America (general)

  It’s no news that extractive projects throughout Latin America have imposed a model of extraction and export that reaches ever deeper. The race for attracting investments from the mining, oil, forestry and fishery industries is a feature of most countries in the region. However, the extractive industry sparks increasingly strong criticism and resistance from several sectors of society, including academia, human rights organizations and social movements.

de rel="author">EU Latin America.

 

On December 8, 2014, a group of extraordinary women leaders gathered in Lima, Peru during the UN climate negotiations to speak out against issues of social and ecological injustice, and to share stories and plans of action for building a liveable, equitable world. Indigenous women from different places shared their experiences and struggles.

El Salvador has the highest rate of femicide in the world, Guatemala the third and Honduras the seventh. In Guatemala and Honduras only 2% of murdered women’s cases were investigated in 2013. And in El Salvador, in 2014 alone, between January and October, over 300 women between the ages of 12 and 18 years were found in unmarked mass graves. The victims of femicide often show signs of torture, rape, or breast and genital mutilation and dismembered body parts.

Leaders of indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon participating in the World Social Forum on Biodiversity held in Manaus, Brazil in January 2015, repudiated countless actions by the Brazilian state that violate the national constitution and international law.

The coordinating team of La Via Campesina in the state of Pará, Brazil, has compiled in a book the political struggles waged over time in the Amazon and the initiatives organized. In addition to a systematized introduction with a focus on ideas about peasant communities and their reincorporation in debates of historical concepts, there is a duel of perspectives with environmental ecological imperialism.

This last World Rainforest Movement bulletin of the year 2014 focuses on an issue that is somehow present in all of the local struggles and related issues that this bulletin informs you about every month. Although it is not specifically about a forest or tree plantation-related issue, it is about something that involves forest-dependent communities and that we feel is very important to dedicate an entire WRM bulletin to: the complex debate about alternatives.

There's an old joke in the US about a public prosecutor who starts to build a case against the Mafia in her city. One day she receives a mysterious visit from several large, polite, well-dressed gentlemen. They take their time to arrange themselves comfortably in chairs around her desk. After coffee is served, their leader clears his throat and begins to speak:

The People’s Summit on Climate Change was held December 8-11 in opposition to the false solutions being discussed at the UN climate negotiations in Lima, Peru.

This report from the organization Corner House explores the question “What’s the alternative to current energy systems?” in a context of a growing climate crisis and increasing uncertainty over the future of fossil fuels. In energy policy today, the main conflict is among the different proposed alternatives themselves.