Alfredo Lopez, Human Rights Defender and Big Headache for Honduran Authorities
Alfredo Lopez is a hunted man.
Advocacy | Página 11 de 19
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Cameroon activist takes on land grabber from Wall Street, now faces imprisonment
Land grabs -- the large-scale and sometimes shady acquisition of massive tracts of land by powerful financial interest -- have become a serious problem in the Global South. As a result, peasant farmers, particularly in indigenous communities, are being driven from their ancestral lands. Fortunately, a growing and increasingly well-organized movement of resistance to land grabs is fighting back --and succeeding. The following story, from Grassroots ally GRAIN, shows how one community leader and his community are pushing back against the grabs.
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Veolia, a target of human rights organizations, derailed in Massachusetts
Since our office is in Boston, Grassroots International takes special satisfaction with the ouster of Veolia from running Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad system here. Veolia’s operation in the occupied West Bank has made it a consistent target of human rights organizations, including Grassroots International and our allies. We join with other members of the Boston Coalition for Palestinian Rights, which initiated the “Derail Veolia” campaign. While we celebrate this moment, we recognize the importance of continuing to push for the MBTA and MassDOT to recognize human rights as part of its decision-making – including both international concerns as well as the need to ensure good jobs and local hiring.
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Haitian Movements Speak Out Against Monsanto, Offer Community-led Solutions
Haiti’s peasant movements are reforesting the countryside, building irrigation systems, feeding communities – just to name a few activites that are improving lives for rural communities across the nation. In the video below, members of Haiti’s Group of Four (G4) and the Dessalines Brigade describe how Haiti’s peasant movement connects with the struggle for food sovereignty in the United States, and globally. The video includes Grassroots International partners from Haiti and Brazil speaking at an Occupy the Food Prize rally on October 17, 2013 in Des Moines.
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Cameroon activist takes on land grabber from Wall Street, now faces imprisonment
Land grabs -- the large-scale and sometimes shady acquisition of massive tracts of land by powerful financial interest -- have become a serious problem in the Global South. As a result, peasant farmers, particularly in indigenous communities, are being driven from their ancestral lands. Fortunately, a growing and increasingly well-organized movement of resistance to land grabs is fighting back --and succeeding. The following story, from Grassroots ally GRAIN, shows how one community leader and his community are pushing back against the grabs.
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Reports from Honduras Show Repression, Voter Fraud
By Lydia Simas
Grassroots International has been in close contact with our partners in Honduras throughout the recent elections there. Many offered first-hand reports that election observers and agrarian reform activists were intimidated, ballots were not collected, and people were threatened with violence and even killed. The report below from the Real News.com (Honduran Elections: Another Chapter of the Ongoing Coup) describes irregularities with the elections, including allegations of widespread voter suppression that ultimately failed the Honduran people.
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Interview with Miriam Nobre, Global Feminist Activist
Miriam Nobre is a Brazilian feminist activist and current coordinator of World March of Women (WMW), an international feminist movement that connects grassroots women to eliminate the root causes of poverty and violence against women. She is also an agronomist, and has completed a master’s program in Latin American Integration at the University of São Paulo (Brazil). Miriam recently received an award from Grassroots International as part of our 30th anniversary celebration in Boston. While in Boston, she talked with Grassroots staffer Jonathan Leaning about her work with the WMW and her activism.
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MPP’s Much Ado About Women
Haiti, like everywhere else, has a complex relationship with women. Women’s work in and out the home is invaluable, sometimes the difference between: eating or not, schooling or not, and medical care or not. The majority of Haitian households are headed by women who are divorced, widowed, or never married. These women are eking out a living by the skin of their teeth—resourceful in a resource-strapped world. But despite Haitian women’s contributions to society and economy, they remain trapped invarious levels of social and institutional discrimination. They face barriers to adequate housing, education, employment, and justice. On the whole, urban-based women fare a little better than rural-based women, but not by much.
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MPPs Much Ado About Women
Haiti, like everywhere else, has a complex relationship with women. Womens work in and out the home is invaluable, sometimes the difference between: eating or not, schooling or not, and medical care or not. The majority of Haitian households are headed by women who are divorced, widowed, or never married. These women are eking out a living by the skin of their teethresourceful in a resource-strapped world. But despite Haitian womens contributions to society and economy, they remain trapped invarious levels of social and institutional discrimination. They face barriers to adequate housing, education, employment, and justice. On the whole, urban-based women fare a little better than rural-based women, but not by much.
