Mobilization for Climate Justice

Note:  As early as Thursday evening, millions of Americans will begin shopping in the most flagrant, obscene display of American consumerism.  This year especially, it is important to recognize the social implications of ‘Black Friday.’  Patterns of over consumption in the US and other major industrialized countries are one of the major drivers of climate change, ecological destruction and displacement of land-based peoples.  While ‘Black Friday’ is advertised as a supposed boon to the American economy, who does it really benefit?  Millions of Americans flock to megastores where under-paid workers are expected to work long hours during the holidays to enrich the one-percent.  This year, it is important to stand with Walmart workers in demanding fair working conditions and an end to the kind of consumerism that leads to fatal frenzies over the hottest new piece of cheap consumer crap.

-The GJEP Team

By Sarah Jaffe, November 20, 2012.  Source:  The Guardian

Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters

On Friday, Americans by the millions will crowd into big-box retail shops to take advantage of bargains on wide-screen TVs and other electronics – necessities, as well as luxuries – all marked down in order to draw them in and have them line up outside in advance of the doors opening. And now, as we’ve learned, several chains plan to open at 8pm on Thanksgiving day itself.

The greatest irony of “Black Friday”, as it’s known, is that it’s seen as a celebration of consumerism, instead of a sign of desperation: when a Walmart worker was crushed to death by a Black Friday crowd in 2008, the news was accompanied with moralizing about American greed, rather than any discussion about low wages in the US.

Would people be so desperate for bargain shopping at already dirt-cheap places like Walmart if they themselves were making a decent living?

This year, Black Friday at Walmarts around the country will be marked by something other than just ultra-low prices. Workers, members of a labor union-backed organization called Organization United for Respect at Walmart (Our Walmart) will be striking and, along with their allies, holding rallies and actions to support the effort. Walmart has managed to go 50 years without a strike; many unions have tried and failed to organize workers. But in just a month and a half, the strikes have spread to stores across 12 cities, and Walmart is worried: the company has filed an unfair labor practices charge with the National Labor Relations Board.

“There is power in Our, and we,” Vanzell Johnson, an Our Walmart member from Lancaster, Texas, told me last month. He’s frustrated with how the company treats its employees, not to mention the dismal wages. Workers around the country allege that despite the company’s supposed “open door policy”, they risk retaliation for speaking up about their conditions by having their hours cut or getting unfavorable shifts.

Walmart, as historian Bethany Moreton pointed out in her excellent book To Serve God and Walmart, was founded and grew in the heartland US where suspicion of chain stores and outsider money was skilfully turned by favorite son Sam Walton into support for his homegrown mega-chain.

Even today, Walmart’s low prices are used for a particular kind of populist appeal: by lowering the cost of living, the argument goes, Walmart helps people “live better”. In fact, they’ve adopted that as their tagline: “Save Money. Live Better.”

The Walmart workers who are now daring to challenge their bosses, meanwhile, have turned that mantra around: “Stand up. Live better” (pdf). Because they know that no matter how low prices at Walmart go, their low wages ensure that they are not, in fact, able to “live better”.

As internal documents have confirmed, Walmart maintains a cap on the wages an associate can make, limiting raises to 60 cents a year for “flawless” performance. Janet Sparks, a Walmart worker from Baker, Louisiana who’s been with the company since 2005, told me that she had colleagues who hadn’t gotten a raise since 2006 because of the cap.

Walmart is by far the nation’s largest retailer, with 2.2 million employees (the next largest is Target with 365,000), and its low wages have set the tone for a nation where the majority of jobs created in the so-called economic recovery pay less than $13.83 per hour.

Catherine Ruetschlin, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan thinkthank Demos and author of its new report, Retail’s Hidden Potential: How Raising Wages Would Benefit Workers, the Industry and the Economy Overall, has said:

“Walmart has been shown to come into a community, pay lower wages than the traditional wage standard, and actually depress the wage standard in the area.”

Manuela Rosales makes $10.70 an hour at the Pico Rivera, California Walmart. I heard her break down in tears on a conference call, as she explained that the $750 or so she takes home after taxes every couple of weeks barely lets her care for her two-year-old son.

“They have it set up to take it or leave it and most people will not leave it,” Johnson said. With average unemployment still hovering around 8% (and much higher for minorities), workers are forced to take what they can get, even if “what they can get” leaves them working long hours over the holidays. If Walmart were to adopt the higher standard she suggests in her report, Ruetschlin asserts:

“Being the largest employer in the United States … they would have significant impact. Based on prior research, it’s absolutely reasonable to think they would raise standards for everyone.”

