Exactly one week before our July 1 visit, police entered Rigores and at gunpoint burned the homes of 135 families, killed their animals, bulldozed their orchards, the school, and two churches. Six months later all but four families remain on their land. They have rebuilt their houses, although now from branches and mud wattle where before stood larger block or poured cement homes.
Ollanta Humala’s first hundred and fifty days in office as President of Peru have produced a “political massacre,” leaving those who built him as a candidate, wrote his speeches, and paid for his electoral campaign in the streets. His refusal to live up to his campaign promises, and dismissal of environmental complaints of citizens living in communities attacked by mining, leave the population who elected him with little option but to take to the streets again.
Surrounding the November 13 elections in Michoacán, one mayor was shot dead, fifty candidates from several parties stepped down due to threats, an indigenous community boycotted the election and instituted their own electoral processes, and an entire city’s police force resigned. In the last five years, Michoacán has seen some of the worst gang violence in the country outside of the border region and has been heavily militarized. Both institutionalized political pressure and “narco-influence” have continue to call in to question the possibility of free and fair elections in Mexico.
Chile’s supreme court of appeals has temporarily suspended the exile sentence imposed upon an ex-militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR). Accused of involvement in the killing of former Santiago mayor Carol Urzúa Ibáñez, Hugo Marchant and his family were arrested and tortured by Centro Nacional de Intelligencia (CNI) agents.
On December 5, 2011, representatives from Mexico, Colombia and the countries of Central American attended the 13th Summit of the Tuxtla Mechanism for Dialogue and Coordination in Merida, Mexico. The summit’s main purpose was to discuss the progress of different initiatives included in the Mesoamerica Project’s framework, which is the new version of the Plan Puebla-Panama (PPP).
The U.S.military approach to undocumented immigrants has moved further south – to a new military academy in Panama. The new school, which Panama announced in early December, will bring together U.S. and Colombian trainers to train Central American police units in border patrol, countering drug traffic, and “combatting undocumented persons.”
Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades. This video follows Chile’s student protest movement and examines the underlying issues driving the anger. […]
Trampling out the Vintage explains better than any other book how the UFW under Chavez’s leadership became in the 1960s and 1970s one of the most remarkable and successful unions in U.S. history but then crashed and burned so breathtakingly fast that by the end of the 1980s it had pretty much disappeared from the fields.
“We need to be the ones to provide the answers to the questions of our times, because we are the main victims of the voracious policies of capitalism,” says Alexis Jiménez, a 23-year-old ethnologist who has spent the last two months camping out in front of the Mexico City Stock Exchange. […]
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