Chimalapas: Building community to save a forest
Their footprints mark the trails beneath the pines, oaks and oyamels. Once a week, 10 men walk through here with machetes on their shoulders, flashlights and jute bags of food, to defend a piece of the 594,000-hectare communal forest that makes up the Chimalapas. They are young people who inherited the management of this woodland, […]
Helena from Sarayaku traces the Sarayaku Kichwa people’s struggle to protect their lives, cultures and their territories from oil extraction in the period 2002 to 2021. It is both an anthropological study conducted by indigenous people for indigenous people, and for the world, and a vehicle to demonstrate the contribution of indigenous peoples to protecting […]
Community Defenders of the Territories Moving Forward
Like vegetation on a burned grassland, Mexico is seeing a growth in community resistance movements in defense of local territories, of life and of Mother Earth. This growth is taking place under innovative formulas that include the rescue of culture and the intervention of art, communication, and the solidarity of urban sectors, including communities of […]
Pablo Alarcón and his luminous environmentalism
True, legitimate, deep environmentalism is, above all, a luminous act where the human being gives himself body and soul to the defense of life. It is luminous because it lights flames of hope in a world of darkness. Pablo Alarcón Chaires was an exceptional environmentalist whose career left a trail of light. His very arrival […]
Removing Racism, one statue at a time
With axes, hammers and ropes, a group of activists called by the Supreme Indigenous Council of Michoacán demolished part of the monument called Los Constructores (The Builders) on February 14.
Traditional fishers defend Colombia’s largest wetland ecosystem
In November, a group of traditional fishers met on the banks of the Cascaloa Ciénaga. Nilton Chacon, a leader of a local association of artisanal fishers, stood to speak.
Mexico scores historic legal victory in defense of native corn
The Supreme Court of Mexico announced two decisions that protect the human right to corn biodiversity — banning permits to sow genetically modified corn in Mexico. That right was challenged in court by the transnationals Bayer-Monsanto, Syngenta, Pioneer-Dupont, and Dow Agrosciences.
Mexican Village Sets International Precedent in Water Conflict Resolution
After nearly 17 years of creative resistance and six visits from the man who is now Mexico’s president – three of them in recent months — the tiny colonial town of Temacapulín stands poised to become a model in the resolution of water-related conflicts.
The Arhuacos: A Message from the Mamos, the Prophets of the Sierra Nevada
When news of Covid-19 came to the enigmatic white-clad peoples of the high Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, nobody was very surprised. Trained since birth in the ways of looking to Nature for guidance, these spiritual guides of the Sierra Nevada predicted this pandemic and other current crises decades ago.
The Kamëntšá Biyá: Land Use Planning in Defense of the Sacred
Territorial planning is sacred work for the Kamëntsá Biyá people of the Upper Putumayo region in Colombia. Their approach reflects a radically different view of land use — one that is integrally connected with their view of public health.
Art to Breathe: A Festival with a Cause
“Art to Breathe” is an international festival that was born in the spring of 2020. The festival came about in the context of the repression and death suffered in many of the participating countries, coupled with the crisis of a pandemic that literally took the breath away and paralyzed to the world. It was necessary to […]
When it rains in the high plateaus of San Luis Potosí, Mexico, the dampened earth releases a scent that showcases its unique biodiversity. During the rainy season, greasewood bushes, mesquites, yucca and a wide variety of cacti flower and give their fruits, while the locals plant their cornfields that grow according to the nourishment they […]
AMLO Comes to Temaca, the Town That Refuses to Drown
Saturday, Aug. 14, was a day that would be marked as a turning point in the history of Temaca. And the Carbajal sisters, together with scores of other defenders of the historic village, would be ready.
