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redavistinnell

Culture of Antigua And Barbuda - history, traditions, women, beliefs, food, family, soc... - 0 views

www.everyculture.com/...Antigua-And-Barbuda.html

culture history traditions beliefs social

shared by redavistinnell on 02 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • culture of Antigua and Barbuda (local creole pronunciation, Antiga and Barbueda) is a classic example of a creole culture. It emerged from the mixing of Amerindian (Carib and Arawak), West African, and European (primarily British) cultural traditions.
  • Before Christopher Columbus arrived in 1493, Antigua and Barbuda had the Carib names of Wadadli and Wa'omoni, respectively.
  • . The population census of 1991 estimated the population of Antigua and Barbuda to be 64,252. Approximately 93 percent of this total are Afro-Antiguans and Barbudans, 0.2 percent are Portuguese, 0.6 percent are Middle Eastern, 1.7 percent are whites from Europe and North America, and 3.4 percent are mixed.
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  • Given the creole nature of its culture, it is not surprising that the language spoken by the vast majority of Antiguans and Barbudans is a creole, often referred to as Antiguan creole.
  • As the union got more deeply involved in the struggles of workers against sugar plantation owners, it became increasingly political. It very quickly developed a "political arm," which later became the Antigua Labor Party (ALP).
  • These struggles, reinforced by those in other Caribbean territories, by the struggles in African countries, and by the opposition of the United States and Russia to European colonial policies, finally pushed the British to dismantle their empire.
  • Antigua in 1623, five distinct and carefully ranked race/ethnic groups emerged. At the top of this hierarchy were the British, who justified their hegemony with arguments of white supremacy and civilizing missions. Among themselves, there were divisions between British Antiguans and noncreolized Britons, with the latter coming out on top. In short, this was a race/ethnic hierarchy that gave maximum recognition to Anglicized persons and cultural practices.
  • Fifth and finally were the Afro-Antiguans and Barbudans who were located at the bottom of this hierarchy. Forced to "emigrate" as slaves, Africans started arriving in Antigua and Barbuda in large numbers during the 1670s.
  • As a result, Afro-Antiguans and Barbudans were reinscribed in a dehumanized and racialized discourse that established their inferiority, and hence the legitimacy of their earlier enslavement and later exploitation as wage laborers.
  • 1700 and 1775, Antigua and Barbuda emerged as a classic sugar colony. Because of its exclusive specialization in sugar, the economy was not very diverse. Consequently, it imported a lot, including much of its food from the American colonies and Britain.
  • Like many other Caribbean societies, Antigua and Barbuda is a classic case of the superimposition of race on class and vice versa.
  • Between these two extremes was a middle class that consisted of the same three groups that occupied the middle layers of the race/ethnic hierarchy—the mulattos, Portuguese, and Syrians. The mulattos dominated the professions (law, medicine, and architecture) and the white-collar positions in banks, businesses, and the
  • redavistinnell on 02 Nov 16
     
    In this article we see how Antigua was settled and can begin to see how the indigenous people were eventually wiped out. It also gives background into the country and how they have progressed through the years.
jackhanson1

Construction of Nicaragua Canal Threatens Indigenous Lives and Livelihoods | Cultural S... - 0 views

