After the protests against mining reform in the Mining Code, the government of Ricardo Martinelli will retake dialogues this Wednesday with the Coordinator for the Defense of Natural Resources and the Rights of the Ngöbe Buglé Peoples.
The president of Panama, Ricardo Martinelli, promised that the new Mining Code will not affect the territories of indigenous communities.
The Huffington Post today published an interview with Paula Palmer, the director of Cultural Survival's Global Response program, about the current Global Response campaign, to stop construction of a dam in Bangladesh that would displace thousands of Indigenous people and destroy their homeland. To read the article and interview, click here.
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At least 2,000 demonstrators blockaded a major highway in northwest Bangladesh last week to protest government plans for open pit coal mining in Phulbari and nearby Barapukuria and demand compensation for lost crops and the destruction of their lands.
Last week, while the rest of Panama was celebrating Carnival, Ngöbe people from across the country gathered to elect a new president of the Ngöbe Bugle Congress, Panama’s largest Indigenous organization.
First, let's celebrate a victory! For the second time in the last six months, last week Indigenous Ngöbe protesters forced Panama's president and legislature to revoke a law that threatened their lands and rights.
By Kate Hoshour, IAP Senior Research Fellow
Roughly 2,000 protesters united to blockade a highway in the Phulbari region this week and demanded that the government honor a six-point agreement, signed on August 31, 2006.
Panama’s president Ricardo Martinelli announced today that he would revoke a reform to the country’s mining law that provoked thousands of Ngöbe Indigenous people to protest by blocking major highways over the past weekend.
On Feb. 15 some 5,000 members of Panama’s Ngöbe-Buglé Indigenous group held
a day of national protests against changes to the Mining Resources Code that
they said would encourage open-pit mining for metals by foreign companies.
The protests, organized by the People’s Total Struggle (ULIP), started at 10
am in San Félix, in the Ngöbe-Buglé territory in the western province of
Chiriquí.
The World Bank has stepped in to support the dumping of toxic waste from the Ramu nickel mine into the seas off Papua New Guinea after the European Union decided to pull its funding.
The on-again-off-again Belo Monte dam has been halted once again by a judge in Brazil after being the go-ahead by Brazil's president last year. The gigantic dam would flood some 190 square miles of rainforest and displace multiple Indigenous communities, who have been protesting the dam for years. The judge's ruling cited environmental concerns rather than the human rights issues, but if the ruling holds (previous injunctions have been overturned), it will still benefit the Indigenous Peoples of the area.
In a referendum on February 18, 99 percent of the population of the San Juan Ostuncalco municipality in Guatemala—a mostly Mam Mayan community—voted to oppose two mining concessions granted by the government on their territory. The people voting in the referendum demanded that the government cease issuing new mining concessions and revoke the existing ones.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
