Search Results for Toward Freedom Journal

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.

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.