Intercontinental Cry has been reporting for almost exactly two years now on the escalating state-sponsored violence in Nicaragua, while many otherwise informed people remained stubbornly, loyally, and piously in denial – clinging to the romantic Sandinista, anti-imperialist, revolutionary narrative… It’s charming; it really is. And, that’s why it has become so dangerous.
The recent mass uprising in Nicaragua is youth-led with decentralized leadership, much like the ‘Occupy Movement’ to the north – and, it has received some of the same criticism of the Occupy Movement regarding the lack of organized leadership. Yet, who is to blame a generation who grew up under a growing dictatorship for wanting their movement to be proactively more egalitarian, in practice not just propaganda?
Many of the original Sandinista fighters are the ones who are losing their retirement pensions right now; there is a broad consensus that the Ortega-Murrillo family dynasty does not embody the original Sandinista values and ideologies.
The mass current mobilization has even been termed a ‘Nicaraguan Spring’ – which fully transcends any standard dichotomy between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. It is challenging not just a dictatorship, but entrenched ideas about an ideologue figurehead who has concentrated power within his personal family to dangerous extremes and has support networks throughout the ‘pink tide’ socialist countries of Latin America as well as with Russia, and possibly even China and Iran1.
The renewed imperialist presence of Russia in Nicaragua – which is impossible to neatly abstract in terms of its impact on the current political climate – poses increased threats as well. Russia has been participating in an ongoing process to remilitarize Nicaragua; and, such activity has long been recognized by regional analysts as potential preparation for this current mass dissent. How Russia’s role there will evolve in this context is somewhat worrisome and hard to predict. Their alliance with the otherwise impoverished country is more important to them than might be assumed.
Hence, Putin has in recent years: initiated a new ‘drug war’ on the ground there; provided ‘security’ for developments in President Daniel Ortega’s infamous plans to build an inter-oceanic canal with the help of a Chinese billionaire; and, has installed a secretive ‘surveillance center’ with satellite capabilities to monitor activity in almost all – if not all – of the Americas. Even people who live and work in the surrounding area of the center in Nicaragua do not seem to understand its true or full purpose.
At risk of burying the lede, it was important to consolidate some context for the Indigenous struggles in Moskitia (an autonomous, pluri-ethnic region which Nicaragua has a complicated relationship with…to put it lightly) which have been simmering at a slower, but consistently oppressive and violent, burn for years now.
This ‘complicated relationship’ included recent accusations that the Nicaraguan government willfully allowed a large chunk of traditional Indigenous (and uniquely biodiverse) territory of tropical rainforest to burn without proper response. The Nicaraguan government turned down help from neighboring Costa Rica to put out the massive forest fire. Many attributed this to a continuance of their longstanding efforts to expand the agricultural frontier into the autonomous Indigenous territory which is home to the second largest tropical rainforest in the Western Hemisphere – considered the ‘lungs of Central America’.
The impact of the loss of this rainforest cannot be understated. And, amid the chaos surrounding the massive fire, there were reports of roads being built into previously respected, and lawfully protected Indigenous Rama territory, which would in the future further facilitate resource extraction activity on their land.
How does all this tie into state propaganda about mental health?
To begin unpacking that, in February of 2018, the pan-South American socialist state-run, media outlet, TeleSUR, ran an article claiming that a “mysterious madness was crippling” Indigenous Peoples in this region where Sandinista forces have been trying to nationalize and gain control of the vast natural resources for decades.
The article – and its premise – was beyond tacky, especially considering the deep and nuanced political undertones it was attempting to manipulate.
According to TeleSUR, “Nicaraguan anthropologists insist traditional techniques are best to treat the ‘grisi siknis’ outbreak; and, “Western medicinal treatments” cannot cure it.
At first blush, it all may sound really noble and anti-imperialist…until one realizes they are, on one point, attempting to displace the region and Peoples’ historic and autonomous relationship with the United States – which was advocated for by the late (AIM) American Indian Movement leader, Russell Means.
As recently as 2013, Mayanga and Miskito Peoples in the region called on President Barack Obama for support in their fight to preserve their ancestral territories and the crucially biodiverse tropical rainforest.
During the Contra Wars, the U.S. also provided limited support to the Miskito, who were defending their ancestral territory from the Sandinista (and in some instances fleeing to refugee camps in Honduras – a practice which has unfortunately resumed in recent years and is perhaps escalating conflicts now – according to claims in another recent TeleSUR article which could not be independently verified — with Honduran authorities).
As Means put it, here was a chance for the U.S. government to: “For the first time in its history…ally itself with an Indian cause”.
Back to the recent propaganda of note…While it implies on the surface that the Nicaraguan state is validating a traditional Indigenous healing approach where there has been an ‘outbreak of insanity’… if one reads further, the article doesn’t actually concede that traditional medicine – as it is implemented by traditional regional healers – is wholly sufficient, either…
According to the article, it took a Nicaraguan physician who had studied Indigenous cures, for it to be properly treated – by him, of course.
A ‘western psychologist’, interestingly, might diagnose the symptoms of ‘grisi siknis’ as a unique form of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). The Indigenous Peoples of the region have surely endured more than their share of trauma at the hands of the now ruling FSLN party in recent decades – which, again, has come to a significant head in the past month of country-wide unrest.
With this in mind, it becomes apparent there is a form of ‘gaslighting’ (manipulative psychological abuse which Psychology Todaydescribes as a tool of dictators) happening in this state-sponsored propaganda.
