Indigenous land defenders face rising threats amid global push for critical minerals

The past decade has seen “a consistent, sustained pattern against people who speak out against business-related human rights" abuses.

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Miguel Guimaraes, a Shipibo-Konibo leader, has spent his life protesting palm oil plantations and other agribusiness ventures exploiting the Amazon rainforest in his homeland of Peru. Last spring, as he attended a United Nations conference on protecting human rights defenders in Chile, masked men broke into his home, stole his belongings, and set the place on fire. Guimarares returned days later to find “he will not live” spray-painted on the wall.

Declaration of Yajxonax*

Today, October 12th of 2024 –a symbolic date for Indigenous Peoples of this territory we call Abya Yala– we have gathered in these territories of resistance in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, at the Continental Encounter Building an Alliance Against Gas Pipelines and Other Megaprojects in Defense of the Territories of Indigenous Peoples.

We are 374 delegates including representatives and spokespersons of Indigenous Peoples and organizations, environmentalists, people from the academia, communicators and free media journalists, coming from 20 states of the part of the Planet some call Mexico, 22 Indigenous Peoples and 11 countries, we have gathered in order to strengthen and amplify the alliances and networking initiatives of the Peoples of the Americas.

How Electricity was (and is) Sold to America

By Elisabeth Robson / RadFemBiophilia’s Newsletter

In 1915, General Electric released a silent promotional film titled The Home Electrical offering a glimpse into a gleaming, frictionless future. The film walks viewers through a model electric home: lights flicked on at the wall, meals cooked without fire, laundry cleaned without soap and muscle. A young wife smiles as she moves effortlessly through her day, assisted by gadgets that promised to eliminate drudgery and dirt. This was not a documentary—it was a vision, a fantasy, a sales pitch. At the time, only a small fraction of American households had electricity at all, and nearly 90% of rural families still relied on oil lamps, wood stoves, hand pumps, and washboards. But the message was clear: to be modern was to be electric—and anything less was a kind of failure.