I just saw Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre last night. It was as powerful as I’d heard. If my word means anything, this is another endorsement for the film.

Do not think that it will not be rough. One is transplanted into the Guatemalan/Mexican border (roughly Chiapas) where two worlds will collide in a reality that many people know nothing about. Many Americans have no distinctive capabilities when it comes to Latin America. “Mexicans” are the catch-all phrase for those do not look like you. That is why this movie is eye-opening. The initial violence at “the other border,” which is just as terrifying, if not more oppressive and controlled, as the US-Mexico border, is hard to take in, and sets the tone for the rest of the movie.

As I mentioned, the violence is hard to take in as we follow MS13 gang member Willy/Casper (Edgar Flores) and his protege Smiley (Kristian Ferrer). Smiley is inducted into the gang through thirteen seconds of beating – as administrated by the local head, the brutal Lil Mago (played amazingly by Tenoch Huerta). My girlfriend found herself almost on the verge of leaving the theatre a few times because of the bursts of violence, mostly directed toward women.

Director Cary Fukunaga

Without going into plot details, Willy ends up alone on the Train of Death (the name of the train ride from northern Guatemala to Texas) with the gorgeous Sayra (played phenomenally by Paulina Gaitan) and her family fleeing to New Jersey to be reunited. Both make it to the border – a piece of land that holds tons of meaning.

In my opinion, the story had to end how it did and it was perfectly logical why it did. It speaks volumes about the degradation of these Central American countries and the influence of gangs that terrorize innocent people. Mostly, it is the lack of a civic structure and lack of political means that bring many into this, their only way of life, their only means of survival, their only family they know or have – their real family left on the Train of Death years back. The United States remains ephemeral, mysterious, unspoken – but it is the only thread tying all these peoples’ lives together.

Some complain about the use of MS13 – of which I have seen firsthand as a student in Manassas, Virginia. MS13 has obtained an almost legendary status in Northern Virginia – tales of machete killings outside of Sears are not only implausible, but are groundless. Yet, MS13, and it is shown in the movie, is terrifying. Some argue that the Eighteenth Street gang in Mexico, featured in a shootout in the film, would be more apt in a film taking place mostly in Mexico. Yet, MS13 provides both accuracy – it is all across Central and North America – as well as scope – the legend I spoke of earlier.

Sin Nombre provides an allegory to the trials of immigration, the sins committed by the governments of Central America – the extreme income inequalities, the land concentration, the denial or balkanization of basic human services – and the United States – the constant threats of economic strangulation, support in their civic and military endeavors, as well as small things, like deporting known gangbangers back to San Salvador and other capitals increasing gang violence in Salvador while decreasing it in Los Angeles or Houston. It is a film, as the allegory goes, that does not end happily, but ends it must.

I see this film as one that wishes to challenge the cyclical nature we sometimes associate with Latin America or gang violence (white, black, brown, green). This film adds humanity – often lost until it is too late – to the murky pictures seen on television or read in the news. We, Americans (and I use the term in its vitally broad sense), are better off for it.

For many, the biggest problem with history, despite the interesting facts and compelling story, is how it is relevant in real life and how the information just consumed can be used today. Often, this is a hard question to answer, especially if one begins to read more specialized literature. Yet, often, the men and women who synthesize decades of research into great reads often have more to give than the original monographs or essay collection. Peter Chapman’s Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World is more than just the history of the banana (although it is just that!). Chapman, who has been based in Mexico and Central America for the BBC and now writes for the Financial Times of London, weaves the story of United Fruit, bananas, and United States/Central American relations into a singular narrative. While saying nothing new, for newcomers the story is incredible and will, more than likely, draw one into further reading.

At the heart of Bananas, is the story of bananas. To be more specific, the origins of the United Fruit Company, which single-handedly created demand for a fruit that it basically invented and harvested from the bowels of Central America. In 1870, tiny Boston Fruit Company head Andrew Preston was introduced to Captain Lorenzo Baker, who provided Preston with “Jamaica Yellows,” the banana that would alter Central American history. The advent of steam technology and the rise of the US financial market coalesced at the closing decades of the nineteenth-century prompting Boston Fruit to expand into United Fruit with ships importing bananas from Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Honduras.

