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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

December 21, 2007

John Ross
New Massacres Loom in Mexico

Dick J. Reavis
A Way Out of the Newspaper Abyss

 

December 20, 2007

David Rosen
Mitt Romney's Secret Life as a Pornographer

Alan Farago
The Huckster and the Wreckage: Jeb Bush and the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Laura Carlsen
Standing Up to NAFTA

Ashley Dawson
The Return of the Bread Riot

Wayne Smith
and Jennifer Schuett
Cuba Changes, US Policy Stagnates

Website of the Day
How to Talk to a FoxNews Reporter

 

December 19, 2007

Saul Landau
Is the NIE Bush's Watergate?

Paul W. Lovinger
Hillary the Hawk

Norman Solomon
The Mad Corporate World of Glenn Beck

Dave Zirin
George Mitchell's Drugs of Choice

Marjorie Cohn
Bush Still Spinning Iranian Nukes

Sen. Russell Feingold
The Iraq War is Exhausting Our Nation

Sonja Karkar
A Christmas Reflection on Palestine

Anthony Papa
Open the Drug Gulags

Christopher Ketcham
Pave the Holy Lands with Good Intentions

Davey D
Britney's Little Sister is Pregnant: Should We Blame Hip Hop?

Website of the Day
When Republicans Use the F-Word on TV

 

December 18, 2007

R. F. Blader
The Politics of Teen Pregnancy

George Wuerthner
Gunning for Wolves in Idaho

Steven Higgs
Can the NAFTA Superhighway be Stopped?

Vijay Prashad
Encounters with Ghadar

David Macaray
The Free Rider Problem

Ralph Nader
Nine Books That Make a Difference: a Reading List for the Holidays

Eva Liddell
Privatizing War Abroad, Invading Privacy at Home

Martha Rosenberg
While the Bodies are Still Warm: Drugs, Shrinks and Shooters

Dave Lindorff
When Impeachment is Out of Print

Peter Morici
The Consequences the Trade Deficit

Website of the Day
Ron Paul: How Fascism Will Come to America

 

December 17, 2007

Mike Whitney
Staring Into the Abyss

Tom Barry
Planning the War on Immigrants

Uri Avnery
A Gaza Masada?

Greg Moses
Crossing the Line in Texas

Allan Nairn
Terrorism; Counter-
Terrorism: Excuses for Murder

Patrick Bond
South Africa's Fight Between Hostile Brothers

Stephen Lendman
Police State America

Charles Jonkel
Grizzly Right of Way

Laray Polk
An Inside-Out Crisis in Gaza

Stephen Fleischman
Pawns in Their Game

December 15 / 16, 2007

Peter Linebaugh
A People's Penny for the Magna Carta

Howard Zinn
Bomb After Bomb

Standard Schaefer
The Greening of Big Tobacco

Raymond J. Lawrence
Let's Take Christ Out of Christmas

Alan Farago
Down on Desolation Row: the Vultures and the Growth Machine

Saul Landau
Lord Byron and the Bad Tourists

Jenna Orkin
Lying to "Reassure" the Public: Bush's EPA and the Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up

Ahmad Samih Khalidi
Why a Palestinian "State" is a Punitive Construct

Robert Fantina
Politics By Photo-Op

Missy Comley Beattie
Resistance Amid the Ruins

Ramzy Baroud
Of Mormons and Muslims

James L. Secor
A Vision for China's Future

Elijah Wald
Ike Turner's Music Won't be Forgotten

Website of the Weekend
The Alliance for the Wild Rockies Needs (and Deserves) Your Support

 

December 14, 2007

JoAnn Wypijewski
The Dirty Cad: What Giuliani's Sex Life Tells Us About Him

John Ross
Iraqi Refugees Return: One Cruel Hoax

Jacob Hornberger
Terror Suspects Belong in Federal Court

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the Supreme Court: What Happened?

Allan Nairn
"Shoot Them on the Spot": Rewarding War Crimes

Dave Zirin
The Mitchell Report: Absolving the Owners

Dave Lindorff
The First Cut is the Deepest

Misty MacDuffee
Toxic Grizzlies

Ben Terrall
What Happened to Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine?

