2. The Ecuadorian government: friend or foe?
On July 10 2018, two courts, over 2,800 miles apart, came to diametrically opposite conclusions about one of the worst cases of environmental pollution in the twentieth century. In Quito, Ecuador, the Constitutional Court upheld a ruling that the giant US corporation Chevron Oil was responsible for the catastrophic pollution of a vast...
1. Lago Agrio – Ecuador’s Chernobyl
On July 10 2018, two courts, over 2,800 miles apart, came to diametrically opposite conclusions about one of the worst cases of environmental pollution in the twentieth century. In Quito, Ecuador, the Constitutional Court upheld a ruling that the giant US corporation Chevron Oil was responsible for the catastrophic pollution of a vast area...
Film: Ex-Pajé (Ex-shaman) (80 minutes)
Directed by Luiz Bolognesi, 2018
With Perpera Suruí, Kabena Cinta Larga, Ubiratan Suruí and Agamenon Suruí… as themselves.
Films about Indians deep in the Amazon raise an expectation of denunciation and commitment. And not without reason, for as LAB friends and followers know, Indian populations in the Amazon face threats from infrastructure projects, from mining, from predatory...
Argentina’s Senate voted 38 to 31 to reject the law to decriminalise abortion in the early hours of August 9. Outside the Congress building, two million people gathered in the streets to remind Senators that public opinion has already been won over to the state taking responsibility for the deaths of women caused by illegal and unsafe abortions.
Inside the...
BOOK REVIEW
Chris Feliciano Arnold, The Third Bank of the River. New York: Picador 2018
This book has been classified as ‘travel-writing’, but it is much more than that. The author, Chris Feliciano Arnold, born in Brazil and adopted into a middle-class California family, tells the story of the Amazon river and its associated port-towns near the headwaters on the frontier...
After days of violent street protests, Haiti’s Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant and his cabinet resigned on Saturday July 14. The resignations followed a widespread backlash against the steep rise in fuel prices – a 38% hike on gasoline, 47% on diesel and 51% on kerosene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjFuJ7FIVOM
Al Jazeera report published on July 8 (added by LAB).
Buildings and cars were burned,...
Latin America and the Caribbean is a place of paradoxes. The region is usually depicted as relaxed, diverse, happy and open. But unfortunately, it also it stands close to the top of the international charts that measure violence against LGBTI people. According to the European advocacy organization TGEU, the region accounts for 78% of the world toll of trans...
LAB correspondent Marilene Cardoso Riveiro has made a beautiful short video, entitled 'Costs', about the impact of hydroelectric dams in Brazil on the communities directly affected. Construction work, the destruction of villages, flooding of land, diversion of water courses, damage to fisheries...
https://vimeo.com/267872971
The video was shown at the Alternative World Water Forum in March 2018 in Brasilia; also at the...
Jan Rocha, author of LAB's widely-read Brazil blogs, has just published a new history of Clamor, the group which took in refugees from the South American dictatorships and denounced the crimes of Plan Condor.
The book, Solidariedade Não Tem Fronteiras, with a foreword by Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, is launched on 10 July in São Paulo, at the Bar Tubaína, Rua...
About 600 indigenous people living in eight villages located in the city of Peruíbe, on the coast of São Paulo state, are at risk of losing their lands. After decades of living in a territory that has 6 km of beach, popular with tourists and people from the city, indigenous people of the Tupi-Guarani ethnic group won approval to...