indigenous ppl2 bak

new cat 1/16 for non-north america

primary 719, front lines, KIA

bak 1219

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On March 14, 2024, Pope Francis on Thursday encouraged a closer collaboration between Indigenous and scientific knowledge to address climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and threats to food and health security facing the world today.

The National Indian Health Board on Tuesday said the Pope’s acknowledgement is a step forward.

The Pope’s recognition of the value of Indigenous knowledge resonates deeply with the National Indian Health Board’s International work that has focused on defining and improving Indigenous Determinants of Health to improve the health and well-being of all American Indian, Alaska Natives, and Indigenous Peoples globally, the National Indian Health Board said in a press release.

Indian Country

“The National Indian Health Board has worked towards, and supports the Pope’s focus on a world view that incorporates Indigenous knowledge and determinants of health in the broader global efforts to mitigate climate change,” Stacy Bohlen, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, NIHB CEO said. “This is another acknowledgement that follows others on the international stage, that indigenous peoples hold game changing solutions to many modern problems through both longstanding knowledge and their experiences.”

The National Indian Health Boards has long recognized that Indigenous cultures hold valuable insights into sustainable living and environmental stewardship. Through millennia of living in harmony with nature, Indigenous communities have developed a profound understanding of ecological systems and the interconnectedness of all living beings.

“The culture of Indigenous people can heal the earth and its people,” William Smith, a citizen of the EYAK Tribe in the Alaska Village of Valdez and Chairman of NIHB said. “It is imperative that we elevate indigenous voices and incorporate their knowledge into global efforts to address the climate crisis.”

https://www.desmog.com/2022/11/04/wilful-ignorance-indigenous-delegation-incredulous-at-bankers-attitude-to-fossil-fuel-impacts/

Indigenous delegates said they had been amazed at the “wilful ignorance” they encountered when demanding global banks cease financing new fossil fuel projects on their ancestral lands in what is today North America.

The representatives of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas and the Nahua nation in Mexico met with executives from HSBC, Barclays, and Credit Suisse in London this week to urge them to stop backing oil and gas pipelines and fracked gas export terminals.

Christopher Basaldú, a member of the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe, said he had been appalled at the lack of awareness of the pollution caused by fracking — a high-pressure drilling technique that has revolutionised America’s energy industry, but caused huge environmental damage.

“I had to give a fracking 101 lesson to this bank official. It’s appalling their level of ignorance. They really do not know how potentially permanently destructive fracking is to groundwater,” Basaldú told DeSmog. “It’s incomprehensible to me that these wealthy, privileged, European people can be so wilfully ignorant and draw such tremendous salaries.”

Fracking works by using contained explosions and a mix of water, sand, and chemicals to fragment oil and gas-bearing layers of shale rock. The technique can taint groundwater, degrade landscapes and threaten wildlife, according to environmental organisations.

In addition, fracking sites release a toxic stew of air pollution that can cause severe headaches, asthma symptoms, childhood leukemia, cardiac problems, and birth defects, and some of the 1,000-plus chemicals used in the process are known to cause cancer, according to a report by the National Resources Defense Council.

Fossil Fight

Basaldú is fighting plans by Houston-based oil and gas company NextDecade to build a $10 billion facility on the South Texas coast near his hometown of Brownsville. The scheme would supercool fracked gas from the Permian Basin for export as liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Community members say the Central Park-sized project — known asRio Grande LNG— would blanket low-income Latinx and Indigenous communities with harmful air pollution, cause irreversible harm to precious wetlands, threaten endangered wildlife, and accelerate climate breakdown via its associated carbon emissions.

The future of Rio Grande LNG and other planned export terminals had looked looked increasingly in doubt as demand for energy slumped during the COVID-19 pandemic. In November, 2020, French utility Engie dealt the sector a further blow when it pulled out of negotiations over a long-term deal to buy LNG cargoes from Rio Grande LNG amid reports that the French government was concerned over methane emissions from the Permian Basin.

But the picture has since changed dramatically as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a European scramble for alternatives to Russian gas — bringing once moribund projects back to life. In May, NextDecade announced that Engie had returned to the negotiating table and signed a 15-year contract to buy cargoes from Rio Grande LNG starting as early as 2026.

The project took another step forward in September, when Credit Suisse helped NextDecade launch a private share placement in anticipation of a final investment decision, Offshore Energy reported.

Barclays and HSBC are linked to the scheme through their role as big financiers of oil majors ExxonMobil and Shell,which have also signed contracts to purchase shipments from Rio Grande LNG, according to a report by the Sierra Club and allied organisations. The two banks also have smaller exposures to Engie, according to Banking on Climate Chaos, a report by advocacy groups.

Barclays, HSBC and Credit Suisse declined to comment.

Indigenous Resistance

Basaldú made the trip to London with Bekah Hinojosa, an artist and community organiser who has also been campaigning against Rio Grande LNG since the project was proposed eight years ago, and serves as the Sierra Club’s Gulf Coast campaign representative.

The pair were accompanied by Oliveria Montès Lazcano, the coordinator of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples in the central Mexican state of Puebla. Lazcano is fighting TransCanada’s project to build the Tuxpan-Tula pipeline to import gas to central Mexico from Texas. HSBC, Credit Suisse, and Barclays finance TransCanada, campaigners say.

Indigenous networks have been mobilising increasingly effective opposition to fossil fuel infrastructure in recent years, playing key roles in the defeat of flagship projects in North America including the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the Atlantic Coast gas pipeline.

A report by the Indigenous Environmental Network and Oil Change International published last year found that Indigenous communities resisting more than 20 fossil fuel projects analysed had stopped or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least 25 percent of annual U.S. and Canadian emissions.

With the world’s 60 largest private banks extending $4.6 trillion of finance for fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, according to Banking on Climate Chaos, indigenous groups are increasingly seeking to persuade bankers to pull the plug on polluting projects.

In 2017 French Bank BNP Paribas pledged to stop granting dedicated financial supportfor fracked gas pipelines and export terminals in North America several months after a previous delegation of Indigenous leaders from South Texas visited Paris and gained significant attention, speaking on radio shows and at rallies and shareholder meetings.

Indigenous groups from Ecuador and Peru scored further concessions in 2021 by persuading BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, ING, and other European banks to stop financing the export of crude oil from the Ecuadorian Amazon after advocacy groups Stand.earth and Amazon Watch published data revealing their multi-billion dollar exposure to the trade.

...

https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-ashaninka-compensation-deforestation-2645751246.html

mongabay

Naira Hofmeister, Translated by Matt Rinaldi

An unprecedented court settlement guaranteed reparations to the Ashaninka people of the state of Acre, in the Brazilian Amazon, whose lands were deforested in the 1980s to supply the European furniture industry. The logging company penalized was owned by the family of the current governor of Acre, Gladson Cameli.

The conflict was resolved through mediationfrom the Prosecutor General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, after thecase had circulated in the courts with no resolution for 20 years.

The indigenous people only agreed with the negotiation because it included an official apology and a recognition of their "enormous importance as guardians" of the Amazon.

Far from the Brazil nut trees that shape the landscape of the Kampa do Rio Amônia Indigenous Reserve in the western tip of the state of Acre, the Ashaninka people realized their most important victory since the federal government first recognized their territory in 1992. On April 1, 2020, the Prosecutor General of the Republic, Augusto Aras, signed an unprecedented settlement that guaranteed reparations for crimes committed almost 40 years ago. The agreement gives this indigenous community the right to compensation of R$ 14 million (nearly US$ 3 million) with an official apology from the criminal offenders.

Their crime: cutting down of thousands of mahogany, cedar and other tree species to supply the European furniture industry from 1981 to 1987. The devastation struck a quarter of the area that currently comprises the indigenous reserve. Francisco Piyãko, the Ashaninka leader, was an adolescent at the time of the logging invasion. "What matters to us is what this agreement represents for the Ashaninka cause andhow it can have repercussions in affirming the rights and values of the indigenous peoples in a broader sense,"explained Piyãko to Mongabay.

A Two-Decade Dispute

The settlement marks the end of a legal dispute that started in 1996, when the Federal Public Ministry (MPF) brought a Public Civil Action against lumber companies owned by the powerful Cameli family. The same family as the current governor of Acre, Gladson Cameli, and his uncle, Orleir Cameli, who was also governor from 1994 to 1998.

The Ashaninka prevailed in their initial court case, in appeals courts and also in the Superior Court of Justice (the highest appellate court in Brazil for non-constitutional questions). But as soon the case reached the federal Supreme Court in 2011, it stalled.

At an impasse, an extrajudicial settlement was imposed, but it took a year of regular negotiations until both sides accepted the terms of the agreement."It was a great challenge for everyone, because the negotiation involved large sums and constitutional questions. It required a lot of study, partners and various public authorities to analyze each detail," observes Antônio Rodrigo, attorney for the Ashaninka.....

https://www.drillednews.com/post/indigenous-women-accuse-credit-suisse-of-rights-violations-for-continuing-to-bankroll-fossil-fuels

COP25: Indigenous Delegation Links Missing and Murdered Women to Fossil Fuel Industry

Posted on December 9, 2019December 9, 2019

FEATURING OZAWA BINESHI ALBERT - As the latest Conference of Parties or COP25 meeting on taking action on climate change continues into its second week in Madrid, Spain, indigenous communities

intercept

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/13/youth-climate-movement-fossil-fuel-industry/

no lnx

HOW THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY IS ATTEMPTING TO BUY THE GLOBAL YOUTH CLIMATE MOVEMENT

Alleen Brown

December 13 2019, 9:30 a.m.

