Adam B's Bookmarks tagged humanrights → View Popular

You are here: Diigo Home > Adam B's Bookmarks

Expand All 1 - 16 of 16

8Expand

The Price of Profits by Zachary Hurwitz

The Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure in South America is the latest and largest in a series of bank-financed schemes to bring "development" to the Amazon Basin—and more trouble to the region's indigenous communities.

Tags: anthropology, culture, latinamerica, humanrights, business, amazon on 2008-06-26 -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: Latin American anthropology

more fromwww.culturalsurvival.org

Initiative for the Regional Integration
of Infrastructure in South America
The Interoceanica Sur highway in Madre de Dios, Peru, is one of the 31 first-stage
IIRSA projects that are programmed for completion by the year 2010. The road
is financed by the Andean Development Corporation, the Brazilian National
Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Peruvian government
and is currently under construction.
The Interoceanica project is going to benefit large agricultural interests,
not local populations. Local populations are not prepared economically to benefit
from the highway, and there’s been no interest from the national or regional
government to give us at least a few incentives to prepare us for the highway.
If the government doesn’t promote a sustainable vision for our region,
what we’re going to see are large trucks passing through here, big businesses
from the Brazilian side. There they have a broad vision of expanding spaces
for soy cultivation, which is going to affect indigenous peoples, riverside
communities, and rural communities. So this is only a capitalistic vision,
not a vision that will help the poor populations of our country.
We’ve been informed that there is a new proposal for an executive law
that would allow the government to begin a colonization project with agricultural
and industrial ends. For the Amazon, this is a threat, because we already live
here, we already exist here, so what lands are they going to colonize? This
could mean land invasions, conflicts between agricultural interests and indigenous
people, so this proposal for new law worries us, and we’ve rejected it
through the Alliance of Federations here in Madre de Dios.
The Madeira Hidrovia Complex is one of the most controversial projects included
in the Initiative for the Regional Integration of Infrastructure of South America.
The Hidrovia plans include the construction of five hydroelectric dams (two
in Bolivia and three in Brazil) along the Madeira river, to facilitate transporting
soy from the southern city of Porto Velho to Manaus for export.
For the Parintintin of western Brazil, who depend on the river for their livelihood
and culture, the hydroelectric dams proposed by the Madeira complex are a serious
threat. As cacique (chief) Domingos Parintintin points out, mining and logging
already exert tremendous pressure on their territory. Hydroelectric dams would
offer even more pressure, cutting river water levels, which would threaten
the availability and health of fish, as well as the Parintintin agricultural
plots, which depend on the river’s natural cycles of flooding to restore
soil fertility. There would also be increased competition for land and resources,
as migrants move in to work in construction and agriculture.
This is 2007; it’s time for things to be different. The government
threw a party to celebrate the 500th birthday of Brazil, but we’re against
that. Because today you go to any land in Amazônia, and our close relatives,
brothers, parents, they’re all buried on that land. How can you celebrate
on the land where your relatives are buried?
Our people, in the area of health, we have our own traditions. We make remedies
ourselves. We have a part of our culture that knows which medicine to use,
which medicines cure, and we pass this on to our people who conserve this knowledge.
For example, if you have a bruise, or a cut, we know which treatment to use
to cure it. We have remedies for everything. We never give up our culture.
Beyond this, we never let go of our culture. For example, we never give up
our traditional clothing. Our people are advancing, but they don’t know
how to do everything. We don’t know how to do everything at the beginning
of something new, but we’re advancing. There are some things about our
culture that I can’t speak about, because they are secrets. This goes
for other people too. Truthfully, for us as Parintintin, from the time of contact
to today, our vision has changed. Today, our people are much more like Brazilians.
To us, our people have failed in some parts of our culture. There are things
that are changing our own culture as indigenous people. We speak two languages.
In the case of my village, we speak our own language and Portuguese. But we
never give up our culture. I’m not an enemy of Brazil, I’m an indigenous
man, but the question of land invasions, the question of mining, the question
of illegal logging, hunting, fishing, all of this comes back to our people;
it causes a problem, a very serious problem.

