Violence has displaced the Triqui people from their homes in San Juan Copala to the sidewalks outside the governor's palace in Oaxaca and across the border in the United States. Read more →

We celebrate Independence Day this weekend, and Nancy Rubin Stuart, author of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, honors the often overlooked women of the American Revolution. Read more →

Journalist Garry Leech explains why exporting Plan Colombia to Afghanistan is a risky proposition. Read more →

Quotes for the holiday from "Language Is a Place of Struggle": Great Quotes by People of Color, edited by Tram Nguyen. Read more →

In the final presidential debate, the South American country of Colombia briefly became a central theme in the U.S. election campaign. Garry Leech, author of Beyond Bogota: Diary of a Drug War Journalist in Colombia, analyzes the presidential candidates' positions on Colombia and free trade. Read more →

The news that the Colombian military had successfully rescued 15 hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) spread quickly around the world. The story was deemed newsworthy by most mainstream media outlets because the leftist guerrilla group's four most high-profile hostages—former presidential candidate and Colombian-French citizen Ingrid Betancourt, and three U.S. military contractors—were among those liberated. The liberation of the hostages has conveniently shifted media focus away from yet another political scandal in which the administration of Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe finds itself mired. Read more →

When I came to the US from England in the 1960s, I suffered a good deal from culture shock. In the first place, in contrast with my British undergraduate classmates who rarely mentioned their parents, my Freud-indoctrinated American graduate school classmates, despite being older and, one might have assumed, already well out of the nest, were obsessed with theirs, especially with their mothers. Trading tales of psychological abuse was a favorite pastime. But for all this tension and ambivalence, they still celebrated Mother's Day. In England at that time we had Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday of Lent, an Anglican Church festival that was generally ignored. The four per cent of the population who went to church on that particular late winter Sunday thanked God for the care and attention they'd received from their mothers, who were only marginally involved in this thanksgiving. In contrast, Mother's Day in America was a federally-sanctified celebration, a deification of the internalized torturer/seductress, which even in the sixties was poised to out-strip the commercial excesses of Christmas. Read more →

In the past 20 years, more than 3,000 Colombian unionists have been assassinated. In 2007, Colombia remained the most dangerous country in the world for unionists with thirty-nine labor leaders killed; a number significantly lower than the 197 assassinated in 2001—the year before President Uribe assumed office. Consequently, the Bush administration is clearly correct when it points out that there has been a marked decrease in the number of unionists killed under the Uribe administration. Read more →