After mass graves full of Indigenous children have been found, how can Canada justify ongoing land theft?
Featured image: The site near the former Marieval residential school where a ground search has been underway. Image has been shared by The Federation of Sovereign Nations and Cowessess First Nation. (Photo by Dennis Ward, Twitter)
By Justin Podur
Canada is developing a new image: one of burning churches, toppling statues, and mass graves. There are thousands more unmarked graves, thousands more Indigenous children killed at residential schools, remaining to be unearthed. There can be no denying that this is Canada, and it has to change. But can Canada transform itself for the better? If the revelation of the mass killing of Indigenous children is to lead to any actual soul-searching and any meaningful change, the first order of business is for Canada to stop its all-front war against First Nations. Much of that war is taking place through the legal system.
Canadian politicians have said as much, adopting a motion in June calling for the government to stop fighting residential school survivors in court. A long-standing demand, it has been repeated by Indigenous advocates who have expressed amazement in the face of these horrific revelations that the Canadian government would nonetheless continue to fight Indigenous survivors of systematic child abuse by the state.
To get a sense of the scope of Canada’s legal war on First Nations, I looked at a Canadian legal database containing decisions (case law) pertaining to First Nations. I also looked at the hearing lists of the Federal Court of Canada for ongoing cases. My initial goal was to identify where Canada could easily settle or abandon cases, bringing about a harmonious solution to these conflicts. Two things surprised me.
The first was the volume and diversity of lawsuits Canada is fighting. Canada is fighting First Nations everywhere, on an astoundingly wide range of issues.
The second thing: Canada is losing.
The Attack on Indigenous Children and Women
In his 1984 essay “‘Pioneering’ in the Nuclear Age,” political theorist Eqbal Ahmad argued that the “four fundamental elements… without which an indigenous community cannot survive” were “land, water, leaders and culture.” Canada fights Indigenous people over land, water, fishing rights, mining projects, freedom of movement, and more. The assault on Indigenous nations is also a war against Indigenous children and women.
Note that this isn’t about the history of residential schools. It’s about discrimination against Indigenous kids in the present day. “In fact, the problem might be getting worse,” writes Blackstock, compared to “the height of residential school operations.” As evidence, she refers to a 2005 study of three sample provinces showing a wide gap between the percent of First Nations children in child welfare care (10.23 percent) compared to a much lower rate for non-First Nations children (0.67 percent). In 2006, following the Canadian government’s repeated failures to act on the inequity described in this report (which also included comprehensive suggested reforms that had both moral and economic appeal), Blackstock writes, “the Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations agreed that legal action was required.” The CHRT was very clear in its 2019 decision that the federal government should compensate each victim the maximum amount, which addressed the victims as follows:
“No amount of compensation can ever recover what you have lost, the scars that are left on your souls or the suffering that you have gone through as a result of racism, colonial practices and discrimination.”
Canada’s war on Indigenous children is also a war on Indigenous women. The sterilization of Indigenous women, beginning with Canada’s eugenics program around 1900, is another act of genocide, as scholar Karen Stote has argued. Indigenous women who had tubal ligation without their consent as part of this eugenics program have brought a class-action suit against the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, both of which had Sexual Sterilization Acts in their provincial laws from the 1920s in Alberta and 1930s in British Columbia until the early 1970s, and Saskatchewan, where sexual sterilization legislation was proposed but failed by one vote in 1930. A Senate committee found a case of forced sterilization of an Indigenous woman as recently as 2019.
The Legal-Financial War on First Nations Organizations
As Bob Joseph outlines in his 2018 book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, Canada first gave itself the right to decide Indian status in the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, which created a process by which Indigenous people could give up their Indian status and so become “enfranchised”—which they would have to do if they wanted to attend higher education or become professionals. The apartheid system was updated through the Indian Act of 1876, from which sprang many evils including both the residential schools and the assertion of Canadian control over the way First Nations govern themselves. In 1927, when Indigenous veterans of World War I began to hold meetings with one another to discuss their situation, Canada passed laws forbidding Indigenous people from political organization and from raising funds to hire legal counsel (and from playing billiards, among other things). The Indian Act—which is still in effect today with amendments, despite multiple attempts to repeal it—outlawed traditional governance structures and gave Canada the power to intervene to remove and install Indigenous governance authorities at will—which Canada did continuously, from Six Nations in 1924 to Barriere Lake in 1995. As a result, at any given moment, many First Nations are still embroiled in lawsuits over control of their own governments.
Canada controls the resources available to First Nations, including drinking water. In another national embarrassment, Canada has found itself able to provision drinking water to diamond mines but not First Nations. This battle too has entered the courts, with a class-action suit by Tataskweyak Cree Nation, Curve Lake First Nation, and Neskantaga First Nation demanding that Canada not only compensate their nations, but also work with them to build the necessary water systems.
Canada dribbles out humiliating application processes by which Indigenous people can try to exercise their human right to housing. When combined with the housing crisis on reserves, these application processes have attracted swindlers like consultant Jerry Paulin, who sued Cat Lake First Nation for $1.2 million, claiming that his efforts were the reason the First Nation received federal funds for urgent housing repairs.
Canada uses the threat of withdrawal of these funds to impose stringent financial “transparency” conditions on First Nations—the subject of legal struggle, in which Cold Lake First Nations has argued that the financial transparency provisions violate their rights. Canada has used financial transparency claims to put First Nations finances under third-party management, withholding and misusing the funds in a not-very-transparent way, as the Algonquins of Barriere Lake charged in another lawsuit. An insistence on transparency is astounding for a country that buried massive numbers of Indigenous children in unmarked graves.
Win or lose, the lawsuits themselves impose high costs on First Nations whose finances are, for the most part, controlled by Canada. The result is situations like the one where the Beaver Lake Cree are suing Canada for costs because they ran out of money suing Canada for their land. When First Nations are winning in court, Canada tries to bankrupt them before they get there.
Land and Resources Are the Core of the Struggle
The core issue between Canada and First Nations is land. Most battles are over the land on which the state of Canada sits, all of which was stolen and much of which was swindled through legal processes that couldn’t hold up to scrutiny and are now unraveling. “[I]n simple acreage,” the late Indigenous leader Arthur Manuel wrote in the 2017 book The Reconciliation Manifesto, this was “the biggest land theft in the history of mankind,” reducing Indigenous people from holding 100 percent of the landmass to 0.2 percent. One of the most economically important pieces of land is the Haldimand tract in southern Ontario, which generates billions of dollars in revenue that belongs, by right, to the Six Nations, as Phil Monture has extensively documented. Six Nations submitted ever-more detailed land claims, until Canada simply stopped accepting them. But in July, their sustained resistance led to the cancellation of a planned suburban development (read: settlement) on Six Nations land.
