Please help relaunch Upside Down World, a vital independent news source on Latin America

Dear former Update subscribers and others interested in Latin America,

As you may know, Upside Down World's website was hacked last year, and the news source has been mostly on hiatus since then. If you think it's important to maintain news sites like UDW and NACLA that provide timely information on Latin America in English, we urge you to contribute to help the relaunch described in the letter below.

Thanks, Update Editors
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Rights Action (info@rightsaction.org, www.rights.org)

August 28, 2017

“If the world is upside down the way it is now,

wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?”

- Eduardo Galeano

Latin America’s right wing is resurgent again. The region’s Pink Tide of left-wing governments is receding. Social movements are contesting power, while resisting being co-opted by it. Land and environmental defenders are being hunted all across Latin America while particularly in Mexico the killing fields are being watered with the blood of journalists. Resource conflicts, corruption, exploitation, repression and systemic impunity continue ...

Upside Down World (www.upsidedownworld.org) is relaunching in mid- September after a short hiatus to reclaim our position as a leading outlet for the latest news on developments in Latin America and analysis to help make sense of it.

We need your support to make this happen
Please help us reach our $5,000 goal
To donate: see below

Upside Down World receives no funding or support from any government, corporation, or major foundation; our reporting is free of state or corporate influence, allowing us to share analyses and follow stories without constraint.

With a view, as the Mayan-based Zapatista movement in southern Mexico says, “from below and to the left,” we are a community of writers, photojournalists, activists, translators, and editors who, through empowering and educational investigations and reporting, aim to flip the world upside down … or right side up.

Your donation will help us pay for on the ground reporting, analysis and translations of Latin American journalists. Returning long-time editor Cyril Mychalejko, along with the addition of new editor Heather Gies and translations editor Nancy Piñeiro, will coordinate our expanded team of contributors from across the region to dig up the stories and analysis you won’t find in the corporate or state media.

Since founder Ben Dangl first launched the website in 2003, our work has been read by thousands of people around the world each week, has been translated widely, used in countless classrooms and activist circles, and often breaks stories long before they appear (if at all) in major news outlets. For over a decade, UDW has been one of the leading outlets in English covering the rise and challenges of Latin America’s new left, the victories and defeats of the region’s vibrant social movements, and the webs of imperialism and power shaping hemispheric relations.

We need your help to continue this crucial work at a momentous time in Latin America and the wider world. Don’t let the right wing and corporate media steal the narrative! By funding Upside Down World, you are empowering radical journalism at its finest. Please lend a hand to help UDW expand its critical work.

We would be glad to answer any questions or concerns you might have.  We thank you in advance for helping make Upside Down World’s relaunch possible.

Sincerely,
Ben, Cyril, Heather, Nancy and the rest of the UDW team.

Cyril Mychalejko
cmychalejko@gmail.com

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To donate to Upside Down World
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Paypal: Specify, when making donation (donate) that your funds are for Upside Down World: 

Full Paypal link: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?token=7l97UpYwBXUfLLFTMo1-FRN8eyRZ16z56czbxec94vY62vtCMjFxPZUnHY41fTKiDLFu7m&country.x=US&locale.x=US

Send a check: Make check out to "Upside DownWorld/PJC" and send it to:

The Peace and Justice Center
60 Lake Street, 1C, Burlington Waterfront
Burlington, Vermont, 05401

Renegotiating NAFTA Will Only Serve the Rich -- Just Like It Always Has

By David L. Wilson, Truthout

Monday, August 21, 2017

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect at midnight on January  1,1994. That night, thousands of Indigenous Mayans rose up in arms in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, seizing at least five towns and declaring NAFTA a "death certificate" for people like themselves. This was just the beginning of Mexico's troubles in a year that brought countless protests, hotly disputed elections and the assassinations of two of the then-ruling party's leaders. 1994 ended with a sudden devaluation of the peso, the start of an economic collapse from which the country didn't recover fully for years.

NAFTA is back in the news this month: On August 16, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer met with his counterparts from Canada and Mexico, the other two NAFTA nations, to open talks on renegotiating the pact.

While it's true that NAFTA was just one of the many problems Mexico had in the 1990s, we have to wonder, given the renewed focus on the trade accord, why US mainstream media have carried so little discussion of the events that accompanied NAFTA's rollout in Mexico.[…]

Read the full article:

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41671-renegotiating-nafta-will-only-serve-the-rich-just-like-it-always-has