Month: March 2007

The state of Alto Paraná, Paraguay, sits on the triple frontier with Argentina and Brazil, an area which some Paraguayans know as the soy frontier. In the past 30 years, what was once jungle and small farms has become a vast sea of industrial soy plantations. On February 12, I spoke with three women who are working with ASAGRAPA to fight these corporations and the spread of industrial monoculture in Paraguay.

New social movements have emerged in Bolivia over the "price of fire"-access to basic elements of survival such as water, gas, land, coca, employment, and other resources. From the first moments of Spanish colonization to today's headlines, The Price of Fire offers a gripping account of clashes in Bolivia between corporate and people's power, contextualizing them regionally, culturally, and historically. Read the book's introduction here…

We rode through the rural communities of the Bajo Lempa in a white pickup, picking up the survivors one by one. Maria. Elsa. Irma. Luisa. Lencho. Chici. All clamored into the back of the truck, chatting about this and that, their laughter filling the sweltering air around us. We were going to listen to stories that no one should ever have to tell: testimonies from survivors of the massacre of La Quesera, a brutal attack by the Salvadoran Army which took the lives 600-800 innocent people, mostly women, children and elders.