Before and after the mining in Yanacocha. Image via Servindi.

An agreement has not yet been reached between national and local authorities in Peru since I reported on the mining disputes there last December. While Newmont Mining Corporation stands by previous agreements with the government regarding the extraction of 11.6 million ounces of gold in Conga, the popular efforts against this and other mining mega-projects also stand resilient. The last meeting took place after a 10-day march that ended in Lima on February 10. This time, instead of solely objecting to the mining project, the protesters broadened their message to also ending the threat against their access to water.

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After a storm comes the calm. Following eight months of struggling to roll back the privatization of education in Chile, the various organizations representing the Andean country’s student movement are now in a temporary and strategic withdrawal as they plan to impact the political system more directly. This year, they will not solely oppose the lack of public funding for education, but a whole political structure that they view as serving only a few.

The students have made clear that the spirit of civil resistance in Chilean society survives after the popular movement that defeated Augusto Pinochet. The persistence of the movement has already led to a re-distribution of power within President Sebastián Piñera’s cabinet, which students accused of acting like a continuation of the Pinochet regime, intensifying privatization and increasing the socioeconomic gap within the population. The government increased its 2012 budget for education by 10 percent, to $1.2 billion; this includes an increased number of scholarships for high-achieving, low-income students by 24 percent. The government also made the system of credit more flexible for students and cut interest rates on student loans.

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Throughout history, South American nations have had their futures decided by a small number of people. It began with the Spaniards, who, as soon as they touched ground, let two or three religious and political authorities rule from 5,000 miles away. Sadly, little has changed since then, except now the ruling few are the corporate elites, empowered through government deals like the recently ratified free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States, NAFTA, and thousands of illicit licenses given to multinational companies. But this trend is beginning to change, as protests in Peru over the last month have challenged the country’s largest mining project.

The story of this ambitious and dangerously exploitative project dates back to 1993, when the US company Newmont Mining Corp. arrived in Peru to open the Yanacocha gold mine in Cajamarca, a region located in the North of the country. Using a process called “micro-mining,” which requires large quantities of a dilute cyanide solution to capture minuscule pieces of gold, Yanacocha ended up contaminating the region’s water sources–a fact overloked by then-president Alberto Fujimori and his intelligence strongman Vladimiro Montesinos.

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In Colombia, when the mainstream media and the government are promoting a wave of protests, expect to find a lot of television cameras using close-up shots. That’swhat happened on December 6, when people took to the streets in several Colombian towns with a common purpose: to march against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC-EP. Now the oldest guerrilla organization in Latin America, dating to the 1950s, is essentially a terrorist group that recalls Marxist ideology when convenient. The “EP” in its name stands for “people’s army”—Ejército del Pueblo—but in reality most Colombians think of it as the people’s enemy.

Close-ups at the protests were necessary, of course, because of the size of the crowds. The mainstream Colombian media attempted to portray the protests as a success, but in comparison with earlier protests against guerrilla violence in 2008, few took part this time.

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Slowly the room grew crowded on Thursday at the Cultural House in Turmequé in Boyacá, Colombia, which hosted around 750 farm workers coming together to define their strategy against the mining industry that is soon to arrive in their municipality. The message has been spreading across the valley, and people are worried: their lands will be expropriated and they will be forced to take work as coal miners, facing all the health risks that come with doing so. They didn’t ask for this to happen. Without warning, the local and national governments granted a Mexican company the rights to exploit their own people. And those in Boyacá are not alone in this fight; their case is just one among many like this throughout South America.

To the governments of countries like Chile, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, mining, biofuel and agricultural projects seem like a panacea for confronting economic crises and generating revenue. Although there are some cases of more sustainable development, many contracts given to national and foreign companies for extracting resources brings only short-term employment, along with long-term environmental and social consequences.

