BREAKING: Kahnawake takes to Mercier bridge in Idle No More rally
Filed under Actions / Protest, BREAKING NEWS, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Tar Sands
Q&A: Fighting to save Africa’s richest rainforest
Note: Palm oil plantations have caused land grabs and displacement of rural people across the world. While industrial palm oil plantations-and their associated displacements, political repression, and violence-must be stopped, there is great risk in the “alternatives,” like REDD+, offered by some NGOs, industrialized nations and corporations, . Some countries have even pushed for palm plantations to be included in REDD+ programs. GJEP has documented the impacts that REDD+ and other “payment for ecosystem services” projects have on local communities in Chiapas, Mexico and beyond. Watch GJEP and Global Forest Coalition’s short film, A Darker Shade of Green: REDD Alert and the Future of Forests, and read more here: http://bit.ly/12Ccnml.
-The GJEP Team
By Monde Kingsley Nfor, December 20, 2012. Source: Inter Press Service
Photo: Frank Bieleu/Oakland Institute
Protests against a controversial palm oil plantation in the Korup National Park, Africa’s oldest and richest rainforest in terms of floral and faunal diversity, in Mundemba, southwest Cameroon will continue despite the arrests and intimidation of local environmental campaigners.
Nasako Besingi, the director of the local NGO Struggle to Economize the Future, told IPS “we won’t stop until environmental justice is done.”
The New York-based agricultural company, Herakles Farms, has been accused of grabbing a piece of this central African nation’s national forest as it goes ahead with a 73,000-hectare palm oil plantation despite a lack of government authorisation – there are claims that the 99-year lease agreement with the government is illegal – and two court injunctions, and in the face of significant community opposition.
The contested land is a “biodiversity hotspot”, a critical area that connects five protected areas in the park, and the project will disrupt the protection and growth of important wildlife, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) said in an environmental and social impact assessment in August.
A report issued in September by two Cameroonian NGOs, the Centre for Environment and Development and Réseau de Lutte contre la Faim, said “there are over 20 villages with ancestral lands inside the concession, and 31 villages within a distance of the periphery, and over 25,000 people will be affected by this. They depend on that land for small-scale food production, hunting, and non-timber forest products.”
About 46 percent of Cameroon’s 20 million people live in rural areas, but according to a USAID country profile on property rights here “only approximately three percent of rural land is registered, mostly in the names of owners of large commercial farms.” The country is ranked 131st of 169 countries on the 2010 United Nations Human Development Index, partially due to persistent poverty.
Besingi said that he and his colleagues have endured police suppression, arrests and intimidation. His latest arrest was on Nov. 14, when the country’s national military police stormed his office.
“We were told we were required for questioning at the police post, and were detained for a day without charge. But it was only following international and local pressure that we were released (on bail) under the condition that we must appear before the authorities whenever we are (asked),” he said.
Besingi explained that the palm oil plantation project was going ahead despite the lack of a formal government agreement, because Sustainable Oils Cameroon (SGSOC), a subsidiary of Herakles Farms, had the support of those in power.
“SGSOC enjoys support from some elites, the chief of Fabe village (which is on the project site) and some government representatives, including the police. They have been bought over with money and material things. These groups of people, including the government, are misleading the people,” he said.
Excerpts of the interview with IPS follow:
Q: What is your interest in this campaign against SGSOC/Herakles Farms?
A: We cannot just sit and allow a few individuals to ruin the lives of thousands. So we have to make our voices and those of the voiceless heard.
Giving so much forestland to a company that has no real development plan for the people is injustice against a people who cannot have access to one-third of the forestland. Many locals feel there are already too many protected zones in the (forest). This massive plantation will further restrict their access to land.
Q: Bruce Wrobel, CEO of Herakles Farms, said in September that the organisation was already employing more than 500 people, and has committed to hiring among the local villages. He said that once the plantation was fully operational, it would require approximately 8,000 employees. Is this not an opportunity for the people?
A: There is little evidence that large-scale plantations will effectively bring economic development to this area. Past experiences in the country show such promises … to be false. Instead, large plantations have resulted in massive environmental degradation, the destruction of livelihoods, and the transformation of small-scale farmers and indigenous populations into low-paid plantation workers.
The company claims that it will create 8,000 jobs. However, the plantation will economically displace approximately 25,000 people who depend on that land for small-scale food production, hunting, and non-timber forest products. Thus, the net impact on employment will actually be negative.
Q: What is the problem with land management issues in Cameroon?
A: There are two fundamental problems in my opinion. Firstly, communities do not have legally-recognised land rights that secure their access to the vital natural resources that they depend on; and secondly, Cameroon is still to develop a national land-use plan which would, in principal, evaluate the needs of local communities before granting foreign investors access to land.
Q: What would you want SGSOC/Herakles Farms to do before operating?
A: We demand that SGSOC respect Cameroonian law and the rights of communities.
Unfortunately, SGSOC has repeatedly violated Cameroonian law. They have signed an illegal contract with the government, and have shown no respect to local communities who, on the majority, oppose the project.
Following the 1976 law governing the allocation of concessions on state lands in Cameroon, subsequent to signing the lease agreement, SGSOC was supposed to be given a presidential approval to start cultivation activities. But this was not given, so the project has been in violation of the law since 2010. Moreover, prior to its operations, an environmental and social impact assessment was not conducted.
Q: What is the opportunity cost for the SGSOC/Herakles project?
A: The opportunity cost for this project is the loss of forest revenue through the payment of environmental services, ecotourism and REDD+ activities.
All these activities can generate more revenue for the state than SGSOC can. For example, the Cameroonian Food Sovereignty Coalition estimates that if the government were to require bread makers to use 20 percent of locally-produced flour, 96,000 farming jobs would be created using just 15,000 hectares of land.
This would generate 13 times more employment and significantly larger government revenue than the SGSOC project and would leave land for peasant agriculture, conservation, and the use of non-timber forest products.
Q: What next with your campaign against SGSOC/Herakles farms?
A: We won’t stop until environmental justice is done. We want a new agreement that takes into consideration the sustainable management of that forest and that gives the locals better access to land and alternative livelihoods. We are currently working with more than 20 community groups and international and local NGOs and using every possible channel, like IPS, to reach the international community.
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
Q&A: Fighting to save Africa’s richest rainforest
Note: Palm oil plantations have caused land grabs and displacement of rural people across the world. While industrial palm oil plantations-and their associated displacements, political repression, and violence-must be stopped, there is great risk in the “alternatives,” like REDD+, offered by some NGOs, industrialized nations and corporations, . Some countries have even pushed for palm plantations to be included in REDD+ programs. GJEP has documented the impacts that REDD+ and other “payment for ecosystem services” projects have on local communities in Chiapas, Mexico and beyond. Watch GJEP and Global Forest Coalition’s short film, A Darker Shade of Green: REDD Alert and the Future of Forests, and read more here: http://bit.ly/12Ccnml.
-The GJEP Team
By Monde Kingsley Nfor, December 20, 2012. Source: Inter Press Service
Photo: Frank Bieleu/Oakland Institute
Protests against a controversial palm oil plantation in the Korup National Park, Africa’s oldest and richest rainforest in terms of floral and faunal diversity, in Mundemba, southwest Cameroon will continue despite the arrests and intimidation of local environmental campaigners.
Nasako Besingi, the director of the local NGO Struggle to Economize the Future, told IPS “we won’t stop until environmental justice is done.”
The New York-based agricultural company, Herakles Farms, has been accused of grabbing a piece of this central African nation’s national forest as it goes ahead with a 73,000-hectare palm oil plantation despite a lack of government authorisation – there are claims that the 99-year lease agreement with the government is illegal – and two court injunctions, and in the face of significant community opposition.
The contested land is a “biodiversity hotspot”, a critical area that connects five protected areas in the park, and the project will disrupt the protection and growth of important wildlife, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) said in an environmental and social impact assessment in August.
A report issued in September by two Cameroonian NGOs, the Centre for Environment and Development and Réseau de Lutte contre la Faim, said “there are over 20 villages with ancestral lands inside the concession, and 31 villages within a distance of the periphery, and over 25,000 people will be affected by this. They depend on that land for small-scale food production, hunting, and non-timber forest products.”
About 46 percent of Cameroon’s 20 million people live in rural areas, but according to a USAID country profile on property rights here “only approximately three percent of rural land is registered, mostly in the names of owners of large commercial farms.” The country is ranked 131st of 169 countries on the 2010 United Nations Human Development Index, partially due to persistent poverty.
Besingi said that he and his colleagues have endured police suppression, arrests and intimidation. His latest arrest was on Nov. 14, when the country’s national military police stormed his office.
“We were told we were required for questioning at the police post, and were detained for a day without charge. But it was only following international and local pressure that we were released (on bail) under the condition that we must appear before the authorities whenever we are (asked),” he said.
Besingi explained that the palm oil plantation project was going ahead despite the lack of a formal government agreement, because Sustainable Oils Cameroon (SGSOC), a subsidiary of Herakles Farms, had the support of those in power.
“SGSOC enjoys support from some elites, the chief of Fabe village (which is on the project site) and some government representatives, including the police. They have been bought over with money and material things. These groups of people, including the government, are misleading the people,” he said.
Excerpts of the interview with IPS follow:
Q: What is your interest in this campaign against SGSOC/Herakles Farms?
A: We cannot just sit and allow a few individuals to ruin the lives of thousands. So we have to make our voices and those of the voiceless heard.
Giving so much forestland to a company that has no real development plan for the people is injustice against a people who cannot have access to one-third of the forestland. Many locals feel there are already too many protected zones in the (forest). This massive plantation will further restrict their access to land.
Q: Bruce Wrobel, CEO of Herakles Farms, said in September that the organisation was already employing more than 500 people, and has committed to hiring among the local villages. He said that once the plantation was fully operational, it would require approximately 8,000 employees. Is this not an opportunity for the people?
A: There is little evidence that large-scale plantations will effectively bring economic development to this area. Past experiences in the country show such promises … to be false. Instead, large plantations have resulted in massive environmental degradation, the destruction of livelihoods, and the transformation of small-scale farmers and indigenous populations into low-paid plantation workers.
The company claims that it will create 8,000 jobs. However, the plantation will economically displace approximately 25,000 people who depend on that land for small-scale food production, hunting, and non-timber forest products. Thus, the net impact on employment will actually be negative.
Q: What is the problem with land management issues in Cameroon?
A: There are two fundamental problems in my opinion. Firstly, communities do not have legally-recognised land rights that secure their access to the vital natural resources that they depend on; and secondly, Cameroon is still to develop a national land-use plan which would, in principal, evaluate the needs of local communities before granting foreign investors access to land.
Q: What would you want SGSOC/Herakles Farms to do before operating?
A: We demand that SGSOC respect Cameroonian law and the rights of communities.
Unfortunately, SGSOC has repeatedly violated Cameroonian law. They have signed an illegal contract with the government, and have shown no respect to local communities who, on the majority, oppose the project.
Following the 1976 law governing the allocation of concessions on state lands in Cameroon, subsequent to signing the lease agreement, SGSOC was supposed to be given a presidential approval to start cultivation activities. But this was not given, so the project has been in violation of the law since 2010. Moreover, prior to its operations, an environmental and social impact assessment was not conducted.
Q: What is the opportunity cost for the SGSOC/Herakles project?
A: The opportunity cost for this project is the loss of forest revenue through the payment of environmental services, ecotourism and REDD+ activities.
All these activities can generate more revenue for the state than SGSOC can. For example, the Cameroonian Food Sovereignty Coalition estimates that if the government were to require bread makers to use 20 percent of locally-produced flour, 96,000 farming jobs would be created using just 15,000 hectares of land.
This would generate 13 times more employment and significantly larger government revenue than the SGSOC project and would leave land for peasant agriculture, conservation, and the use of non-timber forest products.
Q: What next with your campaign against SGSOC/Herakles farms?
A: We won’t stop until environmental justice is done. We want a new agreement that takes into consideration the sustainable management of that forest and that gives the locals better access to land and alternative livelihoods. We are currently working with more than 20 community groups and international and local NGOs and using every possible channel, like IPS, to reach the international community.
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Guatemala-Canada: Clashing world views at a cross roads
By Grahame Russell, December 19, 2012. Source: Upside Down World
“Avatar” overlaps with a “John Grisham” novel in the Mayan Qeqchi plaintiffs versus Hudbay Minerals lawsuits
Recently, I had a front row seat to the colliding of world visions and realities in the heart and center of Canada’s financial district in downtown Toronto.
From November 23-30, five Mayan Qeqchi [Kek’Chi] people came to Toronto to pursue justice and remedy for violations and harms they suffered due to the nickel mining interests of Canadian mining company Hudbay Minerals. They were here to respond to questions during cross-examinations by lawyers from Hudbay Minerals’ law firm Fasken Martineau.
WHO ARE THE FIVE?
Lawsuit #1 – Angelica Choc, wife of Adolfo Ich, a community leader, teacher and father who was the victim of a targeted killing in September 2009 carried out by private security guards hired by Hudbay’s subsidiary CGN (Guatemalan Nickel Company).
Lawsuit #2 – Rosa Elbira and Margarita Caal, representing eleven women from the remote village of Lote 8 who were gang-raped by company security guards, soldiers and police, during an illegal, violent eviction of their community in January 2007, that included the whole-scale burning and destruction of 100 small homes.
Lawsuit # 3 – German Chub, a young man and father who was shot by mining company security guards and left paralyzed on the same say as the killing of Adolfo Ich.
Accompanying them was Maria Cuc, sister of Angelica Choc and their brother Ramiro Choc, a political prisoner jailed unjustly in Guatemala on trumped up charges since 2008.
“AVATAR” CROSSED WITH A JOHN GRISHAM NOVEL
Since 2004, I have been involved (with Rights Action) in funding and supporting community development, environmental protection, human rights and justice projects of mining harmed Qeqchi communities in eastern Guatemala. I had the honor of accompanying and supporting them in Canada from the moment they got off the plane in Toronto.
In certain ways, these are typical civil lawsuits: Plaintiffs X sue defendant Y for acting negligently and causing harms to X. But in most ways, these are anything but typical cases.
These lawsuits represent perhaps the intersection of the “Avatar” blockbuster movie with a “John Grisham” novel.
AVATAR: Like many resource extraction conflicts around the world, both historically and on-going today, this story of Canadian nickel companies trying to operate a mine in the Qeqchi territories of eastern Guatemala (starting with INCO in the 1960s and 70s, continuing with Skye Resources and Hudbay after 2004) is like the documentary version of the Avatar movie.
In Avatar, a powerful mining company brings a battalion of heavily armed men to a remote, far off place, uses extreme violence to forcibly remove the local indigenous people from their ancestral and sacred homelands, so as to get at a mineral that – once mined and processed – will sell for gargantuan profits, somewhere far away.
In general terms, this is the story of nickel companies in Guatemala. Indeed, it is the story of many resource extraction struggles around the world, today and going back centuries.
JOHN GRISHAM: Then, Avatar crosses with a John Grisham novel. In many Grisham novels, powerless victims of corporate abuses and crimes are represented by pro bono lawyers, with few economic resources, to try and hold a ga-zillion dollar corporation accountable, said corporation being represented by well-paid lawyers from a politically well-connected law firm.
