The road to my land is one lane. It is gravel coated and there are no street lights, so in the late evening when I am driving home from a day in town, I cruise slowly, casually avoiding the potholes that have opened up with this winter’s heavy rains. In the darkness the world before me is a vignette painted by the dull yellow glow of my headlights. Beyond the borders of this halo stands of trees surround me on either side until I come to pass a neighbor’s house. Though it is not illuminated, I know that her lawn is to my right and her pond is to my left, but before me is just the thin gray road of crumbled limestone, and standing in the center of it, is a raven.
I slow down to a crawl, giving the bird time to move. He hops a bit, not off of the road to either side, but merely a few paces away from my Jeep. Creeping forward a few feet more, the raven repeats this, hopping on one leg but not leaving the road. He is hurt, I guess, and I momentarily wonder if I shouldn’t get out and try to pick him up, to help him in some way, before I realize that I would have no idea how to do so in any meaningful capacity.
We repeat our dance, me lurching forward a few feet in my car, the raven bounding back. He has plenty of space to leave the road if he would just hop into the grass on one side or the other. He has options. But he only moves forward in his path, and in mine.
Why doesn’t he just get out of the way?
—
As one day of abnormally warm February weather turned into two, then into a week, then into several weeks, I found myself outside more and more. On a Sunday we mucked our chicken and duck coops. Midweek I was repairing a fence line and laying wood chips on the paths in our garden. Today I spread grass seed in our orchard and planted flowers and bulbs with my daughter. We are not wearing jackets. I sweat in a T-shirt as frogs croak down by the pond and songbirds sing in the branches all around us. Walking by a raspberry cane I look down and notice the green buds sprouting up its entire length.
Of course, weather has variance. Growing up outside of Chicago I remember that we would have an odd winter day here and there where the temperature would spike into the fifties or sixties. Snow would vanish before our eyes and all of the neighborhood kids would be out on their bicycles and playing basketball in their driveways. When two days later the temperature had plummeted to a seasonally rational twenty degrees, we would despair the fact that winter had months left with which to pummel us with gray skies, ice, and the boredom of being trapped in our houses.
I acknowledge that such variance is normal. Walking around my land, absorbing the signals of spring six weeks before their time, I know that this is not normal. These are signs of change. Where the change takes us, how it will unfold over the coming seasons, and years, and decades, I cannot know. So I take notes with silent eyes, filing away the date of the first daffodil flowers and fruit blossoms. I hope to adapt, and I hope that enough of our fellow Earthlings across the taxonomic kingdoms can do the same.
—
Paul Kingsnorth asks us, “What if it is not a war?” in his recent essay on the Dark Mountain blog, where he explores how social movements and our general response to the predicaments of our age adopt war metaphors and terminology. Kingsnorth writes:
“War metaphors and enemy narratives are the first thing we turn to when we identify a problem, because they eliminate complexity and nuance, they allow us to be heroes in our own story, and they frame our personal aggression and anger in noble terms. The alternative is much harder: to accept our own complicity.”
Kingsnorth’s exploration is well worth the read and offers many good points for consideration. He culminates with the idea that perhaps, as poet Gary Snyder suggests, we are not in a war but a trial, a perhaps five-thousand year journey towards living well with ourselves and the planet. Such thought experiments can be helpful, as our language clearly shapes our perceptions and then guides our behavior. To be sure, consciously crafting our worldview allows for controlled and meaningful responses to the circumstances of our age. Kingsnorth proposes a worthwhile exercise when he invites us to think of the personal qualities that we would need to possess for an extended trial as opposed to a war.
But what if there is a war, and it is not one of our choosing? What if civilization itself is a war against the living planet, and no amount of ignoring it will make it stop? What if we were born into a war and it was so normalized by our culture, so entirely sewn into the fabric of our being that we could hardly see it, and when we did, everyone around us justified it and made it righteous?
