Panel Discussion: A Blue Tide Rising In Latin America?

Join panelists Robin Broad, John Cavanagh, Manuela Picq and moderator James K. Boyce for a discussion on how social movements and governments in many Latin American countries are rejecting the heavy emphasis on fossil fuels and mining, and embracing paths that defend their waterways and center on indigenous communities and women.

Such grassroots-led movements pressed the government of El Salvador to become the first in the world to ban metals mining to save its water. Similar movements, led by environmental defenders, have won victories in Ecuador, Argentina, Costa Rica and elsewhere, and helped elect greener governments in Honduras, Chile, Colombia, and (hopefully) Brazil. At a time of global chaos and despair, is a blue tide rising in Latin America that can illuminate hopeful pathways to a better future?

Broad and Cavanagh’s book, The Water Defenders, will be available for sale and signing.

MODERATOR
James K. Boyce
Senior Fellow, Political Economy Research Institute, UMass Amherst; author of Economics for People and the Planet (Anthem Press).

PANELISTS
Manuela Picq
Professor of International Relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito & Senior Lecturer of Political Science at Amherst College; co-founder of the movement of water defenders Somos Agua in Ecuador.

Robin Broad
Professor at American University, Guggenheim Fellow, and co-author (with John Cavanagh) of the new award-winning book, The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed (Beacon Press, also available in Spanish).

John Cavanagh
Senior Advisor, Institute for Policy Studies, and author of 12 books on the global economy.