THE SAME DAY that 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg gave a stirring speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit in September, in which she criticized delegates for “stealing my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” the architects of the climate crisis welcomed select youth participants from the summit to dine.

CEOs from fossil fuel corporations including BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and Norway’s Equinor were attending the annual gathering of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative in New York, which includes industry leaders who claim to be committed to taking “practical” action on climate change. On the agenda for lunch was to “explore options for long-term engagement” with young people the industry could trust. Student Energy, a nonprofit based in Alberta, near Canada’s tar sands region, helped organize the event, which included time for students to grill the CEOs about their inaction on climate change.

Tension in the room was high, Student Energy’s executive director, 30-year-old Meredith Adler, told The Intercept. “The whole discussion started off with one of our participants talking about why youth don’t trust oil and gas companies,” she said. But by the end of the meeting, Adler tweeted that she was “very impressed” with OGCI. “I don’t feel they had all the answers or strong enough answers but they are really listening,” she wrote.

The students’ questions may have been tough, but the event was great PR for the fossil fuel industry.Gone are the days when CEOs openly questioned the existence of climate change. Today, industry leaders are feigning a sense of climate urgency while pushing forward proposals for climate action that will allow companies to keep harvesting carbon-emitting products well into the future. Subjecting themselves to a cohort of skeptical students was an opportunity for oil and gas executives to boost their credibility in an era when many young activists will only engage with them with picket signs.

Young activists say they’re seeing more of this “youth-washing” as the global youth climate movement gains momentum, including at the U.N. annual climate conference, known as COP 25, which is wrapping up in Madrid this week. With “youth” becoming synonymous with climate action, corporations and politicians are increasingly using young people to portray themselves as climate serious.

“There’s a real dangerous tokenism of youth for the benefit of public image.”

“The use of youth in campaigning is becoming more and more overt,” said 24-year-old Eilidh Robb, a member of the U.K. Youth Climate Coalition, who has been involved in pushing the U.N. to adopt a conflict of interest policy that would prevent fossil fuel industry representatives from exercising influence at COP. “There’s a real dangerous tokenism of youth for the benefit of public image.”

The OGCI gathering was a particularly egregious example of youth-washing.OGCI has provided funding to Student Energy, and OGCI ventures director Rhea Hamilton is on the group’s board of directors. Among the “partners” listed in Student Energy’s 2018 annual report are Royal Dutch Shell and Suncor, one of Canada’s biggest tar sands producers.Fossil fuel companies consistently fund the organization’s annual conference.

Although Student Energy’s leaders often echo the talking points of activists like Thunberg, the group’s membership — a network it claims includes 40,000 young people — is largely made up of people who want to work in the energy industry.

Student Energy is among the youth groups granted observer status at COP 25, meaning that its members can gain access to negotiation spaces, speak with the negotiating parties, and participate in events. Its presence at the U.N.’s international climate talks is only expected to grow. Student Energy’s 2018 report noted that the group had seen a 73 percent increase in active chapters. Next year, the oil and gas major BP has pledged to send 50 Student Energy delegates to COP26. The funding would double the size of the group’s usual delegation, according to a BP press release. In a conference space that serves as a battleground of ideas about how to address the climate crisis, BP apparently sees Student Energy’s presence as beneficial to the corporation.

But Student Energy’s funders, some of the corporations most responsible for the climate crisis, show no signs of slowing down. Suncor’s production portfolio, which includes mostly tar sands extraction, is the most carbon intensive of the 100 largest fossil fuel companies in the world, and the company has pushed hard for new pipelines that would allow it to continue to increase production. Shell, the world’s 11th-largest greenhouse gas-emitting oil and gas company, is projected to increase its fossil fuel output by 38 percent by 2030. BP, the 14th-largest emitter, will up production by 20 percent.

The corporations’ projections fly in the face of the measures scientists say are required to meet the U.N.’s goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2030. The point of the COP is to move toward that goal.

Adler told The Intercept that Student Energy participated in the OGCI event in order to challenge the oil and gas industry face to face. She said the organization follows strict partnership principles that prevent funders from wielding influence over the group’s activities. A large proportion of the organization’s members want to work in the renewables industry, not for a fossil fuel company, she added, and next year they will be diversifying their funding sources significantly.

As for BP’s COP26 funding, Adler said that Student Energy has not officially accepted the money. “We’re examining what that looks like and the implications of that and if they’re the right partner.”

To Taylor Billings, a spokesperson for the nonprofit Corporate Accountability, it’s no surprise that the industry is seeking a youth movement to collaborate with. As she put it, “If zebras were leading the march, fossil fuel corporations and global north governments would be clambering to get into the zoo.”

Youth-Washing at the United Nations

The U.N. has done little to eliminate opportunities for youth-washing at its conferences. Since 2015, the international governing body has held an annual Global Youth Video Competition, in which participants submit short films highlighting climate action. The prize this year: a fully funded trip to COP 25.

youth-climate-cop-1576254018Youth delegates from SustainUS during an action at COP 25 on Dec. 4, 2019. The group has been a key youth voice against corporate influence at the climate talks. Photo: Courtesy of David Tong]

But alongside several U.N. agencies sponsoring the project was the BNP Paribas Foundation, which is funded by a bank that spent more than $50 billion in fossil fuel investments between 2016 and 2018. In response, 29 climate organizations that work with young people sent a letter to the U.N. organizers of the project.

“This kind of corporate capture of a youth empowerment initiative is not only disappointing, but outright criminal,” the letter said, noting that BNP Paribas is the fifth-largest fossil fuel financier in Europe. The organizations called on the U.N. to “immediately terminate their partnership with BNP Paribas to ensure that youth engagement remains free from the influence of big polluters and their financiers.”

“Do not be responsible for the corruption of our courage and action,” the authors urged.

The U.N. dismissed the letter. “We share your views on the need to decarbonize the world and to that end also decarbonize investment portfolios of financial institutions as soon as possible,” said Niclas Svenningsen, the U.N.’s manager of Global Climate Action. However, he added, “We believe that it is also important to open the dialogue and look at how stakeholders from different sectors are transitioning their business models.”

To many, the response is typical. When it comes to youth-washing, “the biggest example and most egregious is the United Nations,” said Jonathan Palash-Mizner, the 17-year-old co-coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Youth U.S., who is attending COP 25. He said that youth spaces at the U.N. often feel like a “kids’ table,” with participants holding little decision-making power.

Meanwhile, “you go into any negotiation and every negotiator will invoke Greta Thunberg,” said Sarah Dobson, a 23-year-old member of the U.K. Youth Climate Coalition. “It’s embarrassing because they’re not going to live up to that vision.”

Youth strikers to stage sit-in at un climate talks during the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change -COP25 on day 6, in December 6, 2019 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Youth strikers stage a sit-in during COP 25 on Dec. 6, 2019, in Madrid. Photo: Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images]

Dobson has been involved with a long-running youth effort to expel conflicts of interest from the COP.The official youth arm of the U.N., YOUNGO, bars its local chapters from entering partnerships with companies “that stand in conflict with the interests of young people.” The group has pushed for years for a policy that would keep anyone who has worked for a fossil fuel company out of future climate conferences and require disclosure of meetings between the fossil fuel industry and negotiating nations or U.N. officials.

Why VSCO Girls are Going on Strike for the Climate]

They point to the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which states that parties “need to be alert to any efforts by the tobacco industry to undermine or subvert tobacco control efforts” and must protect the agreement from “commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.”

YOUNGO argued again for a conflict of interest policy at a June U.N. gathering where COP logistics were discussed — but with the U.S., the European Union, and other global north delegates dismissive of the idea, they lost.

“Politicians and CEOs are making it look like real action is happening when in fact almost nothing is being done apart from clever accounting and creative PR.”

So, as COP 25 kicked off in Madrid last week, an array of representatives of the fossil fuel industry roamed the hallways alongside the negotiators who will decide the shape of the most important international climate agreement. Leaders from BP, Shell, Total, and Suncor all received accreditation to attend the conference via the industry-led International Emissions Trading Association, which has observer status. Other delegations invited representatives from Chevron, Petrobras, and other fossil fuel corporations. Meanwhile, among the sponsors of COP 25 was the utility company Endesa, the largest carbon emitter in Spain.

The fossil fuel industry has attempted to obstruct a strong climate agreement since the U.N. began negotiating the issue in the 1990s. This year, industry trade associations weighed in most heavily on a section of the agreement known as Article 6, which includes rules for emissions trading schemes. Overall, international carbon trading systems have failed to significantly reduce emissions where they’ve been implemented. Instead of simply forcing cuts via regulations, the markets allow companies to invest in climate offset projects that, in many cases, have been found to have little genuine climate impact.

The shape of the markets will make a huge difference in how much the fossil fuel industry will have to pay. At the COP, as Dobson put it, “Corporations are literally everywhere.”

Fossil Fuel Companies #MaketheFuture

Youth-washing has proliferated beyond the U.N.’s climate gatherings.