United Fruit is remembered for its part in the overthrow of democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz, but its effect was felt well before its apogee in 1954. United Fruit prospered throughout the early twentieth century, even into the 1930s because of its monopolies in countries like Honduras and Guatemala. United Fruit owned vast tracks of land, much of it sterile and unused. It owned exclusive access to railroads built specifically for hauling bananas. The latter was a legacy going back to colonial days when powers would connect hubs of imperial capital with sea access (in short, the tracks begin in the banana fields and travel straight to the ships docked at the harbors awaiting sail for the US East Coast), disconnecting cities from one another. Because of this division, United Fruit was able to pursue harsh labor practices, something Chapman does not go into extensively in his work. Without a pertinent labor movement between countries (or even small villages) the exploited banana laborers were left to fend for themselves, and they did (a clear example is the “Banana Massacre” in Santa Marta, Colombia in November of 1928 in which 11 to 30,000 were killed).

Because of its size and its brazen arrogance, United Fruit was about influence both the United States and the countries from which it derived its profits. Chapman makes it clear that some of this influence can be attributed to characters (wonderfully rendered by Chapman) such as Minor Keith, Samuel Zemurray and Eli Black, the last CEO of United Fruit, who leaped to his death in 1971. With its hands in the halls of government (Secretary of John Foster State Dulles’ law firm represented United Fruit and Allen Dulles, the secretary’s brother, was head of the fledgling CIA), United Fruit would promote equitable trade deals, markets wide open for their taking, and an ideology that provided a convenience to the rise of communism at the dawn of the Cold War.

United Fruit played its hand in two of the most influential moments in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1954, it was United Fruit land that was seized by Arbenz to be redistributed. He rationalized that the land was feral (United Fruit owned huge swaths of land, much of it unused) and it would promote the liberal reforms that had begun after the fall of dictator Jorge Ubico in 1944. The United States cried “communism” and provided Castillo Armas with guns, money and bombing raids to bring down Arbenz. In what would become standard, the US bent Guatemala’s will and Arbenz left the country disgraced, strip-searched on his way out of the country.

Unlike Guatemala, Cuba, after its revolution, was able to appropriate United Fruit landholdings. United Fruit was accused by Fidel Castro of harboring and aiding exiles of the former regime of Fulgencio Batista. This would prove more than correct. In 1961, John F. Kennedy launched an invasion of Cuba from the Bay of Pigs. Honduras, where coffee was never king and is still the land of bananas, provided the spring board for troops. The US did not provide any military support and Cubans repelled the exiles and crushed the counterrevolution. “Cuba is not another Guatemala,” Fidel warned. United Fruit was never compensated for its lost property.

The company does not exist today in the same vein as during its heyday. A combination of a terrible harvest, overpriced shares declining rapidly in value and a diluted brand that would soon by directly implicated in the two incidents mentioned before as Richard Nixon would prompt a review of the CIA and many branches of government. Eli Black, the last owner of United Fruit, killed himself by jumping off the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in New York City. United Fruit existed no more.

The strength of Chapman’s work is that the United Fruit Company is not just an interesting tale in the history of Central America and the longer tale of Western imperialism but continues to be relevant today. United Fruit Company is now Chiquita. It has, for all intents and purposes, gone native in order to dispel its former life as a rogue corporation that overthrew governments and murdered workers. But it is not United Fruit’s transformation to Chiquita that is impressive.

Multinational corporations actively take out pages from the United Fruit playbook. It is increasing difficult to overthrow governments but companies can wield such a sway that decisions are made with executives in the room or the corporation in mind. The ubiquity of advertising was also a standard of United Fruit – seen today as the Chiquita woman and previously in Hollywood shorts that misconstrued the culture of Central America and prompted critics, taking the phrase from O. Henry, to label these degenerate and seemingly vapid societies nothing more than banana republics (literary). The deals it cut with the US government are perpetuated today. Free trade and neoliberalism are the mantras of the moment. Fair trade and the fair distribution of land, or otherwise, is often shunned as being against the free market and capitalism. Chapman, in this final chapter entitled “United Fruit World,” asserts that actions of corporations today have role models. United Fruit was not the only corporation in the United States but it played a large role in US foreign policy history.

In short, United Fruit is an example (and the continued avarice of our economic and corporate players today) of a logic that went awry.

We continually put ourselves in a position to be surprised. We assume the best, elevate people to pedestals and celebrate their friendship with presidents. We are shocked when it is revealed that we have been ‘sold’ a lie. Then we get embarrassed and try to forget, as we did with United Fruit.

