In Brazil, one of the countries with the highest concentration of land ownership in the world, some 200,000 peasant farmers still have no plot of their own to farm – a problem that the first administration of President Dilma Rousseff did little to resolve. […]
Cubans insist that the December 17, 2014 announcement of United States president Barack Obama and Cuban president Raúl Castro to re-establish diplomatic ties was only the first step toward a full normalization of relations between the two countries. After more than fifty years, at least three steps remain to be taken before interactions achieve the level that they should have.
Elisa Vega Sillo, a member of Bolivia’s Vice Ministry of Decolonization, speaks about the unique work of the Vice Ministry, the role of historical memory in the country’s radical politics, and the importance of decolonizing Bolivia’s history of indigenous resistance.
Coup plotters planned on assassinating the Venezuelan president and installing a transitional government. […]
The youth of Peru have started 2015 by showing the country that a break from neoliberalism is possible. They managed, in the space of just over a month, to mobilize tens of thousands in five separate marches and to force the government to revoke the Youth Labor Regime Law, or, more popularly known as the ‘Pulpín Law,’ a controversial piece of legislation that would have slashed their labor rights.
Rarely, do we activists get the opportunity to take out our rainbow flags and banners, not to stage a demonstration, but to celebrate. On January 28, Chilean activists had that rare opportunity: after four years of intense work by LGBT organizations, a civil union law was passed by Congress.
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.
The Yanacocha gold mine did not exist when Reinhard Seifert first moved to Cajamarca, Peru in the 1970s. Everything changed in 1993, when Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp. opened Yanacocha and spurred a modern gold rush of sorts. In 2011, the company proposed expanding its operations with a megaproject known as the Conga mine, a project instantly met with relentless, sometimes violent, anti-mining demonstrations. Four years later, the Conga mine expansion remains on hold under environmental review. Throughout this period, Seifert played a pivotal role in the anti-mining movement as former president of the Environmental Defense Front of Cajamarca.
By the time of his death on January 23, 2015, Chilean writer, performance artist, radio personality and activist Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015) had become an icon of Chilean counter-culture. His art chronicled the history of the city of Santiago as experienced by members of the Chilean Left during the dictatorship and afterward, poor city residents, gay men, HIV positive people, and transvestites, among others. In 2013, he was awarded the José Donoso Ibero-american Literature Prize. These “urban neo-chronicles” about the human costs of the Pinochet Dictatorship are from his 1998 collection, Of Pearls and Scars [De perlas y cicatrices].
There is a long history in Bolivia of couching politics of liberation within the deeper story of colonialism and indigenous resistance. The MAS party of Evo Morales doesn’t have a monopoly on the uses of Bolivia’s rebel past, but it’s incredibly savvy in its deployment of historical consciousness as an ideological and political tool.
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