Robb pointed to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s meeting with Thunberg in September, held before he participated in a youth-led Fridays for Future march, where he was heckled by Canadians who labeled him a climate criminal. Trudeau has tried hard to frame himself as serious about the climate, but last year his government purchased Kinder Morgan’s proposed Trans Mountain pipeline, a highly contested and carbon-intensive project key to keeping Canada’s tar sands industry profitable.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg in Montreal on Friday, Sept. 27, 2019. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via AP)Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks to Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg in Montreal on Sept. 27, 2019. Photo: Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press via AP]

Of course, the most disturbing examples of youth-washing involve the fossil fuel industry. This year, BP sponsored the annual One Young World conference, sometimes referred to as “Young Davos,” and paid for 30 students focused on low-carbon energy issues to attend. At the October event, BP’s CEO and its chief economist took turns on stage. “But hang on — I’m chief economist at BP, one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. What’s BP doing here? Aren’t we part of the problem? Now, I truly believe we’re not,” the economist, Spencer Dale, pitched the audience. “Companies like BP can be, and indeed need to be, part of the solution.”

And Shell has launched a #MaketheFuture campaign, suggesting that it’s building a better future rather than destroying it.The campaign promotes Shell as a driver of low-carbon technology and features images of young people as well as social media posts about the company’s funding of youth engineering and science programs.

Even the far-right CO2 Coalition, funded by the Kochs’ fossil fuel money and led by former Trump advisers who claim that CO2 emissions are good for the earth, is attempting to recruit young people. After struggling to attract support from young Republican staffers, the group has reportedly sought out students on college campuses in an attempt to “reach them a little earlier.”

“They have pretty much endless money to go out and try to move whichever constituency is most resistant to their agenda,” said 26-year-old Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of the progressive think tank Data for Progress.

Greta Thunberg on the Climate Fight: “If We Can Save the Banks, Then We Can Save the World”]

Indeed, the tar sands giant Suncor was also the “founding partner” of Student Energy’s first Indigenous Student Energy Summit, held last January — an opportunity for the company to reach two demographics associated with fossil fuel resistance at once. Other funders of the Indigenous youth conference included Enbridge, TC Energy, and LNG Canada, all of which stand to profit from tar sands pipelines that have been halted by Indigenous-led coalitions.

Adler said that, until recently, it was only the fossil fuel industry that showed interest in funding the group’s programming. “The reality is there were very few types of organizations that were interested in youth until about a year ago,” she said.

As COP 25 wound down, with key issues unresolved, Thunberg was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year. In a speech at the U.N. the same day, she referenced the way corporations and politicians have co-opted her words. “Those phrases are all that people focus on. They don’t remember the facts, the very reasons why I say those things in the first place,” she said. “I still believe that the biggest danger is not inaction — the real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like real action is happening when, in fact, almost nothing is being done apart from clever accounting and creative PR.”

What’s at stake, said Dobson, is the watering down of a forceful youth movement. “For corporations to take our images, to take the symbols of our movement and use them to validate their own activities completely disrespects the effort we put into building this grassroots movement,” she said. “It gives the illusion that the youth have sold out their values to support the activities of horrible businesses.”

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sacred-groves-an-ancient-tradition-of-nature-conservation/

5/19

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-conservation-efforts-can-learn-from-indigenous-communities/

[CLIMATE ### Indigenous Peoples Are Vital to Curtailing the Climate Crisis

September 13, 2018 — Cristián Samper](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/indigenous-peoples-are-vital-to-curtailing-the-climate-crisis/)

Braiding Science Together with Indigenous Knowledge

Dec 2017

As the negative consequences of human-induced environmental and social changes are becoming increasingly obvious, there is a growing recognition that “status quo” approaches to resource development and management, rooted in the dominant, largely linear,reductionist worldview, are failing.

Over the last years, several integrative fields of inquiry—such as systems science, resilience science, ecosystem health, ethnoecology, deep ecology Gaia theory, biocultural diversity, among others—have been advancing our understanding of the complex non-linear and multi-scale relationships between people and nature. To better enable us to tackle the multiple challenges facing the planet, our home, many of these fields of inquiry seek to develop respectful and equitable ways of generating knowledge about our relationship with the natural world through braiding traditional knowledge systems and conventional “Western” science.

This shift in thinking is particularly significant because of the contributions that traditional territories of indigenous peoples make toward sustaining biocultural diversity and the carbon stocks. According to the Right and Resources Initiative—an NGO working on land and resource rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities—though the world’s indigenous peoples make up fewer than 4 percent of the world’s population, their traditional territories support about 80 percent of the world’s biological diversity. In addition, even without counting the carbon stored in the soil, indigenous territories contain close to a quarter of the carbon stored above ground in the world’s tropical forests and northern subarctic peatlands and wetlands.

Moreover, around the world, the indigenous territories are also the spaces where millennia-old indigenous systems of knowledge generation and practice meet modern technology and scientific insights. One of the more positive outcomes is the generation of new knowledge critical for.

For generations, Indigenous peoples the world over have been monitoring what happens on their traditional territories. It was not just an academic exercise for them. It was vital to their way of life. When does freeze-up begin? Are there fewer animals today than a few years ago? Are there more fires in the forest? Based on these observations, they would adjust their activities on the land—move their camp to a new place or stop hunting in a given area. These observations, embedded in their cultural practices and worldview, have guided their relationships with the living world.

To maintain humankind’s resilience in the face of change, we must draw on the best available knowledge, regardless of its origins—whether it is indigenous knowledge rooted in a millennia of meticulous on-the-land observations of phenology, weather and animal behavior, or contemporary scientific methodologies that rely on satellites to remotely capture large-scale habitat changes, track animal movements or monitor climate.

Weneed to move from our past reductive, dualistic conceptualization towards a multiple evidence based (MEB) approach—an innovative framework adopted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The MEB approach braids indigenous and scientific knowledge systems together to support and enhance decision-making and ultimately the resilience of interlinked social and ecological systems. The MEB approach preserves the integrity of each knowledge system by recognizing that the interpretation and authentication of knowledge takes place primarily within, rather than across, different knowledge systems.

The process of braiding knowledge systems creates opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of observed events and their consequences. It facilitates joint assessment of information, leading to new insights and innovations, and results in better informed actions.

These opportunities are being realized around the world more and more. In Asia, the Karen villagers of Hin Lad Nai in northern Thailand, in partnership with researchers, have demonstrated that that their millennia-old traditions of swidden agriculture are an invaluable resource for sustaining biodiversity and carbon stocks. In Central America, indigenous peoples practicing their traditional low-carbon livelihoods on ancestral territories are being recognized by the conservation community as the best guardians of the region’s biodiversity. In Australia, traditional fire management by aboriginal peoples, braided with scientific research, has led to the development of climate change mitigation approaches that decrease greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from savannah fires, while enhancing biodiversity. And in North America, the Environmental Monitoring and Science Division of Alberta Environment and Parks, guided by the Indigenous Wisdom Advisory Panel, is developing new approaches to documenting and interpreting environmental change based on the knowledge co-creation between indigenous and scientific knowledge systems.

mber 21, 2017 — Gleb Raygorodetsky

The Battle for the Soul of Biodiversity

August 23, 2018 — Ehsan Masood and Nature magazine

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/potential-for-sudden-and-extreme-change-new-climate-report-warns-a-feedback-loop-may-already-be-underway/

no lnx

‘Potential for sudden and extreme change’: New climate report warns a feedback loop ‘may already be underway’

Written by Jessica Corbett / Common DreamsDecember 11, 2019

In addition to warning that “the feedback to accelerating climate change may already be underway,” the U.S. government’s latest report on conditions in the Arctic reveals that temperatures in the region are persistently warming, leading to land and sea ice melting, permafrost thawing, species being threatened with extinction, and putting Native communities at risk.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday published its 14th annual Arctic Report Card (pdf), which warns that “the Arctic marine ecosystem and the communities that depend upon it continue to experience unprecedented changes as a result of warming air temperatures, declining sea ice, and warming waters.”

The new NOAA report “draws particular attention to the Bering Sea region, where declining winter sea ice exemplifies the potential for sudden and extreme change,” and features commentary from Indigenous elders.

“The Bering Sea, in particular, has experienced unprecedented declines in sea ice over the last two years, with resulting changes in algae growth to include observations of thepresence of harmful algal blooms,” Clark University polar scientist Karen Frey, lead author of one of the report’s chapters, said in a statement.

Zack Labe

@ZLabe

The annual @NOAA Arctic Report Card is available today for 2019. It discusses recent changes in the Arctic, extreme events, and broad implications for the Earth system.

Report: https://arctic.noaa.gov/Report-Card/Report-Card-2019 …

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlhU4vrE3e4&feature=emb_title …

Summary/News: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/ …

Infographic highlighting 2019's extreme events within the Arctic

Erich Osterberg, a Dartmouth College professor who has studied glaciers, told PBS NewsHour that “I think the headline from this report is that the Arctic is in real trouble. If this were an annual health check-up, I think we’d have to say that the Arctic is chronically sick and getting worse. 2019 was a particularly bad year for the Arctic.”

Osterberg, who did not contribute to the report, highlighted that this year saw the second-warmest average annual land surface air temperature on record, which led to significant sea ice loss in the Arctic Ocean and melting of glaciers on Greenland—both of which cause sea level rise.

