Latina Lista: News from the Latinx perspective > Life Issues > Environment > Latina Lista correspondent reports Mexican government now identifies source of swine flu

Latina Lista correspondent reports Mexican government now identifies source of swine flu

By Anahi Parra


LatinaLista — For the first time since the earthquake in 1985, Mexico City is paralized. Schools are closed until May 6th, as well as museums, libraries, movie theatres and other cultural venues. Like in a science-fiction movie, it seems that the dwellers of one of the biggest cities in the world have disappeared, the streets are empty and the subway, usually crowded, is now deserted.
The outbreak of the swine flu, officially announced by Mexican authorities last Friday, has spread during the last weekend with as many as 103 people killed by the virus. The flu has spread to the United States, and more recently, Brazil, Canada, Europe, Israel, and New Zeland, compelling the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic. World stocks fell, especially those related to travel and leisure, a measure that is obviously related to the warnings made by the EU to not to travel to Mexico and the U.S.
Mexican authorities have tried to direct the public’s attention to solutions more than origins of the virus, in order to come up with an effective plan to solve this emergency situation. However, there is a general feeling of mistrust among the population towards the government due to rumours saying that the Mexican government knew about the virus since the beginning of April, but kept the information to itself.
Recently, a Mexican newspaper reported the case of Adela María Gutiérrez Cruz, a 39 year-old-woman from the southern state of Oaxaca who is now identified as the human being where the virus mutated. María’s symptoms where those of a severe pneumonia, but the samples taken from her lungs and liver after she died revealed the presence of a rare influeza that later on, turned out to be the now notorious swine flu.


Whatever the origins, the Health Secretariat had been notified about the case since April 13th, but the alert was given ten days later. The delay was due to the time it took to send samples to laboratories in the U.S. and Canada for an accurate diagnosis.
These cases reveal the lack of planning, medical materials, and general financial resources needed to cope with emergencies. In addition to discussions about what has to be done right now, some journalists haven’t missed the oportunity to point out Mexico’s lack of investment in scientific research — a problem that has been present here for decades and only draws attention once in a while, when everybody notices that science is somehow helpful.
There is also a general sense of living in a “paranoid”situation created by both the government and the media. Some friends of mine have referred to the empty streets as the “creepy” product of the excessive attention given to the swine flu, stressing the fact that the constant bombardment of data is not helpful in understanding the actual consequences and risks of the virus.
The Ministry of Health website is not updated as often as expected. Instead, the local government in Mexico City is handing out face masks and focusing on hygiene habits, such as washing hands frequently and avoiding any physical contact.
At the time of writing this post, the toll of victims has peaked to 149, which has led several governments to recommend that their citizens avoid unnecessary travel to Mexico. In a population of almost 110 million people, this measure just makes me think that paranoia is somehow blurring an accurate assesment of what is going in Mexico.
Unfortunately, we can already feel some immediate consequences: empty streets, closed businesses, and fewer tourists coming to Mexico. On the international stage, pork meat coming from Mexico is rejected, while some countries subject travelers coming from Mexican territory to exhaustive check-ups before allowing them to enter.
I know that despite the silent chaos we are witnessing now, this will be over soon and will become the most recent in a long list of international medical crises: mad cow disease, SARS, China’s poisoned milk scandal. However, I’m curious about the long-term cultural consequences.
Will we become germophobic? It makes me sad to think that the Mexican tradition of greeting someone with a kiss on the cheek might disappear, especially because I believe the origins of this crisis have less to do with a particular virus, and everything to do with the dynamics that allow diseases to spread. For instance, the appaling conditions in the food industry, and the lack of basic resources such as medicine and running water for Mexico City’s poorest inhabitants.
My hope is that this crisis will be a wake-up call to authorities to sufficiently fund medical research, public health care, and basic infrastructure to improve the living conditions of all Mexicans.

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Comment(15)

  • Hissy
    April 28, 2009 at 1:49 pm

    gee…how can you blame Americans for this one?

  • Karen
    April 28, 2009 at 8:32 pm

    They won’t change unless they are forced. NAFTA is the root of this problem and it has to be renegotiated or eliminated. The ruling class there isn’t even embarassed to live in a third world country. They should want to make improvements and make their country among the best. Who wants to be the source of a pandemic because of unregulated, unsanitary foreign factory farms?
    Google La Gloria, Vercruz.