“Bananas cannot go beyond their genes,” Chapman states. Chapman cites some scientists who believe that by 2013 the banana will disappear due its inability to reproduce without the aid of human beings – for it is was us, after all, who created the banana and it is us, after all, who create and shape history. Although the banana’s life may be in jeopardy, it is clear the mentality of corporations (influenced by United Fruit’s successes), as evidenced by our most recent collapse, will not.

Recreation of slavery in Brazil

Today in 1888 (121 years ago) Brazil officially abolished its slave trade – the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to do so.

Slavery and the slave trade dealt exclusively with Africa and persisted for nearly 400 years. Brazil lasted longer than any other Western Hemispheric nation, although the US South had the highest concentration of slaves that the world has ever seen – 6 million on the eve of the Civil War in 1860. Brazil never reached those heights, but it used slaves in the same fashion as white southerners did. Not only was slavery economically essential to parts of Brazil, but it also created castes of human beings that persist today.

Brazil, like the US, has to deal with a lot of racial strife – positive and negative – over the course of the century since official the end of the slave trade. Let it not be confused – the end of the slave trade did not signal emancipation. Brazil officially began its emancipation of slaves in 1822 when it became an independent nation – but progress was slow. As Douglas Blackmon’s literally revolutionary work Slavery By Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II (which just deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize) shows, emancipation did not equate to freedom in the South as forces of oppression in the forms of sheriffs, corrupt judges, systems of debt peonage and forced bondage and imprisonment were implemented to craft Southern entrepreneurs dreams of industrialization.

To Blackmon, these systems of oppression ended in the 1950s as the civil rights movement began to grow and would be hard to fathom these literal and tangible acts happening today in America – despite race and racism still being a major factor in our daily lives. In Brazil, debt peonage and modern slavery – like the forms taken in Blackmon’s narrative – exist today. Just last year, and going back decades, thousands of workers (4,634 in 2008) have been released from slavery and slave-like conditions. In 2004, the government of Brazil said 25,000 citizens work in conditions “analogous to slavery.”In 2007, 1,000 workers at a sugar cane plantation were freed.

It is clear that slavery is still a problem, especially when the mechanisms of racial subjugation remain in place. The US South is still dealing with this, just as Brazil is. It is never enough to ignore “our Negroes,” as white southerners insidiously called blacks, or dismiss the noise from poor people in the favelas across Brazil. We must continue centuries old conversations so that this anniversary is truly a disgusting prick upon the flesh of human history.

Campaign Against School of the Americas Lobbies El Salvador
By Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, May 7 (IPS) – Representatives of School of the Americas Watch visited El Salvador to ask the incoming government of the leftwing FMLN, which will take office in June, to stop sending military officers to the U.S. army academy, which has long been accused of teaching torture techniques.

El Salvador has a special significance for School of the Americas (SOA) Watch, because the movement was founded in 1990 by Maryknoll priest Roy Bourgeois (a former naval officer and Vietnam veteran) in response to atrocities committed during this country’s 1980-1992 civil war.

Bourgeois became an outspoken critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America after four U.S. churchwomen – two of whom were friends of his – were raped and killed by Salvadoran soldiers in December 1980. The November 1989 murders of six prominent Jesuit priests, along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter, then became a catalyst for the emergence of SOA Watch.

SOA Watch has offices outside of Fort Benning, Georgia – where the SOA, renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC) in 2001, is located – and in Washington, D.C.

“The light of our movement was switched on in El Salvador, where the killings of the priests helped open our eyes to the way the U.S. army was using our taxes,” Lisa Sullivan, SOA Watch’s Latin America coordinator, told IPS.

“Our money was used to train members of the Salvadoran military in how to kill peasants, priests and nuns,” said Sullivan.

The 12-year war between government forces and the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) guerrillas left 80,000 people dead or disappeared, mainly at the hands of the armed forces and far-right death squads.

The FMLN, which became a political party in 1993, won the presidential elections in March.

The SOA was founded in Panama in 1946 as a U.S. army training school for Latin American military personnel.

It trained Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, before and during the years of the U.S. “national security doctrine.” Many SOA graduates ended up involved in human rights violations throughout the hemisphere, in Mexico, Central America and South America.

In 1984, then president of Panama Jorge Illueca kicked the SOA out of his country, and it was moved to the army base at Fort Benning, Georgia.

In response to the controversy and protests by human rights activists, the SOA was officially “closed” in December 2000. But it reopened a month later as WHINSEC – in the same installations, with the same staff carrying out the same work.

