by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 5, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Obstruction & Occupation
By Moises Castillo and Romina Ruiz-Goiriena / Associated Press
Thousands of indigenous Guatemalans shouted in anger Friday and some threw themselves at the coffins of six local people who were shot to death during a protest over electricity prices and educational reform in a poor rural area.
A seventh victim died later at a hospital in the western city of Quezaltenango.
President Otto Perez Molina acknowledged that government forces had opened fire during the protest Thursday, after saying earlier that police and troops on the scene had been unarmed and the protesters had provoked the clash.
Human rights groups condemned the government’s actions and charged they were part of a pattern of excessive use of force against protesters.
The protesters were blockading a highway near the town of Totonicapan, about 90 miles west of Guatemala City, when two vehicles carrying soldiers arrived to help police who had been ordered to evict the demonstrators. Gunfire erupted after the troops came. Bullets killed seven people and wounded 34, officials said.
“We were protesting right next to them when they opened fire on us,” said Rolando Carrillo, a 25-year-old protester with a bandaged arm and lacerated face that he said resulted from being hit during the clash.
The president told reporters Friday afternoon that armed security guards had driven the soldiers to the protest. One of the guards apparently was the first to start shooting and then an unspecified number of others fired at the crowd, Molina said.
He said seven soldiers injured in the confrontation had said they only fired into the air to protect themselves from what they considered to be a threatening crowd.
Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez Bonilla said the president had suspended the order to evict the protesters from the highway.
Some 20 human rights organizations called an emergency meeting in the capital to discuss the incident and called for a protest in front of the presidential palace.
“We’ve been saying for a long time that the army’s use of force brings with it the risk that something like this could happen,” said Francisco Soto, a representative of the Center for Legal Action and Human Rights.
Six of the dead were buried Friday afternoon in Totonicapan, where thousands gathered to watch their coffins pass through the town’s central square. Hundreds shouted “Justice! Justice!” while dozens of mourners hurled themselves toward the coffins in grief.
Read more from The Washington Post:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 2, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Patricia Ardón and Orfe Castillo
“In the struggle to defend our territory, our natural resources, what’s at stake is our very existence.” – Miriam Pixtún, Indigenous Women’s Movement Tz ́ununijá
In Guatemala, the policy of enclaves and extraction of natural resources fomented by the current development model and by the transnational corporations has a tremendous impact on the life of the communities, particularly on indigenous peoples and women.
With the aim of sharing experiences and analysis among women who lead organizing in defense of rights to land, territory and natural resources in Guatemala, Sinergia No ́j, T ́zununijá, Just Associates (JASS), Uk ́Ux B ́e, Unit of Guatemalan Human Rights Defenders (UDEFEGUA), Association for Feminist Studies (AMEF) and the National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG) held the national meeting “Women in Defense of of Water, Life and Territory” on Sept. 11-12, 2012. More than forty women from different parts of the country participated in the meeting.
“We resist due to the disadvantages of the megaprojects; the development that the companies offer just leaves more poverty, sickness, deaths–all kinds of problems. They use pesticides, strong chemical products. They pollute the water… our house are cracked, animals have died, now the corn doesn’t grow, it’s dried up. Water is scarce and polluted. What kind of development is this?” said one participant.
According to Carmen Lucía Pellecer, Co-Directora of Sinergia Noj, the forum enabled indigenous women to talk about experiences of resistance, the acts they carry out in their communities and in their daily lives.
Another participant pointed out, “The megaprojects represent a clash with our vision of the world, the natural resources are interconnected elements of life, we are part of it. What the capitalist companies do has consequences for our way of living together, they use impoverishment to manipulate people, they affect our health, they cause illnesses of the skin, of eyesight. The hydroelectric plants block the flow of the rivers, they cause droughts. We have been exposed to high tension wires, the looting of our lands… All the community has united to stop it but at the cost of being criminalized. They attack us for not giving in, they threaten us with prison, they don’t respect the consultation processes that are binding. For women, all this implies a heavier workload, persecution, facing militarization that revives the horrors of the war–we see soldiers and it generates terror because we know what happened to our mothers, our aunts.”
