Global Education Magazine: World Health Day (April 7th 2013)

IN MEMORIAM...
La santé humaine est le reflet de la santé de la Planète. Il
est fondamental le fait de partager les connaissances et de
fortifier les alliances pour renouveler l'esprit-conscience
dans tous les coins du monde. D'après Global Education
Magazine nous plaidons pour la Santé Globale comme un
élément essentiel pour obtenir le bonheur de la
citoyenneté.
Human Health is a reflection of Earth Health. It is essential
to share knowledge to uplift our bonds and renew the spirit-
consciousness in every corner of the planet. In Global
Education Magazine we stand up for Global Health as a
fundamental way to reach human happiness.
La salud humana es un reflejo de la salud de la Tierra. Es
fundamental compartirconocimientos y fortalecer alianzas
para renovar el espíritu-consciencia en todos los rincones
del mundo. Desde GEM abogamos a favor de la Salud
Global como elementoesencial para lograr la felicidad
ciudadana.
Здоровье человека есть прямое отражение здоровья
всей Земли. Очень важно делиться своими знаниями по
преодолению препятствий и укреплению духовного
сознания в каждом уголке планеты. В своём журнале
"Глобал Эдьюкейшн Мэгэзин" ("Журнал глобального
образования") мы поддерживаем глобальное
здравоохранение как основу достижения счастья всего
человечества.
La sanità umana è un riflesso della sanità della Terra. È
essenziale condividere le conoscenze e rafforzare le
alleanze per rinnovare lo spirito-coscienza in ogni angolo
del mondo. Noi di GEM riteniamo che la Salute Globale sia
elemento essenziale per raggiungere la felicità dei cittadini.
©DanielLópez

Namaste! The main goal of the Global Education Magazine is to unite
the cooperative efforts of the individual-society-specie for the creation of inter-
ethnic dialogues that derive in the construction of a collective intelligence
focused on achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Like an
isolated neuron or an ant, which cannot contribute categorically to the network
structure to which it belongs, mankind must develop a social learning, based
on peaceful coexistence and respect for biodiversity ofdifferent ecosystems.
The architects ofthe future ofeducation should expand existing cognitive
horizons through a multidimensional epistemological revolution that includes
Earth-homeland as commons home and garden of the humanity. Thus, the
knowledge construction of the 21st century entails the inclusion of
morphogenesis and cosmological perspective for metaphysical understanding
of the human species, because our particles were born in the first few seconds
of the Cosmos, our carbon atoms were created in a previous sun and our
molecules were formed on Earth. The human species is a cosmic entity
interlinked with the same future destiny, whose estigmergic evolution is the
result of a nutrigenomic colloquium of thousands of years between our genome
and our interaction with environmental and nutritional resources.
For this reason, it is necessary to reform human communications
through an intellectual, moral and emotional metacognitive effort that warns the
complexity of the MDGs as a solidary super-organism interconnected by
quantum electrodynamic which is manifested in the interactions of cosmic
particles. To do so, we must promote the humanist philosophy UBUNTU, as
thought, awareness, and understanding metastructure of the sociobiology and
antropoetic evolutionary convergence. In this sense, the Ubuntu ethological
polymorphism represents wisdom to learn to grow together as a world-society,
because the ontologic pluricultural simbiosophy adjacent in its spiritual essence
is an emergent element for ethical management of the future.
Cultivating a better future is possible and we can do it in a collective,
justice and solidarity way through a responsible and creative participatory
democracy. We must be self-critical of the current metasystem driven by
economic irrationality of globalization and we must reform international politics
bioethically: including food supply, access to medicine and the right to health
among the fundamental human rights. So, think about starting a new
axiological human consciousness, based on a pluralistic and polylogic
conception of the ethic that inspires new directions for navigating the waters of
socio-educational work.
The seed of love represents, in this sense, the epigenetic and ecological
phenomenon of vital action to achieve a unified ethic understanding among
mankind. Teaching in the 21st century involves resetting democratically multi-
causal relationships between education and culture, toward new cosmopolitan
and cyber-ethical pedagogic practices that integrate a moral view in a global
scale. This reconsideration demands, effectively, training authentic worldists
with a thoughtful civic consciousness capable of ensuring sustainable
development in harmony with nature. Thus, the paradigm shift implies a holistic
view of the human being and the universe itself from the perspective of
consciousness, where we are all interconnected.
Dear readers, I invite you to drink the elixir of cosmopolitan hope
charged by cosmic energy to achieve the objectives agreed in the Ottawa and
Bangkok Charters on global health. We must empower our imagination in order
to feel ourselves as creators of our own lives and conceive the humanity as a
starry sky in which, contemplating this, they enlighten our hearts.
UBUNTU Cosmic Energy:
The Ethical Basis For Future Worldists
Javier Collado Ruano
Director of Edition

¡Namaste! El objetivo principal de Global Education Magazine es
unir los esfuerzos cooperativos del individuo-sociedad-especie para la
creación de diálogos interétnicos que deriven en la construcción de una
inteligencia colectiva enfocada en la consecución de los Objetivos de
Desarrollo del Milenio (ODM). Al igual que una neurona o una hormiga
aislada no puede contribuir categóricamente a la estructura de red a la que
pertenece, el género humano debe desarrollar un aprendizaje social
basado en la coexistencia pacífica y el respeto a la biodiversidad de los
distintos ecosistemas.
Los arquitectos de la educación del futuro deberán ampliar los
horizontes cognitivos actuales a través de una revolución epistemológica
multidimensional que contemple la Tierra-Patria como casa y jardín
comunes de la humanidad. Así pues, la construcción del conocimiento del
siglo XXI conlleva la inclusión de la perspectiva morfogenésica y
cosmológica para el entendimiento metafísico de la especie humana, ya
que nuestras partículas nacieron en los primeros segundos del kosmos,
nuestros átomos de carbono se crearon en un sol anterior y nuestras
moléculas se formaron en la Tierra. La especie humana es una entidad
cósmica interligada con un mismo devenir futuro, cuya evolución
estigmérgica es fruto de un coloquio nutrigenómico de miles de años entre
nuestro genoma y nuestra interacción con los recursos ambientales y
nutricionales.
Por este motivo, es necesario reformar las comunicaciones humanas
a través de un esfuerzo metacognitivo intelectual, moral y afectivo que
advierta la complejidad de los ODM como un superorganismo solidario
interconectado por la electrodinámica cuántica que se manifiesta en la
interacciones de las partículas cósmicas. Para ello, debemos promover la
filosofía humanista UBUNTU como metaestructura de pensamiento,
sensibilización y entendimiento de la convergencia evolutiva sociobiológica
y antropoética. En este sentido, el polimorfismo etológico Ubuntu
representa la sabiduría de aprender a crecer juntos como sociedad-mundo,
pues la simbiosofía pluricultural ontológica adyacente en su esencia
espiritual constituye un elemento emergente para la gestión ética del futuro.
Cultivar un futuro mejor es posible y podemos hacerlo de forma conjunta,
justa y solidaria a través de una democracia participativa responsable y
creativa. Debemos hacer autocrítica del metasistema actual guiado por la
irracionalidad económica de la globalización y debemos reformar la política
internacional bioéticamente: incluyendo el abastecimiento alimenticio, el
acceso a la medicina y el derecho a la salud entre los derechos humanos
fundamentales. Por lo tanto, hay que pensar en iniciar una nueva
consciencia humana axiológica, basándonos en una concepción pluralista y
polilógica de la ética, que inspire nuevos rumbos de navegación por las
aguas del trabajo social-educativo.
La semilla del amor representa, en este sentido, el fenómeno
epigenético y ecológico de acción vital para alcanzar una comprensión ética
solidaria entre el género humano. Enseñar en el siglo XXI implica reajustar
democráticamente las relaciones multicausales entre la educación y la
cultura, a través de nuevas prácticas pedagógicas cosmopolitas y ciber-
éticas que integren una mirada moral a escala global. Esta consideración
supone, efectivamente, la formación de auténticos mundólogos con una
consciencia cívica reflexiva capaz de garantizar un desarrollo sostenible y
armónico con la naturaleza. Así pues, el cambio de paradigma implica una
mirada holística del ser humano y del propio universo desde la perspectiva
de la conciencia, donde todos estamos interconectados.
Estimados lectores y lectoras, les invito a beber el elixir de esperanza
cosmopolita cargado de energía cósmica para lograr los objetivos pactados
en las Cartas de Ottawa y Bangkok sobre la salud mundial. Empoderemos
nuestra imaginación sintiéndonos creadores de nuestras propias vidas y
concibamos a la humanidad como un cielo estrellado en el que, al
contemplarlo, nos ilumine nuestros corazones.
La Energía Cósmica UBUNTU:
La Base Ética De Los Futuros Mundólogos
Javier Collado Ruano
Director de Edición