Represented by the Klippensteins law firm, who are doing much of the legal work for little or no pay, the Qeqchi victims have stuck a legal toe in the side door of the very political and legal structures and systems that so often empower and ‘legitimize’ the expansion of corporate and investor interests across the globe (like Hudbay’s interests in Guatemala), while providing little to no real legal or political oversight and accountability.
The Klippensteins lawyers are well trained and experienced, and utterly committed to the principle that victims of crimes and harms ought to get justice and remedy for the harms and losses they have suffered; that wrong-doers – including wealthy, powerful and influential corporations and investors – can and ought to be held accountable when they directly or indirectly cause serious human rights harms.
CONFRONTING VAST GLOBAL INEQUALITY
On their clients’ behalf, Klippensteins agreed to file these cases and take them as far as they can, knowing full well the enormity of the legal-political challenge.
On this planet, our human community, separated off into hundreds of countries, is characterized by vast inequality of wealth and power, both inside and between nations. Many global corporations and investors (a majority based in Europe and North America) control more wealth than the GNPs (gross national product) of many countries around the world.
These companies scour the earth looking for resources to exploit and profit from. They are heavily invested in by private funds and public pension funds (like the Canada Pension Plan that was invested in Hudbay during the years of these violations in Guatemala). These companies are also supported in many ways by their home governments. They often hire their own armed security forces and are usually supported by the armies and police of the countries where they operate.
This is essentially the history of Canadian nickel companies in Guatemala, from INCO in the 1970s and 80s, to Skye Resources and Hudbay from 2004 forward.
CONFRONTING IMPUNITY AND IMMUNITY FROM ACCOUNTABILITY
These corporations and investors operate this way, around the planet, with close to complete impunity and immunity from legal or political accountability. In the year 2012, it is still next to impossible to hold global companies and investors accountable in any court in the countries where they operate, like Guatemala; in international human rights reporting bodies (like the United Nations or Organization of American States); or in the courts of their home countries, like Canada.
Despite the fact that countries, like Canada, espouse democratic values, a belief in and adherence to the rule of law and good governance, we intentionally do not have the criminal and civil legislation on the books, let alone the political will, to hold our own companies accountable if/when they commit crimes or human rights violations and health and environmental harms in other counties.
These three lawsuits represent, in this regard, an exception to the rule of impunity and immunity from legal accountability. There is no way whatsoever (that I know of) to hold our companies criminally accountable in our courts if/when they commit crimes in other countries.
In terms of civil law accountability, there is, once again, an effort to pass comprehensive legislation (Bill C-323, The International Promotion and Protection of Human Rights Act) so as to start to fill the legal accountability void, … but this is an uphill struggle and is likely to meet strong opposition from the mining industry itself, let alone from politicians in the dominant political parties. (Information about this law and campaign: http://www.facebook.com/PassBillC323; www.peterjulian.ca; http://www.facebook.com/MPPeterJulian)
Our lack of laws and legal accountability is a hypocritical double standard and it is this very impunity and immunity from accountability that directly enables and empowers companies and investors to continue to act as they do.
A LONG TRIP ACROSS A FURTHER DISTANCE
It is in this daunting global context, that these 3 lawsuits are taking place. Of the five who came north, all are Qeqchi speakers. Sisters Maria and Angelica are bi-lingual, speaking fluent Spanish as well. German speaks quite good Spanish, as a second language. Rosa and Margarita speak only Qeqchi.
Four of them had never traveled internationally before. Rosa and Margarita had rarely been to Guatemala City. They all live in poor and materially simple rural communities, with no electricity, running water or access to basic health and educational services.
Lote 8, the village of Rosa and Margarita, is high on the mountain range the runs east-west along the north shore of Lake Izabal. There are no roads into Lote 8, a 2-3 hour hike to and from the main road below on the lowlands.
It took this group over 2 days of travel to get to Toronto. Before dawn on Thursday, November 22, Rosa and Margarita hiked down mountain paths to the main gravel road. Then, a 45 minute drive to the town of El Estor. There, Maria, Angelica and German joined them in the van, and they drove 7 hours to Guatemala City. The next morning, up at 3, they drove 5 hours to the San Salvador airport, to catch a 5 hour direct flight to Toronto.
At 10pm, Friday, November 23rd, they emerged with their suitcases, into the cold of a late November Toronto. Their home region of El Estor lies at sea level, one hour from the Caribbean Sea. It is one of the hottest regions of Guatemala. The cold of Toronto will take some getting used to. On day 1, the cold particularly affected German, due to the bullet still lodged in his back, too close to his already damaged spinal column for removal, without further risk of harm and deepening paralysis.
From the Toronto airport, they walked – German rolling in his wheelchair – into one of the centers of global power and wealth, to do legal battle with a wealthy and influential company, represented by a powerful and influential law firm, to demand justice and remedy in Canadian courts.
That is a very long trip, and even greater distance to cross. And this story is far from over. The 3 lawsuits are a small but crucial part of it.
The Qeqchi people of eastern Guatemalan have been suffering harms and violations by Canadian companies, dating back to when INCO partnered with the US-backed military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, and carried out similar illegal and violence forced evictions, shooting and killings.
The 1999 United Nations Truth Commission concluded that INCO – via its Guatemalan subsidiary EXMIBAL – colluded with the Guatemalan military in at least 5 documented cases of serious human rights violations – including killings and disappearances.
No justice was ever done for what INCO did, neither in Guatemala nor in Canada. The victims were never remedied for their loss and suffering. In 1981, INCO closed the mining operation, but hung onto its (ill-gotten) mining concession.
By 2004, former directors of INCO had incorporated a new company – Skye Resources -, and in 2004, Skye (with support from INCO) started again to try and mine for nickel in the El Estor region; soon after that, repression began all over again.
For more background, please view: 10-minute film “El Estor Evictions”, by Steven Schnoor: http://rightsaction.org/video/elestor/index.htm; 5-minute trailer to forth-coming feature length film “Defensora”, by Rachel Schmidt: www.defensorathefilm.com.
THE LEGAL CASES
These lawsuits – filed in 2011 – may well go on for years. The Qeqchi plaintiffs and their lawyers at Klippensteins are very aware of the lopsided, up-hill nature of the legal struggle they are involved in. As a ‘legal tactic’, Hudbay could easily try to financially overwhelm the plaintiffs, using legal motions and petitions, appeals and counter-appeals, etc., spending seemingly endless amounts of Hudbay’s money to do so.
Hudbay is already arguing that -1- the cases should be brought in the jurisdiction of Guatemala, not Canada; and that -2- Hudbay should not be held to account for what its subsidiary – CGN (Guatemalan Nickel Company) – did in Guatemala.
JURISDICTION: Moving the cases to Guatemala would virtually guarantee complete impunity for Hudbay and its former subsidiary CGN. Notwithstanding a few cases of serious human rights violations and political repression that are finally moving very slowly through the Guatemalan courts, 20 to 30 years after the crimes (including genocide, massacres, disappearances, gang-rapes) were committed, it is widely recognized that legal and political impunity is the norm in Guatemala.
It is not that Guatemala does not have laws to address illegal forced evictions, killings, shootings, gang rapes, etc. It is that the legal system does not work – due to corruption fear, threats and influences – to hold the powerful sectors accountable, even when the powerful are foreign companies or individuals.
‘PIERCING THE CORPORATE VEIL’: Individuals, ultimately responsible for wrong-doing, have long hidden behind the legal artifice of the ‘corporate veil’. Ie, company and investor decision makers (who are also direct financial beneficiaries) hide behind the legal status of corporation ‘A’ (ex. Hudbay Minerals, in Canada) that they incorporated or purchased, and operate, arguing that they cannot be held responsible for the criminal or wrongful activities committed by corporation ‘B’ (ex. CGN, in Guatemala), that was incorporated or purchased by, and is operated by corporation A, that ultimately is controlled by them, the company directors and major shareholders. Nice!
Whether addressing wrongs within our national borders, or around the world, it is long overdue that our courts can and should ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and hold the real controllers and decision-makers (and, lest we forget, the financial beneficiaries) to account.
COSMOLOGICAL CHASM
On one level, these lawsuits are normal and even mundane: filing statements of claim; paying attention to procedural law; filing and contesting motions, and counter-motions; negotiating and fighting about when and where to hold pre-trial hearings; etc. But these are not lawsuits about how one neighbor’s tree fell on another’s fence, shed and property and caused damage … even as many of the same procedural, evidentiary and substantive laws and legal principles apply.
These 3 cases, that operate in many ways as one lawsuit, are bringing together a hugely wealthy company and some of the wealthiest investors on the planet (and their deep pockets, powerful law firm and connections to the Canadian political, economic and media establishments), on the one hand, with some of the poorest people on the planet, from ‘far-off’ places, speaking wildly different languages – the languages of the first nations of the Americas.
Forced together, through the courageous filing of these lawsuits, the two sides sat across from one another in a board room, in a sky-scraper in downtown Toronto, to face off in this initial round of pre-trial cross-examinations.
Four days in a row (German on Monday, Rosa on Tuesday, Margarita on Wednesday, Angelica on Thursday), the Qeqchi and Spanish speaking plaintiffs responded to up to 8 hours of questioning by Hudbay’s lawyers. Four days in a row, the other members of the group walked every morning to the door of the room where the hearings took place, to provide strength and moral support to the person going in that day; waited to have lunch with them; and then welcomed them in the evening when their day of questioning was done.
“WE WON” (Ganamos)
On Wednesday afternoon, Margarita – after 8 hours of questioning – rejoined her Qeqchi friends and community members, raised both arms in the air, and said, with a huge smile of relief, “Ganamos” (we won), as they crowded around her and hugged her. She cried.
Two points. Firstly, nothing has been won. These trials – barring unforeseen circumstances – are still in the initial stages. In Toronto, these are only pre-trial hearings. What did Margarita mean – “we won”? Two nights later, she responded to that question put to her by the media, saying: ‘We know that Hudbay has said that what we say is not true. I know Hudbay said that we [the women of Lote 8] were not gang-raped. But, we were gang-raped; Adolfo is dead, and buried under the ground; German was shot, and is here with us, in a wheelchair. So today, I answered every one of their questions. I did not cry. I told the truth, I did not lie.’
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Margarita said “we” – she did not say “I” won, referring to herself, though she had just been through 8 hours of cross-examination alone.
This “we” versus “I” goes to a larger point about what this struggle is for the Qeqchi people of Guatemala. For all of them, “they” are being harmed by the selfish interests of “outsiders” – Guatemalan and foreign wealthy interests always using violence against them, the original inhabitants of those lands, to get them off their lands so as to produce bananas, coffee, cows (for meat exports), sugar cane, African palm, or to mine for nickel.
The harms, violations and repression always have been and remain a collective harm against a people. Margarita is here, responding individually to Hudbay’s questions, but she is involved in a community struggle, both for justice and remedy in these cases, and ultimately for their community well-being, in their homes, on their lands, in their forests, by their water sources.
The gang-rapes that the eleven women of Lote 8 suffered were both individual and collective harms at the same time. Margarita, who has come from her world in Lote 8 to the heart and center of Canada’s financial capital, is proudly and with extraordinary dignity struggling for justice and remedy for herself and her Mayan Qeqchi people.
It is hard to fully describe the chasm between different world visions and life experiences in which space these lawsuits are playing themselves out.
ENDING 500 YEARS OF IMPUNITY
The scenario of the lawsuits is already hard enough to believe, let alone to consider that this is a precedent setting case. This has rarely if ever happened in Canadian courts.
If the global human community had been actually governed by the rule of law and principles of good governance and democratic accountability for, say, the last 500 years, then countless numbers of these cases would have been filed and addressed since the European (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese) invasion of the Americas beginning in 1492 … (when ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue’). An entire body of law and precedents would have been established and put in place. These types of abuses would no longer occur, and when they did, real justice would be swift.
This obviously never happened – not then, and still not now. We don’t live in that world. 500 years have passed since European expansionism across the globe and the birth of the modern (and very unequal) Nation State system, and still the global human community is still deeply characterized by the impunity with which powerful states, companies and investors can and do act.
In just about every way thinkable, Canada and our courts are not doing the Qeqchi people of Guatemala the favor of hearing and possibly – just possibly – deciding upon the merits of their claims. It is the Qeqchi people of Guatemala who are doing us the favor of ensuring that our courts and legal system operate the way they should have been operating, going back generations, if not hundreds of years.
In their region of Guatemala alone, INCO never should have been able to operate as it did, in partnership with a brutal US-backed military regime, directly and indirectly causing serious violations and repression, acting with impunity.
IT IS THE ECONOMY, STUPID
And even with all this, which is a lot, this struggle is about much more than that of ensuring that the Canadian legal system operates as it should, and ensure everyone’s right to justice and remedy.
Underlying all this, is that the Qeqchi people of Guatemala – like poor indigenous and non-indigenous communities across the world – are working and struggling to be the owners, controllers and beneficiaries of their own economic development, of their own lives and well-being.
‘It is about the economy, stupid!’ … it is about the global “development” model. Not only do the Qeqchi people want and deserve justice and remedy for the repression they have suffered, they want and deserve to be the owners and controllers of their own lands, territories, rivers and forests. They don’t want large-scale “development” projects (mining, large-scale dams, for-export mono-agricultural production, oil and gas extraction, etc.) imposed on them by foreign owners, companies and investors – often backed up by repressive security forces, soldiers and police.
They want and deserve to be responsible for their own well-being, providing for their families and future generations, in balance and harmony with Mother Earth.
THEY WILL BE BACK, IF NECESSARY
As each one of them said, when asked many times over the week, they did not come to Canada for happy reasons, on a tourist trip. It was a very long and hard trip, and not something they enjoyed.
They came here to tell the truth about what happened to them, and to demand justice and remedy in Canadian courts. If necessary, they will come back to Canada as many times as it takes to participate in these lawsuits.
Hudbay purchased its mining interests in Guatemala in 2008, and sold them for a loss of $290,000,000 in 2011, but not before engaging – like companies before them – in serious human rights violations. Other nickel companies are now operating near by. Some of the same threats loom over the lives and well being of the Qeqchi people of El Estor, and beyond.
Thus, their work and struggle in defense of their land and community well-being goes back generations, and continues on now. These lawsuits are a small, but now hugely important part of their work and struggle. It long has been a hard struggle for that the Qeqchi people have carried out with truth and dignity. It continues.
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
Guatemala-Canada: Clashing world views at a cross roads
By Grahame Russell, December 19, 2012. Source: Upside Down World
“Avatar” overlaps with a “John Grisham” novel in the Mayan Qeqchi plaintiffs versus Hudbay Minerals lawsuits
Recently, I had a front row seat to the colliding of world visions and realities in the heart and center of Canada’s financial district in downtown Toronto.
From November 23-30, five Mayan Qeqchi [Kek’Chi] people came to Toronto to pursue justice and remedy for violations and harms they suffered due to the nickel mining interests of Canadian mining company Hudbay Minerals. They were here to respond to questions during cross-examinations by lawyers from Hudbay Minerals’ law firm Fasken Martineau.
