Featured image: Dan From Indiana on flickr. Some Rights Reserved. The Rights of Nature Movement continues to advance through lawmaking and court decisions.
MERCERSBURG, PA, USA: Today, the Colombia Supreme Court of Justice issued a decision declaring that the Amazon region in Colombia possesses legal rights.
The Court declared that the “Colombian Amazon is recognized as an entity, a subject of rights” which include the right to “legal protection, preservation, maintenance and restoration.”
The Supreme Court’s decision builds on the precedent set in November 2016, when Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the Atrato River possessed legal rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration.” The Supreme Court refers to the 2016 decision in its ruling.
The Colombia Supreme Court ruling focused on the devastating impacts of deforestation and climate change on the Amazon, and the need to make significant change in how the region is protected.
In making its finding that the Amazon has rights, the Court cited the Constitutional Court’s 2016 opinion, in which that court wrote that it was “necessary to take a step forward in jurisprudence” to change the relationship of humankind with nature before “before it is too late or the damage is irreversible.”
Transforming nature from being treated as property under the law, to be considered as rights-bearing – and thus in possession of legally enforceable rights – is the focus of the growing Rights of Nature movement.
Throughout history, women, indigenous peoples, and slaves have been treated as property under the law, without legal rights. Legal systems around the world today treat nature as property, and thus right-less. Under these systems, environmental laws regulate human use of nature, resulting in the decline of species and ecosystems worldwide, and the acceleration of climate change.
The first law was passed in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania, in the United States, in 2006. Today, dozens of communities in more than 10 states in the U.S. have enacted Rights of Nature laws. CELDF assisted in drafting the first Rights of Nature constitutional provisions, which are part of the Ecuador Constitution of 2008.
Mari Margil, CELDF’s Associate Director who heads the organization’s International Center for the Rights of Nature explained, “The Court’s decision is an important step forward in moving to legal systems which protect the rights of nature.”
She added, “The collapse of ecosystems and species, as well as the acceleration of climate change, are clear indications that a fundamental change in the relationship between humankind and the natural world is necessary. We must secure the highest legal protections for nature through the recognition of rights.”
About the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) & the International Center for the Rights of Nature
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s mission is to build sustainable communities by assisting people to assert their right to local self-government and the rights of nature. CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature is partnering with communities and organizations in countries around the world to advance the rights of nature.
Today, CELDF is partnering with communities, indigenous peoples, and organizations across the United States, as well as in Nepal, India, Australia, and other countries to advance rights of nature legal frameworks.
Peru is to create two Amazonian reserves for the protection of uncontacted tribes , covering more than 2.5 million hectares. At least seven distinct groups of uncontacted tribes, including Matsés Indians, are known to be living in the areas comprising the new Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin reserves in Peru’s NE Amazon state of Loreto.
The remote region has been under intense pressure from oil exploration, logging and a proposed road that could wreak devastation on the tribes. Those wishing to exploit the area’s natural resources have long denied the existence of tribes living in these forests, whose presence would obstruct their plans.
However, the Peruvian government has not ruled out further oil exploration and has taken over two oil concessions inside the new Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin Reserves. Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples, and the only organization fighting worldwide to stop the extermination of uncontacted tribes, has written to the government, along with thousands of supporters, calling for a total ban on all resource extraction in the reserves and for the two existing oil blocks to be canceled.
The reserves are crucial to the future survival of the uncontacted tribes, who face catastrophe unless their land is protected. Whole populations are being wiped out by violence from outsiders who steal their land and resources, and by diseases like the flu and measles to which they have no resistance. Entire groups can be rapidly decimated.
A Matsés man told Survival International: “Life before contact was incredible. Our uncontacted brothers still live in the forest. They live like we did before. Because the uncontacted people are out there, we want the government to protect the land.”
Survival International’s Director Stephen Corry said: “Though we welcome the creation of the Yavari Tapiche and Yavari Mirin Reserves, the Peruvian government’s refusal to ban all resource extraction is a serious concern. Uncontacted tribes are the most vulnerable peoples on the planet. They’re our contemporaries and a vitally important part of humankind’s diversity.”
The creation of the two new protected areas in Peru follows years of intense campaigning by indigenous peoplesand their supporters. However, three more proposed reserves are still awaiting formation. The longer the government delays the creation of protected areas, the greater the threat to the tribes who live there.
