Venezuela Is Not Alone.

       Over the years the people of Central America have suffered immensely at the hands of Western imperialist capitalism. They have had American puppet governments imposed on them with savage ruthlessness, bloodshed was the building bricks of the new globalisation regime in that part of the world. At the moment Venezuela is in the news, creating the impression that all else is fine, just this nasty Maduro to sort out, and peace and tranquility will return to cover the land.
       However, far from it, the entire surface of Central America is in turmoil as global capitalism hits another of its recurring "crises". The power elites fight ruthlessly and savagely to hold on to their wealth and power, while the ordinary people face ever deeper spiraling poverty and the realities of violent repression. Venezuela is not alone, the whole region is in the midst of bloody turmoil.
      An extract from a well researched and informative article by William I. Robinson posted on NACLA:

"My neighborhood backs me...my neighborhood is Nicaragua." Student protester at an SOS Nicaragua protest against Daniel Ortega in Managua in May 2018 (Flickr/Jorge Mejía Peralta).

      Some three decades after the wars of revolution and counterinsurgency came to an end in Central America, the region is once again on the brink of implosion. The Isthmus has been gripped by renewed mass struggle and state repression, the cracking of fragile political systems, unprecedented corruption, drug violence, and the displacement and forced migration of millions of workers and peasants. The backdrop to this second implosion of Central America, reflecting the spiraling crisis of global capitalism itself, is the exhaustion of a new round of capitalist development in recent years to the same drumbeat as the globalization that took place in the wake of the 1980s upheavals.
         Lost in the headlines on Central American refugees fleeing to the United States is both the historical context that has sparked the exodus and the structural transformations through capitalist globalization that has brought the region to where it is today. The mass revolutionary movements of the 1970s and 1980s did manage to dislodge entrenched military-civilian dictatorships and open up political systems to electoral competition, but they were unable to achieve any substantial social justice or democratization of the socioeconomic order.
      Capitalist globalization in the Isthmus in the wake of pacification unleashed a new cycle of modernization and accumulation. It transformed the old oligarchic class structures, generated new transnationally oriented elites and capitalists and high-consumption middle classes even as it displaced millions, aggravated poverty, inequality, and social exclusion, and wreaked havoc on the environment, triggering waves of outmigration and new rounds of mass mobilization among those who stayed behind. Hence the very conditions that gave rise to the conflict in the first place were aggravated by capitalist globalization.
       Despite the illusion of “peace and democracy” so touted by the transnational elite in the wake of pacification, the roots of the regional conflict have persisted: the extreme concentration of wealth and political power in the hands of elite minorities alongside the pauperization and powerlessness of a dispossessed majority. With the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras, the massacre of peaceful protesters in Nicaragua in 2018, and the return of death squads in Guatemala, this illusion has been definitively shattered. The Central American regimes now face mounting crises of legitimacy, economic stagnation, and the collapse of the social fabric.

Well worth reading the full article HERE:

 

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk

Time For More Family Re-unions.

       From Berkeley to Brussels, from Calton to Catalonia, from Paris to Paraguay, from Moscow to Mumbai, from Italy to Iran, we are brothers and sisters of a very large family, we are anarchists. One of the problems with large families is, that they don't meet up often enough. The following article from Freedom News, first appeared in Winter 2017 issue of Freedom Anarchist Journal, (though I can't seem to trace that issue) mirrors my sentiments. 

  

         I love being an anarchist. Why? Because whatever bigger city you go to, you’re bound to find a liberated space inhabited by your siblings-in-arms. It’s like you’re part of a big family — always bickering, but when the worst comes to worst you always have each other’s backs.

        And you can rely on the fact that if you’re stranded in strange territory, there is always someone who will share a beer and local knowledge with you, and if you’re in need of it, a couch. You’re family, after all.

        But despite all of us sharing the same general goals — liberation, solidarity and all that — you can find different ways of working towards them wherever you go. If you cross a national border and meet with the anarchists there, you will find that they have entirely other methods of abolishing that border than your own group might.

It makes sense, of course. Different environments require different tactics.

          But on my travels I saw some things that might work just as well in Cologne as they do in Belfast or Barcelona — we simply hadn’t thought of them before!

          The things we can learn from each other are almost infinite. Ask the libertarios of Barcelona Sants about resisting eviction and how to connect with a working-class neighbourhood.

Ask Sinistra Anticapitalista in Italy about how to work against the housing crisis.

        Learn about the squatting hotlines in Brescia, syndicated strike action in Paris, the newspapers in Madrid, the radical bookstores in London, the antifascist gyms in Athens.

      It’s truly incredible what we can come up with, and to every problem that the elites and capitalism confront us with, the radically free are quick to find a creative solution.

        With the means of oppression globalising, our resistance has to follow the same development.

        We have to connect with each other and learn about things that already exist in our own environment, and those that are yet to come. Union busting, to name one example, is rampant in the US, and elites in Germany and the UK are going heads over heels to apply the same tactics here.

       We need more connection between activist communities, locally and globally. International — or rather antinational — conferences and actions are something we cannot leave to our enemies only. Let’s spend some of our funds on sending each other greeting cards of love and rage, so that when global capitalism attempts to crush us, we have the united power of anarchists everywhere to fight back.

From Europe to South America to Asia and everywhere else — we are the Antinationale!

La Maupin

Visit ann arky's home at radicalglasgow.me.uk