Violence in Mexico is surging back into the headlines – if current trends continue, deaths in 2017 could hit 30,000, making it the deadliest peacetime year on record. Attempts to stem the violence by Mexican and U.S. governmental agencies have failed spectacularly, and corruption reigns. In the face of this crisis, what alternatives exist? How do people living in the areas most affected negotiate the violence?
Humanitarianism wars are easier to fund than the humanitarian peace.
Source: Waging Nonviolence
2016 saw the emergence of a powerful movement against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, or DAPL, through land vital to Native communities, especially the Standing Rock Sioux. For non-Native people who have not been paying attention to indigenous rights struggles over the past several decades, the #NoDAPL movement may have served as a wake-up call to some of the injustices still confronting these communities. For others, as Tom Hastings points out in “Turtle Island 2016 Civil Resistance Snapshot,” in the Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict, #NoDAPL is simply another in a long line of civil resistance struggles Native communities have mobilized, often successfully, to claim their rights. He highlights this recent history of Native American and First Nations civil resistance movements on Turtle Island — the name, from Lenape mythology, that refers to the landmass others call North America — and takes stock of their characteristics, challenges and successes, arguing that nonviolent resistance has been a more effective strategy than violent resistance in defending Native peoples and their “lifeways.”
Source: The New Internationalist
We should not underestimate the US president’s talent for undermining his own job security.
It took only a few months.
Donald Trump scarcely made it past his first 100 days as President of the United States before the prospect of impeachment went from fringe fantasy to plausible possibility.
Trump apparently hoped that he could make a brewing scandal disappear with his abrupt firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey – the official responsible for investigating his campaign’s possible collusion with Russian interference in the US election. But the move only intensified scrutiny. It also raised the spectre of presidential obstruction of justice, itself an impeachable offence.
Source: The Nation
They’re the next generation, and they’ve been picking up the slack of gutted local newsrooms and indifferent national outlets.
Catherine Palmer was already a seasoned student journalist at The Johns Hopkins News-Letter when Freddie Gray, a Baltimore native and black man, died in police custody, provoking protests across the city that swelled into what would be called the Baltimore Uprising. Even so, she was only 19 when she found herself one of the first reporters on the ground at a pivotal moment in April 2015, thrust onto the scene to cover the peaceful protests and outpouring of emotion in the wake of Gray’s death.
Mexico is the third deadliest place in the world to do journalism — and the U.S. is making things worse.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019