Honduras is just one country very much under the maras control. But how did this come about . In the 1990s the u. S. Government waged war on gangs in cities such as los angeles. As a result, more than 20,000 gangsters were deported to el salvador and honduras. Of all the street gangs in honduras, two are particularly brutal Mara Salvatrucha also known as ms 13 and 18th street, which originated in los angeles. The honduran government has responded with an iron fist, locking up thousands of gang members. But thats had no effect on the influence of the mar as, and membership numbers have continued to rise. In honduras, every day life is permeated by violence. This is t tegucigalpa, one ththmost dangegerous cities in the worl yearold d Jaime Jael Soriano has just been n called to the local Police Station to confirm the identity of his brother. Soririanos 33yearold brother was shot on the street just a few hours ago. People are killed here and the police never investigagate. Thats what happens to the poor here. Murders are a daily occurrence here. Soriano now has to pass t sad ws on to his father. Hondnduras is consnsidered one the e most violentnt of all nat that is not at war. Rigoberto leiva valle sees the results of that every day. He wororks as an embmbalmer at momorgue, prepararing bodies f funerals. Most of the bodies i see here have gun wounds. Some are mutilated. Theyeyve hadad limbs cut o off. Sometimes theyre decapitated or otherwise maiaimed. Valle says he receives around 12 nenew corpses evevery day, more than ever before. There was a time, y yrs ago, that you could go out at night and enjoy yourself. You could walk around on the streets without any prproblems. Now you get scared just crossing two or three streets on your own. The body in the coffin is Jaime Jael Sorianos brother. Soriano wants to know how many times his brother was shot. Valle explains the bullet holes show he was hit two or three times in the chest. Many o of the mumurders in hond are eieither directly or inindirectly related to maras, gangs such as ms13, and t the 18th street gang. Organized crime has drdramatically increased here over the past two decades. To undnderstand ththe nature of gangs, german andidino has spen the past four years visiting gang members in prison and on their home turf. This mans street name is taylor. Andino draws portraits of gang members like taylor and has cently pubublished a graphic novel about life in poor neighborhohoods. He asks when the gangs came to the area. Taylor replies, four years ago. Andino says poverty and lack of prospects are key motivations for joining gangs. They pretty much dodont hav anythihing. All they have is the mara, so. By jojoining the maras, youn men are gradually transformed into dangerous criminals, extortining money from people, and yep p gauging in territoria drug warars with rival gangs. Did your gang k kill the thieves in this neighborhood . Sometimes i feel reallyly close to these guys. And others, when i see what theyey are capablele of, i feel like thesese guys are ananimals. You know . I dont t know. We join Police Officers on patrol in a neighborhood controlled by maras. One of them, jose sandoval, points o out 18th street g gang graffiti. The e presence of f the gang intimidates many of the residents. Young people disasappear. Theyre kidnappeded and beatete in an attempt to restore order, in in 2014 the government of honduras passed its iron fist legislation. Thousands of suspected gang members were arrested. It led t trepeated confrontations betenen polic and gang all the h holesre fro gunsts. Ey are from a shtoutut betwn the fedel police a meers of the8th street gang. Sen memberof t theang died and threpolice o oicers rere wounded. Itit was s succe because we mananaged incapitate a part of this tisocialalroup. Was it a succccess toilill them instead of arresting them . No, but it was a shootout, and they refused to surrender. That hardline apapproa has caused the mururder rate in honduras to decline to some extent, but its also led to Harsh Criticism wiwith regard t abuse of power by th auauthories. Ths in addition to longstanding sususpicions of f corruptition among the sececuri forceses, judges, and popoliticians. So this is the protest. Gman andino, who s coco close the ggs, has so taken pa in sevel demotratio. Mean, theare presting agnst corrtion a the olence ithe couny. A United People will not be defeated, they chant. If you can kill someone and get t away with it, ththen tha just whats wrong with the government. Thats why we are in this situatation. And the demononstrators call for people to fight fotheir ghts in lan america. On the outskirts of tegucigalpa, Jaime Jael Soriano helps carry the coffin as their family take their leave of his brother. Its been just six hours since the man in the coffin was shot and killed. What remains is a shattered family and a a community b burd by e even more gririef and fear. And now theres the potential threat of the honduran gangs developing into Worldwide Drug and humantrafficking syndicates. Human trafficking is a growing market, according to unicef, 3,000 Children Worldwide are sold every day. Thats onethird of all uncovered cases. At least 20,000 children disappear in china every year. The majority of them are taken to rural areas. Here, Human Trafficking is often seen as a tradition, rather than a crime. And few ask any questions when new children arrive in a village. When wu xinghu drives through the streets of pucheng, he turns up the melancholy music. Hes looking for children who have been abducted and sold. About seven years ago his own son was abducted and hes been searching for him ever since. Always keep an eye on your kids, he says, as he hands out calendars and fans printed with photos of missing children. Maybe somebody will recognize one of them and call him. He has information on more than 3,000 children