Join the Alliance For Global Justice in the 2022 All the Walls Must Fall Conference, both virtually and in person. There will be panels, social gatherings and direct actions.
The LGTBIQ community in Honduras demanded Monday the approval of a gender identity law and compliance with a ruling issued in 2021 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH), which condemns the State for the death of a transgender woman and activist. On the occasion of the International Day of Trans Visibility, which is celebrated every March 31, the lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual, intersex and queer (LGTBIQ) collective in Honduras requested in a statement to the Government of Honduras to address the needs of transgender people. Trans people face daily "situations of violation of rights, stigmatization, discrimination, violence and hate crimes because of their gender identity and expression", according to LGTBIQ organizations.
The LGTBIQ community in Honduras demanded Monday the approval of a gender identity law and compliance with a ruling issued in 2021 by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CorteIDH), which condemns the State for the death of a transgender woman and activist. On the occasion of the International Day of Trans Visibility, which is celebrated every March 31, the lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual, intersex and queer (LGTBIQ) collective requested in a statement to the Government of Honduras to address the needs of transgender people. Trans people face daily "situations of violation of rights, stigmatization, discrimination, violence and hate crimes because of their gender identity and expression", according to LGTBIQ organizations.
This blog post comes from Celina Lima, the newest Fair Trade Campaigns fellow who is studying International Development and Social Enterprise at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). This summer, she travelled to Guatemala and Nicaragua as a fellow for our organization, to learn about coffee cooperatives and how Fair Trade Community Development Funds affect their members’ livelihoods. The following is the first of a series of blog posts of Celina’s journeys to the mountains of Central America.
For 20 years, Fair Trade has empowered farmers and workers in countries around the world with protections against the harsh realities of agricultural work. Within the last two years, that has also come to include the United States. This National Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-31), it’s important to recognize and appreciate the estimated 2-3 million U.S. men and women who work the fields to feed us every day. By purchasing produce with the Fair Trade Certified™ sticker, we all have the power to make the world a better place to live and work for them.
Lupita López Dearcia Comitán is a farmworker in Sonora, Mexico. She’s forty-four years old, has five children, and just so happens to grow the cucumbers you put in your salad last night. It’s a job she has a lot of pride in. Most people don’t know that cucumbers grow on vines like tomatoes, requiring constant care to ensure that the plant grows in the proper direction. It’s a technique called “training”, and Lupita has the practice down to a science.
Attacks against former FARC combatants who are integrated into the peace process continue at an alarming rate. About 300 have been killed since the signing of the Peace Accords in November 2016. On January 28, the Constitutional Court, noting that former combants’ “fundamental rights to life, personal integrity and peace … were ignored” by the Colombian state, ordered the government to take measures to protect the lives of former FARC combatants. On February 12, Jhon Sebastián Rivas and Leonardo Agudelo Murillo were with other members of Memoria Viva (a union which represents security personnel for former FARC combatants) in San Vicente del Caguán, Meta Department, to provide security to another former combatant, Lucila Moreno. TV news footage showed the police violently assault one of the men from behind. When the two tried to run away, police opened fire, shooting and killing a 14-year-old bystander. Two days later, an armed group began distributing pamphlets, warning that Memoria Viva members should present their accredited weapons and vehicles or otherwise be “declared military objectives,” i.e. marked as targets of assassination.
Q REPORTS (EFE) The Latin American economy will grow 2.3% in 2022, estimated this Thursday the UN Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which lowered its outlook for the region three-tenths compared to those calculated six months ago, due to the negative effects of the Ukraine war on the global picture.
Social movement leaders Jorge Tafur and Teofilo Acuña Ribón were outspoken against threats to land rights of campesinos and artisanal (traditional) miners in the Magdalena Medio region. The expansion of fossil fuel drilling (fracking) and palm tree plantations (for palm oil) pose threats not only to land rights but to the environment. In February they were staying in a rural area of San Martín, Cesar Department, denouncing that the police and the mayor of San Martín were colluding with a local landowner in making threats and harassing campesino victims of violence. On February 22, armed men dressed in military gear arrived at the house where they were staying, camouflaged by the darkness of the night, and shot them dead. Jorge Tafur and Teofilo Acuña Ribón were active in several social movement organizations that are accompanied by IRTF’s partner organization Community Peacemaker Teams-Colombia (CPT), including the Agro-mining Federation of the South of Bolívar (FEDEAGROMISBOL), the Inter-dialogue Commission of the South of Bolívar, Center and the South of Cesar (CISBCSC), the People’s Congress, the National Agrarian Coordinator (CNA), the Agrarian, Peasant, Ethnic and Popular Summit (CACEP), and others. We join with organizations across Colombia to express our sadness and outrage at the assassinations of Jorge Tafur and Teofilo Acuña Ribón.
Nicaragua recognized the “One-China Principle” and resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for the first time since the beginning of the neoliberal period in 1990. Nicaragua’s withdrawal from the OAS and its reestablishment of relations with the PRC are bold decisions that flex Nicaraguan sovereignty and communicate to developing countries that a path of resistance against Western coercion leads to independence, inclusive development, and promising new opportunities. With support from the fastest growing economy in the world with a population of 1.4 billion, in addition to an array of other governments and solidarity movements, Nicaragua has earned the ability to lead a more aggressive charge against Washington’s proposed militarized security and neoliberal development model for Central America. Such a model which aims to enrich corporations through private investment and austerity to the detriment of the poor and working-class remains the antithesis to the Chinese and Sandinista revolutions.
