This Thursday morning, March 3rd 2016, was stained with blood at the hands of the murderers who took Berta Cáceres’ life. Berta was a Honduran Indigenous leader who has been deeply involved in the protection of Indigenous land rights in Honduras, well known for her activism leading a campaign against the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam in the Gualcarque River, a sacred site for the Lenca people. It was a result of her work that the largest contractor of this dam at the international level, Sinohydro, pulled out of the process.
After many years of organizing in the face of repeated death threats and the assasinations of her colleagues, Cáceres herself was killed at her home in La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras. The attackers entered into her home at approximately 1:00 AM Thursday morning, informed Tomas Membreño, member of Commission of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) of which Berta was the Coordinator. Berta, a Lenca leader from Honduras, had spent many months in hiding, after receiving threats to her life over the years for her work accompanying movements that defended her community, in addition to suffering from political persecution, and multiple calls for her arrest. The international community had strongly condemned the threats to her life; Berta’s fight, together with COPINH and her community, was recognized with the highest recognition on an international scale for Environmental defenders with the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize. Berta had applied for and received Precautionary Measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, meaning that the government of Honduras was obligated to provide police protection. However, there was no police detail protecting her on the night of her death, reported The Guardian.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Vicky Tauli Corpuz recently met with Berta in Honduras during a country visit. “I condemn this dastardly act and I urge the Honduras authorities to investigate this case and bring the perpetrators to justice. I condole and deeply sympathize with Berta’s family, relatives and community. Such impunity is totally unacceptable and the State has to do something about this,” she commented.
Berta held the role of Coordinator of Council of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) and as a member of coordinating team of the National Platform of Social and Popular Movements of Honduras (PMSPH). She was a major contributor to Cultural Survival’s campaign work against the Patuca III Dam in La Moskitia in 2011, and had tirelessly documented the extensive human rights abuses experienced by her community and Indigenous Peoples across Honduras in order to bravely denounce these actions at the national and international level via reports to the United Nations. She was also active in leading protests against the 2009 US-backed coup d’etat against former president Manuel Zelaya, who has also condemned her murder: “The assasination of Indigenous leader Berta Cáceres removes all possibility of dialogue and the responsibility lies with current president Juan Hernandez,” said Zelaya in a statement this morning.
During protests against the construction of the Agua Zarca dam, Cáceres demonstrated her strength and courage in stating “Our people come face to face here with dignity, capacity, resistance, intelligence and ancient strength.” Berta leaves behind her four children and husband Salvador Zuñiga, Executive Committee member of the Council of Central American Indigenous Community Radio network.
“When a bright star of hope and power goes out, we grieve deeply because we know our pain and loss is much larger than ourselves and timeless over generations in our struggle. Berta Cáceres devoted her life to her people, to Indigenous people worldwide, and to life itself. Her murder is a criminal act of violence, is senseless, and a deliberate attack on what Berta stood for — the rights of Indigenous Peoples. It should be condemned at every level from the state to the international and the perpetrators brought to justice,” said Suzanne Benally, Executive Director of Cultural Survival
Cultural Survival sends our deepest condolences to her family, colleagues, and the entire Lenca community. Rest in power, Berta.
A short film discussing the nature of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement and its impact on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the treaty representing the bicultural relationship in Aotearoa New Zealand. Jane Kelsey, Hone Harawira, Marama Davidson and Margaret Mutu provide their insight on the matter and call on this generation to stand up for our rights.
For more on the threat of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement, see:
The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, if approved, would be the largest trade agreement in history involving 11 countries including the United States, Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Vicky Tauli-Corpuz explains that the TPP agreement is about liberalizing the trade and investment regime in order to allow for more fluidity when trading among countries. However, she shared her concern that in this agreement investor’s rights may be more protected than the rights of the Indigenous Peoples; the investment clause would trump social and environmental rights, including human rights.
“You cannot have a situation where investor’s rights are more protected than Indigenous rights,” she explained.
