ATALC - Friends of the Earth Latin America and the Caribbean / Amigos de la Tierra América Latina y el Caribe

ATALC is a regional Latin American and Caribbean organization with member organizations in 14 countries: Ecuador, Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, Brasil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Grenada and Curaçao. ATALC is part of the international federation Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), of which NOAH is also a member. ATALC's purpose is to strengthen the coordination of struggles for social, environmental, economic and gender justice and the sovereignty of our peoples, together with allied social movements. ATALC has four regional programs: Economic Justice and Resistance to Neoliberalism, Food Sovereignty, Climate Justice and Energy, Forests & Biodiversity. ATALC campaigns against neoliberal policies and Free Trade Agreements, Bilateral Investment Treaties, and ISDS. ATALC campaigns for a legally binding UN Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights. ATALC supports local communities - peasants, indigenous, afro descendants - to denounce the power and actions of transnational corporations, being in agribusiness, mining, fossil fuels, etc., and the resulting violations of peoples' rights and destruction of territories. Through the FoEI Internationalist Solidarity System ATALC supports defenders and frontline communities eg through a rapid response mechanism. Most of the member organisations emerged in the 1980s in response to national/local socio-environmental issues and later joined FoEl. In the 1980s and 1990s, Friends of the Earth organisations in Latin America and the Caribbean joined forces with other organisations to resist the commodification of nature and the neoliberal offensive. They also worked together with other organisations and movements in the run-up to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and the Forum of NGOs and Social Movements to consolidate a vision for the South and the region. Faced with the need for a decentralised and autonomous regional structure ATALC was founded in 2001.