In Moskitia, ‘grisi siknis’ is recognized by traditional healers as a behavioral contagion limited to the isolated communities in the region. The communities have been long isolated as they endured many forms of ongoing attacks; and, while the manifestation of a unique set of post-traumatic stress symptoms – or, what is perhaps better described as an impact of ongoing traumatic stress – can be viewed in either more clinical or more holistic terms, if one’s worldview encompassed the overall phenomenon in purely ‘supernatural’ terms (as at least some Indigenous Miskito Indigenous healers do), then through this lens it would take on an optic of all-out spiritual warfare. And for many Miskito, it does.
Bullet holes from an assault rifle attack on the home of the Indigenous Miskito Elder, pictured above. Colonos arrive in the territories with sophisticated weaponry which many Miskito claim to bear serial numbers traceable to the Nicaraguan government. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
It is disturbing to ponder how many people may have been manipulated to internalize this grotesque attempt at ‘gaslighting’ the Miskito Peoples. The article attempts to confer to the masses that ‘collective madness’ is just somehow ‘common’ among this particular Indigenous group.
‘This particular Indigenous group’ – the Miskito – just also happen to be the most politically organized, out of all other Indigenous or other ethnic groups in the pluri-ethnic autonomous region of Moskitia, or elsewhere in Nicaragua.
Their political party, YATAMA – which is an acronym which translates into English as ‘Sons of Mother Earth’ – is one of the only remaining strongholds of opposition to the FSLN in that region (which some have estimated holds up to or above 80% of the colonial borders of Nicaragua’s remaining natural resources, which the region’s Indigenous Peoples have stewarded and protected during their long-standing tenure there).
While it is true that symptoms of the culturally specific designated mental illness include panic and are often accompanied by acts (or delusional attempted acts) of violence – more specifically, they are often attempts at defense from an unseen attacker. What the article doesn’t say is that this behavior is being exhibited in a community that has long suffered ‘invisible’ (to the rest of the country and world) acts of violence from settler and state forces.
A bullet grazed right over the head of the Indigenous Miskito elder pictured above during the attack from Colonos in 2015. The attackers promised to return and inflict more deadly violence if they did not vacate their lands and home. (Photo: Courtney Parker 2016)
In this manner, the propaganda present in the TeleSUR article was also an attempt to legitimize the ongoing colonization efforts from settlers known as ‘Colonos’ (which translates simply from Spanish to ‘colonizers’) who arrive from the country’s interior regions or the Pacific coast. In recent years, these armed intruders have placed the frontier areas under a violent siege, sometimes claiming illegal land deeds – even though all property in Moskitia is communal – to the legally autonomous territories.
The framing of this mental health issue — which is considered unique to Miskito communities — deflects attention from the intolerable acts of violence the settlers routinely commit. It is further, an ostensibly blatant attempt at collective ‘victim blaming’.
It seems painfully obvious that the news outlet, which receives direct fiscal support from the Nicaraguan state, is trying to delegitimize the most politically powerful group of Indigenous Peoples – who are, again, the main challenge to the FSLN dictatorship in the region – who have no choice but to fight back against the heavily armed intruders to protect their families, communities, and sacred, ancestral (and legal) territories, and portray them as (or worse, convince them they are) ‘crazy’ and/or ‘insanely and unreasonably violent’.
A young Miskito girl in a frontier community stands in front of a group of community defenders who have been forced to take up primitive, make-shift weapons as they attempt to defend their families, land, culture, and the carbon-mitigating rainforest. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
IC spoke with a family who had recently fled the frontier community of Santa Clara while in Bilwi, where they had recently been displaced to, in 2016. They described how hard it was to make a living and feed their family in the more urban area of Bilwi (also known as Puerto Cabezas).
While Bilwi is also home to a more ‘urbanized’ – or ‘urban-acclimated’ – population of Miskito Peoples, the refugees from the frontier are used to being able to live off the land and provide for their own food and shelter from it. Some individuals in the incoming waves of refugees have never used money; many children arrive without shoes; and, numerous children and adults speak only their Native tongue and no, or limited, Spanish.
Prior to the mass, country-wide uprising, there was a huge shake-up (which IC also covered) and outright revolt surrounding charges of electoral fraud waged on the FSLN after recent elections in Moskitia. One IC contributor recently documented the claims through independent sources. Investigations into the full extent of the fraud and activities amounting to voter suppression are still underway.
During this time, one of the only Miskito-speaking media outlets – the YATAMA political party’s community radio station – was burned to the ground by ‘Sandinista youth gangs’.
These such ‘gangs’ are now being recognized as state-sponsored paramilitaries by Nicaraguan analysts, as their violent and focused (it is said, directed) activities have become more widely scrutinized while they continue to inflict terror upon expanded regions across Nicaragua at this time.
For now, it is important that as the international human rights bodies are looking to Nicaragua – finally – and seeing the true nature of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship… that they be reminded of the still marginalized struggle of the Indigenous Peoples and other ethnic groups residing in Moskitia, in the Northern Caribbean coastal area.
It was here that the journalist, Angel Eduardo Gahona, was shot in the head while live-streaming the country-wide protests in Bluefields, Moskitia. The incident made international news, but with no recognition of how this shocking act of violence, amidst the recent gross abuses of government force, occurred in the traditionally Indigenous-led, pluri-ethnic, autonomous region which has a name of its own: La Moskitia2.
On a final and sobering note, two men have been arrested and transported to the capital city of Managua – charged with the assassination of Gahona. They are two Creole men, native to Moskitia, named Brandon Lovo and Glen Slate.
According to the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the victim’s own family is protesting this accusation and related charges. Members of the family have claimed the only people within range to shoot Gahona that night were Nicaraguan militarized state police – who had recently trumped up their presence in the region following the unrest after the fraudulent election, even before the countrywide protests commenced.