Major findings include observations about rising temperatures, the Greenland Ice Sheet, North American Arctic snow cover, Tundra greening,thawing permafrost, sea ice extent, thickness of sea ice, ocean primary productivity, wildlife population declines, winter sea ice, and northerly shifts in the distribution of fish species.

Andrew Freedman

@afreedma

This is a BIG deal, and a finding that's a bit buried in the @noaa Arctic Report Card out today. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2019/12/10/arctic-may-have-crossed-key-threshold-emitting-billions-tons-carbon-into-air-long-dreaded-climate-feedback/ …

The Arctic may have crossed key threshold, emitting billions of tons of carbon into the air, in a...

A new federal report on the Arctic finds the region is in the midst of drastic and sudden changes as a result of human-caused warming.

washingtonpost.com

NOAA’s new report is made up of 12 essays written by an international team of 81 researchers from 12 countries. An independent peer review was organized by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program of the Arctic Council.

“It’s a really sobering report, but I have to say it’s not a very surprising report,” said Osterberg, “because this is a continuation of the trends that we’ve been seeing happening in the Arctic for quite a few decades now as climate change has gotten worse.”

Alongside the report, NOAA published a short video which explains that “unprecedented warming and exceptionally low levels of sea ice are imposing dramatic, rapid, and disruptive change on marine ecosystems in the far north,” including a “cascade of impacts on the marine food web.”

Watch:

“Changing growing conditions, including warmer summers, decreasing snow cover, and permafrost instability lead to alterations in the vegetation of the Arctive landscape. This can strongly affect habitat for caribou, birds, and other wildlife,putting further pressure on northern ecosystems and communities,” the video details. “Indigenous communities along the Bering Sea are on the front lines of climate change. As sea ice disappears, so does hunting access to seals, whales, whales, and other marine life.”

Bering Sea Elders Group executive director Mellisa Johnson, who edited a chapter of NOAA’s report, spoke with InsideClimate News about dead or dying salmon increasingly washing up on the shores over the past few years. She explained that “the seals, they don’t want to eat those types of fish. They know they’re unhealthy for consumption. So then they don’t have enough fat reserves to last them.”

The chapter that Johnson edited, which offers perspective from Indigenous voices, reads in part:

Our resilience as Indigenous Peoples comes from our close proximity to the food resources that we depend on. In a warming Arctic, access to our subsistence foods is shrinking and becoming more hazardous to hunt and fish. At the same time, thawing permafrost and more frequent and higher storm surges increasingly threaten our homes, schools, airports, and utilities. Our environment has changed, but we remain vigilant. By adapting as we always have, we continue to hunt, fish, and harvest from the ocean and land. But, we fear for our young people; we worry that they will grow without the same foods and places that we have known throughout our lives. Maintaining what we inherited from our elders and thinking about our future generations, we offer this report as a glimpse into what we are observing and experiencing at the locations of our eight communities in the Bering Sea region of Alaska.

Johnson, whose group represents 38 regional communities, emphasized in her comments to InsideClimate News the need for action to address the climate impacts in the region. “The Bering Sea provides for our people,” she said. “It’s our responsibility to take care of the one who provides for our people.”

Retired Navy Rear Adm. Timothy Gallaudet, deputy undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere at NOAA, led the news conference where the report was released Tuesday. In a statement, he underscored the importance of scientists continuing to track the conditions in the Arctic.

“The speed and trajectory of the changes sweeping the Arctic, many occurring faster than anticipated,makes NOAA’s continued investment in Arctic research and activities all the more important,” Gallaudet said. “We need the best scientific information to support NOAA’s efforts to better understand how environmental change is affecting the Arctic and weather around the globe, to support adaptation and economic opportunities in the region, and to sustain our ocean-based Blue Economy.”

guk1219

The polluters

Argentina How fracking is taking its toll on indigenous people

In collaboration with Forensic Architecture, this video looks at the Mapuche community’s claim the oil and gas industry has irreversibly damaged their ancestral homeland

5:03

'Greed is killing the world'Indigenous Mapuche pay high price for fracking dream

Fossil fuelsTop asset managers oversee $300bn investments

State StreetFossil fuel bosses 'must change or be voted out'

Five Indigenous Leaders Massacred in Colombia; New Wave of Violence Feared as 2,500 Troops Deployed

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/11/4/paulo_paulino_guajajara_amazon_indigenous_killings

indigenous forest protector named Paulo Paulino Guajajara was shot dead in the Amazon by illegal loggers on Saturday. It is the latest incident in a wave of violence targeting indigenous land protectors since the election of Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro last year. Guajajara was killed when he and another forest protector were ambushed by a group of illegal loggers inside the Araribóia reservation in the northeastern state of Maranhão. We speak with João Coimbra Sousa, a field coordinator and legal adviser for Amazon Watch, in São Luís in the northeastern state of Maranhão. And in San Francisco, we speak with Christian Poirier, program director at Amazon Watch.

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/23/indigenous-climate-green-new-deal/

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Indigenous People Are Already Working “Green Jobs” — but They’re Unrecognized and Unpaid

Nick Estes

September 23 2019, 4:46 a.m.

[pix Catcher Cuts The Road, an Iraq War veteran, leads a protest march to a sacred burial ground at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, Sept. 9, 2016. A federal judge on Friday denied the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's efforts to halt the construction of a pipeline skirting the northern edge of the reservation on Friday; on the same day, the government ordered a the pipeline company to pause its work. ]

A GROWING CLIMATE consciousness has spurred popular support for a Green New Deal complete with calls for “green jobs” to aid in the transition away from fossil fuels. It’s a welcome development, but it’s also important to recognize the old labor of ecological stewardship — particularly that being carried out by Indigenous land defenders and Water Protectors.

“There’s an idea that we’re out there as paid activists. Wouldn’t that be great?” Anne Spice, a Tlingit researcher and land defender who has been living at Unist’ot’en Camp for several years while finishing her doctoral degree, said with a chuckle.

“There’s an idea that we’re out there as paid activists. Wouldn’t that be great?”

Founded in 2010 on unceded Wet’suwet’en land, Unist’ot’en Camp, some 750 miles north of Vancouver, Canada, aims to block the Coastal Gas Link pipeline, known as CGL, which is being constructed by TC Energy, the firm formerly known as TransCanada. But that’s not the camp’s only purpose: It was also founded to help bring the land and the community back to health after a period of intense logging that threatened moose hunts and salmon runs, elements of a land-based economy threatened by the oil pipeline.

“We are consistently doing the very thing CGL and RCMP” — the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — “are failing to do, which is ask for permission to enter territories and to gather and harvest,” Spice told me. It’s hard, meticulous work grounded in Indigenous culture and maintaining good relations, and not the quick techno-fixes some people are calling for in climate action.

The sort of land defense undertaken in the camp opens up a larger discussion about what “green jobs” are already being performed by Indigenous peoples to save our Earth — and the kind of value we assign to them.

[Climate Crimes

Read Our Complete Coverage]

Similar to how women and non-men have been historically tasked with doing the unpaid labor of housework and child-rearing, the relationship Indigenous caretakers have with the land, water, air, and nonhuman world is typically not viewed as productive. The financial, service, industrial, or technology sectors usually define what counts as a “job” — and it’s frequently bound up with polluting. Rarely is Indigenous caretaking defined as work. Yet, like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.

Despite preserving the very elements needed to sustain life — such as clean air, water, and land — from settler states, repression against Indigenous peoples protecting their territories runs rampant.

[Related

On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon,Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe

...

Meet Brazil’s Indigenous Leader Attacked by Bolsonaro at U.N. over Efforts to Preserve the Amazon

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/9/24/un_climate_summit_indigenous_leader_barred

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/17/brazil-criminal-networks-target-rainforest-defenders

São Paulo) – Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is driven largely by criminal networks that use violence and intimidation against those who try to stop them, and the government is failing to protect both the defenders and the rainforest itself, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 165-page report, “Rainforest Mafias: How Violence and Impunity Fuel Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon,” documents how illegal logging by criminal networks and resulting forest fires are connected to acts of violence and intimidation against forest defenders and the state’s failure to investigate and prosecute these crimes.

“Brazilians who defend the Amazon are facing threats and attacks from criminal networks engaged in illegal logging,” said Daniel Wilkinson, acting environment and human rights director at Human Right Watch. “The situation is only getting worse under President Bolsonaro, whose assault on the country’s environmental agencies is putting the rainforest and the people who live there at much greater risk.”

The criminal networks have the logistical capacity to coordinate large-scale extraction, processing, and sale of timber, while deploying armed men to intimidate and, in some cases, kill those who seek to defend the forest, Human Rights Watch found.

On September 23, 2019 the United Nations will hold a summit meeting to discuss global efforts to mitigate climate change. As its contribution to those efforts, Brazil committed in 2016 to eliminate illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030.

Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 170 people, including 60 members of Indigenous communities, and other local residents in the states of Maranhão, Pará, and Rondônia. Researchers also interviewed dozens of government officials in Brasília and throughout the Amazon region, including many who provided inside accounts of how President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies are undermining enforcement efforts.

...

Why Indigenous Hunting Is Essential to Forest Sustainability

ew 919

https://www.ecowatch.com/leaked-documents-bolsonaro-amazon-rainforest-2639991444.html

no lnx vid?