6. WORLD HEALTH
DAY. by WHO Regional
Director for the Eastern
Mediterranean.
Dr. Ala Alwan.
8. Health in United Nations:
Millennium Development Goals.
11. "El Oasis de
la Memoria".
Entrevista con
Aminatou
Haidar.
15. Proyectos de la UNESCO
para comienzos de año.
17. UNHCR's work on HIV in
the Americas.
19. Critical Pedagogy
Against Capitalist
Schooling:
Towards a Socialist
Alternative.
An Interview with Peter McLaren.
35. Research Papers.
36. MDGs
58. Global Education.
85. Transversal Studies.
120. Letters to the Editor.
Disseminate GEM to raise awareness!
Editada en Almansa (AB),
España, por Educar para Vivir
e com a parceria do DMMDC
(Salvador, BA, Brasil)
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www.globaleducationmagazine.com
Today we are observing World Health Day. Every year WHO uses this occasion to highlight an important health issue. This year the theme of World Health Day is high blood
pressure, or hypertension.
High blood pressure is a major health issue which affects the lives of nearly 40% of adults over the age of 25 years. Around the world, including in this region. It is known as a
“silent killer” because in many cases it is detected too late to avoid complications. If not detected early and controlled high blood pressure leads to stroke, heart disease, heart
and kidney failure and blindness.
High blood pressure causes around 8 million deaths in the world every year, which is about 13% ofall deaths. Around 50% ofall global deaths from stroke and heart disease are
attributed to high blood pressure.
Our message to you on World Health Day is “Control your blood pressure Control your life”. You can prevent high blood pressure and you can get it treated. How do you
prevent it?
Among the major factors that cause high blood pressure are unhealthy diet, excessive use ofsalt, being overweight and being physically inactive. In our region, with a population
of600 million people, the rates ofphysical inactivity are higher than in any other region in the world. Overall, more than a third ofmen and nearly halfofwomen in the Region are
physically inactive.
Around 50% ofadults in our region are overweight and in some countries more than 70% ofwomen and an increasing number ofchildren are overweight.
High blood pressure and tobacco use is a lethal combination since they both cause cardiovascular disease. In some countries ofthe Region more than 50% ofmen use tobacco.
So what should we do?
We need to change our lifestyles. This means eating a healthy balanced diet rich in vegetables and fruit. It means reducing the amount ofsalt we eat and avoiding food rich in fat
and sugars. And it means maintaining normal body weight and taking regular exercise. Just 30 minutes a day of moderate physical activity will reduce blood pressure and help
prevent heart disease, diabetes and even some cancers, such as breast and colon cancer. It also lowers the risk of stroke and depression. Many countries have managed to
reduce the prevalence of high blood pressure by encouraging and promoting lifestyle changes, driving down the number of deaths from heart disease. We in this Region should
In the Name ofGod, the Compassionate, the
Merciful
on the occasion of
WORLD HEALTH DAY
7 April 2013
Dr.AlaAlwanWho Regional Director for the
Eastern Mediterranean

Nº3
7
do the same.
I call upon communities and individuals to rise to the challenge and take action against this “silent killer”. Simple, practical and cost-effective steps can save you, and millions like
you, from falling victim to this health problem: healthy diet, weight reduction, reduction in salt intake, increased physical activity, and stopping smoking.
Of course, we know that asking people to change their lifestyles is not enough. It needs to be backed up by action at other levels also. For this reason, we call upon
governments, policy-makers, the regional and international community and other stakeholders, including the food industry, to take concrete action to create an environment that
is conducive to healthier living. Improving the availability of healthy foods, reducing salt in processed and manufactured foods, correct labelling of food products and providing
accessible facilities for exercise are all important to creating such an environment. All sectors of government and the private sector have to be involved in this effort, not just the
Ministry ofHealth.
As I have already mentioned, a large proportion ofour population already has high blood pressure. Many people, in some countries more than 50%, do not know they have high
blood pressure, and so it is not controlled and they are at high risk ofdeveloping heart attacks, strokes and kidney damage.
What can we do to help them?
As individuals we need to know whether we have high blood pressure and as health care providers we need to provide adequate services to ensure early detection and
appropriate treatment ofhypertension, especially among those at high risk, like overweight people and smokers. Affordable and effective medicines are available to control blood
pressure and help people to lead a normal and productive life.
We need to ensure that early detection and management of hypertension are integrated in national policies, programmes and activities and are available through primary health
care.
So, let us all take action to reduce our risks, control our blood pressure, and control our lives.
Not in the future, not tomorrow, but now.
I wish you a healthy “World Health Day”.
Dr. Ala Alwan
Who Regional Director for the
Eastern Mediterranean

Nº3
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www.globaleducationmagazine.comSpecial World Health Day
The Millennium Declaration, sets out an historic
commitment to eradicate extreme poverty and improve the
health of the world’s poorest people by 2015. The Declaration
and the resulting internationally agreed targets for the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) place health squarely
at the centre of the international development agenda and
champion it as a key driver of economic progress.
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are
eight goals that all 191 UN Member States have agreed to try
to achieve by the year 2015. The United Nations Millennium
Declaration, signed in September 2000 commits world leaders
to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental
degradation, and discrimination against women. The MDGs
are derived from this Declaration, and all have specific targets
and indicators.
Health is represented in three of the eight MDGs and
makes an acknowledged contribution to the achievement of all
the others, in particular those related to the eradication of
extreme poverty and hunger, education and gender equality.
Goal 8, which calls for a global partnership for development, is
a unique feature of the MDGs, because it recognizes that there
are certain actions that rich countries must take if poor
countries are to achieve all the other Goals. MDG 8 is a
reminder that global security and prosperity depend on a more
equitable world for all.
The Goals related with health are the next:
-Millennium Development Goal 1:
eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.
The target called “1.C.” as part of this goal is halve,
between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people
who suffer from hunger.
-Millennium Development Goal 4: reduce
child mortality. In this goal the target 4.A. tries
to reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015,
the under-five mortality rate.
-Millennium Development Goal 5: improve
maternal health. At this point the target 5.A
wants to reduce by three quarters, between 1990
and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio and target
5.B. achieve, by 2015, universal access to
reproductive health.
-Millennium Development Goal 6: combat
HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. As
part of this Goal the Target 6A. Have halted by 2015
and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, also
the target 6B. Achieve, by 2010, universal access to
treatment for HIV/AIDS for all those who need it.
And finally the target 6C. tries to have halted by
2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria
and other major diseases.
-Millennium Development Goal 7: ensure
environmental sustainability. Target 7C: By
2015, halve the proportion of people without
sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic
sanitation.
Health in United Nations:
Millennium Development Goals
©DanielLópez

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-Millennium Development Goal 8: develop
a global partnership for development.
Target 8E. In cooperation with pharmaceutical
companies, provide access to affordable essential
medicines in developing countries.
For example working in theses goals the world has met
the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of halving the
proportion of people without sustainable access to safe
drinking water, well in advance of the MDG 2015 deadline,
according to a report issued today by UNICEF and WHO.
Between 1990 and 2010, over two billion people gained
access to improved drinking water sources, such as piped
supplies and protected wells.
The report, Progress on Drinking Water and Sanitation
2012, by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for
Water Supply and Sanitation, says at the end of 2010 89% of
the world’s population, or 6.1 billion people, used improved
drinking water sources. This is one per cent more than the
88% MDG target. The report estimates that by 2015 92% of
the global population will have access to improved drinking
water.
“Today we recognize a great achievement for
the people of the world. This is one of the first
MDG targets to be met. The successful efforts
to provide greater access to drinking water are
a testament to all who see the MDGs not as a
dream, but as a vital tool for improving the
lives ofmillions ofthe poorest people”
said United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-
moon.
But that victory could not yet be declared as at least 11%
of the world’s population – 783 million people – are still without
access to safe drinking water, and billions without sanitation
facilities.
In 2007, the global burden of under-five mortality has
fallen for the first time below 10 million deaths and is now
estimated at 9.7 million per year. Increased coverage of
interventions, such as exclusive breastfeeding, measles
vaccinations, vitamin A supplements and insecticide-treated
bed nets, have contributed to this decline.
In 2005, it was estimated that seven high-burden
countries—Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Mexico,
Nepal and the Philippines—were on track to achieve the MDG
4 target of reducing child mortality, and the number of
countries is increasing. Recent surveys have shown a steady
mortality decline in other countries, for example, in
Madagascar, Malawi and the United Republic of Tanzania. In
addition, 6 of 11 African countries heavily affected by HIV
reported a decline of 25 per cent or more in HIV prevalence
among the 15- to 24-year-olds in capital cities. Between 2001
and 2006, the number of people on antiretroviral therapy in
low- and middle-income countries increased from 240,000 to
approximately 2.1 million.
About improve maternal health we have to say that
despite a significant reduction in the number of maternal
deaths – from an estimated 543 000 in 1990 to 287 000 in
2010 – the rate of decline is just over half that needed to
achieve the MDG target of a three quarters reduction in the
mortality ratio between 1990 and 2015. The proportion of
births attended by skilled personnel – crucial for reducing
perinatal, neonatal and maternal deaths – is above 90% in
three of the six WHO regions. However, increased coverage is
needed in certain regions, such as the WHO African Region
where the figure remains less than 50%.
To get these goals Increases in the amount of aid are
necessary, but more effective aid is also required if progress
towards the MDGs is to be sustained. The need for greater
©DanielLópez

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harmonization between donors, and for stronger alignment
around national policies and plans, is repeatedly being voiced
by countries. The reality on the ground is complex, with several
initiatives and partnerships, many of which have their own
mandate, priorities and administrative processes. Additionally,
about 20 per cent of overall health aid is given as general
budget or sector support, while as much as 50 per cent is off-
budget. Making the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness a
reality on the ground is critical if resources for health are to be
deployed and used effectively. Also the Mechanisms that are
transparent and inclusive need to be created to hold all partners
accountable for their performance against international
agreements. The importance of mutual accountability and
responsibility has been emphasized in several new initiatives
focusing on the MDGs, such as the International Health
Partnership in which Governments and development partners
define country-level compacts that represent a close-to-binding
commitment by all, and provide a framework for monitoring
performance.
The international community shares a strong commitment
to reaching the health-related MDGs. Several newly launched
health initiatives by major donors and development agencies
acknowledge the explicit need to invest in the health systems
and better coordinate development assistance, and to introduce
a framework of mutual accountability that recognizes the need
for country-owned and country-led initiatives.
In another hand As the 2015 target date for achieving the
Millennium Development Goals approaches, there is wide
debate as to what development goals the global community
should set next. The United Nations Secretary-General (UNSG)
Ban Ki-moon has appointed a High-level Panel to advise on the
global development agenda beyond 2015. The Panel will
deliver a report to the 2013 September General Assembly. In
support of this process, the United Nations Development Group
is leading efforts to catalyse a “global conversation” on the post-
2015 agenda through a series of global thematic consultations
and more than 50 national consultations.
The Governments of Sweden and Botswana, UNICEF and
WHO co-convene the health thematic consultation.
The UN’s global consultation on health will take place
between October 2012 and February 2013. It will include a
web-based consultation; the development of a series of
background papers (both on lessons learned from the current
MDGs as well as future directions); and a series of consultative
meetings with Member States, non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), private sector partners and academic and research
institutions.
The process will culminate in a high-level meeting on
March 5-6 in Botswana, involving governments, NGO
coalitions, key UN partners and members of the UNSG’s High-
Level Panel. It will seek to incorporate ideas and lessons from
other regional and country consultations, thereby building a
powerful consensus around key issues and recommendations
on health to feed into the inter-governmental process that will
start later in 2013.
An informal Member State Consultation on Health in the
Post 2015 Development Agenda, was held in the WHO
Executive Board Room in Geneva on December 14, 2012. The
meeting’s discussions focused on the first four of the five
questions that are being used to guide the health thematic
consultation. This report provides a summary of the
interventions made by the Member State representatives.
©DanielLópez