The Walmart strikers taking the risk of challenging the company on its most profitable day, then, are truly striking for all of us. And it’s a large risk, because if they’re fired, they go out into a job market where there are few opportunities and many others in the same line also waiting for an opening.

Beyond the wage issue, the strikers are fighting for respect and fair treatment: the ultimatum given the company in order to prevent the Black Friday actions was not a raise, but a call to end the retaliation against workers who speak out. As Moreton has noted, the company managed for many years to have happy employees who felt they were part of the Walmart family; it’s the treatment on the job that drove long-time employees like Sparks to speak out.

“Most working people spend most of their time at work, so when I’m at work, I want to be recognized as being taken care of,” Johnson said. Colby Harris, one of the Walmart strikers, told the Nation’s Josh Eidelsonthat he’s determined to stay at Walmart and keep fighting:

If you change Walmart, and you change corporate America, it can really better a lot of people’s lives.

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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog

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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog

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Filed under Africa, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Forests and Climate Change, Green Economy, Land Grabs, The Greed Economy and the Future of Forests

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Filed under Africa, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Forests and Climate Change, Green Economy, Land Grabs, The Greed Economy and the Future of Forests

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Filed under Africa, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, Food Sovereignty, Forests and Climate Change, Green Economy, Land Grabs, The Greed Economy and the Future of Forests

Tagged as All for Africa, bioenergy, cameroon, Herakles Farms, palm oil

By John Ahni Schertow, November 20 2012. Source: Intercontinental Cry

Photo: unistotencamp.wordpress.com

On the Beautiful Widzin Kwa (Morice River): The Grassroots Wet’suwet’en people are winning the physical and awareness campaigns to stop the onslaught of some proposed pipelines from entering their unceded and occupied lands. Exactly one year ago, the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en of the C’ilhts’ekhyu and Likhts’amisyu Clans confronted, and escorted out, employees and drillers of the Pacific Trails Pipeline (PTP) from one of the Wet’suwet’en territories which they call Tal Bits Kwa along the upper reaches of Morice River. Over the span of a year a lot has happened in that sacred area to ensure that the Wet’suwet’en Laws are adhered to and their lands are protected from further destruction.

In December of 2011, shortly after the PTP blockade the Gitxsan people, who are the Western neighbors to the Wet’suwet’en, boarded up the Gitxsan Treaty office Society because of a backroom deal that was signed with the much contested Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline company. The Grassroots Wet’suwet’en regularly visited and openly supported the grassroots Gitxsan who successfully blocked the entry to the office for an additional six months.

In January 2012 the neighboring Indian Act government body to the East called the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council (CSTC) were confronted during a “contractor’s meeting” that was being hosted by the PTP company. A message was issued to the contractors, industry and government representatives in that meeting which stated, “No Pipelines will be constructed through unceded Wet’suwet’en Lands. The Delgamuukw Supreme Court Case of 1997, which the Wet’suwet’en had won, does not make any reference to Indian Act Tribal Council’s or Bands. The plaintiffs in the case are clearly the Hereditary Chiefs and their members. 50% of your proposed pipelines are planned to be constructed through our unceded lands and you are attempting to avoid meaningful consultation with the true title owners. You will be stopped!”

Social Media sites were used as campaign platforms of Indian Act bodies to mislead constituents of the colonial and indigenous-colonial governments regarding the proposed impacts of a “Natural” gas pipeline through central British Columbia. Misleading information such as, ‘the gas is safe and clean’, and, ‘the same route of the existing pipeline of PNG will be followed to Kitimat’ were the selling points used by sell-out Indian Act leaders to their communities. The Grassroots Wet’suwet’en wasted no time and entered those sites and they continued spreading relevant information of environmentally decimating Hydraulic Fracturing processes in Northeastern BC and the catastrophic but preventable Tar Sands expansion in Northern Alberta. Many of the elected representatives of, what the Grassroots membership describe as, “the Indian Act puppet governments” hypocritically decided to openly condemn oil pipelines while quietly trying to permit Natural Gas pipelines onto lands which were not theirs to decide.

During the early Spring of 2012, speaking events organized by academic institutions in Denver Colorado and Vancouver BC began to help spread the word to professional academics and students. Public concern over the proposed impacts of these destructive projects began to spread like wildfire all over the globe. Supporters from all walks of life and all parts of the planet started writing to the Grassroots organizers and showing up to the territories which are under threat to offer their support and solidarity to the fight.

