Don’t put me on!

Recently, I posted about the 1974 film Hearts and Minds and the racism it documented. I pointed specifically to a quote from a participant in a US Revolutionary War reenactment responding to the startling suggestion that Vietnamese people might comparably be fighting for freedom and against colonial oppression: “Are you kidding? Oriental politics? Don’t put me on!”

It’s too perfect. The setting: A typical reaction piece penned by the US State Depa…uh, Liz Sly at WaPo, about the unilateral, unpopular, tension-deepening, unilateral, fear-raising, complicating, defiant, unilateral, triggering, destabilizing, unilateral, rejected, divisive self-proclamation of a Rojava-Northern Syria Democratic Federation. It includes the requisite guidance from the Obama administration, great ally to Kurdish democrats: “‘We’ve been very clear that we won’t recognize any kind of autonomous or self-rule, semiautonomous zones in Syria’, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said this week.” (Naturally. Semi-autonomous self-rule? We can’t have that!)

Someone in the comments actually dared to compare the possibilities for a Syrian democratic federation to Canada’s, eliciting this beauty:

Comparing Canadiens to Middle Easterners is like ... well, there is no comparison.

The more things change,…

Quote of the day – being aware of the social position from which you speak

« Il est important d’être conscient-e-s du ‘point de vue situé’ c’est-à-dire avoir conscience d’où on parle. Je suis une femme blanche, française, sans problème de papiers, sociologue, de classe plutôt aisée donc. J’ai vécu au Mexique, au Salvador juste après la guerre, en Colombie, au Brésil, en République dominicaine. Les féministes lesbiennes noires, indiennes et les femmes ayant vécu des situations de guerre m’ont appris énormément de choses. ».

- Jules Falquet, speaking at the “Feminist Economic Alternatives to the Dominant System” workshop, September 13, 2015

If you read French, I urge you to read the whole report. Carla Sandoval’s discussion of anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial feminism in Latin America is especially important.

Uprising in Guatemala

“Now, there’s fear in Washington. There’s fear among the oligarchs that this whole Pandora’s box could be opened, because the people are in the streets. Now the people are in the streets talking about the corruption, but if they start more intensively talking about the blood, if they follow that trail of blood, it leads directly back to Washington. It leads directly back to the suites of CACIF, the oligarchs who own Guatemala.”

Allan Nairn returned to Democracy Now! yesterday to talk more about the mass protests in Guatemala and the continuing role of the US government in propping up the oligarchy:



(Transcript available here.)

Historical quotes of the day

“It’s a Washington…where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none of our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear, workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.

…

You know, in the years after her husband signed NAFTA, Senator Clinton would go around talking about how great it was and how many benefits it would bring. Now that she’s running for President, she says we need a time-out on trade. No one knows when this time-out will end. Maybe after the election…. ”

– Obama on the campaign trail speaking in Janesville, Wisconsin, February 2008 [Source]*

“[Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee] was frank in saying that the primary campaign has been necessarily domestically focused, particularly in the Midwest, and that much of the rhetoric that may be perceived to be protectionist is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.

…Noting anxiety among many US domestic audiences about the US economic outlook, Goolsbee candidly acknowledged the protectionist sentiment that has emerged, particularly in the Midwest, during the primary campaign. …[H]e cautioned that this messaging should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.”

– Joseph De Mora, Canadian political and economic affairs consular officer, “REPORT ON US ELECTIONS – CHCGO MEETING WITH OBAMA ADVISOR AUSTAN GOOLSBEE” [Source]

“I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada to try to amend NAFTA because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now. And it should reflect the basic principle that our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street, it should also be good for Main Street.”

“We should use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced.”

- Obama on his supposed plan as president to prioritize renegotiating NAFTA [Source] [Source]

“At a time when the economy has been shrinking drastically and trade has been shrinking around the world...we probably want to make the economy more stabilized in the coming months before we have a long discussion around further trade negotiations.”

- Obama explaining to reporters why he won’t be moving to renegotiate NAFTA, August, 2009 [Source]

“[M]ake no mistake, this administration is committed to pursuing expanded trade and new trade agreements. It is absolutely essential to our economic future.”

