While it wastes its own felled trees, the Belo Monte plant buys irregular wood, heating up a criminal market that invades indigenous territories. Part two of a report on the human and environmental costs of government-sanctioned illegal logging in Brazil's Pará state.

The world’s largest GMO corporation never imagined that it would suffer one of its major setbacks in a small, rural town in central Argentina. Popular opposition, irregularities in the company’s environmental impact assessment, a protest blockade at the entry gate, and a court ruling stalled the construction of its seeds plant three years ago.

Today we live in a crucial moment in which peasants are confronting challenges as they grapple with global warming, with the power of multinational companies over what they eat and how they live, and with an agricultural model that can’t provide them livelihood.

During these 22 years of struggle of Resistance and Rebellion, we have continued to build another form of life, governing ourselves as the collective peoples that we are, according to the seven principles of lead by obeying, building a new system and another form of life as original peoples. One where the people command and the government obeys.

"The situation in Brazil today is in a very profound economic, social and especially political crisis. [...] There are two very important points: one is the left’s opinion that Dilma’s administration is awful, but that a coup represents Brazil’s dominant political elite’s intent to try to eliminate the PT from the government and introduce a right-wing government, similar to the Paraguayan coup not long ago that deposed Lugo." - Ricardo Atunes, sociologist at the University of Campinas, Brazil

The gains of South America’s progressive period, won in the halls of power and in the streets, won't likely be swept aside anytime soon.

In the void left by Maduro’s inaction, grassroots activists have turned inwards and begun to seek concrete solutions. With the help of key ministries that continue to grant money to social movements, these activists have become the motor for a renaissance of small-scale production in this oil-dependent nation.

Activists from the Black Women’s Movement in Brazil and a wide array of social organizations marched on Wednesday, November 18th 2015 to commemorate the first National Black Women's March Against Racism, Violence and for Well Being. Over 10,000 activists from all over Brazil marched through the country’s capital city, Brasilia, demanding visibility of the challenges faced by Afro-Brazilian women and that these issues be acknowledged by the government through policies that promote race and gender equality.