Background Information:
– Uncontacted tribes are tribal peoples who have no peaceful contact with anyone in the mainstream or dominant society. These could be entire peoples or smaller groups of already contacted tribes.
– Some may have been in touch with the colonist society in the past, and then retreated from the violence which that brought. Some may once have been part of larger tribal groups, and split off and moved away, fleeing contact.
– Uncontacted tribes are not backward and primitive relics of a remote past. They are contemporary societies and where their rights are respected, they continue to thrive.
Less than two hours before she was murdered on the evening of March 14, Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco was speaking at a roundtable of black women activists about “young black women moving the structures.”
As Franco was leaving the site, a car pulled up to the side of her own vehicle and fired nine shots into it. Franco and her driver, Anderson Pedro Gomes, were killed on the spot. The councillor’s press officer, who was in the backseat, was hit by glass fragments and injured but survived.
Bearing all the hallmarks of an execution, the attack has sent shockwaves through Brazil including social media. Nationwide protests have been scheduled for the next couple of days. More than 70,000 people and organisations have confirmed their presence in the demonstration in Rio de Janeiro.
Marielle Franco was elected with the leftist Socialist and Freedom Party (PSOL) in 2016 as the fifth most voted councillor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-largest city with a population of over six million.
As a young, black, favela-bred lesbian woman activist, she championed several underrepresented demographics in Brazil’s institutional politics and was beloved by activists across the country.
Remembering a fierce critic and activist
Marielle Franco was born and raised in the Maré favela, the largest complex in Rio and home to 130,000 people. In 2005, Franco’s best friend was killed there during a confrontation between police officers and drug dealers. That episode drove her into human rights advocacy and activism against police violence.
A fierce critic of Rio’s deadly police, she had been appointed in late February 2018 as the main rapporteur for the commission of Brazil’s municipal assembly to monitor the ongoing army intervention in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s army took over the city’s public security in early February in response to gang violence despite criticism from local non-governmental organizations and the United Nations’ Human Rights Council.
She had openly criticized the intervention and compared it to a similar operation in her native Maré favela during the 2014 World Cup.
Franco consistently spoke out, both from the pulpit and on her social media pages, against extrajudicial killings of Rio’s poor and mostly black favela residents.
Just this week, she made a series of posts on Facebook about the ongoing violence in the Acari favela:
This week, two young men were killed and dumped at a hole. Today, the police were walking through the streets threatening residents.
Franco called attention to a news story that reported five shoot-outs in the favela over the course of seven days:
Marielle last Facebook post was about the ongoing police violence in Acari favela. Photo: Screenshot/Facebook
Franco spoke out against Brazil’s lethal police
Police lethality in Brazil is staggering. In 2016, 920 killings by police were documented in Rio de Janeiro alone, up from 419 in 2012, according to Amnesty International. A report by Public Security Forum, a national research institution, counted 4,224 killings by police officers in the whole country in 2016, with 99 percent of them being men and 76 percent black. Many of those homicides may amount to extrajudicial killings, a crime under international law.
On social media, organisations, political parties and civil profiles used hashtags asking for a throughout the investigation of Franco’s murder.
Her political importance goes beyond the direct actions to combat violence suffered by black people from Rio. Marielle, while a black woman, represented millions of women without a political voice within the State, breaking a pact of exclusion of black people crystalized by the history of segregation in Brazil, masked by the myth of racial democracy.
There should not be any doubts about the context, motivation, and authorship of Marielle Franco’s murder.
Her party PSOL issued an official statement saying that the hypothesis of a “political crime” could not be discarded, since “she had just denounced a brutal action” by the police.
Marielle Franco grew up at Maré Complex, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Mídia Ninja CC BY-SA 2.0
“We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10”
Sociologist and public security specialist Luiz Eduardo Soares, a close friend to Franco, remembered how the attack echoes that of Judge Patricia Acioli, also killed in a drive-by shooting in 2011. Accioli had been overseeing a number of cases involving paramilitary groups (called ‘militias’ in Rio).
When, my god, will the people awake and understand that public unsafety starts at the most corrupt and brutal segments inside police forces, and that we cannot live with this haunting legacy from the dictatorship period anymore. Will we continue to talk about ‘individual misconduct’? What can we do now, besides crying?
During the black activists’ roundtable that Franco had joined hours before being killed, she said:
We have a movement pushing for more women in politics, in power positions, more women occupying decision making spots, because that is the only way of getting more qualified public policies.
