We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Thursday, July 16, 2015

US-Backed Violence in Latin America

Click here to listen to a recorded 55 minute interview from KPFA in Berkeley, California with two professors, Jennifer Disney and Ginger Williams, who have recently published findings of their study on right-wing dictatorships in Latin America.

I recommend this for people who are only beginning to question US foreign policies, especially young people who have been subject to years of indoctrination in schools and are beginning to question what adult authorities have been telling them about the US government.

Two American professors tell about their discovery of Pentagon support for right-wing dictatorships and paramilitary armies that engage in terrorism to suppress all civil opposition. Sound familiar? The targets of these paramilitary-terrorist armies have usually been labor activists, teachers, health workers, journalists, and indigenous people who live on resource rich areas in countries like Mexico, Honduras, and Columbia. This, of course, has been going on ever since US capitalists of European origins went on an empire building project around the turn of the 20th/21st century after completing their control over the North American continent. Under neoliberalism this practice has been accelerating in some places in Latin America where right-wing political forces still control their governments. 

The professors' findings have been published in an obscure academic journal where it will likely only gather dust in campus libraries. Such is the control of information wielded by our capitalist masters on subjects that are inimical to their interests.