Extract: Solito, Solita
An exclusive extract from new book Solito, Solita, in which young Central American migrants describe the dangers and traumas of trying to reach and settle in the United States.
ROSA CUEVAS
Age at crossing: 35
Age of child: 12
Born in: Jucuarán, Usulután, El Salvador
Interviewed in: San Luis Potosí, Mexico in transit
La Casa de la Caridad is a migrant shelter run by Caritas, an organization developed by the Catholic Church to promote social welfare. The shelter is adjacent to the train tracks. We notice signs for a shelter across the tracks that we later learn had been placed there by a crime organization for the express purpose of luring migrants into being kidnapped. On the outside, Casa de la Caridad is completely nondescript: another cement structure with no windows and one door with a small sign reading, “Ring bell 24 hours a day, Casa del Migrante.” Inside, it is the most expansive of the shelters we visit in Mexico. It takes up a good portion of the block, with an outdoor basketball court surrounded by a gigantic mural made by migrants, large sleeping quarters with rows of bunk beds, and a full industrial kitchen.
We speak with Rosa in a large meeting room in July 2016. Rosa and her daughter, Alejandra, are traveling with Rosa’s sister and her daughter, as well as Rosa’s brother. Escaping threats by gangs and a death squad, they fled El Salvador only to be assaulted in southern Mexico. At every step of the journey Rosa and her family don’t know whom to trust. They are hoping to receive Mexican visas that will let them travel safely to the US border, where they can turn themselves over to US immigration agents and apply for asylum. Rosa is the only one in her family to speak with us at length. She is clearly traumatized by the recent assaults but wants their story to be heard. This is the only time we are able to speak with Rosa.
I DON’T HAVE A HAPPY MEMORY THERE
I was born in Jucuarán, a town in the province of Usulután.1 In Jucuarán, the people are peasants who work in the fields, growing corn, beans. I moved to Chirilagua, San Miguel, as a child because my mamá lived there.2 It’s very pretty. It’s a village in the mountains. To get to the town, it takes about a half hour.
I lived in the city of San Miguel when I was with my late boyfriend, my daughter’s father. I don’t have a happy memory there. I moved there when I was fourteen and lived there for fourteen years. My boyfriend and I met at a store. He spoke to me and invited me to go out to eat. We went to the movies, and then we started to fall in love. He’d call me on the phone, and I would talk to him.
His family would go around to ferias.3 There were mechanical games, Ferris wheels, things of that sort. His mother, my daughter’s grandmother, owned the mechanical games, and we also
Extract: Blood Barrios
An exclusive extract from Blood Barrios by Alberto Arce, discussing the violence which engulfs Honduras.
A little known war
San Pedro Sula hasn’t always been where it is. Centuries ago Spanish colonialists, wanting to protect the city from constant pirate attacks, decided to move it. Today, the city is in the north of the country, about an hour from the Caribbean coast.
San Pedro Sula is organized in a grid running more horizontal than vertical; like most colonial cities, it has no skyscrapers. Outside of the city center, urbanism grows in concentric circles of poverty and marginalization, neighborhoods divorced from the downtown by highways. According to a mathematician friend of mine, these isolated barrios have levels of violence and homicide that would – if there were the slightest fall in the birthrate – completely depopulate the city in eighty-seven years.
The three-hour ride from Tegucigalpa to the Sula Valley is best done, for safety reasons, during the day. To get through the drive you have to manage traffic jams, climb over mountains, speed by an American military base, cruise through a few prairies, eat fish at Lake Yojoa, and, in the final stretch, hit a twenty-kilometer straightaway that spits you into a stunning view of the most beautiful and violent city in Honduras.
***
The mayor of San Pedro Sula, Juan Carlos Zúñiga, a stout and elegant young man with a finely groomed beard, used to be a surgeon. He doesn’t hesitate to recognize that his city is threatened by a violence the authorities are incapable of combating. Moving the entire city again wouldn’t even work; the violence in Honduras is inescapable.
My interview with the mayor is brief and formulaic. Zúñiga is tired of hearing the epithet, “most dangerous city in the world,” and tries to focus on details. He does what he can, according to the manual of international cooperation, which urges him to follow certain protocols and take specified actions, but which, so far, hasn’t helped. Surrounded by aides and sitting in his office on an ugly, beat-up sofa (which I read as an attempt to present a welcoming vibe) the mayor, like a broken record, churns out statistics and name-drops public projects so mechanically that once he mentions the second shelter for runaway kids, I zone out and start rereading my notes.
And my notes, I find, are full of dead bodies:
- In Honduras there are between eighty-five and ninety-one homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, depending on the local or international count. This is the favorite statistic for journalists who love to define Honduras as “the most dangerous country in the world.”
