World

On January 22, El Salvador’s main opposition party, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), held commemorative activities for the 75th anniversary of the 1932 Nahua-Pipil indigenous peasant revolt led by indigenous leader Jose Feliciano Ama and Agustin Farabundo Martí Rodríguez , leader of the newly formed Communist Party (PCS).

Factional fighting between the armed wings of Fatah and Hamas resumed on January 25 when a vehicle carrying members of the Hamas Executive Force was bombed. Two EF fighters later died as a result of their injuries. The subsequent bloody clashes between rival militants, which took place mainly in the Gaza Strip, left 19 people dead, including a two-year-old boy and eight civilians.

On January 22, the Lebanese parliamentary opposition, led by the Shiite-based Hezbollah movement, organised a general strike to demand the resignation of the US-backed government of PM Fuad Siniora.

On January 8, Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez swore in his new cabinet, including five new members, calling upon them to take an oath that they would “never rest arm or soul in the construction of the Venezuelan path towards socialism”. One the ministers sworn in was Hector Navarro, previously higher education minister and now Venezuela’s minister of science and technology.

Fifteen-thousand people fled from the town of Vaharai in eastern Sri Lanka following heavy shelling by the Sri Lankan army on January 18. According to the Tamilnet website, the shelling was intensified in the evening despite an urgent message sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross from Vaharai hospital authorities saying that the area around the hospital, where many displaced people had sought refuge, was under attack.

Intimidation by armed right-wing thugs and police harassment failed to disperse the January 18-20 founding congress of Indonesia’s new National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) at Kaliurang, near Yogyakarta in Indonesia.

On January 15, Ecuador’s new president, Rafael Correa Delgado, was sworn in, promising to build “socialism of the 21st century” to overcome the poverty and instability of the small Andean country.

Abdias Jean was murdered on January 14, 2005, shortly after finishing his lunch near his home in the Village de Dieu slum.

A chain of events triggered by the passage of a new agrarian reform law, part of the “agrarian revolution” of indigenous President Evo Morales, has brought into sharp relief the drive by the right-wing opposition to overthrow Morales’s government, even if it means pushing Bolivia towards a civil war.

Cochabamba is a city with a history of struggle. In April 2000 the people stood up against the privatisation of their water supply, threw out the multinational Bechtel and retook control of the local water company. In October 2003 they joined the thousands of people on the street in El Alto, La Paz and other cities to defend the right of the people to nationalise the country’s gas reserves, effectively forcing, then president and champion of the neoliberal economic model Gonzales Sanchez de Lozada to flee the country.

Around 200 pick-up trucks and cars comprised the long snake of a protest caravan making its way along Jakarta’s main thoroughfare, Jalan Thamrin, after a rally outside the Presidential Palace, where speakers called on the people to “withdraw the mandate” of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The occasion for the protest was the anniversary of the mass protests and riots against the Suharto government that took place on January 15, 1974.

On December 29, 2006, the 176-member standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC — China’s law-making body) lent its support to the draft of the proposed Property Law. Many fear this controversial law will help launder the enormous state wealth already appropriated illegitimately by corrupt Communist Party officials and their hangers-on, as well as encourage more such activities.