Indigenous Resistance to Globalization

[mom cat]

Indigenous Resistance to Globalization

......... by toni solo June 26, 2004


“Negotiating a free-trade agreement with the U.S. is not something one has a right to - it's a privilege."1 This quote from US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick came to mind when the BBC reported former head of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, US army General Karpinski on policy at the US concentration camp in Guantanamo. Karpinski quoted former Guantanamo commander Major General Miller saying , "At Guantanamo Bay we learned that the prisoners have to earn every single thing that they have." She went on, "He said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them." 2

Lessons from that kind of psychological and physical torture are very evident in US government efforts to force through coercive “free trade” deals on weaker trading partners in Latin America. Disorientating high-pressure timetables, meagre incentives and seriously damaging penalities underlie the superficial, businesslike bonhomie. Over these trade-in-your-sovereignty negotiations hangs constantly the perennial imperial Damocles' sword - “comply.... or else”. In the background, national and international media sound the endless confidence-eroding drip, drip, “there's no alternative....what choice do you have?....no alternative.....”.

The idea that the poor majority in Latin America are unaware of the crude aggression and blunt contempt for their needs and interests on the part of the United States or complacent at their own governments' canine roll-over responses is false. Resistance is widespread to US government attempts to extend and consolidate imperial control of Latin America's resources on behalf of giant multinational corporations. One would never know that from the corporate-owned mainstream media. If it's bad news for US allies, it's a non-event - Colombia

Only the most inescapable signs of that resistance in Latin America make the corporate media. The list of important events barely covered outside the countries where they happened reveals how popular protest is neglected. For example, the successful 37 day strike by national oil company workers in Colombia this year received virtually no coverage at all. Organized to resist continuing attempts to privatize the State oil company to favor multinational giants like BP-Amoco and Occidental Petroleum, initially the strike was declared illegal. Over 200 workers were fired. Seventeen strike leaders were arrested. The government militarised petroleum installations throughout the country. 3


Similarly, on May 18th around half a million public workers held a national strike. A massive protest in Cartagena was brutally repressed by the army. None of this received coverage in the North American or European media in any way comparable to the coverage given to the 2002 Venezuelan opposition lock-out. Army and paramilitary massacres in Colombia, such as those this May in Guajira and in Arauca, that would be headline international news if they happened in Venezuela, are simply not reported.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=5785

[CharlesGroce]

1. Very Good Post

People don't like to read content around here very much though, explains the lack of a response after this amount of time.

I love hearing about the "third world" wisening up to the corporate world strategy, it gives me hope while I'm stuck in the middle of their creations: Wal Mart in every town, fast food at every stop light, etc.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Great article!

So glad to see it.

On June 21st the COB launched a campaign to collect a million signatures calling for nationalization of the country's gas reserves. The US government should send its representative on a basic civics class in Bolivia. Apparently after having been asleep during recent events in Bolivia, Roger “narcolept” Noriega woke up on March 2nd this year to tell the US Senate, “A principal objective of our democracy program in Bolivia is to draw the long-marginalized indigenous population into political life.”12

Arguably as crucial for the future of Latin America as the presidential referendum in Venezuela, very little of the national debate in Bolivia reaches the international media. The imperial “free trade” consensus has never had much time for genuine debate based on accurate and timely information. But the referendums in Bolivia and Venezuela are likely to deliver unmistakeable signals that the empire's subject peoples have had enough - whether the corporate media report it fairly or not.
(snip/...)

That's hitting the nail on the head! Beautiful.

[CharlesGroce]

3. Wow that's a great website...

Thanks again for posting. I'll be checking that site daily!

[legin]

4. This article (posted before) sort of goes with above

How to Silence an Awkward Newspaper

by John Pilger

The editor of the Daily Mirror, Britain’s most famous mass-circulation newspaper, was sacked because he ran the only English-language popular paper to expose the "war on terror" as a fraud and the invasion of Iraq as a crime. He was marked long before the Mirror published the notorious, apparently faked pictures of British troops torturing Iraqi prisoners.

On 4 July 2002, American Independence Day, the Mirror published a report of mine, displayed on the front page under the headline "Mourn on the Fourth of July" and showing Bush flanked by the Stars and Stripes. Above him were the words: "George W Bush’s policy of bomb first and find out later has killed double the number of civilians who died on 11 September. The USA is now the world’s leading rogue state."It was the Mirror at its most potent; not since it distinguished itself as the first mass-circulation paper in the western world to oppose the US invasion of Vietnam and, before that, the British invasion of Suez, had it confronted the rapacious policies of a British government and its principal ally. Most of the Western media were then consumed and manipulated by the fake issue of Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction: "45 minutes from attack," said the London Evening Standard front page; "He’s got ‘em... let’s get him," said the London Sun.

<<snip>>

The day after the "mourn on the Fourth of July" piece was published, a senior executive of the New York investment company Tweedy Browne, major shareholders in the Trinity Mirror newspaper group, called the Mirror and shouted down the phone at senior management, demanding Morgan’s head and mine. This pressure continued as the Murdoch press in the United States and other lunar right-wing papers and broadcasters railed against the "treacherous" Mirror. When, on 1 May last, the Mirror published its "torture" photographs, Tweedy Browne again led the charge of powerful shareholders, notably Fidelity Asset Management, the biggest mutual company in America, run by the billionaire Edward C Johnson III, a donor to the Bush re-election campaign. "We will have to look very carefully," said an executive of Deutsche Asset Management, another shareholder, "at what Trinity Mirror does next in order to protect the value of the Mirror brand." Was corporate influence on the press, and its right to be wrong, ever more eloquently expressed? Morgan had only just survived a year earlier when a new Trinity Mirror senior management under the chief executive, Sly Bailey, ordered him to "tone down" the anti-war coverage and return the paper to celebrities and faithless royal butlers (who had never departed). In the following months, the Mirror, along with the other anti-war daily newspaper in Britain, the Independent, was vindicated. Today, Bush and Blair are universally distrusted and reviled, and the defeat of their atrocious enterprise seems assured.

(more...)

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php