Check out all of our coverage of the first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century.
Filed under News
The first coup d’etat in Central America in more than a quarter-century occurred last Sunday in Honduras. It was led by a graduate of the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, a military facility that has trained some of Latin America’s worst torturers, murderers and human rights abusers.
Filed under Weekly Column
Tools of mass communication that were once the province of governments and corporations now fit in your pocket. As these technologies have developed, so too has the ability to monitor, filter, censor and block them.
Filed under Weekly Column
The Environmental Protection Agency has declared a public health emergency in the town of Libby, Montana, where hundreds of people have died from asbestos contamination. It is the first time such a declaration has been made by the EPA. For decades, W.R. Grace and Co. mined asbestos-contaminated vermiculite in Libby.
See extended Democracy Now! coverage
Filed under DN Archives
As the Obama administration pushes for a vote on health-care reform before Congress recesses in August, has health-industry money too thoroughly polluted the process for anything good to come of it?
Filed under Weekly Column
Ken Saro-Wiwa and Alberto Pizango never met, but they are united by a passion for the preservation of their people and their land, and by the fervor with which they were targeted by their respective governments.
Filed under Weekly Column
Dr. Tiller was assassinated while in church in Wichita, Kan., on Sunday, targeted for legally performing abortions. His death might have been prevented simply through enforcement of existing laws.
Filed under Weekly Column
Profits are higher than ever at oil companies Chevron and Shell. Yet across the globe, from the Ecuadorian jungle, to the Niger Delta in Nigeria, to the courtrooms and streets of New York and San Ramon, Calif., people are fighting back against the world’s oil giants.
Filed under Weekly Column
More Blog Posts »
In the tiny town of Tulia, Texas two years ago, 43 suspects were arrested on charges of selling small amounts ofcocaine, in the biggest drug sting in local history. All but three of the 43 defendants were black More than tenpercent of the African-American community of the town of 5,000 were arrested in a drug sting conducted by a singleundercover officer with no corroborating evidence. In some cases, hometown juries later meted out sentences rangingfrom 20 years to more than 300 years.
In Tulia, set on the high plains of the Texas panhandle, local officials declared the operation a stunning success.In all, 22 of the defendants were sent to prison while others received probation. The undercover agent at the centerof the operation, Tom Coleman, was even named by the state as lawman of the year. Coleman based the raid on claimslike resident Billy Wafer, a forklift driver, sold him cocaine at a local convenience store. But Wafer’s employertestified that Mr. Wafer was at work at the time Coleman said the drug deal took place.
But was this operation, once hailed as a victory in the war on drugs, actually a war on blacks?
On October 2000, relatives of those indicted joined the ACLU, NAACP and the William Moses Kunstler Fund for RacialJustice to file a formal complaint with the Department of Justice against the Panhandle Regional Narcotics TaskForce, the controlling agency in charge of the drug sting. We turn now to a documentary created by the Emily andSarah Kunstler for the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice.
Tape:
Related link:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org
. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions,
contact us.