Surviving Globalization

Globalization has reached even the most remote areas of Latin America, pushing traditional peoples and habitats to the brink of extinction and offering a stark choice: adapt or perish.  Local communities are scrambling to adjust to new market and social realities while trying to hold on to those cultural values that they regard as non-negotiable.

This book tells the story of three Latin American communities experiencing globalization at the point of contact between tradition and modernity: Brazil's rubber tappers, Bolivia's Guaraní Indians, and Nicaragua's women cooperativists.  Through exclusive, in-depth

and religious dimensions of globalization.

Denis Lynn Daly Heyck is a professor at Loyola University Chicago, and is author of
Tradicion y cambio: lecturas sobre la cultura latinoamericana contemporanea, 2nd ed. (McGraw-Hill, 1997); Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States (Routledge, 1994); and Life Stories of the Nicaraguan Revolution (Routledge, 1990).

Available from Broadview Press at www.broadviewpress.com/bvbooks.asp?BookID=536.

Amazon Surveillance System

Brazil has unveiled the Amazon Surveillance System at a cost of $1.4 billion. The radar network system, known as SIVAM, aims to help protect the Amazon from environmental destruction; drug dealing and provide data to unlock the region's economic potential.

Today, the 2 million-square mile wilderness remains a largely lawless frontier. The governments can barely find -- much less catch -- the illegal miners, loggers and drug runners who hop from clandestine air strips through the jungle and across borders between Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Colombia --also Ecuador. But that could change with SIVAM.

With 19 ground based radar sites and five airborne tracking systems aboard AWACS-type surveillance planes, operators can monitor air traffic and even track low-flying drug planes. In the Brazilian Amazon alone, deforestation claimed 6,000 square miles of rain forest in 2001.

Brazilians have expressed some fears that if the destruction of the Amazon is not curbed, the international community will step in. SIVAM is one effort to gain some control. Brazil is also beefing up its military outposts along the frontiers with its Amazonian neighbors. Some of its neighbors have expressed fears that this is will lead to

a continuation of the expansion of its borders further into what is now recognized as the borders with its Amazonian neighbors.

Similar programs are being established in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia.

Jungle Geopolitics - High-Tech Surveillance System May Threaten Amazon, by Marcelo Ballve, Pacific News Service, July 10, 2002.

Retrieved from http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=674 on June 12, 2003.

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Volume 14, Issue 2

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