Ms. Tauli-Corpuz also used the example of Bolivia, where the government had listened and acted upon Indigenous protests against a Canadian mine on their lands, by attempting to cancel the concession. Bolivia was then sued by the Canadian corporation that owned the mine. The mining corporation won and the Bolivian government was left to pay millions of dollars to the company for lost profits. She noted that most developing countries lose in arbitration with corporations because they simply do not have the lawyers to support them. Corpuz warned, these are the types of situations that occur when investors are prioritized over the local and Indigenous citizens.
The TPP was negotiated in secret, and its text was only released via Wikileaks until it was already negotiated by trade ministers of the respective countries. According to Tauli Corpuz, this secrecy is a violation of Indigenous Peoples right to Free, Prior, Informed Consent on policies that may affect them.
“In situations where Indigenous Peoples have the right to Free, Prior, Informed Consent before any company comes to their community to invest, that kind of right has to be respected and that has to be stated and pursued by the countries who are hosting this investment,” she warned.
She urges for deeper transparency in trade deals like the TPP, so that Indigenous Peoples can be aware of the content of these trade agreements so that they can participate and decide whether or not to consent. In order to achieve this there must be a call to action to create a more participatory negotiation process rather than the exclusive and secretive one that has occurred. If the TPP is passed within each country’s legislature, it would deregulate social standards that are put in place and can take states themselves to court for attempting to protect social conducts such as protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The Special Rapporteur also recommends that extra attention be made to Exceptions section of the trade agreement. For example, specifically naming FPIC and Indigenous Peoples rights in the stipulations of how the the trade agreement would play out within each country. It is the responsibility of each country to identify and present exceptions so that they can be held accountable during arbitration panels. For example, New Zealand did manage to include an exception in TPP article 29.6 that references the rights of the Maori people, however activists have argued that the wording of the exception allows too many loopholes to provide legitimate protection.
On February 4th, 2016, the TPP was signed by trade ministers of 11 countries, in a formal ceremony in New Zealand. But the deal must still be approved within the legislatures of each country for it to be put in place: The TPP will not come into effect until a requisite number of original signatories ratify the agreement.
Maori leaders in New Zealand held massive protests against the signing ceremony, saying that they do not give their consent to the deal and that the it violates the Treaty of Waitangi and the 1835 Declaration of Independence of New Zealand. Kingi Taurua, a prominent Nga Puhi elder at Waitangi’s Te Tii Marae, has sent a formal notice of veto of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement to the embassies and trade departments of its proposed partner countries. They argued that the New Zealand government does not have “due authority” to sign the TPP without the agreement of Maori elders, “which [agreement] has not been given.”
In the United States, the next step is the drafting and consideration of a bill in Congress to implement the agreement, which will also serve as U.S. ratification of the international trade deal. Some anticipate this vote to take place after the 2016 elections in November.
Recent media coverage and spiraling public outrage over the water crisis in Flint, Michigan has completely eclipsed the ongoing environmental justice struggles of the Navajo. Even worse, the media continues to frame the situation in Flint as some sort of isolated incident. It is not. Rather, it is symptomatic of a much wider and deeper problem of environmental racism in the United States.
The history of uranium mining on Navajo (Diné) land is forever intertwined with the history of the military industrial complex. In 2002, the American Journal of Public Health ran an article entitled, “The History of Uranium Mining and the Navajo People.” Head investigators for the piece, Brugge and Gobel, framed the issue as a “tradeoff between national security and the environmental health of workers and communities.” The national history of mining for uranium ore originated in the late 1940’s when the United States decided that it was time to cut away its dependence on imported uranium. Over the next 40 years, some 4 million tons of uranium ore would be extracted from the Navajo’s territory, most of it fueling the Cold War nuclear arms race.
