By Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores on June 8, 2021 from Lima
With his wide-brimmed peasant hat and oversized teacher’s pencil held high, Peru’s Pedro Castillo has been traveling the country exhorting voters to get behind a call that has been particularly urgent during this devastating pandemic: “No más pobres en un país rico” – No more poor people in a rich country. In a cliffhanger of an election with a huge urban-rural and class divide, it appears that the rural teacher, farmer and union leader is about to make history by defeating–by less than one percent–powerful far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, scion of the country’s political “Fujimori dynasty.” (more…)
By Carlos Aznárez, Resumen Latinoamericano, June 8, 2021.
Historic vigil of the people to defend the vote.
Peru Libre candidate Pedro Castillo has rejected accusations of fraud in the Peruvian elections and has encouraged his supporters to defend the vote in a “historic vigil”. Monday night’s vigil showed the streets of downtown Lima full of supporters of Prof. Castillo, who waving flags and chanting “the people united will never be defeated” showed exemplary discipline and commitment to the new Peru that is coming. (more…)
By Roger Harris on June 7, 2021 from Praia, Cabo Verde
Delegation denied access to visit Alex Saab
The Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, imprisoned for trying to buy humanitarian supplies from Iran in legal international trade but in violation of illegal US sanctions, is facing extradition to the US. That is like getting stabbed in the back and then being arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. (more…)
By Alejandra Garcia on June 8, 2021, in Havana
Rio de Janeiro, photo: Bill Hackwell
Next week, Brazil will become the host of the Copa America 2021, a soccer event that will draw thousands of fans from Latin America and around the world to the country that is currently reporting the highest number of deaths due to COVID-19 worldwide. (more…)
By Pasqualina Curcio on June 7, 2021
It is not by chance that we have recently heard rulers and UN spokespersons tirelessly referring to the Welfare State and the need for a new “social contract”. They frame this discourse in the post-pandemic world and in what they have called “a new normal”. It is not that it is fashionable to talk about the “Welfare State” and that is why they repeat it, no, they are following a line, a decision, that comes, no more and no less, from the no more than 1,000 great billionaires and world leaders who annually meet at the Davos Economic Forum. (more…)
By Marc Vandepitte on June 8, 2021
A remarkable finding that of all countries of the Americas the ones that are hit by heavy economic sanctions imposed by the US are doing much better in the fight against COVID-19. One thing for sure is that the pandemic has exposed the crisis of the neoliberal and capitalist model. (more…)
By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on June 3, 2021
Cuban Federation of Women, photo: Bill Hackwell
The Revolution will be made with women or it will not be made. They are the ones who create the financing channels, who set up the safe houses, who organize the networks that sustain the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and who, like Eugenia Verdecia, carry under their skirts dynamite cartridges, hand grenades, bullets, machine gun combs, fulminates. “With anonymous heroines like these, who imitate in everything the mambisas of the past, there can be no lost cause”, writes the young Raúl Castro, on Saturday, December 29, 1956. (more…)
By Pascualina Curcio on June 2, 2021
Pasqualina Curcio
It is impossible not to think of maquilas when one hears talk of Special Economic Zones (SEZ). The first thing that comes to mind is cheap labor, violation of labor rights, increased worker exploitation, low or no taxes and exports. This is what characterizes an SEZ according to the World Bank manuals. (more…)