With two years to go before the World Cup in Brazil, already people are questioning the massive evictions caused by the Cup’s enormous infrastructure projects and the legal privileges that must be conceded to the all-powerful FIFA, which has set itself up as a kind of super-state capable of imposing its own laws and special tribunals.
By Talli Nauman The Oglala Sioux Tribe’s rally Feb. 11 against the Keystone XL Pipeline showed the extent to which the multi-billion-dollar tar-sands crude-oil industry has galvanized cross-boundary opposition in the interest of earth justice. While mainstream media have failed to inform decision makers of the preponderance of indigenous input into the controversy, native peoples’ [...]
For over two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become one of the world’s largest growers, packers and exporters of hogs and pork. But the conditions created in Veracruz to help it make high profits, as one of Mexico’s largest pig producers, also plunged thousands of Veracruz residents into poverty.
But if not by force, how do we lower the levels of crime and violence that plague our countries? Colombia doesn’t only have the drug war model to offer the world; it is also home to initiatives that seek to connect at-risk youth to ways to regain self-esteem and to get them out of the only livelihood that doesn’t require academic credentials— crime.
After President Ollanta Humala’s state visit to Venezuela Jan 7, and despite some adverse reactions to the visit in Peru, Humala announced that the two countries have “succeeded in turning away from the bilateral politics of the past in which nothing major had been accomplished in diplomatic, commercial and cultural relations.”
History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.
Despite the serious harm caused by agrochemical fumigation across South America’s Southern Cone, there is a surprising lack of debate and little media coverage on the issue. It has been an uphill battle to build grassroots movements to regulate– and eventually eliminate– certain practices that are prohibited in other countries, like aerial fumigations.