- In San Pedro Sula there are 166 homicides a year per 100,000 inhabitants. This is another favorite statistic for journalists who love to define San Pedro Sula as “the most dangerous city in the world.”
- The World Health Organization defines violence as epidemic if there are more than eight homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. A typical European country, like Spain, doesn’t reach one homicide per 100,000 inhabitants.
Journalists are pushed to report on
Ignoring Brazil’s Left
The current political crisis in Brazil is the most sustained antidemocratic surge since the military dictatorship, as new book Voices of the Brazilian Left painstakingly details.
My new book, Voices of the Brazilian Left, represents the culmination of 22 years living in Brazil and interacting with people from the Brazilian organised left, both as a development professional and as an activist journalist. The questions asked in the unstructured interviews with 15 union and social movement leaders, organic intellectuals and media critics that form the basis of the book were based on my learning through this long process of participant observation.
In 2016 a corrupt, conservative Brazilian Congress impeached its first woman president, Dilma Rousseff. There was overwhelming evidence that what had just happened was illegal. Shortly after taking office, President Michel Temer gave a speech at the corporate think tank AS/COA (producer of Americas Quarterly) in New York in which he said that President Rousseff was impeached, not over the official accusations of a non-impeachable infraction called ‘fiscal peddling’, but because she failed to support his party’s Washington Consensus-style economic plan. In other words, the president himself publicly admitted that the impeachment was a sham. Nevertheless, when Rousseff was removed from office the messages in the Northern media, repeated like mantra, were: the impeachment was a legal process; Brazil’s democratic institutions are working; the Brazilian people have won a victory in the fight against corruption. Immediately after taking office, Michel Temer butchered public health and education spending while raising salaries for the corrupt judiciary that had put him in office by R$57 billion, and shelled R$1 Trillion in tax abatement out to foreign oil companies. The Northern media cheer-leading continued. It either categorically rejected the idea that what happened was a coup, or as in the case of the Guardian, implied that it was something only the Brazilian left believed had happened and put the word in quotation marks. As Temer set labour rights back 70 years and his approval rating dropped to 4 per cent, a chorus of northern journalists with no formal training in economics gushed a new mantra: he’s unpopular, but he’s pushing through important economic reforms.
There is no doubt that the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ of radical and centre-left governments that from the late-1990s spread throughout the region is being pushed back, supported by international capital and the US government. The rise of ultra-neoliberal governments is a continent-wide phenomenon that is not limited to Brazil and not primarily a result of the ‘people’s frustration with corruption’, which seems to be the new US tactic for slandering democratically-elected governments with the collapse of moral authority on human rights issues and torture. The current Brazilian government – which is rolling back decades of gains in women’s, Afro-Brazilian, environmental, indigenous, small farmers, and labour rights – is more a result of conservatives’ inability to win four consecutive democratic presidential elections than any kind of
Extract: Culture and Revolutionary Struggle
This is an exclusive extract from Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt’s book To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture, on the role of popular culture within the Cuban Revolution.
In November 1966, Che Guevara had surreptitiously left Cuba for Bolivia, to open up a new front in the Bolivarian e ort to establish a federation of independent Latin American republics. Less than a year later, on 9 October 1967, having been betrayed by a deserter and captured after a prolonged battle, Che was assassinated by young officers of the Bolivian Army, acting under instructions from the national government and Washington. Nine days later, in the midst of uncertain about the circumstances surrounding the execution, Fidel hosted a rally to honour Che’s memory in Havana’s Revolutionary Square, describing him an ‘artist of revolutionary war’. In considering the poignancy of Che’s death, Fidel surmised that ‘the artist may die – especially when he is an artist in a field as dangerous as revolutionary struggle – but what will surely never die is the art to which he dedicated his life, the art to which he dedicated his intelligence’. In the process, the leader of the Cuban Revolution made a commitment to ensuring that Che’s message would continue to be heard and acted upon across the continent.
The week after Fidel delivered his memorial speech, the Minister of Education, José Llanusa, was called upon to give the opening address at a seminar which had been organised to discuss a putative international cultural congress. In welcoming around a thousand Cuban intellectuals to a seaside resort in the west of Havana, the affable Llanusa expressed his great regret that the seminar precluded the mass participation of the Cuban people, in part because of the great sadness that abounded in the wake of Che’s death.
