Latin America may soon become the next front in Washington’s so-called "War on Terror." Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) , Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, held a hearing on Oct. 27 to investigate his "serious concerns about expanded Iranian influence in the region.”
"We wanted the constituyente so that the poor would finally have a voice with which to speak. In the past we were left on the fringe, not allowed to enter into society because if we ever tried they would break our nose with the door." -Juliana, grandmother, protestor, 80 years old. This six minute video talks with Hondurans in the streets about their thoughts on democracy.
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"I call myself a veteran Defender of Human Rights- it sounds better than old- and as I sit down to write this I feel ill at ease, perhaps because I have the idea that over the long process of the last few decades, we had achieved some small and relative advances in the area of Human Rights. Perhaps its because I always look towards the past in order to spy into the future and, of course, to check on the present ." -Bertha Oliva de Nativi of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras
I met Jose Hernandez, a leader of the Mexican Union of Electricity workers (SME) at a metro station called Obrera (Worker), unsurprisingly located in a working class area of Mexico city, and from there we walked back to his house. “I’m very tired, I’m exhausted,” he said, smiling, as he made me tea. “I haven’t stopped for days.” What follows is his account of the recent events in his union and the electricity company Fuerzas y Luces, after 6000 federal police and soldiers occupied it on 10 October.
Last fall, Colombia’s social and popular movements captured the world’s attention. Emerging initially from the indigenous territories in Northern Cauca and expanding to unite diverse sectors, the Social and Community Minga burst onto the national and international scene with a popular agenda for radical change, a “country of the peoples without owners” A year later, the Minga appears to have arrived at a crossroads, where a once powerful popular agenda risks being manipulated in favour of a narrow and domesticating one. […]
"Democracy doesn’t exist without truth and justice. We have the right to know where our dead are and we have the right to demand that these people, although they are old, pay for the crimes they committed," said Graciela Pintado Nuñez, as their bus reached the outskirts of Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo. On Friday, October 23rd, two days before Uruguay’s Presidential elections, Nuñez and a group of nearly fifty Uruguayans made the overnight trip from their homes in Southern Brazil to their native country of Uruguay.
What the Guaymuras Accords actually do most is create a space for the United States to recognize the legitimacy of the upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for November 29. With National Party front-runner Pepe Lobo likely to win (thanks to a campaign season in which any independent voices were sharply silenced by media censorship), the US also likely secures another puppet in the region who will be opposed to the progressive social, economic and political reforms being articulated and demanded by the country’s social movements. […]
Gloria Arenas Agís was released from prison around 7:30PM on October 28, ten years after Mexican federal agents abducted, tortured, and then—after several days of being held incommunicado—arrested her and her husband Jacobo Silva Nogales on charges ranging from terrorism and homicide to rebellion. One day later, on October 29, Jacobo Silva was released from federal prison in the state of Nayarit, to where he had been recently transferred after nine and a half years inside Mexico’s highest security prison, known as the Altiplano. […]
To prolong influence over Colombia, every US administrations from Nixon to Obama has embraced a ‘war on drugs,’ or more recently a ‘war on terror,’ as a means to deploy counterinsurgency campaigns to silence antagonistic sectors of said population. It is increasingly clear, when concerning the recent actions of Bogotá and Washington to facilitate seven fortified bases controlled by the United States on Colombian territory, that both states have coordinated a strategic alliance to militarize the region, not simply one country. […]
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.
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