Guatemala is a country full of contradictions. Grinding poverty, political ineptitude and a recent wave of violence and murder can easily make one forget that it is a country, the largest and most populous in Central America, incredibly rich in natural resources and full of working age youth. One result of these contradictions is forcced internal and external migration.
Many Chileans are asking themselves what kind of energy future they want for their country. As the growing nation faces higher energy demands and prices. Government officials and business leaders have long seen the HidroAysén Dam project as the ultimate solution to expand the country’s electric grid, but the project has met met with fierce, sometimes violent resistance from student protesters in Santiago and residents of Chile’s Patagonia.
“The social earthquake of 2011, the student movement, is becoming a political tsunami. We see it in the rise of new leaders and different visions,” said Noam Titelman, the president of the Student Federation of the Catholic University. One symptom of this “tsunami” is the growing politicization of movements.
Source: Colombia Informa After two weeks of peaceful protesting against oil exploitation in Arauca, on February 12 that department’s social organizations began a strike announced a few days earlier as a response to the repeated […]
Source: Revista Viento SurThe “citizen revolution” in Ecuador is one of the symbols of the South American “post-neo-Liberals” experiences and Rafael Correa’s Government is often considered a reference for many of the European left. The […]
“The root of the land conflicts lies in the dispute over the use and control of territorial space stemming from the imposition of one culture over another. On the one side is agribusiness, where land is a space to produce and do business. On the other side there is indigenous and peasant culture, where land is understood to be a place for life,” stated the Chaco Argentina Agroforestry Network (REDAF) in a recent report.
Source: NACLA Until recently, conventional economic wisdom held that sustained economic growth in any society could only be achieved at the expense of income equality. Today, even free market disciples like The Economist recognize that […]
Rafael Correa cruised to re-election on Sunday with 57 percent of the vote, while conservative banker Guillermo Lasso came in a distant second place with 23 percent. Surprising was how poorly Ecuador’s left fared in the election. Former close Correa ally Alberto Acosta running at the head of a leftist coalition that opposes the government’s neo-extractivist policies won just 3 percent of the vote.
Source: The Americas Blog At the end of January, I blogged about a Congressional letter to Secretary of State John Kerry and Attorney General Eric Holder asking, among other things, for a U.S. investigation into […]
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