Mike Gatehouse

São Paulo, 26 January 2018. Not only was Lula’s appeal rejected and his sentence increased to twelve years by the court in Porto Alegre on 24 January, but in Brasilia another judge banned him from travelling to Ethiopia on a previously planned trip to take part in a FAO conference on food, to prevent him ‘asking for political asylum’. Lula’s...

São Paulo 21 January. Some are calling it the trial of the century.  The fate of the man who leads all the polls by a huge margin and could therefore be elected president of Brazil in October lies in the hands of three judges of the TRF4, the regional appeals court in Porto Alegre. Although the case will only...

Work on LAB's exciting new book Voices of Latin America is progressing rapidly More than 45 of our interviews, from 11 countries, have been translated, and our wonderful team of volunteer editors are at work on the separate chapters The editor and project co-ordinator is Tom Gatehouse Publication date is now set for September 2018 Alongside the book,...

This post was published by Haiti Support Group. You can read the original here 12th January 2018: Today marks eight years after the Léogâne Earthquake and Trump is, once again, spewing garbage about Haiti having yesterday called it a "shithole". Firstly, it is no such place. Since its revolutionary birth, Haiti has given the world so much in art, science and...

Fujimori pardon creates political havoc Main image: Protest in Lima on 26 December 2017 against pardon for Fujimori. Clip from live stream by RT España. This article was published by Peru Support Group. You can read the original here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIVNiSdvxpc Interview (in Spanish) with journalist  Gonzalo Ruiz Tovar (dpa) published 24 December 2017 as the new of Fujimori's release broke. Kuzynski has now lost...

San José de Apartado is a Comunidad de Paz in the Department of Antioquía, Colombia, created in 1997 by some 500 people displaced from surrounding villages following a wave of massacres committed mainly by paramilitary groups. It was founded on the premise of neutrality in Colombia's savage internal conflict. LAB correspondent Gwen Burnyeat lived there and wrote a number...

20 December 2017 Dear LAB Supporter and Friend, The ghosts of elections past, present and future Across the world, polls this year have been confounded as elections yielded surprising results (not least, for those of us in the UK, in the 2016 referendum on EU membership and the general election in 2017). These results have led many analysts to identify strands...

Argentina has filed indictments against Ricardo Villalba, former Director of the Argentinean Institute of Snow, Ice, and Environmental Research (IANIGLA), and three former Environment Secretaries (Omar Judis, Sergio Lorusso, and Juan José Mussi), for their roles in overseeing the National Glacier Inventory (NGI). Villalba, a renowned glacial researcher, is charged with negligence and failure to properly inventory the...

On 18 December, International Migrants Day, Christian Aid partners in Haiti reminded us of the urgent need to protect the rights of migrants and ‘stateless’ people in the Dominican Republic, who fear violence and mass deportation. Over the past two years, more than 220,000 Haitian migrants and their descendants returned to Haiti from the Dominican Republic. Of these: more than...