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Written by Upside Down World
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Friday, 10 February 2012 19:39 |
Upside Down World began nearly nine years ago as a grassroots news outlet, and it continues to thrive thanks to the support of readers around the globe! Do you enjoy the news and analysis you get from Upside Down World? Please consider making a donate to keep us going!
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Written by Milagros Salazar
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Thursday, 09 February 2012 13:50 |
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Indigenous communities in Peru have a long list of comments and objections to the proposed regulations for the law governing prior consultation on initiatives affecting their territories. This criticism was voiced in a series of workshops conducted across the country ahead of the national meeting on the issue scheduled for Feb. 13-15.
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Written by Aaron Schneider
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Monday, 06 February 2012 11:07 |
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I have just finished my second World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 9 years after I attended my first. 2003 was a year marked by the inauguration of Lula, a union-leader turned politician who led the Workers´ Party to multiple electoral victories; this year’s social forum has been marked by Tunisa, Tahrir Square, the Spanish Indignant movement of unemployed youth (Indignados in Spanish), and the Occupy movement that took Wall Street and many US cities, like my home of New Orleans. My observation and summation of these processes focuses on the demise, and temporary survival, of liberal, democratic capitalism.
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Written by James Bargent
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Tuesday, 31 January 2012 09:07 |
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At first sight, the small town of La Playa in the department of Santander in Colombia seems gripped by a minor boom. Its population has rocketed while new residential buildings, shops and small bars blaring out loud music have sprung up all over town. Yet the growth does nothing to mask the pervading atmosphere of desperation and frustration among its long-term residents, brought on by living with the uncertainty of whether there will even be a town in the future.
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Written by By Mneesha Gellman, Photos by Joshua Dankoff
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Friday, 27 January 2012 12:20 |
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For seventeen months more than 300 Triqui people from the region of Copala, as it is known, have been displaced due to intense paramilitary violence in their community. Unable to return under fear of harm, the displaced camped out in Oaxaca City, demanding a government response to their situation.
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Written by Marcela Valente
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Wednesday, 25 January 2012 09:00 |
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Thousands of people in the northwest Argentine province of La Rioja are mobilising to stop an open-cast gold mining project in the Nevados de Famatina, a snowy peak that is the semi-arid area's sole source of drinking water. Residents of Famatina and neighbouring Chilecito have set up a partial roadblock, allowing local residents and tourists to pass, but stopping provincial authorities and anyone representing the Canadian mining company authorised by the Argentine government to mine the area.
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Written by Ramona Wadi
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Tuesday, 24 January 2012 12:51 |
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In his public ‘Letter to Chileans’ in 1998, Augusto Pinochet sought to reinforce oblivion by portraying the dictatorship as a memory of salvation from socialism, generating a justification amongst right wing sympathizers of the dictatorship. Fourteen years later, Chile's current government is carrying on Pinochet's work of rewriting history.
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Written by Polinizaciones and ASOQUIMBO
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Thursday, 19 January 2012 13:34 |
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The three main demands of the strike are that the environmental licenses for the Quimbo Hydroelectric Project and Emerald Energy be immediately suspended, public environmental hearings be held for the project in affected communities and for multinational corporation Emgesa to immediately repair the Paso del Colegio Bridge and other highways that have been damaged while working on the Quimbo project.
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Written by Raúl Zibechi
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Thursday, 09 February 2012 20:13 |
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Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.
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Written by Emily Willard
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Wednesday, 08 February 2012 18:14 |
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The official Guatemalan government records of the counterinsurgency operation Plan Sofia prove the criminal responsibility of senior government and military officials in the country’s genocide by detailing how the chain of command functioned during the war, says National Security Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle.
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Written by Cyril Mychalejko
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Friday, 03 February 2012 19:07 |
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Elliott Abrams, a former high level State Department official during the 1980s, testified last week that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina's military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered and jailed democracy activists and giving them to right-wing families friendly to the regime. But this didn't deter the State Department at the time from granting Argentina certification indicating that the country's human rights record was improving.
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Written by Aryeh Shell
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Monday, 30 January 2012 12:36 |
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“There is a war here in the Aguán,” says Juan, surveying the distant fields of African palm from the vantage point of his recently planted field of beans and corn. A young Honduran farmer, Juan lives in an encampment of 60 families, dedicated to growing basic grains and reclaiming their food sovereignty. “But the war is not against the drug traffickers, other countries or even organized crime,” he says. “It is a war against the campesinos.”
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Written by Danielle Mackey and Theodora Simon
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Thursday, 26 January 2012 20:21 |
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Violence and intimidation continue in El Salvador against environmental activists and human rights defenders who have publicly opposed metallic mining. The latest round of threats targetted a Salvadoran Catholic priest, Father Neftalí Ruiz, and a community radio station, Radio Victoria.
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Written by Paul Imison
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Tuesday, 24 January 2012 17:34 |
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In the midst of Mexico’s senseless “Drug War” and the erroneous belief that drug-trafficking is the root of the country’s evils, Mexicans were given a powerful reminder last week of the deeper crisis affecting their fellow citizens.
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Written by Heather Gies
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Friday, 20 January 2012 14:59 |
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The Aguán River Valley in the department of Colón, Honduras, is a site of both an ongoing conflict and a powerful social movement. In a struggle for land that greatly predates, but was also further exacerbated by, the 2009 military coup in Honduras, campesinos in the Aguán are constantly subject to human rights abuses, repression and injustice. Still, these communities are also unfailingly resilient. Poor, vulnerable, and landless, the Aguán campesinos truly represent and embody the Resistance movement in Honduras.
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Written by Belén Fernández
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012 10:55 |
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The current hype over an alleged Latin America-based alliance against the U.S. between Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah and Hamas militants, drug cartels, leftists, and any other potentially unsavory regional outfit or trend has produced such ludicrous assessments as that, given similarities between Mexican and Lebanese terrain, Hezbollah is instructing drug smugglers in the art of tunnel construction.
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