Internationalism – Page 2 – Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism

Condemn the Coup Against Evo Morales and Bolivia!

CCDS JOINS THE WORLD COMMUNITY IN DEPLORING THE MILITARY COUP IN BOLIVIA: CALLS ON CONGRESS TO CONDEMN THE OVERTHROW OF THE ELECTED GOVERNMENT OF EVO MORALES

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS), along with nations and movements in solidarity with the people of Bolivia everywhere, condemns the violent military/police coup carried out against the elected government of Evo Morales. President Morales reelected for a fourth term days ago was forced to resign his position on November 10, 2019. Other government officials were also forced to resign and supporters of the coup have been rampaging in the streets, burning and looting. It is said that President Morales’ house has been damaged as well. He was forced to flee to Mexico.

Morales, President since 2006, is the first indigenous leader ever to be elected President of Bolivia. In his thirteen years in office, the percentage of those living in extreme poverty (mostly indigenous people) has declined by half, social services have been expanded, and key industries nationalized while the country has experienced growth rates twice that of any Latin American country with only modest inflation. During his tenure in office, political decentralization empowering indigenous villagers was initiated while a modern economic and political infrastructure has been created.

As a successful national participant in the so-called “Pink Tide,” Bolivia has stood for national independence and sovereignty and against ruinous neoliberal policies prescribed by international financial institutions. It has expanded international ties with nations everywhere. For example, It has signed agreements with China to facilitate development of its valuable lithium resource (a key component of cell phones, electric cars, and other new technologies).

As more information about the coup appears it seems clear that the United States has encouraged and assisted in the military coup, with Senators Rubio and Menendez playing key roles.

We denounce President Trump’s statement in support of the coup and further threatening the overthrow of the governments of Venezuela and Nicaragua. We call on Members of Congress to join with Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar in condemning the coup. All presidential candidates must also take a stand. Thus far only Senator Bernie Sanders has done so. Continue reading Condemn the Coup Against Evo Morales and Bolivia!

More Than a Wall: 30 Years of Life Along the US-Mexico Border

Photos and text © 2019, by David Bacon
The Nation

Mexicali, Baja California – 1996
A worker is deported back into Mexico at the border gate, from a bus that has taken deportees from the detention center in El Centro in the Imperial Valley, on the other side of the fence.

Editors’ note: “If it happened yesterday, we’ve already forgotten.” – an anonymous Nation editor.

What we see and react to in the media conditions us to view the present as a series of immediate crises, and to ignore their roots in the past. For social justice movements, this can be deadly, cutting us off from an ability to weigh and learn from our own history, and to understand how that history shapes the ways we fight for justice today.

In this photo essay, David Bacon reaches into his photographic archive of 30 years, which are now part of the Special Collections of Stanford University’s Green Library. A Nation contributor and former union organizer, Bacon’s photographs and journalism have documented the courage of people struggling for social and economic justice in countries around the world.

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In 1971, Pat Nixon, wife of Republican President Richard Nixon, inaugurated Border Field State Park, where the border meets the Pacific Ocean just south of San Diego. The day she visited, she asked the Border Patrol to cut the barbed wire so she could greet the Mexicans who’d come to see her. She told them, “I hope there won’t be a fence here too much longer.”

Instead, a real fence was built in the early 1990s, made of metal sheets taken from decommissioned aircraft carrier landing platforms. The sheets had holes, so anyone could peek through to the other side. But for the first time, people coming from each side could no longer physically mix together or hug each other. This is how the wall looked when I began photographing it, over 30 years ago.

That old wall still exists in a few places on the Mexican side in Tijuana and elsewhere. But Operation Gatekeeper, the Clinton Administration border enforcement program, sought to push border crossers out of urban areas like San Ysidro, into remote desert regions where crossing was much more difficult and dangerous. To do that, the government had contractors build a series of walls that were harder to cross.

That’s partly how the US-Mexico border became more than mere geography-how it became instead a passage of fire, an ordeal that must be survived in order to send money from work in the US back to a hungry family, to find children and relatives from whom they have been separated by earlier journeys, or to flee an environment that has become too dangerous to bear.

Some do not survive, dying as they try to cross the desert or swim the Rio Bravo. To them the border region has become a land of death. Every year at least 3-400 people die trying to cross, and are buried, often without names, in places like the graveyard in Holtville, in the Imperial Valley.

But the photographs I’ve taken over 30 years also show that the US/Mexico border is a land of the living. Millions of people live and work on Mexico’s side of the border: There are the child laborers who pick the tomatoes and strawberries in Mexicali Valley that line the shelves of grocery stores in the US; there are the workers from across Mexico who staff the massive maquiladoras in Tijuana; And there are thousands who have been deported to Mexico, and who must now somehow survive this passage of fire as well.

… View Complete Essay

Street Scenes in Manila

MANILA, PHILIPPINES (8-31-19) – Street scene in Manila.

These photographs were taken on the streets of Manila in Ermita, Intramuros and around Rizal Park. People live in the street in Manila much more than in the U.S. – it’s more like a city in Mexico, for instance. Some images show the recruitment of sailors in a shape up next to the park – Filipinos make up a larger percentage of ocean-going sailors than any other nationality. Others show workers laying bricks, or driving jeepneys and pedicabs. People go to church, which is sometimes in the street as well.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES (8-31-19) – Recruiters sign up sailors at an open-air shape up near Rizal Park in Manila.

For a full selection of photographs: Click Here