Political Report # 1452 A Global Police State is Emerging as World Capitalism Descends Into Crisis

Political Report # 1452

A Global Police State is Emerging as World Capitalism Descends Into Crisis

by William I. Robinson, Pluto Press

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The following is an extract from the Introduction to The Global Police State, a new book by William I. Robinson that was released early this fall by Pluto Press.

In her novel Everything is Known, Liza Elliott describes a future dystopia where five global mega corporations, dubbed Affiliations, rule the planet. “Infested with the inescapable surveillance industry, the five global Affiliations manipulated Big Data to commodify and commercialize all human activity for profit.” The Affiliations had subordinated states to their domination: “George Orwell got it wrong. Big Brother did not come from a totalitarian state, but from a totalitarian non-state.” Big Data was “a relentless cybernetic grandmaster who with sneaky eyes and listening ears spied on everything: your clothes, your friends, recording every word you spoke or wrote. It kept account of all this and more to amass the info power it needed to control the market, the heartbeat of the money economy.” The world’s population had become divided into three segregated social clusters, the members of the Core, the Peripherals, and the Outliers who comprised a majority of humanity:

Outliers were the discarded people. If they could not function in the Affiliation run world, they were cast off. Their lives, such as they happened, were their own fault. There would never be sympathy. They scrounged out a life with the dregs, the overruns, and the un-sellable excesses from the opulent Core and stark Periphery. Some worked unpredictable marginal field-labor jobs while others scrounged in the leftovers, the scraps, and the trash.

The world Elliott describes could well be, with not much of a stretch, a portrait of the one we live in. The unprecedented concentration of capital at the global level has cemented the financial power of a transnational corporate elite that uses its economic power to wield political influence and control states. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion, more than half the GDP of the entire planet. That same year, the richest one percent of humanity, led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent had to make do with just 4.5 percent of this wealth. It is this mass of downcast humanity that make up Elliott’s Peripherals and Outliers, what in the pages to follow are referred to as surplus humanity.

Yet the technical infrastructure of the twenty-first century is producing the resources in which a political and economic system very different from the global capitalism in which we live could be achieved. Through popular political control of the new technologies we could collectively transform our world for the better. Machines are accomplishing tasks that were unimaginable a decade ago. As Srnicek and Williams remind us, the internet and social media are giving a voice to billions who previously went unheard, bringing global participative democracy closer than ever to existence. Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing all portend a world where the scarcity of many products might be overcome. New forms of computer simulation could rejuvenate economic planning and give us the ability to direct economies rationally in unprecedented ways. The newest wave of automation is creating the possibility for huge swathes of boring and demeaning work to be permanently eliminated. Clean energy technologies make possible virtually limitless and environmentally sustainable forms of power production. And new medical technologies not only enable a longer, healthier life, but also make possible new experiments with gender and sexual identity.

If we are to free ourselves through these new technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, however, we would first need to overthrow the oppressive and archaic social relations of global capitalism. At a time when both fascism and socialism again appear to be on the agenda around the world, it behooves us to study the system of global capitalism, less as an intellectual exercise in itself than in order to struggle against its depredations with a view towards replacing it with one that can avert catastrophe and meet the material and spiritual needs of humanity. Rather than serving to liberate humanity, the new technologies are being applied at this time by the agents of this system to bring about a global police state.

While I am hardly the first to talk about a police state, I mean in this book considerably more than what we typically associate with a police state — police and military repression, authoritarian government, the suppression of civil liberties and human rights. Certainly, we see this, and more, around the world. In this study, however, I want to develop the concept of global police state to identify more broadly the emerging character of the global economy and society as a repressive totality whose logic is as much economic and cultural as it is political. By global police state I refer to three interrelated developments.

First is the ever more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression and warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the real and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity. Savage global inequalities are politically explosive and to the extent that the system is simply unable to incorporate surplus humanity it turns to ever more violent forms of containment. The methods of control include sealing out the surplus population through border and other containment walls, deportation regimes, mass incarceration and spatial apartheid, alongside omnipresent new systems of state and private surveillance and criminalization of the poor and working classes. They also include the deadly new modalities of policing and repression made possible by applications of digitalization and fourth industrial revolution technologies. The global police state brings all of global society into what in Pentagon jargon is called “battlespace,” concentrated in the world’s megacities that are now home to more than half of humanity.

