Editor’s note: DGR acknowledges that Extinction Rebellion and Extinction Rebellion Ireland are valuable and necessary contributors to a broader ecosystem of activism. The analysis in this article is relevant for many movements and it’s republished from Medium with permission from the author.
Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is growing at a decent speed and has already hosted a number of public marches and street art performances. The movement currently follows the Extinction Rebellion International principles and policies, which make it a fully decentralised and non-hierarchical movement which is open to anyone who wants to participate. In Ireland they are currently opting for a consensus based approach to decisionmaking rather than a democratic process, and they are experimenting with using “circles” to organise around key issues like finance, tactics, and policies. The community is somewhat divided on the details, especially regarding the ambiguity of some of Extinction Rebellion’s principles and how they should be interpreted. There is also contention around the details of decisionmaking processes and key financial decisions.
This is very much a social experiment, and you can tell the movement is young and raw. Individual participants run the gamut from brand-new activists to seasoned community organisers, from upper class people to significantly underpriveleged people, and from those living in intensely rural settings to those living in the big cities. The diversity of participants is staggering. There seems to be a central division between those who espouse fundamentally capitalist beliefs and call for incremental progress through government lobbying and public relations stunts, to outright socialists who are calling for the abolition of capitalism and profound restructuring of government institions. Likewise, there is a division between those who believe that climate change is a serious concern but a vaguely distant threat, to those who believe climate collapse is actively occurring and poses a risk of near-term extinction. These divisions are obviously exploitable, and will inevitably identified by opposition forces (e.g. fossil fuel industry propaganda teams).
Below I outline some of my most immediate security concerns. Please note that I’m highlighting these concerns in order to help XRI identify and address them before they fall victim to malicious parties. I will approach these concerns from the perspective of an oppositional force in order to highlight the seriousness of these vulnerabilities.
Crippling Through Consensus
Perhaps the most easily exploitable aspect of Extinction Rebellion Ireland (XRI) is that they’re currently using consensus rather than democracy, which means that they only progress on a tactic or solution if everyone agrees. If one participant wishes to block the decision they can grind everything to a halt. There is no process for dealing with people who consistently obstruct decisions, so it would be easy for a member of the opposition to join XRI meetings and simply blockade all decisions while pretending to do so in good faith — though even if they blockaded XRI without pretending to be sincere, there are no existing procedures for dealing with them. A small handful of malicious individuals could easily cripple XRI and prevent most progress.
Scenario: I am the head of a PR (propaganda) agency for the fossil fuel industry and I’ve identified this weakness. I hire a small team of individuals to join XRI Facebook groups, join the XRI Slack, and participate in all key meetings both in person and via Zoom. These individuals do not need to be skilled at all, so I would select them based on their cover stories. I would give preference to older individuals, since they are perceived to be more trustworthy, and I would favour anyone who has a background in “feel good” activism so that they seem credible. Their entire job will be to bring up “legitimate” concerns about every issue and to trade off on blocking decisions, that way it’s not too obvious.
Outcome: XRI decisionmaking is ground to a halt, effectively the only actions which become possible are those which the fossil fuel industry has authorised because all others are blocked by the small team of paid trolls. These blockade participants may arouse some degree of suspicion, but it is impossible to definitively accuse them of maliciousness. This tactic will continue to work so long as consensus decisionmaking is in effect and/or so long as participation is open to the general public.
Consistent, Controlled Conflict
Groups like XRI are highly diverse, and they always include big personalities. There are a handful of especially divisive issues which are guaranteed to generate conflict and endless argument. Some of the prominent issues include:
Urgently dismantling capitalist systems (“capitalism relies on infinite growth on a finite planet, which is irrational”).
Emotional violence as violence (“if we hurt someone’s feelings it constitutes violence and is against the XRI policies”)
Property destruction as nonviolence (“if we sabotage a pipeline it does not directly harm anyone and is therefore nonviolent”)
Quantifiability of tactics (“we should not pursue tactics which have no quantifiable outcomes”)
Naming and shaming (“we cannot mention any names” & “no naming and shaming only applies to XR participants and the general public”)
Leveraging these key issues to generate internal conflict would be effective because they all address valid, but generally unresolveable issues. They divide people along key lines: capitalism/socialism, idealist/pragmatist, and analytical/emotional. Each of these groups constitute a large ratio of XRI’s participants and can therefore generate substantial conflict with very little prompting. Most of these debates occur on Facebook and Slack, and can therefore be instigated and sustained by fake accounts.
