Marie-Monique Robin’s investigation Death Squadrons: The French School helped shed light on the terrorist acts committed by the State during Argentina’s Dirty War. Recently she testified in two lawsuits concerning crimes against humanity in Argentina. Her new book, Our Daily Poison, investigates the pollutants that contaminate the production of food, and the corporations that want to cover them up.
This April Marks the 29th anniversary of the Falklands War, which claimed the lives of 650 Argentines and 258 British soldiers. But beyond the battle is a territorial dispute that has raged for 178 years and shows no sign of disappearing. […]
Crowded into precarious mud-floored dorms or sheet-metal trailers or forced to live in tents of plastic sheeting, with neither piped water nor electricity, after working 14-hour days: these are the harsh conditions faced by hundreds of thousands of rural workers in Argentina despite bumper crops and record earnings for agribusiness.
A labor activist was shot dead on October 20 in Argentina in a union dispute along Buenos Aires train lines. The victim was Mariano Ferreyra, a 23-year old activist from Argentina’s Workers Party. Corrupt union leaders have used violence to pressure workers not to vote for opposition slates. Outraged residents have protested the violence with marches throughout the nation.
Julio Lopez, Luciano Arruga, Silvia Suppo – three names recently listed the doleful roll call of Argentina’s victims of state repression, a legacy left over from the bloody 1976-1983 military dictatorship. […]
“We were capable, We are capable.” The slogan has repeated itself on government radio and television adverts throughout Argentina, which is celebrating 200 years since the May 25th revolution that eventually led to the country’s independence on July 9, 1816. The natural question such a slogan begs, “of what exactly?” One assumes its independence from Spain. Yet two centuries later, though nobody’s colony, many are still asking: How independent is Argentina really?
Argentina celebrates the bicentennial of a revolution that paved the road to independence from Spain with the nation’s capital transformed into a gala event. But not everyone is celebrating. The nation’s indigenous people are calling attention to a legacy of invasion and displacement that continues to this day. As bicentennial events commenced, indigenous groups led a caravan to the nation’s capital to demand recognition of their sovereign culture and plurality, in one of the largest indigenous demonstrations in Argentina’s history.
The legal battle waged by an indigenous community in northern Argentina against the government over a project that flooded half of their territory highlights the fact that legal title to their land is not enough to overcome the marginalisation they have faced for centuries.
“The poor man has to disappear. There is no more countryside. It’s all private neighborhoods. All private neighborhoods.” Sara Espinosa, age 94, lives in Punta Canal in the town of Tigre, where real estate giant EIDICO is currently constructing two gated communities on either side of her house. While most of her neighbors have sold their land and moved away, Espinosa remains.
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Residents in Northern Argentina have protested the opening of an open pit mining site in the town of Andalgala in the province of Catamarca . A recent police crackdown on the protest has sparked a popular uprising of citizens saying, ‘no to the mine’. Following massive protests in response to police repression this month, a judge temporarily halted further mine works planned to open in 2012.
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