.gif)
These words, spoken by political prisoner Marcelino Miranda, reflect the unshakeable hope and courage that three years in jail have not been able to tarnish. Last Monday marked the three-year anniversary of the violent police attack on the remote Lenca descendent community of Montaña Verde, in southwestern Honduras, which led to the unjust imprisonment of Marcelino and his brother Leonardo.
Benjamin Dangl: How did you get involved in journalism and journalistic film making?
Brian Conley: Well, I initially intended to study history and political science in college. When I arrived there, however, I quickly decided that art and, particularly film, were very good ways to influence the public and to talk about important historical events that might not otherwise be learned or discussed in the public discourse.
Death is nothing new to the Morro do Estado, a mish-mash of redbrick favela housing that clings to the slopes high above central Niteroi, a city near Rio de Janeiro. But as locals crowded into the Bar do Raimundo for a game of snooker one Sunday night in December they had little idea just how close it was.
Within minutes five residents - among them three boys under the age of 15 - lay dead. The weathered cement walls outside the bar were pockmarked with gunshots and the pavement covered in a thick coat of blood.
Forget about Avian bird flu. The threat of it becoming a pandemic is more a political scare tactic and potential bonanza for drug company profits and its major shareholders' net worth (including Gilead Sciences, the developer of the Tamiflu drug and its former Chairman and major shareholder Donald Rumsfeld) than a likely public health crisis - unless you live around infected chickens or take an unproven safe immunization shot. There are much more other likely killer bacterial and viral threats than Avian that get little attention. Don't worry about possible or unlikely threats. Worry about real ones. Bacteria and viruses untreatable by anti-biotics are good examples. So are global warming and many others. But, there's possibly one threat that tops all others both in gravity and because it's been deliberately concealed from the public - never discussed, explained or had any action taken to remediate it. It's the global threat from the toxic effects of depleted uranium (DU), and like global warming; DU has the potential to destroy all planetary life. How can something so potentially destructive be hidden and ignored and why?
Toward Freedom is in Caracas at the World Social Forum to organize a panel on the hopes and challenges of independent media, to participate in the forum’s events and learn more about Venezuela’s political process. On this page we’ll be posting regular dispatches and photos from this experience.
12/30: Fireworks, Politics, Globalized Stew
1/25: The Social Architecture of Caracas
1/25: Information on Panelists, Time and Location of Toward Freedom’s Panel on Independent Media
Avalon Publishing Group/Nation Books firm published in November 2005 a book of letters from various younger Movement activists, titled Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out. The book was co-edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin and Kenyon Farrow. It also contains a preface by former Weather Underground fugitive Bernardine Dohrn, who was one of the 1960s anti-war activists interviewed in the Oscar-nominated documentary film of a few years ago, The Weather Underground. (Co-editor Boudin’s still-imprisoned father, David Gilbert, was another of the 1960s anti-war activists interviewed in The Weather Underground movie). Toward Freedom recently interviewed Dan Berger about the Letters From Young Activists book project.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019