JULY 24, 2017 — Two activists have come forward and admitted to multiple acts of eco-sabotage against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Spring 2017. Several of these incidents had been previously hidden from the public. Much of the sabotage took place with minimal equipment and training, and during broad daylight.
The women have come forward in the hope that others will support and be inspired by their actions.
They have currently been arrested on a lesser charge, and the FBI is investigating. Deep Green Resistance is reaching out via our Political Prisoner / Prisoner of War Support Group and aims to provide whatever assistance possible.
This is a developing story and more news will be coming soon. Press release follows:
The Dakota Access Pipeline is an issue that affects this entire nation and the people that are subject to its rule. With DAPL we have seen incredible issues regarding the rule of law, indigenous sovereignty, land seizures, state sanctioned brutality, as well as corporate protections and pardons for their wrongdoings. To all those that continue to be subjected to the government’s injustices, we humbly stand with you, and we ask now that you stand with us.
Federal courts gave corporations permission to lie and withhold information from the public resulting in a complete media blackout. So, after recently being called by the Intercept, an independent media outlet, regarding illegal surveillance by the Dakota Access Pipeline and their goons, we viewed this as an opportunity to encourage public discourse surrounding nonviolent direct action as well as exposing the inadequacies of the government and the corporations they protect.
After having explored and exhausted all avenues of process, including attending public commentary hearings, gathering signatures for valid requests for Environmental Impact Statements, participating in Civil Disobedience, hunger strikes, marches and rallies, boycotts and encampments, we saw the clear deficiencies of our government to hear the people’s demands.
Instead, the courts and public officials allowed these corporations to steal permissions from landowners and brutalize the land, water, and people. Our conclusion is that the system is broken and it is up to us as a individuals to take peaceful action and remedy it, and this we did, out of necessity.
We acted for our children and the world that they are inheriting is unfit. There are over five major bodies of water here in Iowa, and none of them are clean because of corporation’s flagrant irresponsibility, and now another wishes to poison literally millions of us irreparably by putting us all at risk of another major catastrophe with yet another oil spill. DAPL has already leaked, and it will continue do so until the oil is shut off and the pipes are removed from the ground.
On election night 2016, we began our peaceful direct action campaign to a Dakota Access construction site and burned at least 5 pieces of heavy machinery in Buena Vista County, IA. Details regarding this action are attached to this statement below. This was information which was not shared with the public. We recognize that our action wasn’t much, but we at least stopped construction for a day at that particular site.
We then began to research the tools necessary to pierce through 5/8 inch steel pipe, the material used for this pipeline. In March we began to apply this self-gathered information. We began in Mahaska County, IA, using oxy-acetylene cutting torches to pierce through exposed, empty steel valves, successfully delaying completion of the pipeline for weeks. After the success of this peaceful action, we began to use this tactic up and down the pipeline, throughout Iowa (and a part of South Dakota), moving from valve to valve until running out of supplies, and continuing to stop the completion of this project. More information on these actions is followed at the end of this statement.
These actions of great public interest were hardly reported and the federal government and Energy Transfer Partners colluded together to lie and withhold vital information to the public.
We then returned to arsonry as a tactic. Using tires and gasoline-soaked rags we burned multiple valve sites, their electrical units, as well as additional heavy equipment located on DAPL easements throughout Iowa, further halting construction.
Later, in the first week of May we attempted yet again to pierce a valve located in Wapallo County, IA with an oxy-acetylene cutting torch. It was at this time we discovered oil was flowing through the pipe. This was beyond disheartening to us, as well as to the nation at large. This event was again hidden from the public and replaced with lies about “ditch depressions”.
We stand here now today as witnesses of peaceful, nonviolent direct action. Our actions have been those of necessity and humility. We feel we have done nothing to be ashamed of. For some reason the courts and ruling government value corporate property and profit over our inherent human rights to clean water and land.
We are speaking publicly to empower others to act boldly, with purity of heart, to dismantle the infrastructures which deny us our rights to water, land and liberty. We as civilians have seen the repeated failures of the government and it is our duty to act with responsibility and integrity, risking our own liberty for the sovereignty of us all.
Some may view these actions as violent, but be not mistaken. We acted from our hearts and never threatened human life nor personal property. What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampantly across our country seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply. You may not agree with our tactics, but you can clearly see the necessity of them in light of the broken federal government and the corporations they protect.
We do not anticipate a fair trial but do expect our loved ones to undergo harassment from the federal government and the corporations they protect. We urge you to not speak one word to the federal government and stand firm in order to not be oppressed further into making false, but self-incriminating statements. Film these interactions. There are resources as to what to do if the federal agents appear at your doorstep, educate and protect yourself.”
It is unfortunate to have to prepare for such things, but this is the government that rules, which continues to look more and more like a Nazi, fascist Germany as each day passes. We salute the people.
