This article was first published by Mongabay on 27 May. You can read the original here.In April an official from IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency was violently assaulted by loggers and needed hospital treatment in Pará state. The incident was caught on video.The IBAMA operation was targeting illegal deforestation carried out by land grabbers, wishing to […]
Both the United Nations and World Health Organization have labelled the spread of disinformation during the coronavirus crisis as an ‘infodemic.’ ‘We have faced pandemics before,’ said Graham Brookie, Director of the Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Laboratory, ‘but never in an era in which humans are so connected and with as much access to information […]
Chile’s protests were thwarted when the arrival of Coronavirus forced the population to stay at home. As the impact of the quarantine takes its toll and people are becoming desperate for food, one art collective is censored and attacked for highlighting the struggle. Main image courtesy of _dibujossad. At the end of last week, LAB […]
This article was edited by LAB. The authors’ original text (in Portuguese) can be found here. The authors argue that the acceleration of Amazonian deforestation and environmental degradation —powered by successive blows from Bolsonaro’s government to neuter environmental protection policies — in a region where public healthcare is at best precarious, has amplified the lethality […]
By Emily Gregg, edited by Mike Gatehouse, with additional material from Peru & Haiti Support Groups UK and LAB correspondents in the region. LAB has put together this seventh overview of the spread of coronavirus across the region and the reaction of governments, politicians and local communities. With our limited resources we could not hope […]
The Boa Vista Quilombo in Oriximiná, Pará state, is like many Brazilian quilombola communities. Quilombolas are Afro-Brazilian runaway slave descendants, and point to centuries of inequality and neglect by the government. Quilombos often lack running water, basic sanitation and health services. In the 1970s, Mineração Rio do Norte (MRN) annexed much of Boa Vista’s land […]
This article was written for LAB by Estela Casados González, and translated by Lizzy Sanders As part of the actions to safeguard the lives of the population in the face of the devastating effects of COVID-19, in Mexico the domestic confinement of the families which make up the almost 35 million homes in the country, […]
Mexico is in the most critical stage of the Coronavirus pandemic. As of 18 May, the government reports 49,219 infected and 5,177 dead. The rising curve has flattened but has also lengthened. Mexico City is the epicentre of the epidemic (with 12,456 infected and 1,197 dead). It is followed by areas such as the State […]
This is the second of two articles with testimony from Chile’s protest movements. The first can be read here. Stop Press: there were new street protests in Santiago over the weekend of 16-17 April in the El Bosque neighbourhood, amid tensions over food shortages. Following a recent surge in coronavirus cases, the whole of Santiago […]
This article was originally published on the the author’s own website. You can see the original here. El Salvador ranked 142nd out of 163 countries for Societal Safety and Security in the 2019 Global Peace Index. Nayib Bukele coincidentally became president the same month the report was published. He claimed his victory would be the […]