Police clash with protesters during a rally against austerity measures in next year’s draft budget, in Sofia, Monday, Dec 1, 2025. IIMAGE/Bulgarian News Agency via AP/Yahoo
Bulgarians will go to the polls for the eighth time in five years
later this month, after a massive wave of protests brought down Prime
Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s right-wing coalition at the end of last
year. Demonstrations broke out in November in response to the proposed
2026 budget, which sought to hike social security contributions and
taxes, increase salaries for the police, defence agencies and judiciary
while leaving rank-and-file administrative workers, teachers and
hospital staff with pay rises hardly covering inflation. The budget was
also the first to be denominated in euros, Bulgaria having been approved
to join the Eurozone last year, which inflamed popular anxiety about
inflation. The protests peaked on 10 December, when more than 50,000
people took to the streets of Sofia, with tens of thousands more turning
out across almost all regional cities. The next day Zhelyazkov – having
been in power for less than a year – announced his resignation on live
television, minutes before a scheduled parliamentary vote of confidence.
The protests were lazily described as another ‘Gen Z revolt’ by the
liberal media, while some on the left dismissed them as orchestrated by
the opposition coalition, the centrist PP-DB. Yet they unleashed
political energies that far transcended the nominal organizers: the
PP-DB’s approval ratings are around 15 per cent; an estimated 71 per
cent supported the protests. Surveys revealed, moreover, that they were
not confined to angry youth. Many participants were middle-aged,
animated by concerns for a dignified old age for their parents,
affordable healthcare, education for their children, and profoundly
distrustful about how the higher taxes – raised from wages already
strained by inflation – would be spent given widespread corruption.
As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a kind of disciplined distance; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply, and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing.
As a struggling filmmaker, I find myself watching the world with a
kind of discipline d distance ; absorbing, observing, feeling deeply,
and yet withholding any public articulation of what it all might mean
about us, about the state of our civilization, and about the state of
love that we, as humans, spend our lives chasing. But some time ago, I
watched a video of Sonam Wangchuk speaking after his release from
detention, and that distance quietly collapsed.
What I saw was not an activist, not a figure of resistance, but a
human being carrying the visible weight of care. His face was drawn,
marked by fatigue; there was a faint, almost fragile smile, the kind
that seems less an expression of ease and more an act of endurance. I
could see a thousand quiet wounds etched across his face. And yet, there
was dignity, an unbroken composure that did not harden into hate, nor
dissolve into despair. He spoke gently, almost tenderly, as though the
very thing he was fighting for, his mountains, his home, still required
softness to be protected. What stayed with me was not what he said, but
how he remained: unbitter, without rage, still capable of care and love.
It is difficult to understand how someone can move through such strain
and not be altered into something unrecognizable to love. And perhaps
that is where the unease begins, not in his suffering, but in ours. In
how easily we receive such moments, process them, and move on, as though
they belong to the ordinary rhythm of things.
As though this quiet erosion of the human spirit, this demand that
love must endure struggle to justify itself, is somehow normal. His
suffering did not turn into hatred; it remained, stubbornly, a form of
love. And in that persistence, something about the rest of us, our ease
with forgetting, our fluency in indifference, the quiet coldness of the
human heart feels far more unsettling. Why is it that those who love
hardest, feel deepest, think most clearly and remember, like elephants,
with a quiet and unrelenting fidelity are the ones the world turns
against? They are the ones who are made to suffer, to be broken, to be
silenced, jailed, even erased.
As though memory itself were a threat, and love, when it refuses to
fade, becomes something the world must discipline, its hunger to
possess, to command; because a world that can inflict and endure
violence often cannot bear the persistence of memory, nor the clarity of
those who refuse to forget. Orhan Pamuk is someone who has a deep love
affair with his city, Istanbul; his words carry the power of visuals. He
has captured memories and emotions of himself and of his city and his
people in ways no historian ever could, not just recording the past but
inhabiting it. There is something quietly disconcerting about a novelist
needing protection. Pamuk was not inciting violence; he was naming it,
speaking about histories his country preferred to leave unspoken.
Russia Today (RT) correspondents Steve Sweeney and Ali Reda Sbaity were attacked while reporting on southern Lebanon. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss on The Young Turks.
