About

TerraJusta launched in April 2020. Previously the team had all spent many years with The Democracy Center (look through the timeline to find out more...) and over time we developed the Center’s work in Latin America with a closer focus on how extractivism operates in the region, how it impacts on people and ecologies, and the ways that communities are standing up to extractive companies and asserting their rights over territories, resources, health and livelihoods.

From our bases spread between Bolivia, Ireland and the UK that is the work we are committed to continuing - through campaigns, research, communications and other forms of accompaniment with affected communities in Latin America.

• May 2020: Welcome to TerraJusta!
• Follow the work of The Democracy Center

After this long period of internal reflection and restructuring, and changes in how we carry out our accompaniment and campaigning work, we are able to consolidate our collective vision of our work going forward as we prepare to launch TerraJusta as a separate organisation. Our core mission is now:

Through international campaigns and our research and communications work, TerraJusta accompanies and supports organizations and communities fighting for social, economic and environmental justice, especially those affected by extractive projects in Latin America.

• TerraJusta Vision and Mission

Our relationships  with impacted communities and local organizations in Latin America help orient the ways that we work internationally through our networks in Europe and North America. Alongside accompaniment with these communities we look to target centers of corporate power in the global North, through international campaigning and solidarity work.

Two team members are now permanently based in the UK and Ireland, and a Bolivian team member spent 9 months between Dublin and London in 2019 before returning to Cochabamba. This, along with increased travel in Latin America itself, allows us to greatly strengthen our collaborative networks. As part of increased solidarity activity with communities in La Guajira, Colombia affected by the Cerrejón mine we collaborated with the Latin America Solidarity Centre and others on a speaker tour in Ireland by Jaqueline Romero Epiayu of Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu.

We have become an active member of London Mining Network, working with them on campaigning focused on company AGMs in London. We are also active in the Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power, and produce materials for their efforts to secure a binding treaty on transnationals and human rights - including around the legacy of Chevron in Ecuador. We also contribute to the International Allies group on resistance to extractivism, particularly in El Salvador.

• Corporate Immunity and Community Resistance - Jaqueline Romero Epiayu in Dublin
• AngloAmerican AGM  - activities with London Mining Network
• BHP AGM - activities with London Mining Network
• Rights for People, Rules for Corporations (video)

Following on from our campaigning work in 2017/18 we have continued to strengthen our relationships with groups and organisations on the ground in Latin America - especially within the Andean region - who are resisting extractivism and its impacts. In the context of this relationship building, team members have travelled several times to Peru, as well as Colombia and El Salvador, to better understand local impacts and to contribute to workshops on campaigning and communications strategy building. In 2018 we nominated our close allies in Peru, DHUMA, for the Letelier-Moffit prize, which they received that year in Washington DC.

In October 2019 we coordinated a 2-day event on ‘Communications against Corporate Power: Regional and International Network-Building Strategies’ as part of the ‘International Gathering on Indigenous Communication’ in Cusco, Peru. This brought together representatives of communities impacted by extractive projects from  Colombia, Peru, El Salvador and Bolivia and helped lay the groundwork for much of our accompaniment and support work since then.

• DHUMA receives Letelier-Moffit human rights award in Washington DC
• Reporting from La Guajira, Colombia

In 2017-2018 the Democracy Center worked in a closely coordinated campaign with Peruvian groups, Derechos Humanos y Medio Ambiente (DHUMA) in Puno and the Institute for Andean Cultural Studies (IDECA) as well as with long-time international allies, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington DC and Mining Watch Canada, to help prevent two dangerous legal precedents from being established against social movements in Peru.

The “Aymarazo” case sought to bulldoze over the rights of indigenous Aymara communities and their spokespersons in order to protect the interests of Canada’s Bear Creek Mining Corporation. The campaign helped ensure that convictions against the Aymaran community were overturned in Peru’s highest courts.  Bear Creek’s mining concessions in the region are now “extinguished” and the area has been declared inadmissible for any mining permits for at least the next five years.

• Press release: 130 organizations call for sentence annulment
• Video: The Aymarazo in Peru

As the issue has grown in urgency across Latin America and elsewhere, since 2017 we have focused campaigning efforts on challenging attempts by extractive industries to criminalize those standing against them.

In collaboration with the Association of those affected by Quimbo Hydroelectric Project (ASOQUIMBO) and allied organizations, the Democracy Center successfully forced Italian energy giant, Enel, to drop criminal charges it had lodged against environmental defenders resisting its El Quimbo megadam project in Colombia. Criminalization of protest is one of many tactics that multinational corporations and co-opted governments use to repress the defence of life in the face of destructive megaprojects. As such, it represents an important thread in the Democracy Center’s work in solidarity with communities in Latin America resisting extractivism and corporate capture.  

