Geography Archives: Mexico

In a small, crowded theater in New York’s West Village the night of August 8, a group of thirty indigenous women from central Mexico finally got a chance to perform their play before a U.S. audience. The cast, members of the community group Soame Citlalime (“Women of the Star” in Náhuatl), had spent the past […]

  In a 1965 essay, the great development economist Albert Hirschman bemoaned the tendency of those in his profession to look for the next panacea.  Unfortunately, various panaceas have come in and out of fashion since Hirschman wrote. During three decades of neo-liberalism, development economists and policymakers have celebrated three inter-related strategies: (1) free markets, […]

From the late summer of 1985 into the early spring of 1986, the small town of Austin, Minnesota, figured prominently in the national news.  The dramatic themes and issues, twists and turns, of a labor conflict there captured the national imagination.  This interest was not merely passive, as more than thirty support committees formed across […]

The second part of Fidel’s review of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s book The Mafia That Has Taken Over Mexico…and 2012. “On March 12, 2004, we learned from INTERPOL that a citizen of Argentine origin, naturalized in Mexico, was wanted in a case of illicit operations.

The relevant investigations confirmed that he had entered the country on February 27 of that same year in a private plane together with another person and was staying in a legally-registered rented house.

He was arrested on the 30th of that same month of March.

On the 31st, the Mexican Foreign Ministry presented Cuba’s MINREX with an extradition application for Carlos Ahumada Kurtz, given an order to apprehend this individual for his proven participation in a nonspecific criminal fraud.”

Studying the American recipes for the war on drugs, Felipe Calderón pours more military police into the cauldron of Ciudad Juárez. Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  | Print

Fidel’s reviews Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s book The Mafia That Has Taken Over Mexico…and 2012. “There would be no form or words of describing my impressions like a certain Mexican has done who, no wonder, is the person with the greatest authority to speak of the tragedy of that country, as he was the elected mayor of Mexico’s most important electoral district, that of Mexico City, capital of the Republic, and in the 2006 elections was the candidate of the “Coalition for the Good of All.”

He stood during the elections and won a majority of votes against the PAN candidate. But the empire would not allow him to assume the mandate.

Like other political leaders, I knew how Washington had drawn up the ideas of the “neoliberalism” that it sold to the countries of Latin America and the rest of the Third World as the embodiment of political democracy and economic development, but I never had such a clear idea of the way in which the empire used this doctrine to destroy and devour the wealth of such an important country, rich in natural resources and the home of an heroic people who possessed their own culture before the pre-Christian era, more than 2,000 years ago.”

  Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir, directed by Max Cacopardo, 1967.  Director First Run/ Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 1967.  Video and DVD, 60 mins., b/w. A “time capsule” was how Simone de Beauvoir described Max Cacopardo’s documentary about her and Sartre, made for Canadian television in 1967 and re-issued in 2005.  She was certainly […]

“I left them all small — my daughter wasn’t even one month old.  In videos — that’s how I’ve seen them grow up.” Since 2007 a group of young people from Tetlanohcan, Mexico have been working with filmmakers and theatre professionals from England and the USA, creating videos about their lives and their community.  This […]

What is José Serra trying to do?  In his campaign for president of Brazil he has accused Bolivia of complicity in drug trafficking and criticized Lula for trying to mediate in Washington’s fight with Iran and for refusing (along with the most of the rest of South America) to recognize the government of Honduras, which […]

  La Casa Rosa tells the story of the necessity and difficulty of finding a way forward for every community impacted by free trade and migration.  Drawing inspiration from the real lives and experiences of a group of women from the town of Tetlanohcan, Mexico, the play is the tale of two sisters struggling for […]

Following several weeks of meetings and internal deliberations, a special “high-level commission” has presented the General Assembly of the Organization of American States (OAS) with a long-awaited report on Honduras.  Mandated by a June 8 resolution agreed to at the OAS ministerial meeting in Lima, Peru, the report presents an analysis of the current situation […]

In March I wrote about the Obama Administration’s contribution to the election campaign under way in Venezuela, where voters will choose a new National Assembly in September.  I predicted that certain things would happen before September, among them some new “discoveries” that Venezuela supports terrorism.  Venezuela has had thirteen elections or referenda since Hugo Chávez […]

I recently returned from the quadrennial International Sociology Association’s World Congress held in Gothenburg, Sweden.  It’s kind of like the World Cup of sociology.  There I sat in on a session organized by the Iranian Sociology Association, where a few presenters, including its president Hossein Serajzadeh, discussed the state of social science in Iran.  I […]

  “In contrast to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, no one is predicting that it will possible to contain the blood spill that is being prepared for the Persian Gulf.” Pedro Méndez Suárez is a Cuban cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in Rebelión on 19 July 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi […]

A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media.  Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by […]

Statement to the Commission on Deficit Reduction by James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin, and Vice President, Americans for Democratic Action, June 30, 2010 Mr. Chairmen, members of the commission, thank you for inviting this statement. I […]

The West is worried about Turkey.  Its spokespeople fear that the West might have “lost” Turkey since its Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, associated himself with President Lula, proposed to act as intermediary between the West and Iran, and, later, reacted with determination against Israel’s violent raid on a boat sailing under the Turkish flag and […]

The system under which offshore drilling rigs, and now oil tankers, operate was set up at the end of the second world war to ensure that the US was supplied with the cheapest possible oil without having to consider, or pay for, the consequences. The offshore drilling company Transocean celebrated the explosion on the Deepwater […]

  The global crisis has led some to question the dollar’s place as the dominant currency.  This column discusses three camps in the literature: those advocating a new synthetic global currency, those arguing that a new reserve currency will emerge, and those suggesting a return to sharing the role.  It concludes that talk of the […]

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides relates how Pericles, in the fifth century BC, imposed economic sanctions against the city of Megara, which had allied itself with Sparta.  Athens prohibited trade with this city state and sent a message: if Megara did not break its alliance with Sparta, it would be punished.  Megara […]