The New Dark Age

Thursday, 25 September 2025 — The Tricontinental

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

I first heard the word ‘depression’ when I was about sixteen. My mother took me to the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, India, to be seen by a professional for what I had just considered to be nightmares and difficult afternoons. I was lucky. Today, only 9% of people in the world receive treatment for depression. The doctor spoke to me for a long time, and I spent several days at NIMHANS being treated by this and other doctors. It was clear to me that my problems largely stemmed from a traumatic incident that took place a few years earlier, when I was raped in my school.

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Thursday, 18 September 2025 — The Tricontinental

Reading the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) at the grave of Berta Cáceres, August 2025.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

At the grave of Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (1971–2016) in La Esperanza, Honduras, where she was born and died, I watched a yellow butterfly flutter around a bougainvillea bush. It flew as if unconcerned, going from grave to grave in the quiet cemetery. Beside Berta’s grave is that of her brother, Carlos Alberto López Flores (1958–2004), a communist who studied at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow and was a vital influence on the thinking of his younger sister. The other side of Berta’s grave remains empty. It awaits the body of Carlos and Berta’s mother María Austra Bertha Flores López – known as Mamá Berta – who buried two of her children. The yellow butterfly hovered above Berta’s grave, where there were new flowers from visitors who, like us, came to pay homage to this legendary fighter killed for defending the rights of Honduras’s Lenca people and the global struggle for social justice.

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