Today, the Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) launches a new video describing Our Power Campaign: Communities United for a Just Transition. The video was shot during last year’s CJA “Our Power” camp and action, hosted by the Black Mesa Water Coalition, which...
Recently Rita Zanotto from the Landless Workers Movement (MST) sat down with Grassroots International’s Sara Mersha to talk about global movements, partnership and power.
Barbara Polk traveled with other Grassroots International supporters to Honduras and Guatemala in the fall of 2013. The article below provides an overview of the trip and her experiences.
Alfredo Lopez is a hunted man.
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.
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.
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.
By Lydia Simas
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.
This is a preliminary summary from the US-based Honduras Solidarity Network / Alliance for Global Justice election observation delegation. The summary casts doubt the credibility of Honduran Supreme Electoral Council, which claims that the elections were free and fair, siting the US Ambassador and mainstream corporate media in the USA. Others on the ground, however, disagree.
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.
By Claire Gilbert and Mina Remy
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.
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.
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.
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.
The narrative below is the third in a series of three stories documented by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a Grassroots International partner since 1996. PCHR has gained an international reputation as an independent voice on human rights documenting abuses carried out by both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Raji Sourani, the founder and director of PCHR, recently received the Right Livelihood Award (known as the Alternative Nobel Prize). The PCHR documents human rights violations, provides legal aid to victims, advocates for greater economic and social rights, and, in particular, defends the rights of Gaza fishers who are routinely denied access to their fishing waters by the Israeli Defense Forces.
In January 1994, the Zapatistas - autonomous indigenous communities who organized themselves in a system of liberated zones within Chiapas, Mexico – emerged out of the jungles with a clear and unified voice in opposition to the system of neoliberalism being imposed upon their lives through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A trade deal between Canada, the US, and Mexico, NAFTA instituted a set of regulations that made it easier for transnational corporations to make profits across borders, no matter what the costs or consequences to people and the environment. As a result, thousands of workers in the US lost their jobs as companies moved their operations to Mexico where the costs of production were cheaper.
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).