Juan Gahona told the Knight Center:
“PERSONALLY, I RULE OUT ANY POSSIBILITY I CAN LINK THESE GUYS TO ANGEL’S MURDER. WHY DO THEY HAVE TO TAKE THEM TO MANAGUA? THE CERTAIN THING IS THAT THEY TRANSFER THEM, TORTURE THEM […] AND MAKE THEM SAY THINGS THAT AREN’T, OUT OF FEAR, BECAUSE OF THREATS”.
Amnesty International released a new report on another massive outbreak of deadly violence from government forces and paramilitaries (as Nicaraguan analysts have come to call some pro-government mobs) on student protesters, Monday, May 29, 2018. Find their latest assessment of the situation, here.
1 Iran at one point expressed interest in garnering a stake in the Nicaraguan government’s canal plans as they were being facilitated by a Chinese billionaire, which was – tellingly – to contain no treaty of neutrality or ‘maritime peace clause’ as is central to activity which may take place within the Panama Canal.
2 Traditional linguists insist it is more proper to spell it as ‘La Muskitia’, on grounds that there was no ‘o’ sound in the most ancient version of the Native tongue, but the above spelling has been largely embraced by its inhabitants.
The Tabasará River, one of the largest in Panama and the source of life for the indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé people, was emptied to carry out maintenance work on the Barro Blanco Hydroelectric Dam last week, leaving thousands and thousands of the more than 30 varieties of fish and crustaceans to perish in the mud.
Ricardo Miranda, general coordinator of the 10 de Abril Movement representing the affected communities, standing in the mud and rubble just upstream of the dam, picked up a half-meter-long catfish, holding it up for the camera.
“I would like to take the opportunity to denounce the Generadora del Istmo SA (GENISA), the owner of the Barro Blanco Project,” he told a local cameraman who uploaded it to YouTube. “I also denounce the FMO Bank of the Netherlands and the DEG Bank of Germany, for financing a project like this, which has caused irreversible damage to the environment.”
Initial reports of the death of fish and photos that were sent last week from the Ngäbe community of Kiad were initially singled out as false, Miranda said in a telephone interview on Thursday.The Ministry of the Environment of Panama, MiAmbiente, sent personnel to investigate the death of fish on Sunday, May 13. The agency confirmed in a press release that there had been a fish die-off and that the company had reported the need to lower the water level for maintenance work.
The inspectors of MiAmbiente see the devastation, apparently from the platform of the dam. (Ministry of the Environment)
Miranda, who grew up in the Tabasará River along with his family, now lives on the other side of the Ngäbe-Buglé district, but went to the river as soon as he heard the news. Upon arrival he found thousands of fish dying in the sun. Coyotes ate the dying fish and one person picked up some to carry. The river had been virtually emptied, leaving the riparian population exposed to a vast expanse of mud, according to Miranda, who observed only a few puddles of muddy water just above the dam.
MiAmbiente promised in its press release on Monday that “the surveillance of the site will be maintained in order to guarantee compliance with the regulations that apply to these events and that actions have been taken to guarantee the normal development of natural resources in the zone.”
Five Ngäbe-Buglé communities live along the river and have fought constantly against the dam since it was proposed for the first time. When the river flooded, it destroyed its food forest and the cocoa and coffee crops it depended on for sustenance. Thick mosquito clouds, previously unknown in the area, became common. Fishing became much more difficult, but it was still possible. Now, with the death of fish, they are left without a source of protein, said Miranda. In addition, the river, which also depend on water, is surrounded by 18 hectares of deep mud, and reaching the river to cross to the nearest town has become an almost impossible situation.
The residents of the Ngäbe community of Kiad observe the fish that die in the river in front of their homes. The access to the river has become a daily calvary for the community, which must cross it to leave their village. (Photo: Movement 10 April)
The government offered to pay the communities to relocate, but the Kiad community in particular has refused to accept – on the one hand for its principles, but on the other hand because the adjacent area and the community itself is a sacred site, which It houses several collections of prehistoric petroglyphs that have been the site of ceremonial meetings where the Ngäbe-Buglé people have traditionally connected with their ancestors.
“Obviously when you see this situation, you feel a very great impotence because all this is what we warned,” said Miranda, dismayed. “Then when we enter and see an ecological disaster at the mercy of the presence of the government and a company whose only interest is to profit, causing irreversible damage and death, both to animals and people, because here it is attempting against the feeding of the same inhabitants of the communities that live on this. ”
The Ngäbe leader, Weni Bagama, observes the damage to her community of Kiad and its surroundings by the floods caused by the Barro Blanco dam in February 2017. (Photo: Tracy L. Barnett)
The emptying of the river occurred in the final days of the public comment period for the draft report of the Environmental and Social Compliance Unit (SECU) established to monitor activities related to UNDP. The researchers concluded that UNDP violated its own protocols in the dialogue process that aimed to defuse the conflict surrounding the Barro Blanco dam. The projects (mainly a series of round tables held in 2015 and 2016 and a program to support reforms within the main government agency in charge of the Barro Blanco project) were financed at a cost of more than $ 66 million dollars.
The report was a response to the formal complaint filed on August 22, 2017 by the April 10 Movement, which represents the communities affected by the project. A final report will be issued when receiving and analyzing public comments.
Residents of the affected community of Kiad, one of the five indigenous communities of Ngäbe Buglé inundated by the dam, reviewed the report on their mobile phones from the muddy bank of their sacred Tabasará river. Since the floodgates were closed more than a year ago and destroyed the agricultural base of the community and many homes, residents have had great problems sustaining life.
