The 16.6 billion dollar figure that Mexicans in the United States remitted home during 2004 is equivalent to US$45.5 million per day entering Mexico, overtaking the amount invested by foreign corporations, or income from tourism, or even net income from the sale of oil.7 Mexican migration to the United States is also broadening geographically. Today’s [...]
Support on Capitol Hill for a new companion bill to a proposed U.S.-Mexico Trans-Boundary Aquifer Assessment Act (S. 1957) raises hopes of providing some $50 million over the next decade for the first effort to map groundwater resources flowing under the border. The bipartisan legislation promises to reduce widespread confusion over binational water management by [...]
The U.S. Congress and the Central American nations are currently considering the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Through CAFTA, Central American governments hope to attract new inflows of foreign direct investment. Washington promises that investment will start flowing if Central American governments agree to far-reaching investment rules. Central American governments want investment, and the U.S. [...]
Latin America is being invaded by genetically engineered (GE) crops. The promoters of these crops say they will help fight hunger, reduce agrochemical use, and bring prosperity to farmers and rural communities in Latin America. But so far experience has demonstrated that these novel crops do not fight hunger, do not reduce agrochemical use, do [...]
In early March Guatemala began the process of ratifying the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) despite mass protests by popular movements throughout the country. Repression by military and police security forces resulted in the death of at least one protestor and many injuries. Although the Guatemalan Congress ratified CAFTA on March 10 by a [...]
A little more than a century after the abolition of black slavery in the Americas, economic and other forms of racial discrimination remain its dismal legacy. In Brazil, the black civil rights movement barely began to get underway in the 1990s. Its delay is due to repression of anyone who rejected the carefully nurtured myth [...]
Recently the presidents of South American nations launched a proposal to form a “Community of Nations” that would group twelve countries covering 17 million square kilometers, with 361 million inhabitants, and a GDP of more than $970 billion dollars. The initiative arose in December 2004 in the context of the third summit of the heads [...]
