It is often argued that Israel is an Occupier that has violated the rules of Occupation as stated in international law. This would have been the case a year, two or five years after the original Occupation had taken place, but not 51 years later. Since then, the Occupation has turned into long-term colonization.
On not so great wars, theirs and ours.
Anarchism in Latin America provides a panoramic view of anarchism across fourteen countries in the region, from general strikes in Chilean ports to worker-theorists in Cuban tobacco factories. It offers a rich window into nearly one hundred years of anarchist organizing and agitating, and amplifies the voices of anarchists long gone, who were writing on the docks and factory lines, reading their manifestos from the barricades, striking and dreaming from Tierra del Fuego to Tijuana.
“In the end, the [mining] company is a new form of colonization and exclusion,” Sister Maudilia López Cardona, who works with the Catholic parish in her western Guatemalan community, told Toward Freedom. “The system has worked to erase the historical memory of our people and teach us not to think,” she continued. “These thoughts, these ideas, these preconceptions have soaked into our people’s bones … We have to work to return our hearts to their place.”
On February 20, 2018, I embarked on a global book tour that has, thus far, taken me to eight nations. The main theme of all my talks in various cultural, academic and media platforms was the pressing need to refocus the discussion on Palestine on the struggle, aspirations and history of the Palestinian people. But, interacting with hundreds of people and being exposed to multiple media environments in both mainstream and alternative media, I also learned much about the changing political mood on Palestine in the western world.
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) is one of Latin America’s largest social movements. For decades the MST has operated under their slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce” to settle landless farmers on unused land in Brazil, where roughly 3% of the population owns over 2/3 of arable land. “In whatever society, and even more so in Brazil, social change doesn’t depend on the government but on the organization and the mobilization of society," said MST leader João Pedro Stédile. "It is the people that make the change.”
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019