Judi Lynn
Judi Lynn's JournalGrammy Award winning song: Calle 13 - Latinoamrica
Wikipedia:
Latinoamérica (song)
"Latinoamérica" is a song by Puerto Rican alternative hip hop band Calle 13, released September 27, 2011, as the fifth single from their fourth studio album, Entren Los Que Quieran (2010). It was written and produced by Rafael Arcaute and Calle 13, and features additional vocals from other Latinoamerican recording artists; Peruvian Susana Baca, Colombian Totó la Momposina and Brazilian Maria Rita. The song won Record of the Year and Song of the Year in the Latin Grammy Awards of 2011. The song is important in that it touches on many underlying historical, social, and political themes present throughout Latin America.[1]
Background
Calle 13 is well known for their creation of music with strong themes and agendas, particularly music focused on social consciousness. The band has also released a documentary, Sin Mapa. Sin Mapa follows the evolution of Calle 13 as its two main members, stepbrothers Residente (René Pérez Joglar) and Visitante (Eduardo José Cabra Martínez), travel across Latin America. Sin Mapa presents many of the same issues highlighted in "Latinoamérica". "Latinoamérica"'s reflection on historical, social, and political themes acts as a criticism of Western force and influence within Latin America, while at the same time asserting the collective strength of the Latin American oppressed. In addressing the shared history of Latin America, the band exposes the faults that are still a factor in present-day Latin America.
Music video
The music video for Latinoamérica was filmed in March, over the course of twenty-one days, in Perú. It was directed by Jorge Carmona and Milovan Radovic. In addition to the new footage shot throughout Latin America, the music video incorporates previously unused footage shot by the brothers from their pivotal trip captured in Sin Mapa. The video opens to a striking landscape of Peruvian mountains, as the silhouettes of Residente and Visitante are seen crossing the frame.
The stepbrothers make their way up dirt roads, to a radio station in the Peruvian mountains, where they are presented to a Quechua-speaking DJ.
As the video continues, additional symbolism becomes apparent. The start of the song’s instrumental music contains percussion reminiscent of the sound of heartbeats. The audio image of heartbeats is then synchronized to a large visual image of a beating heart.
In the remainder of "Latinoamérica"'s music video there is a wide variety of interesting symbols that play off the song’s lyrics. Nevertheless, for the most part these symbols ultimately tie back to the themes of unity and knowledge.
Musical composition
The song primarily incorporates the Argentine chacarera, which is a style with 6/8 meter and syncopated drum patterns.
Critical reception
Calle 13 was nominated for 10 Latin Grammys in 2011, two of which – Song of the Year and Record of the Year – were for "Latinoamérica".[1] The group won both awards for "Latinoamérica" as well as seven others, which makes them the current record-holders for the group with the most Latin Grammy wins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinoam%C3%A9rica_(song)
This act has won the post Latin Grammys in history.
Lyrics
I
am I am what they left
I am completely left over from what was stolen
A town hidden on the top
My skin is made of leather so it can withstand any weather
I am a smoke factory
Peasant labor for your consumption
Cold front in the middle of summer
Love in the time of cholera, my brother
The sun that rises and the day that dies
With the best sunsets
I am the development in living flesh
A political speech without saliva
The most beautiful faces I have ever known
I am the photograph of a missing person
The blood inside of your veins
I am a piece of land that is worth it
I am a basket with beans
I am maradona against England scoring two goals
I am what sustains my flag
The spine of the planet is my mountain range
I am what my father taught me He
who does not love his country does not want his mother
I am Latin America
A town without legs but that walks , hears
You can't buy in the wind
You can't buy in the sun
You can't buy the rain
You can't buy the heat
You can't buy the clouds
You can't buy the colors
You can't buy my joy
You can't buy my pains
You can't buy in the wind
You can't buy in the sun
You can't buy the rain
You can't buy the heat
You can't buy the clouds
You can't buy the colors
You can't buy my joy
You can't buy my pains
I have the lakes, I have the rivers
I have my teeth for me when I smile
The snow that makes up my mountains
I have the sun that dries me and the rain that bathes me
A drunken desert with beautiful drinks of a pulque
To sing with the coyotes, everything what I need
I have my lungs breathing light blue
The height that suffocates
I am the teeth of my mouth chewing coca
