Paradoxically, from their status of limited mobility—both as unauthorized migrants and as individuals with injuries—the members of AMIREDIS demand the rights of human mobility, the right to cross borders with dignity, and the right of all to live with dignity in their homeland.
Participants of the School of the Americas Watch (SOAW) delegation in Mexico called for the suspension of Plan Merida last month after meeting with Mexican social movements and human rights organizations in Mexico City, Guerrero, and Chiapas. The visits, organized with groups actively working to end militarization and state violence in the country, took place from June 21 to July 1 and culminated in an urgent call for an end to all U.S. aid to Mexico.
The San Quintín Valley, one of Mexico’s highest producing agricultural areas with a market aimed principally at export, is also one of the places with the most abusive, unsanitary and harmful working conditions for day laborers.
The three contingents of the Caravan in Defense of Water, of the Land, and of Work and Life converged in Mexico City on May 22. The Yaqui tribe led the caravans, heading out May 11, to traverse the entire country from three routes: northwest, northeast and the south.
The millions the big growers make in profits contrasts sharply to the biting poverty of the men and women who work their fields in the San Quintin Valley of Baja California. A new movement has exposed the conditions they suffer– and their determination to improve them.
The ruling party (PRI) and its allies, the National Action Party (PAN), the Partido Verde and New Alliance, lost a battle when the General Water Law to privatize Mexico’s water resources was shelved in the Chamber of Deputies. Grassroots mobilization played a key role in the victory.
Recent weeks have seen a series of mass protests in Peru against the controversial new youth labor law that has caused widespread public debate.
The masked representative of San Sebastián Bachajón, Chiapas, described how residents of this Tzeltal indigenous community reclaimed the entrance to the Aguas Azules waterfalls on Dec. 21, 2014. Although the government once again controls the Aguas Azules tollbooth, the resolve of the movement for local autonomy has not flagged after more than seven years of struggle.
On January 26, for the eighth time since the fateful September 26, tens of thousands of people from various sectors marched through the streets of the capital with a two-pronged demand: to bring back alive the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa and to transform national public life.
Ten years ago, in East Harlem, New York, an area known as El Barrio, members of fifteen Mexican immigrant families, all of them women, came together to see how they could achieve dignified housing in their community. They were struggling against gentrification and displacement; their landlord was trying to force them out of their homes in order to attract wealthier tenants and transform the neighbourhood they lived in. These were people without previous experience of organising, and they knew that they had much to learn, but they listened to and supported each other and in December 2004 they formed Movement for Justice in El Barrio (Movement).