In the immediate aftermath of revolutionary victory, a new beginning for world culture had been anticipated, with Cuba as its vanguard:
‘We want to hear […] a Chinese Communist Party member discussing with a North American Republican Party member the meanings of freedom! Let a Polish economist discuss with a Cuban economist the problems of the collectivization of land. Let a Mexican oil expert discuss the issues of nationalization of oil resources with a Venezuelan expert, employed by Standard Oil of New Jersey. Let a British Labour Party man discuss with a Yugoslav politician – whatever they want to discuss. And put it all on tape. Print it in the newspapers of Cuba. Make books out of it. Make Cuban intellectual life a truly international, truly free forum, for the entire range of world opinion, study, art, judgment, feeling.’
More specifically, the idea of an international cultural congress can be traced to the Tricontinental Conference, which had been hosted in Havana from 3 to 14 January 1966 with the aim of building links between Africa, Asia and Latin America. At this landmark conference – to which Che sent a letter of support, calling for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ – intellectuals conducted a survey which highlighted the
Extract: A Narco History
Alborada presents an exclusive extract from Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace’s new book A Narco History.
The administration of Carlos Salinas (1988–1994), building upon the neoliberal policies introduced by de la Madrid, now put into effect a rolling counter-Revolution. In this round it was the larger public enterprises that were sold off at bargain basement prices: among the eighty or so he privatized were the telecommunications company, the two airlines, the national steel company, the fertilizer and sugar companies, the railways, and the commercial banks that had been nationalized in 1982. The process created a new class of Mexican tycoons. In 1987 there was one Mexican on the Forbes billionaire list. When Salinas left office in 1994 there were twenty-four.
Labor, conversely, was battered. When public enterprises were privatized their collective agreements were scrapped, benefits were removed, and “‘flexible” work rules were imposed. Salinas also distanced the party from its long-affiliated labor unions, and ordered a series of attacks on more militant entities. At the same time, state subsidies that had kept the price of basic foodstuffs low were suddenly removed. The price of milk, tortillas, petrol, electricity, and public transport shot up at the same time wages were being slashed. The provision of basic social services, long a feature of post-Revolutionary governments, was similarly cut so that fewer people had access to free health care and education.
The neoliberal offensive was particularly devastating to farm labor, partly as a consequence of the establishment of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which Salinas negotiated with George H. W. Bush (1989–1992) and which went into effect under Bill Clinton (1993–2000). A principal U.S. condition for entering the agreement was that Mexico undo the agrarian reforms embedded in Article 27 of the Constitution, a principal legacy of the Revolution. Communal (ejido) land could now be divided and converted into private property. Price regulation of staple crops was scrapped. Tariffs and quotas on agricultural imports were removed. Subsidies that had supported small-scale farmers were deleted. All this enabled U.S. agribusiness (which, having zero qualms about ideological inconsistency, remained heavily subsidized) to export corn and other grains below cost. Rural Mexican farmers could not compete. This did not escape the attention of the farmers themselves, especially the Indians in Chiapas who, fearing the loss of their communal lands, formed a Zapatista Army of National Liberation. On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA came into force, they declared war on the Mexican state.
The results of establishing a putatively equal trade between grossly unequal partners was that U.S. agribusiness pushed thousands of Mexican farmers out of their own markets. The price of corn dropped by around 50 percent following the NAFTA agreement, and the number of farmers living in poverty rose by a third. In the six years following the introduction of NAFTA, two million farmers abandoned their land. They flocked from country shacks to the burgeoning barrios of Mexico City; to the spreading slums of Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez to work in assembly plants on the border;
Uncovering the Racket
An introduction to Matt Kennard’s new book The Racket: A Rogue Report versus the Masters of the Universe.
Investigative journalist Matt Kennard’s book The Racket is an exposé of the murky collusions between global high-finance and the militarised US state in the post-World War II era. Kennard traces the expansion of US corporate power across the globe, using case studies from Palestine, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico and elsewhere to illustrate the pernicious and far-reaching impact of Washington DC’s ‘imperial mindset’. A former Financial Times journalist, Kennard identifies the US government as the primary actor in enforcing what he terms ‘the racket’, the system whereby capitalist elites are buttressed through the violent suppression of labour unions, social movements and political groups in selected US satellite states.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the US’ so-called ‘backyard’ of Latin America. Kennard explores in eminently readable prose the self-evident brutality and futility of the professed ‘War on Drugs’ in Honduras, links between US multinationals, Colombian paramilitaries and right-wing governments, and the dynamic resistance presented by anti-imperialists such as the Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo party.
