A discussion of what femicide really is, triggered by a definition of the word in the bourgeois press.
Mexico
Letter from Mexico: ‘Because All of Mexico is Teuchitlán’
April 9, 2025Letter issued by activists, searching families, artists and writers following the recent discovery of an extermination camp in Teuchitlán, Jalisco, where hundreds may have been executed. The camp was not discovered by the State, but by families of the disappeared.
Canada defends itself
March 19, 2025Trump began a trade war, insisting that Canada would be annexed by the U.S. He denied the legitimacy of Canada in terms like Russia’s before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But Canada is not for sale—or for conquest.
Detroit immigration raids and resistance
February 11, 2025Susan van Gelder presents a mix of reports, information, commentary and dialogue about the ICE raids against immigrants in Southwest Detroit, as well as the actions to resist it.
A review: Peregrina—Heartbreak and Joy
January 6, 2025Susan van Gelder reviews ‘Peregrina,’ a multimedia 80-minute one-woman performance, telling the story of femicide in Mexico and the movement of Mexican women to combat it.
World in View: Ayotzinapa: 10 years without justice
September 30, 2024Ten years after a brutal attack by the police and organized crime resulted in the forced disappearance of 43 students from a Rural Teachers’ College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico. What cannot be forgotten is the living social forces that can transform Mexico root and branch–first of all, the parents of the students, who continue searching for their sons.
Oaxaca towns against mining projects
August 3, 2024Statement by the No to Mining for a Future for All Front against the attempt of the Cuzcatlán company to start mining in El Llano, Sitio Santiago, Oaxaca.
Mexico: The Struggle for Self-Determination in Ostula
July 12, 2024Statement with demands by the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, who in July were brutally attacked by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, with no response from state and federal authorities.
Queer Notes: May 2024
May 15, 2024Takes up: The public outcry that restored a talk by a gay actor to middle school students in Pennsylvania; a bill signed by Great Britain to deport people to Rwanda, a country not safe for the LGBTQI+ community; LGBTQ+ curricula being included in Washington state’s public schools; and three extraordinary support groups for 2SLGBTQ+ in Latin America.
Review: A We without State
March 15, 2024The pamphlet ‘A We without State” by Yásnaya Aguilar Gil, a voice of the Mixe people, deconstructs the word “Indigenous” and poses the idea of a world “not as a sum of national States…but as an ever-changing, collaborative and adaptable conglomerate of tiny social structures, as my community.”
Queer Notes: January 2024
January 15, 2024Takes up: Transgender Awareness Week 2023 worldwide; Intersex people’s rights; a LGBTQ+ art exhibit in Sao Paulo; the aftermath of the murder of nonbinary Mexican Justice Jesús Ociel Baena Saucedo; and the Lynchburg, Va., City School Board rejecting a grant awarded by the “It Gets Better Project” to high school students to create a safe space.
World in View: Immigration: the view from Mexico
January 9, 2024The situation for migrants in Mexico is dire: the National Guard is used against newly arrived immigrants; gang members kidnap them and demand ransom from relatives in the U.S.; Mexican and U.S. authorities make the journey to the border excruciating.
World in View: Hurricane Otis and the ‘Other Acapulco’
November 18, 2023Hurricane Otis on the coast of Guerrero on Oct. 25 left more than 80% of the hotel infrastructure unusable and hundreds of houses without roofs. The population was already suffering from hunger and organized crime.
Women WorldWide: October 2023
October 3, 2023Takes up: Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling state laws against abortion are unconstitutional; Britain’s first cohousing community exclusively for women over 50; and #SeAcabo, (It’s Over), the Spanish women athletes’ #MeToo movement.
Women WorldWide: August 2023
August 9, 2023Takes on: Lebanese woman-led media platform “Khateera”; a fine in Chihuahua, Mexico, for singing lyrics in live performances that sexually objectify or promote violence towards women, and the deaths of Dr. Susan Love and Sinéad O’Connor.
World in View: Migrants die on treks to Europe and U.S.
August 4, 2023More than 50,000 migrants are known to have died worldwide since 2014, revealing inhuman conditions that force so many people to flee their homes, indifference of governments, and official acts that caused the deaths of hundreds of migrants.