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi
Prerequisites for Peace

Website of the Day
Sen. Kit Bond: "Waterboarding is Like Swimming"

 

December 13, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Shrinking the Dollar from the Inside-Out

Mike Whitney
Dershowitz for the Defense--of Waterboarding

Ron Jacobs
Blank Check DemocratsL the Great War Funding Conspiracy

Norman Solomon
The USA's Human Rights Daze

Peter Morici
The Dragon and the Toothless Dog: China Doesn't Flinch

Sandy Mayes
Blocking the Strykers: 13 Days of War Resistance at Port Olympia

Franklin Lamb
The UN in Lebanon: Whose Mission Is It Fulfilling?

Jacob Hornberger
Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It

Nadim Rouhana
An Interloper in My Own Land

Dave Zirin
On Pigskin and Petrol

Website of the Day
Rachel's Needs (and Deserves) Your Support!


December 12, 2007

Allan Nairn
US Intelligence is Tapping Indonesian Phones

Alan Farago
How Sprawl Eats Its Young

Ray McGovern
Torture, Lies and Videotape

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Phony Pentagon Budget Cuts

Evan Jones
The Raid on Great Western: Why an Australian Bank Might Spell Doom for the US Farm Belt

James Petras
An Open Letter to Sarkozy on the Exchange of Political Prisonsers

Joel Hirschorn
The Horserace Fiction: Clinton, Obama and the Democratic Machine

Joshua Frank
Why Ron Paul Deserves Our Attention

Sherry Wolf
Why the Left Should Reject Ron Paul

Dan Bacher
Survey of a Fish Graveyard

Website of the Day
Men Eating Bugs

 

December 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
What's Really Happened During the Surge?

Diana Johnstone
The Next Kosovo War

Paul Craig Roberts
It's Waco All Over Again: Preventive Detention and the Constitution

David Macaray
Impasse in Hollywood

Ralph Nader
Gail Collins Versus the Underdogs

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo Britons to be Released: a Mixed Result

Martha Rosenberg
No Holiday for High Risk Sex Workers

Steve Champion /
Anthony Ross

Words for Our Brother, Tookie Williams

Kim Nicolini
Tangled Up in Dylan

Michael Dickinson
Say Goodbye to Purgatory: Pope Rat Gets Indulgent

Website of the Day
A Charming (and Worthy) Pitch


December 10, 2007

Uri Avnery
How They Stole the Bomb From Us

Debbie Nathan
The Perils of Journalism and Child Porn

JoAnn Wypijewski
Is There a Left Here Left? If So, What Can It Do?

Steve Kelly
Cheap Chips, Counterfeit Wilderness

Donna J. Volatile
Welcome to the Revolution

 

December 8 / 9, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Coup Against Bush and Cheney

Brenda Norrell
Seize the Land, Chain the Peace Activists

Saul Landau
The Ruins of Empire

R. F. Blader
A Rape in Every Drink?

Ray McGovern
Spinning Iran's Centrifuges

Allan Nairn
Imposed Hunger in Gaza, the Army in Indonesia

Linn Washington, Jr
Spotlight on Death Row

Paul Craig Roberts
When Will Bush Come Clean?

 

December 7, 2007

Sean Penn
Piano Wire Puppeteers

Arthur Versluis
Mining Water in the Desert

M. G. Piety
Racism and the American Psyche: Some Thoughts on Race and Intelligence

Pam Martens
Banksters Gone Wild

Alan Farago
Will the Free Market Kill Suburbia? Sprawl and the Credit Crisis

Allan Nairn
It Takes (Out) a Village

Col. Dan Smith
Bush, Iran and the Politics of Doomsday

Alice Slater
The Iran Opening

Robert Weissman
The Story of Stuff

Website of the Day
Something About Mitt

 

