Archives for May 2021

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — The face of a new Chile began taking shape this weekend as the South American country was electing 155 people to draft a constitution to replace one that has governed it since being imposed during a military dictatorship.

Nearly 80% of voters in a plebiscite last year chose to draft a new charter for the nation following a year of protests, though there is much less consistent agreement over what it should contain.

Activist groups have mobilized in hopes of enshrining equality for women, protections for the environment, for Indigenous people, for or against the right to abortion. Conservatives hope to maintain a dominant private sector and rules making it hard to pass major reforms in the legislature.

Their ability to get any strong clauses may be limited, though: Two-thirds agreement is required, so any bloc that can muster a third of the votes in the constitutional convention can block any clause.

The governing center-right coalition and other conservative parties are running a single slate in the two-day voting, while the left and center-left are divided among several tickets.

“This is one of the most important elections in our history,” said President Sebastián Piñera as he cast a vote Saturday.

The document that emerges from the wrangling will go to a public vote in mid-2022. If rejected, the current constitution will remain in force.

The makeup of the body reflects a wave of revulsion against the current political system that was obvious during unrest that spread across the nation in late 2019, with a grab-bag of protests against increased taxi fares, inadequate pensions and health care, poor schools and general inequality in one of Latin America’s richest nations.

Members of congress are barred from the convention and by law half of the body must consist of women — the first time any constitution has been drafted in conditions of gender parity, according to the United Nations.

“I don’t believe in the current politicians. …It’s the hour for us, for all who have been fighting for a most just country, to be part of the change,” said candidate Natalia Aravena, a 26-year-old nurse who lost an eye during the the recent wave of protests.

Seventeen seats are reserved for Indigenous peoples, who are not mentioned in the existing constitution.

The left, especially, has long detested Chile’s current constitution, which was written and imposed under the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

That document, which created a strong presidency and guarantees protections for private property, has guided the nation through a period of overall prosperity but also of intense inequality. It also gives broad powers to security forces that civil libertarians see as excessive.

The old constitution was amended over the years, notably with the 2005 repeal of an article that had allowed appointed senators and senators for life in Congress.

The vote originally was scheduled for April, but was delayed by an upsurge of COVID-19 cases. Overall, Chile has been among the countries most successful at vaccinating its population, with nearly 60% of Chileans getting at least one dose, though most of the country’s districts remain under some sort of pandemic restrictions.

The election will also decide mayoral and gubernatorial posts across the country.

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As Dartmouth College sophomore Nicholas Sugiarto flipped through the course catalog last semester, two words caught his eye: “Asian American.”

The 19-year-old Chinese Indonesian American didn’t know Asian American-focused classes were even an option at the Hanover, New Hampshire, campus. The biomedical-engineering major ended up enrolling in “Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature” and now wishes he could minor in Asian American studies.

“I never realized how long and storied the history of Asians in America has been,” Sugiarto said. “You also hear about stories that just never made the news or never made it into the standard AP U.S. history textbooks.”

That feeling of being seen resonates now more than ever for Asian American and Pacific Islander students and faculty at college campuses around the country. For all the “Stop AAPI Hate” hashtagging, accounts keep emerging of new incidents of Asian Americans being coronavirus scapegoats or made to feel like foreigners in their own country.

Ongoing anti-Asian attacks along with the March massage business shootings in Georgia that left six Asian women dead have provoked national conversations about visibility.

The debate has renewed an appetite at some colleges for Asian American studies programs. As student diversity grows, so does the desire for representation in the syllabus. But qualified professors of color say such programs won’t last if they aren’t being offered permanent decision-making power.

Inspired by his literature class, Sugiarto added his signature to the nearly 1,000 on a petition calling on Dartmouth to establish an Asian American studies major, a challenge that’s been brought to the Ivy League school on and off for four decades.

Sugiarto and his classmates hope this time will be different given recent events.

Eng-Beng Lim, the Dartmouth professor who taught Sugiarto’s class, said the petition gained momentum after the massage business killings, and even fueled discussions with administrators.

Those talks recently stalled, though Lim still described it as a “promising and critical impasse.”

