Voices

President Bolsonaro is beginning to discover fear -- as deaths mount, protests multiply and his old adversary Lula emerges onto the political scene as a credible threat in next year's elections. However, those elections might spark a coup spearheaded by the Bolsonaro-loyal Policia Militar.

Now aged 90, photographer Claudia Andujar remains deeply concerned for the Yanomami people with whom she says she “totally identified,” noting that the present threat of illegal mining in Indigenous territories is doing far more harm than the government-driven road projects of the 1970s. Andujar’s years of work and life with the Yanomami are now chronicled in a major photo exhibition at London’s Barbican Centre through Aug. 29.

The short film is intended as an expression of solidarity with the current strike and its title, Desolvido, translates as ‘unforgetting’; evoking a desire not to forget past moments of beauty even in the face of a violent present.

Brazil's indigenous peoples took their struggle to Brasilia, to protest against PL 490, a law being debated in congress, which would further weaken their rights and accelerate the land theft which has stripped them of their lands

Josefina Tunki and Tania Laurini, two leaders of the Shuar Arutam people in Ecuador have received explicit death threats from Federico Velasquez, senior official at Lowell-Solaris, a Canadian owned mining company. The Shuar are opposing a gold and copper project at Warintza in the Ecuadorean Amazon.

Brazil's CPI senate commission is hearing damning evidence of widespread corruption in the vaccine procurement of the Bolsonaro government, with evidence mounting of the direct involvement of the president himself and his family. One of the main planks of his diminishing reputation is crumbling - his claim to be the clean, anti-corrpution candidate.

This is the first issue of Voz, LAB’s new series of guest-written quarterly dispatches, available exclusively to patrons (paid subscribers). Natalia addresses poverty and inequality under Pinochet’s lasting neoliberal economic model, the student uprisings that led to the estallido social, her traumatic eye injury and her political beginnings.

Communities awaiting compensation from the worst environmental disaster in Brazilian history say they’re being stymied by a convoluted legal process that favors those responsible.

Human Rights Watch has found that Ecuador’s criminalisation of abortion violates human rights and discriminates against Black and Indigenous people.

At Espinar in Peru and on Chile's Colina river, major international mining companies are once more in the spotlight, suspected of causing pollution, denying responsibility and failing to consult local communities