The news broke Wednesday in the most banal of venues: the biweekly environmental compliance report submitted by Arlington Storage Company to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Deep in the third paragraph of section B, this wholly owned subsidiary of the Houston-based gas storage and transportation giant, Crestwood Midstream, announced that it was walking away from its FERC-approved plan to increase its storage of methane (natural gas) in unlined, abandoned salt caverns along the shoreline of Seneca Lake.
In its own words, “Arlington has discontinued efforts to complete the Gallery 2 Expansion Project.”
It was a blandly expressed ending to a dramatic conflict that has roiled New York’s Finger Lakes region for more than six years. Together with a separate—and still unresolved—plan for lakeside storage of propane (LPG) in adjacent salt caverns, Crestwood’s Arlington operation has been the focus of massive, unrelenting citizen opposition that has taken many forms.
The Gas Free Seneca Business Coalition has, at last count, 398 members. Together with the more than 100 members of the Finger Lakes Wine Business Coalition, this group has been a powerful voice in promoting wine and agri-tourism—a $4.8 billion industry in New York State—as the centerpiece of the Finger Lakes economy, deploying renewable energy systems for wineries and providing an alternative vision to Crestwood’s plan to turn the region into “the gas storage and transportation hub” for entire Northeast. In letters, petitions, press conferences, interviews and editorials, these business leaders have made clear that industrialized gas storage on Seneca Lake—with all the attendant pipelines, compressor stations, flare stacks and air pollution—is incompatible with the pristine environment on which wine and tourism depend.
Local business leaders have also hammered home the message that gas storage is all risk and no reward for the region. The gas—methane or propane—is not intended for local use. All of it would be sent, via pipeline, to burner tips far from the Finger Lakes. Moreover, shoving massive amounts of fossil fuels into crumbly salt mines creates, as it turns out, only a handful of jobs.
Meanwhile, 32 municipalities—representing 1.2 million residents—have passed resolutions against gas storage on Seneca Lake. These efforts have played an important role in generating political pressure, capturing media attention, and raising awareness among community members about the public health threats created by storing highly pressurized, explosive gases in abandoned salt caverns situated below a lakeshore in an area crossed by geological fault lines.
Seneca Lake serves as a source of drinking water for 100,000 people. Even absent earthquakes or catastrophic accidents, simply pressurizing the briny salt caverns with compressed gases may salinate the lake in ways that could potentially violate drinking water standards.
And then there’s the direct action movement. We Are Seneca Lake—in which I have participated—has engaged in protests, marches and repeated acts of civil disobedience. Since October 2014, when construction on the Arlington project was authorized to begin and all legal appeals to FERC were exhausted, more than 650 arrests have taken place at the gates of the Crestwood compressor station site on the hillside above Seneca Lake. For the act of blockading trucks on Crestwood’s driveway, some of us have gone to jail, serving sentences as long as nine days, while others have had their charges dismissed “in the interests of justice.”
As the months went by, Crestwood, waiting on remaining approvals from New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), did not begin construction.
We Are Seneca Lake continued protesting.
When the state clearances still did not arrive, FERC granted Crestwood a two-year extension to “accommodate the New York DEC’s underground storage approval process.”
We Are Seneca Lake continued protesting.
The power of our all-season civil disobedience movement did not lie in the daring risks that we took—no one ever scaled fences, rapelled down walls, went limp, or chained themselves to heavy equipment. We called ourselves the Girl Scouts of civil disobedience because participants engaged in actions whose sanctions were intentionally limited to violation-level charges (trespass or disorderly conduct).
Tantamount to traffic tickets, such charges do not result in criminal records (although one might choose, by refusal to pay a fine, to serve a jail sentence). This practice allowed arrestees to represent a diverse cross-section of area residents. Ranging in age from 18 to 92, Seneca Lake Defenders have included teachers, nurses, doctors, midwives, farmers, winemakers, faith leaders, town board members, military veterans, mothers, fathers, chefs, bird watchers, cancer survivors and numerous disabled individuals.