Scenario: I am a member of a prominent opposition party and my objective is to cause enough sustained dissent within XRI to cripple an upcoming national strike. I coordinate a dozen party volunteers via Facebook. Each volunteer sets up 2–3 fake Facebook accounts and email addresses, primarily using images of attractive young women to ensure they are inundated with incoming friend requests, which significantly reduces the amount of work needed to create a realistic looking account. Once the accounts have several dozen friends the volunteers are prompted to add them to prominent XRI groups on Facebook, where each fake account regularly initiates arguments about one of the key issues outlined above. The volunteer trolls also engage with each others’ content in order to make the arguments appear authentic and lively. Once the accounts have become regonisable in the community they request to be added to the XRI Slack where they continue baiting arguments.
Outcome: XRI participants end up wasting time and energy on divisive arguments rather than working on actions or making progress toward resolving organisational gaps. Moreover, individuals who engage in arguments will be likely to form cliques and grudges until active members leave out of frustration and emotional exhaustion. XRI currently has no process for resolving these disputes or making critical interpretive decisions, so this tactic would work indefinitely.
Daylight Robbery
Extinction Rebellion and XRI have significant access to funding. The International account generally holds between €500,000 and €1,000,000 in cash and they are beginning to allocate relatively large amounts of funding to individual Extinction Rebellion groups. For example, XRI has been offered €10,000 without strings attached, and an additional €40,000 with minimal strings attached.
The biggest financial obstacle facing XRI and other regional XR groups is accessing funds, because they are often used for illegal activities. Under normal circumstances, XRI members would join forces and create a legal entity (e.g. limited company) to receive and process the funds; this approach requires individual XRI members to sign their name to the company and take on significant legal liabilities. Conversely, individual XR members could be directly paid out the funds as wages, which carries slightly less legal liability but lacks transparency, creates infighting, and makes resource purchases difficult. Another option is to set up an out-of-country legal entity, which provides significant legal protection but requires a trustworthy foreign national. The last option is to receive payment in bitcoin and withdraw cash from bitcoin ATMs, which provides the most legal protection but lacks transparency and requires several trustworthy individuals.
XRI is open to anyone and operates on a consensus model, which means that a dedicated group of thieves could potentially steal tens of thousands of euro by infiltrating the XRI community, driving financial decisions toward methods they can control, and working as a group to mask their actions and mitigate any risk of being caught.
Scenario: A group of 10 friends hear that XRI will soon receive €40,000 in funding. They join XRI groups, the Slack platform, and begin attending all meetings in order to build rapport. These individuals understand the logistical challenges facing XRI and they advise XRI to leverage bitcoin to receive the funds in order to take advantage of its many benefits, namely its anonymity and significantly reduced legal liability. XRI participants express concern about ensuring the funds are safely handled and can be transparently accounted. The group of thieves suggest a best practice: a “circle” of designated people should all have access to the bitcoin wallet in order to monitor the funds and keep each other honest. All 10 of the friends join the circle and insist that many people should have access in order to avoid centralisation and hierarchy. Once the funds are in the bitcoin wallet, they almost immediately disappear into another wallet and are then laundered through one of many services. The funds are eventually divided among the friends and nobody can identify who took the bitcoins.
Outcome: XRI loses €40,000 in funding and has a reduced likelihood of receiving additional funds. The Extinction Rebellion brand is tarnished and media coverage is diverted away from actions and toward the robbery. Extinction Rebellion funders are globally disenfranchised and become less likely to provide financial resources in the future.
Summary
By compiling this analysis I hope to highlight several significant security risks, which can be exploited by malicious third parties with minimal resources or expertise to cripple the Extinction Rebellion movement in Ireland. These approaches are not new, they have been used before to undermine movements, but they have not yet been used against Extinction Rebellion. My hope is that, by highlighting them, Extinction Rebellion can resolve the issues before oppositional parties exploit them or, at the very least, Extinction Rebellion participants will be more likely to identify them before they cause critical damage to the movement.