A log cabin, which was started in 2010, was finally completed construction in July of 2012, directly on the GPS centerline of the proposed pipeline corridors. Preparations began for a Grassroots Wet’suwet’en family to turn the cabin into a full time home. Influentially, more Wet’suwet’en families and friends began to assert the will of the membership against the will of the dictatorship-styled society act representation which fell under the name, The Office of the Wet’suwet’en (OW). The OW’s reluctance to publically oppose and condemn the proposed PTP project directly contradicted the will of the membership, expressed in a 2007 Interest and Use study on the proposed PTP Pipeline project, which outright expressed the Wet’suwe’en people’s will to prevent all pipelines from entering the unceded lands. Information campaigns were waged by the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en to prevent the spread of misinformation and deceit against the larger population of Wet’suwet’en people and their allies.

In early August 2012 a hugely successful 3rd Annual Unist’ot’en Action Camp attracted about 200 people from all over North America and some European countries. The Forest Action Network out of Victoria BC fundraised and purchased a large school bus and brought 44 people from as far away as Denver, Colorado and Los Angeles, California to participate in a 5 day series of workshops. Workshops on Decolonization, Direct Action Training, Security Culture, Resistance Writing, Healing, and Cultural workshops facilitated by an amazing group of intellectuals and professionals helped forge new relationships between Supporters and Indigenous people from all over Turtle Island. For many who attended the camp it was described as a genuine life changing experience.

The Fall months of 2012 busied the organizers with a few road trips which took them to speaking engagements in Vancouver and Victoria. The “She Speaks” and the “Defend our Coast” events both heralded immense support from a diverse audience who were willing to learn more about the Federal and Provincial government’s Fracking and Tar Sands expansion agendas which the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en are stopping.

Camp life since the 3rd Annual Action Camp has been generously supported by many fundraising events across the continent and hands on support from supporters who moved out to the Unist’ot’en camp site. Despite daily flyovers from helicopters and finding hidden cameras along the road leading to the camp, work on the camp site has resumed and accelerated with many construction projects. The supporter community at the camp is continuing to grow and continued support with supplies and food are encouraged from many willing supporters from all over. The helpers at the camp have organized their own group and are encouraging other members of the public to join their numbers under the name, Community Allies Supporting Grassroots Wet’swet’en(CASGW). Their hard work is paying off as they continue to visit and correspond with many community networks who are willing to develop their own community based strategies to support the fight against pipelines in unceded Wet’suwet’en lands.

More recently, the OW issued a newsletter displaying motions made in a meeting back in August 1st, 2012, showing their signing of a Confidentiality Agreement and a Communication and Engagement Agreement between the OW and PTP. This revelation is creating an upheaval of unrest amongst the larger Wetsuwet’en population who were unaware of the signing of such agreements. To top it off, the OW have re-entered the BC Treaty process and have signed agreements with the BC Treaty Commission and the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations – this despite the decision by all Wet’suwet’en Clans in 2008 to unanimously opt out of the BC Treaty Process and begin assert their rights and title on and ancient jurisdiction belonging to them.

Despite the divisive tactics of industry and governments on the will of the people, the Grassroots Wet’suwet’en remain steadfast in their determination to stop all trespassing on their lands. As Freda Huson of the Unist’ot’en people states, “Indian Act and Society Act governing structures do not belong to us nor do they have the ability to override the jurisdiction of our people. If our people make decisions with our unborn populations in mind, the manipulative tactics by industry and governments which are meant to divide our people will not work. We will prevail as sovereign people on our unceded and protected lands.”

Hereditary Chief Toghestiy of the Likhts’amisyu states, “We are winning the battle with pipelines. Enbridge Northern Gateway has just moved their right of way 1 mile South of the Unist’ot’en camp. This just happens to be in the same place where our Wet’suwet’en ancestors have had homeplaces and numerous cultural trails. It is pure coincidence that we were already planning to construct new homeplaces for other Wet’suwet’en families in that exact same area. I guess they will have to rethink their evasive strategies and begin a genuine Free Prior and Informed Consent process with us for the first time. Our protocol to enter into our territories is a tough one for manipulative people to pass. I really doubt that PTP or Enbridge Northern Gateway will be able to answer the same questions that good and honest people have easily answered to be welcomed onto our lands.”

