Archives for April 2021

BOSTON (AP) — After he was elected mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, at just 23 years old, it seemed Jasiel Correia’s political career had nowhere to go but up. Bright and dynamic, Correia charmed voters by portraying himself as a successful entrepreneur who could revive the struggling old mill city.

Prosecutors say in reality he was a fraud and a thief.

Correia heads to trial this month on charges that he stole more than $230,000 from investors in a smartphone app he created to pay for things like a Mercedes, casino trips and adult entertainment. As mayor, he’s accused of convincing his chief of staff to give him half of her salary in order to keep her city job and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from marijuana businesses seeking to operate there.

The trial — one of the first to be held in Boston’s federal court since the start of the coronavirus pandemic — will showcase Correia’s dramatic rise and fall in the southeastern Massachusetts city of 89,000 that’s still hurting by the collapse of its once-booming textile industry. Prosecutors will try to show that Correia swindled investors just like his critics say he smooth-talked voters into entrusting him with the city.

“My husband says it best: He could convince the pope that there’s no God,” said Linda Pereira, a Fall River city councilor whom Correia defeated to be reelected mayor in 2017.

Even as Correia’s former chief of staff and three others have pleaded guilty in the extortion scheme, the former mayor, now 29, has remained defiant. He has denied any wrongdoing, insisted the app designed to help businesses connect with consumers was legitimate and blamed the charges on political foes who want to bring him down.

The question now becomes: Will he take the stand to try to convince jurors? Correia’s name is on the defense’s witness list, but it remains unclear whether he will actually testify.

Unlike many defendants who keep quiet to avoid saying anything that could be used against them in court, Correia has been outspoken since his 2018 arrest. He walked reporters through a PowerPoint presentation to rebut the allegations days after the first charges were brought, and participated in a documentary series executive produced by Mark Wahlberg about Correia’s tumultuous political career.

“If I’m doing something wrong, come and get me. Go ahead and do it. But I didn’t do anything wrong,” Correia said in the series called “Run This City” that aired last year on the now-defunct streaming platform Quibi.

“I’m innocent until proven guilty and I’m not going to be proven guilty,” he said.

Jury selection is scheduled to begin on Tuesday. Correia faces charges including wire fraud, extortion conspiracy and bribery.

His attorney declined to comment to The Associated Press, but has previously said the indictment “reads like a bad John Grisham novel” and that prosecutors have “no corroboration, no physical evidence, no legitimate witness.”

After Correia became a city councilor at the age of 22, the city’s local paper, The Herald News, described him as “a classic example of a Fall River kid made good.”

Correia was at the center of a media frenzy in 2014 when he alleged that Mayor Will Flanagan intimidated him with a gun during a late-night meeting over Correia’s support of a mayoral recall petition. Flanagan never faced criminal charges, but was recalled in an election that year and replaced by the county’s district attorney. Correia will be defended at trial by the same lawyer who represented Flanagan during that probe.

In the 2015 race against Mayor Sam Sutter, Correia touted the app called SnoOwl, capitalized on social media to reach voters and vowed to attract young residents and rebrand the city with the motto, “We’ll try.” Sutter raised some questions about Correia’s business, but said he regrets not seizing on the issue during the race.

“Jasiel was making the case that he was a millionaire entrepreneur when he wasn’t and I kind of fault myself for not being able to expose that. I knew SnoOwl was a bust,” Sutter said.

Authorities say three years before Correia became mayor, he began seeking investors in his start-up, promising he wouldn’t take a salary and had already sold another app for a big profit. Within weeks of getting $50,000 check from one investor, prosecutors say Correia used $10,000 of that to buy a Mercedes sedan.

Over the next several months, prosecutors say Correia used investors’ cash to pay for dating services, luxury hotels and designer clothes, ease his student loan debt and support his political career. Overall, prosecutors allege he spent nearly two thirds of the more than $360,000 he took from investors for himself.

For months after his arrest, Correia resisted calls to leave office and survived a bizarre election in March 2019 during which he was recalled by voters and reelected the same night. But after federal agents arrested him a second time — this time for the extortion scheme — he agreed in October 2019 to take a leave of absence. He was ousted by voters the next month.