Leaked Documents Show Brazil’s Bolsonaro Has Grave Plans for Amazon Rainforest

openDemocracy Aug. 23, 2019 02:01PM EST POLITICS

Wildfires have raging through the Amazon rainforest for weeks.

Pixabay

By Manuella Libardi

Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact.

The Bolsonaro government has as one of its priorities to strategically occupy the Amazon region to prevent the implementation of multilateral conservation projects for the rainforest, specifically the so-called "Triple A" project.

"Development projects must be implemented on the Amazon basin to integrate it into the rest of the national territory in order to fight off international pressure for the implementation of the so-called 'Triple A' project. To do this, it is necessary to build the Trombetas River hydroelectric plant, the Óbidos bridge over the Amazon River, and the implementation of the BR-163 highway to the border with Suriname," one of slides read.

One of the slides from the presentation.

democraciaAbierta

In February, ministers Gustavo Bebianno (Secretary General of the Presidency), Ricardo Salles (Environment) and Damares Alves (Women, Family and Human Rights) had planned travel to Tiriós (Pará) to speak with local leaders about the construction of a bridge over the Amazon River in the city of Óbidos, a hydroelectric plant in Oriximiná, and the expansion of the BR-163 highway to the Suriname border. But this meeting was canceled.

A second meeting among government officials, also in February, used a PowerPoint presentation that details the projects announced by the Bolsonaro government for the region. The presentation, which was leaked to democraciaAbierta, argues that a strong government presence in the Amazon region is important to prevent any conservation projects from taking roots.

The slides are clear. Before any predatory plan is implemented, the strategy begins with rhetoric. Bolsonaro's hate speech already shows that the plan is working. The Amazon is on fire. It's been burning for weeks and not even those who live in Brazil were fully aware. Thanks to the efforts of local communities with the help of social networks, the reality is finally going viral.

The online reaction is far from being sensationalist. This year alone, Brazil had 72,000 fire outbreaks, half of which are in the Amazon. The National Institute for Space Research reported that its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018.

Attacking non-governmental organizations is part of the Bolsonaro government's strategy. According to another of the PowerPoint's slide, the country is currently facing a globalist campaign that "relativizes the National Sovereignty in the Amazon Basin," using a combination of international pressure and also what the government called "psychological oppression" both externally and internally.

This campaign mobilizes environmental and Indigenous rights organizations, as well as the media, to exert diplomatic and economic pressure on Brazilian institutions. The conspiracy also encourages minorities — mainly Indigenous and Quilombola (residents of settlements founded by people of African origin who escaped slavery) — to act with the support of public institutions at the federal, state and municipal levels. The result of this movement, they say in the presentation, restricts "the government's freedom of action."

So it is unsurprising that Bolsonaro's response to the fires comes in the form of an attack on NGOs. On Wednesday, August 21, Bolsonaro said he believed non-governmental organizations could be behind the fires as a tactic "to draw attention against me, against the government of Brazil."

Bolsonaro did not cite names of NGOs and, when asked if he has evidence to support the allegations, he said there were no written records of the suspicions. According to the president, NGOs may be retaliating against his government's budget cuts. His government cut 40 percent of international transfers to NGOs, he added.

Part of the government's strategy of circumventing this globalist campaign is to depreciate the relevance and voices of minorities that live in the region, transforming them into enemies. One of the tactics cited in the document is to redefine the paradigms of indigenism, quilombolism and environmentalism through the lenses of liberalism and conservatism, based on realist theories. Those are, according to a slide, "the new hopes for the Homeland: Brazil above everything!"

https://www.ecowatch.com/gold-miners-murder-indigenous-leader-amazon-2639458840.html

Gold Miners Murder Indigenous Leader, Force Villagers in Brazil’s Amazon to Flee

Olivia Rosane Jul. 29, 2019 01:57PM EST POLITICS

[A Waiapi man looks at a boy picking fruits from a Geninapo tree at the Waiapi indigenous reserve in Amapa state in Brazil on Oct. 13, 2017. APU GOMES / AFP / Getty Images]

Gold miners invaded indigenous territory in Brazil's Amazon, killing one leader and prompting villagers to flee for safety, The New York Times reported Saturday.

The violence confirms fears that right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro's promises to open protected lands to mining and other extractive industries will have devastating consequences for indigenous communities.

"The president is responsible for this death," opposition Sen. Rodolfe Rodrigues told The New York Times.

Rodrigues received an urgent voice message from leaders of the Wajãpi tribe, who live in the state of Amapá in Northern Brazil.

"They are armed with rifles and other weapons," community leader Jawaruwa Waiãpi said in the message. "We are in danger. You need to send the army to stop them."

Federal police arrived in the area Sunday, and both police and the federal prosecutors' office said they would investigate the incident, BBC News reported.

The murdered leader was identified as 68-year-old Emyra Wajãpi. His body was found with stab wounds in a river Wednesday, according to Brazil's indigenous rights agency Funai.

Reports of what happened next are mixed. Armed miners entered the village of Yvytotõ Friday, occupying a home and prompting the villagers to flee 40 minutes on foot to Mariry village, according to accounts from BBC News and Survival International. The Guardian reported that villagers fled Mariry to the larger village of Aramirã, where shots were fired on Saturday. BBC News reported that 10 to 15 miners invaded, while The Guardian and The New York Times put the number at dozens.

"The garimpeiros [miners] invaded the indigenous village and are there until today. They are heavily armed, they have machine guns. That is why we asking for help from the federal police," 26-year-old tribe member Kureni Waiãpi, who lives in Pedra Branca do Amapari, said, as The Guardian reported. "If nothing is done they will start to fight."

As the villagers sent their message pleading for help Saturday, Bolsonaro once again expressed his desire to open indigenous reserves to mining, speaking of the resources located in the Raposa Serra do Sol and Yanomami reserves, where mining invasions are common.

"I'm looking for the 'first world' to explore these areas in partnership and add value. That's the reason for my approximation with the United States. That's why I want a person of trust in the embassy in the USA," Bolsonaro said, according to the O Globo newspaper, as The Guardian reported. Bolsonaro has come under fire for his plan to appoint his son Eduardo as the U.S. ambassador.

Rodrigues said the weekend's incident was the first invasion of Waiãpi land in 30 years, according to BBC News.

Invasions like this one are "encouraged by the irresponsible, authoritarian and prejudiced stance of the current government — especially President Bolsonaro — and its attack on the rights of this country's first peoples," the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon said in a statement reported by Survival International.

The Waiãpi were first contacted in 1973 when Brazil's military dictatorship built a highway through part of their land, bringing miners and deadly diseases. Their territory was officially recognized in 1996. Today, around 1,500 Waiãpi live in the protected area, according to Survival International.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping ... ›

aha: dereg (damages protection of forest, thus buffer and resilience) and corruption is lack of info on effects so we can avert disaster --> AGW:

ref

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point

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Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'

Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil

Jonathan Watts in Altamira

@jonathanwatts

Thu 25 Jul 2019 17.40 BST Last modified on Thu 25 Jul 2019 21.37 BST

Amazon rainforest turned into farmland. An area the size of Greater London has been lost this month. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.

Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.

With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.

The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.

“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”

It may also complicate ratification of Brazil’s biggest ever trade deal with the European Union if EU legislators decide the South American nation is not keeping its side of the bargain, which includes a commitment to slow deforestation in line with the Paris climate agreement.

The official numbers from the National Institute for Space Research are a growing embarrassment to Bolsonaro, who has tried to fob them off as lies and criticised the head of the institute.Earlier this week, the president insisted the numbers should be screened by the ministry of science and technology and shown to him before being made public so that he did not get “caught with his pants down”.

This has raised fears that the data could be vetted in future rather than automatically updated online each day as is currently the case.

In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection.

He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby. His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.

This has emboldened those who want to invade the forest, clear it and claim it for commercial purposes, mostly in the speculative expectation it will rise in value, but also partly for cattle pastures, soya fields and mines.

Earlier this month, it was reported that thousands of gold miners illegally invaded Yanomami indigenous territory near the border with Venezuela. Elsewhere, illegal loggers have mounted at least two attacks in response to Ibama enforcement operations,according to the Folha newspaper. On 4 July, they reportedly burned an Ibama truck in Espigão d’Oeste, Rondônia state and last week they were said to have burned bridges in Placas, Pará state.

Rather than defend his officials, the environment minister Ricardo Salles appeared to side with the loggers when he gave a speech to a group of them in Rondônia soon afterwards, in which he reportedly told them: “The timber industry deserves to be respected … What happens today in Brazil, unfortunately, is the result of years and years and years of a public policy of producing laws, rules, regulations that are not always related to the real world. What we are doing now is precisely bringing the legal part of the real world that happens in every country from north to south.”

During a recent G20 meeting, Bolsonaro told the German chancellor Angela Merkel that she had no right to criticise because Brazil’s conservation record was superior to that of Europe’s. This is a dubious claim, according to Climate Observatory, which cites World Bank data that shows Germany has given protected status to a bigger share of its land than Brazil.

Brazil is also going backwards fast. After an 80% reduction in the rate of deforestation between 2006 and 2012, successive governments have relaxed protections. Clearance has been creeping up. Last year, deforestation rose 13% to the highest level in a decade. This year is on course to be far worse and the trend is back towards the dark days of the early 2000s.

“Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies,” said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups.