Mel Bazil of the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan descent states, “The feelings of deceit and undermining from the constituents of the illegitimate government of Canada towards Harper is exactly what Indigenous people have endured since contact. As we all enter into an era of dramatic climate change and destructive agendas by multinational corporation-led governments we will all need to develop a unanimous strategy to ensure all of our survival. It only makes sense to us to follow Natural Laws like Indigenous people have since time immemorial.”

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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog

By Nyki Salinas-Duda, November 16 2012. Source: In These Times

Bolivia’s embattled TIPNIS reserve. Photo: In These Times

For a viable model of “21^st century socialism,” many progressives look to Latin America’s Leftward surge. But swept up in the continent’s “pink tide” are questions of indigenous land and resource rights, which often clash with state development priorities. From Venezuela to Bolivia to Chile, indigenous communities are charging that they have been betrayed by the populist presidents they helped elect.

Ben Dangl, author of Dancing with Dynamite, notes that the tension between indigenous social movements and pink tide politicians stems from these governments’ reliance on resource extraction to generate income. He told In These Times via e-mail:

For many of Latin America’s new leftist governments, the logic of the state-run extractive industry consistently runs against the rhetoric and rights of respecting the environment and indigenous autonomy. This contradiction has played itself out in many cases across the region, from mining in Venezuela [under President Hugo Chavez], to oil exploitation in Ecuador [under left-of-center President Rafael Correa].

The grandiose rhetoric of Latin American populism often fails indigenous communities who don’t see themselves as part of a national project. But as movements ratchet up struggles against environmental and cultural destruction, they must confront a narrative of economic progress—and, often, face down harsh repression.

The Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) is a protected reserve over 10,000 indigenous people call home. Its muddy waters and breathtaking green vistas reign over a swath of Bolivia, home to Latin America’s first indigenous head-of-state. But after sweeping into office and taking the extraordinary gesture of bestowing rights on “Mother Earth,” Evo Morales has made a surprising about-face by contracting the Brazilian firm OAS to build a 182-mile highway straight through the heart of TIPNIS.  Heavily opposed by indigenous movements, the road was approved last month. But its future remains indefinite.

Carwil Bjork-James, a PhD candidate studying Bolivian social movements at City University of New York, says that the indigenous movements that carried Morales into office are increasingly disillusioned by the contradiction that Morales has come to embody. Though he has called repeatedly for greater consultation with indigenous movements, Morales has also deployed the power of the state to repress them. Throughout the consultation process, officials have pushed an either/or solution on indigenous residents: either the highway project will be completed, or the zone will be declared what Bjork-James calls an intangible economic zone. If TIPNIS is declared as such, other activities that generate revenue for residents – like sustainable logging and ecotourism – will be disallowed, leaving inhabitants with even more limited options for generating income.

In 2011, when indigenous protestors took to the streets in opposition to the highway, organizing slow pilgrimage-like marches through the region, they relied on their “moral credibility as the original inhabitants of the country,” Bjork-James says, to garner support.

But the Morales administration soon took to the offensive. According to Bjork-James, high-ranking members of the government accused anti-highway activists of acting at the behest of USAID. “The government and the movement separated,” he says. “It has reached a crisis point around the TIPNIS controversy and the events that led to that separation.”

By 2011, a TIPNIS march was met with outright repression when police tried to “arrest an entire march. [They] arrested hundreds of people. High-ranking indigenous leaders were severely beaten, some hospitalized. Some of the people who were in there were indigenous members of Parliament, and they were also arrested,” Bjork-James added.

The Morales government went one step further when the President appeared on television during the TIPNIS march to repeat the USAID accusations and claimed the activists were secretly rightwing. “The indigenous who oppose the road are being confused,” Morales has said, later adding that they cannot truly be his indigenous brothers.

That moment permanently fractured the movement’s ties to the government. But shortly after the outburst, Morales put the planned road on hold, first in October 2011 and again in April of this year due to construction delays.

Then in early October, Morales signed a contract authorizing the first stretch of the trans-TIPNIS highway. The government-community consultations are now in their finals days. And though the feasibility of the project relies heavily on the community dialogues, Morales has said the highway is only “in pause” mode, leaving little doubt that the government expects the consultation process to end in its favor.

Bjork-James says indigenous movements have vowed to fight the highway “to the death.”