Many of the First Nations court battles are defensive. Namgis, Ahousaht, Dzawada’enuxw, and Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations have tried to defend their wild fisheries against encroachment and pollution by settler fish farms. West Moberly, Long Plain, Peguis, Roseau River Anishinabe, Aroland, Ginoogaming, Squamish, Coldwater, Tsleil-Waututh, Aitchelitz, Skowkale, and Shxwha:y Village First Nations challenged dams and pipelines. Canada has a history of “pouring big money” into these court battles to the tune of tens of millions—small money compared to its tens of billions subsidizing and taking over financially unviable pipelines running through Indigenous lands—including that of the Wet’suwet’en, whose resistance sparked mass protests across Canada in 2020. The duty to consult First Nations on such projects is itself the outcome of a legal struggle, won in the 2004 decision in Haida Nation v. British Columbia.
First Nations who were swindled or coerced out of their lands (or water, as with Iskatewizaagegan No. 39 Independent First Nation’s case against Winnipeg and Ontario for illegally taking their water from Shoal Lake for use by the city of Winnipeg starting in 1913) fight for their land back, for compensation, or both. The Specific Claims Tribunal has 132 ongoing cases. In Saskatchewan in May, the tribunal awarded Mosquito Grizzly Bear’s Head Lean Man First Nation $141 million and recognition that they never surrendered their land as Canada had claimed they had in 1905. In June, Heiltsuk First Nation won a part of their land back.
Why does Canada keep fighting (and losing) even as its legitimacy as a state built on theft and genocide crumbles? It’s not merely the habits of centuries. It’s also the absence of any project besides the displacement of First Nations and the plunder of the land. Canada could take the first step to ending all this by declaring a unilateral ceasefire in the legal war. Too few Canadians understand that this would actually be a very good thing. First Nations lived sustainably for thousands of years in these extraordinary northern ecosystems. Then the European empires arrived, bringing smallpox and tuberculosis among other scourges. Local extinctions of beaver and buffalo quickly followed, as well as the total extinction of the passenger pigeon. Today’s settler state has poisoned pristine lakes with mine tailings, denuded the country’s spectacular forests, and gifted the atmosphere some of the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions (seventh in the world in 2018—more than Saudi Arabia, which was 10th, and the U.S., which was 11th). Indigenous visionaries have better ideas, such as those presented by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Arthur Manuel, or for that matter the Red Deal and the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba.
Under Indigenous sovereignty, Canadians could truly be guests of the First Nations, capable of fulfilling their obligations to their hosts and their hosts’ lands, rather than the pawns of the settler state’s war against those from whom the land was stolen.
Editor’s note: Testing nuclear bombs in “French Polynesia” is yet another example of the insane western mindset of colonialism, racism and entitlement.
France conducted 193 nuclear tests in the South Pacific
This article originally appeared in Global Voices.
Featured image: This is the third picture of a series of the Licorne thermonuclear test in French Polynesia, a scan of a (digitally restored) hard copy of a picture taken by the French army. Photo and caption by Flickr user Pierre J. (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Written by Mong Palatino
More than 1,000 people gathered in the Tahiti capital of Papeete to condemn the failure of the French government to take full accountability for its nuclear testing program in the South Pacific.
France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966–1996 in Mā’ohi Nui (French Polynesia). France’s 41st nuclear experiment in the Pacific led to catastrophe on July 17, 1974, when France tested a nuclear bomb codenamed “Centaure.” Because of weather conditions that day, the test caused an atmospheric radioactive fallout which affected all of French Polynesia. Inhabitants of Tahiti and the surrounding islands of the Windward group were reportedly subjected to significant amounts of ionizing radiation 42 hours after the test, which can cause significant long-term health problems.
The July 17, 2021 protest was organized under the banner of #MaohiLivesMatter to highlight the target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”continuing fight for nuclear justice. Campaigners said that despite the statement of former French President François Hollande in 2016 recognizing the negative environmental and health impact of the nuclear tests, the French government has done little to provide compensation or rehabilitation to French Polynesia.
After analyzing 2,000 pages of declassified French military documents about the nuclear tests, in March 2021 a group of researchers and investigative journalists from INTERPRT and Disclose released their findings on the health implications of the experiments.
According to our calculations, based on a scientific reassessment of the doses received, approximately 110,000 people were infected, almost the entire Polynesian population at the time.
The report has revived public awareness in France about the impact of their nuclear testing program. The French government held a roundtable discussion about the issue in Paris in early July. Though some criticized the French government for their alleged lack of transparency around the clean-up efforts in French Polynesia, officials denied these claims.
Protesters in Tahiti insisted that the French government should do more to address the demands of French Polynesian residents. Some noted that if French President Emmanuel Macron was able to seek forgiveness for the role of France in enabling the Rwanda genocide in 1994, he should at least make a similar apology for the harmful legacy of the nuclear tests in the Pacific.
The #MaohiLivesMatter protest has inspired solidarity in the Pacific.
Community leaders of West Papua expressed their support for the protest:
Youth activists from Pacific island nations also took part in the protest:
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN) Australia issued this statement of support:
As you gather in Maohi Nui on the 17th July we offer our deep respects to your leaders and community members who have long spoken out against the harms imposed by these weapons. We have heard your calls for nuclear justice. We continue to listen closely when you speak of the lived experience of the testing years and the on–going harms.
French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to tackle the legacy of nuclear testing during his visit to Tahiti this month.
This post will cover the key ideas of the philosopher Karl Marx. In part 2, I will list the Marxist traditions after Marx.
David Harvey, who has written many books on Marxism, describes Marxism as a mode of analysis and a critical way of thinking. He explains that when you want to understand what is happening in a situation, then if you use a Marxist approach you will not be deceived by surface appearances and ‘ideological bluster’. You can use it to do an analysis for yourself and come up with an understanding of what is really going on in a situation. If you really understand what is going on, then you can act against what is really happening in a deeper way rather than deal with surface symptoms.[1]
Marxism is also important because Karl Marx was the first great critic of capitalism. This critique was continued in the many Marxist traditions. Capitalism is the problem, and we need a new system for organising society. [2]
Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary [3]. He lived from 1818 to 1883 and spent most of his life in London. He collaborated with his friend and supporter, Frederic Engels on much of this work. There is much written about Karl Marx so I don’t plan to repeat it all here except to list his key contributions and some resources to find out more.