The gathering also served to present the report of the Nobel Women’s Initiative/JASS delegation, led by Nobel Laureates Jody Williams and Rigoberta Menchú. The delegation visited Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico in January of this year to examine violence against women; most of the women present at the September gathering presented testimony to the delegation in January. Many participants noted that the report helped build a regional view of the situation and of women’s struggles. These links give women a stronger voice and more political influence, they asserted.
Miriam Plxtún of the Movement of Indigeous Women Tz ́ununija identified several major achievements of the gathering, including the importance of creating their own space for recognizing and strengthening the peaceful struggle in defense of territory and natural resources, the discussion of alternatives, and the effort to build cross-border alliances that spread information on the effects of mega-projects. She also stated that the group made specific commitments to continue the analysis on key issues.
The organizations that called the event agreed on the importance of strengthening access to timely, specialized and accurate information on the impact of megaprojects on societies and on women, and of broadening networks and alliances from the local to the international level, drawing in all actors who can contribute to prevent the death and looting of the peoples.
Finally, at the gathering several women described the work being done by the Mesoamerican Women Human Rights Defenders Initiative and the National Network of Women Human Rights Defenders of Guatemala. These organizing efforts, they said, have increased recognition of women’s struggles and awareness of the security challenges for women human rights defenders.
Pixtún recalled that in Guatemala, indigenous women have a long way to go to recuperate the fundamental meaning of democracy, which is the power of the people. Women contribute in an essential way to the construction of dignified lives, she told the group, and it’s time for others–men and women–to join in this effort from all over. Indigenous peoples and women have the right to live according to their own cosmovision, to be recognized as full rightsholders and as important political actors.
From Americas Program: http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/7992
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 20, 2012 | Lobbying, Mining & Drilling, Repression at Home
By the Committee in Defence of Life and Against Mining in San Rafael Las Flores, CODIDENA, the Parlamento Xinca, CALAS, and the MadreSelva Environmental Collective
Following the events of September 17 and 18, 2012 in Mataquescuintla, Jalapa and San Rafael Las Flores, Santa Rosa, we wish to make the following statement:
TIMELINE OF EVENTS:
1. On the morning of Monday, September 17, employees of the San Rafael Mining Company, accompanied by private security agents with anti-riot equipment, attack dogs, tear-gas cannons and rubber bullet guns, and escorted by the National Civil Police, turned up in Morales, Mataquescuintla, to connect high voltage electrical wires to the San Rafael mining site.
2. Over 500 local community members, men, women and children, came out to demand that the company employees remove their equipment and leave, along with the security guards that were accompanying them. The community had already contested the installation of these electrical wires. They demand a free, prior and informed public consultation on the mining project.
3. The community protest stopped the installation of electrical wires. With the support of the PDH, COPREDEH, the Justice of the Peace and the Municipal Mayors of Nueva Santa Rosa and Casillas, the parish of Mataquescuintla, CALAS and CODIDENA drew up a document stating their desire for a peaceful solution to the dispute. However, just as the document was being signed, provocateurs hired by the mine began throwing rocks at community members and authorities, causing some damage to mining company vehicles and dispersing the group of local residents that had gathered.
4. Angered by this new affront from the San Rafael Mine, residents decided to march from Morales de Mataquescuintla to the main entrance to the mine, which is located in San Rafael. When they got there, in an act of peaceful resistance, the group set up a protest at the entrance to the mine, at the junction of the road from San Rafael Las Flores to El Fusío. At no time did the protesters infringe on the property of the San Rafael mine. They stayed on the public road and on an area of private property, with the owner’s permission. Nonetheless, the national media falsely reported that the protest had invaded the property of the mine.
5. According to eye witnesses, no protesters stepped onto the property of the mine. Given that the mine is heavily guarded, it is therefore impossible that the fire that was started inside the mine was lit without the tolerance and help of the private security guards.
6. At 3 pm, the peaceful protest was attacked without warning by members of the mine’s private security agency, the National Civil Police and the army, using tear gas cannons, firearms and rubber bullet guns. Security agents attacked from inside the mine, with trained attack dogs. The Police cornered the unarmed protestors, and the army surrounded them, crouched and at the ready. The display of repressive force had all the characteristics of military counter-insurgency tactics that we had thought belonged to the past, including the bad intentions, brutality and cowardice that so characterize the tactics of the National Army.
