These are the headlines of our fourth episode of Voices are Action, our new podcast series.
1. Argentina – Mendoza: The Assembly for Water of Uspallata, a town in Argentina located at the head of the Mendoza River basin, is currently threatened by the actions of the San Jorge open pit mining project, in a context of public power grabbing and activists criminalized for defending water. Lawyer Marcelo Romano reports from the ground.
2- Panama – Bocas del Toro: Update on the grassroots protests and mass mobilizations in Panama. We will listen to Ronaldo Ortiz in an interview with journalist Carlos Aznárez for Resumen Latinoamericano. Ortiz is a member of the Panamanian Peasant Union, part of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC – LVC) and the National Front for the Defense of Economic and Social Rights.
3- Sri Lanka: lawsuit over the shipwreck of the X-Press Pearl. A ship that caught fire and sank off the coast of Colombo, polluted the sea with dozens of chemical substances and billions of plastic pellets, destroyed the marine ecosystem and left fisherfolk communities without their livelihoods.
Hemantha Withanage, chair of Friends of the Earth Sri Lanka and also of environmental federation Friends of the Earth International, explains the court case in an interview with Maju Varghese of the Internationalist Solidarity System of Friends of the Earth International. This update is of particular interest after another container ship sank in May this year in the Arabian Sea, in the Indian state of Kerala.