Tag: United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon

To really appreciate the untold factors boiling just beneath the surface of the current wave of protests, one must understand that Brazil is a rich nation filled with poor Black and Brown people. Rarely are they seen at the protests demanding the impeachment of President Rousseff and besmirching the image of ex-President Lula. How does the country’s mainstay allure, racial democracy, deflect and misinform us about the current wave of protests against the only aspect of Brazilian life that is truly democratic – political corruption?

President Evo Morales acknowledged Leonard Peltier as a defender of Indigenous Peoples and Mother Earth, and urged President Obama to grant him clemency. He was wrongfully convicted in 1977 in connection with the shooting deaths of two agents of the FBI on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. The federal prosecutor has twice admitted that the government did not and cannot prove Peltier’s guilt.

Individuals in North Africa, Europe and West Asia are rewriting the history of their countries as “people power” takes center stage. This “people power” has always existed within us; history is written by those who recognize the power of the human dream of freedom and who set about making that dream a reality, against all odds.

What if they held an election and nobody came? That is exactly what happened on Sunday, June 21, when Haiti tried to hold run-offs for 12 of 30 Haitian Senate seats. Polling stations around Haiti had even fewer voters than they had on April 19, when Haitians massively boycotted the election's first round by respecting the Lavalas Family party's call for "Operation Closed Doors, Empty Streets." The CEP had disqualified the party, Haiti's largest, on arbitrary and unjustified technicalities.

Today I was slated to speak in Damascus, Syria, at a conference to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 60th year that the Palestinian people have been denied their Right of Return enshrined in that declaration. But I was not allowed to exit the country.