by DGR Colorado Plateau | Dec 24, 2015 | Listening to the Land, Lobbying
By Stephany Seay / Buffalo Field Campaign
Featured image: Hundreds of wild buffalo will no longer be harassed or otherwise harmed on the Horse Butte peninsula, seen in the distance here. Photo by Buffalo Field Campaign.
Yesterday, Montana Governor Steve Bullock issued his final decision on year-round habitat for wild bison in Montana, and Buffalo Field Campaign is very pleased to announce that after more than eighteen years of fighting for wild buffalo to freely roam Horse Butte, we have finally achieved this significant victory! As many of you know, Horse Butte is part of what we have been pressing for since the beginning of our campaign, and we are inclined to celebrate this achievement as the victory that it is; indeed, it may be the biggest victory we have had! It took nearly two decades of hard work in the field, in the courts, and in the policy arena to accomplish this, and it demonstrates how perseverance pays off, and how we must never give up.
This victory is a result of endless pressure, being endlessly applied by BFC, by you our dedicated supporters, by the incredible and active residents of Horse Butte, and by the buffalo themselves who consistently demonstrate resistance, persistence, and endurance. Another boon granted the buffalo is that bull bison — but only bulls — will be given year-round habitat in the Gardiner Basin. Please take a little time to celebrate this victory, as it has been hard-earned by each of you. Thank you to everyone who has been with us for the buffalo, making our work possible.
As we bask in this triumph, we cannot let down our guard. We must strengthen our resolve to continue fighting for wild buffalo and their right to roam the lands that are their birthright. We have many difficult battles yet to win. A closer look at Governor Bullock’s decision shows us that the buffalo are still in grave danger from livestock industry interests and the government agencies that serve them.
In 2004, the courageous and passionate Akiva Silver occupied the Horse Butte bison trap, saving many buffalo from being captured and shipped to slaughter. In 2008, the trap was again occupied by another brave individual, and the Montana Department of Livestock have not set it up since, nor will they ever again. Buffalo Field Campaign photo by Chris Rota.
Even the decision to grant buffalo year-round habitat on Horse Butte has its devilish details, mainly in the form of a population cap: during fall and winter approximately 450 buffalo will be allowed to live there; during the spring that number rises to 600, which is terrific timing since that’s when the large herds come to Horse Butte for calving season; but by July the government will allow only 250 buffalo to remain. From reviewing the Governor’s decision, it appears that, should there be more than 250 buffalo on Horse Butte by summer, hazing would not begin until then, which is about six weeks later than hazing has been taking place in recent years. While our ultimate goal is to put an end to all hazing, this means that wild buffalo will finally have the opportunity to make their own choices about when or whether to migrate into Yellowstone for the summer months. It will be an awesome gift to learn what they will do directly from the buffalo.
The deeper you look into the Governor’s decision, the more questions it raises. Hazing, hunting, and capture-for-slaughter remain tools that the livestock-backed government agencies will employ, with goals of keeping this highly vulnerable — and indeed, endangered — population at artifically low numbers. Additionally, wild buffalo will not be granted any “tolerance” along the south side of the Madison River, which is favored habitat, mostly public lands, that the matriarch-led family groups very much enjoy and require during the months surrounding calving season. Also, in the Gardiner Basin, matriarch-led family groups will not have full access like their adult male counterparts, but will be given tolerance only during “hunting” season, and will be hazed into Yellowstone by mid-spring.
Again, we have a long way to go for the buffalo. We need you to join with us in strengthening your resolve and renewing your commitment to do whatever it takes to defend our beloved wild buffalo until they roam free all across the lands that have been their home since buffalo time began.
Support Buffalo Field Campaign here.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Dec 1, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Listening to the Land, Mining & Drilling
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.
As the morning passes, the sun shines through pine needles and juniper branches to dapple the forest floor in silvers and golds. The trees offer shade where patches of snow glimmer and whisper with the smallest sounds of melting. Pinyon pine cones are scattered across the ground. As they open, their seeds – delicious, nourishing pine nuts – become visible. Beautiful, blue-feathered pinyon jays gather the nuts in their beak before flying off to cache them for the deepening winter.