I’m going to use the framework from Sociological Theory by George Ritzer and N. Stepnisky Jeffrey as I’ve found it the best summary of Marx’s work [3]. There are several summaries of Marx’s work [4]. Marx was heavily influenced by G.W.F. Hegal, a German philosopher who lived from 1770 to 1831. The Dialectic
Dialectical philosophy accepts that contradictions are part of reality and the best way to understand the real world is to study the development of contradictions. Hegal understood historical change through the concept of contradictions. Marx also believed that contradictions drove historical change. Where Hegal thought that contradictions could be worked out in our minds, Marx thought that contradictions were resolved by the “life-and-death struggle that changes the social world.” For Marx this meant the study of social relations based on the material world. “The dialectic leads to an interest in the conflicts and contradictions between various levels of social reality.”
An example of a contradiction is between workers and capitalists, who own the factories or buildings where work is done. The capitalists exploit workers to make a profit and workers want to keep as much of the profits for themselves as possible. Both are not possible and Marx believed that the contradictions would grow worse and more people would be workers as small businesses would be forced out of business and competition between capitalists would force them to exploit workers more. This could only be resolved by social change when the levels of exploitation reach a point where workers resist their exploitation. This resistance would result in more exploitation and oppression and escalate the class conflict. [5]
Dialectical Method
The dialectical method came from Marx’s focus on contradictions in the real world.
Fact and Value
In dialectical thinking, social values and social facts are inseparable. Social values are our judgments about society. The dialectical thinker believes it is impossible and undesirable to keep them separate because it would result in a disconnected study of society.
Reciprocal Relations
A dialectical thinker does not see social processes flowing in one direction, such as cause-and-effect. They see one activity or actor having an effect on another, but that second activity or actor will likely affect the first.
Pass, Present, Future
Dialectical analysts are interested in the relationship between social processes in the present, past and future. They, therefore, study the “historical roots of the contemporary world.” They also study social trends to help understand the potential directions of society.
No Inevitabilities
Marx did not view the future to be determined by the present. Marx believed the direction the future went in is dependent on individual choices and struggles. Marx was interested in the dynamics of real relationships so he rejected Hegel’s approach of ‘grand abstractions’.
Actors and Structures
Marx was focused on the relationship between people and the large-scale structures they produce, such as community organisations, institutions, governments, states. For Marx, these structures help people meet the needs of their lives and also present a serious threat to general well being if controlled by the ruling class that are only interested in the well being of their class. [6]
Human Potential
Before considering Marx’s analysis of the macrostructures of capitalism, it’s important to describe his thoughts on the micro-sociological area of social reality. Marx “built his critical analysis of the contradictions of capitalist society on his premises about human potential, its relation to labor, and its potential for alienation under capitalism. He believed that there was a real contradiction between our human potential and the way we must work in capitalist society.”
Marx argued that human potential is directly influenced by our specific “social relations and our institutional context. Therefore, human nature is not a static thing but varies historically and socially. To understand human potential, we need to understand social history, because human nature is shaped by the same dialectical contradictions that Marx believed shapes this history of society.” He also argued that there is a general human potential, which is called ‘species being’. This is made up of the potentials and powers that only human share.
Labour
The relationship between labour and human nature was important to Marx. Human labour creates something in reality that was only is people’s imaginations. What we produce reflects our purpose. For Marx this process of creating external objects in the real world from our internal thoughts is called objectification. It is also a material process of using nature to provide items to meet our material needs. As well as changing the material world, this labour also “transforms us, our needs, our consciousness, and our human nature.”
The term ‘labour’ for Marx was not only related to economic activities, it includes the act of transforming materials in the natural world into items we need or want. Capitalism has changed the process of labour so it is generally only associated with economic activities.
Marx believed that labour is a response to a need. The labour process results in a transformation that creates new needs, which for Marx was the “engine of human history”. It transforms the individual and society. [7]
Alienation
Marx believed that the relationship between labour and human nature was perverted by capitalism. He called this alienation. Under capitalism, we no longer labour under our own purpose but under the purpose of the capitalist who hires and pays us. Labour is just about earning money. This labour no longer transforms us as we are not doing it for ourselves so we are alienated from our labour and human nature. Marx described how the structures of capitalism cause alienation through the division of labour. The capitalists own the workers’ time, the means of production, and the products.
Marx’s concept of alienation works in four ways:
workers under capitalism are alienated from their productive activity. The labour they do is not to produce objects based on their own ideas.
Workers are alienated from the products they produce. The products they produce are owned by the capitalist and not the workers.
Workers are alienated from their fellow workers. The production process isolated workers from one another. Workers are also forced to compete with other workers in workplaces and to obtain jobs.
Workers under capitalism are alienated from their human potential. Instead of labour being transformational and satisfying our human nature, people feel least human in workplaces, and more like machines.
Alienation is an example of the contradictions that Marx’s dialectical approach uncovered. “There is a real contradiction between human nature, which is defined and transformed by labor, and the actual social conditions of labor under capitalism.” Identifying with our place of employment, or the things we buy with our wages, are symptoms of our alienation. Marx believed that alienation can only be resolved by real social change. [8]
The Structures of Capitalist Society
Marx witnessed in the 19th century rapid capitalist industrialisation across Europe with the significant changes it cause – “poverty, dislocation, and alienation”. Marx identified that capitalism was the main cause of alienation. He focused on critiquing capitalist society and developed a political program to go beyond capitalism.
Marx saw capitalism as an economic system where a large number of workers that own nothing, work to produce commodities so a small number capitalists can profit and who own: “the commodities, the means of producing the commodities, and the labor time of the workers, which they purchase through wages.” Marx understood capitalism to be an economic system and a system of power. Capitalism has transformed political powers into economic relations. Instead of using violence, capitalists are generally able to control workers by sacking them or closing workplaces. So capitalism is an economic and political system, a way of exercising power and a process for exploiting workers.
The capitalist system presents the economy as natural. People lose their jobs, wages are cut and workplaces are closed as part of the normal functioning of the economy. In fact, these outcomes happen because of social and political decisions. Attempts to connect human suffering and the economic structures are ignored or seen as irrelevant. Marx attempted to clarify the social and political structures of the economy by exposing ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’ and capitalisms’ internal contradictions.
Commodities
For Marx, commodities are “products of labor intended primarily for exchange.” Marx identified a commodities ‘use value’ – “objects produced for personal use or for use by others in the immediate environment.” When workers produce something for the capitalist that is then exchanged in the market for money, this is called the ‘exchange value’.