All of these weaknesses can be effectively counteracted, but only if we’re aware of them before we fall victim to them.
Editor’s note: this article is republished from an internal DGR community discussion.
by a DGR member
Definition: “Spiral theory” is a strategic approach adopted by some revolutionary movements in which violent acts are undertaken against state targets with the intention of provoking an indiscriminate repressive response against an associated social group that is relatively uninvolved with the action itself. This repressive response is sought for its ability to radicalize a population that is currently apolitical or unsupportive of violent revolution.
History: Spiral theory has been used to varying levels of success over the 20th century.
Irish Republicanism – The Irish Republican Army realized early on in the campaign against British imperialism that attacks on military installations and against British settlers would lead to indiscriminate retaliation against ethnic Irish communities by occupying forces. IRA strategists soon learned that intentionally provoking this response radicalized previously unsupportive Irish civilians against British rule more than it alienated them from the Republicans. Many of the tactics adopted by the IRA, both before and after the creation of the Irish Republic, had the unintuitive goal of increasing British violence against Irish civilians for this purpose. This strategy was originally effective, but public support for militant resistance to British occupation waned in the latter half of the 20th century as IRA actions became increasingly erratic. By the 1980s, the spiral of government and Republican violence was more exhausting and demoralizing than radicalizing for large portions of the population.
Basque Separatism – Spiral theory is perhaps most associated with the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or ETA, a revolutionary nationalist organization with the goal of establishing a homeland for the Basque people in northern Spain. According to Cyrus Zirakzadeh, the ETA’s strategy centered around “elective attacks [that] would provoke the government into excessive and nondiscriminatory retaliation against all Basque residents.” This strategy was extremely successful during the regime of Francisco Franco, growing the ETA from a relatively small core of marginalized activists to a movement that was supported by the majority of Basque residents in Spain. The ETA was ultimately unsuccessful in establishing a Basque homeland, but their failure cannot be easily traced to their effective use of spiral theory. It is likely that spiral theory was merely insufficient, rather than ineffective, for Basque separatists.
Zionism – Early Zionist militants intentionally provoked repression against Jewish settlers in the hopes of radicalizing moderate Zionists who saw the British state as a potential ally. Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, adopted a policy of bombings, assassinations, and sabotage against British soldiers as well as Palestinian civilians for this purpose. However, the British occupation forces were generally unwilling to respond with indiscriminate violence against Jewish settlers, and no “spiral” formed.
Palestinian Liberation – Spiral theory is a central strategic approach of groups like Hamas, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. All of these organizations are well-known for their strategy of relatively harmless rocket attacks against Israeli settlements and cities, undertaken with the intention of provoking a disproportionate Israeli military response. These military responses further radicalize Palestinian civilians, as well as damage the international reputation of the Israeli state. Although many factors are responsible for the rise of Hamas and the marginalization of the PLO and PFLP, analysts generally see this strategy as having been incredibly effective. Hamas was relatively unpopular before adopting the policy of intermittent rocket attacks, but now holds an absolute majority of seats on the Palestinian Legislative Council. Further, public opinion among Palestinians has shifted towards militancy and away from compromise in recent years, while international criticism towards the Israeli response has intensified.
Considerations: Spiral theory requires complex practical and ethical considerations before it can be applied to Deep Green Resistance and our strategic model.
Practical – Spiral theory is traditionally utilized when an identifiable social group exists to be retaliated against. This is most commonly an ethic group, but it can be any relatively inflexible and publicly recognizable social category. Race, sex, and economic class are all at least potentially capable of being integrated into a strategy based on spiral theory, and Deep Green Resistance does some work revolving around all three. However, it is unclear what social group would be targeted by retaliation were spiral theory to be applied in the arena of environmentalism. A crucial element of spiral theory is the inability of the targeted social group to fracture, dissolve, or disassociate itself; in the face of Spanish repression, for example, Basque people cannot choose to stop being Basque. This contrasts with environmentalism, which is a political and social movement where membership is optional. Therefore, it is at least likely that intentionally provoking retaliation against environmentalists would result in people renouncing environmentalism rather than radicalizing against the corporate state. For this reason, traditional spiral theory is at the very least an uncertain strategy with the potential for severe failure.
Environmentalism is also a unique arena in which strategically effective militancy is often no more difficult than symbolic militancy. In many cases, it is much easier. Blowing up a dam, for example, is more pragmatically beneficial than violence directed at individuals, and it may also be safer and more straightforwardly accomplished. This is not the case for national liberation struggles, where striking decisive blows at the infrastructure of an occupying force is often much more difficult than violence towards “soft targets” like police, politicians, and settler populations. Spiral theory originally developed as a way to leverage relatively powerlessness by striking low-value targets and capitalizing on the response of the more powerful agent. Although environmentalists are similarly powerless, our focus on material extractive infrastructure as opposed to complex political and social organization means our ideal targets are often “softer” than those that would carry (purely) symbolic value. For this reason, spiral theory may be strictly unnecessary; it is likely that effective militancy as outlined in our DEW strategy would bring with it many of the same results that spiral theory intentionally produces.
Ethical – Spiral theory involves intentionally bringing harm to innocent people, including those who we consider allies and community members. Although we cannot legislate any individual’s moral response to strategies like these, it is likely that they conflict with Deep Green Resistance’s dedication to respecting human rights and avoiding oppressive actions. Combined with the previously mentioned practical issues, a straightforward application of spiral theory seems to be ethically unjustifiable.
Applications: Spiral theory, while effective in some revolutionary contexts, contains many liabilities and structural constraints that make it a poor fit for environmentalism. Nonetheless, environmentalists can and should analyze spiral theory to look for ways in which its underlying philosophy can be harnessed in the fight against industrialism.
Utilizing Repression for Propaganda Purposes – While it may not be justifiable to intentionally provoke retaliation against environmentalists, retaliation is nonetheless expected as the ecological catastrophe worsens and environmental activism becomes more militant. With this in mind, spiral theory can help us understand the ways in which we can utilize this retaliation and make the most of it. Already, the Trump administration’s increasingly hostile relationship to both state environmental agencies and non-state activists has altered public perception, and further crackdowns can be leveraged to increase this antagonism. Anti-environmental actions that specifically impact indigenous and non-white communities may be especially open to the dynamics described by spiral theory; although intentionally provoking these actions is likely to be unsuccessful and unethical, the strategies of revolutionary movements like the ETA and Hamas can help us understand how best to leverage these actions once they do occur as a natural byproduct of the worsening ecological crisis.
Utilizing Repression Strategically – As adherents to DEW, we recognize that legal aboveground action will not be enough to reach our goal of dismantling industrial civilization. It is likely that continued reliance on and belief in these sorts of actions is a major impediment to revolutionary success. For this reason, it may be advantageous to intentionally provoke increased legal sanction against common aboveground actions with the hope of creating conditions where underground action becomes the safer alternative, all things considered. This could be considered a form of legal spiral theory. At the very least, it is valuable to identify what aboveground actions would most likely 1) publicly fail in a way that encourages dissatisfaction and radicalization, or 2) succeed in ways that provoke increased legal sanctions and therefore create corresponding incentive for underground action. In contrast, actions that fall in the middle of this spectrum – being effective enough to maintain individual personal satisfaction but not effective enough to compel a strong state reaction – may be the most deleterious form of resistance.
Applying Spiral Theory to Bright Green Environmentalism – The proliferation of liberal reformists in the environmental movement is another serious impediment to revolutionary success. Although violence against these “bright green” activists would be unjustified, the dynamics of spiral theory can also be applied to the social relations between environmentalists. Provoking mainstream environmental organizations to adopt radical positions is, of course, the most desirable goal. However, if this is judged to be unlikely or impossible, it may be beneficial to pursue the opposite response and encourage increasingly ineffective and futile actions. This could have the effect of alienating their potential supporters. As stated above, mainstream environmental organizations that are effective enough to provide contributors with emotional gratification but not effective enough to achieve real goals may be the most harmful form of activism. If this is the case, and radicalization is unlikely, increased irrelevance and ineptitude may be preferable
Takeaways: It is likely that spiral theory as conventionally practiced by revolutionary movements would be unhelpful or harmful to the environmental movement. This is due to three primary reasons: First, there is no cohesive social group to experience and respond to state repression in the case of environmentalists. Second, effective actions against infrastructure would compel state repression to the same degree that symbolic violence would. Third, there are serious ethical concerns that would be both categorically problematic and practically harmful to the image of environmentalists.
Nonetheless, some elements of spiral theory can be applied to the struggle against industrialism in ways that are very helpful. Spiral theory can help us understand how to best leverage the inevitable state repression that will occur as the ecological crisis worsens. Spiral theory can also be applied more directly to our dialectical relationship with the legal system. Closing off unhelpful avenues of aboveground activism by provoking legal sanction may be a helpful way of steering activists towards more decisive action. Similarly, if mainstream environmental organizations reach the point of being unsalvageable, it may be beneficial to encourage their incompetence with the goal of alienating those who previously supported them.
Editor’s note: this article contains extensive excerpts from the Irish Republican Army’s Green Book, one of their key training documents during their 20th-century struggle against British occupation.
Written by Liam Campbell
“Don’t be seen in public marches, demonstrations or protests. Don’t be seen in the company of known Republicans, don’t frequent known Republican houses. Your prime duty is to remain unknown to the enemy forces and the public at large.”
Like all successful underground organisations, the Irish Republican Army maintained a strict firewall between their aboveground and underground movements, this ensured that publicly identifiable individuals could not be pressured into revealing underground militants, providing a certain level of safety for both groups. The Irish Republican Army also emphasized the importance of abstaining from alcohol or other drugs, which they identified as the single greatest threat to any guerilla organisation.
“Many in the past have joined the Army out of romantic notions, or sheer adventure, but when captured and jailed they had after-thoughts about their allegiance to the Army. They realised at too late a stage that they had no real interest in being volunteers. This causes splits and dissension inside prisons and divided families and neighbours outside.”
When recruiting, the Irish Republican Army recognised that successful underground members had certain characteristics; they were intelligent, reliable, and they were capable of giving their total allegiance to the cause. These characteristics ensured that they would consistently obey often difficult orders from the chain of command, regardless of the personal cost, and despite any personal issues they may have with their superior officers. Certain qualities could disqualify a person as a candidate: emotionalism, sensationalism, and adventurism were among them.
“The enemy, generally speaking, are all those opposed to our short-term or long-term objectives. But having said that, we must realise that all our enemies are not the same and therefore there is no common cure for their enmity. The conclusion then is that we must categorise and then suggest cures for each category. Some examples: We have enemies through ignorance, through our own fault or default and of course the main enemy is the establishment.”
One of the most essential features of the Green Book was the precision with which it defined enemies. You cannot wage a successful war if your targets are poorly defined. The Irish Republican Army identified three categories of enemy:
Enemies through ignorance are those individuals who can be cured through education. Tactics included marches, demonstrations, wall slogans, press statements, publications, and person-to-person communication. The Green Book stressed that self education was essential, which included ideological understanding and also tactical knowledge about how to organise large groups of people and how to successfully execute different actions.
Enemies through our own fault are the ones created by the Irish Republican Army’s actions, which includes personal conduct and the collective conduct of the movement. These enemies vary greatly. The elderly woman whose door was pulled off its hinges by an IRA member evading capture who doesn’t receive an immediate apology and recompense, the family and friends of an informer who has been punished without their being notified of the reason, and also the collateral victims of violence.
Members of the establishment who consciously take actions to maintain the status quo in politics, media, policing, and business. Although some of these enemies are clearly identifiable, most of them operate with various degrees of anonymity as bureaucratic cogs in a vast machine of oppression; this means that one of the greatest challenges is accurately identifying establishment members. Surprisingly, execution is not always the best way to make a member of the establishment ineffective, often it is better to expose them as liars, hypocrites, collaborators, or subjects of public ridicule.
“Many figures of speech have been used to describe Guerrilla Warfare, one of the most apt being ‘The War of the Flea’ which conjured up the image of a flea harrying a creature of by comparison elephantine size into fleeing (forgive the pun). Thus it is with a Guerrilla Army such as the I.R.A. which employs hit and run tactics against the Brits while at the same time striking at the soft economic underbelly of the enemy, not with the hope of physically driving them into the sea but nevertheless expecting to effect their withdrawal by an effective campaign of continuing harassment contained in a fivefold guerrilla strategy.”