“When U.S. universities refuse to support Asian American studies that are framed in a way that we have framed it, it’s really a missed opportunity to think about how we might have a more nuanced understanding of American racism beyond binary terms of Black and white,” Lim said.

Pawan Dhingra, a professor at Amherst College and the incoming president of the Association for Asian American studies, said he is aware of a few other East Coast schools either considering Asian American studies or renewing their commitment to it.

“A lot of ethnic studies programs grew out of student demand during key inflection points in American history,” Dhingra said. “This is an inflection point. The push for ethnic studies — in this case Asian American studies — fits the tradition of how these programs come to be. It’s rarely the brainchild of administrators or faculty.”

The concept of ethnic studies is believed to have started in California, where it became state law in August that California State University students take one ethnic studies course to graduate.

In 1968, students of color at San Francisco State University, which was named San Francisco State College at the time, joined Black classmates demanding a curriculum that wasn’t just Euro-centric. What followed was five months of protests — the longest student strike in U.S. history — and hundreds of arrests.

In March 1969, after intense negotiations, the university officially launched a College of Ethnic Studies. Other schools also devised similar programs.

Alumni who were on strike 53 years ago see parallels with today’s “Stop Asian Hate” rallies, said Mai-Nhung Le, chair of San Francisco State University’s Asian American studies program. Young Asian Americans are again demanding classes relevant to them — not just history but everything from popular culture to environmental justice.

But while the backdrop in the ’60s was the Vietnam War, today it’s “two concurrent pandemics”: COVID-19 and structural racism, Le said.

Establishing an Asian American studies department is one thing — nurturing it is another. Ethnic studies programs are on shaky ground if schools don’t recruit instructors who can plan courses and mentor students.

Of more than 428,000 faculty who were tenured or on tenure-track at degree-granting institutions nationwide in 2019, 70% were white, 11% were Asian or Pacific Islander, 5% were Black, and 5% were Latino. Native Americans and Alaska Natives comprised just 0.4%, according to data gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics.

A furor erupted at Dartmouth in 2016 when Aimee Bahng, an assistant English professor, was denied tenure. She had unanimous support from a departmental committee but not with higher-ranking campus officials. The rejection came as students were making another push for Asian American studies. Bahng had even started planning potential classes.

She recalls receiving hundreds of sympathetic messages from female academics in the U.S. and abroad.

“I had an electronic folder of just women or women of color who had been denied tenure,” said Bahng, who now teaches at Pomona College. “It was amazing but also depressing. … I always know when it’s tenure-denial season because I still get a handful of emails.”

Dartmouth freshman Anais Zhang, 18, never gave Asian American studies much thought until she was assigned to write about it for the school newspaper after the Atlanta-area massage business shootings. In her research, Zhang learned of all the attempts to start a program that ultimately went nowhere. It left her frustrated.

“I talked to a lot of my friends about the article and my shock at how we really don’t have an institutionalized program and just my reaction learning about how previous students had put so much effort in petitioning the college and hiring professors … only to have this support trickle away and have all this progress undone in the subsequent years,” Zhang said.

A lot of times fledgling ethnic studies programs decline because junior professors who aren’t full time or permanent have to carry them, according to Dhingra.

“It’s just creating extra labor for faculty that burns people out and it isn’t able to grow because it wasn’t created with enough infrastructure in the first place,” Dhingra said.

At the University of Arizona in Tucson, an Asian Pacific American studies minor launched last month. While it is an “example of the way the university is combating anti-Asian hate and ignorance,” it was a culmination of efforts that started several years before the pandemic, said Brett Esaki, an assistant professor who helped come up with the coursework.

“The short- and long-term goals are definitely about stability,” said Esaki, who is not tenured. “We can’t just hope for another disaster to get people to say, ‘You’re important.’” ___

Tang reported from Phoenix and is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP

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FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) — Arizona Republicans say the voter restrictions they’re pushing after President Joe Biden’s win in the state last year are designed to strengthen the integrity of future elections.

To some, the changes will make voting more difficult than it already is.

The bills, some signed into law this past week by Gov. Doug Ducey, are worrisome for Native Americans who live in remote areas, other communities of color and voters whose first language isn’t English.

