Our monthly selection of the best articles on Latin America from around the internet.

1) Brazil, Southcom and the Push Towards War in Venezuela (Brasil Wire)

Brazil’s former President Lula da Silva has expressed concern about the threat of armed conflict involving Brazil, and questioned the new National Defence Policy announced by Bolsonaro’s military dominated government.

2) Berta Cáceres in Her Own Words (Asís Castellanos and Adrienne Pine/Toward Freedom)

Much of what has been written about Lenca/Honduran activist Berta Cáceres has focused on her identifications as an Indigenous woman and as an environmentalist. While neither is false, those two facts alone paint an anemic picture of Berta’s militancy, and that of COPINH (the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras).

3) Like Water for Capitalists: Understanding authoritarianism, privatization and capitalism in Bolivia (Esha Krishnaswamy/Historic.ly)

American corporate media and American hegemony want you to believe that many socialist governments are authoritarian. But none of the socialist governments, past and present, are as violent or as repressive as a capitalistic government captured by for-profit corporations.

4) Colombia’s Disappeared (Forrest Hylton/London Review of Books)

With more than 80,000 official cases, Colombia has more disappeared people than the rest of the region put together, at least until Mexico began to spiral out of control in recent years.

5) Bolivia’s Ongoing Coup (Oliver Vargas/Tribune Magazine)

Faced with a victory for Evo Morales’ MAS party, the Bolivian government has postponed elections once again – the latest attack on democracy by a coup regime which Western powers supported in its name.

6) Cuba’s Nobel Nomination and Baldwin’s Call to “Begin Again” (Susan Babbitt/Counterpunch)

When an event is unexplained, it can’t be repeated. Cuba’s astonishing internationalism, the “good news” of the pandemic, is talked about (outside Cuba) as if a miracle, without cause. Support grows for the Nobel Prize nomination but the justification for the Henry Reeve Brigade, established in 2005, is left out. The explanation is ideas.

7) How a police spy’s stunning testimony threatens the US-Israeli AMIA bombing narrative (Gareth Porter/The Grayzone)

Revelations by a former police spy upend the official story blaming Iran for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and suggest a cover-up by dirty war elements may have let the real culprits off the hook.

8) Guyana: Sovereignty Imperiled by Disputed Election (Tamanisha J. John/Council on Hemispheric Affairs)

The manufactured political crisis makes Guyana vulnerable to foreign intervention, given Guyana’s ascent into the ranks of the world’s oil exporting countries in 2020 and its geographical positioning as Venezuela’s neighbour. These factors have placed the political situation unfolding within Guyana on the radar of many Western countries looking to secure contracts for oil from a Guyanese government, and the U.S. government in particular which wants to intervene in neighbouring Venezuela.

9) Corporate Greed Drives COVID-19 Pandemic Inside Peruvian Amazon (Aman Azhar/The Real News Network)

Peru’s lawmakers are weighing a vote on crucial legislation, which, if passed, will declare large areas of pristine Amazon rainforest off limits to drilling and mining projects—a clear showdown between Big Oil and corporate mining interests and the rights of Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon.

Documentary

10) In Commune: The Panal 2021 Commune (Venezuelanalysis)

Outside of Venezuela, communes are a little known aspect of the Bolivarian Revolution, yet the development of the communal state is integral to the vision of 21st century socialism laid out by former President Hugo Chavez.