IV595 - August 2024

Five years have passed since Hong Kong’s mass movement of 2019. Despite the regime’s repression and white terror, the embers of resistance still smoulder in the hearts of every Hongkonger, unquenchable. The regime’s censorship, repression, and rewriting of history will not succeed in erasing the memory and the truth of 2019, or the righteousness of our democratic cause.

Unlike what had happened for the last 25 years in Venezuelan elections – and there have been dozens since Hugo Chávez’s victory in 1998 – this time, after the presidential vote on 28 July, the broad Latin American left, including the entire body of supporters of ‘progressivism’, has split from top to bottom.
An ever smaller, but still numerous, sector, full of intellectuals, echoes the argument of the São Paulo Forum , according to which, in order to save Venezuela and the region from US (…)

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, women’s rights to abortion and, more broadly, to safe reproductive health care have been under attack. In response, women have organized at the grassroots to build local and state-wide coalitions to resist and defend their reproductive rights. Women’s resistance has broad political implications. Reproductive freedom has become one of the central issues of the 2024 presidential campaign and could even decide it.

In the context of the capitalist polycrisis that is deepening year by year throughout the world, the political, ecological and social crises in Latin America are taking a particularly acute and chaotic turn.

By a more than two-to-one margin, on June 2, 2024, voters in Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a protégé of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), to the nation’s highest office, the first woman and the first Jew to hold the post. She ran as the candidate of AMLO’s Morena party. Under AMLO, Morena (the Spanish acronym for the National Regeneration Party) stood on the left of the Mexican political spectrum, a populist party with a leader who spoke in a nationalist voice to the masses, but in an authoritarian manner—though AMLO’s administration never had anything like the more anti-democratic character of Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship in Nicaragua or of Nicolás Maduro’s repressive government in Venezuela. Unlike those countries, where the constitutions were changed to permit the presidents to stay in power, the Mexican Constitution still prohibits reelection to the presidency, though AMLO may seek to continue to exercise power through his successor.

By relying on armed militias against the M23 rebellion, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is worsening the already dramatic human rights situation in the eastern part of the country. South and North Kivu are facing an offensive from the March 23 Movement (M23). This rebellion is steadily increasing its area of influence, and is currently capable of blockading the regional capital Goma, which has a population of around two million.

After a series of twists and turns, Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court has ruled that a number of opposition candidates are illegal. Our comrades analyse the contradictions of this anti-democratic decision and how to build a democratic and anti-capitalist project in this context.

Once again, the issue of decriminalizing homosexuality is being discussed in Cameroon with a position that is unexpected to say the least. On June 30, the young 26-year-old rapper King Nasty declared his love for Brazilian model Layyons Valença on the social network X (formerly Twitter) with a photo of the two lovers kissing passionately. This tweet has significant repercussions in Cameroon.

Dave Kellaway reports from the anti-fascist demonstration in Walthamstow East London and reflects on the lessons.

In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa