Guests for this week: Shannon Young, Anthony Arnove and Swanee Hunt
– Shannon Young reports on rising repression in Oaxaca
Shannon Young lives in Oaxaca and anchors the Free Speech Radio News headlines five days a week. She is a former Monitor co-host and KPFT staffer, and has been our reporter on the ground in Mexico for several years.
Since May of this year, Oaxaca, Mexico has seen a rising level of protests, and now government repression. Protesters originally were asking for a teacher pay raise, which is an annual effort. The state’s governor Ruiz sent in 3000 police to break it up. Now, many are demanding the state’s governor step down, charging Ruiz with corruption, rigging, the 2004 election, and sending thugs to kill and intimidate his opponents. Matters have gotten worse and worse: police and paramilitary violence has escalated, and protestors have used barricades and building takeovers to fight back. They have also occupied radio stations. In October, American free lance photographer Brad Will of Indymedia was shot to death while filming there. Mexico’s president Fox has now sent in thousands of federal troops, and on Monday the tension increased when the Federal police announced a “zero tolerance” policy.
Shannon writes that more than 220 have been arrested or disappeared in the past week. “Over 140 were flown to a maximum security prison more than 1000 km from Oaxaca and almost all of them are being held incommunicado – no access to attorneys or family members who have travelled the distance to find them.
Dozens of others have been snatched off the streets in broad daylight by plainclothes police or have been grabbed in private homes during warrantless house raids.”
In addition, a hard-core pro-government radio station has been broadcasting the addresses of APPO (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca) members, teachers, and foreigners who live there. Callers suggest setting the homes on fire, making citizen’s arrests, or otherwise “making justice” against these 3 groups.
LETTER IN SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE OF OAXACA:
Signed by Noam Chomsky, Jim Hightower, Arundhati Roy, Gloria Steinem, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker and many more: http://www.friendsofbradwill.org/wp-content/plugins/petitions/wp-petitions.php?action=show&petition_id=2
– Author Anthony Arnove on the Logic of Withdrawal from Iraq
Mark Bebawi will speak today with Anthony Arnove. His latest book is Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal.
He also edited Iraq Under Siege and co-edited, with Howard Zinn, Voices of a People’s History of the United States. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, The Nation, Mother Jones, Monthly Review, Le Nouvel Observateur, Z Magazine, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal concludes by laying out a clear vision for the antiwar movement, one that constructively involves soldiers, military families, and the many communities affected by the occupation, who together, Arnove argues, can build the needed coalition to bring the troops home.
Nearly forty years ago, historian, activist, and bestselling author Howard Zinn—whose foreword and afterword frame Arnove’s book—published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, which argued with remarkable foresight that getting out of Vietnam was the only realistic option. Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal will likely prove equally prescient.
BOOKS:
Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, (The New Press) by Anthony Arnove
Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, edited by Anthony Arnove
Voices of a People’s History of the United States, coedited by Anthony Arnove and Howard Zinn
– Former Ambassador Swanee Hunt on philanthropy
Monitor co-host Pokey Anderson will speak with former Ambassador Swanee Hunt today. Swanee Hunt grew up as a conservative Southern Baptist, soaked in anti-communist fervor and blessed with wealth but deprived of emotional warmth. Her ultra-conservative father, H. L. Hunt, was a Dallas oilman once called the richest man in the country. The path Swanee has forged as an adult is far removed from her childhood, and includes innovative philanthropy, feminism, theology, and public service. In 1993-97, she served as Bill Clinton’s Ambassador to Austria, and has been involved in global efforts for social change. She was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist murdered in October.
Swanee Hunt is the founding director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, chair of the Initiative for Inclusive Security (formerly Women Waging Peace), president of the Hunt Alternatives Fund, and a member of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and the boards of the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International. She has written hundreds of articles for American and international print media, including a nationally syndicated column for the Scripps Howard News Service. She has two masters degrees and a doctorate in theology.
BOOKS:
Half-Life of a Zealot, Duke University Press (November 2006)
This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace, Duke University Press
FOUNDATION:
Hunt Alternatives Fund http://www.huntalternatives.org
ARTICLE:
Politkovskaya: A Life for Justice
By Swanee Hunt
October 10, 2006
http://www.huntalternatives.org/pages/592_anna_politkovskaya_waging_network_member_murdered.cfm