in his files. One of them is his own son. His name is wu jiacheng, born november of 2007, abducted on december 10, 2008, at 2 00 a. M. Hes been looking for his son for nearly eight years. Its so sad. Yes, its hard to bear. 20,000 children are abducted and sold in china every year. Boys are sold mainly to farmers who have no children of their own. Girls are sold as future wives theres a shortage of women in china after years of its onechild policy. The village where wu xinghu lives, zhaoyuan, is small. A mere 60 families live here. He and his wife have two other children who were born after their first son disappeared. The other villagers show their support for the wu family. Still, not a day goes by when the parents dont think about their firstborn child. My feelings of sadness are unchanged. He was our first child, and that emotional bond cannot be replaced by anything, even if we now have two more children. His birth really enriched my life. Hes now put bars on his windows for security and all the other villagers have followed his example. On that night i slept here and my wife slept there. I held our baby in my arms as i did every night. We didnt have bars on the windows at the time. The kidnappers climbed in and drugged the parents. I woke up at about 2 00 or 3 00 in the morning and our baby was gone. I ran outside right away. The light was on, but i couldnt see anything. I was so frightened that i cried. The police started an investigation, but they soon discontinued the search. Authorities only rarely succeed in breaking up childtrafficking rings. When they do, theyre often able to o free hundreds s of children at a time. Wu xinghu decided to take action. He rode his rickshaw 3,000 kilometers across the country in search of his son and became well known as a result. Ive devoted my life to searching for lost children. I no longer have a regular income. Thats why i took the rickshaw. In china, any gathering of just seven people is regarded as disruptive to the social order. Thats why i rode alone. On his journey he met many other parents who share the same fate. Theyve started an online network. One of them contributed a car. The group has been able to find a handful of children by raising awareness in cities and towns. The parents feel the penalties to child trafficers and people who buy children are far too lax. Those who have been looking for their missing children the longest feel especially abandoned by the state. They get no help from the government. On the contrary, parents who look for their children are seen as trouble makers. Its been 28 years since my son disappeared. Ive been searching for him the whole time. Im now 58 years old and i hope to see him at least once more. That would be enough for me. I no longer have much faith in ever finding my child. I hope that through our efforts there will be fewer kidnapping cases, fewer tragedies. Perhaps our campaign will cause parents to hold on tighter to their children. Hundreds of people stand at the Street Corner and the police allow them to a small victory for the parents of abducted children in china. Its just one of the places of remembrance, a place to think and perhaps come to terms with the past. Today ththe church in nyamata a memorial site, housing the remains of thousands of victims of the 1994 rwandan genocide, the mass slaughter that was the climax of the civil war between the countrys s hutus and tutsi in just a few months, more than a Million People lost their lives. Since then, much has changed in the small african country. Today it is seen as politically stable. Its population is young and theres great optimism about the future. Coffee from the highlands of wanda, harvested by smallholders, small scale farmers. Its a hundred percent arabica. Its fresh actually. This is a small grain in terms of the screen size. It is very small but its really good quality. Three tons of coffee are roasted here every day. The machine is brand new and comes from italy. 27yearold Ephraim Rwamwenge believes in this new company and advises the rwrwanda farmer coffee company, a Coffee Growers cooperative already exporting to britain and south korea. The amounts they produce are still manageable. The e business is jujust developing. The aim is to ensure a livelihood for as many smallscale farmers as possible. Gorillas coffee is an exemplary fair trade brand. The company we work with, our company, we also believe in beyond fair trade. We are certified. We try as much to give back to the farmers and not just give back for the sake of giving back but to empower them so they can increase capacity and they can earn more. Even the profit that we earn, we share it across the whole supply chain equally. Rwandas population is extremely young. More than half are under the age of 25. 12 Million People live in the small east african country. Many young row wandans leave the rural areas to move to the capital kigali. They found companies or drive motorcycle taxies, for instance. A guided tour through kigali tourists want to learn about its history. They hear how hundreds of people hid in the Hotel Des Mille collines during the genocide. What happened in this period of rwandan history is inconceivable to many people today. Within a hundred days more than a Million People were slaughtered. The genenocide is something that affected us quite deeply. Some of the buildings are still there where some of these horrible things happened, so we always are connected to that and it can only basically help us see the future. They believe in the future and in cooperating with one another. Its called umuganda in rwanda where people come together once a month to work toward a common goal. In kigali, dozens of young people are also part of the glglobal shapers community, whi is advised by the woworld Economic Forum in geneva. They contribute to society as entrepreneurs, students, bankers, and