Features

HONDURAS: DRUG WAR AS COUNTERINSURGENCY?

by Bill Weinberg, High Times

Recent headlines from Honduras give an uneasy sense of deja vu for the bad old days of the 1980s, when the US and its local proxy forces waged brutal counter-insurgency wars across Central America.

Residents of Ahuas village, on the remote Miskito Coast, took to the streets May 11 to protest a deadly military-style drug raid, demanding the US DEA leave their territory—and putting government offices to the torch to make their point. Miskito Indian leaders issued a statement declaring the DEA persona non grata in the territory.

MILITARY INTERVENTION IN MALI

“Nothing But Their Eyes to Cry With”

by Stefan Simanowitz, Toward Freedom

This June, following a short but bloody battle, Islamic fighters ousted the Tuareg National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) from the city of Gao. After a hiatus of nearly five months, fighting has again erupted between the MNLA and fighters from the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJWA). On Friday, amid conflicting reports, there was fighting near Mali’s border with Niger and Burkina Faso and more skirmishes took place on Monday. The MNLA claimed to have launched an offensive aimed at regaining the Gao region while the MUJWA have said they have attacked the MNLA and have taken control of the town of Menaka. While the situation is currently unclear, even if MNLA forces suffered heavier losses, the fact that they have been engaged in fighting with Islamists has added a new dimension to the complex conflict in the northern Mali.

THE DESCENT OF THE COLOMBIAN ARMY

“Take No Prisoners” in Practice

by John Lindsay-Poland, Fellowship of Reconciliation

A new and long-awaited report on civilian killings by the Colombian military from 2002 to 2010 argues convincingly that the spike of state violence during those years grew directly from the policies of “Democratic Security” that attempted to militarize all Colombian society.

The study was produced by the Human Rights and Humanitarian Law Observatory of the Colombia-Europe-United States Coordination (known by its acronym in Spanish, CCEEU), a coalition of more than 200 Colombian human rights organizations and their counterparts in Europe and the US. Twenty of these organizations have come together to document, analyze and carry out judicial strategies on extrajudicial executions. The coalition has painstakingly compiled records of 3,512 reported extrajudicial killings from 2002 to 2010, during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe.

HAITI: HIDDEN COSTS OF THE INDUSTRIAL ZONE

by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report

On Oct. 22 Haitian president Michel Martelly hosted the official opening of the Caracol Industrial Park, a 617-acre tax-exempt factory complex in Haiti’s rural northeastern corner that promoters say will bring as many as 65,000 jobs to the country.

The Haitian president was joined by an array of foreign officials and celebrities. The United States, which invested $124 million in the project, was represented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Another guest, former US president Bill Clinton, now the United Nations special envoy for Haiti, was a major promoter of the Caracol facility.

PERU’S SENDERO LUMINOSO BACK —AND THE “DIRTY WAR”?

by Bill Weinberg, Al Jazeera

According to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission established ten years ago, some 70,000 people—mainly indigenous peasants—were killed or forcibly “disappeared” in Peru’s war against the Maoist guerillas of the Sendero Luminoso between 1980 and 2000. Forensic teams are still exhuming mass graves in mountain villages. Now, following April’s hostage crisis in the Peruvian rainforest, there is an uneasy sense of deja vu in the Andean nation.

THE TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP TRADE PACT

More Draconian Than NAFTA

by Peter Dolack, Systemic Disorder

Imagine a world in which which labor safeguards, safety rules and environmental regulations will be struck down because a multi-national corporation’s profits might be affected. A world in which measures to reign in financial speculation are illegal. A world in which the task of governments, codified in law, is to maximize corporate profits.

Imagine a world in which corporations can bypass national laws and courts when they are in a dispute with a government, and instead can have their dispute adjudicated by a closed tribunal controlled by their lawyers.

Unfortunately, the above is not dystopian science fiction; it is the reality of the top-secret Trans-Pacific Partnership. If you like NAFTA, you will love the TPP.