Details of our peaceful direct action are as follows. We hope this information helps inspire others to act boldly and peacefully, and to ease any anxieties to perceptions held that the state and these corporations are somehow an “omniscient” and “undefeatable” entity.
After studying intuitively how fires work, and the material of the infrastructures which we wished to halt (metal) we learned that the fire had to be hot enough to melt steel — and we have learned typical arsonry is not always the most effective means, but every action is a thorn in their side.
On election night, knowing that gasoline burns quickly, but does not sustain by itself, we added motor oil (which burns at a higher temperature and for longer) and rags to coffee canisters and placed them on the seats of the machinery, piercing the coffee canisters once they were in place and striking several matches, anticipating that the seats would burn and maintain a fire long enough to make the machines obsolete. One canister did not light, and that is unfortunate, but five out of six ain’t bad.
As we saw construction continue, we realized that pipe was going into the ground and that our only means to obstruct further corporate desecration was somehow to pierce through the empty steel pipes exposed at the numerous valve sites. We learned that a welding torch using oxygen and acetylene was the proper tool. We bought the equipment outside of our city in efforts to maintain anonymity as our goal was to push this corporation beyond their means to eventually abandon the project. We bought kits at Home Depot and the tanks at welding supply stores, like Praxair and Mathesons. Having no experience with welding equipment before, we learned through our own volition and we were able to get the job down to 7 minutes.
In our particular circumstances, we learned that scouting often hindered our ability to act in windows of opportunity. So, we went with our torches and protective gear on, and found numerous sites, feeling out the “vibe” of each situation, and deciding to act then and there, often in broad daylight. Trust your spirit, trust the signs.
Having run out of supplies (the tanks) we decided to return to arsonry because every action counts. We used gasoline and rags along with tires (as tires burn a nice while, once a steady fire within them burns) to multiple DAPL sites and equipment.
We were able to get more supplies shortly after and returned to a valve site in Wapello County to act again. It was then we discovered that oil was flowing through the pipeline. This was not reported to the public, instead a story of “ditch depressions” was reported to the public in Wapello County as the reason to why the pipeline continued to be delayed.
It is because of these lies we choose to come out publicly, to set the record straight, and be open about these peaceful and viable tactics against corporate atrocities.
If there are any regrets, it is that we did not act enough.
Please support and stand with us in this journey because we all need this pipeline stopped.
This is the first installment of “The Guardians of Mother Earth,” a four-part series examining the Indigenous U’wa struggle for peace in Colombia.
On September 23, 2015, in the Palace of Conventions in Havana, Cuba, his excellency Juan Manuel Santos, the President of the Republic of Colombia, and Commander Timoleon Jimenez, Chief of General Staff of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, signed an agreement on transitional justice and reparations to the victims of the country’s 51 year old civil war, resolving one of the final points in the country’s peace negotiations.
“We are adversaries, we come from different sides, but today we move in the same direction,” said President Santos, “this noble direction that all societies can have, is one of peace.”
In a show of unity, the warring parties all wore white-collared shirts without ties, as they sat on opposite sides of the brown mahogany tables encircling an artificially bright-green shrubbery arrangement. Around the room’s perimeter stood a throng of reporters, crowded together behind a red rope line, snapping photos of the historic handshake between the president and the leader of the country’s largest guerrilla army. A prolonged war that has killed more than 260,000 people and victimized and displaced seven million more seemed to be drawing to an end.
Among the victims of the conflict are the Indigenous Peoples of Colombia. Of the 102 tribal nations in existence today more than half are at risk of disappearing – forced displacement and mining on indigenous territory during the armed conflict have contributed heavily to the widespread demise.
A progressive genocide of negligence and privation is also taking place. The Indigenous Peoples of Colombia are routinely denied basic commodities such as antibiotics, vaccines and clean drinking water that residents of big cities take for granted, not because the country’s indigenous have been targeted for extermination, but because they have become politically insignificant.
During the Havana peace accord, the indigenous nations who trace their Colombian heritage back thousands of years, from before the time of the Spanish conquest, were not mentioned once.
Inside a wooden shack in the isolated cloud forests of eastern Colombia, three kilometers west of the Arauca river on the Venezuelan border, Berito Cobaria, the internationally recognized leader and spiritual guide of the indigenous U’wa, points out the shades on the x-ray scan of his chest. It shows the same strain of tuberculosis that is ravaging his people.
Berito X-ray. Photo: Jake Ling
The single-story hospital in Cubará, the nearest town on the river, is poorly equipped and understaffed. Visits from medical specialists are rare because the hospital is located in the “Red Zone” – conflict areas the Colombian government has declared dangerous due to the heavy concentration of guerrilla forces.