Israel rocket strike on British Journalist Steve Sweeney
This is the moment our member and dear comrade Steve Sweeney was almost killed by the Israeli Zionists, acting hand in glove with US and British Imperialism.
Steve has been reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. His news
pierces the imperialist-Zionist Propaganda. Here he was making an
on-the-ground report in Lebanon.
There can be no doubt that this was 100% premeditated and targeted at
Steve, in line with the Israeli policy of murdering journalists to kill
the evidence of their atrocities.
It is almost certain that our “Labour” prime minister @Keir_Starmer,
and “Labour” foreign secretary @YvetteCooperMP and Armed forces minister
@JohnHealey_MP, and other cabinet level “Labour” ministers were aware
of and green-lit the assassination attempt.
Make no mistake, comrades. We are at war. And the Labour Party is the
enemy running the imperialist murder machine. They walk among us.
Anyone who supports Labour is the enemy of the British workers.
The United States has become too big for the world. It was in August 1945 that the US under President Harry Truman terrorized the world, and particularly the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in japan, when it exploded the atom bombs and killed over 200,000 Japanese. More than 80 years later, now it is Donald Trump who is terrorizing the world especially, Iran.
On April 1, 2026, Trump wrote on his Social Truth site:
On March 7, 2026, at 7:06 AM (EST), US President Donald Trump issued a doomsday warning to Iran:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”
A sadist pronouncement. The threat to nuke Iran. In less than 11 hours.
No country should have this kind of monstrous power.
Will he or will he not?
About four hours before the expiry of Trump’s threat of annihilating the entire Iranian civilization, someone called me and said that Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had asked President Donald Trump to extend the deadline, and requested Iranian leaders to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. He wanted to know my thoughts.
I said it’s probably Trump who, looking for a way out of the Israel ‘s war he got involved in, had perhaps asked Sharif to tweet such a request. Well, it turned out that my guess was correct.
In his enthusiasm, Sharif retweeted it without realizing that the first sentence needed to be deleted.
“Diplomatic efforts for peaceful settlement of the ongoing war in the Middle East are progressing steadily, strongly and powerfully with the potential to lead to substantive results in near future. To allow diplomacy to run its course, I earnestly request President Trump to extend the deadline for two weeks. Pakistan, in all sincerity, requests the Iranian brothers to open Strait of Hormuz for a corresponding period of two weeks as a goodwill gesture. We also urge all warring parties to observe a ceasefire everywhere for two weeks to allow diplomacy to achieve conclusive termination of war, in the interest of long-term peace and stability in the region.”
The deleted sentence with explanation has been posted by investigative journalist Ryan Grim on his X account:
“Oh, this is unbelievable. The edit history on this tweet shows that Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif originally copied and pasted everything he was sent, including:
“*Draft – Pakistan’s PM Message on X*”
Now, obviously, Sharif’s own staff don’t call him “Pakistan’s PM,” they would just call him prime minister. The U.S. and Israel, of course, would call him “Pakistan’s PM.”
Would be funny if the fate of the world wasn’t hanging in the balance.”
Is Pakistan the right mediator?
The answer is yes and no.
Yes. Pakistan is the right mediator for a number of reasons:
Pakistan has overly good relations with the US.
It has good relations with Iran.
Its relations with China <1> is very good too.
With the GCC countries, except the UAE <2>, Pakistan is on good terms.
Turkey is another major country in the Middle East which is close to Pakistan.
As mediator, Pakistan conveyed messages to and from Iran and the US. It then kept China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in the loop by informing them on developments.
No. Pakistan is not the right mediator for one major reason:
Mediators should have enough power to exert on parties involved in the negotiations to abide by the final decision.
Pakistan cannot say anything reasonable to Trump because their relation is that of a master and a subject.
Not only that, there was no guarantee that there won’t be an attack on the Iranian delegation returning back to their country. The US and Israel are famous for back stabbing.
Once the meeting between Iranian and US leaders was over on April 13, the Iranian delegation had to be escorted by roughly a couple dozen Pakistani air force planes because of danger to their lives from Israel and the US!
The world’s two most violent states neither listen to anyone nor respect any global body so it is impossible to expect any meaningful resolution unless Trump himself decides that there is no winning this time around and that it is time to call it quits — from the Strait of Hormuz saga.
