International

The Canadian government is failing either to investigate or to hold the country’s massive extractives sector accountable for rights abuses committed in Latin American countries, according to petitioners who testified in Washington D.C. last month before an international tribunal. Canada, which has one of the largest mining sectors in the world, is estimated to have some 1,500 projects in Latin America – more than 40 percent of the mining companies operating in the region.

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A problem peasant women face is invisibility in the feminist and women’s movements. A second problem is the weakness with which the food sovereignty concept has dealt with the challenges of feminism.

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As recently as June, more than 10,000 children fleeing unchecked gang violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala made it here over the course of a month. Then, a major security crackdown in Mexico slowed the pace of their arrivals down to about 3,000 in August. However, the problems that caused the children to flee are far from solved.

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A wave of change rolled through Latin America at the turn of the twenty-first century, sweeping away neoliberal two-party governments, bringing calls to re-found the states based on broad participation and democratically drafted constitutions. […]

Since the smooth, level path of military coups, in the style of past decades, is no longer possible, the Right turns to the electoral process, with great publicity apparatus, taking advantage as well of the private communications media as their essential weapon. […]

The shooting of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in the southern United States earlier this month has led to widespread public outrage around issues of race, class and police brutality. Despite this unusual bipartisan agreement in Washington over the dangers of a militarized police force, there appears to be no extension of this concern to rising U.S. support for militarized law enforcement in other countries.

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The School of the Americas (SOA), renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2000, is an enduring propagator of the National Security Doctrine and militarization in Latin America. The training and accompanying political support of repressive security forces throughout the world has contributed to the alarming militarization of the domestic U.S. police force. […]

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