by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 5, 2012 | Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
It is important to note that this analysis and perspective is not meant to be authoritative on, nor instructive towards the objectives, organization and operation of Agenda 21; those are always their own to determine, as they see fit. This is definitively an outsider’s perspective, gleaned from publicly available information, and is undoubtedly lacking insight in various ways. Apologies for such inadequacies.
*DGR SUPPORTS THE EFFORTS OF AGENDA 21 AND ALL MILITANT DIRECT DISMANTLING OF INDUSTRIAL INFRASTRUCTURE*
It doesn’t take much to sink a ship.
The physics of buoyancy are somewhat precarious; thousands of pounds of iron & steel, carefully shaped to stay balanced and afloat. The smallest rupture in the hull can drag all the sophisticated design and calculations to cold and watery depths. In some instances, one may not even need to create a rupture, so much as expand existing weak-points—like the salt water intake valve—to submerge a vessel.
That simple technique has become the calling card for a mysterious organization in Norway, which has been targeting the country’s whaling fleet since 1996. They’re called Agenda 21, the name being a reference to the 1992 UN Conference on the Environment in Rio de Janeiro, which proposed an international “sustainable development” program under the name Agenda 21. To date, they’ve claimed responsibility for the sinking of 6 commercial whaling ships.
The style has been more or less identical in each of the attacks: the group scouts a ship, boards at night, and opens the salt water intake valve in the engine room. They’ve been more successful in some instances than in others; in a 2010 attack, a ship alarm alerted the captain the ship was flooding, and the sabotage was discovered before the vessel had fully sunk. Nonetheless, they’ve been engaged in a campaign of underground direct action for close to two decades, and have maintained effective security; to the police who have investigated the actions, Agenda 21 is as mysterious today as it was when it emerged in 1996.
The story of Agenda 21 goes back to before the genesis of the group itself, to 1986, when the International Whaling Commission set a moratorium on commercial whaling around the world. Norway objected to the ban, and international politics being the absurdity that they are, suddenly the rule didn’t apply to the Scandinavian country. Paul Watson, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, then threatened to sink any Norwegian vessel that violated the moratorium. The Sea Shepherds made good on their promise too: in 1992, they sank the whaler Nybraena, and two years later in 1994, they sank the Senet.
Agenda 21 (A21) is said to have taken over the effort in 1996, when they sank the Elin-Toril; it is unclear whether this was a coordinated take-over of the campaign by local Sea Shepherd supporters, or figurative language, but Watson and the Sea Shepherds say they don’t know anyone involved in A21.
The next attack came two years later, in 1998. The whaling ship Morild was scuttled, and A21 claimed responsibility, and was credited with the action.
There weren’t any subsequent attacks for a number of years, until August of 2007, when the group sunk the Willassen Senior in Svolvaer, causing more than £2,000,000 in damage, bankrupting the whaler.
Less than two years later, Agenda 21 struck again. In an effort to pre-empt the whalers, the group sunk the Skarbakk, a commercial whaling vessel docked in Henningsvaer in late April, shortly before the whaling season began in 2009. This action saw a marked increase in media coverage, especially foreign media, with reports, articles, and the group’s communique being published on alternative websites in the U.K. and the U.S. The Sea Shepherds also issued a press release praising the action and Agenda 21; Paul Watson compared the individuals involved to those who resisted Nazi occupation of Norway 60 years prior, and added, “The Agenda 21 team did an excellent job: no injuries, no evidence, no mistakes, and no more whaling. These are results that we can appreciate and admire.”
In A21’s own words, “We came to Henningsvaer. We saw the Skarbakk. We sank the bastard.”
The 2009 sinking of the Skarbakk began a string of more frequent attacks. Only a year after the action in Henningsvaer, A21 struck again; “Norway announced an increased quota of minke whales so we decided to increase our quota of sunken whalers.”
The target was the Sofie, docked in Svolvaer (only a “stone’s throw” from where the Willassen Senior had been when it fell prey to A21 in 2007). On the evening of April 2nd, members of Agenda 21 snuck on board the vessel, and (according to the communique issued afterwards) “[e]ntry was made through the wheelhouse. The engine room was accessed by removing the locked door from its frame using axe and crowbar. Two sea valves were opened fully submerging the engine and electrical systems.”
