When peasant farmers in Cacahuatepec set out to work in their fields in January 2003 they found heavy equipment bulldozing down the corn, fruit trees, and fences they depend on for survival. The indigenous Nahuatl communities of this region in the mountains above Acapulco demanded an explanation from Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission and for months received no answers.
On April 8, President Felipe Calderon dropped a political bomb on the Mexican political scene. The Senate received an executive initiative that would fundamentally change the structure and operations of the oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex). Key operations of the state-owned enterprise would pass into private hands.
In their contributions to the Foreign Policy In Focus strategic dialogue on Cuba, Samuel Farber discusses the problematic economic reforms and nonexistent political reforms in Life After Fidel while Saul Landau looks at the fragile achievements of the Cuban revolution and the hostile U.S. policy toward the island in Cuba: The Struggle Continues. Here, they respond to each other.
Fidel Castro’s official resignation as head of the Cuban state, although expected, was a turning point that has raised major questions concerning Cuba’s future. His younger brother Raúl, who now officially assumed the highest position in the country, had already “temporarily” replaced the commander in chief on July 31, 2006 after Fidel Castro stepped aside due to a serious illness, the nature of which was declared a state secret.
[Note: This essay was drawn from FPIF analyst Mark Engler’s new book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy, published by Nation Books.]
R. Victoria Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is a graduate of Vassar College, Princeton University, and the George Washington University – where, respectively, she studied Romance languages and literatures, Middle Eastern culture and literature, and English literature and literary criticism. Today, she teaches in the English department at Howard University. Her most recent publication is World Poetry from 1900 to the Present (NY: Facts on File, 2007). Here she talks with FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller about new black literature in Britain and its take on empire.
On the first day, Colombian military and police forces launched an attack on an encampment of the Colombian guerrilla group Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in Ecuadorian territory, killing over 20 people.
Victories are within sight for people in a growing number of nations where communities that host U.S. foreign military bases have long fought to get rid of them.
The U.S. base at Guantanamo has been called many things. The “gulag of our time” (Amnesty International General Secretary Irene Khan, May 2005). “The key strategic intelligence platform in the war on terror” (Charles Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, January 2007). The “legal equivalent of outer space” (unnamed Administration official). The right place for “the worst of a very bad lot” (Vice President Dick Cheney, January 2002) and for the “most dangerous, best trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth” (former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, January 2002).
Fidel Castro’s decision to officially relinquish his elected post as president of Cuba once again defied the conventional, but stagnant "wisdom" of U.S. pundits and many Liberal, Right, and Left ideologues and politicians alike.