Landless rural workers occupy farms in Brazil to fulfill the promises and obligations of a people’s agrarian reform movement and to reclaim a sense of justice. Land occupations in Brazil happen continuously throughout the year, however, the month of April – called “Red April” (Abril Vermelho) – pays tribute and remembrance to the Landless Workers Movement’s (MST) fallen comrades of the Eldorado dos Carajas massacre. […]
It seems hard to believe, but it’s been twenty years since the resistance to the large-scale open pit copper mining project began in Intag. Two decades. Almost a generation.
In their struggle to never forget, parents of the 43 missing young people from Ayotzinapa and students from the rural normal school have in recent weeks launched a vigorous and intense international campaign.
International and local human rights groups are carrying out an intense global campaign to get El Salvador to modify its draconian law that criminalizes abortion and provides for prison terms for women. This Central American country of 6.3 million people is one of the few nations in the world to ban abortion under any circumstances and penalize it with heavy jail terms.
Garifuna community radio stations along the Caribbean coast of Honduras are facing harassment from National Telecommunications Commission officials. Garifuna organizers fear the radio stations may face closure.
Two years have passed since the vicious assassination of Juan Vázquez Guzmán, community leader, spokesperson and social activist from the ejido San Sebastián Bachajón, Chiapas, Mexico. Despite the killing of two of their leaders and frequent attacks from local government-supporters and public security forces, the ejidatarios (common landholders) remain firm in their resistance to dispossession, and in their struggle in defense of their ancestral land, territory and Mother Earth. The situation has now become critical.
Fifteen years ago this month the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia were victorious in their now-famous showdown with one of the most powerful multinational corporations in the world, in what has come to be known as the Cochabamba Water Revolt.
“In the last few weeks and few months, there has been an incremental increase in the orders for arrest against campesinos organized with CCDA for the defense of their territory, rivers, forests, and of life,” said Leocadio Juracan, the national coordinator of CCDA, in a press conference with alternative media. “It is repression.”
Over 400 families formed a peaceful encampment outside the National Palace in downtown Guatemala City last week. According to the Farmers Committee of the Highlands (Comité Campesino del Altiplano, CCDA), families are asking for access to land, the resolution of agrarian conflicts, a stop to forced evictions and an end to the criminalization of community leaders.
On April 13, 2014, an Afro-Colombian community of approximately 300 families known as Puente Nayero did something unprecedented in Colombia’s largest port city of Buenaventura: they formed an urban Humanitarian Space. Criticizing the collusion of state security forces with paramilitaries, community members rejected the militarization of their oceanfront neighborhood and began resisting multinational companies trying to displace them from their homes.
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