As mayor, Correia is accused of soliciting bribes from marijuana companies in exchange for letters of approval from the city they need in order to get a license. Authorities say Correia or associates negotiated the bribes with owners of the companies at places like a swanky Boston steakhouse, cigar bars, and a Dunkin Donuts.

“You’re family now,” Correia’s chief of staff, Genoveva Andrade, told one of them after they agreed on the bribe during a meeting in 2018, authorities say in court documents.

In another case, a middleman left an envelope filled with $25,000 in cash from a marijuana business owner in a shed behind the home of a Correia aide, prosecutors said. Authorities say the aide later returned the money to the middleman, saying Correia feared it was “Fed money.”

Three of Correia’s associates who pleaded guilty in the extortion scheme are among those who could testify against him.

Meanwhile, in Fall River, many who feel hurt by the former mayor will be watching closely.

“There was a local person who I know personally who cried to me telling me how stupid he felt that this kid conned him,” said Pereira, the city councilor.

“I said, ‘You know what? Don’t feel that way because he convinced a whole community,’” she said.

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Less than three months after former President Donald Trump left the White House, the race to succeed him atop the Republican Party is already beginning.

Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has launched an aggressive schedule, visiting states that will play a pivotal role in the 2024 primaries, and he has signed a contract with Fox News Channel. Mike Pence, Trump’s former vice president, has started a political advocacy group, finalized a book deal and later this month will give his first speech since leaving office in South Carolina. And Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been courting donors, including in Trump’s backyard, with a prominent speaking slot before the former president at a GOP fundraising retreat dinner this month at Mar-a-Lago, the Florida resort where Trump now lives.

Trump ended his presidency with such a firm grip on Republican voters that party leaders fretted he would freeze the field of potential 2024 candidates, delaying preparations as he teased another run. Instead, many Republicans with national ambitions are openly laying the groundwork for campaigns as Trump continues to mull his own plans.

They’re raising money, making hires and working to bolster their name recognition. The moves reflect both the fervor in the party to reclaim the White House and the reality that mounting a modern presidential campaign is a yearslong endeavor.

“You build the ark before it rains,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked for Jeb Bush’s presidential 2016 campaign, among others. “They’re going to do the things they need to do if he decides not to run.”

Trump, at least for now, is giving them plenty of leeway, convinced they pose little threat to his own ambitions.

“It’s a free country. Folks can do what they want,” Trump adviser Jason Miller said in response to the moves. “But,” he added, “if President Trump does decide to run in 2024, the nomination will be his if you’re paying any attention to public polling of Republican voters.”

Polling does indeed show that Trump remains a commanding figure among GOP voters, despite his loss in November to Democrat Joe Biden. Republican leaders, including those who may hope to someday succeed him, have been careful to tend to his ego and make clear they have no plans to challenge his standing.

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, last weekend awarded Trump a new “Champion for Freedom Award,” which the group publicized — complete with a photo of a smiling, golf-attired Trump holding a small, gleaming cup — even after the former president went after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky in a profanity-laden speech.

A day later, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, considered a top-tier 2024 candidate, told The Associated Press that she will sit out the race if Trump runs again.

“I would not run if President Trump ran, and I would talk to him about it,” she said in Orangeburg, South Carolina. “That’s something that we’ll have a conversation about at some point, if that decision is something that has to be made.”

The deference is, in part, an acknowledgement of Trump’s continued power. Even out of office and without his Twitter megaphone, Trump remains deeply popular with the GOP base and is bolstered by an $85 million war chest that can be shared with endorsed candidates, spent on advertising and used to fund travel and pay for polling and consultants.

Trump is making plans to soon increase his visibility, with aides discussing options to hold rallies as soon as late spring or summer. “There’s a pretty strong demand out there to get President Trump on the road,” Miller said.

Many Republicans acknowledge Trump would leap to the front of the pack if he chooses to mount a bid to become the only president other than Grover Cleveland to serve two nonconsecutive terms. Still, there is deep skepticism in many corners of the party that Trump will run again.