El Oasis de la
Memoria
Entrevista con
Aminatou
Haidar
por Jose María Barroso Tristán
"La verdad sigue
estando oculta en el
Sahara Occidental"
©kalvellido

Nº3
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El Oasis de la Memoria.
Entrevista con Aminatou Haidar.
Jose María Barroso Tristán: Buenos días
Aminetu. Lo primero que quiero es
agradecerle su estancia aquí para presentar
este informe sobre la situación de los
Derechos Humanos en el Sahara Occidental.
Agradecerle también a la Asociación de
Amistad con el Pueblo Saharaui de Sevilla
(AAPSS) que me ha concedido la oportunidad
de entrevistarla.
Ha venido a presentar el informe “El
Oasis de la Memoria”, un informe sobre los
Derechos Humanos en el Sahara. ¿Podría
decirnos a grandes rasgos que se incluye
dentro de este informe?
Aminatou Haidar: Es un informe de testimonios,
extraídos por el Doctor Carlos Beristain, realizado sobre
terreno. Ha ido para hacer las investigaciones a El
Aaiún, también ha sacado testimonios de familiares
desaparecidos de Smara y los ha puesto con cifras y
detalles. Ha arrojado luz sobre las violaciones de los
Derechos Humanos y los crímenes de guerra de lesa
humanidad que Marruecos ha cometido en el Sahara
Occidental. Don Carlos Beristain ha tomado testimonios
de la población saharaui que están como refugiados,
sobre todo las víctimas del bombardeo de Um Draiga y
también de los familiares de los desaparecidos
saharauis en paradero desconocido. El informe trata
varios casos de desaparición: el grupo de detenidos en
la cárcel secreta marroquí de Kalaat M´gouna; mi grupo,
que es el grupo conocido con el nombre de grupo de la
comisión porque fuimos víctimas de desaparición
durante la visita de una comisión de las Naciones
Unidas. Ha tratado casos que nosotros, como activistas,
los llamamos casos individuales porque todos los años
desde 1975 hay detenciones colectivas, pero también
individuales contra saharauis, sobre todo en las fiestas
nacionalistas del Frente Polisario o también por ser
familiar de un dirigente del Polisario o por reivindicar
algún Derecho. Ha tratado también el tema de las
indemnizaciones que hizo Marruecos con las víctimas,
la discriminación por la cual ha tratado de forma
diferente a las victimas marroquís y saharauis. Ha
tratado el IER (Instancia de Reconciliación y Equidad),
que es la instancia de reconciliación establecida por el
reino de Marruecos. Es un informe que nosotros, como
víctimas y ONG de Derechos Humanos, lo valoramos
mucho porque es muy importante ya que hace parte de
la protección de la memoria colectiva de todo un pueblo
y también puede ayudar a la Comunidad Internacional a
crear una Comisión de la Verdad en el Sahara
Occidental. La verdad sigue estando oculta en el Sahara
Occidental.
JMBT: Parece sorprendente que después de
37 años de ocupación ilegal por parte del
régimen marroquí sobre el Sahara Occidental
hayan tenido que ser una serie de
instituciones privadas las que han elaborado
un informe sobre la situación de los Derechos
Humanos dentro del Sahara Occidental ¿Qué
considera usted de este Delito de Silencio
por parte de las Naciones Unidas en la
ausencia de observatorios sobre los
Derechos Humanos que informen sobre la
violación de estos en territorio saharaui?
AH: Esto confirma la complicidad de algunas potencias
de la Comunidad Internacional y la indiferencia de otras
hacia el caso del Sahara Occidental, no hay una buena
voluntad política para resolver el problema. Lo que ya
no es aceptable es que la Comunidad Internacional siga
con esa indiferencia y negándose los Derechos
fundamentales de la población saharaui que sufre
diariamente la represión marroquí en su propia patria y
tierra cuando el único delito es reivindicar el respeto a
sus Derechos elementales, encabezados por el Derecho
a la libre determinación. La MINURSO, que es una
institución, un mecanismo de las Naciones Unidas que
está instalado en el Sahara Occidental desde hace 22
años, no ha podido nunca jugar el papel de respetar los
Derechos Humanos porque no tiene las competencias
en su mandato para vigilar, observar y proteger los
Derechos Humanos en el Sahara Occidental. Esto no es
aceptable. De una lado están las negociaciones entre el
Frente Polisario y el Gobierno de Marruecos, pero por
otro lado, nosotros somos las víctimas directas. Esas
negociaciones no han traído todavía unas medidas que
puedan garantizar el respeto a los Derechos Humanos
mientras se espera a que se haga el Referéndum de
Aminatou Haidar
Activista Pro Saharaui y de
los Derechos Humanos.
Fue nominada para recibir el
Premio Nobel de la Paz en
el año 2008.
Traducido al:

Nº3
13
El Oasis de la Memoria.
Entrevista con Aminatou Haidar.
Autodeterminación.
JMBT: Hablando de la represión y
de la opresión que supone la
constante violación de los
Derechos Humanos, hay una
especialmente singular y que me
sorprende que no lo sepa el
mundo entero. Es que el Sahara
Occidental es rodeado por la
segunda muralla artificial más
grande del mundo, hecha por el
Ser Humano, por Marruecos, el
Muro de la Vergüenza de 2700
kms de longitud. ¿Cómo afecta a
la población saharaui ese
aislamiento frente al mundo
entero, ya no solamente físico
sino todo lo que supone las
dificultades a la hora de entrar o
salir del territorio saharaui?
¿Cómo afecta ello a la población
en el día a día? ¿Cómo afecta a
la relación con organizaciones
y/o entidades que trabajan con el
Sahara?
AH: Este es otro sufrimiento porque el
muro divide al pueblo saharaui en dos.
Una parte que está bajo ocupación y otra
parte que está en el exilio. Este muro
impide la comunicación entre las familias,
impide la posibilidad de que las familias
puedan encontrarse, por ejemplo, en el
desierto. Es poca gente la que ha podido
encontrarse con sus familiares, en
Mauritania por ejemplo para hacerlo hay
que tener un pasaporte y un visado que
hay que conseguirlo en España. Esto es
imposible, es poca gente la que ha
podido salir a España. Claro que hay
medidas del ACNUR pero tampoco son
suficientes, cuatro días después de una
separación de 37 años, es muy poco.
Este muro afecta mucho y de una forma
psíquica porque sabes que hay un muro
que te está impidiendo ver a los tuyos.
Esto afecta sobre todo a la nueva
generación y sobre todo a los jóvenes
que están al otro lado, en el exilio, al ver
que este muro es algo que está
bloqueando la libertad de la llegada a su
patria. Esto es muy fuerte e inaceptable y
nadie habla de este muro. Además de los
riesgos ya que a lo largo del muro
existen minas antipersonales.
JMBT: Global Education
Magazine es una revista
dedicada a la Educación para el
Desarrollo Humano. Creemos en
la Educación como firme
herramienta para conseguir el
Desarrollo Humano Global.
Entonces nos interesa mucho
conocer cuál es la situación
educativa dentro del Sahara
Occidental. ¿Cuáles son los
mayores problemas e
inconvenientes que se están
encontrando la población
saharaui en el aspecto
educativo?
AH: El Derecho a la Educación está
amenazado porque los alumnos, incluso
los más pequeños, no pueden estudiar
tranquilamente de una forma normal
porque siempre son amenazados por
parte de los maestros mismos y, a veces,
por la policía. Nadie puede creer esto,
pero es la verdad. La policía entra donde
están los niños en clase pegando a los
niños. La policía está casi
permanentemente alrededor de las
escuelas e incluso hay 3 escuelas en El
Aaiún que son rodeadas por militares con
tanques. Esto es peligroso. No dejan
estudiar a los niños tranquilamente,
siempre tienen temor o miedo al ver a la
policía o los militares al lado de la
escuela. Hay otro obstáculo que es la
discriminación que sufren los alumnos
saharauis, sobre todo los niños de los
activistas de Derechos Humanos. Yo,
personalmente, puedo ser testigo porque
mi hija ha sido víctima el año pasado de
una discriminación por parte de un
profesor marroquí y hasta hoy día no ha
podido estudiar en las universidades
marroquís. No hay ninguna Universidad
en el Sahara Occidental para terminar
sus estudios superiores tiene que ir hacia
Marruecos que la ciudad más cercana es
Agadir que esta a 600kms. Pero yo no
puedo enviarla a estudiar allí. Este
verano ella y su hermano han sido
víctimas de violencia por parte de una
familia marroquí en un autobús. En vez
de juzgar a los violentos, a la familia que
les ha atacado, ellos también están
acusados, los dos, mis hijos y los
violentos. Esto es una parte del
sufrimiento que nosotros estamos
viviendo a diario en los territorios
ocupados. Los estudiantes saharauis en
las universidades marroquís siempre son
objeto de discriminación, de violencia, de
tortura y de detenciones arbitrarias.
JMBT: Por último, si quiere decir
algo a nuestros lectores de
Global Education Magazine
acerca del tema saharaui o
acerca del Desarrollo Humano
Global.
AH: Quiero agradecer a los
organizadores de la revista por la difusión
de la causa saharaui. Nosotros
necesitamos este trabajo y este tipo de
actividades porque difundir la información
es muy importante para la sensibilización
respecto a la causa saharaui.
JMBT: Muchas gracias Aminatou.
Desde Global Education
Magazine esperamos que se haga
imperativo el Derecho de
Autodeterminación saharaui y así
poder recuperar la dignidad de
todas las personas que luchan
por ello.

