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anonymous report, from From Russia With Love:
"10/02/2013 members of ALF-Kuban torched construction vehicles used for destroying a grove – one of the few left – in Krasnodar.
anonymous report, from From Russia With Love:
"10/02/2013 members of ALF-Kuban torched construction vehicles used for destroying a grove – one of the few left – in Krasnodar.
'All of the river basin is in danger, because these woods act as lungs for three districts: Komsomolsky, Pashkovky and Hydrostroy. In their lust for profit development companies won’t listen to locals, ecological surveys or petitions. So we chose to sabotage their efforts.
We are making them pay,' – ALF-Kuban
On Friday, January 25th, a group of activists agreed to a se
On Friday, January 25th, a group of activists agreed to a settlement in TransCanada’s lawsuit against Tar Sands Blockade, Rising Tide North Texas, Rising Tide North America, and nineteen individuals. The SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) alleged that direct action against Keystone XL has cost TransCanada $5 million. This contradicts frequent public statements by TransCanada’s spokespeople that blockaders were not impeding construction in any meaningful way.
The eight Texans who came to court to defend themselves on Friday, some of whom had not been actively involved with Tar Sands Blockade since protests in August, were threatened with losing their homes and life’s savings if the lawsuit went forward. In order to protect the livelihoods and dependents of brave activists like Tammie Carson, who locked herself to a truck carrying Keystone XL pipe, the activists agreed to settle the lawsuit. The corporation will not seek the $5 million in financial damages, and the named defendants and organizations agreed to not trespass on Keystone XL property in Texas and Oklahoma or face additional charges.
Despite this legal setback, members of Tar Sands Blockade are as determined as ever to stop Keystone XL. The sustained direct action campaign will continue. Here’s a chronology of all the direct actions taken since August 2012.
Defendants made the following statements in response to the settlement:
Tammie Carson, a lifelong Texan, grandmother, and defendant from Arlington, TX, said:
“I took action for my grandkids’ future. I couldn’t sit idly by and watch as a multinational corporate bully abused eminent domain to build a dirty and dangerous tar sands pipeline right through Texans’ backyards. I had no choice but to settle or lose my home and everything I’ve worked for my entire life.”
Ramsey Sprague, Tar Sands Blockade spokesperson, and defendant from Fort Worth, TX, said:
“TransCanada is dead wrong if they think a civil lawsuit against a handful of Texans is going to stop a grassroots civil disobedience movement. This is nothing more than another example of TransCanada repressing dissent and bullying Texans who are defending their homes and futures from toxic tar sands.”
Lauren Regan, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and one of the legal coordinators for the Tar Sands Blockade made the following statement:
“The SLAPP suit (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) filed against the people and organizations that are fighting against TransCanada’s unethical and environmentally destructive pipeline will never stop the people’s resistance to the XL Pipeline. TransCanada has repeatedly attempted to violate the law and bully the people of Texas: through corporate corruption and lies, they obtained “common carrier” status in Texas in order to steal private property from low income and hard working Texans; they have attempted to bring the full weight of the police state upon nonviolent activists in an attempt to crush their peaceful resistance–using mace, tasers, and physical brutality.
Despite physical harm, lengthy incarcerations, felony charges, and now civil lawsuits to restrict their right to protest, the people have not been deterred and have only been emboldened in the face of Transcanada’s attempt at repression and bullying. At each attempt by TransCanada to chill the citizens’ rights to protest the XL Pipeline, the people’s lawyers will stand up to defend them in the Court’s. For every protestor that is jailed or beaten, ten more arrive to take that person’s place. For every homeowner who has had their land stolen, and dangerous tar sands oil now threatens their health and environment, people from around the country will band together to protect the next threatened community through a variety of nonviolent tools. Resistance is Fertile. The survival of the planet in the face of global climate change deserves nothing less.”
A coalition of environmental groups staged a protest Monday morning along Highway 101 to protest the construction of the highway bypass around Willits.
Dozens of protestors from Earth First! joined with a newly formed Willits group called Save our Little Lake Valley in an effort to stop the planned tree cutting along the bypass footprint. In addition to picket signs, a local woman is now living on a platform nestled in top of one of the trees slated for removal. Picketers on the ground vowed to support her tree sitting protest for as long as it takes.