Second is how the global economy is itself based more and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social control, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accumulate capital in the face of stagnation — what I term militarized accumulation, or accumulation by repression. If it is evident that unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ubiquitous systems of social control and repression, it has become equally evident that quite apart from political considerations, the ruling groups have acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as a means of accumulation. As war and state-sponsored violence become increasingly privatized, the interests of a broad array of capitalist groups shift the political, social, and ideological climate towards generating and sustaining social conflict — such as in the Middle East — and in expanding systems of warfare, repression, surveillance and social control. The bogus wars against drugs, terror, immigrants and refugees are enormously profitable enterprises. We are now living in a veritable global war economy.

And third is the increasing move towards political systems that can be characterized as twenty-first century fascism, or even in a broader sense, as totalitarian. The increasing influence around the world of neo-fascist, authoritarian, and rightwing populist parties and movements, symbolized above all by Trumpism in the United States, has sparked a flurry of debate on whether fascism is again on the rise. There has been a sharp polarization around the world between insurgent left and popular forces, on the one hand, and an insurgent far Right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies.

A project of twenty-first century fascism is on the ascent in the civil societies of many countries around the world. The project has made significant advances in recent years in its competition to win state power, and in some cases, it has gained a foothold in the capitalist state. At the same time a neo-fascist culture appears to be emerging through militarism, misogyny, extreme masculinization and racism. Such a culture generates a climate conducive to mass violence, often directed against the racially oppressed, ethnically persecuted, women, and poor, vulnerable communities. But a fascist outcome is not inevitable. Whether or not a fascist project manages to congeal is entirely contingent on how the struggle among social and political forces unfolds in the coming years.

This global police state is emerging at a time when world capitalism descends into a crisis that is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the sheer scale of the means of violence that is now deployed around the world. In the first instance, the global police state is a story of control and repression of the poor and working classes. There are growing movements against the many expressions of global police state — mass incarceration, police violence, U.S.-led wars around the world, the persecution of immigrants and refugees, the repression of environmental justice activists.

Yet often these movements are based on moral appeal to social justice, which by itself begets, at best, mild reform. If these movements are to attack the global police state in its jugular vein, they must identify global capitalism as the driver of the systems of social control and repression that they are combating. This book attempts to do just that. It sets out to identify the contemporary dynamics of capitalist transformation and the novel forms that are emerging. This concept of a global police state allows us to specify how the economic dimensions of global capitalist transformation intersect in new ways with political, ideological and military dimensions of this transformation….

I offer a “big picture” of the emerging global police state in a short book that is eminently readable. The book may startle many readers and make them angry. I trust the work will serve as a warning to the dystopic future that is upon us. More importantly, by exposing the nature and dynamics of this out-of-control system, I hope it will contribute to the struggles to bring about an alternative future based on human freedom and liberation. We do face a crisis of humanity. The destruction under global capitalism of the social fabric worldwide and the extreme alienation of labor, our very species being, raises fundamental questions about what it means to be human and how to recover our humanity. It is in the nature of our species to work together to assure our collective existence. But the capitalist system that throws up a global police state turns such cooperation into a process of destruction for masses of humanity as we are made to compete with one another to survive. Crises of values, identity, meaning, and community ensue.

If we are to recover our humanity we must — contra capital — re-embed ourselves in relations of reciprocity and mutual well-being. [What are] the prospects for a renewal of emancipatory projects around the world? [We must] face [the] challenge of revitalizing a Left that could help bring about an ecological socialist future. Once we have exposed the brutal world of global capitalist inequality and exploitation the most urgent matter becomes how we can move forward toward greater social justice.

