Geography Archives: Americas

Our overall assessment is that the conference was an overwhelming success. Over 400 people from many parts of the country and Canada attended, including a bus of 44 — mostly youth — from Connecticut (see breakdown by states below*).  The conference met its main objective, which was to urge united and massive mobilizations in the […]

Seven days ago I wrote about one of the great men in history: Salvador Allende, a man the world remembered with deep emotion and respect on his first centennial. However, no one quivered or even recalled the date of October 24, 1891, when the Dominican despot Rafael Leonidas Trujillo was born, eighteen years before our admired Chilean brother.

President George W. Bush and his neo-con coterie made it a point of pride that their relationship to regimes they did not like was one of toughness, not of soft-soap diplomacy.  In his State of the Union speech in 2002, Bush denounced the “Axis of Evil” — composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — […]

Oil prices rise and rise.  New record on Thursday: a barrel (159 liters) of oil costs more than US$145 for the first time.  In the event of an attack on Iran, prices could really explode.  Yesterday, the Secretary General of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Abdallah Salem El-Badri, warned.  “It would be […]

  Like many third-world countries, Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations.  With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta — including wheat, rice, corn, soy […]

  A historic event worthy of the Guinness Book may have occurred in Washington in the last week of June.  The worst “torture” president that the United States has ever had met the most corrupt and brutal president ever inflicted on the Filipino people.  Grotesque or farcical?  Bush is now credited with the horrendous deaths […]

  Shasta Darlington, CNN Maylin Alonso, TeleSur Broadcast on the occasion of International Day against Homophobia (17 May) in 2008. | | Print

  As you know, there’s a talk of developing the Green Zone.  The Marriott Hotel chain is here, and I too am involved in hospitality.  I’m representing interests that are building a hotel. . . .  Five stars, a casino, gambling, and it’s going to be here in the Green Zone. The sponsors are a […]

In his book entitled Silence of the Poor, French writer Henri Guillemin said that those who were the foundation of the victory of the Revolution of 1789, the urban and rural poor, including women, were excluded from politics by an electoral law giving the right to elect and be elected only to citizens who could […]

  Two members from a rightwing Santa Cruz youth group were arrested outside the Trompillo airport on June 19 with a rifle, telescopic sight, and 300 rounds of ammunition in a purported assassination attempt on President Evo Morales.  In an unprecedented and highly questionable move, the accused were freed the very next day by a […]

Introduction by Richard Fidler The following article, based on a speech given in December 2007 but only recently transcribed and published, is an important statement by a leading member of Evo Morales’ government on the political situation in Bolivia in the wake of the Constituent Assembly’s vote on a draft Political Constitution.  The draft Constitution […]

Tarek personally asked me to review his book, Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State (CM).  With a book being favorably reviewed in the Canadian (and US and UK) media, including the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Huffington Post, the UK Guardian, and the Asper-family owned newspapers (Ottawa Citizen and […]

On June 11 the axe of Nicaragua’s Supreme Electoral Council (CSE) came down on the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS1) and the old historic Conservative Party of Nicaragua (PCN), now a tiny shell of its former self.  The CSE unanimously decided to deregister both parties on the grounds that they had failed to fulfill the requirements […]

“After a dozen town hall meetings, nearly 50 public hearings, and countless one-on-one conversations, it is clear to us that Texans want us to use existing roadways to start building the Texas portion of Interstate 69,” said Texas Transportation Commissioner Ted Houghton (Texas Department of Transportation News Release, June 11, 2008). This news release reflects […]

  It’s a Slippery Slope to War: Ask Your Representative to Oppose H. Con. Res. 362Over the last three weeks 77 House Democrats and 92 Republicans have agreed to cosponsor a new resolution against Iran that demands that President Bush “initiate an international effort” to impose a land, sea, and air blockade on Iran to […]

The high level summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations held in Rome on Food Security ended on June 5th.  The conclusions of the gathering do not indicate a change in the policy trends which have been in force these last years and which have led to the current situation. […]

  In a June 9 New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman tells us that “Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago.  It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.”  He attributes this to Bill Clinton, […]

It would seem there’s no topic worthy of addressing that would not bore our patient readers, after the Round Table program of June 12, which dealt with the new edition of a book published in Bolivia 15 years ago, featuring now a prologue I wrote. During this program, an introduction was also read written at a later date by Evo Morales and a message from the prestigious Argentinean writer Stella Calloni, to be included in an upcoming edition. I had carefully chosen the information I used for that prologue.

  There is always something unsettling about people who say one thing and do another.  There is for one thing the hypocrisy.  Then, there is the uncertainty.  It only takes a few disappointments to sow the seeds of doubt about whether you can ever trust their judgement again or whether you can ever expect them […]

The excavation of fossil fuels was a one-time bonanza: it provided cheap energy that temporarily quadrupled the earth’s carrying capacity in terms of human population.  Instead of an ever tightening immiseration of the working class and overthrow of the capitalist system, as expected by Marx, the one-time gift of fossil fuels led to a standoff […]