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Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots – Vermont Event Announcement

Toward Freedom January 21, 2010 Toward Freedom

Toward Freedom presents:

Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots
Book Presentation & Discussion
Join co-authors Carlos Martinez, Michael Fox, and photographer Sílvia Leindecker

Monday, February 1st
6:30pm at Burlington College
Free

Community Room
95 North Avenue, Burlington, VT
Burlington.edu
Call 802-540-2516 for more info.
Organized by Toward Freedom

While Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez continues to capture headlines, a much larger story involving a wider cast of characters has gone largely ignored. Venezuela Speaks!, published by PM Press, is a collection of interviews with activists and participants from across Venezuela’s social movements. From community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, from the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network, Venezuela Speaks! sheds light on the complex realities within the Bolivarian Revolution. read more

Will the US Send Haitian Refugees to Gitmo?

James Ridgeway January 21, 2010 James Ridgeway

Source: Mother Jones

The U.S. prison complex at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is inextricably linked to terrorism and torture in the minds of most Americans today. But not very long ago, it was known for torment of a different kind. In the 1990s, an immigrant detention center at Guantanamo served as a holding pen for undocumented migrants from the Caribbean who were caught trying to enter the United States. Most notoriously, it was a destination for Haitian “boat people,” including some with HIV, who fled their country in large numbers in the wake of the 1991 coup. read more

The last time I was in Zimbabwe I had an encounter with a local arts and crafts vendor who has a stall in one of Harare’s bustling flea markets. On this occasion he seemed disinterested in flaunting his archetypal Zimbabwean sculptures of mothers cradling their young or the clichéd soapstone wildlife roaming his rickety tabletop. He had become involved in the burgeoning diamond industry that had sprung up in an area of the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe called Marange District, where there are significant deposits of high-value industrial diamonds. He spoke of the astounding profit margins available to foreign buyers and how well he was doing as a middleman in this new venture. Inevitably, with the diamond trade’s crimson history, these stones were not being unearthed at a co-operative mine where the benefits enriched the soil from which they came. Rather, they brought with them increased violence and corruption to a people that know hardship and injustice all too well. read more

Bolivia’s Next Steps

Benjamin Dangl January 11, 2010 Benjamin Dangl

Published in The Nation on December 16, 2009

A rainbow of campaign posters covered the stairways and tinted glass walls in the Bolivian Congress building. After arriving in the crowded office lobby of leftist Congressman Gustavo Torrico, I sat for hours next to union leaders and other rank-and-file constituents, waiting to speak with the politician.

Torrico was meeting with members of the Bolivian Workers Center, one of the largest unions in the country. When I finally sat down on the couch in his dimly lit office, the smiling Congressman explained one of the key reasons for the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the party he and indigenous President Evo Morales helped construct. read more