América Latina & Caribe

there is this video on twitter of him in this speech

also the reuters article if you want to read about how israel was really sad and thought it is mean that he would say it

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration brought high hopes of reversing devastating environmental destruction. Will a new fossil fuel boom undermine promises for change?

With record-setting fires in the Amazon dominating headlines in recent years, the global environmental imaginary of Brazil often brings up scenes of deforestation, threats of tremendous biodiversity loss, and violent displacement driven by the cattle, forestry, and agribusiness industries. Now, on the heels of a wave of oil industry privatizations, pressure has mounted around the question of oil extraction in the Amazon. While deforestation often tops the national and international agenda, less present is the question of air pollution from the country’s oil, gas, and coal industries.

Care for the environment, however, seems to be part of Brazil’s social fabric, or what brings a lot of people together. In January 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned to power on a platform of socioeconomic change and environmental protection. His appointments of Marina Silva to head the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change and Sônia Guajajara to lead the new Ministry of Indigenous Peoples were especially promising.

But a strong governmental commitment to environmental issues has been lacking. Lula has faced strong criticism for his lack of firm opposition to congressional moves that diluted the powers of both ministries, stripping them of tools to protect water resources, prevent land grabbing, and slow deforestation.

Brazil’s oil production increased in 2022 to 3 million barrels per day, mostly from its deep-water offshore pre-salt oil fields. The energy minister recently announced a projected goal of producing 5.4 million barrels per day by 2029, which would elevate Brazil to being the fourth largest oil producer in the world and lock the country into a carbon-intensive energy model. Giant corporations like Total, Equinor, and Petronas are already reaping the profits. On December 13, the day after the COP28 climate summit ended, the Brazilian National Petroleum Agency (ANP) auctioned drilling rights to 602 exploration areas, several in buffer zones of protected areas in the Amazon that would impact Indigenous and quilombola territories. The state oil company Petrobras—despite being discredited in a sweeping corruption scandal that played out between about 2014 and 2018—is now suddenly positioned to become a major corporate player regionally and globally.

read more: https://nacla.org/brazil-crossroads-oil-gas

For a small farmer in Rio de Janeiro state, a private port catering to the fossil fuel industry has brought a decade-long struggle to remain on the land.

For several years, residents and small farmers in the Port of Açu region in northern Rio de Janeiro have been resisting the forced expropriation of their land. The small farmers note that only 10 percent of the land taken for the construction of the Port of Açu Industrial Complex is currently in use. They are also fighting for the company behind the port, Prumo Logística, to allow artisanal fishers to regain access to the Caruaru Reserve, which, due to the port’s expansion, ended up inside the Industrial Complex.

The Port of Açu was conceived in 2007 by EBX Group, an infrastructure conglomerate owned by businessman Eike Batista. During the company's financial crisis in 2013, EBX sold the project to the U.S.-based investment firm EIG Global Energy Partners. EIG controls the Brazilian holding company Prumo Logística, which now manages the Port of Açu. The port is strategically located for the oil and gas industry, as it is close to the Campos and Espírito Santo basins, both of which are sites of extensive offshore production.

According to the Port of Açu’s website, 30 percent of the country's oil exports pass through the port, which is also hosts the world's largest offshore support hub—with companies such as BP Marine, Vibra Energia, and Vast Infraestrutura operating servicing contracts with Shell, Total Energies, Petrobras, Equinor, and other companies. The port is also home to two combined-cycle thermoelectric power plants, GNA I and II, owned by Gas Natural Açu, and the private iron-ore mining terminal that serves the multinational company Anglo-American, the world’s largest producer of platinum.

Dona Noêmia Magalhães is a rural producer and representative of small farmers in the fifth district of São João da Barra in Rio de Janeiro and an active participant in the resistance against the port. She has recently received the Tiradentes Medal award, the highest honor given out by the state Legislative Assembly to those who serve the common good. In this interview, she discusses the port’s impacts on the community and her struggle to remain on the land and produce food, despite having suffered threats against her life as a result of her organizing.

I spoke with Magalhães over Zoom on October 6, 2023. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

read more: https://nacla.org/oil-few-brazil-export-ports

Felipe Gálvez's award-winning film Los Colonos delves into Chile’s brutal settler-colonial past, exposing the consequences of cultural extermination and resonating with Latin America's contemporary Indigenous struggles.

