Since the 2006 Oaxaca revolt state repression in Mexico has contributed to popular feeling that peaceful protest has failed. Today, the country is on the threshold of a cycle of armed anti-capitalist struggle, argues Mihalis Mentinis

The notion of the 'failed state' is recurrently invoked to justify military and security interventions. Reviewing two books which take so-called failed states in Africa and South America as their object of enquiry, Angela Mitropoulos questions the founding premises of 'successful' national sovereignty

The Counterpunch video interview with Peter Linebaugh is at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/ruspoli03142007.html

No other group has had such a catalysing influence on the new political forms and tactics espoused by the anti-globalisation movement, yet there has been too little critical analysis of the Zapatistas' politics and the relationship of western activists to their guerilla icons. Melancholic Troglodytes review Mihalis Mentinis' book Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means for Radical Politics and discovers some ugly nationalist features behind the mask

Tijuana Organic – a show that profiles contemporary artists and media activists from the Mexican border town made notorious by its maquiladoras, immigration struggles and crime – steers a course between depicting Tijuana's harsh realities and avoiding a sensationalist treatment of its social complexities. Reviewed by Armin Medosch

This is a curious piece of political positioning - a radical curator, Chris Gilbert, has resigned from Berkeley Art Museum after the museum's directors demanded that he neutralise his statement of revolutionary solidarity that accompanied a show on Venezuelan media 'along the path of the Bolivarian Process'. Gilbert delivers a stinging admonishment to institutional hypocrisy (the duplicity of its brief to serve the 'people' while servicing its bourgeois paymasters etc.) - and it makes for a rollicking read.

If government and corporate media are increasingly ‘tactical’ and ‘devolved’,
do tactical media projects mirror strategic capitalist objectives or create real opportunities for oppositional expression? Brazil’s ‘third way’ government has made high speed internet access on open source platforms available to its people through Telecentros across the country. David Garcia reports on a non-governmental project which tried to help the urban poor use these new resources to their own ends

Benetton’s corporate PR campaign against the Mapuche people in Argentina has broken up on the wave of independent media activism. Sebastian Hacher reports

The region called Patagonia reaches from the center of Argentina to where the continent touches the South Pole, and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Andes mountain range. Patagonia is 30 percent of the territory of Argentina, about 780,000 km2 where 80 percent of the oil reserves of the country are concentrated, as well as great water resources and some surviving areas of virgin land.

Mute has recently covered the appearance of street TV in Italy. Here, Sebastian Hacher reports on the emergence of a new form of self-instituted community media out of Argentina's piquetero movement

Like the advertising people we talked about, I'm concerned with