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.
When Google Earth was initially released in 2001, I immediately rushed to locate a village that no longer exists on a map, which now delineates a whole different reality. Although I was born and raised in a Gaza refugee camp, and then moved to and lived in the United States, finding a village that was erased from the map decades earlier was not, at least for me, an irrational act. The village of Beit Daras was the single most important piece of earth that truly mattered to me.
For Nicaraguan university student Rosa, it was the sheer brutality of the police crackdown that left her terrified in her own country. “I never thought it would be like that,” she said, reflecting on the first time she joined a peaceful protest against proposed social security reforms. Like tens of thousands of other Nicaraguan students, she participated in a wave of demonstrations in mid-April against the Ortega administration’s plans to slash pensions and increase employee contributions to the financially troubled Nicaraguan Institute for Social Security.
Morocco's movements are on the march for human rights, jobs, water, and economic alternatives. They have challenged the political establishment and face increasing repression and jail time. The coming weeks and months will likely be critical as pressure builds to release political prisoners, protests continue, and temperatures rise.
Spanning decades and encompassing war, mass exodus, epic migrations and the search for individual and collective identity, The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story tells the story of modern Palestine through the memories of those who have lived it. Ordinary Palestinians have rarely narrated their own history. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed author Ramzy Baroud draws on dozens of interviews to produce vivid, intimate and beautifully written accounts of Palestinian lives - in villages, refugee camps, prisons and cities, in the lands of their ancestors and in exile.
Two South African women, Makoma Lekalakala and Liz McDaid, have won the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world’s largest award honoring grassroots environmental activists, for stopping their government’s massive secret nuclear deal with Russia – a deal that would have threatened the country’s health, environment and finances.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019