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche can claim a lengthy history of struggle stretching back into the pre-Columbian period. Mapuche territory south of the Bio-Bio River was the last bit of the coastal country to be incorporated into the state, not becoming governable in any practical sense until the late in the 1800s. Since that time, the Mapuche have been embroiled in land struggles with both corporations and the Chilean state.

In an effort to recoup their lands from successive presidential administrations, the Mapuche have resorted to increasingly radical tactics such as reoccupying lands and sabotaging corporate equiptment.

Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a pink tide politician who was herself detained under the Pinochet dictatorship, used a dictatorship-era anti-terrorist law to repress Mapuche activists. The law extends the definition of terrorism to include property violence, allows for civilian cases to be tried in military courts and permits the use of anonymous witnesses by prosecutors.

In the Mapuche context, the far-reaching law can be used to sentence activists to lengthy sentence for an array of crimes that wouldn’t normally be considered “terrorism,” from torching corporate crops planted on their lands to carrying weapons.

On October 8, current Chilean president Sebastián Piñera signed an executive order establishing an Indigenous Development Area (IDA)—defined as “territorial areas where state agencies will focus action in favor of the harmonious development of indigenous people and their communities”—in the town of Erskine. Thirty-seven Mapuche communities have accepted the order, but five are refusing to participate in the new scheme. Nine Mapuche activists are being detained for attempted murder, illegal carrying of firearms and other charges that their supporters say are trumped-up or politically-motivated.

Jorge Huenchullán, spokesman, for the Temucuicui community, told Upside Down World that the government is trying to paper over this issue. He added that the IDAs are:

Part of the administration’s strategy to cover up the real conflict, which is the complete recovery of the lands demanded by the communities, and to cover up a series of violent abuses and deny the protests that we are staging here in Ercilla´s Mapuche communities. We Mapuche are not looking for handouts for our people, so we reject the ADI. It does not apply to us.

Dangl told In These Times that he sees a radical potential in indigenous demands. Andean indigenous movements, he explained, have long proposed “buen vivir,” or “living well,” as a solution to crisis. “The concept is roughly translated into a respect for this rights of Mother Nature, an idea of social progress which isn’t based on greed, the depletion or national resources and the pollution of the environment,” Dangl says. The idea is supported by the policies, if not the actions, of national governments in heavily-indigenous Ecuador and Bolivia.

“Here is a case where a vision, history and politics of certain indigenous movements,” Dangl says, “could have an impact on regional and even international debates around how we overcome capitalism and move toward a more just and sustainable world.”

Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog

By Nyki Salinas-Duda, November 16 2012. Source: In These Times

Bolivia’s embattled TIPNIS reserve. Photo: In These Times

For a viable model of “21^st century socialism,” many progressives look to Latin America’s Leftward surge. But swept up in the continent’s “pink tide” are questions of indigenous land and resource rights, which often clash with state development priorities. From Venezuela to Bolivia to Chile, indigenous communities are charging that they have been betrayed by the populist presidents they helped elect.

Ben Dangl, author of Dancing with Dynamite, notes that the tension between indigenous social movements and pink tide politicians stems from these governments’ reliance on resource extraction to generate income. He told In These Times via e-mail:

For many of Latin America’s new leftist governments, the logic of the state-run extractive industry consistently runs against the rhetoric and rights of respecting the environment and indigenous autonomy. This contradiction has played itself out in many cases across the region, from mining in Venezuela [under President Hugo Chavez], to oil exploitation in Ecuador [under left-of-center President Rafael Correa].

The grandiose rhetoric of Latin American populism often fails indigenous communities who don’t see themselves as part of a national project. But as movements ratchet up struggles against environmental and cultural destruction, they must confront a narrative of economic progress—and, often, face down harsh repression.

The Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) is a protected reserve over 10,000 indigenous people call home. Its muddy waters and breathtaking green vistas reign over a swath of Bolivia, home to Latin America’s first indigenous head-of-state. But after sweeping into office and taking the extraordinary gesture of bestowing rights on “Mother Earth,” Evo Morales has made a surprising about-face by contracting the Brazilian firm OAS to build a 182-mile highway straight through the heart of TIPNIS.  Heavily opposed by indigenous movements, the road was approved last month. But its future remains indefinite.

Carwil Bjork-James, a PhD candidate studying Bolivian social movements at City University of New York, says that the indigenous movements that carried Morales into office are increasingly disillusioned by the contradiction that Morales has come to embody. Though he has called repeatedly for greater consultation with indigenous movements, Morales has also deployed the power of the state to repress them. Throughout the consultation process, officials have pushed an either/or solution on indigenous residents: either the highway project will be completed, or the zone will be declared what Bjork-James calls an intangible economic zone. If TIPNIS is declared as such, other activities that generate revenue for residents – like sustainable logging and ecotourism – will be disallowed, leaving inhabitants with even more limited options for generating income.