7. This was a cowardly attack by public and private repressive forces against a peaceful civilian group exercising their constitutional right to protest, amongst whom were women with infants, elderly people and small children. Protesters were busy preparing food for all those present, which shows their intention to hold a peaceful protest.
8. From the outset, residents of Santa Rosa have opposed the San Rafael mining operation. The mine was created without prior information or due consultation on the social and environmental impacts that would affect the water supply and the life of the inhabitants of the Santa Rosa valley. This peaceful, legal resistance has included legal documents presented to the Minister of Energy and Mines; peaceful marches from the village to the mine site; protests in front of the Canadian Embassy; visits to the Ministry of Energy and Mines and the Ministry of the Environment; debates with mayoral candidates and meetings with elected mayors; all of which form part of the “Revolución de las Flores” (Revolution of the Flowers) – a peaceful movement. Three public consultations have been carried out in Nueva Santa Rosa, Santa Rosa de Lima and Casillas, and the majority of the people have expressed their opposition to mining.
9. In the meantime, residents of San Rafael have requested that their consultation be recognized as legally binding as per the Municipal Code by mining company lawyers who have boycotted it thus far. Residents also ask for recognition of the consultation by Mayor Leonel Morales Pozuelos and his Municipal Council, whom they hold directly responsible for this conflict and its consequences because of their attitude of servility to the mine and their refusal to respect the demands of the people of San Rafael.
10. As we write this press release, we have just learned that army helicopters are flying over San Rafael and Mataquescuintla, threatening residents, like in the old days of the armed conflict. Once again, the army is carrying out a psychological and military attack on the civilian population to defend the interests of foreign companies.
WE DENOUNCE:
• The criminalization of community leaders who are legitimately defending their lands and their rights against the spurious interests of national and foreign extractive companies that take advantage of the weakness of national laws and corrupt civil servants who have sold out, allowing the destruction of natural resources of our country.
• This kind of provocation is being systematically used by national and foreign companies to further the growth of extractive projects that threaten our natural resources and our lands and are in flagrant violation of the rights of the people, as was demonstrated by what happened in Santa Cruz Barillas and San José del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc.
• We warn the government of the country that it should not once again attempt to suspend the constitutional rights of the residents of Santa Rosa, as they tried but failed to do in Santa Cruz Barillas.
We demand that the President of the Republic, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Public Prosecutor of the Public Ministry, the Army and the National Civil Police:
1. carry out a thorough investigation of the events we denounce here.
2. stop criminalizing the just struggle of the residents of Santa Rosa and Jalapa.
3. punish those responsible for the provocation staged by the mining company and its private security agents.
4. ensure that the Ministry of Energy and Mines deal with the many opposition documents presented by the residents of San Rafael Las Flores regarding the request for an exploitation licence by the San Rafael Mine.
5. cancel the mining exploration licence permanently and refuse to grant under any circumstances an exploitation licence to San Rafael Mining Company.
6. respect the wishes of residents of the municipalities of the Santa Rosa Valley – they have shown their clear opposition to mining activity in the area in a public consultation.
7. refrain from using the state of siege to criminalize and try to prosecute Santa Rosa community leaders who continue the struggle for life, natural resources and land for the benefit of future generations.
8. free the more than thirty community members that have been detained.
WE APPEAL TO:
1. the International community – to pay attention to these violations of human rights in San Rafael Las Flores and Jalapa.
2. the Human Rights Prosecutor – to strictly survey and protect the human rights of our communities, peoples, leaders and social organizations.
3. indigenous, campesino, union, women’s, environmental, youth, etc., social movements – to keep watch on how the situation in Santa Rosa develops and to give their solidarity and support to this just and exemplary struggle.
From Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3876-guatemalan-government-and-mining-company-attack-community-members-in-san-rafael-las-flores
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 14, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Male Violence, Prostitution, Rape Culture
By Cyril Mychalejko / Toward Freedom
One generally overlooked feature of the Guatemalan government and military’s 36-year (1960-96) genocidal counterinsurgency campaign against the country’s Mayan population is the strategy of targeting women with violence.
Rape, mutilation, sexual slavery, forced abortion, and sterilizations were just some of the sadistic tools used in a systematic practice of state-sponsored terror to crush the surviving population into submission through fear and shame via the suffering of their mothers, sisters, and daughters.
In 1999, UN-backed truth commission, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), declared that during the war, “the rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice aimed at destroying one of the most intimate and vulnerable aspects of the individual’s dignity…[and] they were killed, tortured and raped, sometimes because of their ideals and political or social participation…”
Glen Kuecker, professor of Latin American History at DePauw University, said that the gender specific violence was and continues to be part of the government’s counterinsurgency program aimed to destroy the fundamental social fabric of Mayan communities.
“The goal of counterinsurgency is to undermine the cohesion of a community that is needed for resistance,” said Kuecker. “Gender violence not only terrorizes women in the community, but it also disrupts traditional patriarchal gender relations by sending the message to men that they are not capable of protecting women.”
According to Emily Willard, Research Associate for the Evidence Project of The National Security Archive writing in Peace and Conflict Monitor this April, “The military’s strategies of targeting women reached such a large portion of the male population, normalizing rape and violence against women. The residual effect of these genocidal policies and strategies can be seen in the rate and type of violence in Guatemala today.”
In 2010, 685 women were assassinated in Guatemala, compared to 213 in 2000. And while there were more than 40,000 complaints of violence against women filed with the Guatemalan Public Ministry, only 1 percent of those registered by the Judicial Department resulted in sentencing, according to a report published June 1 by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and the Just Associates (JASS), “Caught in the Crossfire: Women on the frontlines in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.”
The report, co-authored by Nobel Peace Laureates Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Jody Williams, was the result of a fact-finding mission led by them in January 2012 to investigate violence against women in these three countries.
In Guatemala, the report singles out the civil war’s legacy of violence and impunity, the increased militarization resulting from the War on Drugs, land and resource conflicts, and the influence of foreign governments and businesses – specifically from the United States and Canada – as major contributing factors to the ongoing violence directed at women, and the targeting of women as a tactical and deliberate tool of political repression. The report states that the phenomenon of femicide has “reached crisis dimensions.”
Guatemala’s Civil War: No Justice, No Peace
“The crises in Guatemala are not internal crises,” Grahame Russell, co-director of Rights Action, a community development and anti-mining solidarity organization, told Toward Freedom. “They are global struggles.”
Guatemala’s Civil War serves as a perfect example. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, in an uncharacteristic moment of historical honesty, apologized to the Guatemalan people back in 1998 for the U.S.’s role in overthrowing democracy in the country and contributing political, military, and financial support to genocidal counterinsurgency programs which successive dictators carried out on the Mayan population.
“It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression…was wrong,” said Clinton.
The war left over 200,000, mostly indigenous civilians, murdered, while tens of thousands were raped, tortured, disappeared and displaced. But in the wake of the war, as many as an estimated 98 percent of those responsible for war crimes and genocide (both Guatemalan and American) remain free.
“In Guatemala, the surge in femicides demonstrates that peace is not just the cessation of war,” the JASS report states. “The lack of justice for crimes of the 1980s has left victims without redress, and culprits in power.” Amnesty International noted that in the last 10 years as many as 5,700 women have been murdered.
The position of recently elected president Otto Perez Molina that there was no genocide in the country is a perfect illustration of how impunity persists. However, Perez Molina, a former general and CIA asset who was trained at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, is taking a position that is self-serving, not just racist and revisionist. He led a military battalion in the early 1980s in the country’s northwestern highlands where some of the bloodiest massacres occurred. In addition, as Annie Bird, journalist and co-director of Rights Action pointed out in a profile of the president this year, Perez Molina ran a “secret torture center” for political prisoners while serving as head of the country’s military intelligence in 1994. One of Perez Molina’s past bosses, former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, unleashed a scorched earth campaign against the country’s Mayan population between 1982-83, wiping out entire villages in the process. Thirty years later Rios Montt, who was a very close ally of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, is just now standing trial, and is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”
Sandra Moran, a Guatemalan feminist, lesbian, artist and activist working on women’s rights and human rights in Guatemala City, is a member and co-founder of Colectivo Artesana and Alianza Politica Sector de Mujeres. She lived in exile in Canada for 14 years after participating in the country’s student movement in the early 1980s. After working tirelessly abroad to build transnational solidarity, Moran returned to Guatemala to participate in the Peace Process and to help rebuild a more peaceful, just and humane country.