Our goal was to showcase the breadth and depth of citizen opposition to gas storage. Accordingly, we sought to make civil disobedience as inclusive as possible for as many people as possible, and, for those whose conscience so led them, as safe as possible.
We sustained our movement, season after season, by careful vetting of all participants, meticulous preparation for each action, and requiring that all those risking arrest or playing support roles undergo a training session in non-violence. As a result, We Are Seneca Lake maintained high levels of personal discipline during our actions and, through our almost ceremonial approach to civil disobedience, won the (somewhat begrudging) respect of the county sheriff and his deputies.
We did not turn away luminaries. Seneca Lake Defenders have, variously, included filmmaker Josh Fox, actors James Cromwell and John Hertzler, and environmental leaders Bill McKibben, Rachel Marco-Havens, David Braun and Wes Gillingham.
Seneca Lake Defenders blockaded while reading aloud from Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, while enjoying a potluck of local food, and while performing a concert. Our efforts were featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times, as well as in local and regional media. We have received messages of solidarity from around the world.
Unsurprisingly, none of the above activities are mentioned in the official explanation for why Crestwood is now abandoning its plans to expand methane storage.
Nor does it reference last month’s incident at an underground gas storage facility in rural southwestern Indiana where a well failure prompted evacuations and a highway closure. Nor the blowout in California’s gas storage field at Aliso Canyon where, from October 2015 until February 2016, more than 100,000 metric tons of methane spewed into the atmosphere, thousands of households and two schools were relocated, and many residents suffered illnesses from exposure to the emissions.
Instead, the company has this to say about why it is folding its tents:
“Despite its best efforts, Arlington has not been successful in securing long-term contractual commitments from customers that would support completion of the Gallery 2 Expansion Project. While demand for high-deliverability natural gas storage services remains robust in New York…bids for firm storage capacity which Arlington has received from time to time are not adequate to support the investment required to bring the project to completion.”
Credible? For area resident Suzanne Hunt, who, as president of HuntGreen, advises wineries about their renewable energy options, the bigger question is how to make this explanation come true over and over again. In other words, let’s use renewables to make wavering bids for fossil fuels even more unworthy of continued investment.
“The winery owners and other business leaders here didn’t just say no to gas but also collectively invested million of dollars in clean energy systems both to demonstrate their economic and technical viability and to show the state that we are serious about protecting our unique and beautiful Finger Lakes region,” Hunt said.
“As with any major transition, it has been challenging, but we are succeeding in demonstrating that renewables can meet our energy needs and enable economic growth without compromising the health and safety of people today and generations to come.”
For her mother, Joyce Hunt, who is the co-owner of Hunt Country Vineyards in Branchport, New York, the point is to demonstrate how the economic future of the region—based on agriculture, tourism and small business—is aligned with the long-term climate and energy security of the state.
“We applaud the governor and the DEC for withholding permits for natural gas storage, and we are all counting on the governor to deny the permits for LPG, recognizing that these caverns that are unfit for natural gas storage are likewise unfit for propane storage,” she said.
But is Arlington’s natural gas storage expansion project really gone for good? Maybe, maybe not. Fossil fuel infrastructure projects are always resurrectable. Even the Keystone XL pipeline is back in play. But for California native David Braun, who was arrested in a civil disobedience action at Seneca Lake last July, the point is in understanding that we are each, after all, our brother’s keeper.
“None of these gas storage facilities are a problem until they are. And once you see firsthand the kind of devastation and disruption they cause—as I have seen at Aliso Canyon—you begin to understand your moral responsibility to make sure it doesn’t happen somewhere else, to someone else,” Braun said.
“I risked arrest at Seneca Lake because we only need to look at how the last bad idea turned out to know what the next one is going to do.”