Agriculture is destroying topsoil. The skin of the planet, home to a nearly unfathomable quantity of life, is being rendered sterile, sometimes toxic, before it is finally tilled into oblivion to blow away on the wind or drift off downstream. This is how civilization feeds itself a diet of an increasingly lower nutritive value. Forests, prairies, and wetlands are razed to continue this onslaught, species are wiped out, aquifers are drained, fossil fuels burned in massive quantities, and endocrine disrupting poisons are carelessly distributed into the ecosystem.
If I went to someone’s home and engaged in all of the above activities on their land, how would they describe it? If I abandon the language of assault, I am left with little else to lean on. There is killing upon killing upon killing. Nowhere in this activity that is central to civilization can we find a relationship that isn’t one-sided domination. It is not an eagerness to slander that with which I do not agree with that drives me to describe civilization and its process as an assault on life, but rather a complete lack of any other accurate language with which to speak on it. If civilization is not at war with life, is it at peace with life? Is there a truce between civilized man and the forests, oceans, and waterways? When we look around do we see the wild on the rebound? Do we see civilized man reducing the amount of destruction he metes upon the ecology of the world? Is the general course of civilized decision making to prioritize the ecological system over the economic system? Of course not.
Zyklon B was invented as a pesticide. The Haber-Bosch process was developed to supply nitrogen for munitions. If it is not war that civilization is waging, then what is it? And if civilization is at war with the living planet, then why does it make sense to pretend that it isn’t?
—
“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the Judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of a stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
– Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
Kingsnorth says that we love war, though many of us pretend not to. Maybe he is right. For the westerner, it is so easy to avoid the overt wars of our culture, because they are fought far away by paid grunts, and their victims are demonized. We are happy that the media obliges the lies we tell ourselves by not running an endless stream of images showing the dead civilians in third world nations around the globe. Even better, they make it so easy for us to not see the less obvious war, to not know just how much killing and slave-making civilization engages in every day to keep the oil, and the food, and the consumer products flowing into the stores (and the trash flowing away from the neighborhoods.) Again, most people just call this “business” or “capitalism,” and they see in it nothing but the mundane transactions of commerce, but when it all can trace back to one group of people pointing guns, and tanks, and warplanes at another, are we not lying to ourselves if we say it is not war? What if it all traces back to dead primates, dead rivers, dead oceans, dead people?
Maybe we should embrace war, instead of hiding from it. Perhaps if we would stop pretending that there is no war, we could finally fight back in some meaningful way. Honestly, the fact that it is so difficult to know just how we could go about such a daunting task is likely why we never speak of it. To fight back against civilization is to risk the livelihoods of everyone we know, and everyone we don’t. There is not one cabal of people who if brought before tribunal or lined up against a wall and shot would unmake the machinations and complex systems, hundreds if not thousands of years in the making, that comprise the belts and pistons of civilization. If we were to try to stop this system from destroying our planet and our future by rising up against it, we would first have to have some inkling as to how that could be accomplished, and all the while we would know that the odds of success were infinitesimally small. Also, we would be risking everything we have while simultaneously inviting the scorn of almost all of humanity upon ourselves.
Put in such a way, I can see why most people work so hard to unsee the war that is civilization.
Ultimately, Kingsnorth is right about the fact that the language of war is a tool for the destruction of nuance, of gray tones, and uncertainty. This conundrum has existed throughout human history, as people of good heart and conscience always question the righteousness of their motives and actions, a process that often slows their reaction and mutes their response to forces of nihilism and destruction. Albert Camus laments as much in his essays, “Letters to a German Friend,” when he writes about the confused French response to Nazi invasion. Alternatively, civilization is not in possession of a conscience, the systems that are its make up having been so atomized and bureaucratized, splintered into an untold number of moving parts that no one actor can be held accountable for the actions of the whole. This is the great and dark promise of civilization; it will provide a bounty of material access while diluting and thus absolving every recipient of their guilt.
The good and decent bind themselves and blunt their effectiveness with questions of conscience, while those bent on conquest and power never do. Resistance fails to get its shoes on while civilization fells another forest, removes another mountain top, extirpates another species.