Humans have long participated in this vision though the vision is far older than them. From a place deeper than my mind’s memory, in the memories of the borrowed materials forming my body, I feel a kinship to this land’s original peoples. For thousands of years, in this part of the Great Basin, Shoshones and Goshutes have stood looking out at valleys like this one as they gathered the pine nuts that provided the most important winter food source making it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin’s harsh climate.
As I let my memory flow into the past, I see hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes living well off the gifts the land freely gives. Living in this way, I know their relationship with the land could have lasted forever. Pinyon pines could have gone on offering their pine nuts to jays, rats, and humans. Junipers could have gone on twisting in wooden gymnastics and growing their bundles of blue berries.
A herd of cattle catches my attention and I remember that this is just a vision, after all. The presence of cattle, here, forces me to confront the reality of the Great Basin’s ongoing destruction. An anxiety accompanies the cattle. It is the anxiety that flows from the knowledge of ecological collapse. I envy the hundreds of generations of Shoshones and Goshutes who had no reason to question the eternity of their culture.
Following the slow steps of brown and black cows, I see a metallic glint on the valley floor where streamers are tied onto fences built by ranchers so that sage grouse will not fly into the fences and kill themselves. I have seen the bundles of feathers and blood mangled and stuck in the wire fences. The cattle march to a shallow pond. A thin, but growing ring of algae floats on the pond’s surface while piles of cow shit litter sandy soil stripped of any vegetation. From the pond comes a strangled, gurgling sound. Despite the drought, water is being pumped from already strained wells to support the cattle.
The valley floor is striped in green and yellow patches. The green patches represent healthy, native sage brush and the yellow patches represent invasive crested wheat grass. I have learned how in the 1950s and 60s, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) initiated a series of projects designed to strip away sage brush to replace it with imported Asian crested wheat grass. Not long after white settlement cattle herds wiped out most of the native grasses in the Great Basin, so now the land must be forced to support them. Destroying the sage brush has had disastrous consequences including contributing to the collapse of sage grouse populations who, as their name suggests, require healthy sage brush for habitat.
Above the valley floors, where the pinyon-juniper forests drape across the mountains’ shoulders, are brown swaths cut into the land where the forests have fallen victim to the BLM’s so-called “vegetation treatment projects.” These vegetation treatment projects are really just clear-cuts justified by the BLM as “providing woodland products to the public,” “maintaining sage brush habitat,” and “protection of property and infrastructure.”
As my experience of this ancient vision disintegrates with the reminders of the processes threatening life in the Great Basin, I remember why I came here. I came, specifically, because I had heard of the BLM’s practice of clear-cutting pinyon-juniper forests. Friends of mine asked me to write about threats to pinyon-juniper forests. I had never seen a clear-cut pinyon-juniper forest before, I knew very little about the Great Basin at all, and I’ve always thought the best way to write about the land is to seek a true relationship with it.
So, my friend, the great activist, writer, and photographer Max Wilbert flew to Salt Lake from Eugene, Oregon and we made plans to drive from my home in Park City, Utah to Nevada to see both living pinyon-juniper forests and clear-cuts. We met up with Katie Fite, a biologist and the Board Secretary for the environmental protection group, WildLands Defense. Katie brings over 30 years of on-the-ground experience to environmental advocacy possessing expertise in the Great Basin’s ecology.
***
I walk through the shades and shadows of a healthy pinyon-juniper forest. Songbirds create their music celebrating the beauty of their home. Social ravens gossip back and forth diving down to ask who I am. From time to time, I catch a grey glimpse of a rabbit bounding out of my path. The gentle hooting of an owl falls from the treetops. Though I am several hundred yards from any of my companions separated by ridge lines and hundreds of trees, I do not feel alone. A sense of deep familiarity, the feeling shared when friends gather, settles over me.
It is the 19th of November. The full cycle of seasons in the Great Basin carries the range of temperature extremes. The summers are dry and hot and the winters are frigid with plenty of snow. Even a single day in the Great Basin reflects these extremes. Last night dropped below freezing and I woke with a crisp layer of frost on my sleeping bag at dawn.
