Update: Venezuelan government agrees to expand audit of votes to 100 percent of all votes cast

The United States is refusing to recognize the results of the Venezuelan elections, insisting that Venezuela conduct a re-count of 100 percent of the votes in light of the...

In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman devote a chapter to the media's unbalanced coverage of the murder of one priest in Poland in 1984 as compared to the coverage of the 72 religious killed throughout Latin America between 1964 and 1978, the...

With the takeover of the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ("Congo") last year by M23 rebels, and with Rwanda receiving a seat on the UN Security Council last year as well, I wanted to talk to Rwanda's most famous son, Paul Rusesabagina, about Rwanda's role...

The International Criminal Court (ICC) just published its Interim Report on Colombia. It is an interesting read, revealing as much about the ICC itself as it does about Colombia. In the Report, the ICC explains that Colombia has been under preliminary examination by the ICC since June 2004....

For some time to come, Libya shall stand as an enduring symbol of the West's hypocrisy, and indeed duplicity, on the issue of human rights. While the West, and especially the United States, justified its aerial bombardment of Libya last year on the pretense of saving civilians from a possible,...

"There are two types of people in the world -- those that love and create, and those that hate and destroy." -- Jose Marti

While the Nobel Prize Committee has again awarded the Peace Prize to a war-maker on a grand scale -- this time to...

The soon-to-be-released book, Throwing Stones At The Moon ("Moon")(Voice of Witness, 2012) reads like a collection of literary short stories, but, in this case, the stories are both real and horrifying. The stories of those gathered in Moon are told by the Colombian victims of human rights abuses...

The UN just released its annual report on "Children and Armed Conflict." A number of states, as well as non-state actors, are highlighted in this report as engaged in the serious abuse of children in the course of an armed conflict. And a number of the perpetrators are...

This week, international human rights group went to The Hague to request that key Colombian officials be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for their participation in what has come to be known as the "false positive" (in Spanish, "falsos positivos") scandal. As the International Federation for...

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...