- “REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON FINANCIAL RESCUE AND REFORM,” Obama speaking to representatives of the “financial industry,” Federal Hall, New York City, September 14, 2009 [Source]

Obama’s learned an important lesson: dispensing with even the pretense of democracy and cutting the public out of the process – except as passive recipients of placating paternalism – is much more efficient.

* (Some of these remarks are discussed in Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010). The first quotation is presented in historical context in a recent post by John Nichols at The Nation - “Why So Many Democrats Rejected Obama’s Lobbying on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Deal.”)

Quote of the day

“The country’s branding initiatives serve to develop Honduras as an attractive tourism offering, investment opportunity as well as a country with outstanding products and services for export. The efforts must seek to steer the nation’s development with a message that unites the entire country.”

- Aline Flores, president of the Honduran National Investment Council

Data on women in parliaments worldwide

Reading this piece, “Latin America: From U.S. Corporate Hegemony to Regional Autonomy,”* by Preeti Kaur, I came across a useful link to the data on the percentage of parliamentary seats held by women in countries around the world.

What surprised me was that so many of the top countries – those with the highest proportion of women in parliament - were poor. It’s interesting to look beyond the regional breakdowns. In the top ten are Bolivia, Cuba, and Ecuador, and also Rwanda, Senegal, and South Africa. Regionally, the Nordic countries are an outlier at the top, but even with them included Europe still comes in below the Americas; with the Nordic countries excluded, Europe is pretty much on par with Sub-Saharan Africa (a difference of only one percentage point). And the percentages for the US and Canada are below the Americas average. In the full list, the US comes in at 72nd, below Pakistan and Bangladesh (Venezuela, home to teleSUR which published Kaur’s article, has nothing to be proud of here, falling even below the US at 82nd).

Overall, it’s fairly depressing, but there does seem to be real progress - which I can appreciate even as an anarchist - in many countries around the world.

* An important, and infuriating, part of the article described the speech by Ban Ki-moon at the Summit of the Americas this past weekend:

Rather bizarrely, the UN Secretary General then went on to spend a third of his intervention at the Summit of the Americas to discuss the importance of business involvement in the post 2015 development agenda, and in the agenda to address climate change. While the Secretary General recognised that the Americas have been at the vanguard of discussions on key issues regarding climate change, he also said that the ‘new global development agenda and the battle against climate change will need resources, technology and capacity’, and as such ‘private sources and partnerships’ would be crucial in the fight against climate change.

‘With business support for implementing the sustainable development goals, we can transform our world. Business is part of the solution to several major global challenges’, said the UN Secretary General. Such an analysis fails to articulate the ways in which businesses are obliged to pursue profit, even at the expense of harmful impacts to the environment, and people. There is an increasing recognition that capitalism has caused climate change, described incontrovertibly in Naomi Klein’s recent book ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’.

The Secretary General’s intervention failed to explain how businesses might turn their minds to address the key issues of our day. Indeed, only three years previously, in Brazil at the Rio+20 sustainable development conference, Canada, and the U.S. united against reaffirming the responsibility of businesses to respect human rights, and protect our planet.

…Big business is the problem, not the solution. While technical innovation is necessary to combat climate change, much of this innovation is tailored to pursuing energy which increases profit opportunities for business, not which effectively reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Rosewater

Ben Affleck was a guest on the Daily Show a little while ago promoting some film or other. In the course of the discussion, he mentioned that now both he and Jon Stewart had made films about Iran. I’ve been plain about my opinion of Affleck’s dreadful Argo, which Peter Van Buren has recently called “honorary war porn,” and its undeserved Oscar. It shouldn’t be likened to Rosewater in any sense other than that they both concern Iran. (And not even in that sense, really, since Argo isn’t meaningfully about Iran at all, but uses Iran and its people as a backdrop for the struggles and heroics of innocent USians and their swashbuckling covert agents.)

Rosewater is a very different sort of film, both from Argo and from most political films about the Middle East. It actually treats its Iranian characters as human beings, with their own personal and national histories.