In the cold times like these, the slopes of the mountains are the warmest places to be because as the sun comes up and heats the air on the valley floor, the warm air rises. The slopes of the mountains are also where the pinyon-juniper forests are. By mid-morning, the sun is strong and hot. Even though the temperatures fell into the teens Fahrenheit last night, the temperature gains the 60s by noon. The forests, then, are the most comfortable places to be in both the cold night and the hot day. The forests are warmer at night and in the morning than the valley floors, and when the sun beats down during the day the trees offer soothing shade.
It feels, to me, that these ancient pinyon-juniper forests enjoy caring for humans.
I feel I could walk through the forest like this for miles. Then, the trees abruptly stop. The shade ceases and the sun strikes my eyes with a physical force. A cold wind, driven wild over unbroken space, slaps my face. The sudden openness is a shock. I almost trip. Behind me is a living forest, before me is a void.
I have stepped into a clear-cut.
To my left for a mile, to my right for a mile, and a quarter mile across, the land is brown. The long limbs of pinyon pines slump across the gnarled trunks of junipers. I have only seen pictures of human massacre sites. Bodies, frozen and stiff, heaped in piles. And these clear-cuts are truly tree massacre sites.
Old -growth Juniper and Piñon-Pine lie in a twisted heap in a chained area south of Spruce Mountain, Nevada. (Photo: © Max Wilbert 2015)
I can tell this particular clear-cut was “chained.” Chaining is a practice employed by the BLM and is done by stretching a U.S. Navy battle-ship anchor chain between two crawler tractors. The tractors are driven parallel to each other, dragging the chain across the forest floor, and uprooting everything in the chain’s path.
The area chosen for chaining has no logic, no reason behind it. The clear-cut follows no straight lines. The path the crawler tractors took follows no pre-conceived geometric plan. No one mapped out where trees would be cut and where they wouldn’t. The cut looks more like the devastating consequence of a petulant child’s temper tantrum than the cold-calculations of forestry professionals.
Moving through the middle of the clear-cut, now, the worst part is the silence. The silence is more than the absence of sound. This is a spiritual silence. The void seeps from the empty space where a forest once stood and flows into my consciousness. Where moments before I was surrounded in the sense of the presence of life, now there is nothing. Nothing, except the rotting corpses of a once thriving forest community.
I want to know how this is possible. I want to know what justifications cleared the way for this destruction. I want to know who is behind this. I want to know why.
***
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin as well as a list of justifications and motivations for deforestation is too long, perhaps, for one essay. The truth is, I am still learning. I have spent the last three weeks reading everything I can about pinyon-juniper forests and I wish to sketch a broad storyline. This storyline includes dominance of ranching and mining interests in Nevada, a governmental bureaucracy that consistently drinks the kool-aid prepared by ranchers and miners, the historical amnesia that characterizes settler colonialism, insidious racism, blatant genocide, and what pinyon-juniper expert Ronald Lanner calls “dendrophobia for which there seems to be no treatment.” Because one essay cannot possibly provide the whole story – a story pinyon-juniper forests desperately need to be told – I will broadly describe the major themes in this essay and I plan on writing a series on pinyon-juniper forests exploring specific themes in more detail.
The history of pinyon-juniper deforestation in the Great Basin is a glimpse into the dominant culture’s insanity. There was a truly sustainable way to live in the Great Basin, but the arrival of European settlers doomed that way of life. The Shoshones and Goshutes lived for thousands of years hunting game in the spring and summer and gathering pine-nuts in the fall. This sustainability involved understanding how to manage their populations so the land’s ability to support humans would not be drawn down. Ronald Lanner in his foundational work “The Pinyon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History,” credits pinyon pine-nuts as the essential food source that made it possible for humans to live in the Great Basin. Of course, the Great Basin’s original peoples have always known this, and know that destroying the forests is suicidal.