It is not my aim here to reduce the complexity and nuance of our situation into a simplified binary. In fact, if anything I would suggest that our times call for an almost contradictory way of thinking, embracing that in any given context we are both complicit in and victim to the war that civilization makes upon our planet. At different times and in different places we must make both peace and war. Humbly, I offer that when we sit in thought about how we are to respond to the great challenge of our time, that we try not to be only one thing, neither solely a warrior nor a monk, but at various times we are each. Language of war falls short of describing the healing that we must engage in as individuals and communities, whereas language of trial and endurance falls short of describing the fight that we are called to make upon the systems, infrastructure, and yes, individuals whose daily work threatens to drastically shorten the time we may have available to trial and endure.
The heart of Kingsnorth’s point seems to be that when we convince ourselves that we are at war, we break our world into allies and enemies, demanding conformity of the former and diminishing the humanity of the latter. Throughout history such reductionism has often had tragic results. If the war of civilization against the living world has us each playing enemy and ally at different times and in different contexts, we would be wise to caution ourselves against lining up behind eager executioners. However, we would be foolish to continually forgive and appease the people who use their social, political, and economic power to not only blind the public to the horrors of civilization, but to actively increase the breadth and scale of those horrors.
Language of war can, if we allow it, claim nuance as its first casualty. So can the language of peace, or trial, as it were. But let us ask ourselves, to whom do we do service when we refuse to speak of war? Are we doing service to our children and their chance of survival? Are we doing service to the ecosystems under threat of eradication? Or are we doing service to the bulldozer, the pipeline, the feedlot, the open-pit mine?
Accepting that civilization is a war and using the language of war to understand the gravity of its processes does not necessarily mean that we must assume a conventional posture of warfare in order to stand in opposition or to react in a meaningful way. This is to say, not all fights are won with open combat alone. To be always at war with the world is exhausting, especially when defeat looms. I understand the fear of losing everything, before we lose everything. The first challenge to overcome is to understand the existential nature of this war, that it is not necessarily individuals or groups who we must oppose, but the space between us, the relations and duties and notions and systems to which we all find ourselves often unwillingly subservient.
If we honestly want to observe and honor the complexity of this time and our circumstances, maybe it is not one side of the road or the other to which we must hop to avoid being run over. Maybe the clarity we seek will never come as the strands of all of our relations stretch and snap, context ever fluxing, all of us reacting, reacting, wounded and hobbled in the dark.
Yoryanis Isabel Bernal Varela, 43, was a leader of the Wiwa tribe and a campaigner for both indigenous and women’s rights.
The Wiwa are one of four tribes that live on the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a unique pyramid-shaped mountain in northern Colombia. The Sierra Nevada Indians believe it is their responsibility to maintain the balance of the universe.
Bernal Varela is the latest victim in a long line of attacks against Sierra Nevada leaders, who have been at the forefront of the indigenous movement in South America. Many Indians have been killed by drug gangs, left-wing guerrillas and the army.
José Gregorio Rodríguez, secretary of the Wiwa Golkuche organization, stated: “Indigenous people are being threatened and intimidated. Today they murdered our comrade and violated our rights. Our other leaders must be protected.”
The problem is not limited to Colombia. Indigenous activists throughout Latin America are being murdered for campaigning against the theft of their lands and resources. The murderers are seldom brought to justice.
The climate of violence endemic to the ongoing resource wars, illegal occupation, violent siege, and politically motivated land grabs of Nicaragua’s North Caribbean Autonomous Region, iscontinuing to escalate.
On Wednesday evening, January 25, the death of a well-known Tuahka Indigenous leader was confirmed – Camilo Frank López was shot in the forehead and killed while leaving a local bar with his cousin. López was the current Tuahka Indigenous Territorial Government Prosecutor.
López’s first cousin, Eloy Frank, who was the Deputy Foreign Minister Secretary for Indigenous Affairs of the Presidency, also suffered an injury to his arm in the attack.
The killing took place in an area known as the ‘Mining Triangle’.
Nicaragua is often lauded for its low crime rates compared to more systemic cultures of violence found in Central American nations such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. However, the region where this latest killing took place, largely known as La Muskitia, has been host to intensifying violent conflict as the legal territories of Indigenous Peoples, such as the Mayagna and the Miskitu, are encroached upon by Mestizo settlers from the interior and Atlantic regions of Nicaragua.
