For the past three years, the Colombian insurgency has been taking an increasing amount of control of the country's civil war. Despite the implementation of the 7 billion dollar Colombia Plan (a plan designed to bolster the state and resist the insurgency) by the United States in 2000, the North American Congress on Latin...
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The current issue of The Nation, guest-edited by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, investigates the impact in Latin America of Cablegate, the biggest leak of documents in US history. With contributions by Kornbluh (Latin America After Cablegate: What Changed?), Blanche Petrich Moreno (WikiLeaks and the War...
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According to upsidedownworld.org, last week a Mexican official told the news site Al Jazeera that the United States' Central Intelligence Agency does not do their job in assisting Mexico in their Drug War. The spokesman, who works for the Chihuahua state government argued that instead, the CIA actually manages the war. While many...
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Mining is one of the most pressing political issues in many Latin American countries, from Guatemala, to El Salvador, to Peru. In each country, mining can almost always be traced to governmental corruption. Peru is no exception. BBC News reports that, whereas President Ollanta Humala campaigned on the promise the elimination of poverty...
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On July 23rd, Cuba lost an important leader and advocate for human rights, democracy, and freedom of expression. As Global Voices reports, Oswaldo Payá was killed in a car crash in the city of Bayamo. Internationally recognized as a proponent of non-violent protest, some of Payá's major achievements include having founded Cuba's Christian...
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Protests over the recent Mexican presidential elections have continued throughout the month of July. This past Friday, July 27th, another large-scale protest occurred, in which thousands of protestors blockaded the Televisa studios for 24 hours, demanding that Mexico's most popular television station "tell the truth." As The Guardian reports, "the protesters allege that...
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After the impeachment of the center-left Catholic Bishop Fernando Lugo from the presidency last month, Federico Franco, the new president of Paraguay, has taken some vast and controversial measures to open the country up to unregulated foreign investment. According to the Inter Press Service News Agency:
Franco named Jaime Ayala, the president of...
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To say it is difficult to be a union worker in Colombia would be a massive understatement. Ravaged by paramilitary violence and corrupt governments for almost 50 years, union workers in Colombia face unprecedented challenges; they are threatened and sometimes even killed for attempting to unionize and protect their rights. According to upsidedownworld.org,...
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Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation's Victor Navasky writes:
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In the wake of the untimely deaths of Alexander Cockburn and Michael Nash, we are sad to report the passing of John "Tito" Gerassi, author, journalist, historian, and son of Spanish Civil War veteran Fernando Gerassi, the last Republican commander of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War.
Gerassi received his MA at Columbia University...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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