European settlers arrived in droves looking for precious metals and bringing their “white man’s buffalo” (domesticated cattle). Mines were established and the only reliable source of wood in most of Nevada was pinyon-juniper forests. Lanner explains, “The production of mineral riches would not have been possible in nineteenth century Nevada without the pinyon woodlands and their vast supplies of wood. The opening of a mine was only the first of many operations necessary to convert hard rock into treasure. Huge labor forces had to be brought in to work the mines and to build and operate stamp mills, smelters, amalgamators, and concentrators. Lumber in enormous quantities was needed for these operations: timbers for shoring the mine shafts, charcoal for smelting ore, cordwood for heating and cooking. The great Nevada silver boom ran on wood.”
Lanner goes on to quantify the destruction and the numbers are absolutely devastating. He explains the destruction around Eureka, Nevada in the 1870s: “A typical yield of pinyon pine was ten cords per acre, and a cord made about 30 bushels of charcoal. So the furnaces of Eureka, working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of pinyon, the produce of over 50 acres. An additional 20 acres a day were being cut to provide cordwood for the mills. After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare for ten miles in every direction. By 1874, the wasteland extended twenty miles from town, and by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka.”
As is so often true, the destruction of the land is the destruction of the land’s original peoples. Lanner describes the situation in Nevada for the Shoshone as a “vicious circle” and writes, “The mining and urban activities there required huge amounts of wood and the burgeoning population consumed prodigious amounts of food. Local Indians helped provide both of these commodities by working for wages as lumberjacks and ranch hands. Those who cut down trees were destroying the source of their traditional winter food, pine nuts. Those who punched cattle aided and abetted the eradication of the native grasses that provided their traditional summer fare of grass seed. The more these food sources were destroyed, the more dependent the Indians became on wages; and the more they engaged in lumbering and ranching for white men, the more they destroyed their food sources. By the time the bubble burst in the 1880s and 1890s when the mining industry collapsed, the pinyon groves were gone, the valley grasslands were fenced for cattle, and much of the old culture was forsaken.”
The 1950s ushered in the next era of pinyon-juniper deforestation as ranchers became jealous of the presence of trees on potential grazing lands. Lanner notes that since the earliest white settlements in the Great Basin, accessible tracts of woodland had always been grazed. Lanner sums it up writing that overgrazing and timber trespass “combined to make the woodland one of the worst abused vegetation types in the West: even now the acre of woodland where one can find refuge from the ubiquitous cow pat is a rarity. But, as the post-World War II hunger for red meat mounted, the Forest Service started carving up National Forest woodlands with bulldozers and chains, hoping to create greener pastures.”
The ranchers’ jealousy of trees persists to today though new justifications for deforestation have been developed to thinly disguise the ranchers’ war on forests. A recent public scoping notice published on September 29, 2015 by the BLM, Carson City District, Sierra Front Field Office is illustrative.
It is not within the scope of this essay to address the problems with each of the BLM’s justifications. Many of the justifications require their own, full essay to thoroughly undermine them and I plan on writing those essays. Several of the reasons may be addressed, here, though. The BLM’s notice makes no attempt to hide ranching interests as a primary purpose for the treatments. This is clear as the BLM explains that one purpose of the vegetation treatment project is “to maintain and enhance rangeland health.” The problem with this is the Great Basin is not rangeland. The valley floors are naturally covered in sage brush and the highlands are pinyon-juniper forests. Converting the region into rangeland is only possible through great violence.
The BLM gives another justification for the deforestation with, “A large focus of this project would be to improve and protect greater sage-grouse habitat, and treatments would be designed to address threats to greater sage-grouse from invasive annual grasses, wildfires, and conifer expansion.” Of course, it was the BLM’s own disastrous policy of sage brush clearing that led to the sage grouse collapse in the first place. The BLM goes on to blame invasive annual grasses (most of which were brought to the Great Basin by settler activities), wildfires (exacerbated by human-created climate change, drought, and the planting of imported grasses that burn more quickly than native grasses), and finally to conifer expansion. By conifer expansion, the BLM is referring to pinyon-juniper forests who are simply regrowing in regions where they had been cut down by the mining operations of the 1870s.