“We have already read the report and, in general terms, we agree,” said one of the leaders of the April 10 Movement, Adelaida Miranda (Weni Bagama, by her name Ngäbe). “The report makes analysis completely on how the processes went, and investigated. That report is not only an office report but those people came to the area and did interviews, they saw the situation of the reservoir and then they issued that in the report. We are satisfied, of course this does not solve everything, but at least we agree where SECU admits that the United Nations did not fulfill the role it had to play. ”
The results of the draft SECU report included the following:
• The UNDP Country Office in Panama did not apply the required environmental and social assessment procedures to the projects in question.
• UNDP did not prepare a stakeholder analysis and participation plan before the roundtable, as required for UNDP commitments to Indigenous Peoples – commitments that present moderate (and probably significant) risks to communities.
• UNDP did not comply with the due diligence, transparency, consultation / consent and rights of indigenous peoples requirements after the Roundtable Dialogue concluded around June 2015. UNDP, for example, did not ensure consistency with the warnings and conclusions of the UN Special Rapporteur. including warnings that inadequate consultation and consent processes were the source of most of the problems related to the respect and protection of indigenous rights, and the necessary measures to guarantee respect for those rights.
Dr. Donaldo Sousa, president of the Association for Environmental Rights in Panama City, said that the draft report seems to validate the demand presented by his association in 2016, against all those involved in the Barro Blanco hydroelectric project, including the company, government and non-government officials such as UNDP, which was the first and only criminal complaint against a hydroelectric dam project in Panama to date.
“This report clearly demonstrates that this complaint that we introduced was well founded and this project should have been suspended as a precautionary measure because of the damage it was going to cause, and they did not do so. The problem was that he had the support of international organizations as important as UNDP, it is logical that there is an element that has been decisive in this case; but corruption and impunity that exists in this case has also been decisive. And the economic interests that have been put forward once more, destroying the environment and above all impacting in a violent way the communities that live there. ”
For Weni Bagama and her family, each day has become an odyssey, but they have no intention of giving up.
“We are still fighting,” said Bagama. “We ask the United Nations for an apology and we also ask the national authority to cancel that project, because right now we are walking around here seeing the disaster that has caused the emptying …. We have not waived the cancellation of that project. We are still fighting, because the fight is not over. ”
Ngäbe leader Weni Bagama (right) was among those arrested during protests at the Barro Blanco dam. (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)
For radical feminists, gender is understood as not merely a subjective internal sense of self; patriarchal gender norms are a product of culture, imposed on people and limiting everyone’s humanity.
I am routinely described as cisgender (defined as people whose internal sense of gender identity matches their biological sex). Because I have critiqued the ideology of the transgender movement, I also am often labeled a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). But neither term is accurate — I don’t self-identify as cisgender or as exclusionary.
Instead, I identify as an adult male who rejects the rigid, repressive, and reactionary gender norms of patriarchy, and I believe that radical feminism offers the most compelling analysis of a patriarchal sex/gender system. The feminist critique I embrace is not an attack on, nor an exclusion of, anyone who suffers from gender dysphoria or identifies as transgender, but rather offers an alternative framework for understanding patriarchy’s sex/gender system and challenging those patriarchal gender norms.
I used “patriarchy/patriarchal” four times in the last paragraph for emphasis: From a radical feminist perspective, nothing in sex/gender politics makes sense except in the light of patriarchy. (I borrow that formulation from the late evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”)
“Patriarchy,” from Greek meaning “rule of the father,” can be narrowly understood as the organization of a human community (from a family to a larger society) that gives a male ruler dominance over other men, and overall gives men control over women. More generally, the term marks various systems of institutionalized male dominance.
In her 1986 book, The Creation of Patriarchy, the late historian Gerda Lerner defined patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in the society in general.” Patriarchy implies, she continued, “that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources.” The specific forms patriarchy takes differ depending on time and place, “but the essence remains: some men control property and hold power over other men and over most women; men or male-dominated institutions control the sexuality and reproduction of females; most of the powerful institutions in society are dominated by men.”
In today’s world, patriarchy comes in forms both deeply conservative (such as Saudi Arabia) and superficially liberal (the United States), and the laws and customs of patriarchal societies vary. But at the core of patriarchy is men’s claim to control — sometimes even to own—women’s reproductive power and sexuality. In patriarchy, men make claims on, and about, women’s bodies that are at the core of assigning women lesser value in society.
Radical feminists, therefore, focus on the fight for women’s reproductive rights, and against men’s violence and sexual exploitation of women. As feminists from various traditions have long argued, it’s crucial to distinguish between biological sex categories and cultural gender norms.
There are three categories of biological human sex: male, female, and intersex. The vast majority of humans are born with male or female reproductive systems, secondary sexual characteristics, and chromosomal structure, and there is a small segment (the size of this category would depend on what degree of ambiguity is used to mark the category) born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit the definitions of female or male — anomalies of sex chromosomes, gonads, and/or anatomic sex. People born intersex, a biological reality, typically don’t identify as transgender.
Beyond “sex” is “gender” (the non-biological meaning societies create out of sex differences). Gender plays out in a variety of ways, including gender roles (assigning males and females to different social, political, or economic roles); gender norms (expecting males and females to comply with different norms of behavior and appearance); and gendered traits and virtues (assuming that males and females will be intellectually, emotionally, or morally different from each other).
In short: Sex is a question of biologically determined male and female, gender of socially determined masculinity and femininity.