• Timeline: The campaign in support of Miller Dussan and ASOQUIMBO
• Article: Damming Dissent: How an Italian multinational is persecuting environmental defenders in Colombia

We turn 25 and celebrate with a new website! Explore our work through the sections, Build Real Democracy, Take Action on Climate Justice, and Challenge Corporate Power and have a look at the revised version of our vision and mission.

Our reporting and analytical work on climate in Latin America and globally looks both at the structural drivers of the crisis, especially in relation to how corporate power operates, and the complex ways in which its impacts play out on the ground. What is the difference between what corporations say and do when it comes to climate change? What does climate resilience mean in the Bolivian context? How do existing social structures interact with climate impacts? The story of what these drivers and impacts mean for women in particular becomes a key aspect of our work on climate.

• Photo project: Climate Change is About... Women
• Report: Corporate Conquistadors
• Video: Seeds of Resilience

Our efforts to support climate-related activism include a wide range of articles and other resources, many with a specific focus on successful strategy-building. We have been a present but critical voice at Rio+20, COP20 in Lima and COP21 in Paris. We continue to highlight effective campaigning efforts and work directly with groups through workshops and other training methods.

• Article: Keeping it Grounded
• Article: Keeping Paris in perspective on the journey to system change
• Article: Fracking with the Happy People

As our external focus shifts more towards climate as a key issue the organization also consolidates internally, establishing a more permanent team of people coming from Bolivia, Europe and the US. Over the coming years, and continuing to this day, our engagement with the complex social politics of climate change, decolonization, environmental impacts and activism leads to the development of internal reflections around the functions of power and privilege within the organization itself, and the establishment of new ways of working.

Around this time the Democracy Center also shifts its focus away from specifically Bolivian issues to take in a more regional focus on the key social and environmental justice issues of our era.

Partnering with the Institute for Policy Studies, we launch the Network for Justice in Global Investment (NJGI), making the dangers of corporate power and global investment rules a core focus of our work. In the following years we publish two extensive reports as well as numerous articles, a news bulletin and more. We engage in the struggles against major trade agreements such as TTIP and TPP. From 2015 onwards, the NJGI project is only minimally maintained.

• Report: Unfair, Unsustainable, and Under the Radar
• Article: Corporate Power Doesn’t Always Win: Remembering the FTAA
• Report: Beating Goliath

With the publication of Stories from Khapi, a video exploring the impacts of glacial melt in Bolivia, in the lead-up to the infamous COP15 in Copenhagen, we begin a major effort to document the impacts of climate change. In the following years we delve into the issues of lithium, REDD, water, the role of youth, and others and we report from the 2010 People's Climate Summit in Tiquipaya and Rio+20 in 2012.

• Video: Stories from Khapi
• Report: Bolivia and its Lithium
• Report: Off the Market

As a result of several years of research, field work and writing by a diverse team of interns and staff, the Center publishes Dignity & Defiance with University of California Press. The book presents a set of Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization. In 2009, we take the book on tour in 14 cities across the US.

• Dignity & Defiance on The Democracy Center website

The Blog from Bolivia is launched late in the year. Charting change in the shifting political landscape of Bolivia in the 2000s, the blog gains a wide readership and becomes a primary reference point for reporters and journalists worldwide. It runs until 2010.

The Center publishes The Democracy Owners Manual, a Practical Guide to Changing the World and goes on a book tour in the US.

The Bechtel Corporation files a $50 million legal case against the people of Cochabamba as retaliation for the Water Revolt and the Center helps launch a global campaign to force the company to drop the case. In 2005, Bechtel ultimately drops its Bolivia case in response to global citizen pressure.

• The Bechtel Corporation
• Bechtel vs Bolivia: Details of the Case and the Campaign
• International Citizen's Petition to the World Bank

The Center plays a major role in the Cochabamba Water Revolt, helping to turn it into an international story and uncovering the link to the US Bechtel Corporation behind the water privatization. Later, the Center receives the Project Census award for the reporting.

• Full archive on The Democracy Center website
• Reporting: Dispatches from the Streets of Cochabamba (Feb-Apr 2000)
• Article: Bolivia, 15 Years on from the Water War (Apr 23, 2015)
• Article: 15 Years After the Cochabamba Water Revolt, Echoes in New Cases of Corporate Abuse (Apr 28, 2015)

Democracy Center founder and executive director Jim Shultz returns to Cochabamba, Bolivia with his family and begins activity there - eventually, they end up staying for two decades.

The first issue of our newsletter, Democracy Center Online, hits the inboxes of about 200 readers. Eventually, our readership grows to over 6000.

The Democracy Center founds the California Budget Project following a year of taking leadership on California budget issues with the publication of State of Deadlock, a major report on the state of budget politics and a roadmap for a progressive way forward.

We orient our work toward supporting immigrant communities under political attack in California, by helping immigrants with advocacy workshops and taking a leadership role in efforts to stop the passage of California’s Proposition 187 anti-immigrant initiative.

The Democracy Center is founded as Advocacy Institute West and opens its first office in San Francisco.