Featured image: Aymara people outside the courthouse in Puno on June 28, 2017, during final hearings of the trial. Walter Aduviri was sentenced to seven years for protesting against a Canadian mining project.
This past month, eighteen Aymara community leaders endured the final stages of a trial that had them facing up to 28 years in prison and massive fines for their alleged roles in the 2011 ‘Aymarazo’ protests against the Santa Ana silver mine on the Peru-Bolivia border. The group of Aymara leaders stood accused of obstructing public services, disturbing the peace, and committing aggravated extortion against the state.
Seventeen of the accused were acquitted of all charges; however, on July 18, Walter Aduviri was sentenced to 7 years in prison and ordered to pay a 2 million sol fine (over $600,000). His lawyer, Martín Ticona, speaking to the crowds in Puno after final sentencing, indicated irregularities in the judicial process and said that they will appeal Aduviri’s sentencing. The prosecutor, Juan Monzón Mamani, also intends to appeal the decision for reasons that are not yet clear.
Aymara Branded as Criminals for Resistance against Mining
Initially, 100 Aymara had criminal investigations brought against them after the ‘Aymarazo’ protests in the southeastern region of Puno. The investigations were dropped against 82 of the Aymara, leaving just eighteen to stand trial. They had all been equally charged with obstruction of public services, disturbing the peace, and aggravated extortion. On June 28, the accusations were withdrawn against eight leaders—including Francisca Sarmiento, the only woman charged—due to lack of evidence. Ten went on to face sentencing; but only Aduviri was found guilty, for the charge of disturbing the peace.
Photo: DHUMA
“They say that the Aymarazo is an emblematic case, and that should mean justice for our leaders, and compliance with the law of prior consultation,” an Aymara man explains in a video by PUNO organization Human Rights and Environment (DHUMA, its acronym in Spanish). “And the government has decided that because of the protest they must prosecute our leaders, so what is our response? That we must organize ourselves as Aymara communities and indigenous and rural communities in general.”
The accused have paid a heavy price over the past six years – not only in terms of time and money spent to attend numerous court hearings and the heavy threat of 28-year prison sentences. They have also had to cope with the psychological trauma of criminalization, and the Aymara population at large have struggled with a dominant public narrative stigmatizing the Aymara population as alleged “criminals” or with labels such as “anti-development,” according to local organizations and activists.
The ‘Aymarazo’ protests in 2011
Rumors of the proposed mine began to circulate as early as 2004. Communities were immediately concerned about the proposed mine because of its sensitive location. Mining operations are inherently water-intensive and Santa Ana could also contaminate drinking water, affecting agriculture, livelihoods and food security for hundreds.
“We’ve come here today to say clearly that the Santa Ana Mine was going to operate in an area where there are many rivers,” a woman at a recent demonstration reiterated to DHUMA. The Callacami River runs through the area and if it’s contaminated, the pollution could even reach the town of Desaguadero, [near] Lake Titicaca, and the whole lake could be polluted, affecting the entire region and even Bolivia.”
While communities had found out about the mine through rumors in 2004, it was not until 2007 that the news became official when the government authorized the Santa Ana mine. Communities began to carry out a series of public petitions, administrative complaints and procedures directed at local and regional government and environmental authorities. When their concerns remained unaddressed, demonstrations began to be organized in communities and towns all along the shores of Lake Titicaca, near the border with Bolivia, and in the city of Puno, where this steady resistance came to a head with the events known as the Aymarazo in March to June of 2011.
Those protests culminated over several days in May in a mass mobilization in Puno of more than 15,000 Aymara people from all over the south of Peru, paralyzing parts of the city for days. Communities were calling for not just cancellation of the Santa Ana mine, but cancellation of all mining concessions since 2011, and a moratorium on future concessions, according to Rodrigo Lauracio, a lawyer with DHUMA, in an extensive interview with the authors. Indigenous territory in Puno province has seen a massive increase in permits for extractive projects over the past two decades, he said, consistent with nationwide trends.
