By Kevin Clarke & Paul Jeffrey Catholic News Service (CNS) August 4, 2009 A Catholic bishop in western Honduras said members of the country’s wealthy elite were behind the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya. Bishop Luis Santos Villeda of Santa Rosa de Copan also said the country needs a dialogue between the elite and Honduras’ poor and working-class citizens. “Some say Manuel Zelaya threatened democracy by proposing a constitutional assembly. But the poor of Honduras know that Zelaya raised the minimum salary. That’s what they understand. They know he defended the poor by sharing money with mayors and small towns. That’s why they are out in the streets closing highways and protesting (to...
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By Kim Ives June 4, 2009 Haiti Liberté Here’s one anecdote that captures the man. While he was jailed for political reasons in late 2005, the priest took part of his prison rations and any extra food friends and family had brought him and distributed it to hungry residents of the neighborhood outside his prison cell window. Father Gérard Jean-Juste, one of Haiti’s most prominent liberation theology priests, died at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, FL on the afternoon of May 27 due to complications stemming from leukemia and a stroke he suffered in early March. He was 63. Within hours, the news raced through Haiti and its diaspora, particularly in Miami, where...
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By Howard Zinn May 16, 2009, The Progressive We are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too – he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician. If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you – the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it… Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away...
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Photo by Jim Harney By Gary Leech Colombia Journal Tercer Milenio Park is located only a few blocks from Colombia’s presidential palace in the center of Bogotá and offers respite from the chaotic city to local residents. But for the past four months, it has also been a refuge from the country’s rural violence for more than one thousand displaced persons. In March, displaced people from every corner of Colombia occupied Bogotá’s Plaza Bolívar to protest the government’s failure to combat forced displacement and to address the needs of internal refugees. Police relocated the protesters to nearby Tercer Milenio Park, where they have lived ever since in makeshift homes constructed of wood and plastic...
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By John Lindsay-Poland Fellowship of Reconciliation The United States is negotiating for the use of five military facilities in Colombia, in an agreement whose objectives include “filling the gaps left by the eventual cutting of aid in Plan Colombia,” according to sources in Washington and Bogotá cited by an explosive article published July 1 in the weekly Cambio magazine. If such an agreement is reached, it could constitute an end run around the struggles waged for years by human rights, religious, peace, indigenous, Afro-Colombian, women’s, and youth groups to demilitarize U.S. policy in Colombia.
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By Claudia Rodriguez SHARE Foundation As Mauricio Funes and his wife, Vanda Pignato, arrived at the inaugural ceremony, they were received by a cheering crowd chanting, “Yes, we did!” Monday’s inauguration marks a turning point in the country’s history, since it is the first time El Salvador elected a leftist president. “The Salvadoran people asked for a change and the change begins now,” stated Funes at the beginning of his 50-minute inaugural speech. Referring to past ARENA administrations, Funes expressed that his government will not “govern for a few, tolerate corruption and organized crime, or agree to support backwardness in all its expressions.” His government will be of national unity, he added, which...
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