Chief Ompore couldn’t stop smiling as he watched photos of Amazonian animals get projected across the Town Hall wall of Yarentaro – a remote village in Ecuador’s Yasunà National Park inside what oil companies call “Block 16.” It was the 14th of December 2012 and the Spanish oil giant RepSol that administers the petroleum block […]
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A Hidden Tragedy Translated: The Censored Book That Broke Ecuador’s Heart
// jaco // Chekhov's Kalashnikov Tags: Ecuador, Oil, Waorani No Responses
Published on Chekhov’s Kalashnikov: “At the end of march this year, 2013, in the jungles of Ecuador’s northern orient, a great massacre of uncontacted indigenous was committed.” opens the book A Hidden Tragedy. “Accomplished in a way that was abusive and cruel. Those eliminated, above all, where women and children.” Seventeen minutes before the book […]
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How Colombian Farmers Sparked a Movement that Brought the Government to its Knees
// jaco // Chekhov's Kalashnikov No Responses
Published on Chekhovs Kalashnikov: Its not every Sunday that the priest of a rural Colombian city called Tunja begins his sermon with a story of an illiterate Indian girl who grew up in the shadow of the British Empire. The 8th of September was not a normal Sunday. For the three weeks previous farmers from […]
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Vilma Vargas Uncensored: the Caricaturist drawing circles around Ecuador´s attacks on freedom of expression
// jaco // Chekhov's Kalashnikov No Responses
Published on Chekhov’s Kalashnikov: What happens to a democracy when its journalists and artists are too afraid to criticise those in power and express themselves freely? This is one of the questions we ask Vilma Vargas – a rising talent in the Ecuadorian art scene who was twice selected for the “World Press Cartoon” in […]
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Luis Xavier Solis on the 55,140 refugees in Ecuador less famous than Julian Assange
// jaco // Chekhov's Kalashnikov No Responses
Today on Chekhov’s Kalashnikov we are going to talk with Luis Xavier Solis Tenesaca who works for the Comittee of Human Rights of Orellana in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This organization which works closely with UNHCR is in charge of protecting and defending some of the worlds most vulnerable and forgotten people – refugees that have […]