“The government needs to establish a tuberculosis clinic in Cubará,” Berito told IC. He confirmed he is slowly overcoming the deadly disease but despairs for his people as the tuberculosis outbreak rapidly spreads throughout the U’wa Nation’s ancestral lands. The U’wa believe there needs to be harmony in the world for there to be harmony in the cosmos, but the balance of nature has been disturbed and a sickness has fallen upon Berito’s people. Infectious western diseases such as influenza, dysentery, tuberculosis, and the common cold continue to wreak havoc on the unaccustomed immune systems of the U’wa, who up until the late 1940’s lived an isolated existence on the forested cliffs and the remote Andean wetlands and cloud forests of eastern Colombia.
Beginning on February 13th, 2016, Colombia’s second largest guerrilla army, the ELN (Army of National Liberation) imposed a 72-hour armed strike inside Red Zones like Cubará and other towns that border U’wa territory. Under the threat of violence, all stores and businesses in Cubará were closed, the roads were empty and lucky members of the Colombian military got three days’ rest in fortified outposts while their colleagues searched for explosives laid along Highway 66. Despite their dominance in the frontier towns along the Venezuelan border, even the ELN needs to gain permission from indigenous authorities like Berito to enter the ancestral lands of the U’wa. Known as the United U’wa Resguardo, the territory is restricted to all outsiders.
A day after the ELN’s armed strike was lifted, U’wa families on their way to Cubará to stock up on supplies of bread, sugar, eggs and tobacco were traveling barefoot or on the backs of pickup trucks past Berito’s home, which stands sentinel on the eastern border of the resguardo. Ten minutes away at the border town, Colombian soldiers had returned from their outposts to patrol the streets. Stores were serving clients, and locals walked openly with white plastic shopping bags, acts that had been banned and punishable by death during the armed strike. The only trace of the armed strike was the ubiquitous graffiti scrawled on buildings around town: “ELN – 51 YEARS OF RESISTANCE”.
Historically, U’wa territory has been of strategic importance to the Marxist guerrillas because it connects the contraband routes from Venezuela over the Arauca river to the central Andes of Boyacá province, a short drive from the capital Bogotá. Unarmed outside of the agricultural tools they use to cultivate staple crops of yucca, plantains and potatoes, the U’wa authorities will reluctantly grant permission to the ELN to pass through the resguardo on the strict condition they do not set up camp inside their territory. In return the ELN respect U’wa sovereignty, will not enter without permission and will not stop until they have traversed the steep and extremely difficult climb out of the cloud forests and cross the western border of the resguardo, below the snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Cocuy and Güicán.
This region, which is rich in lucrative oil and gas reserves, is also of great strategic importance to the United States’ and Colombian governments, multinationals like Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and Spanish oil giant RepSol, as well as the right-wing paramilitary death squads, which have been historically allied with the central government and big business. For the U’wa Peoples, however, oil is the sacred blood of their Mother Earth, and without its blood their mother will die. For more than two decades U’wa have mobilized aggressive non-violent campaigns to assert more control over their ancestral territory in the midst of one of the most troubled regions of the Colombian Civil War, but it was their struggle against Occidental Petroleum (called Oxy for short) that gained international attention in 1997, when Berito declared that his people “would rather die, protecting everything that we hold sacred, than lose everything that makes us U’wa.”
Oil blocks on U’wa territory. Map by Fidel Mingorance / HREV 2014
As Oxy pushed into the U’wa’s ancestral lands, the indigenous nation collectively threatened to commit mass suicide by leaping off a 15,000-foot cliff if drilling on their territory went ahead. This was not a publicity stunt. U’wa tribal lore tells of their people walking off the “Cliffs of Glory” en masse centuries ago rather than submit to the brutal Spanish conquistadors. The U’wa set up a makeshift village beside Occidental Petroleum’s Gibraltar 1 drilling site, and were clubbed, tear-gassed, threatened with rape, evicted, arrested, and harassed by state security forces on behalf of Oxy. A year later in 1998, Berito was given the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for leading the non-violent campaign against Occidental Petroleum – the same year the US multinational was complicit in the cluster-bombing of a countryside agricultural community, killing 18 civilians including 9 children, near the resguardo’s south-eastern border, in order to protect the Caño-Limon-Covenas oil pipeline.
The pipeline, jointly run by state-owned Ecopetrol and US-based Occidental Petroleum, pumps up to 220,000 barrels of crude daily from the war-torn Arauca province through U’wa territory on its way to the Caribbean coast. It was also the beneficiary of $100 million US military aid that was granted to the Colombian army in 2003, after Occidental Petroleum spent $4 million lobbying the US government to protect it. The ELN, and their ideological ally, the FARC, have bombed the pipeline more than a thousand times. The consecutive attacks over decades have spilt millions of barrels of cancerous unprocessed crude into the rivers and forests of the region, exponentially more than that of the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster.