While people close to him insist he is serious, many see Trump’s continued flirtations as a means to maintain relevance as he has settled into a comfortable post-White House life. At Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, he’s courted by candidates and met by rounds of applause and standing ovations whenever he enters the dining room.

In the meantime, other could-be-candidates are making moves, even as many of their aides insist their focus is squarely on next year’s congressional elections and helping Republicans win back control of the House and Senate.

Jeff Kaufmann, the chair of the Iowa Republican party, said the activity in his state has begun even earlier this year than in the past two election cycles, with every candidate on his potential 2024 list having already visited or thinking of visiting the first state on the GOP nominating calendar.

“I know of no one — honestly no one — that is hesitating to come out,” he said. “Now some are a little more subtle than others, but that may not necessarily be tied to Donald Trump. That may be just tied into their campaign style and not wanting to get too far ahead of their skis until they see if they have any traction whatsoever.”

Pompeo, arguably the most aggressive to date, is among those who have already spent time in Iowa, as well as New Hampshire, and this week past he addressed Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s World Values Network in New York, where he was introduced by video by Republican megadonor Miriam Adelson. And on Saturday, he headlined the Palm Beach County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner at Mar-a-Lago along with Scott and DeSantis.

DeSantis, who is up for reelection next year, recently hired a top Republican strategist who served as executive director of the Republican Governors Association. DeSantis also has been using the race to build a deep fundraising network that could support him if he chooses to run nationally.

The party, which for a time appeared to be paralyzed by division, has grown more united in its opposition to Biden, even as Trump continues to spar with McConnell and works to defeat incumbents who voted for his impeachment. Republicans in Congress have found common cause railing against Biden’s border policies, voting against his COVID-19 relief bill and pushing for new restrictions on voting, while railing against corporate interference in the voting rights debate.

“I think you would find broad agreement in our party that we need to be having the debate about policy,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, who continues to face enormous backlash after voting for Trump’s impeachment. “We need to be talking about policy,” she said while speaking to Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service last week.

Regardless of Trump’s ultimate decision, his critics and acolytes alike say they see the future of the party as dependent on maintaining their appeal to Trump voters, while at the same time winning back the suburban voters who abandoned them last fall.

“I think everyone’s trying to find that magic combination of ‘Trump-plus,’ of continuing to appeal to the new voters that President Trump brought to the Republican coalition while also bringing back some of the college-educated suburban folks that were repelled by his antics,” said Steel.

___

Associated Press writer Meg Kinnard in Orangeburg, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

CHUGUR, Peru (AP) — As schools across Peru closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Pedro Castillo tried to find a way to keep classes going for his 20 fifth- and sixth-grade students. But in his impoverished rural community deep in the Andes, his efforts were futile.

Seventeen of the students didn’t even have access to a cellphone. Tablets promised by the government never arrived.

“I called my students who have a basic cellphone, and the father answers you from the farm. You cannot connect with the child,” he said. “You call again in the afternoon or evening. The children don’t answer because they are exhausted in bed.”

“Where is the state?” Castillo, 51, told The Associated Press after a day of planting sweet potatoes on his own land.

It was the last straw for Castillo, who over 25 years had seen his students struggle in crumbling schools where teachers also cook, sweep floors and file paperwork. He’d already dabbled in activism with the local teachers’ union and helped lead a national strike in 2017. But now he went further, tossing his name into a crowd of 18 candidates in Peru’s presidential election.

Defying the polls, the elementary school teacher came first in the April 11 voting, albeit with less than 20% of the overall vote. The stunning result gave him a place in June’s presidential runoff against Keiko Fujimori, one of Peru’s most established political figures and the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori. It is her third attempt to become president.

Castillo’s unlikely campaign comes at a turbulent time for the South American nation that has suffered like few others from the COVID-19 pandemic. It recently ran through three presidents in a week after one was removed by congress over corruption allegations. Every president of the past 36 years has been ensnared in corruption allegations, some imprisoned. One died by suicide before police could arrest him.

