Archives – Page 47 – Upside Down World

Zapatista Support Bases Under Attack: Call for a Week of National and International Solidarity

February 14, 2014 Jessica Davies 0

“Today, as 20 years ago, the counterinsurgency strategy against the Zapatista indigenous peoples continues: military forces, paramilitaries, ‘democratic campesino organizations,’ commercial media, ‘social programs,’ and the whole political class are part of this war of extermination, a war which is headed by the bad governments, both federal and state, who only serve the interests of a system which needs dispossession, exploitation, neglect and repression in order to survive,” says the Network for Solidarity and against Repression.

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Sabaneta to Miraflores: Afterlives of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela

February 12, 2014 Jeffrey R. Webber and Susan Spronk 0

Six years ago, the journalist Jacobo Rivero asked a 50-year-old black woman from La Vega what would happen if Chávez died. The Bolivarian process “is irreversible,” she told him, its roots are too deep to be easily torn asunder in the absence of el comandante.

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Confronting the Narrative: Gladys Tzul on Indigenous Governance and State Authority in Guatemala

February 10, 2014 Oswaldo J. Hernández, Translated by Sandra Cuffe 0

Gladys Tzul claims to be a direct descendant of Atanasio Tzul. Together with hundreds of others, she belongs to the sixth generation of this lineage that lives in the Paquí canton, in Totonicapán. She experienced a different sense of politics, “a collective and community one, not a liberal one in which an individual citizen exists, represented and protected by the State.” She is one of the few Latin American academics to specialize in analyzing Indigenous governance systems in Guatemala, their power relations, and the struggle that occurs between local forms of government and State authority.

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Self-defense Groups and Community Police Forces in Mexico: Differences as Seen from the Villages

February 9, 2014 Jaime Quintana Guerrero, Translation by Christina Hewitt 0

Salvador Campunar, a Purhépecha Indian comunero, Claudio Carrasco of the Guerrero Community Police Force, and Guillermo Hernandez, a member of the Tepoztlán community, explain that community justice systems, rooted in ancient traditions, essentially respond to the village councils. They also comment that they act as part of a more complex system of autonomy for the villages, whereas vigilante autodefensas, self-defense forces, act on behalf of private groups.

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Costa Rican National Elections: Immediate Results, Longstanding Challenges

February 7, 2014 María Suárez Toro 0

In Costa Rica’s national election on Sunday, where for the first time a progressive party challenging the establishment neoliberal parties remained at the top of all polls until the last couple of weeks, the immediate end result is the need to go to a second round on April 6, as none of the three major parties gained the required 40 percent to win outright.

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Prosecution of Forced Sterilizations in Peru Still Possible

February 6, 2014 Milagros Salazar 0

“They took us in trucks. We got in quite innocently and contentedly. But then we heard screams and I ran… The doors were padlocked. They carried me off in a stretcher, tied my feet and cut me,” said Micaela Flores, then a mother of seven from Anta province in the southern region of Cusco.

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After The Plantones: Looking Back On An Autumn Of Struggle In Mexico City

February 3, 2014 David Martinez 0

The papers on every news kiosk in Mexico City in late August, 2013, blared denunciations: “Imagine – Mexico Without Soccer!” screamed one newspaper. Pictures of crying children stuck outside of a stadium clutching the colors of their favorite team were plastered on the front page of another paper.

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The Criminalization of Poverty in Brazil, a Global Power

February 3, 2014 Raúl Zibechi 0

In the year of elections and the FIFA World Cup, the country that aims to be a global military and energy power must face the challenges of popular sectors, who demand inclusion and access to the same goods and rights enjoyed by half of Brazilians.

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El Salvador Election Offers a Choice between a Neoliberal Past and a FMLN Future

February 1, 2014 Hector Perla Jr. 0

As Salvadorans once again go to the polls on Sunday they are faced with a stark choice. Will they vote to return to the neoliberal past as promised by ARENA, or will they choose to continue down the path that the FMLN has begun.

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Argentine Activists Win First Round Against Monsanto Plant

January 28, 2014 Fabiana Frayssinet 0

Residents of a town in Argentina have won the first victory in their fight against biotech giant Monsanto, but they are still at battle stations, aware that winning the war is still a long way off. For four months, activists in Malvinas Argentinas, a town in the central province of Cordoba, have maintained a blockade of the construction site where the U.S. transnational company is building the world’s biggest maize seed treatment plant.

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