“This was a social protest not just by communities in the district of Huacallani [where the concession is] who were directly affected, but by many communities who would be indirectly affected,” said Lauracio. “In the environmental impact study only three communities were considered, but in reality many communities [were affected].”
Bear Creek Mining Corp.’s public presentation of the company’s environmental impact study in February 2011, badly translated into Aymara in an undersized hearing room, only deepened public fears, according to Lauracio.
“It’s important to note that this mining project was proposed in the territory of rural Aymara indigenous communities,” he said. “They had many concerns to do with impacts on their territory, and above all on the water… Many of these concerns were not resolved by the mining company at this time.”
Aftermath of the Mobilizations
The Aymarazo protests forced the government’s hand: They rescinded the controversial Decree 083 that gave Bear Creek authorization to proceed, effectively stopping the project.
Repressive criminal proceedings are just one of the consequences of the Aymarazo mobilizations. But the repeal of the Santa Ana decree is also a factor in another lawsuit. In 2014, the company responded to that move by filing a $1.2 billion case against Peru at the World Bank’s International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes. Bear Creek contends that Peru violated the terms of its trade agreement with Canada by not allowing the mine to go forward. The hearings, which are ongoing, take place in a closed court in a highly undemocratic process.
Bear Creek asserts that the Aymarazo protests were politically motivated. However, DHUMA and other supporting organizations say that communities rejected the project in order to protect their water sources, and because neither Bear Creek nor the Peruvian state followed correct legal procedures. The company’s attempt at community outreach manipulated communities and both the state and the corporation implemented their policies and plans with a complete lack of transparency, according to Lauracio, failing to even comply with national and international law on free, prior and informed consent.
Repressive Policies and Multiple Abuses of Power
Peru has seen an increase in free trade agreements and a relaxing of environmental protection in recent years. These policies aim to facilitate the entry of transnational corporations and international investment into Peru, and mining and extractive industries have increased across the country.
There has also been an increase in “… public policies that create new crimes against people who participate in social protests,” observed Lauracio. Peru’s wave of neoliberal and repressive policies not only gives extractive industry a helping hand but creates further mechanisms to criminalize resistance to extractivism in the courts. These mechanisms are designed to prevent further protests like the Aymarazo and help pave the way for future extractive projects.
Police stand on guard outside the courthouse. Photo: DHUMA
The repressive tactics of criminal proceedings go along with other forms of state criminalization. These are also present in the Aymarazo – such as the smear campaigns against social protests and those who organize and participate in them as violent criminals or “backwards” or “against development.” The state also intervened in Aymarazo protests in ways that sparked violence, such as the declaration of a state of emergency, which allowed increased repressive tactics and violence on the part of the armed forces and caused trauma, injuries and death.
These dynamics are not just playing out in Puno, but across Peru, which currently has 39 mining conflicts registered by the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America. In the same week as the Aymarazo sentence, three community leaders from Espinar, Cusco, also faced sentencing in a trial for charges relating to protests calling for mining company compliance with environmental and health regulations. The criminal charges are related to protests over mining in 2012 in which five people were killed by Peruvian police during a declared state of emergency. The three have been acquitted—but they’ve gone through five years of unfair criminal proceedings.
In another example of policies that criminalize and harm people, Peru modified its laws in 2014 to create a loophole that allows police officers to kill people in situations of social protests. The police are also permitted to contract with corporations to provide private security services.
On one side, Bear Creek still has Santa Ana mine featured on its website (no doubt in the hope that its share price doesn’t drop, as it did after the 2011 protests) and the Peruvian state may be forced to pay $1.2 billion to Bear Creek, and could reissue the Santa Ana permit. On the other side, the Peruvian state seeks to jail Walter Aduviri and criminalize anti-mining resistance in a bid to silence future protests. Furthermore, they are demanding exaggerated fines, with an initial demand against the 18 for over $2 million, and Aduviri now sentenced to pay $600,000. To put that amount into context, the monthly minimum wage in Peru is around $270 – it would take 185 years of minimum wages to pay Aduviri’s fine.