Protecting the páramos in Colombia
On a recent, pre-pandemic journey to the High Andes of Colombia, I found myself surrounded by one of the region’s emblematic species, the flowering shrubs known locally as frailejones or “big monks.” These giant plants, relatives of sunflowers from the Espeletia genus, mesmerized me, their yellow buds and silvery hairs glistening in the intense, ephemeral sunlight. Looking out over […]
Mexico Makes Strides in Agroecology
Sept. 8, 2016, was a tragic day. At a massive event on that day, Enrique Peña Nieto, president of the country, dramatically announced that he was a daily consumer of Coca~Cola. His words were celebrated with applause and laughter by businessmen and officials who listened to him; meanwhile, 6.4 million citizens were suffering from diabetes, […]
Miller Dussán is one of those rare people who can just as comfortably traverse the traditional fishing villages and small farms of the countryside as he can the halls of research and policy-making institutions. In Colombia, a dynamic, water-rich country that is highly dependent on increasingly controversial hydropower, Dussán plays a vital role in these two spaces. In […]
Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #4: Enrique
The brothers were ambushed on the Ides of March 2019. It happened as they walked toward their childhood home in Quetzaltenango. Guatemala’s second-largest city, boasting a rich Mayan heritage and a dramatic natural backdrop, Xela (as it’s known to locals) is where I went to buy presents for my host family when I lived in […]
Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #2: Perla
Perla has been a professional pharmacist for 22 years. Even as a political refugee living in a tent meant for weekend camping, trapped by circumstance and a cruel immigration policy, the Nicaraguan grandmother managed to ply her trade and make herself useful to the thousands of other refugees halted at the US border by the […]
Colombia's resilient Wayuu resist global and local threats
La Guajira is a dry and windy peninsular desert region between Northeast Colombia and Northwest Venezuela. The striking landscape has been harsh and borderline uninhabitable for many thousands of years. The southernmost parts of the peninsula border the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, where the principal waterway of La Guajira is born, […]
México: The 4th Transformation in a Global Context
It is becoming clear that the future of the planet is red and green. It is equally clear that Mexico’s situation is neither exclusive nor unique, but rather replicates what is happening on a global scale, where the citizens of the world take on diverse forces in order to reduce, stop or suppress the double exploitation that a minority of minorities is imposing on the work of humans and of nature. The enormous ignorance prevailing among leaders and theorists of Mexican emancipation about what is taking place in the rest of the world, limits and reveals them. It is not only about keeping in mind the social and environmental struggles of Latin America, but of many other regions.
Defending the Birthplace of the Sun
It’s been a decade now since Mexico experienced its Standing Rock moment. It was the native Wixárika people—better known internationally by their Spanish name, the Huicholes—who galvanized a global movement with their call for help. In the north-central state of San Luis Potosí, one of their most sacred sites—the Birthplace of the Sun—was being readied for […]
Caring for Colombia's Dynamic Rivers
From the emblematic Magdalena River, which begins high in the Andes as a Sacred Source and descends into the industrial valleys to a overused and contaminated course, to the groundbreaking case of the Atrato River, which gained international attention in 2017 when it was granted the rights of personhood under Colombia’s Rights of Nature law, Colombia’s rivers have much to teach us.
Bringing the Pachamama to the Presidency
For those of us who cherish the wellbeing of life on Earth, for those of us who love and long for peace, for those who envision a future that lifts up the peoples of our millenary cultures and all cultures, we celebrate as we enter an era of new possibilities. In the US, we are […]
Ecocide in the Bolivian Chiquitanía
As a new round of forest fires gained momentum in the tropical Bolivian forests of Chiquitanía, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature placed the blame for last year’s 5 million-hectare “ecocide” on the Bolivian government and the agribusiness industry. And now, as the government gears up for another election season, it has declared a state of emergency in the Chiquitanía.
Farmers Rain on Monsanto's Parade
A crisis facing Mexican corn farmers emerged decades ago as corporate giant Monsanto pushed to get the country to use its GMO corn seed. As a result, a movement was spawned to prevent industrial agriculture from threatening the sustainability of thousands of years of farming tradition. In February, we visited Oaxaca to report on an […]
Spinning a Lifeline in Zapotec lands
High up in the southern sierra of Mexico’s state of Oaxaca, an innovative nonprofit business inspired by Mohandas Gandhi is helping Indigenous Zapotec families to weather the economic storm that COVID-19 has brought to the Mexican countryside. San Sebastian Rio Hondo, a Zapotec highland village like many others, has traditionally supplemented its agrarian way of […]
A Little Bit of Gandhi in Oaxaca
A century after Gandhi’s original Khadi Movement helped Indians to attain economic self-sufficiency and ultimately independence from Great Britain, the movement is having an unlikely revival in indigenous Zapotec communities in rural Mexico. “Khadi” means handspun cloth, and like its original Indian counterpart, Khadi Oaxaca has re-established a farm-to-garment ethic that restores dignity to its […]
Protecting our Guardians in Oaxaca
It was an unusual Calenda (traditional procession) even for Oaxaca, a city used to these colorful, musical and boisterous parades often led by giant puppets (monos) and a marching band for weddings, quinceañeras, and religious observances. This specific Calenda was dedicated to the protection of the guardians of native corn, to defenders of ecological diversity, […]
Heathy Children, Healthy Future in Ecuador
Indigenous Kañaris place the child at the center of the Andean world