Featured image: Indigenous women carry the banner of the VIII Pan Amazonian Social Forum (FOSPA) during the opening march from downtown Tarapoto to Universidad San Martin on April 28. Photo: Manuela Picq
Ever since European colonial powers started disputing borders on its rivers in the seventeenth century, the vast Amazon rainforest—known simply as Amazonia—has been under siege.
Amazon Peoples always resisted the colonial invasion, even after the borders were ultimately settled with the Amazon rainforest getting divided into the territories of nine states. They’ve had no choice. After all, the insatiable lust for ‘wealth at any cost’ did not lessen with time; the siege continued through the nineteenth century, in part with the rubber boom that gave way to the automobile boom.
The attack rages on even now, with the intensive push to extract everything the Amazon holds including oil, minerals, water, and land for agriculture and soy production.
Nations states are leading the land-grab, fostering environmental conflicts that kill nature defenders (most of them indigenous), displace communities, and destroy rivers for megaprojects. The organization Pastoral da Terra estimates that half a million people are directly affected by territorial conflicts in the Brazilian Amazon. About 90% of Brazilian land conflicts happen in Amazonia; 70% of murders in land conflicts take Amazon lives.
That is why people responded to “the call from the forest,” or “el llamado del bosque” in Spanish. This was the motto of the VIII Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, or Foro Social Pan Amazónico (FOSPA), that just gathered 1500 people in the town of Tarapoto, Peru.
The VIII Pan Amazonian Social Forum in Tarapoto, Peru
Photo: Manuela Picq
FOSPA is a regional chapter of the well-established World Social Forum. It is based on the same model that brings together social movements, associations and individuals to find alternatives to global capitalism. From April 28 to May 1, indigenous peoples, activists, and scholars from various parts of Amazonia got together in the campus of Universidad Nacional San Martin.
FOSPA is an important space, not only because the region is at the forefront of the climate crisis but also because it represents 40% of South America and spreads across nine countries—Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana. The 370 indigenous nations in the region are an increasingly smaller part of a booming Amazon population that surpasses 33 million.
This VIII forum was well organized in an Amazon campus with comfortable work space and the shade of mango trees. In the absence of Wi-Fi, participants gathered around fruit juices and Amazon specialties baked in banana leaves at the food fair. The organizing committee, led by Romulo Torres, was most proud of creating the new model of pre-forum. For the first time, there were 11 pre-forums organized in 6 of the 9 Amazon countries to prepare the agendas.
The forum started with a celebratory march through Tarapoto. During three days, participants discussed the challenges of extractive development and land grab across the region. There was in total nine working groups organized around issues such as territoriality, megaprojects, climate change, food sovereignty, cities, education and communication.
During the opening march in defense of Amazonia, Elvira and Domingo, from Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Amazon (Confeniae) walk along Carlos Perez Guartambel, from the Andean Network of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) and Ecuador’s Confederation of Kichwa Peoples (Ecuarunari). Photo: Manuela Picq
“Development is the problem”
Speakers strongly criticized models of development based on extractive industries. “Development is the problem, not the solution,” said Carlos Pérez Guartambel, from the Andean Network of Indigenous Organizations (CAOI) and the Confederation of Kichwa Peoples of Ecuador (ECUARUNARI).
Speakers blamed the political left for being equally invested as the right in extractive development, destroying life in the name of development. Toribia Lero Quishpe, from the CAOI and the Council of Ayllus Markas of the Quillasuyu (CONAMAQ) argued that this investment in capitalist gains corrupted the government of Evo Morales, who licensed over 500 rivers to multinational companies.
Gregorio Mirabal, from the Indigenous Network of the Amazon River Valley (COICA) and Venezuela’s Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon (ORPIA) denounced a massive land grab by the state in the Orinoco region. He said the government is licensing land to mining companies from China and Spain to promote “ecological mining.” Indigenous populations, in turn, have not had a single land title recognized in 18 years and are denied rights to prior consultation.
