“Everyone Must Know What Is Going On”

A Letter to Readers from Sterling Harris

By Sterling Harris
2004 Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar

June 17, 2004

Greetings to my fellow scholars and to the readers of Narco News:

I would like to share with you the story of my education and enlargement. It all started with an atypical professor of Latin American history at Long Beach City College. He managed to weave a fascinating narrative of the history of South America and the U.S. role in shaping it. This inspired me to seek out alternative sources of information, of which there seemed to be precious few at the time. Fed up by the lack of information available to the community some associates and I decided to open up a radical alternative book/info shop in Long Beach.

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From the moment a sign stating quite plainly “fuck the war” was posted in the window, the lines were drawn. During our short time in Long Beach we were under constant surveillance. After the implosion of our experiment, I went to live in Buenos Aires where I learned to speak Spanish. While there, I observed and went to some anti-IMF protests, and was very interested in what was going on. Upon returning to the states I decided I should spend some more time in college, so I have been attending classes at Santa Monica College.

What I have found in our institutions of higher education has sickened me. There is this supposed higher dialogue going on between the intellectuals in the political science departments. What it amounts to is a lot of pompous nonsense, in an attempt to make politics and economics less accessible to the general population as a whole. I hate to see this type of trend, and I want to fight it. I want to make easily understandable information accessible to everyone, so that they can know what’s going on. I’ve had it with the educated types and their pretentious language. I’ve also had it with the Los Angeles Times and that garbage that they call reporting on Latin America. Of course Narco News with our help can be an antidote to all of that.

The recent reporting on the El Salvadoran elections in the Times was instructive. They posited the extremist Tony Saca as a moderate, and ignored his extensive ties to the death squads of the eighties. They applauded the U.S. economic plan for the country, (which will surely mean more suffering) and then took a few potshots at Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (a favorite target of the “liberal” media here in the U.S.). I’m getting angry just sitting here thinking about all of this stuff, but together we can make a difference!

Please make a contribution today to The Fund for Authentic Journalism for this work to continue and expand. You can make a donation, right now, online at:

http://www.authenticjournalism.org/

Or you can send a check:

The Fund for Authentic Journalism
P.O. Box 71051
Madison Heights, MI 48071
USA

Help Narco News continue to report on the issues that matter to all Americans (north and south) and help them to train more authentic journalists this august in Cochabamba, because we all know they are too few and far between in this world

Sterling Harris

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