“The people see me as the President. The coup leader Franco has perhaps formal control over the army and police, but that does not mean that he can control the population. And basically we believe that the people are sovereign to decide who should be president.” – Fernando Lugo
Impunity and split memory in Chile were highlighted on June 10, 2012 with the screening of Documental Pinochet at Teatro Caupolican.
What lies behind today’s headlines, political fights and struggles for justice in Paraguay is a conflict over access to land; land is power and money for the elites, survival and dignity for the poor, and has been at the center of major political and social battles in Paraguay for decades. In order to understand the crisis in post-coup Paraguay it’s necessary to grasp the political weight of the nation’s soil.
In both the United States and Canada there have been sustained grassroots efforts to spotlight the unjust mass incarceration and criminalization of poor people, and especially poor people of color, for drug-related arrests. But there has been too little analysis about the reasons behind and mechanisms of this war, and its economic impact on Mexico and beyond.
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.
The new book “The Drug War in Mexico: Politics, Violence and Neo-Liberalism in the New Narco-Economy,” looks beyond the clichés to examine the causes of the violence associated with illegal drugs trafficking in Mexico. The Latin America Bureau talked to one of its authors, Peter Watt.
After Domitila Chungara died in Cochabamba on March 13 of this year, three days of national mourning were decreed, honoring her heroic life of struggle on behalf of the working class and of women. Married to a miner, she organized other women in mining communities to struggle for justice and for better conditions of life. She was jailed, tortured, and driven into exile; she is most famous for joining four other women in leading a hunger strike that began in 1977 and finally brought down the Banzer dictatorship in 1978.
After Domitila Chungara died in Cochabamba on March 13 of this year, three days of national mourning were decreed, honoring her heroic life of struggle on behalf of the working class and of women. Married to a miner, she organized other women in mining communities to struggle for justice and for better conditions of life. She was jailed, tortured, and driven into exile; she is most famous for joining four other women in leading a hunger strike that began in 1977 and finally brought down the Banzer dictatorship in 1978.
As the conflict over educational reforms in Guatemala’s escuelas normales rages on, police violently evicted student protesters on July 2 from their occupation at Industry Park and various schools throughout Guatemala City, in an ongoing campaign to repress the movement. In the morning, reports described that four police squads detained up to eight students, while 12 more were sent to the hospital. Allegations of sexual aggression toward young female protesters also circulated via independent media outlets.
“I am in charge of Haiti!” one excited former soldier in his fifties exclaims. The others laugh on cue, one of them holding a handgun casually by his side. Swinging around to pose for the camera, an older man in fatigues carelessly waves the barrel of his machine gun past me at chest height. Two hours north of Port-au-Prince, in the town of Saint-Marc, we’ve received our first introduction to the 3,000-strong band of military enthusiasts dubbed Haiti’s “rogue” army.
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