By Shamus Cooke

The propaganda wheels are turning fast.  The barrage of anti-Venezuela misinformation that began while Bush was in office has intensified in recent months.  Not a week goes by without the U.S. mainstream media running at least one story about the "dictatorial" Venezuelan government.  Historically, the U.S. government’s foreign policy "coincidentally" matches the opinion of the media and vice versa.    

A front page New York Times article on August 2, 2009 cited "new evidence" that the Venezuelan government "still" supports the FARC — a peasant-based guerrilla group that has fought the Colombian government for decades. 

This "new evidence" is a mere recycling of the last tactical attempt to link the Venezuelan government with the FARC:  computers were supposedly confiscated from FARC leaders that showed innumerable ties to Venezuelan government officials.  Of course anybody can write anything on a computer and say it came from somewhere else.  Evidence like this needs only a willing accomplice — the media — to legitimize it. 

The Venezuelan government denies the accusations.  But even if Venezuela maintained a policy of openly supporting the FARC, it would be more justifiable than the U.S. policy of openly supporting the Colombian government.   Colombia is the most-hated and repressive government in the western hemisphere, but the U.S. gives billions of dollars of financial, military and political aide.  This despicable relationship has not ended under Obama, but has in fact strengthened.   

The recent announcement that the U.S. military would move potentially thousands of troops to Colombia, where they will access five Colombian military bases, has put Venezuela and the rest of Latin America on alert.  The Obama administration has not explained the move publicly, though Latin Americans need no explanation. 

The continent has a long history of being exploited by U.S. corporations, who work in tandem with the U.S. government to oust "non-cooperative" governments, using countless tactics to meet their objectives including clandestine C.I.A. coups.  Read more »

By Reverien Mfizi

Land and resource scarcity is a major under-examined cause of conflicts in Africa. An environment of mistrust is created when people no longer see each other as neighbors but as competitors for a scarce supply of food, land, and water. These tensions are then exploited by opportunistic politicians who see their power as a way to control a country’s resources and enrich both themselves and the ethnic group they belong to.

Africa has been ravaged by conflicts that have displaced and killed millions of people. Most of these conflicts are seen as tribal disputes that erupted during the post-colonial period, the wake left behind by colonizers exiting their territories after bringing certain tribes to power over others. While colonization has been a major factor, little attention has been given to the fact that the increase of population, coupled with diminishing land and water resources, exacerbated post-colonial tensions. The genocide that ravaged the country of Rwanda in 1994 is a good example.

The Rwandan Genocide—committed by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus—took the lives of more than one million people and is often simplified as a series of tribal killings like any other conflict on the continent. But Rwanda was also facing aggravating factors such as population increase, soil degradation, and chronic food shortages.

Rwanda has one of the highest population densities in Africa (829/sq mile), and more than 90% of the population still practices subsistence farming, with an average farm size per household of just 1.1 acres.

Furthermore, decades of over-cultivation have made the land unproductive and the country has experienced food shortages since the 1980s. While environmental scarcity cannot be solely blamed as the cause of the 1994 Genocide, it provided an environment where unrest and disorder grew and lead to an open conflict. Destitute Hutus who had no land, jobs, or other means of survival were manipulated by corrupt politicians and became the tools of genocidal machinery.

In order to understand the complex relationship of land and conflict, it is very important to examine the effects of human activity and how scarcity of land, water, forests, and fisheries contributes to violence. In his extensive research on environmental scarcity in Rwanda, Thomas Homer-Dixon, currently at the University of Waterloo, explains three ways environmental scarcity could arise:

First, there is “demand-induced scarcity” which is a result of extensive population growth that leads to shortage of resources. Second, there is “supply-induced scarcity” which arises from the degradation of resources and lack of an ability to resupply or renew available resources. Third, there is “structural scarcity” which arises from the inability of a given society to equally distribute resources. These scarcities can affect the social order in different way,s which include food shortages or famine, economic decline, population displacement, and disruption of the social or political order.  A combination of these effects can produce conflict between social groups and therefore lead to violence when these social groups are organized around ethnic or religious divisions.

In Rwanda the increase of the population led to a demand-induced scarcity. The population density increased tremendously during a period ranging from the 1950s -1980s, which led to a reduction of family farm size, making it difficult for subsistence farmers to feed their families. According to the census, the population in 1978 stood at 4.85 million and increased to 7.17 million by 1991, an increase of nearly 40% in 13 years. Read more »

CUBA: AN EMBARGO'S TIME IS PAST
HUNDREDS OF AMERICANS DEFY TRAVEL BAN OBAMA RELAXES CUBA BLOCKADE
VENCEREMOS BRIGADE WANTS IT BROKEN COMPLETELY
 
When the Obama administration eliminated travel restrictions on Cuban-American travel to Cuba, they forgot to do the same thing for the rest of the country. On Monday,Aug. 3rd, the Venceremos Brigade will remind President Obama of that omission when over 250 Americans return from an educational and work trip to Cuba in direct defiance of the federal travel ban.
 
The Brigade’s trip comes at a politically opportune time, as the Obama administration is finally taking tentative steps towards dialogue with Cuba. In addition, both houses of Congress are reviewing bills that would rescind the half-century old travel ban on Cuba. Meanwhile, the Organization of American States recently vowed to reverse a 47-year-old exclusion of Cuba from the group.
 
Over 150 Americans are defying the travel ban this year as part of the Venceremos Brigade’s 40th tour of Cuba. They hail from Massachusetts to Maryland, California to Florida, Cincinnati to Chicago, and Oklahoma City to Oakland. All are exercising their constitutional right to travel knowing they are violating the law, while urging, even demanding that the federal government finally do what most of the rest of the world has done: normalize political and economic relations with Cuba.
 
The Venceremos Brigade started organized visits to Cuba in defiance of the travel ban in 1969. Those tours began just eight years after the U.S. government made Cuba the only country in the world that Americans could not legally visit. Not only does this starve Cuba of contact with the United States, it prevents Americans from learning about what Cuba is really like on a citizen-to-citizen level. Read more »