A talk by journalist Al Giordano

With a new and repressive regime above, and increasingly rebellious social movements from below, Mexico is on the verge of a wider conflict. Al Giordano will share his eyewitness observations from ten years on the ground in Mexico, and travels during 2006 throughout the Mexican Republic reporting on Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos's national "Other Campaign" tour. He will provide background and context about the Popular Assembly movement in Oaxaca, document the electoral fraud of July 2006 that imposed an illegitimate president on the country, and offer some possible scenarios of what could come next. Also, he'll show two or three brief video newsreels from Narco News' 2006 Other Campaign coverage.

Al has spent the last ten years reporting alongside social movements throughout Latin America (Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Central America, the Caribbean, and primarily Mexico). He is publisher of Narco News (www.narconews.com), the online newspaper that in 2001, won the landmark New York Supreme Court decision establishing First Amendment protection for Internet journalists for the first time. Narco News Books has just published The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Assembly by Nancy Davies (available during
Al's talk). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Al, then an organizer for the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance, could frequently be found in Montpelier, including under arrest with 47 other protesters during a sit-in at the governor's office. This will be his first extended visit to the United States in a decade, and his first time back in central Vermont in more than twenty years.