South America

Belem is the Brazilian city at the mouth of the Amazon. Unlike its slummy counterpart, Kinshasa, at the mouth of the Congo, it’s full of resplendent streets with beautiful nineteenth century houses. It has squares and market places full of cafes, fountains and life. The large city grew up shipping rubber from the Amazon forest, which begins on its doorstep. This made it wealthy. One can see the beautiful baroque Theatre of Peace, a fluffy pink building where Anna Pavlova danced. On the main square, ornate with pavements of black and white quartz, is the Hotel Grao Para where Xavier Cugat and his orchestra would play and Zsa Zsa Gabor would stop over on her way, by propeller plane, on the slow flight to Rio. Then there is the magnificent opera house which once attracted the best singers from Europe and North America. Now beautifully restored, it is attempting to...

Ab At The Transnational, we believe in diversity. And in the likelihood that world events are complex and can be seen from more than one – usually US/Western – perspective. You may have wondered why the, now retired, UN representative for Venezuela, the brilliant lawyer, humanist and poet, Alfred De Zayas, has not been used extensively as an authority of both Venezuela and international law? Well hardly because, like me, you had not heard of him, had you? That’s why we should be grateful to Abby Martin and The Empire Files for having given us this conversation. It debunks – in a fact-based and comprehensive, law-respecting manner – most of what you’ve been told and all of what, as of writing, 54 countries have done in support of the regime policies of the US rather than in support of Venezuela as a sovereign state. And of the UN and its...

Av Örjan Appelqvist 5:e februari 2019 Just nu bevittnar vi en samstämmig flod av artiklar till stöd för Juan Guaido som utnämnts sig själv till ”interimspresident” i Venezuela och som USA och dess allierade i Latinamerika sedan omedelbart förklarat som landets legitime president. En mängd stater i Europa har sedan följt i spåren även om de inte ännu officiellt brutit förbindelserna med president Maduro utan nöjt sig med att vädja om ”dialog” mellan regering och opposition med sikte på genomförande av ett nytt presidentval under internationell övervakning. Sveriges urikesminister Margot Wallström talar om att uppgiften nu är att ”återupprätta demokratin” och genomföra ”fria och tillförlitliga val”. Det låter ju resonabelt men i sak betyder det att man – utan att motivera sakligt – hävdar att det inte råder en demokratisk ordning i Venezuela och att genomförda val inte varit fria och tillförlitliga. Gäller det också det två val som oppositionen...

  From the time of its beginning as a nation state “Brazil has been a paradise for some, an endless hell for others, and for the rest, a kind of purgatory on earth.” So write two Brazilian historians, Lilla Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling, in their massive, newly published, volume on Brazil. They continue: “Brazil’s development was born of ambivalence and contrast. On the one hand it is a country with a high degree of social inequality and low rates of literacy, whereas on the other its electoral system is one of the most sophisticated and reliable in the world. Brazil has the second number of Facebook users in the globe. At the same time vast geographical regions lie abandoned, particularly in the north, where the chief means of transport is by rudimentary sailboats. Brazil has an advanced constitution which forbids any kind of discrimination, yet, in reality, silent and perverse...

In 1981 on the editorial page of the New York Times, I wrote a column showing that the mass atrocities against the Indian population of Guatemala were carried out under the direct orders of the then president, Fernando Lucas Garcia. His former vice-president, Francisco Villagran Kramer, had given me information that was incontrovertible evidence of the murders. I also showed how close was the relationship, financially and militarily, between the Guatemalan government and President Ronald Reagan’s government. At the time Regan was considered to be the “Teflon President”. No scandal stuck to him. Certainly not the evidence of a column in the New York Times. The reaction in Washington was zero. A brief while later, Amnesty International published a long report documenting an act of genocide. After a number of changes of government in Guatemala, President Efrain Rios Montt came to power. Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights,...

