Categoría: indigenous

Bolivian Chapare province evicts fascist Coup Regime: Now prepares for a bloody re-invasion

BoliviaDecember 24, 2019Bolivia’s free territory of Chapare has ousted the coup regime and is bracing for a bloody re-invasionShareTweet

Spending time with the union members of Chapare, who run society in a collective fashion, offers special insights into the resistance to the coup. They succeeded in expelling the police, but now fear a bloodbath in retaliation.

By Ollie Vargas

Cochabamba, Bolivia — Known as Bolivia’s Chapare region, the Tropico of Cochabamba is a sanctuary for elected President Evo Morales’ most dedicated base of support. Since the November 10 coup, it has effectively become a self-governing territory where the military junta is absent.

The police and military were sent in full retreat from this area the coup began and were told they would only be welcomed back if the they “get on their knees and apologize” to the community. 

In this 12,000 square kilometer swath of land, hundreds of unions have flourished over the years. I spent several days with the union rank and file, witnessing how they run society in a collective fashion, and how they have organized ferocious resistance to a right-wing coup government that threatens to destroy them.

Despite the resilience on display here, there is also a sense of dread. Union leaders told me that if the state decides to militarize the region, as it has threatened, a bloodbath is practically inevitable. If the violent crackdown arrives, it could unravel a social structure they have been steadily constructing for decades.

Continuar leyendo «Bolivian Chapare province evicts fascist Coup Regime: Now prepares for a bloody re-invasion»

Global Action: Free West Papua! 5th to 7th Sept

Join the Global Action for West Papua! 5th to 7th September

#ULMWP ..  The last 2 weeks has seen the largest mass demonstrations across West Papua in nearly 20 years and as they risk their lives to raise their national flag and call for a referendum.

The West Papuan people are sending a very clear message to the Indonesian government; enough is enough.

The inspiring West Papua Uprising began on August 18th, calling for justice after West Papuan students in Surabaya were racially abused, called “monkeys” and tortured by Indonesian forces.

Since then, it has become a huge movement with protests everywhere across the country, demanding that West Papua’s fundamental right to self-determination be respected through a referendum as the only solution for peace in West Papua.

Continuar leyendo «Global Action: Free West Papua! 5th to 7th Sept»

Record surge in Amazon fires: Our House Is Burning Down!

More and more people are realizing that irreversible Climate change is happening now. This coincides with the far right takeover of the Brazilian State, hitching it to the insane policies of greed and destruction of the US Regime. But the militarist and misogynist Brazilian right is not yet all powerful. We can still exert pressure in many ways, perhaps in Europe by supporting threats to cancel the upcoming EU/Mercosur trade agreement if the Brazilian regime continues its policies and its campaign to destroy the Amazon Rainforest, which belongs to nobody and us all.

Amazon burning: Brazil reports record surge in forest fires

Brazilian Amazon beset by 9,500 new forest fires since Thursday, prompting fresh scrutiny of President Bolsonaro’s environmental stewardship.

Fires raging in Brazil‘s Amazon rainforest have hit a record high number this year, according to new data from the country’s space research agency, as concerns grow over President Jair Bolsonaro‘s management of the environment.

7 Steps You Can Take to Help Save the Amazon Rainforest

Nearly 73,000 fires were recorded between January and August, compared with 39,759 in all of 2018, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) said on Monday. The surge marks an 83 percent increase over the same period last year and is the highest since INPE records began in 2013.

Satellite images spotted more than 9,500 new forest fires since Thursday alone, mostly in the Amazon basin, home to the world’s largest tropical forest and seen as vital to slowing the pace of global warming.

SAVE THE AMAZON and stand with the forest guardians.  Losing the Amazon means losing the home of indigenous and traditional communities, precious habitats, and the fight against climate change. Preserving rainforests can contribute to fighting the climate crisis we’re facing. Continuar leyendo «Record surge in Amazon fires: Our House Is Burning Down!»