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Scaling up Agroecology: A new report from IATP offers a tool for policy
Agroecology is not just a way of doing agriculture but, equally importantly, a way of thinking about agriculture holistically, systemically, and ecologically. Along with respect for nature -- the soil, water, seeds, etc. -- there is equally respect for the people (especially women) engaged in agriculture, including their knowledge, experience, leadership and rights. It is a way of thinking about and doing agriculture that is fundamental to addressing pressing global problems like hunger and climate change.
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140 Indigenous Families Win Back Land in Guatemala
The Peasant Unity Committee (CUC) announced the redistribution of land last month to 140 indigenous and peasant families. The families were part of the largest violent eviction in the recent history of Guatemala in March 2011 when non-state actors, police, military forces and the government forced nearly 800 indigenous Q’eqchí families of their land without notice, destroyed their crops and burned their homes.
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TIAA-CREF Divests Social Choice Fund from Controversial Veolia Corporation
Grassroots International and its partners in the We Divest coalition join activists from around the country in congratulating TIAA-CREF for taking a step toward living up to its motto, “Investment for the Greater Good”. “TIAA-CREF has made a move in the right direction by divesting its Social Choice Fund of Veolia stock given that Veolia's business model and practices have consistently put profit over people -- whether privatizing water resources around the world, or enabling Israeli occupation and segregation in the West Bank. This is a victory for all those concerned with human rights and justice,” said Nikhil Aziz, Executive Director of Grassroots International.
Read the full press release below.
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Hydroelectric Resistance: MAB’s Energy Politics for Brazil
The article below orginally appeared in La Jicarita: An online magazine of Environmental Politics in New Mexico following a presentation by Leonardo Maggi (from the Movement of People Affected by Dams) and Sara Mersha (from Grassroots International).
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Hidden Tent Camps Persist in Haiti Four Years after the Earthquake
It has been almost four years since the devastating earthquake of 2010 shook Haiti to its core. In the aftermath—amid grand plans to ‘build back better’ and huge promises of international aid—more than 1 million people settled into makeshift camps, their homes destroyed by the quake. Many of these camps were in public areas, highly visible on roads and highways--glaring evidence of the need to re-build.
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Palestinian NGOs Issue Statement Condemning World Bank-sponsored Red-Dead Sea Canal
The $10-billion proposed canal would divert water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea in an effort to save the later from “environmental degradation.” The project is a partnership between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Grassroots International partners the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and Stop the Wall are among the signatories to the statement below that calls for a halt to the project. Palestinian organizations cite both political and environmental reasons for their calls to stop this water and land grab that would impede Palestinian rights.
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The Real Food Prize and Protests Against Monsanto and other Food Imposters
In Des Moines Iowa last week, in a stunning example of irony three genetic engineers were given the World Food Prize. The award winners are major developers of the now 20-year-old science and technology behind genetically modified organisms (GMOs), a highly contentious and potentially hazardous substitute for age-old agricultural knowledge and technology. By presenting representatives from Monsanto and Syngenta with the World Food Prize, its sponsors are attempting to elevate the status of GMOs and lend credence to the [false] argument that we need GMOs to feed the world’s burgeoning population. The truth is that most of the GMOs grown today are for U.S.
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The Sound of the Drone – Testimonial from a survivor of Operation “Pillar of Cloud”
The narrative below is the first in a series of three stories documented by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a Grassroots International partner since 1996.
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Palestinian Human Rights Defender Receives the Alternative Nobel Prize
It is with tremendous pride and admiration that Grassroots International shares the news that Raji Sourani, director of our partner the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), has won the 2013 Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. Sourani was granted the award for “unwavering dedication to the rule of law and human rights under exceptionally difficult circumstances.” The award honors and elevates the status of the careful, thorough, and utterly crucial work of Mr. Sourani and PCHR to document human rights abuses and offer legal support and advocacy to the victims of violations of International Law.
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No to the WTO and Free Trade Agreements
Launched in 1995, the World Trade Organization (WTO) completed the Bretton Woods trio with the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in promoting neoliberalism and corporate globalization. The WTO was particularly special in its power to legally enforce and penalize countries, taking away the policy space of governments, and on several occasions, forcing them to change their national laws in order to implement global free trade rules.