Original article can be found by clicking this link: HERE

Political Report # 1429 A Surge in Killings by Police Roils Bolsonaro's Brazil

Political Report # 1429 A Surge in Killings by Police Roils Bolsonaro's Brazil by  Gabriel Stargardter, Reuters Investigates

Just before leaving her teaching job on the afternoon of May 17, Alessandra Mattos received a panicked voice message. “Alessandra!” a relative said. “There’s been an accident with Brayan.” She grabbed her things, flagged a motorcycle taxi and rushed to a slum in the Rio de Janeiro suburb of São Gonçalo. There, dead in a pool of blood, lay Brayan Mattos dos Santos, the 19-year-old nephew she helped raise. She tried to get closer, but a policeman blocked her advance. “It wasn’t me,” Mattos said the officer told her. “It wasn’t me.” The “accident,” Mattos soon learned, was the sort of fate dreaded by families of young, dark-skinned men across South America’s most populous country. Black and mixed-race youths like dos Santos long have been disproportionately represented among homicide victims in Brazil, the country with the world’s highest number of murders. Now, amid a crackdown on suspected criminals championed by President Jair Bolsonaro, they are increasingly dying at the hands of police. No weapons, narcotics or other illegal materials were found on dos Santos, a car and motorcycle enthusiast who had recently begun driving for Uber. He appears, instead, to have been at the wrong place at the wrong time — near a street stall for illegal drugs just as a police raid went down. His death, in a state where killings by police have climbed by 16% this year, according to government figures, is being investigated by Rio prosecutors. The raid is one of many lethal operations that human rights activists, some Rio residents and opposition lawmakers see as part of a bloody and illegal campaign to clean up historically violent neighborhoods across Latin America’s biggest country. Emboldened by victories last year of far-right politicians with aggressive law-and-order agendas, Brazil’s police forces are surpassing their own longstanding reputations for being among the most violent in the world. The slain include victims like dos Santos, who had no known criminal ties. In late September, hundreds gathered in northern Rio to grieve the death of an eight-year-old girl who was shot, according to bystanders, by a policeman who missed when aiming at a motorcyclist. Her death, one of several children allegedly shot by police this year, is still being investigated. Two top commanders of Rio’s military and civil police forces, which together are responsible for security in the state, told Reuters that police have never received or issued orders to kill. Officers, rather, are finding themselves in more violent confrontations because of a nearly 50% increase in the number of raids, a response to higher crime. “An officer never has the objective of killing,” said Fábio Barucke, operational head of the civil police. “But we have a responsibility to defend ourselves.” Rio, a state of 17 million people that includes the seaside metropolis of the same name, has long been known as a hotbed of conflict between criminal gangs and sometimes trigger-happy police. Now, with Bolsonaro and a like-minded governor urging lawmen to get even tougher, tensions, violence and the death toll are mounting. Bolsonaro is seeking to boost legal protections for police who kill on the job, proposing in a bill to lessen sentences for officers who shoot because of “excusable fear, surprise or violent emotion.” He has said criminals should “die like cockroaches.” Wilson Witzel, Rio’s governor, has ordered snipers to fire on suspects from helicopters. Witzel recently told foreign journalists that suspects, when confronted by police, should “surrender or die.” To some in the political opposition, the rhetoric of Brazil’s new leaders is reminiscent of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine president whose offensive against drug dealers has led to thousands of killings by police. “The police feel authorized to kill,” said Marcelo Freixo, a congressman from Rio and veteran researcher on violence and organized crime. “The discourse stimulates violence.” Reuters found no evidence that Bolsonaro, Witzel or other right-wing leaders elected in a wave of populist protest last year have ordered police to break laws or methodically kill criminal suspects. Bolsonaro’s justice minister, Sérgio Moro, told Reuters that the administration doesn’t advocate police violence. “Confrontations between police and criminals are always undesirable,” he said in an interview in Brasília, the capital. “You don’t resolve public security with confrontations, but with intelligence, strategy, due process and state presence.” Between January and August 2019, Rio police killed 1,249 people, according to official figures, nearly a fifth more than a year ago. The rate amounts to 5 people per day, more for the period than any since the state began keeping its current database in 2003. By contrast, 14 police officers have died in operations this year, down from 24 killed on duty between January and August 2018. Recent nationwide figures aren’t available, but killings by police have also climbed in São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state, and other major urban areas. Like dos Santos, most victims of police killings are dark-skinned, a reflection of the socioeconomic and racial makeup of poor neighborhoods where most drug traffickers and other criminal gangs operate. Although whites make up half the population in Rio, they accounted for 12% of those killed by police early this year, according to government data obtained by Reuters via a freedom of information request. It’s impossible to calculate how many of the victims