Across the Americas

by Evo Morales Ayma, President of the Republic of Bolivia

Until the end of the Second World War, Europe was a continent of emigrants. Tens of millions of Europeans came to the Americas to colonize, escape
hunger, financial crisis, wars, European totalitarianisms and the persecutions of ethnic minorities.

Today, I am following with deep concern the approval process of the so-called "Return Directive". The text, validated on June the 5th by the Home Affairs Ministers of the 27 European Union countries, has to be voted on June 18th in the European Parliament. I consider that it drastically hardens the detention and expulsion conditions of undocumented immigrants, regardless of the length of their stay in the European countries, their employment situation, their family ties, their will or their achieved integration.

HEMISPHERIC SOCIAL ALLIANCE
ALIANZA SOCIAL CONTINENTAL
http://www.asc-hsa.org

1) The new referendums in Bolivia were marked by a high level of abstention
2) Peru’s proposal about Decision 486 will be voted on June 21st
3) Ecuador: An audit of the external debt continues
4) Mexico: Food for Mexico’s campesinos: Hunger doesn’t wait
5) Central America: U.S. objectives move forward in Plan Puebla Panama and the Mérida initiative
6) Colombia: Government represses indigenous social mobilization with lethal weapons

(PL and ABI New York, April 21, 2008) -- Bolivian President Evo Morales said today that to save the planet requires putting an end to the capitalist model and for the North to pay its Ecological Debt. This was the first of 10 points presented by Morales at the inauguration of the UN’s VII Indigenous Forum, in a long address acclaimed by participants at this annual gathering.

Morales Ayma proposed 10 commandment to save the world, life, and all of humanity, making reference to respect for the earth, renouncing war, bilateral relations without impositions, water and land as human rights, clean energy, no to biofuels, basic services, prioritizing what is produced locally, promoting cultural diversity, and the notion of "living well" through communitarian socialism and in harmony with mother Earth.

The president affirmed that there remain two paths toward saving humanity, life, and the plant Earth: either recovering a way of life in harmony with mother Earth and all of life, or following the path of capitalism and death.

Morales insisted that the only way to save the world is to put an end to this way of thinking that promotes individualist selfishness and a thirst for profits. He asked indigenous peoples, peasants and governments of the world to consume what is necessary, giving priority to what is produced locally and avoiding waste and luxury.

by Blair Redlin March 13, 2008

On March 5 – the day after the Ohio Democratic primary in which the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was such a vote determining issue – activists, legislators and academics from Mexico, the U.S. and Canada gathered at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C. to take a critical look at NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and what might be done about them.

Regarding a large-scale gold mining project in Colombia
by Jorge Enrique Robledo. Bogotá, 11 January, 2008

Millions of Colombians are living at risk. For decades, every winter, more and more inhabited areas are flooded and face crushing landslides, while others await catastrophe at the base of active volcanoes and occupy buildings constructed without anti-seismic techniques, constituting 80 percent of the total. In Armero, 25,000 people died in a foretold slaughter that could have easily been averted. In Manizales, for example, 2,700 homes were constructed on mountains that should never have been developed. Not one person has been held responsible for many disasters described as "natural" but which, in reality, are political and social and manipulated in impassioned appeals to the public's emotions, ignoring the victims.