Geography Archives: Americas

  “Someday coal’s gonna run out.  And we’re going to have to have jobs, we’re going to have to have energy, when that happens.  So, why not start now?” — Lorelei Scarbro, Coal River Mountain Wind Project Produced by the New York Times.  See, also, Tom Zeller, Jr., “A Battle in Mining Country Pits Coal […]

Recent scenes of roadblocks, strikes, and even the dynamiting of a vice-minister’s home in the Bolivian department (administrative district) of Potosi, reminiscent of the days of previous neoliberal governments, have left many asking themselves what is really going on in the “new” Bolivia of indigenous President Evo Morales. Since July 29, the city of Potosi, […]

Like Gerald Caplan’s hostile “review” of our book, The Politics of Genocide, Adam Jones’s aggressive attack on our response to Caplan can be explained in significant part by Jones’s deep commitment to an establishment narrative on the Rwandan genocide that we believe to be false — one that misallocates the main responsibility for that still […]

As we anticipated, Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in The Atlantic, “The Point of No Return,” laying out the neoconservative case for attacking Iran, is attracting a lot of attention and comment.  We are pleased that, as of this afternoon, our response to Goldberg is the top-ranked “Most Commented” piece on the Foreign Policy website and the […]

  In the wake of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the public and the media have turned their attention to some of the subsidies provided through the tax code to BP, the corporation that leased the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon drilling platform.1  The truth is that oil and gas companies have for […]

The second part of Fidel’s review of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s book The Mafia That Has Taken Over Mexico…and 2012. “On March 12, 2004, we learned from INTERPOL that a citizen of Argentine origin, naturalized in Mexico, was wanted in a case of illicit operations.

The relevant investigations confirmed that he had entered the country on February 27 of that same year in a private plane together with another person and was staying in a legally-registered rented house.

He was arrested on the 30th of that same month of March.

On the 31st, the Mexican Foreign Ministry presented Cuba’s MINREX with an extradition application for Carlos Ahumada Kurtz, given an order to apprehend this individual for his proven participation in a nonspecific criminal fraud.”

Studying the American recipes for the war on drugs, Felipe Calderón pours more military police into the cauldron of Ciudad Juárez. Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  | Print

No one should be surprised when The Economist or another controlled opinion source misrepresents tensions in the Persian Gulf as religious rivalry while overlooking decades of U.S. and Israeli success in stoking them for imperial gain.  The so-called mainstream press typically repeats unsubstantiated charges to pretend that Arab client states of Washington buy tens of […]

  Eyeing the United States Fourth Fleet from Costa Rica: “They say they came here to consume, I mean, combat, drugs.” Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 12 August 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | Print  

Fidel’s reviews Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s book The Mafia That Has Taken Over Mexico…and 2012. “There would be no form or words of describing my impressions like a certain Mexican has done who, no wonder, is the person with the greatest authority to speak of the tragedy of that country, as he was the elected mayor of Mexico’s most important electoral district, that of Mexico City, capital of the Republic, and in the 2006 elections was the candidate of the “Coalition for the Good of All.”

He stood during the elections and won a majority of votes against the PAN candidate. But the empire would not allow him to assume the mandate.

Like other political leaders, I knew how Washington had drawn up the ideas of the “neoliberalism” that it sold to the countries of Latin America and the rest of the Third World as the embodiment of political democracy and economic development, but I never had such a clear idea of the way in which the empire used this doctrine to destroy and devour the wealth of such an important country, rich in natural resources and the home of an heroic people who possessed their own culture before the pre-Christian era, more than 2,000 years ago.”

  The best thing is to ignore the parameters of discussion that are being presented to you, and to shift those parameters. . . . That is the heart of the struggle for us in the United States where the story is already framed, and they are just trying to discuss things within the parameters. […]

  “Artists struggling with the legacy of Agent Orange were invited to exhibit their work at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City.  Nguyen Dinh Trung and Le Thi Be Nga are two of 140 artists who have learned to overcome their own disabilities and are taking their lives into their own hands […]

There is an old saying:  “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  Many of the same writers, thinkers, political actors, and organizations that persuaded the American people and others to support invading Iraq in 2003 are now working to build public support for the United States to initiate a war […]

The ex-CIA officers Phil Giraldi and Larry Johnson; W. Patrick Lang from U.S. Military Intelligence and the U.S. Army Special Forces; Ray McGovern, from Naval Intelligence and the CIA; and other former senior officers with many years of service, are right to warn Obama that the Israeli prime minister has plans for a surprise attack with the idea of forcing the United States into the war on Iran.

Campaigning for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, Senator Barack Obama said: “I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” But as Andrew Bacevich notes in his new book, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, as President, Barack […]

We have argued for some time that the policy debate about Iran here in the United States is distorted by a number of “myths” — myths about the Islamic Republic, its foreign policy, and its domestic politics.  One of the more dangerous myths currently affecting America’s Iran debate is the proposition that, through concerted diplomatic […]

Yes, in the strange but true category, we have a columnist with a major national newspaper worrying that population growth in the United States could slow or even reverse.  Yes, I have the same fear every time I push my way into the metro at the rush hour or get caught in a huge traffic […]

  Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir, directed by Max Cacopardo, 1967.  Director First Run/ Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 1967.  Video and DVD, 60 mins., b/w. A “time capsule” was how Simone de Beauvoir described Max Cacopardo’s documentary about her and Sartre, made for Canadian television in 1967 and re-issued in 2005.  She was certainly […]

The government of Hungary has taken on a lot of powerful interests in the last couple of months, and so far appears to be winning — despite provoking outrage from “everybody who’s anybody.” “The IMF should hold the line,” shouted the Financial Times in an editorial the day after Hungary sent the IMF packing in […]

To be honest,
I don’t remember
What I’ve come here for
Surely, it must have been an important reason
One doesn’t just make a vagabond of oneself for no reason
When I remember I will finish this poem. . .