International
One month for the Trump vs Harris: US begins the countdown with the prevailing uncertainty
There is exactly one month left for the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November of this leap year, the day on which the United States traditionally celebrates its presidential elections, and uncertainty reigns on the horizon. With Kamala Harris slightly ahead of Donald Trump according to polls, the battle will be defined in the key states.
And it is on them that both candidates have focused their efforts in recent weeks and, presumably, they will do so during this month.
After passing through Georgia on Friday, one of the states affected by Hurricane Helene, this Saturday Trump visits Pennsylvania, the municipality of Butler, the place where on July 13 he was wounded in the ear by a gunshot in his first attempted attack.
And Harris, who broke into the campaign by surprise on July 21, after Joe Biden’s withdrawal, went to Michigan yesterday and today travels to North Carolina to receive information on the recovery tasks of the deadliest hurricane since Katrina in 2005, with more than two hundred deaths in the country.
These four, along with Arizona, Nevada and Wisconsin, are the key or hinged states, so tight their results will presumably be since their population is not of a marked political sign as happens in others such as California (democrat since the 90s) or Texas (republican since the 80s).
In electoral language they are known as the ‘battleground states’ and it is there that the candidates fight hardest, with face-to-face acts, advertising and interviews with local media.
Looking for votes in county by county
In a media conversation on Friday, the president of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, said that the party has been “on the ground since the first days of this campaign,” talking “to all voters in all the disputed electoral districts.”
The training has “312 offices in the states in dispute” and the annual investment in the state parties has been increased by 25%.
According to political scientist David McCuan, a professor at Sonoma State University, of the 3,100 existing counties in the United States “approximately 15 or 20 are the most important for the outcome of the presidential elections.”
That’s why in the campaign the focus is on names like Northampton or Erie, in Pennsylvania, Maricopa in Arizona or Gwinnett and Fulton in Georgia. “These are county-by-county elections, not even state by state, to reach 270 electoral votes,” he told EFE.
And it is that in the United States citizens do not elect their president directly but through the 538 members of the Electoral College, who meet on a date after the elections to vote for the president based on what citizens choose at the polls.
Those 538 members are distributed proportionally according to the population among the 50 states and the District of Columbia and the most voted candidate takes all the voters, with the exception of Maine and Nebraska. To be president, one of the candidates must get 270 voters.
Polls show the close Trump-Harris battle in the elections
According to the FiveThirtyEight portal, which prepares an average among the polls for the elections, Harris is ahead of Trump by 48.4% compared to 45.9%, although in the key states the distance is much smaller.
An average of polls prepared by the New York Times gives victory to Harris in Pennsylvania (by less than one point), Nevada (1 point), Michigan (1 point) and Wisconsin (2 points). Meanwhile, Trump would achieve North Carolina (less than one point), Georgia (2 points) and Arizona (2 points).
For Lanae Erickson, political scientist at the Third Way think center, the level of participation will be key in these elections.
“In 2016 many people stayed at home because they did not believe that Trump could win and they were not really motivated by any of the candidates,” while in 2020 “the Democrats came out en masse,” he tells EFE.
There Harris has an advantage, because after Biden’s abandonment many citizens see her as “the agent of change” that will make them go out to vote.
For Aaron Kall, political scientist and author of the book “Debating The Donald,” this will be a month in which “campaigns will intensify their work in terms of travel, interviews with the media and rallies.”
“I think the sense of urgency is finally reaching the campaigns since there will be no more opportunities for debates,” because the former president has not accepted a second debate with the Democrat after the defeat he suffered in the first and only of his clashes.
International
Venezuela Refuses to Repatriate Citizens Amid Tensions Over Chevron’s Departure
The government of Venezuela privately warned the government of Donald Trump that it will not accept its own citizens being deported, following the United States’ decision to end Chevron’s license to operate in the Caribbean country, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal on Friday.
The newspaper, citing sources familiar with the matter, notes that the Venezuelan repatriation agreement is becoming strained after a January meeting between Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell and the Chavista leader Nicolás Maduro, who is not recognized as president by the U.S. The Chevron issue has exacerbated tensions.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration ended Chevron’s license in Venezuela and gave the company a month, until April 3, to leave the country after President Trump criticized Maduro for not accelerating the deportation of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. as quickly as expected.