www.culturalsurvival.org/...threatens-indigenous-lives-and

shared by jackhanson1 on 04 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Construction of Nicaragua Canal Threatens Indigenous Lives and Livelihoods
  • In June 2013, Nicaraguan officials approved a $50 billion (US) deal with a Hong Kong firm to oversee the construction of a 278-kilometer long canal. The HK Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company’s proposed project would attempt to link the Pacific to the Caribbean, allowing the passage of container ships
too large for passage through the Panama Canal.
  • The construction of the canal promises environmental abuses and human rights violations as the proposed route cuts through the land of multiple Indigenous territories on Nicara- gua’s coasts and within its mainland. Thousands of people are expected to be impacted with many being forcibly displaced, primarily including the Kriol and Indigenous Rama people,
in a clear violation of Indigenous autonomy laws in Nicaragua and international human rights documents.
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  • The Nicaraguan Government has failed to properly consult Indigenous communities regarding the canal’s construction.
  • The Nicaraguan Constitution of 1987 recognizes the Indigenous cultures that reside on the land and their right to maintain their languages and cultures. Two additional laws, 28 and 445, grant autonomy and “the use, administration and management of traditional lands and their natural resources” to Indigenous people. Additionally, Nicaragua signed on to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People in 2008 and ratified ILO Convention 169 in 2010, a legally bind- ing document guaranteeing prior consultation before such projects.
  • The government is reportedly anticipating that 7,000 homes may be expropriated to make way for the 278-kilometer canal. However, an independent report by the Centro Humboldt states that the impact will be much greater. The report found that 282 settlements and 24,100 homes were identified within the direct area of influence, estimating that the number of people anticipated to be directly affected by construction at over 119,000. The canal’s construction will not only bring the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, but also irreversible environmental damage. The loss of Indigenous communities will be accompanied by the loss of some of Nicaragua’s most precious and rich resources: its ecologically diverse lands and waters.
  • Meanwhile, the social impact assessment conducted by the Nicaraguan government, if being conducted at all, has lacked any transparency. While quick to boast the economic impact of the canal, officials have blatantly disregarded the needs and fears of community members from coast to coast. A coalition of 11 groups including affected In- digenous communities and environmental and legal organiza- tions submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights criticizing the rights violations inherent in the Canal Law.
  • jackhanson1 on 04 Nov 16
     
    This article relates to my topic of promoting intercultural dialogue and inclusion because this article deals with the absence of communication and dialogue between the government of Nicaragua and the indigenous groups of Nicaragua. This article talks about a proposed plan to build a canal across the largest lake in Nicaragua, Lago Nicaragua. Without consulting the indigenous groups living around the lake, the government went ahead and approved the construction of the canal. Thousands of indigenous homes will be wiped out due to the construction of the canal. These indigenous groups have petitioned the government to come up with a different plan for constructing the canal, but the government refused to grant their requests. As a result, many indigenous villages will be wiped out and many people will have to relocate and start again.
Javier E

For Cuba, a Harsh Self-Assessment - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ment-as-cuba-looks-within.html

cultural values Cuba civility

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • President Raúl Castro unleashed his fiercest and lengthiest public lecture to date on the demise of Cuban culture and conduct. In a speech to the National Assembly, Mr. Castro said that Cubans’ behavior — from urinating in the street and raising pigs in cities to taking bribes — had led him to conclude that, despite five decades of universal education, the island had “regressed in culture and civility.”
  • Cubans build houses without permits, catch endangered fish, cut down trees, gamble, accept bribes and favors, hoard goods and sell them at inflated prices, and harass tourists, Mr. Castro said.
  • And that is just the start: Islanders yell in the street, curse indiscriminately, disturb their neighbors’ sleep with loud music, drink alcohol in public, vandalize telephones, dodge bus fares and throw stones at passing trains, the president lamented. “They ignore the most basic standards of gentility and respect,” Mr. Castro continued. “All this is going on under our noses, without provoking any objection or challenge from other citizens.”
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  • “He should have taken responsibility,” said Alexi, who asked that his full name not be used because he was discussing the Cuban leadership. Cubans’ morals had been broken, he said, by the “special period” of severe economic hardship that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, when many people resorted to stealing, scams and, in some cases, prostitution to get by
  • growing up in an environment where cheating and duplicity were a way of living had bred cynicism. “This cynicism feeds into people’s lack of engagement,” she said. “Individual responsibility toward the collective is very low.”
  • Still, Havana has avoided the rampant crime and drug violence that plague many Latin American — and American — cities. And in spite of complaints about deteriorating manners, many Cubans maintain a sense of community and remain close to family, sharing food or helping out friends and neighbors.
  • Standing shirtless outside his small house, Alexi pointed to his 24-year-old son, fixing a hubcap on the sidewalk. “How could I raise him with the same morals, when just to put rice, beans and pork on the table requires all kinds of illegalities?” he said. “I had to teach him the values of survival.”
  • Cubans complain that sliding professional standards, inexperienced teachers who are barely older than their students and a lack of public facilities have helped corrode people’s civic-mindedness.
  • Mr. Castro proposed a combination of education, promotion of culture and enforcement to restore the country’s civility. He called on workers’ unions, the authorities, teachers, intellectuals and artists, among others, to hold other Cubans to standards of behavior.
Javier E

