The New Dark Age

12 March, 2010 — North American Congress on Latin America

Available Now! Honduras: Whitewashing the Coup March/April 2010:

Since the June 28 military coup in Honduras, the country’s de facto authorities have maintained a by now well-established track record of attempting to conceal their anti-democratic, violent disposition. This edition of the NACLA Report examines this process in both Tegucigalpa and in Washington-including the lengths to which Honduran coup authorities went both to undertake a show election in November, portraying it as legitimate (false claims of massive electoral participation, unaccredited electoral observers) while using coercive practices against dissidents in the run-up to the election (police attacks on protesters, blacklists of resistance members, shuttered anti-coup media). The result? No future Honduran president can count on fulfilling a term in office if the country’s new oligarchs don’t approve. Moreover, the election that brought Lobo to office has ensured the continuity of the golpista agenda in Tegucigalpa.

New on nacla.org
A Crisis at the Central Bank Is a Crisis for Argentina’s Democracy
by Colin Miller
Since the year began, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and the country’s central bank have been in a serious row over the use of the bank’s strategic reserves. The conflict began when Fernández asked the bank for more than $6 billion of reserves to create a Bicentennial Fund meant to pay down the national debt and restore Argentina’s credibility in international financial markets. But political opponents of all ideologies have cried foul. Central bank reserves, they have argued, are not meant for paying down sovereign debt.

U.S. to Haitians: Stay Home and Bear the Burden
by Todd Miller
After January’s earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security immediately implemented a mass migration plan to manage any influx of refugees coming from the country. Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Chris O’Neil said that “The goal is to interdict them at sea and repatriate them.” O’Neil’s declaration reflects the same much-criticized immigration policy that the United States has implemented toward Haiti for dozens of years, a strategy that often corrals the blowback of a long history of U.S. meddling in Haitian internal affairs-both politically and economically. This blowback could be even more explosive now with 1.2 million homeless Haitians living in the squalor of tent cities.