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September 12, 2011
Beto, a 16-year-old hit man for La Familia Michoacana, one of the most notoriously violent Mexican drug gangs, tells his story. This article was originally published in the May/June 2011 issue of the NACLA Report on the Americas.
Cuadernos Colombianos
September 12, 2011
Colombia recently changed the method it uses calculate poverty. Consequently the numbers of the poor were reduced significantly. But how accurate are these statistics? And how are the chosen variables measured?
September 10, 2011
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. But it is also the 38th anniversary of Augusto Pinochet's bloody coup d’état against the democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. In commemoration of September 11, we have pulled from the NACLA archives. The following is the introduction to the October 1973 NACLA Report, written only days after the Pinochet coup and entitled, “Chile: The Story Behind the Coup.”
September 9, 2011
With the recent revelation that President Hugo Chávez underwent emergency surgery to remove a cancerous tumor during a visit to Cuba in mid June, an explosion in political speculation has been swirling through the streets of Venezuela and catching fire around the world.
Traffick Jam
September 8, 2011
In the 1940s U.S. Public Health medical researchers conducted appalling experiments on vulnerable populations in Guatemala. After last week's convening of President Obama's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the revelations are back in the news.
Border Wars
September 7, 2011
A former U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agent offers a perpective on immigration and boundary enforcement almost never heard of in the halls of power in the United States.
Cuadernos Colombianos
September 6, 2011
The government of Juan Manuel Santos is adjusting its military strategy to concentrate on special operations rather than on sustained large scale operations such as Plan Patriota. The move is another step in the shifting dynamics of the Colombian conflict in recent years.
Mexico, Bewildered and Contested
September 6, 2011
When the bodies of two female reporters were found dead in Mexico City last Thursday, public opinion questioned whether their murder should be investigated as a crime against free expression or a crime against women. Before any evidence was gathered, it was assumed that they were killed because they were reporters on the trail of information that somebody didn’t want uncovered. The second supposition was that they were killed simply because they were women.
September 4, 2011
Guatemalans are appalled over new revelations that from 1946 to 1948 U.S. medical researchers infected more than a thousand non-consenting Guatemalans with venereal diseases. The doctors who administered similar experiments on African-American sharecroppers in 1932 had told their research subjects simply that they were being treated for “bad blood.” And bad blood is what has been generated—or simply augmented—by this grim episode in the history of U.S.-Guatemala relations.
Rebel Currents
September 2, 2011
Negotiations between the Bolivian government and indigenous groups protesting the proposed TIPNIS highway broke down before getting off the ground this week, while a visit from Brazil’s ex-president Lula served as a reminder of the larger geopolitical interests involved. Brazil has a major stake in the road's construction, but it also needs a stable political environment in Bolivia to advance its overall economic agenda.