Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
HOLLYWOOD AND THE CIA — Film historian Ed Rampell details Hollywood’s entangled relationship with the CIA and the Pentagon; HOUSES OF THE DEAD: Nancy Kurshan exposes the cruel human rights offenses taking place inside America’s vast gulag of Control Unit Prisons; BROTHERHOOD OF SUMMER:  David Macaray charts the history of the most powerful union in the US: the Baseball Players Association; TAR SANDS COME TO AMERICA: Steve Horn explains how the Keystone Pipeline debates have diverted  attention from Big Oil’s other plans to transport Alberta’s oil into the US. PLUS: Jeffrey St. Clair on CONSTITUTIONAL ENTROPY; Mike Whitney on HOW THE BANKS TARGETED BLACKS; Chris Floyd on THE RISE OF BRITAIN’S TEA PARTY; Kristin Kolb on THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE; Kim Nicolini on the FILMS OF WILLIAM FRIEDKIN; and Lee Ballinger on POETS VS. THE ONE PERCENT.
Archives by Tag 'Mexico'
Malaysia Goes to the Polls
BINOY KAMPMARK
Times are exciting, and terrifying, for the Malaysian electorate.  The voters will be going to the polls to consider the prospects of uncertain change or a continued embrace of the status quo, which resembles a decaying carcass of ill-promise.  There are no dates in the...
Can Worker-Owners Make a Big Factory Run?
JANE SLAUGHTER
This is the conclusion of a two-part series on the TRADOC worker’s cooperative in Mexico. Click here to read part one. A tire is not just a piece of rubber with ...
A Big Victory for Labor in Mexico
JANE SLAUGHTER
“If the owners don’t want it, let’s run it ourselves.” When a factory closes, the idea of turning it into a worker-owned co-operative sometimes comes up—and usually dies. The hurdles to buying a plant, even a failing plant, are huge, and once in business,...
The Myth of the Aztec Tiger
PAUL IMISON
Mexico City. According to rumors spread by everyone from The Economist to The New York Times, Mexico has gone from being the bloody epicenter of the “drug war” to a roaring “Aztec tiger” in the space of three short months. Following l...
Being Political in Arizona
RODOLFO ACUÑA
For the past forty years, the most pressing issue for Mexican Americans and other Latinos has been immigration reform. It has dominated our conversations, our agendas, and for the more politically conscious among us, it goes to the core of who we are. Seemingly the...
The French Woman, the Generals and the Dogs of Iztapalapa
ROBERT SANDELS
On January 22, the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) freed Florence Cassez, a French citizen imprisoned since 2005 on kidnaping and related charges. The court could not decide her guilt or innocenc...
To Look and Communicate
SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS
 “ … the passage to humanity today is called ‘rebellion’…” I’m going to tell you something very secret, but don’t go spreading it around…or, go ahead, spread it around, it’s up to you. In the early days o...
The Fight to Save Mexican-American Studies in Tucson
DAVE FELDMAN
As increasingly hi-tech military equipment continues to drastically shape the manner in which industrial powers wage war around the world, most modern “liberal democracies” must now frame cultural attacks in a way that is compatible with the prevailing democratic idea...
Obama’s Unprecedented Number of Deportations
TANYA GOLASH-BOZA
Between 1892 and 1997, a total of 2.1 million people were deported from the United States. A change in laws in 1996 permitted the number of deportees to increase from 70,000 in 1996 to 114,000 in 1997. In 1998, the number of deportees rose to 173,000. The numbers stayed f...
The PRI and Loathing in Mexico City
PAUL IMISON
Mexico City. Welcome to a new era in Mexico – or so some would have you believe. Twelve years after finally losing power in the democratic transition of 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), aka “the dinosaur”, is back and attempting to ...
Chronicle of a Mexico Without a President
MARTA MOLINA
Mexico City. In Mexico, December 1, 2012, will be remembered as the day that an imposition was legitimized. Enrique Peña Nieto — his name is often abbreviated in Mexico as “EPN” — took the reins of power in the context of deep indignation a...
Contradictions of the New Juarez
KENT PATERSON
The push to rebrand and re-sell the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez is in full swing. With violence way down as 2012 draws to a close, business and political leaders are extolling the return of security, inaugurating public works and opening new restaurants. Accordi...
Goodnight to President Felipe Calderon, the Drug Warrior
PAUL IMISON
Recall the classic scene in Scarface where a raging drunk Tony Montana tells a restaurant full of Miami’s 1%: “Say goodnight to the bad guy! It’s the last time you’re gonna see a bad guy like this again!” Those are surely the words that Mexican P...
El Lazca and the Walking Dead
PAUL IMISON
Mexico City. Mexico awoke Tuesday to the news that one of its leading drug lords had bit the dust. Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano (aka El Lazca), presumed leader of Los Zetas and arguably the country’s third most wanted man, had been killed in a fire...
Mexico en Verano
PAT CABELL
On July 1st, 2012, the day of Mexico’s recent presidential election, I visited the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, hoping to encounter a painting by Remedios Varo. A surrealist painter fleeing the Spanish Civil War, Varo was among the many notable exiles to make t...
Massacre in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas
PAUL IMISON
Mexico City. Forty-four years ago this Tuesday, Mexican soldiers gunned down as many as four hundred student protesters in the Plaza de Las Tres Culturas in Mexico City just days ahead of the 1968 Olympic Games. With an unprecedented media spotlight about ...
An Interview With Noam Chomsky
RICARDO LEZAMA
Noam Chomsky’s latest books are Occupy (Zuccotti Park Press) and ...
The Best Democracies Money Can Buy
SAUL LANDAU and NELSON P. VALDES
“Do you really want to live in a country where one party is so desperate to win the White House that they go around trying to make it harder for people to vote if they’re people of color, poor people or first generation immigrants?” &#...
Occupied Campus in Mexico City
JOHNNY HAZARD
Mexico City. The Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México (UACM) was founded in 2001, ostensibly by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, then mayor of Mexico City, but spurred by the student strike at the much larger Universidad Autónoma Nacional de Méxic...
Testimonies of the Drug War’s Devastation
LAURA CARLSEN
The Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity arrived in New York today and hit the ground running. In the early evening, hundreds of caravan members and New York supporters met each other in ...
Democrats and U.S. Labor Delusional About Latin America
ALBERTO C. RUIZ
The Democrats just put out their platform on Latin America, and it demonstrates only the loosest connection to reality.   Thus, while praising the “vibrant democracies in countries from Mexico to Brazil and Costa Rica to Chile,” as well as “historic peaceful trans...
Mexican Democracy: a Post Mortem
PAUL IMISON
Mexico City. On Friday, thousands of people in Mexico City joined a mock funeral procession to mourn the “death” of Mexican democracy. They needn’t worry. The very resistance by citizens to the electoral fraud this summer – exemplified by the stude...
Divided Families
LAURIE MELROOD
It’s a steamy, overcast monsoon morning in Nogales, Sonora, just across the border from the United States. I’ve come to learn more about what happens to Mexican deportees, many parents of children, who are left off by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)  in do...
My Journey Through Nirvana
RODOLFO ACUÑA
 I am constantly asked the question as to why I write with so much emotion. As a historian I should be more restrained, objective and search for the truth.  When the first edition of Occupied America was published in 1972, I tri...
Along the Border of the Surreal
PAUL IMISON
San Diego. If the Mexico-US border is the most surreal international boundary in the western hemisphere – often described as the only place where the so-called “First World” meets the Third, with all the envy, prejudice and distrust that implies – ...