World

One of the US government’s most important allies in the Middle East was shaken in early April by strikes and demonstrations over rising food prices.

“The Adelitas have arrived/To defend our oil/Whoever wants to give it to the foreigners/ Will get the shit kicked out of him!” yodelled the brigades of women pouring onto the esplanade of the Mexican senate. The demonstration was to protest a petroleum privatisation measure President Felipe Calderon insists is not a petroleum privatisation measure — and which he sent onto the Senate for fast-track ratification at the tag end of the session this April.

As I write this article, the situation in Bolivia seems to be heading toward a civil war provoked by the secessionist attitude of the oligarchies in Santa Cruz and the other departments of the Half Moon (Tarija, Pando and Beni — in resource-rich eastern Bolivia), the prefect of Cochabamba and maybe someone else who remains in the shadows.

The killings of four US soldiers in Iraq on April 30 pushed the US troop death toll for April up to 52, making it the deadliest month for the US occupation forces since last September, when 65 US soldiers were killed. US troop fatalities have now reached 4063 since the occupation began.

Below is an April 30 statement by Survival International (SI). Visit <http://survival-international.org>.

In a blow to repeated claims this year by US and NATO officials that their 50,000-strong occupation force has Afghanistan’s Taliban-led anti-occupation insurgency “on the run”, insurgents used assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades to attack a heavily guarded official ceremony near the presidential palace in the centre of Kabul on April 27.

US Professor John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and teaches political economy and environmental sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the author of Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature and Ecology Against Capitalism. He was a

On live TV, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez signed the law on April 30 that re-nationalised the giant Sidor steelworks — majority owned by Argentinean-based Ternium corporation.

“We have just attended a massive march of workers for May Day in Caracas”, Coral Wynter, a coordinator of the current Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network’s brigade to Venezuela, told Green Left Weekly.

In an unannounced visit to Baghdad on April 20, US Secretary Condoleezza Rice praised Nuri al Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, for “ordering” a military offensive last month in the Iraqi seaport city of Basra against anti-occupation Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army militia.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) welcomes the statement by a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson that the China Ocean Shipping Company, which owns the An Yue Jiang, has decided to recall the ship because Zimbabwe cannot take delivery of the 77 tonnes of weapons and ammunition onboard.

First came the decision by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on April 9 to re-nationalise the Sidor steel plant, privatised by a pre-Chavez government in 1997, after a long workers’ struggle.