Fetishism of Commodities
Exchange values in capitalism become separate from the actual commodity so that the objects and the market for them become independent existences. Marx called this the ‘fetishism of commodities’. This separation is the second source of alienation listed above.
The economy takes on the function of producing value. “For Marx, the true value of a thing comes from the fact that labor produces it and someone needs it. A commodity’s true value represents human social relations.” Any object or commodity that we buy has hidden behind it several social relations.
The fetishism of commodities presents the economy as a natural reality. This relates to the concept of ‘reification’ – “the process of coming to believe that humanly created social forms are natural, universal, and absolute things.” This idea results in people believing that “social structures are beyond their control and unchangeable.” Marx viewed the economy as a form of domination, where political decisions related to the economy benefit the capitalists. People ‘reify’ (naturalise) social relationships, social structures, commodities, economic phenomena such as the division of labour, religion, political and organisational structures and the state.
Capital, Capitalists, and the Proletariat
Marx identified several categories of people in capitalist societies. He identified two broad categories in opposition with each other – the proletariat and the capitalist.
The proletariat are workers that do not own any means of production so sell their labour. Marx believed workers would become less skilled as more machines were introduced. The proletariat are also consumers because they use their wages to buy what they need. They are therefore dependent on their wages to survive and those that pay their wages.
Capitalists own the means of production and aim to produce more capital. “Capital is money that produces more money, capital is money that is invested rather than being used to satisfy human needs or desires.” A capitalist uses his money to buy commodities to then sell to make more money or profit. Non-capitalists obtain a commodity that they sell for money to then buy a commodity that they need to survive.
Marx describes capital as more than money that produces more money. It is also a social relation between “the proletariat, which does the work and must purchase the produce, and…those that have invested the money.” Marx sees capital as a relation of power. To increase it, capitalists must exploit the workers through a system that is produced by the workers’ own labour. “The capitalist system is the social structure that emerges from that exploitative relationship.” Capitalists live off the profit of their capital from the exploitation of the proletariat.
Exploitation
Workers are exploited by the “impersonal and ‘objective’ economic system.” Workers are controlled by capitalists because they need to engage in wage labour to meet their basic needs to survive, so the capitalists do not need to use force. It may appear that workers are free to choose what work they do but to survive, workers have to accept the work they are offered by capitalists. Marx describes the ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ – workers know that if they do not take the job someone from the reserve army of the unemployed will.
Capitalists pay the workers less than the value of what the worker produces and keep the rest as profits. Marx called this “surplus value’ – this is defined as, “the difference between the value of the produce when it is sold and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product (including the worker’s labor).” Capitalists then use this profit to grow their businesses to generate more surplus value. Marx saw surplus value as an economic concept, and like capital, as a social relation and form of domination, because labour is the real source of surplus value.
Marx also describes capital as being driven by non-stop competition. Although capitalists may seem in control, they are in fact driven by constant competition between themselves. Capitalists are driven to generate more profit to invest their capital in expanding their enterprise. Those that do not are outcompeted. Marx called this the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’. “The structure and the ethos of capitalism push capitalists in the direction of the accumulation of more and more capital”. As Marx saw labour as the source of value, then the exploitation by capitalists of the proletariat led to class conflict.
Class Conflict
Marx used the term ‘class’ in his work but did not clearly define it. It is generally understood to mean “a group of people in similar situations concerning their control of the means of production.” Marx also viewed class in terms of its potential for conflict – “individuals form a class insofar as they are in a common conflict with others over the surplus value.” Capitalism contains a conflict of interest between workers and the capitalists who turn their labour into surplus value. It is this conflict that produces classes. This means that class is a theoretically and historically variable concept. To identify a class, first, you need to understand the potential conflicts that exist in a society.
Marx argued that a class only really exists when “people become aware of their conflicting relation to other classes. Without this awareness, they only constitute what Marx called a class ‘in itself’. When they become aware of the conflict, they become a true class, a class ‘for itself’.
Marx identified two classes in capitalism, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Marx called the capitalists in the modern economy, the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie owns the means of production and employs the workers. Marx saw the conflict between the proletariat and bourgeoisie as a real material contradiction, that would only get worse until society is changed. Until that change, society would continue to be polarised between these two classes. Some capitalists will lose out and be forced into the ranks of the proletariat. Marx called this ‘proletarianization’.
Marx saw the increase in mechanisation as decreasing the skills of the proletariat and putting many out of work. The capitalists will create the masses that will organise and overthrow the system. He saw that the international linking of factories and markets are raising the awareness of workers, which will lead to revolution.
The capitalists look to avoid revolution by exploiting workers abroad through colonisation and imperialism, to reduce exploitation of workers in the home countries. Marx only saw this as delaying the inevitable end of capitalism, as the laws of the capitalist economy required the reduction of labour costs by increasing exploitation and therefore class conflict. “Marx did not blame individual members of the bourgeoisie for their actions, he saw these actions as largely determined by the logic of the capitalist system.”
Marx predicted at the economic level, “a series of booms and depressions, as capitalists overproduced or laid-off workers in their attempts to increase their profits.” In the political arena, he predicted the inability of civil society to discuss and fix social problems. Marx believed instead the state will increasingly protect the capitalists’ private property, and, when needed, to step in with force when the capitalists’ economic control of workers fails. [9]
Class Consciousness and False Consciousness
Marx described ‘class consciousness’ as an awareness of your social and economic position in society and in relation to others. Class consciousness is also an understanding of the social and economic aspects of your class, and its collective interests within the structures of capitalist society.
For Marx, workers lived with ‘false consciousness’ before they could develop class consciousness. Marx did not use the term ‘false consciousness,’ but developed the ideas. The term was first used by Engels. False consciousness and class consciousness are opposites. False consciousness is individualistic rather than collective. Individuals compete with each other in society, instead of working to collectivise their needs, struggles and interests. Marx saw that false consciousness was caused by the inequality of capitalist society, controlled by the ruling class. It stops workers from seeing their collective power and interests. It relates to Marx’s ideas around ideology, described below.
“Marx cited the phenomenon of commodity fetishism—the way capitalist production frames relationships between people (workers and owners) as relationships between things (money and products)—with playing a key role in producing false consciousness among workers. He believed that commodity fetishism served to obscure the fact that relations concerning production within a capitalist system are relationships between people, and that as such, they are changeable.” [10]
Capitalism as a Good Thing
Although Marx was critical of capitalism in terms of the dynamic of domination and exploitation, and its regular crises, he believed capitalism to be a good thing. He did not want to return to feudalism, before capitalism. In comparison, capitalism offered new possibilities and more freedom for workers. The workers are not free yet, but it gives hope and a path to great freedom. Also, as capitalism is the most powerful economic system ever created, there is the potential to end hunger and material deprivation.
