IV453 - October 2012

Via Campesina is the world’s foremost international movement of small farmers. It promotes the right of all peoples to food sovereignty. Via Campesina was established in 1993 at the dawn of the anti-globalization movement, and gradually became one of the major organizations in the critique of neoliberal globalization. Its ascent is an expression of peasant resistance to the collapse of the rural world caused by neoliberal policies, and the intensification of those policies as embodied in the World Trade Organization (Antentas and Vivas, 2009a).

IV453 - October 2012 PDF available for download here

The television interview given by Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad on August 29, 2012 presented in clear terms the despotic regime’s strategy against the revolution and the opposition. The messages sent to regional and international forces were also clear. The revolutionaries were no longer presented as “intruders” or “microbes” as in the past, but any Syrian citizen who did not support the regime was clearly accused of being part of an “enemy within” which should be crushed.

Iran is under severe sanctions these days. The EU’s embargo against Iranian crude oil went into effect on July 1, 2012, adding to the US and UN economic sanctions, which went into effect in 2006.

Slanderous stitch-ups and arrests show that a massive political trial against leaders of the opposition is being prepared in Russia. Konstantin Lebedev (RSD) is in custody. Russian activists need international solidarity.

More than 3,000 people were present to listen to four speakers, in the following order: Marisa Matias, EU deputy, member of the Left Bloc (Portugal); Lisaro Fernandez, miners’ union leader (Asturias, Spain); Alexis Tsipras, president of SYRIZA (Greece); Eric Toussaint, president of CADTM (Belgium, www.cadtm.org ).

A draft has been approved by Uruguay’s national parliament making it the first South American country to broadly decriminalize abortion, which only exists so far in Cuba, Guyana, Puerto Rico and the Federal District of Mexico.

The impact of austerity measures on women in Europe

The debt, Trojan horse for an unprecedented social war against the peoples of Europe, is not neutral from the point of view of gender. The austerity measures imposed in its name are gender-determined, both in their characteristics and their effects. Everywhere, they are hitting workers, pensioners and the unemployed, both men and women, as well as all the different kinds of “those without” (without housing, without papers, without the minimum needed to survive...), seeking to make them pay for the effects of a profound crisis for which they are in no way responsible. Everywhere, they impose the worst forms of social regressions on the most vulnerable, the poorest populations and thus predominantly on women! And among them, the most vulnerable (single mothers, young women, elderly women, migrant women, women from ethnic minorities, women who live in rural areas or who have been victims of violence) will suffer the strongest pressure to rush to the rescue of the profiteers of the debt.

On September 11, 2012, two particularly deadly fires struck company buildings in Pakistan. Some 300 employees in the garment export factory Ali Enterprises died in Karachi, making it one of the biggest disasters attributable to inhumane conditions imposed on workers. There were a thousand workers, many of them young women, in this four storey building, which only had one accessible exit. Many died of suffocation, trapped in basements. Others were seriously injured after jumping to escape the flames. On the same day, 25 employees were killed during another fire at a shoe factory in Lahore, in the centre of the country. The identification of the victims is difficult, many of them being contractually undeclared workers hired by subcontractors. It should be added that the company itself had no legal existence.

These two manifestos are those of the initiators of the 25th of September demonstration — Coordinadora 25S and Plataforma ¡En Pie!. For an assessment of the importance of the day of mobilisation see Massive mobilisations against austerity.