Disinformation

Viewpoint: The Cuban government systematically accuses artists and journalists of conspiring against the state, creating a climate of persecution and fear.

Read the editor's introduction to our latest issue of the NACLA Report, "Dispatches from the Field," focused on media and journalism in Latin America.

After recent protests, Cuba needs political solutions that resist all forms of co-optation.

On the eve of legislative and municipal elections in El Salvador, one of the worst acts of political violence since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992 shook the country.

The Covid-19 figures in Haiti don't reflect the reality on the ground. 

Ofelia Fernández is the youngest lawmaker in Latin America. Despite online hate, she's leading the youth movement for the political rights of women. 

In January, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took a weeklong tour of Latin America. That the media seem to dismiss the tour as a joke, while at the same time ramping up fears that somehow Iranian relations in the Americas poses a security risk to the United States, only further shows how little credibility there is in the U.S. corporate media coverage of the Iranian–Latin American relationship.

During El Salvador's 2003–04 presidential campaign season, ads appeared on Salvadoran televisions featuring U.S. Republican congressional representatives. Praising the right-wing ARENA party candidate Tony Saca, who eventually won the election, the U.S. officials warned Salvadoran voters that a victory by the left-wing opposition party, the FMLN, would result in their U.S.-based relatives being deported and their remittances being cut off. In light of the 2004 experience, an L.A.-based group founded in 1999 by Salvadoran American labor and immigrant rights leaders, decided not only to participate as electoral observers in El Salvador's 2009 presidential election but also to pressure the U.S. government to remain neutral. This article originally appeared in the November/December 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.

In August, Bolivian president Evo Morales won a referendum on his term in office with 67% of the vote. The opposition, having failed to unseat Morales in the face of the largest electoral majority in Bolivian history, embarked on a campaign of violent destabilization that culminated in riots, economic sabotage, and the massacre of more than 20 indigenous Morales supporters in September. Just a day before the massacre, at the height of opposition violence, the Bolivian government expelled U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg, following revelations that the U.S. Embassy in La Paz had asked Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar to spy inside Bolivia, together with growing evidence, amid official secrecy, of U.S. funding for violent opposition groups.

In the early morning hours of January 31, vandals broke into Tiferet Israel, a Sephardic synagogue in Caracas. They strewed sacred scrolls on the floor and scribbled "Death to the Jews" and other anti-Semitic epithets on the walls, before making off with computer equipment and historical artifacts. Understandably, the incident frightened and upset many in the Venezuelan Jewish community. Right away, U.S. news outlets, including The New York Times and The Miami Herald, linked the incident to Venezuela's increasingly strained relations with Israel, after the two countries suspended diplomatic relations two weeks earlier over Israel's bombing of Gaza, then still under way.

The political crisis currently unfolding in Guatemala reads like the script of a Hollywood summer blockbuster. The Economist even quipped that it was like something out of Gabriel García Márquez's novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But this is far from magical realism; in fact, it was the virtual reality of interactive networking websites – collectively labeled by some "Web 2.0" – that may have brought a presidency to its knees.