Franco remembered two black women politicians who had come before her, ten years apart from each other, urging:
We cannot wait another 10 years or think that I will be there for another 10.
PUYO, ECUADOR – As in many spots around the globe, Women’s Day in Ecuador was marked by manifestations vindicating their role within society. For Indigenous women in the country, this was no exception. Unlike the short-lived momentum of the date, however, their strategy extended well beyond commemorative schedules. Their objective was clear: Their voices had to reach the country’s Presidential Palace.
For over nine months, political dialogues between Indigenous organizations and President Lenin Moreno’s government have left scattered results. Yet the gap from words to deeds remains firmly in place. The government’s reluctance to fully implement compromises was exposed when, early this month, the Minister of Hydrocarbons announced that a further oil auction is underway despite an explicit commitment to the contrary.
Or worse, when Ecuadorian Minister of Mines Rebeca Illescas, in a clear act of defiance, bypassed Indigenous legitimate leaders and introduced a co-opted low-rank Indigenous representative to give support to the country’s participation at the Prospectors and Developers Association in Canada (PDAC), a major mining investment event earlier this month, a move that was promptly repudiated by Shuar Indigenous Leaders.
Negotiations with the Moreno administration continue with no promising prospects despite all these low blows. Yet what the government did not see coming was that an unexpected group of major players is starting to take its toll on the discussions with a voice of their own: Indigenous women.
March in Puyo on Women’s Day. Credit: Andrés Viera V.
From the heart of Ecuador’s Amazon
In Puyo, the capital of Pastaza –Ecuador’s biggest Amazonian province–, Indigenous women from all over the Amazon region started off their own efforts to further pressure the government. Leaders of seven nationalities including the Andoa, Achuar, Kichwa, Shuar, Shiwiar, Sapara and Waorani were present at the event.
Led by female Indigenous leaders from the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENAIE), the main Indigenous organizations in the Oriente region, the movement strategically crafted a bold agenda that extended for four days.
On March 8, seizing the visibility of the date, the events set off with a march that set the tone for their demands in defense of their territories. Around 350 Indigenous women from across the Ecuadorian Amazon marched down the streets of Puyo to speak up against the extractivist industries.
The message was clear: They had had more than enough of the contamination and exploitation of their territories.
March in Puyo reassembling Indigenous female leaders from seven nationalities of the Amazon region. Credit: Yasunidos
The march was followed by a three-day gathering in Union Base, a landmark concentration spot at the outskirts of Puyo from where major Indigenous protests have been launched in the past. IC Magazine attended the event, which included the establishment of a women-only Assembly of Amazonian Women. For the inaugural session on Friday, March 9, around 400 assembly members had registered, including female leaders and representatives from across the country who had responded to the call of the organizers.
Upon inaugurating what was going to be a three-day session before embarking on a trip to the country’s capital, Elvia Dagua, CONFENAIE’s Leader of Women, reminded the audience that “Women’s Day is not March 8 alone, but every single day of the year.” This, she said, is because there is no life without women, before inviting the few male attendants to also join their cause.
“Together, men and women, we are going to defend our Mother Earth,” she said, as she opened the floor for participants to intervene.
According to Patricia Gualinga, a well-known Indigenous leader of the Sarayaku community and also a participant of the congress, the goal of this series of events is to make women’s voices and proposals heard. In her view, their aim is to awaken public opinion in the face of their latent fearsof what lies ahead. The government, Gualinga told IC Magazine, is calling for another oil auction in the South-East of the country’s Amazon, which is the reason why women are raising their voices in unity.
Leading panel for the Assembly of Amazonian Women on March 9 in Union Base. Credit: Ursula Cliff
Towards a different relationship with Nature
Throughout the opening session, assembly participants were asked to share their own experiences with extractivist activities, as well as to advance concrete proposals for overcoming them. Be it caused by mining or oil extraction activities, stories portraying violence and discrimination cut across themes that marked the interventions.
A participant at the Assembly of Amazonian Women. Credit: Ursula Cliff
Another recurring topic was the importance of such events in bringing together efforts to speak with one voice. Alexandra Proaño Malaver, president of the Andoa nationality located in the province’s far eastern border with Peru, expressed to IC Magazine her desire for local communities to further be included in such events.
“For us women, to talk about the defense of our territories and of life itself, we should do it from the communities” she said. The struggle should not only come from those women who live in the city, she explained, for it is “us, Indigenous women, that day by day are sowing and harvesting […] and thus sustaining life in our communities.”