Indigenous and Country Women hold 100,000-Strong March in Brasília

 From August 9 to 13, the First March of Indigenous Women of Brazil was carried out, with the slogan “Territory: our body, our spirit”. This march then joined the 6th country women’s March of the Margaridas, and the Tsunami of Education in defense of the education system. The Indigenous Women’s March joined the mobilization in Brasília
leer en castellano más abajo
Maria Anecy Martins arrived in Brasília this week with glowing eyes to join the 2019 ‘Daisies’ (=Margaridas) March. The 45-year-old small farmer is one of the 100,000 peasant women who joined the 2-day event .

The sixth edition of the ‘Daisies’ March took place in Brasília on Aug. 13 and 14. The name of the event, originally Marcha das Margaridas, pays tribute to Margarida Maria Alves, a union leader in the northeastern state of Paraíba who fought for rural workers’ rights and was murdered by contract killers hired by big landowners in 1983.

A New Wave of Attacks on Brazil’s Amazonian Indigenous … Invasions of Indigenous territories by land grabbers have spiked since Bolsonaro took office and immediately rolled back federal protections.

A huge banner reads “Women from Maranhão for a Fairer Country” | Andressa Zumpano via Midia Ninja/Collaborative Media Coverage

Since 2000, organized female workers from rural areas, water communities, forests, and urban areas hold the Daisies’ March to continue Margarida Alves’ struggle, demanding workers’ rights and the end of land conflicts and all forms of violence and oppression. Continuar leyendo «Indigenous and Country Women hold 100,000-Strong March in Brasília»

Love and Power: The Ballad of Oso Blanco Revisited

..By     Anonymous Contributon   … shared via It’s Going Down

“It’s a long way to Nottinghamshire,
Or to Chiapas, Mexico,
But you can’t tell me that Robin Hood ain’t real
Since the Feds caught up with Oso Blanco!”
– The Martyr Index, by “Oso Blanco”

“I hope to inspire people to have courage beyond their daily understanding. As we truly have endless love and power within.”
– Letter from Oso Blanco, 6/4/2019

by Clayton P

Official sources say that Oso Blanco, to whom the State refers by his birth name, Byron Shane Chubbuck, is responsible for about 20 bank robberies from 1998-1999, all undertaken for the express purpose of aiding the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional/Zapatista National Liberation Army) in Chiapas. Oso Blanco himself puts the number of “robberies” at closer to 50.

“The bankers got bailed out. Oso Blanco went to prison.”

There’s a satisfying symmetry—I won’t call it poetic justice—in using money from banks to fund revolutionary struggle. Banks are in the business of burying people’s hopes and of destroying their dreams. But the goals of freedom-fighters like the Zapatistas—and like Oso Blanco himself—are to keep hope alive, to nurture the revolutionary dream of a world free from oppression and exploitation. Continuar leyendo «Love and Power: The Ballad of Oso Blanco Revisited»

Zapatistas resisting ecocidal Highway and Luxury Hotels

#Chiapas: The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway is back and so is the resistance

Chiapas, Mexico:
The highway is heating up conflicts in the region.
Originally published by Chiapas Support.
The San Cristobal-Palenque highway is key to an elaborate tourism development plan, the Palenque Integral Center (CIP, its initials in Spanish), which includes a lush green jungle area in the northern zone of Chiapas, the Agua Azul Cascades, the Misol Ha waterfall and the magnificent archaeological site of Palenque.
Agua Azul Cascades. [1]The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway and the Palenque Integral Center are part of a regional development plan for Mesoamerica, originally known as the Plan Puebla-Panamá (PPP). [2]The PPP included numerous infrastructure projects that prompted strong opposition from social, environmental and human rights organizations, as well as academics and organized indigenous communities.
That led governments and planners to silence the most controversial projects contained in the plan and to re-name it the Mesoamerica Project.
In Chiapas, at least up to now, the most controversial projects within the Mesoamerica Project have been the San Cristobal-Palenque highway and the Palenque Integral Center. They go together; the CIP needs the highway to facilitate tourism.
 

