• On Saturday, more than 100,000 turned out in the pale winter sunshine for a march in downtown Moscow against election fraud and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s plan to return to the presidency next month.

• Over 10,000 Bahrainis gathered on Sunday to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Meqsha, north of Bahrain, ahead of the one year anniversary of the revolution.

• Hundreds of flights in France were cancelled today, including 40 percent out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport, as unions ratcheted up pressure on day two of a strike over labor rights.

• Antiwar groups held rallies on Saturday in about 80 cities across the United States protesting a possible strike on Iran.

• In Singapore, two hundred foreign workers staged a sit-in on Monday morning in protest over unpaid wages.

• At least one activist died, and another 39 were injured on Sunday after police tried to break up a protest by indigenous groups—who have blockaded the Pan-American Highway for days—against the recent approval of mines and reservoirs in their region.

• In Canada, close to a thousand people marched through Prince Rupert’s streets on Saturday as part of a rally hosted by local first nations against Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway pipeline and the oil tanker traffic it would generate on British Columbia’s northern coast.

• At least 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested Saturday just blocks from the White House as the U.S. Park Police evicted activists who had been sleeping in McPherson Square since October 1. On Sunday, police also cleared a second encampment at Freedom Plaza.

• In one of more than a hundred protests planned across Europe on Saturday, about 2,000 people marched in the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA).

• Some 20 residents of Khirbat al-Tawil village, south of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, went on a 24-hour hunger strike on Friday to protest against Israel’s occupation of their lands.

• Just after the National Park Service’s noon deadline Monday, by which protesters in Washington’s two Occupy D.C. camps were required to decamp, protesters fought back by stringing up a giant blue tarp in the middle of McPherson Square, which they called the “tent of dreams.”

• Belgium’s first general strike in almost two decades brought parts of the country to a halt on Monday in an anti-austerity protest aimed at the new government and at EU leaders meeting in Brussels.

• Hundreds of Romanians protested on Saturday against a plan to set up Europe’s biggest open-cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town, joining a wave of anti-government rallies.

• Three topless Ukrainian protesters were detained Saturday while trying to break into an invitation-only gathering of international CEOs and political leaders to call attention to the needs of the world’s poor.

• Thousands of cars flying white ribbons or balloons circled central Moscow on Sunday in a show of protest against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

• Argentina’s powerful truck drivers’ union blocked postal distribution centers in several cities on Monday to protest the firing of 200 workers.

• About 200 Indonesian Christians held a prayer vigil in Jakarta on Sunday urging President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to re-open their church and stop intimidation by Muslim hardliners.

• Last Sunday, dozens of Detroit’s undertakers drove a motorcade of hearses through the city’s most violent neighborhoods to protest the high murder rate.

• Thousands of Zimbabwean civil servants conducted a one-day strike Thursday to protest low wages.

• Some 40,000 people were out on the streets on Thursday in various provinces across Turkey to commemorate Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink, who was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office in Şişli on Jan. 19, 2007.

• Air traffic controllers in Cyprus walked off the job for four hours on Wednesday to protest a two-year government worker wage freeze and other deficit-reduction measures.

• Inmates in 13 Kyrgyz jails started a mass hunger strike on Wednesday to support inmates in detention center No. 1 in Bishkek, where security troops violently quelled a prisoner riot on January 16.

• On Tuesday, about 6,000 workers began an indefinite strike for higher wages at a $5.25 billion project to widen the Panama Canal to accommodate larger ships.

• Dozens of orphans in Jordan on Tuesday staged a sit-in in front of the Royal Court in downtown Amman demanding better services.

• A new anti-austerity 24-hour strike and protest hit Athens on Tuesday, as auditors of international creditors returned to Greece for talks on the release of a second aid package.

• Women employees at the Palestinian Women’s Affairs Ministry began a “hunger strike till death” on Tuesday to protest against corruption and harassment.

• The teaching fraternity in Ranchi, India carried out a sit-in rally on Tuesday, to protest Maoist atrocities against them.

• Several hundred anti-Wall Street protesters marched in a “human float” behind the 123rd Tournament of Roses parade on Monday, unfurling a 250-foot banner of the constitution and also displayed an approximately 70-foot octopus made of recycled plastic grocery bags.

• More than 950 relatives of inmates are refusing to leave a Venezuelan prison in a protest to demand faster trial for inmates.

• Troops in Indian-controlled Kashmir have opened fire on hundreds of villagers who were protesting against frequent power cuts, killing one person and injuring two others.

• Thousands of Indiana workers rallied outside, and inside, their state capitol on Wednesday to speak out against Governor Mitch Daniels‘ renewed effort to force through so-called “right to work” legislation designed to undermine labor unions and workers’ rights protected by collective bargaining.

