Month: March 2012
Displaced Guatemalan Peasants Demand Answers
(IPS) – “We want land where we can live and grow food to feed ourselves,” said Pedro Ichich, one of several thousand indigenous farmers who marched to the Guatemalan capital to demand solutions to the […]
Mexico: Blood for Silver, Blood for Gold
In the dry and dusty town of San José del Progreso south of Oaxaca, Mexico, a funeral was held on March 17 for a slain community leader who actively opposed a Canadian silver and gold mining project in his community. But in spite of the fear and intimidation, anti-mining activists from San José together with other surrounding communities affected by the mine, will continue on in their resistance.
Peru: Cajamarca Protests Continue as Conga Gold Mine Awaits Green Light
“¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no! ¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no!” [Water yes! Gold no!] The chant vibrated through the thin Andean air as a regional demonstration against the Conga Gold Mine Project took place last Thursday to honor World Water Day. Thousands of residents of Cajamarca, Peru, gathered at the Laguna Azul, one of many high-altitude lakes on the proposed Conga Mine site, in effort to protect their water resources from exploitation and contamination.
The Morales government: neoliberalism in disguise?
Source: International Socialism For more than a decade Bolivia has been rocked by mass upsurges and mobilisations that have posed the necessity and possibility of fundamental political and social transformation.1In 2005 the social movements that […]
Salvadoran Civil War Survivors Demand Restorative Justice
(IPS) – A choked-up Mercedes Alfaro told the fourth session of the International Restorative Justice Tribunal in El Salvador how she lost seven members of her family in a 1982 massacre. “It’s very hard to […]
UN Body Says Brazil Violating Indigenous Rights
The International Labour Organization (ILO), part of the UN, has criticized the Brazilian government for failing to respect indigenous peoples’ rights. The ILO has stated that by failing to consult Indians about the construction of […]
Indigenous Guatemalan Protestors March in Defense of Territory
Source: Cultural Survival Thousands of Indigenous peoples and campesinos in Guatemala have embarked on a nine-day protest march to the capital city, covering over 214 kilometers. Organized by the Comite de Unidad Campesino, (CUC) the […]
Campesinos Refusing To Disappear: Guatemala’s Polochic Valley One Year After the Evictions
Juan lived in the village of Paraná until August, when for the second time in six months the private security forces of an international sugar company reduced his home to ashes and tilled his crops under to plant sugarcane. The Polochic Valley is now full of farmers, surrounded by a sea of sugarcane, who can’t afford to feed their children sugar. This snapshot is a telling example of what hunger and poverty look like today –according to the FAO, three-fourths of the people who experience food insecurity live in rural farming areas, –and the most recent round of dispossession in the Polochic dramatically illustrates the larger pattern of how small farmers become landless laborers.