In a separate bombing incident in March 2014, the U’wa refused to permit repairs to the pipeline until the government began dismantling the Magallanes drilling site on the northern border of the U’wa resguardo, which Ecopetrol had set up in secret months earlier. The Wall Street Journalreported the Colombian government lost $130 million during the 40-day U’wa protest, which was resolved by dismantling the new drilling rig. Ecopetrol has not cancelled the mining license, however, and the threat of exploitation remains. The most recent attack on the pipeline was a twin bomb attack by the ELN on March 15th, 2016, a week before the deadline to finalize the preliminary peace agreement that President Santos and Commander Timoleon Jimenez had agreed to six months earlier in Havana.
As the March 23rd deadline came and went without even a symbolic gesture of unity, both the FARC and government blamed each other for stalling. A week later the government saved face by announcing to the press it had entered formal peace talks with the ELN, but the country’s second-largest guerrilla army watered down public optimism by stating negotiations would not stop them from attacking critical government infrastructure, which include mining assets in the region and oil concessions surrounding U’wa territory such as Oil Block Cor 19 and Cor 45 which extend across the west and north-west of the resguardo; the Arauca oil block; and RepSol and Integra Oil drilling rigs on the resguardo’s eastern border. There is also Ecopetrol’s Siriri Oil Block, which along with Caño-Limon-Covenas is located in the north of U’wa territory.
A small fraction of a percent of the money rolling in from this multi-billion dollar mining bonanza would be more than enough to fund schools, provide fully-stocked healthcare facilities and install piping to provide clean drinking water for every indigenous and rural community in the region. In one isolated U’wa school inside the resguardo, four computers generously donated by the Colombian government gather dust because there is no electricity; here many of U’wa children are malnourished with swollen bellies because a non-native parasitic worm has contaminated the water supply. In a tin-roofed shack that serves as a hospital in Chuscal on the other side of the resguardo, the head nurse complains of the difficulty of caring for patients suffering from tuberculosis and dysentery because of a lack of vaccines, antibiotics and even clean drinking water after an oil spill contaminated the river.
Now while the international community is openly discussing buzzwords like “Peace Colombia” and “post-conflict” in anticipation of a historic peace agreement between the FARC and government, the U’wa people are demanding high-level talks with the government to address their various grievances. The government response has thus far been to ignore the U’wa, or to invite an indigenous delegation to Bogotá where low-level bureaucrats with no authority merely shuffle papers and nod their heads. Meanwhile, the tuberculosis outbreak continues to spread across U’wa territory.
The U’wa, who call themselves the people who know how to think and speak, consider themselves the Guardians of Mother Nature, and large tracts of land inside their territory have become biological reserves for jaguars, spectacled bears, as well as a kaleidoscopic array of endemic plant and bird life that do not appear anywhere else on the planet. As an ambassador for his tribe, Berito has traveled the world recruiting the support of activists of all stripes, from the late Terry Freitas, native American activists Ingrid Washinawatok and Lahe’enda’e Gay, to the founder of Amazon Watch Atossa Soltani, and Hollywood celebrities like Avatar director James Cameron.
The indigenous leader knows that the ability of his pacifist tribe of 7,000 people to defend themselves against these extremely powerful economic and political forces is limited. This is especially true while numerous multinationals and armed groups battle for control around and sometimes inside his people’s land hidden from the eyes of the international community beneath the forest canopies. Non-violence, however, needs an audience and once again the U’wa leader is calling upon the world to watch over his people.
“History is its own kind of law,” Berito said. “They say the land is dead, but it lives yet. It is only wounded by the taking of oil. The dignity of native peoples comes from the land – and like the land it can be saved.”
The second installment in this series examines the U’wa struggles against tuberculosis, parasitic worms, climate change and threats of violent paramilitary repression. You can read it here: They say the land is dead, but it lives yet
Venezuelan Energy Minister Luis Motta Domínguez reported that more than a dozen attacks had taken place in less than a week.
Venezuelan Electrical Energy Minister Luis Motta Dominguez reported that 13 attacks on Venezuela’s electrical grid took place over the last week, in an attempt to destabilize the Dec. 6 National Assembly elections.
Motta Dominguez presented the information at a press conference on Monday.
“The electrical system in the 18 days of October has received 13 attacks, 13 acts of sabotage, which also destabilizes the system,” he said. “They are intended to disturb and disrupt the elections on December 6.”
Dominguez said that “in previous elections, there were power outages just two days before the elections, and they are repeating the pattern.”
The minister of electrical energy reported the intrusion of armed people in the Corpoelec depot. | Photo: @MPPEE
According to Motta Dominguez the sabotage began on October 13 at a power plant in Zulia state, located in the northwestern corner of the country, where they cut part of the wiring. The owner showed pictures explaining a failure in the Guyana A line.
“The next attack was in Falcon (located in the northwest of the country), where a citizen was found manipulating a power transformer,” Motta Dominguez said. He also reported three attempts to hack the official website of Corpoelec, the state corporation responsible for Venezuelan power.
