Geography Archives: Americas

“Mr. President [Santos]: I would like to have you tell me to my face that I am a guerrilla.  None of us are.  We are workers, peasants who try to live as we can.  It’s not easy to live here.  Our crops produce only losses.  We have to sell very cheap and can’t buy things. […]

  The summer of 2012 brought news of dialogues between the government of Colombia and the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) which would begin in November of the same year.  These new conversations are of great importance for the Colombian people and for the continent as a whole.  What is at stake is nothing […]

Dear Daniel: With great satisfaction I just listened to your excellent speeches at the 8th Petrocaribe Summit. It was very just that the venue of the meeting is Nicaragua, a country that was capable of overcoming the artful blow of the empire under the government of one of the most uneducated and cynical frauds selected by the U.S. oligarchy.

More and more people pouring into the streets: “Free pass!”; “A R$3.20 fare is a robbery!”; “No to 3.20!”

But there is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. This movement is totally beautiful. But what matters is: What will change when everything gets back to normal?

Brazilian Youth (Carrying Vinegar) Beginning to Rise Up! “Enough!  Brazil Has Awoken!” Viva Brazilian Democracy! Who Made the Protests Violent?  Answer: Protester Against the Fare Hike Holding a Sign Saying “Nonviolence”; Cop Scratching “Non” and Replacing It by “With” — “With Violence” #NaoEPor20Centavos: It’s Not About the 20-Centavo Hike — “Power to the People!” Rio […]

One of the greatest horrors of the US security and policy establishment is the prospect of terrorists sabotaging critical infrastructure and key resources — the only horror greatest than that is the prospect of turning the infrastructure itself into a weapon of mass destruction.  Imagine a vast network of pipelines and storage units containing highly […]

  When Wisconsin state workers were courageously occupying the state capitol to protest Governor Scott Walker’s attack on their unions’ right to bargain, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka trumpeted a call for solidarity actions throughout the labor movement on April 4, 2011, the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, killed during the Memphis sanitation […]

Speaking about the then dictator of Nicaragua, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly said: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”  Whether or not Roosevelt actually said it in so many words is disputable, but there is no doubt that it — i.e., dictatorship is licensed in […]

João Pedro Stédile, second from left, speaks to the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti.  Photo: Beverly Bell. João Pedro Stédile is an economist, co-founder and co-coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, and leader among Latin American social movements.  He gave the following talk to hundreds of Haitian farmers at the 40th […]

  John Bellamy Foster is best-known as author of Marx’s Ecology (2000; in which he corrects the popular misapprehension that Marx did not ‘get’ environmental limits), and as editor of Monthly Review (monthlyreview.org), the journal founded by Marxist economist Paul Sweezy in the late 1940s.  In his latest book, The Endless Crisis (2012; written with […]

“I think that the freedom that we have . . . is the freedom not to repeat things, it is the freedom to discover what is the path we have to build within our context, our history and culture, our aspirations, our sense of belonging, our ideology, what we love most.” — Mariela Castro Espín […]

Russia, as travelers have noted over the centuries, is immense.  Most of it is far from large bodies of water.  And yet, in a first visit after many years, I came upon some unusual islands right in the heart of the country.  But they were not islands in the geographic sense.  Some were children’s islands. […]

The International Crisis Group (ICG) sells itself as “working to prevent conflict worldwide” but there is one country where their mission looks more like promoting rather than preventing conflict.  Exhibit A is their report on Venezuela, released on Friday. There is a lot wrong with this report — most of it reads like a statement […]

Some 50 to 60 union meat cutters and their supporters turned out on the afternoon of April 6 for a noisy protest against what they said was a lockout by Trade Fair, a chain of nine small supermarkets based in Queens, New York. Standing in a picket line on a busy sidewalk outside a Trade […]

The official death toll from the April collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which housed clothing factories, has now passed 1,100.  How exactly will the staggering costs of that overwhelming tragedy be figured?  Will they count as part of capitalism’s contribution to economic development across Asia, Africa, and Latin America? In capitalism’s […]

“These people who are commonly known as leaders view politics and religion as that crippled, lame and injured man, displaying whom our beggars normally beg for money.  These so-called leaders go about carrying the carcasses of politics and religion on their shoulders, and to simple-minded people who are in the habit of accepting every word […]

More than 100 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are starving themselves to death.  Twenty-three of them are being force-fed.  “They strap you to a chair, tie up your wrists, your legs, your forehead and tightly around the waist,” Fayiz Al-Kandari told his lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard.  Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo for […]

Bombs set off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15 killed three and wounded over 200 people.  The metropolitan area became a virtual war zone.  Officials at every level let loose with doomsday-style retaliatory proclamations.  For some, however, the clamor served to resurrect memories of U.S. terrorism — against Cuba for […]

August 12-21, 2013 While the mainstream media speculates about the future of the Bolivarian Revolution since the passing of Hugo Chavez, for the Venezuelan people, there is no question.  Come learn about the process currently transpiring in Venezuela as the people, reinvigorated by the legacy of Chavez, deepen and further radicalize their struggle in defense […]

Since Marx, we know that what characterizes and differentiates societies is the way in which they organize the production, distribution and use of the material and symbolic resources
they possess. In other words, the mode of production¹ is what defines the material content of the social life of the distinct human territorial collectivities (nations, peoples, communities), within which there can be differentiated the historically specific form in which each of their components develop, and the manner in which various existing modes of production interrelate within the same society.