Autumn with its leafless leaves
The verses written under the starry night
A vineyard full of grapes
A cane field under the sun in Cuba
I am the Caribbean Sea Who watches the houses
Making rituals of holy water
The wind that combs my hair
I am all the saints that hang from my neck
The juice of my fight is not artificial
Because the fertilizer of my land is natural
You can't buy in the wind
You can't buy in the sun
You can't buy the rain
You can't buy the heat
You can't buy the clouds
You can't buy the colors
You can't buy my joy
You can't buy my pains
It is not possible to buy or sell it It is
not possible to buy or sun It is
not possible to buy to chuva It is
not possible to buy or heat It is
not possible to buy as nuvens It is
not possible to buy as cores It is
not possible to buy minha'legria It is
not possible to buy minhas dores
You can't buy the sun
You can't buy the rain
Let's go walking
Let's draw the road
You can't buy my life
My land doesn't sell
Gross work but with pride
Here it is shared, mine is yours
This town does not drown with marullos
And if it collapses I do not rebuild it I do
not blink when I look at you
So you remember my last name
The operation condor invading my nest I
forgive but never forget, hey
Here you breathe fight
(We are walking)
I sing because you hear (we are walking)
Here we stand
May America live
you can not buy my life
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Rafael Ignacio Arcaute / Eduardo Cabra / Rene Perez
Latin America lyrics © Sadaic Latin Copyrights, Inc
Trump Has Suspended Nearly 50 Laws to Build the Wall
BY
William deBuys, TomDispatch
PUBLISHED
January 16, 2020
A new Wild West has taken root not far from Tombstone, Arizona, known to many for its faux-historical reenactments of the old West. We’re talking about a long, skinny territory — a geographic gerrymander — that stretches east across New Mexico and down the Texan Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico. It also runs west across hundreds of miles of desert to California and the Pacific Ocean. Like the old Wild West, this one is lawless, save for the law of the gun. But that old West was lawless for want of government. This one is lawless because of it.
The Department of Homeland Security, under authority conferred by Congress, has declared nearly 50 federal laws inoperable along sections of the U.S. boundary with Mexico, the better to build the border wall that Donald Trump has promised his “base.” Innumerable state laws and local ordinances have also been swept aside. Predictably, the Endangered Species Act is among the fallen. So are the National Historic Preservation Act, the Wilderness Act, laws restricting air and water pollution, and measures protecting wildlife, landscapes, Native American sacred sites, and even caves and fossils.
The new Wild West of the border wall is an authoritarian dreamscape where the boss man faces no limits and no obligations. It’s as though Marshall Wyatt Earp, reborn as an orange-haired easterner with no knowledge of the actual West, were back in charge, deciding who’s in and who’s out, what goes and what stays.
Prominent on the list of suspended laws is the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which, until recently, was the nation’s look-before-you-leap conscience. The environmental analyses and impact statements NEPA requires might not force the government to evaluate whether a palisade of 30-foot-high metal posts — bollards in border wall terminology — were really a better way to control drug smuggling than upgrading inspection facilities at ports of entry, where, by all accounts, the vast majority of illegal substances enter the country. They would, however, require those wall builders to figure out in advance a slew of other gnarly questions like: How will wildlife be affected by a barrier that nothing larger than a kangaroo rat can get through? And how much will pumping scarce local water to make concrete draw down shallow desert aquifers?
More:
https://truthout.org/articles/trump-has-suspended-nearly-50-laws-to-build-the-wall/
The Lithium Triangle: Where Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia Meet
15.JAN.2020 . 6 MIN READ
Samar Ahmad
The lightest of metals may be causing the largest of impacts. Lithium, which powers our phones, laptops, and electric cars, is essential to our battery-driven world. The demand for lithium has rapidly increased, as the global market’s annual consumption has risen by 8.9 percent annually. This demand will only intensify as hybrid and electric vehicles, energy storage systems, and portable electronics become increasingly widespread. While lithium has been found on each of the six inhabited continents, Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia—together referred to as the “Lithium Triangle”—hold more than 75 percent of the world’s supply beneath their salt flats.
