Geography Archives: Latin America

THE PRICE OF FIRE: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia by Benjamin DanglBUY THIS BOOK For Bolivia’s indigenous majority, the year 1781 is engrained in popular memory as one of open rebellion against Spanish colonialism.  Led by Tupak Katari, the indigenous Aymaras of the highlands lay siege to the city of La Paz for […]

For the first time since its rise as a superpower the United States is facing a serious threat to its hegemony across the globe. In February this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed a security conference in Munich that had 250 of the world’s top leaders and officials in attendance, including such luminaries as the […]

“Out of sight, out of mind” is a basic rule of political propaganda.  If a political event is not reported to the public, the public cannot react to it.  If that same event is misreported, public reaction can be manipulated. U.S. reports on the attempted coup to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002 were […]

Social critics, from Ida B. Wells to Noam Chomsky, recognize that the elite press can serve as the best tool against the elite.  Today’s business magazines have no problem “naming the system,” and they write with clarity and frankness on the inner workings of capitalism and imperialism.  My good friend and correspondent Skip recently sent […]

Una tradición menor del pensamiento conservador es la definición del adversario dialéctico por su falta de moral y por sus deficiencias mentales.  Como esto nunca llega a ser un argumento, se encubre el exabrupto con algún razonamiento fragmentado y repetido, propio del pensamiento posmoderno de la propaganda política.  No es casualidad que en América Latina […]

Havana.  April 4, 2007 The Camp David meeting has just ended.  We all listened with interest to the press conference by the presidents of the United States and Brazil, as well as news about the meeting and opinions stated. Confronted by the demands of his Brazilian visitor regarding import tariffs and subsidies that protect and […]

It is now more than three decades since neoliberal economic and political ideas began to supplant Keynesian orthodoxies within the treasuries and finance ministries of Western governments and in the policy-making centers of development agencies and financial institutions.  Bolivia was one of the first Latin American countries to adopt a neoliberal approach back in the […]

Throughout its history and across its geography, capitalism has swung back and forth between private and state forms.  The former reduces while the latter enlarges the state’s intervention in the economy.  The economic events that precipitate swings (in both directions) have been various mixes of recession and widening inequality.  Political oscillations have paralleled the economic. […]

“The rich are not like you and me.”  “The poor will always be with us.”  Get real and accept it, we are told.  Give alms and aid to the poor, tax the rich.  Establish private foundations, be a responsible trust baby and give.  You’ve heard it all and maybe even believe it in your heart. […]

Q.  2007 is the 140th anniversary of the publication of Volume One of Marx’s Capital.  In your opinion, what is its main contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism? Marx’s object in Capital was to explain capital as a social relation in the fullest dialectical sense and in the process to describe its law(s) of motion.  I […]

The active imagining of an alternate global politics could hardly be more pressing.  Mounting global inequalities, the turbulence of climate change, and recurring military interventions by Western powers have been the daily fare of the neoliberal world order.  This world order was constructed over the last two decades under the hegemony of the U.S., in […]

It is now accepted across a wide spectrum of political thinking that the period of neoliberalism has sharpened income inequalities.  This has occurred along a number of dimensions.  The capitalist class has seen an increase in wealth from an increasing concentration of assets, a rapid run-up in asset prices, and corporate profits restored to historically […]

Stephen Fleischman, A Red in the House: The Unauthorized Memoir of S.E. Fleischman.  New York: iUniverse, 2004.  366pp, $24.95 paperback. This review is late in coming because it has taken a couple of years for me to understand who this Fleischman fellow is, with the tough, brilliant commentaries on various issues in CounterPunch and elsewhere.  […]

Cada poder hegemónico en cada tiempo establece los límites de lo normal y, en consecuencia, de lo natural.  Así, el poder que ordenaba la sociedad patriarcal se reservaba (se reserva) el derecho incuestionable de definir qué era un hombre y qué era una mujer.  Cada vez que algún exaltado recurre al mediocre argumento de que […]

  An interview with Luis Jalandoni, chairperson of the National Democratic Front-Philippines Negotiating Panel, follows E. San Juan, Jr.’s analysis. The February visit of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples, Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, reconfirmed the barbarism of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s de facto martial-law regime in the Philippines.  Stavenhagen bewailed the worsening pattern of […]

  Need a crash course on the present state of the world?  Want to untangle the terminology, separate the victims from the victimizers, understand the dynamics of unilateralism, and deduce what can be done about it all?  I’d like to introduce you to a small literary arsenal. A good place to begin is the book […]

There’s something happeningWhat it is ain’t exactly clearBuffalo Springfield, 1966 Are we in the midst of a momentous turn in world politics?  Donald Rumsfeld has been shuffled out of the Pentagon.  Daniel Ortega, Washington’s nemesis from the Sandinista Revolution of the late 1970s, is back as President of Nicaragua.  Hugo Chavez has been triumphantly re-elected, […]

Con su ritual de acero sus grandes chimeneas sus sabios clandestinos su canto de sirena sus cielos de neón sus ventas navideñas su culto de Dios Padre y de las charreteras con sus llaves del reino el Norte es el que ordena pero aquí abajo, abajo el hambre disponible recurre al fruto amargo de lo […]

Hace diez años, en contradicción con la ola posmodernista, desarrollamos en Crítica de la pasión pura la idea de la moral como una forma de consciencia colectiva.  De la misma forma que un cardumen o un enjambre actúa y se desarrolla como un solo cuerpo, de la misma forma que James Lovelock entendía Gaia — […]

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 […]