WHO ARE THE FIVE?
Lawsuit #1 – Angelica Choc, wife of Adolfo Ich, a community leader, teacher and father who was the victim of a targeted killing in September 2009 carried out by private security guards hired by Hudbay’s subsidiary CGN (Guatemalan Nickel Company).
Lawsuit #2 – Rosa Elbira and Margarita Caal, representing eleven women from the remote village of Lote 8 who were gang-raped by company security guards, soldiers and police, during an illegal, violent eviction of their community in January 2007, that included the whole-scale burning and destruction of 100 small homes.
Lawsuit # 3 – German Chub, a young man and father who was shot by mining company security guards and left paralyzed on the same say as the killing of Adolfo Ich.
Accompanying them was Maria Cuc, sister of Angelica Choc and their brother Ramiro Choc, a political prisoner jailed unjustly in Guatemala on trumped up charges since 2008.
“AVATAR” CROSSED WITH A JOHN GRISHAM NOVEL
Since 2004, I have been involved (with Rights Action) in funding and supporting community development, environmental protection, human rights and justice projects of mining harmed Qeqchi communities in eastern Guatemala. I had the honor of accompanying and supporting them in Canada from the moment they got off the plane in Toronto.
In certain ways, these are typical civil lawsuits: Plaintiffs X sue defendant Y for acting negligently and causing harms to X. But in most ways, these are anything but typical cases.
These lawsuits represent perhaps the intersection of the “Avatar” blockbuster movie with a “John Grisham” novel.
AVATAR: Like many resource extraction conflicts around the world, both historically and on-going today, this story of Canadian nickel companies trying to operate a mine in the Qeqchi territories of eastern Guatemala (starting with INCO in the 1960s and 70s, continuing with Skye Resources and Hudbay after 2004) is like the documentary version of the Avatar movie.
In Avatar, a powerful mining company brings a battalion of heavily armed men to a remote, far off place, uses extreme violence to forcibly remove the local indigenous people from their ancestral and sacred homelands, so as to get at a mineral that – once mined and processed – will sell for gargantuan profits, somewhere far away.
In general terms, this is the story of nickel companies in Guatemala. Indeed, it is the story of many resource extraction struggles around the world, today and going back centuries.
JOHN GRISHAM: Then, Avatar crosses with a John Grisham novel. In many Grisham novels, powerless victims of corporate abuses and crimes are represented by pro bono lawyers, with few economic resources, to try and hold a ga-zillion dollar corporation accountable, said corporation being represented by well-paid lawyers from a politically well-connected law firm.
Represented by the Klippensteins law firm, who are doing much of the legal work for little or no pay, the Qeqchi victims have stuck a legal toe in the side door of the very political and legal structures and systems that so often empower and ‘legitimize’ the expansion of corporate and investor interests across the globe (like Hudbay’s interests in Guatemala), while providing little to no real legal or political oversight and accountability.
The Klippensteins lawyers are well trained and experienced, and utterly committed to the principle that victims of crimes and harms ought to get justice and remedy for the harms and losses they have suffered; that wrong-doers – including wealthy, powerful and influential corporations and investors – can and ought to be held accountable when they directly or indirectly cause serious human rights harms.
CONFRONTING VAST GLOBAL INEQUALITY
On their clients’ behalf, Klippensteins agreed to file these cases and take them as far as they can, knowing full well the enormity of the legal-political challenge.
On this planet, our human community, separated off into hundreds of countries, is characterized by vast inequality of wealth and power, both inside and between nations. Many global corporations and investors (a majority based in Europe and North America) control more wealth than the GNPs (gross national product) of many countries around the world.
These companies scour the earth looking for resources to exploit and profit from. They are heavily invested in by private funds and public pension funds (like the Canada Pension Plan that was invested in Hudbay during the years of these violations in Guatemala). These companies are also supported in many ways by their home governments. They often hire their own armed security forces and are usually supported by the armies and police of the countries where they operate.
This is essentially the history of Canadian nickel companies in Guatemala, from INCO in the 1970s and 80s, to Skye Resources and Hudbay from 2004 forward.
CONFRONTING IMPUNITY AND IMMUNITY FROM ACCOUNTABILITY
These corporations and investors operate this way, around the planet, with close to complete impunity and immunity from legal or political accountability. In the year 2012, it is still next to impossible to hold global companies and investors accountable in any court in the countries where they operate, like Guatemala; in international human rights reporting bodies (like the United Nations or Organization of American States); or in the courts of their home countries, like Canada.
Despite the fact that countries, like Canada, espouse democratic values, a belief in and adherence to the rule of law and good governance, we intentionally do not have the criminal and civil legislation on the books, let alone the political will, to hold our own companies accountable if/when they commit crimes or human rights violations and health and environmental harms in other counties.
These three lawsuits represent, in this regard, an exception to the rule of impunity and immunity from legal accountability. There is no way whatsoever (that I know of) to hold our companies criminally accountable in our courts if/when they commit crimes in other countries.
In terms of civil law accountability, there is, once again, an effort to pass comprehensive legislation (Bill C-323, The International Promotion and Protection of Human Rights Act) so as to start to fill the legal accountability void, … but this is an uphill struggle and is likely to meet strong opposition from the mining industry itself, let alone from politicians in the dominant political parties. (Information about this law and campaign: http://www.facebook.com/PassBillC323; www.peterjulian.ca; http://www.facebook.com/MPPeterJulian)
Our lack of laws and legal accountability is a hypocritical double standard and it is this very impunity and immunity from accountability that directly enables and empowers companies and investors to continue to act as they do.
A LONG TRIP ACROSS A FURTHER DISTANCE
It is in this daunting global context, that these 3 lawsuits are taking place. Of the five who came north, all are Qeqchi speakers. Sisters Maria and Angelica are bi-lingual, speaking fluent Spanish as well. German speaks quite good Spanish, as a second language. Rosa and Margarita speak only Qeqchi.
Four of them had never traveled internationally before. Rosa and Margarita had rarely been to Guatemala City. They all live in poor and materially simple rural communities, with no electricity, running water or access to basic health and educational services.
Lote 8, the village of Rosa and Margarita, is high on the mountain range the runs east-west along the north shore of Lake Izabal. There are no roads into Lote 8, a 2-3 hour hike to and from the main road below on the lowlands.
It took this group over 2 days of travel to get to Toronto. Before dawn on Thursday, November 22, Rosa and Margarita hiked down mountain paths to the main gravel road. Then, a 45 minute drive to the town of El Estor. There, Maria, Angelica and German joined them in the van, and they drove 7 hours to Guatemala City. The next morning, up at 3, they drove 5 hours to the San Salvador airport, to catch a 5 hour direct flight to Toronto.
At 10pm, Friday, November 23rd, they emerged with their suitcases, into the cold of a late November Toronto. Their home region of El Estor lies at sea level, one hour from the Caribbean Sea. It is one of the hottest regions of Guatemala. The cold of Toronto will take some getting used to. On day 1, the cold particularly affected German, due to the bullet still lodged in his back, too close to his already damaged spinal column for removal, without further risk of harm and deepening paralysis.
From the Toronto airport, they walked – German rolling in his wheelchair – into one of the centers of global power and wealth, to do legal battle with a wealthy and influential company, represented by a powerful and influential law firm, to demand justice and remedy in Canadian courts.
That is a very long trip, and even greater distance to cross. And this story is far from over. The 3 lawsuits are a small but crucial part of it.
The Qeqchi people of eastern Guatemalan have been suffering harms and violations by Canadian companies, dating back to when INCO partnered with the US-backed military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, and carried out similar illegal and violence forced evictions, shooting and killings.
The 1999 United Nations Truth Commission concluded that INCO – via its Guatemalan subsidiary EXMIBAL – colluded with the Guatemalan military in at least 5 documented cases of serious human rights violations – including killings and disappearances.
No justice was ever done for what INCO did, neither in Guatemala nor in Canada. The victims were never remedied for their loss and suffering. In 1981, INCO closed the mining operation, but hung onto its (ill-gotten) mining concession.
By 2004, former directors of INCO had incorporated a new company – Skye Resources -, and in 2004, Skye (with support from INCO) started again to try and mine for nickel in the El Estor region; soon after that, repression began all over again.
For more background, please view: 10-minute film “El Estor Evictions”, by Steven Schnoor: http://rightsaction.org/video/elestor/index.htm; 5-minute trailer to forth-coming feature length film “Defensora”, by Rachel Schmidt: www.defensorathefilm.com.
THE LEGAL CASES
These lawsuits – filed in 2011 – may well go on for years. The Qeqchi plaintiffs and their lawyers at Klippensteins are very aware of the lopsided, up-hill nature of the legal struggle they are involved in. As a ‘legal tactic’, Hudbay could easily try to financially overwhelm the plaintiffs, using legal motions and petitions, appeals and counter-appeals, etc., spending seemingly endless amounts of Hudbay’s money to do so.
Hudbay is already arguing that -1- the cases should be brought in the jurisdiction of Guatemala, not Canada; and that -2- Hudbay should not be held to account for what its subsidiary – CGN (Guatemalan Nickel Company) – did in Guatemala.
JURISDICTION: Moving the cases to Guatemala would virtually guarantee complete impunity for Hudbay and its former subsidiary CGN. Notwithstanding a few cases of serious human rights violations and political repression that are finally moving very slowly through the Guatemalan courts, 20 to 30 years after the crimes (including genocide, massacres, disappearances, gang-rapes) were committed, it is widely recognized that legal and political impunity is the norm in Guatemala.
It is not that Guatemala does not have laws to address illegal forced evictions, killings, shootings, gang rapes, etc. It is that the legal system does not work – due to corruption fear, threats and influences – to hold the powerful sectors accountable, even when the powerful are foreign companies or individuals.
‘PIERCING THE CORPORATE VEIL’: Individuals, ultimately responsible for wrong-doing, have long hidden behind the legal artifice of the ‘corporate veil’. Ie, company and investor decision makers (who are also direct financial beneficiaries) hide behind the legal status of corporation ‘A’ (ex. Hudbay Minerals, in Canada) that they incorporated or purchased, and operate, arguing that they cannot be held responsible for the criminal or wrongful activities committed by corporation ‘B’ (ex. CGN, in Guatemala), that was incorporated or purchased by, and is operated by corporation A, that ultimately is controlled by them, the company directors and major shareholders. Nice!
Whether addressing wrongs within our national borders, or around the world, it is long overdue that our courts can and should ‘pierce the corporate veil’ and hold the real controllers and decision-makers (and, lest we forget, the financial beneficiaries) to account.
COSMOLOGICAL CHASM
On one level, these lawsuits are normal and even mundane: filing statements of claim; paying attention to procedural law; filing and contesting motions, and counter-motions; negotiating and fighting about when and where to hold pre-trial hearings; etc. But these are not lawsuits about how one neighbor’s tree fell on another’s fence, shed and property and caused damage … even as many of the same procedural, evidentiary and substantive laws and legal principles apply.
These 3 cases, that operate in many ways as one lawsuit, are bringing together a hugely wealthy company and some of the wealthiest investors on the planet (and their deep pockets, powerful law firm and connections to the Canadian political, economic and media establishments), on the one hand, with some of the poorest people on the planet, from ‘far-off’ places, speaking wildly different languages – the languages of the first nations of the Americas.
Forced together, through the courageous filing of these lawsuits, the two sides sat across from one another in a board room, in a sky-scraper in downtown Toronto, to face off in this initial round of pre-trial cross-examinations.
Four days in a row (German on Monday, Rosa on Tuesday, Margarita on Wednesday, Angelica on Thursday), the Qeqchi and Spanish speaking plaintiffs responded to up to 8 hours of questioning by Hudbay’s lawyers. Four days in a row, the other members of the group walked every morning to the door of the room where the hearings took place, to provide strength and moral support to the person going in that day; waited to have lunch with them; and then welcomed them in the evening when their day of questioning was done.
“WE WON” (Ganamos)
On Wednesday afternoon, Margarita – after 8 hours of questioning – rejoined her Qeqchi friends and community members, raised both arms in the air, and said, with a huge smile of relief, “Ganamos” (we won), as they crowded around her and hugged her. She cried.
Two points. Firstly, nothing has been won. These trials – barring unforeseen circumstances – are still in the initial stages. In Toronto, these are only pre-trial hearings. What did Margarita mean – “we won”? Two nights later, she responded to that question put to her by the media, saying: ‘We know that Hudbay has said that what we say is not true. I know Hudbay said that we [the women of Lote 8] were not gang-raped. But, we were gang-raped; Adolfo is dead, and buried under the ground; German was shot, and is here with us, in a wheelchair. So today, I answered every one of their questions. I did not cry. I told the truth, I did not lie.’
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Margarita said “we” – she did not say “I” won, referring to herself, though she had just been through 8 hours of cross-examination alone.
This “we” versus “I” goes to a larger point about what this struggle is for the Qeqchi people of Guatemala. For all of them, “they” are being harmed by the selfish interests of “outsiders” – Guatemalan and foreign wealthy interests always using violence against them, the original inhabitants of those lands, to get them off their lands so as to produce bananas, coffee, cows (for meat exports), sugar cane, African palm, or to mine for nickel.
The harms, violations and repression always have been and remain a collective harm against a people. Margarita is here, responding individually to Hudbay’s questions, but she is involved in a community struggle, both for justice and remedy in these cases, and ultimately for their community well-being, in their homes, on their lands, in their forests, by their water sources.
The gang-rapes that the eleven women of Lote 8 suffered were both individual and collective harms at the same time. Margarita, who has come from her world in Lote 8 to the heart and center of Canada’s financial capital, is proudly and with extraordinary dignity struggling for justice and remedy for herself and her Mayan Qeqchi people.
It is hard to fully describe the chasm between different world visions and life experiences in which space these lawsuits are playing themselves out.
ENDING 500 YEARS OF IMPUNITY
The scenario of the lawsuits is already hard enough to believe, let alone to consider that this is a precedent setting case. This has rarely if ever happened in Canadian courts.
If the global human community had been actually governed by the rule of law and principles of good governance and democratic accountability for, say, the last 500 years, then countless numbers of these cases would have been filed and addressed since the European (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese) invasion of the Americas beginning in 1492 … (when ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue’). An entire body of law and precedents would have been established and put in place. These types of abuses would no longer occur, and when they did, real justice would be swift.
This obviously never happened – not then, and still not now. We don’t live in that world. 500 years have passed since European expansionism across the globe and the birth of the modern (and very unequal) Nation State system, and still the global human community is still deeply characterized by the impunity with which powerful states, companies and investors can and do act.
In just about every way thinkable, Canada and our courts are not doing the Qeqchi people of Guatemala the favor of hearing and possibly – just possibly – deciding upon the merits of their claims. It is the Qeqchi people of Guatemala who are doing us the favor of ensuring that our courts and legal system operate the way they should have been operating, going back generations, if not hundreds of years.
In their region of Guatemala alone, INCO never should have been able to operate as it did, in partnership with a brutal US-backed military regime, directly and indirectly causing serious violations and repression, acting with impunity.
