International

“The United States is no longer our privileged partner. Now the privileged partner is China,” Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño stated at the close of the third summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Costa Rica on January 29.

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A recent case study on Canadian mining abuses in Latin America has woven one more thread of justice into the tapestry of international law. The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has found five Canadian mining companies and the Canadian government responsible for human rights violations in Latin America, including labor rights violations, environmental destruction, the denial of indigenous self-determination rights, criminalization of dissent and targeted assassinations.

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In her newly released book Drug War Capitalism, journalist Dawn Paley demonstrates how the so-called war on drugs is really a war on people. To understand this ongoing war against people, Paley argues that we must recognize how capitalist expansion of new markets is linked to the reorganization (or destabilization) of a country’s security state and political economy.

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All eyes were on Peru as December began as this rising economic star hosted the United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP 20 (20th yearly session of the Conference of the Parties), the annual climate talks in which 195 states congregate to discuss our changing climate. The main mission in Lima was to advance in negotiations for a new climate treaty that is hoped to be agreed at the COP 21 next year in Paris. […]

The demand for climate justice has created a broad umbrella, a true movement of movements, in which those on the front-lines of the climate crisis are connecting their struggles, sharing strategies,  naming their common enemies, and building solutions from the bottom-up.

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On November 14, the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras – the three countries that comprise Central America’s Northern Triangle – presented their “Alliance for Prosperity” plan at an event at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). Ostensibly a response to the root causes of migration that led to this summer’s child refugee “crisis,” the plan brings to mind various past cases of crises exploited for economic gain, as Naomi Klein detailed in her landmark book, The Shock Doctrine.

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Miskitu and Garifuna community leaders are speaking out to defend their territories from oil and gas activity in Honduras. In contrast to Belize and Costa Rica, where environmental NGOs, scientists, and others formed powerful national alliances to fight oil exploration, in Honduras, Indigenous opposition is as of yet largely unheard and unsupported.

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