December 5, 2007

Mike Whitney
Why the CFR Hates Putin

Sharon Smith
The Anti-War Enablers: Tom Hayden and the Dead End Democrats

James Petras
Venezuela in the Aftermath

Ron Jacobs
The Iran Charade

Dave Zirin
Kicking a Dead Man: the Sliming of Sean Taylor

John V. Whitbeck
Two States or One? Time to Choose

Peter Zinn
Covered in New Orleans

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Impeach Pelosi Instead

Alan Farago
The Credit Bomb Detonates in Florida

Heather Gray
US Meddling in Australian Politics

Website of the Day
A Donner Summit Night Before Xmas

 

December 4, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Jackboot State Stubs Its Toe in Ann Arbor

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo and the Supreme Court

Paul Craig Roberts
The Lies at the End of the American Dream

Ray McGovern
No-Nuke Iran

Winslow T. Wheeler
Admiral Mullen and the Defense Budget: When White Elephants are Too Small

Allan Nairn
The Regime Still Stands in Burma, Where "the People Just Want Food"

Russell Mokhiber
The USA v. Al Arian

Nikolas Kozloff
As Chávez Falters: Raising the Stakes for the South American Left

John V. Walsh
Peace Movement Paralyzed

Ghada Ageel
Will Peace Cost Me My Home?

Stephen Soldz
The Facts be Damned!: Psychologists' President Defends Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations

Website of the Day
Hands Off the People of Iran

 

 

December 3, 2007

Tariq Ali
Venezuela After the Referendum

Bill Quigley
New Orleans: Bulldozers for the Poor, Tax Credits for Developers

Eric Walberg
The Bible and Middle East History

Uri Avnery
After Annapolis

Marjorie Cohn
Operation Iraqi Freedom Exposed

Dave Lindorff
Vengeance Isn't Sweet

Stephen Fleischman
Homeless in Paradise

Martha Rosenberg
Perp Walks for the Mink Clad on Chicago's Mag Mile

Website of the Day
So Just Lead!

 

December 1 / 2, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Emblems of the Bush Age: Adrift in a Sea of Booze

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Bear Minimum: the Grizzly and the Future of the Rocky Mountain West

Mike Whitney
"Iraq Doesn't Exist Anymore": an Interview with Nir Rosen

Shemon Salam
A Visit From the FBI

Roger Burbach
The Battle in Bolivia

Benjamin Dangl
New Politics in Old Bolivia

Brian M. Downing
The Quiet on the Middle Eastern Front: How Much Credit Goes to the Surge?

Greg Moses
Night of the Living Redneck: a Texas Horror Story

Sonja Karkar
The "Never-Never" Peace Conference

Saul Landau
Ethics and Evil in South Boston

Margaret Kimberley
Black America Left Behind

John Ross
What are the Prospects for a New Mexican Revolution?

Reza Fiyouzat
Exit on the Left: When Che's Children Visited Iran

Judith Scherr
Berkeley Turns Right for the Holidays

Lance Olsen
Of Forests and Finance: Logging for the Wealthy

Christopher Brauchli
Mr. Bush and the Despots

Robert Fantina
Iraq as U.S. Colony

Dan Bacher
Fish Triage on Prospect Island

Michael Donnelly
Remembering How to be Human: John Trudell and the Music of Urgency

Website of the Weekend
Appalachian Voices

 

November 30, 2007

Peter Stone Brown
The Re-Packaging of Bob Dylan

Wajahat Ali
The Volatile Mistress: an Interview with Javed Jabbar, Pakistan's Former Minister of Information

Allan Nairn
Cold-Blooded Celebrity: Thomas L. Friedman and the Bali Bombers

Alan Farago
The Sorrows of Suburbia: Politics, Sprawl and the Housing Crash

John Ross
The Death of Latin America's First Revolution

Corporate Crime Reporter
America's Corporate Crime Capitals

Lucia Alvarez
Diego Gonzalez
Argentina's Political Future

James Rothenberg
The Iraqi Miracle

Website of the Day
Bio-Bling?

 

November 29, 2007

R. F. Blader
The Most Dangerous Kind of Bribe

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Distorting Fascism to Demonize Iran

Stephen Soldz
War on the Couch: Fear, Aggression and Empire

Sheldon Richman
Iraq 3.0

George Wuerthner
Forest Fires, Lies and Chainsaws

Felice Pace
Did All Things Considered Self-Censor on Annapolis?

