After the Honduran Supreme Court ruled a Police Reform Bill unconstitutional because it violates police officers’ right to due process, the Congress, lead by President Porfirio Lobo, have recommented dissimissing the four dissenting Judges from the Court, in what is being called a “technical coup” against the judiciary branch. President Lobo himself took power after a coup in 2009.
“When we talk about revolutionary change, the only guide we have is history. We cannot let ourselves be guided by ideology, because ideology is a declaration of intentions or an abstract construct,” said Raúl Zibechi, Uruguayan journalist and author of Territories of Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements.
The Paraguayan Minister of the Interior, Carmelo Caballero, announced that the military will back the police during the first two weeks of December in reaction to “intelligence information” about possible escapes from jails and “infiltrators” in the upcoming human rights protest planned for Monday, December 10, who are “planning to destabilize the government.”
In the last few years, Latin American governments have been adjusting their legislation to categorize marches, demonstrations, the occupation of roads and public buildings, and, ing general, manifestations of social protest as terrorism. Correa’s proposal of an interrnational, coordinated persecution of social protest related to mining opposition is a dream come true for the mining industry.
It has been three weeks since Dr. Wayne Kublalsingh has had a sip of water or a bite of food. He’s edging perilously close to death, but remains steadfast in his demand that a segment of new highway project that would bisect rich lagoon lands on the island of Trinidad be re-routed.
Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, proposed that his country, together with Peru and Colombia, address the problem of anti-mining activists who provoke violence while acting under the false pretext of defending the environment. “This is something we have to deal with together, Colombia included, because Peru has the same problems. There have been outbreaks of violence from activists who are full of talk about democracy,” he stated.
The biggest trial for human rights crimes committed by Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship began Wednesday in Buenos Aires, with 68 people accused of crimes involving nearly 800 victims of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA). For the first time, six pilots who flew the so-called “death flights” – where political prisoners were dumped from planes, drugged but alive, into the ocean – will be tried.
Pressure to privatize public services and goods – and concerns about who stands to gain in the process – has become increasingly familiar in the United States, where many communities now face the same policy prescriptions that have been offered to El Salvador and other countries in the Global South for decades.
Hundreds of indigenous people gathered outside the Marriott Hotel in Quito today at the VII Annual Meeting of Oil and Energy where the Ecuadorian government announced the opening of the XI Round, an oil auction in which 13 oil blocks went on sale covering nearly eight million acres of rainforest in the Amazonian provinces of Pastaza and Morona Santiago near the border with Peru.
Throughout the department of Cochabamba, women who have never taken a course in radio broadcasting are using the airwaves to inform, empower and raise awareness, and to work for change in their communities. Their impact in rural areas and poor neighborhoods surrounding towns and cities is indisputable, thanks to their programming in Quechua, Aymara or Guaraní, the three most widely spoken native languages in Bolivia.
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