Ongoing French colonization in Amazonia
A working group discusses the decolonization of power and self-government in Peru. Photo: Manuela Picq
One of the working groups focused on the decolonization of power; French Guyana being the last standing colonial territory in South America.
Rafael Pindard headed a delegation from the Movement for Decolonization and Social Emancipation (MDES) to generate awareness about Amazon territories that remain under the colonial control of France.
Amazon forests constitute over 90% of French Guyana. Delegates described laws that forbid Indigenous Peoples to fish and hunt on their ancestral territories. They explained the mechanisms of forced assimilation—the French state refuses to recognize the existence of six Indigenous Peoples, claiming that in France there is only one people, the French.
The Women’s Tribunal
The forceful participation of women was one of the forum’s most inspiring aspects. Amazon women held a strong presence in the march, plenary sessions and held a special working group on women.
The highlight was the Tribunal for Justice in Defense of the Rights of Pan-Amazonian and Andean Women. Four judges convened at the end of each day to listen to specific cases of women defenders. They heard individual as well as collective cases. Peruvian delegates presented the case of Maxima Acuña, a water defender from the Andean highlands of Cajamarca who faces death threats. Brazilian representatives from Altamira presented the case of the Movement Xingu Vivo para Sempre, which organizes resistance against the Belo Monte Dam.
The Women’s Tribunal also heard cases from across the continent. Liliam Lopez, from the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH), presented the emblematic case of Berta Cáceres, assassinated in 2016 for leading the resistance in defense of rivers. Delegates from Chile presented the case of Lorenza Cayuhan, a Mapuche political prisoner jailed in Arauca for defending territory and forced to give birth handcuffed.
Initiatives
Many working groups called for a paradigm shift to move away from economic approaches that treat nature as a resource. Participants defended indigenous notions of living well, or vivir bien in Spanish.
There were many initiatives presented throughout the gathering. The working group on food sovereignty proposed to recover native produce and exchange seeds, for instance, through seed banks.
The final proposals of all working groups hang in the main tent allowing participants to add suggestions before the elaboration of the final document. Photo: Manuela Picq
Delegates from the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) and the organization Terra Mater presented a collaborative project to protect 60 million acres of the mighty Amazon River’s headwaters – the Napo, Pastaza, and Marañon River watersheds in Ecuador and Peru. The Sacred Headwaters project seeks to ban all forms of extractive industries in the watershed and secure legal titles to indigenous territories.
Wrays Pérez, President of the Autonomous Territorial Government of the Wampís Nation (GTAN Wampís) explained practices of indigenous autonomy. The Wampís, who have governed their territories for seven thousand years, have successfully preserved over a million hectares of forests and rivers in Santiago and Morona, Peru. The Wampís Nation designed its own legal statute based on Peruvian and international law, including those protecting the collective rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Amazon communication
Radio Nave covered FOSPA, organizing live interviews and debates with participants. Photo: Manuela Picq
Many venues emphasized the importance of Amazon communication. All workshops and plenary sessions were transmitted live through FOSPATV and remain available on FOSPA’s webpage.
Community radios and medias covered the forum and interviewed participants, such as Radio Marañón, Radio La Nave, and Colombia’s Radio Waira Stereo 104 (Indigenous Zonal Organization of the Putumayo OZIP).
Documentary films played in the evenings, followed by discussions. The Brazilian documentary film “Belo Monte: After the Flood” played in Spanish for the first time, followed by a debate with people affected by hydro-dams in the Brazilian and Bolivian Amazons. Other films presented include “Las Damas de Azul”, “La Lagrima de Aceite” y “Labaka.”
The Tarapoto Declaration
A plenary assembly announces the final Declaration of Tarapoto, May 1 2017. Photo: Manuela Picq
The forum closed with the Carta de Tarapoto, a declaration in defense of life containing 24 proposals. The declaration collected the key demands of all working groups. It demands that states respect international indigenous rights and recognize integral territories. It invites communities to fight pervasive corruption attached to megaprojects and suggests communal monitoring to stop land-grabbing.
The declaration stresses the shared concerns and alliances of Amazonian and Andean peoples, explicitly recognizing how the two regions are interrelated and interdependent. It denounces state alliances with mining, oil, and hydroprojects. It defines extractive megaprojects as global capitalism and a racist civilizing project.
It echoes FOSPA’s intergenerational dimension, celebrating elders as a source of historical knowledge to guide the preservation of Amazon lifeways. Youth groups, who had their own working group, demanded that states recognize the rights of nature.
Women concerns are the focus of four points. In addition to making the Women’s Tribunal a permanent feature of FOSPA, the declaration calls for the end of all forms of violence against women and the recognition of women’s invisible labor. It asks for governments to detach from religious norms to follow international women rights.
In closing, the declaration expresses solidarity with peoples who live in situation of conflict, whose territories are invaded, and who are criminalized for defending the rights of nature.
It is in that spirit that the organizing committee decided to hold the next FOSPA in Colombia. Defenders of life are killed weekly despite the peace process, revealing a political process tightly embedded in the licensing of territories to extractive industries like gold mining.
The Colombian Amazon is calling. May it be a powerful wakeup call across and beyond the Amazons.
Over Earth Day weekend, Deep Green Resistance members in Oregon hosted an advanced direct action training in rural western Oregon.
About 45 people attended from several surrounding states.
This workshop broke down critical factors and possible improvements for various recent and historical resistance actions and campaigns.
The training began with several anti-oppression sessions to help foster an equitable and safe environment for facilitators and participants, especially for people of color, women, indigenous people, and members of other oppressed and marginalized groups. These sessions, which included an introduction to radical feminism and a group activity around understanding privilege, aimed to inform the interpersonal dynamic and content of the training. This is also to help facilitate a more inclusive and comfortable organizing experience in our communities.
Other training sessions included:
• Campaign strategy
• Target selection
• Case studies in two recent direct actions from people involved in them
• Analysis of critical factors in other recent and historical resistance campaigns / actions
• Scouting for action
• Know your rights and legal briefing
• Art and resistance
• Media
• Various hard skills for blockades and direct action
• Communications and digital security
• Affinity groups
Experimentation with building materials for blockades.
Trainings like this play an important role in developing two critical elements in effective resistance: community and skills.
This sort of event would be impossible without financial support. To everyone who donates to Deep Green Resistance, is a monthly sustainer, or purchases gear from our website—thank you!
A few comments from attendees:
“Thank you… for such a comprehensive training in just a few days!”
“I considered not coming when I saw some militant photos on the DGR website, but I’m so glad I did. This training really debunked the myth of resistance activists being casually militant and violent people.”
Artistic workshop after a long day sitting down inside.
“My daughter has been telling me for years about radical feminism and I never understood what she was talking about. I do now, somewhat, and I am aware of all I don’t know and hadn’t considered in terms of the climate crisis and potential steps I can take. I’m so glad I came.”
“I could spend weeks hearing and discussing the topics brought up on Saturday morning, and I learned a lot. The Privilege Walk was powerful and a great way to start the weekend. Thank you for the RadFem reading list and the matter-of-fact presentations on intersectional oppressions!”
“Awesome group of people at the training.”
“I’m home and full of inspiration… You have my deepest appreciation for the hours of hard work it took to make this weekend happen. The whole crew of you are simply wonderful, thank you for being dedicated enough to take bold actions and wise enough to do them prudently.”
Tripod and rope ascending workshop.
“The DA training offered an invaluable opportunity for DGR members and allies to meet in person, share ideas and skills, and build real community. Each new relationship felt like a door opening to our greater collective potential and previously unconsidered ideas. There is something magical in spending time together that cannot be quantified or explained. I can’t wait for the next get together and to see the inspiring ideas and actions that will surely come out of this training.”
As a kid, I pictured Nevada as a wasteland of sand and cacti. Today, I know better.
