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March 10, 2010

Since the year began, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the country’s central bank have been in a serious row over the use of the bank’s strategic reserves. The conflict began when Fernández asked the bank for more than $6 billion of reserves to create a Bicentennial Fund meant to pay down the national debt and restore Argentina’s credibility in international financial markets. But political opponents of all ideologies have cried foul. Central bank reserves, they have argued, are not meant for paying down sovereign debt.

March 8, 2010

After January's earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security immediately implemented a mass migration plan to manage any influx of refugees coming from the country. Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Chris O'Neil said that "The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them." O’Neil’s declaration reflects the same much-criticized immigration policy that the United States has implemented toward Haiti for dozens of years, a strategy that often corrals the blowback of a long history of U.S. meddling in Haitian internal affairs—both politically and economically. This blowback could be even more explosive now with 1.2 million homeless Haitians living in the squalor of tent cities.

March 4, 2010

Two weeks ago, leaders of all the governments of Latin America and the Caribbean (save the coup-installed president of Honduras) concluded a three-day “summit” on Mexico’s Maya Riviera with a majority commitment to move toward the formation of a new hemispheric organization, tentatively called the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. The proposed organization, which would exclude the United States and Canada, would promote South-South political economic relations as a springboard to development. Six years ago, NACLA published an essay by economist Keith Nurse calling for a similar strategy. We re-publish it here as essential background for an understanding of the new commitment to a strengthening South-South relations in the Americas.

This article originally appeared in the November/December 2003 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

March 1, 2010

Despite Brazil’s reputation as an emerging economic powerhouse, it remains deeply troubled by challenges that threaten its long-term stability and its prospects for becoming a viable leader of the Global South. Questions of land and wealth distribution, extreme poverty, rampant violence and crime, public corruption, and environmental degradation are a few of the most pressing challenges facing the country during an important election year.

February 24, 2010

In its first year, the Obama administration has embraced and even extended its predecessors’ militaristic counter-narcotics policies in the Americas. In doing so, it has also adopted the basic tenets and priorities that have shaped U.S. drug control policies for decades. Until the administration pays attention to the structural origins of the drug war, as well as the profound international dependencies upon which it has always rested, it will be fated to continue pursuing a destructive, and failed, policy.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

February 22, 2010

In December 2003, the dedication ceremony of Haiti’s first and only public medical school took place in Port-au-Prince. The school’s ability to provide free medical education was considered one of the most important achievements of former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s administration. A mere one month after it opened, however, the school became one of the many casualties of the military coup that ousted Aristide in 2004. The story of this school is both the story of the Haitian people's iron will for self-determination and betterment, and the country's constant struggle with meddling foreign powers.

February 17, 2010

Challenging the notion that poverty has been reduced in Nicaragua under President Daniel Ortega's administration, this rebuttal to the article "Report From a Fact-Finding Trip to Nicaragua: Anti-Poverty Programs Make a Difference," published in December on NACLA's website, proposes to add a broader political and economic context to the debate.

February 15, 2010

Over a year since he was last seen, there is still no trace of Argentine Luciano Arruga. He has joined the list of desaparecidos, the term that usually refers to the 30,000 disappeared during the brutal military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983. The difference is that Luciano was kidnapped and disappeared in a broadly heralded democracy.

February 12, 2010

“I won’t pay until the union workers return!” proclaimed 300 voices in unison on a recent Sunday in Mexico City, igniting a new campaign that joins consumer resistance in solidarity with the embattled Mexican Electrical Workers Union (SME). In October Mexican President Felipe Calderón forcibly liquidated the state-owned Central Light and Power Company, suddenly dismissing 44,000 SME union members to the ranks of the unemployed. The nascent No Pague (Don't Pay) campaign represents the newest phase of the SME struggle against this and has three basic demands: emergency rehiring of the 18,000 SME workers who have not accepted termination; a freeze on electricity rates and restoration of pensioner subsidies; and a halt to privatization of energy resources.

February 10, 2010

“History teaches us not to expect the United States to ride in on a white horse and altruistically save the day for democracy,” says the introduction of the NACLA Report's January/February 1994 edition, which examines the question of U.S. interventionism in Haiti. Now that the U.S. military has deployed some 12,000 soldiers to Haiti in the wake of January’s devastating earthquake, we republish this article from that edition in the hopes that it can offer a useful historical context for understanding current events.

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