#socialism in latin america

[normal-thoughts-official]

So apparently some Swiss company found out that Brazilian blood has more immunoglobulin (which is used in some medications made by pharma companies) than European blood, and now international pharma companies are lobbying to change Brazilian law to allow them to use our blood as a resource

There is no current evidence that those things are related, but it just so happens that at the same time there is also another law being discussed that would get rid of "bureaucracy" when it comes to ethics analyses of trials on humans. It would also remove the right, which all brazilians currently have, to access to the medication resulting from the trials they participated in

Both sources are in Portuguese because both news have been recently broke by a Brazilian investigative news agency, but if you don't speak it, you can always use automatic translation

I know there's a lot of fucked up shit happening in the world right now, but please pay attention to medical rights in Brasil right now. Especially if you're European, because virtually every company related to this is from your continent and plans to benefit you above all

ETA: using blood as a resource for these medications is not new; however, current law in brasil only allows that use to come from donated blood (because it comes from the plasma and apparently not all of it is used in blood transfusion; I'm not a doctor so I'm not clear on the details but that's the gist of it) and to be processed and used by Hemobrás, the State-owned company that handles this type of medical technology. The new law would allow for private companies to buy our blood from blood banks for their use. It is worth noting that at least one company has already explicitly stated that they won't be making the resulting medication available in the Brazilian market, so, essentially, they will be taking blood Brazilians donated to help other Brazilians and using it to treat immunocompromised Europeans, to the detriment of immunocompromised Brazilians that need the medicine. In the process, they will be making it harder for our State-owned company to use that same blood, forcing us to import from them and therefore making the medication more expensive. They also want to make it possible for Brazilians to sell their own blood - a deeply ethically questionable practice that is discouraged by the WHO and that has led to HIV outbreaks in Brasil in the past

[mysharona1987]

Someone tell the New York Times this is actually a good thing.

[degeneratedworker]

"The Pentagon's dream" Soviet Union 1965

[deadpresidents]

A decade ago, the world had a brief fascination with José Mujica. He was the folksy president of Uruguay who had shunned his nation's presidential palace to live in a tiny tin-roof home with his wife and three-legged dog.

In speeches to world leaders, interviews with foreign journalists and documentaries on Netflix, Pepe Mujica, as he is universally known, shared countless tales from a life story fit for film. He had robbed banks as a leftist urban guerrilla; survived 15 years as a prisoner, including by befriending a frog while kept in a hole in the ground; and helped lead the transformation of his small South American nation into one of the world's healthiest and most socially liberal democracies.

But Mr. Mujica's legacy will be more than his colorful history and commitment to austerity. He became one of Latin America's most influential and important figures in large part for his plain-spoken philosophy on the path to a better society and happier life.

-- Here's a gift link from me to bypass the paywall and read this wonderful New York Times interview of lifelong activist, revolutionary, and former Uruguayan President José "Pepe" Mujica, who is still trying to pass along his hard-earned wisdom and political philosophy even as he's likely dying from cancer.

[troythecatfish]

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[nathavali]

I come from Venezuela, a country that is stuck in the corruption of a government that has kept the people oppressed for more than 25 years. I was born in a dictatorship and I don't know more than that, even so I dream of a normal and peaceful life for everyone, but I intensely fear that that will not be possible and the sacrifices, deaths and sorrows of my country will be forgotten.

The deaths cannot be forgotten. Crimes committed against innocent people should not be forgiven. If so, how could I live knowing that so many people have died for less than nothing? That is already a national feeling.

The crimes against humanity are evident, the electoral fraud has been seen and the mask of the Venezuelan government has fallen in front of everyone.

People are dying when exercising their right to peaceful protests and free expression. People are dying for their right and commitment to choose democracy. People are dying to defend their will and the votes that the government want to steal us. But I should correct, because people are not dying, they are being killed.

The government wants to silence us, but they can't. We will fight for all those who have left, for which they have been killed, for those who have been kidnapped, for which they are still here and for those who will come. They cannot stop the truth.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

[berniesrevolution]

Marea Verde Rising

Unstoppable Latin American activists made green the color of abortion rights – now, the U.S. needs the “green wave” more than ever.

by Sarah Mirk and Laura Athayde

(Continue Reading)

TheNib.com

@thenib​

[bimdraws]

Cubans for Palestinian Liberation 🇨🇺🇵🇸

[elbiotipo]

It's also funny that in Victoria 2, if you play as a developing nation outside of the great powers (say, Argentina) and if you implement liberal laissez faire economics, your economy goes to absolute shit. The only good way to play Victoria 2 is with state capitalism or a command economy, because otherwise the invisible hand of the market screws you.

If the Liberals get in charge of Argentina, it ruins the country for generations. 10/10 excellent realism.

