Belén Fernández

Belén Fernández is the author of "Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World" and "The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work." She is a member of the Jacobin Magazine editorial board, and her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Al Akhbar English and many other publications.
Articles by this author
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Views Tuesday, February 16, 2021 The Case Against Jared Kushner's Nobel Nomination Jared Kushner, former White House adviser and prized son-in-law of Twitter ban victim and ex-US President Donald Trump, has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz. The nomination is based on Kushner’s role in negotiating last year the "... Read more |
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Views Friday, January 15, 2021 Here We Go Again, But Now the Target Is Iran In September 2002, United States President George W Bush began a speech in Nashville with some typically eloquent charm: "There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again." This was... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 14, 2020 Friedman at 50 Friedman Units: What Did We Do to Deserve This? In a recent dispatch on coronavirus, three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman complains that he is “stunned by the criticism that anyone talking about saving lives and jobs in the same breath is an unfeeling capitalist.” Given that Friedman has long opposed job... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 07, 2020 Child Suicide Is a Symptom of Our Traumatised World In early January, as the world waited to see whether the United States 's addiction to carnage and destruction would lead to all-out war with Iran , US congresswoman Ilhan Omar remarked : "[E]very time I hear conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD [post-traumatic stress... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, December 31, 2019 How the US Made the So-Called 'Safe Third Countries' Unsafe This year, US President and xenophobe-in-chief Donald Trump finagled " safe third country agreements " with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, allowing the United States to deport aspiring asylum seekers to the very region many of them are fleeing in the first place. Even Salvadoran President... Read more |
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Views Wednesday, May 22, 2019 Has the New York Times Declared War on Iran? Once upon a time, the United States launched a war on Iraq with the help of false allegations of WMD. The corporate media—and most memorably the US newspaper of record, the New York Times —thrust itself onto the PR frontlines by presenting as reality the unhinged claims of the George W Bush... Read more |
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Views Friday, February 22, 2019 Cold Warrior Elliott Abrams Returns to Battle in Venezuela Shortly after right-wing figure Juan Guaido auto-proclaimed himself interim president of Venezuela in January - to the immediate applause of US President Donald Trump - US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced the appointment of a special envoy to "help the Venezuelan people fully restore... Read more |
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Views Sunday, January 06, 2019 How Capitalism Is Killing Us Hitchhiking through Venezuela some years ago, a friend and I availed ourselves of the novel opportunity to receive free medical care at health clinics established by late President Hugo Chavez , a much-vilified enemy of the international capitalist order. I had never experienced the danger of free... Read more |
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Views Friday, December 21, 2018 'Barbed Wire-Plus': Borders Know No Love During a Thanksgiving Day teleconference with members of the US armed forces, US President Donald Trump took the opportunity to exult over the intensified militarisation of the nation's southern border in response to the US-bound Central American migrant and refugee caravan: "We have the concertina... Read more |
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Views Monday, October 29, 2018 The Inconvenient Truth About the US-Bound Migrant Caravan In mid-October, what has come to be known as the " migrant caravan " departed Honduras for a weeks-long trek through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States. The size of the caravan has fluctuated, but the United Nations calculated that, as of 22 October, some 7,200 people had joined up - many of... Read more |