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charles@cmmstudio.com

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So far charles@cmmstudio.com has created 205 blog entries.

Violence, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America

Jan. 2021 Issue Editors: Steve Ellner This issue examines how contemporary capital accumulation in Latin America is driven by legal and illegal actors. That violence both derives from and kindles direct, structural, and cultural violence. Those forms of violence in turn spark various forms of resistance. Articles deal with a wide range of topics, including the dispossession of ranchers and Mapuches in Argentina caused by natural gas and oil extraction; the expansion of criminal organizations dedicated to extortion rackets and other criminal activities in Medellín; popular uprisings against criminal organizations dedicated to kidnappings, extortions, and illegal logging in the states of Guerrero and Michoacán; the overlap between legal and illegal energy markets in northeastern Mexico and their functioning under violent hybrid governance schemes; the existence of a form of “mafia capitalism” in the tri-border area of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil; the differences between disappearances during the Cold War era and the neoliberal era in Mexico; the creation of the Fuerza Civil, a semi-private, highly militarized police force operating in the state of Nuevo León; the disappearance of the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa rural teachers college and the social movement it sparked; the links between violence, capitalism, and the US opioids crisis; the [...]

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COVID-19 in El Paso: A Spectacle of Injustice

By Amy Reed-Sandoval The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously described the nature of a “spectacle” in Discipline and Punish, in which he explored 18th century public executions in France. The purpose of spectacle, he argued, is “to bring into play…the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.” Such “Foucauldian spectacles” are about inequality and, above all else, power. Despite the various forces striving to invisibilize COVID-19 as much as possible, COVID-19 has become, I argue, a Foucauldian spectacle in the U.S.-Mexico border city of El Paso, Texas, which is now being described as the COVID-19 epicenter in the United States. We need to study this heart-breaking spectacle in order to learn vital lessons from it. First, let’s establish what’s being seen: devastating images of ten mobile morgues set up outside the El Paso medical examiner’s office, and circulated photos of prisoners carrying corpses into those very refrigerated trailers. El Paso’s grand convention center was converted into a makeshift medical center, while overrun hospitals have set up “heated isolation tents” to serve even more of the gravely ill. Some patients are being airlifted out of El Paso, to hospitals in other [...]

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COVID-19 in El Paso: A Spectacle of Injustice

COVID-19 in El Paso: A Spectacle of Injustice By Amy Reed-Sandoval The French philosopher Michel Foucault famously described the nature of a “spectacle” in Discipline and Punish, in which he explored 18th century public executions in France. The purpose of spectacle, he argued, is “to bring into play…the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.” Such “Foucauldian spectacles” are about inequality and, above all else, power. Despite the various forces striving to invisibilize COVID-19 as much as possible, COVID-19 has become, I argue, a Foucauldian spectacle in the U.S.-Mexico border city of El Paso, Texas, which is now being described as the COVID-19 epicenter in the United States. We need to study this heart-breaking spectacle in order to learn vital lessons from it. First, let’s establish what’s being seen: devastating images of ten mobile morgues set up outside the El Paso medical examiner’s office, and circulated photos of prisoners carrying corpses into those very refrigerated trailers. El Paso’s grand convention center was converted into a makeshift medical center, while overrun hospitals have set up “heated isolation tents” to serve even more of the gravely ill. Some patients are being airlifted out [...]

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Political Report # 1452 A Global Police State is Emerging as World Capitalism Descends Into Crisis

Political Report # 1452 by William I. Robinson, Pluto Press The following is an extract from the Introduction to The Global Police State, a new book by William I. Robinson that was released early this fall by Pluto Press. In her novel Everything is Known, Liza Elliott describes a future dystopia where five global mega corporations, dubbed Affiliations, rule the planet. “Infested with the inescapable surveillance industry, the five global Affiliations manipulated Big Data to commodify and commercialize all human activity for profit.” The Affiliations had subordinated states to their domination: “George Orwell got it wrong. Big Brother did not come from a totalitarian state, but from a totalitarian non-state.” Big Data was “a relentless cybernetic grandmaster who with sneaky eyes and listening ears spied on everything: your clothes, your friends, recording every word you spoke or wrote. It kept account of all this and more to amass the info power it needed to control the market, the heartbeat of the money economy.” The world’s population had become divided into three segregated social clusters, the members of the Core, the Peripherals, and the Outliers who comprised a majority of humanity: Outliers were the discarded people. If they could not [...]

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The Social Welfare Policies in Brazil under COVID-19

By Ingrid Rafaele Rodrigues Leiria* Overview of Brazilian Case | November 13, 2020 At the beginning of 2020, Brazil and the world were surprised by the presence of a new virus, the SARS-CoV-2, known as COVID-19. By the first half of 2020, the virus had led to the infection of millions of people and the death of thousands worldwide. COVID-19 is easily transmitted, therefore a need for high prevention, frequent hand hygiene, and the use of facial masks by the population (WHO, 2020). However, when we look at the Brazilian case, there is a lot of social-economic problems that may restrict virus prevention and allow it to scatter among people even quickly. Economic inequality can be translated into an inequality in access to water and sanitation, increasing risks of disease transmission (UNESCO, UN-Water, 2020). Worldwide in 2019, 26.1 percent of the global population, did not have access to handwashing with available soap and clean water (Brauer et at., 2020). In 2018, around 32 percent of Brazilians households did not have access to basic sanitation treatment and 6.8 percent of the population with 15-year-old or up were illiterate. In urban parts of Brazil due to an accelerated and not [...]

