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Panama Tries Compromise; US Says It’s Not Enough
After intense pressure by the U.S. on Panama to return possession of its canal to Washington because the Trump administration thinks China is threatening it, the Central American nation on Sunday sought a compromise by announcing it would study whether or not to renew contracts with a Chinese company managing two ports on the waterway…
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Whether Biden or Trump, US’s Latin American Policy Will Still Be Contemptible
With Donald Trump as the new US president, pundits are speculating about how US policy towards Latin America might change. In this article, we look at some of the speculation, then address three specific instances of how the US’s policy priorities may be viewed from a progressive, Latin American perspective. This leads us to a…
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What’s Left in Latin American and the Caribbean: Year 2024 in Review
The progressive regional current, the “Pink Tide,” could be better called “troubled waters” in 2024. The tide had already slackened by 2023 compared to its rise in 2022, when it was buoyed by big wins in Colombia and Brazil. Then, progressive alternatives had sailed into power replacing failed neoliberal policies. Since, they have had to…
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Latin American Governments Pay a Price for Challenging Israel’s Genocidal War
Governments in Latin America have been at the forefront of opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and several of those which have done so suddenly face new threats, even including attempted coups. Adrienne Pine, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, said during a recent webinar hosted by the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition that…
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The US has imposed sanctions on Georgia and Nicaragua for instituting laws that copy U.S. legislation and were designed to ward off coups
Politicians in the small Caucasian state of Georgia have been sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms”, simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics. Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions doing the same. Although the two…
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What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance, by Carolyn Forché
This book is the fruit of an extraordinary coming together of two very different people. One was a burgeoning poet living in Southern California, the other a coffee-growing entrepreneur turned political activist from El Salvador. Wanting more people to know about the disaster that was beginning to befall his country in the turbulent late 1970s,…
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On the Quito Embassy Raid
When armed Ecuadorian police gathered outside the Mexican embassy in Quito last Friday evening, a casual observer might have thought they were there to protect it. Instead, they launched an attack: brandishing assault rifles, police climbed the walls, entered the building by force and kidnapped Ecuador’s former vice-president, Jorge Glas, who had that day been…
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Should we be concerned about what ChatGPT “thinks” about Latin America?
ChatGPT is a powerful AI chatbot that is as easy to use as Google and provides more direct answers to users’ questions. Ask it anything you like, and you will receive an answer that sounds like it was written by a human, based on knowledge and writing skills gained from massive amounts of data from…