IT IS THE ECONOMY, STUPID
And even with all this, which is a lot, this struggle is about much more than that of ensuring that the Canadian legal system operates as it should, and ensure everyone’s right to justice and remedy.
Underlying all this, is that the Qeqchi people of Guatemala – like poor indigenous and non-indigenous communities across the world – are working and struggling to be the owners, controllers and beneficiaries of their own economic development, of their own lives and well-being.
‘It is about the economy, stupid!’ … it is about the global “development” model. Not only do the Qeqchi people want and deserve justice and remedy for the repression they have suffered, they want and deserve to be the owners and controllers of their own lands, territories, rivers and forests. They don’t want large-scale “development” projects (mining, large-scale dams, for-export mono-agricultural production, oil and gas extraction, etc.) imposed on them by foreign owners, companies and investors – often backed up by repressive security forces, soldiers and police.
They want and deserve to be responsible for their own well-being, providing for their families and future generations, in balance and harmony with Mother Earth.
THEY WILL BE BACK, IF NECESSARY
As each one of them said, when asked many times over the week, they did not come to Canada for happy reasons, on a tourist trip. It was a very long and hard trip, and not something they enjoyed.
They came here to tell the truth about what happened to them, and to demand justice and remedy in Canadian courts. If necessary, they will come back to Canada as many times as it takes to participate in these lawsuits.
Hudbay purchased its mining interests in Guatemala in 2008, and sold them for a loss of $290,000,000 in 2011, but not before engaging – like companies before them – in serious human rights violations. Other nickel companies are now operating near by. Some of the same threats loom over the lives and well being of the Qeqchi people of El Estor, and beyond.
Thus, their work and struggle in defense of their land and community well-being goes back generations, and continues on now. These lawsuits are a small, but now hugely important part of their work and struggle. It long has been a hard struggle for that the Qeqchi people have carried out with truth and dignity. It continues.
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Power company loses some of its appetite for coal
Note: Shutting down coal plants: Good. Replacing coal with natural gas instead of working toward drastically reducing consumption: not so good.
-The GJEP Team
By Eric Lipton, December 19, 2012. Source: NY Times
Photo: Shawn Poynter/New York Times
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country.
American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal,announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that was mined locally.
Big Sandy this year became a symbolof the plight of the coal industry nationwide. Strict new environmental regulations are forcing large utilities to spend billions of dollars to retrofit old coal-burning plants or shut them down, replacing them in most cases with equipment that uses cleaner-burning natural gas.
A.E.P., which is based in Ohio, has repeatedly changed its mind over what to do with Big Sandy, a big employer in eastern Kentucky, both at the 120-employee plant itself and in the Appalachian-area coal mines that feed it 2.5 million tons of coal each year.
In May, the power company withdrew a plan to spent $1 billion to retrofit Big Sandy so that it could continue to operate. But that would have required a 31 percent increase in electricity rates for eastern Kentucky residents.
On Wednesday, A.E.P. announced that it would close both of the coal-burning furnaces at Big Sandy in 2015, but left open the possibility that one of the units would be retrofitted to use natural gas. Area residents, if the Kentucky Public Service Commission approves the plan, would see an 8 percent increase in their electricity rates — to replace Big Sandy’s production with electricity from West Virginia — much less than the earlier plan.
But the decision still hurts, said State Representative Rocky Adkins, a Democrat who represents the area.
“It’s kind of like we have had our heart and soul taken from us,” said Mr. Adkins, who also is the majority floor leader of the Kentucky House. “The impact on the economy here is just going to be devastating.”
This has been a bad year for the coal industry.
A total of 55 plants, including Big Sandy, have closed or have announced plans to shut down, according to a count by the Sierra Club. That will leave 395 coal-burning plants in the United States, compared with 522 in 2010, according to the Sierra Club.
Last week, Dynergy of Houston announced that its Danskammer coal-burning power plant near Newburgh, N.Y., which was damaged during Hurricane Sandy, would alsoclose permanently. Last month, Patriot Coal, based in St. Louis, which filed for bankruptcythis year, announced it would be shutting down its Bluegrass Mine Complex near Henderson, Ky., one of dozens of mines that are reducing production or closing operations as electric utilities shift at a record rate from coal to natural gas.
Nationwide, coal production dropped this year by an estimated 7 percent even as exports grew to Asia and Europe, according to the Energy Department.
Politically, this has been a disappointing year for the coal industry as well. Industry executives contributed heavily to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, while also sending large donations to important Congressional races, like Senate contests in Ohio, Virginia and Montana, in which their preferred candidates lost.
“Anyway you count it, this is the worst year ever for coal,” said Bruce Nilles, one of the managers of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. “And to see Big Sandy added to the list — it underscores how the economics of coal have turned so fast. This is eastern Kentucky, a place where the state was willing to do a lot to save it.”
Mr. Adkins said the repercussions in eastern Kentucky will last for decades, adding that local hotels, trucking companies, and even schools, would be adversely affected by the shutdown.
“We will get up, dust ourselves off and we will try our best to move forward,” Mr. Adkins said.
Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said that there remained hope that the price of natural gas would rise in the coming year, making coal more competitive. He said surging demand in India and China could help replace declining domestic sales.
“We have the most of the fuel — coal — that the rest of world wants the most of,” he said.
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Like this:
Power company loses some of its appetite for coal
Note: Shutting down coal plants: Good. Replacing coal with natural gas instead of working toward drastically reducing consumption: not so good.
-The GJEP Team
By Eric Lipton, December 19, 2012. Source: NY Times
Photo: Shawn Poynter/New York Times
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country.
American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal,announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that was mined locally.
Big Sandy this year became a symbolof the plight of the coal industry nationwide. Strict new environmental regulations are forcing large utilities to spend billions of dollars to retrofit old coal-burning plants or shut them down, replacing them in most cases with equipment that uses cleaner-burning natural gas.
A.E.P., which is based in Ohio, has repeatedly changed its mind over what to do with Big Sandy, a big employer in eastern Kentucky, both at the 120-employee plant itself and in the Appalachian-area coal mines that feed it 2.5 million tons of coal each year.
In May, the power company withdrew a plan to spent $1 billion to retrofit Big Sandy so that it could continue to operate. But that would have required a 31 percent increase in electricity rates for eastern Kentucky residents.
On Wednesday, A.E.P. announced that it would close both of the coal-burning furnaces at Big Sandy in 2015, but left open the possibility that one of the units would be retrofitted to use natural gas. Area residents, if the Kentucky Public Service Commission approves the plan, would see an 8 percent increase in their electricity rates — to replace Big Sandy’s production with electricity from West Virginia — much less than the earlier plan.
But the decision still hurts, said State Representative Rocky Adkins, a Democrat who represents the area.
“It’s kind of like we have had our heart and soul taken from us,” said Mr. Adkins, who also is the majority floor leader of the Kentucky House. “The impact on the economy here is just going to be devastating.”
This has been a bad year for the coal industry.
A total of 55 plants, including Big Sandy, have closed or have announced plans to shut down, according to a count by the Sierra Club. That will leave 395 coal-burning plants in the United States, compared with 522 in 2010, according to the Sierra Club.
Last week, Dynergy of Houston announced that its Danskammer coal-burning power plant near Newburgh, N.Y., which was damaged during Hurricane Sandy, would alsoclose permanently. Last month, Patriot Coal, based in St. Louis, which filed for bankruptcythis year, announced it would be shutting down its Bluegrass Mine Complex near Henderson, Ky., one of dozens of mines that are reducing production or closing operations as electric utilities shift at a record rate from coal to natural gas.
Nationwide, coal production dropped this year by an estimated 7 percent even as exports grew to Asia and Europe, according to the Energy Department.
Politically, this has been a disappointing year for the coal industry as well. Industry executives contributed heavily to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, while also sending large donations to important Congressional races, like Senate contests in Ohio, Virginia and Montana, in which their preferred candidates lost.
“Anyway you count it, this is the worst year ever for coal,” said Bruce Nilles, one of the managers of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign. “And to see Big Sandy added to the list — it underscores how the economics of coal have turned so fast. This is eastern Kentucky, a place where the state was willing to do a lot to save it.”
Mr. Adkins said the repercussions in eastern Kentucky will last for decades, adding that local hotels, trucking companies, and even schools, would be adversely affected by the shutdown.
“We will get up, dust ourselves off and we will try our best to move forward,” Mr. Adkins said.
Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association, said that there remained hope that the price of natural gas would rise in the coming year, making coal more competitive. He said surging demand in India and China could help replace declining domestic sales.
“We have the most of the fuel — coal — that the rest of world wants the most of,” he said.
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Like this:
Climate change already playing out in West, report says
By Amy Joi O’Donoghue, December 18 2012. Source: Deseret News
Photo: Jeffrey Allred, Deseret News
SALT LAKE CITY — A new report says the effects of climate change are already being felt in bug-infested forests of the Intermountain West, in reduced flows of the Colorado River basin and in the amount of snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains.
What is key, the report stresses, is how state and federal governments are responding and what land and natural resource conservation strategies can be embraced or expanded to counter the impacts.
“I think the bottom line is that these impacts are not going to happen 50 or 100 years from now,” said Bruce Stein, director of climate change adaption with the National Wildlife Federation. “Many of them are already here, and we are going to have to be rethinking what we do to protect our wildlife and how we build and protect our communities.”
In addition to climate changes causing heat waves in the summer, the report highlights a surprise revelation that its biggest effect occurs in the winter months. Those warmer winters are enhancing pest outbreaks and accelerating the melting of snowpack each year, reducing the amount of water that’s available later when needed.
The report, Impacts of Climate Change on Biodiversity, Ecoystems and Ecosystem Services, was peer-reviewed by the U.S. Geological Survey and drew on the expertise of 60 contributors from government agencies, universities and private, non-profit organizations such as The Nature Conservancy.
The report foreshadows the National Climate Assessment, a report done every four years for the U.S. president and Congress charting projections in global change for the next 25 to 100 years. Done by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, that report is anticipated to be released in draft form in January and available for public comment.
In a teleconference Tuesday highlighting key findings of the biodiversity report, moderator Mary Grimm said U.S. ecosystems are already undergoing “massive” transformations as the result of climate change.
“Ecological systems are already more stressed than at any comparable period in human history, said Grimm, a senior sustainability scientist at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability.
The report notes that forests are already responding to climate change, with longer growing seasons and warmer winters that enhance pest outbreaks such as rampant bark beetle infestations. Such attacks are leading to widespread die-offs of trees in forests, sparking increased risks for more severe and extensive fires.
“If trends continue,” the report warned, “baseline tree mortality rates in western forests are projected to double every 17 to 29 years.”
Peter Groffman, a microbial ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millibrook, N.Y., said their research turned up a significant surprise — that climate change’s impacts are playing out more dramatically in the winter than in other seasons.
While assumptions and most research bemoans climate change with its potential for arid heat waves in the summer, those increasing temperatures during the winter months have substantial consequences as well, Groffman said.
“Climate change is more dramatic in the winter than we thought,” he said. “Those changes have effects on biodiversity and ecoystems in the growing season,” and accelerate snowmelt and even changes in peak runoff, which can come earlier.
“In the Colorado River basin, water shortages are expected as a consequence of changes in snowmelt timing,” the report notes. “Acceleration of the annual melting of snowpack may reduce water availability later in the summer when it is most needed, particularly in the more arid regions such as the western United States.”
By 2050, climate change will triple the fraction of counties in the United States that are at high or extremely high risk of outstripping their water supplies, from 10 percent to 32 percent, the report notes, adding that the most at-risk areas in the United States are the West, Southwest and Great Plains regions.
Stein said water managers, particularly those in the Colorado River basin that includes Utah, are already responding to the threat of such shortages.
“‘Water managers are planning their operations with climate in context, taking into account what is known as the ‘new normal,’” he said. “Much of our water management was developed at a time when there was good supply of precipitation. Over the last 10 to 15 years, we can see that has changed. Along the Colorado, they are beginning to recalibrate their assumptions and accordingly recalibrate how they are managing the river and their allocations.”
The study points to strides and real progress on the ground that demonstrates that government can be responsive and smart in the threat of climate change, and the public-private partnerships out there to curtail its range of potential consequences.
An example is a tree-thinning program instituted in Arizona, which experienced its largest wildfire on record in 2011. Still, the fire did not burn ridges where the thinning had happened. Such strategy invoked in advance of catastrophic wildfires can help reduce other threats, such as flash flooding that can imperil drinking water supplies, the report notes.
“The nexus of climate and forest fires is a flashpoint for several other degraded ecosystems such as water supply and water quality,” the report said.
The report said that the federal government is beginning to take action by managing programs with climate change as a component.
Several states, too, have formal climate change adaptation programs on the books, and even those that don’t are approaching the management of fish and wildlife with strategies that incorporate conservation in a broad sense, including habitat restoration and landscape connectivity.
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
For Indigenous Peoples, land rights are only half the battle
By Barbara Fraser, December 17 2012. Source: Intercontinental Cry
Photo: Intercontinental Cry
LIMA, Peru - While indigenous people in Latin America are increasingly gaining rights to their traditional homelands, obstacles ranging from unclear legislation to entrenched power brokers have prevented them from having any real say over governance or their natural resources, a new analysis says.
Anne Larson, a scientist with the Center for International Forestry Research and winner of this year’s Ostrom Memorial Award for most innovative paper of the year, has spent the last six years studying cases in northeastern Nicaragua.
The North Atlantic Autonomous Region, an area that includes 19 indigenous territories with elected leaders, was created in the late 1980s to give local people a role in decision-making. That added a new layer of control to a system that already included national and municipal governments.
However, that did not necessarily make decision-making more effective or democratic.
Effectively, the national government maintained de facto control.
A turning point came when Awas Tingni, a Sumo-Mayangna indigenous community, filed a petition with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights over a forest concession that the national government had granted to a foreign company on its lands, without its consent. In a landmark case in 2001, the court mandated that the government recognise indigenous land rights. Not long after, Nicaragua passed the Communal Lands Law, officially recognizing this and calling for demarcation and titling of lands.
The law, however, did not automatically resolve key issues facing the communities, particularly those related to the colonisation of the land by outsiders, the formation of territories, election of representatives and authority over natural resources.
“Indigenous land rights are being recognised in part because of important national and international movements that have fought for them, but also in part because those who want access to the resources on those lands are finding other ways to get them,” Larson says.
In Nicaragua and other countries, indigenous territories often overlap the boundaries of municipalities. That can lead to conflicts in cases in which both local indigenous authorities and municipal officials claim jurisdiction. Further complicating matters, the national government may be reluctant to give local people the power to make decisions about natural resources, even if the law requires their free prior and informed consent.
As a result, they still lack the real ability to make decisions, Larson says. Instead, other players with more power take advantage of legal ambiguities and sideline them from decision-making.
Her paper, Decentralisation and devolution in Nicaragua’s North Atlantic autonomous region: Natural resources and indigenous peoples’ rights, published in the International Journal of the Commons, shows that laws establishing multi-level government alone will not enable indigenous communities to better manage their natural resources.
“The only practical solution is to tip the power balance through the empowerment of local actors – through specific interventions to educate, organize and facilitate their ability to bring about change in the way decisions are made,” Larson writes. [emphasis added]
“People need to understand and fight for their rights and demand accountability and representation not only from authorities but also from their own leaders,” she says.
