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Bolivia Gives Legal Rights To The Earth!!!!   VIVA BOLIVIA!!

10/13/2014

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Bolivia Gives Legal Rights To The Earth


from earthweareone.com


Law of Mother Earth sees Bolivia pilot new social and economic model based on protection of and respect for nature.

Bolivia is to become the first country in the world to give nature comprehensive legal rights in an effort to halt climate change and the exploitation of the natural world, and to improve quality of life for the Bolivian people.

Developed by grassroots social groups and agreed by politicians, the Law of Mother Earth recognises the rights of all living things, giving the natural world equal status to human beings.

Once fully approved, the legislation will provide the Earth with rights to: life and regeneration; biodiversity and freedom from genetic modification; pure water; clean air; naturally balanced systems; restoration from the effects of human activity; and freedom from contamination.



The legislation is based on broader principles of living in harmony with the Earth and prioritising the “collective good.” At its heart is an understanding that the Earth is sacred, which arises from the indigenous Andean worldview of ‘Pachamama’ (meaning Mother Earth) as a living being. An initial act outlining the rights – which was passed by Bolivia’s national congress in December 2010 and paves the way for the full legislation – defines Mother Earth as a dynamic and “indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny.”

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developingpolicies that promote sustainability and control industry. The economy must operate within the limits of nature and the country is to work towards energy and food sovereignty while adopting renewable energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency.Preventing climate change is a key objective of the law, which includes protecting the lives of future generations. The government is requesting that rich countries help Bolivia adapt to the effects of climate change in recognition of the environmental debt they owe for their high carbon emissions. Bolivia is “particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” according to an Oxfam report in 2009, with increasing drought, melting glaciers and flooding.

On the international stage, the government will have a legal duty to promote the uptake of rights for Mother Earth, while also advocating peace and the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Following a change in Bolivia’s constitution in 2009, the law is part of a complete overhaul of the legal system. It represents a shift away from the western development model to a more holistic vision, based on the indigenous concept of Vivir Bien (to live well).

The proposal for the law states: “Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.”

Unity Pact, an umbrella group for five Bolivian social movements, prepared the draft law. They represent over 3m people and all of the country’s 36 indigenous groups, the majority of whom are smallscale farmers with many still living on their ancestral lands. The bill protects their livelihoods and diverse cultures from the impacts of industry.

Undarico Pinto, a leader of the social movement Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, said: “It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.”Signifying a fundamental shift away from exploitation of nature, the draft law referrers to mineral resources as “blessings” and states that Mother Earth, “is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos.”
A Ministry of Mother Earth is to be established to promote the new rights and ensure they are complied with. But with its economy currently dependent on exports of natural resources, earning nearly a third of its foreign currency – around £300m a year – from mining companies, Bolivia will need to balance its new obligations against the demands of industry.



Bolivia Rain forest



The full law is expected to pass within the next few months and is unlikely to face any significant opposition because the ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, has a considerable majority in parliament. Its leader, President Evo Morales, voiced a commitment to the initiative at the World People’s Conference on Climate change, held in Bolivia in April 2010.

The Law of Mother Earth includes the following:

The right to maintain the integrity of life and natural processes.

The right to not have cellular structure modified or geneticallyaltered.

The right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration.

The right to pure water.

The right to clean air.

The right to balance, to be at equilibrium.

The right to be free of toxic and radioactive pollution.

The right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities

The law also promotes “harmony” and “peace” and “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical, biological” weapons.


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Charles Bowden on "Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields"

10/12/2014

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http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/14/charles_bowden_murder_city_ciudad_jurez?gclid=CjwKEAjwzeihBRCQ84bhxrz_0w8SJAAohyh1swjxaTF01LPI0XpL3WLw9ZInTU2MllVejm3U_4bLmRoCDFvw_wcB
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STUDENTS MASSACRE IN MEXICO...

10/9/2014

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Anatomy of a Mexican Student MassacreFor almost a century a teacher’s college in rural Mexico has been training educators and activists. Last month, dozens were abducted and slaughtered—by the police.
MEXICO CITY — Twelve days ago, police and unidentified gunmen believed to be members of a drug cartel ambushed a caravan of college student activists in the state of Guerrero, about half way from Mexico City to Acapulco.

