UKRAINE’S PRESIDENT Viktor Yanukovich appears to have been driven from power after the mass protest movement that has occupied Kiev’s Maidan (Independence Square) since November survived a deadly crackdown last week. In a matter of days, the country’s corrupt and autocratic regime was overwhelmed.

This article was written for Mexican Labor News and Analysis and therefore emphasizes NAFTA’s impact on Mexico.

The Three Amigos summit meeting of President Barack Obama of the United States, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico, and President Stephen Harper of Canada just held in Mexico amounted to little more than a reaffirmation of the neoliberal agenda represented by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that took effect twenty years ago.

My problem with Julia's analysis is that it repeats the standard line that is being repeated throughout the press regardless of political point of view. I think there are two main problems with this party line.

While we recognize that the following statement represents the point of view of a small minority both within the Ukrainian rebellion and in Ukraine at large, we reprint it here nonetheless, thinking that it is an important statement of the left. – Editors.

Euromaidan and a Program for the Left

Euromaidan’s popularity has nothing to do with Ukrainians finding the question of free trade with the European Union so significant that it emboldened them to survive sleepless nights on the square. The country’s socioeconomic problems, which are much more acute than those of its neighbors to the East and West, gave the protest its meaning.

There’s no single recipe for building the social movement we need to make public education what it should be, to nurture and protect democracy and kids’ well-being.  But we can see essential ingredients coming together in many different places.

Dear Friends,

As the uprising in Ukraine seems to be coming to a crisis after weeks of mass demonstrations and occupations, I would like to translate for you the following letter received last week from Julia Gusseva, the Russian translator of Victor Serge and co-organizer of the International Conference of Independent Labor Unions in Kiev last November. Julia, an activist since the ‘80s, is one of the founders of the Praxis Center in Moscow, and writes from an anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint.

Four Argentine oil workers were convicted last December 12 of having killed a policeman in the midst of a strike and a demonstration demanding the release of a jailed union member. The four—Ramón Cortez, José Rosale, Franco Padilla, and Hugo González—were sentenced to life in prison, while six other defendants were each sentenced to five years in prison on charges of coercion.

Steve Kindred, an irrepressible American radical— student and antiwar activist, socialist, and labor organizer—died of cancer on December 9, 2013 in New York City at the age of 69.