Chile

NEW YORK — Of apartheid South Africa’s myriad atrocities, one of the most medieval was a system in which white settlers plied their farmworkers with alcohol in lieu of wages. Known by the Afrikaans word for tot, or drink, the dop not only kept workers docile — and wages low — but, in fostering widespread and chronic dependency, the practice bordered on enslavement, manacling workers to their addictions and hence their oppression.

For over two decades, US neo-cons have been pushing for an attack on Iran on the pretext that it was developing nuclear weapons. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a key player in this effort, exerting as much pressure as he and the Israeli lobby can for an US attack. Netanyahu also often threatens that Israel might attack Iran. Note these are the same people who pushed for the illegal US attack on Iraq based on the bogus claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Guards, National Stadium, Santiago, Chile, 1973 photo by Marcelo Montecino teleSUR | September 2, 2018 Chile’s national police force and Starbucks are partnering with the hope that people regain the trust of the state security agency found guilty of embezzling millions. Chile’s national police are implementing their own ‘Coffee With a Cop’ campaign signing a […]

SANTIAGO, CHILE — It is clear that former state-employed torturers have become emboldened since the electoral triumph of Chilean President Sebastian Pinera. While last year’s presidential election illustrated the Chilean left’s disillusion with the center-left coalitions — resulting in a low voter turnout and a right-wing victory — for Chilean memory groups, the events now unfolding in the wake of that victory constitute a severe threat to Chile’s collective memory, the quest for justice, and the constant efforts to discover the fate of the disappeared.

teleSUR | August 1, 2018 Human rights activists in Chile are protesting a Supreme Court decision to release former Judge Gamaliel Soto, three former military soldiers and a police officer involved in the torture and disappearance of 31-year-old Eduardo Alberto Gonzalez Galeno in 1973. The demonstrators gathered in front of the court in Valparaiso holding […]

It all risks becoming pornographic, looped and re-run with an obsessive eye for updates and detail about despair and hope.  The twenty-four hour news cycle tends to encourage this sort of thing, ever desperate for snippets, obsessively chasing the update.  With a soccer team of twelve youths and their coach trapped in Tham Luang Nang Non cave some one kilometre below the surface, the curious, the gormless, and those with an unhealthy interest in the morbid have assumed couch position.

VALDIVIA, CHILE – Last Tuesday, in the wake of recent victories for the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions (BDS) movement elsewhere in Latin America, Valdivia, a relatively small city in southern Chile, became the first city in all of Latin America to officially join the boycott against Israel for its apartheid policies, military occupation of the West Bank and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Selfish suicides, national apologies and realistic gunshot sounds + this day in history w/the Mindbender disaster and our song of the day by Kito Peters on your Morning Monarchy for June 14, 2018.

It is the season for exposures and exposes, and the Catholic Church has been making regular ripples of the wrong and undeniably crude sort.  Globally, the church is finding itself being picked bare in terms of institutional malfeasance, not merely on the issue of having harboured abusive priests, but of placing a dark, impenetrable cover over them.

Thousands of protesters marched in the streets earlier to day demanding the resignation of Albania’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, over alleged links to organized crime.
Albania is a NATO member and is presently looking forward to upcoming talks on its next phase of European integration. The protests come about a month before talks are set to resume on that topic.
This isn’t the first time Rama has fielded mass protests which seek his removal, last year saw multiple such events take place.