By John McPhaul
A case of Indigenous land rights is testing the Central American country of Costa Rica's otherwise stellar reputation for protecting human rights.
In July of 2012, Sergio Rojas, a leader Costa Rica's Bribri Indigenous community, led Bribri and Teribe Indigenous in an effort to reclaim land within the Salitre Indigenous reserve in the Talamanca Mountains in southwestern Costa Rica.
The UK government has published a statement in September highlighting continued opposition and turmoil in Bangladesh over British company GCM Resources’ plans to build a massive open pit coal mine in Phulbari, located in the north west of Bangladesh. The mine would displace up to 50,000 Indigenous Peoples from 23 farming communities, and up to 220,000 people from the wider areas.
On September 12, 2015, hundreds of people from Quechua, Achuar and Kichwa communities of the Pastaza, Corrientes, and Tigre rivers united to form a peaceful protest at the site of the Andoas airport in the Upper Pastaza region of Loreto where Lot 192 has its headquarters. Using their bodies to block the landing strip, mothers, children, elderly and others occupied the space for a total of 12 days.
On September 1st, 2015, the government of Peru announced that the process of prior consultation over oil concessions in the Peruvian Amazon had ended, despite agreements failing to be reached. A series of formal dialogues regarding Lot 192 between the Ministry of Energy and Mines and the Indigenous Peoples organizations ended unsuccessfully at the end of August, 2015.
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.