[lasttarrasque]

Because the CIA has a long history of caring for democracy in Latin America

[mywifeleftme]

312: Victor Jara // Manifiesto

Manifiesto Victor Jara 1975, Discos Pueblo

Manifiesto is assembled from recordings intended for an album that was to be called Tiempos que cambian (literally Times That Change, or New Times) smuggled out of Chile by Jara’s widow Joan after the folksinger’s torture and murder by the Pinochet junta in 1973. It was simultaneously released by different labels under a variety of titles around the world. My copy hails from Mexico, released by leftist folk label Discos Pueblo, who make their intentions clear in a statement (machine-translated by me) on the back of the sleeve that reads in part:

“We find it necessary to point out that due to its quality and value, Victor Jara’s work should be disseminated, but always by those who identify with it, and not by the transnational companies that financed his return to Chile by organizing the bloody military coup of 1973. [Ed. Something in their use of word “retorno” is probably being lost in translation here; I think it implies something like Jara’s “return to whence he came,” e.g. his burial in Chilean soil.] Those transnational corporations that today benefit from Victor Jara’s singing, filtering out its combative aspects and presenting it as incomplete, seem to ignore the deep paths that people use to preserve the integrity of the voice of their singers. This album is our answer.”

The LP is clearly a work of love (and economy), the sleeve purposely left unglued so that it can be opened like a gatefold, revealing testimonies by his peers. There’s scarcely an inch that isn’t crammed with text—even the flaps that cradle the inner sleeve itself hide lyrics to two of the album’s key songs:

The sleeve unfolded.

“I don’t sing for the sake of singing, or for having a good voice, I sing because the guitar has sense and reason, it has a heart of earth and wings of a dove, it is like holy water that blesses my sorrows. This is where my song fits, as Violeta said, a hard-working guitar that smells of spring. It is not a rich man’s guitar or anything like that, my song is the scaffolding to reach the stars. The song has meaning when it beats in the veins of the one who will die singing truths, not fleeting flattery or foreign fame, but the song of a lark to the bottom of the earth. There, where everything arrives and where everything begins, a song that has been brave will always be a nueva cancion [New Song].”

Jara’s artistry (which, besides spearheading the nueva cancion movement, also included poetry and theatrical direction) was inseparable from his politics, and the music of Manifiesto is a stirring testament to his talents and the historical moment he occupied, when Chile like Cuba before it seemed on the verge of breaking free from centuries of resource extraction-driven imperialism and making its own way. These songs cannot help but feel elegiac given the circumstances of their release, and indeed they do frequently mourn the historical oppression of the common worker. Jara’s was a lark’s voice, not that of a conventional rabble rouser, and most of these songs seem best suited for night-time gatherings of comrades and lovers or, in the case of the dazzling instrumental “Caicai Vilu” (referencing a Mapuche creation myth), perhaps a rural cotillion. But these songs were recorded during the years of Salvador Allende’s triumph, a movement that Jara had personally helped galvanize, and there is the sense that these are songs about moving in a changed world that still feels almost surreal. Only at the very end, with the rock-inflected call to arms “Canto libre,” does Jara’s Revolutionary sentiment take on a more martial beat, finally unfurling a flag of victory.

That victory would be short-lived of course, as U.S. imperialists would soon back Pinochet’s reign of terror and grind the Chilean people under the heel of fascism for another generation. It’s hard to make an argument that Jara and Allende’s side “won” in any meaningful sense (without an appeal to some abstracted moral arbiter anyway). It may be blinkered to even try, knowing that Pinochet died obscenely wealth in his nineties and that there were never meaningful consequences for his even wealthier American backers, while a despairing Allende perished at his own hand and Jara with his fingers broken and his body riddled with bullets. Yet I do believe that a song can transcend the accounting of atrocities and persist on its own terms. Music like Jara’s will endure as long as there are human beings who seek a recognition of their own worthiest qualities in art. As one of the Mexican edition’s compilers says:

“…his voice will not have coffins or crematoriums, nor dark prisons nor barbed wire, comrades! His voice and his guitar continue the fight, they remain alive seeking victory. And they will also return as flags when the Homeland regains its joy.”

312/365

[degeneratedworker]

"They violate human rights!" Soviet Union 1977

[sprites4ever]

Extremely hard to swallow pills for the Western far Left:

The only reason Latin and Southern American countries can act like they're the victims of oh-so-evil US imperialism is because the native owners of those countries are all dead. The US American people are descendants of British colonists. Latin and Southern American peoples are descendants of Spanish colonists. The Spanish were far more thorough in their eradication of Natives, hence none of them protesting this misuse of a victim role.

The idea that imperialism and racism are bad was not invented by Brits, but it was popularized in the Western world by Brits.

Socialism was invented by Germans and Brits.

The French revolution may have been a bloody act of democracy, but didn't work. Napoleon and his Grande Armee used the chaos to declare themselves Emperor.

The Soviet Union was not a victim of capitalism, but collapsed because Communism does not work. It was also corrupt beyond belief, and its collapse has led to ex-Soviet countries, especially russia, becoming even more capitalist than before the establishment of the Soviet Union.

The People's Republic of China is less Chinese than the Republic of China aka Taiwan. The PRC was established in 1949 by Mao Zedong and his Chinese Communist Party, and Chinese nationalists fled to the island of Taiwan, establishing an exile government. They are the same people with the same culture, but mainland China is arguably less Chinese, because the CCP constantly revise historical records to suit their propaganda.

[troythecatfish]

[tomlinsonhazz]

💛💙❤️🇻🇪 FREE VENEZUELA !!! 🇻🇪💛💙❤️

Please sign this petition to help my country end

Dictator Maduro's regime 📢🆘

💛💙❤️🇻🇪 Edmundo won by DEMOCRACY!! 🇻🇪💛💙❤️

THE PEOPLE of Venezuela need Maduro OUT! 🚨