In 2011, when indigenous protestors took to the streets in opposition to the highway, organizing slow pilgrimage-like marches through the region, they relied on their “moral credibility as the original inhabitants of the country,” Bjork-James says, to garner support.

But the Morales administration soon took to the offensive. According to Bjork-James, high-ranking members of the government accused anti-highway activists of acting at the behest of USAID. “The government and the movement separated,” he says. “It has reached a crisis point around the TIPNIS controversy and the events that led to that separation.”

By 2011, a TIPNIS march was met with outright repression when police tried to “arrest an entire march. [They] arrested hundreds of people. High-ranking indigenous leaders were severely beaten, some hospitalized. Some of the people who were in there were indigenous members of Parliament, and they were also arrested,” Bjork-James added.

The Morales government went one step further when the President appeared on television during the TIPNIS march to repeat the USAID accusations and claimed the activists were secretly rightwing. “The indigenous who oppose the road are being confused,” Morales has said, later adding that they cannot truly be his indigenous brothers.

That moment permanently fractured the movement’s ties to the government. But shortly after the outburst, Morales put the planned road on hold, first in October 2011 and again in April of this year due to construction delays.

Then in early October, Morales signed a contract authorizing the first stretch of the trans-TIPNIS highway. The government-community consultations are now in their finals days. And though the feasibility of the project relies heavily on the community dialogues, Morales has said the highway is only “in pause” mode, leaving little doubt that the government expects the consultation process to end in its favor.

Bjork-James says indigenous movements have vowed to fight the highway “to the death.”

In Chile, indigenous Mapuche can claim a lengthy history of struggle stretching back into the pre-Columbian period. Mapuche territory south of the Bio-Bio River was the last bit of the coastal country to be incorporated into the state, not becoming governable in any practical sense until the late in the 1800s. Since that time, the Mapuche have been embroiled in land struggles with both corporations and the Chilean state.

In an effort to recoup their lands from successive presidential administrations, the Mapuche have resorted to increasingly radical tactics such as reoccupying lands and sabotaging corporate equiptment.

Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a pink tide politician who was herself detained under the Pinochet dictatorship, used a dictatorship-era anti-terrorist law to repress Mapuche activists. The law extends the definition of terrorism to include property violence, allows for civilian cases to be tried in military courts and permits the use of anonymous witnesses by prosecutors.

In the Mapuche context, the far-reaching law can be used to sentence activists to lengthy sentence for an array of crimes that wouldn’t normally be considered “terrorism,” from torching corporate crops planted on their lands to carrying weapons.

On October 8, current Chilean president Sebastián Piñera signed an executive order establishing an Indigenous Development Area (IDA)—defined as “territorial areas where state agencies will focus action in favor of the harmonious development of indigenous people and their communities”—in the town of Erskine. Thirty-seven Mapuche communities have accepted the order, but five are refusing to participate in the new scheme. Nine Mapuche activists are being detained for attempted murder, illegal carrying of firearms and other charges that their supporters say are trumped-up or politically-motivated.

Jorge Huenchullán, spokesman, for the Temucuicui community, told Upside Down World that the government is trying to paper over this issue. He added that the IDAs are:

Part of the administration’s strategy to cover up the real conflict, which is the complete recovery of the lands demanded by the communities, and to cover up a series of violent abuses and deny the protests that we are staging here in Ercilla´s Mapuche communities. We Mapuche are not looking for handouts for our people, so we reject the ADI. It does not apply to us.

Dangl told In These Times that he sees a radical potential in indigenous demands. Andean indigenous movements, he explained, have long proposed “buen vivir,” or “living well,” as a solution to crisis. “The concept is roughly translated into a respect for this rights of Mother Nature, an idea of social progress which isn’t based on greed, the depletion or national resources and the pollution of the environment,” Dangl says. The idea is supported by the policies, if not the actions, of national governments in heavily-indigenous Ecuador and Bolivia.

“Here is a case where a vision, history and politics of certain indigenous movements,” Dangl says, “could have an impact on regional and even international debates around how we overcome capitalism and move toward a more just and sustainable world.”

By Dawn Paley, November 19 2012. Source: Upside Down World

Photo: Upside Down World

COBAN, GUATEMALA—Since February, forensic anthropologists have turned up over 400 skeletons at a military base in Coban, Guatemala, in what has fast become one of the largest discoveries of a clandestine mass grave in the country. During the country’s 36 year long internal armed conflict that led to acts of genocide, the base at Coban was a center of military coordination and intelligence.

But what sets this dig apart is that it is taking place at a military base that remains active today: foreign military and police arrive regularly at the base to train of troops from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. [1] In 2006, the military zone in Coban was renamed CREOMPAZ, which stands for Regional Training Command for Peacekeeping Operations.

The horrid history of the military base in Coban—and the impunity with which mass killings of men, women and children were carried out—provides a disturbing backdrop for present day “peacekeeping” operations.

Evidence of the ongoing excavation is all over Guatemala’s capital city, in the form of ads gracing billboards and bus stops. On the right hand side of the ad is a stock photo of a woman in a surgical mask, looking at a medical instrument. In Los Angeles, it might be a weight loss ad, in Houston, promotion for a private hospital. Not here. Instead, text across the top reads: “Do you have a family member disappeared between 1940 and 1996?” Then, “with DNA we are identifying them. A spit sample is enough.”

The Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (FAFG) put the ad campaign together in attempt to identify the skeletons of the disappeared by matching them with DNA from their living family members. FAFG anthropologists are at work around Guatemala, digging, dusting, recording and finally exhuming human remains.

CREOMPAZ is one of the largest current excavations.

“We have a few more than 400 trenches, where we’ve found I think 60 graves, and we’ve found 436 skeletons, mostly men, like everywhere else, but there’s also women, and what’s particular to CREOMPAZ is that there are also many children,” said José Suasnavar, the executive sub-director of FAFG, during an interview in Guatemala City in October. FAFG is the only group in Guatemala dedicated to identifying the estimated 50,000 disappeared during the country’s internal armed conflict.

Most of the dead found at CREOMPAZ are believed to be people who disappeared from communities around the country. Men and women kidnapped by the army on their way to the shop to buy some food for their children, people who said goodbye to their families one morning and headed off to school or to work, never to be heard from again. Evidence uncovered by forensic anthropologists shows that people disappeared from various regions were later brought to the base at Coban by soldiers for interrogation and torture, followed by extrajudicial execution and secret burial.

The exhumations at CREOMPAZ call up scenes of terror.

“What is radically different about this military base…is that here there is up to 62 people buried in one single grave, representing a single event,” said Sausnavar.

There are few bullet wounds among the dead, according to Sausnavar. Most of the skeletons still show evidence of being bound, and many reveal bones that had been broken, healed and re-broken, indicating that the dead had been tortured and interrogated, some for lengthy periods of time, before they were killed and thrown in the pits.

The dig in Coban is revealing the gruesome reality of the country’s internal armed conflict, where people labeled subversives—political and student activists, Indigenous leaders and community members, and others— were kidnapped and tortured en masse. Children were also murdered before being dumped in clandestine graves at the base. All of this took place within the protective confines of a military controlled area.

Of the 28 former military areas the FAFG has dug since 1996, 24 have turned up bodies. Some of those digs are still works in progress, while more military bases, zones and detachments remain to be investigated. The dig at CREOMPAZ has turned up by far the largest number of corpses of any base.

“When the peace accords were signed, many military bases or detachments were reduced and closed. But the military remained here the whole time,” said Suasnavar of the base at Coban. “They say to us ‘we didn’t know that that happened, it was another time, it was other people, but you found it so there’s no other option than to keep working,’ right, those have been the words that they use with respect to our findings. But the continuity in the structure and function and the territorial control of this location has been strictly military.”

Regardless of the mass graves at the base, military and police training continues there, supported by countries like the US and Canada.

“The facilities have a sort of rank as a military organization of the United Nations, in fact the Guatemalan soldiers and officials that are based there wear the distinctive blue helmets,” said Iduvina Hernández Batres from the Guatemala City based organization Security and Democracy (Sedem). “This is happening, and this unit exists there, regardless of the fact that this property has been documented to have constituted an enormous clandestine cemetery.”

In 2011, the Ottawa-based Pearson Centre carried out a workshop at CREOMPAZ about “police and military cooperation in peace operations.” [2] Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and the US Southern Command jointly funded the event. Soldiers trained at CREOMPAZ have been deployed as part of UN missions in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For some, like Ka’koj Ba Tiul, a Maya Poqomchi’ anthropologist and professor, CREOMPAZ has received an unwarranted facelift by rebranding the military base as a peacekeeping center.

“It is a school of assassins. The hidden side is the training of teams of military counterintelligence,” said Ba Tiul, who calls CREOMPAZ “the little School of the Americas.”

“There are instructors from Argentina, instructors from Chile, instructors from Colombia, instructors from North America, and instructors from Israel,” said Ba Tiul in an interview at his home just over a dozen kilometers from the base. “It is where they are training all of those who will form part of the modern counterinsurgency model for Guatemala and Central America.”

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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog

By Jim Efstathiou Jr., November 20 2012. Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

“Conflicts — both actual and perceived — can arise between sources of research funding and expectations of independence when reporting research results,” State University of New York at Buffalo President Satish said in an open letter to the university community. Photo: University at Buffalo

State University of New York at Buffalo (85074MF) is shutting down a research institute opened seven months ago to study natural-gas fracking after potential conflicts of interest raised what the college’s president called a “cloud of uncertainty” over its work.

The Shale Resources and Society Institute is closed effective immediately, university President Satish Tripathi said yesterday in a statement. The Public Accountability Initiative, a Buffalo nonprofit that says it focuses on corruption in business and government, said the insitute’s only report in April contained errors and didn’t acknowledge “extensive ties” by its authors to the gas industry.

“Conflicts — both actual and perceived — can arise between sources of research funding and expectations of independence when reporting research results,” Tripathi said in an open letter to the university community. “This, in turn, impacted the appearance of independence and integrity of the institute’s research.”

“Research of such considerable societal importance and impact cannot be effectively conducted with a cloud of uncertainty over its work,” Tripathi said.

The move follows a decision last month by a gas industry group to cancel a Pennsylvania State University study of fracking after some faculty members balked at the project that had drawn criticism for being slanted toward industry. Drilling companies, amid criticism that producing gas by fracking damages the environment, are funding university research that at times reaches conclusions that counter the concerns of critics, Bloomberg News reported in July.

Treated Water

In fracking, millions of gallons of chemically treated water and sand are forced underground to break shale rock and free trapped gas. The technology has lowered energy prices, created jobs, and enhanced national security, according to a task force formed by President Barack Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu.

Critics say fracking has been linked to groundwater contamination in Pennsylvania, high ozone levels in Wyoming and to headaches, sore throats and difficulty breathing for people living close to wells in Colorado. Burying wastewater from drilling has been linked to earthquakes in Ohio, Arkansas and other states.

In May, the Shale Resources and Society Institute found that drillers in Pennsylvania had reduced by half the rate of blowouts, spills and water contamination since 2008. Potential environmental problems could be “entirely avoided or mitigated” under New York’s proposed rules, according to the institutes’s report.

Petroleum Institute

The lead author was Tim Considine a professor of economics in the School of Energy Resources at the University of Wyoming who in the past has worked for groups such as the American Petroleum Institute and the Wyoming Mining Association. The Buffalo report, which identifies Considine by his title at the University of Wyoming, doesn’t disclose his prior work for industry groups.

“In my opinion, it was overblown,” Considine said of the reaction to the SUNY report in an interview in June. “A lot of it is used to deter from the central message of the report, and that is shale gas drilling, hydraulic fracturing in particular, can be regulated so that it doesn’t pose any significant risk for the public and the environment.”

Considine did not respond yesterday to a request for comment on SUNY’s decision to close the institute.

The institute was actively seeking corporate sponsors for a “landmark effort to leverage the safe, sustainable, economic development of shale gas,” according to a document Kevin Connor, director of the Public Accountability Initiative, downloaded from the group’s website.

`Strong Message’

Closing the institute “Does send a strong message to the oil and gas industry that our universities are not for sale,” Connor said in an interview yesterday.

A group of 83 professors and staff at the university in Buffalo in August requested documents on the founding and funding of the shale institute. The SUNY Board of Trustees is reviewing a report from the university on the research group.

“Given the questions that continue to surround the Shale Resources and Society Institute, SUNY Administration and the Board of Trustees support the University of Buffalo’s decision to close it,” according to a statement from the board. “The Board and SUNY reserve further comment at this time while the Board completes its formal review.”

Considine also co-wrote an annual study on fracking for Penn State funded by the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a Pittsburgh-based industry group. The study, which began in 2009, was canceled in October after some faculty members declined to take part.

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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog