The political victories of anti-neoliberal movements and regimes have opened a new chapter in Latin American history, yet the embrace of extractive industries has generated deep paradoxes for those committed to addressing inequality and the crisis of nature.
Since 2007, HIV and AIDS rates have gone up throughout rural Mexican states, partly as a result of returning migrants who have engaged in high-risk behaviors in the United States and not been able to receive diagnosis or treatment. Medical experts are shifting their attention to the particular dangers faced by Central American migrants—human trafficking, sexual abuse, prostitution, isolation, depression, and drug use—as vectors driving these numbers, especially in the southernmost state of Chiapas, where 40,000 to 60,000 migrants cross through in the hope of finding a better life in Mexico or the United States.
Wednesday, May 29, marks 32 years since Puerto Rican activist Oscar López Rivera was arrested and later convicted of “seditious conspiracy,” a questionable charge that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has interpreted to mean “conspiring to free his people from the shackles of imperial injustice.” Today, 70-year-old Oscar López Rivera, never accused of hurting anyone, remains in a cell at FCI Terre Haute, in Indiana. Supporters around the world continue to seek his release, most recently by asking US President Barack Obama for a commutation of his sentence.
A Mexican Observation Mission investigates abuses of Central American migrants traveling through Veracruz state.
This article is about people suffering, surviving and living in the aftermath of the genocides in Guatemala, and how they keep their sights on truth and justice, beyond the cruelty and oppression that so devastated them. It includes a short story about a tenacious and collective struggle of red ants in Chichipate, Guatemala.
The installation of Canadian mining company Rio Tinto Alcan in Paraguay is creating a face-off between those who see it as an opportunity for development and those who denounce its environmental risks. Rio Tinto has plants around the world, but it is accused of polluting sources of drinking water and devastating natural landscapes.
Salaries of less than $300 a month leave little for Mexican workers to live on. An investigation by Mexican newspaper El Financiero digs up the dirt on how employees at the biggest corporations, including Walmart, McDonalds, and KFC, often receive low pay and experience barely legal working conditions.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” When we got to La Piedrita, they already knew we were coming. If not for the phone call they received from a trusted comrade, then from the video cameras lining the perimeter of this revolutionary zone that jealously guards its autonomy from all governments, right or left.
Mayangna indigenous communities in northern Nicaragua are caught up in a life-and-death battle to defend their ancestral territory in the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve from the destruction wrought by invading settlers and illegal logging. “They shoot everything, burn everything, poison the water in the rivers, and chop down the giant trees that have given us shade and protection for years, and then they continue their advance, and nothing stops them,” said Aricio Genaro, president of the Mayangna indigenous nation.
On May 10th, the Guatemalan Court of Justice convicted the ex-dictator General Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for the massacres of indigenous people during the 1980s. But while the Guatemalan people celebrate the conviction, the processes of genocide initiated 30 years ago by Ríos Montt’s massacres still continue by other means.
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