  • Evelyn
    April 29, 2009 at 11:28 pm

    Thats easy to answer Hissy, because an American Co. Is to blame.
    Several days after news broke of a possible link between Mexico-based hog CAFOs and the rapid spread of a novel swine-flu strain, what have we learned?
    • Clarifying details about respiratory ailments in the Perote area of Vera Cruz State—where U.S. pork behemoth Smithfield Foods raises nearly a million hogs a year in large confinement buildings, under a subsidiary called Granjas Carroll—have emerged. In my original post on this topic, I didn’t fully understand that the outbreak of a virulent respiratory condition in the town of La Gloria—located near Smithfield’s farming operations—wasn’t initially identified as swine flu. The disease emerged as early as February and infected 60 percent of the town’s 1,800 inhabitants, according to the widely cited blog Biosurveillance, run by the U.S. disease-tracking consultancy Veratract (which claims the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Pan-American Health Organization as clients). Three children died during the outbreak, Veratract reports. Residents blamed the Granjas Carroll confinements for the outbreak; and local authorities evidently agreed. “Health workers soon intervened, sealing off the town and spraying chemicals to kill the flies [which grew in swarms on Granjas Caroll’s manure lagoons] that were reportedly swarming through people’s homes,” according to a Monday account in the Guardian.
    There was evidently much confusion about the cause of the disease. “According to residents, the [Granjas Carroll] denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu,’” Veratract reports. And “State health officials also implemented a vaccination campaign against influenza.” However, “physicians ruled out influenza as the cause of the outbreak.” Yet the symptoms experienced in La Gloria closely resemble those that would later be diagnosed as swine flu, according to several accounts. The Guardian quotes a La Gloria resident:
    The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu] …. High fevers, pain in the muscles and the joints, terrible headaches, some vomiting and diarrhoea. The illness came on very quickly and whole families were laid up.
    • On Monday, Mexican authorities revealed that at least one victim of the original outbreak definitely had the same strain of swine flu now wreaking havoc in Mexico City—and his is the earliest known case of the disease. The Associated Press reported Monday that:
    Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova said tests now show that a 4-year-old boy contracted swine flu in Veracruz state, where a community has been protesting pollution from a large pig farm, at least two weeks before the first death confirmed by the Mexican government. The farm is run by Granjas Carroll de Mexico.
    The question now becomes: Did the outbreak that started in February and killed three kids involve swine flu—or was the 4-year-old boy’s infection an isolated case? If not—if the La Gloria epidemic turns out to be ground zero of the infection—could the swine-flu outbreak have originated literally in the shadows of Granjas Carroll’s hog confinements, and not have some tie to intensive hog farming? That’s a question that health authorities have to vigorously pursue.
    It’s important to note as well that non-symptomatic pigs can carry flu. Here is a line from the World Health Organization’s recently posted FAQ on swine flu: “The virus is spread among pigs by aerosols, direct and indirect contact, and asymptomatic carrier pigs” (emphasis mine).
    • Citizens of La Gloria, as well as some Mexican public-health workers, have pointed to flies congregating on manure piles as a possible vector for the flu, as I reported in my earlier post. Several commenters dismissed that possibility, denying that flies can carry flu viruses. From what I can tell, those folks are wrong. I recently got my hands on a paper by an international team of scientists—including Jay Graham and Ellen Silbergeld of Johns Hopkins—published in the May-June 2008 Public Health Reports. The paper, “The Animal-Human Interface and Infectious Disease in Industrial Food Animal Production: Rethinking Biosecurity and Biocontainment” (PDF), points to a concrete example of flies acting as a flu vector:
    [R]esearch conducted during an HPAI outbreak in Kyoto, Japan, in 2004 found that flies caught in proximity to broiler facilities where the outbreak took place carried the same strains of H5N1 influenza virus as found in chickens of an infected poultry farm.
    Untreated manure in lagoons, pointed to by La Gloria residents as a health hazard, can indeed contain flu strains.
    Animal biosolids contain a range of pathogens that may include influenza viruses, which can persist for extended periods of time in the absence of specific treatment.
    Regulatory regimes, in the U.S. and elsewhere, tend to be lax. Sanitary laws demand the treatment of human sewage; animal waste is a different story:
    Apart from some use in animal feeds and aquaculture, poultry and swine wastes are almost entirely managed by land disposal. Pathogens can survive in untreated and land-disposed wastes from food animals for extended periods of time—between two and 12 months for bacteria and between three and six months for viruses. [emphasis mine]
    The amount of untreated waste allowed to fester in CAFOs globally is stunning.
    Workers involved in removing the wastes from animal houses, transporting wastes, and spreading wastes on land are especially at risk of exposure to pathogens through inhalation, dermal contact, and hand-to-mouth transfers.
    Regulations for protecting those workers tend to be … not so strict.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~
    This same American owned company was kicked out of Roumania in Aug. 2007
    AFP)”Eleven unauthorised pig farms belonging to US company Smithfield in Romania are to be shut down following an outbreak of swine fever, the head of the national sanitary and veterinary authority said Friday.
    The agency will also send a veterinary doctor to each of Smithfield’s 25 farms in western Timis county to monitor whether sanitary standards were being respected and to oversee the killing of some 40,000 pigs from the two farms where the outbreak occurred, ANSVSA director Radu Roatis said.
    Veterinary authorities found this week that 11 Smithfield farms — revised from 10 initially — had not been authorised to operate in Romania.
    Swine fever was detected during the week in two farms in western Timis county belonging to the US company. One of them did not have an authorisation to operate.
    Roatis also criticised on Friday the local veterinary authorities for failing to report the deaths of several hundreds of pigs in recent weeks, before the outbreak was found.
    Smithfield, which owns 33 farms in Romania, has since the beginning of the year received fines totaling 130,000 euros (177,700 dollars) for failing to respect health norms.
    The company, in Romania since 2004, has already invested some 200 million dollars there and plans to invest a further 850 million in the next 10 years.”
    ~~~~~~~~~~
    Huffington also carried the same story about Mexico
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/mexican-lawmaker-factory_b_191579.html