Notes
<1> An article in Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s NDTV (New Delhi Television) had this heading: “China Didn’t Just Quietly Buy Iran’s Oil. It Funded Its Wartime Economy” by Columnist Anushree Jonko.
(Adani is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friend and political supporter.)
Jonko then quotes Max Meizlish of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD):
“Iran just wouldn’t be able to fight this war without the years of support that it has received from China.”
Meizlish is a pro-Israel and anti-Iran warmonger who instead of accusing Israel and the US of waging war against Iran, is blaming Iran for attacking Israel, the US, and the US bases in the Gulf.
Who has imposed sanctions on Iran? The US. Is it legal for the US to do that? No. But it does it anyway.
Under such heavy illegal/inhumane sanctions, Iran is naturally going to do business with any country that it can do business with. To imply that by buying Iran’s oil, China supported Iran’s war is preposterous. Besides, Iran didn’t start the war, it is Israel/US who initiated it.
<2> In Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh on March 18, foreign ministers of 12 countries from Pakistan, Middle East, and Central Asia had a critical meeting on the ongoing US/Israel war against Iran. The UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait wanted to criticize Iran only and not the US and Israel, the countries which started the war. Iran’s counterattacks also targeted the Gulf countries because they had US military bases which have been used in the past to attack Iran and were also being used this time. The draft included condemnation of Iran only because the UAE wanted no criticism of Israel or the US; it craved Iran’s defeat “by any means necessary.” Pakistan wanted to include denunciation of Israel too. Turkey and Lebanon came on Pakistan’s side. The meeting would have failed but for Saudi Arabia’s efforts in convincing the UAE to include Israel too.
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir wrote in Urdu newspaper Jang that a Gulf country, of course, the UAE, said that for what Iran is doing to us, Iran should be nuked. Turkey’s and Pakistan’s foreign ministers told the delegates that war is not the solution to any problem.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar addressed everyone gathered there:
“With atom bomb, the entire Iranian nation cannot be eliminated. Once Israel is done with Iran, it will head toward Gulf countries one by one because Netanyahu wants to create Greater Israel.”
After a long debate and arguments, the new draft included Israel’s condemnation.
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Both films are based on the life and work of Saadat Hasan Manto, a giant of Urdu literature whose trailblazing path was strewn with controversy and personal tragedy. In United India, he lived mostly in Bombay (now Mumbai) and spent his professional career shuttling between Bombay and Lahore. After partition of India, and the creation of Pakistan in 1947, he moved with his family to Lahore where he spent the last eight years of his life.
The
ongoing animosity between India and Pakistan means that both countries
begrudgingly own the writer, because it is hard to pin him down as
either Indian or Pakistani. One can imagine Manto having the last laugh
on this superficial conundrum because he always belonged to humanity.
The Pakistani version seems to be more mindful of this division than
the Indian version, in terms of the portion of Manto’s life depicted. It
only shows the writer’s life in Lahore, and does a poor job of that;
there is hardly anything of Lahore to be seen in the film, specifically
of the 1940s and 1950s.
This is an odd decision on the part of the filmmakers and indeed
questionable, since filming in Lahore should not have been difficult.
Manto’s house still stands in Laxmi Mansions, but it isn’t shown in the
film. There is also a major anachronistic blunder in the scene where a
modern-day Mercedes car is shown in the 1950s era. Period detail is an
area where the Indian version excels.
Sarmad Khoosat, in addition to directing, plays the title role in his
film, whereas Nawazuddin Siddiqui plays Manto in the Indian film.
Siddiqui’s portrayal is nuanced and grounded, as befits an actor of his
caliber. Khoosat puts in a game attempt, and is sometimes remarkably
close to his Indian counterpart. However, he gets carried away in some
scenes which reek of overacting. Also, his narration and diction are
problematic at times.
Khoosat’s physical appearance is more in line with Manto’s Kashmiri
ethnicity than Siddiqui’s. However, the former is much too bulky and
healthier for the role whereas the latter is more suitably lean. Akbar
Subhani, a Pakistani actor who has previously played Manto better (on
television and theatre) than either of these two, is cast in a minor
role in Khoosat’s film, and one feels it would have been a better
casting choice to have him reprise the role.
