A bit on South and Central America

[the_future_modernes]

MEXICO

We Have Everything And Lack Everything: In Mexico, Community Police Resist Mining Companies

The southern Mexican state of Guerrero in the 1980's and 90's saw rising violence and insecurity due to government neglect, and in some cases involvement, and a corrupt judicial system. The problem came to a head in 1995 when state police massacred 39 campesinos at Aguas Blancas.

That same year, a series of regional assemblies were held in the Costa Chica and Montaña area in southeast Guerrero leading to the decision that the communities would start their own police force comprised of volunteers. In 1998, in addition to patrolling and detaining suspected criminals, the communities began their own justice and community reeducation program to deal with offenders. The CRAC (Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities), as this effort was christened, is now comprised of over 60 communities and around 100,000 people, and counts on the assistance of 750 volunteer police from the communities themselves. It acts as a parallel authority to state and local government, dealing with almost all aspects of community life through traditional assemblies and consensus.And then came the mining companies...

ATF’s PR Gun Busts Perpetuate Drug-War Fairy Tale

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or the ATF, is in the hot seat now because of its alleged investigative practices that have allowed thousands of illegally purchased firearms to be smuggled into Mexico by warring narco-trafficking organizations.

As part of an operation dubbed Fast and Furious, an ATF whistleblower contends at least 1,800 firearms illegally purchased in the U.S. were allowed to “walk” across the border in an effort to target the kingpins behind Mexico’s gun-running enterprises. The whistleblower, ATF agent John Dodson out of the agency’s Phoenix field office, has gone public via the mainstream media denouncing the practice, out of concern that it is seriously flawed and leading to needless bloodshed.

In fact, two of the guns linked to the Fast and Furious operation allegedly were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, who was shot to death in Arizona by Mexican border marauders in Arizona late last year.

Here is what ATF agent Dodson told the Spanish-language TV station Univision in a recent interview:

Once we watch the transfer and those guns head in an opposite direction [into Mexico], there is no way to find them, to recover them, to identify them until they turn up in a crime, either in Mexico or somewhere in the United States. Once they turn up in a crime and the authorities, whichever authority it [may] be, initiates a trace on them, then we find out where that gun was trafficked to.

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Women Human Rights Defenders Risk Death, Discrimination

Josefina Reyes began her career as a human rights organizer the way thousands of women across the globe do: defending her family and her community.

The middle-aged mother staged a hunger strike to demand the safe return of her son after Mexican soldiers abducted him from their home. She lost another son to the violence that has characterized the Valle de Juarez, where the Reyes family lives, since the drug war started. Josefina became a strong voice against the violence and in particular against abuses committed by the army and police.

In August of 2009 she participated in the first regional Forum against Militarization and Repression. On Jan. 5, 2010, Josefina Reyes was shot to death.

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Cases of attacks on women human rights defenders are not well documented and often remain invisible except to the immediate community. This and the lack of government recognition of their work and the risks it entails, make them particularly vulnerable. The UN report notes, “In most cases there are no mechanisms for protection and where they do exist, there is a lack of implementation, political will or gender-sensitivity.” It states that Mexico is working toward a protection program and mechanism, but that it seems to lack a gender perspective. Moreover, protection efforts receive very little funding even when mandated by a national or international body, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars given by both the U.S. and Mexico governments to security forces in the fight against organized crime

Women and men who protest femicides (the systematic murder of women as documented in Ciudad Juarez), LGBT activists, defenders of sexual and reproductive rights, labor movement leaders, women leaders of displaced communities and anti-militarization organizers report the most threats and cases of violence in the Americas. These women have suffered attacks against themselves, their family members and homes, the forced closure of their human rights organizations, and– as in the case of the remaining members of the Reyes Salazar—forced exile due to the threat of violence against them.

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Meet the 41 Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholars, Class of 2011 :These Talents of Social Conscience Will Come Together for Ten Days of Intensive Training in Mexico in May

CAIRO, EGYPT, MARCH 14, 2011: Once again, another class of the School of Authentic Journalism is presented to you, the readers and supporters who make it all possible. I know you will absolutely love reading about each and every one of them, including some of their own words that they shared with us to cause us to choose them from a pool of more than two hundred long, completed applications, and as a result of an extensive follow-up interview process.


....

The Authentic Journalism Renaissance now has the sister we’ve always worked to make possible: The Civil Resistance Renaissance. And our world is changing daily, and for the better, as these movements grow. The great engine of our little corner of this global awakening that is bigger than any of us has been the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism, since 2003. This May’s session in Mexico will be the largest ever, with 41 scholars and an equal number of professors, many of whom graduated in previous years and have gone on to do the work of our times.

So here are some brief introductions to them. MORE

BOLIVIA

From Red October to Evo Morales: The Politics of Rebellion and Reform in Bolivia

The Commune spoke to Jeffery R. Webber, author of a new book From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia, about the country’s social movements and the course of Evo Morales’ MAS government.

What kind of politics did the 2000-2005 movements in Bolivia express? Was it a general desire for socialism, or was it conditioned by the historically strong Trotskyist current in Bolivia? Are indigenous people’s demands of specific importance?


