Geography Archives: Latin America

The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela communicated by telephone with his brother, the President of the Syrian Arab Republic, Bashar al-Assad, in order to convey to him a personal greeting full of affection and hope at a moment when the imperialist forces are unleashing violence against the Syrian people. President Hugo Chávez received […]

President Obama’s speech to the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference on Sunday predictably offered lots of “red meat” for pro-Israel constituencies.  But, in heavily veiled language, the President also made an enormously important point about the evolving character of international relations in the 21st century and what that means for the United […]

13 May 2011 Tonight, the transnational delegation from the Knowledge Liberation Front (KLF) reunited in Tunis to begin the Liberation Without Borders Tour.  This delegation is a project of activist research that was initiated at a meeting in Paris last February.  It aims to reinforce the relations with the Tunisian movement activists that were forged […]

John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York.  The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth.  Monthly Review Press, 2010.  544 pages. Climate change is often called the greatest environment threat facing humanity.  The threat is very real.  Unless we cut carbon pollution fast, runaway climate change will worsen existing environmental and social problems, and […]

On behalf of the American University Anthropology department, I am deeply honored to welcome you all to AU, and to the Latin American Solidarity Coalition’s “Conference to Build a Stronger Movement to End US Militarism and the Militarization of Latin America.” It’s exciting personally to be involved in such an important event — after all, demilitarization of the Americas is now more important than ever — and I sincerely hope that we can continue this relationship and work to increase AU’s involvement with the event in the years to come, not only because it would save us money on the facility fees, but more importantly, because there is a deep thirst among AU students to become more engaged in this kind of solidarity work and because, I believe, the AU community can contribute to it in important ways. This conference is a perfect fit with all of the best aspects of this university, and those aspects — the dedication to community involvement, to social action and public intellectualism — always need reinforcing.

Executive Summary: This paper is the third installment in a series (the first and second editions were in 2001 and 2005) that traces a long-term growth failure in most of the world’s countries.  For the vast majority of the world’s low- and middle-income countries, there was a sharp slowdown in economic growth for the two […]

March 2011 was marked by the worst repression seen against the people of Honduras since the June 2009 military coup.  The repression came in response to massive protests against an all-out final push by the Pepe Lobo regime to essentially privatize Honduras’ public education system while destroying teachers’ independence, politicizing schools, slashing salaries in half, […]

A declaration by the Ecuadorian government that U.S. Ambassador Heather Hodges is “persona non grata” and must leave Ecuador as soon as possible should not come as a surprise, Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said.  Weisbrot noted that the expulsion follows recent troubling revelations in cables released by Wikileaks […]

The Empire admits: without Al-Jazeera, they could not have bombed Libya. How did Al-Jazeera, once dubbed the ‘terror network’ by some and whose staff were martyred by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, end up becoming the media war propagandist for yet another Western war against a small state of the Global South, Libya?  We […]

Fidel Castro was right.  The West was planning an attack on a sovereign third world nation imminently: Libya.  Nothing like a good old war against brown and black people in Libya by the West to remind oneself of what Western civilisation is all about.  Many of us who have been politically active since the 1990s […]

When I was growing up, several decades ago, middle-class society in India was always a little delayed in catching on to Western fashions whether in music or dress or in other aspects.  The past decades of globalisation seemed to have changed all that.  Modern communications technology has ensured that at least the upper income deciles […]

Bolivian, Ecuadoran, and Cuban Foreign Ministers David Choquehuanca, Ricardo Patiño and Bruno Rodríguez, and Nicaraguan Vice Minister of Economic Relations and External Cooperation Valdrack Jaentschke, all say that their governments support Venezuela’s initiative to create an international commission to seek a negotiated solution to the internal conflict in Libya. The officials made their position public […]

As everyone knows, Muammar Gaddafi is an authoritarian dictator.  Authoritarian dictators are a dime a dozen in world history, though, so that is not what would distinguish him from the rest of his kind in history books.  What might make him stand out is this: in the twilight of his autocratic career, Gaddafi had become […]

  On Al Jazeera, Dr. Azmi Bishara said that the violence unleashed in Libya against the Libyan people is beyond belief — indicative of desperation on the part of the political order — or rather “disorder” — in Libya, attempting to put a quick end to the uprising before escalation, as the situation is a […]

The Trial is a Documentary by Rolando Almirante, narrated by Danny Glover and presented by ICAIC and Telesur. You can view the entire documentary below and read articles by Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada about the Cuban 5.

  “The epicenter of the struggle for the public university in Latin America is Puerto Rico.” — José Carlos Luque Brazán, professor and researcher of political science and urban planning at the Autonomous University, Mexico City1 The social conflict taking place at the University of Puerto Rico is polarizing this island to such an extent […]

In 1915 the U.S. Marines invaded Haiti, occupying the country until 1934.  U.S. officials rewrote the Haitian constitution, and when the Haitian national assembly refused to ratify it, they dissolved the assembly.  They then held a “referendum” in which about 5 percent of the electorate voted and approved the new constitution — which conveniently changed […]

Message from WSF 2011 “Neoliberal” globalization, thoroughly bankrupt, is now indeed on the defensive.  It has no legitimacy.  And people in revolt illustrate that.  In Latin America and Nepal, today in Egypt and Tunisia, and tomorrow elsewhere in the South, gigantic popular upsurges are felling regimes that were once at its service. Autocratic regimes are […]

It didn’t get much attention in the media, but U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did something quite surprising on Sunday.  After taping interviews on five big Sunday talk shows about Egypt, she then boarded a plane to Haiti.  Yes, Haiti.  The most impoverished country in the hemisphere, not exactly a “strategic ally” or a […]

Most of the tributes to John Ross have stressed the colorful side of the New York-born journalist, activist, and poet, who died in Michoacán, Mexico, on January 17. “Colorful” is an understatement.  Tall, gaunt, with his black beret and white goatee, a Palestinian keffiyeh around his neck, John was an unmistakable figure at demonstrations.  His […]