Palms. Sea. Palms. Guns. Palms. Heat. More palms…and then a tense calm. This is how it feels from Ceiba to Tocoa and its surroundings, on the only paved road and in the many small shops, a place where people may see something, but say nothing. This is where the dead lived and suffered from the conflict that has gone on for more than 15 years in the Lower Aguán region of Honduras.
On the anniversary of Mexico’s 1938 oil nationalization, artist Yoshua Okón argues that the “energy reform” currently underway in his country will deprive citizens of income directed toward education, health care and anti-poverty programs.
María Santos was walking home on March 5th, 2014, when seven people suddenly jumped out of hiding, surrounded her, and then attacked her with machetes, striking her head and chest. María has been a vocal leader in the struggle against the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric Dam, defending the Lenca territory of Rio Blanco and the Gualcarque River for her children and grandchildren to come. She is a tireless fighter in the struggle of the Lenca people of Rio Blanco to prevent DESA, a private dam company, from privatizing and building a dam on their river.
Free trade agreements have not delivered promised protections to workers, as the case of Guatemalan sweatshop labor illustrates.
Oil and gas company Repsol is selling its stake in controversial oil operations in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon inhabited by indigenous people in ‘voluntary isolation’ (IPVI), just across the border from the ITT oil fields in Ecuador.
Michelle Bachelet’s return to the presidency, and her promise for structural changes to Chile’s educational and political system, is the result of a decades-long struggle to move out of the shadow of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, and is one of the fruits of the more recent student movement for a better society.
La Puya started, as many great movements do, with a single act of civil disobedience. A woman, concerned by the sudden arrival of a gold mining operation in her community, decided to park her car sidewise across a dusty, rural road in order to stop a convoy of massive mining machinery in its tracks. Others quickly joined her, taking a stand in defense of their water supply, farmland, health, and environment.
Norman Quijano, the mayor of San Salvador and candidate for the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party incited a crowd on Sunday night to not “allow this victory to be stolen from us like it was in Venezuela.” He declared that ARENA was “prepared for war” and called on the international community and the Salvadoran armed forced to “defend the country’s democracy” in the face of the supposed fraud carried out against them.
San Francisco de Locomapa is the site of a massacre that occurred on August 25, 2013. Armando Fúnez Medina (46), Ricardo Soto Fúnez (40), and Maria Enriqueta Matute (71) were murdered by Selvin Matute and Carlos Matute (no relation to Enriqueta). The latter two are hired guns for the Bella Vista Mining Company, which has been extracting antimony from the surrounding mountains without the consent of the community and with a mining concession that is in dispute.
In the latest twist in a 21-year-old environmental pollution case, a U.S. federal judge Tuesday ruled that the victims of massive oil spillage and their U.S. attorney could not collect on a nine-billion-dollar judgement by Ecuador’s supreme court against the Chevron Corporation.
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