Features

WHY RUSSELL ‘MAROON’ SHOATZ MUST BE RELEASED FROM SOLITARY CONFINEMENT

An interview with Theresa Shoatz and Matt Meyer

by Angola 3 News

This month, a 30-day action campaign was launched demanding the release of Russell “Maroon” Shoatz from solitary confinement, where he has been held for over 23 consecutive years—and 28 of the last 30 years in Pennsylvania prisons. On April 8, when the campaign began, Maroon’s legal team sent a letter to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PA DoC), demanding his release from solitary confinement and promising litigation against the PA DoC if he is not transferred to general population by May 8.

The action campaign describes Maroon as “a former leader of the Black Panthers and the Black freedom movement, born in Philadelphia in 1943 and originally imprisoned in January 1972 for actions relating to his political involvement. With an extraordinary thirty-plus years spent in solitary confinement… Maroon’s case is one of the most shocking examples of US torture of political prisoners, and one of the most egregious examples of human rights violations regarding prison conditions anywhere in the world. His ‘Maroon’ nickname is, in part, due to his continued resistance—which twice led him to escape confinement; it is also based on his continued clear analysis, including recent writings on ecology and matriarchy.”

Writing that Maroon “has not had a serious rule violation for more than two decades,” the campaign argues that he has actually been “targeted because of his work as an educator and because of his political ideas; his time in solitary began just after he was elected president of an officially-sanctioned prison-based support group. This targeting is in violation of his basic human and constitutional rights.”

LOOKING FOR GANDHIS IN MEXICO

by Jens Erik Gould, Waging Nonviolence

New president, new ministers, new strategies. Same bloodshed. It has never been more obvious that the current approach to reducing Mexico's drug-related violence does not work.

Many of the Mexicans who voted for President Enrique Peña Nieto last year hoped he would fulfill his campaign promise to slow the carnage that has killed tens of thousands of people over the past six years. Not long after he took power, though, gunmen gang-raped six female tourists from Spain, more than a dozen members of a popular band were found dead and a police chief in a border city disappeared. Last month, a shooting killed seven people at a Cancún bar and two federal police officers were fatally shot on the border in Ciudad Juárez.

CURVARADO HUMANITARIAN ZONE

Colombian Communities Reclaim Land and Life
from the Paramilitary-Business Alliance

by James Bargent, Toward Freedom

The first of the displaced people to return to their homes in Curvarado, north Colombia found the forests they had known cut down, the rivers and streams diverted and the native wildlife long gone. It was a desert, they say—not of sand but of African-palm and cattle ranches.

Standing in the shadows behind the palm businesses and ranchers that had taken over the region were the same paramilitaries that had forced them from their homes several years before.

But still the people came. They built new communities known as “Humanitarian Zones,” which are now legally recognized as neutral zones where all armed actors, legal and illegal are prohibited from entering. They also began the process of reclaiming the land exhausted by the agri-business onslaught, dividing recovered territory into “Biodiversity Zones.”

PALESTINIANS AND THE SYRIAN REVOLUTION

Lessons from the Fight against Fascism

by Talal Alyan, +972 Magazine

The lapse of support for the Syrian revolution amongst some segments of the Arab left will in retrospect be regarded as another failure to stray from party vanguards. Palestinians have once again found themselves being used as props for political causes they neither endorse nor hold any sympathy for. The latest instance being the pro-Assad camp that has worked tirelessly to link the Palestinian issue with the Assad regime.

VENEZUELA’S DEBT TO INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

What the Boliviarian Revolution Owes the Yukpa and Bari

by Sybila Tabra and Jorge Agurto, Servindi

Amid the homages that pay tribute to the late Hugo Chávez, we cannot forget the historical debt that the Venezuelan state has to the territorial claims of the Yukpa and Bari peoples, whose leader, Sabino Romero, was brutally assassinated March 3 by sicarios (hired killers) that respresent the interests of various sectors that occupy their ancestral territories.