Residents of the areas affected by these projects have had two general concerns: 1) dispossession of the lands of indigenous communities of subsistence farmers through which the highway would pass and the effects on those communities and 2) the massive amount of tourism envisioned in the Palenque Integral Center.

Perhaps the best articulation of why the Zapatista communities and other pro-Zapatista indigenous communities oppose and resist the superhighway and the Palenque Integral Center may be in the words of Miguel Vazquez Moreno, a Zapatista supporter from the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido, who was briefly a political prisoner as a result of resistance to the superhighway and the tourism megaproject.

“I am a native of the San Sebastián Bachajón ejido and I am part of the EZLN’s support base, an organization that defends its right to exercise autonomy and self-determination as indigenous peoples, its right to territory and to natural resources.

They [the federal and state governments] want to impose neoliberal economic projects on our autonomous territory. As indigenous people, the land is our life, we eat from it, we work, our children grow and it is something sacred, therefore we consider that the land is not for sale but to work and care for. Our territory is rich in water, animals and natural resources.

They want to make it into a ‘Chiapas Cancun’ by plundering the indigenous of our life, that is, the land, just so that foreign and national companies can become richer, as well as the government officials that benefit from these projects. They want to cross through our autonomous territory without respecting our rights.

They want to impose these projects on indigenous peoples without giving importance to our word, and with discrimination they want to remove us from our lands for tourist purposes and only to benefit rich developers and the federal and state government, putting us aside because to them we give a bad appearance to those eco-tourist centers, being that we are original peoples, descendants of the peoples that have lived on these lands since before anything like an official government existed.” [3]

The San Cristóbal-Palenque highway would pass through small rural indigenous communities, both Zapatista and non-Zapatista, thus dispossessing each community of some of its land and, possibly, dividing those lands in two.

It would also alter animal habitats, endanger animal species and cause air pollution from the giant tourist buses. This is not a highway to facilitate local traffic between one town and the next. It’s a superhighway (toll road) to facilitate international mega-tourism arriving by both airplane and cruise ship.

Cruise ships dock at Puerto Chiapas and from there passengers can then board giant tourist buses to visit the world-famous Palenque archaeological site and other sites, such as the Agua Azul Cascades, within the mega tourism project that the CIP envisions. Imagine the volume of tourism a completed San Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway and CIP would bring when combined with a completed Maya Train station in Palenque bringing tourists to Palenque from Cancun!

Stop the war against the Zapatistas

It would transform life and culture, as we now know it in that area of Chiapas. Like Miguel Vazquez Moreno above, some have dubbed the CIP “the new Cancun.” [4]

The CIP contains an elaborate plan to convert the area surrounding the Agua Azul Cascades into a “world-class resort destination.” The government plan includes a Boutique Hotel, a European 5-

Star Hotel, a Conference Center with golf course, and a Lodge overlooking the waterfall at Bolom Ajaw, a Zapatista community on land reclaimed in the 1994 uprising.

Luxury tourists would have to helicopter into the Lodge at Bolom Ajaw due to its remoteness, so plans for the lodge include a helipad!

The Agua Azul area has been a flashpoint of conflict between pro-government communities (in favor of luxury tourist development because the government has promised them a cut of the income) and pro-Zapatista communities (opposed to development based on luxury tourism).

The controversial project pAgua Azul, of roposed for which a superhighway is key to attracting large numbers of tourists, has already generated three pro-Zapatista deaths (one in Mitzitón and 2 in San Sebastián Bachajón), numerous violent conflicts, serious bodily injuries, political prisoners, death threats, torture and the death of at least one government supporter in Bolom Ajaw. The San Sebastián Bachajón ejido includes the entryway to the Agua Azul Cascades.

The government argues that these tourist projects will bring jobs and income into a very poor state, while Zapatista supporters, their sympathizers and allies argue that the volume of tourism envisioned will damage the environment, their food security, their autonomy and their way of life; that is, their culture.