Unfortunately, as previously mentioned, an alarm alerted the ship’s owner who was asleep in his nearby home, and the fire department arrived before the vessel was entirely submerged. However, both the engine room and electrical equipment were put securely to rest under several feet of water. Apparently undeterred, the owner vowed to repair the damage and be hunting whales in less than a month, but whether or not he succeeded in his sadistic intentions is unconfirmed.
The repeated actions have certainly hurt the industry, and after the Sofie attack, the head of one whaling organization complained to the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, “It is outrageous that this can be done year after year without anyone being caught!”
There was a final attack, in October of 2011. The whaling boat Onsoyvaeringen was found on the morning of October 6th, with its bow in the air. The night before, Agenda 21 boarded the ship and opened repurposed one of the valves to let water into the ship, rather than keeping it out. In the communique issued after the action by A21, Onsoyvaeringen was said to have been the last whaling ship in Oslofjord. The statement also indicated the continued resolve of A21 to bring a permanent end to whaling in Norway by any means necessary and to continued escalation, reiterating that any vessels planning on whaling would be targets and that as Norway increases the Minke whale quota, A21 will step up its attacks.
Agenda 21 remains at large, as it has been for 16 years. It is difficult to talk about their organization and function, because they’ve done such an impeccable job of keeping any knowledge of themselves—other than their name and their actions—secret. However, there are still lessons to be learned and new insights to be gleaned in regards to strategic underground action.
To operate successfully for so long demonstrate an undeniable conviction as an organization, but also a careful patience, a keenness that ensures action is effective rather than simply self-actualizing and serves as a counterweight to the (often) blind urgency that strong conviction can fuel.
However, others have questioned whether Agenda 21 has been effective in the fight to end commercial whaling, or whether the organization has been just another group using glorified tactics but making little material difference. Critics point to reports that the numbers of whales killed in the summer season haven’t declined, or that there is a surplus of whaling ships and simply too few processing centers for the meat.
These are important considerations, and critical reflection on ourselves and the effectiveness of our particular strategies is absolutely vital if our movements are to be successful. This is true whether our goal is to end whaling in a particular region, restore grasslands, destroy institutional racism, or dismantle civilization.
A simple breakdown of Agenda 21’s strategy (as I interpret it based on their actions and their public statements) is that at the core, they are fighting a battle of attrition (this seems to be the unconsciously preferred strategy of most activists—liberals and radicals alike—and is a separate discussion in itself), in which they hope to wear down the ability of their enemy (the Norwegian commercial whaling fleet) to operate. In order to be successful in a war of attrition, one must damage and deplete the enemy’s resources quicker than the enemy can replace them. Eventually, this drawdown reaches a critical point, and the enemy loses the ability to function as a force. This leaves us with two important factors to consider: first, how A21 draws down the resources of the commercial fleet, and secondly, the speed with which the fleet is able to replace those resources.
Obviously, A21’s preferred tactic is sinking commercial whaling vessels. The technique which they use to do this is simple, and seems relatively simple and to cost them little (in terms of time, technical knowledge, money, etc.). However, there are some additional, smaller ways in which the sinking of these ships may sap the resources and capacity of the whaling fleet: the attacks have seriously raised insurance premiums for whaling boats, and may discourage investors from fronting the capital for new whaling ships. They’re both smaller, and perhaps less directly measurable effects, but they’re impacts A21 has mentioned explicitly in their communiques.
As for the fleet itself, the most important fact to note is that the entire Norwegian fleet consists of less than two dozen ships: in 2012, only 18 ships participated in the whale hunt, one less than last year. This small fleet-size makes the loss of a ship a significant blow for the industry, much more serious and detrimental than a smashed window or graffiti on a storefront would be, and creates a (rare) situation that lends itself to a strategy of attrition.
It’s not necessarily possible to draw a clear line on whether Agenda 21 is definitively effective or not. Given that the number of whales hunted hasn’t significantly declined or changed, it would be hard to say A21 is close to bringing commercial whaling in Norway to a close. But at the same time, we cannot deny that there are 7 fewer vessels hunting for whales each summer due to A21. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the A21 strategy has very real potential, and for Agenda 21 to ultimately be successful in winning their war of attrition against the whaling industry will require that they escalate the frequency of their actions to impose a fatal (for the industry) drawdown. If the reports of bottlenecks at the over-stressed processing facilities are true, they would represent another vulnerable node. If anything were to happen to those processing facilities resulting in their being temporarily or permanently shut down, the difficulties facing the industry wound undoubtedly be compounded, and the system as a whole would be further disrupted.
