http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/ Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:54:30 CEST Sat, 31 Jul 2010 11:54:30 CEST http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8539 A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media. Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by the French press agency AFP which informed its limited US readership that the meeting participants had decided that Venezuela and Chile would be heading ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8538 I met up with Luis Macas in his office at the Instituto Científico de Culturas Indígenas (Scientific Institute of Indigenous Cultures, ICCI) in Quito, on July 14, 2010. Macas, arguably the most renowned indigenous leader in Ecuador, was born in 1951 in Saraguro, in the Province of Loja. A lawyer by training, he is currently executive director of ICCI. Macas is an ex-President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and former congressional deputy (in the late 1990s) ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8537 In spring 2000, the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia rose up against the privatization of their water, forcing out the US based corporation, Bechtel, and Bolivia’s neo-liberal government to back down. The rebellion opened up new political space in Bolivia, catalyzing the most powerful, radical, visionary mass movements and mobilizations on the planet. My friend and collaborator, Mona Caron, a public muralist from San Francisco, and I spent six weeks in Cochabamba, a city in central Bolivia, duri ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8536 “These people are gringos who are coming here with NGOs. Take it somewhere else. These people’s stomachs are full enough”, said the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, in reference to the protesters who belong to the National Confederation of the Indigenous in Ecuador (CONAIE) [1]. Evo Morales said almost the same thing: “Since the Right can’t find arguments for opposing the process of change, it’s using rural, indigenous or original people leaders who have been paid off in special favors by NG ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8535 At a June 5 meeting of coca farmers in Cochabamba, Bolivian president Evo Morales threatened to expel the U.S. government\'s primary foreign assistance organization, USAID, from Bolivia. Morales accused USAID of lending financial support to organizations that oppose his government and for inciting civil unrest. On July 8, in a show of independence from foreign influence, the mayors of the northern Pando department expelled the agency from their territory, but to date, Morales\' threats have not ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8534 A transcendent fact has happened in the multicultural State of Bolivia. The mayors of the municipalities of the autonomous region of Pando, in the Bolivian Amazon, decided to expel from their jurisdictions the various NGOs, foundations and companies operating in this area with funding from the Agency of Cooperation of the United States (USAID in its acronym in English) noting that these entities \"are those that generate internal conflicts within the country, interfering in our political process ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8533 As of this writing, the hunger strikers camped out in Mexico City’s main plaza are up to Day 86 of their protest, and deteriorating health has led many of them to abandon the encampment. With little sign the government is interested in negotiating, it remains to be seen if the hunger strikers will get any resolution of their demands, or if one or more of them will die in their frustrated efforts. Their plight erupted October 11th, 2009; in the early morning hours after the match in which Mexi ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8532 Following Colombian accusations before the Organisation of American States (OAS) yesterday that Venezuela is “protecting” its guerrillas, Chavez announced that Venezuela would break off diplomatic relations with Colombia and withdraw its ambassador. Venezuelan institutions and international social organisations have expressed their support for Venezuela, while the U.S has supported Colombia’s proposal to the OAS. President Hugo Chavez and various other government leaders have justified the mo ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8531 President Chavez ordered maximum alert on Venezuela’s border with Colombia after the Uribe administration made grave accusations against Venezuela claiming the Chavez government harbors terrorists and terrorist training camps. The outgoing government of Alvaro Uribe in Colombia gave a shameful presentation before member states of the Organization of American States (OAS) on Thursday, reminiscent of Colin Powell’s “weapons of mass destruction” power point evidence presented in 2003 before the ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8530 The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela is the focal point of a political shift to the left that has affected most of the Latin American continent for just over a decade. For years now, we have heard denunciations of the nation and its president, Hugo Chávez, from TV personalities like Glenn Beck and Pat Robertson to establishment figures like George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all of whom liken the nation to a military dictatorship. It\'s no good pointing out to these types that the U.S actually ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8524 I spoke with Alberto Acosta, ex-Minister of Energy and Mines, and ex-President of the Constituent Assembly, in his Quito office on July 8, 2010. Jeffery R. Webber: In a few words, can you describe your political formation and political trajectory? Alberto Acosta: I’m an economist. I’ve worked as an international consultant and as a university professor. I’ve been an advisor to social movements, to the indigenous movement. I’ve been involved in various struggles in the last few years which ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8523 The following is an excerpt from the foreward I wrote to the English edition of Raúl Zibechi’s book, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, translated by Ramor Ryan and recently published by AK Press. Dispersing Power, Zibechi’s first book translated into English, reports on and analyzes social struggles and indigenous community organizing in and around El Alto, Bolivia. I