“CalTrans did not cut today, it was definitely a victory,” says organizer Sarah Grusky of Save our Little Lake Valley. “We plan to hold vigils as often as possible to keep a lookout.”
CalTrans has been working for the past few weeks, placing markers along the project right of way preparing for the contractor to begin work. The first significant work scheduled for the contractor is to cut the trees along the bypass route to prevent migratory birds from nesting in them. Tree cutting is expected to start within two to three weeks according to CalTrans spokesman Phil Frisbie.
CalTrans awarded the $108 million construction project to the partnership of DeSilva Gates Construction and Flatiron West Incorporated late last year with the expectation most of the heavy construction work would not start until 2013 after the seasonal rains subsided.
A lawsuit filed by The Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Willits Environmental Center and the Environmental Protection Information Center in May 2012 is seeking to delay the project until a more thorough examination of alternatives is conducted. The California Farm Bureau joined the lawsuit in August 2012. In November a federal judge denied the groups’ request for an injunction aimed at stopping construction until the lawsuit issues were settled. The trial date is scheduled for June 7.
While the courts settle the overall legality of CalTrans bypass design, some area activists are concerned about the damage being done in the meantime. Protestors brought informational signs and held them up to wave at travelers along the east side of Highway 101 south of Walker Road aimed at stopping any construction through peaceful protest.
“Caltrans has not considered the many other viable and sensible solutions to Willlits’ traffic problems developed by the people,” said Warbler, a Little Lake Valley farmer occupying the tree. “This Bypass will not improve local traffic and will create no permanent jobs, but it will permanently scar the Little Lake Valley. The Army Corp of Engineers is mandated to choose the least harmful alternative and the Bypass as planned isn’t it.”
Warbler is 24-years-old and has been living and working in the Willits valley for the past four years. This is her first tree sit. She volunteered for this role when planning for the protests began last year. She received tree climbing instructions from Cascadia Forest Defenders who also helped her get settled into the tree located at the south end of the new planned bypass not far from the current Highway 101. She has tarps to protect herself from rain and two sleeping bags to keep warm.
When asked how long she planned to stay in the tree she said, “that depends on CalTrans and local authorities.”
22nd Jan. CREVE COEUR, MO — Seven protesters affiliated with the RAMPS campaign (Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival), MORE (Missourians Organizi
22nd Jan. CREVE COEUR, MO — Seven protesters affiliated with the RAMPS campaign (Radical Action for Mountain Peoples’ Survival), MORE (Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment) and Mountain Justice are locked down to a 500-pound small potted tree in Arch Coal’s third-floor headquarters while a larger group is in the lobby performing a song and dance. Additionally, a helium balloon banner with the message “John Eaves Your Coal Company Kills”, directed at the Arch Coal CEO was released in the Arch Coal headquarters.
“We’re here to halt Arch’s operations for as long as we can. These coal corporations do not answer to communities, they only consume them. We’re here to resist their unchecked power,” explained Margaret Fetzer, one of the protestors.
Arch Coal, the second largest coal company in the U.S., operates strip mines in Appalachia and in other U.S. coal basins. Strip mining is an acutely destructive and toxic method of mining coal, and resource extraction disproportionately impacts marginalized communities.
“From the Battle of Blair Mountain to the current fight with the Patriot pensions, the people of central Appalachia have been fighting against the coal companies for the past 125 years. The struggle continues today as we take action to hold Arch Coal and other coal companies accountable for the damage that they do to people and communities in Appalachia and around the world. Coal mining disproportionately impacts indigenous peoples, and we stand in solidarity with disenfranchised people everywhere,” Dustin Steele of Mingo County, W.Va. said. Steele was one of the people locked in Arch’s office.
Mingo County is representative of the public health crisis faced by communities overburdened by strip mining. A recent study of life expectancies placed Mingo County in the bottom 1 percent out of 3,147 counties nationwide.(1)
Arch’s strip mines not only poison communities, but also seek to erase the legacy of resistance to the coal companies in Appalachia. Arch’s Adkins Fork Surface Mine is threatening to blast away Blair Mountain—the site of the second largest uprising in U.S. history and a milestone in the long-standing struggle between Appalachians and the coal companies.(2)
The devastation of Arch’s strip mines plague regions beyond Appalachia. Arch’s operation in the Powder River Basin is the “single largest coal mining complex in the world.(3)” Producing 15 percent of the U.S. coal supply, Arch is a major culprit of the climate crisis.
