The “war against terror” inaugurated by George W. Bush as a response to the September 11 2001 attack is now giving way to a strategy of “containment” of China, the new strategy laid out by the Pentagon to encircle, and eventually stifle the asiatic power, with the objective of maintaining US global supremacy.
In 1994, Manuel Cepeda, a Senator of the Patriotic Union Party in Colombia, was executed by paramilitaries under the command of the state. Since then his son, Iván Cepeda, devotes himself to the fight against impunity by working with the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE).
What is happening in the European Union and the United States today happened a decade ago in Argentina, when it was a hotbed of protest and the streets of major cities were seething with people telling their leaders they had had enough. And then a new story began to be written.
The war in Mexico, often called a “war on drugs,” launched in late 2006, resulted in increased violence and militarization that has spread to municipalities and rural areas all over the country. Since 2008, more than 9,000 people have been murdered in the city of Juarez alone, and massacres against unarmed civilians have taken place across the state. But in some areas, like Madera, it appears the militarization that’s taken place on the pretext of the drug war has worked in favour of the extractive industries.
Brazilian newspaper Folha de São Paulo published a report on Dec. 12 revealing a series of 266 telegrams from the Brazilian embassy in Santiago that unveiled strong economic and diplomatic ties between the nations’ military regimes in the early 1970s. Both Chile and Brazil were involved in the top-secret initiative Operation Condor, which sought to create regional intelligence networks in order to locate and oppress political opponents of the military regimes across the Southern Cone.
Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús, 20, and Jorge Alexis Herrera, 21, paid a high price for taking part in student protests in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero: they were killed when police tried to break up their roadblock. The deaths of the student protesters occurred in the midst of a spate of murders of human rights defenders.
In another event which exposes the reality of Chilean society’s split memory, an homage to former Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) officer Miguel Krassnoff Martchenko was described as an exercise in freedom of expression by mayor of Providencia Christian Labbé, in turn prompting outrage and protests from human rights and activist groups in Chile since its announcement.
Little noticed by the rest of the world, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is cutting a swath through one of the world’s poorest populations, along a stretch of Central America’s Pacific Coast that spans six countries and nearly 700 miles. Its victims are manual laborers, mostly sugarcane workers.
In October, U.S. anti-drug czar and former ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield testified about what he called “Merida Part II,” before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Brownfield highlighted strengthening Mexican institutions and the “rule of law” as well as promoting civil society participation in anti-crime initiatives as key areas of U.S. Mexico cooperation.
The United States is advancing a regional security strategy which apparently is oriented toward the militarization of Central America and the participation of private security contractors in policing, a strategy also being promoted for the region by the Inter American Development Bank (IDB) and former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe.
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