Geography Archives: Americas

  On August 26, the French newspaper Le Monde revealed the existence of a draft UN report on the most serious violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo over an eleven-year period (1993-2003).1  The massive draft report states that after the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s takeover of Rwanda in 1994, it proceeded to […]

For decades Gideon Levy has used the platform provided by the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz to shine a light on the brutal realities of Israel’s occupation.  His journalism, along with that of his colleague Amira Hass, has been an invaluable resource not only for Israeli readers but, through the Ha’aretz website, for international audiences seeking […]

  Patricio Guzmán is a Chilean filmmaker.  The above is a clip from Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary (Dir. Pepita Ferrari, 2009).  The Battle of Chile is available from Icarus Films: <icarusfilms.com/new98/boc.html>.  For more information about Chris Marker, visit <www.chrismarker.org>. | Print  

  John Summa and John Travers, filmmakers, are currently working on The Power of Their Song: The Untold Story of Latin America’s New Song Movement. | Print  

In connection with the release of his memoirs, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has given a number of interviews this week in which he endorses the first-use of military force to stop Iran’s nuclear development.  Blair’s statements on the matter prompted us to reflect on where European policies toward the Islamic Republic are really […]

Neoclassical economic models are based on the assumption that investment is financed from household savings.  Accordingly, capital accumulation will be maximized by policies aimed at increasing household savings rates and capital imports (“foreign savings”).  These models also predict that capital should flow from rich to poor countries, attracted by higher rates of return. However, facts […]

We noticed a small news item, reported from Tehran, which we think deserves more media attention and reflection in the West than it received.  According to the story, Chinese Transport Minister Liu Zhijun is expected to visit Iran Sunday to sign a $2 billion contract to build a 360-mile-long railway linking key Iranian destinations that […]

  Elaine Carey.  Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico.  Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005.  240 pp. $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8263-3545-6. The 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre has been a topic of scholarly inquiry ever since the fateful day when hundreds of Mexican students lost their lives at the hands of […]

7 September 2010 The Reverend Lucius Walker died, this morning, of a massive heart attack in New York at the age of 80, CubaDebate was informed by sources from Pastors for Peace, the organization that he led. Pastors for Peace, organizing US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravans, has systematically broken the US blockade on Cuba, bringing the island […]

  Born in Barajagua, Holguín, Cuba in 1949, Tomás Rafael Rodríguez Zayas (Tomy) became recognized in the universe of Cuban cartoons in the late 1960s. From 1968 he began to work for Juventud Rebelde and soon became part of the golden era of Dedeté, the humor supplement of this newspaper. His work as a cartoonist, […]

  Daniel Branch.  Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.  xx + 250 pp.  $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-11382-3; $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-13090-5. The two related themes in Kenya’s history that have drawn the most debate and interpretations are land and the Mau Mau war.  Daniel Branch’s study […]

Part 1: The German Space of Accumulation The present state of affairs in the Eurozone and in the EU reflects the partition of the European Union into three groups. The first is a group of neomercantilist countries centred on Germany and formed by Holland, Belgium, Austria and Scandinavia.  Their neomercantilism can be defined as a […]

  In your view, does the combat troop withdrawal mean that the mission has been completed successfully? Viewed from all conceivable angles the war must be considered a strategic failure and a humanitarian disaster.  True, the US government, together with its allies primarily the United Kingdom, managed to oust Saddam Hussein who was, by all […]

India’s IT industry does protest too much.  Its latest peeve is that the US has decided to steeply hike, from $2300 to about $4300, the cost of a H-1B visa required for entry into the US of temporary skilled workers from abroad.  The new Border Security Bill passed by the US Senate and signed into […]

  Phillip J. Cooper.  The War against Regulation: From Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush.  Studies in Government and Public Policy Series.  Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.  288 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1681-7. Phillip J. Cooper is an accomplished scholar of the executive branch of the U.S. government and its interaction with the courts. […]

Executive Summary: After nearly six years of record economic growth, the Venezuelan economy went into recession in the first quarter of 2009, shrinking by 3.3 percent that year.  A number of analysts see this as the end of an “oil boom” and the beginning of a long period of recession and stagnation. For example, in […]

Hooman Majd had another interesting piece in Foreign Policy.  His article does something that is very necessary, but which we’ve not had an opportunity to do properly over the past couple of weeks — to take on the stream of recent Western commentary arguing that the Islamic Republic is “unraveling under the weight of economic […]

In a small, crowded theater in New York’s West Village the night of August 8, a group of thirty indigenous women from central Mexico finally got a chance to perform their play before a U.S. audience. The cast, members of the community group Soame Citlalime (“Women of the Star” in Náhuatl), had spent the past […]

“Disaster” doesn’t begin to describe the troubled oil scene in Nigeria.  Last June, in the immediate wake of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the New York Times ran an article exposing a crisis in Nigeria that should have been capable of piquing the conscience of even the most hardened oil barons.  It […]

Over the summer there has been a hot debate about Social Security and the federal budget, especially in relation to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.  It is reasonable to expect that the major players in this debate will do their homework about the issues under consideration.  In order to help them in […]