Marx believed that capitalism was the primary cause of the significant characteristics of the modern age – constant change and the trend of challenging all accepted traditions. These came from the innate competitive nature of capitalism, which drives capitalists to constantly transform the means of production to change society. He believed capitalism to be a truly revolutionary force – it created a global society, constant technological change, and overthrew the traditional feudal society. Marx also believed it needed to be overthrown, as its role in the world was over and the next stage of communism needs to begin. [9]
Materialist Conceptions of History
Marx critiqued capitalism and its future because he believed that history would follow a predictable course. He has a materialist conception of history, also known as ‘historical materialism’. For Marx, this meant that how people provide for their material need determines or influences the relationships people have between each other, their social institutions, and their common ideas.
Marx called the way people provide for their material needs and the following economic relations, the ‘base’. Non-economic relations, such as social institutions and the important ideas in society, are referred to as the ‘superstructure’. Marx did not view the superstructure as simply “coming in line with the base.” He argued that human history was driven by trying to satisfy needs that are constantly changing. The satisfaction of needs resulted in more needs so that “human needs are both the motivating foundation and the result of the economic base.”
Marx describes the ‘material forces of production’ as the tools, machinery, and factories to meet human needs. The ‘relations of production’ are the relationships between people to satisfy their needs.
Marx had a dynamic view of history, so he thought that the forces of production (tools, machinery etc) will constantly change to produce for people’s material needs. Capitalism caused technological changes that resulted in factories. But for capitalism to happen, society changed due to a change in the relations of production (relationships between people to satisfy their needs). “Factories, capitalists, and wage labourers were not compatible with feudal relations.” Feudal lords obtained their wealth from their land and felt responsible for their serfs. Capitalists get their wealth from capital and feel no obligation to workers. Serfs felt loyal to the lords, whereas the proletariat must sell their labour where they can get work. “The old relations of production were in conflict with the new forces of production.” [11]
Cultural Aspects of Capitalist Society
Marx had several theories about the culture of capitalist society.
Ideology
Marx called the prevalent ideas of society that held back progressive change, ‘ideology’. Marx used the term ideology to refer to two related ideas.
Marx’s first understanding of ideology, “refers to ideas that naturally emerge out of everyday life in capitalism but, because of the nature of capitalism, reflect reality in an inverted manner.” An example is money. We know that money is only pieces of paper, but in daily life, we treat it as having an inherent value. Instead of believing that we give money its value, money is seen to give us our value. This understanding of ideology is open to disruption due to its unseen material contradictions. People come to understand that the economy is not objective and is politically controlled, resulting in workers alienation.
Marx’s second understanding of ideology refers to, “systems of ruling ideas that attempt once again to hide the contradictions that are at the heart of the capitalist system. In most cases, they do this in one of three ways: (1) they lead to the creation of subsystems of ideas – a religion, a philosophy, a literature, a legal system – that makes the contradictions appear to be coherent; (2) they explain away those experiences that reveal the contradictions, usually as personal problems or individual idiosyncrasies; or (3) they present the capitalist contradiction as really being a contradiction in human nature and, there, one that cannot be fixed by social change.”
Marx described how anyone can create this second type of ideology, whether they are from the ruling class, bourgeois economics, philosophers or even the proletariat if they have given up hope of changing society. Regardless of who constructs these ideologies, the ruling class always benefits.
Freedom, Equality, and Ideology
Marx argued that under capitalism, it appears that people are free and equal. In fact, it is capital that is free and the workers that are enslaved. For Marx, “freedom is the ability to have control over your own labor and its products.” Under capitalism, “people are dominated by capitalist relations that seem objective and natural and therefore are not perceived as a form of domination.”
The ideas of freedom and equality are the most dangerous to capitalism. Therefore, it needs to use the two forms of ideology to reduce freedom and equality.
Religion
Marx believed that religion was an ideology that was used to distract people who could not see their “distress and oppression” as produced by the capitalist system. He was not against all religion but when it “requires the illusions of religion”, meaning not real, and used to hide things in society. Religion is open to disruption and can result in religious movements opposing capitalism. Religion is also open to the second form of ideology by “portraying the injustice of capitalism as a test for the faithful and pushing any revolutionary change off into the afterlife.” [12]
Marx’s Economics: A Case Study
Marx understood ‘use value’ as items produced for personal use or use by others and ‘exchange value’ as something produced for capitalists for exchange in the market. Use values related to natural human expression and exchange values result in a distortion of humanity. Capitalism is based on exchange values.
Marx developed the ‘labor theory of value’ – “the basic source of any value was the amount of socially necessary labor time needed to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity of the time.” The capitalist “pays the workers less than the value the workers produce and keeps the rest for themselves. The workers are not aware of this exploitation, and often, neither are the capitalists. The capitalists believe that this extra value is derived from their own cleverness, their capital investment, their manipulation of the market, and so on.”
This led Marx concept of ‘surplus value’ – “the difference between the value of the product when it is sold and value of the elements consumed in the formation of that product. Although means of production (raw materials and tools, the value of which comes from the labor involved in extracting or producing them) are consumed in the production process, it is labor that is the real source of surplus value.”
Capitalists use the surplus value to pay for land or building rent, bank interest, private consumption, and to expand their enterprise. Marx calls the capitalist desire to increase profit and surplus value the ‘general law of capitalist accumulation’. Capitalists are driven to constantly exploit workers. As this continues, exploitation achieves less and less gains, until an upper limit is reached. At this point, the working class will put pressure on governments to protect them from the capitalists, through limits to the working day or week. Capitalists respond by developing labour saving machines so they need less workers. “This shift to capital-intensive production is, paradoxically, a cause of the declining rate of profit since it is labor (not machines) that is the ultimate source of profit.”
The increase is the use of machines results in more and more unemployment. Increased competition results in less capitalists. This leads to a very small number of capitalists and a huge number of proletariat. At this point, capitalism is vulnerable to revolution. Capitalists look to avoid this by moving production and exploitation abroad to colonies. Marx believed this would only delay the inevitable failure of capitalism.