• Skipping New Year Eve celebration parties, hundreds of people in Guy Fawkes masks gathered in downtown Kuala Lumpur last weekend in a peaceful protest to demand greater democratic freedom in Malaysia.

• Indonesians have dropped thousands of old flip-flops and other footwear at police stations and a child protection group to protest the heavy-handed treatment of a 15-year-old boy accused of stealing a policeman’s sandals in the northern state of Central Sulawesi.

• About 2,000 Peruvians marched in the northern city of Cajamarca on Monday, resuming protests that started in November against plans to develop a gold mine that would harm their water supplies.

• Thousands of people in Bangladesh’s northwest gathered over the new year period to demand government action to save a dying river which they said is vital to their livelihoods.

• A group of Nigerian protesters marched in the Niger Delta on Saturday calling on Royal Dutch Shell to do more to clean up last month’s massive oil spill.

• The mayor of a remote Armenian village joined on Thursday more than 100 environmental activists in a protest against a German-owned company’s plans to expand open-pit mining in the southeastern Syunik region.

• Dozens of Bahraini Shiite employees fired over pro-democracy protests rallied on Wednesday demanding a return to work, a day after authorities said 181 would be reinstated.

• Thousands of angry Egyptian women joined a fifth day of protests in downtown Cairo to voice outrage over what they said was the military’s abuse and mistreatment of female demonstrators.

• The leaders of the rebellious Wukon village in southern China have reached a tentative resolution with senior provincial officials after a tense 10-day stand-off, which saw the villagers erect blockades around all of its entrances–effectively living outside government control–to protest their lack of basic needs.

• As many as 30,000 people protested plans for a coal-fired power plant in Guangong province, China’s most affluent and open-minded region. Residents stormed local government offices and blocked a busy highway that runs from the manufacturing hub of Shenzhen to the city of Shantou.

• A group of women from the Ukrainian topless-protest group Femen recounted their ordeal in neighboring Belarus, where on Monday they were kidnapped, beaten and abused by local security officials for a protest in Minsk in which they bared their breasts to bring attention to President Aleksander Lukashenko’s crackdown on the opposition.

• After six days of protest, armed with 97,000-plus signatures, queers in Seoul, South Korea got the result they were hoping for. The Seoul Municipal Council’s passage of a Students Rights Ordinance with all clauses intact, including ones that affect the well-being of queer students.

• Demonstrators from Argentina’s UATRE farm hands union, blocked access to the Pan-American highway along some of Buenos Aires City’s main access routes to protest the passage of the controversial Farm Worker Statute, which was debated and approved today at the Senate today.

• For the second time in two weeks, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was temporarily drowned out by Occupy protesters as he made his final push to the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. “Mic Check,” they announced, continuing, “Put people first!”

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.

When they left power in 2000, their many crimes over the years began to come to light. In regards to Yanacocha, it was revealed that Montesinos accepted bribes from Newmont to convince the Peruvian Supreme Court to allow its mining operations in Cajamarca.

For 18 years, the people of Cajamarca have used water that was contaminated with chemical waste to irrigate their crops and, in a chain of disasters, it has affected their animals as well. Farmers reported widespread livestock deaths and a 40 percent decrease in crop yields, since 2009. The contamination has also caused breathing illnesses in children, denounced by the inhabitants but continually denied by national health authorities.

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Farmers from Cajamarca during a strike to protest the Conga mining project on November 24. (Click to enlarge)

Today indigenous people and peasants are fighting against the recklessness of the few by rejecting the new Yanacocha project Conga, which–due to the amount of water it’s expected to consume–will lead to the disappearance of  the region’s many lagoons. At least three have already disappeared due to Yanacocha’s over use of water.

The fight against the Conga project has been brutal, and even some violent uprisings have taken place. On the sixth day of protest, eight people were shot with pellets by the police, and three police were injured. The media insisted on covering these images, encouraging the institutional rejection to the protests. But nonviolence has prevailed among the demonstrators who condemn the contamination of water as a violent act coming from the private interests in collusion with the State.

Current President Ollanta Humala has used the issue to his advantage. Before being sworn in to office in July, Humala announced his total commitment to the protesters’ cause, insisting that “the lagoons of Cajamarca are not for sale, because you can’t drink gold, and you don’t eat gold.” But seven months later–in order to stave off protests and resume mining operations–Humala’s cabinet declared a 60-day State of Emergency for the Cajamarca region, suspending such constitutional rights as personal safety, home inviolability and freedom of reunion and association.

Given that seven percent of the Peruvian GDP comes from gold and mineral mining, companies like Newmont can rely on governmental support when dealing with protests and strikes. So far, 6,000 Yanacocha workers joined the strike that forced Newmont to suspend its operations for more than a week last month, which then led to the suspension of the Conga project.