The dominant conception of masculinity in U.S. culture asserts that men are naturally competitive and aggressive, and that being a “real man” means struggling for control, conquest, and domination. A man looks at the world, sees what he wants, and takes it. This is sometimes labeled “toxic masculinity,” which implies it is an aberration from some “normal” masculinity. But this understanding of masculinity-as-seeking-dominance is the default setting for most males growing up in patriarchy, especially through the glorification of aggression in the military, sports, and business.
All that definitional work is necessary to explain why I am not cisgender. As a male human, this patriarchal conception of masculinity is not my “chosen” identity, nor do I believe it is my fate. As a short, skinny, effeminate child — when I show people my church confirmation picture taken at age 14, they often assume it is a photo of a much younger girl — I never felt very masculine. As an adult with feminist politics, I reject and struggle to overcome the masculinity norms in patriarchy. If we were someday to transcend patriarchy, would I feel more “like a man”? That would depend on how the term was defined, but in the world in which I live, I refuse to embrace the patriarchal gender identity handed to me, a position I defend in a recent book, The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men.
So, I’m not cisgender and I’m not transgender. I am not gender fluid, non-binary, or multi-gender. I self-identify as an adult biological XY male who rejects patriarchal gender norms and works from a radical feminist perspective to eliminate patriarchy, primarily through a critique of patriarchal norms in contemporary pornography.
For radical feminists, gender is understood as not merely a subjective internal sense of self; patriarchal gender norms are a product of culture, imposed on people and limiting everyone’s humanity. In such a political project, no one who wants to challenge patriarchy is excluded. Anyone who refuses to conform to patriarchal gender norms is welcome. Challenging patriarchy’s claims about how “normal” males and females should think/feel/act is encouraged.
But in such a project, it is necessary to name accurately the world and understand patriarchy. So, radical feminists continue to distinguish between biological sex and cultural gender, arguing that sex is a biological binary (we are a sexually dimorphic species) and gender is socially created hierarchy (in patriarchy).
There has been uncivil conduct on all sides of this debate, but it is only radical feminists who are routinely told that their position is hateful and that they should be excluded from the conversation. This has happened to me on occasion (including a speaking invitation rescinded after complaints to the event’s organizers, and protesters at another event attempting to shout me down), although radical feminist women are targeted much more intensely and often.
The most curious thing about my experience is that people rarely respond to the specifics of what I have written and instead simply denounce me, asserting that my arguments are outside the bounds of appropriate dialogue and need not be addressed. Often the denunciations imply that either I do not care about the very real concerns of transgender people regarding mental health, suicide, and violence, or that by making my arguments I actually am contributing to the violence against transgender people. I have been told that opponents of the transgender movement’s policy goals are simply bigots.
But there are important policy questions that are not resolved so simply, such as rules for participation in girls’ and women’s athletics; how to assign scholarships in women’s colleges; public financing for surgery that destroys healthy tissue; and the use of potentially dangerous hormone/drug therapies, especially for children. In Texas, where I live, the debate has focused on access to bathrooms and sex-segregated changing facilities, and the serious challenges raised by girls and women — concerns about privacy and how ambiguity in who has access increases the possibility of assault by non-transgender predators — have been dismissed as irrelevant.
As I always remind my students, reasonable people can and often do disagree, but reasonable conversation is difficult if we cannot agree on basic definitions of sex/gender and if those with a radical feminist analysis are labeled bigots and marginalized.
After four years of writing about this subject, I invite that conversation, and have been fortunate to have it with some in the transgender movement. But I challenge, firmly but politely, anyone who describes me as cisgender or calls me a TERF.
Leader of the Shipibo-konibo community, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, was 81 years old when she was shot in the chest and murdered. The principal suspect, Canadian Paul Woodroffe, died a few hours later.
The leader, practitioner of traditional medicine and defender of the Peruvian Amazon, Olivia Arévalo Lomas, of Shipibo-konibo ethnicity, was 81 years old when she was murdered last Thursday by two 380 calibre shots to the chest.
The main suspect, Canadian Paul Woodroffe died shortly after: a group of community members dragged him through the streets and beat him to death.
Olivia was a known shaman of Victoria Gracia, an intercultural settlement in the district of Yarinacocha. “Her death is an aggression against the entire Shipibo community. She was the living memory of her people” explained Juan Carlos Ruíz Molleda, coordinator of the department of indigenous communities and constitutional litigation of the NGO Institute of Legal Defence.
THE DAY THAT THEY MURDERED OLIVIA, ANOTHER WOMAN FROM THE SHIPIBO COMMUNITY, MAGDALENA FLORES AGUSTÍN, RECEIVED AN ANONYMOUS ENVELOPE AT HER HOME. INSIDE THERE WERE TWO BULLETS AND A LETTER DIRECTED TO HER AND HER HUSBAND.
It was not only members of her own Shipibo community, a village of more than 35,000 people that inhabit the amazon rainforest of Peru that turned to the guardian. She also attended to dozens of tourists who sailed for more than 15 hours down the river Ucayali to cure themselves of illnesses and to treat addictions.
“She was a grandmother who worked with medicinal plants”, Wilder Muñoz Díaz told Cosecha Roja, a traditional Shipibo doctor from a nearby community that shared healing ceremonies with Olivia. “It was very painful for us finding about her death”, he added.
Despite the main leads regarding the crime having discarded the possibility it might have been a political crime, indigenous communities have remained on alert.
The murder of the Amazonian guardian occurred in a context of territorial conflict between the Shipibo community and companies that desire to take over their land to cultivate palm oil.
The exploitation of the Peruvian amazon “affects the subsistence” of every community within the region explains Ruíz Molleda. They contaminate rivers where people wash themselves and fish, and they destroy the land in which the animals they hunt live.