The Indian version acknowledges the presence of other literary
personalities and showbiz celebrities in Manto’s life, much more so than
the Pakistani version. We get to see Ismat Chugtai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Munshi Premchand, Ashok Kumar, Jaddan Bai, Nargis, K. Asif, etc. Manto’s best friend was an actor-singer called Shyam, and he is given much screen time here, but the actor playing him does not rise above amateur level.
The portrayal of Ashok Kumar
is also rather wooden, which is a shame and unfortunate irony,
considering the real life actor was an accomplished and hugely popular
presence in Indian cinema.
The Pakistani version does make Noor Jehan,
the legendary singer, actress and director a part of its story, whereas
the Indian version completely ignores her. Saba Qamar brings glamour
and spark to her depiction of Noor Jehan, but is a little too hammy.
Manto’s wife Safiya was a very supportive and soothing presence in
his turbulent life, and so both movies give her character ample screen
time. The actresses in both versions do justice to their respective
portrayals of Safiya. The bit parts in both movies are a mixed bag, with
some strong and some weak performances.
Manto, review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42
Manto, Review: Man to man, rediscovering the Urdu writer, who died a pauper, at 42
Before the film, the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC)
displayed categorises the language of the film as Hindi/Urdu. Saadat
Hasan Manto wrote short stories and films in Urdu and there is some
Hindi in the film, mainly spoken by others. Among the most controversial
of Urdu writers, Manto has been the subject of rediscovery over the
last decade or so for reasons unknown. Whatever the reasons, Nandita Das
has made a compelling and eminently watchable biopic.
It comes on the heels of a Pakistani biography made in 2015 and
Mantostaan, which filmed four of his short stories in 2017: Thanda
Gosht, Khol Do, Assignment and Aakhiri Salute. We did not get to see the
Pakistani film while the Indian outing, directed by Rahat Kazmi,
received mixed reactions. Manto was his surname, and not his pen-name,
as some might think. He was born in 1912 in Ludhiana but the family had a
home in Lahore, while they moved to Mumbai as well.
His parents and his infant son were buried in Mumbai, but he had
migrated to Lahore after living for many years in Mumbai, a city he
loved dearly. Facing hostilities against the Muslim community, he was
forced to leave much against his wishes. Not that he was a devout
Muslim—a confirmed alcoholic, his only claim to Islam might have been
the numerals 786 (denoting Bismillah—in the name of God) that he wrote
before starting any story, and the prayer visits he made to his mother’s
grave. Manto hated his late father. Muslim scholars and clerics roundly
condemned his writing, often finding them un-Islamic and obscene. He
died in Lahore, in 1955, aged 42, mainly as a result of alcohol abuse.
All this is chronicled in the present film.
Writer-director Nandita Das’s Manto is not a true biopic, for it does
not tell us too much about the personal life of the man and his family.
It begins when Manto is already an established writer in Mumbai’s film
industry of the mid-1940s and takes us through to his death, a decade
later. Along the way, we meet many of his friends and publishers,
including Ismat Chughtai (also condemned for writing stories considered
obscene, including one on lesbianism), Shyam Chaddha (popular hero
Shyam, who died early, like Manto but before him, after falling of a
horse during shooting), Ashok Kumar (the boss at Bombay Talkies, who
pooh-poohed Manto’s fears when the latter told him about repeated
threats to kill him and other Muslims employed at Bombay Talkies) and
many more. Ismat stood by him and the two were tried by a court in
Lahore, for publishing obscene material. She stood by him all through,
when the poet laureate of Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed ‘Faiz’, a leading light
of the Progressive Writers’ Association, refused to consider his obscene
work as literature at all. (The film ends on Faiz’s poem, in a tribute
of supreme irony).
From the Bombay (now Mumbai) of 1946, the action shifts to Lahore, in
1948, where Manto follows his wife Safia and daughter Nighi, who had
left earlier, to attend a wedding. In this city of refugees, just an
hour away from the Indian town of Amritsar, he is shunned and
prosecuted, and finds very little work. His drinking increases with
frustration, though some more his greatest works were written there,
where he learnt about the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, an event that
stunned him, just as partition itself had left deep scars on his
psyche. These anxieties were developed into an all-time great short
story, Toba Tek Singh, about madmen being exchanged between India and
Pakistan, and a village which is in both Hindustan and Pakistan and,
therefore, neither here nor there.