Col. Dan Smith
The Meaning of Annapolis

Harvey Wasserman
Terror Target Nukes

Nikolas Kozloff
Primetime Hate Debate: Lou Dobbs, Immigration and Campaign '08

Paul Krassner
Huffington Post Bloggers Go On Strike!

Dave Lindorff
News Not Fit to Print: US Coup Planned for Venezuela?

CP News Service
The One State Declaration

Website of the Day
A Native View of Yellowstone Bison Slaughter

November 28, 2007

James Petras
CIA Destabilization Memo Surfaces on Venezuela

Jeff Halper
Annapolis: When the Roadmap is a One Way Street

Pam Martens
Crashing Citigroup

Peter Morici
Economy in Crisis: Avoiding a Recession

Mohammed Khatib
Separate and Unequal in Palestine

Helen Redmond
The Horror and the Hope: Health Care in America

William S. Lind
In the Fox's Lair: Quiet Before a New Iraq Storm?

Ben Tripp
We, the People: a Trope for All Seasons

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan: First, Restore the Constitution and Reinstate the Judges

Jeff Berg
Holbrooke Says Bush Won't Attack Iran

Website of the Day
The Lies of Joe Klein

 

November 27, 2007

Joe DeRaymond
On the Road to the Torture School

Paul Craig Roberts
Meet the Only Two Candidates Worse Than Bush and Cheney: Hillary and Rudy

Marjorie Cohn
Remembering Victor Rabinowitz

Mike Whitney
A Dollar the Size of a Postage Stamp

Ron Jacobs
The Myths of Military Progress

Col. Dan Smith
The Pentagon's "People System" Still Doesn't Work

Ralph Nader
Family Learning

Karim Makdisi
Annapolis and the Unholy Alliance: the View from Beirut

Christopher Ketcham
Memo to Hollywood Writers: Strike Until You Drop

Ronan Bennett
Martin Amis Does a Coulter

Website of the Day
Celebrating the Uncensored Media

 

November 26, 2007

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Heading for Annapolis

Paul Craig Roberts
The End of All That

David Macaray
Enter Mediator

Sameer Dossani
Pakistan's Wounded Dictator

Roger Burbach
The Final Battle in Bolivia

Mark Scaramella
Guns and Greed in the Emerald Empire

Brian McKinlay
Howard's End

Rick Kuhn
The Fall of a Racist Union Buster

Binoy Kampmark
Ruddslide and Dull Alec

Monica Benderman
What Do You Know of War?

Brenda Norrell
Return to Alcatraz

Website of the Day
Ghostworld by DJ Spooky

 

November 24 / 25, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
The Ordeal of Catherine Wilkerson, MD

Robert Fisk
Darkness Falls on the Middle East

Saul Landau
Norman Mailer will Not R.I.P.

Jeffrey St. Clair
Justice Stephen Breyer, Cancer Bonds and the Origins of Neoliberal Environmentalism

Rannie Amiri
Beirut's Black Friday

Christopher Brauchli
Iraq Embassy as Gilded Palace

Daniel Gross
The Gap and Black Friday

Mike Whitney
"A Generalized Meltdown of Financial Institutions"

Marjorie Cohn
Iran and the 2008 Elections

David Rosen
Senior Sex: the Real Sexual Life of Aging Americans

David Michael Green
If Conservatism is the Ideology of Freedom ....

Kenneth Rexroth
When Euripides Played the Hindu Kush: Greeks and Buddhists in Afghanistan

Muhammad Iqbal
Trans. Shahid Alam

Ghazal

Website of the Day
Aerial Footage of Delta Fish Kill


November 23, 2007

Gary Leupp
Killing the Buddha in Pakistan's Swat Valley

Laura Carlsen
Coming to Terms with Diversity in Bolivia: an Interview with Alvaro Garcia, Bolivia's VP

David Macaray
Keeping Labor Unions Out

Andy Worthington
Former Guantánamo Detainee Seeks Asylum in Sweden

Clifton Ross
Trashing Chavez: Keith Olberman's Toxic Rant

Seth Sandronsky
Battling Sodexho

Dan Bacher
Death in the Delta: Thousands of Fish Stranded by Bureau of Reclamation

William A. Cook
The Myth of Middle East Peace

Website of the Day
Waiting for the Guards: Stress Techniques as Torture, a Short Film

 

November 22, 2007

Alan Farago
Who Lost America's Everglades?