He said Salles had eradicated the department responsible for policies to combat deforestation, that no leaders have been appointed in eight of the nine Ibama regional offices, and that operations to combat environmental crimes declined 70% between January and April 2019 compared with the same period last year.

The Deter satellite data is considered preliminary, but it is usually a guide to the longer-term trends. More detailed annual figures are usually released towards the end of the year, after the National Institute for Space Research has calculated data from the more powerful Prodes satellite system.

Trees are considered essential to climate stability. Earlier this month, a study indicated that planting a trillion trees could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. But scientists say maintaining existing forests, particularly in the tropics, is far more important.

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/

no lnx many

[vid]

SHE DEFENDED HER LAND AGAINST A MINE IN GUATEMALA. THEN SHE FLED IN FEAR FOR HER LIFE.

Alleen Brown

June 23 2019, 7:30 a.m.

Video by Martyna Starosta

TERESA MUÑOZ WAS riding her motorbike along her regular delivery route on a winding Guatemala road, carrying the homemade cheese she sold for a living, when she saw in her rearview mirror one of the white sedans that employees of the Escobal silver mine drove. Mining company cars had followed her before, but this time, the vehicle swerved. The driver rammed her motorbike, pitching her into the street, and then sped off. Muñoz was left bruised and scraped, convinced they’d meant to kill her.

For years, she had been a leader in the fight against the silver mine, the project of Tahoe Resources, a U.S.-headquartered Canadian company. Located in the southeastern Guatemala city of San Rafael las Flores, Escobal was on its way to becoming one of the largest silver mines in the world. Muñoz and her family helped organize community votes on the mine, participated in rallies to stop production, and educated people about the mine’s potential harms.

Rainfall in the mountains that contain the Escobal mine feeds the Los Esclavos River and a multitude of natural springs, whose waters fuel the production of coffee and onions in the region, grown for export. For sustenance, families grow beans, corn, and squash in the forested hillsides. More than half the surrounding population lives below the poverty line, making them particularly vulnerable to changes in the local hydrology. Mines like Escobal use massive quantities of water and divert flows in ways that can disrupt communities’ access. Such projects have also been known to leach heavy metals into drinking water sources.

The mountains are part of the territory of the Xinca people, an Indigenous group whose language and culture were nearly wiped out by Spanish colonizers and the Catholic Church. For years, Tahoe Resources argued that there were no Xinca people left in the communities surrounding the mine who would require any consultation. They were wrong. In fact, the mine’s denial of the Xincas’ existence fueled a regional reclamation of the identity. “Soy Xinca” — “I am Xinca” — has become the rallying cry under which Muñoz and others fight.

[GettyImages-866773202-tahoe-guatemala-mining-1561145616RTS2014K-guatemala-tahoe-mining-1561145629

Left: The mining complex in San Rafael Las Flores, Guatemala, on Oct. 26, 2017. Right: Workers at the Escobal silver mine in Guatemala on Aug. 14, 2017.Photos: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images; and Luis Echeverria/Reuters]

In response to the anti-mining movement in San Rafael, Tahoe hired firms run by U.S. and Israeli ex-special forces veterans to protect the project and lobbied the Guatemalan government to quash the resistance. Over the course of the 12-year conflict, mine opponents have been shot, imprisoned, and even killed.

For Muñoz, the fight meant exile. “I’m sure, as is my family, that if I had continued there, I wouldn’t be alive anymore,” she told The Intercept. In 2016, she abandoned the land for which she’d risked everything and sought asylum in the United States, a process that has stalled since Donald Trump’s crackdown on asylum-seekers began.

A name for people like Muñoz has emerged over the last decade: land defender. The term encompasses not only environmental activists defending their communities from contamination and lawyers fighting to enforce environmental regulations, but also peasant farmers attempting to hold on to their livelihoods and Indigenous people organizing to protect spaces that represent an extension of their identity.

The most famous land defender was Berta Cáceres, a member of the Lenca Indigenous group in Honduraswho organized opposition to the Agua Zarca Dam. Cáceres’s murder by the dam’s hired hitmen was preceded by a U.S.-backed coup in Honduras in 2009 that paved the way for a wave of mega-project approvals. Now, a global shift toward autocracy is precipitating new threats against land defenders, and Guatemala is a case in point.

Last year was one of the most dangerous for land defenders in Guatemala since the end of the country’s brutal civil war in 1996.According to the Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala, 18 land defenders and campesino organizers were assassinated in 2018, including Indigenous people fighting to protect their territory from agribusiness and hydroelectric projects, and the leaders of peasant organizations fighting to maintain access to land they use to sustain their livelihoods. Ronal David Barillas Díaz, a Xinca leader who organized against the sugar industry as well as the San Rafael mine, was among those killed. Of 392 aggressions against human rights defenders documented by the unit, including threats, assaults, arrests, and unfounded judicial complaints, 184 were aimed at Indigenous people defending their land.

Jorge Santos, the organization’s general coordinator, credits the increase in violence to outgoing President Jimmy Morales’s abandonment of the nation’s lauded anti-corruption efforts. But he finds it hard to be optimistic that the looming runoff presidential election in August holds hope for change. “Guatemala is at an important crossroads,” Santos told The Intercept. “One road is uphill, with many large rocks, but it allows us to build democracy, consolidate mechanisms of equity, aspirations for peace, for social justice, probably very slowly. The other is a road of regression, and it’s a regression that’s taking place at a very fast and accelerated rate. It’s a scenario that is going to put us in a state where it is understood that the only mechanism of exercising power is through violence.”

[GettyImages-81528402-civil-war-guatemala-1561145604

Maya Ixil men carry the coffins of their loved ones, victims of the Guatemalan army massacre of April 16, 1981, for burial in Nebaj, northwest of Guatemala City, on June 9, 2008. Photo: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images]

A Precarious Peace

The roots of the mining industry in Guatemala are soaked in the blood of its 36-year civil war. Beginning in 1960, Guatemala’s military government mercilessly repressed Indigenous-led, leftist opposition movements, killing or disappearing 200,000 people. Although the rebels were called terrorists, the state and its paramilitary groups carried out 93 percent of the killings, and around 80 percent of the victims were Mayan. The communism-obsessed U.S. government provided political and financial support to the murderous regime.

The first large metal mine, owned by theCanadian International Nickel Company, arrived in Guatemala in the early years of the conflict, to an area known to be a center of guerrilla resistance. The mining company’s presence fueled a crackdown that cost 3,000 to 6,000 lives, according to some estimates.

Finally, the 1996 Peace Accords brokered a truce between the government and the opposition movements. The heart of the accords was a demilitarization agreement meant to eliminate the paramilitary forces. For the first time in the nation’s history, the accords also recognized the rights of Indigenous people to preserve their languages, practice their religions, and live free from discrimination. Guatemala signed on to the International Labor Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention the same year.

Beyond humanitarian goals, the accords had another purpose: to signal that Guatemala was open for business. Only months after they were signed, Guatemala enacted a new mining law that allowed foreign companies to wholly own mining enterprises operating in the country, exempted those companies from a variety of taxes, and reduced government royalties on mined minerals. Guatemala became one of the cheapest places in the world to mine.

Meanwhile, members of the old military regime were finding their way into the private sector. In response, the United Nations’ International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, the CICIG, was founded in 2006 “to investigate illegal security groups and clandestine security organizations in Guatemala — criminal groups believed to have infiltrated state institutions.” The U.S. would provide $44.5 million in funding over the next decade.

Quelvin Jiménez, a Xinca lawyer, spent the 2000s developing grammatical standards for the Xinca language and working with a federal anti-racism commission to address ongoing discrimination. In 2010, he learned that the Escobal silver mine would be coming to his people’s homeland. He alerted members of the Xinca community. Among the articles of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention was a requirement that Indigenous people be consulted before minerals are extracted from the territory they occupy.

“As we are in this period of reclaiming our rights, the mine arrives,” said Jiménez. “All those processes are stalled by the presence of the San Rafael mine.”

To its shareholders, Tahoe Resources suggested that it had no responsibility to consult with Indigenous people.“According to our understanding, although Indigenous people may have inhabited the site at one time, there are no Indigenous populations that currently live in the immediate area of the Escobal project site,” the company wrote in a 2012 filing.

[ss-munoz-guatemala-land-defender-1561145638

Teresa Muñoz at her home in the U.S., where she is applying for asylum, in October 2018. Still: Martyna Starosta for The Intercept]

Land Defenders Under Siege

Muñoz’s home in Mataquescuintla, Guatemala, located a few miles from the mine, was built by her father using adobe that she and her 12 siblings helped mix. Growing up, they spent the mornings making tortillas for the family and the rest of the day playing in the woods and planting or harvesting corn, beans, and coffee.

After her father died, Muñoz took charge of caring for her sister Engracia, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a teenager, and cultivated her family’s land, making cheese out of her cows’ milk to sell.

Muñoz had never been involved in any activism until she heard about the mine at church. “When I learned of the tremendous harms that such a project causes to the environment in these territories, I got worried,” Muñoz said.

She and others began holding referenda on the mine in various communities. The tactic could not legally bar the mine from operating, but it created a public record of the lack of local support. In the eight participating municipalities, more than 90 percent of community members voted against the mine. Meanwhile, protesters began rallying at construction sites where infrastructure was being installed.

