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May 12, 2008
Just weeks after Venezuela, Ecuador, and Colombia pulled back from the brink of conflict, the U.S. Navy announced the Fourth Fleet to reassert U.S. power in the Caribbean and Latin America.
May 8, 2008
Since the debt crisis of the early 1980s, Mexico has lived through the slow disintegration of the corporate state created and controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), its gradual replacement by a multiparty neoliberal state, and the emergence of new sources of governance and power—national and transnational, private and public, criminal and legal.
May 6, 2008
About two years ago, the global media discovered "paco," a cheap, highly addictive form of cocaine that was ravaging the impoverished neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. In explaining why paco had become so prevalent, most articles emphasized the widespread poverty that followed Argentina’s economic crisis beginning in 2001. But a NACLA investigation supported by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Fund finds that the more important, if infrequently discussed, factor in the paco phenomenon is a shift in cocaine trafficking in the region—largely as a response to the U.S.-led War on Drugs.
April 30, 2008
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The election of a left-leaning former Bishop in Paraguay, and the growth of left movements around Latin America puts Pope Benedict and the Vatican on a collision course with Liberation Theology.
April 28, 2008
"The IMF is back," declared the International Monetary Fund's managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, at its annual spring meeting earlier this month in Washington. And not a moment too soon either. To hear the organization's economists tell it (as they mingled in five-star hotels, long black limos and posh restaurants with bankers, businessmen and finance ministers from around the globe), they've arrived on the scene just in time to help solve the world's financial crisis.
April 28, 2008
Later this month, the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) will publicly determine the "authenticity" of laptops recovered from a rebel encampment in Ecuador after a March 1 raid on the camp by the Colombian military. Based on previous press coverage of the incursion and the documents, we are concerned that the media take extreme care in interpreting the Interpol findings.
April 25, 2008
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Demonstrations that started in Le Cayes on Thursday, April 3rd, against soaring food prices spread across Haiti to Petit-Goagve, Gonaïves, Aquin and, by April 7, to the capital, Port-au-Prince. Anger over rising prices has been building for many months with basic food stuffs increasingly out of reach for the poor. Tires were set ablaze in the streets and thrown together to form barricades that paralyzed traffic for days.
April 25, 2008
Leading academic scholars and grassroots activists gathered at historic Howard University in Washington, DC, from April 18-20 for the national symposium, “What’s Up With Venezuela: Participatory Democracy or Democracy as Usual?” The meeting provided an opportunity for 200 solidarity activists from across the United States to study the revolutionary changes sweeping through Venezuela.
April 25, 2008
The debate on so-called “biofuels” has intensified in recent days. Rhetorical arguments are blindly repeated with speeches citing the environment and poor people as the central concerns. But when the time comes to make decisions these are wholly ignored. The United Nations and other institutions have made alarming warnings about fuels derived from agriculture, which in a strict sense should be called “agrofuels” to remind us they come from food crops.
April 25, 2008
Fireworks can still be heard in the distance where thousands of people are in the streets of downtown Asuncion sharing, embracing, reveling, hugging, smothering each other in kisses, and dancing until the early morning.