This compassionate attitude extends even to the “interrogators” of the nightmarish Evin Prison, like the man assigned to break journalist Maziar Bahari. In this sense, it reminded me somewhat of the fiction film The Lives of Others:



The character Georg Dreyman’s bitter remark to former minister Bruno Hempf after the fall of the GDR – “To think that people like you ruled a country” – could equally describe the pathetic bureaucrats of Iranian repression and their terrible work.

At the same time, unlike Argo and its ilk, which portray Iranians as driven by religious fanaticism, irrational paranoia, and instinctive hatred, Rosewater situates their motives within the real historical context of violent US and UK interference in the country and the region. And it does so without making the film “about” US crimes past or present - it keeps its focus on Iranian experiences.*

My biggest criticisms would be, first, that I wish the film had featured more of Bahari’s imagined conversations with his father and sister, which I found among the most interesting segments, especially as they related to (and to some extent subverted) notions of strength and masculinity. (Perhaps there’s more in Bahari’s book.) Second, the depiction of the democratic movements, while it did capture the energy and optimism of the 2009 election protests, didn’t show the activists and their goals in enough intellectual depth. This leaves the movements vulnerable to being set by British and North American audiences in a self-serving narrative - seen in simplistic terms as reflecting a desire for “Western” consumerist freedom.

* We shouldn’t, of course, lose sight of the fact that the US, UK, and other powerful states haven’t slackened in their efforts to overthrow democratically elected governments and install friendly dictatorial regimes, using slightly more sophisticated versions of the same techniques they employed in Iran in 1953.

Honduras election reports and commentary - a compilation

Trustworthy international sources* are reporting evidence of electoral fraud in Honduras, supporting the claims of the LIBRE and Anti-Corruption parties (who are not accepting the results), students, and numerous other groups and organizations within the country. They strongly criticize some of the official reports and media coverage, and call for a thorough investigation. Here’s a compilation of relevant reports:

• The National Lawyers Guild questions the validity of the elections and “takes issue with the United States government’s characterization of the electoral process as transparent, given the country's recent and pervasive human rights violations.” Azadeh Shahshahani, NLG president, has co-authored a highly informative op ed in Al Jazeera, “Honduras’ presidential election demands an investigation.” It concludes:

[I]n this election, the Obama administration has two stark choices: to affirm its commitment to human rights, democracy and the rule of law and insist on a full investigation into allegations of a disputed electoral process and pervasive repression, or endorse the findings of the TSE and ignore alarming signs that the will of the Honduran people is being trampled once again.

• Leo Gabriel, a member of the EU observation delegation, contests its preliminary report, which,

[d]espite demonstrating ‘serious signs of trafficking in [election worker] credentials and other irregularities’ in addition to a ‘clear imbalance in the visibility of different [political] parties in the media’ and ‘a lack of transparency in electoral campaign financing’,...gave high marks ‘in terms of voting transparency as well respect for the will of voters in the tabulation’.

and

confirmed that ‘the system used for the transmission of official tally sheets guaranteed all political parties a trustworthy mechanism for the verification of the results published by the TSE (Supreme Electoral Tribunal)’, and congratulated electoral authorities for having achieved ‘greater transparency’ than in previous elections.

Gabriel stated that

I can attest to countless inconsistencies in the electoral process. There were people who could not vote because they showed up as being dead, and there were dead people who voted. It was also clear that there was a huge mess at the voting stations, where the hidden alliance between the small parties and the National Party led to the buying and selling of votes and [electoral worker] credentials [note: by law each party has the right to have an election worker at each mesa electoral or voting station, but as Gabriel notes, in many voting stations, the smaller parties sold their rights to the National Party].

During the transmission of the results there was no possibility to find out where the tallies where being sent and we received reliable information that at least 20% of the original tally sheets were being diverted to an illegal server that they kept hidden.

To speak of transparency after everything that happened last Sunday is a joke and I believe that, first and foremost, we observers have to be honest and portray what we have really seen.

He argues that

In the general evaluation meeting, the majority of my colleagues who observed the elections ‘on site’, on the ground, were in agreement about the irregularities I just laid out. No one defended the content of the report or the idea that there had been transparency in the process, and that brought us up against the intransigence of the EU-EOM team leaders, who did not want to cede even one millimeter. We argued for a serious discussion of the topic, taking into account what we had witnessed and suggesting changes to the text, but they firmly refused.