***
I hope this essay serves as an introduction to the beauty of the Great Basin’s pinyon-juniper forests, the gifts they have long provided, and the dangers confronting them. It is time the BLM’s pinyon-juniper deforestation projects be stopped. The good news is a coalition of allied activists with Deep Green Resistance and WildLands Defense is in the early stages of planning a campaign to save these beautiful, essential, ancient forests. The first step is recognizing their inherent value as living beings. Stay-tuned for more updates including ways to get involved. Join us and stand on the side of pinyon-juniper forests.
Editor’s Note: The second installment of this multi-part series on pinyon-juniper deforestation can be found here.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He is currently living in Utah.
More information on this campaign can be found at Protect Piñon-Juniper Forests.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Nov 16, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Stephany Seay / Buffalo Field Campaign
Winter is setting in. Snow is accumulating, and with the snow comes migration. The deep snows of Yellowstone’s high plateau drive elk, buffalo, deer, moose, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep down to lower elevations. Unfortunately for hundreds of wild buffalo, this migration can mean the end of their lives; not because food is hard to find — winter is extremely challenging, but they are well-equipped to use their huge heads to “crater” through snow to get to the life-giving grasses below — but because the lower-elevation grasslands they seek are located in Montana where they enter a deadly conflict zone put in place by livestock interests.
As the buffalo begin their winter migration, BFC volunteers begin their own, returning to camp from all points of the compass to stand with the buffalo. The early snowfall necessitates the opening of our Gardiner camp along the Park’s north boundary, which we will do this Saturday; it’s been quite a few years since we opened up Gardiner camp this early. Patrols are preparing for another difficult season of documenting all actions made against the buffalo, monitoring their migration, and sharing our stories and first-hand experiences in an effort to end this war against wild buffalo. Will you join us?
In the Hebgen Basin, west of Yellowstone National Park, at least ten buffalo have already been killed by treaty hunters, and Montana’s state hunt will begin on Saturday, with other treaty hunts to follow. In addition to six months of combined state and treaty hunts, Yellowstone National Park, the Montana Department of Livestock, and even some tribal entities, are aiming to capture and kill hundreds more buffalo. Through hunting and slaughter, the Interagency Bison Management Plan agencies intend to kill nearly 1,000 Yellowstone buffalo. There are fewer than 5,000 left, and the Yellowstone population — the world’s most important — is made up of America’s last continuously wild herds. Ecologically extinct throughout their native range, and not yet federally protected, bison are endangered. In 2014 we filed a petition with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to protect wild bison under the Endangered Species Act, and sometime this fall the USFWS is expected to issue their finding. If they issue a negative finding, rejecting ESA protection — and no thanks to politics, we expect they will — we are prepared to take the next step.
Come stand with the buffalo if you can, help keep us on the front lines, and continue to spread the word to save these sacred herds.
Wild is the Way ~ Roam Free!
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 13, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying
By Natalia Ruiz Diaz / Upside Down World
The Sawhoyamaxa indigenous community in Paraguay have spent over 20 years fighting to get back their land, which they were pushed off by cattle ranchers.
They started the new year by collecting signatures to press Congress to pass a bill that would expropriate their ancestral territory from ranchers, in order for the state to comply with a 2006 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Justice ordering the restitution of their land.
“More than 20 years after being expelled from our ancestral land and living [in camps] along the side of the road, watching the cows occupy the place where we used to live, we decided to return because that land is ours,” the Sawhoyamaxa said in a message accompanying the petition drive.
“Che rohenói, eju orendive, aldeia unida, mostra a cara” (I am calling you, come with us, the people united, show your face) thousands of people sang at the “Todos con (everyone with the) Sawhoyamaxa” intercultural festival in Asunción in mid-December.
The event launched the start of their new crusade demanding enforcement of the Inter-American Court sentence, which ruled that they be given back their territory and that they be provided with basic services, such as medical care and clean water.
The “Che rehenói” chorus was heard over and over again in a mix of Guaraní (one of Paraguay’s two official languages, along with Spanish) and Portuguese, sung by the hip hop ban Brô MC’S, whose members belong to the Jaguapirú Bororó indigenous community from Brazil.
The goal set by the Sawhoyamaxa leaders is to gather 20,000 signatures, to pressure Congress to approve the expropriation of the land.
