After almost twenty years of living with the Washington Consensus of free-trade policies, a broad opposition to the political economy of neoliberal globalization has developed throughout Latin America.

A series of investigative reports by journalist Jesús Dávila from New York's El Diario/La Prensa has found the government of Puerto Rico is a major investor in a local subsidiary of DynCorp, the military contractor and private security firm. The company operates an air base in the northwestern part of the island that contributes services to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is the first of two reports published by the newspaper and translated by NACLA.

In the 1570s, a physician named Francisco Hernández led the first colonial scientific expedition to the New World. He traveled Mexico collecting plants that might prove valuable in curing European diseases. Since Hernández was clueless when it came to the properties of local plant species, he depended on knowledgeable indigenous healers who guided him to medicinal plants.

On Monday August 20, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta heard the case of the Cuban Five for the third time. In August 2005, a similar three-judge panel of the same court had unanimously overturned all of the Five's convictions and ordered a new trial. In 2006, after the direct intervention of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, the full panel of that Court reinstated the Five's convictions.