A t the southernmost tip of Earth, in the deepest Patagonian wilderness, Scottish lieutenant Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley) and his men navigate the vast unhospitable landscape at the behest of wealthy, Spanish landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). It’s 1893 and the reformist Chilean state is imposing its authority thousands of miles away from the modernized capital, Santiago de Chile. Governmental policy—to roll out agricultural development across the nation and stimulate the development of its furthest territories—has prompted a mass giveaway of land to Europeans willing to emigrate and bring their skills to the country.

Los Colonos, or The Settlers in English, directed by Felipe Gálvez Haberle, tells the story of the sociopolitical conflicts that emerged in the Patagonia during the mid-1850s as European settlers began arriving in large numbers. A small crew, led by Lieutenant MacLennan (Stanley) and Texan rancher Bill (Benjamin Westfall) who can “smell a Native a mile away,” has been hired to delineate a route for the livestock on the land gifted to Menéndez by the Chilean government. This seemingly simple task is met with fierce resistance by the land’s original inhabitants, the Selk’nam people. The men soon realize what is truly at stake and what the mission will involve.

MacLennan, an ambitious man hired for his military experience, needs a sharpshooter fast enough to react to the ambushes hampering his work. Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a mestizo local that has been captured and forced to work for the men, has all the skills MacLennan is looking for: an ability to communicate with the Indigenous locals and superb gun capabilities. After a selection process in which Segundo’s outstanding marksman skills outshines the other candidates, MacLennan orders Segundo to join him and ranger Bill on their assignment for Menéndez. They force Segundo into betraying his own people and assist in the repartition of his own ancestral land, a task that leads him to wrestle with his own conscious when forced to carry out the most heinous acts of violence.

read more: https://nacla.org/the-settlers-los-colonos-necessary-anatomy-genocide

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Buenos_Aires_Israeli_embassy_bombing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMIA_bombing

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Antonio_Olivera

This past week, federal authorities raided the home of Rio City Councilman Carlos Bolsonaro, son of former fascist President Jair Bolsonaro. (Interestingly, the Bolsonaros happened to have left to go fishing at 5 am shortly before the raid occurred).

As part of the investigation, the Brazilian federal police have revealed that the Brazilian intelligence agency ABIN worked with Israeli intelligence to spy on the electronic communications of over 30,000 Brazilian political dissidents, setting up a “parallel” agency to spy on political dissidents.

It has now been revealed that this group was used to spy on the ex-Rio state prosecutor Simone Sibolio, who was charged with leading the investigation into the assassination of Rio City Councilwoman Marielle Franco.

Sibolio left the prosecution in 2021, citing “federal interference” as making it impossible to investigate the case.

The gunman, who killed Marielle Franco, happened to have breakfast with Bolsonaro on the morning of the assassination in 2018 when Bolsonaro. At the time, Bolsonaro was a controversial Rio City Councilman with close ties to the paramilitary gangs that Marielle Franco was investigating as a Rio City Councilwoman.

Many questions linger in Brazil as to why the Bolsonaros just happened to take off on an early morning fishing trip right before federal police raided their home. Some suggest that they may have taken the fishing trip to destroy files.

read more: https://paydayreport.com/brazilian-intel-agency-spied-on-prosecutor-in-marielle-franco-case-teamsters-prez-settles-2-9-million-racial-discrimination-case-5000-minneapolis-teachers-walk-out/

Cuban revolutionary who founded the Rebel Army and one of its main leaders, together with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida, during the National Liberation War against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was also known as "El Comandante del Pueblo", "El Señor de la Vanguardia", "Héroe de Yaguajay" or "el héroe del sombrero alón" was an outstanding revolutionary of humble extraction and wide popular ascendancy due to his jovial character and natural detachment.

Camilo Cienfuegos was born in Lawton, Havana, on February 6, 1932. On September 21, 1949, at the age of 17, he entered the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts. Later, on March 10, 1952, when the military coup d'état led by Batista took place, Cienfuegos and a group of students went to the University in search of weapons to resist the dictatorship. At that time he established friendships with other young people who would play an important role in later events, Carlos Leijás, Israel Tápanes, Reinaldo Benítez and the brothers Mario and José Fuentes.