The Peruvian movement against mining companies is growing in strength and along with the protests in Cajamarca, it has expanded to Puno in the South, and 14 other regions as well. If the government will finally decide to give up their claims in Conga, it will have to do the same across the country and the main threat will be over the national short-term finances.

The State of Emergency was lifted on Friday after local leaders agreed to talks and suspended protests, but the prospect of negotiations yielding anything positive remain uncertain. First Minister Salomon Lerner recently resigned after a previous fruitless five day attempt at negotiations.

The demonstrators have stated their commitment to returning to the streets every time Newmont attempts to restart the Conga project without taking measures to prevent the destruction of their community’s environment, health, and ultimately, its future. For this, the Peruvian movement stands as an example to other Latin American countries, where mining projects are still in a negotiation stage and the prospect of short-term profits is still alluring.

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.

The trigger for the protest was the recent killing of four soldiers in the national army. They had been kidnapped between 12 and 14 years ago by the FARC and, despite negotiations, remained in captivity. According to the official story released by the Ministry of Defense, the soldiers were killed in cold blood with no other reason than a show of power by the new leader Timocheko, who took command after his predecessor, Alfonso Cano, died in a military operation in November.

Protests against the FARC were first called for by families of the victims, and later supported by various civic organizations. The idea was quickly supported by pro-government media and the government itself. Opposition to the kidnapping frequently practiced by guerrillas was the main focus of the call for protests, though the FARC was the only identified target. It didn’t refer to any of the other armed groups that are still killing, displacing and recruiting young people all around the country. Those armed groups, once defined as “paramilitary” groups and pardoned by former President Alvaro Uribe through an obscure process of transitional justice, are now commonly identified as “emergent criminal bands” by the Santos administration.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets holding photos of their relatives kidnapped or disappeared by the guerrillas. As is often the case when a protest has institutional support, creativity and strategic thinking were largely absent. Entire families called on the FARC to free hostages and demobilize. But while the families were asking for freedom, humanitarian exchange, demobilization and reparation, another group of protesters insisted on the necessity of escalating the use of force against the insurgent group. This is a sentiment shared by Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, who promises to “reach peace by the easy or the hard way,” and who took the protests as a reason to further strengthen the military for fighting against guerrillas. Thus, a protest against violence became, for the government, a chance to legitimize their frequently violent measures through the impression of public support.

The protest, unfortunately, was a smokescreen meant to cover over another part of the reality: these killings didn’t happen without reason. According to a communiqué released by the FARC and supported by the silence a soldier who managed to escape, the killings were caused by the fact that military forces were mounting an armed rescue operation. Of course the presence of a rescue operation doesn’t justify killing captives, but what is clear is that the constant manipulation of information by the government aims to make it appear as if the execution occurred in a vacuum, denying that the Colombian military any part in it.

For years, relatives of those the FARC kidnaps have been begging the government not to use violence to liberate the victims. The families and civic-based organizations have made it clear: the more violent the government’s actions are, the higher the risk for their relatives.

In the aftermath of the protests, the FARC announced that a group of soldiers it is holding captive will be released in the coming months. Later, President Santos countered that the FARC must release all the soldiers and civilians that remain in captivity. The total number of them is still unclear, though local judicial authorities reported 229 kidnappings just in the last year, perpetrated by diverse armed groups including drug dealers, criminal organizations and “emergent criminal bands”—most of them with the goal of extortion.

With or without government manipulation, the outcry against the FARC and its practice of kidnapping is loud and well-organized, not just across Colombia, but also in cities like Madrid, New York, Washington, Panama and Paris. Colombian people are tired of human rights violations and multiple simultaneous armed conflicts. But, unfortunately, people’s frustration is being used by the government to cover over its own historical responsibility for the bloodshed, and to justify the need for even more.

Located in the Montes de Maria region of Colombia’s Bolivar department on the Caribbean coast, the community of Mampuján has experienced the full force of Colombia’s past and ongoing armed conflicts. Their most decisive event, however, occurred on March 11, 2000, during the height of violence in this zone, when the members of the community of Mampuján were displaced from their original location by a group of right-wing paramilitaries, known as the Heroes of Montes de Maria. The community members were rounded up, accused of supporting guerrilla forces, and commanded to leave Mampuján immediately. Three hundred families fled, and 11 campesinos from the surrounding area of Las Brisas were massacred.

Since this time, the majority of the community has resettled in temporary housing, located about seven kilometres away in New Mampuján, where they live a reality very similar to that of the other 5 million internally displaced persons living in Colombia.

However, Mampuján and several surrounding neighbor communities are significantly different from the rest of the victims as they are the first communities to receive a verdict under the Law of Justice and Peace (Law 975 of 2005), where the paramilitary leaders responsible for the displacement have been sentenced to jail time and ordered to repay their victims for damages suffered. This has been the only sentence of its kind in Colombia, despite the existence of this law for over six years.

