Latin America Solidarity News 16th July 07

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Events

VISIT CUBA THIS SUMMER
Cuba consistently makes the news: whether it is it’s health care system (see Salud or Sicko), its response to its oil crisis, its environmental programmes, or by remaining a political opponent of US imperialism for forty years. It is also the home of salsa and its music is world renowned.
Registrations are open for the 25th Southern Cross Brigade to Cuba. Members of the Brigade, which is made up of Australians and New Zealanders, spend approximately four weeks in Cuba, leaving 27th December and returning 24th January.

The Brigade stays in the Julio Mella International Camp and the time there co-incides with visits by Brigades from the Nordic countries and South America, which gives an excellent opportunity for dialogue.

The programme is varied and includes social occasions, dance lessons, cultural events, talks by community groups e.g. the Women’s Federation, visits to schools, hospitals and trade unions, resorts and national parks, as well as free time in Havana. A homestay is always a highlight, this year in Guantanamo Province. Some voluntary work is included in the programme, usually work in the orange orchards. Brigade members with a special interest in an area can usually be provided for.

The trip is suitable for people of any age group. Children are welcome and an 85 year old has coped well. While some knowledge of Spanish is useful, an interpreter is always on hand. As an initial introduction to Cuban society and Cuban people the Brigade is an excellent opportunity to quickly gain insight into this unique country and to express solidarity.
The all up cost is $5500, including airfare, spending money and all accommodation and meals. Members of the Brigade often stay longer in Cuba as private travelers or move onto other countries in the region.

For further enquiries and registration e- mail Ina at inashina@clear.net.nz or Paul at HYPERLINK "mailto:wkcultur@ihug.co.nz" wkcultur@ihug.co.nz; (03 732 4010).

Women in El Salvador
If any LAC people are planning on being Central America later this the year....!

From: cis_elsalvador@yahoo.com

Hello Friends:

The CIS would like to invite you to two special programs we are preparing to learn about the struggles of women in El Salvador and accompany women's organizing, empowerment, and women's businesses.

November 11 - 25 - special spanish program focused on women's issues and Jesuit Anniversary. November 26 - Dec. 4 - special delegation focused on women's organizing and anniversary of U.S. church women.

Please consider participating and pass on the invitation to friends. Women and men are encouraged to participate.

In Solidarity,
CIS
Colonia Libertad
Avenida Bolivar Nº 103
San Salvador, El Salvador
Centroamerica
Teléfonos: 2226-5362 y 2235-1330
www.cis-elsalvador.org
e-mail: cis_elsalvador@yahoo.com

NEWS

MEXICO: OAXACANS MARCH

Some 20,000 people marched in Oaxaca city, capital of the
southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, on June 14 to mark the first
anniversary of a violent but unsuccessful attack by state police
on a downtown encampment by the state's striking teachers [see
Update #855]. The police attack escalated the strike and led to
the formation of the broad-based Popular Assembly of the Peoples
of Oaxaca (APPO), which kept much of the city and the state
paralyzed until federal police and troops ended the uprising in
late October and early November. Marchers in the June 14
demonstration called for punishment for those responsible for 21
deaths in Oaxaca from June through November; the resignation of
Gov. Ulises Ruiz Ortiz; the release of political prisoners; the
reopening of almost 200 schools; and more resources for teachers.
[El Diario-La Prensa 6/15/07 from La Opinion]

On June 12 Justice Juan N. Silva Meza of the Supreme Court of
Justice of the Nation (SCJN) called for the court to set up a
special commission to investigate actions by federal, state and
local authorities in Oaxaca from June 2, 2006 to Jan. 31, 2007,
and to establish "why these serious violations of individual
guarantees took place, who ordered them, and whether [this]
followed a government strategy." His call responded to a May 24
report by the government's National Human Rights Commission
(CNDH), which concluded that government authorities had
"physically harmed a great number of people in a cruel and
inhumane manner." [La Jornada (Mexico) 6/13/07; Noticias de
Oaxaca 5/25/07]

On June 14 CNDH president Jose Luis Soberanes Fernandez confirmed
that soldiers had raped at least two underage girls and possibly
two others during an anti-drug operation in Caracuaro, Michoacan,
from May 2 to May 4. Soberanes was unable to say whether the
military would punish the soldiers. But he added that the
"Secretariat of National Defense [SEDENA] can't be the judge and
a party [in the case] at the same time." President Felipe
Calderon Hinojosa's campaign to use the military across the
country to control organized crime has led to several abuses,
including the June 1 shooting deaths of five members of an
extended family--three of them children--by soldiers in Sinoloa
state [see Update #902]. "[W]hat happened in Sinoloa tells us
that the army isn't prepared to take on the functions of the
police," Soberanes told the press on June 14. [LJ 6/15/07]

Cuba Health Reports online.

Published online by the editors of MEDICC Review journal, Cuba Health Reports (CHR) offers you health and medical news from Cuba with the same standard of reliable, evidence-based analysis.

CHR is the premier destination if you want to keep up with Cuban health and medicine—including initiatives to tackle domestic health problems, updates on the country's global health cooperation, and key research developments.

New articles include:

§ Health Minister Discusses ‘SICKO’ in Internet Debate

§ Cuba’s Aging Pains (and Gains)

§ New Cancer Control Unit Established; Latest Data

§ Cuba Rising in Major UN Indices

Colombia's Para-Political Crisis


President Alvaro Uribe has enjoyed back-to-back election landslides and credit for restoring some stability in Colombia’s decades old conflict. But now a scandal is erupting taking the shine off America's most loyal Latin ally and the largest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East.


Prominent members of the Uribe government have now been linked to right-wing death squads responsible for thousands of murders.


All this comes at an awkward time for Colombia and the US, effectively putting a multinational-pushed free trade deal on ice. About the only big corporation happy is Burson-Marsteller, the PR giant hired by the Colombian government for some emergency re-branding.


Avi interviews Raul Fernandez, an economist and professor of US-Latin American Relations at the University of California.
http://www.cbc.ca/onthemap/fullpage.php?id=98

Venezuela Takes Control of Orinoco Oil

Caracas, Jun 26, 2007 (Prensa Latina) The nationalization process of the Orinoco Oil Strip is expected to conclude in Venezuela Tuesday with the construction of joint companies, with majority in the hands of the Venezuelan state.

Thus, the four heavy and extra-heavy crude oil processing associations, which produce a half million barrels daily, become companies with Petroleos de Venezuela the majority shareholder, at a minimum of 60 percent.

With this decision, Venezuelan authorities end the so-called oil opening, regarded by the present National Assembly (Congress) as covert privatization of the South American country's main natural resource.

Currently Venezuela and 13 joint companies are certifying the quantity of crude in the strip, which should make the country first in the world for oil reserves by 2008.

Exxon, Conoco Nix Deals With Venezeula:

Venezuela's state oil company said Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips had refused to sign deals Tuesday that would allow them keep pumping oil under tougher terms in the South American country.
http://tinyurl.com/3d4w5h

Be ready for guerrilla war against the US, Chávez tells army
Rory Carroll in Caracas
Tuesday June 26, 2007
Guardian

President Hugo Chávez has ordered Venezuela's armed forces to prepare for a guerrilla war against the United States, saying there must be a strategy to defeat the superpower if it invades.
He said Washington had already launched a non-military campaign using economic, psychological and political means to topple his socialist government and seize control of Venezuela's vast oil reserves.

"We must continue developing the resistance war, that's the anti-imperialist weapon. We must think and prepare for the resistance war every day," the president told hundreds of soldiers assembled at Tiuna Fort, a military base in the capital Caracas, on Sunday.

Wearing an olive-green uniform, red beret and presidential sash, Mr Chávez said Venezuela was locked in "asymmetrical warfare" with the US and that, if it led to combat, soldiers must be prepared to lay down their lives.

"It's not just armed warfare, I'm also referring to psychological warfare, media warfare, political warfare, economic warfare," he said.

There was no immediate response from Washington, but the Bush administration has rejected previous claims that it was plotting to attack its outspoken South American foe.

Mr Chávez's speech came on the eve of a trip to Russia, Belarus and Iran, hosts who share much of his antipathy towards Washington.

He said that while in Minsk he would put "the final touches" to a deal to buy an air defence system with long-range radar and missiles and in Moscow he would discuss the possible purchase of submarines.

Venezuela has recently purchased £1.5bn worth of Russian weapons including 53 military helicopters, 24 SU-30 Sukhoi fighter jets and 100,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles.

Mr Chávez stressed the build-up was a deterrent. "We are strengthening Venezuela's military power precisely to avoid imperial aggressions and assure peace, not to attack anybody."

The air system was purely defensive, he said. "But if somebody comes here, well then, ssssssshhh," he said, imitating the sound of a missile.

The former paratrooper said US dirty tricks were evident in the student-led protests which greeted his decision last month not to renew the licence of RCTV, an opposition-aligned television station. He also said Washington was trying to sabotage the Copa America, a pan-regional football tournament which Venezuela is due to host over the coming weeks.

The Bush administration tacitly backed a coup that briefly ousted Mr Chávez in 2002 and has made no secret of its distaste for a leader who has thrown an economic lifeline to Fidel Castro's Cuba.

Mr Chávez claimed there have been numerous US-sponsored attempts on his life since the coup, but he has not provided details.


Lula resumes nuclear program to make Brazil 'world power'
11 Jul 2007, 0456 hrs IST,AFP
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/World/Rest_of_World/Lula_resumes_nuclear_program_to_make_Brazil_world_power/articleshow/2193094.cms

SMS NEWS to 8888 for latest updates

SAO PAULO: President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday relaunched the country's nuclear program, promising to complete a nuclear submarine and a third atomic power plant both mothballed 20 years ago.

"Brazil could rank among those few nations in the world with a command of uranium enrichment technology, and I think we will be more highly valued as a nation -- as the power we wish to be," Lula said at the navy's Technological Centre in Sao Paulo.

"If money was lacking, it won't be lacking now," Lula said. Finishing the nuclear submarine would cost an estimated 68 million dollars over eight years, he said.

"And who knows, with a little more (money), we may build it sooner, because it is running late," Lula said, 20 years after the project was abandoned.

He also confirmed the government would complete the Angra III nuclear plant in Rio de Janeiro state, after the National Committee on Energy Policy approved the project two weeks ago.

"We will complete Angra III, and if necessary, we'll go on to build more (nuclear plants) because it is clean energy and now proven to be safe," Lula said. The plant will cost 3.5 billion dollars over five and a half years, he said.

"Nuclear energy has been tested and approved in Brazil. It is safe and we have the technology. So why not go for it?" Lula said.

Two weeks ago Lula said the country's energy demand was growing at five percent a year. He said the government had to assure investors that there will be no energy shortage after 2010.

However, Greenpeace criticized Lula's announcement as reviving a dream of Brazil's 1964-1985 military regime, which Lula battled as a trade union leader.

"He will reignite the 30-year dream of the military, with no benefit -- but lots of problems -- for the country," Greenpeace anti-nuclear leader Guilherme Leonardi said.

Leonardi said the submarine could be "used for spying or sneak attacks and is unneeded in peacetime."

"Nuclear energy is unnecessary because it is expensive, dirty, dangerous and outdated," he said, adding: "Brazil has enormous potential in clean, environmentally friendly solar and biomass energy."

Brazil has the world's sixth largest reserves of uranium, and completing the nuclear submarine would help Brazil to learn uranium enrichment.

Brazil could then command the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to recycling, navy commander Julio Moura said recently. A submarine-size reactor could also power a small city, he said.

"We have what it takes to become a great energy power and we are not going to give that up," Lula said.

However, Lula's Environment Minister Marina Silva opposes the projects: "In the last 15 years, no country has built nuclear power plants because of the problems with the waste.

"We have other sources of power: a great potential in hydroelectric, and clean energies in which we should invest," she said.

The 2004 opening of a uranium enrichment facility in Resende, outside Rio de Janeiro, triggered international controversy.

Brazil, a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, obliged the International Atomic Energy Agency to accommodate Brazil's demand for an inspection regime that protected the plant's technology and trade secrets.


Latin America Solidarity Committee
Lac Email lac@apc.org.nz
LAC website www.converge.org.nz/lac
LAC blogg www.lascnz.blogspot.com
Zapatista email zapatistasolidarity@gmail.com
Zapatista blogg http://vivazapatanz.blogspot.com/
Incal-Wellington http://incal.orcon.net.nz
Peña Cultural Latina Alternative Mondays 6pm 128 Abel Smith St

Help is needed for:

1: Put notices on web site once or twice a month.
2: Make posters for occasional events, public meetings.

Subscribe to our Email lists:
LAC News: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/lac-news
LAC Organise: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/lac-organise
Zapatista list: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/zapsolidarity

Subscribe hard copy Latin America Report:
A bi-annual publication providing up todate information and analysis on developments in Latin America,
as well as news on solidarity activities in this country.
Subscriptions $15 per year, Supporter $30 Cheques/donations payable to
Latin America Committee, Box 6083, Wellington. Contact: lac@apc.org.nz

Other NZ links
Casalatina Auckland: www.casalatinanz.com
Human Rights Portal www.humanrights.net.nz/
Global Peace & Justice Auckland: http://gpja.org.nz/
Cuba Friendship Society: www.cubafriends.org.nz
Dev-Zone library DVD requests etc http://www.dev-zone.org/library/index.php
Dev-Zone: www.dev-zone.org/
EMAIL info@drc.org.nz, PH +64 4 472 9549, Level 2, James Smith Building, Wellington.

Overseas Links
News from Brazil www.braziljusticenet.org
Mexico Solidarity Network: http://www.cislac.org.au/
http://www.mexicosolidarity.org
http://www.ezln.org.mx
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico.html
http://chiapas.indymedia.org
http://www.narconews.com

LASNET Latin American Solidarity Network www.latinlasnet.org
CISLAC - Latin America Solidarity Australia www.cislac.org.au/
Network Opposed to the Plan Puebla Panama (NoPPP); www.asej.org
ACERCA - Plan Puebla Panama, Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Acerca@sover.net
Latin American Solidarity Coalition: www.lasolidarity.org
Latin American Agenda project team of the Social Justice Committee www.s-j-c.net
Información sobre Puerto Rico y sus luchas
www.redbetances.com http://capaprieto.tripod.com/index.html

Latin America Solidarity News 13th April 2007

Listen to Oye Latino Access Radio Wellington 783AM
Todos los Jueves de 6:00 a 7:30 p.m Thursdays 6pm to 7.30pm
Radio streaming www.r2.co.nz/meta/accessradio-56.asx - www.accessradio.org.nz/
This programme costs $65 a week to produce - if you would like to sponsor Oye Latino
Ph 021 548 985, oyelatino@gmail.com, or direct deposit to ASB #12-3157-0127644-01


The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Revolt

Friday, 13 April 2007, 6 pm, 128 Abel Smith St
Traditional mexican rice and beans provided. Koha!

Mexico's second poorest state is still in rebellion and suffering the repression of Mexico's state security forces. Julie Webb-Pullman, a New Zealand free lance journalist and peace activist will bring us up to date on the popular revolt of 2006-7 in Oaxaca state in Mexico, and the continuing abuse of basic human rights. A report from the International Civil Commission for the Observation of Human Rights and the Mexican Ombudsman will also be presented to Members of Parliament next week.

Julie's presentation will feature background information on developments, in particular the teachers' union strike, the popular assemblies and examples of some of the human rights abuses committed by the police.

Contact:
Nicol Benkert or Paul Bruce Lac@apc.org.nz Tel 021 027 19370


Background:
On 25 November 2006 more than 140 people, including 34 women, were detained in Oaxaca City, southern Mexico, when a protest against the state governor ended in violent clashes with federal and state police. Many detainees were reported to have been beaten and threatened with death once in custody. They were denied access to their families, legal advice and adequate medical attention for several days. On 27 November, at the request of state authorities, detainees were transferred to a federal prison in Nayarit state, 1200km from Oaxaca, where access to family, lawyers and medical care was severely restricted. Non-governmental human rights organizations and relatives who were finally allowed to visit the prisoners reported that many detainees still showed signs of the beatings suffered at the time of arrest and of cruel treatment while in detention, such as shaven hair, even for women.
On 16 December, after three weeks in detention, 43 people were released. The state government is reported to have dropped the charges and paid for their bail. On 20 December, 91 of the 95 detainees were moved back to two state prisons in Oaxaca, and subsequently 11 were released. On 21 December 80 remained in custody. Many of those detained were reportedly not involved in the protests or violence, but they all face serious criminal charges such as sedition, attacks on public roads, arson and theft. [AI]


CUBAN TOUR APRIL 16 TO 22

Chance to hear Cuban ICAP (Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples)
Buenaventura Reyes Acosta, Vice-president of ICAP and
Alicia Elvira Corredera Morales, Director of Asia-Pacific Division, ICAP
National Contact: Mike Treen DD - 64 9 845 4027; Mobile - 0295254744

Wellington meeting Tuesday April 17th:
Public meeting Havana Bar, 32a Wigan Street, 7.30pm.
Presentation/discussion followed by social.

Hamilton Wednesday April 18th:
Afternoon meeting at Wananga,
Public meeting Celebrating Age Centre Victoria Street 7pm

Auckland Saturday 21st April:
Public meeting Descarga Cubana 1pm
280 Karangahape Road.

Latin film festival
Here is a link to the schedule for the Latin American Film Festival put on by the Embassies
in Wellington, Auckland, Hamilton and Christchurch over the coming month.
http://www.miracle-pictures.com/6laff/

Fair Trade Café 07
“Los Andes” Wellington’s own Latin American music and dance group
and speaker Will Padilla, from Coope Agri in Costa Rica

Coope Agi is one of the largest Fairtrade certified cooperatives
in Central America specialising in sugar cane and coffee.

Thursday 3rd May 6.30 – 8pm

St John’s in the City Presbyterian Church conference room
Cnr Dixon and Willis Streets
$4 at the door will get you as many espressos, lattes, cappuccinos or hot chocolates
as you can handle!!
Contact Kate at cwscentral@cws.org.nz or 04 9732973

A fantastic evening of great coffee, live music, and guest speaker from Costa Rica


Five a side football 5th May

Five-a-side Fair Trade Football competition on the afternoon of Saturday 5th May in Wellington.
Why a football game? Firstly, this event is designed to celebrate the launch of fair trade footballs and rugby balls in New Zealand. Secondly, football is a game that brings together communities and cultures on an equal playing field which reflects what Fair Trade does in the global market place. Thirdly, this is a very popular past time in Costa Rica where Will our coffee speaker is from.

The Football competition will include teams representing:
• Wellington based NGOs, including UNICEF, Devzone and LAC
• Wellington based Coffee Roasters, including Havana and Coffee Supreme
• Fair Trade Retail outlets, including The Body Shop and Trade Aid.
• Local Wellington celebrities

If you want to be part of this event,
please contact Carla Batista at cabmen76@yahoo.co.nz
477-3379 (h), 385 0066 (w), 027 4665271

For other fair trade events check out
www.fairtrade.org.nz or email events@fairtrade.org.nz

Habana Blues
World Cinema Showcase film festival is featuring a Cuban film - Habana Blues - in this year’s festival.
A captivating love letter to life on the ‘crazy isle’ of Cuba, Habana Blues follows a group of musicians struggling to make the big time. If that sounds like Buena Vista Social Club: the Return, be aware this is fiction – these young stallions play a vibrant hybrid of soul and rock, and their goal in life is to leave behind the politics of their impoverished island. Ruy and Tito are the Mick and Keith of the band who spend their days flogging everything from cigars to sombreros out of the back of Tito’s delicious red ‘52 Chevy. When their long-awaited break arrives in the guise of Spanish record producer Marta, their lives are thrown into turmoil by the tantalising prospect of a one-way ticket to Spain. For once they’ve left Cuba, they can never return.

World Cinema Showcase - Christchurch - April 12 - 25, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Dunedin - April 19 - May 5, 2007
www.worldcinemashowcase.co.nz

Telecom 39th Auckland International Film Festival, July 13 - 29, 2007
Telecom 36th Wellington Film Festival, July 20 - August 5, 2007
Telecom 31st Dunedin International Film Festival, July 27 - August 12, 2007
Telecom 31st Christchurch International Film Festival, August 2 - 19, 2007
www.nzff.telecom.co.nz

Christian World Service's Partners in Latin America

Christian World Service works with partner groups throughout the world who work to end poverty and injustice within their own communities, responding to those in greatest need, regardless of race, religion or gender.

