Our monthly selection of the best articles on Latin America from around the internet.
1) We’ll See Each Other in Bogotá (Isabel Peñaranda & Gerald Bermúdez/Jacobin)
The western hemisphere’s oldest guerrilla army, the FARC, is putting down their arms and becoming a political party. What does the future hold for them?
2) Memento Mori: a Requiem for Puerto Rico (Miguel A. Cruz-Díaz/Counterpunch)
Puerto Rico is dying. Let those words sink in. Three and a half million people are without power, water, fuel, food, and support. This isn’t some uninhabited atoll. This is where I grew up. This is where my family lives. This is my home.
3) Honduras, the Deadliest Country in the World for Environmental Defenders, Is About to Get Deadlier (Heather Gies/Upside Down World)
Activists in Honduras could soon face up to 20 years in prison for simply marching in the streets after Congress passed an article of the new Criminal Code last week that opposition lawmakers claim criminalizes social protest as a form of “terrorism.”
4) These 15 Documentaries Dive Deep Into the Experience of Undocumented Immigrants (Manuel Betancourt/Remezcla)
You can learn about the perilous journeys these migrants make, get educated about how gender and sexuality crucially complicate their lives, and how everything from one’s education to working conditions become tied up in the fear and shame that often accompanies being undocumented.
5) Grassroots Action Confronts Impunity Three Years After Ayotzinapa (Dawn Paley/NACLA)
“The government, after they disappeared the 43, they tried to say it was an isolated case, and we screamed ‘no!’ It isn’t an isolated case, it is systematic. It happens many times a day in different parts of the country.”
6) Hélio Oiticica’s Place for People (Miguel Salazar/The Nation)
The Brazilian artist’s manipulations of color and space became a way for him to challenge society’s inequalities.
7) Adam Feinstein’s Five Latin American Cinema Masterpieces (Adriana Elgueta/Sounds and Colours)
He’s a major authority on film, and Latin American cinema in particular. With that in mind we asked Feinstein to pick out five of his favourite Latin American films.
8) Rumbas in the Barrio: Personal Lives in a Venezuelan Collectivist Project (Sujatha Fernandes/Verso)
The autobiography workshops of the Misión Cultura, instituted in 2005 as part of a broader Bolivarian project, aimed to “give words, voice, to us, those always silenced” and build up a popular alternative archive of people’s histories.
9) Brazil’s Latest Outbreak of Drug Gang Violence Highlights the Real Culprit: the War on Drugs (Glenn Greenwald & David Miranda/The Intercept)
Supporting a failed policy by hoping that, one day, it will magically succeed, is the definition of irrationality. In the case of drug laws — which spawn misery and suffering — it is not only irrational but cruel.
Documentary
10) Chile Under Pinochet: Colour of the Chameleon (Andres Lubbert/Al Jazeera English)
A son confronts the uncomfortable truth about why his father fled the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
