EL CEIBO, Guatemala, Aug 20 (Reuters) – When 25-year-old Salvadoran migrant Donovan Pedro stepped off a deportation bus at the El Ceibo border crossing that connects Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala, the situation was familiar but the place was not.

Pedro had already made the trek to the U.S. border twice and was stopped by Mexican authorities, who both times sent him to other locations in Mexico.

This time he was detained in the state of Veracruz near the Gulf of Mexico, and sent to a remote border crossing with Guatemala as part of U.S. and Mexican efforts to make it more difficult for migrants to cross the U.S. border repeatedly.

Wearing a jacket and a baseball cap, Pedro carried no suitcase or change of clothes and did not have a working cell phone. But with the pandemic exacerbating unemployment in El Salvador, he was already planning to head back to the United States via the Mexican city of Monterrey near the Texas border.

“I can’t get to my country. I’m going to try to go up and back to Monterrey,” he said.

From there, he planned to get across the U.S. border.

Pedro is one of hundreds of migrants, including children and babies, from Central America that U.S. and Mexican officials have expelled further south by plane and then onward in buses towards El Ceibo, Guatemala, a tiny village of about one hundred wooden and concrete dwellings some 630 kilometers (390 miles) north of the capital, a Reuters witness observed over two days there.

Many are not told where they are going.

U.S. President Joe Biden is under pressure to stem an increase in southern border crossings, with U.S. agents apprehending or expelling more than 1,276,000 migrants since last October.

The Biden administration began flying migrants to Guatemala this month from the United States under a U.S. policy allowing fast-track expulsions for some families arriving from Mexico.

It has also urged Mexico to curb migration, prompting authorities there to quietly fly thousands of undocumented migrants from the north of the country to the south for expulsion. read more

NO ONE TO CALL

For most of the migrants – hailing from Honduras, El Salvador or Nicaragua – they have no connection to Guatemala. When they get off the bus, they have no local currency, no place to stay and no-one to call for help.

Some migrants stranded in El Ceibo told Reuters they are determined to make the journey to the U.S. border again, having learned valuable lessons about navigating the routes.

Others remain in limbo in El Ceibo, unsure of what to do next. Those who can afford it, stay in a local inn for about $20 a night. Others climb a steep hill to a nearby migrant shelter that can house 30 people at a time.

Some sleep in the streets of El Ceibo, a dangerous drug-trafficking area where gunshots can be heard day or night. The rest just start walking.

“This is my first time in Guatemala. I don’t know what to do because I’m alone,” said Aura Diaz, a Honduran woman traveling with her two young daughters, aged 4 and 1.

Fleeing violence in Honduras and hoping to find work in the United States, she had been traveling for more than a month with the two girls when officials stopped them two days before in the Mexican city of Reynosa across from McAllen, Texas, she said.

“We were resting and they grabbed us,” she said.

Guatemala’s government on Tuesday said it was concerned about not receiving any notifications about migrants of different nationalities crossing into its territory by land at its El Ceibo and El Carmen border points.

It said it has facilities for returnees from Mexico at other border points, like Tecun Uman, that have the capacity to provide migrant care in a “dignified and safe” manner.

“Guatemala’s foreign ministry has sent diplomatic communications requesting official information from the governments of Mexico and the United States on these migratory movements,” the government said in a statement.

Guatemala, however, is not providing transport for migrants after they arrive at El Ceibo.

When they get off the bus at the border in Mexico, the migrants cross into the Guatemalan village, where power from a local generator for the houses and three inns goes off at 10 p.m.

Officials there take their temperature, take photos of their IDs and send them on their way. Many migrants could be seen asking where they should go now, or where they should sleep.

“They throw you into a place you don’t know, with no money, nothing, and with small children,” said Eduardo, a Honduran migrant who was staying at a local shelter with his wife and three young children. He, too, plans to return to Mexico in the hope of eventually reaching the United States.

He explained how he and his family fled Honduras after Eduardo’s wife was kidnapped by gang members. Eduardo did not give his last name due to fears for their safety.

“No matter how long we have to stay we’re going to ask for asylum because we do not want to return to our country,” he said.

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PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 22 (Reuters) – Haitian President Jovenel Moise began this year by warning that his country was a land of coups, conspiracy and murder. In the days before he was shot dead in a murky international plot last month, he was telling friends that enemies were out to get him.

“He told me a lot of people were spending a lot of money to murder him,” said a former Haitian senator and close friend of the late president, relating a conversation with Moise the evening of his death. “I told him to stop thinking like that.”

“He said to me: ‘This is reality.’”

Showing Reuters his final text messages with Moise, the politician, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, said the president did not identify the plotters.