In any case, the story of Agenda 21 is a hopeful and promising one. And like all stories of resistance, it’s one that needs to be told. History is full of stories of people, even if only a few of them, organizing to find collective strength and shatter systems of abusive and destructive power that only months before seemed invincible. Those stories are taking place right now, around the world. We need to listen to them, learn from them, find our connection and meaning in them, and share them. We need to tell these stories of resistance, because resistance is a story; whether of mysterious folks scuttling ships on a spring evening so Minke whales can swim free, or Indian women training each other in self-defense and dealing retribution to abusers and batterers, or indigenous and Chicano neighborhoods marching on and scattering a Columbus Day march, or masked groups torching transmission substations to blackout the death culture of civilization: it’s a story larger than ourselves. We need to tell those stories, and then live them out.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 3, 2012 | Property & Material Destruction, Repression at Home
By Noelle Crombie / The Oregonian
A 39-year-old woman accused of eco-sabotage in three Western states turned herself in to U.S. authorities at the Canadian border on Thursday morning.
Rebecca Jeanette Rubin, a Canadian, had been on the run for a decade before surrendering in Blaine, Wash. She is accused of multiple counts of arson as part of a conspiracy with 12 other people from 1996 to 2001 in five Western states.
The charges against Rubin include a Nov. 30, 1997, arson at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management Wild Horse and Burro Facility in Harney county near Burns and the Dec. 22, 1998, attempted arson at the offices of the U.S. Forest Industries, Inc., in Medford. She’s also accused of involvement in the Oct. 19, 1998, arson attack that destroyed the Two Elk Lodge and other buildings at the Vail ski resort in Eagle County, Colorado.
Rubin faces federal charges in California as well in the attack Oct. 15, 2001, of the Bureau of Land Management Wild Horse and Burro Corrals near Susanville, Calif.
Federal authorities say Rubin was part of the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, both underground movements that the government has labeled terrorist organizations. She was indicted on federal charges in Oregon along with 12 others in January 2006 in connection with a coordinated campaign that caused an estimated $23 million in damage between 1996 and 2001 in Oregon, California, Washington, Wyoming and Colorado.
When the indictment was issued eight had already been arrested in a nationwide sweep in the most extensive bust of suspected eco-saboteurs in U.S. history.
The group took oaths of secrecy and called itself “The Family.” They built firebombs, scouted their targets, took dry runs then dressed in black, donned masks and carried two-way radios during attacks.
Rubin shares a name with an 18-inch American Girl doll, produced by a Middleton, Wis., company which was released in 2009. The FBI hoped publicity from the doll would help bring Rubin to justice, according to a story in The New York Times.
“Any publicity that gets the word out that our Rebecca Rubin is wanted on various charges is certainly beneficial,” said Beth Anne Steele, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Oregon.
In August 2007, 10 other defendants were sentenced to prison terms from about three to 13 years after pleading guilty in U.S. District Court in Eugene to conspiracy and multiple counts of arson. Two defendants — Joseph Mahmoud Dibee and Josephine Sunshine Overaker — are still at large.
Rubin will make an initial court appearance in U.S. District Court in Seattle and then will be transferred to Oregon to face trial.
From The Oregonian: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2012/11/accused_eco-saboteur_rebecca_r.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 21, 2012 | Obstruction & Occupation
By The Canadian Press
Members of a First Nation in northern B.C. have evicted surveyors working on a natural gas pipeline project from their territory and set up a roadblock against all pipeline activity.
A group identifying itself as the Unis’tot’en clan of the Wet’suwet’en Nation said surveyors for Apache Canada’s Pacific Trails Pipeline were trespassing.
“The Unis’tot’en clan has been dead-set against all pipelines slated to cross through their territories, which include PTP [Pacific Trails Pipeline], Enbridge’s Northern Gateway and many others,” Freda Huson, a spokesperson for the group, said in a statement.
“As a result of the unsanctioned PTP work in the Unis’tot’en yintah, the road leading into the territory has been closed to all industry activities until further notice.”
Huson was not available for comment.
It’s unclear what road is blocked, or where. The group said its territory is along the Clore River, located west of the Williams Creek Ecological Reserve about 30 kilometres southeast of Terrace.
Company spokesman Paul Wyke confirmed Wednesday that surveyors were asked to leave the area.
“We had some surveyors in the area last evening and they were asked to leave traditional territory by a small group of members from the Unis’tot’en, and they complied,” Wyke said.
