insurrección

“’We have hundreds of kilometers of beaches that aren't developed, and it's

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With Senator Barack Obama having become the United States’ first black presidential candidate from one of the two dominant parties, it is useful to look back at the 1960s, a decade when the nation

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Human rights activists from Latin America met in the Brazilian capital of Brasília in June to talk about and evaluate the efforts regional governments have made toward eradicating racism and discrimi

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Talk about pandering to your wanna-be, gotta-have conservative base.

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Outside of Ecuador, most progressives consider President Rafael Correa to be a Leftist champion of social and economic justice.

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Daniel Ortega’s successful bid for Nicaragua’s presidency last year received enthusiastic support from one of his party’s long-time foes: indigenous groups from the Atlantic coast.

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In 2006, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was at the height of his political powers.

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In January 2003, President George W. Bush announced his plan to ask Congress for $15 billion to fight the global AIDS pandemic. In contrast to the 1980s and 1990s—when many U.S.

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A few months before Myrian Cossio’s 20th birthday, in San José del Guaviare, a bustling frontier town deep in Colombia’s eastern tropical lowlands, armed men forced her into a car.

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LIMA, Jul 14 (IPS) - The Peruvian capital, faced with rapidly rising cost of living, was the epicentre of protests calling for fulfilment of social and wage agreements signed by the government.

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Manuel drives up the winding cobblestone road in the northern highlands of Ecuador, expertly steering the rickety truck while discussing local politics.

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During a recent heated meeting at the US Embassy in El Salvador, Ambassador Charles Glazer admitted to U.S. intervention in the 2004 Salvadoran presidential elections.

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Food is the first thing; morals follow on.
—Bertolt Brecht

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When you consider John McCain’s ties to Big Oil, the GOP candidate’s claim to be a political maverick taking on special interests is nothing short of absurd.

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The debate on so-called “biofuels” has intensified in recent days. Rhetorical arguments are blindly repeated with speeches citing the environment and poor people as the central concerns. But when the time comes to make decisions these are wholly ignored. The United Nations and other institutions have made alarming warnings about fuels derived from agriculture, which in a strict sense should be called “agrofuels” to remind us they come from food crops.

Questions about agrofuels are now coming from various fronts. The director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, added fuel to the fire when stating that producing biofuel from food crops constituted “a truly moral problem” while poor countries face full-fledged food crises. Bolivian president Evo Morales recently launched similar critiques.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler once again called the massive prodction of biofuels a “crime against humanity” since using fertile lands to produce fuels reduces the amount of land used to grow food, which in turn raises food prices.

Speaking from the 30th Latin American and Caribbean Regional Conference of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva retorted, “The real crime against humanity would be dismissing biofuels a priori, relegating countries strangled by food and energy shortages to dependency and insecurity.”

Representatives from 33 countries countries attended the FAO meeting with the objective of analyzing problems caused by the rising price of basic foods and the implications of this on food security. The conclusions of the conference were not promising. As the conference finished, FAO director Jacques Diouf said the food crisis in the world would be a prolonged one: “Some say if food production increases that prices will go down, but that isn’t what’s going to happen.”

He explained the spike in food prices is caused by a combination of factors, among them: the 58 percent rise of fertilizer prices in the last year, the high cost of oil, the actions of “speculators” looking for “opportunities” in markets of raw materials. In his view, the problem is not a shortage of food, but rather a problem of poor peoples’ access to food.

Juan García Cebolla, who coordinates the FAO’s “No Hunger Campaign” in Latin America and the Caribbean, corroborates his boss’ argument: “The region produces 30 percent more than what it needs to adequately feed its population. This shows its not a problem of production in general, even if there are areas that produce less than they consume.” According to the FAO, 52 million people in Latin America are undernourished, nine million of which are boys and girls under the age of five.

Before the FAO, Lula argued that biofuels are not the “villain” threatening the food security of poor countries, and far from it: he said they could be used as a tool for economic development. He complained that biofuels’ impact on food is always brought up, but that no one questions “the negative impact of rising oil prices on production costs, or that few rise up against the harmful impacts of subsidies and agricultural protectionism” sustained by rich countries.

Perhaps without noticing Lula was essentially agreeing with the message of his archenemy at the head of the FAO (Diouf) in highlighting that rising food prices are being caused by a slew of villains, including the rise in oil prices. The value of oil has grown five-fold in the last decade if measured in dollars or quadrupled if measured in Euros. But the costs of extracting and processing crude have not changed substantially, so who is accumulating the winnings?

The major oil wells are not in the lands of central countries, and the largest reserves are not in the hands of private companies. Most of the little oil left in the world is actually in the hands of Third World state oil companies. The key question is: Where are those resources going?

The current discussion over food and agrofuels is avoiding a central issue: the problem is not only what is produced, it also about how the winnings are allocated. It is not just about whether land is sufficiently abundant to accommodate all crops, the problem is also about how this is organized and who controls production and the distribution of the profits.

The rationale expressed by the Brazilian president—part of a broader collective imaginary—is that farmers should produce agrofuels for export, rather than food. In this line of reasoning, the profits generated by biofuels will provide farmers (and other poor people) the economic means to buy food.

The problem, however, is that for some reason this income never reaches the poor farmers, who are supposedly the main preoccupation of rhetoric at these summits. The money stays at the various parts of a long chain of production, distribution, and consumption in which other groups enjoy the profits. This is the real “moral problem,” the actual “crime against humanity.”

It’s likely that the huge demand for biofuels shares responsibility for the rise in food prices. But it’s not true that biofuels are wholly responsible for an entire fifth of the world’s population is going hungry.


Gerardo Honty coordinates the agrofuels initiative of the Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social (CLAES).

For more perspectives on the agrofuels debate:

“The Agrofuels Trap” by Laura Carlsen

“Militant Brazilian Opposition to Bush-Lula Ethanol Accords” by Isabella Kenfield and Roger Burbach

“Biofuel Boom Means Bust for Colombian Campesinos” by Annalise Romoser

And for a NACLA-compiled list of articles on biofuels visit:

Biofuels Articles Compiled by NACLA

Fireworks can still be heard in the distance where thousands of people are in the streets of downtown Asuncion sharing, embracing, reveling, hugging, smothering each other in kisses, and dancing until the early morning.

Fernando Lugo, the opposition candidate and progressive former bishop, has won with just over ten points above his closest challenger Colorado candidate, Blanca Ovelar.

Mark this one down in the books because this moment is already engrained in the hearts of many Paraguayans - both here and across the globe.

People here from age 10 to 100 will never forget it, and it will be talked about for as long as they shall live - regardless of what comes after. It is the beginning of something else, new horizons, a new chapter in this book that is Paraguay, and this is living history. Everyone here realizes it, and tonight, you couldn’t help but get teary-eyed as the grandmothers, wrapped in the Paraguayan flag, danced with children in the streets, and cried at the top of their lungs that this is the moment they’ve been waiting for their whole lives.

Tonight, for millions of Paraguayans in this tiny country, and across the globe, nothing else matters. There is nothing else. “I am renewed!” cried a friend at the foot of the Pantheon in the midst of jubilant revelry after the results were announced. “For the first time in our lives, we have hope, we have possibilities… We are a new nation!”

It is not some far off dream. It is the realization of decades of struggle, beneath a repressive dictatorship, which sent thousands of Paraguayans in to exile. It is finally the fall of the dictatorship, a fall which was never fully realized in 1989, as power was passed from dictator Alfredo Stroessner in to the hands of another Colorado party member. It is the realization of truly legitimate elections, which portrayed the will of the people for the first time in as long as anyone here can remember.

Suddenly the massive crowd before us breaks into a spontaneous choir of the Paraguayan national anthem.

“I’ve never heard our anthem like this before,” says my Paraguayan friend, turning to me with a large smile. “It never meant anything before.”

It is, without a doubt, one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard. I am sure that those around me are feeling the same way.


Michael Fox is reporting on the Paraguayan elections for UpsideDownWorld.org, where this article was first published.

For some, it may come as a surprise that Buenos Aires’s fashion industry relies on slave labor. Even with Argentina’s miraculous economic revival, the practice of using undocumented immigrants as slave laborers in sweat shops continues. An estimated 400 clandestine shops operate in Buenos Aires. And tens of thousands of undocumented Bolivians work in these unsafe plants.

Diseases like tuberculosis and lung complications are common due to the subhuman working conditions and constant exposure to dust and fibers. Many workers suffer from back injuries and tendonitis from sitting at a sewing machine 12 to 16 hours a day.

One worker, Naomi Hernández, joined the Union of Seamstress Workers “UTC”, an assembly of undocumented textile workers, after escaping a sweat shop.

For two years I worked and slept in a three square-meter room along with my two children and three sewing machines my boss provided. They would bring us two meals a day. For breakfast a cup of tea with a piece of bread and lunch consisting of a portion of rice, a potato, and an egg. We had to share our two meals with our children because according to my boss, my children didn’t have the right to food rations because they aren’t workers and don’t yield production.

She reported the subhuman conditions in her workplace and was subsequently fired.

Taking on sweat shops

Who would think that a Sunday social gathering could transform into a movement to fight sweat shops? For many Bolivian immigrants residing in Argentina, it was a question of survival. What began as a Sunday family outing grew into an organizing space for undocumented immigrants forced to work in subhuman conditions inside clandestine textile shops.

In the midst of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, local assemblies sprouted throughout Buenos Aires. One assembly in particular dedicated its efforts to fighting slave-like conditions for undocumented immigrants. In the working class neighborhood of Parque Avelleneda, Bolivian workers began to meet on Sunday’s at The Alameda Assembly.

The Alameda Workers Cooperative Co-op and the road ahead

The Alameda Assembly is a busy place. Aside from the soup kitchen which provides a nutritional meal for dozens of men, women and children, it also houses the Alameda Workers Cooperative. Workers who escaped sweat-shops formed the co-op in 2006.

The men and women who work at this co-op have equal wages and work a maximum of 8 hours a day. They make decisions in a collective assembly. For Olga Cruz, working in a cooperative means that there’s not a foreman or boss who takes away the profits and pays workers pennies.

“The worker is the one who has the most work and knowledge. They have to sew and give the garment its shape. The manufacturers and foremen of the big brands only know how to design, they don’t know how to sew, which is the hard part.”

Now the cooperative is creating its own designs. T-shirts and sweatshirts display graphics with lettering, “a world without slaves - eight-hours, period.” With the help of a local fashion designer the co-op is set to launch its very own brand: Mundo Alameda. The UTC has also proposed that clandestine textile shops be shut down and handed over to the workers to manage them as co-ops and, ultimately, build a cooperative network that can bypass the middlemen and the entire piece-work system.


Marie Trigona is a journalist and radio producer based in Argentina. This article is based on a radio report she produced for Radio Netherlands Worldwide. She can be reached at mtrigona(a)msn.com.