CWS responds to humanitarian emergencies, works within Aotearoa New Zealand to raise awareness of the issues involved, and participates in global campaigns to tackle the causes of poverty and injustice.

CWS works with four partners in the Caribbean and Latin America.

El Salvador
Las Dignas: Asociación de Mujeres por la Dignidad y la Vida
Las Dignas, a feminist political organization, was formed in 1990 after the conclusion of 12 years of civil war. Initially the organization aimed to create opportunities for women in every aspect of life, and to develop programmes to assist women to deal with the effects of postwar trauma. Currently Las Dignas also acts as a political force advocating for the reduction of gender disparity and subordination of women in different sectors of the country.

The programme currently being supported by CWS seeks to advance the economic rights of women at all levels; promote nationally the rights of women to equal opportunities in education; promote the rights of women to a life free of violence; and strengthen the citizenship of women, individually and collectively, through creating opportunities for research, debate and training on gender issues.

Nicaragua
CEPAD: Consejo de Iglesias Evangélicas Pro-Alianza Denominacional
CEPAD was founded in 1972 to provide emergency relief to the victims of a large earthquake in the capital. In the 1980s CEPAD was actively engaged in conflict /peace building efforts during the civil war. Today’s work focuses on development programmes (such as food production, income opportunities, environmental protection and advocacy training to negotiate community services), emergency relief, and community conflict resolution.

CEPAD’S priorities are poverty reduction, deforestation, water issues and water privatisation, campaigning against the damaging impacts of debt and free trade on the poor, promotion of organic production and promotion of fair trade coffee. CEPAD has its own radio station, and uses this to broadcast programmes with relevant social content.

Casa de Passagem, Centro Brasileiro de Criança e do Adolescente, Brazil
‘House of Passage’ was established in 1989 to give support to girls living on the streets. Since 1994 it has conducted preventive programmes for children and adolescents living in situations of social risk.

Cassa de Passagem works through three programmes:
(1) Passage to Life aims to promote citizenship rights among 7 –17 year old girls from vulnerable zones, by providing them with education, health and social assistance and cultural, art, sport and leisure activities.
(2) Community and Citizenship creates and enhances political awareness and participation among adolescents and teenagers. This programme trains 12-24 year olds wishing to become ‘Adolescent Spreaders of Information’ and community leaders.
(3) Initiation to Work offers vocational courses to young women and men aged 16-24 in the fields of telemarketing, mechanics, fashion, handcraft, paint, cookery and early childhood education.

Haiti
Institut Culturel Karl Leveque (ICKL)
ICKL works with 6 partner organisations in different parts of the country. Their goal is to strengthen people’s organisations and peasant groups in Haiti and increase their capacity to identify their problems, claim their rights, develop strong networks for collective action, and institute in their communities a participatory democratic culture.
The programme has three strands which together aim to build strong structural and economic analysis and organisational capacity:
1. Training, publications and mobilisation (Appui a la Base).
2. A focus on gender across the peasant movement.
3. Building understanding and skills toward an alternative economic model (Economie solidarie).

CWS is currently funding Appui a la Base. This programme offers strategic support through the training of people who exercise leadership within the community, without financial reward.


The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Assembly" by Nancy Davies (2007, Narco News Books) is coming! (100 collector's limited edition galley proofs will be made available at the book fair for donations of $20 or more to The Fund for Authentic Journalism, on a first-come first-serve basis.)

The book fair, to be held at the Judson Memorial Church at 55 Washington Square South in Greenwich Village brings together radical booksellers, publishers, authors and readers from throughout the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, and some, like us, from farther away.

The Narco News Team seeks more volunteers to help us staff the table. Sign up for a shift anytime between 10:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. to assist booksellers in ordering the work, and help offer the collector's edition of the book and other gifts for donations to The Fund for Authentic Journalism! If you can take a shift, send me an email at narconews@gmail.com.

Also premiering at the book fair: A new DVD of reports from Mexico by The Other Journalism with the Other Campaign: 2006: The Other Oaxaca, with three Video Newsreels from Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos' February 2006 visit to that state (English and Spanish versions of each, for a total of six documentaries), which will be made available along with other DVDs and books by collaborators of Narco News and the School of Authentic Journalism.

At 4 p.m. until 5:15 on Saturday, at that same Judson Memorial Church, the book fair is hosting a forum about Insurgent Mexico:

"While others talk, the poor and indigenous people of Mexico have been acting to take control of their future. The Zapatista movement established a new pattern of antiauthoritarian, nonhierarchical organizing that has inspired organizers around the world. Last year, the people of Oaxaca moved to oust their corrupt governor and establish a new form of horizontal self-government. Despite severe government oppression, communities across the country are launching similar efforts. Meanwhile, the Zapatistas' Other Campaign has galvanized a wide-ranging, community-based discussion about the future of the people of Mexico. Insurgent Mexico brings together two American journalists who have provided some of the most consistent, on-the-ground coverage of Mexico's social movements to discuss the struggle in Oaxaca and the Other Campaign."

The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com
webmaster@narconews.com

Latin America Solidarity Committee
Help is needed for:
1: Layout of next hard copy LAC report (we have templates available,
and possible tuition).
2: Put notices on web site once or twice a month.
3: Make posters for occasional events, public meetings.

Lac Email lac@apc.org.nz
LAC website www.converge.org.nz/lac
LAC blogg www.lascnz.blogspot.com
Zapatista email zapatistasolidarity@gmail.com
Zapatista blogg http://vivazapatanz.blogspot.com/
Incal-Wellington http://incal.orcon.net.nz
Peña Cultural Latina Alternative Mondays from 20th October 6pm 128 Abel Smith St

Subscribe to our Email lists:
LAC News: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/lac-news
LAC Organise: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/lac-organise
Zapatista list: http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/zapsolidarity

Subscribe hard copy Latin America Report:
A bi-annual publication providing up todate information
and analysis on developments in Latin America,
as well as news on solidarity activities in this country.
Subscriptions $15 per year, Supporter $30 Cheques/donations payable to
Latin America Committee, Box 6083, Wellington. Contact: lac@apc.org.nz

Other NZ links
Dev-Zone library DVD requests etc http://www.dev-zone.org/library/index.php
Dev-Zone: www.dev-zone.org/
EMAIL info@drc.org.nz, PH +64 4 472 9549, Level 2, James Smith Building, Wellington.
Casalatina Auckland: www.casalatinanz.com
University of Auckland hispanic club: www.geocities.com/hispanic_club/
Human Rights Portal www.humanrights.net.nz/
Global Peace & Justice Auckland: http://gpja.org.nz/
Cuba Friendship Society: www.cubafriends.org.nz
Lea – Lengua Espanola en Aotearoa: http://geomatica.rediris.es/elenza

Overseas Links
News from Brazil www.braziljusticenet.org
Mexico Solidarity Network: http://www.cislac.org.au/
http://www.mexicosolidarity.org
http://www.ezln.org.mx
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico.html
http://chiapas.indymedia.org
http://www.narconews.com

LASNET Latin American Solidarity Network www.latinlasnet.org
CISLAC - Latin America Solidarity Australia www.cislac.org.au/
Network Opposed to the Plan Puebla Panama (NoPPP); www.asej.org
ACERCA - Plan Puebla Panama, Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Acerca@sover.net
Latin American Solidarity Coalition: www.lasolidarity.org
Latin American Agenda project team of the Social Justice Committee www.s-j-c.net
Información sobre Puerto Rico y sus luchas
www.redbetances.com http://capaprieto.tripod.com/index.html

Latin America Solidarity News March 18th 2007

Events and Resources

The tale of Mundo, Daniel, the co-pilot, the duck, the mouse and the pig: Observing the 2006 Nicaraguan elections

Christchurch Tuesday 20 March, 12noon, Jobberns room, level 4, Geography building, University of Canterbury Geography Departmental Seminar by Julie Cupples

Last year Julie Cupples worked as an international election observer with the Carter Center for the 2006 Nicaraguan elections which saw Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Front for National Liberation returned to power. This talk will talk about some of the political complexities of the electoral process from the point of view of an observer.
Contact: julie@geog.canterbury.ac.nz to organise a meeting in your centre.
Also visit youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUS9cnODlaY.

CUBAN TOUR APRIL 16 TO 22
Chance to hear Cuban ICAP (Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples) visitors:
Buenaventura Reyes Acosta, Vice-president of ICAP and
Alicia Elvira Corredera Morales, Director of Asia-Pacific Division, ICAP
National Contact: Mike Treen DD - 64 9 845 4027; Mobile - 0295254744

Wellington meeting Tuesday April 17th:
Public meeting Havana Bar, 32a Wigan Street, 7.30pm.
Presentation and discussion followed by social.

Update on Oaxaca and report back from Central America
Hear Julie Webb-Pullman 13th April 6pm VTBD
Presentation of Commission report on Human Rights in Oaxaca (Mexico)

LAC AGM Thursday 26th April 6pm
Planning for new year! VTBD.

Habana Blues
World Cinema Showcase film festival is featuring a Cuban film - Habana Blues - in this year’s festival.
A captivating love letter to life on the ‘crazy isle’ of Cuba, Habana Blues follows a group of musicians struggling to make the big time. If that sounds like Buena Vista Social Club: the Return, be aware this is fiction – these young stallions play a vibrant hybrid of soul and rock, and their goal in life is to leave behind the politics of their impoverished island. Ruy and Tito are the Mick and Keith of the band who spend their days flogging everything from cigars to sombreros out of the back of Tito’s delicious red ‘52 Chevy. When their long-awaited break arrives in the guise of Spanish record producer Marta, their lives are thrown into turmoil by the tantalising prospect of a one-way ticket to Spain. For once they’ve left Cuba, they can never return.

World Cinema Showcase - Auckland - March 15 - April 4, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Wellington - March 29 - April 11. 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Christchurch - April 12 - 25, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Dunedin - April 19 - May 5, 2007
www.worldcinemashowcase.co.nz

NEWS

Chiquita admits to working with Colombian terrorist group
CBC News
The Chiquita banana company admitted to doing business with a Colombian terrorist organization on Wednesday and agreed to pay a $25 million US fine.
The Cincinnati-based banana company worked out the fine with U.S. federal prosecutors, who accused Chiquita of paying $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a right-wing organization also known as AUC.
Chiquita Brands International said the payments were made to ensure the safety of its employees, who work on farms in volatile parts of Colombia, where leftist militants frequently clash with right-wing paramilitaries. AUC promised to keep Chiquita's workers safe in exchange for money, Chiquita said.
The United States designated the AUC a terrorist organization in September 2001. The AUC is alleged to be responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia in recent years. The group is also accused of running much of the country's cocaine trade.
"The payments made by [Chiquita] were always motivated by our good faith concern for the safety of our employees," Fernando Aguirre, Chiquita's CEO, said in a statement Wednesday.
Details of the fine and settlement agreement were not released Wednesday, but Aguirre said the company has money set aside to pay the $25-million fine.
The U.S. Justice Department launched a lengthy investigation into Chiquita's financial dealings with AUC several years ago. In April 2003, Chiquita officials and lawyers admitted to prosecutors they had been paying AUC, but still continued to hand money over to the AUC until 2004.
Federal prosecutors filed what's known as an "information" against Chiquita in a U.S. court Wednesday. Unlike an indictment, the information is resolved by the prosecutors and the defendants and is usually followed by a guilty plea.
Mayan activists 'purify' sacred site in Guatemala
IXIMCHE, Guatemala (AP) - A whiff of incense, a sputter of candles, a hum of prayer. Mayan Indian activists on Thursday offered the gentlest protest yet to the Latin American tour of U.S. President George W. Bush as they held a purification ceremony to drive out the "bad spirits" they said he had left behind during a stop at their ancient pyramid.
Bush visited Iximche, capital of the prehispanic Kaqchiqueles kingdom, during his daylong trip to Guatemala as part of a five-nation tour of Latin America.
The activists said the bad spirits were roused by Bush's policies, including the U.S.-led war in Iraq and an immigration raid last week in Massachusetts that netted several Guatemalan immigrants and left dozens of their children stranded at schools.
"Today is a special day on the Mayan calendar," said Jorge Morales, director of the Young Mayan Movement. "That's why we are taking advantage to do this special event to clean and get rid of the bad spirits and re-establish this sacred place's harmony."
The group of about a dozen ascended a partially restored stone pyramid to a central altar, where they burned incense, scattered holy water and bowed to the ground in prayer.
The organizers of the protest are leaders of Indian rights organizations associated with the left-leaning National Indian and Peasant Co-ordinating Committee.
© The Canadian Press, 2007

Si­ Es Verdad
by Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith
March 15, 2007

President Bush got a big surprise on his goodwill visit to
Guatemala this week. Protesters filled the streets of
Guatemala City to denounce an immigration raid that took place
at a leather goods factory in New Bedford, Massachusetts on
March 6th. The raid resulted in the arrest of 361 people,
most of them undocumented immigrants from Guatemala and El
Salvador.Even the President of Guatemala criticized the raids
in his welcoming speech to Bush on his arrival. This is big
news in Guatemala because 10% of the entire Guatemalan
population - many of them undocumented - lives in the US.

The press in Guatemala - and in Massachusetts - has been filled
with stories of the raid and its aftermath of families
shattered,children separated from their parents, and children
being held in federal custody. According to the New York Times:

"Facing pointed questions from Guatemalan journalists,Mr. Bush
stood by the raid, saying, 'People will be treated with
respect,but the United States will enforce our law. Mr. Bush
said he disputed 'conspiracies' relayed by Mr.
Berger [Guatemala's President] that children were taken away
from families. Mr. Bush denied such accounts. 'No es la
verdad,' Mr. Bush said, 'That's not the way America operates.
We're a decent, compassionate country. Those are the kind
of things we do not do. We believe in families, and we'll treat
people with dignity."

Well, si­ es verdad. Days after the raids the
Massachusetts Department of Social Services ( DSS) reported
that they 'could not connect 100 children with their
families'. One woman arrested in the raid was flown back from
Texas where she was being held when her 7 year old daughter
called a hot line created to unite families divided by the raid
to ask about her mother'swhereabouts. Two nursing infants were
hospitalized for dehydration when they were separated from
their mothers.

Once again Bush is either lying or out of touch with reality.
The events of this raid have been well documented and
roundly condemned by the press and politicians in Massachusetts
across the political spectrum. In the era of global
communications, people in Guatemala didn't even have to rely
on the media; they could pick up the phone and call their
relatives in New Bedford to find out what was really going on.

The New Bedford raid had what is by now a familiar feel to it.
On March 6, up to 500 government agents, police, and others
surrounded the Michael Bianco, Inc.leather goods factory in
New Bedford Massachusetts. Inside, an announcement came over
loudspeakers, 'Stay where you are. Immigration agents are in
the building.' Panic ensued as workers made a run for it, but
the exits were blocked, some by police with guns drawn. Some
workers scurried into hiding places, hoping to wait out the
raid.

When the building was finally locked down agents instructed US
citizens or green card holders to move to one area and all
others to another area. Workers were interviewed. Some were
released in a few hours because of compelling health or family
reasons. But most were loaded onto buses and transported to a
holding facility on Fort Devens, a former military base about
60 miles away.

Following processing at Fort Devens, 70 of those arrested
were released for a variety reasons within a few days, 90 are
being held in various jails in Massachusetts and Rhode Island,
and 207 were flown far from their homes and families to jails
in Texas. 8 minors were picked up, 3 were released, the rest
are being held in Miami.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick engaged in a few
testy exchanges with the Department of Homeland Security as did
Senators Kennedy and Kerry and other members of the state's
Congressional delegation. Patrick attacked the 'race to the
airport,' to move the workers out of state before they could be
properly interviewed. Kennedy compared the effect of the raids
to, 'the tragedy and human suffering that we all
witnessed after the devastation wreaked by Hurricane
Katrina....These men and women had not harmed anyone. They were
victims of exploitation, forced to work under barbaric
conditions by an employer who knew that they could not afford
to complain. Their children, many of whom are United States
citizens, had done nothing wrong at all. None of them had any
reason to expect that the Departmentof Homeland Security would
decide to make an example out of them."

Kerry called for a Congressional investigation of the raid.

Meanwhile, immigrant rights groups rushed to court and won
a federal court order to halt the out of state flights. But
most of the captives had already been moved.

The Massachusetts DSS sent two teams of 18 social workers
to Texas to interview those arrested. They asked that 21 mothers
be returned to Massachusetts immediately. While the Department
of Homeland Security maintains that it has worked closely with
DSS in the aftermath of the raids, DSS Commissioner
Harry Spence angrily denies this: 'They stopped us at every
step of the way. ICE's rhetoric has been completely different
from the truth.'

The company - owned by Michael Bianco - makes backpacks and vests
for the military under a $138 million contract, and
employs about 500 people. The firm also makes high end leather
goods for name brands like Coach, Inc.

Bianco and four others were arrested following the raid
and charged with knowingly employing undocumented workers or
providing false documents to workers. But unlike the workers,
Bianco and the managers were immediately released on bail and
were back at work the next day.

The Pentagon's contract rules encourage sweatshop production
like those that exist at Bianco, Inc. In fact, Massachusetts'
politicians complained to the Department of Defense long
before the raids about poor labor conditions in
factories producing uniforms and other articles for the
military, although they did not specially mention Bianco.

At a press conference announcing the raid US Attorney Michael
Sullivan pointed to the 'horrible' conditions in the
plant. Indeed an 11 month long investigation, which included
the use of undercover agents, turned up evidence of classic
sweatshop conditions: low wages, no benefits, harsh working
conditions which included restrictions on workers talking or
using restrooms, and workers' pay being docked for
infractions of workplace rules.

Yet no attempt was made to enforce labor laws. Instead,
the victims of the labor abuse were arrested and transported
and their children subjected to what, by virtually any
definition, is child abuse by federal authorities.

The story of the New Bedford raid is still unfolding. But it
could have areal impact on the current immigration debate.

Many advocates of immigration reform see the increase in
the number of raids by the Bush Administration as a move to
satisfy both the hard-line anti-immigrant wing of the
Republican Party and the corporate wing that wants access to
cheap immigrant labor through a guest worker program.
By creating a crisis, the Bush Administration hopes to push
through an immigration reform bill that it likes. It's unclear
whether the strategy will be successful.

On the one hand, many well meaning people - and some not so well-
meaning people - are now calling for immediate action
on comprehensive immigration reform. Massachusetts Senator
Kennedy is preparing to refile a bill similar to one filed in
the last session of Congress that attracted bi-partisan
support. That bill would provide an amnesty for many ofthose
already living in the US. But it would also create a guest
worker program for future immigrant flows and increase funding
for enforcement. It is as we have often written a bad
bill. It will not prevent future immigrant flows; it does not
stop New Bedford-style raids but instead increases enforcement
funding; and it creates a guest worker program that
could institutionalize sweatshops, since it is clear that
authorities are not interested in enforcing labor laws even
when they know from their own investigations that rampant labor
law violations exist.

On the other hand, the New Bedford raid could have a positive
blowback effect. As a result of Bush's visit to Latin America
and the protests in Guatemala, the raid may serve to highlight
the need for a hemispheric approach to immigration reform. Real
reform must involve both the sending and the receiving
countries and as the US moves to further militarize the border
and more draconian raids take place, Latin Americans are
demanding more of a say in how immigration is managed. Latin
American countries weighed in on the U.S.immigration law
reform debate last year, and the coalitions of social
movements and labor such as the Hemispheric Social Alliance
have long proposed principlesto regulate immigration
throughout the Americas.

It's time for immigrant rights advocates, labor unions, and
other elements of global civil society with a stake in
US immigration policy to step into the vacuum and create a new
immigration discourse and program based the realities of
immigrant flows in the age of globalization .

[Tim Costello, Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith are the
co-founders of Global Labor Strategies, a resource center
providing research and analysis on globalization, trade and
labor issues. GLS staff have published many previous reports on
a variety of labor-related issues, including Outsource This!
American Workers, the Jobs Deficit, and the Fair Globalization
Solution, Contingent Workers Fight For Fairness, and Fight
Where You Stand!: WhyGlobalization Matters in Your Community
and Workplace. They have also written and produced the Emmy-
nominated PBS documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? GLS
has offices in New York, Boston, and Montevideo,Uruguay.
For more on GLS visit: www.laborstrategies.blogs.com or email
info@laborstrategies.org.]