Situated by colonialist policies on the very margins of U.S. society, the Navajo didn’t have much choice but to seek work in the mines that started to appear following the discovery of uranium deposits on their territory. Over the years, more than 1300 uranium mines were established. When the Cold War came to an end, the mines were abandoned; but the Navajo’s struggle had just begun.
Back then, few Navajo spoke enough English to be informed about the inherent dangers of uranium exposure. The book Memories Come to Us in the Rain and the Wind: Oral Histories and Photographs of Navajo Uranium Miners and Their Families explains how the Navajo had no word for “radiation” and were cut off from more general public knowledge through language and educational barriers, and geography.
The Navajo began receiving federal health care during their confinement at Bosque Redondo in 1863. The Treaty of 1868 between the Navajos and the U.S. government was made in the good faith that the government – more specifically, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) – would take some responsibility in protecting the health of the Navajo nation. Instead, as noted in “White Man’s Medicine: The Navajo and Government Doctors, 1863-1955,” those pioneering the spirit of western medicine spent more time displacing traditional Navajo healers and knowledge banks, and much less time protecting Navajo public health. This obtuse, and ultimately short-sighted, attitude of disrespect towards Navajo healers began to shift in the late 1930’s; yet significant damage had already been done.
Founding director of the environmental cancer section of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Wilhelm C. Hueper, published a report in 1942 that tied radon gas exposure to higher incidence rates of lung cancer. He was careful to eliminate other occupational variables (like exposure to other toxins on the job) and potentially confounding, non-occupational variables (like smoking). After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was made aware of his findings, Hueper was prohibited from speaking in public about his research; and he was reportedly even barred from traveling west of the Mississippi – lest he leak any information to at-risk populations like the Navajo.
In 1950, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) began to study the relationship between the toxins from uranium mining and lung cancer; however, they failed to properly disseminate their findings to the Navajo population. They also failed to properly acquire informed consent from the Navajos involved in the studies, which would have required informing them of previously identified and/or suspected health risks associated with working in or living near the mines. In 1955, the federal responsibility and role in Navajo healthcare was transferred from the BIA to the USPHS.
In the 1960’s, as the incidence rates of lung cancer began to climb, Navajos began to organize. A group of Navajo widows gathered together to discuss the deaths of their miner husbands; this grew into a movement steeped in science and politics that eventually brought about the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) in 1999.
Cut to the present day. According to the US EPA, more than 500 of the existing 1300 abandoned uranium mines (AUM) on Navajo lands exhibit elevated levels of radiation.
Navajo abandoned uranium mines gamma radiation measurements and priority mines. US EPA
The Los Angeles Times gave us a sense of the risk in 1986. Thomas Payne, an environmental health officer from Indian Health Services, accompanied by a National Park Service ranger, took water samples from 48 sites in Navajo territory. The group of samples showed uranium levels in wells as high as 139 picocuries per liter. Levels In abandoned pits were far more dangerous, sometimes exceeding 4,000 picocuries. The EPA limit for safe drinking water is 20 picocuries per liter.
This unresolved plague of radiation is compounded by pollution from coal mines and a coal-fired power plant that manifests at an even more systemic level; the entire Navajo water supply is currently tainted with industry toxins.
Recent media coverage and spiraling public outrage over the water crisis in Flint, Michigan has completely eclipsed the ongoing environmental justice struggles of the Navajo. Even worse, the media continues to frame the situation in Flint as some sort of isolated incident.
Madeline Stano, attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, assessed the situation for the San Diego Free Press, commenting, “Unfortunately, Flint’s water scandal is a symptom of a much larger disease. It’s far from an isolated incidence, in the history of Michigan itself and in the country writ large.”
While many environmental movements are fighting to establish proper regulation of pollutants at state, federal, and even international levels, these four cases are representative of a pervasive, environmental racism that stacks up against communities like the Navajo and prevents them from receiving equal protection under existing regulations and policies.