The minister reported an explosion and fire in a power transformer in Tachira – located in the Andes mountains, to the southwest of the country – which has affected two electrical substations. It was determined that the damage was caused by two bullet holes, leaving the people of Tachira without 200 megawatts of energy.
“Note that all the attacks are concentrated in Falcon, Zulia and Tachira, all border states,” he concluded. “It is no accident.”
In 1993 Michael Carter was arrested and indicted for underground environmental activism. Since then he’s worked aboveground, fighting timber sales and oil and gas leasing, protecting endangered species, and more. Today, he’s a member of Deep Green Resistance Colorado Plateau, and author of the memoir Kingfishers’ Song: Memories Against Civilization.
Time is Short spoke with him about his actions, underground resistance, and the prospects and problems facing the environmental movement. Due to the length of the interview, we’ve presented it in three installments; go to Part II here, and Part III here.
Time is Short: Can you give a brief description of what it was you did?
Michael Carter: The significant actions were tree spiking—where nails are driven into trees and the timber company warned against cutting them—and sabotaging of road building machinery. We cut down plenty of billboards too, and this got most of the media attention. We did this for about two years in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, about twenty actions. My brother Sean was also indicted. The FBI tried to round up a larger conspiracy, but that didn’t stick.
TS: How did you approach those actions? What was the context?
MC: We didn’t know a lot about environmental issues or political resistance, so we didn’t have much understanding of context. We had an instinctive dislike of clear cuts, and we had the book The Monkey Wrench Gang. Other people were monkeywrenching, that is, sabotaging industry to protect wilderness, so we had some vague ideas about tactics but no manual, no concrete theory. We knew what Earth First! was, although we weren’t members. It was a conspiracy only in the remotest sense. We had little strategy and the actions were impetuous. If we’d been robbing banks instead, we’d have been shot in the act.
Nor did we really understand how bad the problem was. We thought that deforestation was damaging to the land, but we didn’t get the depth of its implications and we didn’t link it to other atrocities. We just thought that we were on the extreme edge of the marginal issue of forestry. This was before many were talking about global warming or ocean acidification or mass extinction. It all seemed much less severe than now, and of course it was. The losses since then, of species and habitat and pollution, are terrible. No monkeywrenching I know of did anything significant to stop that. It was scattered, aimed at minor targets, and had no aboveground political movement behind it.
Clearcuts in the Swan Valley, MT near Loon Lake on the slope of Mission Mountains. Photo by George Wuerthner.
TS: What was the public response to your actions?
MC: They saw them as vandalism, mindlessly criminal, even if they were politically motivated. This was before 9/11, before the Oklahoma City bombing; the idea of terrorism wasn’t so powerful, so our actions weren’t taken nearly as seriously as they would be now.
We were charged by the state of Montana with criminal mischief and criminal endangerment. The state’s evidence was solid enough we thought we couldn’t win a trial, so we pled guilty on the chance the judge wouldn’t send us to prison. Our defense was to say, “We’re sorry we did it, it was motivated by sincerity but it was dumb.” And that was true. We were able to get our charges reduced from criminal endangerment to criminal mischief. I got a 19 year suspended prison sentence, Sean got 9 years suspended. We both had to pay a lot of money, some $40,000, but I only spent three months in county jail and Sean got out of a jail sentence altogether. We were lucky.
TS: As you said, this was before the obsessive fear of terrorism. How do you think that played into your trial and indictment, and how do you think it would be different today?
MC: Had it happened after any big terrorism event, they would have sent us to prison, there’s no doubt about that. States have to maintain a level of constant fear and prove themselves able to protect citizens.
The irony was, I’m not sure I wanted to be serious—there seemed to be something protective in not being all that effective, in being intentionally quixotic, in being a little cute about it. There was a particularly comical aspect to cutting down billboards, and that was helpful only when I was arrested. It made it look less like terrorism and more like reckless things I did when I was drunk, and a lot of people approved of it because they thought billboards were tacky. I want to emphasize that cutting down billboards is nothing I’d advise anyone to consider, only that a little bit of public approval made a surprising difference to my morale, and may have positively influenced sentencing. But the point, of course, is to be effective and not get caught in the first place. These days, if someone gets caught in underground actions, they will be in a lot more trouble than ever before.
TS: How did you get caught?
We left fingerprints and tire tracks, we rented equipment under our own names—like an acetylene torch used to cut down steel billboard posts—and we told people who didn’t need to know about it. We assumed we were safe if they didn’t catch us in the act and because our fingerprints weren’t on file, and we couldn’t have been more wrong. The cops can subpoena anyone’s fingerprints, and use that evidence for something in the past. The importance of security can’t be overstated—and we didn’t have any. Even with a couple rudimentary precautions, we might have saved ourselves the whole ordeal of getting caught. If we’d read the security chapter of Dave Foreman’s book Ecodefense, I don’t think we would have even come under suspicion. Anyone taking any action, above- or underground, needs to take the time to learn security well.