Gabriel believes that the announced results were predetermined and charges that most of those who pushed through the EU report were politically motivated:

Some of them really believe what the TSE says, but in general there is a deeper political and economic reason. The 2009 Coup d’État harmed the image of Honduras around the world, slowing down progress on the Association Agreement signed by the European Union and the Central American region (EU-CA AA). Presenting [an image of] a clean and transparent electoral process helps the European Union to clean up Honduras’s image around the world and set this commercial project into motion.

• The SOA Watch delegation

observed numerous irregularities and problems during the elections and vote counting process that cause us not to trust the electoral results released by Honduras' Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE). In additon to what we directly observed, the control of the TSE by the ruling parties provided opportunity for significant manipulation of the results and fraud after the polls closed and information was transmitted to the TSE.

• The Honduras Solidarity Network’s preliminary report, based on their observation of at least 100 voting tables (MER) in the north of the country, says that they witnessed “a grand number of Hondurans going to the polls and participating in good faith in the electoral process” and the good work of many electoral workers. They state that while

[i]t was reassuring to witness the level of commitment to the election as an expression of the popular will,… this heartening manifestation of Honduras’s possibilities was overshadowed by violence, intimidation and outright fraud, all of which went almost completely unreported in the Honduran and international media. Despite the public availability of this information early on Election Day, we are left baffled by the deafening silence of international observer groups and also the U.S. Embassy regarding the following events and their obvious and explicit impacts upon the electoral results.

The report concludes:

Given the extensive list of threats and violence before and during the election, and given the hourly revelations of discrepancies in the data on the vote tallies (Acts), and considering the fact that 20% of the votes are held by the TSE, the Honduras Solidarity Network cannot and will not in good conscience join in the rubber stamp endorsement of the results as they have been announced by the TSE.

• Peter Hart at FAIR refers to the National Lawyers Guild’s preliminary report in his piece about slanted, inaccurate coverage at the Washington Post.

• The Real News Network covered allegations of harassment, intimidation, and fraud.



They interview Ana Lucia Perez of the Women’s Human Rights Observatory:

We have the assassination of two members of the Libre Party in the Francisco Morazan Department on the night of Saturday November 23rd…we have also seen the intimidation of international observers from El Salvador who were staying at a hotel in Tegucigalpa where they were approached by armed immigration officials and were demanded to show their papers and interrogated as to why they were in the country in a violent and intimidating manner, we have also received complaints of forms of voter extortion in certain election centers where the National Party offered voters discount cards for local supermarkets in exchange for their vote…

…We also witnessed irregularities at voting centers where certain voter lists turned up missing, or where people would be listed as deceased although they were living, or where the deceased were presented as living eligible voters, some people arrived to vote and were told that they had already voted, someone else had used their identity to vote…we also saw in some areas the military did not let the public view the vote count in spite of the fact that the electoral law states that all people may attend the vote count.

• Vía Campesina’s observation report listed irregularities observed. They continue:

At this point we also want to highlight to the irresponsible attitude of major traditional media in publishing data, surveys and other biased comments, both during the campaign and a few hours after the closure of the election polls, and even worse, that without having reliable and definitive data on the total count of the vote.

As delegation of observers of the elections, we want to show our concern about the insufficient attention of the public institutions (Tribunal Supremo Electoral (TSE), the Public Ministry, the National Police) as well as the funding of the political parties and the use of public resources for campaign purposes before the elections.

Our conclusion is that the electoral process has not been transparent enough. On the contrary we consider the elections an ‘institutional fraud’, which position the country in a very worrying situation.

We are also surprised about the attitude of the European Union and the OAS that despite the many irregularities identified, were quick to support both the (preliminary) results and the process, which according to their Delegation of Observation has passed ‘normally’.

It’s astonishing that anyone would expect that the National Party wouldn’t resort to widespread intimidation and fraud. After a coup, rampant human rights abuses, attempts to silence media, threats to and murders of journalists, threats to and murders of activists, threats to and murders of candidates, a history of lies and propaganda,…why would we expect that the National Party, the military, and the oligarchy would hold such free, fair, and transparent elections that their results could be uncritically accepted? What’s transparent is the self-interested dishonesty of those who rushed to declare the announced results credible prior to any investigation or recount.

