NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

In the middle of this year's regional seminar of the UN C24, the proceedings stopped briefly in order to recognize the release of Oscar Lopez Rivera, a long-time Puerto Rican political prisoner. Rivera was part of the Puerto Rican independence group named FALN, which was involved in more than 100 bombings around the US during the 1970s. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy along with other crimes and spent 35 years in prison. Rivera has been mentioned each year I have attended the regional seminar, as some Latin American countries feel a strong sense of solidarity with Puerto Rico and its independence activists, and therefore consider his case to be that of a political prisoner or a prisoner of war, who should have been subject to international court proceedings, as he was fighting for the liberation of Puerto Rico from US colonial control. Vilma Reveron, who frequently attends the seminars to discuss the state of affairs in Puerto Rico made the announcement and held up her

Published on Monday, December 9, 2013 by The Guardian If Nelson Mandela Really Had Won, He Wouldn't Be Seen as a Universal Hero Mandela must have died a bitter man. To honor his legacy, we should focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to by Slavoj Žižek     ‘It is all too simple to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism a real option?’ (Photograph: Media24/Gallo Images/Getty Images) In the last two decades of his life, Nelson Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and anti-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Robert Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multiparty democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well-integrated into the global market

I wrote about last week that I was working with the Office of Senator Frank Blas Jr. on their Real Stories. Real People. project, which has been working to collect the stories of our manamko' who survived World War II and also push for war reparations with the US Government. Most of the discussion on island around World War II happens around July of each year when the island transforms itself to celebrate Liberation Day. This year the Senator's office wanted to do something different and try and get the island to remember its history and this important event, not when the war ended, but when it began, in December. Part of my job with the office was conducting researching and helping the Senator write four columns on what sort of lessons we might draw about the war, by looking at it from its tragic and traumatic beginnings, rather than its celebratory and grateful ending. These columns were published in the Marianas Variety over the past month. I've decided to collect them

In my endless quest to make sure that I always have too many things to do and not enough time to do them in, I've started working with the office of Senator Frank Blas Jr. on an event to be held on December 8th to commemorate the invasion of Guam in 1941 by the Japanese. Each year there is a Paka-level-strength-typhoon of memorialized and commemorating for the reoccupation of the island by US force, known as Liberation Day, but very little takes place to remember the island was first cast into the fire of war. This event will feature a photo exhibit at the Cathedral Gallery in Hagatna, a mass on December 8th as well as a war storytelling event to take place after the mass. This project is the most recent part of Senator Blas' push to get war reparations for Chamorros. If you want more information on that issue then they have created a website devoted to it called Guam War Survivor Story . I'm pasting information on the project below, the photo exhibit and also some info on

I have only been in South Korea for two days and I have already met dozens of political prisoners, some of whom were imprisoned for a matter of months, others for years. When I say political prisoner I don't mean someone arrested at a protest, but rather people who have been condemned and wrongfully incarcerated by the South Korean government. In fact, within the span of one day, I met three men who were political prisoners longer than Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in South Africa. I didn’t make this connection right away (this connection to Mandela), but it was something that was regularly reiterated throughout the day. I’ll return to this at the end of the post. Most people on Guam or in the United States don’t know anything about South Korea, and certainly not about its government. But that is why nationalism and the imaginary cognitive mapping that it provides is so important when dealing with “the rest of the world.” Most people might know about the Korean War or know that S