Category: Tribal Solidarity

September 10th, 2015

With bows, arrows, GPS trackers and camera traps, an indigenous community in northern Brazil is fighting to achieve what the government has long failed to do: halt illegal logging in their corner of the Amazon.

The Ka’apor – a tribe of about 2,200 people in Maranhão state – have organised a militia of “forest guardians” who follow a strategy of nature conservation through aggressive confrontation.

Logging trucks and tractors that encroach upon their territory – the 530,000-hectare Alto Turiaçu Indigenous Land – are intercepted and burned. Drivers and chainsaw operators are warned never to return. Those that fail to heed the advice are stripped and beaten.

It is dangerous work. Since the tribe decided to manage their own protection in 2011, they say the theft of timber has been reduced, but four Ka’apor have been murdered and more than a dozen others have received death threats.

Now the Ka’apor are seeking support through NGOs and the media. Earlier this month, the Guardian was among a first group of foreign journalists and Greenpeace activists who were invited to see how they live and operate.

Reaching their land was a long haul. After flying to São Luis, the capital of Maranhão state, it took more than eight hours to drive along a potholed highway flanked by cattle farms and palm plantations before turning off on to a bumpy dirt track through tracts of deforested land, until a dense thicket of jungle marked the limit of Ka’apor territory.

The path was so close to the foliage here that branches constantly scratched and scraped the sides of our 4×4 until finally, just a few minutes before midnight, we emerged into a clearing bathed in moonlight.

This was Jaxipuxirenda, one of eight former logging camps that have been taken over by the Ka’apor and settled by a handful of families so the timber thieves cannot return. It was very simple; six thatched roofs under which families slept in hammocks.

Living in such outposts is a sacrifice. Longer-established villages have electricity, health centres, football pitches and satellite dishes. Jaxipuxirenda is bereft of such creature comforts.

But it is a key part of a drive to regain territory, independence and respect – all of which have been steadily eroded by loggers for more than two decades. Alto Turiaçu, which covers an area equal to Delaware or three times that of Greater London, is a vulnerable and lucrative target. Although 8% has already been cleared, the indigenous land contains about half of the Amazon forest left in Maranhão state. This includes much sought-after trees, like ipê (Brazilian walnut), which can fetch almost £1,000 ($1,500) per cubic metre after processing and export.

The Ka’apor asked the government to protect their borders, which were recognised in 1982. Last year, a federal court ordered the authorities to set up security posts. But nothing has been done, prompting the community to organise self-defence missions.

In the morning, one of the forest guardians, Tidiun Ka’apor (who, like all of the leaders of the group, asked to have his name changed to avoid being targeted by loggers) explains what happens when they encounter loggers.

“Sometimes, it’s like a film. They fight us with machetes, but we always drive them off,” he says. “We tell them, ‘We’re not like you. We don’t steal your cows so don’t steal our trees.”

The main weapons used by the Ka’apor are bows and arrows and borduna – a heavy sword-shaped baton. One of the group also owns a rusty old rifle. Mostly though, they depend on greater numbers.

Tidiun Ka’apor takes us to a charred truck and tractor that the group burned in a confrontation a little over a week earlier and uses the ashes to paint his face. “This gives us strength,” one of his associates says. The Ka’apor are thought to have set fire to about a dozen loggers’ vehicles. Further along the road, they build a pyre of planks seized inside their land, douse it with gasoline and then watch it burn.

Another of the group’s leaders Miraté Ka’apor says the use of violence – which has resulted in some broken bones but no deaths among the loggers – is justified. “The loggers come here to steal from us. So, they deserve what they get. We have to make them feel our loss – the loss of our timber, the destruction of our forest.”

Compared with the past, he said the missions were effective. “Our struggle is having results because the loggers respect us now.”

But the loggers also appear to be responding with lethal force. On 26 April, a former chieftain, Eusébio Ka’apor was murdered by gunmen on his way back from a visit to his brother. Like most killings of indigenous people and environmental activists in Brazil, the crime has not been solved, but the dead man’s son has little doubt who is responsible and what they were trying to achieve.

