Geography Archives: Americas

  “Light!  Camera!  Action!“ Gervasio Umpiérrez is a cartoonist based in Montevideo, Uruguay.  This cartoon was featured on the home page of Rebelión on 22 August 2009.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com).

  There is growing anger in Swaziland as it emerges that the media have been forced to censor news that a group of King Mswati III‘s wives have been on another international shopping trip squandering up to E50 million (6 million US dollars) that should belong to ordinary Swazis. When the wives went on a […]

Seven weeks after the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, the divide between the United States and Latin America continues to grow — although you might not get that impression from most mainstream media reports. The strategy of the coup regime is obviously to run out the clock on President Zelaya’s remaining […]

Familia Forty years ago this summer the presence of the Young Lords came into the consciousness of all New Yorkers.   What had once been a gang on the streets of Chicago now was present in New York City.  The Young Lords, no longer a gang, was now a Puerto Rican Revolutionary Nationalist organization fighting for […]

On Friday nearly 100 Latin America scholars and experts sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch urging HRW to speak up about human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime and to conduct its own investigation of these abuses.  The letters’ signers include Honduras experts Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, Latin America experts […]

There has been very little attention in the U.S. press to repression in Honduras under the coup regime.  Hopefully, that will now change: Amnesty International issued a report yesterday documenting “serious ill-treatment by police and military of peaceful protesters” in Honduras, warning that “beatings and mass arrests are being used as a way of punishing […]

A short while ago I dealt with the United States’ plans to impose the absolute superiority of its air force as an instrument of domination on the rest of the world. I mentioned the project that by 2020 they would have more than a thousand latest generation bombers and F-22 and F-35 fighter planes in their fleet of 2500 military aircrafts. In twenty more years, every single one of their war planes will be robot-operated.

[Edited to add: See recommended movie link at bottom of post]

Tariq Ramadan just got purged from not only his position as “integration advisor” to the city of Rotterdam but also his visiting professorship at Erasmus University. — Ed. An Open Letter to My Detractors in the Netherlands Tuesday 18 August 2009 Once again I have come under attack in the Netherlands.  Last May and June, […]

Document of the First ALBA Political Council Meeting, Quito, Ecuador, 9 August 2009 1. We reiterate the terms of the ALBA Extraordinary Presidential Council Proclamation, of June 29, 2009, issued in Managua, Nicaragua, in which the Heads of State demand the safe, immediate, and unconditional return, to his constitutional functions, of the legitimate and constitutional […]

  Lisa Keller. Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.  xvii + 338 pp.  Illustrations.  $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14672-2; (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-51847-5. How do a city’s parks, squares, and boulevards enable democracy, and how does the local state negotiate the sometimes fine line between free […]

Here in America pistols are brandished by upbeat protestors swaggering to the downbeat hustle of what are called “town hall meetings” Their pieces swivel cowboy-style on pink stubby fingers like a blur of chrome hubcaps at a Nascar dragstrip Here, at these “town hall meetings” where the Grand Ole Opry meets the Beltway grim men […]

  Since the coup of 28 June 2009, the world has been focusing on Honduras.  We have already seen images from a country that did not have a history of social movements — at least till now.  So, who are these young people?  Who are the people organizing these marches?  By chance, I was able […]

Doris “Dobby” Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90.  Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights.  The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant […]

  For many years, various American governments have called on Israel to stop the expansion of settlements, but Israel has consistently ignored this demand.  The Obama administration has been the most vocal administration so far in articulation of this demand.  Yet unfortunately a number of American individuals and institutions have provided large quantities of material […]

Our trip to New Orleans gave us the opportunity to visit a unique American city and to speak to survivors of one of the country’s worst natural disasters, Hurricane Katrina. We heard some great stories of hope from Muslim New Orleanians who provided food and water to those, like Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American, who heroically saved people using their personal boats. But it was also from Zeitoun that we heard a different kind of Hurricane Katrina story that left me aghast and ashamed.

The Great Recession is allowing some widely held beliefs about the U.S. economy — which were the source of much evangelism over the last few decades — to run up against a reality check.  This is to be expected, since the United States has been the epicenter of the storm of policy blunders that caused […]

Thank you for all that you have done so far to increase U.S. pressure on the coup regime in Honduras.   While the Obama administration’s previous round of targeted sanctions demonstrated great promise in helping to reverse the coup, the administration has since appeared to back down from its position of active support for the […]

13 August 2009, Washington, D. C. — The Obama administration has an obligation to demand that the de facto regime in Honduras stop ongoing political killings and other human rights abuses, Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said today.  Weisbrot noted that human rights observers and international media have documented the killings […]

The military coup carried out by masked soldiers in the early hours of June 28against the democratically elected President of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was a bandit act with differing messages intended for different audiences. One such audience is the oligarchical groupings throughout the hemisphere, who will be emboldened by Washington’s tacit tolerance of […]

  In the Summer of 1984, under the oversight of U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, I was deported from Honduras with five other Americans for meeting with union representatives who wanted to tell us about the murders and disappearances of their leaders. At the time, the poor nation was known as “the aircraft carrier USS Honduras” […]