“We understand that there are some members of the Unis’tot’en that have expressed some concerns with the proposed PTP project, and we continue to consult with First Nations along the entire proposed pipeline right-of-way.”
Wyke said the company will continue ongoing consultations with aboriginal groups. The project has the support of 15 of 16 aboriginal groups along the route, he said.
The blockading group said the province does not have the right to approve development on their traditional lands, which lie northwest of Kitimat, the future home of an Apache Canada liquefied natural gas plant and the tanker port for the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.
From the CBC: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/11/21/bc-pipeline-surveyors-evicted.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 13, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Property & Material Destruction, Reclamation & Expropriation, Worker Exploitation
By Agence France-Presse
Work on Brazil’s controversial $13 billion Belo Monte mega-dam ground to a halt Monday after protesters torched buildings at three dam construction sites over the weekend, the developer said.
Saturday, “a group of 30 people set fire to prefab structures at the Pimental site. They went into the cafeteria, destroyed everything and robbed the till” before setting it ablaze, said Fernando Santana, spokesman for builders Consorcio Constructor Belo Monte (CCBM).
And late Sunday, groups of 20 people set structures ablaze at Canais and Diques, two other dam construction sites, said Santana.
“On Monday, as a precautionary security measure, all activities were suspended at the construction site,” said Santana, suggesting that “vandals” might be trying to derail salary renegotiation under way.
The state-owned Norte Energia hired CCBM to build the dam, which is set to be the world’s third largest when it has been completed. Between 12,000 and 13,000 workers would be employed at the site on two shifts, Santana said.
The incidents broke out after CCBM proposed a seven percent wage hike to the workers in an area where the inflation rate is at 30 percent, said Xingu Vivo, a non-governmental group opposing the dam.
On October 9 protesters — 150 natives and local fishermen — interrupted dam construction, accusing Norte Energia of backtracking on accords signed in June when people occupied the Pimental area for three weeks.
Indigenous groups fear the dam across the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, will harm their way of life. Environmentalists have warned of deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions and irreparable damage to the ecosystem.
The dam is expected to flood some 500 square kilometers (200 square miles) along the Xingu and displace 16,000 people, according to the government, although some NGOs put the number at 40,000 displaced.
The natives want their lands demarcated and non-indigenous people removed from them, as well as a better healthcare system and access to drinking water.
Expected to produce 11,000 megawatts of electricity, the dam would be the third biggest in the world, after China’s Three Gorges facility and Brazil’s Itaipu Dam in the south.
It is one of several hydroelectric projects billed by Brazil as providing clean energy for a fast-growing economy.
“Avatar” director James Cameron and actress Sigourney Weaver support dam opponents, drawing parallels with the natives-versus-exploiters storyline of their blockbuster Hollywood movie.
From Bangkok Post: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/320956/trouble-at-brazil-mega-dam-stops-construction-for-now
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 7, 2012 | Property & Material Destruction, Strategy & Analysis
Civilization is not a static force. It has metastasized across the world by accelerating its own development, by transforming the blood and corpses of its victims into new weapons with which to wage its relentless war against all life
Grasslands become grain monocultures feeding armies, conquering forests and mountains that become ships and swords that kill other cultures, conquering more forests and mountains, whose trees and minerals are turned into timber mills and trains, going forth to dam rivers, turning the relentless fluidity of their being to electricity to smelt iron and steel and aluminum, which in turn become guns and ocean tankers, which expand this superstructure ever further, tirelessly taking in what little wild remains, absorbing everything and everyone into this accelerating death march.
And yet, as the world is tied and bound tighter into this brutal arrangement, civilization (and especially industrialism) becomes more and more vulnerable, more open and fragile to disruption and destruction.
This brittleness is exemplified by the near-total dependence of the industrial economy on “advanced” technology, and the internet. This dependency upon a decentralized and accessible system that is poorly regulated and controlled—at least compared to other physical structures, like the offices of the same corporations— presents a potential point of powerful leverage against the operation of civilization.
Activists and resisters around the world are beginning to realize this, and seize the opportunity it presents to groups engaged in asymmetric forces against destruction.
Such as in Saudi Arabia; from a recent article in the New York Times;
“On Aug. 15, more than 55,000 Saudi Aramco [described as the world’s most valuable company] employees stayed home from work to prepare for one of Islam’s holiest nights of the year — Lailat al Qadr, or the Night of Power — celebrating the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad.
