Democratic Republic of Congo has highest levels of hunger in world, UN says

For humanitarian agencies trying to keep people alive, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) presents multiple challenges: hunger, displacement, disease and violence.

Nowhere in the world do more people need food assistance, according to a new study by two UN agencies.

More than 27 million people in the DRC -- one in three of the population - are affected by what the agencies call "high acute food insecurity." That's up from 13 million in 2018.

Seven million people are now struggling to survive "emergency levels" of food insecurity, according to the analysis by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP).

That means they rely on aid for more than half their food needs.

The WFP says it is already providing life-saving food aid to 8.7 million people in DRC.

"For the first time ever we were able to analyze the vast majority of the population, and this has helped us to come closer to the true picture of the staggering scale of food insecurity in the DRC," says Peter Musoko, WFP's representative in DRC.

Conflict-driven shortage

Conflict is a key driver of this food insecurity in DRC, especially in the east of the country and in the central region of Kasais.

Aristide Ongone Obame, the FAO's representative in the country, says that "the recurring conflicts in eastern DRC and the suffering they bring remain of great concern."

There are more than 40 armed groups in DRC. Insecurity is especially high in parts of North Kivu province where a group calling itself the Allied Democratic Forces -- which is affiliated with the Islamic State - launches frequent attacks on villages. Part of the province has emergency levels of food insecurity.

The impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the spread of diseases such as measles have worsened the plight of Congolese.

Earlier this month, the NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres reported more than 13,000 cases of measles since the beginning of the year.

Cholera and malaria are also widespread, and there have been further outbreaks of ebola.

The pandemic has also affected DRC's economy and the government has reduced its 2021 budget by 38%.

In the face of these challenges, aid agencies are trying to provide emergency assistance and longer-term help.

The FAO says its priority this year is to improve farmers' access to tools and seeds; provide livestock and better storage for crops and help combat animal and plant diseases.

Source: CNN

'An atmosphere of terror': the bloody rise of Mexico's top cartel

The Jalisco cartel’s violence has taken a horrific toll on the state and experts say it poses a threat to Mexico’s government

Photograph: Emilio Espejel/The Guardian

It was mid-spring when residents of the wasteland behind Guadalajara’s international airport noticed a dog roaming their community with a strange object in its mouth: a human forearm.

Search teams in the ramshackle neighbourhood of La Piedrera entered a roofless red brick shack flanked by trees decked with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of dusky earth they made an even more grotesque discovery.

“There were 26 of them here. We found them wrapped in plastic sheets,” said Guadalupe Aguilar, a local human rights activist, as she stood beside the shallow grave. “And they’d thrown something on them – acid or something – because it hadn’t been long [since their murders] and the bodies were already in a real state of decay.”

Aguilar, 63, said there were dozens of such clandestine burial sites across Jalisco state, a sun-scorched slice of west Mexico that is paying an increasingly nightmarish price for its pivotal role in North America’s multibillion-dollar drug trade.

“This is all about organized crime,” said Aguilar, who spends her life locating and excavating Mexico’s 21st-century killing fields in search of the victims. “Why? Because one person couldn’t do all this on their own.”

A police commander speaks to press about a crime scene. Photograph: Emilio Espejel/The Guardian

Aguilar, whose activism forces her to travel with armed guards, did not specify which group’s killers were responsible for the bloodbath in La Piedrera. A crimson handprint on one of the hovel’s walls provided a chilling reminder of organized crime’s capacity for carnage.

But authorities say the area, like increasing swaths of Latin America’s second largest economy, is controlled by the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (Jalisco New Generation Cartel), a criminal behemoth now considered Mexico’s most indomitable mafia firm.

Less internationally famous than the Sinaloa cartel of the now jailed Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Jalisco organization is notorious at home for displays of ultraviolence and military might that experts say pose a growing threat to Mexico’s nationalist president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Last June, Jalisco gunmen launched one of the most brazen assaults in decades: a pre-dawn attempt to assassinate Mexico City’s security chief that underlined how López Obrador’s pledges to “pacify” Mexico have gone unfulfilled.

Last month came another reminder of the cartel’s punch: the body of a key defector, El Cholo, was dumped on a park bench in Tlaquepaque, a tourist town near Guadalajara famed for its pottery and mariachis. A white-handled kitchen knife had been used to pin a warning to the black body bag. “El Traicionero,” it read. “The Traitor.”

The security specialist Eduardo Guerrero said authorities north and south of the US border now considered the group a national security threat. “They have huge amounts of money, the latest generation weapons, military-style paramilitary groups and vehicles … and they represent a very severe challenge to the [Mexican] government – above all in small and mid-sized cities where a detachment of 50 cartel operatives can obviously defeat any local police force.”

The official telling traces the Jalisco cartel’s birth to July 2010 when troops killed Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel – the gangster credited with founding Mexico’s methamphetamine trade – in the state capital, Guadalajara. Coronel’s elimination – which the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) called “a crippling blow” to the Sinaloa cartel he represented – caused a local rupture that paved the way for the emergence of a new group taking the name of Mexico’s seventh biggest state.

But one underworld yarn suggests the split actually began three years earlier, in 2007, when one Guadalajara narco spilled a glass of hibiscus tea over a rival during a gathering in the city’s east. The apparently mundane incident reputedly prompted a bloody and bewildering sequence of betrayals, gun battles and massacres which eventually saw one group prevail. That group was led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes – or El Mencho as most know him – a former police officer who is now the DEA’s top Mexican target. For his capture it offers a record $10m reward.

Unlike El Chapo, who sought Sean Penn’s help to turn his criminal life into a Hollywood blockbuster, El Mencho prefers the shadows. Few photographs of him exist. His biography, which includes a stint working illegally in the US in the 1980s, is mostly a blur.

