World

Mexico’s president has stepped up his attacks on a number of media outlets in one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists, branding them “mercenaries” who defend vested interests.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a left-wing populist who faces a midterm recall referendum on Sunday, often uses his weekday press conferences to lash out at newspapers, prominent journalists and industry leaders.

“They’re aligned with a conservative bloc. The goal is to hurt us,” the president said in February after news articles questioned how his son’s mansion in Houston fit in with his own pro-austerity agenda.

“It’s very important to know that the media — not all — are the defenders of interest groups, of people who did not pay taxes, who were in charge of economic policy,” he added.

Prominent Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui sees such criticism as “a direct attack by the president” against media figures like her.

“We are neither for nor against his government. The goal is to inform,” added Aristegui, famous for hard-hitting reports on government corruption.

For Juan Pardinas, the director of the Reforma daily newspaper, part of the problem is that Lopez Obrador’s attacks against the press are so frequent.

The president “has mentioned the newspaper more than 300 times in his morning conferences,” Pardinas told AFP.

Reforma has been a harsh critic of major presidential projects, such as Lopez Obrador’s tourist railroad in the Yucatan Peninsula and controversial energy reforms, as it was during other governments.

In February, the president accused Reforma of acting “at the service of the mafia of power, which has done a lot of harm to Mexico.”

Such an attack “puts at risk not only my colleagues from the Reforma group but the entire journalistic profession,” Pardinas said.

Media workers in Mexico already face myriad dangers.

Eight journalists have been killed in the Latin American country since the start of 2022, according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Around 150 journalists have been murdered in Mexico since 2000, and only a fraction of the crimes have resulted in convictions, the media watchdog says.

Such killings doubled during the first three years of Lopez Obrador’s term, which began in December 2018 — to 30, compared with 15 in the same timeframe under his predecessor Enrique Pena Nieto, according to media rights group Article 19.

Usually the victims are reporters working for local media in states plagued by drug cartel-related violence rather than those at the national press in the capital singled out by the president.

– ‘Who’s who of lies’ –

In March, the European Parliament angered Lopez Obrador with a resolution urging his government to protect journalists and accusing him of using “populist rhetoric” to denigrate and intimidate the press.

Lopez Obrador accused EU lawmakers of supporting his opponents’ “coup” attempt “like sheep.”

On social networks, the president and his allies are sometimes the targets of disinformation about issues such as Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum’s nationality or the first lady’s qualifications — rumors debunked by AFP.

The presidency now has its own fact-checking service. Every Wednesday, part of his news conference is dedicated to highlighting the “lies” attributed to journalists or political opponents. 

The segment, known as the “Who’s who of lies,” amounts to “direct attacks on people and their reputation,” historian Ana Maria Serna told AFP. 

“I don’t remember a presidency fighting directly with journalists (before now). In the past, other forms of censorship were used,” she added.

“There was a lot of advertising bought by the federal government. It was a form of control. Another was direct payment to journalists,” Serna said.

Lopez Obrador, a vocal critic of corruption, this week announced a support fund for journalists without social security, lamenting the fact that many of them “end up with nothing.”

The attack on the train station in Kramatorsk came mid-morning, when hundreds were gathered, waiting for evacuation out of east Ukraine as they had done at the same time for the last several days. 

Body parts, packed bags and stuffed animals were flung across the floor after two rockets struck the busy hub on Friday, killing at least 39 people.

“I was in the station. I heard like a double explosion. I rushed to the wall for protection,” said Natalia, searching for her passport among the abandoned belongings.

“I saw people covered in blood coming into the station and bodies everywhere on the ground. I don’t know if they were just injured or dead,” she told AFP.

Around 30 bodies, all dressed in civilian clothing, were grouped together and placed under plastic sheets next to a kiosk daubed yellow and blue — the colours of Ukraine’s flag — outside the station, where blood pooled on the ground.

On the station platform, a walking stick lay next to a lump of flesh. Further along, a toy rabbit soaked red.

The toll from the strikes rose throughout the morning with Ukraine’s SBU security service saying least 39 people had been killed, including at least four children.