Contextualising the ascent of this racketeering, Kennard details how a worldwide recession in the early 1980s, along with the rise of neoliberal privatisation, caused the forced indebtedness of developing countries via the International Monetary Fund’s ‘structural adjustment programmes’. In order to repay debts, developing countries were forced to privatise and open their economies up to transnational corporations. The extractive industries – ‘a particularly vicious arm of the global racket’ – boomed as a result. In his former role at the Financial Times, Kennard had prolonged access to the individuals heading these multi-billion dollar mining industries. Their power is colossal. The annual turnover of mining companies often exceeds that of the countries within which they operate and from which they extract valuable resources.
In the extract below, Kennard presents Bolivia as a locus of change in the way that developing countries manage their natural resources. Known for its robust rejection of western imperialism, Bolivia has been a tenacious thorn in the side of the US government’s plans for the region. Struggling for autonomy against the global capitalist forces seeking to consolidate its economic dependency, Bolivia has taken control of its lucrative lithium mines and resisted the encroachment of multinational extractive corporations to stand at the helm of recent anti-imperial resistance in Latin America.
A programme of continuing resource extraction nevertheless raises uncomfortable questions over sustainability and environmental degradation. The balancing of economic development of the resource-rich global south, in countries such as Bolivia, with the protection of the planet remains one of the greatest challenges we face. An exploration of debates around this is something that remains beyond the scope of Kennard’s fascinating book, which focuses instead on expertly and accessibly outlining forces of reaction and resistance in the world today.
******
Our Lithium
Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, is at the forefront of a change in the attitude among developing-world leaders toward foreign – or, more specifically,
Extract: The Racket
This is an exclusive extract from Matt Kennard’s book The Racket.
Our Lithium
Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, is at the forefront of a change in the attitude among developing-world leaders toward foreign – or, more specifically, western – mining companies. His country owns half the world’s deposits of lithium, which could be hugely lucrative if developed. But his government is reluctant to let western companies in. Mining minister Luis Alberto Echazu has said: “We will not repeat the historical experience since the 15th century: raw materials exported for the industrialization of the West, which has left us poor.” Instead, Bolivia has bucked conventional developmental economics – which outsources development and production to foreign companies expert in the field and with reserves of capital – and has endeavored to develop its deposits with state-owned companies, rebuffing the overtures of countless western companies. Morales needs to raise $800 million to construct the mines and processing plants needed for this approach. In an industry report, Bolivian mining was reported to have grown 13 percent in 2009.
In 2012, I went to see the Bolivian ambassador to the UK to find out what was behind this new way of doing things. She told me she doesn’t get many requests for media interviews. When financial news outlets in the West write about Latin America, it’s inevitably an article lauding the “economic miracle” of its Brazilian neighbor or a scaremongering editorial about the Red Menace of Venezuela. But a look at the media elsewhere – specifically emerging markets in East Asia – and the story isn’t so monochrome. In fact, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, covers pretty much every statement made by Bolivian President Evo Morales. Why? It’s quite simple: a soft, silver-white metal called lithium. This landlocked country of 9 million people, which is the poorest in South America, has the world’s largest reserves of a mineral that could become one of the most sought-after of the century. It’s needed to make the batteries that will power the electric car revolution that many are waiting for, particularly in China.
But the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) has been in government since 2005 and it is pioneering a new development model, which, if successful, could become the norm across the developing world. What may worry multinational mining companies and their backers is that it takes no heed of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank orthodoxy, which has traditionally advocated minimal regulation on foreign direct investment. “I know that they are in some discussions with France, Korea and Japan about working in Bolivia to develop lithium, but we don’t want to be only raw material exporters. We want to create added value in the country,” said Ambassador Maria Beatriz Souviron, as she sat in the Bolivian embassy in Eaton Square. By “added value” Ms Souviron means building factories in Bolivia to manufacture the batteries within the country, rather than sending the metals abroad once they are out of the ground. It’s an idea that has an increasing number
Extract: Gangsterismo
The prologue of Jack Colhoun’s book Gangsterismo: The United States, Cuba and the Mafia, 1933 to 1966.
PROLOGUE:
August 1960, Miami: a telltale bargain was struck between exiled Cuban politician Manuel Antonio Varona and organized crime leader Meyer Lansky. Lansky, the impresario of the Mafia gambling colony in Cuba since the 1930s, had owned Havana’s Hotel Riviera and the Montmartre nightclub and their fabulous casinos.
In Cuba, Lansky was known as the “Little Man” for his five-foot-four-inch stature, but his cold, hard eyes and intense demeanor were physical expressions of a man used to wielding power and getting his way. His dream of turning Havana into a tropical paradise for North American tourists had come true. Havana had a reputation for the best gambling and wildest nightlife in the Western Hemisphere in the 1950s. And since Lansky shared the Mafia’s profits with General Fulgencio Batista and senior Cuban army and police officers, that gambling paradise became the cornerstone of a full-fledged Cuban gangster state.