The United Nations Truth Commission in El Salvador found that 19 of the 26 Salvadoran soldiers and officers implicated in the murders of the Jesuit priests were SOA alumni.

The 64,000 Latin American soldiers who have trained at the SOA also included three of the five Salvadoran troops who raped and killed the three U.S. nuns and a Catholic lay worker in 1980 and two of the three cited in the March 1980 assassination of Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was shot by a sniper while conducting mass.

A total of 48 of the 69 Salvadoran officers cited by the U.N. Truth Commission for human rights violations had been trained at the SOA.

The list of SOA graduates also includes: former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega (1983-1989); Leopoldo Galtieri and Roberto Viola, former members of the military juntas that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983; and other dictators like Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975) of Peru, Guillermo Rodríguez (1972-1976) of Ecuador, and Hugo Banzer (1971-1978) of Bolivia.

Since SOA Watch protests against the school began, nearly 200 activists have served a combined 81 years in prison for acts of civil disobedience, like attempting to enter the grounds of Fort Benning.

One of them is Jesuit priest Joseph Mulligan, who was arrested in November 2003 for trespassing and spent February to April 2004 in a prison in Georgia.

Mulligan told IPS that he took part in the SOA Watch protest vigils held every November outside of Fort Benning to commemorate the murders of the Jesuit priests because as a U.S. citizen he feels responsible for what his government does in Latin America.

The largest number of protesters drawn to the annual vigil was 22,000, in 2006. Six SOA Watch protesters are currently in prison for civil disobedience, serving sentences ranging from two to six months.

“We want to send the army and U.S. society the message that we are opposed to the continued training of soldiers who go on to violate human rights,” Mulligan said.

SOA Watch activist Pablo Ruiz, from Chile, called for the construction of “a new concept of the armed forces,” and protested that the president of his country, socialist Michelle Bachelet, has not yet removed Chilean soldiers from the school in Fort Benning “because the power of the military is still very strong.”

According to SOA Watch figures, civil war-torn Colombia sends more troops to SOA/WHINSEC than any other country: 323 in 2007, followed by Chile (195), Peru (134), Nicaragua (78), the Dominican Republic (65), Ecuador (62), Panama (50), Honduras (44), El Salvador (37), Guatemala (35), Costa Rica (22), Paraguay (15), Mexico (13), Jamaica (10), Belize and Brazil (four) and Canada (two).

The SOA Watch activists say they have visited 16 Latin American countries since 2008, meeting with local officials to urge them to withdraw all troops from SOA/WHINSEC.

Their efforts have borne fruit in several cases. Chile only sent 45 troops in 2008, and Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Venezuela have ceased to send troops altogether.

Sullivan said that when President-elect Mauricio Funes of the FMLN takes office in June, there is a possibility that El Salvador will follow suit.

Mary Anne Perrone, another SOA Watch activist, said that when Vice President-elect Salvador Sánchez Cerén met with the group’s representatives, he admitted that he was unfamiliar with WHINSEC, but that he would take the information provided by the activists very seriously.

El Salvador had plans to increase the number of troops sent this year to SOA/WHINSEC to 58.

A source close to Sánchez Cerén confirmed to IPS that he met with the SOA Watch representatives, but did not discuss the results of the meeting.

“It’s disturbing; governments are often not fully informed that troops from their countries are undergoing training at WHINSEC, because since 2005 the school no longer reveals the names of its students, since most of them are attending on the basis of a personal invitation,” said Sullivan.

“We believe it is important to strengthen the concept of sovereignty in Latin America,” the SOA Watch Latin America coordinator added.

However, I hope to have a post about May Day up in a timely manner, if possible. But, after graduation, expect lots more from Latin American Musings as I try to make something out of this little guy.

Thanks for the patience. And follow me on Twitter, I don’t post often, but am becoming more welcoming of the social network.

May 1, 1909. Police kill thirty workers in a South American city. The workers are gunned down and violently beaten during a protest to demand an eight hour work day and remember the Hay Market Martyrs. Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, was the scene of this massacre targeting the anarchist-labor movement which proliferated throughout the region through the beginning of the 20th century.

One of Argentina’s first unions, the anarcho-syndicalist Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) organized the May Day protest in 1909, joining workers around the world mobilizing on May 1 to demand the institution of an 8-hour-long workday and commemorate the Chicago martyrs; Parsons, Engel, Spies, Fischer, executed by hanging at the hands of the United States government and Lingg, who committed suicide in his jail cell. Buenos Aires police commissioner, Coronel Ramón L. Falcón, legendary for his anti-anarchist and immigrant tendencies, gave the order to brutally repress the peaceful May Day protest.