Despite the common thread among these cases, the wave of righteous indignation over the ongoing tragedy in Flint has yet to reach the Navajo Nation, the Mohawk community of Akwesasne, the Yakama Nation – or the many other Indigenous communities across the United States that continue to endure various toxic legacies in relative silence.
Current public outcry may be a harbinger, however, of an environmental justice movement ready to galvanize itself towards a higher calling, one that includes all peoples across the United States, and truly shares the ongoing, collective environmental victories with all communities of color.
A new report published by Survival International reveals that the appalling suicide rate among the indigenous Guarani Kaiowá people of southern Brazil is the highest in the world.
The rate of self-inflicted deaths within the tribe is 34 times the Brazilian national average, and statistically the highest among any society anywhere on earth. Suicide rates among many other indigenous peoples such as Aboriginal Australians and Native Americans in Alaska also remain exceptionally high. This can be viewed as the inevitable result of the historical and continuing theft of their land and of “development” being forced upon them.
The report, “Progress can Kill,” exposes the devastating consequences of loss of land and autonomy on tribal peoples. As well as the shockingly high suicide rates among tribes, it also reveals high rates of alcoholism, obesity, depression and other health problems.
Particularly striking statistics include the sky-rocketing rates of HIV infection in West Papua, which increased from almost no cases in 2000 to over 10,000 by 2015, and the rate of infant mortality among Aboriginal Australians – twice that in wider Australian society. In large parts of the world, poor nutrition continues to cause further problems, such as malnutrition for Guarani children in Brazil, who are forced to live on roadsides, and obesity for many Native Americans, for whom junk food is the only viable option.
Roy Sesana of the Botswana Bushmen, forcibly evicted from their land in 2002, said: “What kind of development is this when the people lead shorter lives than before? They catch HIV/AIDS. Our children are beaten in school and won’t go. Some become prostitutes. We are not allowed to hunt. They fight because they are bored and get drunk. They are starting to commit suicide. We never saw this before. Is this ‘development?’”
Olimpio, of the Guajajara tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, said: “We are against the type of development the government is proposing. I think some non-Indians’ idea of ‘progress’ is crazy! They come with these aggressive ideas of progress and impose them on us, human beings, especially on indigenous peoples who are the most oppressed of all. For us, this is not progress at all.”
All of these statistics demonstrate the fatal consequences of forcing change on tribal societies in the name of “progress” and “development.” In many cases, tribes have been forced to move away from abundant and sustainable food sources and a sure source of identity in favour of poverty and marginalization on the fringes of mainstream society. Tragic repercussions of such forced change can continue even several generations down the line.
Around the world, tribes continue to fight for the recognition of their right to live on their lands in peace. Where this right has been respected or restored, tribes flourish. For example after the creation of an indigenous reserve in the northern Amazon in 1992, medical teams worked with tribal shamans and together they halved the mortality rate among the Yanomami Indians. Likewise, the Jarawa In India live on their ancestral lands and enjoy what has been called a “life of opulence.” Nutrionists rate their diet as “optimum.”
For more information you can download Survival’s new short report, “Progress can kill,” and a more in-depth paper for those wanting to know more.
Around the world development is robbing tribal people of their land, self-sufficiency and pride and leaving them with nothing. Watch this short, satirical film, written by Oren Ginzburg and narrated by actor and comedian David Mitchell, which tells the story of how tribal peoples are being destroyed in the name of “development.”
Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rights, is calling for the United Nations to enforce better protection of tribal land rights and to call on governments to uphold their commitments to their indigenous peoples.
On December 28, 2015 Ethiopia’s Agricultural Ministry revoked their contract with Karuturi Global Limited, an Indian company who in 2010 won a concession for 100,000 hectares of land to be developed for industrial agriculture for export in the Gambella region of southern Ethiopia, home to the Indigenous Anuak, Mezenger, Nuer, Opo, and Komo peoples. The Agricultural Ministry’s land investment agency cancelled the concession on the grounds that by 2012 Karuturi had developed only 1,200 hectares of land within the initial two year period of the contract.
