[Previous entry: "On the Anniversary of Slave Trade Abolition: Easy on the euphoria"] [Next entry: "Young, successful, well paid: are they killing feminism?"]

03/25/2006:

"General Rejection of Bolivia Bombing"

La Paz, Mar 22 (Prensa Latina) The terrorist bombings in Bolivia have sparked widespread condemnation, as false explosive alarms proliferate.

Two people were killed in the bombings of two small hotels in La Paz late Tuesday and early Wednesday. A US citizen was one of two people arrested in connection with the terrorist actions, according to reports.

President Evo Morales described the attacks as destabilizing actions by oligarchic sectors affected by the ongoing process of change in the country, and recalled that history shows that terrorism always precedes military coups.

He called on the people to organize in committees of defense of democracy, and urged the US to prevent US people from coming to Bolivia to disrupt democracy, the government and the Constituent Assembly to be elected in July.
plenglish.com


Blum:The Cuban Punching Bag
The Committee to Protect Journalists, located in New York, calls itself "An Independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending press freedom worldwide". In December it issued a report that said that "China, Cuba, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are the world's leading jailers of journalists in 2005".

On January 7 I sent them the following email:

"Dear People,

"I have a question concerning your report on imprisoned journalists. You write that you consider journalists imprisoned when governments deprive them of their liberty because of their work. This implies that they've been imprisoned because of WHAT THEY'VE WRITTEN PER SE. You show Cuba with 24. And I would question whether your criterion applies to the Cuban cases. The arrests of these persons in Cuba had nothing to do with them being journalists, or even being dissidents, per se, but had everything to do with their very close, indeed intimate, political and financial connections to American government officials.

"The United States is to the Cuban government like al Qaeda is to Washington, only much more powerful and much closer. During the period of the Cuban revolution, the United States and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in the US have inflicted upon Cuba damage greater than what happened in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. In 1999, Cuba filed a suit against the United States for $181.1 billion in compensation for victims of (at that time) forty years of aggression. The suit accused Washington policies of being responsible for the death of 3,478 Cubans and wounding or disabling 2,099 others.

"Would the US ignore a group of Americans receiving funds from al Qaeda and engaging in repeated meetings with known leaders of that organization inside the United States? Would it matter if these American dissidents claimed to be journalists? In the past few years, the American government has arrested a great many people in the US and abroad on the basis of alleged ties to al Qaeda, with a lot less evidence to go by than Cuba had with its dissidents' ties to the United States.

"Moreover, most of the arrested Cubans can hardly be called journalists. Their only published works have appeared on websites maintained by agencies of the United States."


El Salvador 2006: Elections in a Broken Nation
...Dreams of a life in the United States are the norm here among working people. Since the country converted its currency to the dollar in 2003, the low wages and high unemployment mean working people live in poverty, if they are lucky enough to find a job. The maquilas pay starvation wages, and there are no unions. Each day, over 700 Salvadorans flee on the dangerous trek through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. Young Salvadoran women look for a mate that is "going north". I heard a tale of a high school class of 18 young men, all of whom got on a bus out of the country the day after their graduation. The effect of this economic migration is that 2 million Salvadorans working in the United States sent back $3 billion to their families in 2005. These remittances, or "remesas" support the economy, and are the source of the cash for the malls and fast food restaurants that proliferate in this poor nation. They are not a source for investment that develops the infrastructure. The cash simply recycles back to the corporations and banks of the United States and El Salvador.