That morning, at 11:08, a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date. The virus erased data on three-quarters of Aramco’s corporate PCs — documents, spreadsheets, e-mails, files — replacing all of it with an image of a burning American flag.”
This attack presents a good example of targeting a systemic weak point within the infrastructure of Saudi Aramco and maximizing impact through effective use of systems disruption: destroying three-fourths of corporate data will have impacts that last for weeks, and inhibit the company’s operation for some time. In fact, the attack leveraged the company’s response against itself:
“Immediately after the attack, Aramco was forced to shut down the company’s internal corporate network, disabling employees’ e-mail and Internet access, to stop the virus from spreading.”
The cyber-sabotage also highlights the importance of careful planning and timing.
“The hackers picked the one day of the year they knew they could inflict the most damage…”
This smart and strategic approach to action planning is something that is too often overlooked, ignored, or dismissed entirely. Yet for resistance to be effective, it must follow the same principles. Rather than striking at weak points to cripple the operation or function of industrial activity, attacks are typically made against symbolic or superficial targets, leaving the operation of the brutal industrial machine unscathed. We cannot continue to stumble with strategic blindness, lashing out all but randomly, and no more than hoping to hit the mark.
Again, civilization is not a static force: every hour, more forests, prairies, mountains and species are destroyed and extirpated. Every hour, civilization is pulled further into biotic collapse. We are out of time. With everything at stake, we are not only justified in using any means necessary to bring down civilization; it is our moral mandate as living beings to do so. But for that resistance to truly be meaningful and effective, it must also be smart. It cannot be reactive and sporadic, but strategic and coordinated; designed not just to inflict damage or dent profit margins, but to disable the fundamental support-systems that sustain industrial civilization and bring it all to a screeching halt.
This is one reason why cyber-sabotage has such potential as a tactic to be used in dismantling industrial civilization. Most, if not all, of the critical systems that sustain it are by now reliant upon computer networks, which as the Saudi Aramco attack demonstrates, are very vulnerable to disruption.
Online attacks also lend themselves as a tactic to asymmetric forces, and allow a very small group of people to carry out decisive, coordinated strikes from a distance, rather than requiring people on the ground to coordinate across the country to achieve a similar effect.
Civilization’s relentless growth and accelerating technology-spiral has rendered murder and death across the planet on a scale that would be unimaginable if it weren’t the horrific reality we now find ourselves in. But this process of unceasing centralization and control has also become its weakness, and for all its imposing gigantism, the tower of civilization is incredibly unstable, and now begins to sway precariously. It’s time to push with all our might, and topple it once and for all.
Learning to leverage key systems against themselves is crucial to the success of a militant resistance movement, and ultimately is at the core of any effective strategy to disable the function of industrial civilization and ultimately to dismantle it. Cyber-sabotage presents a vital opportunity to use the dynamics of industrial operations—such as the complete dependency of the electric grid or oil refineries upon complex computer systems—to accomplish that most fundamental and necessary goal.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a biweekly bulletin dedicated to promoting and normalizing underground resistance, as well as dissecting and studying its forms and implementation, including essays and articles about underground resistance, surveys of current and historical resistance movements, militant theory and praxis, strategic analysis, and more. We welcome you to contact us with comments, questions, or other ideas at undergroundpromotion@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 5, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Obstruction & Occupation
By Jennifer M. Smith / Upside-Down World
More than five centuries after Colombus’ arrival in the Americas, the invasion of European powers continues to threaten traditional ways of life in indigenous communities in Mexico. The conflict against the corporate takeover of the ancestral lands of the Huave, or Ikoots people, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca is just one of the struggles continuously being played out in the face of trans-national development policies such as Plan Puebla Panama (now known as Proyecto Mesoamerica).
The Ikoots people of Oaxaca have inhabited the Isthmus of Tehuantepec for more than 3000 years, pre-dating the better-known Zapotec culture in Oaxaca. They are a fishing society that depends on the ocean for their livelihood; the Ikoots peoples’ history is so integrated with the sea that they are also known as Mareños (“Oceaners”). Now Ikoots communities are struggling to defend their ancestral lands from multinational corporations who want to build wind turbines in the water along the coast, in the very ocean that has supported their way of life for centuries.