However, economic problems were serious and he dropped out of school and later traveled to the United States. He participated in several demonstrations and wrote for the newspaper La Voz de Cuba a critical article against Batista entitled "Moral Identification". But in 1955 in San Francisco he was arrested and deported to Cuba, joining the student struggles and being wounded in a protest demonstration. Imprisoned, tortured and booked by the dictatorial regime's hired assassins, he had to return to the path of exile in New York, joining the revolutionary opposition in exile.

On December 14, 1955, he was wounded by a firearm during a demonstration in honor of the Cuban independence hero Antonio Maceo; however, that did not prevent him from participating in the event commemorating the 103rd anniversary of the birth of José Martí in the Central Park. Once again, he was beaten and taken to the Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities (BRAC) where he was registered as a communist by the dictatorial government. Due to these circumstances, he decided to go into exile and in March 1956 he traveled again to the United States.

In September he was in Mexico, where he managed to establish contact with Fidel Castro, who was organizing a revolutionary expedition that would return to Cuba to begin the struggle against the Batista regime. Cienfuegos was the last one chosen, because he had no practical military knowledge, so he was sent to the camp in Abasolo, Tamaulipas, where he received training in guerrilla warfare and shooting practice. He received his baptism of fire along with his comrades in Alegria de Pio, on December 5, 1956.

A year later, in 1957, column number 4 was created, daughter of the mother column "José Martí", under the command of commander Ernesto Che Guevara. In the group, Cienfuegos fulfilled his role as head of the vanguard. In March 1958 he became the first leader of the movement to take the combat beyond the Sierra Maestra, to the Cauto plains. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Cienfuegos became part of the high command of the Revolutionary Army as its supreme chief. Commander Camilo Cienfuegos was much loved for his humility, simplicity and frank smile, and his popularity was even compared to that of the revolutionary leader Fidel Castro.

Thus, we can highlight Camilo Cienfuegos as one of the most important and beloved leaders during the revolutionary process that led Cuba to its definitive independence in 1959. On the other hand, he contributed to the political education of the members of the armed forces and the Cuban people. Likewise, in his speeches he made reference to the unity of the revolutionaries, to freedom, to the importance of the agrarian reform and other measures of the Revolution and he particularly dealt with the role and work of the members of the Armed Forces.

On the evening of October 28th, 1959, Cienfuegos' Cessna 310 ('FAR-53') disappeared over the Straits of Florida during a night flight, returning from Camagüey to Havana. Despite several days of searching, his plane was not found. By mid-November, Cienfuegos was presumed lost at sea. In 1979, the Cuban government established the "Order of Cienfuegos" in his honor.

• Amistad entre Camilo Cienfuegos y Ernesto Guevara :che-smile:

• el Che habla de camilo :che-poggers:

• El último discurso de Camilo Cienfuegos :fidel-salute:

• Documental: Camilo, Érase una vez un Comandante (Revolución Cubana) :fidel-salute-big: este es muy bueno, lo recomiendo

• Camilo Cienfuegos :red-fist:

hello everyone - happy Black history month 🌌 here's a massive archive list of Black and Marxist writing and film (with downloads!) to check out xoxo

• @777

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
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• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Rural land concentration compounds inequality and threatens democracy. Through grassroots land reform, this movement offers hope.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the largest social movement in the Americas: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Portuguese).

What began as a group of displaced farmers has evolved over decades into a mass movement — with as many as two million members and a presence in 24 of Brazil’s 26 states. Today, the movement is the largest producer of organic food in Brazil and the largest producer of organic rice in all Latin America.

While Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal nations, the MST has made incredible progress during their 40 years of existence — achievements that can inspire efforts to reduce rural inequality in the United States and elsewhere.

read more: https://fpif.org/brazils-landless-workers-movement-turns-forty/

The GGT, the most powerful labor union in the country, hopes to mobilize at least 40,000 people in Buenos Aires to protest the executive’s plans to scale back the state

Javier Milei is facing his first big challenge on the streets. The general strike called by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) to protest the Argentine president’s economic policies has swelled into a mass anti-government protest. In addition to the CGT — the largest labor union in the country —, social movements and communities affected by Milei’s sweeping reform plans will march down the streets of Buenos Aires to the doors of Congress on Wednesday. Social organizations expect at least 40,000 people will attend the demonstration in the capital.

Under the Bolivarian revolution, militarization has permeated all facets of politics and society, capturing institutional power as the ambit of the Armed Forces repeatedly expands.

In a perfect example of civil–military union,” reads a tweet posted in 2017 on the official account of the Bolivarian National Armed Force (FANB), “@VladimirPadrino supervises the distribution of [food baskets] in Valles del Tuy.” In one of three photos included with the tweet, Venezuelan defense minister General Vladimir Padrino López squats over a large map spread on the floor. Dressed in uniform and pointing to an area on the map, Padrino López’s pose suggests a similarity between food distribution to poor Venezuelans and the logistics of deploying troops across a conflict zone.

The imagery reminiscent of war is no coincidence. President Nicolás Maduro created the food distribution program through Local Supply and Production Committees (CLAP) in April 2016 to counter the effects of what he called an “economic war,” which he blamed on the Venezuelan elites. Food shortages, speculation, and the hoarding of basic goods like flour and toiletries were commonplace at the time.

“It is a tremendous battle to stabilize the entire economy, identifying the evildoers who wage war against the people and taking away their power,” said Maduro during a state television broadcast announcing the program. In a separate address, he added: “An economic revolution has begun in the food distribution system of Venezuelans by means of socialism.”

To coordinate the “battle” for food distribution, Maduro put Padrino López in charge of an ambitious social program, the Gran Misión de Abastecimiento Soberano (Great Sovereign Supply Mission), one of dozens of similar social missions that became a signature of Hugo Chávez’s government beginning in 2003. With activities spanning the food supply chain—encompassing production, distribution, commercialization, regulation, and development for import substitution—Misión Abastecimiento aimed to shore up the supply of food, medicine, and hygiene products, with ripple effects in other areas like seed production and animal feed. During the initial announcement, Maduro described the program as “a major civil-military effort, the first civil-military Misión to be created.”

Couched in a logic of security, defense of national sovereignty, and development, Misión Abastecimiento offers one example of how Venezuela’s Armed Forces under Maduro are involved in every activity deemed strategic by the Venezuelan state. This builds on a gradual shift beginning under Chávez in the early 2000s that has transformed the Venezuelan Armed Forces materially, symbolically, and ideologically. The government’s strong control over the Armed Forces became clear aft er the opposition tried and failed to encourage mass desertions to boost self-declared interim president Juan Guaidó in 2019. Today, given the limitations of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) to serve as vanguard of the revolution, the FANB has embraced that role.

This is best illustrated in the rising proportion of military officials occupying key ministries. In 2014, a quarter of the cabinet was made up of military officers. By September 2023, according to the civil society organization Control Ciudadano, 13 of 33 ministers in Maduro’s cabinet—roughly 40 percent—were military officers, and 9 of those 13 were on active duty. Generals and former generals now run ministries overseeing food, agriculture, oil, mining, water resources, transport, energy, housing, and public works, in addition to defense and security, justice, and prisons.

Meanwhile, in June 2022, the Maduro government launched the Community–Military Brigades for Health and Education (BRICOMILES), deploying the Armed Forces into schools and health centers to repair decaying infrastructure. When community-based organizations, such as communes and communal councils, request services like rebuilding, repainting, and facility upgrading, the Armed Forces send troops to carry out the works locally.

Maduro has described BRICOMILES as “a solution that brings together the people and the FANB even more.” He added: “We have to be united—popular power, military power, social power, political power. We must continue working together with the people.”

As with social programs, the influence of the Armed Forces over strategic sectors of the economy has also grown, particularly under Maduro. Transparencia Venezuela, a chapter of the anti-corruption organization Transparency International, describes the Armed Forces as “a corporation with increasing economic power in several areas of business.” The FANB owns at least 24 companies in areas including banking, construction, agroindustry, oil and gas, mining, and transport, according to a November 2021 report by Transparencia Venezuela. Crucially, all but six of all military-owned enterprises came into existence under Maduro. In addition, military officers sit on the boards of more than one in 10—a total of 103—of the 925 companies that are completely or partially publicly owned.

A March 2022 report by Control Ciudadano notes that military-owned companies often “perform unconstitutional activities, incompatible with those attributed to the FANB.” According to the report, Compañía Anónima Militar de Industrias Mineras, Petrolíferas y de Gas (CAMIMPEG), a military limited company created in 2016 to carry out extractive activities in the mining, oil, and gas sectors, and Empresa Militar para el Aprovechamiento Sustentable de Productos Forestales y Recursos Naturales SA (EMASPROFORN), established in 2020 to make sustainable use of natural and forest resources, are among the most controversial of the lot. These two companies’ “environmental exploitation activities,” the report notes, “are irreconcilable with the role of environmental guardian assigned to the military institution.”