In response, Tahoe hired International Security and Defense Management, a private security firm run by a U.S. Special Forces veteran, to assemble a security plan. The company hired Golan Group, founded by former Israeli special forces officers, to carry it out.

Muñoz was one of few women who stood front and center at the anti-mine actions. “They realized I was one of the leaders,” she said.

Advocates for land defenders have observed a pattern in the cases of violence they’ve investigated in San Rafael and across Guatemala. “They start to portray human rights defenders as terrorists,” said Maria Reyes, who worked closely with Escobal opponents as an official with Protection International. Extractive industries push the narrative that “thisisn’t a peaceful protest, but rather a blockade that is violating the rights of others.” [THEREFORE VIOLENT?!]

“There’s an escalation that begins with the act of defamation,” Santos explained. “It can reach such a level that it ends in the ‘civil death’ of the human rights defender — when they are captured and brought to prison — or with their physical death, when they are assassinated.”

By the end of 2012, events around the mine were escalating. Protests erupted as Tahoe installed high-voltage lines to power the project.A cement plant and a storage facility were set on fire. Then, in January, two security guards were killed in a confrontation with armed men. The resistance movement denied responsibility for the violence and property damage, suggesting that agents provocateur might have been responsible. The mine’s head of security claimed that surveillance cameras weren’t working at the time, and the identity of the perpetrators never emerged. Two months later, four Xinca leaders, including the president of the Xinca parliament, were kidnapped after participating in a referendum on the mine. One of them was killed.

Meanwhile, Tahoe’s pressure campaign on the Guatemalan government was paying off. The National Security Commission decided that unrest against any mine should be considered a matter ofnational security, according to a report by Plaza Pública, and an opaque interagency group made up of environment, energy, and national security officials was formed to monitor such projects.

Things came to a head in April 2013, when a group of protesters gathered in front of the mine’s entrance. Security guards opened fire, injuring six mine opponents. Protests and road blockades followed, as the Xinca leaders demanded dialogue. The escalating conflict culminated in a midnight standoff near the mine between police and men with covered faces. An officer was shot and killed.

Two days later, Guatemala’s then-president, Otto Pérez Molina, approved a state of siege in four municipalities including San Rafael, deploying thousands of military personnelandsuspending constitutional rights. Arrest warrants were issued for more than a dozen mine opponents, including Muñoz, who was accused of being an organized crime leader.

GettyImages-167936856-siege-guatemala-1561145608 A soldier inspects a car at a checkpoint in Guatemala on May 2, 2013, after then-President Otto Pérez Molina ordered a state of siege. Photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images

Muñoz was in the middle of taking a shower the following morning when she was alerted that military officials were approaching her home. Other women arrested for mine resistance had reported physical and verbal abuse by police. Muñoz made a split-second decision, putting on her clothes backward in her haste to escape into the forest behind her house. She walked all day through the mountains toward Guatemala City, rushing to avoid ending up alone in the dark. She made it the roughly 40 miles before nightfall.

In the months that followed, Muñoz stayed indoors and adopted a new identity. Her brother Santiago had fled too, claiming asylum in Costa Rica, but she was unable to have any contact with him, Engracia, or the rest of her family. It was difficult to bear. Finally, after seven months, a judge withdrew all allegations against her.

Although returning home was a relief, “Another difficult phase of my life began,” Muñoz said. Her dairy business was destroyed, and she felt emotionally frayed and ill-equipped to manage her mounting debt after months in hiding.

Yet to the surprise of her family, she kept participating in the anti-Escobal movement, even as the mine began production.

By then, its impacts were revealing themselves.Residents of the tiny, intensely poor town of Cuchilla, which sits directly above the mine, were experiencing small earthquakes they said always occurred at the same time of day. Cracks appeared in the foundations of their homes, and the state agency that manages disasters eventually declared the community to be uninhabitable. Although the mine agreed to buy the homes of many displaced residents, it denied responsibility for the seismic activity, calling the purchases humanitarian assistance.

Meanwhile, Tahoe continued to claim that there were no Indigenous people in the region. The law was clear enough: If the Xinca existed, then the mine had to consult with them in order to operate. But the company’s argument was based on data from Guatemala’s 2002 census, the results of which have been questioned by anthropologists as well as Xinca leaders.

Muñoz’s story offers insight into why the census data is wrong. When asked by The Intercept if she identified as Indigenous, Muñoz said no. But when asked if she was Xinca, she said yes. Jiménez, the Xinca lawyer, explained that community elders see the designation “Indigenous” as a Western imposition and that few identify as such. A report published by Guatemala’s Ministry of Culture and Sports noted that census takers might have asked ineffective questions or assumed subjects’ ethnic identities based on their clothing or language.

The violence continued.In one of the most tragic incidents in the fight against the mine, a 16-year-old artist, musician, and vocal mining opponent named Topacio Reynoso was shot and killed in 2014 as she left a local festival with her father. Reynoso’s case remains unsolved.

Muñoz was run off the road the next year. At first, she tried to hide her injuries, even from her siblings. But she knew that after defamation, criminalization, and assassination comes impunity. “When one wants to access justice, the fact is it’s not on the side of those who defend human rights,” Reyes explained.

Rather than hoping that her attackers would be deterred by Guatemala’s feeble criminal justice system, Muñoz fled to the United States in 2016. At the time, Tahoe was the second-highest producing silver mine in the world.

GettyImages-486339366-otto-perez-1561145611

Former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, center, attends a court hearing to face corruption charges on Sept. 3, 2015. Photo: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg via Getty Images

At a Crossroads

There was a moment, around the time Muñoz left the country, when it seemed to Santos that the cycle of attacks on land defenders might break.

In 2015, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand the resignation of Pérez Molina. CICIG investigators had uncovered a multimillion-dollar customs fraud scheme involving the president, and it appeared that people were finally fed up with impunity and corruption. Pérez Molina stepped down and was jailed.

It was a time of intense relief and hope for the nation. Aggressions against land and human rights defenders dropped. But it didn’t last long.

By August 2017, the anti-corruption commission was seeking to investigate the new president, Jimmy Morales, for possible campaign finance violations. Although Morales had run on an anti-corruption platform, he refused to become the CICIG’s next target and announced that he would eject its commissioner, Iván Velásquez, from the country. It was the beginning of the president’s war against the commission — and what many would come to call a slow-motion coup.

In turn, 2018 became one of the most violent years Santos had observed. Relative to its population, Guatemala was second only to Colombia in the number of land and human rights defenders assassinated, according to Front Line Defenders. The most intense period of violence began on May 9, when two men gunned down Luis Arturo Marroquín in broad daylight in the town of San Luis Jilotepeque before driving away in a pickup truck. Marroquín was a leader of the Campesino Development Committee, or CODECA, which had applied to launch a political party the same day. In a speech that spring, Morales had railed against the group.

By the time the month was over, threeMaya Q’eqchi’ members of another prominent campesino organization had been murderedin a region to the north, where palm oil plantations have claimed vast tracts of land. In June, three more CODECA members were murdered, all by machete. And at the end of July, the body of Juana Raymundo, a 25-year-old Maya Ixil woman and rising CODECA leader, was discovered with signs of asphyxiation by some kind of rope or belt.

In the midst of it all, the Escobal opponents obtained an appointment with the head of the anti-corruption commission. They explained to investigators that in addition to police repression and the potential for contamination, they were disturbed by the mining money that was coursing through the community.

Some of the money may have been the kind of legal bribery that every boom town sees. In San Rafael, 36 percent of the $16 million in royalties provided to the town has gone toward local government administration. But Leonel López Díaz, who worked as a driver and security guard for the mine and is now involved in the resistance, said he witnessed checks being passed to local officials that he believed to be separate from the royalties. A spokesperson for Pan American Silver, which purchased Tahoe Resources in 2019, did not respond to a question from The Intercept about the allegation. When he worked for another mine, López Díaz said, he used to go to church and record the priest’s Masses, listening for anti-mining rhetoric.

The concerns were enough to pique the investigators’ interest. It was bad timing. In August, Morales officially announced that he would end the CICIG’s mandate.

[GettyImages-1025598396-morales-1561145621 President Jimmy Morales announces that he will not renew the mandate of a U.N. anti-corruption mission in a press conference in Guatemala City on Aug. 31, 2018. Photo: Orlando Estrada/AFP/Getty Images]

When Pérez Molina threatened to shut down the commission in 2015, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withhold aid, and Pérez Molina backed off. But this time, Donald Trump’s administration remained silent, perhaps encouraged by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lobbying from anti-CICIG politicians and businesspeople, or Morales’s attempts to curry favor by opening a Guatemalan embassy in Jerusalem days after the U.S. did the same.

“What is happening in terms of the democratic regression of the United States since the arrival of Donald Trump has also played a fundamental role in the aspirations of the fight against corruption and impunity in [Guatemala],” said Santos.

It’s a problem that goes beyond Central America. “There is also a global expression leaning more and more toward the extreme right,” he said. “We feel this more in the countries that historically have shortfalls in democracy and human rights.” In many such places — such as Brazil, the Philippines, and Colombia — the shift is expressed in violence against land defenders.

Even in the U.S., as Indigenous people and environmental activists gear up to stand in the way of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, many wonder how a law enforcement response under Trump might be even worse than Standing Rock, an oil pipeline fight that was violently repressed under President Barack Obama.