Thousands of workers from the FORA began to mobilize in the late afternoon in Plaza Lorea, in front of Congress on May 1, 1909. Shortly before the speakers began, Coronel Falcón ordered police to break up the protest. The squadron mounted on horses, armed with clubs and bullets, attacked the unarmed anarchists. Those who could escape ran to inform of the police repression. A witness of the event, Dardo Cuneo gave the account from a separate socialist May Day act 20 blocks away, “among those who arrived from Plaza Lorea with the news of the police repression, was a young man…in his hand he had a blood stained scarf. ‘This is the blood of the brothers and sisters who were killed,’ he said in his foreign accent. Afterward it was discovered, when a newspaper published his photo, that the young man with a blood stained scarf clenched in his fist was named Simón Radowitzky” (Juan B. Justo, Editorial América Lee, Buenos Aires, 1943).

Simón Radowitzky

Six months later, a young anarchist named Simon Radowitzky took justice into his own hands – organizing a direct action against Coronel Ramon Falcon. He threw a bomb at the Coronel’s coach, killing Falcon in the act. We can only assume that Radowitzky was deeply hurt by the bloodshed and deaths at the hands of the police. Knowing that Falcon would order future police repression against workers, Radowitzky wanted to prevent future bloodshed.

Radowitzky, of Russian origin and barely 18-years-old, was sentenced to life in prison in the Siberia of Argentina, Ushuaia. At his trial he admitted to throwing the bomb which killed Falcon. “I killed Colonel Falcon because he ordered the massacre of workers. I am the son of working people and a brother of those who have died fighting the bourgeoisie.”

Anarchist historian, Osvaldo Bayer wrote a number of books and articles on Radowitzky, including Simón Radowitzky, ¿mártir o asesino?. Anarchists made several attempts for Radowitzky’s release and organized an international campaign to “Free Radowitsky.” Bayer writes that Radowitzky stood up to all humiliations in prison and defended his fellow prisoners who respected Radowitzky as a man jailed for defending his ideals. The campaign for his release continued until he was finally freed in 1930, after 20 years of hell and almost complete isolation. He was expelled from Argentina, taking Uruguay as his new home. When the Spanish Revolution broke out, he headed for Spain in 1936 to join the anarchist division on the Aragon Front. Radowitzky died of a heart attack on February 29, 1956 as a true internationalist in Latin America – far from his birth place Russia.

Simon Radowitzky left a tradition of anarchist-individualist action. After Radowitzky, came the anarchist expropriators, individuals who employed direct, violent means to undermine what they saw as an unjust, corrupt and violent political and economic system. Whether or not these actions were justified can be debated, but it must be taken into consideration the violent attacks that the state and state apparatus has imposed on the oppressed in order to judge whether violence should be used against the state as a method of defense or social revolution.

Tradition of State Violence

La Semana Tragica

Brutal state violence against working class resistance did not begin nor end with the 1909 May Day massacre. The Argentine State implemented a number of measures in fear of growing manifestations of radical activity – particularly anarchism. Ten years after the 1909 massacre, four workers were killed by police in Buenos Aires, Argentina starting “la semana tragic” or the tragic week. On January 7th, 1919, military officers used deadly force against striking workers echoing the worldwide demand for an eight hour day and improved wages in the Vesena Iron Workers plant in the capital city. Two days after the start of the tragic week, the FORA mobilized hundreds of thousands of people into the streets. The military, police and company vigilante groups cracked down on the general strike as hundreds of workers were killed and more than 50,000 were arrested during the tragic week. Later in 1921, the Patagonia Rebelde took place, with the mass shooting of over 1,500 rural workers on strike in the southern region of Patagonia.

Argentina would see several military dictatorships after 1909. The most brutal being the 1976-1983 military junta which imposed absolute terror throughout the population. During the nation’s darkest chapter, the dictatorship disappeared more than 30,000 people – students, labor organizers, and activists, victims of the military’s unimaginable methods of terror. The military dictatorship systematized the practice of forced disappearances and torture with U.S. financial support and training. Like the previous massacres throughout the century, the military sought to wipe out political opponents and growing social movements in order to implement an economic model in line with the Washington Consensus. They didn’t want radical organizers who would challenge the accumulation of foreign debt, reliance on foreign investors and foreign corporations’ industrial takeovers.

