Features

ANARCHISM IN EGYPT

An Interview from Tahrir Square
Tahrir
by Joshua Stephens, Waging Nonviolence

I met Mohammed Hassan Aazab earlier this year over tea at a table of young anarchists in downtown Cairo. The anniversary of the revolution had just passed with massive protests and the emergence of a Western-style black bloc that appeared to have little to do with anarchists in the city. At the time, much of the ongoing grassroots organizing was against sexual violence—in particular, the mob sexual assaults that have become synonymous with any large gathering in Tahrir. The trauma of such violence carried out against protesters was apparent in our conversation. In fact, Aazab told me that he was done with protests and politics, and had resigned himself to the dysfunction of day-to-day life in Egypt. 

Then came June 30. Crowds reportedly as large as 33 million took to the streets to call for the Muslim Brotherhood to step down from power, just a year after Mohammed Morsi took office. In the pre-dawn moments of July 1, as Aazab's phone battery dwindled steadily, I reconnected with him to chat a bit about his return to resistance.

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BRAZIL: PRIVATE TRANSIT, PUBLIC PROTESTS

Change Brazilby Euan Gibb, Socialist Project

São Paulo has some of the worst traffic in the world. Workers' daily commutes can be over two hours—one way—without ever leaving the city. Rain or traffic accidents can easily increase a commute to over four hours. Streets become so congested during peak hours of traffic that the local news stations report on the length of kilometers of stopped cars and trucks on the highways entering the city. There are permanent signs mounted beside these highways with lights that can be turned on and off indicating that "traffic is stopped in front." São Paulo has the highest per capita density of private helicopters in the world. Those with serious money in this extremely rich and unequal city choose the option to literally fly over the traffic jams.

People traffic can be equally awful. Despite an extensive underground metro and many bus lines (with 60 kilometers of dedicated lanes, diesel, bio diesel, and electrified buses, double and even triple length articulated buses) in São Paulo, buses and subways fill to the point of internal pressure. Line-ups to get on the subway can be as long as two hours while buses that are filled beyond capacity roar past line-ups of passengers standing at the bus stop.

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IS MEXICO FAILING TO PROTECT JOURNALISTS?

Anabel Hernández Thinks So, and Fears for Her Life

by Jason McGahan, Vice

Anabel Hernández is one of the most decorated journalists in Mexico, and currently reports for the weekly news magazine Proceso and the online magazine Reporte Indigo. She's been on the radar of the most powerful corrupt law enforcement officials in the country since at least 2008, when she published her first expose on Genaro García Luna, the head of Mexico's equivalent of the FBI and then-president Felipe Calderón's right-hand man in the drug war. She revealed he owned lavish homes and vast amounts of property that far exceeded what could be bought with the salary of a humble public servant. She followed that up, in 2010, with Los Senores del Narco, a 588-page history of the Mexican drug mafia that exposed, in exhaustive detail, the crimes of García Luna and his inner circle of corrupt officials. (That book is being translated into English by Verso Press and will be available in September under the title Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers.) Sources in the federal police warned her soon afterward that Mexico's top cop was plotting to have her murdered and make it look like an accident. 

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IN GUATEMALA, A LONG ROAD TO JUSTICE

Ixilby Marta Molina, Waging Nonviolence

On May 20, Guatemala's Constitutional Court overturned the historic guilty verdict of the nation's former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who had been convicted of committing genocide and crimes against humanity during his short reign from 1982 to 1983. The Constitutional Court's decision annulled Montt's 80-year prison sentence and ordered that the final weeks of the case be retried. At 86 years old, Ríos Montt was the first former head of state in Latin America to be sentenced for genocide by his own country.

In response, human rights organizations across Latin America organized actions protesting the sentence annulment, supporting the victims of genocide and condemning legal impunity. In Guatemala, an estimated 5,000 people marched through the capital on May 24. Simultaneous actions occurred in front of the Guatemalan embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Mexico City, Mexico; Managua, Nicaragua; Lima, Peru; Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula in Honduras. Additional protests occurred in El Salvador and Costa Rica.

