Women are not only fighters in Sudan’s battles to overthrow al-Bashir, but they are also determined to continue the great tradition of women of the Arab Spring: to make sure that their revolution does not stop until all human relationships are transformed.
Indigenous peoples
Latin America in continuous struggle
November 22, 2013Resistance by Indigenous groups in Colombia; Indigenous Guatemalans resist Canadian mining company; teachers in Mexico protest “educational reform” law
Canada’s First Nations against fracking
November 21, 2013Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) attacked men and women of the Mi’kmaq and Elsipogtog First Nation for blocking a New Brunswick highway in protest of Southwestern Energy doing seismic testing to determine whether local shale gas deposits merit fracking.
Latin America in view, September-October 2013
September 23, 2013Latin America in View, Sept.-Oct. 2013: Ecuador oil drilling; Brazil rapes; Mexico Escuelita Zapatista.
Latin America in view
July 10, 2013Bolivia’s Statism; Guatemala’s Genocide Trial in Disarray; Honduras coup anniversary
Climate change and development
May 3, 2013Another devastating sign of capitalism’s degeneracy is its failure even to slow down climate change. Youth have spearheaded a new movement to control it. It is the actual social relations, relations of production, forms of labor, relationship to the land and other means of production, by which we can judge what must be uprooted, and to what extent any society has or has not moved to a path of development that breaks from capitalism’s never-ending growth of capital, or, as Marx put it, production for production’s sake.
Idle No More
February 22, 2013Winter is often seen as a quiet time in Canada. In one area, however, there is a major event right now: the emergence of a new and powerful movement of Indigenous people across Canada: “Idle No More.” It grew out of resistance to the environmental destruction caused by the extraction of natural resources and the [=>]
Zapatistas’ new era
February 13, 2013World in View
Dec. 21, 2012, was a special date in the Mayan calendar—the end of an era and the beginning of a new historic cycle. For the Zapatistas of Chiapas in southern Mexico, it signaled a new moment of the movement. Some 40,000 Zapatistas from the autonomous Indigenous communities in resistance marched through the five [=>]
Afro-Colombian Women: Defeating invisibility
February 10, 2013by Gerry Emmett
In the remarkable documentary film, La Toma (2012), Afro-Colombian woman activist Francia Marquez Mina is threatened by government forces and forced to spend each night sleeping in a different place for her safety. (See “Afro-Colombians Throw Off Shackles,” Nov.-Dec. 2012 N&L.) She has described the experience of people in her community this [=>]
Honduras three years after the coup
December 12, 2012La Voz de los de Abajo (Voices from Below) sponsored a delegation to Honduras in September, three years after the 2009 coup which deposed the elected President Manuel Zelaya.
Under his successor President Lobo, violence escalated. Seventy Aguán campesinos (peasants) were murdered in three years.
Honduras’ homicide rate is the highest in the world. Lawyers, politicians, human [=>]
Appeals for Support from Russia, Colombia
December 3, 2012An appeal from the Russian leftists to their comrades in the struggle:
We, the representatives of Russian leftist organizations, turn to our comrades all over the world with an appeal for solidarity. This call and your response to it are very important to us. Right now we are facing not just another instance of dubious [=>]
Readers’ Views, September-October 2012, Part 2
October 16, 2012From the September-October 2012 issue of News & Letters:
Readers’ Views, Part 2
REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM DISCUSSION CONTINUES
The discussion article on “Revolutionary Syndicalism” (July-August N&L) reminds me of when it was considered a major force of revolution. There was a syndicalist party, the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), that thought we could vote in socialism. [=>]
Earth Summit 20 years on
June 2, 2012To mark the 20th anniversary of the original “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, here is what we wrote about it at the time (from the July 1992 News & Letters):
Ideological pollution at ‘Earth Summit’
by Franklin Dmitryev
The UN Conference on Environment and Development (or Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, began June 3 with [=>]
Free Angye Gaona!
February 12, 2012World in View
by Gerry Emmett
Free Angye Gaona!
I collect the rootlets of thought.
I carry them on my eroded back
next to the wild oblivion falling from me.
—Angye Gaona
The U.S.-allied Colombian government has falsely charged Surrealist poet and activist Angye Gaona with “drug trafficking” and “rebellion.” She is being held under house [=>]
Durban climate summit: sellout, revolt
February 7, 2012“2020 is too late to wait!” rang out the words of Abigail Borah, a 21-year-old college student/activist from Vermont. She was interrupting U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern’s speech at the latest yearly UN climate summit, held this time in Durban, South Africa, Nov. 28 to Dec. 11. Her passionate intervention, drawing applause from many delegates, [=>]
Bolivia’s two roads
December 2, 2011From the November-December 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Bolivia’s two roads
Indigenous protestors from the Bolivian Amazon won a victory when they forced President Evo Morales’ government to cancel a road-building project through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), a supposedly protected region in eastern Bolivia. The victory [=>]
A divided Canada
August 15, 2011Following the May 2 federal elections, Canadians woke up to a very different Canada. In this “new” Canada the polarization of Canadian society has finally fully revealed itself, polarized by social class, between English-speaking and French-speaking, and between the “Right” and “Left” ends of the political spectrum. The Conservatives, a true right-wing Party under Stephen [=>]
World in View: Challenges for independent Southern Sudan
July 28, 2011After 50 years in which millions have died, Southern Sudan becomes an independent nation on July 9. It is a momentous occasion marked by contradictions.
In Southern Sudan: While the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement has been the primary organization in the liberation struggle, a number of splits occurred recently, and it remains to be seen how [=>]
California’s real history
June 9, 2011Rulers & Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769-1901 by Laurence H. Shoup.
Laurence H. Shoup presents the history of California from the European incursion of Native America by the Spanish to the Great San Francisco Waterfront Strike of 1901. His interest is agency from below in the form of direct action: “The stories told in [=>]