Latin America Bureau

Founded in 1977, the Latin America Bureau (LAB) is both an online and print publisher dedicated to providing high-quality, independent news related to Latin America. Our primary focus is on the challenges surrounding social and environmental justice, highlighting the perspectives of local partners in the region. As a charity registered in the UK, we operate as a not-for-profit organization.

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El Salvador: 'No to Life, Yes to Mining'

Jan 15, 2025 | lab.org.uk | Mike Gatehouse

President Nayib Bukele has overturned El Salvador’s seven-year-old ban on metal mining (the first such ban in the world) and renewed the assault on communities which campaign against mining. The five water defenders from Santa Marta, Cabañas, now face a new trial because of their opposition to gold mining. This article draws on research by Pedro Cabezas, John Cavanagh and colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies and on reports by Mongabay and MiningWatch Canada.
US helping Brazilian police kill

Jan 10, 2025 | lab.org.uk | Joseph Bouchard

Brazil’s highly militarized policing disproportionately impacts poor and racialized communities. By providing funding and training, the United States has helped exacerbate the crisis. This article is reproduced here by kind permission of NACLA where it was first published on 7 January 2025. You can read the original here. Main image: Brazilian Military Police stand equipped in riot gear at the São Paulo World Cup protests on June 12, 2014.
Brazil: soldiers acquitted of Rio 'execution'

Jan 8, 2025 | lab.org.uk | Natalia Viana

This article was published by Agência Pública, Sã Paulo, on 18 December 2024. It was written by Natalia Viana & Augusta Lunardi and translated for LAB by Mike Gatehouse. You can read the original (in Portuguese) here. Main image: STM President Joseli Camelo speaks to family members of the victims. Photo: Agência PúblicaIn a court room more crowded than usual in the last week of sessions, the 15 judges who make up the Higher Military Tribunal today gave judgement in the Evaldo Rosa case.
The Other Militaries

Nov 28, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Cornelia Gräbner

The CAMeNA archive in Mexico City contains fascinating testimony from members of the Latin America’s armed forces who remained loyal to constitutions and democracies and stood up (often at the cost of their rank, their liberty and sometimes their lives) against golpistas, the oligarchies, and US-inspired National Security doctrines. Cornelia Gräbner reports.
What Donald Trump’s possible re-election could mean for the Amazon and its Peoples

Nov 5, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Marcos Colon

As the world confronts overlapping crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and social inequality, we must recognize the Amazon as a battleground where these struggles converge. Allowing its continued destruction under a future Trump administration will not just be a moral failure, but an ecological catastrophe that will reverberate for generations.
COP16: is biodiversity offsetting a false solution?

Oct 21, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Rebecca Wilson

Indigenous groups, ecologists, scholars, and NGOs have spoken out against the idea of biodiversity markets, emphasizing their lack of effectiveness and stressing that the protection of ecosystems should be rooted in local knowledge and community-led governance rather than top-down market solutions. Ahead of the COP16 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, we get to the bottom of it. Read the previous article ‘COP16 and biodiversity markets: Indigenous peoples meaningfully included?’ here.
COP16 and biodiversity markets: Indigenous peoples meaningfully included?

Oct 21, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Rebecca Wilson

Today, 21 October 2024, in Cali Colombia, the COP16 conference begins. This is not the ‘Climate COP’ familiar to most people but the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. This international meeting will be a platform for promoting the concept of biodiversity credits and biodiversity markets. But what do these terms mean, and what is at stake, especially for Indigenous peoples and local communities?
The mess in Argentina

Oct 14, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Walden Bello

Argentines who have grown up in the last 30 years have done so in a country that has been constantly in crisis, besieged by inflation, recession, and poverty. But Milei’s radical libertarian economic reforms are creating even more of a mess, frankly. This piece by Walden Bello was originally published by CounterPunch. At the heart of Buenos Aires lies the lovely Calle Florida.
Chinese labour in Latin America & the Caribbean

Oct 8, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Harriet Evans

Hannah Lowe, poet, writer, teacher, academic and founding member of the Chinese-Caribbean Studies Network, grew up in Ilford, Essex, as daughter of a Jamaican Chinese father and a white British mother. As a child, she knew nothing about her father’s background, and it was only some years after he passed away in 2001 that Hannah began to uncover the story of his paternal family’s journey from China to Jamaica, and her father’s own journey from Jamaica to the UK.
'Open Fire' exhibition in UK

Oct 4, 2024 | lab.org.uk | Mike Gatehouse

In September 2022, LAB described a new photo exhibition, created by the Brazilian photographer and film-maker Marilene Cardoso Ribeiro. Now that exhibition has come to the UK and is on display until 16 November at the West Downs Gallery, on the campus of the University of Winchester. At the opening in Winchester on 2 October, Marilene spoke about the scale of fires now breaking out across both the Amazon and the Pantanal in Brazil.