For the past five years, I’ve been packing up my truck every spring and taking a long day to drive to eastern Nevada to bask in the glory of one of the least densely-populated areas of the United States.
The broad valleys never fail to stun me, but most amazing are the mountains, limestone peaks arcing into the sky. Springs and creeks flowing from the hills support rich riparian zones and bring in birds and other wildlife from miles around. Antelope, deer, elk, and wild horses cross the valleys or stick to forested patches. This region is lush, biodiverse, and beautiful.
It’s also under threat. Across eastern Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority seeks to build dozens of massive groundwater wells and pump almost every drop of water south to feed Las Vegas developments. The project has been a battle between locals and developers from Vegas for decades, and still drags on.
Another major threat is felling pinyon pine and juniper forests across not just this region, but the entire intermountain west. Ranchers have been doing this for decades to remove pesky trees getting in the way of their grass—and more importantly, their profit. As overgrazing continues to desertify Nevada—it’ll look like Iraq in another 100 years—removing trees allows ranchers to maintain the illusion that overstocking can continue indefinitely.
Countless people, including myself, are mobilizing to fight like hell for this land, this water, and these forests. We aim to stop these destructive projects by exposing their true nature and—if necessary—standing in their way.
There is a lot more to these stories, but I don’t have time to share it all here. Instead, I’d like to invite you to join myself and other community members, indigenous people, activists, ecologists, photographers, and families for the fifth annual Sacred Water, Sacred Forests Camp.
The camp takes place over Memorial Day weekend, May 27 to 29, near the town of Ely and Great Basin National Park. If you’re interested in attending, you can RSVP on the Facebook event page or by emailing greatbasin@deepgreenresistance.org.
I hope to be able to introduce you to this important, imperiled area in a few weeks.
— Max Wilbert is a community organizer based in western Oregon who considers Nevada a second home.
Featured image: Fracking well. The damage that causes earthquakes seems to occur after the drilling, when the wastewater is injected deep underground, stimulating existing fault lines. Indigenous and other communities want Colombia to join France, Germany, Scotland and Bulgaria in banning fracking. By Thinkstock.
Fracking is coming to indigenous Colombian territories and other parts of the country, and activists are trying to halt the process.
The controversial process known as fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, involves injecting water, sand and various chemicals at high pressure into subterranean rocks, so as to force open existing fissures and extract oil or gas.
Environmentalists, scientists and others around the world have asserted that fracking can contaminate surface water and subterranean aquifers and has been linked to earthquakes and low birth rates among other things. At least four countries – France, Germany, Scotland and Bulgaria – have banned fracking and other countries and regions are considering similar measures.
On March 22, close to 40 environmental organizations, trade unionists and land defenders known as the Alliance for a Colombia Free of Fracking sent a public letter to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, asking him to issue a moratorium on fracking due to it’s potential harm to the environment and to thousands of Indigenous and other Colombians living near the wells.
According to an April report, the Colombian government had granted 43 gas and oil concessions to various corporations including multinationals such as ExxonMobil. ConocoPhillips and Drummond Ltd.
The activists note in the letter that fracking has been associated with increased seismic activity. They point to a study showing how wastewater fracking wells in Oklahoma cause a dramatic increase: from 50 seismic events at a level of 3 in 2010 to 400 level 3 earthquakes in 2014, an 800 percent jump.
“And in terms of public health,” the Alliance letter continued, “there are studies from the U.S., Canada and the European Union that connect the proximity of people to the areas where fracking activities are carried out with cases of neural tube alterations (The neural tube is the structure in the embryo that ultimately forms the brain and spinal cord), births with low birth weight, other birth defects and an increase in the incidence of congential heart problems.”
The activists asserted that “there is evidence that emissions from wastewater fracking wells can travel through the air to residential zones where they can cause asthma…”
Some of the fracking areas overlap with Yupka, Wiwa and Wayuu territories and activists have noted that these projects would violate the land rights of these Indigenous Peoples and potentially others.
