One of the greatest living exponents of Peruvian musica criolla (creole music), Eva Ayllon, performed at the Sydney Opera House on September 25. Finding my seat, I felt as if I’d walked into an exuberant family gathering full of animated conversation, laughter, waving and group photography.
David T. Rowlands
September 18 marks the 40th anniversary of the death of US musician Jimi Hendrix, widely regarded as one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time.
Hendrix’s identification with progressive politics embodied the ferment of the late 1960s, with songs like “If Six Was Nine” (“I’m gonna wave my freak flag high”), “I Don’t Live Today” (about the plight of Native Americans) and the visceral anti-war tone poem “Machine Gun”.
On June 19, six executives — the entire board of Australian mining corporation Sundance Resources — were killed in a plane crash in the Republic of the Congo. Australian politicians and the corporate media emphasised the tragedy of their untimely deaths, showering praise on the deceased.
On June 1, part-Peruvian US actor and indigenous rights activist Q’orianka Kilcher was arrested for “disorderly conduct” after chaining herself to the White House fence while Peruvian President Alan Garcia met with US President Barack Obama.
Garcia refers to the Amazonian indigenous peoples of his country as barbaric savages. Kilcher had doused her body in black paint, symbolic of the oil killing the Amazon and its people.
Right-wing candidate Juan Manuel Santos won the second round of the Colombian presidential elections on June 20. This re-affirms Colombia’s position as the US’s chief proxy in the region, playing a similar role to that of Israel in the Middle East.
Santos won 69% of the run-off election against Green Party presidential candidate and former Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus. However, IPS said on June 21 that, with just 45% of registered voters taking part in the poll, Santos won with a mere 30% of potential votes.
Recently declassified documents from US archives have shed further light on the extent of US complicity in Guatemalan human rights crimes, one of Latin America’s most brutal examples of population control.
The hard-working farmers of Dos Erres, in Peten department, had never asked for much — just a few acres of recently-cleared land from which to scratch a meagre living in a country racked by violence.
The conspicuous presence of barbed wire in Australian immigration detention centres, such as Rudd’s newly re-opened Curtin detention centre, is a reminder of the inhuman pedigree of these grim despair factories.
It is no accident that barbed wire — or the “devil’s rope” as the First Nations people of North America called it — has accompanied and facilitated many of the worst crimes against humanity of the modern era.
In every corner of Greece, popular anger over the government’s latest neoliberal assault on job security, pensions and social services has lead to a series of general strikes involving hundreds of thousands of militant workers.
By waging a brutal war against its own population on behalf of transnational interests, the Colombian state has earned the endorsement of successive Washington administrations. They have lavishly rewarded Colombia’s ruling elite with high praise and billions of dollars of military aid.
The US government is clearly seeking to foment war between its client state Colombia, the third-largest recipient of US military aid in the world, and revolutionary Venezuela.
The revered Argentinean matriarch of protest music, Mercedes Sosa, died in Buenos Aires on October 4. She was 74.
Before the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement was ratified in 2007, many Peruvian and international human rights and environmental organisations said the deal would lead to increased social destabilisation and drug production.
The Australian right has long staked a proprietary claim over the nation’s First World War experience, holding up the “diggers” as models of conservative virtue.
Recent events in Honduras — where a Washington-backed military coup deposed President Manuel Zelaya on June 28 — conform to the historic pattern of United States involvement in Latin American affairs.
At the turn of the twentieth century, global demand for rubber from the upper reaches of the Amazon (encompassing Peruvian, Colombian and Brazilian territory) was at its height.
At last, after decades of brutal right-wing rule, the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) won El Salvador's March 15 presidential election.
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