It’s not just saving yourself the anguish of arrest and prison time. If you’re rigorous about security, you might be able to have a real chance at changing how the future of the planet plays out. You can have no impact at all in a jail cell. In our case, we definitely could have stopped timber sales with tree spiking even though that tactic was extremely unpopular politically. It was seen as an act of violence against innocent lumber mill workers instead of a preventative measure to protect forests. The dilemma never got past that stage, though. We had little chance of having any reasoned tactical considerations—let alone making reasoned decisions—because we were always a little too afraid of being caught. With good reason, it turns out.
TS: What have you learned from your experience? Looking back on what you did all those years ago, what’s your perspective on your actions now? Is there anything you would have done differently?
MC: Well I definitely would have taken steps to not get caught. I would have picked my targets more carefully, and I would have entered into an understanding with myself that while my enemy is composed of people, it’s only a system, inhuman and relentless. It can’t be reasoned with; it has no sanity, no sense of morality, no love of anything. Its job is to consume. I would have tried to focus on that guiding fact, and not on the people running it or who were dependent on it. I would have tried to find the weaknesses in the system, and then attacked those.
I’d have tried not to allow my emotions to dictate my strategy or actions. Emotions might get me there in the first place—I don’t think you could get to such a desperate point without a strong emotional response—but once I arrived at the decision to act, I would have done everything I could to think like a soldier, find a competent group to join with, and pick expensive and hard-to-replace targets.
TS: I assume you didn’t just wake up one day and decide to attack bulldozers and billboards. What was your path from being apolitical to having the determination and the passion to do what you did?
MC: When I was struggling with high school, my brother loaned me a stack of Edward Abbey books, which presented the idea that wilderness is the real world, precious above all else. The other part was living in northwest Montana, where you see deforestation anywhere you look. You can’t not notice it, and there’s something about those scalped hills and skid trails and roads that triggers a visceral, angry response. It’s less abstract than atmospheric carbon or drift-net fishing. You don’t see those things the way you see denuded mountainsides. My family heated the house with wood, and we would sometimes get it out of slash piles in the middle of clearcuts. I had lots of firsthand exposure to deforested land. I wondered why the Sierra Club didn’t do something about it, how it could be allowed. We would occasionally go to Canada, and it was even worse up there. No one can feel despair like a teenager, and I had it in spades. If Greenpeace won’t stop this, I reasoned, well then I will.
I started building an identity around this, though, and that’s disastrous for a person choosing underground resistance. You naturally want others to know and appreciate your feelings and accomplishments, especially when you’re young, but the dilemma underground fighters face is that they must present another, blander identity to the world. That’s hard to do.
TS: You were fairly isolated in your actions, and you’ve emphasized the importance of a larger context. Do you see those two ideas connecting? Do you think saboteurs should be acting in a larger movement?
MC: I think saving the planet relies completely on the coordinated actions of underground cells coupled with an aboveground political movement that isn’t directly involved in underground actions. When I was underground, I had no hope of building a network, mostly because of a lack of emotional and political maturity. I also didn’t have the technological or strategic savvy, or a means of communicating with others. The actions themselves were mostly symbolic, and symbolic actions are a huge waste of risk. They’re a waste of political capital too. Most everyone is going to disagree with underground activism and it’s not going to change anyone’s mind about the policy issue—hardly anything will—so it has to count in the material realm. If people are ready and willing to risk their lives and their freedom then they should fight to win, not just to make some sort of abstract point.
TS: After you were arrested, what support—if any—did you receive from folks on the outside, and what support would you have wanted to receive?
MC: The most important support was financial, but there wasn’t a lot of it. Our plea bargain didn’t guarantee we wouldn’t go to prison. We were also worried that the feds would indict us for racketeering, an anti-Mafia charge with serious minimum sentencing. If we’d had more legal defense financing we’d of course have felt a lot more secure, but twenty years of reflection tells me we didn’t really deserve it considering how poorly we executed the actions, what little effect they caused.
That sounds like I’m being awfully hard on myself, and hindsight is always 20/20, but the point is that a legal crisis is exhausting and expensive. Your community will question whether your actions are worthy of the price they’ll have to pay if you’re caught. My actions were not.
Even so, I appreciated any sort of support. Hearing from the outside in jail is better than you’d believe. A lot of Earth First! Journal readers sent me anonymous letters. I wrote back and forth with one of the women who was jailed for noncooperation with a federal grand jury investigating the Animal Liberation Front in Washington. Seeing approving letters to the editor in the papers was also great. Just knowing that the whole world isn’t your enemy, that someone is thinking about you and appreciates what you did, is priceless.
Artwork by Stephanie McMillan
TS: Do you still think militant and illegal forms of direct action and sabotage are justified? Why?