Full Tanks at the Cost of Empty Stomachs:
The Expansion of the Sugarcane Industry in Latin America
http://www.mstbrazil.org/?q=sugarcaneindustrybrazillatinamericamstanalysis20

We, representatives of organizations and social movements of Brasil,
Bolivia, Costa Rica, Colombia, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic,
gathered at a forum on the expansion of the sugarcane industry in Latin
America, declare that:

The current model of production of bioenergy is sustained by the same
elements that have always caused the oppression of our peoples:
appropriation of territory, of natural resources, and the labor force.

Historically the sugar industry served as an instrument to maintain
colonialism in our countries and the creation of dominant classes that have
controlled, through today, large extensions of land, the industrial process,
and commercialization. This sector is based on latifundio ownership, on the
overexploitation of labor (including slave labor) and the appropriation of
public resources. This sector was created upon intensive and extensive
monocropping, provoking concentration of land, profit, and wealth.

The sugarcane industry was one of the main agricultural activities developed
in the colonies. It allowed sectors that controlled production and
commercializaction to continue accumulating capital and with this contribute
to the development of capitalism in Europe. In Latin America, the creation
and control of the State, beginning in the 19th century, continued to
service the colonial interests. Currently, control of the State by this
sector is characterized by so-called "bureaucratic capitalism". The sugar
industry defined the political structures of national States and of Latin
American economies.

In Brasil, beginning in the 1970s, during the so-called world oil "crisis",
the sugarcane industry began to produce fuel, which justified its
maintenance and expansion. The same was repeated in 2004, with the new
Pro-Alcohol program, which principally serves to benefit agribusiness. The
Brasilian government began to stimulate the production of biodiesel as well,
principally to guarantee the survival and expansion of large extensions of
soy monoculture. To legitimate this policy and camouflage its destructive
effects, the government stimulated the diversified production of biodiesel
by small producers, with the objective of creating a "social seal". The
monocultures have expanded into indigenous areas and other territories of
native peoples.

In February of 2007, the United States government announced its interest in
establishing a partnership with Brasil in the production of biofuels,
characterized as the principal "symbolic axis" in the relation between the
two countries. This is clearly a phase of a geopolitical strategy of the
United States to weaken the influence of countries such as Venezuela and
Bolivia in the region. It also justifies the expansion of monocultures of
sugarcane, soy, and african palm in all Latin American territories.

Taking advantage of the legitimate concern of international public opinion
on global warming, large agricultural companies, biotechnology companies,
oil companies, and auto companies now perceive that biofuels represent an
important source for the accumulation of capital.

Biomass is falsely presented as the new energy matrix, the ideal of which is
renewable energy. We know that biomass will not actually be able to
substitute fossil fuels, nor is it renewable.

Some characteristics inherent to the sugar industry are the destruction of
the environment and the overexploitation of labor. The principal workforce
is migrant labor. As a result, processes of migration are stimulated, making
workers more vulnerable and attempts at organization more difficult. The
rigorous work of cutting sugarcane has caused the death of hundreds of
workers.

Female workers who cut sugarcane are exploited even more, as they receive
lower salaries or, in some countries such as Costa Rica, do not directly
receive salaries. Payment is made to the husband or partner. Child labor is
commonly practiced in the industry throughout Latin America, as well as the
exploitation of youth as the main labor force in the suffocating process of
cutting sugarcane.

Workers do not have any control over the total amount of their production
and as a consequence over their salary, as they are paid according to the
quantity cut and not for hours worked. This situation has serious
implications for the health of workers and has caused the death of workers
through fatigue and the excessive labor that requires cutting up to 20 tons
per day. The majority of contracts are through third party intermediaries or
"gatos". This complicates the possibility of achieving workers' rights, as
formal work contracts do not exist. The figure of the employer is hidden in
this process, which negates the very existence of labor relations.

The Brasilian State stimulates the use of resettled lands under agrarian
reform and lands of small producers, currently responsible for 70% of the
production of food, for biofuel crops, compromising food sovereignty.

As a result, we assume the commitment of:

Expanding and strengthening the struggles of social movements in Latin
America and the Caribbean, through an articulation among existing workers'
organizations and support groups.

Denouncing and combating any agrarian model based on monocultures and
concentration of land and profit, destructive of the environment,
responsible for slave labor and the overexploitation of the working force.
Changing the current agrarian model implies a full realization of a profound
Agrarian Reform that eliminates latinfundios.

Strengthening rural workers' organizations, salaried workers, and
farmworkers to construct a new model that is closely cemented to farmworker
agriculture and agroecology, with diversified production, prioritizing
internal consumption. It is important to fight for a policy of subsidies for
the production of food. Our principal objective is to guarantee food
sovereignty, as the expansion of the production of biofuels aggravates
hunger in the world. We cannot maintain our tanks full while stomachs go
empty.
[Comissao Pastoral da Terra (CPT)
Grito dos Excluídos
Movimento Sem Terra (MST)
Servico Pastoral dos Migrantes (SPM)
Rede Social de Justica e Direitos Humanos
Via Campesina]

Bush to Press Free Trade in a Place Where Young
Children Still Cut the Cane
March 12, 2007 New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/world/americas/12guatemala.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

CHIMALTENANGO, Guatemala, March 11 -- Work starts early
for the people of the Guatemalan countryside, sometimes
as early as 5 or 6. Not the time, the age.

Guatemalan children shine shoes and make bricks. They
cut cane and mop floors. At some factories exporting to
the United States, they sew and sort and chop, often in
conditions so onerous they violate even Guatemala's
very loose labor laws.

"They like us young people because we don't say
anything when they yell at us," said Alma de los
Angeles Zambrano, 15, who recently quit after 18 months
at a food processing plant to work part time for an
organization trying to improve conditions for young
workers.

President Bush is likely to miss this side of
Guatemala's labor market when he comes to this rural
area on Monday to visit a thriving agricultural
cooperative that sells products to Wal-Mart's stores in
Central America. The president will meet with Mariano
Canu, the leader of a United States-backed co-op that
hopes to take advantage of theCentral American Free
Trade Agreement. Mr. Canu is doing well enough that his
children are in school preparing for Guatemala's new
economy.

Opening up trade, Mr. Bush argues, will ultimately
raise wages and improve working conditions in Central
America. "My message to those trabajadores y
campesinos," Mr. Bush said last week, using the Spanish
words for workers and peasants, "is you have a friend
in the United States of America. We care about your
plight."

But this country's young workers, most of them poor
indigenous people, say they often feel that nobody
cares about them: not their parents, who send them off
to the work force; not their stern bosses, who treat
them like adults; not the dysfunctional government off
in Guatemala City.

"It's a major concern," said Manuel Manrique, Unicef's
representative in Guatemala. "Child labor keeps
children out of school. The numbers are very high and
there's a social acceptance in this country that child
labor is O.K."

None of the child workers interviewed around here said
they had yet felt any benefits of Cafta, as the trade
pact is known, which Guatemala signed nearly two years
ago and which slipped through the United States
Congress by a hair. One provision in Cafta, which is
intended to increase trade by eliminating tariff and
nontariff barriers, requires companies to adhere to
local labor laws and commits the United States to
helping improve inspections.

But that is easier said than done. Guatemala's labor
code sets the minimum age for employment at 14. In some
cases, though, the government can provide work permits
to even younger children. Children under 14, who require
parental permission to work, are supposed to work in
apprenticeships appropriate for their age. Economic
necessity in the family must be shown, which is not a
problem in this country where 80 percent of the
population lives in poverty and two-thirds of that
number, or 7.6 million people, live in extreme poverty.

But with little enforcement of labor laws, those
conditions are routinely violated. Guatemalan
workplaces can resemble grade schools, with adult
supervisors standing over little laborers like the
strictest of teachers.

The State Department acknowledged in its latest human
rights report for Guatemala released this month that
"child labor was a widespread and serious problem" and
that "laws governing the employment of minors were not
enforced effectively."

A few hours before leaving for Guatemala on Saturday,
Gordon D. Johndroe, the National Security Council
spokesman traveling with Mr. Bush, said: "Cafta, in its
nine-month existence, is beginning to bring economic
benefits to the people of Central America, but it will
clearly take some time before all those benefits are
fully realized. We'll continue to work with the
Guatemalan government to make sure all obligations to
their people are met."

An independent study of the issue estimated that about
a million Guatemalan children under age 18 are working.
Another review by the United Nations found 16 percent
of children between the ages of 5 and 14 in the labor
force in2000, more of them boys than girls.

The child workers are people like Maria, 16, who
lamented her four years in the labor force but at the
same time insisted that she not be fully identified so
as not to endanger a job that is helping to support her
parents and four brothers and sisters.

"My father hits me and tells me I can't study," she
said, tears running down her cheeks. "He stays home and
drinks and I have to go to the factory."

She studies on the sly. On Sundays, her only day off,
she goes to special classes for young laborers offered
by the Center for Study and Support for Local
Development, a small group known by its Spanish
initials, Ceadel. Despite having worked at a factory
since she was 12 and at home for years before that,
Maria has now completed the equivalent of third grade.

"I can be so tired, so exhausted, but I feel so good
when I come home and read," she said, her tears
stopping and her face lightingup. "It can be any book.
I just like to see the words."

Critics of Cafta see Guatemala's child labor problem as
evidence of the flaws in so-called free trade.

Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, was one of the
principle opponents of Cafta while he was in the House
of Representatives. "These trade agreements were
written for investors in large American corporations,"
he said in a telephone interview. "They weren't written
for American workers and they weren't written to
protect Central American children."

Cafta's backers, however, say it will take time to lift
countries like Guatemala out of poverty and to improve
longstanding social problems like child labor. The
United States government is paying for efforts to
improve the Ministry of Labor, which is now so
dysfunctional that some inspectors say that since they
work during the day they cannot possibly investigate
reports that children are working night shifts.

Mr.Bush, in his speech in Washington before leaving on
his Latin American trip, said American government aid
had helped lift Guatemala's percentage of children who
complete first grade to 71 percent from 51 percent, a
significant increase but one that illustrates the dire
state of education in the country.

"Children have more energy and they don't complain or
know anything about unions," said Carlos Toledo, whose
Asociacion Nuestros Derechos aids child laborers. "For
a company, they are perfect."

To draw attention to the issue of child labor in
advance of Mr. Bush's visit to Chimaltenango, the
National Labor Committee, a New York-based group that
has investigated gross labor violations worldwide,
interviewed child workers in the area.

The group focused on Legumex, a factory that exports
broccoli, melons and other fruits and vegetables to the
United States, and in a report to be issued on Monday
accuses it of violating a host of labor laws, including
employing children, some as young as 13, for shifts
longer than permitted.

Charles Kernaghan, director of the labor group, traced
the food exports to American food service marketers
that distributes to schools, hospitals, restaurants and
the military. "It is very possible that children in the
U.S. may be eating broccoli harvested and processed by
other children in Guatemala," Mr. Kernaghan said in a
statement.

But at Legumex, executives interviewed about child
labor in general insisted that they were complying with
labor laws. They said they did not employ children
under 18 without parental permission. They said they
paid low wages -- which they said were the legal minimum
of about a dollar a day but that Mr. Kernaghan said
were well below it -- because of the low prices paid for
their products in the United States.

"We're a developing country," said Hermann Peterson,
the company's auditor. "We can't have the
same conditions as factories in the United States."

Latin America Solidarity Committee
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Latin America Solidarity News 12th March 2007

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Events and Resources

Successful showing of Salud!

A great response from viewers at our screenings of Salud! at the Film Archive last week.
"Salud" is top value, with a really engaging style, excellent photography and deals with the
fundamental issues of access to primary health care, and the sort of outcomes that can you
get when health care is community orientated rather than patient specific.

If I was in my early 20s, I guess I would be taking the next boat to Cuba to
enrol in their international medical college.

Three copies have been purchased, one will go to Department of Spanish and
Latin American Studies Centre, Auckland Univ, another to Global Education Centre
http://www.globaled.org.nz/, and another to the Otago Medical School.

Please spread the word around that it is available. Would be a great
appetiser for the upcoming District Health Board elections.

The DVD can be borrowed from the Global Education Centre http://www.globaled.org.nz/

Salud! Cuba/USA, 2006, Exempt, 93 minutes
Directed and produced by Academy Award nominee Connie Field, ,em>Salud! is a timely examination of human values and the health issues that affect us all. Salud! documents how Cuba not only overcomes its lack of resources to provide universal health care for its citizens but also helps other developing nations do the same.

Cuba Health Reports

Published online by the editors of MEDICC Review journal, Cuba Health Reports (CHR) offers you health and medical news from Cuba with the same standard of reliable, evidence-based analysis.

CHR is the premier destination if you want to keep up with Cuban health and medicine—including initiatives to tackle domestic health problems, updates on the country's global health cooperation and key research developments.

A few of the articles in this issue:

§ Cuba's Infant Mortality Rate Declines, Again

§ Overdue: Hospital Nacional Completely Overhauled

§ Julian Bond, NAACP, Visits US Students at Latin American Medical School

§ Studying Medicine in Cuba: Impressions of a First Year Student


Poverty, Development and Human Rights in Central America

Sally O’Neill, Director of Trocaire Central America, gave a fascinating talk on key development and human rights issues facing the peoples of Central America on 7th March.

Trocaire Central America is an organisation with over 25 years experience working alongside local development organizations in Central America around the themes of human rights and peace building (indigenous rights, gender and women’s empowerment), sustainable rural livelihoods, HIV-AIDS and civil society building. Trocaire Central America is a long term partner of Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand. Contact: belinda@caritas.org.nz


Venezuela Documentary in the making
From: Julia Capon

I have just been in Venezuela over election time with the Australian
Solidarity brigade (with 8 other Kiwis - so really an Australian/NZ
brigade!) and were impressed by what we saw. My partner Ricardo and
are also currently in the process of making a documentary on
Venezuela..and applying for funding to get it out there - so shouldn't
be too long! We had some amazing interviews with Eva Golinger, Noam Chomsky, Michael Lebowitz, Greg Wilpert and Michael Fox from Venezuela Analysis to name a few and also went to the final Chavez rally and press conference and to be fair and balanced talked to the oppositon and went to their rally. We really looking forward to spreading the word about the

Bolivarian Revolution in NZ!

We thought you may be interested in looking at our documentary preview for "Venezuela's Revolutionary Tide" (working title) to see a little bit of what we experienced! It is on youtube so follow this link to watch it http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUS9cnODlaY. Please feel free to forward this to anyone you feel may be interested as we want as many people as possible to see this and really want to publisice it! Or if you want we can supply you with the code to embed it in any websites related to Venezuela if your that keen! We are just in the process of applying for funding which is proving quite tricky from NZ based funding sources..but hopefully it won't be too long until we are able to show you the whole thing! Can't wait!

When we were in Venezuela we discussed setting up a solidarity group or a latin american solidarity group - but seems that we have already been beaten to it!

Venezuela
If you too want to be a "revolutionary tourist'' and ``join the wave of
backpackers, artists, academics and politicians on a mission to
discover if Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, really is forging a
radical alternative to neo-liberalism and capitalism" check out the
three solidarity brigades that the Australia Venezuela Solidarity
Network are organising this year including the first one for May Day
http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/?q=node/40 also http://tinyurl.com/2yeg5a

.....and Venezuela Bolivariana Tours.
If your organization's members or friends are thinking of travelling to Venezuela on a tour; we are at your service. We are political activists who have seen a need to help people visit Venezuela in a safe and instructional environment. Our tours show and educate the international community about the Bolivarian revolution and the accomplishments it has achieved. People who travel on our tours will visit co-ops, factories, clinics, schools, farms, etc. They will meet with politicians, workers, community activists, doctors, teachers, etc. They will travel to various cities and states within Venezuela.

All proceeds from our tours go towards building an international solidarity and friendship centre within Venezuela. When the centre is completed it will accommodate, feed, translate for, transport and guide international visitors to places where they can learn about the revolution: the process and the people. The idea of the project is to build a self sufficient and sustainable community around it. This means that there will not only be services to visitors, but the Venezuelan community around it will benefit from, have input into, and form part of the centre. The plan of the centre is to bring the international solidarity movement together to make it united, stronger and more effective. http://www.bolivariancentre.com


May Day Global Solidarity School in Cuba

We extend a warm invitation to register for the historic first annual Global Solidarity School taking place in Havana Cuba from April 28 to May 12 2007. In the tradition of the World Social Forums, union education schools and community organizing, we are combining these elements to create a school for building social change -- bringing together students seeking to build a better world.

As a student at the Global Solidarity School, you will meet with international counterparts who care about the well being of our planet and who seek to create progressive social changes necessary to ensure social and environmental sustainability. Our classes allow you to examine global issues and strategies for change in a creative and friendly environment. Recognized activist educators and academics together with the University of Havana's top foreign language staff and cultural experts lead Global Solidarity School classes. www.solidarityschool.ca for details.

Peña Cultural Latina
Films, live music, food and conversation 128 Abel-Smith St, Wellington.
To assist in planning contact: hjorge40@hotmail.com

"La pesadilla azul" ("Blue Nightmare" in Spanish only)
Testimonies of people arrested by order of Ulises Ruiz during one of the most violent
interventions of the Federal Police on Nov. 25, 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico
Please view at: http://www.maldeojotv.net/spip.php?article9

MAL DE OJO TV is an independent media collective in Oaxaca covering the
human rights violations in Oaxaca since June 2006. maldeojotv@espora.org

NEWS

President Bush's Trip to Latin America is All About Denial
http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1067&Itemi
d=45

"State of Denial" is the title of Bob Woodward's famous book on the Bush
team's road to disaster in Iraq, but it would have served just as well
for a description of their Latin America policy. This week President
Bush heads South for a seven-day, five country, trip to Latin America to
see if he can counter the populist political tide that has brought left
governments to about half the population of the region.

Carrying vague promises of a joint effort on ethanol production - but no
offer to lower tariffs protecting the US market - President Bush hopes
to entice Brazil into taking his side against his nemesis, President
Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. This is a fantasy.

President Lula da Silva of Brazil made a point of visiting Venezuela
for his first foreign trip after being re-elected last October. There,
he presided over the dedication of a $1.2 billion bridge over the
Orinoco river, financed by the Brazilian government, while he lavished
praise on Chavez and gave the popular Venezuelan president an added
boost in his own re-election campaign.

The Bush Administration's policy of trying to isolate Venezuela from its
neighbors has only succeeded in isolating Washington. Last week
President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina, speaking in Caracas, flatly
rejected the notion that Argentina or Brazil should "contain President
Chavez," whom he called "a brother and a friend." In another
thinly-veiled swipe at Washington, Kirchner said: "It cannot be that it
bothers anyone that our nations become integrated." At the same time he
announced that Venezuela and Argentina would jointly issue a "Bond of
the South" for $1.5 billion.

If Washington is in denial about the political reality of Latin America,
it is even more in denial about the economics. For twenty-five years our
government has pushed a series of reforms throughout the region: tighter
fiscal and monetary policies, more independent central banks,
indiscriminate opening to international trade and investment,
privatization of public enterprises, and the abandonment of economic
development strategies and industrial policies. The Bush team thinks
that these reforms, known as "neoliberalism" in Latin America, were just
the right formula to stimulate economic growth.

In fact, Latin America's economic growth over the last 25 years has been
a disaster - the worst long-term growth failure in more than a hundred
years. From 1980-2000 GDP per person grew by only 9 percent, and another
4 percent for 2000-2005. Compare this to 82 percent for just the two
decades from 1960-1980, and it is easy to see why candidates promising
new economic policies have been elected (and some re-elected) in
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
They also came close to winning in Mexico, Peru, and Costa Rica.

The left governments that have introduced new economic policies have
done pretty well: Argentina has grown by a phenomenal 8.6 percent
annually for nearly five years, pulling more than 8 million people out
of poverty in a country of 36 million. Bolivia has increased government
revenue from hydrocarbons by about 6.7 percent of GDP, an amount that
would equal $900 billion in the United States, and is using the
additional revenue to help its majority poor. Venezuela is also using
the government's increased take of oil production to provide health
care, education, and subsidized food for the poor. All of these
governments have succeeded by implementing policies that Washington
opposed.

