A quick report on yesterday's meeting
The highlight was hearing from Peter Knowlton of the UE and Raul Cisneros of SITESABES/FAT and professor of adult basic education in Mexico. Raul talked to us about the gap between Mexican labor law and reality, the corruption of Mexico's "official" unions, and the struggles of his teacher's union (affiliated with the dissident Frente Autentico de Trabajadores) in Guanajuato. Peter talked about the history of the UE as an independent union in the US and its cross-border solidarity with the FAT.

Avi gave a brief report on her trip to the Voces por la Vida human rights conference in Bogota at the end of August. The conference brought together international solidarity people, Colombian academics, activists in Colombia's social movements, and testimonies from victims of massacres, displacements, etc., especially from Colombia's "regions" where U.S. investments, military aid, and Plan Colombia are devastating communities. A Brazilian Workers Party speaker called Colombia "the Chile of the 2000s"--the place where the U.S. is trying to carry out its neoliberal experiment no matter how much violence it entails. As other countries in Latin America (Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil) are electing leftist parties and trying to find economic independence from the US and create more social equality, the US is using Colombia as its bastion.