Many claim the illegal settlers are affiliated with the ruling Sandinista political party, who have much to gain economically from seizing and exploiting the resource rich region. Estimates have held that around 85% of Nicaragua’s intact natural resource preserves are contained there; and thanks to ongoing Indigenous stewardship, much of the biodiversity is currently preserved and remains intact.
The binational Indigenous nation of Muskitia, which extends into Honduras, is also home to the second largest tropical rainforest in the western hemisphere – second only the Amazon in size and commonly referred to as “the lungs of Central America”– and many endangered species of animals.
Before dawn on December 21, 2016, dozens of police raided the headquarters of the Shuar Federation (FISCH) in the Ecuadorian Amazon and arbitrarily detained its president, Agustin Wachapá. The indigenous leader was thrown to the ground and repeatedly stamped on and ridiculed beneath the boots of police in front of his wife. The police then razed the Shuar Federation’s office—turning over furniture and carrying away computers. According to the indigenous leader’s wife, her husband was taken away without any kind of explanation. An arrest warrant for Wachapá was never presented.
Agustin Wachapá has since been accused of publicly calling for the mobilization and violent resistance of the Shuar communities against state security forces in San Juan Bosco, where the indigenous community in Nankints was evicted and had their homes demolished against their will to make way for the Chinese Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) open-cut copper mine. In the two months since the forced eviction, members of the communities surrounding Nankints have twice attempted to retake the land that was confiscated from them. On Dec. 14, the second attempt to storm the mine resulted in the death of a policeman and wounded seven other members of the state security forces.
The Ecuadorian government also declared a State of Emergency suspending basic rights such as freedom of assembly, freedom of movement, and due process under law, as well as granting the military the exceptional power to enter private residences and arbitrarily detain people without warrants or evidence.
An overwhelming military presence was then deployed across the Amazonian province to bolster security around the Chinese mine and quell all dissent, prompting Domingo Ankuash, the historical leader of the Shuar to call upon the United Nations and other international human rights organizations to monitor the militarization of his people’s ancestral lands, in which he estimates 8,000 high-ranking members of the military—marine, air and land troops—as well as 4 war-tanks, surveillance drones, aerostatic balloons, mobile satellites, and helicopter gunships, have been deployed.
The region—known as the Cordillera of the Condor—is where the cloud forests on the eastern slopes of the Andes drops off into the vast rainforests of the Amazon basin. It contains some of the most richly biodiverse ecosystems in the world. Once operational, the Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) mine—a joint venture of Tongling and China Railway Construction—will be the second largest copper mine on the planet. It will make an estimated $1.2bn in annual royalties for the Ecuadorian government. It will also consume 41,769 hectares of rainforest and rural agricultural land, much of it belonging to the Shuar Peoples.
Now, almost a month after his arbitrary detention, Agustin Wachupá is being kept in a maximum security prison on the other side of the country near the capital Quito, despite a call from Amnesty International to respect his judicial rights. The State of Emergency within Morona Santiago has been extended for another 30 days, and a media blackout has been imposed, forcing 15 community radio stations to broadcast the state-run Radio Publico.
Meanwhile, the government stepped up its manhunt for the “illegal armed group” involved in the violent incursions onto Explorcobres S.A., but community leaders are claiming a witch-hunt has begun in order to capture and detain people of influence such as teachers or leaders who belong to local committees opposed to the mine, as well as the heads of households whose homes were bulldozed in Nankints. All of these people have one thing in common: they are predominantly indigenous males of military age.
“The government of Rafael Correa is pushing the Armed Forces to play a role that we have never seen before, not even in times of dictatorship,” said Jorge Herrera, an indigenous leader of the Kichwa Peoples from the neighbouring Andes highlands. As president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Herrera has expressed his increasing alarm at the military buildup inside of the Condor Cordillera on behalf of the 14 other indigenous nations of Ecuador that belong to the confederation. “The military is not defending the security of the population, but rather the transnational corporations that have purchased licenses [to exploit] large hectares of Ecuadorian territory as private property.”
