Week 13: Everyone Posts Comments to This Thread (by Sunday 12/02)

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A film we will watch in class on Tuesday. If Guatamala (with three major invasions/destabalizations by the U.S. are known), Cuba with several hundred presumed attempts on Castro's life by the U.S.--along with the failed "Bay of Pigs" invasion of 1961--represents a failure at least from the standpoint that many operations were a failure. However from Stockwell and Blum's point of view, if you merely symbolically delegitimate an attempt at independence you have succeeded.

However, the strange context is that Castro was quite U.S.-friendly originally. Howard Blum even mentions that Castro was accepting U.S. CIA funds in 1957-8 immediately before he was in power. In other words, it's the same story as other destabalizations that Blum mentioned. However, it represents a case that they were unable to "re-topple" once they disliked many of his policies within Cuba. This set up the embargo by the U.S. attempting to starve the island into submission. And thus contributed to the huge sponsorship of the USSR afterwards. Castro had been unable to get armaments from the USSR before, though after the Bay of Pigs incident he was increasingly successful.

We will treat Guatamala and others like El Salvador as completely U.S. dominated on many infrastructural levels, and we can treat Cuba as only partial U.S. dominance (through the trade and travel blockade (intermittently the latter) that still goes on by the U.S. against Cuba). I have a lot more to say about comparisons than this, particularly what it means for sociological analysis of state/cultures when much of Latin American experiences economically, financially, and culturally are covertly manipulated and the governments seated and unseated with such regularity.

Even this documentary leaves out some issues that are worth mentioning. I will integrate what is known from Blum's collated research as well as others into this documentary as we watch it.

Fidel.the.Untold Story - Part 1 CBC
Canadian Broadcasting Company
44 min - 21-Sep-07 - (5 ratings)
"Fidel" tells a previously untold story and presents a new view of this powerful and compelling figure. On July 26, 1953, Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-6718909413798152672

Week 12: Everyone Posts Comments to This Thread (by Sunday 11/25)

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This week's theme: 100 years of U.S. military invasions of Latin America


Since Stockwell's voice is somewhat muffled, I post two links to the same audio. The first version has key phrases subtitled:

1a.

Whistleblower, Ex-CIA Station Chief, John Stockwell: The Third World War
[subtitled English phrases, his voice from 1988, without face, 6 min]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9VxnCBD9W4

1b.

John Stockwell (voice and face, same audio as above, 7 min)
John Stockwell: Crimes of the CIA (recorded in 1988)
http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?ei=UTF-8&gid=157767&vid=182610&b=66


2.

OPTIONAL: Case Studies: very violent images, be warned; we are not watching these in the course. I place them here as optional resources. The first is the famous BBC reporter John Pilger's documentary about U.S.-Nicaraguan relations in the 1980s:

Nicaragua - A Nations Right to Survive
52 min 34 sec
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=727858608691408118

This one was produced by Canadians and won the 1992 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The audio is slightly out of sync with the video. However, most of the film is narrated so this is not wholly annoying.

The Panama Deception
1 hr 31 min
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=1723848710313426491

The Panama Deception is a controversial documentary film that won the 1992 Academy Award for Documentary Feature. The film is critical of the actions of the US military during the 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States, covering the conflicting reasons for the invasion and the depicting of the US media as biased. It was directed by Barbara Trent of the Empowerment Project and was narrated by actress Elizabeth Montgomery.

One of the many allegations made by the film is that the United States tested some form of laser or energy weapon during the invasion. The film also includes footage of mass graves uncovered after the US troops had withdrawn, and depicts some of the 20,000 refugees who fled the invasion.

3.

For a comparison of different ethnic politics, I mentioned on one side you could place very mixed-race Brazil (noted in the reading packet as an example, to where the European concepts were later inverted in their experience because the plurality of the population is mixed race despite ongoing skin color class stratification), versus very ethnically separated Bolivia where the majority of the population is indigenous. Particularly look at the ethnic politics involved in this short film:

Unreported World: Anarchy In The Andes
24 min - 12-Oct-07
This documentary has nothing to do with anarchy. But uses the word in the title in the common "anarchy is chaos" meaning. This sets the level of the documentary. Hamida Ghafour reports from Bolivia, where natives are exercising political power for the first time since the Spanish conquest more than 470 years ago. The election of the country's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, who pledged to redistribute land and resources, has rapidly led to confrontation between various factions (and the ethnic based mobilizations of these factions are well seen). [This was filmed before the factions agreed on the novel Bolivian Constitution.]
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6928016964832751026

Week 11: Everyone Posts Comments to This Thread (by Sunday 11/18)

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Week 10: Everyone Posts Comments to This Thread (by Sunday 11/11)

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