It was a sentence uttered in an unguarded moment by Shyam (remember
Dillagi and the song ‘Too mera chand’ sung and picturised on him?),
whose family had lost a member to the riots in Lahore and the rest of
them had managed to escape to India, that finally made Manto decide to
quit India. Shyam had said that he could have killed Manto in a fit of
rage had he been around when the rioters attacked his family. Shyam used
to nurse and humour Manto a lot. He did regret his statement, but the
two met only once afterwards, when Shyam visited Lahore for a film’s
release.
So What Do We Do About Manto, Who Was Neither Indian Nor Pakistani?
by HARISHCHANDRA THORAT
“How do we bracket Manto?’ IMAGE/Wikimedia Commons
In our quest to define Manto, we arrive at the same results as we have while getting to the bottom of our current political crises.
Saadat Hasan Manto was born in 1912 in a village in Ludhiana district,
Punjab, then part of the British Empire. He lived in the cities of
Amritsar and Aligarh for a while, before moving to Mumbai. After the
partition, he migrated to Lahore in Pakistan. He died there, somewhat
prematurely, in 1955.
The government of Pakistan posthumously awarded him the Nishaan-i-Imtiyaaz, a prestigious civil award, in 2012. Manto is, therefore, a transnational entity.
He is known as a Punjabi writer, even
though he hasn’t written much in Punjabi. He wrote in Urdu, so he is an
Urdu writer. It doesn’t seem like he took religion very seriously – he
is still known as a Muslim writer. In his youth, he was a member of the
Indian Progressive Writers association. The latter had a distinct leftward lean. So Manto could be called a Marxist writer too.
Something which is important from the
point of view of his cultural and literary identity – and which is a
point of contemporary controversy and relevance- is that his family has roots in Kashmir.
After being displaced from Kashmir, his ancestors moved to Punjab.
Manto was proud of his Kashmiri roots. His family lovingly maintained
the distinctiveness of Kashmiri culture. In a letter to Pandit Nehru, he
does mention their shared connection to Kashmir.
‘To be Kashmiri is to be beautiful,’ he wrote.
So what do we do about Manto? In which identity do we bracket him? If we call him Indian, he was Pakistani too. If we call him Punjabi, he was Kashmiri as well. His being ? leftist comes in the way of trying to capture his identity as a ‘Muslim’ writer, on the basis of his religion. Punjab, Kashmir, the alleys of Mumbai and being a Mohajir in Lahore; all these dichotomous ?aspects were united in his character. Manto, as a writer, can be connected to all of these things, but not to any one of them.
Contemporary politics does not get
along with such complex identities – formed of elements which are often
conflicting but complementary. It prefers to state questions of identity
in a simplistic, crude, rigid and politically convenient ways. To it,
identity is something without any ambiguities, an easily identified
uniform. Such a uniform would allow, for example, to demarcate a writer
into two categories – ‘ours’, or ‘theirs’. This is exactly what has
happened to Manto.
Recently, an English translation of one of Manto’s books came to my attention. The book is Why I Write. The translator and editor of this translation is Aakar Patel. It includes Manto’s discursive prose. Mr. Patel writes about Manto in the preface of the book.
The preface begins by stating that
Saadat Hasan Manto was an Indian trapped in Pakistan. Mr. Patel next
goes on to say that Manto’s ‘identity didn’t come from religion and it
came only partially from geography. It came mainly from his belonging to
our culture, about which he wrote with great skill.’ By ‘our’ culture,
Mr. Patel of course means ‘Indian’ culture, which is, of course,
different from ‘Pakistani’ culture. Patel concludes that Manto was a
great Indian writer; he wrote in an Indian language, for an Indian audience and about the Indian experience.
Mr. Patel unambiguously puts Manto’s
writings in the category of Indian literature and in doing so, excludes
the place of Pakistan in the formulation of the notion of Indian
literature. Before Independence and Partition, about 70 years ago, there
was no nation called Pakistan. So the difficult question of what to do
about the literature from the region now in Pakistan, before the nation
existed, whether to call it Indian or to call it Pakistani, does not
seem to occur to Patel.
Does political partitioning lead to cultural partitioning too, if so, what exactly is its process, these questions too do not bother Mr. Patel.
