James Phillips
James Phillips is a cultural and political anthropologist with forty years as a student of Central America.
His major concerns are movements of social change, political conflict, human rights, colonialism, and immigrant and refugee populations.
He is the author of articles and book chapters on Honduras and Nicaragua. His most recent book is Extracting Honduras: Resource Exploitation, Displacement, and Forced Migration (Lexington Books, 2022).
James can be reached at phillipsj@sou.edu.
Obstacles to Change
Attempts to change the United States immigration system faces the serious problem that the current system is a very lucrative business for some powerful interests. Corporations benefit with an influx of cheap labor into the U.S.
Corporations also benefit in countries where they are free to pursue the...
Immigration has been a “hot issue” in the United States for a long time. In the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin complained about the influx of German immigrants. In the mid-1800s, there was a strong nativist movement against European immigrants, especially Catholics and Jews. In the 1880s, it was the Chinese...
On the evening of September 14, Delegate of the Word Juan López had just finished leading a Saturday evening service at the Catholic church in Tocoa, Honduras.
Witnesses say that, as he was getting to his car, someone on a motorcycle rode by and shot him multiple times, killing him.
López...
In Part 1 of this article, a brief outline of the evolution of the Monroe Doctrine makes clear how utterly destructive that doctrine and its descendants have become to the nations of Latin America and the United States, both to its relationship to Latin America and to the fundamental...
Last December, U.S. Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) introduced Resolution 943 in Congress, to have the United States formally renounce and annul the Monroe Doctrine. Meanwhile, the government of Honduran President Xiomara Castro has withdrawn Honduras from an arbitration mechanism in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) that allows...
The dangers of a coup remain, given past policies
In November 2021, Hondurans resoundingly elected a new government, headed by President Xiomara Castro, that pledged to end official corruption, reduce violence, and move away from reliance upon a destructive, extractive economy controlled by foreign corporations.
Castro’s government committed to moving the...