  • Karen
    April 30, 2009 at 12:51 pm

    Re: “how can you blame Americans for this one?”
    Nobody is blaming the American people. But I do blame our government and the Mexican government and the American Virginia based factory farm that operates in la Gloria, Veracruz without a waste treatment plant. They have big ‘fecal lagoons’ near their plant full of flies that swarm the whole town. Sickening! 60% of the people in La Gloria got sick last February.
    What made that company think that they could operate this way without creating disease? And why does our government and the Mexican government allow it? They let these corporations do whatever they want, and to hell with the effect on everybody else.
    Obama said during the campaign that he would renegotiate NAFTA and I am holding him to his word! NAFTA needs to include environmental regulations.

  • Horace
    April 30, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    Get real Karen! Obsolete farming methods and the inability of Mexico to compete with the rest of the world is the problem, not NAFTA. The small farms of Mexico are inefficient, as they are all over the world. It wouldn’t matter if NAFTA disappeared, ultimately the Mexican farmer would remain non-competitive. It’s time for Mexico to change its economic practices, as the rest of the world isn’t going to be charitable in its business competition.
    The legitimately elected government of Mexico, the only entity that can abrogate its obligations under the treaty, has said that they like NAFTA. I suppose that you think that the U.S. should insult Mexico by telling them that we’re nullifying the treaty because their government is too incompetent to make the decision itself. Who are you to say otherwise, as you have no dog in that hunt? Send your rant to the Mexican government, because therein the solution to the mass exodus of its citizens lies. You waste your time repeating the same crap over and over again.