Near the central plaza in the town of Iguala, a total of six persons were shot to death. Three were student activists from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa. Three additional shooting victims were a semiprofessional soccer player riding in one of the three buses, a taxi driver, and his female passenger. But most likely they were unintended victims caught in the line of fire. There’s no question the students were the target.

One who survived the first fusillade, a 19-year-old named Julio César Mondragón, panicked and, over the objections of classmates who said they should stay together, ran away on his own. He was later found dead and horribly disfigured; a photo of his corpse has gone viral in Mexico: it shows the face stripped away to the bare skull underneath.

Survivors of the incident report that the police and thugs attacked the students three times. They sprayed one of the buses with machine gun fire. One eyewitness reported seeing the police force students out of another bus at gunpoint. In addition to the three students killed, 17 student activists were wounded. But they may have been the lucky ones. As many as 44 others were abducted. Some reports say they were taken away in police vehicles. None of them have been seen since September 26.

The precise motives for the killings are difficult to determine, but the students come from a school that has been training rural teachers—and activists—for the better part of a century. Their commitment to helping small farmers and farm workers in the rugged, semi-feudal countryside often has put them at odds with the local powers that be. And when you add to that the cozy relationship that exists today between some of those powers and narcotics traffickers, the situation is explosive.

A foretaste of last month’s massacre took place on May 30, 2013, after an activist group called Popular Unity of Iguala demanded that the city’s mayor, José Luis Albarca Velázquez, provide fertilizer to poor farmers in the area. Six of the group’s members were kidnapped, including its leader, Arturo Hernández Cardona, who was killed along with two others. One of the kidnapping victims, an activist named Nicolás Mendoza Vila, managed to escape and later made a statement to the authorities that he watched the mayor himself pull the trigger of the gun that killed Hernández Cardona.

A photo of his corpse has gone viral in Mexico: it shows the face stripped away to the bare skull underneath.
The murdered activist’s widow, Sofia Mendoza, requested that the federal prosecutor’s office revoke Mayor Albarca Velázquez’s mandate in light of the murders. But Mexican Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam determined that his office had no jurisdiction over what he deemed “a local matter.” After this latest slaughter last month, the widow said, “The events that occurred on September 26 could have been avoided if anyone had listened to us.”

The initial shock of the police rampage that day had barely set in when the attorney general for the state of Guerrero, Iñaky Blanco Cabrera, announced that over the weekend investigators had exhumed the contents of six mass graves discovered on a densely wooded parcel of land outside of Iguala. The assumption was that the abducted students might be among the cadavers. The initial body count was estimated at 28, but subsequent reports raised the estimate to 34.

Now the Mexican Federal Government has taken note. A cordon of about 200 Mexican Army soldiers, Marines and Federal Police stood guard as the bodies were exhumed from a hilly stretch of nearly inaccessible woodland known as Pueblo Viejo. The bodies had been piled onto dry branches and logs, doused in gasoline, and set afire. DNA testing is underway to identity the cadavers, which at the time of discovery were burned beyond recognition. But four members of a drug cartel known as Guerreros Unidos that operates in Iguala, who are currently in police custody, told investigators that they knew of 17 student activists transported to the killing ground of Pueblo Viejo.

Twenty-two police officers from Iguala are now in Federal custody for homicide and kidnapping in the case, along with the four alleged drug traffickers believed to have colluded with them. Video surveillance cameras posted on a highway overpass filmed the moment when police pickup trucks drove past at top speed, each carrying a load of detainees.


Abominable acts of violence have become common enough in Mexico that the public has built up a tolerance for such news. But the details of this massacre have been especially difficult to absorb. The victims are young, all between the ages of 19 and 23, and their murders and kidnappings have every appearance of being politically motivated.

Indeed, there are echoes of some very bad days, of uprisings and repressions on a ferocious scale, in what suddenly does not feel like such a distant past. The timing of the violence against the students has particular resonance and has stirred public sentiment. It happened just six days before the annual march in Mexico City to commemorate the horrific student massacre in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968, when the government moved to crush political opposition by gunning down scores, and perhaps hundreds, of protestors shortly before the opening of that year's summer Olympics.

