“We want to introduce to you one of our many selves, our compañero Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés. He watches over our door and with his voice is the voices of all of us. We ask you to listen to him, that is, to look at him as we look at ourselves, ” stated Subcomandante Marcos in an announcement on the new appointment.
The Resistance movement is ardently opposed to the government’s plan to build “Model Cities” along the Caribbean coast, enclaves free from Honduran laws that would be planned and run by private entities and meant to stimulate business and foreign investment. On January 24, the Honduran Congress again passed legislation enabling the Model Cities plan to move forward, with a vote of 110-13 with 5 abstentions.
After months of rumors in opposition circles of a forthcoming devaluation, and denials of the rumor by Bolivarian government officials, the Venezuelan bolívar was finally devalued by 47% on February 8th . Even though devaluation has become a fairly regular event, especially since currency controls were put in place in 2003, this devaluation has a potentially far greater significance for the future of the Bolivarian Revolution than the previous economic measures and an undeniably greater immediate impact on the base of support for the Bolivarian government.
In late 2001 the Argentine economy collapsed. People’s bank accounts were frozen and the State offered nothing by way of a solution – the people went out into the streets, banging pots and pans, singing que se vayan todos (they all must go), and with popular power forced out four consecutive governments.
Part of the problem you’re seeing in Ecuador is what contradicts directly with what was codified in the 2008 constitution. This is particularly true in terms of plurinationalism and sumak kawsay (the good life). This is supposed to incorporate alternative visions of development and Correa wants to see those exclusively on the levels of symbolic statements rather than something that will be operationalized. Indigenous movements don’t see this as something symbolic, but something that needs to be operationalized and put into practice.
Two more peasants were assassinated by paramilitary units on Feb. 2 in Honduras. This brings the murder of subsistence farmers and indigenous leaders to over 60 since the Honduran coup d’etat in 2009. Juan Peres and Williams Alvarado were members of the Peasant Movement for the Recovery of the Aguán (MOCRA), an organization that seeks to protect peasant cooperatives from the rash of land grabs being carried out in Honduras.
Colombia remained the country with the largest amount of Pentagon contracts in continental Latin America, with $77 million. A multi-year contract shared by Raytheon and Lockheed for training, equipment and other drug war activities accounted for more than a third of Pentagon contract spending in Colombia. Honduras, which has become a hub for Pentagon operations in Central America, is the site for more than $43 million in non-fuel contracts signed last year.
Darío Aranda, I think, is a bit like Rodolfo Walsh. Like Walsh, Aranda has no place on the editorial staff of newspapers and media companies, even those that still fly the flags of the Open Letter to the Military Junta. He still works closely with campesino and Indigenous communities who resist in defense of their ancestral territories and ways of life. He doesn’t tolerate being enclosed in an editorial office, writing or editing what “reliable” news agency cables tell him to write.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) ended “a phase on the path” of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle and announced the start of its next political steps, which include upcoming meetings (encuentros) in its territory and the explicit selection of those who will accompany future initiatives, that will have as its main objective: “to be in direct contact with the Zapatista support bases in the way that, in my long and humble experience, is the best: as students,” said Subcomandante Marcos.
The doctrine of national security imposed by the United States on Latin America, which fostered the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, is making a comeback in Honduras where a new law is combining military defense of the country with police strategies for maintaining domestic order. “We are back again with old national security concepts dating from the Cold War era in Central America, and the danger is that the former anti-communist rhetoric may be used against the ‘new threats’, such as allegedly criminal youth, dissidents against the regime, social protests or for the imposition of absolute powers,” said sociologist Mirna Flores.
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