For Migrants, New Land of Opportunity Is Mexico - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-of-opportunity-is-mexico.html

mexico opportunity culture economy latin america

shared by Javier E on 22 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • it is already cheaper than China for many industries serving the American market.
  • while Mexico’s economy is far from trouble free, its growth easily outpaced the giants of the hemisphere — the United States, Canada and Brazil — in 2011 and 2012, according to International Monetary Fund data, making the country more attractive to fortune seekers worldwide.
  • residency requests had grown by 10 percent since November, when a new law meant to streamline the process took effect. And they are coming from nearly everywhere.
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  • Spanish filmmakers, Japanese automotive executives and entrepreneurs from the United States and Latin America arrive practically daily — pursuing dreams, living well and frequently succeeding.
  • “There is this energy here, this feeling that anything can happen,” said Lesley Téllez, a Californian whose three-year-old business running culinary tours served hundreds of clients here last year. “It’s hard to find that in the U.S.”
  • more Americans have been added to the population of Mexico over the past few years than Mexicans have been added to the population of the United States, according to government data in both nations.
  • If the country of 112 million people can harness the energy of foreigners and newly educated Mexicans, become partners with the slew of American firms seeking alternatives to China, and get them to do more than just hire cheap labor, economists and officials say Mexico could finally become a more equal partner for the United States and the first-world country its presidents have promised for decades.
  • “There’s been an opening to the world in every way — culturally, socially and economically.”
  • global trends have been breaking Mexico’s way — or as President Enrique Peña Nieto often puts it, “the stars are aligning” — but there are plenty of obstacles threatening to scuttle Mexico’s moment.
  • The challenge, he said, is making sure that the growing interest in his country benefits all Mexicans, not just newcomers, investors and a privileged few.
  • Mexico has failed to live up to its economic potential before. “They really blew a moment in 1994 when their currency was at rock bottom and they’d just signed Nafta,”
  • The number of Americans legally living and working in Mexico grew to more than 70,000 in 2012 from 60,000 in 2009, a number that does not include many students and retirees, those on tourist visas or the roughly 350,000 American children who have arrived since 2005 with their Mexican parents. For DiscussionWhy did you decide to move to Mexico?Please share your story in the comments below.
  • closer ties with Mexico’s beloved and hated neighbor to the north, through immigration and trade, have made many Mexicans feel less insular. Millions of emigrants send money earned abroad to relatives in Mexico, who then rush out to Costco for more affordable food and electronics.
  • “Europe feels spiritually dead and so does the United States,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “You end up wanting something else.”
  • “We are now more certain about the value of sharing certain things.”
  • Some of the growth is appearing in border towns where foreign companies and binational families are common. American retirees are showing up in new developments from San Miguel de Allende to other sunny spots around Cancún and Puerto Vallarta. Government figures show that more Canadians are also joining their ranks.
  • More and more American consultants helping businesses move production from China are crisscrossing the region from San Luis Potosí to Guadalajara, where Silicon Valley veterans like Andy Kieffer, the founder of Agave Lab, are developing smartphone applications and financing new start-ups. In Guanajuato, Germans are moving in and car-pooling with Mexicans heading to a new Volkswagen factory that opened a year ago, and sushi can now be found at hotel breakfasts because of all the Japanese executives preparing for a new Honda plant opening nearby.
