RIO DE JANEIRO (Dispatches) – The mayor of the Brazilian port city of Belem, Edmilson Rodrigues, has declared his city an Apartheid Free Zone, denouncing the Zionist regime’s “expulsion of a people from their ancestral territory, a true apartheid”, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has announced. Belem, the capital of the state of Para in the Amazonas, has a history of bringing indigenous and other people together in the struggle for justice and building solidarity. Belem’s decision follows those by the mayor of Barcelona, Spain, to suspend institutional ties with apartheid Israel and end twinning with Tel Aviv, by the Liège city council in Belgium to cut ties with apartheid Israel and by the Oslo city council in Norway to exclude from public procurements companies that directly or indirectly contribute to the regime’s illegal settlement enterprise.