The epicentre of the community’s two-decade struggle is the Santa Elisa settlement, where the largest group of families are camped out along the side of the road 370 km north of Asunción en Paraguay’s semiarid Chaco region.
They are living “in extreme poverty, without any type of services, and waiting for the competent bodies to decide on the land claim they filed,” according to the 2006 Court ruling.
The Sawhoyamaxa form part of the Enxet linguistic family. There are 19 indigenous groups belonging to five language families in Paraguay, spread out in 762 communities mainly in the east of the country and the Chaco region, a vast dry forest area.
According to the 2012 census, 116,000 of Paraguay’s 6.7 million people – or 1.7 percent of the population – are indigenous, with over half of that group belonging to the Guaraní people. However, the overwhelming majority of the population is “mestizo” – people of mixed European (principally Spanish) and native (mainly Guaraní) descent.
The Sawhoyamaxa, who had no title deeds to the land where they had always lived, were displaced from their land, which was taken over by large cattle ranchers.
“They don’t want us to progress in our way of life,” the leader of the community, Carlos Cantero, told IPS. “We want the land to dedicate ourselves to our ancestral activities, like hunting and gathering in the forest.”
He was referring to the powerful cattle industry, which has successfully lobbied to block implementation of the 2006 binding sentence handed down by the Inter-American Court, an autonomous Organisation of American States (OAS) body.
Cantero said it was important for the situation to be resolved immediately because “there is still a little forest left on our land, some swamps and streams; but if the state does not take a stance on this soon, those reserves are going to disappear.”
Cattle ranchers have steadily advanced on Paraguay’s Chaco region, where in November 549 hectares a day were deforested, according to the local environmental organisation Guyra Paraguay.
The Chaco scrub forest and savannah grassland, which covers 60 percent of Paraguay but accounts for just eight percent of the population, makes for good cattle pasture.
Since the 19th century, the worst dispossession of indigenous people of their lands in this landlocked South American country occurred in the Chaco, especially after the 1932-1935 Chaco War with Bolivia, when the government sold off huge tracts of public land to private owners.
Today, less than three percent of the population owns 85 percent of Paraguay’s arable land, making this the Latin American country with the greatest concentration of land ownership.
The Sawhoyamaxa community is fighting for 14,404 hectares of land.
In a largely symbolic move, when the final deadline set by the Inter-American Court expired in March, the native community began to “recover” their land, setting up small camps on the property to which they are waiting to be awarded a collective title.
Their fight for the return of their ancestral lands dates back to the early 1990s. After exhausting all legal recourse available in Paraguay, they took the case to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in 2001, which referred it to the Court.
The Sawhoyamaxa case is one of three in which the Inter-American Court has handed down rulings against the Paraguayan state in defence of the country’s native people. None of the resolutions has been fully complied with.
After the 2006 sentence, the government attempted to acquire the land in question in order to live up to the resolution and return the property to the native community. But it failed, due to the refusal by the rancher who holds title to the property, Heribert Roedel, whose 60,000-hectare estate includes the land claimed by the Sawhoyamaxa.
“The other route for expropriation is through the legislature, for which a bill was introduced, currently being studied in the Senate,” said Oscar Ayala, a lawyer with Tierraviva, which supports indigenous communities in Paraguay.
This local non-governmental organisation and Amnesty International Paraguay are the main civil society supporters of the cause of the Sawhoyamaxa.
The bill Congress is debating was presented by the government in August for the expropriation of the land, in order to fulfil the Inter-American Court order.
According to Ayala, there is a more positive environment than in the past. “The impression we have is that there is greater openness” for an eventual solution and for justice to be done in the case, he said.
On Dec. 18, the Senate commission for audit and oversight of state finances pronounced itself in favour of expropriation of the land.
“This first favourable ruling is a good indicator; these questions are always complex because caught up in the middle is that deeply rooted economistic view of land, but in this case those issues are no longer in debate,” Ayala said.
The bill will now go to the agrarian reform and finance commissions and then on to the Senate floor, before being sent to the lower house.
Some 120 families – around 600 people, half of them children and adolescents – are living in the Santa Elisa settlement.