For Marx, the general law of capitalist accumulation meant that both the capitalists and proletariat had a fixed role to play set by the logic of the capitalist system. He did not blame individual capitalists. (Sociological Theory, p68-70)
Economic Crisis
In Marx’s time, there were two schools of thought about what caused an economic crisis. Some thought that crises were caused by a “lack of proportion between output of some sectors” – production not meeting the demand of items in some sectors and too many items in other sectors. This was known as ‘disproportionality theory’. Others thought that crises were caused by an “excess of total output” – overproduction. This is known as ‘underconsumptionist theory’ Marx and Engels were in the first school of thought.
Marx and Engels described individual economic crisis and also the recurring pattern of economic crises over the years. They predicted that crises would expand across sectors in society as capitalism spread around the world, rather than deepen in severity. They described a regularity in the time between crises but did not decide on a fixed period. [13]
Communism
For Marx, historical materialism helped “identify some predictable trends and to use these trends to discover the points where political action could be more effective.” Rather than focus on historical predictions, Marx believed that the way we meet our material needs was the best way to identify the “opportunities for effective political interventions.”
Marx thought that “capitalism had developed its productive powers so that it was ready to enter a new mode of production, which he called ‘communism’.” Marx wrote little about what a communist society would look like. He was against “recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Marx focused on critically analysing capitalist society and believed that “there would be time to construct communist society once capitalism was overcome.” In general, he wanted decision making taken away from the capitalists and economy, and replaced by “social decision making that would allow the needs of the many to be taken into account.” [14]
Sociological Theory, George Ritzer and N. Stepnisky Jeffrey, 2017, CH2
The Thought Of Karl Marx: An Introduction by David McLellan 1995. The Marx-Engels Reader By Robert C. Tucker; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels, 1978. Marx and Marxism, Gregory Claeys, 2018. Marxism and Social Theory, Jonathan Joseph, 2006.
Featured image: Dayak Culture Parade to commemorate Youth Pledge Day in Anjungan village, West Kalimantan, Borneo. Image courtesy of Antonsurya12/Wikimedia Commons.
A new report highlights systemic social and environmental problems that continue to plague the Indonesian palm oil industry and ripple far up the global palm oil supply chain.
The report looked at local and Indigenous communities living within and around 10 plantations and found that their human rights continued to be violated by the operation of these plantations.
The documented violations included seizure of community lands without consent; involuntary displacement; denial of fundamental environmental rights; violence against displaced Indigenous peoples and communities; harassment; criminalization; and even killings of those trying to defend their lands and forests.
The problems have persisted for decades due to ineffective, and sometimes lack of, due diligence by buyers and financiers along the global supply chain, the report says.
JAKARTA — Human rights abuses continue to fester in the Indonesian palm oil industry as global brands and financial institutions and investors turn a blind eye to the problem, a new report says.
The report by a coalition of NGOs documents the human rights and environmental impacts of 10 oil palm plantations in Indonesia that are currently supply to markets in the EU, U.K. and U.S., with consumer goods giants such as Nestlé and PepsiCo rounding out the supply chains.
The report found that local and Indigenous communities living within and around these 10 plantations continue to have their human rights violated by the operations of these plantations, which are the declared holdings of the Astra Agro Lestari, First Resources, Golden Agri-Resources/Sinar Mas, and Salim (Indofood) conglomerates.
The documented violations include seizure of community lands without consent; involuntary displacement; denial of fundamental environmental rights; violence against displaced Indigenous peoples and communities; harassment; criminalization; and even killings of those trying to defend their lands and forests.
“It is scandalous that Indigenous and rural communities endure years and sometimes decades without redress for harms inflicted by the palm oil industry, that continue to this day,” said Norman Jiwan, a Dayak Indigenous leader and co-author of the report.
Palm oil from these 10 plantations end up in the supply chains of numerous global brands, including Cargill, Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Wilmar International, Archer Daniels Midland and AAK.
And funding the operations of these plantations are prominent institutions and investors, including BlackRock, ABN-AMRO, Rabobank, Standard Chartered, Citigroup, Lloyds Banking Group, JP Morgan Chase, as well as various other banks and pension funds, according to the report.
“Our report is just the latest in a whole set of independent studies showing the Indonesian plantation sector and associated global palm oil trade are not complying with industry sustainability standards nor applicable laws,” Norman said.
New oil palm planting near a protected area in Indonesia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
Selling off problem assets
One of the cases highlighted in the report is the ongoing conflict between the Indigenous Dayak Hibun communities in the western part of Indonesian Borneo and plantation firm PT Mitra Austral Sejahtera (MAS).
The conflict started in 1996, when MAS obtained a location permit for the lands of the Dayak Hibun without their free, prior and informed consent, or FPIC. Despite that, MAS went on to obtain, in 2000, a right-to-cultivate permit, or HGU — the last in a series of licenses that oil palm companies must obtain before being allowed to start planting.
The HGU permit, valid until 2030, covers 8,741 hectares (21,600 acres) of land, of which 1,400 hectares (3,460 acres) overlap with the ancestral lands of the Dayak Hibun. As a result, the communities’ lives have been impacted by the plantation, with their sacred sites damaged and their environment degraded.
The land conflict has also led to injuries, threats, harassment and intimidation, and the criminal prosecution of four farmers seeking land justice.
Despite the conflict being well-documented over the years, MAS continues to be a supplier to Cargill, Nestlé, Unilever and Wilmar, and also supplies AAK via Cargill, according to the report.
Cargill had the case logged as “under investigation” in July 2019 without details and no updates in 2020.
Although MAS was named on Unilever’s 2018 mill list, Unilever said in May 2020 via its grievance tracker that MAS was now “outside” of its palm oil supply chain, though it precise status in 2021 is unclear.
Nestlé had not logged the conflict at the time the NGOs compiled their report.
In an attempt to seek remedy, the communities and the NGO Sawit Watch filed a formal complaint to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) in 2012, as MAS at the time was owned by Sime Darby, an RSPO member.
This complaint remains unresolved and still “under investigation,” eight years after the original grievance was lodged.
In 2019, Sime Darby sold MAS to PT Inti Nusa Sejahtera (INS), despite strong objections and pleas from the communities for Sime Darby to remain engaged.
The report says this shows how powerful palm oil conglomerates like Sime Darby are still permitted to wash their hands of responsibility for remedying community grievances by divesting “problematic” subsidiaries, even as formal complaints remain unresolved.
At the end of 2020, INS allegedly sold its majority stake in MAS to PT CAPITOL, citing difficulties in getting bank funding to finance acquisition, consolidation and operational activities. The communities affected by MAS’s operations have still not received any official notification of changes in the company’s ownership, according to the report.