The Lithium Triangle is one of the driest places on earth, which complicates the process of lithium extraction: miners have to drill holes in the salt flats to pump salty, mineral-rich brine to the surface. They then let the water evaporate for months at a time, forming a mixture of potassium, manganese, borax, and lithium salts that is then filtered and left to evaporate once more. After between 12 and 18 months, the filtering process is complete and lithium carbonate can be extracted.
While lithium extraction is relatively cheap and effective, it begs the question of sustainability and long-term impact. That is to say, will lithium mining benefit the globe and its inhabitants, or will it entrench societal and environmental harm? Perhaps the Lithium Triangle will provide some answers.
Economic and Social Factors at Play
Bolivia is home to Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat that spans 4,000 square miles. Beneath this natural wonder are massive lithium deposits, composing about 50 percent of the earth’s total. In 2008, the vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, proclaimed that this natural resource would relieve the 40 percent of citizens who are living in extreme poverty by “training them in scientific and technological fields so that they become part of the intelligentsia in the global economy.” This sentiment was echoed through government policy and action, with the impassioned declaration of “¡100 percent Estatal!”, or full control by the Bolivian state of the lithium extraction, that would occur in Salar de Uyuni.
More:
https://hir.harvard.edu/lithium-triangle/
Wiretapping Colombia's Supreme Court: the suspects and witnesses
by Adriaan Alsema January 13, 2020
Top members of Colombia’s military, the government of President Ivan Duque and his far-right party are implicated in Colombia’s biggest wiretapping scandal in more than a decade.
The last time the government was involved in a scandal of this magnitude, the country’s top intelligence chief and multiple presidential aides disappeared behind bars. The same could happen to the following suspects.
Former National Army chief Nicasio Martinez
The prime suspect who should expect to be called to trial by the Supreme Court is retired General Nicasio Martinez, Colombia’s former National Army chief.
Having spent 38 years in the army, his future now looks bleak as multiple army spies have accused him of ordering to set up the clandestine wiretapping operations and send information on magistrate Cristina Lombana to a “well-known politician” of President Ivan Duque’s far-right Democratic Center (CD) party.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/wiretapping-colombias-supreme-court-the-suspects-and-witnesses/
To Build a Left-Wing Unionism, We Must Reckon With the AFL-CIO's Imperialist Past
FRIDAY, JAN 10, 2020, 3:05 PM
BY JEFF SCHUHRKE
Two days after Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales was forced from office in a right-wing military coup last November, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka condemned the coup on Twitter and praised Morales for reducing poverty and championing indigenous rights. In doing so, Trumka joined Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent figures of the Left in countering the US political and media establishments’ dominant narrative that Morales’s violent ouster was a win for democracy.
While it’s fitting for the president of the nation’s largest union federation to denounce a right-wing coup against a leftist foreign leader — which was endorsed by the State Department and CIA — it also represents an important break from precedent for the AFL-CIO. Though rarely discussed, the federation has a long record of supporting the US government in disrupting leftist movements around the world, including through coups d’état in Latin America.
Throughout the Cold War, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council and International Affairs Department were run by zealous anticommunists determined to undercut the rise of left-wing trade unions overseas. Like their counterparts in the US government, George Meany, AFL-CIO president from 1955–1979, and Lane Kirkland, his successor who served until 1995, understood that if allowed to thrive, class-conscious labor movements would pose a serious threat to global capital.
Meany, Kirkland, and other AFL-CIO officials subscribed to a philosophy of “business unionism,” meaning they had no desire to topple capitalism but instead promoted the idea that class collaboration and limited workplace bargaining over “bread and butter” issues would bring workers all the prosperity they needed. They championed economic nationalism over transnational labor solidarity, reasoning that US workers would see higher wages and lower unemployment as long as US corporations had easy access to foreign markets to sell products made in the United States — a version of the kind of nationalist ideology that has fueled racism and xenophobia among segments of the US working class and aided Trump’s rise to power.