More than a dozen officials, politicians, diplomats and relatives of Moise spoke to Reuters about the events surrounding his murder. The assassination decapitated a fragile government in a Caribbean country repeatedly convulsed by crisis – now exacerbated by a major earthquake on Aug. 14 – since the overthrow of the Duvalier family dictatorship in 1986.

The conversations painted the 53-year-old president as a man increasingly isolated and in peril toward the end of his life.

Moise supporters described his downfall as the inevitable consequence of a corrupt ruling elite closing ranks against a provincial outsider who dared to help Haiti’s majority poor.

“He was putting things in order. Here, when you put things in order, you die,” said Guy Francois, an ally who served as Moise’s minister of citizenship.

Critics, by contrast, cast Moise as a political novice who lacked the skills to build consensus, drifted towards autocracy and turned a blind eye to gang violence in areas hostile to his administration.

“He was a poor choice from the get-go,” said Salim Succar, a lawyer and onetime aide to Moise’s predecessor and former backer, ex-President Michel Martelly. “He never stood a chance.”

Many saw in his killing a microcosm of institutional rot in Haiti, where government has been hobbled by factional disputes, entrenched inequality, and a dependence on foreign powers still widely viewed as hostile to the country’s very foundation in 1804, when a slave revolt threw off the French colonial yoke.

MISSING MASTERMIND

In the rubbish-strewn center of Port-au-Prince, the government district is ringed by deserted streets now considered to be gang-controlled territory. Buildings battered by a 2010 earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country still scar the landscape.

Officials say Moise’s killers took advantage of the porous state of law and order to execute their plot at his personal residence in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Petion-Ville.

Moise’s bullet-ridden body was found in the early hours of July 7 after what the Haitian authorities said was an attack by a commando unit of mostly Colombian mercenaries. His wife, Martine, was injured. Police arrested some of the president’s security chiefs but have not identified the mastermind.

Allies accused “oligarchs” – members of Haiti’s business elite – of hiring foreign assassins to eliminate Moise for threatening their privileges, stoking popular anger over Haiti’s historic treatment by Western powers and the economic predominance of lighter-skinned Haitians.

Some among the elite made no secret of their disdain for Moise, said one diplomat, recalling the “contempt” with which one of its number spoke of Moise at a private meeting.

Several business leaders have publicly condemned Moise’s murder. To date, 18 Colombians, some 20 Haitian police and a handful of other Haitian and Haitian-American suspects have been arrested.

Colombian officials familiar with the investigation say that most of the Colombians detained were probably victims of a plot within a plot to divert attention from the architects.

Only four of the Colombians knew about the conspiracy against Moise beforehand; most went to Haiti in the belief they would be bodyguards, said one Colombian official.

Because the commando unit faced no meaningful resistance until after his killing, investigators believe Moise was betrayed by his own security staff, the official added.

Moise’s friend, the former senator, said the president had known the Colombians were in Haiti and told him during their last phone call he was preparing to arrest the plotters.

“I said, ‘Why don’t you do it right away?,’” the politician said. “He said: ‘I am going to do it.’”

Haiti was meant to elect a successor to Moise and a new parliament in September, but that date quickly began slipping towards November after his assassination.

After the latest earthquake that killed over 2,000 people and destroyed thousands of homes, holding any election this year looked “very difficult”, said Adriano Espaillat, a U.S. congressman originally from the neighboring Dominican Republic.

SHOCK, BUT NOT SURPRISE

Six months before his death, Moise seemed only too aware of the risks. On Jan. 1, he gave a speech to commemorate Haitian independence steeped in gloom.

“For 217 years, the whole history of the country has been based on conspiracies, coups, assassinations,” he said. “We conspire to destroy it, never to build it. More than 30 presidents overthrown or assassinated.”

Moise’s push to improve power supply at the expense of private interests and a constitutional reform that would have strengthened the presidency were cited by both allies and critics as key markers on his road to ruin.

But the problems started early.

Within months of taking office in February 2017, Moise’s administration was rocked by major street protests over tax hikes, then rising fuel prices.

A Senate report later accused Moise of embezzling funds from the Venezuela-backed PetroCaribe oil program, which he denied.

Protests worsened, and in 2019 Haiti fell into months of “Peyi lock”, or country lockdown, fueled by opposition-backed demonstrations. As political unrest, violence and kidnappings spread, calls for his resignation mounted.

Moise, who last year declared himself second only to God in Haiti, began ruling by decree in 2020 in the absence of a sitting parliament, and became increasingly confrontational.

In February, a month after his independence address, Moise said police had foiled a coup and an attempt on his life. A sense of foreboding among foreign officials deepened.

“Everyone was shocked” one diplomat said of his assassination. “But not many people were surprised.”

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BBC- At least eight people are known to have died after Hurricane Grace tore through eastern Mexico, bringing torrential rain and high winds and causing power cuts and flooding.