“He was a target because [the loggers] thought he was the main leader of the group,” said Iraun Ka’apor. “They thought the Ka’apor would stop if they killed him. But we will continue with our work of protection. I’m not afraid. This is my home, my land, my forest.”

Ten days before we arrived, Iraun received a death threat and was told that the bullet that killed his father had been meant for him.

The authorities in Maranhão – the poorest state in Brazil – warn the Ka’apor that although they are within their rights to protect their land, it is ultimately up to the state to resolve disputes over territory.

“The involvement of the Ka’apor in the defence of their territory against the loggers should be understood as legitimate defence, since the action of the loggers puts their survival at risk,” said Alexandre Silva Saraiva, regional superintendent of the federal police. “But the presence of the state is the only way to diminish the agrarian conflicts and reduce homicides.”

Inside Alto Turiaçu, people are sceptical that the police and government are willing to look after indigenous interests. Last year 70 Indians were murdered in Brazil, a 32% increase on 2013, according to the Missionary Indigenous Council. In many cases the killings were related to land disputes with loggers or ranchers. In their community gathering, many Ka’apor expressed the belief that the authorities were colluding in the sell-off of the forest.

“We are very concerned,” Miraté says. “Even the local authorities are involved. They grant licences to the sawmills and that encourages the loggers. The way the brancos [white or non-indigenous people] are organised also promotes death. They make a profit from this.”

Government officials prefer to focus on the positives: the slowdown in Amazonian deforestation rates over the past 10 years (though in Maranhão’s case this is largely because there is so little forest left) and the progress made in bringing culprits to justice. This year, prosecutors in neighbouring Pará state have broken up an illegal land-clearance ring and arrested corrupt officials in timber-laundering syndicates that supply fake certification to loggers. Elsewhere, satellite monitoring has helped to identify which landowners are tearing down or burning the most trees, though this approach is of less use when it comes to the steady degrading of the forests by invasive loggers.

Pedro Leão, superintendent for Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources) insists his agency is already combating the criminal organisations behind illegal logging and cautions that it is “extremely risky” for the Ka’apor to do the same. He said he hoped Ibama could make greater strides in the future by focusing on sawmills and possibly using GPS trackers.

These are already areas where the Ka’apor are active. During this month’s visit, Greenpeace – which also helped the Guardian to reach the area – provided the community with 11 camera traps, 11 GPS trackers and two computers, worth a total of 20,000 reais (£3,480/$5,260).

Marina Lacorte, a forest campaigner with Greenpeace Brazil, said the devices – which are usually used to capture wild animals on film – were intended to enhance the Ka’apor’s success in diminishing illegal logging. “With the cameras, we hope to prove that at a certain time and date in a certain place, the trucks arrived empty and left with timber. We hope the devices can produce more evidence to persuade the authorities to do something to stop the logging and the conflict and the murder.”

For many conservationists, the significance of the Ka’apor’s actions goes beyond their particular case and puts them on the frontline of the battle against climate change. Brazil, like other Amazonian countries, has struggled to tackle deforestation partly because environmental authorities are constantly outnumbered and outgunned by loggers, ranchers and farmers.

Ibama – the main agency dedicated to protecting the forest – has about 1,500 rangers to monitor the Brazilian Amazon, an area that is more than half the size of the US. Many of them have mixed feelings about land clearance. Some are even in the pay of loggers, as recent scandals have revealed.

By contrast, indigenous groups like the Ka’apor have the incentive and the manpower on the ground to resist the decimation of their forests. For them, this is not just a job, but a matter of identity and survival. The benefits can be global. In a recent report, the World Resources Institute noted that when indigenous people have weak legal rights, their forests tend to become the source of carbon dioxide emissions, while those in a strong position are more likely to maintain or even improve their forests’ carbon storage. Underlining this, a research paper published last month in Science, notes that forest dwellers are the best defence against logging and land clearance.

