At midnight on Octover 10, President Felipe Calderon issued an executive decree to liquidate the company and its union, the Mexican Electrical Workers Union (Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas—SME), one of the strongest and most vocal independent unions in the nation. Ironically, the current economic crisis provided the Calderon Administration its strategic opportunity to cut the underfunded company and malign the union.
On August 17, 2009, masked men carrying high caliber rifles forced anti-mining activist Mariano Abarca, 52, into an unmarked car as he was leaving the primary school in his hometown of Chicomuselo, Chiapas. Held without contact to his family, it was feared he had been kidnapped. But although the detention had all the hallmarks of a kidnapping, it turned out to be a state sanctioned arrest. […]
Both Staughton Lynd (a Marxist from the US) and his co-author Andrej Grubacic (an anarchist from the Balkans) of the book Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History, are public supporters of the Zapatistas, who they argue have set a powerful example of revolutionary organizing that should influence anti-capitalists around the world. Much like the historical traditions of the Haymarket Martyrs and the ‘Wobblies’ (the Industrial Workers of the World) in the United States, Lynd and Grubacic argue that the Zapatistas have synthesized the best aspects of both the Marxist and anarchist traditions. […]
Teaching Rebellion: Stories from the Grassroots Mobilization in Oaxaca (PM Press) teaches us why the 2006 rebellion in Oaxaca, Mexico was so impressive, and is something we can all learn from.
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Fear of environmental contamination and dwindling water resources are motivating a nearly two-month-long permanent civilian occupation of Canadian-owned Trinidad Mine in San José del Progreso, Mexico and all its installations. […]
A University of Kansas professor is under fire for a mapping project in Mexico partially funded by the U.S. Defense Department, as colleagues in the field of geography are calling for an investigation, while growing local opposition to the project leaves it in peril.
"War was God’s way of teaching Americans geography," once wrote Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist and social critic. Today, a University of Kansas (KU) professor may be using geography to teach Americans war. […]
When the Union of Social Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) released a press statement last January denouncing the Mexico Indigena/Bowman Expeditions extensive geographical project to produce maps of the “digital human terrain” of Zapotec communities, they had little idea the storm it would create across the globe. […]
Carlos Slim, the second richest man in the world, calls Mexico home, as do millions of impoverished citizens. From Spanish colonization to today’s state and corporate repression, Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt, by John Gibler, is written from the street barricades, against the Slims of the world, and alongside "the underdogs and rebels" of an unconquered country. […]
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