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Ecuador’s April 11 presidential election by Marc Becker — 31 March 2021     On April 11, Ecuadorians will go to the polls to select their next president. On the surface, the contrast between the two candidates seems stark and the choice clear.     Out of a record number of 16 candidates in the first-round vote on February 7, Andrés Arauz and Guillermo Lasso emerged at the top of the polls. Arauz of the progressive Union for Hope (UNES) coalition is a protégé of former president Rafael Correa. Like Correa, Arauz is a heterodox economist who emerges out of a Keynesian and developmentalist framework. Redistributive policies during Correa’s administration resulted in notable socio-economic gains, including record drops in poverty, extreme poverty, and inequality. Arauz presumably would return Ecuador to the model of using the country’s natural resources to fund redistributive policies, even as the current debt crisis and relatively low commodity prices provide less favorable conditions.     Lasso, in contrast, is a rightwing Opus Dei adherent and a banker who has been personally responsible for many of the neoliberal ills that have plagued Ecuador over the last quarter century. The legacy of his role as a “super minister” that [...]

Political Report #1454 Don’t Make Puerto Rico a State Now Don’t Make Puerto Rico a State Now — by Pedro Cabán, University at Albany     Puerto Ricans went to the polls on November 3 to elect a new governor and hundreds of other officials, and yes to vote on whether their colonized archipelago should become the 51 st American state. The results signaled a resounding rejection of both major political parties. They also revealed a far more ambivalent attitude towards the status question than pro-statehood proponents will admit.     The New Progressive Party’s (PNP) gubernatorial candidate garnered 32.9% of the vote, besting his Popular Democratic Party (PPD) opponent by 1.4%. These two political parties have dominated politics for over half a century: the PPD a proponent of the current failing commonwealth status and the PNP, a fierce ideological proponent of statehood. Although support for both has been waning, the gains made by new opposition political parties was a shock. Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) received 13.7% of the vote, the most it has received in decades. The upstart Movimiento Victoria Ciudadana (MVC) in its first time on the ballot got 14.2%, and even the Christian fundamentalist Proyecto Dignidad, [...]

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 [...]