SHARE YOUR REFLECTIONS
IN THE NEXT EDITION
JUNE 20th:
WORLD REFUGEE DAY
©PaulHutchinson

Nº3
15
Compartiendo los valores de
Global Education Magazine la UNESCO
ha lanzado esta primavera una serie de
proyectos para seguir contribuyendo con
sus objetivos de paz y entendimiento a
través del fomento de la cultura y la
educación.
La primavera siempre ha sido
vista en el imaginario de cada cultura como un nuevo renacer o comienzo que lleva a
nuevas empresas de renovado optimismo y espíritu constructivo. En este sentido la
dedicación y el trabajo hacia la orientación de los pueblos en una gestión más eficaz
de su propio desarrollo y autonomía, a través del uso responsable de los recursos
naturales así como de los valores culturales, teniendo como finalidad la
modernización y progreso conjunto solidario entre las naciones del mundo, sin que
por ello se pierdan la identidad y la diversidad cultural son las directrices que se han
seguido en estos nuevos proyectos.
Las actividades culturales buscan la salvaguarda del patrimonio cultural
mediante el estímulo de la creación y la creatividad y la preservación de las entidades
culturales en este ámbito pasamos a comentar los diferentes programas y proyectos.
Entre el 11 y el 15 de marzo se llevo a cabo un
provechoso taller llamado “Re-orientando la
educación y formación técnica y profesional hacia el
cuidado del ambiente” en San José, Costa Rica.
Como ya señaló Ban Ki-Moon, Secretario General
de las Naciones Unidas, en enero de 2012 “Los
indicadores ambientales, económicos y sociales nos
dicen que nuestro actual modelo de progreso es
insostenible. El cambio climático está destruyendo
nuestro camino a la sostenibilidad. El nuestro es un
mundo de retos inminentes y recursos cada vez más limitados. El desarrollo
sostenible ofrece la mejor oportunidad para ajustar nuestro rumbo”. La intención del
seminario fue el intercambio de buenas prácticas y experiencias entre los países de
la región en el área. En ella se identificaron los desafíos y oportunidades para darle
un nuevo enfoque a los cursos de “Educación y formación técnica y profesional”
(EFTP) hacia los llamados “empleos verdes”, donde se desarrollaron
recomendaciones para fortalecer el programa para empleos verdes en la región.
Orientados hacia un desarrollo sostenible la inclusión de estos cursos en la
formación de futuros trabajadores es también inculcar una educación de respeto a la
naturaleza y responsabilidad cívica claves para el futuro. Como señala Jorge
Sequeira, director de la Oficina Regional de Educación de la UNESCO para América
Latina y el Caribe “La transición hacia una economía verde en el contexto del
desarrollo sostenible y la erradicación de la pobreza, tiene un potencial significativo
de creación de empleos y puede contribuir a cerrar la brecha de inclusión social”
continuando en un camino a largo plazo al “‘enverdecer’ la EFTP [ya que] significa
enseñar a los futuros técnicos a cuidar el medio ambiente en sus procesos de trabajo”
según Astrid Hollander, especialista del programa en Educación para el Desarrollo
Sostenible, Educación Técnica y Profesional y Educación en Situaciones de
Emergencia.
La intención es llegar al punto de convertir todos los empleos en empleos
verdes, así al mismo tiempo irán apareciendo nuevos perfiles laborales que
respondan las necesidades de la economía verde, siendo en estos momentos el
ecoturismo y la agricultura orgánica los grandes exponentes. El mismo Jorge
Sequeira explicó que enverdecer la EFTP es crucial para hacer una transición desde
los patrones de producción y servicios intensivos de emisiones y gasto de energía
hacia una producción más limpia y más verde.
En el siguiente enlace se puede observar en formato PDF el cronograma y
como fue la organización del taller y en este otro, en el mismo formato, “el fomento de
competencias para el desarrollo sostenible”.
Con el mismo objetivo de desarrollo sostenible y mirando a la conferencia
mundial sobre el tema (Japón 2014) se está trabajando en un nuevo marco global a
definir un el seguimiento al Decenio. En este sentido la Oficina Regional de
Educación para América Latina y el Caribe (OREALC/UNESCO Santiago) apoyará la
organización de dos consultas subregionales, con el fin de continuar trabajando en el
Proyectos de la UNESCO
para Comienzos del Año

Nº3
16
informe final de monitoreo y evaluación del Decenio de las Naciones Unidas de la
Educación para el Desarrollo Sostenible (2005-2014).
Las consultas tendrán
lugar los días 16 y 17 de
abril en Costa Rica, donde
solo estarán orientadas a los
Estados Miembros de
América Latina y estarán
acompañadas por un
proceso de consulta online
totalmente abierto hasta el
31 de marzo a todos los
interesados en la Educación
para el Desarrollo Sostenible
(EDS). Estas consultas
regionales son clave para
afianzar una planificación sustancial más allá de 2014 ideas y apoyos procedentes de
toda la región
El objetivo por tanto será asegurar un proceso innovador donde primarán la
transparencia y participación dentro de un marco programático de la EDS que
continuará más allá del 2014 a través de la colección de ayudas de los actores
relevantes de los Estados Miembros. Como afirmó el ya nombrado Astrid Hollander
“Las consultas regionales permiten rescatar los intereses y necesidades de los países
para diseñar los lineamientos y acciones para el desarrollo de una Educación para el
Desarrollo sostenible de alto impacto en América Latina y el Caribe. Además, nos
permite de conocer las experiencias de los países, identificar factores de éxito y
lecciones aprendidas que puedan orientar el diseño de actividades de EDS en el
futuro”.
En el siguiente enlace se puede acceder a la web de consultas subregionales.
Y por último, señalando los proyectos interesantes para este comienzo de año
por parte de la UNESCO hablamos sobre la aplicación de evaluación regional de
aprendizaje TERCE que comenzará en abril de 2013, después de la reunión de los 15
países participantes.
La XXX Reunión de Coordinadores Nacionales del Laboratorio Latinoamericano de
Evaluación de la Calidad de la Educación (LLECE) donde participarán representantes
de los 15 países miembros de esta institución se realizará el 24 y 25 de abril, en
Ciudad de Panamá. Los socios implementadores del TERCE (MIDE Universidad
Católica y Universidad Diego Portales), así como el Instituto de Estadísticas de la
UNESCO y el equipo de coordinación técnica del LLECE desarrollaran la última
instancia previa con la entrega de los instrumentos de investigación, lo que representa
el inicio del estudio más importante de la región de America Latina y el Caribe sobre
logro de aprendizaje. Comienza el 26 de abril con la aplicación definitiva del Tercer
Estudio (TERCE).
“Estamos en una fase
crítica para la
planificación estratégica
del LLECE. No
solamente porque
estamos en el proceso de
aplicación definitiva del
TERCE, también porque
es necesario visualizar
dónde estará el LLECE
en 5 años y cómo se
adaptará a los nuevos
desafíos y tendencias,
regionales y mundiales, en educación” afirmó Atilio Pizarro, Jefe de la Sección de
Planificación, Gestión, Monitoreo y Evaluación de OREALC/UNESCO Santiago.
En esta reunión además se difundirán cuatro informes claves del LLECE, como
por ejemplo informe sobre políticas educativas en la región junto con el Análisis
Curricular del TERCE, el trabajo de la Comisión Especial sobre Métricas de
Aprendizaje (sobre calidad de la educación) de la agenda mundial Educación para
Todos de la UNESCO y también los resultados de la 2ª reunión del Consejo Técnico
Consultivo de Alto Nivel del TERCE (CTAN), que se celebró en Santiago en diciembre
del año pasado.

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17
UNHCR's Work on HIV in the AmericasIn Latin America and the Caribbean there are around 3.6 million internally displaced persons and about 445,000 refugees / asylum seekers facing a series of challenges
due to their displacement, a situation that exposes them to a risk and vulnerability to HIV.
Border areas reports in most cases a higher HIV prevalence due to the presence of sex work networks, high levels of violence and lack of timely medical services related
to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support. During their transit, our population of interest may be a victim of sexual exploitation and violence, situations that can lead to
acquiring HIV infection. Besides, their legal status often hampers timely and equal access to existing health services in these areas. Poverty, broken family structures, social
obstacles to local integration, precarious education services, and situations of stigma and discrimination due to their refugee status, also expose them to factors that facilitate HIV
transmission in their host communities.
UNHCR seeks to ensure that our target population has access to information on HIV prevention and transmission and that people living with HIV could have full access to
HIV treatment, care and support services without becoming victims of stigma and discrimination, or that their refugee status may affect the provision of these services. In a
broader way, UNHCR conducts advocacy interventions before governments and international agencies aiming at the inclusion of our population of interest in the design and
implementation of HIV national and international programmes.
Projects and actions designed by UNHCR HIV focal points from each country operation with the support of the HIV Regional Coordination, corresponds to strategic
planning that seeks to develop and apply the 10 Key Points on HIV/AIDS and the Protection of Refugees, IDPs and Other Persons of Concern and the latest
UNAIDS recommendations on the subject for our region.
During 2012 countries as Mexico and Brazil implemented a series of HIV and Reproductive Health trainings to stakeholders working on refugee issues. In Ecuador, a
project was implemented in the provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana (northern border with Colombia) for strengthening the sex work network in the area of HIV prevention amd
other sexually transmitted. Venezuela implemented a project aimed at promoting human rights and the reduction of stigma and discrimination against people living with HIV in
border communities with Colombia (Tachira, Zulia and Apure). Dominican Republic implemented a set of actions on HIV prevention and reproductive health issues in rural areas
(Monte Plata) and urban areas (Boca Chica) of Santo Domingo. Costa Rica and Haiti implemented projects related to HIV and Sexual Gender based Violence in urban areas.
Finally, Panama developed a series of trainings in the border area with Colombia (Darien) on HIV prevention measures and reproductive health addressed to population of
concern and local population.
Although our region has made significant progress in terms of access to antiretroviral therapy, unfortunately there is an increase in the report of new HIV infections. Taking
into account these circumstances it is essential that UNHCR continues to implement HIV and Reproductive Health projects and actions in benefit of our population of concern.
Despite all the progress that has been achieved since the first AIDS case was detected more than 30 year ago, there is still much to do to in order reach a world vision in
which there is no a single HIV infection, where nobody dies as a results of aids and free of stigma and discrimination. Meanwhile, the battle continues.
Rosalina Cermeño Vargas
Associate Regional HIV & Reproductive Health Officer for the Americas
Regional Office Panama

18What is the Role of the Pharmacist in the Health Care System?

Critical Pedagogy Against Capitalist Schooling:
Towards a Socialist Alternative
An Interview with
Peter McLaren
by Jose María Barroso Tristán
"Together, we can turn possible futures into
tangible realities that can liberate us from the
chains that make us as much as we make them.
We have the power to break our chains."

Nº3
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Towards a Socialist Alternative.
Jose María Barroso Tristán: The first question
I would like to ask you is: Considering the
fact that you are a critical educator, which
would you say are the main components that
distinguish a critical education from a
traditional one?
Peter McLaren: While I am a critical educator and
have the utmost respect for the field, I do not work in the
arena of what might be considered ‘conventional’ critical
pedagogy. In the field of critical education there is an
entanglement of visions, locations, practices and these
understandably vary from individual to individual,
neighborhood to neighborhood, district to district, region
to region, country to country, etc. Critical pedagogy is,
after all, part of a geopolitics of knowledge. For me, the
fundamental goal of critical pedagogy is the struggle for
a socialist alternative to capitalism—with capitalism
understood as a global ecology of exploitation—and the
approach I take builds on conventional approaches to
critical pedagogy. I include in my recent work insights
from the “decolonial school” that contests the coloniality
of power, I include advances in critical race theory,
feminist theory, and ecopedagogy, to name several
areas of interest that I feel are important. My approach
to critical pedagogy is therefore radically heterodox—or
if you prefer, fundamentally orthodox—depending upon
where you stand, or your positionality. But it is safe to
say that my approach cannot be essayed by traditional
liberal efforts to reform dimensions of capitalist society
that most impact teaching and learning. There would be
critical educators that would contest my own approach to
critical education, and that is part and parcel of being a
critical educator, and their (frequent) opposition to my
position is not something that I condemn but engage in
the spirit of critical dialogue. Of course I fully agree with
many of the more accepted goals of the liberal variants
of critical pedagogy whose arch-categories include the
following—to foment dialogue, to deepen our
appreciation of public life, to create spaces of respect
and appreciation for diversity, to encourage critical
thinking, to build culturally sensitive curricula, to create a
vibrant democratic public sphere, to try to change the
hardened hearts and minds of our increasingly parasitic
financial aristocracy, to build knowledge from the
experiences and the histories of students themselves, to
make knowledge relevant to the lives of students, and to
encourage students to theorize and make sense of their
experiences in order to break free from the systems of
mediation that limit their understanding of the world and
their capacity to transform it, to challenge racism,
sexism, homophobia, ableism, to fight against white
supremacy, etc. But I believe that around the mid-
1980s, when corporations began to become more
powerful that some nation states, that the battle for
critical democratic citizenship became just a
smokescreen for the production of consumer citizenship
and critical pedagogy as it was then conceived became
more like a dying star about to go into a supernova stage
and incinerate any hope we had for real educational
transformation, locked as we were within a neoliberal
state that was quickly consolidating itself (and that a few
decades later would have transformed itself into a
security state akin to fascism). Hence I looked for a
navigatable transit route beyond liberalism in the
direction of a Marxist humanism. At the time, when the
wet-sock formlessness of postmodern theory was
becoming an unwitting companion of neoliberalism, I
was mocked by some in the field for returning to a
discredited Marxism. But the more our daily toil and
struggle in the sloughs of ordinary human existence and
human suffering increased, and the more our journey
within in the fearful paradoxicality of everyday life
contrasted with the neat and seemless principles of
neoliberal logic of privatization, the more rational
Marxism sounded to me. Critical pedagogy has a
transnational heritage. There is no final resting place in
the vault of the critical pedagogy pantheon, since critical
pedagogy is constantly reinventing itself to meet the
challenges of the present. The work of Freire remains
central and we need to remember the initiatives of
popular educators and socialist Sunday schools,
liberation theologians, schools for factory workers,
socialist collectives, and other groups in various parts of
the world. We not only need to build a collective memory
of the field, but a shared memory. So we need to learn
the history of struggles for educational transformation as
it has occurred throughout the globe. I see my role in
very modest terms-to push critical pedagogy in North
America in the direction of appreciating socialism as a
PETER McLAREN is the inaugural recipient of The Social and
Economic Justice in Public Education Award by the Marxian Analysis of
Society, Schools and Education, The American Educational Research
Association, 2012; the Central New York Peace Studies Consortium
Lifetime Achievement Award in Peace Studies; the 2013 Award of
Achievement in Critical Studies by the Critical Studies Association
(Athens, Greece); the "Friend in Solidarity with the Struggle of Mexican
Teachers" award by the National Union of Educational Workers
(Michoacan), and the First Annual Social Justice and Upstander Ethics
in Education Award presented by the Department of Education, Antioch
University, Los Angeles. He is also the recent recipient of the Ana
Kristine Pearson Award in Equity in Education and Economy presented
by The Center of Education and Work, the University of Toronto, 2012.
The government of Venezuela recently honored Professor McLaren with
the International Award in Critical Pedagogy, while the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México recognized him with the Distincion
Academica Educación, Debates e Imaginario Social. Professors
McLaren's work has been translated into 20 languages. One of his
books, Life in Schools, was chosen in 2004 as one of the 12 most
significant education books worldwide by an international panel
commissioned by The Moscow School of Social and Economic
Sciences and by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation.
As a political activist, he lectures worldwide and works with
revolutionary, community and educational groups around the globe.
Peter McLaren is Professor of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los
Angeles. He is also currently Distinguished Fellow in Critical Studies at
Chapman University, California.

Nº3
21
collective goal. And here I am not referring to the
European tradition alone, but to autonomous social
movements of indigenous communities in Las
Americas and elsewhere. The revenants of critical
pedagogy will return to haunt us, should we forget
what first animated its mission, which was the
struggle against the ravages of capitalism, and to
bear witness to a better future. The little maledictions
of daily political life over time abrade the flesh of our
hope so that we resignedly give over our agency to
others to run the engines of democracy. The popular
majorities have a pent-up cargo of vitriol aimed at
the nation’s corporate bloodsuckers: the rent-
extractors, rich financiers, money-for-nothing
bankers, kleptocrats, rogue traders, subprime
malefactors, neo-feudal overlords of commerce
headquartered in Wall Street, Paleolithic
demagogues working as CEOs, and hedge fund
slime masters, whose corporate machinations collect
like massive gobs of rancid spittle in the melting pot of
capitalism we call America. Those are the 99 percent,
who do not control most of the country’s wealth, who
have become the victims of the great recession, and
have organized themselves as the Occupy Wall Street
movement (and various other Occupy movements). But
the anger directed at the banking and finance
establishment, or at the government’s bailout of these
institutions, while understandable, is nevertheless
misdirected. The social relations that have victimized the
poor are not simply the result of greedy bankers who
over the last few decades have decided to overreach
themselves in the squalid frenzy of market deregulation;
rather, the social relations that are largely responsible for
the current economic crisis are those produced by the
regime of capitalism itself. Paulo Freire would have
clearly understood this. And while the anger of the 99
percent may be misdirected, this historical moment
presents itself as an opportune time to reflect upon
capitalism and to explore alternatives to it.
JMBT: Please correct me if I am wrong but I
get from your words that this issue goes
beyond every educator´s paradigm. Without
playing down its importance, this problem is
actually rooted in nowadays neoliberal-
capitalist supranational superestructure that
imposes its logic over every institution that
depends on it. Which epistemology and
educative methods do you avail yourself to
achieve progress towards a Marxist
humanism?
PM: That is an important question. I do agree that
neoliberalism is animated by an identifiable logic or
system of intelligibility. Neoliberalism’s epistemological
imperatives are burningly relevant for every critical
educator; they must be engaged, critiqued and
contested, but the issue for me goes beyond
epistemology. Ideas and paradigms and worldviews are
important, and so are new ways of thinking about
ourselves and our relation to the ecology of
capitalism, but it is those ideas that are located in
the routines and rituals of everyday life that are
more likely to have an impact on transforming
society. Critical consciousness is more of an
outcome of certain social practices, cultural
formations, habits of mind and the institutional
arrangements that help shape them, as well as the
rituals and routines that give them legitimacy, than a
precondition for them--but there is no question that
they are dialectically related. But let me discuss
epistemology first, and then try to make a case for
why a transformation of our thinking, or our logic, is
only one part--albeit an important part -- of the
dialectical struggle for a democratic socialism. And
why such a struggle is enriched by a Marxist
humanist analysis as we seek to overcome the
current empire of finance capitalism. I’m interested
in the evolution of neoliberalism’s cultural logic—or
what you refer to as ‘ supranational superstructural’
logic—and also how it has manifested itself throughout
regional or national contexts. I’ve been interested in this
topic since the early 1960s. Those were wide-awake
days of wide-wale corduroy pants, Maynard G. Krebs
beards (as opposed to today’s popular shadow beards),
fake turtleneck sweaters (known as “dickies”), fake
turquoise Navajo necklackes, milk-crate-living room-
décor, and neighborhoods where you could count on
your mom-and-pop stores being in the same location for
at least the next five years; that was before the days
when your favorite empty back lot would suddenly give
birth to a Walmart, a Costco, a Home Depot or your local
ravine transformed in a month into a suburban business
park or cookie cutter strip mall. Then came the nerd-cool
days and the high tech revolution, a status-obsessed
culture of consumption, more sophisticated and
devastating U.S. imperialist wars, purblind postmodern
doxa, and, of course, the trend towards cultural studies in
the academy. And along came advances in information
technology and the social media that were able to pry
Picture by Laura Herrera

Nº3
22
open some cracks in the corporate pavement and the
petrified slough of everyday life, where internet culture
was able to fertilize some of Tupac Shakur’s famous
roses springing from the cracks in the pavment in the
form of “talk-back” forums and on-line petitions.
Yet, even with new forms of resistance ushered in
by technological innovation, the stiff-gestured ideology
of neoliberalism has arched towards a state of “human
exceptionalism” where all of humanity is now supposed
to feel free to exploit at will the relations between nature
and society any way that it chooses, as long as profits
can be squeezed out. You really can’t describe the
situation we are in today as an estrangement between
the bankers and corporate CEOs and the rest of the 99
percent that brings out the worst in both—barefaced
greed and a hateful relish in the suffering of others in the
first and a dystopic and quiescent resignation to the
inevitability of capitalism in the second. Because there is
no possible future for capitalism that doesn't reproduce
the immense suffering of the popular majorities--the 99
percent-- in the present because capitalism is premised
on the free development of the few at the cost of the
exploitation and immiseration of the many.
The epistemological presuppositions that
undergird neoliberal capitalism can be unraveled like an
unspooled film; each application of neoliberal
prescriptions to knowledge formation can be scrutinized
in the context of the larger mise-en-scène. Cultural
theorists have done an excellent job of understanding
the impact of neoliberal ideology on the production of
space, place, scale, historical time, and race, gender and
class identity and human agency. I agree that this is
important work and we need to look at such production in
relation to the commodification of everyday life. Among
other things, neoliberal logic is a logic of the lowest
common denominator, a technocratic rationality in which
value is accorded to how much surplus value can be
extracted and accumulated. Finance or asset
capitalism, accumulation by dispossession, disaster
capitalism, crony capitalism--all of these incarnations of
capitalist exploitation are an outgrowth of neoliberal
ideology. I would not be able to think outside of
neoliberalism's own limits without the fertilizing influence
of Marx. Utilizing a historical materialist critique has
helped me to think more deeply about how we might live
differently in the present and imagine futures of concrete
possibility outside of neoliberalism and the logic of value
production and where we can break free from the
production of time, space and self which exists under the
servitude of capital.
Historical materialists generally believe that it is
possible to grasp the object of knowledge, that a world
exists independent of our existence, and that this world
can be directly grasped (although not fully grasped) in
itself. They wager that the objective world needs to be
understood in relation to others, to the social character of
both our being human and our becoming more fully
human. I call this a transformative volition, or
protagonistic intent, a praxis of the possible that moves
in and on and through the world designed to transform
the material and social conditions that shape us (and are
shaped by us) so that our capacities are enhanced and
our humanity enlarged. Here, the world can be conceived
as a concrete totality , a reality that is already a
structured, self-forming dialectical whole in the process
of coming into existence. Here the challenge is to avoid
solipsism and idealism through a method of analysis and
a conception of the world that involves a dialectical
analysis of reality and a dialectical unity with the
oppressed. Here I try to be consistent with the holistic
human science developed by Marx, who, by the way,
was no economic determinist. Historical laws of tendency
of capital are not the same for Marx as natural laws.
Marx did not ascribe to the idea that capitalism follows
universal evolutionary laws. History does not follow a
single trajectory, there are many contingencies and
regularities, broadly predictable tendencies and possible
futures. Marx believed in the primacy of material
relationships as against the primacy of "spirit" and made
us aware that profit does not come from market relations
(buying low and selling high) but from human labor
power and the sweated labor of the toiling class. Now I
am not saying that I believe spiritual values are
unimportant. What I am saying is that we need certain
material conditions to obtain in society before the quest
for spiritual values can be pursued effectively. If we want
a simple formula to examine humanity, we could say that
those who have to sell their labor power to earn a living
(those who produce the profit for the capitalist) are part
of one class--the working class. Those who purchase
human labor and take the profit away from labor are part
of another class—the capitalist class. I follow Marx’s
focus on the development of human productive forces—a
very complex process that is historically related to the
material conditions of production and the class struggle.
Every given stage of development of the productive
forces of society—that is, of the human species, and of
the division of labor—is bound up historically with certain
social relations of production, particularly class relations.
Once a particular form of class domination comes into
existence as a result of this complex process of historical
development, the dominant element in the relations
attempts to freeze it into place, and the existing society
loses its progressive character. Despite changes in the
material conditions of production, any ruling class will
seek to preserve its rule at all cost, thus becoming a
fetter on further social and economic development. The
state, law, religion, and the entire realm of ideas, to the
extent that they represent the overarching interests in
society and are conditioned by the underlying set of
socioeconomic relations, will all be enlisted for the
purpose of defending the status quo and of patching up
society’s contradictions, often through the disheveled
fantasies of Hollywood or the brittle enchantments of
popular culture. Now what does this all mean for
education? Well, it means trying to push capitalists to
address the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, as

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long as capitalism continues to operate, but we must
recognize that we need to move beyond capitalism if we
ever hope to bring about genuine equality and a greater
unfolding of human powers and capacities.
While well-meaning progressive educators might
be willing to criticize the manner in which humans are
turned into dead objects that Marxists refer to as
fetishized commodities, they are often loathe to consider
the fact that within capitalist society, all value originates
in the sphere of production and that one of the primary
roles of schools is to serve as agents or functionaries of
capital. Furthermore, they fail to understand that
education is more reproductive of an exploitative social
order than a constitutive challenge to it precisely
because it rests on the foundations of capitalist
exchange value. Reading Marx and Freire may not
alchemize us into revolutionaries capable of
transcending capitalism but ignoring what they had to
say about transforming education in the context of class
struggle would be a huge loss to our efforts.
Much of my work has tried to demonstrate that
many liberal progressive educational reforms are
embedded in a larger retrograde, opportunistic and
banalizing politics that situates itself a culture of liberal
compassion and a polyglot cosmopolitanism that does
more to impede educational transformation than advance
it.
JMBT: We agree that Education acts as a
social reproducter of the Neoliberal system.
And so, it is imbued with its Neoliberal logic
and perpetuates the extreme wealth of a
negligible minority against the vast majority
of people that struggles to reach a
respectable life. What can Educators do to
change this situation and move forward a
Global Humanist development? How did you
start out in your life to become a critical
educator?
PM: Okay, let me begin, then, with your question about
my own history, just briefly. Like many young people
growing up in Canada during the 50s and 60s, I felt
increasingly like I was being swallowed up in some viscid
mass of dull, mind-numbing convention, particularly my
experience of being schooled, since I like to make a
distinction between being schooled and experiencing an
education. Education requires the cultivation of critique,
or critical consciousness, and in my teenage high school
years, being intelligent or able to conscript concepts into
the service of sustained analysis was not something that
earned one a lot of attention with one’s peers, and I was
culturally shallow enough to want to be part of the
popular crowd, so I would often hide my intellectual
curiosity about life, mostly during moments of grinding
loneliness. In those moments I would expostulate with
myself about why my life at school seemed so ruinously
vacuous, why I was so interminably miserable, why acts
of creativity, and why displays of ingenuity and wit
seemed to be off-limits and treated by so many teachers
as unjudicious, as a type of impolitic epistemological
breach. I did have two wonderful and exceptional
teachers my last year of high school—Dennis Hutcheon
and Harold Burke. Mr. Burke would do dramatic readings
in class. With lungs as unfillable as St. Peter’s Basilica,
he would bellow samplings from Shakespeare and
contemporary plays, which he scrupled to be an
indispensable part of a good education, and of course he
was right. In his classes we made earnest, if not halting,
attempts to fathom the doxa and paradox, the stereotype
and the novation of everyday life. From Mr. Burke I would
learn to appreciate the power of rhetoric, and often
engaged in debates with a shameless extravagance.
Such profligacy could be tolerated in a young sprat in
those days, and the gasconade that flushed out of my
mouth no doubt made me insufferable among many of
my more learned peers. “Hutch” developed a course on
Communication and the Media that examined the
theories and ideas of Marshall McLuhan. He was also a
Catholic convert and largely as a result of his influence I
became interested in theology (although Hutch became a
conservative Catholic in his later years while I ventured
into the chilly hinterlands of the Jesuit mind to explore
abstruse books deemed by the guardians of the faith as
heretical, works by liberation theologians and apostates).
Wanting to join the priesthood, but not having much
religious faith, I abandoned the idea, destining myself to
live on the secular fringes of what was considered at the
time the normal world (where the men no longer were
required to wear fedoras, but where sterile office cubicles
in some cold stone building became the bleak destiny of
so many of my contemporaries). Often I found myself
lost in a world of reading-- Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre,
Hesse, Genet, Proust, Northrop Frye, Marshall McLuhan,
Harold Innis, Gregory Baum—where I tried in vain to
dislodge myself from everyday life in the Toronto suburb
of Willowdale, what was to me a Cimmerian land of
gloom and despair. The work of Dylan Thomas, Vachel
Lindsay, Leonard Cohen, Irving Layton, and then, of
course, the Beat Poets, helped de-anchor me temporarily
from my malaise but the intemperate despair of youth
would inevitably overwhelm me.
I grew up in a conservative working-class family
who had left its roots in farming communities of Ontario
to travel to Hamilton, Toronto and other large
metropolitan areas (where my dad landed a job as
manager of Eastern Canada for Philips Electronics and
brought us temporarily into the middle class). I was told
that my ancestors worked the shipyards in the docks of
Glasgow as riveters and welders, but I haven’t really
gone deeply into my family tree, all that I remember are
pictures of my great uncle on the farm, photos of my
maternal grandfather in a kilt and carrying a riding crop,
and photos of my paternal grandfather selling soap out of
the back of a car. My paternal grandmother lived with us
until she died when I was about sixteen and I remember

