Dear NACLA friends,
Photojournalist Paul Jeffery wrote in this issue's review of "Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy" that a photograph freezes time in two dimensions, but a good image takes the viewer beyond those limits to tell a story. And like one of those good photos, different sides from the political spectrum came together last Sunday in Nicaragua and Guatemala for their national elections. This week, NACLA bought you closer to those stories, and others, with daily web coverage:
Paul Dix and Pamela Fitzpatrick: Nicaragua: Surviving the Legacy of U.S. Policy (Photo Essay)
Suzanna Reiss: DEA Gets Its Groove Back
Bryan Finlayson: Voters Elect Presidents in Nicaragua and Guatemala
Fred Rosen: The U.S. War in Mexico
Nazih Richani: An Open Letter to President Juan Manuel Santos
Joseph Nevins: Children as Collateral Damage
The Human Rights Issue:
Lorraine Bayard de Volo, a political scientist who focuses on women's political mobilization and the history of feminism in Latin America, looks at Cuba's Damas de Blanco, and how WikiLeaks documents have linked them with the support of powerful allies, including the U.S. government.
International relations scholar Arturo López-Levy discusses the centerpiece of U.S policy toward Cuba, the Helms-Burton law, which mandates a "soft" approach to bolstering civil society and "democracy promotion" in Cuba, while causing many humanitarian concerns.
Anthropologist Nicole Fabricant sketches a critical portrait of Bolivia's aggrieved regionalist right-wingers, who today assert themselves as the victims of a totalitarian regime under President Evo Morales.
Gregory Wilpert, a sociologist and frequent commentator on Venezuelan politics, argues that the right has successfully harnessed the power of the country's political polarization, staging protests and other actions that are deliberately calculated to provoke conflict and create spectacles in which the Chávez government will react in a heavy-handed manner.
Finally, NACLA editor Michael Fox interviews Bertha Oliva, a leading human rights activist in Honduras. Her organization, COFADEH, was founded in 1982, just as the Reagan administration was discovering human rights to be the potent rhetorical weapon it is today.
NACLA's Digital Archive
Now that we are approaching our 45th anniversary, don't forget to visit our archive and read the award-winning articles that have made the NACLA Report on the Americas the most reliable resource for progressive politics in the region. Subscribers and customers can now download PDFs of full issues!
Stay tuned for upcoming interviews, event announcements, and previews.