Subjects Archives: State Repression

The U.S. role in the defeat of leftist Andrés Arauz in Ecuador’s presidential contest on April 11 was not overt because it did not need to be, according to a high-ranking Latin American diplomat.

Twenty years ago, a group of neoconservative think tanks used their power to push for disastrous wars in the Middle East. Now, a new set of think tanks staffed with many of the same experts and funded by Taiwanese money is working hard to convince Americans that there is a new existential threat: China.

After twenty years, the United States government–and the forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)–will depart from Afghanistan. They said that they came to do two things: to destroy al-Qaeda, which had launched an attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, and to destroy the Taliban, which had given al-Qaeda a base.

AGRA was started, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to double yields and incomes for 30 million smallholder farm households while halving food insecurity by 2020.

General Stephen Townsend, commander of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), and General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 22.

On Sunday night on 21 March 2021, a gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

During the pandemic, landlords have filed for 284,490 evictions–and that’s just in five states and 27 cities. But how could this be? After all, a moratorium shouldn’t allow for hundreds of thousands of households to fall through the cracks.

Lucas Koerner examines the U.S. Empire’s fixation with Chavismo.

Ecuador provides an example of a government which officially decided to investigate the process of indebtedness so as to identify illegitimate debt and suspend its repayment.

One year ago, as both the Trump administration in the U.S. and the Johnson government in the UK responded fitfully to the growing pandemic, the international media were looking for whipping boys: other countries whose response to the virus was even worse.

The lead up to the second round elections in Ecuador have been marked by misinformation campaigns, a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases and fears of manipulation and fraud.

Reports by Reveal (10/21/20) and PBS NewsHour (10/20/21) called for a boycott of “conflict beef” from Nicaragua. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal claims to be “fair and comprehensive” and PBS to be “trusted,” but their misleading and inaccurate reports could have drastic consequences for Nicaragua, at a time when the country is already struggling […]

The Saudi offer of a ceasefire in Yemen on 22 March was an acknowledgement by Riyadh and its backers in Washington that they had lost the war.

Pressure to prevent Morales from running in the election in 2019 mounted early, but it failed. The opposition—with the full backing of the U.S. government—tried to undermine the October 2019 election by painting it as fraudulent. With no real evidence, the military—with a green light from Washington, D.C.—moved against Morales, sending him into exile.

IAIN DUNCAN SMITH sees the Chinese sanctions applied to him and other politicians yesterday as a “badge of honour.”

Americas Quarterly and AS/COA’s media arm ran a de-facto PR campaign for discredited Operation Lava Jato, which helped impeach Dilma Rousseff, jail Lula, and bring a neofascist (who it called an “arch-conservative”) Jair Bolsonaro to power.

“We would like you to succeed… friends should be supported. The sooner you succeed, the better,” U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said.

Meanwhile, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the “killer” jab a “very bad statement by the U.S. president,” ​that indicated “he doesn’t want to normalize relations.”

In George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm, the ruling pigs led by Napoleon constantly rewrote history in order to justify and reinforce their own continuing power. The rewriting by the western powers of the history of the ongoing conflict in Syria leaps out of Orwell. 

The Brazilian Supreme Court this month dismissed all charges against former President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva. A towering figure in national politics, Lula was the country’s president for eight years between 2003 and 2011.