Ecuador: ‘Crudo’ – film about the fight against Chevron

The short film El Silencio del Rio, ‘The Silence of the River’, by Peruvian director Francesca Canepa, won the Grand Jury Award at the Oscar-qualifying Calgary International Film Festival and is currently longlisted in the Best Short Film category for the 2021 Academy Awards. Mathilde Aupetit considers the film’s blurring of dream and reality in order to present an Amazonian perspective, and its representation of the narrative power of nature.

A recent report, published by the Cyrus R. Vance Centre for International Justice, Earth Law Centre and International Rivers has found that the movement to grant legal rights to rivers and the natural environment is rapidly gaining momentum around the world.

British businessman and football club owner, Joe Lewis, has created resistance from the indigenous community by purchasing and developing their ancestral lands in Rio Negro, Argentina. Lewis blocks access to the land, where he has hosted Israeli soldiers and former right-wing President Mauricio Macri.

Haiti is not unfamiliar with violent uprisings. However, since the US-backed installation of Jovenel Moïse in 2004, unrest has been relentless, with violence and repression reaching a bloody crescendo in recent weeks.

Ever since the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors in the 16th century, many outsiders have followed the example of these bold European adventurers along with the crown heads of Europe in seeing South America as a treasure house of mineral wealth.

Residents of traditional communities in the Brazilian Amazon municipality of Barcarena, near the mouth of the Amazon River, say that their subsistence and commercial livelihoods, and their health, have been destroyed by an invasion of mining companies which began in the mid-1980’s. This story is the fifth in a series.

Peru’s official contender for the Oscars, Song Without A Name (Canción sin nombre) follows a young indigenous woman as she searches for her child, stolen at birth in a fake health clinic in Lima.

Across Latin America, mining has expanded massively in recent decades. But communities aren't taking this lying down. LAB plans a new book and website, entitled The Heart of Our Earth: Community Resistance to Mining in Latin America.