“We need to rethink ways of managing community development, emphasising identity and intercultural relationships,” says co-author, Jadder Mendoza-Lewis, former director of the Natural Resources, Environment and Sustainable Development Institute at the University of the Autonomous Regions of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua (URACCAN), who is a native of that region.
“It is important to engage in deeper dialogue and design mechanisms that ensure communal and territorial governments that are democratic, transparent and inclusive,” Mendoza-Lewis says.
Legal reforms can also help by creating a process for communities to give their free, prior and informed consent about concessions or other use of resources on their lands, specifying how communities will exercise their rights and clarifying the relationship between municipalities and territories.
Such steps could “help level the playing field,” according to Larson, encouraging dialogue with communities and empowering local leaders by helping them understand their territories and training them in negotiating skills.
“The dynamics are partly about natural resources, because they are a main source of employment and development, but governance structures and the reasons people come together have to do with what they want for their future, not just natural resources,” she says.
Larson hopes to compare Nicaragua’s experience with the autonomous region with systems for governing indigenous territories in other parts of Latin America.
The Ostrom Memorial Award is named for the late Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 and was known for her studies of the management of common resources.
Michael Schoon, an editor at the International Journal of the Commons, said the paper by Larson and Mendoza-Lewis was noted for the interesting and innovative approach it took in grappling with the problem of how to embed power relations in a theory of decentralisation.
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
California issues first-ever fracking regulations
Note: Looks like the Golden Age of Gas is coming to the Sunshine State. Good thing California doesn’t have to worry about water scarcity. On second thought…
-The GJEP Team
By Paul Rogers, December 18, 2012. Source: Mercury News
Elizabeth Allen, of Boulder, wears a “No Friggin’ Frackin’” sign while waiting for the meeting to begin, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012, at the Boulder County Courthouse in Boulder, Colo.
Photo: Jeremy Papasso/AP Photo
Wading into one of the hottest environmental debates in the nation, California on Tuesday released its first-ever regulations for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the increasingly common — and controversial — practice of freeing oil and gas from rock formations by injecting chemicals under high pressure into the ground.
The rules proposed by the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown would require energy companies to disclose their fracking plans to the state 10 days before starting operations. The companies also would be required to post to an online database with the locations of their work and the chemicals used, and they would face new rules for testing and monitoring their wells.
“There is a high degree of public interest in this, a high degree of legislative interest, and interest in the Brown Administration in having rules that are clear,” said Jason Marshall, chief deputy director of the California Department of Conservation.
Environmental groups immediately blasted the rules as weak and riddled with loopholes.
“These draft regulations would keep California’s fracking shrouded in secrecy and do little to contain the many threats posed by fracking,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The rules are going to have to be completely rewritten if the goal is to provide real protection for our air, water and communities.”
In recent years, fracking has made headlines in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and
other states, as energy companies have used new technologies to produce huge amounts of natural gas, creating jobs and lowering natural gas prices considerably. The practice even has an environmental benefit: By making natural gas cheaper, it has led utilities to use less coal, reducing global warming and soot emissions.
But critics have raised concerns about fracking chemicals polluting groundwater, along with widespread disruption to rural property owners from huge rigs and loud industrial equipment. A documentary film, “Gasland,” further increased concerns when it showed tap water so polluted near one fracking area that it caught fire.
The oil industry on Tuesday said the California draft rules were a good start.
“We certainly appreciate the effort that the Department of Conservation is making on these,” said Tupper Hull, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association. “We are encouraged that they continue to recognize the important role that hydraulic fracturing can play in the state’s economy.”
Monterey Shale
Companies in California have used fracking at least since the 1960s. But most of it has been done to produce oil, and largely in Kern County and other Southern California areas. But now the oil industry is looking at a dramatic expansion into the Monterey Shale, a huge geologic formation that extends through much of the Central Valley into San Benito and Monterey counties.
The formation is believed to hold as much as 15.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil, which would make it the nation’s largest shale oil formation. Last week, the federal Bureau of Land Management leased 18,000 acres in southern Monterey County for fracking.
Fearing an oil rush that could increase pollution, several lawmakers in Sacramento this year unsuccessfully tried to limit the practice. One bill, by state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, for example, would have required 30 days notice to any property owner within 300 feet of a fracking operation. Pavley also wanted the energy companies to test groundwater before and after fracking to ensure that the thousands of gallons of chemicals injected into the ground do not pollute potential drinking water sources.
The state Senate rejected the measure amid opposition from the oil industry and Republicans, who said it would cost jobs.
On Tuesday, Pavley said that some parts of the draft rules are promising, but the notification and disclosure requirements fall short.
“There is still much work to be done,” she said.
Brown administration officials contended that California has some of the strictest rules about well safety in the nation and that fracking has not caused environmental damage in the Golden State.
“There is no evidence of harm from fracking in groundwater in California at this point in time. And it has been going on for many years,” said Tim Kustic, state oil and gas supervisor with the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources.
‘Discussion draft’
The draft rules released Tuesday came after the agency held public discussions around the state. The “discussion draft” begins a process that will play out next year with more public hearings and could take a year to finalize.
Although state regulators said the rules would protect public safety, they raised many new questions. Among them:
The rules require companies to give 10 days notice to the department, but they require only three days public notice of the fracking site before work begins and do not require notification of adjacent property owners.
The rules do not include an appeals process for property owners who oppose the fracking work.
The rules require for the first time that energy companies disclose the chemicals they are injecting into the ground. But the database for that information is not be subject to public records laws.
Instead, rules would require companies to post the information to a privately owned and difficult-to-navigate Web database called FracFocus, which critics link to the oil and gas industry.
Companies could claim “trade secrets” exemptions to withhold the names of the chemicals they inject.
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
California issues first-ever fracking regulations
Note: Looks like the Golden Age of Gas is coming to the Sunshine State. Good thing California doesn’t have to worry about water scarcity. On second thought…
-The GJEP Team
By Paul Rogers, December 18, 2012. Source: Mercury News
Elizabeth Allen, of Boulder, wears a “No Friggin’ Frackin’” sign while waiting for the meeting to begin, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012, at the Boulder County Courthouse in Boulder, Colo.
Photo: Jeremy Papasso/AP Photo
Wading into one of the hottest environmental debates in the nation, California on Tuesday released its first-ever regulations for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” the increasingly common — and controversial — practice of freeing oil and gas from rock formations by injecting chemicals under high pressure into the ground.
The rules proposed by the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown would require energy companies to disclose their fracking plans to the state 10 days before starting operations. The companies also would be required to post to an online database with the locations of their work and the chemicals used, and they would face new rules for testing and monitoring their wells.
“There is a high degree of public interest in this, a high degree of legislative interest, and interest in the Brown Administration in having rules that are clear,” said Jason Marshall, chief deputy director of the California Department of Conservation.
Environmental groups immediately blasted the rules as weak and riddled with loopholes.
“These draft regulations would keep California’s fracking shrouded in secrecy and do little to contain the many threats posed by fracking,” said Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. “The rules are going to have to be completely rewritten if the goal is to provide real protection for our air, water and communities.”
In recent years, fracking has made headlines in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and
other states, as energy companies have used new technologies to produce huge amounts of natural gas, creating jobs and lowering natural gas prices considerably. The practice even has an environmental benefit: By making natural gas cheaper, it has led utilities to use less coal, reducing global warming and soot emissions.
But critics have raised concerns about fracking chemicals polluting groundwater, along with widespread disruption to rural property owners from huge rigs and loud industrial equipment. A documentary film, “Gasland,” further increased concerns when it showed tap water so polluted near one fracking area that it caught fire.
The oil industry on Tuesday said the California draft rules were a good start.
“We certainly appreciate the effort that the Department of Conservation is making on these,” said Tupper Hull, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Association. “We are encouraged that they continue to recognize the important role that hydraulic fracturing can play in the state’s economy.”
Monterey Shale
Companies in California have used fracking at least since the 1960s. But most of it has been done to produce oil, and largely in Kern County and other Southern California areas. But now the oil industry is looking at a dramatic expansion into the Monterey Shale, a huge geologic formation that extends through much of the Central Valley into San Benito and Monterey counties.
The formation is believed to hold as much as 15.5 billion barrels of recoverable oil, which would make it the nation’s largest shale oil formation. Last week, the federal Bureau of Land Management leased 18,000 acres in southern Monterey County for fracking.
Fearing an oil rush that could increase pollution, several lawmakers in Sacramento this year unsuccessfully tried to limit the practice. One bill, by state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, for example, would have required 30 days notice to any property owner within 300 feet of a fracking operation. Pavley also wanted the energy companies to test groundwater before and after fracking to ensure that the thousands of gallons of chemicals injected into the ground do not pollute potential drinking water sources.
The state Senate rejected the measure amid opposition from the oil industry and Republicans, who said it would cost jobs.
On Tuesday, Pavley said that some parts of the draft rules are promising, but the notification and disclosure requirements fall short.
“There is still much work to be done,” she said.
Brown administration officials contended that California has some of the strictest rules about well safety in the nation and that fracking has not caused environmental damage in the Golden State.
“There is no evidence of harm from fracking in groundwater in California at this point in time. And it has been going on for many years,” said Tim Kustic, state oil and gas supervisor with the California Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources.
‘Discussion draft’
The draft rules released Tuesday came after the agency held public discussions around the state. The “discussion draft” begins a process that will play out next year with more public hearings and could take a year to finalize.
Although state regulators said the rules would protect public safety, they raised many new questions. Among them:
The rules require companies to give 10 days notice to the department, but they require only three days public notice of the fracking site before work begins and do not require notification of adjacent property owners.
The rules do not include an appeals process for property owners who oppose the fracking work.
The rules require for the first time that energy companies disclose the chemicals they are injecting into the ground. But the database for that information is not be subject to public records laws.
Instead, rules would require companies to post the information to a privately owned and difficult-to-navigate Web database called FracFocus, which critics link to the oil and gas industry.
Companies could claim “trade secrets” exemptions to withhold the names of the chemicals they inject.
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Keystone protesters pay price for camping in Texas trees
Note: Gotta love Bloomberg coverage. For folks in the Texas area, there will be another Tar Sands Blockade mass action camp from January 3-8th; info here: http://bit.ly/TxYS19
–The GJEP Team
By David Mildenberg, December 19 2012. Source: Bloomberg
Protesters trying to save the world by sitting in trees or blocking equipment used to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline are learning that environmental activism can be a ticket to lengthy jail time in east Texas.
Matthew Almonte, Glen Collins and Isabel Brooks landed in jail in Tyler Dec. 3, charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass, resisting arrest and illegal dumping, following efforts to stop work on the TransCanada Corp. (TRP) pipeline. Each has asked for a reduction in the $65,000 bond that must be posted to get out pending trial, without success.
The trio joined more than 30 others arrested since October near Tyler and Nacogdoches as they tried to halt work on the $7.6 billion pipeline that would bring products of Alberta tar sands to Houston-area refineries. President Barack Obamablocked the northern U.S. leg, citing environmental risks inNebraska. An updated review of a revised route may be released in days. The southern end runs from Oklahomathrough Texas.
“This is the front line where the climate debate comes onto the ground and you can come over and kick it,” said Eddie Scher, a Sierra Club spokesman. The Washington-based group calls itself the largest, most effective U.S. environmental advocate. “There isn’t an inch of space between us and the blockaders.”
First Well
Dozens of mostly 20-something activists have pitched tents on a ranch outside Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas and near the site of the state’s first oil well. The camp provides a staging area for protests, which have included perching in trees on the route and locking people to construction equipment.
“Gangs of tree sitters who trespass and defecate on landowners’ property don’t understand Texas values and culture,” Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in an essay posted on his website in October. He called the protesters “a bunch of out-of-state, self-appointed eco-anarchists.”
No state elected officials have lent public support to the protests, which, if successful, may curb the energy boom in Texas, the nation’s biggest oil producer. Blocking interstate pipelines would threaten the economic viability of Houston refineries, which support thousands of jobs, Tom Zabel, a TransCanada lawyer, said in an Oct. 4 court hearing.
At least five groups are fighting the Keystone route across their property, while about 95 percent of landowners favor the project for financial reasons, said John Johnson, a rancher in Douglass who has leased acreage to accommodate the pipeline.
‘Fair’ Deal
Pipeline protesters are a small minority and are the type of people who always are unhappy about something, Johnson said. “I think the pipeline has been fair in its dealings.”
The Keystone project became a cause celebre last year among supporters of environmental activists, who say extracting oil from tar sands releases three times more carbon dioxide than conventional drilling and worsens global warming. Actress Daryl Hannah was charged with criminal trespass and resisting arrest during an Oct. 4 pipeline protest in Wood County, near Tyler. Hannah, 52, spent less than six hours in jail before being released on $4,500 bond, court records show.
The much higher bail amounts set for Almonte, Collins and Brooks, by a judge in Smith County, a two-hour drive east of Dallas, has raised questions of fairness.
“If they’ve been charged with misdemeanors and don’t have prior criminal records, $65,000 bond is ridiculously high,” said Brandon Baade, a criminal defense lawyer in Tyler.
Crude Carrier
TransCanada, which says on its website it expects to win approval for the northern leg early next year, has consistently prevailed in court over opponents to the southern section of the 2,151-mile (3,460-kilometer) pipeline. Output from Canada’s tar sands, currently 1.5 million barrels a day, is forecast to double by 2020. Keystone will also carry crude from North Dakota, Oklahoma and Texas.
“You have just about every mainstream NGO speaking about game over for the planet if this pipeline is built,” said Ron Seifert, a blockade spokesman, referring to nongovernmental organizations. “There is a disconnect between that rhetoric and the willingness to take aggressive action like the Tar Sands Blockade is doing.”
Grace Cagle, 22, started organizing the east Texas blockade while studying for a degree in biology at the University of North Texas in Denton. She graduated in May.
80 Feet Up
Cagle spent 16 days in a tree house 80 feet (24 meters) off the ground on property leased to TransCanada. After coming down Oct. 17, she was arrested on a criminal trespass charge and spent 17 hours in jail before being released on a $1,500 bond.
Protestors “are doing this with full knowledge that they are breaking the law,” Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said. “Their goal is to get publicity or raise money.”
Cagle counts it as a small victory that the stand of trees remain, with at least three protesters still aloft.
“A real special ecosystem is still standing because of the actions we took,” said Cagle, who grew up in suburban Dallas. “There we were able to stop them.”
While he didn’t know what would become of the trees, Howard said TransCanada hasn’t changed its route in the area.
Some local residents admire the passion displayed by protesters and said they’re frustrated that county commissioners and others in Nacogdoches won’t discuss the pipeline’s effects, said Vicki Baggett, who helped organize an anti-Keystone group called NacSTOP. County commissioners got a TransCanada report in October 2010 and haven’t met with opponents, said Keith Bradford, an assistant county attorney.
‘Money Talks’
After learning TransCanada money backed an annual blueberry festival put on by a local chamber of commerce, NacSTOP plans to match the donation next year, Baggett said.
“We don’t have that same legitimacy with the powers that be in town,” said Baggett, who has operated a tree-service company with her husband for 22 years. “Money talks.”