The government justified the creation of CAMIMPEG in 2016 citing the need to secure national resources in the context of a global energy race, but the opposition expressed concerns that it could weaken oversight in the oil sector—Venezuela’s main source of income and a provider of endless opportunities for corruption.

read more: https://nacla.org/venezuela-war-of-all-people

As corporate boosters push to shift supply chains from China to northern Mexico, military expansion in the borderlands secures manufacturing zones for transnational capital.

In 2021, in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, industry promoter Jon Barela testified at a joint hearing of the Texas House. CEO of the Borderplex Alliance—an El Paso, Texas-based economic development organization representing the leading voices of the maquiladora, construction, and fossil fuel industries on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border—Barela spoke at length about “an incredible, maybe once in a generation opportunity.” He was referring to the benefits of nearshoring—a term used by pundits, journalists, and government actors to refer to the relocation, or return, of manufacturing from China to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Barela and his associates hope that these relocation efforts will target the “Paso del Norte region,” a historical moniker local elites use to refer to the binational region encompassing the cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. He predicted a coming wave of nearshoring—“at least 100,000 jobs to the border region if we play our cards right”—due to the borderlands’ longstanding importance as a major manufacturing hub.

Ciudad Juárez, the birthplace of the maquiladora in the 1960s, is densely packed with (mostly) foreign-owned factories where goods are manually assembled for export, mainly to U.S. markets. In his testimony, Barela linked nearshoring to transnational corporations’ efforts to reduce transportation and labor costs and to combat supply chain disruption. This, he argued, was particularly important in the context of the Covid-19 crisis, which saw companies scrambling to fulfill orders as factories shut their doors during the pandemic’s onset.

In his remarks, Barela also highlighted geopolitical tensions between the United States and China as a driver of the coming “return” of manufacturing to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. He argued that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s revival of the “common prosperity” concept in 2021 has amounted to “a return to Maoism.” “For that reason,” he said, “businesses are getting scared, and they are looking at very much returning to North America for manufacturing and other investments.”

Barela’s invocation of Maoism is representative of a wave of anti-China rhetoric leveraged by pundits and politicians in the United States, where transpacific economic competition has become increasingly wedded to a haphazard reignition of Cold War lingo. In this context, the movement of manufacturing from China to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands is depicted as a national security concern or political imperative, de-linked from the ongoing restructuring of global supply chains by transnational corporations seeking to lower production costs.

read more: https://nacla.org/nearshoring-and-militarization-us-mexico-border

Following the abolition of the Army, narratives celebrating Central America’s most peaceful nation have masked a militarized policing model shaped by U.S.-sponsored counterinsurgency.

Costa Rica is regularly depicted as Central America’s Switzerland to the extent that it has become a cliché. This image is the result of a decades-long self-fashioning effort through which the Costa Rican state has sought to make itself known as a place of stability, safety, and peace. And indeed, the country’s record is outstanding, especially when compared to its Central American neighbors.

Yet since the abolition of the Army 75 years ago, the longstanding military pedigree of local law enforcement reveals the idea of “demilitarized” Costa Rica is more of a myth than reality.

Once its 44-day-long civil war concluded in April 1948, Costa Rica outperformed other Central American countries on the economic front and built a welfare state that is second to none in the region. Not unrelated, Costa Rica, together with Colombia, exhibits the longest democratic track record in Latin America. Maybe even more remarkably, the country has been an enclave of peace. This makes Costa Rica an outlier in a region whose recent past was tainted by violent internal strife and military dictatorships, infamous for their unaccountable state repression, severe human rights violations, and terrorizing of entire societies, at times with genocidal proportions.

read more: https://nacla.org/myth-demilitarization-costa-rica

A Puerto Rican demilitarization activist reflects on the decades-long struggle to urge U.S. forces to withdraw from the island and the ongoing challenges Viequenses face today.

In 2003, the Puerto Rican island of Vieques won an important victory. After years of citizen-led struggle, the United States Navy ceased using the territory as a testing range for military activities, a practice it employed for more than six decades. Twenty years after the end of the bombings, many debts to the residents of Vieques remain regarding outstanding needs to restore the environment, end lasting violence, and ensure respect for the human rights of the community.

Myrna Pagán is an octogenarian leader who participated in the movement for demilitarization and has lived for decades in the Esperanza neighborhood, on the south side of Vieques. Today, she has children and grandchildren on the island.

