MANILA: The Philippines will close its border to foreigners and restrict the number of Filipinos entering the country as authorities battle to contain a spike in coronavirus infections.
The temporary measures come after the number of daily cases hit a seven-month high of 5,404 on Monday and experts predict the figure could double by the end of March.
Most of the active infections are in Metro Manila where targeted lockdowns, night-time curfews and a stay-at-home order for all children are being used to curb the spread.
The ban on overseas arrivals was announced late Tuesday by the government’s COVID-19 task force and takes effect March 20.
Overseas Filipino workers will be exempt, but the number of passenger arrivals will be limited to 1,500 a day, it said.
Authorities have blamed the infection surge on poor compliance with health protocols, such as wearing a mask and face shield in public, and more contagious variants of the virus.
A year after ordering the first lockdown that crippled the country’s economy, threw millions out of work and triggered record hunger, President Rodrigo Duterte urged Filipinos to “not despair.”
“It’s a small thing in our lives. We went through (things that) are more severe, more difficult and brought more tears,” Duterte said Monday.
His remarks sparked anger among social media users and opposition lawmakers who accused him of belittling the suffering of health workers and people who have lost loved ones to the disease.
Duterte’s government has been flayed over its handling of the pandemic, which has infected more than 630,000 people. Nearly 13,000 have died.
The hospital bed occupancy rate is at 59 percent in Metro Manila and surrounding provinces, presidential spokesman Harry Roque – who has tested positive for COVID-19 – said Tuesday.
But at the Philippine General Hospital, one of the country’s main facilities treating COVID-19 patients, 80 percent of beds for patients diagnosed with the disease were occupied and its intensive care wards full, a spokesman told local media.
The government hopes to inoculate 70 million people by the end of this year.
More than a million doses of vaccines developed by China’s Sinovac and British-Swedish drug maker AstraZeneca have been delivered in the past two weeks.
The government hopes to have “a stable supply of vaccines starting April or May,” said retired general Carlito Galvez, who is overseeing the effort.
About 216,000 health workers have received their first jab so far, he said.
Authorities aim to inoculate 1.7 million medical staff by mid-April before distributing vaccines to the elderly and poor.
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Philippines to shut border to foreigners as coronavirus cases surge
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Philippines to shut border to foreigners as coronavirus cases surge
- Temporary measures come after the number of daily cases hit a seven-month high
- Overseas Filipino workers will be exempt, but the number of passenger arrivals will be limited to 1,500 a day
US talks with hard-line Venezuelan minister Cabello began months before raid
NEW YORK/MIAMI/WASHINGTON: Trump administration officials had been in discussions with Venezuela’s hard-line interior minister Diosdado Cabello months before the US operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro, and have been in communication with him since then, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
The officials warned Cabello, 62, against using the security services or militant ruling-party supporters he oversees to target the country’s opposition, four sources said. That security apparatus, which includes the intelligence services, police and the armed forces, remains largely intact after the January 3 US raid.
Cabello is named in the same US drug-trafficking indictment that the Trump administration used as justification to arrest Maduro, but was not taken as part of the operation.
The communication with Cabello, which has also touched on sanctions the US has imposed on him and the indictment he faces, dates back to the early days of the current Trump administration and continued in the weeks just prior to the US ouster of Maduro, two sources familiar with the discussions said. The administration has also been in touch with Cabello since Maduro’s ouster, four of the people said.
The communications, which have not been previously reported, are critical to the Trump administration’s efforts to control the situation inside Venezuela. If Cabello decides to unleash the forces that he controls, it could foment the kind of chaos that Trump wants to avoid and threaten interim President Delcy Rodriguez’s grip on power, according to a source briefed on US concerns.
It is not clear if the Trump administration’s discussions with Cabello extended to questions about the future governance of Venezuela. Also unclear is whether Cabello has heeded the US warnings. He has publicly pledged unity with Rodriguez, whom Trump has so far praised.
While Rodriguez has been seen by the US as the linchpin for US President Donald Trump’s strategy for post-Maduro Venezuela, Cabello is widely believed to have the power to keep those plans on track or upend them.
The Venezuelan minister has been in contact with the Trump administration both directly and via intermediaries, one person familiar with the conversations said.
All of the sources were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive internal government communications with Cabello.
The White House and the government of Venezuela did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CABELLO HAS BEEN MADURO LOYALIST
Cabello has long been seen as Venezuela’s second most powerful figure. A close aide of late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor, he went on to become a long-time Maduro loyalist, feared as his main enforcer of repression. Rodriguez and Cabello have both operated at the heart of the government, legislature and ruling socialist party for years, but have never been considered close allies of each other.
A former military officer, Cabello has exerted influence over the country’s military and civilian counterintelligence agencies, which conduct widespread domestic espionage. He has also been closely associated with pro-government militias, notably the colectivos, groups of motorcycle-riding armed civilians who have been deployed to attack protesters.
Cabello is one of a handful of Maduro loyalists Washington has relied on as temporary rulers to maintain stability while it accesses the OPEC nation’s oil reserves during an unspecified transition period.
But US officials are concerned that Cabello — given his record of repression and a history of rivalry with Rodriguez — could play the spoiler, according to a source briefed on the administration’s thinking.
Rodriguez has been working to consolidate her own power, installing loyalists in key positions to protect herself from internal threats while meeting US demands to boost oil production, Reuters interviews with sources in Venezuela have shown.
Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative on Venezuela in his first term, said many Venezuelans would expect Cabello to be removed at some point if a democratic transition is to advance.