He also forgets that a national identity is an artificial construct, not a natural one. His scheme of classification is simple – writings are either Indian or Pakistani.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Apple CEO Tim Cook having dinner at the White House, September 4, 2025.
Another devastating round of job cuts has just opened in the tech
industry with the layoffs announced by Block and eBay, one in which
corporate executives are openly and explicitly justifying mass sackings
as the product of artificial intelligence and “new ways of working.”
On
February 27, Block, formerly the financial services company Square,
announced that it is eliminating more than 4,000 jobs—nearly 40 percent
of its workforce—and cutting headcount from over 10,000 to just under
6,000.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey made a point of tying the destruction
of jobs directly to AI, bragging that “the intelligence tools we’re
creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a
new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build
and run a company.”
Dorsey insisted that this was not a response
to crisis, but a strategic “structural change,” writing to shareholders
that Block is “ahead of the curve” and that “within the next year, I
believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and
make similar structural changes.”
The company expects hundreds of
millions of dollars in restructuring charges in the first quarter alone,
with most of the layoffs completed by mid?year, meanwhile its stock
price surged on the news and Wall Street celebrated the enormous cut to
labor costs.
Almost simultaneously, eBay announced that it will
cut approximately 800 positions, around 6 percent of its global
workforce, in yet another restructuring aimed at “realigning” staffing
with “long?term strategic priorities.”
This is the third round of
job cuts since 2023 at the massive global online marketplace, coming
just days after its $1.2 billion agreement to acquire Gen?Z–focused
resale platform Depop, as part of a multi?year effort to “consistently”
reduce headcount while ramping up AI investments across its marketplace
and internal operations.
Local reports are saying that managers,
researchers, data scientists and software engineers are being hit
heavily and that the restructuring is directed squarely at the core
technical and professional layers whose work is being increasingly
automated or offshored.
An anti-gender crusade is sweeping across Latin America: the far right, religious fundamentalists, and transnational networks are mobilising to roll back feminist gains to consolidate political power.
The works in this dossier
include illustrations and excerpts from longer comics – snapshots of
scenes of struggle, care work, invisible labour, militancy, and
instances of ‘putting one’s body on the line’ (poner el cuerpo). The
creators of these works are Latin American women and members of the
LGBTQIA+ community who seek to defend and tell their own stories in the
face of the far right’s many-pronged agenda in the region.
The selection was made in collaboration with Feminismo Gráfico (Graphic Feminism), a collective dedicated to compiling, recovering, and showcasing Argentinian women creators of comics and graphic humour from the early twentieth century to the present. Feminismo Gráfico builds a critical genealogy of the comics medium from a feminist perspective, contesting meanings in a popular language that has long been undervalued and centring the experiences of women and dissident genders and sexualities. Visit their archive at feminismografico.com.
Introduction
Since 2016, marches against sexual and gender diversity1
have swept across Latin America. They feature women dressed in pink and
men in blue to underscore traditional gender roles. The marches have
been accompanied by a strong social media presence, with hashtags such
as #NoALaIdeologíaDeGénero (‘No to gender ideology’),
#ConMisHijosNoTeMetas (‘Don’t mess with my children’),
#AMisHijosLosEducoYo (‘I will educate my children’), and #ConLosNiñosNo
(‘Not with children’).
These campaigns, which have their roots in the United States in the
1970s and reemerged in the twenty-first century, are part of an
anti-gender, anti-feminist wave driven by Christian fundamentalism. This
wave has swept across Catholic-majority countries in Western Europe
such as Spain and Italy; across Eastern Europe, from Croatia and Hungary
to Poland and Slovenia; and beyond Europe, from Australia to
Sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, efforts to sabotage comprehensive
sex education and restrict access to contraceptives and safe abortion
are widespread (for instance, more than half of the countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa criminalise sexual and gender diversity).2
Alongside this conservative wave, Latin America experienced an intense
transnational cycle of feminist mobilisation (2015–2019). This cycle of
feminist mobilisation also strained the limits of state institutions and
often outpaced the agendas of the region’s progressive governments,
pressing demands that went further than those governments were willing
or able to pursue.