The politics articulated through the movements of the 2000-2005 revolutionary epoch in Bolivia are best conceived through what I call the “combined oppositional consciousness” of their leading layers of activists and organisers. This consciousness drew on the two most important popular cultures of resistance and opposition in the last few centuries in the Bolivian context – an eclectic politics of revolutionary Marxism and indigenous liberation. These traditions were adapted and combined – not without tension and contradiction – in novel ways to the twenty-first century environs of urban shantytowns, mining enclaves, and the largely indigenous countryside.


The combined consciousness I’m talking about was characterized by a complex critique of imperialism, capitalism, and racist domination, seen together as integral components of a singular, intertwined system that had to be defeated in its totality, rather than each ingredient one by one, or through distinct stages to be played out over an extended historical period. It’s true that, historically, Trotskyism was the dominant force within revolutionary Bolivian Marxism, but organized Trotskyists played a very marginal role in the latest series of revolts in the country. Some of the best residual ideas and practices of Trotkyism continued to reverberate in activist circles, though, if under different descriptive rubrics.

Indigenous demands for liberation, against what was effectively a ethno-racial regime of informal apartheid, cannot, in my view, be separated out from the wider anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle that was taking shape in these years. We are talking about a profoundly racialized capitalism of a specific character, existing within a particular subordinated country, which is, in turn, inserted into the lowest echelons of the hierarchy of the world capitalist system. Subjectively, this condition is revealed in the minutiae of the daily lives of workers. The activists I spoke to in the leading city of revolt – El Alto – thought of themselves, for example, as workers and indigenous (principally Aymara, but also Quechua) simultaneously. They weren’t workers on Monday and indigenous on Tuesday, or workers in some parts of their lives, and indigenous in others. To paraphrase one militant I spoke to, the urban Bolivian proletariat in El Alto has an indigenous colour.MORE

Bolivian President Uses Former DEA Agent’s Book to Send Message to the World


Bolivian President Evo Morales earlier this week held up a book, titled “La Guerra Falsa,” for the world to see.

The tome Morales displayed for the cameras on March 3 at a military ceremony in La Paz, Bolivia is the Spanish-language version of “The Big White Lie,” a book penned by former DEA undercover agent Mike Levine. The book exposes the CIA's corrupt involvement in the drug war, including its role in the "cocaine coup" in Bolivia in 1980.


Mike Levine now hosts the Expert Witness Radio Show on Pacifica Radio in NYC, a show that has given Narco News plenty of airtime.

The U.S. mainstream media coverage meme now argues that when Morales kicked the DEA out of Bolivia in 2008, it opened the door to widespread narco-corruption, as evidenced by the recent arrest in Panama of Bolivia's former top counternarcotics cop, Rene Sanabria.

Morales' critics contend Bolivia’s stability is in jeopardy because it has become a magnet for global narco-trafficking since the DEA’s departure. Consequently, the critics argue, Morales should let the U.S. counter-drug agency back onto Bolivian soil.

Morales, though, is steadfast in his refusal to change course on that front, given the reasons for making that decision in the first place seem to remain valid concerns in his mind. MORE

COLOMBIA

Celebrating Popular Struggle in Cauca, Colombia

Statement on globalizing resistance from the grassroots, with an introduction by the La Chiva Collective

Source: The Media Co-op

This month marks forty years since the founding of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) in Toribío, Colombia. It might be a sign of the times that, especially these days, celebrations are often bittersweet.

Circulated in Spanish by the Tejido de Comunicación (of the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca - ACIN), the editorial translated below highlights both the bitter and the sweet of the CRIC's first forty years, as well as the challenges underpinning the next. Achievements giving way to celebrations and contradictions warranting great challenges.

In the Sa'akhelu Ritual, held in Cauca's indigenous territories every year, the hummingbird meets the condor. The hummingbird polenates, creates life, mesmorizes in its rapid-fire action, it's beauty. The
Condor circles, hunting, looming overhead: it is a terrible kind of beauty. When one overpowers the other, say the Nasa, we lack balance or 'equilibrio'. While the editorial below speaks for itself, the Tejido's message is essentially a call to correct an imbalance, one that exists not only within the CRIC as an organization but also in Colombia, the continent and the world.

This message could not be more relevant as we hear of, and reflect on, struggles in other parts of the world: as much as we celebrate victories, we must be conscious of where we are headed.
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Colombia Students talk about sexual diversity

In Colombia, the government of Medellin has started a campaign to raise awareness on sexual diversity in high schools, and part of the campaign includes online videos of different students speaking about their experiences.

Take Isabela, for example: She's been an advocate for herself since she had to speak to government authorities to intercede on her behalf and get her parents to support her decision to return to school not as a boy, as she had done to that moment, but as the girl she felt she was. After that first hitch, she found that her school not only supported her decision but actually commended her for being true to herself. She insists that although some students are hostile, she's also found support and less harassment than she expected. However, she's also had to knock some heads together to get the point across that she won't stand for being abused or insulted.

 
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