doctors. Ephraim rwamwenge is one of them. He grew up in exile because his family had to flee. Im young. Im rwandan. I was ononeyearold when the genocide happened. So im part of what we call the new rwanda, the people who only know of the past through either knowing somebody, having a relative that you lost, or hearing about it when youre toldld about it through stories and through exhibitions. The doors in his company are open to everyone. He says differences have to be overcome and lays importance on developing the economy. Young people need jobs and prospects for the future. Ephraim rwamwenge sees himself as a social entrepreneur. I truly believe that entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship on the continent, is not a fancy thing that you do like it is in developed countries. Its actually a necessity, because there are so many needs we have in the market. The only solution, the only way to do business is to actually come up with a solution for people. Theres plenty to do. Rwanda is one of the worlds most densely populated countries. Many people live in rural areas, which often lack Running Water or electricity. But young rwandans in particular believe in the future. For thousands of years people have been seduced by scents found in nature resin from trees, musk from animals, the fragrances of wood, plants, and petals. Perfume production often makes use of the most diverse aromas. The heart note of a fragrance is frequently dominated by intense flowery scents. Jasmine is regarded as the king of essential oils. And much of it comes from the nile delta in egypt. When the sun setsts over the nile delta, millions upon n millionsns of blossoms open up and give off their heady, intensely sweeeet aroma jasmine, the king of pererfumes. Because nocturnal momoths, instead d of bees,s, pollinate flowers, harvesting takes place at night from 2 00 a. M. Till just after dawn. Its back breaking work. We pick the flowers every year, always for six months, seven days a week, all season long. The sweet fragrance suffuses the nile delta. Around 10 00 or so jasmine plantations provide jobs to thousands of pickers, men and women, at harvest time. The more skillful and concentrated they are, the more petals they can put on the scales in the morning. Five kilos per night shift are nothing unusual. After the harvest, everything has to go fast on the fakhry farms near the city of tanta. If the flowers arent process edmeadly, their precious aroma dissipates. At 9 30 in the morning the pickers strenuous work is done. The women return home in small groups, walking through one of the most fertile stretches of land in the middle east. Everywhere in the region there are small collection points where intermediaries buy up the jasmine and then deliver it to the scent factories. For half the year, everything revolves around the flower harvest. Counting all the pickers and their families, the jasmine harvest here in the nile delta provides a living for about 50,000 people. Hala, her daughter and her husband each earn about 300 euros a month, more than a teacher. Although they have to look for other work outside harvest time, for six months their jobs are secure. In egypts current economic difficulties, thats a blessing. I used to love the scent of jasmine in the fields. But now that i know how exhausting the job is, i cant stand the smell anymore. Hussein fakhry and his wife cherifa now produce 80 different plant essences from a for acacia to y for yarrow. Their prod ubblingts are organic and they sell the top quality aromatics to the most demanding perfume labels. Good instincts are essential to this business. They take care of their workers. In a small school the pickers children receive free tuition because cherifa says the quality in state schools is abysmal. No other plant is as del kate as jasmine. After the tiny blossoms are weighed they have to be process edmeadly. The oils are washed out with an organic solvent in huge steel barrels. The solution is filtered and distilled to produce a waxy mass called concrete. The more fragrant compounds are extracted from that into ethanol, which evaporates, leaving the final product, known as absolute. This material is what im going to be taking in here. And i will proceed by evaporating the ethanol, which i will collect over here for further use, and at the bottom im going to be collecting the absolute. This would be about five kilos of absolute, which corresponds to about 3. 3 to 3. 5 tons of jasmine blossoms. The market value of those five kilos of absolute is about 22,000 euros. Husseins father started the jasmine farming business, but the tradition of perfume making on the nile is much older. Its quite exceptional. I mean, we connect to the very roots of egypt, both from the land point of view this is agriculture and were planting and from the type of products that we produce, aromatics. We basically relate to cosmetics and oils and everything dealing with beauty. People can easily imagine how this goes back to ancient egypt and d pharaohs and so o on. We basically still carry this in what we do. Soon, the next night shift will begin. The workers will collect grams, kilos, and tons of blossoms and filter out the heart of the jasmine a lot of sweat for a whif of expensive perfume. And thats all from us for today. You can watch us online anytime and of course were back next week with a new edition, packed with exciting topics. In the meantime, do get in touch. We love hearing from you. D 07 01 16 07 01 16 [captioning made possible by democracy now ] amy from pacifica, this is democracy now we finally have legislation that at least is going to give puerto rico the capacity, the opportunity to get out from under this circus with respect to the debt and start growing again. Amy as puerto rico faces a paymenton debt
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