Government planners envision converting autonomous subsistence farmers, who believe that the land is sacred, into busboys, maids and bellhops.

The Los Llanos court decision

The Los Llanos ejido is located on the current highway to Palenque, close to where the new highway was originally supposed to start. It is across the highway from the Mitzitón ejido, near the intersection where the current highway to Palenque forks off from the Pan American Highway.

In January 2014, the Los Llanos ejido filed for an injunction against the new superhighway crossing through their lands, based on their right to a prior, free and informed consultation (consulta) about the project. [5]

The government had not followed the United Nations protocol for consulting with Los Llanos before starting construction. A temporary injunction against highway construction was in place while the case was pending. Two years later, in January 2016, the court granted an amparo (permanent injunction) to Los Llanos, ruling that the government failed to conduct the required consultation with the affected communities. [6]

The court decision prevented construction of the superhighway, but only in the municipalities of San Cristóbal de las Casas and Huixtán, where Mitzitón and Los Llanos are located, leaving open the possibility of either re-routing the controversial superhighway or improving the existing highway.

Approximately 9 months after Los Llanos filed its court case, opposition to the San Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway emerged again and it was from La Candelaria ejido in the Chiapas municipality of San Juan Chamula. More than 2,000 representatives, including people of faith belonging to Pueblo Creyente, attended this meeting at La Candelaria’s sacred site of Laguna Suyul and vowed to resist the highway. [7]

The clear implication of this important meeting was that government planners intended to re-route the superhighway to begin in San Juan Chamula, a municipality bordering on San Cristóbal de las Casas, and pass close to the sacred Laguna Suyul site.

A map of the route is shown in the article. The recent news article about resistance in San Juan Cancuc means that the new route remains pretty much the same as that shown at the time of the La Candelaria meeting and would pass through San Juan Cancuc over the mountains in the direction of the Agua Azul Cascades.

Many of the municipalities and organizations represented in La Candelaria have joined San Juan Cancuc in resisting the new route for the superhighway. They issued a statement as members of the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite). [8]

The list of municipalities signing the statement is a good indicator of the superhighway’s new route and the municipalities that would be affected.

[1] https://chiapas-support.org/2019/04/11/residents-of-san-juan-cancuc-reject-san-cristobal-palenque-superhighway-construction/

[2] https://chiapas-support.org/2014/03/25/the-plan-puebla-panama-is-changing-chiapas/

[3] Chiapas Update, August 2009, pp. 3-4

[4] https://expansion.mx/obras/pulso-de-la-construccion/chiapas-se-perfila-como-el-nuevo-cancun

[5] https://chiapas-support.org/2014/01/25/indigenous-file-lawsuit-against-san-cristobal-palenque-toll-road/

[6] https://chiapas-support.org/2016/05/30/indigenous-win-lawsuit-against-the-san-cristobal-palenque-superhighway/

[7] https://chiapas-support.org/2014/09/22/opposition-to-chiapas-super-highway/

[8] https://chiapas-support.org/2019/04/30/8-more-municipalities-reject-the-san-cristobal-palenque-highway/

Members of the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) during the celebration act of the New Year in the community of La Garrucha,PHOTO /BERNARDO DE NIZ

Chiapas: Frayba Denounces Intensification of Attacks against Indigenous Peoples since December 2018

Frayba

On May 27th, the Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Center for Human Rights published a bulletin warning that, “aggressions against peoples, communities and organizations have intensified as part of a strategy to contain civil and peaceful resistance in defense of territory.” Two years after the Constituent Assembly of the Indigenous Council of Government (CIG in its Spanish acronym), of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI in its Spanish acronym).

It illustrated the statement by referring to the six indigenous defenders who have been murdered so far in 2019, as well as mentioning the CNI’s own denunciations since December 2018 with situations of “dispossession, forced displacement, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, threats, harassment, criminalization and attempts of executions.”