In the past few years, around 6000 hectares of rainforest were deforested by companies who were operating illegally.
“The communities don’t want to sell their lands and that’s when hitmen start appearing”, according to Ruíz Molleda. In 2013 Mauro Pío Peña, historic leader of the Ashaninka community, was murdered by two hitmen.
The following year, Edwin Chota Valera, Leoncio Quintisima Meléndez, Francisco Pinedo Ramírez and Jorge Ríos Pérez, leaders from the Ashaninka community, were also murdered.
The suspicions point to wood extraction entrepreneurs that illegally exploit the amazon rainforest and drug traffickers who had threatened them. In 2015, other leaders and members of the Shipibo community of Santa Clara de Uchunya were threatened.
The day that they murdered Olivia, another woman from the Shipibo community, Magdalena Flores Agustín, received an anonymous envelope at her home. Inside there were two bullets and a letter directed to her and her husband: “you have 48 hours to leave here. One bullet for each of you”.
The investigators of the crime are following two leads: according to the first version, on the 19th of April the Canadian Woodroffe arrived at Olivia’s house by motorbike. When she left to go to the shops he shot her twice in the chest.
Two days later the police found the body of the Canadian buried on their terrain. They arrived there after discovering a video on social media in which several men can be seen lynching Woodroffe.
The investigators suspect that the neighbours of the leader caught him when he tried to escape and they dragged him with a rope around his neck whilst they beat him. Yesterday, the Supreme Court of Justice of Ucayali ordered the capture of the two men who appear in the video.
“What happened with the supposed suspect of the murder of Olivia Arévalo is not indigenous justice and it has nothing to do with it” explained Ruíz Molleda.
The Peruvian constitution establishes that the authorities within indigenous and rural communities may carry out justice in their own territory according to their customs. “But always with respect for human rights”, explained the lawyer of the NGO Legal Defence.
The Shipibo Konibo Xetebo Council (Coshicox), the highest authority within the Shipibo – Konibo – Xetebo community, condemned the crime and declared that justice is compatible with indigenous culture.
The Federation of Native Communities of Ucayali and Alfluentes (Feconau) also asked the state to provide guarantees to other indigenous leaders that receive death threats and harassment.
This article was originally published at OpenDemocracy and re-published at IC under a Creative Commons License.
As an environmental sociologist who has spent hundreds of hours researching communities directly affected by oil and gas production, I find that many people living in these places feel that fossil fuel industries already had the upper hand before Trump took office.
Even among people who support drilling, many believe these industries need to be more regulated. The residents I have interviewed report feeling uncertain and vulnerable. They tell researchers like me they consider themselves powerless to control their surroundings or to protect the environment, their health or their property. Reducing regulations even more will only intensify these problems.
After the enactment of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the law that codified many of these exemptions, states became responsible for creating their own policies, procedures, budgets and enforcement plans – most of which weren’t in place before the boom got underway. The government exempted fracking from federal environmental regulations like the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act.
States could decide rules like setbacks from homes, zoning, water acquisition and disposal, and most other aspects of drilling. This made it easier and quicker to permit hydraulic fracturing, but the states had to scramble to determine how to regulate it.
As fracking spread into more densely populated areas, wells ended up within a few hundred feet of homes, schools, hospitals and other buildings in states like Colorado, Texas, Pennsylvania and North Dakota. That made a big impact on people’s quality of life.
But in places like Denton, Texas, and Colorado’s Front Range – a booming region that stretches along the Rocky Mountains and includes cities like Fort Collins and Pueblo – the people who live in places most affected by these types of changes have no seat at the table. They live alongside oilfields and gas patches but have little power to affect what happens around them.
Oil and gas infrastructure like this can end up in the middle of Colorado communities. Stephanie Malin
Health hazards and other problems
As a result, there’s a mounting debate regarding state and local control over oil and gas development. Having spoken to people affected by fracking’s spread, I believe it’s clear why people are demanding a bigger say.
Like other states where oil and gas production has soared, Colorado struggles to balance the desires of drillers with local needs. In many communities, people living fracking sites say they are at risk. But Colorado’s state Supreme Court has ruled that only the state government can control where and when fracking may occur.
I belong to a team that unites social scientists, epidemiologists and statisticians. Together, we are completing a detailed study that measures how oil and gas drilling affects the quality of life in several Colorado communities. We have conducted surveys, in-depth interviews, ethnography and even taken blood and hair samples to examine how drilling may affect people’s stress levels and health, their daily lives and physical symptoms of stress, like elevated cortisol levels.
While doing this research, I have personally witnessed the toll that underregulation is taking. To collect our data, I’ve sat around kitchen tables and listened as people described their concerns about water quality, earthquakes and air pollution.
They are uncertain about how it affects the health of their children, grandchildren and elderly parents. I’ve visited once-idyllic homes, now set in the shadows of sound barrier walls standing 30 feet tall and stretching for hundreds of feet.
Sound walls from multiple drilling sites tower over a Weld County farmhouse. Stephanie A. Malin
No way out
Coloradans who want to stop fracking and drilling near their homes now have two options. They can draft agreements about protocols with a willing operator – a process that often requires expensive legal advice and lots of time. Or, residents can locate an acceptable alternative site that is equally suitable for production – which of course only pushes risks into someone else’s backyard.
But some people have little recourse. Consider the situation facing Bella Romero Academy, a Weld County middle school. Its students are primarily Latino and belong to low-income households. Many have undocumented relatives.
