Archives – Page 86 – Upside Down World

Cajamarca Anti-Mining Movements Celebrate and Question Study Results For Peru Conga Gold Mine

April 20, 2012 Alice Bernard and Diego Cupolo 0

The long-awaited environmental impact review for the Conga project was published Wednesday, suggesting U.S.-based Newmont Mining Corp make “substantive improvements” to its development plans if it wants to move forward with its $4.8 billion gold and copper mining project in Cajamarca, Peru. While Cajamarca Regional President Gregorio Santos, a leader of the anti-Conga movement, said the review is a victory for the region, many question the quality of the findings.

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Latin America: Dismantling the Monoculture Mentality

April 19, 2012 Raúl Zibechi 0

“Young people today are more critical than they were in the seventies,” Adolfo Pérez Esquivel observes, much to the contrary of what the majority of his generation thinks. In the conference he gave in Montevideo on the 13th of March, he explained that human rights are violated when people don’t have access to a healthy environment and secure food sources because a “speculative economy” of monoculture farming and mining is privileged over an “economy of production.”

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Why Haiti Wasn’t “Built Back Better”

April 18, 2012 David L. Wilson 0

Earthquakes may be hard to predict, but it should have been easy to foresee the disaster that would result from the sort of quake that hit Haiti in January 2010. Haiti’s failure to recover in the two years since was just as predictable. The structural problems that turned a bad earthquake into a cataclysm go all the way back to Haiti’s colonial history, but the immediate causes are much more recent.

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The History and Resurgence of Death Squads in Central America

April 18, 2012 Annie Bird 0

Politically motivated killings apparently by death squads have been growing over the past few years in Central America, and concern in Guatemala is heightened as the new administration has brought back to public office many of the same individuals directly implicated in the State repression and genocide of the 1980s.

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Progress or Promises? Free Trade and Labor Rights in Colombia

April 16, 2012 James Bargent 0

Rodolfo Vecino is the president of Colombian oil workers union (USO), which was last year declared a “military target” by right-wing paramilitaries for its campaigns against what the union says are the abusive labor practices of Canadian oil giant Pacific Rubiales.

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Gathering in Bajo Aguán: Oligarchy and Human Rights Violations in Honduras

April 13, 2012 Emma Volanté, Translation by Jim Rudolf 0

The objective of the recent International Human Rights Gathering in Solidarity with Honduras in the Bajo Aguán region was to give voice to the victims of the violence of the government, raise awareness of the political situation in the country, and share experiences, searching for common strategies at the national and international levels to check the repression. […]

Argentina Thirty Years After the Malvinas War: Demanding Sovereignty and Healing the Wounds of War

April 11, 2012 Francesca Fiorentini 0

On April 2, the National Day of Veterans and the Fallen in the Malvinas, provinces and social organizations throughout Argentina held commemorative activities and marches. But for Argentina, the act of remembering the thirty-year-old Malvinas War is no straightforward task. It is charged with both international politics and an internal struggle within Argentine society.

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Small-Scale Miners in Nariño Face Crackdown as Foreign Companies Set Sights on Colombia

April 11, 2012 Leah Gardner 0

Police arrived at the Santa Isabel mine in Colón-Génova on February 21, 2012. The officers asked these local miners to attend a meeting to see if they could sort out their licensing request; However, when the roughly twenty-five miners arrived, they were read their rights and arrested. Miners and rural social movements allied with the miners, believe that this is part of a federal government strategy to phase out informal mining and pave the way for foreign multinationals. “We are seeing the criminalization of artisanal mining in this country,” says organizer Luz Mila Ruana.

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Ecuador: A Revolutionary March Versus a Counter-Revolutionary March

April 10, 2012 Decio Machado 0

President Correa has two options. He can choose to turn to the left and to demonstrate greater capacity of consensus with the communities affected by his extractivist and neo-developmentalist policy, and with the social movements and the organizations to his left; or make more and more evident the conservative turn of the executive, consolidating and establishing new alliances with business sectors and political organizations to his right.

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Dying in Defense of Land in Mexico

April 6, 2012 Maria Sanchez 0

Tucked between sand dunes and the Pacific Ocean, perched on a small hill, is Xayakalan, home to members of the indigenous community, Santa Maria Ostula. Here, a group of Mexican Nahua people are fighting to keep control of their land. The cost has been high. Since 2009, this small community of around 3, 000 people has seen 28 of its members killed. Another four are missing.

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