Grupo Raices and Justice for Colombia will be hosting a film screening on Thursday July 28th in Liberty Hall at 6pm.
We will be showing the documentary “El Baile Rojo” (The Red Dance). The film is about the experience of the Patriotic Union, a left-wing political party which tried to challenge the dominant oligarchy in Colombia [...]

Grupo Raíces will be hosting a film screening in Dublin city centre on Thursday April 21st. We will be showing the documentary Toribio: the war in Cauca by Hollman Morris. Hollman is one of the bravest Colombian journalists, whose television documentaries have exposed the reality of the Colombian civil war. He has recently been forced [...]

Latin America Solidarity Centre’s Thursday night talk this Thursday, the 17th Feb will be held at 7.30pm in the meeting room above Connolly books in Essex St, Dublin. The speaker, Stephen Sefton, who has worked for a number of years on a project in Esteli, Nicaragua, will give a country update. Stephen worked for Comlaimh [...]

The results of the Venezuelan parliamentary elections have been met with almost unanimous negative responses in the Western press. Typical of the headlines was one in the Irish Times on the 28th of September: “Opposition gains loosen Chavez’s grip on power“. While this is technically correct it’s far from the full picture. As the last [...]

Is Not How It Looks. She is Just My Assistant
The appalling latest news in the world of celebrity “entertainment,” which was come out of the blue only this week, is the confession from Latin heart-thrub and all-round croner Randy Martin that he has been leading a double-life all this time. In secret, and behind everyone’s [...]

Fordlandia: the rise and fall of Henry Ford’s forgotten jungle city by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books, New York 2009
This book uncovers the complex history of Henry Ford’s attempt to create a secure source of natural latex in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1920s and ‘30s.  But it also reveals the complex and often contradictory character [...]

At the heart of Rod Stoneman’s book lie questions about power. Specifically, the power to construct reality, and to create both ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’.
My first tangible encounter with apartheid was probably Richard Attenborough’s 1987 film, Cry Freedom. The moving images brought to life my incomplete, abstract knowledge in powerful ways. Apartheid, for me, was to [...]

Chavismo and democracy
The assertion that Venezuela has become a more democratic society under Hugo Chavez is bitterly contested. We can pass over the repeated claims that Chavez is a brutal dictator who has turned Venezuela into a communist state - the people making such allegations are certainly not troubled by the burden of proof. But [...]