Far from excluding men, all female leaders talked about a certain gender balance. Proaño, for instance, reckoned that “equity between man and woman is very important for [them]” while pointing out the experiences within her own nationality. A point that was further corroborated by Gualinga when she said, “We do not exclude men; we actually strengthen the relationship between (women and men).”
“This is simply a kind of space where we women regain our own voice,” she added.
Patricia Gualinga’s intervention in the Assembly of Amazonian Women unveiling the Kawsak Sacha project of the Sarayaku community. Credit: Andrés Viera V.
During her long-awaited intervention within the assembly, Patricia Gualinga unveiled her community’s proposal for overcoming the constant failures of what in her view are top-down approaches for the protection of the Amazon. Elaborated by members of the Sarayaku community, Kawsak Sacha, Living Forest in Kichwa is a new scheme when it comes to natural conservation, she said, that leaves the responsibility of the protection of the Amazon in the hands of Indigenous people.
In her view, this is a proposal that intends “to change the conception of everything that we have been taught at school,” for it is based on her own ancestral traditions and Indigenous ways of relating to Nature. The project’s goal, she said, is “to transform the whole scheme on which the current and obsolete economic system is based.”
Without providing further details as to the specifics of the project besides a major launch event in Quito in the coming months, Gualinga’s intervention served rather to spur the mood of the audience.
“This is a proposal for and by us; nobody has done the thinking for us,” she proclaimed in a boost to the pride of Indigenous women and their holistic relation to Nature that they want to share with the world.
Alicia Cahuiya, another experienced Indigenous leader from the Waorani nationality located in Yasuní National Park, shared with IC Magazine some key insights as to the overall message they are trying to send. “The government needs to understand that these are ancestral territories,” she said. “We don’t want more oil and mining companies; our territories need to be respected.”
Confronted with the government’s continued neglect, their message seems to preserve the living voices of the Amazon. “This is our home; here we have lagoons, waterfalls and animals and they all have spirits,” Cahuiya said, the government needs to grasp that “they all need to be included and heard, because our lives are interconnected with theirs.”
Waorani leader, Alicia Cahuiya, intervening in front of the Assembly of Amazonian Women to expose the dangers of the oil industry within the Yasuní National Park. Credit: Andrés Viera V.
Standing up in unity, directly defying power
The working sessions in Puyo resulted in a document that incorporated all their demands. The next and final destination was Quito, Ecuador’s capital, to hand down their ‘mandate’ to the President himself.
Indeed, on Monday, March 12, the march reached the capital for a press conference scheduled at the Independence Plaza, right in front of the Presidential Palace.
The collectively crafted document called Mandate of Amazonian Women included 22 specific requests headed by the most urgent demand: rejecting what they consider “illegal contracts or agreements between local authorities and any oil, mining, hydroelectric or logging company,” for “we are more than 50% of the Indigenous population, we are the carriers of life and take care of our families and Mother Earth.”
The document also included, among others, their rejection to the upcoming oil auction of 16 blocks located in Ecuador’s South-East Amazon region, their request to overturn recent oil concessions in blocks 79, 83, 74, 75 and 28, as well as their solidarity and demands for the liberation of Indigenous leaders Bosco Wisum and Freddy Taish, arbitrarily imprisoned for their upfront rejection of mining activities in Shuar territories in Morona Santiago, the country’s southernmost Amazon province.
Despite mild police repression in front of the Presidential Palace, the leaders of the Indigenous women conveyed their willingness to stay until the President hears them. As of the time of this publication, Lenin Moreno had not given any response. Whether he will attend those demands or not, the message has been clear. The striking echo of their demands will be hard to ignore, for voices of the Amazon have now joined their cause.
Indigenous women gathered at the Independence Plaza to hand down their demands to the president. Credit: Yasunidos
Featured image: A girl stands alone in a flooded home in the Palifitas neighborhood of Invasão dos Padres, Altamira. The neighborhood has now been completely destroyed by the Belo Monte dam. The area where the community once stood is being turned into a public park by the Norte Energia consortium which built and operates Belo Monte. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
The future of Brazil’s mega-dam construction program is unclear, with one part of the Temer government declaring it an end, while another says the program should go on. More clear is the ongoing harm being done by the giant hydroelectric projects already completed to the environment, indigenous and traditional communities.
