by Eliane Brum
In May, I gave a talk at Harvard University on the Amazon and creating futures and I closed it by saying that hope, like despair, is a luxury we can no longer afford. Given our overheating planet, there’s no time for lamentations or melancholy. We need to act, even without...
by Shafik Meghji
A fishing net that recreates the sound of the ocean. An earthenware pot that emits traditional stories and songs. A cocoon-like structure that pulses with light to the rhythm of your beating heart. These are some of the results of an innovative project that paired non-indigenous artists and indigenous communities...
The Bolsonaro administration has launched policies that undermine IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, and ICMBio (The Chico Mendes Institute) which protects the nation’s federal conservation units, by effectively dismantling environmental law enforcement and allowing deforestation to proceed unchecked.
Fines imposed for illegal deforestation between Jan. 1 and May 15 this year were down 34 percent from the same period...
The Andirá-Marau Indigenous Reserve in Brazil’s Amazonas state — in a remote part of the Amazon basin — covers 7,885 square kilometers (3,044 square miles), and is occupied by 13,350 Sateré-Mawé indigenous people who live sustainably off the rainforest.However, an area of Sateré-Mawé ancestral land along the Mariaquã River lies outside the demarcated ...
El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly is expected to vote soon on a controversial new 'Special Law of Transitional and Restorative Justice for National Reconciliation'. Despite its title, the law would provide both army and guerrilla soldiers with de facto impunity for crimes against human rights committed during the country’s bitter conflict in the 1970s and 1980s. The proposed...
Situated only 60km from Brumadinho, where a massive tailings dam collapse killed 270 workers and local residents on 25 January 2019, is the small town of Barão de Cocais, home to around 30,000 people. Just 1.5 km away lies the Gongo Soco mine, owned by mining giant Vale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eGlQ_meTlY
Video: FalaBrasil 28...
Is this the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for Bolsonaro?
São Paulo, 27 May. Crowds dressed in green and yellow took to the streets this Sunday in support of President Jair Bolsonaro. The more extreme protesters demanded the closing down of the Supreme Court and Congress, but others...
A new manifesto by eight of Brazil’s past environment ministers has accused the rightist Bolsonaro administration of “a series of unprecedented actions that are destroying the capacity of the environment ministry to formulate and carry out public policies.”The ministers warn that Bolsonaro’s draconian environmental policies, including the weakening of environmental licensing,...
Martin Paddio of Monthly Review Press
Hosted by Monthly Review Press, NACLA, Voices editor Tom Gatehouse, and the New York Latin America Bureau team, Voices of Latin America: Social Movements and the New Activism was launched in Brooklyn, New York on 16th May at the Verso loft in Jay Street, on the...
Photographer Francisco Elias Prado, of Ojos Ilegales, in Caracas Venezuela, has sent LAB this video. He produced a photo-essay, Transmigración en Movimiento, from which LAB used the image (on p.187 of Voices of Latin America) of Ana Enamorado, a Honduran woman living in Mexico and working with the Movimiento Migrante Mesoamericano (MMM). Her own son is one...