Frayba denounced that “this logic of war against the peoples that build autonomy, is reproduced in the increase of militarization of Zapatista territories, especially the incursions, flights and espionage of the Mexican Army to the headquarters of the Junta de Buen Government Toward Hope, in La Realidad Caracol (Official Municipality of Las Margaritas). This containment is deepened by the presence of the National Guard in the region, which increases risks to the integrity and security of the population.”

In this context, Frayba demanded that the Mexican State: “Cease the attacks against peoples, communities and organizations that make up the National Indigenous Congress; justice for the defenders and communicators murdered in the country; and high militarization in Chiapas and Mexico.”

For more information in Spanish:

Contrainsurgencia a Pueblos Originarios que construyen la vida digna (CDH Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a 27 de mayo de 2019)

Las agresiones contra pueblos originarios se intensifican: Frayba (La Jornada, 29 de mayo de 2019)

For more information from SIPAZ:

Guerrero: Two Members of CRAC-PF and CIPOG-EZ Murdered (May 28, 2019)

Guerrero: CNI Denounces Kidnapping and Murder of Two Members (May 11, 2019)

Chiapas: denuncian dos comunidades choles de Salto de Agua amenazas, persecución y hostigamientos (El 22 de abril de 2019)

National: Third Assembly of National Indigenous Congress and Indigenous Council of Government (CNI-CIG) in Mexico City (March 14, 2019)

Chiapas : CNI denuncia amenazas y agresiones en la zona Norte (El 16 de agosto de 2018)

Paula Rosero, 596th Human Rights Defender Killed in pro-US Colombia

…» if Venezuela falls to the US capitalist onslaught it will be a new Colombia, with profits for the rich, a genocide against the poor and indigenous and a 50 year long civil war..»
shared from TeleSur English, with thanks

  • featured image above: Murdered human rights defender Paula Andrea Rosero Ordóñez. | Photo: Facebook /

According to a recent count, just since the signing of the peace agreements in Colombia, in November 2016, 596 social leaders have been killed.

Ordóñez was murdered Monday night by a group of strangers in the department of Nariño, in southwestern Colombia, official sources said.

Rosero Ordóñez, 47 years old, was the representative of the Public Ministry of the town of Samaniego, in Nariño, and had previously warned she was receiving threats against her life.

According to a police report, the lawyer was approached by two hit men, who shot her at close range.

Although she was given first aid almost immediately, it was impossible to save his life, the reports said. The Attorney General of the Nation and the Ombudsman of Colombia, in a joint statement, lamented the crime.

SEE ALSO .. Colombia: US backed Right murders over 313 Community Activists/

«@PGN_COL and @DefensoriaCol condemn the crime against the person from Samaniego, Nariño. Statement attached»

Both institutions demanded that the government of Colombian President Ivan Duque «take urgent measures» to guarantee the lives of human rights defenders, as well as all social leaders.

Luis Eduardo Dagua, his body was found with clear signs of torture;

According to a recent count made last week, after the signing of the peace agreements in Colombia, in November 2016, there 139 former guerrilla fighters were killed. Also 31 relatives of ex-rebels have been killed, while 596 social leaders and 119 Indigenous people were murdered.

According to the non-governmental organization Programa Somos Defensores, from January to March, 25 more human rights defenders in Colombia were killed.

shared from TeleSur English, with thanks

The US is blockading and subverting Venezuela to control it like Colombia. Plan Colombia was a counter narcotics and counter insurgency military aid package launched in 2000 by then U.S. President Bill Clinton to put down leftwing resistance to the oligarchy, the ‘Mafia of the Rich’  who have long plagued Colombia, and indeed Latin America, …

COLOMBIA’S WOMEN: VICTIMS OF A COERCIVE PEACE

Plan Colombia Has Been a Nightmare for Women  Six women were raped every hour in Colombia during the first nine years of Plan Colombia. That figure was taken from a joint survey done by women’s rights organizations, which include Oxfam and other Colombian based groups. The study revealed that some 489,678 women were victims of some type of sexual violence, while 7,752 had been forced into prostitution between 2000-2009—what were integral years for the controversial deal.

