The major agent of global land grabbing is TIAA (formerly TIAA-CREF), a giant investment firm that manages pension funds for public employees of many respected institutions – municipalities, universities, museums, hospitals, even National Public Radio.
The international training courses created as part of the Global Peasant Solidarity Movement Building Initiative provide the foundation for the intellectual, technical, and cultural exchange that takes place during these brigades.
Movement leaders in Brazil, including Grassroots International partner the Landless Workers Movement, are conducting a hunger strike to defend democracy. Volunteer Leonie Rauls writes about the struggle to release former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva from prison so he can stand in the upcoming national elections.
Grassroots International and the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil are supporting new projects to develop independent news sources that tell the workers’ and peasants’ side of the story.
Last month the Jean -Jacques Brigade of International Solidarity with Haiti held various activities in the women's and production sectors.
Flavio Barbosa, who organizes with Grassroots International partner the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Ceará, Brazil, stopped by our offices in Boston last week. He shared a solidarity message from the MST to immigrants and refugees facing persecution in the United States and at the border. As he states in the video, "People should be free to live and choose a place where they can be well with their family."
In 2017 Grassroots International launched the Global Peasant Solidarity Movement Building Initiative, a series of projects coordinated in collaboration with our partner the Landless Workers Movement/ Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). This initiative, now in its second year, supports international social movements as they strengthen the infrastructure of regional learning centers, independent media production and popular communications trainings, political education, and global solidarity.
Below is the declaration created from the latest Alternative World Water Forum that occurred on March 17-22, 2018, which several of our partners signed.
On this World Water Day, we want to honor the movements in Latin America struggling for their human right to water.
Test show that people affected by November 2015 hydrodam disaster in Brazil are contaminated with nickel and arsenic.
From Brazilian mass movement building to pinpoint alternatives and retain the countryside, to Honduran reclamation of natural resources through food sovereignty, agroecology, and climate justice, to relentless Palestinian efforts of upholding international law and defending human rights, people are challenging destructive political orders. Doing so is a collective act of resilience and resistance, ‘grabbing back’ in order to move forward in uncertain times.
Without a doubt, 2017 brought tremendous challenges to people around the world – and also witnessed amazing feats of resilience, resistance and resolve. Together with our global partners and committed US-based supporters, Grassroots International celebrates many remarkable accomplishments.
The Landless Workers Movement (MST) has had an active presence in the Governador Valadares region and in other areas along the Doce River. They began organizing people who had been affected by the dam disaster, people who had suffered the consequences including job loss and lack of clean water.