News
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's call for Brazil to become a “green Saudi Arabia” over the next few years has investors giddy and environmental and workers organizations panicked...The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST)...warns that the expansion of sugar cane plantations is both concentrating land ownership and creating slave labor...
Catholic Church Denounces Brazil's Agribusiness and Slavery
Written by Newsroom
Wednesday, 23 May 2007
Brazil's Pastoral Land Commission, linked to the Brazilian Catholic Church, has just released its 2006 report on violence in the Brazilian countryside. The document blames the concentration of land in the hands of a few and...
BRAZIL:
Homeless Take Fate into Their Own Hands
Mario Osava
SAO PAULO, May 31 (IPS) - The occupation of the huge empty lot was carried out at night, by some 300 families. Just a few days later, there were nearly 5,000 families living in a sea of black tents in Valo Velho, a poor, sparsely populated neighbourhood in...
IPS Reports -
BRAZIL: Dorothy Stang Sentence - More Than Symbolic?
Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 16 (IPS) - Forty percent of the 1,237 murders linked to land disputes in Brazil between 1985 and 2001 took place in the northern state of Pará. But things could begin to change there if the sentence handed down to the...
YES! Magazine Summer 2007 Issue:
Latin America Rising
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Democracy Rising
by Nadia Martinez
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Grassroots movements change the face of power.
As the people of Latin America build democracies from the bottom up, the symbols of power are changing. What used to be emblems of poverty and oppression—...
Dear Friends of the MST,
The fact that so many popular movements, unions, and student groups from all over the country have come together to build a Day of Struggle on May 23 shows that there is a revival of working class mobilizations. Since the People’s Plebiscite Against the Free Trade Agreement of the Americans in 2002, there has...
IRC Americas Program Report
Allied with Brazilian Agribusiness, Syngenta Resists Governor's Decree to Expropriate Site
Rennie Lee | May 17, 2007
Americas Program, International Relations Center (IRC) americas.irc-online.org
March 14 marked the one-year anniversary of the Via Campesina's non-violent occupation of...
Brazil Man Guilty in Killing of US Nun
Tuesday May 15, 2007 9:01 PM
Guardian Unlimited
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BELEM, Brazil (AP) - A Brazilian rancher was found guilty Tuesday of ordering the killing of American nun and rain forest defender Dorothy Stang, a judge announced following a two-day trial.
Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura was...
Letter from the Landless Mothers
We speak to the sons and daughters of the land from all nations. To those who were not invited to the banquet. To those who have been waiting in the queue of history for centuries. We will not be spectators at a film waiting for the light to go out. It’s time to believe in the possibility of defeating...
RIGHTS-BRAZIL:
Homeless Join Month of Protests
Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 25 (IPS) - The Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) blocked three access roads into Sao Paulo on Wednesday, continuing a month-long struggle during which they have invaded a large number of buildings and unoccupied urban sites in several state capitals...