Kramatorsk had been hit by Russian strikes earlier this week but had been otherwise spared the destruction witnessed by other eastern Ukraine cities since Russia’s invasion.

– ‘Looking for my husband’ –

Moscow denied involvement in Friday’s strike and accused Kyiv of carrying out the attack deliberately.

Ukrainian authorities had warned this week that time was running out to flee westwards in advance of an anticipated Russian attack.

Rescue workers and men in camouflage carried bodies onto a truck to be ferried away. Some of the bags were light and needed no more than two men to be carried.

Prosecutors in the Donetsk region said in a statement that at the time of the attack there were approximately 4,000 civilians at the station, mostly women and children.

Earlier in the morning, AFP saw dozens of people — women, children and the elderly — throng the station desperate to escape the feared Russian advance on eastern Ukraine.

After the attack, a sneaker with the foot still inside was visible under a bench, where the people hoping to be evacuated had been waiting.

A policeman moved between the debris, picking up phones and putting them in a box, one of them ringing out incessantly.

“I’m looking for my husband. He was here. I can’t reach him,” sobbed a woman in a red turtle neck. Shaking, she hesitated to get closer to the bodies, holding her phone to her ear.

– ‘For our children’ –

The head of Ukraine’s railway company, Alexander Kamyshin had said earlier that at least 100 were injured by two rockets hitting the station.

“This is a deliberate attack on the passenger infrastructure of the railway and the residents of Kramatorsk,” Kamyshin said.

A soldier at one of the three hospitals in the city told AFP that around 50 wounded had arrived from the scene.

“Many of them will die because they have lost a lot of blood, and we don’t have enough blood,” he said.

Outside the station, four burnt-out cars could be seen next to the military-green remains of a rocket, cordoned off.

“It’s a Tochka missile, a fragmentation bomb,” a policeman on the scene told AFP. “It explodes in several places over an area the size of a football pitch.”

The missile was tagged with white spray paint with the words “for our children” in Russian, a recurring expression used by pro-Russian separatists in reference to their losses since the start of the first Donbas war in 2014.

Cash-strapped Sri Lanka’s central bank hiked interest rates by a record 700 basis points Friday as police fired tear gas at hundreds of students protesting about the economic crisis.

Severe shortages of food, fuel and electricity have led to widespread anti-government demonstrations with calls for President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign.

The latest protests saw students try to march to the national parliament on Friday.

Elsewhere demonstrators nationwide carried placards demanding Rajapaksa step down over the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.

Buddhists monks, who had largely led Rajapaksa’s election bid in November 2019, were also seen joining demonstrations in the capital Colombo.

The Central Bank of Sri Lanka said its benchmark lending rate had been raised to 14.5 percent to “stabilise the exchange rate” after the rupee tumbled over 35 percent in a month.

The rate for deposits was also increased by seven percentage points to 13.5 percent as reports said Sri Lanka’s rupee was the worst performing currency in the world, edging out the Russian ruble.

The bank said the shock-treatment rate hike was due to its belief that the embattled island’s inflation, which is already at record levels, could get worse.

The Colombo Consumer Price Index rose 18.7 percent in March while food inflation stood at more than 25 percent, but private analysts placed inflation at over 50 percent in the month.

International rating agencies have downgraded Sri Lanka as fears grow that it could default on its $51 billion external debt after foreign reserves fell below $2 billion at the end of March.

This week Rajapaksa appointed a panel of experts to organise a restructuring of foreign debt.

His government is preparing for bailout negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, and finance ministry officials told AFP the panel will prepare a programme for sovereign bond holders and other creditors to take a haircut.

“What Sri Lanka is keen to do is avoid a hard default,” a source from the ministry who requested anonymity told AFP. 

“It will be a negotiated restructuring of the debt with the help of the IMF.”

Meetings with the IMF are set to begin by next week but finance minister Basil Rajapaksa — the president’s brother — resigned on Sunday night along with nearly the entire cabinet. 

The country is still without a replacement, with his successor quitting after just one day in office.

