Skip to main content

We must honour lost land defenders by fighting the system which killed them

By
As the Guardian and Global Witness revealed that almost four environmental defenders were murdered every week in 2017, War on Want learned of two more killings through our Latin American partner organisations.

On 24 January, Márcio “Marcinho” Matos, involved in the fight for rights of landless peasants in Bahia in north-east Brazil, was shot in front of his son. Three days later, Temístocles “don Temis” Machado, a prominent figure in the struggle of Afro-Colombian communities across the Colombian Pacific, was murdered in his home in the Isla de Paz community.

Machado, of the Black Communities’ Process (PCN) and Matos of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) were tireless land defenders

These killings are designed to silence and break the frontlines of the struggles against corporate power, catastrophic climate change and the unlimited extraction of the world’s natural resources. The violent tactics aim to bypass local communities whose lives and livelihoods stand in the way of corporations looking to profit from exporting primary materials for global markets, whatever the human and environmental cost.


Source :- theguaraian
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We're open to work with Britain over incident involving ex-agent

By
The Kremlin said on Tuesday it was ready to cooperate if Britain asks it for help investigating an incident involving a former Russian double agent who fell ill after exposure to an unknown substance. Sergei Skripal, once a colonel in Russia's GRU military intelligence service, was critically ill in hospital on Tuesday after he was exposed to an unidentified substance in southern England. "Nobody has approached us with such a request," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters, when asked if the British authorities had been in touch seeking help. "Moscow is always open for cooperation." When asked to respond to British media speculation that Russia had poisoned Skripal, Peskov said: "It didn't take them long." Calling the incident "a tragic situation," he said the Kremlin did not have information about what had happened. Source :- yahoonews
Post a Comment
Read more

Key players recall 1968 Polish student revolt, ensuing anti-Semitism

By
In March 1968, a student revolt crushed by Poland's baton-wielding police was used as a pretext for an anti-Semitic purge by the communist regime. It began when the communists banned the 19th-century play "Forefathers' Eve" by poet Adam Mickiewicz claiming it had anti-Russian elements. Two students who contested the ban were expelled from the University of Warsaw, prompting their peers to stage a demonstration on March 8. Backed by other civil groups, particularly workers unhappy with daily life under communism, the pro-democracy protests spread to other cities. The regime used the student revolt as an excuse to unleash an anti-Semitic campaign that was rooted in a settling of scores inside the Communist Party, which was split into two camps. Source :- yahoonews
Post a Comment
Read more

Tension with Israel 50 years after Poland's anti-Semitic campaign

By
On the 50th anniversary of a brutal anti-Semitic campaign in Poland, the country faces a diplomatic crisis with Israel over a controversial new Holocaust law. In 1968, partly to settle disputes inside the ruling Communist Party, the Polish government stripped many Jews of party membership -- and thus jobs -- prompting around 12,000 to leave the country. Today, Poland's conservative Law and Justice party (PiS) has been accused of trying to deny the Holocaust after introducing a law notably intended to prevent people from describing Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland as Polish. "It's not the same today," said Adam Michnik, a prominent communist-era dissident who is now editor-in-chief of Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading liberal newspaper. "There are certainly similarities. Once again there's a growing image of a Poland besieged by enemies and the enemies are the Jews who want to do us harm," he told AFP. Source :- yahoonews
Post a Comment
Read more