Workers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico united in an Inter-Continental Day of Action on January 31 to stop a massive new trade agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership 鈥 commonly referred to as 鈥淣AFTA on steroids.鈥
In the U.S., the immediate fight is to block a bill that would grant the president 鈥渇ast track鈥 authority to sign off on the TPP. Defeating fast track would likely stop the TPP.
Fast track is designed to swiftly pass trade deals, circumventing the standard Congressional procedures of hearings, debates, and resolutions.
Mexico
The tide of history sometimes surges out of the most unexpected places. Twenty years ago, the Zapatista indigenous uprising broke out in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.
Zapatismo, limiting itself to operating in Chiapas, may be an incomplete solution to the national rule of the capitalist class, but the Zapatista rising in 1994 was a big advance in Latin America鈥檚 liberation struggle.
Over the past few months, plazas, airports and roads in Mexico City and several other cities across the country have been paralysed by teachers and their supporters.
They have been protesting against neoliberal reforms to the public education system proposed by Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and recently approved by Congress.
These so-called structural reforms to education coincide with other neoliberal attacks pushing the privatisation of education, oil and electricity industries.
Striking Mexican teachers from a dissident union leading popular resistance to the government鈥檚 neoliberal reform agenda in recent weeks.
Despite enduring relentless media hostility, the teachers' strike is now starting to broadened out to merge with protests against plans to hand over key national assets, such as Mexico鈥檚 state-owned oil industry, to the profit-hungry multinationals.
Thousands of striking teachers seized two of Mexico City's central thoroughfares on a march to the president's residence on September 11 after losing their battle to block new educational reforms less than 24 hours earlier.
The teachers disrupted the centre of the city for at least the 14th time in two months, decrying a plan designed to break union control of Mexico's education system and, they say, damage education in Mexico's poor south in the process.
One has to hark back to 1968 in Mexico City, when thousands of students and workers marched against the Olympics, to find a sports-related demonstration that compares to the size and militancy of the mass anti-World Cup/Olympic protests taking place in Brazil.
As in Mexico City, thousands of people in Brazil took to the streets 鈥 and outside of stadiums hosting Confederations Cup matches 鈥 raising slogans that connect the spending and austerity that surround these mega-events to a much deeper rot in the nation鈥檚 democratic institutions.
Everywhere you look these days, things are turning green. In Chiapas, Mexico, indigenous farmers are being paid to protect the last vast stretch of rainforest in Mesoamerica. In the Brazilian Amazon, peasant families are given a monthly 鈥済reen basket鈥 of basic food staples to allow them to get by without cutting down trees. In Kenya, small farmers who plant climate-hardy trees and protect green zones are promised payment for their part in the fight to reduce global warming.
The final official results in Mexico's July 1 presidential election were published in the early hours of July 4, claiming Enrique Pena Nieto had won. However, his victory had been proclaimed within just a few hours of the voting centres being closed and 1% of the ballots counted.
Pena Nieto, the candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was declared the winner with a 6.5% margin over progressive candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Alameda Park is Mexico City's languid space for lovers and open-air ballroom dancers: the gents in two-tone shoes, the ladies in finery and heels.
The cobbled paths undulate from the great earthquake of 1985. You imagine the fairground sinking into the cobwebs of cracks, its Edwardian organ playing forlornly. Two small churches nearby totter precariously: the surreal is Mexico's facade.
The United Nations global climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, looks set to repeat the failures of Copenhagen. The chances of Cancun producing a binding agreement that would avert climate disaster are next to zero.
Many world leaders have not even bothered to attend the summit, which runs from November 29 to December 10.
Leaders of rich nations and the media talked much about the 鈥渓ow expectations鈥 of an agreement in the lead-up to the conference.
If at first you don鈥檛 succeed, redefine success. This phrase has become the unofficial motto of this year鈥檚 United Nations climate conference in Cancun, Mexico.
A week out from Cancun, which runs over November 29 to December 10, there is little hope of meaningful progress. Yet key players have sought to throw a shroud of official optimism over the looming failure.
Few Western politicians want a repeat of last year鈥檚 Copenhagen climate conference. They consider it a public relations disaster.
In Mexico, a war involving rival drug gangs, law enforcement agencies and the national army has officially claimed 23,000 lives since 2006.
This figure does not include the many thousands of innocent people who have been 鈥渄isappeared鈥 by police and army units.
The violence can be directly attributed to the corrosive impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
NAFTA was signed on January 1, 1994 between the United States, Canada and Mexico with the aim of removing trade and investment barriers between these nations.
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