  • Mr. Pace, bearded and as slim as a Gauloises, said he moved to Mexico in 2011 because college graduates in France were struggling to find work. He has stayed here, he said, because the affordable quality of life beats living in Europe — and because Mexico offers more opportunity for entrepreneurship.
  • Some Mexicans and foreigners say Europeans are given special treatment because they are perceived to be of a higher class, a legacy of colonialism when lighter skin led to greater privileges. But like many other entrepreneurs from foreign lands, Mr. Pace and his partners are both benefiting from and helping to shape how Mexico works. Mr. Rodríguez, the former Interior Ministry official, Cuban by birth, said that foreigners had helped make Mexico City more socially liberal.
  • Many immigrants say Mexico is attractive because it feels disorderly, like a work in progress, with the blueprints of success, hierarchy and legality still being drawn. “Not everyone follows the rules here, so if you really want to make something happen you can make it happen,” said Ms. Téllez, 34, whose food business served more than 500 visitors last year. “No one is going to fault you for not following all the rules.”
  • compared with South Korea, where career options were limited by test scores and universities attended, Mexico allowed for more rapid advancement. As an intern at the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency here, he said he learned up close how Samsung and other Korean exporters worked. “Here,” he said, “the doors are more open for all Koreans.” He added that among his friends back home, learning Spanish was now second only to learning English.
  • There were 10 times as many Koreans living in Mexico in 2010 as in 2000.
  • Europe, dying; Mexico, coming to life. The United States, closed and materialistic; Mexico, open and creative. Perceptions are what drive migration worldwide, and in interviews with dozens of new arrivals to Mexico City — including architects, artists and entrepreneurs — it became clear that the country’s attractiveness extended beyond economics.
  • Artists like Marc Vigil, a well-known Spanish television director who moved to Mexico City in October, said that compared with Spain, Mexico was teeming with life and an eagerness to experiment. Like India in relation to England, Mexico has an audience that is larger and younger than the population of its former colonial overlord.
  • “In Spain, everything is a problem,” he said. “Here in Mexico, everything is possible. There is more work and in the attitude here, there is more of a spirit of struggle and creativity.”
  • it was not a country that welcomed outsiders; the Constitution even prohibited non-Mexicans from directly owning land within 31 miles of the coast and 62 miles of the nation’s borders.
  • He struggled to make sense of Mexico at first. Many foreigners do, complaining that the country is still a place of paradox, delays and promises never fulfilled for reasons never explained — a cultural clash that affects business of all kinds. “In California, there was one layer of subtext,” Mr. Quemada-Díez said. “Here there are 40 layers.”
  • Mexico has allowed dual nationality for more than a decade, and among the growing group of foreigners moving here are also young men and women born in Mexico to foreign parents, or who grew up abroad as the children of Mexicans. A globalized generation, they could live just about anywhere, but they are increasingly choosing Mexico.
  • Domingo Delaroiere, an architect whose father is French and mother is Mexican, said Mexico’s appeal — especially in the capital — was becoming harder to miss. When he came back here last year for a visit, after two and a half years in Paris, he said he was surprised. “Art, culture, fashion, architecture, design — the city was filling up with new spaces, things that are interesting, daring,” he said. He soon decided it was time to move. Compared with Mexico, he said, “Nothing is happening in Paris.”
rachelramirez

