Geography Archives: Venezuela

  The view south-east across the bay from the hills of Las Hadas, the hotel zone in Manzanillo is especially beautiful in the evening as the sun sets and the white painted hotels and restaurants stretching for several miles sparkle in the sun, behind the curving beach.  It’s a major Pacific port for Mexico and […]

Peter McLaren David Gabbard and Karen Anijar Appleton, “Fearless Speech in Fearful Times: An Essay Review of Capitalists and Conquerors, Teaching against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, and Teaching Peter McLaren,” MRZine, 30 October 2005 Peter McLaren is Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of […]

How stupid do they think we are?  The administration has been on the road these past few days trying to package the war in Iraq as a success.  Bush insists that the war is going well and that the US will stay on until final victory and eternal democracy.  Dick Cheney told the world that […]

10,000 people, with a strong labor feeder march and speakers from Venezuela! Quite encouraging! Click on the image for a larger view. Michael Dawson works for pay as a paralegal and sociology teacher in Portland, Oregon.  He is presently writing a book, Automobiles Ueber Alles: Corporate Capitalism and Transportation in America, forthcoming from Monthly Review […]

Los datos divulgados recientemente por el Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) confirman que la economía venezolana exhibió un crecimiento de 10,2% en el cuarto trimestre de 2005 en relación con el mismo período del año anterior, acumulando la novena alza consecutiva a partir del último trimestre de 2003.  El resultado final del PIB en 2005 […]

The more things change, the more they remain the same.  This commonplace contains more than a little truth of what liberal democracy has become in Canada today.  The daily political discourse might adopt a “compassionate conservatism,” a “social liberalism,” or even a social democratic “third way,” but all the parties agree that the benefits of […]

On the morning of February 24, 2006, President Gloria Arroyo issued Proclamation 1017 (PP 1017), which declared a State of Emergency throughout the Philippines.  Using identical words as those of Ferdinand Marcos when he declared martial law in 1972,  Arroyo ordered the armed forces to suppress “any act of insurrection or rebellion.”  Arroyo claimed there […]

There is screaming, hugging, chanting, and many shhhs; the group takes a momentary pause in their celebration to hear the news.  A delegation of 70 women from all over the world, including, India, Uganda, Guyana, the UK, and the US, stand together in the community of La Padera, Venezuela, awaiting the details. Juanita Romero, also […]

  Caracas, Venezuela — Under the elevated lines in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union has been waging a battle against poverty that has taken them to center stage of the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela.  Led by Cheri Honkala, a formerly homeless mother, the KWRU began by building encampments […]

The following is a conversation with Heinz Dieterich about his friendship with Hugo Chávez, irregular war, the new Venezuelan military doctrine, and an account of the Bolivarian revolution in Latin America. Heinz Dieterich is a sociologist and economist.  He has been a professor at Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City since 1977.  Since the 1990s, […]

While George Bush, the man who controls the trigger of the world’s greatest nuclear arsenal, expresses his fear that a “non-transparent” and nuclear Iran might use its non-existent nuclear weapons to blackmail the world, and his Secretary of State tells the media that the time for talking with the regime in Tehran is over, a […]

El futuro de la Revolución Bolivariana en América Latina se ve más brillante desde que Evo Morales participa en la construcción del Bloque Regional de Poder (BRP) de América Latina, en lo que será probablemente el año más peligroso para la humanidad desde el fin de la “Guerra Fría”: el año del ataque de la […]

Andre Vltchek Andre Vltchek is a Czech-born American writer who has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, the Guardian, and many other international papers.  He has reported on the violence of the neo-liberal order from all over the globe,  but especially from Indonesia, about which he has made a ground-breaking documentary: Terlena: Breaking of a […]

  Michael A. Lebowitz, the author of Beyond Capital: Marx’s Political Economy of the Working Class, argues that Capital, taken alone, is one-sided, given Marx’s intention to also write a book on wage-labor.  The incompleteness of Marx’s work has helped produce a left whose theory is distorted and characterized by economism and programmatic narrowness.  I […]

Click on the image for a larger view. Chicago, 2005 In the middle of a blizzard in Chicago on December 8, 2005, I stood with about 250-300 union members and supporters at the Haymarket Memorial, chanting, “Workers’ Rights Are Human Rights.”  This was one of a number of rallies around the country that the AFL-CIO […]

Capitalism always stays focused on the bottom line — profit — but occasionally finds more than it is looking for.  Such is the case with Standard and Poor’s recent research report, “Credit FAQ: The Impact of the Rise of the Left on Latin American Sovereign Ratings” (17 January 2006).  While doing research to update the […]

Guatemala City, Guatemala Carlos, my driver, was a former federal policeman.  He weighed a good two hundred pounds and was well over six feet.  He was assigned to me by a local businessman whom I knew in Guatemala City after I explained that I wanted to visit some areas where I could see gang activity.  […]

There was a subtle difference in both groups this year — many said they noticed it. As in every year, tens of thousands of Germans visited the Memorial Site of the Socialists in an eastern section of Berlin and placed red carnations at the tall memorial stone honoring Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, or the […]

It is fascinating for me to think about SDS. In fact, it’s downright compulsory. I am gathering stories and pictures, trying to weave them into a script for an artist to make into a visual (or comic-book) history, mostly “from the bottom up,” i.e., the chapter standpoint. Sometimes the national leaders were good, sometimes they […]

  José Martí and Simón Bolívar, two of Latin America’s most respected independence fighters, recognized nearly a century ago that their homelands would never be free of imperial domination, until Latin America came together in solidarity as a united force. Martí and Bolívar’s insights remain relevant in the age of neo-liberal globalization.  The colonizers of […]