Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Poverty, not just populists, to blame for Covid-19's impact

A poor country with very limited resources and an American embargo A successful programme to contain coronavirus

An excellent account! Rebellion, Reformism, and Reaction in Latin America

"How privatisation increases corruption in the developing world"

The Metamorphosis The political education of Mario Vargas Ilosa

Venezuela A disaster caused by  - the economic policies of the government,  - the sanctions imposed by the US,  - and the control of what is left of food and foreign aid by the "mafia" food. ويرجع عدد من التقارير المتخصصة أسباب هذه الأزمات إلى سياسات الحكومة الاقتصادية، إلى جانب الحصار الاقتصادي الذي فرضته الولايات المتحدة على فنزويلا، إضافة إلى سيطرة "مافيا" الغذاء والدواء  على ما تبقى من مواد غذائية أو ما يصل من مساعدات خارجية. ماذا خلف المساعادات الإنسانية لفنزويلا "Aid groups on the ground worry, however, that a political operation thinly padded with humanitarian objectives could send a precarious situation down an even worse path—disastrous American efforts to intervene in Latin America from decades past serve as a reminder of how badly things can go. Even some liberals tell us that The examples are numerous. The United States  sought to overthrow  Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende in the 1970s, a move that eventuall...

Venezuela What Vice-President Pence could not say in public when he spoke about helping the Venezuelan "people" get their "freedom". "There is no room for any outside influence other than ours in this region [Latin America]. We could not tolerate auch a thing... Until now Central America has always understood that governments which we recognize and support stay in power, while those which we do not recognize and support fall."— Robert Olds Quoted in Peter Baofu's The Rise of Authoritarian Liberal Democracy , Cambridge 2007, p. 85 Recent interventions aside, Mark Rosenfelder (1996) counted, for instance, that between 1846 and 1996 alone, there were more than "79 U.S. military interventions in Latin America and Haiti..."

Crossing divides

Monje also recalls a conversation with Guevara from the pre-Bolivia period. Che had said: ‘Hey, Monje, why don’t you get a guerrilla war going in Bolivia?’ ‘What will it get us?’ Monje asked. Che accused him of cowardice. No, Monje said, you’ve just got ‘a machine-gun stuck in your brain, and you can’t imagine any other way to develop an anti-imperialist struggle.’ The nine (or so) lives of Che Guevera

"Between the onset of the global Cold War in 1948 and its conclusion in 1990, the US government secured the overthrow of at least twenty-four governments in Latin America, four by direct use of US military forces, three by means of CIA-managed revolts or assassination, and seventeen by encouraging local military and political forces to intervene without direct US participation, usually through m ilitary coups d’état . . . The human cost of this effort was immense. Between 1960, by which time the Soviets had dismantled Stalin’s gulags, and the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. In other words, from 1960 to 1990, the Soviet bloc as a whole was less repressive, measured in terms of human victims, than many individual Latin American countries. The hot Cold War in Central America produced an unprecede...

Revolutionary icon finally defeated by infirmity of old age