Geography Archives: Americas

“What’s the rationale for allowing Chavez to govern by decree?”  Why such a “precipitous approach”?  As the apparent resident apologist (or, let’s just say, on-site interpreter) for the Bolivarian Revolution, I get questions like this regularly from friends who don’t know much about Venezuela but do know what they don’t like (from reading the always […]

Le 25 janvier 2007 se tenait, à Paris, la Conférence internationale de soutien au Liban, dite « Paris III », convoquée et présidée par Jacques Chirac. Etaient réunis les représentants de trente-six pays, notamment la secrétaire d’Etat américaine Condolezza Rice, et de quatorze institutions internationales dont le nouveau secrétaire général des Nations Unies Ban Ki-Moon, […]

Veterans, community groups, and campus activists organized an action of solidarity to make the University of Oregon the second school in the nation to visually represent the Iraq death toll.  Two hundred volunteers placed 112,000 white flags around school property, with each flag representing 6 Iraqi lives destroyed during the US occupation.  3,000 red flags […]

Heavily-armed federal agents stormed six Swift meatpacking plants last month and rounded up nearly 1,300 immigrant workers in one of the largest workplace raids in U.S. history.  The raids represented the climax of a year in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ratcheted up its workplace operations. ICE claims that it’s tripled its workplace raids […]

  The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians.  Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire […]

When I was a teenager apprenticing at being a trade unionist and a left winger both, two of my favorite books were Labor’s Untold Story and History of the Great American Fortunes.  I recommend them to any readers desiring a review of our own history as working people here in the United States.  Both are […]

Evo Morales climbed into his presidential jeep, ducking a barrage of sticks, debris and insults thrown from members of right wing civic groups in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.  Cameramen and livid activists chased him until police filled the streets with tear gas.  Bolivia’s first indigenous president, a former coca grower and self-described anti-imperialist, was not welcome […]

En su vehemente proceso al islam y al estatus de inferioridad legal y de sumisión de la mujer que prevalece en la mayoría de países musulmanes, Telima Nesreen, Ayaam Hirsi Ali y otras emancipadas de su credo religioso han evocado y evocan repetidas veces el nombre del autor de Cándido: “Permitidnos un Voltaire . . […]

A chain of events triggered by the passage of a new agrarian reform law, part of Bolivian president Evo Morales’ “agrarian revolution,” has brought to sharp relief the drive by the right-wing opposition to overthrow Morales’ government, even if it means pushing Bolivia into civil war. On November 28, in front of thousands of cheering […]

Recientemente, el presidente de Brasil, Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, fue homenajeado por la revista Istoé, que lo eligió Brasileiro do Ano. Significativamente, la revista entregó otras distinciones: IstoÉ Dinheiro e IstoÉ Gente, que puestos en su propio contexto podrían significar dos premios redundantes. El texto de AFP, repetido por una docena de diarios del […]

When Colonel Harry Summers told a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that “[y]ou know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” the reply was: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.1 News stories surrounding the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proclaimed the arrival of a long-promised “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), a […]

“We cannot admit rivals in the East or even the central parts of Africa . . . to a considerable extent, if not entirely, we must be prepared to apply a sort of Munro [sic] doctrine to much of Africa.” — Lord Carnarvon1 The original Monroe Doctrine initiated in 1824 prevented European interference in the […]

  G.M.S.: Here in Tucson, Arizona, 70 miles from the border, we are feeling the effects of President Bush’s deployment of National Guard troops at the U.S. border.  The first hundreds arrived last summer, and 2,500 are expected to be in our “Tucson Sector” by August.  Moreover, the Border Patrol is to grow from 12,400 […]

The recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that paralyzed Swift and Company across the heartland of America were part of Endgame, a massive immigration enforcement operation launched by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003.  Ultimately, it promises to be the biggest police operation in U.S. history.  The stated objective of Endgame is […]

Así como en teología el mismo Cristo sirve para justificar la acumulación de capitales o para suprimir al prójimo en nombre del amor, así también la historia de los oprimidos sirve para crear mitos e ideoléxicos incuestionables, a la medida del poder de turno: el patriotismo, la libertad, la salvación del mundo,nuestro derecho de aplastar […]

When supporters of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez rallied in the Teresa Carrena theatre in Caracas to celebrate their presidential election victory on December 15, 2006, “there were cheers in the back half of the theatre,” writes Michael Lebowitz, “but few in the high-priced seats.” This was not because Chávez spoke of going forward to socialism […]

Romanticized, demonized, celebrated, denounced — among activists in the United States and Canada, academia is all of these things. It is a gate-keeping institution that shapes and is shaped by relations of power and privilege. It is a site of intense struggle: those who are structurally excluded battle for access, while those who study there fight for affordable and relevant education, and those who work there demand dignity, respect, and living wages. It is a place both where people develop radical politics and transformative visions and where people seclude themselves in insular, disconnected ivory towers. These contradictions are stark. Yet radicals have tried to make use of the academy. Since the 1960s, in particular, graduate school has become an attractive pathway for many activists, but also often an isolating and depoliticizing one. This is still true today, as radicals active in a variety of movements are choosing to go to grad school.

Several weeks ago, with much media fanfare, the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Committee submitted to President George W. Bush its long-awaited, bipartisan report on the U.S. war in Iraq.  On balance, the report provided Bush with a face-saving strategy for pulling out all U.S. combat forces by the beginning of 2008.  The Baker-Hamilton report favors an […]

February 17, 2007 New School New York City All welcome! SDSers at the New School, led by Patrick Korte, will be hosting and joining in the events of February 17, an all-day conference to confirm a sister organization for the revived Students for a Democratic Society: the Movement for a Democratic Society.  The program is […]

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa are not names familiar to most Americans.  The longest-serving political prisoners in the United States, these two former Black Panthers have spent more than thirty-five years behind bars for a crime they did not commit — the 1970 murder of Omaha, Nebraska, police officer Larry Minard. The American media […]