  • Evelyn
    May 1, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    Horace
    There is no legitmately elected government in Mexico. The U.S. gov. (Bush) helped hoist corrupt officials to power in exchange for access to the citizens part of the wealth of that country.
    ~
    Stealing Mexico – Bush Team Helps ‘Floridize’ Mexican Presidential Election
    author: Greg Palast
    found in the Bay Area Indy Media
    Stealing Mexico – Bush Team Helps ‘Floridize’ Mexican Presidential Election
    by Greg Palast
    George Bush’s operatives have plans to jigger with the upcoming elections. I’m not talking about the November ’06 vote in the USA (though they have plans for that, too). I’m talking about the election this Sunday in Mexico for their Presidency.
    It begins with an FBI document marked, “Counterterrorism” and “Foreign Intelligence Collection” and “Secret.” Date: “9/17/2001,” six days after the attack on the World Trade towers. It’s nice to know the feds got right on the ball, if a little late.
    What does this have to do with jiggering Mexico’s election? Hold that thought.
    This document is what’s called a “guidance” memo for using a private contractor to provide databases on dangerous foreigners. Good idea. We know the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf Emirates. So you’d think the “Intelligence Collection” would be aimed at getting info on the guys in the Gulf.
    No so. When we received the document, we obtained as well its classified appendix. The target nations for “foreign counterterrorism investigation” were nowhere near the Persian Gulf. Every one was in Latin America — Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico and a handful of others. See one of the documents yourself.
    Read all story here
    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/341919.shtml
    ~
    BALLOT BOXES ARE THE FREAKING PUBLIC DUMP!
    “One of Obrador’s aides, Claudia Sheinbaum, went on to claim that their party had found “very grave inconsistencies” in 50,000 polling booths, including 18,646 in which there were more votes cast than registered voters.”
    “Supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador show electoral ballots that were found in a public dump.”
    “IFE’s Claim that 98.5 Percent of Votes Had Been Counted Was False: Authorities Now Oppose Recount”
    “Tuesday’s “discovery” of 2.5 million votes hidden by IFE since Sunday’s election,”
    “Police cordon a Nezahuacoyotl garbage dump where ballots and ballot-boxes from three precincts won by López Obrador were discovered on Tuesday. …The ballots from three precincts in the city of Nezahuacoyotl – a López Obrador stronghold – were discovered yesterday in the municipal garbage dump. The results from two of those precincts have been missing, since Sunday, from IFE’s vote tallies.”
    “An IFE official, ambushed by television reporters, exacerbated the crime yesterday when she blamed the Mexican military: the Armed Forces, not IFE, are supposedly guarding the ballots, she said, in defense of her bureaucracy. This, sources close to the military told Narco News, produced significant anger among the military generals and troops”
    http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2006/07/342179.shtml

  • Anna
    May 1, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    Horace: Obsolete farming methods and the inability of Mexico to compete with the rest of the world is the problem
    It’s hard to compete with the massive subsidies doled out to American and European farms. It’s hardly the “free market” that NAFTA was meant to embody. Not defending the Mexican government and its flaws, just being realistic about how the American way of life is maintained by exploiting countries that are constantly being undermined in their attempts to compete.

  • Horace
    May 2, 2009 at 8:20 am

    Evelyn said: “There is no legitmately elected government in Mexico. The U.S. gov. (Bush) helped hoist corrupt officials to power in exchange for access to the citizens part of the wealth of that country.”
    The rest of the world accepts that it is, so all the rants from you about this mean nothing. I don’t think that many people believe you, Evelyn. I see you as one whose opinions are dismissed as those of a wacko Chomskyite communist, filled with hate for this country. Nothing of what you say or do will make me or those who actually do love this country believe otherwise.

  • Evelyn
    May 2, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    Nothing of what you say or do will make me or those who actually do love this country believe otherwise.
    Ha, thats what you said when I told you Obama was going to be our next President Horace. anyway…….
    I dont care what you or the other pseudo-patriot racists think or believe.
    People like you need to be exposed so average Americans can see who is behind the lies, hate, and demonization of Hispanics especially Mexicans or anything having to do with Mexico except Mexican food!
    Who the anti-Hispanic extremest racists hate groups really are and what their motive is.

  • Horace
    May 3, 2009 at 4:11 pm

    Your lies are exposed every day, Evelyn, as Latinos account for a very large number of legal immigrants to this country every year. It is your racial bias and that of the Latino hegemonist activists that motivate demands that illegal Mexican immigrants are also deserving of citizenship. Your only motivation is to make Latinos a majority in order to gain political power, regardless of whether it makes economic sense to the well-being of this country. As for hate, I reserve my loathing to ignorant white hating racist traitors like you, blinded from the fact that it is just plain stupid to import poverty and illiteracy.
    Ultimately, if amnesty is granted, it will be the ignorance of these illegal immigrants that will be presented as characteristic of the Latino community, so be careful what you wish for. The 20 million believe that they are doing what is right for them and not entirely to blame for their illegal behavior. They will be the faces in the welfare lines and the burden that the rest of America will have to bear. Liberals will then wonder stupidly why Latinos are not represented proportionately in the highest positions of government or academia, and then demand that the rules be changed to lower the standards to ascertain a certain quota is achieved. It’s happened before and it will happen again.