Pagán is the daughter of Puerto Rican parents from Juncos and Rio Grande. They met in New York, and her life revolved around visits to Puerto Rico and returns to New York. “I was born in Puerto Rico, in San Juan,” she says. “Before I was two years old, my parents had returned to New York, where I grew up and where I studied until college. I left the city of New York to go to a couple of women’s universities.”

Pagán had an interest in literature and theater. “I studied fine arts, that’s when I started to grow, I think … and I entered a very interesting time in my life when I started to travel to South America, and part of that was always singing or in theater,” she recalls. “Then I visited Vieques for the first time.” A friend “who had trained for the Korean War here in Vieques fell in love with the island,” she remembers. “He quit the Marines and returned to Puerto Rico, and he settled in Vieques.” She then decided to live on the island.

read more: https://nacla.org/how-people-of-vieques-evicted-us-navy

Sounds like a cool place to hang with some comrades.

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) welcomes the decision of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) in Brazil to cancel the “Innovation Challenge Brazil – Israel” over Israel’s military assault that has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

In a statement, UFC clarified that it stands “firmly against the war and is outraged by all the loss of human life and the destruction that have occurred.”

Israel is currently carrying out what legal experts have defined as an unfolding genocide, using starvation and thirst as weapons.

Holding an “innovation challenge” with complicit Israeli institutions on topics such as food security and water and sanitation, would have been a grave affront to the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza struggling for their lives under Israel’s brutal bombing campaign and siege.

Initiatives such as these aimed at strengthening ties with complicit Israeli institutions are part of the close-an-eye culture of impunity that has allowed Israel to carry out the world’s first livestreamed genocide and maintain its apartheid rule oppressing Palestinians.

“Innovation Challenge” partner Ben Gurion University partners with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and Israeli weapons companies currently carrying out the genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza, including Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries.

In addition, the Israeli military is building a technology campus next to Ben Gurion University, aimed at furthering the ties between the military and BGU. A brigadier general at the ribbon cutting ceremony said it will “reinforce the army's operational capabilities.”

We thank UFC community members for campaigning to raise awareness, refusing business-as-usual with Israel’s genocidal regime, and successfully working to cancel this partnership.

We urge all universities, academic associations, faculty unions and student groups to work to cancel all ties with complicit Israeli institutions as a contribution to stopping Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza and to dismantling its apartheid regime.

link: https://bdsmovement.net/news/brazilian-university-cancels-innovation-challenge-with-complicit-israeli-university

On Friday, Indigenous organizations called for a massive march in response to the threats of a coup d'état through which Attorney General Consuelo Porras intends to prevent the inauguration of Bernardo Arevalo as Guatemala's president on Sunday.

Previously, on Thursday, the Guatemalan Supreme Court ruled against the arrest of Vice President-elect Karin Herrera and four judges of the Electoral Court.

This happened amid rumors that Attorney General Consuelo Porras intends to make these arrests, which would hinder the inauguration of the new president.

Since Arevalo came second in the first round of the elections in June 2023 and won the runoff by a landslide two months later, the Prosecutor's Office has sought to establish court cases to prevent the new authorities from taking office.

The Seed Movement and other progressive political and social organizations have described this “lawfare” as an "attempted coup d'état." This week, the Vice President-elect Herrera requested legal protection to avoid her arrest.

read more: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Guatemalan-Indigenous-Peoples-to-Defend-Arevalos-Inauguration-20240112-0009.html

Good stuff.

• On Dec. 17, 55% of Chilean voters rejected a proposal to reform the country’s Constitution, which dates back to the Augusto Pinochet regime; it was the second attempt, after a different proposal failed to get approval in September 2022.
• The latest proposed text, drafted mainly by conservatives, did not make significant progress on environmental and climate change topics, experts say.
• The 2022 draft included an entire chapter on the environment and made provisions on nature’s rights, while expanding protections against extractive industries. But concerns regarding the nationalization of water resources contributed to the “no” vote.

On Dec. 17, Chile said no to a proposal to change the country’s Constitution, with 55% of voters rejecting a second try at reforming the country’s fundamental law. The first attempt was rejected in September 2022 by a 62% majority.

The drive to rewrite the Constitution arose in 2019, as a political response to civil society protests that shook Chile for months, as people demanded an end to inequality, expensive health care and education, low pensions and a neoliberal system that seemed to benefit only the wealthy. The protests even led to Chile withdrawing last minute from hosting COP25.