BEHIND THE CHICAGO CONNECTION

Does a Mexican Drug Kingpin Have a Case Against the DEA?

by Andrew Kennis and Jason McGahan, Time Out Chicago

The abandoned car of Margarito Flores Sr., a resident of Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, was discovered in western Mexico’s Sinaloa desert in 2009. A message directed to his twin sons, Pedro and Margarito, was stuck to its windshield: tell those fuckers to shut up or we are going to send you his head.

The Flores twins, 31-year-old Chicago drug traffickers, had warned their father not to return to Mexico, and especially not to the drug-war-torn state of Sinaloa, home to the Sinaloa cartel, which US intelligence considers one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world.

Margarito Sr. was never heard from again.

PERUVIANS STAND UP TO NEWMONT MINING

by Bill Weinberg, The Progressive

The Newmont Mining Corporation, based in Colorado, has embroiled itself in a controversial project in northern Peru that locals say threatens their water and their future. Peasants and workers in the region have engaged in mass demonstrations and general strikes, and the president of Peru has responded by declaring a state of emergency. At stake is the economic model of aggressive resource extraction lubricated by the new free trade agreement with Washington.

GUANTÁNAMO DETAINEES: THE “OTHER” VICTIMS OF 9-11

by David Frakt, JURIST Forum

On September 11, 2012, as the nation remembered those who lost their lives in the horrific and senseless attacks of 9-11, the government released information about the death of Guantánamo detainee Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. His story exemplifies how many of the detainees are also victims, not of terrorism, but of the war on terror.

As a result of the Bush administration’s overreaction to the actions of a small terrorist network, 787 men have been detained at Guantánamo Bay since it opened in January 2002—only a handful with any connection to the attacks on September 11, 2001. Many detainees, including several later proven to be innocent, have been subjected to torture. Most were subjected at least to inhumanity and abuse, especially during the early years when our government did not recognize that the Geneva Convention requirements of humane treatment applied to detainees. Of the over 600 detainees released, none have ever received compensation of any kind from the US government, or even so much as an apology or acknowledgment that they were wrongfully imprisoned.

YEAR TWO OF THE ARAB REVOLUTIONS

by Kevin Anderson, US Marxist-Humanists

Beset by the twin dangers of Islamism and nominally secular authoritarianism, the Arab revolutions continue to shake up the region as they move through their second year. This essay, which first appeared in Logos, Vol. 11, Issues 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2012), is based upon a presentation to a Convention of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization in Chicago on July 14, 2012 — Editors

MEXICAN PEACE CARAVAN OCCUPIES WALL STREET

Opposing the “Drug War” on Both Sides of the Border

by David L. Wilson, New York Indymedia

The well-known Mexican poet and author Javier Sicilia stood on the steps of New York’s Federal Hall a few feet from George Washington’s statue on a hot, humid Friday afternoon and pointed across Wall Street to the Stock Exchange. “That building,” he called out in Spanish, “is a symbol of the finance capital that launders money.”

Surprised tourists, office workers returning from lunch, and a contingent of police on motor scooters watched from the street below. “That building,” Sicilia went on, in the low-key style of someone more accustomed to poetry readings than to political speeches, “is a symbol of the finance capital that profits off narco-trafficking.”

GOLDCORP ON TRIAL

First International People’s Health Tribunal Held in Guatemala

by Beth Geglia and Cyril Mychalejko, Toward Freedom

“A few years ago, our people, the people you can see around you, we began to realize what was happening,” Maudilia López told the hundreds gathered to attend the first ever People’s Health Tribunal in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, Guatemala. The event was packed, even as some attendees spilled out of the entrance of the crowded room, others shuffled to find a spot.

The International Peoples’ Health Tribunal (IPHT) took place on the second floor of the parish hall of San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a municipality in Guatemala’s western Highlands of roughly 60,000 people, a majority of whom are Maya-Mam. San Miguel Ixtahuacán is the main site of the Marlin mine, an open-pit gold mine that is one of the most important projects of Canadian mining giant Goldcorp Inc.

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