Just who is "developed"?

Bolivia celebrated 20 years of the UN Convention on Rights of the Child, a treaty recongized by every country on earth save two pirate outlaw nations. One of them is Somalia. Guess which one is the other?

Joe Hill ain't no ghost

I am happy to read that someone in the United States seems willing to stand up to the neoliberal ass-raping also referred to as "the Crisis" going on in Gringolandia. Let's hope other take on the example of University of California students and tell their corporate masters to fuck off (or otherwise known as acting like Bolivians). cheers!

Joe Hill lives

The Mex Files

Today is the 94th anniversary of the judicial murder of Joe Hill, executed by a Utah firing squad 19 November 1915. Hill, a Swedish immigrant (born Joel Hägglund in the 1870s — no one seems to be certain), while working as an itinerant laborer throughout the U.S. west, was also an entertainer, songwriter, and — most dangerously — an IWW organizer. Charismatic and handsome, Hill’s labor organizing skills were a threat to the mining company management, and several attempts had already made to silence him.

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Indigenous People Send Ultimatum to Ray Hunt:

'Get Your Oil Company Out of Our Protected Areas'

As deadline approaches, tensions rise again in the Peruvian Amazon

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a recent letter to Hunt Oil Company President Ray Hunt, the Native Federation of the Rio Madre de Dios (FENAMAD) gave Hunt until this week to leave the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve in the southern Peruvian Amazon as a condition to continuing any further talks.

"Having peacefully exhausted all protest, without receiving any answer, we hereby communicate that we have agreed to a fifteen-day period for you to definitively withdraw from the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve since you do not have the indigenous community's consent," states FENAMAD's letter.

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Election news and updates

• Evo Morales predicts the future: he will win by 2/3rds and the opposition will get violent. But we kind of knew that already.

• Wow, look. An article actually writes about what is really at stake in the December election (not Morales' reelection) but control of the Senate- and I should add all the indigenous, regional, and departmental autonomy referendums. However they still quote a retarded "political analysist" who claims Morales needs 2/3rds of the Senate to pass new bills. Wrong. They only need simply majority for new laws, 2/3rds to amend the constitution.

• Vice Presidential candidate Leopold Fernandez is getting some visitors at the San Pedro prison today he would probably rather not see, the family members of the people he had massacred September 11th 2008 in Pando.

• It turns out that Sucre's mayor in addition to being a racist piece of shit is also a corrupt piece of shit and has been removed from office for embezzlement. Sabina Cuellar, you are next.

• As I said before, Branco Marinkovic is fucked. The Congressional commission investigating the neo-nazi mercenary cell has recommended Marinkovic and Santa Cruz Prefect Ruben Costas be put under investigation for their role in the terrorist plot and that their properties be put under preventive registration.

• On the flip side, Bolivia is now transvestite friendly.
  

• And what does US Customs have against Bolivian potatoes?

Oh snap. Ben Bernanke just got served

...by an uneducated Marxist coca farmer! Inca Kola News has the details.

Justice closing in on Goni

¡Juicio a Goni Ya!

Cambridge, Mass. – The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Florida ruled yesterday that the claims for crimes against humanity and extrajudicial killings could move forward in two related U.S. cases against former Bolivian President Gonzalo Daniel Sánchez de Lozada Sánchez Bustamante (Sánchez de Lozada) and former Bolivian Defense Minister Jose Carlos Sánchez Berzaín (Sánchez Berzaín). The cases, Mamani, et al. v. Sánchez Berzaín, and Mamani, et al. v. Sánchez de Lozada, seek compensatory and punitive damages under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).

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Opposition using their old standby tactic

violence

They know they are finished. Evo has the election locked up. In the latest poll Morales is leading his scumbag challenger Manfred 52-22%. So what is a fascist to do? Do what they do best, club people.

Last night a political campaign rally in support of Morales' reelection on the campus of Santa Cruz University Gabriel Rene Moreno was assaulted by rightwing thugs leaving five injured hospitalized.

This is the third such violent assault (by my count: previous one and two) related to the December elections by the opposition in the last weeks in Santa Cruz. One university student summed up the significance last night,

"This is a demonstration of the pigeons of the dictator, that they do not know how to live in democracy. They are desperate, they know that President Evo Morales is going to demolish this election."

Desperate is right. Evo is cleaning house even in the once supposed "Media Luna" heartland of the rightwing opposition. Check out these photos from a MAS rally with VP Alvaro Linera in Beni (eastern Bolivia) last month.



I believe Woody Guthrie has a few words:

People of every color
Marching side by side
Marching 'cross these fields
Where a million fascists dies
You're bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!

Update: The UN representative to Bolivia, Yoriko Yasukawa condemned these violent acts.

Alvaro Linera and the End of Poverty

At the end of the Democracy Now! interview with filmmaker of "The End of Povertry?" they play a clip of an interview of Bolivia's Vice-President Alvaro Linera with John Perkins so you can see what a badass Evo Morales has for his right-hand man (followed by an Amy Goodman discussion with John Perkins). The two DN! segments below are well worth your viewing.