El Mencho is thought to live hidden in the mountains of south Jalisco – but when troops tried to capture him there in 2015 it ended badly, with cartel killers shooting down an army helicopter with a rocket launcher.

“Would I recognize him in a restaurant? No, I don’t think so,” said one underworld observer who asked not to be named. “El Mencho’s leadership is indisputable [but] he’s discreet. He has his bastion of control in the south of Jalisco. Nobody touches him. Nobody messes with him. He’s happy.”

The source claimed El Mencho, thought to be in his mid-50s, was known for being simpático and having a good repertoire of jokes. “But also very explosive,” they added. “Veeeery explosive.”

Few understand the cartel’s powers better than residents of the Sierra de Ahuisculco, a mountain range to Guadalajara’s west where it runs paramilitary-style training camps and secret laboratories that produce vast quantities of synthetic drugs to traffic north to the US. The area’s proximity to two Pacific ports, Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas – through which precursor chemicals are smuggled in from China – has made it a strategic location.

A resident of one small town in the Sierra described how cartel gunmen in black combat gear with the group’s initials stamped on to their bullet-proof vests often swept through its streets in high-end 4x4s, some with mounted machine guns. “You’re afraid to go out at night. You’re afraid to go out with your kids,” complained the resident, who asked not to be named.

Guadalajara has long been one of the most important addresses in the Mexican drug business. Infamous cocaine and marijuana barons lived here during the 1980s. By 2008 US officials considered Jalisco’s capital a methamphetamine hub they called “Chemical City”.

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The Sierra de Ahuisculco has also long been a haunt for drug lords, whose high-level political connections allow them to avoid capture and thrive. But in the last six years residents said the violence had become intolerable. “I’ve never lived through a civil war – but I think this is what living through a war must be like,” said one. “You live in fear. You live in uncertainty. I know three or four people who have vanished. Everyone here has lost someone.”

In 2019 138 bags stuffed with human remains were dumped in a nearby forest. “We see it and we do nothing because we know exactly what will happen if we do,” said another local.

The violence and the cartel’s struggles with rivals have also taken a horrific toll on Jalisco’s capital. Celebrated as one of Mexico’s most dynamic and culturally rich cities, Guadalajara has simultaneously become a place of almost incomprehensible cruelty and grief.

“We’ve been experiencing tough times because criminal groups have been trying to destabilize our state and create an atmosphere of terror,” Enrique Alfaro, the Jalisco governor, said last month as hundreds of troops arrived, supposedly to combat the violence. A few weeks earlier his 46-year-old predecessor, Aristóteles Sandoval, had been shot dead in a restaurant toilet in a meticulously planned hit many suspected was the work of Jalisco assassins.

Each Wednesday, desperate mothers, wives, sisters and daughters gather outside the city’s forensic institute seeking news of loved ones.

Guadalupe Ayala embraces Carla Flores Salazar in Guadalajara. Photo: Emilio Espejel/The Guardian

“It’s the sisterhood of pain,” said the group’s 50-year-old leader, Martha Leticia García, as they waited to examine images of body parts unearthed from an ever-growing network of mass graves.

García, whose son César Ulises disappeared in 2017 and has not been found, described the macabre routine of such relatives as they sifted through excavated remains for those they had loved and lost. “You see these things up on the screen and say to yourself: ‘That arm looks sort of familiar, that head.’ It’s just so terrible – the viciousness that we’re seeing in this state,” she said.

Nearby stood Cecilia Flores, 54, whose 28-year-old son, Wilians, was taken in 2019. Four months later officials told her some body parts had been recovered from a notorious torture house called El Mirador. “They found a hand, his torso and forearm. I’m still missing the other hand and his legs,” she said.

The next afternoon grieving mothers gathered at the foot of a monument to the six teenage soldiers who died defending Mexico’s capital from US troops in the mid-19th century. The group marched around the memorial to mourn more recently lost souls, and María Guadalupe Ayala, 47, described the disappearance of her 25-year-old son, Alfredo, in September 2019. Five months later parts of his body were found at El Mirador too.

“Why so much evil in the world?” Ayala wept as she remembered her difficulty in breaking the news to her three-year-old grandson who thought he had been abandoned by his father.

Vast illicit fortunes have been made from the drug conflict tearing Jalisco, and Mexico, apart. But for the Ayalas, and thousands of families like them, the consequences have been cataclysmic.

“Every night I can’t sleep, thinking about what they did to him,” she sobbed. “I go to sleep and wake up asking myself the same question: ‘How much did you suffer?’”

Source: Guardian

Country can look forward to brighter days ahead says the UK Prime Minister in Easter message

The Prime Minister's Easter message in full:

Happy Easter to everyone who is celebrating today.

I know that for many people that means chocolate eggs and the Easter bunny and hot cross buns and all the rest of it and I will certainly be joining in.

But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is Christianity’s most important festival.

And that, while churches are open, the ongoing Coronavirus restrictions mean that once again it won’t be possible for many Christians to mark Easter in the way that they would like.

But if there’s one thing British Christians have shown us this year it’s that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” not just today but every day.

His teachings, and the message of his death and resurrection, permeate through every aspect of daily life.

That’s why I’ve lost count of the number of church leaders and congregations that have stepped up to support us all in these very challenging times.

Millions of Good Samaritans, each of them showing what loving thy neighbour as thyself really looks like in 21st century Britain.

And having done all that during the darkest days of the pandemic, churches across the UK are now helping us light the path out of it by opening their doors as vaccination centres.

It’s really, very moving to see it.

This has been a very tough 12 months.

But, as ever, the arrival of Easter brings with it new hope.

And, this year more than ever, it brings the promise of brighter days ahead for us all.

So stay safe, keep following the rules, and have a very happy Easter.

The Thatch