Fujimori herself has been imprisoned as part of a graft investigation though she was later released. And her father Alberto, who governed between 1990 and 2000, is serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and the killings of 25 people. She has promised to free him should she win.

The two candidates have had dramatically different lives.

While Fujimori’s father himself was a political outsider when he won office, his daughter grew up in the halls of power. She attended Boston University and got a master’s from Columbia University in the United States. She later served as first lady during her father’s last six years in office.

Castillo is the son of illiterate peasants, the third of nine children. While he went on to complete a degree in educational psychology at Peru’s César Vallejo University, he still lives in the country’s third poorest district, his home surrounded by cypress trees, cornfields, pigs and cows.

He wears ponchos, straw hats and sandals made from leftover tires. When he walks through rural areas, people run to shake his hand.

“He is my neighbor, he is good people, he talks to us wherever he is,” said Emelina Medina, 70, who was shucking corn at her home a few blocks from Castillo’s house.

He also made a favorable impression on 31-year-old Elizabeth Altamirano, though she said she doesn’t know him personally.

“He is in favor of the countryside. We have not finished primary school, we have not had the ability to eat good food,” she said. “He is a peasant, a teacher. Politicians have only come to the (presidential) palace to profit, while we live in misery.”

Castillo’s politics mingle a nationalist, agrarian leftism with socially conservative impulses. He is Catholic and his wife, Lilia Paredes, a rural teacher like him, and his two children are evangelical. He has expressed opposition to same-sex marriage and has said that for him abortion and LGBT issues “are not a priority.”

He has proposed nationalizing mining, oil and energy sectors as well as deporting all immigrants living in the country illegally who commit crimes, a move aimed largely at the wave of Venezuelans who have sought refuge from their country’s crisis.

His chances of enacting his policies are uncertain. He would face a deeply divided unicameral congress that was newly elected on April 11. At the moment, his party has 37 of the 130 seats though the electoral counting to determine how many seats each party gets has not yet concluded.

It is also very much up in the air his chance of winning the June runoff against Fujimori. He received roughly 19% support in the first round of voting and she about 13%, leaving a vast sector of the electorate that supported neither.

His proposals to nationalize broad sectors of the economy have alarmed many in Peru, including business interests.

Peruvian Nobel Prize laureate for literature Mario Vargas Llosa, a longtime critic of Keiko Fujimori and her father, in a column published Saturday in the newspaper El País, warned that if Castillo wins in June, Peru will become like crisis-wracked Venezuela.

“It is an unprecedented danger, the daughter of pure ignorance,” wrote Vargas Llosa, who lost Peru’s 1990 presidential election to Alberto Fujimori. He urged people to support Keiko Fujimori as “the lesser evil.”

Whoever wins the runoff will have to cope with the economic hammer-blow of the pandemic, which prompted a lockdown of more than 100 days that left about 7 million people unemployed.

The country has recorded more than 1.6 million confirmed cases and over 56,400 deaths from COVID, and rising death counts recently forced the return of lockdowns.

According to data collected by Johns Hopkins University, only 1.48% of the population has been fully vaccinated, undermining hopes for a quick recovery from the pandemic.

Unlike former Bolivian President Evo Morales – an Indigenous former coca growers’ union leader to whom he has been compared – Castillo has held no public office before this run for the presidency. Morales held a seat in Bolivia’s Chamber of Deputies before becoming president.

Castillo’s lone “political post” was leading the 55-day teachers’ strike for better pay. He was an active rural teacher until 2020. Even with the campaign entering a critical phase, Castillo has continued to work on his farm in Chugur, hundreds of miles north of Lima, the capital.

“When you go out to ask for rights, they say that you are a terrorist,” said Castillo, apparently referring to unsupported allegations by some Peruvian media outlets that has ties to the country’s Maoist Shining Path rebel group.

“I know the country and they will not be able to shut me up,” he said. “The terrorists are hunger and misery, abandonment, inequality, injustice.”

___

Garcia Cano reported from Mexico City.

Copyright © 2021 . All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.