By Jonathan Power The Brazilians have an elected president. They must keep her. If Dilma Rosseff is pushed to resign democracy has failed. Two years ago she won re-election handsomely. That is the source of her mandate. From that she derives her legitimacy. The only thing that could topple her is if hard evidence emerges that she is crook- in her case supposedly stole millions of dollars from the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, of which she was once head of the board. Then Congress would be within its rights to discuss her impeachment. But there is no evidence of her personal corruption- although there is evidence aplenty that her party, The Workers’ Party, has received a lot of black money, not just from Petrobras. Brazil is not a parliamentary democracy. It is not necessary for her to have a majority in parliament to rule, anymore than Barack Obama does in...

s. In truth it is not difficult to be cynical about Brazil. It is a large land of both great potential and many lost opportunities- and yet whenever I visit it, as I have regularly over 40 years, I find the positive changes are immense. In my time I have seen growth rates year after year of 10% or more. I have seen the transformation of favelas- shanty towns- into solid working class housing. I have seen infant mortality rates plummet. (To capture the flavor of the lives of the poor a must read is the new top prize-winning novel, “Quarenta Dias” (Forty Days), written by Valeria Rezende, a nun.) And under Brazil’s last president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party I have seen the almost unbelievable- capitalist economic progress and socialist social progress storming ahead hand in hand. Right now Brazil is in the middle...

Bogotá, The accords were signed a week ago with still much work to do this coming half a year. 23 March 2016 is the deadline. However, are they peace accords? Or absence of violence eliminating “that other army”, for Weber’s state monopoly on ultima ratio regis, even strengthening the government’s army? That Western concept of peace practiced recently in Sri Lanka and Nepal, against LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and Maoists? Leaving untouched the problems that brought them into being unsolved? And the word “peace” violated, as “conflict”, saying “post-conflict”, as if nothing more to solve. Words matter; handle them with care. In all the Colombian conflict complexity, the focus is on only one conflict, between the violent parties:

. Guatemala on Sunday held a reasonably honest presidential election. But it is probably not the end of the brutal saga of the country- 36 years of continuous murder, mayhem, abductions, disappearances, rapes and genocide that have kept on rolling, chapter after chapter. Labour leaders, villagers and peasants, students and churchmen, journalists and human rights activists have been killed by death squads. This is a Harry Potter saga with bullets. Few countries have suffered as much as Guatemala. More people were killed in the 36 years of civil war than in all of the rest Latin America put together, more than in the civil wars in Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru and the bloody coup d’etats in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. A UN investigation in Guatemala reported that far more guerrillas had died than government forces, by a factor of 9. The Commission estimated that the number...

 In my columns, “The Year 2015-What Are We in For?”, I identified four unfolding, dramatic processes: the West will continue fighting unsuccessfully and violently to keep their world grip; Eurasia will expand and consolidate successfully and nonviolently; Islam will expand and consolidate partly violently; Latin America and Africa will expand and consolidate, spearheaded by Brazil, South Africa, BRICS. A third of the year 2015 has now passed; let us take stock. Headlines in the International New York Times tell the story: 18-19 April 2015: “U.S. is said to risk losing economic leadership”; “–a divided nation shedding hard-won clout”, “We’re withdrawing from the central place we had on the world stage”. And for the UK: 29 April: “Britain’s drift from the world stage looms over the vote”. These are statements about leadership, about being the center as a model to emulate; controlling world stage politics; not about economic growth. Losing leadership...

They made it, with constructive alternatives – the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Agreement–to the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those two parts of Bretton Woods were basic pillars in the economic infra-structure of the US Empire in the hands of the US Congress. Loans were disbursed in return for “structural adjustment” –privatization, budget cuts, devaluation, repatriation of profit, also against BRICS countries. US companies were commissioned for huge jobs serving local elites. Untold damage was done in spite of some recent changes in rhetoric. The USA used them to export the US economic–and with it the social, political, cultural, military–order through loans, grafting it upon social bodies that after some time rejected the implants as foreign and incompatible. Even a decaying order however brilliant it may have looked to the untrained eye as late as the 1990s. What remains today of that US “order” is...

Time to take stock. The shot in Sarajevo 100 years ago inspires narratives of 19-year old Gavrilo Princip killing the successor to the throne of an empire and his pregnant wife as the event unleashing mutual mass murder (INYT, FAZ 28-29 June 2014). Not the empire annexing Bosnia-Herzegovina on October 6, 1908 (Art. 25 of the 1878 Berlin Congress of “great powers”). Maybe the inhabitants did not like it? Moral of that stock-taking: watch out for terrorism, not for empires and occupation-colonialism; and protect leaders, not people. ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, alternatively translated as Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) comes up. TIME 30 June: The End of Iraq. Maybe Iraq – that highly artificial English colonial entity encasing Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds–never started? Like its French colonial neighbor Syria – adding Alawite Arabs, Christians, Jews...