Greg Moses
A Thanksgiving Basting

Dave Lindorff
Impeachment is Back on the Table

Mike Ely
Native Blood: the Myth pf Thanksgiving

Omar Azfar
Gore for President of Pakistan?

 

November 21, 2007

Vijay Prashad
Our Dictator, Their Democracy

Martha Rosenberg
Undercover at a Turkey Slaughtering Plant

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Epiphany on the Glacier

John Ross
The Last Days of Mexican Corn

Brian McKenna
Cancer Terrorists Unmasked

Stephen Soldz
Isolation Torture Routine at Guatánamo

Monica Benderman
Needing Peace

Ben Terrall
Slavery in the Fields: The Real Price of Sugar

Website of the Day
Mercy for Animals

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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December 21, 2007

Can Sex Workers and Transvestites Change the World?

Sex and Revolution

By RAÚL ZIBECHI

The alliance between Zapatistas, sex workers, and transvestites shows the power of social change in a key cultural way-when it's anchored to daily life. In Mexico, one of the strongest and most overbearing enclaves of patriarchy and machismo, Subcomandante Marcos has opened the doors to debate about discrimination in a controversial area.

What purpose is there, in classic revolutionary logic, in covering thousands of kilometers to meet with a handful of whores and crossdressers? What can such alliances offer to strengthen the "accumulation of power," any professional politicians' central task? It seems obvious, from a cost-benefit analysis, that this type of effort should be useless. However, Subcomandante Marcos has been committed to this kind of meeting since January of last year under the auspices of The Other Campaign (La Otra Campaña), with the understanding that it means looking for new ways of doing politics. It passes through places that are far from the madding crowd and takes place with actors who, like indigenous people, understand social change as an affirmation of difference.

Brigada Callejera de Apoyo a la Mujer (Women's Supportive Street Brigade) is a Mexican collective that has managed, in the last 15 years, to weave a wide net of social work with prostitutes and transvestites, called the Mexican Sex Work Network. This has meant transcending the "victim" role and becoming people who want to be recognized as workers by their peers, not seen as beings who have "fallen" into the world's oldest profession through ignorance, poverty, or submission. A quick look at what they have tackled so far reveals a deep work of emancipation.

Education, Clinics, and Condoms

A differentiating characteristic of the Network is that its members don't want to depend on the State, although they are constantly criticizing it. Street Brigade began its work 15 years ago, its base a group of sociology graduates from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The small initial nucleus-Elvira Madrid, Jaime Montejo, and Rosa Icela-began to weave a net that now reaches 28 of Mexico's 32 states. Over time they chose to work in a horizontal form, but not for ideological reasons. "The government co-opted many state coordinations, a habitual practice in the political culture of this country, so we saw that the best way to work is horizontally, in an assembly style, and trying not to have representatives," Elvira points out.

The Network encouraged women to form cooperatives to avoid dependence and to make themselves the bosses of their sources of employment. They rented hotels and shared the profits among the members. The first were the transvestites who formed the cooperative Angeles en Busca de Libertad (Angels Searching for Freedom).

"The cooperative hotels exist in various states but some of them failed because the members would end up replicating the same behavioral patterns as the ones they were organizing against," Rosa comments.

But the star project, the one most valued by the workers, are the clinics. Two clinics already exist in Mexico City and are self-managed and free of charge. They were born from the corruption and discrimination of the state organisms that only provided them with services through bribery. Moreover, Elvira indicates, "Getting tested scared them because it could mean loss of income, given that when a girl has AIDS there are state governments that will put her photo up in hotels so that they don't give her a room." On the contrary, in the Network clinics tests are voluntary and confidential, emphasizing education. "The majority of sex workers are illiterate and many are indigenous. For this reason we dedicate most of our efforts to education, to the point that most of the participants in the Network are health promoters and educate their peers, which is much more effective."