NASA scientist James Hansen describes the burning of coal as a leading cause global climate change.(4) The Midwest region faces serious public health impacts from climate change due to “increased heat wave intensity and frequency, degraded air quality, and reduced water quality(5),” according to recently published data from the National Climate Assessment.
An indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon has won a reprieve after building up an arsenal of spears, blowpipes, machetes and guns to fend off an expected intrusion by the army and a state-run oil company.
An indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon has won a reprieve after building up an arsenal of spears, blowpipes, machetes and guns to fend off an expected intrusion by the army and a state-run oil company.
The residents of Sani Isla expressed relief that a confrontation with Petroamazonas did not take place on Tuesday as anticipated, but said the firm is still trying to secure exploration rights in their area of pristine rainforest.
“We have won a victory in our community. We’re united,” said the community president, Leonardo Tapuy. “But the government and the oil company won’t leave us alone. “
The Kichwa tribe on Sani Isla, had said they were ready to fight to the death to protect their territory, which covers 70,000 hectares. More than a quarter of their land is in Yasuni national park, the most biodiverse place on earth.
Petroamazonas had earlier told them it would begin prospecting on their land on 15 January, backed by public security forces.
Before the expected confrontation,the shaman, Patricio Jipa said people were making blowpipes and spears, trying to borrow guns and preparing to use sticks stones and any other weapons they could lay their hands on.
“Our intention was not to hurt or kill anyone, but to stop them from entering our land,” he said.
It is unclear why Petroamazonas hesitated. The company has yet to respond to the Guardian’s request for a comment.
Locals speculated that it was due to a reaffirmation of opposition to the oil company at a marathon community meeting on Sunday.
“They’ve heard that we are united against the exploration so they have backed off,” said Fredy Gualinga, manager of the Sani Lodge. “We’re happy they haven’t come. Life is going on as normal.”
The relief may not last for long given the huge fossil fuel resources that are thought to lie below the forest.
“It was a close thing, but we’re not out of the water. The oil company has not given up. They will continue to hound us and to try to divide the community. But at least we have a few days respite,” said Mari Muench, a British woman who is married to the village shaman.
The elected leaders of Sani Isla have pledged to resist offers from Petroamazonas for the duration of their term.
“This policy will remain in place during our period in office. We’re committed to that and we will do what we can to make it more permanent,” said Abdon Grefa, the speaker of the community.
The battle has now moved to the judicial system and the court of public opinion. Their appeal for an injunction went before a judge on Wednesday and they are calling on supporters to help them build a long-term economic alternative to fossil fuels.
“We hope people will write protest letters to Petroamazonas, come and visit our lodge, promote Sani, donate money to our school and projects, volunteer as teachers or provide funds to students to travel overseas so they can learn what we need to survive in the future,” said the community secretary, Klider Gualinga.
17 January 2013
17 January 2013
Native people across Canada have blockaded roads, bridges and railway lines as part of the grass-roots indigenous movement Idle No More.
From British Columbia, where dozens of protesters demonstrated outside hearings for a proposed oil pipeline, to Ontario, where border crossings to the USA were blocked, the scale of the protests strongly suggest that the movement is showing little sign of dying down.
The Idle No More movement began in November 2012, when four women from the province of Saskatchewan held a ‘teach-in’ about the likely effects of Bill C-45, a large and complex bill proposed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which would seriously weaken many environmental regulations.
On 4 December, a group of chiefs from the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Canada’s principal indigenous organization, were prevented from entering the Parliament buildings to lobby MPs over the bill. News of the snub, using the Idle No More hashtag, quickly spread across the country.
Another important element of the protests has been a hunger strike by Theresa Spence, chief of the Attawapiskat First Nation in northern Ontario. This Cree community, despite being the location of De Beers’s Victor diamond mine, is riven by social problems, including poor housing and chronically inadequate education provision.
Chief Spence declared that her hunger strike would continue until the Prime Minister and the Governor General (the Queen’s representative in Canada), agreed to meet her to discuss Aboriginal rights.
On January 11 a delegation of First Nations leaders, under the aegis of the AFN, held a meeting with Mr Harper and various other ministers. The Governor General, however, did not attend. The meeting was inconclusive, with the Aboriginal Affairs Minister reporting that ‘it would be followed by high-level dialogue between the Prime Minister and Shawn Atleo’, leader of the AFN.