The Politics of the Guilty Verdict against Aduviri
Aduviri has said that the trial is politically motivated, and that he is the target of political persecution. He ran for governor of the Puno province in 2014 on a platform many said was controversial, and has been branded as using the movement as a leadership platform to gain votes, by those seeking to discredit the demands of the 2011 protests.
Walter Aduviri campaigning in 2014. Source: YouTube
While he may be acquitted of the charge of extorting the state, he is charged with being the ringleader of not only the protest, but acts of destruction of state property that happened during the Aymarazo in 2011: his guilty verdict for the charge of disturbances labels him as autor mediato— indirect perpetrator or perpetrator-by-means. His being part of the leadership of a movement, his politics, and the widespread support he receives in Puno, seem to be included in the condemning judgment.
Outside the courthouse on July 6, the day of provisional sentencing, hundreds of Aymara mobilized in support of Aduviri, crying, “If there’s no solution, Quechuazo y Aymarazo! [more protests].” Aduviri declared his innocence in a press conference on July 7. On July 18, the day of the final sentencing, he addressed crowds in Puno in a fiery speech, interrupted by shouts of slogans denouncing the prosecutors and judges as biased. Aduviri is not in jail because the sentence can’t be executed while his appeal is ongoing.
With the verdict in the ICSID case due in September of this year, and Aduviri’s harsh sentence, the situation is a confluence of the state’s policy to criminalize anti-mining protests, and the toxic impacts of the tools of corporate power, like free trade agreements, when protests cause a mining project to be halted.
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.
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, roughly 600 African Americans and their allies gathered and marched towards Montgomery, Alabama in order to take a stand and draw attention to the fact that 99% of Selma, Alabama’s registered voters were white, and that the African American community was being denied their legal right to vote. The unarmed men and women who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge were met by a heavily armed police force and were tear gassed and beaten horrifically. In the end, 17 marchers were hospitalized, and another 50 were treated for injuries caused by the police.
On Sunday, November 20, 2016, more than 400 Native Americans and their allies marched on the Backwater Bridge outside of Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The Water Protectors had been demonstrating peacefully for months in order to preserve sacred burial grounds and protect their only source of clean drinking water from the oil-bearing Dakota Access Pipeline. However, this unarmed march was meant to clear vehicles that had been set up by DAPL to block the Backwater Bridge. They were attempting to clear the road so that emergency medical vehicles could have faster access to the residents and campers at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. After being trapped on the bridge by heavily armed police, the marchers were hosed with water cannons in 23°F temperatures, and shot with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, and concussion grenades for more than 7 hours. 26 people were hospitalized, and more than 300 were treated for injuries caused by the police forces.
It is highly likely that neither group of marchers knew the full extent of the violence that they were about to experience as they marched on these bridges for the first time. However, they certainly knew what was in store for them for any subsequent actions. After the first march on Montgomery, the nation was horrified by the images broadcast by media sources, and on March 9, more than 2500 people showed up for the second march on Montgomery. Due to a pending decision, and a restraining order issued by Federal District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson, the marchers turned around on the Pettus Bridge.
Ultimately, on March 17, Judge Johnson ruled that the civil rights activists’ right to march could not be abridged by the state of Alabama, writing “The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups…by marching, even along public highways.” Meanwhile, on March 13th, President Lyndon Johnson met with Alabama Governor George Wallace in an attempt to prevent further violence and harassment from being directed at the civil rights activists. While unsuccessful with Wallace, President Johnson introduced a bill two days later to Congress. That bill became the Voting Rights Act. While it took time for the bill to pass, President Johnson deployed 2000 soldiers of the U.S. Army, 1900 Alabama National Guard troops under federal command, and unknown numbers of FBI and Federal Marshals to protect the demonstrators as they successfully continued their march on March 21.
