Land Dispossession

The members of Centro Campesino, a cooperative in Guatemala's Petén region, are fighting to recover their land. Their displacement, their struggle, and their inability to protect their community, Yaxchilan, reveal the surprising ways that both export-led development plans and conservation programs can disregard the interests of indigenous and traditional communities. For conservation groups, this oversight can lead to a failure to ally with the only communities that may effectively stop mining, petroleum exploration, hydroelectric dams, and monoculture crops that destroy the environment.

Commemorating International Women's Day, thousands of landless women engaged in protests across Brazil. Several of the protests targeted large eucalyptus plantations for pulp production, as part of a renewed effort by the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) and Vía Campesina to fight against multinational agribusiness corporations. As activists turn the screws on agribusiness, state repression against the landless movement has also increased.

The Caribbean coast of Honduras has been home to Afro-indigenous Garifuna communities for over 200 years. But a government-sponsored plan to build a tourist mega-resort on Garifuna lands in Tela Bay threatens not only their communally owned territories, but also an entire way of life for one of the planet's most unique cultures.

Traducido por César Flores Unzaga A lo largo del último medio siglo, diez millones de pobres en Latinoamérica han tomado

Throughout the last half century, tens of millions of poor Latin Americans have illegally seized land. Such invasions are usually

In the Brazilian state of Paraná, Valmir Mota de Oliveira of Via Campesina, an international peasant organization, was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by armed gunmen on an experimental farm of Syngenta Seeds, a multinational agribusiness corporation. The cold blooded murder took place on Sunday, October 21 after Via Campesina had occupied the site because of Syngenta's illegal development of genetically modified (GM) seeds.

Argentina and Chile have temporarily avoided going to war over the Beagle Channel. On January 8, in Montevideo, Uruguay, the

The popular and peasant organizations of El Salvador have always advocated land reform. Increasingly, over the past 20 years, the

This is Brazil, but it isn't Carnaval. There are no sequins or bright feathers here in Rio Novo. Instead, a

One year since the country began to excavate common graves, chilling information has come to light: the "paras" (paramilitaries) gave courses on how to dismember a human body, the recently formed "Black Eagle" paramilitaries have been digging up graves and throwing the remains into the rivers and victims remain fearful.