The danger is that such groups might become involved in a proxy war against emissions without the technology, the firepower or the legal authority to overcome more powerful opponents. But Miraté said the community would pick and choose how and when to get involved.

“It’s not that we don’t understand technology. We can drive cars and motorbikes and we can use computers. But we want to do things our way, the Ka’apor way,” he said.

The loggers are not the only threat to the tribe’s survival. Previous battles with the authorities and the spread of diseases brought in by outsiders reduced the population – which once stood at several thousand – to little more than 500 at the low point in 1982. The community has since rebounded – largely thanks to the recognition of its territory – and it continues to assert its cultural identity on a variety of fronts.

While many other indigenous groups are plagued by alcoholism, the Ka’apor recently introduced a ban on consumption of beer and spirits (as well as visits by Christian evangelists and political campaigners). If a member violates the rule once, he gets a warning; twice, he must face a full meeting of the tribe; three times and he is sentenced to work in the nearby town. In their relations with the government, the tribe insisted last year on being represented by a member of their own community rather than a bureaucrat from Funai (the National Indian Foundation). They have also moved away from what they say is a Funai-led system of having a single village chief and instead reverted towards collective leadership.

In education, they have ensured that their children are taught entirely in Ka’apor rather than Portuguese until the age of 10. Most creatively, they also recently codified their own calendar, which prioritises planting, harvesting and mating seasons, as an alternative to the solar-based Gregorian system. While they occasionally shop for rice, the Ka’apor says they are largely self-sufficient with crops of manioc, bananas, pumpkin and watermelon. They also raise chickens, and hunt wild boar, deer, capybara and parrots – though only in certain seasons to ensure wild populations remain strong.

But Miraté fears the authorities in Brasília are more concerned about the country’s non-indigenous population and the pressure of a global economy.

“We believe that what the Brazilian government is doing now is wrong. They are following a policy to finish off the indigenous people,” he warns. But “we want to do things our own way, to respect our own culture. That’s the only way to survive.”

by Jonathan Watts / The Guardian

from CBC News

A 30-strong splinter group of Ngäbe from the M10 resistance movement has blocked the entrance to the Barro Blanco hydroelectric dam in western Panama, preventing workers from entering the site. The 15 year struggle of the Tabasará river communities to protect their livelihoods, their culture, and their ancestral heritage now appears to be entering a tense new phase. With negotiations exhausted and the dam 95% complete, M10 has an issued an ultimatum for the government to cancel the project by Monday, June 15, 2015. It is unclear how the government will respond.

“Being Ngäbe-Buglé cultural patrimony,” said Clementina Pérez, part of the group camped at Barro Blanco’s gates. “Our river, our mother earth, our ecology, our existence, we are here to make known to the national and international community that this patrimony belongs to us and to the church of Mama Tata. With the conservation of peace, liberty, justice and unity, liberation and social justice… [we ask] the President of the Republic the cancellation and removal of the dam from our communities, our river and our mother earth, which belong to us as original people of the Americas…”Funded by European banks – the German Investment Corporation (DEG) and the Dutch Development Bank (FMO) – the dam is set to inundate a string of Ngäbe and campesino communities, all of whom have voiced their objections from the outset. The flood will destroy ancestral petroglyphs, fertile agricultural grounds, and Mama Tata cultural centres, including a unique school where the emerging written script of the Ngäbere language is being developed and disseminated. The dam will significantly impact the river’s marine life, wiping out migratory fish species which many communities – both up and down stream – rely upon for essential protein. None of the Tabasará communities have provided their free, informed and prior consent to the dam, a fact recently confirmed by the FMO’s own independent complaints mechanism (ICM).

“Lenders should have sought greater clarity on whether there was consent to the project from the appropriate indigenous authorities prior to project approval,” said an ICM report, published on May 29, 2015. “[The plan] contains no provision on land acquisition and resettlement and nothing on biodiversity and natural resources management. Neither does it contain any reference to issues related to cultural heritage…”

The report is the latest in a series of professional analyses that pour a thick layer of scorn over the dam project’s owner, Generadora del Istmo (GENISA). Demonstrably unlawful, GENISA has been condemned by numerous independent investigators, the United Nations, several international NGOs, and Panama’s own environmental agency, ANAM, who found a raft of flaws and short-comings in their environmental impact assessment.

