Hugo Blanco (1934-2023), Peruvian Revolutionary

July 19, 2023

Marxist, activist and defender of the Indigenous movement, Peruvian revolutionary Hugo Blanco (1934-2023) died in June. His history shines a light on the needed exploration of the conflictive, contradictory story of Marxism and the Indigenous movement in Latin America today.

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Women Worldwide: July-August 2022

July 21, 2022

No Birth Behind Bars “feed-in” in London; Cross-Border Network of Mexico and U.S. abortion rights groups formed; Montreal protest of the prostitution common at Grand Prix auto race; study finds women less likely to receive credit for their scientific work.

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The hell of normalized domestic violence

July 20, 2022

Catholicism, “traditional family life,” silencing of women, combine to make life a “living hell” for many and reveal how the normalizing of domestic violence wars against the Universal of Freedom.

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World in View: Why Haiti is so poor

July 12, 2022

A new series by the New York Times paints a picture of Haiti’s stark, painful, preventable history of more than 200 years. Slaves who freed themselves in revolution were subverted first by Napoleon’s France—supported by the U.S.—demanding outlandish sums of money as ransom.

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The hell of normalized domestic violence

June 11, 2022

Catholicism, “traditional family life,” silencing of women, combine to make life a “living hell” for many and reveal how the normalizing of domestic violence wars against the Universal of Freedom.

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World in View: What way will Xiomara Castro take Honduras?

March 15, 2022

The first woman president elected in Honduras, Xiomara Castro, took office after a 12-year rule by the corrupt, conservative National Party. Will she focus her attention on the powerful grassroots movement which brought her to the presidency allowing its actions to be a determining new beginning for Honduras?

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Mapuche people fight for their land in Chile

November 19, 2021

In October, right-wing Chilean President Sebastián Piñera twice decreed a 15-day state of emergency for several provinces which directs the armed forces to provide support for policing and surveillance of the Mapuche people. We include part of the Mapuche people’s declaration.

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U.S.-Mexico collusion against immigrants

Once again a migrant caravan—primarily Central Americans and Haitians—is proceeding from southern Mexico towards Mexico City, with hopes of reaching the U.S. While Mexico has historically been a safe haven for exiles the Haitians are facing Mexican government hostility, including National Guard soldiers who have attacked caravans near Mexico’s southern border.

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Cáceres, Presente!

March 11, 2021

March marks the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Berta Cáceres, Honduran defender of the rivers, the Lenca people and life.

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Latin America under COVID-19

July 1, 2020

Capitalism is exacerbating the havoc being wreaked by COVID-19 in Latin America. In the projected largest recession in its history, 12 million more people will lose their jobs, leaving 29 million more in poverty.

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Bolsonaro’s fascism threatens Brazilians

December 13, 2018

Jair Bolsonaro, elected President of Brazil, is a racist, misogynist, homophobic admirer of Brazil’s 1964-1985 military dictatorship. The coming months will tell whether the masses will mount a crucial resistance.

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Argentina in crisis

September 20, 2018

Argentina has been bouncing this year from one crisis to the next. Today it needs a movement that refuses to separate the slogan “They all must go!” from building an authentically new kind of society.

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Women WorldWide: March-April 2017

March 21, 2017

Movement du Nid’s fake escort service raises awareness of violence against women; Argentinian feminist collective Ni Una Menos organized the first regionwide Latin American march against femicide; Russia’s new law reduces first-time domestic violence assaults to civil offenses; huge outcry of Arab-Israeli women against fundamentalist Muslims’ claims that 19-year-old Arab-Israeli Lian Zaher Nasser deserved to be murdered for celebrating a Christian holiday with men where alcohol was served.

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Essay: The masses in Latin America face a duality

November 30, 2016

The essay takes a critical look at the “Latin American Pink Tide” (a decade of progressive governments in South America), its limits and contradictions, and poses the question: Is there a way forward that does not substitute statism for the action and thought of the masses?

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Upheaval and crisis in Latin America

July 14, 2016

Venezuela is in ever-deepening crisis–including electricity shortages, outrageous inflation, food shortages–because of neoliberal politics. Colombia sees a cease-fire agreement signed between the government and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia/FARC while agricultural injustice, a major cause of increasing poverty, remains. Peru elects Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a right-wing neoliberal, as their new president, defeating Keiko Fujimori, daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori, who committed many human rights abuses while in office.

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World in View: Murder in Honduras

Over 1,300 activists from more than 20 countries attended a gathering in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, celebrating the life of murdered Indigenous rights and ecological-social activist Berta Caceres.

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World in View: Refugee crisis measures world’s inhumanity

April 29, 2016

At the crux of the world refugee crisis is a demand for new human relations. The will to deny any responsibility for centuries of exploitation of Latin America and Africa is at the root of inhuman attitudes toward refugees, and it becomes an opening for the most reactionary politicians.

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Oil: bad both ways

March 12, 2016

People’s suffering, no matter the price of oil, demonstrates capitalism’s inherent deep ties with climate change and economic destruction.

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Latin America ‘statism’ challenged by movements

September 6, 2015

Governments which could never have come to power without the social movements’ mobilizations are using vague expressions of anti-capitalism, socialism, resource nationalism, anti-imperialism, etc., to impose developmentalism on their populations, often in collaboration with neoliberalism.

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Readers’ Views, July-August 2015

July 4, 2015

Black lives as Subject; Russia in crisis; Nothing about us without us; Homelessness in L.A.; Central Canada Alliance; Perspectives and philosophy; Elderly to the streets?; Women and Yemen half-peace; Labor and climate justice; Dialectic and women’s liberation; Voices from behind the bars

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World in View: Obama meets Castro

Real possibilities for social transformation in Latin America, and with it an end to U.S. domination with iron fist or velvet glove, lie not in the choreographed dance between the U.S. and the Latin American governments, including “Leftist” or progressive ones, inside or outside the “Summit of the Americas.”

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From Turkey to USA, women as force & reason fight inhumanity

March 5, 2015

Another savage sexual assault and murder—this time in Turkey—brought forth thousands of demonstrators, mostly women, throughout the country and beyond. Özgecan Aslan was a student taking a bus home. Worldwide, women are not only railing against sexism and challenging men to change what is often deadly behavior and when not deadly, deeply oppressive; they are as well explicitly extending their critique to the state itself.

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Help us! Paramilitaries in Colombia Threaten Black and Indigenous Communities to Protect Illegal Mining

October 19, 2014

An appeal for help from the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network (ACSN):
Hello. We need the media to help us get this information out. These paramilitaries are going to kill us.

Help us please.
We need many people to write letters to the council of state and to the government of Colombia demanding the protection of the communities of La Toma and the north of Cauca.

On the evening [=>]

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Queer Notes, September-October 2014

From the September-October 2014 issue of News & Letters

by Dee Perkins

With the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected categories, going nowhere, President Obama signed an executive order July 21 prohibiting such discrimination by federal contractors, which employ some 28 million workers, and, further, [=>]

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