Protesters are getting support and supplies from Austin Heights Baptist Church, formed in the 1960s in Nacogdoches by opponents of racial segregation, said the Rev. Kyle Childress, pastor of the congregation. A dozen or more protesters now attend its Sunday morning service, he said.
“Swimming against the stream is often a pretty good indication that you are practicing your faith,” Childress said. “Many of these kids have sold everything they own except what’s in their backpacks to come here. Some of them haven’t had a bath in a month. I think what they are doing is extraordinary.”
Training Activists
Protesters who remain in the Nacogdoches camp are inviting activists to a training seminar starting Jan. 3, Cagle said. Organizers hope to find indoor accommodations soon as temperatures fall near freezing at night, she said.
Most of any monetary support is used to post bail for those jailed, Cagle said.
Almonte, 21, said the only other time he has been locked up stemmed from his participation in an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York. Brooks said she’s a newcomer to jail. Collins couldn’t be reached for comment on his experience.
“All you do in jail is sleep and eat and then wait to eat and watch TV,” said Lizzy Alvarado, 20, a cinematography major at Stephen F. Austin University who spent 28 hours in the trees before she was ordered to descend, and then was arrested. “Going to jail was part of what I wanted to do.”
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog
Coal may pass oil as world’s No. 1 energy source by 2017, study says
By Bill Chappell, December 18 2012. Source: NPR
China and India are projected to propel coal’s challenge of oil as the world’s top energy source within the next five years, according to a new study. Here, a man rides a bicycle toward a coal-fired power station in China’s Guangdong province last year.
Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Despite a slowdown in U.S. consumption, coal is poised to replace oil as the world’s top energy source — possibly in the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency. The rise will be driven almost entirely by new energy demands in China and India, the IEA says.
“This report sees that trend continuing. In fact, the world will burn around 1.2 billion more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared to today – equivalent to the current coal consumption of Russia and the United States combined,” says IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.
Together, China and India will account for more than 90 percent of the rise in demand for coal over the next five years, according to the IEA.
The agency predicts that coal’s growth trend will hold everywhere in the world except the United States, where it says the wide availability of cheap natural gas brought a decline in coal demand — a situation also summed up in a recent post by NPR’s State Impact team, Why Coal Is on the Decline in Texas.
By 2017, the IEA also expects India to surpass the U.S. as the world’s second-largest coal consumer. With that in mind, van der Hoeven says, electricity prices around the world “will depend increasingly on Chinese and Indian policy and investment decisions.”
The agency’s projections only change slightly if, as some predict, China will be forced to reduce its coal consumption and seek cleaner and more cost-effective ways of powering its growth. The IEA study found that even in a scenario in which China’s predicted growth were halved, demand would still go up.
In China’s role as the world’s largest coal consumer, “net coal imports have increased by 39.5 percent so far this year, to 217 million tons,” reports Coal Investing News, citing Chinese government data.
In the short term, not all of coal’s growth is seen coming from large emerging markets. Europe’s coal consumption is also rising.
As industry analyst Elliott Gue of Energy Income Advisor wrote today, “In Europe, demand for coal has surged as a result of sky-high natural-gas prices in international markets and declining output from nuclear power as Germany phases out its fleet of reactors.”
Faced with lower domestic demand, many U.S. coal producers have bolstered their exports to Europe and China. Despite that trend, the IEA predicts U.S. coal production will decrease over the next five years.
Even as U.S. utilities shut down older and inefficient coal-fired energy plants, large facilities are expected to be major producers for America’s power grid for years to come, according to analyst Elliott Gue.
In her remarks presenting the IEA study, as well as in Huff Post’s Green blog, van der Hoeven said natural gas remains the largest immediate threat to coal, which she called “the 21st century’s dirty engine of growth.”
Saying that “neither climate policy nor a macroeconomic slowdown stops the relentless increase of coal,” van der Hoeven added, “but cheap natural gas can.”
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Coal may pass oil as world’s No. 1 energy source by 2017, study says
By Bill Chappell, December 18 2012. Source: NPR
China and India are projected to propel coal’s challenge of oil as the world’s top energy source within the next five years, according to a new study. Here, a man rides a bicycle toward a coal-fired power station in China’s Guangdong province last year.
Photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Despite a slowdown in U.S. consumption, coal is poised to replace oil as the world’s top energy source — possibly in the next five years, according to the International Energy Agency. The rise will be driven almost entirely by new energy demands in China and India, the IEA says.
“This report sees that trend continuing. In fact, the world will burn around 1.2 billion more tonnes of coal per year by 2017 compared to today – equivalent to the current coal consumption of Russia and the United States combined,” says IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven.
Together, China and India will account for more than 90 percent of the rise in demand for coal over the next five years, according to the IEA.
The agency predicts that coal’s growth trend will hold everywhere in the world except the United States, where it says the wide availability of cheap natural gas brought a decline in coal demand — a situation also summed up in a recent post by NPR’s State Impact team, Why Coal Is on the Decline in Texas.
By 2017, the IEA also expects India to surpass the U.S. as the world’s second-largest coal consumer. With that in mind, van der Hoeven says, electricity prices around the world “will depend increasingly on Chinese and Indian policy and investment decisions.”
The agency’s projections only change slightly if, as some predict, China will be forced to reduce its coal consumption and seek cleaner and more cost-effective ways of powering its growth. The IEA study found that even in a scenario in which China’s predicted growth were halved, demand would still go up.
In China’s role as the world’s largest coal consumer, “net coal imports have increased by 39.5 percent so far this year, to 217 million tons,” reports Coal Investing News, citing Chinese government data.
In the short term, not all of coal’s growth is seen coming from large emerging markets. Europe’s coal consumption is also rising.
As industry analyst Elliott Gue of Energy Income Advisor wrote today, “In Europe, demand for coal has surged as a result of sky-high natural-gas prices in international markets and declining output from nuclear power as Germany phases out its fleet of reactors.”
Faced with lower domestic demand, many U.S. coal producers have bolstered their exports to Europe and China. Despite that trend, the IEA predicts U.S. coal production will decrease over the next five years.
Even as U.S. utilities shut down older and inefficient coal-fired energy plants, large facilities are expected to be major producers for America’s power grid for years to come, according to analyst Elliott Gue.
In her remarks presenting the IEA study, as well as in Huff Post’s Green blog, van der Hoeven said natural gas remains the largest immediate threat to coal, which she called “the 21st century’s dirty engine of growth.”
Saying that “neither climate policy nor a macroeconomic slowdown stops the relentless increase of coal,” van der Hoeven added, “but cheap natural gas can.”
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The bribery aisle: How Wal-Mart got its way in Mexico
By David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, December 17 2012. Source: New York Times
Photo: NBC
SAN JUAN TEOTIHUACÁN, Mexico — Wal-Mart longed to build in Elda Pineda’s alfalfa field. It was an ideal location, just off this town’s bustling main entrance and barely a mile from its ancient pyramids, which draw tourists from around the world. With its usual precision, Wal-Mart calculated it would attract 250 customers an hour if only it could put a store in Mrs. Pineda’s field.
One major obstacle stood in Wal-Mart’s way.
After years of study, the town’s elected leaders had just approved a new zoning map. The leaders wanted to limit growth near the pyramids, and they considered the town’s main entrance too congested already. As a result, the 2003 zoning map prohibited commercial development on Mrs. Pineda’s field, seemingly dooming Wal-Mart’s hopes.
But 30 miles away in Mexico City, at the headquarters of Wal-Mart de Mexico, executives were not about to be thwarted by an unfavorable zoning decision. Instead, records and interviews show, they decided to undo the damage with one well-placed $52,000 bribe.
The plan was simple. The zoning map would not become law until it was published in a government newspaper. So Wal-Mart de Mexico arranged to bribe an official to change the map before it was sent to the newspaper, records and interviews show. Sure enough, when the map was published, the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field was redrawn to allow Wal-Mart’s store.
Problem solved.
Wal-Mart de Mexico broke ground months later, provoking fierce opposition. Protesters decried the very idea of a Wal-Mart so close to a cultural treasure. They contended the town’s traditional public markets would be decimated, its traffic mess made worse. Months of hunger strikes and sit-ins consumed Mexico’s news media. Yet for all the scrutiny, the story of the altered map remained a secret. The store opened for Christmas 2004, affirming Wal-Mart’s emerging dominance in Mexico.
The secret held even after a former Wal-Mart de Mexico lawyer contacted Wal-Mart executives in Bentonville, Ark., and told them how Wal-Mart de Mexico routinely resorted to bribery, citing the altered map as but one example. His detailed account — he had been in charge of getting building permits throughout Mexico — raised alarms at the highest levels of Wal-Mart and prompted an internal investigation.
But as The New York Times revealed in April, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut down the investigation in 2006. They did so even though their investigators had found a wealth of evidence supporting the lawyer’s allegations. The decision meant authorities were not notified. It also meant basic questions about the nature, extent and impact of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s conduct were never asked, much less answered.
The Times has now picked up where Wal-Mart’s internal investigation was cut off, traveling to dozens of towns and cities in Mexico, gathering tens of thousands of documents related to Wal-Mart de Mexico permits, and interviewing scores of government officials and Wal-Mart employees, including 15 hours of interviews with the former lawyer, Sergio Cicero Zapata.
The Times’s examination reveals that Wal-Mart de Mexico was not the reluctant victim of a corrupt culture that insisted on bribes as the cost of doing business. Nor did it pay bribes merely to speed up routine approvals. Rather, Wal-Mart de Mexico was an aggressive and creative corrupter, offering large payoffs to get what the law otherwise prohibited. It used bribes to subvert democratic governance — public votes, open debates, transparent procedures. It used bribes to circumvent regulatory safeguards that protect Mexican citizens from unsafe construction. It used bribes to outflank rivals.
Through confidential Wal-Mart documents, The Times identified 19 store sites across Mexico that were the target of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s bribes. The Times then matched information about specific bribes against permit records for each site. Clear patterns emerged. Over and over, for example, the dates of bribe payments coincided with dates when critical permits were issued. Again and again, the strictly forbidden became miraculously attainable.
Thanks to eight bribe payments totaling $341,000, for example, Wal-Mart built a Sam’s Club in one of Mexico City’s most densely populated neighborhoods, near the Basílica de Guadalupe, without a construction license, or an environmental permit, or an urban impact assessment, or even a traffic permit. Thanks to nine bribe payments totaling $765,000, Wal-Mart built a vast refrigerated distribution center in an environmentally fragile flood basin north of Mexico City, in an area where electricity was so scarce that many smaller developers were turned away.
But there is no better example of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s methods than its conquest of Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field. In Teotihuacán, The Times found that Wal-Mart de Mexico executives approved at least four different bribe payments — more than $200,000 in all — to build just a medium-size supermarket. Without those payoffs, records and interviews show, Wal-Mart almost surely would not have been allowed to build in Mrs. Pineda’s field.
The Teotihuacán case also raises new questions about the way Wal-Mart’s leaders in the United States responded to evidence of widespread corruption in their largest foreign subsidiary.
Wal-Mart’s leadership was well aware of the protests here in 2004. (The controversy was covered by several news outlets in the United States, including The Times.) From the start, protest leaders insisted that corruption surely played a role in the store’s permits. Although woefully short on specifics, their complaints prompted multiple investigations by Mexican authorities. One of those investigations was still under way when Wal-Mart’s top executives first learned of Mr. Cicero’s account of bribes in Teotihuacán (pronounced Tay-o-tea-wah-KHAN).
But Wal-Mart’s leaders did not tell Mexican authorities about his allegations, not even after their own investigators concluded there was “reasonable suspicion” to believe laws had been violated, records and interviews show. Unaware of this new evidence, Mexican investigators said they could find no wrongdoing in Teotihuacán.
Wal-Mart has been under growing scrutiny since The Times disclosed its corruption problems in Mexico, where it is the largest private employer, with 221,000 people working in 2,275 stores, supermarkets and restaurants.
In the United States, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the federal law that makes it a crime for American corporations or their subsidiaries to bribe foreign officials. Mexican authorities and Congressional Democrats have also begun investigations, and Wal-Mart has been hit by shareholder lawsuits from several major pension funds.
Wal-Mart declined to discuss its conduct in Teotihuacán while it is continuing its own investigation. The company has hired hundreds of lawyers, investigators and forensic accountants who are examining all 27 of its foreign markets. It has already found potentially serious wrongdoing, including indications of bribery in China, Brazil and India. Several top executives in Mexico and India have been suspended or forced to resign in recent months.
Wal-Mart has also tightened oversight of its internal investigations. It has created high-level positions to help root out corruption. It is spending millions on anticorruption training and background checks of the lawyers and lobbyists who represent Wal-Mart before foreign governments. The company has spent more than $100 million on investigative costs this year.
“We are committed to having a strong and effective global anticorruption program everywhere we operate and taking appropriate action for any instance of noncompliance,” said David W. Tovar, a Wal-Mart spokesman.
In Mexico, a major focus of Wal-Mart’s investigation is none other than the boxy, brown supermarket in Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field.
Eight years later, it remains the most controversial Wal-Mart in Mexico, a powerful symbol of globalism’s impact on Mexican culture and commerce.
As it turns out, the store also took on symbolic importance within Wal-Mart de Mexico, Mr. Cicero said in an interview. Executives, he said, came to believe that by outmuscling protesters and building in the shadow of a revered national treasure, they would send a message to the entire country: If we can build here, we can build anywhere.
City of the Gods
In ancient times, Teotihuacán was a sprawling metropolis of perhaps 150,000 people. The “city of the gods,” as the Aztecs called it, rose up around a vast temple complex and two great pyramids, the Sun and the Moon. The ancient city is long gone, buried under farm fields, small pueblos and the detritus of bygone civilizations. But the temple complex and pyramids remain, which is why Teotihuacán is so central to Mexico’s cultural patrimony.
Teotihuacán’s leaders naturally wanted to protect this legacy as they began work on a new zoning plan in 2001. To keep the town attractive as a tourist destination, they decided to limit development in the “archaeological zone,” a buffer of protected land that encircles the pyramids. At the same time, they wanted a plan that would lure more tourists into the town’s central square.
“People complained tourists didn’t go into town,” said Víctor Ortiz, a partner in the consulting firm the town hired to draw up its new zoning plan.
By early 2003, just as Mr. Ortiz’s firm was finishing its work, Wal-Mart de Mexico had settled on Teotihuacán as a ripe target for expansion. Its population, nearly 50,000, was growing fast, and its commerce was dominated by small neighborhood shops and a traditional public market in the central square — exactly the type of competition Wal-Mart de Mexico had vanquished in town after town.
Mr. Cicero, a trim, sharp-featured man, recalled how Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field jumped out as Wal-Mart’s real estate executives scoured aerial photographs of Teotihuacán. By putting one of Wal-Mart’s Bodega Aurrera supermarkets at the town’s main entrance, they could create a choke point that would effectively place the town off limits to competitors. There was also space to add other types of Wal-Mart stores — restaurants or department stores — down the road. “We would be slamming the gate on the whole town,” he said.