President Bush will get a good reception from the right-wing governments
he is visiting: his close allies in Mexico, Colombia, and Guatemala.
Colombia is in the midst of a huge national scandal over the
responsibility of government officials for mass murder and
assassinations of political opponents. More trade unionists are killed
in Colombia each year than in the rest of the world combined. Guatemala
is another right-wing ally with a terrible human rights record: two
weeks ago, three Central American parlimentarians were murdered by a
Guatemalan police death squad. All three governments have been linked to
narco-trafficking, but President Bush will likely praise them for their
cooperation in the war on drugs.

It's all about denial. The political and economic changes sweeping Latin
America are a serious break with the failed policies of the past.
Washington's influence has collapsed, and is not likely to recover.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.

Stephen Lendman: Ecuador's President Embraces Bolivarianism :
Correa took office January 15 in a country of 13 million, over 70% of whom live in poverty. They voted for a man promising social democratic change and the same kinds of benefits Venezuelans now have under Hugo Chavez
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17142.htm

Venezuela's growing influence in Bolivia raises U.S. concerns:
Since Morales became president little more than a year ago, Venezuela has quickly come to rival the United States as Bolivia's main patron. It has provided assistance for the army, cattle ranches, soybean cultivation, microfinance projects, urban sanitation companies and the oil industry.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/02/23/news/bolivia.php

Protests Mount Against Mining Giant: -
Dangerous levels of lead and arsenic have been found in the blood of Honduran villagers living downstream from a controversial gold and silver mine owned by Canada's Goldcorp Inc., the world's third largest gold mining firm.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36717

Chavez signs decree to nationalize foreign oil companies:
The decree allows Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, (PDVSA) to take a 60 per cent stake on May 1 in four projects which process crude oil into 600,000 barrels of synthetic oil a day in the country's eastern Orinoco River basin.
http://snipurl.com/1bjlg

In Uruguay, Bush Finds a Friendly Ear

NY TIMES-Published: March 11, 2007
ESTANCIA ANCHORENA, Uruguay, March 10 — Of all of the Latin American nations President Bush is visiting this week, this one is the smallest, with a population that is roughly half that of New York City.
But it has two things that provide a particular draw: a left-leaning president in the area who is still willing to buck the anti-American push of regional strongmen like President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and one who has a sprawling presidential retreat that is a cross between Camp David and Mr. Bush’s Texas ranch.
In a news briefing that followed the first of two meetings at that retreat, a pastoral setting with goats, cows and horses near the border with Argentina, Mr. Bush and President Tabaré Vázquez avoided their most contentious issues: Uruguay’s objection to United States trade quotas, and what has to be displeasure at the White House with Uruguay’s opposition to the Iraq war.
Mr. Bush renewed his pledge to create an overhaul of United States immigration laws that would include a guest worker program — a prospect that continues to languish in Congress but will certainly come up again on the trip. “I expressed to him that it is my interest to get a comprehensive immigration bill out of the United States Congress as soon as possible,” he said.
And Dr. Vázquez stuck to friendly, broad terms, recalling a visit to Uruguay by Mr. Bush’s father in 1990, when the doctor was the mayor of Montevideo, the nation’s capital.
Most important, officials said, was to use the visit to raise up Dr. Vázquez, still a part-time oncologist, as an example of what Dan Fisk, the top Western hemisphere specialist on the National Security Council, on Friday called “a country that is making the right policy choices.”
Last month, the United States and Uruguay signed the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement to strengthen economic and trade ties without addressing the thorny issues of tariffs and subsidies. But Mr. Chávez has opposed the framework and is trying to push the region’s Mercosur trade alliance toward a stronger anti-America political stance.
Asked at the Saturday briefing about his position of juggling his country’s expanding relations with the United States and its membership in Mercosur, Dr. Vázquez said he was “strongly in favor of the regional process; we are where we are, and we don’t want to leave this place.” Though the trade alliance opposes individual bilateral deals by its members, he said, “Mercosur should be able to integrate to other blocs, other countries in the world.”
Neither he nor Mr. Bush mentioned Mr. Chávez, who was just across the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires, having staged a demonstration against Mr. Bush on Friday night.
In fact, when Mr. Bush was asked what he thought of Mr. Chávez’s taunts, the president, who has not even spoken Mr. Chávez’s name, did not answer the question directly, saying, “The trip is a statement of a desire to work together with people in our neighborhood.” If he referred to Mr. Chávez’s bombast at all, it was by emphasizing that “I would call our diplomacy quiet and effective diplomacy.”
At his rally in Buenos Aires on Friday night, Mr. Chávez mocked everything from Mr. Bush’s poll ratings to his attempts to reach out in the region, and he said, “Gringo, go home.”
Afterward, Mr. Bush’s aides complained about the attention the news media were giving to Mr. Chávez, whose reported influence in the region they said was overblown and resented by his neighbors.
But even as Dr. Vázquez has made a show of friendship with Mr. Bush, as he did Saturday, he has also seemed to send signals to leftists like Mr. Chávez and others in the region that he has his own issues with American power.
In remarks this month in which he also spoke about Mr. Bush’s coming visit, Dr. Vázquez declared his was an “anti-imperialist” government, sharing the language of Mr. Chávez, who calls the United States an imperialist power.
When a group of Latin American journalists asked about that comment preceding the trip, Mr. Bush said last Tuesday, “I would hope he would define my government as pro-freedom.”
But officials here with Dr. Vázquez said he was not referring to the United States specifically, and was speaking in global terms. If anything, Uruguay seems very much to be swinging the United States’ way more than Mr. Chávez’s, providing important symbolism — despite Uruguay’s tiny size — for Mr. Bush this week before he moves on to a leg of his trip with other friendly nations: Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico.
And in a potential salve to the television images of anti-American protests even in Montevideo, Mr. Bush and Dr. Vázquez had a lunch of barbecue beef and took a boat ride together.

Bush Heads to Colombia as Scandal Taints Key Alliance
NY TIMES-Published: March 11, 2007
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, March 10 — The Bush administration has no closer ally in South America than Colombia, the recipient of more than $4 billion in American aid this decade to combat drug trafficking and guerrilla insurgencies. But a widening scandal tying paramilitary death squads and drug traffickers to close supporters of President Álvaro Uribe is clouding President Bush’s brief visit here on Sunday.
Since the scandal worsened in recent weeks, Democrats in the United States Congress have increased their scrutiny of two important measures before them: a broad trade agreement with Colombia that has already been signed by Mr. Bush and Mr. Uribe, and a request from the administration for a new $3.9 billion aid package for the country.
Claims of human rights abuses by political allies of Mr. Uribe, including the use of information from the executive branch’s intelligence service to assassinate union organizers and university professors, have already resulted in the arrest of Jorge Noguera, a former chief of Colombia’s secret police who was awarded that job after working on the president’s campaign.
“Uribe has certainly been considered a bright light here in the United States, but at some point you have to ask: what are these people doing?” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate panel that oversees aid to Colombia, said in a telephone interview from Washington. “It’s time to take a pause and look at what we’ve done,” he said, referring to the effectiveness of aid to Colombia.
Senior government officials here say concern over the scandal should not distract legislators in the United States from strides by Mr. Uribe since his presidency began in 2002. Mr. Uribe, an Oxford-educated lawyer, remains highly popular, with a 72 percent approval rating. Many Colombians, particularly in cities like Bogotá and Medellín, have welcomed a break with the chaotic years early in the decade when violence by guerrillas and paramilitaries was more widespread.
“This country was going to be Sudan, and we’ve turned a corner in a dramatic way,” Vice President Francisco Santos said in an interview, referring to fears at one point that Colombia, destabilized by an internal war, could become a failed state.
He pointed to accomplishments like economic growth expected to surpass 6 percent this year, a reduction in violent crime rates in large cities, and a process demobilizing about 30,000 paramilitary combatants.
Mr. Santos expressed gratitude for American help with efforts to end Colombia’s internal war, which has dragged on for more than four decades, displacing three million people.
Still, Mr. Santos turned on its head a statement by Winston Churchill about Americans always doing the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives by saying the United States had made “all the right decisions” in relation to Colombia. “If the Congress doesn’t approve the free trade agreement, the message is that being a friend of the United States doesn’t pay,” Mr. Santos said.
Supporters of Mr. Uribe say ties between paramilitary death squads and political supporters of the president are coming to light because of the resilience of Colombia’s political institutions, particularly the Supreme Court, which has been investigating the connections.
The court’s diligence despite death threats to its members has resulted in startling actions like an arrest warrant issued this month for Álvaro Araújo Noguera, a regional political boss implicated in the kidnapping of a member of a rival political family. Mr. Araújo, the father of Mr. Uribe’s former foreign minister, María Consuelo Araújo, remains at large.
“It is not our concern,” said Alfredo Gómez Quintero, the magistrate at the Supreme Court leading the investigation, when asked in an interview how the revelations might affect American aid to Colombia. “We know the eyes of the world are upon us. Our only job is to arrive at the truth.”
Beyond the paramilitary scandal ensnaring members of Mr. Uribe’s government and at least eight members of his coalition in Congress, human rights organizations are calling attention to the killings of trade union officials in the past six years. And there are claims of abuses involving American companies like the Drummond Company, a coal producer based in Birmingham, Ala.
A judge in Alabama this week allowed a civil lawsuit against Drummond to go forward in which the company is accused of allowing paramilitary gunmen to kill three union leaders at its operations in northern Colombia.
Drummond has repeatedly denied having a role in the killings, which have nonetheless generated skepticism over tightening trade relations with Colombia without safeguarding the rights of the working poor.
“Our aid should be more focused on giving Colombian prosecutors the resources to do their job,” said Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat who visited Colombia this month.
Here in Bogotá, officials point to Mr. Bush’s visit, the first by an American president to the capital since Ronald Reagan in 1982, as evidence that the security situation has improved. Certainly the scrubbed prosperity of parts of Bogotá, its hotels bulging with foreign business executives and even the occasional tourist, contrasts with the swaths of territory still controlled by leftist-inspired guerrilla organizations.
But Mr. Bush’s visit has also drawn attention to the fact that Colombia, despite being the largest recipient of American aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan, remains the world’s largest producer of cocaine.
The recent emergence of shadowy new paramilitary organizations with an intense focus on the cocaine trade illustrates the hydra-headed nature of Colombia’s traffickers, political analysts here say.
Mr. Santos, the vice president, said the supply of Colombian cocaine to the United States would be even greater without American antinarcotics aid. Mr. Bush is expected to stand by Mr. Uribe at a time when explicit allies in the region remain scarce.
The fragile stability in Colombia’s largest cities and the slow-burning war in its countryside came into focus in the days before Mr. Bush’s arrival, after Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro, the country’s police commander, said officials had monitored communications by guerrillas about plans for sabotage and attacks to coincide with the visit.
More than 7,000 police officers have been assigned to protect Mr. Bush.

Half Million of Latin Americans Recover Vision in Cuba

Havana, Feb 10, 2007 (Prensa Latina) Over half a million of Latin Americans recovered their vision thanks to an ophthalmologic program Operacion Milagros developed between Cuba and Venezuela since 2004.

Among those receiving the benefits there are 306 thousand Venezuelans and 100 thousand Cubans, expressed the Island Deputy Foreign Minister Yiliam Jimenez to the full session of the 9 International Meeting on Globalization and Development Problems.

According to the report of the National Information Agency Jimenez described the large cooperation program the Cuban Revolution has in education, health and other spheres with the so-called Third World, without expecting anything in return.

He also emphasized that in the late seven years of collaboration the medical groups have made over 304 million of medical consultations in 69 countries.

Meanwhile they safe lives of nearly 600 thousand lives, 5.6 over those that were lost in the Central American catastrophe, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Indonesia, he said.

Cuban doctors have also operated over 2 million 100 thousand patients.

He also noted that as part of the cooperation of Cuba with other countries over 28 young people from 120 States are studying in universities, most of them doing medicine.

Venezuela Orinoco May Top World Oil

Caracas, Feb 21, 2007 (Prensa Latina) The Orinoco oil zone, a key player in Venezuela s energy strategy, has the potential of becoming one of the world s largest oil reserves.

Petroleos de Venezuela S.A., with the State as major share holder, runs Magna Reserva Project within the 2005-2030 Siembra Petrolera Project to gauge and confirm its estimated 235 billion barrel potential.

PDVSA expects 15.3 billion dollar investments between 2006 and 2012 from partners in Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, China, Cuba, Iran, India, Malaysia, Russia, Spain, Uruguay and Vietnam.

Such hopes also involve four heavy oil refining ventures with US transnationals Exxon Mobil, Conoco Phillips, Chevron Texaco and British Petroleum, Total (France) and Statoil (Norway).

If such potentials are confirmed Orinoco would stand as a pillar of Venezuela s industrial, social, economic, technological and domestic development.

MEXICO: CHIAPAS GROUP THREATENED

On Feb. 26 the Center for Economic and Political Investigations
of Community Action (CIEPAC), a non-governmental organization
based in San Cristobal de las Casas in the southeastern Mexican
state of Chiapas, received a note reading: "Enjoy your last day.
We will kill you I am looking for you and now we have found you."
This followed a series of incidents of surveillance and
harassment directed at CIEPAC's members over several months. The
organization is asking "national and international organized
groups in solidarity [to] maintain your vigilance in anticipation
of events that might occur shortly, continue your solidarity with
social movements in Mexico, and denounce the continuous
violations to human rights that are affecting civil society in
this country." [CIEPAC bulletin 2/26/07]

LET WASHINGTON DIVULGE WHAT IT KNOWS ABOUT PARAMILITARY AND "PARA-POLITICAL"
ACTIVITIES IN COLOMBIA

In connection with the planned visit of President George W. Bush to
Colombia, Senator Jorge Robledo, spokesperson for the Polo Democrático
Alternativo (PDA), wanted answers to the following questions: "Are the State
Department and the US Embassy in Colombia aware of what has happened in
terms of paramilitary activities and "para-politicking" in Colombia over the
last twenty years? Do they know that nearly one hundred political leaders
close to President Uribe are jailed, fugitives from the law, and named or
implicated because of their relations with paramilitary organizations? Do
they know that already nine members of the Colombian Congress, all close
friends of the Uribe administration, have been ordered to jail by the
Colombian Supreme Court because of their involvement? Are the State
Department and the US Embassy aware that in Colombia people speak
increasingly of "para-Uribismo," not merely "para-politicking"? Was there no
connection between US policies and the formation of these criminal
organizations and activities?"

Senator Robledo formulated these questions after sources close to the
administration of President Uribe touted the forthcoming March 11 visit of
George W. Bush to Colombia. These sources portrayed the visit as an explicit
backing by the White House of Colombia's President, even with respect to the
para-politicking scandal.

Senator Robledo reminded us that, under Plan Colombia, the military presence
of the United States increased to the tune of four billion dollars. The US
presence includes well-known robust operations by numerous agents of the
CIA, the DEA, the FBI, regular US military as well as mercenary forces. In
that regard Robledo cited comments by U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy who said
that "the Colombian government is not simply a victim of their corrupt
influences." Leahy further stated that the Colombian government "allowed the
flourishing of paramilitary groups, sometimes colluding with those groups,
other times fostering their activities." (El Tiempo, March 4, 2007)

Senator Robledo emphasized that the truth about paramilitary and
para-political activities must be addressed for peace to be achieved in
Colombia.

Senator Jorge Robledo, Official Spokesperson, Polo Democrático Alternativo (PDA)

Latin America Solidarity News 22nd Feb 2007

Lac Email lac@apc.org.nz
LAC website www.converge.org.nz/lac
LAC blogg www.lascnz.blogspot.com
Zapatista email zapatistasolidarity@gmail.com
Zapatista blogg http://vivazapatanz.blogspot.com/
Incal-Wellington http://incal.orcon.net.nz
Peña Cultural Latina Alternative Mondays from 20th October 6pm 128 Abel Smith St

Listen to Oye Latino Access Radio Wellington 783AM
Todos los Jueves de 6:00 a 7:30 p.m Thursdays 6pm to 7.30pm
Radio streaming www.r2.co.nz/meta/accessradio-56.asx - www.accessradio.org.nz/
This programme costs $65 a week to produce - if you would like to sponsor Oye Latino
Ph 021 548 985, oyelatino@gmail.com, or direct deposit to ASB #12-3157-0127644-01

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CARNIVAL (CUBA) MADNESS

¡Salud!
2nd and 3rd March 7pm Wellington
Follow up the Cuba Carnival (26-28th Feb)
and find out what puts Cuba on the map in the quest for global health …

NZ Community Trust Mediatheatre, NZ Film Archive,
Cnr Taranaki & Ghuznee Streets, Wellington
Tickets: $8 Public ($6 Concession)

Discussion following screening of film incl issues over community health in NZ.

Through the Cuban experience, the film challenges us to reflect on the larger questions: What will it take to stop disease from decimating poor countries and reaching around the world? How can we get enough doctors and health workers to where they are needed most? Do governments have a responsibility for the health of their citizens? In today's world, shouldn't every person be born with the right to a healthy chance at life?

Filmed in Cuba, South Africa, The Gambia, Honduras and Venezuela, the cameras of ¡SALUD! reveal the human dimension of the global health crisis, and the complex challenges faced by developing nations struggling to provide decent health care. The documentary examines Cuba’s example and its cooperation programs, in which 28,000 health professionals volunteer to meet emergencies and staff public health systems in 68 countries

Sponsored by Latin America Solidarity Committee and the Green Party
Further information http://events.filmarchive.org.nz, or contact Paul Bruce Tel 972 8699

Granito de Arena = Grain of sand!
Wednesday 28th February 6pm
Centre for Global Action Level 2, James Smith building,
cnr Cuba & Manners Malls

Granito de Arena is a powerful documentary about the fight
of Mexican teachers (and their unions) against neo-liberalism
and the dismantling of their public education system.

Free screening - Hot drinks and treats in the Dev-Zone
library from 5pm. Movie at 6pm followed by discussion
More information at www.dev-zone.org

For over 20 years economic globalisation has been dismantling public education in Mexico. But always in the shadow of popular resistance. This is the story of that resistance - the story of a grassroots, non-violent movement of public school teachers who took Mexico by surprise and have endured brutal repression in their 25-year struggle to defend public education

Compay Segundo: Quijote Tropical (Cuba, 2005 Exempt, 65 mins)
Thursday, 22 FEBRUARY, Friday, Saturday: 7.00pm
NZ Community Trust Mediatheatre, NZ Film Archive, cnr Taranaki & Ghuznee Streets.
Screening by kind permission of Southbound
Directed by Ileana Rodriguez, this 65-minute documentary looks at the life of Compay Segundo, the 90 plus-year-old Cuban musician who achieved international fame in the final years of his life with the Buena Vista Social Club. Segundo's unique life force shines bright in interviews with friends and colleagues along with a few choice musical clips...
Tickets: $8 Public ($6 Concession) http://events.filmarchive.org.nz

“FILMS UNDER THE STARS” series: “VIVA SÃO JOÃO!”
The Dell, Wellington Botanic Gardens, on Thursday, 22nd February 2007 9pm.
By Andrucha Waddington, with Gilberto Gil, Dominguinhos and others, at the
Cuba Street Carnival Trust in conjunction with the
Embassy of Brazil in Wellington and the NZ Film Archive.
NB: In the event of bad weather, the screening might be cancelled. Please check on the following:
Summer City Website - www.feelinggreat.co.nz; Wellington City Council Website
www.wellington.govt.nz; Newstalk ZB 1035 am or call the Summer City hotline - 801 3500

Urgent Action
As you may know the situation of indigenous peoples in Colombia has been a permanent struggle for autonomy and self-determination, but in the last years the U'wa people had achieved some recognition of their ancestral land against the oil exploration companies and the Colombian government. Unfortunately the greed is always powerful.
Carlos cevaldiviesol@unal.edu.co

Urgent action needed to stop oil drilling on U’wa land:

Following the Colombian government’s announcement of seismic testing on
their cloud-forest homelands, 150 heavy trucks carrying drilling equipment
accompanied by soldiers and police are reported to be heading for U’wa
territory. After the last decade of campaigning by the U’wa and their
international supporters, the Colombian government and it’s state-owned oil
company Ecopetrol appear on the brink of causing a human and environmental
tragedy. Please take a minute to view our Action Alert and send an urgent
letter to the US Ambassador in Bogota calling on him to urge the Colombian
government to reconsider.
--------------
http://www.amazonwatch.org/take_action/action_alerts/view_news.php?id=1325

Dear Friends,

The U’wa Indigenous People of Colombia are facing the biggest threat to
their way of life and homeland since the year 2000. As of January 17, 2007
some 150 trucks have moved towards U’wa land carrying oil exploration
equipment. This is the latest news after the Colombian government announced
last month that Ecopetrol would re-initiate oil exploration on the Siriri /
Catleya oil site in northeastern Colombia. Military personnel from the 18th
Brigade and from the Colombian National Police are in the area providing
protection to the oil workers.