Chile’s current fundamental law dates back to 1980 and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and has been blamed for paving the way for privatizations, a booming business sector, and an economy focused on extraction and exploitation of Chile’s numerous minerals, while minimizing social rights and the role of the state.

full article

The Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has insisted his government must not lose the “war” against the environmental criminals devastating Indigenous lands in the Amazon after claims that thousands of illegal miners were resisting eviction from the country’s biggest such territory.

After taking power last January, Lula made expelling an estimated 20,000 gold and tin ore prospectors from the Yanomami Indigenous territory a top priority after four years of Amazon destruction under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro. Environmental special forces and federal police teams were sent deep into the region’s remote jungles as part of a supposedly historic crackdown.

At first those high-risk airborne operations bore fruit but in recent months they have been dramatically scaled back. Speaking last month, the veteran Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa claimed thousands of miners were again causing havoc in his people’s mountainous, Portugal-sized territory. “Mother Earth is angry,” Kopenawa told the Guardian, urging Lula to re-escalate an anti-mining campaign critics say has been allowed to fade.

On Tuesday, almost a year after his Yanomami crackdown started, Lula summoned more than a dozen top ministers, as well as military and federal police chiefs, to review their progress in dislodging miners blamed for a surge in child mortality and diseases such as malaria.

“This meeting is about deciding – once and for all – what our government’s going to do to make sure Indigenous Brazilians no longer fall victim to massacres, hooliganism, mining, and to people who want to invade preserved areas that belong to the Indigenous people and cannot be used [by outsiders],” Lula told his cabinet, vowing to tackle the Yanomami crisis with “the full force of the government machine”.

“We cannot lose a war to illegal miners, we cannot lose a war to illegal loggers [and] we cannot lose a war to people who are breaking the law,” Lula added.

The president’s remarks come amid growing frustration from Indigenous and environmental activists over how the anti-mining offensive waned after its initially positive impact. Despite a flight ban imposed last April, “illegal aircraft are flying as normal” within the Yanomami territory, a government source admitted last month. No permanent river blockades have been set up to cut off the supply routes of miners.

“My sense is that the battle [against the miners] has gone back to square one – and that in some areas the situation is even worse than before,” the source warned.

Writing on social media, Lula said his government was planning “new, even more serious actions targeting the invaders”. Lula’s chief of staff, Rui Costa, told reporters “permanent incursions” by security forces would replace “sporadic actions” in the Yanomami territory. The role of the armed forces would be rethought.

Despite exasperation that miners continue to torment Yanomami communities, overall Lula’s administration made major environmental progress during its first year. Last week Brazil’s national space agency announced that Amazon deforestation had fallen by 50% in 2023 compared with 2022, the last year of Bolsonaro’s government.

On the 7th of january in 1919, the "Semana Trágica" began in Argentina when police attacked striking metalworkers in Buenos Aires, killing five, after workers set the police chief's car on fire. The city was quickly placed under martial law.

The "Semana Trágica" (Tragic Week in English, not to be confused with the Spanish Tragic Week) was the violent supression of a general workers' uprising, beginning with the attack on January 7th. In addition to the actions of the police and military, right-wing vigilantes launched pogroms against the city's Jews, many of whom were not involved, in order to suppress the rebellion.

The conflict began as a strike at the Vasena metal works, an English Argentine-owned plant in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. On January 7th, workers overturned and set fire to the car of the police chief Elpidio González. Militant workers also shot and killed the commander of the Army detachment protecting González. Following this, police attacked, killing five workers and wounding twenty more.

On the same day, maritime workers of the port of Buenos Aires voted in favor of a general strike for better hours and wages. After the police attack at Vasena, a waterfront strike began: all ship movements, and all loading and unloading, came to a halt.

Rioting soon spread throughout Buenos Aires, and workers battled with both state and right-wing paramilitary forces. Police utilized members of the far-right Argentine "Patriotic League", who targeted the city's working class Russian Jewish population, which they associated with the rebellion, beating and murdering many uninvolved civilians.

On the 11th, the city was placed under martial law, and the military restored control over the city over the next several days. Estimates of the death toll range from between 141 to over 700. The United States embassy reported that 1,500 people were killed in total, "mostly Russians and generally Jews"

La Semana Trágica - el historiador

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