Selected Articles

  • Argentina’s Berlusconi and the Triumph of Soccer

    NACLA, Essay, Jul 31, 2007

    Buenos Aires has just elected a mustachioed, millionaire mayor who owns Argentina's most popular soccer team. Mauricio Macri is Argentina's answer to Italy's Silvio Berlusconi or New York's Michael Bloomberg. The only difference being shades of ideology, gradations of fabulous wealth and the fact that Macri's high-profile business is not media, but sport. In the fractured Argentine capital where the sentimiento for soccer is virtually the only language that cuts across class and ideological differences, that counts for a lot.

  • Pachamama Goes Organic: Bolivia’s Quinoa Farmers

    NACLA Report on the Americas, Feature, Jul 03, 2007

    The elevator is broken in Bolivia’s Ministry of Campesino and Agricultural Affairs, so together with Arturo Mamani Poma and Salustiano Vargas Villca, I walk up to the sixth floor, where we find a small, dark office with three desks, a few computers, and a conference table. Mamani and Vargas, both members of the National Association of Quinoa Producers (Anapqui), have come to the La Paz office to request a loan to build a quinoa-processing plant.

  • Remembering in the Land that Memory Forgot

    Contexts, Essay, May 14, 2007

    Impunity rides the coattails of amnesia and oblivion. Without memory to link the present with the past, current wrongs seem like historical aberrations, rather than the consequence of accumulated injustice. Authoritarian regimes and their allies know this well and are keen to snuff out those who reflect too thoughtfully on the past. By continually wiping the historical slate clean, they are free to do as they please and cover their tracks in the process. Nowhere do these dynamics seem more clearly at work than in Latin America.

  • Paraguay's Peculiar Politics

    NACLA, Feature, Apr 05, 2007

    “An island surrounded by land” is how novelist Roa Bastos described his native Paraguay, as much in reference to its political and social insularity, as to its landlocked geography. With less than seven million people in an area about the size of California, Paraguay is considered by some to be South America’s so-called “Empty Quarter.” The country’s eccentricity leaves many outsiders puzzled or uninterested.

  • Colombia's Women Warriors for Peace

    NACLA, Feature, Nov 15, 2006

    “C’mon, muchachos, let’s go!” With this abrupt order, Celia Eumesa and a group of the Nasa Indigenous Guard under her command jumped into a van and drove off in hot pursuit of a handful of guerrillas that had just kidnapped some people from her community. Armed with no more than decorative staffs, which they carry to symbolize indigenous authority, they sped behind the guerrillas’ car with a caravan of 60 other Indigenous Guards trailing behind.

  • A Day in the Life of the Other Campaign

    NACLA Report on the Americas, Feature, Mar 01, 2006

    “We did not come here to invite you to die or to kill; instead we came here to invite you to live—to live by fighting—but no longer alone, apart from each other. That way, there won’t have to be another January 1, 1994, and no one else will ever have to cover their face in order to be seen.” With these words, Subcomandante Marcos on January 14 addressed a crowd of about 700 people in the city of Chetumal, the state capital of Quintana Roo.