The military dictatorship successfully implemented a neo-liberal order, but they were unable to prevent future movements from trying to undo neoliberalism. State violence and the killing of activists transformed Argentina’s labor movement, but it has not destroyed it which leads us to where we are today.

Historic Memory and Resistance

On May 1, 2009, workers and social movements will return to Plaza Lorea the location of an event that changed the face of working class history and the life of Simon Radowitzky, where he saw his fellow comrades fall victim to police violence a hundred years ago. The utopian dreams of the anarchists of social revolution a century ago have dwindled but hope reigns.

Ramon Falcon has been memorialized with bronze statues and his name given to police academies and streets. During the 70′s, military dictatorship named a plaza tucked in a residential neighborhood after Ramon Falcon. In 2003, a neighborhood assembly unofficially changed the name of the Plaza to “Che Guevara,” which was decided in a popular vote in which over 10,000 people voted. Falcon’s memorial statue located in an upper-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires has been destroyed on a number of occasions. Falcon’s memory as an honorable police official can be erased, his memory as a brutal repressor will remain in the historic memory of the oppressed.

This May Day comes as a recession is begins to unfold in Argentina, since October 2008 more than 55,000 people have lost their jobs. During this financial crisis when capitalism is at its weakest, the revolutionary spirit of Simon Radowitzky lives in the struggle of women and men who continue to fight for a better world, a world without exploitation and oppression. Radowitzky is alive in the subway workers who are fighting to form their own union in Buenos Aires subways; the autonomous social movements fighting transnational companies polluting the Andes mountains; the anarchist groups of today; the worker occupied factories where over 10,000 workers are producing without bosses or owners and the many social movement practicing direct democracy and carrying out their own direct actions against capitalism.

Que viva Simon Radowitzky y los Mártires de Chicago!

Subcomandante Marcos:

“I have said before that I will take off my ski mask when Mexican society takes off its own mask, the one it uses to cover up the real Mexico…However, today I am announcing that even if that were to happen, I would keep my mask on so as to not catch the swine flu!”

Enough said.

¡Basta!

Swine flu did not begin because of Mexican genetic fallibility, terrorism, or otherwise. These accusations are baseless, ignorant and racist.

Swine flu is about capital, not race. Swine flu is the fault of multinational pig farms (despite their “moans”) – housing pigs who lay in their own shit, are fed antibiotics so as not to die from diseases they swim in, and are quickly processed and eaten. One does not get swine flu from eating swine, pigs, but develops a strain of disease from a pig, which is then transferred person to person.

Recently, it is almost impossible in the media to receive any sort of information. Think of the Somali pirates (no mention that we pour toxic nuclear waste and shit into their harbors). This time, we hear no word about Smithfield, the conglomerate pork processor that is headquartered miles from my home. It has been the policy of the United States to export its ability to produce massive amount of food across the world. Smithfield’s plants, in Mexico and elsewhere, did not happen overnight, but this was something that we should have seen coming.

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Perote, Veracruz, where it is believed the strain of swine flu came from, houses an enormous “half-owned” agricompound, run by Smithfield, that produces mass amounts of swine. As Mike Davis notes, in his wonderfully needed “Capitalism and Flu,” this morning:

In 1965, for instance, there were 53 million American hogs on more than 1 million farms; today, 65 million hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities–half with more than 5,000 animals.

This has been a transition, in essence, from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, unprecedented in nature, containing tens, even hundreds of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems, suffocating in heat and manure, while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates and pathetic progenies.

Mexico has been our haven for cheap labor and lax standards. Not only is the world in an economic mess, but in an environmental one too. However, I am not suggesting that everything is known about the flu (it travels unpredictably, springs up in any season: where does it go? how does it travel?), but our drive towards capital at the cost our health has cost us, at best, a health scare, at worst, a pandemic. Washing ones hands will do not good if one is living in shit.

Our contempt for the environment, capital, human beings had led us here. It is not Mexico, or Mexicans. They, unfortunately for us, are not the problem. Mexico does not lack the genetic code to be productive humans or healthy humans, they deal with a lack or resources and a disdain from the US, both in policy circles as well as cultural circles. (In fact, Mexico learned about the swine flu strain six days before it was even picked up by the press in the US – but that speaks to our arrogance as much as our ignorance).

