Over the new year, Chilean students; migrants from the Movement for Justice in El Barrio (New York); representatives of the Mexican National Indigenous Congress; and members of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) met at the CIDECI Unitierra in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, to recount their experiences of struggle and to analyze current economic systems and social movements.
Elliott Abrams, a former high level State Department official during the 1980s, testified last week that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina’s military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered and jailed democracy activists and giving them to right-wing families friendly to the regime. But this didn’t deter the State Department at the time from granting Argentina certification indicating that the country’s human rights record was improving.
A Senate report released in October 2011 urging the US government to expand the use of social media as a foreign policy tool in Latin America offers another warning for activists seduced by the idea of technology and social media as an indispensable tool for social change.
On December 5, 2011, representatives from Mexico, Colombia and the countries of Central American attended the 13th Summit of the Tuxtla Mechanism for Dialogue and Coordination in Merida, Mexico. The summit’s main purpose was to discuss the progress of different initiatives included in the Mesoamerica Project’s framework, which is the new version of the Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP).
The U.S.military approach to undocumented immigrants has moved further south – to a new military academy in Panama. The new school, which Panama announced in early December, will bring together U.S. and Colombian trainers to train Central American police units in border patrol, countering drug traffic, and “combatting undocumented persons.”
The “war against terror” inaugurated by George W. Bush as a response to the September 11 2001 attack is now giving way to a strategy of “containment” of China, the new strategy laid out by the Pentagon to encircle, and eventually stifle the asiatic power, with the objective of maintaining US global supremacy.
Little noticed by the rest of the world, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is cutting a swath through one of the world’s poorest populations, along a stretch of Central America’s Pacific Coast that spans six countries and nearly 700 miles. Its victims are manual laborers, mostly sugarcane workers.
The United States is advancing a regional security strategy which apparently is oriented toward the militarization of Central America and the participation of private security contractors in policing, a strategy also being promoted for the region by the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.
The link between trade liberalization and food availability is becoming a critical factor that, far from improving living conditions, threatens to deepen and entrench the structural causes of hunger, violence and malnutrition in the region. […]
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