New Access to a Nicaraguan Island - The New York Times - 0 views

intransit.blogs.nytimes.com/...-access-to-a-nicaraguan-island

nicaragua island economy

shared by rachelramirez on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • Search New Access to a Nicaraguan Island
  • The government of Nicaragua is betting that a new $10 million airport will boost tourism on Ometepe Island, a Unesco Biosphere Reserve known for its towering twin volcanoes.
  • But the ship bypassed Ometepe, and Twain never set foot on the island. Fifty years later, the Panama Canal opened, making the old shortcut through the lake to get from the Pacific to the Caribbean Sea obsolete.
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  • The airport, essentially a 1,500-meter airstrip with a small customs building, was due to open more than a year ago, and hopes that other regional airlines like Taca and Nature Air would offer service to the island haven’t materialized.
  • rachelramirez on 04 Jul 16
     
    Although this island may be insignificant in the grand scheme of things, the Nicaraguan government seems desperate to cash in on anything the country's natural resources has to offer. The idea seems like a good small one, but would not be useful for giving the economy much 'kick'. Nicaragua has a lot to offer in terms of natural resources, but it is in my opinion that they should not overuse the land.
Javier E

Rebecca Solnit: Apologies to Mexico - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics - 0 views

www.guernicamag.com/...cca-solnit-apologies-to-mexico

drugs Mexico Latin America pain economics US cultural values

shared by Javier E on 23 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.
  • We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed
  • Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.
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  • No border divides the pain caused by drugs from the pain brought about in Latin America by the drug business and the narcotraficantes.  It’s one big continent of pain–and in the last several years the narcos have begun selling drugs in earnest in their own countries, creating new cultures of addiction and misery.  
  • We’ve had movements to get people to stop buying clothes and shoes made in sweatshops, grapes picked by exploited farmworkers, fish species that are endangered, but no one’s thought to start a similar movement to get people to stop consuming the drugs that cause so much destruction abroad.
  • Many talk about legalizing drugs, and there’s something to be said for changing the economic arrangements. But what about reducing their use by developing and promoting more interesting and productive ways of dealing with suffering? Or even getting directly at the causes of that suffering?
  • We give you money and guns, lots and lots of money. You give us drugs. The guns destroy. The money destroys. The drugs destroy. The pain migrates, a phantom presence crossing the border the other way from the crossings we hear so much about.The drugs are supposed to numb people out, but that momentary numbing effect causes so much pain elsewhere. There’s a pain economy, a suffering economy, a fear economy, and drugs fuel all of them rather than making them go away.
  • I have been trying to imagine the export economy of pain. What does it look like? I think it might look like air-conditioning. This is how an air conditioner works: it sucks the heat out of the room and pumps it into the air outside. You could say that air-conditioners don’t really cool things down so much as they relocate the heat. The way the transnational drug economy works is a little like that: people in the U.S. are not reducing the amount of pain in the world; they’re exporting it to Mexico and the rest of Latin America as surely as those places are exporting drugs to us.
  • Here in the United States, there’s no room for sadness, but there are plenty of drugs for it, and now when people feel sad, even many doctors think they should take drugs. We undergo losses and ordeals and live in circumstances that would make any sane person sad, and then we say: the fault was yours and if you feel sad, you’re crazy or sick and should be medicated. Of course, now ever more Americans are addicted to prescription drugs, and there’s always the old anesthetic of choice, alcohol, but there is one difference: the economics of those substances are not causing mass decapitations in Mexico.
  • Mexico, I am sorry.  I want to see it all change, for your sake and ours. I want to call pain by name and numbness by name and fear by name. I want people to connect the dots from the junk in their brain to the bullet holes in others’ heads. I want people to find better strategies for responding to pain and sadness. I want them to rebel against those parts of their unhappiness that are political, not metaphysical, and not run in fear from the metaphysical parts either.
  • A hundred years ago, your dictatorial president Porfiro Díaz supposedly remarked, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” which nowadays could be revised to, “Painful Mexico, so far from peace and so close to the numbness of the United States.”
Javier E

Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ape-to-venezuelan-fantasy.html

