With dual citizenship now a possibility, many Mexican Americans have taken an active interest in Mexican elections.

NACLA presents its Winter 2013 Radio Podcast. Featuring content on forced evictions in Brazil, the Venezuelan elections, and the speech from Chavkin Award winner for Integrity in Journalism in Latin America, Félix Antonio Molina from Radio Globo, Honduras. You can now also subscribe to NACLA Radio.

The general elections of November 6 in Puerto Rico presented a great challenge to the national liberation movement. Through the work of the political action committee ¡Boricua ahora Es! (Puerto Rico, Now!), we succeeded in uniting nearly all the political tendencies of the country with the goal of ending our colonial-territorial status with the United States.

There was no single message to be culled from the election results throughout Latin America last year. Elections held in five countries did, however, suggest the shapes of some alternative American futures. The voters have spoken. What now?

A staggering 54 countries have participated in various ways in the American torture system, hosting CIA “black site" prisons, allowing their airspace and airports to be used for secret flights, providing intelligence, kidnapping foreign nationals or their own citizens and handing them over to U.S. agents to be “rendered” to third-party countries. How did Latin America come to be territorio libre in this new dystopian world of black sites and midnight flights?

“Charter cities” have been promoted for years by Paul Romer, a University of Chicago–trained economist teaching at New York University. But the applicability of Romer’s radical vision in Honduras always depended on the enthusiasm of the authoritarian, post-coup government of Porfirio Lobo.