at people accused of crimes.

Old enough to remember how D.A.R.E. officers would recount sexual assault in prisons as a means of scaring people off drug use. Americans deeply and indelibly believe in the power of corrective rapes. It is embedded in our culture.

The campaign is run by FairSquare. We’re a UK-based non-profit organisation working to improve accountability in sport.

I mean, that’s cool I guess? I just don’t know anything about these guys other than what’s in the click-through.

The most Elon Musk ass “we’re looking into it” article. They aren’t even launching an investigation. They’re discussing the possibility of beginning the process of forming a committee.

Oh, I forgot. You fascists only think the government exists to hurt rich people

Not letting them off the hook that easily.

It’s not your hook. They’re dealing with their fascists. You’re dealing with yours.

When Canada stops putting members of the Ford family in elected offices and clapping for real literal 1930s Nazis, they can tell the Americans about how to do democracy correctly.

They could still vote against an obviously horrible candidate.

That’s not how elections work. The seat doesn’t sit vacant because enough people vote “I don’t like you” to the winning candidate.

For starters…