Under this sentence and an additional sentence by the Supreme Court of Justice in April 2011, the community is entitled to receive both individual and community reparations for damages suffered during displacement. The Supreme Court sentence defines the parameters that the courts, the State and various institutions will work within to make sure that reparations take place. However, despite this groundbreaking legal action, nothing has in reality taken place. The community of Mampuján and its surrounding neighbours have not received their promised reparations and there are increasing fears that nothing will happen as the Justice and Peace Law and government offices dedicated to enforcing this law are phased out and replaced with the new Victim’s Law.

If the only sentence of and reparations from paramilitary violence in Colombia’s history cannot be carried out for a community of 250 families, what are the chances of justice for the rest of the over 5 million victims, even with new laws?  This is a significant testing of the government’s stated intention to support and provide justice for the victims, especially as President Santos has staked his presidency on providing justice.

Therefore, the community of Mampuján is getting ready to march, not only for their own benefit, as they demand their reparations, but for the benefit of all the victims of armed conflict in Colombia. This morning community members—the majority children and senior citizens—are planning on leaving their homes behind and non-violently walking 32 kilometres to Cartagena, the capital of Bolivar province and the home of numerous different institutions and state governments. They are demanding to meet with the different agencies responsible for their reparations and are hoping to be joined by other victims of armed conflict along the way.

This is the first action of this type for the community, so a lot of learning is taking place as they go along, but they are steadily moving forward, accompanied by a number of different organizations and experienced nonviolent activists. Mampuján is already gaining national attention for its women’s quilting group and its sentence; this march will serve to focus this attention and pressure the Colombian government to comply with its promised changes.

In September 2011, the humanitarian aid group No More Deaths released a shocking human rights report entitled Culture of Cruelty: Abuse and Impunity in Short-Term U.S. Border Patrol Custody. This is the organization’s second report; in 2008, it published Crossing the Line which narrated the stories of over 400 individual accounts of abuse of migrants while in Border Patrol custody. Their new report contains even more detailed evidence, concluding that “the abuse, neglect, and dehumanization of migrants is part of the institutional culture of Border Patrol.” Data collected from almost 13,000 individuals in 4,130 interviews—over the course of a three year period while simultaneously providing direct aid to repatriated and deported migrants—unmask an often-untold (or at least, unheard) story of pervasive and systemic human rights violation committed by a federal agency in the United States.

Vicki Kline, a spokesperson for No More Deaths who also co-wrote the report, commented on the report’s findings:

We hope to achieve increased public (and policy-maker) knowledge of the complex set of contextual circumstances that have led to 1) the current border situation, and 2) an institution [Border Patrol] that has the capacity to institute simple changes that make them more accountable to the public and their stated policy of treating people with respect and dignity. They do not appear to be making those change and has, instead, continued to be a place the creates a culture in which abuses of people’s dignity are permissible.

Culture of Cruelty documents more than 30,000 instances of abuse from respondents—the most frequent being denied or provided insufficient food while in custody; length of custody ranged from a few hours to more than 2 days. This may not seem “that abusive,” but considering that migrants in detention are often held after having been arrested in the desert, the punishment is particularly harsh. It is not uncommon for migrants to have been in the desert for days at a time—many without enough food or no food at all. But there is more. The report highlights twelve areas of concern regarding Border Patrol treatment of detained migrants:

• Failure to Provide and the Denial of Water

• Failure to Provide and the Denial of Food

• Failure to Provide Medical Treatment and Access to Medical Professionals

• Inhumane Processing Center Conditions

• Verbal Abuse

• Physical Abuse

• Dangerous Transportation Practices

• Separation of Family Members

• Dangerous Repatriation Practices

• Failure to Return Personal Belongings

• Due Process Concern

• Psychological Abuse

The report copiously substantiates—quantitatively and qualitatively—its findings regarding the areas of concern. For example:

April 15, 2010, with Angélica from Mexico. Angélica has a son in Oregon. When the Border Patrol apprehended her group, agents handcuffed them to one another and made them walk in a line for 20 minutes in the dark. She fell because it was difficult to walk and agents pushed her. While she was in custody in Yuma on March 14, agents threw away all of her possessions, including medicine. Border Patrol agents kicked Angélica in the stomach and denied her medical attention. When No More Deaths volunteers met her on April 15, she reported persisting pain in her abdomen.

May 18, 2010, anonymous man from Mexico. He stated that he had lived in Wisconsin for 14 years and Texas for one year, and has family in the U.S. The interviewee and his group were apprehended by Border Patrol agents. Many people asked for water and did not receive it. Some were wounded and did not receive medical care. They were told neither where they were being taken nor where they were being held in custody. The agents used curse words and racial epithets and told the detainees, “You are illegal, you don’t have rights.”

