Four people were killed and dozens arrested last week in the village of Dong Tam as a long-running land dispute flared after a dawn raid by police

By Rina Chandran

BANGKOK - A deadly land dispute in Vietnam has led to a crackdown on social media posts, a sign of growing heavy-handedness by authorities as rising demand for land spurs more conflicts across the country, analysts and human rights activists said.

Last week, our colleague Ghanimat Azhdari was one of the 176 people who lost their lives in a plane that crashed just outside of Tehran, Iran.  While our interaction with Ghanimat was brief, our team had the pleasure and honour of working with Ghanimat at the First Arab Land Conference, which took place in Dubai in February of 2018. 

The Hadzabe people of northern Tanzania are one of the world’s oldest communities. Living at the base of the Rift Valley, believed to be the origin of human species, the Hadzabe live as they always have.

For tens of thousands of years, the Hadzabe have hunted and gathered food in their forests. There has never been a single account of famine.

BAGAYO PETRO, Hadzabe, Yaeda Valley, Tanzania

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous pygmy communities displaced from their lands for “conservation” and a community leader imprisoned for defending their rights

Ercilia Araya is the President of  Pai-Ote, a Colla Indigenous community of 60 people in the Atacama Region of Northern Chile.  Since 2014, Ercilia has been criminalized and harassed for defending her community’s land rights against mining projects, and denouncing the pollution of sacred water sources in the Andes.

The ancestral territory of Pai-Ote is of great mineral wealth and includes the “Maricunga Strip”, one of the most important gold districts in the country. At least a dozen gold mining projects, most of them Canadian, are operating there.

Members of the organization Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu (Force of Wayúu Women) have received death threats and been subject to defamation and stigmatization for opposing the harmful effects of a mining project in La Guajira, Colombia.

Force of Wayúu women is part of a group of four organizations that filed a nullity claim for the environmental license granted to the multinational company Carbones de El Cerrejón, which owns one of the largest open pit coal mining mines in the world. The presence of the mine in the region has had a devastating effect on the quality of li

Ranked as a country most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, The Philippines is also the most dangerous place in the world to defend land rights and the environment. President Duterte’s government has enabled seizures of Indigenous lands by an environmentally damaging gold and copper mining project. When communities stand up to defend their land, they face threats, intimidation, criminalisation and even murder.

Bernardo Caal is an indigenous Q’eqchi leader from Guatemala currently serving a seven year prison sentence. His crime? Defending the Cahabón River, one of the largest in the country, against two hydroelectric dams.  

The river is of plays a central role in the lives of 195 Q’eqchi communities in the municipality of Santa María de Cahabón, in the department of Alta Verapáz. Today it is under threat from seven hydroelectric projects that have already destroyed hectares of primary forests and hills that are sacred to the Q’eqchi.  

We can’t tackle the climate crisis without tackling corruption.

The Land Portal Foundation is recruiting up to two new board members to complement its existing board.

The Land Portal was set up in 2009 as a partnership project dedicated to supporting the efforts of the rural poor to gain equitable access to land by addressing a fragmentation of information resources on land, which makes it difficult and often prohibitively expensive to draw together reliable evidence in support of programs, advocacy campaigns or policy formulation, especially for grassroots organisations.

Chileans have been taking to the streets around the country to protest economic inequality and a democratic system set up after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that many say is not responding to people's needs.

Indigenous Mapuche protesting in Temuco, a city 420 miles south of the capital of Santiago, last week tore down several statues of Spanish conquistadors and Chilean national heroes that dotted the city’s downtown area.