are believed to have been innocent bystanders. Human-rights activists, however, say they believe that the surge in killings indicates some police are out to kill, regardless of any evidence or the risk of collateral damage. “These numbers aren’t those of a few murders,” said Freixo, the congressman. “They are numbers of execution, of extermination.” Officially, many of the deaths in police operations are attributed to “resistance” by suspects. Police, wary of heavily armed gangs, argue they have little choice but to shoot in self defense, especially in labyrinthine slums where gangs can easily ambush them. But local and international activists have for decades decried excessive force and outright executions by police. The problem predates Bolsonaro. After a 2003 visit to Brazil, a special rapporteur for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights wrote that she was “overwhelmed with information about human rights violations.” She criticized Brazil’s government, especially some state administrations, because they “fail to fully accept the existence of extrajudicial and summary executions.” In early September, Michelle Bachelet, a former Chilean president who is now the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticized Brazil for “discourse legitimizing summary executions.” In response, Bolsonaro criticized Bachelet for pursuing the agenda “of criminals” and “attacking our valiant police.” Dos Santos died at the hands of Rio’s 7th Military Police Battalion, the state’s most lethal. The unit, one of 39 battalions in Rio, since 2003 has killed 1,055 people. Through August, 137 civilians this year have died in operations involving the 7th, 35 more than any other battalion in the state. The 7th operates “in very complex geography,” said Rogério Figueredo, commander of Rio’s military police force. “There are various communities with several criminal factions all disputing the territory.” According to a police report reviewed by Reuters, dos Santos’ death may have been accidental. Officers, the report said, returned fire after being shot at by suspects. Dos Santos died because of “intervention by a state agent.” To understand his killing and the recent rise in the body count, Reuters spoke to police and government officials, security experts, human rights researchers, and friends and family of dos Santos. The picture that emerges, including exclusive details about the May raid in São Gonçalo, is that of an entrenched conflict worsening amid the law-and-order agenda of a new populist leadership. T he very structure of Brazilian police forces has long been controversial. After a two-decade military dictatorship that ended in the 1980s, a new constitution gave responsibility for most law enforcement to each of Brazil’s 26 states. Rather than reinvent their forces, the states kept a military format for police charged with everyday law enforcement. A “civil police” force were made responsible for investigations and working with prosecutors. But the beat cops and routine patrols that most Brazilians encounter still operate within a highly regimented, militaristic structure. As a result, everything from the fortresslike architecture of police stations to the language used by officers still reflects a barracks mentality. Training is often phrased in terms of “us” against “them.” Criminals are “the enemy.” “The mold is that of the military,” said Fernando Salema, a former commander of the 7th battalion who is now a lawmaker, from Bolsonaro’s party, in the Rio state assembly. “We inherited that culture.” That culture is often in sharp relief in Rio. Clashes are as much a part of the landscape as its verdant hillsides and dramatic juxtaposition of rich and poor. Shootouts and the hum of police helicopters are a daily reality for many in a state where haphazard planning led slums and wealthy neighborhoods to co-exist in a dense urban tangle. São Gonçalo, a hardscrabble suburb across the bay that carves Rio’s coastline, in recent decades became one of the state’s most violent areas. Per capita income, about $4,000 a year, is similar to that of El Salvador and less than a third the level in the city of Rio. Once an industrial center, São Gonçalo has increasingly become a base for criminal gangs who smuggle drugs and weapons through the bay and hijack nearby highway cargo. It’s also one of many areas around Rio where so-called “militias,” violent criminal enterprises made up of retired and off-duty police, control extortion rackets and other illegal ventures. In 2011, Patricia Acioli, a state judge who jailed dozens of corrupt São Gonçalo police, was shot 21 times outside her home. Eleven officers from the 7th, including its chief, were convicted of planning and executing the murder. “São Gonçalo is a giant favela,” or slum, said another recent commander of the 7th. The officer, who now leads another battalion and spoke on condition of anonymity, said crime is so common it seeps into the force. “It has a corrupt population, and the officers come from the same.”  