Geography Archives: Americas

The political conflict over the Bush administration’s plan for a bailout of the banks, brought about both by differences with the Democrats and even more intensely with rightwing Republicans, makes it highly unlikely that Congress will be able to pass a bailout plan that can stabilize the financial situation along the lines that Secretary of […]

Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s most outspoken and tenacious scholars on the Israel-Palestine conflict, and a fierce critic of the way Israel’s supporters try to wield the memory of anti-Semitism as a baton to beat up on those who criticize the country’s well-documented atrocities. Author of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism […]

Justice for our sister Marcella Sali Grace! Brother and sisters, Our hearts are full of sadness and rage because our sister Sali was brutally raped and murdered 20 minutes from San Jose del Pacifico, and up to now the Oaxacan Attorney General’s Office, as is its custom, is not doing anything despite the fact that […]

On September 10 the U.S. government acknowledged that its Secure Border Initiative (SBI) was behind schedule and over budget.  Promoted in 2005 as a new way to block unauthorized immigration, the $2.7 billion project was supposed to create a 670-mile physical and “virtual” fence by the end of this year along the 2,000-mile border with […]

Friends, Enemies, and “Existential” Threats In the ceaseless and invariably bellicose calls for war (both open and clandestine) against Iran, perhaps one argument invoked by pro-war pundits and politicians stands out and takes pride of place above all others: Iran, it is claimed, “poses an existential threat to the state of Israel.”  It’s certainly been […]

  Treasury Sec. Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout plan now has a name: the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.  But even as Capitol Hill debates TARP, few seem to have noticed the proposal item that puts taxpayers on the hook for future bailouts.  It’s in Section 6, and the key phrase is this: “The […]

Around 35,000 Cuban health specialists are providing free or paid services in the world. Furthermore, some young doctors from countries such as Haiti and others among the poorest of the Third World are working in their homelands thanks to the assistance provided by Cuba. In Latin America, our main contribution has been the ophthalmologic surgeries that will help to preserve the eyesight of millions of people. In addition, we are assisting in the training of tens of thousands of young medical students from other nations, both in and outside Cuba.

Faced with the failure of the financial sector and the possible collapse of the economic system, Republicans and Democrats are working together feverishly to come up with a plan and find the funds to save the American financial system.  The Congress that has been unable to provide adequate funding to health, education, housing, public transportation, […]

Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, has adopted the rhetoric of change which has captured the imagination of many Americans and non-Americans around the world. But when it comes to the foreign policy, there are enough reasons to remain sceptical.  Will he adopt a foreign policy with objectives which differ from those of George Bush, […]

  In a statement drafted in scrupulously selected terms and circulated with exceptional discretion, the so-called U.S. Aid for International Development (USAID) has publicly confessed to having squandered taxpayers’ money in its dirty war on Cuba. It did so in the face of warnings by certain scandalized congress members and the embarrassing revelations of audits […]

  The financial sector meltdown spelt an opportunity for the system to reinvent itself. Will the financial sector meltdown in the developed economies lead to a rethink about the path the global economy has traversed in the last few decades? Simply put, will it curb the primacy of finance, will it rein in the penchant […]

Relative calm has returned to Bolivia following a three-week offensive of violence and terrorism launched by the US-backed right-wing opposition denounced by Bolivian President Evo Morales as a “civil coup.” This campaign of terror, centered on the four resource-rich eastern departments (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, and Tarija) known as the media luna (half moon), was […]

  On September 18, 2008 Human Rights Watch released a report entitled “Venezuela: Rights Suffer Under Chávez.”   The report contains biases and inaccuracies, and wrongly purports that human rights guarantees are lacking or not properly enforced in Venezuela.  In addition, while criticizing Venezuela’s human rights in the political context, it fails to mention the […]

Elegy is a fitting title for Spanish director Isabel Coixet’s recent adaptation of the short novel by Philip Roth, The Dying Animal.  It is a pensive lament for its principal character, who sadly is never fully realized in this work. The film follows the life of sixty-something David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley), a professor and critic […]

The news agencies are reporting that Chávez will visit Cuba tomorrow on his way to China, Russia, Belarus, France and Portugal.

Watching Venezolana de Televisión I learned that he was signing energy investment agreements in Caracas with important businessmen from Japan, Russia, Malaysia, Italy, Argentina, the United States, Qatar, and Portugal. The deals are for the extraction of gas from one of the reserves located in an area of 500,000 square kilometers of territorial waters.

A new crisis of capitalism, in the style of 1929.  The theories of casino capitalism are confirmed.  The US government contradicts itself again and heavily intervenes, demonstrating that its confidence in the market isn’t as great as its propaganda displayed.  Neoliberal capitalism spills its guts, and the theories of the Left — Keynesian or anti-capitalist […]

Yesterday we were talking about the Financial Ike that is driving the empire mad. America can’t find a way of reconciling consumerism with unjust wars, defence spending and the massive investments in the arms industry, which kill peoples, rather than feeding them or otherwise satisfying their most basic needs.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the agreement on September 8 between Nicolas Sarkozy of France in his capacity as current president of the European Union (EU) and Dmitri Medvedev, President of Russia.  It marks the definitive end of Act I of the new world geopolitical order. What was decided?  The […]

If the United States manages to unleash a civil war in Bolivia, the plan is to extend it throughout the region and to resort to massive and extensive use of violence to regain ground, said Luis Bilbao, director of Revista América XXI, in an interview with Ernesto Villegas (via satellite) for the VTV program “Mediodías […]

Reading the cables will suffice.

In the reflection I wrote the day before yesterday I stated that Cuba would not accept any donation from the government that is blockading us and that, in the Verbal Note handed over to the U.S. Interests Section, we had requested authorization so that U.S. companies could sell us construction materials; that same Note made no reference whatsoever to foodstuffs. There was an additional request for trade in those materials to take place under normal conditions, including credits, something that is only logical considering that, for eight years, our country has been paying in cash for the few commodities that U.S. companies are authorized to export to Cuba.