The Court also ordered the state to provide food and healthcare assistance to the community. But while the situation in this respect has improved in the new settlements, much more needs to be done.
“We have a health promoter but no health post,” Cantero said. “The worst affected are the children, who are suffering from dehydration because of the bad quality of the water.”
The settlements receive clean water every month, but it is not enough, and they depend on rainwater, which is scarce in the semiarid Chaco.
To find a solution, Sawhoyamaxa men and women have been knocking on doors everywhere, showing people papers that describe the history of their community, their struggle, and the Court ruling, in search of support.
“We won’t stop until we are living on our land; our very survival depends on that,” Cantero said.
From Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/4629-sawhoyamaxa-battle-for-their-land-in-paraguay
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 4, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Inter-Press Service
The land conflict between the Guaraní-Kaiowá indigenous people and large landowners in the southwestern Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul is a powder keg ready to explode, say observers.
Nísio Gomes, Jenivaldo Vera, Rolindo Vera, Teodoro Ricardi, Ortiz and Xurete Lopes are just a few of the names on a long list of people murdered in this state in recent years, according to the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI).
The statistics gathered by the Council, founded in 1972 by the Brazilian National Bishops’ Conference, reveal that 279 indigenous people have been killed since 2003 in land disputes with landowners and ranchers.
The most recent case is that of Eduardo Pires, who disappeared on Aug. 10 when armed men attacked a group of Kaiowá people in the Arroio Korá indigenous reserve, located in the municipality of Paranhos in the south of the state, near the border with Paraguay.
Arroio Korá, an area of roughly 7,000 hectares, was officially recognized as indigenous land on Dec. 21, 2009 by then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But one week later, a Federal Supreme Court ruling on an appeal filed by a landowner exempted a 184-hectare section of the land from this status.
“Even with this partial embargo, the government did not foresee that the rest would be effectively turned over to the Guaraní-Kaiowá,” said Flávio Machado, the CIMI regional coordinator in Mato Grosso do Sul. “The community, which is made up of around 600 members, currently occupies around 700 hectares. When they decided to retake control over the rest of the land, they met with a violent response,” he told Tierramérica*.
According to Eliseu, a Kaiowá leader who was present when the attack took place, on the morning of Aug. 10 some 400 members of the community set up a camp on a section of the officially recognised reserve land where a ranch is located.
A short time later, a number of armed men arrived. “I heard the gunshots and took off running. We are a people with a culture of peace, we have no weapons, but we are not going to give up fighting for our land. If we are going to die, we would rather die on our own land,” he told Tierramérica.
No one has seen Eduardo Pires since the attack. “I believe he is dead,” said Eliseu.
The Federal Police of Mato Grosso do Sul are in charge of the case. “The indigenous people say that one of them is missing. We are investigating, but we have nothing concrete. We have to be impartial,” Federal Police Superintendent Edgar Paulo Marcon commented to Tierramérica.
The following week, CIMI reports, the police removed a number of ranchers and their cattle from the area. Since then, the Kaiowá have been targeted by threats, the most explicit of which is a filmed declaration by Luis Carlos da Silva Vieira, known as Lenço Preto (“Black Kerchief”), posted on YouTube.
“We are going to organize and prepare for confrontation…They only want the land to be bothersome. We have weapons. If they want war, they’ll get war,” he states repeatedly.
In response, the Kaiowá community published a letter calling for urgent attention from the government. “Faced with a collective death threat, made publicly in the press by the landowners, we request an investigation and severe punishment of these promoters of the genocide/ethnocide of indigenous peoples.”
“Everyone knows that they have sophisticated and fearsome weapons, that they have money obtained at the expense of indigenous blood to buy more weapons and to hire gunmen… We do not have guns and, above all, we do not know how to use them,” the letter continues.
“We want to reiterate and highlight the fact that our fight for our ancestral lands is aimed solely at protecting human life and the fauna and flora of the planet Earth; it is not our intention to kill anyone.”
From Upside-Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/3844-brazil-landowners-declare-war-against-indigenous-guarani-kaiowa-in-mato-grosso-do-sul
