Geography Archives: Guatemala

Guatemala’s notoriously corrupt right-wing government banned Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera and her leftist Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP) party from running in the presidential election. International observers warn this is an “electoral coup”.

As the U.S. government’s Summit of the Americas opens in Los Angeles, California, the presidents of Mexico, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala have refused to attend, protesting the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

This is an updated, re-edited version of my 2007 essay written for a Celebration of Ernesto Che Guevara’s life held in New York City in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of his execution, attended by 300 people. —Ike Nahem Che Lives! Che died defending no other interest, no other cause than the cause of the […]

The March 9 debate in Miami between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was the first chance the two candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination had to discuss immigration and its connections to trade and U.S. policy in Latin America.  Unfortunately, neither candidate took advantage of the opportunity. The mainstream “immigration debate” generally avoids mentioning the […]

  The Left upsurge in Latin America appears to be abating.  In October 2015 Jimmy Morales, the conservative candidate in Guatemala, defeated the Left-leaning Sandra Torres in the presidential elections.  On November 22, Mauricio Macri, the conservative presidential candidate in Argentina, defeated Daniel Scioli, his Peronist rival, by a narrow margin, to bring to an […]

  “Venezuela defines the future of the progressive cycle” In your work on South America, you speak of the duality that has characterized the last decade.  What exactly is that duality? Claudio Katz: In my opinion, the so-called progressive cycle of the last decade in South America has been a process resulting from partially successful […]

Early this month in Germany, a few thousand refugees from war-torn Syria and neighboring countries spilled out of a train station and into Munich.  Rather than being tripped by the locals, or thrown inside cargo trucks, or sorted out according to skin color (as per quaint Old World custom), the migrants were actually welcomed by […]

For some in other lands and continents Greece may seem distant and marginal, a few narrow peninsulas and scattered archipelagos jutting out of the sea.  Some may vaguely recall school knowledge about it.  “Didn’t some fellow named Prometheus steal fire from the gods?  Or was it Alexander the Great untying some “Gordian knot”?  Or a […]

Gerald Horne.  The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America.  NYU Press, 2014. In the conventional, celebratory liberal historical narrative about the Founding Fathers, the post-revolutionary persistence of slavery in the United States, along with women’s lack of essential political and legal rights, has long been regarded as […]

Dawn Paley is a Canadian author.  Drug War Capitalism (AK Press, November 2014) is her first book.  We conducted an e-interview as protests grew against police and military policies in Mexico and the U.S.  The drug war on both sides of the border has played no small role in generating such dissent. Seth Sandronsky: Can […]

In a recent Washington Post article entitled “Latin Americans Are Embracing Globalization and Their Former Colonial Masters,” written by a political science professor from the University of Colorado, the author begins with the following sentence: “Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano recently renounced his 1971 classic, Open Veins of Latin America, one of a few books admitted […]

  On March 12 this year, the Public Safety Committee of the Philadelphia City Council held a public hearing to review the practice of detaining undocumented immigrants in what are known as “ICE Holds.”  An ICE Hold, or civil immigration detainer, is a request from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to local police […]

April 16, 2013 New York A delegation of National Lawyers Guild (NLG) election monitors visited polling sites in five Venezuelan states on April 14 and found that the Venezuelan presidential election process was fair, transparent, participatory, and well-organized. With over 78 percent voter turnout, Nicolas Maduro Moros was declared Venezuela’s new president with a 50.66 […]

Part 1: Mexican Workers Win Ownership of Tire Plant With Three-Year Strike “If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.”  When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up — and usually dies. The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and […]

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa‘s idea that we are not “living in an epoch of change” but rather “in a change of epoch” is very much to the point.  There is an obvious worldwide decline of existing imperialisms and historic changes in the correlation of social, class, and nation-state forces.  There have arisen popular movements of […]

People in the United States may not be as rabidly anti-immigrant as we’ve been led to believe. An article posted on the Center for American Progress website in December, “The Public’s View of Immigration,” summarizes five recent U.S. opinion polls.  Authors Philip E. Wolgin and Angela Maria Kelley find that while the media and the […]

Argentinean singer Facundo Cabral, best known for his song “I’m Not from Here, Nor Am I from There,” was murdered this morning on his way to Guatemala’s La Aurora airport after a concert tour of that country. In his 2006 interview with Télam, Cabral said: “People often call me maestro, singer-songwriter, poet, troubadour, minstrel, and […]

In January the government of the United States of America saw fit to seize $4.207 million in funds allocated to Cuba by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for the first quarter of 2011, Cuba has charged.  The UN Fund is a $22 billion a year program that works to […]

The United States is planning to open a new military base in the Islas de la Bahía (Bay Islands) in Honduras, according to a report in the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo this Wednesday. The news emerged after the meeting between Honduran Defense Minister Marlon Pascual and the head of the US Sothern Command Douglas Fraser. […]

  Nik Theodore is Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading theorist of the urban dimensions of neoliberal restructuring.  He has collaborated closely with the Right to the City Alliance, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, and other groups that have been at the […]