The clinics, one of them situated in the center of the city right in the "red light district" offer colposcopies and pap smears and also electrosurgery because, as Rosa says, "in Mexico papiloma viruses (HPV) cause more deaths than HIV." While inefficient public hospitals have two-month waiting lists for being seen and one year waiting lists for surgery, the Network clinics' results are ready in just a week.

The prostitutes and the transvestites seem enthusiastic about "their" clinic, where they often bring their partners, and where some even drag their clients. "The main part of our work is respect. We don't ask why they got infected, rather we concentrate on educating them so it doesn't happen to them again, so they aren't just patients any more, so they begin to be active participants in their health care," Elvira says. The project is rounded off with a food program for people with limited resources or who for some reason can't work, a school assistance program for the kids, and another to help mothers finish school.

The Network's projects are financed by "social condom marketing." Condoms are sold at different prices depending on the ability and responsibility of the buyer, and represent 85% of the Network's income. No one is salaried and the only people who are paid for their work are the doctors. "We don't agree with sex work, but it exists and will continue to exist, and in the meantime we have to do something. We were an abolitionist group but later we saw that it wasn't about saving anybody, but really about working together," Jaime intervenes. For those who are looking for alternatives to sex work, there are productive projects, the most outstanding of which are handicrafts, production and sale of clothing, and condom stores. Although some projects have turned out to be unviable, as families collaborated they managed to keep two-thirds of the attempts open.

Survival in the Jungle

In 2004, the members of the Street Brigade came into contact with the Health Collective for Everyone (Colectivo de Salud para Todos y Todas), university students who coordinate health projects in the autonomous Zapatista communities in Chiapas. For two years they worked with a group of health promoters in the communities, indigenous people chosen by their neighbors to specialize in sanitary assistance. "One of the first challenges was breaking the fear of supposed cultural resistances about the subject of contraception, sexual and reproductive rights, and sexually transmitted diseases," they relate.

During these consultations and workshops they chose the themes that would later resurface in the elaboration of a long and densely-named manual: The Other Campaign of Sexual and Reproductive Health for the Indigenous and Peasant Resistance in Mexico. Over 270 pages, this text, full of detailed illustrations designed for work with indigenous women, covers the usual issues like anatomy and physiology of the reproductive organs, use of contraceptives, pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other illnesses. They also speak of abortion, although the catechists condemn it. "Samuel Ruiz, a man who is very close to the indigenous people, toured the communities when the Zapatistas decriminalized abortion, saying that it's a crime," Jaime remembers.

But there are sections imbibed with diverse currents of alternative health. One of these concentrates on "women's bodily autonomy," which covers education on how to avoid illnesses, choosing how many children to have, and how to enjoy one's sexuality (almost a taboo among indigenous people). Bodily autonomy supposes, according to this manual, the exploration of the senses, connection with language to do with the body, and the different reactions of the body in extreme situations. Collective and self-massages link this to a holistic conception of health and curing.

Can Transvestites Change the World?

Can indigenous people? Half a century ago, one of the founders of so-called "scientific socialism," wrote that the proletariats could change the world because they had nothing to lose "but their chains." Today, the heirs of those proletariats are rebellious at the hour of losing privileges like steady work and retirement, they refuse to pay taxes, and they strike to avoid being charged the tax on their income.

Marcos himself hints at this in his epilogue to the manual, laying bare how the alliance between health and sex is one of the strongest nuclei of social control. "Capitalism converts health into a market good, and health administrators, doctors, nurses, and all the apparatus of hospitalization or health distribution are also turned in to a type of foreman of this business, turning the patient into a de facto client, from whom the object is to get as much money as possible from without necessarily giving more health back in return." It seems to be no coincidence that, along their dependency-breaking road, the Zapatistas have run up against the area of prostitute health and organized transvestites, groups that have been forced to take control of healthcare into their own hands. Seen in this light, some people belong in the "disposable" category, barely even having chains, material or symbolic, to lose.

Translated by Nalina Eggert.

Raúl Zibechi is a member of the Editorial Council of the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, teacher and researcher of social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to social groups. He is a monthly collaborator of the IRC Americas Program .

 


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