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she could kick over her head well into her eighties. An
only child, who watched my father, a WWII veteran in the
Royal Canadian Engineers, enter the reserve army of
labor after he was fired from Philips and my mother-a
homemaker-venture out to work to support the family as
a telephone operator when my father’s emphysema
made it impossible for him to continue working in part-
time electronics stores, I grew up angry, suspicious of
giving my life over to a corporation, or what we called
"the suits." Prior to my dad’s illness, our house was a
fusty solarium of normalcy: television detective stories
and westerns in the evening, televised hockey games,
televised comedy shows; in short: televised happiness
for a life unexplored (although I did long to travel,
Kerouac-style, with Buzz Murdoch and Tod Stiles in the
excellent Route 66 series, and later, down the long and
lonesome highway with Jim Bronson [Michael Parks] in
the hit television series, Then Came Bronson). In the
late 60s, I had joined the Yorkville Village hippie
community as a part-timer, as what was called a
“weekender” and Yorkville as I remember it was as much
a state of mind as it was a cluster of streets downtown
where we used to hang out, try every drug imaginable,
and sometimes, if we were lucky, get “turned on” to good
books and albums and meet Pre-Raphaelite-looking
young women who knew members of the Toronto artist
and literati circles and would invite us along to parties
and gatherings where we would pretend to fit it. Yorkville
was a place where, potentially, you could develop a more
discerning eye for understanding the production of
culture and sometimes come to recognize the
coincidence between mass cultural production and the
regression of one's own intellect, as bikers, greasers,
hippies, teenyboppers, and sometimes political
organizers, congregated in the coffee shops and flop
houses, or just hung out on the streets, all pretending
that we were creating a new society free from the
normative shackles of conventional morality and lifestyle
but basically we were looking for drugs, sex and rock
and roll and our twenty minutes of fame. That I was
living in the latest phases of capitalist globalization was
not something that arrested my attention, even
momentarily. It had not occurred to me that such a
exploration of the "integral society" was important—or
even significant—or that it was necessary to fathom the
means and ways that I was situated in the larger social
order, immersed in an internally differentiated yet
dialectically unified nation state called Canada, living in
the fringes of a civil society consisting of an ensemble of
practices and relations of power dialectically
interpellated by and integrated within the state. That was
life before critical theory, sociology, anthropology,
hermeneutics and existential phenomenology. Life was
lived as a crude binarism: We were cool and everybody
else was suspiciously uncool, especially anyone over
thirty. There was even an adversarial relationship at that
time between youth-based politics and social movements
advocating class struggle. Yorkville was more about
lifestyle and counterculture as opposed to the political
transformation of society, and the Maoists that you might
infrequently encounter appeared to us as too militant or
dogmatic to be taken seriously if one wanted to enjoy the
bohemian lifestyle and that's what we were looking for in
those days. I became politicized later on, mainly by
Americans who had left the US as a result of the Vietnam
war and ended up my professors at Waterloo University
and the University of Toronto, although admittedly this
was a New Left politicization, with identity politics, civil
rights and new social movements (feminism, gay rights,
immigrant rights) displacing rather than integrating into
much of the previous class-based political formations.
I recall that there was a City Controller, Herb
Orliffe, who suggested, ominously, in the Spring of 1967
that Yorkville’s hippies should be warehoused in work
camps where they would learn a trade. I recognized that
a desinence had arrived in the trajectory that my life was
taking, and that the Yorkville scene was dying, and by
1968, I had come to the inevitable realization that a
change in my life was sorely needed. Well, I’ve written
about what happened next—the beating I took with
flashlights administered by the Metropolitan police in a
dank North York jail, meeting Alan Ginsberg, my trip to
the US, my psychedelic evening with Timothy Leary, the
exhilarating craziness of San Francisco and Los Angeles
in the summer of 1968, so I won’t recount those days
here. How was any of this distinctly Canadian, I’m not
sure because I didn’t really reflect upon my Canadian
roots until I ended up in the United States, what began
as a desperate sojourn but what has lasted 28 years and
counting, having lost my university teaching post in
Canada due to my increasingly politicized teaching, and
being rescued by Henry Giroux, who brought me to
Miami University of Ohio and helped me figure out how
to do political work and remain in the academy. Living in
Ohio, I was often told by students that I reminded them of
a Northern American, a decaffeinated American, rather
than a Canadian, an observation, frankly, I found
disturbing, and very telling about the US students and
culture. While geo-specifically Canadian, and working
within a coloniality of power that I often felt obliged to
critique, I think my identity growing up in Canada was
more mobile than nationalist, if not badly mangled,
bleeding through the figurative membranes of its
Canadian-ness, as something that was always already
foreign to itself, as I really didn’t have a sense of what it
meant to be a Canadian but at the same time I tried to
account for the people I met and the ideas I encountered
in the context of living a life in the service of something
larger than one’s nation state, trying to understand what
it meant to be of service to society. I felt I belonged
everywhere, and nowhere, everywhere an aberration,
and nowhere did I feel remotely comfortable--I suppose I
grew comfortable in my discomfort. Moving away to the
US, however, motivated me to claim a Canadian identity
(as opposed to re-claiming an already well sutured
Canadian identity) inasmuch as I grew to loathe the US
political scene, its American exceptionalism, its
imperialist wars, its phony democracy, it’s incipient and
then blatant fascism—and I wanted to claim something

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outside of that, which at times I would label Canadian.
Especially during my visits to Latin America, I highlighted
my Canadian identity but, to be fair, I have been
impacted in many ways by American activists and
thinkers and I feel I am all the better for that. I am more
interested now in a politics of solidarity and
“communalidad” than I am in conventional identity
politics. What drives me today is not narrating the many
trajectories of selfhood as much as committing myself to
a protagonistic politics, forging a united front against
capital and its attendant hydra-headed antagonisms:
racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, abelism,
speciesism, and the like. What I can tell you now is that I
do feel much more comfortable among workers and the
popular majorities than I do among the transnational
capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, and that is the case in
all the countries in which I am regularly privileged to
spend time. Well, on to the next parts of your question.
If there exists a structured silence and motivated
amnesia surrounding the urgent task of historicizing
power relations in concrete material conditions of
production and reproduction, and if, following this, there
exists a grand refusal to disclaim the limitations of
bourgeois ethics in the project of social transformation
and, finally, if there remains a studied reluctance to
engage the concrete multilayered totality of everyday life
in which use value is subordinated to exchange value,
then we can’t simply blame the education system or
teachers for churning out capitalist dupes. We are all
dupes to some extent and each day I am striving to
become less so, as I continue to take advantage of my
potential to be a learner. As I tried to point out in my
discussion of my experiences as a youth growing up in
Canada, teachers are not immune to the ruling ideas of
their society, which, as Marx noted, are usually the ideas
of the ruling class. And, so, as we know, the educators
themselves must be educated. As Marx opined in his
Theses on Feuerbach, “The materialist doctrine that men
are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that,
therefore, changed men are products of changed
circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is
men who change circumstances and that the educator
must himself be educated.” Even the teachers unions
have been in the grip of neoliberal education policies,
although for years I have advocated a social movement
unionism—that is dedicated to engage beyond workplace
concerns, but also in terms of wider political struggle for
social and economic justice, for human rights, and for
participatory and direct democracy. Social movement
unionism works with affiliates in worker’s movements,
women’s movements, student movements, other human
rights organizations to and integrates them into a broader
network or popular front against injustice and exploitation
by the ruling class.
Revolutionary critical pedagogy is part of an
ecosystem of political activism that includes community
organizations, teachers organizations, and larger human
rights groups advocating for multicultural education, gay,
lesbian, transgender and bisexual rights, living wages,
ecological justice, and disability rights, and anti-racist
and anti-imperialist organizations. Here we find
curriculum organizations, teacher education
organizations, and educational policy organizations
working together against standardized testing, the
privatization of public schooling, the school to prison
pipeline, advocating for parent and community
involvement in schools.
The overall agenda that I have been trying to
develop since the mid-1990s is captured in the
description of what István Mészáros calls socialist
education: “the social organ through which the mutually
beneficial reciprocity between the individuals and their
society becomes real.” My concern has been with
marshaling critical pedagogy as a broad, non-sectarian
coalition or social movement into the service of altering
historical modes of production and reproduction in
specific social formations, including if not especially
educational formations.
The question we need to ask is: How do you
abolish value production, wage labor? We need to go
beyond state intervention into the economy, since this is
not socialism. State intervention into the economy
doesn’t prevent value-producing labor, alienated labor.
In fact, capital is a social relation of abstract labor, and it
is precisely capital as a social relation that must be
transcended. Of course, this is the challenge for all of
us. To go up against the ideological state apparatuses
(that also have coercive practices such as non-promotion
and systems of privilege for those who follow the rules)
and the repressive state apparatuses (that are also
coercive in that they secure internal unity and social
authority ideologically via patriotism and nationalism) is
not an easy task. There are disjunctions and
disarticulations within and between different social
spaces of the superstructure and we must work within
those, in spaces of the legal and ideological systems that
can be transformed in the interests of social and
economic justice. The struggle is multi-pronged.
Revolutionary critical pedagogy is a mode of
social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the
silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to
un-conceal operations of economic and political power
underlying the concrete details and representations of
our lives. It reveals how the abstract logic of the
exploitation of the division of labor informs all the
practices of culture and society. Materialist critique
disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus
as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced.
Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social
differences—gender, race, sexuality, and class—have
been systematically produced and continue to operate
within regimes of exploitation—namely within the
international division of labor in global capitalism, so that
we can fight to change them. Thus, a pedagogy of
critique is about the production of transformative

