Maya Q’eqchi’ women survivors recently entered the Supreme Court in Guatemala as part of the Sepur Zarco case to demand justice for sexual violence, sexual and domestic slavery, forced disappearances and murder, crimes committed during the internal armed conflict of 1960-1996.
The enormous mining corporation tried every which way they could to evict Máxima Acuña de Chaupe and her family of subsistence farmers. They used the police, guards, journalists, judgements, and many other weapons. But this is a steadfast family, with a woman deeply rooted in her land in Peru’s northern Andes, who resisted with all her strength and would not give up.
Will Bolivians approve a constitutional amendment that would allow President Evo Morales to run for a fourth term?
This February 4, celebrating the “historic collaboration” between the United States and Colombia, current Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos visited the White House to meet with President Barack Obama as they commemorate the fifteen-year anniversary of Plan Colombia. Signed in 2000 under U.S. President Bill Clinton and Colombian President Andrés Pastrana, Plan Colombia was a $1.3 billion initiative to support the Colombian government’s counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts.
Family, friends and supporters of Saúl Méndez and Rogelio Velásquez, two political prisoners who had been falsely accused of femicide, kidnapping, and murder, received some joyous news on January 14, 2016; after three years in prison, they were released. However, six other prominent activists from northern Huehuetenango still face prosecution for their resistance to hydroelectric projects imposed in their territory by transnational corporations.
Keiko Fujimori will likely win the 2016 Peruvian presidential elections scheduled for this April. She is the daughter of deposed president Alberto Fujimori, who became one of the first heads of state to be convicted of human rights violations in Latin America. Keiko Fujimori is polling at over thirty percent in an early crowded field of around 12 candidates. The election of a far-right candidate who has pledged to pardon her imprisoned father when she assumes the presidency seems incomprehensible. […]
The campaign to shut down Colombia’s infamous La Tramacua prison, located in the country’s sweltering Caribbean region and often referred to as the “Guantanamo of Colombia,” could be on the verge of a major breakthrough. Built in the year 2000, with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons and USAID funding, as part of the penitentiary restructuring component of Plan Colombia, La Tramacua is a veritable house of horrors.
While it wastes its own felled trees, the Belo Monte plant buys irregular wood, heating up a criminal market that invades indigenous territories. Part two of a report on the human and environmental costs of government-sanctioned illegal logging in Brazil’s Pará state.
Two years ago, the only man running in Haiti’s fraudulent presidential election run-offs on January 24, 2016, Jovenel Moïse, dispossessed as many as 800 peasants and destroyed houses and crops. The land grabbed by the company Moïse founded now hosts a private banana plantation.
The world’s largest GMO corporation never imagined that it would suffer one of its major setbacks in a small, rural town in central Argentina. Popular opposition, irregularities in the company’s environmental impact assessment, a protest blockade at the entry gate, and a court ruling stalled the construction of its seeds plant three years ago.
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