Category: The Americas

  • Violence has displaced the Triqui people from their homes in San Juan Copala to the sidewalks outside the governor’s palace in Oaxaca and across the border in the United States.

  • We celebrate Independence Day this weekend, and Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, honors the often overlooked women of the American Revolution.

  • Journalist Garry Leech explains why exporting Plan Colombia to Afghanistan is a risky proposition.

  • Quotes for the holiday from “Language Is a Place of Struggle”: Great Quotes by People of Color, edited by Tram Nguyen.

  • In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign. Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, analyzes the presidential candidates’ positions on Colombia and free trade.

  • The news that the Colombian military had successfully rescued 15 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) spread quickly around the world. The story was deemed newsworthy by most mainstream media outlets because the leftist guerrilla group’s four most high-profile hostages—former presidential candidate and Colombian-French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, and three U.S. military…

  • When I came to the US from England in the 1960s, I suffered a good deal from culture shock. In the first place, in contrast with my British undergraduate classmates who rarely mentioned their parents, my Freud-indoctrinated American graduate school classmates, despite being older and, one might have assumed, already well out of the nest,…

  • In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when…