The deaths and the worst damage occurred in the state of Veracruz, where the storm uprooted trees when it made landfall early on Saturday.

In the state capital, Xalapa, many streets became rivers of mud.

The hurricane later weakened to a tropical storm as it moved inland.

image sourceReuters

However, high winds and downpours were reported to be causing more flooding as Grace travelled north of Mexico City.

• Above-average hurricane season expected
• What are hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons?

The storm brought wind speeds of up to 200 km/h (125mph) when it reached the coast of mainland Mexico. Of the eight people killed, six were members of the same family, state government officials said.

image sourceReuters

Residents of the coastal town of Tecolutla, in Veracruz state, said the hurricane had been devastating.

image sourceReuters

“You could just hear the thunder of the falling trees, it sounded very nasty, very horrible,” Laura Jacinto said, adding: ” I was very scared, I was very scared last night.”

image sourceReuters

Another resident, Adolfo Lopez, said: “The roof… everything is gone, it took everything with it.”

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Florida gives two school districts 48 hours to comply with mask rule or lose funding

Florida is escalating its war against school districts that require masks in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) directive against them.

The Florida Board of Education is ordering Alachua and Broward County school districts to comply with an order allowing parents to opt out of local mask mandates, with state officials giving the districts 48 hours to comply before they move to withhold funding.

The state is requesting a list of the annual salaries of all school board members in the counties, and the BOE will then begin withholding 1/12th of that amount each month from the district’s funds, as an initial step.

Both Alachua and Broward have instituted mask requirements for all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status, in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose “Bill of Rights” order has effectively prevented schools from requiring masks.

The state requires public schools to allow for a parent or legal guardian of the student to opt-out of any mask requirements without any reason. Alachua and Broward require doctors’ notes.

The state: “It is important to remember that this issue is about ensuring local school board members, elected politicians, follow the law,” Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran said in a statement. “These are the initial consequences to their intentional refusal to follow state law and state rule to purposefully and willingly violate the rights of parents. This is simply unacceptable behavior.”

Federal support for schools: The White House on Friday said Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has spoken with officials in Broward and Alachua counties, telling them to hold the line, and assuring them that any financial penalties imposed by the state can be addressed using federal funds.

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AstraZeneca antibody cocktail considered effective in preventing symptomatic COVID-19 among the high-risk

AstraZeneca scored a win on Friday as data showed its antibody cocktail is 77 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in high-risk populations.

The research found no one who took AstraZeneca’s combination, called AZD7442, developed severe COVID-19 or died due to the virus. In comparison, three participants who received the placebo endured serious illness, with two fatalities.

AstraZencea called the treatment, involving the antibodies ixagevimab and cilgavimab, the first “long-acting antibody combination to prevent COVID-19” in a release.

Overall, 25 positive coronavirus infections were confirmed in the Provent study involving more than 5,100 patients across sites in the ​​U.S., U.K., Belgium, France and Spain. The participants were unvaccinated at the time and had a negative test.

Significance: Drug manufacturers have been testing different antibody treatments for COVID-19 to provide a way to help those who may not have adequate vaccine protection, including cancer patients, fight the virus.

“With these exciting results, AZD7442 could be an important tool in our arsenal to help people who may need more than a vaccine to return to their normal lives,” Myron Levin, principal investigator in the study, said in a statement.

What’s next: The study is expected to be sent to a peer-reviewed medical journal to be published, as well as to regulators for an emergency use authorization or conditional approval.

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US extending travel restrictions with Mexico, Canada

The U.S. is extending the nonessential closure of its borders with Canada and Mexico to at least Sept. 21 due to the delta variant of the coronavirus, the Department of Homeland Security announced Friday.

“In coordination with public health and medical experts, DHS continues working closely with its partners across the United States and internationally to determine how to safely and sustainably resume normal travel,” the agency tweeted.

The extraordinary closures have been extended monthly since they were put in place at the onset of the pandemic in March 2020.

Canada began letting fully vaccinated U.S. citizens and permanent residents into the country on Aug. 9, but Canadians still can’t travel into the U.S. unless it is for an essential purpose.

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World Stats

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By MARK STEVENSON and EVENS SANONyesterday

LES CAYES, Haiti (AP) — Haiti’s unusually close relationship between the living and the dead has helped hide, in part, the huge toll of Saturday’s earthquake: People in Haiti want to be close to their deceased relatives, to the point of sometimes burying them in their front yards.

Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency puts the number of dead from the quake at almost 2,200. Questions had arisen about how such a large number of dead could have been handled or buried so quickly, but amateur burials and overflowing private funeral parlors may explain where all the bodies went.