This year the students from the Ayotzinapa teachers college had come to Iguala from their school in the town of Tixtla, about two hours away, to solicit donations to pay for school supplies and to cover transportation costs to the Tlatelolco march in Mexico City.

Will justice be done this time, as it clearly was not a year ago? It seems unlikely.

In the aftermath of the latest killings and kidnappings, the mayor of Iguala, Albarca Velázquez—the alleged trigger man in the last round of killings—requested a 30-day leave of absence. The city council granted it. The mayor has since gone into hiding along with his chief of police, Felipe Flores Velázquez, who is the mayor’s first cousin. On Monday the state prosecutor’s office initiated proceedings to strip the mayor of his office and issue a warrant for his and his cousin the police chief’s arrest. They are now considered fugitives from justice.

After the violence in Iguala, it’s not surprising that the governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre Ribero, accused Mayor Albarca Velázquez and his administration of close ties to organized crime. He even offered a reward of 1 million pesos ($74,000) for information leading to the safe return of the student activists. But the governor’s critics say he was instrumental in protecting the mayor from prosecution last year because they are both from the same political party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution.

In light of the oppression visible now, and for many generations past, it is almost a miracle the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College of Ayotzinapa has been able to survive. It was founded in 1926 in the aftermath of the last full-fledged Mexican Revolution to address the challenge of primary school education for children living in impoverished farming communities.

The curriculum at Ayotzinapa includes instruction in native indigenous languages, as well as laborious field observations and student teaching assignments in far flung villages.

The slogan of Ayotzinapa is “the cradle of social consciousness,” and its student body of 520 is renowned for  political activism, which critics refer to as strident. The school provides room and board to students from some of the poorest families in Mexico. As part of the curriculum and as a means to reduce expenses, the students work the fields behind the school and raise livestock, hogs and chickens.

Ayotzinapa, like other rural teachers colleges in Mexico, has long resisted attempts to phase it out or to throw out its model for public education. So it continues to make local authorities and their ruthless cronies uneasy. Two of its students were murdered in a paramilitary attack on the school in 2011.

And maybe there is reason for the old order to worry. Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vásquez studied at Ayotzinapa, both became teachers in the countryside, and both became famous martyrs during a guerrilla insurgency in the mountains of Guerrero. That was back during Mexico’s Dirty War of the 1960s and 70s—the time of Tlatelolco.

The current generation of Ayotzinapa students and teachers has opposed the federal government’s education reform and stood with teachers to oppose changes to hiring protocols. Last year they joined with the widows of the men from Popular Unity in calling for an investigation into the triple homicide. Together they briefly occupied Iguala’s city hall to demand a full investigation.

The students of Ayotzinapa have set up a protest across the federal highway that links Iguala to Acapulco to demand the police in Iguala return their classmates alive.

But as the forensic scientists continue sifting through the remains of the mass graves, that possibility seems remote.

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Fonda la Catrina exhibits a talent for Mexican sauces and more

5/27/2012

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 The aromas of garlic, cilantro, mole, slow-cooked pork, freshly made tortillas and roasted peppers waft out of the open kitchen at Fonda la Catrina in Georgetown to remind patrons that despite the artsy setting this restaurant is all about the food.

By Tryone Beason

Seattle Times staff reporter.

Nestled in a pleasantly gritty section of Georgetown across from an old brewery building, Fonda la Catrina bills itself as a contemporary Mexican restaurant and cantina that treats "food as art." That's an apt description because owner Enrique Trejo has given the former Tileworks building where the restaurant is located the sleekness of a downtown gallery, complete with polished concrete floors and works by Latin American artists on the walls.

But the appetizing aromas of garlic, cilantro, mole, slow-cooked pork, freshly made tortillas and roasted peppers wafting out of the open kitchen remind diners that despite the artsy trappings, this place is all about the food.

The menu: A simple menu executed with an expertly balanced mix of earthy and springy ingredients makes for a dining experience that is undeniably crowd-pleasing if not especially challenging. The luscious but light cactus salad ($3) and creamy guacamole with thick, homemade tortilla chips ($4) work well against hearty platters of pork braised in green sauce with pinto beans, Yukon Gold potatoes and grilled cactus ($12); chicken enchiladas in green or red sauce ($8); tacos filled with chorizo, pork or steak ($6.50-$8); and tamales with chicken and roasted tomatoes or pork with tomatillos ($4).

