The 2023 round of AmericasBarometer, a survey of 39,074 individuals across 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, revealed an overall feeling of pessimism and dissatisfaction alongside a lack of faith in democracy:
64% of adults think the economic situation in their country has worsened
32% report food insecurity
40% feel unsafe in their neighborhood.
22% report being the victim of a crime in the past 12 months
"Berlin-based publisher Contingent Sounds has released a new book capturing 'the female protagonists of Latin American electronic music.' To coincide with the release, we take a look at some archival shots of Latin America’s female 20th-century electronic pioneers."
Latin American nations have increasingly sided with the plight of Palestinains against Israel.
Brazil recalled its ambassador to Tel-Aviv, following Lula’s comparison of the Gaza onslaught to the Holocaust
Venezuelan President Maduro stated strong support toward Lula’s remarks
Nicaragua is co-sponsoring South Africa's ICJ case against Israel
Bolivia’s Pres Luis Arce: Bolivia cut relations with Israel on the wake of Israel's assault on Gaza and expelled Israeli ambassador from Bolivia. More recently, Luis Arce expressed support for Lula.
Next was an extremely informative panel on the interaction between big business and politics in Latin America at the @stiglercenter with Aldo Musacchio and Ben Schneider. There's incredibly rich historical context here and how state owned and private conglomerates have influenced political development in the region and how successful companies have navigated shifting regimes. Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GumuAyXPSHU (6/11) #economics#history#LatinAmerica
Cuba has charged 30 people for stealing 133 tonnes of chicken and selling them on the street in a rare major heist at a time of food shortages in the communist-run nation. Thieves took the meat, in 1,660 white boxes, from a state facility in the capital Havana, and used the sale proceeds to buy refrigerators, laptops,...
EU-Mercosur trade talks still alive, Brussels says in rebuke to France's Macron
The European Commission assured on Tuesday that talks on the EU-Mercosur trade agreement continue after a French official claimed President Emmanuel Macron had convinced the bloc's executive to bury the deal.
#LatinAmerica#Surveillance#Privacy: "The challenges in ensuring strong privacy safeguards, proper oversight of surveillance powers, and effective remedy for those arbitrarily affected continued during 2023 in Latin America. Let’s take a few, non-exhaustive, examples.
We saw a scandal unveiling that Brazilian Intelligence agents monitored movements of politicians, journalists, lawyers, police officers, and judges. In Perú, leaked documents indicated negotiations between the government and an U.S. vendor of spying technologies. Amidst the Argentinian presidential elections, a thorny surveillance scheme broke in the news. In México, media reports highlighted prosecutors’ controversial data requests targeting public figures. New revelations reinforced that the Mexican government shift didn’t halt the use of Pegasus to spy on human rights defenders, while the trial on Pegasus’ abuses in the previous administration has finally begun.
Those recent surveillance stories have deep roots in legal and institutional weaknesses, many times topped by an entrenched culture of secrecy. While the challenges cited above are not (at all!) exclusive to Latin America, it remains an essential task to draw attention to and look at the arbitrary surveillance cases that occasionally emerge, allowing a broader societal scrutiny."
#LatinAmerica#Marxism#Christianism#LiberationTheology: "Liberationist Christianity instead found in the Marxist dictum of solidarity with the oppressed in their self-emancipation an appropriate conceptualization of charity. Engagement with the Marxist concept of the proletariat was not, though, a reduction to it — contrary to critics of liberation theology within the church.
The term “pooretariat” [pobretariado], coined by Christian Marxist trade union activists in El Salvador, neatly captures liberationist Christianity’s attempts to encompass the specific Latin American experience of dependent peripheral capitalism. This crucified poor, then, included not only exploited classes but also those excluded from the formal productive system, despised races and marginalized cultures and, as figures like Gustavo Gutiérrez have stressed, women as a doubly oppressed social category.
A third innovation was the rejection of the traditional separation between religion on the one hand and politics on the other. Static and privatized religion and a truncated bourgeois conception of love were rejected in favor of grappling with dehumanizing political and economic structures."
The Waste Problem And Climate Change In Latin America
Between 85 and 95 percent of the world’s solid waste ends up in open dumps and landfills. Latin America barely recycles between five and 15 percent of this waste.
The pollution in this area is not only caused by hidden dumping, but also by people from the higher community or people who throw garbage into the streams
(Probable) Loss of the far-right in the referendum for a new Chilean Constitution:
It looks like the new proposed Chilean Constitution was rejected by the clear majority. Seeing how the fascist Milei won in Argentina, this is great news for the continent.
Last year a progressive Constitution was proposed to the voters, but it was clearly rejected. The political consequences were severe for the government: months later the centre-left and left lost the majority in parliament and the far-right became dominant force in the right-wing block. Their discourse was extremely aggressive and destructive, supported by the classic right, like in Argentina.
This resulted in a weird, almost postmodernist, situation. The progressive parties had to campaign to keep a Constitution that originated during the horror of the Pinochet years, when their militants were tortured and disappeared. This in the hope to be able to change it later, way way in the future.
While the Chilean Constitution is where neoliberalism was historically codified, this didn't go far enough for the far right that calls itself openly "Pinochetist". So they ended campaigning against the Constitution of their hero.
Jason Buch's Follow the Money, a joint publication of Texas Observer and Border Hub, was just named one of the 15 best investigative reports in all of the Americas at COLPIN, the Latin American Investigative Reporting Conference in #Mexico City.
In the United States, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific butchers died as he lived — beloved by the rich and powerful, regardless of their partisan affiliation.
Cuba charges 30 over massive chicken heist (www.reuters.com)
Cuba has charged 30 people for stealing 133 tonnes of chicken and selling them on the street in a rare major heist at a time of food shortages in the communist-run nation. Thieves took the meat, in 1,660 white boxes, from a state facility in the capital Havana, and used the sale proceeds to buy refrigerators, laptops,...