But Wal-Mart officials got a cold reception when they began to inquire about permits at Teotihuacán’s municipal offices. Saúl Martínez, an employee in the urban development office, recalled telling Wal-Mart’s representatives that a supermarket could not be built in Mrs. Pineda’s field, because the field was zoned for housing. Wal-Mart would need a zoning change. But a supermarket, he told them, was sure to generate strong opposition because of the traffic chaos it would create.
“Go look for something else,” he recalled telling Wal-Mart.
At first, Mr. Cicero’s team thought it had found a perfectly legal solution to the zoning problem. Only a narrow strip of land separated Mrs. Pineda’s field from Hidalgo Avenue, the main road into town. If Wal-Mart could build an entrance across that strip, zoning rules would let it rely on Hidalgo Avenue’s zoning, which allowed commercial development. But Wal-Mart could not get a right of way, despite months of trying.
By then, the municipality was rushing to complete its new zoning plan. Officials were already holding public meetings to present the plan and solicit feedback. A final vote was scheduled for Aug. 6, 2003.
The Times obtained four different copies of the new zoning map as it existed on the eve of the vote. All four, including two found in the town’s urban development office, confirm that housing was the only kind of development allowed on Mrs. Pineda’s field. There is no record of Wal-Mart seeking a last-minute change, and nine officials closely involved in drafting the plan all said in separate interviews that they were certain Wal-Mart made no such request.
“I would remember,” said Humberto Peña, then the mayor of Teotihuacán. “And if they would have asked that, my answer would have been no.”
After two years of painstaking work, Mr. Peña and the municipal council unanimously approved Teotihuacán’s new zoning plan on Aug. 6
The next day Mr. Peña sent the new map to the state’s Office of Urban and Regional Planning, a bureaucratic outpost of roughly a dozen employees in Toluca, the State of Mexico’s capital. The office’s main job was to verify that local zoning plans fit the state’s development goals. It also handled the critical final step — arranging publication of completed plans in the state’s official newspaper, the Government’s Gazette.
An Altered Map
If the council’s vote seemingly dashed Wal-Mart’s hopes for Teotihuacán, Wal-Mart de Mexico’s executives certainly acted as if they knew something the rest of the world did not.
On Aug. 12, records show, they asked Wal-Mart’s leadership in the United States to approve their plan to spend about $8 million on a Bodega Aurrera in Mrs. Pineda’s field. The request was approved by Wal-Mart’s international real estate committee, made up of 20 or so top executives, including S. Robson Walton, the company’s chairman.
The committee’s approval, records show, was contingent on obtaining “zoning for commercial use.”
By law, the state Office of Urban and Regional Planning could not make zoning changes on maps it reviewed. If there were problems, it was supposed to send the map back to the town for revisions. Teotihuacán’s plan, however, was quickly approved and then sent to the Government’s Gazette on Aug. 20.
It typically took the Gazette a few weeks to publish a new zoning plan. Only then did it become law. But even before Teotihuacán’s map was published, Wal-Mart de Mexico did two very curious things: First, it began an expensive soil mechanics study of Mrs. Pineda’s field, which it would later lease. Second, it submitted an application to the Business Attention Commission, a state agency that helps developers get permits.
The application and the soil study would have been a foolish waste of time and money, assuming the soon-to-be-published map matched what the Teotihuacán council approved on Aug. 6. It made perfect sense, though, for a company that had reason to believe the map would be published with a single strategically situated change.
The Times found evidence of that change on a computer disc stored in a shoe box inside the Office of Urban and Regional Planning. The disc, created by a senior official in the office, held a copy of Teotihuacán’s zoning map as it existed on Aug. 20, the day it was sent to the Government’s Gazette.
Zoning Bribe: $52,000
The biggest hurdle was Teotihuacán’s zoning map. It clearly prohibited commercial development where Wal-Mart wanted to build. Wal-Mart de Mexico authorized a $52,000 bribe payment to have the map altered, records and interviews show.
“One thing I am sure of — this was altered,” Alejandro Heredia, a partner in the consulting firm that created Teotihuacán’s zoning map, said when he was shown that Aug. 20 map.
“It was surgical work,” he said, adding, “It would be quite a gift to someone who wanted to do something here.”
It was a safe bet that a single small change would not be noticed by Teotihuacán’s municipal council. Because of term limits, the entire council left office after the Aug. 6 vote. A new mayor, Guillermo Rodríguez, was sworn in with a new council on Aug. 17. In interviews, Mr. Rodríguez and members of the new council said they had no idea Wal-Mart had its eye on Mrs. Pineda’s field when they took office.
“They must have had to bribe somebody in order to make the illegal legal,” Mr. Rodríguez said when he was shown both the Aug. 20 map and the map approved on Aug. 6.
“Whatever happened here must be explained,” Jesús Aguiluz, a former high-ranking state official whose domain included the Office of Urban and Regional Planning, said when he was shown both maps. Only one person, he said, could explain what happened — Víctor Manuel Frieventh, then the director of the urban planning office.
“He was in charge totally,” Mr. Aguiluz said.
In interviews with The Times, people who worked in Mr. Frieventh’s office recalled a steady parade of favor-seekers — housing developers, wealthy landowners, politically wired businessmen — all hoping Mr. Frieventh would use his influence to shape zoning plans to favor their interests. Wal-Mart de Mexico, they said, was part of the parade.
During a two-hour interview with The Times, Mr. Frieventh jovially described how his predecessors had taken bribes to shift zoning boundaries. But he insisted he never met with anyone from Wal-Mart, and said he had nothing to do with the change to Teotihuacán’s map.
“It’s very strange,” he said, looking intently at the altered map.
The formal order to publish Teotihuacán’s new zoning plan was received by the Government’s Gazette on Sept. 11, 2003. The next day, internal Wal-Mart de Mexico records show, Mr. Cicero authorized five bribe payments totaling $221,000. According to the internal records, the bribes were for obtaining zoning changes to build five supermarkets. One of the payments, for $52,000, was for the Bodega Aurrera in Teotihuacán, Mr. Cicero said in an interview.
Wal-Mart de Mexico officials did not themselves pay bribes. Records and interviews show that payoffs were made by outside lawyers, trusted fixers dispatched by Mr. Cicero to deliver envelopes of cash without leaving any trace of their existence. Wal-Mart de Mexico’s written policies said these fixers could be entrusted with up to $280,000 to “expedite” a single permit. The bribe payments covered the payoffs themselves, a commission for the fixer and taxes. For some permits, it was left to the fixers to figure out who needed to be bribed. In this case, Mr. Cicero said, Mr. Frieventh was the intended recipient.
Mr. Frieventh, the son of a shoe-store owner, earned a government salary of less than $30,000 in 2003. However modest his pay, he was in the midst of amassing an impressive real estate portfolio. From 2001 to 2004, property records show, he bought up most of a city block in Toluca. The land costs alone were nearly 65 percent of his government pay during those years.
Asked if he had ever accepted anything of value from a Wal-Mart representative, Mr. Frieventh shook his head, chuckled and extended a hand, palm up. “Bring him to me so he can pay me, no? Have him bring it to me.”
Even with the right zoning, Wal-Mart still needed at least a dozen different permits to begin construction. But to apply for them, Mr. Cicero’s team first had to get a zoning certificate, which verified that a plot’s zoning was consistent with the proposed development.
Zoning certificates did not come from Mr. Frieventh’s office. They were issued by the state Office of Urban Operations, and Wal-Mart’s request went to Lidia Gómez, a career civil servant known as a stickler for rules. Ms. Gómez rejected Wal-Mart’s request. Wal-Mart tried again a few months later, and again Ms. Gómez said no, saying that even with Teotihuacán’s new map, a Bodega Aurrera would still run afoul of a rarely enforced federal guideline. Wal-Mart was dead in the water.
With help from Mr. Frieventh, Mr. Cicero’s team found a way around Ms. Gómez, and the law. Mr. Frieventh had no legal authority to overrule Ms. Gómez. But at Wal-Mart’s request, records show, Mr. Frieventh wrote a letter on government letterhead on March 9, 2004, that directly contradicted Ms. Gómez’s rulings. Citing the altered map, he wrote that Wal-Mart’s supermarket was indeed compatible with the zoning for Mrs. Pineda’s field.
Mr. Frieventh said he did not recall the letter, or why he wrote it. But Wal-Mart de Mexico immediately put the letter to work. It began applying for other permits, each time submitting the letter as if it were a valid zoning certificate.
One of its first applications was to the state agency that regulates roads.
Traffic Bribe: $25,900
Wal-Mart wanted to build by the main entrance into Teotihuacán, in a spot already choked with traffic. Wal-Mart de Mexico authorized a $25,900 bribe payment to gain the approval of local traffic authorities, records and interviews show.
There were obvious reasons for traffic regulators to balk at Wal-Mart’s permit request. Traffic, of course, was one of Teotihuacán’s biggest headaches, and a supermarket at the main entrance would only make matters worse. But there was a far bigger complication. The town had recently approved a long-term plan to ease congestion. The plan called for building a bypass road through Mrs. Pineda’s alfalfa field.
According to internal Wal-Mart records, Mr. Cicero authorized a $25,900 bribe for the permit, which was issued in less than two weeks. The paperwork approving it did not even mention the bypass road.
A Helpful Mayor
Teotihuacán’s municipal council had just finished its regular meeting on June 11, 2004, when the mayor, Guillermo Rodríguez, made an unusual request. He asked the council members to stick around and meet privately with some people from Wal-Mart. Instructions were given to turn off the video camera used to record public meetings. But the video operator disregarded the instructions, and the camera continued to roll.
“They are going to explain what they want to do here,” the mayor told his colleagues.
To build in Mrs. Pineda’s field, Wal-Mart now needed a construction license from Teotihuacán. Construction licenses were issued by Hugo Hernández, the town’s director of urban development. Yet Mr. Hernández had thus far declined to give Wal-Mart a license because it still lacked several approvals — an environmental permit, for example.
But Wal-Mart de Mexico had found a friend in Mayor Rodríguez, who now, in private, explained to the council why it was essential to act with speed and flexibility to help Wal-Mart build, regardless of the inevitable opposition.
“They say that if we don’t solve this quickly, they will leave,” he told the council members. Wal-Mart, he revealed, had raised the possibility of a donation. “They asked me, ‘What are you going to ask from us?’ I said, ‘Pay your taxes, reach an agreement, help the community.’ ”
Then he summoned Wal-Mart’s team, led by Jorge Resendiz, one of Mr. Cicero’s deputies.
Mr. Resendiz got to the point. In exchange for bringing jobs and low prices to Teotihuacán, Wal-Mart wanted something extraordinary. It wanted the council members to let Wal-Mart start construction even though it did not have all the required permits. And it wanted them to do it then and there, in private, without public hearings. Wal-Mart was in a rush to open for Christmas shopping. “Time is precious for us,” he said. “If we don’t start this unit in the coming days, we will have a delay.”
Mr. Rodríguez assured Mr. Resendiz that the council would give its approval the next week.
The mayor’s aggressive activism was out of character. In interviews, former aides and colleagues described Mr. Rodríguez as “insecure,” “easily manipulated” and “passive.” He was frequently absent during working hours. “My persistent thought was that I was disappointed by him,” said Mr. Peña, the former mayor who had been Mr. Rodríguez’s political mentor.
But according to Mr. Cicero, there was nothing accidental about Mr. Rodríguez’s enthusiasm. Wal-Mart de Mexico, he said, bribed Mr. Rodríguez to secure his support and that of his allies on the town council. The decision to bribe Mr. Rodríguez, he said, was blessed by Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders.
Political Bribe: $114,000
Facing certain opposition from local merchants and residents, Wal-Mart de Mexico executives agreed to pay $114,000 in bribes to guarantee the support of Teotihuacán’s mayor and his allies on the municipal council, records and interviews show.
“I didn’t receive any money from Wal-Mart — no money,” Mr. Rodríguez insisted during two lengthy interviews with The Times.
But he struggled to explain why he began to spend tens of thousands of dollars in June 2004, the same month he emerged as Wal-Mart’s champion.
The spending is described in financial disclosure reports Mr. Rodríguez prepared himself under oath. The reports, obtained by The Times, show that he spent $30,300 to begin building a ranch on a hill overlooking the pyramids. He spent $1,800 more on a used Dodge pickup. He paid cash in both transactions.
As mayor, Mr. Rodríguez was paid $47,000 a year. His wife made $23,000 more working for the municipality. His spending spree in June nearly equaled their entire pay for the first half of 2004.
Even more remarkable was what happened six months later. Mr. Rodríguez swore in his disclosure reports that he had no savings as of Dec. 31, 2004. Yet on Jan. 1, 2005, he and his wife spent $47,700 in cash on improvements to their ranch, his reports show.
Before becoming mayor, Mr. Rodríguez had been the town comptroller, responsible for making sure municipal officials completed their financial disclosure reports correctly. Yet in the interviews, Mr. Rodríguez claimed over and over that the amounts he reported were “mistakes” or “approximate figures” or “generalized.”
He tried to be precise, he explained. “I now see it wasn’t so.”
But he did not dispute the overall spending pattern. From June 2004 to June 2005, he acknowledged, he spent “approximately” $114,000 building and furnishing his ranch, all in cash.
Wal-Mart’s investigators would ask Mr. Cicero how much Wal-Mart de Mexico had paid to bribe the mayor. About $114,000, he said.
Teotihuacán’s council members met again on June 18, 2004, a week after Mr. Rodríguez first introduced them to Wal-Mart. It was just after 7 a.m. and Mr. Resendiz took a seat up front. Item 7 on the agenda was Wal-Mart.
It was the first and only public airing of Wal-Mart’s plans. The council members spent 15 minutes discussing one of the largest construction projects in the town’s modern history.
Mr. Rodríguez announced they were there to give a “favorable or unfavorable opinion” of Wal-Mart’s supermarket. When a council member pointed out that Wal-Mart had not even submitted a formal written request, the mayor waved away the problem. “That’s a detail we omitted,” he said.
Mr. Hernández, the town’s urban development director, noted that Wal-Mart still did not have several permits it needed before the town could issue a construction license. He urged the council to stick to the rules.
Mr. Resendiz objected, saying Wal-Mart did not have time to spare.
The mayor pushed for a vote, suggesting that all they were doing was indicating general support while Wal-Mart rounded up its missing permits. He gave no indication that the vote constituted a final approval.
In interviews, council members said they viewed Wal-Mart’s proposal through the prism of lingering resentments toward their public markets. Residents had long complained about vendors inflating prices and rigging scales. They liked the way Wal-Mart challenged the old irritants of the Mexican shopping experience — stores that do not list prices; stores with no parking; stores with musty display cases.
The vote was unanimous for Wal-Mart. Days later, construction began.
Getting By the Guardians
In 2004, Wal-Mart de Mexico built a supermarket by the pyramids of Teotihuacán, a cultural landmark in Mexico. The project was controversial from the start, provoking months of protests. In 2005, a former Wal-Mart de Mexico attorney told Wal-Mart executives in the United States about a series of bribes that he said had secured crucial permits and approvals necessary to build the store. Wal-Mart’s leaders did not report this information to authorities, even though the company’s internal investigation corroborated many of his allegations.