From Dayuma to Sarayuku, President Correa’s government has deployed its overwhelming military might against rural and indigenous communities that oppose the nation’s booming mining industry before; but the current mobilization of state security forces inside Morona Santiago is unprecedented in terms of scale and scope in the country’s modern history. Not since 1995, during the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru, has their been such a massive build-up of armed forces along the Peruvian border on the western ridges of the Condor Cordillera, but back in 1995, in a complete reversal of roles, former president Sixto Duran commended the Shuar for working with the military to defend the Ecuadorian homeland from an invading foreign army.
“We will not yield a millimetre more”
The War of the Cenepa was the third military confrontation between Ecuador and Peru since 1941, and Ecuador had already suffered two embarrassing military defeats in both its previous battles with Peru along with the annexation of almost a third of the country’s former territory—hundreds of thousands of kilometres of oil and mineral rich land in the Amazon rainforest. Until its resolution in 1998, the border dispute between the two nation states had become the longest-running international armed conflict in the Western Hemisphere—and back in 1995, when the Amazon rainforest had turned into a theatre of modern warfare—this ancient people known as the Shuar were joining the Ecuadorian military en-masse.
A military anthem called “We will not yield a millimetre more” was being broadcast into television sets across the country to recruit men in their prime to join the Ecuadorian army and defend the nation’s borders against the Peruvians. The televised anthem featured clips of patriotic crowds waving Ecuadorian flags, coffins of the fallen being carried from army-helicopters, as well as soldiers in motorized canoes with mounted machine guns, scanning the thick vegetation on the river banks for Peruvian invaders. The speech of former-President Sixto Durán invokes patriotic fervour, uniting the Ecuadorian people to defend the motherland against a common enemy. The chorus, “Heroes of the Cenepa, we are all heroes” is chanted as an indigenous leader speaks to the Ecuadorian media, his traditional feather-headress proudly flashed across the screen.
The Shuar have always been a proud and fierce nation of warriors—long-feared for their practice of shrinking and mummifying the heads of enemies killed in combat in the days before contact—and they were respected and admired by their military comrades. In the Cenepa War, they were charged with transporting food and munitions over inhospitable jungle terrain, running reconnaissance missions around enemy camps and fighting on the Amazonian frontline—a mineral-rich basin by the river Cenepa within the mountainous Condor Cordillera. While the ancient tradition of head-hunting is no longer practiced by the Shuar, the feats on the Amazonian battlefield of an elite unit of Special Forces made up indigenous Shuar, and their ethnic cousins the Achuar, had captured the imagination of the Ecuadorian people. They were known as the Arútam Brigade, or the Iwia—the Demons of the Jungle—and they had become the pride of the nation. They were the Heroes of the Cenepa.
As night fell over the Condor Cordillera, legend goes that when possessed by the sacred spirit of Arútam, these indigenous commandos could enter the enemy camp with the stealth of the jaguar and the cunning of the anaconda, and then, disappear into the night as silently as they came without alerting the lookouts. When the Peruvian military woke at dawn the next day they discovered evidence of the incursion when members of their regiment would not move—they were still sleeping, lifeless without heads.
These mythical war-stories of the Arútam Brigade on the Amazonian battlefield not only canonized the Shuar as defenders of the motherland at a time when the Ecuadorian people’s confidence in their own military had been shaken by their two previous military defeats—they struck fear into the heart of the invading Peruvian army. The Shuar Peoples helped the Ecuadorian government and its military win the War of the Cenepa. Ecuador did not yield a millimeter more of its territory to its much larger neighbor Peru—and the Shuar were proud to have served for their military and for their country in a time of need.
Ecuador’s Presidential Elections and Backlash to the Mining Boom
The conflict in Nankints could not have come at a worse time for President Correa and his ruling party Alianza Pais. As the incumbent government closes ranks around Correa’s anointed successor—former Vice-President Lenin Moreno—in the upcoming February presidential elections, the Shuar uprising in the Condor Cordillera has again illuminated the dark underbelly of President Correa’s so-called socialist “Citizens Revolution”. The outgoing president has spent unprecedented sums of money on infrastructure projects and social programs on his ambitious socialist agenda, but a perfect storm of plummeting oil prices, economic mismanagement, and numerous corruption scandals, have almost bankrupted the country.
It took multiple billion-dollar loans from China to artificially prop up the Ecuadorian economy – and with it President Correa’s popularity. It will take generations for Ecuador to pay back this debt, and in the last few years the cash-strapped administration of President Correa has sold mining concessions to the Chinese that span a third of the country’s vast Amazon rainforest, as well as opened up large sections of pristine Andes wetlands and cloud-forests for mining in fragile ecosystems such as Intag and Quimsacocha.
These mines have become even more invasive and destructive to Ecuador’s richly biodiverse ecosystems and rural communities, exposing President Correa’s brand of socialism for what it is: militarized neoliberalism where anyone who is unfortunate enough to live above an oil or mineral deposit is stripped of their rights at the point of a gun.
As the leader of the Shuar federation Agustin Wachupa sits in prison, his thoughts have no doubt called upon the memory of Jose Isidro Tendetza Antun – another Shuar leader who fought against another open-cut copper mine along the Condor Cordillera. El Mirador was the first open-cut mine in the country and was widely viewed as establishing a precedent for the nation’s booming mining industry. For years, Tendetza had organized community opposition to the mine, protesting the contamination of the region’s rivers as well as the eviction of rural and indigenous people who lived on the lands now being consumed by El Mirador.
For his opposition against the mine, the late Shuar leader received constant harassment and death threats against him—including in 2012, when his house and crops were set on fire by men his family claimed were employees of the Chinese mine. Tendetza filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. In 2014, as the Shuar leader prepared to leave for Lima, Peru, to give a speech at the 2014 Climate Change Conference, he went missing. After a tip-off, the son of Tendetza found his father in a grave marked “no name”. There were strangulation marks around his father’s throat, as well as broken bones and other signs of torture that marked the Shuar leaders body. His arms and legs were also trussed with a blue rope.
Tendetza was the third Shuar leader to be violently murdered for opposing the mining industry since Bosco Wisum in 2009 and Freddy Taish in 2013.
As is the case with many other large scale mining projects across Ecuador, a process of Free and Informed Prior Consent and Consultation was not carried out with the Shuar community over the exploration and exploitation of the minerals beneath the land in Nankints. This means Explorcobres S.A. (EXSA) is now in direct violation of Section 7 Article 57 of the Ecuadorian Constitution, as well as the rights enshrined in Articles 6 and 15.2 of Convention 169 of the ILO, and Article 19 of the U.N. Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“Our territory is not only Nankints,” the Shuar Peoples stated in a letter. “In fact, more than 38 percent of our territory has been concessioned to large-scale mining. All the riverbanks of the Zamora and Santiago basins have been concessioned to small-scale mining. A gigantic hydroelectric dam is about to be built. So our question is: where do they want us to live?”
“The invasion of oil and mining companies, now Chinese and Canadian and others, are accomplices with this regime and their military police and followers,” said Domingo Ankuash, the historic leader of the Shuar. “The constitution, conventions and international declarations of human rights as well as the United Nations are worthless with no coercive power to stop this aggression. The Shuar Peoples are suffering at this time.”
In a shocking escalation of the ongoing violent conflict devastating the Indigenous binational autonomous nation of Moskitia, a Mayanga family of three was killed in a brutal attack by ‘Colonos’ at the Llano Sucio site of the Alamikamba community in the Awala Prinsu territory on November 27, 2016. The attack sent shockwaves through the already war torn territories of Moskitia.
The family’s names and ages were documented by community members; and, the Miskito community continues to seek international solidarity amidst this tragedy and related ongoing devastation. The Mayanga individuals who lost their lives in this most recent and exceptionally brutal attack, have been identified as:
Bernicia Dixon Peralta, age 30 (family and community members claim she was between 3 and 5 months pregnant);
Photo: Cejudhcan Derechos Humanos
Feliciano Benlis Flores, age 37;
Photo: Cejudhcan Derechos Humanos
And, their 11 year old son, Feliciano Benlis Dixon.
