Oppressed communities in Colombia see newly-elected President Gustavo Petro’s proposal to reform healthcare—among other aspects of Colombian society—as aligning with their culture as well as their spiritual understanding, reports Natalia Torres Garzon.
Chile’s population rejecting a proposed constitution on September 4 will hit hard one group: Indigenous people, who are socially and economically disadvantaged, thanks to generations of land dispossession and invisibility in Chile’s political landscape. Carole Concha Bell reports.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a writer, historian and activist, possibly best known for her 2014 classic book, “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.” She argues that the context behind the Second Amendment is that the newly-independent United States needed “well-regulated militias” of white men to “kill Indians and take their land,” or to form slave patrols that would hunt down Black people fleeing their captivity. It was out of these slave patrols that the first police departments were formed. Hip hop artist Lowkey conducts this interview.
Journalist Linda Farthing and attorney Thomas Becker’s 306-page book evaluates the balance of class forces that led to the 2019 coup, as well as the anti-imperialist forces who were ultimately able to repel it and seize political power again in the plurinational state of 11.4 million, writes Danny Shaw in a review.
The report, “Reconciling Conservation and Global Biodiversity Goals with Community Land Rights in Asia,” comes ahead of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference. To be held next month in Kunming, China, the conference is expected to adopt the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Conservation Framework (GBF), which includes placing under protection 30 percent of the world’s land and water by 2030, reports Deepa Padmanaban.
Between former U.S.-backed dictator Augusto Pinochet’s terror laws being used to criminalize Mapuche elders and activists, the United States and the United Kingdom arming Chile’s security forces, and the failure of international agencies to treat the Mapuche conflict with urgency, the West appears complicit in the genocide of the Mapuche people.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019