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knowledges. It is not about liberty as the freedom of
desire, because this liberty, this freedom of desire, is
acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. A
pedagogy of critique does not situate itself in the space
of the self, or in the space of desire, or in the space of
liberation, but in the site of collectivity, need and
emancipation.
To sum up, teachers need to support sustainable
alternatives to neoliberal capitalism with its emphasis on
economic growth; protect nature’s resources for future
generations; protect ecosystems and help support
biodiversity; support a community based economics, and
a grassroots democracy that includes participatory and
direct forms, embody anti-racist, anti-ableist, anti-sexist,
and anti-homophobic pedagogies that respect diversity
and work from a post-patriarchal perspective. I won’t
summarize here the imperatives and practices of critical
pedagogy, or popular education, except to say that these
approaches build from the experiences of students, and
employ languages that help students interrogate the
transparency of their own experiences, that is, languages
that enable students to challenge the interpretation of
their experiences and that assist students in connecting
their own experiences and histories to broader situations
that are local, regional, national and global in scope. I
think it’s important to give students the opportunity to
think dialectically and employ an historical materialist
perspective in analyzing their own communities and
relationships in their neighborhoods and schools. Not
only do teachers need to become critical researchers but
they should give students the opportunity to acquire
research skills. There are lots of theoretical perspectives
that teachers can draw from—critical disability studies,
critical ethnography, feminist theory, critical race theory,
postcolonial theory and the work of the new “decolonial
school” who work from the premise that we need to fight
the “coloniality of power.” Also, liberation theology offers
a tremendously rich source of understanding state power
as a form of ‘social sin.’ What this comes down to is
encouraging teachers to become transdisciplinary public
intellectuals who are engaged in what Henry Giroux has
called “public pedagogy.” Teachers can learn a lot from
the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela in becoming
“public pedagogues,” and the work being done in the
misiones Bolivarianas. Here students connect their
learning to working on community projects. All learning
is connected to improving the lives of families and social
groups. All of this activity requires adopting a philosophy
of praxis. It is a disposition that one acquires. It does not
come from becoming critically conscious and then
entering into revolutionary activity, in fact critical
consciousness is more of an outcome of revolutionary
activity than a precondition for it. The revolution makes
critical educators as much as critical educators make a
revolution. As Che taught us, revolutions produce
subjectivity and agency (aesthetically, ethically and
ideologically) simultaneously with new social relations of
production. I call this “protagonistic agency.” An agency
for building a radically new future.
JMBT: We know the importance of the
production of knowledge because it imposes
the established "truth" inside schools. The
most inhumane consequences of the
capitalist system are behind this ¨truth" that
perpetuates human inequality. What role do
media and textbook publishers play in this
issue? What can be done to establish
mechanisms that ensure that the knowledge
taught in schools is reliable?
PM: Since capitalist democracy is really an oxymoron,
capitalism's relationship to democracy has always been
a "sweetheart deal", with one partner playing off the
other. One plays the comic, while the other plays the
'straight' man who sets the comic up for the joke. One
plays the good cop, and the other plays the 'bad cop' and
then they switch roles. Capitalism produces economic
inequality and extreme poverty while democracy covers it
up in the name of the never-ending search for ‘diversity,’
or ‘human rights’ or ‘freedom of choice,’ or whatever is
the flavor of the month, thereby undermining the whole
notion that we can have any real political equality in a
capitalist society. The popular majorities—those who are
forced to survive on wage labor, sometimes known as
the 99 percent—are never able to win great substantial
victories for democracy, but are forced to accept
incremental steps towards achieving some small
victories in the areas of progressive taxation, health care,
universal education, retirement pensions, and
environmental and consumer protections and civil rights.
Even though these small victories are reversing
themselves, drastically in some case, the transnational
capitalist class makes
sure the situation
doesn’t get so bad that
the 99 percent takes
to the streets like they
did during the Occupy
Wall street movement
heyday, so they will
sell hope for the future
for those that agree to
be patient. But such
hope is really snake oil
in disguise. The rich
don’t need
government social
assistance, they can
buy all that they need
of anything, privately. With so much structural
dependence on corporate dollars, real democracy is out
of reach in the United States. What about the world-
producing power of the media? In these days of finance
capital and banking deregulation, the media are going to
remain in the hands of private corporations that work
hand-in-hand with the government.
Powerful commercial media owners who are

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sanctioned by the government control the production of
knowledge, and set the limits on what gets said and what
doesn’t get said, and create the contexts in which
information is valued or perceived as unimportant. The
military/industrial/digital sectors of the media are all part
of the ‘power complex’ we associate with finance
capitalism. Robert McChesney has written about how the
media operate as an oligopoly through corporate
lobbyists, political campaign contributions, government
media policies, the control of news coverage by
corporate elites, and the enforcement of monopolistic
rights for those broadcasters who can make the most
profit. Media reform almost impossible in this context.
The potential of the internet for the deepening and
enhancement of democracy has been destroyed by the
success of monopoly capitalism and the internet has
actually contributed as much to inequality as it has to
fostering equality and here I am particularly concerned
about the potential of the media to aid in the surveillance
of citizens and well as the propagandizing against
socialist alternatives to capitalism. Google, for instance,
spent 5 million dollars lobbying in Washington in the first
three months of 2012. Political participation as a means
of creating a more democratic future is limited by the
internet’s commercialization. We are seeing antitrust
laws being overlooked, we are seeing an increase in
digital technology patents, and the monopoly of
corporations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
You can’t have a real democratic public sphere that
advances the interests of community and public
participation as long as it is monopolized by corporate
greed, fueled by indirect government subsidies and
made to bow to commercial interests through an
increase in copyrights, patents, and proprietary systems.
It is interesting to me how the corporate media in the
United States helps to disguise itself as being "free" by
attacking Hugo Chavez’s treatment of the media in
Venezuela. Most media outlets here in the United States
criticized Chavez for restricting and manipulating the
media in Venezuela. But the Venezuelan government
does not control its media. Many people in the U.S.
believe that all the television channels and newspapers
are pro-Chávez. The truth is that most of Venezuela’s
media is anti-Chávez. Yes, Chávez took action against
anti-Chávez network RCTV (Radio Caracas Televisión
Internacional) but the U.S. media does not provide the
historical context.
As reported in only a few alternative media
outlets, Venezuelan television has four major networks:
Venevisión, Televen, Globovisión, and Venezolana de
Televisión (VTV). Of these four networks, Venevisión and
Televen are moderately anti-Chávez, Globovisión is very
anti-Chávez, and VTV is extremely pro-Chávez. There is
the notorious RCTV (Radio Caracas Televisión
Internacional) which faked film footage to make it look
like pro-Chavez gunmen were shooting down
demonstrators on the streets of Caracas when in fact it
was anti-Chavez gunmen. This is one of several reasons
that the government of Venezuela declined to renew
RCTV's broadcast license. About 60% of the television
audience in Venezuela watches Venevisión and Televen.
Only about 6% of Venezuelans watch VTV. Most
Venezuelan media is owned by right-wing business elites
who are strongly mobilized against the socialist politics
and policies of Hugo Chávez that support Venezuela’s
poor and powerless. The majority of the Venezuelan
media notoriously conspired with the coup leaders in
their failed 2002 attempt to oust Chavez from power. The
media refused to show statements by the Chavez
government condemning the coup d’état. When the coup
d’état failed, the private Venezuelan networks refused to
broadcast the news that Chávez had been restored back
to power as a result of hundreds of thousands of pro-
Chavez supporters surrounding Miraflores Palace
demanding him back and as a result of sectors of the
military turning to support Chavez. You can see the
footage of this in the fly-on-the-wall documentary
directed by Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha
Ó Briain, This Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Or watch
Oliver Stone's documentary, South of the Border. Again,
President Hugo Chavez did not "shut down" RCTV on
May 27th. The Venezuelan government decided not to
renew the broadcast license that granted RCTV a
monopoly over a section of the publicly-owned
frequencies. It is the case that RCTV still reaches half
the population through its cable and satellite operations.
That's not bad for a television station that committed
treason against a democratically-elected President,
whose many election victories were considered
extremely fair by President Jimmy Carter.
Sure, it is true that government television is
overwhelmingly favorable towards Chávez but only six
percent of Venezuelans watch government-owned VTV.
And yes, Chávez did interrupt news programming with
hours of cadenas (political viewpoints) but this hardly
counteracts or balances out the 23 other hours of anti-
Chávez broadcasting. Okay, what about the
newspapers? Venezuela has three major newspapers:
Últimas Noticias, El Nacional, and El Universal. Últimas
Noticias is pro-Chávez; El Nacional and El Universal are
anti-Chávez. El Nacional, as is commonly known, is
owned by Miguel Henrique Otero, a founder of the anti-
Chávez organization Movimiento 2D. There are also
more anti-Chavez radio stations in Venezuela than pro-
Chavez stations, since only 14 percent of radio is publicly
owned.
That this ardent visionary who fought austerity
measures , who agitated for the poor and the powerless,
who founded the movement for the fifth republic, who
integrated the downtrodden and marginalized into the
mainstream of Venezuelan society, and who helped
make his country one of the most equal in Latin America,
would be so demonized in the capitalist press is not so
surprising. This son of rural schoolteachers created a
crack in the concrete wall of finance capitalism where
some roses were able to push through. The wall is

Global Education Magazine: World Health Day (April 7th 2013)

Global Education Magazine: World Health Day (April 7th 2013)

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