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Liza Detenber

BBC NEWS | Americas | Colombia gay rights step closer - 0 views

news.bbc.co.uk/...6759271.stm

Colombia Gay Rights Benefits Equal rights other nations

shared by Liza Detenber on 08 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Liza Detenber on 08 Sep 09
     
    This article discusses the fact that Colombia has been considering offering equal rights to gay couples for a long time. In 2007 the bill passed "by 62-43 after a heated debate in the lower house". Gay couples receive the same rights to "social security benefits as heterosexual couples". Although a few regions have already passed similar bills in Latin America such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Rio Grande do Sul (a province of Brazil), rights like these have not been passed as a whole nation.
Courtney Connors

Foreign Policy: Gays in Latin America: Is the Closet Half Empty? - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...cms.php

Homosexuality Gay Rights Human Rights Political Movements Legislation

shared by Courtney Connors on 16 Sep 09 - No Cached
  • The region is becoming gayer. It's not that there are more gays and lesbians living in Latin America (we would never know)
  • he region is becoming more gay-friendly
  • Latin America was the land of the closet and the home of the macho
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • In 1998, Ecuador's new constitution introduced protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 1999, Chile decriminalized same-sex intercourse. Rio de Janeiro's state legislature banned sexual-orientation discrimination in public and private establishments in 2000. In 2002, Buenos Aires guaranteed all couples, regardless of gender, the right to register civil unions. The policy changes just kept coming. In 2003, Mexico passed a federal antidiscrimination law that included sexual orientation. A year later, the government of Brazil initiated "Brasil sem homofobia" (Brazil without homophobia), a program with nongovernmental organizations to change social attitudes toward sexuality. In 2006, Mexico City approved the Societal Cohabitation Law, granting same-sex couples marital rights identical to those for common-law relationships between a man and a woman. Uruguay passed a 2007 law granting access to health benefits, inheritance, parenting, and pension rights to all couples who have cohabited for at least five years. In 2008, Nicaragua reformed its penal code to decriminalize same-sex relations. Even Cuba's authoritarian new president, Raúl Castro, has allowed free sex-change operations for qualifying citizen
  • regime change
  • homophobia
  • A recent survey in Brazil, the country with the largest gay-pride parades in the world, showed that 58 percent of respondents still agree with the statement, "Homosexuality is a sin against the laws of God," and 41 percent with "Homosexuality is an illness that should be treated."
  • Courtney Connors on 16 Sep 09
     
    This article proposes the idea that an increasing number of Latin American countries have become more acceptive of gay and lesbian ideals. Due to regime changes, the once "closeted macho" countries now welcome such legislation as protections against sexual discrimination; the decriminalization of same-sex intercourse; grants to health benefits, parenting, and so on in countries like Ecuador, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, and NIcaragua.
Kristen Palmer

A Partnership for Prosperity in Latin America - 0 views

www.heritage.org/...bg1794.cfm

conflict america reform trade government

shared by Kristen Palmer on 08 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Kristen Palmer on 08 Sep 09
     
    This article discusses how many Latin American countries would benefit from government reforms. It also talks about how the United States should help these nations to fix their own problems rather than doing it for them. I think this relates to the course because we will be talking about reform after civil wars, and here reform was thought to be necessary to improve the Latin American nations.
Sam Obstfeld

Latin American Herald Tribune - 40% of Guatemala's Elderly Living in Poverty - 0 views

www.laht.com/article.asp

Guatemala Social Problems Social Service Poor Standard of Living

shared by Sam Obstfeld on 17 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Aria Auerbach on 17 Nov 09
     
    This article discusses the notion of poverty and violence within the Guatemalan society. Currently, there are at least 900,000 residents, all above the age of 60 who are living on the dirty, impoverished streets of Guatemalan cities. Although the government has proposed solutions to the overwhelming amount of poverty and economic turmoil, there has been little progress in recent years.
  • Sam Obstfeld on 17 Nov 09
     
    This site reports a recent study of the living standards for Guatemalans. In the past few years, the rates of poverty, crime, and malnutrition have skyrocketed alarmingly. The hardest hit are the elderly and the children. In order to combat this, Guatemala is instituting benefit programs to give welfare to the elderly.
Arabica Robusta

