Caribbean Matters: Democratic Rep. Nydia Velzquez calls for an end to the Monroe Doctrine

Denise Oliver Velez, author
by Denise Oliver Velez for Community Contributors Team
Community
Thursday, December 28, 2023 at 6:59:13a CST

The United States has had a checkered and often ugly history in policies toward and relationships with our Caribbean and Latin American neighbors, going back to our birth as a nation. The Monroe Doctrine, crafted by President James Monroe, a founding father who was also a major slaveholder, and expanded by Theodore Roosevelt in his 1905 Corollary, has shaped the history of U.S. invasions and interventions up to this day.

Before Congress shut down for its year-end break, I was elated to see that Democratic Rep. Nydia Velázquez of New York has raised the issue of ending that age-old policy via a resolution co-sponsored by Reps. Greg Casar of Texas, Jesus G. "Chuy" Garcia and Delia C. Ramirez of Illinois, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

The resolution has been virtually ignored by the U.S. media.


. . .

How Biden's Economy Puts Money in Workers' Pockets

DECEMBER 26, 2023

BY DAVID MCCALL

Libbi Urban’s co-workers broke into applause at the union hall last year when they learned that their new contract with Cleveland-Cliffs not only increased wages by a whopping 20 percent but provided greater work-life balance and even enabled them to retire earlier than planned.

They’d spent years fighting for some of the improvements. But this time, they wielded extra bargaining power because of the hot economy that President Joe Biden engineered with bold investments and a deep commitment to working people.

Workers in aluminum, auto, steel, tire, mining, paper, heavy equipment, service, health care, and package delivery, among other industries, all racked up historic contract gains as the economy exploded under the current administration.

Biden inherited a nation battered by COVID-19. But under his steady leadership, America turned the tide.

His Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) unleashed $1.2 trillion to upgrade transportation, communications, and energy networks with union labor and union-made materials and parts. His CHIPS and Science Act catalyzed billions more to boost the production of semiconductors and rebuild crucial supply chains.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/26/how-bidens-economy-puts-money-in-workers-pockets/

'DEA KNEW' US government 'WAS told' of gun smuggling ahead of failed Venezuela coup by ex-Green Berets

A couple of prisoners Venezuela gave to Washington had been arrested trying to assassinate Maduro, Trump-backed.

Trump denies ties to Americans linked to Venezuela ‘coup plot’
Two US citizens among dozens arrested by Venezuela after a beach invasion allegedly aimed at overthrowing Maduro.

6 May 2020

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States government had nothing to do with an alleged incursion into Venezuela that landed two US citizens behind bars in the crisis-stricken South American country.

Trump said he had just learned of the detention of the pair, accused by Venezuela of being mercenaries. Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said they were part of an operation to kill him that was backed by neighbouring Colombia and the US.

“Whatever it is, we’ll let you know,” Trump told reporters in Washington, DC, before departing from the White House to Arizona. “But it has nothing to do with our government.”

Maduro said: “The United States government is fully and completely involved in this defeated raid” and praised members of a fishing village for cornering one group and netting the “professional American mercenaries”.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper echoed Trump’s comments later on Tuesday, saying “The United States government had nothing to do with what’s happened in Venezuela in the last few days.”

More:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/5/6/trump-denies-ties-to-americans-linked-to-venezuela-coup-plot

How the Campaign to Free Venezuelan Political Prisoner Alex Saab Succeeded

What Lies Beneath the Vatican of the Zapotecs?

An archaeological expedition in Mexico seeks what’s left of the sprawling, centuries-old catacombs hidden below the ruins of Mitla.



A caretaker is halfway descended down stairs in a square hole in a courtyard area of Zapotec ruins surrounded by stone steps and walls on a bright sunny day.
Ramiro Ruiz, a caretaker of the archaeological grounds of San Pablo Villa de Mitla in southern Mexico, descends into
a tomb belonging to the site’s ancient Zapotec ruins.


By Franz LidzPhotographs by Meghan Dhaliwal
Reporting from San Pablo Villa de Mitla, Mexico

Dec. 23, 2023
Leer en español

The ruins of Mitla sit about 30 miles from Oaxaca in the mountains of southern Mexico, built on a high valley floor as a gateway between the world of the living and the dead. The site was established in roughly 200 A.D. as a fortified village, and then as a burial ground by the Zapotecs, the so-called Cloud People, who settled in the region around 1,500 B.C.