World in View: Mexico Notes, May-June 2023
June 16, 2023Takes up: how Mexico has increased the number of migrants it has detained five-fold, most at the behest of the U.S.–from 88,000 a year a decade ago to 450,000 now; and that Lopez Obrador is pushing the mega-project “Mayan train” that is invading Indigenous communities, as well as a new airport outside Mexico City, a huge oil refinery, a thermo-electric plant.
Capitalism profits off immigrants’ woes
June 8, 2023U.S. President Joe Biden simultaneously put in place a proposal different from Donald Trump’s Title 42 that required asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their asylum hearing appointment. Biden used another of Trump’s laws: to require refugees to prove that they sought asylum in the first country they encountered. In both proposals human rights are trampled.
Queer Notes: March-April 2023
March 21, 2023A Lesbian mother in Mexico was reunited with her young children thanks to Lesbian Mothers in Mexico and All Out; about 50 high school students of the Wyoming Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) met with state legislators on the GSA’s biannual Civics Day; and in Tunisia, NGOs circulated a petition demanding freedom for a Trans woman and Trans man sentenced to prison for suspicion of taking part in an LGBTQ+ event.
Indigenous Resistance in Mexico
November 11, 2022The Xonacatlan Indigenous Council (Juanacatlán, Jalisco State) issued a declaration establishing their territory “free of industry, free of megaprojects, free of mining and material banks.”
Women Worldwide: July-August 2022
July 21, 2022No 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.
Handicap This!: May-June 2022
May 19, 2022Takes up: Difficulty for a disabled raped women in Kyrgyzstan to get justice; Mexican women marching on International Women’s Day for disabled women’s rights; the Disability Rights Coalition of Nova Scotia hailing a victory; and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ ad seeking psychologists boasted of all the mentally ill people in U.S. prisons.
Biden complicit in border brutality
May 14, 2022Trump’s national health emergency, continued by Biden, had asylum seekers wait in Mexico for processing. This breaks U.S. law and though other pandemic emergency measures have lifted, virtually all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are urging the Biden Administration to keep breaking this law past May 23, despite the suffering it causes.
Biden complicit in border brutality
April 30, 2022Trump’s national health emergency, continued by Biden, had temporarily superseded certain statutes so that asylum seekers had to wait in Mexico for an appointment. While other pandemic emergency measures have lifted, virtually all Republicans and a growing number of Democrats are urging the Biden Administration to keep breaking the law past May 23.
Women in defense of the territory
March 19, 2022A call from women living in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, to meet together to fight developmentalist capitalism, and stop the rampant violence against women in the area.
Discussion Article: Towards a dynamic unity of struggle
Discussion article on the question of unity and diversity of struggles, theory and practice, Marxism and other currents of thought, exploring briefly the Zapatista Indigenous movement from 1994 to the present.
‘The Isthmus Is Ours’
March 4, 2022A call from women living in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, to meet together to fight developmentalist capitalism, and stop the rampant violence against women in the area.
With the migrant caravan in Mexico
November 29, 2021An in-person report from an Accompaniment Brigade which joined a Migrant Caravan crossing southern Mexico on its way to Mexico City and encountered a great deal of difficulty from the Mexican government and little to no aid from agencies charged with helping them.
Women Worldwide: November-December 2021
November 19, 2021Social media’s effects on young women’s mental health; Mexican Supreme Court bans criminalizing abortion; FiLiA2021 conference in Europe; and women boycott bars and clubs in Britain demanding better training for staff to protect women from rapists.
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.
Woman as Reason: Violence against women on the rise
November 16, 2021After over 50 years of a Women’s Liberation Movement unthinkable numbers of women continue to be brutally raped and murdered worldwide—with the COVID-19 pandemic spiking that number even higher. What can help us gain that needed confidence is to understand the meaning of our own actions and thoughts which is the role of a philosophy of human liberation.
Latin America Notes: September-October 2021
September 21, 2021Cubans revolt and students speak out amid food and medicine shortages and human rights violations; and Latin America suffers under climate change.
To build a new society
From Mexico, a search for agroecology, food autonomy and a truly human world after an experience with green capitalism.
