Anti-extractivism protests in South America are sometimes oversimplified to "rural communities vs. big government." This framing overlooks movements' internal complexities and alternative proposals.
The conflict over Bolivia's new mining law offers a window into the complexity and contradictions of the country's mining sector, as they play out during the run-up to October’s presidential election.
Bolivia's Amazonian region is experiencing the most disastrous flooding of the past 100 years. Two Brazilian mega-dams on the Bolivian border may be contributing significantly to this tragedy.
Even as they continue to shape the domestic political agenda, Chile's resurgent social movements are mobilizing to build cross-border solidarity, pressuring newly-elected President Michelle Bachelet to ally with other leftist governments in the region.
Bolivia's highest court has rejected a constitutional challenge to the country's restrictive abortion law, while ruling that legal abortions no longer require a judge's consent. Both opponents and advocates of abortion rights have found reasons to celebrate.
A proposed children’s rights law being considered by the Bolivian Congress is facing opposition from an unlikely source: a union representing the child workers themselves.
CONAMAQ, a federation of Bolivian highland indigenous peoples, has split into two parallel organizations after a bitter struggle. Is this the result of internal political conflict, or a government strategy to undermine opposition?
Bolivian workers received an unexpected gift this past Christmas: an extra payment equal to one month’s wages, mandated by President Evo Morales on November 20. Is this a redistributive measure to socialize profits, or an electoral strategy to shore up key voting sectors and finance the presidential campaign?
In past weeks, the governments of Ecuador and Bolivia moved to shut down or expel major NGOs (non-government organizations) that work on issues of the environment, extractivism, and indigenous rights. Is this a reasoned assertion of sovereignty against foreign intervention or a move against social movements and democracy through an attack on their bases of foreign support?
Evo Morales’s 2005 election brought an end to a long period of U.S.-Bolivia relations. Since at least 1952, the United States held Bolivia under its sway as a client state. Although it is important to acknowledge Morales’s push-back against U.S. imperialism, other forms of imperialism loom large.
