Forty two Democrats voted to keep the world's foremost torture school, the School of the Americas (SOA), open during a House vote on June 21. The vote was 203 yes, 214 no, 1 voting "present" and 19 not voting. These Democrats voted no on the McGovern/Lewis Amendment that would have finally cut off funding to the SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).
As the historic march flooded into the old colonial central plaza, there was a moment of great jubilation. From the side streets flowed legions of people from the feeder marchers, swelling the ranks of the main body. As the rivers of indigenous marchers merged, a tremendous roar filled the air as hundreds of smiling faces greeted each other like long lost brothers and sisters re-uniting-which of course in many respects, they were.
Hovering over the proposed immigration bill is the cloud of ethnic cleansing. When we think of ethnic cleansing we think Darfur, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Maybe its time we started thinking Hazleton, Pennsylvania and Whitewater, Wisconsin, and Farmer's Branch.
Fifty years ago, Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country to achieve independence. And fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, my father took my brother and me - just out of high school - to visit this new nation, and to interview Ghana's prime minister Kwame Nkrumah and the other shining lights of the Pan-African independence movement.
With hundreds of thousands of Latino-led immigrants marching in the streets for family reunification and legalization, and similar numbers of anti-immigrant groups lobbying their representatives, the recent "grand compromise" between Democrats and Republicans is not simply about immigration and labor policy. It deals with the heart of who is considered American.
Throughout the process of increasing voter and citizen participation and electoral democracy, the Venezuelan opposition and their allies in the U.S. press have told us that authoritarianism was just around the corner. They now say it has arrived.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019