Roberto David Castillo Mejía is a Honduran businessman, former government employee for the state energy agency, and later Executive Director of the company in charge of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project: Desarrollos Energéticos S.A (DESA). Berta Cáceres and the Lenca community from Rio Blanco opposed the installation of DESA’s project on the Gualcarque River. The project was granted a 20-year…
On Thursday 25 February, Nury Martinez, Chair of the National Agricultural Union Federation (FENSUAGRO), member of La Via Campesina in Colombia, will address the plenary meeting of the 46th session of the UN Human Rights Council. She will denounce the systematic violence and repression of peasant organisations in Colombia, as well as the ongoing selective threats against defenders of land…
The Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism (CSM) addressed the Chair of the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), Thanawat Tiensin, last week, demanding a new course for the Food Systems Summit set to take place in September 2021. “The CSM cannot jump onto a train that is heading in the wrong direction,” state the member organisations in this…
25 January 2020 marked two years since the worst environmental crime in the history of Brazil: the collapse of a giant mining dam operated by Vale S.A., located in Córrego do Feijao, near Brumadinho, Minas Gerais State. The thousands of people affected have still not received adequate reparations for the impacts they suffered. The Brazilian Movement of Peoples Affected by Dams (MAB)…
Capire is an initiative coordinated by the World March of Women, together with women members of La Vía Campesina, Friends of the Earth International and organisations that are part of the project “Strengthening Popular Feminism.” “There are so many things that women are organising, resisting and building in the territories which must be recognised and expressed as part of feminism.…
The year 2020 saw the highest recorded murders of social leaders and defenders of territories and peoples’ rights in Colombia, since the signing of the Peace Accords in 2016, according to data from the Institute of Studies for Development and Peace (INDEPAZ). On 28 December 2020, peasant and social leader Omar Moreno Ibagué was murdered in Nariño department and his…
One month after the murder of João Alberto Silveira Freitas by the security guards hired by Carrefour supermarkets in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Patrícia Gonçalves, member of the Board of Directors of Friends of the Earth Brazil and activist in the Front in Defense of Quilombola Territories in Rio Grande do Sul, analyzes the measures taken by the company and the…
At the last minute, the State Attorney General's Office of Ecuador informed the Union of People Affected by Texaco (UDAPT) that it had begun the appeal process of the arbitration award in favor of Chevron in The Hague. In November, UDAPT warned in a statement that the arbitration award issued ordered the Ecuadorian State "to violate judicial autonomy and interfere…
The Latin American Coordination of Rural Organizations (CLOC-LVC) denounced the "arbitrary detention" by the Attorney General's Office of Colombia of three well-known leaders of the National Agricultural Coordination (CNA) on December 15. They are Adelso Gallo, a recognized peasant and social leader from the central-eastern region of Colombia, a member of the National Board of the CNA, detained in the…
In early November, Elsa Nury Martínez, Chair of the National Agricultural Union Federation in Colombia (FENSUAGRO) and member of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organisations (CLOC-Via Campesina), received death threats against her and her family. These threats came from the ‘Black Eagles’ narco-paramilitary group (Águilas Negras - Bloque Capital), who singled out the peasant leader as a military target…
