Dan Kovalik

According to the Honduran newspaper, Tiempo, as well as the Honduran human rights group, COFADEH, the agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), dressed in military uniforms, killed at least four and possibly six civilians in a raid which took place on Friday, May 11. The victims...

In mid-April, the Summit of the Americas was held in Cartagena, Colombia. Of course, the Summit will be most remembered for the scandal of the U.S. Secret Service who were there to prepare the way for the visit by President Obama, but who were more interested in bedding...

One would think that the U.S. had it in for Guatemala and its people. As most know, the U.S. was behind a coup in 1954 that brought down the democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz. The U.S. then installed a military dictatorship that, with U.S. support, lasted through the 1980s....

"Never . . . was so much owed by so many to so few"-- Winston Churchill

In his book, In Cuba, Father Ernesto Cardenal -- the famous Nicaraguan priest, revolutionary and poet who is known to don a black beret a la Che Guevara -- described Cuba...

As Western Hemisphere leaders (with the possible exception of Cuba which most likely will not be invited) prepare to travel to Colombia in April for the Summit of the Americas, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has released a report in which it concludes that, between 2008 and...

I just had the pleasure of reading an important new book entitled, Cocaine, Death Squads and the War on Terror (U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia). This book, which was ten years in the making, is written by Oliver Villar & Drew Cottle and published by Monthly...

Back in the 1980s, thousands of Americans travelled to Nicaragua to see the Sandinista Revolution for themselves, and to show solidarity with the Nicaraguan people who were being victimized at the time by the U.S.-sponsored Contra War. I myself travelled at the age of 19 to Nicaragua in 1987 to...

As Noam Chomsky has often cautioned, when considering foreign relations, and especially military intervention, states should always heed the primary Hippocratic oath -- "First, do no harm." The U.S. has certainly disregarded this admonition with reckless abandon in Latin America, and Colombia is the foremost example of this, at least...

Last night, I received an email from the Colombia Support Network about a Catholic priest who was assassinated in Colombia. His name was Father Jose Reinel Restrepo, and he was killed in the midst of his campaign against the threatened incursion of a Canadian mining operation, Medoro Resources, into an...

While the mainstream press has been silent on the issue, there is a growing movement in Colombia for a peaceful settlement of the decades-long civil war in Colombia between the FARC and ELN guerillas and the Colombian government. A step was made in the direction of building a process toward...

Recent documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University from the U.S. Justice Department show that Chiquita Brands International, in direct contradiction of the claims of both Chiquita and the U.S. government for many years, made illegal payments to both guerrilla groups and then AUC...

While little attention has been paid by the press, Colombia just reached an ignominious benchmark -- it is now the country with the largest population of internally displaced persons in the world, surpassing Sudan which had held this position for the past several years. Colombia, with a population...

There is a lot of talk right now on Capitol Hill about the need to balance the federal budget. Sadly, both Democrats and Republicans alike are largely debating about how best to balance the budget upon the backs of the poor and working people (who are many times the very...

The biggest obstacle to the attempt first by the Bush Administration, and now by the Obama Administration, to achieve passage of the long-stalled Free Trade Agreement with Colombia is that country's long-standing shameful reality as "the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists," to use the words of...

In their new book, The Politics of Genocide, published by Monthly Review Press, Edward Herman and David Peterson document the double standard used by the U.S. government, mass media and intellectual community in labeling, or refusing to label, particular events as "genocide." As these authors demonstrate in great...

As it has for many successive years now, Colombia continues to be the union murder capital of the world. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), which keeps track of such statistics, issued its Annual Report yesterday, and reported that Colombia (with its small population of about 44 million...

On May 13, 2010, staff from the Washington Office on Latin America ("WOLA"), a D.C.-based human rights organization, met with long-time Colombian Ambassador Carolina Barco at the Colombian Embassy in Washington. At this meeting, WOLA staff, including Gimena Sanchez, expressed their concern for the safety of a number of its...

In his book, Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy, Father Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest and long-time human rights activist in Colombia, estimated that, between 1988 and 1995, more than 60,000 Colombians lost their lives to the internal conflict in Colombia - most of them at the hands of the...

The biggest human rights scandal in years is developing in Colombia, though you wouldn't notice it from the total lack of media coverage here. The largest mass grave unearthed in Colombia was discovered by accident last year just outside a Colombian Army base in La Macarena, a rural municipality located...

This week, Pittsburgh-based Global Links is celebrating its 20th year of providing desperately-needed medical supplies to nine different countries in the Western Hemisphere. Global Links does this by recovering perfectly good, surplus medical materials from U.S. hospitals and shipping them to under served communities in less developed countries, such...