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.
VISIT DEEP GREEN RESISTANCE FOR MORE RESISTANCE UPDATES: http://www.deepgreenresistance.org
Este artículo está disponible en español aquí
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.”
Oscar winning actor Julie Christie joins Survival protesters outside Brazils Embassy in London, calling on Bolsonaro to stop Brazil’s genocide. © Rosa Gauditano/APIB/Survival International
Protesters handed in a letter to Brazilian Embassy officials calling on President Bolsonaro to abandon his crackdown on indigenous rights. © Rosa Gauditano/APIB/Survival International
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.”
© Rosa Gauditano/APIB/Survival International
© Rosa Gauditano/APIB/Survival International
Protesters in Berlin, Germany outside the Brazilian Embassy. © Survival International
Protesters in Madrid, Spain handing a letter to the Brazilian Embassy, calling for an end to indigenous rights violations. © Survival International
Protesters in Milan, Italy outside the Brazilian Consulate. © Survival International
Survival protester hands in a letter to the Brazilian Consulate in Milan, Italy. © Survival International
© Rosa Gauditano/APIB/Survival International
Featured image: On Jan. 18, an estimated 10,000 Indigenous activists and allies will descend on Washington, D.C. for the first-ever march to highlight human and civil rights abuses against Native communities. Photo by Indigenous Peoples Movement/Twitter. Many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, families divided by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality.
by Jessica Corbett / Common Dreams
Raising alarm about human rights violations and the global climate crisis, activists from around the world are traveling to Washington, D.C. for the first annual Indigenous Peoples March, which will kick off at 8am local time on Jan. 18 outside the U.S. Department of the Interior’s main building.
“Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness.”
—Chase Iron Eyes, Lakota People’s Law Project
“It’s wonderful—and needed, now more than ever—to see so many tribes and organizations coming together to raise awareness about the ongoing need to preserve and respect the rights of Indigenous peoples,” said organizer Phyllis Young of the Lakota People’s Law Project.
Launched by the Indigenous Peoples Movement, a newly formed coalition dedicated to fostering positive change on “issues that directly affect our lands, peoples, and respective cultures,” the marchwill be preceded by a group prayer at 9am and followed by an evening fundraising concert at the Songbird Music House.
“Indigenous people from North, Central and South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean are a target of genocide,” the organizers charge. “Currently, many Indigenous people are victims of voter suppression, divided families by walls and borders, an environmental holocaust, sex and human trafficking, and police/military brutality with little or no resources and awareness of this injustice.”
More than 10,000 marchers are anticipated to descend on D.C. for the event, including people from Australia, Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, Canada, the Caribbean and across the United States. Those interested in participating or supporting the march can check for updates on the official Facebook event, and are encouraged to post updates to social media using the hashtags #IPMDC19 and #WHYIMARCH.
Chase Iron Eyes, lead counsel for the Lakota People’s Law Project, said in a statement on Wednesday that his delegation will also advocate for a Green New Deal—an increasingly popular proposal championed by the Sunrise Movement and other grassroots organizations as well as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a growing number of Democratic lawmakers that would pair climate and economic policies—”as a way to combat climate change and create green jobs, especially in Indian Country.”
“It’s going to be a beautiful day,” he said of the march. “Our people are under constant threat, from pipelines, from police, from a system that wants to forget the valuable perspectives we bring to the table. But those challenges make us stronger. We look forward to gathering together and raising awareness. We must remind the world, again, that Indigenous people matter. We are all made better when we respect one another and lift each other up.”
Iron Eyes’ comments come just a day after global protests spurred by outrage over the Canadian government’s support for TransCanada’s plans to build a fracked gas pipeline through unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, despite opposition to the project from First Nations leaders. Public anger ramped up on Monday afternoon, ahead of the demonstrations, after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) invaded a checkpoint established by Indigenous land defenders and arrested 14 of them.
Plans for the march also come amid growing concern over the presidency of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, who was sworn in at the beginning of the year and has not wasted any time launching attacks on the environment and Indigenous communities in his country.
As Common Dreams reported, “On his first day in office, Bolsonaro introduced an executive order that will effectively take away land rights for indigenous Brazilians and descendants of former slaves and gave control of Amazon lands to the agriculture ministry; eliminated LGBTQ rights from the purview of the country’s human rights ministry; and set the minimum wage lower than the rate his predecessor’s government had budgeted for.”
This photo shows the flyer in question, and was sent to us by a business making a complaint.
Over the past few days, several organizations from across the United States have reached out to Deep Green Resistance, letting us know about a printer exploit being used to print off DGR-themed flyers at their place of business.
These intrusions seem to be related to a larger wave of forced printings currently affecting unsecured printers (see: https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/30/pewdiepie-printer-hack-thehackergiraffe/).
