It is not only in the Amazon and remote rural areas that indigenous lands are coming under increased pressure as the new Bolsonaro government extends carte blanche to land-thieves and developers. As CIMI (the Conselho Indigenista Missionário - Indigenous Missionary Council) has denounced, indigenous residents of a Guarani community near Porto Alegre are being threatened by security guards hired...
Voices of Latin America is being launched today (18 January) 2019 at a grand fiesta, '¡Viva La Resistencia!', at Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA, from 7:00 pm. Tickets are sold out, but you can watch and hear our speakers and readings on a live stream to LAB's Facebook page from 7:45 - 9:00 approx.
Voices...
07 January 2019
Dear LAB Supporter and Friend,
LAB News
Only two weeks to go! Reserve your tickets now!
Voices of Latin America - social movements and the new activism will be published on 18 January. The launch party on that day is at popular London music venue Rich Mix, in Shoreditch, starting at 7:00 pm. You can reserve tickets (and a...
Almost two centuries ago two leading British naturalists and explorers, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, spent three years studying animals and insects in the region of Lago do Maicá (Maicá Lake) in the municipal district of Santarém in the Brazilian Amazon. Despite hardship, the men revelled in what they called the “glorious forest”. It is estimated that by the...
Brazil’s 1988 constitution and other laws established the right of landless peasants to claim unused and underutilized lands. Thousands, with the support of the landless movement, occupied tracts. At times, they even succeeded in getting authorities to set up agrarian reform settlements.
Big landowners always opposed giving large tracts of land to the landless but, until roads began...
This is a book of many voices (more than 70 of them, from 14 different countries): of anthropologists and archaeologists; urban planners and architects; artists and musicians; journalists and politicians; women and LGBT people trying to halt gender-based oppression and violence; indigenous activists fighting oil drilling on their territory; residents of favelas resisting evictions; students staking their claim to...
President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has chosen Ricardo Salles as Brazil’s environment minister. The former São Paulo state government environment secretary is under investigation for allegedly redrawing maps allowing protected lands to be developed for mining and factories. His statements are heavily pro-agribusiness and sometimes espouse violence.
The selection of ruralist Tereza Cristina as agriculture minister, and Ernesto Araújo as...
19 December 2018
Dear LAB Supporter and Friend,
LAB News
Two new major LAB publications in two months. First Amazon Besieged - by dams, soya, agribusiness and land-grabbing, by Mauricio Torres and Sue Branford. And then, on January 18, Voices of Latin America - social movements and the new activism, edited by Tom Gatehouse.
Voices of Latin America - social movements and...
From 2016 to 2017, Mongabay contributors Sue Branford and Maurício Torres traveled to the Tapajós River Basin, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, to report on the controversial plan to turn the region into a major commodities export corridor.
Branford and Torres wrote a 15-part investigative series (published in partnership with The Intercept Brazil) based on what...
Rios de Encontro (Rivers of Meeting), is an eco-cultural and socio-educational project based in the community of Cabelo Seco, Pará, Brazil. The project spent the last two weeks of November in national and international activities to celebrate the role of young arts-educators who, in the midst of worrying and uncertain times, are searching for creative ways to promote social...