In April of 2004, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored a study to accelerate the development of wind projects in the state of Oaxaca, which found that the best area for wind project development was in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the heart of the ancestral Ikoots territory. [1]
The proposed Parque Eolico San Dionisio (San Dionisio Wind Park), a wind farm to be constructed in the ocean along the coast, would consist of 102 wind turbines in the water outside the town of San Dionisio del Mar (and 30 more outside neighboring Santa Maria del Mar), two electric transformer substations, six access paths and additional support structures. [2] It would take up 27 kilometers of coastline. The multinationals implementing the project have also informed the Mexican government that they will need to install 5 mooring docks in the Laguna Superior, a coastal lagoon that local communities heavily depend on for fishing. [3]
The construction of wind turbines would have a devastating effect on both Ikoots society and the environment. The community fears that the vibration from the machines would destroy the aquatic life in the area, which is the economic basis of survival for Ikoots communities such as San Dionisio del Mar, San Mateo del Mar and San Francisco del Mar.
“This is the life of the poor: we fish so we can eat and have something to sell, to have a bit of money. They say that now that the wind project is here, they’ll give us money for our land and sea, but the money won’t last forever. We don’t agree with this. How are we going to live?” says Laura Celaya Altamirano, a resident of Isla Pueblo Viejo and the wife of a fisherman. [4] The wind turbines also present a threat to migratory birds and would damage the ecosystems of the local mangrove swamps. In addition, the proposed construction would desecrate Ikoots sacred territory, namely the Isla de San Dionisio and the Barra de Santa Teresa (known by the Ikoots communities as Tileme).
The proposed location for the aquatic wind farm is San Dionisio del Mar, a town of about 5000 residents. The project in San Dionisio is being implemented by a consortium called Mareña Renovable, which consists of the global investment bank Macquarie, based in Australia; the Dutch investment group PGGM; and the Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan. It includes turbines constructed by the Danish Company Vestas Wind Systems, and the involvement of two wind power companies: Grupo Preneal of Spain, and DEMEX of Mexico. The project also has funding from the Inter-American Development Bank. [5] The electricity from the farm would be used to power such corporate giants as FEMSA (based in Mexico, the largest beverage company in Latin America), Coca-Cola, Heineken, and other multinational corporations. [6]
A total disregard for the environment and the livelihoods of local people is par for the course when multinationals step in to take over communal lands for profit. In the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, wind power companies have been exploiting local communities for years, pressuring farmers (most with little formal education) to sign contracts they often don’t understand in order to give up their rights to land that has been held communally for generations. “Oaxaca is the center of communal landownership. There is probably no worse place to make a land deal in Mexico,” says Ben Cokelet, founder of the Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research.[7]
Developers held meetings with locals in which model windmills the size of dinner platters were shown; they were led to believe they could continue farming around them. Later they were shocked to see 15-to-20-story turbines constructed, taking up acres of their land. Developers pay the farmers a pittance in exchange for their land, often paying only 1/5th of what they would pay for similar land in the US, or 1/7thof what they would pay the Mexican government for the same land.
And, in a move that exacerbates tension in the community, local leaders are given better deals for their land in order to make the process more appealing to the rest of the population: “The first guy or two that bites gets [$8] per square meter. That’s a hundred times better contract than the other people,” says Cokelet. “But the 98 percent of farmers who sign afterwards sign on for rock-bottom prices. Those one or two people who bite – they don’t bite because they’re lucky. They bite because they know someone. And their job … is to sell it to all their neighbors.” [8]
There are currently 14 wind farms built on land in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with 4 under construction in 2012 and 3 more scheduled for 2013. [9] According to the Declaración de San Dionisio del Mar, released on September 17 by the indigenous rights organization UCIZONI (La Unión de Comunidades de la Zona Norte del Istmo – The Union of Communities in the North Zone of the Isthmus), the communities affected by the 14 existing wind farms have not benefited from lower electricity rates; rather, the intention of the farms is clearly to serve the interests of transnational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Walmart, Nestle, Bimbo and others. [10]
The wind turbines in San Dionisio are the first proposed turbines to be built in the sea. Ikoots communities would not even benefit from the jobs created by the wind turbines; the construction and maintenance of the wind turbines would most certainly be given to employees of the multinational corporations funding the project, not to local fishermen.
The Ikoots community of San Dionisio del Mar did not consent to this project, nor were they even informed that it was under consideration. The International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency dealing with labor rights, specifically states in its Convention 169 (Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples) that “special measures… be adopted to safeguard the persons, institutions, property, labour, cultures and environment of these [indigenous] peoples. In addition, the Convention stipulates that these special measures should not go against the free wishes of indigenous peoples.” Mexico ratified this convention in 1990. [11] In this case, there was no public forum or announcement regarding the construction of the wind farms.
