On June 2, Guatemalan police and military carried out the eviction of Q’eqchi Maya residents of the community of Laguna Larga in the Laguna de Tigre region of the country. Days later, the refugees from the eviction arrived in the Mexican state of Campeche.
At least 120 campesino families from Guatemala have installed a makeshift camp at the border between the Central American and Mexico as they fear a violent eviction from the army.
Residents of a village in Hanoi's outskirts took 38 officials and policemen hostage recently in protest against what they claimed was the illegal seizure of their land by a telecommunications firm owned by the military.
The stand-off riveted the nation, and also highlighted the persistence of land disputes in a region where rapid development is pitting large commercial interests against longstanding communities.
KOIDU, Sierra Leone, May 5 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A dispute over a bridge in eastern Sierra Leone thought to span diamond deposits has divided a local community with a foreign mining company accused of illegally mining the area after volunteering to rebuild the overpass.
The Congo Bridge in Koidu, the capital of Kono District, was deemed by local authorities to be in danger of collapsing after years of illegal small-scale mining around the base.
Shortly after a visit from an EU delegation last week, Kenya Forest Service (KFS) guards based at Tangul, Kipsitono and Maron KFS camps carried out intensive evictions according to Sengwer witnesses, with KFS allegedly having since burnt down over 90 Sengwer homes and destroyed their property.
Nearly 4,000 of more than 62,000 refugees living in camps in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu have registered to return
BANGKOK, Oct 26 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Thousands of Sri Lankan refugees living in India are ready to return to their homeland decades after fleeing civil war, according to a rights group that said returnees will receive a plot of land and other assistance.
Self-declared state wants to shift much of its population to the coast as grazing land fails
It is often said that climate change will hurt the world’s poorest people first. Nowhere is that potentially truer than in Somaliland, an unrecognised state in the Horn of Africa sandwiched between an expanding desert and the Red Sea.
A prolonged drought has killed 70 per cent of the area’s livestock in the past three years, devastating the region’s pastoralist economy and forcing tens of thousands of families to flee their grazing land for urban camps, according to authorities.
By: Tom Gardner
Date: November 15th 2016
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
LAKE NAKIVALE, Uganda (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Nyirahubinka Maria, a Congolese refugee and mother of two, lives in "New Congo", the oldest and largest of 86 small villages scattered over the plains and low rising hills that surround Lake Nakivale in southwest Uganda.
Date: November 11th 2016
Source: The Economist Namibia
Resettled farmers cannot access the loan facility fund offered by Government and Agribank as part of land reform attempts by the Ministry of Land Reform.
By: Kieran Guilbert
Date: November 1st 2016
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
FREETOWN (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - When floods struck several slums across Sierra Leone's capital last year, 55-year-old Amienata Bangura was forced to flee as her small shop, stock and years of savings were wiped out.
By: Alisa Tang
Date: November 3rd 2016
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Land conflicts in Myanmar have escalated in recent years, with military and armed groups driving people from their land, and new laws failing to protect farmers, a rights watchdog said on Thursday.
By: Matheus Hamutenya
Date: October 24th 2016
Source: AllAfrica.com / New Era
After their land resettlement applications failed for about two decades, a group of fed-up farmers on Thursday moved onto farm Dickbusch - owned by government - with their livestock.