MC: I do, yes. In an ideal world I don’t think violence is the best way to accomplish anything, but obviously this isn’t an ideal world. Our circumstances are getting worse and worse—overpopulation, pollution, oceanic dead zones, you name it—and any options for a decent and dignified future for humanity are dwindling day by day, so what choice does that leave us? Individual attempts at sustainable living won’t work so long as the industrial system is running. The dismantling of infrastructure is the most important missing piece right now. It’s where the system is most vulnerable, so it should be employed right away. It can be effective, but it has to be responsible, careful, and extraordinarily smart.
One of the reasons underground political actions are so unpopular is that they’re always presented as attacks on individuals, rather than on a system. I think it’s important to reframe sabotage as strikes on an unjust, destructive system, and that civilization is not us, and not the highest expression of human endeavor, but only an idea. Civilization is masquerading as humanity, but that’s not what it is. Civilization is only one sort of cultural plan, a way of creating unsustainably large human settlements, based entirely on agriculture which itself is completely unsustainable.
The argument that militant actions are counterproductive has a little bit of merit because the scale they’ve happened on hasn’t been large enough to have any impact. For example, the Earth Liberation Front burning SUV’s. You’re left with the political fallout, the mainstream activists distancing themselves and all the other bad stuff that comes with it, but you don’t have any measurable gain, in reducing carbon emissions, say. Sabotage needs to happen on a larger scale, against more expensive targets, to be impactful. Fighters need to think big. That’s how militaries accomplish their goals—by acting against systems. They blow up bridges, they take out buildings, they disable the enemy arsenal, they kill the enemy—that’s how they function. I agree activists don’t want to identify with militarism, but it’s foolhardy to not consider what’s actually going to get the job done, and militaries know how to do that. No moral code will matter if the biosphere collapses. Doctrinal non-violence isn’t going to have any relevance in a world that’s 20 degrees hotter than it is now.
I wish an effective movement could be nonviolent, but we just don’t have enough social cohesion to orchestrate that kind of thing. There’s so few of us who give a shit, and we’re scattered, isolated, and disenfranchised. We don’t have adequate numbers, influence, or power, and I don’t see that changing. Everywhere we look we’re losing, because we don’t have a movement that can say, “No. You’re not going to do that. We will stop this, whatever it takes,” and back that up. Aboveground activists need to advocate a lesser evil, to continually pose the question of what is worse: that some property was destroyed, or that sea shells are dissolving in acid oceans? Underground activists need to act that out. It’s not a rhetorical question.
We need to remember, too, that small numbers of people can engineer profound changes when their actions are wisely leveraged. Very few took part in the resistance movements of World War II, but they made all the difference to ultimately defeating the Axis.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a 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
To most of us with no military experience, the Decisive Ecological Warfare strategy (DEW) of Deep Green Resistance can seem abstract. The aboveground efforts of rebuilding local food systems, local economies, and local decision making are straight-forward and well known to citizens engaged in any sort of social justice or environmental activity. More confrontational public direct action and nonviolent civil disobedience are familiar to most activists, from historical examples of women’s suffrage and civil rights movements to modern fights like the tar sands blockade and the Unis’tot’en Camp. However, the crucial underground role of directly attacking critical infrastructure, though it sounds exciting in theory, has little grounding in our daily experience or even in the history we’ve learned.
This is probably a deliberate omission from our history books, as sabotage is a highly effective tactic for small groups, outnumbered and outsupplied by opposing forces. In any situation of asymmetric warfare, sabotage plays an important role. This is precisely why the DEW strategy depends on one or more underground resistance groups carrying out unpredictable attacks on infrastructure to cause cascading systems failures. The aboveground work of slowing down destruction and building alternatives is crucial to easing the transition to a sane and sustainable way of living, but only decisive action by an underground can stop the entire juggernaut of industrial civilization in the time available to us before complete biotic collapse.
In 1987, Captain Howard Douthit III of the US Air Force published a thesis on “The Use and Effectiveness of Sabotage As a Means of Unconventional Warfare – An Historical Perspective From World War I Through Viet Nam.” Douthit performed an extensive literature search on the subject, and his report describes historical concepts and many specific instances of sabotage. He makes the subject much more accessible to the layperson, and demonstrates the effectiveness of sabotage in a wide range of circumstances.
Douthit provides summaries of different aspects of historical sabotage, distinguishing between forms such as passive (carried out by people forced to work for the occupying power) vs active, land-based vs aquatic targets, and targets of vehicles vs industry vs utilities. He found that among the most often used (and presumably most effective) forms of active sabotage were the use of explosives and mines, cutting power and communications lines, and arson. The most common targets included fuel depots, supply warehouses, oil pipelines, ships, railway infrastructure and trains, roads (including bridges & tunnels), communications infrastructure, and electrical facilities.
