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30.09.2004 Citizens and authorities of Rio Hondo, in eastern Guatemala, met on a sweltering August day to form an association to defend their water amidst a planned hydroelectric project on Colorado River, which flows down from the lush Sierra de las Minas Biosphere behind the town.

29.09.2004 According to national statistics for 1997, in the case of rural girls, 13.5% of 5 to 17 year olds do not have access to school. Thus, despite relatively high levels of enrolment, some rural and indigenous girls are still excluded from education.

29.09.2004 Despite persistent race-based inequality and the recent assertion of black identity by Afro-Brazilians, race relations in Brazil are not characterized by conflict or ethnic tension.

27.09.2004 On the first birthday of the caracol, a trio of ski-masked representatives of the 14-member Junta de Buen Gobierno Altos de Chiapas, or Altos de Chiapas Good Government Committee, are squeezed together behind a tiny desk inside a small wooden house whose façade is draped with a mural depicting a giant ear of corn on which all the kernels are ski-masked Zapatistas.

27.09.2004 In rural Guatemala, poor mostly indigenous farmers scrape a living off the nation’s poorest soils while wealthy plantation owners reap the benefits of an agricultural system based on international exports and the exploitation of cheap labor. Guatemala has one of the most skewed land distribution patterns in the world, and the second-most inequitable in Latin America ; roughly 2% of the population owns 70% of all productive farmland.

17.09.2004 Each day, hundreds of Central Americans cross the town of Tecun Uman on the border between Guatemala and Mexico in search of a better life in the United States and what they find is "the nightmare of the American Dream."

16.09.2004 The possibility of finding large quantities of light petroleum in deep waters off Cuba, where the Spanish-owned transnational Repsol-YPF is carrying out exploration, has raised questions about the impact such a discovery could have on the island that has resisted the stranglehold of a US trade embargo for more than four decades.

13.09.2004 Factories “recovered” by their workers are a response to two decades of neoliberalism and deindustrialization. In a movement unprecedented in Latin America, workers have taken direct control of production and operation without bosses--and sometimes even without foremen, technicians, or specialists--in about 200 factories and workplaces in Argentina, some 100 in Brazil, and more than 20 in Uruguay.

10.09.2004 While authorities and oil company officials in early August enthusiastically celebrated the start of the gas era in Peru, indigenous peoples affected cited the impacts that the extraction of the natural resource have had on their lives and on the environment.

09.09.2004 Hundreds of thousands of Brazilians—among them tens of thousands of children—died of starvation and hunger-related illnesses during the 1979-1983 drought that wracked their country. In four years, reports the Pastoral Land Commission of Brazil, the drought killed 12 times more people than did the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.