Meanwhile, Honduras Culture and Politics reports on the “new political landscape” created by the announced results of the congressional elections.

* As opposed to US ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske, US government representatives more generally, and the corporate English-language media. These are not to be trusted on any matters related to Latin America and the Caribbean, as they have a shameful documented history of spin and outright lying.

Watch live coverage of historic Honduran elections

If you understand Spanish, you can follow teleSUR's live feed.

UPDATE: CEPR is live blogging the election (in English).

UPDATE: You can also listen to Radio Globo (in Spanish) online.

You can also follow the election observers (in English) on their site, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Here are an interview with Adrienne Pine and an article from Al Jazeera explaining what's at stake.

I'll have something to say about the execrable coverage by Elisabeth Malkin at the New York Times later.

Honduras election observers

Adrienne Pine at Quotha has links for observers of the Honduran election, which is tomorrow.

For the best & most complete info on election observation over the coming days keep focused on:

1. Website: http://www.hondurassolidarity.org

2. Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/hsnelectionwatch

3. Twitter: http://twitter.com/hsnelection

4. Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5yEwgyCWgMIKp632-ujcw

5. Email: hsnwatch@hushmail.com

(There are already efforts to intimidate some election observers.)

She also shared this video of a short teleSUR documentary, “Los votantes golpeados” [in Spanish]:



Especially impressive are the LIBRE candidates and social movement leaders, whose message is clearly that the resistance and struggle are ongoing, encompassing but also transcending this (and any) election.

Rights Action report on killings and attempted killings linked to the Honduran electoral process

Rights Action has published a report on the violence in the months leading up to the November 24 elections in Honduras, including a list (based on the information available) of the names of the victims of murders or attempted murders, their party affiliations and political involvement, and a description of the circumstances of the crimes. “The intent of the incomplete list,” they state,

…is to encourage a discussion of the circumstances in which the Honduran elections will occur. Almost a month remains until Hondurans will cast their votes in the 2013 General elections. To date and since the May 2012 Primary Elections, there have been a disproportionate number of killings and attempted killings targeting LIBRE candidates. A thorough investigation of each case is a difficult if not impossible task before November 24. But our hope is that this incomplete list raises significant questions about how democratic and fair voting and election campaigning can be held in a context of on-going terror, violence and impunity affecting candidates and their families throughout the country.

They provide some background and context:

Honduras has maintained a two party political system for decades. However, in the wake of the June 28, 2009 military coup a strong new political force emerged, the National Front for Popular Resistance (FNRP) which sought to oppose the coup through peaceful means. After overthrown president Manuel Zelaya returned to Honduras, the decision to participate in the 2013 General Elections was taken by the resistance movement and the FNRP, and the first major third political party in the modern history of Honduras was created: the Libertad y Refundación (Freedom and Refoundation) party, or LIBRE.

Including LIBRE candidate Xiomara Castro de Zelaya, there are eight presidential candidates participating in the November elections involving nine political parties, as one, new, non-traditional party formed an alliance with the existing Unión Democrática (UD) party (2).

Though President Porfirio Lobo’s post-coup regime has been promoted internationally as a government of ‘Unity and National Reconciliation’, it includes none of the key actors who were forcibly removed from power during the 2009 coup. The Canadian and United States government as well as the European Union have stood behind the false projection of reconciliation and unity projected by the Honduran government (3).

Lobo’s term in office has been marked by unprecedented levels of violence: Honduras today has one of the highest homicide rates in the world coupled with a high impunity rate (4). The Lobo government’s efforts to persuade the international community that the government is taking effective action against the country’s rampant violence - as Honduran Vice President María Antonieta Guillén attempted to do at the UN Assembly on September 27, 2013 (5) - has been followed by continued massacres and killings in Honduran streets and the on-going systematic targeting of political opponents and social activists (6).

Since the 2009 coup, international human rights organizations including the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the Committee to Protect Journalists, have noted gross human rights abuses particularly targeting certain sectors of Honduran society – lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and opponents of the current post-coup military regime (7).