TRANS-ATLANTIC PARTNERSHIP TRADE PACT

Duplicates Secretive Trans-Pacific Trade Pact

by Pete Dolack, Systemic Disorder

Neoliberalism knows no borders, so perhaps it should not come as a bolt out of the blue that the United States and European Union are set to negotiate a "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership."

It might be thought that the Obama administration would have its hands full with the ongoing, top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership talks, but it seems that much can be done in the absence of any pesky oversight. It might be thought that European Union officials would have their hands full with their series of financial crises, but it appears this is an irresistible opportunity to safeguard austerity.

PLANET EARTH: NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE

by Karl Grossman, Common Dreams

With the second anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster this week, with North Korea having just threatened a “pre-emptive nuclear attack” against the United States and a US senator saying this would result in “suicide” for North Korea, with Iran suspected of moving to build nuclear weapons, with the continuing spread of nuclear technology globally, the future looks precarious as to humankind and the atom.

Can humanity at this rate make it through the 21st Century?

ANARCHISM AND THE ARAB UPRISINGS

An Interview with Mohammed Bamyeh

by Joshua Stephens, Toward Freedom

Spontaneity, largely horizontal organization, and a suspicion toward explicit political leadership have all been signature components of what’s referred to as the Arab Spring. This has been the case since the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution—regardless of the regimes that have resulted from the power vacuums left in their wake. Yet very little of the particularities or the historical forces driving these uprisings captured the imagination of or spoke to left anti-authoritarians in the west, until the appearance of a western-style black bloc in Cairo on the two-year anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. That contradiction, and a sudden gaze cast—particularly on Egypt—pose rather unsettling questions about representation, and a slouch toward Orientalism.

MARX AND EXTRACTIVISM IN LATIN AMERICA

by Joan Martínez Alier, EcoPortal.net

President Rafael Correa of Ecuador asks when and where Marx criticizes mega-mining. In various interviews, Correa, the mouthpiece of mega-mining and the expansion of oil exploitation, has asked, “Let’s see, señores marxistas, where was Marx opposed to the exploitation of non-renewable resources?” The response is easy. Marx and Engels criticized predatory capitalism, even if (in my opinion) we cannot make a proto-ecologist critique a fundamental pillar of their work, which was more focused in an analysis of the exploitation of salaried workers and its consequences for the dynamics of capitalism.

CAN VIGILANTE JUSTICE SAVE MEXICO?

by Dudley Althaus, Global Post

AYUTLA DE LOS LIBRES, Mexico — For almost a month now, hundreds of masked men wielding old shotguns, rifles, revolvers and machetes have claimed to be the law in the rugged mountains outside the faded resort of Acapulco.

Manning roadblocks and patrolling by the truckload, these citizen posses have been rounding up accused drug dealers, rapists, killers and rustlers under the wincing but winking watch of state and federal security forces.

TUNISIA ON RAZOR’S EDGE

After the Assassination of Chokri Belaid
by Kevin Anderson, International Marxist-Humanists

The assassination of leftist leader Chokri Belaid on February 6, apparently by Islamists, has brought into the open the long-simmering conflict that has pitted the ruling Islamist Ennahda Party against progressives, trade unionists, and secularists, who have staged the first general strike in 40 years and the largest street demonstrations since the 2011 revolution. – Editors

STRUGGLE FOR LAND AND WATER IN THE ANDES

Campesinos Stand Up to the Mineral Oligarchy

by Bill Weinberg, WIN Magazine

In what has become an emblematic struggle against government plans to open peasant lands to mineral interests throughout the sierras of Peru, local campesinos continue to hold strikes and protests in the northern region of Cajamarca—in defiance of a state of emergency and a heavy presence of army and National Police troops.

The months-long campaign to halt the mega-scale Conga gold mine high in Cajamarca’s alpine zone—which Colorado-based Newmont Mining hopes to develop with Peruvian partners and investment from the World Bank—cost five lives last July 3 and 4, when government troops opened fire on protesters in the rural towns of Celendín and Bambamarca. The youngest of the fallen was only 17 years old.

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