One codifies the existing practice of giving voters who didn’t sign mail-in ballots until 7 p.m. on Election Day to do so, defying a recently settled lawsuit that would have given voters additional days to provide a signature. Another will result in potentially tens of thousands of people being purged from a list of voters who automatically get a ballot by mail.

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said Ducey’s actions belittle tribes and fail to recognize the unique challenges Native Americans face when casting ballots. That includes driving hours to reach polling places, unreliable mail service and the need for more Native language translators.

“This is an assault to the election process for people of color throughout this country,” he said. “Here in Arizona, it’s pushing back on the voters of tribal communities, and we came out in big numbers to vote our candidate of choice, which is President Biden.”

The bills’ sponsor, Republican state Sen. Michelle Ugenti-Rita, said claims of retaliation or voter suppression were “outrageous” and “unfounded.” Elections aren’t a surprise, she said, and voters want them to be run efficiently with timely results.

“Not everything has to do with Biden and Trump,” she said. “These are important cleanups and fixes. It makes sense.”

Arizona is among several states controlled politically by Republicans that are tightening election rules this year, primarily around early and absentee voting. Democrats say the new rules will disproportionately affect minorities and lower-income voters. Florida, Georgia and Iowa already have enacted voting restrictions, and Texas is debating its own set of tighter rules.

In March, Biden issued an executive order creating a Native American Voting Rights Steering Group. It’s tasked with consulting with tribes nationwide to address barriers to voting, among other things.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic, voter turnout on swaths of tribal land in Arizona surged in 2020 compared with the 2016 presidential election, helping Biden to victory in a state that hadn’t supported a Democratic presidential candidate since 1996. Former President Donald Trump and a legion of his supporters have refused to accept his loss in Arizona and other battleground states, resulting in a partisan review of the ballots cast in the state’s most populous county.

The Navajo Nation sued the secretary of state and county officials in 2018 to force changes in election procedures for the tribe’s voters. The complaint alleged that more than 100 ballots cast by Navajos were rejected because they didn’t have signatures on the envelope or they had mismatched signatures.

Secretary of State Katie Hobbs agreed to insert language into the elections manual that would give all mail-in voters up to five days after an election to fix their ballots — the same as voters whose signatures don’t match the one on file.

The attorney general and Ducey didn’t sign off on the changes. The Democratic Party has since sued seeking a five-day curing period for mailed ballots. A U.S. District Court judge initially agreed, but the decision was challenged. Oral arguments are scheduled for July in federal appeals court.

Nez said the ballot signature measure just signed into law undermines the settlement in the tribe’s lawsuit. It is evaluating the language and has not yet decide on its next step.

“We have to deal with the federal government on broken promises. Now we have the state breaking promises on a settlement we thought we all agreed upon,” Nez said.

The secretary of state doesn’t have final say over the elections manual, and Ugenti-Rita said promises shouldn’t have been made that couldn’t be kept. She said the Navajo Nation’s anger is wrongly directed at the Legislature.

Before the pandemic, Native Americans made voting a social event on many reservations. It was one of the few times a year where they’d meet with old friends and chat about the government, community needs and their families. Tribal leaders give voters time off to cast a ballot and help get others to the polls. Campaigns courted voters with traditional food.

Even when they receive mailed ballots, many Native Americans prefer to drop them off on Election Day at their polling site, no matter how distant. Unless poll workers check for a signature on the spot, voters would have no chance to fix it.

Patty Hansen, the recorder in the state’s largest county by size, said she’s disappointed with the new law because it treats voters differently based on the error they’ve made.

“We were headed in the right direction,” she said. “Now it’s being reversed.”

Submitting mailed ballots earlier without a signature could mean an hours-long trip to make the fix, said Democratic state Rep. Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, who is Navajo. The new law says county officials have to make a reasonable effort to contact voters. Blackwater-Nygren said that could be problematic if Navajo translators, for example, aren’t available.

The other change in Arizona affects the list of voters who automatically receive a mailed ballot. Voters who sit out all elections — municipal, primary and general — for two election cycles will be mailed a notice asking if they want to remain on what had been known as the permanent early voting list.