The communities are also insisting that Sime Darby honor its earlier commitments to assist in resolving the case, the report says.
They say this can be done by providing funds to the Indonesian land agency to compensate MAS for relinquishing the disputed land to the Dayak communities, or to cover their legal costs to seek land restitution through the courts, the report adds.
The communities are also demanding the RSPO investigate Sime Darby’s divestment of MAS, given that RSPO members are discouraged from selling any subsidiaries subject to ongoing complaints, according to the report.
“It’s regrettable that the RSPO, Unilever, Sime Darby, PT Inti Nusa Sejahtera, PT CAPITOL and PT Mitra Austral Sejahtera have failed to remedy the human rights of Dayak Hibun communities in Kerunang and Entapang,” said Redatus Musa, a member of the Dayak Hibun community and the head of Entapang hamlet in West Kalimantan province.
On the issue of Sime Darby’s divestment from MAS, the RSPO pointed Mongabay to the resolution passed in November 2018 “discouraging” members from divesting units with active complaints.
“However, it is pertinent to note that the above resolution looks into measures to discourage members from divesting, and not to prohibit or refrain members from doing so as the RSPO recognizes its members’ rights to divest as part of its ongoing business dealings,” the RSPO told Mongabay in an email.
The RSPO added that its complaints panel may investigate the divestment “based on the independent legal review and the final comments from the parties of the complaint.”
Sime Darby did not respond to Mongabay’s questions on the issue.
Oil palm fruit bunches in a truck for transport to market. Image by John C. Cannon/Mongabay.
Weak due diligence
Most of the companies in the supply chains of the plantations linked to human rights abuses, and some of the investors, are prominent members of the RSPO and other sustainability initiatives.
“Yet, despite the fact that the violations uncovered are clearly contrary to RSPO standards, as well as the companies’ own ‘No Deforestation, No Peat and No Exploitation’ [NDPE] policies, the trade and investment continues unchecked,” the report says.
This is because existing industry accountability mechanisms, such as the RSPO complaints system, are typically slow and ineffective, according to the report.
It highlights this lack of effectiveness in the case of the Dayak Hibun communities, whose complaint against MAS has languished for more than eight years at the RSPO.
Most of the businesses were also found to have ineffective due diligence systems in place to uphold their human rights responsibilities and commitments.
In 2019, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB) initiative found that 49% of 195 large global companies surveyed scored between 0 and 10% against a set of human rights due diligence indicators, while only one scored above 80%.
Responding to the criticisms, the RSPO said some cases could take a long time to resolve since its complaints system “follows a rigorous process to ensure the highest standards of assurance and integrity are upheld.”
“At times, this may result in lengthy investigations, especially for complex cases,” the RSPO told Mongabay in an email, adding that it continues to address any inefficiencies in its system and expedite the resolution of complaints.
A woman collects oil palm fruit on an oil palm estate in southern Papua. Image by Albertus Vembrianto for Mongabay and The Gecko Project.
Opaque finances
The due diligence failings are even more prevalent among global and local financiers and investors of the palm oil industry. Many global financiers and the corporate agribusiness groups in Indonesia and elsewhere that they finance or control don’t have public grievance logs, according to the report.
Financiers should step up their game, said Linda Rosalina, a campaigner from TuK Indonesia, an NGO that advocates for social justice in the agribusiness sector.
“Banks and investors should have looked at these cases and taken an active role to ensure that their clients could improve [the situation on] the ground,” she said. “It’s important for banks and investors to improve their regulations to ensure the mitigation of impacts [of their clients’ activities] on the ground.”
The report also calls for greater transparency in the finances of the plantation sector, with many corporate groups failing to disclose their beneficial owners. This opacity has allowed the persistence of offshore financial jurisdictions and shadow companies to enable investments in the sector, according to the report.
This study and related investigations indicate that beneficial ownership of subsidiary companies associated with land conflicts and deforestation is not being disclosed by RSPO members like First Resources in potential violation of RSPO rules on transparency.
As a result, companies and their financiers are evading accountability for violations against the rights of local communities and the public.
“Our research in 2019 shows that less than 1%, or 0.7% to be exact, of companies have disclosed who their beneficial owners are,” Linda said. “This is a far cry from companies’ responsibilities to be transparent, and I think responsibilities are key.”
Interior of an oil palm plantation in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
Falling through the cracks
While many conflicts are still awaiting resolution before the RSPO and other sustainability mechanisms, many others aren’t even picked up at all.
Tom Griffiths, responsible finance coordinator at the Forest Peoples Programme and co-author of the report, said those cases that come to the fore are only a sliver of the total conflicts brewing on the ground.
“The main finding [of the report] is that the impacts and grievances are not being picked up,” he said at the virtual launch of the report. “We know that companies increasingly have grievances logged or registered, but they only touch the tip of the iceberg of the grievances and harmful impacts.”
Most of the time, companies only respond to cases that are reported to the RSPO or documented in reports by major NGOs, Griffiths said.
“But other impacts that we have documented here are not being picked up or certainly not disclosed,” he said.
This is because companies further down the supply chain from these plantations appear to apply a flawed approach to the definition of community “grievances,” limited to formal complaints only, according to the report.
“This narrow focus is failing to identify numerous outstanding community concerns and grievances, which should be picked up and addressed through due diligence, thus overlooking unresolved human rights abuse cases in their operations and palm oil supply chains,” the report says.
These ongoing cases of human rights violations fall through the cracks despite companies and global food and beverage brands continuing to market their green credentials and claim to support due diligence and “environmental, social and governance” (ESG) principles.
The report calls for strengthening the due diligence process to identify the impacts that the whole supply chain has. Without it, affected communities will continue to be denied remedy, according to Griffiths.
“Many of these [communities], sometimes [they are] waiting for years or even decades, they have no remedy,” he said. “They’re still suffering from harmful impacts, and these are still ongoing.”
Community activists in Memphis, Tennessee and northwest Mississippi celebrated a grassroots victory on Saturday after two oil companies canceled plans to build a pipeline that would have run through wetlands and several low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods.
Valero and Plains All American Pipeline had long planned to construct the Byhalia Connection pipeline, which would have been 49 miles long and linked two pipelines that transport crude oil to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.
The two companies announced they were canceling the project “due to lower U.S. oil production resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic,” but opponents of the pipeline noted that the announcement followed grassroots organizing by climate action advocates, homeowners, and elected officials at the local and federal levels.