While none of these communities have issued press statements regarding fracking, two of the largest Indigenous organizations have identified the process as a serious problem in past reports.
In September of last year, the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) published a statement by the allied Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) about the peace process between the government and the FARC guerillas. In that statement they pointed out that the Indigenous communities were worried about the government’s policies involving “extractavism” and “fracking” and the lack of prior consultation of the communities which is against Colombian and international laws.
In response to the recent developments the Alliance group known as the Corporation for the Defense of Water, Territory and Ecosystems (CORDATEC) held a two day conference on April 19 and 20 on “The Social-Environmental Impact of Fracking” in an area already affected by gas exploration.
Among the panel topics at the conference were “Environmental Impact” and “Resistance and Social Conflicts.”
As of press time President Santos had not publicly responded to the letter from the Alliance.
Cultural Community of Kiad, Panama — Members of the grassroots indigenous Ngäbe-Buglé group known as The April 10 Movement (El Movimiento 10 de Abril, or “M10”), issued a call to the international community on Wednesday. They ask for an intervention to stop Ngäbe-Buglé communities from being flooded by the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam.
The M10 called the flooding illegal and a violation of their human rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They refer to an environmental impact statement that failed to acknowledge the presence of the three communities that would be flooded by the project. They also say the agreement that Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela signed last August with the now-impeached leader Silvia Carrera was illegal, since it was done without the approval of the Ngäbe-Buglé General Congress, and was rejected by the congress in September.
Government representatives met with members of the group in the Cultural Community of Kiad on March 27. It was part of a series of meetings “to agree on options with respect to spaces and points of cultural veneration by communities impacted by the project and the monitoring of water quality studies,”[1] according to an institutional response from the government. Several days later, the water began to rise in the reservoir and has continued to rise until the time of publication of this communique. Community members have still not received communication from the government regarding the rising water levels or a future meeting date.
Communiqué from the April 10 Movement on the Barro Blanco hydroelectric plant
The community affected by the Hydroelectric Project Barro Blanco, hereby makes public the following facts of the violation of human rights by the Barro Blanco Dam:
1- As has been public knowledge since the beginning of the Barro Blanco project, the environmental impact study denied the existence of the original community that for centuries had lived in the confluence of the Tabasará River, and concessioning this place for the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam has created a social, economic, cultural, spiritual, and environmental conflict for the community.
2- The government and the Supreme Court of Justice have violated the constitutional and legal precepts of our rights with the implementation of the Barro Blanco hydroelectric plant.
3- We firmly reject the ratification of the Varela-Carrera agreement for the defunct congress presided over by Demecio Case, held between 6 and 9 April 2017 in the northern community in the ñökribo region, in which agreement we played no part. Nor were we consulted about the content of the agreement, and the agreement was not accepted by the population of Llano Tugrí on August 22, 2016 and was rejected in Cerro Algodón on September 15, 2016 by the full General Congress where 148 delegates attended.
4- The highest body of expression and decision, the General Congress, has 255 elected delegates, with full right of decision and for which quorum constitutes 50% plus one; therefore the Norteño decision is illegal, since only 61 delegates attended, in addition to Mr. Demecio Case, who was removed from office on March 7, 2017, in Llano Tugrí, in the ordinary congress.
5- We request the President of the Republic to be a little more respectful of our rights, since any act carried out for the execution of said project has been done violating our legal security, and not only has violated the norms of the Republic, but also violated the Convention and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
6 – We call on the Panamanian population to protect the rights of all before the imposition of the government who makes use of economic and political power and interferes in the decision of the full Congress through the dismissal of Silvia Carrera and Demecio Case.
7- We make an urgent appeal to the national and international solidarity organizations and the United Nations to intervene to protect our rights as peoples most vulnerable to deserved justice in the Republic of Panama.
Gäejet Miranda
President of the M10 movement
Ngäbe-Büglé Comarca
Kiad Cultural Community, April 16, 2017