“During the war it was State Policy to target the bodies of women as part of the government’s ‘Counterinsurgency Plan’. Although the war ended, this violence against women has continued,” Moran told Toward Freedom. Her office has been targeted and broken into in the past, with spilt blood left, and she has received numerous death threats as a result of her work. “The way some murdered and mutilated bodies have appeared [in recent years] are the same way they appeared during the war,” added Moran.
Amnesty International submitted a briefing on Guatemala to the UN’s Human Rights Committee in March, voicing concern how “female victims often suffer exceptional brutality before being killed, including rape, mutilation and dismemberment.”
Moran added that these misogynistic forms of violence and torture are social problems that have been taught at both institutional and individual levels. Many of the teachers of this violence are working with the government, military and police, and are often those same people who committed these types of crimes during the war. Moran also singled out the heads of private security industry, which according to the JASS report, has ballooned to an estimated 28,000 legal and 50,000 unregistered private security agents in the country.
In 2007 Amnesty International issued a report noting the presence of “clandestine groups” in the country, comprised of the “the business sector, private security companies, common criminals, gang members and possibly ex and current members of the armed forces,” who were then, and continue to target human rights activists in order to maintain impunity and an unjust and patriarchal social order.
“Guatemala’s peace-making process never moved into a necessary peace-building process that could assure strong institutions and practices,” the JASS report states. “The government typically fails to conduct investigations or prosecute the perpetrators of women’s murders.”
The Guatemalan government’s embrace of ex-war criminals and current criminals, combined with the support of international political and business actors, sustains what Rights Action’s Russell calls, “an unjust, racist, and violent social order” and “maintaining business as usual and politics as usual.”
Business as Usual
In 1954 the CIA, at the behest of United Fruit Company, coordinated the coup which overthrew democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Reasons behind this act include the fact that he rewrote the country’s labor code and initiated land reforms, acts deemed unacceptable by United Fruit Company and Washington. The idea of Guatemala being solely a source of cheap labor and a place to extract resources with low costs and even lower oversight has been a continuum in the country’s history. The lack of justice and weak governance appears to be seen as a comparative advantage for the country. For example, Amnesty International, in its briefing to the UN this past March, also pointed out how “[t]he failings of the state continue to be relied on by companies, in particular mining companies, who prefer the lower national standard to international human rights standards.”
One example the JASS report points out is Perez Molina’s refusal to respect the 55 community consultations held throughout the country in indigenous communities, which overwhelmingly rejected so-called development projects involving mining, oil and hydroelectric dams. According to ILO Convention 169, the international law which Guatemala is a signatory of, indigenous communities must provide free, prior, and informed consent to any projects that would impact their land and communities. Other “failings of the state” include the refusal to investigate and prosecute those responsible for violence against activists who challenge the status quo by demanding that their human rights, such as those enshrined under ILO 169, are recognized and honored.
The JASS delegation led by Menchu and Williams listened to testimony from women who shared stories about the violence during the war and the violence associated with what might be described now as low intensity conflicts surrounding land and resources. Their report stated, “They described that today’s intent is subtler: to force communities out of areas where mineral and other types of resources are coveted. But the methods are very similar: rape, murder, imprisonment, division and harassment…Women presented testimonies and evidence of many cases where army and private security presence is associated with putting down local protests against mining operations and other development projects that displace and disrupt communities to exploit natural resources.”
Less than two weeks after the report was released, Yolanda Oqueli Veliz, a community leader from the municipalities of San Jose del Golfo and San Pedro Ayampuc working against the widely unpopular Canadian gold mining project owned by Radius Gold, was shot by assassins and is now in the hospital in critical condition.
While criticism of the Guatemalan State is necessary and warranted, the Canadian government deserves the same treatment. Lawmakers in Ottawa have consistently aided and abetted such behavior by their industry due to what at best could be considered indifference, but is more likely a deliberate disregard for the human rights and environmental rights of communities affected by Canadian mining companies.
