For two days in early October, the sides of the barren Posokoni Hill above the mining town of Huanuni, 150 kilometres southeast of Bolivia’s capital La Paz, were transformed into a war zone in the two most violent days since leftist Evo Morales was elected the country’s president last December.
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To judge by the coverage in the corporate media, the main opposition candidate in the December 3 presidential elections, Zulia state governor Manuel Rosales, is on the march and making ground against socialist President Hugo Chavez. This is despite pro-Chavez forces winning every national election since 1998, and most polls suggesting Chavez
is certain to win the presidential vote.
In April 2000, the people of Cochabamba captured the imagination of anti-corporate campaigners the world over. Only months after the US transnational Bechtel took control of the regions water supply forcing citizens to pay for rainwater they collected the people of Cochabamba, organised through the Coalition in Defence of Water and Life, rose up and booted out the corporation.
At its first conference to be held since Tommy Sheridan and his supporters split from the Scottish Socialist Party to set up a rival organisation, SSP national convenor Colin Fox said that the party had been through a “real-life horror movie, a nightmare so acute that it would have broken other parties completely”, but “with every passing week, more and more people are overheard saying that it was the SSP that was telling the truth all along”.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is coming under increasing pressure to release a report implicating security forces in the murder two years ago of Munir, Indonesia’s most prominent human rights activist.
On October 9, North Korea announced it had successfully carried out its first nuclear-weapons test, six days after announcing it intended to conduct such a test. The test was the culmination of nearly two years of hostility and provocation by the United States.
Moments after hearing about North Koreas nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einsteins statement that there is no secret and there is no defence; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.
On October 4, Jim Gilchrist, a leader of the racist anti-immigrant Minutemen group, came to speak at Columbia University. Gilchrists hate speech was met with a peaceful demonstration in which students came on the stage unfurling banners reading No human being is illegal and No to racism. The Minutemen responded with force, punching and kicking protesters. Footage of the assaults can be seen at <><http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N41eXtVK7hA>.
In a September 25 appeal to the international community to act to end the humanitarian disaster in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the UN envoy on Palestinians human rights, John Dugard, pointed out: In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions the first time an occupied people has been so treated.
George Bushs administration claims it is waging a war against terrorism. But since April 2005 Luis Posada Carriles, who worked for the CIA and engaged in brutal terrorist acts including the bombing of a Cuban airliner, has resided in the US, and Washington has resisted pressure to deport him to Venezuela, where he escaped from jail, to face justice. Posada Carriles is currently in immigration detention for entering the US illegally. Even a court filing by the US Justice Department described him as the admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks. The following letter, among the signatories of which are four Nobel laureates, was issued on October 6.
On October 11, a team of Iraqi physicians, whose work was overseen by US epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins Universitys Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, estimating that the US-led occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis.
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