“A common practice of foreign businesses is to ‘buy’ [via bribes] the local PRIista authorities,” says Carlos Beas Torres, a leader and co-founder of UCIZONI and a well-known activist for indigenous rights. In 2004, Alvaro Sosa, the then-president of the “comisariado de bienes comunales” (essentially, the commissary for the territory held in common by the community), signed a preliminary contract renting a section of land to the Spanish corporation Preneal without the knowledge of the town’s residents. The 30-year contract that gave the multinationals access to 1643 hectares of land; Sosa did not inform the community of this action and accepted bribes in exchange for his consent.[12]
The people of San Dionisio del Mar did not find out about the existence of this contract until late in 2011, when the municipal president, Miguel López Castellanos (a member of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), again without consulting the community gave his permission for the consortium Mareña Renovables to begin construction of wind turbines in exchange for a payment of between 14-20 million pesos (between $1-1.5 million USD). The multinationals claim to have given him 20 million pesos, but Lopez Castellanos only admits to receiving 14 million pesos. [13]
Upon this discovery, the residents of San Dionisio held a public assembly where they demanded that the municipal president revoke his consent for the wind farm, which he refused to do. In February, representatives from the community met with DEMEX in Mexico City to request that the contract process start over, but were turned down. [14] Thus the struggle for control of the Ikoots’ ancestral land began.
Not surprisingly, an intense resistance movement against the wind farm has surged in San Dionisio del Mar. The townspeople have initiated a legal battle in the Tribunal Unitario Agrario (Agrarian Unitary Tribunal), the government agency in charge of settling agrarian disputes, in an attempt to nullify the contract. However they are also taking direct action in an attempt to defend their land.
In late January 2012, community members took possession of the municipal palace in San Dionisio in protest, ejecting municipal president Miguel López Castellanos, creating the Asamblea General del Pueblo de San Dionisio (General Assembly of the People of San Dionisio), and declaring themselves in resistance.[15] In April, the San Dionisio communal assembly prevented employees of the multinationals from laying out access roads in the Barra de Santa Teresa, and set up a permanent watch to make sure the contractors do not return. [16]
In September, community members organized a national encuentro (or gathering) in San Dionisio, with the participation of around 300 people from 25 different indigenous and activist organizations from 6 different states in Mexico.[17] The intent of the encuentro was not only to raise awareness on what was happening on Ikoots land, but also to create a large-scale national plan of action to resist megaprojects such as the wind farms. “It’s practically a second Spanish Conquest; they’re coming again to snatch our land with a contract that is completely advantageous, draconian and in violation of our rights as indigenous people,” says Jesús García Sosa, a representative of the Asamblea General. [18]
The resistance movement continues to grow despite threats and intimidation, as well as actual physical attacks on community members committed by opposing political factions. The general consensus is that these factions are being paid by the multinationals involved to hamper resistance to the development project. On August 25, a representative of the Asamblea General named Moisés Juárez Muriel was brutally attacked while walking home in the evening by two men who beat him with stones.
He was taken by two compañeros in resistance to the IMSS-Complamar clinic, where he was refused treatment because the clinic was under control of the municipal president. [19] In mid-September, immediately after the conclusion of the encuentro in support of the Ikoots community members in resistance, a group of heavily armed individuals surrounded the municipal palace that the community members were occupying, pointing guns at and intimidating the people who were guarding the building. [20]
Resistance movement leaders have also received public death threats from political parties and anonymous sources. On October 6, a group of PRI agitators marched through San Dionisio, making specific death threats against Bettina Cruz Velazquez, a well-known human rights activist and founder of the Asamblea de los Pueblos Indígenas del Istmo de Tehuantepec en Defensa de la Tierra y el Territorio (Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Defense of Land and Territory).
Cruz Velazquez is deeply involved in the resistance movement against the wind project. Human rights groups in Mexico have formally asked the governor of Oaxaca, Gabino Cué Monteagudo, to guarantee her safety. [21] Carlos Beas Torres of UCIZONI has received threatening phone calls for his public stance in opposition of the project. [22]
In some cases, attempts to stop resistance support have led to clashes. In mid-October, two organizations, El Frente por la Defensa de la Tierra (The Front for the Defense of the Earth) and UCIZONI sent a caravan of support attempting to bring food and supplies to the community in resistance in San Dionisio. A blockade was set up by armed PRIista sympathizers of the municipal president, Miguel López Castellanos, to keep the caravan from passing. [23] A violent confrontation ensued.
