Home
July 8, 2008
According to the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, a growth of only 15% in food prices in 2008 is likely to drive some 15.7 million Latin Americans into a position of desperate food insecurity (“indigence”), and another 15 million into moderate insecurity (“poverty”).
July 8, 2008
The Republican nominee's campaign team is packed with lobbyists of the oil industry and the Arizona Senator himself has been a reliable friend to the oil industry, leading him to support bloody U.S. military interventions in Iraq and Colombia to keep his friends at several oil companies happy. Under a potential McCain administration, the United States would remain the belligerent policeman of the world's oil fields.
July 7, 2008
Fourteen years after implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a majority of the population in all three countries believe the agreement has had a net negative effect on their nation, and it turns out that the North American Free Trade Agreement is a misnomer in every one of its terms—it wasn't an agreement, it isn't free trade, and North America doesn't exist. So now what? First, stop extending it. Second, stop copying it.
July 1, 2008
Despite the fact that public sentiment in Latin America has been strongly against the Iraq war since it began, thousands of Latin Americans have the joined the occupation, many of them as private contractors hired by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy.
July 1, 2008
Landed elites in eastern Bolivia have allied themselves with multinational agribusiness corporations to consolidate their wealth and power, which they are using to destabilize the government of president Evo Morales. The rising food prices and shortages driven by those same corporations have only made their radical right-wing project stronger.
June 30, 2008
There are two salient trends in the US reporting about Bolivia: (1) the personalization of Morales as the representative of Bolivia's transformation backed by social movements and (2) the misrepresentation of both the new Bolivian Constitution and the so-called Autonomy Statutes of the business and regionalist elite.
June 26, 2008
The Kelwo Association of Chiloé, an organization of Mapuche residents of Chile’s island-province, was formed in 2001 to bring to public attention one of the great social debts of Chilean democracy: the right to health and life of people in indigenous communities affected by HIV/AIDS.
June 24, 2008
Apparently, Miami is a parallel universe where reality can be distorted with impunity. It's hard to know where to begin a critique of this June 17 Miami Herald editorial by Eduardo Gamarra. His editorial describes tense protests, but his manipulative account is unforgivable and grossly distorts the background leading up to the protests.
June 24, 2008
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama likes to employ soaring rhetoric when discussing human rights. But he has failed to take a strong position opposing the infamous School of the Americas, which trains Latin American militaries. When pressed, the candidate praised Congress’ revision of the school’s curriculum but said that he wanted to continue to evaluate the institution.
June 20, 2008
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.