Public anger is at fever pitch, and thousands of people were expected to take part on Saturday in what likely will be the biggest protest since the crisis began.

Recent days have seen civil servants and schoolchildren join in demonstrations largely organised through social media.

In an apparent bid to head off more protests, the government on Thursday declared extra public holidays for next week to coincide with the traditional Sinhalese and Tamil New Year.

Opposition parties have rejected an overture from the president to form a unity administration and instead joined calls for him to step down.

The shortages of essentials have been caused by a wide-ranging import ban as Sri Lanka seeks to conserve its meagre foreign currency reserves to pay its debts.

In recent years the vital tourism sector has also been hit hard by Islamist bomb attacks in 2019 and the coronavirus pandemic, which dried up remittances from Sri Lankans abroad.

Economists say the crisis has been exacerbated by government mismanagement, years of accumulated borrowing and ill-advised tax cuts.

Hanna Predko fled Bucha on the first day of Russia’s invasion. With her three children, Hanna left as soon as the first bombs began to fall.

Her mother, Natalia Predko, 69, joined Hanna on March 11, slipping out in a civilian evacuation operation while the town was under Russian occupation.

Fighting around the town never ceased completely and, at the end of March, Russian troops pulled out.

Dozens of civilian corpses were found after their exit, a number of them with their hands tied behind their back.

“We’re all very happy that our forces have chased the bastards away,” Hanna said, as she and her mother returned to the suburban town near the capital Kyiv on Thursday.

“Now, everyone knows this place, sadly for an enormous cost,” the 31-year-old said, pulling up outside the town hall with her mother in her car, the boot full of food to share with locals.

Perched on the arm of a cherry-picker, a local official raised the Ukrainian flag above the municipal building for the first time since the occupation by Moscow’s forces.

 – Spring weather –

“I am very very happy to have come back and to see our national flag after the liberation of our town by the army of Ukraine. Glory to Ukraine!” said Natalia, as she watched the blue and yellow standard flapping in the wind.

She is pleased, too, to have found her husband safe and sound after leaving him behind because he had refused to leave his home.

“We’re planning to stay here,” Hanna said when asked where they will live from now on. 

“Lots of my friends live abroad, we were invited and there were possibilities to leave. But we decided to come back, even if the town is in ruins,” she said.

In a small square in front of the town hall, volunteers handed out food.

Dozens of residents lined up, mostly older people, dressed for mid-winter despite the gentle spring temperatures. They trotted away slowly, pulling a trolley or swinging plastic bags full of supplies.

With the sun out, Boris Byguik decided to take his bike to inspect his son’s house.

Byguik, 63, whose son is a policeman and was away when the occupation began, is currently based in the nearby town of Vorzel.

“The curfew ended today. I decided to come and fix my son’s gate, since the neighbours said it was broken. The Russians stole everything in the house, broke the doors and the windows,” he says.

“I was scared to go inside because there could be traps. You can’t rule anything out from these ‘fascists’ — we saw them!” said the retired police officer.

 – ‘They looted everything’  –

Russian soldiers came to Vorzel, too, and stayed there a month.

Byguik recalled how the son of their neighbour was killed one night, “because Russians equipped with a thermal camera fired grenades from a drone on anyone that stepped outside”.

A week ago, when the Russian troops withdrew “they took with them anything they could carry. They looted everything, their armoured vehicles were brimming with stolen possessions”, he said, getting back on his bike.

He left before a convoy of United Nations 4x4s pulled up in front of the town hall. 

In front of a mass grave dug by the Ukrainians, where some of the bodies are still only half-buried, the British diplomat listened to a local official’s account of how civilians were killed in Bucha.

“The world is already deeply shocked” by the events in Bucha, Griffiths said, adding that “the next step is conducting investigations”.

By the mass grave, in the shadow of a white church with two golden domes, archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Greek Catholic church in Ukraine, said a prayer.

“We have seen the genocide of the Ukrainian people here,” he told AFP.

“We pray because the most important judge is almighty God, but justice must be done here, too. If we do not condemn a crime like this, it will be repeated.”