The push to reintroduce long-lost native crops is one expression of Latin America’s burgeoning food sovereignty movement. Governments across Latin America are increasingly concerned with promoting the rural poor’s ability to live self-sufficiently on locally produced goods instead of dumped products often exported from monoculture farms. […]
An interview with Aviva Chomsky, professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts.
Chomsky is a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from a Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. […]
It has been well publicized that on March 1, 2008 the Colombian government, with support from Washington, carried out a series of attacks on Ecuadorian soil which violated the sovereignty of a foreign nation (and international law) and resulted in the murder of Raúl Reyes and two dozen other members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP). Less attention, however, has been given to the five Mexican academics present in the FARC-EP encampment at the time of the attack conducting research on the insurgency movement.
Colombia’s popular movement to reform the nation’s constitution by including explicit protection for the human right to water took a giant leap forward last week. […]
There is a dire need for international reflection regarding the role of U.S policy abroad, and especially in response to US Government publications regarding the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA). In actuality, if passed, the FTA would further destabilize Colombia’s small-property farmers, take away an estimated 250,000 jobs, maintain state sanctioned impunities for military and paramilitary violences against Colombia’s civilian populations, and threaten biodiversity within the country. […]
The peace community of San José de Apartado was created in 1997 by five hundred displaced villagers from seventeen different towns in the wider region, following a wave of massacres perpetrated mostly by paramilitary groups. While forced out of their homes, these farmers were determined that they would not give up their lands. The only way to do so, they resolved, was through self organization and refusing to take part in the conflict in any way.
This week five hundred people representing over a hundred social movement groups from across the Americas gathered in Medellín for a People’s Development Alternatives Assembly coinciding with the 50th anniversary meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank. […]
Yet another of Colombia’s top paramilitary leaders was extradited to the U.S. Thursday to be brought up on drug trafficking charges despite the objections of some rights groups and questions raised by Colombian politicians visiting Washington. Éver Veloza García was put on a plane for New York by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, making him the 15th high-ranking paramilitary leader to be extradited.
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Last week over 200 people held a march and rally in the city of Barrancabermeja, Santander department, to demand justice for two imprisoned leaders of the largest campesino association in the region a day before the beginning of their trial. […]
We write these lines overcome by tremendous pain and sadness. We write from the shared rage we feel towards this criminal act, apparently committed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cauca, FARC, whom we condemn for these irreversible horrors and the shedding of innocent blood. […]
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