When I showed up on November 24 to bring supplies and provide medical support at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, there were an estimated 3500 people at camp. When I left at the end of the week, there were roughly 10,000. Dozens of countries, and hundreds of tribes from around the world are expressing outrage and concern over the violence and harassment directed towards the Water Protectors at Standing Rock. These communities are also outraged that the pipeline was originally supposed to pass north of Bismarck, ND, but was rejected as being too dangerous to pass near that overwhelmingly white community’s water source, and instead was relocated to pass through traditional Lakota lands and under their Missouri River water source without any conversation regarding indigenous concerns and opposition to the pipeline.
Governor Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota is escalating his rhetoric towards the safety of the people camped at Standing Rock. He has threatened anyone bringing food and clothing donations to the camps with $1000 fines. This week, he threatened to oust the Water Protectors from their camps in the name of safety, due to winter conditions. However, the Water Protectors are not going to leave, and making someone homeless in winter is unconscionable. Using water cannons on peaceful demonstrators in sub-freezing temperatures shows that safety is not Dalrymple’s top priority. Getting people to vacate the land is his priority.
The Water Protectors are going to continue to march, pray, and peacefully demonstrate, regardless of the violent reactions from DAPL security and police forces. They are doing everything that they can to stand up for their rights in a peaceful manner. They are waiting for action from President Obama. It is time for a sit-down between President Obama and Gov. Dalrymple. It is also time for an immediate and decisive response from the Obama administration to ensure the safety of peacefully assembled citizens and their right to clean water. This means troops standing with the Water Protectors, not opposed to them. President Johnson was not perfect, but he has been judged by this nation, and the world, to have been on the correct side of history on civil rights in the wake of Bloody Sunday. Due to the shared history of abuse and denied rights, despite laws and treaties on their side, it is difficult to see why President Obama praises one group’s actions, but has yet to do anything of substance for the other.
Bloody Sunday
When will troops protect the Water Protectors? So far the only troops acting in such a capacity are the veterans recruited by Wes Clark Jr. My thanks go out to Mr. Clark and his veterans. However, anything short of deploying troops to protect the peacefully assembled demonstrators, in conjunction with pushing a bill through Congress to extend the rights of indigenous communities over the governance of their own land, would be a shameful act by the Obama administration. This is your Pettus Bridge, Mr. President. On which side of this historic bridge do you stand?
Taking the least effective route to enact change is not praiseworthy. A teacher would award a D for such effort.
While the ruling by the Army Corps of Engineers sounds nice, demonstrators are still fighting for Lakota rights on land that is considered to be federally-owned, but was granted to the Lakota “in perpetuity” by the government. The Lakota never relinquished their right to this land. The government took it.
There are still Federal Police and Army Corps vehicles on Lakota land. They are still on the north side of Cantapeta Creek…with the DAPL security forces. I will believe something has changed when Federal forces are standing shoulder-to-shoulder WITH the Standing Rock Water Protectors, indigenous rights have been extended by law, and the pipeline is re-routed or terminated. Until this happens, nothing has changed.
Noah Weber is a nurse and a farmer from Montana. He volunteered as a medic at the Oceti Sakowin Camp at Standing Rock, though most of his time went to ensuring everyone in the medic, healer, midwifery, and warming tents had wood, warmth, and functional stoves.
Cannon Ball – On November 20th at approximately 6PM CST over 100 Water Protectors from the Oceti Sakowin and Sacred Stone Camps mobilized to a nearby bridge to remove a barricade that was built by the Morton County Sheriff’s Department and the State of North Dakota. This barricade, built after law enforcement raided the 1851 treaty camp, not only restricts North Dakota residents from using the 1806 freely but also puts the community of Cannon Ball, the camps, and the Standing Rock Tribe at risk as emergency services are unable to use that highway.
Water Protectors used a semi-truck to remove two burnt military trucks from the road and were successful at removing one truck from the bridge before police began to attack Water Protectors with tear gas, water canons, mace, rubber bullets, and sound cannons.