The story CNN ran on the report detailed Border Patrol council President Brandon Judd denying the report’s findings; “it just doesn’t ring true,” Judd said. Analysis of news sources highlight similar institutional responses from the agency to deflect the reports’ findings by not responding to the findings directly or making unrelated statements affirming Border Patrol’s professionalism.

Yet what is remarkable about this report is not just its finding, but that the process that produced it—like its 2008 predecessor. It was born out of the painstaking work of a community-based human rights groups: non-professionals. That is, No More Deaths is an all-volunteer community group of concerned citizens (not all of whom are documented) who, for the most part, are rather ordinary. They are students, retirees, teachers, pastors, skilled workers, and social service providers. Bringing together young and old alike to “end death and suffering on the U.S.-Mexico border,” No More Deaths funds itself, has no paid staff, operates by consensus, and is rooted in a tradition of nonviolence called civil initiative. A problem was identified, the root causes were identified, and a small group of concerned people got together to come up with a response that took personal responsibility for finding solutions for the issue.

Both reports were a direct response from the aid work No More Deaths was engaged in and it informs decisions as to where its limited energies and resources should be put. “The abuse documentation project sprang out of humanitarian work; so that has always been really important—we started documenting things that people told us in the course of providing first aid, or responding to crises,” said Kline, who recently returned from presenting the report to the Human Rights Commission in Mexico City and migrant aid groups in Oaxaca. Kline continued:

We didn’t just go in with an idea that we wanted to document what we believed what was happening; we began documenting the repeated stories and experiences that people were sharing with us. The point of the reports is to inform people of the situation on the ground; policy and history; the lived experience of people who have been in short-term border patrol custody.

Culture of Cruelty represents an activist group at its best: relevant to the needs of a community, collaborative sharing of power, high quality results, accessible to the public and other institutions, and has the freedom to engage in activities that respond directly to the identified problems. “We’ve only focused mostly on abuses in short-term Border Patrol custody,” said Kline. “But our documentation uncovered other issues within the larger immigration detention system, issues related to the health impact of deportations of people who’ve been living in the U.S. for extended periods of time, and the impacts of changing demographics of repatriations and the flow of migration. The deportation impact report will be released this season. The rest is leading to other conversations about where do we go from here?”

• Occupy protesters across the country celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, bringing all the trimmings of a traditional meal to the unlikely location of a demonstration. In New York’s Zuccotti Park, organizers said they distributed some 3,000 individually wrapped plates for what they described as an “open feast.”

• Some 10,000 people from the majority Shi’ite community in Bahrain took to the streets of the town of Aali, chanting slogans that were taken from the inquiry led by international rights lawyer Cherif Bassiouni.

• Yemeni protesters—who have been in the millions for nearly 10 months—were out again Thursday, rejecting a provision that gives Saleh immunity from prosecution.

• Portuguese workers’ general strike halted public transport and some factories in many parts of the country on Thursday and thousands marched to protest austerity measures imposed as the price of an EU/IMF bailout.

• A Romanian mayor has begun a hunger strike to protest cuts in heating subsidies imposed under a government austerity drive, reawakening memories of the harsh final years of communism.

• Hundreds of people in Thailand’s Pathum Thani province north of the capital blocked cars from using the outbound lane of an elevated highway on Wednesday to pressure the government to accelerate the drainage of water.

• Iran’s main government-run newspaper was published Tuesday without a front-page headline, replaced by photographs of its headquarters during an assault a day earlier by forces working for the judiciary who briefly arrested the newspaper’s top official and more than 30 others.

• Several thousand Colombian students participated in multiple marches on Thursday to demand more funding for public education. In Argentina, about 1,000 student marched through Buenos Aires holding flags reading “the student struggle is walking through Latin America.”

• Thousands of Peruvians have protested a $4.8 billion open-pit gold mining project they fear will damage their water supply.

• Thousands of workers in southern China went on strike in the last week to demand higher pay and better treatment, disrupting work at companies including one that supplies equipment to International Business Machines Corp.

Crowd estimates from organizers for the Sunday morning “presente” memorial vigil were around 5,000—much lower than years past, where attendance once peaked at 20,000. The Columbus Police Department reported 3,007 people. But that does not mean the movement to close the SOA and resist militarism is waning. “We can’t get caught in the numbers game,” said SOA Watch field organizer Nico Udu-gama. “This is an anti-imperialist struggle that has ebbed and flowed over the years and is part of the movement that is waking up around the world.” SOA Watch has changed over the years but a few things have remained consistent in one form or another: direct action, solidarity across the Americas, and a view towards the long haul.