hope this is the first of many of Zibechi\'s books that are translated into English. If you donate $ ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8522 By hosting the People’s World Conference on Climate Change, the Bolivian government offered much-needed leadership in opposition to the majority of the world’s corporate-sponsored governments. The agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth which emerged from the conference is a significant step forward in thinking and planning for the future of human society and nailing the real problems we face. It states: The corporations and governments of the so-called ‘developed’ count ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8521 Ecuador\'s anti-mining and indigenous movements are denouncing renewed attempts by the Correa Administration to criminalize dissent. Over thirty people, including top leaders of the national indigenous movement, are being investigated for allegations including terrorism and sabotage as a result of their participation in protests related to controversies over gold and copper mining, as well as water and indigenous rights. President of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador ( ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8520 Based on a presentation delivered May 1st at the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Arlington, VA. Overt breaches of electoral democracy occurred in several countries in June 2009. Two cases were especially noteworthy: the June 12 presidential election in Iran in which the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was widely accused of electoral fraud, and the June 28 military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. Exactly what happened in the case of Iran—that is, the extent of the fraud and ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8518 On June 27, the streets of Tegucigalpa were oddly quiet. The suddenly sparse police presence contrasted with the rest of the year, and reminded many Hondurans of the eerie calm preceding last year\'s military coup. The build-up to the anniversary of the June 28, 2009 military ouster of democratically-elected president Manuel Zelaya has been the source of extensive public and private reflection in the country. Today—in stark contrast to previous years—human rights, militarization, the two-part ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8517 The U.S. State Department is secretly funneling millions of dollars to Latin American journalists, according to documents obtained in June under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The 20 documents released to this author—including grant proposals, awards, and quarterly reports—show that between 2007 and 2009, the State Department’s little-known Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor channeled at least $4 million to journalists in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela through the Pan America ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8516 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed figures on Sunday that he said show the great strides the Bolivarian Revolution is making in improving and protecting the health and well-being of children and older people. Chavez said that in the last 10 years the government has given out a million pensions to retired workers worth in total Bs. 67.8 billion, around Bs. 678 million per year. According to the president, this is a sharp increase in performance compared alongside the governments of t ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8515 The dire threat of Iran is widely recognized to be the most serious foreign policy crisis facing the Obama administration. General Petraeus informed the Senate Committee on Armed Services in March 2010 that \"the Iranian regime is the primary state-level threat to stability\" in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility, the Middle East and Central Asia, the primary region of U.S. global concerns. The term \"stability\" here has its usual technical meaning: firmly under U.S. control. In Ju ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8514 Markets subjugate ecology, abominate personality, breed poverty, and require gross inequality. War, what is it good for? Not people. Capitalism? It makes accumulation the goal of life and caring a token of failure. But, another world is possible nearly everyone replies. Really, what is it? We want the world and we want it now. Yes, but kind of world do you prefer? Well, when I am asked that question about economics—and it is a good question about culture and kinship, and polity too—I answer, ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8513 Nelson Dávila is not your usual diplomat. He does not come from a comfortable bureaucratic position but rather from the revolutionary struggle, from the struggle of students and teachers and ultimately the process of building the Bolivarian revolution. Even before the start of the revolution he had been under the command of President Hugo Chávez. In the 1960s he was involved in the guerrilla struggle. During the ‘60s and up to 1974, universities were attacked and closed down by “democratic” gove ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8512 A high-level meeting in Venezuela earlier this month, in which senior Latin American and Caribbean diplomats from 32 countries discussed the creation of a new forum for regional concertation, slipped under the radar of the entire U.S. media. Indeed, the only English-language report on the event that appeared in the mainstream media was filed by the French press agency AFP which informed its meager US readership that the meeting participants had decided that Venezuela and Chile would be heading ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8511 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stressed that his administration\'s commitment to pensioners caused it to spend more money in one year than previous governments in four decades. While attending a ceremony for delivering savings account booklets to senior citizens, Chávez, noted that while in the last decade a million grants were delivered, during the past 22 years the so-called Fourth Republic only made 387,007 grants. \"In these years we invested approximately 67.8 billion Bolivars (abou ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8510 Humankind will suffer annual losses of \'natural capital\' valued at between 1.3 to 3.1 trillion Euros, if \'business as usual\' deforestation and land use change