Elon Musk and all that was wrong with 2021

 Al Jazeera English

Time magazine recently chose Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history” and the CEO of rocket firm SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla – as its “2021 Person of the Year”. In the first paragraph of the lengthy profile of Musk accompanying the accolade, we learn that the man “tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun”, sends the stock market soaring and swooning with a “flick of his finger”, and also “likes to live-tweet his poops”. . . .

Presumably, the excremental intro is meant to project a down-to-earth, human dimension onto the tyrannical South African entrepreneur who wants to colonise Mars and has officially appointed himself “Technoking” of Tesla. Call it poop-washing, if you will. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Welcome to Tijuana – or not

 Al Jazeera English

In February 2017, Guadalupe Olivas Valencia, a Mexican man in his mid-40s, killed himself by jumping off of a bridge in Tijuana, Mexico, which lies directly across the border from San Diego, California.

The suicide took place just minutes after Olivas Valencia had been deported from the United States for the third time. Symbolically, he jumped holding the plastic bag that had been issued to him by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for his belongings, as CBP customarily does for deportees.

Now, nearly five years later, US border policy continues to destroy lives – and Tijuana continues to serve as an epicentre of destruction.

The Joe Biden administration has just reinstated the so-called “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP) – the criminally euphemistic Donald Trump-era policy that saw Tijuana and other Mexican border cities converted into holding pens for asylum seekers in the US. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

Remembering US-backed state terror in El Salvador

Al Jazeera English

Forty years ago, on December 11, 1981, one of the worst massacres in modern Latin American history commenced in El Salvador, in the village of El Mozote and its environs.

Some 1,000 civilians, most of them women and children, were slaughtered over a period of several days by the Salvadoran military’s elite Atlacatl Battalion, which had been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States.

A Jacobin Magazine tribute published on the 35th anniversary of the massacre recalls some of the gruesome scenes:

“The soldiers entered the house and began slashing the children with machetes, breaking their skulls with their rifles and choking them to death. The youngest children were crammed into the church’s convent, where the soldiers unloaded their rifles into them.” 

The bloodbath took place in the context of El Salvador’s civil war of 1980-92, which ultimately killed more than 75,000 people – with the vast majority of atrocities perpetrated by the right-wing state in collaboration with paramilitary outfits and death squads. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.