As described by the native writer Lisa Charleyboy, the objectives of Idle No More are ‘to build indigenous sovereignty, to repair the relationship between indigenous peoples of Canada (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit), the crown, and the government of Canada from a grassroots framework, and to protect the environment for all Canadians to enjoy for generations to come.’
Idle No More has called for a World Day of Action on January 28th.
Vancouver, BC / Coast Salish Territories – This morning (15th Jan), six people directly intervened in the Enbridge pipeline joint Environmental Assessment and Energy Board hearings and put climate change on the agenda.
Vancouver, BC / Coast Salish Territories – This morning (15th Jan), six people directly intervened in the Enbridge pipeline joint Environmental Assessment and Energy Board hearings and put climate change on the agenda. The group managed to make their way past police undetected and into the secured 4th floor of Vancouver’s Sheraton Wall Center. Once inside they revealed shirts emblazoned with messages like “Stop the Pipelines” and proceeded to use police tape to cordon off the hearing area as a “climate crime scene.”
“Climate change is killing thousands of people every year, primarily in developing countries and Indigenous communities that are the least responsible for creating this problem. Despite this fact, the Joint Review Panel has instructed those participating in the hearings not to talk about climate change. This is a shockingly irresponsible move considering Canada’s tar sands contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. New fossil fuel pipelines are an irresponsible step in the wrong direction.” said Sean Devlin.
The impacts of climate change have been drawing global attention recently, between Hurricane Sandy, unprecedented deadly typhoons in the Philippines and previously unimaginable temperature records in Australia. In this urgent context the JRP has designated climate change and the carbon emissions of Canada’s tar sands “outside of the panel’s mandate,” a move that officially discourages interveners from raising these critical issues during their oral statements.
“Enbridge and the federal government are using their position of authority within this process to coerce members of the public into silence on these issues. The majority of First Nations and settler communities in the province oppose fossil fuel pipelines. We respect those who are voicing their opposition to the pipelines inside the hearings, but the hearing process is meaningless, especially since Harper has changed the law, giving his cabinet final say on pipeline projects,” said Fiona De Balasi Brown.
Today marks the second day of the Joint Review Panel hearings in Vancouver and the second day that the members of the public have crossed police lines to make their opposition heard. On Monday more than a thousand protesters peacefully forced their way past police onto the Sheraton property drumming so loudly the noise could be heard inside the hearings. Public outrage has been emboldened by a decision to exclude the public from the hearings in Vancouver, a move the BC Civil Liberties Association criticized yesterday as “potentially unlawful.”
News reports are ablaze with reports of looming Indigenous blockades and economic disruption.
News reports are ablaze with reports of looming Indigenous blockades and economic disruption. As the Idle No More movement explodes into a new territory of political action, it bears to amplify the incredible economic leverage of First Nations today, and how frightened the government and industry are of their capacity to wield it.
In recent years, Access to Information (ATI) records obtained by journalists reveal a massive state-wide surveillance and “hot spot monitoring” operation coordinated between the Department of Indian Affairs, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), local security forces, natural resource and transportation ministries, border agencies, and industry stakeholders. These efforts have been explicitly mobilized to protect “critical infrastructure” from Indigenous attack.
What is critical infrastructure? According to an RCMP internal document concerning the risk of Aboriginal protest, “critical infrastructure refers to infrastructure, both tangible and intangible, that is essential to the health, safety, security or economic well-being of Canadians and the effective functioning of government.” RCMP National Security Criminal Investigations have prioritized four critical infrastructure sectors: finance, transportation, energy, and cyber-security.
On January 5 alone, INM protests included five border crossing blockades, bridge blockades, and rail line disruptions spanning the country.
And it’s not only intelligence services that are warning of threats to critical infrastructure.
Conservative military analyst Douglas Bland has also long warned that Canada’s economic vulnerability is based on the “critical infrastructure that transports natural resources and manufactured goods from mines, oil fields, hydro-electric facilities and factories to international markets.” Without these critical systems, he cautions, “Canada’s economy would collapse."
Though Bland has counseled a conciliatory approach to Aboriginals in order to stave off the coming crisis, his alarmism – and that of other right-wing pundits – simultaneously justifies the state’s security and surveillance apparatus by manufacturing a fear of native uprising. But for Bland and others, a coming “Native Spring” is less feared for its potential “violence” and all the more grave for its threat to property rights.