As one more example, Colombian Indigenous and campesino leader Alicia Lopez Guisao was killed in Medellin

Opinion
  Pro governement march in Nicaragua

Nicaragua in the Shadow of Western Fascism   by Tortilla con Sal

Caracas, May 4, 2019.

The Bolivarian Revolution Metes Out Poetic Justice   by Arnold August

Ramzy Baroud draws comparisons between the global reaction to the fire at Notre-Dame last week in Paris vs that towards the destruction of Churches and mosques in Gaza and Middle East.
Videos

Decolonial feminists in Abya Yala: we are anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-sexist.

Why Decolonial Feminism: New Possibilities from Abya Yala (Latin America)*

It is no longer accurate to speak of one feminism, encapsulating the experiences of white women in the west and laboring women in the global south, for example.

Rather, today, we speak about feminisms, different branches fighting in the cause of women’s freedom, and created by women from the so-called ‟third world” – women of color, black women, and indigenous women.

These feminisms were brought into being when women from around the world began to critique the limitations of the sort of universal feminism that come from the white bourgeois women in the West to explain our own realities. Continuar leyendo «Decolonial feminists in Abya Yala: we are anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-sexist.»

Victory: HSBC Climate Criminals vow to Ditch Fossil Fuels

 Published on Friday, April 20, 2018 by Common Dreams

‘Incredible’ News as Banking Giant HSBC ‘vows’ to Ditch New Coal, Tar Sands, and Offshore Arctic Drilling Projects

The development is «yet another signal to Donald Trump and the rest of the world that, despite their worst laid plans, the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close.»
by  Andrea Germanos, staff writer    8 Comments

Climate groups applauded HSBC's announcement that it is moving away from fossil fuels. (Photo: ItzaFineDay/flickr/cc)Climate groups applauded HSBC’s announcement that it is moving away from fossil fuels. (Photo: ItzaFineDay/flickr/cc)

In another signal that «the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close,» Europe’s biggest bank, HSBC, announced Friday that it will no longer fund oil or gas projects in the Arctic, tar sands projects, or most coal projects.

The move was cheered by climate campaigners on social media, who said, «This is huge,» and called it «incredible news.»

According to Daniel Klier, group head of strategy and global head of sustainable finance at the financial giant, the bank recognizes «the need to reduce emissions rapidly to achieve the target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global temperatures rises to well below 2°C and our responsibility to support the communities in which we operate.»The changes are laid out in HSBC’s updated energy policy, which says it will no longer provide financial services for

  • a) New coal-fired power plant projects, subject to very targeted exceptions of Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam in order to appropriately balance local humanitarian needs with the need to transition to a low carbon economy. Consideration of any such exception is subject to: (i) independent analysis confirming the country has no reasonable alternative to coal; (ii) the plant’s carbon intensity being lower than 810g CO2/kWh; and (iii) financial close on the project being achieved by 31 December 2023

(HSBC finances new coal-fired power plants inBangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia. All three countries are on the front line of climate change and have significant renewable energy potential, a crucial tool to sustainable poverty eradication.)

  • b) New offshore oil or gas projects in the Arctic
  • c) New greenfield oil sands projects
  • d) New large dams for hydro-electric projects inconsistent with the World Commission on Dams Framework
  • e) New nuclear projects inconsistent with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) standards

The announcement, said Kelly Martin, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Dirty Fuels Campaign, «is an important step forward for Europe’s largest bank, and yet another signal to Donald Trump and the rest of the world that, despite their worst laid plans, the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close. There is no future in Arctic fossil fuel operations. There is no future in tar sands. And there is no future in coal.» Continuar leyendo «Victory: HSBC Climate Criminals vow to Ditch Fossil Fuels»