beauty latin america Venezuela surgery sexism culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Eliezer Álvarez made a simple observation: Venezuelan women were increasingly using plastic surgery to transform their bodies, yet the mannequins in clothing stores did not reflect these new, often extreme proportions.
  • So he went back to his workshop and created the kind of woman he thought the public wanted — one with a bulging bosom and cantilevered buttocks, a wasp waist and long legs, a fiberglass fantasy, Venezuelan style
  • Now his mannequins, and others like them, have become the standard in stores across Venezuela, serving as an exaggerated, sometimes polarizing, vision of the female form that calls out from the doorways of tiny shops
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  • “You see a woman like this and you say, ‘Wow, I want to look like her,’ ” said Reina Parada, as she sanded a mannequin torso in the workshop. Although she cannot afford it, she said, she would like to get implant surgery someday. “It gives you better self-esteem.”
  • Cosmetic procedures are so fashionable here that a woman with implants is often casually referred to as “an operated woman.” Women freely talk about their surgeries, and mannequin makers jokingly refer to the creations as being “operated” as well.
  • The embrace of plastic surgery clashes with the government’s socialist ideology and frequent talk of creating a society free of the taint of commercialism.
  • the world’s largest estimated petroleum reserves — has long fed a culture of easy money and consumerism here, along with a penchant for the quick fix and instant gratification.
  • “Venezuela is known for its oil, and it’s known for its beauty,”
  • Beauty took on a particularly important role in the late 1970s and ’80s when the country’s beauty queens, already a national obsession, were crowned Miss Universe three times.
  • And the beauty queens’ fame helped fuel a fascination with cosmetic surgery and procedures like breast implants, tummy tucks, nose jobs and injections to firm the buttocks.
  • For Mr. Sousa, beauty really is skin deep: “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”
rachelramirez

How an Indigenous Group Is Battling Construction of the Nicaragua Canal | Science | Smi... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...tion-nicaragua-canal-180956418

indigenous nicaragua canal diplomacy

shared by rachelramirez on 04 Jul 16 - No Cached
  • live on Rama Cay, a 22-hectare island that rises from the water like a set of oversized goggles about a kilometer and a half off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast. The island is home to roughly half of the Rama’s 2,000 or so community members;
  • Unlike most Rama, Becky McCray has a college degree
  • The Rama’s territory, along Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, stretches roughly from the Costa Rican border north to just south of Bluefields. Their territory is shared with the Kriols, descendants of Africans who adopted the Rama way of life centuries ago.
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  • The Rama-Kriols hold a communal title not only to the nine settlements where community members live, but also to the 4,843-square-kilometer territory where they fish, hunt, and farm. If current construction plans for the canal go ahead, that territory will be severed in two.
  • The massive Nicaragua Canal planned by a secretive Chinese billionaire, Wang Jing, and managed by his company, the Hong Kong Nicaragua Development Group (HKND), will stretch from the Pacific coast, across Lake Nicaragua, to the Caribbean coast and is destined to wipe at least one Rama village off the map
  • . The Rama’s fishing grounds will no longer be safe in the path of 400-meter-long megaships approaching the canal.
  • Aside from the Rama, whose territory will likely be the most impacted, at least four other indigenous groups will face disruption if the canal proceeds. Nicaraguan law explicitly bars indigenous land from being bought or sold; that means the land will be rented, not expropriated, says Kautz. Yet, critics say that because this is not expressly stated in the concession law, the land is vulnerable to seizure.
  • The following day, McCray and her companions watched in dismay as the law was adopted. “We didn’t get a chance to say anything,” McCray remembers. “They didn’t respect us, they didn’t give us a chance to defend what we were claiming.”
  • According to both international and Nicaraguan law, indigenous people must give their “free, informed, and prior consent” to any project that will affect the community’s territory or way of life.
  • According to Manuel Coronel Kautz, the president of Nicaragua’s Canal Authority, the National Assembly had documents from the Rama-Kriol government giving permission for the canal to be constructed prior to the vote that granted the concession
  • McCray was nervous as she read her remarks in Spanish. She cited three articles in the concession law that explicitly give the Canal Commission the right to expropriate indigenous land, and then she accused the government of violating international norms in the way it conducted community consultations, perhaps most blatantly by paying villagers—many of whom are illiterate—to come to the meetings. (Those villagers, Acosta claims, were then pressured into signing documents that they could not understand.)
  • Acosta filed a legal challenge to the canal concession law on July 1, 2013, just weeks after it was approved. Like the 31 other legal challenges to the law—based on environmental factors, human rights, and national sovereignty—the Rama’s legal case was dismissed. The Supreme Court said the lawsuits were invalid because the law passed the National Assembly with a wide majority and because the major development project took precedence.
  • Acosta worries that the Rama will lose their territory—displaced by golf courses and beach resorts—even if the Nicaragua Canal is never built.
  • The case at the IACHR is probably the Rama’s best chance for meaningful international intervention, but it remains to be seen whether or not this glimmer of hope is enough to protect their territory and keep their culture alive.
  • rachelramirez on 04 Jul 16
     
