This article originally appeared in NACLA.org and The Reporters Inc.

From a pasty blue building behind a crumbling church in a Guatemalan highland village, a contortion of antennas stands raised against the sky.

Beneath the antennas is a metal-plated door. Behind that, in a sparse room with a paint-chipped table and a sprawling tangle of wires, sits Osmar Miranda, a radio operator. Adjusting the black knobs on a control board, he takes off his headphones and explains how Radio San José—one of the Central American country’s so-called “pirate radio” stations—offers its poor Mayan population one of the few ways to get their voices heard on the airwaves.

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The New Extractivism? A review

1.

In April, 1997, several thousand fighters from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, entered the Caribbean department of Bolívar, along the Magdalena River, their stated goal being the “cleansing of the area and (the) handing it over to multinational corporations.”

The AUC, short for Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, was a paramilitary army whose right-wing ideology had grown out of the network of rural businessmen and druglords who supported them. The official raison d’etre of the AUC had originally been to fight the communist guerrillas of the FARC and ELN, against whom the Colombian state had been waging a three-decade internal war. Yet making the departments of Bolívar and Magdalena safe for corporations meant far more than merely clearing out communists, and the broader agenda at play was more sinister than mere “self-defense.”

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Silence on the Mountain Review

Early one evening in 1993,  Daniel Wilkinson, a Harvard postgrad researcher, was finishing an interview in a remote Guatemalan village when he began hearing gunshots on the mountain above him.

Though at first, the sound seemed to be little more than a discordant series of unconnected reports, it soon became clear that he was hearing a battle between leftist guerrillas and the Guatemalan military. Wilkinson’s interviewee, an indigenous man and former hand on a coffee plantation, insisted on account of the danger that his guest spend the night at his house, an offer which, machine guns rattling in the distance, the fearful Ivy-leaguer was eager to accept.

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North Florida’s estuarine Matanzas River at dusk

This article first appeared in the Flagler College Gargoyle. You can view the original here.

By Jared Olson, photos by Walter Coker

For conservationist Jen Lomberk, the Matanzas River is both a blessing and a curse.

“We have something very beautiful that a lot of people are passionate about protecting,” she says, contemplating the estuary she’s spent the last year fighting to protect. “But I’ve also noticed it’s very hard to get people to care and pay attention when things aren’t catastrophic.”

As the “Matanzas Riverkeeper,” Lomberk, 28, is a legal expert-turned-conservationist who’s ingratiated herself into a web of local volunteers agitating to protect the waterways around St. Augustine, the majority of which lay within the beautiful but threatened Matanzas River watershed.

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Robert Fisk is a journalistic genius—though not because he’s discovered anything new.

The brilliance of Fisk, in his monstrously large The Great War for Civilization, lies in his unparalleled ability to animate swaths of history that could otherwise seem static, doing so with such emotional immediacy that this book—whose raw material could easily serve as a dossier of injustices—is transformed into a vast, compulsively readable human drama. The result is a story that’s by turns intimate, tragic, heartbreaking and epic.

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The author Jared Olson in the rural mountains of the south Mexican state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border

This article originally appeared in the Flagler College Gargoyle. You can view the original here. 

The Equation

IT WAS IN THE SOUTH MEXICAN town of Comitán, Chiapas that I first caught wind of the shootout. I had been taking a taxi to the edge of town when the driver, hearing I was a journalist, first offhandedly mentioned it to me. Three days before, he said, two rival gangs broke into a bloody territorial dispute in a local market, and the firefight that followed was dispersed only when a local faction of the army arrived. Twenty had been shot in the melee, many of them innocent bystanders. Five more people had died.

“Were you scared?” I asked the taxi driver.

He smiled. “It’s normal around here,” he said, shrugging. The lightheartedness of his response seemed to suggest that he thought the whole scene to be little more than an absurd cosmic joke.

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