By Rodrigo Acuña
Eureka Street
3 October 2007
Outside the alternative media, last month saw nearly no coverage of the incarceration in the United States of Cuban agents Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando Gonzáles and René Gonzáles.
Now into their ninth year of imprisonment, the Cuban Five — as they are otherwise known — are serving a variety of sentences that include convictions for conspiracy to commit espionage and homicide. By most credible accounts, the Cubans are in prison — some on life sentences — for political reasons and not because they have broken any serious laws, other than overstaying their visas.
By Rodrigo Acuña
New Matilda
27 September 2007
In his first feature film The War on Democracy, journalist John Pilger aims to expose Washington's foreign policy in Latin America, and does not pull any punches.
Through a series of interviews with activists, scholars and incumbent and retired Washington officials, and not the least with the “ordinary” people of Latin America, Pilger seeks to illustrate some of the current changes taking place in the region following the coming to power of current Left-wing governments.
By Rodrigo Acuña
New Matilda
18 April 2007
A recent article by Paul Richter and Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times has again brought international attention on Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez. At the centre of the LA Times article is a leaked report from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which claims that Colombian army chief General Mario Montoya and a paramilitary group carried out an operation against Marxist rebels in 2002, that left 14 people dead and ‘dozens more disappeared in its aftermath’.
Given the nature of the activities of paramilitary groups in Colombia and Uribe’s ‘long and close association’ with Montoya, the revelation adds to a scandal which, Richter and Miller say, ‘already has implicated the country’s former Foreign Minister, at least one State Governor, legislators and the head of the national police’.
By Rodrigo Acuña
New Matilda
20 December 2006
It is a truism that all evaluations of history are tainted by one’s vision of how the world should work. Another truism is that a lack of primary sources can often leave certain grey areas in the historical record.
Sometimes, however, events or eras are roughly clear and some degree of consensus is achieved.
General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) is one such case. In particular, the illegitimacy of his regime and its vast human rights violations against anyone broadly on the political Left or who opposed his regime. Most serious Latin American studies scholars and journalists would agree that Pinochet brutally overthrew a government which, despite many faults, was democratically and legitimately elected.
Dissent from a consensus, of course, always exists and on 15 December, The Australian published a strange article by James Whelan, a neo-conservative journalist who for many years has written works which present the Pinochet era in a favourable light. Whelan’s piece was revisionism of the worst kind.
By Rodrigo Acuña
New Matilda
13 September 2006
This week, one of the largest cities in Latin America is almost at a standstill as tensions rise over what many are calling a fraudulent election. Yet with notable exceptions, the international press have ignored the crisis.
Since the 2 July Mexican presidential election, which was won by National Action Party (PAN) candidate Felipe Calderón under controversial circumstances, the historical Zócalo Plaza and other prominent areas of Mexico City have been occupied by hundreds of thousands of supporters of rival candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PDR).
Obrador's supporters claim that he was robbed of electoral victory through fraud, while Obrador himself has declared he will set up a parallel government if votes are not recounted in full.
