Argentina

The Bachillerato Popular and the Cooperative are part of Ñanderoga, the social organization located in Las Flores neighborhood, in the district of Vicente López, north of Greater Buenos Aires. Ñanderoga, established in 2004, sets out to organize around cultural, social, and educational activities in an impoverished neighborhood of a wealthy district — a reflection of the so-called paradoxes of a painfully unequal Argentina.

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Residents of a town in Argentina have won the first victory in their fight against biotech giant Monsanto, but they are still at battle stations, aware that winning the war is still a long way off. For four months, activists in Malvinas Argentinas, a town in the central province of Cordoba, have maintained a blockade of the construction site where the U.S. transnational company is building the world’s biggest maize seed treatment plant.

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Following Argentina’s economic crisis in 2001, the country leaned heavily on mining and large-scale agribusiness (especially soy) to reinvigorate its ailing economy. The expansion of these industries requires the accumulation of new lands and the violent displacement of rural communities. Many farmers and indigenous communities don’t have titles to their lands, leaving them vulnerable to displacement or criminal charges for squatting.

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As new potential fracking investments appear on the horizon, so do community protests, mostly from indigenous groups fearing the same sort of environmental problems witnessed in other countries that ventured into non-conventional shale gas extraction. The Mapuche tribe of the Patagonia Region, where most of Argentina’s shale gas reserves lie at Vaca Muerta, are staunchly against fracking and insist that Argentina should uphold its commitments to ILO Convention 169, granting indigenous peoples the right of consultation before large investment projects move forward.

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There are no prisons for autonomy. There are no situations that make it impossible. The experience of the Corriente Villera Independiente in Buenos Aires’ Villa 31 demonstrates that even in the most difficult of material conditions, even going against the current, autonomy can be placed at the center of collective community building.

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The first prisoners’ union in Argentina, a country with a strong organized labor tradition, fights for the rights of inmates. “No one had never fought before for anything like this in here,” said 33-year-old inmate Gustavo Moreno, serving a 22-year sentence in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal in Buenos Aires. […]

A small town in Patagonia is at the heart of the anti-mining struggle in Argentina. Ten years ago it voted against a proposed gold and silver project, and now – a decade later – it has mobilized to reaffirm it’s rejection of mega-mining projects.

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