From a Quixote Center announcement:

At dawn on Friday, June 5th, 600 Peruvian police in helicopters and on foot opened fire on thousands of peaceful indigenous protesters blocking a road near Bagua in the Peruvian Amazon. Conservative estimates indicate that 60 indigenous and police have been killed.   Police are accused of burning indigenous bodies, throwing them in the river and removing wounded from the hospital to hide the real number of casualties.

For two months, over 30,000 indigenous have sustained nonviolent protests along the roads and waterways of the Amazon.  These protests are in response to a series of Presidential decrees issued under the U.S.-Peru FTA implementation law that violate indigenous rights and open the way for an unprecedented expansion of new transnational petroleum, mining, logging and mono-cropping in the Amazon rainforest.

Rainforest Action Network asks for letters to the Peruvian president, Alan Garcia.

Below are some photographs of the attack from Amazon Watch (CAUTION: graphic images). Very high quality versions of these photos can be obtained from a link in AmazonWatch's report and press release on the attack.

Police use of unnecessary force reframes public discussion away from critical analysis of the way things are run now, Legba Carrefour reports (republished on Douglas Rushkoff's blog). As part of this there has been an apparent targeting of media and support groups. Carrefour writes that police set up:

This is a reporter's notebook in the real sense-- raw notes, to be turned into an article next time I have Internet.

 

Officials and NGO representatives from the Guatemalan state of Petén flew to the capital "for an impromptu meeting with President Álvaro Colóm, who is unveilling a proposal that he says will promote forest conservation on a grand scale," Michael Stoll reports from Guatemala.

[This piece is cross-posted from PBS.org Mediashift / Knight Foundation blog, Idealab, as a follow-up to an article there which I based on polls reported at Narco News predicting a reform win in the Venezuelan Constitutional referendum.]

A previous post of mine  had an inflammatory headline unjustified by the text: "Lies about Venezuela:  If NYT.com ran Related Content".

I was guilty of looking at Jens Erik Gould's article, "Venezuela's Fateful Choice," through a frame: that major media  coverage overwhelmingly seeks to portray the Venezuelan government as illegitimate and bad.  My own view (frame) that the New York Times has that overall frame overrode a good analysis of the article.  I apologize specifically to the reporter.  Gould's article, while (despite the headline) primarily about accusations that the Venezuelan government lacks financial transparency, was not by itself part of the anti-democratic, pro-elite frame which I accuse the New York Times of employing against Venezuela.  (Broadly, this frame or lens is applied by major U.S. media against the world.)

Interesting, this coming out of Colombia.  Just lip service for Colombians or?

Colombia's vice president said on Sept. 9 that a US-backed program to fumigate coca fields is failing to stem cocaine trafficking and called for anti-drug efforts to shift away from the practice.

[...]

"After a five-year frontal attack against drug trafficking, the results aren't the most successful or the ones we hoped for," Santos told a news conference.

He said Bogota is committed to fighting drug cartels, but "at the end of the day, the benchmark is whether the street price of cocaine in New York, London or Madrid rises or the quality falls. So far, we haven't found any statistics that bear this out."

Read it all at the Asheville Global Report

From Chris Fernandez to the BinaryFreedom mailing list:

In Oajaca (Oaxaca in old Spanish) Mexico people from all over the world are joining the struggle to help the  native people against the capitalist machine and the US influence  in Mexico, police brutality and even military horror has been the topic for 1 year already, but this time they screw with the wrong people, 4 Spaniards from Barcelona got arrested and tortured, but it happens that one is a lawyer, another a reporter, another a well known teacher and another is a scientist.

From the Black Agenda Report:

The Green Party, once perceived by many Blacks as a club for white counterculturalists, now champions an end to racially selective administration of justice in the U.S. By making Black and Brown mass incarceration a top priority, the Greens engage a public policy-created crisis that impacts all aspects of African American life. While the Democrats, including Barack Obama, make occasional feeble noises about the fact that half the U.S. prison population is Black, the Greens call for an end to the so-called "drug war" as "a war on youth and people of color."

Read more.

The Moment of Truth with Jeff Dorchen: First They Came for the Latinos

About a mile or so west and a little south of my house on the south side of Chicago, there's a mall called the Discount Mall in Little Village.  [...]   Nearly everyone who patronizes the mall is of Latino heritage. I guess that makes it a good place to look for illegal immigrants. You would also find a lot of legal ones, and many just plain U.S. citizens.

However, you could just as easily find the same percentage of illegal immigrants to legal immigrants to just plain U.S. citizens at lunchtime in what residents of Chicago call The Loop, the downtown business district. So, let's say you threw a Gestapo-style cordon of Federal Agents carrying high-powered rifles and wearing bullet-proof armor around a block of lunch places and storefront businesses on Wabash between Madison and Monroe and didn't let anybody in or out of that cordoned area while you checked everyone's “papers.”  [...]

What? Why not? Oh, I see—because totalitarian police state-style behavior tends to upset people who work for banks, law firms, city, county and state offices, foreign consulates, and stylish department stores. [...] Yes. It's a little out of place in an open society, a democratic republic such as the United States of America, to cordon off a section of the public thoroughfare as if it were a block of apartments in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Read the whole truth.

Sean Donahue wrote an article on Colombia, published in the Maine newspaper "The Times Record" – impressive work getting information usually found few places but on Narco News in front of more folks.

"Paramilitarism has not been dismantled, it has simply been 're-engineered.'" (Amnesty International)

Imagine that you work bundling cut flowers in Colombia. After years of working 10- and 12-hour days for very little pay, you and your fellow workers finally form a union to fight for better conditions and better pay and you are elected president. Your manager calls you into his office and tells you that unions only bring trouble and that you should really consider your family's safety.