It's good to be with media makers who don't believe that climate change is just a rumor, don't think immigrants coming to the U.S. for a better life should be turned into criminals, and didn't need over three years to figure out that the administration manipulated public opinion and distorted reality to go to war in the Middle East.
Bolivia has Evo Morales. Mexico has the Zapatista movement. Argentina is Kirchner's. Where do social movements stop when facing progressiveness that restores power? Are these governments the triumph, or the downfall of these movements? Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican with vast experience in Bolivia, visited Buenos Aires to talk about these themes with local movements and with LaVaca.org, offering a deep look to look at the continent in its own mirror.
"Think Globally-Act Locally," read the fading bumper stickers on thousands of cars and guitar cases across the United States. This influential statement has defined a popular activist strategy that politically connects our local movements with those in other countries. But what does this idea mean and where has it gotten those of us working toward social change in our communities and across the world? How does the challenge to think globally and act locally play out in our everyday lives?
Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, has been forced from his comfortable exile in Nigeria by growing international pressures and cooperation between Liberia's new president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo. Taylor has now been arrested for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual slavery, mutilation and sending children into combat. Taylor
On January 21, on a hill outside of La Paz, a traditional ceremony marked both a major shift in Bolivian politics and a milestone for the growing New Left in Latin America. At Tiwanaku, a site of pre-Incan ruins significant to the country's indigenous populations, Evo Morales, barefoot and dressed in a red tunic, received a silver and gold staff from leaders of the Aymara people.Photo: J. Bigwood
Houzan Mahmoud is a co-founder of the Iraqi Freedom Congress (IFC), a new initiative to build a democratic, secular and progressive alternative to both the US occupation and political Islam in Iraq.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019