News Articles
Isabella Kenfield
October 13, 2008
As Brazil's economy booms from rising agricultural commodity prices worldwide, conflicts over land in the Amazon-where the agricultural frontier is rapidly expanding-are also on the rise. At times, the region appears to be ungovernable for the administration of President Luis Inácio "Lula" da Silva and the governing Workers' Party (PT), which face strong pressure to yield to the interests of regional, national and international agribusiness.
Since it came to power in 2003, the Lula government has been embroiled in a conflict between six large-scale rice growers and 19,000 indigenous people over 4.2 million acres of Amazon grassland, forest and river called Raposa Serra do Sol, in the northernmost state of Roraíma, on the border with Venezuela and Guiana. Today, the land dispute threatens to provoke a civil war in the region.
September 23, 2008
By Tanya M. Kerssen and Roger Burbach
A popular upheaval is sweeping Bolivia, threatening the departmental capital of Santa Cruz, the bastion of the right wing rebellion against the government of Evo Morales. Some twenty thousand miners, peasants and coca growers are moving on the city to reclaim state institutions occupied by autonomist forces. They are also demanding the resignation of the Santa Cruz prefect (governor), Rubén Costas, and the apprehension of Branko Marinkovich, an agro-industrial magnet who heads up the Santa Cruz Civic Committee comprised of large land owning and business interests.
September 14, 2008
By Roger Burbach
As Bolivia teeters on the brink of civil war, President Evo Morales staunchly maintains his commitment to constructing a popular democracy by working within the state institutions that brought him to power. The show down with the right wing is taking place against the backdrop of the thirty-fifth anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, the heroic if tragic president of Chile who believed that the formal democratic state he inherited could be peacefully transformed to usher in a socialist society.
June 30, 2008
By Roger Burbach
Like many third world countries, Bolivia is experiencing food shortages and rising food prices attributable to a global food marketing system driven by multinational agribusiness corporations. With sixty percent of the Bolivian population living in poverty and thirty-three percent in extreme poverty, the price of the basic food canasta--including wheat, rice, corn, soy oil and potatoes, as well as meat—has risen twenty-five percent over the past year with prices gyrating wildly in the local markets.
By Roger Burbach
The illegal referendum held on Sunday to declare autonomy in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s richest province, is backed by the Bush administration in an attempt to halt the leftward drift of South America. While the US embassy in La Paz blandly declares its support for “unity and democracy” in Bolivia, the government’s Interior Minister Alfredo Raba states what is widely known, that the United States “has an agenda more political than diplomatic in Bolivia, and this agenda is linked to opponents of the current government.” Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of the country, bluntly declares: “The imperialist project is to try to carve up Bolivia, and with that to carve up South America because it is the epicenter of great changes that are advancing on a world scale.”
By Isabella Kenfield
On March 7th—International Women's Day—dozens of Brazilian women occupied a research site of the U.S.-based agricultural biotechnology giant Monsanto in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, destroying the greenhouse and experimental plots of genetically-modified (GM) corn. Participants, members of the international farmers' organization La Vía Campesina, stated in a note that the act was to protest the Brazilian government's decision in February to legalize Monsanto's GM Guardian® corn, which came just weeks after the French government prohibited the corn due to environment and human health risks.
By Roger Burbach
While both Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales are trying to transform their countries, the upheaval in Bolivia is very different from Venezuelas in that it is led by the Indian majority against the historically dominant "karas," meaning whites and mestizos. A current showdown over efforts to draft a new constitution is exemplary of this divide. Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
By Roger Burbach
Evo Morales, the first Indian president of Bolivia, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, "Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14," the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present the constitution.Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linares states, "Either we now consolidate the new state - with the new dominant forces behind us, or we will move backwards and the old forces will again predominate." A leading trade union leader, Edgar Patana, put it bluntly: "The final battle has begun, and the people are prepared for it."
By Isabella Kenfield & Roger Burbach
In the Brazilian state of Paraná, Valmir Mota de Oliveira of Via Campesina, an international peasant organization, was shot twice in the chest at point blank range by armed gunmen on an experimental farm of Syngenta Seeds, a multinational agribusiness corporation. The cold blooded murder took place on Sunday, October 21 after Via Campesina had occupied the site because of Syngenta’s illegal development of genetically modified (GM) seeds. Via Campesina and the Movement of the Landless Rural Workers (MST), the main Brazilian organization involved in Via Campesina’s actions, are calling the murder an execution, declaring, “Syngenta used the services of an armed militia.”
By Roger Burbach
This article is published in NACLA’s Report on The Americas, The Multipolar Movement? Latin America and the Global South, September-October, 2007**
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