In the aftermath of the pandemic, Colombians are striking and demonstrating against austerity and police repression in a historic rebellion. The uprising highlights the power workers hold – and if the rising is successful, it could spell the end of decades of right-wing rule.
by Zack Frailey Escobar · Published April 13, 2021 · Last modified January 19, 2022
The return to power of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party after the 2019 coup, has been followed by a swift effort to hold the golpistas accountable. In response, the US media has taken up the State Department’s line, shedding crocodile tears over alleged civil rights abuses. Ironically, these same voices utterly failed to condemn a right-wing coup which led to a year-long period of political violence that left at least 30 dead and thousands more injured or arrested. These disingenuous commentators are now wringing their hands over the arrest and prosecution of the guilty parties. Those of us concerned with genuine democracy in Latin America should ignore them, looking at similar machinations that previously occurred in Brazil.
by Justin Akers Chacón · Published October 6, 2020 · Last modified January 19, 2022
In a recent interview, Joe Biden was visually irritated when responding to a reporter who asked if his proposed policies are “socialist”. “Do I look like a socialist? Look at my career — my whole career. I am not a socialist…I beat the socialist!”
This back-handed slap at Bernie Sanders occurred precisely at the time that Sanders and the self-identified progressives and Socialists in Congress push for the 10-15 million people who voted for Sanders in the primaries to get behind Biden—despite deep ideological differences.
On the heels of the deployment of Federal police in several states to repress Black Lives Matter protests, and Trump accusing him of being soft on the movement against police violence, Biden defensively replied and criticized the protests. At a high-profile press conference at a steel mill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with all of its dog-whistle
Born in San Francisco, California, Roberto Lovato was raised in the shadow of silence surrounding family history and trauma, a commonly shared experience among those in the Salvadoran diaspora. In Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and the Revolution in the Americas (2020) Lovato shares his experience growing up surrounded by this omnipresent silence and the personal and political stakes of intergenerational forgetting. Lovato states “the machete dismembers our humanity from our stories” (xxiii). He uses the machete as a metaphor to describe the ways the social fabric of this community has been cut, wounded, and
I feel that within the imagination of most people who are neither Salvadoran, of Salvadoran descent, or Central American, El Salvador as a nation, people, and culture is a blank book with only four bookmarks for reference: the civil war, present-day mass migration, MS-13, and pupusas.
One of the greatest misconceptions and purposeful misrepresentations that has been constructed around El Salvador (and in general, Guatemala and Honduras) is a perpetual and contradictory dichotomy of simultaneous victimhood and criminality.
In the United States we are either pitiable victims of war, political repression, or poverty as long as we remain within our lands. But the moment we migrate, we become MS-13 terrorists and invaders that merit no asylum.
What is known about Salvadoran history and culture, even among progressive or leftist circles in the U.S., is largely informed from solidarity work around the 1980s civil war and interactions (between mostly white college students) and representatives of various liberation fronts.
Today, at times, it feels like many of our friends and allies still don’t know us.
This characteristic of being unknowable is not of our choosing or making. It is an unfortunate side-effect of the willful ignorance that comes with being absorbed into and propagating the hegemonic white supremacist culture of the United States.
Which is unfortunate, because to know us is to understand that Salvadorans are born fighters. Resistance is in our blood, from the anticolonial rebellion led by Anastasio Aquino in the 19th century, to the 1932 Indigenous Uprising, to the 1944 National Strike that brought down a dictatorship; we are a people in continuous mobilization for justice.