The 2013 General Elections will occur in a historical and on-going context of gross human rights abuses committed by the current government and the 5-month de facto government of Roberto Micheletti that preceded it, June – November 2009. A lot weighs on the results of the General Elections, whether it’s the US Government and OAS hoping for a seemingly clean, democratic and reliable election, or the sympathizers of the LIBRE party, hoping for a transformation of Honduran society as per the promises and principles of the FNRP.

The coup and its repercussions over the last four years have polarized Honduran society. At odds are those hoping to change the status quo and reject the interests behind the 2009 coup – largely the FNRP and the political party that grew from that movement, the LIBRE party - and those that perpetrated and/or supported the coup and hope to maintain the status quo - largely business elites, the two traditional political parties (the National and Liberal Parties) and its allies.

The World Before Her

Nirmukta posted last month about a documentary to be aired on PBS, The World Before Her, so I set the recording.



I recommend it, actually.* When we talk about people being victimized by or victims of unequal and oppressive systems, some listeners appear to hear "victim" as a sort of total identity that renders someone incapable of willful action. But what we're generally talking about is how people's paths are shaped and their options constrained in ways suited to others' purposes rather than their own needs and fulfillment. Within these limiting systems, they still make choices and pursue goals. They have agency, but this makes them no less victims.

Anyway, you can watch it free online at PBS (I think only if you're in the US, though) through October 16. It appears you can also watch it on iTunes, on YouTube, and probably elsewhere as well. After you do, check out this update on what the people involved have been doing since.

*I added the "actually" in tribute to the people in the film, who seem inordinately fond of the word. :)

Compassion for those about to be killed

From Free from Harm:

During Toronto’s torturous heat wave this July, with temperatures soaring to some 40 degrees Celsius (that’s 110 degrees Farenheit), activists from Toronto Pig Save have mobilized to give water and watermelon to severely overheated pigs on their way to slaughter. The gesture is the last— and, likely, the first— act of kindness that the pigs will ever know. When the sweltering trucks transporting the animals to Quality Meat Packers pause at a stoplight just outside the slaughterhouse, volunteers slip watermelon through ventilation holes in the trucks, and pour water into the mouths of as many frantic pigs as they can reach. It’s not enough. It’s never enough.

But just being there is important to these activists. It’s part of the larger project of bearing witness that is at the heart of Toronto Pig Save.... It’s also a refusal to turn away from the needless violence and death inflicted on animals exploited for food....

Shut it down.

Last month, protesters chanting “Shut it down!” managed to (peacefully) storm the gate at Marineland in Niagara Falls, Canada. (In developments today, it’s being reported that Marineland is threatening to sue a former trainer for more than $1 million over her statements to the Toronto Star about injuries to an orca named Kiska confined at the park.)

In related news, yesterday was an important court date in Amsterdam for the orca Morgan, when more arguments were to be brought and reports submitted in favor of getting her released from Loro Parque in the Canary Islands. You can read more here, here, and here. I haven't found any updates, but I'll post them when I do.

WikiLeaks, Stratfor, and the Assange distraction

While many are focused on the vicissitudes of the Julian Assange case, I should post briefly about WikiLeaks and the Global Intelligence Files. The site went back up a couple of days ago after being inaccessible for a while to a DDoS attack. This followed upon WikiLeaks’ publication over the past two weeks of documents related to Stratfor and TrapWire. There are disagreements over how concerned people should be about TrapWire specifically (here’s what seems a more balanced piece), while others contend that the issue is "not the surveillance, it’s the sleaze."

It’s also that this whole corporate-political business is shadowy as all hell. I’ve read through several of the recently released emails, and they’re…interesting. But even they shouldn’t necessarily divert attention from earlier Stratfor revelations or WikiLeaks documents generally.