If they respond, nothing will change. If they don’t respond within 90 days, they will be dropped from the list but will remain a registered voter.

They can rejoin what will now be called the active early voting list at any time, request a mailed ballot for a single election or vote in person. But a ballot won’t automatically arrive in their mailboxes.

About 75 percent of registered voters in the state are on the early voting list. That includes some 38,000 Indigenous people, most of whom are concentrated in the competitive but Democratic-leaning 1st Congressional District. The district takes in several tribes in the northern and and eastern parts of the state, including the Navajo Nation.

Voter rolls regularly are purged elsewhere, including on the Navajo Nation, but advocates contend the change will result in more people being disenfranchised.

Blackwater-Nygren said she often hears from Republicans that tribal members know what to expect when it comes to voting. That’s true, she said, but the vast distances, spotty phone service and lack of home mail delivery on some reservations also pose challenges not found elsewhere.

“We’re saying we don’t have the same access to polling locations, and that message seems to get lost,” she said.

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BUCARAMANGA, Colombia (AP) — Thousands of young people and college students have been at the forefront of Colombia’s antigovernment protests for more than two weeks, armed with improvised shields made from garbage cans and umbrellas.

They have taken the brunt of the tear gas and gunshots from security forces, and dozens have paid for it with their lives.

The young men and women have become the voices for Colombians fed up with a government they say has mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic and crushed hopes of a better future.

“To a large extent, we found that there was no fear of death. Sometimes it is the only thing that remains when the system is starving us and there are no opportunities,” said Yonny Rojas, a 36-year-old law student who also runs soup kitchens in one of the poorest areas of Cali, the city where the government response has been especially violent.

The students didn’t begin the demonstrations, which erupted on April 28 when unions called people into the streets after President Iván Duque’s government tried to raise taxes on public services, fuel, wages and pensions, effectively squeezing the middle class. That protest drew tens of thousands of people across the South American nation.

The administration withdrew the proposal four days later, but it was not enough to quell the discontent that had simmered during the pandemic. Anger grew with reports of police brutality, deaths and disappearances of protesters.

Despite more than a half century of nearly constant civil conflict between the government and leftist rebels, Colombia is among the wealthier nations in the region, with one of the highest levels of university education in Latin America.

But it is plagued by profound inequality and violence, by powerful drug trafficking organizations and paramilitary groups blamed for displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their lands, and by murders of social and labor activists at a scale unseen elsewhere in the hemisphere.

Hopes that a 2016 peace deal with the largest rebel group would lead to a flowering of opportunities had been frustrated even before the pandemic hit.

Duque tried to calm the protests by meeting with young demonstrators in Cali and Bogota, the capital, promising subsidies for low-income students at public universities. But student leaders rejected the offer, complaining it would not apply to all students and repeated a pledge that was only partly fulfilled following 2019 protests.

The protests continued this weekend.

Human rights groups, including the U.N.’s rights body, have accused government security forces — long accustomed to confronting suspected guerrillas and drug gangs — of excessive use of force against protesters.

The government said it has confirmed only 14 deaths directly tied to the protests, but Human Rights Watch said it has received “credible” reports of 48 deaths — most between the ages of 13 to 34.

The government accuses protesters of vandalizing properties, looting and setting up roadblocks that have caused food shortages, prevented vaccine deliveries and blocked ambulances. Officials have also accused the protesters of trying to burn alive 10 police officers in Bogota.

The Ministry of Defense has reported the arrests of nearly 700 people as well as the seizure of 520 firearms and 14,000 sharp weapons.

Paloma Valencia, a pro-Duque senator, equated the roadblocks to “kidnappings of Colombian society with a social protest.”

“We understand that our constitutional obligation is also to protect those who participate in the protests, in the mobilizations, if they are peaceful, but it is also to combat the vandalism and the violence when it emerges, and avoid that they affect the rights of others,” Defense Minister Diego Molano told reporters last week.

Young people were also heavily involved in protests in 2018 and 2019 against other proposed government reforms. But the anger has spread throughout the nation as people lost jobs, friends and relatives to a pandemic that has claimed at least 80,250 lives across the country. Many have given up hopes of being able to afford to return to colleges when they reopen.

