National Strike in Colombia (April 28th to…) Translated by Conor Harris. The morning of Wednesday, April 28th did not bode well for a massive protest in Colombia. The country was at the peak of a third wave of COVID 19 infections, and its hospitals were under a red alert due to the high occupancy rates of Intensive Care Units. The national government, as well as many regional and local governments, had issued a stay-at-home order to avoid infections due to large-scale, open-air gatherings. Moreover, some regional and local governments issued mandatory curfews, prohibitions on the sale of alcohol, and obligatory…

(This is the second dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines)   Abstract The emerging SARS-CoV-2, a novel human coronavirus, caused the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 9.5 million cases and 484 000 known fatalities to date (June 24th, 2020). In several regions, healthcare systems have collapsed whereas interventions applied to slow the viral spreading have had major social and economic impacts. After China, Europe, and the United States, Latin America has emerged as the new epicenter of the pandemic. By late-June, the region accounted for roughly 50% of global daily deaths (Gardner, 2020)….

DOSSIER: COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines Introduction The outbreak of coronavirus with early epicenters in Eastern Asia, Europe, and the United States, has been followed more recently by increasingly alarming health emergencies across the Global South, with India, Southern and Central Africa reporting exponential surges of deaths and infections in May and June. But it is in Latin America where the pandemic is now threatening to explode into dimensions unseen even at the previous epicenters’ peak points, with Brazil now reporting the highest daily numbers of infections and deaths worldwide and other countries including Chile, Ecuador,…

Image: Aldeia Guarani/Kaiowá, Dourados (Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil). Photo: Maximino Rodrigues   (This is the first dispatch in our series COVID-19 in Latin America: Dispatches from the Southern Frontlines.) Translated by Jens Andermann Dear readers, and everyone interested in this situation, which frightens all people of this earth, the water planet. We live amidst so many diversities that today we get confused even about the kind of people we are, even though we are the first inhabitants of this land called tekoha guasú (the great land). At this difficult time, our Indigenous people here at the village where we…

Feminism, in all its multiplicity, is the most important social movement in Latin America now. After the region’s populist cycle, a turn to the most reactionary right-wing (either via the ballot box, as in Argentina and Chile, or via coups, as in Brazil, Paraguay and Honduras), has returned the continent to a stage of economic restoration, in the sense of a vertiginous accumulation of capital, perhaps the biggest since the nineteenth century, and one that runs parallel to former values related to the body, alongside former social privileges, with astonishing violence. The horrifying and escalating number of femicides and transfemicides…

On 1 Aug, Santiago Maldonado took part in a demonstration by members of the Mapuche community in Chubut province, Patagonia, over land rights. The Pu Lof in Resistance are engaged in a struggle for an ancestral territory, currently owned by part of the Benetton empire, one of many overseas concerns that bought up big chunks of the far south in the 1980s and 90s. Protests had taken place alongside Route 40, the main north-south artery near the popular tourist destination of El Bolsón, demanding the release of the lonko (community chief) Facundo Jones Huala, jailed over an extradition request from…