Cuba’s 50-year defiance of US attempts to isolate it is an inspiration to Latin America’s people Philip Agee (from The Guardian)

 There is a wave of progressive change sweeping Latin America and the Caribbean after the many lonely years in which Cuba held high the torch, with free universal healthcare and education, and world-class cultural, sports and scientific achievements. Although you won’t find a Cuban today who says things are perfect - far from it - probably all would agree that compared with pre-revolutionary Cuba, there is a world of improvement.

George Bush, the antithesis of this process, is now in Brazil at the start of a mission to lure five countries away from regional economic integration. However, the many thousands in the streets demonstrate the region’s vast repudiation of Bush and what he stands for, something polls reflect unanimously.

All Cuba’s achievements have been in defiance of US efforts to isolate Cuba; every dirty method has been used, including infiltration, sabotage, terrorism, assassination, economic and biological warfare and incessant lies in the media of many countries. I know these methods too well, having been a CIA officer in Latin America in the 1960s. Altogether nearly 3,500 Cubans have died from terrorist acts, and more than 2,000 are permanently disabled. No country has suffered terrorism as long and consistently as Cuba. (more…)

Autora de un contundente libro contra la globalización neoliberal El Informe Lugano, George es una de las principales ideólogas del movimiento ATTAC. Para ella, si continúa la actual situación de deudas colosales e impagables de los países en desarrollo con las naciones ricas, no hay muchas esperanzas de que aquellos puedan crecer a tasas realmente significativas.

Entrevistada por Carta Maior, la investigadora contabiliza en 90 crisis causadas por el sistema financiero entre 1990 y 2002 y demuestra que el actual funcionamiento de los mercados ha generado crecientes desigualdades entre las personas y las naciones. (more…)

According to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, 17 coal-mining accidents occurred in 2004, 40 in 2005 and 44 in 2006.

Last February, 40 people were killed in two separate mine explosions — in the northeastern department (province) of Norte de Santander, and in Boyacá, in east-central Colombia.

However, independent sources say the real number of accidents is much higher than the official figures suggest.

“There are an estimated two accidents a day, most of which go unreported for fear that the mine will be shut down, and sources of income will be lost,” especially “in the case of small-scale miners,” Tatiana Roa, director of the non-governmental organisation Censat - Agua Viva, told IPS.
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Casi dos meses después de que las tropas de la ONU comenzaran a lanzar duros ataques que dicen haber estado dirigidos contra miembros de las pandillas de los barrios pobres de Puerto Príncipe, los controles policiales en las carreteras y las alambradas de púas siguen en pie, y la atmósfera es sombría.

Mercius Lubin, morador del distrito de Boston, en Cité Soleil, relató a IPS que una incursión a principios de mes dejó a sus dos hijas muertas. “Fue el ruido de los disparos de la MINUSTAH (la fuerza de paz de la ONU) lo que nos despertó”.

Eran aproximadamente las once de la noche del 1 de febrero, y la familia estaba durmiendo en el suelo porque los soldados de la ONU habían aconsejado a todos en la zona que hicieran así. “Entonces comenzaron a disparar. Me di cuenta que yo había sido herido en un brazo, mi mujer en los pies, y que mis dos hijas se hallaban bañadas en su propia sangre”. (more…)

Brian Concannon is the director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti (IJDH). He founded IJDH after the 2004 Canada-US-France coup d’état that ousted Haiti’s democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Concannon formerly co-directed the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) , the most prominent legal group prosecuting human rights cases in Haiti, and worked for MICIVIH, a UN human rights mission in Haiti. Darren Ell interviewed him in the offices of the BAI in Port-au-Prince on February 28, 2007, the third anniversary of the 2004 overthrow of democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Darren Ell: Why did you create the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti?