The Irish Republican Army’s strategy included a war of attrition, the destruction of high-value assets, to make large regions ungovernable, to sustain a propaganda campaign, and to protect the movement against criminals, collaborators, and informers. The Green Book emphasized that volunteers need to achieve more than just killing enemy personnel, they must also create and maintain support systems that would not only carry the movement through the war, but would also facilitate a smooth transition after military victory had been achieved.
“Most volunteers are arrested on or as a result of a military operation. This causes an initial shock resulting in tension and anxiety. All volunteers feel that they have failed, resulting in a deep sense of disappointment. The police are aware of this feeling of disappointment and act upon this weakness by insults such as “you did not do very well: you are only an amateur: you are only second-class or worse”. While being arrested the police use heavy-handed `shock` tactics in order to frighten the prisoner and break down his resistance. The prisoner is usually dragged along the road to the waiting police wagon, flung into it, followed by the arresting personnel, e.g., police or Army. On the journey to the detention centre the prisoner is kicked, punched and the insults start. On arrival he is dragged from the police wagon through a gauntlet of kicks, punches and insults and flung into a cell.”
Capture was one of the greatest fears that volunteers lived with on a daily basis, so the Green Book addressed these concerns in detail and prepared volunteers for that possibility. This section was broken down into the actual arrest, the interrogation, and the legal process. There were three categories of torture that volunteers could face: physical, subtle psychological, and humiliation. Physical torture often took the form of beatings, kicking, punching, and cigarette burns. Psychological torture could include threats to family, friends, and self, or threats of assassination and disfigurement. Humiliation included being stripped naked, remarks about the prisoner’s sexual organs, and removing symbolic defense mechanisms.
One of the ways the Green Book prepared volunteers was by reminding them that they could only be held and tortured for a maximum of 7 days. Although the experience would likely be horrific, it could only last for a relatively brief duration; if they confessed or capitulated during their interrogation they could easily face a lifetime in prison where they would experience much of the same torture. One of the coping strategies they employed was to form images in their minds or on the surrounding walls, directing their concentration away from the interrogators and diverting it toward positive or neutral ideas, even something as simple as a flickering candle or a leaf.
Overall, what the Green Book does is it clearly lays out the ideological foundations of the movement, the requirements of its volunteers, the methodology for identifying and categorising enemies, the tactics that should be employed, and it also addresses the greatest fears of volunteers and teaches them how to cope in the event that they must face them. These are the foundational psychological requirements that are needed to recruit and retain effective underground guerillas. They must know why they are taking action, what their actions will achieve, how to behave, who they are targeting, and they need to know that they will be able to overcome their fears should they need to face them.
DGR member and lawyer Will Falk explains why the legal and regulatory system is structurally incapable of defending the natural world from threats, because it was never designed to do this. His conclusion is that communities must organize around revolutionary, ecological principles to defend the land themselves. We cannot rely on government to do it for us.
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San Antonino Castillo Velasco, Oaxaca, Mexico — Twelve years ago in the verdant Ocotlán Valley of Mexico, a group of men and women of Zapotec origin watched as their crops of vegetables and flowers began to wither away. A long drought seemed destined to turn their fertile valley into a desert area. But through a rainwater harvesting technique, they created a series of “absorption wells,” and since then life has re-emerged in this remote region in the South of Mexico.
As he irrigates his onion crops using the “drip technique”, Emiliano remembers those years when his crops languished for the lack of water from either the rain or the irrigation canals. In those days, back in 2005, they knew that in this area there was a 1967 presidential decree, which established a prohibition on agricultural use of water that required the payment of up to 24 thousand pesos (about $1,200 USD) to gain access.
The National Water Commission (Conagua) imposed a heavy fine when they continued to use the water, as well as excessively high electrical fees for use of their water pumps. The desperation of seeing their crops die and the lack of economic solvency caused peasants like Emiliano, Esperanza Alonso Contreras and Juan Justino Martínez González among hundreds of others to organize themselves and seek help from Flor y Canto, a social organization dedicated to the defense of life and territory; and since then the Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos por la Defensa de Agua or “Copuda” was born.