“The store owners in San Dionisio belong to the PRI and refuse to sell food to the people resisting the wind project,” says Carlos Alberto Ocaña, whose father (a native of San Dionisio) was the driver of the first truck in the supply caravan. “When the caravan approached the town, it was stopped by a blockade of about 70 people. They had guns, machetes, and gasoline for setting the cars on fire. My father was in the first truck with five other people. They PRIistas in the blockade pulled them out of the truck and started beating them.”
The police eventually arrived, but the caravan was unable to pass the barricade to reach San Dionisio and eventually it was forced to turn back without delivering the supplies.
On October 17 and 18, members of the Asamblea General of San Dionisio, UCIZONI, la Asamblea de Pueblos Indígenas del Istmo en Defensa de la Tierra y el Territorio, la Alianza Mexicana por la Autodeterminación de los Pueblos (Mexican Allaince for the Self-Determination of the People, AMAP), and a half dozen other groups held protests in Mexico City. They held rallies in front of the Interamerican Development Bank, Mitsubishi, Coca-Cola, Vestas, and the Danish embassy. Their goal was twofold: to impede the construction of the wind park in San Dionisio, but also to publicly denounce the environmental and cultural damage that threatens the Ikoots communities of the Isthmus.
They were received and allowed to present written complaints at the Interamerican Development Bank, Vestas, and the Danish embassy. oca-Cola-FEMSA refused to meet with them. [24] As of this writing, the Ikoots communities’ struggle against corporate takeover continues; in November representatives of the community will travel to the Netherlands, with the support of Dutch unions, to present a letter of protest in person to the Dutch investment company PGGM.
In the words of Asamblea General representative Jesús García Sosa, “We will not allow that business and government to yet again displace us from our territory, which symbolizes our very life, our mother, our father; we can’t sell it to them or put a price on it, much less in exchange for projects of death and plunder.” [25]
On October 30th, President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, who was in Oaxaca to inaugurate a new highway, also travelled to inaugurate the Piedra Larga Wind Park. Calderon saluted the project, citing it as a solution to poverty and climate change, and mentioning the “additional income” the residents of the town Unión Hidalgo would receive for allowing the turbines to be installed on their communal land.
Meanwhile, 300 meters outside the park, theirn entrance blocked by national police, nearly 200 people from different communities in the region including San Mateo del Mar, San Dionisio del Mar, San Francisco del Mar, Unión Hidalgo, Juchitán, Santa María Xadani and the UCIZONI, protested the park’s opening. [26]
1. Noticias de Oaxaca, Oct. 14 2012.
2. Noticias de Oaxaca, Aug. 20 2012.
3. Noticias de Oaxaca, Apr. 21 2012.
4. Noticias de Oaxaca, Aug. 20 2012.
5. Recharge News, Mar. 12 2012.
6. Noticias de Oaxaca, Apr. 23 2012.
7. Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 26 2012.
8. Ibid
9. Noticias de Oaxaca, Oct. 11 2012.
10. UCIZONI statement, Sept. 17 2012.
11. International Labor Organization Convention 169.
12. La Jornada, Aug. 23 2012.
13. Noticias de Oaxaca, Aug. 20 2012.
14. Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 28 2012.
15. El Sol del Istmo, Jan. 30 2012.
16. Noticias de Oaxaca, Apr. 21 2012.
17. Despertar de Oaxaca, Sept. 28 2012.
18. Noticias de Oaxaca, Aug. 20 2012.
19. Quadratin Oaxaca, Oct. 9 2012.
20. Ibid.
21. E-Oaxaca, Oct. 15 2012.
22. Quadratin Oaxaca, Oct. 9 2012
23. E-Oaxaca, Oct. 11 2012. (Link at e-oaxaca.mx/noticias/nacional/13411-impide-edil-de-san-dionisio-del-mar-ingreso-de-caravana-contra-empresas-eolicas.html no longer works)
24. La Jornada, Oct. 17 2012:
25. Noticias de Oaxaca, Aug. 20 2012.
26. Eco Noticias Huatulco. Oct 30, 2012.
From Upside Down World: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/mexico-archives-79/3952-indigenous-communities-in-mexico-fight-corporate-wind-farms