What to write home about: The spicy, chocolaty, smoky brown sauce on the mole poblano enchilada special ($9) somehow managed to be magnificent, despite some of the listed ingredients (plantains and anise, in particular) lacking prominence in the dish and the fact that the chicken version was served instead of the vegetarian option we ordered.

The green sauce on the enchiladas verdes had a memorable brightness, thanks to lots of citrus and cilantro.

The setting: Candlelight and industrial chic prevail. Trejo, a former contractor, used reclaimed wood and metal to bring warmth to the open, gallerylike space.

Summing up: Guacamole and chips with a side of red salsa ($5), cactus salad ($3), enchiladas verdes ($8) and mole poblano enchiladas ($9) came to $25 plus tax and tip.

Tyrone Beason: 206-464-2251 or tbearson@seattletimes.coml

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CARNIVAL IN GEORGETOWN¡¡¡¡¡

6/10/2011

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Come celebrate with us the Georgetown Carnival in La Catrina, will be attended work from Fulgencio Lazo, Jose Orantes, Jesus Mena, Amaranta Ibarra-Sandys and Almendra Sandoval, among others ... we also have music in the evening, "Canals Of Venice" will be playing around seven in the evening, and there will be some special performances throughout the day. Admission is absolutely free, the farmers market is just across the street, the "Beer Garden" of Goergetown Brewery in the back of our building, in addition to the market in the "Trailer Park", filled with crafts and antiques.
Come and delight yourself in art, music, food, racing tools and more.

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Foto Bolivia...

4/28/2011

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Saturday 9th was great...

4/28/2011

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Luis Martinez
 

On Saturday April 9, we present the work of two artists from Oaxaca, Mexico, JesusMena and Luis Martinez. They filled our space with art, music, friends, family and food. Was a success, many people came to admire the work and enjoy the music. All the dancing began to the beat of the Banda Gozon and lasted until about 10 pm. We never miss the wine and the food was a success. We had a great night. Several proposals for these artists appeared and there was much interest from many people to buy their work.
  We wish the best of luck to Jesus and Luis, I hope we have the opportunity to work with them again in the future. Apparently other galleries are interested in their work after seeing this show, so for any information regarding any of the works or interested in contacting any of them you can write to fondalacatrina@gmail.com and gladly refer them correctly.


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The place was full for long time...
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Jesus Mena
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Luis Martinez work
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Luis Martinez
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La Banda Gozona
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Jesus Mena
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Jesus Mena and Luis Martínez @ LA Catrina Saturday April 9th, 2011

4/1/2011

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Bolivia, presente...

3/31/2011

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Art Attack this saturday March 12, 2011

3/12/2011

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Georgetown Art Attack
Assaults Seattle’s Senses on March 12th!

The fabulous Georgetown Second Saturday Art Attack returns on March 12. The neighborhood lights up from 6:00 to 9:00 PM with visual and performing arts presentations throughout the historic industrial arts corridor. This monthly event affords the public an opportunity to visit working artists’ studios and patronize the lively and diverse establishments that surround them.

Among the highlights of the March 12 Art Attack: 
The amazing Georgetown Trailer Park Mall celebrates Americana at its best with the debut of Charlie's Buns ‘N' Stuff, a trunk show of Frida Kustoms in the Frida Trailer Gallery, and live recording for the Georgetown Trailer Park Podcast; Krab Jab Studio presents "The Alien-Pooka War" by artist Milo Duke; the grand opening of Vecta Photo, a photography studio and gallery in the Original Rainier Brewery, features photographs of Seattle Slam wheelchair rugby athletes (proceeds of sales will benefit the team); "Chalk:” new art by Mark LaFalce at Mark LaFalce Painting Works; the neighboring Seattle Sculpture Atelier features a preview of Spring classes; Calamity Jane’s hosts an assemblage and sculpture group show with Yvette Endrijautzki, Morbid Anatomy, Matthew C. Scott, Jack Howe and Brandon Bowman; Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery mounts an exhibition focusing on master French cartoonist Jacques Tardi with a slide talk by curator, editor and Tardi translator Kim Thompson; and the many wonderfully creative shopping and dining experiences that make historic Georgetown a priceless civic asset worthy of preservation.


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