Tourism in Chiapas has become part of the strategy of big business and the government to break the resistance of the Zapatista communities in rebellion, and facilitate their dispossession from their territories. Hermann Bellinghausen, a correspondent in Chiapas for the newspaper La Jornada, talks about the increasing development of tourism in the State and its various implications.
Researchers have unveiled new data warning that governments in Latin America are infringing on the rights of their indigenous populations in a bid to fuel development through the extraction of natural resources. The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a Washington-based organization, says it has documented a “natural resources giveaway” in Latin America, which highlights how an outdated development model is trampling on human rights and the environment throughout much of the region.
Report from a March 16-23 Rights Action educational-solidarity delegation: Before heading off on a 6-day road trip, our group met with Berta Oliva of COFADEH (Committee of Family members of the Disappeared), who described the repression, violence, corruption and impunity. Since the 2009 coup, hundreds of civilians have been the victims of targeted assassinations.
A report containing the testimonies of victims of torture during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war will be published 27 years after it was written, to help Salvadorans today learn more about that chapter in the country’s history. More than 40 torture techniques are described in detail and depicted in drawings in the report.
An important new investigative report from the Associated Press’ Alberto Arce describes the apparent ongoing activities of death squads within the Honduran police. The AP report also describes a now-infamous and disturbing video that appears to show the extrajudicial, cold-blooded murders of two young men in city streets “by masked gunmen with AK-47s who pulled up in a large SUV” – consistent with the police death squad modus operandi as described in the article.
Jaime Rivera, Secretary of the Sindical de Trabajadores de Sector Electricos (STSE – Union of Electric Sector Workers) has recently returned to El Salvador from a CISPES labour solidarity tour, where he visited cities along the US West Coast to express solidarity with US workers and denounce US intervention. He has been active in Salvadoran labor politics for over 30 years. Jamie sat down with CISPES to speak about the Public-Private Partnership P3 law following a march to the US embassy in El Salvador to denounce its ambassador’s interference in Salvadoran public affairs.
Images from the first day of the historic trial against former de facto dictator Efraín Ríos Montt and former Intelligence Director José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez. Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez are charged with Genocide and crimes against humanity during the civil war in Guatemala (1960-1996) against the Ixil Mayan people.
Chavez not only rejected neo-liberalism. He put socialism back on the public agenda at a time when apologists for global capitalism were still claiming it was “the End of History” and when the defeatist left was insisting that we had to be “realistic” and “pragmatic,” to renounce anti-capitalism, and to limit ourselves to putting a “human face” on the capitalist system.
Where they have been able, Cauca’s indigenous Nasa people have stood firm, campaigning to have all armed actors removed from their lands. The Indigenous Guard’s July 2012 dragging of six troops from a hill in Toribío, Cauca saw images of bawling army sergeant Rodrigo Garcia beamed around the globe, however the Nasa’s arrests of suspected guerrillas in the same period gained less exposure.
Four representatives from Rarámuri communities have made the long trip from their remote communities to Washington, DC, to appear before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, where they will appear today at 5pm. It is expected the four representatives, who are backed by 41 Indigenous governors, will testify about logging, tourism, and other issues impacting their communities.
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