Juan Justino Martínez González, founder of the Coordinator of United Peoples for the Defense of Water “Copuda”.
Now that they were organized, the Sowers of Water — together with Flor y Canto, headed by the indigenous rights defender Carmen Santiago Alonso — established two strategies for the defense of the aquifers in this area of the valleys of Oaxaca: The first one was to train people in the creation of absorption wells. They went to the Water Museum in the city of Tehuacán, Puebla, and from their training they built “pots” or large ponds where they accumulated rainwater, and also seven wells as a pilot. Currently there are more than 300 such wells that are planted in the fields.
The second route that the peasants took was the legal one. In 2011, they sued Conagua before the Superior Court of Fiscal and Administrative Justice for unfairly high charges without a consultation under ILO Convention 169. Two years later, in 2013, the Court ruled in favor of Copuda and ordered the indigenous consultation in 24 communities throughout the region.
The consultation process is the only one that has been done in Mexico for the defense of water, according to Santiago, a pioneer in the country in water rights. The case is currently in the fourth or “consultative” phase, and according to the farmers, the hope is that the government of Andres Manuel López Obrador will “lift the decree of closure” and to convert this region of the Ocotlán Valley into a “Regulated Area,” because the National Water Law endorsed by the government of Enrique Peña Nieto is in violation of their human and indigenous rights.
Land and water defender Carmen Santiago Alonso, who has seen the rebirth of crops in the Ocotlán Valley, stressed that this process of sowing and cultivation of water is the result of the organization of the people, who have learned to sow water for the simple love of the countryside and community knowledge.
Carmen Santiago Alonso, who has seen the rebirth of crops in the Ocotlán Valley, stressed that all this process of germination and cultivation of water is the result of the organization of the people, who have learned to sow water for the simple love of the countryside and community knowledge.
Now the community waits for the Mexican government to really keep its word at the end of the consultation and thus lift the decree and close and create a set of rules for the “Niza Microregion” of the Ocotlán Valley.
“We hope that at the end of the consultation, the government will respect the voice of the peoples of COPUDA who for many years have fought for water to be free,” she said. “Here we sow water under a community technique, we collect it for our crops, so that there is life; we only want to live freely and be respected.”
Protests against the anti-indigenous policies of Brazil’s President Bolsonaro are occurring in Brazil and around the world to mark his first month in power.
Demonstrators held placards declaring “Stop Brazil’s genocide now!” and “Bolsonaro: protect indigenous land.”
The protests have been led by APIB, the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil, as the culmination of their “Indigenous blood – not a single drop more” campaign, known as “Red January.”
Before he was elected president, Mr Bolsonaro was notorious for his racist views. Among his first acts on assuming power was to remove responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from Brazil’s Indigenous Affairs Department FUNAI, and hand it to the notoriously anti-Indian Agriculture Ministry, which Survival labelled “virtually a declaration of war against Brazil’s tribal peoples.”
President Bolsonaro also moved FUNAI to a new ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights headed by an evangelical preacher, a move designed to drastically weaken FUNAI.
Emboldened by the new President and his long history of anti-indigenous rhetoric, attacks by ranchers and gunmen against Indian communities have risen dramatically.
The territory of the Uru Eu Wau Wau Indians, for example, has been invaded, endangering uncontacted tribespeople there; and hundreds of loggers and colonists are planning to occupy the land of the Awá, one of Earth’s most threatened tribes.
But Brazil’s indigenous people have reacted with defiance. “We’ve been resisting for 519 years. We won’t stop now. We’ll put all our strength together and we’ll win,” said Rosilene Guajajara. And Ninawa Huni Kuin said: “We fight to protect life and land. We will defend our nation.”
APIB said: “We have the right to exist. We won’t retreat. We’ll denounce this government around the world.”
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said today: “Having suffered 500 years of genocide and massacres, Brazil’s tribal peoples are not going to be cowed by President Bolsonaro, however abhorrent and outdated his views are. And it’s been inspiring to see how many people around the world are standing with them.”
