Geography Archives: Latin America

Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa, one of the most celebrated voices of Latin America, died on Sunday, 4 October 2009, at the age of 74 after a long illness, according to the announcement by the hospital where she had been under intensive care since 18 September 2009. Nicknamed “La Negra,” she won the hearts and minds […]

  I wish to congratulate you on your election and reiterate to you our confidence on your capacity to unerringly conduct our works and deliberations. Likewise I would like to recognize the excellent work developed by Father Miguel D’Escoto, President of the recently concluded session.  The ethical dimension and the political scope of his presidency, […]

Now that President Zelaya has returned to Honduras, the coup government — after first denying that he was there — has unleashed a wave of repression to prevent people from gathering support for their elected president.  This is how U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the first phase of this new repression last night […]

BMR:What is the likely impact of the present financial crisis on geopolitics, especially if the crisis is considered in the context of the energy crisis including the peak oil issue, the food crisis, The Great Hunger, the environmental crisis, and the declining dollar?  Will the world experience war(s) as an effort to survive?  Will monopoly-finance […]

It was a winter day in the Argentine city of Bariloche when 12 South American presidents gathered there on August 28. It was so cold that Hugo Chavez wore a red scarf and Evo Morales put on a sweater. The presidents arrived at the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) meeting to discuss a US […]

  When I decided to teach Joseph Conrad‘s Heart of Darkness at Berkeley High School, it had been out of favor as an appropriate text because it was considered too controversial.  I wanted to do a whole unit on Africa and the Congo, including African authors, journalism, and history, and I figured we could start […]

As the peace movement digs in for long-haul opposition to continuing U.S. wars, we simultaneously face urgent immediate challenges.  Policy fights that may well determine Washington’s course for many years ahead regarding Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and Honduras (and Latin America in general) are at important junctures.  It will take more noise — in the streets and […]

On Friday, Latin America scholars sent an urgent letter to Human Rights Watch, urging HRW to speak out on violations of human rights under the coup regime in Honduras and to conduct its own investigation.  HRW hasn’t made any statement about Honduras since July 8. One of the things Human Rights Watch should be investigating […]

Seven weeks after the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras, the divide between the United States and Latin America continues to grow — although you might not get that impression from most mainstream media reports. The strategy of the coup regime is obviously to run out the clock on President Zelaya’s remaining […]

On Friday nearly 100 Latin America scholars and experts sent an open letter to Human Rights Watch urging HRW to speak up about human rights violations in Honduras under the coup regime and to conduct its own investigation of these abuses.  The letters’ signers include Honduras experts Dana Frank and Adrienne Pine, Latin America experts […]

13 August 2009, Washington, D. C. — The Obama administration has an obligation to demand that the de facto regime in Honduras stop ongoing political killings and other human rights abuses, Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said today.  Weisbrot noted that human rights observers and international media have documented the killings […]

Thank you for all that you have done so far to increase U.S. pressure on the coup regime in Honduras.   While the Obama administration’s previous round of targeted sanctions demonstrated great promise in helping to reverse the coup, the administration has since appeared to back down from its position of active support for the […]

  In the Summer of 1984, under the oversight of U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, I was deported from Honduras with five other Americans for meeting with union representatives who wanted to tell us about the murders and disappearances of their leaders. At the time, the poor nation was known as “the aircraft carrier USS Honduras” […]

The military coup carried out by masked soldiers in the early hours of June 28against the democratically elected President of Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was a bandit act with differing messages intended for different audiences. One such audience is the oligarchical groupings throughout the hemisphere, who will be emboldened by Washington’s tacit tolerance of […]

There were great hopes in Latin America when President Obama was elected.  U.S. standing in the region had reached a low point under George W. Bush, and all of the hemisphere’s left-leaning governments expressed optimism that Obama would go in a different direction. These hopes have been dashed.  President Obama has continued the Bush policies […]

  Labor Express interviews four Honduran civil society leaders, who visited Chicago on 7-8 August 2009 as part of the Honduras Coup Resistance Speaking Tour sponsored by the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC): Abencio Fernández Pineda, Gerardo Torres, Maria Luisa Jimenez, and Luther Castillo. Play now: “We are here, in the […]

Honduras’s three principal labor centrals, the Unitary Confederation of Honduran Workers (CUTH), the General Workers Central (CGT), and the Confederation of Honduran Workers (CTH) began an open-ended national strike on 6 August 2009. * * * Communiqué The three workers confederations of Honduras, CUTH, CGT, and CTH address the critical political situation that prevails in […]

The people of Honduras have now suffered more than 40 days of military rule.  The generals’ June 28 coup, crudely re-packaged in constitutional guise, ousted the country’s elected government and unleashed severe, targeted, and relentless repression. The grassroots protests have matched the regime in endurance and outmatched it in political support within the country and […]

On July 29th, Tortilla con Sal managed to talk to Salvador Zuniga, a veteran leader of the indigenous peoples’ movement in Honduras. Zuniga talked about what is currently happening in Honduras. At the time of the interview, Zuniga and other leaders like Bertha Caceres and the Garifuna Miriam Miranda were in temporary encampments in Nicaragua set up to give some respite to Hondurans from the fierce military repression in Honduras, especially along the frontier with Nicaragua.

  Iran, a major oil producing and exporting country, also imports gasoline because of inadequate refining capacity and rising petrol consumption.  This article examines the problems faced by an economy dependent on the export of crude oil and gas that are compounded by the dilemmas of rising domestic consumption, a significant decline in productive capacity, […]