continue, according to United Nations\' latest estimates. These stupendous figures exceed the total financial capital lost to Wall Street and City banks during 2008, their worst year in history. The calculation has been made by the TEEB project of the UN Environment Programme\'s Green Economy Initiative in the lead-up to the 10th C ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8509 International migration is not, strictly speaking, a new phenomenon. However, in recent decades, the ascendancy of the global economy and the (short-lived?) triumph of neoliberal economics produced a parallel ascendancy in the rate of international immigration. Specifically, in Mexico the effects of neoliberal structural-adjustment programs in the 1980s, NAFTA in the 1990s, and the ongoing Security and Prosperity Partnership have produced successive waves of Mexican migrants to the United States ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8508 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez declared the performance of the nationalized Banco de Venezuela unprecedented, one year after it passed formally into public hands. At an event last Thursday to commemorate the first anniversary of the nationalization, Chavez proclaimed, “I don’t know if there has been any experience like it before in Venezuela of such growth. That means a lot of things. This throws out all of that information that is emitted from the laboratories of psychological warfare that ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8507 With votes secured from the official National Liberation Party (PLN), the Libertarian Movement, and Justo Orozco, the evangelical congressman from the Costa Rican Renovation party, on July 1st, the Costa Rican Congress authorized the entry into that country of 46 warships from the U.S. Navy, 200 helicopters and combat aircraft and 7,000 Marines. While the various published stories do not allow a clear view of the decision’s origins, the limited evidence available seems to indicate that it wa ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8506 The governments of Venezuela and the Netherlands committed themselves to respecting territorial sovereignty on their maritime and air borders, during a meeting between their foreign ministers in this capital. Foreign Ministers Nicolas Maduro and Maxime Jacques Verhagen issued a joint communiqué in which they agreed to set up a commission to review aspects of air operations, according to a press release from the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry. Recently, Caracas accused the air force of the Net ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8505 The different explanations given for Africa’s current food crisis seem to miss the real causes of the problem. Mamadou Goita does not believe that the crisis is of an economic nature. Rather, it is the endpoint of the dismantling of Africa’s agricultural sector and its linking to the international market and brutal liberalism. Based on an analysis of the political choices that have contributed to the current situation, notably the structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s, Goita proposes sol ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8504 Uruguayan President José Mujica is expected to attend a free official concert on Sunday at the Adela Reta National Auditorium to celebrate the 180th anniversary of the Constitution\'\'s Oath of Allegiance. Mujica will be accompanied by his wife, Senator Lucia Topolanski, and the program will include performances by the choir and the symphonic orchestra of the Radio and Entertainment System (SODRE), conducted by maestro Federico Garcia Vigil, with works by Mozart, Verdi, Bizet, Puccini, Rossin ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8503 As evidenced by USAID administrator Rajiv Shah\'s recent speech to the US Global Leadership Coalition (USGLC), the US and the Green Revolution\'s \'solutions\' for African agriculture remain more of the same, rooted in a corporate-funded, GMO-oriented and market-based system designed entirely in the interests of Western business. While US development aid fasts becomes simply \'an investment subsidised by US taxpayers with high returns for US corporations\', African farmers\' groups such as COPAG ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8502 In the middle of the deepest crisis that the capitalist system has ever seen, when it’s already showing its cruellest face, when anger and sometimes impotence spreads among those of us with years fighting and predicting the consequences, the lights of hope that show us that another world is possible pass us by unnoticed. Venezuela hasn’t had too many “lovers” among the left. It has always been an uncomfortable process for the organisations of the “institutional left”. Not to speak of the “so ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8501 Imagine if Barack Obama, upon taking office in January 2009, had decided to deliver on his campaign promise to “end business as usual in Washington so we can bring about real change.” Imagine if he had rejected the architects of the pro-Wall Street policies that led to the economic collapse - such as Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and the stable of former Goldman Sachs employees running the Treasury Department - and instead appointed Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stigli ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8500 Venezuela’s principal union federation, the National Union of Workers (UNETE), recently circulated a document calling for broader nationalizations, a revolutionary labor law, and a radical shift toward a democratic, worker-led management model to stave off state bureaucracy. The statement was released earlier this month and coincided with a series of worker assemblies and worker education programs initiated by unions in state-owned and private companies, indicating that the movement for worke ... http://www.forumdesalternatives.org/EN/readarticle.php?article_id=8499 The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) was established on December 14, 2004 by Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. Tired of failed neo-liberal initiatives and Washington’s unfettered political leadership in Latin America, Venezuela and Cuba sought to create a regional alliance committed to social, political, and economic cooperation and equality. These changes were to add up to nothing less than a radical transformation in the way the region considers itself. Today, ALBA forthri ...