Since 2013 the company began spiraling out of control, when it was found guilty of tax evasion in in a similar land grab venture in Kenya, and the following year had its operations was taken over by Stanbic Bank.
Karaturi’s Managing Director Sai Ramakrishna has challenged the Agricultural Ministry’s project termination in Ethiopia, telling Bloomberg Business, “I don’t recognize this cancellation,” and is seeking arbitration. If international arbitration is granted, Karuturi will advocate for the continuation of the company’s commercial agriculture plan. Ethiopian officials have dismissed their claims.
Karuturi Global’s project failure resembles that of many foreign investors who have purchased land under the Ethiopian government’s push to lease Indigenous lands to foreign investors, in what many term “land grabbing.” According to Bloomberg, none of these farms in Ethiopia have reported any success in exporting crops.
Ethiopia’s land leasing plans were described as a roadmap to development. Called “villagisation,” the plan involved removing the Indigenous Peoples who sustain themselves from their lands practising farming, hunting, gathering, and pastoralism, and grouping them into established villages, with the idea that the land would be used to produce large scale industrial agriculture to sustain the population’s food needs. Jobs would be created, turning Indigenous Peoples into wage workers who could then buy foods. But Karaturi’s plans were different–aiming to export grains for sale abroad rather than selling them locally, despite Ethiopia’s ban on the export of cereal crops.
The socio-economic transformation promised by the regional government was never realized. Rather, villagisation has meant the forced removal of Indigenous Peoples from their ancestral lands and the creation of an aid-dependant food source. Obang Metho, Anuak human rights activist from Gambella, explained in a video with local media Ethiopian Satellite Television, “This was not empty land. People have been living on this land for generations. When I grew up we didn’t have an office job to earn wages, people depend on land. Our supermarket is going to the field. The field was our bank. When you take away our lands, you are taking away our livelihood, our futures.”
An aerial view of the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya where many Anuak people turned to for shelter after forced removal from Gambella. Photograph taken on November 1, 2011 by Oxfam International
On a morning in late 2010 the Anuak peoples living in the province of Gambella were met by regional government officials and soldiers. Without their knowledge or consent the Ethiopian government had sold an estimated 42% of Anuak land to foreign investors. The Anuak people were forced to leave their only known livelihoods, including essential food sources, and move to government sponsored “villages” which soon turned into refugee camps. In 2012, Human Rights Watch published its report, “’Waiting Here for Death’ Forced Displacement and “Villagization” in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region” documenting the “forcible moving tens of thousands of indigenous people in the western Gambella region from their homes to new villages under a ‘villagization’ program.”
“In their old village there was a school under a mango tree. In the new village, donor money had paid for a new school building. The children, however, were too hungry to attend, roaming instead in the forest looking for food… but now the government can show the world there is a ‘school’” –Anuak refugee displaced to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya (from The Guardian’s article, Ethiopia’s rights abuses ‘being ignored by US and UK aid agencies’.)
Since their displacement in 2010 the Anuak have become refugees – many having turned to the crowded refugee camps in South Sudan and Kenya. As a result of their forced displacement many of the Anuak, and other Indigenous Peoples of the southwest, have endured scores of human rights violations including documented cases of rape, torture, extrajudicial imprisonment and famine, while these conditions were ignored by donor agencies USAID and DfiD.
Now, Ethiopia, USAID and Dfid have a chance to right their wrongs, and return the lands to the Indigenous Peoples turned into development refugees. But the Agriculture Ministry has said that the rest of the land will return to a “land bank” for future re-investment.
The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples clearly states in Article 28.1
Indigenous peoples have the right to redress, by means that can include restitution or, when this is not possible, just, fair and equitable compensation, for the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used, and which have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their free, prior and informed consent.
For the survival of the Indigenous Peoples of Gambella, International aid agencies must take an active role to bring these displaced communities access to lands and a means of sustainable livelihoods.