But despite failing their own due diligence, the banks appear to have shrugged off the ICM report with an insipid call for ‘constructive dialogue’ and ‘a solution for a way forward’. In February this year, the FMO chose to threaten the government of Panama after building work was temporarily suspended on the recommendation of ANAM. Writing to the Vice President, the FMO warned that the suspension “May weigh upon future investment decisions, and harm the flow of long-term investments into Panama.”

The government seems to have taken this threat to heart. Panama’s president, Juan Carlos Varela, who was elected to office in 2014, flip-flopped on Barro Blanco before finally falling in line. Last week, while proffering flimsy reassurances about having found a human rights solution, his government left the negotiating table and signaled an end to the suspension of works. M10 claims the work never stopped and has been continuing clandestinely. They are now mobilising for action.

Clementina Perez (Photo: Oscar Sogandares)

“If this situation is not resolved,” said Clementina Pérez, “We will go to the Panamerican highway to ask together, at a national level, the cancellation of Barro Blanco…”

Rising with stark grey walls above the denuded banks of the Tabasará, Barro Blanco has become a symbol of the previous administration, its fundamental violence and contempt for the rule of law. The former President Ricardo Martinelli – now on the run in the United States and facing a corruption probe back home – provoked no less than four major uprisings as he grasped for land and resources in Panama’s indigenous territories. Heavy-handed repression resulted in the deaths of several protesters and bystanders, including an unarmed teenage boy who was shot in the face by police. Barro Blanco is the visible legacy of a proudly thuggish President who serially abused Panama’s Indigenous Peoples and plundered the country at will. Thus far, Varela has been keen to strike a more decent and humane tone. How he now handles the crisis evolving on the banks of the Tabasará River will be a demonstration of his sincerity, or lack of.

by  IC Magazine

April 2nd, 2015

[NOTE: All faces have been blurred and all names have been withheld for security reasons.]

Clashes have erupted in Colombia’s western department of Cauca as the Nasa Indigenous Peoples press the government to fulfill its promise to return 15,600 hectares to their control. A succession of occupations of sugar plantations has seen the government deploy the army and riot police against them prompting fierce battles across the north of the region.

This is the latest stage in a decades-long struggle for the return of indigenous territory lost to intensive agriculture, a struggle that received international attention in past decades following a wave of massacres. Protected by the Indigenous Guards, the fields remain largely under Nasa control, but an abrupt rise in threats from the “Black Eagles” paramilitary group and the issuance of new eviction orders by the government raise fears that deadly violence may return to the region.

There was no shade to shelter the small party as they crossed the expanse of earth last week, carrying a plantain sapling and a bag of maize. In the middle of the field, its vastness already rippling in the morning heat, they planted the sapling and scattered the seeds of local indigenous maize.

Keeping an eye on the ‘ESMAD’ riot police stationed in the shade of the trees around the hacienda was a local teacher.

“We are recuperating the land” she told IC. “We are replacing the mono-cultivation of the multinationals with the original vegetation. …One day trees will be growing here again: what we are seeing is the liberation of Mother Earth”.

The Indigenous Nasa peoples have been seeking the ‘liberation’ of the territory of the hacienda for years, regularly occupying the fields and buildings, and blocking the road that runs between the property and the Nasa reservation of Huellas.

Behind the line of riot police, soldiers patrolled the buildings of the ‘Hacienda La Emperatriz’. Two weeks ago, on Mar. 17, they had opened fire on the Nasa, citing a leaflet supposedly delivered by the FARC guerrillas claiming to have infiltrated the indigenous demonstrators. Three Nasa were injured by gunfire.

The planters continued sowing the seeds in the growing heat, small handfuls as a symbolic gesture amidst the stumps of sugarcane and the cast tear gas grenades of earlier confrontations. In the distance other groups worked with maize and plantains, often among patches of ground where the sweet fermented smell of burned cane indicated where the plantations had burned during confrontations with the ESMAD.

