Farmer Maria Lopez says she has lost most of her corn and beans this year due to lack of rain. Photo by Chris Hufstader/oxfam America

It is hard for visitors to fathom the depths of the tragedy Guatemala’s indigenous people continue to suffer, but a brief look at the museum in Rabinal will certainly get the process started. It commemorates those who died in some of the worst massacres of indigenous people during this country’s 36-year civil conflict.

Gloria Gonzalez, a young program officer at a non-governmental group working in the area, showed me the museum. It consists of two rooms filled with photos of the dead, one of whom was her grandfather, Camilo Mayor. The caption under his photo says “assassinated during the conflict in our community.”

The community of Rio Negro was particularly affected: when they objected to the terms of a forced relocation to make way for the Chixoy River hydroelectric dam, the military claimed they were allied with guerrilla forces and killed nearly every resident between February and March 1982, part of its scorched earth counter-insurgency policy. More than 250 were murdered, including 177 unarmed elderly, women, and children on one day. The Guatemala Truth Commission declared the incident a state-sponsored act of genocide.

Today, the Maya-Achi indigenous people who were pushed up the mountain slopes to make room for the Chixoy Dam are suffering a slow-motion type of disaster, no less deadly. The centuries of racism and discrimination that led to their precarious living conditions are now exacerbated by a long drought and high temperatures that have left most with little corn, beans, and other crops on which they depend. Read the rest of this entry »

Author Peter Maass. Photo by Maura Hart/Oxfam America

I’m just finishing reading an excellent book by investigative journalist Peter Maass called Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil. It’s about the world’s dependence on oil: the pollution, corruption, compromised ethics, and tragedy of poverty in countries rich with the stuff. “Just as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, every dysfunctional oil country is dysfunctional in its own way,” he writes, and his book is indeed a catalog of dysfunction and unhappiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Father Marco Arana of Peru. Photo by Jessica Erickson/Oxfam America.

 Over the past few years I have written several pieces (on this blog and in our magazine) about Father Marco Arana of Cajamarca, Peru. He’s one of about 30 people who TIME says are making a difference and is part of their “Heroes of the Environment” special section in the magazine this week.

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Cotton famers load a truck in Sibirila, Mali. Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

The first time I went to Mali, about five years ago, I met with a group of cotton farmers just a few hours east of Bamako. It was near the harvest time, and you could see the white dots on the scrubby little plants all over the countryside, but there was not much optimism among the farmers in the cooperative I visited that day. Most of them reported that they work all year, sell their cotton to the government agency that exports all the cotton grown in Mali, and after they pay back their loans they don’t usually walk away with enough to make it worth the effort. Some years they would get just about $100. A relatively good year was $200 or $400.
Farmers in Mali told me they only grow cotton because they know their government will buy it from them for cash, which they need for health care, school fees, and other expenses. They can also get fertilizer from the government on credit — if they use it to grow cotton.
Read the rest of this entry »

No place in Africa is quite like Ethiopia. Photo by Petterik Wiggers/Oxfam America.

Our colleague Anna Kramer is on her first trip to Africa, and just drove from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa to the southern border with Kenya, near Moyale where she and Coco McCabe are working on a video about climate change. It’s a long trip but a great way to see a beautiful country.

She left us a phone message we can share with you here:

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I recommend listening–you can get a sense of Anna’s powers of observation and her enthusiasm.

If we hear more from Anna and Coco we will pass it along as it becomes available…

Here at Oxfam we are following Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tour of Africa closely. She seems to be tackling some of the tough issues: political violence in Kenya and democratic reforms and government accountability in Angola (which just became the largest oil producer in Africa, with an economic growth rate of 18 percent).  Nor is Secretary Clinton is shying away from one of the continent’s worst crises: widespread gender violence in eastern Congo, where 600 civilians have been killed and thousands of others have been raped since January. For those who are following the situation, Marcel Stoessel, Oxfam’s director in the Democratic Republic of Congo,  blogged about his first-hand experience in Congo. Colleagues here at Oxfam America shot a short video about gender violence in Congo that includes some striking testimonial from Congolese women.

Tomorrow is the 60^th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions, so the fact that the conflict in DR Congo is in the news seems fitting. It’s been 60 years since we set out to ensure that civilians would be protected from violence. If you want to know why the Geneva Conventions are still relevant today, think about life in the Congo—especially for women and girls.