Researchers

The Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER) is a Mexico-based NGO whose mission is to improve corporate transparency and accountability in Latin America from a human rights perspective and to strengthen civil society stakeholders of corporations as long-term accountability guarantors. Since beginning operations in 2010, PODER’s strategy has been to follow the money and analyze power relationships at strategic nodes of the global economy so as to produce actionable intelligence for human rights defenders and other corporate stakeholders and accompany their efforts to hold businesses accountable for human rights violations. The main problem it seeks to address is state capture, whereby an economic and political elite controls public decision-making and effectively limits the realization of democracy and democratic economies for the rest of society. In the case of Sonora, since 2014 PODER has accompanied communities and rural residents affected by the worst mining spill in Mexican history to form the Comités de Cuenca Río Sonora, a collective empowerment vehicle for thousands of local residents to seek environmental and legal remediation. PODER regularly researches and documents the situation of human rights in Sonora as related to the extractive sector. This information can be found here: www.rindecuentas.org, www.colaboratorio.org/proyecto/campana-rio-sonora.