Adrienne Pine and David Vivar: Saving Honduras? - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/pine10152010.html

honduras us intervention coup neoliberalism caceres

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • They say that following the coup, Cáceres, working with the pro-coup Marrder family that controlled the HTW website, deceitfully wrested control from the Gutierrez family which had founded the paper and until then had maintained editorial control.
  • The Marrders eventually decided to found Honduras weekly as a competing newspaper, with Cáceres as editor. Stanley Marrder, listed on its website as "Owner and publisher of Honduras Weekly," is a Texan businessman and large Republican donor who grew up in Honduras. As they watched their own paper go under, the staff and owners of HTW darkly joked that they too had been victims of a coup.
  • HTW had been a printed and online English-language newspaper aimed at tourists and investors, employing journalists. Honduras Weekly, by contrast, is a blog that does not employ any trained journalists or paid staff, although you would not know that from its "about" page. In a tally last week, of forty-one "guest contributors," fourteen were evangelical missionaries who had each written one travelogue in classic "Heart of Darkness" style. Here is an example: After months of prayerful, "Jonah and the whale" thoughts, I booked my ticket to La Ceiba, Honduras this past weekend and no longer retain a wussy status. This gives my 'I don't leave home well' feelings a whole new slant. I'm flying out with the Vision Honduras team from Dassel, Minnesota on March 3 for a volunteer eye care mission that will last 19 days, carrying only what I can fit into a backpack.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Cáceres uses deceptive tactics like these specifically to prop up an illusion of balance in a blog masquerading as a newspaper, but which is really Cáceres' personal soapbox. In a similar vein, Cáceres recently quoted me out of context in a way that made the quote appear to support his work in a press release promoting his book, written for the 700 club.
  • One of the articles recently republished to appear to look like it was written for HW was titled "US, Honduran Soldiers Partner on Medical Mission to Colón," describing a "humanitarian" mission to the community Guadalupe Carney, written by Alex Licea .Two important facts are left out in the article: first, that SOUTHCOM specifically targets communities like Guadalupe Carney, named for the revolutionary priest and martyr, that are united in their resistance to the coup and U.S. imperialist policy for its "aid" efforts, and secondly, the full attribution of the article, reprinted from SOUTHCOM's website and written by Sgt. 1st Class Alex Licea, SOCSOUTH PAO [Public Affairs Officer].
  • Cáceres has been an enthusiastic supporter of SOUTHCOM's operations in Honduras, and Joint Task Force Bravo, and Bravo has returned that enthusiasm, even sponsoring his annual conference in 2008, themed "Building Global Partnerships: Implementing MDG 8 in Honduras." According to a participant at the conference, Cáceres proudly described to his audience the process that led up to the partnership, explaining that a director at DARPA who had been on a mission trip to Honduras with his church and "fell in love" with the country arranged for SOUTHCOM to allocate a substantial sum of money for the conference.
  • a woman from Task Force Bravo spoke. She proceeded to describe what they did as well as how they help humanitarian efforts. But she also gave a short history of the base. She stated that the base was there in the 1980s to combat aggression. That deeply affected me because I know the role of the US government at that time and have seen the effects of US support of Central American regimes like Honduras and El Salvador in that time.
  • As described on an earlier version of its website, the goal of Cáceres's conference is "to inform, inspire and to generate creative thinking about ways to help Honduras through grassroots projects aimed at providing the Honduran people with some basic abilities to live, learn, and grow... so that eventually they are in a better position to solve the problems of their society." The Social Darwinist assumption implicit in this description (as in the missionary travelogues posted on Honduras Weekly) is that Hondurans have not been able to solve the positions of their society for cultural and developmental reasons-rather than military and economic imperialism. Cáceres insists in his writings and in official conference propaganda that the work is apolitical, but this is of course an impossibility in today's Honduras.
  • While these and other individuals representing the U.S. State will be presenting, the vast majority of individuals attending come from reactionary evangelical groups, promoting charity work based on a premise of "apolitical" salvation that stand in direct opposition to the vibrant Honduran resistant movement's goals of justice and self-determination.
  • Why is USAID ("From the American People") officially sponsoring the Conference on Honduras this year? It's not because the NGOs involved are doing any good; they aren't. In their acceptance of a Social Darwinist model that identifies poverty as the result of a lack of "empowerment" and human capital, they can't.
  • In ignoring those voices, they refuse to address the roots of the problem. Instead, they provide ideological cover for a neoliberal agenda, promoting a Protestant ethic of individual responsibility that eschews notions of social justice, participatory democracy and the public good.
  • why, then, does the U.S. State support Cáceres? It is because he, like the NGOs he promotes, has been a truly effective tool in whitewashing the neoliberal undermining of democracy in Honduras, and the role of U.S. policy and military in it. Cáceres' advocacy is Clinton's Smart Power, combining institutions of military force and media and Non-Profit Industrial Complex coercion to undermine democratic processes in the interest of supporting the corporations that funded and have benefited from the coup. And indeed, as long as we don't focus on the pro-corporate, anti-democratic golpista praxis in our own government, as the State Department employee I met on the train said, our fingerprints are all over that.
Shannon Coco