Isolation by Lucas Bessire

In South America's Gran Chaco, voluntarily isolated indigenous groups are still dodging the rampant development of the region, and with good reason: those that have already come out have found that even greater isolation awaits them.

Tags: anthropology, ayoreo, paraguay, bolivia, humanrights on 2008-06-13 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.culturalsurvival.org

Freed student uses Twitter to demand translator's release - CNN.com

Tags: twitter, politics, humanrights, egypt on 2008-06-05 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.cnn.com

Olympic torch extinguished on Paris run | Reuters

Security officials extinguished the Olympic torch on Monday on the Paris leg of its journey, disrupted by protesters against China's crackdown on Tibet.

Tags: olympics, protest, tibet, china, humanrights on 2008-04-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.reuters.com

1Expand

6Expand

CHILE: Rights of Mapuche Indians Still Not Ensured

Tags: anthropology, chile, humanrights, indigenous, ksuanth, mapuche, southamerica on 2007-05-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.ipsnews.net

"We regularly receive complaints, and practically every day we hear news about (mistreatment of and discrimination against) Mapuche people," he said during a meeting with the press ahead of Wednesday's release of Amnesty's annual human rights report 2007, which for the fifth year in a row mentions ill-treatment of indigenous people in Chile.
The Mapuche, who number 600,000 in this country of 15.6 million, are the biggest indigenous group in Chile, making up 87 percent of the total native population. One-fifth of them live in the southern region of Araucanía.
In the report, the London-based Amnesty states that Carabineros (militarised police) raided the Mapuche indigenous community of Temucuicui in Araucanía in July 2006, purportedly looking for livestock stolen from local ranchers.
"Police reportedly fired tear gas, rubber bullets and live ammunition at members of the community, who were unarmed. Several people were injured and a number of homes destroyed. Children were affected by the tear gas and several escaped to nearby hills. Women and children were ill-treated," says the report.
Above and beyond such incidents, "the state of economic prostration of certain indigenous communities is not seen by the Chilean state as a situation that should cause concern from a human rights perspective," journalist Nibaldo Mosciatti, press officer for the Bío-Bío radio station, told IPS.
"The power of the logging companies (that have displaced indigenous people from their land in that region) is so strong that in the end you have the sensation and suspicion that part of the state apparatus is placed at their disposal, which is more or less what occurs in the north, where small communities are fighting mining corporations over water rights," said Mosciatti.

1 - 16 of 16

List 20 50 100

Notation: * = Private bookmark and comment|… = Clipping [?] | … = Public highlight [?]

Adam B's Related Tags

Selected tags

humanrights

Related tags

See More Top Contributors

isaac Mao dilaycock elsamary dave sgonechina Wesley Fryer Pam

Related Groups on Diigo

Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University

Members (50)

bookmarks (520)
World Systems @ KSU

Members (48)

bookmarks (842)
KSU Anthropology

Members (52)

bookmarks (116)

Related Lists on Diigo

Latin American anthropology

Collection of resources rel...

Items: 4 | Visits: 5

Created by: Adam B

Adam B's Bookmarks tagged humanrights → View Popular

The Price of Profits by Zachary Hurwitz

Isolation by Lucas Bessire

Freed student uses Twitter to demand translator's release - CNN.com

Olympic torch extinguished on Paris run | Reuters

unsubscribe-me.org | Watch the film

WITNESS: See it. Film it. Change it.

The Hub

Indigenous fight to keep land in Chile, 2003 - Mapuche International Link/English|News

Cultural Survival

Abuela Mapuche - Documental

Latin American NGOs

...SweatShop Watch ...Welcome to Sweatshop Watch!

CHILE: Rights of Mapuche Indians Still Not Ensured

Democracy Now! | Zapatistas, Internationals Gather for Meeting of the Zapatista Villages with the Peoples of the World

Tibet: China Must End Rural Reconstruction Campaign (Human Rights Watch, 20-12-2006)

BBC NEWS | Africa | Botswana bushmen win land ruling

Adam B's Related Tags

See More Top Contributors

Related Groups on Diigo

Latin American anthropology

Diigo - Highlight and Share the Web!