From aiding US-backed military coups in Brazil and Chile to cheerleading ruthless counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and El Salvador, the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy during the Cold War was fundamentally geared toward the interests of US empire. By the 1970s — just as capital launched a renewed, decades-long attack on workers’ rights around the globe — the US labor federation had lost whatever credibility it might have had as a vehicle for international working-class liberation, derided by anti-imperialists at home and abroad as the “AFL-CIA.”
More:
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22245/left-wing-union-afl-cio-imperialism
Duque's inaction to dismantle Colombia's paramilitaries
by Adriaan Alsema January 10, 2020
Despite the terror sown by paramilitaries, Colombia’s President Ivan Duque has ignored recommendations to dismantle these groups, newspaper El Espectador reported Thursday.
According to the daily, Duque was given a report with policy recommendations at a meeting of the so-called National Commission on Security Guarantees in August last year.
This commission came to life after a 2016 peace deal with demobilized FARC guerrillas and is supposed to meet monthly to define policies that would cut the long-standing ties between death squads, the state and the private sector.
Duque, however, did nothing until after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres reported to the Security Council on December 27 that the government was not complying with the peace deal.
More:
https://colombiareports.com/duques-inaction-to-dismantle-colombia-paramilitaries/
USAID Arriving in Bolivia to 'Monitor Elections,' Raising Fears of US Meddling in May 3 Vote
Published on
Friday, January 10, 2020
by Common Dreams
"The Trump administration has clearly picked sides."
by Eoin Higgins, staff writer
Seven years after former President Evo Morales expelled the organization from his country, claiming it was undermining his government, USAID is returning to Bolivia at the invitation of Jeanine Añez's coup government to monitor elections in the Latin American nation set for May 3.
Officials from USAID and the U.S.-dominated Organization for American States (OAS) arrived in Bolivia Thursday to "give technical aid to the election process in Bolivia."
Students of history should approach these developments with a critical eye, said Latin American historian Thomas Field.
"With USAID and OAS assisting in the May 2020 election, we can be sure its goal will be similar to Bolivia's 1966 election (following 64 coup), which CIA steered to ensure country returned to constitutionality in way that meshed U.S. interests," Field tweeted.
The Morales government expelled USAID from Bolivia on May 1, 2013 due to the U.S. agency's repeated actions conspiring "against the people and especially against the country" of Bolivia.
The right-wing Añez government, which unilaterally declared its own legitimacy in November after toppling the democratically-elected Morales, has focused on privatizating Bolivian resources like the country's vast lithium deposits, the rolling back of Morales-era reforms, and closer ties to the U.S.
. . .
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/01/10/usaid-arriving-bolivia-monitor-elections-raising-fears-us-meddling-may-3-vote
Peru to plant one million trees around Machu Picchu
Issued on: 09/01/2020 - 23:14
Modified: 09/01/2020 - 23:12
Lima (AFP)
Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra launched a campaign on Thursday to reforest the Machu Picchu archeological site in order to protect it from mud slides and forest fires.
Vizcarra has pledged to plant one million trees in the 35,000-hectare protected archeological complex that features the stunning Inca citadel.
"We're here to begin the planting of a million trees in the protected zone around the Machu Picchu sanctuary," said Vizcarra.
The Machu Picchu estate -- which includes three distinct areas for agriculture, accommodation and religious ceremonies -- is the most iconic site from the Inca empire that ruled a large swathe of western South America for 100 years before the Spanish conquest in the 16th century.
More:
https://www.france24.com/en/20200109-peru-to-plant-one-million-trees-around-machu-picchu
The long read:How the US helped create El Salvador's bloody gang war
The long read
How the US helped create El Salvador’s bloody gang war
The story of El Salvador’s gang problem is a study in shortsighted thinking – and Donald Trump’s policies threaten to make a bad situation even worse. By William Wheeler
Fri 10 Jan 2020 01.00 EST
Israel Ticas is racing down the highway, drumming his hands on the wheel of “The Beast”, a tall, boxy police truck that he aims at the small, bustling town of San Luis Talpa, about 25 miles south of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador.
