Weekly News Update on the Americas | February 2, 2015 Retired Chilean army colonel Pedro Espinoza and former Chilean air force intelligence agent Rafael González Berdugo have been convicted in the murder of US journalist Charles Horman and US graduate student Frank Teruggi during the days after the Sept. 11, 1973 military coup that overthrew […]
What Liberia is to shipping companies, Canada is for mining companies.
— Theresa Wolfwood, Director of the Barnard-Boecker Centre Foundation, April 12, 2013
A very angry Senator John McCain denounced CODEPINK activists as “low-life scum” for holding up signs reading “Arrest Kissinger for War Crimes” and dangling handcuffs next to Henry Kissinger’s head during a Senate hearing on January 29. McCain called the demonstration “disgraceful, outrageous and despicable,” accused the protesters of “physically intimidating” Kissinger and apologized profusely to his friend for this “deeply troubling incident.”
teleSUR | January 8, 2015 A Chilean judge sentenced 23 former agents from Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s secret police to prison on Thursday for their role in the forced disappearance of a left-wing activist following the 1972 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s government. Among those sentenced was General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, who was in charge […]
For example, when we say that the Chilean state should become a true guarantor of material rights, that is certainly antithetical to the neoliberal capitalist vision which turns rights into a business to be regulated by the market.
— Camila Vallejo (former Chilean student protest leader)1
teleSUR | January 7, 2015 Chile rejected Bolivia’s renewed request for sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean off of its coast Tuesday. “Chile is not going to cede land or maritime sovereignty in any way, and that has to be clear,” Chilean Foreign Minister Heraldo Muñoz told Radio DNA. “Bolivia is wasting its time when it […]
The developed world is just crazy in love with the “miracle of Chile,” as expressed by Milton Friedman some years ago. The accolades are everywhere, ranked as a “high-income economy” by the World Bank. The country has the strongest sovereign bond rating in South America. It is a role model for neoliberalism.
Milton Freidman (1912-2006) labeled it the “Miracle of Chile,” as his “Chicago Boys,” a considerable group of Chilean economists who studied at the University of Chicago, established his neoliberal principles under the tutelage of General Augusto Pinochet from 1974-90.
The infamous general overthrew Salvador Allende’s socialist Chilean government in a coup d’état in 1973 with help from classified CIA support as well as cloak-and-dagger cheerleading from distant corners of the world, Milton Friedman in Chicago and Henry Kissinger in Washington, D.C.
Twenty-five years ago this week, six Jesuit scholars at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in El Salvador opened the doors of their residence to members of a government death squad, who had been armed and trained by the United States. The soldiers marched the priests to the back garden. They were ordered to lie face down. They were shot and killed like dogs along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter.
This week, we look at the fierce militant protests against Columbus Day by the indigenous Mapuche nation in so called Chile. Also the uncompromising resistance of Normalista students who have nearly brought the Mexican government to its knees, as they demand the safe return of their 43 kidnapped comrades. In Kobane we learn how an anarchist inspired Kurdish liberation movement has kicked out ISIS out of their liberated zone, and it was done with the efforts of the women’s brigade of the YPJ.
