Every 14 of March Uruguayans who were prisoners of the dictatorship celebrate the Day of the Liberated.

It’s something more than a coincidence.

The disappeared, who are beginning to appear, Ubagesner Chaves, Fernando Miranda, call us to struggle for the liberation of memory, which continues to be imprisoned.

Our country wants to stop being a sanctuary of impunity, the impunity of murderers, the impunity of thieves, the impunity of liars, and we’re turning this direction, at last, after so many years, taking the first steps.

This is not the end of the road. It is the beginning. It was costly but we are beginning the hard and necessary transit to the liberation of memory in a country that seemed to be condemned to a state of perpetual amnesia.

All of us who are here share the hope that sooner, rather than later, there will be memory and there will be justice because history teaches us that memory can stubbornly survive all its prisons and that justice can be more powerful than fear when people give it aid.

The dignity of memory, the memory of dignity.

In the unequal combat against fear, in that combat that each one of us fights every day, what would become of us without the memory of dignity?

The world is suffering an alarming disparagement of dignity. The undignified, those who rule in this world, say that the undignified are the prehistoric, nostalgic, romantic, those who deny reality.

Every day, everywhere, we hear the eulogy to opportunism and the identification of realism with cynicism; the realism that requires elbowing and forbids the embrace; the realism of screw everything and fix it as you can and if not screw you.

The realism, too, of fatalism. This is the worst of the many ghosts seen today in our progressive government, here in Uruguay, and in other progressive governments of Latin America. The fatalism, perverse colonial inheritance, which forces us to believe that reality can be repeated, but it can’t be changed, that what was is, and will be, that tomorrow is nothing more than another name for today.

But could it be that they weren’t real, these men and women who have struggled and who struggle to change reality, those who have believed and believe that reality doesn,t demand obedience? Aren’t they real, Ubagesner Chaves and Fernando Miranda and all the others who are arriving from the bottom of the earth and time to testify to another possible reality? And all those who hoped and wished with them, weren’t they, and don’t they continue to be, real? Were the hangmen not real, were the victims not real, were the sacrifices of so many people in this country that the dictatorship turned into the greatest torture chamber of the world not real?

Reality is a challenge.

We are not condemned to choose between the same and the same.

Reality is real because it invites us to change it and not because it forces us to accept it. Reality opens spaces of freedom and doesn’t necessarily enclose us in the cages of fatalism.

The poet has well said that a single rooster doesn’t weave the morning.

This Creole with a strange name, Ubagesner, wasn’t alone in life nor is he alone in death; today he is a symbol of our land and our people.

This militant worker embodies the sacrifice of many compatriots who believed in our country and our people and risked their lives for this faith.

We have come to tell them it was worth the effort.

We have come to tell them that, dead, they will never die.

We are gathered today to tell them that the tangos we hear tell us that life is short but there are lives that are startlingly long because they continue in others, in those who will come.

Sooner or later we, walkers, will be walked on by the steps of others, just as our steps are taken in the footprints other steps left behind.

Now when the owners of the world have forced us to repent of all passion, now when style makes life so cold and barren, now is a good time to recall that little word that we all remember from childhood tales, “abracadabra,” the magic word that opened all the doors, that word, abracadabra which meant in ancient Hebrew, “Send your fire to the end.”

Today, more than a funeral, this is a celebration. We are celebrating the living memory of Ubagesner and all those generous men and women who, in this country, sent their fire to the end; those who continue to help us to not lose our way and not to accept the unacceptable and not to ever resign ourselves and never to step down from the beautiful little horse of dignity.

Because in the most difficult hours, in those days of enmity, in the years of the grime and fear of the military dictatorship, these people knew how to live and give themselves entirely and they did so without asking for anything in exchange, as if their lives sang that old Andalucian copla that said, and still says and will always say, “My hands are empty, but they are mine.”
counterpunch.org

For decades the International Monetary Fund (IMF) served as one of the key pillars of the “Washington Consensus.” Dominated by the White House, the Fund allowed successive administrations to control the economic policy of poorer countries in this hemisphere and beyond. Those nations wishing to buck a U.S. agenda of corporate globalization risked having their access to international loans cut off. The brutish IMF not only handled its own funds but also played gatekeeper for money from other creditors, such as the regional development banks. This power made the institution as hated throughout the global South as it was celebrated inside the Beltway.