  • Evelyn
    May 4, 2009 at 1:20 pm

    Your crystal ball is WRONG as usual Horace.
    You should get a real job instead of trying to predict the future like the Know Nothings of another era.
    Those immigrants the Know Nothings predicted a dire future about turned out to be the very opposite.
    Mexicans are hard workers, you could stand to learn a thing or two from them instead of blaming your failures on them.

  • cookie
    May 5, 2009 at 12:19 pm

    There is no race/ethic group that can be attributed the blanket statement that they are all hard workers. I live in the southwest and believe me, there are just as many lazy Mexicans are there are whites or blacks.
    I haven’t read that Horace is a failure or that he blames anyone for his accused failures. Is this the typical character asassination that your side does when you can’t win an argument along with the race card pulling?

  • Evelyn
    May 5, 2009 at 7:05 pm

    I agree with you Anna, here is an excerpt from a book on some of the reasons so many people south of our border are forced to come here to follow the wealth of their nations.
    Violence in America is today a manifestation of our society and history, of a never ending thirst for blood, conquest, oppression and death that sprung from the first moment of Puritan arrival. Before and after the Revolutionary war Americans participated in one of the greatest acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing the world has ever witnessed. Millions upon millions of native Indians were slaughtered, raped and cleansed from the lands of North America. Manifest destiny ransacked from Atlantic to Pacific like a devastating hurricane, destroying everything native people thought precious and sacred. Wars against native populations extinguishing the energies of men, women, children and elderly alike. The American thirst for violence had been born.
    Native peoples’ lands were taken from them; lies, manipulations and betrayals erased their tribes from the homes they once knew and cherished. Replanted into hellholes called reservations, Indians were left to rot away their existence, given only the evil of Firewater to wash away their inner demons and scars in a land both alien and inhospitable. Hidden from the voracious Anglo onslaught, Indians of talent and ability were left to dwell on a future lost through the disappearance of opportunity. Disease, depression, lack of education and incessant poverty soon followed. Demons of a life wasted and opportunity lost consumed those who escaped the barrel of a gun and the virus of the white man.
    Entire ethnicities, tribes, languages and cultures were eviscerated from the face of the Earth by those whose importance of property and ownership superceded the respect for human life. Beautiful peoples took with them to the grave lives living free, roaming pristine and untouched forests, deserts and prairies, being one with nature, respecting everything that breathed and a spirituality that has much to offer our capitalistic civilization. Advanced civilizations in wisdom and spirituality, yet seen as savages to the “more sophisticated” European people, native peoples’ way of life was vanished, never to fully flourish again. Millions ethnically cleansed, millions whose lives were made barren, all making way for the destructive bulldozer ravaging land and man. The United States of America had sprung to life, a trail of victims visible everywhere the giant walked.
    The U.S. omnipotent reach has had devastating effects in Latin America as well. The US government has interfered with the internal governance of several Central and South American nations in its quest to maintain its form of democracy and capitalism. The US has meddled in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Brazil, not to mention Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. The Evil Empire has imposed coups and US friendly dictatorships and leaders in many of the above mentioned nations. In Central America it supplied death squads with military support and logistics. In Chile, Argentina and Brazil, dictators, with the consent of their American masters, initiated a war against leftist dissenters and opponents, leading to the disappearance of thousands of men and women. In Panama, Manuel Noriega, a former CIA puppet, betrayed his American masters and hell was unleashed on Panama City by the US military. Anywhere from 3,000 to 10,000 civilians died as the U.S. pursued the capture of one man.
    Today, the U.S. is once more interfering in the destabilization of Latin American nations. Haiti is but the latest but by no means the last country to be burned by the searing claws of America’s might. President Aristide, a champion of the poor and a seeker of equality and justice, stepped on US shoes with his defiance of neo-liberal threats imposed on him by Haiti’s elite and the Bush administration. In essence, he sealed his own fate, and the clandestine coup sponsored by the US removed Aristide from office. As a result, Haiti, which has been the slave shop for US corporations for decades, will remain poor and exploited, a cesspool of poverty and hopelessness for its citizens.
    Colombia has, thanks to the US, become a militarized zone where hundreds of people are killed on a yearly basis. Civil war has ensnarled the nation, instability runs amok and the livelihood of rural peasants has been destroyed by the coca eradication program enacted the America that has ruined arable land. With the potential of large oil reserves present under the nation’s lands and the already discovered exploitable natural resources prevalent throughout the countryside, Colombia has become a target for US interests. Oil and energy companies, along with their growing infrastructure, are already protected by the US military as they continue their exploitation of the nation.