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Despite Mexico becoming a scapegoat for the US and the West’s responsibility in this health scare (guns, drugs, and swine…), Mike Davis suggests that we not sit back in our understanding of what I outlined above. He emphasizes, in his article and in his 2006 book, Monsters At Our Door, that pandemics are real, and should be feared. The Spanish Influenza of 1918 began as a benign flu and roared back with a vengeance just as World War I came to a close. It is not too much assume, according to some, that this could happen once again.

The governments of the world project readiness. President Obama suggests that we should be concerned. Janet Napolitano, Homeland Security Director, declared a state of emergency on Sunday and has freed up the distribution of antibiotics, Thermaflu and such in case of emergencies. But Davis doesn’t think this is enough.

The swine flu, in any case, may prove that the WHO/Centers for Disease Control (CDC) version of pandemic preparedness–without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health and global access to lifeline drugs–belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as AIG derivatives and Madoff securities.

It isn’t so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn’t exist, even in North America and the EU.

I cannot comment on the readiness or reliability of our ability to stop this flu from killing more people (almost 200 have died in Mexico alone, no other casualties have occurred from other nations). But I will emphasize that Mexico, and specifically Mexicans, are not the problem. It may have originated in Mexico, but if it happened in, say, Fort Riley, Kansas, like the 1918 flu, we would not be having this discussion. This would be a global tragedy instead of an occasion to once again ignore one’s role and perpetuate the same fractured stereotypes that have led us here in the first place.

In 1945, following World War II, the Soviet Union (USSR) began to create diplomatic ties across Latin America. This is not to say that the USSR, and moreover, what the USSR represented to many, was not popular or influential in Latin America. But following the war, diplomatic and formal relations were being fostered – before the churning of the Cold War. This is an individual review of the nations of Latin America during this time period. The main purpose is to illuminate to the relationships and draw in new scholarship to the readers of this blog. Its tertiary purpose is to use these conclusions in current Latin American relations that take place outside the internal and United States’ sphere (i.e. China).

Key to understanding Latin America-USSR relations at all is the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (the Rio Treaty) that was signed by all of Latin America in 1947. (Suffice to say, but the role of United States is critical to the role of the USSR in Latin America). But it did not take long, especially after the Guatemalan coup and the Cuban Revolution and increased US manipulation in Latin American affairs, that Non-alignment – the Nonaligned Movement – began to grow steam. Being nonaligned during the Cold War was dangerous, but the risks sometimes out weighed the rewards. It reduced dependence on the United States (although, in Cuba’s case, shifted dependence to another power), allowed nations to bargain and trade on both sides of the East-West divide. Many did not take part in this movement, some were only observers.

To step back: the role of communism and the presence of the USSR must be differentiated. There is little doubt that, especially in the 1920s to the 1950s, Latin American communists were inspired by the Soviet Union – if, for nothing else, the mythology surrounding it. There is also no doubt that the Soviets had a large presence in Latin America. But it would be a mistake to say that international communism, the kind purported by the Comintern and other organs, was the sole cause of all communist threats in the Western Hemisphere. This is naive, and still assumed by cold warriors today. Communism in Latin America, while using the dialectical frameworks of Marxist-Leninism among others, was organic and – in the case of El Salvador in 1932, grew out of not only class resentments but also racial and ethnic issues that led to the deaths of 15,000 “communists,” as the government claimed. Both the right and left held the banner for communism – either for or against during the cold war – but in our examination of countries and crises, it would do us better to acknowledge that communism, and the set of interpretations it conjures, are diverse.

The two most famous examples of Cold War hysteria include the CIA-funded overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz and the Cuban alignment with the USSR and international communism following the island’s revolution in 1959. Their individual stories will be elaborated elsewhere, but the truth remains the same. Guatemala was not a communist dictatorship, not even close – it’s only sin was appropriating United Fruit land and having a more open democracy than even the US. Cuba began as an organic revolution. It turned socialist and espoused communism only after the Revolution. These two examples, as well as US response, is important to understanding the role of communism, and the Soviet Union, in Latin America.

Following World War II, and especially after Guatemala and Cuba, the role of the USSR became quite fixed. As hinted at with El Salvador in 1932 and Guatemala two decades later, the Soviet Union held Latin America at a low-priority. Cuba changed this in 1959.