You can help the U’wa people by sending a letter to the United States
Embassy in Colombia conveying your concern for the U’wa people, and request
that the Colombian government stop all operations on U’wa land. We are also
recommending that a Verification Commission led by the Defensoria del Pueblo
travel to the U’wa territory, and that the Colombian government ensure that
no human rights violation will be committed by the Colombian Armed Forces or
by the National Police while they are stationed there.

Please take a minute to write U.S Ambassador William Wood to tell him about
your concerns for the U’wa’s safety and the threat to their way of life by
the Siriri / Catleya Oil Project.

You can use or adapt the letter below and fax it to:

The Honorable William Wood
Ambassador
U.S. Embassy
Bogota, Colombia
Via Fax: 011-571-315-2197

For additional background information, please look at the links below, and
on our website: http://www.amazonwatch.org/amazon/CO/

May Global Solidarity School in Cuba
Labour, community and academics launch May Day Global Solidarity School in Cuba

We extend a warm invitation to register for the historic first annual Global Solidarity School taking place in Havana Cuba from April 28 to May 12 2007.

In the tradition of the World Social Forums, union education schools and community organizing, we are combining these elements to create a school for building social change -- bringing together students seeking to build a better world.

As a student at the Global Solidarity School, you will meet with international counterparts who care about the well being of our planet and who seek to create progressive social changes necessary to ensure social and environmental sustainability. Our classes allow you to examine global issues and strategies for change in a creative and friendly environment. Recognized activist educators and academics together with the University of Havana's top foreign language staff and cultural experts lead Global Solidarity School classes. See our course offerings on our website.

Register for one or two weeks. Please see our website www.solidarityschool.ca for details.

* Be part of May Day in Cuba: Participate up front as a respected international guest in the world's largest gathering of labour. Join with one million Cubans in what they describe as the Celebration of the Free Peoples in the American Hemisphere.
* Take Spanish and Cuban cultural courses taught by Cuban professors at the University of Havana.
* Participate in our courses on global issues and strategies for building solidarity and leadership led by expert educators and movement leaders from Canada and elsewhere.
* Learn how to perform and dance to Salsa, Son, Rumba and other popular Cuban rhythms.
* Participate in afternoon tours led by professional Cuban guides and translators to visit Havana's most important historic sites, plus visits to artist's studios, museums, Afrocuban enclaves, and contemporary Cuban cultural centers.
* Choose optional evening cultural events and you'll enjoy visits to some of Cuba's best jazz clubs, an Afrocuban dance performance, cabaret performances and other activities.
solidarityschool@vdlc.ca Email www.solidarityschool.ca Web

Peña Cultural Latina
Films, live music, food and conversation 128 Abel-Smith St, Wellington.
To assist in planning contact: hjorge40@hotmail.com

Venezuela
If you too want to be a "revolutionary tourist'' and ``join the wave of
backpackers, artists, academics and politicians on a mission to
discover if Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, really is forging a
radical alternative to neo-liberalism and capitalism" check out the
three solidarity brigades that the Australia Venezuela Solidarity
Network are organising this year including the first one for May Day
at http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/?q=node/40]
also http://tinyurl.com/2yeg5a

Habana Blues
World Cinema Showcase film festival is featuring a Cuban film
- Habana Blues - in this year’s festival.
A captivating love letter to life on the ‘crazy isle’ of Cuba, Habana Blues follows a group of musicians struggling to make the big time. If that sounds like Buena Vista Social Club: the Return, be aware this is fiction – these young stallions play a vibrant hybrid of soul and rock, and their goal in life is to leave behind the politics of their impoverished island. Ruy and Tito are the Mick and Keith of the band who spend their days flogging everything from cigars to sombreros out of the back of Tito’s delicious red ‘52 Chevy. When their long-awaited break arrives in the guise of Spanish record producer Marta, their lives are thrown into turmoil by the tantalising prospect of a one-way ticket to Spain. For once they’ve left Cuba, they can never return.

World Cinema Showcase - Auckland - March 15 - April 4, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Wellington - March 29 - April 11. 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Christchurch - April 12 - 25, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Dunedin - April 19 - May 5, 2007
www.worldcinemashowcase.co.nz


NEWS

"La pesadilla azul" ("Blue Nightmare" in Spanish only)
Testimonies of people arrested by order of Ulises Ruiz during one of the most violent
interventions of the Federal Police on Nov. 25, 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico
Please view at: http://www.maldeojotv.net/spip.php?article9

MAL DE OJO TV is an independent media collective in Oaxaca covering the
human rights violations in Oaxaca since June 2006.
maldeojotv@espora.org

GUATEMALA: WORKERS BURN MAQUILA

Dozens of laid-off workers looted and set fire to the Genesis
Feliz Tex S.A. garment plant in Guatemala City on the afternoon
of Jan. 20. The workers came to the plant to demand their
severance pay. Finding no one at the factory, the workers decided
to seize apparel and machinery in compensation. Within minutes
unit of the National Civil Police (PNC) arrived and dispersed the
crowd with tear gas, but before they left the workers started a
fire; firefighters spent two hours putting it out. No arrests
were made.

The plant was a maquiladora (tax-exempt assembly plant producing
for export) apparently owned by a Korean company. There are more
than 300 apparel-producing maquiladoras in Guatemala, employing
about 100,000 workers, mostly impoverished women. Some 20 of
these plants closed down in 2006, leaving 5,000 people without
work. [Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 1/21/07;

Venezuela's Chavez Sets Oil Fields Takeover for May:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the government’s planned takeover of the Orinoco belt oil fields, and the re-nationalization of the electricity sector at an international press conference yesterday. He also responded to U.S. President George W. Bush’s “concerns” over Venezuelan democracy.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2208

Ecuador won't recognize Occidental claim:
Two-year-long dispute with the Los Angeles-based company led Ecuador to cancel its contract with Occidental, which produced about 100,000 barrels of crude daily in Ecuador, and seize its facilities.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8N0DNC01.htm

Bolivia's Morales: 'This little Indian won't be leaving office'
by Federico Fuentes
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36151

.............A poll published in the main La Paz daily, La Razon, a
year after Bolivia's powerful indigenous movement took
control of parliament, showed that Morales's approval
across the major cities was 59% -- higher than his
historic 53.7% vote in the December 2005 elections. The
rate was higher in the countryside, where Morales's
main support base is.

This reflects the support that Bolivia's national
revolution, led by Morales and with Bolivia's
indigenous people as its core, has among the Bolivian
masses, who, having regained their spirit and dignity
are fighting to liberate Bolivia and decolonise its
racist state structures.

A year of indigenous power

This strong support is in large part due to the
progress made on one of Morales's key election promises
-- the nationalisation of hydrocarbons. Having
overthrown two presidents in their struggle to regain
control over their natural resources, particularly gas,
over 90% of Bolivians approved when Morales sent the
military into the gas fields on May 1 to return control
of hydrocarbons to the state.

Six months later after intense negotiations, which
resulted in the resignation of hardline pro-
nationalisation hydrocarbons minister Andres Soliz Rada
and a war of words between the Bolivian government and
Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, 44 new contracts
were signed. The new rules meant that the state gained
control over hydrocarbons, from below the ground
through to the end of the industrialisation phase, and
the corporations were to become service providers. The
state would receive 82% of the revenue, which the
corporations previously took for themselves.

The government also successfully renegotiated a
doubling of the price for gas sold to Argentina, and
hopes to do the same soon with Brazil.

The result -- nearly US$1.3 billion in revenue from gas
(an increase of $635 million). Combined with a growth
rate of 4.3%, a reduction of parliamentary salaries by
50% and macroeconomic stability, the government has
been able to use this strong economic position to begin
to deliver on some of its promises, reversing the
impact of neoliberalism in Bolivia.

Morales has personally traveled around the country to
redistribute the gains from the gas nationalisation.
These include (with substantial help from Cuba and
Venezuela) 2000 Cuban doctors, 20 new hospitals, a
literacy campaign in which 73,000 out of 300,000
participants have already graduated, the Juancito Pinto
annual bonus for all school children under the age of
10 to help cover the costs of schooling, and tractors
as part of the government land reform plan.

This high level of support has also allowed the
government to move forward with its "agrarian
revolution", violently opposed by the large landowners
who have begun to set up paramilitary groups.

Challenges ahead

While there were some important gains made in
implementing the government's economic plans over the
past year, its key political plank -- the Constituent
Assembly -- remains stalled by the opposition.

According to Morales, the Constituent Assembly "is the
best democratic instrument ... to profoundly change our
country. It is the best instrument to unify, to
integrate our national territory." He added that the
assembly is "the hope of Bolivians to patent the
necessary structural transformations, and the changes
in the economic and social sphere".

Three other key challenges the government faces are
pushing forward with the industrialisation of gas and
mining to maintain and further improve economic
stability, better management at the microeconomic level
in order to ensure more resources and redistributed
wealth reach those sectors and regions that need it
most, and better coordination in the face of the rise
of a new opposition.

Morales noted that still pending in the process of
nationalising hydrocarbons was obtaining 50%-plus-1 of
the shares in companies operating in Bolivia, and the
refoundation of the state oil company YPFB, which is
still not in a position to carry out the
industrialisation of gas. The increased revenue from
the nationalisation, as well as help from Venezuelan
state oil company PDVSA, through the newly formed joint
project Petroandina, will allow the government to move
ahead on these tasks, Morales said.

Morales also used his one-year anniversary to announce
the "second nationalisation" of the mining industry.
Last year, mining exports equaled $1.1 billion, of
which only 1.5% went into state coffers. Morales
proposed that at least half of this now go to the
state, while the exportation of raw minerals will be
limited to give primacy to Bolivia's industrialisation.

To help this, the government proposed recovering
ownership of the Vinto tin smelter, sold off illegally
under previous neoliberal governments. The Morales
government has already begun to rebuild the state
mining company Comibol, having integrated 5000 ex-
cooperative miners into the company.

National Coalition for Change

In order to ensure better management of the state
apparatus, particularly in the opposition-controlled
regions, as well as coordination among the social
movements and their representatives in parliament and
the Constituent Assembly, Morales initiated the
National Coalition for Change on January 23.

The coalition is to involve 16 national social
organisations -- including indigenous, campesino and
workers' organisations -- and will "coordinate the
social power of the social movements with the executive
and legislative power and the constituent delegates,
and will fundamentally define the political,
revolutionary, democratic and cultural line", explained
the president of the lower house of parliament, Raul
Novillo.

This coordination is necessary to confront the rise of
a new opposition, based in the pro-business civic
committee of Santa Cruz and the prefectures of the four
eastern departments (states) referred to as the "half
moon". Raising the banner of autonomy in order to
maintain its hegemony over the east, the Santa Cruz
elite (tied to the gas transnationals and the US) have
attempted to mobilise the predominately white middle
and upper classes against the Morales government.

Stressing the need for social stability, furthering
economic improvements and defending autonomy within a
clear framework of national unity and control of
essential areas -- such as natural resources, police
and taxes -- will be crucial to isolating this new
opposition and winning over and consolidating large
sections of the middle classes and the armed forces to
supporting Bolivia's revolution.

Similar structures are to be established at the
departmental (or state) level from February, which
along with departmental delegates selected by the
national government will help in coordination and
organisation at this level. Such coordination has been
impeded because six out of nine prefectures are
controlled by the right.

On January 24, the three opposition parties in the
Senate united to elect one of their own as president of
the upper house, National Unity senator Jose
Villavicencio. This revival of the "mega coalition" of
the neoliberal parties that sustained the previous
governments is one more part of the oppositions plan to
block Morales's attempts to lead a democratic and
cultural revolution.

That day, Bolpress reported that other official sources
said this new opposition directorate would ask for the
revision of the parliamentary session that passed the
new agrarian reform law. Villavicencio has also
announced that the Senate would review another bill in
that session relating to cooperation with the
Venezuelan military on Bolivian soil.

In response, Morales was quoted by the Bolivian
Information Service on January 24 as saying that "the
right, the neoliberals, the auctioneers have united,
but there is no need for us to protest".

"The experience we have is that there are social forces
who are demanding their rights. Within this framework I
am sure that the people will identify if [the Senate]
works against this process of change."

Morales recalled how the opposition had tried to block
the passage of the agrarian reform law, as well as the
ratification of the gas contracts, by boycotting the
Senate, and argued that "it was the mobilisation of the
people that unblocked the Senate".

MEXICO: MARCH FOR "NEW SOCIAL PACT"

Tens of thousands of Mexicans filled Mexico City's huge Zocalo
plaza on Jan. 31 in the first large demonstration against the
center-right government of President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa,
who took office on Dec. 1 and now faces popular anger over a
dramatic rise in the price of corn and other staples [see Update
#884]. "Without corn, there's no country," the marchers chanted.
"We don't want PAN, we want tortillas." (The initials of
Calderon's National Action Party, PAN, form the Spanish for
"bread.")

At the demonstration the organizers proclaimed the "Declaration
of the Zocalo," which called for "broad social unity" to achieve
a "new social pact," including renegotiation of the agricultural
sections of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); an
emergency program to increase production; restrictions on price
increases; punishment for hoarders; an emergency wage increase; a
push to create jobs; and an end to repression of social
movements. One participant was the sociologist Pablo Gonzalez
Casanova, a former rector of the Autonomous National University
of Mexico (UNAM). Asked by reporters if the movement could turn
back Calderon's neoliberal economic policies, he answered: "We're
going to win, because now we are in a stage where neoliberalism
doesn't fool anyone.... The whole world knows clearly that
neoliberalism is one of the great lies of humanity...."

The march was called by a broad coalition of 150 labor unions and
campesino and farmer groups. The coalition included labor
federations like the National Workers Union (UNT) that split from
the old Congress of Labor (CT), which is dominated by the
formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); but
another important component was PRI-affiliated groups like
National Campesino Federation (CNC). The march organizers
insisted that the demonstration would not be partisan and barred
political speeches. But many protesters waited in the Zocalo for
the arrival of a second march around the same demands; this one
was led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the center-left coalition
candidate who narrowly lost the July 2 presidential race to
Calderon, according to electoral authorities. [La Jornada
(Mexico) 2/1/07]

Chávez in charge
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_gott/2007/02/gottvenezuela.html

Hugo Chávez is a man in a hurry, and this week's decision by the Venezuelan
national assembly to grant him additional powers foreshadows the radical
changes that are in the pipeline. President for the past eight years, Chávez
has only just begun to scratch the surface of the gigantic revolutionary
project that lies ahead. There have been obvious successes. Unprecedented
sums of oil money have been diverted towards the country's poor majority,
funding education and health programmes, and providing cheap food. The
results are already on show. A freshly mobilised and alert population is
beginning to flex its muscles, taking part in political decision-making
through a myriad local councils and ad-hoc committees operating at many
levels. Nothing like this has happened in Latin America since the Cuban
Revolution nearly half a century ago. It is riveting stuff.

Yet all this energy and excitement has been channelled through new
institutions, financed directly by the oil revenues, and essentially
unmonitored. Again, this is a revolution in progress. At the same time, much
of the old, pre-revolutionary Venezuela still remains. The country's
traditional infrastructure is plagued by bureaucracy and corruption, the
twin-headed disease inherited from the Spanish colonial era. Bureaucrats,
and that means public servants in every ministry and ancient state entity,
exist to ensure that nothing ever gets done, while corruption exists to
lubricate their powers of inaction. What is true of the state is true of
private industry as well. So this week's "enabling" legislation will give
greater powers to the executive at the expense of the legislature, with the
hope that Chávez will be able to push through some necessary changes. At
some stage, the new institutions and the old bureaucracies will have to be
merged.

Is this road to dictatorship or the path to reasonable reform? The nature of
the problem is familiar to political scientists, and certainly not new to
Latin America. Where should the balance fall between the executive and the
legislature? Each country makes its choice, and revolutions provide an
opportunity for the balance to be changed.

Allowing the Venezuelan president to issue executive orders is nothing new.
It is permitted under the constitution of 1999, as under the previous
constitution. Chávez's recent predecessors availed themselves of a similar
facility from time to time, notably when dealing with economic and financial
matters. Even Thomas Shannon, the US diplomat in charge of Latin America,
admitted in an unusually friendly comment that the enabling law was nothing
new. "It's something valid under the constitution (and) as with any tool of
democracy, it depends on how it is used."

So what is important here is a change in the nature of government rather
than a madcap scheme to seize private assets, soak the rich, and nationalise
everything in sight by presidential decree. Perhaps the most significant of
the planned reforms is the provision of finance and teeth to the "communal
councils" springing up in their thousands all over the country. The future
"socialist democracy" of Venezuela will depend more on these grassroots
expressions of the popular will than the national assembly in Caracas. Since
the opposition parties foolishly boycotted the assembly elections, the
entirely pro-Chávez assembly has a rather limited use.

For most of the past eight years, Chávez has moved ahead in response to the
actions of others. The attempted coup d'etat of 2002, the oil strike of
2003, and the recall referendum of 2004 all led to an acceleration of the
revolutionary process. Now he is advancing under his own steam. We know that
he wants to retain the commanding heights of the economy, the traditional
ambition of Latin American nationalists as well as old-fashioned social
democrats. That means oil and gas and electricity, and telecommunications.
We know that he hopes to extend the land reform, the essential first step
towards rural development. We know too that he wants to improve tax
collection and to do something about gross inequality, the untackled evil
throughout Latin America except in Cuba. We also know that he is hostile to
unbridled capitalism, and has made friendly remarks about cooperatives and
other ways of organising the private sector.

Yet the Venezuelan future is still interestingly uncertain and opaque, for
the simple reason that Chávez is not a dictator and has never shown the
slightest sign of wanting to become one. He has no blueprint that he seeks
to impose on the country. He wants to extend press freedom, for example, not
to reduce it, and, while curbing the power to make money of irresponsible
press barons like Marcel Granier of RCTV, he has also put state funds into
the development of community radio and television stations, as well as more
ambitious projects like Vive, the new cultural channel, and Telesur, the
international news channel. These new lines of communication already provide
fresh opportunities for popular participation, the ultimate safeguard of his
regime and the source of all future programmes and policies.


Chávez Lives Castro's Dream:
Chávez has begun using his plentiful oil, and oil money, to finance ambitious Cuban-inspired social policies in his own country and elsewhere, either by providing cheap oil (as in Bolivia and Nicaragua) or by helping ease his friends' financial burdens, as with Argentina
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17081706/site/newsweek/

Chavez a threat to democracy, US intelligence chief says:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez exports a form of "radical populism" throughout Latin America that poses a threat to democracy, the top US intelligence official said Tuesday. John Negroponte, during hearings on his nomination to become deputy secretary of state
http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/234/52/

Viva Chavez: Venezuela is the hip new socialist utopia

Leftists are flocking to see a country being transformed, writes Rory
Carroll in Caracas

TO SCEPTICS, they are naive Westerners who would not recognise
communist tyranny if it expropriated their sandals.

"Malodorous, left-wing, US and European peace creeps armed with Mom's
credit card and brand new Birkenstocks," sneered the American Thinker,
a right-wing magazine.

To the Venezuelan Government, however, they are valued friends who are
witnessing first-hand the positive changes sweeping the slums and
countryside and who return home, a volunteer army of ambassadors, to
spread the good news.

Meet the revolutionary tourists, a wave of backpackers, artists,
academics and politicians on a mission to discover if Venezuela's
President, Hugo Chavez, really is forging a radical alternative to
neo-liberalism and capitalism.

