Lawyer and human rights defender Glenda Ayala Mejía is the commissioner and president of the National Committee for the Prevention of Torture, Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Honduras (MNP-CONAPREV). Since the end of 2021, her and her family's physical integrity have been at risk after receiving a series of threats. Although Ayala has been working for the administration of…
On 17 August 2021, the third revised draft of the Binding Treaty on human rights and transnational corporations was published- as part of the seven years of negotiations at the United Nations. As the negotiations develop and new drafts are presented, what has been agreed is becoming further removed from the demands of civil society. This latest draft is no…
The current COVID-19 pandemic is a symptom of the environmental imbalances that have resulted from treating nature as a commodity. We could argue that the impact of the pandemic would not have reached this magnitude if it weren’t for decades of neoliberalism, which has privileged business over lives: promoting agribusiness and extractivism, cutting down forests, and destroying vital water ecosystems.…
November 27, 2019, marked the 10th anniversary of the murder of Mariano Abarca Roblero, environmental activist who defended human rights and the rights of nature in Chicomuselo municipality, Chiapas, Mexico, by denouncing the socioenvironmental effects caused by Canadian mining corporation Blackfire Exploration, involved in the crime. Since then, the relatives of Abarca and several organizations have been demanding the Mexican…
This week there was a new round of negotiations and in light of the potentially imminent conclusion of negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement between Mercosur and the European Union, social movements and organizations gathered in the Continental Day for Democracy and against Neoliberalism expressed their rejection to the agreement and demanded an immediate end to the negotiations. To analyze…
At the end of May, Juan Orlando Hernández´ administration announced several reforms aiming to privatize services, through the passing of the Law of Restructuring and Transformation of the National Education and Healthcare System. So people took to the streets once against in Tegucigalpa against the threat of massive dismissals of doctors and teachers and to denounce the general state of…
Since January 2018, the population of Reitoca, a municipality of Francisco Morazan department, Honduras, is controlling the territories of the high areas of the town, where they set up a campsite to prevent a hydroelectric dam from being built on Petacón River. In the afternoon of Wednesday 24, police officers and members of the Tigre security forces came to forcibly…
Last week’s terrible and violent events in Latin America and the Caribbean - the assasination of Sergio Rojas in Costa Rica, the tragic death of 8 indigenous people in Colombia and the murder of Dilma Ferreira Silva in Brazil, among others - fill us with grief and above all with deep concern and outrage for the injustice and impunity against…
Water is more than a basic need: it is a right. In the struggle for this recognition there are many communities facing governments and corporations that attempt to take away this common good from them. Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean (ATALC) published at the end of 2018 the report Public Policy and the Fundamental Right to Water in…
On March 18th, Sergio Rojas, a Bribri indigenous leader, was murdered after being shot 15 times in Yeri, Salitre area, in southern Costa Rica. As a member of the National Coordination of the National Front of Indigenous Peoples (FRENAPI), Rojas fought for the restitution of ancestral lands and the conservation of native ecosystems. Local organizations condemned this “vile murder” and…
