Latin America

Journalists generally aren’t supposed to print their own imaginary stories as established fact, but that’s exactly what seems to happen on a regular basis when covering Venezuela. The latest example of this was the viral story of a mob of half starved Venezuelans descending on a zoo to consume a prized show horse. At the time of writing, the latest incarnation of the

Naomi Klein, Oliver Stone, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sarandon, Arundhati Roy, and 17 other human rights activists, intellectuals, and public figures on Wednesday sent a letter to the Brazilian government condemning the impeachment of the country's President Dilma Rousseff, and demanding that Brazil's senate "respect the October 2014 electoral process

In a landmark decision that has been hailed as a victory of public health measures against narrow commercial interests, an international tribunal has dismissed a claim by tobacco giant company Philip Morris that the Uruguay government violated its rights by instituting tobacco control measures.

The World Bank was always dominated by the United States, but in its earlier years and up to the 1980’s – the time when neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus – started their merciless ascent, the World Bank financed and carried out some real ‘grass-roots’ projects

The United States is, by far, the world’s most aggressive nation when it comes to cyberspying and cyberwarfare. The National Security Agency has been eavesdropping on foreign cities, politicians, elections and entire countries since it first turned on its receivers in 1952. Just as other countries, including Russia, attempt to do to the United States. What is new is a country leaking the intercepts back to the public of the target nation through a middleperson.

Theotonio Dos Santos is one of the pillars of the Dependency Theory and the term “World-systems”. Now, on his trip to Buenos Aires, where he was invited by the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), which he co-founded, he explains the reasons why Dilma Rousseff’s government is agonizing and, parallelly, the region is experiencing a return to neoliberalism, even though it seemed to be in the past history of the continent.

Populist opposition to international integration is on the rise in much of continental Europe and has always been the norm in Latin America. The question now is what should be the guiding principles of international economic policy? How should those of us — who believe that the vastly better performance of the global system after the second world war than after the first world war is largely due to more enlightened economic policies — make our case?

The defence of national sovereignty, like its critique, leads to serious misunderstandings once one detaches it from the social class content of the the strategy in which it is embedded. The leading social bloc in capitalist societies always conceives sovereignty as a necessary instrument for the promotion of its own interests based on both capitalist exploitation of labour and the consolidation of its international positions.

Mining is the activity that causes the greatest amount of death among workers in Brazil, as reported by the Ministry of Labour (MTE). In addition to mutilation, death and serious illness directly caused by work, the main mining states in Brazil —Goias, Minas Gerais and Pará— have became the most dangerous ones.

A local leader of Venezuela’s United Socialist Party (PSUV) was gunned down in south-central Caracas Monday by alleged members of an armed criminal group. Elizabeth Aguilera, 43, was the head of the local PSUV chapter– known as Bolívar-Chávez Battle Units– in the working class neighborhood of Cota 905 in the Caracas municipality of El Libertador.