Month: January 2015
Raúl Castro demands that US return Guantánamo base to Cuba
Source: Associated Press Cuba’s President Raúl Castro has demanded that the United States return the US base at Guantánamo Bay, lift the half-century trade embargo on Cuba and compensate his country for damages before the […]
In Memoriam: Pedro Lemebel’s Chronicles of the Pinochet Dictatorship
By the time of his death on January 23, 2015, Chilean writer, performance artist, radio personality and activist Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) had become an icon of Chilean counter-culture. His art chronicled the history of the city of Santiago as experienced by members of the Chilean Left during the dictatorship and afterward, poor city residents, gay men, HIV positive people, and transvestites, among others. In 2013, he was awarded the José Donoso Ibero-american Literature Prize. These “urban neo-chronicles” about the human costs of the Pinochet Dictatorship are from his 1998 collection, Of Pearls and Scars [De perlas y cicatrices].
How Israeli High-Tech Firms Are Up-Armoring the U.S.-Mexico Border
Source: NACLA Report on the Americas It was October 2012. Roei Elkabetz, a brigadier general for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), was explaining his country’s border policing strategies. In his PowerPoint presentation, a photo of […]
Argentina: Societies in Movement or Politics as Usual?
Source: TeleSUR English We arrived in Argentina and everything in Buenos Aires looked about the same as two years ago, and the year prior, and the ones before that for that matter; a city somewhere […]
Roads are encroaching deeper into the Amazon rainforest, study says
Source: The Guardian Unlimited Oil and gas access roads in western Amazon could open up ‘Pandora’s box’ of environmental impacts Oil and gas roads are encroaching deeper into the western Amazon, one of the world’s […]
The Power of the Spectacle: Evo Morales’ Inauguration in Tiwanaku, Bolivia
There is a long history in Bolivia of couching politics of liberation within the deeper story of colonialism and indigenous resistance. The MAS party of Evo Morales doesn’t have a monopoly on the uses of Bolivia’s rebel past, but it’s incredibly savvy in its deployment of historical consciousness as an ideological and political tool.
La Legua, Santiago de Chile: Building Community in Small Spaces
Like so many other peripheral populations, La Legua, a Santiago neighborhood, is subjected to military-police intervention under the pretext of drug trafficking. However, in the midst of poverty and repression, they resist by creating life and community with women and youth as the leading actors.
El Salvador: Pardon Granted For One of 17 Women Jailed for Miscarriage, Accused of Homicide
Guadalupe, a Salvadoran young woman who has already spent more than 7 years in prison on charges of aggravated homicide for miscarriage of her fetus, was pardoned. However, Cinthia, who gave birth alone to an infant she says had its cord wrapped around its neck, was denied pardon, ostensibly because she smoked and drank beer on a daily basis. Cinthia, like Guadalupe, was also 18 when she miscarried, and was likewise found guilty of aggravated homicide and has been serving the same 30 year sentence.