You are currently browsing the archive for the May 2007: Bolivia's social revolution category.
Tough Luck
by Dawn Moore & Diana Young
Does getting ‘tough on crime’ work? Challenging the dangerous popularity of heavy-handed justice.
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire
by Jim Harding
There are many reasons to oppose the nuclear industry. Here are five of the most compelling.
Bolivia Rising
by Jorge Uzon
Documenting the challenges and hopes of Bolivians through President Evo Morales’ first year in power.
By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007
This is written in the night.
In war the dark is on nobody’s
side, in love the dark confirms
that we are together.JOHN BERGER
RESEARCH FOR, AND feedback from, the last issue of Briarpatch (“Feminism 3.1,” March/April 2007) found me grappling with the claims and ideas of “masculists” and “men’s rights groups.” The experience of wading into a worldview at once so familiar and so fundamentally different from my own was both disorienting and deeply challenging — and it forced me to think long and hard about the concept of victimhood, and how we relate to the suffering of others.
Masculism and men’s rights groups arose in the last couple of decades as a backlash to the gains fought for and won by the feminist movement — a sort of rearguard action in defence of male privilege. Dr. Michael Flood, a pro-feminist sociologist of men’s studies, defines the masculist worldview thus:
Words and photographs by Jon Elmer
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007
For four weeks in the fall of 2006, photojournalist Jon Elmer traveled through South Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut — the front lines of Israel’s summer war against Hezbollah — documenting the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastation and Hezbollah’s declared victory.
![[image]](http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com/batches/may07/Elmer1.jpg)
THIS HEZBOLLAH RECONSTRUCTION tent in Dahiya, a southern suburb of Beirut, is the headquarters for the rebuilding process in Lebanon. Since the bombing ended in August 2006, Hezbollah officials have been meeting with families and merchants to register losses and coordinate compensation.
According to Dr. Bilal Naim, the chief of Hezbollah’s reconstruction effort, more than 5,000 housing units in the Dahiya suburb were destroyed and 17,000 more were damaged. Twenty schools were bombed and three were completely leveled. Entire apartment blocks were flattened under massive Israeli bombardment.
![[image]](http://www.briarpatchmagazine.com/batches/may07/Ars1.jpg)
Three-story-high dumptrucks carry coal out of Cerrejón for export to Canada and other countries.
Words and photographs by Chris Arsenault
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007
Thirteen years ago, the world turned upside-down for Miluolis Arregoces and his five children.
The family lived in Caracolí, a small farming community in Colombia’s parched La Guajira province, until bulldozers contracted by El Cerrejón, the world’s largest open-pit coal mine, demolished their home. Buttressed by a heavy police presence, mine officials confiscated land from around 30 families in Caracolí. The mine says some residents were compensated. Mr. Arregoces says he received nothing.
By Ashley Walters
Briarpatch Magazine
May 2007
“We sell water . . . so we’ve got to be clever.”
Senior vice president of Nestle Waters’ Global Marketing and Communications division
IT OFTEN SELLS FOR three times the price of gasoline, and more and more of us are guzzling it — even though we can get the equivalent for next to nothing simply by tapping into the publicly owned infrastructure. It’s bottled water, and it’s a lucrative business. But why would we pay 240 to 10,000 times more for something that we can get for less than a penny by simply turning on a tap?
