The government of Peru recently announced it will not auction the reserve lands of uncontacted Tribal Peoples for oil exploration.

“The decision represents a U-turn for Perupetro, the state body responsible for negotiating exploration rights,” comments Survival International in a recent press release. “Perupetro spokespeople had previously suggested the uncontacted Indians did not exist, and that exploration in their reserves would be permitted.”

In fact, last year a Perupetro spokesperson compared the Peoples’ to the Loch Ness monster, saying “everyone seems to have seen or heard about uncontacted peoples, but …

Courtesy of Rights Action, here’s a story discussing a reparations plan for Genocide survivors and Mayan-Achi people who were massacred and forcibly evicted from their communities in the 1970s and 1980s - to make way for the Inter-American Development Bank- and World Bank-funded Chixoy hydro-electric dam.

CHIXOY DAM AGREEMENT
By Hugo Alvarado, www.prensalibre.com
Translated by Rosalind M. Gill, for Rights Action

The Government and communities affected by the construction of the Chixoy Dam have signed an agreement to set up a reparations plan. Diego Paz, representative of the OEA, Rafael Espada, Vice-president, and Juan …

Can pigs fly? Well you may be surprised to know one skyrocketed passed the House of Commons on Tuesday. Amazingly enough, it happened just as the House announced their support of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Courtesy of the Western Shoshone Defense Project (WSDP), here’s a joint statement on the matter (of the announcement by the House of Commons, that is)

Photo by abdallahh, modified and republished here under a Creative Commons License

UN Declaration on the Rights …

Kristin Bricker (mywordismyweapon.blogspot.com) reports that on Tuesday, April 1, “the Chiapas government freed thirty political prisoners in response to years of protests for their freedom, but not before giving some of them one last thorough beating.”

According to the recently released, while they were en route to a government press conference “the police beat them… until their heads and arms were purple and they were bleeding. Their wrists were bound tightly with tape, cutting off circulation to their hands. After the press conference, the police loaded them back into a government vehicle, …

Survival International reports a Brazilian judge has affirmed the rights of the Enawene Nawe in the Rio Preto, an area of huge economic and spiritual importance to the People.

Each year the Enawene Nawe spend several months there, trapping and smoking fish for the community, while performing an elaborate ritual “called ‘yankwa’ where foods are exchanged to placate the ‘yakairiti’ spirits. Enawene Nawe elder Kawari explains, ‘All this land [the Rio Preto area] belongs to the yakairiti - our ancestral spirits. They own the rivers, the fish and the trees. If …

Over the weekend, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was informed that Agroflora, an affiliate of the British Vestey Group, illegally set up a fence that encircled 200 Yaruro indigenous people. According to the denunciations filed by Representative Cristóbal Jiménez, “the farm put up a fence around them and they can’t get out without permission from the farm owners.” Another 800 People remained outside of the fence.

After learning this on Sunday, Chavez quickly ordered the National Guard to demolish the fence, allowing the indigenous people to once again move freely. “If they want …

On Friday, Ecuador’s government announced that it was revoking Ascendant Copper’s mining concessions for the controversial Junin Project, an open pit copper mine located in one of the world’s most ecologically diverse regions.

Publicly, the government says it decided to revoke a total of 587 mining concessions for economic reasons; for instance, because of the companies’ failure to pay proper fees on the concessions. However it seems more likely that it’s because of the social and environmental consequences of the project. The government of President Rafael Correa just doesn’t …

On Jan. 7, about 100 campesinos successfully blocked the spraying of pesticides on soy fields in the Ybypé community of the department of San Pedro, Paraguay. Riot police were mobilized to protect the fumigation tractors, but in a rare and inspiring turn, the campesinos convinced the officers of their right to resist the spraying. The police then refused to break up the blockade.

The Campesinos have so far resisted every attempt to fumigate these fields since the land was sold to Brazilian soy growers, who removed the previous life with …

A few days before the Ontario Court of Appeals decision that favoured Whitefish Lake First Nation in Canada, there was another important court ruling South of the US/CAN border.

On October 29, Chief Judge Lisa Adams issued an order forcing the Native American Energy Group (N.A.E.G.) off the Pine Ridge reservation, declaring the company had been trespassing on Lakota Territory.

In a recent article, Ken Lesbock, the Director of the International Human Rights & Justice Project for Owe Aku, explains that earlier this year, the New York-based uranium mining …

A decade-long struggle for the Maya villages of Conejo and Santa Cruz came to an unexpected, hopeful end last week. Chief Justice, Dr. Abdulai Conteh granted the order sought by the villages to have their customary land tenure practices acknowledged and secured under the Constitution.

Historically, the Government of Belize has systematically denied the Maya rights to their land, by claiming they were Guatemalan immigrants, therefore without a valid claim.

Under that premise, in 1993 the Government allowed logging on over 500,000 acres in the Toledo District, and granted …