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A downpour didn’t stop students from filling the streets of the main cities of Colombia yesterday. The biggest protest took place in Bogotá, where around 20,000 people walked for hours until reaching Bolivar Square. A day earlier, President Juan Manuel Santos tried to deter protesters by offering to withdraw the privatization bill they oppose once universities go back to normal academic activities. His offer was not convincing. The students once more decided to press on until the government and minister of education withdraw the proposed law.

The protests at least managed to frighten the ex-vice-president Francisco Santos, a relative of the current president. In a private interview, he expressed his surprise about the lack of authority that President Santos has shown in confronting the students. He feels that is time to use stronger force against them. At least 22 students were detained.

Media coverage of the protest was, as it usually is, very poor. The private national TV channels insisted on analyzing the traffic jams it produced and used the most violent footage they could when referring to it. They neglected to mention than the student strike has won support from high school students, parents, professors and some labor unions. Still, with cities around the country shut down for a day, this nonviolent movement showed how widely Colombians hold the conviction that the defense of education is a public good.

It’s the first time since 1990, when Colombians took to the streets demanding a new constitution, that the country’s students share a common cause. This time, they’re determined to defeat a bill that would further privatize the educational system. The movement has spread across Colombia, with tactics including the composition of new songs, hugging police officers instead of confronting them, and kissing each other while blocking principal city streets—known as besatón. These kinds of actions are similar to those used by this year’s Chilean student movement, which forced Chile’s government to negotiate and managed to paralyze the country for weeks at a time.

Last March, Colombian Minister of Education Maria Fernanda Campo proudly announced the need to reform higher education. Public and private universities took part in roundtable negotiations with the government in order to draft a bill that would integrate the different proposals. The bill eventually presented to the Chamber of Representatives in the National Congress the last October 4, however, seemed to many only to reflect the government’s interests, ignoring the previous deliberative process.

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During the last three weeks, the Bolivian indigenous movement has taken to the streets in protest against a plan to build a multinational highway running through the Amazon, which would cross indigenous territory and a national reserve. The protests, in which indiginous groups were joined by other national civil movements, now seem to be growing in momentum, to the point of becoming a true popular mobilization.

The Amazon highway is a project financed by the Brazilian government. The road is supposed to connect Bolivia with both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, crossing through Brazil and Chile. But it is also slated to pass through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS). Two main concerns lie behind the indigenous protests of the highway: its environmental effects, as well as the indigenous community’s frustration with facing deadlock in their attempts to gain access to the decision-making process.

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A few months back, when I first heard about the student movement in Chile, Olivera’s movie The Night of the Pencils came to mind. The movie takes place in neighboring Argentina and tells the story of seven students who were captured, tortured, and killed by the regime for demanding lower bus fares. Fortunately, that kind of dictatorship is a thing of the past in both Argentina and Chile, but the struggle for a better educational system, and broader access to it, continues. Today, Chile is in its second day of a 48-hour general strike; just yesterday more than 100 people were injured in clashes.

Over the course of this year, uprisings among people longing for better living conditions and systemic transformation have seemed unstoppable. Yet despite the simultaneity, continuity, and frequency of these events around the world, each one has its own particular history and context that have to be taken into account.

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It has been a year since I came back to Bogotá after two years living in Egypt, where I got to know some of the young people leading nonviolent protests and cultural activities. If I had been part of the Mubarak government, I couldn’t have planned it better; I left Cairo just five months before the revolution began. As I followed the news of what was happening there in February and March, I was here in Colombia, but a part of me was over there, hoping to see change, waiting to be part of it.

Cairo was a tough place to be—so hot, so brown, and hard for a woman, especially a woman who comes from green mountains, from a country with uncountable rivers, lagoons, and lakes. But what I missed the most while living there was my bike. I never saw a woman cycling, nor a businessman. Bread deliverers were on bikes, along with the very badly-paid workers risking their lives on a daily basis by crossing the 23-kilometer-long bridges that go through Giza and Zamalek to Heliopolis. Besides them, it was just a few foreigners living in wealthy neighborhoods dared to use a “steel horse” to go around on weekends.

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