A decades-long veteran of the security forces, Ticas’s first job was as an artist in the counter-terrorism unit, sketching suspected guerillas during the country’s 1979–1992 civil war. The experience left him equally as distrustful of the rightwing generals he had served as of the guerrilla commanders who would join them among the political elite at war’s end. In most ways, the country has never quite recovered since. In 2015, homicides in El Salvador rivalled the most violent peak of the civil war, and it ranks consistently among the world’s most violent nations. Before long, Ticas spots a body by the roadside. “It’s fresh,” he observes. “With clothes on.” It hasn’t been stripped or dismembered. The victim, he says, was likely shot at that spot during the night.
Ticas calls himself a “lawyer for the dead”. A self-taught forensic criminologist, he locates and digs up the bodies of victims of gang killings, and in so doing, he documents the crimes of the country’s notorious maras, or gangs. On this hot March morning in 2018, his finger is wrapped thick with gauze – a few days earlier, he pricked it on a thorn covered in fluids from decomposing bodies. His belt is adorned with a skull-and-crossbones pattern. As always, he carries a pistol in a handbag at his side.
But we aren’t here for the body by the roadside. Instead, we stop outside a two-storey concrete building where men in blue-and-white camouflage uniforms armed with assault rifles are milling about. Our security detail piles into a Toyota Hilux, and we follow them zig-zagging out of town and into the surrounding sugar cane fields, the convoy kicking up a bright cloud of swirling dust. Our destination is a site used by members of the local MS-13 gang to rape, torture and execute people. The victims include civilians, rivals from the Barrio 18 gang, and their own members who break internal codes of discipline. After a few minutes, the convoy stops at a parched basin beside the fields, a spot where a river runs during the wetter months.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/jan/10/how-the-us-helped-create-el-salvadors-bloody-gang-war
Also posted in Editorials and other articles:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016245600
Easter Island's Monoliths Made the Crops Grow
By quarrying rock for the statues, the people of Rapa Nui fertilized the soil.
BY REINA GATTUSO
JANUARY 8, 2020
A row of stone monoliths, or moai, on Ahu Tongariki in Rapa Nui. BJØRN CHRISTIAN TØRRISSEN/CC BY-SA 3.0
WHEN EUROPEANS FIRST REACHED RAPA Nui, or Easter Island, on Easter Day, 1722, they were awed to find around 1,000 imposing stone moai, or monoliths, carved in the shape of human beings. The statues overlooked a barren landscape. While archaeological evidence shows that Rapa Nui was once lushly forested, by the time Europeans reached the island, it had been clear-cut, devastated by human overuse, ecological change, or a bloody civil war. The population, which had once likely numbered in the tens of thousands, had been reduced to 3,000 at most.
For the Dutch sailors, many of whom had travelled Polynesia extensively, the sculptures were astounding. Human sculptures are rare in Polynesian art, which more commonly depicts mythic and animal forms. In addition, Easter Island was incredibly remote—more than 1,200 miles away from other populated islands, and 2,100 miles away from Chile, to which it now belongs—and appeared barren. According to Joanne Van Tilburg, a UCLA archaeologist who has researched Easter Island for decades, the sailors regarded the sculptures as a mystery. “How and why did people produce these wonderful sculptures when it was crystal clear that the environment of the island had been completely altered?” she says.
The Dutch, of course, weren’t the first sailors to land at Rapa Nui. That honor goes to the Polynesian seafarers who settled the island by around 1200. While the island likely had significant vegetation, including forests, when they arrived, a 63-square-mile chunk of rock in the middle of vast ocean is an unlikely incubator of a complex society. But the Rapa Nui people initially thrived, producing Polynesia’s only writing system and the famous monoliths.
When Europeans visited Rapa Nui in the 1700s, however, the island’s population was already in decline, and its history getting hazy. The ship’s officers recorded their observations, but the most extensive documentation of the Islanders’ views of their own culture didn’t emerge until 1914, when an English anthropologist, Katherine Routledge, teamed up with a Rapa Nui man, Juana Rapano, to collect oral histories. By that time, after almost 200 years of Peruvian slave raids, missionary activity, and European disease, many memories of precolonial society—including knowledge of the island’s writing system, which died with the elites who mastered it— had been lost.
More:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-do-easter-island-statues-mean
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