The Government of El Salvador extends its condolences and expresses solidarity with the Government of Turkey following the death of at least 76 people and more than 50 injuries in the fire at the Grand Kartal Hotel in Bolu Province on January 21.

“El Salvador offers its hopes for the swift recovery of those affected and expresses its deepest sympathy to the families of the deceased due to this tragic event,” said a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“Our country reaffirms the strong bonds of friendship shared with the Republic of Turkey, especially during this time of profound sorrow.”

The Turkish government began burying the victims on Wednesday, amid accusations of negligence.

A student was killed and two others were injured in a shooting that occurred this morning at a high school in Nashville, the capital city of Tennessee, in the southern United States, according to the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department.

The shooter, a 17-year-old student armed with a handgun, opened fire in the cafeteria of Antioch High School around 11:00 a.m. local time before taking his own life, police reported during a press conference.

One student was fatally shot. Of the injured, one student sustained a gunshot wound to the arm and is in stable condition at a hospital. Another student suffered a facial injury that was not caused by a gunshot and is receiving treatment, according to ABC News.

The school was placed on lockdown following the shooting. Students were transported by bus to an off-campus reunification site where distraught parents picked them up.

“Antioch High School is on lockdown due to shots fired inside the school building,” the school posted on social media. “Metro police are on the scene. The person responsible for the shooting no longer poses a threat.”

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A SWAT team cleared the school, and authorities have launched an ongoing investigation.

Antioch High School serves approximately 2,000 students in grades nine through twelve, according to its website.

The presidential candidate of Ecuador for the indigenous movement, Leonidas Iza, who was part of the wave of protests of 2019 and who led that of 2022, reveals himself as an “anti-system” politician in the face of “a corrupt system” that he intends to reformulate to relieve the impoverished, because he predicts a new social explosion if there is no change in the Government to meet popular demands.

Iza, 42, is the candidate of Pachakutik, the political arm of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie) that he himself presides over, and with which he was at the forefront of the 2022 wave of protests against the government of conservative President Guillermo Lasso, where he was arrested and even labeled a “terrorist.”

“I am one of those who has never lost the ability to be outraged when governments have had policies against their own citizens,” Iza, a native of the Andean province of Cotopaxi, said in an interview with EFE.

“I am not against the private sector, I am against those who do not pay taxes and those who come to the Government only to defend their companies,” said the candidate in reference to the last two presidents (Lasso and Daniel Noboa).

“We fight for social justice, not to be violent. It is a reaction to the injustice to which we have been subjected,” he said.

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For Iza, who represents the anti-extractivist left of Ecuador, the country has “a corrupt system, a health system that does not work, a deficient and unfair economic system, and public services that are not helping citizens.”

“And that’s what we want to change. We won’t be able to do it overnight, but the State can give relief to the people,” the candidate said.

To do this, it proposes to fight against tax evasion, which amounts to about 7.5 billion dollars a year, and also against corruption, which is estimated at about 3 billion dollars per year, to balance public accounts without having to follow the current credit program with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that asks to cut public spending and raise taxes.

He also aimed to increase agricultural productivity, as well as boost tourism to go from 1 to 3 million visitors a year, and anticipated that he will regulate small and artisanal mining to avoid illegal mining but will not allow large-scale mining because it considers that it can contaminate the country’s large river basins.

Iza anticipated that he will not pay the external debt as long as there are “guaguas (children, in Kichwa) who have no education and are dying of hunger, and colleagues who are dying for lack of health.”

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“We will tell the IMF and the other multilaterals that we are going to pay, but first we are going to solve the structural problem we have at the moment: education, health and minimum conditions for security,” he warned.

In that sense, Iza pointed out that “the strength of a popular reaction in the streets is accumulating” that must be resolved by whoever is elected. “Knowing my country, which has been on the streets all its life, there will be a popular reaction if (the discomfort) is not resolved in the following months,” he reiterated.

“The option that understands the people is us, and not the sectors that have always been in the Government,” said Iza, who avoided pointing out whether that reaction will reach the dimensions of the strong protests of 2019 and 2022, both led by the indigenous movement.

In this electoral campaign, Iza has left his distinctive Andean red poncho to put on the bulletproof vest in the face of the persistent wave of violence of organized crime that the country is experiencing, because he warned that the “war” that Noboa declared to the criminal gangs has not worked because its leaders are still free.

Faced with this, he promised “a hard hand for all” and recalled that “state institutions must suffocate everyone (criminals)”.

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The candidate also advocated deepening international cooperation: “there must be a responsibility of all countries (producers, consumers and drug transit), especially in the region (of Latin America)”.

Asked if Ecuadorian society is ready to have an indigenous president of rural origin, Iza sees himself with popular support to face “the most reactionary sectors that have support in racism and stigmatization.”