The WSJ indicates that Venezuela’s private warning could further hinder Trump’s promised mass deportation campaignof undocumented immigrants, which his administration has already had to pause due to the high costs of using military planes for repatriation flights.
International
Hearing suspended in Guatemala on revocation of José Rubén Zamora’s house arrest
Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora Marroquín will know until next week if he should return to preventive detention, after this Friday the hearing was suspended for a possible revocation of his house arrest.
The resumption of the hearing was rescheduled for next Monday, at 10:00 local time (16:00 GMT), by order of criminal judge Erick García, since, as he indicated, he lacks the case file for the moment.
The possible return of Zamora Marroquín to prison is due to a case of alleged money laundering in 2022, the year in which the Public Ministry (Prosecution), whose leadership is sanctioned internationally under allegations of corruption, began a judicial prosecution against him.
The journalist’s potential return to prison takes place after this week an Appeals Chamber revoked the house arrest measures that had been granted since October 2024 to the former owner and founder of the media El Periódico, a morning in which he uncovered more than a thousand cases of state corruption.
According to the opinion of the magistrates of the Third Appeals Chamber, there was “an error” in the resolution of the judge who decided to release the journalist last year. The review of the measures was requested by the Prosecutor’s Office.
Zamora Marroquín was detained for the case for more than 800 days, between July 29, 2022 and October 2024, without his guilt being proven to date.
Before this Friday’s hearing, the journalist recalled in statements to the media that he has complied with all the court orders regarding his house arrest, and reiterated that he has not seen his family for more than two years, since they are abroad in the face of the risks they could encounter in the Central American country.
Likewise, he added that the persecution against him has been “physical and psychological but I am not going to give up” and described the Third Appeals Chamber as a court linked to the “corrupt” and Deputy Felipe Alejos, sanctioned by the United States for corruption.
Zamora Marroquín, with 30 years of journalistic career, was arrested on July 29, 2022, just five days after issuing strong criticism for corruption against then-President Alejandro Giammattei, between 2020 and 2024, and his close circle.
The journalist remained in prison for a judicial process for alleged money laundering, which according to international organizations such as the Inter-American Press Society (IAPA) has been plagued with irregularities.
International
Trump withdraws 400 million federal funds from Columbia University for anti-Semitism
Donald Trump’s government canceled this Friday subsidies and contracts with Columbia University in New York worth 400 million dollars “due to its passivity in the face of the persistent harassment of Jewish students,” after receiving on Monday a report commissioned by the administration on anti-Semitism on the campuses of several universities in the country.
This cancellation “is the first set of actions, and new cancellations are expected,” warns a statement signed by the general administrative services, which specify that Columbia currently has 5 billion federally committed.
The decision to cut subsidies and contracts has been made together with the federal departments of Justice, Health, Education and Administrative Services, after the operational group commissioned by the government with the specific task of detecting and denouncing anti-Semitic behavior has not received a satisfactory response from Columbia, according to the statement.
Complaints of anti-Semitism began to appear in Columbia and other campuses shortly after October 7, 2023, the date on which Hamas launched a terrorist attack against Israel, which was then followed by a war declared by Israel against Gaza that has been one of the deadliest in several decades.
That war gave rise to demonstrations against Israel as they had not been seen on university campuses for fifty years, with Columbia at the spearhead, with some anti-Jewish incidents that made the Joe Biden Government intervene and summon the rectors of several universities to Congress, several of which (including Columbia’s) had to resign.
Despite the fact that the protests have dropped a lot in terms of intensity, Trump went further than Joe Biden: first, he named that operative group on anti-Semitism on campuses, and second, he threatened to withdraw visas or residence permits from students accused of supporting “terrorist organizations like Hamas.”
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon says that Columbia “for too long has left its homework with Jewish students on its campus, but today we show Columbia and the other universities that we will no longer tolerate that terrible passivity.”
And the director of the group that sent his report last Monday, Leo Torrell, abounded in the threats: “Freezing funds is one of the tools at our disposal to respond to this upsurge in anti-Semitism. This is just the beginning,” he said.
Curiously, in the protests against Israel, one of the most active groups has been the left-wing Jews, who have denounced that under the premise of anti-Semitism, legitimate political criticisms against the State of Israel are being included.
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