>From a trickle, a few years ago, there are now thousands. They travel
individually and on package tours, exploring a purported left-wing
mecca, and their ranks are set to swell now Mr Chavez is accelerating
his self-styled revolution after last month's landslide re-election.
"Socialism or death - I swear it," he said last week, and declared
himself a communist.

"It's just amazing being here. There is so much vibe and passion,
there is truly a sense of revolution," gushed Lucy Dale, 20, a
university student from Chicago on a 17-day trip. "I want to return to
do volunteer work."

Global Exchange, a San Francisco group that doubles as a travel agent,
organised trips for almost 500 Americans last year, five times the
2003 figure, said Jojo Farrell, its Venezuela liaison worker.

>From Britain, the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign plans to send at least
six delegations this year, mostly trade unionists. "Interest is
growing significantly," said Andy Goodall, co-ordinator of the
Wolverhampton-based group.

Visitors tend to shun the Caribbean beaches in favour of tours to
agricultural co-operatives, shantytown medical clinics and adult
literacy programs.

"We saw healthy, happy, well-dressed children taught by well-qualified
teachers who get paid a decent salary. These are opportunities that
did not exist for poor people before Chavez," said Kate Young, who
travelled with the Rotary Foundation.

Others hail Caracas and its alliance with other left-wing governments
for loosening the US's traditional grip on the region.

"We need checks and balances to US unilateralism, and any good North
American would laud Chavez for doing that," said Clif Roberts, a
Californian writer who stayed on in Venezuela after attending a poetry
festival.

Visiting celebrities such as the actor Danny Glover, the singer Harry
Belafonte and the anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan, echo the
sentiment.

Many enthusiasts set up solidarity groups when they return home and
record their impressions in blogs, amplifying the message sent out by
Venezuela's embassies and information offices.

The aim is to correct alleged mainstream media distortion depicting Mr
Chavez as an autocratic megalomaniac.

"The UK media is very disappointing, always a negative slant," said
Rod Finlayson, 62, a British union official who was thrilled by the
nationalisations and cultural events. "Bach in the slums. Stuff you
could only dream about."

Dreaming, say some critics, is the problem. Instead of investigating
complexities, such as the corruption and mismanagement undermining
some social programs, visitors sleepwalk through government spin and
never hear allegations that Venezuela's oil bonanza is being wasted or
that democracy is being smothered.

Mr Finlayson said his delegation ignored such voices because the goal
was to express solidarity, not investigate. But the group did
encounter some Chavez critics: walking through a wealthy district of
Caracas, it was pelted with eggs.

Some groups, such as those travelling with Global Exchange, meet
opposition figures and hear claims that Mr Chavez is hoarding power by
collapsing his movement into a single socialist party, not renewing
the licence of an opposition-aligned TV station and plotting to
abolish limits on terms of office.

"I was encouraged by what I saw in Venezuela but the focus on one
person as the source of hope strikes me as unfortunate," said Sarah
Gelder, an editor of the Seattle-based magazine Yes!.

Another left-wing journalist, Monica Vera, hailed the country as a
progressive beacon but voiced unease: "I just hope it continues on
that track."

Last Saturday Mr Chavez vowed to replace municipal governments with
councils inspired by the Paris Commune, France's shortlived experiment
with radical socialism in 1871.

Cuba Debates Economic Path Ahead Under Raul Castro

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSN072796412


HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuban economists are busy studying
ways to rev up one of the world's last communist-run
economies, a step encouraged by acting President Raul
Castro since he took over from his ailing brother six
months ago.

The debate is focused on how to make Cuba's inefficient
command economy more productive and take advantage of
newfound financial buoyancy in foreign exchange
earnings.

"There is consensus on our goals: more popular
participation, the country's development and a better
material and spiritual life," China expert and
economics professor Evelio Vilarino told Reuters this
week at a globalization conference. "Where there is no
consensus is on how best to achieve that."

In a series of end-of-the-year speeches, Raul Castro
expressed frustration with bureaucracy, demanded
answers to declining food output, urged Cuba's press to
be more critical and authorized a study of socialist
property relations.

Cuban economist and agriculture expert Amando Nova said
agriculture reforms of the early 1990s -- when Cuba
divided state farms into worker cooperatives and
legalized private produce markets -- stopped halfway.

"We need farmers to participate more in production and
price decisions, to be able to purchase inputs and in
general enjoy more autonomy from the state," said Nova,
who is involved in a report on agriculture commissioned
by the government.

Similar reports are being prepared on other sectors of
the economy where the state dictates most output and
prices in exchange for inputs and credits.

Many experts view Raul Castro, 75, as more pragmatic
than his brother and believe he could steer Cuba's 90
percent state-run economy toward one that resembles the
more open Chinese model.

ADAPT, DON'T ADOPT

Luis Marcelo Yera of the National Economic Research
Institute, a member of the panel looking into property
relations, said Cuba is taking a path closer to one of
his favorite Japanese sayings.

"Adapt, don't adopt -- we can adapt the best
experiences but not adopt another's model," he said.

Marcelo said the panel was "looking at better defining
property under socialism ... because experience has
demonstrated it has many problems functioning."

Cuba's foreign exchange earnings have nearly doubled
over the last two years, thanks mainly to the export of
medical and other services to Venezuela and record-high
nickel prices.

Economic growth has sped up to three times its pace at
the start of the decade when Cuba was pulling out of
the economic collapse that followed the collapse of its
former benefactor, the Soviet Union, in 1991.

Nevertheless, the state has run into problems investing
the revenues through its more than 3,000 state-run
companies. The economy also suffers from chronic
disorganization, bad accounting, poor quality, lax
discipline and graft.

The head of parliament's economic commission, Osvaldo
Martinez, told Reuters the debate over economic policy
probably would be taking place even if President Fidel
Castro were not too ill to govern.

"We are not talking about the Chinese model, but a
Cuban model, the best way forward given Cuba's
possibilities, realities, resources and problems,"
Martinez said.

Some Cuban economists believe that only by adopting
China's model of a capitalist market under communist
political control, or at a minimum by decentralizing
and developing private cooperatives and markets in
nonstrategic sectors, can internal production be
improved.

Others say any opening would provide the United States
with a chance to topple the socialist system.

Agriculture specialist Nova said taking steps to loosen
the economy would not threaten his sector.

"Decentralization and more autonomy would result in
more production and food security, consolidating our
economy and making us less vulnerable," he said.

Latin America Solidarity News 28th Jan 2007

Latin America Solidarity Committee
Lac Email lac@apc.org.nz
LAC website www.converge.org.nz/lac
LAC blogg www.lascnz.blogspot.com
Zapatista email zapatistasolidarity@gmail.com
Zapatista blogg http://vivazapatanz.blogspot.com/
Incal-Wellington http://incal.orcon.net.nz
Peña Cultural Latina Alternative Mondays from 20th October 6pm 128 Abel Smith St

Listen to Voz Latinoamericana Wellington Access Radio 783AM
Todos los Jueves de 6:00 a 7:30 p.m Thursdays 6pm to 7.30pm
Ph 021 548 985 or hjorge40@hotmail.com
Radio streaming www.r2.co.nz/meta/accessradio-56.asx - www.accessradio.org.nz/

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Events and Notices

“FILMS UNDER THE STARS” series: “VIVA SÃO JOÃO!”

Free screening of “Viva São João”, by Andrucha Waddington, with
Gilberto Gil, Dominguinhos and others, at the Wellington Botanic Gardens, on Thursday,
22nd February 2007. This event is being organized and promoted by the Cuba Street Carnival Trust in
conjunction with the Embassy of Brazil in Wellington and the NZ Film Archive.

When: Thursday 22nd February, 2007, from 9pm
Where: The Dell, Wellington Botanic Garden, Main Entrance, Tinakori Road
How much? Free... Come along and bring your friends!
NB: In the event of bad weather, the screening might be cancelled. Please check on the following:
Summer City Website - www.feelinggreat.co.nz; Wellington City Council Website
www.wellington.govt.nz; Newstalk ZB 1035 am or call the Summer City hotline - 801 3500

¡Salud! 2nd and 3rd March 7pm

Follow up the Cuba Carnival (26-28th Feb)
and find out what puts Cuba on the map in the quest for global health and see SALUD …
At New Zealand Film Archive, 84 Taranki St, Wellington (entrance off Guzhnee St)
Discussion following screening of film incl issues over community health in NZ.
Further information contact Paul Bruce lac@apc.org.nz Tel 972 8699
or NZ Film Archive Tel 384 7647
¡Salud, 93 minutes,is produced and directed by Academy Award nominee Connie Field
(The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter; Freedom on My Mind) and co-produced by Gail Reed.
http://www.saludthefilm.net/ns/main.html

Venezuela
If you too want to be a "revolutionary tourist'' and ``join the wave of
backpackers, artists, academics and politicians on a mission to
discover if Venezuela's President, Hugo Chavez, really is forging a
radical alternative to neo-liberalism and capitalism" check out the
three solidarity brigades that the Australia Venezuela Solidarity
Network are organising this year including the first one for May Day
at http://www.venezuelasolidarity.org/?q=node/40]
also http://tinyurl.com/2yeg5a
Habana Blues
World Cinema Showcase film festival is featuring a Cuban film - Habana Blues - in this year’s festival.
A captivating love letter to life on the ‘crazy isle’ of Cuba, Habana Blues follows a group of musicians struggling to make the big time. If that sounds like Buena Vista Social Club: the Return, be aware this is fiction – these young stallions play a vibrant hybrid of soul and rock, and their goal in life is to leave behind the politics of their impoverished island. Ruy and Tito are the Mick and Keith of the band who spend their days flogging everything from cigars to sombreros out of the back of Tito’s delicious red ‘52 Chevy. When their long-awaited break arrives in the guise of Spanish record producer Marta, their lives are thrown into turmoil by the tantalising prospect of a one-way ticket to Spain. For once they’ve left Cuba, they can never return.

World Cinema Showcase - Auckland - March 15 - April 4, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Wellington - March 29 - April 11. 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Christchurch - April 12 - 25, 2007
World Cinema Showcase - Dunedin - April 19 - May 5, 2007
www.worldcinemashowcase.co.nz

Telecom 39th Auckland International Film Festival, July 13 - 29, 2007
Telecom 36th Wellington Film Festival, July 20 - August 5, 2007
Telecom 31st Dunedin International Film Festival, July 27 - August 12, 2007
Telecom 31st Christchurch International Film Festival, August 2 - 19, 2007
www.nzff.telecom.co.nz


NEWS
GUATEMALA: WORKERS BURN MAQUILA

Dozens of laid-off workers looted and set fire to the Genesis
Feliz Tex S.A. garment plant in Guatemala City on the afternoon
of Jan. 20. The workers came to the plant to demand their
severance pay. Finding no one at the factory, the workers decided
to seize apparel and machinery in compensation. Within minutes
unit of the National Civil Police (PNC) arrived and dispersed the
crowd with tear gas, but before they left the workers started a
fire; firefighters spent two hours putting it out. No arrests
were made.

The plant was a maquiladora (tax-exempt assembly plant producing
for export) apparently owned by a Korean company. There are more
than 300 apparel-producing maquiladoras in Guatemala, employing
about 100,000 workers, mostly impoverished women. Some 20 of
these plants closed down in 2006, leaving 5,000 people without
work. [Prensa Libre (Guatemala) 1/21/07;

Venezuela's Chavez Sets Oil Fields Takeover for May:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announced the government’s planned takeover of the Orinoco belt oil fields, and the re-nationalization of the electricity sector at an international press conference yesterday. He also responded to U.S. President George W. Bush’s “concerns” over Venezuelan democracy.
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2208

Ecuador won't recognize Occidental claim:
Two-year-long dispute with the Los Angeles-based company led Ecuador to cancel its contract with Occidental, which produced about 100,000 barrels of crude daily in Ecuador, and seize its facilities.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8N0DNC01.htm

Chávez in charge
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/richard_gott/2007/02/gottvenezuela.html
By Richard Gott

Hugo Chávez is a man in a hurry, and this week's decision by the Venezuelan
national assembly to grant him additional powers foreshadows the radical
changes that are in the pipeline. President for the past eight years, Chávez
has only just begun to scratch the surface of the gigantic revolutionary
project that lies ahead. There have been obvious successes. Unprecedented
sums of oil money have been diverted towards the country's poor majority,
funding education and health programmes, and providing cheap food. The
results are already on show. A freshly mobilised and alert population is
beginning to flex its muscles, taking part in political decision-making
through a myriad local councils and ad-hoc committees operating at many
levels. Nothing like this has happened in Latin America since the Cuban
Revolution nearly half a century ago. It is riveting stuff.

Yet all this energy and excitement has been channelled through new
institutions, financed directly by the oil revenues, and essentially
unmonitored. Again, this is a revolution in progress. At the same time, much
of the old, pre-revolutionary Venezuela still remains. The country's
traditional infrastructure is plagued by bureaucracy and corruption, the
twin-headed disease inherited from the Spanish colonial era. Bureaucrats,
and that means public servants in every ministry and ancient state entity,
exist to ensure that nothing ever gets done, while corruption exists to
lubricate their powers of inaction. What is true of the state is true of
private industry as well. So this week's "enabling" legislation will give
greater powers to the executive at the expense of the legislature, with the
hope that Chávez will be able to push through some necessary changes. At
some stage, the new institutions and the old bureaucracies will have to be
merged.

Is this road to dictatorship or the path to reasonable reform? The nature of
the problem is familiar to political scientists, and certainly not new to
Latin America. Where should the balance fall between the executive and the
legislature? Each country makes its choice, and revolutions provide an
opportunity for the balance to be changed.

Allowing the Venezuelan president to issue executive orders is nothing new.
It is permitted under the constitution of 1999, as under the previous
constitution. Chávez's recent predecessors availed themselves of a similar
facility from time to time, notably when dealing with economic and financial
matters. Even Thomas Shannon, the US diplomat in charge of Latin America,
admitted in an unusually friendly comment that the enabling law was nothing
new. "It's something valid under the constitution (and) as with any tool of
democracy, it depends on how it is used."

So what is important here is a change in the nature of government rather
than a madcap scheme to seize private assets, soak the rich, and nationalise
everything in sight by presidential decree. Perhaps the most significant of
the planned reforms is the provision of finance and teeth to the "communal
councils" springing up in their thousands all over the country. The future
"socialist democracy" of Venezuela will depend more on these grassroots
expressions of the popular will than the national assembly in Caracas. Since
the opposition parties foolishly boycotted the assembly elections, the
entirely pro-Chávez assembly has a rather limited use.

For most of the past eight years, Chávez has moved ahead in response to the
actions of others. The attempted coup d'etat of 2002, the oil strike of
2003, and the recall referendum of 2004 all led to an acceleration of the
revolutionary process. Now he is advancing under his own steam. We know that
he wants to retain the commanding heights of the economy, the traditional
ambition of Latin American nationalists as well as old-fashioned social
democrats. That means oil and gas and electricity, and telecommunications.
We know that he hopes to extend the land reform, the essential first step
towards rural development. We know too that he wants to improve tax
collection and to do something about gross inequality, the untackled evil
throughout Latin America except in Cuba. We also know that he is hostile to
unbridled capitalism, and has made friendly remarks about cooperatives and
other ways of organising the private sector.

Yet the Venezuelan future is still interestingly uncertain and opaque, for
the simple reason that Chávez is not a dictator and has never shown the
slightest sign of wanting to become one. He has no blueprint that he seeks
to impose on the country. He wants to extend press freedom, for example, not
to reduce it, and, while curbing the power to make money of irresponsible
press barons like Marcel Granier of RCTV, he has also put state funds into
the development of community radio and television stations, as well as more
ambitious projects like Vive, the new cultural channel, and Telesur, the
international news channel. These new lines of communication already provide
fresh opportunities for popular participation, the ultimate safeguard of his
regime and the source of all future programmes and policies.

Bolivia's Morales: 'This little Indian won't be leaving office'
by Federico Fuentes
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2007/696/36151

.............A poll published in the main La Paz daily, La Razon, a
year after Bolivia's powerful indigenous movement took
control of parliament, showed that Morales's approval
across the major cities was 59% -- higher than his
historic 53.7% vote in the December 2005 elections. The
rate was higher in the countryside, where Morales's
main support base is.

This reflects the support that Bolivia's national
revolution, led by Morales and with Bolivia's
indigenous people as its core, has among the Bolivian
masses, who, having regained their spirit and dignity
are fighting to liberate Bolivia and decolonise its
racist state structures.

A year of indigenous power

This strong support is in large part due to the
progress made on one of Morales's key election promises
-- the nationalisation of hydrocarbons. Having
overthrown two presidents in their struggle to regain
control over their natural resources, particularly gas,
over 90% of Bolivians approved when Morales sent the
military into the gas fields on May 1 to return control
of hydrocarbons to the state.

Six months later after intense negotiations, which
resulted in the resignation of hardline pro-
nationalisation hydrocarbons minister Andres Soliz Rada
and a war of words between the Bolivian government and
Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, 44 new contracts
were signed. The new rules meant that the state gained
control over hydrocarbons, from below the ground
through to the end of the industrialisation phase, and
the corporations were to become service providers. The
state would receive 82% of the revenue, which the
corporations previously took for themselves.

The government also successfully renegotiated a
doubling of the price for gas sold to Argentina, and
hopes to do the same soon with Brazil.

The result -- nearly US$1.3 billion in revenue from gas
(an increase of $635 million). Combined with a growth
rate of 4.3%, a reduction of parliamentary salaries by
50% and macroeconomic stability, the government has
been able to use this strong economic position to begin
to deliver on some of its promises, reversing the
impact of neoliberalism in Bolivia.

Morales has personally traveled around the country to
redistribute the gains from the gas nationalisation.
These include (with substantial help from Cuba and
Venezuela) 2000 Cuban doctors, 20 new hospitals, a
literacy campaign in which 73,000 out of 300,000
participants have already graduated, the Juancito Pinto
annual bonus for all school children under the age of
10 to help cover the costs of schooling, and tractors
as part of the government land reform plan.

This high level of support has also allowed the
government to move forward with its "agrarian
revolution", violently opposed by the large landowners
who have begun to set up paramilitary groups.

Challenges ahead

While there were some important gains made in
implementing the government's economic plans over the
past year, its key political plank -- the Constituent
Assembly -- remains stalled by the opposition.

According to Morales, the Constituent Assembly "is the
best democratic instrument ... to profoundly change our
country. It is the best instrument to unify, to
integrate our national territory." He added that the
assembly is "the hope of Bolivians to patent the
necessary structural transformations, and the changes
in the economic and social sphere".

Three other key challenges the government faces are
pushing forward with the industrialisation of gas and
mining to maintain and further improve economic
stability, better management at the microeconomic level
in order to ensure more resources and redistributed
wealth reach those sectors and regions that need it
most, and better coordination in the face of the rise
of a new opposition.

Morales noted that still pending in the process of
nationalising hydrocarbons was obtaining 50%-plus-1 of
the shares in companies operating in Bolivia, and the
refoundation of the state oil company YPFB, which is
still not in a position to carry out the
industrialisation of gas. The increased revenue from
the nationalisation, as well as help from Venezuelan
state oil company PDVSA, through the newly formed joint
project Petroandina, will allow the government to move
ahead on these tasks, Morales said.

Morales also used his one-year anniversary to announce
the "second nationalisation" of the mining industry.
Last year, mining exports equaled $1.1 billion, of
which only 1.5% went into state coffers. Morales
proposed that at least half of this now go to the
state, while the exportation of raw minerals will be
limited to give primacy to Bolivia's industrialisation.

To help this, the government proposed recovering
ownership of the Vinto tin smelter, sold off illegally
under previous neoliberal governments. The Morales
government has already begun to rebuild the state
mining company Comibol, having integrated 5000 ex-
cooperative miners into the company.

National Coalition for Change

In order to ensure better management of the state
apparatus, particularly in the opposition-controlled
regions, as well as coordination among the social
movements and their representatives in parliament and
the Constituent Assembly, Morales initiated the
National Coalition for Change on January 23.

The coalition is to involve 16 national social
organisations -- including indigenous, campesino and
workers' organisations -- and will "coordinate the
social power of the social movements with the executive
and legislative power and the constituent delegates,
and will fundamentally define the political,
revolutionary, democratic and cultural line", explained
the president of the lower house of parliament, Raul
Novillo.