We want to be very clear that these flyers are not official DGR material and have not been approved by us for publication anywhere, and certainly not on private printers without consent. The use of a Printer Exploitation Toolkit to hijack unprotected printers is unethical, unhelpful for anyone, and illegal.
At the moment, we are unsure who is behind these mailings. If this is the work of an unaffiliated DGR supporter, we ask that you please stop immediately and avoid such invasive, unhelpful behavior in the future. If these mailings are the work of agitators attempting to discredit our movement, we would ask that you please find something better to do with your time and stop wasting paper. Either way, we would like to apologize to anyone who has had to deal with this time-wasting stunt. Although we are unable to prevent every unstable or unscrupulous person from deciding to do stupid and unhelpful things, we are taking every step possible to make sure this doesn’t happen again. In the meantime, we encourage everyone – especially activists – to make sure their internet-connected devices are secure.
Here is the official recommendation on how to secure your printers against this type of attack: “Network administrators should never leave their printers accessible from the Internet and disable raw port 9100/tcp printing if not required” (more here).
by Honduras Solidarity Network
On October 12, 2018, hundreds of women, men, children, youth and the elderly decided to leave Honduras as a desperate response to survive. The massive exodus that began in the city of San Pedro Sula, reached more than 3 thousand people by the time the group crossed to Guatemala. The caravan, which is headed north to Mexico first, and to the United States as the goal- is the only alternative this people have to reach a bit of the dignity that has been taken from them. They are not alone in their journey. Various waves of Hondurans, whose numbers increase every hour, are being contained by Honduran security forces on their border with El Salvador and Guatemala.
The Honduras Solidarity Network in North America condemns any threats and acts of repression against the refugee caravan, human rights activists and journalists that accompany their journey. The conditions of violence, marginalization and exploitation in which this refugee crisis find its origins, have been created, maintained and reproduced by US-backed social, economic and military interventionist policies, with the support of its Canadian and regional allies. We call on people in the US to reject the criminalization, prosecution, detention, deportation and family separation that threaten the members of this march and the lives of all those refugees forced from their homes in the same way. We urge a change of US policy in Honduras and to cut off security aid to stop human rights abuses and government violence against Hondurans.
This refugee crisis has been exacerbated by the governments of Guatemala and Mexico, who subservient to Donald Trump’s administration, have chosen the path of repression. Bartolo Fuentes, a Honduran journalist and spokesperson for the refugees, has been detained in Guatemala. Meanwhile the Mexican government has sent two planeloads of its National Police to the border with Guatemala. Irineo Mujica, a migrant rights activist and photojournalist, was arrested in Chiapas by agents of the Mexican National Institute of Migration when he was getting ready to support the Honduran migrant march. Today (Friday) in the afternoon, tear gas was fired into the group as they tried to come into Mexico on the border bridge. Honduran human rights organizations report that a 7 month old baby was killed.
The massive forced flight of people from Honduras is not new; it is the legacy of US intervention in the country. Since the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras, the post-coup regime has perpetuated a system based on disregard for human rights, impunity, corruption, repression and the influence of organized crime groups in the government and in the economic power elite. Since the coup, we have seen the destruction of public education and health services through privatization. The imposition of mining, hydro-electric mega-projects and the concentration of land in agro-industry has plunged 66 percent of the Honduran population into poverty and extreme poverty. In the last 9 years, we have witnessed how the murder of Berta Cáceres and many other activists, indigenous leaders, lawyers, journalists, LGBTQ community members and students has triggered a humanitarian crisis. This crisis is reflected in the internal displacement and the unprecedented exodus of the Honduran people that has caught the public’s eye during recent days.
The fraudulent November 2017 elections, in which Juan Orlando Hernández -president since questionable elections in 2013- was re-elected for a second term in violation of the Honduran constitution, sparked a national outrage. The people’s outrage was confronted by an extremely violent government campaign with military and US-trained security forces to suppress the protests against the fraud. The result of the repression was more than 30 people killed by government forces, more than a thousand arrested and there are currently 20 political prisoners being held in pre-trial prison.
To the repression, intimidation and criminalization faced by the members of the refugee caravan, we respond with a call for solidarity from all the corners of the world. In the face of the violence that has led to the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans, we demand an end to US military and security aid to Juan Orlando’s regime, not as the blackmail tool used by Donald Trump, but as a way to guarantee the protection of the human rights of the Honduran people. We demand justice for Berta Cáceres, for all the victims of political violence as a consequence of the post coup regime, and the approval of the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act H.R. 1299. We demand freedom for all the political prisoners in Honduras. We demand the US end the criminalization, imprisonment, separation, deportation and killing of migrants and refugees.
Today we fight so that every step, from Honduras to the north of the Americas, is dignified and free
Honduras Solidarity Network of North America