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that an increasingly progressive Latin America is starting to say good riddance.
tompaine.com

ON February 7, 1901, [Cuban] President Tomás Estrada Palma [] signed the agreement ceding Cuban territory to the United States in order for it to construct a naval base in Guantanamo.

Guantanamo Bay is one of the country’s deepest and largest bays. Christopher Columbus discovered it during his second voyage to the New World on April 30, 1494. It has some very special natural characteristics: it is extremely deep, it is secure and it has the capacity to receive large ships.

For centuries, it was virtually abandoned, as the Spanish colonizers were incapable of appreciating its virtues.

After an attempt by the British to occupy the Bay in July, 1741, in the hope of establishing a base of operations there, the colonial government finally understood the site’s strategic importance.

U.S. REFOCUSSES ON CUBA

In the early 19th century, when it realized the value of the island’s geographic location, natural resources, its historical, economic and social characteristics, as well as those of its population, the United States publicly expressed its interest in taking over Cuba.

Attempts to buy the island from Spain were made in 1805, 1807 and 1808, but according to the Central Report of the First Congress of the Communist Party, “if Spanish obstinacy ever served Cuba’s cause, it was in its systematic refusal to agree to the buying and selling that the United States had repeatedly proposed during the last century.”

In 1823, John Quincy Adams, the U.S. secretary of state, articulated the “ripe fruit” thesis, holding that Cuba would inevitably fall into U.S. hands as soon as it was no longer a Spanish colony. And that same year, President James Monroe developed the doctrine that bears his name, warning the European powers that America was reserved solely and exclusively “for the Americans.” At the same time, for years his country obstructed and discouraged attempts by the Cuban people to achieve independence.

In 1895, U.S. investments on the island totaled some 50 million pesos, particularly in the sugar and tobacco industries, along with iron, chrome and manganese deposits.

Thus, in 1898, the Americans understood that the imminent end of Spanish colonial rule and before the unstoppable advance of the Liberation Army was a propitious time to intervene in the Spanish-Cuban war.

Taking advantage of the growing sympathy among North Americans for Cuba’s cause, the U.S. Congress in April 1898 approved a Joint Resolution that brought about the Northern giant’s intervention in the conflict.

The Spanish-Cuban-U.S. War, described as the first imperialist war of pillage, was centered primarily in the eastern provinces of Cuba and the Guantanamo region. On July 16, 1898, the terms of surrender were signed, and on December 10 of that same year, the Treaty of Paris was signed. The United States took control of Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam; Cuba remained as “special territory,” from which the Americans were to withdraw after the “appeasement.”

The administrative government, with General Leonard Wood at the head, convened a Constituent Assembly charged with drawing up the Constitution for the future republic. But in order to firmly establish relations between Cuba and the United States, the occupying forces brought heavy pressure to bear and imposed the notorious Platt Amendment, with two clauses that atrociously encroached on Cuba’s national sovereignty and which had serious implications for the nascent republic’s self-determination.

Clause 3 of the Amendment reserved the right of the United States to intervene for the preservation of Cuba’s independence and the support of a government appropriate to its interests, while Clause 7 forced Cuba to cede part of its territory for the establishment of naval bases or coaling stations [for the loading of coal into rail cars].

Historian Miguel D’Estéfano Pissani, in his book Derecho de Tratados (Treaty Law), explains: “The Platt Amendment became a Sword of Damocles, whose edges were the naval and coaling concessions. The strength of the Constitutional appendix was based, precisely, on the military base clause.”

On November 8, 1902, the U.S. government asked for a permanent lease of land in the bays of Nipe, Honda, Cienfuegos and Guantanamo. But due to the violent reaction of the people, it was limited to the Honda and Guantanamo Bays.

One of the most outstanding individuals of our independence struggle, Juan Gualberto Gómez, made his voice heard, warning that Articles 3 and 7 of the Platt Amendment “… were the same as handing the keys of our house over to the Americans, so that they could come in at any hour … day or night, with good or bad intentions …” and that “… its purpose is none other than to reduce the power of future Cuban governments and the sovereignty of our Republic.”

Finally, after a series of negotiations, on December 10, 1903, the United States took possession of the territory for its naval base in Guantanamo. Via a supplementary agreement signed on July 2, 1903, the U.S. government promised to pay 2,000 pesos per year in U.S. gold (about $4,085 at today’s prices), a laughable sum that Washington would continue to deposit, but which Cuba has refused to accept or cash since the triumph of the Revolution in 1959.

According to Doctor Fernando Alvarez Tabío, in his article “La Base Naval de Guantanamo y el derecho Internacional” (The Guantanamo Naval Base and International Law”), the leasing contract for the naval base lacks legality and juridical validity because it is marred in its essential elements: … due to the inability of the Cuban government to cede a piece of its national territory in perpetuity … and because the consent was snatched via irresistible and unjust moral violence…

Rejecting Honda Bay, the United States concentrated on Guantanamo. That choice was due to a strategic objective. Because of its exceptional value and geographic characteristics, it made it possible to assure military predominance in the Caribbean and fix its eyes on Panama’s inter-ocean canal, for which it had obtained the construction rights that year as well, in 1903.

A CENTURY OF INFAMY

During its century of existence, the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo has been the scene of shameful episodes and events.

Once the base was established, U.S. capital investment rose, first with the construction of the base’s vital water supply, and then in the sugar industry, railroads and electrical power. Gambling, prostitution and contraband proliferated with the arrival of the Marines, and became lucrative businesses for the national bourgeoisie.

The enclave’s presence also had repercussions on the region’s political life. In 1917, 1919 and 1922, the Marines were sent out from the base to “protect” the sugar mills and other U.S. economic interests in response to the revolt by the Partido Independiente de Color (Colored Independence Party), the Chambelona uprising and that of the liberals against the Menocal government.

During the final liberation war led by Fidel and the Rebel Army, the base was used as a supply point for the Batista dictatorship’s air force, which indiscriminately bombed and fired on farmers and other civilians in the liberated zones. The base was also a launching point for U.S. troops invading other countries, like Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1918.

After the revolutionary triumph in January 1959, the base became a refuge for the old regime’s murderers and torturers, and has been used as a platform for aggression against Cuba, including infiltration by enemy agents; the protection of counterrevolutionary bands; pretexts for justifying direct aggression against the island; a center of radio-electronic espionage and a point of concentration for ships and planes enabling sudden naval blockades to be imposed on the island.

Throughout these years, the military enclave has been the center of provocations and violations of our nation, and against the Border Guards responsible for patrolling the outer perimeter. According to official figures, from 1962 to August 1992, more than 13,000 such incidents have been registered, including shots fired with rifles and pistols (taking the lives of two Cuban Border Guards); aiming with machine guns, tanks and cannons; the throwing of objects; obscene gestures; breaking through the border fence and violating air and maritime space with ships, planes and helicopters.

The most recent ugly episode in the base’s history is its use as a prison, where more than 500 detainees accused of being terrorists or having links to terrorism have been held and subject to physical and psychological torture, without the right to legal assistance or a decent trial. The world has been shaken by the spine-chilling images of chained men being subject to extreme degradation and force fed after waging a hunger strike to protest conditions in the prison, where they are denied access to their lawyers, humanitarian organizations or the United Nations.

The Constitution of the Republic of Cuba, approved by the people on February 24, 1976, says in Article 11 that our country “… rejects and considers null and void the treaties, pacts or concessions agreed to under unequal or unknown conditions or that diminish its sovereignty or territorial integrity.”