A perfect illustration of this was the failure to pass Bill C-300, a modest, if not flawed piece of legislation, which would have empowered the Canadian government to investigate human rights complaints and strip guilty companies from taxpayer subsidies through the Canadian Pension Plan and Export Development Canada. Apparently murder and gang-rapes linked to Canadian mining projects in Guatemala (not to mention similar acts throughout the hemisphere and around the globe) are not enough to encourage lawmakers in Canada to pass legislation that would hold their country’s companies accountable for these crimes and human rights abuses.
While women are being targeted for their social justice leadership roles in these conflicts, it is modest progress in the realm of rights and empowerment that has allowed women to assume such roles.
“Since the war ended women’s leadership in their communities and with community struggles have increased. More and more women have realized that they have rights and that they must defend their rights. And this is part of the reason why violence against women has increased,” said Moran. “An act of violence against a woman is not just an act against the individual, but against all women. It is a message that if you leave your house, if you continue to organize or raise your voice, that this can happen to you.”
Read more from Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/guatemala-archives-33/3755-guatemalan-femicide-the-legacy-of-repression-and-injustice-
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 25, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Daan Bauwens / Inter Press Service
Despite growing evidence that biofuel production is causing food insecurity around the world, the new European Union policy blueprint on renewable energy ignores the social effects of biofuels. Last week, Guatemalan victims of the food crisis came to Brussels to make European policy makers aware of the problem.
In a bid to reduce the of amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the European Union decided three years ago to increase biofuel use in transport. With the 2009 directive on renewable energy, the Union set a mandatory target of a ten percent share of agrofuels in transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.
But even before the directive had been approved, NGOs around the world had already pointed out a series of problems with agrofuels.
The British NGO ActionAid calculated that reaching Europe’s target would require converting up to 69,000 square kilometres of natural ecosystems into cropland, an area larger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Furthermore, because of the conversion of forests, grasslands and peat lands into crop fields for biofuel, total net greenhouse gas emissions would amount to 56 million tonnes of extra CO2 per year, the equivalent of an extra 12 to 26 million cars on Europe’s roads by 2020.
ActionAid estimated that the extra biofuels entering the EU market would be, on average, 81 to 167 percent worse for the climate than fossil fuels.
NGOs also found that the EU’s planned increase in biofuel use would push oilseed, maize and sugar prices up. According to a study by the Austrian International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), the 10 percent target would put an extra 140 million people at risk of hunger, with the poor urban populations, subsistence farmers and the landless in developing countries particularly vulnerable. Finally, the Rome-based International Land Coalition recently stated that the demand for biofuels is driving more than 50 percent of large-scale land acquisitions globally.
Earlier this month the European Commission published its post-2020 communication on renewable energy. Despite the relentless campaigning of several international NGOs to cancel out the 2020 target, the new communication remains completely silent on the effects of biofuels on food security in developing nations, leaving a similar target for 2030 open.
“The European Commission wants to decide on the 2030 policy without having considered the impacts of the 2020 policy first,” Marc-Olivier Herman, Oxfam’s EU biofuels expert, told IPS. “The new communication specifies hard criteria to measure environmental impact, but stays mute on the social impact of biofuels. The word ‘food’ is not even mentioned in the document, let alone food security.”
According to Herman, the Commission is moving too fast because of industry demands. “Investors in biofuel want security,” he added.
“Ever since the first target was set in 2009, the biofuel industry has been growing rapidly. This industry now wants to know what will happen after 2020. And it is an industry with lots of lobby power here in Brussels.”
In the meantime, the social effects of the growing demand for biofuels are aggravating. For instance, a large percentage of Guatemala’s indigenous population is facing a new hunger crisis because of land grabbing, forced evictions and water diversion to create large-scale monoculture plantations of palm oil trees and sugar cane for biofuel.
In one such case in March last year, Guatemalan police and soldiers evicted more than 3000 indigenous people from their homes in Guatemala’s Polochic valley to make room for a large-scale plantation. Banned from their land, these 700 families are now facing severe malnutrition and high child mortality as a consequence of diarrhoea or fever.
Read more from Inter Press Service: http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/06/biofuels-and-hunger-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/