Photo: Cejudhcan Derechos Humanos
Reports from the community indicate the family was on the receiving end of threats from invading Colonos – heavily armed Mestizo settlers encroaching on Miskito territory, acting as agents of a large scale land grab. They also say these threats were fully realized last weekend while the family was attempting to plant seeds on their traditional land.
Eklan James Molina, mayor of Alamikamba, which is located in the municipality of Prinzapolka, has demanded a thorough investigation of the massacre. In a statement to one of the few independent news outlets in Nicaragua, La Prensa, he charged: “As mayor, I ask the police and the army to follow up on the case. You have to get to the bottom of why it [occurred].”
In the article published by La Prensa, unverified claims surfaced suggesting the deceased family’s land had been illegally sold to the violent, encroaching settlers by a mysterious third party. Nancy Elizabeth Henriquez, deputy of the YATAMA Indigenous political party – the only real political opposition to the Sandinista state in the region at this time – has dismissed such claims as already having been settled in a court of law; and, explicitly categorized this recent massacre as a revenge killing. In her statement to La Prensa, she relayed, “The owner sued and won the right [to the land] that is theirs; and the Colonos killed the entire family for revenge.” She cited ongoing ethnic clashes as one potential reason the Nicaraguan National Police continue to allow such atrocities to take place with impunity.
Moskitia, a lesser known conflict zone where the violent and heavily armed Meztizo settlers from the Pacific coast and interior of Nicaragua continue to invade traditional and legal Miskito land, has been experiencing escalations in terrorism and violence since June of 2015, according to an official statement issued by the Miskito Council of Elders in August of this year. In a statement published by The Ecologist in October, the elders explained:
“Since ancient times we’ve [cared for] our forests, because apart from being our only means of sustenance, we understand that any alteration to [them] attracts risks; alters our form of life; puts existence itself at risk; causes drastic changes [to] the climate; alters the ecosystem; and breaks our link with our ancestors.
[For] little more than five years, [we] have experienced the largest internal colonization [of] our history. The presence of ‘Colonos’ has drastically altered our form of life. In such a short time [the invasion] has destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of our forests, which has led to [the drying of] our rivers, [causing] the animals [to] migrate and the climate to alter, and us to emigrate. Our large forests are now deserts, occupied for the livestock, and [we] can do nothing to curb the advance of the settlers as they have the support of the Government of Nicaragua and [we] are alone.”
***
At this point, the much hyped November presidential election in Nicaragua has come and gone. President Daniel Ortega managed to further consolidate power and formally establish the foundations for a family dynasty and authoritarian dictatorship. All fanfare aside, Fidel Castro’s recent death means little in a pragmatic sense to the quasi-socialist, former Sandinista revolutionary, Ortega; his contradictory embrace of neoliberalism has carved out even more geopolitical space for a disturbing emerging brand of neoliberal authoritarianism – more in line with Putin’s newly conservative Russia, the theocratic regime of Iran, and the authoritarian capitalism embraced by China, than Fidel’s revolutionary ideals in Cuba. It is thus likely no coincidence that all three of the aforementioned nations have sought a stake in the notorious Nicaragua trans-oceanic canal. After mounting skepticism regarding whether the environmentally catastrophic, human rights disaster would actually come to fruition, recent reports have cited the monstrous development project may be poised to move forward after all. At least 11 non-violent protestors were recently injured amid the growing anti-canal movement.
Another recent report from La Prensa indicates the continued violent expansion of the agricultural frontier into the Indigenous nation of Moskitia – which includes the second largest tropical rainforest in the Western Hemisphere after the Amazon, referred to as the ‘lungs of Mesoamerica’ – may also be tied to Russia’s increasing imperialist presence in the region. A key player in the re-militarization of Nicaragua, Russia recently sold the impoverished nation an estimated 80 million dollars’ worth of military war tanks (some suggesting to suppress ongoing internal dissent) and is launching a strange new imperial drug war in the region. It is unclear what stake Russia has in fighting a drug war in Central America, but the La Presna report suggests that they may be hoping for a payoff in agricultural land appropriated through recent land grabs and ongoing deforestation.
