Dear LAB Supporter and Friend,
Protest art in Latin America
Louise Morris, a member of LAB’s Editorial Team who travelled to Central America for us at the end of 2016 to collect interviews for our forthcoming book
Voices of Latin America won a commission from the BBC to record an exciting series of three programmes on protest art in Latin America, which are being broadcast on successive Tuesdays this month, at 11:30am.
- A Call to Art: Memorial. -about memorial art in Guatemala and Chile. 14 November
- A Call to Art: Graffiti. Tuesday 21 November
- A Call to Art: Cumbia. Tuesday 28 November
All will then be available on iplayer at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09dy204
My Home is Your Home
This exhibition of prints and wall-hangings by Fiona Macintosh, author of LAB book
Rosa of the Wildgrass – the Story of a Nicaraguan Family is at Glasgows’ WASPS – The Briggait, from 27 November to 26 January. Fiona will be giving readings from the book on 10 December and 19 & 23 January, all at 2:30pm.
Latest on LAB website
A new blog piece from São Paulo-based LAB correspondent Jan Rocha records a recent visit to Santarém in Pará, at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers. Jan found that much has changed since her last visit: the city has grown exponentially and a huge Cargill soya grain terminal towers over the old river boats. Patches of rainforest are being cleared for soya cultivation. Meanwhile, Warao women from Venezuela are begging in the streets (
Read more.)
LAB volunteer Jaskiran Kaur Chohan writes from San Pablo in Bolivar province, Colombia, where she finds coca cultivation returning to areas previously insulated by the conflict and the peace process endangered by failures in the government’s crop substitution programme. There has also been a marked upsurge in killings. (
Read more)
LAB editor Tom Gatehouse interviewed two campaigners from Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam on 5 November 2015 submerged the nearby community of Bento Rodriguez near Mariana, killing at least 19 people and leaving hundreds homeless. There has been little progress in rehousing and compensating the victims and the prosecutions of those responsible have stalled. (
Read more)
LAB volunteer Anne Liedloff has been monitoring the excellent El Salvador Perspectives blog compiled by Tim Muth. She brought together several of Tim’s posts to chronicle the breakdown in relations between San Salvador’s charismatic but bombastic mayor, Nayib Bukele, and the FMLN party who originally backed him. There are signs that Bukele is positioning himself to run for the presidency as an independent in 2019. (
Read more)
Voices of Latin America
LAB’s next major title will now be published in September 2018. Tom Gatehouse is working full-time on the project for the next few months, co-ordinating a team of translators for the more than 60 interviews with social movement activists that we collected over the past year. We still need more help to translate (from both Spanish and Portuguese) and to do the background writing and research to put together the theme based chapters. If you would like to help, please contact Tom at
mailto: tkdgatehouse@gmail.com
Meanwhile, LAB Editor Sue Branford is hard at work with her Brazilian colleague Mauricio Torres to edit their recent, series of 15 stunning articles (published on LAB under the title
Tapajós Under Attack) into a single LAB book,
Amazon Besieged — by dams, soya, agribusiness and land-grabbing, which we hope to publish in April 2018.
Best wishes,
The LAB Team