Brian Concannon : We started the IJDH because — despite painstaking progress made by the Bureaux des Avocats Internationaux (BAI), the UN and the Haitian justice system from 1995 to 2004 — when the US, Canada and France threw out Haiti’s elected leader, they also threw out all our progress: everyone we had convicted was let out of jail; they packed the courts with new judges; appointed new prosecutors; put pressure on existing judges; and then systematically reversed everything else. Good judges and prosecutors were pushed out and replaced with people willing to do what the regime asked them to do. (more…)

President Bush has recently returned from a seven day, five country trip to Latin America, with which he had hoped to regain some of the influence that the United States has lost in recent years. The political and economic changes taking place in the region are often seen as a cyclical or temporary phenomenon - a swing to the left, or to populist or “anti-American” governments, that will in time reverse itself. The conventional wisdom is that populist governments that stray too far from the “Washington Consensus” will be unable to achieve sustainable growth and development. They will run into high inflation through irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies, or will stifle investment - particularly foreign investment - and therefore productivity growth. According to this view, they will inevitably revert to the set of orthodox economic policy reforms that have been introduced over the last 25 years. (more…)

Lesbian or gay non-citizens trying to join their U.S. partners, and transgender people trying to see their relationships acknowledged, are caught between two forces: escalating panic about “porous” borders, and intensifying battles over the legal status of partnerships between people of the same sex.

These pincers convey an unmistakable message: You do not belong.  Yet neither ferocious anti-immigrant feeling, nor fear of sexuality and sexual “deviance,” is new in U.S. politics or society.  Nor is it novel for them to meet.

The United States has long been schizophrenic about its own immigrant identity.  In the nineteenth century, the U.S. had land, and needed labor.  Early immigrants such as the Irish might face invective and violence, but rarely had to hurdle major legal barriers at the ports where they disembarked.26 The numbers rose; their sources shifted, from northern to southern and eastern Europe.27  From 1860 to 1920, almost thirty million immigrants entered the country, invigorating every part of the nation’s life from literature to cuisine, infusing its culture with their cultures, increasing its population, wealth, and power. 28 Yet, hostility reared to meet them. In the 1880s, as Emma Lazarus famously imagined the Statue of Liberty offering luminous asylum to tired and poor beside the “Golden Door,” that anger showed ominous strength.

Gender Identity and Expression: Transgender Human Rights Training at the US Human Rights Network!!! RSVP TODAY!!!! 404 588 9761.

The multiple oppressions faced by transgendered people of color — based on race, ethnicity, class, and immigration status, among others will also be examined in this groundbreaking workshop Presented by Pauline Park as part of the US Human Rights Network Atlanta Community Human Rights Education Series and In Honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Month

If you are working with migrant communties, Latino and Caribbean Communties, and communties of color, this training is a MUST YOU CANNOT AFFORD TO MISS IT!!!

THIS Monday, March 26th 2007 at 5:00-9:30 PM Studio Plex Community Center 659 Auburn Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30312

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What is Latin America?  Who is a Latin American?  What do “Latin American Studies” and “Latino/a Studies” refer to?  What ought they refer to?  These are not new questions.  But they are in my view all the more pressing in light of the transnational processes sweeping the Western hemisphere and the world as globalization proceeds.  These processes compel us to reconceptualize Latin American as well as Latino/a Studies.  Among the most salient of these processes are a worldwide upsurge in transnational migration as global capitalism reorganizes economies, labor markets, and social hierarchies in every locale in accordance with its logic of integrated transnational accumulation. (more…)

In less than two years the troops of MINUSTAH (Mission of the Nations United for the Stabilization of Haiti) perpetrated three massacres in Cite Soleil, an outlying slum of Port au Prince. According to numerous testimonies, barely mentioned by the corporate media, the occupation forces entered the poorest district of the impoverished island with armoured vehicles backed by artillery wielding helicopters. On at least two occasions - July 6, 2005 and December 22, 2006 - MINUSTAH fired on unarmed residents causing scores of deaths. Many died in their flimsy houses, where they had taken refuge from the “blue helmets”. According to the Nobel Laureate, Adolph Perez Esquivel, during the first year of MINUSTAH’s mission alone (which was authorized June of 2004) 1200 people died in acts of violence.
It is striking that the Latin American Left - which has justly denounced imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - is not doing the same with the genocide that is taking place in Haiti. Considering that MINUSTAH’s troops are contributed largely by countries that boast left leaning governments (more than 40 percent of the 7 thousand soldiers and officials, and commanded by Lula’s Brazil) (more…)

Deforestation just the tip of the iceberg of climate change’s threats to the region.

Glaciers from the Andes to Patagonia are melting quickly. Droughts and floods threaten South America in nearly equal measure. Hurricanes increasing in size and strength assault Caribbean islands.

These are effects of global warming, a result of the excessive amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Under normal conditions these gases are beneficial because they stabilize the climate and allow for greater human development. But they have concentrated in a manner never seen before. (more…)