Americas Program “A New World of Citizen Action, Analysis, and Policy Options” www.americas.org Dear Readers, We’ve been struggling to keep the Americas Program going over the past years. It’s been a sacrifice made possible by…
The hopes of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon to have the European crisis under control before he presides over the G20 Summit have been dashed. Although the immediate threat of an economic meltdown has subsided, the…
Progressive small farmer organizations in Mexico scored a victory over transnational corporations that seek to monopolize seed and food patents.
The U.S. drug war on neighboring American countries has been going from bad to worse ever since Plan Colombia and Plan Condor began wreaking untold environmental destruction of herbicidal fumigation on the biologically diverse countries of Colombia and Mexico in the 1970s.
Mexico took on the presidency of the G20 in December 2011 at a moment of multiple crises. The nation shares the presidency with a “three-member management Troika of past, present and future chairs”, this year, France and Russia. As chair, Mexico is responsible for establishing a temporary secretariat to coordinate work and prepare for and organize the June 2012 Summit.
President Obama’s January 18, 2012 rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline was cheered by environmentalists, who called the decision “a victory over truth and misinformation” and a “brave call.” Despite such celebrations, the battle over Keystone, which has become a real and symbolic battle over oil and its role in global warming, is not over.
With two years to go before the World Cup in Brazil, already people are questioning the massive evictions caused by the Cup’s enormous infrastructure projects and the legal privileges that must be conceded to the all-powerful FIFA, which has set itself up as a kind of super-state capable of imposing its own laws and special tribunals.
For over two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become one of the world’s largest growers, packers and exporters of hogs and pork. But the conditions created in Veracruz to help it make high profits, as one of Mexico’s largest pig producers, also plunged thousands of Veracruz residents into poverty.
History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.
Despite the serious harm caused by agrochemical fumigation across South America’s Southern Cone, there is a surprising lack of debate and little media coverage on the issue. It has been an uphill battle to build grassroots movements to regulate– and eventually eliminate– certain practices that are prohibited in other countries, like aerial fumigations.