This coordination is necessary to confront the rise of
a new opposition, based in the pro-business civic
committee of Santa Cruz and the prefectures of the four
eastern departments (states) referred to as the "half
moon". Raising the banner of autonomy in order to
maintain its hegemony over the east, the Santa Cruz
elite (tied to the gas transnationals and the US) have
attempted to mobilise the predominately white middle
and upper classes against the Morales government.

Stressing the need for social stability, furthering
economic improvements and defending autonomy within a
clear framework of national unity and control of
essential areas -- such as natural resources, police
and taxes -- will be crucial to isolating this new
opposition and winning over and consolidating large
sections of the middle classes and the armed forces to
supporting Bolivia's revolution.

Similar structures are to be established at the
departmental (or state) level from February, which
along with departmental delegates selected by the
national government will help in coordination and
organisation at this level. Such coordination has been
impeded because six out of nine prefectures are
controlled by the right.

On January 24, the three opposition parties in the
Senate united to elect one of their own as president of
the upper house, National Unity senator Jose
Villavicencio. This revival of the "mega coalition" of
the neoliberal parties that sustained the previous
governments is one more part of the oppositions plan to
block Morales's attempts to lead a democratic and
cultural revolution.

That day, Bolpress reported that other official sources
said this new opposition directorate would ask for the
revision of the parliamentary session that passed the
new agrarian reform law. Villavicencio has also
announced that the Senate would review another bill in
that session relating to cooperation with the
Venezuelan military on Bolivian soil.

In response, Morales was quoted by the Bolivian
Information Service on January 24 as saying that "the
right, the neoliberals, the auctioneers have united,
but there is no need for us to protest".

"The experience we have is that there are social forces
who are demanding their rights. Within this framework I
am sure that the people will identify if [the Senate]
works against this process of change."

Morales recalled how the opposition had tried to block
the passage of the agrarian reform law, as well as the
ratification of the gas contracts, by boycotting the
Senate, and argued that "it was the mobilisation of the
people that unblocked the Senate".

MEXICO: MARCH FOR "NEW SOCIAL PACT"

Tens of thousands of Mexicans filled Mexico City's huge Zocalo
plaza on Jan. 31 in the first large demonstration against the
center-right government of President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa,
who took office on Dec. 1 and now faces popular anger over a
dramatic rise in the price of corn and other staples [see Update
#884]. "Without corn, there's no country," the marchers chanted.
"We don't want PAN, we want tortillas." (The initials of
Calderon's National Action Party, PAN, form the Spanish for
"bread.")

At the demonstration the organizers proclaimed the "Declaration
of the Zocalo," which called for "broad social unity" to achieve
a "new social pact," including renegotiation of the agricultural
sections of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); an
emergency program to increase production; restrictions on price
increases; punishment for hoarders; an emergency wage increase; a
push to create jobs; and an end to repression of social
movements. One participant was the sociologist Pablo Gonzalez
Casanova, a former rector of the Autonomous National University
of Mexico (UNAM). Asked by reporters if the movement could turn
back Calderon's neoliberal economic policies, he answered: "We're
going to win, because now we are in a stage where neoliberalism
doesn't fool anyone.... The whole world knows clearly that
neoliberalism is one of the great lies of humanity...."

The march was called by a broad coalition of 150 labor unions and
campesino and farmer groups. The coalition included labor
federations like the National Workers Union (UNT) that split from
the old Congress of Labor (CT), which is dominated by the
formerly ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI); but
another important component was PRI-affiliated groups like
National Campesino Federation (CNC). The march organizers
insisted that the demonstration would not be partisan and barred
political speeches. But many protesters waited in the Zocalo for
the arrival of a second march around the same demands; this one
was led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the center-left coalition
candidate who narrowly lost the July 2 presidential race to
Calderon, according to electoral authorities. [La Jornada
(Mexico) 2/1/07]

The Costs of Rising Tortilla Prices in Mexico
Enrique C. Ochoa

Spurred by the increasing use of corn for ethanol,
tortilla prices in Mexico have skyrocketed by more that
50 percent in many regions. Mexicans protested these
sharp increases, forcing the government of Felipe
Calderon to publicly promise to punish speculators and
to call for increased corn imports. Calderon also
negotiated a pact with the largest tortilla producers
to cap the price of tortillas at 8.5 pesos per
kilogram - a 40 percent price increase. However few
consumers will benefit from these efforts. Instead,
WALMART, the large corporations that dominate the
industry, and the U.S. transnational companies that
supply Mexico with corn are likely to be the
beneficiaries.

The tortilla price hikes and the government's responses
will be shouldered by Mexico's poorest consumers and
producers. Tortilla prices have increased by more than
10 times the recent increase in the minimum wage. In
some states a kilogram of tortillas accounts for as
much as one-third of the daily minimum wage. Increasing
imports is likely to further devastate Mexican corn
producers, who have been especially hard hit since the
1994 implementation of NAFTA.

The Mexican government has not always been willing to
sacrifice the poor for giant corporations. In the
Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century, Mexico's
working classes demanded social justice. Successive
Mexican administrations responded by granting land to
the landless and subsidizing the production of
tortillas. As Mexican governments sought to transform
the economy through industrialization and large scale
agriculture, peasant and worker resistance led to the
creation of a government agency with a chain of stores
to keep basic food prices within the reach of
consumers. This agency established a minimum producer
price and purchased staple grains directly from small
producers. While the goal was not to eradicate poverty
or challenge the market system, this authoritarian
responsiveness provided a basic security net for
millions of Mexicans.

These social policies were greatly weakened by Mexico's
economic crisis of the 1980s and the U.S.-inspired
response. Social programs were slashed and food
subsidies eliminated as private businesses were hailed
as the solution to Mexico's economic ills. This has led
to a virtual abandonment of the countryside. Mexico's
farm employment has been reduced by 30 percent since
the implementation of NAFTA. According to a study the
International Relations Center, between 1999 and 2004
the price paid Mexican corn farmers fell by about half
as U.S. imports flooded Mexican markets. While for
centuries Mexico's campesinos have produced maize and
other basic staples, their lands are increasingly
privatized or abandoned and are forced to migrate in
search of better opportunities.

Among the major beneficiaries of the government
policies in the 1980s and 1990s, and of recent price
hikes, is the Mexican tortilla giant Grupo MASECA
(GRUMA). Founded in 1949, GRUMA pioneered an industrial
process of making corn flour and tortillas. When
subsidies to maize and tortillas plummeted, GRUMA
thrived as Mexican President Carlos Salinas diverted
state corn stocks away from smaller subsidized tortilla
factories and to the ready-mix tortilla industry, such
as GRUMA, openly favoring them as more efficient
producers.

GRUMA's dominance of the Mexican market stimulated its
international expansion. GRUMA controls approximately
65 percent of the overall Central American corn flour
market. In the U.S., with Mission and Guerrero as their
key brands, GRUMA controls about 70% of the tortilla
market in Southern California. It operates 13
industrial plants in the U.S including the largest
tortilla factory in the world in Rancho Cucamonga.
GRUMA has benefited from its strategic alliance with
Archer Daniel's Midland, one of the world's largest
agribusinesses and a key recipient of U.S. corn
subsidies.

WALMART, Mexico's number one private employer and
leading retailer, also stands to gain from the price
hikes. In its nearly 800 stores, WALMART has not
raised the price of tortillas as much as other
retailers. Its dominance of the market allows it to
undersell smaller stores thereby attracting more
customers. Smaller and national retailers are likely
to be the casualties, enabling WALMART to consolidate
its monopolistic hold over the Mexican market.

The current crisis provides an opportunity for
agribusiness to strengthen their dominance of the
Mexican countryside. Several large producer
organizations and biotech firms have called on the
government to authorize the planting of genetically
modified corn to increase yield in Mexico. In the
search for a quick fix, however, such a policy would
deepen Mexico's food dependence.

The lack of food sovereignty has had disastrous
consequences for Mexicans. According to Laura Carlsen
of the International Relations Center, the Mexican
government recently reported that 12.7 percent of
children under age five are chronically malnourished.
In the countryside, the percent is nearly double. The
increases in the price of tortillas, heightens the risk
of malnutrition. Hector Bourges Rodriguez, the
director of Nutrition of the National Institute of
Medical Sciences and Nutrition, reports that tortillas
are the one food item in the Mexican diet that deliver
the greatest amount of nutritional components.
Increasing the price could lead to the further
deteriorization of the Mexican diet.

The recent price increases of tortillas in Mexico,
therefore, are not mere market adjustments. They have
profound implications for who controls Mexico's basic
food staple. Long-term solutions to price increases
must be rooted in policies that increase Mexico's food
sovereignty and give more control to local campesino
producers and consumers. Short-term panaceas that
benefit WALMART, GRUMA, and U.S. agribusiness will not
improve the standard of living of the average Mexican;
instead, they may lead to greater malnutrition and
instability.

*Enrique C. Ochoa is a professor of History at the
California State University, Los Angeles and the
2006-07 Weglyn Chair of Multicultural Studies at Cal
Poly Pomona. The author of Feeding Mexico: The
Political Uses of Food Since 1910 (2000), he is
currently writing a book on the tortilla industry in
Mexico and Los Angeles.

Chavez a threat to democracy, US intelligence chief says:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez exports a form of "radical populism" throughout Latin America that poses a threat to democracy, the top US intelligence official said Tuesday. John Negroponte, during hearings on his nomination to become deputy secretary of state
http://www.ichblog.eu/content/view/234/52/

Viva Chavez: Venezuela is the hip new socialist utopia

Leftists are flocking to see a country being transformed, writes Rory
Carroll in Caracas

TO SCEPTICS, they are naive Westerners who would not recognise
communist tyranny if it expropriated their sandals.

"Malodorous, left-wing, US and European peace creeps armed with Mom's
credit card and brand new Birkenstocks," sneered the American Thinker,
a right-wing magazine.

To the Venezuelan Government, however, they are valued friends who are
witnessing first-hand the positive changes sweeping the slums and
countryside and who return home, a volunteer army of ambassadors, to
spread the good news.

Meet the revolutionary tourists, a wave of backpackers, artists,
academics and politicians on a mission to discover if Venezuela's
President, Hugo Chavez, really is forging a radical alternative to
neo-liberalism and capitalism.

>From a trickle, a few years ago, there are now thousands. They travel
individually and on package tours, exploring a purported left-wing
mecca, and their ranks are set to swell now Mr Chavez is accelerating
his self-styled revolution after last month's landslide re-election.
"Socialism or death - I swear it," he said last week, and declared
himself a communist.

"It's just amazing being here. There is so much vibe and passion,
there is truly a sense of revolution," gushed Lucy Dale, 20, a
university student from Chicago on a 17-day trip. "I want to return to
do volunteer work."

Global Exchange, a San Francisco group that doubles as a travel agent,
organised trips for almost 500 Americans last year, five times the
2003 figure, said Jojo Farrell, its Venezuela liaison worker.

>From Britain, the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign plans to send at least
six delegations this year, mostly trade unionists. "Interest is
growing significantly," said Andy Goodall, co-ordinator of the
Wolverhampton-based group.

Visitors tend to shun the Caribbean beaches in favour of tours to
agricultural co-operatives, shantytown medical clinics and adult
literacy programs.

"We saw healthy, happy, well-dressed children taught by well-qualified
teachers who get paid a decent salary. These are opportunities that
did not exist for poor people before Chavez," said Kate Young, who
travelled with the Rotary Foundation.

Others hail Caracas and its alliance with other left-wing governments
for loosening the US's traditional grip on the region.

"We need checks and balances to US unilateralism, and any good North
American would laud Chavez for doing that," said Clif Roberts, a
Californian writer who stayed on in Venezuela after attending a poetry
festival.

Visiting celebrities such as the actor Danny Glover, the singer Harry
Belafonte and the anti-Iraq war activist Cindy Sheehan, echo the
sentiment.

Many enthusiasts set up solidarity groups when they return home and
record their impressions in blogs, amplifying the message sent out by
Venezuela's embassies and information offices.

The aim is to correct alleged mainstream media distortion depicting Mr
Chavez as an autocratic megalomaniac.

"The UK media is very disappointing, always a negative slant," said
Rod Finlayson, 62, a British union official who was thrilled by the
nationalisations and cultural events. "Bach in the slums. Stuff you
could only dream about."

Dreaming, say some critics, is the problem. Instead of investigating
complexities, such as the corruption and mismanagement undermining
some social programs, visitors sleepwalk through government spin and
never hear allegations that Venezuela's oil bonanza is being wasted or
that democracy is being smothered.

Mr Finlayson said his delegation ignored such voices because the goal
was to express solidarity, not investigate. But the group did
encounter some Chavez critics: walking through a wealthy district of
Caracas, it was pelted with eggs.

Some groups, such as those travelling with Global Exchange, meet
opposition figures and hear claims that Mr Chavez is hoarding power by
collapsing his movement into a single socialist party, not renewing
the licence of an opposition-aligned TV station and plotting to
abolish limits on terms of office.

"I was encouraged by what I saw in Venezuela but the focus on one
person as the source of hope strikes me as unfortunate," said Sarah
Gelder, an editor of the Seattle-based magazine Yes!.

Another left-wing journalist, Monica Vera, hailed the country as a
progressive beacon but voiced unease: "I just hope it continues on
that track."

Last Saturday Mr Chavez vowed to replace municipal governments with
councils inspired by the Paris Commune, France's shortlived experiment
with radical socialism in 1871.

Guardian News & Media


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Latin America Solidarity News 2nd Jan 2006

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Events

“FILMS UNDER THE STARS” series: “VIVA SÃO JOÃO!”

Free screening of “Viva São João”, by Andrucha Waddington, with
Gilberto Gil, Dominguinhos and others, at the Wellington Botanic Gardens, on Thursday,
22nd February 2007. This event is being organized and promoted by the Cuba Street Carnival Trust in
conjunction with the Embassy of Brazil in Wellington and the NZ Film Archive.

When: Thursday 22nd February, 2007, from 9pm
Where: The Dell, Wellington Botanic Garden, Main Entrance, Tinakori Road
How much? Free... Come along and bring your friends!

NEWS
US and Latin America: Overview for 2006
The weakest link in Washington’s projected strategy in Latin America is the re-emergence of socio-political movements, like those which burst forth in the late 1990’s and first years of the new century: The MST in Brazil, the workers, peasant and Indian movements in Bolivia and Ecuador and the mass uprising in Oaxaca and electoral protests in Mexico are in the process of re-grouping, none having suffered a historic defeat.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15935.htm

Chavez targets Venezuela homeless woes :
President Hugo Chavez has pledged to do away with homelessness in Venezuela through an aggressive outreach program that is offering street people communal housing, drug treatment and a modest stipend.
http://www.dominicantoday.com/app/article.aspx?id=20893

Pinochet: : A Declassified Documentary Obit:
As Chile prepared to bury General Augusto Pinochet, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of declassified U.S. documents that illuminate the former dictator's record of repression. The documents include CIA records on Pinochet's role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB212/index.htm


As Castro Fades, A Crop Of New Leaders
Interviews with two younger political figures suggest a gradual opening both economically and socially.
By Tom Fawthrop http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1227/p06s01-woam.html

'Children Are the Hope of the World' Says Che's Daughter
www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=35849
MILAN, Dec 14 (Tierramérica) - Aleida Guevara March has the eyes of
her famous father, the revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara. She
speaks energetically, as if she is attempting to convince a full
auditorium of her ideas. But she also smiles tenderly as she
remembers her father.

The pediatric allergist, 46, still refers to Cuba's ailing President
Fidel Castro as "tio" (uncle), and is confident of his recovery. Once
active in the Union of Young Communists, she now combines her work in
a children's hospital in Havana with frequent trips around the world
to promote what she considers the achievements of the Caribbean
island nation's socialist regime, among them, universal access to
free healthcare.

Poverty Crushes Guatemala
http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={15658122-
CE16-4090-8D0A-37C893CF5A5D}&language=EN

Guatemala, Dec 26 (Prensa Latina) After having signed a peace
agreement, extreme poverty currently affects over 60 percent of the
population in Guatemala, where the war wages on, analysts said here.

Amid the armed conflict in 1989, about 80 percent of Guatemalans were
poor, and 59.3 lived in abject poverty, chiefly in rural areas, a
situation that experts consider has not changed in the Central
American country.

"The social stage set by the war still prevails," said Nadia
Sandoval, from Human Rights International Investigation Center in
Guatemala City.

The representative of the European Commission in Guatemala, Jo úo
Melo de Sampaio, said it was a contradiction to have an apparently
stable macro-economy to international eyes while there are such
domestic impoverishment exists.

According to local press, the country is not only socially divided
with a high percentage of abandoned native people in the countryside,
but huge differences in the concentration of wealth.

==========

Oaxaca, an Irreversible Crisis
http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={48DE8877-
A8B8-44C8-9F49-9C4688F15398}&language=EN
the Oaxaca social conflict that broke
on May 22 in Mexico, with 70,000 local teachers demonstrating for
higher salaries, became the most significant political, social crisis
in the country in the last few years.

On that day, teachers of Section 22nd of the National Education
Workers Union could not even imagine they would start an irreversible
process that includes many commitments.

Slowness and disdain of federal authorities, intransigence of a local
governor who is clung on to power, the framework of interests of
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and Accion Nacional (PAN) parties,
as well as the presence of police forces have all turned Oaxaca into
a vicious circle.

But, contrary to what politicians and observers may think, this
southern Mexican coastal state is today a powder keg, where a
solution to the conflict gets complicated, as the domination system
prevailing there was broken, and reconstruction of society cannot be
guaranteed by repression.

Far from serving as a dissuasion factor, state constraint has
encouraged resistance against Governor Ulises Ruiz, who for more than
six months has been urged to resign his post due to the high level of
ungovernability prevailing in the area.

Known as land of the sun, indigenous sanctuary of Mexico, birthplace
of national heroes and other names, Oaxaca is among worst hit Mexican
places when it comes to poverty, marginalization and backwardness.

At least 40 percent of its economically active population do not get
any payment for their work, and 60 percent of those lucky to be paid
earn less than a minimal wage a day. In contrast, just a tyre of one
of the governor's cars costs 2,400 dollars.

In the light of these realities, on June 14 Ruiz ordered a brutal
removal of teachers and social activists from their sit-ins, all of
which left 92 people wounded, including several with serious
injuries, according to official figures. A strong popular movement
followed.

Then, led by Oaxaca's Popular Assembly of the Peoples (Asamblea
Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, APPO), grouping unions, as well as
indigenous, students, worker organizations and several settlers,
Oaxaca residents gave free rein to a broad mass movement of a
unitary, opposition nature.

Successive clashes with local and state police ensued, including the
occupation of main government buildings, the lifting of barricades,
street blockings and occupation of Universidad Radio, all of which
were responded by arbitrary detention, torture and violation of
individual guarantees.

Based on a skillful policy of alliances, APPO managed to build a
network of resistance and peaceful civil disobedience capable of
facing the state executive and paramilitary groups, only stopped by
the entry of Federal Preventive Police (PFP) into Oaxaca on October 29.

However, a lack of sensitivity in the Congress of the Republic to
declare the disappearance of powers in the area triggered not only a
radicalization of APPO, but also the most violent clash with PFP,
with 17 people killed and more than 284 detained.

Over 10 rounds of talks between APPO and representatives of the
Ministry of Interior and efforts made by senators and deputies bared
no fruit in finding a solution to the conflict.

Stuck in political interests of PRI and PAN, the Oaxaca crisis is in
a blind alley, on the brink of an increased social violence,
especially after the detention of main APPO leaders.

In opinion of the country's opposition progressive forces, the Oaxaca
conflict is a complex political issue that requires the resignation
of the state governor to be solved, as many recognize.

It is a reflection of ungovernability and incapacity to build bridges
of understanding, as well as incompetence to channel social demands
with firm, radical solutions.

Poll: Venezuelans Have Highest Regard for Their Democracy
Wednesday, Dec 20, 2006 - Gregory Wilpert -
www.venezuelanalysis.com/news.php?newsno=2179

Venezuelans view their democracy more favorably than
the citizens of all other Latin American countries view
their own democracies, except Uruguay, according to a
new survey released by the Chilean NGO Latinbarometro
last Saturday. Also, Venezuela is in first place in
several measures of political participation, compared
to all other Latin American countries.

