Solidarity and Foreign Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean
Alborada, the independent, political journal on Latin American affairs, hosted this day school at the University of Sheffield on 11th May. A number of Sheffield Left comrades were present and were given presentations of material, much of which would have been new to many on the UK left.
We learned about the French neo-imperialist intervention in Haiti to overthrow its only (and twice) democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004, for having the temerity to ask France to pay back the 90 million francs (currently equivalent to $21.7 billion) that French gunships extorted from a newly liberated Haiti in 1825 as compensation for French (ex) slave owners and which has been the main cause of Haiti’s poverty ever since!
Then we heard about the influential, but little known, role of the ‘Information Research Department’, originally a cold-war propaganda unit set up by British Intelligence in 1948, in destabilising progressive governments in Latin America and the Caribbean and supporting right-wing regimes, in return for favours from the USA in areas of British influence and to promote British commercial interests in the region.
Later, we were shown how Colombia has become the most dangerous place on earth to be a trade union, human rights or environmental activist; the complicity of the British state with the right-wing government of Columbia in its phony war on drugs, which is merely a pretext for supressing popular, left-wing movements, and the effectiveness of British trade union solidarity campaigns in saving the lives of Columbian activists.
The last session dealt with the subversion of British mainstream journalists by the Information Research Department (particular reference was made to the Guardian) ensuring that they disseminate disinformation and black propaganda about Latin American and Caribbean countries, specifically Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico.
Earlier in the day-school, our very own Maria Vasquez-Aguilar spoke from the heart of the experiences and activities of Chilean refugees arriving in Britain from 1974 onwards and of the birth and development of the Chile Solidarity Campaign in the British Labour Movement.
The event finished with a showing of ‘Santiago Rising’, a moving documentary that describes the rise of the Chilean, anti-capitalist ‘Social Movement’ as it developed in Chile’s capital city in the face of the most horrific police brutality, from its outbreak in October 2019 until it forced the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera to call a referendum on whether to replace the constitution which had remained unaltered since the Pinochet regime imposed it to enshrine the neo-liberal economy introduced after the 1973 military coup. This referendum unleashed a chain of popular and progressive political events that led to the election of leftist president, Gabriel Boric on 11th March this year. There are lessons we should be learning in Britain from the phenomenally brave and determined, Chilean ‘Social Movement’!
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