In Bland’s fictional book Uprising, he predicts coordinated attacks by secret native cells on key installations and urban hubs, such as the James Bay hydro-electric dam and the downtown core of Winnipeg. This attack on critical infrastructure tellingly ends in a blaze of heroic Canada-US military attacks on the rebel army. (The US gets involved only when they realize their source of electricity, oil, and gas is at stake.)
Herein lies the real role of right wing alarmists in the INM movement: to maintain the economic status quo, because territory is capital. Land is money. And the circulation of goods, resources and energy through territory is the very essence of capitalism today.
The fact is that critical infrastructure in Canada is at the mercy of Indigenous peoples, who are more rural than Canadians and have access to important arteries for economic flows: transportation corridors, energy sectors, and sites of natural resource extraction.
This vulnerability is deadly to the logistics industry. Logistics is a business science concerned with the management of goods and information through global supply chains. As the World Bank has declared: “A competitive network of global logistics is the backbone of international trade.” For an industry dependent on maintaining open channels for capital circulation, a blockade means massive losses: the trucking industry alone is worth $65 billion and employs more than 260,000 drivers.
In the energy sector, Canada has oil reserves second in the world after Saudi Arabia, though less accessible – 98 per cent of this oil is in Alberta and 95 per cent of it is in the tar sands, where effective Indigenous resistance by Treaty 8 and other First Nations has led to global boycott campaigns and fierce resistance.
In northern BC, the Unist’ot’en Clan, with support from grassroots Wet’suwet’en, have built a community of resistance directly on the GPS co-ordinates of the proposed pipeline route from the Alberta tar sands to the Kitimat port. From this camp they have evicted surveyors working for Pacific Trails Pipeline. Meanwhile, in Ontario, Enbrdige’s Line 9 has been has been opposed by the Oneida, the Haudenosaunee Development Institute, and Aamijiwaang First Nation, who have all vowed to fight the pipeline to protect their lands and waters.
In terms of natural resource extraction, over 10 per cent of Canada’s economy is comprised of the natural resources sectors and earth science industries, which directly employ close to 763,000 people. The greatest concentration and correlation between Indigenous lands and mineral claims are being currently developed in the northern modern treaties and territories, such as Nunavut; Yukon; the James Bay region of Quebec, and the Quebec-Labrador border; on unceded northwestern BC lands (e.g. on Nakazdli, Tzalten, and Tlingit traditional territory); and in northern Ontario’s “Ring of Fire” on historic treaty lands, particularly Treaties 3 and 9.
In addition to mineral resources, over half of large intact forest landscapes are found on lands in historical Aboriginal treaty areas. More specifically, as Global Forest Watch reports, “Treaties 8 and 9 contain about a quarter of all of Canada’s intact forest landscapes and close to half of all the intact forest landscapes that occur within treaty areas. Modern land claim settlements contain about a quarter of Canada’s intact forest landscapes.”
That is not to say meaningful consultation concerning critical infrastructure has not been taking place. The problem is that it has exclusively been between industry and government, instead of between Indigenous peoples and the state. Journalists have been uncovering multiple incidents of high-level co-ordination between industry and government officials. For example, Access to Information requests revealed that the government has been sharing information with the oil industry on environmentalists and Indigenous groups twice a year since 2005 at secret briefings, even on such seemingly irrelevant activities such as participation in anti-G20 demonstrations.
The irony is that many corporations are tired of having operations held up by Indigenous protest and are willing to go further than governments to recognize Indigenous rights. The logics of colonialism and capitalism divide here around conflicting objectives of territorial acquisition versus the circulation of goods. But more often than not, the state and industry converge around the common interests of the ruling class. For Indigenous peoples, this becomes a question of co-ordinating leverage.
In conclusion, I want to highlight three main concerns expressed in the risk assessments undertaken by RCMP, CSIS, Indian Affairs, and right-wing thinkers on Indigenous uprising that foreground Indigenous economic power.
The first is that a mishandling of conflict will galvanize co-ordinated efforts of First Nations across the country; hence the relatively hands-off approach taken until now. In the Federal Coordination Framework for the AFN Day of Action in 2007, the proposed solution in the case of co-ordinated mobilization is to “isolate the splinter group.”
