Culture, Music, Film, Photography

Folk-singer Victor Jara, murdered by Pinochet’s troops in 1973, had planned to record an album, telling the story of the 1934 massacre of peasants and Indigenous Mapuche and Pehuenche at Ránquil. He never completed the project and in the following decades repression has claimed new victims whenever the interests of large landowners were threatened.

LAB partner Latino Life, is 25 years old this year (and its . A Latina-run organization, festival and website, it is a wonderful resource for the UK's thriving Latin American communities, and the rapidly growing and ever more diverse audiences who are inspired by the liveliness and optimism of Latin American culture, especially its music. Latino Life founder Amaranta Wright describes the growth of this phenomenon, since a chance meeting in a salsa club in 2001.

At London Climate Action Week, Indigenous women, especially from Latin America, featured prominently as leaders of their communities and territories

Tony Corden reviews Katia Chornik’s book about the relationship between music, politics, memory, and human rights.

Venezuelan poets in exile tell Piotr Kozak about their experiences of leaving their home country, their conflicted feelings towards it, and the promise and sadness of their lives abroad.

Marcos Colón reviews the Cannes and Golden Globe award-winning Brazilian film The Secret Agent, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, starring Wagner Moura. The film engages questions of state censorship, political repression, and surveillance not by following a reporter chasing a story, but, this time, by following a man hunted by a system terrified of memory.

The issue of enforced disappearances in Mexico has been represented in cinema, on stage, in music, in performance, and in literature. Through various means of artistic expression, a demand for truth and justice is made, inviting society to feel compassion and empathy. It is a call to give a face, a life story, to the numbers, to the digits of violence in Mexico. It is a call against revictimisation. 

On the anniversary of the deadliest volcanic eruption of the last 100 years, Colombians are using the power of dance to heal generational trauma...

In her latest project COST, Monica Perez unravels the thread between England and Uruguay, exploring the raw wool trade and the displacement and erasure of Indigenous communities. 

In northern Chile’s Atacama Desert, Alto Hospicio has become a dumping ground for the world’s fast fashion waste. Mountains of unsold clothes from Europe, Asia, and North America pile up, creating toxic conditions. A local youth collective, Desierto Vestido, is fighting to expose the crisis, demand accountability, and develop circular solutions.