Ocotlán residents defy criminal mine company
September 20, 2021Community authorities and residents of the Ocotlán Valley, Oaxaca, are demanding that the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources not give in to pressure from Compañía Minera Cuzcatlán, a subsidiary of Canada’s Fortuna Silver Mines, to expand their San José II mining project.
Mexico Notes: July-August 2021
June 29, 2021Mexico Notes on Precarious Labor; Zapatistas in Spain, and The collapse of the Mexico City Metro-line.
Youth in Action: July-August 2021
On June 4, the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, thousands of Chinese students protested a government plan to merge private colleges with vocational schools; rural youth in eSwatini demonstrated on June 19 for the right of the people to vote for their own prime minister; and several high school graduates spoke out at graduation for an end to anti-Asian racism, the right to give your speech, not the principal’s, and for pride at being the first in your family to graduate.
Central America deal: troops at borders
May 8, 2021Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico agreed with the Biden administration to put more military at their borders to stop immigrants.
Agroecology in Xico
Our landlords run the biggest agroecological project in the zone. They sell organic food in a store in the capital city of Veracruz. It is astonishing to see that their great respect for nature is matched with their great disrespect for human life.
Women from India to the USA fight against misogynist violence
March 11, 2021Violence against women has worsened in the era of COVID-19. Sexism, like racism, is systemic to almost every culture. Nevertheless women fight back with creative activism and thought. What is new is the internationalization and deepening of that struggle. This year’s International Women’s Day shows women deepening our fight for full freedom and new human relationships.
Racism still core to immigration policy
Despite immigration reforms by President Biden that made a significant impact on people’s lives, they fall short in some ways and racism and exploitation continue–not only in abuses by ICE officers but in the overall concept and design of the system.
Latin America notes, March-April 2021
Coal mines continue to kill in Mexico; the Mapuche nation is resisting Chile’s government and logging companies.
Biking Diaries: Mexico’s pandemicide
Almost one year after the declaration of the COVID-19 alert in Mexico, the way the government has been “managing” the situation is genocidal.
News from Mexico: January-February 2021
January 31, 2021While the U.S. and Mexico argue whether General Salvador Cienfuegos and former Mexican President Peña Nieto were involved in abetting a narco-trafficking cartel, the Mexican army and navy have a despicable history of human rights violations never honestly investigated. The Zapatistas issued a “Declaration for Life” and intercontinental call for meetings.
Argentine women win abortion rights
January 29, 2021After years of struggle by women, the Argentine Senate finally passed an abortion rights bill, making it legal to terminate a pregnancy in the first 14 weeks. Abortion will be free in government hospitals, crucially important for poor women.
Argentina’s feminist revolution
January 10, 2021At four in the morning on Dec. 30, the Argentine Senate finally passed an abortion rights bill, making it legal to terminate a pregnancy in the first 14 weeks. The procedure will be free in government hospitals, crucially important for poor women.
Zapatista Declaration for Life
January 2, 2021The Zapatistas have just issued a new declaration signed by hundreds of organizations regarding their work in the last several months establishing contacts with many groups and discussing what unites and divides them and working out what allows them all to move forward. They agreed to continue to have meetings around the globe, inviting those [=>]
Trump’s immigrant policies challenged
November 28, 2020Both the “Remain in Mexico” policy, in which border guards stop asylum seekers from approaching U.S. border stations, and the family separation policy on the border which has failed to unite families of over 650 children are being challenged by immigrant rights activists and organizations.
News from Mexico: November-December 2020
Guanajuato has 2,587 missing persons, and 3,438 intentional homicides in the first nine months of 2020; President López Obrador claims to be against neoliberalism, but combines it with state-capitalism in developmentalist projects; many states and communities are COVID-19 hot spots with high levels of deaths, particularly in maquiladoras; and the Zapatistas report on their situation vis-a-vis COVID-19, and their resistance along with CNI against developmentalist projects.
Biking Mexico Diary: Indigenous protect the forest, land and water
November 25, 2020Travelers learn how the Indigenous people of San Marcos, Veracruz, Mexico protect the forest, land and water.
Biking Mexico Diaries: The devil’s bridge
November 3, 2020Continuing with their bike trip throughout Mexico, the author and his friend have to cross “The Devil’s bridge” and they meet a family that has suffered the consequences of developmentalism.