News in English

28.01.2005 Returning to its original venue of Porto Alegre, Brazil, this year's fifth World Social Forum (WSF) will attempt to incorporate some of the lessons learned from the 2004 edition, held in Mumbai, India.

27.01.2005 The Haiti Support Group wrote to representatives of international freedom of expression bodies to raise the alarm about the situation of journalists in Haiti, and to call for immediate action to protect them from further attacks and threats.

25.01.2005 With the implementation of affirmative action policies, Brazil has gone from an official “racial democracy” to a country that acknowledges racism. Many activists now face the dilemma of wanting to abolish racial distinctions while having to affirm them in order to combat persistent racism.

21.01.2005 The New Year has arrived for human rights defenders with renewed attacks from clandestine groups and organised crime aiming to intimidate and sabotage human rights work. Attacks include death threats, attacks with firearms, false bomb alarms and "burglaries" in which mostly sensitive information was taken.

21.01.2005 On December 21st, 2004, representatives of communities near the Tintaya Copper mine in Cusco, Peru, signed an unprecedented agreement with the BHP-Billiton mining company, culminating two years of dialogue and negotiations.

21.01.2005 Cold-blooded killings of journalists in Mexico in 2004 transformed the barely established Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (Cepet) into an activist organization defending the very lives of its constituents. With death at the doorstep, the group sought solidarity from representatives of the U.S. media in a border conference to fortify the free press. But only a week later another Mexican journalist was gunned down.

13.01.2005 In response to the international community's pledge of US$41 million to fund elections in Haiti later this year, the UK-based Haiti Support Group expresses its concern about the timing of the announcement and the context in which it has been made.

13.01.2005 US returns to its old doctrine of national security, but this time with a new name.
If three, five, or 10 years from now, Latin America returns to the military dictatorships and "dirty wars"’ of its all-too-recent past, analysts might find clues in the comments of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s in the VI Conference of the Ministers of Defense of the Americas held in Quito, Ecuador.

07.01.2005 Chile's supreme court yesterday upheld the indictment and house arrest of General Augusto Pinochet for nine kidnappings and one homicide allegedly committed during his long dictatorship.

04.01.2005 The image of Bush breezing through Colombia for three hours, treating the place like an afterthought, given the utter military, political, and economic dominance over that country, is telling. No one in Colombia, indeed no one anywhere, can afford to think so little about the US.