Indigenous Peoples


Social organisations against UN Food Systems Summit in 2021

“If this Summit, convened by the United Nations (UN), goes on in the same way, whatever guidelines come out of it will most likely continue promoting the industrial food systems that have made people unwell,” warns Saúl Vicente from the International Indian Treaty Council. He was referring to the UN Food Systems Summit, scheduled for September 2021. Vicente added that…

RECORD NUMBER OF LAND CONFLICTS IN BRAZIL IN 2019

Throughout 2019, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) recorded 1833 conflicts in the countryside (averaging five per day), 23% more than in 2018. This is the highest number on CPT records in the past five years. There was also a 14% increase in the number of murders (from 28 to 32), 7% more attempted murders (from 28 to 30), and 22%…

Meeting for new UN framework to protect biodiversity to be held in Italy

Environmental federation Friends of the Earth International reaffirms its concern over the lack of ambition in the new framework currently under negotiation at the UN, which will set the basis for the protection of biodiversity globally from 2020 to 2030. A Friends of the Earth International delegation will participate in the second meeting of the Open Ended Working Group of…

“We are willing to give our lives if necessary to bring democracy back”

“Neither bullets nor repression will silence the indigenous peasant movement” stated the National Coordinator of the Landless Indigenous Peasant Workers Movement of Bolivia (MST-B), Silvestre Saisari. “We have gone back to the times of the Inquisition, when they colonized you with the Bible and swords”, he added. Real World Radio interviewed Silvestre on Monday, eight days after the coup d´état…

Latin American Movements reject coup d’état in Bolivia and express solidarity with Bolivian people

In the past hours, popular social movements and organizations from Latin America and the Caribbean have expressed their strong opposition to the coup d’état in Bolivia, perpetrated by civic business committees, primarily the one from Santa Cruz, the national oligarchy, the armed forces and the police. On Sunday, shortly after president Evo Morales and his vice president Álvaro García Linera…

BlackRock invests in burning the Amazon

“As fires rage across the Amazon, a report released today reveals that BlackRock, the world’s largest institutional investor with $6.5 trillion USD in assets, is deeply invested in the sectors most responsible for tropical forest destruction in the Amazon and around the world”, reads a press release issued by Friends of the Earth US about the new report. The report BlackRock’s Big…

System change is urgently needed to face serious biodiversity crisis

“If we keep on allowing that those who defend the environment actually get killed, we can never hope to save the environment”, said environmental activist Nele Marien, of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), a few hours before the beginning on Tuesday of an important meeting of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD) that will take place…

In the eye of the storm

A special report by the United Nations Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous People, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, warns about a common pattern of attack against indigenous peoples at global level by governments in alliance with transnational investment projects related to the sectors of extractive industries, agribusiness, infrastructure, hydroelectric dams and logging, which is displacing the communities from their territories. “I’ve been…