Eight South American countries met in Brazil for a summit to combat deforestation in the Amazon basin. The summit’s failure to agree on a pact protecting Amazon forests points to the global failure of forging concrete agreements to combat climate change.
Two hotly anticipated global summits on ecology and climate papered over a raging war of capital against humanity and Planet Earth—a war manifested in open conflict between “developed” and “developing” countries, but more deeply in a war of the two worlds of rulers and ruled within each country.
After journalist Dom Phillips and Indigenous solidarity activist Bruno Pereira were murdered in the Brazilian Amazon, condemnations and calls for justice rang out around the world.
Cubans revolt and students speak out amid food and medicine shortages and human rights violations; and Latin America suffers under climate change.
Mostly Burmese protesters gathered in front of Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., to say stop funding the bloodshed in Burma. Every week since the coup, the Free Burma Action Committee holds a protest in San Francisco.
Australia’s megafires show that the climate crisis is upon us and powerful people are forcing humanity into a death march toward climate catastrophe–in sharp contrast to the passion and urgency of the youth climate strikes that have spread across the globe.
Participant report on a California protest against the burning of the Amazon rainforest and the Brazilian government’s negligence.
Governments which could never have come to power without the social movements’ mobilizations are using vague expressions of anti-capitalism, socialism, resource nationalism, anti-imperialism, etc., to impose developmentalism on their populations, often in collaboration with neoliberalism.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, barely won a runoff election against the conservative free-marketeer Aécio Neves. With her election to a second term, the Workers’ Party, first under Lula Da Silva and now under Rousseff, has won its fourth consecutive presidential election. While Lula’s first election was greeted with great hope for a sweeping change in Brazil’s developmentalist trajectory, Rousseff’s cliffhanger illustrated the grave disappointment that much of Brazil’s masses felt recently….
A new conflict broke out in Bolivia at the end of March. Thousands of miners blocked highways in five departments of Bolivia to protest a pending new mining law. Three miners were killed by the national police, while the miners took dozens of police hostage.
Latin America in View, Sept.-Oct. 2013: Ecuador oil drilling; Brazil rapes; Mexico Escuelita Zapatista.
From the November-December 2011 issue of News & Letters:
Bolivia’s two roads
Indigenous protestors from the Bolivian Amazon won a victory when they forced President Evo Morales’ government to cancel a road-building project through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), a supposedly protected region in eastern Bolivia. The victory [=>]
