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Each hairpin turn on the winding mountain road to the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas revealed peaceful panoramic views of pine-covered forests and incredible vistas of cascading sheer drops to the canyons below. Our small Global Exchange delegation was on its way to an overnight stay with the Las Abejas nonviolent sympathizers of the Zapatistas.

Earlier in the week, we had met with experts who spoke about the region’s unique biodiversity, comparable to none save the Amazon. We also heard about an impending neo-liberal plan on the drawing boards of the Fox government and transnational corporations. The plan — Puebla Panama Project (PPP) — would be a major enterprise stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec that could trigger a volcanic eruption of armed protest. Although it has so far slipped by the media without making a ripple, the communities we visited in April were clearly aware of its potential harsh impact upon their culture. read more

Growing up in the remote mountains along Nicaragua’s border with Honduras, it was Neyrin Rivera’s job to mind the cows. When one wandered off, he knew he had to fetch it, or else face a hiding when he returned to the one-room, mud-brick shack he called home. But he didn’t know that he was following the errant cow into a minefield.

When the ground exploded beneath him, the seven-year-old had no idea what had happened. His leg had become a pulsating stump of blood, torn flesh, and protruding bone. “I didn’t know anything about mines, even what a mine was,” says Neyrin, now 11 and an old hand at riding a bicycle and playing football with the plastic prosthesis that replaced his right leg below the knee. read more

Since Sept. 11, deep concerns have arisen about the threats to civil liberties and basic rights posed by the US government’s anti-terrorist campaign. Among other things, Uncle Sam has profiled the Muslim-American community, eavesdropped on conversations between people held in detention and their lawyers, and required colleges to provide certain records on foreign students.

Less publicized has been the federal government’s bold move to drastically restrict the right to know what officials are doing. But this is also part of a trend involving several other Western countries, not coincidentally some of US’s closet allies in the “war on terrorism.” read more

In Colombia’s northeast Norte de Santander province, the country’s richest oil region, an indigenous people known as the U’wa are in a life and death struggle with Occidental Petroleum (OXY), one of the world’s largest multinational oil companies. It’s been going on since the early 1990s, when OXY began oil exploration plans that threaten to destroy the tribe’s culture and way of life. The U’wa oppose oil drilling in their ancestral lands, saying that oil is “the blood of Mother Earth” and therefore must not be touched. read more

 
The world is not square, or so we learn at school, yet, on the brink of the third millennium, it is not round, either. I do not know which geometrical figure best represents the world in its present state but, in an era of digital communication, we could see it as a gigantic screen – one of those screens you can program to display several pictures at the same time, one inside the other. In our global world, the pictures come from all over the planet. But some are missing – not because there is not enough room on the screen but because someone up there selected these pictures rather than others. read more