And in the background, the effects of climate change are putting new pressure on land disputes across the globe, including in Guatemala.

Morales will be out as president following a runoff election on August 11. But on the question of uprooting corruption, the two candidates that survived the first round of elections in June are unpromising. Both have already found themselves in the crosshairs of the CICIG. After former first lady Sandra Torres announced her candidacy, she was granted immunity from prosecution for alleged campaign finance violations in the 2015 election. The anti-corruption commission sought to lift her immunity, a request that remains stranded in legal proceedings. And former prisons director Alejandro Giammattei was jailed in 2010 in the wake of a CICIG investigation into the murder of seven prisoners by security officials. Charges against him were eventually dropped. Neither candidate has committed to support the commission.

In 2019, the assassinations of land defenders and campesinos have only continued.The Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala has documented six so far. Four of those killed worked with CODECA. Two more were conservationists for the Foundation for Ecodevelopment and Conservation. They worked in protected areas in eastern Guatemala, including a reserve home to a dozen threatened species of frogs and salamanders whose habitat has steadily been deforested by agribusiness and the timber industry.

[RTS20CIL-xinca-people-guatemala-1561145625

Xinca residents of San Rafael Las Flores outside of the Constitutional Court of Guatemala after a news conference on Tahoe Resources’ Escobal mine on Sept. 6, 2018. Photo: Luis Echeverria/Reuters]

The Checkpoint

Teresa’s brother Miguel Ángel Muñoz begins his 24-hour shift in the community of Casillas at 5 p.m. once a week. As he sits on the side of the highway, he sips coffee and chats with the other dozen or so people keeping watch. Every so often a large truck rolls by, and that’s when the action begins. The men rush to the road and place cones around the vehicle. Most drivers agree to allow them to inspect what is being carried.

“Our job is to stop the trucks and check them to see if they carry mining products or if they’re bringing fuel or cement to the mine. We stop them here, and we register them,” Miguel Ángel said during an October shift. “If they’re not carrying anything, we let them pass.”

The checkpoint in Casillas was set up in 2017, shortly before a court ordered the mine to suspend production, pending litigation over the Xincas’ existence in the area. Law enforcement attempted to evict them that first year, shooting tear gas that billowed near a school and a health center, but they failed. A similar checkpoint has since been set up in the family’s home community of Mataquescuintla.

Despite centuries of efforts by the church, the state, and a private corporation, the Xincas have refused to die. In September, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled against Tahoe Resources, affirming that the Xinca people exist in the area impacted by the mine and must be consulted. Unanswered is whether Xinca consent is required before the project can recommence. “The only proposal we have is that they leave,” Miguel Ángel said.

Tahoe’s share prices tumbled in the wake of the movement’s success in sparking delays. In January, the massive Vancouver-based mining company Pan American Silver moved in to purchase the company for $1.07 billion. “We are working towards building enduring, positive relationships with all stakeholders in the region, and to establishing a reputation as an honest, credible partner. At this stage, we are focused on actively listening in order to create a space for dialogue and to gain a deeper understanding of people’s expectations and concerns about the mine,” Siren Fisekci, Pan American Silver’s vice president for investor relations and corporate communications, told The Intercept in an emailed statement. She said the company is not setting any timeline for the mine’s potential restart.

On the ground, the change in ownership meant little. The in-country staff remain the same, according to the nonprofit Earthworks, and aggression toward the resistance has continued.

Jiménez, the lawyer representing the Xinca people, received death threats over the phone in February. He’s noticed people following him in cars and watching his house. Amnesty International has urged Guatemala’s attorney general to investigate and provide protection.

Asked for comment, Fisekci wrote, “We adhere to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. We do not tolerate threats or any forms of violence.”

In March, Guatemala’s University of San Carlos, along with the local anti-Escobal organization CODIDENA and Virginia Tech researchers from the same lab that exposed lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, published a study on the impacts of the mine so far.

In San Rafael, arsenic has been detected in tap water. Its origins are complicated, according to Guadalupe García Prado, the study’s coordinator. Demand for water after the mine began operations required the city to drill a new water well. The San Carlos researchers traced the arsenic to the new well and found that a water treatment plant is making little difference.

The study found that at least 12 springs have dried up since the mine arrived. Possibly to blame, the researchers argue, is a process called dewatering, where the mine perpetually pumps water out of its tunnels — approximately 255 million gallons per minute — into treatment ponds, before releasing it into the Los Esclavos River. The process is necessary even when the mine is out of production to keep the tunnels from flooding.

The expected productive life of the mine is 18 years, and much of the risk of contamination will arise after it is closed. Newly exposed sulfide minerals in mining areas often react with water and air to form acid mine drainage, which can dissolve other metals, like arsenic, from the surrounding rock, contaminating water. It will fall to the Guatemalan government to manage the risk — a task the researchers argue it lacks the capacity to carry out. In fact, the researchers confirmed that an old artisanal mine in the area that ceased operation 40 years ago was still leaching into water systems, contaminating natural springs with cadmium and lead.

In the end, the mining executives will move on, and the hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in royalties that Tahoe used as bait to hook Guatemala’s government will disappear.

“Guatemala has built a model of such a nature that it exploits, excludes, or exiles,” as Santos put it. “What’s installed is a spurious private investment in which the guarantees of labor rights and social welfare are not exercised.” He added, “What this is going to produce are large contingents of migration.”

ss-checkpoint-guatemala-1561145634 Miguel Ángel Muñoz, Teresa’s brother, at the checkpoint in Casillas, Guatemala, in September 2018. Still: Martyna Starosta for The Intercept

If the conflict against the mine heats up again, Miguel Ángel says he’s willing to die if he has to — migrating to the U.S. is not on the table. He tried that already.

In 1995, Miguel Ángel joined his brother Santiago in the U.S. and got a job at a doughnut bakery in Virginia. He hated almost everything about it. He hated being trapped indoors and the way people looked at him like he was a burden. Remembering riding his bike on a path near the mountains is the only thing that lights up his face when he talks about Virginia. He came home to stay.

Teresa’s sister Salomé Muñoz returned too, after eight years of working long night shifts and selling tamales in the U.S. to get by. Her three children are U.S. citizens, but given the opportunity to go home to the mountains, she opted out of the United States. “Here, I walk barefoot in the mountains. Here, you go along singing; there’s no penalty for making noise. My life was very confined there,” she said. She’s caring for Engracia in their father’s home in Teresa’s absence.

Teresa Muñoz packages bacon on a frigid, fast-moving assembly line 10 hours a day. Her lawyer says hers is a textbook asylum case, yet proceedings have been stalled for months. Still, she’s building a life for herself. Although she has few friends, she attends church on Sundays and goes to the gym. Her studio apartment is surrounded by large trees.

Muñoz can’t imagine a scenario in which she’ll be able to return to Guatemala. But she’s found small ways to continue to defend her land, even from thousands of miles away. “I’ve managed to form a little group of people here in the United States,” she said. Over the phone, she’s coordinating friends of the Escobal resistance now living across the U.S. to raise money for meals for mining opponents during their 24-hour shifts. “We’ll send it to the mountains, to my town.”

Reporting for this story was supported with a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Defending Land and Environmental Rights Has Become an Increasingly Deadly EndeavorSAN PEDRO, PERU – JULY 19, 2017: A dead fish floats in a film of oil residue. A recent pipeline leak leaves the fishing grounds for five communities contaminated. 1,600 barrels of oil skimmed were off of this stream. San Pedro, on the Marañón River in the State of Loreto, Puru on July 19, 2017. (Photo by Ben Depp)“This Is Not A Symbolic Action” — Indigenous Protesters Occupy Oil Platforms in Radicalized Fight Against Pollution in the AmazonA woman holds a picture of Honduran Human Rights activist, Coordinator of the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) Berta Caceres Flores, reading "Justice for Berta", during a march for the International Women Day in Managua on March 8, 2016. The march was to demand an international commission to investigate Caceres' murder, which took place on March 3 in La Esperanza, Honduras. AFP PHOTO/ Inti OCON / AFP / Inti Ocon (Photo credit should read INTI OCON/AFP/Getty Images)Drugs, Dams, and Power: The Murder of Honduran Activist Berta CáceresHow a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Alleen Brown

alleen.brown@?theintercept.com

:{ Indigenous Resistance to Big Oil Heats Up in Ecuador:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:

Reynard Loki - June 28, 2019 - Earth | Food | Life

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/social-movements-in-latin-america-are-under-attack-despite-colombia-peace-plan/

Social movements in Latin America are under attack despite Colombia ‘peace plan’

With Venezuela occupying the small bandwidth our media has for news about Latin America, there is virtually no information about Colombia, where a horrible wave of violence in the past two years has taken the lives of hundreds of social movement leaders and activists around the country, especially in places such as Cauca, Antioquia, Santander and Arauca. That’s why Colombia’s social movements organized the Humanitarian Refugee Convergence, which took place April 28-May 2 in Bogota, Colombia. It brought together over 1,000 activists from indigenous, black, women and campesino (farmer) organizations, as well as groups representing victims of Colombia’s long armed conflict, to speak out against the violence and call on the government to protect their lives.

During the Convergence, we had a chance to talk to Wilmer Castillo, a spokesperson for the National Agrarian Coordination, a group that brought campesinos from around the country to Bogota.