Articles by Upside Down World
Belize: Mayan pyramid bulldozed by road construction firm
Source: The Guardian Unlimited A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize‘s largest Mayan pyramids with diggers and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities have announced. The head of the […]
Uruguay: Birth of a Movement Against Mining and Extractivism
On March 7 one of Uruguay’s strongest myths was broken: trust in state enterprises. That day those who turned on their faucets were met with a foul smell and those who were drinking coffee or maté found a strange taste. The company in charge of the water supply, the State Sanitary Works (OSE), had to confess that there was “an episode” of algae contamination in the Santa Lucia River Basin, which supplies six out of ten Uruguayans.
After a Two-decade Occupation, Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement Wins Land Rights
Source: MST.org, via Grassroots International After 20 years of struggle and waiting, the families camped out in the municipality of Prado (in extreme south of Brazil’s Bahia state) finally received legal title to their land. […]
Noam Chomsky, Scholars Ask NY Times Public Editor to Investigate Bias on Honduras and Venezuela
Source: NACLA Readers can add their names to the petition at New York Times eXaminer, or contact Ms. Sullivan directly at public@nytimes.com. Please limit emails to 300 words, and follow the guidelines listed at the public […]
Brazil: The Biggest Extractivist in South America
Source: América Latina en Movimiento Extractivism is the appropriation of huge volumes of natural resources or their intensive exploitation, most of them exported as raw materials to global markets. It seems to have gone unnoticed […]
What Changes Lay Ahead for Paraguay?
Instead of dealing with land problems, the government’s attention will be on keeping social conflict from growing in the cities, for which they’ll invent new ways to criminalize the urban poor by creating job sources that do not lead to work security, but rather to things like encouraging the maquiladora sector and deregulating the workplace. The issues of land and farmworker resistance will be treated in the same way they have for decades; that is, through persecution and repression.
Displaced by Gold Mining in Colombia
(IPS) – “I was displaced here by mining a month ago. Illegal miners forced me out of my municipality. No, don’t write down where I’m from, let alone my name,” said a 40-year-old black man […]
Guatemala: So they weren’t “Zetas” after all
This editorial, published last week in Spanish by Guatemalan newspaper La Hora, denounces how the government of Otto Pérez Molina and complicit media attempted to criminalize anti-mining protests in San Rafael Las Flores by linking protestors to organized crime.