Since 1990, when the convergence began, thousands have crossed the line—risking trespass charges on the military base and federal prison time—as an act of conscience and to put the SOA on trial in federal court. Over 300 people have been sentenced to over a collective hundred years in prison. This year, one person, Theresa Cusimano, 43, climbed over the barbed-wire fence on a make-shift ladder. She faces up to six months in prison, if convicted. SOA Watch is planning direct action training in April 2012 in Washington and hopes to capture some of the budding energy in the Occupy movement to break the culture of militarization we are in. It is also drumming up attention for HR 3368—which would cut the school’s funding and free millions of taxpayer dollars that fund it.

The SOA rally—often criticized as a catch-all gathering for justice issues and being a place for “tourist activism”—is entering a new phase where its analysis and incorporation of the interconnectedness of global injustices makes for a diverse and exciting cross-country struggle. SOA Watch has field offices throughout the Americas and has played a leading role in organizing “encuentros” for social activists and anti-militarism resisters to build relationships of solidarity and share best practices and organizing skills. Struggling against racism within the movement, more and more of the speakers, workshop presenters and leadership are people of color while white allies continue to explore the roots of oppression and domination not just at a structural level—such as is modeled by the SOA rally—but in individual relationships as well. A new film from SOA Watch, Somos Una América, documents the incredible movement that exists outside of one protest weekend in November in Georgia.

Because SOA Watch sees itself as an anti-imperialist struggle, it’s in it for the long haul. “This movement is about more than just closing the School of the Americas,” said former prisoner of conscience Friar Louie Vitale, OFM. “It’s about saying no to torture, no to empire.” Critics of the movement—and supporters like the Ignatian Solidarity Network who moved their teach-in to Washington D.C. in 2010—suggest that the continued presence in Georgia is not the most effective place for putting pressure on the politicians with the power to close the SOA (which was, incidentally, renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2002).

While some truth resides in that perspective and SOA Watch has increased its presence in Washington, such critique misses some key points. The annual gathering in Georgia is an energizing and healing weekend for many activists. It is a time to connect and build community; to mourn and remember the thousands who’ve been killed by the state-sponsored terrorism across the Americas; and to celebrate those who resist it—including ourselves. The rally and vigil are a source of sustenance for the thousands of activists who work diligently around the world the rest of the year and the SOA Watch gathering helps keep them going. It also continues to attract new folks, especially young people. With hundreds participating in the student/youth caucus and working groups, a new generation is radicalized into the anti-imperialist struggle.

“We are in a politicizing moment” said Udu-gama referring to the global Occupy Movement. Representatives from occupations across the region came for the weekend to “Occupy Ft. Benning.” The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer speculated that numbers were down in part because of Occupy. But that is a good thing because it means people are acting locally, noted Udu-gama. The energy and rhetoric of the Occupy movement was present during the weekend on signs and banners and in speeches and songs. “The School of the Americas protects the 1 percent. It is the military muscle backing unpopular economic policy [like the neoliberal Free Trade Agreement of the Americas] and the connection between economics and militarism is key for the continuation of imperialism,” said Udu-gama.

Looking forward, the School of the Americas Watch movement is popularizing resistance to the deeply-rooted militarism in the Americas and worldwide. As citizens around the world are rising up against anti-democratic forces that put economic and military interests of the few above the lives, rights, and dignity of the many, grassroots organizations like SOA Watch—that are simultaneously broad-based and issue-focused—are increasingly more relevant for educators, organizers, and activists in the struggle for justice, peace, and democracy.

• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

Why, one might ask, is it located in Costa Rica?

To make a long story short, Edgar Cardona, minister of security in the junta that ruled Costa Rica from May 8, 1948, to November 8, 1949, proposed the abolishment of the armed forces as a permanent institution. In December of 1948, the head of the junta, José Figueres Ferrer, later president of the country, declared that a nation that was not rich could not simultaneously afford good education, health care, and a military. The funds dedicated to the armed forces should instead be destined for education, Figueres said in a speech, and in a symbolic act handed the key for a military fortress to the minister of education. In November 1949, a new constitution recognized the ideal of “changing rifles into notebooks.” This perspective of valuing education over militarization has become part of the national memory and aspiration, to be materialized in UPEACE.

In 1976, a rancher named Cruz Rojas Bennett promised the aspiring president, Rodrigo Carazo, a donation of forested areas of his farm for a university dedicated to peace studies, on the condition that the institution would eternally protect what was the last virgin forest in Costa Rica’s central valley. It was approximately 15 miles southwest of the capital San José, in the coffee-growing highlands at El Rodeo, Cantón de Mora. Rojas Bennett was partly motivated by a fear that environmental degradation worldwide had become akin to a war against nature. After his untimely death, the Rojas Bennett family gave 303 hectares, and 100,000 additional trees were planted on what is now the main campus.