The appearance of heavy excavation equipment in Mrs. Pineda’s field quickly aroused suspicion around town. The suspicions stemmed from Teotihuacán’s fraught relationship with the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH, the official guardian of Mexico’s cultural treasures.
Because of the pyramids, INAH (pronounced EE-nah) is a major presence in Teotihuacán. Its approval is required to build anything inside the protected archaeological zone. Its officials patrol town looking for signs of illegal construction, and it is not hard to find stories about zealous inspectors stopping a homeowner from extending a kitchen a few feet.
It was also well known that INAH required excavations to be done with picks and shovels to minimize damage if digging uncovered ancient ruins. So the sight of bulldozers and backhoes stood out, especially when a sign went up announcing that a Bodega Aurrera was coming. Why, residents asked, should Wal-Mart get special treatment?
Among those who noticed was Sergio Gómez, an archaeologist and researcher for INAH. Mr. Gómez knew that before the agency issued a permit, it first had to officially “liberate” the plot by verifying that construction would not destroy valuable archaeological remains. That meant conducting a formal archaeological survey, with grid lines and exploration holes.
For any developer, a survey was risky. If significant remains were discovered, it could kill the project, or at least force lengthy delays. Yet Mr. Gómez had not seen any sign of a survey, an odd thing since a survey like this should have occupied a team of INAH researchers and laborers for a good six months. This, too, was a red flag.
Mr. Gómez was concerned enough to follow trucks from the site one day. When they dumped their loads, he could see fragments of pottery and other evidence of ancient remains. “I didn’t need to scratch the ground to see it,” he said in an interview.
Iván Hernández noticed, too. He was one of five INAH archaeologists who did surveys to liberate land for construction in the protected zone. He knew every major project in town, but nothing of this one.
Residents were also calling INAH to complain. The calls went to Juan Carlos Sabais, the agency’s top lawyer in Teotihuacán. He would have been the one to review the permit paperwork and prepare the official liberation letter for this plot. “We didn’t have a clue,” he recalled. “People were saying this was Wal-Mart, and we didn’t know a thing.”
Mr. Sabais led a party of INAH officials to the site to find out what was going on. They passed through a small crowd of angry residents. It was July 16, and construction was already well under way. There were several large excavations, one as deep as 16 feet, records show. Workers claimed they had an INAH permit, just not on site as the law required. Mr. Sabais ordered them to stop construction.“The crowd started clapping,” he said.
By the time Mr. Sabais returned to his office, senior INAH officials were calling from Mexico City demanding to know why he had halted construction. Only then, he said, did he discover that Wal-Mart had somehow managed to get a permit without a survey, or a liberation letter.
This bureaucratic miracle, Mr. Cicero would explain to Wal-Mart investigators and The Times, was made possible by another payoff. As Mr. Cicero described it, senior INAH officials had asked for an “official donation” of up to $45,000 and a “personal gift” of up to $36,000 in exchange for a permit.
Wal-Mart’s permit was signed by Mirabel Miró, then the agency’s top official in the State of Mexico. According to Ms. Miró, it was Wal-Mart de Mexico that made an improper offer of money. Her chief architect, she said, told her that Wal-Mart had approached him with an offer of a sizable “donation.” He wanted to accept, she said.
Archaeology Bribe: Up to $81,000
Wal-Mart could not build by the pyramids without a permit from the agency that protects Mexico’s cultural landmarks. Wal-Mart de Mexico offered a “donation” of up to $45,000 and a “personal gift” of up to $36,000 in exchange for the permit, records and interviews show.
“I told him, ‘I don’t want a dime, not as a donation, not as anything, because it may be interpreted as something else,’ ” she said.
Sergio Raúl Arroyo, the director general of INAH, recalled in an interview that Ms. Miró had told him about Wal-Mart’s offer. He could not recall any other instance of a company offering a donation while it was seeking a permit. “That would have been totally irregular,” he said. “It was obvious we had to be very careful with these people.”
“I told Miró to accept no donations,” he added. “Not even a pair of scissors.”
And yet in June 2004, three weeks after Ms. Miró signed the permit, Mr. Resendiz spoke about a payment to INAH during his private meeting with Teotihuacán’s council. “INAH itself is asking us for a considerable contribution,” Mr. Resendiz said.
“We are going to formalize the contribution next Monday,” he added. “But it is a fact.”
Mr. Resendiz, who has been placed on administrative leave pending Wal-Mart’s investigation, declined to comment. Every INAH official interviewed, including Ms. Miró’s chief architect, Carlos Madrigal, denied accepting money from Wal-Mart.
But Mr. Sabais, the agency’s top lawyer in Teotihuacán, knew nothing about official donations or personal gifts on the day he stopped construction. All he knew was that he was being summoned to INAH’s headquarters in Mexico City. Over several tense meetings, he recalled, his bosses confronted their embarrassing predicament: INAH had halted construction even though Wal-Mart had the required permit. Yet the agency had given Wal-Mart that permit without first conducting a survey and liberating the land.
Fearing a public relations debacle, senior INAH officials concocted a trail of backdated documents to hide its blunders, Mr. Sabais said. He pointed to an INAH report dated April 2, 2004, seven weeks before the agency issued its permit. The report suggested Wal-Mart’s plot had been liberated after a 1984 survey. “This document,” Mr. Sabais said, “was made later to justify what had not been done.”
INAH officials would later tell multiple government inquiries that Wal-Mart’s plot had been liberated because of this 1984 survey.
The Times tracked down the 1984 survey. It had nothing to do with the land where Wal-Mart was building. The survey was done on a different plot several hundred yards away. The archaeologists who supervised and evaluated the survey were appalled to learn that it had been used to justify INAH’s permit for Wal-Mart. “This is a fraud,” Ana María Jarquín, one of the archaeologists, said in an interview.
In interviews last week, top INAH officials acknowledged for the first time that Wal-Mart’s plot had neither been surveyed nor liberated, either in 1984 or any other time, before construction began. They also made one other startling admission. The agency has long maintained no ancient remains were destroyed during construction. But Verónica Ortega, INAH’s top archaeologist in Teotihuacán, acknowledged it was indeed possible ancient remains were destroyed during the excavation before Mr. Sabais halted construction.
“I am not able to affirm categorically that no soil went out,” she said.
The work shutdown ordered by Mr. Sabais did not last long. Four days later, INAH allowed Wal-Mart to resume construction. The agency did take one precaution: it began an extensive survey, digging dozens of exploration wells alongside Wal-Mart’s crews.
A Gathering Protest
By now a loose protest movement had begun to form. Its leaders all had deep roots here. Lorenzo Trujillo owned produce stands in the public market. Emmanuel D’Herrera, a teacher and poet, had celebrated his son’s birth by tucking the boy’s umbilical cord in a crack atop the Moon pyramid. Emma Ortega was a spiritual healer who cared for patients a stone’s throw from the pyramid. “You feel that it’s part of you, and you are part of it,” she said.
The protesters immediately suspected something “dirty” had taken place, Ms. Ortega recalled. The first clue came on Aug. 1, 2004, when she and other protest leaders met with Mayor Rodríguez. By now the supermarket’s walls were being erected. They asked the mayor to show them the construction permit. The mayor, nervous and evasive, admitted Wal-Mart did not actually have one.
“So we were like, ‘Why are they there working?’ ” Ms. Ortega said. They asked the mayor to halt work and hold hearings. The mayor said he would think about it. Two days later, he issued Wal-Mart a construction license.
He signed it himself.
In response, the protesters demanded his resignation and filed the first of several legal challenges. Then they blockaded the construction site.
As word of the blockade spread, bells rang from a chapel in Purificación, the neighborhood where Wal-Mart was building. It was the alarm used to summon neighbors in an emergency. Residents marched toward the blockade.
“We thought they were there to support us,” Ms. Ortega recalled. “No. They were there to attack us.” The crowd descended on the small band of protesters, pushing and yelling insults until the blockade was broken.
What Ms. Ortega did not know was that Wal-Mart had already bought the support of Purificación’s neighborhood leaders. In interviews, several of those leaders recalled being invited to Mr. Rodríguez’s office to meet with the company’s representatives. The Wal-Mart people, the leaders said, offered money to expand their cemetery, pave a road and build a handball court. They offered paint and computers for Purificación’s school. They offered money to build a new office for the neighborhood leaders.
But the money came with strings: if there were any protests, they were expected to be visibly and loudly supportive of Wal-Mart.
Protest leaders began to get anonymous phone calls urging them to back off. In news conferences, the mayor dismissed them as a tiny minority of gadflies and self-interested local merchants. He insisted the town overwhelmingly favored Wal-Mart’s arrival, and as proof of his incorruptibility, he boasted of how he had rejected Wal-Mart de Mexico’s offer of a $55,000 donation to the municipal treasury.
But the tide turned as INAH’s archaeologists began to find evidence that Wal-Mart was building on ancient ruins after all. They found the remains of a wall dating to approximately 1300 and enough clay pottery to fill several sacks. Then they found an altar, a plaza and nine graves. Once again, construction was temporarily halted so their findings could be cataloged, photographed and analyzed. The discoveries instantly transformed the skirmish over Mrs. Pineda’s field into national news.
Student groups, unions and peasant leaders soon joined the protests. Opponents of other Wal-Marts in Mexico offered support. Influential politicians began to express concern. Prominent artists and intellectuals signed an open letter asking Mexico’s president to stop the project. Many were cultural traditionalists, united by a fear that Wal-Mart was inexorably drawing Mexico’s people away from the intimacy of neighborhood life, toward a bland, impersonal “gringo lifestyle” of frozen pizzas, video games and credit card debt.
The support emboldened the protesters. When the mayor held a news conference, they interrupted and openly accused him of taking bribes. They blockaded INAH’s headquarters and marched on Wal-Mart de Mexico’s corporate offices in Mexico City. “All we have found are closed doors and an ocean of corruption around the authorizations for this Wal-Mart,” Mr. D’Herrera told reporters with typical flourish.
Their allegations of corruption seeped into the news coverage in Mexico and the United States. In September 2004, an article in The Times included this passage: “How Wal-Mart got permission to build a superstore on farmland supposedly protected under Mexican law as an archaeological site has vexed the merchants here, who freely accuse the town, the state and the federal Institute of Anthropology and History of corruption.”
Open for Business
Back in Bentonville, Wal-Mart’s international real estate committee was aware of the growing attention from the news media, former members said in interviews. Some committee members cringed at the ugly optics of Wal-Mart literally bulldozing Mexico’s cultural heritage. “I kept waiting for someone to say, ‘Let’s just move sites,’ ” recalled one member, who, like others on the committee, asked not to be identified because of the continuing inquiry.
But top Wal-Mart de Mexico executives assured the committee that the situation was under control. They portrayed the protesters as a fringe group — “like they were from Occupy Wall Street,” another person recalled.
Despite multiple news accounts of possible bribes, Wal-Mart’s leaders in the United States took no steps to investigate Wal-Mart de Mexico, records and interviews show.
Mr. Tovar, the Wal-Mart spokesman, said that while executives in the United States were aware of the furor in Teotihuacán they did not know about the corruption allegations. “None of the associates we have interviewed, including people responsible for real estate projects in Mexico during this time period, recall any mention of bribery allegations related to this store,” he said.
In Mexico, government officials were looking for a way to quell the controversy. Mr. Arroyo, INAH’s director general, urged Wal-Mart de Mexico to build elsewhere. The state’s urban development ministry quietly searched for alternate sites outside the archaeological zone. Then, on Oct. 2, Mexico’s newspapers reported a major announcement: Arturo Montiel, the state’s governor, was looking for another site “that is better for all.”
With its supermarket more than half built, Wal-Mart de Mexico was not eager to accommodate the governor. The company raced to complete construction and mounted a public relations offensive. Executives argued that Wal-Mart de Mexico had scrupulously fulfilled every legal requirement: the zoning was correct, as confirmed by the map in the Government’s Gazette; necessary approvals had been duly obtained from INAH, traffic authorities and other agencies; the mayor himself had signed the construction license.
Not even a week after Mr. Montiel’s announcement, his top deputy told reporters there was, alas, no way to stop Wal-Mart. “We would be violating the law since they can tell us they complied with all that is required,” he explained.
The supermarket opened on Nov. 4, 2004. A year later, Mr. Cicero met with Wal-Mart’s lawyers and told his story for the first time. His allegations were shared with several of the same executives who were on the international real estate committee, records show. If the protesters’ vague allegations of corruption had been easy to dismiss, now they were coming from the person responsible for obtaining Wal-Mart de Mexico’s permits in Teotihuacán.
More important, Mr. Cicero’s allegations emerged as a comptroller for the State of Mexico was wrapping up a lengthy investigation into whether officials had acted unlawfully in granting permits to Wal-Mart de Mexico.
But Wal-Mart did not share Mr. Cicero’s allegations with any authorities in Mexico. “This is one of the areas we are reviewing as part of our ongoing investigation,” Mr. Tovar said.
When the comptroller’s office subsequently announced it had found no wrongdoing, it chided protesters for failing to present any specific proof.
The comptroller had been the protesters’ last hope. Most moved on, resigned to the idea that their struggle had been for nothing. But not Mr. D’Herrera. He continued to visit government archives, seeking access to Wal-Mart’s permit records. He kept appealing to public officials for help. “I shall continue my hunger strike until Wal-Mart leaves or until I die,” he wrote in a letter to Vicente Fox, Mexico’s president at the time.
Despite the passage of time, Mr. D’Herrera never wavered in his conviction that Wal-Mart must have paid bribes. He was appalled by the store’s impact on Teotihuacán, and infuriated that so few seemed to care. It did not go unnoticed when protest leaders were spotted shopping contentedly in the Bodega Aurrera, where people can buy everything from tortillas to tires, almost always at a substantial discount from local shops.
Friends and relatives urged Mr. D’Herrera to let it go, but he refused. “He became obsessed,” Ms. Ortega said. Mr. D’Herrera finally snapped. On May 16, 2009, he entered the Bodega Aurrera and placed a crude homemade bomb in a shopping cart. According to prosecutors, the bomb consisted of a small juice can containing gunpowder and nails. Mr. D’Herrera pushed the cart into the store’s home section, looked around to make sure the aisle was empty, and then lit a fuse poking from the can. His intent, he later wrote, was to kill himself and damage the store to draw public attention back to Wal-Mart. But all the blast did was knock him down and damage $68 worth of merchandise.
As he awaited trial from a prison cell, he continued his hopeless campaign. He wrote more letters to politicians. He asked his wife to publish his diatribes against Wal-Mart on an obscure poetry blog. Yet he clearly recognized the precariousness of his circumstances. He was thin and severely diabetic. His teeth were falling out. In early 2010, he asked a cellmate to deliver a letter to his wife in case he died in prison. A few months later, he had a brain hemorrhage and slipped into a coma. Death quickly followed. He was 62.
In his final letter to his wife, Mr. D’Herrera tried to explain why he had battled so long at such grievous cost.
“I am not leaving material patrimony for you and our son,” he wrote. “I’m leaving you a moral and political legacy, dying as I am for a cause, in defense of the Mexican culture.”
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Article source: GJEP Climate Connections Blog