Today’s far right is international and ascendant, from the
Philippines and Hungary to India and Argentina. In this dossier, we
examine how, in Latin America, its tentacles intertwine with those of
global, regional, and local ultraconservative organisations – both
religious and secular – to promote an agenda against the rights of women
and sexually and gender-diverse people. Our main lens for analysing how
this agenda operates in different countries is The Con Mis Hijos No Te
Metas (‘Don’t Mess with My Children’) campaign, which is active across
most of the region. We look at six Latin American countries to show how
this campaign operated between 2016 and 2025: Peru, where it originated;
Ecuador, where it was first exported and took hold under an
economically and politically progressive government; Argentina, home to
the strongest feminist movements in the region, where major legal and
institutional advances have been achieved for the rights of women and
sexually and gender-diverse people; Chile, where the massive popular
uprising of 2019 failed to consolidate broad gains even as the feminist
movement managed to achieve some; and El Salvador, among the most
conservative countries on sexual and reproductive rights. El Salvador
shares with Brazil – also analysed here – a strong presence of
evangelical fundamentalist movements and the fact that, although the Con
Mis Hijos No Te Metas campaign has played a limited role, other
mechanisms and closely related campaigns have.
Walter Rodney Collection, Robert R.Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center
To mark the 84th
anniversary of the birth of Afro-Guyanese Marxist historian and
revolutionary Walter Rodney (23 March 1942), we share an article from
ROAPE’s special issue 186 on Frantz Fanon that examines the shifting
imprint of The Wretched of the Earth on Rodney’s evolving
anti-imperialist politics. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney
Papers and beyond, Chinedu Chukwudinma and Baindu Kallon argue that
Rodney’s changing engagement with Fanon reveals key patterns and nuances
about his political development on questions of class as the strategy
and tactics of liberation. They contend that while Rodney initially
embraced Fanon’s ideas, he gradually refined, challenged and at times
rejected them as he grappled with the failed promises of
post-independence Jamaica and Tanzania.
Introduction
In June 1974, a severe bout of malaria
confined Afro-Guyanese historian Walter Rodney to a bed at Muhimbili
National Hospital in Dar es Salaam. As he lay ill in his mid-thirties,
Rodney was perhaps haunted by the memory of Frantz Fanon’s premature
death from cancer at the age of 36. That fate loomed large in the
imagination of the comrades who stood by his bedside. Horace Campbell
later recalled that when a European doctor proposed transferring him to
Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, DC – where Fanon had died 13 years
earlier – Rodney’s comrades protested. They eventually secured his
release into the care of a fellow activist, under whom he recovered (Campbell 1974, 178–179).
The spectre of Fanon in Rodney’s life
extended far beyond mortality. Though born 17 years apart, both men
traced remarkably similar paths: descendants of enslaved Africans from
the Caribbean who saw Africa’s liberation as essential to their own.
Each moved from intellectual critique to revolutionary organisation:
Fanon as an activist in Algeria’s National Liberation Front, and Rodney
as a Marxist leader of Guyana’s Working People’s Alliance (Lewis 1998; Boukari-Yabara 2018; Zeilig 2021, 2022).
This article examines how Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
(1961), though written on the eve of African independence, inspired
Rodney to reflect on questions of strategy and class in the
anti-imperialist struggles of postcolonial Africa and the Caribbean from
1968 to 1978. Drawing on material from the Walter Rodney Papers (WRP)
and beyond, it argues that Rodney’s shifting engagement with Fanon’s
work illuminates important patterns and subtleties in his political
development. While Rodney initially embraced many of Fanon’s ideas, he
gradually refined, challenged and at times rejected them. Recognising
their limits amid the pitfalls of anti-imperialist struggles, he turned
to Marxist theory as a more powerful guide to revolution.
Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his
laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every
frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift,
he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots,
sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States.
His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different
personas.
“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m
talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a
woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need
to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at
in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers,
developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex.
“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw
someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a
lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But
you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for
me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”
Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI
companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization
called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,”
a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex
bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to
fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian
non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that
often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and
moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the
world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the
runaway valuations of AI companies.
Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi
Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.
Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.
“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m
talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a
woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need
to act like a gay person,” he told me at a coworking space I met him at
in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers,
developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex.
“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw
someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a
lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But
you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for
me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”
Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI
companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization
called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,”
a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex
bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to
fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian
non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that
often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and
moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the
world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the
runaway valuations of AI companies.
Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi
Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.