Sabotage groups that were better organized, trained, and supplied were able to pull off more complex and effective actions, often causing disruptions behind enemy lines in coordination with traditional military maneuvers on the front lines. But even small, amateur, destitute groups such as the Viet Cong were able to leverage the little they had to inflict disproportionate damage on their enemies.
Conventional forces had an extremely difficult time preventing the sabotage:
The only countermeasure that stopped sabotage was the manpower-prohibitive act of exterminating the saboteurs. Committing the number of forces necessary for effective counter-sabotage also produced too much of a drain on the front line. Indeed, as this fact became known, sabotage efforts increased in a deliberate move to force the enemy to guard against sabotage in the rear area. Thus, this research indicated there were no effective countermeasures to sabotage.
Douthit concludes:
[H]istory supported the thesis that sabotage is an effective means of warfare. Sabotage was used against both strategic and tactical targets. It was proven capable of being used near the front line, in the rear areas, and even in support areas out of the theater.
[…]
Sabotage can be used against both tactical and strategic targets.
Any nation, rich or poor, large or small can effect sabotage against an aggressor.
Sabotage is an economical form of warfare, requiring only a mode of transportation (possibly walking), a properly trained individual, and an applicable sabotage device.
To read more, download the PDF of “The Use and Effectiveness of Sabotage As a Means of Unconventional Warfare” (6.3 MB). For a detailed review of sabotage operations organized by chronological period and by country, start reading at page 13 of the report (page 25 in the PDF), or jump straight to the conclusions starting on page 92 (104 in the PDF).
Many films about historical resistance, especially about opposition to Nazi occupation, show successful examples of sabotage and other asymmetric warfare actions. Browse our Deep Green Resistance IMDB Lists for recommendations.
Time is Short: Reports, Reflections & Analysis on Underground Resistance is a 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
New People’s Army rebels on Saturday raided a mining firm in the southern Philippine province of Agusan del Norte, reports said.
Reports said the rebels swooped down on Philippine Alstron Mining Company on the village of Tamamarkay in Tubay town and overpowered the security guards without firing a single shot before they torched several trucks and other heavy equipment.
The rebels also seized at least 6 shot guns and short firearms from the company’s security arsenal. There were no reports of casualties.
The raid came following threats made by the NPA on mining firms operating in the southern Philippines.
Just last month, rebel forces attacked a police base and government troops in Davao del Sur’s Matanao as punishment for their “reign of terror” against indigenous tribes and other communities opposing mining operations in the province.
Dencio Madrigal, a spokesman for the NPA-Valentine Palamine Command, said the deadly attacks were a punishment for police and military units protecting Glencore Xstrata. He accused the mining firm of exploiting nearly 100,000 hectares of ancestral lands of indigenous Lumad Blaans tribes, and peasants in the region.
Jorge Madlos, a regional rebel spokesman, also warned mining firms and fruit plantations in the region, saying military operations in Mindanao have escalated and have become more extensive with the aim to thwart the ever growing and widespread people’s protest against destructive mining operations and plantations.
Madlos said among their targets are Russell Mines and Minerals, Apex Mining Corp. and Philco in southern Mindanao; Dolefil, Del Monte and Sumifru plantations in northern Mindanao; TVI Resource Development Philippines in western Mindanao whose operations inside the ancestral domain of indigenous Subanen and Moro tribes are being opposed by villagers.
NPA and Moro rebels had previously attacked TVI Resources in Zamboanga province.
“If one recalls, more than 400 families were forced to evacuate their ancestral lands because of TVI and the ruthless military operations that ensued to protect it in Buug, Zamboanga del Sur. In order to defend the people’s human rights and general wellbeing, the NPA launched tactical offensives against TVI as well as against units of the AFP-PNP-CAFGU protecting it, such as the ambush on February 2012 that hit elements of the army intelligence group operating on the behest of TVI and the imposition of the local government to allow TVI mining operations on Subanen ancestral lands is one of the bases the NPA raided on April 9, 2012 the PNP station in Tigbao, Zamboanga del Sur,” Madlos said.
NPA rebels also intercepted a group of army soldiers who were using a borrowed truck from TVI and disarmed them in Diplahan town in Zamboanga Sibugay province two years ago. The rebels also burned the truck before releasing the soldiers.
“In view of these events, the NDFP in Mindanao calls upon the Lumad and Moro peoples, peasants and workers, religious and other sectors to further strengthen their unity and their courage to oppose the interests of imperialist mines and plantations, which are exceedingly damaging to Mindanao, to its people and to the environment. We call upon the units of the NPA in Mindanao to be ever more daring in their defense of people’s interests against the greed and rapacity of the local ruling classes and their imperialist master,” Madlos said.
TVI Resource Development Philippines has repeatedly denied all accusations against them. It recently ended its gold mining operation in Mount Canatuan in Zamboanga del Norte’s Siocon town after several years of operations and now has a gold-silver project in the town of Bayog in Zamboanga del Sur province and a nickel plant in Agusan del Norte province.
