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Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Guaraní people
12 min read
The article discusses violence against the Guarani Kaiowá community and their land struggles. Understanding the history, culture, and ongoing persecution of the Guarani people provides essential context for the colonial dynamics described.
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Quilombo
13 min read
The article mentions quilombos recovering their autonomy. These historically significant settlements of escaped enslaved Africans in Brazil represent a powerful legacy of resistance that parallels the current land reclamation movements described.
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United Nations Climate Change Conference
13 min read
The article critiques COP30 extensively. Understanding the 30-year history of these conferences, their structure, and why the author argues they have failed to reduce emissions provides crucial background for evaluating the article's central argument.
A couple weeks before the COP30 United Nations climate conference started in Belém, Brazil, police in Rio de Janeiro deliberately killed almost 130 people in a complex ambush targeting several poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city.
During the conference, Brazil’s progressive president, Lula da Silva, privatized three rivers in the Amazon, while a death squad probably hired by land-stealing cattle ranchers carried out a massacre against a Guarani Kaiowá community in the south of the country. Lula and the conference organizers tried to showcase Indigenous peoples as the forefront of the struggle to save the planet, even as they fail to stop extreme violence targeting Indigenous communities, and all they could offer is a relatively small investment fund, when financial investment is often a driving force of colonial violence. Additionally, very little of the money is going to Indigenous peoples. Instead, what isn’t going to business investment will be allocated to NGOs who will spend it on their behalf, continuing the mistrust and infantilization of colonialism.
And, the final statement of the COP30 didn’t even mention fossil fuels.
Nonetheless, there are so many amazing projects and struggles across Brazil that present real solutions to the ecological crisis and the many social crises enfolded within it.
I’ve been travelling for a month and I’m exhausted, but I wanted to share some initial articles. More stories are coming!
If you have a connection with any medium to large publication that might reach people who care about ongoing colonialism or the failure of the climate movement, tell them they need to start publishing articles that showcase effective, realistic responses to the crisis! Get us in touch!
And thanks to everyone who contributed to the fundraiser that made this project possible!
The longest article published so far is on Truthout: “The Real Models for Sustainability in Brazil Are to Be Found Outside COP30.” It’s based on several interviews Brazilian comrades and I conducted with members of the Guarani, Ka’apor, Krenak, and Kaingang people who are reclaiming and defending their lands, and interviews with community members from the Teia dos Povos network and the housing movement in Belo Horizonte. The latter is made up of 100,000 people housing themselves through direct action!
Here’s an article from In These Times, “COP30 Isn’t a Failure,
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.