“This is a win for the entire community of Memphis, Tennessee, but especially those in the Black community who fought it courageously,” Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, tweeted.
Community members in Memphis neighborhoods including White Chapel, Westwood, and Boxtown objected to the pipeline project, which would have run over the Memphis Sand Aquifer—leading to fears that an oil spill would pollute the drinking water of about one million people.
Local organizations Protect Our Aquifer and Memphis Community Against the Pipeline (MCAP) led rallies and garnered the support of former Vice President Al Gore and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), while the Memphis City Council weighed an ordinance to make it harder for the companies to begin construction.
MCAP leader Justin J. Pearson organized canvassers and lobbied the city council, and called Friday’s announcement “an extraordinary testament to what Memphis and Shelby County can do when citizens build power toward justice.”
A representative of the two oil companies sparked local outrage when they said South Memphis, where the Boxtown community was established in the 1860s by people who had been enslaved, had been identified as “the point of least resistance.”
“We’ve shown them that we aren’t the path of least resistance,” said Pearson. “We are the path of resilience.”
Lawyers for the two companies began legal proceedings against local landowners who refused to make deals with project officials; they planned to invoke eminent domain against the property owners. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in a separate case in New Jersey that a company could use eminent domain to build a natural gas pipeline on state land.
“Their playbooks are the same everywhere,” Pearson said on Twitter on Friday. “Find the poor. Appease the rich and politically powerful. Misinform the community. Make local leaders afraid to stop them. Exploit the poor. Reap billions in profits from the deaths of the poor and marginalized.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which helped landowners fight the two companies in the legal battle, called Friday’s announcement “a triumph for environmental justice.”
“We are so inspired by the people of Boxtown, Westwood, and White Chapel, and the work of our amazing partners MCAP and Protect Our Aquifer, for showing what is possible when a community stands together,” said Amanda Garcia, director of the SELC’s Tennessee office.
“However, justice for Berta will never be truly complete until everyone who took part in the crime, including those who planned it, is brought to justice.”
Human rights advocates on Monday welcomed the conviction of Roberto David Castillo Mejía, a Honduran businessman and former military intelligence officer, for the March 2016 assassination of Indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres, while calling on authorities in the Central American nation to bring everyone involved in planning the murder to justice.
“Until all those responsible are held accountable, other human rights defenders in Honduras will continue to lose their lives.”
—Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International
The Guardianreports the Tegucigalpa high court found Castillo—formerly head of the dam company Desarrollos Energéticos, or DESA—guilty of collaborating in Cáceres’ murder. The court ruled that Cáceres was killed for leading the campaign to stop construction of the $50 million Agua Zarca dam, a local grassroots effort which caused delays and monetary losses for DESA.
The environmentally destructive hydroelectric project is located on the Gualcarque River, which is sacred to the Indigenous Lenca people, and was approved despite its failure to comply with Honduran and international environmental requirements.
Cáceres, who was 44 years old when she was murdered, was co-founder and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), a group dedicated to the defense of the environment in Intibucá and the protection of the Lenca. In 2015 she received the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading “a grassroots campaign that successfully pressured the world’s largest dam builder to pull out of the Agua Zarca Dam” project at Río Gualcarque.
According to The Guardian:
After a trial that lasted 49 days, the high court… ruled that Castillo used paid informants as well as his military contacts and skills to monitor Cáceres over years, information which was fed back to the company executives. He coordinated, planned and obtained the money to pay for the assassination of the internationally acclaimed leader, which was carried out by seven men convicted in December 2018.
COPINH hailed Monday’s verdict as “a popular victory for the Honduran people” that “means the criminal power structures failed to corrupt the justice system.”
“Berta lives, the fight continues!” the group tweeted.
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, said in a statement that “the long-awaited prosecution of David Castillo, convicted as co-author of the murder of Berta Cáceres, is an important step towards justice and the result of her family and COPINH’s tireless efforts to secure truth, justice, and reparation. However, justice for Berta will never be truly complete until everyone who took part in the crime, including those who planned it, is brought to justice.”
“We urge the prosecutors to keep uncovering the truth,” Guevara-Rosas continued. “Until all those responsible are held accountable, other human rights defenders in Honduras will continue to lose their lives, for raising their voices and defending the most vulnerable. The Honduran authorities must put an end to impunity.”
Noting that Honduras is “the most dangerous country for defenders of land, territory, and the environment,” Guevara-Rosas admonished the Honduran government, which she said “seems to look the other way when human rights defenders are attacked instead of fulfilling its obligation to protect them.”
“Authorities must take this seriously and do whatever is necessary to keep human rights defenders safe from harm, so that a crime like the murder of Berta Cáceres is never repeated,” she added.
A 2019 profile (pdf) of Castillo by five human rights advocacy groups states:
Evidence suggests that the murder of Berta Cáceres was part of a pattern of violence, corruption, intimidation, malicious prosecution, and impunity for violence orchestrated by Castillo and others at DESA, who appear to have functioned as a criminal structure…
Castillo and his associates and employees at DESA enlisted the support of key agencies of the Honduran government, using influence in the Ministry of Security, police, and military and improper influence in the Honduran judiciary, seemingly to advance efforts to intimidate, persecute, and neutralize Berta Cáceres and COPINH’s opposition to the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric Project.
DESA, and representatives it employs, continue to promote the stigmatization of Berta Cáceres, COPINH and Indigenous Lenca villagers in Río Blanco after Cáceres’ murder.
Prior to Castillo’s arrest, eight other men, including Douglas Bustillo and Sergio Rodríguez, both of whom worked with Castillo at DESA corporation, and both graduates of the U.S. Army School of Americas (SOA), were arrested and charged with Cáceres’ murder. Bustillo, Rodríguez, and five other men were convicted of murdering Cáceres in 2018.
A 2017 report (pdf) by international legal experts concluded Cáceres’ murder was not an “isolated incident” and alleged “willful negligence by financial institutions.” The report found that the targeting of Cáceres was part of a “strategy” by DESA employees, private security firms, and public officials “to violate the right to prior, free, and informed consultations of the Lenca.”
“The strategy was to control, neutralize, and eliminate any opposition,” the report said.
Cáceres co-founded COPINH in 1993 and led campaigns against dam building, illegal logging, U.S. military bases on Lenca land, and other environmental and social injustices. Her work became increasingly dangerous following a 2009 coup perpetrated by SOA-trained military officers and backed by the Obama administration, as numerous activists were assassinated, attacked, or threatened for their work.
Shortly before her assassination, Cáceres excoriated former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for her role in the coup.
