While the union representatives met in Mexico City, in Washington Trump signed two executive orders about commerce. One requires a report on deficits in trade relations that seeks to identify unfair practices and the other orders the application of anti-dumping sanctions. Actually, there is nothing new in either.
Caceres’ memory must be invoked along with that of dozens of other martyrs for the defense of the sanctity of all living beings, as the cross-boundary struggle builds to reinstate indigenous primacy in the protection of land tenure rights, biological diversity, habitat, food and water security, and the balance of nature.
Feminism will never defeat the Trump patriarchal revival in the U.S. or the resurgence in the rest of the world unless it embraces its nature as profoundly anti-systemic. As the system becomes more deadly and alienating, women’s defense of life and their stands against impunity present a radical challenge.
The basic principle at the core of demands of indigenous peoples at Standing Rock and at Loma de Bacum has been supported internationally by two former UN Special Rapporteurs for Indigenous Rights, and recently endorsed by the current Rapporteur, Victoria Tauli Corpus. That principle states that governments must ensure that companies consult with indigenous peoples prior to launching megaprojects and was first set out in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The group of migrants has decided to walk across the city’s characteristic bridge to call for “fewer walls, more bridges.” Among them are mothers and children who had not seen each other in more than 20 years, and grandparents who had never met their grandchildren who grew up in this huge city far away from the villages their parents were born in.
If my life does not matter, produce without me.” With that slogan was born, from Argentina, the call for the first national woman’s strike. The idea quickly spread to several Latin American countries, and women from Honduras, Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, among others joined the call to mobilize.
On Oct. 9, 200 activists marched along a dusty highway between Nogales and Tucson toward a Border Patrol checkpoint just north of Tubac, Arizona. At the front, activists prepared to risk arrest clutched painted crosses in their hands, each bearing the name of someone killed by US-trained assassins or the militarized US-Mexico border.
The broad student movement that won Chile’s alamedas – with demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of young people and the occupation of dozens of secondary schools, demanding changes in the education system – has sedimented in the creation of some thirty self-managed education initiatives in working-class territories.
It’s anybody’s guess how many victims of violence are still buried somewhere in the Juarez Valley on the Mexico-U.S. border. For starters, there is the still largely unexcavated Navajo Arroyo, where the remains of 18 young women who went missing from nearby Ciudad Juarez have been recovered and identified since late 2011, according to the local daily Norte.
The Colombian people voted NO to peace. Or to be exact, 50.2% of 37% of the eligible population voted no. In the referendum held Oct. 2, the majority of voters decided to scuttle four years of peace talks dedicated to ending 52 years of bloodshed.