Thus, Cuba demands the return of that territory because, as Fidel affirmed, “… That base is in their possession against the will of our people … it is a dagger thrust into the heart of Cuba’s land …”
watchingamerica.com

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras – A speeding bus crashed into a small van carrying a group of U.S. soldiers in northern Honduras, killing two and injuring one, authorities said Thursday.

The accident happened Wednesday near the village of Agua Caliente, on the Atlantic coast 220 miles north of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, Transport Police Commissioner Jose Luis Flores said.

The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa declined to confirm the identities of the victims pending notification of next of kin.

Flores said the driver of the bus was speeding before he crashed into the van carrying the soldiers. The soldier driving the van was unable to avoid the collision.

The bus driver was uninjured but was immediately detained by police.

The soldiers were traveling from La Ceiba to the industrial city of San Pedro Sula, Flores said. They had been participating in joint military exercises with their Honduran counterparts for the past month.
news.yahoo.com

PARIS, March 16 — Once again, students are on the barricades in France, evoking comparisons to the uprising of May 1968. But this is not a revolt. It is not 1968 revisited.

Certainly, students are taking to the streets and shutting down universities, and tear gas penetrated the heart of Paris.

On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of protesters, most of them students, filled the streets and marched in cities throughout France. With teachers, workers, labor union leaders, the jobless, even retirees beginning to join in, an even larger nationwide protest is planned for Saturday.

And the images of cheering students occupying the 17th-century Sorbonne, the birthplace of the 1968 revolt, last Friday night called forth memories of that exhilarating, romantic leftist youth movement 38 springs ago.

But the students’ goal this time is far more modest. They want the abolition of a new law, the First Employment Contract, which aims to increase hiring by allowing employers to fire new workers without cause in their first two years.

“We’re not back there in ’68,” said Nadjet Boubakeur, a 26-year-old history major at a public university here and a leader of the student movement UNEF. “Our revolt is not to get more. It’s to keep what we have.”
nytimes.com

Tony Blair’s announcement that he will henceforward account only to God for the Iraq war makes perfect sense. Every secular reason he has concocted for the catastrophe has turned out to be the reverse of the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction, we are less safe from terrorism, the Iraqi people themselves do not want us in their country. No more of his excuses for this epic man-made disaster stand an earthly chance of being believed.

As the third anniversary of the calamity draws close, the final argument used by what little remains of the brave army of pro-war punditry that set out with the prime minister in 2003 has gone belly up. Far from preventing a civil war, the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq is provoking one. It is doing so through its divide-and-rule strategy, which has entrenched and inflamed the Sunni-Shia divide beyond anything in Iraq’s history, and through its refusal to afford Iraqis the unfettered exercise of national sovereignty, which is the only framework for overcoming such differences.

There is scarcely even a pretence that Iraq is permitted such sovereignty at present. Both Jack Straw and the US ambassador to Baghdad have recently been instructing the Iraqis as to what sort of government they must form – three months after the supposedly decisive national elections took place.

And all this to the accompaniment of unabated violence. Reliable estimates for violent civilian deaths under the occupation range well over 100,000. Faik Bakir, the director of the Baghdad morgue, has had to flee the country after revealing that more than 7,000 people had been killed, often after torture, by officers of the US-supervised interior ministry. The carnage continues: more families will be burying their dead this morning after yesterday’s 50-warplane assault on Samarra by the US – the biggest yet and clearest possible demonstration of the occupation’s brutality and failure.

It defies common sense to suppose that the only torture and degradation of civilians carried out by US and British troops has been that caught on camera at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. No wonder Iraqi local authorities now refuse to deal with the British army in the south.

The pledge that all this suffering would at least assist a solution to the Palestinian question has proved painfully hollow, with the Israelis ram-raiding a Palestinian prison in Jericho – just like British troops in Basra. But still the war junkies seem to believe one more hit – this time against Iran – will lead to the breakthrough to the docile Middle East they desire. Straw’s assertion that it is “inconceivable” has found no echo in Washington or Jerusalem. Almost every Iranian agrees that aggression will consolidate support for the regime in Tehran. It will certainly cost many more lives and inflame Muslims everywhere.
guardian.co.uk