Judging by the relative disinterest – in both the mainstream and left media in North America – towards the situation in Honduras, you would think that the crisis in this country was over. Yet, almost everyone I have talked to in my most recent stay here has told me that the situation is grave; twice in one week alone, I was sitting with an activist in the movement when they received news of the assassination of one of their compañeros.
On the morning of Monday, September 17, employees of the San Rafael Mining Company, accompanied by private security agents with anti-riot equipment, attack dogs, tear-gas cannons and rubber bullet guns, and escorted by the National Civil Police, turned up in Morales, Mataquescuintla, to connect high voltage electrical wires to the San Rafael mining site.
Ariel Dorfman’s Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (HMH Books, 2011) is an eloquent memoir which fluctuates between reflections on death and exile – the meaning of not having died next to Chilean President Allende during the 1973 military coup, and the consequences of Dorfman’s own exile, a decision enforced by Allende’s advisors and which very possibly saved his life from the deadly machinery of the Pinochet dictatorship, but which has assailed Dorfman with a tenacious need to question his own role and actions within that particular era of Chilean history.
Tensions are mounting in the indigenous Naso territory in Bocas del Toro province, western Panama, where protestors have blocked access to the Bonyic Hydroelectric project, a 30MW dam currently under construction on the banks of the Bonyic river. The Naso are one of Panama’s most marginalized indigenous groups, currently numbering approximately 4000. Their populations are concentrated in eleven different communities on the forested banks of the Rio Teribe, which they call Tjer’di (Grandmother Water) – a vital source of material and spiritual sustenance.
In an extraordinary paper released last week, former US Ambassador to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, outlined a range of military, financial, and diplomatic measures that the US should be prepared to take against the Chavez government after the coming elections on October 7th.
“Paul Romer’s propaganda talks about building Charter Cities in uninhabited places. Unfortunately, in Honduras they are trying to dispossess the Garífuna people of half of our territory in order to create the RED (Special Development Region). The level of disinformation and violence that exists in this country reveals that multiple human rights violations will be caused by the establishment of a neocolonial project in the 21st century.”
On July 14-15 the first ever International People’s Health Tribunal was held in the town of San Miguel Ixtahuacán in Guatemala’s Western highlands. The tribunal was organized to judge Canadian mining company Goldcorp Inc. for […]
As with the water, so too “this land is heavily contaminated,” sighs Father Lorenzo, the priest from the nearby city of Santa Rosa de Lima. In the words of a local man whose father worked for Wisconsin-based Commerce Group: large-scale mining involved “making a pact with the devil.”
Mexican activists winding down a month-long U.S. tour warned Tuesday that guns licensed in the United States were playing a massive part in gang- and drug cartel-related violence in Mexico. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has confirmed that approximately 70 percent of the guns being used and recovered in the Mexican drug war are of U.S origin.
The false notion that the state and drug traffickers are oppositional forces is firmly dispelled in Drug War Mexico, which draws on numerous examples to prove cooperation and at the very least complicity between the political and business class and the so-called underworld. They go on to document how narcotics trafficking must be understood as an “integral component” in Mexico’s economic transformation towards neoliberalism.
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