The Tupamaro Gang of Venezuela - 0 views

www.ngcrc.com/tupaprof.htm

violence substance abuse gangs urban venezuela

shared by Shannon Coco on 04 Oct 09 - Cached
  • emerge officially in 1992.
  • But in 1992, Chavez was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Venezuelan Army and he tried, unsuccessfully, to take over the government in a failed coup d’ etat. When the coup failed, Chavez went to prison for two years. While doing time, he met the Tupas. Chavez needed the protection that the Tupa gang could offer, and the Tupas needed the resources and opportunities that Chavez could offer. They have worked well together ever since then in a quid pro quo relationship. Chavez was released from prison on March 26, 1994 and went on to be elected as president four years later (1998).
  •       It is a curious identity that we find in the Tupamaro street gang. On the one hand it identifies most specifically with being a guerilla warfare organization, dedicated to fighting the powers that be and seeking to implement its own type of revolution. On the other hand, it functions as a kind of armed paramilitary group that fervently defends and supports the controversial president of Venezuela — Hugo Chavez.
  • ...14 more annotations...
    • Shannon Coco
      Shannon Coco on 04 Oct 09
       
      this is important to note! while the Tupas are a gang, they also have an important role to play with the government.
  •  The contradiction here is that the identity of freedom fighter or urban guerilla organization is typically “at odds with” or antagonistic to the status quo. Here, in the case of the Tupamaros street gang of Venezuela, we find they have laid claim to the cloak of freedom fighter, but apparently with a new twist: they do not want a new revolution, they like who they have now — Chavez.
  •    The portion of their identity that is “guerilla fighter” is reserved for fighting against police, judges, and others who they need to intimidate. And, as will be shown, this is a gang totally capable of some well-organized, military scale violence.
  •   One of the long standing “identifiers” of the Tupa gang is that they have historically worn a “hood” to hide their face and conceal their identity. These “hoods” are nothing more than dark, black or brown or blue in color, knit face masks that also roll up as a “hat”. They were a part of the Tupa uniform though from their beginning all the way up until recently. A Tupa will today have one in their possessions, they just may not use it as much.
  •             While traffic stood at a standstill, the Tupamaros on motorcycles began their assault — couching it as a “democratic protest”. Highly trained in such urban protest-assault tactics, typically one member acts as a news media representative, videotaping the scene in case they are able to provoke American drivers into over-reacting. In unison, some of the others begin shouting pre-arranged “chants” and protest slogans, some wield banners, but almost all begin launching stones, bricks, eggs, tomatoes, whatever they can muster at the Ambassador’s car.         Although alarming, such actions are typical of a low intensity conflict designed to send a message to the U.S. officials. The Tupas could have just as easily opened fire with armor piecing ammunition using fully automatic weapons. But they did not. Rather, they repeatedly, over time, waged these kind of street protest attacks against the embassy officials.
    • Shannon Coco
      Shannon Coco on 04 Oct 09
       
      staged reaction to the U.S. Ambassador shows that they know how to create a riot in a way that helps them the most. they ensure the right conditions and are able to use the event in their favor
  • The Tupamaros street gang regularly gets away with murder and more.
  • Some people join the gang for the financial or econonic benefits: they are almost guaranteed a job of some kind, today often a government subsidized job. If they personally or have a family member that resides in the “el 23" barrio, then they can live “rent free”. Everyone in “el 23" is a squatter, but the Tupas gang will extort rent payments for anyone living there who is not in alliance to their gang.
  • They feel a need to stand out, to escalate, to take things to extremes, they are fanatical in certain regards. A common method of execution used by the Tupas is to simply hang the victim. The Tupas are known to be armed, have access to military grade weapons, and they make firearms available free to youthful members of the gang.
  • a militaristic sense of entitlement.
  • if a local program was offering assistance to the needy and poor, Tupa members would be first in line seeking any additional handout they can get.
  • The Carapaica gang exists separately and apart from the Tupas. It also identifies itself as an armed leftist guerrilla organization. It functions similarly outside of the law, as a vigilante organization.
  •   The Tupamaro gang leaders are accumulating significant wealth and they function like a local ghetto group who collects “tribute” for King Chavez. Extorting goods, service, and street taxes or protection money is a main ongoing source of income for the Tupamaro gang
  • it illustrates a type of gang organization that has made a transition into state-sponsorship. For gang specialist police officers it is the ultimate example of a gang gone wild: a gang that specializes in extra-legal vigilante-style violence develops over time into a gang subsidized and directed by the government — indeed, major leaders in the Tupa gang today hold positions of enormous “police power” in Venezuela. And as stated, the primary sponsor of the Tupas is Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela.
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