Peter Bol is a 22 year-old community radio volunteer from the Toledo District of Belize. He has been volunteering with the community radio Ak’Kutan Radio for just 4 months now, after meeting another community radio volunteer at a workshop on Mopan Mayan hieroglyphs in August of this year. He was interested in volunteering with the radio due to his awareness of the marginalization experienced by Indigenous communities of the Toledo District. According to Peter, “There have been a lot of barriers between the Mayan culture and the rest of the country, such as language and illiteracy.
December 13, 2013 marks ten years since the brutal massacre on 424 Indigenous Anuak in Gambella, Ethiopia by Ethiopian national forces and armed militia. The Anuak people have long been persecuted in Southern Ethiopia, and recently have been forcibly evicted from their homelands to make way for translational agriculture companies.
By Amy Ferguson and Sara Schenkel
In a groundbreaking decision, the Constitutional Court of Guatemala ruled last week that community consultations against mining projects should be considered as binding legal decisions. The government is now obligated to respect the results of consultas populares or community referendums regarding mining projects.
Press release by Greenpeace Africa and Oakland Institute:
Greenpeace Africa and the Oakland Institute are alarmed by the decision of the Cameroonian government to award US agribusiness company Herakles Farms a three-year provisional land lease to develop a palm oil plantation in the South West region of the country. The move disproves Herakles Farms’ claim that it had all the necessary permits from the start, and confirms that the company has in fact been operating illegally for more than three years.
Sixty five years ago, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declaring that "all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Yet, Indigenous Peoples worldwide still struggle to protect their basic rights and suffer gross human rights abuses.
Protests were held outside the Annual General Meeting of British mining company GCM Resources on December 4th over the company’s Phulbari coal mine in Bangladesh. The protests were held by UK solidarity groups the London Mining Network, Phulbari Solidarity Group, and the UK Committee to Protect Oil-Gas and Mineral Resources in Bangladesh.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.