Earlier this decade, as Rio prepared to host the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, locals in São Gonçalo complained yet more criminals were moving in because of a police cleanup near beaches, hotels and sporting venues. When a deep recession took root shortly thereafter, crime worsened across Brazil. In 2017, a record 64,000 murders were reported nationwide, more than in any other country. Already exasperated with the downturn and a far-reaching corruption scandal, voters swung sharply right, electing Bolsonaro and other populist conservatives last year. A former fringe congressman with little record as a lawmaker, Bolsonaro was best known for incendiary comments, including a 2015 quip in which he said police “should kill more.” Witzel, a former judge, was unfamiliar to most of Rio’s electorate until he too outmaneuvered veteran rivals with promises to purge crime. After taking office in January, the two politicians embraced their law-and-order mandate. Witzel rode along with rifle-wielding police in a helicopter and posted the video online, promising to “bring peace back.” In an opinion piece in a local newspaper, he said the surge in police killings “isn’t difficult to justify.” Some police say they felt invigorated. “It’s what we want to hear,” Salema, the former commander turned assemblyman, told Reuters. On Salema’s old beat, police this year began struggling with an internecine war within the local branch of the Comando Vermelho, or CV, one of Brazil’s most powerful drug gangs. After one CV boss in April killed a rival, fighting between factions spilled onto the streets. Gun battles erupted across São Gonçalo, and schools, hospitals and bus routes shut down. The violence soon spread to other parts of Rio, prompting operations by police seeking to track down those responsible. In Maré, a slum near Rio’s international airport, a police helicopter on May 6 flew overhead and began shooting, according to local residents. By the end of the operation, police had killed eight suspects, including four who had been surrounded after running into a home. A resident of the home told state prosecutors she hid in another room and heard the confrontation. A prosecutor, speaking on condition of anonymity, gave Reuters details of her account. When police entered, the resident told prosecutors, two of the men gave up. But the officers rejected their surrender, according to the resident, replying, “our order is to kill.” The police then shot the two men and, finding the other two suspects on the roof, shot them, too. Before a forensics team could arrive, the resident told prosecutors, the police dragged the four bodies outside. The officers, the prosecutor said, told investigators they only fired after being shot at. Rio’s civil police force, which ordered and conducted the operation, said it is still carrying out its own investigation and couldn’t comment on specifics of the raid. Eleven days later, in São Gonçalo, officers from the 7th battalion conducted the raid that killed dos Santos. As part of their efforts to curb gang activity, police had targeted a point of sale for drugs in the São Gonçalo slum of Chumbada. Around 4:40 p.m., according to the police report reviewed by Reuters, at least four officers neared the drug stall and split into two teams. One team, Captain Renato de Souza and Sargent Andre Ricardo Mendes, took one path toward the stall. A second, Corporal Erik Ribeiro and Corporal Alex Dias, took another. Reuters was unable to confirm the details of the police report independently. Police officials declined a request to speak with the officers. As the operation got underway, dos Santos had gone to a shop in Chumbada to buy clothes for a party that evening, according to Mattos, his aunt. She showed Reuters a credit card receipt for the purchase, which she said came from dos Santos’ telephone, valued at 217.79 reais, or about $53. “It’s expensive here,” dos Santos texted a friend in a message, seen by Reuters, about 10 minutes before the raid began. According to statements the officers gave civil police investigators, Ribeiro and Dias were approaching the stall when gunfire burst from a group of about six people. It isn’t clear from the report who within that group is alleged to have fired. The officers, carrying high-caliber rifles made by Imbel, a Brazilian state-owned manufacturer of military weaponry, said they returned fire. Ribeiro fired 23 times, Dias 31. During the firefight, Ribeiro told investigators, one person fell to the ground “near a shop.” Two others fled on a Honda motorcycle; several more escaped on foot. Another man, his shirt stained by a bullet wound in the shoulder, put his hands up and dropped to the ground. Ribeiro and Dias approached the drug stall as the other two officers pursued the motorcycle. The injured man, still prone and unarmed, told police he had gone there to buy marijuana. Several meters beyond the stall, on a residential street, lay dos Santos. Renato Perez, a civil police chief in São Gonçalo with knowledge of the raid, told Reuters he suspected dos Santos had gone there to buy marijuana. He offered no evidence or documentation to support that claim. Mattos, the aunt, denied the assertion, saying her nephew didn’t use drugs. “They always have to invent something,” she said. Mendes and de Souza, the officers who chased the motorcycle, caught up with the two suspects on a nearby street. According to the police report, one of the men carried 65.2 grams of marijuana and a 9 mm pistol with two bullets and its serial number scraped off. The other carried 49.7 grams of cocaine and a walkie-talkie. The two were detained and charged with resisting arrest and possession of narcotics. They are awaiting trial, according to Rio’s public defenders’ office and state court filings. No other suspects were apprehended and no other weapons were found. Danielle Costa, the civil police investigator who authored the report, concluded the officers had acted legitimately. They had “no other option,” she wrote, but to “use their firearms, in legitimate defense and to overcome resistance posed by lawbreakers.” The civil police declined to make Costa available for an interview. State prosecutors are probing the operation. Andrea Amin, a Rio prosecutor who investigates police killings, in an interview told Reuters the law-and-order rhetoric risks legitimizing excessive force and a lack of due process. “A rise in deaths can’t be seen as a successful public security policy,” she said. Original article can be found (here). URL:      Click here for article