    Nicaragua seems to be blatantly attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the indigenous people, but not expecting to get caught. From what I have previously read Nicaragua wants to be a player on the world stage, but they cannot achieve this status if they are not treating their people humanely. Although the government did get the indigenous group the Rama to sign documents that allowed the canal to be built on their land, government representatives knowingly had illiterate members of the Rama sign these official land documents. The indigenous people of Nicaragua deserve to be better informed about the canal, and the government owe the people understanding.
Javier E

Mexico - 0 views

This is one of the two countries we have been assigned as a school for the 2010 December MOAS Conference.

Mexico foreign relations diplomacy politics economics culture environment

started by Javier E on 09 Aug 10 no follow-up yet
Javier E

Mannequins Give Shape to a Venezuelan Fantasy - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ape-to-venezuelan-fantasy.html

fantasy sexism latin america Venezuela beauty surgery culture

shared by Javier E on 24 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • “I have lots of clients that come here and say, ‘I want to look like that mannequin,’ ” Ms. Molina said. “I tell them, ‘O.K., then get an operation.’ ”
  • While Ms. Corro’s mannequins took a quantum leap in body shape several years ago, Ms. Mieles said that the busts and buttocks of her family’s mannequins had grown gradually to keep up with the trends in plastic surgery.
  • Ms. Corro, the co-owner, explained the changes in the mannequins over just a few years: bigger breasts, bigger buttocks, svelte waists. Until recently, “the mannequins were natural, just like the women were natural,” she said. “The transformation has been both of the woman and of the mannequin.”
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  • “Beauty is perfection, to try to perfect yourself more and more every day,” Ms. Mieles said. “That’s how people see it here.” <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/>
krystalxu

'But what about the railways ...?' ​​The myth of Britain's gifts to India | W... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...in-empire-railways-myths-gifts

history politics diplomacy economy British India

shared by krystalxu on 10 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • the British took what they could for 200 years, but didn’t they also leave behind a great deal of lasting benefit?
  • Indeed, the British like to point out that the very idea of “India” as one entity (now three, but one during the British Raj), instead of multiple warring principalities and statelets, is the incontestable contribution of British imperial rule.
  • The idea of India is as old as the Vedas, the earliest Hindu scriptures, which describe “Bharatvarsha” as the land between the Himalayas and the seas.
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  • Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”
  • there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.
  • the dismantling of existing political institutions, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining British domination.
  • Later, in 1857, the sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together,
  • As early as 1859, the then British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that “Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours”.
  • The effort to understand ethnic, religious, sectarian and caste differences among Britain’s subjects inevitably became an exercise in defining, dividing and perpetuating these differences.
  • entire new communities were created by people who had not consciously thought of themselves as particularly different from others around them.
  • many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.
  • the creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy
  • The British ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice.
  • Indians were excluded from all of these functions.
  • As late as 1920, under the Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms”, Indian representatives on the councils – elected by a franchise so restricted and selective that only one in 250 Indians had the right to vote
  • Democracy, in other words, had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British by Indian nationalists.
  • British law had to be imposed upon an older and more complex civilisation with its own legal culture
  • only three cases can be found of Englishmen executed for murdering Indians, while the murders of thousands more at British hands went unpunished.
  • In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians
  • The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled
  • But the facts are even more damning.
  • the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time
  • their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives.
  • today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.
  • The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect.
  • In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.
  • there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British.
  • Today Indians cannot live without the railways;
  • As I’ve often argued, you don’t need to seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.
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