In the middle of the modern, concrete city of Caracas, Venezuela, Noralí Verenzuela is standing in a garden dressed in jeans and work boots. She is the director of the Organopónico Bolivar I, the first urban, organic garden to show its green face in the heart of the city of Caracas, Venezuela.
In this post-9/11 "Era of Permanent War Crimes," U.S. antiwar activists have not yet been able to create a U.S. antiwar movement to end the U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq or the U.S. government support for the Israeli war machine.
Cindy Sheehan, the Vacaville mother of a fallen soldier who reinvigorated the anti-war movement in the U.S. last year during her vigil outside Bush's ranch near Crawford, Texas, is planning another "Camp Casey" this August when George W. Bush takes his annual vacation.
For five weeks in the late spring of 2006, we toured the eastern half of the United States to promote two books–"Letters From Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out" (Nation Books, 2005) and "Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity" (AK Press, 2006)–and to get at least a cursory impression of sectors of the movement in this country. We viewed each of the twenty-eight events not only as book readings but as conscious political conversations about the state of the country, the world, and the movement.
While hitchhiking across Paraguay a few years ago, I met welcoming farmers who let me camp in their backyards. I eventually arrived in Ciudad del Este, known for its black markets and loose borders. Now the city and farmers I met are caught in the crossfire of the US military's "war on terror."
Today's street gang killers in Somalia were barely 10 years old when I first came to Mogadishu in 1988. Since heavy fighting broke out again in Mogadishu in early May 2006, far more than 300 people have been killed and many more have been injured. Somalia has been the focus of repeated US attention. One might have thought that after the complete failure of the "Black Hawk Down" or officially the "Operation Restore Hope" mission in 1993, the US would have decided to call it quits in Somalia. They have not. (1)
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019