Finally the calm was broken as the riot police drove an armoured vehicle down the road parallel with the fields, a line of police advancing across the cleared plantations to keep pace with it and firing gas and stun grenades at the Nasa.

The indigenous responded with catapults and slingshots, and the police line was halted halfway across the sugar fields from where they fired stun grenades and gas grenades coated with marbles. These were lobbed high in the air; their explosion shooting the marbles out like bullets.

Other gas and stun grenades were regularly fired parallel with the ground, directly at the bodies of the Indigenous, causing a steady stream of injuries to be treated by the community’s medical teams.

Fierce battles regularly erupted where a stream surrounded with bamboo offered cover for each side to attempt to outflank the other. The Nasa used a three-man catapult against the ESMAD, often forcing them back, while the riot police hidden on the other side of the stream responded with missiles fired blindly at the three. A hostile stalemate over the plantation lasted for the rest of the day, the gas clouds blown sometimes one way, sometimes the other.The plains of Colombia’s western Valle del Cauca department are now an expanse of sugar; road trains of coupled trucks haul the cane from the plantations to be refined or used in the creation of ethanol. Across the plantation of La Emperatriz lie proofs of hours worked and records of fumigation tossed onto the ground in past months by contractors of InCauca, the agro-industrial multinational that runs the largest sugar refinery in Colombia and which dominates the region.

The same plains once supported a landscape of leafy savannah where communities produced numerous crops. One can read of this world as recently as the late nineteenth century in the work of local journalist and chronicler Luciano Rivera y Garrido, who described,

“Riparian forests, thick carpets of dark green… vast plains covered with forests, over there pastures, yonder hamlets… small valleys sowed with seeds, clogged woodlands… quaint huts of peasants… golden light… sapphire sky.”

A mixed landscape has been reborn in the land on the other side of the road. A hacienda similar to La Emperatriz has been meticulously maintained–and now, painted with Nasa symbols and iconography, serves as the community health centre and music schoo..

The surrounding land is held in common though dotted with parcels of land where individual families farm their own mixed crops, interspersed with forest and pasture. The territory of the Huellas reservation was a cattle ranch until the Nasa retook it; the road that forms the boundary between the reservation and La Emperatriz running along the edge of the plain and below the gentle foothills of the Sierra Occidental.

“Before this we had no land”, said a former governor of Huellas. He continued,

“We came from high up and had to work for two days a week for nothing other than the permission to be here through the system of the ‘teraje’. Then around 1971 we established the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN), and we refused to pay the teraje. The local powers responded with threats and assassinations, but we had found our voice. The elders teach us that we lived in the plains until 1915, when the police came from Cali trip to evict everyone who refused to leave for the mountains.”

ACIN became a driving force in the indigenous movement of Colombia, and as part of the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC) its successes in overcoming state and paramilitary violence to reclaim ancestral land and oppose the export economy of intensive agriculture have gained it support beyond indigenous Colombia.

In 1985, the national government was pressured into passing Decree 865, which led to the establishment of the Commission of Land for the People of Cauca, but the government machinery proceeded at a snail’s pace in realising promises of land reform. In October 1991, with threats and attacks rising against Nasa occupying haciendas, the CRIC and indigenous councils of northern Cauca asked that the Government intervene to prevent a massacre and pass 15,663 hectares to the indigenous community to settle claims. The government did not respond.

On 16 December 1991, 50 armed men in military style uniforms shot 21 Nasa to death in the El Nilo hacienda. An investigation pointed to the involvement of Major Jorge Enrique Durán Argüelles, police commander of the Second District of Santander de Quilichao, and Captain Fabio Alejandro Castañeda Mateus, commander of the anti-narcotics company of that unit, along with numerous police personnel, but the charges were dropped.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated the El Nilo massacre from 1993 to 1997, publishing its recommendations in 2001 urging Colombia to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the massacre, including police officers; to make social and integral reparation to the Nasa people; and to guarantee the non-repetititon of similar acts.