By September 27, 1978, under President Rodrigo Carazo Odio, Costa Rica proposed the creation of the University for Peace at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Finally, on December 5, 1980, the 35th General Assembly approved Resolution 35/55, formally creating UPEACE. Its charter, approved by the General Assembly’s founding resolution with no opposition, calls upon UPEACE to

provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace … to stimulate cooperation among peoples, and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations. To this end, the University shall contribute to the great universal task of educating for peace by engaging in teaching, research, post-graduate training and dissemination of knowledge, … through interdisciplinary study of all matters relating to peace.

The new university was to be a U.N. treaty organization, although receiving no funding from the world body, and it retains autonomy and academic freedom.

UPEACE took possession of the land donated by Rojas Bennett in 1981, placing it under protection as he had intended. Aided by the educator Robert Mueller, and with support from UNESCO in Paris and the U.N. University in Tokyo, the new university began with its first degree in media and peace. Its first donor was the industrialist Ryoichi Sasakawa of Japan.

The study of peace is inherently multidisciplinary, since no discipline can address its numerous components. Fifteen disciplines may need to be at the table for serious study. How then to help lessen the obstacles and overcome threats to world peace and progress?

Today, UPEACE offers 11 master’s degrees in fields ranging from environmental security and peace, to gender and peacebuilding, to international law and human rights. Each of these programs explores the trends and forces that give rise to violent upheaval and discord, all in an attempt to push through the limitations in existing theory and practice. Students come from 52 countries, and the faculty is similarly diverse. Teaching with me this month is Jan Pronk, for instance, who formerly held governmental ministerial portfolios for The Netherlands in defense, development, and environment, and was head of peace operations in Sudan. A new distance learning program is allowing people across the world to work toward master’s degrees online. This is one of many ways in which the university is a global institution, not limited to its Costa Rican base.

The UPEACE Africa Programme—based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—does not have students per se. It works with academicians from the continent’s 800 universities and some 26 institutes for peace studies. These are people who want to develop their capacity to respond to the clamor of the young who want to learn how to build more peaceable societies. With assistance from The Netherlands, in 2002–2003 consultative missions visited instructors in 50 universities in 15 African countries, and met with 500 nongovernmental institutions. (I was privileged to be part of the team.) As observers in my classroom this year I’ve had senior fellows in the Great Lakes Programme—instructors in Burundian and Ugandan universities. Junior fellows from Kenya and Zambia are taking my course, preparing to teach upon their return. In addition, Canada’s International Development Research Centre assists the Africa Peace and Conflict Journal, which gives voice to African practitioners and researchers while offering African perspectives on international issues.

On the other side of the planet, this year more than 1,800 young people under 30 years of age applied for 30 slots in the Asia-Pacific Leadership Programme, which is supported by the Nippon Foundation. The Bank of Brazil recently brought staff to the campus and then to New York City for a short course.

My own course at UPEACE in nonviolent transformation of conflict is always a two-way street for me, as we study the extensive history, theory and methods of nonviolent action. In class we’ve heard a firsthand account of the 2007–2009 Lawyers Movement in Pakistan, which succeeded in reinstatement of the chief justice through nonviolent action by barristers, students and human rights activists. Another student has been telling us about the continuing impact of the national nonviolent movement that deposed Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 in the Philippines. From Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square, we examine failures and vulnerabilities of nonviolent movements as well. Some students arrive with skepticism about civil resistance, which they have heard disparaged as a solely Western phenomenon, and they are intrigued to learn that both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. formulated their thinking based on active study of nonviolent struggles occurring contemporaneously in Africa, and that if anything knowledge moved from East to West.

Regrettably, one country that pronounces itself indispensable for and committed to democracy and the pursuit of peace—the United States—has never given any funds to support this practical, global educational organization, which prepares specialists to build peace in their home countries around the world. Lessening the obstacles and overcoming threats to world peace and progress needs less lip-service and more concrete contribution to institutions like this, ones that are preparing world leaders to be principled as well as pragmatic.

Did I get your attention? While titles that draw attention to women’s physical features may summon most of the male population, a title like, Women, War and Peace was probably written off as a women-only television series. You know: “girl’s stuff” or women-as-victims drama.

Over the past month, the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aired a fascinating series that showed real women around the world in their roles as serious nonviolent organizers. The five-part film series, now completely available online, offers five cases of women’s activism in the following contexts (I have edited the website’s language with a nonviolent conflict perspective, bolding the significant political achievements of their efforts):

I Came to Testify is a story of how 16 Bosnian women who had been imprisoned and raped by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history’s great silence – and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law. Their courage resulted in a triumphant verdict that led to new international laws about sexual violence in war.

Pray the Devil Back to Hell is the story of the Liberian women who took on the warlords and regime of dictator Charles Taylor in the midst of a brutal civil war, and won a once unimaginable peace for their shattered country in 2003.