Second, the economic cost of even a few hours of such co-ordinated efforts would be crippling and impossible to police given current resources.
Third – and this is one of the most worrisome trends to observers – solidarity and co-ordination between non-Natives and Indigenous peoples will encourage the movement to build.
As a final thought, while the general population might have been taken by surprise by the strength of Idle No More, the government had long prepared for this inevitability. As far back as 2008, when changes were first proposed to the Navigable Waters Act, CSIS’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre warned about “potential unrest.”
Canada created the crisis of insurgency. Canada’s greed created a situation where Indigenous peoples stand with almost nothing to lose. Therefore, the fight is theirs to take. It is also ours to support.
Read the full article here.
An indigenous community in the Ecuadorian rainforest says they “will die fighting to protect the rainforest” after they say they were swindled by an oil company into signing away rights to 70,000 hectares of one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.
An indigenous community in the Ecuadorian rainforest says they “will die fighting to protect the rainforest” after they say they were swindled by an oil company into signing away rights to 70,000 hectares of one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.
But the state-backed oil company, PetroAmazonas—backed by the Ecuadorean army—plans to begin prospecting the Kichwa village on the Napo River on Tuesday, The Guardian reports.
PetroAmazonas, one of the biggest oil companies in South America, originally offered the village a new school, university places for village children and better healthcare, but dropped those provisions before the chief of the village signed away the rights to the land for $40 per hectare.
But the community secretary, Klider Gualinga, said 80 percent of the village opposes the deal, which he says has not yet been finalized. “People think it is dishonest and the oil company is treating them like dogs. … They’re very upset and worried. We have decided to fight to the end. Each landholder will defend their territory. We will help each other and stand shoulder to shoulder to prevent anyone from passing.”
“If there is a physical fight, it is certain to end tragically,” Shaman Patricio Jipa said. “We may die fighting to defend the rainforest.”
He continued:
It makes me feel sad and angry. Sad because we are indigenous people and not fully prepared to fight a government. And angry because we grew up to be warriors and have a spirit to defend ourselves. I wish we could use this force to fight in a new way, but our mental strength is not sufficient in this modern world.
[…]
There is huge concern the oil company will move quickly to clear the land. When that happened elsewhere, they used armed troops, beatings and abductions to remove those who stood in their way.
Jipa and his wife, Mari Muench, a British businesswoman, are fighting the plan.
Scientists say a single hectare in this part of the Amazon contains a wider variety of life than all of North America. The Amazon rainforest and other tropical forests are also among the earth's best defenses against climate change, absorbing some 20 percent of carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels.
"Protecting the Amazon basin, which contains the largest tropical rainforest on the planet, is critical to our planet's climate stability," according to Amazon Watch.
On December 11, 2012, the US Justice Department announced that banking giant HSBC was immune from prosecution despite overwhelming evidence that they consistently failed to implement controls against money-laundering. Assistant attorney general Lanny Breuer said: “Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”
The entire banking system would have been destabilized?
The Department of Justice opted rather to charge HSBC a record-breaking 1.9 billion dollar fine, and ordered the bank’s activities monitored for five years. The 1.9 billion is equivalent to five weeks’ worth of HSBC earnings, in other words, a drop in the bucket. The saddest part of the story in the mainstream media, is the focus on money laundered and money fined, as opposed to lives lost and crime legitimized in one of the most grotesque admissions of complicity with organized crime in the so-called war on drugs. Basically what was announced to the world by the US Justice Department was that the money ran too thick, and the criminals were too powerful. The global economic impact of prosecuting a bank where the dirty money has been going, was too dangerous to risk. “Sorry kids, but we guess the bad guys win.”
In Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico the news of HSBC’s immunity from criminal prosecution and US sanctions comes as no surprise. Organized crime has been prevalent in the community since 2000. After a 2008 mayoral race that left a PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) candidate in office, illicit activity increased substantially. The community learned that organized crime is an integral part of local politics and economics everywhere. Cheran is a beautiful small indigenous Purepecha mountain community surrounded by precious forests, that knows the true cost of those profits laundered. Immediately after the 2008 mayoral race the community began experiencing the devastating effects of dog eat dog capitalism of which organized crime is only another part.