But when Fidel Castro’s bearded revolutionaries drove Batista from power on New Year’s Day 1959, Castro condemned the Mafia’s gambling colony for corrupting Cuban values, and shut it down. The Cuban revolution brought down the curtain on the era of gangsterismo in Cuba.
In the meeting in Miami, Lansky offered Varona several million dollars to form a Cuban government-in-exile to replace Castro’s revolutionary regime. Lansky also promised to arrange a public relations campaign in the United States to polish Varona’s political image. In return, Varona, a stout man with heavy dark-framed eyeglasses, endorsed the Mafia’s single-minded objective: to reopen its casinos, hotels, and nightclubs in a post-Castro Cuba.
Several months before the Miami meeting, Varona, a leading member of the reformist Partido Revolucionario Cubano-Auténtico (Cuban Revolutionary Party-Authentic), had publicly broken with Castro. Ever since, he had been shuttling between cities in the Americas to confer with other anti-Castro Cubans in a bid for leadership of the Cuban counterrevolution.
Varona had been both prime minister and Senate president under Auténtico President Carlos Prío Socarrás. For their part, Prío and his brother Paco were closely connected to Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. In March 1952, Batista seized power in a coup d’etat (strike against the state), and Prío fled, leaving Varona to assume leadership of the Auténtico Party.
But the Auténticos’ reputation as a reform party had been badly tarnished by the ties of its leaders to the Mafia gamblers. Varona himself had been connected with smuggling and kidnapping, and he kept pistoleros (political gunmen) on his payroll. A CIA memorandum reported, “[H]e maintained action groups at his service to force political decisions both in his [Camaguey] province and in Las Villas province where he was once provincial leader of the Auténtico Party.” Varona had good reason to accept Lansky’s offer. And so, in a remarkable act of political surrealism, the American Mafia, notorious for gangland murders and corruption of politicians, cleaned up the image of its Cuban partners in crime.
They hired the public relations firm of Edward K. Moss in Washington, D.C. Moss was a good
Extract: The Disinherited Left
Chapter one of David Raby’s book Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today.
Chapter 1
The Disinherited Left: From Dogmatic Orthodoxy to Romantic Anti-capitalism
*To view the book’s table of contents click here.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Left has been in crisis. The orthodox Communist model was discredited even among its traditional supporters, and as the Eastern European countries were seduced one after another by the siren song of capitalist consumerism, it soon became clear that Western Social Democracy had also lost its way. The ideological victory of supply-side economics and monetarism paved the way for what we now know as neo-liberalism, and with Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’ leading the way, Social Democratic parties ceased to defend even a minimal degree of public ownership and became advocates of ‘Thatcherism lite’: the supremacy of the market with only a limited social safety net to protect the most vulnerable. Neo-liberal globalisation appeared to make the viability of any kind of socialism problematic: could any state, even the most powerful, resist or control market forces? With some transnational corporations being bigger than the GDPs of all but the largest countries, it was said that the state could no longer even regulate the economy, let alone control it.
In these conditions even traditional left-wing critics of Stalinism like the Trotskyists failed to benefit politically from the implosion of ‘really existing socialism’, and the neo-liberal consensus seemed to rule the roost in both East and West. The electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua early in 1990 seemed to confirm that even Latin America, with its vigorous independent revolutionary tradition, was not immune to the debacle of socialist values. Although Communist regimes survived in China and Vietnam, they appeared to be adopting capitalist market mechanisms with indecent haste, while the other case of East Asian socialism, North Korea, seemed to be locked in a Stalinist time-warp. It was in this context that Francis Fukuyama could write about ‘The End of History’ (Fukuyama 1992), presenting liberal capitalism as the final and universal goal of humanity, and in Latin America Jorge Castañeda could produce Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (Castañeda 1994), which amounted to a repudiation of that continent’s revolutionary heritage in the name of Blairite Social Democracy (and perhaps not surprisingly, Castañeda later became a minister in the government of right-wing Mexican President Vicente Fox).
Of course, the triumphalism of the neo-liberal advocates of the ‘New World Order’ was soon tempered by the rise of vigorous mass movements in opposition to the negative impact of market reforms. In Latin America the ink was scarcely dry on Castañeda’s book when in January 1994 the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas showed that the region’s revolutionary heritage was not dead and that popular opposition to the neo-liberal consensus could take militant forms. In Europe and North America the anti-globalisation movement revealed the hostility of a significant minority to the new orthodoxy and their allegiance to collective, egalitarian and anti-capitalist values. The rise of
