From across North Africa to Wisconsin, activists are navigating a new terrain of global protest and relationships with their governments. Whether in ousting old tyrants or dealing with new allies in office, the example of Bolivia holds many lessons for social movements.
Mexican Federal Police allegedly shot radio journalist Gilardo Mota Figueroa as he covered a protest last Tuesday against President Felipe Calderón’s visit to Oaxaca City. Mota Figueroa told Crónica de Oaxaca that during clashes with Oaxaca’s teachers union, a Federal Police officer opened fire on the crowd from a distance of about six meters (or about twenty feet). One of the bullets struck Mota Figueroa in the leg. Another 2-4 bullets were embedded in an armored SUV that authorities had left parked on the street.
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For more than 20 years, the people of Porto Alegre, Brazil have been directly determining how the city spends it’s money. Chicago’s 49th Ward became the first US community to adopt the practice in 2009, and is now repeating the process.
The case, Aguinda v. ChevronTexaco, began on November 3, 1993, when 30,000 people from Ecuador’s Amazon filed a class action suit against Texaco in New York federal court. The trial was then forced to move from New York to a local court in Ecuador in 2002, alleging that any decision required national jurisdiction. Monday Superior Court Judge Nicolás Zambrano ordered Chevron to pay $8.6 billion in damages and twice that amout if they refuse to “publicly apologize to the victims of the Ecuadorian Amazon for the crimes committed.”
On January 24, Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia died aged 86. Thousands of people, especially indigenous people from the communities from the most forgotten corner of the country, as the Zapatistas defined it in 1994, have filed past the coffin of the man who was the bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas for forty years. […]
The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Ecumenical Commission for Human Rights (CEDHU), the Regional Human Rights Advisory Foundation (INREDH), and the Centre for Economic and Social Rights (CDES) express their concern for growing criminalization against social protest of indigenous communities in Ecuador, which are mobilized in defence of their rights due to the presence of large scale mining activities on their territories.
Since early December, hundreds of private contractors of multinational banana corporation Banacol have illegally invaded and occupied Afro-Colombian peace communities in the Curvaradó river basin in order to clear the land for banana cultivation. Their actions have been supported and assisted by local paramilitaries, army soldiers and municipal governments.
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