Geography Archives: Latin America

Cuba solidarity activists rallied in Bogota’s Policarpo district on January 26 to celebrate Cuban national hero José Martí’s 161st birthday.  Martí, champion of “Our America” — lands south of the Rio Grande River — launched an anti-imperialist movement that persists in Cuba more than a century later.  Colombian revolutionary struggle mirrors that durability. U.S intransigence […]

“Here I would like to talk especially about the documentaries that we have produced about the participation of people in communities and how to produce videos for educating grassroots community leaders who in general do not have any formal education but are interested in working in communities.” — Marta Harnecker English Español Marta Harnecker is […]

If regular armies are generally a man’s world, guerrillas and insurgent forces are just the contrary.  There women have always had a central role.  Think of Agustina of Aragon, Olga Benário, Tania Bunke, Maria Grajales, and Celia Sánchez, or even (stretching a bit) the legendary Amazons.  It is not for nothing that Liberté — the […]

This article reviews the background and the implications of two transitions in Brazil: the political transition from a military regime (1964-85) to democracy (1985-present), and the economic transition from import-substituting industrialization (ISI, 1930-80) to neoliberalism (1990-present). It subsequently examines how neoliberal economic policies were implemented in a democracy, under the centre-right administrations led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-98, 1998-2002), and the centre-left administrations led by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula, 2003-06, 2007-10) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-present). The article concludes with a reflection about the limitations of these policies and of neoliberal democracy more generally.

Mr. István Mészáros, you are coming to visit Brazil to talk about György Lukács.  As a profound expert of the work of the philosopher, how do you evaluate the importance of his ideas today? György Lukács was my great teacher and friend for twenty-two years, until he died in 1971.  He started publishing as a […]

  Christmas has just gone by, and we’ll soon be ringing in the New Year, a time when a “profound feeling of consolation and peace” overwhelms the faithful.  But the buzz, created by Pope Francis’ “apostolic exhortation”, Evangelii Gaudium (EG, translated as “The Joy of the Gospel”), issued in late November, and the subsequent clarificatory […]

  Samuel Grove [SG]: For a while now you’ve been working on and defending the old idea of ‘the will of the people’, and you’ve described it in terms of a ‘dialectical voluntarism’; what do you mean by this? Peter Hallward [PH]: I’m not stuck on the terminology, and I’m leery of the way these […]

Steve da Silva (SD): Over the last decade you have emerged as a leading thinker in synthesizing radical ecology with the Marxist tradition.  From Marx’s Ecology (2000) to The Ecological Rift (2010) and everything in between, you’ve carried out the much needed intellectual work of recovering the overlooked ecological content of Marx’s original thought, presenting […]

It has become commonplace to observe that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has been re-making the symbols and practices of the Canadian state.  Canada, in this view, was once the social democratic heartland of North America.  But under Harper, Canada has been transformed into a hyper-regime of neoliberal market fundamentalism.  Nowhere, it is argued, […]

John Bellamy Foster: My talk is called “The Epochal Crisis.”  The term “epochal crisis” was introduced by Jason Moore to deal with periods in which economic and ecological crises intersect or merge.  We are certainly in the greatest epochal crisis in the history of the world. . . .  Now, we can also talk about […]

Introduction The 2008 report of the Competition Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on the construction sector found that “[u]nfortunately the construction industry has tended to suffer from cartel activity, as shown by the spate of well-publicized recent matters around the world.”  There were 19 countries included in this OECD roundtable, […]

Arnold August.  Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion.  NY: Palgrave Macmillan / Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing / London: ZED Books, 2013.  For full information: . Arnold August has written an important book on the developing participatory democracy and people’s empowerment in those ALBA countries that form the bulwark of 21st century socialism and […]

On September 18, 2013, a press release issued by the Ad Hoc Committee Against the Militarization of CUNY stated: “Six students were arrested in a brutal, unprovoked police attack during a peaceful protest by the City University of New York’s students and faculty against CUNY’s appointment of former CIA chief ex-General David Petraeus.  Students were […]

The divide in Colombia between poverty-stricken rural masses and land-hungry ruling elements is famous for leading to serious conflict.  Farmers, agricultural workers, truckers, and traditional miners revived that pattern on August 19 as they launched a nationwide agrarian strike.  Government repression, true to form, was not lacking. Some farmers gain reasonable livelihoods from sales of […]

Consumers are ultimately the ones responsible for dangerous conditions in garment assembly plants in the Global South, Hong Kong-based business executive Bruce Rockowitz told the New York Times recently.  The problem is that improved safety would raise the price of clothing, according to Rockowitz, who heads Li & Fung Limited, a sourcing company that hooks […]

The following is an interview of me (MDY) conducted by Cedric Muhammad (CM), who is an aide to the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, the National Representative of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam.  An abbreviated version of the interview appears in The Final Call, the Nation of Islam’s newspaper (available at www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/Business_amp_Money_12/article_100637.shtml). […]

Upon the release of the Indian edition of Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker’s José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology (Kharagpur: Cornerstone Publications, 2013; originally New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), Vanden is in India on a lecture tour to spread the word about the ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui.  On this occasion, we are publishing […]

  CJP: What began as a financial crisis in 2007 has become one of the biggest unemployment crises in the advanced capitalist world.  Could this perhaps mean that the crisis of 2007-08 was not actually caused by finance itself but had its underlying causes in the real economy? JBF: No one doubts that it was […]

“Mr. President [Santos]: I would like to have you tell me to my face that I am a guerrilla.  None of us are.  We are workers, peasants who try to live as we can.  It’s not easy to live here.  Our crops produce only losses.  We have to sell very cheap and can’t buy things. […]

João Pedro Stédile, second from left, speaks to the Peasant Movement of Papay in Haiti.  Photo: Beverly Bell. João Pedro Stédile is an economist, co-founder and co-coordinator of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) of Brazil, and leader among Latin American social movements.  He gave the following talk to hundreds of Haitian farmers at the 40th […]