The government had belatedly signed an accord in Bogotá on 23 December 1991 that promised to return the requested land to the Nasa, but only a portion of this has been legally transferred. In 2001 further massacres occurred at Gualanday, San Pedro, and Maya. The government has never accepted responsibility for the massacres, and the return of properties has consistently relied on pressure from the Nasa.

“We lost many people killed in order to reclaim this finca” said the ex-governor of Nasa.

“The narco-traffickers, the land-owners, and the police were all involved. Now they call themselves the Black Eagles or the Rastrojos, but they’re just the same people. When we pressure the government to fulfil its promises to return our land the intimidation increases. Three months ago we had paramilitaries passing along the road in front of the reservation shouting threats against the current governor. They said they were from the Rastrojos but the name is not important.”

We had walked into the foothills to see the transformation of Huellas in the years since it had been passed to indigenous control. Between the land returned to woodland, fields of mixed crops of beans, yuca, plantain, coffee and maize were interspersed with citrus groves and pasture.

The plain spread out beneath us, the endless sugar sugar plantations extending to Cali and beyond; the explosions of gas grenades and white smoke rising beyond the furthest trees of Huellas showed where the daily struggle to reclaim the plains continued.

The current governor emphasized in assemblies each morning that the focus of the struggle was to recuperate the land and to liberate Mother Earth. “We are Indigenous, we know how to care for the land,” she told the community, before its members prepared to return to the struggle at La Emperatriz. “Focus on your replanting of the land, don’t provoke the fighting.” The Nasa would then line up to have their heads bathed in a herbal mixture prepared by the spiritual guide. Then, they would cross from Huellas into La Emperatriz.

The struggle for control of the fields is currently swinging in favour of the Nasa; the increased repression serving only to boost the numbers of those coming to the property. The riot police are growing reluctant to spend each day before the slings and catapults in the fields; but at the same time, as they begin to remain closer to the confines of the buildings of the hacienda the number of threats has multiplied. By night the fields are deserted by the Nasa; “In the dark the police would shoot us dead” they say, “The ‘Black Eagles’ is just the name they use at night”.

A similar pattern of disengagement followed by threats has occurred in the properties between the sugar-producing town of Corinto and neighbouring Nasa communities, where ESMAD police wielded machetes and fired live bullets injuring four Nasa who were contesting the ownership of the sugar plantations of Quebrada Seca and Garcia. The escalation of violence prompted the UN to negotiate an agreement in which the police and army occupied the hacienda buildings of the contested haciendas of Miraflores, Quebrada Seca, Granadillo, and Garcia, while the Nasa are left in possession of the fields. The first two properties are owned outright by InCauca, the sugar company that rents the other two properties as well as La Emperatriz. Nasa have also received firearms injuries from the private security company of InCauca.

A leaflet from the Black Eagles circulated in Corinto last week, promising the “social cleansing” of the area and the eradication of the “bandits” in the sugarcane plantations. The paramilitaries ordered a regional curfew of 10pm. Threatening prominent Nasa, they signed off with: “United for a northern Cauca without Indians”.

This week, the Government issued eviction orders for some of the settlements the Nasa have been establishing in the contested fields around Corinto. From the Monday until Wednesday the same property also seen a Nasa Assembly develop a “plan of life” for the communal ‘recuperation’ of the land. Around the assembly the former sugar-plantation was already growing with indigenous maize, such as the planters had been sowing at La Emperatriz.

During the struggle at La Emperatriz the plantain sapling they had planted was later uprooted when the ESMAD gained control of that part of the field, but in the days that followed it was replanted and likely grows still. The teacher who had spoken of the liberation of Mother Earth as the planters walked through the heat had claimed that the environmental and spiritual dimension of the struggle gave the community a strength that violence couldn’t break. “We will always be here, and we will always demand this land back, not just for ourselves to live as before but also for Mother Earth. We are not like the Government which only knows how to sell things. That is why we will win, that is why we have the patience which will win here.”