It is 21 years since the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in Chiapas, Mexico encouraging the mobilization of people around the world against neoliberalism, or global capitalism. They have not gone away, but are continuing to organize in their communities alternatives to the suicidal dominant system.
Zapatistas host world festival of resistance and rebellion
By December 21, 2014, Roarmag.org
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Corporate Globalization, Indigenous Peoples, Latin America-Caribbean, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Victory!
(Montpelier, Vt.) – Vermont State Police today announced that all charges have been dropped against the 64 Vermonters who occupied Governor Peter Shumlin’s office on October 27, to demand an end to the fracked gas pipeline and a ban on fossil fuel infrastructure.
The Governor was the focus of the sit-in due to his continued support of the pipeline, which would transport dirty, climate-disrupting fracked gas from Alberta Canada through Addison County, underneath Lake Champlain to the International Paper mill in Ticonderoga, Ny., and eventually to Rutland.
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Filed under Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, Fossil Fuel Infrastructure, Frontline Communities, Pipeline, Victory!
On November 13th, Adam Briggle of Frack Free Denton spoke to Margaret Prescod for Sojourner Truth’s Earth Watch.
On election day, Denton passed a fracking ban, making it the first in Texas to ban further hydraulic fracturing. Only days later, they received push back. Denton is preparing for an extended court battle — a fight that cities nationwide considering similar laws will likely be watching closely.
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by Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Twenty years ago today an army of Indigenous Peoples, some using only wooden cut outs as guns, emerged from the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico. They took over municipalities around the Mexican state, including the city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, in defiance of the enactment of NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement.
La Realidad, 1996. PhotoLangelle.org
The Zapatistas had condemned NAFTA as “a death sentence for the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico” due to many of its unjust provisions, but especially that which eliminated Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.
Article 27, which guaranteed the rights to communal lands in Mexico was an outcome of the revolution led by Emilano Zapata – after whom the Zapatistas took their name – in the early part of the 20th century.
But in order for NAFTA – the free trade agreement between Canada, the US and Mexico – to be passed, Article 27 had to be eliminated. The eradication of this hard-won victory was accomplished by Edward Krobaker, the CEO of International Paper. Why did a multinational paper corporation care about this? Because most of Mexico’s forests were on ejido (communal) lands, which meant they could not easily be obtained or controlled by multinational corporations such as IP.
According to anthropologist Dr. Ron Nigh,
In June of 1995, the government received a letter from Edward Krobacker, International Paper CEO (now John Dillon), establishing a series of conditions, some requiring changes in Mexico’s forestry law, to “create a more secure legal framework” for IP’s investment.
According to La Jornada, all of Krobaker’s (original) demands were agreed to and new forestry legislation has been prepared. Upon returning from a Wall Street meeting with Henry Kissinger and other top financial celebrities, Zedillo announced the rejection of proposed legislation that would have implemented the Zapatista accords.
Instead he presented a counterproposal, designed to be unacceptable, which the Zapatistas rejected.
Shortly thereafter, Environmental Minister Carabias announced a large World Bank loan for “forestry,” i.e. commercial plantations.
Earlier that year, in January 1995 – one year after the passage of NAFTA and while the Zapatista uprising was still fresh and garnering support from all corners of the globe – Chase Manhattan Bank sent a memo to the Mexican government about the Zapatistas which was leaked. This memo, released in January 1995, urged the Mexican government to “eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy” or risk a devaluation of the peso and a fleeing of investors. The portion of the memo dealing with the Zapatistas is below:
CHASE MANHATTAN’S EMERGING MARKETS GROUP MEMO
CHIAPAS
The uprising in the southern state of Chiapas is now one-year old and, apparently, no nearer to resolution. The leader, or spokesman, of the movement, sub-commandante Marcos, remains adamant in his demand that the incumbent PRI governor resign and be replaced by the PRD candidate who, Marcos argues, was deprived of victory by government fraud in the recent election. Marcos continues to lobby for widespread social and economic reform in the state. Incidents continue between the local police and military authorities and those sympathetic to the Zapatista movement, as the insurgency is called, and local peasant groups who are sympathetic to Marcos and his cronies.
While Zedillo is committed to a diplomatic and political solution th the stand-off in Chiapas, it is difficult to imagine that the current environment will yield a peaceful solution. Moreover, to the degree that the monetary crisis limits the resources available to the government for social and economic reforms, it may prove difficult to win popular support for the Zedillo administration’s plans for Chiapas. More relevant, Marcos and his supporters may decide to embarrass the government with an increase in local violence and force the administration to cede to Zapatista demands and accept an embarrassing political defeat. The alternative is a military offensive to defeat the insurgency which would create an international outcry over the use of violence and the suppression of indigenous rights.
While Chiapas, in our opinion, does not pose a fundamental threat to Mexican political stability, it is perceived to be so by many in the investment community. The government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy.
Orin Langelle, Board Chair of GJEP, who was then the Co-Coordinator of Native Forest Network Eastern North America (NFN ENA) attended the Chase Manhattan Board meeting that year and read the memo out loud to the stock holders.