I linked to a description of Stratfor’s efforts with regard to Bhopal and the Yes Men in a footnote to a recent post, but they deserve another mention. Back in February, the Yes Men reported:

WikiLeaks begins to publish today over five million e-mails obtained by Anonymous from "global intelligence" company Stratfor. The emails, which reveal everything from sinister spy tactics to an insider trading scheme with Goldman Sachs..., also include several discussions of the Yes Men and Bhopal activists. (Bhopal activists seek redress for the 1984 Dow Chemical/Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India, that led to thousands of deaths, injuries in more than half a million people, and lasting environmental damage.)

After detailing some of this activity, they note:

Perhaps most entertainingly of all, the email trove reveals that Stratfor's "Confederation Partners"—an unethical alliance between Stratfor and a number of mainstream journalists—are referred to informally within Stratfor as its "Confed Fuck House." (Another discovery: Coca Cola was spying on PETA. More such gems are sure to surface as operatives sift through the 5.5 million emails.)…

Many of the documents released in recent months also relate to Latin America (including the Honduran coup), and people there have analyzed the information and some of the implications of their release for Latin American politics.

It’s tempting to take the media’s lead and narrowly follow the legal travails of Assange and associated diplomatic maneuverings, but this is to some extent an unfortunate distraction from the content of the WikiLeaks materials.

“the pesticides that seep into every water source, crop, and conversation”

Via Quotha, two more analyses of the Paraguay coup:

“Paraguay's presidential coup: the inside story,” Andrew Nickson

“A Coup Over Land: The Resource War Behind Paraguay's Crisis,” Benjamin Dangl (the source of my title quote*)

(*Another interesting quote from this week is Venezuelan OAS ambassador Roy Chaderson, after OAS head José Miguel Insulza’s declaration that Paraguay shouldn’t be suspended from the organization, describing the OAS as “like a bowl of cold onion soup, without even the crust of melted cheese.”)

A reminder: where to go for Honduras information

I've mentioned several times here that the best place to go for Honduras news and analysis is Adrienne Pine's Quotha (the first of the Honduras links to the left). Pine provides on-the ground coverage of the Honduran resistance movement, as well as critical analysis of events there, media (mis)representations, and the policies and actions of the US and Canadian governments and corporations.

Here are three recent articles posted there that provide information on recent events with valuable political context and historical background:

- Dana Frank, "Honduras: Which Side is the US On?"

- Annie Bird, "USA/DEA Killings in Ahuas"

- Press Release: "Scholars and Human Rights Organizations Demand End to U.S. Military and Police Aid to Honduras"

A quote from Pine from the press release:

94 Congress Members, hundreds of academics from Honduras and around the world, dozens of high-profile human rights and press freedom organizations, and citizens from Honduras and the U.S. are demanding the same thing of the Obama administration: stop funding and training the murderous Honduran police and military, and stop killing innocent Hondurans in the name of the War on Drugs. In the wake of the DEA-led massacre of pregnant women and children in the Moskitia, it is high time this administration start listening to citizens and experts. Rather than starting another unwinnable war against people in a nation ruled by a U.S. supported, coup-installed president, the U.S. should be spending its resources on shoring up our own democracy.

Violations

It doesn't sound like anything is definite here, but a violation of someone's human rights in the name of a baseless disease model (and even if it weren't baseless...) seems highly possible.

The US in Honduras: analysis

My posts about Honduras have decreased of late because I’ve been encouraging people to read Quotha. But I think it would be helpful to offer a smaller selection of pieces found there in recent weeks. These focus on the role of US-based (and Canada-based) interests, both private and governmental, in the disastrous situation that continues to develop in Honduras and the region.

· Dana Frank, “In Honduras, a Mess Made in the US”

· Robert White, “A Diplomat’s View on Honduras”

· Mark Engler, “Honduras: Our Continuing Catastrophe”

· Paul Imison, “Violence Sweeps Central America”

· Honduras Resists, “Delegation Report: Standard Fruit [Dole] Uses the Army and Police to Attack Campesinos”

· Adrienne Pine, “Honduran mining set for boost from new mining law”

Pine has of course been covering the prison fire. Here’s Democracy Now!’s recent interview with Dana Frank about the tragedy:

Great reporting on Honduras

This 25-minute video provides a solid overview of Honduras from the coup to the present, focusing on violence against resistance journalists and activists. It ends on a hopeful note. There are some brave people in Honduras.



(via Quotha)