Despite efforts by activists to block drilling, a company called Extraction Oil and Gas aims to place 24 well pads and other infrastructure within about 1,300 feet of the school and even closer to its athletic fields.
The Colorado context illustrates the lived reality of what researchers like me call “environmental injustice” amid the oil and gas development also afflicting other states.
People who live near drilling may be exposed to a wide array of environmental and health risks. In this way, they experience “distributive injustice,” due to their exposure to more than their fair share of pollutants and hazards. Hundreds of studies have shown that people of color, low-income communities and otherwise marginalized groups in the U.S. are more likely to be exposed to disproportionate environmental risks and hazards from polluting facilities and industrial activities.
The public has little power to zone or regulate oil and gas production near their homes, especially in states like Colorado. This is a form of “procedural inequality.”
When local governments try to restrict oil and gas production, they can face steep penalties meant to discourage local control.
The Trump administration’s efforts to further reduce federal regulations will surely escalate these sorts of injustices. Instead of serving the interests of communities where oil, gas and coal production takes place, I believe that its actions will disempower and divide the public.
Photo taken from the roof of a study participant in Weld County, near 22 well pads that were relocated from a wealthier neighborhood. Dawn Stein
An investigation by the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, has turned up allegations that the government of Tanzania is sidelining the country’s Maasai population in favor of tourism.
The government and some foreign investors worry that the Maasai, semi-nomadic herders who have lived in the Rift Valley for centuries, are degrading parts of the Serengeti ecosystem.
The authors of the Oakland Institute’s report argue that approaches aimed at conservation should focus on the participation and engagement of Maasai communities rather than their removal from lands to be set aside for high-end tourism.
The government of Tanzania is casting aside Maasai communities to make way for lucrative high-end safari tourism and hunting, says the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank, in a report published May 10.
The four-year investigation revealed that groups of the Maasai in the Loliondo division of northern Tanzania have been kept off lands vital to their survival so that wealthy safari-goers and foreign royalty can have unfettered access to East Africa’s iconic wildlife.
The policy has led to widespread hunger and fear among the population, said Anuradha Mittal, director of the California-based Oakland Institute.
A map showing the location of Loliondo Game Controlled Area in northern Tanzania. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
After thousands of Maasai have been threatened or displaced, “Their sentiment is that the next person to be evicted and displaced will be me,” Mittal said in an interview with Mongabay. “This is a fear that the villagers live with.”
The report cites firsthand accounts, communications with and within a safari company, and government and legal documents. It argues that authorities, eager to keep the deep-pocketed tour companies that operate in Tanzania happy, are driving the Maasai into poverty and dependence on aid to maintain the country’s tourism sector. The reason they often give is the protection of the environment.
But this issue isn’t confined to Loliondo or Tanzania, Mittal said.
“This is not just about a specific company. This is not just about a specific government,” she said. “This is happening across the world in the name of conservation, in the name of economic opportunity for governments.”
An elephant in Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
Conservation and the Maasai
It’s difficult to pin down an exact figure, but perhaps a million or more Maasai live in East Africa’s Great Rift Valley, stretching across northern Tanzania and southern Kenya. For centuries, large numbers have grazed their livestock in the area around the Serengeti plain. The name Serengeti translates to “the place where the land runs forever” in Maa, the group’s language.
In the 1950s, the colonial government in charge of what is today Tanzania asked the Maasai to leave Serengeti National Park, which was created in 1951, so the area could be devoted entirely to conservation. The Maasai living in the region agreed and moved into the vicinity of the nearby Ngorongoro Crater. But when concerns arose that too many people living there would impact the wildlife, they were again asked to move, with many ending up in Loliondo division.
This pattern, the Oakland Institute contends, has continued, justified as efforts to keep ecosystems intact, but also as a way to maintain the flow of tourism dollars, mostly from high-end safaris, into the country. Restrictions by the government on where the Maasai could and could not go, as well as their ability to cultivate small farm plots and gardens, had by the 1990s led to widespread malnutrition, one study found. The authors, who published their research in the journal Human Organization, concluded that the government’s success in protecting the region’s wildlife was coming at the cost of the health of the semi-nomadic Maasai.
In 1992, Tanzania’s prime minister, John William Malecela, lifted the ban on gardens in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area to ease the pressure on the Maasai, and laws passed in 1999 were aimed at codifying customary claims to land in Tanzania. But that wasn’t the end of the setbacks to the Maasai’s way of life, according to the Oakland Institute’s investigation.
A herd of cows in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
Mittal and her colleagues point to an emblematic example of the challenges that Maasai communities face in Loliondo, centering on a piece of land originally called Sukenya Farm near the border with Kenya. In 2006, Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland, the owners of Thomson Safaris, a safari outfitter based in Watertown, Mass., that has operated in Tanzania since the 1980s, bought a 96-year lease on 12,617 acres (5,106 hectares) of land for $1.2 million. Thomson and Wineland intended to turn the land into a nature reserve, according to the company’s blog.
“Purchasing the land in Loliondo was a way to protect a wildlife corridor from Kenya to the Serengeti, to provide a refuge for the endangered wildlife, to provide a place for tourists to see wildlife in the wilderness, to walk amongst the wildlife in an authentic setting, to meet the [Maasai] who have been our friends for years and to provide benefits to the community around us,” Thomson told Mongabay in an email.
But it would also mire them in an ongoing dispute over the land that started in the early 1980s. In 1984, Tanzania Breweries Limited purchased 10,000 acres (4,047 hectares) of this land from the district council. The sale drew the ire of some of the local Maasai, who said they grazed their animals on the land and should have been consulted.