A case in point: the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam and reservoir, located on the Amazon’s Xingu River, and the third largest such project in the world.
Photographer Aaron Vincent Elkaim and I spent three months in the Brazilian Amazon, between November 2016 and January 2017, documenting Belo Monte after it became operational.
We were based in Altamira, a once small Amazonian city that saw explosive growth when the Brazilian government decided to build the controversial six-billion-dollar mega-dam.
The dam was built in a record three years, despite widespread outrage and protests from locals, along with the environmental, indigenous and international community. Major public figures including rock star Sting, filmmaker James Cameron, and politician and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger waged a high-profile media campaign against the project, but even these lobbying efforts weren’t enough to change the direction of the Dilma Rousseff administration, which was ruling Brazil at the time.
Ana De Francisco, an Altamira-based anthropologist and her son Thomas, visit the Belo Monte Dam in 2016. De Fransisco works for the regional office of the Socio-Environmental Institute (ISA), an influential Brazilian NGO focusing on environmental and human rights issues. She has been doing research for her PhD on the displacement of ribeirinho (traditional riverine) communities in the Xingu region. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
Ultimately at least 20,000 people were displaced by the dam, according to NGO and environmental watchdog, International Rivers, though the local nonprofit, Xingu Vivo, puts the number at 50,000. Eventually, the project succeeded in staunching the once mighty Xingu, a major tributary to the Amazon and lifeblood to thousands of indigenous and forest-dwelling communities.
Altamira, which lies just downstream from the dam, was transformed overnight becoming a raucous boomtown: the population shot up from 100,000 to 160,000 in just two years. Hotels, restaurants and housing sprang up. So did brothels. According to one widely circulated anecdote, there was so much demand for sex workers in Altamira at the time, that prostitutes asked local representatives of Norte Energia, the consortium building the dam, to stagger monthly pay checks to their employees, so as not to overwhelm escorts on payday.
The boom didn’t last. The end of construction in 2015 signaled an exodus; 50,000 workers left, jobs vanished, violence surged in the city, as did a major health crisis that overwhelmed the local hospital when raw sewage backed up behind the dam.
Boys climb a tree flooded by the Xingu River in 2014. Today, one-third of the city of Altamira has been permanently flooded by the Belo Monte Dam that displaced more than 20,000 people, destroying indigenous and ribeirinho (river-dwelling) traditional communities. The effects were so severe that Norte Energia, the company behind the dam, has been required to carry out a six-year study to measure the environmental and social impacts of Belo Monte and to determine if indigenous and fishing communities can continue to live downriver from the dam. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
When Aaron and I arrived in Altamira in 2016, the city still held some charm. Families strolled a popular boulevard skirting the Xingu River in the evening, and restaurants stayed open until late. But Aaron, having spent two years in the region before me, saw a different Altamira. He described the city I was seeing as “hollow,” and noted the disappearance of vibrant communities of ribeirinhos, “river people,” who had lived for generations by fishing at the riverside, and had been displaced by the dam. Many were relocated by the Norte Energia consortium to cookie-cutter suburban homes on the edge of town, far from the river and their fishing livelihood, and without access to public transportation.
Ana de Francisco, an Altamira-based anthropologist and expert on ribeirinhocommunities, estimates that as many as 5,000 of these families were displaced.
Belo Monte was no Three Gorges Dam – the Chinese project that displaced over a million people in 2009 – but it did wreak havoc; destroying communities and traditional ways of life, while also damaging the Xingu’s aquatic ecosystem, which has unique fish and turtle species.
A map showing the Belo Monte mega-dam and reservoir where it bisects a big bend in the Xingu River hangs on the wall of a home in Ilha da Fazenda, a small fishing village a few kilometers from the dam. According to village leader Otavio Cardoso Juruna, an indigenous Juruna, around 40 families live in Ilha da Fazenda, which was founded in 1940. Ilha da Fazenda is a mixed village of indigenous and non-indigenous residents. Residents complain that although they were negatively affected by the dam like others in the region, they were not compensated because they were not designated as an “indigenous village.” There is no potable water, sanitation or healthcare in Ilha da Fazenda, and locals were forced to stop fishing after the dam reduced the river’s flow by 80 percent and massively depleted fish stocks. Otavia said villagers were forming an organization to negotiate for compensation due to the planned Belo Sun goldmine, the region’s next mega-development project. Photo by Aaron Vincent Elkaim/The Alexia Foundation
