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Political Report #1453 — Afrodescendientes in Paraguay: the 209-Year Struggle for Recognition by Valencia Wilson Introduction A glimpse of Afro-Paraguayan contributions occur through the annual Kambá Cuá festival on January 6th.  Kambá refers to the Afro-Paraguayan community, and this proud community with Kenyan roots participates in this festival using vivid colors and dances.  The problem is that this annual tradition consistently falls short of the recognition they deserve. In simple terms, Afro-Paraguayan activists are fighting an uphill legislative battle for Paraguay to acknowledge that they exist. Existence in the Afro-Paraguayan context means opportunities for formal, cultural education and a variety of employment opportunities; it is weaving their historical and current efforts into the national consciousness demonstrating their relevance today. The Proyecto de Ley de Reconocimiento de Afrodescendientes en Paraguay began as a blueprint.  A report submitted to the UN stated that Congressional support would ensure the acknowledgement of Afro-Paraguayan contributions to its citizens. This article explores more than the history of Afro-Paraguayan contributions in historically significant black towns like Kambá Cuá, San Agustín de Emboscada de los Pardos Libres, and Kamba Kokué.  It delves into an exhausting struggle for the bare minimum of being recognized for their contributions and how it has [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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:

The Rise and Fall of Marcha Verde in the Dominican Republic | October 9, 2020  by  Emelio Betances The Marcha Verde movement emerged in 2017 to protest bribery on the part of the Brazilian transnational Odebrecht. It conducted 25 protests in the provinces and large marches in July 2017 and August 2018 but ultimately failed to force the government to try those responsible. As a movement for the democratization of democracy through the construction of citizens’ rights, it was a watershed moment in Dominican political history. However, it did not have time to build the social base that would have allowed it to challenge the authorities. The political parties that supported it were only interested in weakening the official party, and the electoral race intervened as the way to channel the movements’ demands, leaving the radicals alone in  calling for a transformation of the political sphere CONTINUE READING FULL ARTICLE HERE CONTINUE READING HERE > > > Posted by Latin American Perspectives at 1:22 PM

From one of LAP's editors, Paul Almeida, a recent book on global struggles and social change co-authored with Christopher Chase-Dunn.  Good for updating material for those remote classes. GLOBAL STRUGGLES AND SOCIAL CHANGE From Prehistory to World Revolution in the Twenty-First Century Now available from JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS Christopher Chase-Dunn is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, where he is the director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems. He is the coauthor of Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present. Paul Almeida is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced. He is the author of Social Movements: The Structure of Collective Mobilization. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, an international movement to slow the pace of climate change mushroomed across the globe. The self-proclaimed Climate Justice movement urges immediate action to reduce carbon emissions and calls for the adoption of bold new policies to address global warming before irreversible and catastrophic damage threatens the habitability of the planet. On another front, since the 1980s, multiple waves of resistance have occurred around the world against the uneven transition from state-led development to the neoliberal [...]

Political Report # 1451   Letter from Friar Neto to his friends from abroad Carta do Frei Neto Aos Amigos E Amigas Do Exterior   Carta de Fray Neto a sus amigos del exterior Frei Betto   Frei Betto's Letter - The Brazilian drama encourages us to carry the Frei Betto Letter, addressed to citizens of other countries. We count on your participation in this journey. Carta de Frei Betto - O drama brasileiro nos incita a sermos portadores da Carta de Frei Betto, dirigida a cidadãos de outros paises.  Contamos com sua participação nesta jornada. Carta de Frei Betto - El drama brasileño nos anima a llevar la Carta de Frei Betto, dirigida a ciudadanos de otros países. Contamos con tu participación en este camino. In English: CONTINUE READING HERE > > > Posted by Latin American Perspectives at 12:25 PM 

Political Report # 1450   Walking the Tightrope: Latin America's Pink Tide by Frederick B. Mills, New Politics   Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings Steve Ellner, ed. Foreword by Boaventura de Sousa Santos Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. 355 pp. Latin America’s Pink Tide: Breakthroughs and Shortcomings, edited by economic historian and prominent Latin Americanist Steve Ellner, offers a critical ethical theoretical framework for assessing the performance of left and left-of-center governments in Latin America during the Pink Tide. The “Pink Tide” refers to the wave of progressive governments beginning with the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998. These progressive governments provided alternatives to the neoliberal economic model that had brought growing economic and social inequality, austerity, privatization of public resources, and political subordination to Washington to most of the region during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Pink Tide governments were brought to power by widespread disillusion with traditional political parties and were buoyed by social movements that sought economic and social justice and more democratic participation in the political life of their nations. The Pink Tide brought a period of economic nationalism, progress toward regional integration, and the inclusion, [...]