In the ensuing years, however, Tanzanian Breweries Limited didn’t use much of the land, ostensibly abandoning it in 1990. Meanwhile, the Maasai continued to move their herds through in search of grass and water, and they would set up traditional compounds called bomas in the area.
An entrance to a new boma built by the Maasai. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
When Wineland and Thomson acquired Sukenya Farm through their company, Tanzania Conservation Limited (TCL), some of the adjacent Maasai communities objected. For one, the size of the land had grown to include an additional 2,617 acres that the Maasai say the brewing company illegally took several years before the sale. Maasai communities also said that once again, their traditional lands had been sold without their consent, and their lawyers argued that the Maasai communities’ use of Sukenya Farm in the preceding decades amounted to a legal claim on the land.
This all came as a surprise to Thomson and Wineland.
“Unbeknownst to us,” Thomson said, “we would be used as a pawn, a political football, in a broader game on the board of Loliondo that is a struggle between NGO local interests and national government interests for political, economic and territorial control of Loliondo.”
The land has been the subject of several court cases. In 2015, a Tanzanian court upheld TCL’s claim to the land for 10,000 acres, but said that the extra 2,617 acres had been illegally acquired.
If it should not have been part of the sale, Wineland contends that the addition happened before she and Thomson purchased it. “The title deed reads 12,617 acres,” she wrote in an email to the Oakland Institute on Nov. 21, 2017. “Any changes made to the size of the land did not happen under the ownership of the land by TCL.”
In the 12 years since TCL acquired the land, according to the report, Maasai communities point to several instances in which herders have been driven off the land, now called Enashiva Nature Refuge. The Oakland Institute surveyed the testimony by both sides of the recent court case over the land involving several communities and TCL, which alleges that at times TCL staff would call in the local police to force the Maasai off the land. That led to arrests, beatings, shootings and the destruction of bomas, the report says.
A leopard in Serengeti National Park. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
“All these will remain allegations as the villages could not provide evidence in court to prove any of the allegations,” Wineland wrote in her emailed response to the Oakland Institute.
Thomson also told Mongabay that Mittal’s team “failed in its due diligence” because it didn’t speak with representatives of Thomson Safaris while in Tanzania. Nor did the researchers include the perspectives of village leaders who are supportive of the company’s work.
Mittal said she aimed to find unvarnished accounts of what was happening in Loliondo, and she said that in village after village, she saw people who weren’t happy with TCL and Thomson Safaris’ presence in the area.
Thomson, who said that Thomson Safaris “vehemently” denies any allegations of abuse, insists that the company’s relationship with local communities is quite different than how it’s portrayed in the report.
“There are no conflicts with our neighbors, in fact we have letters requesting more dispensaries, water bore holes and school buildings,” he said, referring to the clinics, wells and schools that the company has helped fund in communities near Enashiva. Wineland also co-founded Focus on Tanzanian Communities, a nonprofit charity involved in social and economic development.
In his testimony during the court case, Thomson said, “The police are only called when the situation is escalating and people are feeling like they’re being threatened or something of that nature.”
However, Mittal points to internal communication within TCL that surfaced during the discovery phase of the litigation, indicating that TCL staff would call the commissioner of Ngorongoro district (which includes Loliondo) in response to herders grazing livestock, cutting wood or farming. The district commissioner would then call the police, according to court documents.
On July 30, 2012, a TCL staff member wrote in an email, “Nice to know that it is the [district commissioner] and police that are dealing with this, that we are out of that picture in the sense that we did not have face to face conflict and the usual thing of being accused of beating people …”
People from the village of Naiyobi line up for water. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
A hunting concession
In another part of Loliondo, a land dispute has long simmered between Maasai communities and the Otterlo (sometimes spelled Ortello) Business Corporation. In 1992, the Tanzanian government gave Otterlo permission to hunt on 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) in the Loliondo Game Controlled Area, which the Oakland Institute estimates is home to 50,000 Maasai.
The Oakland Institute reports that the license has effectively turned the Loliondo Game Controlled Area into a private hunting reserve for the family, complete with an airstrip and Emirati cellphone networks.
Otterlo has also played a part in keeping the Maasai from using the land, according to the report, as in a 2009 eviction of 200 bomas by Otterlo security and a government “paramilitary” unit. Accounts hold that the action affected 20,000 people and rendered 3,000 homeless. Government officials said the Maasai were evicted because their cultivation of the land was degrading it.
Otterlo did not respond to several requests for comment through social media, and the telephone number listed for the office in Tanzania is no longer in service. The Oakland Institute’s attempts to reach out to Otterlo by telephone and postal mail also went unanswered.
A boma in Ngorongoro District. Image courtesy of the Oakland Institute.
John Cannon is a Mongabay staff writer based in the Middle East. Find him on Twitter:@johnccannon
Citation
McCabe, J. T., Perkin, S., & Schofield, C. (1992). Can conservation and development be coupled among pastoral people? An examination of the Maasai of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania. Human Organization, 353-366.
A bullet grazed right over the head of the Indigenous Miskito elder pictured above during the attack from Colonos in 2015. The attackers promised to return and inflict more deadly violence if they did not vacate their lands and home. (Photo: Courtney Parker 2016)
A young Miskito girl in a frontier community stands in front of a group of community defenders who have been forced to take up primitive, make-shift weapons as they attempt to defend their families, land, culture, and the carbon-mitigating rainforest. (Photo: Courtney Parker, 2016)
The Trump administration’s efforts to further reduce federal regulations will surely escalate these sorts of injustices. Instead of serving the interests of communities where oil, gas and coal production takes place, I believe that its actions will disempower and divide the public.
