They set out on February 25, from different parts of a country torn apart. In silent defiance, they entered the capital city of Tegucigalpa on March 6. On International Women’s Day they made their demands of a government that has trampled their rights and brought bloodshed across the nation since the rule of law was shattered three and half years ago.
Women’s organizations are raising a red flag on Nicaragua. In a hearing of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on March 12, they reported rising violence against women, corruption and abuse of power in government when dealing with the crimes, and the increasing vulnerability of girls and young women.
You could almost hear the sigh of relief coming out of Washington at the news of Hugo Chavez’s death on March 5.
President Obama issued a brief statement that failed even to offer condolences, forcing a senior State Department official to patch over the evident callousness and breach of diplomacy by offering his personal condolences the following day.
It has been five months since the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity led a peace caravan across the United States to end the war on drugs. Yet much has happened in that time that changes the context for our movement, or rather, collection of movements.
Monsanto has a map for conquering the world and Mexico is in the center of it. For nearly two decades the transnational corporation that manufactures the pesticides used across the planet has been trying to take over the global seed market with genetically modified (GM) seed. If successful, most of the food we grow and eat would have to be purchased annually as seed from Monsanto. The mutant plants would grow up addicted to Monsanto herbicides. Local varieties would disappear, and in their place standardized, genetically modified food–doused with chemicals–would fill supermarket shelves and corner stores.
As the immigration reform debate heats up, an important argument has been surprisingly missing. By granting legal status to immigrants and ordering future flows, the government would save billions of dollars. A shift to focus border security on real crime, both local and cross border, would increase public safety and render a huge dividend to cash-strapped public coffers.
Last September, more than a hundred Mexican drug war victims on the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity gathered with New Yorkers in Riverside Church. The testimonies they presented, in the same place where in 1967 Martin Luther King called for an end to the Viet Nam war, revealed the similarities between the two unjust wars and why we should oppose them.