The Soviet Union also became a someone benign character in Latin America. It is often easy to think of the USSR, the evil empire, as engaging all the struggles in Latin America from afar, supplying guns and aid. But this view is at best ignorant, and at worst, racist. The people of Latin America never needed a “great power” to change their fortunes. To be honest, there was not much of an academic presence in support of Latin America in the Soviet Union. There was no one espousing imperialism – in fact, Latin America was a low priority for the USSR from its beginning until its end. Like the US, the USSR went through an important period in which it thought Latin America would its for the molding but realized that Latin America is diverse and has opinions of its own – that it often voiced. This would be important as we continue. They learned that Latin Americans have opinions of their own, and as the policies of the USSR began to move, so to did Latin American perceptions. The Soviet Union main policy objective was to support destabilization of US influence on the region. They often encouraged countries to accept sweetheart deals with them or to, at least, become “non-aligned,” which drove the US wild. As a result of the social upheaval to be discussed below, the Soviet Union kept a low profile in the Western Hemisphere. Soviet trade never reached US levels, except for Cuba, but it did provide, like Russia and China do today, new outlets for Latin American goods.

Despite the public low-profile, the USSR was active behind the scenes peacefully and violently. After several attempts to help revolutions in Latin America that failed (Venezuela in 1965, Bolivia in 1967, etc.) began to espouse a “peaceful road to socialism.” In 1970, Salvador Allende would be elected president in Chile. It looked “bright” for communism in Latin America as leftist and social movements worked readily with communist movements. After Allende was taken out of power in 1973, Primer Brezhnev noted, “revolution must know how to defend themselves.” In 1976, the Soviets used Cuba a proxy for arming Latin American revolutionaries. It enhanced its military presence on the continent with advisors to guerrillas, to counter the increased US military involvement with entrenched government forces being fought by guerrillas. For example, the threats the US saw in Grenada in the early 1980s were real, leading to the US intervening in 1983; and in the most famous example of social revolution since Cuba, Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas took power on July 19, 1979, was directly aided by Cuban and the Soviet Union guns and aid. Now it looked as if violent revolution was the way to go, only a decade after “peace” was the supposed answer. Nicaragua openly gave Soviet arms to El Salvador and Guatemalan revolutionaries during the 1980s.

The Soviet Union dissolved in August 1991, but warning signs were apparent in 1989, if not earlier. Its impact on Latin America, however, would probably be bigger than their impact when it was a functioning state. Cuba, the only country with lasting ties to the USSR, suffered the worse as it traded sugar for oil and after 1991 found itself without oil and under the US embargo. It is still trying to find its way out of that hole. For revolutionary Latin America, the collapse of international communism, embodied by the USSR, led to the swift end of civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, as well as the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. Without communism to fight, Latin America changed drastically. US relations with Latin America were the warmest ever following the fall of the USSR (1989-2001). South America began to align with the US more forcefully than before the fall of the Soviet Union. Ideologically, with the fall of “communism” and “socialism,” “free trade” and economic “liberalism” won the day. The proliferation of free trade deals and the birth of neoliberalism ushered in a new era of “progress” for Latin America.

So what became of the relationships with the former Soviet Union? Russia is still a force in Latin America, albeit diminished. It now associates with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez as well as its other allies from the cold war. It is more confrontational than the USSR as it is not the second world any longer but a rising nation that wishes to assert its will. The roads that the USSR used to traverse have been taken by China, still technically “communist,” which has become a major trading partner for Latin America in the past eight years as the US has taken a hands-off approach of the Americas.

In conclusion, it would not be too much to say that Marxist-Leninist thought was become discredited, but that has not stopped dissent (we will come to the dialectical issues of the new movement towards “socialism” by Venezuela and Bolivia in the Americas at another day). And in reality, as “communist” as the cold war social upheavals seemed to the US and the West, it was mostly coalitions of leftists and socially active Latin Americans have produced change in the face of great adversity. That is where relations with the Soviet Union must be interred at. It supported, when the US rejected, social change in the 1950s and beyond, communist or not. Some Latin Americans allied with the USSR, some did not. The Soviet’s kept their hands off the country for the most part, but played a theoretical role that, despite its excesses and mass murder, dialectically played a role in challenging US hegemony after WWII.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 20, 2009

A retired army general and two other retired officers have been indicted in the killing of 14 dissidents in 1973 during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The Santiago Court of Appeals said Gen. Gonzalo Santelices, Maj. Patricio Ferrer and Lt. Pablo Martínez were being held Monday at a military barracks. The killings were part of the so-called Caravan of Death, a military operation that left more than 90 political prisoners dead as it traversed the country shortly after the coup led by General Pinochet.