Five main sets of ruins are scattered throughout the small modern tourist hub that is San Pablo Villa de Mitla. Some are royal houses and ceremonial centers featuring central plazas. One is a crumbling pyramid, and another is a domed Spanish church with adjoining Zapotec courtyards. Elaborate mosaics cover the walls, meandering geometric friezes resembling carved lace; “petrified weaving” is how Aldous Huxley described them in his 1934 travelogue, “Beyond the Mexique Bay.” Traces of color linger on masonry that was once slathered in bright red paint made by grinding cochinillas, wood lice that live on nopal cactuses.

Spanish chroniclers christened Mitla the Vatican of the Zapotec religion, and its wonders were said to continue underground. The Zapotecs, known for their metaphysical connection to rain, thunder and lightning, believed that they could commune with gods and ancestral spirits in an earthen cavity below their city, which led to a netherworld known as Lyobaa, the “place of rest.”

In 1674, Francisco de Burgoa, a Dominican friar, wrote an account, based largely on church documents, of Spanish missionaries who had explored a sprawling labyrinth of tunnels and burial chambers beneath the ruins of a monumental palace. A century earlier, secular clergy had blocked the doorways to the sunken complex with bricks and mortar, presumably either to keep the masses out or the ghosts in.

“The Spanish believed that demons performed black magic in the underground tombs,” said Denisse Argote, a researcher at the National Institute of History and Anthropology in Mexico. In September, Dr. Argote and a team of 13 geophysicists, engineers and archaeologists spent a week at Mitla for the second season of an ambitious exploration to determine what remains of the Zapotec’s long-abandoned catacombs. In the still, steady calm of morning, they lugged around enough electronic ganglia to jump-start the Bride of Frankenstein.



Two researchers in gray-tan shirts and black hats look at a display screen on the top of sophisticated equipment attached to what looks like the push-handle of a lawnmower on the grounds of an archaeological site.
Manuel Ortiz Osio, left, a graduate student with Project Lyobaa, and Gerardo Cifuentes Nava, a geophysicist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, worked with ground-penetrating radar at the Mitla site in September.

More:
https://web.archive.org/web/20231223111844/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/science/archaeology-mexico-zapotecs.html

Or:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/science/archaeology-Mmexico-zapotecs.html

The Modern-Day Nativity Scene: A Concertina Wire Christmas

DECEMBER 25, 2023

BY TODD MILLER

I am at the Stanton Street Bridge between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, where one year ago I watched groups of people wade through the shallow water to “pedir posada,” the Spanish-language term used for Joseph and Mary asking for refuge in Bethlehem 2,023 years ago. This year, there are no people below me, at least not right now, and the Rio Grande is a greenish, contaminated trickle that will dry up completely just east of El Paso, and then be replenished by the Rio Conchos 200 miles downriver in Presidio, Texas. On the other side of the bridge, you can see that the holiday season is in full gear as the line of people entering the United States coming from Ciudad Juárez extends up to the top of the bridge, exactly above the river. Surrounding the river are the props of the modern-day nativity scene: coiling razor wire, 30-foot walls, Texas Army National Guard troops and their armored jeeps, armed U.S. Border Patrol agents in their green-striped trucks, drone surveillance, camera surveillance, biometric systems. Partially, this is the result of the most money ever put toward federal border and immigration enforcement (as we reported this year, 2023 was $29.8 billion, a record number, which adds to the more than $400 billion since 2003). Partially, this is because Texas’s spending on Operation Lone Star, courtesy of Governor Greg Abbott and his right-wing, un-Christian justification machine, which has added up to $4.5 billion over the last two years. And this has been the response of the United States for people “pidiendo posada” for 30 years since Operation Blockade/Hold the Line began a border-building spree that has not ceased: there is no room at the inn.