Peace Unveiled follows three women in Afghanistan who are risking their lives to make sure that women’s rights don’t get traded away in the deal for peace talks with the Taliban.

The War We Are Living travels to Cauca, a mountainous region in Colombia’s Pacific southwest, where two Afro-Colombian women are braving a nonviolent struggle over land. They are standing up for a generation of Colombians who have been terrorized and forcibly displaced as a deliberate strategy of war.

War Redefined, the capstone of Women, War & Peace, challenges the conventional wisdom that nonviolent leadership is a male domain through incisive interviews with leading thinkers. Although we in the nonviolent conflict community – thinkers, scholars, activists, writers and educators – don’t generally agree with the so-called “leading thinkers” interviewed in this episode, on this topic they are worth hearing out. Unfortunately, the world is short on policy makers, including women, who are committed to nonviolence. I wish the producers had instead featured leading thinkers who specialize in civil resistance, both women and men.

The film production team is mostly women, led by Abigail Disney who also produced the award winning film, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which exposed Liberia’s women’s movement as a critical component of the end to Liberia’s bloody conflict. Just this year, we witnessed the film’s protagonist, Leymah Gwobee, win the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Africa’s first female head of state, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.  By the way, an excellent Al Jazeera People and Power documentary segment, titled, Yemen: A Tale of Two Protests, features the third Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakkul Karman, of Yemen.

Watching each of the recent PBS episodes, one can see how the women from each of these countries took on huge political struggles, albeit through a very local angle.  If you can only watch one episode, make it The War We Are Living. The issue of local land struggles amidst political polarization, government and private sector corruption, and the tangled web of institutions and drug traffickers, offers important lessons for nonviolent movements around the world, including Occupy Wall Street.

Just this morning, I came across an article posted by the master of all feminists, Eve Ensler. Perhaps she is dismissed among male circles as the woman who’s always pissed-off about something, but she makes a point about rape that I and many women around the world have to agree with:

I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you? You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?

And if you’re a guy, and I managed to get your attention with the title of this blog post, then Eve Ensler’s recent Huffington Post article, Over It, may be for you! Women’s rights, women’s community organizing, women defending land, and women fighting against rape is not just a “girl” thing. The episodes in Women, War and Peace help shed light on where some of the solutions to the world’s acute injustices lie . . . with the full inclusion and leadership of women. Now that is gorgeous.

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.

The mining industry began a revival five years ago, especially in Chile, Perú and, more recently, in Colombia. There are beneficiaries, of course, and there are victims. The former are the mining companies themselves, as well as local, regional and national governmental institutions. The mineral and metal market has thrived. But the latter are indigenous and rural populations, who face water contamination, land expropriation, cultural deterioration, slavery, prostitution and a variety of health risks. The victims, however, are starting to realize what is happening and to confront it.

After the infamous accident that took place in Chile’s Mine San José on August 5 last year—leaving 33 miners underground for more than one month—mine workers reinforced their organization, demanding better working conditions, an end to exploitation and accurate studies on environmental damage. Gold and copper mining are now the biggest threat to clean water and the environment in that country. Last July, workers from the Escondida mine forced copper prices to fall by 15% after two weeks of striking—with tremendous effect on the status quo, given that the industry represents 20% of the Chilean GDP.

In Colombia there are localized initiatives against several projects. One of them is happening in Boyacá, near Bogotá, where people in the countryside gathered to demand that environmental authorities deny the necessary environmental licenses. A similar protest was successful in Santurban, located in the northeast of the country. Around 40,000 people went into the streets there last February to oppose the mining project and its environmental implications, and the conflict spread throughout the entire country. The protests lasted for weeks, until finally the Canadian company GreyStar Resources was forced to withdraw. The movement then went even further, insisting that the government protect the area as part of the national parks system. These Santurban protests alerted other communities to the dangers of exploitation and encouraged them to join in a common fight to protect their water and natural resources.

A different situation exists in Peru, where protests are causing a proliferation of so-called “informal mining.” There, people are fighting a Newmont gold mining project—which the government supports—with blockades, strikes and protests. As a result of this, however, the value of minerals and metals increases, resulting in widespread illegal exploitation. These miners pose an opposite challenge to the government than protests alone do: they bring water contamination, dangerous residues and an increase in prostitution. As illegal mines attract workers, solitary men are making taverns and brothels a very profitable business, while having no protections under the law themselves. These mines therefore pose a dilemma to both the government and the protesters.

The root of these problems, however, lies with insensitive governments that insist on the necessity of pursuing their economic goals through exploitative mining. The governments give permits to companies covertly, often ignoring the potential for environmental and social damage. However, a broad range of initiatives throughout South America is motivating the people to demand a better balance between the benefits of mining and people’s right to have access to clean water, good health and basic safety protections.

For more information, see No a la Mina, a multinational website promoting civil resistance against mining.