“If and when he goes, Venezuelans will know that the regime has really begun to change,” said Abrams, now at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
US SANCTIONS AND INDICTMENT
Cabello has long been under US sanctions for alleged drug trafficking.
In 2020, the US issued a $10 million bounty for Cabello and indicted him as a key figure in the “Cartel de los Soles,” a group the US has said is a Venezuelan drug-trafficking network led by members of the country’s government.
The US has since raised the award to $25 million. Cabello has publicly denied any links to drug trafficking.
In the hours after Maduro’s ouster, some analysts and politicians in Washington questioned why the US didn’t also grab Cabello — listed second in the Department of Justice indictment of Maduro.
“I know that just Diosdado is probably worse than Maduro and worse than Delcy,” Republican US Representative Maria Elvira Salazar said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on January 11.
In the days following, Cabello denounced American intervention in the country, saying in a speech that “Venezuela will not surrender.”
But media reports of residents being searched at checkpoints — sometimes by uniformed members of the security forces and sometimes by people in plain clothes — have become less frequent in recent days.
And both Trump and the Venezuelan government have said many detainees who are considered by the opposition and rights groups to be political prisoners will be released.
The government has said that Cabello, in his role as interior minister, is overseeing that effort. Rights groups say the liberations are proceeding extremely slowly and hundreds remain unjustly detained.
The officials warned Cabello, 62, against using the security services or militant ruling-party supporters he oversees to target the country’s opposition, four sources said. That security apparatus, which includes the intelligence services, police and the armed forces, remains largely intact after the January 3 US raid.
Cabello is named in the same US drug-trafficking indictment that the Trump administration used as justification to arrest Maduro, but was not taken as part of the operation.
The communication with Cabello, which has also touched on sanctions the US has imposed on him and the indictment he faces, dates back to the early days of the current Trump administration and continued in the weeks just prior to the US ouster of Maduro, two sources familiar with the discussions said. The administration has also been in touch with Cabello since Maduro’s ouster, four of the people said.
The communications, which have not been previously reported, are critical to the Trump administration’s efforts to control the situation inside Venezuela. If Cabello decides to unleash the forces that he controls, it could foment the kind of chaos that Trump wants to avoid and threaten interim President Delcy Rodriguez’s grip on power, according to a source briefed on US concerns.
It is not clear if the Trump administration’s discussions with Cabello extended to questions about the future governance of Venezuela. Also unclear is whether Cabello has heeded the US warnings. He has publicly pledged unity with Rodriguez, whom Trump has so far praised.
While Rodriguez has been seen by the US as the linchpin for US President Donald Trump’s strategy for post-Maduro Venezuela, Cabello is widely believed to have the power to keep those plans on track or upend them.
The Venezuelan minister has been in contact with the Trump administration both directly and via intermediaries, one person familiar with the conversations said.
All of the sources were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive internal government communications with Cabello.
The White House and the government of Venezuela did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
CABELLO HAS BEEN MADURO LOYALIST
Cabello has long been seen as Venezuela’s second most powerful figure. A close aide of late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor, he went on to become a long-time Maduro loyalist, feared as his main enforcer of repression. Rodriguez and Cabello have both operated at the heart of the government, legislature and ruling socialist party for years, but have never been considered close allies of each other.
A former military officer, Cabello has exerted influence over the country’s military and civilian counterintelligence agencies, which conduct widespread domestic espionage. He has also been closely associated with pro-government militias, notably the colectivos, groups of motorcycle-riding armed civilians who have been deployed to attack protesters.
Cabello is one of a handful of Maduro loyalists Washington has relied on as temporary rulers to maintain stability while it accesses the OPEC nation’s oil reserves during an unspecified transition period.
But US officials are concerned that Cabello — given his record of repression and a history of rivalry with Rodriguez — could play the spoiler, according to a source briefed on the administration’s thinking.
Rodriguez has been working to consolidate her own power, installing loyalists in key positions to protect herself from internal threats while meeting US demands to boost oil production, Reuters interviews with sources in Venezuela have shown.
Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative on Venezuela in his first term, said many Venezuelans would expect Cabello to be removed at some point if a democratic transition is to advance.
“If and when he goes, Venezuelans will know that the regime has really begun to change,” said Abrams, now at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
US SANCTIONS AND INDICTMENT
Cabello has long been under US sanctions for alleged drug trafficking.
In 2020, the US issued a $10 million bounty for Cabello and indicted him as a key figure in the “Cartel de los Soles,” a group the US has said is a Venezuelan drug-trafficking network led by members of the country’s government.
The US has since raised the award to $25 million. Cabello has publicly denied any links to drug trafficking.
In the hours after Maduro’s ouster, some analysts and politicians in Washington questioned why the US didn’t also grab Cabello — listed second in the Department of Justice indictment of Maduro.
“I know that just Diosdado is probably worse than Maduro and worse than Delcy,” Republican US Representative Maria Elvira Salazar said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” on January 11.
In the days following, Cabello denounced American intervention in the country, saying in a speech that “Venezuela will not surrender.”
But media reports of residents being searched at checkpoints — sometimes by uniformed members of the security forces and sometimes by people in plain clothes — have become less frequent in recent days.
And both Trump and the Venezuelan government have said many detainees who are considered by the opposition and rights groups to be political prisoners will be released.
The government has said that Cabello, in his role as interior minister, is overseeing that effort. Rights groups say the liberations are proceeding extremely slowly and hundreds remain unjustly detained.
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