According to the Latinobarometro survey, Venezuelans
rank their democracy as being more fully realized than
the citizens of all other surveyed countries do except
Uruguay. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means a country
that is not democratic and 10 is a country that is
completely democratic, Venezuelans, on average, gave
their own democracy a score of 7.0. The Latin American
average was 5.8, with Uruguay having the highest score,
of 7.2, and Paraguay the lowest, at 3.9.

Similarly, Venezuelans say more often than the citizens
all other countries except Uruguayans that they are
satisfied with their democracy. 57% of Venezuelans are
happy with Venezuelan democracy, which is the second
highest percentage, with 66% of Uruguayans expressing
satisfaction. The average for all countries surveyed
was 38%, with citizens of Peru, Ecuador, and Paraguay,
expressing the least satisfaction, of 23%, 22%, and 12%
respectively.

For Venezuela, the percentage of citizens surveyed who
indicated satisfaction increased more since 1998, the
year Chavez was elected, than any other country. The
percentage expressing satisfaction increased from 32%
to 57% in those eight years.

In terms of political participation, Venezuelans
indicate that they are more politically active than the
citizens of any other surveyed country. Venezuelans
have the highest percentage of citizens that say they
discuss politics regularly (47%, average is 26%), who
say that they try to convince others on political
matters (32%, average is 16%), who participate in
demonstrations (26%, average is 12%), and who say they
are active in a political party (25%, average is 9%).

With regard to whether they believe that elections in
their country are 'clean,' Venezuelans answer in the
affirmative 56% of the time, which puts them in third
place, after Uruguay (83%) and Chile (69%). These were
the only three where over half said they believed
elections were clean. On average, only 41% of Latin
Americans expressed confidence in elections in their
country. Paraguayans (20%) and Ecuadorians (21%)
expressed the least confidence in their elections.

According to Latinobarometro, Venezuelans and
Uruguayans expressed the highest percentage of
confidence that elections were the most effective means
to promote change in their country (both 71%), compared
to 57% for all of Latin America.

Latinobarometro has been conducting an annual poll in
Latin American countries for the past 13 years. The
polls are financed by a variety of multilateral
agencies, such as the European Union, the Inter-
American Development Bank, and the World Bank. The 2006
poll was conducted in 18 countries in the month of
October 2006 and involved interviews with over 20,000
people. Its margin of error is about 3% (varies from
country to country).

The Latinobarometro report contradicted the common
perception that Latin America was heading towards more
authoritarian regimes with the recent political shift
towards the left. 'It is clear that there is no
authoritarian regression [in Latin America], which is
demonstrated by the fact that 14 presidents were
substituted, for various reasons and due to popular
pressure prior to the end of their mandate and within
the valid legal framework in each of the countries,'
said the report.

According to Latinobarometro, 'An important part of the
errors of perception about the evolution and
development of the region are produced by the false
expectations that international elites have about what
the region should be doing.'

Countries included in the survey were Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador,
El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua,
Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Uruguay,
and Venezuela.
www.latinobarometro.org/fileadmin/intranet/Informe_Latinobarometro_2006.pdf

Paramilitary Ties Implicate Colombia's Political Elite
By Juan Forero: Washington Post Foreign Service

BOGOTA, Colombia, Dec. 18 -- In what has been heralded as a decisive moment in Colombia's shadowy, decades-long conflict, a powerful paramilitary commander is to appear in a special court Tuesday to account for crimes that include massacres and assassinations. Salvatore Mancuso's testimony will be the first by a top death-squad leader in a Colombian courtroom, and it is being touted by the administration of President Álvaro Uribe as evidence that the wheels of justice are turning.

Rather than rejoicing, however, the Uribe government has found itself in the awkward position of being implicated in the wrongdoing. Over the past several weeks, Colombians have been gripped by revelations of ties between paramilitary fighters and several congressmen close to the president, as well as some officials in his administration. The scandal now threatens to unravel his authority.

Uribe won reelection in May after cultivating his reputation as a workaholic technocrat -- someone who would be relentless against corruption and illegal armed groups. But lately, he has joined a cast of lawmakers, intelligence service operatives and mid-level government bureaucrats in publicly denying ties to the paramilitary groups, which for a generation the military used as a proxy force to battle guerrillas.

"The government's smokescreen is becoming transparent," said Venus Albeiro Silva, a congressman from the left-leaning Alternative Democratic Pole party. "What's happening now is they cannot put the lid on this. That's why we're telling the president to come out and say the truth."

Repeated requests for an interview with Uribe went unanswered. But Vice President Francisco Santos said in an interview that the administration fully supports the investigations into ties with the paramilitary umbrella organization known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish initials, AUC.

"The government has said this has to go as deep as it needs to go," he said. But he added, "We're seeing the whole iceberg here."

So far, investigators from the Supreme Court and the attorney general's office have revealed case after case that not only expose friendly ties between officials and paramilitary fighters but also detail how lawmakers and others helped the fighters expand their hold over northern Colombia, liquidating opponents in the process.

Since three congressmen were jailed last month for collaborating with paramilitary groups, investigators have opened official probes into six more members of Congress and three former lawmakers. The most prominent is Sen. Álvaro Araújo, whose sister, Maria Consuelo Araújo, is the country's foreign minister. The senator has even admitted meeting with Rodrigo Tovar, a paramilitary commander who prosecutors say has been running a drug-trafficking group while negotiating with the government.

Another senator, Miguel de la Espriella, publicly detailed how he and dozens of other lawmakers met with paramilitary commanders in 2001. At the meeting, they signed a pact cementing an alliance designed to lead to disarmament negotiations, which death squad commanders hoped would help them avoid extradition to the United States on drug charges and hold on to land and other possessions. The talks began after Uribe won office in 2002.

"The interests of these men is personal, that they don't lose property and that they don't get extradited," said José Mejia, a former political officer in Tovar's paramilitary group who gave up his weapons this year. "What they're looking for is that they don't get tried for massacres and narco-trafficking."

The developments involving congressmen follow disclosures that a string of officials in the Uribe administration -- among them the former head of the intelligence service, the former head of the rural development agency and the former ambassador to Chile -- helped paramilitary groups by giving them classified information while orchestrating the takeover of land and the murder of the group's enemies.

The government has also come under withering criticism for moving too slowly to bring paramilitary fighters to justice, although the groups began disarming in 2003.

The government says 2,700 paramilitary commanders should be tried for atrocities, but the attorney general's office says administration officials have fully identified only 400. And although Mancuso agreed to talk to prosecutors, dozens of other top commanders have balked, threatening to paralyze the process.

Maria McFarland, of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said the system set up to investigate paramilitary fighters puts the burden on prosecutors, not defendants.

"So far, the government hasn't gotten the paramilitaries to fulfill their commitments," she said. "They're supposed to confess, turn over their illegal assets, cease with their criminal activities, and they haven't really done any of those things."

The setbacks have the Uribe administration scrambling to contain the political damage while ensuring that the new Democratic majority in the U.S. Congress does not take a hard line against Colombia, the largest recipient of U.S. aid outside the Middle East. Most of that aid -- $700 million a year -- is spent to fight guerrillas and eradicate drug crops.

Colombian officials also worry that the government's inability to successfully prosecute paramilitary groups -- at least until now -- could hurt its chances for a free trade agreement with Washington, since the Democrats have called on Uribe to improve Colombia's human rights record.

"There's this perception of strong infiltration of the paramilitaries in Colombia's system, and if it's not straightened out and cleaned out, it's hard to see how he's going to move forward on any of his priorities," said Michael Shifter of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington policy group.

Santos, the vice president, extolled the administration's achievements, noting, for example, that the number of homicides in rural areas has dropped sharply. He said the government is advancing in a process that will for the first time bring the commanders of an illegal insurgency to justice.

"Everyone who said this wouldn't work is wrong," he said.

Still, Santos cautioned patience: "To me, it's preferable that we go at it slow, and do it better than very quickly, and in the end we don't hear the victims."

Santos said that it was under Uribe's order that 59 paramilitary commanders were recently transferred to a prison. And he warned that they would be extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges if they do not cooperate.

But documents from the attorney general's office, as well as interviews with rights groups and opposition congressmen, show that as the government prepares to process paramilitary commanders, some of them are forming parallel drug-trafficking gangs.

Even Mancuso, despite his imminent court appearance, was recently implicated in an international cocaine-trafficking and money-laundering ring involving the Italian Mafia.

A defector from one group, in the southern state of Meta, said in an interview that earlier this year he was recruited by a new paramilitary group run by Carlos Jimenez. The defector, Arley Rincón Herrera, 26, said the new group's purpose was to protect shipments of cocaine, cash and chemicals used to make drugs.

"They didn't teach us anything political, since it was narco-trafficking that they were interested in," said Rincón, who is in hiding in Bogota. "We had to guard the merchandise. If a car came down with merchandise, we protected it."

Meta's paramilitary forces demobilized under government auspices. But far from being freed of fighters, the state is afflicted by new groups that are snatching farms and killing rivals.

A local cattleman who spoke on condition of anonymity said these fighters demand the sale of farms at bargain-basement prices and that people who resist are killed.

Ranchers used to be able to appease the paramilitary forces by giving them support.

But those days appear to be over, the cattleman said. "We all see now that the medicine was worse than the illness."



Low-Wage Workers From Mexico Dominate Latest Great Wave of Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
NY TIMES-Published: December 19, 2006
Since the early 1990s, the United States has seen the largest wave of immigration in its history. Of 300 million people now living here, about 37 million were born in another country. Not since the trans-Atlantic rush a century ago have immigrants made up such a large portion of the population.
The new immigrants come from places as far-flung as the Philippines, India, China and El Salvador. But the great wave is dominated by people like Raquel Rodríguez and her sisters: low-wage workers from Mexico. At least one-third of the foreign-born in the United States come from Mexico, census figures show.
When Mrs. Rodríguez moved to Texas 11 years ago as a legal resident, she was lucky to have the best of an American immigration system that is generally agreed to be broken. Proposals for broad changes in the system by President Bush and the Senate met opposition this year from Republicans who favored a crackdown on illegal immigrants. The push for change could resume in the coming months with the new Democratic majority in Congress.
The clearest sign of the system’s dysfunction is that legal permanent residents are no longer the majority of newcomers. Among recent arrivals, legal immigrants are outnumbered by illegal ones who sneaked across a border, or came legally and overstayed their visas. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, about 56 percent of illegal immigrants come from Mexico.
The calculation Mexican immigrants make is simple: there are jobs across the border at wages that are much higher than in Mexico. In the United States new Mexican immigrants mostly earn poverty wages by American standards, a median income of only $300 a week, the Pew Hispanic Center reported last year. But that is as much as four times what they would make for similar work at home.
The current United States immigration system, first created by Congress in 1965, is based on family ties, not labor market demand. An American citizen or legal resident can petition a federal agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, to bring a foreign spouse or children, and citizens can bring their siblings. Employers may also petition for workers, but most of these visas are for professionals with special education and skills. In 2005, only 8 percent of visas were for workers, according to a report in September by an independent bipartisan task force directed by Doris Meissner, a former head of the immigration service. Lawful immigrants receive a document known as a green card, even though the current version is pink.
Most visa categories have numerical caps, limiting their overall annual total to about 675,000 immigrants, and every country has a general limit of about 26,500 visas per year. As a result, the backlog of applications has become unmanageable. With the immigration agency overwhelmed, the process is generally tedious and frustrating. Today, for example, an American citizen seeking to bring a sibling from Mexico faces a wait of 13 years, the task force report found.
While Mexicans are coming in ever larger numbers, their legal avenues have not expanded. One result is that Mexican families often have mixed immigration status. There might, say, be a legal resident mother and an illegal father with children who are American citizens because they were born in the United States.
For Mexican immigrants the ties of family and religious faith are often more compelling than national allegiance. When immigrants first arrive, they rely on relatives already established in this country to give them shelter and steer them to jobs. Mexicans sent back $20 billion last year to aid families at home, the Inter-American Development Bank reported.
Mexicans more than live up to the truism that immigrants work hard. Often they carry more than one job at a time. Their driven work ethic is the unspoken factor in many debates about their impact on the labor market. It can lead them to accept jobs in unacceptable conditions. They run down their health and have little time to spend with their children.
Legal residents have clear advantages over illegal immigrants. While their job possibilities are not vastly different, they can hold driver’s licenses and bank accounts, build credit and receive government medical assistance. A growing proportion of legal immigrants are women.
Mexicans have not always shown a passion for learning English and becoming American citizens. But the accelerating crackdown on illegal immigration made many legal residents feel insecure, prompting hundreds of thousands of applications for citizenship.

Historical Perspectives on Latin American
By Noam Chomsky
http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2298
This is a lightly edited and excerpted version of Noam Chomsky’s December 15, 2006 talk to a Boston meeting of Mass Global Action following a recent trip to Chile and Peru. It is posted at Japan Focus on December 20, 2006.
There was a meeting on the weekend of December 9-10 in Cochabamba in Bolivia of major South American leaders. It was a very important meeting. One index of its importance is that it was unreported, virtually unreported apart from the wire services. So every editor knew about it. Since I suspect you didn't read that wire service report, I’ll read a few things from it to indicate why it was so important.
The South American leaders agreed to create a high-level commission to study the idea of forming a continent-wide community similar to the European Union. This is the presidents and envoys of major nations, and there was the two-day summit of what's called the South American Community of Nations, hosted by Evo Morales in Cochabamba, the president of Bolivia. The leaders agreed to form a study group to look at the possibility of creating a continent-wide union and even a South American parliament. The result, according to the AP report, left fiery Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, long an agitator for the region, taking a greater role on the world stage, pleased, but impatient. It goes on to say that the discussion over South American unity will continue later this month, when MERCOSUR, the South American trading bloc, has its regular meeting that will include leaders from Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Paraguay and Uruguay.

There is one -- has been one point of hostility in South America. That's Peru, Venezuela. But the article points out that Chavez and Peruvian President Alan Garcia took advantage of the summit to bury the hatchet, after having exchanged insults earlier in the year. And that is the only real conflict in South America at this time. So that seems to have been smoothed over.
The new Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa proposed a land and river trade route linking the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest to Ecuador's Pacific Coast, suggesting that for South America, it could be kind of like an alternative to the Panama Canal.
Chavez and Morales celebrated a new joint project, the gas separation plant in Bolivia's gas-rich region. It’s a joint venture with Petrovesa (PDVSA, Petroleos de Venezuela, SA. Pronounced “pedevesa”), the Venezuelan oil company, and the Bolivian state energy company. And it continues. Venezuela is the only Latin American member of OPEC and has by far the largest proven oil reserves outside the Middle East, by some measures maybe even comparable to Saudi Arabia.
There were also contributions, constructive, interesting contributions by Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, and others. All of this is extremely important.
This is the first time since the Spanish conquests, 500 years, that there have been real moves toward integration in South America. The countries have been very separated from one another. And integration is going to be a prerequisite for authentic independence. There have been attempts at independence, but they've been crushed, often very violently, partly because of lack of regional support. Because there was very little regional cooperation, they could be picked off one by one.
That’s what has happened since the 1960s. The Kennedy administration orchestrated a coup in Brazil. It was the first of a series of falling dominoes. Neo-Nazi-style national security states spread across the hemisphere. Chile was one of them. Then there were Reagan's terrorist wars in the 1980s, which devastated Central America and the Caribbean. It was the worst plague of repression in the history of Latin America since the original conquests.
But integration lays the basis for potential independence, and that's of extreme significance. Latin America’s colonial history -- Spain, Europe, the United States -- not only divided countries from one another, it also left a sharp internal division within the countries, every one, between a very wealthy small elite and a huge mass of impoverished people. The correlation to race is fairly close. Typically, the rich elite was white, European, westernized; and the poor mass of the population was indigenous, Indian, black, intermingled, and so on. It's a fairly close correlation, and it continues right to the present.
The white, mostly white, elites -- who ran the countries -- were not integrated with, had very few relations with, the other countries of the region. They were Western-oriented. You can see that in all sorts of ways. That's where the capital was exported. That's where the second homes were, where the children went to university, where their cultural connections were. And they had very little responsibility in their own societies. So there’s a very sharp division.
You can see the pattern in imports. Imports are overwhelmingly luxury goods. Development, such as it was, was mostly foreign. Latin America was much more open to foreign investment than, say, East Asia. It’s part of the reason for their radically different paths of development in the last couple of decades.
And, of course, the elite elements were strongly sympathetic to the neoliberal programs of the last 25 years, which enriched them -- destroyed the countries, but enriched them. Latin America, more than any region in the world, outside of southern Africa, adhered rigorously to the so-called Washington Consensus, what's called outside the United States the neoliberal programs of roughly the past 25 or 30 years. And where they were rigorously applied, almost without exception, they led to disaster. Very striking correlation. Sharp reduction in rates of growth, other macroeconomic indices, all the social effects that go along with that.
Actually, the comparison to East Asia is very striking. Latin America is potentially a much richer area. I mean, a century ago, it was taken for granted that Brazil would be what was called the “Colossus of the South,” comparable to the Colossus of the North. Haiti, now one of the poorest countries in the world, was the richest colony in the world, a source of much of France’s wealth, now devastated, first by France, then by the United States. And Venezuela -- enormous wealth -- was taken over by the United States around 1920, right at the beginning of the oil age, It had been a British dependency, but Woodrow Wilson kicked the British out, recognizing that control of oil was going to be important, and supported a vicious dictator. From that point, more or less, it goes on until the present. So the resources and the potential were always there. Very rich.
In contrast, East Asia had almost no resources, but they followed a different developmental path. In Latin America, imports were luxury goods for the rich. In East Asia, they were capital goods for development. They had state-coordinated development programs. They disregarded the Washington Consensus almost totally. Capital controls, controls on export of capital, pretty egalitarian societies -- authoritarian, sometimes, pretty harsh -- but educational programs, health programs, and so on. In fact, they followed pretty much the developmental paths of the currently wealthy countries, which are radically different from the rules that are being imposed on the South.
And that goes way back in history. You go back to the 17th century, when the commercial and industrial centers of the world were China and India. Life expectancy in Japan was greater than in Europe. Europe was kind of a barbarian outpost, but it had advantages, mainly in savagery. It conquered the world, imposed something like the neoliberal rules on the conquered regions, and for itself, adopted very high protectionism, a lot of state intervention and so on. So Europe developed.
The United States, as a typical case, had the highest tariffs in the world, most protectionist country in the world during the period of its great development. In fact, as late as 1950, when the United States literally had half the world's wealth, its tariffs were higher than the Latin American countries today, which are being ordered to reduce them.
Massive state intervention in the economy. Economists don't talk about it much, but the current economy in the United States relies very heavily on the state sector. That's where you get your computers and the internet and your airplane traffic and transit of goods, container ships and so on, almost entirely comes out of the state sector, including pharmaceuticals, management techniques, and so on. I won’t go on into that, but it’s a strong correlation right through history. Those are the methods of development.
The neoliberal methods created the third world, and in the past 30 years, they have led to disasters in Latin America and southern Africa, the places that most rigorously adhered to them. But there was growth and development in East Asia, which disregarded them, following instead pretty much the model of the currently rich countries.
Well, there’s a chance that that will begin to change. There are finally efforts inside South America -- unfortunately not in Central America, which has just been pretty much devastated by the terror of the ’80s particularly. But in South America, from Venezuela to Argentina, it’s, I think, the most exciting place in the world. After 500 years, there’s a beginning of efforts to overcome these overwhelming problems. The integration that's taking place is one example.
There are efforts of the Indian population. The indigenous population is, for the first time in hundreds of years, in some countries really beginning to take a very active role in their own affairs. In Bolivia, they succeeded in taking over the country, controlling their resources. It’s also leading to significant democratization, real democracy, in which the population participates. So it takes a Bolivia -- it’s the poorest country in South America (Haiti is poorer in the hemisphere). It had a real democratic election last year, of a kind that you can't imagine in the United States, or in Europe, for that matter. There was mass popular participation, and people knew what the issues were. The issues were crystal clear and very important. And people didn't just participate on election day. These are the things they had been struggling about for years. Actually, Cochabamba is a symbol of it.
Noam Chomsky’s most recent book is Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy: Dialogues on Terror, Democracy, War and Justice.