Americas News

El Inca is a 2016 Venezuela romance by Ignacio Castillo Cottin.
Starring Alexander Leterni, Scarlett Jaimes and Miguel Ferrari.

A tragic love story based in the life of the great Latin American boxer Edwin "El Inca" Valero. The only fight he lost, was the one against himself.

On an April morning in 2010, Venezuelan boxing legend Edwin El Inca Valero, an undefeated two-time world champion, murdered his wife. Two days later, he took his own life in his prison cell at 28 years of age.

Now, his violent and troubling story is making headlines again, in a politically charged scandal over a banned film about his life. The movie, El Inca, was a box office sensation when it premiered on Nov 25, rising to become the third-most lucrative film of the year in Venezuela in less than three weeks.

But its run came to an abrupt halt on Dec 13, when a judge ordered it removed from theaters and impounded all copies. The court case was brought by Valero's family, which accused director Ignacio Castillo Cottin of slander. But the director alleges politics had more to do with the ruling.

The film was banned by temporary injunction before the defamation trial even got under way. The judge then postponed the first hearing, scheduled for last Monday, because neither he nor the prosecution had seen the movie.

Connections of the film were not impressed that it was banned before the judge had even seen it.

Two dozen human rights and civil liberty groups have thrown their weight behind Google's challenge of a Canadian court decision it warns could stifle freedom of expression around the world and lead to a diminished internet of the lowest common denominator .

In an appeal heard on Tuesday in the supreme court of Canada , Google Inc took aim at a 2015 court decision that sought to censor search results beyond Canada's borders.

In 2012, Canadian company Equustek won a judgment to have a company banned from selling a counterfeit version of Equustek's product online. Google voluntarily removed more than 300 infringing URLs. But as more sites popped up, Equustek went back to court -- this time seeking a worldwide ban. A court of appeal in British Columbia sided with Equustek in 2015, ordering Google to remove all of its search results linked to the company. It is this ruling that Google is now appealing.

The human rights groups are focusing on the question at the heart of the precedent-setting case: if one country can control what you see on the internet, what is to prevent other countries from doing the same?  Gregg Leslie of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said:

It's a worrisome trend, where we see individual countries trying to regulate the internet worldwide. And of course the consequences of that would mean that even countries like Russia and China could do the same thing and that will really affect the content available on the internet.

The Canadian Parliament has unanimously agreed a motion calling on the Commons Standing Committee on Health to examine the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent and degrading sexually explicit material on children, women and men.

Kamal Khera, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of health, announced the government's full support for the motion.

Northern Alberta MP Arnold Viersen, the driving force behind the motion told the religious website, LifeSiteNews, loath to raise the issue of internet censorship and that oncentrating on the health implications was a good way to ensure all-party support and also to stress public education rather than legal restrictions. Ultimately, he wants the same kind of widespread condemnation of pornography that has already occurred with smoking. Rather than offering any evidence of harm, he is rather hoping for something to crop up in the future. He said:

Gradually the scientific evidence became known about smoking's impact on the heart and the lungs. Now that kind of information about the health impact of pornography on the user is also being discovered.

When pornography's harms become thoroughly exposed, he hopes that Internet providers will restrict porn use voluntarily.

In Canada, sexually explicit websites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined, with PornHub, the largest free site, alone receiving over 21 billion visits in 2015. Thirty-five percent of all Internet downloads are sexually explicit. Globally, this sexually explicit material is a $97 billion industry. 

With all that porn being used and so little evidence of tangible harm, one wonders what the MPs are hoping to discover. Perhaps they should examine the public health effects of the ease of access and viewing of online violent religious material on children, women and men. The murder and violence caused by religion is far more widespread and apparent than any moralistic hopes that there may be a few moral downsides to porn.