Americas

“In the end, the [mining] company is a new form of colonization and exclusion,” Sister Maudilia López Cardona, who works with the Catholic parish in her western Guatemalan community, told Toward Freedom. “The system has worked to erase the historical memory of our people and teach us not to think,” she continued. “These thoughts, these ideas, these preconceptions have soaked into our people’s bones … We have to work to return our hearts to their place.”

We know that male privilege, the subordination of women, and other stubborn cultural holdovers are central to the problem. But it's worth looking, too, at something broader: the entire context in which we think about sex.

In the last decade, the number of speakers of indigenous languages in Mexico increased 20 percent, practically at the same rate as the population growth. In fact, for the first time in 80 years, the downward trend in the population of speakers of native languages has stopped. A good part of this phenomenon is due to the work of young indigenous people who are working to recover their identity, language and territory.

Maya Q’eqchi’ fishermen faced deadly state repression last year for their opposition to transnational nickel mining and lake pollution in El Estor, Guatemala. Now they are confronting criminal charges for their protest. The court case highlights the ongoing environmental and human rights crisis in a country where corporate power regularly meets indigenous resistance. “Just for defending our rights as Maya Q’eqchi’, we’ve been criminalized,” fishers' union leader Cristóbal Pop told Toward Freedom.

Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) is one of Latin America’s largest social movements. For decades the MST has operated under their slogan "Occupy, Resist, Produce” to settle landless farmers on unused land in Brazil, where roughly 3% of the population owns over 2/3 of arable land. “In whatever society, and even more so in Brazil, social change doesn’t depend on the government but on the organization and the mobilization of society," said MST leader João Pedro Stédile. "It is the people that make the change.”

The indigenous communities of southern Chile have seen the dispossession of their lands for private interests for centuries. Their resistance has been met by a systematic criminalization by the Chilean state. Recently, this long struggle entered a new phase in one struggling Mapuche community.