The illegal logging industry began to ravage the community’s most precious forests, which have been traditionally respected as a spiritual connection by the Indigenous Purepecha people to their territory. The logging began to look a lot more like pillaging and when community members began to attempt to defend their forests, they were met with a real life nightmare: the loggers were not only aided and protected by government agencies and local police, the entire logging operation was being coordinated by members of a major organized crime syndicate. [To this day I am told by community members not to name the actual syndicate in anything I write or say, or risk an almost certain death.]
The first community members who began to defend their forest were simply and quickly assassinated. From 2008-2011 the situation only became worse. Criminals charged protection to run even a small business in the community of Cheran. The forest was raped and terror reigned as anyone felt at risk. The city would become a ghost town by sunset. This is a reality confronted by too many communities in Mexico every day.
Murders, disappearances, kidnappings, the criminal amounts of illegal logging and the reign of terror came to a head on the early morning of April 15th, 2011. A group of women had begun quietly organizing in the days before an action to bring the ravaging of their town to a halt. On April 15th, with children and youth at their sides, the women rose up and attempted to detain loggers traveling through town. The loggers tried to run the women over and in response the community reacted as a whole, and began burning the loggers’ vehicles and began detaining the loggers themselves.
It is at this point that the community recognized the complicity of the local police when it was police officers who guided organized crime thugs to the place where the loggers were being held, in an attempt to violently release them. The community erected “fogatas” or bonfire barricades throughout town in order to prevent violence against community members. Within days the community decided that it no longer trusted any politicians from any political party or any of the local and state police. They began to organize for self-determination and self-defense and chose to return to their traditional Purepecha forms of self governance.
A general council of community elders was elected and commissions were formed in order to carry out the community’s logistical, social, economic, and political needs. Community members simply say that they referred to their history and referred to their elders in order to return to the way the community was organized before political parties, police, and organized crime existed. The general council is legally recognized as the governing body of Cheran, Michoacan today.
The community has maintained that they only have three demands: safety, justice, and the reforestation of their territory. They have actively been reforesting the entire region and take that aspect of their struggle very seriously, and remind us that for them protecting the forest is both a traditional and a spiritual obligation. Cheran does not believe that anybody will ever be able to bring them justice for their dead, disappeared, and displaced as a result of the conflict, nor do they expect anyone in power to understand the justice they seek for the forest. Today Cheran knows that justice is something that they will have to take care of obtaining on their own from now on. When it comes to safety, the world is able to see what it looks like for a community to take responsibility for its own safety through traditional indigenous forms of self governance and self-defense.
Shortly after the 2011 uprising began, community members state that the local politicians and the police simply exiled themselves in fear from the community, warranting no need to run them out of town. Community members took the local government offices, took police trucks, took the polices’ weapons, and put them all to use. Historically, Cheran had traditionally been “policed” or defended by members from the community. In a voluntary rotation members from each of the four “barrios” or neighborhoods would patrol the community for self-defense in what is known as the “community ronda.” After the uprising the general council made a call out for volunteers to participate in the community “ronda”, or community guard. Community members maintain that police are imposed by the government, but the “ronda” is a traditional way in which community members protect themselves and their community. Today the “ronda” is separated into two parts. The “ronda comunitaria” which is responsible for patrolling and protecting the community from within its borders and the “guardabosques” or forest defenders, which patrol the outskirts of town and deep into the forests in order to protect community members living in those more rural areas and in order to protect the forest itself.
Cheran is not the first community in Mexico to return to their traditional means of community self-defense, nor is it the first place in the state of Michoacan, nor in the indigenous Purepecha region. Other communities have engaged in similar practices of self governance and self-defense, and little by little more and more communities are seeing traditional self governance and self-defense as a viable alternative to corrupt politics and submission to organized crime. Recently council members from Nurio, Michoacan, a larger community and long time practitioner of self governance and self-defense, suggested that the entire Purepecha region should begin to organize a regional “ronda” that could potentially coordinate self-defense patrols on a regional level for the indigenous Purepecha people living throughout the state of Michoacan.
It is hard not to throw your hands up in the air in resignation when you hear about criminals such as HSBC being granted immunity from prosecution and sanctions, but it is even harder not to throw a fist in the air when you see indigenous Purepechas successfully overcoming organized crime, corrupt politicians, and big business by establishing models for self-determination and self-defense, on a community level.
Simòn Sedillo
