The indigenous territories most hard hit by mining concessions are the Rarámuri, Zapotecos (mostly in the central valleys of Oaxaca), Chatinos, Mixtecos, Coras, Tepehuanes and Nahuas of Michoacan. The concessions in these people’s lands add up to more than a million hectares.
In the last decade, the expansion of oil palm plantations and sugarcane production for ethanol in northern Guatemala has displaced hundreds of Maya-Q´eqchi´ peasant families, increasing poverty, hunger, unemployment and landlessness in the region, according to a new Food First report by Alberto Alfonso-Fradejas, “Sons and Daughters of the Earth: Indigenous Communities and Land Grabs in Guatemala.”
I read the statistics before joining 16 School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) activists on our first trip to the U.S.-Mexico border–before I followed Steve into the Sonora desert to drop off water jugs on migrant trails, before I watched Olga call her coyote to make sure he’d delivered her son safely, before I conversed with Pedro and tried not to stare at his missing leg – severed by The Beast, the deadly train that migrants hop to travel through Mexico. Before I stood at the wall with Jose Antonio’s mother and wondered why the Border Patrol pumped so many bullets into his young body as he walked along a street in his own city, on the Mexican side.
President Obama touched down in Mexico and then flew to Costa Rica in a short trip with ambitious goals. The president sought to re-set the image of U.S. involvement in the region by downplaying the increasingly controversial drug war that is currently the focus of U.S. aid and engagement, instead highlighting trade and integration.
During President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Mexico, hundreds of migrants and rights activists in four cities protested Obama’s deportation policies and called for inclusive, comprehensive immigration reform in the United States.
As many as 10,000 people assembled on the Zocalo, the main square of Mexico City last Wednesday to celebrate another anniversary of the Chicago Haymarket Rebellion that ushered in the labor movement at the turn of the century. This year’s May Day in Mexico came after a sweeping reform in its Federal Labor Law enacted this past December. Unions participating mostly protested the reforms, which they call a threat to the future of their jobs and wages.
Horacio Cartes, tobacco tycoon and political novice, had a resounding victory in Paraguayan presidential elections, bringing back to power the Colorado Party, which ruled the country with a tight grip of power for over sixty years until 2008.
Cartes, who has accusations of narcotrafficing, smuggling and money laundering[CP1] all of which he was denied, won the elections with 45.8% of the votes, while second runner-up, Efrain Alegre, got 36.94%. 68.57% of the more than 3.5 million Paraguayans that could vote went to the polls to cast their ballots and choose not only president and vice president, but also members of congress, governors and representatives to the Mercosur parliament.