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Female Bodies and Globalization: The Work of Indigenous Women Weavers in Zinacantán

Female Bodies and Globalization: The Work of Indigenous Women Weavers in Zinacantán | November 10, 2020 by  Eugenia Bayona Escat  | November 10, 2020 ABSTRACT: Women producers and sellers of textile crafts in Zinacantán, Chiapas, Mexico, use one of the few resources they have to enter business: craft production as informal, invisible, and underpaid work. Taking the body as the axis of analysis, three distinct areas of transformation of indigenous women producers by tourism may be identified: the private and domestic body of craftswomen, the social and public body as an icon of ethnic difference, and the commodified body as an extension of the touristic object. The analysis shows that tourism and participation in the international market strengthen gender, class, and ethnic differences and contribute to the perpetuation of existing inequalities. CONTINUE READING FULL ARTICLE HERE CONTINUE READING HERE > > > Posted by Latin American Perspectives at 1:28 PM No comments:   Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest Labels: Chiapas, Globalization, Mexico, November 2020 Issue, Women

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Climate Change, Neoliberalism, and Migration: Mexican Sons of Peasants on the Beach

by Tamar Diana Wilson | November 10, 2020 Climate change and neoliberal policies in Mexico have been fomenting migration by campesinos and their sons. This migration is primarily internal, to cities and tourist centers, where migrants engage in informal and semi-informal income-generating activities. Interviews with 32 beach vendors, sons of campesinos, in Cabo San Lucas reflect these two drivers of migration: while most reported that they would like to farm, they identified drought and lack of government aid as major difficulties for farmers in their hometowns. CONTINUE READING FULL ARTICLE HERE CONTINUE READING HERE > > > Posted by Latin American Perspectives at 1:54 PM No comments:

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The Multidimensional Impact of Neoliberalism on Mexico

Nov. 2020 Issue Editors: Steve Ellner This issue examines neoliberal policies that clashed with the Mexican revolution’s legacy of state intervention in the economy and set the stage for the presidential triumph of López Obrador in 2018. Articles deal with human rights violation from the 1970s “dirty wars” to Ayotzinapa; legislative formulations that threaten the rights of indigenous people; urban planning promoting social exclusion in Mexico City; the devastating effect of globalized agricultural production on biological diversity and labor exploitation; corporate-based tourism that strengthens gender, class, and ethnic differences; and climate change and neoliberal policies that stimulate urbanization.   TABLE OF CONTENTS | PURCHASE THIS ISSUE [/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]

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Refugees, Indigenous People, Transgenders and Prisoners : Latin American Governments’ Miscommunication with the Most Vulnerable Communities During COVID- 19

By Marcelo Rodriguez and Victoria De La Torre | October 13, 2020 In times of a pandemic, vital information becomes a matter of life and death. However, at a time when civilians need it the most, the overnight transformation of government information into a solely virtual presence has created a plethora of issues as well as even more obstacles to reach the most vulnerable communities. These insecurities have transformed any vital pandemic-related information emanating from the government into a minefield of contradictory, constantly-changing, and at times erroneous messaging. When it comes to vulnerable communities, feelings of mistrust and fear have exacerbated and exposed a pattern of insufficient resources and isolation. We have chosen to concentrate our research on four vulnerable communities in the region: Refugees, Indigenous, Transgender and Prisoners. From the perspective of these four vulnerable groups, we would like to highlight how the new virtual reality of exclusively online government information has left these groups stranded and isolated when they needed these government services the most. The pandemic has essentially halted all global, international migration as borders close, and workers return to their home countries. Over 120 countries have closed their borders all over the world citing Coronavirus as the primary reason, and [...]

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A AMAZÔNIA ARRASADA ENFRENTA O COVID-19

 Por Mônica Dias Martins e Bernardo Mançano Fernandes | October 12, 2020 Durante a pandemia que assola o planeta, a Amazônia com uma extensão de 7 milhões de quilômetros quadrados, abrangendo territórios de 9 países, sofre uma nova ofensiva capitalista, neocolonialista e etnocida respaldada pela cumplicidade ou inércia dos governantes. Os povos da floresta persistem sendo submetidos à violência do genocídio cultural e físico por parte de grandes empresas agropecuárias e extrativistas (madeireiras e mineradoras), em especial os povos isolados. A devastação ambiental ameaça diretamente o modo de vida das populações indígenas que ao perder seu entorno natural veem desaparecer suas fontes de alimentação, têm suas águas contaminadas, perdem seus espaços de convívio social e religioso. Desde sempre o contato com o “homem branco” encontra corpos fortes e sadios, mas despreparados para reagir às enfermidades da “civilização ocidental”. Os problemas ambientais e sociais são gigantescos e há resistências, sendo notável o surgimento de uma gama variada e crescente de militantes e cientistas indígenas. O modo de gestão territorial indígena e a ideia de florestania (em contraposição à cidadania) são duas importantes contribuições ao reivindicar um lugar na sociedade sem renunciar a sua identidade indígena. II No Brasil, país [...]

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Latin American Perspectives, founded in 1974, is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars throughout the Americas.

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Alfredo Saad Filho — "SOAS, University of London" “Latin American Perspectives is the most important resource available providing in-depth progressive analyses of developments in Latin America. It is the unmissable Journal!”
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