The expanding wars in Afghanistan, conflict with North Korea, the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM), U.S. intervention in Venezuela, proposals to increase the military budget by $75 billion, and the war on African/Black people are all interrelated expressions of the systemic violence that the US state is waging and prepared to wage to salvage its rapidly declining power.
![Shannon Rivers protested Trump at the Phoenix rally on Tuesday. For Rivers, a tribal citizen of the Akimel O’odham of the Gila River Indian Community, the alliance between indigenous people and Latinos is personal. “Many [Latinos] are our family,” he said. Photo by Jenni Monet.](https://towardfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/image-1-1-326x245.jpg)
“The historical trauma is still happening today. We’re still suffering but in different ways,” said Anthony Thosh Collins, a citizen of the Onk Akimel O’odham with the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. For Collins and dozens of other indigenous rights activists, their message in response to recent white supremacist rhetoric was simple: “This is our land.”
One hundred Q’eqchi Maya families have established an encampment next to the Presidential Palace in Guatemala City to protest the government's unwillingness to resolve agrarian conflicts in their territory. “We are here in front of the National Palace because of the failure of the state," indigenous activist Carlos Choc explained. "Our Q’eqchi communities have risen up."
Trump recently went to the 19th National Scout Jamboree in West Virginia and addressed a crowd of 40,000 young scouts, and apparently, potential future Trump voters. His comments sounded more like a campaign rally than a talk to future young leaders.
The camp for a left program has grown notably stronger. In 2016, everyone across the spectrum moved right. Will everyone move left in 2018? It depends on mobilizing enthusiasms. The next six months or so should be very interesting if we keep our eye on the ball – energizing the left and remembering the major struggle we face after 2018.
Violence in Mexico is surging back into the headlines – if current trends continue, deaths in 2017 could hit 30,000, making it the deadliest peacetime year on record. Attempts to stem the violence by Mexican and U.S. governmental agencies have failed spectacularly, and corruption reigns. In the face of this crisis, what alternatives exist? How do people living in the areas most affected negotiate the violence?
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019