Buried underneath last week’s hysterical news about the continuing, politically manufactured “debt ceiling crisis,” was an article from a non-U.S. press agency, the French Press Agency, entitled “US unveils sanctions against global organized crime,” It detailed how President Obama had signed an executive order imposing financial and other sanctions on a group of foreign criminal organizations ranging from Russia, Japan and Italy to Mexico.
Diana Gomez, is the daughter of Jaime Enrique Gomez Velasquez, a union leader and member of the political opposition who was disappeared and murdered in 2006. As a member of “Sons and Daughters for Memory and Against Impunity” (Hijos e Hijas por la Memoria y Contra la Impunidad) Diana has never stopped seeking justice.
Nearly two thousand activists explored extractivism over three days in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador, at the Continental Conference for Water and Pachamama, debating the problems created by the extractive model and possible alternatives. The Conference Ethics Tribunal condemned militarization and the criminalization of protest, which are integral parts of the extractive model.
Two objectives guide the United States and transnational companies in Central America: geopolitical and military control and enormous profits from mining megaprojects. Militarism, drug-trafficking, and violence complete a picture in which the same ones always lose.
Congress could vote any day now to strike a new blow against already-battered U.S. workers and the unemployed in the form of three Bush-era Free Trade Agreements. The Obama administration and corporate interests are urging their passage. Read why unions and human rights groups say no.
By the middle of 1997 officials from Chiquita Brands International had grown nervous about the company’s increasingly long list of so-called “sensitive payments” in Colombia. For years Chiquita had been quietly paying off the leftist rebel groups that dominated the country’s banana-producing northern coast. But the balance of power was shifting away from the guerrillas and toward increasingly powerful paramilitary groups, and Chiquita’s security payments reflected this new reality. Thousands of dollars that previously had gone to guerrillas were being redirected to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a confederation of drug traffickers and right-wing death squads that promised to drive guerrilla influence from the region and seize control of the illegal narcotics trade.
The Party of Institutional Revolution’s (PRI) recent effort to reform Mexican labor law took aim at workers and independent unionism in Mexico. In this second installment of David Bacon’s series on cross-border solidarity, the author looks at this legislative assault on workers’ rights and other recent neoliberal reforms of Mexico’s economy. All articles in this series were originally published in the Institute for Transnational Social Change report ‘Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity’.