What many do not know about the Zapatista struggle, is that it is and was a struggle for the land. For autonomous Indigenous control over their territories. NFN ENA put out a video about this aspect of the Zapatista struggle after we were asked to help expose the ecological threats to Chiapas which the Zapatistas were trying to stop–including illegal logging, oil drilling and hydroelectric dams. The video includes interviews from the first North American Encuentro in the Zapatista stronghold of La Realidad in the summer of 1996. The video is called “Lacandona: The Zapatistas and Rainforest of Chiapas, Mexico.”
A clip of the video can be viewed here:
Despite massive pressure from governments, multinationals and major banks, twenty years later, the Zapatistas are still organizing. Maybe you thought they had disappeared, but they have not. They are just busily doing the work of daily life. They have their own autonomous form of government, their own schools, and they maintain their rejection of any type of support from the Mexican government.
Today, as social movements around the world continue to resist unjust “free” trade agreements such as the TPP (TransPacific Partnership), the Zapatistas continue to be an inspiration to me and I hope to many others as well.
To view Orin Langelle’s photo exhibit of 15 years of photographs from Chiapas, click here.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Hydroelectric dams, Illegal logging, Indigenous Peoples, Land Grabs, Oil, Posts from Anne Petermann, Rights, Resilience, and Restoration, Victory!
May 28, 2013. Source: Global Justice Ecology Project
Protestors sent a clear message to the GE tree industry and its investors – expect resistance. Photo: Langelle/photolangelle.org for GJEP
Asheville, NC (US)-Hundreds of demonstrators marched on an international forest biotechnology industry conference today, demanding a ban on the release of genetically engineered trees into the environment.
The protest, the largest yet against GE trees, occurred one day after two Asheville residents were arrested while disrupting a presentation titled “Engineering Trees for the Biorefinery.”
Following the arrests and the threat of protest today, the conference went on high alert. Police maintained a presence inside and outside the hotel conference center all day, participant badges were scrutinized, conference doors were locked during sessions, and hotel access restricted.
Two of the major conference sponsors, FuturaGene and ArborGen, are moving forward with plans to commercially release GE eucalyptus trees in Brazil and the US.
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Bioenergy / Agrofuels, Climate Change, Ending the Era of Extreme Energy, False Solutions to Climate Change, GE Trees, Genetic Engineering, Victory!
By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
As I sat at home in northern Vermont yesterday, with the remnants of Hurricane Irene swirling outside, the rain beating in waves rhythmically on the roof, I thought about climate chaos—the intensifying effect the warming globe is having on the world’s weather; and I thought about the so-called leaders of this and other countries who stick their heads in the sand to ignore it, while corporations continue business as usual and the planet’s life-support systems steadily erode.
In the local paper on Saturday there was a front page article about the mobilization in Washington, DC against the tar sands: the world’s dirtiest source of oil and a major contributor to climate chaos. One barrel of tar sands oil results in three times the emissions of convetional oil. The oil is mined and extracted using a highly destructive and toxic process that poisons Indigenous communities and flattens boreal forests in the region of Northern Canada where the tar sands are found. Wildlife in the area is being devastated. Indigenous Environmental Network and other organizations have been campaigning to raise awareness about this horrific “gigaproject” for years now. And so far, several hundred people have willingly been arrested in Washington, DC to send politicians a message that they must stop all support for the tar sands project. IEN is calling for an Indigenous Day of Action this Friday.
Today, August 29th, is the birthday of our good friend and compañero, Will Miller. He would have been 71. He passed away in 2005. He was also one of Global Justice Ecology Project’s founding Board members. Will’s birthday and the tar sands civil disobedience campaign have made me think of another mass-mobilization in Washington, DC—this one happened 40 years ago on May Day 1971. It was called to stop another US government-backed horror—the Vietnam War. That mobilization was designed to shut down Washington, DC. To stop all business in the city. To let the politicians in Washington know in no uncertain terms that there would be no more business as usual until the war was ended.
I was not there, but my husband, Orin, was. As was Will. Though they did not know each other then. The May Day action plan was for affinity groups—tightly knit groups willing to take direct action together and risk arrest—to take over key locations across DC and shut them down. In Orin’s case, it was one of DC’s circle intersections. In the case of Will, it was the 14th street bridge. This collective direct action to shut down the city showed the country’s “leaders” that the anti-war movement was escalating its tactics in response to the growing body counts in Vietnam of both U.S. Soldiers and Vietnamese people. An estimated three million Vietnamese people were killed in that war, as were 60,000 U.S. soldiers. An additional 100,000+ U.S. soldiers who were in Vietnam committed suicide since returning from combat.
Will Miller (far left) at the 1971 May Day action in Washington DC.
The May Day mobilization was widely publicized and the authorities stood at the ready. Will (a veteran) and his affinity group had successfully taken over the 14th street bridge. The National Guard—a group of young soldiers recently returned from Vietnam—was called in to remove them from the bridge. The officer in charge ordered the soldiers to fix bayonettes and force the protesters off the bridge. These young draftees looked at the mix of veterans and activists on the bridge, then back at their commanding officer. Then they laid down their weapons and joined the protesters in blocking the bridge.
This, Will said, was what revolution would look like.
¡Will Miller, Presente!
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Filed under Actions / Protest, Climate Change, Indigenous Peoples, Tar Sands, Victory!