I think of that cold night on the ground in a stable that is depicted in so many places this time of year as I walk past shivering refugees in heavy coats sitting outside against the Sagrado Corazón church in El Paso a few blocks from the border. I am reminded of the hundreds upon hundreds of people arriving to the Arizona border, as Melissa reported on earlier this week. I am reminded of the young Guatemalan mother I met myself at the border wall in late November as she tended to her two-month-old under the 30-foot border wall. They had been waiting there for two days. The infant was sick, and the nights were cold. The rest of the group, from the coast of Guatemala, built a fire to keep warm. When were the wise men going to arrive, the kings, the angels? The humanitarians did arrive, as they do, day after day (see Melissa’s reporting on that). I am reminded of being in Bethlehem myself a few years back, visiting the Aida refugee camp of Palestinians, which was surrounded by a tall concrete wall that had an embedded “pill box,” or a tower where snipers could point their assault rifles located mere miles from that stable where Mary gave birth on the cold ground. The Christmas story is playing out all around us, as lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar pointed out for us just yesterday. Where Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus had to flee Bethlehem when King Herod started to wield authoritarian power, the long trek to Egypt fleeing persecution is happening right now, throughout the world, such as in the Darién Gap in Colombia and Panama, as discussed in Melissa’s two interviews with anthropologist Caitlyn Yates—one podcast in December, one in August. Or the equivalent might be in the Mediterranean, as we discussed with Lauren Markham last June after a ship capsized near Greece, killing 600 people, or the countless places across the world where people struggle with a huge enforcement apparatus, which Anna Lekas Miller wrote about in her book Love Across Borders. We have spent the year doing our best to give you insight into what is happening on our borders.

I love this time of year, December, because things start to slow down, the frenetic pace starts to wane. For me, this becomes a more reflective period. Yet this modern Christmas story is anything but reflective. On television sets, commercials remind us of the holiday spirit (and to buy as much as we can), and movies have heartwarming tales of people coming together. Yet hospitality is scoffed at in words and policy, no matter what president, no matter what political party. Melissa has reported time and time again about the dehumanizing rhetoric; earlier this week, she wrote about a Fox News reporter talking about invaders and invasions and “credible fear thresholds.” This discourse abounds, with stories of people “taking advantage of our asylum system,” and claims that the United States can’t absorb any more people. Did Mary and Joseph hear similar soundbites on their journeys?

In these stories, we rarely hear about U.S. foreign policy, both historical and current. Take, for example, the Monroe Doctrine’s effect in Latin America: the centuries of upholding dictatorships, training generals, arming militaries—and, lately, creating border guards—and influencing politics, as well as the economic domination, in which corporate power and extractive industries enjoy a borderless world and can travel anywhere and take anything they want (see NAFTA, see CAFTA), from precious resources to cheap labor. Meanwhile, regular people—sometimes the very people displaced by corporate power—face harsher and harsher border regimes that extend throughout the continent. The same thing the Greg Abbotts of the world accuse undocumented people of doing here, corporate power is doing there. Studies have continually shown how a migrant labor force bolsters the U.S. economy in myriad, even critical ways (see, for example, the film A Day without a Mexican), yet border crossers get blamed for the big societal problems as if they had the power to set policy in corporate board rooms and in Washington. In the halls of power, debates stagnate over whether people are refugees or economic migrants—creating more divisions between the people most affected by the entrenched borders.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/25/the-modern-day-nativity-scene-a-concertina-wire-christmas/

US Media Suppressed Their Government's Role in Ousting Brazil's Government

DECEMBER 20, 2023

Array
BRIAN MIER



In a new peer-reviewed academic article in Latin American Perspectives (11/19/23), “Anticorruption and Imperialist Blind Spots: The Role of the United States in Brazil’s Long Coup,” Sean T. Mitchell, Rafael Ioris, Kathy Swart, Bryan Pitts and I prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the US Department of Justice was a key actor in what we call Brazil’s “long coup.” This was the period from 2014, beginning with the lead up to the illegitimate 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, to the November 2019 release of then-former, now-current President Lula da Silva from political imprisonment.

“For over half a century, intervening against democratically elected governments has been only half the story,” we wrote; “the second half involves justifying, minimizing or denying US involvement.” The article criticized US scholars on Latin America for ignoring a significant body of evidence of this involvement. It called on Latin Americanists to return to the anti-imperialist tradition that established their field as a leading source of informed criticism of US foreign policy.