At 1:30am CST the Indigenous Rising Media team acquired an update from the Oceti Sakowin Medic team that nearly 200 people were injured, 12 people were hospitalized for head injuries, and one elder went into cardiac arrest at the front lines. At this time, law enforcement was still firing rubber bullets and the water cannon at Water Protectors. About 500 Water protectors gathered at the peak of the non-violent direct action.
The following is a statement from the Indigenous Environmental Network:
“The North Dakota law enforcement are cowards. Those who are hired to protect citizens attacked peaceful water protectors with water cannons in freezing temperatures and targeted their weapons at people’s faces and heads.
“The Morton County Sheriff’s Department, the North Dakota State Patrol, and the Governor of North Dakota are committing crimes against humanity. They are accomplices with the Dakota Access Pipeline LLC and its parent company Energy Transfer Partners in a conspiracy to protect the corporation’s illegal activities.
“Anyone investing and bankrolling these companies are accomplices. If President Obama does nothing to stop this inhumane treatment of this country’s original inhabitants, he will become an accomplice. And there is no doubt that President Elect Donald Trump is already an accomplice as he is invested in DAPL”.
TigerSwan is one of several security firms under investigation for its work guarding the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota while potentially without a permit. Besides this recent work on the Standing Rock Sioux protests in North Dakota, this company has offices in Iraq and Afghanistan and is run by a special forces Army veteran.
Law enforcement and private security at the North Dakota pipeline protests have faced criticism for maintaining a militarized presence in the area. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and National Lawyer’s Guild have filed multiple open records requests to learn more about the extent of this militarization, and over 133,000 citizens have signed a petition calling for the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene and quell the backlash.
The Federal Aviation Administration has also implemented a no-fly zone, which bars anyone but law enforcement from flying within a 4-mile radius and 3500 feet above the ground in the protest area. Dallas Goldtooth, an organizer on the scenes in North Dakota with the Indigenous Environmental Network, said on Facebook that “DAPL private security planes and choppers were flying all day” within the designated no-fly zone.
Donnell Hushka, the designated public information officer for the North Dakota Tactical Operation Center, which is tasked with overseeing the no-fly zone, did not respond to repeated queries about designated private entities allowed to fly in no-fly zone airspace.
What is TigerSwan?
TigerSwan has offices in Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, India, and Latin America and has headquarters in North Carolina. In the past year, TigerSwan won two U.S. Department of State contracts worth over $7 million to operate in Afghanistan, according to USASpending.gov.
TigerSwan, however, claims on its website that the contract is worth $25 million, and said in a press release that the State Department contract called for the company to “monitor, assess, and advise current and future nation building and stability initiatives in Afghanistan.” Since 2008, TigerSwan has won about $57.7 million worth of U.S. government contracts and subcontracts for security services.
Company founder and CEOJames Reese, a veteran of the elite Army Delta Force, served as the “lead advisor for Special Operations to the Director of the CIA for planning, operations and integration for the invasion of Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom” in Iraq, according to his company biography. Army Delta partakes in mostly covert and high-stakes missions and is part of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the latter well known for killing Osama Bin Laden.
One of TigerSwan’s advisory board members, Charles Pittman, has direct ties to the oil and gas industry. Pittman “served as President of Amoco Egypt Oil Company, Amoco Eurasia Petroleum Company, and Regional President BP Amoco plc. (covering the Middle East, the Caspian Sea region, Egypt, and India),” according to his company biography.
“It is sad, but not surprising, that this firm has ties to the US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange, told DeSmog. “It is another terrifying example of how our violent interventions abroad come home to haunt us in the form of repression and violation of our civil rights.”
The North Dakota Bureau of Criminal Investigation and the Private Investigation and Security Board are also conducting parallel investigations to the one recently completed by Morton County. TigerSwan did not comment on questions posed about their contract.