The magnitude 7.2 earthquake injured more than 12,000 people, destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 homes and left about 30,000 families homeless, officials said. Schools, offices and churches — and even funeral homes and cemeteries — were demolished or badly damaged.

The quake also brought the living and the dead even closer in a nation which, like Mexico, celebrates a Day of the Dead holiday: In the countryside outside the city of Les Cayes, some of the frontyard burial crypts were broken open by the force of the quake, exposing coffins inside.

And some of the living came closer to the grave than anyone should: Serge Chery, the head of civil defense for the Southern Province, which covers Les Cayes, said that his officers had found two women buried in the rubble of a two-story apartment building because they had been able to communicate with the outside world via cellphones.

Such stories are common rumors in disaster zones. Chery said his department received innumerable false reports of such calls. “We dialed one number that people said was sending messages from a collapsed house, and a living person answered it in Jeremie,” a nearby city.

But Chery refused to call the real cellphone rescue a miracle.

“The only miracle was that they had their phones charged and in their hands at the time of the quake, and they had sufficient room to dial afterward,” Chery said.

Government hospital morgues, like the one at the Les Cayes’ general hospital, are almost empty. That’s because, as the hospital’s director admits, they haven’t had working refrigeration at the morgue for at least three months due to problems with the electrical equipment.

Instead, local residents know they have to take deceased to one of the dozens of small, modest private funeral homes in the area.

There, at least air-conditioned rooms mean the bodies won’t decompose while relatives struggle to come up with enough money to meet burial costs that can run around $500, a fortune for people in the hemisphere’s poorest country.

Jean Eddy Montezima runs one such parlor, the St. Jaques funeral home in Les Cayes, on a shoestring, and he is overworked and fed up. As he spoke with journalists, another rickety, informal “ambulance” — actually just an SUV with a folding stretcher in the back — pulled up with another body, a woman who died of natural causes at a local hospital.

That’s good, because Montezima says he is no longer accepting the bodies of quake victims. He has 15 corpses crowding his small, air-conditioned rooms. The woman’s body was carried into the parlor and relatives promised to come back later to make arrangements.

Montezima says he has taken in the bodies of at least 50 quake victims since Saturday at his small building, where a noisy generator growls 24 hours a day to keep air conditioners running so the bodies won’t decompose.

“A lot of people may not have the money to bury them,” Montezima said. “If the families don’t come back, I will probably have to do a mass grave with them.” Such a solution is little short of a sacrilege in Haiti, but the beleaguered funeral home director has little choice.

“I was already working eight hours a day, and now I have to work 24,” he said. “I am burning $50 in gas every day. We need an institution or a charity to donate to help with the costs.”

“In some cases, the bodies were in such bad condition, we had to bury them immediately,” he said, adding he can’t hand that task off to the government. “If the body is badly decomposed, they won’t accept them at the morgue.”

Eventually, though, the dead and the living have to part ways.

Chery has the painful task of deciding, along with other authorities, when to send in heavy machinery to clear the rubble, though he acknowledges it will ’inevitably” result in churning up more bodies. Chery said that in the Les Cayes area alone, 300 people are still missing; many are probably still under tons of broken concrete and brick.

“We are planning a meeting to start clearing all of the sites that were destroyed because that will give the owner of that site at least the chance to build something temporary, out of wood, to live on that site,” Chery said, noting that “it will be easier to distribute aid if people are living at their addresses, rather than in a tent.”

He stressed the need to start engineering inspections of buildings to find out which are safe. “If we want the schools and banks and hotels to start working, we have to give people confidence, because they don’t want to go back into those buildings now,” Chery said.

“In Haiti, it is something cultural; families are attached to their dead,” Chery said. “Culturally, even with cholera or COVID-19, people want their relatives to be buried in a nice grave.” But due to the mangled condition of many quake victims, many were buried immediately.

That attitude is on display at the Marc Dor Lebrun funeral home, which he touts as the city’s cleanest and best equipped. Here grieving families can rent a 30-foot-long stretch Humvee limousine to carry the funeral cortege.

Stainless steel refrigerated body cabinets line one room and an air-conditioned preparation room lies nearby. But with the bodies of 17 earthquake victims, and 22 others, already filling his facilities, Lebrun says he cannot take any more.

“It’s because we’re honest. We’re telling people we are not receiving any more bodies,” Lebrun said. “I don’t know about the rest of them,” he said, referring to less well-equipped homes.

“We got three bodies that were so badly destroyed that we put them in zippered body bags and gave them to relatives and they buried them on their own,” Lebrun said.

For the rest — families who can’t meet the costs of burials — Lebrun said he won’t turn them away or set a fixed price. “This is the situation,” he said, referring to Haiti’s grinding poverty. “If a family can’t pay, we’ll help them out.”

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