“Thousands of young people have taken the streets across Colombia because they feel they have no future. They see government institutions as distant entities that are not willing to listen to them,” José Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch’s director for the Americas, said in a statement. “While some of them have engaged in violence, police officers have arbitrarily dispersed peaceful protests and responded with excessive, often brutal, force to violent protesters.”

Colombia’s security forces have spent decades fighting rebels — and have been often accused of cooperation with right-wing paramilitaries and of killing innocent civilians to boost “rebel” body counts.

“Struggles to make Colombia more democratic and equitable are often met with murderous force, whether by government forces, particularly the police in 2021, and in 2019, or sometimes what they called paramilitary forces that are kind of loosely allied in shadowy ways with usually the armed forces, or the police or both,” said Forrest Hylton, a professor of history and politics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín. “So anybody who stands up for their rights in Colombia is often risking his or her life.”

The government also has alleged that rebel factions that rejected the 2016 peace deal, along with drug traffickers, have infiltrated the protests.

“It’s a continuation of a long history of state repression of popular protests, and stigmatizing protesters,” said Lesley Gill, a Vanderbilt University professor focused on cultural anthropology, political violence and human rights.

“The situation in Cali is so sad that today, unfortunately, young people in less favored communities are more likely to be linked to a criminal gang than to a cultural group,” said Andrés Felipe González, a 29-year-old communications student and community leader in an impoverished neighborhood in Cali. “Colombia is in a very precarious situation and in all social classes.”

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LONDON (AP) — British health workers, aided by the army, distributed coronavirus tests door-to-door Saturday in two towns in northern England, seeking to contain a fast-spreading variant that threatens plans to lift all lockdown restrictions next month.

Cases of a variant first identified in India have more than doubled in a week, defying a sharp nationwide downward trend in infections won by months of restrictions and a rapid vaccination campaign. Government scientific advisers say this variant is likely more transmissible than even the U.K.’s dominant strain, though it’s unclear by how much.

“If the virus is significantly more transmissible, we are likely to face some hard choices,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at a news conference on Friday. “I have to level with you that this could be a serious disruption to our progress.”

He said the next stage of lockdown-easing measures would take place as planned on Monday, but warned the variant might delay plans to lift all restrictions, including social distancing and face-covering rules, on June 21.

Johnson said soldiers would help carry out “surge testing” in Bolton and Blackburn in northwest England, where pop-up vaccination sites were also being set up to speed the inoculation drive.

The government’s scientific advisory committee says there is no evidence so far that the variant causes more severe disease or that existing vaccines won’t work against it. More than two-thirds of British adults have received a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and 37% have had both doses.

The government is shortening the gap between doses for people over 50 from 12 to eight weeks in a bid to give them more protection.

The government’s Scientific Group for Emergencies says the Indian-identified variant, formally known as B.1.617.2, could be up to 50% more transmissible than one first recorded in southeast England last year that is now the U.K.’s dominant strain. But they say there is a high level of uncertainty about the exact figure.

Mark Walport, a member of the advisory group, said the new variant had “intensified” the race between the virus and vaccines.

“The knife edge on which the race sits has just sharpened,” he said.

Britain has recorded almost 128,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest reported toll in Europe. But new infections have plummeted to an average of around 2,000 a day, compared with nearly 70,000 a day during the winter peak, and deaths have fallen to single figures a day.

Restrictions that have curbed travel, commerce and daily life for months are gradually being lifted. Starting Monday, restaurants and pubs in England can open indoors, museums, theaters, cinemas and hotels can reopen, and people can once again hug friends and family members they don’t live with.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are following similar but slightly different paths. The Scottish government is keeping the city of Glasgow and the northern area of Moray under restrictions because of rising case numbers there.

Critics said the government should have acted sooner to ban travelers from India, which has been gripped by a devastating coronavirus outbreak.

Labour Party lawmaker Yvette Cooper said the government had not barred visitors arriving from India until April 23, a decision that let in “many hundreds of new variant cases.”

“This was predictable but it was not inevitable,” she said.

___

Follow all AP stories on the pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic and https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine.

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