In this article, I will make the same call to US journalists who lived in Brazil during this period who remained silent about their government’s role in removing Brazil’s front-running presidential candidate in the 2018 elections, opening the door for the right-wing extremist No. 2 candidate, Jair Bolsonaro.

For nearly five years, Brazil’s huge anti-corruption investigation, called Operation Car Wash (Lava Jato in Portuguese), received glowing coverage in US media (FAIR.org, 3/8/21). Articles treated investigation and trial judge Sergio Moro as a heroic, anti-corruption crusader, rarely challenging the public prosecutors’ official narrative. Media failed to question judicial overreach, even when prosecutors did things like illegally wiretap former President Lula da Silva’s defense team’s law offices (Consultor Jurídico, 12/19/19).

This narrative began to crack in 2019, thanks to a long, slowly released series of articles in the Intercept, based on a huge archive of hacked Telegram chats revealed by hacker Walter Neto Delgatti. The texts showed collusion between the Operation Car Wash taskforce and Judge Sergio Moro, and revealed, among other things, that they knew they didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute Lula in a fair trial (Intercept, 6/9/19).

More:
https://fair.org/home/us-media-suppressed-their-governments-role-in-ousting-brazils-government/

Panamanians remember 1989 US invasion and continue to demand justice and accountability

Dec. 20 is a national day of mourning in Panama in memory of the victims of the 1989 US invasion of the country. At the time, it was the largest invasion since Vietnam and the first after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the US, it was heralded as liberating the country from dictator Manuel Noriega, a former US ally. But in Panama, many saw it as something much different. The victims of the US action are still demanding justice.

The World
December 20, 2023 · 11:30 AM EST
By Michael Fox

In the poor Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, the wounds of the 1989 US invasion are still written on the walls.

“Do you see this? This remains as a memory of the shots fired,” El Chorrillo resident Efrain Guerrero said. He points to the bullet hole left in the wall from the invasion, down the street from his house. Guerrero has dedicated recent years to telling the story of El Chorrillo’s past. “Right here. There was a downed helicopter," he said.

Overnight on Dec. 20, 1989, nearly 30,000 US soldiers attacked positions across Panama. The neighborhood of El Chorrillo was ground zero.

One video, shot by a US soldier during the invasion, shows flames engulfing homes as planes and helicopters fly overhead. El Chorrillo surrounded the main military barracks for the Panama Defense Forces. When US soldiers attacked, they leveled entire city blocks.

. . .

Many were buried in mass graves.

More:
https://theworld.org/stories/2023-12-20/panamanians-remember-1989-us-invasion-and-continue-demand-justice-and

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Schutz's Angels and the Other Christmas Oratorio

DECEMBER 22, 2023

BY DAVID YEARSLEY




Matthias Grünewald, Nativity Scene from the Isenheim Altarpiece, Unterlinden Museum, c. 1515.

Forget the Christmas tree and Saint Nic’s suit, it is music that marks Germany’s greatest contributions to the holiday. Aside from any number of carols, there is the ubiquitous Messiah, like Handel himself, to be thought of as a Teutonic export. Long since migrated from its original Springtime calendar setting, the overdone oratorio is a Christmas interloper now overshadowing all other classical yuletide offerings, even Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

If you’ve had your fill of these classical chestnuts this holiday season, turn your listening attention to Heinrich Schütz’s Christmas Story (Historia der Geburt Jesu Christi). This revered master of the German baroque was born exactly a century before Bach and Handel and lived almost long enough to overlap with their births. Schütz’s influence on Lutheran music and education was pervasive and felt in innumerable ways by both Bach and Handel. Standard music histories often claim that Schütz’s music “culminates” in the works of Bach and Handel. But this progressive view of history is obliterated by the breadth and profundity of Schütz’s creations. They are their own zenith.

Whereas the oratorios by Bach and Handel both last a good two hours, Schütz’s Christmas Story comes in at around forty minutes. That duration speaks to the economy with which Schütz’s music sets its familiar text. His Christmas tale is packed with vibrant vocal and instrumental sonorities and literally star-studded, images. It radiates warmth and wonder like a Nativity scene by the greatest German colorist painter of the early sixteenth century, Matthias Grünewald.

. . .