Political Report # 1393 Puerto Ricans Are Resisting Policing as a Solution to Crisis

By Anton Woronczuk, Truthout

In Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico, author Marisol LeBrón shows how Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the U.S. has shaped policing in the archipelago as a form of “colonial crisis management.” Her new book exposes the ways policing harms marginalized communities and deepens social inequality. In this interview, LeBrón discusses the legacy of punitive “solutions” and the various ways Puerto Ricans are challenging state violence and building alternative forms of justice. Truthout: Policing Life and Death begins with the history of a series of anti-crime measures introduced in Puerto Rico in 1993 called mano dura contra el crimen. What exactly was mano dura and why is it central to understanding the legacy of policing in Puerto Rico? Marisol LeBrón: Mano dura contra el crimen, which translates to “iron fist against crime,” was a series of crime-reduction measures introduced by Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rosselló in 1993. As part of mano dura, police and military forces raided and occupied public housing and other low-income spaces around the archipelago, but primarily across the big island, in an effort to eliminate drug trafficking. The activation of the Puerto Rican National Guard as part of mano dura’s “war against crime” remains one of the longest “peacetime” mobilizations of a National Guard unit under U.S. jurisdiction. The willingness of the Puerto Rican government to unleash military tactics and technology against public housing and barrio residents really showed the extent to which some of Puerto Rico’s most vulnerable citizens had been marked as internal enemies of the state.

Political Report #1224 "Day of Terror": Munduruku Village Attacked by Brazil's Federal Police

Adenilson Krixi Mundurku's family watches in solemn grief as Mongabay journalists are told how he was killed by Brazil's Federal Police. Photo by Thais Borges  Political Report # 1224 "Day of Terror": Munduruku Village Attacked by Brazil's Federal Police By Sue Branford and Maurício Torres, Mongabay

The Tapajós River Basin lies at the heart of the Amazon, and at the heart of an exploding controversy: whether to build 40+ large dams, a railway, and highways, turning the Basin into a vast industrialized commodities export corridor; or to curb this development impulse and conserve one of the most biologically and culturally rich regions on the planet. Those struggling to shape the Basin's fate hold conflicting opinions, but because the Tapajós is an isolated region, few of these views get aired in the media. Journalist Sue Branford and social scientist Mauricio Torres travelled there for Mongabay, and over coming weeks hope to shed some light on the heated debate that will shape the future of the Amazon.

Political Report # 1178 Death Squad Revelations and the New Police in Honduras

By Annie Bird Americas Programs

On June 21, 2015 the London-based Guardian newspaper published an article describing the testimony of a soldier who says he deserted the army after his unit was given an order to kill activists whose names appeared on two lists. He reported seeing one list given to his Military Police unit that formed part of the Xatruch task force, and a second for a Military Police unit that formed part of the National Force of Interinstitutional Security (FUSINA) task force. The second contained the name of Lenca indigenous leader Berta Caceres, murdered on March 3, 2016. On June 22 Honduran Defense Minister Samuel Reyes published a response to the Guardian article, claiming that the Military Police did not have a seventh battalion, that the FBI had not trained military forces in Honduras and that the TESON (Troops Specialized in Jungle and Nocturnal Operations) training course did not have U.S. military trainers.