Interviews

On July 26, 1953 Fidel Castro led an assault on the Moncada Barracks in Cuba, launching a popular movement that would topple the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. This week, NACLA spoke with Ike Nahem, one of the coordinators of the July 26 Coalition, to discuss the significance of the anniversary, and its relevance to American activists in the United States.

"The roots of the War on Drugs go deep in Mexico. In fact, in some ways, they are deeper there than in the United States," explains historian Isaac Campos in the most recent issue of NACLA. In order to better understand the forces behind drug prohibition in Mexico, NACLA spoke with Campos, who discussed the recent NACLA article, his forthcoming book, and his experience covering marijuana, prohibition, and drug culture in Mexico and the United States.

Peruvian leader Mario Palacios speaks to NACLA about organizing to counter the impacts of the increasing presence of extractive industries in Peru. He says: "Our ancestral communities, many of which have territorial titles that date back 300 or 400 years to the colonial period, are today suffering from the expropriation, dispossession, and dissolution of their territories, not only because of the actions of the mining companies, but also because of the state itself and the governmental policies that are being applied in Peru." This interview originally appeared in the September/October 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

NACLA remembers the life of Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis, who died June 19. This interview with Monsiváis, titled "We Are Living in a Time of Pillage," was originally published in the January/February 2007 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas.

Aggression against journalists in Mexico often gets lost in the murky impunity of the country's violent drug war. However, a report by Mexican freedom-of-the-press organizations asserts that 65% of attacks on journalists have been not at the hands of drug cartels, but rather at the hands of the state. This interview is with independent journalist and writer Laura Castellanos. On May 10 still-unknown assailants ransacked her apartment, stealing only her laptop and reporter's pad, while leaving other items of value behind. Castellanos's experience is only one more incident in the recent surge of violence against journalists in Mexico, the most dangerous place for the profession in Latin America, according to Reporters Without Borders.

Brazil's former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso visited Cornell University on April 7 to give a lecture, talk to the press, and receive yet another academic award. The onetime Marxist sociologist, now the political leader of the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), and one of the North's favorite neoliberal statesmen, Cardoso commands boundless respect in the international arena. He frequently airs his views in editorial pages and lecture podiums all over the world, but back in Brazil, Cardoso inspires rather less awe, which could have an impact on Brazil's upcoming election.

On March 7, NACLA Research Associate Jason Tockman interviewed Pablo Solón, Bolivia's ambassador to the United Nations. Solón brought his unique combination of both grass-roots economic-justice activism and his more recent official background under the Evo Morales administration to the interview. With this broad experience he takes on myriad topics, stressing that Latin America is finally moving away from the claws of the Monroe Doctrine, and beginning to define its own future, despite what happened in Honduras. This has had a direct impact on Bolivia as it continues to move forward with its own particular challenges.

Correa says that Ecuador's government-backed "Citizens' Revolution" will accelerate at an intensifying pace over the next four years. With a majority in the National Assembly and a Constitution that was drafted and approved during his first government by a broad convergence of allied forces, his path seems wide open. He also promises to work with other South American governments to create an alternative financial architecture for the region.

Alan Knight, a specialist on the Mexican Revolution, once wrote, "Revolutionary generations die, but the legacy of (especially successful) revolutions is never entirely spent." In this interview, he discusses revolutionary icons, the competing claims to revolutionary legitimacy by contemporary political actors, and official amnesia over tensions within the revolution, among other topics.

Casimira Rodríguez spent decades organizing her fellow domestic workers into a union, which she founded in 1985. When Bolivian Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia, he tapped Rodríguez to become the nation's Justice Minister, a post she held for year. She spoke with Nancy Romer about her experience in government, the opposition to the government, the president's relationship with social movements, and even offered advice to U.S. workers.

The Portuguese thinker says several events in Latin America have put the brakes on Washington's hemispheric agenda. At the root of this process, he says, is the unprecedented strength of social movements that led to the election of left-leaning Latin American governments at a time in which the U.S. was using the discourse of democracy to justify interventions around the planet.

A Los Angeles native of Mexican and Salvadoran descent, Rubén Martínez is one of the United States’ most trenchant writers