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PERU BACKSLIDES ON INDIGENOUS RIGHTS

Tintayaby Emily Greenspan, Oxfam America

Recent statements from the Peruvian government do not bode well for implementation of Peru's new Indigenous Peoples Consultation Law (Consultation Law). The landmark law, passed in 2011 and now being implemented, requires the Peruvian government to consult indigenous peoples affected directly by development policies and projects such as oil drilling, mining, roads and forestry. Consultations must aim to achieve agreement or consent. If implemented effectively, the law could help reduce the number of violent conflicts that frequently emerge in the country’s oil and mining industries.

However, last month Peru's Vice Minister of Culture Ivan Lanegra—responsible for overseeing implementation of Peru's Consultation Law—resigned in protest following Executive branch declarations that highland (or campesina) communities do not qualify as indigenous peoples. At the same time, the Peruvian government announced that it will proceed with 14 mining projects located in the Peruvian highlands without prior consultation with neighboring communities.

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TURKISH HOPES FOR A NEW BEGINNING

Gezi Parkby John McSweeney, openDemocracy

Over the past few days Turkey has been gripped by large-scale social unrest not seen since the disastrous economic crisis of 2000-2001. The protests started on the 28 May in Istanbul when a collection of environmentalists and local activists occupied Gezi Park against the uprooting of one of the few major green parks in the sprawling urban metropolis that is Istanbul—a city of over 13 million people—to make way for a shopping mall. 

However, what started out as a protest by a small number of people turned into a nation-wide crisis after images began to circulate on social media sites of the repressive approach the police were taking to the protests. The pictures of fully armoured riot police spraying tear gas and pepper spray onto unarmed and peaceful protestors, many of them women, provoked widespread indignation and disgust that resulted in a cacophony of "that's enough" across Twitter and elsewhere.

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WHITHER IRAN'S DEMOCRATIC OPPOSITION?

Tehran protestby Frieda Afary, Iranian Progressives in Translation

As we approach the June 2013 Iranian presidential election, the real front-runners of the 2009 election, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and  Mehdi Karroubi, as well as  Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard—all of whom came to be known as the leaders of the reformist Green movement—continue to languish under house arrest.  Many young opposition activists,  feminists,  and ethnic activists who participated in protests against election fraud in 2009, or any activities deemed "seditious" by the regime, are also in prison.

Although the recent disqualification of two candidates, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, from the election, is very significant and further reveals the intense power struggles within the regime, more significant are the defining issues which continue to fuel the grassroots discontent inside Iran. These issues are the following:

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VIOLENCE AND IMPUNITY IN XALAPA

One Year after the Murder of Journalist Regina Martínez
Regina Martínez

by Andalusia Knoll, Upside Down World

On April 28, 2012 journalist Regina Martínez was found strangled in the bathroom of her home in Xalapa, the capital of the southern Mexican state of Veracruz. Martínez was a renowned journalist with the Mexican weekly magazine Proceso, which for the past 36 years has been publishing articles about narco-trafficking, the war on drugs, and government corruption, among other topics. While Martínez reported frequently on all of these aforementioned topics, the Veracruzan government negated the fact that she was killed for her publications, instead attributing her murder to a common robbery.

Her assassination and the impunity surrounding it has become an emblematic case in the crisis suffered by journalists in Mexico. Over the last decade, Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, with increasing assassinations, forced disappearances, and physical threats against members of the media. According to press freedom group Article 19, threats against journalists in Mexico rose 20 percent from 2011 to 2012. Meanwhile, in the four months since president Enrique Peña-Nieto has taken power, the number of threats has risen another 20 percent. The Committee for Protection of Journalists has classified Mexico as the eighth worst country in the world for journalists in its annual Impunity Index.

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