    Meanwhile, the U.S. already has its sites set on destabilizing Venezuela and a harsh critic of the US, Hugo Chavez. Forces now at work, supported and maintained by the US, are slowly setting in motion mechanisms that, it is hoped, will unseat Chavez from office, whether by force or other means, thereby installing a friendly US pro-neo-liberal puppet that will allow for the pilfering of Venezuelan oil by the U.S. A coup, assassination and or invasion are not out of the realm of possibilities, especially when the Devil’s excrement is involved.
    What the U.S. has done to Latin America and its hundreds of millions of people is the imposition – by its proctors in high office and its bullying threats involving capital – of market colonialism that has had the effect of imprisoning and enslaving the masses. Neo-liberal ideology has indebted most “third-world” nations, not simply those of Latin America, and it has furthered indigence, lack of education, the corrosive caste system upon which millions are born into, inequality, injustice, hunger, disease, suffering, loss of opportunity and death.
    Latin American nations have been made worse off since the inception of neo-liberal economic models forcefully imposed by the U.S. As a result, labor has been made cheaper for US corporations, translating into cheaper goods for its citizens. Through the back-breaking slave labor, conditions and wages Latin Americans are exploited so that we in the rich north can consume to our hearts content. Yet millions upon millions live in squalor, surviving day to day, usually earning less than two dollars a day, living in feeble conditions and without the chance of ever improving their lives due to the non-existence of opportunity.
    The U.S. domination of Latin America has resulted in the mass migration towards our borders. When mechanisms such as NAFTA and neo-liberal tools are put in place in countries such as Mexico, only the elite benefit and profit. Everyone else is made worse off; jobs are meager, scarce and dehumanizing. US subsidies to agriculture have devastated rural farmers and workers in Latin America. When these people leave for the cities they find that employment is non-existent and life unbearable. The push to migrate north, where natives no longer perform the jobs of hard labor, is tremendous.
    Thus, today we see millions of undocumented workers living in the US. It is the U.S. imposed economic models and trade mechanisms that have created the eruption of Latin slave labor in our nation. Is it any coincidence that the mass migration north began after NAFTA was imposed on the region? The only entities that have benefited from NAFTA, both in the US and Mexico, are the corporations and the few ruling elite. Everyone else has been thrust into the realm of exploitation and failure.
    The near enslavement of Latin America for the benefit of the U.S. has devastated millions of lives, talent and ability. It has created colonized economies, based on US crony capitalism that has exploited both man and land. Public companies and utilities have been privatized and subjugated to fit the Leviathan’s goals. The rich have become richer while the poor poorer, and this has led to the greatest disparity in wealth the region has ever seen.
    The U.S. has created a region that has for the last fifty years been subservient to the US. Its many puppets and proctors have helped devastate lives and subjugate the masses. Democracy has historically been an illusion. Fraud, coups, assassinations, destabilization, dictatorships and a state of perpetual wretchedness have been used by the U.S. as tools to control Latin America. When the will of the people triumphs, such as in Chile with Allende, Venezuela with Chavez or Haiti with Aristide, the U.S. imposes its will in order to decimate democracy and maintain a system that benefits the US, its corporations and the elite.
    Social democracy and economic models that benefit the masses are not allowed to flourish lest they become a threat to the US. Systems of governance that benefit the people are never allowed to prosper, lest the “pestilence” gain momentum and traverse like a virus beyond borders, giving millions of destitute people hope. Only US style crony capitalism that makes serfs and slaves of the masses for the greater benefit of the Leviathan and the elite oligarchs can exist. Only US style debauched democracy can stand, where the will of the people is silenced and their incredible ability quashed.

  • Horace
    May 6, 2009 at 7:47 pm

    If you agree with this in its entirety, Evelyn, you’d have to be as ugly as the country that this person describes. How can you claim to love a country with so much to answer for? I aver that you actually hate this country and find it entirely without redeaming qualtities. If you still love this country after advocating this crap as fact, then you are one of the biggest hypocrites of all time.

  • Evelyn
    May 7, 2009 at 6:58 pm

    The hypocrit is you Horace for wanting to deny the facts.
    Tell me which one of those facts do you deny and what proof do you offer.
    If you cant at least try to spin your way out of this one with a lie then you will have to eat your words. Enjoy your dinner!

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